Flipped Lifestyle Podcast

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In this episode, I get real about one of the toughest moments of my life. Over the holidays, my family faced a major crisis that derailed my plans for 2025 right out of the gate. On Christmas night, my dad stopped breathing in my arms. I’m sharing how I handled it as a son, an entrepreneur, a husband, and dad while keeping my business going. From stepping into the fire during emergencies to giving yourself permission to hit pause, I break down the strategies that helped me navigate this storm. Life doesn’t stop for entrepreneurs, but with the right mindset, you can get through anything and keep business going.

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Your brand story isn’t just a nice-to-have—it's the foundation of your business. In today’s noisy marketplace, people connect with brands that share their values, their journey, and their vision for impact. Your story is what sets you apart, builds trust, and turns customers into loyal advocates who feel like they’re part of your mission, not just buyers.

In this episode of The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, I’m breaking down how to craft a compelling brand story that makes your audience feel seen, understood, and inspired. You’ll learn:

Why sharing your story creates a powerful bridge of trust.
How to structure your story for maximum impact.
Steps to turn your audience into loyal fans and partners in your journey.

If you want to stand out, grow your business, and make a real difference, this is where it starts.

🎧 Ready to take the next step? Join the Flipped Lifestyle Community at FlippedLifestyle.com and get the tools, support, and strategy you need to grow your online business. Let’s tell your story, serve your audience, and build a life-changing business together!

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In this episode of The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, I sit down with Emily Tanner, a former healthcare executive who turned her personal tragedy into a powerful online coaching community: Brave Widow. After unexpectedly losing her husband, Emily navigated the stages of widowhood and found her purpose helping others rebuild their lives.

Emily shares how she created a faith-based program that goes beyond grief recovery. She talks about the importance of offering personalized support, creating new ventures, and building meaningful connections through community.

We also dive into the marketing strategies that helped Emily grow Brave Widow, including tips for leveraging social media to attract an authentic and engaged audience. Whether you're looking for inspiration, guidance on launching your own online business, or strategies to scale your impact, this episode has something for you.

Don’t miss this conversation – it’s proof that even in life’s hardest moments, there’s a way forward, and it might just change someone else’s life too.

🎧 Ready to take action? If you’re inspired by Emily’s story and want to start or grow your own online business, head over to FlippedLifestyle.com for our free resources and community support. Don’t wait – let’s turn your idea into income today!

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In this episode, we’re exploring one of the fastest ways to increase your online business revenue: launching a 1-on-1 coaching program. Whether you’re trying to monetize a smaller audience or add a high-value offer to your business, coaching allows you to charge more and get paid for your expertise quickly.

We’ll walk you through the steps to design a coaching offer that’s fulfilling, time-efficient, and profitable. Learn how to set your rates for maximum impact and serve clients on a personal level—all while leveraging the audience you already have. By the end of this episode, you’ll have the tools to start turning your knowledge and skills into real income.

Ready to take your business to the next level? Join the Flipped Lifestyle community at flippedlifestyle.com for the support, tools, and coaching you need to build your dream online business. Don’t wait—your breakthrough is just a click away!

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Hey, y’all! In this episode of the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, I’m catching up with longtime Flipped Lifestyle Community member and successful online entrepreneur, Gena Lester! Gena has an incredible story of transformation, taking her traditional college admissions consulting business and turning it into an automated membership site that gives her the freedom to travel the country in an RV.

We dive into how she made this amazing shift, the challenges she faced, and the systems she put in place to make it all work. Gena’s journey is proof that with the right mindset and strategies, you really can flip your life and live the dream!

In this episode, we cover:

The challenges of transitioning from a hands-on business to an automated online model.
How Gena balances running her business while traveling full-time in an RV.
Ways to leverage technology to grow your business without sacrificing your life.
Why focusing on experiences and freedom can redefine what success looks like for you.
The power of entrepreneurship to create a life you love.

If you want to learn more about Gena and her amazing work, check out her website: The Business Growth Accelerator.

Ready to flip your life? At Flipped Lifestyle, we help real families create online businesses that provide freedom and flexibility. If you’re ready to start your journey, head over to FlippedLifestyle.com and take the first step today! Let’s do this!

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Hey y’all, it’s Shane Sams, and I’m so excited to bring you another incredible story from the Flipped Lifestyle Community! Today, I’m talking to Jessica Stipanovic, an amazing entrepreneur who has turned her passion for helping others into a thriving online business. Jessica’s journey is nothing short of inspiring. She’s hosting writing sessions, launching a podcast, and building the Female Entrepreneur Organization to support and empower women in their entrepreneurial journeys.

In this episode, we dive into:

How Jessica overcame personal struggles, including alcoholism, to reclaim her life and rediscover her purpose.
The power of community and how surrounding yourself with the right people can help you grow your business.
Tips on balancing family and entrepreneurship—because we know how challenging that can be!
Practical advice for launching a podcast and engaging your audience online.
How Jessica is turning her ideas into action to build a business that impacts others.

Jessica’s story is proof that with the right mindset, strategy, and support, you can overcome anything and create the life you dream about.

Check out Jessica’s work and connect with her at: ➡️ JessicaStipanovic.com

💡 Are you ready to flip your life? If you’re inspired by Jessica’s story and want to start your own online business, there’s no better place to get started than the Flipped Lifestyle Community! We’ll give you the coaching, resources, and support you need to build a business that works for you.

👉 Join the Flipped Lifestyle Community Now!

Let’s go, y’all—your dreams are waiting!

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In this episode of the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, I sit down with Den Lopez, the founder of Learning Guitar Secrets, who turned his love for music into a thriving online business.

Den’s journey is nothing short of incredible. He went from working as a mechanic to building a multi-six-figure business teaching people how to play the guitar. Along the way, he’s grown a Facebook audience of over 100,000 followers and created a membership site that helps aspiring guitarists learn the ropes.

We dive deep into Den’s story, including how he pushed through the challenges of the pandemic, overcame limiting beliefs, and structured his offers to generate reliable, recurring revenue. Den shares the strategies he used to build his audience through daily, consistent content creation and how he plans to scale his business even further.

During our conversation, I offer actionable tips to help Den take his business to the next level. We talk about batching content to save time, collaborating with others to reach a wider audience, and refining his monetization strategies to maximize revenue and freedom.

This episode is packed with practical advice and real-life inspiration for anyone looking to grow their online business. If you’re ready to turn your passion into profit and create a better future for your family, don’t miss this conversation!

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

How Den built a Facebook audience of over 100,000 followers.
The mindset shifts that helped Den go from mechanic to online entrepreneur.
Why consistency is key to audience growth and engagement.
Tips for creating recurring revenue streams in your membership.
How to batch content for efficiency and free up more time.
The power of collaboration in scaling your business.

Resources and Links:

Explore Den Lopez’s lessons at Learning Guitar Secrets.
Learn how to start and grow your online business with our FREE 30-Minute Webinar.

If this episode inspired you, imagine what could happen if you joined a community of entrepreneurs just like you! The Flipped Lifestyle Community is filled with people who are taking their ideas and turning them into income streams that change their lives. Join us today and get the step-by-step training, coaching, and support you need to start, build, and grow your own online business. Head over to FlippedLifestyle.com and let’s flip your life!

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Hey y’all! On today’s show, we’ve got an inspiring conversation with JD Stewart, the founder of New Magic Academy. JD’s story is powerful—he turned challenges from his childhood into fuel for something truly transformative. Now, he’s using magic not just to entertain, but to empower others and make a difference in their lives.

We talk about how teaching magic can create life-changing opportunities, why storytelling is the secret sauce in any great trick, and how JD can grow his online business to reach more people. You’ll hear some heartwarming stories about the impact of magic and get actionable tips to build your audience, grow your platform, and share your passion with the world.

If you’ve got a dream to turn your unique talents into a thriving online business, this episode is for you. Let’s flip your life!

Ready to take action? Join the Flipped Lifestyle Community today and surround yourself with like-minded people who are building their own online businesses. Whether you’re just getting started or scaling to the next level, you don’t have to do it alone. Head over to FlippedLifestyle.com to learn more and start your journey.

Don’t miss this episode! Hit play now and get ready to be inspired.

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In this episode of the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, we’re diving into the world of urban herbology with our special guest, Lynn Shore! Lynn, an expert herbalist based in Amsterdam, takes us on her journey of moving from England to the Netherlands and immersing herself in the art of urban foraging and herbal medicine. Lynn has turned her passion for urban herbology into a thriving hybrid course that combines online learning with in-person experiences, showing how you can take even the most niche interests and create a vibrant business around them.

We discuss Lynn’s unique approach to marketing, exploring ideas for expanding her reach, growing her online presence, and connecting with more students interested in the healing power of nature right in the heart of the city. Plus, Lynn shares an exciting upcoming project—a research initiative where she'll attempt to live solely on foraged food for an entire month! This one-of-a-kind challenge opens up incredible opportunities for content creation, storytelling, and audience engagement.

To learn more about Lynn and her work, visit her website at urban-herbology.org.

If you're inspired by Lynn’s story and want to start, grow, or scale your own online business, join our community of family-focused entrepreneurs at the Flipped Lifestyle Community! Together, we’ll help you create a life you love by building a business around the things you’re most passionate about. Visit flippedlifestyle.com to learn more!

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In this episode of the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, hosts Shane and Jocelyn welcome Dr. Carolyn Lincoln, a longtime member of the Flipped Lifestyle community and a successful online dog trainer. Dr. Lincoln shares her inspiring journey of transforming her passion for dogs into a thriving online business that helps people build stronger relationships with their pets.

Throughout the conversation, Dr. Lincoln opens up about her early days in the Flipped Lifestyle community, the valuable lessons learned along the way, and the ways her business has grown. She dives into how her business adapted through the pandemic, the benefits of online training, and the essential role that membership and courses play in reaching her audience. You’ll hear her personal stories, like her experiences with dog rescues, and her vision for the future of her business.

Dr. Lincoln shares specific strategies she uses to connect with clients and followers through social media, especially TikTok, where she’s seen impressive engagement and growth. She talks about the importance of community, balancing calls to action, and tips for building relationships through direct messaging. For anyone looking to leverage social media to build their own business, Dr. Lincoln’s insights on content creation and AI for generating fresh ideas are a goldmine. Wrapping up with reflections on personal development, Dr. Lincoln explains how her journey as an entrepreneur has also been one of self-growth and making a meaningful impact.

Dr. Carolyn's website: https://playtobehave.com/

Ready to take your own business to the next level? Join the Flipped Lifestyle community, where you’ll find the support, guidance, and resources to turn your passion into profit. Head over to FlippedLifestyle.com to learn more and join our incredible community of entrepreneurs!

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In this episode of The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, Jocelyn and I dive deep into some of the most common fears and mindset challenges that entrepreneurs face—like the fear of failure, imposter syndrome, and the fear of criticism. We share personal stories and practical strategies to help you manage these fears, stay consistent, and balance the demands of running a business with your personal life.

We also had some incredible members join us to share their own experiences. They talked about how pushing through self-doubt and taking small, consistent steps has made a huge difference in their success.

We encourage you to prioritize your own happiness, publish content regularly, and lean on the support of the community to help you get through the tough times. Tune in for actionable tips and a whole lot of encouragement as you continue your journey toward building the life and business you want!

This episode was recorded from one of our member calls, and you can be on the next one! Join the Flipped Lifestyle Community today at flippedlifestyle.com and get the support you need to succeed.

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In today's episode of the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, we’re reconnecting with two incredible members of the Flipped Lifestyle community, Daniel and Nicole Whitworth! They've been on quite the entrepreneurial journey, and today, we're diving into everything from breaking free of the 'never enough' mindset to balancing financial success with personal fulfillment.

We talk about the ups and downs of running a business while raising a family, sharing some of our own stories about parenting, managing money, and teaching kids the value of hard work. It’s a real conversation about juggling life, work, and everything in between.

Daniel and Nicole also open up about their experience with email marketing strategies, how important community has been in their journey, and why staying flexible and resilient is key in today’s fast-paced world. Whether it’s evolving a hobby into a real business or shifting from a scarcity mindset to one of abundance, their story is packed with insights for anyone looking to take their online business to the next level.

As we wrap up, you’ll hear plenty of motivation and encouragement to keep pushing forward. Remember, success isn’t a straight line — it’s all about learning, growing, and staying in the game. Tune in and get inspired to take action in your own journey with the Flipped Lifestyle community!

Check out Nicole’s business: YourNursingTutor.com Check out Daniel’s business: TheWorkflowWiz.com

Ready to take your online business to the next level? Join our amazing community of entrepreneurs inside the Flipped Lifestyle Community and start building your dream business today! We're here to help you every step of the way.

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In this episode of the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, Jocelyn and I sit down with one of the most inspiring members of our community, Karim Morato. Karim’s journey is nothing short of amazing — she went from facing language barriers and struggling with a limited income to building a successful online business in bilingual education.

As a former Spanish teacher, Karim didn’t just teach kids; she took on the challenge of learning English herself and grew her business teaching Spanish to homeschoolers, especially during the COVID pandemic.

Karim opens up about the challenges she faced early on and how she found her way by saying “yes” to new opportunities. With the support of the Flipped Lifestyle community, she navigated those difficult times and transformed her life. Her story is all about grit, persistence, and how crucial it is to be part of a community that lifts you up. If you’ve ever doubted your ability to make a dream happen, this episode will remind you that success is possible with the right mindset and support.

In This Episode, We Talk About:

Karim’s transformation from facing language barriers as a Spanish teacher to building a thriving online education business.
The mental and emotional hurdles of entrepreneurship and how Karim overcame those with the help of the Flipped Lifestyle community.
How Karim built her team and expanded her business during the pandemic, growing it in a time when many were struggling.
The importance of saying “yes” to opportunities that may seem outside of your comfort zone.
How embracing webinars, consistency, and staying true to core principles helped Karim build a sustainable business.
Balancing entrepreneurship with maintaining personal connections in a digital world.
Karim’s experience with membership models and how speaking opportunities have helped her grow her brand.
How Karim found financial freedom while still achieving her family goals, and why community and continuous learning are so important to ongoing success.

Check out Karim's podcast Becoming Bilingual.

If Karim’s story inspired you and you’re ready to start your own journey to financial freedom and lifestyle independence, we’d love to help you take the next step. Join the Flipped Lifestyle community, where you’ll get access to expert training, support from like-minded entrepreneurs, and the tools you need to grow a successful online business. Don’t wait for the perfect moment—create it! Head over to FlippedLifestyle.com and start your path to freedom today!

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In this episode, we reconnect with Bonnie Finnerty, a long-time Flipped Lifestyle community member who has built an incredible business, Principal Health Coach. Bonnie shares her inspiring nine-year journey from school administration to launching a thriving coaching program that helps school leaders manage stress, improve health, and boost productivity.

Despite facing obstacles, Bonnie persevered through mindset challenges, fear of failure, and perfectionism to create a meaningful business that makes a lasting impact. Her story demonstrates how consistent progress, even when slow, can lead to big outcomes.

Key Takeaways:

The importance of overcoming mindset barriers like fear and perfectionism.
How Bonnie pivoted her business idea to align with her passion for health and leadership.
The ripple effect of entrepreneurship and how helping others can make a wide-reaching impact.
Encouragement for anyone feeling stuck to keep moving forward, even if success takes time.

Learn more about Bonnie’s work at www.principalhealthcoach.com

This episode will inspire you to stay the course, focus on progress, and build a business that makes a difference.

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Earn More, Live More, And Build A Life Of Freedom! Join Thousands of Families Who Have Transformed Their Lives by Building Online Businesses with Flipped Lifestyle™. Get the Tools, Training, and Support You Need to Flip Your Life!™

Get started today at https://www.flippedlifestyle.com!

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In this episode of the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, Shane Sams interviews Flipped Lifestyle Hall of Famer Jeanette Stein, one of the earliest and most inspiring success stories from the Flipped Lifestyle community. Jeanette shares her incredible journey from nearly two decades as a math teacher to becoming a successful online entrepreneur. She started by building a math tutoring business and later pivoted to using AI tools to scale her impact even further.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

Jeanette’s story of transitioning from teaching math for almost 20 years to building an online business.
How burnout and personal challenges led Jeanette to pursue financial freedom through her math blog and online membership.
The power of waking up early and dedicating focused time to build a business, even while balancing a family of six.
How Jeanette leveraged her existing audience of 10,000 subscribers to create a profitable membership that replaced her teaching salary.
Why AI tools like ChatGPT have become a game-changer for Jeanette, helping her grow her business even faster.

Key Takeaways:

Success takes consistency—Jeanette built her business from 4 AM to 6 AM every day while raising six children.
Turning an email list into a source of income can be the key to quitting your 9-to-5 job.
The importance of community: Jeanette credits the Flipped Lifestyle community for guiding her to launch a successful membership.
With the availability of AI tools and the right support system, there’s never been a better time to start an online business.

Check Out Jeanette’s Work: Jeanette now helps entrepreneurs use AI tools to grow their businesses. Learn more about her work at jeanettestein.com.

Join the Flipped Lifestyle Community: Ready to start or grow your online business? Head over to flippedlifestyle.com to learn more about our community and access the Flipped Lifestyle Blueprint.

Make sure to subscribe to the podcast and leave us a 5-star review! Until next time, get out there, take action, and do whatever it takes to flip your life!

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In this episode of The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, we get to talk to Kevin Depew, the creator of Relax and Learn Guitar. Kevin shares his journey from starting his online business to turning it into a full-time income. He emphasizes the benefits of having a supportive community, the value of consistency, and how his stress shifted from working a traditional job to being an entrepreneur. Kevin also discusses his YouTube strategy and email marketing techniques that keep his audience engaged and growing.

https://www.flippedlifestyle.com

Join The Waiting List for My New Book (Available October 2024) TAKE CONTROL OF YOUR FINANCIAL FUTURE, REDEFINE YOUR LIFE-WORK BALANCE, AND START LIVING ON YOUR OWN TERMS.

https://www.shanesams.com/

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What’s going on, y’all! In today’s episode of The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, I’m sitting down with my good friend and longtime community member, Kenny Troiano. Kenny has an incredible story—he’s taken his passion for breeding chickens and turned it into a thriving online business called Breeders Academy!

In this conversation, Kenny shares how he built his membership site from the ground up and why consistency and curiosity have been the key drivers of his success. We also dive into some powerful strategies he’s used—like live streaming, YouTube, and newsletters—to engage his audience and grow his platform.

Kenny also opens up about the balance between family, freedom, and ambition. He’s figured out how to create a business that not only provides financially but also allows him to spend time with the people who matter most. You’re going to love hearing how his online business has changed his life!

Plus, I’ll give you a sneak peek into my new book, Earn More, Live More, packed with more success stories from our Flipped Lifestyle community. If you’re ready to start your own journey, you won’t want to miss this episode!

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

Kenny’s story of turning his love for chickens into an online membership business
How staying curious and consistent led to massive growth
The power of using YouTube, live streaming, and newsletters to connect with your audience
Simple tactics to create scarcity and urgency in your offers
How Kenny balances work, life, and family as an entrepreneur
Proven strategies to automate your business for more freedom

We would love to have you as a member of The Flipped Lifestyle Community! We believe you have God-given talents and experiences you can use to start an online business! All you need is 100 people to pay you $50/m online to make $5,000/m, $60,000/y! Let us help you start a membership of your own. Click here to learn more: https://flippedlifestyle.com

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In this episode of the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, I had the pleasure of talking with Valerie Weber, a dynamic real estate agent from Charleston who's making the leap into the online business world. Valerie's journey is a powerful one—from the grind of traditional real estate methods like cold calling to finding a more authentic and flexible approach through one-on-one coaching and membership programs. Her 'Inspire Society' is already making waves with 12 paying members, helping female agents succeed without losing sight of who they truly are.

We dive into how Valerie is funneling Instagram leads into sales, creating content that resonates with her audience, and strategically growing her membership. Valerie brings incredible energy and an unfiltered perspective on the real estate world, and I know you're going to love this conversation!

Follow Valerie on Instagram: @the.inspiresociety.

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I’m super excited for y’all to listen to today’s episode! I’m chatting with Terry Mejean, a standout member of our community with a really cool business idea involving heartfelt greeting cards.

Here’s a quick rundown of what we dive into:

A Thoughtful Surprise: I kick things off by sharing a fantastic gift I got from Terry—a box full of personal, meaningful greeting cards. Trust me, these aren’t your average cards. They’re packed with real thought and emotion.
Terry’s Journey: Terry opens up about his background as an executive chef and pastor, and how a major health scare in 2020 changed his life. We both reflect on how such experiences can shift our perspectives and priorities.
The Magic of Greeting Cards: Terry talks about his talent for crafting impactful messages and how this, combined with his personal experiences, inspired him to create cards that offer genuine wisdom and support.
Nurturing Relationships: We dive into a conversation about relationships—how they evolve and the importance of keeping them strong. Terry shares his struggles with his marriage, and we discuss the idea that consistent, small efforts are often more effective than occasional grand gestures. Think of it like our cells regenerating; relationships need ongoing attention.
Business Ideas: Terry’s vision is to help men improve their relationships through a box of cards, and we brainstorm how to turn this into a subscription model. I suggest starting with a physical box and then sending small, monthly envelopes to keep things fresh. We also talk about adding digital versions and building a community around the product.
Subscription Strategy: We flesh out the idea of combining cards with monthly courses, practical tasks, and community support. We discuss how to target men in their late thirties to early fifties, using content like podcasts to reach them.
Starting a Podcast: Finally, I give Terry some advice on starting a podcast to share his journey and connect with his audience. Consistency is key, and a podcast could be a great way to build his brand and engage listeners.

Tune in to hear all about Terry’s unique approach to greeting cards, his personal insights on relationships, and some solid advice on turning a passion project into a thriving business!

Subscribe & Connect:

Subscribe to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast
Flipped Lifestyle YouTube
Join the Flipped Lifestyle Community

Learn How to Make Money Online, and Live The Life You Want Inside the Flipped Lifestyle™ Community! https://flippedlifestyle.com/flippedlifestylemembership

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In this episode of the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, Shane dives into key strategies for boosting member engagement in your online community, highlighting the importance of mixing up your interaction methods. He talks about pricing your memberships right—focusing on what the market can handle instead of just the value of your content. Shane also breaks down the perks of having different membership tiers and shares tips on how to repurpose your podcast content like a pro.

Along the way, he answers listener questions on topics like understanding your audience, switching up your domain name, and running smooth group coaching calls. This episode is full of actionable tips and inspiring success stories from the community!

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Hey, y’all! We’re back after a short break, and we’ve got some exciting updates to share! In this episode, we talk about what we’ve been up to during our time away, the challenges we faced, and how we’ve grown both personally and professionally.

We also take a trip down memory lane, reflecting on our journey from being school teachers starting our own online business to now helping other families find the same kind of success.

We’re pumped to unveil some new projects we’ve been working on—like our revamped membership tiers, upgraded coaching programs, and a sneak peek at Shane’s upcoming book, "Earn More, Live More." We also share some amazing messages from our community that keep us motivated and focused on our mission to help families build better lives through online business.

Learn More:

Join the community: flippedlifestyle.com
Get our free online business idea guide: flippedlifestyle.com/idea

Don’t Miss an Episode! Subscribe and stay updated with all the latest from the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast.

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In this episode of The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, Shane dives deep into the critical topic of mindset in online business. We all know that success in entrepreneurship isn’t just about strategy—it’s about having the right mindset to push through challenges, overcome doubts, and keep moving forward. Today, Shane answers some of the most pressing mindset questions submitted by our community members.

Whether you’re struggling with self-doubt, feeling stuck in your business, or wondering how to shift your mindset for success, this episode is packed with practical advice and insights. Shane shares his personal experiences, mindset hacks, and actionable steps you can take to overcome the mental barriers holding you back.

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In this episode of the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, Shane answers your questions about discovering the perfect online business idea.

He discusses how to identify your passions and turn them into profitable ventures, shares low-cost business ideas that are easy to start, and explains the importance of validating your concept before diving in.

The episode also covers common mistakes to avoid and offers tips for staying motivated during the idea development phase. Join us as we explore practical steps to help you find and launch your ideal online business.

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Hey y’all! Today’s episode of The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast is a “Best Of” episode! For those who are new to the podcast, these episodes will tell the story of where Shane & Jocelyn started, and how they got to where they are today.

For those who are long-time listeners, these episodes will motivate you and show you what is possible with online business. Our goal is to bring our best content every week, so you have everything that you need to build a better future for your family. So wherever you are listening today, enjoy this week’s episode of the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast.

This week’s episode is where we talk about our transition between the nine-to-five and to becoming full-time, online entrepreneurs.

Our online business journey started out with so many people around us asking, “Why did you do that?”

After taking action and showing the doubters and naysayers that success is possible, that you really don’t have to live paycheck to paycheck, that question later turned into, “How did you do that?”

We realized the difference we can make in other people’s lives — a life where you can be the boss.

We created the Flipped Lifestyle to help answer one of the most vital life questions — “How can I do that too?”

We’re going all out in this episode, so we hope you can take home a nugget of wisdom or two.

And remember, if we can do it, YOU CAN DO IT TOO.

Best quotes from the episode:

If people don’t think you’re crazy, you might not be dreaming big enough

You can either build your own dreams or build someone else’s

Highlights of this chapter:

Taking a chance by going to meet Pat Flynn

Making more money in one week than we did in one year!

Difficult decisions: selling our house & quitting our jobs!

We would love to have you as a member of The Flipped Lifestyle Community! We believe you have God-given talents and experiences you can use to start an online business! All you need is 100 people to pay you $50/m online to make $5,000/m, $60,000/y! Let us help you start a membership of your own. We offer a FREE Basic Membership to give you the tools and resources you need to find your online business idea and get started. Click here to learn more: https://flippedlifestyle.com/free

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Last week, we talked about the worst day of our life, a truly terrible experience with a daycare center where they were mistreating our son, and that awful experience with a boss at our workplace that made us say, “Hey, this is not the life for us. We are going to do something else. We are going to find something different.”

As much as we wanted to quit our jobs right there and then, we couldn’t until we figured out a way to earn and replace our current income.

Check out how we discovered online business, the entrepreneurial struggles, and our heart-stopping 11￠ moment!

Highlights of this chapter:

Where the idea for our online business came from

How to get 100 people to pay you $50/month

Our first money ever made online!

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This story will inspire you, show you what is possible, and how you can do it, too.

Highlights of this chapter:

Our wedding

Our career pivots

The worst day of our lives — the catalyst that pushed us closer to a more non-conventional way of living.

We would love to have you as a member of The Flipped Lifestyle Community! We believe you have God-given talents and experiences you can use to start an online business! All you need is 100 people to pay you $50/m online to make $5,000/m, $60,000/y! Let us help you start a membership of your own. We offer a FREE Basic Membership to give you the tools and resources you need to find your online business idea and get started. Click here to learn more: https://flippedlifestyle.com/free

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Tune in this week and keep tuning in, who knows? You just might connect the dots in your life and realize you too have the puzzle pieces you need to succeed online.

Highlights of this chapter:

Dating, marriage, and relocation

How Shane and Jocelyn began to figure out their career paths

How taking chances can get you where you want to be

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Highlights of this chapter:

Shane and Jocelyn go to college

How Shane won Jocelyn’s love and attention

Major changes--pun intended

Brace yourselves, things are going to get cheesy and then hilarious… really, really fast.

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In today’s episode you’ll learn:

Shane & Jocelyn Sams’ upbringing and family background

How to lean into your unfair advantages

We would love to have you as a member of The Flipped Lifestyle Community! We believe you have God-given talents and experiences you can use to start an online business! All you need is 100 people to pay you $50/m online to make $5,000/m, $60,000/y! Let us help you start a membership of your own. We offer a FREE Basic Membership to give you the tools and resources you need to find your online business idea and get started. Click here to learn more: https://flippedlifestyle.com/free

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In this episode of the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, we're sharing part of a lively member call focused on optimizing and driving online business success.

The episode includes highlighting success stories, effective use of testimonials, and refining sales funnels. Featuring interactions with Flipped Lifestyle community members, listeners learn actionable strategies like consistent email marketing, offering value-first discovery calls, and ensuring high retention rates by building a strong community. They also touch on the importance of guarantees and systematic strategies for high-ticket sales.

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Whether you're just starting out or looking to refine your online business strategy, this episode is packed with tips to help you succeed.

Questions asked on today's podcast:

Should I promote my lead magnet or product?
Should I offer coaching or a membership to my Facebook group?
What video should I put on my homepage?
What should my YouTube thumbnails look like?
Should I offer my membership for free to beta members?
Should I offer multiple funnels?

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In this episode of The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, we're letting you listen in on a member call!

Hear from Paul, Peggy, Saril, and Amy as they ask their questions about getting more sales and taking their online businesses to the next level!

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In today’s episode, we help our members Sarah and Ryan push past a plateau with their membership.

Sarah and Ryan are a couple who’ve been married for 22 years and have 7 kids (who she home schools)!

A few years ago Sarah started a blog to share their experiences, sidetrackedsarah.com and now she and Ryan run a successful membership website.

They are currently dealing with hitting a plateau in their membership and aren’t sure how to boost their numbers.

In this episode Shane and Jocelyn help them strategize ways to take their membership to the next level.

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Are you lacking the confidence to make sales because your email list is small?

Maybe you’re contemplating if people would even pay for your digital product?

Put yourself in the shoes of the customer for a second and ask yourself:

When you purchase something online, do you know what you’re really paying for?

“Well, I bought this because I need to do this… or that…”

Is that really the ONLY reason behind the purchase?

Sometimes people confuse the real selling point of a digital product as just the product itself.

Yes, they need your product to do this and that, but your digital product delivers something more than what that product description is saying…

A product allows your customer to gain:

The time to do the things they want. Convenience or ease of use. Confidence and support. Peace of mind and leadership. Your product or what you’re creating / what you’re about to create, is a part of a greater purpose, which is why you should step up and share this with others who need it to improve their quality of life.

Your email list, no matter how small, have people who believe in you and the results your product will deliver. They look to you for guidance, so be confident with your role as the leader because YOU do have what it takes and YOU can help so many by leading them towards their next step.

And this is why you can still make big sales even if you have a small email list!

So, join us this week as we help Flipped Lifestyle community member, Brad May, get his acoustic guitar business to the next level!

Flip Your Life.

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Today’s guest is Flip Your Life community member, Julie Halitzka.

Hailing from Louisville, Kentucky, Julie loves singing and plays a number of musical instruments.

She has worked with youth in various roles as a worship leader, play & music teacher, and youth counselor for over 10 years.

She decided to take her business online to change and improve their current financial circumstances.

Julie created an early childhood music curriculum (for children ages 0-6) called Rockin’ Rhythms Music.

After starting her website, she had the original intent of marketing this curriculum to teachers.

This proved to be a bit of an adjustment from her job as a music teacher, where she is mainly marketing to parents.

Not having a well-established email list yet, Julie struggles with the question what a lot of online entrepreneurs have with their digital product — “Will people buy this?” — and the fear of not finding the right people to sell to.

Join us today as we help Julie reframe her avatar, grow and build her email list.

We also help her with improving content strategies for better efficiency, prioritizing and time management when “life gets in the way”, as well as accountability.

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Mark has played drums and percussion for a living, where he has gotten the opportunity to tour the UK, Europe and the United States.

He had also found teaching to be his other passion at age 40, thanks to his children.

Mark is also part of the National Association for Primary Education in the UK which helped him understand the issues surrounding people involved in education, not just the amount of work and stress closely tied to this profession, but also because of certain limitations in the school system makes it difficult for them to deliver the kind of learning the children deserve.

His podcast, Education on Fire, helps fellow educators discuss ideas and share resources online.

But having the freedom to pursue his passion for music and teaching doesn’t come without a price.

You see, time flexibility can be a double-edged sword.

When you agree to one opportunity, you will have to turn down another, simply because you can’t be in two places at the same time and exert the same amount of effort to accomplish two different tasks.

Being a father, professional musician, primary school teacher AND a podcaster is no easy task.

Pursuing his music or teaching career will have its own benefits, but he has found great interest in podcasting and how it can help him have the freedom to spend more time with his family.

He has already found a good audience through sharing his insight as a primary school teacher on his podcast, so how can that help him make money online?

If you wanna know how we helped Mark, then don’t miss this episode, we’re going to dive deep into several fantastic points that will help take his online business to the next level and it can help you too!

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David's blog, aTexasCowboy.com, started to attract audiences in no time!

Hundreds of people enjoyed his posts — it was a surprisingly huge hit.

But here’s the thing, David is quite the perfectionist. He has zero tolerance for poor grammar and takes great care to proofread his work at least 10 times before even hitting “Publish.”

Juggling an unmonetized blog with his already demanding profession didn’t feel like a path he wanted to keep pursuing, so he inevitably threw it to the back-burner.

But despite not updating their website, his audience stayed.

So, they started a Facebook page called, “Through The Eyes of a Cowboy.”

And it was another instant hit!

Years roll by and now David is struck with a new realization:

He can’t keep training horses forever, not at this level and not when he is getting older.

He’s got the expertise, he’s got the audience and now, comes the question…

HOW DO THEY MAKE MONEY ONLINE?

Join us as we help David refine his avatar and share our content creation strategies to turn his ideas into lead magnets and offers.

Are you stuck figuring things out by yourself?

Then saddle up, it’s time to take action and get this show on the road!

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After listening to our podcasts, Misty decided that she wanted her family to experience amazing can’t miss moments too, and invested in herself and joined our online community.

She learned how to use Canva to create content and sold her first digital product on a third party market.

She felt more and more empowered because of her new found sense of creativity.

After creating enough content and proving her credibility, Misty went on to launch her website where she can showcase her skills and expertise, School Counselor World.

Here, she provides community support and digital resources to fellow school counselors, helping them fulfill the variety of roles you didn’t know school counselors were expected to fill.

She now has a thriving community of 30+ paying members, tons of thoughtfully organized content, and over 4,000 email subscribers.

Her numbers are growing steadily, but how will she 5x or 10x this?

Join us as we dive deep on purchase order sales strategies, your business’ potential growth from conducting more B2B type transactions and why success is just a matter of finding the time to take consistent action.

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Want insight on running a successful online membership business?

Then this week’s episode is a must hear for you.

We’re going to share the 6 Phases of a Successful Membership with YOU, dear listeners and fans.

Recently, Jocelyn and I had our Flipped Lifestyle leadership excursion / vacation, where we took the time to talk about the future, reflect on the things we’ve learned this year, and enjoy some downtime to really unwind.

We wanted to give you more insight on how to start and grow a successful membership community, so we summarized key points about the phases that make up the membership cycle.

6 Phases of a successful membership

Phase One: Discovery

Phase Two: Learning

Phase Three: Onboarding

Phase Four: Assimilation

Phase Five: Participation

Phase Six: Exit

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We’re so excited to have one of our most active members on air with us this week!

On her 4th time guesting on the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, we have the author of the ultimate parenting book called, “Positive Discipline Ninja Tactics: Key Tools to Handle Every Temper Tantrum, Keep Your Cool, and Enjoy Life with Your Young Child,” Karen Lock Kolp, M.Ed.

Karen is a blogger & podcaster who specializes in helping parents understand their young children.

She shares her personal life lessons with her audience, and is driven by the passion to guide us parents through our everyday parenting challenges.

Her husband, Ben, helps in processing the audio content for the “We Turned Out Okay” Podcast and is her biggest supporter.

They’ve already gone a long way from when they first started out online, and now need help to grow their parenting community even more.

Join us as we share our own experiences on making mistakes, learning from it and how Karen can benefit from embracing these likely mishaps online.

If you’re feeling discouraged and nothing is going the way you want it in your own business, make sure to tune in and gain the insight that will help take you to the next level!

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Not getting enough traffic on your website?

Learn more about optimizing your website look and feel as we listen to today’s guest.

Asking next level questions this week is returning guest and owner of DentalTutor4Me.com, we have Cathy Middlestetter.

Cathy creates content and shares her expertise to help dentistry students prepare for their board exams. Her reach and membership community has grown quite a bit since the last time she was on the show.

Cathy is ready to try something new and maximize her website’s profit-generating potential. We’ll help her analyze her site to find the right look and feel that would impress her audience.

Makes sure you have your pen and paper ready, there’s going to be a lot of information bombs that’s going to help you take your online business to the next level.

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Need ideas on monetization strategies? Listen in as we talk to today’s guest about analyzing different monetization strategies for her online business.

On air with us today is a returning guest and Caregiver Advocate, Elizabeth Miller.

Elizabeth helps overwhelmed & stressed family caregivers find time for themselves and the things they love.

She initially launched as Savvy Sandwicher on SquareSpace, then joined the Flipped Lifestyle Community and participated in our mastermind, which led her to do a re-brand.

Her website, Happy Healthy Caregiver, is where she launched her products and her support community for caregivers craving work-life balance. She has tons of content, offers, and some members.

Elizabeth has already earned some money, but is looking into monetizing the brand even more and be able to work on her online business full-time.

With a network and speaking engagements lush with prospects, we analyze which route would lead to a more stable, recurring income.

We’ve seen Elizabeth take action before and it’s brought her some success, now join us as we help her take even more action to get her online business to the next level.

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Our guest this week is a real inspiration!

We’re super excited to help Flip Your Life community member & ASL Resource Developer, Cynthia Long.

Cynthia has been married 32 years, a mother of 3 AND grandmother of 3. Her passion in learning ASL began when her son had met a deaf boy in his study group. He said, “Mom, no one is talking to him.” It’s how they decided to learn sign language and she became hooked. She loved signing so much that she eventually got a degree in ASL.

Because her passion was so strong, she took her board exam fresh off her first year. She was the first in her college to become Nationally Certified and later was the first to be Certified in the school district.

After 8 years of interpreting in the school system, she noticed that there were no resources for deaf and hearing impaired kids. This led her to create Sign Baby Sign that was initially meant to teach babies ASL, and has now evolved to supplementing school systems with ASL resource.

Their website is now ASLteachingresources.com and continues to expand its content.

Cynthia’s website is loaded with content and has generated income mostly from one-off sales. She is looking into turning her online business to lean towards a more sustainable and recurring feature. This brings us to her guest question, “How do I set up my membership site for my niche?”

Join us as we help Cynthia pivot from one-off sales to the more passive income generating membership model.

Are you interested on what the membership model can do for you and your business? Do you want to learn about its advantages and the strategies we use to implement it? Then get your thinking cap on and tune in, this episode just might take you to that next level you’ve been wanting to reach!

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Want to know more about creating product tiers in your membership community?

In this episode, we will discuss this strategy with our our Flip Your Life guest member, Joe Muench.

Joe is a pharmacist who works in a hospital’s intensive care unit, and has been practicing since 2000. His wife Daphne is an elementary reading teacher and supports him in his online business through brainstorming and doing all the editing.

They spent the first year building their audience with their podcast, but didn’t have a product yet. At the end of the first year, he wrote a book, called “A Pharmacist’s Guide to Inpatient Medical Emergencies” to teach hospital pharmacists and residents what to do during a “code blue” in the hospital.

Joe pre-sold and then launched the beta version of his critical care pharmacy academy – intended as a recurring membership site. The membership successfully launched and has garnered him over 90 members to date.

Joe and Daphne are wanting to flip their lives by growing their online academy, so they can have the flexibility to spend more quality time with their two kids.

Join us as we help Joe decide how to deliver different product levels in order to get more people onboard. We will share our insight on the advantages of using pricing strategies and get a deeper understanding on customer lifetime value.

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How do you start an engaging online membership community where people come and stay month-after-month? That’s what we’re going to be analyzing with you and Kristin today.

Joining us on today’s show is a Private Mastermind participant and fellow educator, Kristin Houser.

Kristin is currently working and researching as an Elementary School Instructional Coach. She has been in the education scene for about 13 years now, 7 years as a Classroom Teacher and 6 years as an Instructional Coach. She specializes in helping teachers maximize their potential and enable them to improve their way of teaching.

During her transition from classroom teacher to instructional coach, she had been searching for content and possibly a community, where she could get the extra boost that could help her in her own coaching journey. Having found little information online, she decided to create a place to provide a solid resource for other coaches that she had wished to have while she was just starting out.

Kristin wants to take her 6 years old blog a step and a leap further. More than just making some stable and recurring income, she wants to create a place where these professionals can get together and have a community.

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Tara currently gets her income from e-commerce, YouTube, crypto, real estate investing, and more, and she wants to help other people work around their life instead of live around their work. She recently took a six week trip in her RV and was able to do that by having several sources of passive income.

On this coaching call, Shane Sams and Tara Eitman come up with a plan of how to get people into Tara’s membership. This plan includes creating content regularly and promoting that content on various channels. They talk about the 80/20 rule and how getting something done is better than being a perfectionist.

Learn more about Tara at TheDifferentLife.com!

In today’s episode you’ll learn:

Content marketing strategies
How you can use lead magnets to build your email list
How memberships are multiple streams of income
How to get over perfectionism
How to improve your copy to get people to join your membership

We would love to have you as a member of The Flipped Lifestyle Community! All you need is 100 people to pay you $50/m online to make $5,000/m, $60,000/y! Click here to learn more: https://flippedlifestyle.com/free

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Today’s guest on the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast is Stephen Gates! For the last 10 years, Stephen has been an electrical engineer and teaches people how to run software that runs robots!

Stephen has an awesome career in engineering, but about two years ago he got the entrepreneurial bug and started exploring online business! He wanted to scale and leverage an online business for himself and of course that brought him to the membership model. I’m excited to say Stephen has grown his online membership to over 300 people and is making over $10K/month in his membership website! Even more exciting – Stephen just quit his job and has become full-time online, self-employed!

Today we’re going to talk about:

Growing, scaling, and leveraging all the tools at your disposal to grow an online membership community
How our team sets goals and plans what to do in our membership every single quarter
An exact strategy for Stephen so he can add 80-100 net members to his membership for the next 12 weeks

We would love to have you as a member of The Flipped Lifestyle Community! All you need is 100 people to pay you $50/m online to make $5,000/m, $60,000/y! Let us help you start build and grow a membership of your own. Click here to learn more: https://flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife

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Today’s guest on the Flipped Lifestyle podcast is Lauren Cobello (formerly Greutman)!12 She’s an entrepreneur who has been on several television shows, and she’s known as an expert on budgeting and saving money.

Lauren had considered starting a membership before, but it seemed like a huge undertaking. She joined memberships previously that were a bit overwhelming, and since she was making a decent living already, she wondered if it was worth the time and effort.

Well, Lauren decided to launch her budgeting and personal finance membership just 11 days ago and already has 62 paying members!

So, how did she get so many members so fast? It’s all about focus! Lauren had previous courses and content and was using a variety of tools to run her business, but she decided to take the plunge to put all of her courses in one place and sell one thing: a membership.

Shane and Lauren also discuss some mindset issues behind pricing, along with some strategies that Lauren can use to get to 100 and even 1,000 members!

Check out Lauren’s appearance on The Shane Sams Show by clicking HERE.

Find out more about Lauren’s podcast and membership at LaurenGreutman.com!

In today’s episode you’ll learn:

How to launch a membership fast!
How memberships can change your family’s future
Marketing strategies to get your first 100 members
How to grow and scale your membership while also protecting your time

Shane talks about previous podcasts with Brooke Castillo and Jody Moore, and you can check those out below:

Brooke Castillo on The Shane Sams Show

Jody Moore on The Shane Sams Show

We would love to have you as a member of The Flipped Lifestyle Community! We believe you have God-given talents and experiences you can use to start an online business! All you need is 100 people to pay you $50/m online to make $5,000/m, $60,000/y! Let us help you start a membership of your own. We offer a FREE Basic Membership to give you the tools and resources you need to find your online business idea and get started. Click here to learn more: https://flippedlifestyle.com/free

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Today’s guest on the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast is Sarah Kostusiak! Sarah is a mother of 3 with a master’s degree in Health & Nutrition Education. She is also a health coach and the founder of HabitMasters.me!

Sarah recently got her first member! And we know that if you can find 1, you can find 101!

Inside Habit Masters, Sarah encourages members to choose business, personal, and household goals, and her system helps members determine what habits need to be established to meet those goals.

We discuss learning from past failures and how to celebrate small wins, plus we figure out a YouTube content strategy for her business and come up with challenges that are inclusive to the whole community and can get results for her members!

Today we’re going to talk about:

– How to identify goals and track them on a daily basis

– Creating challenges that will get results for your community

– How fear and stress from uncertainty can affect our mindset

– Decision fatigue and how to overcome bad decisions with better habits

– YouTube content and community strategies that get results

Make sure that you stick around at the end because we discuss branding and how over-complicating your brand and running multiple websites can take your focus off where it needs to be and confuse your audience.

Learn how to start, build, and grow your membership website at FlippedLifestyle.com!

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Bill Giovanetti is a Flipped Lifestyle Member and today we get to watch Bill go from membership dreamer to Membership Master! He had a promotion that generated over $33K in a single week!!!

Bill leads the Veritas School of Biblical Ministry, an unaccredited Master’s level program in theology. For him, the month of November was the breakthrough he needed to keep with his membership. At $33K in a single week - it’s pretty easy to understand how!

While Bill doesn’t like to talk about how much money he made it’s important to note: Bill has an important mission and the money makes his mission possible!

Bill's Website: Veritas School of Biblical Ministry

We can help you start, build, and grow an income from home even if you've never made a dime online! Learn how at https://www.flippedlifestyle.com!

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Today’s guest on the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast is Flipped Lifestyle Community Member Jason Atha!

Jason Atha came into the Community on fire! He is super active in the Flipped Lifestyle Community forums, he likes to take massive action – he has built a website, he is building his membership out, he’s been blogging. And, whenever we see people taking action like this we love to bring them on the show to help take them to the next level!

On today’s show you’ll learn:

The process of how Jason has built his online business and presence
What Jason is doing right now to create an online audience
How to roll out a successful launch via email
The few mistakes several people make when people launch their membership site that keep them from getting their first members
How to overcome feelings of imposter syndrome so you can take your dream to the next level

We would love to have you as a member of The Flip Your Life Community! All you need is 100 people to pay you $50/m online to make $5,000/m, $60,000/y! Let us help you start build and grow a membership of your own. Click here to learn more: https://flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife

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Today’s guest on the podcast is… well, it’s actually 3 guests! Jessica, Liz, and Carrie from Rhubarb and Rubbish join the Flipped Lifestyle podcast! They are sisters who are on a mission to live a more faith and family-centered life. After seeing the importance of community, they are looking to turn their blog into a membership!

The sisters are trying to figure out a plan for their community, and we help to steer them onto the right path by showing them the importance of having a defined avatar and providing results for their members.

In today’s episode you’ll learn:

The most important thing when running a membership is delivering results
How to define your avatar
Delegation and division of labor leads to success
How to lean into your unfair advantages

We can help you start, build, and grow an income from home even if you've never made a dime online! Learn how at https://www.flippedlifestyle.com!

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Today’s guest on the podcast is Flipped Lifestyle member Chad Allen of ChadRAllen.com! Chad was in the book publishing industry for over 20 years, and now he helps writers get their books into the world in his BookCamp membership community!

After years in the industry, Chad started his own blog to help writers. He moved into courses, coaching, and then into memberships!

We discuss the effectiveness of trials for your memberships and how to provide value in email marketing to increase sales.

In today’s episode you’ll learn:

How to give yourself a raise in your online business
How to get more customers by using trials
How to retain members with discounts, bonuses, and promoting community
How to serve your community at such a high level that everyone wants to stay

Get access to the Flipped Lifestyle Blueprint, forums, and monthly member calls to help you start, build, and grow your online business at https://www.FlippedLifestyle.com

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Today’s guest on the podcast is long-time Flipped Lifestyle community member, Ben Pugh! Ben is the host of the IMPACT: Parenting with Perspective podcast, where his mission is to help parents who are struggling with their teens and want a better relationship.

Ben has a successful business in which he coaches parents, but he is trying to transition from 1-on-1 coaching into a membership model. Shane Sams and Ben discuss different approaches that Ben can take to build his membership, which currently has 5 paying members.

Ben’s membership is a bit complicated because he has partners who are also involved, so how can they best serve their members, and how much should they be charging for group coaching, individual coaching, and the membership?

It’s also important to remember that your business doesn’t have to be an “either/or” business; you can have a membership and also offer more personalized services.

You can find Ben Pugh at BenPughCoaching.com.

In today’s episode you’ll learn:

How to take your coaching business and turn it into a membership
Your membership can include coaching; it doesn’t have to be either/or
Do the things that make your business profitable
How to handle running a membership with partners

We can help you start, build, and grow an income from home even if you've never made a dime online! Learn how at https://www.flippedlifestyle.com!

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Today’s guest on the podcast is Flipped Lifestyle member Terry Dunlap! Terry’s story is amazing! He was arrested for credit card fraud at 17 years old but later worked for the government, helping to eliminate security threats with the NSA.

After that, Terry started his own successful security company and started developing training classes and automated processes, which led to the creation of a second company that Terry eventually sold to Microsoft for $20 million!

In today’s episode you’ll learn:

How to create a successful membership by teaching your skills to others
How offering multiple pricing tiers in your membership can lead to more sales
Actions begets action; success begets success, and how to make the next decision instead of worrying about best decision

Terry’s previous appearance on the Flipped Lifestyle podcast: https://flippedlifestyle.com/podcast355-we-help-terry-turn-his-hacking-superpowers-into-a-legit-and-legal-membership-site/

Get access to the Flipped Lifestyle Blueprint, forums, and monthly member calls to help you start, build, and grow your online business at https://www.FlippedLifestyle.com!

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Today’s guest on the podcast is Flipped Lifestyle Community Member, Keanu Trujillo! Keanu has a passion for serving people and runs a professional development company called True Strategy, where he teaches companies how to attract great people, make them better, and keep them around.

Keanu uses the Enneagram to help businesses understand what their teams need to succeed. He is getting ready for his founding member launch, and, soon after, he will be opening his membership to the public!

You can find out more about Keanu and his membership at https://www.truestrategy.info.

In today’s episode you’ll learn:

How to have the same conversation one-to-many that you have one-to-one in your membership
Being authentic and intentional will draw people to you and build relationships
The biggest opportunity in podcasting is to get in front of other people’s audiences
How to be consistent, prolific, and relentless in your podcasting strategy

We can help you start, build, and grow an income from home even if you've never made a dime online! Learn how at https://www.flippedlifestyle.com!

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Today’s guest on the podcast is Flipped Lifestyle community member, Rebecca Smith, founder of CompletePerformanceCoaching.com! In her PerformHappy membership, Rebecca helps gymnasts, cheerleaders, and swimmers go from fearful to confident.

Rebecca graduated with a Masters in Sports Psychology, started a private practice, and then realized that she wanted to serve more people and could do so through online business. Upon launch, her membership got 4 members and quickly grew into a thriving, $20,000/month membership site!

Rebeca’s membership has now hit a plateau, so we discuss how to get her business to the next level by taking a profit-first approach and using the Dream 100 strategy to get in front of other people’s audience.

You can listen to Rebecca’s first episode on The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast here: https://flippedlifestyle.com/podcast105/

We can help you start, build, and grow an income from home even if you've never made a dime online! Learn how at https://www.flippedlifestyle.com!

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Today’s guest on the podcast is Flipped Lifestyle community member, Daryn Ross! Daryn caught the entrepreneurial bug his sophomore year of college when he started selling apparel and supplies to fraternities and sororities. His business exploded due to his ability to get items to his customers quickly

In today’s episode you’ll learn:

The key to running a membership site is to find a simple way to create content, connect community, and coach people
How to get past the fear of complicated technology
How to create the right membership for your audience
The importance of figuring out what problem you are solving for your members

We can help you start, build, and grow an income from home even if you've never made a dime online! Learn how at https://www.flippedlifestyle.com!

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Today’s guest is Flipped Lifestyle Community Member Nicole Whitworth! Nicole started YourNursingTutor.com to teach nursing students how to get through nursing school confidently and calmly. She launched her membership 3 months ago and already has 20 members!

We talk about using the Dream 100 strategy to get Nicole and her content in front of other people’s audiences in Facebook groups and on podcasts. Reciprocity can bring value to others while also building your business.

Since the recording of this episode, Nicole's business has exploded. Listen to her most recent podcast here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGBRwBQYlBI

We can help you start, build, and grow an income from home even if you've never made a dime online! Learn how at https://www.flippedlifestyle.com!

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In today’s episode, we help Beth find an audience for her online business.

We can help you start, build, and grow an income from home even if you've never made a dime online! Learn how at https://www.flippedlifestyle.com!

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Brad Barrett is one of our original community members – he was actually the first person we ever helped on the podcast way back on Episode 23! He has come a long way.

On today’s show we about how Brad was able to quit his full-time job thanks to his online business, how a random message from a stranger led to Brad starting the ChooseFI Podcast (which has now been downloaded more than 1.4 million times every single month)!

We can help you start, build, and grow an income from home even if you've never made a dime online! Learn how at https://www.flippedlifestyle.com!

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Today’s guest on the podcast is Flipped Lifestyle community member Mike Buchanan! Mike is in software development, has created multiple products over the years, and he now wants to move into online business and create a membership, but he has a dilemma: too many ideas!

Mike and Shane Sams will try to figure out which of Mike’s three ideas provides the best path to a profitable online business. Focus on the one that has the best chance to succeed by going all-in. If you try ideas A, B, and C at the same time, you make it more difficult to see what works.

Brainstorming, choosing which idea is quickest to get to market, and using SWOT analysis will give you clarity on which idea you should pursue.

In today’s episode you’ll learn:

How to decide which online business idea to try
Don’t let your biases or assumptions get in the way
How to prioritize and go all-in on one idea
Don’t let your biases or assumptions get in the way

We can help you start, build, and grow an income from home even if you've never made a dime online! Learn how at https://www.flippedlifestyle.com!

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How do I set and raise my price for my online business? I have so much time. What do I do first? How do I grow a community?

These are the questions answered on today's Earn & Grow Show!

Learn more at shaneandjocelyn.com!

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How should I price my membership? How can I get on more podcasts? How do I make the time to run my online business?

These are the questions we're answering on today's Earn & Grow Show!

Learn more at shaneandjocelyn.com!

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On today's Earn & Grow Show, we tackle these questions:

How do I get more interaction in my online community? 2. Should I start running Facebook ads? 3. How do I find the time to run my online business?

Learn more at shaneandjocelyn.com!

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On today's Earn & Grow Show, we answer some great questions from our community!

Should a QR code take people to my website or lead magnet? 2. How can I repurpose video content for an ebook? 3. How can I get free trial members to stay and pay? 4. Should I be everywhere on social media?

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Hey y'all! We're beyond excited to have you join us for a very special episode. We're celebrating a significant milestone in our lives - a whole decade since we took the leap and quit our jobs to become full-time online entrepreneurs.

In this episode, we want to take you on a journey down memory lane. We'll reflect on the last ten years and share the remarkable highs, the inevitable lows, and the incredible lessons we've learned along the way. From our very first steps into the world of online business to the joy of building a thriving community of entrepreneurs through our platform, it's been an amazing ride.

But wait, there's more! We're thrilled to announce our next adventure: healandgrow.com! Heal and Grow is a safe space for individuals seeking a path to transformation beyond traditional methods. Whether you're dealing with unexplained physical discomfort, mental challenges, or simply seeking personal growth, our platform offers a roadmap to self-discovery and empowerment. Together, we'll navigate the depths of our inner landscapes, uncover hidden truths, and pave the way for a life filled with joy, purpose, and authenticity. Embrace the journey of healing and growth with us. Your transformation begins from within. We would love to have you as a member of The Flipped Lifestyle Community! We believe you have God-given talents and experiences you can use to start an online business! All you need is 100 people to pay you $50/m online to make $5,000/m, $60,000/y! Let us help you start a membership of your own. Click here to learn more: https://flippedlifestyle.com

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On today's Earn & Grow Show, we're answering some questions from the community!

Is my niche too small? 2. Do i build a free or paid community? 3. is my niche oversaturated?

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On today's Earn & Grow Show, we're tackling a few questions:

Should I focus on improving my sales funnel or growing my list?
How do I expand my audience?
Where should i put my offer?

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Today on the Earn & Grow Show, we're answering questions about AI, free vs paid content, fast-tracking success, and email marketing! For more on how to earn & grow, head to flippedlifestyle.com!

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We're answering questions from The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast on Today's Earn & Grow Show!

Learn more at https://www.flippedlifestyle.com/free!

Check out the Shane Sams Show at shanesams.com!

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Create multiple streams of revenue from what you already know!

In today’s episode, we discuss:

Building a bridge vs taking a leap
Monetizing your content
Scaling your business with memberships
Building out your team
Creating multiple streams of revenue

Today’s guest on The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast is Chad Allen!

Chad was on the podcast before (listen here). He was in the book publishing industry for over 20 years, and now he helps writers get their books into the world in his BookCamp membership community! Chad has over 220 people paying him $49 per month.

In this episode, Chad and Steven Foust talk about moving from a 1-on-1 coaching service to a membership and how you can scale that business!

Learn more at https://www.flippedlifestyle.com/free!

Check out the Shane Sams Show at shanesams.com!

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When starting an online business, tap into resources and the networks you already have!

In today’s episode, we discuss:

Starting a 2nd online business
Working together as a couple & having your own thing
What are you curious about?
Marketing a new business to your existing audience
Setting up a referral/affiliate program

Today’s guest on The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast is Daniel Whitworth!

Daniel and his wife Nicole are 2 of Flipped Lifestyle’s most successful students! Nicole started YourNursingTutor.com a few years ago, and Daniel has been helping her run that business. They’ve hit several 5-figure months!

After being on the road with us for a couple of years, Daniel decided that he also wanted to start his own business. He is an expert in tech and helping other entrepreneurs get their businesses off the ground. He is now “Helping Business Owners Automate Their Busywork!” at DanielWhitworth.com!

Instead of starting from scratch, we talk about how Daniel can use his existing audience and network to get momentum out of the gate.

Learn more at https://www.flippedlifestyle.com/free!

Check out the Shane Sams Show at shanesams.com!

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We help Brenda grow her online business!

In today’s episode, we discuss:

Growing your audience
Content creation strategy
What to name your Facebook group
Using a live event to get sales
Be clear, not clever

Today’s guest on The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast is Brenda Knight of DivorcedDiamondGirls.com!

Brenda's goal is to reach women around the world with unresolved emotional darkness from divorce, or ending of a relationship, and inspire and empower them to transform into bright shining, like the DIAMOND they truly are!

Learn more at https://www.flippedlifestyle.com/free!

Check out the Shane Sams Show at shanesams.com!

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You can continue to grow your audience and even get customers before your membership is built!

In today’s episode, we discuss:

Growing a Facebook group to get leads
If you can sell one thing, you can sell anything
How to get beta members while building your business
Transitioning to a membership site
Do you need to make more content?

Today’s guest on The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast is Flipped Lifestyle Community member Jason Webb! He runs an online business called TheProfitableSalesman.com!

Jason has been an entrepreneur all of his life, going back to when he sold Jolly Ranchers in school. He learned a lot in his 20s through trial and error, and then he joined a tire company, where he became the top salesman.

Now, Jason wants to help other Christian entrepreneurs improve their sales.

In this episode, Steven and Jason talk about focusing on one platform to grow your business. Jason is doing some coaching and wants to add a membership site to his offers, so they discuss the best ways to make that happen.

Learn more at https://www.flippedlifestyle.com/free!

Check out the Shane Sams Show at shanesams.com!

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Sometimes, in online business, you just have to do it before you’re comfortable.

In today’s episode, we discuss:

Getting your offer in front of more people
Figuring out where to post content
Doing local events to get early customers
Making sales from testimonials

Today’s guest on The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast is Nicole Grey of ReadingTeacherSupport.com!

Nicole has been in education for 22 years, and her main priority is to help ACT and SAT students prepare for their exams.

At the time of this recording, Nicole has already gotten 2 people to pay her $147! If you can find 2, you can find 202, and our goal is to help Nicole find more customers.

Nicole wants to create content, but she’s been a bit hesitant because she’s not sure what kind of content she should create or where she should post on social media. Sometimes it helps to simplify and ask yourself who you’re posting for and where they consume content!

Learn more at https://www.flippedlifestyle.com/free!

Check out the Shane Sams Show at shanesams.com!

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How can you get 100 people to join your membership and pay you every single month?

In today’s episode, we discuss:

Life is based on relationships
Email marketing tips
Hitting pain points in potential customers
Short, value-based webinars

Today’s guest on The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast is Eric Wooten from AltaredMarriage.com!

Eric is one of Flipped Lifestyle’s coaches because his online business has grown steadily over the past few years, and he has the knowledge and experience to coach others who are just a few steps behind him in their journey!

Eric started his RelationShots YouTube channel right before the pandemic, and has been consistently making videos every single week for 3+ years now.

At the time, his plan was to make YouTube videos and do public speaking, but, when the world shut down, he had to adjust his plans. That’s when he started doing online group coaching and launched his membership. Now he has over 80 members paying him monthly!

Learn more at https://www.flippedlifestyle.com/free!

Check out the Shane Sams Show at shanesams.com!

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Follow the Flipped Lifestyle framework that has gotten us millions of downloads!

In today’s episode, we discuss:

The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast framework
Choose your guests wisely
What to script and what not to script
Preparing for your guest
What to ask your guests for a good interview

Hey y’all! This episode is a little bit different than a typical episode of The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast!

Instead of interviewing and coaching one of our students, we’re coaching a team member on how to host a podcast! Steven Foust, Flipped Lifestyle’s head coach, joins the podcast to learn about the framework of the podcast, how it should flow, and to get some podcasting tips!

We’re also joined by Flipped Lifestyle’s content manager, Kevin Crowe, because he’s the one who edits the podcast and distributes it out in all formats and on all social media platforms!

We talk through how to choose your guests, what to ask them, how to prepare for the interview, and what to do if the guest isn’t very good on air!

If you like the show, please leave us a review and rate the podcast!

Learn more at https://www.flippedlifestyle.com/free!

Check out the Shane Sams Show at shanesams.com!

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A strategy that will help you grow your online business!

In today’s episode, we discuss:

How to have compassion for our past selves
Healing is in community
Become your mentor’s best testimonial
Is your avatar problem aware?

Today’s guest on The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast is Peggy Easterling of TheMindsetSchool.net!

Peggy Easterling grew up in East Texas, a carefree child who spent every Sunday at her grandparent’s home after church playing and laughing with her cousins outdoors. “Pretend play” gained a different meaning for Peggy when at age 8 she became the victim of sexual abuse by her grandfather.

Although God used her to do some amazing things in her early life in spite of her skeletons, it was not until her 40s that Peggy became fed up with the fake, phony smile. With help, she finally unpacked and surrendered the basement of her heart to Christ, learned to smile from within, and have fun and enjoy life again.

Peggy is making it her life’s mission to help other women smile from the inside out. She wants to wrap loving arms around the child still balled up in darkness within women and show them they can have fun, be playful, and love to live again. She founded The Mindset School to forever be a student of renewing her mind the way God intended and to help others do the same.

In this episode, we help Peggy to understand her avatar and dive into some strategies that can help her grow from 4 members to 400!

Learn more about Peggy at TheMindsetSchool.net/quiz!

Learn more at https://www.flippedlifestyle.com/free!

Check out the Shane Sams Show at shanesams.com!

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In entrepreneurship, you keep going until you succeed!

In today’s episode, we discuss:

What do you know that nobody knows you know?
All roads lead to the email list
How to charge more money because of proven results
Don’t give up your dream
Continuity is king

Today’s guest on The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast is Coco O’Connor!

Coco became a first time mom at age 40, and now she helps moms 35+ take back control of their time, money, and life with The Vintage Mama Podcast!

Coco got a record deal in her 20s, but it wasn’t quite what she thought it would be, but she was able to get another record deal after turning 40 and sold over 3000 CDs.

She’s been involved with a bit of everything: owning a coffee shop, ecommerce, music, and other entrepreneurial ventures.

Coco discovered The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, and has started a successful membership at VintageMamas.com, with over 300 members! She’s also helped get other memberships off the ground.

She has a fascinating story, and you’re sure to learn a lot from this episode!

Learn more at https://www.flippedlifestyle.com/free!

Check out the Shane Sams Show at shanesams.com!

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Fire your boss, and make as much money as you want in your online business!

In today’s episode, we discuss:

Dr. Gail Clifford’s amazing story
How to price your products
Align with what your people are looking for
How much money do you want to make online?

Today’s guest on The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast is Dr. Gail Clifford of SingleMomMD.org!

Dr. Gail is a Wall Street Journal and USA Today Best-Selling Author, and she has an unbelievable story full of hardships and triumph!

Her goal is to help doctors get out of student loan debt, get support, and spend more time with their kids.

Dr. Clifford has been involved in the online business space for many years, but, back when she first started, her employer told her that she couldn’t make money through affiliates. In this episode we talk about shattering the golden handcuffs and getting control of your time and life back!

Learn more at https://www.flippedlifestyle.com/free!

Check out the Shane Sams Show at shanesams.com!

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We help Dana narrow down his customer avatar, so he can share his story with the right people!

In today’s episode, we discuss:

Unfair advantages
Narrowing down your avatar
Telling the right story to the right people
The 3 phases of a customer journey
Broadcast email strategy

Today’s guest on The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast is Dana Morrison of ITPath.net!

Dana attended Liberty University, majoring in Theology and minoring in Computer Science. He always had a passion for tech, but he ended up dropping the Computer Science minor and going into ministry.

Dana’s passion for tech remained and was fueled further after some kids from the youth group helped him build a computer. Soon after, that he got a job in IT, and now he wants to help other people transition into careers in tech!

In this episode, we help Dana narrow down his customer avatar and talk about how his story can help him sell to the right people.

We talk about email marketing and the three phases of a customer journey. You’re sure to learn a lot in this episode!

Learn more about Dana at ITPath.net!

Learn more at https://www.flippedlifestyle.com/free!

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Get more sales in your online business with the power of storytelling!

In today’s episode, we discuss:

Using your story to sell
Attracting the right members
The importance of your first customer
How to price beta launches
Webinar strategies

Today’s guest on The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast is Dale Wilsher of YourAuthenticPersonality.com!

Dale is a certified life and leadership coach, motivational speaker, and author! She is a professional development expert turning purpose into full potential for organizations and individuals.

In this episode, we talk a lot about the power of stories and how you can use it on webinars, stages, and sales pages!

We also discuss moving from courses to memberships, what that entails, and how important it is to treat your first member like they are a $20,000 client!

Learn more at https://www.flippedlifestyle.com/free!

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How do you market to your current audience and get in front of new ones?

In today’s episode, we discuss:

How to get a lead magnet right
If you can find 1 member, you can find 101
Improving an elevator pitch
The fortune is in the follow-up
Getting in front of similar audiences

Today’s guest on The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast is Kylie Cross of BeyondTheWallsPodcast.com!

Beyond The Walls is a podcast and membership that helps women experience a life they love that is beyond their circumstances!

Kylie came to one of our live events, and she was encouraged to take action and start an online business. Her sister, Romika, is familiar with the online marketing world because she runs a successful business through Instagram. The two decided to team up for Beyond The Walls.

Kylie and Romika spoke in front of about 60 women and got their first member! And you know what we say: if you can find 1, you can find 101!

In this episode, we talk about what Kylie needs to do to get more members and how guest podcasting is a great way to get in front of audiences similar to yours.

Join us for our FREE Internet Income Challenge at https://www.flippedlifestyle.com/register

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Focus is one of the biggest keys to growing your online business.

In today’s episode, we discuss:

Saying no to things so you can say yes to what matters
Memberships vs 1-on-1 coaching
Focusing on one content platform
Growing your audience
Creating a minimum viable product
Collaborations: work your way in or buy your way in

Today’s guest on The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast is Christine Swartz of RVMamaOf4.com!

Christine went to law school, was on partner track, but then she had kids and decided to be a stay-at-home mom and homeschool her children. After her sister bought an RV, Christine became interested in the RV life, so she bought her own and realized there’s a lot to learn!

Now, inside her online community, Christine helps women learn how to RV on their own, so they can live the life they want! She teaches them the confidence, skills, and knowledge necessary for all aspects of RVing!

Christine joined the Flipped Lifestyle Community after one of our live events, and she has been taking action every day in her online business!

One of the biggest challenges for Christine is that she has lots of opportunities everywhere she turns, so a huge emphasis of this podcast is about helping her to focus on doing the things that will move the needle for her membership!

You will be inspired to take action after this episode!

Join us for our FREE Internet Income Challenge at https://www.flippedlifestyle.com/register

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A long-time member of the community just had back-to-back 5 figure months!

In today’s episode, we discuss:

YouTube strategy: solve, don’t sell.
Memberships create a new floor in your online business
Building a big online audience
Being service-first
Running online challenges

Today’s guest on The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast is Kevin Depew from RelaxAndLearnGuitar.com!

Kevin has been on the podcast more than anyone not named Shane or Jocelyn Sams! He is one of our biggest success stories, and he just had his biggest month yet: over $10k! Not only did he do it in March, but he did it in April, too!

We take a deep dive into his YouTube strategies and the tactics he uses there to get more people into his membership. We discuss doing challenges for our communities and always taking a service-first approach in our online businesses.

Kevin is one of our favorite examples because he’s been so successful but also because he pivoted from an early idea. If what you start with doesn’t work, KEEP GOING!

Here’s Kevin’s first appearance on the podcast: https://flippedlifestyle.com/podcast79

Join us for the Internet Income Challenge at https://www.flippedlifestyle.com/register

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Membership sites are a great way to provide community for those who need it most!

In today’s episode, we discuss:

You don’t have to be the expert
Free vs. Paid content
How to raise your prices
How to bring awareness and attention to your membership

Today’s guests on The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast are Joe and Stacy Buzako!

The Buzakos have been a crucial part of the Flipped Lifestyle road team for well over a year now, as we’ve traveled all over the country, bringing people into the Flipped Lifestyle Community!

They’ve taught with us and also learned from us, and now they’ve started their own membership site called ChampionsOfAutism.com!

Joe and Stacy have 5 children, and their son, Jack, is on the autism spectrum. They started their membership to create community for other parents of autistic children. In their first webinar, the Buzakos got 5 people to join their membership!

In this episode, we talk about strategies to get more people to discover their awesome community!

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Creating regular content can bring more people into your online business sales funnel!

In today’s episode, we discuss:

Creating anchor content so people can find your product
Building a sales funnel
Narrowing down your avatar
Podcast strategy
Freedom = No debt, no guilt, more time
Figuring out a lead magnet

Today’s guest on The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast is Dr. Christy Walter of DogGoneDepression.com!

Dr. Christy is a board certified Emergency Medicine Physician and holds a Master’s Degree in Counseling Psychology. She has struggled with anxiety, depression, and cPTSD for decades, and she spent lots of time and money trying to free herself via hospitals, residential treatment, extensive therapy, support groups, etc.

One day, she started sketching her dog, and that helped her tremendously. Now, she helps others who are struggling with mental health issues find hope, healing, and happiness by combining her expertise with art!

In this episode, we help Dr. Christy create a sales funnel and figure out what kind of content she can create regularly to get more people to her amazing product!

There’s tons of value in this episode of the podcast because we’re also answering a question from the Flipped Lifestyle Community forums!

Which social media should I use to promote my business?

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Making your entire living with an online business is possible!

In today’s episode, we discuss:

Paul Clifford’s first 5-figure month!
Put yourself out there, and good things will happen
You don’t have to be an expert
Do more of what works
How to deal with plateaus in your business

Today’s guest on The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast is Paul Clifford!

Paul is a long-time member of the Flipped Lifestyle Community and has been on the podcast multiple times. He runs a membership called ChurchTechU.com, and had his first 5-figure month last year!

One thing Paul did is just put himself out there! He made videos, saw what worked, and did more of that. His membership wasn’t an overnight success, but he has been steadily growing his membership for years!

Check out Paul’s Facebook group HERE.

Paul’s previous appearance on the podcast HERE.

There’s tons of value in this episode of the podcast because we’re also answering a question from the Flipped Lifestyle Community forums!

How should I price my membership?

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We help people start, build, and grow online businesses. Sometimes there’s one more step: SELLING!

In today’s episode, we discuss:

Why do people sell their businesses?
How to make your business more attractive to buyers
What to keep in mind when deciding to sell your business
The emptiness that can occur after selling

Today’s guest on The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast is Jason Yelowitz of QuietLight.com! Jason helped Shane & Jocelyn sell one of their first membership websites for 7-figures!

Jason goes into the process of selling your membership business and why you should! He talks about what you can do from the beginning to make your business attractive to buyers if you ever decide to sell!

There’s tons of value in this episode of the podcast because we’re also answering a question from the Flipped Lifestyle Community forums!

What is the most effective way to create a content calendar?

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Having more than one income stream provides more security and stability when running an online business!

In today’s episode, we discuss:

Creating multiple streams of income
How to create opportunities for yourself by making connections and putting yourself in the right place at the right time
The fulfillment from creating community and a movement in online business
Using YouTube to generate more leads and sales!

Today’s guest on The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast is Ryan Reger, author of Streams of Income! Ryan helps others start and grow their own e-commerce businesses in his membership, Legends!

He got started in 2008, working in a family wholesale business, posting ads and having success selling furniture on Craigslist.

Ryan has written several books and started multiple businesses as a way of creating multiple streams of income! His passion is bringing dads home and giving them more time to be with their families by teaching them how to make money online. Ryan’s goal is to provide jobs worldwide!

You can find him at RyanReger.com!

Our spotlight speaker is Kevin Crowe, Content Manager at Flipped Lifestyle!

Kevin was a part of the Flipped Lifestyle Community for years before joining the team in 2021. He was laid off right before the pandemic in 2020 and turned his attention to YouTube.

Over the past few years, Kevin has grown and monetized 2 YouTube channels, and he joins the podcast to share some tips on growing your channel on the platform!

Find out more about Kevin at TubeAtoZ.com!

There’s tons of value in this episode of the podcast because we’re also answering a question from the Flipped Lifestyle Community forums!

Should social media posts point people to a lead magnet or content?

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Building an online business gives you the flexibility and freedom to live the life you want!

In today’s episode, we discuss:

Migrating from products to membership sites
Creating community online
Dan Miller’s book 48 Days to the Work (and Life) You Love
Finding systems that work for your online business

Today’s guest on The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast is the author of 48 Days To The Work You Love, Dan Miller! I feel so fortunate to be able to connect with Dan today on the show.

Dan’s book was a key influence early on in my online journey. Dan has touched the lives of thousands upon thousands of people all over the world.

On today’s podcast, Dan and I have a conversation about his inspiring membership community, 48 Days Eagles. In this episode you will learn why a membership community is the perfect compliment for an author to combine with their books and how going through the pain of switching your membership platform could be the best thing for your community in the long term!

Learn more about Dan and his book at 48days.com!

Our spotlight speaker is Keri Kitchen, Flipped Lifestyle’s Director of Operations!

She and her husband, Aaron, run a membership called Grow with the Flowchart, where they teach entrepreneurs to regain their freedom by strategically automating and systematizing their businesses!

Find your business superpower at https://www.growwiththeflowchart.com!

There’s tons of value in this episode of the podcast because we’re also answering a question from the Flipped Lifestyle Community forums!

What should my sales funnel look like?

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How do you manage your time when you’re a parent running an online business?

In today’s episode, we discuss:

Prolific content strategy!
How to price your membership
Creating multiple streams of income through multiple memberships
How to start, build, and grow a membership while raising your family!

Today’s guest on The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast is an amazing friend of mine and Jocelyn’s - Erin Chase of 5 Dollar Dinners (5dollardinners.com). Erin has been in the online business world for 12 years (that’s pioneer-level stuff)!

She has been out there helping families save money on their grocery bill and save time on their dinner plans for a long, long time and she is here today to tell us about her membership site! Erin is a true master of the low-price membership offer!

Our spotlight speaker is our very own Lydia Lane! Lydia is our Customer Support Specialist at Flipped Lifestyle.

She is also a personal trainer, nutrition coach, wife, pastry chef, and most importantly- Mom. Lydia has exercised her entire life, but everything changed when she had kids. Her passion is helping Moms find their confidence by building strong, healthy bodies and minds. Check her out at — https://www.busymomfit.com

There’s tons of value in this episode of the podcast because we’re also answering a question from the Flipped Lifestyle Community forums!

What should I focus on once my product is done?

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How to grow your online business by taking action and telling stories!

In today’s episode, we discuss:

More traffic, more money
How to keep looking forward to get past fear
Leaning into your story
Action breeds clarity
Do you even need social media?
How to close sales

Today’s guest on The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast is community member Stephen Morris of RenownedLeadership.com!

Stephen has over 21 years of experience in leadership roles, including 16 years of military leadership in the United States Army.

Renowned Leadership is committed to empowering leaders to become exceptional and achieve their professional goals.

There’s tons of value in this episode of the podcast because we’re also answering a question from the Flipped Lifestyle Community forums!

Should my membership be open all the time?

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We help Chris grow his membership and podcast audience!

In today’s episode, we discuss:

Launching a membership from a freemium model
Growing a podcast
The “podcast to membership” funnel
Prolific email marketing
Creating upsells for potential members

Today’s guest on The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast is community member Chris Grainger!

Chris runs a membership for Christian men called The Lion Within Us: a community to support one another on the journey to become the leader God intends you to be.

He has over 40 members and is looking for the best way to serve them while also growing his community.

We talk about strategies of how to grow his podcast and email list, along with ways that Chris can delegate some of his current responsibilities.

In the second part of the podcast, we welcome new Flipped Lifestyle coach Eric Wooten! Eric talks about his own experiences running a membership and how the Flipped Lifestyle Community helped him grow it.

There’s tons of value in this episode of the podcast because we’re also answering a question from the Flipped Lifestyle Community forums!

How do I package and promote group coaching?

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Online Business legend Cliff Ravenscraft joins us to talk about mindset!

In today’s episode, we discuss:

Cliff Ravenscraft’s steps to achieve any goal
All beliefs have consequences
Actions equal results
4 steps to break free from limiting beliefs

Cliff Ravenscraft, known as The Podcast Answer Man, has been podcasting since 2005 and has produced thousands of podcast episodes. He currently has a total of nine shows that are "in production" and more than 30 podcasts that are "currently inactive" but where the archives are still available and folks from all over the world are still benefiting from that content today.

He has taught hundreds of the world's biggest podcasters how to podcast (and inspired us to launch our very first show).

Cliff can help you take your message, your business and your life to the next level so that you can live the life of your dreams and do the work you feel most called to do in this world.

Live the Life of Your Dreams: https://mindsetanswerman.com/free

Free The Dream Course: https://www.freethedreamcourse.com

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Podcasting, Coaching, and Mastermind strategies to grow your business!

In today’s episode, we discuss:

Taking the reporter approach (imposter syndrome)
Masterminds (isolation is the enemy of success)
What it means to be a coach
How to promote your book
Evan Burse’s $10,000 launch

You can start an online business around something that you love, something that you know, or something that you’ve lived through, and the possibilities are amazing!

Evan Burse started uploading videos to YouTube many years ago, teaching people how to draw cartoons. He struggled for years, just making a couple hundred dollars in ad revenue until he finally did something different and created his own product.

Then he found the Flipped Lifestyle Community and everything changed. After joining, Evan finally started making money online!

Sam Feeney joins us to discuss his book, his podcast, and his FL journey!

Why Aren't You Thriving? is the result of 39 podcast interviews with experts and everyday people who are experiencing success and fulfillment in at least one area of their lives. Put them all together, and we basically crowdsourced success in the 7 Core Areas.

Get Sam’s book HERE.

There’s tons of value in this episode of the podcast because we’re also answering a question from the Flipped Lifestyle Community forums!

How do I have a successful launch?

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We’ve heard many weird online business ideas, but this might be the weirdest!

We have a jam-packed episode of The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast today!

First, we tell a story of how Teresa Perleberg built a $250,000 online business in a very specific niche!

Then, we take you inside of a Flipped Lifestyle Community Call with our Community Manager, DeLyn Beard. You’ll hear members of our community help each other and give their thoughts on different topics surrounding online businesses!

Finally, our head coach, Steven Foust, will be answering several questions from the community on a group coaching call!

I hope you’re ready to learn today!

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Getting your mission right is crucial to the success of your online business.

In today’s episode, we discuss:

Offering multiple products
Getting your avatar right
Marketing your online product
Communities are powerful
What happens when you get away from your mission

Today’s guest on The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast is Patrick Portman!

Patrick is the Executive Director of Lifetools, Inc - a non profit organization which provides training, resources, and diagnostic services for the medical and mental health communities.

He lives in Cincinnati, Ohio with his wife Misty (who is deaf) and 5 children. Patrick graduated from Liberty University with a degree in Psychology and a masters from Harvard University in Neuropsychology. His passion is for helping people live the abundant life that they were intended to live by identifying obstacles and looking for ways to overcome these obstacles.

Patrick was in ministry for 16 years and then went back to school to be a therapist. He’s also a flight attendant!

In this episode, we help Patrick figure out who he serves and get some clarity on his mission.

There’s tons of value in this episode of the podcast because we’re also answering a couple of questions from the Flipped Lifestyle Community forums!

Do you have a system for writing emails?

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How to get your online business product done and out into the world!

In today’s episode, we discuss:

The flexibility that online business provides
The first idea might not work, but it makes the process faster
Hiring help
Do the next thing!
Product first
February marketing ideas

Hey y’all, on today’s show we help Theresa Steckel design and launch her product.

Theresa helps nurses lead with confidence and thrive in their personal lives!

Check her website out: theresasteckel.com

We also bring Jenn Trinidad back on to talk about how she’s making money with mystery shopping and her course about it @ BudgetDivas.com!

In this episode, we’re also going to talk about some great marketing ideas for the month of February!

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How would your life change if you could make $100 every day from an online business?

In today’s episode, we discuss:

Action is the cure to fear
Don’t reinvent the wheel
Surround yourself with people with the same goals
A successful life doesn’t happen by accident!
What are you really worth?
3 tips for a successful life

We know how hard it is to make ends meet, the stress of living paycheck to paycheck, and having little to no means of investing in ourselves, let alone start our own online business.

In this week’s episode, we’ll share 3 practical tips to help you make $100/day online. We’re also going to give you 3 tips for a successful life and help you understand your worth!

AND we’re bringing community success story Paul Clifford back on the podcast to talk about ridiculous optimism!

There’s tons of value in this episode of the podcast because we’re also answering a question from the Flipped Lifestyle Community forums!

How do I run a membership AND sell coaching?

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Your story can become someone else’s survival guide!

In today’s episode, we discuss:

Short-term sacrifice for long-term gain
Taking risks and goal setting
Putting in consistent effort
Paying attention to your plan

Today’s guests on The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast are Dave and Beth Mortell of SailingLifeWarriors.com!

Dave and Beth have been married for 30 years and started sailing about 20 years ago!

They have encountered many hardships throughout their lives, but planning and goal-setting has helped them achieve the life they want to live.

In this episode, we talk about their early retirement and sailing lifestyle, along with the difficult events that they’ve encountered along the way.

Follow The Mortells on Instagram: @sailinglifewarriors

We’re also including a systems workshop from one of our Flipped Lifestyle coaches, Brooke Butcher! Brooke will be talking all about setting up systems for success in your online business!

There’s tons of value in this episode of the podcast because we’re also answering a question from the Flipped Lifestyle Community forums!

How do I turn my podcast into a membership business?

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Sometimes you just have to take a risk and pursue what you know is right!

In today’s episode, we discuss:

Going from employee to entrepreneur
Putting yourself in uncomfortable situations to succeed
Authenticity grows your audience
Pushing past mindset fears
The importance of a community
Small email lists can produce big results
Get discovered by podcast guesting

Today’s guest on The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast is Patricia Ortega!

Patricia quit her six-figure counselor job to focus on her online business! She runs a coaching business at TheUncommonCareer.com!

On today’s episode, we discuss Patricia’s leap into entrepreneurship and what she must do to grow her audience and get members!

Oh, and here’s Shane’s Awkward Family Photo!

Our spotlight student this week is Stephen Morris!

Stephen served in the military in leadership positions and is now taking what he’s learned and turning it into an online business.

Find him at RenownedLeadership.com!

There’s tons of value in this episode of the podcast because we’re also answering a couple of questions from the Flipped Lifestyle Community forums!

How can I launch my online business in 3 months?

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Online business isn’t just about following your passions; we can also help others get through difficult times with our experiences!

In today’s episode, we discuss:

How to use life experience to build a purposeful online business
Launching with a minimum viable product
Building an audience on YouTube
Pivoting from one idea to the next
Moving from courses to a membership

Today’s guest on The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast is Kate Conwell!

Kate was a pole vaulter in college and a personal trainer, and, after coming to one of our events, she had a desire to start an online business around fitness.

She soon discovered that she wasn’t passionate about this and, instead, decided to start a community to help women overcome the betrayal of infidelity.

She started JourneyBeyondBetrayal.com to provide comfort, connection, and resources for women facing the pain of an unfaithful husband.

Kate launched the community and has her first 2 members! We talk about strategies to help her get more members and build an audience.

Our spotlight story this week is Jessica Lopez from OTGenius.com!

Jessica had successful courses but pivoted into the membership model to better serve her customers.

There’s tons of value in this episode of the podcast because we’re also answering a couple of questions from the Flipped Lifestyle Community forums!

How do I find people in my niche?

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Creating a plan and goal-setting for the new year in your online business!

In today’s episode, we discuss:

How to plan for an entire year
What it means to be outcome independent
Reviewing habits from the previous year
Building a sales funnel (discovery to purchase)

Our spotlight story this week is Steven Foust, the head coach at Flipped Lifestyle!

At the time of this recording, Steven hadn’t yet joined the team, but he had already quit his job and had a thriving online business with over 130 members!

Listen to Steven’s episode of The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast here: https://flippedlifestyle.com/how-a-flipped-lifestyle-member-call-changed-stevens-life-forever/

There’s tons of value in this episode of the podcast because we’re also answering a couple of questions from the Flipped Lifestyle Community forums!

What is the best marketing strategy for a coworking membership?

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If you take action daily in your online business, you’re more likely to succeed!

In today’s episode, we discuss:

How to be consistent, prolific, and relentless through daily action
Lessons from Marcus Aurelius
The obstacle is the way to success
Become outcome independent

Get Meditations by Marcus Aurelius HERE.

Our spotlight story this week is Patricia Ortega!

Patricia hosts The Uncommon Career Podcast and is doing some 1-on-1 coaching!

She talks about her journey so far and the support that she’s received from the Flipped Lifestyle Community!

There’s tons of value in this episode of the podcast because we’re also answering a couple of questions from the Flipped Lifestyle Community forums!

Should I do member calls for just a few members?

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Launching a minimum viable product can get your online business off the ground FAST!

In today’s episode, we discuss:

What community really means
Building a sales funnel (discovery to purchase)
Figuring out your lead magnet
How to take consistent, prolific, relentless action in your online business!
Getting a minimum viable product to market to know what converts

Today’s guest on The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast is community member Bridget Lynch!

After overcoming fears and anxieties from trauma and abuse, Bridget wants to help women do the same!

Bridget is an action taker who followed the steps of the Flipped Lifestyle Blueprint and got her business launched with a minimum viable product!

In today’s episode, we help Bridget build out her sales funnel to lead her potential customers from discovery to purchase!

Learn more about Bridget at inthelightcoach.live!

We’re also sharing a clip from one of our mindset calls with Flipped Lifestyle Community Manager, DeLyn Beard!

DeLyn is talking about adversity and what steps our members can take to overcome it!

There’s tons of value in this episode of the podcast because we’re also answering a couple of questions from the Flipped Lifestyle Community forums!

How do you keep working hard on your business without putting too much pressure on yourself?

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Today’s guest on The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast is renowned speaker, author, and entrepreneur Priscilla Shirer!

In today’s episode, we discuss:

How Priscilla Shirer got into ministry and speaking career
Priscilla Shirer’s writing process
Working with your spouse
Raising children to be entrepreneurs
How to work with a team and delegate

Priscilla Shirer is a wife and a mom first. But put a Bible in her hand and a message in her heart and you’ll see why thousands flock to her conferences and dive into her Bible study series and books each year.

A graduate of Dallas Theological Seminary, Priscilla holds a Master’s degree in Biblical Studies and considers it a privilege to serve believers from every denomination, and culture through Going Beyond Ministries.

Her trade books include Discerning the Voice of God, God is Able, and two New York Times Bestsellers – The Resolution for Women and Fervent: A Woman’s Battle Plan for Serious, Specific and Strategic Prayer, which was named the 2016 Christian Book of the Year. Her latest offering is a 365-day devotional called Awaken: 90 Days with the God Who Speaks.

Learn more about Priscilla and her ministry at GoingBeyond.com!

This is a great conversation about speaking, writing, family, and building a strong team.

I know you’re going to be inspired!

There’s tons of value in this episode of the podcast because we’re also answering a couple of questions from the Flipped Lifestyle Community forums!

How often should I email my list?

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Today, we’re sharing 3 ways to stop procrastinating and be more productive in your online business!

In today’s episode, we discuss:

3 ways to stop procrastinating
How to get more opt-ins to your email list
How to sell high-ticket offers to people who want more access
Higher-priced products succeed because they are anchored in mission and vision
The power of mentorship

Our spotlight story this week is Blair Thielemier!

Blair has a thriving membership called Pharmapreneur Academy and has now moved into selling high-ticket items.

She recently launched The Inner Circle Mentorship, a 6-month high level program for her members and those who want to have more access to her.

We discuss pricing models, coaching strategies, and other ways to help your customers and clients get results!

There’s tons of value in this episode of the podcast because we’re also answering a couple of questions from the Flipped Lifestyle Community forums!

How do I get more opt-ins to my email list?

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Online business owners all have weaknesses, and we’re going to talk about how to overcome them!

In today’s episode, we discuss:

How to overcome your weaknesses
Dealing with impostor syndrome
How to turn your podcast audience into paying members!
Why writing a 3-year vivid vision is important to your success as a business owner!

Our spotlight story this week is Luke Miller!

Luke has been a tile installer since the time he was 17 years old where he first started his love of ceramic tile. At age 25, he became a licensed tile contractor (because you have to have a license for it in California). However, his business never took off – he knew a lot about tile but not a lot about business. After leaving tile installation for a while he got back into it in 2012 and luckily it was better (not perfect but better)!

Even though he wasn’t making a ton of money, he was making double what his competition was. It was because like Luke they knew their stuff when it came to tile, but operating their business was much harder. Now, he hosts his own podcast the Tile Money Podcast all about tile to help serve others in the same business and make sure they learn from Luke’s mistakes!

Find more about Luke at TileMoney.com!

There’s tons of value in this episode of the podcast because we’re also answering a couple of questions from the Flipped Lifestyle Community forums!

Can I start a membership by doing Q&As while I build my courses?

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Your first online business idea might not work, but you can pivot and have success!

In today’s episode, we discuss:

Nothing happens unless you take action
Your first idea often isn’t your best idea
How community is key to growing your online business
Email list growing strategies

Rocio Baeza runs an online business at CyberSecurityBase.com!

Her first online business idea was a called GDPR Standup, and, while she had some success with that, Rocio found that the time and effort she was putting in wasn’t worth the ROI.

So, she pivoted into a B2B approach, which meant she was able to get more money for her efforts!

Now, Rocio helps financial institutions secure all of the consumer information that they hold through corporate coaching & advisory.

In this episode, we talk about the power of community and the ability for one to pivot into something else and have success!

Rocio’s first appearance on the podcast: https://flippedlifestyle.com/podcast272/

Our spotlight story this week is Chad Allen!

Chad was in the book publishing industry for over 20 years, and now he helps writers get their books into the world in his BookCamp membership community!

After years in the industry, Chad started his own blog to help writers. He moved into courses, coaching, and then into memberships!

There’s tons of value in this episode of the podcast because we’re also answering a couple of questions from the Flipped Lifestyle Community forums!

How should I price my new membership?

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If you’re selling something, make sure it’s something that people actually need!

In today’s episode, we discuss:

How to get your avatar right
Make people vote with their wallets
Give away the what, not the how
You don’t fail: you either win or learn
Aspirin vs vitamin
Creating content to generate awareness

Today’s guest on The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast is Lisa “The Tech Lady” Stoumile!

Lisa has a passion for technology and helping people fix technical issues in a way that makes sense to them!

She pre-launched a product, and 10 people said they were interested in it, but when it came time to purchase, they didn’t buy.

In this episode, we help Lisa get her avatar right. People who pay, pay attention, so it’s important to make sure that people vote with their wallets.

If something doesn’t work, that doesn’t mean you failed: we either win… or we learn!

Our spotlight story this week is Nicole and Daniel Whitworth!

Nicole runs a website called YourNursingTutor.com. She and Daniel have been adding members every month and are now well over 100 members! They talk about some of the strategies they’ve used to get where they are today.

There’s tons of value in this episode of the podcast because we’re also answering a couple of questions from the Flipped Lifestyle Community forums!

How do I adjust my idea to my avatar or vice versa?

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The ripples you can cause with your online business are amazing!

In today’s episode, we discuss:

How starting an online business can create ripples that change lives!
How to keep going when you feel like giving up
Creating products can earn more income than relying on social media
People aren’t looking for experts to help them

Then he found the Flipped Lifestyle Community and everything changed. After joining, Evan finally started making money online!

Evan started his own membership, and he started inspiring his students! One of those students was Dameron Cribbs. Dameron is an artist who was wanting to create a comic book, and he sought out Evan for mentorship.

He got his comic book done and is now working on a children’s book!

We talk about how going out into the world and creating what you’re meant to create can have ripples that last for generations!

Check out Evan Burse’s appearance on the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast HERE.

Evan’s website: TheCartoonBlock.com

Find Dameron’s Condemned comic book at Dameronc.gumroad.com!

Dameron Cribbs on Instagram: @dameron_sketchbook

Our spotlight story this week is Dr. Christy Walter!

Dr. Christy is a board certified Emergency Medicine Physician and holds a Master's Degree in Counseling Psychology. She has served people over the last 20+ years in settings ranging from crisis counseling centers, hospice, trauma hospitals, community hospitals, and rural hospitals.

She runs a site called Doggone Depression, which helps people overcome anxiety and depression through art!

There’s tons of value in this episode of the podcast because we’re also answering a couple of questions from the Flipped Lifestyle Community forums!

Should I start a beta group at a lower price?

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If you could ask a billionaire a question, what would it be?

In today’s episode, we discuss:

Asking a billionaire 3 questions
How to create a successful membership by teaching your skills to others
How offering multiple pricing tiers in your membership can lead to more sales
Actions begets action; success begets success, and how to make the next decision instead of worrying about best decision

I recently had the amazing opportunity to ask a billionaire three questions!

Check out the YouTube video where billionaire Peter J. Daniels answers my questions: https://youtu.be/84z19rilrKg

Our spotlight story this week is Terry Dunlap!

Terry’s story is amazing! He was arrested for credit card fraud at 17 years old but later worked for the government, helping to eliminate security threats with the NSA.

Listen to Terry’s first appearance on the podcast HERE.

There’s tons of value in this episode of the podcast because we’re also answering a couple of questions from the Flipped Lifestyle Community forums!

Is my price too high?

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If you make content, you’ll inevitably say something wrong. How do you deal with it?

In today’s episode, we discuss:

Putting yourself out there on the internet
How Rebecca Smith grew her membership site to $20,000/month
How to take your online business to the next level after plateauing
How to use the Dream 100 strategy to find new members

Our spotlight story this week is Flipped Lifestyle community member, Rebecca Smith, founder of CompletePerformanceCoaching.com! In her PerformHappy membership, Rebecca helps gymnasts, cheerleaders, and swimmers go from fearful to confident.

Rebeca’s membership has now hit a plateau, so she and Shane Sams discuss how to get her business to the next level by taking a profit-first approach and using the Dream 100 strategy to get in front of other people’s audience.

There’s tons of value in this episode of the podcast because we’re also answering a couple of questions from the Flipped Lifestyle Community forums!

How do I create a minimum viable product?

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Nothing can build income, influence, and impact quite like podcasting. We’ve been doing podcasts for over ten years, and podcasting is how we’ve made our living online.

In today’s episode, we discuss:

Why podcasting is the most powerful medium today
5 tips on how to be a podcaster
The best way to tell stories on a podcast

On today’s show, I give my 5 best tips on how to be a podcaster: real, practical tips that can help you get started right away on launching a successful podcast and online business of your own!

There are plenty of gurus out there who tell you that you have to have all of the fanciest equipment and do things a certain way, and many times they’re just trying to sell you something or have you click their affiliate link!

I’m giving you real tips to help you get started.

Podcasting helped me quit my job and become a self-employed online entrepreneur, and I know it will help you, too!

Equipment mentioned in this episode:

Audio-Technica ATR2100x microphone

Scarlett 2i2 mixer

Scarlett solo mixer

Our spotlight story this week is Paul Clifford!

Just like us, Paul’s online membership started small. He started the way we did, building brick by brick. However, with our help and following the Flipped Lifestyle blueprint, he made a 70% jump in membership in a matter of months. In doing so, he hit our first goal of 100 memberships joining his online community.

Paul’s episode on the podcast: https://flippedlifestyle.com/podcast335/

There’s tons of value in this episode of the podcast because we’re also answering a couple of questions from the Flipped Lifestyle Community forums!

How do I grow my business with guest podcasting?

Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 3rd Gen USB Audio Interface for Recording, Songwriting, Streaming and Podcasting — High-Fidelity, Studio Quality Recording, and All the Software You Need to Record

Audio-Technica ATR2100x-USB Cardioid Dynamic Microphone (ATR Series)

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Andrew Bustamante was a spy for the CIA; now he’s a successful online entrepreneur!

In today’s episode, we discuss:

Andrew Bustamante’s time as a CIA spy and what happened afterward
How to build a deeper connection with a podcast
Leaning into what you’ve learned to build a business
Learning through simulations

Today’s guest on The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast is Andrew Bustamante of EverydaySpy.com!

Andrew and his wife operated as a “tandem couple” in the CIA until they decided that the life that the CIA wanted from them was not the life they wanted for their family.

They spent 6 months unemployed, Andrew took everything he had learned at CIA and applied it to his situation to land a great corporate job.

Now, Andrew runs an online business, teaching others real-world spy skills that give them an elite advantage in everyday life.

Learn more with Andy: https://everydayspy.com/

Find out your Spy Superpower: https://everydayspy.com/quizFollow

Andy's Podcast here: https://everydayspy.com/podcast/

Andrew Bustamante on Lex Fridman’s podcast: https://lexfridman.com/andrew-bustamante/

Our spotlight story this week is Kathy Martin!

Several years ago, Kathy joined the Flipped Lifestyle Community and started her online journey. She struggled her first year, and, after getting her first members, they quit. Kathy was relentless, prolific, and consistent. Now, she leads an amazing online community of over 500 members!

There’s tons of value in this episode of the podcast because we’re also answering a couple of questions from the Flipped Lifestyle Community forums!

How do you handle competitors with lower prices?

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If you haven’t heard the concept of the flywheel, listen to this episode! We think it can really help your online business grow!

In today’s episode, we discuss:

How the flywheel can help grow your business from good to great
How to stay persistent when your online business is growing slowly
Actionable steps to take to grow your membership

Take a look at the Flipped Lifestyle flywheel: https://flippedlifestyle.com/flywheel/

Our spotlight speaker is Flipped Lifestyle Community All-Star, Kevin Depew! Kevin is a long-time member of the community and founder of RelaxAndLearnGuitar.com!

Kevin started his membership in 2017 and has been steadily growing it for the past 4 years. His membership recently surpassed 200 members, which gave him the financial freedom to quit his job!

Shane Sams and Kevin talk about the most important things to focus on when growing a membership and how Kevin can take his membership to the next level.

Check out Kevin’s recent appearance on the Flipped Lifestyle podcast:

https://flippedlifestyle.com/podcast303/

There’s tons of value in this episode of the podcast because we’re also answering a couple of questions from the Flipped Lifestyle Community forums!

Can I build my online business in less than 90 days?

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I’ve been asked which books I recommend for new entrepreneurs… or which books have helped me the most in my business. If I could go back in time, I would read these 5 books at the beginning of my online business journey.

In today’s episode, we discuss:

Discovering your why
Focusing on the right things in your business
Clearly articulating your message
Sales and marketing your online business
Managing your finances as an entrepreneur

Get these books by clicking below:

Start With Why by Simon Sinek
The One Thing by Gary Keller
The Pumpkin Plan by Mike Michalowicz
Building a StoryBrand by Donald Miller
Expert Secrets by Russell Brunson
Profit First by Mike Michalowicz

Our spotlight story this week is Jason Geiman!

Jason had a great pressure washing business in the greater-Cincinnati area, and he had built that revenue up to 7-figures.

After selling that business and looking for a way to make money, he discovered online business through the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast! Now, he has created a multiple 6-figure membership business!

There’s tons of value in this episode of the podcast because we’re also answering a couple of questions from the Flipped Lifestyle Community forums!

How do I start an online business while working full-time?

Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen

Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action

Expert Secrets: The Underground Playbook for Converting Your Online Visitors into Lifelong Customers

The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth About Extraordinary Results

The Pumpkin Plan: A Simple Strategy to Grow a Remarkable Business in Any Field

Profit First: Transform Your Business from a Cash-Eating Monster to a Money-Making Machine

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Do you struggle with perfectionism? What is it that keeps you from taking action in your online business? Today we’re going to define what perfectionism really is and how we can overcome it!

In today’s episode, we discuss:

5 ways to overcome perfectionism
What perfectionism actually means
How to grow your online business with promotion
How to run a successful membership in a small niche

Our spotlight story this week is Rina Orellana!

Rina Orellana is a professional flamenco dancer for around 25 years and has been teaching LIVE studio classes for the last 15-20 years. Rina says flamenco dancing is a nighttime and weekend gig, which is really hard when you have a family. She was a mother all day and a teacher all night, and it eventually became too much!

As her kids got a little older she realized she wanted to make some money without having to teach more hours. Before long, the prospects of having her own online business came into her life -and she eventually came to terms with creating a course teaching flamenco dancing. Of course, this search is what led her to Flipped Lifestyle (and her membership community)!

We have loved watching her growth in her membership as well as her growth as an entrepreneur and a CEO. This is an inspiring story of how you can transform your membership into an amazing income and career!

There’s tons of value in this episode of the podcast because we’re also answering a couple of questions from the Flipped Lifestyle Community forums!

How can I build a membership in a small niche?

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You can start an online business around something that you love, something that you know, or something that you’ve lived through, and the possibilities are amazing!

In today’s episode, we discuss:

How to manage your time to run an online business
Evan Burse’s story of making $10,000 in 24 hours
Figure out the exact product your audience wants to buy

Our spotlight story this week is Evan Burse!

Evan started uploading videos to YouTube many years ago, teaching people how to draw cartoons. He struggled for years, just making a couple hundred dollars in ad revenue until he finally did something different and created his own product.

Then he found the Flipped Lifestyle Community and everything changed. After joining, Evan finally started making money online!

There’s tons of value in this episode of the podcast because we’re also answering a couple of questions from the Flipped Lifestyle Community forums!

Should I use a course to promote my membership?

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Have you ever wanted to make money from home? We’ve been making a living from online business for over a decade, and I’m going to show you the top 5 ways to earn money online.

In today’s episode, we discuss:

The 3 questions you need to ask yourself before starting an online business
The 5 best ways to earn money online (proven ways that we teach and have done ourselves)
How to make money online without owning your own business

We were school teachers who figured out how to make our entire living on the internet. We’ve seen what works and what doesn’t, and we can give you tips on what will work for you, depending on your goals.

Our spotlight story this week is the Voxy Ladies!

We are hanging out with 5 amazing women from the Flipped Lifestyle Community, and you are going to hear our conversation about how these ladies formed a mastermind!

There’s tons of value in this episode of the podcast because we’re also answering a couple of questions from the Flipped Lifestyle Community forums!

Can I start a membership by doing Q&As while I build courses?

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We love online courses and coaching, but membership sites truly unlock so much potential for service and steady income!

In today’s episode, we discuss:

Dr. Cathleen King’s amazing membership launch
How memberships allow you to serve more people
Simplifying your business as it grows
How to build out the right team

Today’s guest on the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast is Dr. Cathleen King of PrimalTrust.org!

Cathleen is an expert on chronic illness, chronic trauma, relationship/attachment repair, and inner child healing. She has the rare combination of in-depth doctoral-level education and training, over 20 years coaching others in the health/healing world, and has been through her own heroine’s journey of spending 2 decades navigating through deep, debilitating illness.

After navigating through her illness, Cathleen started creating courses and doing some coaching, but we told her about memberships, and everything changed!

She saw what was possible with memberships and that she only needed about 150 people to reach her income goals. Well, Cathleen launched and now has 700+ members within 6 months of opening up her membership!

You’ve gotta listen to this one!

Find out more about Cathleen and her membership at PrimalTrust.Org!

There’s tons of value in this episode because we’re also answering a question from the Flipped Lifestyle Community!

How much content do I need in my membership?

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The sky's the limit with online courses, coaching, and memberships. If you’re willing to put in the work, you can build a six-figure business!

In today’s episode, we discuss:

How to grow an online business by being prolific
Why beta memberships work best in the beginning
What do you do when people around you are on the fast-track to success
Why online communities are amazing
How to grow your business to six figures!

Today we are celebrating the amazing success of one of our community members, Kathy Martin. In today’s show you’ll learn how Kathy grew her membership from 15 members to nearly 300 members, how she talked her spouse into getting on board with her online business dream, and three prolific strategies for growing a membership site to 500 members and beyond.

Kathy Martin lives in Los Angeles, California, where she has been a special education math teacher for 13 years. She has a membership where she sells middle school math resources to middle school math teachers. She has been an online entrepreneur for the last 4 years! Kathy was actually on the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast back in January of 2018. She had launched and had a few members. Back then it was a real struggle to get members.

Kathy says her membership site was a “hot mess” in the beginning. She wasn’t happy with the way her site looked, she didn’t know who she was talking to. It took her a really long time to figure out what she wanted to write about and she wanted to target. It took her a while to figure out what her people needed. Yes, it took her a long time to figure out but she knows that if she would have started with 100 members in 2018 or 2019, all of these members would have quit because she didn’t know what she was doing.

Kathy’s website: https://www.prealgebrateachers.com

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Business owners are used to paying fees to popular payment processors, but it doesn’t have to be that way!

In today’s episode, we discuss:

The pros and cons of payment processors
How to keep more of the money you earn
How to build the right team
Tapping into partnerships to grow your business

Today’s guest on The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast is Karla Dembik, founder of Phoenix Payment Processing!

Karla spent 14 years in the Military, first as a U.S. Marine and later as an Army Intelligence Officer and UH-60 Blackhawk Helicopter Pilot. After a couple of tours overseas, she decided to take her leadership skills and move into the private sector.

She has spent almost the last decade working with industry leaders in digital payments to bring the most exclusive opportunities to business owners and enterprises nationwide.

Phoenix Payment Processing provides businesses all over the nation with payment processing services, payroll and business funding, coupled with top of the line customer service.

We love to highlight the success of the students who have been through the Flipped LIfestyle Blueprint and are seeing results!

This week’s student spotlight is Francine Ivey!

Francine came to one of our live events and has been taking action in her online business. She runs a faith-based coaching program and is up to 17 members in her Kingdom Coach HQ membership!

Learn more about Francine and her business at consumedcoaching.com!

There’s tons of value in this episode of the podcast because we’re also answering a couple of questions from the Flipped Lifestyle Community forums!

What kind of content should I have on my podcast?
How can I get my price right for my membership site?

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Are you a course creator, coach, or community leader trying to figure out how to start your online business? This episode will help you get it going!

In today’s episode, we discuss:

Podia: an all-in-one platform for coaches, course creators, and community builders
How to define your core values
How to build an online business the right way
People don’t start small enough

Today’s guest on The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast is Spencer Fry, founder and CEO of Podia! Spencer is a lifelong entrepreneur who wanted to build a platform where other entrepreneurs could sell their products and host their websites. That’s what led him to start Podia in 2014!

In this episode, we discuss mission and core values, how Spencer’s values led him to start Podia, along with the features of the all-in-one platform.

We also talk about how to start small and build an online business the right way!

Try Podia for FREE: flippedlifestyle.com/podia

We’re starting something new on The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast: Student Spotlights!

This week’s student spotlight is Jennifer Trinidad of BudgetDivas.com!

Jennifer is taking action in her online business. She’s up to 20 members now, including one member who just joined her coaching program!

There’s tons of value in this episode because we’re also answering a couple of questions from the Flipped Lifestyle Community forums!

When starting a website, what should my call to action be?
How do I know what content to create?

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Are you trying to get more people to find your products? This is the episode for you!

In today’s episode you’ll learn:

Why email marketing works and how to improve yours
How to get more people to find your online business
Marketing vs promoting
Build the life you want and scenarios to protect the life you have

Today’s guest on The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast is community member and major action-taker, Francine Ivey!

Francine has coached in ten different industries, including Fortune 500 company leaders and managers. She has certifications in Universal Life Coaching, Sales and Leadership Coaching, and is certified as a John Maxwell Coach, Speaker, and Trainer. Her years of experience in evangelism and ministry combined with her experience and training make Francine an in-demand coach, speaker, and trainer.

After coming to one of our Income Surge events, Francine added a membership to her online coaching program, and she has already gotten 17 members!

We talk a lot about marketing and promotion in this episode, so, if you’re trying to grow your online business, this will help you tremendously!

Learn more about Francine at consumedcoaching.com!

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As online entrepreneurs, our sales page is one of the most important elements of our business!

In today’s episode you’ll learn:

Our knowledge equips us to help others
How to scale your online business
The importance of a great sales page
The “Problem, Agitate, Solve” method

Today’s guest on The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast is community member Betsy Guerra! Betsy has been a practicing therapist for over 20 years with a doctorate in psychology.

She suffered a great loss in her family and has been helping others get through the pain and grief from their own losses.

Betsy has an incredible program, but she’s having a bit of trouble with the marketing aspect, so we focus on how she can improve her sales page to get people in the doors of her membership!

The bottom line is that it doesn’t matter how good your program is if the marketing is wrong. We have to demonstrate to potential customers that your program will solve their problems.

You can learn more about Betsy at BetterWithBetsy.com and Hurt2Hope.com!

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Sometimes one email or one promotion can take your online business to the next level! That’s exactly what happened for Jennifer Bradley!

In today’s episode you’ll learn:

How to sell to your email list
The power of free trials
How to downsell to the people who don’t buy your offer
Try new things, and it just might grow your business exponentially

Jennifer Bradley started her membership back in 2017 – since then she and her husband have gotten to quit their 9 to 5 and are now both ALL IN on the membership model!

Jennifer sent out an email to her list offering 4 months of her membership FREE! She had 806 people take her up on the offer! On today’s podcast we will tell you how she did it…

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If you have experience or expertise on a subject, a group coaching program may be the perfect online offer!

In today’s episode you’ll learn:

How to charge for your expertise
The 3 things you need to decide for your coaching program
Don’t worry about the competition
How to create a path for your clients

Today’s guest on The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast is community member Kemi Adeniyi! Kemi was born in Nigeria, came to America, went to Duke University, and is now an anesthesiologist!

Kemi has been successfully coaching people on how to get into anesthesiology programs–the only problem is that she has been doing this for free! That’s not a coaching business; that’s helping someone as a friend, and it’s not sustainable.

In this episode, we go in depth on what steps she needs to take to start a successful, profitable coaching business!

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Today’s guest is Brooke Castillo of The Life Coach School! Brooke’s online business is on-pace to make $35,000,000 this year!

In today’s episode you’ll learn:

How Brooke discovered the membership model (through the Flipped Lifestyle Community)!
The pivotal moment Brooke decided to use the membership model for her online business.
How to run high-priced memberships
Why it’s important to get your pricing right for your audience
The marketing, tactics, all the things that took Brooke from 1,000 members and took it to the next level
How you can implement Brooke’s strategies to make an 8-figure membership site!

Brooke started out with a podcast (The Life Coach School Podcast) and a lot of launch products - no membership.

One of the things she wanted to do was simplify her business with two main products.

She wanted:

A membership for clients that wanted to get coached (on anxiety, for drinking, weight loss).

Her certifications for those who wanted to become a life coach.

Creating a way to get coached in an affordable way meant memberships were the way to go!

Brooke truly understands not to devalue yourself. She stacked up TONS of money into developing herself and her skillset.

That means members paying $297/month is NOT too high of a price!

When you create that much value, members could never spend enough to get the value out of it.

In Brooke’s membership, she wanted her members to feel like they have exclusive access to her. That is why she didn’t let the members talk to each other! In doing so, the relationship felt more like they were just having it with her on a more personal level.

The Life Coach School started because of Brooke’s personal experiences with ending her suffering around emotional eating.

When she decided to become a life coach her experiences (God-given talents of experiences) lead her to fix a problem she knew was out there and that she knew the answers to!

You can’t go into business just to make money. You have to have an offer and a desire to help others!

Check out Brooke’s site: TheLifeCoachSchool.com

If you need help starting, building, and growing an online business, check out all of the support and resources for entrepreneurs at https://www.FlippedLifestyle.com!

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Many people are held back from pursuing their online business dreams because they feel they aren’t expert enough to teach others. We talk about that mindset hurdle today!

In today’s episode you’ll learn:

How to get over feeling like you’re not an expert
How to overcome obstacles in your online business
Ways to increase productivity with the time you have
The importance of planning

On today’s episode of The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, we welcome community members Tommy and Jaslynn Reynolds! Tommy and Jaslynn are brand new to the online business world, but they have a passion to help young couples navigate the early years of their marriage.

Jaslynn works the night shift, so we talk about how she and Tommy can maximize their productivity with the limited time they have during the day. Planning is everything in your business, especially when just starting out. From our experience, we know that if it gets put on the calendar, it’s more likely to get done!

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Do you hate your job and wish that you could be your own boss? How would you like to work when you want… from home… and only work 15-20 hours per week? It’s possible with online business!

In today’s episode you’ll learn:

How to set hours that work for you in your online business
How limiting access to you helps your business grow
Online marketing strategies to promote your business

In today’s podcast we welcome back Brooke Butcher! Last time Brooke was on the show, she was just starting out and growing her online nursing community. On this episode we get to celebrate Brooke’s growing membership and her incredible milestone: Brooke just quit her job and went FULL-TIME online!

We help Brooke get used to her new self employed, location independent lifestyle and grow her nursing membership! You’ll learn how to balance your time between business and life while working at home, promotions to help you grow your membership site, and how to know when it’s time to go full time online!

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If you have followers on social media, that means you have potential customers who are likely to buy products that you sell online!

In today’s episode you’ll learn:

How to get your offer right for your audience
Build a product that you know your audience wants
How to structure your online membership
Do what works, so you can expand your business to what you want

Laura Dalpini has over 55,000 Instagram followers! She started her Instagram account 10 years ago as a way of keeping herself accountable on her weight loss journey.

After posting pictures of her progress, several of her followers wanted to learn how she lost the weight. Laura then decided to start offering meal plans to her followers and started making $2500 per week!

After some life hardships, she’s ready to get back into making money online, so we’re going to help her figure out her online offer and get back on the wagon!

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Hey y’all! On today’s podcast we celebrate an AMAZING Flipped Lifestyle Community success story!

In this week’s interview, we welcome back long time member Karim Morato to the show! Karim has been fighting for her dreams for years. Karim came to the United States from Guatemala with nothing but a suitcase. She actually learned how to speak English while stocking shelves at K-Mart!

Now, she’s using her God-given experiences to teach American homeschool children Spanish in her online business!

Karim almost gave up a few years ago…

We convinced her to keep chasing her online business dream. The result? Last month Karim made $17,000 online!

This is one of the most amazing stories of perseverance you will ever hear on any podcast. We know Karim’s story is going to inspire YOU to take action and keep going in your online journey as well!

In today’s episode you’ll learn:

How to keep going when you want to give up on your dreams

Masterminds and accountability help to keep momentum

Hiring helps you scale your business and become a true CEO

How to use challenges and webinars to get more members

We would love to have you as a member of The Flipped Lifestyle Community! We believe you have God-given talents and experiences you can use to start an online business! All you need is 100 people to pay you $50/m online to make $5,000/m, $60,000/y! Let us help you start a membership of your own. We offer a FREE Basic Membership to give you the tools and resources you need to find your online business idea and get started. Click here to learn more: https://flippedlifestyle.com/free

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Are you trying to figure out how to grow your online business? We go over some of the most effective online marketing strategies in this episode of The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast!

In today’s episode you’ll learn:

How to get over the fear of selling
People who pay, pay attention
Biggest obstacles in online business
Online marketing strategies that work
How to grow your business with podcasting

Today’s guest on the podcast is Tina Rains of MasterpieceWomen.org!

Tina has been an entrepreneur all of her life. She was a missionary and also founded Masterpiece Women’s Ministry. She realized that she needed to switch from a not-for-profit into a sustainable business model because money makes the mission possible.

After coming to one of our Income Surge events, Tina found the guidance she needed to start her online membership, and she got 12 members in the first week!

To hear the rest of this coaching call, Join The Flipped Lifestyle Community!

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Imagine 2000 people paying you $29, $49, even $109 each month!

Do the math! We are talking over $1M /year online!

That’s exactly what happened to Jeff Twiddy!

Jeff started listening to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast a few years ago, joined the Flip Your Life Community and started taking massive action!

We first introduced you to Jeff in episode 104 (listen here: https://flippedlifestyle.com/podcast104)

In that episode, Jeff’s membership was taking off! He was making great money, and had created enough monthly revenue for his wife to come home!

Then… things got crazy!

Jeff’s membership has gone from successful to a full-blown online empire of 2000 paying customers!

Crazy right!?!?

In today’s episode, you will learn how Jeff scaled his membership in record time, and how he’s truly living the Flipped Lifestyle with his wife and kids!

If you have an online dream, you do not want to miss this episode of The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast!

In this episode, you’ll learn:

How Jeff built a seven-figure membership

How to use what you know to create the life you want

Jeff Twiddy’s advice for people who want to start an online business

We would love to have you as a member of The Flipped Lifestyle Community! We believe you have God-given talents and experiences you can use to start an online business! All you need is 100 people to pay you $50/m online to make $5,000/m, $60,000/y! Let us help you start a membership of your own. We offer a FREE Basic Membership to give you the tools and resources you need to find your online business idea and get started. Click here to learn more: https://flippedlifestyle.com/free

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Hey y’all! Today’s guest on The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast is community member Matt Walker!

Matt has a master’s degree in vocal performance and has been a choir director for over 15 years! He had a desire to help choir directors and wanted to have a greater impact on choral music education. Matt started searching for resources for professional development and sharing what he found with colleagues. This led him to eventually start ChoirDirectorCorner.com!

This is Matt’s website that “provides practical resources, collaboration and support to help choir directors save time and frustration, conquer rehearsal challenges and arrive at a successful performance.”

One day when he was on his riding mower, Matt was listening to a podcast about online business and heard Shane talking about memberships. He joined the Flipped Lifestyle Community, started a membership for his audience, and is now up to 58 members!!

On this podcast, we talk about how to stop listening to the naysayers and, instead, listen to the people who are interested in what you have to say. We talk about pushing past plateaus in your membership and strategies on how to grow your podcast!

Learn more about Matt and his business at ChoirDirectorCorner.com!

In today’s episode you’ll learn:

How to get past impostor syndrome

Stop listening to the naysayers

How to keep growing your online business after it plateaus

How to shift to a marketing strategy after your membership grows

Focus on what you can control

How to raise prices in your membership

How to grow your podcast

To hear the rest of this coaching call, join The Flipped Lifestyle Community!

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Our guest this week on The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast is Jody Moore! Jody is the host of the Better Than Happy podcast, and her membership has over 4,000 members!

One day on one of our member calls in The Flipped Lifestyle Community, one of our members said, ‘hey, someone was talking about you all the other day.’ So, we looked up this podcast. It was the Better Than Happy Podcast with Jody Moore. The name sounded familiar. When we listened to this episode that we were mentioned in, she was talking about her membership and how she learned about them from us! So, of course we had to talk to her!

Jody is a great example of how you really can change your life and others through the membership model. The membership model allows more people access to Jody’s life coaching and allows her to help more people at the same time!

Growing up, most of us are told that you work your tail off through college for a job with a decent income. For us, we hit a point where our floor, because of our memberships, was everybody else’s ceiling.

It took us a few years to get through that launch world where if you don’t get 1000 members or $100K when you launch, then you’re not a success.

But, through the membership model, we have the mindset of giving ourselves raises every day!

That is how we developed our philosophy of:

Consistent

Relentless

Prolific

We consistently put out our podcast. We share the podcast every day and write the email to our list every day.

We relentlessly follow up with every possible person that slightly raises their hand up into the sky that says ‘I’m paying attention to you.’ Good things are going to happen, because I keep doing that over and over and over again. Then, it’s just a matter of what tools you’re using to keep that going, as everything continues growing.

Find out more about Jody at JodyMoore.com!

In today’s episode you’ll learn:

You don’t have to have a big launch

How to reach thousands of people

Your membership site can evolve as you do

How to define your own success

We would love to have you as a member of The Flipped Lifestyle Community! We believe you have God-given talents and experiences you can use to start an online business! All you need is 100 people to pay you $50/m online to make $5,000/m, $60,000/y! Let us help you start a membership of your own. We offer a FREE Basic Membership to give you the tools and resources you need to find your online business idea and get started. Click here to learn more: https://flippedlifestyle.com/free

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Hey y’all! Today’s guest on The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast is community member Kevin Alexander! Kevin runs an online coaching business that helps people start and grow their speaking careers!

We had the opportunity to meet Kevin at one of our live Income Surge events! Kevin had previously been a youth pastor, but he pivoted into speaking as a full-time job. He realized that many people wanted to become speakers but didn’t know how to get started or get their messaging right, so he used his marketing knowledge to build a business that serves speakers.

On this podcast, we help Kevin move from the 1-on-1 coaching model into group coaching and a membership site! We talk a lot about marketing and what products to offer. We talk about having mentors and coaches (even people making a great living still need them)! We also talk about mission and message.

In today’s episode you’ll learn:

Your entire business is marketing

How to scale your online business to reach more people

The value of coaching

How to go from individual coaching to group coaching and memberships

We would love to have you as a member of The Flipped Lifestyle Community! We believe you have God-given talents and experiences you can use to start an online business! All you need is 100 people to pay you $50/m online to make $5,000/m, $60,000/y! Let us help you start a membership of your own. We offer a FREE Basic Membership to give you the tools and resources you need to find your online business idea and get started. Click here to learn more: https://flippedlifestyle.com/free

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Our favorite thing to do in The Flipped Lifestyle Community is celebrate a member’s success!

And in this week’s Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, we have an amazing success story!

It takes a long time to become an overnight success and persistence to reach your online goals. Ben started his journey in the community 5 years ago, and he has steadily grown his online business. He recently reached an amazing milestone!

On this week’s show you will learn how Flipped Lifestyle Community Member Ben Landers built his online business from scratch and had his first 6-figure year!

That’s over $100,000 in a single year online! WOW!

Listen in and learn how he did it (while working full-time and raising kids), and how you could too!

In today’s episode you’ll learn:

How to launch your membership with no content

Pivoting your business ideas is okay

How to raise your prices and get more members

How to outsource tasks so you can scale

The best action steps to become successful

We would love to have you as a member of The Flipped Lifestyle Community! We believe you have God-given talents and experiences you can use to start an online business! All you need is 100 people to pay you $50/m online to make $5,000/m, $60,000/y! Let us help you start a membership of your own. We offer a FREE Basic Membership to give you the tools and resources you need to find your online business idea and get started. Click here to learn more: https://flippedlifestyle.com/free

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Hey y’all! Today’s guest on The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast is community member Jay Cravens! Jay and his dad, Mark, came to one of our recent Life Surge events in Tampa, FL. They attended one of our workshops to try to figure out an idea for an online business they could work on together!

Jay and Mark came up with a great idea to help parents and grandparents connect with their kids and grandkids by learning technology at LinkTheTree.com!

Before coming to the event in Tampa, Jay had experience as a YouTuber, so he’s been able to take that experience to quickly launch his membership. We can use the skills we’ve built over the years to get a minimum viable product available to the public.

In this episode, we try to narrow down exactly what Jay needs to offer in his membership, so he can have more focused marketing with Facebook ads. We also talk about the dangers of creating too much content. You don’t want to overwhelm potential customers by throwing a ton of content at them immediately; instead, focus on just a few vital elements to make your membership more enticing.

Jay has a great mission, and it’s a fitting podcast because this is Shane’s first episode after a scary visit to the hospital. It was through technology that he was able to communicate with his family. I know you’re going to get value from this podcast!

In today’s episode you’ll learn:

How to get your offer right

The dangers of creating too much content

How to narrow down your avatar

How using skills you’ve learned can help you start your membership quickly

No matter what you’re building, the fundamentals are the same

We would love to have you as a member of The Flipped Lifestyle Community! We believe you have God-given talents and experiences you can use to start an online business! All you need is 100 people to pay you $50/m online to make $5,000/m, $60,000/y! Let us help you start a membership of your own. We offer a FREE Basic Membership to give you the tools and resources you need to find your online business idea and get started. Click here to learn more: https://flippedlifestyle.com/free

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Hey y’all! Today’s guests on The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast are Chris and Ivy Newport!

About 14 years ago, Ivy created a blog as a new mom. She just wanted to get online and share her creativity with others. Through that process, she discovered a need for women to connect so they could be inspired by each other. From there, Ivy began getting into online art-focused classes and fell in love. This is when Ivy’s husband, Chris, decided to get on board and see what these online creative classes were all about!

Chris and Ivy started their membership inside The Flipped Lifestyle Community, and grew it to a quarter-million dollar business in record time! In today’s Flipped Lifestyle Podcast we detail how they did it, and exactly how a real couple built their 6-figure membership on the Internet!

You can check out their earlier podcast episode by clicking here!

In today’s episode you’ll learn:

How to raise the floor of your business with memberships

How to accept the uncertainty

Memberships create community that course cannot

The challenges of working with your spouse

We would love to have you as a member of The Flipped Lifestyle Community! We believe you have God-given talents and experiences you can use to start an online business! All you need is 100 people to pay you $50/m online to make $5,000/m, $60,000/y! Let us help you start a membership of your own. We offer a FREE Basic Membership to give you the tools and resources you need to find your online business idea and get started. Click here to learn more: https://flippedlifestyle.com/free

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On this week’s Flipped Lifestyle Podcast we welcome back one of our favorite guests and Flipped Lifestyle Community members – Teresa Perleberg!

We first shared Teresa’s story on Podcast 191 – click here to listen!

In that episode, we learned that Teresa was building her membership business around needle felting!

We helped Teresa improve her engagement and retention in her budding membership business.

And WOW did she take action!

Teresa now runs a $250,000 needle felting empire from the plains of North Dakota!

We know this episode of the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast will inspire you to take your membership to the next level as well!

In today’s episode you’ll learn:

How she grew her quarter million dollar business!

How partnerships were the key to taking her membership to the next level!

How she BOUGHT A SCHOOL, and what she plans to do with it (it’s INCREDIBLE)!

We would love to have you as a member of The Flipped Lifestyle Community! We believe you have God-given talents and experiences you can use to start an online business! All you need is 100 people to pay you $50/m online to make $5,000/m, $60,000/y! Let us help you start a membership of your own. We offer a FREE Basic Membership to give you the tools and resources you need to find your online business idea and get started. Click here to learn more: https://flippedlifestyle.com/free

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Today’s guest on the Flipped Lifestyle podcast is Lauren Greutman! Lauren was previously a guest on The Shane Sams Show. She’s an entrepreneur who has been on several television shows, and she’s known as an expert on budgeting and saving money.

Well, Lauren decided to launch her budgeting and personal finance membership just 11 days ago and already has 62 paying members!

Shane and Lauren also discuss some mindset issues behind pricing, along with some strategies that Lauren can use to get to 100 and even 1,000 members!

Check out Lauren’s appearance on The Shane Sams Show by clicking HERE.

Find out more about Lauren’s podcast and membership at LaurenGreutman.com!

In today’s episode you’ll learn:

How to launch a membership fast!

How memberships can change your family’s future

Marketing strategies to get your first 100 members

How to grow and scale your membership while also protecting your time

Shane talks about previous podcasts with Brooke Castillo and Jody Moore, and you can check those out below:

Brooke Castillo on The Shane Sams Show

Jody Moore on The Shane Sams Show

We would love to have you as a member of The Flipped Lifestyle Community! We believe you have God-given talents and experiences you can use to start an online business! All you need is 100 people to pay you $50/m online to make $5,000/m, $60,000/y! Let us help you start a membership of your own. We offer a FREE Basic Membership to give you the tools and resources you need to find your online business idea and get started. Click here to learn more: https://flippedlifestyle.com/free

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Hey y’all! Today’s guests on The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast are community members Kenny and Nancy Troiano! They run a membership site for people raising backyard chickens.

That’s right. Over 100 people are paying them monthly to learn about chickens!

Kenny had been writing articles for chicken magazines (yes, those are real), and then he started a membership site called The Breeders Academy and has almost 100 people paying him monthly!

The content that Kenny puts out is great, but he’s running into a big issue: time. He doesn’t have time to do all of the things he wants to do in his business, so we recommend outsourcing podcast editing, so he can focus on putting out great content to grow the membership!

In today’s episode you’ll learn:

How to handle annual plan renewals

How starting a podcast can help people know, like, and trust you

When to outsource parts of your business

Done is better than perfect

Focus on the 5 things that produce members in your business

We would love to have you as a member of The Flipped Lifestyle Community! We believe you have God-given talents and experiences you can use to start an online business! All you need is 100 people to pay you $50/m online to make $5,000/m, $60,000/y! Let us help you start a membership of your own. We offer a FREE Basic Membership to give you the tools and resources you need to find your online business idea and get started. Click here to learn more: https://flippedlifestyle.com/free

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Hey y’all! Today’s guest on The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast is community member Jennifer Dixon! Jennifer quit her 9-5 corporate job to open her own yoga studio in Chattanooga, TN, but she faced challenges during the pandemic.

Everything has been making its way online for a while now, but recent events have only sped up the process. We have seen how valuable it is to have an established online community. Grocery stores, clothing stores, fitness studios, even doctors offices and pharmacies are all using the tools they had in place to virtually continue their services.

If you have a desire for freedom, peace of mind, and sustainability, there is no time like today to start your own online membership. The only thing that Jennifer needed to keep her studio open was the internet and her passion to help others through yoga!

Online memberships allow you to continue serving + building your community.

In fact, through her online memberships, Jennifer’s market is now bigger than before because she is reaching a target audience that does not have to live in Chattanooga.

Online memberships can sustain existing businesses.

Let’s use Jennifer as an example here: 1) she had monthly memberships to her physical yoga studio 2) she found a way to keep her business alive by utilizing those memberships online. It was literally as simple as it sounds. Even after Tennessee’s Governor closed non-essential businesses because of COVID-19 Jennifer is still keeping your studio open by driving online memberships.

In today’s episode you’ll learn:

How to serve + build your online community

How to turn physical memberships into sustainable online memberships

How to monetize your online presence

Connect + influence your audience

Use feedback to take your business to the next level

How to market your membership

We would love to have you as a member of The Flipped Lifestyle Community! We believe you have God-given talents and experiences you can use to start an online business! All you need is 100 people to pay you $50/m online to make $5,000/m, $60,000/y! Let us help you start a membership of your own. We offer a FREE Basic Membership to give you the tools and resources you need to find your online business idea and get started. Click here to learn more: https://flippedlifestyle.com/free

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Today’s guest on the Flipped Lifestyle podcast is community member Eric Wooten! Eric is a licensed counselor who helps couples build stronger marriages. In early 2020, he had scheduled many speaking opportunities, and then the pandemic hit.

Eric pivoted into online coaching and counseling, started a YouTube channel, and, soon after, he started a membership for helping married couples called AltaredMarriage.com!

Eric dove head first into tons of online trainings and webinars to figure out how to grow his membership, but nothing was working very well. Then, he found Shane and everything changed. Eric followed the Membership Masters calendar that Shane sends out and grew his membership from 17 to over 50!

In this podcast, Eric and Shane talk about finding your people. They discuss how Eric launched to a list that already trusted him, but it didn’t convert. They discuss how to do strategic price increases to create urgency for your email list and how getting on other people’s podcasts is the best thing you can do to grow your audience!

In today’s episode you’ll learn:

How to do a price increase sale

How to create urgency for your audience to join your membership

The importance of community for a membership

The effectiveness of group coaching

We would love to have you as a member of The Flipped Lifestyle Community! We believe you have God-given talents and experiences you can use to start an online business! All you need is 100 people to pay you $50/m online to make $5,000/m, $60,000/y! Let us help you start a membership of your own. We offer a FREE Basic Membership to give you the tools and resources you need to find your online business idea and get started. Click here to learn more: https://flippedlifestyle.com/free

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Hey y’all! Today’s guest on The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast is community member Eva Klein of MySleepingBaby.com! Eva is married with 3 kids and lives in Toronto.

When she was on maternity leave, Eva decided that she wanted to make some extra income with a side hustle. She became a certified sleep consultant and began acquiring one-on-one coaching clients by Facebook group recommendations. Her side hustle was quickly turning into much more.

Eva was working part time as a lawyer, but her boss wanted her to come back to full-time duties. She decided, instead, to pursue her growing sleep consulting business but wasn’t sure how to scale it. That’s when Eva discovered our article on Forbes, and a light bulb went off that she needed to start selling digital products, and now she just had her first 5-figure month!

On this coaching call, we help Eva take the next steps in her online business journey by figuring out which tasks she can outsource to a virtual assistant and what she needs to do to be able to scale her membership.

In today’s episode you’ll learn:

You don’t have to have it all figured out to get started

You can predictable income with a membership

How to prioritize virtual assistant tasks

How to improve your elevator pitch

We would love to have you as a member of The Flipped Lifestyle Community! We believe you have God-given talents and experiences you can use to start an online business! All you need is 100 people to pay you $50/m online to make $5,000/m, $60,000/y! Let us help you start a membership of your own. We offer a FREE Basic Membership to give you the tools and resources you need to find your online business idea and get started. Click here to learn more: https://flippedlifestyle.com/free

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Here are some of my early thoughts reflecting on my life threatening experience...

1) Health is wealth

2) Family and community are everything.

3) Thank God for the flexibility of online business

4) God has a mission for us all, and every day you wake up, he's saying "I'm not done with you yet. Get to work."

5) There is no tomorrow.

Only today.

When you are faced with the real possibility of no tomorrow, you realize how precious today really is.

I was healthy one day, then not the next. That fast.

I was attacking life, and then I was fighting for my life.

If the sun is shining, if you are awake and reading this email...

Then you have TODAY!

Today is the day the Lord has made... let us REJOICE and be glad in it y'all!

Procrastination has no place in our life anymore. I declare war on "tomorrow" and claim "TODAY" as the day of my salvation, my action, my chance... the day of action, the day of effort, the day of stop putting things off, the day of checking off the boxes and getting stuff DONE...

And you should too...

Your life can change in an instant (mine did), and unfortunately, it doesn't always have a happy ending or a second chance or a clear bill of health at the end of the story...

You may not have tomorrow to chase your dream...

Or call that loved one...

Or to start your online business...

You only have TODAY.

Did YOU see the Sunrise?

What does that mean?

It means God gave you another day...

Don't waste it...

No more "tomorrows"

Get out there...

Take action...

And do whatever it takes to Flip Your Life.

A special thank you to everyone out there who prayed for me and my family, left us a messages on social media, or sent us cards and emails while I was sick.

You helped us through the storm, and we will never forget the love you sent our way in a hard time. We love you, and are so grateful for you, and will use this gift of life and time to serve you and your family!

We would love to have you as a member of The Flipped Lifestyle Community! We believe you have God-given talents and experiences you can use to start an online business! All you need is 100 people to pay you $50/m online to make $5,000/m, $60,000/y! Let us help you start a membership of your own. We offer a FREE Basic Membership to give you the tools and resources you need to find your online business idea and get started. Click here to learn more: https://flippedlifestyle.com/free

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Hey, y’all! Today’s guest on The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast is community member Blair Thielemier!

Blair was a pharmacist and wanted to teach other pharmacists to have other services so they were not so dependent on doctors or drug systems! This helps them create better practices and more money.

Blair had her website going, but she had paywalls and things we needed to change. After we talked to her, we re-did her membership, and she began making over $30K/month in just a matter of a few months!

In today’s episode you’ll learn:

How to take risks in your online business

Charging a high join fee can keep potential members from ever seeing the value of your membership

How to sell to a small email list

Your customers will help you build the membership by letting you know what they need

We would love to have you as a member of The Flipped Lifestyle Community! We believe you have God-given talents and experiences you can use to start an online business! All you need is 100 people to pay you $50/m online to make $5,000/m, $60,000/y! Let us help you start a membership of your own. We offer a FREE Basic Membership to give you the tools and resources you need to find your online business idea and get started. Click here to learn more: https://flippedlifestyle.com/free

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Hey, y’all! Today’s guest on The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast is Laura Kebart! Laura runs a membership site called LanguageArtsTeachers.com. In her membership, Laura serves middle school teachers who want to spend more time with their families. She gives them their time back by creating lesson plans for them.

In today’s episode, we help Laura get new members and also retain current members in her education business. We talk about how memberships are a marathon, even though they sometimes look like overnight successes from the outside.

We talk about how, to stand out, you need to be consistent, prolific, and relentless in your online business. Repurposing your content goes a long way in serving your members. Also, once you find the things that work, continuing to do them consistently and prolifically will keep new members flowing into your business.

The goal is to stop spending time on things that are not moving your membership forward. Creating graphics and logos can be fun, but how much do they actually contribute to growing your online business?

In today’s episode you’ll learn:

How to retain members by keeping them happy

How to gain new members by doing what works

What perfectionism really means

What can hold you back from growing your membership

We would love to have you as a member of The Flipped Lifestyle Community! We believe you have God-given talents and experiences you can use to start an online business! All you need is 100 people to pay you $50/m online to make $5,000/m, $60,000/y! Let us help you start a membership of your own. We offer a FREE Basic Membership to give you the tools and resources you need to find your online business idea and get started. Click here to learn more: https://flippedlifestyle.com/free

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Today’s guest on the Flipped Lifestyle podcast is community member Joel Santana! Joel came to one of our Flipped Lifestyle Experience live events in Tampa, FL and took immediate action on creating a membership site!

In Joel’s ImageMakers Society membership, he teaches artists and aspiring artists how to turn their sketches into digital art using tools like Photoshop. Upon launch, Joel got 5 paying members! He’s since doubled his community and we’re going to help him find his next steps to grow.

On this episode of the podcast, we talk about the feeling that we get when we have our first member cancel and how we need to focus on the people who are there. We discuss content strategies and how to get Joel’s product in front of more people.

In today’s episode you’ll learn:

How Joel Santana got his first 5 members

What happens when a member cancels and how to focus on those who stay

How to let your members give you ideas for content

A content strategy to promote your membership

We would love to have you as a member of The Flipped Lifestyle Community! We believe you have God-given talents and experiences you can use to start an online business! All you need is 100 people to pay you $50/m online to make $5,000/m, $60,000/y! Let us help you start a membership of your own. We offer a FREE Basic Membership to give you the tools and resources you need to find your online business idea and get started. Click here to learn more: https://flippedlifestyle.com/free

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Today’s guest on the Flipped Lifestyle podcast is Daniel Hulsman, creator of VGMAcademy.com!

The story of how we met Daniel is an interesting one! One day, we received a… not so nice email detailing his doubts, frustrations and surprisingly his hope that maybe – just maybe – we could help him become a successful online entrepreneur too!

In this episode, we help Daniel figure out if he is expert enough to lead an online community of aspiring video game music creators.

This week’s episode is all about how YOU can turn a critic into a customer, why you are not for everyone and why that’s okay, and how to dispel that voice saying you are not expert enough.

In today’s episode you’ll learn:

The difference between a troll and a critic

How to turn a critic into a customer

Are you expert enough to lead?

Understanding your mission online

We would love to have you as a member of The Flipped Lifestyle Community! We believe you have God-given talents and experiences you can use to start an online business! All you need is 100 people to pay you $50/m online to make $5,000/m, $60,000/y! Let us help you start a membership of your own. We offer a FREE Basic Membership to give you the tools and resources you need to find your online business idea and get started. Click here to learn more: https://flippedlifestyle.com/free

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Today’s guest on the podcast is Flipped Lifestyle community member, Tara Eitman! Tara is a money and mindset coach who has seven different streams of income! These income streams help her to live a different kind of life, so it makes sense that she is launching a membership site called TheDifferentLife.com!

Learn more about Tara at TheDifferentLife.com!

In today’s episode you’ll learn:

Content marketing strategies

How you can use lead magnets to build your email list

How memberships are multiple streams of income

How to get over perfectionism

How to improve your copy to get people to join your membership

We would love to have you as a member of The Flipped Lifestyle Community! We believe you have God-given talents and experiences you can use to start an online business! All you need is 100 people to pay you $50/m online to make $5,000/m, $60,000/y! Let us help you start a membership of your own. We offer a FREE Basic Membership to give you the tools and resources you need to find your online business idea and get started. Click here to learn more: https://flippedlifestyle.com/free

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This week’s episode is where we talk about our transition between the nine-to-five and to becoming full-time, online entrepreneurs.

Our online business journey started out with so many people around us asking, “Why did you do that?”

We realized the difference we can make in other people’s lives — a life where you can be the boss.

We created the Flipped Lifestyle to help answer one of the most vital life questions — “How can I do that too?”

We’re going all out in this episode, so we hope you can take home a nugget of wisdom or two.

And remember, if we can do it, YOU CAN DO IT TOO.

Best quotes from the episode:

If people don’t think you’re crazy, you might not be dreaming big enough

You can either build your own dreams or build someone else’s

Highlights of this chapter:

Taking a chance by going to meet Pat Flynn

Making more money in one week than we did in one year!

Difficult decisions: selling our house & quitting our jobs!

We would love to have you as a member of The Flipped Lifestyle Community! We believe you have God-given talents and experiences you can use to start an online business! All you need is 100 people to pay you $50/m online to make $5,000/m, $60,000/y! Let us help you start a membership of your own. We offer a FREE Basic Membership to give you the tools and resources you need to find your online business idea and get started. Click here to learn more: https://flippedlifestyle.com/free

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As much as we wanted to quit our jobs right there and then, we couldn’t until we figured out a way to earn and replace our current income.

Check out how we discovered online business, the entrepreneurial struggles, and our heart-stopping 11￠ moment!

Highlights of this chapter:

Where the idea for our online business came from

How to get 100 people to pay you $50/month

Our first money ever made online!

We would love to have you as a member of The Flipped Lifestyle Community! We believe you have God-given talents and experiences you can use to start an online business! All you need is 100 people to pay you $50/m online to make $5,000/m, $60,000/y! Let us help you start a membership of your own. We offer a FREE Basic Membership to give you the tools and resources you need to find your online business idea and get started. Click here to learn more: https://flippedlifestyle.com/free

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This story will inspire you, show you what is possible, and how you can do it, too.

Highlights of this chapter:

Our wedding

Our career pivots

The worst day of our lives — the catalyst that pushed us closer to a more non-conventional way of living.

We would love to have you as a member of The Flipped Lifestyle Community! We believe you have God-given talents and experiences you can use to start an online business! All you need is 100 people to pay you $50/m online to make $5,000/m, $60,000/y! Let us help you start a membership of your own. We offer a FREE Basic Membership to give you the tools and resources you need to find your online business idea and get started. Click here to learn more: https://flippedlifestyle.com/free

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Tune in this week and keep tuning in, who knows? You just might connect the dots in your life and realize you too have the puzzle pieces you need to succeed online.

Highlights of this chapter:

Dating, marriage, and relocation

How Shane and Jocelyn began to figure out their career paths

How taking chances can get you where you want to be

We would love to have you as a member of The Flipped Lifestyle Community! We believe you have God-given talents and experiences you can use to start an online business! All you need is 100 people to pay you $50/m online to make $5,000/m, $60,000/y! Let us help you start a membership of your own. We offer a FREE Basic Membership to give you the tools and resources you need to find your online business idea and get started. Click here to learn more: https://flippedlifestyle.com/free

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Highlights of this chapter:

Shane and Jocelyn go to college

How Shane won Jocelyn’s love and attention

Major changes--pun intended

Brace yourselves, things are going to get cheesy and then hilarious… really, really fast.

We would love to have you as a member of The Flipped Lifestyle Community! We believe you have God-given talents and experiences you can use to start an online business! All you need is 100 people to pay you $50/m online to make $5,000/m, $60,000/y! Let us help you start a membership of your own. We offer a FREE Basic Membership to give you the tools and resources you need to find your online business idea and get started. Click here to learn more: https://flippedlifestyle.com/free

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In today’s episode you’ll learn:

Shane & Jocelyn Sams’ upbringing and family background

How to lean into your unfair advantages

We would love to have you as a member of The Flipped Lifestyle Community! We believe you have God-given talents and experiences you can use to start an online business! All you need is 100 people to pay you $50/m online to make $5,000/m, $60,000/y! Let us help you start a membership of your own. We offer a FREE Basic Membership to give you the tools and resources you need to find your online business idea and get started. Click here to learn more: https://flippedlifestyle.com/free

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Today’s guest on the podcast is Flipped Lifestyle community member, Veronica Lopez! Veronica is an Educational Consultant and the founder of Tree-Top Secret Education. She has provided district and campus workshops, serving teachers through one-on-one coaching for several years.

When she first launched her online course, she made $16,000! She has embraced the membership model and recently added over 70 new members with a strategy that involves live webinars and a free, follow-up mini-course for those who couldn’t attend.

Shane and Jocelyn Sams strategize with Veronica to see where she is in her business and how she can grow her membership without burning out. This includes taking inventory of how many hours she is putting in and figuring out exactly what she needs to do next.

In today’s episode you’ll learn:

Veronica’s webinar strategy

Jocelyn’s follow up recommendation

Flipped Life Cycle Basics

Inventory & calculating your effective hourly rate

Check out Veronica’s first appearance on the Flipped Lifestyle podcast here: https://flippedlifestyle.com/podcast86/

Veronica’s Tree-Top Secret Education Membership: https://treetopsecret.com/

We would love to have you as a member of The Flipped Lifestyle Community! We believe you have God-given talents and experiences you can use to start an online business! All you need is 100 people to pay you $50/m online to make $5,000/m, $60,000/y! Let us help you start a membership of your own. We offer a FREE Basic Membership to give you the tools and resources you need to find your online business idea and get started. Click here to learn more: https://flippedlifestyle.com/free

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Today’s guest on the podcast is Flipped Lifestyle community member, Sandra Chen! Sandra has an amazing story that you’re not going to want to miss. She has dealt with incredibly challenging circumstances while running her online business.

Sandra moved to a new country with her husband, found out she was pregnant, had a baby, and then got a cancer diagnosis...all within a short period of time. She had started her online business in the midst of all of this and had to take a break to focus on the events of her life. During that break, she was still able to make hundreds of dollars online per month!

Shane, Jocelyn, and Sandra discuss how to return to a business after a hiatus and what steps Sandra should take to make the business manageable.

Check out Sandra’s business at InspiredKeys.com!

In today’s episode you’ll learn:

Sandra’s inspiring life story & online business journey

Overcoming internal and external obstacles

Just take action instead of trying to figure everything out

Tips on how to get back in online business post-hiatus

Getting your members engaged in your community

We would love to have you as a member of The Flipped Lifestyle Community! We believe you have God-given talents and experiences you can use to start an online business! All you need is 100 people to pay you $50/m online to make $5,000/m, $60,000/y! Let us help you start a membership of your own. We offer a FREE Basic Membership to give you the tools and resources you need to find your online business idea and get started. Click here to learn more: https://flippedlifestyle.com/free

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Today’s guests on the Flipped Lifestyle podcast are community members Rebecca and Dan Dekker, creators of evidencebasedbirth.com!

Rebecca is a mother, wife and PhD-prepared nurse researcher with years of expertise in reading research, evaluating and then summarizing it. She is also someone who had personally experienced both the wonders and horrors of childbirth.

Managing the finances side of the business is her husband, Dan. He has an MBA and uses his expertise to allow Rebecca to focus on creating content and serving her members.

They got 150 members on their beta launch, and then did a price increase and got 150 MORE members!

In today’s episode, you’ll learn:

How to delegate, so you can get more done in your online business

The launch model vs. the membership model

Community helps us take action

The advantage of being ad affiliate free

We would love to have you as a member of The Flipped Lifestyle Community! We believe you have God-given talents and experiences you can use to start an online business! All you need is 100 people to pay you $50/m online to make $5,000/m, $60,000/y! Let us help you start a membership of your own. We offer a FREE Basic Membership to give you the tools and resources you need to find your online business idea and get started. Click here to learn more: https://flippedlifestyle.com/free

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Today’s guest on the podcast is Flipped Lifestyle community member, Jeanette Stein! Jeanette had been in the online world for 4-5 years, selling one-off products along with a one-time course never being able to make more than a couple dollars a month. She joined the Flipped Lifestyle Community with the hopes of being able to stay at home with her children.

Jeanette learned to have ONE direct focus online after joining the community, and within 4 weeks of starting a membership website, she had 55 members! As the membership site continued to grow, Jeanette decided to quit her full-time job and go all-in on her online business.

Jeanette shares with us the top three things she did to keep her membership site moving forward and how her life has changed on a daily basis after leaving her full-time teaching job.

In today’s episode you’ll learn:

How staying focused will help grow your online business.

The importance of taking action

Why having other like minded people around you is important

Do at least ONE thing every day to keep your business moving forward

3 Tips to help you be more successful online

We would love to have you as a member of The Flipped Lifestyle Community! We believe you have God-given talents and experiences you can use to start an online business! All you need is 100 people to pay you $50/m online to make $5,000/m, $60,000/y! Let us help you start a membership of your own. We offer a FREE Basic Membership to give you the tools and resources you need to find your online business and get started. Click here to learn more: https://flippedlifestyle.com/free

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You can listen to Rebecca’s first episode on The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast here: https://flippedlifestyle.com/podcast105/

In today’s episode you’ll learn:

How Rebecca Smith grew her membership site to $20,000/month

How to take your online business to the next level after plateauing

How to use the Dream 100 strategy to find new members

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Today’s guest on the podcast is Flipped Lifestyle community member, Cindy Dunn! Cindy runs a membership site called The Foreign Language Library Online, which has now reached 10 members! The best part is that Cindy has gotten these members without running any ads!

Cindy started her website as a hobby site ten years ago, but it started to grow into something that she wanted to monetize. She started building her email list, and, amazingly, all 10 people on her list are currently members!

One of the things that has been holding Cindy back are technical issues. She has her membership on Wordpress, which requires lots of plugin upgrades and extra attention to make sure that everything works properly. In this episode, she and Shane Sams discuss whether she should stay on Wordpress or move her membership site to another platform. They also discuss some Facebook ad strategies and best practices.

Find out more about Cindy and her business at thefllo.com!

In today’s episode you’ll learn:

How entrepreneurs can stop self-sabotaging

How to get past technical issues that hold your membership site back

Facebook ad strategies

It ain’t gotta be perfect; it’s just gotta be done!

We would love to have you as a member of The Flipped Lifestyle Community! We believe you have God-given talents and experiences you can use to start an online business! All you need is 100 people to pay you $50/m online to make $5,000/m, $60,000/y! Let us help you start a membership of your own. We offer a FREE Basic Membership to give you the tools and resources you need to find your online business idea and get started. Click here to learn more: https://flippedlifestyle.com/free

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His business went nationwide when he started selling products through catalogs. Daryn sold that business in 2017 and is looking to get into podcasting and running a membership site! He is starting a podcast called Patriots with Grit.

Shane Sams and Daryn talk about the importance of investing in yourself and learning from the experts in your field. They also discuss how comparison and distraction have held Daryn back from getting started with his online business.

Another obstacle for Daryn has been the technical component of running an online business, but he and Shane discuss how to find a simple way to create content, connect community, and coach people and not get too bogged down with tech.

In today’s episode you’ll learn:

The key to running a membership site is to find a simple way to create content, connect community, and coach people

How to get past the fear of complicated technology

How to create the right membership for your audience

The importance of figuring out what problem you are solving for your members

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It’s also important to remember that your business doesn’t have to be an “either/or” business; you can have a membership and also offer more personalized services.

You can find Ben Pugh at BenPughCoaching.com.

In today’s episode you’ll learn:

How to take your coaching business and turn it into a membership
Your membership can include coaching; it doesn’t have to be either/or
Do the things that make your business profitable
How to handle running a membership with partners

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Brainstorming, choosing which idea is quickest to get to market, and using SWOT analysis will give you clarity on which idea you should pursue.

In today’s episode you’ll learn:

How to decide which online business idea to try

Don’t let your biases or assumptions get in the way

How to prioritize and go all-in on one idea

Don’t let your biases or assumptions get in the wayWe would love to have you as a member of The Flipped Lifestyle Community! We believe you have God-given talents and experiences you can use to start an online business! All you need is 100 people to pay you $50/m online to make $5,000/m, $60,000/y! Let us help you start a membership of your own. We offer a FREE Basic Membership to give you the tools and resources you need to find your online business idea and get started. Click here to learn more: https://flippedlifestyle.com/free

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This is a special episode of the Flipped Lifestyle podcast because it’s the 8-year quit-iversary of when Shane and Jocelyn Sams quit their jobs to go full-time in our online businesses.

On this podcast, Shane interviews Jocelyn to ask her some questions about what she’s learned in those 8 years, along with what decisions have helped to steer the business into what it is today.

Shane and Jocelyn share the story of what led them into online business, as well as what they did on the first day that they worked from home and became their own bosses.

They talk about the challenges of running a business during a pandemic and how thankful they are to have an online business when so many businesses were shutting down around the world.

Running an online business enabled Shane and Jocelyn to continue to serve the members of the Flipped Lifestyle community and to watch those members succeed during tough times.

Shane and Jocelyn also discuss Life Surge, a huge new opportunity and addition to their business plans. They will be speaking on many stages in the near future, which will grow the membership, and S&J will be expanding their team to take this big next step.

You’ll also hear about the current Flipped Lifestyle team and the plans to expand it and some of our favorite memberships and success stories from the community!

In today’s episode you’ll learn:

How two school teachers quit their jobs to run their online business full-time

The challenges of running a business during the pandemic

How online business enables people to better serve their communities

What Shane and Jocelyn Sams have learned during 8 years of working for themselves

What’s next for Flipped Lifestyle

We would love to have you as a member of The Flipped Lifestyle Community! We believe you have God-given talents and experiences you can use to start an online business! All you need is 100 people to pay you $50/m online to make $5,000/m, $60,000/y! Let us help you start a membership of your own. We offer a FREE Basic Membership to give you the tools and resources you need to find your online business idea and get started. Click here to learn more: https://flippedlifestyle.com/free

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Today’s guest on the podcast is… well, it’s actually 3 guests! Jessica, Liz, and Carrie from Rhubarb and Rubbish join the Flipped Lifestyle podcast! They are sisters who are on a mission to live a more faith and family-centered life. After seeing the importance of community, they are looking to turn their blog into a membership!

The sisters are trying to figure out a plan for their community, and Shane Sams helps to steer them onto the right path by showing them the importance of having a defined avatar and providing results for their members.

In today’s episode you’ll learn:

The most important thing when running a membership is delivering results

How to define your avatar

Delegation and division of labor leads to success

How to lean into your unfair advantages

We would love to have you as a member of The Flipped Lifestyle Community! We believe you have God-given talents and experiences you can use to start an online business! All you need is 100 people to pay you $50/m online to make $5,000/m, $60,000/y! Let us help you start a membership of your own. We offer a FREE Basic Membership to give you the tools and resources you need to find your online business idea and get started. Click here to learn more: https://flippedlifestyle.com/free

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You can find out more about Keanu and his membership at https://www.truestrategy.info.

In today’s episode you’ll learn:

How to have the same conversation one-to-many that you have one-to-one in your membership

Being authentic and intentional will draw people to you and build relationships

The biggest opportunity in podcasting is to get in front of other people’s audiences

How to be consistent, prolific, and relentless in your podcasting strategy

We offer a FREE Basic Membership to give you the tools and resources you need to find your online business idea and get started. Click here to learn more: https://flippedlifestyle.com/free

Check out the Shane Sams Show, and get the Membership Masters newsletter at ShaneSams.com!

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In today’s episode you’ll learn:

How to create a successful membership by teaching your skills to others

How offering multiple pricing tiers in your membership can lead to more sales

Actions begets action; success begets success, and how to make the next decision instead of worrying about best decision

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In today’s episode you’ll learn:

How to stay persistent when your online business is growing slowly
Actionable steps to take to grow your membership
How networking and connections can take your membership to the next level

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In today’s episode you’ll learn:

How to give yourself a raise in your online business
How to get more customers by using trials
How to retain members with discounts, bonuses, and promoting community
How to serve your community at such a high level that everyone wants to stay

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Today’s guest is Flipped Lifestyle Community Member Robin Mohlenkamp!

In today’s episode you’ll learn:

How the impact that can be accomplished through a membership program is infinitely bigger than 1-on-1 programs
When you get community behind a membership, it can really take off
How to identify and provide what your members need

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Today’s guest is Flipped Lifestyle Community Member Nicole Whitworth!

In today’s episode you’ll learn:

How to avoid shiny object syndrome and the burnout of living launch to launch by creating a membership
How to go all-in on your online business by taking chances and taking advantage of opportunities that are placed in front of you
How becoming debt-free enables you to take risks
How to prioritize what matters in your business

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Sarah recently got her first member! And we know that if you can find 1, you can find 101!

Inside Habit Masters, Sarah encourages members to choose business, personal, and household goals, and her system helps members determine what habits need to be established to meet those goals.

Shane Sams and Sarah discuss learning from past failures and how to celebrate small wins. Shane and Sarah figure out a YouTube content strategy for her business and come up with challenges that are inclusive to the whole community and can get results for her members!

Today we’re going to talk about:

How to identify goals and track them on a daily basis
Creating challenges that will get results for your community
How fear and stress from uncertainty can affect our mindset
Decision fatigue and how to overcome bad decisions with better habits
YouTube content and community strategies that get results

Make sure that you stick around at the end because Shane and Sarah discuss branding and how over-complicating your brand and running multiple websites can take your focus off where it needs to be and confuse your audience.

Learn how to start, build, and grow your membership website at FlippedLifestyle.com!

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Today’s guest on the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast is Steven Foust, who Shane Sams has had the pleasure of getting to know through the Flipped Lifestyle Community and in Shane’s Round Table Coaching Program.

In this episode you’ll learn:

How Steven found his winning idea for his online business
The one thing Steven changed that helped him get his first members
A 12-week program that will help scale and grow Steven’s membership to a full-time income

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In today’s training Shane Sams is talking about people - all the people that hold you back from building your online business. It’s the human element that gets most of us derailed the fastest.

You know what he’s talking about - the trolls out there that are lurking outside of every single post you make, the doubters, the haters, and the critics.

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On today’s episode of the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, Host Shane Sams helps Flipped Lifestyle Community Member Jennifer Trinidad of budgetdivas.com take her business to the next level!

Through budgetdivas.com Jennifer is helping other people get out of debt and live a higher quality of life by creating and sticking to an awesome budget - just like she did!

In this episode you’ll learn:

How to grow your membership and get stable number of members
How Jennifer plans to build an amazing audience
How you can grow your email list

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Today Shane Sams is going to teach you how to find the time to start, build, and grow your own online business. Or, how to take your online business to the next level.

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Today’s guest on the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast is Flipped Lifestyle Community Member Jason Atha!

Jason Atha came into the Community on fire! He is super active in the Flipped Lifestyle Community forums, he likes to take massive action - he has built a website, he is building his membership out, he’s been blogging. And, whenever we see people taking action like this we love to bring them on the show to help take them to the next level!

On today’s show you’ll learn:

The process of how Jason has built his online business and presence
What Jason is doing right now to create an online audience
How to roll out a successful launch via email
The few mistakes several people make when people launch their membership site that keep them from getting their first members
How to overcome feelings of imposter syndrome so you can take your dream to the next level

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Today Shane Sams is helping us overcome tech issues that hold you back from chasing your online dream!

There is no getting around it guys - we are in the future. Technology is involved in everything we do online and offline so I am busting down the fear of technology with you today so you can build your online business!

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Today’s guest on the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast is Flipped Lifestyle Community Member David Marquardt.

David Marquardt is struggling to find his idea and settle on a niche. He has a very successful brick-and-mortar retail wedding apparel business but really wants to get into the online business space.

Right now in his 9 to 5, David does not feel like he is working at his passion or mission - even though he makes a good living.

In today’s episode you’ll learn:

How to narrow down your niche
How to commit to your next idea, commit to it, and put it out there into the world
How to figure your missions and passions to help you find joy, purpose, and happiness in your life

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Today Shane Sams is talking about one of the biggest things that hold people back from starting and growing their online businesses - procrastination! Putting things off over and over again keeps you from achieving the goals you want.

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This week’s guest on this Best Of Edition of the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast is Jason Geiman of kingofpressurewash.com!

When Shane Sams met Jason Geiman years ago - he had a great offline business in the greater Cincinnati area and he had built that revenue up to 7-figures.

After selling that business and looking for a way to make money he discovered online business through the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast! Now, he has created a multiple 6-figure membership business.

In today’s episode you’ll learn:

How Jason built has multiple 6-figure businesses so fast (primarily focused on YouTube as a content channel)
Organic growth, what is working best on YouTube right now
YouTube ads (what works, what doesn’t work, and how we can get better at finding new traffic)
Mindset struggle to get past plateaus in your business
What it’s like to work with your spouses every single day as an entrepreneur

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Today Shane Sams is going to knock down the biggest myths about memberships that hold people back from starting and growing their online businesses!

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Today’s guest on the Membership Masters Podcast is Kathy Martin of prealgebrateachers.com!

Over the years Shane Sams has helped thousands of family-focused entrepreneurs start, build, and grow online businesses of their own.

Several years ago Kathy joined the Flipped Lifestyle Community and started her online journey. She struggled her first year and after getting her first members - they quit. Kathy was relentless, prolific, and consistent. Now, she leads an amazing online community of over 500 members!

In today’s episode we talk about:

How desire was critical at the beginning of Kathy’s online business journey
Overcoming mindset issues that entrepreneurs face every step in their journey
How Kathy says “NOPE” when fear creeps into her mind to try to stop her growth

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Wanting to start an online business but don’t know where to find the money?

Shane Sams is here today to tell you how he found the money for his online businesses, even as a broke school teacher. He wants to teach you how you can do the same!

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Today’s guest on the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast is Patty Jackson of mygriefrelief.com. On the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, we always talk about using your God-given talents and experiences to build your online business.

Patty is using one of the worst experiences in life to go out and serve others through her online business.

A few years ago, Patty’s husband passed away unexpectedly and she of course became overwhelmed with grief. It took her several years and counseling to move through the grief cycle and start living life again.

Patty is beginning to build an online presence and community - where it is going to help others in the same position. What an amazing mission!

Today we’re going to talk about:

How to create an amazing product inside your community.
How to set the tone of your business.
How to charge for sensitive subjects.

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Would you like to be self-employed - but you’re having a hard time believing it’s possible?

It is totally possible to make your entire living online from home! Today I am going to give you 7 real-world people from completely different niches and backgrounds - that are examples of you can truly change your family’s life and future through online business!

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Today’s guest is Flipped Lifestyle Community Member Bob Evans. Bob Evans is the former WWE wrestler Brutal Bob Evans and he came into the Flipped Lifestyle Community a few months ago with an idea to start a membership to help indie wrestlers chase their dreams while keeping their family life and day job in-tact. When he launched his membership he got 30+ members out of the gate!

In today’s episode you’ll learn:

How entrepreneurs do too much and why having fewer things on your plate can get bigger results.
How to define your avatar.
How to position your membership so that you can highlight the value proposition for your avatar and audience.

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Everyone is switching to the membership model - something Jocelyn and I have been preaching since 2015! It’s the best business model to build, security, stability, and create recurring revenue!

There is no such thing as free money. But, you don’t have to spend a fortune on ads to get to 1,000 members or work yourself into an early grave to get 1,000 members.

1,000 members is a great threshold because it creates a lot of stability and security. If you have that many members you’re not going to lose them all in one month. You may lose 50 members, but look how many you have left! All you need to do if find 51 new members to grow.

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This week on the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast Shane Sams sits down with Jordan Radke - a principal from Washington state.

Jordan has created a membership site (set4math.com) - designed for kids in special education programs. His website helps teachers and parents to help those students succeed in math.

Today you’ll learn:

How to build an audience
How to price your membership
How to grow your email list

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Hey y’all! Welcome to a Best Of Edition of the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. These Best Of Editions of the show feature amazing guests and episodes of the podcast you may have missed when they first aired. If you are new to the show, these are those can’t miss episodes that we really want you to listen to. Or maybe you’re a long-time listener. We want to bring these episodes around for you to hear them again. Our goal is to bring our best content every week so you have everything that you need to build a better future for your family. So wherever you are listening today, enjoy this week’s episode of the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast.

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Today on the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast Shane Sams is talking to Ivy + Chris Newport of ivynewport.com!

Not only are they creating an amazing business/membership site, Shane has had the privilege of watching their journey from the very beginning. Chris + Ivy joined the Flipped Lifestyle Community to learn how to start, build, and grow membership sites. We had the privilege of being a part of their first membership site and we watched them grow up to hundreds of members in that first month and they have been growing ever since - which is why we had to have them on the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast!

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We’ve got a great guest for you today - Rina Orellana of onlineflamencostudio.com! Many of you who are long-time listeners of the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast will recognize Rina as she has been on the show a couple times before.

Rina has an amazing story and we had the pleasure of helping her launch her membership and watching it grow from zero members to nearly 400 members - inside the Flipped Lifestyle Community!

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Today’s guest on the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast is Stephen Gates! For the last 10 years, Stephen has been an electrical engineer and teaches people how to run software that runs robots!

Stephen has an awesome career in engineering, but about two years ago he got the entrepreneurial bug and started exploring online business! He wanted to scale and leverage an online business for himself and of course that brought him to the membership model. I’m excited to say Stephen has grown his online membership to over 300 people and is making over $10K/month in his membership website! Even more exciting - Stephen just quit his job and has become full-time online, self-employed!

Today we’re going to talk about:

Growing, scaling, and leveraging all the tools at your disposal to grow an online membership community
How our team sets goals and plans what to do in our membership every single quarter
An exact strategy for Stephen so he can add 80-100 net members to his membership for the next 12 weeks

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Today’s guest on the Shane Sams Show is Dean Graziosi - and I can not tell you how excited I am to share this interview with you!

In this episode we are going to talk about his decades-long experience in the marketing world, going from offline marketing to infomercials, and all the way to the online space.

In this episode you’ll learn:

What the emerging knowledge industry looks like
The rise and importance of self-education
Why the future will belong to the people who go out there and invest in themselves

And - we’re going to talk about the addiction that Dean Graziosi brought into my life many moons ago!

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Today we have a very special episode with 6 guests on the podcasts - including Jocelyn! We are hanging out with 5 amazing women from the Flipped Lifestyle Community and you are going to hear our conversation about these ladies formed a mastermind inside of the Flipped Lifestyle Community.

They’ve built their business together. They’ve built trust with one another. They talk to each other about family, relationships, marriage, and parenting. In the hard times, especially 2020, they leaned on each other so they could survive everything that was happening. They encouraged and motivated each other so they could thrive!

In this episode you’ll learn:

The power of masterminds
How masterminds positively impact all areas of your life
How you can find and join a mastermind too

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Today’s expert guest on the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast is Aaron Walker from View From The Top (viewfromthetop.com)! Aaron has been in masterminds + relationship with some of the biggest names out there - Jay Abraham, Dan Miller, and Dave Ramsey!

Over the years Aaron has built and lead dozens + dozens of masterminds - packed with super high-achieving men and women.

In this episode you’ll learn:

Why masterminds are the key to unlocking your potential and going to the next level
How small masterminds can change your life and your family’s future

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Today’s guest is Allen Paul! Allen just launched his membership on New Year’s Day and got his first 5 members!

Allen has been doing so many things for free for so long. He is running free Facebook groups, free communities, a free podcast, he is volunteering in his church - he is doing all these things and it is stacking up on him. This overwhelm caused Allen to be confused about where to spend his time so that he can grow and build momentum to make this into a really successful online business.

Today we are going to:

Go deep into Allen’s story and teach him how to say no to a few things.
Teach Allen some techniques we use to prioritize what’s really important to his online business.
Plan Allen’s day and week based on how Shane spends his time.

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Hey y’all! Welcome to a Best Of Edition of the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. These Best Of Editions of the show feature amazing guests and episodes of the podcast you may have missed when they first aired. If you are new to the show, these are those can’t miss moments that we really want you to listen to. Or maybe you’re a long-time listener. We want to bring these episodes around for you to hear them again. Our goal is to bring our best content every week so you have everything that you need to build a better future for your family. So wherever you are listening today, enjoy this week’s episode of the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast.

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Today’s guest is Adam Sears! Adam has an amazing membership product called Silver Spaces. His goal? To help moms, dads, and grandparents stay in their home and age in place a few years longer! Adam does this through an amazing tool he created to help people make modifications to their home and this has a LOT of potential, guys!

This is a great conversation about:

What’s possible in online business.
The tools you can create in your membership.
Marketing to different segments or audiences.

Adam’s membership has a ton of potential in the consumer space and business-to-business where he can get professionals to join his membership, and even a business-in-a-box element!

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On this Saturday episode of the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast Shane is answering a question about email marketing form the Flipped Lifestyle Community Forums!

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Today’s guest is Odell McCants! Odell has a great back story - he is a former NBA Agent! Over the years and throughout his career he has built some amazing relationships with coaches. This helped him realize there was a need for professional development in the coaching community.

Now, on his podcast (and soon in his membership), he helps coaches get the professional development and leadership skills they need to go to the next level in their career!

One thing holding Odell back is his fear of not having enough content to launch! On today’s show we help Odell launch a membership with NO CONTENT!

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On this Saturday episode of the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast Shane is answering a question about email marketing form the Flipped Lifestyle Community Forums!

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Long-time listeners of the podcast, you know we are all about some online business here on the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. We are all about helping real members of the Flipped Lifestyle Community and we let you listen in so you can change your family’s future as well.

We cover a lot of topics here: we talk about online business, parenting, marriage, all the above! Today’s show is a very special addition to everything we normally talk about.

About a year ago I got a message from a friend on Facebook that said, “hey Shane, you’ve got to talk to this guy Anthony Woolever. Anthony is a Flipped Lifestyle fan but he has a really special story and I want him to be able to tell it.”

I thought this was going to be another success story but what came next impacted us in a big, big way! We started messaging on Facebook. Anthony began telling us how he had gotten into a dark place in his life and had decided he was going to commit suicide. As he was preparing his house for his loved ones so they would not have to deal with the after math. As he was doing so, he decided to listen to podcasts. Anthony found Pat Flynn’s Smart Passive Income Podcast and it just so happened that he heard our story (along with several others) and he was filled with hope.

In this interview you will find out that we were just the period at the end of the sentence. There were a lot of God-ordained moments and now Anthony is living an amazing, productive life and making an impact in a big way out in the world!

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On this Saturday episode of the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast Shane is answering a question about email marketing form the Flipped Lifestyle Community Forums!

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Shane Sams is excited to welcome back our first repeat guest on the Membership Masters Podcast: John Lee Dumas of Entrepreneurs On Fire! Now, John has written an amazing book called The Common Path To Uncommon Success. And Shane was lucky enough to get an advanced copy before it was released and was so pumped up about it we had to have him on the podcast today!

In today’s podcast Shane and John talk about:

What Uncommon Success looks like for you.
How you can achieve the exact dream you want to go after.
How you can find amazing mentors to shorten that runway to success and avoid pitfalls along the way.
The importance of masterminds and how you can find the people for your mastermind group.
The content strategy John Lee Dumas used to create his multi-million dollar empire.

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Today we talking about people. All the people that hold you back form building your online business. It’s the human element that gets most of us derailed the fastest.

You know what I’m talking about - the trolls out there that are lurking outside of every single post you make, the doubters, the haters, and the critics.

We have to deal with these people and thoughts and that’s what we’re doing today on this training!

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Todays guest is Julie Patterson - Julie has put some serious school time in y’all! (she was on the 12-year path)!

Julie has found her dream job but after working remote during the COVID-19 pandemic, she has realized the importance of time freedom! She wants to stay in her position but have the option to do both.

On today’s show you will learn how to lean into your unfair advantages, God-given talents and experiences to grow the audience you want!

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Today’s topic is one of my favorite things to tackle - the biggest myths about memberships that hold people back from starting and growing their online businesses!

We are going to knock down the 7 biggest myths about membership sites and replace them with 7 membership truths!

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Our quest today is Lizzie Shearing! Lizzie has been listening to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast for years but she was scared to take the leap.

She finally got inspired to just launch her membership site - she launched on a pre-sale page. She posted it on Facebook and boosted it with some ads! She got almost 100 members overnight in her membership for special education teachers!

Today we’re going to talk about how Lizzie built those first 100 members, how she is serving those members, and how she is going to grow to 1,000 members!

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One of the hardest things you can do when you first become an entrepreneur is to get other people to see what you’re trying to do!

9/10 who is the hardest person to convince? Your spouse, partner, significant other, or somebody that you live with!

Today I am going to give you some tips on how to get your spouse on board with your online business dream (I’ve been there, I’ve done it. No I’m going to help you do it)!

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We are talking about one of the biggest things that holds people back starting and growing their online businesses - procrastination! Putting things off over and over again keeps you from achieving the goals you want.

In this training I’m going to give you 3 simple steps to get your to stop procrastinating!

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You guys know I’m very enthusiastic but we have a story for the ages with Jennifer Bradly from the Flipped Lifestyle Community! Jennifer has been on the podcast a few times now because she is just crushing it in the membership game!

In that interview where we had Jennifer on the Membership Masters Podcast we came up with a crazy, “what if this works” strategy to offer her membership for FREE! When she did sent out the offer to her list, she got 806 members off that single offer!

Today we are going to break down how Jennifer had this life-changing moment, what happens next, and how you can have a wildly successful offer too!

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One thing I love about the Flipped Lifestyle Community is we are not your normal online business coaching community! We have some of the craziest, most far-out ideas that people succeed with in online business!

Today I am talking about 5 of my favorite most unbelievable memberships we have in the Flipped Lifestyle Community!

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This week’s guest is Dr. Joe Martin! He has an awesome podcast called the Real Men Connect Podcast where Christian men heal wounds from their past, become better fathers, get control of their finances, have better marriages, and be the lead that their family needs.

He used to be a speaker but now he has a membership with over 100 members! The COVID-19 pandemic dried up his income but his membership kept him afloat!

Today we’re going to talk about:

How to switch up your pricing!
How to change your offers!
How entrepreneurship is an ever-evolving hot mess for us all!
How to overcome some mindset issues and fears many entrepreneurs face!

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Today’s topic is one of my favorite things to tackle - the biggest myths about memberships that hold people back from starting and growing their online businesses!

We are going to knock down the 7 biggest myths about membership sites and replace them with 7 membership truths!

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This week’s guest is Flipped Lifestyle Community Member Justin Geis! He has been grinding and working hard for a while now - he is pretty successful in online course sales!

He has already gotten 40 members after launching a few months ago. He has a great audience - but he is having trouble growing!

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I’ve seen a lot of great ideas and products come through the Flipped Lifestyle Community - I’ve also seen a lot of those great ideas fall to the wayside and fail because the people with those ideas didn’t know how to sell things online!

The biggest thing? Learning how to create a simple sales funnel that converts!

Today I am talking you through the basics of a simple sales funnel that will get installed fast and is almost guaranteed to get people into your membership site!

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Today’s guest is David Braun! Dave is an awesome member of the Flipped Lifestyle Community and is taking massive steps towards his online business goals! Not only that - he is hanging out in the forums, in the Facebook Group, hanging out on Q+As, and helping other people move their online business dreams forward.

In the episode we are talking about:

How introverts can succeed online.
Setting priorities on your calendar to take action.
How to set a price-point for your membership.

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One of the things that I always hear is, “it would be great to become and stay self-employed - I just don’t believe it!”

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Today’s guest is one of my absolute favorite people on the planet - Tawnya Kordenbrock!

I met Tawnya in the Flipped Lifestyle Community, she has been doing amazing things through her mission and her membership!

Today we talked about how to scale Tawnya’s community so she can serve more people!

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Today we are overcoming tech issues that hold you back from chasing your online dream!

There is no getting around it guys - we are in the future! Technology is involved in everything we do online and offline so I am busting down the fear of technology with you today so you can build your online business!

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Today we are talking to Kurt + Sirena Wuerfele - they have an incredibly inspiring story abut how they are pursuing time freedom so they can build an online membership to impact lives all over the world!

You will hear Sirena’s amazing and inspiring story about how she overcame an accident that left her in a wheelchair and a breast cancer diagnosis to build a better life for her and her family!

Kurt and Sirena talk about how they are building an online business together! We are helping them structure their membership so they can be successful when they launch later this year!

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We are overcoming mindset issues and obstacles. One of the biggest? Being “expert enough,” or what we like to call imposter syndrome.

Imposter syndrome is that feeling of, “who would ever listen to me - lead alone pay me enough money?” This is something we had to overcome a lot when we were starting our online business. We learned how and now we’re going to help you do the same!

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Today we are helping Rabbi Ariel Sholklapper and his wife Sarah onto the show today - they have created a membership all about Jewish mindfulness!

Ariel has been crushing it in the Flipped Lifestyle Community for a while! He has launched, he has some members, but today we are helping him move the things out of his way that are holding him back!

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Today we are helping you overcome a major obstacle that keeps people from starting + growing their online business: MONEY!

I’m here today to tell you how we found the money for our online business, even as broke school teachers. I want to teach you how you can do the same!

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Today’s guests are David and Jill Chase! They are an awesome couple who have been in the Flipped Lifestyle Community now for several months and they are crushing their online business goals!

On today’s show we are helping David and Jill do keyword for SEO so they can get in front of the right people and pan for gold. That way they can find the perfect members for their membership site!

Today you’ll learn:

How to use tools to do YouTube keyword research
How to use the Google Keyword Planner tool to find out what your perfect customer is looking for!

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We have a special training for you today - we’re going to teach you how to find the time to start, build, and grow your own online business. Or, how to take your online business to the next level.

You see, time is the thing that holds us back and we are going to beat that today!

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Today’s guest is Bill Giovanetti - who I just met a few months ago as he started in the Flipped Lifestyle Blueprint! He was completely lost. He had all the pieces of the puzzle scattered around the table but he had lost the box top. He didn’t know how to put all the pieces together to start, build, and grow a successful membership site.

Bill jumped into a Flipped Lifestyle Community workshop and we taught him how to set up a sales funnel, how to re-work what he was doing in there. Then, he took major action on the Membership Masters Monthly Newsletter!

Bill did exactly what the November edition said and he had a promotion that generated over $33K in a single week!!!

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Today we are helping Flipped Lifestyle Community Member Reena Philpot take her business to the next level! Thanks to Jocelyn - Reena has officially launched her membership!

Reena has a beta group going right now so we are helping her grow her membership site where she helps women in sales learn how to be better salespeople!

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In this special training today we’re going to help you choose a winning idea for your online business! You have to get your idea to market if you’re going to make any money off of it - that’s what we’re going to talk about today.

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Hey y'all! On today's podcast we celebrate an AMAZING Flip Your Life Community Success story!

In this week's interview, Shane welcome's back long time member Karim Morato to the show! Karim has been fighting for her dreams for years. First for her American dream as an immigrant from Guatemala. Karim came to the United States with nothing but a Suitcase years ago. She actually learned how to speak english Stocking shelves at K-Mart!

Now, she's using her her God-given experiences to TEACH American homeschool children Spanish in her only business...

Karim almost gave up a few years ago...

Shane talked her out of it, and convinced her to keep chasing her ONLY dream. The result? Last month Karim made $17,000 online!

This is one of the most amazing stories of perseverance you will ever hear on any podcast. We know Karim's story is going to inspire YOU to take action and keep going in your online journey as well!

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Maybe you’re a course person and you’re trying to launch a membership site or you have an existing membership site already but one thing is missing - you simply need more traffic so you can get and keep more members!

Today we are talking about how to get and grow the audience you need to make this a reality for your online business - by using 3 marketing strategy fundamentals!

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On this week’s episode of the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast we are super excited to have Jane Anderson on the show!

We are talking about some big topics today:

Overcoming the fear of leading a large community.
How to have tiers in your membership to create pools in your membership
Growing and scaling a successful online membership!

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On today’s episode of the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast we are helping you get to 1,000 members!

Jocelyn and I have sold thousands of memberships. We have sold over 5,000 memberships over the course of our online business journey. Now, we want to help you hit that 1,000+ member mark too!

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Today we are helping Flipped Lifestyle Community Member Luke Miller - who has an awesome website at tilemoney.com! What does Luke focus on? He talks all about tile!!

In this episode:

We are attacking a lot of things that entrepreneurs deal with the biggest being imposter syndrome!
How to turn your podcast audience into paying members!
Why writing a 3-year vivid vision is important to your success as a business owner!

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In today’s episode of the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast we are talking about pricing your memberships and subscriptions!

There is a huge difference between pricing memberships and subscriptions - compared to digital courses, coaching, and any other digital products or services.

People are paying this every single month! You have to get your value proposition down-pat and say, “this is why this is it your payment each and every month!”

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My guest today is Flipped Lifestyle Community Member Andrew Biernat, from New York! Andrew and his brother run a fitness membership - when COVID-19 hit, it really shut them down because they couldn’t open their doors. That’s of course when they turned to online membership!

Today, we’re helping Andrew overcome fears that are stopping him from becoming a prolific promoter of his business!

We are talking about Andrew’s unique business model that includes a charity component.

Lastly, we’re talking about how to schedule prolific promotions so you can get new members every single day!

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On today’s episode we are talking about turning your business ideas into products! If you have great idea now you need to turn it into a product.

The only difference in the people that make money online and the people that say they want to make money online - is they go create a product!

We want to give you 3 tips to get you onto the market faster, get those ideas out of your head, and create a digital product!

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Hey y’all! On today’s podcast Shane helps community member Anna overcome Imposter Syndrome + commit to a niche for her online business. Our guest today is Anna Harris. Anna is having a hard time commiting to her niche and going all in on her online business idea. She’s wrestling with some common fears + doubts.

Listen in as Shane helps Anna in a live keyword research to help her build out a content strategy for her new online business!

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On today’s Saturday edition of the Flipped Lifestyle podcast we are taking all about email marketing for beginners! And, how we built our entire business just with email marketing (we still get about 90% of our income from email marketing)!

When we first started our business 8 years ago, email marketing was the foundation for everything we did and still is to this day!

We want to tell you how we grow our business using email marketing and give you 3 strategies that you need to focus on if you are trying to grow your email list!

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On today's podcast we help Jon Fugler launch his mission based membership to spread the Gospel around the world!

Jon has spent his entire career as a Christian Radio Broadcaster. He wants to take those skills and start a membership that helps people all over the world grow closer to Jesus through daily group devotions!

In today's podcast, you will learn: how to FINALLY get your content done fast, so you can launch your membership, the exact order you need to work to get a minimum viable product out into the world, and how to capitalize on your unfair advantages, to give you a unique advantage in your niche!

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We are excited to help you guys find and vet your online business idea! Everybody has an idea in their back pocket - but we’re going to help you vet that idea and make it better in our live workshop!

All of your talents come from your life experiences. We want to help you take those, put them online, and make monthly recurring revenue!

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Hey Y'all! In today's podcast we welcome back Brooke Butcher!

Last time Brooke was on the show, she was just starting out and growing her online nursing community. On this episode we get to celebrate Brooke's growing membership, and her incredible milestone: Brooke just quit her job and went FULL TIME online!

In today's podcast, Shane is helping Brooke get used to her new self employed, location independent lifestyle, as well as growing her nursing membership! You'll learn how to balance your time between business and life while working at home, promotions to help you grow your membership site, and how to know when it's time to go full time online!

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On today's episode we are talking about something I am extremely passionate about - prolific marketing success! I am going to give you 3 of my best strategies to improve your marketing. After all, marketing is EVERYTHING in the online business space!

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On today's podcast, we help Rebecca launch her membership site!

Rebecca is a speech language pathologist who helps parents teach language skills to their toddlers!

Rebecca has already written a book she sells on kindle, and is selling one off calendars and resources to parents on 3rd party sites.

In today's podcast, Shane will help Rebecca repurpose her existing content into a newsletter subscription!

You will learn how to:

Use print subscriptions as the core content of a membership community!
The logistics necessary to turn your old content into a subscription product!
And how to get excited about your online business again!

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Have you ever had someone cancel on you? What about twice?! Well, I have!

Time management and relationships are vital in the online business space!

If you are a:

Blogger
Podcaster
YouTube creator..

You are inevitably going to be doing interviews. Scheduling conflicts and life happens to all of us, that’s why I wanted to talk about it and how to overcome it in today’s weekend edition of the show!

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On today's podcast we help a convicted Hacker use his hacking Superpowers for good in a legit (and legal) hacking membership site!

Our guest today is Terry Dunlap.

Terry realized from a very young age that he had a skill for hacking!

In fact, he was actually arrested for hacking credit card numbers back in the 80s before there was even an internet!

Seriously!

Later, he discovered that the government and fortune 500 companies would actually pay people to hack their systems in order to improve security.

Terry went all in and built an amazing business around high ticket coaching programs!

Now he wants to take his hacking classes worldwide with a hackers membership site!

This is a fascinating episode of the flipped lifestyle podcast you do not want to miss!

Don't forget to give it a share on social media, and follow or subscribe on your favorite podcast app!

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On this episode of the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast we are talking about finalizing your idea - because we can’t go forward with your business until you go all in on and commit to your business idea!

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On today's podcast we talk to new flip your life community member Chrissie Riese! Chrissie has been a mommy blogger online for a while now and has been able to generate a great side hustle for her family. But after losing her father suddenly, she decided to pivot and focus on her family's tradition of RVing and camping!

In today's podcast, you get to listen in as Shane helps Chrissie build a sales funnel with lead magnets, trip wires and trials!

This episode of The Flipped Lifestyle podcast is an emotional roller coaster you will NOT want to get off!

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On today's podcast we help Elaine launch her Nutrition coaching membership site!Elaine is a certified life and weight loss coach who is on a mission to help women stop yoyo dieting and lose weight for good!

She wants to take her 1 on 1 coaching business, and switch to the membership model so she can achieve true time and financial freedom in her online business!

In today's podcast, Shane helps Elaine:

Refine her message so she can attract the perfect members for her Community...
Create a business plan to launch her membership site ...
And map out a plan to build her email list to 1000 subscribers fast!

You are going to LOVE today's podcast!

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Hey Y’all! On today’s podcast we are going to give you 3 tips for overcoming imposter syndrome - so you can finally take action on your online business idea!

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On today's Flipped Lifestyle podcast, Shane helps Flip Your Life Community member Anne Byrd launch a business coaching membership for female CEOs! Anne is no stranger to success, she's been a successful consultant her entire career, helping female CEOs succeed in business!

Now, through her website, Ms. Chiefs.com, Anne is trying to scale her influence and reach into the online world!

In this episode, you will learn...

Why it's NEVER too late to chase your dream!
The exact order you need to work on your business to launch your membership into the world!
How to stand out in a crowded niche with your unique message and style!

And get this... Anne turns 60 this year! She's had a dream to own an online business and website for years. The coronavirus pandemic inspired her to look in the mirror and ask "if not now, when!" That's why she joined the community and is taking massive action!

We know this episode will inspire YOU to take action on your online dream too!

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Hey y’all, welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast! On today’s show I’m going to teach you how to choose the best online business ideas for you and your family’s business!

Plus, I’ve got a FREE gift for you at the end of today’s podcast I know will help you get your online business idea off the ground!

Whether you’re looking for your first idea or your next business idea - today’s show was made just for you! Wherever you are listening from today, get excited, focused and get ready because it’s time to Flip Your Life!

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Hey y'all! On today's podcast we celebrate an AMAZING Flip Your Life Community Success story!

Now, she's using her her God-given experiences to TEACH American homeschool children Spanish in her only business. Karim almost gave up a few years ago. Shane talked her out of it, and convinced her to keep chasing her ONLY dream. The result? Last month Karim made $17,000 online!

This is one of the most amazing stories of perseverance you will ever hear on any podcast. We know Karim's story is going to inspire YOU to take action and keep going in your online journey as well!

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Today's guest is Dr. Luke Hobson, a PhD credentialed of Instructional Designer at MIT. Dr. Hobson's goal is to support instructional designers from around the world through his online membership community.

In today's podcast, Shane helps Dr. Hobson plan out a strategy to grow his audience! You will learn how to overcome the fear that nobody will join your membership, how to grow your email list, and how to turn followers on social media into paying members!

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Today's guest on The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast is Brazilian Jiu Jitzu master and macro nutritionist Jermey DePrato! Jeremy has built an amazing 1 on 1 coaching business where he helps people who study Brazillian Jiu Jitzu master their nutrition so they can perform better on the mat!

Now he wants to expand his reach, and take his nutrition expertise to the entire BJJ community in an affordable membership training site! In fact, he threw up a sales page his first week in the community and on his second day got hist first annual member at $950 per year!

Talk about an 11 cent moment! WOW!

In today's interview, Shane helps Jeremy...

Plan out what his core membership content will look like...
Overcome the fear that he will not be able to grow an audience because he is an introvert...
And leverage his existing offline relationships with BJJ gym owners to find the first members of his site!

This is such an amazing and unique episode of the podcast!

Don't forget to give it a share on social media, and follow or subscribe on your favorite podcast app!

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On today's podcast we help Dr. Michele Summers grow her membership site!

Dr. Michele is mobile physician and long time member of the Flip Your Life Community.

She runs an online health coaching business at Dr. Michelle.com where she teaches women how to get their health back on track so they can feel younger and live happier, healthier lives.

In her online health coaching business she teaches women how to get their health back on track so that they can feel younger and live happier, healthier lives.

In today's podcast, we celebrate Dr. Michelle's growing membership, and Shane helps her had a higher priced certification program as a new tier for her membership site!

If you've ever wanted to add a certification to YOUR online business, you do not want to miss a single minute of this episode!

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Our guest on the show today is Tyler Books. Tyler and his wife abby have launched a marriage podcast where they help new parents navigate their relationship while getting used to raising kids! In today's call, Shane helps Tyler navigate the rocky waters of being a Husband and Wife business team - something we know all about. And, how to overcome one of the biggest fears almost all entrepreneurs have in the beginning of their journey.

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Hey y'all, on today's Flipped Lifestyle podcast we help Heather and Topher grow their brand new Ukelele membership! There entire marriage, Heather and Topher have worked together by supporting each other's interests and careers. When the pandemic hit in March it caused a major disruption in their lives. Then they found The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast! Now Heather and Topher have launched a growing membership of over 60 families from around the world!

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Hey y’all! On today’s podcast we chat with Flip Your Life Community members Steve and Rebecca Newlin. A few years ago they got into raising kids. But not the human kind of kids - goat kids! On today’s show Shane is going to help Rebecca and Steve create an amazing member area where goat farmers from around the world can learn, connect, and talk about their kids, plan a launch that will flood goat farmers into their new membership, and set the price for their goat farming membership along with a launch discount offer.

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Hey y'all! You're listening to a preview of our interview with Stu McLaren on the Membership Masters Podcast. Stu McLaren is a legend in the membership site space. Listen now to hear a preview of the full episode that was an amazing podcast interview where Stu and I ‘geek out’ on membership sites. We take a role by role look at Stu’s team, so you can learn what a high-level membership looks like.

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On today’s podcast we help Flip Your Life Community member Tim Madison turn his web development skills into an online membership. Tim is just starting out but he’s already built a website and starting to create courses for his future members. He’s a little unclear about who he’s going to serve. Shane helps Tim answer some important questions that anyone can ask when starting an online business. Shane helps Tim find a great domain name for his membership site and teaches him how to start a successful YouTube channel!

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Hey y'all! You're listening to a preview of our interview from the Membership Masters Podcast with Robbie Baxter. Robbie Baxter is the OG evangelist of the membership model. Her book, The Membership Economy, predicted the rise of subscription services like Netflix. Listen to the our preview of the full episode where we dive deep into when and where you should use free trials, pricing memberships, and her new book The Forever Transaction.

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Dustin Heiner of Master Passive Income is a fellow podcaster and today we are helping him grow his high-ticket membership site. Dustin has 15 members paying him $189/month. Not bad for a guy who thought membership sites wouldn’t work! His next goal is to build a team to help his membership site grow to 100 members and beyond. In today’s episode Shane helps Dustin design a team that will help Dustin turn his new membership site into another source of passive income!

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James Schramko is one of my own personal membership mentors. He helped me flesh out my own first online membership many moons ago, and is a true membership master himself in the subscription game. In this interview, we discuss the makings of a multi-million dollar membership site, using affiliate marketing to make more membership sales, free trials, and how to make content areas your members will love. Listen now to this preview of the full episode from out interview on the Membership Masters Podcast!

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Today we are celebrating the amazing success of one of our community members, Kathy Martin. Kathy's membership makes enough money online to finally quit her job! In today’s show you’ll learn how Kathy grew her membership from 15 members to nearly 300 members, how she talked her spouse into getting on board with her online business dream, and Shane’s three prolific strategies for growing a membership site to 500 members and beyond.

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Hey y'all! You're listening to a preview of the Membership Masters Podcast interview I had with John Lee Dumas. John Lee Dumas is an amazing personal friend, known for his podcast, Entrepreneurs on Fire and his website eofire.com. John is not only a prolific podcaster, he is also a true membership master inside his membership community, Podcasters’ Paradise. Listen to the full episode now on the Membership Masters Podcast to hear how John teaches aspiring podcasters how to start, build, grow, and monetize podcasts of their own.

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Brad Barrett is one of our original community members - he was actually the first person we ever helped on the podcast way back on Episode 23! He has come a long way. On today’s show Shane and Brad talk about how Brad was able to quit his full-time job thanks to his online business, how a random message from a stranger led to Brad starting the ChooseFI Podcast (which has now been downloaded more than 1.4 million times every single month), and how he is bouncing back from the economic challenges brought on by the COVID pandemic.

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Brendan Hufford is a great friend of ours that we have known for years now and we got to know him by being in the same spaces online! Brendan now is trying to grow his SEO membership site. In this episode you'll learn: 1) Why sometimes you should just quit your job, 2) why you should start a membership site, and 3) how not to work for free. Subscribe now and listen to this week's full episode where we help Brendan take his membership site in the right direction!

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Investing has really been a hobby for Jason Tremere for the last 20 years. Jason has decided that since he can teach this in person, it’s time to teach people the same things online through his very own membership site! In this episode you'll learn: 1) Why you’ve got to be relatable, 2) How to let your content flow into other platforms, and 3) Why you don’t want to teach on your YouTube channel. Listen now to hear how we help Jason choose a direction for his investing membership site!

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Josh Rageth is a 4th grade teacher, that has been teaching now for 7 years. In his first year, Josh began selling lesson plans on occasion for a third-party lesson plan site. In this episode you'll learn: 1) the biggest mistake that anyone makes in online business, 2) how to do something next level, and 3) how great marketers have to look into the future. Listen now and subscribe to hear how with our help and Josh's consistency, his possibilities on his picture book membership site are endless!

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In this bonus Quick Flip edition of the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, we give you a shorter version of the show. That way, you can catch up or review everything we covered on Tuesday! In this episode we talk to Michele Hayes, from Australia, about her education-based membership site. Listen now to hear how we help convert her prolific email list of nearly 2,000 people, into members!

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While Michele Hayes does not not many members in her education membership site just yet, she has good ones! Quantity is good, but quality is equally as important! Listen now to hear how we help Michele climb her biggest mountain by converting her epic email list of nearly 2,000 people, into members!

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In this bonus Quick Flip edition of the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, we give you a shorter version of the show. That way, you can catch up or review everything we covered on Tuesday! In this episode you'll learn how, like Jason Geiman, you can truly use your God-given experiences to change your life for you and your family. Listen now to hear how we helped him turn 2 members into nearly 200!

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Jason's blue-collar membership site has grown incredibly since we lost saw him 9 months ago, at Flip Your Life Live. He's started with 2 members and is now up to 189! In this episode you'll learn: 1) how to turn your membership into a community, 2) become less accessible, 3) how to get your members to renew. Listen now to hear about Jason got to his 5-figure monthly income!

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In this bonus Quick Flip edition of the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, we give you a shorter version of the show. That way, you can catch up or review everything we covered on Tuesday! In this episode you'll learn: 1) how to define your own success, 2) you have to get A done before you can get B, and 3) there is no cap to your potential. Listen now to hear how Jody has reached more than 4,000 members!

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Jody Moore from the Better Than Happy Podcast started out as a Flip Your Life member. Now, she has more than 4,000 members and a podcast of her own! In this week's episode, you'll learn: 1) how to reach thousands of people, 2) your membership site can evolve as you do, and 3) to picture the milestone you're pursuing. Listen now to hear how we helped Jody pursue her own membership site success!

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In this bonus Quick Flip edition of the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, we give you a shorter version of the show. That way, you can catch up or review everything we covered on Tuesday! In this episode we teach Jill Fox the most important part of your membership: getting people to join you and getting it off the ground. Listen now to hear how we help Jill stop dabbling and start setting big goals!

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The most important part of your membership: getting people to join you and getting it off the ground. Jill Fox has her own social media agency but was often asked for her help with simple marketing strategies for small business owners. That's why we've helped her put her knowledge into a membership site! In this episode you'll learn: 1) How to Create Forever Customers, 2) The Most Important Part of Your Membership, and 3) Email Marketing 101. Listen now to hear how we help Jill stop dabbling and start setting big goals!

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In this bonus Quick Flip edition of the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, we give you a shorter version of the show. That way, you can catch up or review everything we covered on Tuesday! This week we helped Allison build her hair and makeup online membership site. Listen now for tips on how you too can start your online membership today!

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Hey y'all! This week we helped Allison build her hair and makeup online membership site. In this week's episode you'll learn 1) how to make a passive income off your skill-set, 2) how to clarify your goals, and 3) how to use other platforms to drive members to your site. Listen now for tips on how you too can start your online membership today!

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In this bonus Quick Flip edition of the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, we give you a shorter version of the show. That way, you can catch up or review everything we covered on Tuesday! Brick-by-brick Nikki built her business, but we helped changer her focus to a membership mindset. Now, thanks to her Flip Your Life membership, we helped her membership site flourish. Now, she is crushing her goals, including her first $60K month!

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Nikki built her business brick-by-brick over the years, but we helped her take her limited '1-on-1' approach and turn it into a never-ending supply through online memberships. In today's podcast you'll learn: 1) how to identify your 'super-fans' 2) how to make memberships the core part of your business 3) the 'true magic' of the membership motto. Listen now, as we celebrate Nikki's first $60K month!

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In a matter of a few months, we helped Paul go from 25 members to 100! In today's show you will learn 1) how you can be a solution to any problem 2) how to use marketing as a launching pad 3) how to grow and expand, so you can helps others in their missions. Listen now, as we celebrate Paul's 100th member!

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Jennifer's yoga studio was the only gym in the Chattanooga area that survived the COVID-19 lockdown and a tornado. How? Her online membership! In today's show, you will learn: 1) how build and serve an online community 2) how to take advantage of the opportunities at hand to move forward 3) be prepared for the unexpected! Listen now!

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In today's Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, we help Kenny choose a great idea for his membership! Kenny is a college professor in communications. He is stuck and can't find an idea for his membership site. In today's show we help him find his idea!

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Welcome to today's Flipped Lifestyle Podcast! In today's episode, we help Flip Your Life Community member Roz take her health leadership business to the next level! If you want to launch a membership of your own, listen to today's show!

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The CARES ACT (Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act) was passed last week and small business owners will start receiving their stimulus checks soon. However this is a HUGE and confusing bill that is difficult to understand. In today's show, we interview our power money team: Jessica Stafford and Marilyn Parham from Profit Hero 365 to explain what's happening with taxes and the stimulus bill! Not only are Jessica and Marilyn our personal accountants and great friends, but they are also incredible entrepreneurs! They own online businesses, memberships, real estate, and restaurants. They have helped hundreds of business owners in their tax company online, offline, and in ecommerce! They are our go-to source for all of our money questions. In today's interview, I ask Jessica and Marilyn: How will moving the deadline for filing taxes impact small business owners and entrepreneurs? What is the CARES act, and how does it impact small business owners? What is the PPP (Paycheck Protection Program) and how can I get a stimulus check for my business? What other emergency economic relief is the government offering due to the Covid-19 pandemic? Can we expect another coronavirus relief package after the current one is finished? And more! You owe it to your family and employees to explore all options offered by the CARES act, and the Paycheck Protection Program. Listen to today's show and Jessica and Marilyn will have you up to speed on what aid is available to help your business survive and thrive during the Covid-19 outbreak! If you have any questions, you can contact Jessica and Marilyn directly at https://profithero.com/covid19 This is an important discussion. Please tell any business owner, offline or off, about this episode of the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast! We are praying for you, your family, and your business! Shane & JocelynListen to today's show and Jessica and Marilyn will have you up to speed on what aid is available to help your business survive and thrive the Covid-19 outbreak! If you have any questions, you can contact Jessica and Marilyn directly at https://profithero.com/covid19

This is an important discussion. Please tell any business owner, offline or off, about this episode.

We are praying for you, your family, and your business!

Shane & Jocelyn

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Chris and Ivy Newport started their membership inside The Flip Your Life Community, and grew it to a quarter-million-dollar business in record time! In today's Flipped Lifestyle Podcast we detail how they did it, and exactly a real couple built their 6-figure membership on the Internet!

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On today's show, we stop everything and help Flip Your Life Community Member Crystal Harper navigate a difficult situation. Crystal has been investing time and money into growing her Facebook page and group. Then one day she logged in and her entire account was disabled! We help her create step-by-step plan to not only get her Facebook account back, but also make sure she grows her audience on other platforms so she is not reliant on one traffic source! It's an emergency coaching call on today's Flipped Lifestyle Podcast!

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In this special edition of The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, we address the Coronavirus outbreak, and discuss ways you and your family can prepare for the global pandemic, it's impact on the economy, and how you can overcome the fear of the virus to make good decisions over the next few months in your life and business!

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Imagine 2000 people paying you $29, $49, even $109 each month!

Do the math! We are talking over $1M /year online!

That's exactly what happened to Jeff Twiddy!

Jeff started listening to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast a few years ago, joined the Flip Your Life Community and started taking massive action!

We first introduced you to Jeff in episode 104 (listen here: https://flippedlifestyle.com/podcast104/)

In that episode, Jeff's membership was taking off! He was making great money, and had created enough monthly revenue for his wife to come home!

Then... things got crazy!

Jeff's membership has went from successful, to a full blown online empire of 2000 paying customers!

Crazy right!?!?

In today's episode, you will learn how Jeff Scaled his membership in record time, and how he's truly living the Flipped Lifestyle with his wife and kids!

If you have an online dream, you do not want to miss this episode of The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast!

Enjoy!

Shane & Jocelyn

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In today's show, we answer questions from the Flip Your Life Community, including: How to outsource vital tasks in your membership site, lead generation using public limited time challenges, and the pros and cons of offering lifetime memberships! Enjoy today's Q&A with S&J!

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On today's episode of The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, I welcome my good friend Grant Baldwin on the show!

Grant Baldwin is a prolific speaker, keynoting events all over the country. He coaches speakers hot to consistently find and book speaking gigs to grow their business!

Whether you're just starting out in the speaking world, or you've been a speaker for years, Grant has exactly what you need to launch, build, and grow a speaking career!

Jocelyn and I have used public speaking to grow our brand for years.

Whether it's at our own live events... or at major conferences like FlynnCon...

We have been using speaking to grow our membership business!

Being on stage elevates you (literally and figuratively) in the eyes of an audience. It lends instant credibility, authority, and legitimacy to your brand.

When you speak at a live event, you earn instant know, like, and trust ... almost celebrity status ... just for being on stage! (Exactly what you need to grow your membership).

In today's podcast, Grant and I breakdown exactly how to use public speaking to grow your membership site, and get more members!

You will learn:

How to turn a high ticket course into a recurring revenue overnight using self-financed payment plans!
How to use public speaking opportunities to grow your audience and your email list!
How to sell more memberships directly from stage at your next speaking events!

It doesn't matter if you want to speak full time, or just want to speak a few times per year to enhance your personal brand ... this episode has everything you need to get started!

Enjoy! I know this episode has some golden information that will help you...

Flip Your Life!™

Shane
Flipped Lifestyle™
Membership Masters™

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Hey Y'all, welcome to another Q&A w/ S&J! This is the podcast where we answer all of your questions about memberships! In today's show we discuss: Whether or not you should open and close your memberships. How to use monthly special promotions to sell more memberships. How to warm up a cold email list and improve your email marketing. How to bust through sales plateaus in your membership.
Whether or not you should put a sign up / sales button on every page of your website. How to make amazing courses for your online membership business!

We also celebrate some amazing success stories from The Flip Your Life Community!

Enjoy the show!

Shane & Jocelyn
Flipped Lifestyle™
Membership Masters™
Flip Your Life™

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On this week's Flipped Lifestyle Podcast we welcome back one of our favorite guests and Flip Your Life Community members - Teresa Perleberg!

We first shared Teresa's story on Podcast 191 - click here to listen!

On that episode, we learned that Teresa was building her membership business around needle felting!

What is needle felting?

Needle felting is a process which uses barbed needlesto interlock wool fibers to form a more condensed material. Click Teresa's Site to learn more: https://bearcreekfelting.com/felting-101/

Teresa not only provides the sheep wool to her customers, she teaches them how to needle felt the wool into AMAZING creations!

In episode 191 we helped Teresa improve her engagement and retention in her budding membership business.

And WOW did she take action!

Teresa now runs a $250,000 needle felting empire from the plains of North Dakota!

In today's episode, you will learn:

How she grew her quarter million dollar business!
How partnerships were the key to taking her membership to the next level!
How she BOUGHT A SCHOOL, and what she plans to do with it (it's INCREDIBLE)!

We know this episode of the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast will inspire you to take your membership to the next level as well!

Enjoy!

-Shane & Jocelyn
Flip Your Life™

Ready to start your online membership business? We can help! Click here to learn more: https://flippedlifstyle.com/flipyourlife

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On today's Q&A we talk about:

How do I host a giveaways to grow my business?
How to use limited time offers and limited opportunity offers to make more sales.
How to improve member and customer experience for your members to create more lifetime value per customer.
How to know if I need to improve my marketing or my product idea?
How do I know if I have enough content to launch my membership?

And celebrate:

Crystal's launch with 29 new members!
And more!

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This week we welcome Flip Your Life Community member Ben Landers on the show! We celebrate his incredible success story and explain how Ben had his first six figure year online! Listen in, and learn how you can too!

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In this episode of the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast we answer online business questions and celebrate the success of real Flip Your Life Community members! Today, we answer questions about launching podcasts, making more sales on webinars, and how to price your memberships! We also celebrate Daniel and Tawnya growing their memberships!

Learn more at https://flppedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife

Today's Questions & Case Studies: 1. Nicola - "How do I get started in podcasting? I want to launch a podcast, but I don't know where to start." 2. Beth - "What is the best platform for hosting webinars?" 3. Daniel - SUCCESS: Daniel gets 45 new members! 4. Tawnya - SUCCESS: Celebrates new members and FINALLY reaches the next level! 5. Tyler - "What is the best price for your membership: monthly or annual?"

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Imagine getting 1000 people to pay you $26 per month! That’s exactly what Jennifer accomplished in just two years inside the Flip Your Life Community!

Listen to today’s podcast, and learn how she did it (and how you can too).

Enjoy the show!

-Shane & Jocelyn

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In today's episode, we help Kenny and Nancy determine priorities to help grow their business.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jocelyn Sams: Hey, y'all. On today's podcast, we're going to show you how to make a living raising chickens.

Shane Sams: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast where life always comes before work. We're your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. We're a real family that figured out how to make our entire living online. And now we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? All right. Let's get started.

Shane Sams: What's going on, everybody? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. It is great to be back with you again today. I am super excited for this episode. I know I'm super excited every week. I'm always excited. That's what I do. I just live excited. But I am really, really excited about this one because we have an awesome guest for the show today that we met at a live event. They're out there in the Flipped Lifestyle universe, listen to the podcast all the time, and we got to talk to them at a live event and they have one of the best niche markets I've ever heard in my entire life and I cannot wait to share this episode with you today. Please help us welcome our guests, Kenny and Nancy Troiano. Guys, welcome to the program.

Kenny Troiano: Well, thank you for having us. It's a pleasure. It's an honor, actually, because we've been listening to you for so long. It's amazing that we're actually able to do this.

Nancy Troiano: Yeah, really glad to be with you.

Jocelyn Sams: I love it. Yes. It is great to talk to you guys. We actually just met you not too long ago in California, so it's great to talk to you again and I can't wait to dive in to what it is you're doing.

Shane Sams: Yeah, we were speaking at an event out in San Diego and we said, "Hey, let's have a meetup." So we put the all points bulletin out to all the Flipped Lifestyle email list. We said, "Hey, is anybody in San Diego. I know this is last minute, but we're going to be-"

Jocelyn Sams: "Come meet us tonight."

Shane Sams: "Come meet us on this patio at this random hotel in San Diego." And you guys showed up and I'm so glad you did, because you have an amazing story.

Kenny Troiano: I saw the email. I said, "Hey, what the heck, let's throw that out there, see if they'll want to talk." And you guys invited us. And then I told Nancy right away, I called her on the phone. She was at work and I said, "You won't believe this, but we've been invited to talk to Shane and Jocelyn. You want to go?" And she's like, "Yeah."

Nancy Troiano: Heck yeah.

Shane Sams: "Heck yeah we do." And we were sitting around a fire and I remember everybody was sitting around it like, we had a lot of people show up. There was like 25 or 30 people ended up around those two fires that we had. And I remember sitting in front of that fire at first and the wind was blowing out on that patio and I thought I was going to get set on fire. And then the people that were hosting the live event, it was Pat Flynn's Flynn-Con event and his business partner comes up to me and goes, "Shane, Shane, Shane." And is said, "What's up, man?" And he goes, "They told us that you had the whole patio reserved and we've got all our sponsors and we want to come out here and sit on the patio." And I'm like, "We don't have the whole patio reserved." He's like asking us at his event if they could come out on the patio and I was like, "That's right. Flipped Lifestyle is taking over the world, baby."

Nancy Troiano: Yes, they are.

Kenny Troiano: I was actually standing next to you when he said that to you.

Shane Sams: Oh, yeah. Right. That was amazing.

Jocelyn Sams: That was a little weird. All right. Let's tell everybody else what you guys do out there. And they might be a little bit surprised at what you do because you guys are living in California and I think a lot of people don't really associate California with farm life.

Shane Sams: And livestock and stuff like that.

Kenny Troiano: California's actually a pretty big agricultural community.

Shane Sams: We were just talking about this with our assistant. She was like ... First of all, you tell everybody what you do and tell us a little bit about your background and your online business, and then we'll talk more about what's happening out in California.

Kenny Troiano: First of all, I teach people how to breed chickens. And I've been doing this for over 20 years. Actually teaching for almost 30 years now. But I've been raising chickens for a long time and everything, and maybe 20 some odd years ago, I can't remember exactly, 22 years ago, I'm trying to get the timelines right. The feed stores in my county, we have like a small town, but we have like five feed stores. We had six at one time. And they all do really well. That's how many people raise livestock, it's in every backyard around here. So, the feed stores knew that I raise chickens, so they would send people over to me to answer questions and help them out and get them started, the beginners. And at the time, it wasn't that they thought I was an authority. They just knew I raised chickens.

Kenny Troiano: And I would also get the chicken magazines, too, and my daughters would read them and would overhear me talking to people on the phone or they would come to my house and we would talk chickens.

Shane Sams: I love how you just flippantly threw in there, "Yeah, I get all the chicken magazines," and I'm like, "There's chicken magazines? I didn't know there were chicken magazines."

Kenny Troiano: There's a lot of chicken magazines, you know. So my daughter came up to me, she goes, "Dad, you could do better than these guys," because she would read the magazines and "Why don't you start writing for the magazines?" I told my daughter Sam, I go, "If you think it's that easy, you do it." Because I wasn't exactly the greatest student. I didn't flunk English, but I didn't excel in English, okay? So I told her, "If you think it's easy, you do it." So she did. She started writing these little articles. She was only 13 years old at the time. And I would send them into the magazines and they would publish everything she wrote.

Shane Sams: That's amazing.

Kenny Troiano: Yeah. This went on for like two years. And then finally she was going into high school and she said, "Dad, I need a little time off and I was wondering if I could take break." I go, "Sam, you can do whatever you want. Let me, I'll go ahead and write a few articles and give you like a four or five month break and if you want to come back, you can." Because I didn't want them to forget about her. So I went ahead and wrote a four part series on selection, how to select your birds. And it really took off. I didn't even have a computer at the time. This was before computers for me.

Shane Sams: What did you type the articles on? Did you hand write them or were you using like an old typewriter-

Kenny Troiano: Typewriter.

Shane Sams: ... like a word processor with the tape that erased and stuffed?

Kenny Troiano: No, typewriter. Hunt and peck.

Shane Sams: Nice. That's amazing.

Kenny Troiano: So, I sent those in and they got a lot of attention and I got a lot of mail. I was like, "Wow, this is kind of cool." I've been writing for the magazines ever since. After that four part series, I never stopped and then other magazines asked me to write for them. Now I'm writing for magazines, I'm sending articles all over the world in different magazines in different countries. So I ended up taking, after four years of that, I took the information, all those articles I wrote and I put them into a collection, in a book, and I published a book. It did okay. Not enough to make a living on, but I made pretty good money.

Kenny Troiano: And then four years later I wrote a second book, which was more formatted. It was more on breeding and everything. And that did really good, but I wasn't really making the kind of money that I could make a living on. I really thought for a while there that I was going to make a living writing a whole bunch of books, that I was going to just keep writing books and making a living, and I realized that wasn't going to happen. I was going to make, I still make money on my books. The orders still come in and it's nice extra money. But I needed something more. So I ran into Jeff Walker's product launch formula, and I thought, "What if I create a program with a series of courses that I could market digitally?"

Kenny Troiano: So I started on that. And then one day I was driving down the road with my wife and my daughter, I have three daughters. Two of them are in their 30s, 35 and 33, and then I've got my young one which is 16. So I've got pretty good span there, by the way. So I was talking to my oldest daughter about an idea I had of putting together an online magazine where I could put it on the computer, I could put my material on there with multiple formats and color instead of black and white, and I could do all these different things and they could subscribe to it. And I looked forever to find something that would do that, like a program. And this was kind of, I think before membership sites were, I don't know about popular, but easier to do where they had plugins and things like that.

Kenny Troiano: So, I kind of just put it on the back burner and just knew some day I wanted to do that. And then I don't remember exactly where it was where I heard the term membership site. Could've been Michael Hyatt. Could've been the four hour work week. I read a lot of books at that time. And then I was searching the Internet, Googling membership sites. You had a free webinar and it came up, and I basically took a bunch of notes, listened to everything you said, and you gave a series of steps like, "You get this platform, you do this and that." And I just kind of followed them and got the ball rolling. And then shortly after that, I found your podcast and I just started listening to that podcast. I'm a road biker, too. So I would listen in my mp3 player, your podcast up and down the road. And I would stop and I had a Note 4 at the time, and I would write all this stuff in my phone that you would do and I'd go home and implement it in my thing, my website.

Kenny Troiano: And it just kind of went from there. One thing I just always tried to do was not to introduce a lot of bells and whistles, but to keep everything as simple as possible.

Shane Sams: Yes.

Kenny Troiano: It just kept getting really complicated the more ... SO I started one website, it's called The Chicken Breeder's Gazette. The first launch was like what? 30 some odd people, Nancy?

Nancy Troiano: Right. It was pretty small.

Kenny Troiano: At the time-

Shane Sams: 30 something members? You got 30 something members on the first launch?

Kenny Troiano: Yeah. To me, that was terrible. Because I'm so well known all over the country. I told Nancy that I would like to try to start, launch this and get like 1000 people, and I figured if I didn't at least get 300 people, that was a travesty, you know?

Shane Sams: Right.

Jocelyn Sams: I like the way you think, actually.

Kenny Troiano: So I almost quit when I got like 34 people, I think it was. I was like, "Oh, no. I can't, this is not going to work." And I know you guys would probably think that's great, because Nancy was saying that to me all the time.

Nancy Troiano: Well, that and I'd always have to remind him it's a marathon, it's not a race.

Shane Sams: I wonder where you've heard that before.

Nancy Troiano: Exactly.

Shane Sams: Who says that?

Kenny Troiano: Yeah, really. She kept telling me, "Shane and Jocelyn would think you're doing great. You got these members, you're doing this, and this, and that. They would think you're a success." I just didn't feel like a success. So it started kind of slowing down. The members weren't really coming in and I just couldn't figure it out. So I actually started a new membership called The Breeders Academy and that has done better. I still have the Gazette. I still have about 20 some odd members over there, but the Academy has almost 100.

Shane Sams: Wow.

Kenny Troiano: It's doing a lot better. It's still not doing as well as I would like it to do.

Shane Sams: And how much do you charge for The Breeder's Academy?

Kenny Troiano: I have a few membership levels. I have $29.95 is the master breeders. And then I have a little cheaper one which we call the apprenticeship program, which is $9.95. It's just to get them in the door. And I've had a lot of people upgrade since they got in there. And then I had an annual one for $295 that, it did okay. A lot of people would join that, but the problem I had with that is some times they would get surprised at the end of the year with this all of a sudden coming out of their account. And I had a few instances where they got a little upset and stuff, and some of them just kind of keep it going no problem. And just recently I changed it to, it's still like an annual $295, but what I did was I made it so that it expires at the end of 380 days. I give them a few extra days.

Shane Sams: I gotcha.

Kenny Troiano: They can, if they want to rejoin and they want to keep it going, then they can just rejoin or they can maybe go to the monthly plan which is $29.95.

Shane Sams: What we've done for that is we've noticed that same thing, too, now. Mathematically it works out where you have, usually annual plans we're seeing somewhere between 15 to 30% depending on the niche will actually renew, right? You're doing a lot of refunds. And you do make a lot of people mad, and we don't really want to make people mad even if the math works out that it's worth it, you know what I'm saying? So we actually, what we did was we changed all of our annual plans and our terms and conditions. They now renew at the monthly plan. That's the equivalent. So what happens is we send out, how far in advance do they get that message, Jocelyn?

Jocelyn Sams: I think it's like a couple of months or maybe like a month.

Shane Sams: Like a month out we say, "You are about to renew on your annual plan and you will convert to the monthly plan." We let them know that. And then once they roll back over, it's a lot lower charge, so they're not like ... It eliminates the anger because it's like, "Hey, I got this charge. What is this?" And we're like, "Oh, you had an annual plan and it rolled over." And a lot more of those people are staying now at that monthly rate and then we just give them a nice, the email when they renew gives them an option to upgrade back to the annual plan at a discount. You see what I'm saying? So that way we keep our retention, we increase lifetime value, but it's like you didn't get charged $300, right? And you lose all the anger that way. You still have people cancel, but it's like you lose all the anger. And the anger is what you want to eliminate.

Kenny Troiano: Yeah. I have to figure out how to do something like that, because I'm using paid membership pro right now and I don't know how to make it so that it automatically goes to a monthly after the annual.

Shane Sams: Sure. There's probably something in there you can set it up that way. But let's back up a little bit. First of all, yeah you're successful. Do you know how many people right now would come to your house and steal all your chickens because you got 100 people around $29 a month? That's crazy when you think about it. Some people in America don't make that much money a month. And if you found 100 people, with probably a few tweaks, you could double or triple that within a year. You've got the momentum, you've got the members, you've got the community, you've got the authority, and you've got this niche. Who would think an online business could be built out of raising chickens, right? But you've done that. You've built the foundation.

Shane Sams: It's kind of like when people build a house. You ever drive by a house and you see, "Oh, they're building a house there in that lot. I didn't think anybody was ever going to build a house there"? And then about two weeks, three weeks later, they've poured the foundation. And it just looks like, "Man, it's taking forever for them to build that house." Then you drive back by the next week and you're like, "Oh look, they've got the frame up." Then you come back by a week later and they've got the roof. Then you come back and there's something else. And then it sits there for a month because it rains, right? You know what I mean? And then all of a sudden, without even paying attention, you drive by and you see somebody moving in. That's when the house ... and that's kind of like what you're doing with this membership now. You've got the foundation and the frame up. The hard part's done. Now it's just marketing at this point to take it to the next level, to get that next 100 members.

Shane Sams: We always tell people if you can find one, you can find 101, right? But if you found 100, there's 1000 of them chicken raising people out there, I know there are. There's 1000 people out there breeding chickens and their chickens aren't breeding. And they need some help from The Breeders Academy!

Kenny Troiano: I'm trying to scoop them up, man.

Jocelyn Sams: what I want to know is can you tell people how to keep them out of the road, like our neighbors.

Shane Sams: We live in rural Kentucky. There's chickens everywhere.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, maybe we could like send them to you, I don't know. Because I'm about to run over chickens all the time. We talked about a lot of people don't really think about California as somewhere agricultural, and I know that we do see the commercials about California cows and cheese and stuff like that. And it's a really large state. But when most people think about California, they think about LA or-

Shane Sams: The whole place is LA and San Francisco. That's all you think about when you're not from California.

Kenny Troiano: And we're actually embarrassed about that, to tell you the truth. We don't like to be associated with LA.

Shane Sams: You're the country folks. You're the country folks, right?

Kenny Troiano: San Diego's a lot different than Los Angeles, that's all I can say.

Jocelyn Sams: For sure. But you know, we know about this kind of stuff, we'll get along just fine. You've opened up your membership. You kind of changed direction a little bit. You've got people in right now. So I guess my question is what is next or what's holding you back from going to another level?

Kenny Troiano: I'll tell you what we've done that's helped out. I'll tell you what I think I need to do, but I'll tell you what I've done that's helped out a lot, which is starting the podcast, the Bred to Perfection podcast. That made a lot of difference. I've heard it from you and other people that, I get it right, get to know, like, and trust you factor, and that's made a lot of difference. And almost everybody who joins nowadays, it's because they were listening to our podcast.

Shane Sams: Awesome. Is it a weekly podcast? Or how often do you do it?

Kenny Troiano: We try to make it weekly. We don't always succeed, but yeah, it's basically a weekly show.

Shane Sams: I just picture someone that has a backyard chicken coop and they've got like, what's a normal person own? 10 chickens? Let's just say 10 chickens.

Nancy Troiano: Maybe that, yeah.

Shane Sams: I'm going to say 10 chickens. And they're out there throwing seeds from a bucket or whatever you feed chickens. I don't know what you feed chickens. You're the chicken expert, not me.

Jocelyn Sams: I know. It's like we live in Kentucky. You would think we know all about chickens.

Shane Sams: I have no idea how to raise chickens.

Jocelyn Sams: Aside from-

Shane Sams: We might need to learn. We've got plenty of-

Kenny Troiano: I can help you with that.

Shane Sams: I just picture a guy out there, or a girl out there throwing seeds from a bucket, feeding their chickens while they're listening to your chicken podcast. And that to me-

Kenny Troiano: And that's exactly what happens.

Shane Sams: It feels gloriously wholesome and it's just American. Someone out there listening to a podcast raising chickens. It's amazing. Why is it not consistent? We have three pillars in our business that we think everyone has to do to build an audience online. You've got to be consistent, prolific, and relentless. So the consistent part is a consistently, you have a consistent core piece of content. For us, it's our podcast, right? We have two podcasts a week now. We have one podcast on Tuesday and then we bring back a best of episode or maybe we release one of the trainings from our community or we do something on Saturdays now. So we have consistently, every week, no matter what, we've been going ... I think we've been on almost a five year run now of not missing a week of our podcast.

Kenny Troiano: Wow.

Shane Sams: What's keeping you, because that is really critical. That know, like, and trust comes from your audience being able to rely on you, and if they ... like on Tuesdays if there's anything late, I know we would hear about it immediately. Some times iTunes will mess up and the feed won't go in iTunes, but it'll be out on our website and we'll get like 10 emails like, "Hey, where's the podcast? It's not on iTunes. I download it and listen to it on work on Tuesdays." Because I run the website, some times iTunes doesn't update. Go check it out. But like what's keeping you guys from being consistent on that podcast? Why do you miss them? Is it just time? Is it effort? Are you doing it in real time weekly? How are you getting behind some times?

Kenny Troiano: Well, we've got 32 episodes out and I have 30 some odd episodes in the bank that just need to be-

Nancy Troiano: Edited.

Kenny Troiano: Edited and formatted and put out. It's always time for me. I get these great ideas. I get these questions from members. And the best I can do some times is put them on a list and try to order that list in the order that they need to be produced, I guess you could say.

Shane Sams: Right, right.

Kenny Troiano: So I just keep adding to that list and I'm not ticking off that list as fast as I need to some times, so it always comes to time and we're doing, since we started interviewing our members and getting some experts on here and there, we've got a lot of episodes in the bank, so we're not hurting for episodes, actually. Thank God for 20 some odd years of working and doing this for that long and creating all kinds of content and material and programs and articles. I've got so much in the bank that I'm good for five, six more years without ever having to produce anything new.

Shane Sams: Yeah. If you would get them edited now. Are you editing your own podcast?

Kenny Troiano: But I'm talking about articles. I'm talking about articles-

Shane Sams: On your blog.

Kenny Troiano: Yeah. Like the material that I drip into my website, if it wasn't for the fact I had so much already produced, if I had to create new content, I'd be in trouble.

Shane Sams: Right. So you've got, did you say you've got all this content scripted or you actually have 20 or 30 things recorded, it's just a matter of finding time to get them edited and uploaded and all that stuff?

Kenny Troiano: Yeah.

Shane Sams: Okay.

Kenny Troiano: They're recorded and ready to go, they just need to be edited and formatted.

Shane Sams: Okay. Do you edit your own podcast?

Kenny Troiano: Yeah.

Shane Sams: Okay. I think you know what's coming next, right? You need to go take about $200 out of that 100 people paying $29 a month and you need to say like, "Hey, we're going to outsource this. It's time." It's time to go hire someone on Fiverr, hire someone on Upwork, and just find someone, all they have to do is edit it, upload it, and go. And you could even just get a transcript for any copy that you're going to put on the stuff.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. And it would be awesome if you just had all of those scheduled out and then you know you don't have to worry about that piece for a really long time, right?

Shane Sams: Yeah. Because you could drop all those in a folder today, hire someone tomorrow, and like we do this with YouTube videos. One thing that we do is we cut up our Q&As in our community and then we can roll those out like as single Q&As. Because we usually answer 15 to 20 questions, every Q&A that we do live in the community. So we take those and we cut them up and we're like, "Hey, we can roll these out on YouTube later." Okay? So we hire someone and we tell him, "We don't want to get $1000 a head, so you're allowed to do one of these a week that creates 15 videos," and that just keeps us pushing forward, right?

Shane Sams: So you don't have to go hire someone to say, "I need to pay you $3000 to do 30 episodes." No. Just say, "HEre's what we want to do. I want you to do five of these a month." And that way we're constantly getting one week ahead. And that way it's affordable, you've got it kind of on a payment plan where you're like, "All right, this is a fixed cost, but I know I never have to worry about this podcast again for the next 30 weeks." That lets you step back and say, "How do we get more members in? That's all we're going to focus on now. We need to stop creating content for the next six months, because we've already got it and we need to go out and we need to do the things that we need to do to prolifically promote all of your stuff. You've got the consistent content. Scratch it off the list. Now you can go out and actually promote The Chicken Breeders Academy, because you have time to do it and you're not thinking about, "Oh my gosh, I got to sit down for two hours and edit all this show, and edit all this podcast and do all these things."

Kenny Troiano: Right.

Nancy Troiano: Here's two things. We do know that we want to create enough podcasts to last throughout the end of the year, because Christmas is crazy busy for a mail carrier. So we know we need to do that and we're only like five podcast shows away from getting that completed. The other thing is we're a little bit apprehensive about having somebody else edit our shows, because what if they edit out something that was important to be said in the show?

Kenny Troiano: Or they leave something they shouldn't have left in.

Shane Sams: Okay.

Kenny Troiano: Like I said, if you heard our raw stuff, it's pretty bad.

Shane Sams: That's an amazing question that I don't think anyone has ever asked before and I totally get that fear. We get that fear 100%, okay? What you have to do first of all is realize this principle. Where were we at? New York when we were talking? Yeah, we were in New York one time, we were kind of in a group of entrepreneurs and we were all talking, and this was back when we were thinking about selling ElementaryLibrarian.com. And I remember in the conversation, Jocelyn was saying, "Well, this is my community. I've done this. What if somebody doesn't get it who buys it?" And one of the people in the Mastermind looked up and said, "Everyone is replaceable, even the founder of the company." And what's important to you and like what we say on our podcast, will probably shine through as the editor is listening to it and anything they cut out is going to be prob not important. Like you can tell.

Shane Sams: And anything that gets through the editor and makes it to the ears of the people that you talk to is going to be something they didn't even have before no matter what, right? So, they're always going to learn, they're always going to get content. Something's always going to go through. And yes, the editor is going to put things on the editing room floor that you wish had made the podcast. But it doesn't matter, because the person listening didn't even know that was there in the first place.

Jocelyn Sams: As of right now, they're not even getting the information, because you have everything recorded and it's not even out there. There are definitely weeks when I've listened back to the podcast. I don't always listen back, but some times I do. And there are weeks that I'll listen back to it and I'm like, "Oh, we're talking over each other. Why was that included in the podcast?"

Shane Sams: Or I say something like, "Oh, he left a part out of that thing that I was talking about or whatever."

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. And it's okay. It's better for some information to get out than no information to get out. And it's much better than you trying to do it yourself.

Shane Sams: 80% of what you would do done by somebody else is 1000% better than you doing it by yourself. Because it actually happens. Let's say you're missing every third or fourth podcast and there's just not one that week because one didn't get out, right? Well, releasing a podcast that's slightly edited that may, let's be honest, just tell them not to cut out anything, just be like, "Cut out the mess ups. Cut out the screw ups. Cut out the ooms and the ahs and all that stuff. Just leave the rest of it in." You don't have to edit it perfect. And if you can let that go, you will become a prolific content creator. You won't be able to maintain the flow of content. It'll just pour out of you, because you can just let it out.

Shane Sams: For years, we even, we read through the transcript, but we don't check our transcript perfect like at all. It's probably 95% what it really should be because, you know what, 25% of our audience reads the transcript. Another 50% listen to the whole podcast. Somebody else consumes it in a different way. You can't match up everything to everyone listening anyway, so don't try. Just get the stuff out, get it batch. Yeah, you got to just kind of let it go. It's not your baby anymore when you let somebody edit it. But you're the one who actually makes all the content, right?

Kenny Troiano: You are talking to a control freak here, you know that.

Shane Sams: I live with a control freak, bro. So I have this conversation all the time with almost everything that we create.

Kenny Troiano: But I'm always telling Nancy that I need to do something because I'm wearing too many hats and I can't make this all ... and we were just talking about it this morning that I'm wearing too many hats and I can't make it all happen just with my effort. And it's like pretty soon I'm going to be doing video, and edit those, too.

Nancy Troiano: Here's the thing, once we have all the podcasts done for the rest of the year, then he's going to switch over to video and start working on that.

Kenny Troiano: Right.

Shane Sams: What are the three hats, Kenny, that you need to wear? What are the three hats-

Jocelyn Sams: That only you can wear.

Shane Sams: That only you can do in your business right now. One we know is chicken guru extraordinaire.

Kenny Troiano: Yeah, content creation, big time. Dealing with my customers, because only I can answer their questions, really. And that's the biggest thing. And then the marketing, which I'm always struggling with. I think I have a brilliant idea and it flops.

Nancy Troiano: I think that's one that you would like to push out to somebody else.

Kenny Troiano: Yeah, I wish I could find someone I could hire to do that for me. When it comes to marketing, to me I come up with these great ideas, "Oh, we're going to get all kinds of members," and it just doesn't produce like I think it's going to. What I was thinking, like the podcast really made a lot of difference and we have a lot of hope in that. So, we're going to continue to do that. And I do know that I need to start doing webinars, but every time I want to do it, it's that time issue that gets in the way to create the webinars. And we just started doing Facebook live and I was afraid to do that because I'm putting myself out there and I get nervous. So I wasn't sure if I wanted to do that. We started doing the Facebook live, we've done three or four of them now, and we're like, "Wow, we can do this. This ain't so bad."

Shane Sams: And live's better, you don't have to edit it. It's amazing. I love live video.

Kenny Troiano: I'm just calm. We're just chatting with the screen, with our people listening. It ended up turning out to be okay. So I told Nancy, I go, "If I can do this live, then I can do a live webinar." So I'm getting more confidence about that. Now it's just, again, we're back to the time issue.

Jocelyn Sams: Right. And one thing that I would challenge you on would be the questions like customer service, because this is something that I was reluctant to let go of for a really long time because I was like, "Oh, well nobody can answer the questions like I can." Here's the thing, once you've answered them a lot of times, most people are asking the same types of questions. So I started using a customer service ticketing system. It is called Zen Desk. And the cool thing about Zen Desk is that it keeps all of your responses and it keeps them in like a database. So what I would do is for the first few months, I would respond to all of the customer service tickets and then I turned it over to someone else and if they needed some help, they would look back and see, "Okay, well what did Jocelyn respond? Oh, okay. She said this, so I'm going to copy and paste it and type a couple other things in it."

Jocelyn Sams: And if there was something they didn't know how to answer, then they would ask me and I would tell them, and from then on it would be inside that ticketing system.

Shane Sams: Even in our community, our community has grown so big that we can't keep up with everybody, right? So like what we did was we have a community manager that we hire and we pay him ... How much? It's a part time college student kind of role.

Jocelyn Sams: Oh, yeah. We pay him just like, I think it's like $12 an hour, I think.

Shane Sams: $12 an hour or something like that, and what he does is he scours our forums, because you would think Shane and Jocelyn have seen literally thousands of businesses, talked to hundreds of people on our podcasts, answered thousands of questions on all of their Q&As, only they could answer the marketing questions, right? Well, no. Not really because we took all of our wisdom and knowledge and made a course called The Flip Your Life Blueprint and we have 50 courses that basically answer 80% of all questions could be asked. So now what he does is he makes sure every single person in our forums, if they ask a question, like say it's about sales funnels. Or webinars. His job is to know where the answers are and get people to them. He doesn't answer-

Jocelyn Sams: His job is not to answer. He doesn't give a personal opinion. He doesn't say, "In my experience." He says, "Hey, have you checked out the webinar course? Here's a link to it."

Shane Sams: "Here's Shane and Jocelyn's webinar course. Shane and Jocelyn actually answered this same question on a Q&A last week and it's on YouTube. Here's the link." So it's getting people to their answers the fastest. It's still you answering the question. It's like Dave Ramsey. Dave Ramsey ain't sitting down and helping nobody write a budget by himself. But they're going to point to his course that helps you write the budget. And that's what you have to do. You've got to let go of this stuff. You have so much content that you've created and I'm pretty sure from egg to dinner plate, that's probably a terrible analogy, but raising a chicken is about the same. From egg to the fryer, it's about the same system. When you hatch the egg, you raise the chicken, they make more eggs. I bet you answer the same questions a lot of the time. And if you can answer the most frequently asked questions and then have a system in place where someone points to the answer, it doesn't have to be just you, right? And then you're free to say, "Wait a minute, why didn't this launch work? Why didn't this webinar work? Let's actually me and Nancy sit down and figure this out and we can focus on the important thing, getting more members and creating new content," okay?

Shane Sams: Challenges, when you look at ... We've really figured out that the only thing that really we have to do is talk on this podcast. Like next week at Flip Your Life live, we have to be onstage. That's something that only we can do, because the event itself is billed as headlined by Shane and Jocelyn, right?

Nancy Troiano: Right.

Shane Sams: But all we're focused on is the content. We have a live event coordinator who's handling everything else. We have an AV team that is handling everything else. We have an MC who is going to go out and take care of the crowd and keep us organized. Our assistants will be there. Our assistants will help us with all the other stuff, like checking people in, registration. We have one job. Be Shane and Jocelyn and answer questions. That's our job during the thing. If we were constantly just involved in everything, we couldn't have the live event. It wouldn't even work, right? But it's the same thing with your chicken stuff. You've got to let go of ... You need to question yourself as anything but podcasting, circle the podcast, circle Q&As in your membership, and now say, "Those are the only things I do. I want to go get more members, so how do I get rid of everything else?"

Shane Sams: And some times it doesn't take hiring 20 people to do it. It could just be some automation. It could be not doing some things, saying no to some things, right? Like I would question why you're doing maybe even Facebook lives and YouTube videos and stuff now. Why aren't you just focusing on getting the podcast out consistently and then promoting that podcast every single minute of every single day of your life to triple your chicken audience, and then let your podcast send them to opt ins to get them on your list so you can market them to your webinars or to your membership itself. I really question going tactically wide when you could go deep on one thing right now and not add more things to your plate. Let go of some of these things and see if you can work out a better system where you're not so overwhelmed, right?

Shane Sams: I'm rambling a little bit here, but I just had a Mastermind discussion and one of my buddies said the other day, he came on and he said, "Hey guys, I got an idea." We just planned a fourth quarter and we realized that we were maxing out our capacity every quarter and all these fires kept coming up that we had to put out. All these things, these new opportunities would show up that we had to act on, so we did something pretty unique. We only filled our calendar to 70% capacity. We went through every person's calendar, every project, and we said, "Drop it down 30%. Say no to 30% of the plan right now," and now when opportunities come or when we have ideas, we're going to have capacity to act on them. And I would challenge you a little bit like you don't have to do more, you might have to do less better to double you membership.

Nancy Troiano: You know, that speaks volumes to me because a lot of times what we talk about in our podcast is we'll have breeders that will have 10 varieties of chickens on their yard and we say, "You need to focus down to one or two of them so that you can give them all of your attention." That speaks volumes to me about what you just said.

Kenny Troiano: Yeah. I do need to release some of it. I know I'm doing too much. And I like the idea of automating some of it, too.

Shane Sams: Even without the automation, people go to automation instead of saying no some times and that causes more problems, because then you got to learn how to automate it, right? What if your whole, like we know for sure that your content is king, because you are the chicken guy, right? So what if your entire business was just take, is one podcast a week, every day is promote the podcast, and then you're emailing out other content to get them to join your membership, right? And then you go and you do a webinar, right? You say one webinar that you do every other week forever. And now all you have to do is podcast and all you have to do is email your list and all you have to do is a webinar twice a month. And you start adding 10 members every two weeks.

Shane Sams: And then all of a sudden, six months form now, you've done 12 webinars and you've added 100 more members. And nothing else matters. Nothing else matters. You don't have to go Facebook live. You don't have to go YouTube live. Just take your podcast when you record it, turn the video on, and then put that on YouTube. There's your YouTube channel. Upload that to your Facebook page. You don't have to go live. You could just do that. And you just hire an editor out to go do that thing and now you can focus on the marketing.

Jocelyn Sams: Do you see how by getting someone to help you get this content out, that is then going to release you to be able to work on other things to grow your membership?

Kenny Troiano: Oh, yeah.

Nancy Troiano: Most definitely.

Kenny Troiano: We've been talking about this for a while. It's just a matter of making it happen. We just keep putting it off or we keep coming up with reasons why we shouldn't do that. But I do know we need to do that.

Shane Sams: I would challenge you both after this call, and anybody listening to the podcast right now, to sit down, because I know everyone listening is overwhelmed. Everybody gets overwhelmed because we all want to fill our bucket. We get capacity, and humans just want to fill their capacity. It's like getting a bigger garage. You're like, "Man, all my stuff fits on one wall." And then four years and two kids later, there's 97 things on every wall.

Nancy Troiano: Exactly.

Shane Sams: We fill things up. It's what we do. So we have to guard against this. Write down the five things that actually produce members in your business, period. For us, it's definitely the podcast. It's email marketing. I email the lists every day. It's more and more becoming Facebook ads. It's doing webinars and some kind of live component. That's been our life for the last year and a half. Those five things matter. Nothing else matters. I wanted to do a YouTube channel and a daily YouTube video live every day. It didn't matter. So I just said, "We'll just cut up the questions and we'll upload those. We can outsource that."

Shane Sams: Just think about the five things that actually matter that lead to you being able to promote your membership to your list every day. And your followers every day. That's it. And then get rid of everything else. Say no to everything else. Now automate those five things only. Don't add anything new for a year. Go out and just hammer the nail that's working every two weeks and make more members happen over time. And then a year from now when you've got 200 or 300 members, maybe now you add something new because you've got capacity and you've got funds to actually go hire more people and do it. Does that make sense?

Kenny Troiano: Oh, yeah. Definitely.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay, guys. It has been a fun chat with you today. Tell everyone where they can find you and then also tell us your action step, what you plan to do. I think it's pretty clear after our conversation. But just let everyone know where to find you and what you're planning to work on based on today's conversation.

Kenny Troiano: Well, first of all when I do the five steps that you talked about, write those down and implement those. And then we're going to work on trying to find someone to do our editing, which is going to be a little tough. We're going to have to struggle with that one a little bit, but definitely those five steps right away. And they can find us on Spotify, Google Podcast, Apple Podcast, and our show is Bred to Perfection. And they can find my website at, it's called The Breeders Academy at www.BreedersAcademy.com.

Jocelyn Sams: Awesome. Thank you so much for being here today. We have loved talking chickens with you guys.

Kenny Troiano: You got it. Thank you for having us on your show and the opportunity to meet you guys in person in San Diego, that was great. We talked about it all the way home.

Nancy Troiano: It was great seeing you guys down there.

Kenny Troiano: Hopefully we can do this again some time.

Shane Sams: What a great conversation with Kenny and Nancy Troiano. I love hearing amazing stories about amazing niche memberships like raising chickens. I mean, there's so many cliché things out there in the world, guys. Everybody's trying to do the live coach thing. Everybody's trying to be the motivational speaker, but man, people are making real money with real world niches in online business and you can too. We would love to help you start build and grow your own online business over at FlippedLifestyle.com. That's F-L-I-P-P-E-D Lifestyle dot com. You could head over there right now, check out the side bar, grab your online business quick start guide. It's a free series of courses to help you come up with your idea, research to make sure that it's making money online, and get started creating products that you can sell on the Internet.

Shane Sams: That's FlippedLifestyle.com. We would love to help you in our community today. Before we close the show, we're going to read you a bible verse. Jocelyn and I get a lot of our motivation and inspiration from the bible and we love to close our show with a piece of wisdom from the bible. And today's bible verse is Psalm 138:3. The bible says, "When I called, you answered me. You made me bold and stout hearted." So be bold and stout hearted. Go out there and chase your dreams. Whatever your idea is, it is worthy. You can go out, you can start an online business. You can share your experience, share your wisdom. You can change the lives of the customers that you find and you can change your family's future forever. That's all the time we have for this week. Until next time, get out there. Take action. And do whatever it takes to flip your life. We'll see you then.

Jocelyn Sams: Bye.

Nancy Troiano: One thing that, our ultimate goal here is to at some point be able to have conferences like what you guys are going to do real soon. And we're thinking that would be so much fun to do. But like you were telling us a little while ago about you've got somebody to do all these different functions and all you've got to do is be the content for the conference. That's kind of scary that you have all these different people doing all these things for you and you have to learn that, "Okay, we're going to need this for this and that for that kind of thing." But like we said, that's our ultimate goal is some day to be able to have those conferences in person.

Shane Sams: Sure. Sure, yeah. Well, we've learned in the last couple of years, conferences have a different place in your business. It's to build retention and they're usually not profitable, okay? Small things are profitable. Classroom setting sizes are profitable if you can sell an expensive ticket like 30 or more. But once you start getting into hotels and stuff, it's really, really like a lot of money. I would probably say make your goal at least 500 to 1000 members, and go get it and make that happen. And then maybe start doing work. When you get to 500 members, which you can get to 500 members, you just got to put your mind to it and say, "That's our goal, we're going to get there." You probably have enough money now to start thinking about doing workshops. And then push as high as you can get to start selling those conferences.

Shane Sams: We sell a conference ticket at almost $1000 and it's still usually just a break even event. You know what I'm saying? But if you've got the capacity to do it, it can be an amazing thing for retention. You may have 500 members and you say, "Hey, here's a conference ticket to come to this conference." All those people pay you every month until the conference, right? So it creates an anchor. It creates a place to get together. It creates things like that. Conferences are a big deal and they are fun. Workshops are easy. Workshops you can usually get away with. It's a little bit cheaper, you can make them profitable. But going out and making a big conference of 100 plus is really overwhelming and I probably actually wouldn't recommend anybody doing it until they get to 1000 members. Because then you've got a community big enough to support it, okay?

Kenny Troiano: I'll tell you what I do like to do and want to get back into as well, which would impede on my time I'm sure, was ... and I left it out, I forgot about it, was we used to do seminars. We used to travel the country doing seminars. I worked for an organization called The Sustainable Poultry Network and it was really funny when they first hired me, they said, "I know you wrote books, books are great. But do you know how to speak in front of people or are you just a writer?" And I said, "Well, I've spoke in front of a small group, so you can let me try it and see if I work out. And if I do, then you can keep going." "Oh yeah, okay. So we'll bring you to Wellmont, Ohio." They actually put me in the basement thinking that maybe my subject matter wasn't going to be popular or maybe most people wouldn't, I wouldn't get a very big following. And it filled the room. Standing room only. It was crazy.

Shane Sams: Love it.

Kenny Troiano: And then the next seminars after that, I got the biggest rooms.

Shane Sams: Yes.

Kenny Troiano: And I really loved that interaction.

Shane Sams: Maybe the best thing to do then in this regard would be probably like go speak at other people's events to continue building your membership and your authority. And then you have side events like meetups and stuff like we did at Flynn Con. And that's a great way to start that live event process, and then keep your mind focused on that one goal of getting to your income goal for your membership. And then all doors open and there's more possibilities. Okay?

Kenny Troiano: Sounds good. Sure. Before we get offline here, I got to say this and I wish I would've said it in the actual podcast, because I'm now regretting it. But I got to thank you guys, because if it wasn't for you, we would not be where we're at today. We would've never found what we needed to find to make this all work. I wouldn't probably have even known about it. It probably would've took me a lot longer. I really appreciate what you guys do and I want to thank you, because you guys made all the difference in our lives, I'll tell you.

Shane Sams: Oh, man.

Jocelyn Sams: Thank you so much. That's awesome.

Shane Sams: That's why we do what we do, bro. That's why we do what we do. We appreciate tha.t

Kenny Troiano: Really, you guys are doing a great job. I can't thank you enough.

Nancy Troiano: Your steps that we followed, you made it so easy for us and it was simple and it was great.

Kenny Troiano: You know how some people say they found you through Pat Flynn?

Shane Sams: Yeah.

Kenny Troiano: I found Pat Flynn through you.

Shane Sams: Yeah, baby.

Kenny Troiano: And I listen to mostly all your shows. I've missed a few here and there. But I've only listened to maybe 50 of his.

Shane Sams: That's amazing. I've got to cut this out and I'm sending it to Pat.

Jocelyn Sams: We love it when people tell us that. It's really funny.

Links and resources mentioned on today’s show: * Kenny & Nancy's Website * Flip Your Life Community * PROLIFIC Monthly

Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!

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In today's episode, we help Theresa design and launch her product.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jocelyn Sams: Hey y'all, on today's show we help Theresa design and launch her product.

Shane Sams: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast where life always comes before work. We're your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. We're a real family that figured out how to make our entire living online. Now, we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? All right, let's get started.

Shane Sams: What's going on everybody. Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. It is great to be back with you again today. Super excited to welcome another member of the Flipped Lifestyle community onto the show so that we can help them take their business to the next level. We're really, really, really super excited today to welcome Theresa Steckel. Theresa, welcome to the show.

Theresa Steckel: Hey guys, thanks for having me. I'm super excited to be here.

Shane Sams: And lest you think that Shane and Jocelyn are perfect I'm going to tell you what happened earlier today. We looked up, and I got a notification that said someone had joined a Zoom call. And I looked down, and I was like, "What?" Because we were getting ready for an appointment. We had a student teacher meeting at Isaac's school as we were getting ready-

Jocelyn Sams: It was a parent teacher not a student teacher.

Shane Sams: Or a parent teacher not a student teacher. That's right. We're not the students. We're the parents. But we had this parent teacher meeting, so we were getting ready to go to that, and I looked down, and I was like, "Oh no. We've double booked, the dreaded double booking when five people are controlling your calendar and you're not one of them." And so I looked over at Jocelyn. I was like, "I think we have a Podcast right now."

Jocelyn Sams: And I was like, "What?" And I'm usually such a slave to the calendar. It's so funny. I get up every day, and I look at it, and I'm like, "Oh no we've got A, B, and C to do," but for whatever reason this morning I didn't do that.

Shane Sams: And then for some reason we had A and then B, B, B, and C because there was all sorts of stuff going on at the same time. So Theresa was kind enough to move this down a couple hours, and we have finally gotten on the call together. So we are sorry that we stood you up a couple hours ago, Theresa.

Theresa Steckel: You know, that is just the way it goes sometimes.

Jocelyn Sams: Yup, life happens. I really hate rescheduling Podcasts, but thank you so much for being kind enough to do that for us.

Theresa Steckel: You're welcome. I really am just happy to be on the call, so I appreciated you guys rescheduling too.

Jocelyn Sams: Alright. Well, I'm excited for you to talk a little bit about your background. We talked about it before. Before people come onto the Podcast we do like a little intake survey so we can learn more about you, and it sort of guides our discussion and lets you know what we're going to be asking you so you can start thinking about it. And one of the things that we ask about is your background, and I think your background is really interesting. So can you get into that just a little bit. Tell us about how you started and what it is that you do and anything else you want to tell us.

Theresa Steckel: Yeah, so going way, way back we moved to Oklahoma, I don't know, like 24 years ago, and I became a housekeeper in a nursing home making a whopping $4.25 an hour and decided that ... I got talked into going to an LPN program. One of my friends talked me into it, so I got admitted into this LPN program, and she did not make the class, so I ended up there by myself.

Shane Sams: Oh no.

Theresa Steckel: Yeah.

Shane Sams: What is an LPN?

Theresa Steckel: It is a licensed practical nurse so more technical and less assessment and critical thinking. So I worked as an LPN. I was married at the time. We had a daughter. So basically after that worked my way through nursing school and eventually as I was working through nursing school had two kids and a husband, was working full time. Spent a lot of time in pediatric hematology/oncology and then worked in public health for a few years and then decided I thought I wanted to teach. So I went back to school and got a master's with a focus in nursing education. I taught full time for about three years and then but really kind of missed the clinical care.

Theresa Steckel: I loved working with students, but I missed sort of that hospital piece of it, that acute care. So I got a full time job in nursing leadership, became a director of patient care. I was in that role for about seven years, and as part of that position I was responsible for 85 to 110 beds kind of depending on which time period you looked at, up to 200 employees at one time.

Shane Sams: Whoa.

Theresa Steckel: Yeah, 125-200 was kind of ... Usually I sat closer to 120, which was a little more manageable. And then most recently about a year and a half ago was promoted to an executive level position and have been working more in focusing on service and kind of the patient experience side. I've loved really all the jobs I've had. There's always something you don't like. Really like I've spoken at state events and national events a little bit. I've really liked that. I love working with students and mentoring. As a leader you have a lot of chances to work with students and new nurse graduates, so I always really loved doing that. But that's kind of how I ended up here.

Shane Sams: This is crazy because you've literally climbed the ladder.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, this is like the classic American dream.

Shane Sams: This is the American ... I started out as a housekeeper making $4.25 an hour, and now I'm a vice president.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay, so it sounds great. So Theresa-

Theresa Steckel: It does sound great.

Jocelyn Sams: Why are you trying to do online business. Clearly you have the dream life, right?

Shane Sams: Yeah, like what's the ... Before we get into what you're doing online what is the desire there? Why online business instead of ... You're clearly successful. That's an amazing resume. Anyone would be proud. Gosh, in charge of 200 employees and 110 patients.

Theresa Steckel: Right, everyone's dream 200 employees.

Shane Sams: I know, right?

Jocelyn Sams: Definitely not my dream.

Shane Sams: Maybe not two employees. What is the goal? What's the dream? What's taken you down this path?

Theresa Steckel: Yeah, you know I've always wanted more flexibility with my family and my kids and always kind of had ... I called a bug or an itch or just sort of a deep desire to have your own business and do something on your own, and I've never really been able to shake it. So while I've kind of climbed and done great things in my career that's just never gone away, and feeling like there's something more that I'm supposed to be doing. Does that make sense?

Shane Sams: It totally makes sense. We always say that people are driven into online business for two reasons. It's usually inspiration or desperation, right? You're inspired to do something, you feel like there's something that you want to do or maybe something happens like we have like a negative experience, a catalyst that kind of drives you forward. Our good friend, Mark Mason he says the two reasons that you start a business are because you're being driven away from something ... I'm sorry, you're moving away from something, or you want to move towards something, right, it's kind of the same thing.

Theresa Steckel: Right, right.

Shane Sams: So you're definitely leaning on the I'm moving toward this rather than like I'm at the ... You're not at the end of your career, but you've kind of done it, you know, and it's like can I do this other thing inside of you.

Theresa Steckel: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jocelyn Sams: Well, and here's the thing. I feel like, Theresa, that probably you have other gifts and talents that you want to share with the world, and when you work in this healthcare space you're sort of in this one area mostly, right, instead of being able to share all that you have to offer.

Theresa Steckel: Yeah, you have to kind of especially as a nurse find ways to not get pigeonholed into specific things. It's pretty broad. It is a great career. I wouldn't say that it's not, but trying to branch out into other areas you can't just go work at Google or something.

Shane Sams: Right, exactly, and like try some new project. 20% of your projects are all the same or, no, you're the vice president. You have one job, right?

Theresa Steckel: Yeah, yeah.

Shane Sams: Yeah, exactly.

Theresa Steckel: And I have definitely had kind of those events in my life in the past where I wish I had more flexibility. My mom was really sick for a long time, and I didn't have the flexibility to go spend the kind of time with her that I would've liked to. My job was great to let me go whenever I wanted to, but it would've been nice to just been able to go be with her.

Shane Sams: Yeah, without asking for permission basically.

Theresa Steckel: Right.

Shane Sams: Or making sure everything was okay on the backside. That was interesting. I was actually posting on, I took a picture of me and Jocelyn at the school today, and she was like, "Why did you just take a picture of us sitting in the waiting room at the principal?" And I was kind of like, "Because I want to remember," like this is cool like it's the middle of the day and we can go to a parent teacher conference, and at the end of the parent teacher conference we got to tell our teachers like we are always on call. If our kid ever needs us you call us, and if you need help let us know. We can volunteer. We can be here for that, and we don't have to check in with anybody. And that's one of my absolute favorite things about online business, period. Have you always wanted to do online business or did you maybe try some other things?

Theresa Steckel: No, no, I tried some other things. I did that whole thing, too, where you write down everything you can think of and try to pick a job or pick a business out of the sky, like socks. I was going to make socks.

Shane Sams: You were going to make ... Oh no, wait. This was not in the intake form, I don't think. You were going to make socks. What does that mean?

Theresa Steckel: No, it's like-

Jocelyn Sams: I don't know what this is.

Shane Sams: Yeah, I got to hear this one.

Theresa Steckel: I never quite figured it out, which is why it never worked. Not like make them myself but you can import things from China and get designs on them. I have a sister who is an artist, and I was like, "Ooh, she could design these cool socks," and then I don't know. We could sell them to nurses because they buy, like, compression socks and you know.

Shane Sams: That was the first person I ever had say, "My first idea was making socks." You know what I'm saying?

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. I had an idea of making curtains once. That's a little different than socks.

Shane Sams: Yeah, Jocelyn tried to sell curtains once. We went out, and we were teachers. We didn't have any money, but I was like, "Let's do it. Let's go buy the fabric, buy a sewing machine."

Jocelyn Sams: Hey, I made two sets of curtains, and they did work. The problem is it took me, like, you know-

Shane Sams: 75 hours to make the set.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, a long time.

Shane Sams: Right. Okay, so scratch socks. What happened next?

Theresa Steckel: So we've done a couple of different things. We had a brick and mortar business at one point, and I don't know if you read this in my intake form but sort of the last two weeks of that business I had our last child, so she was about a week old and my husband was supposed to find someone to work in the business because I had a full time job. So his job was the business, and I had a job job like a traditional nursing job. But he was also working part time, and he got stuck working this one weekend, so I had to run the business. And my baby was seven days old, and I'm working in this business where we rent out vehicles and trailers and I'm nursing, and it was horrible, and I was ...

Shane Sams: Yeah. I have to say this. You wrote in your form, "I was one very unhappy lactating mamma."

Theresa Steckel: Yeah.

Shane Sams: So hard when I read that because I was like, "Well, that's not a good situation for anyone."

Jocelyn Sams: No, that reminds me of teacher life too. My baby wasn't seven weeks old, but like when I had Anna I was working at the school, and it was a really old school, so every single square inch of space was taken by somebody and there was nowhere you could go to pump milk, so I had to go in this office, and I can remember one time the principal opened the door and I'm like, "Oh no, don't come here." He was going to bring a kid in there to talk or something. I'm like, "No, no, no."

Shane Sams: Oh my God.

Theresa Steckel: Yeah, and it makes that noise, right. It's like [inaudible 00:11:37].

Shane Sams: Okay, for all the men out there uncomfortable about this breastfeeding discussion I'm going to move us forward.

Theresa Steckel: I'm a nurse, so I can talk about just about anything.

Shane Sams: Talk about anything, that's right. I was just kidding. But is says you and your husband are still married through this-

Theresa Steckel: Yeah, we are still married, 25 years even after that incident. But when he talks about brick and mortar I look at him, and I don't know how he doesn't die because I think, "No. No, I'm not doing that again."

Shane Sams: All right, so brick and mortar is out. Making socks is out. What was next?

Theresa Steckel: So we dabbled in a little bit of MLM, but it always felt like a bait and switch to me. I was never comfortable with it. You're not really selling the product. You're selling an opportunity, and-

Shane Sams: Oh.

Jocelyn Sams: Yes.

Shane Sams: Jocelyn hates MLMs.

Jocelyn Sams: Oh, you are speaking my language, Theresa. MLMs, I don't know. I was reading this thing about them the other day about 99 point something percent of people lose money, and I'm like, "How are they still in business?"

Shane Sams: I know, right? Yeah. It always makes me mad because when we try to run Facebook ads sometimes it says like, "Are you an MLM because we don't allow MLMs to advertise on Facebook?" I'm like, "No. We don't even ... No. We have no products. We're not trying to do that, like we're not even an MLM."

Jocelyn Sams: Okay, and before we get e-mails we're not an MLM because you own your own business. You're not trying to recruit people.

Shane Sams: Right, we're more of like a marketing ...

Jocelyn Sams: We don't take any cut of it.

Shane Sams: ... marketing and promotions company. That's what we are really. We're just helping you build it and market it basically.

Theresa Steckel: Yeah. So didn't do that. And then my husband's had a couple of service-based businesses I haven't really helped out with, but I just really want something, like I said, that's flexible, still allows me to be creative, kind of use my leadership the way that I want to. So I probably have for four years been just trying to think of ... And at that time I still didn't know about ... I knew there were online businesses, but I didn't really know what that meant, which is kind of ... And now that I've discovered you guys I don't know how I was so slow to figure it out.

Shane Sams: Yeah because if Shane and Jocelyn can do it surely I can.

Theresa Steckel: Yeah.

Shane Sams: You guys can figure it out, what's taking me so ...

Jocelyn Sams: I don't know. This interview's going downhill.

Shane Sams: It's going downhill fast. We're off the rails.

Theresa Steckel: It just didn't make sense to me until ... I still remember the moment I was listening, and so I know that this is a common way that people find you. But I discovered Pat Flynn through a different conference I had gone to, and he was a speaker there, so a couple months later I was doing some back reading into some of that material, and I thought, "I'm going to check this guy out a little bit more." So I went to his stuff, I listened to a bunch of his Podcasts, and I still remember. I was like on the stair climber at the YMCA, and I heard I think it was Shane's maybe second interview on the Pat Flynn show, and I was like, "Oh, that makes sense to me like that's something I could do," because when I would Google things that nurses were doing online they were doing a lot of blogging where they were really just doing affiliate marketing, so they didn't have a product. They were just peddling other people's things, and I didn't like that. And I'm not totally opposed to affiliate marketing. I just didn't want that to be my only thing.

Shane Sams: It shouldn't be your only ... We're not against affiliate marketing either. We don't do affiliate launches and stuff because we like to ... One, we don't want to spam our e-mail list with everybody else's stuff. But we do recommend products. We recommend things like aWeber and Kajabi and stuff like that like we've done that in the past.

Jocelyn Sams: And that is a way to do business.

Shane Sams: But it should not be your only way to do business like your business has to be your courses, your services, your products because it's your family and it's your future and it's your life, and you can't rely on somebody else's stuff to support you. That's more like gravy, right. That's the extra stuff that you get.

Theresa Steckel: Yeah. I think when I heard your Podcast just the concept of the idea made more sense to me. But I still was like, "I don't know what I'm going to do," and then I just kind of like I said I listened to ... I was on one of the member calls one time where Shane was like, "Get off your butt. Just pick something." I was like, "Oh, I don't know." "Just pick something."

Shane Sams: Right.

Jocelyn Sams: Theresa, you're making our member calls sound unappealing.

Shane Sams: Right.

Theresa Steckel: No, they're great. They're a lot of fun. Just, you know ...

Jocelyn Sams: Our member calls are amazing.

Shane Sams: Hard core. We're hard core in the member calls. I'm not going to lie. I'm not going to lie. If you want to see how they go we have a couple clips. We actually cut out individual clips of some of our best questions and answers, and we put them on your YouTube channel, so flippedlifestyle.com/youtube, check that out okay. All right, so let's pivot here then. Let's talk about, okay, what was the thing that you just picked and then tell us how that's kind of turned into something different and the direction that you're taking now with your online business.

Theresa Steckel: Yeah, so what I did was I called a couple of my friends who were instructors, full time nursing instructors, and I said, "What do you need?" And a couple of them were like, "I really need some good case studies." And so in nursing education that's one of the ways we teach students. You kind of go through, "Okay, this 50-year-old male walks into the emergency department and he has these symptoms. What's your first thing, what's your second thing, what meds, what diagnosis?" You kind of walk them through a real scenario. So I thought I'll do that. I'll write some of those. So I started trying to write those, but again I'm in leadership, so it was just the amount of time ... And I don't know. I'm still trying to learn for myself what part is necessary and what part is me just trying to be perfect. And I can't quite figure that line out yet. But it has to be accurate, right. You're teaching people how to take care of patients. So just the time that it was taking to build all that and validate that the data was accurate.

Theresa Steckel: And then I think when I was at the live event last year I'm trying to think who asked me the question, maybe Bonnie, about content. And that was when I realized that other people could help you create some of that stuff I thought ... But even with that hiring people through Upwork to create some of it was really expensive. And it was, I think, February before I even had, February 2019 like three case studies ready to sell. And I didn't enjoy it really. So I kind of kept doing it because I didn't have any other ideas, and my daughter started nursing school in January. So she was coming to me and asking for help with this or that, and I kind of told her how I made it through nursing school and how I've coached my other students to make it through nursing school. And then I started looking at some of the things that she created after I kind of told her how I had done it.

Theresa Steckel: And suddenly I was thinking, "You know what, it would make so much more sense for me to just do that because that's what I really like." So then I pivoted towards more tutoring students starting with the first semester because I kind of have all that content together. And I can still use those case studies that I've made. They're not first semester material. They're more second and third. But they'll flow really nicely in there. So what I've been focusing on now since probably the beginning of July is trying to create materials for nursing students and then figuring out what would the rest of that look like if I built that around a membership.

Shane Sams: I assume that's going smoother and coming a little easier.

Theresa Steckel: Yeah. I haven't made any income off of it, but I haven't really put it up for sale, anything for sale yet within that piece but as far as-

Shane Sams: [crosstalk 00:19:25] not for sale.

Theresa Steckel: I know.

Shane Sams: Right?

Theresa Steckel: Right. But the content creation is much easier to me. It flows much ... It just feels more authentic.

Shane Sams: Good, that's awesome.

Theresa Steckel: Does that make sense?

Shane Sams: It makes total sense. And that's why we're so big ... Like people come into the community, and they really wrestle with their ... Like the first course that you take is learning your idea and then validating it, right?

Theresa Steckel: Right.

Shane Sams: And people really struggle with that part because they want ... We all want to go hit the home run or we hear the guy on stage that hit the home run, right. And we want the home run, and we think that's how you do it is that you really research it, and you make a good decision, and your first business works out. But here's the truth. 90% of people's first tries at online business don't work. But we always find this. It bends you toward what eventually does work, right, like even now just in the story you just told I just did something, and I did it, and I realized it wasn't right, but it made me wrestle with it, and that pushed me back to where I think I should've been the whole time, right?

Theresa Steckel: Yeah.

Shane Sams: And until you make that decision you can't get to that part.

Theresa Steckel: And I think listening to you guys for the last year and a half you say that a lot. And I just had to keep reminding myself of okay, this might not be the thing, but it will turn into the thing. And I also knew I didn't know how to build a website. I didn't know what an autoresponder was. I didn't know about e-mail list creations. I didn't know any of that. So just doing something forced me to learn those steps. And I haven't sold a lot of my first product, but actually two this week. It's my best week ever.

Shane Sams: Congratulations. That's awesome.

Theresa Steckel: But I've learned the process.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. That is amazing. And there are so many people who are listening right now who have maybe been listening to us for years, and they haven't even done that much. So even if it wasn't the perfect thing think about how much you've learned, and now even if you decide to pivot it's going to be so much easier this time.

Shane Sams: Oh yeah like we just had, a couple weeks ago we had Kevin Depew. He just crossed over-

Theresa Steckel: I listened to that, yeah.

Shane Sams: Yes. Actually we played a best of episode the weekend before that. I wanted everybody to hear his first episode where he was just like, "I have nothing." But he was kind of where you are. He was in his second iteration, like he had tried a couple ideas, didn't work, but he was to the point where he was comfortable with tech. He was comfortable with the terminology. And he was like, "Yeah, I can pivot really fast now. I think I can actually have this thing launched in a month instead of a year." And he did, and now he just crossed over his hundred member mark, and he's doing really well. But it's all because he made a decision to try something. And he failed a couple times, but it got easier and easier, and then the ideas can happen faster.

Shane Sams: Jocelyn and I were talking just we launched a product a couple months ago, and it was a paper newsletter. It's called Prolific Monthly, and it's like deep marketing strategy like daily promotions. And I launched the entire product line on a completely new platform that we had never used by myself with absolutely no help from our team in three days, right? And this thing required logistics. I had to figure out who was going to mail it, how we were going to make it, what was going to be in it, like the whole thing. But it's just after years and years now of launching products and seeing hundreds of other people launch products you just get good at it. And I look back and I'm like it took me ... I don't even know how long it took us get our first digital product online, like probably six months. But now it's like, "I've got an idea." Three days later we have a product.

Shane Sams: So anyone out there that's listening to this do what Theresa did. Pick something, do something, learn things, pay your dues, get through the ropes, and then bam, the next idea is probably the one that's going to make it, okay. So let's figure out how you're going to make this idea big. Before we get into the technical stuff of the business, it sounds like the product's kind of being created, what fears and mindset struggles are holding you back?

Theresa Steckel: I think ... There's so many, and recently it's a little bit ... It's been a lot of anxiety lately and a little bit of exhaustion. I'm used to knowing what I'm doing. I just know what I'm doing. I know what I'm going to do the next day. I'm kind of in control. So I think starting a new job and this online business at the same time and just learning so much in a year and a half has been a little overwhelming and exhausting, and learning to manage my energy has been a little bit more challenging. And then just like I had a sale this week, and she said she couldn't find the product, so I tried to send it back to her, and she didn't respond to my e-mail. I didn't sleep the entire night.

Shane Sams: Like you were just worried about the customer.

Theresa Steckel: Yeah. I was just, you know, and I'm like ... And then you start thinking I'm like, "Gosh, what are they going to say about me? It's online and I'm going to have ..." You know, it's so weird.

Jocelyn Sams: I suspect we are the same person.

Shane Sams: Yes. I think you guys are related somehow.

Jocelyn Sams: Like you're sitting here talking, and I'm like, "Yup, yup, mm-hmm (affirmative)."

Shane Sams: They're going to tweet about me, and all the world will know.

Theresa Steckel: Right. That I'm a total failure, and my people at work are going to know.

Jocelyn Sams: Why didn't I tweet my customer and make it right? The whole world will know that.

Shane Sams: Then I'll tweet that, and people will think I'm lying because they'll believe the customer.

Theresa Steckel: Exactly. That is exactly where my brain went.

Jocelyn Sams: We're sitting in two chairs, and I'll tell you more. Right now he's just sitting here looking at me like, "It's you. It's you."

Shane Sams: As you were talking I was sitting there pointing at Jocelyn while you were doing that because it's the same things that she says.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. It totally is.

Shane Sams: I am glad you didn't say imposter syndrome because if you were like, "You're the vice president of 24 years. Whatever, you don't get to be imposter." Like when I hear that though, they're like, "The stress of getting it right for your customer and just the anxiety and the ..." I love how you put those. I've never ... It's funny how many Podcasts we've done now. I've never heard someone say that and felt so related to what you said. You said anxiety and exhaustion because we feel that a lot.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. And I'll tell you I think that was a lot of what was going on with me the past couple of years because I've had all this stuff going on, and I guess I didn't really let myself have permission to think about it or rest or whatever, like I just kept going, and I finally just reached a point where I couldn't do it anymore. And I just started kind of falling apart. And then on top of all that we brought the kids home for home school, and I don't know that just made it that much worse.

Shane Sams: Well that was kind of like what Theresa's going through like, Theresa, you said, "I just started this new job as a vice president what like a year ago, something like that."

Theresa Steckel: Yeah, about the same time I started trying to build a business too.

Shane Sams: Oh yeah, so it's like you basically launched two new things, and you were vastly over prepared for one and maybe under prepared for the other, and that just collided like a battering ram basically and kind of created some exhaustion in there.

Theresa Steckel: Yeah, it's a lot of learning.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, absolutely. I just wonder if maybe now might be a good time for you to hire someone on a very part time basis to help you with some of the website stuff.

Shane Sams: Do you have anybody that helps you in your home like do you hire a housekeeper or anything like that?

Theresa Steckel: No.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. That might be the best place to start actually.

Shane Sams: Yeah. This is something that we've been talking about a lot lately with people especially like our one-on-one clients is we're seeing people ... People know they need some kind of support network to help them achieve their goals, right, and their dreams. And everybody goes straight to, "Well, I need a virtual assistant or I need this or I need that," but not really.

Jocelyn Sams: And it's okay for people to do that.

Shane Sams: Sure, it is.

Jocelyn Sams: People think, "Oh, hiring a virtual assistant. That's my next step." But then when you mention hiring someone to help you with housework or something that's when people step on the brakes, and they're like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa."

Shane Sams: Why would I do that? Hold on. I can't do that.

Theresa Steckel: I know. I've definitely been thinking about it for a while.

Shane Sams: I'll tell you right now. I love everybody we work with. We have an awesome small and mighty team right now, and they're the best people ever, but if I fire anybody it's everybody but the lawnmower guy and the person that is our personal assistant at our house because if we don't have the support ... We have a personal assistant who comes every day from 10:00 to 3:00. And she helps us handle all of the chores like not deep cleaning. We have a cleaning lady that comes in on Thursday who does the deep stuff, right. But Jen helps us get all the other stuff done. She does our errands for us.

Jocelyn Sams: She files stuff.

Shane Sams: Files stuff like if Jocelyn needs her to run to the store to get the stickers for the kids' project tomorrow or whatever.

Jocelyn Sams: She does grocery shopping. She buys birthday presents.

Shane Sams: Yes.

Jocelyn Sams: And really in most areas it's a relatively inexpensive thing to hire.

Shane Sams: It's actually cheaper, probably, than hiring some kind of online assistant or marketing help. And what's crazy is it's not that we don't want to ... like we think we're like too good to do those things. It's when she handles that it allows us to serve you, right, and for us to be there for our community and be there for our clients and to be there for our members and to be there for the people who write in every week from our Podcast listeners. We have to clear that mental space. We have to clear it even if it's only a couple hours a day.

Shane Sams: Pat Flynn, we spoke at FlynnCon, and he asked us on stage like, "Do you mow your yard anymore?" Because the story that ... I discovered online business while I was mowing my grass. I was on the lawnmower. I found The Smart Passive Income. I heard this guy talk about online business, and I nearly wrecked the lawnmower I got so excited because I was like, "That's it. That's how I'm going to do this." And he asked me, "Do you mow your yard anymore?" I'm like, "I haven't mowed a yard in five or six years," because if I'm mowing the grass I'm not in here talking to you on this Podcast.

Jocelyn Sams: And it's not about being lazy or anything like that. It's about clearing your mental space because right now our assistant is actually, she's on vacation. She was on vacation today, and what I'm sitting here thinking right now even is that, "Oh, I forgot to put the laundry in the dryer."

Shane Sams: Right.

Jocelyn Sams: I mean I'm serious thinking that, and I really did so I have to do that after this Podcast. It just takes off that kind of stress. And there are other things that you can do. It's not just somebody to do your laundry or whatever. If you're sitting here thinking, if you're listening out there and you're thinking, "Okay, well that sounds nice, and if I had the money I would do it," well how can you ... Don't say why you can't do it. Think about how you could do it. Could you skip a meal eating out this week and pay someone to come in even two or three hours and do your laundry? Could you pay someone to watch your kids for a little bit while you do some work? Could you pay someone to mow your grass? There's a lot of different possibilities. And I don't want to dive too far into this because I'm actually presenting a talk on it at the live event.

Shane Sams: So you're going to here a lot more about this.

Theresa Steckel: Yeah, I have to hold back just a little bit.

Jocelyn Sams: Just a little bit, but.

Shane Sams: Actually the reason I stopped mowing my grass was because we had a coach, like, six years ago, and I was still mowing my grass, and I got on a coaching call with him, and I was still mowing my grass. And I said, "Hey man, I just got done mowing the grass," and he goes, "Why are you mowing your grass?" I'm like, "I don't know. It doesn't take ... It's an hour and a half." And he goes, "That's an hour and a half that you could've grown your business." And I was like, "Oh, that is true."

Jocelyn Sams: Ouch.

Shane Sams: And then he told me, he said, "I want you to hire someone to mow your grass next week, and I want you to sit at the window, and I want you to have your laptop in your lap and I want you to watch out the computer or watch out the window while they're mowing the grass. And I want you to make five times more money than you pay that guy to mow your grass." And I did it. I wrote an e-mail, I sent it out, made a couple hundred bucks. I paid that guy 20 bucks to mow my grass because it was a small yard.

Shane Sams: So that's what we're saying here is like can you ... The anxiety may still be there, but maybe you can get rid of the exhaustion if you would just take back five hours of your life every week like write a list of everything that you're doing at home besides your job and besides your online business and your kids, right. And just say to yourself, "How can I get back five hours a week, 20 hours a month around my house?" If you can do that the exhaustion goes away, the creativity comes back up, and you get to move forward without feeling anxious and exhausted at the same time. Does that make sense?

Theresa Steckel: Yup.

Jocelyn Sams: All right, Theresa. It's been a fun conversation today, and I think we got to delve a little bit into topics that we sometimes don't get to, so it's been kind of fun. But let's talk a little bit about moving your business forward. What can we help you with just to kind of overcome and move to that next step?

Theresa Steckel: Well, I think I have probably two key things. One thing is more kind of technical, so I still have stuff on the old website, and then I have the new website. And I know that my e-mail list, which isn't very big, like maybe 43 people now, 50, I can't remember, but I know it's a mix of students and instructors. I just sent out an e-mail this morning that was written towards instructors, but it was really like, "Hey, I have this free dosage calculation Webinar that your students could have. Do you have anyone that's struggling? Maybe they would like to watch this." But I'm not quite sure how to kind of transition that. Do I just kind of let it float over there by itself or do I just get everything redirected to my new site? Does that make sense?

Shane Sams: It does. I think in any pivot there's always this question of what do I keep, what do I get rid of, what do I turn off, what do I turn on, right?

Theresa Steckel: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Shane Sams: And you'll have much more clarity when your product is completely done. How far are you from being completely finished with the student-focused product?

Theresa Steckel: For the first semester?

Shane Sams: Yeah.

Theresa Steckel: If I could take a week off of work I would be able to get it done. It's probably going to take me ... I think it's going to take me a few more weeks. I've noticed that I have this really bad habit of, I don't know if it's a habit, but I get creative and I start creating a bunch of stuff, and then I've got to go back and put the logo on it and the website name. And I didn't organize it very good as I was creating it, so I've got almost probably two thirds of the actual stuff created. It's just kind of going back and reorganizing it is taking me almost as long as it took to create it.

Shane Sams: Yeah. I think the best ... Anytime someone doesn't have their product done, and they're asking us about all these other questions I almost always tell them do your product. Forget everything else. Don't send any more e-mails.

Theresa Steckel: Okay. Just get it done.

Shane Sams: Yeah. Don't send anymore e-mails, don't do anymore blog posts, don't do anything else. You're so close to having the actual product. Because when the product is done it becomes a magnifying glass shining the sunlight onto the ground, so it focuses everything like you all of a sudden know exactly what to do because you say, "Wow, I've got this product. What do I need to do? I need to tell people about the product." And that's what everything becomes about. And if you're going to pivot I would just like when you get the product done abandon the other thing like don't worry about it like put the stuff in there, forget it, shut it down. Anything that you want to bring over bring over to the new place. And go all in. Go all in on this one thing and make it grow. You've already got the passion behind the content. You know this is where you kind of want to be going forward, so don't worry about what's happening on that old stuff.

Shane Sams: Go all in on the new thing, but get that product first. If you can finish the product all this other stuff becomes so much more clear like how do I get it ... How does my e-mail list grow? Well I need a lead that leads to the product. What kind of content do I create? Content that leads to the product. So just finish that product, and if you get that done it's going to help you do so much better so much faster.

Theresa Steckel: And then I think the second ... So that makes sense to me. And actually I kind of forgot that I had stuff for sale on the other website, so when I got a couple sales this week I was like, "Oh no, what do I do?"

Shane Sams: Yeah. That's where the greed kicks in. You're like, "Maybe I should focus on that a little."

Theresa Steckel: Yeah. And then I thought I'm having all this anxiety about a product I'm not even planning on continuing to sell, so sort of wasted emotion a little bit. And then the second piece is ... So the part I like is ... So I am an introvert, which isn't always obvious when you meet me, but I like the one-on-one kind of interaction with people. And I think one of the hard things for the online business to me is you can't really see how people are responding to you, so it makes it scarier to me. I mean it's much more vulnerable than when I'm just in a one-on-one situation. So I'm trying to figure out what would fit for me as far as like I've thought about kind of doing Zoom calls or Webinars with students a couple times a month.

Theresa Steckel: You know, I guess I'm trying to figure out what would that look like? Would it just be a Q&A where I'm like, "Hey, what are you struggling with?" Or would I have a topic I've designed to talk about or is that something that I can just figure out after I get the product done?

Jocelyn Sams: Yes. So the beautiful thing about online business is that you can design it any way you want it to be designed. So I often say the best product or the best way to do something is the intersection of what your customers want and what you're willing/able to provide them. So you have to figure out what it is they're looking for and what fits your skillset and your strength the best to get it done.

Shane Sams: And you can change it any time like right now so we've always done Q&A in a chatroom format. So in the Flip Your Life community if you're a premium member of our community you get to go in, and there's two live Q&As with me and Jocelyn every single month, right. We answer questions, we do all that. We've always done it where people type in the chatroom, Jocelyn reads the questions, we answer them, okay, but last ... They changed some of the tech on YouTube, which is how we used to deliver this content, so we said, "All right, we're going to use Zoom." And since we were going to use Zoom we decided, "Let's let people answer the questions this time." So everybody puts their-

Jocelyn Sams: Ask the questions.

Shane Sams: Or ask the questions, yeah, not answer them. So everybody put their questions in the chat. Jocelyn picked one. I just clicked on them, and they talked, and they got the answer to their question and talk to us live on air, right. It was awesome. It was totally cool. We've always kind of not done that because of logistics, but I kind of wish we always had now because it was really, really fun. It could change in the future. We could ... I was just coaching somebody the other day, and they didn't want to do live calls where it was too confusing to get all of their people together in one place at the same time or something. So what they did was the people submitted the questions early, and then they read the question online, and then they just did like a Q&A, but you submit your question ahead of time. So there's a thousand different ways.

Theresa Steckel: Okay.

Shane Sams: And I would just do it and practice a couple different ways and change it on the fly and see what happens because you'll eventually find something you're like, "This is it. I love this, and I want to do it this way." And that's what you're looking for, but you won't know until you experiment a little bit.

Theresa Steckel: So just pick something is what you're saying.

Shane Sams: Yes. That's usually what I say to people.

Jocelyn Sams: The moral of your story, Theresa, is pick something and move ahead.

Shane Sams: Yeah. You know what's so funny. It's like pick something is probably the wrong way to do it.

Theresa Steckel: Yeah.

Shane Sams: I should tell people pick the next thing. Just pick the next thing because the next thing probably has no bearing on the three next things, right. It's just do the next thing, and it will lead you to where you have to go next.

Jocelyn Sams: All right, Theresa, we are at the point in the show where we are going to ask you what is one thing that you plan to take action on based on what we talked about here today?

Theresa Steckel: I have two, but I think my first thing is I'm going to get my product done.

Shane Sams: I think you should do that.

Theresa Steckel: Yes. And second I'm going to hire someone.

Jocelyn Sams: All right, awesome.

Shane Sams: Love it.

Theresa Steckel: Clean my house.

Shane Sams: And I am going to see you ... Let's see, right now we're recording this. What is today, August what?

Jocelyn Sams: August 23rd.

Shane Sams: It is August 23rd, so we are going to see you on September-

Theresa Steckel: Ooh, like a month.

Shane Sams: Okay, it's almost exactly a month. As soon as I see you at Flip Your Life Live I'm going to say, "Theresa, who did you hire, and is your product done?"

Jocelyn Sams: And let's see the product.

Shane Sams: And let's see the product. Actually you got to come up to me on your phone and pull it up.

Theresa Steckel: Okay.

Shane Sams: Is that a deal?

Theresa Steckel: Sure. That won't make me nervous at all.

Shane Sams: That's a massive accountability, massive accountability, okay.

Jocelyn Sams: All right. So if you would like to see Theresa's product and know who she hired join us in Lexington September 19th through the 21st. We would love to see you there at Flip Your Life Live.

Shane Sams: I don't even know if this is going to air before Flip Your Life Live, but if it is-

Jocelyn Sams: Well, if it does ...

Shane Sams: If it does you sign up flippedlifestyle.com/live. If not, you've got to buy the replay, sorry.

Jocelyn Sams: Yup, buy the video if it's after.

Shane Sams: All right, guys, what a great, great conversation with Theresa. Man, that was an awesome talk. I love watching people's journey. I love seeing them make those big pivots. And I love watching them find the thing that really they latch onto, and they're ready to take it to the next level. We would love to help you take your next steps. We would love to help you choose your next thing over at flippedlifestyle.com. We have a free course to help you come up with your idea, validate that it's going to make money online, and even get your product started. There is a free course over at flippedlifestyle.com. It's called our online business quick start guide, and we would love to have you go check that out over at flippedlifestyle.com.

Shane Sams: All right guys, that's all the time we have for this week, but before we go we always like to close our show with a Bible verse. Jocelyn and I get a lot of our inspiration and motivation from the Bible. There's a lot of great stuff in there about being successful at business, but today Theresa has a Bible verse that she'd like to share with us, so Theresa take it away.

Theresa Steckel: Yeah, so I chose Matthew 6:26, which says, "Look at the birds in the sky. They don't plant or harvest. They don't even store grain in barns, yet your father in Heaven takes care of them. Aren't you worth more than birds?" I always think about that verse, and this is going to sound really silly, but when Shane tells his cow story I always think of this verse. If God cares about that cow he cares about you.

Shane Sams: I know like let me tell the cow story because someone might be like, "A cow story? What are we ..." This whole conversation.

Jocelyn Sams: We should make them go back and listen to the podcast.

Shane Sams: Oh I should, but I'm going to tell the cow story. When I was selling insurance in my young 20s right out of college, and I had this little office where I was just ... I was a glorified secretary, and I hated my job so bad, and I just wanted out of it so bad. And I remember leaning up one day on the filing cabinet looking out the window, and there was a herd of cattle across the street. And I remember thinking to myself right there in that moment I would love to be one of those cows. Look at those cows. They're just free, free to do whatever they ...

Theresa Steckel: I know. I'm from Nebraska, so I can so connect with that.

Shane Sams: That's right, that's right. So if God takes care of the birds and the cows he's got something for us too, right Theresa?

Theresa Steckel: Right.

Shane Sams: All right guys, that is it. That is all the time we have for this week. Thank you so much for listening to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. Until next time get out there, take action, do whatever it takes to flip your life. We'll see you then.

Jocelyn Sams: Bye.

Shane Sams: Even if you just had someone like Monday and Thursday.

Jocelyn Sams: And I'll tell you it'll make you so happy when you come in and like-

Theresa Steckel: Everything's clean.

Jocelyn Sams: Yes.

Shane Sams: Yes.

Theresa Steckel: We've been working on what things we can cut out of our budget because my husband's decided now too he's not going to do online, but he's trying to do something new. So we for, like, the last two weeks have been just kind of line item like what can we cut out, what can we cut out, what else can we cut out.

Shane Sams: Yup. But this is buying back time. It's way more important than spending money.

Theresa Steckel: Right, right.

Jocelyn Sams: And mental space.

Shane Sams: Yes. Because that's going to allow you ... Like for example if you cut ... It looks like you ... I'm not saying you do this, but let's say you cancel cable, right? But you take that money and immediately put it right back into somebody else or something else, right?

Theresa Steckel: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Shane Sams: That doesn't really make you anything. But if you put it back into this mental space and this time it allows you all that time back to go make more money and more space. Do you see what I'm saying, so like there's ROI.

Theresa Steckel: Right. And that's what we're trying to look at is what things can we cut out that really aren't going to move us forward so that we can pay for things that are going to move us forward.

Shane Sams: When you're looking at your line item veto what we do is we say ... We're actually about to do this. We do this every about quarter. I've got all three of our last, like, statements printed from the business and our personal life, and we're going to through it with a highlighter, and we're going to say, "How does this save us time or how does this make us money?" And if it doesn't do one of those things, especially the business side of the equation it's probably going to get axed, right?

Theresa Steckel: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Shane Sams: So just ask yourself that every time. Does this save us time? Does this save us money? Does this make us money? Nope, bye, and it's gone. And then start looking at those other things that do, okay.

Theresa Steckel: Okay.

Jocelyn Sams: All right, Theresa, you've got this. Can't wait to see-

Theresa Steckel: Thanks, guys.

Shane Sams: We'll see you soon, okay.

Theresa Steckel: Have a great day.

Jocelyn Sams: All right, thanks, bye.

Theresa Steckel: All right, bye, bye.

Links and resources mentioned on today’s show: * Theresa's Website * Flip Your Life Community * PROLIFIC Monthly

Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!

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View Details

In today's episode, we explore how to convince your spouse that online business is not a scam.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jocelyn Sams: Hey y'all. On today's podcast, we explore how to convince your spouse that online business is not a scam.

Shane Sams: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast where life always comes before work. We're your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. We're a real family that figured out how to make our entire living online. Now, we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? All right, let's get started.

Shane Sams: What's going on everybody? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. It is great to be back with you again today. I am really excited about today's show. I'm always excited about the show, but I'm super excited about this one because we are welcoming back Daniel Hulsman to the show, and this time he has brought his wife with him, Katelyn Hulsman is here too. So, Daniel, Katelyn, welcome to the show.

Daniel Hulsman: Thanks for having us. We're really excited to be back and I'm really excited that Katelyn / nervous that Katelyn is here to talk about what she's doing now.

Katelyn Hulsman: Thank you so much for including me.

Jocelyn Sams: Absolutely. We were so excited. Not too long ago, Daniel posted about you getting involved in the community and I could not wait to show Shane because the very first words out of our mouth was, “They have to be on the podcast.”

Shane Sams: They have to be on the podcast. For those of you who may not remember Daniel's first episode on the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, it was episode 212. We actually just posted it again in a best of edition on Saturday of last week. And in that episode we introduced you to Daniel Hulsman. Daniel had written me, I like to call it a scathing email full of doubt and disbelief of what we were doing.

Jocelyn Sams: I’m not sure it was quite scathing.

Daniel Hulsman: I was trying to get as much fury into it as possible.

Shane Sams: There was some fury. There was definitely some fury in this email. But I remember looking at that email and I said, “Hey, I'm going to email this guy back and I'm going to be like, “Hey look, let's talk about this bro. Let's go back and forth.””

Jocelyn Sams: And a lot of times when we get emails that are hateful or, whatever, I will just say, “You know what, just delete it and move on.” But Shane made it his personal mission to get you on board with what we were doing and he was successful. And I'm happy to say that this is over a year later since we talked to you the first time and you still love us. We're still all friends.

Shane Sams: I remember when you sent me that email, and I think I read the whole email in episode 212. So if anybody wants to listen to that, go back to episode 212 and check it out. But, I remember when I read it, at first I was mad and then Jocelyn was kind of like, “Delete it.” But then I was like, “I'm going to get this guy to join the community. I don't know how I'm going to do it, but I'm going to get this guy to join the community.” I write you an email back, you joined the community, we bring you on the podcast. Turns out your online business was able to make a little money, right?

Daniel Hulsman: Yes, it was. It sure was. No, but let's be fair. What you wrote me back was not an email, that was a short novel.

Shane Sams: Yes, I prefer a novella. That's what I’m going to go with.

Daniel Hulsman: Of course, yes.

Shane Sams: I'm going to go with a novella. But yes, I wrote you an epoch. That's what it was. It was an epoch. But it was awesome and I remember you writing me back and it was just kind of like, “All right, you're right. Let's go.”

Daniel Hulsman: Got enough now.

Shane Sams: But then, tell us just a little bit, catch us up what's happened since then. You were back on the podcast again and gave us a little update in episode 263. So, tell us where you're at now that we're over episode ... What is this? It’s going to be 300-and-something by the time we release it. So where are you at right now in your online business?

Jocelyn Sams: And I just want to say too, it's not been all smooth sailing. Like if you listened to your second episode you were having a lot of like mental doubts and just trying to overcome some obstacles. So, we've worked through a lot of that through the community. We worked through it on the podcast, and now over a year later what's going on?

Daniel Hulsman: So, I guess where things are at right now is that we’re treading waters the way I would kind of say, like the membership community is inside of our membership site with which we launched a year ago, almost to the day. And it's been going well inside of the community it’s been fun. Like we've been doing more … Katelyn gave me some ideas that have like really been resonating with the people inside the membership community, but we're having a really hard time growing it. We never broke in 50, and or we've been hovering between like 30 and 40 pretty much the whole time. We had a couple of months there where we just got slammed with lots of stuff outside of online business. And that ended up kind of showing in the results where we kind of lost some customers. So, we ended up getting the churn under control there, but now we're just really struggling to grow it.

Daniel Hulsman: And at the same time we've got … Now we have two humans to care for instead of one tiny human.

Shane Sams: That's right. If I remember correctly, Katelyn, you were pregnant last time Daniel was on the show, right? Like the baby was on-

Jocelyn Sams: Well, the first time.

Shane Sams: Yes. The other baby was almost here. So, how old is the newborn baby now?

Katelyn Hulsman: He's six months old.

Shane Sams: Ooh, that's a tough time you all. I remember.

Jocelyn Sams: And like, people always would tell us like going from one to two kids is so much harder than zero to one. And I was like, “Oh, you know, whatever.” But it really is very, very difficult.

Shane Sams: Very difficult. It's a whole different animal when you've got two of them things running around. Do you know what I mean?

Katelyn Hulsman: I know. Now each of us has one of them at all times.

Shane Sams: What I can't fathom is how people go to three and then you're just outnumbered like at all times, or four or five. Or we've got a couple of members with like six and seven kids and I'm like, “I don't want to be outnumbered. I like a fair fight.” You know what I'm saying?

Daniel Hulsman: Yeah. I'm with you on that one.

Shane Sams: All right, so let me bring this back a little bit. So Katelyn, you were a bit skeptical of all this online business stuff in the beginning, correct?

Katelyn Hulsman: I was, yes. I'm a fairly practical person and fairly blunt. And so, when Daniel started to get into this stuff, I was kind of like, “Well, that sounds really exciting for the people who are able to make that work, but how many people actually are able to make money doing online business?”

Jocelyn Sams: Katelyn, you are my people. I totally get you. I totally understand what you're saying. And like, that's where I was too. I was like, “Well, that's great. I'm sure that some people are able to make it work. They have some kind of special gifts and talents that we don't have. And this is just dreams. Let's move on.”

Shane Sams: I remember when I first heard someone making money online I was mowing my lawn. A lot of people have heard the story, but I was out cutting my grass. I was listening to a podcast by Pat Flynn, the smart passive income. He was talking about making money online, and I just knew it was our destiny, and I jumped off the lawnmower and I ran inside. I busted through and I remember Jocelyn was standing over by the stove and she was cooking or doing something for the kids lunch, or whatever. And I told her all about this dream and how awesome it was and we could do this. And I asked her what she thought and she was basically like, “Good for them. Go finish mowing the grass.” Like it was just total dismiss at that moment, right?

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. I often say Shane is a light switch. It's like he goes from off to 100 miles per hour, and I'm more like a dimmer. So I start out and I'm like, “Eh, I don't know.” It takes me a while to come up to his level of excitement. And I'm not sure I ever come up to your level of excitement.

Shane Sams: I don’t think you've ever been. It's hard to get to this level of excitement all the time.

Jocelyn Sams: I’m thinking I’ve maybe been to like 25%.

Shane Sams: Maybe. I'm working on getting her to 50%. That's my goal by the end of 2020, okay? All right. So, bringing this around, so Daniel starts making … I want to go back just a little bit in time to when he actually got in the community and these members started coming. Because listen, I know it's frustrating right now being stuck. There's all kinds of plateaus. Like we've hit three or four plateaus in all of our membership growth over the years. And you're kind of at one of those plateaus now where it feels like, “Oh, how do we grow this thing?” It's there. But when he started getting members and it was more consistent, like what was happening in your mind at the time, like when you saw Daniel get in the community gets this thing going. Oh, Daniel, real quick. Tell everybody about your business again.

Daniel Hulsman: Oh yeah, sure. That's just probably important.

Shane Sams: That's probably important.

Daniel Hulsman: Small footnote, the website is for new and aspiring composers who want to get into the gaming industry, writing music for soundtracks for video games and it's vgmacademy.com.

Shane Sams: Vgmacademy.com. You basically help people compose like the score or the background music when you're running through the level or playing in the background of a cut scene, or something like that. Correct?

Daniel Hulsman: Yep, we help them with that or help them with like kind of the business end of things, which is always really terrifying for folks, it seems.

Shane Sams: Is that like negotiating with the game companies and things like that, like how to talk to them?

Daniel Hulsman: Yeah, contracts, naming your rates and getting a contract together, marketing yourself, that kind of stuff.

Shane Sams: Got you.

Jocelyn Sams: And if you didn't listen before, Daniel is into this because he has done this in the past. Tell everybody just like the 30 second version of your experience with this.

Daniel Hulsman: Yeah, so actually I've never composed myself in the past, but what I did was I tried to get into it in college a few times, and there just was no good resource. So, out of college I ended up just getting frustrated with it and decided to make one myself, and leverage the expertise that I had in like some of the areas that are weaknesses for new and aspiring composers. But I did. I also work with a choir and a couple of times a year we record soundtracks for video games. So I've sent out a few, to big video games and that's a lot of fun.

Shane Sams: Awesome. That's amazing. I love your story because I’m a gamer.

Jocelyn Sams: Well, and since we're on that subject, I have to bring up something that was in the intake form. I know we need to move on, but it says that you guys met in opera class. I need to know about this. Like this is just so fascinating.

Shane Sams: That’s amazing. Where did you all meet? Opera class.

Katelyn Hulsman: Well, Daniel was a music major in college and I was a music minor. And I guess, I mean, we had met before … I think we'd met before this, but the night that I really noticed Daniel was our opera teacher told us, she wanted to have a party at her house and could we all meet in this one location if you needed a ride. And she would make sure that the students who had cars would show up there and offer rides to the students who did not have cars. So, I showed up there myself waiting for a ride. Daniel picked me up in the car.

Shane Sams: Did you work with the opera teacher to set this up Daniel? This is-

Daniel Hulsman: Totally, you saw right through me, Shane. Actually, just saying, this is Katelyn’s version. My version is I picked her up on the side of the road. That's the version that I like to tell.

Katelyn Hulsman: You tell that version. But so he actually played his car's theme song for me on the ride to our opera teacher's house. So I was sold at that point.

Shane Sams: Amazing. That’s amazing. We have a similar story. When we first met probably about a year. Jocelyn and I met in a stairwell. We ended up like I was a … You were a sophomore, was your … I think Jocelyn was a sophomore and I was a second sophomore. You know what I'm saying guys? That’s how it works.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, pretty much.

Daniel Hulsman: I know what you’re saying.

Shane Sams: You know what I'm saying. And I was coming downstairs to meet some friends of mine we were going to go out that night, and Jocelyn was coming upstairs and I guess … Where had you been, the gym?

Jocelyn Sams: I had been to the gym.

Shane Sams: She had been at the gym. I just fell in love on that stairwell. I was like, “Oh my gosh, who is this?” I stopped Jocelyn. I asked her her name and we talked for just a second and I was like, “Well, I got to go meet my friends. I hope I see you around.” And she was like, “Yeah, okay.” And then so she goes on upstairs. I go downstairs and I told my friend, “I just met the girl I'm going to marry.” Like I told him that. And I didn't see her again. How many days was it until we met again?

Jocelyn Sams: I don’t remember. It was like maybe a week or two.

Shane Sams: Yeah, about a week or two. Jocelyn, I was standing at the desk at our dorm talking to the person that was working the desk and she walked in and we got to hangout and the rest is history, as they say. But, we actually realize later that we had met before. Actually, Jocelyn had lived in another dorm the year before us, or the year before we met and I was over there to see another girl and I was hanging out with her.

Jocelyn Sams: Your cousin?

Shane Sams: No, it wasn't my cousin. That wasn’t Amber, it was Catherine. It was Catherine.

Jocelyn Sams: But Amber did live in the same building.

Shane Sams: Amber lived in the same dorm too. So we were all in this room together and Jocelyn, and we hear a knock on the door-

Jocelyn Sams: And they know this is going to date me a little bit.

Shane Sams: It’s going to date Jocelyn here. Jocelyn opens the door and goes, “Hey you all, can I borrow the phone book? I need those yellow pages, you all.”

Jocelyn Sams: Some of our listeners are probably like, “What's a phone book?”

Shane Sams: What's a phone book? If you’re a millennial, we’re sorry.

Katelyn Hulsman: They actually still deliver them to our house.

Daniel Hulsman: Yeah, we just got one randomly for the first time in years.

Shane Sams: Hang on to that.

Daniel Hulsman: We’re excited about it.

Shane Sams: Tell your kids that's the only way you can look up a phone number for like 10 years and then like let it … It's like making your kids watch ‘80s movies, like they have to watch the Goonies Neverending Story. Now you've got to find a phone number in the phone book guys, and then we'll teach you about the internet later. But then, we figured out later that we actually had met and I kind of like, I kind of remember it, but it was like not really. So, maybe it was love at second sight Jocelyn, that's what it was.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, I don’t know. One of the things that I need to know about this, do you guys like go around the house and sing like Arias? I need to know this.

Shane Sams: Opera. Are y'all blasting out some opera in the morning over coffee.

Katelyn Hulsman: You know what, maybe we should do that actually. It's funny. I wish we did, although I will say our oldest son is really getting into musical theater now. And so, he definitely is walking around the house with a straw hat and a hanger trying to recreate Jolly Holiday from Mary Poppins.

Shane Sams: Nice.

Jocelyn Sams: Well, I'm going to need to see you guys do one of those viral videos where everyone's like singing a video game part. Now that would be pretty cool.

Shane Sams: It’s going to happen. So let's come back to today now. We've got, Daniel's thinks, got this online business idea, he's hating on Shane and Jocelyn. Shane and Jocelyn call him back. I was like, “Get in here.” He goes out, he sells some memberships and we get to the point where you are today. So, Katelyn is still skeptical, still not totally on board. And then one day in the forums I see this post in the success forums inside the Flip Your Life Community, “Success. My wife has joined my team.” I opened it up. I'm going to read this whole thing to you guys because it's epic. All right? Honestly, I never thought I'd see the day. My wife and I have butted heads several times over the years about my former blog, now business.

Jocelyn Sams: I feel you.

Shane Sams: She has severe doubts that entrepreneurship and online business in general and will not believe that it can replace full-time income until she's staring at that reality in the face. Has Katelyn ever read this, first of all?

Jocelyn Sams: I’m thinking not.

Daniel Hulsman: I’m asking her.

Shane Sams: All right. She is currently on maternity leave and has acknowledged that we're really relying on the small, steady monthly income from the online business and has offered help. We've probably had this conversation starting from both ends, me suggesting her suggesting about 10 times in the past and it never landed anywhere good. How many conversations between spouses never land anywhere good? This time it ended with me just handing over the login to the business Twitter account and cutting her loose. The next morning I walk in to get our three month old baby out of the bedroom before he wakes up my wife since she's nursing through the night I wake up early with our two sons in the morning and let her sleep a little bit longer. She's usually laying there unconscious looking like she's been clubbed over the head.

Jocelyn Sams: I’ve so been there before.

Shane Sams: Oh my gosh. Everybody with a baby's like, “Yes.” All right. But the morning after giving her the Twitter account, I walk in and find her curled up looking at her iPhone. She looks up at me and says, “I've been tweeting.” She's been awesome so far. Totally complimentary with the Twitter stuff finding and responding to relevant timely stuff. I don't have time to see or react to making a list of people for me to contact for interviews with notes about why I have a good feeling about this. And then it says, now … What does it say here? Now if only I could get her to see the full-time entrepreneur light at the end of the tunnel. Baby steps. And it just got a mad response because everybody knows your story in the community. And that was a awesome thing to read, man.

Shane Sams: Because like, when two people unite together to do something, you're stronger. It's more than just two people’s efforts. You know what I mean? And it's just awesome to hear that and to hear her coming right now. Now Katelyn, where are you right now like with online business? Like, you've seen it make money and you know about us and you know about these other people in the community that you can see that are making money. Where are you right now, whether you're involved, you're doing the thing, what's the feeling right now?

Katelyn Hulsman: Well, I feel very onboard at the moment. Really, for years Daniel had been having me listen to podcasts with him, including yours. And it was hard for me to kind of come to the place of believing this was something that we could actually make money off of. But I actually had kind of an aha moment on the phone with my best friend. She had been telling me about trying to kind of take on more with the kids to give her husband time to work on his MBA. And he had all this coursework to do, and she was trying to kind of take some burden off him so he would have time to do that. And at the time we had gone years probably more of a hobby for Daniel. He hadn't been able to dedicate as much time to it, and it hadn't been generating any kind of income. But I guess I had this conversation with her probably a few months after he had launched the membership site, and it was actually generating some money.

Katelyn Hulsman: And I was sitting there and she's telling you all the things she's doing. And for a second I realized, “Oh my God, why have I not been doing this for days?” And I realized, I needed to invest in this business that was bringing in money that we were now depending on. The same way that I would be investing if he was going back to school for a masters or whatever it might be. I needed to actually treat it like a business now, because it had transitioned from a hobby to a business. And I think, when you're in it every day, you don't necessarily realize this has become something else now and you need to treat it as a business now that it's grown into one.

Shane Sams: That's amazing. We always tell people, we actually talked about this on stage at an event we spoke at recently. The interviewer kind of asked us like, “Well, how do you get each other on board?” And we have a course about this inside the Flip Your Life Community. And the basic moral of the story though is, you've got to prove it. Like, you can't convince someone that it just works. You can't come in sweaty off a lawnmower and say, “I got an idea.” And someone believe you. But when you see it and you do it and you grind it and all of a sudden it is making money, and not just money but like enough money to pay a car payment, or enough money to pay the bills or enough money to even pay a mortgage, then it becomes real. And it's a lot easier then to open up to those aha moments of, “Wait a minute, what if I got involved?”

Shane Sams: Kudos to you Daniel for sticking with it. Because how long were you in business before you really launched a membership that made some good money? How long had you been doing the VGMA Academy?

Daniel Hulsman: I think I actually launched the website in 2014.

Shane Sams: Oh wow. So it was like-

Daniel Hulsman: It was several years.

Shane Sams: Three or four years.

Daniel Hulsman: Like three and a half, four years. And I even remember like this was … I don't blame her even for being skeptical of what I was doing, because it was like a situation where I was spending time on it as a hobby. It was like pre-kids and I would like do all this stuff and then nothing would really tangibly happen in our lives as a result. And I remember I had an aha moment one day where I was kind of like talking in like sort of like almost like really talking about it like it was a business in order for trying to defend how much time I was spending, which obviously it was not getting huge results back then. And she said, well, it's a hobby right now. It's not a business until it's making money. And then I had to kind of like really reassess how I was spending my time on it and figure out how to make it work.

Shane Sams: Wow. That's awesome man. Well, I am so glad. And we're going to kind of turn this story into the normal episode of the podcast because we really want to help you guys get to the next level. That's our number one mission. When we get on the podcast is, let's figure out where you're at and let's figure out where you're going to go next. Man, I'm just so happy for you guys because it really is an epic turning point when both of you are on the same page, and both of you are working together, and both of you do see that light at the end of the tunnel. And it's kind of like, “Man, if we can just get there together, how awesome is it going to be together on the other side?” And for everybody listening to the podcast right now, we totally understand the one person having an idea and the other person just kind of not on board. And we know there's a lot of people out there.

Shane Sams: You've been listening to our podcast for a while, you've been listening to other podcasts and you know that you hear these success stories and you know it can be possible in your life and maybe your spouse, whether it's the husband or the wife. We see it both ways all the time. It's just not on board. Doesn't believe it. Doesn't see it. Just go prove it. Go and make that first dollar. Go and make that first $50. Go get those first five or six members. And once they see that, that's the only way you can get them on board with it, man, when they come on board it's going to be amazing.

Jocelyn Sams: I would say too, just keep planting those seeds. You know how Daniel was having Katelyn listen to podcast and I'm sure he has entrepreneurial books laying around and all this kind of stuff. Like, all of those seeds eventually will start growing. And it took a conversation with a friend about something completely unrelated, but because he had planted those seeds and said, “Hey, this is possible. I need you to get on board.” Then that conversation was able to help her open her mind to the possibilities. And one day something clicked in her mind and she's like, “Oh yeah, okay. Maybe this is possible.” So, don't give up, that’s what I’m trying to say.

Shane Sams: And also too Daniel said something, Daniel did the work. Three years he worked. We find a lot of couples discover online business and they'll just try to talk their way into it. Like they'll talk their spouse on it, but they're not actually doing anything. Well, you said that there wasn't a lot of tangible benefit. But you had your group, you had your blog, you had stuff that you could show that you had actually produced, right?

Daniel Hulsman: Yeah.

Shane Sams: You were considering the content, and all this stuff. So, you actually did the work. That's the worst case scenario is when you hear our podcast, hear our story, and then go tell your spouse that this is going to happen, and then you don't do anything. You just keep telling them how it's going to happen. You got to do the work. So the work added up, the seeds added up, the conversations added up. Then you made some money and now it's off to the races.

Katelyn Hulsman: Well, I think it's also in marriage, I think probably everyone feels like this, where time is just such a precious resource. We found ourselves a lot of the time trying to prioritize what do we need to do today, what do we need to do tomorrow? And I think in that conversation I had with my friend, I realized that too often it wasn't a conscious thing on my part. I wasn't trying to prioritize lower than some other things. But I was doing that. It was the thing that I could kind of put lower and we had a more urgent issue. And it just kind of made me realize, “No, this needs to be a top priority because it really is something we depend on now.” And I will also say that, we've always tried to kind of support each other's interests. And so, I had listened to a lot of the podcasts with him, even though it wasn't my interest in the beginning.

Katelyn Hulsman: And it was really exciting for me when he started listening to yours because it was the first one I had heard that was really more like family first. And that was kind of eye opening for me because a lot of the other podcasts I had heard and stories that I had heard about other entrepreneurs had been single people going after it and kind of doing it on their own. And it was a little concerning to me, “How do you do it as a family? How do you balance that, and how do you allocate your time?” And so, that was a turning point for us as well when I really started listening to you guys, because you talk a lot more about how you've been able to work it out with your family and the choices that you've made to make it work for you. So, that was also something that really helped us out.

Shane Sams: Let's, let's go one step further. Like, so you listen to our podcast, and you see, “Okay, there's a husband and wife, they actually care about their kids. They're not living on a beach in Thailand somewhere on $6 a day.” Did the community show you anything? Like when Daniel got into the community and you see, “Wow, it's not just Shane and Jocelyn, there's literally hundreds of other people in there.” And the success story, a forum now has like … I can't remember it. It's something like 4,000 posts total in it. When you see like this community open up in front of Daniel, did that have any impact on kind of … Was that another seed that was planted like, “Wow, it's not just an MLM, there's not a big pyramid going on over here. These are all individuals doing it individually but walking together.” Did that make any difference in what you saw?

Katelyn Hulsman: Yeah. I mean, he started talking about posts that were being made in your community and-

Daniel Hulsman: Questions I was asking and getting answers to. She's never jumped into the forum herself, which you can honestly tell because that was our first kind of hearing my little spiel about her joining my team. But she's never jumped in there, but I started talking about how I was just going in there and asking questions and getting not only answers from you two but answers from other people and suggestions. I don't know how visible it was because the community for me, like one of the biggest benefits that I get out of it is when I'm feeling stuck or in like in crisis or like in doubt I can kind of get in there and get support for that.

Shane Sams: Love it.

Daniel Hulsman: And now I don't need that as much, because I've got my wife on board, which is awesome. Now we're like talking about it together and just now she's getting more into it. She's kind of going through like a lot of like the phases that like I went through at the beginning of the journey. So like, little things are still there I'd like to go away. But it's funny. I guess it's a funny dynamic now where it's like, I feel like she's experiencing things that I've already experienced but I'm still experiencing, so I can talk about them, but I'm not over them myself yet. It was nice to go and be able to talk about that with her, but the community definitely was super helpful, especially during those months in the winter when I was really having a tough time.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay guys. This thing has come a long way and we're very proud of you for where you have been and just where you've come from and where you're going. Let's talk about what is holding you back right now as you're trying to move forward, what kind of fears or mindset issues are going on that's just causing you some problems?

Katelyn Hulsman: Well, for me personally, I think because I'm really so new to all of it I get nervous every time there's a new competitor. Daniel laughs at me because I'm like, “This person is doing the same thing.” I get very worried about it. I see everything crumbling the minute there's a new competitor. So that's been a little bit of a learning experience and also fear of mine. And also, we've talked about being plateaued a little bit. I think I'm a little nervous about, “Where do we go from here? What's the next avenue you choose?”

Katelyn Hulsman: And is it possible we might choose the wrong avenue and kind of have to backtrack? Daniel has a really great foundation, but I'm kind of playing catch up a little bit. That's sort of where we're at, I think.

Daniel Hulsman: Yeah. And you've also talked to me about like, not being worried that we've hit the cap, like we've hit the ceiling already. And is this it? If it is, what do we do time wise if it's not, what do we do next?

Shane Sams: Does every cancellation feel like an arrow to the chest?

Katelyn Hulsman: It does.

Shane Sams: Is that like anxiety and like, “Oh no, someone else left, how do we replace them.” Did you-

Katelyn Hulsman: Well, I feel like I've disappointed someone when they cancel.

Jocelyn Sams: Yes. I totally get that. I feel the same way when people cancel. But, I think that the competition thing is kind of hard sometimes because you're out there looking and you see things because you're looking for it. But a lot of times people don't even know competitors are out there. You know, the Internet is a big place. If they're happy with your membership, they're probably not looking around other places. And if they find you just on a random search and or like say an ad or something and they get to you first, chances are they're not looking around saying, “Hmm.” It's not like Amazon-

Shane Sams: “I want to compare.”

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. It's not like Amazon and Walmart. Like if I find something I want I'm going to see if it's cheaper on Amazon or Walmart because there are two totally different products. Like you're a different person, you have different skill sets and experience than this other person who's doing something similar. You have different personalities, all those types of things. So, really it's not competition so much because they're totally different. Like, some of the people are going to be your people and then some of the people might be this other person’s people.

Shane Sams: I always consider online business a lot like golf. Golf, you have to go out and play your game. Like in full contact golf would be an amazing sport to watch because you could run over and tackle a guy right in his back swing, or like maybe you could scream at the guy ahead of you. You know what I'm saying? But that's not how it works. Golf, all you can do is play your game and then you look up at the leaderboard at the end. Jocelyn and I don't even look at competition a lot. We try to ignore it as much as possible because you get into comparison. Comparison is the thief of joy. You can't be happy in what you're doing, and you just can't focus on anything else. And the truth of the matter is the Internet is so big and all niches are big. If you've got 100,000 people in the world that want to do something, that's a huge niche, and you only need 100, 200 of them to make a really good living on the internet.

Shane Sams: The best thing to do about competition is just ignore it. When you find someone that's doing what you do, try to like not even look at them. I actually made this terrible mistake last week. Our history site, we're ramping up for back to school right now. So we sell lesson plans to history teachers. And I got onto this third party marketplace called teachers pay teachers and I started looking and I realized there's like 20,000 people selling worksheets for history teachers in this third party marketplace. So, technically, even though I have a membership where people can get all my lessons, they're kind of my competitors, because people can go buy these one off thing. And I got to thinking, “Oh my gosh.” Then I found this one guy, he has 40,000 four star reviews on teachers pay teachers. 40,000. That's insane.

Shane Sams: He probably got in early, he's been there forever, but that, but our website still makes thousands and thousands of dollars a month. So I don't need all of his one off sales, or his thing. I can't compare myself to him. We're not the same person. We're selling a different product. It's got a whole different vibe. Yes, Abraham Lincoln was the 16th president, that's the same … But like, at the end of the day, they're different. And they're going to be a little different and people are going to have different needs and I only need like a couple hundred of those people in the world to do this thing. So, try to ignore competition as much as possible on the Internet. It's not like we're both opening a fried chicken shack across the street from each other and we're both trying to sell fried chicken. Like, we're in a different town, we're in a different place.

Shane Sams: These people are all over the world and our goal is just to get you from 50 to a 100, then 100 to 200 and now we're off to the races. And if everybody else in the market goes somewhere else you've got your core. And that's what matters.

Jocelyn Sams: And really it's a good thing when somebody else starts something similar because they see that there's a market there that there's money to be made. And that's good news for all of us. And I know it seems like, “Oh well, these people are competing against me. There's a small market,” or whatever. But it's probably bigger than you think. There are probably thousands of people out there who don't even know that either of you exist.

Shane Sams: And also too, remember this, collaboration can exist online that can't exist like in a small town, mom-and-pop type of business. You can eventually befriend these people and you can help each other because consumers on the internet are collectors, especially people who are learning stuff. If I want to learn something, like if I want to learn about … If I buy a book about real estate, I got into real estate a couple of years ago. So I bought my first book about real estate. You know what I did after that? I bought like 10 more books about real estate. So, sometimes there's even opportunities to reach out to, quote unquote, competitors and be like, “Hey, I see that you sell your products in the first and third quarter, what if we did an affiliate and you sold mine in the second, third. You can make extra money. You could offer your people something new. I could do the same for you.”

Shane Sams: And we give people more information that they can go succeed with. They like you better because you introduced them to someone cool, and you get this more cyclical nature of helping each other instead of hurting each other. Now, there will be people who are just hyper competitive. They want to be the top dog and they're not going to do that. So, collaboration is not always possible.

Jocelyn Sams: It's not always the answer for everyone.

Shane Sams: That's right.

Jocelyn Sams: You might not want to do it and that's cool, but just look at it more as an opportunity than a threat.

Shane Sams: And get out there and just like run your race, play your game. It's your shot, you swing. And then let the chips fall where they lay at the end of the round. Okay?

Daniel Hulsman: Sounds good.

Shane Sams: Does that make sense? That makes sense, right?

Katelyn Hulsman: Yeah. No, actually it's hitting home. Daniel has a much better attitude with that stuff than I do. And you're kind of speaking to some of the inclinations he probably already has to kind of befriend people who are doing this.

Shane Sams: Well, I'll tell you another thing here. The danger is you're dealing with a lot of the social media type stuff and the stuff like that, so you're actually going to probably see that more because you're not really making content. You know what I'm saying? When you're in content on your cave, right?

Katelyn Hulsman: Exactly. And then I have the decision of, “Do I tweet this person now?” Do I do a tweet about somebody who's going to compete with what we do? It's very strange to me, but I'm playing catch up. So it's a-

Shane Sams: Always ask yourself this, “Will it help my potential customer? Will my customers smile when I share this with them? Will my customer be happy that I helped them, that I recommended something that could make them go to the next level?” Even if it's a little close to what we're doing will they have affinity for me so much that they'll come back and join us anyway, because I always lead them to the good stuff. That's usually how you understand if you're sharing somebody else's stuff. So if I'm going to retweet something from one of our friends or somebody, like Pat Flynn is our direct competitor. He sells exactly the same courses we do.

Jocelyn Sams: Well, a lot of people sell the same things we do.

Shane Sams: A lot of people sell the courses that we do. But I share his stuff sometimes. Like we're going to promote his book really hard here in a couple of weeks. Because, one, we're in the book. Two, it's our friend and he's doing the same thing and I know the book will help our people. That's usually how you kind of solve that dilemma is, is this going to help someone? Is it going to drive affinity back to me, and do those two things add up to maybe a potential member down the road? If they do, then go ahead, share it. Don't worry about it. Think abundance, think collaboration, and think about running your own race, you'll be fine. Okay?

Katelyn Hulsman: Yeah, that's a great attitude to have about it. And actually Daniel had had a while ago sort of someone be a little prickly with him along time ago, and-

Shane Sams: I would never know what a prickly customer was like.

Daniel Hulsman: This is a new experience, Shane, I'll tell you all about it.

Shane Sams: But what goes around comes around son, that’s what I'm talking about.

Katelyn Hulsman: It was not a customer, but it's another industry person was a little prickly with him. And one day I was looking through things, I saw this person's name and I kind of tried to avoid it and Daniel was like, “No, no. we should reach out.” And I said to myself, “Well, that's a great way to look at it.”

Shane Sams: My Dad always told me, if someone's like really like prickly, I guess that's a great word actually. About like with you and when they do something that harms you or hurts you or they say something to kind of put you down or whatever, he said, “Every time you see them, do not let them avoid you. You walk up, you shake their hand, you get six inches from their face. And say, “How you doing?”” He said, “You never let them see you back down. You always go straight up to them and you just kill them with kindness.” And we were at an event a couple of weeks ago and a few years ago we had a little … I don’t know if it will be a disagreement. What would you call it Jocelyn? It was a moment of-

Jocelyn Sams: It was a slight.

Shane Sams: It was a slight. We were slighted by someone in the industry. And we came in and we saw him at this event, and I went right up to him and right in his face shook his hand, hugged him and like, “Hey, how are you doing? Good to see you again.” Just bam. But you know what, that opened a conversation and we sat in a back room one day and we really talked out the slight and we actually kind of had a good little … It was amicable. We were like-

Jocelyn Sams: Everyone was still friends.

Shane Sams: Everyone was still cool. Everyone was still friends.

Jocelyn Sams: No barroom fight broke out, or anything like that.

Shane Sams: That's right. I would have won if it did, I'm just saying, I’m a big guy. I’m kidding. We did that and it was like, “That's a great attitude to have even when your competitors.” You don't have to share his stuff, but hey, we're pulling for you. No big deal.

Jocelyn Sams: People don't really know what to do when that happens. We had a situation-

Shane Sams: It killed Jocelyn. It scares Jocelyn to death. Because I look over and go, “I'm going to talk to him.” She goes, “Oh my God.” Then I just walk over there.

Jocelyn Sams: But I've kind of started doing this too. Like this has sort of rubbed off on me a little bit. We had a situation locally not too long ago with the one of the activities my kids are involved in. But anyway, we had a disagreement with some of the coaches and stuff. But, anyway we talked about it and I think some of the other people that I'm friends with they were expecting us to avoid each other. But like, I just walked in and I'm like, “Hey guys, how are you?”

Shane Sams: And went right into the room with them the next day.

Jocelyn Sams: People don't even know what to do when you do that. They're just like confused. But it’s fine now. There’s no big deal. Like everyone's moved on and whatever.

Shane Sams: And again, you don't have to be best friends with anybody. That's why we try not to look at what anybody else is doing, especially when we're making decisions. Like we'll watch the magician's hands a little bit, but most of the time we're just like, “Let's do our own thing. Let's see what works.” And then compare it maybe to other people. Because then we're not polluted by what our competition is doing.

Jocelyn Sams: All right guys. Hopefully that helps you bust through that fear of competition and competitors and all that type of thing. Let's talk about how we can move this business forward. What questions can we help you with as you're trying to grow?

Daniel Hulsman: So, I think we've got maybe a couple of things that we still really wrestle with. One is, like we were saying earlier that we feel kind of stuck between the 30 to 50 number of members in our membership. And then the other is that just sort of balancing business and family time. I think it's still really tough for us to prioritize because everything, and everyone who’s got kids knows that when you’ve got two small children everything feels urgent. So, it's still kind of tough for us to know where the … We're still trying to find that balance I guess that’s what we're saying.

Katelyn Hulsman: Well, and because I've been doing a lot of the social media, I don't want to feel like when I'm with the kids, I'm like also on my phone, but then with ... So, I'm having a hard time of figuring out when is family time, versus when is business time, because business time could be at any time. And I want to make sure that we're still getting those quality family moments, but not neglecting the business because obviously in the past maybe I de-prioritized the business a little bit maybe when I shouldn't have. So, that's kind of what we've been wrestling with. And also, kind of an aside to that is just kind of finding my place in the business because, this is really Dan's baby. And so, it's kind of hard to figure out, “I'm not an employee, but I'm also not really a full partner.”

Katelyn Hulsman: And trying to navigate that kind of balance, I guess you would say.

Shane Sams: And I bet as you've gotten involved too like all your conversations are about business. Like it’s all you feel that you talk about.

Katelyn Hulsman: Yes.

Shane Sams: It's like babies or business, that's it, right?

Katelyn Hulsman: Yes.

Shane Sams: Yeah, that's been my life for about the past seven years, something like that. Let's address the family stuff first because I know all about mom guilt, and I've had it for a very long time, 10 years. That's how long I've been a mom. But, the way that I like to deal with it is to calendar everything. So, we use Google calendar and we share a Google calendar together. We always put our family time on first. So like anything that the kids have to do, like if they have sports activities or other activities, we put that on first and that's always our priority. We put quality time with the kids on, so if we take them to the waterpark, if we do another activity together as a family we put that stuff on, and then we put business stuff on. I've said it many times on the podcast, humans are terrible multitaskers.

Shane Sams: We think we can multitask, but we cannot. We are very, very bad at it. So, what you have to do is you have to block out times. Now, this is harder with babies because somebody needs a diaper change, they need a diaper change. You can't really like be like, “Oh sorry, it's business time. You have to wait a couple hours.” That's not going to work. And we get that and we recognize that. But, at the same time you need to have times blocked out to work on the business. Preferably if you can get someone to watch the kids for you, even if it's a student, high-school student, somebody who could even be in the house with you. Like if you can even pay them a little bit to just keep the kids away for just a little while so you can have really focused time to do your work, and that's your work time.

Shane Sams: And anything else for the kids can wait. So make sure they're fed, make sure they're changed, all that kind of stuff. If an emergency comes up, yes you got to deal with it, but otherwise don't feel bad about saying, “Okay, right now is mommy's work time. You're going to have to do something else for a little while and I'll be with you in just a little bit.”

Shane Sams: And then also too focus on quality, not quantity. This is something that Jocelyn and I really wrestled with in the last couple of years big time because our team is growing, our websites are growing, our stuff is growing, and we're really starting to see like literally one we're together 24 hours a day.

Jocelyn Sams: Which is wonderful.

Shane Sams: Which is great, most of the time. But sometimes it's like we've been together for 24 hours a day. And we've been really conscious of … And then all those conversations are like kids or business, that's all we talk about. We've really focused more on like we drove down to Knoxville, Tennessee the other day to go to dinner. And Jocelyn basically said when we got in the car, I don't want to talk about business until we get out of this car. This is an hour and a half where we could just not talk about business. Let's talk about something else. So we might talk about a trip that we're going to go on, or we might talk about something we're going to do. So, even just blocking really disciplined-

Jocelyn Sams: Intentional.

Shane Sams: … intentional once or twice a week, “Can we just not talk about business for 30 minutes?” Like it's off limits. We don't get to talk about it. Both people have to come up with one other thing to talk about. Just even that at the house, I'm not talking about going out to dinner, I'm not talking about driving somewhere. I'm just like, “Hey, this hour right here on Thursday night from eight to nine no one gets to say anything about Twitter or the video game academy.” Stuff like that really goes a long way, and it doesn't take much. It really doesn't. You just need those gaps to let your brain kind of reset. And also to like get away from each other a little bit. Like, if you feelyourself like three days in a row, always talking about business even when Jocelyn, will come in into the room and just lay down at night and read or play a game on her phone and I might go just go sit in the other room and we're just not in the same room.

Shane Sams: That way you kind of have some like absence makes the heart grow fonder in the house. You don't have to be up in each other’s grill talking about business all the time, but people forget that because they think, “Oh, we worked on business for eight straight hours, now we have to go on a date and be romantic for two straight hours.” That doesn't work. You can't be together 10 hours and there be any romance. There's a lot of nomance at the end of 10 hours together. So like getting away from each other even like if you did this right, like right now, one 30 minute block where you weren't allowed to talk to each other for 30 straight minutes. Preferably with the kids at someone else's house, and then one 30 minute block where you were not allowed to talk about business.

Shane Sams: You had to talk about something else that happened. That would go a long way to just giving you some boundaries in the house. You know what I'm saying?

Katelyn Hulsman: Yeah.

Jocelyn Sams: And I would recommend getting … Like he was saying, getting the kids like totally away from you. Even if you can do it one day a week, like the other day I was shocked. Shane had taken the kids somewhere and I had something I really needed to work on, and I got more done in that hour and a half than I got done with probably like a day and a half if the kids were here. And I was like shocked at how much I was able to get accomplished without them being like, “Mom, can I have a snack? I need your help pouring the milk. Can you make me some macaroni?” All those kinds of things. Like you would think that my kids are 10 and 8 they would be a little more self sufficient. Well, not so much so much.

Shane Sams: Not so much. It's like it's going to get worse as they get older. But like, even for each other. Like if you can't find childcare, I know a lot of people are listening will go, “I can’t find childcare or a babysitter.” Well, you got two of you. So, one of you take the kids somewhere for an hour and just sit on a park bench if you have to and let the other person have a minute to breathe and then switch.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, we used to do that. Do a mom swap. If you know a mom locally who needs the kids to go somewhere for a little bit, but they don't have a lot of money, swap with them. Take their kids for a day. You let them take your kids for half a day, whatever, and just make it work. Like that's what we used to do before we had a lot of extra money to hire people we would do things like that. You have to get creative.

Shane Sams: And just don't feel guilty about it. Like, when you feel yourself getting frustrated with each other because you will. That’s what Jocelyn always says. We bring out the best in each other-

Jocelyn Sams: Most times.

Shane Sams: … but occasionally the worst. And that's going to happen. Just recognize there's two ways to do it. Like, don't talk about business and get away from each other for a few minutes and give each other a break. If you can do those things, then that's going to calm that problem. All right. Let's get into some more technical stuff about the business here, some deep strategy. Tell us a little bit about where you're at. It sounds like you said earlier you've got the churn problem under control, so you're at least adding enough members to cover people that cancel right now. But that's a slippery slope. Like that's the edge of the mountain. We're walking on the edge, we don't want to fall off. What's happening? How are you getting the new members? How much are you promoting the membership? How much time and money are you investing in the membership?

Shane Sams: Because the goal now is to get to 100. 100 is an amazing place to be in your membership. That's a stabilizing point. And we want to get this thing, you're saying you're floating 30 to 50. We want to float 100 to 150. So, what are you doing right now to promote this stuff? You're being consistent, but like how are you being prolific in your promotions?

Daniel Hulsman: I’m not. I'll tell you what I'm doing. There's always more that you can do and I'm not doing very much. I've been pretty strapped with both kids at home this summer. I'm a teacher, so I'm at home during the summer. But the main way we're getting new people into the site in general is through a quarterly 21 day challenge. So, every quarter I've been doing this. I started doing a quarterly after you told me to last year.

Shane Sams: And it worked.

Daniel Hulsman: And it worked. So, I'm getting anywhere between three to 500 people signing up for this challenge every quarter. And I'd say like 100 to 150 of those people are brand new people who's never signed up for anything before. But then, at the end of the 21 day challenge, I do a promotion for their membership. And that's when I really kind of like hit it hard via email. And I pitched them pretty hard with some of the templates and like some of the examples that I saw in the community. The trick is that … Sorry. The kind of the unfortunate thing is that we do these like three-week challenges. We get to the end and the first two times back in last July and then last October, that was like when I was in beta mode and promoting as like, “This is a beta. This is the lowest price it will ever be.” Those two went really well and I ended up getting like 20, 25, 30 for each of those two launches.

Daniel Hulsman: And then after that when I raised the price in January, and ever since then it's been like two people, six people, one people. So, it's really kind of grinded almost to a halt there. And I've really had to kind of fight to just get a handful in. Outside of that challenge.

Shane Sams: How much is the membership now?

Daniel Hulsman: It's $29.99 per month.

Shane Sams: And how much was the one that was the last time it got like a good amount, like 15 to 20.

Daniel Hulsman: $19 a month. But what I'm doing is I'm also like, you can go to the website and sign up for the membership at that price now, and in January I launched it at that new price and I didn't do any like promotional pricing or anything on it. And I got one or two people sign up for that price. And then the next time I did it, I tried it like a 25% discount for three days only for just the people who signed up for the challenge. And I got like six people that time, but then I just did the same thing. And I only got one person this last time. I think that I kind of painted myself into a corner a bit, like discounting a membership, like probably not a great strategy in general. But I think there are a lot of possible things that are not working. I just don't know which to really dive into. Part of me says like getting new people in, like in general, but I don’t know.

Katelyn Hulsman: Well, and one thing that we've talked about a little bit was I had kind of talked to Daniel about, is there a way to make it easier for people to kind of come across the membership in times when you're not running a challenge? Because, for a while I think that part of his website was a little buried. I think you've brought it out a little more obviously now, but I think we're struggling with, when you use social media, how much are you … Does it come across as too salesy, if you're using social media to sell a membership? We had recently, he put up a post in his Facebook group advertising the membership site after the challenge and we had somebody make an angry face at it in the Facebook group, which we were a little surprised by.

Daniel Hulsman: That like rocked Katelyn’s world for a day.

Katelyn Hulsman: Yes, it did. It rocked my world.

Daniel Hulsman: She was like, “Someone gave an angry emoji. Oh my God.”

Shane Sams: How many people are in your group right now?

Daniel Hulsman: I think 1700. If not, it's really close.

Shane Sams: 1,700 people didn't emoji the post but one person did, dan-dan-daa.

Daniel Hulsman: We gotta close up shop now.

Shane Sams: It’s the one Goomba at the end of the level that got you. You know what I'm saying?

Daniel Hulsman: Yeah, exactly.

Shane Sams: You can't let that bother you. Like that's going to happen. People get mad at me. I had a guy on my history site last night I posted. I post these funny memes, and I posted a picture that was totally like benign and this guy basically … And I post my real name on that Facebook. It's like 6,000 followers. And I post my real name on there all the time. And the guy said, “Shane Sams, you’re an F-ing moron.”

Katelyn Hulsman: Oh my goodness.

Shane Sams: Straight up, right on the comments of the thing. And I just posted a little picture of Sylvester Stallone with the word joke going over his head. Like I just totally trolled back. But like you can't let them … Don't let the emoji warriors get you. Don't let the emoji warriors get you. You can't be. Well, let's break this down. One, I think you need to do more challenges. I actually think you need to do a week long challenge. You need to evolve that process, and you need to do it probably every month. Like, if you could do it one week, every month now, let's ramp it up. But what you're going to have to do is, do you have more than one challenge or is it the same one every three months?

Daniel Hulsman: It's the same one, but the theme of it and like the content changes a tiny bit.

Shane Sams: What we've got to do is we've got to make them feel … You need two, that you can go rotate, like back to back. And this is going to be on you because you've got to figure out how this works within the context of what you're doing. But like, maybe one is like all about … I know that your challenges about composing music, correct?

Daniel Hulsman: Yeah.

Shane Sams: Maybe you could do more of a little bit of a challenge about maybe like the business aspect of getting into the business.

Daniel Hulsman: Let’s say that was kind of one concern I think I'm having is that the people getting into the challenge or like people who are doing it for fun. And so, I'm not getting people who are really serious about it professionally.

Shane Sams: If you had two challenges, one was all about the music, and one was like, you could theme it kind of like you show them the process basically of getting in and out of the business.

Jocelyn Sams: I don’t think there's even a way of bridging those people who are doing it for fun. Like maybe even just put a bug in their ear, “Hey, did you know that you can make money off this?”

Shane Sams: That song could make you money. Right?

Daniel Hulsman: Yeah.

Shane Sams: So I think you need to do the challenge at least once a month.

Jocelyn Sams: I would like to see it as automated as possible. When you do it the next time, really write out the procedures if you haven't done this already, so that why maybe even Katelyn could help you, or eventually you guys could get a virtual assistant to help you to be able to roll those parts of the challenge out. So, it's not so manual at the time.

Shane Sams: You did this for three weeks though, you said, right?

Daniel Hulsman: Yeah. And just so you know, Katelyn had to step away for a minute to go check on the baby. He was with my mother downstairs.

Shane Sams: Our kids will be pouring in here at any minute. That's what happens. This is real life, guys listening to the podcast.

Daniel Hulsman: It's real life. So, but like I said three weeks. It's 21 days, Once every three months. And a lot of it is automated or it's automatable. Like the emails I've already written, they're already automated. I just have to like basically recreate the workflow that sends the emails every time.

Shane Sams: If you could take that challenge and get it down to a week and they don't do the whole thing … And this is a simple way of saying this. We'd have to talk about it more. But like, if you could take the first week and that was actually part of the challenge where they got to a point where they could feel the result but they weren't quite done and then the rest of the challenge lived in the community I think you could pitch it every month. You know what I’m saying? Because like, the goal is to get them started. I know that you write like a whole piece of music or whatever. Right?

Daniel Hulsman: Well, it's like you have to write, you write it like an idea. So it's basically just like about like making sure you're getting new ideas generated every day and not just like sitting there stuck with a blank screen stressed about not writing anything.

Shane Sams: If we could condense a part of that down to the one week challenge and we could change it just a little bit, you could open and close it more often. So like right now if you've got six every three months, next time you'll have it. If you've got three every month, that would still be more right. It'd be none. I know you’d probably get more, because it'll get more momentum because you open and close it. So it's like open on Monday, closes on Friday. We don't do it again for three weeks. So you just do your normal stuff then the challenges. The August challenge is opening. The September challenge is opening. The November … Whatever. You know what I'm saying? It's like opening and closing more challenges is definitely like the next step. But now you do have to get more traffic. You've got to get more people in that group.

Shane Sams: That's going to be the goal. I'm wondering like what you're doing to get people to grow your group or grow your email list.

Daniel Hulsman: Yeah, I mean, when I talked to you in December I was kind of like in survival mode, so we just sort of … You gave me a lot of permission to kind of like not do that and so I've really been focusing on like the membership and stabilizing that. So right now I'm just starting to like get a little bit more content going. I've done a couple of interviews that I have posted on the sites. I don't have a podcast, but it's an idea that I'm kind of playing with. I've got a YouTube channel that I do nothing with. I've like put a couple of videos like years ago up as like just a way to embed videos on a blog post and I've got like 350 subscribers. I could go maybe in that direction. There's a lot of directions I feel like I could go. I do have like an exciting opportunity later this month where I've got a grammy nominated composer that I'm going to be interviewing live probably on Facebook live.

Daniel Hulsman: And so, we're going to hopefully get a good live audience for that.

Shane Sams: Awesome.

Daniel Hulsman: He's going to be in our members only area a few days after that. I'm going to use that as not only a way to promote what he's working on, but then too to plug the membership at the end. But, other than that, I'm not really buckling down and like creating a lot of content right now. I feel like I need to sit down and like plan out social media and then like get that all going. Because what Katelyn's doing is great. It's like really reactive. It's really timely. And then for me, like really what I need to do is sit down like kind of thoughtfully slam the promotions, schedule all the automated stuff.

Shane Sams: Our general rule when we're trying to grow our businesses is, and we say this all the time, is to be consistent, to be prolific and be relentless. Consistency always goes to that one piece of content that comes out every week, like it's our podcast. That's our consistent thing of content. Prolific always talks directly to promotions. Like, how are you going to promote everyday? I wake up every day and while my coffee is literally pouring into the pot I think to myself, “How am I going to promote today?” I don't care if it's one email, one social media post, one tweet. I've got to do something to tell somebody that I've got something for sale. It could be promoting content like on Tuesdays I always send an email out that we have a new podcast come out. On Wednesdays I might send an email that says, “Hey, did you catch last week's podcast?”

Shane Sams: But on Thursday I might say, “Hey, we've only got 13 tickets left to flip your life live.” On Friday I'm going to say, “Hey, you need to join the flip your life community, you've been sitting around listening to the podcast for two years, what are you waiting on?” Right? And then I'm just constantly every day trying to figure out how can I promote, what can I promote? And I actually have a 30 day calendar at the beginning of every single month, I actually include this calendar in Prolific Monthly, my newsletter. And like it's exactly like, this is what I do to promote. What I'm going to do in August or September, October to promote our membership. And that's probably the next level. What you're going to have to think is, how do I promote content to get more cold followers? How do I promote my membership to get more people to join? And then, how do I follow up with people I know are on the edge?

Shane Sams: That's another thing I do every day, is reach out to people who I know are interested. Like if I get an email back off of one of our auto-responders, I got this one email goes out and it says, “What's frustrating you?” I always write those people back because everybody's one question away from buying your product. Stuff like that is the next level, and you're going to have to figure out how to manage that with that little baby we hear talking in the background.

Jocelyn Sams: I love those baby noises.

Shane Sams: I love those baby noises, I miss them. But that's where you got to go next is being prolific with your offers once a month, at least, as some kind of challenge. And then being prolific, promoting your content and then being relentless like every day someone needs to hear about this academy. They need to know it's there. Even if it was just a social media post at 10:00 like, “Hey guys, the thing is open now, check it out,” every other day, that would be good.

Daniel Hulsman: I think that just really kind of paralyzed because there's so many different directions I can run with in terms of like what to do. A lot of my content I feel like is old, like I've got a couple of newer things now, but I know a lot of that I wrote years ago, and a lot of it is still relevant. I don’t know. That makes me, there's more I can be doing that's like way more timely and relevant now. And then, in terms of promotion, again, Twitter is like mainly what I've been focusing on for years. And I've got this Facebook group, so I don't know if I should just kind of just stick with those two and just try to get more people following in both of those places, or if I should try to do the thing where you make a video and turn it into a YouTube video on a podcast, or just like try to do a podcast and keep it super simple.

Daniel Hulsman: There's so many different ways I feel like I could get new people to the site. It’s just a little overwhelming to kind of pick one and run with it.

Shane Sams: That's what you got to do. You got to pick one and run with it. That's what most people won't do, because they all work. You'll find a millionaire on every social media network. You'll find a millionaire in every business. You'll find someone making a living online doing everything. But they usually pick one thing like the pizza guy who runs the pizza shop picked pizza instead of hamburgers. That's why he's making money. Like, pick one timely thing to do a week and then promote everything else you've ever created every other day. It's so much easier and that will keep you from getting overwhelmed. So, just pick that one path that feels the most right to you right now and just do it for six months and see where that takes you. That's probably going to be your best bet.

Jocelyn Sams: You're doing a lot of things right already. So, I feel like you just need to do more of the things right. You need to find a way to make it work where you can basically pitch these people more often. Maybe it's not a three week challenge. Maybe it looks like something different. So, if challenges are working, how can you find a way to make one work more often?

Shane Sams: And you may have to rewrite the whole challenge model, but you know challenges work, and you just need a couple to rotate the way it's not the same challenge every single month. Does that makes sense?

Daniel Hulsman: Yeah.

Shane Sams: That's how you become more prolific with challenges. You say, “All right, this worked scrap the three week thing, I'm going to have, “Hey remember the 21 day challenge, now we're doing a seven day challenge, or a five day challenge.”” The same amount of people are going to join. The same amount of people are getting involved. They're just going to hear your offer more, which is going to equal more sales, basically.

Daniel Hulsman: I actually kind of really like the idea of like alternating and doing a different kind of challenge like with the more business centered stuff too, because then I know of at least getting people who are more interested in making a career out of it, then people who are really just enjoying the process of writing.

Jocelyn Sams: Absolutely. All right guys, we've had so much fun talking today. There are so many exciting things going on in your world and I'm really, really excited to see what is going to happen for the future of the site. But before we go, we always like to ask, what is one thing that you plan to take action on based on what we talked about today?

Daniel Hulsman: I guess for me it's figuring out one way, one path to promote way more prolifically and decide what I'm going to do to grow, getting more … cold people into the website environment and then just kind of hit that same nail over and over again for a while.

Katelyn Hulsman: And one takeaway that I have is I'm going to stress a lot less over the competitors and the angry emojis.

Shane Sams: Yes. Oh my gosh.

Katelyn Hulsman: And focus more on the people who are receiving and enjoying the content and potentially giving us constructive feedback. Worry little less about the people I’m not going to reach.

Shane Sams: Worry about that baby. That's all you got to worry about. Worry about the baby. Worry about each other, and everything else will kind of take care of itself. Well, listen guys, we are super proud of you guys. There are big things ahead. You've not tapped out the market yet. There's a lot more members probably waiting right in your existing audience. And when you start pitching them more and you start promoting your stuff more, they're going to really respond. So keep going. You're doing it together now. That is absolutely amazing. I can't wait to see the next amazing post to the success forum by you guys.

Katelyn Hulsman: We really appreciate all of your help. It's been a blessing, honestly.

Shane Sams: All right. And I think, Katelyn, you have a principal that you're going to share with us. A life related Bible verse or principles from the bible that you have that a you want to share with everybody.

Katelyn Hulsman: Yeah. It's not a direct quote, but the bible verse that always sticks with me is, what you hear in the ear, preach on the house tops. And when I was preparing to join you guys today, it's one of the things that came to mind because I actually think it's something that you all do really well. You really have shared a lot of the knowledge and experience that you've collected and it's made a difference in our lives. I'm sure it's helped a lot of other people as well.

Shane Sams: Love it. I love it. We need to have a baby on every episode.

Jocelyn Sams: I know.

Shane Sams: If you’ve got a baby bring em on the show. We're going to have to start interviewing the babies as well.

Jocelyn Sams: One time we had cattle mooing in the background.

Shane Sams: Yeah, we had some cattle mooing in the background. This is the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, that's how it rolls around here. You know what I'm saying?

Daniel Hulsman: My next success story is going to be when the baby starts to tweet. I'll put that in there. Baby is on board.

Shane Sams: All right guys. That wraps up another edition of the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. What an amazing discussion with Daniel and Katelyn Hulsman.

Jocelyn Sams: And their baby.

Shane Sams: And their baby. It is so exciting to see people get their entire family on board with their business. We would love to help you change your family's future just like the Hulsmans. Go to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife. We'd love to have you inside the membership community. We've got all the training, coaching and community support that you need to be successful in your online business. And maybe, like Daniel, you need a little support in your promotions. Maybe you're not quite being prolific enough in getting your content out there, getting your message out there, getting your products out there. Well, I have a print newsletter. That's right. A print newsletter that I send out every single month. It's called Prolific Monthly. And if you go to prolificmonthly.com right now, you can sign up for the next edition of my print newsletter.

Shane Sams: I include a calendar and tips and copywriting help, everything you need to promote all of your content and all of your products every single day of the month. That's prolificmonthly.com. You got to sign up really fast or you're not going to be able to get it before we send the next print run out. So I go to prolificmonthly.com, I would love to help you promote your business every single day. All right guys, before we go, I know Katelyn shared an amazing principal earlier in the podcast, but I had to share this bible verse with you guys, because it's one of my favorite bible verses and it really sums up what it's like to work with your spouse and work inside of a community surrounded by people who are going the same direction as you. It's Ecclesiastes 4:12 and the Bible says, though one may be overpowered, two can defend themselves, and a cord of three strands is not quickly broken.

Shane Sams: Hey listen, get your spouse onboard with your dream. Go out there and prove it to them. You may be working on this thing all alone right now, but you can prove that you can make it happen. Then get them on board. Then surround yourself with other entrepreneurs, other family focused folks who are going in the same direction so that your dream will not be broken and it will come to pass. That's all the time we've got for this week guys. Until next time, get out there, take action, and do whatever it takes to flip your life.

Jocelyn Sams: Bye.

Links and resources mentioned on today’s show: * Daniel's Website - VGM Academy * Flipped Lifestyle Podcast 212 with Guest Daniel Hulsman * Flipped Lifestyle Podcast 263 with Guest Daniel Hulsman * Flip Your Life Community * PROLIFIC Monthly

Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!

Join the Flip Your Life Community NOW for as little as $19 per month!

https://flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife

View Details

In this Best of Episode we help Daniel decide if he’s expert enough to start his online business.

This episode was originally published on July 10, 2018. You can check out the original episode here: http://flippedlifestyle.com/podcast212

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jocelyn: Hey, y'all! On today's podcast, we help Daniel decide if he's expert enough to start his online business.

Shane: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams.

We’re a real family who figured out how to make our entire living online. And now, we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? Alright, let’s get started.

What's going on everybody? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, it is great to be back with you again this week! Super excited to have another member of the Flip Your Life community on the show today. I've been looking forward to this specific interview all week, and you're going to learn why here in just a minute.

Jocelyn: I'm pretty sure he's talked about it like every single day.

Shane: Every single day. I'm so pumped up right now to welcome Daniel Hulsman to the show.

Daniel, what's up man?

Daniel: Hey, how you guys doing? It's really good to be out here and talking to you both!

Jocelyn: We are pumped to have you here, as Shane has mentioned.

Shane: I am super pumped to have you here!

Jocelyn: Shane loves telling stories, so I'm just going to let him take it away.

Shane: Alright, here's how Daniel and I got together, okay?

Jocelyn: Something I should know?

Shane: No, no. This is a G-rated show, Jocelyn. Alright, so Daniel sent me an email during a recent launch. A few weeks ago, we opened the doors to the Flip Your Life community and started giving everybody out there a month for free. Daniel apparently heard this and signed up and you know, and he went through a couple of the emails and things like that. He had not joined yet, he had not joined the membership yet. So, I wake up one morning, and I get this email because yes, we check our emails, okay. And I get a message and the first line -- what was the subject line on this?

Daniel: I'm just shaking my head over here.

Shane: I know, right. There was some hater-ade in this email, people. This is a critique, is what I'm about to show you, I'm not going to read the whole thing. But Daniel's sends me this email and says two things -- a little smug Daniel, I'm not going to lie -- but it said two things: "One, your customer service link in this email leads to a 404 page.” So that is not a good sign when somebody pointing out a broken link.

Jocelyn: When your email starts like that it’s probably not going to go too good.

Shane: And he made the emoticon, it wasn't even the Emoji. He actually used the type of symbols of a smiley face with a tear. That's sad, guys, we're supposed to have all this together, right? And then he goes on with this giant block text of paragraph about just all sorts of stuff he didn't like in our marketing and things like that, but here's what drew me in. Are you ready for this Daniel? This is the turn to the positive, this is the turn to the light side of the force.

Daniel: (sighs)

Shane: So he's critiquing all of our sales techniques and blah, blah, blah, and I just heard all of this skepticism in all of this stuff. And then he said, "And you gave me a heart attack on Episode 200 when you said goodbye because I did not want your podcast to go away.”

So that's where the turn was and it says, "You are changing lives of people like me who want a better life for their families.” I read every word of this email and it was really long, and that's the point where I was like, man, I saw something there. I was like, “This guy wants a better life.” Then he went on to say, "I've been struggling to get my website off the ground for a few years, and your story inspires me to keep trying."

So, all of that criticism, all of that critique, when I got to the end, I realized it was just frustration. It was just a little frustration, a little skepticism, a little "Is this real?" and you've been doing this for a while, and I sent him a message back, my email. I purposefully had to write more words than you did.

Daniel: Oh, that was a good little novella.

Shane: Yes, yes. There was some massive… this was a no-sugar soliloquy.

Jocelyn: Oh, now we're going to get tons of hate mail, so people will get to have--

Shane: Yeah, everybody will just send me hate mail now, like, "Shane will write me back if I do that!” Here's what's funny though. This is the difference between me and Jocelyn. I was writing this email, and when I was doing it, Jocelyn was like, "Are you still writing that guy back?" And I'm like, "Yeah, yeah, I'm still writing. I'm doing it!”

Jocelyn: I'm trying to talk to him about stuff, and get things done. And he's like, "No, no, no, I'm writing this email!”

Shane: "No, Daniel is getting a message back from me.”

Jocelyn: I'm like, "Okay.”

Shane: I could have gone a thousand ways with this email. I could have gone, "How dare you find my broken link.”

Daniel: Or just deleted it.

Shane: Or just deleted it and I could have just ignored it. But I really just felt drawn, and there was potential there and you wanted something more, and that's what we're here for -- that's our mission. So basically I won't read the whole soliloquy.

Jocelyn: Please don't.

Shane: I won't, I won't. I won't read this parable that I wrote you back. But in the future book, it will come out. But my main point was, “Are you going to let a link that goes to a 404 page or a sales page hold you back, and are you going to look back again in a few years from now and say, ‘Man, I've struggled for a few years and I'm done,’ or are you going to look back and say, ‘That was the moment I actually took action and took my next step.’”

And I challenged you. I just said, "Go join! It's free for 30 days. You go look at every course we've got and you see if it doesn't move you forward.” And I said, "Instead of critiquing our sales process, watch the magician's hands. You've been struggling for a few years, and we have it. Maybe there's something there. Maybe there's something we're doing differently.” I've got to read what you sent me back.

Daniel: Oh, yeah. Please go ahead, I was angsty. There was a long time of just reflection before I sent anything back.

Shane: I jumped up, man, and you can ask Jocelyn. I started going crazy and pumping my fist because I was so excited. You sent me this message back, and it said, "I started to spend a few minutes, trying to think of a clever yet grateful response to your candid feedback--" and I like how you said 'candid feedback' because if anyone saw this message, it was pretty candid.

Daniel: Yeah.

Shane: And it says, "But I think I'll just shut up and get started instead. Sounds like I've got some work to do. I just finished the form, I'm logging in, and when I get home, I'm printing your email and hanging it on my wall next to my computer. Thank you for the much-needed kick in the (blank)!” So I just want to say, you're welcome for the boot print on the back of your pants.

Daniel: Thank you, sir.

Shane: And I am so glad that you are a member of the Flip Your Life community now, and that we turned a critic into a customer. After you followed up, and I saw what you have going in your business, I know that you've got a great, great potential to do something with it, okay, so Kudos to you, man.

Jocelyn: We love these kinds of stories so much because it's just awesome. So many people want to point fingers at other people and say, "You're doing this wrong, you're doing this wrong.” But most of the time it's more like a mirror. They're looking back at themselves, and thinking, "My life is not perfect either.” None of our lives are perfect. So that's the cool thing about this, is that we're able to help each other and we don't just give up on people. I mean, if you were like a blatant hater or...

Shane: There is a difference in a critic and a troll. I was actually very thankful you found that link. Before I wrote you back, I emailed our team and I said, "We've got to fix this link.” That's how I started my email back to you, so I was actually really grateful that you sent email in the first place. It helped us, and I wanted some reciprocity there to help you back.

Jocelyn: And so we knew that we had to talk to you because of this crazy story, and we just love it when things like this happen, so thank you for being here today!

Daniel: No problem. And I'm sure my wife's going to get a real kick out of listening to this as well because when I finally told her that you had offered to speak with me this morning, she was like, "Why?!" And then I had to tell her the whole backstory. And she's like, "I am a little surprised that you sent that email, but sounds like you deserved your response."

Shane: That is absolutely hilarious!

Jocelyn: Okay. If we're being honest with ourselves, like everyone listening to this show, myself included, we've all done something like this. This is not something-- we're not trying to pick on you and say like, "Oh, you shouldn't have done this or whatever."

Shane: This is like when you get mad and you honk at somebody or give them a rude gesture on the highway for doing something you did a week ago. It's all it is. I've seen so many emails like that. There's a difference between a troll, and a guy who's like, "Guys, I really like what you're doing and I'd love to have it, too. And I think I could get it, but I'm frustrated, and nothing's just working and I'm just trying to vocalize that, and I don't know how to do it."

Daniel: Yeah, I mean, I feel like I've been beating my head against a wall for years. The whole way that I started my current website, I actually bought another course, a $500 course years ago. I've been a longtime listener of that podcast, and I signed up. They're very adamant, don't skip any steps. As a good little soldier, I did all the steps and at the end I had ended up with this website and like a tiny little affiliate sale every now and then. And a website that I felt was nice, but it was a website, it wasn't a business. I just didn't know where to go after spending all this time pouring myself into this and years later here I am still not sure how to course correct.

Shane: Well, listen. You're not the only person that's ever done that. The next step is always the most frustrating step that never goes away. We're sitting here figuring out our next step just like you are. It's just at a different level. That frustration is part of the journey and hey, man, we'll get you past it, and let's get you to the next step and that's what we're here for so we can help you do that.

Jocelyn: The reason that we started this trial because we feel like there are so many people out there who are frustrated, and they don't know what to do next.

Shane: Or they've been burned by that $500 course in the past and nothing happened. Like I got burned by a course like that! What happened in 2012, when I first started this, the first thing I discovered was Google ad marketing, like where you make a niche website that has like five pages and you put Google ads on it and the gurus all said you'd be a millionaire in six months.

Jocelyn: All that was before the big Google smackdown, they call it.

Shane: So I built a couple of these sites and, granted, it did make our first ad click, which was eleven cents that inspired us that it's possible to make money online. But I'm paid a dime and a penny! If you can't pay my groceries with this thing, you can't even get the cart at Aldi! That's a quarter. For anybody that has an Aldi, you know what I'm talking about here, you can't even get the cart out at the grocery store for a dime and a penny. But what happened was -- it's so funny-- I got frustrated, but once we figured that out, I bought another course about email marketing.

I noticed, not that that guy was email marketing for affiliates. I noticed that his email marketing was to sell his course on email marketing and he was selling his own product. That was really the epiphany that we had was, it's not about partnering and JV Partnerships. That's cool, that's later. It's not about affiliate links, it's not about ad clicks, it's not about Amazon and all that. You're not going to make any money that way. It's about figuring out how you can serve other people, creating a product that solves their problem and that's what you promote. That may be the next step for you too. Alright, so rewind!

Jocelyn: That was a lot of information.

Shane: It's still one of my favorite stories ever and it always will be, and I'm going to be so proud of you, not only because you joined, but I can't wait to see you succeed.

Jocelyn: I can't even express the joy that Shane had when you decided to join the membership.

Shane: Oh my gosh, when you joined the membership, I was like, "That dude joined. Holy cow, that's unbelievable!”

Jocelyn: That's his mission in life.

Daniel: You know what it was. It was the last line in your email. It just went off on me and then at the end, the last time was just 'Finish', with a link back to the form that I didn't complete. That was just the word that echoed in my subconscious until I did it.

Shane: Oh yeah. I see it now. It just says 'Finish:' and then the form.

Jocelyn: I hope that, if nothing else from this story, I hope that people understand that we really do care about you and we want what's best for every single person listening to this podcast. That's the reason why we do what we do. Yes, we are a for-profit business. We have to pay our bills, but we want everyone out there to succeed, and that's why we're offering this free trial. So I hope that if nothing else, people understand that we really do want what's best for every single one of you.

Shane: And I also realized too, there's a lot of movement out there. People want to shut everyone out of their lives and all these gurus are like, "Well, if anyone hates you, delete them, and if anyone critiques you, screw them, and if anybody, whatever, whatever, whatever," but like man, 90% of the people that even send you feedback, they're just really asking you for some advice.

Jocelyn: And if somebody has taken their time to email you, even if it's something you'd really don't want to hear--

Shane: They care. They at least care.

Jocelyn: They care enough to send the email.

Shane: Love it, hate it, but never ignore it, man. Help somebody next time they send you a bad email, send them back and say, "You alright? What's going on? Can I help you?"

Jocelyn: That being said, please don't send us a lot of hate mail!

Shane: I can read through the fake hate mail guys. I know fake hate from real hate. Okay, so let's do it!

Jocelyn: Alright. So before we get more into the story, let's go back just a little bit. We want to know about you, your background, and what you have started so far online.

Daniel: Sure, so, by day, I'm a father. I live in Boston and I am a full-time music teacher at an inter-high school in Boston. I grew up in Delaware. Go Blue Hens! Our mascot's a giant blue chicken, really exciting!

Shane: We have a mascot in the Kentucky school called, “The Hilltopper.” It's literally a red pile of dirt. That's what he is. The Hilltoppers and the Blue Hens can go to war.

Daniel: I don't even know what to say about that. That's so strange. But you know, why not? Sure. I graduated with my music education degree looking to be a music teacher, and then that was 2008 and then the economy crashed. All the arts jobs disappeared so I had to kind of scramble and figure out something else to do. I ended up working for Apple for a few years doing B2B sales, and then I just started nerding out on online marketing stuff after reading the Four-Hour Work Week. I ended up getting a job at a marketing software company called Hubspot.

Worked there for a year before getting back into teaching.

So it's been kind of a bit of an eclectic journey professionally. But then on the side of that, two years ago, as I said, I started, you know, I did an online course and at the end of that I had a website for video game composers because I love video game music and I've always loved to do games and stuff.

Jocelyn: Okay. I need to just stop you right there because in your intake form, it says I manage--

Shane: 'Intake Form.' That sounds like he's getting up for parole, and your intake form-- "Your podcast application" would be better, probably.

Jocelyn: On the podcast questionnaire, how's that?

Daniel: Perfect.

Jocelyn: Okay. I just have to ask you about this because I don't know what this means. Okay, it says, "I manage a choir that records professional video game soundtracks twice a year.” So let's back the truck up.

Shane: That seems like the coolest job ever!

Daniel: Alright, sure. So I ended up by networking in the Boston scene here, which actually there's an orchestra called the Video Game Orchestra in Boston and they started as a club out of Berkeley College of Music, and then they ended up becoming a full-blown professional orchestra that records the live music for video games. I happened to meet and befriend the guy who runs that. Over a couple of years, just because he knew I was a singer, I ended up getting pulled into a choir to record a trailer for a game called, “Final Fantasy 15.”

Shane: Are you kidding me? You sang on Final Fantasy 15?!

Daniel: I did. I sang on the trailer, and then I sang on 10 tracks on the soundtrack.

Shane: Dude, I am so glad you wrote me hate mail!

Jocelyn: Who gets this job?

Shane: Yeah, this is amazing.

Jocelyn: "Yeah, I sing on video games.”

Daniel: It's a very fun thing to drop in a conversation. I've got to admit. I mean, you know, it's very few and far in between, but the gigs are extremely fun. I've just wrapped up a second one or our first one for the year. It's just a lot of fun. But the third grader in me is just elated. Every time I go into the recording studio and get the recorded video game music, I got the music pumping into my headphones, and with the school to sing-- the instrument that I was trained on was voice. And so it, you know, I'm really thankful for that because now I get to go and sing on video games.

Jocelyn: My nine-year-old son would think this is the coolest thing ever.

Shane: Oh yeah, because he loves music, he loves video games.

Daniel: Then you know, he and I, we understand each other, then.

Shane: What's cool about this, too, man, is I can see where this is going. One thing that people love about the Flip Your Life community, and once again there are needs for life coaches and business coaches, but everybody doesn't have to be one. The variety of niches and our community is second to none. Like we have people, we talk about it all the time. We've got people doing everything you can imagine. Ninety percent of our people are doing something besides life coaching.

And you hear about this, I would never think, oh, there's a niche for video game music composing. But even as you say this, we've got a member named Chris Greenwood, he goes by the name, Manafest. Really big Christian artist, awesome guy. His songs, though, one of the ways that he markets his music is he licenses it for games and licenses it for movies.

And now you're actually recording original tracks for things, so there are so many niche markets out there that you wouldn't think people would want to get into. But then you're like, "Well, wait a minute, if you're doing it and he's doing it and somebody else is doing it, well, there are probably thousands of people that want to do it. Right?" And uh, that's where this kind of came from.

Jocelyn: Okay, so your site is about this video game music, correct.

Daniel: Yup, to help new and aspiring video game composers.

Shane: What is it called? What's the domain name?

Daniel: VGMacademy.com

Shane: videogameacademy.com, okay.

Daniel: You can go to either videogamemusicacademy.com, or you can go to vgmacademy.com, and it'll redirect you.

Shane: You actually own a three letter domain?

Daniel: vgmacademy.com

Shane: Wow, that's really awesome that you have that, you know what I'm saying? Because those are hard to get.

Daniel: Well, it was kind of those dot academy ones, I wasn't that fast.

Shane: I got you, I got you, I got you. Now tell everyone a little bit about where your community is, because you've actually built a community, an audience around this. We've not monetized it yet, which is very common, right? So tell everybody else about the other assets that are around the website.

Daniel: Yeah, sure. So I've got an email list that has got currently over 2,600 people on it, which I feel pretty good about that number. I just obviously don't know what to do with it at this point.

I've got a pretty sizable Twitter following of like 4,500 people or somewhere around there right now. But my thing that I really liked the most at this point is that I've got a private Facebook group that has just reached 1,000 members. It's like a no-spam, no-self-promotion zone for people to get in there and get questions and ask help, but also engage in anything that's going on with the website.

I've got a community challenge that I run over the summer. So this is the second time I'm doing it, starting in a couple of days in July. It's a 21-day challenge for composers to get in there, and just write something, even just like a little tiny something. One little musical idea, just write something new every day for 21 days straight to make it a habit, and everyone goes in there. Last year it was awesome! Everyone posted, you know, put up a graphic for each day.

Shane: Is this free?

Daniel: Yeah, this is free! Yup!

Shane: Do you make them opt in to get in the challenge?

Daniel: Yes. Yeah.

Shane: Okay, that's good. Do you create content regularly on your website? Like blogs or videos or anything like that?

Daniel: I used to, but this past year, to be completely upfront and honest, I've just been kind of burned out and frustrated. I feel like anytime I come back and pour energy into it, I feel like it's misdirected, or it doesn't really move the needle on anything. So this past year, it's been pretty inconsistent.

Shane: Listen, you have no idea what you've got in your hands.

Jocelyn: You're doing so many things right!

Shane: So many things right, so many things that other people can't even figure out how to do or won't figure out how to do. Like how to do a challenge, how to opt in for it, how to get them in a private Facebook group. And your audience? I mean you have 2,500 emails. Do you know how many people would drive to Boston and punch you in the face to steal 2,500 emails from you? You have this Facebook group with a thousand people, Twitter followers. You have an audience that you've built!

When Jocelyn and I launched our first product that did like thousands of dollars, we had less than 400 emails total, and it did like almost three grand in like the first week. So you've got the people, you've got the thing, you've proven that people want this, and these challenges, you've proven that people will opt in. It's not a large stretch to just say, "Well, what if I charged for a challenge that got more involvement with me?"

Jocelyn: Or at the end of my challenge, I'll give them their next step and I charge them for it? Daniel, this is not hard!

Shane: Yeah, you got this, man, dude. I want to talk about two things, first, really quick is fears and obstacles. Something's holding you back because you've got the tools in place.

Jocelyn: What's going on inside your head that's saying, "I can't do this?

Shane: What are you afraid of? What's the fear that's holding you back?

Daniel: The biggest thing is that I feel like-- and this is again a part of the result of that original course. I ended up with a website and a community that's really looking for someone. In some ways at least I feel like I'm not qualified enough to take people to the next step that they want because I'm not a full-time working video game music composer. I'm a music teacher. I know a lot of basics in terms of songwriting and composition.

But in terms of like a lot of the technologies that people want help with the digital audio workstations, people can spend and waste countless hours of time diving into the audio technology and the audio engineering part of it. And that's just something that's a huge time investment. I'm not able to become the expert on that as fast as I think I would need to be at this point. I feel like I'm in a lot of ways behind the ball of my audience in terms of the audio engineering component. But that's the biggest thing: I kind of feel like in some ways I'm just not qualified.

In other words, I think I am. I think that I know a decent amount about marketing, I know a little bit about negotiating, which is something that comes up with freelancing. So I got some transferable skills, you know, music theory and that kind of stuff. But I just don't know if I'm at a point where I have put myself in a position where I can be as helpful as I originally intended to be. I think I have really big and ambitious dreams. But then becoming a parent, apparently you have a lot less free time and energy. So yeah!

Shane: You have less time than the millennial on the beach in Thailand?

Daniel: You know, believe it or not, I have a little less time than them, you know. And that was the thing that shocked me. That was, I was definitely one of those, "I'm going to make it, I'm going to figure out how to manage this and make it work for me,” sort of people. But then I had a kid that didn't sleep for two years.

Jocelyn: Okay, let's push pause on that because that's a different issue.

Shane: Let's pause! Okay. We've pulled out a fear and an obstacle. The obstacle is kids that don't sleep on time. We'll get to that in a minute. Now the fear is this: let me do a mock conversation for you here, okay.

I walk up to you and I'm like, "Oh man, I would love to compose music for video games. Man, that'd be a cool job. I would love to do that, but Daniel, I think you could maybe teach me how to do that, but you know what? Like I just want to make sure that you're even expert enough.”

So then it comes back to you, "You look at them and say, 'Have you sang on Final Fantasy 15?' And that guy goes, 'No,' and you look at him and you say, 'I have. Sit down and listen.'"

Okay, so let me just dispel that: you're expert enough! What you're trying to do is what a lot of people do: you think you have to know every single thing ever about your topic. There are things that we don't know about online business.

I meet with people that are very high level all the time in different spaces. I'm in a mastermind group with some ballers and they're good dudes and we all do our businesses very differently and sometimes they say things and I can't even wrap my brain around it, what they're talking about. But that's okay because I don't teach that thing even though it's still online business. What we teach is how to start, how to find an idea, how to get your website going, how to get your product created, how to get it out to market, how to start a membership site and create stable recurring income.

I don't know anything about JV partnerships and affiliate marketing, but I've got a friend who's made millions of dollars doing it, but I don't teach that. I don't have to teach that and I don't have to go learn that.

You don't have to learn all the digital audio mixing and stuff like that. You could partner with someone who sells that and be an affiliate for them though, and then you could teach composition, negotiation, how to get the job, how to keep the job, how to make sure they call you back because you're getting called back.

You got to teach what you know and then point them to other people. We don't teach people to do public speaking even though that's a big part of some brands. Jocelyn and I, the only public speaking we do is at our own live events, we don't have time to go do all that other stuff. But if I wanted to send someone to teach public speaking right now, I would send them to my friend, Grant Baldwin, The Speaker Lab, because he knows how to teach public speaking. But I'm not going to go learn how to teach public speaking just so I can create a course about it, that doesn't make sense for us.

Jocelyn: Let me tell you, and everyone who's listening, a secret. And it's not really a secret. But you are not for everyone. We are not for everyone. There are people out there who say, "You know what, I've grown my business and you know, I'm making a million dollars a year, and your stuff is beneath me. Like I don't know how to get to the next level, and you're not going to be able to help me.” No, we're not, because that's not who we serve.

Shane: I don't want to help you get to 10 million dollars a year. Fine, you're a millionaire. You figured it out! You know what I mean? Like that's not our point. Our mission is to help 100,000 people start their online business, and get to a point where they could have the decision to quit their job. That's our mission is to help people start that journey.

Our mission is not to take the person from a million dollars to 10 million dollars. I'm not going to go try to figure that out. I'll leave that to somebody else. Same thing here, don't think you've got to teach all these other things. I don't know the Video Game Music Act that requires you to have so many hours of certain degrees to teach people how to get into the industry. That doesn't exist.

Jocelyn: Let me tell you what this is, though. This is you looking at yourself saying, "I'm not perfect in these ways, and I don't want someone to point out those flaws," and let me tell you how I know that because this is my everyday life.

Shane: Yeah, Jocelyn always does that. We might have a deficiency. Like, one of the things that we struggle with is leading our team. Jocelyn and I are very much like visionary, mud-on-the-wall, let's go, let's figure this out, and sometimes it's hard for us to pull back and lead our team. But we have a really big team and we've got to actually go and sort this out. We have to be better.

Jocelyn: It's just not something we enjoy doing. Therefore, we don't want to do it.

Shane: But we do share our struggles with our community. We share our struggles on our podcast, and those struggles are just as valuable as someone who's got it figured out. You could even talk about that. Listen, what if someone is a composer, and understands music because they went through music, and the band, and choir, and all these things, and they went to college, and they were vocal, and they learned how to sing.

What if the millions of people who do that never learned how to use these digital audio things? And now you can say to them, “I don't have this skill, but I made it. I figured it out and I can help you do it, too!”

Jocelyn: Do you know what the beauty of having a community for this is? You don't have to know all the answers. You are surrounded by lots of other people who are interested in the same thing and guess what? They might be strong where you're weak. It's just like our community. Like there are things that I'm not fantastic at, but there are hundreds of people inside our community, and a lot of them might have experience with it where maybe I don't.

That's the awesome thing, is that I can go in and say, "Hey, I've never done this, but our member, Kevin, has done this," or, "Our member, Karen, has done this.” You know, I can pull out names of people who are an expert in this field and I don't have to be. So that is the awesome thing about doing that.

Shane: That's one reason that we always say people come for the content, but they stay for the leadership in the community, because the leadership guides them to what things that leaders don't even know. Like I can at least point to you the direction where you need to go, and the community fills in gaps of knowledge because if we have thousands of entrepreneurs in one place that are dealing with the three-year-old who doesn't sleep, that are dealing with the fear of being expert enough, that are dealing with how do I overcome this software plugin or whatever, then now we get to fill in the gaps and we get to work together and you can create that same dynamic.

You've probably seen this, I bet, in your community, haven't you? Like people are talking about things and giving feedback that you didn't even think of and conversations and challenges. Have you seen that in your community?

Daniel: Yeah, yeah! It's funny that you mentioned that because you know in a way I haven't needed to talk about the technical stuff in terms of the software in the Facebook group because a lot of times when people ask that question, which is not as often as I would've expected, but when those questions do come up, a bunch of people jump on them.

Shane: Exactly. And that's why a community is really important in this kind of thing because what you have to do is say, “What CAN I teach people? That's the most important question. “What problem CAN I solve?” And we so often get bogged down in the things that we can't solve. "Well, I can't solve this for them. Well, I can't teach them this so I must not be sufficient," but you are sufficient. You are good enough and you are awesome at these things.

You have to make a bulleted list of “What Can I Teach Them?” Well, I can teach them to the composure. I can teach them to negotiate. I can teach them where to look for these gigs because you've probably got an idea of that, you know, you can teach them all those things. That's what forms the basis of your content and then your leadership with coaching or community and things like that, that's going to guide them to the next step. And that's what you are. You're a lantern bearer on a dark path, you're going down a path, you're showing them where to go.

Jocelyn: You've already found the lantern.

Shane: That's right, you got it. So you know where to go. You came back and got somebody else. Now, you're taking them to where you were. And another thing I really sensed from you is you really want these people to do this. Like, you know this is awesome, and these people want to do it. And you're like, "Man, I really would love for everybody to get to sing on Final Fantasy 15, right?"

Daniel: Yeah, I mean, one of the biggest kicks I got doing this challenge last year was that, I was blown away by -- I was very clear with the community that I was really only looking for you to show up and write two to four bars of music a day. A few seconds of music, a little idea. People really just created some really beautiful, some really awesome tracks, and a lot of them were doing full-blown, completed tracks almost every single day. That to me was a huge win. There was so much really great music that came out of it. And I was just really happy!

Jocelyn: But here's the problem. You pumped the brakes, you gave them something awesome. And he said, “Okay guys, see you next summer. We'll do this again.” Daniel, stop it!

Shane: You're like, "Look, I'd love to create a course, but I got to write some hate mail to Shane. That's what I've got to do here."

Daniel: I've got emails to write.

Shane: “I've got emails to write, y'all. I know we're making great music, but I'm writing great copy here.” I love your mission that poured out right there. Your mission is to help people write great music. Your mission is to give them a doorway, an opportunity to go the next step. Your mission is not to teach them the mixer, teach them the thing, get them the job, all of that. The first step that you can teach everybody is that you can do this. because you do it every day in your classroom, you do it every day in your group, you do it on all these challenges. You can teach people to make music that's changing their world, the people around them. They're releasing new things into the world that never existed before, and then they have the opportunity to go the next step, And then they have the opportunity to learn the technology. And then they have the opportunity to apply for the job, but until they write that music, until it's released into the world, they don't have that opportunity. Your endgame for them might be to do what you've done, but you have to help them get started and give them the opportunity.

Jocelyn: And I'm going to tell you something. I talked about this a few weeks ago on the podcast. I feel like I can speak freely with you because, well, this whole podcast this week is kind of crazy.

Daniel: Yeah, it's free, pretty free.

Shane: There's been some free speaking.

Jocelyn: But here's the thing. I talked about this, I think the 200th episode. You are being selfish by holding this gift back, so stop it. You have to do this. You owe it to these people who have a dream, who have something that they want to do, you're being selfish by not giving them the next step.

Shane: Your mission is not to get people a video game job. That's a result! Your job is to help people unleash music that's inside of them into world through the conduit of video games. I play Fortnight with my son.

Daniel: Nice!

Shane: Isaac and I play all the time.

Jocelyn: Not so nice for me.

Shane: Yeah, Jocelyn loses about an hour and a half a day of her life, so we play Fortnite together. We play almost every day. I love the music at the beginning of Fortnite. I just love it, it makes me happy. But going back before that, before I had kids, and right up when we had kids, I played Halo, that very famous game. And I looked it up one day.

Jocelyn: That music haunts me.

Shane: Yeah, the music haunts her. It's not just the music. I looked it up one day and it keeps all your stats, and me, my brother, and my two best friends from high school, we lived far apart from each other when we were adults, right? So Halo was a way that we got to connect every night. We got to get together for an hour before we had kids and we could actually play games and we got to connect virtually.

When I hear Halo's music, I don't just think of the video game, I don't just think of the actual looked-up-in stats, ninety days of my life in actual hours, that I put into that game over a few years in Halo 3. I don't think about that. I think of laughter, and I think of joy, and I think of all the good times and good conversations that I got to have with my brother who lived five hours from me, with my best friend who lived five hours from me. Like that's what I think about.

If that guy doesn't write that music that was the soundtrack of that game, then those memories don't happen and that nostalgia doesn't come back when I hear that music again. That's your mission, bro! It's the help these people unleash music that can be used in these games, not only for them, but for all the people that are going to hear it. You've got no choice, man. You got to do this and you are expert enough. There is no degree, there's no certification that can make you more qualified for what these people need.

Jocelyn: And I want to say, too, before we move on from this, think about people that you respect as leaders, just in everyday life, maybe in online business, every different area of your life. Do you respect somebody more who is perfect and never makes mistakes, or somebody who says, "Hey, I don't know everything, but I'm going to help you. I'm going to do the best I can to help you get to the next step," and I feel like that's why people follow us because we're not perfect, we're not polished, we're just regular people who are trying to help other people have a better life. So, who do you prefer to follow?

Shane: Yeah, let me tell you a story about a guy. This podcast may never end. We're going to talk for a while, we're just sitting back.

Daniel: This is my first day of summer break.

Shane: You're good. Alright, cool, man. Our kids are probably doing something right now. I haven't seen them in about an hour, whatever. They'll be all right. I can see the lake behind our house. So as long as they're not going into that, we're cool.

Okay, so I had a very influential man in my life who was a teacher of mine in high school. He actually was what made me even consider being a teacher when I got a history degree because he was my history and political science teacher.

He really taught me a lot about how to argue politics, and think about deep issues and you know, look at both sides, and not be so hateful like everybody is on Facebook these days and all this other stuff. He was very good at playing devil's advocate and arguing socratically. But that's not where he made the most influence in my life.

I actually took a media class and I got to be the director and producer of our school news show when I was a senior in high school. And I was a hoodlum! But when people see what I do now and my teachers, they're like, "Wow, you're not in jail! That's pretty amazing.” And then when people see Jocelyn, like from her high school, they're like, "Why did you marry that guy? Because he had very great potential to go to jail.” For him to give me a leadership position like that and give me that opportunity, it was amazing.

I so appreciated it because he knew that I had a passion for the video editing, the audio editing, and the production of it. I still have a passion for that stuff today with our podcast, with our videos and things like that. Here's why this story is so related to what we're talking about. He took the media class because he liked the journalism aspect of it. He liked the telling stories aspect of it. He couldn't use a video editor. He could barely use a VCR. We're going way back now.

He didn't know which way to put the tape in the VCR. It would've been upside down, inside out and he didn't understand how to use anything technology-wise. And we had got a grant, and they had bought us all this video editing stuff. So this was like professional tape editing stuff back in the day, right?

Daniel: Yeah. We had the same stuff.

Shane: Yeah. So we go in and he's like, "Shane, you're the producer, you're the director. So you've got to figure all this stuff out. I don't know how to do it, but I'm going to tell you how to organize the show. I'm going to tell you how to lead your team. I'm going to tell you how to do this.”

And we would sit in there. I would remember me sitting at the station just slaving, I would stay hours after school. I'd leave the school at like 8:00 in the night right after school. Loved it, editing the broadcast for the next day, and he never left me. He was always right there beside me, and it's really emotional, thinking about it like right now, how much that changed my life because it kind of was a foundational thing for now, like what we do.

I always remember him just sitting there with his leg crossed, reading his newspaper and every once in a while, he'd look over and go, "Shane, how's it going?" Or I'd look back at him and say, "Hey, do you think this story should go before this story? How should I edit this?" But I had to figure out the technology. He had no clue how to do it. But he taught me how to lead and he taught me how to put things in the right order and how to compose the show. And it didn't matter if he didn't know how to do the editing, and it doesn't matter if you don't know how to use the technology.

You're leading them and you're teaching them how to compose and you're pointing people in the right direction to figure it out. He gave me the instruction manual. I just had to read it. And that's really what you're doing for your people is you're just leading them, and you're helping them compose and you're giving them the chance, the opportunity, and who knows what happens to those people 10 to 20 years from now? That's up to them. You're going to give them the chance and they're going to pay you for it, and then some of them probably the minority are going to do something with it.

It's going to be inspiring and it's going to be world changing, and that's going to be because you made the decision, "I am qualified to do this, and by God, I'm going to teach it.” Okay.

Whew!

Jocelyn: Whew! That was a lot of information.

Shane: Oh my gosh. I'm sitting in here, teared up thinking about that guy, and how much it changed my life and it tears me up because I know we've changed lives, but not all of them, the minority because the majority can't cut it. And if you're in the majority, you need to get over in the minority, if you're listening to this podcast. I know you can change lives and I know that everybody listening has something but they can do!

All that guy did was sit beside me and read the newspaper, answer a question here and there. He didn't answer every question. He answered maybe one question a day. We'd sit there for four hours together.

Daniel: And he just gave you the opportunity.

Shane: And he just gave me the opportunity, man. That's what everyone listening to this podcast right now has to do, is release what you know into the world and give people an opportunity.

Jocelyn: Okay, Daniel, we have said a lot of words.

Shane: Which, for an introvert like Jocelyn, this was like triple the word count of the normal podcast.

Jocelyn: I know, my word count for the day is over, so I'm not going to be talking anymore.

Shane: Oh, yeah. Now, my wife will not speak to me until tonight! I know that she's going to go into her cave, watching Netflix and it's over.

Jocelyn: Okay, but in all seriousness, alright, how do you feel about all of the stuff we just said? I know it was a lot to process, but how do you feel about that and how do you think that it can hopefully help you to move forward to the next step?

Shane: It's not what me and Jocelyn think your next step is. It's, what do you think your next step is?

Daniel: I think I need to stop trying to be everything and really focus on what I know. As I was listening and I had been thinking about this and going through the content in the Flip Your Life community this week, I think what's kind of been slowly shifting to the surface is this idea that I know music theory, I know how to teach that. I know how to teach the basics of composing a good tune. And that's something that is missing a lot in this niche.

A lot of people go towards the technology and they go towards the audio engineering and spent hours and hours and hours and making a really basic thing sound really complicated and expensive but the music is forgettable, so it doesn't take it anywhere. So, I think I need to focus more on the piece that I know, and divorce myself from the piece that I don't need to focus on.

And then I guess in terms of specific steps, I need to come up with a core product offer I can lead people to. Get them the end result of getting their music, getting music that is not only memorable but the music that they'll like themselves the next day, which I think is like a huge pain point.

I think that I'm thinking of like a lot of the people who get into this niche, they have these composers that they've been listening to since they've been growing up. And there's this one Japanese composer who is like the John Williams of video game music.

Shane: John Williams is the greatest composer of all time who did Star Wars -- I just want to show my nerd cred.

Daniel: Well done, sir. Well done! Tip of the hat to you. People constantly are comparing themselves to this guy. They always hold him up as the example that they want to aspire to. He was fantastic at writing great melodies and he was fantastic at using, you know, really beautiful harmonies and then people go out and they write these like beats and there's no melody, and they have no idea how to get over that hump. I think it's just a piece that's missing because they went to the technology but they don't have music education, the formal education. The technology's there, they have access to that. They've got a lot of resources to learn that, but not everyone went through a formal music education degree or knows where to look or what the problem is.

Jocelyn: Right. And I think that we can really help you craft your offer in the community. Like, that's something that our community members can really latch onto and help you with because I really think that you need to launch something off this next challenge. That is really, really important. So we can definitely hash through all that.

Shane: And it could be ready in 21 days.

Jocelyn: Absolutely, yeah.

Shane: It's already named, it's the Video Game Music Academy, right? So you have to open a membership area, and your whole thing is give them the training they need to write these things, and then give them a place where they can share music for you to listen to so you can tell them what to do next. That's it! That's the whole concept of your membership, is that they need someone to show them how, a place to let people hear it, and some feedback, and then they can go and take the other courses that you make, like How to Contact the Video Game, how to submit your music, how to do that stuff.

Jocelyn: We will get into that inside the community a little bit more, and I wanted to touch on one other thing that we kind of glossed over. It was the time aspect because we've talked about this a million times. Everyone has the same amount of time, but here's the thing: Once you can get clear on your mission, and you can get clear that you are enough of an expert or whatever mindset hurdle is holding you back, I promise that time will not be as much of an issue going forward.

Shane: You've been obsessed so far with how to monetize a product. That's not exciting. But now, you have a passionate mission to reach into people's hearts and unleash music into the world that can change other people's lives AND maybe make those people a living. That's deep, dude! That's going to make you find the time, that's going to push everything that's taking up your time to the side, except the things that matter, your mission, your family, your focus. You're going to see your calendar changed dramatically over the next couple of weeks. I promise you.

Daniel: Sounds good. Sign me up!

Jocelyn: Alright, Daniel.

Shane: I'm signing off. Jocelyn usually signs off, but listen, man, I am so glad that you wrote me that email! I'm so glad that you wrote it in the way you did, where it was a critic, but it wasn't hateful. You let yourself be vulnerable there and you were like, "Man, I'm just frustrated, and it frustrates me that you're doing this stuff.” I'm just really glad that you were also responsive to my feedback back to you and most importantly, that you took action because if you don't take action, right, wrong or indifferent-- I'm not going to say that that hateful email was right, wrong or indifferent.

But like if you don't take some action, right, wrong or indifferent, nothing happens. You took action and it turned into another action, and then it turned into a better action and now you're going to take even better actions going forward. And that's how we all get to where we want to be, is just taking action.

So, hey man, I'm glad you're in the Flip Your Life community, and I cannot wait to see how you change the world through this music business and it's going to be awesome watching your journey going forward, Daniel.

Daniel: Yeah. Thank you, thank you both! And for anyone else who's listening, who is not sure about whether or not to finish that form, shut up and do it. You'll feel a lot better. Like I said, I've been through a course before. I was super impressed once I got into this. I mean, you know, everyone's in there, everyone's doing the work and I've been checking in every day and, the videos, and it's like... it's bulletproof. At the end of every video, there's a giant yellow button telling you what to do next. I'm not confused. I know what I need to do, so I'm feeling better. I think I know what I need to do next now, and I'm looking forward to having you help me out craft my offer.

Shane: All right man. Awesome stuff, dude! Welcome to the community! Let's get it going.

Daniel: All right.

Shane: Hey guys. Thanks again for listening. We hope you enjoyed today's podcast. If you still need more help with any of the topics that we discussed today, or maybe you have a question about something that we went over, we have all the training and support you need inside of the Flip Your Life community.

With over 50 training courses on dozens of online business topics, active community forums, and live member calls with me and Jocelyn every single month, the Flip Your Life community is your opportunity to get the help and support you need to make your online dreams a reality.

And the best part is you can get started today for free. That's right! All you have to do is go to flippedlifestyle.com/free, and you can get full unlimited access to everything we offer inside of the Flip Your Life community at no cost for 30 days. Your first month is absolutely free!

If you sign up today, you can get unlimited access to all of the courses inside of our training area, unlimited access to all of our community discussion forums, and you'll get to attend our next two live member calls with me and Jocelyn, where you can ask questions about your online business.

And it's all free for the first month. All you have to do is go to flippedlifestyle.com/free and start your free month today. That's flippedlifestyle.com/free. We can't wait to see you inside!

Shane: Before we go we like to close every single one of our shows with from a verse from the Bible.

Today's Bible verse comes from Proverbs 11:3 and the Bible says, "Honesty guides good people. Dishonesty destroys treacherous people.”

Make sure you are always building on an honest online business that’s full of integrity and you treat people the way you would want to be treated.

That's all the time we have for this week! As always, guys, thanks for listening to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. Until next time, get out there, take action, do whatever it takes to Flip Your Life. We will see you then.

Jocelyn: Bye!

Links and resources mentioned on today’s show: * Daniel's Website * Flip Your Life community * PROLIFIC Monthly

Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!

Join the Flip Your Life Community NOW for as little as $19 per month!

https://flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife

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In today's episode, we help Grant make time for his online business.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jocelyn Sams: Hey y'all. On today's podcast we help Grant make time for his online business.

Shane Sams: What's going on everybody? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. It is great to be back with you again today. We are super excited to welcome another member of the Flip Your Life community onto the show so that we can help them take their online dream to the next level.

Shane Sams: Our guest today is our good friend Grant Downes. Grant, welcome to the program.

Grant Downes: Hey guys, thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.

Jocelyn Sams: We are very excited to talk to you today. You are coming to us from your vehicle, is that correct?

Grant Downes: That's true. So, I am securely fastened here in the van in the garage, which hopefully will insulate me from the kid sounds that are upstairs.

Shane Sams: Hey, listen, there is no better acoustics, or there are no better acoustics than inside of your car, inside of your garage. When I first started creating our courses, the very first course I ever created, it was the same thing, it was just chaos, kids running around everywhere. I tried every room in the house, from the basement to our bedroom.

Jocelyn Sams: And then you listen to it back and it's like oh, kids screaming.

Shane Sams: Oh, just terrible. I can hear kids. So, I went out and locked myself in the garage, got in the car, sat in the back seat in the middle, so I could be as far away from anything as possible, and it sounded great. So, if you're struggling to find a place to record anything, go to your car.

Jocelyn Sams: And just remember, please do not run it inside your garage.

Shane Sams: Yes, don't turn it on if it's cold. We don't want you to do that.

Grant Downes: Yeah, pro tip.

Shane Sams: And don't record while you're driving, that's, unless you got a lapel mic or something like that on so it's all good.

Jocelyn Sams: All right, so you are at home. You have a family. Let's hear a little bit about them and your background.

Grant Downes: Yeah, so I am in eastern Ohio. I live with my wife, Sarah, and my three kids, Charlotte, Henry, and Brenna. I grew up on a tree farm kind of around agriculture, a beautiful 300 acres of rolling farmland here in eastern Ohio, went to school for horticulture, which is basically plant stuff, and then worked kind of a couple different jobs in the plant industry. So, I worked at a nursery for a long time, did a little bit of landscaping, also spent time in agriculture, actually, a feed mill. Now I work as a pesticide and fertilizer inspector for the Ohio Department of Agriculture.

Grant Downes: And then what's really awesome about that position, actually, is that I am based out of my house. So, I have a nine county territory that I run around in, and I do inspections, and I meet with people, and investigate complaints, and give tests, and all sorts of things. But I come home every day, start at eight AM in my basement, run out and do what I'm doing, come back home, and then I'm done by 4:30 and I'm already home, so it works out pretty well.

Shane Sams: So you're not actually working in your home a lot, you're actually out on the road like going to farms. Do you inspect like the plants, or do you inspect like the chemical barrels of chemicals that they're doing? Like, what do you do?

Grant Downes: Not so much plants, but sometimes products. Usually people in licensing is most of what I deal with, and then typically I spend four days in the field and then Friday is an office day. Although, like yesterday, for example, I was at home writing a report. So, I sat in my basement all day and wrote a report.

Shane Sams: How does one get into horticulture? Is that what it's called? Agriculture?

Grant Downes: Yeah.

Shane Sams: That's, like, what makes you obsessed with I want to know everything about plants? Like, that's my job. What is that?

Grant Downes: You know, it varies. So, agriculture and horticulture are a little bit separate. Horticulture is more like garden plants, and greenhouse plants, and nursery plants, whereas agriculture is more of your corn, beans, animals, livestock, that sort of thing.

Grant Downes: So, I've been in a little bit of both. When I grew up on that tree farm, so that was like growing an ornamental product, basically, and so that's more on the horticulture side of things, but agriculture kind of goes hand in hand. You're still growing, you're still formulating a plan of fertilizer, you know, whatever the case is. So, growing is growing, it just depends on what specific direction you go in.

Shane Sams: You know, everybody gets like, all these people get like obsessed with their lawns, and they want everything to grow perfect, they want every blade of grass to be green and every garden plant to look good. I just look outside and I'm like, as long as it doesn't grow too thick and it all looks kind of green, I'm cool. Like, I'm cool with that. I'm not a big, I don't have much of a green thumb, and Jocelyn, I'm pretty sure, has killed-

Jocelyn Sams: Oh, my goodness.

Shane Sams: ... every living plant we've ever owned.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. I'm like the worst when it comes to plants. People give me live plants sometimes and it's very nice, I'm very appreciative, but I cannot keep them alive. Like, I forget to water them, and I don't know, I'm not very good with plants.

Shane Sams: Plant murderer.

Grant Downes: Yeah.

Shane Sams: Every morning I take my dogs out to let them go out and use the bathroom, all that stuff.

Jocelyn Sams: And kill our landscaping.

Shane Sams: And kill our, they kill our landscaping, which apparently that's not good for your plants, and I always sit there and look at our landscaping, and I'm like, can I get all fake plants? I look at my lawn and I'm like, can I just turf this like a football field so I never have to.

Grant Downes: You could. That's an industry. People have artificial lawns.

Shane Sams: Hey Jocelyn, I've been telling you about this. This is totally going to work, so-

Jocelyn Sams: It may be worth the investment, you know? It's very expensive to mow all this grass. So, anyway.

Grant Downes: Yeah, well, just put in some field turf, it will be fine.

Shane Sams: All right, Grant, I'm not going to lie, sounds like you have a pretty sweet set up here with your day job. So, tell us a little bit about why you wanted to start a website, what is your website, and what is the purpose of it?

Grant Downes: Sure. So, I do have a decent set up. I mean, it's really about as like home office working as you can get. I get to go out and I can meet cool people, and I do nice things, but I'm also working a strict 40 hour a week and then I'm off and already home for my family. I think the online business thing would just be a continuation of that process, except it would even be more of what I want to do, instead of what my department wants me to do.

Grant Downes: And so then, you know, my online business that I have got going on, it's called SustainableFamilyHome.com, and the whole goal is to provide people, you know, just kind of like us, busy families with young kids, a opportunity to find little ways that are easy in their life to become more sustainable. So, things like doing a little bit of gardening, composting, using reusable water bottles, you know, little, easy, incremental changes that are not hard to make that will help just be more sustainable over time.

Shane Sams: Okay, so what sent you down the journey for SustainableFamilyHome.com? How did you get into online business, were you running around inspecting and licensing listening to podcasts, or did you read a book? Like, what was your first step into the waters of hey, I think there might be another way to make a living than what I'm doing right now?

Grant Downes: Sure. So, actually a couple jobs ago, before I was with this inspector gig, I definitely had a career crisis. I wasn't super happy in what I was doing. It was a small company and there was no room for advancement, and so I was starting to look outside of what was available in that framework.

Grant Downes: Discovered The 4-Hour Workweek, flipped through that very quickly, it was really fascinating. That kind of led me to Pat Flynn and then eventually to you guys, and just thinking I would love to have, even if it was just a little bit of a side income, something else that could provide for our family, you know, pay for a vacation. And then, sure, if it was successful enough, allow that to build up into what could be a really cool, self determined full-time job.

Shane Sams: So, what did you like about The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss? It's funny you say that, because I find that's a common thread between most people that want to go down this path. I read The 4-Hour Workweek, you know, after I discovered there was a thing called online business, of course I saw this book on a shelf that said wait a minute, four-hour workweek? That sounds awesome, right?

Grant Downes: Sure.

Shane Sams: And, but I started reading it and it really does lay the case out, like, hey, the world is different now. You don't have to do the 40-hour workweek. You don't have to have an employer. You don't even have to stay local. You can reach out to anyone in the world and kind of make a living online. So, what was it that sparked that in you? Was it to make more money? To do more of what you wanted to do? Or just basically, hey, I want total control of my time, not just average control of my time?

Grant Downes: Sure. I mean, definitely a couple factors. I am very much an analytical and processes person, so through that story, what if, the book, you know, he really laid out okay, all these processes, it was a lot of outsourcing, it was a lot of okay, setting this up and let it run, and set this up and let it run, and it works together. I love that sort of process system scheme. And so, that was fascinating.

Grant Downes: And then, you know, just the concept as a whole. Like I mentioned, at that time I was not happy with my job, had a manager that was not a manager, and was really just looking for something else, and just think wow, you can really be autonomous, and put these systems in place that can lead to something awesome. So, it was really, I don't want to say a light switch, but it was definitely an open way of thinking about something different.

Shane Sams: The thing about The 4-Hour Workweek that always gets me is people, the book is actually not saying you're only going to work four hours a week and make as much money as you want. It's saying that at most four hours of your week will be spent on stuff you don't like, right?

Grant Downes: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Shane Sams: Because it does take a lot of work, it does take a lot of hustle, and it does take a lot of guts to even start a website to do your business, or to try to replace your income and do something different.

Shane Sams: I love this quote you put in there from your dad in the ... we have this form that everybody fills out when they come on the podcast, and it says, “My dad is a great role model for me, and is the hardest working person I know.” And then you talk about how online business seemed like a dream big dreams. But then later you said, “It reminded me of a quote my dad said growing up, 'You have champaign tastes and a beer budget.'” Like, what does that mean? Like, why did you put that in here? How does that relate?

Grant Downes: You know, that's funny, it used to be for sure, I really wanted to buy big things, and even now, like at Christmas time, I don't want a little bunch of tiny little gifts, I want one nice big gift.

Grant Downes: But regardless, the way it ties in now is with time, and that's kind of, I think, what we're going to get into a little bit more here is that I have a lot going on. And so, with my champaign tastes I want to do everything. I really want to be involved in a lot of things. I want to make positive contributions all over the place. I want to experience tons of different things.

Grant Downes: Like, last night I went to do a mountain biking group ride because I never have been mountain biking and I wanted to try to ride some trails. So like, that was just something else I worked in.

Grant Downes: And my beer budget is I only have so many hours in a day, and then that's something I know you guys have stressed a lot is we need to get control over our hours. And so, okay, I've got to fit what I really want to do into my budget of time. And so, I think that's one of my biggest struggles that I'm still continuing to work on.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay, so you are a dad. You are an employee. You are a business owner. You are an aspiring mountain biker. Did I say that already?

Shane Sams: You're apparently on the village council as well? So, you're a politician?

Grant Downes: Yes. Politician is a strong word. We're pretty apolitical. We just really run the town business and get things done.

Shane Sams: How big is the village? How big is it?

Grant Downes: So, our village, Magnolia, Ohio, is about 1,000 residents.

Shane Sams: Oh, okay, so this is a real village, like straight up village, right?

Grant Downes: Yes.

Shane Sams: But you're going for mayor, it says, of the village too. So, you're going-

Grant Downes: That's true. So, I am going to be on the ballot here this coming November for mayor of Magnolia. Our previous mayor retired, or is retiring, I should say, after four years, and he's kind of elbowed and nudged, and said, “Hey Grant, I think you should give it a try.” So, after thinking about it for a while I decided to give it a try.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay, so you're also a coach of a youth soccer league.

Shane Sams: Oh, my gosh. Do you breathe?

Grant Downes: Yeah.

Shane Sams: When do you go to the bathroom, or eat?

Grant Downes: Very seldomly, seldomly.

Shane Sams: Right. I mean, this is, it reminds of like Lord of the Rings where he goes, “I feel like butter spread, too little butter spread thin over a piece of bread, right?” Do you ever feel, it seems like you feel that way right now, like you just have, well, I do this, and I do that, and I'm constantly going from eight AM until midnight, and then I have no time left for anything else.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, and so it's not very surprising that you say you feel like you don't have a lot of time. I mean, I totally get this. But let me ask you, what's your vision for your website? Like, what is your plan? What do you plan to sell? What products? What services?

Grant Downes: Well, so far I do have a website up and running. It's basically 15 different blog posts on various topics, kind of what I mentioned earlier, composting, reusable water bottles, you know, things like that, that are easy to incorporate.

Grant Downes: Each post basically walks somebody, if you had never done anything before on gardening, let's say, I have a bunch of how tos, exactly what you need to get started, and then embedded in those posts are Amazon affiliate links. So sure, that's basically my only way to receive money from someone right now is if they did make a purchase through one of my links.

Grant Downes: Ideally, I think what I would like to do is build up to that membership site. So, you know, for people who really want to be on board with getting more sustainable, you know, have the community, have a lot more information that they can utilize as to all right, here's little tweaks here and there that I can help make my home, my family, my day to day activities just a little bit more sustainable.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay. So, you have that idea. You have that goal of eventually doing a membership style website, which I think is kind of interesting for this product, and you think that your main problem right now is that you just don't have time to work on it, right?

Grant Downes: Basically.

Shane Sams: Now, wait a minute, you don't have time or you're not making time? So, because you chose mountain biking the other day, right? So, is this business a true priority for you, or is it something that you feel like is just another one of the 1,900 things that you slice on your pie every day?

Grant Downes: Yeah, that's a great question. I would say that it's probably somewhere in between. I can't say that it's a need, because I am employed, right? And my family is okay. It's definitely a little bit more of a want. I would love to have this, to have more control over my life, my income, things along those lines, and then just trying to balance it in between where everything goes.

Grant Downes: You know, it's funny, I actually let my wife read the intake form and all of the answers that I wrote down to your questions, and she's like, you know, don't be too hard on yourself. You're taking care of us, you've got a lot going on. Yes, it would be cool to have this thing, yes, work on that when you can, but don't stress yourself out or get too crazy.

Grant Downes: So, I don't know. It's definitely, for me, trying to find the balance as to yes, I would love to have this thing, and I would love to help people. Like, that's the thing, this is something, overall, that is important to me. You know, our planet is in a precarious state, I guess, for lack of a better word, and it would be awesome to help people make a positive influence on the earth and in their lives. So yeah, finding time is that sweet spot.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, and I love that. I love what you said about, you know, it's important to you to help people become aware that we do need to be involved in sustainability, and the longevity of our planet and all of the stuff on it. So, it is something that's important.

Jocelyn Sams: I think that is important to you, but I don't know that this is a proper recommendation for a membership site, I wouldn't say. Would you?

Shane Sams: I'm not for sure about that. And you said something really interesting in your form, “I'm not sure how to translate the urgency I feel into creating urgency for others.” Like, you're urgently, like, I want to be sustainable. You've bought into that style of life, and it's like trying to translate that to others, but that's kind of the wrong way to run a business.

Shane Sams: Businesses don't succeed because you can take your passion and urgency and plant it on someone else. You can inspire someone else, right? Like, that's possible, but usually a business that's successful takes something in their customer that they already have an urgency for, right? And you go and give them the solution to that thing they've already discovered for themselves is urgent.

Shane Sams: Like, I urgently wanted to quit my job. I had to find a way to get out, because I was in a bad situation with a bad boss, right? So, I was already looking for a solution, all someone had to do was drop the solution in my face. If your house is on fire, and I walk up and hand you a fire extinguisher, I have met your urgent need, right?

Shane Sams: And this gets into the aspirin versus vitamin analogy that we often talk about. If you're trying to make someone care as much as you, it's going to be really hard to sell something. And that's not what you want to do in your business anyway.

Shane Sams: You want to tell people things. You want to teach people things. You want to help them solve their problems and give them the answers that they need right in the moment, and if you're just constantly thinking oh, man, I can't make anyone else care as much as me, you see what I'm saying? Like, you're not going to have motivation. You're not going to be able to look at your calendar and say let's see, mountain biking or mission, nah, I don't really care about my mission as much, you know? So, it does become a harder sell to go and get people.

Shane Sams: So, if you could change the way you think about it a little bit first, of hey, wait a minute, I don't need to create urgency, I need to find people who are already feeling urgency about this issue, it becomes a lot easier to kind of market the thing, and get involved in the thing.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, and I think that there is a market for this, certainly. You know, there's a market for pretty much everything, but I just wonder if maybe you're thinking about it the wrong way, because it seems to me like you should create something like a book that maybe you sell on your site, maybe you sell on Amazon. I don't know, but that would create a little bit of extra income for you guys, and at the same time you're not tied down to a membership site where you have to be there all the time serving your members, so-

Shane Sams: This almost seems like courses, too. Like, it's hard to think about it like a membership site right, I'm sure we could get there if we work through it, but it seems like if I was going to be more sustainable, right? What's one thing I could do, composting? Is that what you said?

Grant Downes: Sure.

Shane Sams: To become more sustainable.

Jocelyn Sams: We're apparently not very-

Shane Sams: Not very sustainable right here.

Jocelyn Sams: ... sustainability minded.

Grant Downes: Yes, start composting today. You can do it.

Shane Sams: We recycle our cardboard, how about that?

Jocelyn Sams: We do recycle cardboard, because-

Shane Sams: That's right.

Grant Downes: Okay, that's something.

Jocelyn Sams: ... I use a lot of cardboard.

Shane Sams: Because Amazon sends us a lot of boxes. I'm just saying, Jocelyn's got the little one-click buy option going strong.

Shane Sams: But like, what if you had a course that was like $99, and it was like how to compost, right?

Grant Downes: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Shane Sams: And then you can string together courses in a very similar way to a membership model. It's called an ascension model, right? So, if I got into composting, what would you tell me is the next thing that I need to do, Grant? Like, what's the next thing that I need to do?

Grant Downes: Well, if you're composting, I guess you would probably want a place to use that compost. So, if you're not already gardening, I might lead you in that direction.

Shane Sams: Okay. So, basically, say someone comes in and they buy your course. Well, the thank you page is not the end of a sales funnel. The thank you page is the start of the next sales funnel. So immediately, on that thank you page, it would say hey, you're going to need something to do with all that compost, take my gardening course, that's $97, right? And then two weeks later, if they didn't buy it, you remind them again, because maybe they got into composting, they see it looks really cool, and they have all this big mound of compost sitting around, right?

Grant Downes: Yes.

Shane Sams: And then what does that string to next? What does that string to next? What would happen after you taught me how to garden? All right, I got my compost bin going, okay, I've got my garden growing, I'm like, herbs, sweet, or herbs if you're across the pond, herbs or herbs. We've got some herbs and herbs growing in our compost garden, what happens next? What do I need to do?

Grant Downes: Well, then I would push you, probably, into making sure that you can store all that food from your gardening, so having nice, reusable food storage containers.

Shane Sams: Okay, there we go, so that's another course, like how to make sustainable food supplies or whatever, you know?

Jocelyn Sams: Okay. Okay, fire hose.

Shane Sams: Sorry. I'm just saying.

Jocelyn Sams: Let's back the truck up just a little bit.

Shane Sams: Okay. My point is that you can string together courses, which is actually a lot more passive. It does take a lot less time, right?

Grant Downes: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Shane Sams: It's harder, because when you get a member, a member kind of just gets used to like, I'm a member, I'm a part of this community, I'm going, right?

Shane Sams: This is much more sales driven, because you have to sell the next thing, but the good thing is you create the course, like, composting is composting, right? Like, making compost is going to be the same in two years from now, how you make it, okay? Gardening is kind of gardening, right? Water, sun, plants, dirt, I don't know what else goes into it, compost apparently.

Shane Sams: But you can make the course once, sell it forever, and you just create, my buddy calls it the funnel of death, just keep stringing together these courses over and over until people hit all the things that they buy. But you make them once, then you go sell it for six months, then you make the next course, then you go sell it for six months. And then you look up, and all of a sudden you're like whoa, I had 500 course sales this month, or something like that.

Shane Sams: So, maybe that's the way you could make it more immediate for people is, well, this person wants composting, right? So I need to make just that course for them.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay, I'm just laughing because I feel like this train is three towns down the way. Grant's just watching it go by.

Grant Downes: No, it's all good, but I do have a question. So, if we circle back to my existing content, right? So, the blog posts I have now, those are kind of, you know, in theory, designed to walk a person through that. Should I not be giving that content away?

Jocelyn Sams: Definitely not.

Shane Sams: Definitely not, no.

Grant Downes: All right, so then if I take that content away, how do I have blog posts, you know, free content, and then separate that into the paid stuff later on?

Shane Sams: Basically, your free content should only tell them what to do. So, free blog post would say you need to compost. It wouldn't say here's how to compost. Does that make sense?

Grant Downes: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Shane Sams: And it would tell them the reasons why they need to compost. Like, give me three reasons why I should compost without telling-

Grant Downes: I mean-

Shane Sams: ... me how to do it.

Grant Downes: ... you shouldn't have that food in your trash because it's going to stink, it's going to fill up a landfill, and then the benefit is you can use it in your garden and provide nutrients for your garden plants.

Shane Sams: Okay, so that-

Jocelyn Sams: There's your blog post.

Shane Sams: There's your blog post. That's what a blog post should be about, because now you've actually created urgency in me, right? Like man, I don't want my trash to stink. I got to get that trash out of here. And gosh, I don't want to fill up another landfill. And wait a minute, I need to garden? I don't know how to garden. If only there was a course on this website that-

Jocelyn Sams: But wait-

Shane Sams: ... taught me how to garden, right?

Jocelyn Sams: ... here's a free checklist that you can sign up for if you give me your email.

Shane Sams: Exactly. So, that's kind of where you probably went off the rails a little bit, or maybe I went off the rails, according to Jocelyn, because I go off-

Jocelyn Sams: Um, yeah.

Shane Sams: I get a business idea and I just go with it.

Jocelyn Sams: I know, but we need to stay at this town.

Shane Sams: Okay, gotcha. Sorry. I was going to the next town. But like, that's what you have to do is create the why, right? Maybe that's why you're not creating urgency is because you're giving them a steak instead of an appetizer, right? And that's where all your free time-

Grant Downes: Yeah.

Shane Sams: ... is going to. And you also probably feel like, man, I made this thing that shows them how to do it, what do I do next, right?

Jocelyn Sams: Let me ask you a question, Grant. What if I told you that you could spend like a weekend putting together a little book about, say, composting, because that's what we keep talking about here, and get it for sale on your website, batch up a little bit of content, meaning like a month of content, and you don't work on it again until next month?

Grant Downes: I mean, that would be cool. That sort of a batching format is definitely where I need to focus, because you know, midweek commitments, soccer practice, all that stuff. Yeah, if I could set aside six hours, eight hours, 12 hours, whatever that weekend timeframe is, crank-

Jocelyn Sams: Exactly.

Grant Downes: Crank a bunch of things out, and then have it be there and just trickle out over time, that would certainly be helpful.

Shane Sams: Yeah, I think that's probably the way you should go. And you may, eventually, all your customers, you could even, if you wanted to create some kind of community environment you could throw together a quick Facebook group, and everybody that bought an eBook, or everybody that bought a course, you could just throw them in there, they could all talk about sustainability together, and that's where your fans kind of just hang out, right?

Grant Downes: Sure. Yeah, I have a Facebook group, there's just no one there, so-

Shane Sams: Right, exactly.

Shane Sams: But your sales can kind of end up there, like, eventually, and that's-

Grant Downes: Yeah, yeah, oh yeah.

Shane Sams: ... you just string these courses together. But you could actually create like what Jocelyn just said, pick one weekend a month to create your content, you have 28 other days to do whatever else you want, like run for village council and ride into the mountains on your bike, right? And then, after that, you know, you don't have to do anymore, but your goal would be day one, create a new product, right? Like the gardening product.

Jocelyn Sams: Like something to sell.

Shane Sams: Something to sell. Day two would be create a lead magnet for that product and write like three blog posts about it, or maybe one blog post. You know, a lot of people have been asking me lately, wow, I just, I want to be a prolific content creator, and I'm like, no, that's not what you should do, you should be a consistent content creator, you should be a prolific promoter.

Shane Sams: You could literally make a course on Saturday, or an eBook, that tells them how to do something like gardening, composting, plastics, whatever, you know, and the next day write one epic blog post on why that's so important, and then create a lead magnet for it, and then just set up an ad to promote it for the rest of the month, let it work for you, right? That's your whole business model.

Shane Sams: And you just, eventually you've got to string these together in an order in your sales funnel that's like, okay, the first one is composting, the second one is gardening, the third one is food storage, and these kind of sell out over time, right?

Grant Downes: Yes.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay. And so, your goal is to do this in X hours per month, okay? So, maybe you give yourself eight hours to get it done, and that's how much time you have. So, if you get one blog post done, and one product done, and you send out a couple emails, then that's your eight hours.

Shane Sams: Are these long blog-

Jocelyn Sams: Then you move on to the next month.

Shane Sams: Are these really long blog posts, the ones you've already created? They actually show you how to compost, like literally how to do it?

Grant Downes: Yeah, they vary. Gardening and composting are longer. I mean, I have another one, for example, that's air drying clothes, pretty short. So, it just depends on the topic, but-

Shane Sams: Okay. So, I would probably pull those down, the big, the two, like the best ones, like the gardening and the composting one, take those off, turn those into products, okay? You might have to flesh them out, right?

Grant Downes: Sure.

Shane Sams: But that will get you a jump start on the first ones. And they can be, these don't have to be super expensive, they could be $10 eBooks, right? It's just something people download, and it shows them how to do it. Because if it shows them how to compost and it solves a problem, it doesn't matter the length or the format. All that matters is if it solves someone's problem, if someone wanted to learn about that for $19 on a 20-page eBook that's cool, right?

Shane Sams: So, you could totally sell that, because it solves a problem. Pull those off, use those as your first two eBooks. You already have the products basically done, okay?

Grant Downes: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Shane Sams: And do what Jocelyn said, write a blog post on the why. You just told us why we should compost, so you've already got that outlined, and then make some kind of checklist, like the things you need to compost, right? Like, you need X, Y, and Z. And then, of course, that's for the opt in. And then the opt in goes to the sales page, you start selling your eBooks, and then you write the next one next month. So, 12 months from now you have 12 eBooks selling all over the place. Put them on Amazon, put them on your website, put them everywhere.

Jocelyn Sams: So, I think this solves a lot of problems for you. It helps you to be able to get something done in a short amount of time. It helps you to hopefully make some extra income, and just kind of satisfies that curiosity of can I do this, can I make something work?

Jocelyn Sams: Could you change it in the future to become something bigger, of course? Like, if you start seeing it get some traction, and you're like, hey, this is really cool, I wonder if I could make something else out of this, well, of course you can. But if you just want to see what's happening, and just kind of prove a theory to yourself, can I do this, can I make some extra money online, I think this is probably going to be the best way for you to go.

Shane Sams: And another note on recurring revenue, whenever people get into a membership site, or recurring revenue, recurring revenue only just simply means that your existing customers pay you again, and again, and again, okay? So, it's not like it has to be what we have, this forum of hundreds of people hanging out on Q&As, right? That's not what a membership has to look like. That's a good way to do it, but it doesn't have to look that way.

Shane Sams: Recurring revenue can be I created 100 really cool customers. They really like what I do, so I sell them something else next month and they buy it again, right?

Grant Downes: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Shane Sams: And then they become super fans. And then, 30 days later, I create a new product and they buy it again. So, that's all what recurring revenue means is you have an existing group of customers that love what you do, want the next thing, you create the next thing and they buy it again, okay? So, you can create that recurring revenue for yourself just based on your customer list.

Grant Downes: Right. Now, I wanted to ask you a little bit about community. So, we talked a little bit about sure, you could have a community group on the side, but I feel like there's two buckets to put that in, right? So, you could either have, excuse me, you could either have the ... like a private Facebook group for your existing customers, or let's say you could have a free Facebook group, and try to bring people in and lead them to products. Do you guys see an advantage one way or the other?

Shane Sams: I mean, for us, the way our business works in Flipped Lifestyle, we definitely want to put them in a paid community, right? But, for another business that we have, USHistoryTeachers.com, it's an education company that sells lesson plans to social studies teachers, that one has no paid community, not at all. It has a big Facebook group. It's actually the largest Facebook group for social studies and US history teachers on Facebook, okay?

Shane Sams: So, that's a big community, I share memes, everybody, it gets dozens and dozens of shares and likes, and people laugh and have fun. So, I've kind of created this free community there, right? But it has no paid component to it. So, it's more of a what does the business really need, right?

Shane Sams: Our business for Flipped Lifestyle, people need a community. You need to be surrounded by other people. You need to see people succeeding to keep you moving, right? You need to have some accountability, place to go ask questions. US History Teachers, eh, they just want something funny to get them through the day, and they need their lesson plans in the morning.

Jocelyn Sams: And of course there are benefits and drawbacks to each way. I mean, the benefits of a paid community is that you don't have to babysit them as much because, you know, the people, they've paid money, they're not going to come in there and spam it up, usually. Free groups, sometimes you'll get people in there who are trying to basically poach your customers, and pitch them stuff, and all that kind of stuff. And so, you're going to have a little bit more, like, babysitting of that type of community, but the good news is that it can bring potential customers in to your environment.

Shane Sams: I would still think that there's a coaching component to what he's doing, don't you think? Like-

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, totally. I mean-

Shane Sams: ... if I downloaded a composting thing, and my, whatever, maybe my composting pile didn't compost, or caught on fire, or I don't know what would happen bad in composting, but let's say my garden, the plants wouldn't grow, I would think I would need to ask the dude who wrote the book, you know, hey, why is this herb not growing, you know what I'm saying?

Grant Downes: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Shane Sams: So like, it seems like there is a community element about this that could be paid on the back end of all of your coursework, or bookwork.

Jocelyn Sams: I think that there are a lot of different opportunities that you could pursue, you know, as your schedule freed up, or as you see a need. But for now, if I were you, I would just start kind of with what we're talking about as far as like the eBook, and possibly get into some courses if you see that that's catching on. How do you feel about that strategy?

Grant Downes: You know, I do like that a lot. That does break things down a little bit for me in terms of okay, because I, well, a big concern, you know, thinking about membership, has been all right, well, if I've got this free content, how do I then create pay content that's even better. This system, the way we've talked through today, definitely helps, okay, separate the why into the free content, and then the good stuff will be paid but still, you know, there and available for everybody.

Grant Downes: And even about the coaching, I remember that was in the training somewhere that you guys mentioned hey, if nothing else, have a button on your website that says, you know, individual coaching, click here.

Shane Sams: Exactly.

Grant Downes: And then that's always been in the back of my mind as something that, yeah, I'd like to be available as well.

Shane Sams: And just one more thing, circling around to the beginning of this conversation, stop trying to put your passion and urgency on your customers. Go find customers who share your passion and urgency, right? Someone, somewhere, is typing into Google right now, how do I compost, okay? And if you have a thing called how to compost, they will eventually find you, right?

Shane Sams: So, try to jump in front of existing traffic. Don't try to find some random person, and shake them, and go save the world! Right?

Grant Downes: Right.

Shane Sams: Like, don't do that. Find the people who are already looking for it, and let your content be kind of the bait that kind of like draws them in.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, and on the time, I just wanted to throw this in here too, one of the things that you might have to practice, and this is something that I have to practice too, is saying no, and this is something that can be hard for people, you know? You have your kids involved in stuff. You want to help coach the team. You want to be there for the community meeting. You want to be there for your kids' back to school stuff and all that kind of thing.

Jocelyn Sams: But there are times that we have to say no to stuff, and I think that that would probably help you, you know, to prioritize and say okay, well, I had this time blocked out to work on my business, I'm not going to be able to attend the mountain biking meeting or whatever, you know?

Grant Downes: Right.

Jocelyn Sams: Like, you're going to have to figure out, and that's something that you can only do yourself, what is the most important, and how do I make it a priority?

Shane Sams: And these can be hard decisions. I had a friend the other day who was really, really involved in the church for years, and years, and years, and leadership, and doing all these things, and was really, you know how it is when you volunteer for stuff, you kind of, you know, it's 80/20 rule, right? Only 20% of the people are ever doing anything.

Shane Sams: So it's people rely on you, you get really ingrained, and then all of a sudden people start over asking, you're doing so many different things, you didn't say no for years and now you're saying yes to everything. And he had this really big dream that he wanted to start his own business, and do these things, and I actually said to him hey, when we started our online business and it got traction, we had to let go of a couple things.

Shane Sams: One of those things was actually teaching a small group that we taught in school, at like Sunday school or whatever, for like two years, okay? And it was a group of our friends, but we just had to step back from it because there are only so many hours in the day. You're only awake 16 hours a day, right?

Grant Downes: Right.

Shane Sams: So, we had to say we're going to give up some things now that we can get back later if we want them, okay? And he stepped down from all of his leadership positions. He started a business, made his first sale the other day, and things are kind of rocking now, you know?

Shane Sams: So, there are things you're going to have to say no to to be able to get the things that you want, and that's going to be really hard. You might have to wait to mountain bike, but wouldn't it be amazing if you could take a month long mountain biking trip later because you didn't have to go to work, you know?

Grant Downes: Oh yeah, absolutely. And I have gotten better at that in the last few years. My wife and I joke that if I sign up for anything else I will come home and all of my stuff will be in the yard. So-

Shane Sams: Yeah, don't want that. That's a bad thing.

Grant Downes: ... yeah, we're getting a balance there. Yeah, it will be okay.

Jocelyn Sams: All right, Grant. It has been really fun talking with you today, and I really look forward to seeing what happens with your sustainable living website.

Jocelyn Sams: Before we go, we always like to ask our guests, what is one thing that you plan to take action on based on what we talked about today?

Grant Downes: I really want to go back to those two big posts, basically the gardening and the composting, and try to format, I need to do that, I'm sure, go through the Flipped Lifestyle training to see what an eBook would look like, and then start to put things in motion to get those going.

Shane Sams: That's an awesome goal, Grant, but I want to push you a little bit. I want to challenge you a little more here. Grant is coming to Flip Your Life LIVE in just a few weeks, so I kind of want to tie this goal to that. I want to challenge you to have the first product, the first lead magnet, and everything leading to it on your site before you set foot in the door. And I actually want you to like start an ad for it, maybe you just boost a post-

Grant Downes: Oh, yeah.

Shane Sams: ... on Facebook, before you come to Flip Your Life.

Shane Sams: Because like, wouldn't it be amazing if you made that first sale of this first product before you actually got to Lexington, Kentucky. Would that be amazing?

Grant Downes: That would be amazing. It would be really cool to see all this background and work actually translate into some dollars.

Shane Sams: Exactly, so let's-

Jocelyn Sams: All right.

Shane Sams: ... put that on there. I challenge you. I'm going to be there at check in. I'm going to find you. But I'm going have them-

Grant Downes: All right.

Shane Sams: ... call me, I'm going to say, is Grant here? Where's Grant? Has Grant showed up yet? And I'm going to be like, did you put it online? Show it to me. I want to see it. Okay? And if you-

Grant Downes: All right.

Shane Sams: ... make your first sale you got to post it in the Flip Your Life LIVE Facebook group, okay?

Grant Downes: Sounds awesome.

Shane Sams: All right, guys, that wraps up another great discussion with one of our Flip Your Life communities. We can't wait to meet Grant at Flip Your Life LIVE in Lexington, Kentucky, on September 19th through the 21st to see how he is doing on his goals.

Shane Sams: We would love to meet you in Lexington, Kentucky as well, but if you don't act fast, we won't get that chance, because we only have a few tickets left before the event, and it is coming up very, very soon. All you have to do to get your ticket to Flip Your Life LIVE is go to FlippedLifestyle.com/Live and you can get one of the few remaining tickets that we have left. As of today, we only have 13 tickets left to the event.

Shane Sams: And please remember, we are not doing Flip Your Life LIVE in 2020. This is your last chance to go. So, if you were putting it off, you were waiting, you are running out of time. The tickets are almost gone, the time is almost running out, and we are not going to be doing this event again next year. So, go to FlippedLifestyle.com/Live and see if any tickets are left today.

Shane Sams: Before we go we'd love to share a Bible verse with you. Jocelyn and I draw a lot of our inspiration and motivation from the Bible. Today's Bible verse comes from Proverbs 24, verse 27, and it says, “Do your planning and prepare your fields before building your house.” So, get your priorities in order. Get your plans set so that you can accomplish the things that you want for your family and in your online business.

Shane Sams: That's all the time we have for this week, guys. Until next time, get out there, take action, and do whatever it takes to flip your life. See you soon.

Jocelyn Sams: Bye.

Links and resources mentioned on today’s show: * Grant's Website * Flip Your Life LIVE 2019 Tickets & Registration Information * Flip Your Life community * PROLIFIC Monthly

Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!

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View Details

In today's episode, we help Pat successfully launch a membership website.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jocelyn Sams: Hey y'all. On today's show we help Pat successfully launch a membership website.

Shane Sams: Welcome to The Flipped Lifestyle podcast where life always comes before work. We're your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. We're a real family that figured out how to make our entire living online. And now we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? All right, let's get started.

Shane Sams: What's going on everybody? Welcome back to The Flipped Lifestyle podcast. It is great to be back with you again today. Super excited to help another member of our flip your life community start, build, and grow their own online business. Excited to welcome Pat Eardley to the show today. Pat, welcome to the show.

Pat Eardley: Thanks for having me.

Jocelyn Sams: We are very excited to talk to you today and I can't wait to see what is going on with you and your business. But before we get there, let's talk a little bit about your background and what led you to kind of pursue online business.

Pat Eardley: Currently, okay, so maybe I'll back up and tell you background. So I am from Virginia and I live in Charleston, South Carolina. So like the best place on earth, I believe. And I've lived here for about 12 years. And my background professionally is human resources. I've been in HR for a little over 20 years. So mathematically that means I started when I was about five years-old.

Jocelyn Sams: Of course. Yes.

Shane Sams: Of course you did.

Pat Eardley: And so I have an HR consultancy. I've had this business for 10 years now. This year makes 10 years. And it's myself and I have two employees. But it's just not scalable. We truly are trading dollars for hours. You can say that you're not because there's some automated components, but it really is trading dollars for hours. So that really made me look into online business. And is there a way to scale it by having an online component to the business?

Shane Sams: So what exactly is... So you own the business, right? So yourself-

Pat Eardley: I do.

Shane Sams: So you're kind of in the flipped lifestyle, but your business dominates a lot of your time because you are trading those time for dollars. Correct?

Pat Eardley: That's correct.

Shane Sams: So you're looking at the other direction.

Jocelyn Sams: Well, let's first of all explain HR. Like that's human resources-

Shane Sams: For sure.

Jocelyn Sams: ... For people who have never been in corporate or maybe they just don't know that.

Shane Sams: And what is an HR consultancy? Like what do you? I know there's HR people that work in corporations that handle human resources, and when employees have problems or something like that. But what does an HR consultancy do?

Pat Eardley: So what we do is we help small businesses. So typically if you have less than 100 people, you don't have an HR person on staff. It doesn't make sense to have an HR person full time or even part time for that matter. Financially it doesn't work. So what we do is we help small businesses manage the HR component, which is like hiring, firing, the onboarding, the off boarding. What happens when there's bereavement and someone needs an extended amount of time off? Or there's an injury at the workplace? Or maybe it's just annual reviews, like doing that on a regularly scheduled basis. A disciplinary action conversation. Those are the type of HR things that frankly, business owners did not get into business to do. They don't want to manage that stuff.

Shane Sams: But they can't afford to basically have someone do it for them. So you're like an HR mercenary, right? It's like a horrible way to say that. But people go out and they're like, "Man, I really wish someone would take all this HR off my plate, but I can't afford to hire anyone. But maybe I can hire Pat and her firm and they'll take care of that." So really you're pretty much maxed out on how many businesses you could ever personally serve because you would have to hire someone else to add more businesses. Because there's only... Like if you're having these HR meetings, and disciplinary meetings, and hiring, and firing. There's only so many hours in the day. So basically in your business now it runs up to a cap, correct?

Pat Eardley: You're exactly right.

Shane Sams: Like a time.

Pat Eardley: There is a cap. It will cap out. And the only way to, I don't know, get beyond it is to hire more people.

Shane Sams: Right.

Pat Eardley: That's not of interest to me. I don't want to have 20 employees.

Shane Sams: Exactly. So you've got the two employees you do now, did you hire them to add more businesses or do they just support you with the businesses that you serve?

Pat Eardley: One supports, one adds.

Shane Sams: Gotcha. Okay. So basically one was for growth and one was for support.

Pat Eardley: Yeah you're right.

Shane Sams: Okay, cool.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay. So you're doing this consultancy, you have your support people. And now what is this going to look like as you transition it to an online business?

Pat Eardley: Yeah, so the online business. So the business is MyShiftHR.com. So my brick and mortar, if you will, I'll just refer to it, the consultancy as a brick and mortar. That's actually called Shift HR, like shifting car gears.

Shane Sams: Like S-H-I-F-T.

Pat Eardley: Yeah. Because you have to have a change in order to have a difference. Right?

Shane Sams: For sure.

Pat Eardley: So Shift HR. So My Shift HR is the online product. And what that is, is there is a forum for business owners to be able to ask those questions that they don't necessarily have anyone to talk to about, and they don't want to pay $200 an hour to talk to a lawyer about them. There's also a component where we'll have trainings from other professionals, like maybe it's an insurance person or maybe it's a payroll company talking about new changes, laws, best practices. And then the heart of it is the HR portal. So the portal will be where they can get forms, documents, policies, procedures. They can write an employee manual, they can write an operations manual all from this portal. And the portal is a white label. Like it's not mine.

Shane Sams: Right.

Pat Eardley: But I am a reseller. So that'll be white labeled and it is already to Shift HR. And you would be subscribing to that whole thing I just described.

Shane Sams: So white labeling basically is someone has made this product but you get to basically lease it and put your branding on it, your stuff, and people can come in and it looks like all of your stuff. But all that legal stuff, documents and things like that come from somewhere else that's already created, correct?

Pat Eardley: You're correct.

Shane Sams: All right. So this is interesting. So basically there's gaps here is what I'm seeing. So if you don't have 100 employees or more, you're not going to hire an HR person. And then I assume then there's a gap somewhere between like 30 and 100 people where you could hire a consultancy. But then like maybe people who are like one to 30, one to 50 employees they want to still do it themselves because they can't afford to hire the consultancy or the HR person. So their goal is just to at least do it as painlessly as possible. They don't want to come up with procedures, they don't want to figure all this stuff out. They just want to go somewhere and say, "This is my problem. Where is the solution?" And the solution would exist somewhere within this HR portal. Was that what the online business is?

Pat Eardley: Yeah. You're on point, you're spot on.

Shane Sams: The difference is there's do it yourself, right? And then there's do it for you. But in the middle is do it with you. So this is a very like do it with you kind of membership. It's like, "Yeah, here, just read this document. It'll help you hire somebody. Read this document, watch this course. It'll help you deal with the workman's comp claim." Or something like that.

Pat Eardley: Yeah. And Shane that was good. I'm going to borrow that, that do it with me. That's good.

Shane Sams: Yeah. I'm pretty good at writing descriptions for businesses. I've done this a few times.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay. Pat. So in your podcast intake form that you fill out before you come on the show, you told us that this is a brand new business. And I'm just wondering what you have done so far? I know that you have a website. So tell me a little bit about what is already there.

Pat Eardley: So yes, the website is done, the portal is there. Really what I'm trying to do now is building the followers, right? Building the list because it is a different client than what we would be after in the consultancy. Because in the consultancy we know that there's a minimum amount that that client or that prospect is okay with spending.

Shane Sams: Right.

Pat Eardley: But this is someone who's at a lower price point, they need a lower price point. So I think that right now I'm trying to figure out like how do I get to those individuals? How do I target them?

Jocelyn Sams: And I know that you're thinking about membership as far as like your product. Do you have anything prepared for that? Like is it ready to go basically is what I'm asking?

Pat Eardley: Yes. Yes. To answer the question. It is ready to go.

Shane Sams: Okay. What fears and mindset issues are like holding you back then right now? Is it just confusion? Is it just, I don't know how to reach these people. Is it just they're so different because we're not marketing to the same people in the consultancy. If it's ready to go and ready to launch, like what's kind of holding you back right now then?

Pat Eardley: I think it's a few of those things you just said. I'm a little fearful because it is a different client and I'm not sure where to find them. I don't necessarily think they're on LinkedIn. They may be on Facebook, they may be on YouTube. So I'm trying to figure out what is the right avenue to take to find them. And then secondly, how do I communicate what the site does.

Shane Sams: Right.

Pat Eardley: With HR I will go to events and I'll tell people, "Oh, I do HR." And they think, "Oh payroll?" And I'm like, "No." And they're like, "Oh, benefits?" "No." So how do you teach the audience what you do? And I'm thinking that that's via video. That's what I'm thinking.

Shane Sams: Well that could definitely be the platform. And it's really interesting the fear, you said like, "I don't know where to find these people." It almost sounded like deep behind your voice it was like, "Do they even exist?" Right? Because you've had success finding clients in the, we'll say 50 to 100 range, right?

Pat Eardley: Yeah.

Shane Sams: So where are all the people in the one to 25, or one to 50 range, right? Because you've never had to go out and find those people before. But I would actually say there's probably way more people like that than there are in 50 to 100 employee range. Right? So they're there. It's just a matter of finding them. And usually the best way to find people in your niche is to search for people who are searching for symptoms. Right? So like a lot of times we'll say, "What is a symptom of a problem they're having?" Because they don't know... Let's say there's someone with five employees, they just started hiring, they've made a bunch of mistakes, they have no clue how to manage all these people. Right? Like Jocelyn and I-

Jocelyn Sams: Oh are you talking about us?

Shane Sams: Yeah we're talking about us. That was us. We started hiring people. We had no clue what was going on. We had no clue how to manage anything like benefits or onboarding. I didn't even know there was a thing called onboarding when we first hired our first employee.

Jocelyn Sams: Well there's not a class in college called How To Effectively Manage People. Or maybe there is, I don't know. My degree-

Shane Sams: Wait a second I know that.

Jocelyn Sams: ... Is literally in management and I fail at this.

Shane Sams: Yeah right. And it's like all the HR stuff, they don't... No one would know the technical terms of onboarding employees that you've hired recently, right? Like no one's going to know. They're going to be like, "God, this person I hired didn't fit their job." Or something. Right? Like, "I can't find a A+ employee." Right?

Pat Eardley: Right.

Shane Sams: So that's the best way to do it is to figure out the symptoms of the problems that they are having, and then figure out the language that they're using to talk about it. And that will at least tell you what they're searching for.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. And honestly, I would venture to say that most small businesses aren't really thinking about this. They're not sitting back and going, "I really need an HR person to help me out." What they're thinking is, "Oh gosh, somebody just filed a workman's compensation." Or whatever it's called, workers comp claim, "And I don't know what to do."

Shane Sams: So the way you can word this to like catch people and your lead magnets and stuff, is you can use have you ever statements, right? These are powerful statements, especially for email lists, or even if you're involved in online Facebook groups and stuff like that. You can say, "Have you ever had an employee file a workman's comp claim? And you had no idea what to do?" Right?

Pat Eardley: Yeah.

Shane Sams: Or, "Have you ever hired someone but couldn't figure out how to teach them how to do their job?" Right? That's onboarding. We know that word is onboarding, but that is not a word in the vocabulary of the pizza guy who's got five employees, a cook and a couple servers, right?

Pat Eardley: Yeah, you're right. They're just saying, "How come they don't get it?"

Shane Sams: Yeah. Like, "How come you didn't do your job?" They don't know. You could walk up to that guy and go, "Could you show me your SOP's for making pizza and getting them to the table?" And he'd be like, "What's a sops? What's a sop? That's what you do with a rag when you spill out water. You sop it up."

Pat Eardley: That's so good.

Shane Sams: You know what I'm saying? He doesn't know what a SOP is. Right? But like I didn't know what an SOP was five years ago. But you could say to somebody, "Do you have a checklist that the pizza cook needs to follow?" But that's a system and procedure. We know that, HR helps with that. We have onboarding and stuff like that. But they don't know that. Right?

Pat Eardley: Right.

Shane Sams: Or like, "How do I get health insurance for my employees?" Like that's a question that someone... So that's the kind of mindset shift you've got to have when you have the curse of knowledge. You've got 20 years of experience. You've been doing this since you were five years-old. Remember? All that information is in your head and you know all these jargon's and terms, and things that people need to know. But what you need to look for is the question that they're asking. Okay? So that's where you got to go to find your audience is the symptoms. Think about the symptoms, research keywords in Google. Because everyone goes and tries to solve their problem with Google. Right? They search there before they search their own brain. We can start looking there for some of these symptoms that people are having. Then My Shift HR is going to cure it for them. Okay?

Pat Eardley: Yeah.

Jocelyn Sams: All right. So you have your platform, you have your product ready, which is awesome. That's one of the things that we are really big on, having your products ready to go. So that when your audience starts coming they will have something to purchase. So let's talk about audience. Do you have an audience? Have people started coming to your site and do you have social media followers? Do you have an email list?

Pat Eardley: I do have an email list. I probably have about 45 to 50 people on that email list.

Shane Sams: Awesome.

Pat Eardley: I don't have what I would say an audience on social media because I don't have like a Facebook page that is the My Shift HR Facebook page. But I do have a Shift HR Facebook page. So I guess that would be a question that I'd ask you. Do you guys feel that I should... So the flip your life live training that you've been doing Shane. One of the, I think it was the first training you said that you set up your businesses separately. And I'm wondering should I do that for this? Like should there be a Facebook page for My Shift HR? And whatever other social media avenue I choose, should that be separate from Shift HR? Because I haven't done that. I haven't done anything in that realm yet.

Shane Sams: I totally would separate them completely. Because the one big thing that we've already determined for sure is this is a totally different market segment, right? Like this is not the same person necessarily. And you're going to need some way to filter them like, "These are the people who might be candidates for my consulting. These are people who are candidates for the do it with you online training." Right?

Pat Eardley: Yes.

Shane Sams: Yeah. You need to separate everything and keep... We will even separate things like products. We have our flip your life community with all of our trainings, we have our forums, we have our two Q&A's that we do every month, Jocelyn and I do Live with our premium members inside of the flip your life community. Right? But we have another product, it's a print newsletter. It's all about marketing and promotion. It comes every week to your mailbox. Okay? I have that completely separate. It's a separate payment processor. It's a separate everything because that's a different avatar, and that's a different segment than the actual flip your life community, right? The flip your life community is really focused on starting, building, growing, getting those first 50 customers, right? Getting those first 50 people to pay you $50 a month and make that first good chunk of change. And then it's time to really market and promote it. And that's what my newsletter is, Prolific Monthly. But we separate products even, if it's got a different segment you need to have some separation between it, you know what I'm saying?

Pat Eardley: Yeah.

Shane Sams: I could start a Facebook group for my marketing newsletter because it talks about different things than are talked about in building your website, getting your courses done, creating your content for the first time. And if there's a line between brick and mortar and online, and the markets totally different, yes you need to totally separate that. Now you can see the other one though. You can be like, "Hey, everybody who follows me right now on this page, if you have less than 25 employees, you've got to check out my new page." You see what I'm saying?

Pat Eardley: Yeah. Okay.

Shane Sams: That's the market delineation there, right? That's 25 to 50 people, somewhere in there. We know that's the gray area, right?

Pat Eardley: Yeah.

Shane Sams: If you can get them over to move over to the new place, then you're going to have a lot easier time marketing your stuff and you're not going to overwhelm them with, "Hey, I've got a consultancy package open if you've got 90 employees." And then they're like, "Well this isn't relevant to me." Right? But this other one would be. So yeah, I would totally, always have something separate.

Jocelyn Sams: And let's talk a little bit about your content strategy. What are you doing as far as content? Are you blogging, are you podcasting? Are you doing videos? What does that look like?

Pat Eardley: What I've been doing is Facebook Lives.

Shane Sams: Okay.

Pat Eardley: I will post a statement or a question and see what feedback I get from the question. And then that opens the door for further communication. But what I found to be most successful is Facebook Lives.

Shane Sams: Okay. How many people follow your page right now? Are you doing Facebook Lives on your personal profile page? Or are you doing-

Pat Eardley: Yeah. No. I'm doing Facebook Lives on the Shift HR page.

Shane Sams: Okay.

Pat Eardley: But so that was the question you just answered about like I probably should make that separate. Or I should do the Facebook Lives on the Shift HR page and point them to My Shift HR.

Shane Sams: How many people follow you there? Is it a big following? Is it a little following? Is it? How many people are there? Give or take.

Pat Eardley: I don't know. Let me... 1300, 1200. Something like that.

Shane Sams: Oh wow. That's really good. That's really, really good. So you've got a lot... Yeah. You can keep doing them there. But here's the problem with building Facebook's platform instead of your own platform. That'll show up in their news feed. Maybe. Maybe you can put some money behind it and boost the Facebook Live so more of your followers see it. Right? But really it just disappears into the nothingness of the social media noise factory. Right? Like when you're done with it. And you're not getting any Google search traffic off of that. You're not getting any traffic on any other platform. It's just there, which is okay. But I think we need to... To build your audience, you're going to have to expand out and you've got to get search and social traffic. And this is where a lot of people make a mistake because they'll do one thing and then like they never get found in Google.

Shane Sams: And they're like, "Why does no one ever find me?" And I'm like, "Well because they search for things that you're interested in. And you're not there. You're not in the search results." So I wonder if you couldn't even like do your Facebook Live there, right? And then like you said for a while, you could start pointing people to your other place. You know what I'm saying?

Pat Eardley: Yeah. Yeah.

Shane Sams: Or you could start a group. Just say, "I've got a group for people who are less than 50 employees." Right? And like attach the group to the page so the page can stay brick and mortar, and the group can be kind of your online component or your avatar. But then you could download that video, right? And then upload it to YouTube.

Pat Eardley: Okay.

Shane Sams: And then people could find you on YouTube. And then you could take that YouTube embed, right? And you could do a blog post and you can embed it at the top of the blog post, write some notes, and start getting search traffic to your new website, right? So you don't have to do a lot of extra work, but you just need to give yourself a better opportunity to be found in more places. You could even take the audio off that same Facebook Live, and you could launch a podcast. And like you just use the audio, it doesn't matter, right? You're still telling people about your group, you're still telling people about your freebies on your email list. But now that one Facebook live creates YouTube traffic, creates traffic from podcasts, it creates a blog post. And it's not really that hard. You're just downloading, uploading, downloading, uploading. That's it. That's all you have to do.

Pat Eardley: Okay. Right.

Shane Sams: And you can give yourself a lot better chance to be found.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. And it will be awesome if you could teach one of the people who are working with you, or you can even hire someone to do this relatively inexpensively to explode that content out. You can find someone and just say, "Okay, I need this video uploaded here. I need it uploaded here." And put together some simple procedures for doing that.

Shane Sams: Yeah.

Pat Eardley: So here's a question. So when would you guys say that for videos, home should be YouTube?

Shane Sams: I think so because YouTube is a search engine. It's the second biggest search engine on the planet, right? So if you're going to do video... Now, the problem is, it's not a problem. But the thing is you've got people engaging with your Live videos on Facebook, right? So like you kind of have, it can start, it doesn't matter where the content explosion starts from. I can light the wick to the dynamite at the end or in the middle, it's still going to blow up, right? So it doesn't matter. So you can start on Facebook, get your engagement, that's going to get your questions and stuff like that. But it's like you can't hide that content there on Facebook. Everything eventually falls off the bottom of the newsfeed, right? What we need is content that can be found in organic search results.

Shane Sams: Okay? So like YouTube, people search for, how do I follow a workman's comp claim? Wouldn't it be nice if you had a video called How To File A Workman's Comp Claim If You Don't Have An HR Person, right? And then you do a video on Facebook Live, people ask you questions. Then you take that video and put it over here. Now you write a blog post called that. So now if someone searches for that in YouTube, they find you, if someone searches for that over in Google, they find you. If someone is on your Facebook page, you can boost the post and now they can find you through some paid advertising. Right? And then at the end of that article on your website, you have, "Hey, get my free checklist for filing a workman's comp claim. Opt in now."

Shane Sams: On YouTube, "Click the link in the description to get my free opt in for how to file a workman's comp claim." Like you see what I'm saying? Like you're giving yourself an opportunity to be found where people are looking for the answers to their questions. Okay? And it doesn't have to start anywhere. It's more like a circle. Like there's Facebook on one spoke of the wheel, there's Google on one spoke of the wheel, there's YouTube on the other spoke, maybe Twitter's on the other spoke. And you're always just constantly referring to everything all the time, and sending people through all of your stuff. That way they follow you everywhere. And you've got a better chance to like talk to them.

Pat Eardley: Right.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. And the good your content strategy should be pretty easy as far as knowing what to talk about because you've been doing this a very long time, which means that you have lots of good questions and you have insight as to what people might need to know.

Shane Sams: And she's doing Facebook Lives with feedback so she has people literally asking her questions. Like every question is a blog post or a YouTube video.

Jocelyn Sams: And at the end of your video say, "Hey guys, I'm doing a series. And I would love to know what you need help with. Type your questions in here. And I'll answer them on a future Live video."

Shane Sams: So let me circle this back around to why this is important for your launch strategy because we really want... You've got a product that's the most important thing. You have a product and some people paying attention to you, right? So like you got a social media following, you've got a small email list that could definitely be launched right now for beta. Like, "Hey, this things open. Go try and buy it." Right? You could totally ask people to do that right now because the product's ready? Right? So as a launch strategy though, what you have to do is build audience. And you build audience with content. That's the only way you can build an audience online is with content, either your content or participating in other people's content, right?

Shane Sams: If you were to go on an HR podcast and they had business people listening about HR, that's content you're creating to get in front of new people. If you create organic content regularly consistently produced blog posts or YouTube videos, whatever it is that's going to build your audience. And then you're always asking for the opt in, that's going to slowly, organically build up enough people where you start filtering them through the machine to get into your sales pages and all that stuff. Now if you want to just immediately go after a bigger audience with some paid advertising, then the best way to launch a membership or any kind of product like this is consistent weekly webinars.

Shane Sams: You would basically go find, remember those words we talked about that people are searching for in the language that they're looking for those symptoms. You would go to Google, you would go to YouTube, and you would do some research using tools like the Google AdWords keyword tool or VidIQ.com for YouTube. And you would see what are people looking for? You would find some of these words, show ads to those search results to let people sign up for your webinar. You could have a webinar that's called How To Handle Human Resources When You Have Less Than 25 Employees And Can't Afford An HR Professional. Right? Something like that, just really direct.

Pat Eardley: Right.

Shane Sams: And that's like an opt in. So, "Hey, I'm having a free training this Thursday or Sunday." Whatever day you do it. "Come sign up for it. I'll send you an email to remind you." They opt in, you do the webinar, you put your thing at the end of it. Okay? So there's your two big strategies that you've got to flesh out now. You've got to have a prolific and consistent content schedule, right? Where you're repurposing and reusing this on different platforms. That's your organic strategy. And then you've got to have a paid strategy and the best way to do it when you've got a product is just buy traffic to your opt in page, get them to a webinar and pitch it live.

Shane Sams: We'll do it live. If you do it live, you're much more likely to sell a few people in. But you also, right now need to send an email to those 42 people and say "The doors are open. Come to the grand opening. This is going to be XX dollars, but I'm only going to charge you X dollars if you join now for a beta. Come in and break stuff." See what happens, right?

Pat Eardley: Yeah. Right.

Shane Sams: You've got got an email list. And I would do a Facebook Live launch. I would hype it up like, "I'm going to do a Sunday night Facebook Live launch." You've got 1300 people. I bet all 1300 of those people are not consulting candidates. I would say some percentage of those people that follow you right now are definitely in this target market, right? One to 50 employees, let's say.

Pat Eardley: Yeah, right.

Shane Sams: So you need to do a Facebook Live and open the door. You need to send an email and open the door and let people know that you have something for sale. Because someone might buy it. You just have to ask them to buy it right now.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay Pat, this might seem a little bit overwhelming, right? So what are you thinking right now?

Pat Eardley: Well, there's a ton of information, but it's good information. So the question that popped up in my mind when Shane, you were talking about doing a Facebook Live and then uploading that to YouTube, and then turning that into a blog. Should blogs be separate from your membership site? Should they be a separate URL altogether?

Shane Sams: Not really. No. It's just like your web... No. You use blog on your website, you know what I'm saying?

Pat Eardley: Okay.

Shane Sams: You're just creating content. You need organic content to go to your website. You need search traffic, right?

Pat Eardley: Right.

Shane Sams: So you have your blog on My Shift HR, right? That's the one that's got the membership on it, correct?

Pat Eardley: Yes, yes.

Shane Sams: You just do the blog there. And then at the end of the blog you point them to an opt in. And at the end of the opt in you point them to the sales page for your membership.

Pat Eardley: Okay, that's great. I knew that you could do blogs for a typical website. But I just didn't know if that same rule would apply for a membership site. So thanks.

Shane Sams: What platform are you using on it? Like where? Is it hosted on a WordPress website? Like what-

Pat Eardley: Yes it is. WordPress.

Shane Sams: Yeah, you can just go ahead and make posts and they'll appear organically in the background.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. So I think what maybe you're trying to ask is should the membership site be separate from your website? Is that kind of what you're saying?

Pat Eardley: No, no. Okay. So Shift HR is a separate website. And that does have a blog on it. But I didn't know if you could actually, if you should, like what the rule was for putting a blog on a membership site.

Shane Sams: Oh there's no rules. There's no rules.

Pat Eardley: Okay.

Jocelyn Sams: You're like there's no rules.

Shane Sams: Yeah. There's no rules. We just make up the rules as we go. Basically, here's the deal. If you don't blog weekly at least, or if you don't do something on your website weekly, nobody's ever going to find your website.

Pat Eardley: Yes.

Shane Sams: Because every blog post, every podcast, everything you do on your website is a breadcrumb to lead Hansel and Gretel back home. Right?

Pat Eardley: Right.

Shane Sams: If you're not throwing breadcrumbs, then the witch gets Hansel and Gretel and you don't, right?

Pat Eardley: Right.

Shane Sams: So it's like you've got to go out and create content of some kind. You're doing the same thing on YouTube, but here's the problem. If you ever look up and you say, "I'm building someone else's platform, not mine. Then you don't control your platform." Like you can make your YouTube channel. And it's very unlikely. But what if they shut your YouTube channel down? Then you lose all your traffic. What if Facebook and their infinite algorithmic wisdom shuts down your Facebook page? You don't get to talk to those 1300 people anymore. Right?

Pat Eardley: Right.

Shane Sams: But you just never know what's going to happen with that stuff. But you do know what's going to happen on your website. So you want the search traffic coming there. If you do anything content driven on any other platform, the goal is to drive them back to your place because you own your place. But you have to create content there. You know what I'm saying?

Pat Eardley: Yeah.

Shane Sams: And the only gray area is what contents free and what contents not. But you've already kind of figured that out.

Pat Eardley: Yeah. And I think your point about converting the videos into a blog is great because like I hate writing. I used to literally write an article every month for the local paper about HR. And I didn't enjoy it at all. So I think-

Shane Sams: In online business you don't have to do anything you don't want to do.

Pat Eardley: Yeah.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. That's the awesome thing about it is like you can build it whatever way you want to. So if you really, really love speaking and doing video, then find a way to make it work to take it to other platforms. Okay, Pat. Well it has been so much fun talking to you today and I can't wait to see what happens next in your business. So before we go, we always like to ask our guest, what is one thing that you plan to take action on in the next little bit based on what we talked about today?

Pat Eardley: Well, I think that what I need to take action on is definitely getting more content out there. It's pretty overwhelming. And I know like this is you guy's every day. But for a newbie I'm like, "Oh my gosh, there's so much to do." But I think just simplifying one, and then figuring out like, "Okay, just start with content and then you can convert this to that. And then you can convert that to that." It's really not as hard as it seems.

Shane Sams: You just have to take the next step. Like that's where people get overwhelmed as they zoom back too far. Right? If you think to yourself, "Oh, what's the next year of content going to look like?" Yes, it's overwhelming. But if you think, "What's my next blog video going to be?" Then you just go do your video and then you make it a YouTube video. And then you make it a blog post.

Jocelyn Sams: And if you ask the people on your videos, you don't even have to think about what the next one's going to be because they'll tell you.

Shane Sams: And I want to challenge you to do one more thing launching this product. Because launching a product has this big mythical almost like storytelling aura about it. I'm going to launch my product, right? If I can go to your sales page right now, you've already launched, it's available. It can be bought, right? So it's not about launching your product, it's just telling people that it's for sale. You need to email your list as soon as we hang up, "This is open, go buy it. Here's why you should buy it." And now you're launched. Okay? Never hold back telling people that you have a product for sale. It needs to be on the front page of the website, like a little ad for it. Right? So I would really encourage you in the next 24 hours too, to email those 42 people and do a Facebook Live about your membership. Tell people about it. You never know, there might be 10 people there begging to give you your money. Okay?

Pat Eardley: Yeah. Thank you.

Shane Sams: All right guys, that wraps up another great talk with one of our flip your life community members. I cannot wait to see what happens next as Pat launches her business. If you need help launching your very own online business, Jocelyn and I would love to help you do it inside of the flip your life community. All you have to do to learn more about our community is go to FlippedLifestyle.com/FlipYourLife. We have all the training you need to get started with your online business. We've got all the community support you need to hold you accountable, and help you take your next steps.

Shane Sams: And Jocelyn and I will be there to help you all along the way. Go to FlippedLifestyle.com/FlipYourLife, and who knows you may be on a future episode of the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. We are about out of time, but before we go, we love to close every episode of the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast with a Bible verse. Jocelyn and I get a lot of our inspiration and motivation from the Bible. And we love to share these verses with you guys so you can get that too. And we're super excited because today our guest Pat has a Bible verse that is special to her. So Pat take it away.

Pat Eardley: Well, the Bible verse that I want to share is Jeremiah 17, 7, and 8. And most people have heard the first part of this verse, but I don't know if anybody out there is like me, but sometimes I struggle with fear. And this verse has become my life verse to help me to not struggle with fear. So it says blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord and whose trust is in the Lord. For he will be like a tree planted by the water that extends its roots by the stream and will not fear when he comes. But its leaves will be green and it will not be anxious in a year of drought nor cease to yield fruit. So when life gets hard, sometimes we want to just kind of recoil and not fight. But this verse helps us to know that God's got it. And we just need to be strong and fight through it.

Shane Sams: Oh I got chills. Wow. What an amazing Bible verse that Pat shared there guys. Look, it's really important in your life, in your business to plant those deep roots, get through all those anxious times because there is great hope, and awesome stuff on the other side of those trials, those tribulations, those hard things, those overwhelming things that we all have to fight through on a daily basis. And what a great reminder it is to get through that stuff. That's all the time we have this week guys. Thanks for listening. Until next time, get out there, take action, do whatever it takes to flip your life. We'll see you then.

Jocelyn Sams: Bye.

Links and resources mentioned on today’s show: * Pat's Website * Flip Your Life LIVE 2019 Tickets & Registration Information * Flip Your Life community * PROLIFIC Monthly

Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!

Join the Flip Your Life Community NOW for as little as $19 per month!

https://flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife

View Details

In this Best of Episode, we re-visit Chapter 1 of the "Our story" series.

We'll be sharing our entire "Our Story" episodes in the Saturday "Best of" releases over the next few weeks.

You don't want to miss these! We'll be giving you all the juicy details of who we are, where we began, and how it all happened!

This episode was originally published on October 10, 2017. You can check out the original episode here: https://flippedlifestyle.com/podcast164/

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Shane: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams.

We’re a real family who figured out how to make our entire living online. And now, we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? Alright. Let’s get started.

What’s up, everybody? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. Great to be back with you again today. This is going to be a solo show with just me and Jocelyn. We are not going to have a guest on the program today. As we continue to tell you a little bit more about our story, about how two normal people from Kentucky were able to start an online business with no money, no time, while working full-time, raising kids, and basically, how maybe you can do it, too. That is what we are doing today, we are talking about the next chapter in our story.

Last week, we told you a little bit about our early life about where we came from, where we grew up, before Jocelyn and I knew each other. The next chapter in our story is actually about how we met in college at the University of Kentucky.

Jocelyn: Alright, in our last episode, we were talking about how young I was when I went to college. At the time, I thought I was all grown up and independent but looking back now, I realized how incredibly young and naïve I really was.

Shane: You technically were not even legally of age. You are not even 18 years old when you moved away from home. But could not even vote when you moved out of your hometown and moved to the big city in Lexington.

Jocelyn: And the scary thing about that is I think about how my son is eight. I was nine years older than him when I went to college. That is just scary. I can’t even picture my son being that age. I know there is a big difference between 8 and 17. But still there is not as big of a difference as you think.

Shane: It is scary. There is no way we would ever let our kids– like Jocelyn, her birthday is on March 27th. My birthday is actually on March 28th. Funny story about that, we will talk about that soon. I will tell you about that later. Jocelyn was born on March 27th. She turned 17 on March 27th of her senior year. Did you move in June? Or when did you move?

Jocelyn: I think it was probably like early August of that year.

Shane: Yeah, okay.

Jocelyn: When I moved into the dorms. I could not wait, I was counting down the minutes. I was just a very independent person. I knew that it would not be a problem. Honestly, I never even really went home. I went home sometimes. You know how sometimes people in college, they will go home every single weekend? Yeah, that was not me. I went home maybe once a month if I had to. Again, it is not because I had a bad home life or anything like that. I was just that fiercely independent. I just wanted to do my own thing.

Shane: So you graduated in 97? I had already been in college a year then, right, when you came to college?

Jocelyn: Yeah, you were a sophomore when I got there.

Shane: I graduated in 1996, and I was kind of the same way. I had a dream my whole life to go to the University of Kentucky.

Jocelyn: And I did, too.

Shane: Which is hilarious because I didn’t really work hard enough in school to actually get the grades to go to college anywhere. But I wanted to go to the University of Kentucky. I refused to go anywhere else, on any college visits, I didn’t go look at any other schools, didn’t go anywhere. I just wanted to go to the University of Kentucky because I love Kentucky basketball, I loved Kentucky football, and I just really wanted to go live in Lexington.

Jocelyn: For me, I just really wanted and escape from small-town life. Most people where I am from, they went to either Western Kentucky University, which is actually where I had my Master’s degree from. They went to Murray State University; both are fine schools, nothing wrong with the schools, nothing wrong with them at all. It is just I did not want to go there. I wanted to get away. I wanted to get out of small-town life and experience something new. Funny story is, I even got a scholarship to Murray State University. I had applied to two places, I applied to Murray State, and I applied to UK. I wasn’t able to apply for scholarships for UK because you had to have a 28 on the ACT.

Shane: So she was just a little shy.

Jocelyn: I took it four times, and the highest I could get was a 27.

Shane: But she could’ve went to school for free at Murray. It was like dorms and television, or something.

Jocelyn: Part of it was covered. I can’t remember exactly what it was.

Shane: Would have been a lot cheaper though.

Jocelyn: Yes, it would have been a lot less expensive but I talked to my parents and they basically said, “Look, you worked really hard all through school. You should do whatever you want to do.” And so I did.

Shane: Thank goodness she did.

Jocelyn: I felt like that was just where I was supposed to be.

Shane: I wonder if it was because I was there. The fates were telling you, “The love of your life, the shining star of your universe, is waiting for you at the University of Kentucky.” Right? Your knight in shining armor riding the white horse. But I actually wanted to go to UK really bad, too. To when I graduated high school, I had no scholarship offers, I had absolutely nothing.

Jocelyn: How’d you even get in?

Shane: I barely made it in. Like seriously, I had the exact GPA where you could barely every once in a while apply and get in. Actually, I did not go straight to the University of Kentucky. I did go live in the dorms my first year and I lived on campus. There was a community college that was attached to UK–

Jocelyn: So you could still live in the dorms.

Shane: Yeah, you could live in the dorms, you could go to UK, but you went to the Lexington Community College part which was over by the football stadium. I actually went to that first. That was my first year. My shining principles as a student, and just the excellent student I was, of course, I did not barely ever go to class. I had a crazy roommate who ended up failing out of school which was a whole other ball of acts. I was around some people who were not the best examples of human beings that you could probably hang out with in your life. I did not go to class very much, and I almost failed out.

My first semester, I made all D’s and one C or something. I actually dropped a course instead of failing it, so I only ended up getting 12 hours that semester. I actually came home, and one day, my dad put me in his car, and he goes, “Hey, come up to the office with me.” And I’m like, “Alright, I’m home for Christmas or something. I will ride up there with you.” My dad gets of the car and then he goes by his office, and I kind of look over at him and I’m like, “What are you doing?” He didn’t say anything, did not say a word.

He just goes and gets on the interstate. And I’m like, “Oh man, he got my report card. He knows my grades were terrible. This is what this is all about right here.” He takes me 30 minutes south to this really teeny, tiny town in the middle of nowhere that has this little, bitty NAI college tucked over in the mountains. It was probably not a thousand, maybe at this time a thousand people went to the whole school. He just pulls off the interstate, and he starts driving around campus. For like 20 minutes he wouldn’t say a word to me, and finally looks over at me and goes, “Pretty campus, huh? If your grades aren’t better next semester, you are going to be going to school here. So get used to it.” And then he just drove me home.

I literally almost screwed it up before you even got to college and would have never met you in the first place. And you almost went to Murray. Our paths, legit, we were almost that Ships in the Night song, just crossed. I got my act together, I met this girl that helped me get through algebra the second semester, and then I actually studied as much as I could, and did a lot better my second semester. Not my best semester ever, that was when I met Jocelyn.

But that got me through my freshman year. You lived in the dorm next door to me when you were a freshman and I was a sophomore, right?

Jocelyn: Yeah, I lived in the building that was like adjacent to where Shane lived.

Shane: We looked back on it now, but we didn’t meet until Jocelyn was a sophomore because we ended up both moving dorms, and we lived in the same dorm. I can think back, and I think there were two places where our paths kind of crossed. One night, I was over at another girl’s room. A friend of mine from high school, and Jocelyn lived next door to her. I was sitting on the bed, and–

Jocelyn: This story dates us a bit.

Shane: This story dates us a bit. There was a knock on the door, there was a bunch of us in there, and this beautiful girl came to the door. I was like, “Who was that?” I just caught a brief glimpse of her, and she was coming to borrow the phone book.

Jocelyn: That’s right.

Shane: That’s right. An actual, like, the phone book, like you had to flip through.

Jocelyn: Some people listening to this podcast probably don’t even know what a phonebook is.

Shane: Yeah, some of you may not even know what a phonebook is. But we had phonebooks, okay? She came by to borrow the phonebook to call a pizza place or something, I don’t know what it was. But I remember just asking my friend. I was like, “Who’s that?” And she was like, “Oh just the girl who lives next door.” Didn’t think anything of it, and then that winter, there was a huge snow. It was the only time our entire college career.

Jocelyn: Classes actually got canceled, which was unheard of.

Shane: Yes, classes got canceled at UK. People were everywhere having snowball fights. Me and some buddies were outside having a snowball fight and a bunch of girls walked out of your dorm. I think you were one of them, and I think we started throwing snowballs at you guys or something, trying to get you guys to join us.

Jocelyn: We’re not 100% sure.

Shane: But something like this happened, but we were pretty sure that our paths kind of crossed a couple times. What really happened was the second year Jocelyn was there, my 3rd year, I moved to a dorm that was called, “The Wellness Dorm” because it had a gym in the basement.

Jocelyn: And I also moved to that dorm because it had a gym in the basement and because there was no smoking allowed, because at that time, smoking was still allowed at dorms.

Shane: That time, you could smoke right out in the dorms in the college. We ended up moving into the same dorm. We were there for a little while, and I was still kind of wild, and I was actually going out one night with my friends. We would drive down to Richmond, KY to go hang out and you know–

Jocelyn: Dance clubs.

Shane: Dance clubs and college stuff. Me and two of my buddies were getting ready to go out. I lived on the second floor, Jocelyn– I didn’t notice it at the time, but she lived on the third floor– and my buddies lived on the first floor. I was getting dressed up, sprayed my $10 Walmart cologne on so the ladies would be smelling good–

Jocelyn: That is what stopped me in my tracks. I’m just saying.

Shane: That’s right, that $10 Walmart cologne, baby. I think Gravity is what it was. It’s, like, Gravity. Go get yourself some of that Gravity, guys, I’m telling you. Brings the ladies in like crazy. Flies to honey, I’m telling you. Anyway, I go out of my dorm, I will never forget this moment in my life. I walk down the stairs, and as I’m going down to go with my friends to chase women, basically, Jocelyn walked in. She was coming up the stairs. Where were you coming from? Work?

Jocelyn: No, I had just come from the gym. I had been working out.

Shane: Okay. Jocelyn was coming up the stairs. I had to talk to her. I had to stop her. There was something about that moment was just like, I had to stop her. She walked up the steps a little bit, and I kind of walked a little bit past her. I turned as I passed her, and I said, “Hey, what is your name?” And Jocelyn turned around and said–

Jocelyn: “My name is Jocelyn.”

Shane: Jocelyn what?

Jocelyn: Jocelyn Hyravi.

Shane: Here name was Jocelyn Hyravi. And I said, “Whoa, where are you from? Is that foreign?” And she is like, “Kentucky.” I thought like ‘Hyravi’ sounds like some kind of foreign, exotic name.

Jocelyn: And it is, it’s Czechoslovakian.

Shane: Czechoslovakian, yeah. I thought to myself, whoa, I got this exotic foreign woman walking into my dorm, but it turns out she was just from Western Kentucky. Anyway, I was going out with my friends, and I didn’t have time to talk to her and I don’t really remember exactly what happened after that. We just kind of exchanged names, and said, “Hey, kind of hope we run into each other at some time.” She went up, and I went down. Did you think anything of that first encounter lesson, like, at all?

Jocelyn: Who is this creepy guy talking to me at the stairs with the terrible cologne?

Shane: “Man, that guy smelled terrible. He buys his cologne at Walmart. What a cheapo.”

Jocelyn: No, I mean, I remember it but I don’t know. I guess I didn’t–

Shane: It was kind of passing and passing, so it wasn’t that big of a deal. But it definitely left an impression on me because I went to my friend’s room, they were downstairs, and I was looking down at the ground shaking my head like, “That girl was awesome.” And I sat down on my buddies bed and they were like, “Dude, what is wrong with you?” At that moment, just knowing Jocelyn’s name, I looked at my friends, and I said, “I just met the girl that I’m going to marry. I know it, I don’t know how I know it, I don’t know when it is going to happen, I don’t know what is going to happen, but I just met the girl that I am going to marry.” And they’re like, “All right, shut up, let’s go.”

So, we go on, we go out. We come back, and I don’t know how long it was between we ran into each other again.

Jocelyn: Probably like a week or maybe two, I don’t know.

Shane: Yeah, it was pretty good. I was standing in the lobby talking to a buddy of mine who was working at the desk.

Jocelyn: It was a mutual friend.

Shane: Yeah, a mutual friend. Jocelyn comes in the door on this day, and she comes up and she says something to the guy. I was like, “Hey!” And she was like, “Hey!” And we kind of remembered each other. Jocelyn and I started talking. We did the classic, ‘What’s your major?’, ‘What are you studying?’ And Jocelyn says, “Computers.” She said she is studying computers. I’m like, “Really? Because I am having some computer problems and since you are a pro at computers, maybe you can totally help me with that.” I’m like, “I have a printer. I cannot get my printer to print. Could you come up to my room and check out my printer, maybe?”

Jocelyn: And being the nerd and the nice person that I am, I said, “Sure, I’ll be happy to help you.”

Shane: Did you go back to your room first, or did you come straight up with me?

Jocelyn: No, I think I just came up there. Because that’s smart.

Shane: That is smart, right? Strange guy inviting you to his room in the dorm to fix his printer. We go up there, it was the darndest thing. My printer worked.

Jocelyn: It worked with no issues at all.

Shane: Jocelyn sat down–

Jocelyn: That’s shocking.

Shane: — And basically hit to print, and the thing printed. But I swear that there was a problem at one time with a printer, and I was not just telling you that so you would come hang out with me, I promise.

Jocelyn: Right.

Shane: Yeah. Jocelyn comes to my room and we discover that the printer isn’t broken, and she has probably at this point now thinking, “Okay, this guy just totally lied to me to come up to his room, and hang out with him.” So I’m like, “Okay, let’s talk. What are we going to talk about?” So we started doing the other things, we start saying ‘Where you from?’ And Jocelyn is like, “I’m from Western Kentucky.” And I’m like, “I’m from Eastern Kentucky.” And then we started talking–
Jocelyn: And he was like, “How old are you?” And I’m like, “Well, I’m 18.” Oh, goodness, I was 18.

Shane: Yeah, barely legal, barely legal.

Jocelyn: He’s like, “Oh, when do you turn 19?” I’m like, “March 27th.” And he’s like, “No way, my birthday’s March 28!” And I’m like, “Okay, buddy.”

Shane: Alright, you lied to me about the printer, you tell me your birthday is the day after mine. Jocelyn literally– and this is like a window. I should have seen this window into her pragmatic, logical lifestyle. She literally made me show her my ID, like right there. Conversation didn’t get to go one minute further until I actually had to pull out my driver’s license and prove to her that my birthday actually was the day after hers. That was weird.

Jocelyn: And then we started talking about like what kind of cars we had. I’m like, “Well, I drive a Buick.” And he’s like, “I drive a Buick, too!” I’m like, “Yeah, I don’t know, man.”

Shane: “This is not right.” But it was so crazy how everything just totally lined up, and I was like I knew it. I knew I was going to marry this girl. Then, you know that awkward moment when you start a relationship where you kind of, that first time you’re together? You’re like okay, what do I say next, what do I do next? And I was sitting there, like, “I’ve got to ask this girl out. I have to ask her to go with me.” Well, as fate would have it, and for those of you who are long time listeners of the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, you know that I am an enormous pro wrestling fan. I go to WrestleMania, I go to pay-per-views, I watch wrestling every week still and I always have since I was a little kid. Me and my brother is to sneak and turn on wrestling and at 11 PM on USA. Monday nights, my mom would be in the next room and we would have the volume off, and we would just try to read their lips and watch them do their wrestling. I had ordered three tickets to WCW professional wrestling at Rupp Arena. They were doing a television taping. This was like a big wrestling promotion. I looked down, and my buddies had sold me out. I had bought these tickets, and the two guys that were going to go with me had totally sold me out, and said they couldn’t go. I looked down, and I said, “That’s what I’ll do. I’ll ask her to go with me to wrestling.” So I looked over at Jocelyn and I said, “Hey, do you like pro wrestling?” And she just looked at me–

Jocelyn: And I’m like, “No.” And I’m still like, “No, I don’t.”

Shane: And I was like, “Well, look. Listen, even if you don’t like it, you’ll have a good time. Come with me. My friends sold me out. Why don’t you come to pro wrestling with me? We will go, it will be awesome.” I have no idea why she said yes, but you did, and you said yes, and it was incredible.

Why did you say yes to that?

Jocelyn: I have no idea.

Shane: It was the cologne. That’s what it was. I was like, “Man, I’m going to sit by this guy for six hours at a wrestling taping because he smells good.”

Jocelyn: Well, I didn’t realize it was six hours.

Shane: Neither did I.

Jocelyn: Me, knowing nothing about wrestling, I don’t know anything about it.

Shane: We get there, and I thought it was like a two hour show. But they did a double taping of wrestling, and it was six straight hours of professional wrestling. This huge, enormous dude sat beside us. The dude weighed probably 500 pounds. Every time one of us would get up, and climb around him, he would be like, “Hey buddy, could you bring me back a hotdog or a beer or something, man? I’m just so big, I can’t get up.” This is Jocelyn’s first date: six hours of pro-wrestling, sitting by me in my Walmart cologne and this 600-pound guy who was asking her to bring him hotdogs. It was the best first date ever, and that is why you are still here with me today, right?

Jocelyn: Right, that wrestling really sealed the deal, let me tell you.

Shane: But the funny thing was, really, after that moment, we’ve never left each other’s side for any extended period of time since then, not being a couple moving toward living our life together. It was just a really, really cool deal.

Jocelyn: I just think back on those times now; I just think about how young we really were. Shane was 20 when we met, and I was 18. Just think back on that.

Shane: Kids, man. Kids.

Jocelyn: I mean, it was crazy that we made it this long. It was not without any bumps in the road, of course. Everybody has them. But, it has been kind of crazy. I think back to college, and just some of the things that happened along the way that helped us, I think, to be where we are today. The first thing for me is I started college with the intention of being either a computer programmer or a systems analyst. That is what I wanted to do when I grew up. Nerd alert!

Shane: Most people dream of, “I want to be a famous athlete. I would love to be able to be a movie star.” Systems analyst: Jocelyn.

Jocelyn: That’s a total shock to long-term listeners. I’m sure. But like I said, in the last episode, I didn’t really know what I want to do for sure, but I knew that I really liked working with computers and programming and other nerdy stuff like that. I was like, “Okay, you know maybe that will be a good thing.” At the University of Kentucky though, the systems analysis department was in the business department.

So, I kind of got a little bit of business because you had to have some business classes in with your systems analysis. My plan was to be a business major and a computer science minor. Well, in the middle of one of my first programming classes– it might have been my second one, I can’t remember. The instructor basically accused me and my roommate of cheating in programming. We did not. I will maintain that to this day 20 years later.

Shane: Jocelyn does not cheat at board games or anything at all, ever would cheat at anything, it’s hilarious.

Jocelyn: If I did it, I would admit it. But we honestly did not. It was just kind of a weird situation. My roommate and I, we were working on something together. We were in the same class. Basically, the timestamp on the assignment was exactly the same, like even down to the millisecond. While I admit that that is unusual, it was totally innocent. We did not do any cheating. We did work together, but that was not what she was trying to say.

Anyway, this lady accused me of cheating and that just sort of really affected me. I was just really upset about that. Honestly I just didn’t want to continue on in the program. That is how much it just really affected me. I decided, okay. This programming thing, I don’t know about. But I think I still want to stay in business. I ended up getting a job at the computer lab in the chemistry and physics building. I had two jobs in college: I worked there as a computer lab clerk and I was also a salesperson at the fitness center. I worked at an all-women’s fitness center and I did sales those experiences sort of got me thinking a little bit broader.

I started becoming interested in sales and marketing because I worked in sales at this gym, and something I had never done before, but I actually kind of liked. I started thinking, okay, well, what if I could maybe open a gym one day? That would be cool. That got my entrepreneurship wheels spinning a little bit.

Shane: When I first met Jocelyn, she was building bikes at Toys “R” Us and I would go and pick her up at Toys “R” Us when she would get off work, and then it’s so funny. Jocelyn and I, we were just broke in college, and we would always kind of try to pay for things at the first. Jocelyn is not the let-the-dude-pay-her-way kind of gal. But, what we would do is we would get our paychecks on opposite weeks.

I would pay for dinner one week, and then Jocelyn would pay for the next because we were so broke. Jocelyn was working two jobs one time. I would go sit in the computer lab with Jocelyn and she would be at work, and I would be just go and hang out at one of the computers while she was there. I’ve heard you tell that story for a minute, something just clicked to me, too. Later on in our story, a lot of you know why we got into this. We had a terrible experience with our child–

Jocelyn: Which we are going to get into in future episodes.

Shane: And we had a boss that was, you know. It was just awful. Anybody out there who’s ever dealt with a bad boss, you know what that feels like, or if you’ve got something happen to your child, you know what that feels like. We will get more into that, but in this micro chasm of the story that you just told, Jocelyn dealing with someone totally out of her control, who accused her of something stupid, you kind of realize that someone could affect you.

No power of your own, that was higher up than you, and you just said, “Screw it, I’m just going to go do something else.” You left the program. It is amazing for me to even, now, to hear that connecting that dot that that is also not just a seed of your entrepreneurial bug, or whatever. But of our mentality that was forming even at the time, we are not going to let other people ruin our life or dictate our life, and you just said, “I’m going to go a different direction.”

It is so hard. I know that a lot of people listening to this, it is so hard to change directions, you get inertia. You’ve got people at home telling you, “Oh, yeah, you should be a computer programmer.” But you are like, “No, this is not going to happen, I’m not going to deal with this. I’m going to remove this bad thing from my life and move on.” That’s something that we did later on in a very huge scale when we left our jobs.

Jocelyn: Yeah, I agree with that. It was something that happened, I didn’t like it, so I did something different. It definitely has, I think, some implications for things that happened later on in life. But as I was starting to do the sales job, I started becoming more interested in sales. I even took an entrepreneurship class because it was required in business to do. Once I took that class, I even have a business plan. I will see if I can find it.

Shane: You still have it. I’ve seen it recently.

Jocelyn: I do still have it, I’m not sure where it is at. But I even created a business plan for this entrepreneurship class, and I could remember doing that so vividly. At that moment, I was like, “Okay, do I really want to design systems my whole life?” Not to mention, that program was a master’s degree program. I was like, “I do not want to go to any more school.” At the time, I was like, “This is it. I’m going to do four years, and I’m done.” So what I decided to do, this systems analysis thing, I don’t think it is going to work out either.

What I’m going to do is I’m going to look and see what can I finish in four years? With the courses that I already have, what can I do in four years? I started looking at all the programs. What I settled with was management. I actually have a bachelor of business administration in management. That was the program I could finish in four years.

Shane: Which is hilarious, because Jocelyn hates managing any people at all. Like, period. Like, she hates it with a passion. It’s funny when we did, ‘What is your major?’ thing. I have a degree in education. I was a history teacher and the reason that I did that was basically because my dad told me to. I think the grand plan for him was to have all of his sons working for him and his insurance agency–

Jocelyn: Much more to come on that.

Shane: Much more to come on that. I actually had my insurance license already. I got it when I was 18 years old. I will never forget him telling me. I’m like, “Dad, what do I major in, what do I do?” Man, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. He said, “Be a teacher. Worst case scenario, you will always have a job. They always need teachers somewhere. It is a steady paycheck, with benefits and worst-case scenario, at the end of the day, no matter what happens, you will be all right.”

Shane: And, I was like, “Yeah, that sounds like a great idea.” I liked history, I like political science. I hated math, so it got me as far away from Math classes as possible once you go through your basics. And I was like, yeah, it sounds like a great idea. I did some business classes, but did not want to do businesses. I just was not even interested in doing it. Accounting almost made my head explode. I took an accounting class, I got a D, and I was like, “I’m out.”

Jocelyn: My accounting has never been very great.

Shane: I look back on that, and I’m really glad that I’ve got my teaching degree. It opened doors for me to coach football, it opened doors for me to make money online eventually, but one thing that I really look back on, and I look at that, was my mentality and the mentality that the world teaches to survive. You can survive, plan for the worst-case scenario. Worst-case scenario, you won’t starve to death.

I’m so blessed that my dad gave me that advice. I’m glad that I’ve got my degree. That is not the mentality that we have any more. I want a mentality of abundance and success and drive and striving for something more. That is something that I picked up even coaching football, is let’s get better. Let’s win the next game by two touchdowns, by five touchdowns.

I just don’t want to live life ‘good enough’. I don’t want to live life planning for the worst case scenario, or, “This is the worst thing that could happen, and that is not that bad.” I feel like that is why I picked my degree in college, was I was trying to set a bar that I could not fall below, but almost like a ceiling that I could never really rise above either.

Jocelyn: And we know, that looking back, at the time, it seemed like a good idea. But now, looking back, we’re like, wow. Maybe that was not–

Shane: The right mentality, basically. I think it was from my dad, like he was an entrepreneur, he went through the ups and downs of rollercoaster of struggling with his own business. It was a great thing, it was a bad thing, and I think he just wanted a very stable job for me. He wanted to know I was okay. I think that that was just, now looking back, knowing what we know now, knowing that anyone can do this online business thing, knowing that you can make everything happen in your own life, you can control your own destiny and if you just to go get it, that there is unlimited potential in all of us.

I mean, there is no cap on what any of us can accomplish, knowing that now, I wish I could go back in tell my 20-year-old self that you don’t have to plan your life around the worst case scenario. You don’t have to be scared about what happens if I take a risk, or take a chance or chase a dream instead of just picking that nice, safe, railroad-track stable path back in college.

So basically, Jocelyn goes through, and we actually graduated in the same year, even though I started college before her because I was on the five-year plan, and I may have had to retake a “few classes,” so we actually graduated in the same year.

Jocelyn: Not the same month.

Shane: Not the same month, though. I walked graduation, but I had actually gotten mad at a teacher because, oh, she was terrible. She wasn’t teaching, the class was out of control, and I just stopped going to the class because I was like, “This is ridiculous. I’m not wasting my time here.” She totally failed me, and I try to argue it. She was terrible, and it didn’t work.

Anyway, I had to go to summer school to finish my degree that year, but we did graduate in 2001. Is that right? Yeah, 2001. Jocelyn and I graduated school, and some people are like, “Propose, get married!” And things like that, but Jocelyn and I didn’t really work on anyone else’s timetable. We were not ready to get married. Or maybe, Jocelyn didn’t want to marry me because I was–

Jocelyn: Probably. No, I’m just kidding.

Shane: A little immature at the time.

Jocelyn: No, we were just super young still. I was 21, you were 23.

Shane: I kind of had it in my mind, too, that I did not want to get married until I was 25. I wanted to work a little bit and do some things.

Jocelyn: We just kind of felt like we needed to just explore the world a little bit–

Shane: — Figure out what we wanted to do with our lives.

Jocelyn: Be real adults. In college, you are not a real adult.

Shane: Just part-time adult.

Jocelyn: You are still kind of with your mom and dad. So we wanted to live on our own for a while in see how that worked out.

Shane: Basically, what we did was we actually moved back to my hometown. Jocelyn rode around with my dad, and he introduced her to everyone in town, trying to help her find a job.

Jocelyn: I got my very first apartment, living all by myself.

Shane: That’s right. So did I.

Jocelyn: That was super exciting.

Shane: I went to work for my dad selling insurance, which we are going to get into and the next episode and how fun that was. Jocelyn got a job. Where do you work first?

Jocelyn: My very first job ever was selling commercial dishwashers.

Shane: Like big dishwashers in the back of restaurants, basically.

Jocelyn: Yeah, it was my first ever real job and I have a lot more to say about that. We will get into that more in the next episode.

Shane: That gives you a little bit more background about where we come from, or education, how we met, how I tricked Jocelyn into being my girlfriend. Like coming to wrestling with me. We are about to take the next step in our journey, that’s really going to push us toward where we are today.

This is where we start growing up, start settling in, and start moving into our careers, and we start experiencing those adult things that really, most of you listening have probably felt like, “Should I be doing this? Why am I giving so much control of my life to people? Why am I working for someone else? Can I do something on my own?” We are going to take you through that journey that led us to not only turning our backs against society and getting out of the world’s view of what we should do, and moving into online business, and really flipping our life upside down.

That is all the time we have, for next week to then we will go into our first careers, and when we really started pursuing our dreams. I’m going to tell you the story of my romantic storybook proposal to Jocelyn and how I convinced her to be my bride.

Jocelyn: #nomance.

Shane: There is no romance in this story, so you’re going to want to tune in next week, and I had actually upgraded my cologne at this time. I wasn’t doing the Walmart cologne anymore, so maybe that had something to do with it. Tune in next week, and we’ll get into that, and we will take you to the next step of our Flipped Lifestyle journey.

Links and resources: * Podcast 164: Our Story - Chapter 1: Love at First Sight * Flip Your Life LIVE 2019 Tickets & Registration Information * Flip Your Life community * PROLIFIC Monthly

Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!

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In today's episode, we help Brian figure out if his business idea will make money online.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jocelyn: Hey y'all, on today's podcast we help Brian figure out if his business idea will make money online.

Shane: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast where life always comes before work. We're your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. We're a real family that figured out how to make our entire living online. Now we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? All right, let's get started.

Shane: What's going on everybody? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. It is great to be back with you again today. Super excited to talk to another member of the Flip Your Life community. You'll have to bear with us. Jocelyn and I are just getting back from a conference, and both of our voices are a little shot. We're still a little jet lagged, but that's not going to hold us back from helping today's Flip Your Life community member, Brian Kelley. Brian, we're tired, but welcome to the show.

Brian: Thank you. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

Shane: And Brian's on the road too. He's on the road too.

Brian: I absolutely am, yup.

Shane: He's in Chicago at a conference, so he might be a little tired too. We're going to go through this now. We're going to fight through it together. How's that?

Brian: That sounds great.

Jocelyn: We're excited to talk to you today, Brian. You are coming to our event, which is coming up very, very soon so that is super exciting. And I know that you have been taking a lot of action lately which is how you got on the show today, so congratulations for that. And we can't wait to hear a little bit more about it, but before we get there let's hear about you and your background.

Brian: All right. I work in restaurants. I've been in the restaurant industry for about 25 years, and I actually love it. I love my job. I'm married with two kids, and the issue I tend to run into is that I'm concerned about our financial future. I like what I do, but both of our kids have special needs, and it requires extra planning for the future. I don't think that there's a way for me to get my family where we ultimately need to be at retirement with just our incomes. So I'm looking to supplement it with something online.

Brian: And then the other reason that I've been pursuing it is just because I think it's a lot of fun. I've listened to your Podcast for a long time now, and I've actually been a member for a year. Everything that I learn that's new and sitting down and actually creating a website and stuff is really intriguing to me. I find it exciting, and I like it, so that's kind of why I chose this path. I'm just looking for any bit of success at this point. I think I've done a lot of the base level stuff. I'm up and rolling, and I'm just trying to get that first dollar made.

Shane: Dude, I get it, man. I sat there for months and months waiting for any amount of money to flow into my pocket. And what's crazy is we ask our guests on the show, we look for people in the forums who are taking action, filling out success stories, helping other people, and you have just had this flurry of activity. You've been taking all the courses, talking in the forums, coming to the live event in September, and all of this stuff lately. And that's kind of how we were like, "Whoa, what is this guy doing? He is doing everything. We've got to get him on the show, we've got to help him because we really want to reward action takers in the community." What caused this flurry of activity. You said you've been in the community for a year now. What's happened lately or changed or how'd you [inaudible 00:03:42] to get moving forward in your business?

Brian: It was two things. It was, one, probably first and foremost, a new idea for a website. And secondly was I just got really angry that I hadn't finished my last idea, that I hadn't succeeded with it. I got mad and determined because of that. So I just committed and said I was starting again and going to try to do it again.

Shane: And are you looking to create a full time income right now or is it more like a side hustle like you love your job? Are you looking to create something on the side that's more like, "Hey, now I can make a lot more money and still do this job that I love, and then maybe someday I can use it to get some time freedom back?" What's the ultimate goal right now?

Brian: The ultimate goal is to create a full online business.

Shane: Right, right, right.

Brian: [inaudible 00:04:39] I want now like I really meant it when I said I think this stuff is really fun, and I'm extremely dedicated to it. I don't have to have ... I'm not beating down the door to escape my job. I love it. I love the people I work with. It's not an urgent need, but there is that need. It has to happen over the next 10 to 20 years for sure.

Shane: For sure, yeah. Recently I met this guy named Mark Mason. He has a Podcast called Late Night Internet Marketing, and his story reminds me of yours a lot. He was like, "I love my job. I've got a great job. It fulfills me. I love the people I work with. But I like other things too," is what he said. And he's like, "And of course, if anything ever happened I've got this other thing. It's sitting there waiting for me. I've got choices in my life." And that's what online business can do for you. It gives you choices, and it gives you exactly what you need in the moment. Some people may love their job and just want some extra money or some people may love their job, but they're not quite sure how it could handle a recession, so they want to have something in their back pocket to do that. And some people are like, "Man, I love my job right now, but I'm smart enough to look into the future and see I'm going to need something different later," right?

Brian: Yes.

Shane: All of us should be doing that. Even in our online business right now we do that a lot. We look into the future and be like, "What is our business going to look like 10 years from now? What does it need to look like based on our needs, our kids' needs, our future needs as we get older or whatever?" And we have to think about those things, and it's really cool that you're seeing the flexibility here of, "Hey, let's not get desperate. Let's not get crazy. Let's just build something cool and have fun with it, and it will be there for me if I need it and my kids need it.

Brian: Yes.

Jocelyn: All right. So you like your job now, but you want some options as far as making extra income, which I think is a great idea. I actually used to work in the restaurant industry too years ago. I don't know if you've ever listened to our Podcast where I talk about I used to work for a commercial dish machine manufacturer.

Shane: She puts your dishwasher in the back room is what she did for them.

Brian: Right. I heard you say that on the Podcast. I think about it every day when I walk by a dishwasher].

Jocelyn: Yeah.

Shane: That's hilarious. You might be the only person that sees a dishwasher and thinks-

Brian: I know people who sell this equipment. That's right.

Jocelyn: So I actually didn't do a lot of end user work. It was mostly to manufacturers' representatives and that type of thing. But anyway, so yeah I know about the restaurant industry. I've been to many trade shows and all that kind of thing, so I know a lot about restaurant stuff. Anyway, I love that you are trying to branch out and do something different. Let's talk a little bit about that. What have you tried before, and what are you doing now?

Brian: Okay. As far as what I've tried before there's probably a list of five or six, maybe more, things going back 10 years all the way starting with Etsy and just trying to make products for Etsy. I looked into doing drop ship stuff for a little while and decided that totally wasn't for me. Most recently when I joined the community I had an idea for online fishing tournaments. I thought it would be really fun to do online fishing tournaments. I have a lot of friends and family that are competitive at fishing, and I thought it was going to be a great idea. The issue I ran into was two-fold. One, it really wasn't ... What I had created wasn't conducive as it was, so the membership model and I really wanted to do that, and it required so much involvement that it just was never going to work with my schedule. I didn't have the time to execute the operation, so I kind of let it die, and I got discouraged because that was my favorite idea at the moment.

Shane: What is an online fishing tournament? How would that even work? Would I fish at my house and you would fish at your house and we'd take pictures?

Jocelyn: No, this is what I think of. Do you remember there used to be the Nintendo Wii that had those little controllers. There was a fishing tournament on there.

Shane: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jocelyn: That's what comes to my mind.

Shane: Oh yeah, we would compete on ... What was ...

Brian: Actually it was like real fishing, and it's modeled after the capture, photo, release style of fishing, which is what a lot of kayak fishermen do. So instead of wait it's on links, so I built an app and people could just take a photo of the fish they caught on a fish ruler and upload it. And basically it allowed people to compete wherever they were on the same species of fish.

Shane: That's actually a really cool idea though.

Brian: It is, but the problem is I had to be there to launch the tournaments, and I had to be there to judge the tournaments, so there were specific times where I would have to wake up at like ... Fishermen wake up at, like, four in the morning, right, to launch a tournament. And then I had to judge it, and then there were issues with faking species.

Shane: Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Brian: There's some logistics that ... I still have that website. I have not thrown it away. I still have an e-mail list for it. There's a ton of interest in it. I just can't execute that right now.

Shane: Interesting. We'll keep that one in your back pocket, okay?

Jocelyn: I have never heard of an online fishing tournament. This is a first.

Shane: My nephew comes over. We've got this lake behind our house. And he'll just sit here and catch fish for five hours. He's all by himself, but I could picture that being like what if he was virtually with other people fishing at the same time?

Brian: And could win money for if he caught a big fish. It makes it a lot of fun.

Shane: What a cool idea? That's an amazing idea. What else did you try?

Brian: Oh gosh. We were doing ... I was trying to do something connected to restaurants so I modeled a website after some others I had seen that were basically just promoting websites kind of like an affiliate except it was locations and venues would pay a fee to be listed on the website, and the website would market to people that were traveling to the area, give them itineraries, lists to view, things like that.

Shane: That sounds cool. What was the holdup there? It's too hard to get every restaurant in the world on it kind of deal or ...

Brian: No, it was honestly ethically I didn't want to promote ... I work at a restaurant. I didn't want to promote my competition, and I didn't think that was the right thing to do. And it was honestly that started out as a way for me to gain a marketing strategy for my own restaurant briefly, and I just didn't feel okay doing that. And also there's a reason that ... I'm very experienced in the restaurant industry, but there's a reason that the things that I'm choosing to do are not related to the restaurant, and that is because I don't want burnout. Restaurant hours are long, so if I were to tackle more restaurant stuff after that I just feel like it's restaurant all the time, and that's just too much for me. I think I'd burn out because [inaudible 00:12:11] something new.

Shane: For sure. A lot of people come into the community, and one of the things that you hear online a lot is, "Chase your passion and the money will follow." And there is a lot of truth to that, but like Jocelyn and I usually try to start with something you're more familiar with because it's actually a lot easier to create something and make money with something you're trained for or that you know. But if someone doesn't want to do that there's lots of other alternatives. You don't have to do that, and I totally get the burnout stuff.

Shane: Even as much as I used to love football coaching, like I loved it. I ate it, I breathed it, I slept it. I was always on football coaching. But after you start a community for football coaches, you talk to coaches, you go to work and coach, you come home and coach, and you make playbooks, and you go study playbooks, then you use your playbook on Friday night I really felt the burnout. It didn't matter how much I loved or was passionate about coaching football, at the end of the day you've got to do something else, like you've got to do something else. I can totally get onboard with that.

Shane: Tell us about your idea now and how did you switch to that, and when did you start it?

Brian: All right. My ideal now is to educate people on credit card points, travel points and miles that you can accumulate spending on credit cards and how to cash them in for maximum value to book free trips and vacations. So my website now is learnthepoints.com, and there is a strategy in there which we teach people so they can earn eight to $10,000 worth of free travel in basically nine months. So that's my goal is to have people that are willing to pay for a monthly membership for even if it's a short term be educated on the best way to accumulate these points and to redeem them for the most value.

Shane: And also, too, make sure you're paying off the credit card, staying out of debt?

Brian: Yes, 100%.

Shane: It's always free money, right?

Brian: It's free money. Don't spend anything that you weren't normally going to spend and set up automatic payments, pay everything off every month. I came up with this idea. I got shocked, honestly, just recently. My wife and I do not have any debt. It took us a while to get there. We're very credit card averse. I had just never looked into credit card points before. I had heard people talk about miles and flying and all of that stuff, and I just assumed in my head that these were people that fly all the time, and that's how they do this or they're on these big corporate accounts, so that allows them to rack up all these points. And that's just something that's not for me, and I don't apply for credit cards, so when offers come by I don't look into that stuff.

Brian: But what happened was we went through a dark time in December as a family, and when the end of the school year was rolling around and it was summertime was coming up, and we were like, "We need a vacation." All I had set aside for vacation for free money was, like, 500 bucks, which is not bad. We can have fun as a family on 500 bucks, no problem. But all of our other money goes to saving. It all goes to retirement accounts or education accounts or you name it. So we've never really taken a really awesome vacation.

Brian: It was kind of out of desperation or just, "You know what? I'm going to look into this and see what it's about," that I discovered what the possibility was with credit card points. And then when I realized all these bonus sign up tricks and stuff I just got obsessed and started doing all this research and figured it out and based on that developed a strategy and a plan that's basically going to get us free vacations for the next three or four years for our family. I was like, "This is awesome. How did I not know about this for so long?" I was like, "Hey wait. This could totally be an online business. Other people need to know about this." So I just popped up a website real quick and then got enthused and jumped back into the trainings.

Shane: Wow. Brian, what happened in December?

Brian: Unfortunately in December we lost our daughter at birth. She died, and we were really excited. We have two boys that are young. They're four and five. Both of our boys have special needs. They're both autistic, and my oldest son has Down's syndrome. We were really excited not just to have a girl in the family but to have what would be most likely our first typically developing child as well. And it was just we were really excited about it, and there were complications during delivery, and she passed away. So it was a really sad time. There's a lot of grief and anger that comes with that, and it really ... My wife and I both went to counseling. We both got help through our church. We had spent probably three months was just like in shock and recovery. And then the next three months was kind of like just rebuilding your life a little bit and trying to return to normalcy.

Brian: But after being through those last six months and dealing with that there's just this need for a break like from all of life almost in a way. We work hard. We have separate schedules. It's crazy at the house because the kids are crazy. So I could see it on my wife's face like we need a vacation.

Shane: Like an actual remove from the world like-

Brian: Like the community pool is not going to cut it this time. We've got to go.

Jocelyn: Absolutely.

Shane: How did you explain it to your kids? It would be hard enough explaining it to kids who are developing at normal rate. Was it tough?

Brian: It was tough because we did a lot of practicing. We did a lot of therapy going up, so we had a doll that we carried for half a year before the due date where we were training the boys on, "Hey, this is Baby Sister, and this is how you hold Baby Sister." It took us three months before they stopped throwing the doll around. We were practicing and training and getting ready, and we had her room ready of course. We found our own special ways to talk about her with the boys and remember her. I feel like we're in a really healthy place thanks to the involvement of others in the communities that we're in mostly. It's always sad. It's just something that you're never going to forget. You don't move on from it so to speak, but you cope better and better every day.

Shane: Yeah. I appreciate you sharing that. I know that's probably really hard to talk about.

Jocelyn: That's just heartbreaking. I'm so sorry to hear that.

Shane: It is. I'm having trouble even not crying right now, and I stammer over my words for a few minutes. I also want to just kind of highlight that you did recover, and you did move forward, and I love how you harnessed the negative thing to think about something positive like my family needs to more forward. We need to go on a vacation. That's not trivial. That's a thing that's going to help us to take the next step because we have to take the next step.

Brian: Right.

Shane: And then even to come up with an idea like we have a saying that we always say around our house and around our kids and others is like, "Successful people don't say I can't do that. Successful people say how can I do that?" So you didn't say, "Oh there's only $500 in the bank. I can't go on a vacation." You said, "No, this thing is important for our family. How can we make it happen?" And that's true for life. That's true for online business. That's true for anything like if you're going to be successful you've got to figure out how to do it. So regardless of whatever happens with this online business idea, dude, just the fact that you made that happen, and your family did the thing was totally worth going down that path.

Brian: Yeah.

Shane: That's a powerful story, man. There's an awesome story in the Bible, I believe it was David's son passed away. I don't want to butcher the Bible, but I'm just going off the cuff here. And he mourned, and then he immediately put on his cloak and got back to work. In the story people were like, "What are you doing?" And he's like, "I have to move forward. I've got other sons. I've got a kingdom I have to do," and I really felt that kind of story coming through when you were telling us that, man. I have no words about something like that, but I am very impressed and inspired by that story you just told me because if that ever were to happen to us I know, "Hey look, Brian got it, he stepped up, we can do this." So anybody else out there listening to this I hope you are really inspired by Brian's story too.

Jocelyn: Okay. I am kind of curious, and I'm sure other people are too. So you got this credit card thing going. You started learning about it. And were you able to book something?

Brian: We're actually we've racked up a ton of points, and we're saving them. We started kind of at the beginning of the summer, and my wife works for the school district. School's about to start, so we're just deciding what date we're going to book and where we want to go.

Shane: That's amazing.

Brian: We're kind of lined up and ready. We're all excited now. It's like one of those things where we were really anxious to go anywhere. We would've taken anything, you know what I mean, but now that we've got these points in the bank and we can pretty much go anywhere for free we're like, "Hold up, hold up, let's think about this. Let's pick a really good one."

Shane: Right. We get a lot of points too. We're like you though. We're like we hate debt. Credit cards scare us. I pay out credit cards. Any credit card use that we have I pay it off every week, every Thursday. I don't mess around. Every Thursday I sit down. But we use two cards. We have a business card, and we have a personal card. And we put everything on it, like everything. And we pay it off once a week because man those points are like free flights here, free all-inclusive vacation in Cancun. You can just book hotels.

Jocelyn: We travel a lot because our daughter's on a travel cheer team, and I got every room last year except for one for free.

Shane: Yeah, and that's like nine cheerleading vacations. Nine weekends of the year we're on the road staying two or three nights. And it's just you show up, and you have a room for free.

Brian: And what I think is crazy is that there are just so many people that were like me six months ago, had no idea that you could do this.

Shane: I didn't know you could do it either because we were Dave Ramsey people too of course. We're like, "Get out of debt. Never use a credit card. Credit cards are evil." And I'm like, "But they're giving you free money. Wait a minute. Let me look at this for a minute." Now, you're not going to get rich off of it, but free money's free money. It doesn't matter how you look at it.

Jocelyn: And disclaimer, we do not advocate going into debt to get credit card points.

Shane: No, don't go into $10,000 in debt to get $5,000 in credit card points. That doesn't make sense. You're losing money there y'all. Tell us a little bit more about that.

Brian: What I try to get people to understand, and I don't know if my message is really good. I'm still trying to perfect it to get it quick because there's a lot of pushback. People just don't know that you can do it. There are credit card fees on some of these cards, but essentially I had $500 in the bank. For $500 you can afford the credit card fees on eight different cards at one time. And if you were to do that you'd have somewhere between, depending on your spending, $8,000 and $12,000 worth of free travel. So it's not that it's-

Shane: Right, you're spending 500 for 8,000 basically.

Brian: Yeah. If you were going to spend 500 you have two options. You can either spend $500 on your vacation or you can spend $500 on the credit card fees and take a $10,000 vacation.

Shane: Yeah, that's incredible. We actually know a guy that does something similar to this. He was a member of the Flip Your Life community. His name's Brad Barrett. Have you ever heard of Brad Barrett?

Brian: I did. I started researching everybody. I found his ... He has a Facebook group and a training that he does. And it's awesome. Facebook group is an awesome community. He built something really great there, and his training is very to the point and succinct, and it's good info to. So I really liked looking at his stuff.

Shane: Yeah. And he was an accountant, and he really did want out of his job. He just went all in. But he focused. He only went like ... It was to go to Disney. It was straight up to go to Disney. That's how he taught it. And we've met other people who do successfully do this. And I was just at a conference this weekend, and someone was telling me like, "You know, I feel like I've got to invent a brand new thing. I've got to go the blue ocean." You guys hear that blue ocean, red ocean stuff?

Brian: Right.

Shane: And I looked at him. I said, "No, that's not what you do." You don't have to bake a new pie. You don't have to invent a new recipe. You've got to look around and find a pie, and you just want a slice of that. So that's why we always really encourage people like if you see someone else doing something similar to you that's not bad. That's good. That means that they've figured out how to make money at it, and there's 4 billion people connected to the internet. I promise you they're not selling to all 4 billion people. You just need some of the other people that are interested in that space. It's like abundance mentality. There's more than enough customers out there. You don't have to invent the better mousetrap. You just need to find people that need a mousetrap and sell them one. You're on the right path, and there's definitely something to this. So what's holding you back right now? Is there a mindset issue or an obstacle from doing this?

Brian: Okay, so I went back and I watched the Vetting Your Idea video. So I had jumped into this full force before watching that video. I wish I would've watched it first.

Shane: Wait a minute. So you're saying you should do the Flip Your Life blueprint in order?

Brian: Shane, I knew you were going to say that. I knew you were going to take this opportunity to tell people to follow the plan the right way.

Shane: Right. People jump in all the time, and they're like, "I watched video 12, and it was awesome." And I'm like, "Did you watch one through 11 because they're important?" You've got to do it in order. The Vetting Your Idea course, you know what's funny about that course in particular. I laugh because I'm saying watch it in order. When we made the blueprint, when we created the blueprint that course didn't used to be in there. Yeah, because we were so caught up in helping people find their idea and get started. I kind of looked at it, and I was like, "I go through the process whenever we have a new business and I'm like is someone else doing this? How do I find out if it's making money online?" I have a process that I check things, and I realized we were ... Because a lot of times people get held back, and I didn't want to put too much information in front of someone like I just wanted you to get your idea and start because that's where the real magic is when you start.

Shane: But then I thought, "Wow, there's really an easy way to tell if people are making money on this, and I just need to show that to them." So we put that course back in later. I actually made that course after the original blueprint was created so that people could properly vet that, yes, this is a real idea. People are definitely making money online, and I can check it empirically. I can go and say, "That is a 100% truth. This can make money online. I just have to do it." And that's kind of probably what you saw when you watched that with the idea course.

Brian: Yeah 100%. So I started looking, and what I found a lot of regarding credit card points and miles there's a ton of people who are offering free courses, and they are using affiliate links for their credit card sign-ups.

Shane: Yes 100%.

Brian: That is what most, like 95% of what's out there is affiliates for the credit cards, which I don't think there's anything wrong with necessarily although I have started my website and really pushed that I am not an affiliate for the credit cards.

Shane: Great differentiator. That makes you different.

Brian: Yes. I've also noticed affiliates have different promotions and all that stuff, and sometimes teaching others isn't true. It's just not the best version of the information because they're promoting a specific credit card before another one, so I really wanted to focus on ... yeah. I really want to focus on what's going to be my users, my guests on my site, and what's going to get them the most bang for the buck the right way to do it. I'd rather not get involved with affiliates at all. I'd rather just tell them the truth like if you want to get the most money this is how you get the most money.

Shane: So one sticking point is like you're kind of ... You said a lot of other people have went down the road because if I can get you to sign up for the credit card I might get a $100 fee. The bad part about that strategy is you're really relying on a lot of traffic. You've got to have a lot of traffic coming in to make that work because you're not getting any recurring off these credit card points that you get people to sign up for. It's just you get 100 bucks, you move on. You know what I mean? So you almost have to get them to sign up for five at once just to make a good chunk of change out of the beginning. Are you concerned that nobody will pay for it because the other ...

Brian: Right. I was concerned that nobody would do a membership for the information. There is a lot of free information out there. It's just that my information's better than the free information that's out there, but I need to be able to convince people that it's worth whatever I'm charging right now I set it up to charge $25 a month.

Shane: Right.

Brian: I did find at least one site that is doing a membership model, and that gave me hope, but it was hard to find.

Shane: To be fair the internet's a big place. You know what I mean? So there's probably other people out there doing it to. If you found one there's probably more.

Brian: Yeah, I would think so. There is another aspect to it. Some people are also doing one-on-one coaching and booking trips for people using their credit card points to get the most value for it. So those are some one-offs that I found. But my biggest concern is that looking for validation that approaching this from the membership model setting up a $25 a month membership to educate people and provide them with free tools and resources is something that somebody will pay for, that it'll work.

Shane: I would say they would if you position it correctly, right? Because there's an old saying in copywriting where if you can give people free money they'll buy your product. And this is a free money product. It is. It's like if you get the cards you will get free money. You will get the points. So if you can say, "Hey look, I ..." Telling your story is the most critical part of your marketing because you literally did this. You're like, "Look, I have no debt. I have these cards. I've got three vacations, enough money for three vacations over the next three years. I have $8,000 in credit card points. I spent $500 to do it. I made $7,500." This is true. These are all facts. You can check it. It's 100% real, and it happens when you do it this way. So like that's free money. It really is. It sounds so scammy but it's not. It's free money. It really is free money.

Brian: It is, yes.

Shane: And you've actually done this. Your story is where you have to start with your marketing to convince people that that's going to happen.

Jocelyn: I almost feel like this is one of those situations where it's a side-by-side. And what I mean by that is that you have a course on one side, and you list all the benefits of just doing the DIY course. And then on the other side you have your monthly payment, which is the same price as your course, but it just recurs. And you position that as this is the courses plus support from me as you go through this.

Shane: Yeah. So it is kind of two products. The content is isolated, but then there's a way to interact with you like I'm going to help you make purchasing decisions, and I'm going to help you. I'm going to walk with you as you spend the money. We're going to have a ... A buddy of mine does a membership, so listen to what this is. He does this membership where basically it's a writing hour. So twice a week he shows up, he does a quick writing tip, and then basically he has, like, 300 members and they all just show up to write together. That's what they do, but it's accountability. It's to ask a question. It's to just hang out really. There's no relieving content involved in the membership, but people love it because they've got somewhere to go in the moment to either get accountability or ask a question.

Shane: So it's like you could have a weekly pay off your credit card party. Hey guys, last week we got our groceries. Hey Jim, what'd you do? Oh man, I bought a subscription to Netflix. Okay, let's pay that off. You could keep people out of debt parties. It's not like you're really even answering questions. It's just you show up, and everybody's accountable to stay out of debt while they're accumulating their points. And then they can ask questions to you like, "Well, I found this other card. Is this a good card Brian?" Yeah it is. That's a good card. You should do this. You should do that. Don't worry. You can trust my advice because I'm not an affiliate for that card.

Brian: Exactly.

Shane: But you can throw stones at the other people like, "Hey guys, all these other people they're recommending cards that give them the best affiliate payout. Not me. Brian you can trust because I'm here for you." I love the idea that the course is separate or they can work with you for real, work with you. And your whole story then becomes so important because now they trust you to join your membership community. So you're not selling them content anymore. You're not selling them the path anymore. You're really just selling you. You know what I mean? And your experience, your coaching, and your leadership.

Brian: If I switch this over and change it so I've got this side-by-side thing going on on the website would you market or promote the course, and then when they get to the landing page they would see the course or the membership option then?

Shane: I'm going to give everybody that's listening a tip right now. Nobody cares what's in your course. Nobody cares about the course. All they care about is your story. The only thing I would be telling yours like you need to go on this vacation, and you need to have some pictures of it, and you need to be able to talk about it, and you need to be able to blog about it. And everything happens going forward is I had this horrible experience. I knew my family needed vacation. I found a way. We did it. And now I'm bringing the torch back from Mt. Olympus. This is a heroes journey story if there ever has been one.

Jocelyn: I agree. And I don't think that the course material is unimportant per se.

Shane: Right. It's not unimportant. It's just not the most important.

Jocelyn: But I do feel that the most important things are being able to relate to you, can you solve their problem, and then the course material is way on down the list.

Shane: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like the second thing.

Jocelyn: And I think people get this backwards. People always want to do their sales page look at all these wonderful things that I have in my course or program. And they want to give you the 10-minute rundown of every nut and bolt in their program. People don't care about that. People care about can you solve my problem and do I like you?

Shane: What most people remember at any event, like let's say you go to a rock concert, when musicians create their set they really focus on the first song and the last song because that's what you're going to remember. It's like a movie. You remember how a movie started. A lot of stuff happens in the beginning, and we all remember the end. You know what I'm saying?

Jocelyn: Right.

Shane: It's like Avengers. There's like 18 movies over like 20 years, and pretty much it all boiled down to at the beginning Thanos wanted some rocks, and at the end Iron Man fights him. That's what we all remember in between, right? So that's kind of what you're doing here. It's like, "This is my story. This is real. You can trust that it's real because all these other people are only recommending things that pay them good. I'm not because I'm not an affiliate for any of these people. I'm telling you the truth, and inside my community I'm going to help you do it.

Shane: So you can have a general list of things like categorical these are the results you'll get inside. Know the first thing you'll buy. Know the first card to get. Know the order that they're going to get. You're more telling the results, but you're not telling the exact courses and all that stuff. There's no reason to. No one cares. But when they get inside we get into detail.

Jocelyn: Okay.

Shane: First course, blueprint one, second course, blueprint two, third course, blueprint three. That's when you get really into it. Don't try to sell the content. Like you said the content's free. I hate to tell everybody this. All content's free. Every piece of content that has ever existed inside of any course is somewhere free on the internet. Now, can you find it? Is it hard to find? That's where curation and courses come into play. But it's all free. You've just got to figure out how to make your free stuff look better, and your story is the best way to do that.

Brian: Okay, great.

Jocelyn: Okay, Brian. I think that we have some good ideas about moving forward as far as your product goes. What else do you need help with right now?

Brian: I think I'm up to close to 400 people on my e-mail list. That's mainly coming through Facebook and Facebook ads with my lead magnet. However, I have not converted anybody on my e-mail list into purchasing as of yet.

Shane: How often do you e-mail your list? Let me ask you a couple questions here. It's a big list. You should've converted something, so let's figure this out.

Brian: Yeah. I have an auto responder set up for the first eight e-mails that follow very closely the e-mails in the blueprint. So those go out, and I follow the same timeline, so it's like a couple immediately and then about a week later and then a couple days later. And then there's one at the end two weeks out that's like, "Hey, I'm not going to send you anymore. You'll just continue to get vacation updates from me basically." And I send out whenever I have time to design a new vacation that somebody can take for free I just e-mail that to my whole list.

Shane: So basically your e-mail ... So only your auto responder is what's tried to sell this so far. You've only [crosstalk 00:40:30].

Brian: That's true. That's correct, only my auto responder, yeah.

Shane: Okay. What if you sent them a message that said, "Hey, I'm doing a live training this week, and I'm going to show you how to get $8,000 for free?"

Brian: I haven't done that yet.

Shane: Okay. You've got to add more layers to it. The auto responder is just for picking low hanging fruit, the lowest of the fruit. Actually it's like walking under an apple tree, and the apple has already fell off, and you bend down and pick it up. That's where automation comes in. You're never going to convert more than a single digit percentage off of your e-mail list, right? You have to add live Webinars. You have to add weekly Podcasts or blog posts or something.

Shane: I'm also looking at your site here, and it definitely needs a facelift. It's just too plain, and it's also too ... It looks too pie and the sky. For example, let's take you. I'm going to describe your website as I go through here. One, at the top you've got all these credit cards. That's cool. Then it says, "Become a member." You know what I'm saying? It's just like okay that's cool. Then it's like a picture of four probably 18-year-old girls running down a beach. That's not Brian. Brian was a dad who had just lost his daughter and went through a dark time. And the rest of his family needed him to step up and help them climb out of the darkness, right?

Brian: Right.

Shane: So Brian, with his two children and his wife went forward together. I need to see a family here. That's what I need to see. I don't need to see this.

Shane: Then the next one is a guy with like a mini Afro and a surf board. He's like, "Whoa, dude, I'm a cool 18-year-old dude on a beach in Thailand making six bucks a day or whatever." That's not Brian, man, I really came home from work at the restaurant and I was tired, and I knew we needed a vacation. So you're not talking to the other guys out there that are like, "Yo, I'm tired. My family really needs me to step up and figure out a way. I've not been able to afford a vacation in three years. What can I do to help my family get a little break?" You know what I'm saying?

Brian: Right.

Shane: It's just not resonating. The people who are on your list are just not resonating with what they're seeing and hearing in your marketing.

Brian: Ah, that makes sense, okay.

Shane: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Your story is not being told, and that's why nobody's buying anything from you. We tell some pretty deep stories, and we wrestled with how much of our personal life we always want to share on the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast or when we speak on stage. And 99% of the time it's be an open book because our stories are what really help someone else. And we told our stories this week. We were at FlynnCon, and we spoke with Pat Flynn on stage, and we told the story of Isaac being mistreated in a daycare center. That's a really hard story to tell when you find out someone was literally locking your child into a bathroom to punish them for potty training accidents at three years old it's horrifying to even say that out loud. But that story always makes people realize how important their kids are, how important their time is. They want to get their kids out of daycare centers and home with them.

Shane: I have to tell that story because if I don't then I can't relate to someone enough to make them change their life. So your story has to take over this page. Your family has to take over this page. And you have to say to somebody, "If we did it you can do it too," and that'll resonate more as well. And then showing up live not just in their inbox is going to give you a better chance to convert those.

Shane: If you could get 50 of those people to come to a Webinar, and you told us your story like the way we even talked about it off air today before the Podcast started people are going to resonate with that because they're going to look at their kids, and they're going to look at their family, and they're going to realize this guy's for real. If he wasn't for real he'd be signing up for all the affiliate things just trying to get my affiliate check, right? But he's telling me the truth, and I need to listen to this guy, and he can help me. Where do I sign up? So if you could just plant some storytelling overtop of all of this, and then do the work. And I know you're going to do the work because you're an action taker, you could turn this thing around. 400 people, man, you've got members. We just have to get the message right to do it.

Shane: I'd love to see your e-mails too. We don't have time to go over every e-mail in your auto responder today, but your e-mails should be telling the story. It shouldn't just be here's all the benefits. It's like in 2018 December this happened. It moves into why you went down the path to the credit cards, and that creates trust, and it shows them like, "Hey, this guy figured it out. I can figure it out. Let's do this."

Brian: Okay. Yes.

Jocelyn: All right Brian, it has been great talking to you today, and I can't wait to see what you do next. Before we go we always ask our guests what is one thing that you plan to take action on based on what we talked about today?

Brian: I am going to ... Since I am out of town right now I am going to set up the side-by-side course versus the membership on the website and just get that done quickly. And then when I get back home I'm going to start taking some pictures with my family and redoing my story on the website.

Shane: Love it. I love that you're like, "I'm going to take some pictures with my family. We're putting them on there." That's good. And I want to see the website, so make sure you send it to me in the forums or hit me up, and I want to see the link when you redo it because it'll be awesome.

Brian: Will do.

Shane: Hey Brian, before we go let me ask you a question. What made you come to Flip Your Life Live? Flip Your Life Live happens in Lexington, Kentucky on September 19 through the 21st of 2019. It's our big Flip Your Life Flipped Lifestyle Podcast family reunion where all of our listeners, fans, followers, and members can come together in one place to hang out together, eat together, work together, and really get inspired to do big things for our families. I always love to hear people's stories. Why did you come to Flip Your Life Live? What made you look at it and go, "I got to go. I just got to go to Flip Your Life Live?"

Brian: I wanted to dive all in. I didn't want to leave anything on the table. Really I am not afraid of failure. I am really afraid of not trying, not giving it my all. And I just felt like, "Hey, this is something I haven't done, and I can't say that I gave it all I could if I didn't go."

Shane: I love that, man. No regrets, right. I'd rather have a life full of failures than a life full of regrets at the end of it.

Brian: Also I'm not paying for the flight, so that helps.

Shane: Shameless plug for the credit card points. I love it. That's amazing.

Jocelyn: Love it. That is awesome.

Shane: Listen. If you would like to join us and Brian in Lexington, Kentucky at Flip Your Life Live this year go to flippedlifestyle.com. That's F-L-I-P-P-E-D lifestyle.com/live. We have a few tickets left, but they are almost sold out, and this will be the last big conference Flip Your Life Live that we do for a while. We are not doing the event in 2020, so you can't go all in next year. You might as well go all in with us and Brian this year at Flip Your Life Live.

Jocelyn: And who knows, maybe if you join Brian's membership maybe he can get you a free flight too.

Shane: That's right. Maybe you can fly there too. Go to flippedlifestyle.com/live. We'd love to see you at our live event. All right guys, that is all the time we have for this week. Thank you so much for listening to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast today. We would love to see you inside of our community as well. Who knows, you may end up right here on the Podcast just like Brian did. So if you'd like to take action today go to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife and you can check out all of our membership options.

Shane: Before we go today we like to close every show with a verse from the Bible. Today's Bible verse comes from 1 Thessalonians 5:16-19. The Bible says, "Be joyful always. Pray continually. Give thanks in all circumstances. This is the will of God for your life."

Shane: Until next time, guys, get out there, take action. Do whatever it takes to flip your life. We'll see you then.

Jocelyn: Bye.

Links and resources mentioned on today’s show: * Brian's Website * Flip Your Life LIVE 2019 Tickets & Registration Information * Flip Your Life community * PROLIFIC Monthly

Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!

Join the Flip Your Life Community NOW for as little as $19 per month!

https://flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife

View Details

In this Best of Episode, we re-visit the Prologue to: "Our story."

We'll be sharing our entire "Our Story" series in the Saturday "Best of Episode" releases over the next few weeks.

You don't want to miss these! We'll be giving you all the juicy details of who we are, where we began, and how it all happened!

This episode was originally published on October 3, 2017. You can check out the original episode here: https://flippedlifestyle.com/podcast163/

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Shane: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams.

We’re a real family who figured out how to make our entire living online. And now, we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? Alright. Let’s get started.

What is going on, everybody? This is Shane and Jocelyn here, flippedlifestyle.com, super excited to be back with you for another podcast today. This one’s going to be a little different than our normal podcast where we’re helping our people take their online business to the next level, members of our Flip Your Life community.

Jocelyn and I actually are having a book written about us. An author is writing a book about our story and a part of that process is we are recording our story on audio for her to listen to, to go through, kind of like in an interview style format.

Jocelyn and I were sitting here recording, and we thought, man, what a great opportunity to fill in the gaps and a lot of you listen to our podcast for online business advice and things like that. But what a great opportunity to share our story with you, how, basically, two normal people from really, really small rural communities in Kentucky over a period of time– we went through our careers, we learned about online business, and we ended up creating this amazing life that we didn’t even know existed a few years ago, and maybe just let you guys in on that, and let you walk that journey with us, listen to it, and listen to our story, let it inspire you, and let you know that you can do this, too.

Jocelyn: Today, we are starting out with our early life. A lot of you guys have listened to us on other podcasts and you’ve heard a lot of our story from the past five years, but what you really don’t know is more about us from the past 35 years or more.

Shane: That dated us, Jocelyn, you totally had dated us right there. What we’re going to do is we’re going to release these every week as we record them and we’re going to let them roll out, and this is going to be our story, our journey how we got to where we are, literally, right now today from A to Z. We’re going to look back and connect the dots. We were writing an outline for today’s podcast and it’s mind blowing when we were reading it. We both just stopped, and we’re like, “This doesn’t even sound real, it doesn’t even sound possible,” like, it’s incredible when you see looking back with 20/20 hindsight how all of the dots aligned and everything, and all the puzzle pieces came together.

What we want you to do is listen to these podcasts. You are going to get a ton of information out of them that is going to help you succeed in your journey, too, and it’s going to help you see those dots in your own life, and see how you have all the puzzle pieces right in front of you, and you just have to move them around and connect them together.

Alright, so we’re going to jump right into it. You want to start?

Jocelyn: Oh, we were just having a conversation who was going to start, and Shane’s like, “You start.” And I’m like, “No, you were born first.”

Shane: So, this is like those board games we play with Anna Jo and she gets really upset if it’s the youngest person first to the oldest person first, so I think we have opened the box to a board game where the oldest guy in the room gets to start off the deals.

My story basically starts in a really, really small-town in Southeast Kentucky. Very much a coal town, we’re a railroad town, we have a depot here and basically all the coal that comes through the mountains of eastern Kentucky comes through my little town. That was kind of the industry: the railroad, the coal miners, we had less than 5,000 people in my town as we were growing up. Really, just a very rural childhood. I lived in the city limits, what we call a city– it’s not really a city. But I lived inside the city limits. I didn’t live out in the country, but a very rural upbringing, not anything remotely related to technology or big business or anything like that.

Basically, the people were schoolteachers, coal miners or they worked at the retail stores, like Walmart or something like that–

Jocelyn: Or maybe at the hospital.

Shane: Or maybe at the hospital. Yeah, things like that. That’s the kind of jobs that we would have around here. I’m actually the 4th of five boys. My parents have five kids, huge age differences between us. My oldest brother is 19 years older than me. I’ve got another brother that is 18 years older than me, and then there was a gap between the middle of all five of us. The next brother up was nine years older than me, and that I have a little brother who is about three and half years younger than me. Huge span of children in my family, and lots of different age groups.

It was kind of weird because when I was born, two of my brothers were not even in the house and one of them was in college. When I was nine years old, he’d moved off. By the time I could remember things and I was a kid, three of my brothers were gone, so it was kind of like I was the oldest, it’s me and my little brother. It was just a bizarre kind of family dynamic and that.

Jocelyn: I actually grew up in a small town in Western Kentucky, very flatland.

Shane: Still a coal mine in place though. It’s a big coal mine place.

Jocelyn: Definitely, coal mining is the major industry there. I was born in 1980.

Shane: Oh, yeah, I was born in 1978. A child of the 70s.

Jocelyn: Barely. My parents, they were really young when they had me. My mom was just out of high school. Actually come to think of it, I think she was in high school. They started from a very young age, they worked very hard to make sure that we had everything that we needed. I have a sister, she is three years younger than me and we grew up in just a neighborhood, we had a lot of friends who lived next door. They were probably, I would say, maybe 30 houses in this neighborhood. It was the 80s, we all ran around and played together —

Shane: — Rode bikes —

Jocelyn: — Went out at breakfast time, and came in at dinnertime but it is just what we did. I spent a lot of time outside and a lot of time playing. No iPads or technology at that time. I feel very fortunate to have grown up in a time like that.

Shane: It is pretty cool. I think we had similar childhoods growing up because we both grew up in very traditional Southern-type towns, went to church on Sundays, hung out with the neighbors, both of our mom stayed home while our dads worked. It was just like good, slow-paced, southern life before the Internet, before we had all this technology and stuff.

My dad worked really hard, too. He was an insurance agent. He had his little independent office where he sold auto insurance. Had his own business. It was kind of cool I think that was maybe where the seeds of entrepreneurship kind of were born in me because I can remember my dad telling me about jobs he had had. Used to drive to Chicago from Kentucky to work in the steel mills during the week and they would drive back to Kentucky. This was before the interstates, basically, were really in place. He would come back on the weekends to come down here and he always told me about these grocery stores or restaurants or places he worked.

Jocelyn: And he would sleep in the steel mills.

Shane: Under the boilers.

Jocelyn: He’s told us about this before. They would drive up there to Chicago, they would sleep in the steel mill, and then they would drive home to Kentucky on the weekends.

Shane: Yup, they’d work there all day, sleep under the boilers at night where it was warm, and then they would get up and work, and they would come home, after they just did that. But I would remember that because he would always tell me growing up, I was like, “Well, dad, why do you do this? Everybody else has a job, what are you doing?” He goes, “Well, I just decided that I would rather be broke and work for myself, and have my time freedom and be able to go to your ball games,” or something like that.

That always kind of stuck with me a little bit, and he just said he had worked for other people and he decided it was just better through the ups and downs that they could go at it on his own. That is what he did.

Jocelyn: He’s made it a long time. He is still there today.

Shane: Still in business.

Jocelyn: Still doing very well.

Shane: He’s 77 years old, and he’s still going in every day. He loves what he does. Other than that, he was just very traditional. Grow up, go to ballgames, played baseball in the summer, played basketball in the fall or in the winter, play a little football in the fall. We never really traveled much or did anything. I didn’t really know of a lot about I guess the rest of the world other than what you saw on TV or something. Really, until I went to college, the farthest we ever really drove was maybe up to Lexington Kentucky or down to Knoxville. That was the big city for me, 250,000 people that was my New York, I guess, growing up. I did not even fly on an airplane until I was in my 20s. Just a very small-town, sheltered kind of life.

Jocelyn: My dad was a cable engineer. He has been doing that for a very long time.

Shane: He was the cable guy. Climbing poles, and hooking up cable systems and all that good stuff.

Jocelyn: My dad, he is super hard working person. Just something I really respect about him for sure. I can remember that he always worked extra jobs. He was an engineer, super smart guy. People would hire him to do things on the side. I remember he installed satellite dishes and he worked with a guy who did audiovisual type things for a while.

I could remember going places with him sometimes at night like when he would install somebody’s satellite or something like that, that would be how we would spend time together a lot of times. I remember those types of things as I was growing up. My mom, she helped us do everything. She helped us with our homework when we came home, make sure we were reading, which really wasn’t a problem for us because we loved to read.

Shane: But she probably helped you learn that.

Jocelyn: Oh, of course, she would always work with us and make sure that we had everything we needed for school and take care of all the grocery shopping, and the cooking it, the cleaning and all those types of things that had to be done. My parents, great people, really appreciate everything that they’ve done for me growing up.

We also did not travel a whole lot. We would go to the surrounding larger towns which in Western Kentucky are not very large.

Shane: There is like, two of them.

Jocelyn: Pretty much. Yes.

Shane: Bowling Green yeah, that is about it.

Jocelyn: Owensboro, we would go places like that. We would do that. We didn’t get to take a lot of vacations, far away. We, instead, would go camping. Those are some my fondest memories growing up. We started out tent camping. We had a boat so we would take it on the lake and we eventually were able to get a camper, which was awesome. We had an old black-and-white TV.

Shane: Was it like a pop-up camper?

Jocelyn: No, it was a regular camper.

Shane: That little square thing you hook up to the truck kind of deal?

Jocelyn: It was orange and white, I remember that. We would pull it with this old green and white truck; we called it Alice.

Shane: I think it was the 80s, so weren’t all campers orange and white back then with the big stripe?

Jocelyn: Yeah, probably, I don’t know. But we would take our camper down to the lake. We would go out and ride in a boat, those were some of my most fun memories growing up. I could just remember going to the campgrounds, we would go to the pool. We would swim in the lake. I was saying we had an old black-and-white TV in the camper, and we thought that was the greatest thing ever because there was no Internet, there was nothing back in the 80s and before when we were tent camping, we just had our books which was awesome, but then when we had this black-and-white TV, we were really high-tech.

Shane: High-tech, all three channels that you picked up on the airwaves. Our upbringing was kind of cool because I would never say we were poor-poor like we were farming for our food or anything. We were middle class. We just did not have a ton of stuff. I grew up in a two-bedroom, one bath house. We, finally, when I was in high school, I think my sophomore year in high school, maybe my freshman year, we built onto our house, and it was the first time I actually got my own room because I had to share a room with my little brother.

But I did get to see our parents as I grew up, they worked so hard, and they built on to their life. I saw the value of how working hard works. My dad had this little bitty office that was seriously– how big do you think that building is? It couldn’t be 15 x 15, maybe? It was really tiny. Had this little bitty, tiny office, and for the first 10 years of my life, I could remember going out into that little office after school. My dad would put my Legos up on the shelves.

I loved going into his office, but it was this little bitty room. It was probably about as big as the room we are in right now in our house. I can remember when he upgraded to this bigger space, this bigger office, and I thought, “Man, that was the coolest thing ever,” because you could see the fruits of his labor. I remember when we built onto our house, basically my five brothers and their families and everybody came over to this little, bitty, tiny house. We actually had this room we call the back porch. There used to be a back porch on it, and my that mom and dad built walls and made it like a sunroom.

We kind of took it over as the kid room because it was extra space, then we closed in the area that was between the patio in the garage, this big living room. I got a room on the back, and it was cool watching that progression of, we started with very little, and as I got older, things got better because they worked so hard. I think it was cool that I didn’t necessarily have everything growing up that I wanted, but we always had our needs met, and I got to see my parents build a life, and I think that that definitely had an impact on the stuff that we are doing now.

Jocelyn: I definitely had a similar situation. When my mom and dad started, like you said they were super young. I can’t even imagine my life right now, just the way they had started out versus the way I started out. It is crazy, but they started out, in a trailer, just in the middle of nowhere.

Shane: Stereotypical Kentucky trailer kind of deal.

Jocelyn: Yeah, not too much after that, they were able to get a house. They, later, built a house.

Shane: And when we say built a house, Jocelyn’s dad literally poured the concrete, hammered the wood, put on the roof, pretty much built the house the they have now by hand in his spare time, when he wasn’t being a cable guy.

Jocelyn: He did a great job on that, and they still live there today. It is a beautiful house, so they have just worked hard and–

Shane: Basically from nothing.

Jocelyn: Yeah, and they’ve done a great job. They’ve built on what they had, the same as Shane’s dad’s insurance agency, and today their life as much different than it was when they started out. It is awesome to be able to have been part of all the transformation.

Shane: There is a great book called out ‘Outliers’ were it talks about people who took advantage of their unfair advantages. You have the guys like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs.

Bill Gates, his unfair advantage was he was born into a wealthy family. There were only three or four computers in the 60s all around the country. His high school or his school something had access to one of these supercomputers, so he got to learn it early.

I think, if I remember the book correctly, Steve Jobs, he lived down the street from Hewlett-Packard. He would go tinker in his garage, and that was his unfair advantage. The neighborhood he lived in and the people he had around him.

I think that an advantage that Jocelyn and I had was, we grew up in poor, southern Kentucky town to parents who had to work really, really hard for everything they had, and they did an amazing job modeling that for us. That kind of gave us the foundation that we were able to go forward and say, “Hey, we see something. Let’s go get it!”

Jocelyn: And the reason that we start here and tell you guys this is because I think a lot of times, people want to think that, “Oh, look that person has a trust fund,” or, “That person– somebody gave them tens and thousands of dollars to get their business started.”

Shane: Or they look for a variable, what was their magic pill? What makes them different than me that makes them succeed, and me not, basically?

Jocelyn: We didn’t have that. I am just saying we got started all on our own. We certainly had support of a loving family–

Shane: Love, and a loving family. That goes a long way.

Jocelyn: I don’t discount that in any way. But we didn’t have some like super-privileged upbringing, is what we’re trying to tell you.

Shane: We didn’t have the financial advantages of some other people. We met people that started a business and maybe someone funded it for them, gave them the money to seed their capital for the first business venture, or something like that. We really literally started from nothing. We started life, just a normal total upbringing. When we were starting our business, which we will talk about later, we had nothing. We had no extra money, no extra time, and all we had were a lot of drive and ourselves. That is kind of the moral of the story is, you can definitely rely on that work ethic and those things you’ve learned, you know, the lessons of life growing up from your parents, from other people or whatever and turn that into something successful.

While Jocelyn’s values and my values are aligned, and we had very similar socioeconomic and regional upbringings, we could not have been two more different people when we were like, growing up. I was a total knucklehead when I was in school. I was a football player and was kind of a troublemaker. I didn’t do anything too legal but her mom and dad might have had to pick me up from the local police station once or twice.

Jocelyn: And how many times did you get kicked out of school?

Shane: I actually got sent home from school a few times. I never got expelled —

Jocelyn: You got suspended.

Shane: I got suspended a few times. I like to fight and do some things like that. I was kind of like, gosh, it’s so funny. I’ve literally had former teachers, when they hear what we do now, say, “Are you sure that’s you? Are you sure that’s Shane Sams?”

Jocelyn: “Is it a different brother?”

Shane: “Is this a different brother? There’s five of them. That can’t be the same guy.” I always tested really high on the test scores, and then I would make terrible grades or I wouldn’t do my homework, and I just didn’t care about school.

Jocelyn: People got mad because you are part of the gifted program, right?

Shane: Yeah when I was in sixth grade, they put me in this thing called SOAR, which was like our local gifted and talented thing, where you got to take classes at the high school. Here was me, getting on the bus, this knucklehead who just got suspended from something or whatever I was doing in school, and I’d get on the bus to go over to the– oh, where do we go? We went to the middle school to do those classes, and sometimes we go to high school. You see all these other straight A, smart people.

This is how big of a knucklehead I was. Multiple parents literally called and said they did not want me to be in the SOAR program, the gifted and talented thing, because they didn’t want me with their kids. That tells you like what kind of idiot I was. I was just like, man, I just hated the structure of school. I hated the rules, I hate following rules even today. It irks me when I am on a railroad track. I can’t be on a railroad track. I’ve got to be out exploring or something like that.

The things that I did love: I love sports. I absolutely loved playing football. I loved media classes. I got to be the producer of our local news show on our high school news program; loved media class, loved editing, love to technology, but from a school perspective, I just hated it. I almost missed graduation because we had to do these portfolio things. We didn’t get it done. I just thought it was the stupidest thing in the world. I hated keeping up with it, and I literally almost did not do it, and my mom and I were like the week before graduation, we were frantically trying to get this thing done. Jocelyn was a little bit different when she was in high school.

Jocelyn: Yeah, growing up, I would say– and I know that you long-term listeners, you will totally get this. I was a very high achiever. I have always been a high achiever; I don’t know why. I think that part of it is just my upbringing. My parents didn’t necessarily pressure me; it’s just they always expected us to do our very best. I think honestly, it is just something that is in my DNA, it’s just very important to me to always be a high achieving person in anything that I do. Growing up, I wasn’t necessarily competitive with other people, I just wanted to make sure that I was doing everything that I could do. I generally made straight As in schools I mean, there were a few times that I got a B, and once even a C in Math. Imagine that!

Shane: Yeah, once again, long time listeners. We are not so good at the adding and subtracting over here the Flipped Lifestyle World Headquarters.

Jocelyn: Yeah, actually, my very first C ever was in sixth grade, and in math, so that was a fun fact about me. And I cried. My parents were like, “What happened?”

Shane: My parents cried for joy when I got C’s. “You didn’t get a D!” “You didn’t fail! Good job, Shane! Woohoo!”

Jocelyn: That is not because you were not intelligent. It was because you didn’t apply yourself.

Shane: I just didn’t care. I never did homework. Wait until we start telling you about college, and you hear how many times I went to class. I don’t know how I have a degree, to be honest with you.

Jocelyn: Back in school, I just followed the rules, I went along with the plan I didn’t really cause any problems.

Shane: Jocelyn was in the band.

Jocelyn: I was actually in the Color Guard. I wasn’t in the band.

Shane: It’s the band. It is the band.

Jocelyn: But I didn’t play an instrument. I was in the Color Guard.

Shane: It is the band.

Jocelyn: So yeah–

Shane: Nothing wrong with the band. I’m all cool with the band.

Jocelyn: So, yeah. I was just a very straight-laced kind of gal. Had Shane and I known each other in high school. There is no way. This would have never worked.

Shane: No chance. No, no there is no way. She would have looked at me, and been like, “Who is this loser-jock-guy that won’t do anything and won’t listen to the teachers and all this stuff?” Yeah, I am so glad. It is funny like the person I became was actually totally different, even when you did meet me because when I was in high school, I had a devastating knee injury. I actually was playing in a football game. I was playing linebacker, and they handed the guy the ball, it was on the three-yard line, and I came running in to fill the gap, to fill the hole that was created because he was going to score a touchdown when they blocked our lineman.

I planted my foot, the guy dove for the end zone. My cleats went into the ground. The guy hits my knee and all my weight falls forward with my foot pinned to the ground. It snapped my ACL and my PCL in half. I’ve never felt anything like that since, and I hope I never have to again. I fell backwards. He was laying on my foot, and my teammate went to kill him, he hit me instead, and it literally turned my body 360°. My shoulders were facing one goal post, my toe was facing the other and it snapped all the other ligaments in my leg and that moment basically ended my football career.

Over the next couple of years, my first year in college, my last year in high school, I kind of became a different person because I was really down, because I couldn’t play the sport that was my identity anymore. But I started hanging around with different people more, I got away from that kind of jock culture a little bit, it kind of humbled me and mellowed me out a little bit. It’s funny, like that moment in my life, I always point back to for a lot of different things, but if that had never happened to me, as negative and terrible as it was at that time, when I got to the point where I met Jocelyn, it made me a person that I think that she could accept. I’m kind of glad it happened. Not only would that not have sent me down a career path, which I will tell you more about later, that we are in now, we would not have been the right fit for each other.

Jocelyn: Yeah, I think that’s definitely true. But I’ll tell you, before we get to where we met, I will tell you a couple other things about my high school career. I think that they are relevant to where we are today. First of all, I told you that I am a high achiever. I always knew my entire life, not even just in high school, but my entire life, I just knew I just wanted something more than what most people in my town wanted. Most people in my town, they wanted to grow up, get a job, maybe have some kids.

Shane: Young, get-married-the-day-after-graduation kind of thing.

Jocelyn: And you know, if that is what you want to do, I don’t judge you for it. It’s just that I knew that that wasn’t what I wanted for me. I wanted something more. I did not know what that something more was, but I just knew that I wanted something more.

Shane: It is also important to remember, too, our environment especially in the rural southern Kentucky, there is really high rates of teen pregnancy. There is really high rates of smoking and drugs and things like that. It’s not this sanitized, you know, everybody is walking up and down Main Street environment. You see a lot of people just check out of life. There is not a lot of people trying to go to the next level.

In the entrepreneur community, or when you discover online business, man, you see hustlers, easy grinders, you see people wanting to 10X everything. You see people wanted to change their lives and change other people’s lives, and make a difference in the world. We do not see that. We see 80% of our people that we grow up with and settle.

Jocelyn: And that is okay with them, that is cool with them.

Shane: For some of them, they may not want to, but they don’t feel like they got the opportunity.

Jocelyn: But it has never been okay for me. I’ve just never wanted that for my life. In the early 90s, I mentioned before, that my dad is an engineer, in the early 90s, he realized that having a home computer and being online was going to be something super important. I am so thankful that he bought us a PC back in 1993. I was 13 years old, it had a whopping 4 MB of RAM and a 256 MB hard drive.

Shane: That’s big time right there, now.

Jocelyn: I have a memory stick right here in my drawer that probably holds a lot more than that.

Shane: The light bulb on our roof probably has more memory. The light bulb in the ceiling right now, like one of those LED lights that you can control from your phone or something probably is more powerful than the computer that you had.

Jocelyn: It might have had 8 MB RAM, I can’t remember the RAM exactly, but I know that it did have a 256 MB hard drive, it even had a modem. It would connect to these local bulletin board systems that are also called BBS’s. Some of you guys know what I’m talking about. Through a 2400 baud modem.

Shane: It might even fit not even the 56K. You know what I’m saying? Not even your phone modem. I don’t even know what baud means what is a baud?

Jocelyn: I think I could, seriously, crawl faster than this transfer data.

Shane: You could write down your message, and run it to the guy on the other end of the bulletin board system and come back.

Jocelyn: I think probably, somewhere on the Internet, there is a simulation of what a 2400 baud would be like. Maybe our VA’s can–

Shane: Maybe we can find that.

Jocelyn: –and put it in the show notes for today like what it would look like to load a website in 2400 baud. Of course, at the time, it was just text but there wasn’t even like any pictures or anything.

Shane: But just early computers experience like that at the birth of the Internet, basically.

Jocelyn: But I learned to communicate with a computer. We didn’t even use Windows. It was like old school DOS operating system, I learned how to use that. That was like invaluable experience for me just as a kid, learning this on my own, I didn’t have any instruction manual.

Shane: That was a major investment at that time for your dad and mom who didn’t have a lot of disposable income to do that.

Jocelyn: They just recognized that this is going to be something super important, and they went out on a limb and did it, and I am so thankful for that. That is one moment in my life that I think was just critical to my future success. But my very first online experience was on the coal mine BBS. It was a local bulletin board system just where local people would talk, and we logged in there.

Shane: This was pre-Facebook. This was before Facebook, folks, or MySpace or anything like that.

Jocelyn: And we went and met the sysops– the system operators– we went to meet them in person, like we knew them, it was just a good time. If you are on BBSs back in the 90s, it was good times.

Shane: I think I had a similar experience. My dad is old-school. My dad was born in the 40s right after the depression era, and wasn’t super into the technology; still isn’t today– I’m pretty sure his computer at office was Windows 98 or something.

Jocelyn: He may be using a flip phone.

Shane: He is using a flip phone, and I’m pretty sure he is like still using Paint and stuff.

Jocelyn: Loving him.

Shane: Love the guy. He doesn’t even use a computer. He just got one sitting there, and just like, “Yeah, I got a computer. I don’t use it, but whatever.” I remember when video games really took off, like Atari and Nintendo came out, and all these things. They were really expensive. But at Christmas time, he really wanted us to have these video game things, and he actually told me one time, he’s like, “I didn’t understand computers, I didn’t understand what was going on or what it was, but I knew that this technology you guys needed to know it.”

He always made sure we had those things. Not just from a kid perspective, but he wanted us to be familiar with technology, and it was cool because I had friends that had computers. I remember my cousin; his dad was like Jocelyn’s dad. He was a postman. He was a post office guy, and he didn’t understand really the computer, but he felt like he wanted to give his kids a better opportunity. He was going to buy a car or that computer, and he bought that computer. I’m so thankful that he did it because I would walk up to their house to play Wolfenstein 3-D and learn how to type. But I learned how to use DOS.

I think having some kind of technology background for sure was one of those dots that we connected later and at least we spoke the words, the language and things like that. I’m not saying you’ve got to have technology background to do that.

Jocelyn: But it didn’t hurt.

Shane: We used an unfair advantage there. Hey, we were exposed to that when a lot of kids, especially in our area in Kentucky, were just not being exposed to technology.

Jocelyn: So I spent a lot of my high school days being obsessed with this PC. I mean obsessed. I would start taking programming classes. That is something they offered at my high school which is really kind of unusual. There weren’t a whole lot of people in those classes.

Shane: We had typing. We had keyboarding on computers, was the most advanced computer thing you got.

Jocelyn: We learned keyboarding, too. I learned keyboarding in middle school, but when we got to high school, we had a very limited selection of business classes. One of those classes was computer programming. I am like, “Alright, I’m signing up for this.” I learned basic, and then I moved on to Pascal, and then started learning some C++ which is actually still used today. Now, do I still remember it? No. For a variety of reasons but anyway. I learned those programming languages, and I started learning more and more about computers and they started getting more and more sophisticated. That was a cool thing about it is that, I just kept up with that and kept learning and kept getting better.

Shane: When you went to college, you were trying to be a programmer at first right?

Jocelyn: Yeah, and I’ve got some story about that as we move into the college days, but yeah. Honestly, when I was in high school, I counted down the days until I could go out to college. It wasn’t because I had a bad home life, I had a fantastic home life, it was just because I wanted something more. I didn’t even know what that something more was. I just wanted something more. I was ready to get out.

Shane: And Jocelyn left her hometown. She moved to Lexington to go to University of Kentucky. She was 17 because Jocelyn is really smart, and she like, skipped second grade something.

Jocelyn: I skipped first grade.

Shane: First grade, whatever. She skipped a grade. She was she literally turned 17 in March of her senior year, that summer– can you imagine having a 17-year-old right now letting them do that– would you let your kids do that?

Jocelyn: No —

Shane: Because they will meet bad people like you, Shane, they’ll be bad influences like you.

Jocelyn: Yeah, but the thing about it is, you have to remember, back in the 90s– this is 1997, when I moved to the University of Kentucky, people didn’t have cell phones. A few people did, but a lot of people didn’t even have cell phones. My parents sent their barely 17-year-old daughter–

Shane: In a shoddy car–

Jocelyn: In a 1989 Buick Skyhawk–

Shane: And a 1989 Buick Skyhawk that barely ran. One time we drove Jocelyn’s car, it was– what did you call it? Myrtle or Ethel? Ethel. She called it Ethel —

Jocelyn: Hey, I loved Ethel. I cried when I traded Ethel in.

Shane: I do miss Ethel. Ethel was a good old girl. But one time, the muffler broke or fell off or something —

Jocelyn: I’m pretty sure it fell off —

Shane: I’m pretty sure it fell off, like literally. We were driving, and all of a sudden you’re like, “Oh, it’s a car,” and then it goes, wah-wah-wah-wah-wah because it is terrible when the muffler is not on the car. And we’re like, “Did the muffler just fall off?” And she’s like, “I saw sparks. Yeah, I think so.” We had to go back to Jocelyn’s hometown for the weekend or something, and I think my car was broken down or something, too. Something was going on, so we drove her car there, and we went all the way back to her hometown, like a three-hour drive with no muffler. That was bad on the ears, that time. Yeah.

It’s funny you say that though, because we’re about to go to the next phase here, but Jocelyn looks back, and you’re so systematic now and process-oriented and things like that, and that experience with the computers that you had, you were drawn to that, like you said, you were obsessed with it. I think about going back to high school. I just hated school, and I think about the things that I did like. I liked to be talking and argumentative, so I really loved history, political science and debate-style classes. Also, I loved those video editing classes.

Anything where I could take my imagination and be creative, and it’s funny how we both, even in our business today, if you look at our roles, how you connect the dots, and it gravitates toward those things, you do deal with a lot of the systematic process stuff. Even the technology stuff, you talk to our Infusionsoft contractor, and things like that, where I’m doing more like producing the kids’ YouTube channels, and working with our editor to make things sound and look right, and it’s funny how some people I think that are listening right now may not be connecting all those little things that you take for granted that you could use to build some kind of epic life and business out of, basically.

Jocelyn: You know, just remember that when you start looking back at things to affirm your life, there are experiences that are beneficial for you as you move forward in your online business, or whatever it is that you are trying to do. You might not even think about it right now, but as you think back, then you just remember, that hey, this experience happened for a reason, and maybe it can benefit me in the future.

Shane: I think that what’s really important about that part of our journey, too, and your journey as you are listening to this show is knowing that there is something else, and knowing that you want something else is the most important part of this entire formula, this entire process because you take our parents; our parents– we’ve already said, they were really, really hard workers– they all built lives out of nothing, basically. They didn’t have a lot, but they kept building, kept stacking. They didn’t really know outside of our community. They didn’t really know there were other jobs out there. They didn’t really know there were other things that they might be able to do or grow.

We didn’t really know that until maybe five or six years ago, when we started our journey. We just thought it was, this is the way life was. The world told us we need to get jobs, we need to be secure, we need to safe, we need to be stable, we need to prepare for the worst case scenario all the time, and just hang on and wait until retirement or whatever.

But when you make the decision, I want something else. When you make the decision, I would like to model that person, I think I could do that, too. When you look around in your life, and you say, “There’s more to this; I can go do this.” And you’re like Jocelyn when she leaves, when she’s 17 to go find out what that is, or me getting frustrated and bored with what I was doing, and saying, “No, I’m going to go out and pursue another career,” that’s the most important part of this whole thing.

What we’re telling you here is: everything in your life, every experience leads you to a moment where you want something more, and then take action to go do that. You have all the equipment, all the tools built inside of you whether you know how to use computers or didn’t, whether you played sports or didn’t, whatever it is, and you can make something happen out of that if you put all of those puzzle pieces together.

Guys, that’s the first part of our journey, the first part of our lives. That’s the backstory of how Jocelyn and I grew up, and next week, what we’re going to get into is actually going to college, where we met, and how I knew that I was going to marry this beautiful girl across from me on the microphone right now, I knew it. I knew it from the first time I saw her, and she did not quite know it yet; she resisted the magnetic pull of my romance.

Jocelyn: Can you blame me?

Shane: That’s what we’re going to get into next week. We’re going to talk about basically how our lives, our paths crossed, and how we got into our relationship, and how we dated for seven years almost before we got married, and all that stuff that kind of kicked off the journey that led us to where we are today.

As we go through this journey, you’re going to learn about how we started online business, how we built our online business, how we made it happen, but what we really want to do is just inspire you. We have so many examples in the entrepreneur community.

You see these young, single millennials, or you see these people that are living in Thailand off of $8.00 a week, or you see these people who work 95 hours a week and they are swearing and they are cussing and they’re screaming about how you’ve got to be a hustler, a grinder, and do this and do that. But we want to just show you our story so that you can be inspired and realize we are just normal people. You are normal people, but you can do extraordinary things when you really set your mind to it, and you really want to flip your world upside down. You want to flip your life, you want to try to live the Flipped Lifestyle, and you want to make a change that not only changes your life, but it changes your family tree, and your kids’ lives.

That is the point of these, I hope you are enjoying this. We will be back next week to give you the next step in our journey. Hope that you guys get a lot out of this, thank you for hanging out with us for a little while, and we can’t wait to see you again next week.

Links and resources: * Podcast 163: Our Story - Prologue: A Couple of Kids from Kentucky * Flip Your Life LIVE 2019 Tickets & Registration Information * Flip Your Life community * PROLIFIC Monthly

Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!

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In today's episode, we celebrate with Kevin for crossing the 100 member mark.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jocelyn Sams: Hey y'all. On today's podcast, we celebrate with Kevin for crossing the 100 member mark.

Shane Sams: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, where life always comes before work. We're your hosts Shane and Jocelyn Sams. We're a real family that figured out how to make our entire living online. Now, we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? All right, let's get started.

Shane Sams: What's going on everybody? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. It is great to be back with you again today. And we are super excited for a number of reasons in this episode of the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. Yes, we have a member of our Flip Your Life Community back on the show today. It's a guest that we have had before. He's actually the most prolific guest in Flipped Lifestyle Podcast history. This is his fourth appearance on the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. And this one is going to be a great one because we are celebrating a major milestone in this member's life. His online business, his membership has just crossed the 100 member mark. Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, our good friend and member of the year at last year's Flip Your Life Live, Kevin Depew. Kevin, welcome back.

Kevin Depew: Hey, what's going on guys? It's great to be here.

Jocelyn Sams: We are so excited to talk to you today. We got a message not too long ago from Kevin. And he was really excited saying he had crossed over 100 members. And I think that it's safe to say, Kevin, that this was definitely not an overnight success.

Kevin Depew: Yeah, this would be the polar opposite of overnight success.

Shane Sams: Hey, success is success, right? And it usually takes a long time to become an overnight success. So, real quick, tell us a little bit. How many members do you have now? And-

Kevin Depew: We're at ... Go ahead.

Shane Sams: How many members do you have now? And tell us a bit about what your business is. Just remind everybody what's going on.

Kevin Depew: Okay. Yeah. We are at 105 members. We run a website, relaxandlearnguitar.com where I teach folks over 40 how to play guitar, so they can relax, have fun, and be part of a great online community.

Shane Sams: Man, I see your stuff in my newsfeed all the time because you know you see the stuff from your friends and stuff? And I just always see ... like, you always make me want to play guitar. I need to relax and learn ... I need to relax a little bit. I'm a little high strung. So, maybe I need to learn it. But man, that is so incredible just knowing your journey and knowing how long it's taken you to get to that 100 member mark. And that's a really big number for us because we tell everybody if you can get 100 people to give you $50 a month or 200 people to give you $25 a month, you can make real money. You could make $5,000 a month, $60,000 a year. And just getting 100 real people to give you money and you give them value and you make a difference in their life. Like, imagine if you were in your living room and you had 100 human beings pile into your living room right now, what would that look like? Your house would be spilling out into the streets because you couldn't fit 100 people into your house, right?

Kevin Depew: Yes, very crowded.

Shane Sams: Yes. And you've got 100 people that are in your thriving guitar-based community, man. And how long ago did you start Relax and Learn Guitar? What year did you start that in?

Kevin Depew: So, my ... Let's see, a bunch of pivots and a bunch of changes. And Relax and Learn Guitar, first member was December of 2016.

Shane Sams: Wow.

Kevin Depew: Yeah, two and a half years.

Shane Sams: Wow, that's amazing. And I love how you said many pivots because you had another website. I remember when you joined the Flip Your Life community. And in the show notes for today's episode, we'll put all of Kevin's other podcasts. Just a little reminder, I remember you came in and you said you posted your first idea in the forums. And I remember reading it, distinctly yours for some reason, I remember reading it and thinking, "That's horrible."

Kevin Depew: What? Yeah!

Shane Sams: "That is terrible. What are you ..." What was that idea?

Jocelyn Sams: But of course, we never say that to our members. We say-

Kevin Depew: No.

Jocelyn Sams: "You might want to try something else."

Shane Sams: I'll tell you what, I said it in private this time, Jocelyn. I'm going to be open and honest here, no sugar. I went to Jocelyn and I went, "No, Kevin." What was that original idea?

Kevin Depew: Yeah. Well, I had a couple before I even joined the Flip Your Life community. The one that was original was a time management website, and then I was working with caregivers. I did a few other things. I was very much focused on the things I'd done in my work life. And then when I switched to, you would ask, "What do you want to do?" When I switched to something I was passionate about, that's when it really became much more clear what to do.

Shane Sams: Yeah, it became easier. I always felt that after you ... Like, when you switched off of the work thing and you did go after something that you like, you know? Because I remember saying, "What do you want to do?" And you were, "I just want to help people learn how to play guitar because they need to relax, they need to chill out. This is my meditation, right? What if I could help other people do that?" And you were then on fire. And that kind of gave you the energy and the perseverance to kind of stick with it because your membership didn't take off right out of the gate, did it?

Kevin Depew: No, not at all. It was very slow.

Shane Sams: How long did it take you to get your first member, do you think?

Kevin Depew: That was almost three months to get the first member.

Shane Sams: Wow.

Kevin Depew: And then it was kind of one or two a month for a while for a long while. And I just kept at it with creating content consistently and trying to be really responsive to folks I did have, answer their questions. Did a lot of phone calls with people just to talk to them. It was probably six or seven months before we started kind of seeing the Facebook ads start to work and get more emails that then led into the membership.

Shane Sams: Interesting.

Jocelyn Sams: Imagine that. You put in the work and good things happened in time. Wow.

Kevin Depew: Yes. They are, it's pretty exciting now.

Shane Sams: So, let's walk through this because I want to take everybody kind of today on a journey to 100 members because a lot of people listening right now, they're just like where you were. They have no members.

Jocelyn Sams: And it sounds like such a lofty goal, you know? If you're just getting started, 100 members, "I don't even have one member, you know? How am I going to get 100?"

Shane Sams: Right. So, let's kind of walk through that a little bit, and we'll bring it up to today and figure out how you actually crossed the century mark and you filled 100 people in your house, okay? So, you get your first member, right? We talked about that back on an earlier episode of the podcast. What was it like after that, though? Because you said it took like six or seven months before any kind of traction started building, even after you got that first member. What kind of kept you going in that phase? Because we've got a lot of members that post that first sale success story, but then they get really frustrated because it's like they've tasted the promised land, but they can't get in, you know? Like, they can't build momentum on it. So, what kept you going after you got that first sale and then that huge gap until some traction started building after that?

Kevin Depew: Probably two things. Somewhere along the line about learning how to celebrate even small wins. So, even though you don't have your second, third, 20th customer who's paying in your membership, if you've got emails coming in with people asking questions, you have people sharing some of your information, you have people thanking you for what you are doing, that's probably a big part, celebrating kind of the small things along the way. And then, honestly it's probably the ... It was the Flip Your Life community I was really active in there and talking to other people that were on the same kind of journey and same questions and just kind of learning from them. And just kept trying. It wasn't really ... For me, it's never been a matter of if this is going to happen, it's always for me been, "When is this going to happen?" That's just my mindset. So, I'd say those two things.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. I love how you talk about celebrating those small things. I think that's something that we are really bad at. I've talked about that on the podcast before because I think that we are such ambitious people. We've had such success in a lot of different areas, and we think that everything that we do is supposed to be a home run. And when it's not, it's so disappointing, you know? We feel this immense failure. And that's not a great way to be. And I love how you talk about just knowing that you're affecting one person, you're affecting four people, you know? Just all those little things adding up to be something really awesome.

Shane Sams: Yeah. I love how you talked about the community too because that's a good filter, you know, when you're struggling in your business or when something's going wrong, as you're kind of surrounded by other people. And when you have a question, like, "Why is this ad not working?" But then you see someone else ask that question, you can kind of think to yourself, "Oh, it's not just me. Someone else is struggling with getting their ad to work, so maybe we can combine forces and work together." Or when you are not having success and then you log in and you see 10 success stories posted last night, right? Then you get to be like, "Wow, it is real. There's other people doing it. And I just have to keep going because my success is somewhere under one of these rocks. I've just got to keep flipping rocks."

Kevin Depew: Yeah. My wife was much better at, and still is, about the celebrating part. And another kind of shift there was when she kind of saw, "Okay, this might work, there's people actually paying us," because it's all been ground up. She always says, "You built this from the ground up. You made the website, you've created the membership area. You're doing the videos. Be proud of that because a large amount of people don't even get to that point." So, she's much better at reminding me to celebrate small wins.

Shane Sams: Yes. Most people don't even create their first course. It's just always an idea, right? It's a dream that's kind of stuck in your head. And until you get it out there and you build it brick by brick or you grow a grassroots following, it's never going to become a reality. But the cool thing about when you build a grassroots following is your business has deep roots and those people are loyal to you and those people care about what you're doing, and they feel a part of your community, right? Like, sometimes success can come too fast, and then it flames out like a forest fire. And that's not what we want. We always say we want to be a glacier. We want to build strength and size snowflake by snowflake until we are an unstoppable, immovable force just roaring down the gorge, right? And as you build that momentum, and as you build that foundation, your house is built on rock, not on sand. You can say, "Hey, I've got 105 members today. Tomorrow I'm going to have 110. And then the next day I'm going to have 120." And you just keep stacking those bricks until your foundation is so strong it holds this big huge awesome online business and you've got this amazing worldwide community of second life halfer guitar players chilling out around the campfire.

Kevin Depew: Yes.

Shane Sams: So, the ads start clicking, okay. What kind of happened next? So, when you saw the ads start to work, what happened there? Did you get to like 20 members or 25 members? What started happening with your ads?

Kevin Depew: Yeah. I would say ... So, once the kind of cold ads started getting traction, then it was making the warm ad, repixeling. And I've just slowly moved it from $5 a day, $6 a day. We're at about $20 a day now on the ads. And it's just a cold ad and a warm ad to get folks onto the email list. I would say we got to probably 30 members by the end of 2000 ... See, I have to go back a little bit, end of 2017, I guess, about 30 people we had in the membership. And most of that was just paid traffic and ads was the primary way to get them.

Shane Sams: What do you think was the biggest difference to where the cold ... That's that hard one, right? When people learn about us, warm ads, you can upload your email list, you can find people that follow you and target them.

Jocelyn Sams: The people who have landed on your website.

Shane Sams: Yeah, yeah, people who know about you. What do you think the difference was in getting a cold ad to work? Was it just targeting? Was it the ad itself? What do you think helped you turn the corner and get some traction there?

Kevin Depew: When I had enough traffic to make a lookalike audience that was big. And then, doing a video. Video has been everything. So, when I was first starting out, and it seems kind of ironic, I'm playing guitar, but I didn't really have a YouTube channel. And yes, I mean, I built the website, I built the membership. And then everything else kind of came after that. But once I kind of embraced the live video, I was doing live video on Facebook. And then it's moved to the live video on YouTube. And once the ad changed to a video ad, that's when it moved.

Shane Sams: Wow, that's amazing because people saw you playing, they could hear you playing.

Kevin Depew: Yeah.

Shane Sams: There was proof right there that you knew what you were doing and could teach someone.

Jocelyn Sams: Well, and it also gives you somewhere to send people. So, like if somebody messages you on social media and says, "Hey, I found your stuff. It's pretty cool." You can say, "Well, check it out. I also have a YouTube channel."

Kevin Depew: Yes. I always joke and say, "If it wasn't for Johnny Cash, I would not have a membership."

Shane Sams: Why? Because that was the-

Kevin Depew: That's the one ad. That Johnny Cash ad has done very well as far as learning how to play. Yeah.

Shane Sams: Everybody wants to be Johnny Cash.

Kevin Depew: Yeah. I do.

Shane Sams: You've got to burn that ring of fire, man. You've got to burn that ring of fire. It's interesting you say that now for just everybody listening who's a beginner, cold ads are to people who don't know about you. The main thing for a cold ad to do is to create awareness and hopefully create an opt-in, where they can become more familiar with you, they can build that relationship with you. And cold traffic is everything. It's the life blood of your business. You have to be found by new people before ... to be able to grow your business and get more members because you can't just stay static. You can't just protect what you've already got. You've got to grow. So, the cold ad started creating enough awareness and traffic to make your warm ads work because everybody thinks, "I'm going to get a cold ad, they're going to opt-in, they're going to join. This is going to be amazing. It's all going to work flawlessly." But that's not true. Cold ads, they need to see you probably five or six times before they even recognize you enough to try to trust you, you know?

Kevin Depew: Yes.

Shane Sams: So, people are constantly seeing you strumming Johnny Cash in their newsfeed, right?

Kevin Depew: That's the idea.

Shane Sams: That's right. And eventually they say, "Who is this guy? He looks so relaxed while he's playing his guitar. Maybe I need to relax and play guitar."

Kevin Depew: He makes it look easy, I bet I could do it.

Shane Sams: He makes it look easy.

Kevin Depew: Guess what? You can.

Shane Sams: There you go everybody. You're going to learn how to play guitar before this episode is over. Get your guitar out, Kevin. All right, so in 2017 then, you got about 30 members, right? That's not making a living, but it's making something.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, I mean that's no joke.

Shane Sams: Exactly.

Jocelyn Sams: Having 30 members.

Shane Sams: You know? So, then you come in to Flip Your Life Live, which is in November ... I'm sorry, when was it?

Jocelyn Sams: September.

Kevin Depew: September 18.

Shane Sams: September of 2018. So, you go into 2017 with about 30 members, how many members did you have coming into Flip Your Life Live in 2018?

Kevin Depew: 51. The big change there is that Vicki was able to quit her full-time job in early 18 and really help. I mean, she's taken on all the social media posts, a lot of the promotion stuff, and kind of the bookkeeping part, which was just huge. So, we basically looked at each other and said, "It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when. We're all in on this. And let's go to the live event."

Shane Sams: Isn't it amazing how that first initial ... You know, some people feel discouraged when they have 25 or 30 members. And you're like, "No. This is creating a foundation. We've got enough money for ads. We've got enough money for you to come home. We're going to invest and go to this conference." And even though you were still grinding, like, let's be realistic, you added 20 members net in like seven, eight months, right?

Kevin Depew: Yeah.

Shane Sams: It wasn't this avalanche of members coming in, but you could feel those baby steps starting to creep and add up. She comes home, you split focus. Now you could worry about content, she can do the backend, you're coming to this event to be surrounded by people, and it's just starting to build.

Jocelyn Sams: Let's talk about what happened after the event. So, you came to the event, both you and Vicki came to the event, which was awesome because it's the first time that we had met and in real life, you've been our member for a very long time. So, let's talk about what happened after that. Like, what did you implement as a result of being at the live event that helped you get to where you are now?

Shane Sams: Because you've doubled. You've more than doubled the membership now, right?

Kevin Depew: Yeah.

Shane Sams: So, we're starting to see the magic numbers like 2X, 5X, 10X, right? Like, these things are starting to happen now. What's the big difference?

Kevin Depew: I mean, I'm very much like if you tell me an idea to implement, I'm going to try it. So, I had my workbook, that was a big piece of just kind of going through the content from the event. The biggest part I would probably say though was I hooked up with some really great people and did a mastermind. We were talking monthly. One of those folks helped with a new Facebook ad that really took off and has increased the number of emails that we're getting.

Shane Sams: And these are people you met at Flip Your Life Live?

Kevin Depew: Yeah. Yeah. Yes.

Shane Sams: Give them a shout out. Who was it?

Kevin Depew: Shout out to Lauren from Corner of Hope and Mane. She's been-

Shane Sams: I love it.

Kevin Depew: ... Amazing with kind of Facebook ads and just marketing strategy stuff. Chris from Multiples, Living With Multiples, Leah from Mom Knows College. Those are the main folks.

Shane Sams: It's so awesome because I know all those people. Like, when you say their names, I see their faces. Like, we have literally hugged and eaten food with all of those people from Flip Your Life community, right? And you know, I think we even sang happy birthday to Leah last year during the live event, right? We had 100 people-

Kevin Depew: Yes, we did.

Shane Sams: That was awesome. So, just amazing knowing that you came to that place and met those people and they helped you. Together, you all doubled your membership, right?

Kevin Depew: Yes.

Shane Sams: And it's so parallel to our journey because when we first started out, we were the same way. We were all alone, we didn't know if this was real. We were kind of making some money, but we were like, "Is it all going to go bankrupt next month?" And then we start building momentum, we go to a live event, we meet people, we form a mastermind. We do huge things. And I just hear that story so much. Jocelyn and I just came back from FlynnCon. We spoke at FlynnCon with Pat Flynn on stage. And we were there and on stage we were talking about what was the biggest inference maker. And we told a story about going to one of Pat Flynn's early events called a one day business breakthrough. And we met our good friends Cliff and Jessica LaRue, the selling family. And they were at Flynn Con. And we had dinner with them. And it was so crazy because three years later, we're still friends with people we met at this very first live event. And you just can't replace those kind of relationships or even put a numerical value on how those relationships impact your business.

Kevin Depew: Right, yeah. It's been amazing. And we're in such different businesses, but we're in the same business, so that's the cool part.

Shane Sams: That was a Kevin bomb.

Kevin Depew: There we go.

Shane Sams: Kevin just dropped a bomb on your heads about masterminds.

Kevin Depew: Yeah.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, and that's the thing is most of the people that we have been friends with for all this time, we're in totally different businesses too, but it's just knowing someone who's also willing to invest in themselves, most likely if they're willing to travel and spend the money to come to an event. They're not a total psycho. So, there's that.

Shane Sams: Right.

Jocelyn Sams: And no guarantees about that. But most likely that's the case. And just having those shared experiences, I just think there's really no substitute for that.

Shane Sams: So, what other than ads have you done to grow your authority? To grow ... because I remember talking to you a lot about authority. Like, "Well, I'm just a guy who knows how to play guitar. I'm not Johnny Cash. Who's going to listen to me?" That's a big fear that a lot of people have. How did you kind of overcome that and grow your business? How did you build your authority from 50 to 100 members? How did you start leading your community and convince people, "Hey, this was the place where you needed to be?" Like, what other things did you do besides buying ads to grow your business?

Kevin Depew: So, the game changer in 2019 has been challenges. We've done three of them this year, just finished one up in the middle of July, which is what pushed us over the 100 mark. So, it's a lot. I'll tell folks it's a lot of work, but it's really paid off for us. So, we've done, learn this song in five days, it's sent out to our ... we've got over 5,000 folks on our email list now.

Shane Sams: Wow, that's incredible.

Kevin Depew: Yeah.

Shane Sams: Oh my gosh.

Kevin Depew: Yeah, so it goes to the email list. And I've learned that I've tried running ads for the challenges and didn't have a lot of luck with that. So, I've just been focused on the folks already on the email list, getting them into this free challenge Facebook group. It's five nights. I do an email every morning with a PDF download of what we're going to work on. We go at seven o'clock every night five nights in a row with a different lesson each night. And at the end of the week, we've learned a song. And then I pitch the membership. And Vicki helps, the one who's kind of filming that and helping moderate the comments coming in. On the last challenge, we had over 300 people. So, about 100 probably by the end that were actually kind of viewing pretty consistently. And that's one of the questions I had for later, but those three challenges have gotten us over the 100 mark for sure. That's been the key.

Shane Sams: I love this story because we always tell people there's only two ways to grow your business, roll up your sleeves or open your wallet. And usually, it's both. You've got to invest in ads, you've got to grow your list, and then you've got to go after the people on that list. And we go after our list in different ways, right? I love copywriting. I love writing letters to our people, right? We don't do any kind of affiliate promotions. Someone just sent me a message the other day and said, "I have never received a sales pitch from someone else in your email list, and I really appreciate that," because we're not constantly jumping on all these affiliate launch bandwagons, right? And I activate my list with this personal ... Like, I feel like I'm writing them a letter. And I almost expect people to write me back. I love it when people write me back. So, listen guys, If you get an email from me, hit reply, okay? I love hearing from you.

Jocelyn Sams: You're going to have a bunch of emails.

Shane Sams: I get enough as it is, but I want more. But I love how you have found another way to do it. Yours is like, "Okay, get awareness, get people on my list, but then invite them to this periodic quarterly maybe five day live thing." This isn't pre-recorded. You're manually having this engagement and this relationship with them because you know it works. You've found what works for your people and you guys are just hammering that now, right? So, what an amazing testimony of how rolling up your sleeves a little bit, opening your wallet a little bit, how that can kind of add fuel to the fire that you already started. How often are you doing the challenges?

Kevin Depew: They've been about every six weeks. Let's see. I had one in March, May, July. So, six to seven weeks in between them.

Shane Sams: That's a good gap. It's not quite every month, so there's a little like, "When's the next challenge?" You know?

Kevin Depew: Yeah, if I wasn't working full-time, I could probably pull off the monthly.

Shane Sams: Right. This makes me want to do a challenge, Jocelyn.

Jocelyn Sams: I know.

Shane Sams: We could do a come up with an idea challenge.

Jocelyn Sams: I've had so many ideas about this and I have taken notes on it when we've talked to other people who are successfully running challenges, and yet we still have not done it.

Shane Sams: We're not being prolific about doing it. I'm learning from you now, bro.

Kevin Depew: Okay, great.

Jocelyn Sams: I know, I have a lot of ideas about it.

Shane Sams: Yeah. Like, I love how we do learn as much from our community. You probably have found this in your mastermind, you're all kind of peers and we're all kind of working. And some people are ahead, some people are behind. But you learn something new from each other every day, right? There's not a day that I don't log into the Flip Your Life community that I don't look over at Jocelyn and go, "Look what this person's doing. That is really smart." Right? Because none of us have all the answers. That's why community is so important because we have to do that. Where did you get the ideas for the challenges?

Kevin Depew: I mean, Vicki had some of that. Lauren has helped with kind of that idea of saying, "You know, if you can get folks ..." Because before the challenges, I was doing weekly lives for probably seven or eight months both on Facebook and on YouTube. And we were getting folks to show up and like things and say positive things and they were getting things out of it. But they weren't clicking the link, the description.

Shane Sams: Buy button. Right, right.

Kevin Depew: They weren't taking that step. And I've learned too that in my audience, it takes a little while. So, there's folk that have been on my list for a year and come to two challenges before they join. But they're staying. So, I've had pretty good retention.

Shane Sams: So, what I'm seeing develop here is we always talk about consistent, prolific, relentless, right? Like, you're consistently creating content, you've been super prolific with your content creation because you've been doing Facebook live, you've been doing YouTube live.

Jocelyn Sams: And when something didn't work, you didn't just throw it all out the window and say, "Online business is not for me, better try something else."

Shane Sams: Exactly.

Jocelyn Sams: You tried something different.

Shane Sams: That's right, and it worked. You just created an event that was more ... I don't know what to say. It's more-

Kevin Depew: Interactive.

Shane Sams: It's more interactive and bigger than your daily lives, okay? And you created this thing where you could relentlessly sell. Like, it's pretty relentless to say, "I'm blocking off a week and I'm going to get up and email these people every day manually. I'm going to go live with them at 7:00 PM at night, and then the last day I'm going to do a webinar." That's what we're talking about about being relentless, you know what I'm saying? So, dude, what a great job. I mean, I'm just so impressed by you, Kevin. I can't-

Kevin Depew: Thanks.

Shane Sams: I feel like it's awesome developing the friendships that we've developed in the Flip Your Life community. It's not a teacher, student relationship. We do teach a lot, but you're one of our friends. You're right down the road, you're a couple of hours away. And we've met you in person, and we're so impressed by you and everything you've accomplished. And we just know that you are a great example for everybody listening. Hey, real people can take something they love and turn it into a business, and they can go get 100 members. And if you can get one, you can get 100. And when you get to 100, you start opening your eyes and saying, "Wait a minute, could I get 1,000? I probably could. That's probably possible." And that's what we're going to try to move you to next, man.

Kevin Depew: Okay, great. Thank you very much. Couldn't have done it without you guys and without the community for sure. Vicki and I are very appreciative.

Jocelyn Sams: All right, Kevin, we appreciate your kind words about our community so much. And we appreciate you for being an awesome member for such a long time, being so relentless, just not giving up, and keeping pushing forward always. So, that is so awesome. Now, let's talk about what happens next for Relax and Learn Guitar.

Shane Sams: So, 100's not enough.

Kevin Depew: Okay, yeah, I'd like to increase.

Shane Sams: You've got to become the guitar guy, that's what we want. So, what do you need help with right now? Are you stuck? Do you feel like there's good momentum? Or what's kind of holding you back?

Kevin Depew: I'm probably just kind of question mark. So, probably the most specific, and it's kind of a specific nitty gritty question. So, the strategy for the first two challenges that we had done, we had done the five days, I left the videos in that Facebook group to replay for folks who couldn't make it to the live each night. And I left them in there for maybe four or five days past the challenge finishing. And kind of said, "Sign up now for the membership, and the videos are going to be taken down on Wednesday," or whatever. And I took them out of that group. People stayed in the group.

Kevin Depew: This last time, we didn't take that approach. So, I don't know if I ... I want the events because I think that's really the answer, at least initially for a while. I think we can keep building the list, offering a challenge every six, eight weeks, whatever it is, and selling the membership that way. Do I leave all of that content in that free Facebook group just to play in between the challenges? Or does that make it less special?

Shane Sams: You're recording each [crosstalk 00:28:47].

Kevin Depew: Yeah.

Shane Sams: Are you doing a different song every challenge?

Kevin Depew: Yes.

Shane Sams: Okay.

Kevin Depew: However, the first three nights of each challenge are very similar because we go through dexterity, finger exercises, chord, chord changes, rhythm. That's a very ... Like, part of that five day challenge, the first three days are very similar. The last two really gets into the new part of the songs.

Shane Sams: Let me ask you this, how long is each lesson of the challenge? You said you go on at 7:00. How long is it?

Kevin Depew: It's 30-45 minutes each night.

Shane Sams: I just wonder if you couldn't do something differently and start creating evergreen funnels behind the live events. Like, I think you could get out of there, right? Take it out of the Facebook group. It has to disappear, the live parts, right? But what if you had challenges that were, "Learn this song in a day." And you structured it in a way where people could opt in. So, you take the challenges that you're using to sell your membership, you pull them out and you rebuild them as a course, okay? And it's like, rebuild them as an evergreen funnel. Like, you have a thing that says, "Learn Johnny Cash, Ring of Fire in a day. Click here." They opt in. And this is kind of a long opt in. We usually say a short opt in. But this is kind of a ... Philosophically it's can they get a result in a day? You could probably, if someone was obsessed and took a whole Saturday, they could spend 30 minutes, do one course. Spend 30 minutes ... Like, five hours longer, they'd be playing the song a little bit.

Kevin Depew: Absolutely, yeah, because part of that 30 minutes is questions and answers, saying hello to people. The cool part is-

Shane Sams: So, you can edit all of that out.

Kevin Depew: Yeah. Yeah.

Shane Sams: You know? And you could turn each one of these into just a pure evergreen opt in funnel. And it always pitches in the last lesson.

Kevin Depew: Okay.

Shane Sams: So, that might be some low hanging fruit where 5-10% of the people opting in could just go ahead and join you, right? And if they did one of these, even if they didn't do it or didn't join it, they would be so much more hyped for the live one, right? So, that's probably where you should take that content out. It's too valuable to leave it in there, okay?

Kevin Depew: Okay. That's what I was kind of thinking. Yeah.

Shane Sams: Yeah, and don't put it in your courses though. You could, you could put it there too. But use it as opt ins. Say, "Hey, learn this song in a day. Hi, I'm Kevin. I've got a challenge for you. You've always wanted to learn guitar, you've never known what to do. You've kind of messed around with it, but I'm going to teach you how to play a song in one day. All you got to do is get up, pour a cup of coffee, block off a couple hours, and three or four hours from now, you're going to be playing this song. Promise this is going to happen if you do the work. So, opt in, I'll give it to you for free." And now you've got kind of like an evergreen webinar, but you've structured it like a free course.

Kevin Depew: Okay.

Shane Sams: And then that will go ahead and start selling people and really warm them up because if they go do the live challenge then, how much easier is it to follow up, "If you loved doing the challenge by yourself, you're really going to love doing it with 300 people."

Kevin Depew: Okay.

Shane Sams: And that's where I would probably put that stuff is keep using it as leads, but make some evergreen funnels now, so you can kind of ... When you go eight weeks in between a challenge, it doesn't matter. You've got challenges running every day and you can have those on your sidebar, "Learn to play Ring of Fire. Learn to play a Nirvana song." Whatever, you just pick different genres because people will like different genres. And how many of those have you done so far? You said three or two?

Kevin Depew: We've done three, yeah.

Shane Sams: So, what songs?

Kevin Depew: Did some Bob Dylan, some Hank Williams, and some Johnny Cash.

Shane Sams: Oh my goodness, you've already got a nice little-

Kevin Depew: Yeah, you've got to have the core, right?

Shane Sams: Yeah, if you're not doing those guys, who are you going to do, right?

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, exactly.

Kevin Depew: Yeah.

Shane Sams: So, start some ads on those. Just go take a day or two to edit them and put some evergreen challenges on it. Just make sure you're pitching. The pitch needs to be in there at the end, right? Full blown pitch it at the end when they watch that last course, you're going to start picking up a lot more sales that way.

Kevin Depew: So, you see this as an ... I mean, could I use it as an opt in and also to the email list? I mean, it could be part of the autoresponder.

Shane Sams: Yes.

Kevin Depew: Once they apply through, "Hey, I do live challenges, but you don't got to wait. You can do one now. Click here," kind of thing.

Shane Sams: Yes.

Jocelyn Sams: Absolutely.

Shane Sams: And I would also put it in your member area so you can curate it because some people are like, what if they missed the Hank Williams Junior challenge and they join your membership? That can go in the community too.

Kevin Depew: Yes, I already do that because at the end I say, "If you missed any of this or you would like the replays, you can slow the speed down, whatever you want to do, become a member and all of these challenges are inside the membership for sure."

Jocelyn Sams: Perfect.

Shane Sams: Yep. 100%.

Jocelyn Sams: All right, Kevin. At this point in the call, we usually ask for an action step. But today, we want to know a little bit more about where you're heading more longterm and just your overall goals? So, what are you planning for the site? And what about for your life? Like, is there a magic number that you have to hit to maybe leave your job? Tell us just a little bit about that.

Kevin Depew: Yeah, so goals is to keep growing this. I love what I'm doing in there, the interaction with the guys is amazing. And the messages I get back from them and the interactions about how much they've enjoyed and now are looking forward to things in their life is great. So, we want to keep growing that. And yes, we have a magic number. 300's kind of the low end of the magic number that we could probably make it work, but believe me, we've already talked about that. The goal is ... I joke and say this is my retirement plan. So, I'm not going to ever probably quit working, but I would like to quit working in a full-time job and work full-time for myself inside this membership and have that be kind of what I'm doing maybe two years out, I don't know. We'll see what happens.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, and the cool thing is that when you do this kind of work, it doesn't feel like work because you do what you love every day.

Shane Sams: That's right.

Kevin Depew: Absolutely. Yeah. I want to hang out at home with my wife, work on the guitar stuff, and we just got a new puppy, so that's fun.

Shane Sams: Hey, well listen, that puppy's going to grow up and maybe, maybe Relax and Learn Guitar moves to doing beach live challenges, right?

Kevin Depew: I would love to do a live event too with my guys.

Shane Sams: Yeah, sitting on a campfire on the beach, puppy running in the ocean, time to learn some Margaritaville or something, right?

Kevin Depew: Yep. That's perfect.

Shane Sams: We're ready to roll, man. Well, listen dude, we love you man. Like, we do. We're so impressed by you. You inspire us. Every time that I think about, "Man, I wish someone would do this," or, "I wish we could do that." I'm just like, "Man, look at Kevin Depew. Look what he's done." When you hit the 100 member mark, dude, I cried. I am not lying. You can ask Jocelyn. I was sitting on my couch and Jocelyn told me about it, and I cried, dude. I just was so proud.

Jocelyn Sams: I think we've had the most celebratory ... I don't even know what you'd call it.

Shane Sams: Moments or whatever.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, about your successes because we've just been with you since the very beginning.

Kevin Depew: Yeah.

Jocelyn Sams: I can remember being upstairs and Shane yelling to me that you got your first member, you know? We were both like, "Yeah." We were screaming in the house.

Kevin Depew: That's awesome.

Shane Sams: Yeah, it really is our life blood to hear these success stories, not because we helped do it or helped in any way. You did the work, you made the investment. But it's just we know that people's lives are changing. And 100 members, man, if you can get 100, you can get 1,000, right? It might take a couple of years, but you're going to get there. And I know you're going to do the work. I know you guys are going to keep investing. And we are just so happy for you guys and we are so proud of you guys. And we're just thankful for the example that you set inside of the Flip Your Life community. And we're super thankful that you've came on the podcast four times now. And we just keep sharing you, we just keep begging you to come on to share your story because I know you're inspiring other people out there, man. We just really appreciate you.

Kevin Depew: The feeling ... it's absolutely mutual. I am so appreciative for the work you guys have done and what you've created to help me and Vicki and a lot of other people. And just honored to be part of it and flattered for the compliments. So, thank you. One more thing, another part that was very important in the success was the one on one coaching with you guys through Voxer that happened right after that live event. So very helpful to be able to say, "I've got a question today." And it was like, I think I got a question a day. And I absolutely used that every day. And then, to get an answer back from you guys, that was a really, really important part of this too as well.

Shane Sams: Man, I appreciate that. That's why that program exists. We usually reach out to people when we see them on the verge of something crazy, you know? When we know they're at the tipping point, but maybe they're frustrated, or maybe they don't know exactly how to handle the next step, that's when we reach out to people in the coaching program. And I love people like you, Kevin, who come into our Voxer program or one-on-one coaching because I know you're going to take action on what we say, right? We talk about it. We figure out a solution. And within 24 hours, Kevin's knocked it out and got his next member. So, man, you killed it in the Voxer program. And it's there just for that reason.

Shane Sams: Wow, that wraps up our amazing interview with Kevin Depew. What an awesome, inspiring, incredible dude that guy is. Him and his wife are action takers extraordinaire. They're an awesome example of what can happen when you invest in yourself, when you roll up your sleeves and you do the work, you can build a life changing online business. You can literally grow from zero to 100 members and change your life and the lives of all of those people who are in your membership. We would love to help you guys achieve this kind of success. We have dedicated our lives to helping other families do what we did, start an online business, turn it into a membership, get that recurring revenue, grow to 100 members. Imagine having 100 people giving you $50 a month. That's $60,000 a year. You can take control of your life and you can change your family's future. And you can do it inside our Flip Your Life community.

Shane Sams: So, if you'd like to learn more about the Flip Your Life community, if you'd like to come hang out with us, if you'd like to come hang out with Kevin Depew, all you have to do is go to Flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife. That's F-L-I-P-P-E-D lifestyle.com/flipyourlife. We have programs available for every budget and every ability level, and we would love you to join the community today.

Shane Sams: All right, guys, that's all the time we have for this week. Before we close the show, we would love to share a Bible verse with you. Jocelyn and I get a lot of our inspiration and motivation from the Bible, and I've got a great verse for you today. In Galatians chapter six, verse nine, the Bible says, "Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time, we will reap a harvest if we do not give up." So, be like Kevin, be like Kevin Depew. Go out there, keep grinding, keep hustling, keep investing, and you too will reap a harvest when the time is right. Until next time, guys, get out there, take action, and do whatever it takes to flip your life. We'll see you then.

Jocelyn Sams: Bye.

Kevin's past episodes: * FL 103 - We help Kevin gain traction for his guitar tutorial website * FL 194 - We help Kevin find more organic traffic and find the right people to join his membership * FL 283 - Sales Funnel Strategy from Opt-In to Pitch

Links and resources mentioned on today’s show: * Kevin's Website, Relax and Learn Guitar * Flip Your Life LIVE 2019 Tickets & Registration Information * Flip Your Life community * PROLIFIC Monthly

Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!

Join the Flip Your Life Community NOW for as little as $19 per month!

https://flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife

View Details

In this Best of Episode we help Kevin gain traction for his guitar tutorial website.

This episode was originally published on August 9, 2016. You can check out the original episode here: https://flippedlifestyle.com/podcast103/

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jocelyn: Hey y’all! On today’s podcast, we help Kevin make a pivot to a new online business.

Shane: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, where life always become work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. We’re a real family who figured out how to make our entire living online. And now, we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? Alright. Let’s get started. What’s going on everybody? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. It is great to be back with you as always. This week, we’ve got a beautiful sunny day out the window here in Kentucky at the podcast, and we are excited because we are welcoming back a former guest and friend of ours, Kevin Depew - a Flip Your Life member who has been on the podcast before, but we have something we’ve never done that’s happening here on the podcast today. We are going to help someone pivot from one online business idea to another. So, Kevin, welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast.

Kevin Depew: Thank you. Great to be here.

Shane: And, it was very interesting watching the progression of Kevin’s online business since he was on the podcast. What episode was that Jocelyn?

Jocelyn: I think it was 79.

Shane: Episode 79, so if you want to check out his first episode to kind of partner with this, go back to flippedlifestyle.com/podcast79. Kevin had an online business that was totally different than where he is today and where he is making progress. So, Kevin, tell everyone a little bit about, just quickly where you were when we last spoke. And, maybe what your avatar was, what you were trying to do, maybe a couple of, you know, little problems that you had with that and then, tell us about your business and your avatar now.

Kevin Depew: Sure. So, that was back in late January – so, January, February when I had my first call with you guys. I was really new. I had turned a blog in November 2015, just kind of getting idea to want to do online business. And, at that point I had come across you guys through I believe it was from Pat Flynn’s podcast, really felt like you guys were some real folks I could learn from. So, I jumped right into the community and I think I did my phone call with you guys. I was maybe in there a week and a half…

Shane: All right.

Kevin Depew: Yeah. Got an email and said, “Yes. I’m going to – I will talk to people in person about online business. What the heck?”

Shane: I probably will.

Kevin Depew: At that point I was doing the blog with createsometime.com and it was a tag blog. So, let’s just say that. The avatar was everyone living in America, basically

Shane: Right. And literally you said that. I’m pretty sure you’re like, “Yes, I just wanted to help everybody.” And I’m like, “No. That’s not how this works, man.” You know?

Kevin Depew: Yes. I learned a lot. So, at that point... I mean I have strengths in being creative and art, and music, that kind of thing. And I’m also really good at time management. I’ve worked my entire career, 25-plus years administration, children and families, multiple projects, you know, hiring and training and working with multiple people.

Shane: Right.

Kevin Depew: So, it was very broad. That first phone call – we really narrowed down how to choose a more specific avatar, which I was kind of... what ended at that call was figuring out a more specific avatar and a more specific problem.

Shane: And, we really niched down to you were trying to help older people who had parents that were caregivers for their older aging parents and you were going to help them control their time, basically.

Kevin Depew: Exactly. So, we narrow it down to that demographic and just kind of myself as the avatar and things I’ve learned from that. And then, you know, step off from there with the blog post, the lead magnets, time management, -- the stress and issues that caregivers have -- did some Facebook ads, learned a lot of stuff. And, you know, it wasn’t really gaining any traction. So…

Shane: Sure.

Kevin Depew: ...there was a lot of involvement with the help of you guys. Jocelyn was very, very patient and very helpful. So, I will say that for sure.

Jocelyn: Yes, Kevin, we definitely did a lot of soul searching on the old action plans forum.

Kevin Depew: Yes.

Jocelyn: We talked together a lot, I know. And one of the suggestions that – I’m not sure if it was me or another community member had, was for you to actually sit down with a person and to see what they were willing to pay for and if there were people willing to pay for something. So…

Shane: Like this avatar, basically.

Jocelyn: Yes, so I think you actually did that. And, tell us a little bit about that and how that led to change in direction a little bit.

Kevin Depew: Sure. Yes, that was in May pretty much. I did meet with about five different people, face to face and had asked them a couple of questions about how they would like to get content, whether it be a free blog or through a community or through a course. And, just found on that topic, there’s a lot stress and a lot of time that people are trying to spend better in taking care of themselves. But, it’s really something they felt like they weren’t really jazzed about paying a lot of money for. So, you know, my wife and I are trying to figure the stuff out. And she’s like, “You know what? You’re creative. You’re giving a guitar lessons to people. You love music. What about that? That seems a little more concrete.” So, that was two months ago. So, since then that’s been the major shift to working on a website that’s teaching people how to play the guitar and then moving the direction of a membership site for that topic.

Shane: That’s good, man. And like this is so interesting. Like when I was talking to you come back on the show, I was fascinated about this because nobody talks about pivoting. Everybody is always just like, “Chase your dreams. Get an idea and hammer it until it works.” You know, it takes a lot of courage to pivot and you did that. And I’ve seen how much easier the last couple of months was than the first six months, because it’s just flowed out of you because you’re finally kind of hitting your stride. You may have been through it once before, you know you’ve created the blog, you’ve kind of done all the growing pains stuff, learning how all this fit together and it seems like it’s been a little bit easier for you to pivot into this new idea, where you do seem to be getting like more personal traction in it. Does that make sense?

Kevin Depew: Oh, absolutely. I will say I totally agree with that. And a part of me is like, “I’m just not doing this right.” You know what I mean, I’m starting to self-doubt and kind of figure out... and I’m a person who kind of once I get my mind set to it, I’m going to figure it out.

Shane: Sure, sure.

Kevin Depew: I felt like I can’t be really wrong. Let’s just try something else.

Shane: Exactly. And, that’s where most people I think really fail at online business. You know, we tried different things before things worked. Most successful people, anybody that you find, whatever they’re doing online now, they were not necessarily doing that in the beginning. The beginning was where they had their first ideas, they tried and they learned and they made some mistakes. And, eventually, you find your way to that idea that does stick and you know how to act on that better because you figured all the other stuff out. So, it’s a lot easier, you know, the second or third time to try something, but most people just quit because they stopped their blog and two months later they’re not quitting their job and that’s just not how you do it.

Kevin Depew: Yes, yes. That’d be nice.

Jocelyn: Yes, for sure. Alright, Kevin. Let’s jump into some questions for today. Let’s fast forward a little bit to what you’re working on now and what is your biggest challenge right now? I know that you’ve just started kind of recently. So, you have your website up and I think that you have your opt in bonus going. Have you had people opt in?

Shane: Yes. And also to tell everybody your domain name and then maybe narrow down the avatar a little bit.. It’s not just all people that want guitars. Who are we speaking to here?

Kevin Depew: Yes. And so, the website is relaxandlearnguitar.com and my avatar is that – I’m going just say affectionately – the middle-aged person...

Shane: Right.

Kevin Depew: ...like myself. And recently, maybe the empty nester or those who have more time to themselves to learn to play for the first time or maybe they’ve done that in the past and life got in the way and they wanted to pick it back up and start again. Those looking for ways to enjoy, have less stress and just have better health – mental health-wise by learning an instrument, which I think is a very powerful thing for folks who do that.

Shane: That is an awesome avatar, awesome avatar. Where are you at right now like Jocelyn said? then if you want to go ahead and tell us what your biggest challenge is with this new direction.

Kevin Depew: Sure. The website is one-week old. So, I have revamped everything. And you’re totally right, man in “the second time around.” I’ve got these pieces like WordPress or AWeber or Leadpages. I’ve got that under my belt. So, it was just a matter of kind of redoing these things. It didn’t take me as long as I thought it would.

Shane: For sure.

Kevin Depew: So, I have a website, I’ve got a blog. There’s probably eight or nine posts on there, there’s a couple of free lessons, there’s an opt in. I did have to learn Vimeo because obviously with this avatar, that’s going to be huge of how that’s going to be delivered.

Shane: Sure.

Kevin Depew: So, you know, a little learning curve there. But, I have a YouTube channel now, too. It’s one week old. I’ve not have any new opt ins, but I have not done any kind of like paid promotion. And that’s kind of first question like – I know I need to work on and I’ve started just beginning with video taping those first kind of core membership video series I’m working on.

Shane: Sure.

Kevin Depew: And, while I’m doing that I’m also kind of promoting the website too before there’s an actual paid piece to it. What does that look like?

Shane: Right, exactly…

Kevin Depew: So, how do I gain traction, I guess?

Shane: Well, I think that you do have those first few lessons done. And the big selling point in any membership like this, we find this a lot – and a lot of our people who’d come through better in the arts or in like teaching music or teaching people how to draw, stuff like that - The powerful thing is going to be… not only the community that you build, but working directly with you like people want how-to videos but there’s how-to videos all over the place. I would even argue in your space, what you’re doing here. The stuff that goes in an organized fashion inside your community, like you’re going to have like lesson one, lesson two, “Start here. Go there.” That’s all going to be inside your membership in a nice, neat orderly fashion. I think most of your videos you’re going to be able to just release on YouTube anyway. And that’s going to get you a lot of traction. Because just let the videos be free and let people come in, and start picking up the guitar and learning from you. What you’re going to offer people is come into the community, record yourself playing, share it. Let me come on as a teacher and record myself, telling you what you need to do or talking in the forums about what you need to undo to improve your video. I think that’s what you’re going to find is more valuable here for the membership not just the content. You want to get your content out there. You want people to say, “Dang it. Kevin taught me the guitar.” You know what I mean? and then, “But I want him to help me get better. I want to be around a lot of other empty nesters. I want to be a lot – around, you know, 50 to a 100 guys that are doing this with me and we’re all doing it together. I can see where they messed up, I can see what they do or I can write a song and go share it with them in a safe place. And Kevin can come in and kind of help me a lot on that journey.” So, I would actually argue if you’ll just set your forums up, you’re not going to need a ton of content in there. As your content gets out into the world, people are going to start coming there for you. There was even a coaching component to this. You know, one of the fastest ways to make money is to just go one-on-one and do what doesn’t scale first. As people discover you, let them just come in. Do some Skype lessons. Jump on Skype, see them play, help them out, talk about video one that they found and then move forward into that with them. So, you’re really a lot closer than you think. You do have a paid product, you’ve got you.

Kevin Depew: OK, yes. That’s shift the there. It’s a lot of competition with a lot of talking in the forums, I operate under the premise that what folks are going to do is be there for the relationship and with myself, more so than the actual – because you can get free guitar lessons, you get free lessons on a lot of stuff online.

Shane: Yes.

Kevin Depew: So, yes, that makes sense so it’s kind of this recapping on. I’ve done five or six lessons already that were going to be on the membership site. Just go ahead and put those on YouTube now and have it lead back to the website. Is that…

Jocelyn: Yes, I think that’s what you should definitely do. You need some free content out there. You need to be bringing people back to your site so that they can opt in and hopefully join your membership off that.

Shane: Like it doesn’t matter how good your lessons are if no one sees them. So, like, yes you’re going to be able to offer things in your membership later. Like when these people really get down the road with you and invest in you, they’re going to say, “Teach me something high-tech. Teach me something awesome. What can I play when I’m on the beach with my grandkids for this vacation this week that’s going to impress them?” Those are things you can offer in the membership but like basically right now, you can just say, “Let it all go, man. Let it all free.” Now, this is another trick to – no, it’s not a trick. It’s like a way to leverage your content. Like things you release for free can be out there. But, then you can still use those in a paid area because you’re going to organize them and guide people through them in a certain order. That’s how you monetize your content. You know most of the information, when we give advice on here that we could get probably charge for, if we were doing like consulting calls. But, we let it go out there because information wants to be free and we want people to see that they can come to our membership to get direct help. So, that’s exactly what you’re doing here. Be that guy for these people in public as much as possible. Get a following and then draw them back into your membership where they can get actual one-on-one help.

Kevin Depew: And that’s what they’re paying for is the direct one-on-one help.

Shane: And the community and the relationship and, you know, stuff like that.

Jocelyn: And you can have other pay content also like you don’t have to release every single thing that you make.

Shane: Right.

Jocelyn: But, you need enough there so that people can discover you.

Kevin Depew: Sure and that’s kind of a traction thing and like, “Yes, it’s great.” But until they – when no one’s looking at the website, there’s a whole lot of thing that’s going to be going on there. So….

Shane: Exactly. That’s why initially when you start a membership website, no matter what you’re selling, it’s really coming from the point of, “Work with me.” Now, as you get to a certain level of people, 200, 300 – that becomes harder and harder to scale. So, you’ll have to come up with other kinds of strategies like more lessons, like more automation, like more group coaching instead of one-on-one coaching. But, you’re at a phase right now where everything you create should be out on YouTube, everything. Eventually, you’ll pull people in and say, “Let me do some one-on-one lessons. I’ve got 10 guys coming through this month.” You know, like we do our Masterminds in Flip Your Life.

Kevin Depew: OK.

Shane: If you get a 100 people following, 200 people following you over the next couple of months, you get 10 of those people to come in one-on-one. You learn from them, you help them and you go through a month or two with them and that helps you get more people down the road.

Kevin Depew: OK, good.

Jocelyn: Alright. Let’s move on to the next question.

Kevin Depew: So, kind of related to this, or an option to that first question. That’s kind of maximizing effort. I thought of I want to release a blog post every couple of weeks. I want to have a free lesson on that blog every month. And then, also the thought of recording these content for YouTube and getting out there. So, it’s kind of how do I maximize my effort and use that same content in all those different places?

Shane: Yes.

Kevin Depew: Does that make sense?

Shane: Well, I don’t know why you’re blogging. You can’t read a guitar play.

Kevin Depew: OK.

Shane: Like why not just make videos and put that on your blog with the embed and write a description.

Kevin Depew: OK, yes.

Shane: Like, yes, don’t blog. Do one thing really, really good at first. You can’t be everywhere until you’re somewhere. It’s impossible. Jocelyn and I can be in as many as we want because we have six people that work for us, but you can’t and you don’t have a following yet. You’ve got to be in one place, but you can use that one thing everywhere. That’s the real trick to it. So, if you make your YouTube videos and you release them on YouTube and you write a description, there’s nothing stopping you from embedding that in a blog post and writing the description on your site too to get more traffic. There’s nothing wrong with you uploading that to your Facebook group or your Facebook page that you start and using that same video in 20 different places. That’s how you’re going to leverage your time. Just because somebody else blogs, podcasts and has YouTube, that does not mean that you have to.

Jocelyn: Yes.

Kevin Depew: So, one of those a-ha moments. OK.

Jocelyn: Yes, for sure. And, you know, I think that there are places for blog posts on your site. Like if you decide to do that later, maybe you like My Top Five Favorite Guitars or something like that, you know?

Shane: That’s good.

Jocelyn: You can write some of that content so that Google will find you more easily and that’s OK but don’t feel like you have to do that. I mean if you’re already making the videos, let’s just use that as your main content.

Kevin Depew: Yes.

Shane: What’s the most important thing is that what you always have to ask yourself when it comes to content. For us, like on Flipped Lifestyle, this podcast is the most important thing. It is the only thing that we create. Now, we drop that into a Dropbox folder and it gets turned into show notes. It gets turned into a transcript, which can be a downloadable opt in. It gets turned into a YouTube video. We go have a team and add slides to it, and we put that on YouTube. So, we can share stuff that we create, audio clips and things on our Facebook page. So, we use that one piece of content in a lot different places, but we don’t say to ourselves, “I’ve got to create a new YouTube video this week, I’ve got to create a new podcast this, and a new blog post this week.” That would be impossible. In fact, when we send our email out for our podcast, we actually use the show notes copy in the email so we don’t have to write a second email. We just take the show notes and use that in the email that we send out to our followers to let them know there’s a new podcast. So, leveraging your time is about picking that one thing that your people like and that you love to do or do well, and getting it out in multiple places.

Kevin Depew: Yes, that makes sense. No wonder I’m feeling like, “Oh, man. How am I going to do all this?” But if I’m saying, “The most important piece is that video. I’ve done a video on how to tune your guitar.” Let’s just use that as an example. I’ve put that video on YouTube. I have a link or have that piece of the website mentioned in that video, so that they would go from the YouTube channel to the website.

Shane: Yup.

Kevin Depew: That’s where they’re going to see the opt in and that’s the post.

Shane: Yup, that’s right. Everything drives you back like that. It doesn’t have to be all new stuff to do that.

Kevin Depew: Yeah, and that same video goes into membership and it’s kind of video number one. And, if you’re in the membership I’d organize it for them because I know the thing that happens just with entrepreneurs too I think is that there’s so much information out there. I think that happens with people learning how to play an instrument. There’s so much free stuff like where do you even start? Who do you listen to?

Shane: That’s what you sell. Right...

Kevin Depew: I’ve done that. OK, I’ve done that work for them because I’ve said, “You come here to get all of the very easy-to-follow package.”

Jocelyn: Yes, I mean, I think that you’re starting to kind of understand the way that it has to work, especially if you’re working by yourself at the beginning. There’s just no way that you can do all of those things.

Kevin Depew: Oh, yes, yes. It gets – it’s a lot. I mean I’m kind of, you know, still working full time and my wife’s still working full time. So, we want that to eventually change obviously. But, right now, that’s what I have to do.

Shane: Yes, you got to do what you got to do. You just got to pick something and do it as best you can, get some traction and then you’re going to expand out later, OK?

Kevin Depew: So, do I do like a Facebook ad or YouTube ad that kind of directs to that video on the blog?

Shane: I think you can, but you’re right at the beginning.

Kevin Depew: Oh, right.

Shane: Your only mission right now is to get enough content out there to be found.

Kevin Depew: OK…

Shane: So, go ahead and setup the membership area. Go ahead and get the first couple of videos in there. It’s there. It should be for sale. That’s the first thing that should happen. But, you need to be focused right now on building enough content to support that membership area. And then, when that feels comfortable, maybe around the 10th to 20th piece of content, you can start really ramping up promotion of that.

Kevin Depew: OK, that was my question. Like my promotions now come of – sounds like a little early on the promotion piece because I have other stuff done first.

Jocelyn: Yes, I would kind of get some stuff out there organically. Let’s see what’s popular with people. You can see that by your number of views. And, I think that even YouTube has some analytics, things like that, that you can look at. And then once you kind of establish that, then you can start to put some money on those pieces of content that are already coming up organically.

Shane: Yes, we started a YouTube channel last week. We did not promote it. We didn’t tell anybody. We uploaded one video and like in 48 hours it already had almost a hundred views. That’s because I keyword researched what the title of the video was, it was called Lego Land Hotel review. We went to Lego Land, we did a travel review. So, I really researched what the top 10, 15, 20 searches were for the Lego Land Hotel in Winter Park Florida or was it in Winter Haven, Florida?

Jocelyn: Yes, we always get that...

Shane: Yes, Winter Haven, Florida. But, we basically put it in position to be found and it got found organically. Now, I’m going to send it out to our email list. And, everybody that’s listening here or get the email discovered eventually. Things will get traction if they’re researched properly. Like if we look up how to tune a guitar and we do the research on it, I’m sure there’s a keyword phrase or a way that people are typing that in. It might just be “How to tune a guitar.” They might be typing in “Tune a guitar” or “Tune my guitar” “How do I tune my guitar?” We can find something and really work on those titles and stuff and we can get you some organic traffic on YouTube which will then lead – fixed to your site, a couple of emails, get a little feedback. And then, we’ll know exactly what to draw traffic to.

Kevin Depew: OK, that makes sense. I do the keyword research right. I think my next step is like I kind of choose those words that have a lot of hits or people are searching for.

Shane: Yes...

Kevin Depew: I haven’t gone back in like the next step or actually looked in what Google started and what that page looks like for those phrases. So I know I could do much better there.

Shane: Yes. We just had a post last night. Someone was asking about that and I explained in my example in the forums why a 500-key word search per month was 10 times better than a thousand keyword search in this specific example. And, we’ve redone the keyword videos in the training area. Those will be rolled out pretty soon where you can go in and really get deep into that, how to do that work research right to make sure you’re targeting words not only that are popular. That’s what the first thing is, but can you be on the first page of YouTube or Google? That’s what really matters.

Kevin Depew: Awesome. OK. Yes, good.

Jocelyn: Alright. I that we have time for one more quick question. What do you have for us?

Kevin Depew: OK, so this will be kind of down the road. So, I’ve had producings in place to kind of gain traction and interest and, you know, eventually have that form and that membership side open. I’ve heard a lot of folks talking about a beta membership on either your podcast or in the forums. I mean, is that – I have some people come in for free to help me figure out the bugs or like what does a beta membership look like, I guess, is the question.

Jocelyn: OK, that’s a good question. As far as letting people in for free, I don’t recommend that you do that. Maybe for a limited time they could come in for free. I would prefer to see you sell it at a very discounted cost. And that’s what we’ve always said in the past. So, basically when you start getting your list up, when you start getting people to opt in and they’re reading your emails, things like that... you can ask them if they would like to be a part of what’s called a Beta Launch. And, basically that just means that you’re going to open up your forums or your membership community to people on your list and they’re going to join at an discounted rate which you will continue for the lifetime of their membership as long as they never quit. And basically, the purpose of doing that is so that these people can guide your content. They can come in. They can make sure everything’s working OK. They get the benefit of getting a lower rate and then you get the benefit of having early adopters come into your membership community to test everything out to guide your content and let you know what it is that they’re looking for. And so, it’s just a really beneficial relationship for both parties.

Shane: And, basically, you’re really upfront with them when you do a beta launch. You say, “I haven’t made everything. I’ve only made these three videos but I’m planning these 10 over the next three months.” So, they know that everything’s not going to be there. But, they’re getting in for the discount. You tell them, “Hey. Come help me get in the forums, talks, start, you know, my community.” They now that there’s not going to be a lot of chatter in the forums right away. They know that they’re going to be a part of seeding all the conversation in your community. But, like Jocelyn said, it’s really beneficial to them because if you were eventually going to charge $50 a month for something and they can get in for $20, that’s a no brainer. The best thing about a beta launch is let’s say, you get 20 people for your beta launch, OK? You’re going to give them a low rate but when you go live with your public pricing, they’re never going to quit because they don’t want to quit and have to come back later for double the costs. So, the beta group is basically, “Come break my stuff and tell me what to do next for a while. In return, I’ll give you massive value and more of a one-on-one relationship than I will be able to give to people down the road.”

Kevin Depew: And, you will give me some testimonials out of it.

Shane: Oh, yes. That’s a huge benefit of it. You know, you only need two to three really good testimonials to take a business pretty far.

Kevin Depew: Yes.

Shane: And, you can totally get that out of a 10-person beta group.

Kevin Depew: OK.

Shane: Awesome.

Jocelyn: Alright. Well, we hope that that was helpful for you today, some great questions and I think that the decision that you made to pivot was a good one. Time will tell as you start to build this new business and we look forward to helping you in our forums. We always ask everyone at the end of our calls, what’s something that you plan to take action on, say in the next 24 to 48 hours, based on what we talked about here today.

Kevin Depew: I think I would say it’s kind of a shift of putting the videos I’m taping that I thought would just going to be in a locked membership. But, no one has seen those so how would they know to come buy them. So I think it’s putting those lessons onto the YouTube channel. So, the next thing would be actually uploading. That’s what takes the most of of my time.
Shane: Yes, for sure. And I think if you get that done today, you’re going to see great benefit immediately. Your YouTube channel’s going to tick up and there’s going to be people that show up. OK? Well, Kevin, listen man, I am really proud of you, dude! because you’ve take a lot of action and that you’re going about this in the exact right way. You’re looking at it. You’re testing. If something works, you keep doing it. If something doesn’t work, you change something. And, usually that’s the people we see that eventually get there. And, I love this new – the avenue for you. I love this new angle. You seem happier. You seem more energetic.

Kevin Depew: Yes.

Shane: You’re moving forward now, man and it’s just absolutely awesome to see.

Kevin Depew: Great, thanks. Couldn’t do without the help from you guys and the community. It’s been awesome.

Shane: Another awesome call – one of our Flip Your Life community members. To learn more about our Flip Your Life community, head over to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife and we can help you with your online business today.

Jocelyn: Alright. Next we are going the end to our Can’t Miss Moment segment of the show and these are moments that we were able to experience recently that we might have missed if we were still working at our regular nine-to-five jobs. Today’s Can’t Miss Moment is volunteering at Isaac’s school. Not too long ago, they had some testing and after their testing, depending on what scores they get, they have a wall of handprints where the children can put their handprint on if they receive distinguished scores. Well, I happen to be at the school one day and there was a lady there volunteering and she was trying to get all these kids rounded up and she had no help. She was dealing with paint cans and lots of primary aged students, like kindergarten through second grade - usually those few things together don’t mix very well.

Shane: Paint and kindergarteners. Not a good combination.

Jocelyn: Yes. So, I asked her does she need some help. And she says she would love to have some help. So, I was able to take some time off, go up to his school and I was able to see him actually put his handprint up on the wall for scoring those distinguished scores. It just means so much to him to have me there at his school, just to support him and be there when he’s there. He thinks that’s really cool. So, I’d love to be able to go there from time to time and volunteer.

Shane: And, it’s cool just because this was a friend of ours, she actually was a former neighbor that we used to live beside. It was nice to know that people can count on us to help and that we have the time to be able to go invest into the kids. Not just Isaac but his friends and at the school that he’s a part of. So, it’s really cool to be able to just volunteer in the community and do those things, we would never be able to do that in the past because we would have been at work ourselves. We would have been in school. So, outside of that we would not have been able to do anything like that. Before we go, we’d like to close every single one of our shows with a verse from the bible. Today’s bible verse comes from Proverbs 11:3. And the bible says, “Honesty guides good people. Dishonesty destroys treacherous people.” So, make sure you’re always building an honest online business that’s full of integrity and you treat people the way you would want to be treated. That’s all the time we have for this week. As always, guys, thanks for listening to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast and until next time, get out there. Take action. Do whatever it takes to flip your life. We’ll see you then.

Jocelyn: Bye.

Links and resources mentioned on today’s show: * Kevin's Website: Relax & Learn Guitar * Flip Your Life LIVE 2019 Tickets & Registration Information * Flip Your Life community * PROLIFIC Monthly

Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!

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In today's episode, we help a truck driver start an online business.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jocelyn: Hey, y'all. On today's podcast, we help a truck driver start an online business.

Shane: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast where life always comes before work. We're your host, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. We're a real family that figured out how to make our entire living online, and now we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? All right, lets get started.

Shane: What's going on everybody? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. It is great to be back with you again today. We are super excited to have another member of the Flip Your Life community on the show, so that we can help them find their idea, start, build, and grow their own online business, just like we have, and just like hundreds of other people have in the Flip Your Life community.

Shane: Super excited to welcome our guest today, Bryan Goodwin. Bryan, welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast.

Bryan: Hey guys. I appreciate y'all having me on here today.

Shane: I think this is a first Bryan because ... we're going to get into your story in just a second. Bryan is a truck driver, and we are actually recording this podcast, he is in his truck on the side of the road right now. Right?

Jocelyn: Not driving.

Shane: Not driving, he's not driving, but this is the first time I think anyone has ever recorded a podcast with us inside of a semi truck, so I'm pretty excited about that.

Bryan: Well, actually I've heard just about all y'all's episodes, so its ... I think yeah the first one y'all had someone that was a truck driver or is a truck driver. No, there's a truck driver in the forums.

Shane: That's right. There is. There is. I remember that podcast, but they were not actually in their truck.

Bryan: Yeah, they weren't actually in the truck.

Shane: That's where you took it to the next level, Bryan. You took it to the next level.

Bryan: Glad I could do that.

Jocelyn: I'm just curious. I know you spend a lot of time on the road. I'm sure that you listen to a lot of different stuff, but how did you discover us, and have you listened to everything?

Bryan: How I actually found you, I'm not a hundred percent. I believe what happened is I was just looking for a business podcast. I was looking for some more information on businesses, because I listen to the (inaudible) and things like that. Y'all's came up, and so I decided let's give them a try, started listening and, I don't know, got all the way up to one particular episode, and I was like, "All right. Well, they've got me pretty much sold. I've got this, but I want to see what else I can learn," so I jumped all the way back and started with episode one, which I actually had to manually download the first 30 because y'all had already cleared the 300 mark-

Shane: Right.

Bryan: -by that time, so I had to manually download the first 30 and then go from 30 all the way up to what I had listened to at that time.

Shane: Love it.

Bryan: I've listened to a whole lot of Shane and Jocelyn Sams.

Jocelyn: Bless your heart.

Shane: Right, bless your heart, man. I know we had you hooked here because I've heard you say y'all about five times, and as soon as you heard that hey y'all at the beginning of the show, you're like, "Wait a minute."

Bryan: Oh, yeah.

Shane: These are my people. These are my peeps. I've found my people.

Jocelyn: Yeah, so I was curious about that because I know you spend a lot of time driving, and you probably spend a lot of time listening.

Shane: Well, I'm glad that we have kept you company on many miles of road.

Bryan: Yep.

Shane: Hopefully, we can help you take everything to the next level, what you're doing. Maybe someday we'll get you off the road.

Bryan: Well, that's the objective.

Jocelyn: All right, so you are a driver right now, and tell us just a little bit more about your life, about your background, and then we'll get into more of the business side.

Bryan: Okay. I've been driving truck for about 11 years now. I drive for the oil field. I actually just hauled what's called frack sand from quarries and stuff like that and take them out to where they do the hydraulic fracking at, and they use the sand actually as a means to prop the cracks and the rock up. I won't go into the details on what fracking is because that just goes completely off rails, but-

Shane: We've been known to go off the rails a little bit here on the show, man. That's okay.

Bryan: So-

Jocelyn: This is all Greek to me. I have no idea what all this means.

Bryan: Yeah-

Shane: Jocelyn, I just heard sand and I was like, "Sweet. Sand. Okay."

Jocelyn: Okay, I can call it that.

Shane: There's a big truck of sand. Bryan's at the wheel. Here we go.

Bryan: Yeah, so the issue that I run into is that I'm subjected to the swings in the market, so if oil fields, natural gas, and oil prices are getting really high, then yeah I get to have steak and go out and have fun, but if they fall through the floor, I'm eating Cheerios out of a tinfoil bowl. There's a lot of feasts and a lot of famine, and you don't really know when one is going to come upon you, and when the other one's going to leave, so just the swings, and I'm not enjoying the trucking life anymore.

Bryan: I've always wanted to get myself out of the truck after about, I don't know, probably about seven years of it. That's when I really started diving into podcasts and started trying to come up with different ideas. I've ran podcasts and blogs for probably about 10 of those years, but just I'm to the point now to where it's like, "All right. I've got to start trying something. I've played at poking the bear a bit. Now, let's go ahead and let's wrestle the guy down to the ground."

Jocelyn: Yeah, exactly. Well, tell me about your driving? Do you drive for away? Is it mostly more locally? I know you live in Oklahoma, right?

Bryan: Right. It's mostly just regional. There's been a couple times where we've had to go grab sand at some really odd places, all the way up from Oklahoma all the way to Pennsylvania to pick up a load-

Shane: Whoa.

Bryan: -get halfway ... yeah-

Shane: My gosh.

Bryan: -go and get halfway back for the oil company that we were hauling for to go, "Yeah. That sand you got, nevermind. We don't need it. Go take it back."

Shane: Oh my Go-. I think you just also set the record for the longest commute of anyone who's been on the show. I got this 24 hour commute, guys, and I'd really like to show you...so maybe this aha business thing can open some doors for me.

Bryan: Open some doors, exactly. So, it was - but most of the time it's just around the western Oklahoma area, western Texas, Texas panhandle area, may go up into Kansas just a little bit, but most of it's Oklahoma.

Shane: Just a lot of moving down the road, man.

Bryan: Yes, sir.

Shane: Lot of lonely times on the road, right?

Bryan: Yep, lot of I-40.

Jocelyn: All right, so you've been doing this driving thing for quite awhile. You decided, okay this is not the life that I want long term. So tell us a little bit about how you decided to start something online, and what it is that you're doing.

Bryan: All right. Started out - one of the podcasts I listen to is Late Night Internet Marketing, and Mark Mason is the host there. And he had talked about how he was doing drop ship. I was like all right, hey...cause I'd kind of heard about it and I'd wondered how do you get into drop shipping, thinking that would be better than having a room in the back packed full of inventory.

Shane: Let me explain what drop shipping is, because some listeners might not know. Drop shipping is basically where you are responsible for selling goods, but they're kept at another location. So if you fulfill - you may have a big inventory that's kept at a factory, and you just sell it online - the order goes to the factory, or the warehouse or whatever, they send it out. You're just responsible for basically selling it. You buy the goods, they're kept somewhere else, they're shipped from somewhere else, and so you never touch the stuff, you're just responsible for the marketing, and the sales, and getting it actually ordered by people.

Bryan: Precisely. And so I thought, that would be a great idea. It's really easy to get it all set up. So I went over to one of the little online store areas. You can set one up for about 30 bucks a month, and tried that out, and just through 3-6 months worth of 30 dollar payments out the window. And didn't make sale. But, I liked what the premise was about, but just because I was focusing more on the guy lifestyle - just being the guy. That's kind of what I've always...

Shane: What kind of products were they, that you were trying to sell?

Bryan: Well, they were anything from some of the unique whiskey glasses and decanters. And so you had kind of like the smoky bar room vibe to it.

Shane: Gotcha. Stereotypical man stuff.

Bryan: Yeah, stereotypical is the best way to put it, yes sir. Stereotypical man stuff that was neat looking - wasn't just a normal glass, it was like a glass looked like it was kind of twisted - things like that.

Bryan: Anyhow, went from that and just realized I wasn't making any money, wasn't making any sales. The closest I'd get - the software that was in the background would say that the sale was done in a very sketchy way, and so it was probably a stolen credit card, so I was like all right, I'm not going to set here and put myself at risk and be on the hook for a bad sale.

Shane: Right.

Bryan: So I went ahead and I decided I'll ditch that and go back into what I really like to do. I like to write, I like to blog, like to write. And just kind of start go blog and do affiliate marketing, things like that. And that's where Relaxed Male come from. And it's just kind of progressed, and every time I progress a little bit, about once a year it, seems like I'll get a little more focused, and a little more focused. So it was guys lifestyle, and I was like, no, let's talk about guys and getting them leadership and keeping the outdoor element to it, because I think getting people outside and being outdoors and stuff like that is really important for people as a whole. And for men more in particular.

Bryan: And so I've gotten down to where now it's men's coaching. Men's outdoor coaching is what I'm focusing into.

Shane: I love this journey, okay. Cause you said some really interesting things there.

Shane: One, just like, to combat stereotypes a little bit. So, since we're stereotypically talking about men's stuff we're selling, let's combat some stereotypes. You wouldn't think, you know, you talk to a truck driver - we all have this Americana image of a good 'ol truck driver driving down the road, a manly man, working with his hands and all this stuff. But you're like, I'm a truck driver, and I love to write. I like that. It's like, I thought about what I really like to do, and I was waiting for you to be like, fix diesel engines, or something like that. But you're like, I just love to write. And I just want to blog.

Shane: But it's so funny, we live in this weird world now where that is true. We all are a weird conglomerate of interests now, because of the internet, because of online, because of the way the world works now. And it's like, yeah man, a truck driver can love to blog, and he can get his message out there. And this driver - you know, you probably have a lot of anxiety about meeting deadlines and stress getting the sand where it needs to be, and there's people yelling all this stuff. I'm like, man...you just go home on the weekends, you're like, I'm getting out, I'm going outside, going for a hike. I'm going to hunt, fish, whatever you do. You do something outside to relax. You've learned how to manage this crazy lifestyle of driving to Pennsylvania from Oklahoma every once in awhile, right?

Bryan: Right.

Shane: And you've learned how to manage this, and now you want to mentor other men how to do this, right?

Bryan: Right.

Jocelyn: And I think it makes a lot of sense, I mean, there's also a lot of family stress I would imagine that goes along with this type of job, too.

Shane: Yeah, just being away from everybody and stuff like that.

Bryan: Oh yeah. That's one of the big things about in oil field, is you're on call. It's not a - it's Monday morning, it's time to hop in the truck and go drive around. It's all right, it's time to head out and it's 11 o'clock at night and they're like - hey one trucking company messed up so they're needing some loads. So I need you and about five other guys to hop in those trucks and head out to go grab some sand.

Bryan: So, it was always...it was kind of a running joke at the company - which is an amazing company, I'm not disparaging them in the least, because the company I would drive for, they're great folks. But, there was more than one time where I would be two hours down the road going to the city, and I would get a call just as I crossed into the city limits, and they'd be like, we need you to go ahead and go on a run. And it was like, oh man, all right, I'll be there in two - I'll be back in about two hours.

Shane: Crazy, man.

Bryan: Cause we'd sat there for two days beforehand with nothing, so it was like, all right, let's get some errands run.

Shane: But the crazy thing is though, Bryan, this is the life that a lot of people live, and there's millions of truck drivers. There's millions of people that are on call. Everybody from truck drivers to doctors. And that disruptive, not being able to plan things ahead lifestyle can make you feel out of control.

Shane: I'm sure there's a lot of people listening right now, you don't feel like you have control of your schedule. You feel like you're at the whim of the markets and everybody else. And that's just - the world works - we all got to grind, we all got to do things. We all have to meet expectations of others and ourselves. And managing the anxiety of that, managing the stress of that is really half the battle toward living like a flipped lifestyle.

Shane: We've talked a lot about this lately. I don't want to pigeon-hole the flipped lifestyle into totally 100% you've quit your job, you're making money with digital products, whatever.

Jocelyn: Life is good.

Shane: Yeah, life is good. That's not what it is. It's more like being able to create a life where you feel in control. That's the flipped lifestyle. If you could just manage your anxiety and stress, that might be the first step of hey, I've got joy back in my life to enjoy what I'm doing now, and then I can do something else later too, and change what I'm doing.

Shane: So, I think it's a super worthy mission, and I think it's an amazing idea. I love that you're - I can just picture you driving down the road in your semi-truck, but your wheels - you listen to a podcast and you just turn it off, sitting in silence thinking about your next blog post. For some reason, that makes me really gloriously happy. That's awesome.

Jocelyn: Your website is relaxedmale.com

Shane: Which is a great two-word domain name, by the way.

Jocelyn: And you've tried a couple different things on this, right? So let's talk a little bit about that.

Bryan: I've tried a couple different things. First off, like I said, I was doing affiliates and realized it didn't work. So, focused in on more of a service, just because I had the epiphany that I wanted to help people. And, I've done that for - every since I was little - I would try to find a way of helping people out. So, naturally wanted to start doing coaching, so that's where the...I started getting into how to coach, and wanted to run a blog post about how to help guys through the different challenges that they're running into through today's society.

Bryan: A lot of the posts are maybe a little on the touchy-feely side, but at the same time there's also a touch of woo-woo into it, so there's a method to it, and I've been trying to kind of use the blog as a means to map out a good solution. And I've got couple different ways that I like to take that.

Shane: Cool. I pictured it's like, Bryan Goodwin, the touchy-feely truck driver. I just pictured...which could actually be totally misinterpreted in a terrible way. No, we're not going to call you the touchy-feely truck driver. I do not want to do that, okay. I do not want to go there. But, I think we all can just be friends here and know what we mean, okay?

Jocelyn: Let's steer clear of that.

Shane: Let's steer clear of the touchy-feely...

Bryan: Touchy-feeling truck driver.

Shane: I think Relaxed Male is a much better choice of a domain name than the Touchy-Feely Truck Driver. Yeah, that might be a terrible made-for-TV movie someday...

Shane: I love your website. I'm looking at your website. You're doing a lot of things great. You've got a great - you're website at the top says Reconnecting Leaders to Nature - I want to talk about that in a little bit. Love your logo, it's a stick man leaning back on a mountain like he's in a hammock though. That's pretty genius, and it looks amazing. And then all your imagery is very good, it's manly, you have this picture of this tent that's by this campfire, by this lake, with mountains...it's like someone pulled over their truck in Colorado and slept under the stars. You know what I'm saying?

Bryan: Right.

Shane: And you've got this big picture of a chain, and your writing is very good, it's very plain spoken. It sounds like you. I love how you started your About page with "You know, this was going to be an online store for guys. I was going to try some drop shipping. Then, as I was writing the blog post, the store fell away and I closed it." I love how decisive that is. "The store was not important. I wanted to talk about the adventure of being a guy." And then you just go in to talking about how - basically what I just said - your writing is very good, very, very good. Is that plain English, Jocelyn? Very good, or should I say you write well.

Jocelyn: Yes, either way works.

Shane: Either way would be correct? Okay. All right. I'm just making sure all the grammar police aren't out there pulling me over. Ya'll write good, you write real good, man. You know what I mean?

Bryan: You're all right.

Shane: We're all right, we're all right.

Shane: Your website's beautiful, you write well, you've got awesome imagery. Your doing a lot of things right, and I can see how this has evolved by just sitting here and looking at your site. You've got a pop up opt in and a hero bar at the top way for them to opt in. Have you been able to collect some emails and stuff like that?

Bryan: No, my email list is very hard-earned, and I've actually had two new ones sign up just within a couple weeks.

Shane: Awesome man, those are real humans, man. Everyone counts. You know what I mean?

Bryan: But, I avoid like the plague to say I have just X-number of opt ins, because I think I have a low number, but I mentioned something about it on the blog and something about just visits, and people were like well, that's better than what I'm getting, so...

Shane: How much traffic do you get right now?

Bryan: This month here, apparently I've done something correct, because I'm up to about 10-30 people a day visiting.

Shane: I'll tell you what you did correct, you joined the Flipped Lifestyle community, man. You've went into the Flip Your Life community and you said I'm doing something right around here, and everybody's like, I'm paying attention. So they showed up, right? That's great. That's good for 30 or 40 emails a month if you do it right.

Shane: All right, so you've got the blog, you've got some direction. You've got some opt ins and things like that. Let's talk about how we're going to grow this thing.

Jocelyn: All right, so you have the website, you're no longer selling items that are being drop shipped, and I'm just kind of looking at it here - I don't really see any form of monetization right now, would that be accurate?

Bryan: No, there is some up at the top where you'll see coaching. Coaching the Mastermind are the monetization areas.

Shane: Oh, okay I see it.

Jocelyn: Okay, I gotcha.

Shane: There's buttons below the fold, so we need to get those above the fold for sure.

Bryan: Okay, there's also the...so I need to work on.

Jocelyn: I see, I see the menu bar.

Shane: I see the menu bar now, I see it. Yep. It's just kind of hidden a little bit.

Bryan: Okay.

Shane: It's not prominent, basically.

Jocelyn: Okay.

Shane: But that's okay.

Jocelyn: So, we have that. What is holding you back right now?

Shane: What kind of internal fears or doubts, or maybe an external obstacle, like technically challenges or something...what's kind of keeping you from moving forward. Because it looks like you're doing a lot of things right, so what's stopping you?

Bryan: I have where I want to be. I have a vision of how I want Relaxed Male to look. I want to be able to not have grand conference, but you know you have, maybe a yearly gathering of some of the guys who are able to get together, and we go out to do a week long camping expedition out in the middle of the Grand Teton or something like that. I have this vision of that, but I'm not exactly sure how to progress into that - to get on the right road to go to that dream. I see coaching and masterminds as kind of a way to get the ball rolling, but I'm not 100% sure if that's really the best way.

Bryan: Right now, I feel like I'm just trying, but I'm just not making any headway. I don't know if it's just me being impatient or what. But that's precisely what I'm feeling - I've been hammering at this for totally the blog is almost two years old. Which, everything I've heard and read and understand about blogs, I'm just right there at that point where a lot of times you start building critical mass and everything takes off out of nowhere. But I've also done blogs that lasted four years and stayed around 10-15 visitors a day.

Bryan: So I don't know if I'm just always, am I focusing too much on the visitors? Am I too obsessed with my numbers and just keep chipping away and eventually something's going to break and I'm going to all of a sudden have people paying attention, or what.

Shane: Yeah.

Bryan: Am I making myself any more clear, or am I about as clear as mud?

Shane: No listen, I guarantee you that there are thousands of people listening to this podcast right now in their cars, on treadmills, or wherever they're at, and they're shaking their head like that's totally me. Right? That's part of the journey.

Shane: There's four phases of entrepreneurship. Jocelyn and I call it the Flipped Life cycle.

Shane: So, at first you become a yearner. You yearn for more. You want more, you know there's something else. It's almost like you're out on a hike and you're standing on one side of the mountain. And you know there's something cool on the other side of that mountain. You yearn for it, but you don't really do it.

Shane: So then you learn. You start learning about online business. You start learning about all the things that go, right? You start learning about how to start a blog, how to do these things. And it's kind of like learning the trail that takes you to the top of that mountain to see what's on the other side.

Jocelyn: And a lot of people never get past that.

Shane: That's exactly right. And then what happens is you move, you shift, and you actually go on the trail. You start walking, right? And this is where you want to go become an earner. You want to take all these things you learned, take action on them, and go earn some money, right?

Shane: But before that is the grind. You got to sweat, you got to hump it, you got to pull it up, you got to climb the mountain. But then here's what freaks people out...they grind for all this time, they get to the top of the trail that they learned about, they look over, and they realize that there's a huge valley with no trail, and they got to get to the mountain top on the other side, right?

Shane: And that's where a lot of people quit. And that's kind of where you are right now. You went to the top of the mountain. You're getting traffic, you're getting some emails, you're getting some traction. You're idea is kind of clarifying into some general concept into what you want it to be, and then you realize ah crap, there's still a lot of work left to do. You know what I mean?

Bryan: Yes.

Shane: But that's kind of what happens. You have to go through the grind, and then there is a tipping point where you start earning money. And then everything just starts burning it up. You figure it out. Right?

Bryan: Okay.

Shane: Now, so that's kind of like the path. And you're kind of at the edge of the grind. You're kind of coming out of it like, man if I just could put this together, I think there - it's like a puzzle that you've poured out. You see all the pieces, there's a picture on the box, and you're just not sure where the corners are yet. Right?

Bryan: Right, okay.

Shane: And that's where a lot people are. And what we want to do is we want to get you to the next level. So I think the best use of our time here is probably clarifying this idea, right? We've got to take the fuzzy picture, and we've got to turn the knob, and we've got to bring it into focus. Okay?

Shane: So, let's talk about really the mission of Relaxed Male first. I think you're onto something here about a mentorship and a coaching program. I know a lot of people that do this really well. There's a guy named Aaron Walker. His brand is called A View From the Top. Have you ever heard Aaron?

Bryan: Oh yes, Aaron's...Big A.

Shane: Big A, man.

Jocelyn: Yep. Shane loves Big A.

Shane: I love Big A. I've met the guy, and I have some friends who hang out with him. Gosh, what a genuine soul and human being. He's got this Facebook series. And every morning he goes for a walk, and he goes, What's going on, it's Big A coming to you live from the National [inaudible 00:25:33]. Right, it's hilarious.

Shane: But anyway, but I know a lot of men that are in his mastermind. He's got a mastermind that's called Iron Sharpens Iron. And he just wanted to take his mentorship to these people. And it's an expensive mastermind, but they do trips like this. But they don't do hiking - they meet at a hotel or something. It's a different vibe than what you're doing, but it's definitely taking your life experience, finding guys that need it, and a lot of guys need this. Reconnect with nature, get rid of this anxiety from your job, let me show you how - listen to how stressful my job is, and I figured it out, so I can totally help you figure it out. So, you're more than qualified and worthy to do this.

Shane: But I want to talk to you about your mission. I think your mission is a little too broad.

Bryan: Okay.

Shane: Relaxed Male is fine. That's a good domain name, we can use that. But it says Reconnecting Leaders to Nature, okay?

Bryan: Right.

Shane: And I think that's influenced maybe from hearing other podcasts and a lot of people do stuff like that, like leadership and whatever.

Jocelyn: It sounds nice.

Shane: It sounds nice, but it's so - what is a leader? Who are you really talking to? I'm just wondering if you wouldn't reconnect now. Imagine if this said - let's go super hyper-specific and broaden back out - what if it said Reconnecting Truck Drivers to Nature? Right? You are a truck driver. What if every truck driver in America listened to your podcast or read your blog at the truck stop or - there's millions of truck drivers out there, and they're probably as stressed out as you were until you figured out dang man, if I just go out and camp for a few days, I feel so much better about that drive to Pennsylvania. You know what I mean?

Bryan: Okay.

Shane: And so maybe it's just a tightening of the message to draw in super high quality traffic. You can get 30 hits a day on a blog, but if every one of them joined your list because they're targeted, you're getting 30 emails a day. So it's not about the bulk of traffic, it's about the quality of traffic. And I could even see maybe it expanding out to more like reconnecting blue collar workers to nature. Right, guys that are out there - these are manly men who are - what about the mechanic that's working on the trucks? What about the guys on the oil field that are taking the sand out, putting it where it needs to go?

Shane: I think if you could just focus in a little tighter, you're going to have a better chance of resonating.It's not about getting attention. It's about resonating with the people who are paying attention.

Jocelyn: Because right now, when I look at your website, just on first glance, it reminds me of some type of yoga retreat or something. And I don't feel like that's who you are.

Shane: Yeah, right. It's more like being the meditative quality of being in the tent. It's not about sitting around going Wohhmm with yoga mats on the side of the lake right?

Jocelyn: So I think where we are right now, is you have to decide who am I and what problem am I solving for people in a unique way? And that's what your site needs to say, and that's where your content needs to go.

Shane: And you also have to create competitive advantage with your idea. Take the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. When we were thinking about the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, we started looking at other podcasts and saying, well what are these other guru people doing, right? We know we can teach this, we've taught people in real life...how can we be different? Okay?

Bryan: Right.

Shane: And how can we resonate? Well, the first thing we said was we've got to both be on the podcast. There's nobody else that's a husband and wife team doing what we're doing, right? Or at least not doing it as good as we can do it, okay? So that was one differentiator. And then we said let's exclude solo-preneur, single people, 20-something millennials running around Thailand on 6 bucks a day. We don't want to talk to them. We want to talk to families, we want talk to - we can talk to single people, but we want them to have kids. We can talk to married people, but we want them to have kids. And we decided that we would talk to families, we would talk to adults who were raising children, who wanted to go out and start their own online business, right?

Shane: We would talk to people who had real responsibilities, like keeping other people alive and making in a real 9-5 job.

Bryan: Right.

Shane: So if you can think what's my unfair advantage? I've been in a truck for 11 years. Who's a truck driver going to listen to? Another truck driver or some random other person who's trying to tell them to connect with nature? Right?

Bryan: Right.

Shane: Who's the guy working on the oil fields going to listen to? A guy that understands what he's dealing with? Your anxiety is different than our anxiety, right?

Bryan: Right.

Shane: So if you can really hone in and just...I'd love to see a picture of you on the About page in your truck - like someone takes a picture of you leaning out the window. And be like, hi I'm Bryan, I'm a truck driver, I understand you. Let's go on a hike. Right? When a guy sees that, he wants to opt in, right? Because that dude gets me.

Shane: I think back when the...when I was looking for somebody to follow, I looked at a bunch of gurus. I ran through the Ravenscrafts and the Brian Masons and the Timothy Ferris's and Gary Vaynerchuck's and all this. But I connected with Pat Flynn of The Smart Passive Income podcast, for one reason, and one reason only. When I went to his blog, at the very top above the fold, was a picture of him holding his son who was the same age as mine. I didn't know Pat Flynn from Adam. I didn't know what he was talking about. I didn't know what his podcast was about. But I did know this: he had a son, and he had the same concerns I did about that little boy. And I needed to go and listen to him, right?

Bryan: Right.

Shane: So, I think that's what you're too broad right now is. It's just too leadership and male. I get it, it's every man who could ever possibly lead anyone. But that's not where we got to be at. Does that make sense?

Jocelyn: Yeah. And we've said if you're targeting everyone you target no one.

Bryan: No one. Yeah. All right. And so, I can see. Is blue collar at this moment still too broad?

Shane: Not necessarily. Usually it works better when you start really targeted. Truck driver's still pretty narrow. You don't want to also exclude people, right? Blue collar makes sense because you could say something like the blue collar man has a different kind of stress, a different type of anxiety than business people do. You know, we're out and we're doing physical things that could kill us. You know what I'm saying? We're risking our lives every day to make industry move, right? When I pull the lever on that thing of sand, if I'm in the way, whatever. If you're working on a car, you could break your hand or cut yourself, or whatever. You're constantly on call, you never know when you're going to be needed. There's just a different way to present that, but a lot of blue collar people can totally relate to that.

Shane: Like a mechanic, from an oil field worker, from a truck driver, from a logger, from a whatever is going to be able to understand what you're talking about.

Jocelyn: And just remember that you don't have to necessarily use that in your language. And what I mean by that is, Shane and I, on our website, we don't say we only target families and people with children. We don't explicitly say that, we just put pictures of ourselves with our kids. Do people follow us who don't have kids? Yeah. And that's okay. But, in our minds, we're marketing to the people who are people - parents - with children.

Shane: Yeah, and you could also say like - it says Reconnecting Leaders to Nature. That's cool, but what if it just said - what if it said this: The Relaxed Male. Reconnecting Working Men to Nature.

Jocelyn: Yes. And that's what I was going to say is that you can use your language to allude to that without explicitly saying that, if that makes sense.

Shane: Any person that's working could consider themselves a working man. But we all know that stereotypically, when you hear about a working man, you're talking about a blue collared guy going out and using his hands and doing stuff like that, right?

Bryan: Right. Okay.

Jocelyn: So does that make sense and fit the direction you think you're going?

Bryan: Yes, it helps out tremendously. I had a little adjustment made last week with the mastermind group that I'm with. They were pointing out that I was being even more broad with one of the lead magnets, one of the opt in forms that I had on the site. I wasn't even mentioning men, it was self-coaching tools for a better life. And it's like, what does that even mean really, and who's that supposed to really attract to. So, they were like, well, you're about guys so why don't you start incorporating guys into that. So from here, yeah, I can see just nudge that down even granular.

Shane: Yeah, right here it says: 14 of the Best Morning Routines. And it's just a name and thing, right?

Bryan: Right.

Shane: But what if that said - forget 14 - what if it said The Best Morning Routine For Working Men. No way they don't know it's them. You know what I'm saying?

Shane: And you got this other opt in, I'm looking through your site, and it says Get Four Self-Coaching Tools to Beat Anxiety. What if that said Working Men Experience a Different Kind of Anxiety...and then the sub-heading said Get Four Self-Coaching Tools to Help the Working Man Beat Anxiety, or something like that.

Bryan: Oh okay.

Shane: You know what I'm saying? We can grammarize this is a little bit better later on. Right now we're just trying to get the mud on the wall. So. And your pictures. On this picture. I'm looking at your above the fold hero image. It's this beautiful picture of a tent sitting on a side of a lake looking down into a valley. I don't even know where that is. But it's gorgeous.

Shane: But what if that was actually a truck driving down the road...

Jocelyn: This needs to be...the About page needs to be a picture of you driving your truck.

Shane: For sure. And even your front images, if it was like a truck - a huge open cinematography spread of a truck going down the road, but it was driving through the mountain of Colorado. So kind of tied in this image of truckery and cars and going down the road, but into nature or something like that. There's just a...

Shane: And then instead of this picture of the tent that you've got on one scroll down, that could be a picture of people working in an oil field. And we could - about 50% of your images are nature, and about 50% of them are what we would consider blue collar jobs.

Bryan: Okay.

Shane: Truckers, miners, whatever.

Bryan: Okay, got you there, yeah.

Shane: And imagine then how much easier it would be to sell this thing. Hey guys, I'm Bryan. I'm a working man. I drive a truck. I know what you go through on a daily basis. I've been doing this for over a decade, and I know that you're job, while it's paying the bills and you're taking care of your family, you're doing a great job, but you're stressed, you've got a lot of anxiety. You're having trouble managing your working job and your life with your family. Well, I've started mentoring people in the Relaxed Male Coaching program, whatever...and I'm going to tell you how, on a daily basis, to get rid of the anxiety, get rid of all that stress, and I'm going to make sure that, not only can you go do your job that you love to do, but you can come home and be with your family. You can come home and go out into nature and be there with yourself so that you're a balanced working man, or something like that.

Shane: That'd be an awesome name for it - The Balanced Working Man, or something like that. Have a guy standing up on top of an oil rig or something like that. But by niching down and really communicating who you're talking to, your blog posts are going to get more traffic. Those posts are going to get more opt ins, and you're going to have a much clearer picture of what you want to teach people. Does that makes sense?

Bryan: I'm seeing that, yes sir.

Shane: Does that clarify maybe how you could actually even teach your mentors in your coaching program?

Bryan: I think it helps at least give me a better direction on how to point them to the...I realize how scattered I am with the information, and I'm just kind of talking too broad of an audience. So I definitely see where, if I was to just take that and just squeeze it down to even blue collared, ah, heck I could even do for the oil fields. I mean that would...

Shane: Oh, that's a huge industry. Natural gas, oil, truck. That's the truckers, the drillers, the unloaders, the loaders, everybody.

Jocelyn: I can even...

Bryan: Precisely.

Jocelyn: ...see this maybe going into - you could sell to corporate. To companies.

Shane: Oh gosh, that would be huge. Make a deal with a company.

Jocelyn: Yeah, maybe they want their workers to have a better quality of life, and you could market to them.

Shane: Oh wow, that's really good. Really, really good.

Bryan: Okay.

Jocelyn: Okay Bryan, I think some really good stuff has come out of this conversation today, and I can't wait to see where you take this.

Jocelyn: We always ask our guests before we go what is one thing that you plan to do in the next day or so based on what we talked about on this call.

Bryan: Well, that is definitely going to be niching all the way down. I think I'm either going to focus in on the oil field angle a lot more. Get the language changed, and start just making sure that I have that particular guy in mind whenever I start re-writing some of the sales pages and things like that.

Shane: And also, as you're - you've got coaching and mentoring down there - you could really focus hard on your product. Because it'll help you when you blog. If you know what that coaching and program's going to look like and you know what that happens, you know what you're pointing your stuff to to get something sold, it's going to make it a lot easier to write opt-ins, a lot easier to write blog posts, and it's going to make a lot of difference. Okay?

Bryan: Okay.

Shane: All right guys, that wraps up another great conversation with one of our Flip Your Life community members. It is awesome to see someone get focused on their idea, because with great focus on your idea, that's what leads to an awesome product. That's what leads to an amazing platform, and that's what leads to making money online and replacing your income so that you can quit your job and live the life you want.

Shane: We would love to help you inside of our Flip Your Life community. All you have to do learn more about the community is go to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife. You can read about all the amazing courses that we have inside to guide you through the process of starting, building, and growing your own online business. You can check out all of the amazing forums with our community of hundreds of family-focused entrepreneurs from around the world to rally around you and support you in your dreams. And of course, me and Jocelyn will be in there right with you all along the way.

Shane: So go to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife and check out the community today.

Shane: We would also love to meet you live and in person in Lexington, Kentucky on September 19-21 at Flip Your Life Live. This is our Flip Your Life family reunion. It is our conference that we hold for all of our listeners of the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, and everybody that's a part of our Flip Your Life community. We would love to see you in Lexington, and you can get your ticket now at flippedlifestyle.com/live - that's L-I-V-E.

Shane: But you want to hurry, because we are almost sold out and tickets will not be sold after August 30th. So you've got to get your ticket right now if you're going to get one. We only have a few left. It's in the teens, guys. Those seats are going to fill up, and we're not adding anymore chairs inside of the venue.

Shane: And guess what? We are not doing this event in 2020. This is your last chance to come to Flip Your Life Live, the big conference that we've been holding for the past couple of years for our Flip Your Life community and Flipped Lifestyle podcast listeners. So go to flippedlifestyle/live right now so that you can get your tickets before they sell out.

Shane: All right guys, that is all the time that we have for today. But before we go, we're super excited because Bryan has a Bible verse that he wants to share with you guys. Jocelyn and I get a lot of our inspiration and motivation from the Bible for our business and our life, and we love it when our guests have a verse that they want to share with everybody. So Bryan, take it away.

Bryan: All right, my Bible verse is Isaiah 41:10 and it reads: So do not fear, for I am with you. Do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you. I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.

Bryan: Just completely dig that verse, because if you're ever feeling overwhelmed, you know that you don't have to live a life in fear. And fear is one of the big things that I like to talk about on my site itself, but there's always something you can use from God - He will actually help you out - you don't have to live a life of fear and worry that you're going to mess something up, because God's there to actually help you out.

Shane: Whoo! That was a great Bible verse from Bryan. I love anytime the Bible says do not fear. We talk about this all the time with our kids. The Bible says do not fear or some permutation of that phrase like 365 times. The Bible gave us a do not fear quote for ever single day of the year, ya'll.

Shane: So go out there in a fearless way. Don't be afraid to pursue and chase your dreams. There's nothing to be afraid of, there's everything to gain. You just got to take action and go get it done.

Shane: That's all we've got for today ya'll, so until next time, get out there, take action, and do whatever it takes to flip your life. We'll see you then.

Jocelyn: Bye.

Links and resources mentioned on today’s show: * Bryan's Website * Flip Your Life LIVE 2019 Tickets & Registration Information * Flip Your Life community * PROLIFIC Monthly

Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!

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View Details

In today's episode, we help Kevin decide between a course and a membership.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jocelyn Sams: Hey y'all, on today's podcast we help Kevin decide between a course and a membership.

Shane Sams: What is going on everybody, welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. It is great to be back with you again today. Super excited to help another member of our Flip Your Life community take their online dream to the next level. We're really excited because we have met this member in person last year at Flip Your Life Live. Our guest today is Flip Your Life community member, Kevin Crowe. How you doing, Kevin?

Kevin Crowe: I'm doing good, how you doing?

Jocelyn Sams: We are great. It is great to talk to you today. Love Kevin's story, because he came into the live event last year, and it was so funny because he and another member of our community, Nick, they came up to me, I think it was at the reception, and they're like, "Hey, we're introverts too."

Shane Sams: It was all secretive like, "There's a club. We're the introvert club, and we're in it. So, we're all in it together."

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, and I was pumped. I just ... I always will remember that, because it was just awesome. Like coming up, and they're like, "Hey, we're kind of like you." So, it was kind of cool. But you'll be really happy to know, Kevin's coming back to the event this year, and we're thinking about even doing an introvert room.

Shane Sams: Yeah, we're going to have it at Flip Your Life Live, dude, we're going to call it The Quiet Room.

Kevin Crowe: That's awesome.

Shane Sams: Yeah, it's going to be off over to the side, so during the working ... So, how Flip Your Life Live works, for everybody that's not been, Jocelyn and I get up on stage, we answer questions from the audience, and do all of our content, but then we actually have breakout sessions where we work on what we just learned. It's really chaotic when you put 100 people in a big room.

Shane Sams: It can get loud, people are talking, there's some music playing, but this year we're going to have the spa room, the quiet room, where we have the lights turned down a little bit, and it's like you go in there's going to be a sign that says, "Shh, online businesses being built." So, there's going to be an introvert room, man. It's going to be awesome. We thought about you, Kevin, when we came up with it.

Kevin Crowe: That sounds like paradise. Last time we just kind of tucked ourselves away in the back corner table.

Shane Sams: It was ... Everybody's just got their hoodies on just looking down.

Shane Sams: It's alright.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, exactly. I was talking to Shane earlier, and he's like, "Oh, you know, two introverts, it's going to be ... I'm going to have to talk a lot this show.", and I'm like, "Listen, introverts are not necessarily shy, they just need to be alone to process things, and to gain their energy back, that's all."

Shane Sams: Yeah, we were having a meeting yesterday, Kevin, you might be able to relate to this, and Jocelyn, I was like ... When I start talking I don't stop, which everyone-

Jocelyn Sams: Well, if you listen to our podcasts-

Shane Sams: To our podcasts you know, but as I was ... We were writing ideas on Post-it Notes, and I looked over at Jocelyn, and she was carefully writing these ideas on her Post-it Notes in perfect handwriting, and I'm just flying Post-it Notes out, I've got like 25 Post-it Notes, she's on the third one, and then when we started talking about them, I just start laying out Post-it Notes, and she's like, "Dude, calm down, one at a time. Let me process this. Let me see what your first Post-it Note is before we're on Post-it Note 12."

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, Shane, he wants to hit me with this firehose of information at all times, and I'm like, "Bro, I have to process this.", and then he wants to ask me questions, and me to just spit something out, and that's not how I roll. You know this, Kevin, that's-

Kevin Crowe: Oh yeah.

Jocelyn Sams: ... we have to think about it-

Shane Sams: You got to absorb-

Jocelyn Sams: ... and process it, and-

Shane Sams: ... all the information, basically.

Jocelyn Sams: ... Yeah, all right, well, it is always good to have a fellow introvert on the show, and we're excited to talk to you today about moving your business forward. You've had some really interesting things going on, and we will get into that just a little bit later. But first, tell us a little bit about you and your background. How did you get into all this?

Kevin Crowe: Yep. So, I live in Calhoun, Georgia, about 50 miles north of Atlanta, just me and my two dogs. No wife, no kids, just a girlfriend. But, I was born in Michigan, but I've lived in Georgia most of my life, so I definitely say y'all. I've worked in shipping and logistics for most of my life, and right now I'm working for a logistics company up in Chattanooga. But, I recently changed jobs there. I was working in operations for a while, but now I got a new position in marketing, and I'm able to work from home most of the time. I might go to the office maybe one day a week. So, that's really helped me to start the flip my life process.

Jocelyn Sams: So, tell us a little bit about that process. I'm assuming that somebody in your company didn't just come to you and say, "Hey, Kevin, you seem like a good candidate for working at home."

Shane Sams: And that's pretty amazing too, because one thing we've talked a lot about this year on the Flipped Lifestyle podcast is flipping your life means taking control of your time more than anything else. That's like if someone asked me, "What does flip your life mean? What is the flipped lifestyle?", it's you get to wake up and choose what you do. Yes, we all have things to do, and we have deadlines, and we have all this stuff, but you get to pour your coffee, you get choose where you go during the day, you get to pick when you work, and you kind of created that even before your online business is off the ground. So, how did that happen?

Kevin Crowe: Yeah, exactly. I've been listening to you guys for years, and a bunch of different online podcasts, so I've learned a good bit about online marketing. Not enough for my own business to take off yet or anything, but I noticed a need with our company that we didn't have much of an online presence, or weren't really doing much with marketing, so I approached my boss and just, I told him the things that I saw, the needs in our company, and he basically just created a position for me, and now I'm working at home, I'm loving this job, and just taking the things that I've learned.

Shane Sams: How often do you actually go into the office.

Kevin Crowe: Well, the last time I was actually in the office was about two weeks ago.

Shane Sams: That's amazing.

Kevin Crowe: Yeah. It's just kind of ... I go when we need to have meetings and stuff like that, but other than that I can do my job completely from home. I got a pretty sweet home office setup, and I just chill here with the dogs.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, that's awesome.

Kevin Crowe: They're asleep under my feet right now.

Jocelyn Sams: That sounds like my dream job. I'm here with my dogs right now, we've got two labs, but yeah, so this is actually very similar to something that happened to me a long time ago when I still worked in the corporate world. I had been there I guess about four years, and there were some changes going on in my life. Shane had moved to Alabama for a time, and if you guys have listened to our backstory podcast you know all about that, how we sort of went our separate ways for a little while, and then we decided we couldn't do that anymore. He got a job opportunity in West Virginia, and I was still working the corporate life, and I'm like, "This is not going to work.", because my company was in Kentucky, and we were going to be living in West Virginia, and so-

Shane Sams: It was like a ... How long a drive was that?

Jocelyn Sams: Probably about six or seven hours.

Shane Sams: Yeah, it was really far away, like a really long drive.

Jocelyn Sams: So, basically I just went in, and I'm like, "You know, I'm going to be moving, so is there any way that we can work something out?", and at first they're like, "I don't know if that's going to work.", and after thinking about it for a while we were able to come up with something that worked for everybody.

Shane Sams: This was back in like 2000 and ... was it 2005, or?

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, 2004 I think.

Shane Sams: 2004, or 2005 when it wasn't normal to work on the internet, or work at home back then. So, it was kind of radical that Jocelyn would even ask this, but she was the marketing coordinator. So, literally all she did all day was call people, coordinate projects, work online, send files, do things like that. So, it was actually like, "Man, you could totally do this over the internet."

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, and so I just asked. I'm like, "What's the worst thing that can happen? They might tell me no." I loved the way that you did because you had a plan, you wrote something out, or I assume you did, and you went in, and you're like, "Hey, these are the weaknesses I see, this is the benefits that I can bring, and is there a way that we can work this out?", and I think any smart business owner would at least consider it.

Shane Sams: Yeah, for sure. What did your boss say when you asked him that?

Kevin Crowe: Well, he said that it's been something that he's been thinking about for a while with our company, and he saw the need too, he just hasn't really had time to address it, and he was thinking about going outside, making an outside hire, but that he was excited that I was excited about it, and he just said that he would rather have somebody who's already been experienced at the company to take that role over anyways. So, it worked out well.

Shane Sams: Wow. That's awesome, dude. Well, good job, and anybody out there listening, have the courage ... Some of you are like, "Man, I really wish I just had more time." We hear this story actually happen time and time again in the Flip Your Life community, people will go to their boss and say, "Hey, can I work remotely two days a week? Hey, is there a new need for a new position? Hey, what can we do to give me a little bit more flexibility?", and then they free up time all of a sudden to do their side hustle, or gain control of their life, or get some more freedom to be able to spend with their family, and that's really the goal.

Jocelyn Sams: And I think though sometimes people are just so scared to ask. We had a member not too long ago who worked for like the federal government, and she was like, "There's no way. They definitely won't let me do this.", but they did, they let her go part-time. I actually planted that seed ... It's Wendy, you guys might have heard her podcast, oh, she's been on the podcast before, but anyway, I planted that seed. I had met her at an event, and the two of us were talking, and I was like, "What are the possibilities ...", because she was driving, I think it was like ... Was it like 90 minutes, or something?

Shane Sams: It was ridiculous. Her commute was insane.

Jocelyn Sams: It was a crazy commute, and I'm like, "What if you could work it out where you could only go a couple days a week?", and she's like, "Oh no, that'll never happen.", but then she contacted us not too long after that, she had a conversation with them, and they said yes.

Shane Sams: Yeah, so, I mean, the worst they can say is, "No.", right?

Kevin Crowe: Exactly.

Shane Sams: 99% of the time they're not going to be like, "I can't believe you asked that, you're fired.", you know what I'm saying?

Jocelyn Sams: No, and I think that what you can do also, just for anybody out there listening, is just reassure them, "Hey, I'm not planning on going anywhere, but I thought that this would be a really good opportunity.", blah blah blah. There's a way that you can present it where it doesn't sound negative like, "I hate this job, and I'm getting out of here if you don't let me do this."

Shane Sams: So, what a huge change it's going to ... just to give you more ... You're not driving to work every day, if that alone saves you the time and energy to start to be able to start your own side hustle and things like that, what an amazing opportunity it is. But I'm going to tell you here, Kevin, when people listen to this back you're actually going to get in trouble, because a few minutes ago you said, "I live down here with my two dogs, and no wife and kids, just a girlfriend."

Jocelyn Sams: I know, I caught that.

Shane Sams: I can't wait until your girl listens to this, and goes, "Oh, I'm just a girlfriend, Kevin? That's all I am, just a girl. Just a girlfriend over here on the side." So, what's her name? What's your girlfriend-

Kevin Crowe: Yeah, woops. Annalise.

Shane Sams: What is it?

Jocelyn Sams: Annalise?

Kevin Crowe: Her name's Annalise.

Shane Sams: Annalise, when you listen to this, I'm just telling you, I called him out.

Kevin Crowe: Well, I just meant that she doesn't live here with me.

Shane Sams: Right, I got ... I understand. I'm just trying to dig you out of a hole that you dug-

Jocelyn Sams: Exactly.

Kevin Crowe: Thank you, sir. I appreciate that.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay, Kevin, so now we are ready to hear a little bit about what it is that you are doing online. What made you decide to start an online business, and what are you working on?

Kevin Crowe: Okay so, I've been thinking about online business for years. A long time ago I started a football blog, not really having much of a direction or knowing where to go, but as I got to thinking about what I could do online I realized that one thing that I love that I'm good at and that I know a lot about is fantasy football. So, a lot of my coworkers would ask me about fantasy football advice, or what it is, how it works, and that just sort of made me think that I could do something with that online.

Shane Sams: What's your blog called? Is the blog the same site as your online business now?

Kevin Crowe: Yep, it's thefantasyfootballcoach.com.

Shane Sams: Oh wow, that's a good domain name. That's really cool.

Kevin Crowe: Yeah, I was surprised that it was still available.

Shane Sams: What's your background with fantasy football? Were you old school, doing it on paper before you could do it online and stuff? What got you into fantasy football, and how did you become the go-to guy at the water cooler to see who's starting their quarterback this week?

Kevin Crowe: Yeah, well I just love football, and most of the people who know me know that I'm pretty obsessed with football in general, but I don't quite go back to the paper days, but I did start back in like 2001, 2002, so it's the pretty early days of online fantasy football. I got into it from some coworkers and friends wanting me to join their league, and I had no idea where to start. So, I learned it pretty quick, and I've just been playing it for a long time, and people at work just tend to come to me and ask me, because they just know that I like football, and I play ... I'm in like five or six different fantasy leagues.

Shane Sams: You're playing in-

Kevin Crowe: So, I just-

Shane Sams: ... Let me tell you something, that's time consuming y'all. Here's how ... For people who don't know, what fantasy football is, is you get a bunch of people that are friends, and you get together, and you draft real players. So, if I've got the first pick, I might say like, "I want Eli Manning.", I would never pick him first, but he's at this point in his career. But you know what I'm saying, you pick your quarterback, then Kevin gets to pick, then Jocelyn gets to pick, and we go through the rounds. Basically you pick, and you draft a team, you have a quarterback, you have a running back, you have a defense, you have receivers, and-

Jocelyn Sams: And they can be from different teams in the league.

Shane Sams: ... they can be from different teams, right, and then what happens is you watch the games on Sundays, and you watch all the games, because you might have a receiver playing in one game, and then your defense is playing in another game, and then your quarterback's playing in another game, and then they actually add up the stats of those players, and create a score. So, if me and Kevin are in a fantasy football league together, all my players get to add up, and they have a score, and then all his players add up, and they have a score, and then we basically win or lose the game.

Jocelyn Sams: So, Kevin, each thing is worth some type of points, right?

Kevin Crowe: Right.

Jocelyn Sams: So, if you get a tackle, if you get a sack, all these different things are worth different amounts of points, right?

Shane Sams: Jocelyn's showing off her football ... That's the wife of a football coach talking right there, guys.

Jocelyn Sams: You know what's hilarious is before I met Shane I knew absolutely nothing about football. I mean, I knew that if you scored it was called a touchdown, but that's pretty much it.

Shane Sams: After about 10 seasons of being a football coaches wife she knew way more than some of the coaches I'd hired before, I'm just saying.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, I won't say that I'm an expert, but I do know a lot about it. What's hilarious is that one of the schools that he worked at was so pitiful at football, oh my gosh, I mean it was so bad.

Shane Sams: We were bad.

Jocelyn Sams: But anyway, the cheerleaders of the high school team, they didn't know anything about it either. So, I would always sit on the front row, and I would have to tell them if it was offense or defense. They had no idea.

Shane Sams: They didn't know, they'd be like, "Defense ... defense." I'd be like, "We're on the three with the ball, what are you talking about?", and yeah, so Jocelyn had to straighten that stuff out for us like really, really fast. But really, people don't understand though, fantasy football and fantasy sports in general is like a major multi tens of millions of dollar industry where people are playing online, people playing in their pools for money, like the winner's going to win money. There's a very ... There's incentive, even if you're just playing in a local pool with 12 people, to win, because everybody might've put in 100 bucks, there might be a $500 price, or you're playing online for prizes and stuff.

Jocelyn Sams: And it just kind of makes it more fun to watch.

Shane Sams: Oh, yeah.

Jocelyn Sams: I know you've done it before, right, years ago?

Shane Sams: Oh yeah, I don't like pro-sports at all. I only watch college football, college basketball, except for NFL when I draft, because if I do a fantasy draft, every game matters, and you're just glued to the TV all Sunday, because you may be coming down to the 9:00 game, and it's over on the west coast, but you've got a guy playing, and you're down three, right?

Kevin Crowe: Yep.

Shane Sams: So, it makes the games themselves way more fun.

Jocelyn Sams: All right, so you've realized that you had this kind of talent, because people were asking you about something, and we often talk about this, people say, "Well, I don't know what I would do online." Well, like Kevin said, he said, "Oh, well, people are always asking me about this, and they see me as an expert in this field. So, maybe I'll give this a try." All right, so you started a website, and then what?

Kevin Crowe: Then I created an eBook, I finished that last year, but it was already most of the way through football season, but I started to promote it a little bit this year, and I just made my first sale actually last week.

Shane Sams: Boom. There you go.

Jocelyn Sams: Oh yeah.

Shane Sams: You release something and it sells, especially when it's ... How much did you charge for it?

Kevin Crowe: Just a few bucks, but it was my 11 cent moment.

Shane Sams: That's right, man.

Jocelyn Sams: We'll take it.

Shane Sams: I made 11 cents my first sale. So, seriously, what's a few bucks, like $4.99, $3.99? What'd you charge for it?

Kevin Crowe: $2.99.

Jocelyn Sams: All right.

Shane Sams: That is like 30 times more money than we made on our first sale, Kevin. You got to take this into perspective, brother. You know what I'm saying? But that is awesome. I mean, that just shows that there is an interest for something like that out there, right?

Kevin Crowe: Yeah, validation.

Shane Sams: That's validation.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay, so you have your site, you have the book, you've made a sale, which is amazing. So, what is next? Where do we go next?

Shane Sams: What's holding you back right now? Fears, obstacles? You've got this eBook sale, why aren't you just flooding promotion on this eBook, or where are you ... What's next for your fantasy football blog?

Kevin Crowe: Yeah, I thought the next step would be to create an online course. So, I actually finished that a couple of days ago, and now I'm just trying to figure out, do I just want to sell that as a one off course, or do I want to turn it into a membership where I can get some recurring revenue? I'm just kind of unsure on how to proceed, because the window is kind of small, because football is season, right-

Shane Sams: Right.

Kevin Crowe: ... So, I want to get my course out there now, but I don't know how many people are going to be buying it once football season's actually underway, halfway through, or whatever.

Shane Sams: So, basically we've just got to figure out how to position this to make the most money, or make the most money over time basically.

Kevin Crowe: Right.

Shane Sams: So, this was ... you're just ... What's your eBook about? It's like how to draft, or what is it?

Kevin Crowe: It's basically the ultimate guide to fantasy football, so it's taking somebody who's never played, and teaching them the ropes basically from preseason drafting, through the draft, what to do afterward, and what to do if you make the playoffs. Just kind of a strategy guide.

Shane Sams: Sure. I'm almost thinking that that ... If I'm thinking about the way that your product works, what's the most valuable thing to a fantasy football player? Well, the first thing, for me, is the draft, because that happens first. You've got to get your draft ... You've got to go into the draft knowing what's going on, and really you need a draft guide. You need something that's going to help you make picks in the moment. I always had this big printout, and I was highlighting people off as they went, but it was like a pick order almost. So, my quarterbacks would be ranked, and as people took quarterbacks I'd highlight them, right?

Kevin Crowe: Yep.

Shane Sams: And then it's running backs, whatever, like a pick guide. So, that way it took the guesswork out of it for someone who shows up at their fantasy football draft and doesn't have enough time to really research it, you know what I'm saying?

Kevin Crowe: Yep.

Shane Sams: But, I think the money, dude, is in the weekly picks, because every week you've got a depth chart, and you've got a roster, and you've got to pick the starters. So, you might have three quarterbacks. Well, maybe one quarterback, depending on how your draft works, you might have one quarterback that is against a really weak defense, even though he's not your best quarterback, and you might choose to start him that week. But, choices like that seem to be where some recurring revenue, or some bigger money would be in. I'm just wondering if you couldn't give them the strategy guide as an opt-in, but then sell them something where you send out a thing like that this week. Just like they would do on ESPN Insider, or anywhere else, where you actually tell them the pick order. What do people at the water cooler ask you to do?

Jocelyn Sams: So, I think what might be interesting ... How long is the book?

Kevin Crowe: The book is like ... it's 50 tips...so, it's about 25 to 30 pages.

Jocelyn Sams: All right.

Shane Sams: Yeah, that's something someone could read right before the draft-

Jocelyn Sams: I wonder-

Shane Sams: ... if they've never done it before.

Jocelyn Sams: ... I think that's a little bit large for a free thing, though.

Kevin Crowe: I have a top 10 tips eBook-

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, I wonder if you-

Kevin Crowe: ... for a lead magnet.

Jocelyn Sams: ... bring it up. Exactly, yeah.

Shane Sams: So, could you give away the top 10 tips, and then take the big book and put it inside of a product ... We'll call it a product for right now, okay?

Kevin Crowe: Yeah.

Shane Sams: Then maybe what you would do is you would say, "Hey, it's a $100, or $99 season pass." So, they pay $99, they get access to your thing for the entire season, inside is your ... You just got the 10 tips for free, but inside is the strategy guide you need before you start the season to get this right, and then you say, "Hey, also, on whatever date, I'm going to release my pick orders where you can go to your draft, and you can get in there, and make sure you draft the best possible team, and then every single week I'm going to email you my start em, sit them charts where you're going to help them decide who ...", it's basically just a newsletter is what it is at that point, but it's something that you're doing anyway, because you're playing fantasy football, right?

Kevin Crowe: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Shane Sams: ... So you're researching all this stuff anyway, and then they kind of get a little monthly email. So, say you get like 100 people to pay $99, you got basically $10,000, and then all you're going to do is each week you send out your newsletter on email. So, it is in real time, and it is live, so there is going to be work to do. This is a hard passive product, you know what I mean?

Kevin Crowe: Right. Oh yeah.

Jocelyn Sams: But it's something that you're doing anyway, and I think that eventually if you were to want to make it more passive you might bring someone else in, so-

Shane Sams: To help you do stuff, to research and stuff like that.

Jocelyn Sams: ... Yeah, somebody else to spread out the work a little bit.

Shane Sams: Yeah, but I mean, I don't think it's going to be that much work, because you're going to be ... One, you're doing it anyway, and you're just going to write a little report up that says ... You might have each position in the newsletter, and your top picks this week to start, just five for each position and why, you know what I'm saying?

Jocelyn Sams: I mean, this is going to be kind of short too, I mean, at most one page front and back.

Shane Sams: Yeah, it's just ... You don't even have to put pictures and stuff, it's just bulleted lists, like, "Here's my top quarterbacks of the week, start them, sit them. Here's my top running backs of the week start them, sit them." Maybe a little information on your top pick, and just to help people to decide what they're doing, but that gives you a bigger ticket, because it's like NFL fantasy season pass with Kevin, like, "I'm an expert, I know this, I'm going to make sure you win your fantasy draft, I'm going to make you be able to rub it into your friends in the forums."

Shane Sams: You know what I'm saying, like talking trash to them, and you're just going to give them the information that they need. I think it's going to be hard to sell just the strategy guide, or even a pick order by itself, because those exist, but if I was doing fantasy football, and I'm like, "Man, I've got a guy, I've got a ringer. I've got a guy that tells me every week what to do, and his name's Kevin.", I'm going to be much more likely to pay for something like ... Does that make sense?

Kevin Crowe: Yep, totally.

Jocelyn Sams: I think that possibly, it might be a good idea, you could go live each week and answer questions, or talk through the newsletter that you put out.

Shane Sams: Yeah, if you want to do that, that'd be ... Yeah, send the newsletter, and then you have a follow up video for like an hour, where people could actually-

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, and you don't even have to prepare anything, just go through the guide, explain more about your picks in depth, why you decided this, and then answer questions. So, people might be sitting at their computer, "Okay, should I start person A, or person B?" "Oh, well, I think you should start person B, because ABC.", you know?

Shane Sams: Yeah, that could be really-

Kevin Crowe: You're inside my head right now, Jocelyn.

Shane Sams: She's an introvert.

Jocelyn Sams: Introvert connection.

Kevin Crowe: Yeah, so I've looked at starting a membership, that's one thing I've been thinking about, and you talked about the Q&A, and that was something I was thinking about that could help me get recurring revenue if I'm doing a live Q&A Sunday morning before the games start where people have those questions of, "Who should I start?", and I'm there to answer the questions for them.

Shane Sams: Yes, that would be amazing, because you can't go to ... You can watch the start them ... They have fantasy football shows on ESPN, but you can't ask about your team, and they don't always cover your players. So, to have an expert do that, you know what I'm saying, who's been playing for almost 20 years, and someone's just starting out, or they're really into it, they're going to be all over something like that. So, maybe they get the email on Friday, because it's like then you got the weekend to think about it, and there might be a Saturday game when college football's over, something, you know what I mean, and then on Sunday you go live to talk about it, so they've got time to process what's in the newsletter, but that would be fine.

Shane Sams: Think about it like, I mean, who knows how big something like that could get. 99 bucks season pass, get the strategy guide, get your draft pick orders. I'm going to have a special draft live where we can ask questions, whatever, and then ... You could even ... you know what would be amazing, is if you had something set up where they could email, and you would get an email on your phone and they're in their draft, and you can send them a pick. That would be amazing. That might be too much. But, 99 bucks, you go get 500 people over the next couple years doing this, you got ... that's $50,000 in a season, you know?

Kevin Crowe: Yeah.

Shane Sams: I mean, you can ... and that's not unreasonable, because there's millions of people that play fantasy football, right?

Kevin Crowe: Yeah.

Shane Sams: So, what about outside of the season though, is there anything outside of the season that fantasy football people care about, or do they usually just move to another sport at that point like baseball, or golf, or basketball, or something?

Kevin Crowe: Yeah, it's typically just after the Super Bowl people don't really think about fantasy football again until ... I mean, when the NFL draft happens there are some questions about rookies, and what teams they go to, and how that might impact, but people generally don't start worrying about fantasy football until July or August when they're getting ready to do their next draft.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay, so how much interest/expertise do you have in other sports?

Shane Sams: Like other fantasy sports.

Kevin Crowe: Not much. I've played fantasy baseball a couple times, but it's not something that I do regularly. It's mainly just football for me.

Shane Sams: Well, that's where you could outsource. That's where you probably ... So, let's say if you build up a fantasy base over so many years of a couple hundred people, because they're going to come back year after year, this is a perfect regenerating product, it's like ... We always say that ... My U.S. history teacher site is like this, because every year a new crop of social studies teachers graduate college, and a bunch of teachers retire, and teachers change jobs. So, it's regenerating the customer base all the time, and this is the same thing. If you get 100 people, and you help them do good in their fantasy league, they're going to come back to you next year, you're going to re-market to them, right?

Kevin Crowe: Yeah.

Shane Sams: But maybe you could get someone like a partner who's doing really good in baseball, or maybe you know somebody that's like a pro at fantasy baseball, they could do that for you, and you could just be the gears behind the machine.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, and I wouldn't bring in a partner, I would probably just hire somebody, but-

Shane Sams: Hire it out, yeah, you're in control.

Jocelyn Sams: ... I know that the thought is, "Okay, well if this person knows so much about it, they'd start their own website." Well, here's the thing, most people don't know how to start a website, or how to do online marketing, but you do.

Shane Sams: You said earlier you listen to almost ... Have you listened to every Flipped Lifestyle podcast, or almost every Flipped Lifestyle podcast?

Kevin Crowe: I think I've listened to them all, honestly.

Shane Sams: Okay, so you've listened ... Those people haven't, you know what I mean, and you still just got your product out recently and made your first sale, you know what I mean? So, it's not like they're just going to run out and do this. You may not even have to. Like I said, you go out and get 300 to 500 people, that's a modest amount of people over the next couple of years to build up as a customer base, and all of a sudden you're making 40, 50 grand a year just off this, and you're working at home anyway. So, it might not even be necessary to go into the other sports. You could just spend the money off season.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, so I would just start with the fantasy football, and if it gets to a point where you're ready to expand a little bit, I would maybe just choose one more. If it's something that you yourself would be willing to learn, and invest time into becoming an expert at it, then that would be amazing, but if not, you can always go with somebody else.

Shane Sams: What is your ultimate goal with this business? Is it a side income, especially now that you're working at home, or is it maybe to make enough money to stay home and just do this only?

Kevin Crowe: Well, for a while it was to do it full-time, just because I wanted that to be what I did all the time, but now that I have this job where I work at home and I love this job, it's more of like a side income, I just want to be able to make enough on the side to take vacations, and do other things like that.

Shane Sams: For sure, and that is a worthy goal, and I want to stress that, because a lot of people get obsessed with the quit your job, do this, but gosh, what if you could play fantasy football and make enough money to pay your mortgage and your car and go on a vacation every year? That would be pretty-

Jocelyn Sams: Not the worst life ever.

Kevin Crowe: No.

Shane Sams: Yeah, that sounds amazing, and especially if you're already working at home. So, this has a lot of potential, dude, there's a huge audience for it, huge niche. I mean, you've sold one of them. I think if you just put it together, and do something, it's like a hybrid. It's not really a membership, but it's a seasonal product, right?

Kevin Crowe: Yep.

Shane Sams: We've got some friend, they sell Halloween t-shirts. So, every year they fire up the printing press, and they make hundred of Halloween t-shirts. It's a seasonal income, it gives them that extra money that they need, and this could be something that could turn into something great for you like that too.

Kevin Crowe: Awesome.

Jocelyn Sams: All right, Kevin, it has been a fun conversation about your business. We are so excited that you made a sale, that is so awesome, and I can't wait to see what you do next, and more importantly, we can't wait to see you again in September. But before we go, we always ask everyone, what is one thing that you plan to take action on based on what we talked about on the podcast today?

Kevin Crowe: I am definitely going to look into getting the membership set up, and get that structured, what it's going to look like, and get ready to launch that to my audience that I got.

Shane Sams: When do people start drafting? We're in mid July right now, it's pretty soon, right?

Kevin Crowe: Yeah, typically August. Some people do early August, but mostly mid to late August.

Shane Sams: Awesome. Well, just don't over complicate it. It's basically, "I'm going to email you, and I'm going to be in a private Facebook group on Facebook Live." So, if you can just do those two things and get that set up, you're going to be able to launch this way before August 1st. Okay?

Kevin Crowe: Cool.

Jocelyn Sams: As a fellow introvert I'm going to say this, because I know it's happening, stop thinking so much.

Shane Sams: That's right, just go do it, dude.

Kevin Crowe: You've got me pegged.

Shane Sams: All right guys, that was another great conversation with a Flip Your Life community member. We would love to help you inside of the Flip Your Life community just like we helped Kevin today. All you have to do to join the community is go to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife. We have all the training you need to come up with your idea, research your market, create your product, and launch it in your own online business. That's flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife.

Shane Sams: We would love to see you and hang out with you and meet you at Flip Your Life Live. We're going to be hanging out with Kevin, you can come meet him too, it's happening in Lexington, Kentucky on September 19th through the 21st. You can find out all the information that you need about Flip Your Life Live at flippedlifestyle.com/live. There are only a few tickets left. Once they sell out, they are gone forever. We have decided that we are not doing a Flip Your Life Live conference in 2020. So, stop putting it off, stop waiting for it. This is your time. If you want one of the last few tickets remaining for Flip Your Life Live, go to flippedlifestyle.com/live and get yours before they sell out.

Shane Sams: Before we go, we always love to close our podcast with a bible verse. Jocelyn, and I get a lot of information and inspiration from the bible, and we want to share some of that with you. Today's bible verse is 1 John 3:18, and it says, "Let us not love in word or talk, but in deed and in truth." What that bible verse is saying guys, is stop talking, get out there and take action. It's not about the words. It's not about the talk. You are judged by your deeds and what you are doing in the real world, so get out there and take action if you really want to make it happen in your life. That's all the time we have for today's show. Thank you so much for listening, and until next time, get out there, take action, do whatever it takes to flip your life. See you then.

Jocelyn Sams: Bye.

Shane Sams: For some reason I kept wanting to laugh, I don't know. I was about to laugh.

Jocelyn Sams: You were all like-

Shane Sams: I know I was like dancing around in my chair, I don't know what I was doing right there.

Jocelyn Sams: I don't know what was going on right there, but-

Shane Sams: I don't know what was happening right there, man, it was kind of weird. I'm just antsy, antsy. I'm ready to take action-

Kevin Crowe: Well, I have been trying to figure out a way out of the dog house for that just the girlfriend comment.

Jocelyn Sams: Oh, yes.

Shane Sams: Yeah, you're done. You're done-

Jocelyn Sams: Maybe we can edit that out.

Shane Sams: No, we're not editing it out, Jocelyn. It's all going in. This banter is going to be the B-roll it goes with it, I'm telling you right now.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay, so I had an idea for you, I didn't really want to get into it on that, because I was afraid it would be too long, but so I think maybe one thing that you might could do is either write a blog post, or ... I'm trying to think. So, most people, a lot of people do a party, right? Like a draft party?

Kevin Crowe: Yes.

Jocelyn Sams: So, my guess is that people are googling draft party ideas, or something like that. I would do some keyword research on that, but I think you should write something about that, maybe have something that people could print out-

Shane Sams: How to host a fantasy draft or something?

Jocelyn Sams: Yes, and so-

Kevin Crowe: Oh, that's kind of cool.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, so you could have your branding information on ... Do people have something that they write on? How does it work? I don't know, I've never done this.

Shane Sams: It's usually on computer, or on paper.

Kevin Crowe: Yeah, most of the time it's on computers, sometimes people have those big draft boards where you peel off the players name and stick it up on the board where-

Shane Sams: People get elaborate, it's crazy.

Kevin Crowe: Yeah.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, I wonder if you could ... If he can get something that would be in peoples homes, that would be in front of a lot of people who were drafting, you see what I'm saying?

Shane Sams: Oh, like a ... or even like a draft printout that said the website, like basically everyone that prints that is giving it to 10 of their friends, so it's going viral almost.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, but I would like to see you come up with a blog post that has some ideas for food to have at a party, some ideas for décor, you might could even do some Amazon affiliates.

Shane Sams: Well, what you ... No, what you really want them to hand out is the top three picks for every position, because that's what people are going to hand out.

Jocelyn Sams: Well, that's fine, but I'm saying to get traffic.

Shane Sams: I am.

Kevin Crowe: Yeah, I was actually going to ask you guys about affiliates, because to me that makes a little bit of sense on my blog to-

Shane Sams: Does DraftKings have an affiliate program?

Kevin Crowe: Yep.

Shane Sams: Bro, yes, DraftKings-

Kevin Crowe: Yeah, that's been on my radar. The DraftKings, or even Fanatics for sports apparel.

Shane Sams: Yeah man, if you do what Jocelyn said, like have some posts that are about hosting the draft, but then maybe you have an opt-in that is like, "Download for your draft D's, the top three pics at every position.", and then they could hand it out to everybody.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, and it would have your information on it-

Shane Sams: And it would have your information-

Jocelyn Sams: ... and then you could have-

Shane Sams: ... Get weekly draft support at-

Jocelyn Sams: Yes. Yes.

Kevin Crowe: Oh, that's cool.

Shane Sams: People are going to ... you want ... The draft host has to find the blog post, then he prints the free thing to give to all of his people playing-

Jocelyn Sams: Yes, exactly.

Shane Sams: ... and now you have 12 people in your hands that say, "Hey, get weekly draft support.", and all you do is put the top three picks at each position.

Jocelyn Sams: Now we're on the same page.

Shane Sams: Right, so it's basically you want the host to find the post, and then you want the opt-in that ... Give your people all this thing, and then maybe when they go to that website ... I would do the affiliate thing, the host thing, maybe you could ... Oh, here's another post you could do. Do a comparison between multiple fantasy football platforms. Like DraftKings versus-

Jocelyn Sams: Versus.

Shane Sams: ... CBS Sports Live, and then you pick draft teams, and click here to get a 10% discount on your affiliate.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, I'm going to tell you right now, Kevin, this is a very keyword heavy thing.

Shane Sams: Oh yeah, for sure.

Jocelyn Sams: You need to concentrate on Google a lot, because people are going to be typing in, "how to win at fantasy football. DraftKings versus whatever."

Shane Sams: Have you done the research on that?

Kevin Crowe: Yeah.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, so if I were you, I don't know-

Shane Sams: I do like the idea of targeting the draft people though, the guy or girl that's hosting the draft.

Kevin Crowe: Yeah, that's something I definitely have not thought of. That's pretty cool.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay, hold on. I don't even remember what I was saying, because you interrupted me, which was rude.

Shane Sams: Sorry.

Jocelyn Sams: Sorry. I had something good.

Shane Sams: [crosstalk 00:38:01]-

Jocelyn Sams: Oh, yes. So, what I think you should do if you haven't done it already, I would invest in some SEO training. I bought a course on Udemy not too long ago, and it was like the top course. I actually haven't done it yet, but it was like $10.

Shane Sams: Just to get a little deeper into the ad platforms that you want to run ads-

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, I would really ... I would invest a lot of time-

Shane Sams: But you said you've already done the keyword research, right?

Kevin Crowe: I've done a pretty good bit, yeah.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, but I would invest some time and energy in making sure that your posts come to the top.

Shane Sams: Like getting the posts themselves doctored up, and clean.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, because Google's going to be huge for you. I might even put somebody behind ads.

Shane Sams: Fantasy is competitive though. Do you have an email list?

Kevin Crowe: Yeah, I do. It's got about 550 on it.

Shane Sams: Oh yeah, there's some people in there. Hey, you should send an email out that says, "Hey, just doing a quick survey, who is hosting a draft?", and ask your 550 people who is actually going to host their teams draft, and then send them the free thing that they can give out, like print it, and just say, "Hey ...", so let's say that 10 people write you back. Send those 10 people a free cheat sheet front and back top three people at every pick with basically a sales copy at the bottom of the back page, so that everyone in their room gets a "Need help making your picks every week? Go to thefantasyfootballcoach.com.", and get you some traffic that way too.

Jocelyn Sams: But ask your people, be like, "Hey, if you're hosting a draft party, what information do you need-"

Shane Sams: What do you need? Yeah-

Jocelyn Sams: What would be helpful for you to have?", like ask-

Shane Sams: "What would you want to give your players, and I'll ...", say, "What would you want to give out to your players, and I'll make it for you.", and volunteer yourself to do that, and they'll basically ... Anyone who writes you back, is automatically going to give that thing to their people.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, and so they're going to get there to their draft party, and they're going to be like, "Man, this is sweet.", and it's going to make-

Shane Sams: Because that'll raise their status in the room.

Jocelyn Sams: ... Yes, it's going to make the person look good.

Shane Sams: Yeah, what can I do to make you look good for your players, right?

Kevin Crowe: Yeah, that's cool, because a lot of the ones that I've gone to, the in person drafts like that, people have the top however many players printed out, and just given it out to everybody who walks in.

Shane Sams: But it would be nice if the back half of that paper ... Actually, if you can get it all on the front, and then the back was literally a sales page, was a sales letter about your course. Everyone in the room might-

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, but these people are going to be printing it themselves, though, they won't print the back.

Shane Sams: They might print two pages and staple it.

Jocelyn Sams: No.

Shane Sams: Yeah, you want the-

Kevin Crowe: I could at least just have the website and stuff at the bottom-

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah.

Shane Sams: Well, I would cut the page in half, the top of the page I would have the top three picks at every of position, which will fit, just put little squares, you know what I'm saying?

Kevin Crowe: Yeah.

Shane Sams: And then the bottom is basically a little short sales letter for your product, which is, "I will help you ...", you could put on it, "Do you want to beat every player in this room right now, dot, dot, dot.", and then you have a little paragraph that says, "Hi, I'm Kevin, I've been playing fantasy football for over 20 years, I'm going to help you pick the best starters every single week, and keep you up to date on everything that's happening in fantasy football. All you have to do is go to thefantasyfootballcoach.com, and you can sign up today."

Jocelyn Sams: How many times have you won your draft, do you know?

Kevin Crowe: Several. I was in six leagues last year and won four of them, and made about 1,000 bucks.

Shane Sams: Okay, that's what you need to say.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, that needs to be on your sales information.

Kevin Crowe: It's on the-

Shane Sams: "Last year alone I won four of my six leagues and over 1,000 bucks. Wouldn't you trade $99 for $1,000?"

Jocelyn Sams: This reminds me ... Do you remember when J.T. was doing the-

Shane Sams: PA announcers?

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah ... No, he was doing the radio show. So, Shane had been a coach in high school for years-

Shane Sams: Oh yeah, I was like the expert. I was the color guy on the radio show, because I knew about football.

Jocelyn Sams: Well, and one of his friends was doing this show, and he was like, "Hey, who's going to win this game?" So, Shane picked all ... He told them who to pick every week, and I think you got like 90 something percent.

Shane Sams: Yeah, basically it was a high school football pick em show, and he would call me every week with every high school game in the tri-county area where we live. So, there's like 10 schools in the area, and I was 90% for the season.

Kevin Crowe: Wow.

Shane Sams: But yeah, every week I just was like, "They're going to win. They're going to win. They're going to win."

Jocelyn Sams: One time you weren't here or something, or I don't know, he couldn't get a hold of you or something, he's like, "I need to get him. I don't know who to pick."

Shane Sams: Yeah. Right, exactly. I was pretty awesome. So, this is good stuff. I think you got a lot of potential here. I think this year we're running up to it a little quick, but if you can make a few sales and get your logistics done, it could really blow up next year, because you'd have a whole year to market it, you know what I'm saying?

Kevin Crowe: Right.

Jocelyn Sams: No, blow it up this year. What are we waiting for?

Shane Sams: Well now, you can blow it up this year too, I'm just saying you can't get a bunch of people, if you've got 500 people on your list there's probably 40 to 50 that would definitely want this, you just got to get them to buy it.

Jocelyn Sams: But just think about what your people are thinking about right now. They're probably thinking about their party, and they're probably thinking about-

Shane Sams: The draft.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah.

Shane Sams: And then ... Yeah, they're not worried about the games yet, they're just worried about the ... and they're probably in multiple drafts.

Jocelyn Sams: So, that's the content that you need to focus on right now.

Kevin Crowe: So, what do you think about charging monthly, because-

Shane Sams: I would not charge monthly on this, I would make a season pass, and charge $99.

Kevin Crowe: Okay, because I was just thinking for people who might not join until October, or something. If they're just wanting to get into for-

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, it's still the season pass.

Shane Sams: Season pass, man. That's why I think giving away as much draft information as possible for free is amazing opt-in stuff. One, because you can find a lot of that stuff for free anyway, and I don't think the value is in the draft. I think the leads are in the draft. The value is, "Oh crap, it's Sunday, who do I start?", you know what I'm saying? "What defense do I run if I've got two defenses? Who has the better matchup?", and I'm clueless

Shane Sams: The drafts can be put on autopilot a little bit, because if you have a really good draft sheet you're going to know who to pick next, because you're going to go, "Okay, well the top quarterback's gone, the top running back's gone, top, top, top.", and then you're looking at it, and you're like, "Well, of the receiver and running back, these are the two highest scores. I'll just pick the highest score.", right?

Kevin Crowe: Yeah.

Shane Sams: So, those can kind of be ... That's free and automated basically. You can go buy a magazine at book whatever, but what's not automated and what's not good is I need someone to ask. I need someone that I can hit reply and email and say, "Kevin, who should I pick?" That is not easily done. So, that's where it really ... You can read articles and all this stuff, but you still have to make the call, and most people need validation more than anything else. So, they need someone there to validate them, and they will pay for that, right?

Kevin Crowe: Yeah.

Jocelyn Sams: On the pricing, if you're in October, you could always discount it.

Shane Sams: Yeah, I would just charge $99 for a season pass no matter what, unless you did like a playoff bundle, because you know how people redraft for the playoffs?

Kevin Crowe: Yeah.

Shane Sams: You could totally do a playoff pack of like 25 bucks, playoff special, where they get the whole playoffs for 25 bucks, or something like that if they redraft, but 99 bucks is worth it, and that's how you position it though. "Last year alone I won four out of my six drafts, and I made over $1,000. What if you could win your draft? How much money would you make? Isn't that ... I bet it's more than $99. This is totally worth it.", you know what I'm saying?

Kevin Crowe: Yeah.

Shane Sams: "And then imagine the bragging rights every week when people are looking at you like Nostradamus, because you're walking in and killing them, and they don't know how you're doing it. You've got your secret in the back pocket, Kevin Crowe. Not Russell Crowe, but better looking." That's what you say.

Kevin Crowe: The fantasy gladiator.

Shane Sams: The fantasy gladiator. Change your website, fantasygladiator.com, and then just have a picture of you standing in the middle of a football field screaming, "Are you not entertained?", that'd be amazing. That'd be awesome.

Links and resources mentioned on today’s show: * Flip Your Life LIVE 2019 Tickets & Registration Information * Flip Your Life community * PROLIFIC Monthly

Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!

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View Details

In today's episode, Jocelyn and I reflect on the past, talk about our fears and struggles, and discuss plans for the future!

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jocelyn Sams: Hey y'all. You're listening to episode 300 of the Flipped Lifestyle podcast.

Shane Sams: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, where life always comes before work. We're your hosts Shane and Jocelyn Sams. We're a real family that figured out how to make our entire living online. And now we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? All right, let's get started.

Shane Sams: What is going on everybody? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. Super excited to be with you this week for episode 300 of the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. It's just me and Jocelyn today for episode 300. And if you're wondering what we're going to talk about on today's podcast, on this milestone episode of the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, episode 300. If you're wondering that, good, because so are we. We have no plan, we're going into this ... We tried to come up with some stuff and we just couldn't think of anything or figure it out.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. We had all kinds of ideas of things that we wanted to do. We've been talking about it forever. And a couple days ago our assistant emails us and she's like, "Hey guys, just wondering if you have anything for episode 300?" When in the back of her mind I know she's thinking, this episode is supposed to come out next week, get this done.

Shane Sams: We're batched ahead on all of our interviews before and after, but you guys have not recorded episode 300. And we started talking about it a little bit and we're like, why can we not think about this? Why can we not figure it out? Maybe we should have a guest on. Maybe we shouldn't have a guest on. Maybe we should talk about X. Maybe we should talk about Y. Maybe we should talk about Z. And we just could not come up with any topic. So what we decided to do for episode 300 is one, explore a little bit why we couldn't figure out what we wanted to talk about. Two, talk about some of the projects and things that we're doing right now and how that's going to impact what Flipped Lifestyle looks like in the future. And then we're actually going to go through the same questions. We're going to interview each other a little bit and talk about those internal fears that are holding us back. Those external obstacles that are getting in our way. And we're going to talk about our biggest business questions that we have for growing and scaling our business. Because we are not immune to fear, we are and not immune to the obstacles, and we are definitely not immune to all the questions that rise up. And we find ourselves right now in kind of a weird limbo in our business.

Shane Sams: We've got this huge live event coming up, Flip Your Life LIVE. It's happening September 19th through the 21st. We've got new projects that we've started. We recently acquired back some ownership in another company that we owned. So we're going to be able to grow that thing and make it more profitable now. And we've just got a lot going on and it's kind of left us in this weird paralyzed place. Have you ever felt that way in your business? Have you ever felt like there were things happening and you felt busy and you felt like things were going on, you had a lot of ideas, but you were just kind of stuck or plateaued? And that's kind of where we feel right now emotionally, mentally, and everything about our business.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah we thought we would just give you a little bit of insight into what we're thinking, what we're working on, because we really haven't done that I guess in a while. And I was just thinking today that in August this is going to be five years of this podcast, which is kind of crazy.

Shane Sams: Unbelievable.

Jocelyn Sams: So we've come kind of a long way but of course there's a lot of things that we still want to do and a lot of places we still want to go. So we're just going to kind of explore that a little bit and just give you guys a little bit of an insight into what we're thinking.

Shane Sams: All right, so the first thing we want to talk about is Flip Your Life LIVE. And yes, we want you to come to Flip Your Life LIVE. It's in the teens, however many tickets are left right now. I'm not exactly sure what the count is. We've not met with our live event coordinator in a couple weeks. But we've only got a few tickets left and we really want you to come to Flip Your Life LIVE. It's September 19th through the 21st, it's in Lexington, Kentucky, and it's going to be an amazing event where 100 entrepreneurs from all over the world are going to come together and work for a couple days to build and grow our businesses. We've mentioned this on the podcast a couple times, but we want to explore it a little bit. We are not doing Flip Your Life LIVE in the big conference style event that we've done for the past couple of years anymore. There will not be a Flip Your Life LIVE in 2020 or 21.

Jocelyn Sams: And we've had a couple questions about this. I've had a couple of personal friends message me and they're like, "Is everything okay? Why aren't you having an event?" And yes, everything is fine. It has nothing to do with any type of crisis or anything like that. It's just that this event, it just takes a lot of work and a lot of bandwidth that's taking away from other things that we do.

Shane Sams: As we explored ... Our first initial idea for Flip Your Life LIVE was let's create a family reunion for the Flip Your Life Community, for our Flipped Lifestyle podcast audience. Let's create an event, a place where people can go and they don't have to worry about constantly getting pitched every hour on the hour. They don't have to worry about hearing a bunch of speakers talk about the crust of whatever they do and then sell them the rest of it. Let's create an event where people come and learn real deep content. Let's create an event where people have time to work on that content together and individually at the event. And then let's create it where it's a Q&A with S and J every hour on the hour. You can ask questions about everything that we talk about. And we wanted to make it a catalyst for people on their calendar where they're like, "I've got to get stuff done before Flip Your Life LIVE. And when I leave Flip Your Live LIVE, I'm going to be super hyper crazy excited and make massive strides to make progress in my business." And we did that.

Shane Sams: Last year's event was incredible. This year's event has been awesome. We've done live trainings every week for our attendees. And everything is just really coming to a head. But, Flip Your Life LIVE had an unexpected consequence or two. One, it sucked up all of our bandwidth. I mean from January 1st until September 19th. Every day, almost always, every morning we get up and we look at each other and we're thinking about Flip Your Life LIVE. We're planning meals with our person, we're planning content, we're talking to people in the Flip Your Life LIVE Facebook group. We're just constantly thinking about the marketing and the sales and how to get people to come to Flip Your Life LIVE and we just did not expect it to take up so much bandwidth. Even the stuff we've outsourced. Like our live event coordinator handles all the meals and planning what people are going to eat and all the logistics in the hotel, but you're still thinking about it. You just can't put it up because it's such a big deal and it's such a big event. And people are coming and you want to put on such a good show that it actually pulled us out of the Flip Your Life Community. It pulled us away from our Q&A's. It pulled us away from our Flip Your Life Community forums a little bit. And it actually impacted the reach that we could have.

Shane Sams: It even pulled us away a little bit from podcasting. We used to be 12, 13 weeks ahead on our podcasts, and now we're only staying about three or four weeks ahead, because instead of a podcast, we have to record a meeting about Flip Your Life LIVE or we have to talk to each other about something that's going on with the event instead of going on other people's podcasts. We used to do interviews all the time. We've done dozens and dozens of interviews in magazines and on other people's podcasts and those were really good to spread our message and get our word out there, but we've not been able to do that for two years because we don't have time to do that.

Shane Sams: So Flip Your Life LIVE was an amazing event and it is going to be an amazing event this year. And we kind of looked at ourselves last year when we were getting ready to walk on stage and said, "Did we really do this? Did this really happen? Did we really pull this off?" Like how did a couple people from Kentucky who started a podcast four or five years ago get 100 people to fly in from the world to change their family's future? And it was awesome. But it's just really kind of holding back our business right now and other things that we want to do. So we decided hey, let's blow this one out. Let's make this one bigger, double what it was last year, awesome. And then we're going to go in another direction.

Jocelyn Sams: So for me, the event is amazing. I mean it was my idea to begin with. I had gone to another event that was sort of similar to this and I thought it was really cool. And I thought wow, it would be awesome to bring our people together. But what I really didn't anticipate was, first of all, the massive expense that it takes to put on a live event. There are of course benefits to doing that and there are drawbacks to that. I've mentioned it before that we pretty much make zero profit on the event, which means that we do all this work and we don't make any money. And of course it's not all about the money, but it's hard to put so much time and effort into something that you're getting no financial return on. Now are we getting other types of return? Yes. There have been people who have done really amazing things leading up to the event, following the event. I'm not saying that it wasn't worth it, but it's just been really difficult for us trying to sell this thing, trying to coordinate everything, and just keeping those wheels in motion all the time.

Shane Sams: Yeah, and we are a profit first company. Jocelyn and I don't do anything unless it is going to be profitable. And when you hear the work profit, it's not just like oh, we made more than we spent. That's not what profit is. You have to also take into account opportunity costs. Like every time I'm doing a Flip Your Life LIVE training, which I love to do, that's my energy, I love it every week. It gets me hyped. Jocelyn doesn't come around me for three or four hours because I'm like a nuclear bomb generating heat after I get off the mic talking to our Flip Your Life LIVE attendees. But that could be a webinar where we could put another 100 people in the Flip Your Life Community. That could be a coaching call where I can help one of our Flip Your Life Community members go to the next level one on one. So there's a lot of other things that we think we could do with our time that would make a bigger impact on more people and it would actually make more money and put more money in our pocket which is what business is all about.

Jocelyn Sams: Does that mean that we are never doing a live event again? Not necessarily. We will probably not do the large scale one for quite some time, maybe ever. We don't like to make promises or bold statements like we will never ever do this event again.

Shane Sams: Never say never. But for right now, it is definitely not on our mind. It is not in our plans for next year, the year after, or on the horizon. And we've started thinking about some other things that we could do. Jocelyn and I used to go around the country. We've been to Chicago, San Diego, Tampa, and we've had small mastermind style live events where we have maybe 15 to 20 people in a room and we just really get into the weeds with them about their business. Those were really, really successful. Much more profitable than the big live event. And we got a lot of great results out of them too.

Jocelyn Sams: Another thing that we have considered and that I'm actually really excited about, is a destination style event. So what I mean by that is maybe we would go to an all inclusive resort where there will be childcare and everybody can just hang out together and we would do it more like a vacation and also a mastermind event. So one of the things that I wanted to do with our podcast listeners is I would like for you guys to fill out a little survey. So if you're a listener and you would like to share your thoughts on what we're doing or what we might be doing, we put together a little survey over at flippedlifestyle.com/survey. And we would love for you to answer a few questions and just tell us some feedback about some of the things that we talk about. Are you interested in a smaller type mastermind event? Are you interested in a destination type of live event? And that would help us as we sort of make plans for the future.

Shane Sams: And the reason we came up with those two options as some kind of live event thing, because live events are one our big core beliefs. We are going to a live event, actually as we are recording this, we are getting ready to fly to San Diego in a couple days. And we are going to be appearing on stage with Pat Flynn at his first live event, FlynnCon. And we're going to be going to that event, it's going to be an amazing event, we can't wait to do it. By the time you've heard this we've already done it so you can probably go to YouTube or Twitter or somewhere and you could find video of the event and what we did. But live events are really important to us. We believe in live events. We go to live events and we want to host some kind of live event. But, we started looking at some of the problems or objections or the things that made a huge conference hard for our people. And two of the biggest objections were, number one, traveling to the live event. It's a big deal to go to a live event. That's part of the reason why you take so much action before and after a live event, is because you've invested so much time and money to get there so you want to get your ROI.

Shane Sams: But getting to the event was hard for people. And so we said hey, we need to maybe go back where we can go to them. If we did two or three smaller masterminds we could probably reach as many people as our big live event and we could actually come to them. So if we come to your town it's a lot easier to attend a mastermind or a live event than it is to go all the way across the country to a big thing. The second biggest reason was, I can't leave my family. I can't leave my kids. I can't find a babysitter. I can't find anything else. And so we said hey, a destination live event ... You know if you go to an all inclusive in Mexico, they're, one, half the price of any hotel in America. Two, they've got kids clubs, they've got childcare. If we all go on a Disney cruise or a Royal Caribbean cruise or a Carnival cruise or something, they all have kid's clubs. They've got childcare. So you can get away to mastermind, you can get away and have dinner together and you can do those things.

Shane Sams: So a part of this was, yes, it was taking away from our business. But a part of it too was, hey I think we could serve our community better if we would do some kind of different live component. Still give people the destination, still give people the day on their calendar, but solve some of these problems for people that will allow them to actually attend.

Shane Sams: The next thing that we wanted to talk a little bit about was the Flip Your Life Community. That's our community where ... We setup this community ... Did we setup the community right away? We had a course or something when we started out.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. The podcast has been on since 2014 and we started the community in 2015.

Shane Sams: That's right. We had some training and stuff and we had a couple beta groups and then we went to a life changing live event. And we met an expert named James Schramko, who talked to us about recurring revenue. A lot about recurring revenue. And he was really into the big ticket, high ticket coaching stuff. And we kind of applied what we talked to him about at that live event to our own brand and said hey, let's create a membership for the masses. Let's create a place where anybody can go. You know some people can't afford to go out and pay $5,000 every six months for coaching. Let's create a place where people can have an affordable monthly rate. They can go in and get all the training they need to start, build, and grow their own online business. We can fill up a forum and surround people with a community of family focused entrepreneurs from all over the world and we can be in there and we can actually create leadership opportunities for us. We can answer forum posts, we can do Q&A's with our members. And that's what we did and we started the Flip Your Life Community.

Shane Sams: It continues to grow, it continues to amaze us every single day. It's incredible when we log in and see all the success stories. There are literally hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of posts in our success story forum. There's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of questions that have been answered over the years in the Flip Your Life Community. And we just see so much growth. We were just on a member call about two weeks ago and one of our long time members, her name's Kathy, she was talking about how she had finally gotten some traction and she got 15 people to join her membership in one month. And the crazy thing was, it was the worst month of the year in her niche to get members. And we have been working with Kathy ... Kathy came to Flip Your Life LIVE last year. She's been a long time listener of the podcast, long time member, and really I'm just giving her a shout out right now because Kathy, when you hear this, we're so proud of you for sticking with it. And to see her after a couple years of grinding and striving and getting that first sale, but not being able to get traction and all a sudden bam, getting those 15 members in one month and just building that foundation.

Shane Sams: Crazy stuff like that happens all the time in the community and that's just our favorite place in the world because we are so proud of all the people that are in there taking massive action and changing their lives. And it's really fulfilling to see hey, we do this podcast every week, you hear us help someone one on one, and then people come and join the community. It's pretty amazing.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, I loved our last member call because we actually had more success stories than questions. That's the first time I think that's ever happened and it was really cool because people are actually taking action and making things happen in the community, which makes me so happy.

Shane Sams: So the Flip Your Life Community is going really, really strong. We always like to kind of do a state of the union on episode 100, 200, 300. And we just want to reaffirm our commitment to the Flip Your Life Community. Our commitment to family focused entrepreneurs. We're not out here with massive egos and narcissism and our Ferrari's and our Lamborghini's. We know that this community is a bunch of people who love their families and want to have a better future for their kids. They want to get out of the grind. They want to create a side hustle. They want to do something with their life that's more than what they're doing now. And we love the Flip Your Life Community and it's going to be there and going strong for a long, long time.

Shane Sams: All right, the next thing I really want to talk about before we get into our question session where Jocelyn and I are going to interview each other like we do our guests every single Tuesday, is my new project that's called Prolific Monthly. It's a newsletter. It's a literal paper newsletter. It's like a top secret document that you get in the mail. It's 15 to 20 pages. I've had an idea for a hand delivered, physical product, a paper newsletter, for a couple years now and I've just never really got around to messing with it. One, because we've been so preoccupied for two years now with Flip Your Life LIVE. And once we decided not to do that it was like all of the ideas gushed out of my head that I've been putting on the back burner that Flip Your Life LIVE has prevented me from thinking about.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, they gushed out of your head, out of your mouth, and into my brain. I mean, it was literally like a fire hose of information just hitting me at all times, and I'm like, "Bro, I cannot process all this. You're going to have to slow down a little bit."

Shane Sams: Make a list dude. Make a list.

Jocelyn Sams: So one day I got an email, and you guys probably got this too, about this newsletter. Like, "How many people would be interested in this?" So before the email goes out he sends me a text and he's like, "Hey, I'm getting ready to send an email. Don't freak out. I'm not doing anything." I'm like, "All right."

Shane Sams: Because Jocelyn really doesn't like it when I just start random projects. Because she knows I'm kind of all in. She always tells me, "When you tell me about things, it scares me because I know you're going to go do the thing." So it kind of created this ... It was kind of like boundary system. Like okay, I have to preface every new idea with, "Okay, I'm not thinking about doing this right now, but hear me out."

Jocelyn Sams: So all it took was about, I don't know, a couple dozen of you guys to write him back and say, "Hey, this sounds like a great idea." And the next thing you know ... I figured this out the other day-

Shane Sams: Remember the text said, "I'm not doing this right now. This is for later. I'm just conducting a little interest survey to see if anybody in the audience would like it."

Jocelyn Sams: So like a good wife I smile and nod. Well, the other day we were on our member call and this hit me like a ton of bricks. So the next day Shane tells me, "Hey, let's go over to this restaurant that you really like in the next town over." I'm like, "Okay."

Shane Sams: She's was like, "That's a great idea." It's called Compadres and it's this little ... It's like a home mom and pop Chipotle.

Jocelyn Sams: It's really good.

Shane Sams: It's really good. Like super delicious.

Jocelyn Sams: Best tacos ever.

Shane Sams: Best tacos ever. So shameless plug for Compadres.

Jocelyn Sams: So I was like, "All right, yeah, I love tacos. I'll go." So we head over there and it just so happens that there's a print shop on the way to the restaurant.

Shane Sams: No, it wasn't on the way to the restaurant. You can see my master plan was happening here guys. We went to the tacos, we ate tacos, I didn't say anything about business, didn't talk about anything in business at all. And I was like, "You know, we need to go to Starbucks." So I drove around town, got me a coffee, and I went to Starbucks so that I would have to redirect back by the print shop to get back to the road back to our hometown. And I'm like, "Hey, there's the print shop. You know what, remember that idea I had the other day about the Prolific newsletter?"

Jocelyn Sams: I'm just going to go see if they can do it.

Shane Sams: "I'm just going to go see if it's even possible." How long was I in there when you first started thinking uh, he's up to something here?

Jocelyn Sams: I mean you were there at least 30 minutes. I'm like, what are you doing? Because I didn't go in. I'm just sitting there thinking he's just talking to this guy, whatever. The next thing you know he comes out all excited and at that point I knew that it was happening.

Shane Sams: Yeah, right. I did not sign any papers. I did not do anything. I would never actually go through with something until you actually give me your signature of approval. So I go home and I was telling Jocelyn how much it was going to cost, I was showing her the profit margins, and I was telling her my ideas on how this could really help people. Because the point of the Prolific Monthly newsletter is to help people be more prolific in promotion. Because I'm a big, huge believer that you have to be consistent, prolific, and relentless. You've got to consistently create content. You have to prolificly promote your content. People get that backwards. You don't have to prolificly create content guys. You have to consistently create content. Once a week, twice a week. But then you have to prolificly promote your content every single day to get traction, to get followers, to make sales. And then you have to relentlessly sell things. You've got to be up front and say, "I have products. They cost money. You should buy them."

Shane Sams: Those are my three core philosophies in business and life. Be consistent, be prolific, be relentless. So Prolific Monthly, what I wanted to do was I wanted to send people a calendar. So on the 28th of the month, before the 1st of the next month, you get, in your hands, a calendar that literally tells you what to do every day. It talks about what's on your avatar's mind. It talks about what's in popular culture happening. It talks about what you should do every day. You should do this sale this week. You should do this promotion this week. You should send these emails this week. And I wanted to put this thing together and then have articles in it like this is what you should do in August of 2019. This is what you should do in September of 2019. This is how you prolificly promote your brand and grow your sales and change your life.

Shane Sams: So I was really fired up about this magazine. I came home and I was like, "Look Jocelyn, it costs this. I've already got it written." I had already created some of the stuff for it. And I told her about what was going to be inside. And I convinced her to write an article. Jocelyn's like the back page article. She's like the closing thing. So I got her to write an article for it, and I said, "Hey, let me do this. Let's do this." So I talked her into it, but then we're on the member call and someone was asking about it and I look over at Jocelyn and her mouth is open three inches, and her eyes are looking at me like oh my gosh, you tricked me. She was like, "I just figured it out. You took me for tacos to soften me up to launch this new business."

Jocelyn Sams: Yes. That so happened. And I can't believe it took me that long to figure it out. Usually I can figure stuff like that out quicker.

Shane Sams: Yeah. So anyway, just one more story about this. So I go and launch it. I talked her into it on a Monday. Remember, we've not actually created this thing. We just got quotes and everything else, and some interest from some surveys. I send out an email on Tuesday, over the next three days I get sales. So I set up a beta. My beta exceeds the actual amount that I thought I could get. And I looked over at Jocelyn, I said, "Well, I guess we better write this thing." And I go out and on Friday and Saturday we create the newsletter. We edit it, we go through it, we put it together. Super proud of how it came out. It was absolutely incredible. I'm so pumped. And then the next Monday, one week later, I emailed the files to the printer and he sent them out.

Shane Sams: And actually, anyone listening right now, you should be getting your copy of Prolific Monthly in the mail this week. So it's going to be absolutely awesome. And it was just a fun experience to launch a product. But the moral of that story is the second we removed something from our slate, Flip Your Life LIVE, it freed up all this bandwidth to come up with ideas that were very profitable, very helpful for our community and our audience and our listenership, and it was just an awesome thing.

Shane Sams: So if you'd like to check it out go to prolificmonthly.com. P-R-O-L-I-F-I-C M-O-N-T-H-L-Y. Prolific Monthly. You can check out the newsletter. You can sign up. We go to print again on the 20th of August and you can get your copy for September. But that's my new project. I'm really super excited about that. And I invented it and created it in a week.

Jocelyn Sams: And one more lesson about that. If you're going to send a physical product, make sure you get a mailing address.

Shane Sams: Oh my gosh. Here's a mistake for you guys. I was in such a hurry to get this thing to market after the survey showed so much interest, that I went into Kajabi. If you have not checked out Kajabi, it's an awesome platform. And I was like I'm going to try a new software tool because I want to learn a new platform. So I went into Kajabi, I set up a sales page and an order form, and I sent it out to the list to start taking beta members. And about two days in I was like man sales are great, beta's going to sell out, this is better than I thought it could go. And I looked down and I was like, why do I only have this person's name and email address? And I looked at the form and I forgot to get a shipping address because we've never needed really shipping addresses before for anything, and I did not put shipping addresses. So I had to manually go back and find all these people and put their addresses back in. And I learned the lesson that I should have probably learned over the last 20 years. Always let Jocelyn check my work. Because Jocelyn would not have let that go out without that right?

Jocelyn Sams: Absolutely not.

Shane Sams: All right, on that note, that's kind of what's going on with Flip Your Life LIVE. Still again, love to have you there, flippedlifestyle.com/live. And check out my newsletter Prolific Monthly if you're having trouble advertising and promoting your brand. But we're going to go into a little question and answer here. We're going to take each other kind of through the things that are kind of holding us back right now. Because even though we've got a lot going on, even though we're getting our bandwidth back, we still feel kind of stuck in our business. We've reached a weird plateau in our business. We've got a lot going on, we've got a lot of things happening. There's a lot of good going on in our life. We see it all around us, but we feel stuck like we don't really have a plan for the future. We don't really know what the next level is.

Shane Sams: We've said this before on the podcast, but it's really easy to see the future when you're in that nine to five. You know you want to quit your job. You know you want to go out there and scale and make more money than you're making now at your nine to five. You know you want to spend more time with your kids. But now we're kind of like what happens next? What's the next part? We've built this business that's impacting hundreds of lives all over the world. What does the next level look like? And as we've wrestled with that this summer especially, we've been stuck. We've been totally stuck. We've had trouble setting goals. We've had trouble figuring out how to grow things. And we've kind of looked at each other and been in this ... What would you call it? It's almost like a ... What's it called? Like a stationary orbit. We're just kind of circling the earth, doing our thing, but we don't really know what's going to happen next right?

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, it's been a kind of unusual last couple of years, but I mean even the last little bit. We have our community, which is awesome, and we definitely have ideas of ways that we want to grow, but there have been a few things, like the live event, and some other things that we'll get into in just a little bit. But it's just made it more difficult for us to figure out what we're doing. And I think part of it is because when we started our kids were super young. Our son Isaac was three and our daughter was 18 months old. Their lives obviously were a lot different at that time because they were babies and they didn't have anything to do after school, and they didn't go to school. And because our kids are now growing up, Isaac's 10 and Anna's eight, they are involved in more things, and their lives are getting more complicated, which makes our lives more complicated.

Jocelyn Sams: We're starting to wrestle with things like how much screen time is appropriate, how much exercise do they need, all these types of things.

Shane Sams: What friends should they be hanging out with? And we're having to manage their relationships while we manage our relationship, while we literally interact ... I can't tell you guys how many people we interact with a day through our forums, in our private coaching program, online we get emails all the time, social media posts. We probably interact with 100 to 200 people a day. And we're still trying to sort out ... We have a marriage that we have to work on and we have kids and they have problems. Isaac has had a lot of anxiety in the last year or two. He's had a lot of things that we've had to wrestle with and look at that and be like, we don't know how to deal with this. So we've talked to counselors. We go to counseling with Isaac and we talk about his problems, we talk about our problems, and we talk about all the things that we have in our life.

Shane Sams: So we're dealing with all the life stuff. I don't want you guys to ever look at our Instagram and think it's perfect. We talk about that all the time. We actually have a joke that the more perfect someone's Instagram is, the more likely they probably are to be getting divorced. We look at each other and we're like, we have all these things that we have to deal with and we have to struggle with. We're together all the time. Jocelyn and I wrestle with that. We work together, we hang out together, we have parenting together, we have our marriage. There's so many things that are going on. Life is just really, really complicated now.

Jocelyn Sams: And if you, like us, are raising kids right now in this time, there is no owner's manual for this time. When our parents were raising us all this technology wasn't available.

Shane Sams: There was not internet. There was no cyber bullying.

Jocelyn Sams: And there's really nowhere for us to go for support. We're having to figure this out in realtime and figure out what's appropriate, what's not appropriate, how do we control this? There's just so many things going on in our heads and that mental stress has been really tough for me. So let's kind of get into that just a little bit. Let's talk about ... We always ask people on the show, what are some internal fears or obstacles that are holding you back?

Shane Sams: I think the biggest internal fear or struggle that I'm having right now is definitely comparison syndrome. They say comparison is the thief of joy. And as we've gotten around more successful people ... I'm in a really good mastermind right now with a lot of really great guys that are doing really cool things in their businesses. As we compete for those top spots in the podcast rankings, we see other people who are our peers, who kind of came up with us, who are ahead of us and there's a lot of competitiveness in this space, a lot of ego in this space, and I really find myself down in the dump sometimes comparing myself to other people and saying, "Our podcast is better than that. Why don't we get more downloads and why don't we get more shares, what are we doing wrong?" And I just really struggle a lot with comparing myself to people. Almost where it's oppressive. I feel bad about myself because we don't do something someone else does. Or I see someone who's doing other things.

Shane Sams: I know deep down, logically, that person is giving up something to get more results in a certain area. Whether it's more money in ads, whether it's time with their family, whether it's something else, I know there's something. I don't know the whole story, but comparison really is the thing I'm struggling with I think the most in our business right now. And it gets me down. I get depressed sometimes. I feel sometimes like nothing I do is good enough in our business, or all the efforts that we take should have put us at the top of the mountain and top of the rankings and the top of the search results, but it just doesn't and that really gets me down sometimes.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, and it drives me crazy. I think it's a man thing. I don't know.

Shane Sams: What do you mean?

Jocelyn Sams: I don't know. I think it's because you're just in a mastermind with men and I think men are just kind of naturally competitive in that way, like you just want to be the top dog or whatever. I don't know. Because I don't really deal with that a lot. I mean I don't really look at a lot of competition I guess. I do a little bit. Like I'll scroll through Instagram or whatever and I might see a few things here and there, but I try to shield myself from some of the comparison because I don't want to go to that place. So maybe that's part of it.

Shane Sams: A part of me likes being pushed, and then a part of me thinks about the bible and it's like run your own race. Every runner runs the race to win it, but what race are you really running? I read a great devotional about this probably about two weeks ago that really helped, and it was talking about hey, it's not about running someone else's race and you should live your life cheering other people on in their race. Like when you see someone else doing something good, you should cheer them on, and then you run your race. What are your goals? What are your aspirations? Where is your finish line? That's what you're running to. But it's so easy to say that out loud and it's so easy to read that in a devotional. It's just really hard to apply it. And I can definitely think of probably a couple days a month over the last year where that has derailed me. It's knocked me out. And I find it happens most when something good happens.

Shane Sams: For example, last week we launched Prolific Monthly. I was on a high when we got it done. But when I emailed the files in and I looked out and I thought about what other people were doing and other people this, and I got kind of down yesterday. It was like a crash almost from the high of launching the product. And I think that was just that comparison thing creeping back in. So that's been my biggest internal fear or struggle lately and it's something I'm going to have to work on right now. What's yours? What's the biggest fear or mindset issue that's holding you back right now?

Jocelyn Sams: Well, mine is definitely a mindset thing in general. I've talked about it a little bit on the podcast in past episodes, but I haven't really delved into it too much. I want to talk a little bit about my mental health. I've had kind of a rough time for a couple years now, and actually it's funny because some people have noticed this. I've gotten some messages about it. People just concerned, and I appreciate all of those.

Shane Sams: People from the podcast and stuff?

Jocelyn Sams: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah.

Shane Sams: They could hear a difference?

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah.

Shane Sams: Yeah, we've talked about that.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. And for a long time I couldn't even listen to our podcast because I sounded just so bad. And I didn't really realize how bad it had gotten. But I went down to Mexico this past March with some friends and some business people that I mastermind with, and we were talking one night and all of this stuff just kind of came spilling out, and I realized how bad this really was. And I've been doing some different things to try to improve. I've always had a lot of anxiety, but I just started really struggling with it and I just couldn't even really do anything. I couldn't do work. I couldn't do anything. I was just paralyzed I guess. And poor Shane, he's been shouldering so much of the burden of the business and everything else because I just couldn't do it. I just reached a place where it was just getting, even a little bit scary.

Jocelyn Sams: The good news is I have gone somewhere and I am getting help from a professional. I have started some medication, which has helped me immensely. And I feel like I'm on the right track to getting better and getting more involved in the business, and pushing things forward. So that is definitely a good thing. So I think that, for me, has been the hardest thing. And then on top of that, this last December a lot of you guys have listened to the podcast about where we decided to take our kids out to homeschool them. And I was already not doing well, but I knew it was something that Shane really wanted so I decided to tough it out and try to do it anyway, and it was just not a good thing for me, especially at this time. I love my kids, but just having the mental health issues and bringing them home all at the same time was not great for me.

Shane Sams: Yeah. And we're actually sending our kids back to school. We did our best. We gave it a shot. No regrets. But for right now in our life, with our business, with our community, with each other and our individual health we just said hey, let's go back to school, let's get the kids back where they're going everyday, let's get on a consistent schedule, and let's try to sort this stuff out. And it's funny because watching this happen over the last couple years ... A lot of things changed in our life. We sold a business. That was a huge transition for us when we sold elementarylibrarian.com. I think that was one of the things where I remember you kind of turning the corner into a different space in your head.

Jocelyn Sams: Well it's almost like a death for me. That was my baby. It was something that I had grown from the ground up. And it went to someone else. And I realized through this process that I can't even go to the website anymore, and I've unfollowed everything on social media. I just can't bear to look at it. I think that was a part of it. I think there were a lot of other things that contributed to this anxiety and even some depression along the way, but like I said, I'm on a good road now. I hope that we're able to move forward and things just continue to look up.

Shane Sams: And it's funny because, just always remember we fully recognize that we are very blessed. We have had good fortune. We have put ourselves in the right place at the right time, but while we were in those right places we made great contacts, we met the right people that helped us do the right things, and we are fully aware that we live a very blessed life. We've got a dream house and a dream property. All of our needs are met. We have a great life. But what I've learned, mental health can creep in guys at any time. It can come in and it can attack you, it can attack your family, and whether it's spiritual, mental, physical, whatever it is, you can be living your best life and still inside your head be struggling.

Shane Sams: I remember the conversation I had with Jocelyn about counseling, and I said, "You got to talk to somebody. We've got to talk to somebody about this." And then Jocelyn had to talk to me about, "Hey, maybe medicine will help me a little bit." Because I'm kind of scared of medicine a little bit. That's probably a weakness of mine is I'm not real big on taking medicine. Maybe it's fear because I don't understand it. But we've had these conversations and through counseling, through the medication, through working through this, I can see a dramatic improvement in the last two or three months. Incredible. It makes me happy because you're happy.

Shane Sams: So don't listen to all these entrepreneur gurus who are like, "Tough it out. Work 90 hours. Suck it up. Be an individual. Be tough." You've got to get help when you need help. And you might need help at the bottom of your journey, when nothing's going right. And you may need help at the top of your journey when everything from the outside is going perfect.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, and that's the thing is like, I am an expert at burying this deep down. I've been doing it for years. And it took me a long time to get anyone to take me seriously. I had gone to a couple of different people and they're like, "Oh, you seem fine. You don't seem depressed." And I'm like-

Shane Sams: Everything in your life is perfect. You're getting your work done. You're doing this, you're doing that. A lot of people listen to you, blah, blah, blah.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. So I was like, okay, apparently I'm fine, and I just kept going and kept going and kept going. And I did do things to try to get better. I did an online counseling thing for a while. I tried massage. I tried physical therapy because I was having some issues with my neck because I was holding that tension and anxiety in my neck and my upper back. I tried that. I tried something called dry needling. I mean I did all the work. I did all the things to try to get better. I did meditation, which I still do now. And it might have improved some, but I think I was just so far into that spiral I just couldn't come out on my own. It sort of feels like you're drowning and just your nose and mouth are about the water. So you can breathe, but you can't do much else. And that's pretty much how I felt for a long time. So I would just encourage you, if you're feeling that way, go and get some help. Find someone who actually believes you, especially if you're good at hiding things.

Jocelyn Sams: My psychiatrist that I go to, she said really most people who are in your situation, they wouldn't even be able to function. And I was able to function fairly well in some circumstances, not all. And I think that that's deceiving to people. They think well, if you can do well in this area then you're totally fine, when I definitely wasn't totally fine. So anyway, I've been working with this particular person since March and I have seen a very drastic improvement, which is very good. So anyway, if you're struggling I encourage you to get some help.

Shane Sams: There's online counseling. There's people in your community. We drive an hour and a half to get to the person that Jocelyn works with now. So we drive 30 minutes to go get some counseling with Isaac to help him with his anxiety that he's experiencing. Wherever you got to go don't let your success trick you into thinking you've got this. And if it's holding you back from success, take care of that first.

Jocelyn Sams: All right, what else do you feel like is holding you back right now as far as the business goes?

Shane Sams: I think probably the biggest business thing that I'm struggling with right now is really building a team and becoming a true CEO. Jocelyn and I really value our time, our freedom, and I think sometimes that makes us a little scared of leadership. Which is hilarious because we have this community of hundreds of people that we lead. And we have this podcast listenership in the thousands. I was reading the other day that only 18% of podcasts actually have recorded an episode in the last three months. So I'm like, okay, we're already in that 18% and then I look and we're always in the top 20 of business and marketing. So we're probably one of the bigger podcasts in business and marketing. We're not the biggest but we're definitely up there. And it makes me laugh when I'm like, man, I struggle with leading and growing our team. We can grow our audience, we can grow our community, but we don't really grow our team.

Shane Sams: Jocelyn and I have been burned on employees in the last couple years a number of times. We've made bad hires, we've struggled to get through those bad hires, to fire those bad hires, and to do different things. And we've always really resisted hiring people, especially full-time people. I feel like for the first time right now ... We were up to 14 people working with us and now we're down to probably six, counting a couple of contractors. But I'm really super happy with the people that we have now. I see the difference in what paying people and hiring really good employees makes a difference. Our executive assistant is incredible. Our personal assistant is incredible. Our editor is awesome. And we've got a couple really good contractors. Like for the first time I feel like we hired a contractor for our InfusionSoft account who's really super attentive and does a really good job and always gets things right the first time. We've just seen a difference that hiring can make lately. And I was at a mastermind retreat with my mastermind.

Shane Sams: We drove down to Nashville for a couple of days and we all met together. We rented an Airbnb and we stayed and we just put it out there. Like what do you guys see that's holding us back? And without question every man at the table said it's your team. You guys won't hire. You're trying to do everything by yourself again and you're really taking this all upon yourself and you have this fear of growing your team because you know it will make your job different. I know it won't just be us on the mic and just us leading cool courses and just us helping people in our forums or at our Q&As. It'll be okay, we've got to manage this team, we've got to have a meeting on Mondays and we've got to say hey, you do this, you do this. You're in charge of marketing. You're in charge of sales. You're in charge of customer retention. You're in charge of X, you're in charge of Y, you're in charge of Z. And there's going to be a different vibe there. But I also know that we have a mission to grow our business to a point where we can reach as many people as possible.

Shane Sams: And it is not going to be possible to go to the next level without a true team. Full-time employees, benefits, running an actual bigger type corporation. I know that's really on my mind right now from a business perspective and I've got to learn how to hire better. I've got to learn how to fire faster. I've got to learn what people need to do their job correctly. We've got to be able to sacrifice something to hire these people, income and things like that, and I know hiring at a high level is where we want to go. So I've been reading a lot of books. I've been getting up every morning and reading three devotionals on leadership. I've got this one called ... It's the Maxwell Daily Promises or something like that and it's a bible devotional based for leaders. And then I've got another one called Jesus CEO. I've been reading a chapter of that every morning. And I've got another one called Make It Better or something like that where it's like daily devotionals about mindset.

Shane Sams: So I've been pouring leadership teachings into my brain. I've been reading this amazing book called Who. I think it's by ... Is his name Geoff Smart or Geoffrey Smart?

Jocelyn Sams: I'm not really sure.

Shane Sams: It's smart is his last name, but it's called Who, W-H-O, and it's all about creating amazing job descriptions and figuring out what you want and who's going to lead your team, and putting all that together because we've kind of started moving toward hey, we're going to figure this out on how to hire. We're going to slow down, become great leaders, and maybe start hiring people next year. So I know that the scariest thing on my plate Jocelyn is hiring people. Because we're talking real salaries. Not freelancers, not contractors, people that work for us, that we're responsible for them and their family, and they are responsible to go to bed at night thinking about Flipped Lifestyle and how we can reach more families like you guys who are listening and convince you to take the leap and start and grow an online business and stick with it until the end.

Shane Sams: So that's the big thing, I guess, for me is just it's time to grow up and become a CEO. And that's kind of terrifying because I don't really want to grow up.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, it's definitely scary for me. I don't know. It's just a new level I guess. For me, there are several things that are holding me back right now. But I think that one of them is a fear of success, which we've talked about on the podcast before. And the reason that I fear it a little bit is because I know that with more success and potentially notoriety, comes a lot of negative things. And we always have haters no matter what we do, but I feel like the more successful and the more visible you are, the more hate you are going to get. And that's hard for me because people will bring things up that you're already self conscious about and it just makes you feel really, really bad. So that's part of it for me. I just don't want to have to worry about it. And I guess I don't want affirmation of something that I already see in myself that I don't like.

Jocelyn Sams: So that scares me a little bit. Also, I feel just kind of lost right now in the business. We sold Elementary Librarian a while back a couple of years ago and that still bothers me. I feel like that is something that's holding me back a little bit is just not knowing exactly what I'm doing and Shane and I have a lot of differences a lot of times because we do both own this business. We have very different ideas about what we should do and how we should do it, and I think sometimes that holds us back because we don't really get a solid plan, we just sort of go on our way. And then we're like, "Well what are you doing?" "Well I don't know, what are you doing?"

Shane Sams: And there's not third vote. There's no third vote to help us, in the moment, figure things out sometimes. I think in the last year especially, we froze in those moments. When we are at the fork in the road and Jocelyn wants to go left and Shane wants to go right, we both just kind of don't hit the brake and go off road right down the middle and crash. So it is hard. It's just really hard. It's a different dynamic. A lot of the people that we're in masterminds with, they are solo in charge of their business and their spouse is not involved, and it's like we have a dynamic that we have to deal with that I don't think anyone else really understands unless you're working with your spouse. It's really hard to get that. So we've got to figure out better ways to either do both ideas, or figure out a compromise, or do one idea and not freeze. I think we froze in the last year and it's kind of hurt our growth a little bit.

Jocelyn Sams: I think it's hard for us too because we are very different, but in some ways we're very similar. We both like to control things, and when you have two people who want to control things, that can be a little bit difficult. So I miss having my own projects that I can control and I can do all on my own. And I haven't really had that in a while. So I'm hoping that when we start this hiring process that we can sort of, I guess-

Shane Sams: Create capacity to be able to explore other ideas, or something like that?

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, and just we would have more defined roles. Right now we sort of do everything and we try to reach some kind of consensus together, but that's kind of hard to do sometimes.

Shane Sams: All right, so let's talk about action steps. Let's wrap this thing up here a little bit. Jocelyn what do you think your next steps are? Now that we've kind of talked about all these things and we kind of see some things, some chapters coming to an end and some other chapters turning the page and opening up, like what do you think your next steps are? Not in the next 24 hours, but in the next 24 months. What does that look like? What do you think you want to do? What's your vision or something you want to explore basically?

Jocelyn Sams: The first thing is I'm going to continue to get well. I talked earlier about dealing with anxiety and all that kind of stuff. So I'm continuing to work on that. That's really my number one mission is just to get well. And beyond that I've had some ideas about wanting to expand into brick and mortar and service based businesses, and also some ideas about maybe going on some destination type trips for our live events. And I talked about that a little bit earlier. So again, if you're interested in something like that, let us know at flippedlifestyle.com/survey. So that's some of the things that are on my mind. I have a few other things also, but I'm trying to just take it one step at a time for right now.

Shane Sams: I think that's a good tip for our listeners too. You don't have to know in the moment what to do next as long as you're at least thinking about what the next step is. It's not always about just being so decisive that you do something. I mean that's really where we want to go, but I love how you were just wrestling with it and thinking about it and just trying those things. I think what I really want to just keep working on is hiring. I've got another mastermind here at the end of August coming up where we're meeting back. We're basically starting to meet two or three times a year and focusing on goals for the next mastermind. And I really want to have a good idea in my head what the team is going to look like a year from now. And I want me and you Jocelyn to kind of talk through that. Jocelyn's reading the book Who with me. We're going to go make these scorecards out for these employees.

Shane Sams: I just want to make sure that we're hiring A+, just amazing people. Like world class people to help us grow a world class brand. And also just to myself just to keep growing up, keep filling my head with leadership and knowing this was where it has to go because we can't scale ... We've always envisioned Flipped Lifestyle being the brand for the masses. All these people have such closed doors and they position themselves where no one can get to them and they have all these high end products. I was just listening to a guy the other day and he was like, "You should never sell to the masses. Screw the masses. Go find rich people with a lot of money and get some of their money." And I'm like, what a terrible thing. I want to give everyone in America, every family, every person that wants to change their future, an opportunity to start, build, and grow their business and change their life like we did. We were working people. We were school teachers in southeast Kentucky and we made it out of that and found a way.

Shane Sams: I want to show people that path and I don't want to close that off. But I want to make sure that we have the team in place to keep Flipped Lifestyle a lower cost membership, a place where anyone can go learn this stuff, and then reach as many of those people as possible, and we're just not going to be able to do that alone. I think for me, especially over the next six months, is just one, learning how to be a leader, how to hire people. Two, doing things that we can do right now to increase revenue to make sure we have plenty of extra revenue streams to hire these people. And then go find those people.

Shane Sams: I may actually put a question on the survey. If you are interested in even working with the Flipped Lifestyle podcast and you have experience in retention or marketing, or we're going to be looking for a web content manager. If you love our content and you love this kind of content and you've got experience producing this kind of content. I may put a couple of questions on the survey and you can just go tell us that you're interested in working with us and when we get these job forms ready to go maybe you can apply for some of those jobs. Just stuff like that. I think just hiring is my number one focus for the next six months. And we'll see where it goes.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay guys, we are going to wrap this thing up, but we would love to hear from you. I know some of you guys are out there listening and maybe you've never interacted with us and you think that we don't even know that you're out there listening. But we look all the time, we see people in different countries that are listening, different states, and we want to hear from you. So if you want to give us some feedback about our podcast and some other things that we're doing, head over to flippedlifestyle.com/survey. We have not even created the survey as of right now, but we will-

Shane Sams: By the time you hear this it will be created. We're recording this a little bit early. So we're going to go make that survey as soon as we get done recording today.

Jocelyn Sams: So check it out and give us some feedback. We want to hear from you. And that means all of you, even you lurkers who don't want to communicate.

Shane Sams: Don't be shy y'all. Come fill out the survey. And also too, this is episode 300, seriously, I have a question for you. Why have you not joined the Flip Your Life Community? We are the most affordable, largest community of family focused entrepreneurs on the planet. Guys, you need to come and check out what's going on. We have a super active community. People in there helping each other. People just like you. We literally have all the training you need to get started online. We can show you how to get your idea. We can help you build your product. We can help you set up your website.

Jocelyn Sams: And if you've been a member before, come back. We want you back. We have people come back all the time. We welcome you with open arms.

Shane Sams: Yeah, we have all kinds of different price points. Maybe you just need training courses right now. Maybe you just want to walk into the shallow end of the pool. Well we have a plan for that. Maybe you want to interact with me and Jocelyn twice a month literally live on our Q&As. They're the funnest times of the month for us because we get to hang out with dozens and dozens of you guys from all over the world inside of those Q&As so that we can help you take your next steps just like we do on our podcast. Or maybe you need additional help. Maybe you need help promoting stuff. Maybe you need help working one on one. Whatever it is guys, we created this for you. That's what the Flip Your Life Community is. It's not about me and Jocelyn. We've already done it. It's about you and your family's future. Sometimes I get frustrated with you guys because I know we have thousands upon thousands of people listening to us every single week and so many of you just have never taken action. Maybe you have listened to all 300 episodes of the Flipped Lifestyle podcast and you haven't done anything yet.

Shane Sams: Well, it's time. I want to challenge you here today on our 300th episode of the podcast. Five years of doing this. If you have never taken that leap of faith, go join today at flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife. We've got plans where you can join for as little as $19 a month. You can get coaching from us on our Q&As twice a month for $49 a month. That's our premium level membership. I highly recommend that you go try it. Give it a try. If you don't ever try it you'll never succeed. If you don't do this now, then when will you ever do it? Guys it's time to take action and go out there and check out all the things that we have for you inside of the Flip Your Life Community. So go to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife and join today. Draw a line in the sand, let's make it happen. We'll help you do it together.

Shane Sams: All right guys, that wraps up episode 300. It has been an amazing ride for five years doing this podcast. We commit to you that we will be here for you every single week helping people from the Flip Your Life Community change their lives. Helping you by letting you listen in to those calls. And we've got a lot of great plans, a lot of surprises for you, coming up on the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. We want to make sure we're bringing you the best content and giving you and your family the best chance at a better future. So thank you so much for listening. We are so grateful and so thankful for all the people that send us messages, follow us on social media, and join our community and listen every single week. And we want to be here for another 300 episodes with you guys.

Shane Sams: So thanks for tuning in. Until next time, get out there, take action. Join the Flip Your Life Community. Get started today and do whatever it takes to flip your life. We'll see you next time.

Jocelyn Sams: Bye.

Links and resources mentioned on today’s show: * Listener Survey * PROLIFIC Monthly * Flip Your Life LIVE 2019 Tickets & Registration Information * Flip Your Life community

Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!

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View Details

In today's episode, we help Sarah sell without being too salesy or spammy.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jocelyn Sams: Hey y'all, on today's podcast we help Sarah sell without being too salesy or spammy.

Shane Sams: What's going on everybody? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. It is so great to be with you today. Wherever you're listening to the show, thank you for listening. We're really excited to welcome another member of the Flip Your Life community onto the show, so that we can help them overcome fears, breakthrough obstacles and take action on the next steps in their online business. Our guest today is Flip Your Life community member, Sarah Cottrell. Sarah, welcome to the show.

Sarah Cottrell: Hi, thanks so much for having me.

Jocelyn Sams: Welcome Sarah, I'm actually sensing a little theme here in the podcast. If you listened a couple weeks ago, we had another attorney on, and Sarah of course is an attorney. Tell us a little bit about you, your background and your online business.

Sarah Cottrell: Well, so I worked as a lawyer for the last decade. I graduated from law school in 2008, and last summer, after the last of our kids was born, I left my legal job to stay home with them. My path through being a lawyer was a pretty common story. This is true for a lot of lawyers, which is that I started practicing, and pretty early on realized it was not for me in the longterm. However, we had a lot of student loan debt, and I say we because my husband is also a lawyer. We actually met in law school and combined between the two of us, we had over $400,000.

Jocelyn Sams: Ouch!

Shane Sams: Oh my God. That is a lot of scary mountainous debt, especially when you're like, "I'm not going to use this degree anymore," right?

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. It's basically like you have a mortgage, except there's no asset associated with it other than your own blood, sweat and tears.

Shane Sams: Wow, that's unbelievable. Are you still in debt?

Sarah Cottrell: No, we paid off all of our debt last June, so June of 2018.

Shane Sams: Well done, congratulations.

Sarah Cottrell: Thank you.

Shane Sams: I can't even imagine having that much debt coming out of college.

Jocelyn Sams: What a weight lifted, oh my goodness.

Sarah Cottrell: Yes. I was about two years in to practicing when I realized, "This is just not for me in the longterm." When you have over $400,000 in debt, you can't just chalk it all and leave. We had to make a plan to get out, and it had to be a longterm plan. You know a lot of personal finance guru types will say, "Do all these things and cut everything down, and then pay off your debt in like 5 months and then you'll be great." Well, when you have a mortgage size level of debt, you have to have a little bit of a longer term plan that is survivable for five or 10 years in my case. That's what we did.

Sarah Cottrell: We made a plan and got out of debt, and that enabled us to be in a position where I was able to stay home with our kids. I also have started doing some writing on the side, which is something that I've always been interested in. With a full-time job and young kids, especially a job that was a lot of research and writing, not a lot of time for writing.

Shane Sams: Well for one thing, what's crazy when you were telling your story I was like, "How was 2008 over 10 years ago?" I saw this thing on Facebook the other day, and it was like, people of a certain age you always think the 70s are 30 years ago. I do think that. I'm like, when was 1970? What, 30 years ago? When was 1980? What, 20 years ago? Really, 1980 was like almost 40 years ago and it doesn't seem like that in my brain.

Sarah Cottrell: Oh yeah.

Shane Sams: When you said, 2008, I was like, how was that 10 years ago for one thing. Then getting out of debt in that short amount, that actually is a short amount of time to me to get out of $400,000 in debt. That's crazy that you did that. That's one of the things that hang people up that we always find coming into the community, is like, "Well, you know I got this college degree. Then I was in this career, and I've got so much time invested in this career, that I just don't want to pivot." I'm like kudos for you for having the guts to say, "Yeah, I'm not going any further. Two years is enough, even though I've invested all of this, I'll figure out how to use this later in my life."

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. Well, and I think for lawyers in particular, you are trained to be extremely risk averse. What you're talking about the sunk costs fallacy that I have all this money and time invested into it, so I can't leave, that's a very strong, mental obstacle for many lawyers.

Shane Sams: For sure.

Sarah Cottrell: For us, I mean I'm two years in I'm thinking, "I don't want to be a lawyer forever," but I still worked as a lawyer for another eight years.

Shane Sams: You had an end game in mind.

Sarah Cottrell: Exactly.

Shane Sams: That's institutionalized though in almost all businesses and industries. The day I resigned from my job, I slid the letter of resignation over to my principal and he looks at me and he goes, "Man, are you sure?" I'm like, "Oh yeah, I'm 100% positive." Then he goes, he's like, "But how long have you been teaching?" I was like, I said, "Nine years I'm going on my tenth year." He goes, "Nine years, and you're just going to throw all that away? You're just going to throw all that retirement away?" I looked at him and I was like, "Yeah, but there's 18 left before I can retire. I'm not just going to sit here for 18 more years."

Sarah Cottrell: Exactly.

Jocelyn Sams: Just because we put nine years in, I mean.

Shane Sams: Yeah, I don't care how much time I've got put in it, I've got the rest of my life to live. Anybody listening out there, you know Jocelyn and I full degrees, masters degrees, all this education. Taught for almost a decade, we bailed, because we wanted to go a different direction. Sarah was a lawyer, she didn't want to be. $400,000 invested in her education, and decided to do something different.

Jocelyn Sams: Well, and I'll tell you, I was looking yesterday because I have one pesky student loan left, and it doesn't have a large balance, but we have one left.

Shane Sams: The reason is, I'll tell you why we keep that loan, this is so morbid. If you die, those go away.

Sarah Cottrell: I feel you, yes.

Shane Sams: We're like, we could pay it off early, or we could just use it as a reverse insurance policy if something ever happens. Totally morbid logic for why we still have the student loan.

Jocelyn Sams: Well I was looking yesterday just to see how much was...

Jocelyn Sams: Not that much left on it, but anyway, that loan is for an MBA that I never finished. To this day I am paying every month, it just comes out automatically whatever, I pay every month for a degree I didn't even get. You know what, it's part of my life experience. It's part of the reason that I am the person I am today. I don't have any regrets. I'm not sitting here every month going, "Oh you know I'm still paying for this degree that I don't even have." I don't even think about it. It's just part of my life, it's something I did.

Jocelyn Sams: Somebody, is it Dave Ramsey that calls it the stupid tax? It's a stupid tax, we've paid a lot of stupid tax in our life.

Shane Sams: We've paid a whole lot of stupid tax in our lives. It's all part of the story and it gets you to where you're supposed to be at.

Sarah Cottrell: Exactly, yes. I mean to me, and this is part of why I created Former Lawyer, just because you put a lot of time and money into something, if it's not working for you, to say, "Well I'm just going to keep doing it for another one, two, three, maybe even four decades," is actually crazy. Especially because lawyers are so risk averse, it's very hard to get over that hurdle and say, "I'm going to spend the next five years getting myself out of this situation into a better situation, even though ultimately that's what's going to be better for you in the long run."

Jocelyn Sams: Okay, so you mentioned just there in passing what it is that you're doing now. You left your job and you started a website. Tell us a little bit about that.

Sarah Cottrell: The site is called formerlawyer.com, and the purpose or the overall purpose of Former Lawyer is to provide support and inspiration to unhappy lawyers, who want to make a career change. Right now what that looks like is, there's a blog. There's a podcast I'm actually starting to record episodes this week. What I'll be doing is, in each episode I'm going to be interviewing a lawyer, a former lawyer, someone who used to work as a lawyer and now works in some sort of other career.

Sarah Cottrell: My goal is also to have some membership component, but that's the piece that I am still working on. The other pieces I have a little bit more clarity.

Shane Sams: For one thing, that's an amazing domain name formerlawyer.com. That's a masterclass in naming your business, because it's helped everything about what it is. Like the Former Lawyer Podcast, the Former Lawyer blog, formerlawyer.com. It's just so tight and good and it's a two word domain.

Jocelyn Sams: That two word .com, like that is almost impossible to come by.

Shane Sams: That is an awesome domain name and a name for your business. It's when you say it out loud, I can envision it like a miserable lawyer is driving to court to represent some dude or a lady in a divorce, that he just doesn't even want to be in court that day. He's listening to your podcast, interviewing someone who broke out of the prison. He hears that, and she hears that, and it's like hope. I could totally do that.

Shane Sams: You said something interesting in your intake form that you filled out before you were on the podcast. "I don't see myself as a guru that tells people, "Do this," and end up where I am. This is more of just a John Lee Dumas model where you're not claiming to be the guru. You're just interviewing people who have done this and giving people ideas, and pushing them out that way. Is that what I'm getting from that? I'm I hearing that correctly?

Sarah Cottrell: Yes. Part of that is, every person's issues are so individualized. There are strengths, there are financial situation, whether they have a spouse or don't have a spouse or a significant other. There are just so many things that impact when you're making a plan for example to get out of debt, how long it will take. What it is that you actually want to do, and so there are some people out there who are former lawyers, who do specifically career coaching, where they're telling someone like, "Here's what you need to do. This is the job that you should be looking for," and those sorts of things.

Sarah Cottrell: What I see as a need is, less so the, "Here let me tell you exactly what you specific person should be doing." More this idea of, it can feel really lonely. One, because you're like, "I'm I the only crazy person who doesn't actually want to be a lawyer? Is thinking about walking away from this thing that I put all this money and time into?" Also, it can feel like a lot of... My family and friends who are like, "What are you doing? You're throwing away this thing that they perceive as though great, because they don't necessarily understand all of the drawbacks of what it is to work as a lawyer.

Shane Sams: For sure.

Sarah Cottrell: Then also it's just the length of time. I mean, again, we're not necessarily talking about someone saying, "I want to get out," and they do three months and they're out. We're talking about sometimes two, three, four, five, 10 years. That's a long time to be doing something on your own without other people saying, "Hey, you're doing great, you're going to get out. Keep going."

Shane Sams: Sure. I think that's really good, that's really, really good. It just fits the motif of the Former Lawyer. People will look at you like, what was the guy's name? What was Morgan Freeman's character's name? Gosh from Shawshank Redemption? Somebody go send me that on Facebook message. Oh Andy Dufresne. It's like you're Andy Dufresne, you got out. You got out of the prison, you're in Mexico on the beach. It's like whatever. You're the other side of where they want to be, like the story. We always say instant street cred, you did it once, you don't have to do it more than that, right? To be this expert that can actually present this story, and then show other stories of other people who've made it. That's awesome.

Shane Sams: You've got a lot going on. You've got a lot of stuff that you've created, and you're already creating content. How many blog posts do you have on formerlawyer.com?

Sarah Cottrell: I think that there are about, I want to say eight or nine currently.

Shane Sams: Good.

Sarah Cottrell: I have stuff scheduled to post three times a week. I'm currently only batching like for a week ahead.

Shane Sams: This is still in the beginning of everything, right, it's all been created?

Sarah Cottrell: Oh yeah, like June, it all launched in June.

Shane Sams: When did you buy that domain name?

Sarah Cottrell: Oh years ago. I mean before I even knew when I was going to be getting out of the law.

Shane Sams: Give me an estimate of when you bought that.

Sarah Cottrell: It was three to five years ago.

Shane Sams: All of you people sitting on your old dusty domains that you bought five years ago, dust them off and get to work. You all get some blog posts going, it's time to start building that online business.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay, so you started working on content. First of all three times a week is very ambitious, and I applaud you for trying to do it. I don't know that it's 100% necessary, like it might take some pressure off you for now just to schedule the post out for like once a week.

Shane Sams: Yeah. I would not go...

Sarah Cottrell: Okay, sorry.

Shane Sams: Be prolific with your promotion, not necessarily your content in the beginning. We have three rules, like one, be consistent with your content, for us that's a weekly podcast. Could be more, could be less, but we're going to have a podcast. Two, be prolific with your promotion, that's like sharing and ads and things like that. Write one post and promote it for seven days, then write another post. Then relentlessly sell, like sell every day to your list. Sell everyday on your social media. Sell every time somebody asks you a question, because everybody's only one question away from giving you money.

Shane Sams: Think of it that way like when you're thinking about being consistent and being prolific, especially in the beginning. Like Jocelyn said, you can burn yourself out really fast, and we don't want you to be formerblogger.com in about six weeks.

Sarah Cottrell: I think one of the reasons that I have been so prolific with content since starting not that long ago, it goes back to one of the concerns that I have of, I want to feel like I'm providing value. It's this issue in my mind of, oh well I need to show that I have something to provide. Therefore, I think I've been focusing more on the content creation, because I don't want to feel like I'm selling nothing. Does that make sense?

Shane Sams: It does for sure, and that's why we're going to talk about this here in a few minutes when we get to your business question. I don't hear a lot of talking about what you're selling, what the product is. I was reading a book this morning. I've got this book on leadership and it said, let me word this correctly. "Our society loves the sound of hammers." We love the sound of the hammer and the nail and the building of things, but nobody likes to make a plan.

Shane Sams: That's the thing is, you can have a pile of wood, a box of nails and a truck load of hammers. You can throw the workers out there, and you can say, "Go start hammering," see what happens and nothing will happen. It'll just be a bunch of wood hammered together, but if someone walks in and goes, "Here's the blueprint, this is the finished product. This is what we're selling. We have six weeks to put it together, let's go." That's going to create something. It's not necessarily just, "I'm going to write a blog, I'm going to start a podcast. I'm going to have a Facebook page. I started an Instagram last night. I bought-"

Jocelyn Sams: "Maybe something cool will happen."

Shane Sams: "Maybe something cool will happen, I'll get some value out there and people will love me." Even if you became the most popular person on earth, you would still have nothing to show for it, because there would be no product, nothing for sale. We always recommend that people start with a product first mindset, and figure out at least the basics of what it's going to look like on the end. Then it will evolve into what your customers want as you talk to them and get them.

Shane Sams: You're probably just swinging a lot of hammers right now, and that's why it feels like, you're trying to get busy instead of start building a business.

Jocelyn Sams: I'm going to make a little bit of an assumption here based on some of the information that you put in your form and also what I'm hearing from you. I'm assuming that you do not really want to make a type of product that basically tells people their next steps, I'm I right in that?

Shane Sams: Or like what their job is or something like that?

Sarah Cottrell: Yes. What I envision is something more like this. Okay, membership community where you can come in and talk with other people who are in similar stages. I actually, I'm in a writing membership, and one of the things that they do is facilitate people, forming smaller affinity groups. Say, people who are in a certain city and are looking to get out of the law. Or people who want to leave and be a stay at home parent. People who, I don't know, are getting ready to quit their job in the next twelve months, whatever. Facilitating things like that.

Sarah Cottrell: Then also in terms of the podcast content, there are some questions that I'm planning to ask our guests that might be a little bit more like things they don't necessarily want, just blasting out into the entire universe. That would be stuff that would be available within the membership to members only.

Shane Sams: A private place to share their concerns, not with everybody around them kind of deal.

Sarah Cottrell: Yes. Just the general, "I'm new and I'm trying to make a plan. What have you done people who might be in a similar situation?" The other thing is, many, many, many people who are lawyers and want to get out, have not thought about what else they want to do ever.

Shane Sams: True.

Sarah Cottrell: I know so many people who hit this point of, "I don't want to be doing this anymore," and they are just like, "I don't even know what's out there."

Shane Sams: It's like a pro athlete that gets too old to pay, they don't know what's next. This is all they've ever done kind of deal.

Sarah Cottrell: Yes, exactly.

Shane Sams: Well let me jump in here really quick, because there's two things I'm hearing. I'm actually going to read this question you wrote in your form instead of let you do it, because I hear this is happening.

Sarah Cottrell: Okay.

Shane Sams: We have a question in our form that says, "What fears, mindset and obstacles are holding you back?" You say, "I don't want to be spammy, I don't want to be salesmany or seem like I'm trying to sell people something unrealistic." I hear a dramatic fear of commitment to your product, because you don't want to go sell something to somebody. I really feel like this might be like a major issue holding you back. When I'm looking through everything you've done, you've done everything but address. You've thought about the product or the membership, but it just sounds like with all of your questions and everything, like you're scared to sell these lawyers' something.

Shane Sams: Is it because you feel it's like you're selling a dream to them, or you're selling hope to them? What is this fear of maybe even selling yourself a little bit, that you have that's keeping you from saying, "Hey, this is the product, I know people will join it. Let me write a sales page for this right now,"? What is that? This is a membership. Right now I don't hear a lot of content, so it's almost this could be opened next week if you really wanted to. Something's keeping you from doing that.

Sarah Cottrell: Yes. I think the primary thing is, well they're two things. One is the more, I don't know, high level meta thing, which is that I feel like many lawyers were sold a certain line of what their life is going to be like. Then they got into the law, and that wasn't accurate for them. And, I do not want to. Well I know there's a lot of value in what I'm wanting to provide. I do not want people to feel like I'm saying, "Join this membership and everything in your life will magically become better. You will be just like me and you will be able to leave the law."

Shane Sams: What you really don't want is, you were sold that lie, and you resent the lie that you were sold. You don't want to be resented by someone else the way you resent being a lawyer.

Sarah Cottrell: Yes. I don't want to prey on people's desperation to get out of the law.

Shane Sams: You're not. You're not doing that, that's not true. You're not doing that.

Sarah Cottrell: That is accurate.

Shane Sams: You're wanting to help people, so that's the truth. Now, you can't help that the fact is they are desperate. They are desperate for a career change, they are desperate to get out. They are desperately in debt and might need someone to show them how to handle that. It's not your fault that they're desperate, it's a fact that they're desperate. The truth is, you want to help them and show them that there is another way. The truth and the facts are not aligning with your actions here. They're not.

Shane Sams: Now your feelings, one thing you said, you said the four letter word. In our house, whenever we start a sentence with, "I feel like," we go like, "Conversation stops right there, hold on. What do you mean you feel like? Is that real? Is it factual? Is that the truth?" Facts don't care about our feelings. This seems like the major mindset issue here that you're struggling with is, you feel and you've told yourself this story. You don't want the end of the story to be someone's mad at you, but that does not match the facts and the truth of the matter that your intentions are good. They are desperate and need help, and you can help them.

Jocelyn Sams: This is something that goes through my mind at times also, just by the nature of what we do. There are a lot of people out there who are selling the dream. If you pay me $1,000, I will help you buy a Lamborghini.

Shane Sams: For $997, all your dreams will come true, end of the webinar, here we go.

Jocelyn Sams: There are a lot of people out there who are selling that kind of dream. A lot of people out there might look at what we do and say, "Well you know you're just doing the same thing." Our truth is that, we want to help people who feel like there is no other way and they need to do something different in their life. We're here honestly to help people. It's just something that you have to reconcile with yourself, just I'm here to help people. If other people want to perceive it another way, that's their problem. It's not my problem.

Shane Sams: What's that counselor friend you've got that says, what does she always say Jocelyn it's...

Jocelyn Sams: Heather Gray?

Shane Sams: Yeah. What's Heather say, what's the story or the...

Jocelyn Sams: It's like the stories that you tell yourself. One of the things that she says to do is to say, "Some people might say this. What I want you to know is something else."

Shane Sams: Right, so you said, some people might say, "I'm just preying on the desperation of lawyers who want to quit their job."

Jocelyn Sams: What I want you to know is that, I felt this way.

Shane Sams: I really want to help you.

Jocelyn Sams: The reason that I'm doing this is because I want to help other people in the same situation.

Sarah Cottrell: Yes, 100%.

Shane Sams: You've got to reconcile that today. We're recording this guys, it's the fourth of July. It's the fourth of July right now you all.

Jocelyn Sams: It's a holiday.

Shane Sams: It's a holiday, but we're working, we're helping Sarah. We're getting after here. Listen, it's the day of freedom, so set yourself free. Be free of all that nonsense, because it is not true. You honestly, this is heavy, you may be the only person that possibly can help them. If you don't help them, then nobody else is going to say this stuff, because 99.9% of people don't want to let their family down. They don't want to quit the job. You're a doctor, a lawyer, your successful right?

Shane Sams: If they don't have a trailblazer to say, "I did it. I'm going to introduce you every week to somebody else who did it," they may never hear that story that inspires hope, that gives them a chance to change their life. That's what we do and that's what you're doing. You're just doing for a different segment of the population. Okay?

Sarah Cottrell: Okay.

Jocelyn Sams: All right Sarah, we're busting through the mindset issues. Now let's talk about how we are going to make some money. How can we help you with your offer?

Sarah Cottrell: Basically, I'm trying to figure out how to prioritize content creation and what I'm creating, when to start selling the membership or product. How to do a beta launch if that's what I should be doing, and how to price it. Basically, all the questions.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay.

Shane Sams: Basically, you're like, "I'm making blogs, I don't know what else to do." Is that what you're saying?

Jocelyn Sams: We're here until the fireworks tonight in other words. Okay. All right, so let's just break this down. I think that Shane and I have some different ideas. It's going to become interesting moving forward about what we think you should do. Ultimately it's about what you want to do. Take all this in and just think about it. Basically, right now we have nothing for sale right?

Sarah Cottrell: That is correct.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay.

Shane Sams: You want to sell a support group for these attorneys basically?

Sarah Cottrell: Yes.

Shane Sams: It doesn't seem like you want to create anything, you just want to have them to have a place to go. Is that true?

Sarah Cottrell: Yes.

Shane Sams: Okay. I don't know. I think there's an asprin versus vitamin argument here a little bit, or like asprin or something we have to think about. One, I'm not sure how practical that is in my opinion, because to me it's like, it's a support group. You're alone, you want to talk to other lawyers who might want to quit their jobs, that's kind of a vitamin. There's a lot of serious headaches like, "Well how do I get out of $400,000 in debt? How do I re-identify myself as something else?" That's an asprin.

Jocelyn Sams: "How do I talk to my family about why I'm doing this?"

Shane Sams: Yeah, there's a lot of huge obstacles that you're going to have to solve for people like headaches. That you're going to have to provide them an asprin for, before you ever get to the vitamin. Usually the vitamin almost goes first, you know what I'm saying? The vitamins are free, the asprin cost money. If I've got a headache, I'm going to get up at midnight and run to Walmart to get some asprin, because I need to fix this headache, it hurts. If I wake up at midnight and I forgot to take my vitamin C, guess what, I'm not going to Walmart till tomorrow, it's not urgent. That's what we say when we say, is this an asprin or is this a vitamin?

Shane Sams: Now I think at face value, it's a vitamin. It's like, is it really that urgent that I join this community? They might listen to your podcast, they might read your blog posts. Are they really going to go the next level if there's nothing in it to them to solve their actual practical problems that they have? Does that make sense?

Sarah Cottrell: Yes.

Shane Sams: What we've got to figure out are some different ways that we can highlight the headache and make this thing where they're willing to get up out of bed, go to the computer. Get out their wallet and order the bottle of asprin.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay, but before we go there, I want to present a possible other solution. Usually we will fall on the side of creating your own product and selling it. That we like that, is because that is what we have always done. However, I do think that there are some other ways, especially with things that are like this vitaminy. Where you can make money and it's a little bit less work. I just want to throw this out there and then we can talk about which way is more appealing to you.

Jocelyn Sams: Basically, what I hear Shane saying is, that what you could do is address some of the hard issues that are facing people who want to get out of this field. I think what he's trying to say is that, you could create some content that would help people with these big headaches, right?

Shane Sams: In a way. I think that's the draw into the membership. I think the membership is good, but I almost think that the membership itself should be totally free. It should be almost like a thing that they could sign up for and start connecting with these other attorneys, with these other lawyers. Basically, it's your lead magnet, like the forum itself, the community itself, whatever it looks like, is something you could just let listeners in. If you've got a podcast, if you've got the thing at the end of it, you say, "Hey, come join the Former Lawyer community. This is a private community that we can let people in," and have that private support group ready to go. It can be like an opt-in.

Shane Sams: I know a lot of places that use forums or a community driven approach to their lead magnets. It's a place where you can go hung out. There's no barrier to entry, low hanging fruit, all that stuff. Then I was thinking in the community on your email list, you could create content that just showed how you did it. One of the things you said that really stood out to me before was, "Hey, everybody else needs other places they can pivot, they can quit their job, they can go a different direction. For a lawyer, it's a longterm plan."

Shane Sams: You're not selling a, "I'll get you out of your law debt and fix careers in six months." It's, "Yo! If you want the fast plan, go somewhere else. This is the longterm plan." Then inside of that you show them content that addresses this things. You have a course called how to tell your friends and family. You have a course called how to pay off your student loan debt without being a lawyer for the next 40 years of your life. That content then is what you sell almost like an advanced tier. These people are all lawyers who are dreaming, interacting together, but then the content is led by you, and it's the lawyers who are actually taking action. You're the 20%, you're the people that are actually taking action. You're going to do it, and then maybe you do Q and As each month. That was what I was thinking.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay, so that's probably the way that we would do it just based on our history, and because creating content is fairly easy for us to do. Another way that popped into my head to do this, might be to... I was also on board with the free community, because in the age of social media, it's really easy to find groups of people who have something in common basically. I can go on to Facebook, I can go on to LinkedIn, I can look at these groups and find people who are probably similar to me.

Jocelyn Sams: With you having the podcast, I think that's a really good vehicle for you to be able to do some other things. I think about one of the podcasts that I support. I've talked about several times on the podcast that I listen to a lot of true crime podcasts and other types of media. Anyway, one of the podcasts that I support is Crime Junky, which is one of the top 10 podcast in the world right now. The reason that I support them, it's not something that I really need. It's definitely a vitamin in my life, it's not an asprin. They will create extra content for their fan club, so I joined their fan club because I love their podcast so much and I want to hear more content. I think that could be an opportunity for you.

Jocelyn Sams: I think also selling affiliate products might be an opportunity for you. If you don't want to go and create all these courses, create this amazing community for people to come to and either take on sponsorships for your show of things that might be of interest to people who are leaving the law profession. Or, you could also find courses that other people have created for these same things, and be an affiliate for them.

Shane Sams: Yeah, or she could even sell like other biz op stuff. There's a lot of people out there selling how to start a business, like ClickFunnels they do a lot of stuff like that. How to come up with your idea, how to set up your sales pages. They have an affiliate program to get people to sign up for ClickFunnels. There's other places that teach real estate like Bigger Pockets. They have an affiliate program I think for their stuff, where it's like learn how to do real estate instead of be a lawyer. You could promote that stuff on your podcast.

Jocelyn Sams: There's probably courses out there, how to get out of enormous amounts of student loan debt. You could be an affiliate for that type of program.

Shane Sams: Let's build an audience. I would only pick stuff that was high ticketed back if that was true though, because you're going to need any affiliate sales to make a lot of money. You know what I'm saying? Every time it happens, because it'll be the normal.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, so let's go through some of the benefits. The benefits of having your own stuff obviously is that you get all the profit, I mean minus cost of course. Also, it is under your control, nothing's going to change all that kind of stuff. The drawback's is that it's going to take time, it's going to take energy, it's going to take effort. With the affiliate stuff, it's just the opposite, like the benefits is that it's already completed for you. You just sell it, but the drawback is that...

Shane Sams: You have to build a huge audience to make affiliates work. You've got to have a good lead capture, but that could work though because of the forums.

Jocelyn Sams: You don't have complete control. There are some different things that you have to consider for each side. I just want to throw that out there, it's not something that we recommend for all people. I think in this case, it might possibly work.

Shane Sams: Well there's a lot of lawyers that probably hate being a lawyer. How many lawyers are there? Can you build a big enough audience of lawyers who hate their jobs to build an affiliate thing? I don't know. How many lawyers are there in the country? I'm going to look that up.

Sarah Cottrell: I would have to go back and look at the data. I mean I think every year, I don't want to say a wrong number, because I'm just not completely sure.

Shane Sams: Don't worry, I'm looking it up on Google.

Sarah Cottrell: We're talking like...

Shane Sams: We have the sum of all human knowledge at our fingertips here. At this time...

Sarah Cottrell: The magic of Google.

Shane Sams: All right, there are 450,000 lawyers right now practicing in the United States. There are 34,000 new ones every year. Let's just assume that half of those hate their job.

Sarah Cottrell: Accurate.

Shane Sams: Yes, so you've probably got 200. You've got an audience size of somewhere between 200 and 300,000 people to go out there and put this out there to your podcast. Then it's just a matter of converting those, either end with affiliate sales or whatever. Jocelyn, couldn't she do the affiliate sales inside of the community, like instead of her creating this stuff? On the podcast say, "Hey, come join the Former Lawyer community if you want to learn how to leave the law profession." Then you could populate it with other people's stuff that already exists, if you don't want to sell your own thing.

Jocelyn Sams: Or you can also sell sponsorships on your podcast, so that's another thing that the crime podcast that I listen to they do that.

Shane Sams: You could reach out to someone who sells a biz opportunity, because I don't think you're going to be able to promote this. You've got to show them a path to get out of debt and get out of their job. If you don't do that, they're not just going to go hung out for a support group, they're not going to do that. You've got to have some kind of path. You just have to figure out how to populate that path with content. Either create it yourself, or you go out and you promote other people's stuff.

Sarah Cottrell: That makes sense to me. The affiliate thing that is a little bit clearer to me. The other piece, Shane that you were talking about, if I were to do my own thing, are you're saying like creating courses that I would then promote to the members in the community?

Shane Sams: Yes, you would basically do... This is probably more of a free membership course driven webinar model, no matter how you do it. You're freebie is the support group. I'm trying to think this through, and then you would have maybe like weekly webinars selling a different aspect of the journey. Whether it's promoting someone else's thing or yours or something like that. You're just telling your story, like how did you get out of debt? All you've got to do is say, "I will show you how I got out of debt, which enabled me to leave the legal profession." That's a webinar, you sell the course, and it's just your steps that you took. Your plan that you created and they're open to follow it or not. Your job is not to make them follow your plan, it's to give them an opportunity to follow your plan.

Jocelyn Sams: Essentially if your community's free instead of advertising other people's stuff, you would advertise your own products if that makes sense. Actually you could do both.

Sarah Cottrell: That's what I was just going to ask.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, you can totally do both.

Sarah Cottrell: There are certain things that I feel like I could create a course, and I feel confident that it would be helpful for people. There are other things that I think would be helpful for people that I'm just not the expert on that thing.

Shane Sams: Like what? Name one. What are you an expert in, let's start there?

Sarah Cottrell: Well, I guess I would say the things that I feel like I know something about are one, making a longterm plan to get out of debt.

Shane Sams: Boom, that's the first product right there.

Jocelyn Sams: I would say getting out of debt, I would say you're probably pretty good at that.

Shane Sams: An expert, you did it, you paid up for it. It doesn't matter how long it took you, right? I love this. I love the alternative pitch there too of, it's not the get rich fast it's the, "Hey look, that's not true. Those people are wrong. This is the longterm plan, this is what I did." Bam, that's the product, right?

Sarah Cottrell: Yes. Then like for example, I think I could talk to the people about how to start thinking about what you want to do, but in terms of specific career coaching. I want an individual person to hold my hand and help me figure out what to do. There are other people who do that, and I think do it well. I don't necessarily want to be doing that individual hand holding, but there are other people that I could refer people to, that would be helpful.

Shane Sams: Okay, then this is all you have to do then. You're the bridge. That's how you get to view yourself. You build the community on your podcast. You give the Former Lawyer podcast, you give people hope by letting them hear testimonials and stories of you and other people who have actually left the legal professional and got to be debt free. You tell them, come join a bunch of other lawyers in a safe place where you can talk about not wanting to be a lawyer, it's free. Come join our free community.

Shane Sams: You sell them one thing, the longterm plan to get out of debt. You can do that on a weekly webinar, where all of your members you invite them, they show up and you sell the product and the product can be $497. They're lawyers, it could be more if you wanted it to be. They've got disposable income, so you sell that. You have this nice generating, engine generating however many sales a week of thousands of dollars. At that point, and this is how all online businesses work, you sell them one thing, and then to make real money you sell the next thing.

Shane Sams: Then you create a portfolio of affiliates, so you might promote twice a month. Maybe two times a month you sell them your get out of debt longterm plan. That's all you sell, and then you sell them and your other affiliates that maybe you go do a, what do you want to be? You go find someone. Maybe there's somebody that teaches people how to become writers, like you said you liked writing. Maybe there's a lot of lawyers that would like to become writers, so you have them come on for a guest webinar and sell their product. You get 40% of whatever's sold. You just find this portfolio of six to 12 good affiliates and over time that maybe you want to be in real estate , well have a real estate coach on. Sell their products and then you get half.

Shane Sams: Your job is to be the bridge and the guide. Bridge them across the debt problem, and then introduce them to people that can help them find a new career. That's it. That's the whole business model, and all you have to do is podcast and drive the leads. Does that make sense?

Sarah Cottrell: That makes sense.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay, so we're feeling pretty good about that?

Sarah Cottrell: I think so.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay, awesome.

Shane Sams: Yeah, it's a little overwhelming right now, but the good thing is you've got a lot of things in place. You really only have to just give the content out there and maybe create that one course. That way you could go ahead and say, "The community exists, there's a course inside." Within a month, if you would just create it, and then you can start looking for affiliates as you grow.

Shane Sams: You know what's funny is, you're going to find affiliates, because these former attorneys are going to be selling something when they come on your podcast, I guarantee you. "What did you do?" "I bought 10 houses, some apartments, now I teach people how to do real estate." "Oh you do? Well how about you teach the Former Lawyers how to do real estate." That's where you're going to find all these affiliate programs from. Cool?

Sarah Cottrell: That makes sense. I have one question about that, which is, should I start... Okay, so I have Restrict Content Pro on my site, I just haven't actually done anything with it.

Shane Sams: What is that? I didn't hear that.

Sarah Cottrell: Restrict Content Pro, it's a formatting software.

Shane Sams: Membership forum basically yeah.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah, membership forum software. I have that already, should I be waiting to actually open the membership until I have created the course? Or should I be...

Shane Sams: No, I think it's your main lead.

Sarah Cottrell: Got it.

Shane Sams: When you start recording those podcasts, episode one at the end should say, "Go to blank.com and sign up for a free account to the Former Lawyer membership site," whatever you call it. The Former Lawyer community and say like, "Even if you're still a lawyer, but you don't want to be, we want you in there. It's a safe place to talk." Make a pitch for it basically.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, and every blog post you write, every piece of content should all be pointing there.

Shane Sams: Then when you create this first product, that's going to be like your seed product, so you have your own thing, you can go ahead and create that. Then put that in there and sell it to those people, and then you can start finding these other affiliates to sell the other stuff too.

Sarah Cottrell: I love that, because I feel like I want to help people, and that makes me feel like I'm helping people.

Jocelyn Sams: Love it.

Shane Sams: What if you just connected them and got them out of debt, then you tell them how to get a new job, that's amazing. You know what I'm saying, send them to us we'll be an affiliate, no I'm just kidding.

Jocelyn Sams: All right Sarah, it has been so much fun talking to you today. I can't wait to see what happens next in your journey. Before we go, we always like to ask our guest, what is one thing that you plan to take action on based on what we talked about here today?

Sarah Cottrell: I am going to put together an outline for the course that I'm going to create for the membership.

Shane Sams: That is an awesome action step. Product first, get that done, give those podcasts recorded. Who knows, Sarah you might be selling those before we know it. It won't be salesy and it won't be bad, and it won't be desperate. It'll be awesome,, because you're going to free a lot of people from the bondage of a career they found themselves strapped in. Okay?

Sarah Cottrell: I'm excited.

Shane Sams: All right guys, that wraps up another great episode of the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. Cannot wait to see what Sarah does with her online business, and we cannot wait to see what you do with your online business as well. Dust off that old domain, recharge that dream and get started. If you don't start, you can't finish and we would love to help you get started over at flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife.

Shane Sams: You can check out all the information about the Flip Your Life community. We have all the content, community and coaching you need to finally get your online business done, take it to the next level and who knows, someday maybe even flip your life. Go to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife. We would love to help you inside of our community, and who knows maybe someday you will be a guest right here on the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast.

Shane Sams: Also, we would love to see you in Lexington, Kentucky this September 19th through the 21st for Flip Your Life LIVE. This is our conference, we are going to connect you with over 100 family focused entrepreneurs from around the world. Go through some amazing content, covering lots of sales strategies, traffic strategies and other things to grow your online business. That's happening this September. You can go to flippedlifestyle.com/live. There are only a few tickets left, and here is a huge announcement guys, we are not doing Flip Your Life LIVE conference in 2020. This is probably going to be your last opportunity. Your last chance to come to Lexington, to come and meet over 100 members of the Flip Your Life community. To come hang out with me and Jocelyn and take your business to the next level, live and in person. That's happening again September 19th through the 21st in Lexington, Kentucky.

Shane Sams: Go to flippedlifestyle.com/live to see if any tickets are still available. There were only a few left when we recorded this promo, so you need to go there right now if you're planning on coming. Again, don't put it off, you can't wait till next year. It's not happening next year. It's probably not going to happen any point in the future. This is the last large Flip Your Life LIVE conference. We'd love to have you there in Lexington, Kentucky this September.

Shane Sams: That's all the time we have for this week guys, but before we go, we would love to share a Bible verse with you. Jocelyn and I draw a lot of our inspiration in life and business from the Bible. Today we are super excited, because Sarah, our guest today, has a Bible verse she would like to share with you.

Sarah Cottrell: One of my favorite Bible verses is Colossians 1:17 which says, "And he is before all things, and in Him all things hold together." I just love that verse, because it reminds me that ultimately my identity is in Christ, and I do the work, but He is the one who holds all things together and I can trust Him.

Jocelyn Sams: Awesome reminder. I think that all of us need that reminder from from time to time.

Shane Sams: All right guys, that is all the time we have for this week. Until next time, get out there, take action and do whatever it takes to flip your life. We'll see you again.

Jocelyn Sams: Bye.

Links and resources mentioned on today’s show: * Sarah's Website * Flip Your Life LIVE 2019 Tickets & Registration Information * Flip Your Life community

Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!

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In today's episode, we help Marty monetize his golf podcast.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jocelyn: Hey y'all. On today's show, we help Marty monetize his golf podcast.

Shane: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast where life always comes before work. We're your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. We're a real family that figured out how to make our entire living online and now, we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? All right, let's get started.

Shane: What's going on everybody, welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. Great to be back with you again today. Super excited to welcome another member of the Flip Your Life community on to the show. Really excited about our guest today because he is a golfer and I love me some golf. So, welcome to the program, Marty Griffin. Marty, welcome man.

Marty: Hey, thank you so much for having me. I'm always happy to talk to anyone who's interested in golf, especially people who have kids who are interested in golf.

Jocelyn: Well, that would be us right now because our 10-year-old son, Issac, he has just started getting interested in golf a little bit. We did a golf camp this summer and he was really, really excited about it. And we should also mention that Marty is a fellow podcaster. So, it's always exciting to talk to someone who podcasts on our show.

Marty: Yeah, it's a ton of fun to do both of those things. I saw your picture of Issac at golf camp, and I was just like yes.

Shane: I think it's a sign. Issac's getting into golf. We've got a golfer on the show. All signs are pointing to getting him out on the range and out on the lakes this summer. So, we're going to do that and we're going to talk about golf later on today. But, Marty, tell us a little bit about you and your background and your online business.

Marty: I'm, like a lot of your community members, I'm a husband. I'm a father of two girls. We call them Moose and Goose. They're six and 10. I've been playing golf really, pretty much forever. I had some health issues early in life, and I actually had a couple open-heart surgeries. When I was 12 years old was when I had my second one. And the doctors told me that I couldn't do any of the sports that I was currently doing, which was wrestling and baseball.

Marty: So, I happened to follow my dad to the driving range one day and I had enough of a knack for it, and I enjoyed it enough that he saw that interest and he got me lessons. So, that was every single waking moment for about 15 years of my life was golf. I'm talking 16 hours a day over the summer, taking lessons, playing in national tournaments. I even tried to go pro for a little while.

Marty: So, I decided that in terms of my online business, like our good buddy Pat Flynn says, use your unfair advantage. I got 23 years in the bank doing something that I love that a lot of other people love, so I wanted to really flex that unfair advantage and really get into the golf side of things with my online business.

Shane: That's amazing. I played a lot of golf too, when I was a kid. I started playing when I was like 13. The first time I ever swung a club, my brother hands me a driver. I'm like, what do I do? And he goes, well, just hit it like a baseball, but point down. That's what he said. I'm like, okay, whatever. so I watched him swing for a minute and they showed me how to grip the club. I just torched this thing. It left the driving range straight ahead and I was just addicted. The first time I ever swung a club, this happened.

Shane: I got really into golf. We went every single day after school, me and my buddy. We would get straight in his car and drive to the next town over to the golf club that we played at. And I bet you for four straight years, I played golf every day it wasn't freezing outside. The best job that I ever had, I was a lifeguard at a country club. There were three holes, seven, eight, and nine, wrapped around the pool.

Shane: So me and my buddy, I got paid to do this, this is incredible. For two straight summers I worked at this golf club. I would sit in the chair for 45 minutes and he would go golf those three holes. And then he would get in the chair and I would go golf those three holes. And then when we got off work at the end of the day, we would go play nine holes. So we would play like 27 holes of golf every single day. And half the day we were getting paid to do it. It was unbelievable. How can I get that job back?

Marty: That's dream job stuff. That's the real flipped lifestyle Jocelyn is playing golf and being a lifeguard.

Jocelyn: Now, did you make any money at that job?

Shane: No, I made like minimum wage, but man, it was a good, hard-earned minimum wage. I think I lowered my handicap by about 10 that summer, so it was worth it.

Marty: You got yourself a tan and a pretty draw.

Shane: Exactly.

Jocelyn: It will take me about 10 seconds to tell you about my golf experience. We lived in a townhouse on a golf course when we lived in West Virginia, so there's that.

Shane: That was pretty much it. I think Jocelyn came out one time and we walked three holes, and I think she swung the club once. I actually got you a set of golf clubs one time for Mothers Day.

Jocelyn: Yeah, and I'm pretty sure they never got used. But, actually, when I used to work in corporate, I would go and ride along with people, because you know in the corporate world, golf's a big thing. I did actually try to play a little bit then, but it was pretty laughable. So, anyway, tell us what is your website and your podcast.

Marty: I run a podcast called Golf Strategy School and the website is golfstrategyschool.com. It's been going since, I want to say I launched it in January of 2015. I initially started out trying to be like the John Lee Dumas of golf, where I was going to interview pros and coaches from around the world. And I did that for about the first year. It just didn't get the traction that I wanted.

Marty: So I took advice and niched down further. I just kind of kept niching down further and further and further where I could see the opportunity for it and the listenership kept growing. It was a nice kind of feedback point. But I want to say around late 2016, early 2017, I wasn't getting any traction from my audience. My listeners were kind of just non-responsive. So, I actually hung up the microphone, I guess you could say it that way, and walked away from the podcast for a while.

Marty: It wasn't until into 2018 about this time, June 2018, I started to get some emails from people who had found the podcast saying, hey, is it on hiatus, are you coming back? So, I started to kick around the idea of bringing it back.

Shane: Did you leave the website up, though? So, you left the podcast on iTunes, you left the website up. You just stopped making new episodes basically, for a year, something like that?

Marty: Yeah, correct. It was about a year. I just stopped producing new content. I just kind of felt like it was a one-sided relationship between me and my audience. I was just kind of shouting into a black hole.

Shane: But you were getting downloads, you were getting listens? It was like pulling teeth to basically get them to talk to you.

Marty: Exactly. I was getting downloads. If I went in a regular month, I might get 4,000 downloads. When I wasn't producing, I was still getting 2,500 to 3,000 downloads.

Shane: Jocelyn, what was it you were looking at the other day? It was like 90% of the podcasters were getting less than 200 downloads a month or something like that.

Jocelyn: Yeah, I'm in this group, it's a podcaster group on Facebook and they were doing a poll. How many listens do you get when your podcast comes out each week. The options were like 1 to 100 or 100 to 200. And then the final one was over 1,000. And hardly anyone was over 1,000.

Shane: Over 90% were like less than a hundred. You're getting this many downloads, that's a lot of people paying attention to you. That's 2,500 to 4,000 human beings that are literally listening to you every single month.

Jocelyn: And the thing about it is like, I think you were kind of even new on the podcasting game. I guess you could say you were ahead of your time. And I think really we were too, because podcasting is just now starting to become a mainstream-type thing, I feel like.

Jocelyn: I was walking yesterday with a friend of mine. My daughter has cheerleading practice and I was walking with one of the other moms and she was like, tell me what a podcast is. And I was like, wow.

Shane: And this is a smart, connected, professional person. It's not like this was someone who didn't have an iPhone or something like that. They knew technology. She works in a place where they use technology. It's just not the thing yet.

Jocelyn: And I don't really say that to make fun of people or anything like that. I'm just saying, it's just now starting to hit where people are like, oh, yeah, I know what a podcast is. It's starting to become more everyday knowledge rather than just sort of like people who are nerds, I guess, because that's what I am. I've been doing this podcast for a long time.

Shane: We've been doing this since like 2012.

Shane: Let me ask you this. There's an interesting twist here in the story. Even though you were not getting a lot of feedback, or maybe you just weren't doing it right where you were reaching out correctly or getting them to opt-in correctly. There was some kind of disconnect between you and your audience, even though they loved your content.

Shane: But, you actually started making money off of your podcast, correct?

Marty: Yeah, that's the interesting thing. So, I had done an interview in 2016 with a couple of guys who had invented a product. And I was told by my fellow golf podcasters that I should interview these guys, they're very charismatic. And they were. And they offered me an affiliate relationship on their product. They only make one thing and it's designed to help you swing your golf club faster. So, I interviewed them and they gave me a promo code. I'm thinking, wow, man, I've really made it I have a promo code.

Shane: Not even an ad, it's just a promo code.

Marty: Exactly. It's not an ad, no one's paying me to put anything out. It's just there's a promo code out there that's loosely related to my industry. I remember I got a paper check from them the following month for like $28. And I wanted to run up and down the street like I made I, I did it. It was my 11 cents.

Shane: You generated money from your words that came out of your mouth.

Marty: Exactly. I went right up to my wife, I'm like, see, people do pay me to talk.

Jocelyn: Totally killing it.

Shane: Crushing it. Taking you to Applebee's tonight, baby. That's right. $28 bucks.

Jocelyn: Appetizers on me.

Marty: I was going to say, we're going to have to split that appetizer.

Shane: Split the appetizer and we're drinking water, but we're paying for it with this check.

Marty: So, a couple months later the affiliate revenue died down because I was still producing content. Well, after I had hung up the microphone. Out of nowhere, I got some email from PayPal saying, hey, someone gave you money. I look, and it was the company that I had my affiliate relationship with.

Marty: And first month it was like 48 bucks. I'm like, hey, that's more than I got before. That's awesome. The next month, July rolls around, hey, you got like $97 from that company. I'm like, no way. August comes by, I got like 150 bucks. It just kept growing and growing and growing until I'm fairly business-minded. I knew the fourth quarter was coming up.

Marty: Lo and behold, December rolls around, I get like 900 bucks. From this company.

Shane: That's insane. From one podcast, one affiliate.

Marty: One day's worth of work.

Shane: That's amazing.

Marty: and it just keeps paying. So, I'm thinking to myself, okay, that was Christmas, that was all Black Friday, Christmas, all that rolled into one. January rolls around, 1,100 bucks. February, 1,248 bucks. That was the peak that I hit was 1,248.

Shane: And that was this year? Was that in 2019?

Marty: Correct. That was 2019. So I'm getting this giant red flag being waved at me by my PayPal account saying, hey, these people want you to do more things. So, kind of buckle up and let's do it here. So, I decided to re-launch the podcast.

Shane: That's awesome. So, there's some interesting things here. And we'll go deep into this. Okay, there's some red flags here too. One, it's really a testament to everybody out there listening to create some freaking content. This is ridiculous. If you create it, you've got a chance. You created this content way before the money ever started rolling in. But then it just started rolling in and it was true passive income.

Shane: Somehow that episode got ranked or that coupon code got put into what's it called, Honey, is that that app? The Honey app picked your coupon code. Something happened, and you got found in a search engine. That's what happened. How many episodes did you record before you picked it back up again? When you stopped?

Marty: Before I relaunched. I stopped at about 70 episodes.

Shane: See, you put 70 episodes in and one of them hit. That's just a great lesson for everybody out there, that if you're not creating consistent content and you're not prolifically creating content and you're not putting things in there that can make you money. That episode had the coupon code that made you money. That's just like selling something. You gave yourself a chance to make money online and lo and behold, you did.

Shane: So, what if all 70 episodes were giving you a chance to make money? Maybe there'd be something to that.

Marty: Yep, that's exactly what I started to do. I started to make advertisements for myself in my podcast.

Shane: Exactly. That's the good thing. That's the lesson that I want everybody listening to the podcast to get today is go make 70 podcasts, I don't even care if you know what you're doing yet, just figure it out. You've got to niche down, you've got to figure it out. If you're not doing it, you can't niche down. You can't figure that out.

Marty: Yep, you've got to start.

Shane: Here's the second thing. If that algorithm changes, you will go back to zero because you don't know exactly where it's coming from, how it's being found. There's ways that we can look into that. You can research that a little bit on your site. You can look at your top pages and what keywords are driving. Do you have Google Analytics on your website?

Marty: I just set it up maybe about a month ago.

Shane: Good. That's going to give you some data and kind of maybe figure out what people are typing in to find you. If the promo code itself was picked up in that Honey app or some other app that might be a little harder, but you could get some clues.

Shane: It's kind of like living on rented land at this point. You've got this podcast, these guests came on. It's working, but if anything outranks you, you're done. I've got a buddy who ranked number one for a very prolific term. He gets like a million hits a month on his website. Crazy traffic. He was number one for a website and he was making like 60,000 off this one page on his website. Just all kinds of affiliates and things like that that he had on the page to monetize it. It was a big operation. It was designed SEO-wise to be number one. Well, he got knocked to third place, and it knocked off $40,000 in revenue, just one algorithm change.

Shane: That's the danger of having uncontrolled revenue or relying on affiliate. Or what about this. What do they call it, the super speed trainers, or whatever.

Marty: Yep, Super Speed Golf.

Shane: If Super Speed Golf goes out of business and they're not selling that product anymore. Guess what, you don't get to make any more money.

Marty: Absolutely, yeah.

Shane: So, that's the risk of where you're at right now. But, I do love that you paid attention. So many people when they give up just turn everything off. You didn't do that. You left it on and you let it just keep running and you left those breadcrumbs for Hansel and Gretel to follow you back and they followed you back and gave you some money.

Jocelyn: I think it's kind of an interesting lesson. You kind of hung it up for a while, but then you were like, oh, wait, this is starting to do something. This is kind of cool. I don't think that what Shane's trying to say is that there's anything necessarily wrong with having affiliate relationships.

Shane: No, not at all.

Jocelyn: There's nothing wrong with it, but it's always a good idea to have something else to diversify in some way.

Marty: Yep. And that's my big concern right now is the fact that I only have this one revenue stream. In my nine to five, I'm a public speaker for a financial thing. And so, this is what I preach to people all the time. So, the fact that I'm just kind of walking down this very thin high wire, I'm like I know better.

Shane: Don't we all? I think that all of our jobs that we all fall into is eventually so we can preach to ourselves. Jocelyn and I talk about it all the time. Of all people we know what to do. We tell people what to do, we help people figure out what to do, we've seen hundreds of people what to do. But sometimes we're sitting around and we're not doing what we know we're supposed to do.

Shane: So, even just talking about it with you guys, with our guests, with our members, everybody, it's just like helping us. I remember when I was a football coach and I would coach the younger coaches. You had to teach the younger coaches how to be coaches. And I would tell them, do X, Y, and Z. And then I would think to myself, am I doing X, Y, and Z? Am I getting my scripts ready, am I?

Shane: It makes you think about that in the real world. You're on stage telling people diversify, have multiple streams of income. Then you look down and you've got one coupon code bringing in the cash. Let's try to figure that out. We'll try to expand and grow. I've got one more question. Since you've started your podcast back, are the numbers back up to where they were?

Marty: Way, way, way above and beyond. I just finished June and I had 11,000 downloads in the month.

Jocelyn: Great!

Marty: I just shared in the community that I crossed 200,000 downloads for my podcast over the lifetime.

Shane: That's amazing.

Jocelyn: That's awesome.

Shane: We've got to monetize that better. How many days a week do you podcast?

Marty: One episode a week.

Shane: That's great numbers, for only having four episodes a month. That's really, really good. There is massive amounts of potential there, once we tap into it.

Jocelyn: Let me ask you about your website. Other than the affiliate promotion, or the affiliate code, is there anything else that you're selling? Is there something that you plan to sell? What's going on as far as that goes?

Marty: So I had, before I hung the microphone up, I had a membership area. And I only got like two people that signed up and I was banging down their door every possible opportunity about how can I help you, how can I do something for you. And they were just dead silent. The eventually stopped.

Marty: So, now my plan is to, now that I've niched down further, is to recreate the membership with more focus towards my new audience.

Shane: And what is that audience? Are you selling a course on something now?

Marty: It's helping people break 90 for the first time. It's the average golfer. It's the once a month kind of player. How can I help you think your way around the course better so you don't make the stupid mistakes so you can play better.

Shane: It's like a virtual caddy, basically.

Marty: Oh, stealing that, immediately.

Shane: Everybody thinks a caddy just carries clubs for people, but a caddy for a pro, the main reason they're there is to go play the course, walk the course, know every distance from every tree to the pin and basically, they're the brain. They're playing chess with the player on, the upside of going around this tree, might save you a stroke. But the downside is there's a water hazard and you could lose two. Then the golfer makes the decision on the risk.

Shane: But that little book that they're flipping is not the scorebook, it's the strategy guide for getting around the course. So, that's kind of what you're doing. You're teaching people how to make good decisions to get as much upside as possible and reduce the downside as possible.

Marty: Absolutely.

Shane: I get this. I see where you're going with this. That's pretty interesting. And it's strategies that they could apply to any course.

Marty: We go through practices and drills that people can do to improve their skills. But when it comes to on the course time, the way that I envision it is almost like four different modules. So, working from short game out until actually how do we play the course.

Shane: That's amazing. That's awesome. I think that could really capture a part of the market. A lot of people just focus on the swing and taking strokes off your short game, and drills and things like that. But this is literally like, hey, let's learn how to play the game. It's like tapping into the people who are the thinking golfers. You do think about what your next shot's going to be. You think about what club you're supposed to use and not showing off how far you can hit the pitch and wedge.

Marty: Exactly. That's one of the questions that I ask in my email sequence is do you want to have a lower score, or do you want to have a cooler story in the clubhouse having drinks afterwards. Because that's really what it comes down to. If you want to cooler story, have a great time, go somewhere else.

Shane: Are the courses done?

Marty: No.

Shane: Why not?

Marty: The text version of them are done, but the video version of how do I actually provide this to people is not.

Jocelyn: Let's dive a little bit into why you haven't done this. So, you say that your videos are not done. Usually, when we are dragging our feet on creating a product to sell, it's usually because of some reason. So, let's hear it, Marty. What's your reason?

Shane: What's the fear. What's the mindset struggle that's holding you back from just getting this finished?

Marty: It's the same thing for a lot of people for me, I think it's imposter syndrome. This is something that I have literally dedicated decades of my life to. And what happens if people don't like it?

Shane: Are you afraid they're going to judge you as golfer if you do that?

Marty: Yeah.

Shane: Are you an actual golf pro? Have you ever been a golf pro at a clubhouse or anything like that?

Marty: Right out of high school I was trying to accomplish that, but I didn't know how to do it at the time, so I never actually completed that end of the spectrum.

Shane: Is that part of this? Well, I never was a golf pro at a country club, so who's going to listen to me? Is that part of it?

Marty: I don't think it's that so much because some of the biggest, best teachers that teach the best pros on the PGA tour, they are not affiliated with the PGA.

Shane: For sure. 100%. The guy that's going to be teaching Issac his private lessons is not a golf pro. But he's a heck of a high school golf coach, I'll tell you that much.

Marty: Exactly. And for me, it's the fact that I've done this for 23 years and for a large portion of those 23 years, that was like 100% of my life. It's the fear of kind of striking out of the thing that I put all this time into.

Shane: If me and you went golfing today, just a normal, average round for you, what would you shoot?

Marty: Probably 75, three or four over par.

Shane: There are 99.9% of anyone who will ever play golf will never shoot a 75. You are more than qualified and an expert. There's no reason you should ever consider. No one could ever possibly judge you for that. I think my lowest round ever was like an 81. Like ever, ever, one time magic day. Sorcery. God looking down and said, angels, kick that ball out of the rough. Where we went with that. And you're like, 75, whatever.

Jocelyn: Not a bad day.

Shane: Yeah, not a bad day. But that's what I'm saying. I know you know this. But the scoreboard's all that matters. No one can ever judge you or tell you good, bad, right, or wrong, because it's like yo, bro, did you shoot a 75 last week? No, you didn't scoreboard.

Shane: A lot of times fears or mindsets don't have a quantifiable number that proves something. Imposter syndrome's a really difficult one because it's like, well, am I expert in it. Jocelyn struggled with this when we started her elementary librarian site because she's like, well I've only been a librarian for a few years. And there were probably older librarians that came at her and said you're not qualified to do this.

Shane: Yours is literally like, I have a score, I can go prove this any day of the week with clubs and balls and grass and divots. You've got a score, just latch on to that. Because nobody can touch you on that.

Jocelyn: Have you been able to provide results for someone else?

Marty: Absolutely, yeah. I ran a challenge a few years ago trying to drum up subscribers for my email list. At the time my email list was like 70 people. And I got 300 people to sign up for this challenge. What I did, was I walked them through three lessons a week for a month. In hindsight, I realize that was the course. And that's why I say the text version exists, but the video version doesn't.

Marty: The feedback was fantastic. Facebook post after Facebook post of just shot 79 for the first time in eight years.

Shane: So, where is this coming from, then? This is crazy. Not you're crazy, but this is crazy. Imposter syndrome is crazy. I don't know why it hits us all. Is it just like a block of some kind? Are you scared at the haters? Because you know there's going to be haters.

Marty: Absolutely. And I think some of it is, probably the lion share is probably fear of the haters. Because when I was running that challenge. I had one, and I sent out my scheduled email and a guy emailed me back, just like I invite people to at the end of every message. And he was like, hey, this is dumb. You shouldn't teach putting this way, it's teaching you to miss putts. And I got in this long drawn out back and forth email with him.

Marty: Eventually, at the end of it, I realized this one guy out of 300 is taking up so much of my time. Just delete, walk away.

Shane: Here's what you should have wrote that guy back instead of arguing with him about putting technique. You should have wrote him back and said, hey, where's your challenge with 300 people following you? And he wouldn't be able to write you back because he's just some dude who thinks he knows how to putt. Why did you sign up for the challenge, bro?

Marty: If you knew this.

Shane: Right. If you knew all this. And, if you're so good at this, why aren't 11,000 people listening to your podcast. You've got so many numbers that can just defeat the haters. You've just got to latch onto that.

Marty: Even beyond that, for some reason, I'll argue your side of the argument against myself. I just got back from Scotland. I played the third-oldest course in the world. It was the eighth-most difficult. And you talk about your miracle day where heaven and earth all aligned for an 81. Without my own clubs, because I just rented them there, playing at 11:00 at night in 40-mile an hour winds at the eighth hardest course in the world, I shot 82.

Shane: That's what I'm saying. Anyone who can't do that, you get to teach. That's just the way it is. Because you know more than they do. So, you've just got to go create this thing and give it to people. And if anybody complains about it or doesn't want it, give them their money back and say goodbye.

Jocelyn: They're just not your people. We're not everyone's cup of tea. Some people turn this podcast on and say these people are hicks from Kentucky and I'm not listening to them. And that's fine. Move on. There are plenty of other people out there that you can follow.

Shane: I think there's something deeper than imposter syndrome. I think that's the easiest one you've kind of latched on to. Let me ask you this. This happens to people to, this is kind of a hidden fear that some people get. We see a lot of people that will come into the community, and they'll do what we tell them, and bam, they make money. And they freak out and quit.

Shane: They get scared or they doubt themselves because they feel lucky. Do you ever feel like that with this affiliate thing? Oh man, I made some content, but I got lucky. That was someone else's product that carried the burden of being quality and good. If someone hates the Super Swing Swing Swing Club, then they're going to hate them, not me. Is some of that at play here? Do you feel like that's happening to you?

Jocelyn: Isn't that a wing of the imposter syndrome museum?

Shane: I think it is, but it kind of dips into fear of success. When you feel lucky.

Jocelyn: Honestly, that's what I was going to say is fear of success. I've even had this happen in my golf life. When I was trying to go pro, I was playing an event and I shot six under par and everyone was congratulating me, I won the event. High-fives, handshakes, hugs, drinks afterwards. An I went and I sat down in my car and I had a full-blown meltdown. Like, holy crap, I'm capable of this. Am I committed am I passionate enough to actually do it?

Shane: That's deep. I wish there was an easy answer for this. The only solution is to just make the product. And kind of accept the meltdowns. Accept stuff like that.

Shane: I remember last year when we did Flip Your Life LIVE. Two years ago, when we decided to do a big live event, we were like can we, by ourselves, with no guest speakers, put over 100 people in a room. Could we get 100 people to fly to Nashville Tennessee and come just to see us speak for two days? Because usually you go to an event and they get six or seven headliners and a keynote. Because that way all of their audience is drawn, they can get a bigger crowd.

Shane: But we were just like, can we do this. And I remember when we sold out. I remember specifically when we sold out and we looked at each other and we were like did we just do that? Why is anyone coming to listen to us? We're just Shane and Jocelyn from Kentucky. We struggled with that, deeply.

Shane: But then once we'd sold it, that's actually a good reason to pre-sell things. Because once you sell it, you've got no choice to make it even if you don't believe in yourself anymore. Because you owe someone something for their money. I remember when we were kind of like, no, we did do this. And we podcasted for four years to earn the right to get these people to come and listen to us.

Shane: That's kind of where it is now. At that point, it was like, well we've got to do it. We've got to go make the things. You know what, massive results for people who came out of that. People came in, they took action. And we saw people add 300 members over the next few months. We saw people launch their businesses and actually quit their jobs and all these things happened. And it's just because we did it.

Shane: You will see that as soon as you make this course. People will start writing you those messages of the lowest round of their life. The sun and moon aligned and all that good stuff. And then bam, all of the sudden, it's like, well I do deserve to do this and the haters don't matter. But until you kind of force your way past it, it's like being stuck on a roller coaster and you really wish you could get off.

Marty: Only way out is through.

Shane: Only way out is through. You've just got to go. You've just got to push forward and you've got to get the product done. That's where you're at.

Jocelyn: Hopefully, that helps you to be abl to move forward and actually get this product created so you can help other people with their golf game. Let's talk about what we need to do next in terms of getting this out there to your existing audience and what that looks like.

Marty: Right now, I've got roughly 600 people on my email list. I send my weekly emails with my episodes and any blog articles that I've written. It's essentially only contacting them when I have something new to share. I'm not doing any selling because I don't have anything to sell at the moment.

Shane: How do you get those emails? Do you get them from the podcast? Do you just offer lead magnets, what do you do?

Marty: I've got a lead magnet on my website that has three free short game lessons. Those are videos that I had created. I just don't get a lot of website traffic. I only get about maybe 1,000 people per month. So, my emails have actually come from doing contests and giveaways and stuff like that.

Shane: On the podcast? Or on the website?

Marty: It's on all fronts. So, I'll mention it on the podcast. I'll have little popup floaters on the website and then I used $80 worth of Facebook ads last time.

Shane: Here's what you need to do. One, I really think you need to pre-sell this thing. You need some way to force yourself to do this product. The easiest way that we have ever found to do that is to pre-sell it. The four modules are going to be short game, mid-game, driving, and then strategy, or something like that, right?

Marty: Yep.

Shane: I'm thinking that you need to probably go ahead and create a sales page that tells what's going to be inside it. Especially since you basically have the outline because of those text files. I think you need to go four straight weeks in a row and just hammer this product. You need to have episodes about this product, four in a row.

Shane: one of them is, all right guys, I'm telling you about module one, telling you about module two, telling you about module three, talking about module four. And then basically at the end of every episode, I'm doing a beta launch. This is eventually going to be, whatever the price is going to be. But I'm going to let beta people in right now for 29 bucks or something stupid. Really cheap price.

Shane: And then what happens is, over those four episodes, you're basically doing an extended webinar for each module inside of what the course is going to look like. And you're going to have a sales page and you're going to sell it, and they're going to pay it. And then there's going to be a countdown on the thank you page that says, "We launch this day." You're going to get those done by that day. You leave yourself no choice, this way.

Shane: And it doesn't have to be right immediately after. If you did this four weeks in July, you can say that it's going to come out August 21st or something stupid. And then you just leave yourself no mercy. Let's say you sell 20 of these. Not a lot of money, but you've got 20 people that gave you money and you're on the hook to create it now. You have to, you have no choice.

Shane: And all you've got to do is go film this stuff. It doesn't have to be perfect it can be edited shoddily right now and then it can be made better later. But at least the first draft would be done. And you have an audience that's big enough right now to sell. If you've got 11,000 downloads a month, there's probably 20 to 25 beta members just waiting for something like this to fall onto their lap, you just have to go out and tell them about it and sell it and then be on the hook for it. Because you don't want to give back 500 bucks to anybody.

Marty: No, I don't. That's a transactional direction I do not wish to participate in.

Shane: After you do that, I think your whole podcast needs to switch over to getting emails. Because you've got 11,000 people listening to you a month. Or 11,000 downloads. You've got 1,000 people visiting your site. Your site's not going to get you email addresses. Your whole life will be podcast to email list to sell this thing. That's the whole flow of your sales funnel at that point.

Shane: But right now, your biggest problem is you know what you need to do, you just have to be forced to do it. And you need some financial accountability from your customers to make it happen. Do that. Plan four episodes. Each episodes is about one of the four modules. And at the end of every episode, you say to your audience, hey, I'm opening this to beta members now. It's $29, it's going to be $99, whatever it's going to be for the course. Forget the membership thing right now. Just get the product done because that's going to seed the membership.

Marty: As a follow-up, as I'm thinking through what you're saying here. If we do four episodes, let's say like you said in July. One about each module. Because each module's going to be multiple videos. Am I incorrect in thinking it's a good idea to maybe put one of those videos in the blog post supporting that podcast episode, saying hey, this is something from the actual course. Sign up here.

Shane: The only thing I'm worried about that is you don't have these done yet. Now, that could give you some accountability to go get that done.

Jocelyn: I like the idea of that, for sure. Just to give people an incentive to get on the list. If people are just listening to your podcast, but they're not on your list, you can tell them about it once on the podcast, but if they don't do anything, you have no way to contact them.

Shane: I want you go to make an order form that's $29 or something. And you say at the end of the podcast, go to what was your domain name again?

Marty: Golfstrategyschool.com

Shane: Go to Golfstrategyschool.com/beta and go there right now. This is going to be $100, I'm going to give it to you for $29. Golfers know that language, that's how everything's sold in the golf world.

Shane: This driver was $400, now it's yours for 99 cents. Whatever.

Marty: It has been a while since you played if you purchased something for 99 cents.

Shane: Right. I got my clubs at flea markets. I bought them at yard sales. But what I'm saying is I want them to go buy it. I don't even want them to opt in. A waiting list, you can still bail on. It's like, no, this is the module, go to this page, buy it. This is what I'm going to teach you. These are the results you're going to get in this module. You can get the whole thing right now for 29 bucks, I'm going to make this, it's going to be launched on August 21st, I'm going to launch it at $99, I'm going to give it to you for $29.

Shane: And the second week is I'm going to tell you all about this new thing. I know that golfers have a problem with this. That really sucks because you can't score what you want to. Here's all the benefits in my thing that I'm going to teach you. All the skills and strategies. Oh, by the way, that's going to lower your strokes by five on your next round. This is happening. But you need to get it now because once I close the doors on it, the beta price is gone forever. And you're going to do this all four modules, tell everybody about it. For a month, you're just going to talk about this product.

Shane: And then, here it comes. Then we launch it, then we go. Then you have 21 days to create it, which means you have to get out on the golf course and film all your modules. That's how you do it.

Shane: Jocelyn used to do this with a month of lesson plans. She would sell them and they weren't even finished. Then she would go and sit down in a room and be like, crap, I've got to give these to everybody by Monday and she would do 20 days of lesson plans for five grades.

Jocelyn: It's amazing how much you can get finished when you know someone's waiting on it and they've paid for it.

Shane: And perfection doesn't matter when it's due on a certain date. It's just got to be delivered.

Marty: That's the strategy that I used when I created my first challenge, which essentially is going to be the course. I said, hey, does anybody want to do this? 300 people raised their hand. I said, oh, crap.

Shane: Exactly. But if 30 of those people give you money, it's really going to light a fire under you. Pre-launching is an amazing strategy to bust through barriers and overcome these obstacles that you're facing because you have no choice anymore. And that's really what we want to put on you right now is that pressure and give you absolutely no choice.

Jocelyn: All right, Marty, I can't wait to see how this turns out. It's going to be really exciting to see the next steps that you take with this audience. Before we go, we always like to ask people what is one thing that you plan to do in the next 24 hours or so based on what we talked about here today?

Marty: So, I think I'm going to go down the route that Shane was saying and I'm going to build a sales page.

Shane: That's perfect. Get the sales page, get the order form, and then now you're ready to outline the podcast and you're off to the races.

Shane: Listen, Marty, what a great conversation. Good talking golf with you today. I'm super excited. I may buy one of your challenges. Because then you got me looking over your neck, like give me this thing. I need to get my short game back. I got to teach my son how to play.

Shane: Listen, thanks for coming on the show, thanks for sharing numbers, downloads, all these things that people kind of keep close to the vest and just being really super transparent. We're always so grateful that our members are willing to come on the show and be very vulnerable in a real-live coaching situation so that everybody that listens to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast can benefit from that. We just really appreciate you for coming on the show today.

Marty: It was an absolute blast. I hope other people can gain from this as well, and thank you so much for the opportunity.

Shane: All right, guys, that wraps up another episode of the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. What a great conversation with Marty. Maybe you're struggling with imposter syndrome. Maybe you have a great idea or an outline and you're just so close to getting that product created. Or maybe you're ready to launch or pre-launch something on your existing platform. We would love to help you do all of that inside of the Flip Your Life community. You can learn more about the Flip Your Life community at Flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife. We have plans for every budget and every need. You can get 100% access to all of our training courses, all of our forums, and hang out with us live twice a month right now. All you have to do is go flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife. Who knows, you may be a future guest on the show.

Shane: All right, guys, that is all the time that we have for this week. Thank you so much for listening to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. Whatever you do, until next time, get out there, take action and do whatever it takes to flip your life. We'll see you then.

Jocelyn: Bye.

Links and resources mentioned on today’s show: * Marty's Website * Flip Your Life LIVE 2019 Tickets & Registration Information * Flip Your Life community

Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!

Join the Flip Your Life Community NOW for as little as $19 per month!

https://flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife

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In today's episode, we help Chris find the confidence to build his side hustle business.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jocelyn Sams: Hey y'all. On today's podcast we help Chris find the confidence to build his side hustle business.

Shane Sams: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast where life always comes before work. We're your hosts Shane and Jocelyn Sams. We're a real family that figured out how to make our entire living online. And now, we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? All right, let's get started.

Shane Sams: What's going on everybody, welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. It is great to be back with you again this week. Super excited to welcome another member of the Flip Your Life community onto the show so that we can help them take their business to the next level.

Shane Sams: But before we do that, want to remind you that the Flipped Lifestyle podcast is brought to you by the Flip Your Life Community. We do not sell ads, sponsorships on our show. We are completely supported by you the listener and our members inside of the Flip Your Life community. We would love to help you take your online dreams to the next level, just like we're about to help our guest today.

Shane Sams: If you'd like to learn more about the Flip Your Life Community, go to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife and you can check out all of our amazing membership options we have. We have an entire community of hundreds of entrepreneurs from around the world, courses that can help you at any stage of your online business and if you need a little bit more help from me and Jocelyn, we do live member Q and A's every single month. We'd love to have you in there. Check it out over at flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife.

Jocelyn Sams: Now it is time to introduce today's guest Chris Holdheide. Welcome to the show.

Chris Holdheide: Hi Jocelyn, hi Shane. Thanks for having me on the podcast. I really appreciate it, thanks.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, we are excited to talk to you today and we cannot wait to meet you in person in Lexington in September. We're very excited that you are coming and that someone in your family too, right?

Chris Holdheide: Yes. Actually, it's me and my twin brother. We both signed up at the same time and decided -

Shane Sams: That's awesome.

Chris Holdheide: Yeah, we kind of debated it at first and then I kinda told him ahead of time that I was gonna buy my ticket and I kinda got him to, push him a little bit to buy his ticket and then, lo and behold here we are, we're going. We're gonna be there.

Jocelyn Sams: Well are you guys identical twins, first of all?

Chris Holdheide: Yes, we are.

Shane Sams: Do you have identical businesses?

Chris Holdheide: No.

Jocelyn Sams: And, are you not going to switch name tags at the event? I'm just curious.

Chris Holdheide: We might, just never know.

Shane Sams: See that would just totally mess me up. You look down, you're sitting at different tables. I'm on stage. I'm getting confused. I wouldn't know what was going on, man. You can't do that to us, man.

Shane Sams: So before we get started and get deep into your story and help you take your business, what you're working on right now to the next level. Like, what made you decide to come to Flip Your Life LIVE in Lexington, Kentucky this September? What was the big, you know you said you kinda looked at it, you thought about it, and you wrestled with it. What pushed you over the edge and then allowed you to push your brother over the edge too? To drag him down I-75 kicking and screaming to Lexington?

Chris Holdheide: I'd been to several conferences over the years, but a lot of them were ... They're very generic and they just had a lot of you know content where it was just like, I felt like it didn't really help me or improve or help me move forward with my business. I wanted something that was a lot more hands on and that's what you guys were talking about, more hands on, and like you're teaching something then we're gonna go do something. I just thought, "that's gonna be what I need. That's what I need." Someone show me something and then I can do it and I can get my hands dirty and kind of learn some things.

Shane Sams: Awesome. Our philosophy when we started Flip Your Life LIVE was to create an event where you did more work in two days and made more progress than you had done like in the year before you actually got to the event. So we actually designed it that way on purpose, like it's deep teaching, it's a no pitch event. We're not going to be selling anything at the end of every session, like they do at some events. We're going to go into a topic, dive as deep as we can into it, stop, let everybody work on it for a minute. We'll be sitting around at tables doing masterminds, helping each other to make progress on whatever we're doing. We're going to focus a lot on traffic and sales. Closing the deal and getting more people to your actual deals.

Shane Sams: But then we come back out and Jocelyn and I actually stop and answer questions every session for thirty minutes to make sure there's no problems. You're completely clear on what you need to do. You can wrestle with it for a minute and then we even come back after the event at night and we have these big working sessions. So we do like four sessions a day. You work on everything at the event, you get to ask questions and then, we all come back and mastermind after the questions session so we get to go out and get things done. I'm glad you're coming. Have you been coming to any of the weekly live trainings that I'm doing for Flip Your Life LIVE, have you been coming to those?

Chris Holdheide: Yes. I've been coming to almost every single one.

Shane Sams: Love it.

Chris Holdheide: Just not the ones, some were during the day, during work, but most of them, any of them in the evening, I've pretty much been there for every single -

Shane Sams: You've got the replays there too, if you want to watch those.

Chris Holdheide: Yes.

Shane Sams: How are those helping you? Are those good, getting you kind of making some progress before you even get to the event?

Chris Holdheide: Those are incredible. So far I've been able to create my first course, get it up, get it launched and just actually make my first sale.

Shane Sams: Awesome, wow, that's amazing.

Jocelyn Sams: Wow, yeah.

Shane Sams: If that's not a sign that you should be coming to Flip Your Life LIVE, so you can take some massive action. You need to be there. You can go to flippedlifestyle.com/live to check out how many tickets are left. We were under thirty the last time I checked and we want to announce this, I think we've said this on the podcast already, but this is the last time we're doing the big Flip Your Life LIVE conference. We've got some other ideas that we're gonna pursue next year. This will be your last chance to come to Flip Your Life LIVE so join us in Lexington, Kentucky, September nineteenth through to twenty-first at Flip Your Life LIVE. We would love to see you there and you get to meet Chris and help us figure out if it's him or his brother for the entire event.

Jocelyn Sams: All right Chris, so let's start talking a little bit about what you are doing online and tell us also a little bit about you and your background and how you started doing this?

Chris Holdheide: Okay. I started way back in 2004 actually, with my very first business. I started doing a lot of different things from multi-level marketing for about four and a half years and then I jumped into affiliate marketing and building my first website in 2008. It really just snowballed from there until today where I have, basically my bigger website now, that I work with mostly now.

Shane Sams: What's that website called?

Chris Holdheide: My main website is sidehustleacademy.com.

Shane Sams: Awesome. And it looks like you have done a lot of side hustles. Being the MLMer and the affiliate marketer and doing all the side hustles.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah and I need to know about this, okay so, in your form that you filled out to be and the podcast it says that you run your own brick and mortar business gating for swine and dairy. I need to know about this.

Shane Sams: What? Like pigs and cows?

Chris Holdheide: Yes.

Shane Sams: It's going to be another farm episode of the Flipped Lifestyle podcast.

Jocelyn Sams: How does one get into building gates for swine and dairy? Just curious.

Chris Holdheide: So that business was actually started by my father and he retired from it back in 2009, which I took it over. Me and another guy, we partnered up and we took it over and we've been running it ever since. It's basically a gating and manufacturing business. We build gating for swine barns, cattle barns, stuff like that. We've been doing that for just over ten years now. You know that's been going very well. We actually just built a brand new shop, fifteen thousand square foot shop.

Shane Sams: Wow. That's amazing. I would say though, that that's a lot of hard work to run something labor intensive with, you've got to have people that you manage. I mean building, fencing and gating can't be easy.

Chris Holdheide: No, it's a very high overhead business. It's also, it can be stressful at times and I wear a lot of multiple hats in that business. Because I do a wide variety of different things. Pricing, quoting, stuff like that.

Shane Sams: Awesome. So is that kind of what your motivation is to get into that online world, is hey, we've got a high risk, high overhead, if something goes wrong, you know, I'm sure there's some liability involved and all that. Someone loses their pig herd, right, whatever.

Chris Holdheide: Yeah, yeah.

Shane Sams: You know what I'm saying. I mean if you do something wrong, the gate breaks, pigs you know, run away, right?

Chris Holdheide: Yeah. So it does very well. People are going to come back over time 'cause you know stuff wears out and stuff like that. So the gating business is pretty stable for the most part. I mean, this year's a little slower than the last few but you know, that's why I kinda turned to online business is because I want something that kinda supplements my income a little more and gives me more ... It's less overhead, it's more time with my family, stuff like that. That's what I'm really looking for.

Shane Sams: Love it. Tell me about this MLM route a little bit because you know we hear a lot of people get into the MLM place and some people even try to mask an MLM as being like an online business. And if you're an MLMer out there, please don't get mad at me, but Jocelyn and I just don't like MLMs at all. But tell us a little bit about the MLM route, like what were you doing and like why did you get away from that multi-level marketing aspect of a side hustle?

Chris Holdheide: So yeah when I started that, I had a few friends in it and I thought it was kinda a neat thing but what I learned, 'cause basically I was selling insurance, investments, stuff like that. But in order to even get paid in that business you had to have a license. So you had to go get an insurance license and investment license, stuff like that. Then on top of that, what they don't really tell you is that, MLM is a very high energy type business. You have to be beating people's doors down, calling people. You have to be doing it every day or you're just not going to get anywhere with it. And I did it for four and a half years. It was okay but in the end, I just realized that it wasn't for me.

Shane Sams: Yeah, MLM is 24/7. And like, it's not just beating down doors. It's beating down everybody's door. Like you gotta beat down your friend's doors, you gotta be Facebook messaging people. You gotta be like, you have to literally like make every single network relationship in your life, family, friend or anywise into a business relationship. And it can get uncomfortable and like Jocelyn gets them all the time from people and she's like "Oh my gosh, I don't want to buy your MLM product."

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, I've had to take people, block people from my phone because they won't stop texting me stuff.

Shane Sams: It's like when you hear from someone, you haven't talked to them in ten years. They haven't even liked a picture on your Facebook page and they just show up and be like "Hey girl, I got something good for you."

Jocelyn Sams: My rule is if I haven't talked to you in like the last five years without something that's not MLM related, I probably don't want to talk to you about something that is.

Shane Sams: Yeah. And it will just wear you out. It's like it doesn't give you any, there's no chance for passive income. I mean they say there is, but the top, what is it, one to three per cent actually get any kind of income or passive income out of those big networks. You know what I'm saying. So. We're not going to be building any downlines today y'all, if you're here for that you're in the wrong place, okay?

Jocelyn Sams: All right, so you decided MLM wasn't for you and you then decided to start a website then?

Chris Holdheide: Yeah, I started a personal finance website first in 2008. And then I wrote a bunch of content for the first year I had it up. I didn't make a whole lot. I started running AdSense on there and I think I made maybe a hundred bucks in my first year doing it. In the second year I kind of figured out this thing called SEO and how all that stuff worked and then I started dabbling with that and then within a year I was making about a thousand bucks a month doing that.

Shane Sams: Nice, that's awesome man. Yep. That was mostly of affiliates or ads? Or just a combination of like everything?

Chris Holdheide: That was just pure advertising at that point.

Shane Sams: So all Google ad clicks, people click it you get, you're basically using SEOs, search engine optimization to bring more people to blog posts that you wrote and then hopefully those people would click an ad that you posted from an ad network, that's correct?

Chris Holdheide: Right, right.

Shane Sams: Cool.

Chris Holdheide: And then, I was doing really good 2010. By the end of 2010 I was making a thousand bucks a month and then 2011 came and Google had a little update and all of a sudden, everything I had worked for, I think I was making about thirteen hundred bucks a month and it was gone. Google just decimated that entire business for me.

Shane Sams: And that's why it's like, you can't build your house on rented land. You know what I'm saying? That's the danger of a true SEO strategy, of only relying on Facebook ads, of doing anything else, or you're putting all your eggs in someone else's basket, and it's why we're so adamant about building your own thing with your own products, with your own community of followers and fans because that's where the security really is, right?

Chris Holdheide: Right, yes.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay, so you decided okay this whole Google thing, you know it got kind of screwed up, but the online business, you still see hope there obviously. So then you decide that you're going to start this new thing right?

Chris Holdheide: Yeah, so in 2015 I started my new site which is called sidehustleacademy.com where I just, I help people, basically I write a lot of content about helping people do various types of side hustles that I've learned over the years. Learned a lot with affiliate marketing, I was teaching people about that so and it's just, right now it's really just a content website and stuff like that right now. But I started a little YouTube channel and stuff like that. That's doing okay and stuff and it's starting to draw some people in.

Shane Sams: Good.

Chris Holdheide: I'm looking to take it to the next level though.

Shane Sams: For sure. Basically right now, you're making money with affiliate marketing, so it's kind of similar to the ad thing, but you're creating the content, getting some traffic and then you're basically recommending products for people you're an affiliate for. So like, you gotta say, "here's a side hustle about this, this guy teaches a really good course, I recommend it." That's what you're doing, right now?

Chris Holdheide: That's correct, yeah.

Shane Sams: Okay. And how's that going?

Chris Holdheide: That's going okay. I mean, it's not making a ton of, maybe around five hundred bucks a month on average.

Shane Sams: Getting back up there though. Right?

Chris Holdheide: We're getting back up there.

Shane Sams: What's the problems with that that you've encountered? Like besides, is it percentages, is it just getting people to click on something when they really came to you? Like what are the biggest problems you're having with that style of business?

Chris Holdheide: So that business, the bigger problem is just trying, because you don't really have a huge name built up to it, and to get people to click and then buy, it's a little harder.

Shane Sams: To get that, know, like and trust enough to, you gotta have a lot of know, like and trust to recommend somebody, right?

Chris Holdheide: Right. Yeah and that takes a lot just to get that, you know and then to write great content and you know make sure you're promoting good products and stuff like that you know. You want to really make sure that you're promoting a good product. You don't want to just promote anything. You want to promote the right things.

Shane Sams: So basically you're putting a lot of time into research, looks like you're taking a lot of time into content.

Chris Holdheide: Yeah, pretty much any course I recommend, I've bought. I bought it, I reviewed it, I went through it, so I know what I'm selling is good.

Shane Sams: 'Cause that's a reflection on you, at that point. You've got to trust the affiliate, you know what I'm saying. 'Cause if they screw the customer, they're never coming back to your site, right?

Chris Holdheide: That's right. That's right.

Shane Sams: I follow a guy named Ben Settle and he said something on his podcast once. He's a copywriter and he's kind of a brash, hard core guy. One time he said, a mentor told him you should never enter an affiliate relationship with someone who you wouldn't give the keys to your house and let them stay there alone for week. You gotta have that much trust before you're an affiliate or they'll just burn your house down.

Shane Sams: Right, so where are we now? Now, we've gotten up to this point now, where you've done the affiliate thing but you're trying to transition again to more teaching and course models and your own thing, right?

Chris Holdheide: Yes, that's correct. Right now, I've got my first course created. I just threw it together. There is five videos, put it together and I threw it up on Teachable real quick and started promoting it to my email list and made my first sale.

Shane Sams: Love it.

Chris Holdheide: Right now I'm actually working on setting up my membership area so, trying to get that all put together and then get my community going there.

Shane Sams: Awesome. You know I say, if you can find one, you can find a hundred and one. If you can find a hundred and one people to give you fifty dollars a month, you're making sixty grand a year, right?

Shane Sams: If there's one person that'll buy it, there's more people that'll buy it. We just have to figure out a path to finding all those people. Also I want to comment here too, this is very interesting. I was talking to somebody yesterday, I was coaching somebody and basically we created this email sequence for them. They're probably listening to this right now. I'm not going to tell you who it is but they're listening.

Shane Sams: But I was coaching yesterday and they wrote an email sequence and they sent it out and panicked 'cause like only two or three people bought something or something in one day, right? And they were freaking out 'cause their list is kinda big. "Do I need to change direction? Do I need to write longer emails? Do I need to write shorter emails? Do I need to not do emails? Maybe I should have ran ads to this. Maybe I should have tested it. Maybe we should pull the plug and not do the rest of the sequence."

Shane Sams: They were just freaking out and I'm like, "Calm down." Like, whoa Nelly. You know. Pull the brakes a little bit. You gotta ride stuff out to learn if it works or not. I told them the goal is to ride this out for three months and just see what happens. And do it over and over again and test it. But she was totally willing to pull the plug immediately.

Shane Sams: But what I love about your story, dude. 2008, was that when you said you started your first website?

Chris Holdheide: Yeah. August of 2008.

Shane Sams: That's amazing. And like, that was eleven years, when we're recording this. And you went up and you got to that magic thousand dollars a month, but you got slammed and destroyed. All the way back to nothing. But you pivoted and tried something else for a while and got it back up to five hundred a month and then you're like, "Man, I'm hitting a ceiling here. I need to do something else." And now you're testing the next thing which should be the best thing, right? And it's taken you eleven years of relentless never giving up to do it, right. And I just love that, man. I think that speaks volumes about you and your character and is a great example for everybody listening, like this is not a, "I tried it and I hit a home run." Or, I tried online business for three months, like success comes by grinding and grinding and grinding until you hit the home run.

Shane Sams: Like, how many swings do batters make in a baseball season? Hundreds to get forty home runs, right? And you're doing that and all this stuff has built to the point now where you're like, "whoa, I made a course and sold it, maybe this could be a membership. I found one." Six months from now you might have a hundred and one people, right.

Chris Holdheide: Right.

Shane Sams: Dude, great, great job just sticking with it. Making money. And look at all the knowledge, you can't run the Side Hustle Academy unless you've been running side hustles for ten years.

Chris Holdheide: Yeah.

Shane Sams: Just an amazing story, man. I absolutely love your tenacity and keep sticking with it. Great example for you all our there that are like, "I started a blog in 2007 and I quit because I didn't get a million followers on Instagram." Or whatever.

Jocelyn Sams: All right. So let's talk just a little bit. Obviously you have a spirit of not giving up which we love, but something is still holding you back. So let's talk a little bit about some fears, mindset issues or whatever else might be holding you back right now.

Chris Holdheide: So when I was creating my first course, my initial thought was I was going to create this course and I'm gonna price it ninety-seven dollars. And then I started creating the course and I started having this feeling like, I just don't know if this is worth ninety-seven dollars and then all of sudden I back it down to like forty-seven dollars and then all of a sudden, I'm at nineteen dollars and I'm also thinking the same thing with like my membership. How much is this worth in the beginning? Is what I'm selling worth it? Or worth the amount of money I'm thinking it should be worth.

Shane Sams: So basically this is a confidence problem. It's not really is the course worth it, it's more like, is anyone gonna pay me to teach them x, to teach them y, to teach them z.

Jocelyn Sams: And actually what I hear in this conversation, Chris, is that you don't feel that you can convince someone that the value is there. That's what I'm reading between the lines.

Chris Holdheide: Right.

Shane Sams: Let me ask you a question here. So you're basically, let's talk about value and how to actually, the problem that most people do with their course is they assign the value to themselves and not the result that they're trying to get for their customer, right?

Shane Sams: When we start valuing ourselves, well we're our worst critics. We look in the mirror and we don't like the way we look. We put our clothes on, we don't have the newest clothes. We get in our car and we're like, "Man, do I have the best car? Is anybody looking at me funny?" We're all self conscious, right?

Chris Holdheide: Right.

Shane Sams: If you try to put the value of what you're selling on you, you're always going to talk yourself into giving it away for free, right? Because it's hard to assign value to ourselves. But that's, the trick is, we've got to assign the value to what we're giving people, right? To the actual result that they're going to get.

Shane Sams: For example, in our teaching businesses, our result was not, our value wasn't based on we're the best teachers, we make the best lesson plans, we're the smartest elementary librarians and social studies teachers in the world. Because if that was true, we would have probably not even made our courses. Jocelyn had been teaching for three years. I was a social studies teacher but I was half football coach so like I didn't even really teach a lot. You know what I'm saying?

Shane Sams: It was like we couldn't possibly value. So what we did was we flipped it and said, You know the result that we could give people, if we could literally plan their day for them, every school day of the year, the result would be going home at three o'clock, seeing their kids, being able to sit down and have dinner and not worry that you're not going to have anything planned tomorrow. And that was priceless. So that was easy to go five hundred dollars. You've got to pay this. Or forty-nine dollars a month. It's worth forty-nine dollars a month to see your kids at night and not be stressed out about your job.

Jocelyn Sams: And like what I'm wondering is, okay so your course, what is it for? Is it to help people learn how to start a side business?

Chris Holdheide: So my course is all about helping people develop the idea that they want to go forward with and then figure out how to profit or make their first sale basically. Not to like build their entire business but just to get them started and make their first sale and realize like okay, there's something here. I can make money with this. And they see a way out, you know.

Shane Sams: Sure, let me ask you this. If you could, you've told us, your side hustles have generated a thousand bucks a month, five hundred bucks a month, something like that off and on for different side hustles, right?

Chris Holdheide: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Shane Sams: If you could tell somebody, "Hey man, what stresses you out?" If you could ask them that question and they said to you, "Man, you know what really stresses me out, man. My car payment. It's three-ninety-nine a month and I've got a hundred dollars in insurance a month and it just really stresses me out, man, 'cause that car payment makes me run thin every month and sometimes we run out of money for groceries." And you said to them, "Hey man, what if I could teach you something? I've been making five hundred dollars a months plus for ten years. That could pay your car payment. It could totally take that stress off of you. How much more space would you have for your spouse? How much more time would have for your kids, when you wouldn't be worrying about it? How good would it feel to walk into the grocery store and know you had a little margin and you didn't have to put the real Fruit Loops back to get the generic Fruit Loops, you know what I'm saying?"

Shane Sams: Like, how would that make you feel? If you could literally say that ti someone and you could do that for someone. There is no way you can put a value on that, right? It would be worth it. I'll give you a hundred bucks to show me how to make five-hundred a month. Any day of the week. Right?

Chris Holdheide: Right.

Shane Sams: But what we've done there is we've transferred the value to the result, not you. It ain't about you, man. Like you've made a thousand, five hundred dollars a month for ten years. Like, yeah man. If you can teach that to someone, there's no way to put a value on that at all.

Jocelyn Sams: And I can assure you that people do not really care about the quality of the course in those cases. All they care about is the result. Can you teach them to do whatever it is that you told them that you're going to do?

Shane Sams: And that's how we price our products. That's how we have the confidence to say, it's worth it. Like our courses are not the fanciest, most polished courses in the world. I had a buddy in a mastermind group I'm in, they just spent like ten grand, hired a video crew, redid all of their courses. You know what I'm saying? And I'm not gonna do that. I just don't do that. It's fine if he wants to do it, right. And maybe his audience puts value in the presentation, but for us it's more like, let's just get this information in people's hands 'cause it could change their life, right? And that's where we assign the value of our community. That's how we price our community. And then you can look at other things like the demographic of your audience, like there's nothing wrong with having lower tier prices. We do that sometimes too, right? Because we want to help as many people as possible take our courses.

Shane Sams: But like you've got to assign the value based on the result, not based based on your own confidence issues in yourself. 'Cause if you do that, you're always gonna just charge nothing. So...

Chris Holdheide: That's great, that's great.

Shane Sams: Yeah, so. Is your result worth a hundred dollars, tell me that right now?

Chris Holdheide: I feel like it's worth fifty dollars a month.

Shane Sams: Chris, you're not listening.

Chris Holdheide: Okay.

Shane Sams: Why do you feel like, if you said, "I can teach you how to make five hundred dollars a month." Why is that only worth fifty dollars?

Chris Holdheide: I don't know. I'm just thinking what I was gonna price it at, that's all.

Shane Sams: Fifty dollars a month is fine. You can do that. But try to focus on the result.

Chris Holdheide: Okay.

Shane Sams: And not focus on yourself. Because I think you're judging it on, "Does it look as good in the lighting? Did I make a good enough PowerPoint? Did I say it in an epic Nelson Mandela speech?" You know what I'm saying?

Jocelyn Sams: Is it five hours long?

Shane Sams: Is it, yeah, is it, does it give them the result? That's all you've got to worry about it. Okay? And I've seen your stuff. I like your website. Talking to you, it's fine. Your stuff is well worth fifty dollars a month 'cause the result's worth more. Okay?

Chris Holdheide: Awesome.

Jocelyn Sams: Alright, so let's kinda jump into your next question. As far as building this thing, what can we help you with?

Chris Holdheide: My biggest, my big thing there is trying to lead them down a path and how to build that up as I go in my business. I'm trying to figure out, okay, I've figured out in my first course, just basically how to get them to start their side business, but I'm trying to figure out how, where I need to lead them after that point and stuff like that.

Shane Sams: Well I mean, I think you just look at your own experience here because you've spent the last ten years literally selling everyone else's stuff, right? And like you've spent the last ten years writing content designed to get them to click other things on your site, right? So that copy writing and that skillset that you've developed over the last ten years is the same thing you're doing here. Like getting people to go click on your product is the same as getting them to click on someone else's product, right? And just like in affiliate marketing, if you're an affiliate marketer, you might sell one product in January for affiliate Bob. Here's Bob the affiliate, right? But then in February, you might have different promotion for Sally, your other affiliate, you know what I'm saying? And you just teach people, you write different email campaigns to sell different products.

Shane Sams: So what you have to do is, you have to look at the steps to guide them and say, well what's step one? Well that's, I'm gonna convince them to buy step one. Well then you look and you say, what's step two. If step one is starting their side hustle, then step two is going to be growing their side hustle to x sales per month or whatever. So you just sell that. That's what you guide them to, you just write the emails that get them to that. Maybe you've got another tier of membership or you just answer their questions like along the way. All you have to do is figure out how you've always sold everyone else's products and how you always sold the next affiliate's thing, and then you just have to map out your path that you want people to follow. What's the success path that your people need to follow to get from zero to a thousand dollars a month, right? Because you can teach that, you've done it for years.

Shane Sams: You need to write that path out. Know the six steps they have to do to get there and then take them through that path with all of your email and copy.

Chris Holdheide: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, I've been trying to figure out that path, I guess but when you say that, that makes a lot of sense.

Jocelyn Sams: And do you have people that you have worked with that this process has worked for? So in other words I'm asking do you have testimony?

Chris Holdheide: The only one I have is my brother. I've been coaching him on a few things here and there and you know I helped him get a few coaching calls lined up and stuff like that.

Shane Sams: You can make a million dollars on one testimonial.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, that's totally fine. The only unfortunate thing in your case is that the picture's gonna look just like you.

Shane Sams: That's not his brother. That's him. He just changed shirts.

Jocelyn Sams: This scam artist is trying to tell me...

Shane Sams: Y'all need to be on camera together, but in this day and age with deep fakes and I don't know, he's got some trick camera stuff going here. That's what's happening.

Shane Sams: You just have to have some kind of success. There's only two ways to actually sell courses. You can sell a lot of course to a lot of different people, right? You can say, "I only teach the first step." Well once they're past the first step, they leave you and go somewhere else. That's cool. You just need to find more people that need to take the first step. Or the real money is in selling your existing customers your next thing, right?

Shane Sams: So you can sell them their next product, like beginning side hustle and then intermediate side hustle, turning it into a car payment, right? You know, get started, get it to five hundred a month. That might be your first two parts of the path. Okay? And you don't have to complete the whole path. You just need that path, right? It's the same way we get people to pay for our membership. We just treat our membership, each month is like a different product. You come in to the Flip Your Life community and maybe you don't have an idea. So your first month you're going to be researching your idea, talking about your idea in the community, getting feedback from me and Jocelyn on our member calls and then finally, month one, "I've got my idea. I've set some goals. Now what?"

Shane Sams: Okay, it's time for month two. Now we're gonna figure out what your customer looks like and we're gonna start building your product. Month three, what do we do next? Well we're gonna build out this product, and then we're gonna get your website started. Month four, we're gonna try to launch this thing and build an audience. Right?

Shane Sams: We just have a path, we know how long it takes. We know what people need to do next. And like that's how we sell membership. We treat it like a different product. Does that make sense?

Chris Holdheide: Yeah.

Shane Sams: As you're building yours out, you need to do the same thing. In the beginning, you know, when so and so creates their side hustle, what does the first month look like? That's the easiest way to think about this. That's how you get them in the first course. But then what does the second month look like. "Okay I've got this website, I've got some affiliate links. How do I promote this thing?" Okay maybe the second month is, well you start a social media page with some ads behind it, whatever.

Shane Sams: So you just have to create a success path for your business. Figure out, we assume that it will take people about as long as it took us to get to the promised land which is thirteen to eighteen months, right? So our success path is actually written out over thirteen to eighteen months. That's how I thought about the Flip Your Life blueprint and I was like what did we do in month one? What did we do in month two? It's the same thing for our education businesses, right? What does a teacher do in August that teaches US history? I have to know that right? What do they do in September? Okay well here's September's lesson plans. What do they do in November?

Shane Sams: And we just go through that path and that's how you build retention. That's how you get people to take the next step, is 'cause you know where they're gonna go, 'cause you've already been there and you drew the map and you're just taking them down the map. Like Dora the Explorer. Right?

Shane Sams: That's probably your next step is actually creating that success path and that'll build out that monthly retention for you and your business and help you sell the next thing, help you sell the next month and keep people paying about forty-nine dollars a month every single month.

Chris Holdheide: Awesome.

Jocelyn Sams: All right, so that is kinda a lot of information. How do you feel about all of those ideas?

Chris Holdheide: I feel like I'm ready to get some stuff done. I'm excited.

Shane Sams: Chris, you sound a little overwhelmed, dude.

Chris Holdheide: Yeah.

Shane Sams: You sound a little like that. So let's boil this down and eat the elephant one bite at a time here. Like, what do you think your very next step should be?

Chris Holdheide: As far as my next step should be, I feel like I need to finish up my membership and I need to start working on, start promoting and stuff like that.

Shane Sams: Figure out what your next step is for your customer, right? I want you to try to create, on paper, an outline, handwritten. I want you to number one to twelve, okay?

Chris Holdheide: Okay.

Shane Sams: Now I want you to imagine that you've got someone that is just starting their side hustle journey, okay? And I want you to say, "Month one, I've already got. That's my course that exists right now." That's gonna start the side hustle. And then I want you to write a path for that person to walk. Each month, what do they need to do to get to a thousand dollars a month? Okay? What did you do to get to that point? To get to thousand dollars a month? And then just an outline. You get one line per step. Does that make sense?

Chris Holdheide: Right.

Shane Sams: Now you'll know that so you can start building that. The next thing you'll do is build the second step. That's all you gotta do. When that's done you build the third step. And then as you roll this out and more people join it and get into the membership and we start promoting that thing, they're gonna have somewhere to go so they stay and you don't have to worry about it anymore, okay?

Chris Holdheide: Awesome.

Shane Sams: All right guys, that wraps up another great interview with one of our Flip Your Life community members. Super excited to see what Chris does building out that success path for his customers which will lead to a lot of success in his business.

Shane Sams: If you need help building that success path in your business, we would love to personally help you do that inside of the Flip Your Life community. All you have to do is go to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife and you can check out all of our great membership options. We've got options that start as low as nineteen dollars a month to get access to all the courses, all the training you need and join a community of hundreds of family focused entrepreneurs from all over the world who are building out their online business and building better futures for their families.

Shane Sams: So go to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife today. We would love to have you in the Flip Your Life community. Who knows? You may find yourself right here on the Flipped Lifestyle podcast some day.

Shane Sams: Before we go, we'd love to close the show with a bible verse. Jocelyn and I get a lot of our inspiration, motivation and business tips, believe it or not, from the bible. Today's bible verse comes from Second Corinthians chapter nine, verse eleven and it says "Yes, you will be enriched in every way so that you can always be generous. And when we take your gifts to those who need them, they will thank God."

Shane Sams: Guys, people need you. You need to build your business. You need to build your business just like us, just like Chris, just like all the people in the Flipped Life community so you can go out there and get those results to people. Take what you know and teach it to others so that their life can be better too and they will thank you for it with their hard earned money every single month in those membership sites that you've built. So, take that to heart, get out there, get started and until next time, do whatever it takes, flip your life. See you.

Jocelyn Sams: Bye.

Links and resources mentioned on today’s show: * Chris's Website * Flip Your Life LIVE 2019 Tickets & Registration Information * Flip Your Life community

Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!

Join the Flip Your Life Community NOW for as little as $19 per month!

https://flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife

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In today's episode, we help Evan overcome her fear of charging for her products.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jocelyn Sams: Hey y'all! On today's podcast we help Evan overcome her fear of charging for her products.

Shane Sams: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, where life always comes before work. We're your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. We're a real family that figured out how to make our entire living online, and now we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? All right, let's get started.

Shane Sams: What's going on everybody, welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. It is great to be back with you again today. Super excited, super pumped, cannot wait to talk to another member of the Flip Your Life community today about growing and building their online business so that they can find the freedom they want in their life. Our guest today is Evan Garrapy. Evan, welcome to the show.

Evan Garrapy: Thank you, I'm so excited to be here.

Shane Sams: We already changed Evan's life before the show even started. Because I asked Evan before we got going, I said, "How do you say your last name?" And she said, "It's really hard, it's Garrapy." And I said, "Oh, it's like therapy, but Garrapy." And she's like, "I've never thought of that!"

Evan Garrapy: So helpful.

Jocelyn Sams: Yes, we'll send you our bill for that later, right.

Shane Sams: Exactly. That was worth the call, worth the call.

Jocelyn Sams: All right, well we are very, very happy to have you on the show today, and I'm really, really interested in what you do. So let's talk a little bit about that. Tell us about you, your background, and about the website that you started.

Evan Garrapy: Yeah. In 2007, after my grandmother passed away, my dad's mom, I got really interested in researching family history, because I realized there were so many things I wanted to ask her, and I would never get the chance to. And one of them was about her German heritage that she was really proud of. And I just felt like, I didn't write anything down, I didn't ask her questions, so I scraped up enough money to buy an Ancestry.com account, and I taught myself over the next, what is it now, 2007, 12 years I guess, how to trace my family online. And I've learned a lot, so I started a website to teach other people how to do the same thing.

Shane Sams: That's amazing that you say that, and I want to dig deeper into your background too, like what you do outside of the online world. But I have tried to do the Ancestry.com thing, because I'm kind of like ... Everyone thinks, because we work online, that we know everything about computers, and every website.

Jocelyn Sams: False.

Shane Sams: This was false. So my mom one time, we got one of those DNA kits, and my dad got one. I tried to get on there and figure out how to start ... In the commercial it's like, "I clicked the leaf and I knew that Alexander Hamilton was my second cousin." That's so stupid because that is not how it works.

Evan Garrapy: Not quite.

Shane Sams: Once you get in it, you just get overwhelmed and confused. I couldn't figure it out, I gave up. I tapped out. So that's what you kind of do, right?

Evan Garrapy: Exactly. I kind of compare it to that last scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, where they're in that big ... The warehouse with all the crates. All the answers are in that big warehouse, but you would never know where to look unless you already knew where they are. So I just kind of teach people how to navigate the warehouse.

Shane Sams: That's amazing. That just shows ... We were talking off air about how, I'm like, "No one's ever done anything like this. This is an amazing niche." If you just keep figuring out things that you've figured out how to do, you will eventually figure out how to start an online business. It's just going to happen.

Shane Sams: Tell us more about your background too, like what's your actual background, what do you do for a living? What led, what's the nutshell version of how you ended up where you are today?

Evan Garrapy: I am technically an attorney. I don't always like to admit it but yes, I'm a lawyer. I realized pretty quickly out of law school that it was probably not a good fit for me, and I was really bummed out, because you obviously spend a lot of time, a lot of money, blood, sweat and tears to become an attorney, only to realize, whoops, I made a mistake. But at that point it's not easy to switch because of all the money and time, and all of your experiences in this one area. But my mom heard you guys on a podcast, and I want to say, was that on Dave Ramsey? Were you all on there? Were you on that one?

Shane Sams: I don't think so. Maybe somebody talked-

Evan Garrapy: You were on something that my mom heard. She even told me about you guys.

Shane Sams: Maybe somebody talked about us on Dave Ramsey. We need to look that up and see if it actually happened.

Evan Garrapy: It was something my mom heard, and I looked you guys up, and I started listening to your podcast from the beginning. And truly, this sounds so sad, but I was so miserable that I would cry on the way to work. But I would listen to you guys, and it made me feel better. Like I had hope there was something I could do eventually.

Shane Sams: Wow.

Jocelyn Sams: Good, that makes me feel better.

Shane Sams: I thought you were crying because of it.

Evan Garrapy: No.

Shane Sams: Like "It made me cry, you all were so mean."

Jocelyn Sams: I know, I was like, no one has ever cried over our podcast before.

Shane Sams: What you're saying is, you hated going to work, but this gave you hope that yes, there is something else.

Evan Garrapy: It did. I probably said that in a weird way, but it was some of the only hope I felt like I had. I really was down, I was like, I ruined my life. That sounds so dramatic, but I really just didn't know what I was going to do. Listening to you guys gave me an out, and I've just been kind of slowly working at it in bits and pieces, and started to take it really seriously, just this year.

Shane Sams: Awesome. That's why we do this show though, honestly, because I was there. I hated going to work. I had no hope after some horrible things that happened to us, or to me specifically, at work, and I was looking for something different. Because I felt the same way, like I went to college for this, I went to two Master's degree programs to be a teacher, and a coach, and coach football.

Jocelyn Sams: And that's not even anywhere near what Evan's done.

Shane Sams: Near what you did. And I had been teaching for nine years, so to even think about switching was overwhelming, you know what I'm saying.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, and so many of the people listening right now, there may be somebody listening in their car right now thinking, "Oh my goodness, this is me."

Evan Garrapy: Yeah.

Jocelyn Sams: So I'm just so glad that you've taken the next steps, and you're trying to overcome that.

Shane Sams: You said something really interesting there, I kind of wrote a note here as you were telling your story. You said you figured it out after you got out of law school, right. So what pushed you into law school? Did other people say, "You should be a lawyer, because doctors and lawyers make money"? What even pushed you down that path in the first place?

Evan Garrapy: People did say, they always said I should go to law school. Common thinking for a long time was, "You're a great writer," or, "You kind of like to argue," which I don't actually that much, "And so you should go to law school." And honestly, being a lawyer isn't about writing, and I don't like confrontation, so not a good fit for me

Shane Sams: Yeah. It's so funny though, how we get-

Evan Garrapy: And I did think I could make good money.

Shane Sams: It's so funny how we get those things in our head though, right. Like one person, one time, says, "You should be a lawyer," and you're like, "Yeah, I'm so lost in my life, and I have no clue what I want to do, so I'll do that." And then you get to the end of it and you're like, "That is not what I should've done seven years ago, what the world told me to do."

Jocelyn Sams: That's what I did in high school. I was in the FBLA. I won an award at a competition about computers, because you know, nerd. But anyway, I was like, "I'll be in business and do something with computers."

Shane Sams: So she went to be a computer programmer and all this stuff, and then just wank, opposite direction.

Evan Garrapy: Yeah, absolutely.

Shane Sams: It's just so funny how common that story is, that we find almost everyone seems to come into the community like, "I thought this, someone told me this, so I did that, and now I don't want this any more." That is such a common story, of everybody really.

Evan Garrapy: Yeah.

Shane Sams: Because none of us know what we're doing in our 20s. We're just kind of like, "Well my advisor said," or "My mom said," or "My dad said," and then we end up looking up going, "I wish I had looked in the mirror and said, what do you say?"

Evan Garrapy: Exactly.

Shane Sams: But you get a do-over now, you can do what you want. You totally have that freedom.

Evan Garrapy: I do. Like you said, I am grateful I went to law school, because I met my husband there, so I need to put that in, but I should've thought more about what day to day life is like as a lawyer.

Shane Sams: What kind of law do you do?

Evan Garrapy: Right now I'm doing consumer bankruptcy law. Chapter 7, Chapter 13.

Shane Sams: So it's all positive and sunshine and rainbows, it sounds like.

Evan Garrapy: There's happy people, nobody's ever crying at all, not stressful at all.

Shane Sams: Yeah, I know. Well let's do what we can to change the narrative and get you away from bankruptcies.

Jocelyn Sams: So you wanted to be an attorney, right.

Shane Sams: So you wanted to be an attorney. Although attorneys do have a good racket. We were talking off air about, lawyers do make crazy money. Because we have this trademark attorney, and if I look at his email in my inbox he charges me somehow. He's got like a retina scanner. "You looked at the email, that'll be $5.95." "What?" And if I email him I get a bill right back, it's like $39.24. It's just so silly, it's like they charge by the letter or something like that.

Evan Garrapy: Yeah. Certain types of attorneys can definitely get away with that kind of thing. I'll tell you, my local county prosecutor job though, I think they were offering maybe starting at 38 a year. Which after law school is not that much money, with the loan.

Shane Sams: That's for sure. That's like your monthly payment on your law school loan.

Evan Garrapy: Exactly.

Shane Sams: Right, exactly. So tell us a little bit more then. We know why you want to get away from that job, but what are the positive benefits that you see? Like if you can get this online business off the ground, flip the script, and change your life, what are the benefits you're wanting to get out of your online business?

Evan Garrapy: I want to build something that I can really be proud of. Everyone's actually impressed when you say you're a lawyer, but I'm not that proud of it. Not to sound bad, but I really want to build something that helps people, that I can be proud of and have freedom over my life. I'm kind of freedom-obsessed. It makes me feel really panicky thinking about someone else being in charge of my time.

Shane Sams: Me too. It drives me insane. It gets to a point where ... I drive Jocelyn crazy because she likes schedules, but I don't even like appointments.

Evan Garrapy: Me too, I know.

Shane Sams: Other than these podcasts, no appointments. You're not allowed to get on my calendar for any reason.

Jocelyn Sams: And I love appointments.

Shane Sams: Jocelyn loves appointments.

Jocelyn Sams: As many appointments as possible.

Shane Sams: She likes her rigid schedule.

Evan Garrapy: I'm the same. My husband is the Jocelyn in our relationship.

Jocelyn Sams: And speaking of which, speaking of charging people for stuff, I always say that I'm going to charge people for wasting my time. So if I come to the doctor's office, and I sit there for an hour, I'm going to send them a bill for my time.

Shane Sams: That's amazing.

Evan Garrapy: I want to do that too.

Shane Sams: And this is a really ... To piggyback off of that, what a worthy thing, to be able to make sure that people can find out who they are, where they came from, and complete their story.

Evan Garrapy: Yes.

Shane Sams: Or even think ahead to the place where it's like, "I wish I had asked all those questions." Well now we can make sure those questions get answered and exist before it's too late.

Evan Garrapy: Exactly. It just fills you with a sense of pride. If you go back far enough, really we're pretty much all related. So it makes you think of the world in just a totally different way.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, exactly.

Shane Sams: That's amazing. that's an awesome mission.

Jocelyn Sams: So I'm actually a little bit obsessed with your business topic right now, and I'll tell you why. And I've mentioned this on the show before, but I'm a true crime nut.

Evan Garrapy: Oh yeah.

Jocelyn Sams: I love listening to True Crime podcast, and one of the things, I know this is really kind of weird, but anyway-

Shane Sams: I think Jocelyn is planning her exit strategy. I'm just saying. She's listening to all these crime things like, "That's how that guy got away with it, hmm."

Jocelyn Sams: It does look a little suspicious. If something happens to you, it will-

Shane Sams: Her computer searches are putting her in jail if anything ever happens to me, I'm telling you.

Jocelyn Sams: That is not true. But I do like to look up information about serial killers and things like that. Anyway, the reason that I'm really obsessed with this ancestry information is because one of the cases that I follow, actually many of the cases that I follow, have been solved using DNA, by people's family members who have submitted their information to police databases and stuff. So anyway, that got me thinking, "I don't really know that much about my family. So anyway, murder shows have gotten me thinking how I need to know more about my extended family.

Shane Sams: Right, so she's been researching.

Evan Garrapy: Yeah, I know the case you're talking about I think.

Shane Sams: So you may have a customer, not just a coach, on this call.

Evan Garrapy: Great, perfect.

Shane Sams: I'm just saying, she maybe joining you.

Jocelyn Sams: Let's jump into, what do you have so far? What does your site look like, do you have anything for sale yet?

Evan Garrapy: I don't have anything for sale, but I have a blog with probably, I don't think there's even 20 posts I think. I have an opt-in set up with a free e-book. I have a small social media following and a YouTube channel, and I have a mailing list with about 60 people on it.

Shane Sams: That's awesome though.

Jocelyn Sams: That's a great start.

Shane Sams: When did you start that actual blog?

Evan Garrapy: I started the blog last year, but I didn't do much with it, just a few posts. Then this year, really only getting serious in January, even having a mailing list. So it's only been a few months.

Shane Sams: Sure. How many people do follow you on social?

Evan Garrapy: Instagram is a big one, that's like, well for me big, 500-something.

Shane Sams: That's awesome. Okay. I might need to-

Evan Garrapy: I really like Instagram, and people love pictures with their genealogies, so it's a good format for that.

Shane Sams: For sure. What about YouTube? Do you have any subscriber base?

Evan Garrapy: I think 16, but I only have four videos, and one of them is 1,300 views.

Shane Sams: Oh wow, that's good. What was it about?

Evan Garrapy: I did a video comparing the different options for family tree software. It's something you host on your own computer, just like any software that you track your own family tree.

Shane Sams: Got you.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, I love that.

Shane Sams: You could even do something like, it would be neat to have a video comparing, what's it called, 23andMe and Ancestry.com, the big players, or something like that.

Evan Garrapy: Yes. I do want to do that. In fact my dad just did an ancestry DNA test, and I'm going to actually use his results and try to compare.

Shane Sams: Yeah, document the whole thing. Yes, document the whole thing. And right now you do not have an actual product created though, right? Or you do?

Evan Garrapy: I don't have it up for sale. I've done the first part of a course that I wanted to release.

Shane Sams: Got you, okay.

Evan Garrapy: It's about a 40 minute video.

Shane Sams: Awesome.

Evan Garrapy: You're in good shape.

Shane Sams: Good shape, yeah. So basically we're just, right now you kind of ... It's a little backwards, because you really want to get the product done first before you start blogging stuff.

Evan Garrapy: Yeah.

Shane Sams: But it's okay, you caught it early enough where you're like, "I need something to sell."

Evan Garrapy: Right.

Shane Sams: And you have an email list offer that's actually converting. Because to get 60 emails off of 15 to 20 blog posts in such a short amount of time is a really good indicator.

Evan Garrapy: Yeah, I'm excited.

Shane Sams: Like to pick up 500 Instagram followers, even to get views on YouTube, that's all really, signs point to yes, that you're moving in the right direction.

Evan Garrapy: I'm excited about that.

Shane Sams: So basically, infrastructure wise, you kind of are doing this. Now let me ask you a quick followup question. You said you did a video about comparing the software. Is your product just how to research, or does it focus on something, like Ancestry.com, like how to use Ancestry.com?

Evan Garrapy: How to research is basically telling people how to use each of these websites, because they're these big databases, but there's not really great instructions on how to use them. So I do different posts and courses about each one, because people have different preferences of what they like.

Shane Sams: Exactly. So you might have in your membership, you might say, "Here's the Ancestry.com, how to use it course."

Evan Garrapy: Exactly.

Shane Sams: "Here's the 23andMe course. Here's this other software that you can manage by your ..." I'm sure there's more of these out there, right?

Evan Garrapy: That's the part one course I've done, is a course on how to use FamilySearch.org, which is like Ancestry.com but it's free.

Shane Sams: Oh, that's interesting. Do they have DNA and all that stuff, or no?

Evan Garrapy: It doesn't offer DNA, but they have just as many sources as Ancestry.com.

Shane Sams: Got you.

Evan Garrapy: And it's completely free to use, so I just wanted to teach people how to use it.

Shane Sams: Oh wow, that's amazing.

Evan Garrapy: I almost prefer it.

Shane Sams: Awesome. So your course could even show people how to do this from that. So it's like, you don't have to convince people to buy these softwares, you're like, "No, there's a free one. Just come here, let me show you how to do it."

Evan Garrapy: Exactly.

Shane Sams: That's a powerful way to train people, is if you can get them in ... We had a guy on the podcast ... Gosh, it's like four years ago. But he taught people how to go to Disney for free by credit card points.

Evan Garrapy: Wow, that's awesome.

Shane Sams: Yeah, he didn't have to sell anything though, he just had to get them to sign up for the cards. And then he showed them a free course how to use it, or he sold them a course how to do that. So it wasn't like he had to sell them anything, he just had to convince them to do it. And that's kind of like what you're doing too.

Evan Garrapy: Exactly. Yeah.

Jocelyn Sams: The only kind of red flag for me is showing people nuts and bolts of how to use software, because they change things a lot.

Evan Garrapy: Yeah.

Jocelyn Sams: So I'm wondering if maybe we can find a way to make it more evergreen.

Shane Sams: Yeah. It would be nice if there was a course that was like, "Here's the general thing how to do this, forget what software you're using. Here's the things you have to search for." And then also, you had the individual ones that you could update later, but you at least had the core thing that was like, "These are the first five steps to researching your genealogy, period." you know what I'm saying?

Evan Garrapy: Yeah. I think that's what I've done with the blog posts. There's a difference between the software, which is just where you store your information, and the websites, where you can actually research.

Shane Sams: Got you.

Evan Garrapy: So that's why I was doing it more specific. And the websites don't change that much, which is why I was going to do the courses on those. Because that's just research, and that's like going to the library.

Shane Sams: Exactly. If you're going to go that route, I've got to buddy that does a ... His name's Joe, and he has this website called Learn Scrivener Fast. And he teaches this-

Evan Garrapy: Oh yeah.

Shane Sams: He's a buddy, that's a friend of mine. Anyway, he does this piece of software that changes every once in a while. But he just puts it into his promotional calendar and he's like, "No, it's awesome. When they change something, I get to promote that I made a video on how to do the change." So it's almost like a new excuse to sell things to people. you know what I'm saying?

Evan Garrapy: Yeah, that's been a good way for me to think of content too.

Shane Sams: Exactly.

Jocelyn Sams: So you have a great start, and you have some people interested, you have some content going on, you're on social media, you're doing a lot of things right, which is awesome. But tell us something that is holding you back. Maybe it's like a fear, maybe it's a mindset issue, that is just kind of slowing you down a little bit.

Evan Garrapy: Fear of charging people, which I know is really common, which is probably why I've been blogging and making content, and not jumping into creating a product. Because I'm kind of procrastinating, jumping in and charging people.

Shane Sams: Why are you afraid to charge people? What are you afraid they're going to do?

Evan Garrapy: I'm not afraid to charge people, I don't like ... Like I said, I don't really like conflict, I don't want to deal with people saying, "How dare you charge for this," potentially. I know I just need to get over it, but ...

Shane Sams: You're a lawyer. You should be the most used to this. Lawyers charge for ... We've already talked about this. Lawyers charge for everything, you know what I'm saying. Have you had negative experiences like that though, as a lawyer? For example-

Evan Garrapy: Oh, every lawyer. Every lawyer. Yeah, they think everything should be free.

Shane Sams: Because you're a bankruptcy lawyer. You're literally charging people to go bankrupt. That's what bankruptcy ... you know what I'm saying? Think about that. "Hi, I'm bankrupt." "All right, that'll be $500 to file your bankruptcy." "No, I'm bankrupt, you don't get it!" So maybe you're just scarred from being ...

Evan Garrapy: I probably am. Being a lawyer is very scarring. Not to sound dramatic again, but ...

Shane Sams: It gets the mindest in. This is common though. I don't know why it is that we all are like ... Maybe it's just because we know so much about the thing, we think, why would anyone pay for this? Like you've been so deep down the ancestry research model, you know every nook and cranny that someone's birth certificate could hide around. So it's like, why would I even pay for this, why should I charge for this?

Evan Garrapy: Right.

Jocelyn Sams: And there are other people out there, like me, who are listening to crime podcast, and think hey, I need to know more about my family. Like I've heard of a couple of ancestry websites, but I don't know anything about it. And so I think sometimes what happens is that people like you, who are researchers most likely, and this is the way that I am too, I like to research things. I like to go and figure out what all is going on. And I think that you assume that other people already know the same things that you know. Is that part of it, do you think?

Evan Garrapy: Yeah, I don't want people to say, "This is obvious. Why would you charge anyone for this?" Because I've been doing it so long, I just think of it as being obvious.

Shane Sams: It is obvious, but it's almost like disconnecting the price from you. We talked to someone else about this on a podcast a couple weeks ago. You're not really charging people for you, you're not even really charging people for the answer, you're charging people for a shortcut. It's almost like a toll road. Like if a toll road will get you there in five minutes but traffic takes you two hours, you're going to pay to go on a toll road, because it's quicker.

Evan Garrapy: Right, definitely.

Shane Sams: Yeah, that's what we're really charging for. I say this all the time, and I say it to anybody in the community or out of the community. We have 55 total videos or something like that inside of the Flip Your Life Blueprint, our course area. You could probably find every bit of that information somewhere online, but it will not be in order, it will not tell you to this, then this, then this, you're going to spend countless hours of frustration in your life trying to figure it all out. Or, you just get on the fast ramp. We're like the fast pass line at Disney. You can go wait in line for three hours for the flight of passage, or you can go over here and get in the fast pass line and just jump on the ride.

Evan Garrapy: Yeah, so true.

Shane Sams: That's what you're really charging for. So don't even think about it as, you're charging them, or that you're charging them for your content. You're giving them the thing they want as fast as possible.

Shane Sams: For example, let's go back to your original inspiration for this business. Grandmother passed away. You wished you had known more about her German heritage.

Evan Garrapy: Yeah.

Shane Sams: Someone else is sitting there right now, and they're looking at their grandparent, and they're like "Man, they could be gone, and if I don't get this done now and figure this out, they may not even know where they come from." So at that point it's a matter of hurrying and getting people to get to where they need to be faster, and you're helping them do that. It's kind of like a mission then, and not a business. Like "I have to get people to do this, so that they can get there faster." And if you can tie your pricing to that result and to that mission, it removes you from it. You don't have to feel bad about it any more.

Jocelyn Sams: I just thought of an example for this. It reminds me of sort of a tour guide. So years ago, almost 15 years ago, when Shane and I got married, we went to Niagara Falls. Niagara Falls is a state park, you can go check it out by yourself, certainly there are a lot of different activities you can do there, but you can go and look at the falls by yourself. But instead we chose to do a tour, and we paid someone to take us around and tell us information.

Jocelyn Sams: Remember that crazy guy who said "Okie dokie" on the bus?

Shane Sams: "Okie dokie" everywhere we went. I do remember that. "Okie dokie, come on guys. Okie dokie, get on the boat."

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, and so we paid for that tour because we wanted somebody else's expertise. We wanted them to know where to go. We didn't want to have to wade through all the information, looking everything up on our own. we wanted someone just to take us to all the best places.

Evan Garrapy: Yeah.

Shane Sams: Yeah, we did this out in San Diego too one time. We're total tourist nerds when we're out traveling. But when we're in a town, we want to see the most things that we can see as fast as possible, and we just can't find it all by ourselves if we're only going to be there for like two days. So we took a tour in San Diego and they took us all over the place, and we got to see the big mountain with the cross on top of it, we got to see Balboa park, all these other things.

Evan Garrapy: Wow.

Shane Sams: One time in New York, we were only there for a limited time because we were watching a basketball game, UK was playing Duke, and we said, "How can we tour the city as fast as possible?" So we got on a boat and they took us around the outside of Manhattan. And we just went around the island and they just pointed everything out to us.

Shane Sams: That's what you're doing. You're like, "You don't have time. You need to listen to me. Trust me, this is the best thing for you, and it is my mission to make sure that you don't miss this moment with your family." That's what you charge for.

Evan Garrapy: That's a really good way of putting it.

Shane Sams: It's an obligation basically. You have to charge for this to get them there faster, or they won't be able to do it.

Jocelyn Sams: And the thing that you have to remember too is that 90 to 95 out of 100 people are going to be like, "No, I don't want that, I can find that for free online," or, "I can figure it out."

Evan Garrapy: Right.

Jocelyn Sams: You want to worry about the five to 10 people who are like, "Yeah, this is awesome, and I can't wait for you to show me what you know."

Shane Sams: I'll tell you, this is the last thing I'll say about pricing fears. Because this is really common. We had it, you have it, everybody listening at some point is going to be like, "I have to charge for something," and you almost feel guilty about it.

Evan Garrapy: Yeah.

Shane Sams: Here's what we've learned. We've probably had ... I bet you that Jocelyn and I have had at least probably four to five thousand transactions over all of our businesses in the last so many years. Literally sold that many products to people. Like elementary librarian, history teacher, football coaching, Flipped Lifestyle, thousands of people have actually bought something from us. Over that same time we've actually helped some people. We've given them free resources, we've hooked them up because we felt bad for them because they had a really bad situation, whatever. And what we have learned is that 90% of the time, the people who pay, pay attention, and they will actually follow through. The people who go and get the freebee, they don't, because they just don't value it. So it's almost like if you don't charge them, they won't take action and learn about their family.

Evan Garrapy: That's true.

Shane Sams: If you just give it away for free, they're just piddling, they're not actually just trying. You actually help people when you charge them, because they give you their hard earned money, they will now take action and get the value out of the product you sold them. So just make sure you know that, that it's actually good for people to pay for something.

Evan Garrapy: Yeah, definitely.

Jocelyn Sams: So that seems a little bit overwhelming. Do you think that that helped you?

Evan Garrapy: Definitely. I agree completely with what you're saying. I know a little bit from being a lawyer. People who do free consultations, the people that don't end up being good clients. But if you charge, even if it's $5, to meet with someone, it ends up usually working out better.

Shane Sams: 100%, yeah, because both parties are invested, and they care about each other, you know what I'm saying. And they also care about getting the result that they're both entering into the agreement for, so it makes more sense. We say this all the time too, every person we've ever given a free membership to Flip Your Life, for a hardship or anything, I can never think of one person that actually went ... "Here, we will help you, we feel bad, do this, we're trying to do something for you," and they never follow through. So there came a point where we just said, "We're not doing this any more." People are going to be charged, or they're not going to do it.

Evan Garrapy: Exactly.

Jocelyn Sams: So we've kind of talked a little bit about your fear. Now let's talk about actual business strategies. What do you need help with right now?

Evan Garrapy: I think I know what you're going to say, but I keep going back and forth with whether to start out with a course, and try to make it apply to as many people as I can, or do I have to do a membership right out of the gate?

Shane Sams: Well you know what we're about to say.

Evan Garrapy: I know, that's why I don't even know why I asked. I bought the buddy boss theme, I'm ready to go.

Shane Sams: So she knows. Honestly though, that's a good question. There's very limited or rare chances that we will say just do a course. If you had 500,000 people following you for some reason, because you had something go viral, that actually does make sense to do. If you have a huge audience, like a massive audience, it can make a lot of sense to have like a $500 course, and go ahead and try and sell it. Because you can make a lot of money upfront really fast. But when you're starting out with your own following that's good, niche, you've got to few people following, you've got 500 people on Instagram, 60 people on a list, it makes a lot of sense to start the membership right away, because you can start recurring revenue. Like if you sell 20 of those people on that list right now at $50 a month for your help ... And I'll also tell you ... You've been doing this since what, 2007? Studying your genealogy is not something you take a course and do it in a week.

Evan Garrapy: Right.

Shane Sams: It's something that you basically get into and you do it forever. That's a perfect membership model. "How do I do this? How do I go to the next level? How do I go deeper? How do I find this? I'm having trouble finding my great great great grandmother, where do I look?" They're going to need that support that a membership can only provide. And if you sell 20 of them right away you've got $1,000 a month. You sell 20 more, you've got another $1,000. You start building an actual sustainable income right away.

Evan Garrapy: Yeah.

Shane Sams: So you could probably go ahead and just launch the membership straight away, and just sell it as a, "Let me help you research your family." You can get the course inside to get started, and then every week I will do office hours where you can come and tell me where you're stuck.

Evan Garrapy: Yeah.

Shane Sams: Or you could even design the course in a way like, "Month one on Ancestry.com, here's what you've got to do. Month two ..." Because you've got to go in and set all that stuff up, and make your links and your connections.

Evan Garrapy: Oh, yeah.

Shane Sams: So you could actually just set it up like a 12 month program, like "One year from now you will know everything that could ever be known about your family tree." Right?

Evan Garrapy: Right.

Shane Sams: Then people get obsessed with it, they stay with it. And I'd say, like Jocelyn loves ... Our personal assistant who works at our house, Jocelyn got her listening to crime podcasts, so that's what she listens to while she's working. And that's all they talk about when they're not talking about what's going on around the house. I say these people will geek out together when they find some artifact of ancient yore or something like that, whatever. So it seems like a community would really bind together around this product.

Jocelyn Sams: I really don't think that there's a wrong answer to this question. If you want to create the course and then later create a community, I think that's fine.

Shane Sams: This is one of the rare instances too, Jocelyn, where I think that you could sell both. Like sometimes we say don't sell your courses outside of your membership, but like Jocelyn was saying, what if somebody really just wants the ancestry course, and they don't really care about talking to anybody else?

Jocelyn Sams: Or if I just want to worksheet, or a little thing that shows me the best way to go about looking all the stuff up. I mean I might want to buy that, and I don't really want to talk about it or anything.

Shane Sams: Yeah, exactly. So you could almost offer both. Like you could have, each individual platform could have its own course, but all of them could be in a membership if they wanted to come in.

Evan Garrapy: oh yeah.

Shane Sams: That's where the people really geek out. Because I know people that are a member of all of them. Like, "I got my DNA for 23andMe and my Ancestry, I want to compare them." Right, they get really into it.

Evan Garrapy: That's how I am.

Shane Sams: Right, exactly, so if you exist, there are 105 other people somewhere like you. You just have to get them all to join your membership so you can help them geek out better.

Evan Garrapy: Yes exactly. I love that.

Shane Sams: How big is this audience? How many people actually use Ancestry.com or whatever?

Evan Garrapy: I think the last time I looked, they have either six or seven million members. And that's a lot of people.

Shane Sams: See that's amazing. That's a lot of people. You only need like 100 of them, you know what I'm saying.

Evan Garrapy: I know.

Shane Sams: To replace your lawyer income it's probably going to be a little more, but 200 people paying $50 a month is 120,000 a year. That's a lot of money. Also too, when you can target a big ... You can go into Facebook and probably target Ancestry.com followers. You could literally show people who've liked Ancestry.com's Facebook page an ad that says, "I will teach you how to use Ancestry.com." Then they go and they get the thing ...

Evan Garrapy: Yeah, exactly.

Shane Sams: Have you ever thought about ... I know you're blogging, but have you ever thought about ... Doesn't this sound like Crime Junky Jocelyn? What if it was like a podcast where you interviewed someone who found a really great story from their history? you know what I'm saying, or you talked about these things-

Evan Garrapy: Oh, that's a good idea.

Shane Sams: Or these things, like you could even read case studies of where people have discovered crazy things like that. It seems like this could be like a cool-

Evan Garrapy: It's in the news now too, more and more.

Shane Sams: Oh yeah.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, for sure.

Evan Garrapy: With ancestry DNA in all the crimes that they're solving.

Jocelyn Sams: Absolutely.

Shane Sams: You could do a conspiracy theory episode too, like, "Is the government really just using Ancestry.com to register my DNA?" I want to know that!

Evan Garrapy: I would love that!

Shane Sams: Tinfoil hat on, this is my tinfoil hat going on.

Evan Garrapy: My husband always calls me a conspiracy theorist, so he's going to love when he hears this episode.

Shane Sams: That's amazing. So basically, circle back around though, I always recommend that people think at least about how they could turn it into a membership in the beginning. Because small lists can make big income, if you have a recurring revenue model. Small lists do not make a big income when you're just selling courses, I don't care if they're $1,000 a piece. Like if you've got 100 people you might make 10 grand, but what happens next?

Evan Garrapy: That's it.

Shane Sams: So you'd rather find people, get them to join the thing, and get them to go.

Evan Garrapy: Yeah. So do you have an idea about what I should charge for something like that, like a membership course, for this idea?

Shane Sams: What does Ancestry.com charge? I know they have monthly product.

Evan Garrapy: Yeah, they have tiers, and it's annually, or biannually, and I think the very cheapest one is like $150.

Shane Sams: A year?

Evan Garrapy: A year.

Shane Sams: A year?

Evan Garrapy: That's a year, but it's just for the library. Like it doesn't teach you how to use it. It's literally just an expensive library card.

Shane Sams: What's their more middle tier option, or whatever?

Evan Garrapy: $200 or $250 a year I think.

Shane Sams: If you just think about it this way ... Let's say that middle tier is their best seller, which it usually is, that's why it's in the middle. If I divide 250 by 12, that kind of works out to like $20 a month. You see what I'm saying?

Evan Garrapy: Yeah.

Shane Sams: I think that's probably a good starting place, only because you know people are paying for the access to the research for $20 a month. It only makes sense they're willing to pay $20 a month for something. So it's like, why not just charge what they're already charging to teach them how to use the tool. Because the answer to that question is, how much are people willing to pay? Well we know they're willing to pay about $20 a month. Let's start there and then see how high we can push it, basically.

Evan Garrapy: Right, that makes sense.

Shane Sams: Yeah. Just let the market tell you, "Someone who's interested in Ancestry.com information is willing to pay $20 a month, therefore they would probably be willing to pay $20 a month to learn how to use the stupid thing they already bought.

Evan Garrapy: Yeah.

Jocelyn Sams: All right Evan, it has been such a fun conversation today. I feel like we've just kind of scratched the surface, but unfortunately we are out of time. So we always ask our guest, what is one thing that you plan to take action on based on what we talked about today?

Evan Garrapy: I need to focus on finishing up the courses I already have in progress so that I can put them into my membership site and get that out for people, and start having that recurring income.

Shane Sams: All right, what an amazing action step. I know Evan's going to get out there and take action and make that happen, and grow her online business. And we would love to help you grow your online business. So you heard an amazing idea for an online business today. Jocelyn and I, before the show started, said we've done hundreds of these episodes, and that is such a unique niche. You have a unique idea, you have a unique niche, that you can get into if you will just take action and make it happen.

Shane Sams: If you need help researching your idea, we have courses inside of the Flip Your Life community that can help you pick what you're going to do online. All you have to do is go to FlippedLifestyle.com/FlipYourLife, and you can learn all about how you can join the Flip Your life community. We have plans starting for a little as $19 a month to get you all the coaching, community support, and content you need to get started. That's FlippedLifestyle.com/FlipYourLife. We would love to see you inside.

Shane Sams: All right guys, that is all the time that we have for today, but we like to close every episode of the Flipped Lifestyle podcast with a Bible verse. Jocelyn and I get a jot of our inspiration, motivation, and business advice from the Bible, and normally we share a verse with you, but our guest Evan had a verse that she wanted to share with you today, so Evan, take it away.

Evan Garrapy: Yes, this is from Matthew Chapter 5, 14 to 16. It goes, "You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden, nor does anyone light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on the lamp stand, and it gives light to all who are in the house. Let your light shine before men in such a way that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven." I picked that, and it goes back to what you said about having an obligation to using your talents to help people. So that's what I try to do in my work, my online business.

Shane Sams: Ooh, I got chills. That's a great Bible verse. That's an awesome Bible verse, Evan. Thank you so much for sharing that.

Evan Garrapy: Yeah.

Shane Sams: All right guys, make sure you get out there, make sure you take action, make sure you let your light shine, and go out there and help the people that you were meant to help through your online business. Until next time, get out there and take action. Do whatever it takes to flip your life. We'll see you next time.

Jocelyn Sams: Bye.

Links and resources mentioned on today’s show: * Evan's Website * Flip Your Life LIVE 2019 Tickets & Registration Information * Flip Your Life community

Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!

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In today's episode, we help Crystal launch her product and find customers.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jocelyn Sams: Hey y'all. On today's show, we help Crystal launch her product and find customers.

Shane Sams: What's going on, everybody? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. Super excited to be back with you today. We've got another member of the Flip Your Life community on the show, and we are going to help them take their online dreams to the next level. Want to welcome Crystal Harper to the program today. Hey, Crystal. How you doing?

Crystal Harper: Hey, guys. Thanks for having me.

Shane Sams: And I'm super excited to have Crystal on the show, because Crystal is one of our private mastermind people. We've been working with her for a few weeks, now. And she has taken massive action and made massive progress in her online business, and we're ready to get to the next level, and go to the next steps.

Jocelyn Sams: All right, it is great to have you here today, and I look forward to everyone else in our audience knowing more about your business and what you are up to. So let's start out by telling everyone a little bit about you, your background, and what you are doing online.

Crystal Harper: Okay, well I got my bachelor's degree in psychology back in 2007. And back then, I was planning on getting my PhD in clinical psychology, but I actually had a daughter right after I graduated, so I decided to take time off from school. I became a waitress. I wanted to be on my daughter's schedule during the day, so her dad watched her at night, and I worked at night. But when I turned 30, and my daughter started first grade, I decided to go back to school for my teaching certification, thinking that I would be on my daughter's schedule. But once I was in the program, I realized that wasn't really the case. So I started thinking that working in the classroom wasn't really what I wanted to do, so I decided to go back to school again and get my Master's degree in e-learning, which I will graduate from in December.

Crystal Harper: So I've just kind of been on the fence of where I'm going. And then I ran into you guys, beginning of April, and I just felt like that's where I needed to be. I've just always wanted to own my own business, but never knew how I could possibly do that. Yeah, like I said, I just found you guys and the rest is history.

Shane Sams: It's funny, because Crystal, when she says, "I found you guys," here's what she actually means. So Crystal finds our podcast, signs up for the membership, buys a ticket to Flip Your Life live, and she went to our private mastermind, all within a week. I'm watching this happen, as the week's going on. Monday, I see ... Like, "Oh, we got a ticket to Flip Your Life live. Whoa, they joined the community. Wow! They signed up for private coaching!" What is going on here? So you dove into the deep end.

Jocelyn Sams: You went all in, Crystal.

Crystal Harper: I did.

Jocelyn Sams: I like that. And you're also our people because I like how you're like, "Okay, so I started out to work in education, and then I decided I didn't want to work in education."

Shane Sams: Pivot.

Crystal Harper: Yeah. Right?

Shane Sams: All right, like, "Fork in the road, go left. I don't even know what's right. Let's just go left."

Jocelyn Sams: Oh, that's sort of the way we were. We were kind of like, "We want schedule flexibility. Let's be teachers." And then we're like, "No. Let's not."

Shane Sams: That's not as peachy as you think it is. You Know?

Crystal Harper: I know.

Shane Sams: But it is really important for people to take that lesson, though. Just because you've already invested a certain amount of time into something doesn't mean you have to keep going down that road if you don't want to do it. And when you realize you don't want to do it, you don't just finish something. When we quit our jobs, I sat down and gave my letter of resignation to the principal. Right? And he looked at me and he goes, "How long have you been teaching?" And I said, "Nine years, going on ten. This'll be my 10th year," if I was going to finish. And he goes, "Nine years." He goes, "You've got all that retirement in, and you're just going to give that up?" And I looked at him, and I went, "Yeah, but I've got 18 left. I'm not just going to finish the last 18 years to retirement because I've got 9 in the system." You don't do that. I realized I don't want to do this, so I'm going to pivot. You know?

Crystal Harper: Right. I mean, and it's all a learning experience, too.

Shane Sams: Exactly. And I know there's a lot of people out there that probably know your story. Like, "have lived your story." Didn't know what they wanted to do, they were waitressing, being a waiter, doing stuff, just kind of floating around. Went back to school, and now this sucks, too. "That's it, I'm getting a new degree." Go to another direction, and that's where it brought you today.

Shane Sams: But tell us about e-learning, though, because this is going to be ... I mean, this is where we're going to go with your online business, but tell us a little bit about e-learning. What does that mean to have a degree in e-learning?

Crystal Harper: Well, it's e-learning and instructional design, is what the actual program is. So I'm really learning how to design courses online. So I can actually even work in the back end and just design courses for teachers, or I can teach online. So pretty much the business that we've came up with is teaching teachers how to learn how to teach online.

Shane Sams: Exactly.

Crystal Harper: Or showing them how to teach online.

Shane Sams: And giving them that path. Right?

Crystal Harper: Right.

Shane Sams: A few weeks ago, we had a guest on. Her name was Gina, and she is an online teacher. She teaches English to Chinese children. Right?

Crystal Harper: Right.

Shane Sams: But she needs to ... It's different teaching on the internet. It's different teaching an online ... It's different creating an online course, than doing something live, in front of 30 students. You got to know how to transition. And there might be a lot of teachers out there in the future who never walk in a classroom, because they are going to be teaching from their home, on the Internet, and they've got to know how to actually manage that process.

Crystal Harper: Yeah, and I've realized that especially since starting this business, that there are so many different opportunities to teach online that I didn't even realize while I was going through the program, but just doing all of the research, I mean, there's so many opportunities.

Shane Sams: Well, tell us a little bit about your journey so far, though. This was not your first idea. Right?

Crystal Harper: Right.

Shane Sams: Right. What did you kind of dabble into before we started actually working together, and I was like, "No, don't do that. You can do this"?

Crystal Harper: I was just thinking about starting a business to help teachers learn how to work with technology better in their classroom, which I thought was a great idea, but then after talking to you, you kind of discouraged me of that.

Shane Sams: Well, we started researching it. It's always about the research, and nobody was really looking for that.

Crystal Harper: And I had even ... Yeah, I know. And I had even tried to find other people that were doing it, and I realized that there weren't.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, and so usually when that happens, it might make you think, "Hmm, this might not be the best idea."

Shane Sams: If nobody's selling anything, and nobody's running ads about the thing, there's probably nobody making money with the thing. Right?

Crystal Harper: Right.

Jocelyn Sams: And it doesn't mean it's necessarily a bad idea, it just might mean it's the wrong time for it.

Crystal Harper: Yeah, that's true.

Shane Sams: So tell us about your business right now, though. Now, what have we created? Now, what's amazing is, is just a few weeks ago, you had absolutely nothing. Right? And tell us what we're doing now. What's your idea, how it's evolved, and what you've actually already created?

Crystal Harper: Okay. Well first, I created the course. It took me almost, probably about three weeks, where I just created three different modules. So the first module is telling teachers about what opportunities they have to be able to teach online. And then the second module, what you helped me create, Shane, was the Harper Method. So I teach teachers, step by step, how to design their own online course.

Shane Sams: We have an onboarding call in our Voxer program, and we were like, "Well, what is this going to look like?" And we started ... Something happened, and we were talking about some kind of weird acronym, or something. And I was like, "What if your name was just an acronym?" And we just made up what the H, the A, the R, the P, the E, and the R were. Right?

Crystal Harper: Yeah.

Shane Sams: And by the end of this call, we were like, "I think we just invented a whole thing." It was like, "You are now the ... " Wait, trademark. "The Harper Method: How to be an e-teacher," basically.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, and education loves their acronyms, anyway. So it's perfect.

Crystal Harper: Yeah, it seemed to work out. It seemed to flow well for me, and it makes me look a little more original because as I did the research, there are a lot of people out there who are doing the same exact thing.

Shane Sams: Which is a good thing, though, because that means there is a market and you just got to get your piece of the pie, right?

Crystal Harper: Right.

Shane Sams: What is the Harper method? What did we come up with? Tell everybody about the Harper method.

Crystal Harper: Okay. H starts for helping you understand your students. So, it's analyzing the characteristics of your students and their learning styles, just to determine what type of class that you're going to be teaching.

Shane Sams: Okay.

Crystal Harper: A is assign objectives and learning theory. R is resources, selecting and preparing your resources and strategies.

Shane Sams: Okay. What's the P?

Crystal Harper: P is participation, just you determine assignments, assessments, and feedback of how your students will be participating. E is evaluate. So, you evaluate your course that you've designed and look at where you need to improve. And then R is revision and repetition.

Shane Sams: Awesome.

Crystal Harper: So, you just go over what you've evaluated and repeat the process.

Shane Sams: And here's what's funny, that didn't exist before our meeting. And now you've created the actual Harper method. We have modules and courses that actually teach this to e-learners to help them become better. And I always tell people this. They're like, "Everybody else looks so official and everyone's got their accreditation and certification." Here's the deal, somewhere at some point, every one of those certifications that you see anywhere, someone just sat in a room and made it up. All these acronyms, all these things that we have. Common Core and all that was just people who made stuff up. And you clearly have the expertise in this, because you have a degree in it.

Jocelyn Sams: And I was going to say, it sounds very professional. To me I'm like, "Oh, wow."

Shane Sams: "The Harper method".

Jocelyn Sams: That sounds very legit.

Shane Sams: That's like hardcore. But like you can go out and create these things. My favorite is like coaches. There's this coach named Brendon Burchard. And he has high performance coaching and getting a high performance coaching certification's a big deal. But that dude just made that up. He didn't go get accredited by Yale or anything. He just made it up and he started selling it. And it's like yeah, he created a system, you learn it, and it will help you be a better coach. Right?

Crystal Harper: Right.

Shane Sams: All you've done is created a system that will teach people who are not e-learners or not e-teachers to go be e-teachers, and you have every right to do that because you've got the expertise to do it. That's amazing.

Crystal Harper: Right. And it's funny because even going over the other models that are already out there, I feel like my model, I kind of ... Not made it better, but I tweaked things a little bit to where ... I can't. I'm sorry.

Shane Sams: Go ahead. Go ahead.

Jocelyn Sams: You're fine.

Crystal Harper: Well, you know how just things continually get better when you look at something, you can see what could make it better.

Shane Sams: Sure.

Crystal Harper: So, I just kind of looked at what's out there and I tried to make my model flow a little bit better than what I personally have seen.

Shane Sams: And the difference there between you and everybody else, okay? Anyone who doesn't take action, is you actually created this thing. There's probably 100 other people that looked at that same thing and said, "Well, I could do this better." But they never made the thing and you did. And that's why you've given yourself such an opportunity to go be successful and get your course out there, and actually start selling it and become this expert where people come to you to learn how to be like an e-learner, right?

Crystal Harper: Yeah. It's pretty cool.

Shane Sams: It's amazing.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay, Crystal. So, you got your product kind of outlined and where is it at right now? You have already been working on it. Have you completed it? Have you sold it? Where are you at right now?

Crystal Harper: I did complete it. At first I put it on Udemy and I haven't made any sales on Udemy. But I have also put it on my website. So, I started up my website. I've been building my social media. That's mainly what I've been focusing on the last week or so is just building up LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest.

Shane Sams: So, basically you're following the Flip your Life blueprint. It's amazing how things happen when you do that. You created your course. You put it in a third party market just so it's for sale, just in case. You've built your website and your social media, you're building your platform, okay? You're creating infrastructure that will support this and now you have to take it to the next level and just find people to buy the thing, right?

Crystal Harper: Right. Right.

Shane Sams: So, tell me about your e-mail list. You've actually got that out there, too. What's happening with your email list?

Crystal Harper: Yeah. I made a few opt ins or lead magnets, and put them ... I have blog posts. I wrote out, I have a bunch of blog posts going all the way through October, but I put lead magnets on the blog posts and then on my website and people have been opting in. So, I got my first email a little over a week ago and then I got another one, and then I realized that ... Going back a little bit, I didn't have a lead magnet on the home page. And I actually just fixed that a couple days ago and then all of a sudden I got six more people-

Shane Sams: That's amazing.

Crystal Harper: Yeah, all in the last 30 hours, I've gotten six more people added to my email list.

Shane Sams: Let me ask you this now. How many actual blog posts are done? Because one of the things that we really preach in the Flip Your Life blueprint is batching your content ahead so that you can go back and promote the content you've batched, right?

Crystal Harper: Right.

Shane Sams: So, how many of those have actually went live?

Crystal Harper: Live, there's probably maybe around eight or so.

Shane Sams: Oh my gosh. Now, think about that. People get frustrated at us sometimes because they listen to other people and they're like, "No, I have to have 100 blog posts and build an audience, and then I ask them what they want and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." But no. You've made your product, it's already for sale, and with just eight blog posts, you're being found. And people are subscribing. And now you can email them and you can sell them this product that you've already got that you can make money off. Even though it's in its infancy and it's just at the very beginning, like you can see things happening just because you're making things happen, right?

Crystal Harper: For sure, yeah.

Shane Sams: There's people that have 10,000 people reading their thing, but they never put an opt in up, so they never even get a lead, right?

Crystal Harper: Right.

Shane Sams: And you're starting to see it come to fruition.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, because they're like, "I'm not ready," or you know, "I don't know what they want." Well, here's the thing. If you make something, somebody might buy it. If you make nothing, there's no opportunity for anyone to buy it.

Shane Sams: Exactly.

Crystal Harper: Right.

Shane Sams: You're giving yourself massive opportunity.

Crystal Harper: Yeah, it's just putting yourself out there. I've just been posting on social media every day and I'm getting between 15 and 20 something views a day, so there's people out there-

Shane Sams: What's going to happen when you have 20 or 30 blog posts? And you've been consistently doing social media for months, right? You're going to start getting traction. The course will start evolving. You'll start talking to people and the first sales come, right?

Crystal Harper: Yeah.

Shane Sams: It's so funny how many times we've seen, I mean, we've literally watched hundreds of people go down the path and it always happens about the same way. And then we watch hundreds of others veer completely off the path and they just play on social media all day, and then they quit and say online business doesn't work, right?

Crystal Harper: Right.

Shane Sams: But it's like we said when we were first talking, "Hey, if you build the course and if you have a lead magnet, somebody's going to opt in." Lo and behold, guess what happened? You got leads, right?

Crystal Harper: Sure. Right.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay. My first question would be have you asked these people to buy yet? Are they in some type of a sequence?

Shane Sams: Like an auto responder? Have you actually sent them an email and said, "Hey, I have a course over here"?

Crystal Harper: I have not and that's part of my action plan for this week is to create an email auto responder, especially since I got six new people in the last day or so, I feel like I need to be emailing them. That's definitely my plan. I've been promoting the course on social media, but I haven't sent it out in email yet.

Shane Sams: That's where the real power is. Because usually social media is kind of only good for getting you emails, like getting you leads, and then you follow up with them to actually make the sales. But that's okay, though. You're going in order. I'm telling you, you're doing things step by step. And that's why you're going to be successful at this, because you've done it right. Now you know, you're like, "Wait a minute, I have people that raised their hand, I just have to email them. And maybe they'll raise their hand again, except this time there'll be a wallet in it."

Crystal Harper: Right. I know.

Shane Sams: You know what I'm saying?

Crystal Harper: It's crazy when you go step by step, but it really seems like it's working.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay.

Shane Sams: Okay, cool.

Jocelyn Sams: You mentioned a little bit about putting yourself out there, and I know that it's one of the fears that you have because I'm looking at your form that you filled out before the podcast, so let's talk a little bit about that. What fear is holding you back just a little bit right now?

Crystal Harper: My biggest fear is going live. I don't mind as much going on video or audio and you record it and they see it later, but I'm terrified of going live.

Shane Sams: What are you terrified of? Is that the real fear or is there something behind it? What are you afraid is going to happen?

Crystal Harper: That I'm going to mess up and there's no erase button. I just, I guess I need to build up my confidence. I know that I know it. I know that I know the materials. But it's just like sometimes I get tongue twisted or just I don't ... Like right now, I don't know what to say.

Shane Sams: I was kind of setting you up there as well, because I'm never short for words, you know what I'm saying?

Crystal Harper: Yeah.

Shane Sams: But what's cool about it, though, is one, you don't have to go live. I do encourage people to go live a lot, but if you don't want to go live, Crystal, nobody's got a gun to your head telling you to do it, right?

Crystal Harper: Right.

Shane Sams: I was talking to somebody the other day about, we were talking content strategies. And we basically had a little bit of a disagreement on what worked online or what was the best way to be successful. He was really pushing for like, "No, write one blog post a month, 3000 words, epic post. Deeply researched. That's the best way to get traction in your content."

Shane Sams: And I was like, "No, be prolific. Go out there and share something. Write an email everyday," like I do, right? Or something like that. I like a prolific strategy. Be like John Lee Dumas. Do a podcast every day for whatever. If you want to get traction, throw as much mud on the wall, whatever. We had an impasse about what we each wanted to do, but we could both easily point to successful people in either direction, right?

Crystal Harper: Right.

Shane Sams: And you will find as many millionaires on Pinterest as you will on Facebook. Right? You just will. It doesn't matter. You'll find as many millionaire real estate developers selling single family homes as you will selling apartment buildings, okay? There truly 100% is no right way to do this. It's just your way. And right now you've just done blog posts and they've gotten you subscribers, right?

Crystal Harper: Right.

Shane Sams: Don't feel like you have to do that. Now, that being said, also don't be afraid to do it just because you might mess up. If you write a blog post, you're eventually going to write blog posts that have a spelling mistake, okay? If you make YouTube videos, you're eventually going to say something crazy. If we were on a member call, the last member call that we did for the Flip Your Life community, twice a month we answer premium member questions for members. They show up, we answer questions.

Jocelyn Sams: We do it on video.

Shane Sams: We do it on video. It's in our bedroom and we have two chairs that sit by this big bay window that look out at the lake. We were sitting here and we were like, "Whatever." I look behind me and Anna Jo is taking off her clothes in the back of this video, putting on-

Jocelyn Sams: Well, she's changing into pajamas.

Shane Sams: She's changing into pajamas. Like the dogs were in here, we were in here, the kids are allowed to come in here. And she literally had her shirt off. And I'm like, "What are you doing?" And she's like, "I'm putting on my pajamas," like it was just nothing, right? But you can't avoid every mistake is what I'm saying. It's impossible. I wouldn't necessarily even worry about getting tongue tied. People probably would like that better if you weren't perfect.

Jocelyn Sams: And here's the thing for me, Crystal, is that the live video actually gives me a sense of peace about doing video because I know that it's live and I feel like people might actually be more forgiving because of that. And if something happens, I might just be like, "Hey, live video, you know." Brush it off. No big deal. But I feel like if I am editing something, it has to be absolutely perfect.

Crystal Harper: Right.

Shane Sams: It's like in Game of Thrones, the last season of Game of Thrones, someone on Twitter noticed that they had left a Starbucks coffee cup on the table during-

Jocelyn Sams: On ye old table.

Shane Sams: Like ye old table during a scene of this medieval fantasy novel. Right? You know? But it was like they got butchered for it because you've got this $100 million a year show that has all the time spent, an extra year editing it to make it perfect, and they still left a coffee cup in, right?

Crystal Harper: Right.

Shane Sams: But live, it's like crazy stuff just happens live. It's just like no big deal. And I also love live, too, because I think it's actually easier for me to do a live video than it is to prepare, because I spend so much time preparing when I have to do something and I know I've got to prepare it and edit it and stuff. And some times when I do a live video, i' just like, "I have an idea. I'm going to write three bullet points and talk about it and then turn it off." And those are usually my most popular videos.

Crystal Harper: Really?

Shane Sams: Yeah, always. It's so funny that live seems so scary, but both of us kind of have agreed that it's actually a lot easier to do live.

Jocelyn Sams: The more you do it, the easier it will become. This was something that was just really hard for me. It took me probably years. But now when we sit down to do a video, I'm not perfect at it. And I still mess up. But I don't even really care that much anymore. It's become so much easier because I've practiced it all these times.

Crystal Harper: Right. I can see that.

Shane Sams: Another thing, too, that I think people really intimidated with live video is the teaching. Right? One, you have to know your content when you're teaching live. That's true. I think most, a lot of people that are listening right now, your fear is not going live, your fear is people finding out you don't know what in the heck you're talking about, right? So, if you know what you're talking about, it doesn't matter. I could get on and talk about football all day. I could talk about the 3-5-3 defense for hours. I could talk about online business. You put me on. I did a 45 minute training the other day off of three bullet points that I wrote down literally walking in the door before the show, right?

Shane Sams: And it was like I just know I'm talking about things I know. So, this thing that you've invented called the Harper method, if you want to talk about it, it's your thing. You're going to know more about it than anyone else on the planet. You shouldn't be intimidated by that.

Crystal Harper: Right.

Jocelyn Sams: And just remember that ... I forgot what I was going to say.

Shane Sams: See?

Jocelyn Sams: See?

Shane Sams: Right there. Leave that in. We're not even taking the out. That's what happens.

Jocelyn Sams: Oh, okay. I know. And just remember that people do not expect you to have all the answers. It's okay to tell someone you don't know something. If someone asks you something and you're not sure, just be honest with them and be like, "Hey, I don't know the answer to that question. Let me look into it some and I'll be happy to get back to you later."

Shane Sams: And go after the low hanging fruit when you start. I think people think they have to do live videos that are like, "You're going to change the world with your next Facebook live," right? But sometimes a live video can be, "Hey, guys. Crystal Harper here. Founder and inventor of the Harper method. We've got a new blog post. It's titled The H in the Harper Method. Go check it out, I'm going to drop a link below." That's a live video.

Crystal Harper: Okay.

Shane Sams: You don't have to tell them that something's going on. Your live strategy doesn't have to be live teaching.

Crystal Harper: Okay.

Shane Sams: You can teach in those detailed blog posts and then just use live to show a little personality and tell people about your existing content.

Crystal Harper: Yeah, I like that. It's like baby steps.

Shane Sams: It's like baby steps, right.

Jocelyn Sams: Exactly.

Shane Sams: Or it's a strategy in and of itself.

Crystal Harper: Right, true.

Shane Sams: There's no right way to do this. Just incorporate all these awesome tools that we have to promote the stuff that you already do.

Crystal Harper: Okay. That makes sense.

Jocelyn Sams: All right. Let's talk about how we can grow this audience and get you to your next level.

Crystal Harper: Well, is it too early to be starting my membership? Because I kind of already have started looking into starting a membership, but that was one of my questions that I wanted to ask you guys, like when am I ready to take that step? I mean, I only have a few people even viewing me right now.

Shane Sams: Is it too early is what you're saying, basically?

Crystal Harper: Right, right.

Shane Sams: I don't think so. The answer to us for anybody that ever asks us this is no. It doesn't matter what you sell, it just matters that you sell, right?

Crystal Harper: Do I need to start a ... I hear you guys talk about beta groups. Is that the way I should go about it before I actually just throw a membership out there?

Shane Sams: Your first 20 members are your beta members anyway. Beta just means the first run and basically-

Crystal Harper: Okay.

Shane Sams: You've not started yet. You're literally crossing the finish line of having a thrown together platform with a product sitting in the middle of the stage, right?

Crystal Harper: Right.

Shane Sams: We just have to figure out how that product changes a little to make it into a membership. Basically, if you have the content living in a protected area on your site, the only thing you really have to add to it is access to you, and you have a membership.

Crystal Harper: Right.

Shane Sams: You could do member calls like we do. Teachers could come, ask you questions twice a month, and you charge a recurring cost for that. There's different ways that you could do that. You could sell the course and then sell a $19 a month talk to the founder of the Harper method twice a month kind of thing. Or you could package it all together. It really doesn't matter how you frame it, but I like when people start with their membership, because let's say you have 100 people on your list and you're charging $50 a month. If you get 10 of those people, you're making $500 a month, that's a car payment month one.

Shane Sams: When you have a membership, you don't have to convert so many people. If you're just selling a course by itself, like an email list of 100 people won't do it. But if you have 100 members, that'll totally do it. Like 100 times 50 is 60,000 a year, right? So, I like it when people start with the membership.

Crystal Harper: Okay.

Jocelyn Sams: The whole thing about doing the beta is that it gives you the opportunity to see if it's working for you and then also if it's working for your members. Like if you started out and you tell them that you're going to do two members calls a month and you don't like doing that or you want to change something about it, it gives you the opportunity to do so.

Shane Sams: You can evolve, basically, with the first members.

Crystal Harper: Right.

Shane Sams: You have an unfair advantage right now. Let's say you have 10 people on your list. You could literally record a video for all 10 of them and be like, "Hey, Christy. Thanks for signing up for my list. I'm getting ready to start a membership where I will personally teach you the Harper method. I'm only going to charge you $9 a month. This is eventually going to be $99 a month. But right now, limited time, get in. You can ask me questions about being an e-teacher. I can show you how to transition from classroom teaching to online teaching. I can show you how to do the curriculum and stuff. You'll literally get to talk to me, but it's a beta. So, I'm letting you select people and I select you," right?

Crystal Harper: Yeah, I like that.

Shane Sams: You could totally reach out to these people and try to get those beta members.

Crystal Harper: Okay.

Shane Sams: Any time you can build recurring revenue as early as possible, you should do it.

Crystal Harper: Okay.

Jocelyn Sams: And I would even reach out to them personally before you get this auto responder done. These people just signed up for your list, so take advantage of the small numbers right now and write them back personally. Say, "Hey, I just wanted to thank you for signing up for my list. Are there any questions I can answer for you?"

Crystal Harper: Okay. Cool.

Shane Sams: The auto responder, I think ... People always ask me this in the community. I don't know if we've talked about this much on the air, but we've talked about this in our member calls quite a bit. Your auto responder is almost like whipped cream on the ice cream. It's like the cherry on top. People get this romanticized version of online business, like "I built a product and I had a single lead magnet that led to seven emails, and that's how everyone joins." Honestly, that's not how barely anybody really joins, you know what I'm saying?

Shane Sams: The auto responder, we always say it takes the low hanging fruit. There might be 5% of your email list that ever just signs up because you asked them with an auto responder, right?

Crystal Harper: Right.

Jocelyn Sams: And there's no magical auto responder. There's no magical copy.

Shane Sams: No.

Jocelyn Sams: And one thing that we've decided to do is that we've decided to market like it's 25 years ago. We actually reach out to people. We send them videos. We reach out to our audience. We reach out to our members. We say, "How can we serve you? Would you like to buy a live event ticket?" These are things that we actually do and that's going to help you, especially in the beginning to build that know, like, and trust for people so that they will invest in what you're selling them.

Shane Sams: The auto responder is more like your day off insurance. Any time, like tomorrow, Jocelyn and I today had three podcasts that we recorded. We had a strategy meeting over lunch about some hiring decisions that we're making. We worked a lot today basically is what I'm saying. We put a lot of hours into the day and tomorrow we're going down to Gatlinburg, Tennessee to take our kids to the water park at Dollywood.

Crystal Harper: Oh, cool.

Shane Sams: We're going to spend all day with the kids tomorrow. But I know that if anybody signs up for my list tomorrow, I've got an auto responder. At least they're going to get an email. They're going to get that coming out. We're going to have, we have a promotion running. We have like a quarterly promotion, like a first day of summer promotion. So, I know that email's going to go out this week to people who are not in the auto responder. I know that members are getting emails about Flip Your Life live next week. It's already kind of done.

Shane Sams: Those automated emails are not the end all be all. The followup is what matters. If someone hits reply and asks a question about Flip Your Life live, I have those pushed to me. And then I make them a video and freak them out. Right? That's where sales are made. They're not made in the auto responder.

Crystal Harper: And that's one thing I love about you guys is how you guys are just super connected with your customers. So, it just makes you seem much more real.

Shane Sams: Well, you actually get to talk to us.

Crystal Harper: Right. It's so cool.

Shane Sams: Right. And everybody can make that happen in their business, because we really mean it when we say, like who wouldn't want to make $60,000 a year working at home? As a minimum. As a baseline. That's 100 people, $50 a month. 200 people, $25 a month. Those are real numbers. And they're really possible for anyone who's listening to this podcast right now. If you do what we say. Build recurring revenue, do a membership. Be real. Reach out. Let them know you're a real human. Let them know the Harper method is actually ran by Crystal Harper, and they can talk to Crystal, and Crystal will help them implement that to change the way they run their business, right?

Crystal Harper: Right.

Jocelyn Sams: And hopefully it will grow to a point where you can't do that forever, but there are still ways to get things like that done even if you grow to a really large number.

Shane Sams: And it's why we actually started the program that you're in. We call it S&J All Access is what we call it. And one of our big things is our community has gotten so big, right? It's impossible for us to literally talk to hundreds of people every day, right? But we find ways to go one to many. We find like the forums, we can jump in and kill a bunch of questions, the member calls twice a month. We're live, listening to people asking questions and answering them right there on the air.

Shane Sams: But the reason we started S&J All Access is because we have a philosophy where we say we need to be able to do for a few what we wish we could do for everybody. Right? I wish I could help every single person starting out do what you're doing. Like we're working like this. Crystal gets to actually talk to me on Voxxer. It's an app. Everyday she can send me messages. And I send her a message back and tell her-

Crystal Harper: I know, it's amazing. I love it.

Shane Sams: But I can't do it for everybody, right?

Crystal Harper: Right.

Shane Sams: And there is a cost associated to it.

Crystal Harper: Right.

Shane Sams: But that keeps us, like someone asked me one time at mastermind, they were like, "Why do you let beginners into your private mastermind, your S&J All Access? Why don't you only work with people who have 500 members, you're trying to get them to 1000?" Which I do have people like that. But that's not the heartbeat of our community. The heartbeat of our community is people like you who are like, "I've got an idea. This is gold. We've got to make it happen. How do I do this?" Like, okay. Let's go. Let's go make it happen. Right?

Crystal Harper: Oh, yeah. If I didn't sign up for the Voxer program, I know I wouldn't be where I'm at now, that's for sure.

Shane Sams: I mean, most people aways tell me, "I don't think I would have made my course." Right? And I'm like, "Yeah."

Crystal Harper: Oh, yeah.

Shane Sams: "That's why I won't let you start until you make your course."

Crystal Harper: Right. Now I'm really learning the steps. I know what to do next.

Shane Sams: Exactly.

Crystal Harper: It's super helpful.

Shane Sams: And you'll do the same thing with that personal connection if you keep it in your business, and that's what creates loyalty. That's what creates recurring revenue. That's what creates a stable online business.

Jocelyn Sams: All right, Crystal. We have had an awesome conversation today. It has been great talking to you. I cannot wait to meet you in person very, very soon. But before we go, we always like to ask our guest what is one thing that you plan to take action on based on what we talked about on today's call?

Crystal Harper: I think the first thing I'm going to do in the next day is personally email each of my email subscribers and thank them for joining my list, and maybe ask them some questions, or what they would like to know with teaching online.

Shane Sams: And anyone that replies to you, ask them to buy your course.

Crystal Harper: Okay.

Shane Sams: Sell it. You got to sell that thing or you're not going to make any money on it, you know what I mean?

Crystal Harper: Right. Yes. Sounds good.

Shane Sams: All right. Listen, thank you so much, Crystal. I know Crystal was very nervous when we first got on the call today and I know it can be very intimidating to come on a podcast when it's not something that you do all the time. Thank you for just sharing your fears and your vulnerabilities. Listen, we all have these things that we have to overcome and there's a lot of people listening that just probably nodding their head with this episode like, "This is me. This person is me and I'm going to do this because she's doing it." So, thank you for coming on the show.

Crystal Harper: Yes, thank you so much. I really, you just have to put yourself out there and just do it, even if you have fears. You just have to go for it. And it gets a little bit easier the more you do it, I guess.

Shane Sams: Let's just keep building it and changing it and we'll flip that life. We won't just change your life. We're going to flip your life, right?

Crystal Harper: Right. That's true.

Shane Sams: You're amazing, Crystal. All right, guys. What an amazing conversation that we had with Crystal today. She is doing everything she needs to do to start, build, and grow a successful online business. She's got all the pieces of the puzzle laying on the table and we're just putting them together one piece at a time and I cannot wait to see what that picture looks like for her. And I cannot wait to see what it looks like for you as well. We would love to help you take your next steps in your online business inside of the Flip Your Life community. We have plans available for every budget and every need. All you have to do is go to FlippedLifestyle.com/flipyourlife and check out all of the great content that we have inside. Check out all of the amazing community support that is waiting for you inside of the Flip Your Life community. That's FlippedLifestyle.com/flipyourlife and we would love to work with you inside.

Shane Sams: Before we go, we like to close every episode of the Flipped Lifestyle podcast with a bible verse. Jocelyn and I get a lot of our inspiration, motivation, and even our business ideas from the bible. Today's bible verse comes from Proverbs 28:10. The bible says, "Lead good people down a wrong path and you'll come to a bad end. But do good and you will be rewarded for it." That's all you have to do, guys. Take something that you know, that you can help someone else out there on the Internet with, build a business around it. And when you take action, you will be rewarded for it.

Shane Sams: So, thanks for listening today. Until next time, get out there. Take action. Do whatever it takes to flip your life. We'll see you then.

Jocelyn Sams: Bye.

Links and resources mentioned on today’s show: * Crystal's Website * Flip Your Life LIVE 2019 Tickets & Registration Information * Flip Your Life community

Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!

Join the Flip Your Life Community NOW for as little as $19 per month!

https://flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife

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In today's episode, we help Jennifer scale her yoga business online.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jocelyn Sams: Hey y'all on today's podcast we help Jennifer scale her yoga business online.

Shane Sams: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, where life always comes before work. We're your host, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. We're a real family that figured out how to make our entire living online. Now we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? All right, let's get started. What's going on everybody? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, it is great to be back with you again today. Really excited about today's guest because this is going to be an interesting show. We've been talking a lot on the podcast about different ways to live the flipped lifestyle, different ways to take control of your life, to be able to make your own money to become and stay self employed, offline, online, work from home, work in your office, wherever it may be.

Shane Sams: And this episode is going to fall squarely in the middle of every one of those possibilities because we have someone that has flipped their life through their brick and mortar business, but now they want to scale it online. There's all kinds of, we're at a fork in the road and there's 47 prongs on the fork. So we're going to dig into this a little bit today and see if we can make sense out of it. We want to welcome flip your life member Jennifer Dixon to the show.

Jennifer Dixon: Hey guys, thank you for having me.

Jocelyn Sams: We are very, very happy to talk to you today. Jennifer is one of our more active members. We see her over and over again on member calls-

Shane Sams: Asks amazing questions and I was telling her off air before we started the show. Set a new world record for amount typed into the podcast intake form. I mean we're talking to some multiple paragraphs here folks. I mean it was impressive. It was very impressive.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay, so let's just end this podcast now and maybe you should write a novel.

Shane Sams: It's prolific that's it, that's right. You just to write a book and it'll be so prolific that no one won't be able to help but purchase it.

Jocelyn Sams: Like podcast done that is like a record.

Shane Sams: That's a record. We'll see y'all next week. Bye. All right, so first of all, before we get started tell us about your background. How you ended up doing what you do now in your brick and mortar business. Right? And then maybe a little bit about how you found us and then we'll jump from there?

Jennifer Dixon: Okay. So you all can tell me to speed it up or slow it down because as you can tell, I'm not great at brevity. That might be the Southern roots. I don't know. We just go slow.

Shane Sams: We'll edit you out, it's okay.

Jennifer Dixon: All right, so I got into yoga about 10 years ago. I was really active and running, I was training for a marathon at the Disney marathon, actually with my sister and doing crossfit at the time. And I herniated a disk in my low back and I went from being able to sling weights around and run for hours on end, which I used to love to do, to basically being bedridden. I went through eight rounds of four epidural shots in my back. I wasn't even 30 at the time. And the next step really was surgery is what the doctor had said. And I was not willing to do that. My Dad's had back surgery and I am not a huge fan of the ramifications of that. So, my boyfriend now husband at the time was like, "Why don't you try yoga?" And I was like, "Yoga is for sissies." Famous last words.

Jennifer Dixon: And he took me to my very first heated power class, and when I was getting into the studio, I had to use the handles to get out of my car, my back was hurting so bad. And by the time the class was over, I could touch my toes and my back didn't hurt. And ever since then I basically practice nearly every single day for this'll be, I think my 10th year. And yoga's given me my life back, it's legitimately saved me from living a life full of pain. And that's how I got into it. I got certified right away to teach. I didn't really ever think I was teaching, I had a very, very lucrative career in the energy industry. And I just did yoga and taught yoga on the side because it was fun. And then lo and behold, I got laid off of my very lucrative position. I think you talk about that there's not really jobs security when you're working for somebody. And boy is that not the truth. Two weeks after coming back to work from having my first child, I was laid off. It was divine providence, I know it's totally a God work, because my husband was laid off Wednesday. I was laid off two days later Friday.

Shane Sams: Oh my gosh, woah that's crazy.

Jennifer Dixon: That's when you know God's got his hands into something. And it was funny, they had this box full of tissues on the table and I think they were prepared for this emotional breakdown. And I was like, all right, God, I have no idea what you're doing, but all right, give me my severance. What's my insurance? And then we moved home in two weeks. And I sat around on unemployment for about six months and I interviewed and interviewed. And at the time I was working 60, 80 plus hours a week, traveling everywhere. And that was really cool before I had a baby. But then once I had a baby, and the baby didn't like bottles she just wanted to nurse, and she lost all this weight in two weeks. I didn't want to do that anymore. And I found a yoga studio for sale. And I kind of laughed at first when I first saw it because I was like, we can't live off of that. Famous last words.

Jennifer Dixon: And at the end of unemployment I was like, all right honey, this is still there. Maybe this is what we should be doing. And my husband, he's a saint. God bless him I'm so lucky. He's like, whatever you want to do honey, whatever you want to do. And that was three years ago this month. Yeah.

Shane Sams: So you basically bought an existing yoga studio that had clients already? And you just kind of picked up and started teaching and then you grew this into a way to make a living and kind of control your schedule, control your life. And you've just got this place now and you've built a community up there and you have plenty of members and things like that?

Jennifer Dixon: Correct. Well, I'm not going to say we have plenty of members. We can always grow. I do have a fantastic community. The best thing about it is I have a group of teachers that love to teach, and they love to work and teach for me in the community, it's unlike any other yoga studio I'd ever been in, which that was kind of the things that I wanted when I took over the studio is a lot of times yoga studios are not known for being like tears is the joke that I like to use. You know, where everybody knows your name, and that is exactly what the studio is. You come in, we get to know you. We get to know about your family, we celebrate your successes. It's a very tight knit community and I love that part of it.

Shane Sams: Sure. But the challenges of the brick and mortar, how big is the area that you live in? Like how big is the town you live in?

Jennifer Dixon: Chattanooga. It's pretty good size. I think-

Shane Sams: Pretty good size. But you probably have a lot of competition. I'd say there's other yoga studios and other gyms and things like that?

Jennifer Dixon: Exactly.

Shane Sams: The problem with brick and mortar is sometimes you hit up against like geographic boundaries of how many clients you can have and there's a lot of overhead I would assume in something like that correct?

Jennifer Dixon: Correct.

Shane Sams: Like you said there are coaches and staff and things like that. So did that lead you to say, hey, wait a minute, maybe there's another way to make money online or like what got you into thinking about like online business?

Jennifer Dixon: I was thinking about trying to come up with another peg of income, you've got to have multiple pegs if you're doing this on your own. And my two pegs I do teacher training and the yoga studio we were still struggling to create margin in our lives. And I was listening to another podcast where you guys were on. And I think it's hilarious because you talked bad about your accent but I love it because it just sounds like home to me. Because I'm just a few hours South of you.

Shane Sams: I need to put that on a T-shirt. Shane and Jocelyn sound like home to you.

Jennifer Dixon: Yeah, you all sound like home. It just sounded like my people, and I immediately signed up for your podcast after listening to that one, and kind of binged listened to it. And then one day, I guess it was funny because I've never thought of my life being flipped. It was a Friday. I was at the zoo. I can't remember if my son, yeah my son must've been born, I'm not sure if it was when I was pregnant or when he was born, but I'm pretty sure he was new. I was at the zoo with my daughter and you sent out an email about asking for a question or something. And here we were looking at the chimpanzees, my daughter's were making monkey noises and I sent you an email and you responded right away. And I was like, holy cow that's-

Shane Sams: Shane and Jocelyn actually talk to people. That's a miracle, right?

Jennifer Dixon: Exactly.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. And sometimes we even send a video like just to make sure people know that it's really us-

Shane Sams: We jut like to mess with people basically, we just like to freak them out while they're at the zoo.

Jennifer Dixon: I love it. No, I was like, whoa. And I think that was a Friday and I signed up for the membership that Sunday. So that would've been a year ago actually. Really recently.

Shane Sams: So there's the first lesson for today's podcast y'all is be a real person and actually communicate with your audience and people will buy your stuff.

Jennifer Dixon: Oh yeah, that's true. I signed up like that, after the first webinar I was like, I'm in-

Shane Sams: I remember when you came into the community too because I can remember, you are on every single Q and A that we do. Which is awesome.

Jennifer Dixon: Nearly.

Shane Sams: Almost. But I remember the first couple of questions you had were basically like the theme of what we first initially talked about was how in the world can something like what I do become an online business? Because it wasn't about certifying other yoga instructors or anything like that. It was how can we just make the... If you look at a bullseye, you've got a bullseye in the middle. That's kind of where your brick and mortar business lives. And it's like, how can we create circles of income that span out from that and still do kind of the same thing right?

Jennifer Dixon: Correct.

Shane Sams: So what path did you choose to go down? What did you start creating? How did that go and kind of bring us up to speed with where you are now with the online stuff?

Jennifer Dixon: Sure. So right when I joined the community, I also decided to rebrand the studio because the studio had been around since 2010, and it had a different brand and I wanted to make it mine. And so this was a year ago in the summer was just one heck of a summer. I rebranded, redid a website, all that kind of stuff. And at the same time shot my very first material for a course, which I was going to put into a membership. And at first I titled it the Mommy Bounce Back program because my son was about a year. And this will go into probably a question later on. I'm not like a typical yoga person. And as long as I'm breastfeeding, I'm going to hold on the last 10, 15 pounds of momma weight, that's just my body everybody's different.

Jennifer Dixon: And I knew that if I marketed to the women that were, at least my thought was if I marketed to women who had had babies either recently or were never able to successfully get in shape postpartum, then I would look real to them because I was legit there. And so I created, I think it was almost five hours of material, different videos, full length videos. And to me a full length video at the time was a minimum of, I wanted to do an hour and my dad was the one who was shooting the videos. He was like, maybe you should do a 45 minute one. And in my head I'm like no way. And so we did like one 30, one 40 and then two 60 minute videos. And then I did a lot of little drills and I did it in Kajabi at first because that was easy. And I'm not a tech person. And I sold, I can't remember, I sold five, I think I sold five.

Shane Sams: That's amazing.

Jennifer Dixon: I was pumped, yeah I sold five, and then it was like crickets, and it was bad crickets. And then a friend of ours offered to help me market it and all that kind of stuff. And I think I sold one more at a really, really discounted price and then nothing. And so I shutdown Kajabi because I didn't want that monthly fee. And I just started trying to like what you guys talk about, be really prolific with my content creation. So in the summer, like right around when I was filming all this, I upped my blog post. I'm posting three times a week, I'm writing that stuff every three times a week. I'm doing live things on Facebook for the studio and for online at least weekly.

Jennifer Dixon: And then I started doing things on YouTube at least weekly. And then January happened and I was like, man, I'm so tired of living without margin. So I've got to make this work. I was up really late with my husband dealing with stuff and I said, honey, we've got to make this online stuff work. That's the only way we're really going to scale if I want to do this and this is what I want to do. And ever since then it's just been, all the ponies are running.

Shane Sams: Right. So basically then this is very common, people do this. They create the product, they sell something, it's exciting. And then it's like, we ran out of people to sell something to, so basically you've turned all your energy toward trying to build an audience, right? Like trying to get YouTube subscribers, get followers, get the blogs going on. Let me ask you this is the thing still for sale though? Are you still selling the thing you created to these new people? Because you've been creating an audience now for six months regardless of how big it gets or is. Did you just stop selling the thing all together?

Jennifer Dixon: Yes. I did, and I'm laughing until I forget which one of those, because I signed up for flip your life live, that was like part of that conversation with my husband. I was like, I've got to make this work, I'm going to this training. I know it's a lot of money. We're going to figure out how to do it. And so I don't remember which training it was Shane, but you were no sugar Shane, I guess. And you said, "If you got something, put it for sale," and you said Udemy which I didn't even know about. But like that day after the phone call or maybe the next day I had my course back up on Udemy. So it is for sale.

Shane Sams: It is for sale now. Okay, good. At least it's for sale somewhere. Because I'm like, okay, wait a minute. I don't remember where building an audience leads to not selling things to them. That was the disconnect I was finding there because you made all this content and that's where you got it to go. You know what I'm saying?

Jennifer Dixon: Yeah.

Shane Sams: Well that's a good. There's a lot of people out there who do this. There's always a roller coaster. Just a little while ago we were talking to our accountants and we were looking at like our numbers, like we meet with them quarterly to see if numbers go up and down and we had a dip in April. And it was like totally because of stuff that we had done earlier in the year, some promotions, we had changed some prices and we had done some things, but our actual financial check mark dipped that month, and it always cracks me up when I talk to people and they're like, "Wow, you and Jocelyn just everything goes up and it's perfect forever." And I'm like, "No. It goes up and down, it is still feast or famine."

Shane Sams: The membership model that we teach and that we use smooths that out, but it doesn't protect you totally from it. Like that's just business, right? You know this with brick and mortar. And it's like anything else. If you open a store in a town of a hundred people and you sell to all the hundred people, you have to go to the next town to find more people, that's just the way it works. And so many people though, the problem is they have that, "I sold something," and then it dips and they're like, "Ah, that was a fluke," and then they quit forever.

Shane Sams: So I do want to like to commend you for like doubling down and getting your content going, running it in parallel, figuring out ways that you can use it with your existing business. And really that's what you just got to figure out now is how to maximize this new audience that you've created. So how is the audience building going? How is that prolific content creation panning out? Is it going up steadily? Is it spiking? What's happening?

Jennifer Dixon: So my blogging is I had a brand new website. I think my website's less than a year old, and within six months I was front page for yoga Chattanooga, or Chattanooga yoga. And then within just a couple months after that I was number one with one of those searches. So I really feel like the blogging has helped get people into my brick and mortar business, which is-

Shane Sams: Okay, that's interesting.

Jennifer Dixon: ... which is really great. And when we do our client intake, they say, Oh yeah, I found you online and all that. So that's been great. My online video stuff, not so much. I think I have like 138 YouTube followers and I have a really big family that makes up a large number of that.

Shane Sams: Well you know what, honestly though if you put 130 people in a room, that'd be a lot of people. You know what I'm saying?

Jennifer Dixon: It would be.

Shane Sams: And don't discount that. When Jocelyn and I launched our first product, how many people were on your email list?

Jocelyn Sams: A couple hundred maybe.

Shane Sams: Like 250 maybe. So you're not far off where we were at that tip to find that tipping point to start making some real money with this. So they're there. The problem is your product is totally geared toward expectant mommas right? or like mothers that just had baby?

Jennifer Dixon: Not anymore. Not Anymore. So when I relaunched it on Udemy, I think I called it, I should have known this and I'm just having a brain fart, thrive hit yoga is what I call it. And high intensity training, yoga inspired high intensity training. And I talk about how it's great for women, especially if you've had kids or even if not. And then all of the content that I've been creating since that course has just been that high intensity training focus. So it's very low impact. I don't jump around. I mean, once you have a herniated disc, you always kind of got one, right?

Jennifer Dixon: So you're not going to see me jumping around. But you're going to see me doing lots and lots of things that'll... You give me 30 minutes and you'll burn some calories or you giving me an hour and you'll really burn some calories, and it's just all yoga inspired fitness things.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay. So that is what you're selling then on your website, right?

Shane Sams: Is that what you put back on Udemy?

Jennifer Dixon: Udemy is technically the mommy bounce back, but I just repackaged it to not just talk about mommas.

Shane Sams: I gotcha.

Jennifer Dixon: And then what I'm creating now on Teachable is just thrive online a hit of high intensity yoga inspired fitness thing. Which has the mommas and it has other workouts.

Shane Sams: Okay. So what's the biggest problem you're facing right now? Like what's the biggest struggle? Is it like figuring out how to run these things together or is it like figuring out how to promote that thing? Is it do I sell this locally? What's the biggest thing right now that's holding you back? Because it sounds like you've got a lot of pieces in play. Okay, forget the in-person yoga studio. You've got consistent content being created, you're creating this thing on Teachable that is going to be able to be marketed to these people. Right? So where are you stuck? What's causing like, because you know this is how you want to scale. Where are you frozen at right now that you can't move forward?

Jennifer Dixon: Well, I guess I'm not really sure where I'm stuck. I just know what I'm doing is not working and that's not the answer that you wanted. So I did a five day challenge. Again, that was something in the flip your life live training to get us to sell some stuff. So I did a five day challenge. Technically it was 27, but one was me and one was a duplicate. So 25 people signed up, of that five people actually did all five trainings most of them did not. And nobody converted. And that made me really bummed. And you said Jennifer, go reach out to all of them. So I finally got through all 25 of those yesterday. I sent them some bonjoros and of the 25, 16, 17 opened up, but nobody gave me any feedback.

Shane Sams: Interesting.

Jennifer Dixon: So this'll probably go into, I listen to your podcasts a lot, like those fears and things like that. I don't know if my content is too hard, if it's not hard enough. I know that based on what I've done online, my stuff is way harder. Because I don't like most of the stuff that I've seen online, it's not hard enough. If I feel I'm looking for a workout, if I'm looking for something gentle, there's plenty of that, but there's not a good workout. And so I don't know if it's too hard if it's, I don't know. So that's like where I'm stuck.

Shane Sams: I think it's just a connection problem more than anything because like 25 people signed up for the challenge, that shows they're interested. But then there was a disconnect and not one person sent you an email back. But 16 open the thing. That's amazing.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. That's very interesting. Okay. So first of all, I have several thoughts, but my first thought is that that's not a very large sample size. Okay. So if it were 300 people and you said nobody wrote you back, I would probably be a little bit more concerned. 25 people. I mean, who knows? This is like the busiest time of year for a lot of people. And we just came off of a crazy month of May. We were in Disney for a week. We had dance recital practice, we had dance recital dress rehearsal, we had cheer evaluations, we had two nights of dance recital. We are now three nights into vacation Bible school. Next week we have science camp. We have golf camp this week. The week after that we have-

Shane Sams: Not a lot of time to reply to the yoga instructor.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. So what I'm trying to tell you is that if you went to 25 of my friends during this time of year, they're probably not answering you either because we're just really busy. So I wouldn't say, okay, well this clearly didn't work because 25 people didn't answer me. I don't think that you have enough data to know that. So that's the first thing I would say.

Shane Sams: And five people finished it. Honestly, if you just think about it like it's a small sample size, but if you put 25 people in a room and five of them do it, that's pretty good. That's 80/20 rule, right? Like 80 people, a hundred people in a room, 20 will actually finish. So it's like don't look at it like a failure there's a lot of valuable insight there that something just didn't connect at the end when it was time to buy something.

Jocelyn Sams: And that's part of my next thought. Okay. So tell me what was the challenge exactly?

Jennifer Dixon: I called it the, and I'm terrible with online stuff, so I can't wait to hear what I did wrong. So I called it the five day hit yoga challenge and it was a drip campaign. I think that's the industry lingo. Where the participants were emailed a link to a video that was embedded on my website because I was trying to get them for people to stay on the website. It was a YouTube video and some of them were unlisted, some of them were public video embedded on my website where they can watch it.

Jennifer Dixon: And so each day for five days they got a video and then on the sixth and then each day they, I also tried to sell them the membership. And then on the sixth day I sent them a slightly longer video, like all the videos were 20, 30 minutes. And on the sixth day I think they got like a 42 minute video.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay. Jennifer. Whoa, back the truck up. Okay. First of all, why do they need to buy anything? Because you're giving them all this stuff. And second of all-

Shane Sams: You have to take it away or they won't buy it. You can't just keep giving them stuff.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay second of all, what were you trying to sell them and was that even related to high intensity yoga?

Jennifer Dixon: Yeah, I was trying to sell them into my membership that would have even more videos, just like the one that they had that they got access to. Here's like five different workouts you can do, and if you join the community, you'll get even more workouts with me. And this was in part of the emails, I'll come into the community and we can work out live until it got too big I figured we could do like zoom meetings where we can see each other, and if it's just a handful of people at first, my husband can be there and he knows enough about yoga that he can be like, hey, so and so it needs to do this or this person. And so then I can give them cues with him like in the background.

Shane Sams: Okay, all right hold on.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay, let's hit the pause button of just a minute.

Shane Sams: Jocelyn and I are looking at each other like, okay, let's fix this.

Jennifer Dixon: Yeah, help me.

Shane Sams: Okay. So for one thing, you think you sold them the same thing that the challenge was, but it wasn't, okay? The thing you were selling was you leading them live and being a part of a community, but you had this very sterile challenge of 42 minute videos where you were sending them emails and they click and watch them alone. Like think why people join your yoga Studio. They want to be led and they want to be around other people who love yoga. And you did not provide that for these people in the online environment that's why they didn't buy, right? They weren't just doing it for the high intensity workout. They weren't just doing it for this cool structure that was different than everybody else. They basically were like, I want to do yoga with somebody, and I want someone to tell me how to do it.

Shane Sams: And yeah, that's kind of what you're selling. But it was totally different from the strategy. Imagine if your challenge had been like this, "Hey guys, we're going to make this challenge for five days. Here's what we're going to do. We're going to do eight minute workouts every morning, live, I'm going to be there." And you do an eight minute tabata hit style workout that will make them just barely sweat. And then at the end of it, you say, "That's the end of the challenge, but I bet you feel better and you only had to show up live with me for eight minutes a day. What if we could do this for real? I teach 20 and 30 minute classes all the time. We can crush it, join the community, led live by me," and now they have an act. That challenge would have been a representation, an actual thing that you do in your actual community and it would've simulated what you do for people in your yoga Studio, right? Because people don't want an email campaign with videos. They can just go on YouTube and find videos.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, and so here's the thing too, Jennifer, is that usually with a challenge, what you want to do is sort of give them like the appetizer, and then you get them to purchase the main course. You gave them like a four course meal.

Shane Sams: You gave them the four course meal and the blue apron boxes to make the next three weeks of video of meals. You see what I'm saying? But the main thing was, I think 25 people signed up because they thought they were getting led by Jennifer's sample of what they were going to do, and they didn't buy because it wasn't what they thought they were going to... Basically what they probably thought they were buying was more emailed videos. You see what I'm saying? Does that make sense? Are we overwhelming you? You sound confused. You got really quiet.

Jennifer Dixon: I'm thinking. You can't see all the smoke.

Shane Sams: Ooh, that was her head exploding.

Jocelyn Sams: Jennifer's no longer with us, due to information overload.

Shane Sams: Okay so we're going to take over the yoga studio. But do you understand what we mean? Like you didn't do anything wrong. It's just you did a challenge, but the challenge wasn't exactly, it doesn't sound like what you were selling.

Jocelyn Sams: It didn't lead in to your paid offer.

Shane Sams: Right. And also too, like challenges are like Jocelyn said, sampler platters. It's the guy that stands in front of the Japanese food restaurant at the mall with the bourbon chicken. You know what I'm saying? It's like that's what challenges are for. But you just like, wow, like here. Did you say one of the videos was 42 minutes?

Jennifer Dixon: Yeah.

Shane Sams: That's just too overwhelming for a new person.

Jocelyn Sams: Your heart is in the right place. Like you were trying to give them something and be like, whoa, this is really cool. But the problem is you gave them more than they needed. Like if it were me, I'd be like, oh well, I can just do these videos. I don't even need anything else.

Shane Sams: Anytime you have a problem, an alignment between a lead magnet, remember the lead magnet is the first step. If it's a five day challenge, like imagine someone who was totally out of shape and never done yoga before, came to your yoga studio and you were like, get down and down dog for 42 minutes, let's go. You know what I mean? You would kill them. You know what I'm saying? Like it would be like, get in warrior three and don't move until I look back at you. That's like not the first step of yoga. if I came in to you and I was 200 pounds overweight and I said, I really wanting to do yoga, I think this is the way that I can get back in shape and get my life back. What would be the first thing you would tell me to do? Honestly. If I got 10 minutes to swing by could you show me a couple of things to get my feet wet, what would you tell me?

Jocelyn Sams: I think that your offer was more for like advanced people though right?

Jennifer Dixon: Yeah.

Shane Sams: So is crossfit. Like I go to a crossfit gym, but when a beginner comes in, there's nothing not advanced about crossfit. But you still don't kill them. You give them a PVC pipe instead of a bar. You see what I'm saying? So even someone who wants advanced workouts, what would you do with them in the first day? If I was coming to your beginner 30 minute class, what would you do for me?

Jennifer Dixon: We only do hour long classes?

Shane Sams: Okay. What would you do for me in an hour long class?

Jennifer Dixon: You do the beginner poses, which is basically what was in all of the sequences, they're all beginner friendly poses. And you talk about the alignment a lot, you get a lot of cues, which I tried to do in the videos. And then you get the person comfortable with the names of the poses, the alignment, and then they move on to more challenging classes.

Shane Sams: Okay, so here's what you should have done. Like let's say your beginner class is one hour, right? You would take that into 10 minute videos and they never should've saw anything over 10 minutes. Like they're at home or by themselves. They're overwhelmed. 10 minutes today, 10 minutes tomorrow, 10 minutes the next, 10 minutes the next. Now you know all the poses, would you like to buy into our courses and try a longer class? Like that's the beginner version of online courses, right? You take that beginner part, they're not really there with you, so you can't assume you can do the same thing and you break it apart, right? Like you've got to step back.

Shane Sams: You're having some curse of knowledge things and I can really feel it coming through like, no, everyone should do this hour class because this is how I do it and it's better workout. That's fine. But you can't throw people into that online. They're home alone by themselves.

Jocelyn Sams: Well, not to mention, most of them have probably never heard of you before.

Shane Sams: Or done yoga. They don't even know what hit means probably they just thought yoga, sweet. And then they get in there and it was really hard.

Jocelyn Sams: Or maybe I'm a person who is an advanced yoga person and I'm like, wow, I really want to do this workout but I don't even know this person. Like they're just wanting to get a little taste of what you have to offer. And when you hit me with like a 35 minute video, what if I don't like it or what if-

Shane Sams: And also too they're not invested enough to finish something like that. Like the reason I would watch a 30 minute video is because I paid money for it. If I pay for my subscription in Netflix, I'm going to find a show to watch. Right? But if someone just told me the show, I'm not going to go out of my way to find it. You know what I mean? And also to that, did you say in the community you are doing these live?

Jennifer Dixon: Well I don't have a community yet.

Shane Sams: But that's your plan, right?

Jennifer Dixon: That's the vision, is to do like a zoom call, like what we're doing except with video. And then we work out together. So-

Shane Sams: Okay, that has to be a part of any challenges. You have to make people understand what you do, right? It's one reason why we changed our format of our podcasts. We don't talk to experts, we don't interview people who are writing books and stuff like that. We want to demonstrate how our community actually works. And the best way we can do that is to help someone, right? So even our podcast, even our free content is generated in a way that tells people that, you know what I'm saying? Because when you listen to this you're like, wow, Shane and Jocelyn brought a real member on and they're helping them, I want their help.

Shane Sams: So if I joined your challenge, like I'd be like, wow, Jennifer showed up for a tabata or something. You know what I'm saying? You do a four minute yoga pose. And like wow she showed up. That's really cool. I want more of this. You see what I'm saying? Someone told me one time, you never ever make noncustomers feel satiated. Noncustomers should always feel hungry. Always. So that's the problem here I think too is like one, it wasn't what you were selling. You were selling them something completely different than videos. You were actually selling them lead, live community, whatever. So there was a disconnect and you stuffed them, they were so over full they wanted to puke and didn't even finish their meal.

Shane Sams: So there was a disconnect there and if we can fix that disconnect, I would challenge you to do this again, but I would literally be like, remember what were those videos called Jocelyn? Eight minute abs, remember those from the 90s? Remember those eight minute abs that that guy would come on and be eight minute buns, eight minute arms. You know I'm talking about?

Jennifer Dixon: I've done a few of those.

Shane Sams: That's what I would do. I would say, hey, we're going to get on live every morning or we're going to do an eight minute workout or something like that. Just whatever. And it's just really short and you use it to teach the best 10 poses, right? Like you do two poses a day for five days. You just take them back and forth through the poses. Super simple. And then like the last one, you pick up the intensity a little bit, and make it more intense kind of 15 minute workout or something. And then when it's over, they're more into it, they got it. They got to see you every morning. They got to hear you say like, "Hey, it's good to see you again, Jennifer. Hey, it's good to see you again, John, it's good to see again, whoever." And it's like there's a feel there and then they lose that, and when they lose that, they'll buy it back. That's how challenges should work. So I wouldn't give up on that. I think it's a great idea. I love it. That would be really cool. It's like, what's the bike called, peloton?

Jennifer Dixon: Yeah.

Shane Sams: Like this the same model. Right? Like you can get on, you can take a live class, but you don't have to leave your house. You don't have to go to the yoga studio or if you find a personality that you connect with, you can do it with them right there on the zoom call. correct?

Jennifer Dixon: Yeah.

Shane Sams: So like I love the idea and I know a guy that does this, I've told you this before. We have a buddy named Jeff Mcmahon, he lives up in Cincinnati and he's probably listening right now, hey Jeff. And he kind of is the trainer for all the entrepreneurial people and podcasters and stuff, and he does virtual classes like all the time, even one on one and stuff like that. So there's definitely a model, people are definitely doing this. You just have to kind of connect those challenges better.

Jennifer Dixon: Gotcha.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay Jennifer, so tell us what is making you feel overwhelmed about this strategy?

Jennifer Dixon: So my top three, I'll give you my top three. What happens if I say, okay, I'm going to do this zoom video every day for I don't know, five days, six days and nobody shows up during the workout? Do I still do the workout as if there was somebody there and then the people that have the link, they can watch it later. Then that's one. Two is what possible time of day can I possibly say every day I'm going to give you 10 minutes of my time. I guess it's just two there's not three, there's just two.

Shane Sams: You're so overwhelmed you lost them.

Jennifer Dixon: Yeah.

Shane Sams: All right, well let's do number one first. Yes you would just go ahead and do it. You can actually do these in different ways. If you did it in a different way, maybe you could do the challenge even on YouTube live instead of Zoom, right? Because then you just do it live and then if someone finds it that's cool because you just got more leads. It's not a paid challenge so you really don't care that it's broadcasting for free. It might actually find you new people. Right? And then if they did not show up live, they would click through it and it would be there ready to go. See what I'm saying? I think YouTube live would be a better thing for free content like this. You could put like, hit yoga challenge day one, hit yoga challenge day two. So you're still emailing them, you're still getting them to come, but they can come live and they can participate in a chat, they can do things like that if you want to.

Jocelyn Sams: So I would jus take one of the videos that you're already doing, and I've done some hit training before. So is it basically like sequences that you do? So many exercises together?

Jennifer Dixon: No, it's not the interval. It's only one I. I don't know. It's just high intensity. I'm not doing intervals as much it's just high intensity. Honestly, it's a lot like a power class it's just not hot. And there's a little bit of psychology there, at least here at my studio if you say power then people are like, oh, I can't do that. I don't know it's just going to make me sound kind of silly. What people are searching for is that high intensity, that sort of workout, but they don't want maybe the jumping up and down. And so it's just yoga on-

Shane Sams: Do you hold poses for a long time or something like that?

Jennifer Dixon: Yeah, or you do poses dynamically. So anytime you're working your balance. Shane, you said you've done some yoga, I don't know if you've done it. Jocelyn you've done stairsteps so you can totally do this. It's moving between postures with control. That's really, really hard because you're having to use your balance, which incorporates your core muscles and your glutes and all that kind of stuff. So it's a high end. Oh, gosh, I shouldn't use the word in the definition.

Shane Sams: I know what you're saying. It's like get the high intensity workout you want without the impact.

Jocelyn Sams: With no impact.

Shane Sams: Basically. It's perfectly marketable. But the real key is the live component. That's the thing.

Jocelyn Sams: So I wonder if you shouldn't change your language a little bit to high intensity, low impact.

Jennifer Dixon: I've thought about that, but then when I look up high intensity, low impact, I'm like, if people see that and then they see what I'm doing, they're going to be like, this girl is crazy.

Shane Sams: That's okay though. That's a total assumption that you're putting on. You don't know that, you do not know that. There's no way you can know that.

Jocelyn Sams: So try it out and see what happens.

Shane Sams: You're trying to think like the small group of people who've walked into your studio and left, and not like the people that stay because they thought it was cool. Like that's curse of knowledge at its finest. I know this and when they know it, they'll leave. Like that's not true, but there's no way you can possibly know that, if someone types in like high intensity yoga, right? And they find you and then you say it's high intensity, low impact, just because it's hard doesn't mean they're going to freak out and leave. Right? I don't think it was because it was hard that people didn't finish the thing.

Shane Sams: I just think it was too long. Like not everybody wants to work out for an hour and a lot of people at home might just want a 20 minute workout in the morning, they may not want a big hour long thing. You know what I'm saying? Like-

Jocelyn Sams: Well, I think we have to be careful because we're making a lot of assumptions.

Shane Sams: Yes, a lot of assumptions. We're all making a lot of assumptions.

Jocelyn Sams: The thing about it is they wanted to see if they liked what you had to offer. You gave them a huge banquet of stuff to process through-

Shane Sams: And they didn't even do it.

Jocelyn Sams: And as a result I feel like they were kind of like, ah, this is cool but like whoa, I don't even know you-

Shane Sams: Yeah, it's like I don't even know if it was cool because I'm not even going to try that. You know what I'm saying? They looked at it and got scared basically.

Jocelyn Sams: So instead let's give them some more bite sized pieces that are more similar to your paid offer. And see if that-

Shane Sams: And I think you're thinking, I think you've gone SEO crazy. I hear a little bit of that too. Well not exactly the right people are searching for this exact right word, but that doesn't matter, what they're really looking for is probably just yoga at first. Like that's the core, right? They're looking for somebody to teach them yoga live at home. That's the whole gist of what you're really selling. No one cares about your method. Have you ever noticed that Jocelyn and I even on our sales page don't really go into what's in the flip your life blueprint?

Jennifer Dixon: Yes. I did notice that.

Shane Sams: We never talk about it. Because if I told you what was in there, it would overwhelm a beginners so much that they would pass out. So for all you beginners out there start passing out. Like if you got in there and really saw what it takes, if I threw all that out at you at first you would be so overwhelmed you'd never try. But if you came to me and said, whoa, here's where I am, I've got an idea. I even made a product, then I would look at you and say, let's build your website. I wouldn't say, let's go build an audience or let's get traffic, or let's start ads or let's do SEO research, I would just say, hey man, you need a website. It's the next step that's the most important step. It's not all the steps.

Shane Sams: So I think you're trying too hard to regurgitate all of your past experience onto these people in that five day challenge, and it's just so overwhelming they don't even try. You know what I'm saying?

Jennifer Dixon: I do.

Shane Sams: All right, so imagine this, imagine if your whole thing was the four minute, I picked tabata because it's four minutes. I just say. For those of you guys that are out there, it's like you work 20 seconds then you rest 10, whatever. You can plant that on almost any workout scheme. But like if you did something like that, that was like a 10 minute workout, let's just say, that's not overwhelming. Hey guys, we're going to do two poses a day, 10 minutes a day. You can do that. And then at the end you tell them there's more inside and to show up next Monday and you'll do the workout, and it's like a, my crossfit gym, sometimes the coach won't even tell us what the workout is until we get there. Because she's afraid if she post it, we won't show up.

Jennifer Dixon: Yeah, that used to happen to me.

Shane Sams: Right. You know what I'm saying?

Jennifer Dixon: It's like I'm not doing that.

Shane Sams: I know but you are doing that online. That's exactly what you did. Right? You're like, here's the 42 minute death workout, instead of hey guys, I'm not going to tell you how long we're going to go today so I'll just keep moving or whatever. So as for the other question, where am I going to find 10 minutes? Last I checked, you was running to the zoo, making chimpanzee noises with your kids.

Jennifer Dixon: Oh no but-

Shane Sams: You have time to find 10 minutes somewhere to do it.

Jennifer Dixon: It wasn't the finding of the 10 minutes. But from what I understood is you wanted it to be the same time everyday, and that's where I was like, crap, what is the same time every day where I'm doing something the same time? That's where the disconnect was. Because if I'm going to do a challenge, I imagine we've got to meet up at let's just say 10 o'clock Eastern time every single day. And that's where I was like, ooh-

Shane Sams: Make the time. If it's important enough, you'll find a way. If it's not you'll find an excuse.

Jennifer Dixon: Yep.

Shane Sams: But you can find the time. Like it's your schedule, it's your calendar. I would guess it would probably be early too, by the way. Like, I mean, you know, you can catch people before work, so maybe you do a 6:00 AM challenge to get people real fired up or you do a 9:00 PM challenge and you do it at night. Like we have webinars at 9:00 PM sometimes look at our member calls. You think we want to do a member call at nine o'clock on a Sunday? No, but we do it because we know people need it, and we know and we know they'll show up for it.

Shane Sams: So like sometimes you just have to pick a time and you have to do it. You can find that, that's the easiest part of the whole equation to figure out, is when you're going to do it. Just look at your calendar and say, all right, next week I'm going to do a challenge and I'm going to do it every day at 8:00 AM forget it, whatever. Because it's not forever.

Jennifer Dixon: Yeah.

Shane Sams: You know what I'm saying? It's like not forever.

Jennifer Dixon: Would that turn people away if it was at my house? Because at like six in the morning, I'm going to be at my house. I'm not going to be-

Jocelyn Sams: No.

Shane Sams: No one cares.

Jocelyn Sams: I don't think it will.

Shane Sams: No one cares.

Jocelyn Sams: I watch workout videos all the time, like on YouTube and people are in their bedroom. People are in their living area.

Shane Sams: You watch our member calls twice a month and we're sitting in our bedroom.

Jennifer Dixon: Yeah but y'all aren't doing yoga and let's be honest yoga has a fair amount of, what is the word I'm looking for? Stereotype expectations. And that's probably like into one of the questions later. That's why I was like, oh, because my house is not decorated. I've got two little kids, there's probably green boogers on the wall somewhere.

Shane Sams: On the last member call that we had our daughter came in here changing into her pajamas.

Jennifer Dixon: I saw that.

Shane Sams: Yeah right. Exactly right behind us. And I was like, get out of here. There was dogs running in here. No one cares as long as you give them what they want. I mean, you can lock the door. And also too I'll tell you another story. I got to tour Michael Hyatt's office a couple weeks ago. He was an online guy. So they have these things in their offices called podcast closets. Okay. And they use them for webinars and podcast. Anybody at time can go on one of these closets shut the door and do it. And they've already got all this stuff set up for podcasts and Webinars, right? But they made it proportion. Like there's decorations on the back of the wall. It's so funny. All the decorations were smaller, there was paintings and pictures and stuff, and it looked really tiny. But it was done in a way of perspective. It made it look like they were in a huge room. You see what I'm saying? But it was totally an illusion, like they were in a big conference room with a wall of stuff but it was hilarious, because they had thought like, well, who cares where we are, we'll just make it look like we want.

Shane Sams: And we interviewed someone a few weeks ago on this program who teaches English to students in China, and she does it in her laundry room-

Jennifer Dixon: Yeah, I heard that one.

Shane Sams: Where the camera points at the white wall and she's got it looking like a school room. So I promise you, one Saturday you could go clear one wall in some room of your house that you can shut a door-

Jocelyn Sams: And make it look amazingly decorated.

Shane Sams: And make it look like you're in a yoga studio. You could make it look however you want it.

Jennifer Dixon: So that's not showing up every day. It's just doing it one Saturday?

Shane Sams: No, I'm talking about you pick one wall in your house that becomes the yoga wall and point your camera at that and nobody will even know you're in there. It doesn't matter. Like you can make it look as pretty as you want. You can make it look not as pretty as you want, it doesn't matter. All that matters is what's behind you on the camera. It doesn't matter if it's in this big room, and I still don't think people will care. They'll see a yoga mat and somebody working out and guide them through a workout. Here's another assumption we're making. You're assuming people care, like me and Jocelyn don't really care about stuff like that. Some people will care, but you just want the ones that don't care. You want the ones who care more about is this person real and authentic and will they show up for me when they say they will, and are they going to lead me through this process? If they will, I'll follow them and everybody else who doesn't. Like all the stereotypes in yoga.

Shane Sams: I'm six foot tall and 260 pounds and I do yoga. Is that stereotypical? Probably not. There's somebody out there that will follow you just the way you are and if you want to make it a little prettier you can. Like you don't have to have a film studio or a yoga studio or anything like that, that's not important, that's not what you're selling. You know what I'm saying? That's the Instagram model, 30 year old millennial Instagram yoga person. Let them go worry about what their camera looks like. You know what I'm saying? You're selling to moms. The mom that's doing yoga with you is probably doing it in her bedroom floor or she may be in the laundry room hiding from her children so she can do yoga. So she would probably appreciate that, that it is so real.

Shane Sams: But I guess just challenge those. You can't worry about what it looks like. You just can't. You just got to do it. You just got to make it happen and make it live and make it real. And I think people will actually probably like it better you know?

Jennifer Dixon: Got it.

Shane Sams: Yeah. I hope that makes sense?

Jennifer Dixon: Yeah. Get over myself.

Jocelyn Sams: All right Jennifer, we've had a really fun time talking to you today and trying to figure out what your next steps are going to be. Unfortunately we are almost out of time but before we go we'd like to ask everyone what is one thing that you plan to do based on what we talked about here today?

Jennifer Dixon: I will relaunch my challenge to include I guess three to five days of live mini trainings. No more than 10 minutes and try to get people into my membership that way.

Shane Sams: I think that's a good idea. I think that's good because you can use the same process and just teach it differently and try it again. And I would really invite those people that did it the first time. They'll probably sign back up and they'll probably do it this time, you can say I revamped it. It's all new. It's going to be much easier and you're going to love it even more. Okay?

Jennifer Dixon: Got it.

Shane Sams: All right guys, that wraps up another episode of the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. What a great conversation with Jennifer about her business. Man it can be easy to get overwhelmed or even discouraged and frustrated when you're out there worrying about your online business, trying to make something work and you get a little success and then it goes away, and you just don't know what to do next to make it happen. And that's what the Flip Your Life community is all about. We would love to help you with your next steps inside the community, on our member calls and in our training area. You can check out everything we have to offer for the Flip Your Life community at flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife. We'd love to have you in there. We'd love to see you on our next member call and maybe we'll even be able to talk to you on an upcoming podcast. So until next time, get out there, take action, do whatever it takes to flip your life.

Jocelyn Sams: Bye.

Links and resources mentioned on today’s show: * Jennifer's Website * Flip Your Life LIVE 2019 Tickets & Registration Information * Flip Your Life community

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In today's episode, we help Beth find an audience for her online business.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jocelyn Sams: Hey y'all! On today's show we help Beth find an audience for her online business.

Shane Sams: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast where life always comes before work. We're your hosts Shane and Jocelyn Sams. We're a real family that figured out how to make our entire living online, and now, we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? All right, lets get started.

Shane Sams: What's going on everybody? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. It is great to be back with you again today. Super excited to talk to another member of our community so we can help them take their online business and their online goals and their dreams to the next level.

Shane Sams: But first we want to let you to know that the Flipped lifestyle Podcast is brought to you by The Flip Your Life Community. That's where we teach real people, just like our guest and just like you, how to start, build, and grow their online business. We are proud to be one of the only business podcasts that does not sell ads or sell interview spots to guests who are selling their latest book or affiliate products. No, we are 100% supported by our members, listeners, and fans. That keeps us independent, free, and focused on doing what's best for you, the Flipped Lifestyle listener.

Shane Sams: We'd love to have your support and support you in your online business journey inside of The Flip Your Life Community. Members get early access to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast each week, bonus and extended episodes of the show, complete access to our entire training library of courses to help you start, build, and grow your own online business, and access to hundreds of other family focused entrepreneurs from around the world in one of the most active business communities online. So help us keep the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast ad and affiliate free all while we help you build your dreams and create a better future for your family. We have affordable plans starting for as little as 19 dollars a month and your first month comes with a 30 day money back guarantee. You can learn more at flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife. Join today, we appreciate your support and can't wait to help you reach your goals online. That's flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife, join today.

Shane Sams: And with that we are super excited to bring on a real member of The Flip Your Life Community. Our guest today is Beth Dekker. Beth, welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast.

Beth Dekker: Thanks for having me I'm excited to be here!

Jocelyn Sams: It is awesome to have yet another member of the Dekker family in our community. We also have your brother-in-law, Dan, and his lovely wife Rebecca.

Shane Sams: Yeah. The Dekker, they're taking over. It's kind of like they're taking over a whole wing. They may need their own forum eventually.

Jocelyn Sams: Dekker plan only.

Shane Sams: The Dekker forum may be an exclusive membership, you've got to pay extra. You gotta be a true Dekker or related to a Dekker to get into that.

Beth Dekker: There you go. That's another level.

Jocelyn Sams: That would definitely be a fun group to be a part of, I'm sure. But we are very excited to have you in our community and we look forward to talking to you today about how to grow your online business. So tell us a little bit about you and your background and what you are doing online?

Beth Dekker: Well, thank you so much for having me. I have been listening to the podcast for the last few years but I only recently joined the community. I'm kind of at the very beginning of the process. But I am coming to the Flip Your Life LIVE Event this year and I'm really excited about that. I have spent the last 13 years or so as essentially a support person for small business owners. That's been kind of my day job for several different entrepreneurs. I've had many titles, a manager, executive assistant, studio director, but ultimately among all of them I perform the basic same functions

Beth Dekker: I was essentially the business owner's right hand person. My skills generally are in like ideation, activation and restoration. I have pretty good abilities to organize and prioritize the lots of ideas that my different entrepreneurs were generating and make them reality. Over the years when I would tell people what I did, I generally got two main responses. Most of the business owners that I would talk to would invariably say, "I need a Beth." And the people who had similar skills would say, “I want to learn how to do that.” I had the idea to start a company back in, I think it was 2017 called The Right Hands.

Beth Dekker: I developed my course called Superhero Management, to be able to train people to do what I do. So far I've taught several in person courses but I'm really interested in being able to scale up my company to be able to reach people everywhere and step into the membership model. I do have a kind of a newer relationship this year with a big coworking company here in Columbus, where I live and work. Where I'm providing some education to their members and they have several hundred members that are already kind of built in small business owners. That means for now that I'm offering workshops in their locations, which are both free and paid. But my hope is that I can use this to generate leads for future membership plans.

Shane Sams: Awesome. I love your business. For all the game of Thrones fans out there. You kinda train people to be the hand of the king, right? Like you're like you're training like the person who goes out like you know that you've got this crazy ideas generated leader of the company who has all the great ideas and can set the direction and cast the vision, but you need somebody to like, bundle it together and actually execute all that and lead the teams and do all that. And you train people like how to do that. Correct?

Beth Dekker: Yes. That's exactly it. I was doing it for a while and quite honestly, I mean this has happened throughout history. I mean, I think Alexander Hamilton is also one of the most famous, right hands in history, you know, to George Washington as an aid to come. This is certainly a position that has been around for forever. I didn't bet that but I did realize I was doing something a little bit more unique than people who maybe have the title of executive assistant or personal assistant or virtual assistant or whatever that may be. All of those things together. And then I realized it was being successful, but that when I thought about it, I was like, Gosh, this is actually teachable. I can teach what I'm doing. It's not just me.

Shane Sams: Anyone that graduates your program, you need to send them the little pin with the hand with the sword behind it like in Game of Thrones. Like you are now the hand of the king.

Jocelyn Sams: I'm pretty sure that's copyrighted.

Shane Sams: Probably copyright infringement of some kind but it's kind of awesome.

Jocelyn Sams: I understand what you're saying. I love it when you said that there's a difference between an assistant and somebody's right hand. And I totally agree with that. We've had a variety of assistants through the years, but there's one person that I kept coming back to. And the reason for that is because that person just really provides the skills that I need, and they have that training that I needed to do a lot of different roles. And you know, I often say that I call it the competent right hand. This person for me is like, she can do most of what I can do, which is amazing. It's just so amazing to have somebody who has that type of skillset. And most people are looking for that.

Shane Sams: And it's a special person too because it really is a different role. It is not a virtual assistant. It's someone who you can trust to do all the things that you need to do but can't, and can't do, but need someone to do them. Right? They kind of take over. They kind of fill in all the gaps that are holding you back. And there's this like infinite trust in that person that they're going to carry out their mission. Right?

Beth Dekker: A big part of my class talks a lot about the relationship and that relationship between that person and you're a small business owner or entrepreneur or whatever you want to call them, is based in trust. I did a lot of research. I did several dozen interviews with right hands and they're entrepreneurs before I launched my business and almost every one of the entrepreneurs said that their number one thing is they wanted it to be able to trust somebody who had an owner mentality. And so that they were able to trust them to be able to walk into a room. And for example, if the floor needed swept instead of them leaving the room and not doing it, that they would grab a broom and they would sweep it because that's what an owner would do.

Shane Sams: Have you ever seen that meme, there's an awesome meme. That meets this criteria where we're at. There's this dead possum in the middle of the road.

Jocelyn Sams: I mean, of course we would go there.

Shane Sams: Jocelyn, its Kentucky, there's dead possums everywhere, right? But like there's this awesome meme with a dead possum on the road, it's got like the yellow line that goes down in the middle of the road and the yellow line, just paints right over the possum and keeps going. But you can't see the like the paint truck. And the meme's like not my job or something like that. Like the guys that were painting didn't stop, get out. Like that's what you really need your right hand to do. You need your right hand, to see something that's wrong even before you see it and fix it so you don't have to deal with it, and you can beat the visionary.

Jocelyn Sams: I know that for me as business owner like what I want that person to do is to be a problem solver. I don't need to be involved in every single problem. If you can solve it without me, nine times out of 10 actually probably 99 times out of a hundred I want you to solve it without my intervention.

Beth Dekker: The more I always say that the mark of a mature employee is somebody who is able to present a problem to their boss alongside a solution to that problem, even if it's not the perfect solution that they have made an attempt to solve the problem already, instead of just coming up and saying there's a dead possum in the road, they're actually going to make an effort.

Shane Sams: We've talked about Game of Thrones and dead possums, so we're going to circle back around here. You don't, you don't find dead possums and Game of Thrones just everywhere, only on the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. You can be thankful for that. This is a really interesting niche. I've always been fascinated by your business ever since the first time we heard about it and just because it creates so much opportunity and I think there's a really huge market for this because you can elevate like there's a lot of people that do this for a living that could do it better. They could benefit from your course, right?

Shane Sams: There's a lot of people who are in that virtual assistant role and may want to step up their game and become someone who's a higher paid employee who's a right hand to the entrepreneur and look, here's the deal. A lot of people want the flipped lifestyle. They want to be able to make money virtually or have more freedom or work with somebody who's really exciting and a really cool company and they don't know exactly how to do that because they don't want to own the company we hear that all the time. People come in, they're like, I don't want to lead a company. I don't want this business, but I do want to do something else.

Shane Sams: We've had a few people on the show now that I've talked about other ways to do this, like we've, a few weeks ago we interviewed a virtual travel agent. We interviewed someone who teaches language online to Chinese students. We talk to all kinds of different people and I see this almost like that, like you're kind of training people to really thrive in a role that they're perfect for and be able to build that life that they want. Like a lot of these people are going to be virtual our, we call ours an executive assistant, that's what we call ours, right? Kathy? If you're listening, I may change you to the hand of the King and the Queen. Okay. We might change that, and I might send you a pin.

Shane Sams: But like-

Jocelyn Sams: And, Queen

Shane Sams: I said, and Queen. I'm always in this as a team, tag team, duo here. But like that, that person is virtual for us. She lives in another town, a little ways away, we don't really meet in person a lot, but it's just man having a competent person that can handle all that stuff.

Shane Sams: Like, we're getting ready to hire some new help for the summer person for some various like pop up tasks and we just know that we can turn them loose to her and that's cool. We don't have to worry about it. And this is a great opportunity for anybody out there. This could be something you could open up to and say, Hey, I could do that. I don't want to start the business. I don't want to teach the courses, but I could do that. And then you help people kind of elevate themselves into a role like that.

Beth Dekker: Yes, exactly. And honestly, my background is in the arts and in theater specifically. And what I have found is that people that have that kind of creative brain, I'm more artistic brain, and that, but that enjoy kind of the organizational side of things often make the best right hands. And they generally kind of find themselves in positions where they are the support people, but they become kind of superstars in their own right and are able to really take on the right hand role as an executive assistant.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay, Beth so I sort of already got a plan for your business worked out in my mind, but before we go there, I want to know sort of what are you doing online right now? So I know you said that you have like in person workshops that you do and I know that you have a website, so what is it that you're doing right now? Like are you actually selling anything and what does that look like right now?

Beth Dekker: Sure. I have a Squarespace site and so I just sell essentially products on there, services on there and I have my classes on there. I have my main superhero management class which is a two session course, kind of the big one. I do believe that in the future it can be broken down even farther than that. It's a really dense course, but I have that class, and I have several other ones that are kind of more enhancing other skills that a right hand would need things like social media work, that kind of stuff.

Beth Dekker: I have several classes online. I have some that are listed that are in person, and then I have the most are listed as live webinars. I'm selling those there. I have sold a handful of them this year, which has obviously been great. I've taught my superhero management class a couple times and then the in person ones a couple of times and they went really well but it's certainly not the numbers that I want to see.

Shane Sams: Are these, okay, so the courses are all live or you have some that are prerecorded. What's the two session?

Beth Dekker: They're all live. My goal is to do them prerecorded, but just because I'm just starting up, I just haven't gotten there yet. They're all live.

Shane Sams: But you have done these online before to live audiences and you've got recordings of those, correct?

Beth Dekker: I do, yes.

Shane Sams: What do you charge for the workshop?

Beth Dekker: That's another one of my issues is figuring out what that work. My smaller workshops that are more like 45 minutes, with a kind of a Q&A at the end are $45 a piece. But my large superhero management course, which is almost, it's a little over three hours over a two session course is a $149.

Jocelyn Sams: Who are you marketing each course to?

Shane Sams: Is it the same person? So the small courses are skills, so the large course is kind of like the base and then the skill development adds on top of the base, these smaller workshops, is that correct?

Beth Dekker: Yes.

Shane Sams: Okay. Let's say I'm right, let's say I'm a want to be hand to the King, I'm the foot of the King. I want to be the hand, right? And I come in and I'm like, okay, well I need to take the superhero management thing for one $149 right? And then I need to then shore up my skills in these other areas, other workshops like Ooh, I'll take the $49 social media course. Ooh, I'll take the $49, whatever course. Is that the correct flow that people usually go through this?

Beth Dekker: Yes. That's kind of the intention I have divided up my site into, there's a button on the very front, it says, if you're an entrepreneur, click here if you're a right hand click here. And the classes that I've offered for each Avatar, if you will are different. Some of them are overlapping, of course, but they're slightly different. But yes, you're right. I think the superhero management would be the big one and then there's all these additional courses on the on the end.

Shane Sams: Is there a course for the entrepreneur to learn how to train their hand of the King or whatever?

Beth Dekker: No, That's definitely coming because that was something that I think as I went, I was going through your courses and I realized when I was really answering the question of Avatar and I was like, Oh, I'm actually selling to the entrepreneur, because they're the ones that are buying their employees this class.

Shane Sams: But some people have bought them, but some people haven't. Correct.

Beth Dekker: Right. I would say probably 75% of the courses were purchased by the entrepreneur. The other 25% were purchased by right hands or assistants that wanted to learn more about being a right hand.

Shane Sams: Awesome. And now have you done any one on one actual training?

Beth Dekker: Yes. I have done several hours of that kind of individually. Yeah.

Shane Sams: Okay. So really what this looks like and the our goal for this call is basically to figure out how this turns into a recurring revenue model of training. Right? That's the goal to learn how to do that. To me, well, Jocelyn has got some ideas. What were you going to say first?

Jocelyn Sams: My thought is that this is a perfect place to start for a membership site and I think that your mind is already gone there, right?

Beth Dekker: Definitely.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. So I think that you've already got a perfect start. In the end, I think this would be a perfect way to match people basically. What would you call it? Like a-

Shane Sams: Like a head hunter service for right hands. Oh my gosh! Like if you had a bunch of entrepreneurs over here training and you had a bunch of assistants training to be entrepreneurs and you could connect them together like for a fee almost or like, or that would just be a benefit of membership. They would be able to network to hire each other or something. You know?

Beth Dekker: That was my initial goal. That's, that was way back when when I was talking about it. Literally everybody I interviewed said, if you could give me a list of right hands right now that I could interview, I would 100% pay you a lot of money to do that-

Shane Sams: And they would be guaranteed trained. That's what's amazing.

Jocelyn Sams: I can even see this as like a certification type situation.

Beth Dekker: Yes, that's exactly what I was thinking and I think what where I really got caught up though, in that is all of a sudden I was like, shoot, I don't know how to market or I don't know how to find the, I want to be a right hand audience. I had tons of entrepreneurs. I literally am sought on the street of people that know that I'm doing this and know me and they're like, “Hey, do you have anybody in mind for so and so.” And I don't have right hands in the wings right now that I have trained and I don't know where to find them and that's one of my challenges.

Shane Sams: What we've got to do first is we've got to figure out what the actual membership looks like. Okay. And then this may evolve. This would be an interesting chat because its going to like I have a feeling that whatever we talk about in the next five minutes, will totally change by the last five minutes. Because we're going to have to like toy with this a little bit because you know like it's almost like it's not, we don't want to make this a job service necessarily. It's a benefit of the membership that if you train here, we could recommend you to entrepreneurs, right? You will have the opportunity to network with entrepreneurs. To me, this, I think you can charge quite a bit for this. Like you're talking about that $49 for a workshop, but like this is easily $50 bucks a month this might be a $97 a month membership.

Shane Sams: This is a valuable thing because you're not only training people to get better jobs, but you're helping entrepreneurs to make more money by having a better team and training their team better. Right? All that stuff. Okay. So you're on the right path. And I'm drawing a picture here of entrepreneurs on one side, right? We're going to say hands on the other, like you're in good, the right hand person, right? There's definitely two tracks in the membership. You're going to have to go ahead and make this thing for the entrepreneurs. Like that's gotta be done like right now.

Jocelyn Sams: Well, some of that is already done, correct?

Shane Sams: She has webinars. Do you have slides that you've went through and all that stuff? Like when you do the presentations?

Beth Dekker: Yeah. I have full prezis for all those.

Shane Sams: Okay. So why don't, instead of just making new stuff, why don't you just kind of edit those up and clean them up a little bit and make those your courses right now and you could put all those in a membership area just like we do. Right? Okay. And so basically you tomorrow or this week could have the entire right hand side of the equation completely finished, correct?

Beth Dekker: Yes. I certainly have plans for more classes, but yes, at the classes that I have right now I could.

Shane Sams: Perfect. Okay, so we're going to put all those on this side. I'm drawing three squares over here to represent the course area. Cause that's the first step in any membership. Content is first we have to curate content into an organized plan that they should take in order or be able to al-a-carte and go get what they need when they need it. Right? So your course on the hand side of the equation, right inside the membership is going to look like this. Master, that big thing at the, why do you call it management? What was the name of that course? Superhero management.

Beth Dekker: Superhero management. Yeah, because when I first described what I did to people, I usually told them that I was, I was busy managing superheroes because one of my first inspirations for this class was actually Pepper Potts in Iron man. I remember, 10 years ago, the first time I had the idea for this class was I was watching Iron man. I remember I turned to my husband and I was like, Oh my God, I'm Pepper Potts.

Shane Sams: Amazing! All right. Do you explain that in the course? Like when you say that?

Beth Dekker: I do, yeah.

Shane Sams: Okay, perfect. There's the first course they have to take that first. I do think your instincts are correct about breaking that into parts, not just two sessions. Like you might be like, week one, you watched the first half of part one, right? And you go take action and learn and whatever, ask questions, what do you do? So you're just going to list these in order and that's going to be a course on the other side of your content area is the entrepreneur side where you're going to have like how to train your person, how to communicate with your person. I'm sure you've already got this all thought out, right?

Beth Dekker: Yes. As far as that the initial class goes, yes.

Shane Sams: Really I think entrepreneurs consider themselves whether they are not really busy, right?

Beth Dekker: Yep.

Shane Sams: Really getting an entrepreneurial in, is just, "Hey, I've got one course for you and then you're going to make your assistant watch the other courses." Really your only goal when you're selling to entrepreneurs is short course. I'm going to teach you how to communicate and train your person, your right hand and like it's going to take you 45 minutes of your life and you're done. Then you're going to turn the rest of this over to them, right? The better. And then you can add stuff later. But that's the initial jist of this is, let me get you started and then you're going to work with your right hand person just so we've got something in there for entrepreneurs to market.

Shane Sams: All right. So there's your content area. All right. That's the first part of building a membership. Second part of building a membership is community. We curate content, imagine if you got a triangle drawn in front of you. There's a big C in the middle of it. There's three C's to any program like this. So contents easy, we've already got it all done. We just have to organize it correctly. The next part is community. How are you going to build a community of entrepreneurs and right hands. I don't know that. What do you think? How are you going to build it? How are you building it now? Like what do you think about that?

Beth Dekker: Yeah, I thought a lot about that because one of your videos, I think it was a couple of weeks ago for the Flip your Life LIVE members and I do think that it will most likely be like a Facebook group where I'm able to come in and answer questions at a certain amount of time. I would love to be able to have some kind of live Q&A's on there as well. I do like facetime. I'm a facetime kind of person and I think that having that in there to be able to answer questions to each other is just great as a support group.

Shane Sams: I think you're going to have to have them separate. You might need two groups in this case. Okay?

Beth Dekker: Okay.

Shane Sams: I believe your business owners need to maybe be in a group together. And that's where you train business owners and they can ask you questions on how to like communicate better, how to lead their team. This is definitely a leadership kind of group. And then you need your right hands a separate, completely separate from them for a couple of reasons. One, I think the entrepreneurs and the right hands would feel more comfortable only being around their peers. You know what I'm saying?

Beth Dekker: Right, I agree with that.

Shane Sams: Because you can say things that you can't say in front of bosses and bosses can say things that they can't say in front of employees.

Beth Dekker: It's a safe space. Yes.

Shane Sams: Exactly. Safe space to vent, complain, and do all that stuff and ask you questions-

Jocelyn Sams: Or to talk about how amazing they are.

Shane Sams: Or to brag on each other. You know what I'm saying? Because that's going to happen. Okay. But that also, if you're going to make a feature of this membership connecting entrepreneurs to the hands, the right hands, you don't really want them to talk to each other because that's something that you have to be the gatekeeper of. Because if they can find them theirselves, they wouldn't need you.

Beth Dekker: Sure.

Shane Sams: But there is a strategic reason to separate them other than we just want different groups like talking in the different groups. Is that okay? Does that sound good?

Beth Dekker: Yeah. That's perfect.

Shane Sams: The management of that's pretty easy because if you are going to do Facebook lives or any kind of Q&A lives, we have found that the best schedule is every other week anyway. Like we tried to do like weekly one time and it like, it actually was like too available so people would not come because they're like, I'll catch the next one. I'll catch the next one. Right. So it actually works really good on like a bimonthly monthly schedule like every other week. So you could do like week one and three could be the entrepreneurs and week two and four are the right hands and now you're only still doing like an hour, hour and a half work a week on these to manage those groups, it's just they're separate. You don't have to worry about it.

Beth Dekker: Sure.

Shane Sams: We talked about content. We talked about community. We got these two groups that we're going to set up for the different people. The third point in the triangle for any membership is coaching. Like it's being a leader. But I think you're going to kind of cover that on those Facebook lives, right? Like you're going to do that stuff. And you could even offer a one on one tier above the normal membership price. You could have like, cause you like doing one on one, you just said you like getting face to face. You like doing that consulting stuff. Correct?

Beth Dekker: I do. Yeah.

Shane Sams: I would just have a nice coaching package that's probably the same. It might be like the same price for either tier. If they wanted to have some one on one coaching in addition to the thing it'd be, it would give you something to sell on each Facebook live. Like maybe, you take three calls a week or something like that just to boost revenue. And that way you just got that leadership thing in there and you're good on both sides.

Beth Dekker: Sure.

Shane Sams: That's the membership. Like that's what it looks like. That's how you get people like into your stuff and it's pretty much mostly all created like you've got the Squarespace thing. You can sell access to courses on Squarespace, is that, is that correct?

Beth Dekker: You can sell individual services and then you can also sell products. The issue is, I would need some kind of a plugin or some other program to be able to create like a membership space.

Shane Sams: Why don't you just use something like Kajabi or click funnels? Because-

Beth Dekker: I certainly can. I just have to learn.

Jocelyn Sams: Or alternatively, you could create another website where your membership is housed, it could be like a wordpress website and you could just link to it from your original site.

Shane Sams: Yeah, you could do something like that. How technical are you with stuff? Like you're using Squarespace. So I'm assuming. Have you played with wordpress? Do you know how to do that or not?

Beth Dekker: I played with a little bit of my husband's site. He's a food and travel writer and his is on wordpress and so he knows it a little better than I do. I just feel, for some reason Squarespace works well with my brain. I built several sites on that program. I'm not opposed to wordpress at all though.

Shane Sams: Well. Okay, so basically like wordpress of course is the cheapest option, right? Because you just buy the plugin, install it-

Jocelyn Sams: But I don't think you have to blow away what you already have. I think you-

Shane Sams: No, basically you just write a sales page and you use your same site for the sales page, with the little button clicked over to Right Hands community or wherever, the order form or whatever. Click funnels is really good with this because clickfunnels and Kajabi are both, not cheap, but they're also really good at really simple content based memberships. Like people would join, they would go to a page that had all your courses. Okay. So you might have two courses set up and then they can just click and buy and use what they want, log in there that handles all the payments and then as they buy or you just add them into your Facebook group if they're still in the course. That makes Sense? It's pretty, the only management part when you use something like a Facebook group for your community is the manual keeping up with who's actually paying. Like once a month you're going to have to go through, you're going to print the customer list, see who's payment failed, to see who canceled, and you've got to go remove them from the group manually.

Shane Sams: That's why, what we do is we have all of our content, all of our community, everything is hosted on wordpress. That way if you cancel or your payment credit card fails, it just locks you out of everything. That's why we choose to do it that way but it totally works either way, it doesn't matter. All right, we've kind of built out what the membership is going to look like. We don't have to scrap your entire website you've already got. There's going to be-

Jocelyn Sams: Sigh of relief on that one.

Shane Sams: That's exactly right. No technical stuff. It's like start two Facebook groups done. Okay. Do you have any followup questions or is any of that confusing or what do you see with this plan?

Beth Dekker: That seems great. I think that's a really direct way to do it. I think one of my main questions is, I do enjoy teaching classes in person and because of this relationship that I have with this coworking company here in town, which I'm hoping to be able to use that as a great way to sell my membership because they have hundreds of members. How should I balance kind of these in person courses with my online courses? Do I keep them 100% separate? Do I talk about them both on my website? Like how should I work that out? So it's not confusing.

Shane Sams: It's really just an ascension ladder I think because what's going to happen is, it is a separate product kind of, but it's kind of like our live event. Like you're coming to Flip Your Life LIVE. Like Flip Your Life LIVE, flippedlifestyle.com/live boom, we'll see you there. Flip Your Life LIVE is like a separate product to us. Like it really doesn't like, it's not really connected with the membership. Like it has its own Facebook group, completely separate from the membership. We do trainings in that completely off the grid of the Flip your Life community. But it's kind of, what all roads lead to in the membership like we want, if you're listening to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, we want you to come to Flip your Life LIVE. If you're in the community, doesn't matter what tier you're at. We want you to come to Flip Your Life LIVE.

Shane Sams: They're kind of symbiotic in the way they fill each other up. And I think that's what will happen here. You'll find that entrepreneurs will join, you'll make business connections, you'll go do your workshops, which are your courses. But like now you can get people to come to these workshops or at the workshops, you can sell people into your membership. Things are going to kind of flow back and forth and I don't know if you're going to have to like separate them like you think you're going to. That makes sense?

Beth Dekker: Yeah. No, it does. When I look at my sales page, I look at it and I'm like, I know what's going on here. And I'm confused. I need to make sure that it, cause I know that the company that I'm working with does want me to have like a little registration area and that kind of thing and I think I need to divide that out so that when they're linking to me they're linking to a specific part of my site that is just what is going on with them.

Shane Sams: We have our, if you want to join our, I actually just covered this in a training last night for Flip Your Life LIVE attendees, we have a sales page for the membership. Like if you go to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife all one word, right? You're going to land on a sales page for our community and there's going to be three options to join either our standard membership our premium membership or the accelerator program. But our one on one coaching program, our private mastermind is not on that page. It's on a different page. Our Flip Your Life LIVE is not on that page. We don't even talk about it cause that's not what we're selling there.

Shane Sams: They almost string together back and forth. Does that make sense? You're going to market them separately, but they're going to be very symbiotic and send people like for example, if someone buys a membership to Flip Your Life, the Flip Your Life community, their thank you page sells, Flip Your Life LIVE. If someone buys a ticket to Flip Your Life LIVE, we say on the thank you page, Hey, we just want to make sure that you're going to get the most out of your ticket. Are you a member? We want to make sure that it's not just someone who bought a live event ticket. They flow back and forth. But if someone literally asked, hey, I need to go to your workshop, you need to point them to the workshop page. And if someone said, "Hey, I want to join your community at the workshop.” You need to be able to point them back to the community where they're completely separate in that regard.

Shane Sams: But I don't want you to think of it as like a different business. It's almost a different product.

Beth Dekker: Sure, ok.

Shane Sams: Would that make it, so do you have the workshops and the community on one page right now?

Beth Dekker: I have everything on one page. Like I said, it really is just the past couple of weeks that I've been trying to build up this relationship.

Shane Sams: That's a store is what you've got, not a sales page.

Jocelyn Sams: A lot of people do this at first and it's totally fine. Like you just have to think like your customer. Whatever page someone lands on, what is the logical next step for them? And that's what they need to continue down. If they're a business owner and they're reading articles about how to effectively hire someone to assist them in their business, you don't want them landing on a sales page for people who are wanting to become an executive assistant or whatever.

Shane Sams: They're actually, if I'm following you Jocelyn there'd be three pages. Then she would have an entrepreneur page where they would join the membership in a different way. There would be a right hand page where they would join the membership and then there would also be a workshop, which is like a group kind of hiring you kind of thing to come and speak to other business owners or something like that.

Jocelyn Sams: If that's the way you want to set up your business, yes.

Shane Sams: Sure. If you're going to do all three things.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay, Beth let's find out if you have any additional questions for us before we go.

Beth Dekker: I just really have, kind of one more because it seems like I have pretty much two different customers or two different avatars that I'm not sure how that affects my sales tactics for both of them or how that affects my lead magnets. If I am offering, say two different items, say that they could choose from, they could download either this pdf or this pdf, and that, that they could kind of choose which one or how that would work. If I'm using one thing to sell to two different people.

Shane Sams: You've got, you're going to have different lead magnets for sure. And you do have two segments of your audience, but so do we, like there's some people who really want to go all in DIY, we have a DIY tier on our membership, right? That's marketed way different, than we would market our premium membership, which is more hands on with me and Jocelyn. There's two member calls a month or even our email program or even our Voxer program. Like, so you do market things a little bit differently in your language. But I don't know if you can get really, I don't know if you have to get away from only dealing with one person. Like you don't only have to market to entrepreneurs you don't like, you're really not selling the program to be the right hand or the program to train your right hand.

Shane Sams: You're really selling you as the mediator between those two tiers. Like that's what your program actually teaches, right? It's like you're teaching those two entities how to exist and make great things happen together and maybe even how to find each other down the road. Basically it's like, if you had to make a schedule, it would be like, okay, well on Monday I'm going to write a blog post that's geared toward the entrepreneur, then have the lead magnet for the entrepreneur, five easy steps to train your right hand, right? Then on Wednesday, every Wednesday I'm going to release a piece of content that's geared toward the assistant or the virtual assistant who wants to step up in the company and be the right hand. And then they would have their own lead magnet. Like how to make more money being an assistant or whatever, so they have to have more skills.

Shane Sams: And then Friday could be something like a management article of how to manage your right hand. Another one could be like, how to serve your entrepreneur and like there's, you just go back and forth and talk about different things. Like usually on like a Monday, I'll kind of send out a general email and the PS, will be something like, hey, if you're not a member, we have tiers as low as $19, whatever. And then maybe later in the week it might be like, Hey, I'm opening a spot in our one on one mastermind program that's x thousand dollars. Does that makes sense? You're just going to kind of bounce back and forth between the segments but you are going to need to think of them in silos. Think of them completely independently. It's just like where, it's just like coaches and players. They're all on the same team. You're not, you're not really dividing them up. It's your content is going to kind of speak to different people as you go.

Shane Sams: I think what will happen as your sample size increases. I know that mostly business owners have bought it now, but there's a whole lot more people at the assistant level wanting to be a higher assistant level then there are business owners and I think this might flip eventually once you get more numbers, like into the funnel.

Beth Dekker: That'd be great to see.

Shane Sams: Because then you'd have more people to do it.

Jocelyn Sams: All right. Beth, I am really looking forward to seeing what happens next in your business and what you're able to accomplish before the LIVE event in September. Before we close today, tell us what is one thing that you plan to work on based on what we talked about?

Beth Dekker: I think I'm going to work on my, no I don't think. I am going to work on my sales page and build that out and then look at a building out the membership in wordpress.

Shane Sams: Awesome. That's good. And Yeah, you just need to go tell your husband he's got to help you because he knows how to do it.

Beth Dekker: There you go.

Shane Sams: Listen, what a great call. Thank you so much. I love your business. Like ever since I've said it earlier but I really mean it. Like when I first heard about your business I thought, wow, that is something that every entrepreneur needs and everyone you know on the ladder needs to move up the ladder in their course in their a job. You've got an awesome idea and you're already seeing some things happening. And I know when you get this set up correctly, get the marketing in place that people are going to jump all over it. Just wanted to thank you for coming on the show. Again, being so transparent, letting us have a peek inside of your business and I know a lot of people out there listening are going to get a lot of benefit out of that today. Thanks for being on the show.

Beth Dekker: Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

Shane Sams: Alright, what another great episode of the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. Man, Beth was just killing it, planning her business out, getting that membership ready, building that recurring revenue and doing it all before she comes to Flip Your Life LIVE. We cannot wait to meet Beth in person at Flip Your Life LIVE and we would love to meet you there too. Flip Your Life LIVE is an open event for everyone who listens to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, members of the Flip Your Life community at any level and we would love to see you there. Flip Your Life LIVE this year is in Lexington, Kentucky on September 19th through the 21st. Tickets are on sale right now at flippedlifestyle.com/live. That's F-L-I-P-P-E-D-L-I-F-E-S-T-Y-L-E.com/L-I-V-E.

Shane Sams: You can get your ticket now, but you better hurry because they are selling out fast. We only have about 29 tickets left. The original allotment when I'm recording this podcast, and by the time you hear this, they may be gone. VIP tickets are sold out. We still have a few general admission tickets left. Go to flippedlifestyle.com/live and we will see you in Lexington in September. That's all the time we have for this week guys. Thanks for listening. Until next time, get out there, take action, do whatever it takes to Flip Your Life. We'll see you then.

Jocelyn Sams: Bye.

Links and resources mentioned on today’s show: * Beth's Website * Flip Your Life LIVE 2019 Tickets & Registration Information * Flip Your Life community

Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!

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In today's episode, we help Brooke overcome imposter syndrome and implement new marketing strategies for her nursing student membership.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jocelyn: Hey y'all. On today's podcast we help Brooke overcome imposter syndrome and implement new marketing strategies for her nursing student membership.

Shane: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast where life always comes before work. We're your hosts Shane and Jocelyn Sams. We're a real family that figured out how to make our entire living online. Now we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? All right. Let's get started.

Shane: What's going on everybody? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. It is great to be back with you again today. Super excited to have another real member of the Flip Your Life Community onto the show. Cannot wait to celebrate a big success in their business and help them take their business to the next level. But, first, we wanted to let you know that the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast is brought to you by the Flip Your Life Community. That's where we teach real people, real people just like our guest and just like you how to start, build, and grow an online business of their very own.

Shane: We are proud to be one of the only business podcasts that does not sell ads or sell interview spots to guests who are in turn selling their latest book or pushing affiliate products. No, we are 100% supported by our members, listeners, and fans. That keeps us independent, free, and focused on doing what's best for Flipped Lifestyle listeners just like you. We would love to have your support and help support you on your online business journey inside of the Flip Your Life Community.

Shane: Flip Your Life members get early access to the Flip Your Life podcasts each week, bonus and extended episodes of the show, complete access to our entire training library. Of course, there's over 50 training videos to help you find your business idea, launch your online business, and sell things online. Plus you will get access to hundreds of other family focused entrepreneurs from around the world in one of the most active business communities online.

Shane: So help us keep the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast ad and affiliate free all while we help you build your business and help you create a better future for your family. We have affordable plans starting for as little as $19 a month and your first month comes with a 30 day money back guarantee. There's absolutely no risk when you join. You can cancel anytime. To learn more go to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife. That's F-L-I-P-P-E-D-L-I-F-E-S-T-Y-L-E dot com/flipyourlife all one word. Join today. We appreciate your support and can't wait to support you and help you reach your goals inside the Flip Your Life Community. That's flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife. Join today.

Shane: But today we are super excited to welcome Flip Your Life Community member Brooke Butcher to the show. Brooke, welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast.

Brooke: Hey, guys, thanks for having me.

Jocelyn: We are very, very happy to have you here today. I am especially interested in what you're doing for your day job right now. We'll talk about that just a little bit. But before we jump into all that, tell us a little bit about you and your background.

Brooke: You bet. I am from Oklahoma. I am a wife and a mother to two girls, five and three, so we're pretty busy around here. I'm a nurse, but I don't really work at the bedside right now. I went back and got my Master's so I could start teaching several years ago, and I worked as a professor for about five years teaching in the final semester of the nursing program at one of our colleges. I have stepped away from that as well just because it wasn't very flexible.

Brooke: Right now for my 9:00 to 5:00, I'm working with nursing students in an online university serving in more of like a mentor role to help them navigate their classes and graduate on time. Sadly, it's not a teaching role or it would be more fun and tolerable frankly, but I basically have to check in with them weekly and do these calls. I'm working from home, so that's kind of a hard battle right now with the girls being the ages that they are and trying to keep them out of the office and that sort of thing while I'm working.

Shane: You left out... On your intake form that you filled out you said, "A call that many of them despise."

Brooke: That's absolutely right.

Shane: So basically you're forcing these poor nursing students to spend time with you on the phone and they hate this. Why do they hate it so bad?

Brooke: It's a weekly call and basically just to check in to say, "Are you doing your work?" You did this well last week. Seriously, some of them will answer the phone and be like, "Hello?" I'll say, "Hi, Nicole, it's Brooke."

Brooke: "Oh, hi."

Shane: Oh, no.

Brooke: You can hear this shift in energy in their voices.

Shane: Are these like nontraditional... I know not a lot of nurses are nontraditional students. Are some of these older people too that have families that went back?

Brooke: Most of them are. These are actually students that are already... They're already nurses. They're going back to get their BSN.

Shane: Oh, okay. See, that's even worse because you're taking... If you get on to college student, sorry if there's any college students listening out there, but those are children. You're getting real adults that you're taking time away from what they're doing. They probably just hate you for it.

Jocelyn: Yeah. I was particularly intrigued by this because I'm just surprised that you actually call these students every week. I did my master's online when I was getting my education degree, and nobody called me every week to make sure I was getting my work done. In fact, I'm pretty sure they didn't contact me at all.

Brooke: Right.

Shane: Why do they do that? Is it like a retention strategy for the nursing school or something or is it just meant to be support?

Brooke: Yeah. It's meant to be support. They call it... They say it's like their secret sauce to the success of the students in their program. It's not just the nursing college, it's all of the colleges through that online university. It's a hard role because most people don't appreciate it. Some really do, but for the most part it's just frustrating. I'm not a phone person, which kind of adds insult to injury, but I took the job because it's really flexible with my family for the most part, and it offers much better pay than you'd get at a brick and mortar college these days.

Shane: For sure. And it is... There's always trade-offs, right? We all make trade-offs no matter what our business is. There's going to be something in it that you don't like. Every job, even when you fully start your own online business and you're doing it self-employed forever, there's going to be something you don't like. But does the trade-off match up? Do you get the hours back with your kids? Do you have more money than another job or are you able to pursue another thing like your online business because you took one job over another? Kudos to you for not only supporting the nurses of the future but taking all their crap when they're mad at you.

Shane: Well, tell us a little bit about what you're doing online. One reason that we asked you on this show was because you've been very active in the Flip Your Life Community, very active in our Flip Your Life LIVE attendee sessions by the way. Just chatted with you last night in one of those. We're super excited that we get to meet you and we get to talk to you, and we get to help you. You've been doing some really cool things online, and you've had some success. Tell everybody what you're doing online on the side, and tell us about these success stories you've been having, these big wins.

Brooke: Yeah, you bet. I provide online resources for nursing students. These are not the student's I'm working with now. These are students who are trying to get their RN degree so they can go be nurses at the bedside. It's set up as a membership site. Right now I have it on Teachable where students pay $25 a month, and they have access to PowerPoints and videos, cheat sheets, study guides, practice questions, all kinds of things. Then I have a private Facebook group where I do Facebook lives, answer Q&As and offer extra trainings and things like that over testing and study habits and everything that goes along with nursing school basically.

Brooke: There are four semesters in nursing school. I currently have all of the resources built out for the fourth and final semester, and I started a beta group back in January as I was building out the rest of the content and had I think around 22 or 23 students join there.

Shane: Did you charge for your beta group or was it kind of like a free thing?

Brooke: No, I charged for my beta group because what I did, I had been working with this group of five students. I had been tutoring them from the first semester. This was from the college that I used to work at, and one of the faculty members had given them my name and said, "Oh, I know sometimes she does tutoring on the side." These students had reached out to me. I was tutoring them as a group. Every week I would meet with them for an hour or two hours and go over content. Whenever it came to the fourth semester, I thought, "I have all of the content ready to go for this because I taught this entire semester." I sent one of them a group message on Facebook and said, "Basically made a template on Teachable. This is what this would look like. Do you think people in your class would be interested in this resource?"

Brooke: I didn't realize this, but the student sent it to her entire class of 75 students.

Shane: Wow.

Brooke: Brooke is willing to build this out for us if she has people who are willing to pay for it. Within 24 hours she sent me back 44 messages that said yes.

Shane: Oh, my gosh. That is amazing. This happened just last September, correct?

Brooke: That's right.

Shane: Wow.

Brooke: That happened in August, and then I was like, "I better get my butt in gear." I started building out like the first unit. I said, "I'll have that ready to go by the day that your class launches." I think 25 people signed up right away. I offered two different tiers then because I was kind of afraid of my bandwidth having this full time job and everything. I said, "For those of you who will pay $25 a month I'll do Facebook lives for you and provide you with the video content and that sort of thing." Everybody else I think I only charged $10 or $15.

Shane: This is the beta group, right, not what you're doing now?

Brooke: That's right.

Shane: This is the beta group.

Brooke: Yeah.

Shane: Okay.

Brooke: That have access to the content. I should've just-

Shane: Super smart.

Brooke: Yeah. So it worked out really well, but, of course, that was the fourth semester so they all graduated in December.

Shane: You basically built in your own attrition to stop all the payments?

Brooke: Yes, so it was not a great plan.

Jocelyn: Well, you know, the good news is you did that at the beginning, so that's a nice little lesson for you of what not to do.

Shane: That's right. Right, exactly. This is an amazing.. I was writing things out as you were saying this like an outline. I just looked over at Jocelyn, and we're like fist pumping every time you said the next step that you took. Because you were like just doing something one on one kind of randomly tutoring people, and then you kind of just put it out there to a group, and you built an outline, and then you didn't even have anything ready to go. You just showed them kind of what it was like a prelaunch. And you had all these people raise their hand and then half of them gave you money. Basically what you just said too, I wrote this down, there were 75 people in the class who heard about this. That's like an email list of 75 humans. That's 75 people. Just like an email list of 75 people, that was a classroom of 75 people. Forty something of the 75 raised their hand and 20 something of those actually opened their wallet.

Shane: That just goes to show you if you just put yourself out there even if it's not perfect, even if it's not done, you don't need a huge amount of people. If you can find an email list of 75 to 100 people, and they're the right people, you may be sitting on a membership of 25 to 30 people paying you $25 a month tomorrow and then once they give you money, you're going to be so pumped up and scared, you have to go create the content because you took their money. That's what you get, right?

Brooke: This is right.

Shane: How motivated were you after those people signed up to be like I have got to get this stuff done. I need to do six months of work in a month because these people are expecting this from me.

Brooke: Oh, yeah. I was super motivated and kind of terrified because I was thinking, "How on earth am I going to pull this off?" I honestly had this vision since 2012, and I did not take action on it because I just kept saying oh well, now we've got a new baby. Oh, now we've got this and that. And now I kick myself because why didn't I take steps. For all of the listeners who are just sitting on something, just do it. I finally decided even if it fails, at least I gave it a shot, and I won't ever have this regret. I won't ever wonder about it.

Shane: And don't worry, that happens to a lot of people too. I don't know if we've said this on the podcast before. I think I've talked about it a little bit here and there. Back in like... When was I selling those playbooks on Ebay on DVDs, Jocelyn? Was that like-

Jocelyn: That was like 2002 maybe.

Shane: In like 2002, we had just graduated from college. Jocelyn was working as a sales and marketing director for commercial dishwashers.

Jocelyn: Don't be jealous.

Shane: Exciting task right there, living the high life, let me tell you. Then I was working for my dad doing insurance. For some reason, I got this idea that I could sell football playbooks on Ebay. I would just download them and put them on a DVD and sell them.

Jocelyn: And physically mail them.

Shane: And physically mail them to people.

Jocelyn: Because people still did that in 2002.

Shane: Yes. What's crazy is I somehow built this website with dream weaver. I went and bought a book from the bookstore about dream weaver the old HTML website software that you did on your Windows 98 computer or whatever we were using back then. And I actually made money. I made like almost $500, but then I just stopped. I just went down a career path. I got a job coaching football, and I said, "I'm just going to go do this." Internet marketing wasn't a thing then, but this was a full 10 years before we circled back around and we're like, "Hey, I wonder if we can make money online." I often look back and go, "Oh my goodness, what if I had just kept going?"

Jocelyn: And didn't play as many video games.

Shane: What if I didn't play as many video games back in 2002 as I did? Where would we be? But you can't really do that, right? All you can say is, "Well, wait a minute. What's happening now, and how can we turn this into a better tomorrow?" It's truly amazing. Let's fast forward a little bit. You sell this thing, you build it accidentally where everyone has an end date, and they all leave in December. What happens in January of this year? Kind of bring us up to where you are in your membership today, how many members do you have and things like that.

Brooke: In January, one of the students that I had been tutoring she had to sit out her semester in the fall because she had a baby. She was the first one to jump on and say, "Yes, I will sign up for your membership," because she had already been working with me, and she knew that what I was providing was valuable. She had clearly talked to some of her friends, and they weren't really biting. Some of them would come to some of the Facebook lives I was doing just on my regular Facebook page, but they weren't invested in any of it. So I started kind of implementing some of your strategies and things like that, and going on and doing more lives just to show people what I was capable of offering them and that sort of thing and reaching out. You said, "Send out an email that just says 'What are you working on right now?'" So whenever somebody would come visit or sign up for a cheat sheet or something like that, I would say, "What do you need help with right now?" Half of them would respond.

Brooke: I think through doing those little things like that it started to gain some momentum, and I think it was in February I got 17 new members. Just slowly, week by week I'll look up and I'll have five new members and six new members. Now I'm at 36 right now.

Shane: Amazing.

Brooke: I started a beta group for the third semester students a couple of months ago, and I only have four students in that, which has been fine because I've had more on my plate than I anticipated. So that's been working well. Now, of course, this semester has finally ended this last week, and so I'm hoping that I'll have some time over the summer to really build out that MP3 content, the third semester content, so that way I won't lose all of my students each semester.

Shane: Right. Basically, the long term play then is to have all four semesters covered, and then you can figure out a way to support... Maybe the first two semesters is totally passive people, just courses. They just join and do courses until they're out of those two semesters, and then you support with your Facebook lives, your Q&As the third and fourth semester people who are really anticipating I've got to buckle down and graduate. I need help. Right? I would say nursing students it's probably a huge attrition from the first two semesters into the end. You start with 100 people, and I don't know, half of them or less probably actually graduate?

Brooke: Yeah. It kind of depends. Where I was, one, two and three weren't as bad, and then the jump to four was just crazy. They would lose all their students between two and three and then a bunch of people couldn't make it through four.

Shane: That's crazy. Here's what's amazing though. You have had this idea forever, right? Since you've taken action in just a few short months, you've basically built a business that... Granted, you've not even turned the temperature up on it. You've not even put the fuel to the fire. You just got the fire going. You've already built a thing that's basically creating $1000 of extra income a month just from your content and just from you showing up to a couple of lives. It's totally scalable because the way you're doing it is one to many, so you could add another 40 members and be making $2000 a month really, really fast and eventually create an entire income off of this.

Jocelyn: I think that there's a longer term play for this too that's a little bit different than some industries because it is sort of like a short term product meaning that once they're finished with school then they probably won't need it anymore. I wonder if maybe you could set up some type of program where they could refer other people to you maybe in exchange for being added to a free support group.

Shane: Yeah, or something like that.

Jocelyn: Or something like that.

Shane: Or like a post nursing school support group for their first year. That could even be a community or something like that just to extend that lifetime value.

Jocelyn: It's such like a close knit group, you know? It's like nurses know other people who are going to nursing school, and that would be great leads for you.

Shane: Yeah. Also, too, what's really cool about this niche is it does seem short term. Let's say, how long does it take them to go through a semester? Is it like an actual college type semester like four months of the year or whatever? Let's say you get the third semester and the fourth semester done. You've basically created a situation where you've got a good seven to nine month retention, something like that. But the cool thing is, there's always new nursing students the next semester. There's always new nursing students going into the third semester. With the right marketing funnel and the right support to your sales process, you're just going to reset your members all the time. You got new members being created every day or every semester that they start their new nursing thing. If you ever get to the point where you've covering all four semesters, you've just got this amazing revolving door of I've got eight month retention for every new member I get, I've got new members coming in right when they leave. That's pretty amazing. It's all because you took action even though you started thinking about taking action seven years ago. That's crazy.

Shane: Well, listen Brooke, before we go any farther, congratulations because you are farther ahead than 99% of people will ever make it. You have done some amazing things just from taking action, just from putting yourself out there. I can confidently say that with what we're seeing here you are definitely going to grow this thing, and it is going to be an awesome thing for you and your family.

Jocelyn: Thanks. Yeah. I'm really excited to see where it goes. I'm really kind of curious also. What does your husband have to say about this? When you were getting started, and then it started working, was he like, "Whoa, this is really cool"?

Shane: Well, first of all, when you started it, was he like, "Are you listening to those people from Kentucky again? Come on."

Brooke: That's right.

Shane: What was that like? Then when you dropped a grand in his lap, were you like, "I told you so"?

Brooke: Yes. I remember last summer whenever the student came back to me with that list of all the students I said, "So I'm going to do this." He looked at me. He is not a man of few words. This man can talk for days. Speechless. I mean, he didn't say anything. He looked at me like-

Shane: Jocelyn would know nothing about what you're talking about.

Jocelyn: Yeah, I definitely do not know about that.

Brooke: He seemed kind of confused about it a little bit, and he said, "All right. Well, I support you," but it seemed skeptical. Anyway, after a few months I would show him, "Oh my gosh, I've hit the $500 mark. I've hit the $1000 mark." Then recently hit the $3000 mark, and was just really excited. He was very much more supportive of me going to the Flip Your Life LIVE than I anticipated he would be because of the success he'd seen.

Shane: That's amazing. What made you decide to come to Flip Your Life LIVE? Flip Your Life LIVE to us it's an event that we do once a year. It's kind of like the Flip Your Life Community family reunion. It's not just for members though. Anybody can come. It's open to all listeners, supporters, fans, members. It doesn't matter. We did that because live events are what really took our business to the next level. We wanted to kind of pay that forward by hosting our own live event, getting people to put this on their calendar, be really focused, and be able to go meet everybody in the community in real life because a different energy happens when you're in the same room together. What made you decide though to come to Flip Your Life LIVE?

Brooke: Like I said I've had this vision and this dream for a really long time. I didn't just... I was actively looking for resources to help me learn how to get there, and so I was an avid podcast listener. I would consume a whole lot of SPI and listen to all kinds of different podcasts and read blogs and things like that about things, but I didn't take action on any of them or I would take tiny baby steps but not see any sort of momentum at all and get frustrated. I heard you guys on Pat Flynn, and I think I heard your second guest appearance first, and then he said they were also on the podcast back on this episode. As soon as that first one ended, I immediately went back and listened to the other one and then went to your website because I just really liked your energy and it seemed like you guys were really real, and it seemed approachable what you were doing. I mean, that's where I am education space, and you made it happen.

Brooke: I started looking around at what you had to offer, and I just thought... And you had the 30 day free membership I think at the time. I joined that, and that was in January, I believe. I honestly started to see results right away with what I was implementing. I became a member, and I thought, "I'm going all in with this. I can't waste my life at that computer calling students any longer." You posted something on Facebook, and it rings in my head, "Don't live the same year for 77 years and call it a life." I can't do this job anymore. I want to spend time with my family. I want to be there for them. I want to be able to have a flexible schedule where we can go do things as a family. I think that's my ticket.

Shane: I asked that because I love it when I see people do this. I'm like, "Hey, this person signed up for this level. Whoa, this person upgraded. Whoa, they just bought a ticket." It just like all happens in succession that leads you all the way to that Flip Your Life LIVE. You've been actively... We do weekly training sessions that are exclusive to our attendees. You've been coming to those, checking those out, and it's just going to be an awesome experience. I'm really glad you're coming because if you think great things are happening now, wait until you get to that live event, and you go home and do more work in a month than you've done in two years.

Jocelyn: I love that quote that you were talking about about don't live the same year 77 times.

Shane: The life, right?

Jocelyn: Then there's another one that I really like that is similar. It says, "You're only one decision away from a totally different life." I really like that one too.

Shane: You've already made those decisions, so now we've got to figure out how to get you to the next level. What kind of fears and obstacles have you run into now? You've launched this thing. You've already busted through a lot of fears and things like that to get to the point that you're at now where you're making money online. It's starting to stack up. You're starting to see money that could turn into a real income in a very short time, but there's always little things that kind of get in our way. What things are happening inside your head or maybe some external obstacles are you facing right now that are keeping you from getting to that next level?

Brooke: One thing I definitely struggle with off and on is imposter syndrome. It doesn't happen nearly as often as it used to, but when it hits it can really derail me for days. I had a bout of this maybe like a month and a half ago as I was building out some of the newer content. All of a sudden this hit me like you don't know what you're talking about. You haven't taught this in seven years, and you're not going to be able to answer their questions on this live session. Honestly, it set me back for maybe three to four days where I was putting off working on it because this was such like a looming thing for me as opposed to just kicking it to the side and moving on with my work.

Jocelyn: Yeah, this is a tough one because I think that we all go through this. It's like everyone no matter what field you're in you're going to have this feeling at some point if you don't have it all the time. I have it pretty much every day. But the cool thing is that most people don't expect you to be perfect. In fact, they usually like you better if you do show a little bit of vulnerability. Sometimes you say, "You know what? I don't have all the answers, and I don't know the answer to your question, but I'm going to find out and let you know." That's really all most people ask for.

Shane: Yeah. Imposter syndrome comes from this myth that to be a "expert," you have to know everything about the subject. Because when we watch Bill Nye the Science Guy come on his scripted science program, these personalities that we see, they look like they know everything, but we don't realize that they sat in a room and they had to research all the answers to their little questions for their little TV shows. They are not totally the expert. If you caught them out in the street and asked them a question, they wouldn't know the answer either. But experts do know where to find the answers. That's what you really know. That's what you have to lean on is you're helping students who definitely don't have the answers. Right?

Brooke: Right.

Shane: They're like going through the process of learning some of the answers, but you've been through it, you've seen it, you've got experience helping other people. You've tutored now dozens of people, and you know how to find the answers even if you can't recall it. That's what Jocelyn and I really try to do like on our member Q&As. When we come in the door our premium membership there's two Q&As a month where people could come in and ask us questions. There are times when we get stumped. You've probably heard us get stumped on our member calls, and we just say, "Hey, I don't know that for sure. Post it in the forums. We will go research it, and we'll circle back around with an answer." Because we do know where to find the answers. Usually it's in somewhere where we've posted it before. We just have to go back and remember what we talked about.

Shane: Imposter syndrome is insidious because it makes us feel inferior. It makes us feel like we don't belong, and it makes us feel like we're not the ultimate expert on the entire earth in our subject matter. But really, we don't' have to be that. We are just a little ahead of other people who we are trying to help achieve a goal. We're all just a little bit ahead of somebody else. But if anybody's behind you, you can help them. You can clearly help your students and they've acknowledged that you can do that. Try to change it to where you're saying, "Hey, I need all the answers," to, "Wait a minute. I just have to help that person find the answer they need. If I can do that, I'm expert enough. I'm worthy of being able to do this because I'm just their guide. I'm just their mentor. I'm not the know it all that knows everything. I'm not Oz behind the curtain." Right?

Shane: The moral of the story is something Jocelyn just said, that does not go away. You would think that we would never suffer from imposter syndrome because we've literally been doing this every single day since 2014. We've woken up every day and all we do is help other people with their online business, build our own businesses, and do all these things. Man, anytime a question comes up and you get stumped, you're like, "I don't know everything." Right? It just doesn't go away, and that's a part of the rollercoaster, and you almost have to learn how to ignore it basically.

Jocelyn: It's also like we all have our own insecurities whether they are conscious or subconscious. Anytime someone brings one of those up, like maybe someone says, "Hey, I asked you this question, and you didn't know the answer to it," and it brings up something that you're already self-conscious about, then it makes us feel bad. Just remember that we all have haters. There's always going to be someone who's dissatisfied with what we do, and that always helps me just to know that there's no one in the world that everyone likes or that everyone thinks has all the answers. For me, that makes it okay.

Shane: Because now I don't have to please everybody because I can't. I just have to please the people that pay me, and you're paying us in the Flip Your Life Community membership, so we're here to help you, and you're here to help those other nurses.

Jocelyn: All right. Brooke, let's move on talking about how we can help you to move this thing forward.

Brooke: As we've discussed I have hit a roadblock in that all of my students graduate and leave me. I would really like to have a good game plan or kind of a roadmap in place what I can do over the summer in order to help start the school year off really well, get a lot of members, because I really never advertised it to the masses as I know I should because I've been afraid that students who are not in that content when they show up to the membership, like those from earlier semesters, will show up and be disappointed and leave. I guess I just kind of... I don't know what next steps to take or how to prioritize really the best things to do in order to get the membership really rolling at the part of the semester.

Shane: Yeah, and keep more retention, more live time value and things like that, right? Are you planning on making all four semesters' content? Are you planning on doing that?

Brooke: Yes. I would like it to be a one stop shop, like this is where students go forever.

Shane: And you already have the fourth semester? Is the third semester done or are you working on it right now?

Brooke: I'm working on it right now.

Shane: You know, I'll be honest. This probably... Even though you've already got the membership, you've already got some promotion, you've already got that marketing stuff kind of ready for that fourth semester especially, this seems like a product first problem. I almost think you have to just buckle down and knock out all four semesters just to get it done. Because you can't really promote this correctly to get people in longer. Imagine if you got a first semester student. Right when they're running in, they find you, they join the community for 25 bucks a month, and this all of a sudden is a two year member. That's a lot of LTV. That's a lot of guarantee.

Shane: Imagine if you got 100 people at $25 a month, that's $2500 a month, and you could predict that you were definitely going to make that base income going forward for 24 months. That would be amazing, right?

Brooke: Right.

Shane: But you can't do that without that content being created. You know?

Brooke: Yes.

Shane: So sometimes it really just means buckle down and do it. Back in February of 2016 or something, I was looking at all of our content in the Flip Your Life Community, and we were constantly updating stuff. We had stuff in there about lead pages, stuff in there about WordPress, just tools that always change on you. They update them every six months, and, well, I better go update that course. I don't know how Facebook ads course people to keep up with Facebook. I don't know how they make new courses every three months. I looked at it and I said, "This isn't going to be sustainable. This isn't going to work." I went through and said, okay, I'm going to redo the entire Flip Your Life blueprint and make it more evergreen. Focus on the strategy, focus on the tactics.

Shane: You've been in the Flip Your Life blueprint, there's a lot of courses in there, a lot of videos, a lot of workbooks, a lot of stuff. I actually did every single one of those in about a five week period. I just buckled down on February 1st. I looked at Jocelyn and said, "I'll see you in March." I knew if I would put that one month in then, it would produce freedom for me for the next three or four years because I wouldn't be updating courses every single month. I think I did 50 something videos over like a five week period because I just knew it had to be done, and I really believe that you're at that point where you're like, "This works, people react to it, I've just got to make sure that I can get all of the nurses into it."

Jocelyn: It's also going to take a huge mental load off of you because you're not sitting there thinking about it. Like, "Oh, well, if I only had this done, then maybe I could attract more people." Or, "If I only had it done, then I wouldn't have to worry about it anymore." Right?

Brooke: Sure, yeah.

Shane: Right now you're probably feeling like, man, I'd love to market. Also, too, the biggest class, we've talked about this earlier, is the first semester nurses. That's your biggest audience, your biggest segment. You can't even market to them right now. When you get the content... I'm not saying that the content needs to be perfect. I'm just saying-

Jocelyn: At least get it started.

Shane: Yeah. If you could hit the main themes... How much content is in your membership right now? In semester four, what does it look like?

Brooke: I mean, probably like 25 topics. It takes a lot of work to build out the content for each semester because you learn an ungodly amount of material.

Shane: Oh, sure.

Brooke: I mean, it probably took me a month to build out each unit, and there were four units in that.

Shane: So there's four units in each? Would that be the same for the second and first semester?

Brooke: The same for the first. The second and third semesters are different because you enter into mental health and OB, and you split it up.

Shane: Here's the deal. If you can set yourself some deadlines with consequences, I'm willing to bet that you could do the first semester in a month and the second semester in a month, and you could just be done with them. I'm not saying it's the final product, I'm saying it's the minimum viable product. It's the least that you could do. You don't have to do every single thing that's in there. Basically you just have to create the course in a way where you can like, "Okay, here's week one. You study this," but then you come to the Q&A, they ask questions, you record those, and you start bulking up the course.

Shane: I use this analogy sometimes when we're building courses. Everybody says, "Oh, it took me four weeks a unit. It took me 16 weeks. I got to do this thing." You built this massive product. That's fine. We're going to get there. The game that you're playing is kind of like a football field. Everybody does this. You know, the football is 100 yards long and 53-1/3 yards wide. That's what an actual football field looks like. That sometimes we get in our mind, "Well, I've got to play that game." But that's not true. You get to make the field. You get to create the rules. So you could say, "Our football field is going to be 50 yards long, and it's only going to be 25 yards wide." I'm going to do that right now, but we might extend it a little bit as we go.

Shane: If you said to yourself, "I have to have something available for these first semester students, and I have to have it done in four weeks, that's the field. That's the game I'm playing on," what would that look like? What would be the minimum thing to get these people started just to get them one thing a week plus they get to come to that live thing with me to ask questions. What would that look like? It wouldn't look like the finished product, but it would look like something that you could sell. Right?

Brooke: Yes.

Shane: That's really what you've got to do next is you've got to say... What month is it now? We're in May. So you've got June and July and then you've got to start marketing for these people going into this semester. Correct?

Brooke: Yes.

Shane: Okay. You have got to say to yourself, "What does the first semester look like if I only had four weeks to create it, X hours a week, and it has to be done?" Imagine you've sold this to 20 people, and you have to deliver something, not the final thing. It's going to bulk up over time. What would that look like? That's your next step, and you've got to go out and create that. Then you do the same thing in July. You just say, "Okay, well, what would the second semester look like if I only had four weeks and I've got to get this thing ready to sell knowing I've got plenty of time to add to it as we go, and I'm going to do live Q&As to fill in the gaps?" Then you create those two things, and now you look and say, "The one stop shop, Brookebutcher.com. Here we go." What's your website? What's your domain name?

Brooke: Thenursingprofessor.com.

Shane: All right. Thenursingprofessor.com is now the one stop shop, period. Then let your members that buy your product tell you what to add to it and what you left out. That's a mindset shift. That's not, "Oh, I got to spend 16 weeks creating a new course." I have four weeks. This has to be done. Let's go.

Jocelyn: And it also allows you to not be able to hide behind that. You can't tell yourself, "Well, I'd probably sell more memberships, but I don't have that done." So it takes that excuse away from you.

Shane: Yeah, because there is something there to sell. What you have to be prepared for is someone will go in there, you have to be prepared for the questions. Someone's going to go in and say, "Oh, where's this? I'm studying this." And you'll be like, "Oh, yeah, I didn't put that in there because I was in a hurry." Then you just make it real fast, and you put it in there, and now it's there forever. Then the next person will say, "What about this?" You say, "Oh, don't worry." But that's what the Q&As are actually for is to show you holes in your system. If you can't point to a course at a Q&A, then you just found your next course you need to create basically.

Brooke: Okay.

Shane: Does that terrify you?

Brooke: Well, I mean it just makes me feel like I'm not going to get much sleep this summer.

Shane: That's right.

Jocelyn: Well, you know, the sun stays out longer in the summer, so maybe you'll feel like you have more time.

Brooke: You're right.

Shane: Yep. Let me ask you this. How many hours do you usually work on... Let's say you're going to make courses. How many hours do you actually have in a day to work on this?

Brooke: Not much. I start my job at 7 a.m., and I'm calling students while running around and getting my kids ready and fed and out the door to school. Then one or two nights a week I also have to work in the evening time. I mean, I use fringe hours. I try to get up early a couple of days a week when my daughter doesn't beat me to it, and then I stay up late working, so maybe four or five.

Shane: A week?

Brooke: Yeah. If my husband's working late one night, then I power through and get as much content done on those nights as I can.

Shane: Okay. Let me ask you this. Let's say there's five hours that we're going to try to get back in a week. What is something that you're doing right now that you could give up for eight weeks to give your family a better life for the next eight years? What is something that you could stop doing even if it's just one more hour a week right now?

Brooke: I honestly think it's just sleep. I don't watch a lot of TV when my girls are here. They're five and three. I do sometimes hire a sitter or schedule a play date with cousins and such so I can get some more work done. I've got family who's really supportive of stuff like that sometimes.

Shane: Okay, let's say this then. We found something. You can part with something. You can part with money to hire a sitter, right? That's your main focus is to say, "I want to work five hours on this business a week, period." That's more than enough time. That's 20 hours in the month of June. That's more than enough time to create the outline of this content, right? That's more than enough time. But you have to be proactive with making sure on your calendar at the beginning of the week that you've got your sitter lined up. You may find those three hours that you're definitely going to work, but you got to be proactive about making sure you've got childcare and backup childcare to make sure those other two hours don't disappear on you.

Shane: If it shrinks to three hours in a week, we've got a problem. Correct?

Brooke: Yes.

Shane: There's your strategy. That's what you're going to give up. You give up the 25 bucks to whoever is watching the kid or whatever, and that's what you do. For some people it might be Netflix and Chill. You give it up for eight weeks to give your family a better life for eighty years, whatever. It doesn't matter. You've got to give up something. Remember, it's only in the short term, and once you make this content, you're not going to have to do it again for a while. You may give up... Let's say you give up 50 bucks a week or whatever, 200 bucks a month for two months, that's 400 whole dollars, but if you go out and you sell 100 extra memberships to first year nursing students, you immediately 5x'd your money on the backside.

Shane: It's just giving up something in the short term to get a whole lot of benefit in the long term, and you've got to lock it down like I am working five hours on this a week, and then what you do is you write down, as soon as you get off this call with us, you talk about it in the forums, we can go through and hash that out a little bit with you more in there. Now, you write down a plan. You say, "I have 20 hours. I am going to guarantee myself 20 hours in June. I will create this first semester program in June in those 20 hours. What can I do in 20 hours?" You say, "Hour one. Make this thing. Hour two, make this thing. Hour three, nope, that takes too long. Erase it. I'll do it later. Hour four..." You see what I'm saying?

Shane: That gives you a 20 hour plan. You've got 20 hours to create whatever that first semester minimum viable product looks like, and we are selling it in August, and it's happening, and then we'll make it better.

Brooke: Game on.

Shane: That's game on. That's right.

Jocelyn: All right, Brooke. It has been fun talking to you today. We always ask people before we go what is one thing that you plan to do in the next 24 hours based on what we talked about here today.

Brooke: I will map out these 20 hours and start making an outline of what to do for my first semester content.

Shane: Boom. That's what I'm talking about, Brooke. That is a game plan. I'm excited to see what you create. You've got all these deadlines that matter coming right at you too because you've got to sell this thing when they go back to school, and you got to show up to Flip Your Life LIVE to tell us how it went.

Brooke: Right.

Shane: Listen, thank you so much for coming on the show today. Thank you for sharing your success with everybody in the Flipped Lifestyle universe out there who's listening in. I know that your story has inspired some people who've had dreams since 2012 to get off the couch and take action, and we really, really appreciate that.

Brooke: Thank you guys for having me.

Shane: Also, Brooke, has a Bible verse that she would like to share with us. Jocelyn and I draw a lot of our inspiration from the Bible for our life and our business. We know a lot of other people out there do the same. Brooke would like to share a verse with us today.

Brooke: This is from Ephesians 5:15 and the verse of 16. Be very careful then how you live, not as unwise, but as wise making the most of every opportunity.

Shane: How ironic that we're going to make the most out of those 20 hours next month. They do know the verse, but I knew it was going to be related because God always turns it back around on the show. That's awesome stuff. Okay, Brooke, thanks again. We appreciate you.

Brooke: Thank you guys.

Shane: All right, guys. What another great show with one of our Flip Your Life community members. Brooke is doing amazing things. It took her a while to get off the sidelines, but once she got in the game, she really took it to the next level. She's making things happen. I have no doubt that she's going to be very successful in the next steps in her business.

Shane: That's what you have to do as well. You can't waste any time. You cannot stay on the sidelines anymore. If you're just listening to the podcast, if you're just hearing about other people's success stories, it's never going to happen for you in your life. You've got to take action, and the best way to take action is to join the Flip Your Life community. Go to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife, and we would love to have you as a member of our community. We've got all the training you need. We have a massive community, an active community that is ready to rally around you and help you achieve your goals. Jocelyn and I will be there for you all along the way. Again, that's flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife, and you can get your journey started today.

Shane: That's all the time we've got for this week, guys. Until next time, get out there, take action, and do whatever it takes to flip your life. We'll see you back.

Jocelyn: Bye.

Links and resources mentioned on today’s show: * Brooke's Website * Flip Your Life LIVE 2019 Tickets & Registration Information * Flip Your Life community

Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!

Join the Flip Your Life Community NOW for as little as $19 per month!

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In today's episode, we help Chad grow his new membership site.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jocelyn Sams: Hey y'all. On today's podcast we help Chad grow his new membership site.

Shane Sams: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, where life always comes before work. We're your hosts Shane and Jocelyn Sams. We're a real family that figured out how to make our entire living online. Now we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? All right. Let's get started.

Shane Sams: What's going on everybody? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. It is great to be back with you again today. Super excited to welcome another member of the Flip Your Life community onto the show so that we can help them grow their online business and change their family's future. Today's guest is Chad Bostick. Chad, welcome to the program.

Chad Bostick: Hey guys. So happy to be here. Man, I've been a long time listener of the show for many many years and I was honored and shocked that you guys invited me to the show and just super, super pumped to be here.

Shane Sams: Well listen, man. We reward action takers in the community and we watch those forums like a hawk, looking for success stories, looking for great questions, looking for people that are following through with their action plans and you earned your spot on the show today, man. So we're glad to have you.

Jocelyn Sams: And I loved your success story. This is the reason that we chose you to be on the show today, because Chad put out that he got his first paid member and that's something that's really exciting and that we always celebrate here on the show. His success story says, "I'm out of town for work so I didn't think I would make much progress on my business this week, but while I was waiting for my flight Sunday evening," He had been to an event, "I followed up with one of the folks that showed interest at my live speaking engagement. We've exchanged emails a few times this week and last night he said he tried to sign up for my membership but the site wasn't working. He asked my permission to PayPal me money. I said yes."

Shane Sams: Wow, that's amazing. Someone was literally like, "Can I just throw money at you? Because this is awesome." That's what it's all about.

Jocelyn Sams: It reminds me of that meme that says, "Shut up and take my money."

Shane Sams: Right, exactly.

Chad Bostick: It was so odd because I didn't even know how to respond. Somebody literally was like, "Shut up and take my money." I sat there and there was all of these negative thoughts in my head. I should say no, I'm not ready yet, I'm not a real entrepreneur, I don't know what I'm doing here. But instead, thank God I have Gmail so the Gmail client on my iPhone had responses built in at the bottom and one of the responses was sure. And so I just clicked the button.

Shane Sams: Oh my gosh, that is a great story man. What a first sale story. That is awesome.

Jocelyn Sams: I love that. That is awesome. And in the back of your mind you're thinking, "My sales process doesn't even work. Why do you want to give me money?"

Shane Sams: That's amazing, man.

Chad Bostick: Yeah.

Shane Sams: Well listen, let's back up. We're going to get deeper into that first sale and we're going to talk about the next hundred sales as well, but before we do that tell us a little bit about your background. Tell us where you come from, what you do and the life outside of this online business pursuit.

Chad Bostick: Absolutely. My name is Chad Bostick. I'm married 14 years to my beautiful wife Shauna. We have two kids, two daughters. One is nine and one is two, and so we've kind of got the whole range of kids here in the house and it's awesome. I am a software developer. Grew up as a software developer and have been a very technical person inside the software development space for many, many years. The last 20 plus years.

Chad Bostick: What I struggle with my entire life has been anxiety. I have had really, really difficulties in creating relationships and talking to people and speaking up and it really held me back in life and in my career. When I first got my first programming job back in the 90s, I kind of lucked into it and it was awesome and it was great and I had a lot of fun, but then building my career and moving up took a lot of effort that I didn't know I was going to have to put into it. I showed up and I was a good employee, I did a great job, but after five years of the first company I worked at I found out that I was one of the least paid people in the entire organization and it was really soul crushing.

Chad Bostick: There was a lot of other obstacles that I overcame but after a while I figured out that what I was really missing were soft skills. I didn't have confidence, I didn't have a good communication style, and I had no leadership skills whatsoever. So I worked on those, I developed those, and then my career started taking off and I started getting job offers, I started moving into management positions or being asked to be moved into management positions even though I said no for many many years on that. And then I've had amazing opportunities to work at big Fortune 100 companies and really small awesome niche companies in a lot of different areas and work on some amazing projects, work with some amazing people, and yeah. That's what I'm doing.

Jocelyn Sams: That's really interesting Chad, and I can actually relate to your story in a lot of ways. First of all I'm really into computer stuff and I would even go so far to say as I'm a little bit of a nerd, or a lot-

Shane Sams: A lot of a nerd. I used to ... Our first dates when we first started dating in college, Jocelyn worked at the computer lab as the person who helped people with computers and I would go sit beside her at the computer lab.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, and what was funny is that I started out in college, my plan was to become a programmer. I used to program years and years ago.

Chad Bostick: Yes.

Jocelyn Sams: In the midst of all this one of the computer science instructors accused me of cheating. I think I might have mentioned this on the podcast before. I did not cheat but she accused me of cheating and after that I just couldn't even think about programming any more. It really affected me that much. Along that line I also suffer from anxiety. I've been dealing with it for probably my entire life, but the last couple of years it's been really bad, so I can definitely relate to you on several different levels.

Chad Bostick: Yeah, the struggle is real. It's not fun at all when you get those anxiety attacks. I was so bad, guys, that back in my teens and in my early twenties, it was so bad that I couldn't even go to my family reunions and have conversation with my aunts and uncles and cousins because they felt like strangers to me and I didn't know how to open up to them. I didn't know how to just relax around people that weren't my best friends, and I had very, very few best friends. So it was ... That anxiety held me back in not just work but a lot of life opportunities as well.

Shane Sams: You said something like you turned down some opportunities to grow in your actual job, like your nine to five. You were offered jobs and you said no to them over and over, is that what happened?

Chad Bostick: Yeah, so at one point I had a boss who we ... I was in the oil and gas business at the time, working in the IT department at an oil company, and it's very cyclical. When it's hot it's hot and when it's not it's not. There's a lot of ups and downs and I didn't have a good way to grow my career so my career was growing through attrition. As everyone else was leaving or getting laid off I was doing a great job and I was sticking around, and then I was being offered these opportunities to move up into a senior developer position, into a lead developer position, into a supervisor or manager position, and I was like, "Whoa. That is way too stressful for me. I'm just going to sit here in front of the computer with my headphones on and stare at the code all day because that sounds like ... First of all it sounds like a bunch of meetings, which is boring, and second of all it sounds like a lot of responsibility of dealing with people problems instead of technical problems." That really stressed me out.

Jocelyn Sams: All right. Listen, I totally get that-

Shane Sams: I'm sitting here nodding.

Jocelyn Sams: Yes, I'm sitting here shaking my head.

Shane Sams: She's rocking in her chair right now.

Jocelyn Sams: I totally get this because honestly, I've said it many times, I would rather work with things than people any day. And it's not because I don't like people, I mean obviously I talk to people for a living, that's part of what I do, but I just don't like managing people. It's just not my thing, it's not what I enjoy. I would prefer to sit on a computer all day long than to interact with people in a work type setting.

Shane Sams: The problem is there's different ways to make money. I heard a speaker say one time there's three main ways people make money. One is with your muscles, you actually do things, you build the software, you build the house, you do the thing, right? But those are the lowest paid employees. And then the next one is you make money with your mouth. Like you're the manager, you tell people what to do, you talk, you do those things. Or you make money with your mind, you're like the entrepreneur who's creating and running the company. And the problem is if you get stuck in the muscles then you never move to that next level where you make more money, and then you never get to have a chance to go to the third level where you can make even more money, like owning your own online business.

Shane Sams: I can see where that fear almost of success or responsibility could hold you back a little bit. How did you break through that, get out of that?

Chad Bostick: First of all, in the software development space, it's a really really hot industry and not always the case that the manager makes more money. In some cases the software developers make more money than the manager. I've had several software developers work for me over the last eight to 10 years, that they were in a niche and they had a skill set that was very, very hard to find and they named their price and we were like, "Shut up and take my money," because we need this job done. A few individuals got to name their price and got whatever they wanted to.

Chad Bostick: But when I was moving into management it was really difficult because I really said no for three or four or five times before I finally kind of just took a look at my life and was like, "You know what? Am I getting into the same patterns as I was before?" One of the things I was struggling with wasn't really the money because honestly guys, I felt blessed to have the job and I felt like not worthy to have the job in some cases. I did not graduate college. I was a college dropout. But I started writing code when I was 10 years old because it was fun and I don't feel like English is my first language, I feel like Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code is kind of my first language because that was ... BASIC programming was what really grabbed my attention when I was a 10, 11 year old.

Chad Bostick: It was a struggle for me to accept that job because on one hand I didn't feel like I deserved the job that I had, and get the money that I had, but on the other hand dealing with people problems just seemed like an insurmountable task. I would fail at it on my first day. And it turned out that wasn't the case and I had a knack in it. I just needed to practice my skill sets and get more comfortable in that area.

Shane Sams: Yeah, that's what happens with most fears. We create this story that tells ourselves we can't do this, but then we go do it and it's fine. It's taking that leap from one side of the cliff, I can't do it, to the other side, okay I'm going to try it and then I'm good at it, is what most people really really need to do that.

Shane Sams: So you've got this good job, you've started moving up in your career. Why online business? Why then do you want to pivot now and go down this entrepreneur path, which is a whole different set of challenges and problems than even climbing that corporate ladder?

Chad Bostick: Yeah, that's a great question and it's not now that I want to make the change. I actually started down the online path 15 years ago and I had a lot of starts and I had a lot of stops and I had a lot of successes and I had a lot of failures, and I feel like this is something that I've been seeking and searching for for over a decade and I haven't quite figured it out. And it frustrates me because I'm a smart guy and I know how to get things done technically. I know how to build a website, I know how to set up all the funnels and all that kind of stuff, but just turning it into a business is not a skill that I've ever learned. It's not a skill or a collection of skills that I've really figured out how to practice.

Chad Bostick: The reason I wanted to get it was just the freedom in so many ways. It's not just about the money for me. It was the freedom to work on the projects that excited me. I worked on a lot of projects over the course of my career that ended up kind of being the same thing over and over and over and just not really exciting. I worked on a lot of projects where I did not have a lot of empathy for the customer space. It was just like an area where it's like, "Okay, we're building this thing, but I don't really know who's going to use it or why they're going to use it." And just the project cycle of our project spins up and you work on it and then our project spins down and then the next project spins up and down. That project-based work has just kind of drained me over the course of the years. What I want to do is get into a business where I have freedom and flexibility to work on the projects that excite me, to work with the type of customers that excite me, and to have that freedom to work anywhere in the world however I want to do it.

Shane Sams: I love this part of your ... We have a form that we fill out for everybody that's on the show and it says, "The nine to five is slowly killing my soul." You have this really matter-of-fact way that you say things, and it's really matter-of-fact all the way. You get to that sentence and it's like now stop, we're killing my soul. Like, and-

Jocelyn Sams: But I think that so many people can relate to that. There are so many people listening to this right now that are like, "Yes. I totally get that."

Shane Sams: It's almost just finding a purpose. Every project has to have a purpose. I'm the same way, I get bored really really easily, especially if someone else hands me something to do. Even if I like to do it, if someone tells me to do it, it just hurts me somehow because I don't feel like I'm flexible and free.

Jocelyn Sams: It's because you're the rebel. We just read a book recently, it's called The Four Tendencies by Gretchen Rubin. It's a really interesting book. Shane is called the rebel. He doesn't want to meet other people's expectations and sometimes he doesn't even want to meet his own.

Shane Sams: Yeah, I just want to get out ... Today's been the greatest day ever because we just had all these random things we've been working on. Jocelyn looked over at me ... We recorded another podcast about 45 minutes ago, and she looked over and an email had popped up in her inbox. She looked over and goes, "Did you just send that email or did you schedule it?" I go, "No, I just got bored and started writing it." I like to just be totally flexible and free and throwing emails out there and just doing all these different things and the nine to five, I've been in that grind, man. It can wear you down.

Shane Sams: Even if it's something that you do feel blessed. When I got out of college I went to work for my dad. He was an insurance salesman, he had a couple agencies, and I got to go into insurance and I worked in one of the offices. I think I've told this story before, but I remember one day that I was only about a year into it and I was standing there leaning on the file cabinet, looking out the window, and across the street there was a herd of cattle, like cows. They were just walking around, using the bathroom, eating whatever they wanted. Some of them had jumped in the pond and they were getting a drink. I remember distinctly at that moment thinking, "Look how free those cows are. Man, I wish I was one of those cows." Because I felt so trapped in this nine to five life.

Jocelyn Sams: Never on another podcast will you hear this story.

Shane Sams: No, I wanted to be a cow. At that moment I knew that was my life's dream, was to be as free as a cow in a field.

Jocelyn Sams: You heard it here first folks, on the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast.

Shane Sams: That's kind of what took me down to even thinking about entrepreneurship. Even many years ago before we ever did this I actually started a couple websites, probably five to 10 years before we ever even thought about doing our websites that actually succeeded this time. Don't think you're alone in that it's been 15 years, why didn't I do this? I actually started a couple sites and sold a couple things back in two thousand and ... What year was that, four?

Jocelyn Sams: I think it was 2002, something like that?

Shane Sams: No, I think it was a little bit later than that. Yeah, because it was before I got my football coaching job. When the internet was in its infancy I somehow found a way to build a website and sell something online. I don't even remember what it was. Maybe-

Jocelyn Sams: No, it was like a football-

Shane Sams: Drills. It was football drills. That's what it was.

Jocelyn Sams: And so what he was planning to do was sell these on eBay, and he actually sold a couple of them.

Shane Sams: That's right, and I made like 500 dollars doing it.

Jocelyn Sams: On a CD-ROM and we were actually physically mailing them to people.

Shane Sams: Yeah, and I ... But the problem is, I did it for three months and then I listened to the rest of the world that said, "Well, maybe you don't want to do this, but you should go back to school, get another degree, go a different path." So that's what I did and then something 10 years later, we get back into this, it bubbles back to the surface, we start our journey and we make it. So dude, you are not alone when you feel like you've put this off and you can't figure out why. I look back sometimes and I'm like, "Oh my gosh. What would have happened if we had kept doing this back then?" But you can't do that, you've just to move forward with what you've got now.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay, so we have talked a little bit about what you've been doing the past few years as far as starting your own online journey and trying to figure out what you're going to do. Where has this taken you? What have you been doing recently?

Chad Bostick: A few years ago one of the next steps in the evolution of Chad and fighting my social anxiety and pushing myself past my personal barriers was I knew that I needed to launch a podcast. I wasn't quite sure how it was going to make money and my wife and I were both kind of like, "Where's the sponsorships going to come from?" But I just had this desire in me that I need to get out and I need to just start a podcast. So I did it the go big or go home way and I started a seven day a week show that was, really looking back, it was really about career development, but at the time I didn't know how to articulate it.

Chad Bostick: Every day of the week had its own topic. Monday motivation, Tuesday productivity, Wednesday leadership, Thursday technology, Friday people and communication, Saturday entrepreneurship, and Sunday is what I called being unplugged, which was a joke because I was working 24/7 and didn't know how to be unplugged. That was what I did and I produced 270 episodes and it was awesome and it was fantastic. It really helped me put myself out there not just in my job but outside of my job, and start to build a brand and start to connect with other people. Meet hundreds and hundreds of software developers and entrepreneurs and business leaders and managers all across the world and that was fantastic, but there wasn't any money and sponsorships. Or maybe there was, but I didn't know how to tap into it.

Chad Bostick: After a while that shut down. We had a personal event where a little girl needed our help and so we ended up adopting her, but through the adoption and fostering process I had to get another job. It was a serendipitous moment where I was actually on a call with a recruiter who was trying to recruit me for a manager job and my wife was on a call with Child Protective Services who was trying to help us get this baby. I was saying, "No no no, I'm doing my podcast and I want to figure out how to turn it into a business." The lady that was talking to my wife was telling my wife, "You have to quit your business and get a job or your business has to be successful for three years before you can get this baby." My wife was grabbing my shoulder, shaking me, trying to get my attention and say, "Chad, you have to get a job now, otherwise this baby goes and lives with somebody else." I said, "Okay, so tell me about this job again. Sounds very interesting. I want to take it."

Shane Sams: Right, exactly.

Chad Bostick: So I put a pause in the podcast but now after two years of reflection on what that show was about, it was really about me trying to explore my career development path and all of the obstacles that I've overcome in my career and the transformations that I've had in my life and my career and trying to help others see that transformation is possible in their own lives and in their own careers. Now what I've done is focus all of that energy down into a more succinct, clear message, and that is I help software developers and IT professionals build their confidence, their communication and their leadership skills so that they can get better jobs, make more money, and have a bigger impact on the world.

Shane Sams: Yeah. I love how this says on your form too that you recorded ... You'd heard John Lee Dumas, you just went all in making podcasts every day of the week. You did 270 episodes, then it says, "I made $2000 in ads but I spent $3600 in audio editing."

Chad Bostick: Yeah, I know.

Shane Sams: That's a common theme, though. Because you kind of have to invest and spend up front when you're starting your business. Everyone's first year or two probably looks in the red, because you have to get ahead of the game and then when you start making money ... There's only a $1600 difference there. If you go out and sell 100 memberships you're going to make all that money you originally invested back. All those building blocks have stacked up and led you to the place that you are today where you actually can succeed and make that first sale and do those things. So that's not wasted effort or time by any means, it's just learning, figuring it out, and you know now what that clear vision looks like because you did all those things in the past.

Chad Bostick: Yeah, it was definitely lessons learned and I'm glad that I did it. It was very costly and it was very kind of painful to see that paycheck that never arrived and to know that I'm responsible for my family's wellbeing. I've got to keep a roof over their heads, I've got to keep the bills paid and whatnot. But it wasn't happening and I felt like a failure. Why is this not working? Again, I'm a smart guy. I'm doing the right thing, I'm doing good, I'm on Apple's New and Notable section, my podcast is growing, but just selling those ads wasn't working so I needed a pivot and I had to take some time off in order to get that clarity to get it.

Jocelyn Sams: Absolutely. And the best news is, is that you didn't just give up. I think some people at that point would just say, "Well, podcasting's not for me. Better go do something else." But you didn't say that. You said, "Okay, well this didn't work, so now what can I do to make it work?"

Shane Sams: And we're getting back into that now. So you've pivoted back. You're ready to go forward with a clearer vision, with an online business, right?

Chad Bostick: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Shane Sams: What is the biggest thing that's holding you back right now? What are the fears and obstacles now as you move forward? We talked a little bit about your first sale a few minutes ago. Tell us what you're doing now, what's kind of held you back to this point, and then tell us more about how that first sale came about.

Chad Bostick: The first sale that came about was really ... I feel like I kind of lucked in to this client, where I gave a presentation at a local event and I hadn't really prepared a whole lot of information for that event, but I knew that I wanted to get back in touch with that side of me that was doing the podcast. I hadn't done any public ... Well, I'd actually never gotten up in front of a live studio audience and spoke. I've only hidden behind the microphone. I knew that I wanted to speak in front of this audience, and so I bounced a couple of ideas off my buddies and had the idea for Career Design Patterns and they said, "Oh, that sounds great, you should speak at this event."

Chad Bostick: I showed up, I gave the speech, and then afterwards this person approached me and said, "I need a job and I feel like I need a coach. Do you think you could help me?" And then, "Here, please take my money." That was amazing and it feels like I'm so honored to have that but I need to figure out how to repeat that same process. What I don't want to do, since I have to stay here with my family, I want to stay here with my family, I don't want to leave them and travel the world and be on a conference circuit. I want to figure out how to meet my avatars or meet my customers online and figure out how to put the message out there that I have been where they have been and I know how to solve some of their problems, and I can solve those problems for them.

Chad Bostick: What I'm really looking for is marketing messages and marketing tactics on how to ... Again, I know how to build a podcast but I don't necessarily know how to pitch myself and pitch the services that I'm offering.

Shane Sams: Okay. Wait, I want to talk about that, but I've heard something in our conversation that you haven't really articulated but I keep hearing it bubble back up.

Jocelyn Sams: Like a theme.

Shane Sams: It's a theme. You keep saying, "I'm lucky. Oh well, I got lucky and got that good job even though this shortcoming. Oh man, I was lucky enough to get offered one, two, three, four opportunities for this to move up the ladder. You know, I got so lucky that one person decided they wanted to throw their money at me."

Shane Sams: You can't keep saying that because you are not lucky. Here's what I've heard about you this entire conversation, Chad. I show up and I'm a great employee. You deserve the raise, you deserve the promotion. I show up at the speaking gig and I get up there and I do my best and someone wants to give me money because I'm worth getting the money. The danger of that word ... That word is actually banned in our household. We don't allow our children to say they're lucky or I'm lucky or we got lucky, because everything is based on effort. Everything is based on work. Everything is based on putting yourself in the right place so that you can be in the right place at the right time. That's just true. Are there some good fortune along the way that help us all? Of course. But being successful and what ... All the things you've done had nothing to do with luck. They had everything to do with Chad, and you're just killing it and you're doing it. Do you know how many people would not show up at a speaking event and get up on stage? 90% of people would be terrified to even do it, and you might have been terrified to do it but you did it and guess what, you got leads and you got a sale because of it.

Shane Sams: I just want to just really call that out a little bit right now and say don't feel like the good things that happen to you are luck. They are not luck.

Jocelyn Sams: None of it is an accident.

Chad Bostick: Okay. I'm taking it in. It's hard. Guys, it's always hard for me to accept any sort of recognition or rewards or pat myself on the back or do my performance evaluations, my self appraisals at the end of the year because I'm my own worst critic and I want to exceed not just everybody else's expectations but my expectations, and when sometimes it happens I'm like, "Wow." But I don't give myself enough credit that yeah, I actually deserve this. I own this. I rocked it out. I did the work. I put in the effort and my efforts and my ideas were good. That's definitely something I need to work on.

Shane Sams: See, the problem is though, if you don't ... In this particular instance you just said, I can't remember if we said this off-air when we were doing our preroll or if you were doing it during the call, but you said, "I look down. I've been trying this online thing, these side hustles, these podcasts, these affiliates, whatever. I've been trying this for 15 years and I can't quite put my finger on why it's not taking off, why it's not making the money."

Shane Sams: You've got this weird tug of war happening where the good things that happen to you, you're saying, "Oh, I got lucky." But then it stops you from taking your next step when it's time to take the next step because there's almost this fear of success tugging on the other side. So it's like luck is on one side, success is on the other, and you're afraid to go over and pull with success so you pull on the luck. Well, that must have been luck.

Jocelyn Sams: I think that part of it is that you are intentionally distancing yourself from any type of responsibility in the positive things, if that makes any sense at all.

Shane Sams: Like on the success side. Like if it's successful, well that couldn't have been me.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, so if you tell yourself, "Okay, well I had nothing to do with this success, it was just luck," that means that you sort of let yourself off the hook a little bit for repeating it.

Shane Sams: And you're also trying to ... It seems like too, the daily podcast thing cracks me up because it's like you do the 270 episodes, you're like, "I'm going to do it so much eventually I'll step on the success rake and it will fly up and hit me in the face." You know what I'm saying? I'm just looking to walk around and somewhere there's a rake in that field and I'm just going to let it whack me. But that's not being prolific, that's trying to get lucky. That's like playing the lottery every day in hopes that one day in your life it will hit.

Shane Sams: That's not the mentality you've got to do to be successful. The successful thing is, "What have I done that's been successful? I'm going to do that again and again and again, but I'm going to do it in a more strategic way where I'm not trying to kill myself and I'm not just looking to be lucky, I'm looking for the success." You went to a place and spoke on a stage where there were people who were your avatar that needed your help and gave you money. Now we have to repeat that, so you're on the right path-

Jocelyn Sams: Does it mean that you have to be a stage speaker and speak all over the world? No. But what can you pull out of that? What was successful about that that you could potentially replicate in an online way?

Shane Sams: For example, whenever we find our first customer, one thing we tell people to do is really get deep into a conversation with that person and say, "Why? Why did you pick me?" The answer is not going to be, "Man, you were just lucky and I felt like sending you some PayPal money." That's not the answer that that person would give you.

Jocelyn Sams: I felt kind of bad for you, and so-

Shane Sams: I felt bad for you bro, it's your first speaking gig and you just got lucky I was in the audience.

Chad Bostick: A pity customer.

Shane Sams: Yeah, right? Exactly. It's not a pity customer-

Jocelyn Sams: Hey, we will gladly take pity customers.

Shane Sams: I'll take pity customers. Anybody out there want a pity customer, throw your money at me. Or throw it at Chad. Whatever, we're all here.

Shane Sams: But he won't say it was lucky. He'll say, "Man, you said this that made me realize you were the person I needed to help me with my problem." That's really the conversation you've got to have right now and you've got to blow that luck thing out of your vocabulary because you've got all the things you need in place to find more customers, it's just going to be getting rid of the luck mentality to do it. Okay?

Chad Bostick: All right.

Shane Sams: Let's talk about this a little bit now. Your success, the real success in finding this member, was you got on stage. It says you got five ... Let's see, what does it say here? You converted five of 20 attendees. What do you mean by that?

Chad Bostick: I didn't know how to write it. After the speaking event, when it was over, everybody kind of gives you the applause and there were roughly about 20 people in the room. And then after, everybody was filing out towards the door, I was trying to grab my laptop and get my bags and all my stuff, and there were about five people that kind of gathered around me as I'm trying to find the exit, same as everybody else is find the exit, because there's another speaker right after me. Kind of in a classroom type setting and there was another speaker trying to set up his laptop and I was trying to get out of his way and people were standing around and they were saying, "Hey Chad, I really appreciated what you said." Or, "I'm struggling on this career stuff too. I don't know where I'm going next."

Chad Bostick: I was trying to get their names and numbers and whatnot but I did a poor job of prepping for that and having business cards ready or having flyers ready or having a sign-up sheet passed around the room. When I say I lucked into it, what I mean is after that we were filing out for lunch later on in the day and one of the attendees was out there in the lunch line and we just kind of bumped into each other and he said, "Wow, how did you get to be such a good speaker?" I'm like, "Wait, you weren't in my class obviously because I bombed it, right?"

Jocelyn Sams: Oh, Chad.

Chad Bostick: But no, he ... We sat down and we had a great conversation and he got really, really emotional about me spending time with him and sharing some of the struggles that I've struggled with over my career and some of the challenges that I've overcome with social anxiety, and I think it just struck a chord and it struck a nerve. After he's my paying client I have asked for his testimonial, I have spent a lot of time talking to him to try to figure out what's the DNA behind this little person here so that I can go find other people with the same problems or with the same ... That are looking for Chad. That's part of the process that I'm going through.

Shane Sams: See, that's amazing though because you had five people interested and one ... I mean, imagine if every 20 people you come in contact with, five people gave you their email and one of them bought. You just go find 100, then you find 1000, then you find 10,000 of those people and you just keep finding more of these people because you're just filtering is all you've done. You showed up, you gave the speech, you filtered down to five which filtered into one.

Shane Sams: I would guess that those other four people were probably ... You just didn't get to have the sit down and the lunch with them. You didn't get to warm them up even more so there probably might have been four more customers sitting there.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay, so here's the thing, Chad. First of all, I'm pretty sure we were separated at birth.

Chad Bostick: Nice.

Shane Sams: A lost brother. You might be Jocelyn's long lost twin brother, I don't know.

Jocelyn Sams: I think you might be, because-

Chad Bostick: A sister from another mister.

Jocelyn Sams: Exactly.

Shane Sams: I've never heard that before.

Jocelyn Sams: We-

Shane Sams: I've heard brother from another mother, I've never heard sister from another mister.

Jocelyn Sams: We both had luck programming back in, as my daughter says, the 19's.

Chad Bostick: Right. Back in the day.

Jocelyn Sams: Exactly.

Chad Bostick: What was your language? I have to geek out for a minute. What was your language?

Jocelyn Sams: I started out with BASIC, GW-BASIC in the 1990's. I went on to program Pascal and I hung my programming hat up on C++.

Chad Bostick: Yeah, that's a tricky one. Good, good, yes. We have-

Shane Sams: Okay, back to normal human language, guys, okay?

Jocelyn Sams: Right. But what I was going to say is that okay, I can totally relate to you with people. I don't really have a lot of the social anxiety. Mine is more everyday type of anxiety. But I can understand what you're saying about people coming up to you and you being like, "Oh, you thought that was really good?" Because I know, as I am, you're very hard on yourself and you think that no matter how well you do something it's still not good enough. Right?

Chad Bostick: Yeah.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay. I got your number, Chad.

Chad Bostick: You found me.

Jocelyn Sams: Yes. What I want to say to you is I think that it would really be beneficial to you to find some partner, and by partner I mean an accountability partner, who's going to push you out of your comfort zone. Because I don't think there's any way you're going to do it on your own.

Shane Sams: And not just your wife. This is like a mastermind, you know what I'm saying? You need to find the quick start that's got too much confidence but never actually does anything. That's the kind of people you're looking to surround yourself with. You know there's that saying that says you're the average of the five people you hang out with the most, right?

Chad Bostick: Exactly.

Shane Sams: That's not just saying find good people, it's finding the three or four other people that fill in the holes in your armor. We all have 25% of what it takes to really make it, but then we surround ourselves with those three friends, colleagues, mastermind people or whatever that kind of fill that in for us. If you're the person who's the quick start but never finishes and procrastinates anything, you need to find the person that says, "Get your blank together." Right? If you're the person who's telling everybody to get their blank together, you need the person that's saying, "Yo, why don't you dream a little bigger and go do something with all this blank you're doing?"

Shane Sams: You've got to make sure you've got the right people in this space that are feeding you to be able to do that. Okay?

Chad Bostick: Okay.

Jocelyn Sams: And the good news is, you're already a part of that in some ways. You're already a part of our community, you post in our community obviously. But go out there and say, "Hey guys, I'm a doer. I'm a person who likes to mark items off a checklist. I have trouble believing I'm good enough." Whatever the issues that you're facing are. I need someone who has the opposite skill sets, the opposite palette, I guess you would say.

Shane Sams: And let's form a mastermind together. Right, so we-

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, even if-

Shane Sams: ... can achieve together and talk or whatever-

Jocelyn Sams: It doesn't have to be an official we meet every Monday night and we have a 15 minute hot seat type mastermind. It doesn't have to be that. You guys could add each other on Voxer and just talk every day and say, "Hey, today I'm working on this. I'm worried about X, Y, Z." And this person would say, "Okay, well here's the thing Chad, get out of your own way." And that's something I have to say to myself all the time, so I'm not picking on Chad. But-

Shane Sams: It could even be a Facebook conversation with three people and you all just text each other. It doesn't have to be anything formal.

Jocelyn Sams: Or in our community.

Shane Sams: Yeah, exactly. Or you could go in and start an accountability thread and you all just join it in the Action Plan forum, right? That you all just get the updates for that kind of stuff. It's really simple to fix the problems that we all have. You know what I'm saying? It's just surround ourselves with people who can help us fix the problem.

Jocelyn Sams: And I totally know your problem because I have the same problem every single day. Get out of your own way.

Shane Sams: That's what we're ... I'm going to address your how to replicate this success in a second. But your problem has nothing to do with your offer, with the way you're presenting it, anything like that, because you're clearly presenting it in a way that's fine. It's just convincing yourself that one, you need to do this. You're worthy.

Jocelyn Sams: You're good enough.

Shane Sams: You're good enough and you're worthy to get the success. And finally, that people need you. Like that person ... Whenever I hear someone say, "And then that person got emotional." I can't tell you how many people have broke down crying with me and Jocelyn. That's when you know that someone needs you to get this right. Like you said, "They needed me to not do the podcast anymore so that this little girl would have a home with us." That moment of clarity gave you the catalyst to take that action, correct?

Chad Bostick: Exactly.

Shane Sams: You've got that same thing right here whenever you have the doubt, whenever you feel lucky, whenever you do that. That moment of clarity with that emotional person who needed your help has to make you take the next step. Okay?

Chad Bostick: Got it. Yeah, there's folks out there who are struggling with some of the struggles that I've overcome in my life and in my career and if I'm not actively trying to find them and help them then I am doing them a disservice. It is my responsibility to track them down, to find them, and to help them get past those obstacles, and that will help me sleep better at night.

Shane Sams: Exactly right. Jocelyn and I have always taken our online career as a responsibility, especially with Flipped Lifestyle but even with elementarylibrarian.com. We've got to help these people have their afternoons back with their children. Even with CoachXO, our football site, I've got to help these coaches win more games so they go home more Friday nights happy and enjoy their weekend.

Shane Sams: Everybody out there, no matter what your job is, no matter what you're doing, go out there with a purpose and find the people that need you to help them. Don't just go out and try to make money online. That's not what it's all about. That's a part of it that makes it work, but you've got to go out with purpose or you're never going to feel worthy. You're always going to feel down, and when things do get a little hard you're going to stop.

Jocelyn Sams: This conversation sort of reminds me of that book that we read. I can't remember what the book was. The one that talks about the different types of entrepreneurs and one of them is the reluctant hero or something like that.

Shane Sams: Was that ... Probably DotCom Secrets, I would say.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, I can't remember. But anyway, I can relate to that because I feel like my life is a mess. Every day I screw something up. All these people are looking to me for inspiration, information, just to inspire them to move forward and I'm like, "Gosh, I'm such a mess. Don't these people see this?"

Jocelyn Sams: That's part of it. It's like being yourself and being okay with people seeing that you're not perfect, that's going to make people even more drawn to you.

Shane Sams: All right. Let's just circle back here. I want to talk about now what you really need to do to grow this thing. Right?

Chad Bostick: Okay.

Shane Sams: Okay. Did you fire back up the podcast, or are you going to podcast again? Or right now basically, this was just, "I'm doing this and I did this speaking thing and I got a client."

Chad Bostick: No. I fired back up the podcast. I rebranded, so I kept all of my Libsyn account where it is but I just rebranded, put a new logo, put a new name on it to niche down from Hello Tech Pros down to Career Design Patterns. It's up. I think I've published about three or four episodes now and-

Shane Sams: How often are you doing this?

Chad Bostick: Weekly.

Shane Sams: Perfect. Okay, good. You don't need to do anything more than that. Because what you really want to do is create one really good episode and promote it for six days. That's how you make things grow. Let it kind of marinate a little bit.

Shane Sams: Here's how you can recreate the success that you had without going on the road. Just make your podcast lead to webinars and that's your lead magnet strategy. In your form you said, "I've experimented with many different lead magnets and they all fall flat." But a webinar ... If you did one podcast on Tuesday and a webinar that came out on Thursday and the end of every podcast invited people to go opt in for your webinar. I'm doing a live training on Thursday, I'm going to help you do X, Y, Z, and then you go give that same speech that you gave in that classroom that converted 25% of people and got your first sale. You just do that same speech in a webinar format.

Shane Sams: You can replicate the speaking circuit from your house if you just do that, and you can make that your entire lead magnet and opt in strategy. You just have to figure out a way to succinctly tell them why it's important that they go the next step beyond the podcast. Hey, did you like today's podcast? Did it help you overcome some of these issues you're dealing with? Well listen. I'm having a free training this Thursday where I'm going to do a live Q&A. I will talk to you about anything that's holding you back in X, Y, Z, so all you have do is go to blank slash whatever and register for the webinar. I'll see you Thursday and if I don't catch you there, I'll catch you right back here on the podcast next Tuesday.

Shane Sams: Just do the thing that you did on stage with a little bit of a pitch at the end of it, and you'll see that you'll get more opt ins. The podcast will produce opt ins, the opt ins will produce sales, and it will completely replicate that speaking thing where you don't have to travel so much. It doesn't matter where they hear you, all that matters is that they hear you, and putting yourself out there in that way is going to allow the people to hear you in the exact same way that that person did at lunch that day.

Chad Bostick: Yeah, I love the ideas of webinars. I've actually talked about it a couple of times to friends and to my wife. Just getting it set up, I get ... Well obviously there's some sort of internal battles that I'm having of launching that. But then finding the tech and then getting it signed up and then start talking about it, that I'm going to do this thing and then have it and have it scheduled. I think that's where I've been held back before. So I just need to get it scheduled and start doing it, on a weekly basis.

Shane Sams: Let me tell you how to do this to get it started really easy. One, your job actually is information technology so I don't ever want to hear you tell me you're scared of the tech. Don't do that, dude. You all were talking about programming in foreign languages I didn't even understand a minute ago.

Chad Bostick: I know. It's an excuse.

Shane Sams: It's an excuse. Here's all you've got to do. Anybody listening, this is the easiest way to set up a webinar. One, just go start a YouTube channel. YouTube has an amazing thing in it called YouTube Live. You can set up an event on a date. That's where you're going to host your webinar. You're going to do it on YouTube, you're going to do it live.

Shane Sams: Don't make a PowerPoint unless you already have one. If you've already got one from that presentation, maybe use that, but don't even make a PowerPoint. Just make a talking head, the first couple, and you're just giving the presentation. Then, at that point, here's all you've got to do. On your podcast you say, "Hey, go to this domain." And when they go there they have an opt in box where they join your email list. That's it. And then anyone who opts in on that form, you shoot them an email 30 minutes before the webinar with a link to the YouTube Live. And then in the description of the YouTube Live you just put the link to the thing you sell. And at the end of it you tell them to look in the description for the link, drop it in the chat box, and you tell them what to do.

Shane Sams: So it's literally as easy as sign up for my YouTube channel, which is just put your name and email in, you've got one. It's that easy. If you've a Gmail account you actually already have a YouTube account. You've already got a YouTube channel. You've just got to go turn it on and then you click the button that says schedule a hangout. You pick a date and that's it, it's over.

Shane Sams: Don't get lost in the technology. You can make a lot of money online just talking to people on YouTube Live and your podcast. Russell Brunson, one of the most prolific online marketers on the planet, he just does Zoom. He just has a Zoom link. They don't use fancy tools and stuff for webinars all the time. A lot of times they'll just, "Here's a Zoom link. Click it, open it up, listen to me talk. I'll give you a link at the end in the chat." And that's how they make millions of dollars online.

Shane Sams: Do it live, don't worry about so much the presentation. The most important thing is you tell people on your podcast to go opt in. You show up and you do it live and you ask them to buy something at the end of it. That's really all you have to do. Can you get fancier later? We can always get fancier later. But right now it's just about showing up. And I think that you've actually stumbled in to exactly what you need to do to make this thing go to the next level.

Jocelyn Sams: And it wasn't luck. It was all part of the plan.

Chad Bostick: I stumbled into it on purpose.

Shane Sams: That's right. There's a great quote that says, "Even if I fall on my face I'm still moving forward."

Chad Bostick: That's right.

Shane Sams: You know what I mean? That has nothing to do with luck. That has to do with relentless determination to move forward, and you keep doing that and you keep doing that and then you just look back and go, "Okay, I tripped over a stick last time. So I'm going to watch out for sticks moving forward. Oh, I tripped over a rock last time. Okay, now I'm going to watch out for rocks." So now I get to take a step forward and then fall again. Or two steps forward and then fall again and eventually you figure out how to just keep walking, and that's where you are right now. Do the podcast. Talk to these people in the same speech you gave on stage but do it on a webinar. That's your lead magnet that's going to get you opt ins, that's going to make you sales. Do that 52 times in the next year and see where it takes you. It's going to make your business blow up.

Jocelyn Sams: All right Chad. It has been quite a, I guess you would call it a smack down of a conversation. It has been a little crazy but you know what, I kind of feel like I'm talking to myself and I know how to relate to you because it's how I would relate to me. It's how other people need to relate to me. So take a lesson over there, Shane.

Shane Sams: I relate to you just fine. This is exactly how I talk to you sometimes, what are you talking about?

Jocelyn Sams: Sometimes. Yeah, this is like pretty much daily. Anyway. All right, as we wrap this up Chad, it's been awesome talking to you today. We have really enjoyed learning more about you and your business. We always ask people before we go what is one thing that you plan to do in the next 24 hours or so based on what we talked about today?

Chad Bostick: I think the first thing that I have to do is go find myself an accountability partner that will help me push past these barriers that I have. So I'm going to reach out in the forums first and foremost. Keep it simple, reach out to my community, Flipped Lifestyle community, and put it out there and say, "Hey, I need an accountability partner who's going to check on me and make sure that I'm actually doing the webinar and I'm not just pretending that I'm going to do the webinar some day but not really." So I need that accountability partner to keep me on track.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, and the awesome thing is is that you have something to offer them as well. You have the ability to get things done and someone else has the ability to dream a little bigger and make you think in those terms.

Shane Sams: Also too, I would challenge you actually as soon as you get off this to set up that YouTube channel and the next time you record a podcast, tell people that you're going to do something and have that opt in ready to go. Right? If you will go ahead and start the YouTube channel and create the opt in page, now you've got everything in place. There's no excuses anymore, it's just a matter of you actually doing it on your podcast. Does that make sense?

Chad Bostick: Yeah, that makes sense.

Shane Sams: Yeah, so build the thing and go do that and you'll be right on your way to making a habit. All right buddy well listen, we've got to go. I hate that this conversation has to end but I just want to thank you really quick man for being so transparent because it's hard to talk about the things that hold us back. It's hard to talk about dealing with anxiety and having that fear of success and feeling lucky sometimes. We all get there but you've overcame a lot of that, you're still overcoming it, and now you're going to help other people do it too and that's pretty impressive. I know you've helped a lot of people who are listening to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast today, and we just thank you for being on the show.

Chad Bostick: Thank you so much for having me. I can't express how much I appreciate you bringing me on the show and giving me this awesome advice. I'm going to take the action and flip my life.

Jocelyn Sams: Awesome. We cannot wait to see what happens next.

Shane Sams: All right guys, what an amazing conversation with Chad today. Man, we just tackled some big fears, some things that hold a lot of people back, and that's what we want to do for you inside of the Flip Your Life community. Maybe you need an accountability partner like Chad did. Maybe you need to go in there and ask some questions. Maybe you just need to celebrate some of the victories and things that are happening in your life.

Jocelyn Sams: Maybe you might be the perfect accountability partner for Chad-

Shane Sams: That's right.

Jocelyn Sams: Maybe you're listening to this and you're thinking, "I need someone who can get things done and I'm a big dreamer." Okay, join and hang out with Chad.

Shane Sams: All you have to do is go to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife. That's F-L-I-P-Y-O-U-R-L-I-F-E, all one word, flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife and you can join the most amazing community of online business owners and entrepreneurs anywhere. Family-focused real people who are out there trying to change their life who would love to have you in our community as well. Go to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife and you can join today.

Shane Sams: Before we close, we love to end each podcast with a Bible verse. Jocelyn and I draw a lot of our inspiration from the Bible and there's a lot of great stuff in there about owning and operating a business. Today's Bible verse comes from Philippians chapter 3 verse 13, and it says, "But one thing I do: forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize."

Shane Sams: And that's what we all have to do. It doesn't matter if you've been trying online business out for 10, 15, five years. Maybe you're just starting your journey. It doesn't matter about any of the failures in the past. It doesn't matter about what you've done before. All that matters is what you do next. So keep straining toward what's ahead and keep doing whatever it takes to win the prize and you'll get there eventually.

Shane Sams: That's all the time we have for this week, guys. Until next time get out there, take action, do whatever it takes to flip your life. We'll see you then.

Jocelyn Sams: Bye.

Links and resources mentioned on today’s show: * Chad's Website * Flip Your Life LIVE 2019 Tickets & Registration Information * Flip Your Life community

Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!

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In today's episode, we help Priscilla overcome five fears that hold entrepreneurs back.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jocelyn Sams: Hey y'all, today we help Priscilla overcome five fears that hold entrepreneurs back.

Shane Sams: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast where life always comes before work. We're your hosts Shane and Jocelyn Sams. We're a real family that figured out how to make our entire living online. Now we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? All right, let's get started.

Shane Sams: What's going on everybody? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. It is great to be back with you again today. Super excited to welcome another member of the Flip Your Life Community onto the show so that we can help them take their life and their business to the next level. Really excited to introduce Priscilla Yocum to y'all. Priscilla, welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast.

Priscilla Y.: Thanks you guys. This is so surreal.

Jocelyn Sams: Yes, it is great to have you here and we always get kind of tickled when people say things like that because we're just a couple of normal people from the great state of Kentucky.

Shane Sams: Sitting around in our pajamas talking to you today, so it's okay.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, we are. I have not even brushed my hair today, I'll just be honest so.

Shane Sams: And that is why we podcast instead of doing videos.

Jocelyn Sams: We are very happy to have you though. We're happy to have you as part of our community. And we want you to tell everyone a little bit, about you and your background.

Priscilla Y.: Well, thanks so much you guys. I mean, I listen to you. I've been listening to you guys for almost two years now so that's the surreal part for me but in my everyday life, I am a professional organizer, so I started my own service business in 2010 and I absolutely love what I do. I help families organize their spaces for functionality and to better their routines. And I've loved to doing it. But since I started my business, I added two children to my family and-

Shane Sams: Which can disorganize things very quickly.

Priscilla Y.: Oh, yeah. It's made me a better organizer for sure because they bring a whole new world challenges and that's what I help, are families. So I'm kind of in the thick of it with them. And so I identify with a lot of their problems but one thing that I've found in my business that's made it more difficult in recent years is that I don't want to prioritize my service business over my children. And that's really hard when you're a one woman show not to do. And so when I started listening to you guys, I didn't really connect the dots that I could at all transition my business online, but the more I started thinking about it, the more I started feeling like it was a possibility. And so in about the last year or so I've kind of been thinking about how I can scale my business better by adding this online element to the knowledge that I have and I felt like you guys are the perfect place to help me do that. And so that's kinda how I got here.

Shane Sams: That's awesome. So as a personal organizer in your service based business, I would assume that you literally go into people's houses, look around, create a game plan, and then do you help them actually do any of the physical organizing or is it up to them? What does that look like? Because it's definitely a time for dollars business. Correct?

Priscilla Y.: Yes, exactly. Time for dollars. I don't work then I don't make money and if I don't work outside of the home, I don't make money. So I physically go into my client's home and I assess the situation and then I come up with a game plan. I've been really lucky that my business is 100% referrals. So usually if I've gotten that far, I'm for sure doing the project. And then what we do is we schedule as many days as needed for the project. There have been some projects where I can get them done in a four hour period and then there are some that take 40 hours.

Shane Sams: So do you ever walk into a hoarder, have you ever been in a house and you're like, oh, no and you walk in, it's like, yeah, I'm a little disorganized, but then you walk in and there's 17 boxes of stuff in the living room. There's a room with all laundry, but there's a bed under it somewhere. Have you ever hit that before?

Priscilla Y.: Well, luckily my business is referrals, so you get a lot of like business, so, no, the answer to that is no, I don't get a lot of that. I-

Shane Sams: Dang, I was hoping for a good story there.

Priscilla Y.: I have had one or two situations like that and I don't feel equipped to handle those projects, so I've turned those down. But what I do get a lot of are moms who are so tough on themselves, they call themselves hoarders and I walk into their house and I'm like, "Why am I here? Like, what is the problem in this house?" So when they start opening drawers and cabinets? And I like, oh, right, okay, this is what-

Shane Sams: Now I see.

Jocelyn Sams: That's kinda like my house. I always like people who do this job because I feel like I'm a pretty organized person. But then I watch these people who do this on YouTube or there's now like Netflix shows-

Shane Sams: What's that Netflix show called? What is that girl's name?

Priscilla Y.: Marie Kondo.

Shane Sams: Yes, yes like-

Priscilla Y.: That's like the tidying up.

Shane Sams: Yes, everyone's obsessed with her right now, right? Like-

Priscilla Y.: She's a crazy, she's the fairy godmother of my industry.

Jocelyn Sams: So I look at things like that and I'm like, oh wow. I thought I was organized, but maybe I'm not as organized as I once thought.

Shane Sams: I'm at a mastermind and a guy watched that show the other day on Netflix, one of the guys gets on to our mastermind. We have like a little circle where you leave messages and talk to each other. And he goes, "Dude, I just watched a show on Netflix and I immediately cleaned my garage and sold all my stuff." Like he watched it in the morning and just spent the rest of the day cleaning out his house.

Priscilla Y.: I love it.

Shane Sams: So do people pay you by the hour or do they pay you by the job? Like how does that work? And then like how many hours? I guess that just takes up a full time job every week, doesn't it?

Priscilla Y.: Yeah, so well, I don't work more than part-time because I prioritize my kids. My husband travels two to three days out of the week, so I'm kind of a one woman show with my family as well and part of the time. And so I only work part-time, I'm just coming off of maternity leave. But before maternity leave I was working about 20 hours a week with clients within their home. And then usually there was about five to eight hours of backend stuff that I could do while the kids were napping or sleeping or whatever. So yes, I do charge by the hour. I've kind of played around with charging by the project, but that doesn't necessarily work with organizing because some people are very quick at editing and others are not. So I found that an hourly rate was the most fair to me.

Shane Sams: Yeah, that's easy to explain to people too, like this it's this much an hour, let's just get in there and see how long it takes, right?

Priscilla Y.: Totally, yeah.

Shane Sams: So the reason you're kind of going toward this online thing is not that you want to even give up organizing, you just want to be able to scale your income, but you physically don't have enough hours to go get any more jobs. And I'm looking at your sheet here and it says you really don't want to hire other people to be organizers under you because you don't really like building, you don't want to build a business like that. Correct?

Priscilla Y.: That's right. So I've done that before. I've had assistants, I had a team of three assistants at one point. And you know what, it's just so stressful. You're responsible for people that worked for... I mean, you guys know this, you have people that work for you, you're responsible for other people. And my number one priority is my family. So I always felt like I was being torn in different directions. And so scaling that way, which I know a lot of professional organizers do, is scaling with as a team. But my family is so young, I really just can't focus that way. So for me, scaling online to share my knowledge is something that would be much more reasonable.

Jocelyn Sams: I totally understand what you're saying about working with people. That's something that's really stressful for me. I know a lot of people love working with the team and they love team building and all that comes with it. But I'm just not one of those people. I like working by myself and there's-

Priscilla Y.: Me too.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. I think that there's nothing wrong with that.

Shane Sams: Nothing, wrong with that.

Jocelyn Sams: You just have to realize what works best for you and you have to run that way. And that's kind of the way that we've decided to build our business.

Shane Sams: We actually re-wrote our core values a couple of months ago and one of our core values in our company is scale income without hiring people whenever possible, we literally wrote that into our core values. Because I do have a lot of friends, they believe in the most important job of the CEO is to hire the team and to hire great people and great people grow your business. And we just don't want that even if it prevents us from going to another level like-

Priscilla Y.: Thank you for saying that-

Shane Sams: Yeah, you do have to have some support either part time contractors, like we all do that. We hire things out maybe by the job, by the task. But we've got people that work with us regularly, but right now we were up to the point where we had 14 people working with us and we have scaled back now to two not counting our personal assistant in the house. So it's, we didn't like it. We did not like it. Maybe that will keep us from becoming a $10 million company someday but who cares? We have a peace of mind. We have time with our kids. I got up this morning and played chutes and ladders with my kids. Right?

Priscilla Y.: I love it.

Shane Sams: So it's like, why does it matter if we hire 75 people and we have this big company, like that's not what success has to look like. And everyone out there listening right now, you have permission to grow your business without hiring a bunch of people.

Jocelyn Sams: And the way that you want to do it.

Priscilla Y.: Thank you so much for saying that because for me, I feel like everything that you consume, all of the business developments that I'm consuming is saying be a leader, lead more people and I'm like, "Oh crap, I'm not a leader. Am I bad at business?"

Shane Sams: No, you're not. That's a great point. You don't even have to be the leader of all the things in your business. There's sometimes where you just turn things over to a contractor they do it in three weeks and we're out and we don't have to deal with them anymore. Right?

Priscilla Y.: When you're strained, right.

Shane Sams: Yeah, and it's actually just doing what you want to do. Jocelyn and I like interacting with people online. We like to do a podcast, we like to do our forums, we like to get emails from our exclusive members and we have a little Voxer program. One thing that Jocelyn and I really, really don't like to do all the time is one on one coaching, like on a call, like where we have the schedule. And we get up and there's five people there. Everyone told us well, you can't do high ticket offers without one on one getting in people's faces and being there with them. And I'm like, yes we can. We invented a new program, we use an app called Voxer, it's like walkie talkies and we talk back and forth to people and we were like, we don't have to make appointments. Our calendar doesn't fill up.

Shane Sams: So if the kids have practice we can go do it and we can do it from anywhere. So you can invent any online business structure that you want as long as it works for you. And that's what everybody else really needs to do.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay. Priscilla, you're just getting started online and we actually selected you for our podcast from our community. So we have different areas of discussion. And you had recently gotten on talking about some things that you're working on. So tell us a little bit about that. What have you been doing so far?

Priscilla Y.: So I've mainly been working on my lead magnet and I toyed around a little bit with idea of making it a video but then it was getting just too long. So I decided to make it a simple checklist and a big thing in organizing is spring cleaning. So it's just a simple annual spring cleaning checklist, kind of master lists for the house of things that you wouldn't normally remember to do. And so now I'm just trying to figure out how to best get it out there. I already have a website for my current service business, there's a blog attached to that. I also have an Instagram audience, a small one and some Facebook followers and a very small email list.

Shane Sams: Okay, let me get some mindset, we're about to get into some deep stuff here but let me just talk about this. You don't have a small list. I'm looking at the numbers here. You already have 144 subscribers. Your open rate is like 55% average, which is insanity. That's like 75 humans paying attention to you, right? You have 700 and something followers on Instagram, 500 and something followers on Facebook. Jocelyn, our first email list that we ever emailed out to. It was only like 200 people, but it was 200 real people who bought Jocelyn's product and made like almost $3,000. So don't think that's small. There's probably hundreds if not thousands of people listening right now that are like, "Dang, I haven't even released a lead magnet. I don't even have an email list. I've not even started my Instagram." That's amazing that you're at the very beginning of your journey and you already created that kind of audience.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, and I love how you just decided like, "Hey, I'm working on this video lead magnet but it's not working for me. I don't like it. It's too long. I'm just going to do something else." Like some people would just stop right then and be like, "Oh this lead magnet thing's too hard can't do this, I'm out." But you didn't do that, you said, "Okay, well this is too hard or it's too time consuming so I'm going to do something else."

Shane Sams: Yeah, and you've actually taken action. That's the people we love to talk to you in the community. We saw you in the forums working through this lead magnet, getting this thing done, bouncing back and forth between, and I think I'm going to do a video, but then the video didn't work and I've got this thing and now you've actually got content out there. You've got some people paying attention to you, and really we're just going to figure out how to turn that into an actual income. Okay. Before we get into your deep technical questions about the business stuff, I want to talk a little bit about fears, obstacles, and mindset issues that usually hold entrepreneurs back from whatever they're doing online because these are the things that actually stop us. Usually the technical stuff, you can fight for it. It's just a matter of grinding it out.

Shane Sams: But sometimes those doubts, those disbeliefs, those things internally inside of us or externally that are trying to hold us back or what really stop people from being successful. So when people fill out the form to come onto the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast it's like, Hey, what a fear or a mindset issue or an obstacle? Something that's holding you back?

Jocelyn Sams: Most people, they might list one, maybe two. But Priscilla, she's an over achiever.

Shane Sams: She's an over achiever. She's organized, she's got five and it's like a bulleted checklist. Like you can see the personal organization of your fears.

Jocelyn Sams: So we did this podcast intake form and earlier Shane was just kind of like reading it out before we get on the phone and I was like, okay, check, check, check. I feel like I was playing online business bingo. Okay, here's this mindset-

Shane Sams: I think these are the five biggest fears that everybody has. Right?

Jocelyn Sams: Bingo!

Shane Sams: Bingo, got it. All right, so we've got this, we have a bulleted list. Normally we tackle one fear on the show, we're just going to have a kind of a lightning round of fear and obstacles.

Jocelyn Sams: We like to over deliver in this podcast.

Shane Sams: We're going to over deliver, so get back guys, everybody out there. I guarantee you in the next few minutes you're going to hear a fear or five that you have holding you back right now in life. Okay. All right. So what I'm going to do is we're going to read the fears to you, okay? And then you take us and give us a little more information about the fear and then we're going to talk about some strategies maybe for overcoming it.

Jocelyn Sams: And we're not hating on you of course.

Shane Sams: No, not hate on you. Everybody has fears.

Jocelyn Sams: I'm happy to provide entertainment.

Shane Sams: That's right. Okay, all right, Jocelyn, let's go to fear or obstacle number one.

Jocelyn Sams: All right so number one. Hold on, I got to scroll just a little bit here.

Shane Sams: There's so many fears. We had to scroll back up. It was below the fold.

Jocelyn Sams: No, in fairness, in fairness I had accidentally closed the calendar. Okay, number one, I know families need my product but I'm not sure people are willing to pay for it. I find a lot of what I would sell for free on Pinterest, blogs, Instagram, Facebook, etc.

Shane Sams: So that's kind of a fear of maybe people won't see the value in it. So where does that come from? Tell us a little bit more about why that's holding you back.

Priscilla Y.: Well, I think really where it comes from is I'm a pretty resourceful person on my own and so a lot of what I've learned, I've had to learn by going on Pinterest and reading tons of blogs. And observing the way other people do things and in my mind, other people do that too. I'm like, "Why would they pay me for the knowledge that I have around this if they can go and do what I did? Which is go onto Pinterest or blogs or get these ideas themselves."

Shane Sams: Yeah. I think you and Jocelyn might have the same brain cells because that's one of the things that really gets her fired up is, well I just go figure things out like trips, whatever, why doesn't anyone else do this?

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. There is this I don't know if it's a book or a system, I don't know. But anyway, it's one of the personality assessments. I can't remember which one, but you basically identify as like a quick start or a fact finder and I'm a fact finder. It's the one with the numbers, I can't remember what it's called. But anyway-

Shane Sams: Is it the Enneagrams?

Jocelyn Sams: No, I don't think it's the Enneagram, it's another one that has like, well-

Shane Sams: It's one of those things that tells you your basic personality traits.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. So I'm a fact finder and those things are really interesting to me. I love to Google search, I love to dig in and research things and find out all the information. And I feel like there aren't really a lot of people like that. And I think I never realized that for a really long time. I just kind of assumed that everyone else was like me.

Shane Sams: Except Shane, I'm a quick start.

Jocelyn Sams: That's a given. But I just kind of assumed that everyone else was like me. And as I started in business, I realized that most people just want to have things handed to them. They don't like to dig in and do the research. A lot of people don't. There are some people who do and they will probably never buy your product, but they're not your market.

Shane Sams: And this goes back to it, fears are always defeated by truth, right? The problem is, sometimes we're in the forest and we can't see the forest for the trees and we can't see the truth. The truth that beats this fear almost every time is that people are not buying your content, okay? What they're buying is leadership. What they're buying is curation. What they're buying is someone who's walked the path to show them the potholes in the road. That's what everything is like you don't really sell courses, you create courses, but then you put the courses together to give a system to people that they can follow without having to go research it for four hours. Okay, so like that's what the flip your life blueprint is, we have so much content in the flip your life blueprint, right? There's dozens of courses, thousands of conversations and comments. There's so much stuff in there, but that's not why people like the blueprint.

Shane Sams: They like the blueprint because it says at the top, step one, watch this video and do it. And then it says step two, step three, step four and just guides you through the process without you having to look it up, without you having to go search for everything and watch the magician's hands and totally deconstruct exactly how this stuff works. Right? And if you embrace that truth, you realize people will pay for the process. For example, I bet there's a lot of people out there who have thought to themselves, and you may have thought this in the beginning, is anyone really going to pay me to come in their house and help them sort their junk drawer like right? Did you feel that when you first started doing it?

Priscilla Y.: Oh yeah.

Shane Sams: Right? Because they didn't want to organize the junk drawer, they wanted to pay you to help do it. And it's the same thing with online business. Okay.

Priscilla Y.: Okay.

Shane Sams: Yeah. So people will pay for this. We have seen other community members in a similar space create products in this world and it's worked. Okay. So we'll talk a little bit more about what those it looks like. All right, so fear or obstacle number two on the organized checklist.

Jocelyn Sams: I'm scrolling again. Okay. Number two says, I'm not sure I'm tech savvy enough. I built my own website, taught myself MailChimp and some other tools but I feel really overwhelmed by online business terms and tools. Doing keyword research was a challenge. Is that a red flag?

Shane Sams: Okay. Priscilla, you literally said, I don't think I'm tech savvy enough but-

Jocelyn Sams: I have learned 67 tools however-

Shane Sams: However, I built a website, taught myself how to integrate MailChimp and other email tools and I've learned a lot of other tools, but there's one tool can be a little speed bump, is this a red flag, do I need to turn back now?

Jocelyn Sams: Priscilla, it's over. Sorry.

Shane Sams: Yeah, right.

Jocelyn Sams: Just kidding.

Shane Sams: The tech stuff is so funny because if you think about it, every piece of technology that we encounter, we have to learn it. Like you didn't know how to use an iPhone when you first got it, right? Back in the day I remember when I got my first flip phone, I got the razor, that Motorola Razor.

Jocelyn Sams: I was going to say back the in 19s but it wasn't in the 19s.

Shane Sams: It was like the early twos or whatever it's called. But I got this thing, but like I didn't know how to text on it. I had to figure out that you had to type the words like-

Jocelyn Sams: And you had to hit the button three times-

Shane Sams: Hit the button three times before it switched over. But like everything is new, everything is totally new and you figured all this other stuff out, why couldn't you figure the next thing out? Or if you can't figure that out, you just find another path and use another tool. Right? What hung you up about doing keyword research? Was it the tool or was it the process of finding good keywords for your brand?

Priscilla Y.: It was both. So initially the tool was set up for my service business and the key words are different for this than my service business so changing the keywords alone, I found difficult and I like, this cannot be this hard, why am I having a hard time with is. And then once I got it I was kind of clueless as to what the data was pulling out. Like what am I looking at here, what is this two point whatever or number? So-

Shane Sams: What tool are you using?

Priscilla Y.: Google.

Shane Sams: The Google key word tool.

Priscilla Y.: Yeah. And so then I found a video on YouTube that kind of broke it down. And I still feel like I don't fully understand it, but I kind of narrowed in what is a decent range versus, that didn't get any keyword searches then, then that's probably not the direction.

Shane Sams: Sure.

Priscilla Y.: But. Yeah.

Shane Sams: And see, what I heard there, you may not have a full grasp of what you're doing with the keyword research tool, but you're doing exactly what it takes to overcome the tech fear. You're wrestling with it, right? I can do as many courses. Like we got tech courses in there about WordPress, we have keyword research stuff. It's more strategic, not exactly with those tools. Right. But until you actually get on the bicycle and try to stay up, you're never going to be able to ride the bicycle. You can watch a course about how to ride a bicycle. You can have someone sit over coffee and tell you how to ride the bicycle, but until your butt's in the seat and your feet are on the pedals, you're not riding a bicycle.

Shane Sams: Right. And what happened when you learn how to ride a bike? You fell. I remember when you learned how to drive a car. I remember, let me tell you a story about me driving. So I was learning how to drive a car and I was like 16 right? And my dad had an office parking lot and he was like, we bring two cars over to the parking lot and I had to practice parallel parking right, before I could go take my driver's test. So Dad's like, all right, look, you've got the whole parking lot. I want you to just get used to it in here when nobody's around you. I'm going to go inside and do some paperwork and get stuff done. So I've got one of our cars right beside the other car so I kind of parallel park once and mess it up.

Shane Sams: I do it again and get way far and I'm like, man, I'm not close enough. I can't get to the car. So I get a little closer to the other car and I cut the wheel and I'm not kidding you. The one car went under the other car and lifted it off the ground and I was like, oh no. And I pulled it back in drive and I hit the gas and I pulled off and I just heard this big kaboom kaboom and the other car fell to the ground and started like popping like somebody was hitting switches in a rap video and it was insane. And I looked around, I was looking over at the mirror, the window, and dad was looking down at his papers. I got out and made sure for somehow, it didn't barely do anything but like scratch it a little bit, but somehow I got the car under the other car and I was like, oh my gosh. But I eventually I figured out how to parallel park. I passed my driver's test unlike my wife and-

Jocelyn Sams: Hey.

Shane Sams: And I was able to do that, but I had some problems figuring out the new tech, you know what I'm saying? So you're doing... That's how you beat the tech challenge is you don't try to figure it all out. You just go play with it. You break stuff, you put it back together, and eventually that fear will go away and it'll start serving you better. Okay?

Priscilla Y.: Okay.

Jocelyn Sams: All right.

Shane Sams: Fear number three. Scroll the checklist one more time.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay, I didn't have to scroll too far, this one's kind of short. Okay. It says, I'm a perfectionist. In other words, procrastinator/scaredy cat.

Shane Sams: Why do you think you're a perfectionist? And also why do you think it's related to being a scaredy cat?

Priscilla Y.: Oh, well, I mean, c'mon let's be real here. Any time somebody has to have something perfect, it's because they're afraid if it's not, they'll look stupid. There are very few people that are perfectionists. Just because it just bothers them if something isn't just the right, I think a lot of times, at least for me it's related to, "Oh man, I don't want egg on my face here."

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. And listen, maybe we should start a support group Priscilla.

Shane Sams: I think you and Jocelyn definitely need to start a support group because you all have the exact same-

Priscilla Y.: I'm in.

Jocelyn Sams: I'm pretty sure that we're the same person and I'm sorry about that. No, I'm just kidding. Okay. So all right, I'm with you. I think mine a lot of times is fear of what might happen if it isn't 'perfect.' That's a lot of what bothers me. I don't know if that's what bothers you.

Shane Sams: Especially when you're trying to meet external expectations. I think Jocelyn wrestles with that more. I think you do too, a little bit hearing these fears because you're more... It's not necessarily that you're not going to get it perfect. And I would say in your own life you might be a little more forgiving as a perfectionist, but it's like, what if it's not perfect then the other person expected perfection or they always-

Priscilla Y.: And they're disappointed.

Jocelyn Sams: Yes. And for me it's about, okay if the results don't turn out the way that I think they should be or the way someone else thinks they should be, what might happen then? It's like that fear of something unknown to me and I don't like that. That's why I try to very tightly control things, which is not a good thing.

Shane Sams: That's why I don't let Jocelyn read emails that I send out before I send them because Jocelyn will spend four hours. The first thing she does is she has this super power where she can look at a 5,000 word block of text and go, there's not a period in sentence 38 and she can just like, you accidentally used a there instead of their, like she can just see grammatical errors it's like she can process the whole thing.

Jocelyn Sams: It's sort of like they blink red to me. I don't know like I can-

Priscilla Y.: It's a gift.

Shane Sams: Yes, it's a gift.

Jocelyn Sams: It is, it's a very annoying gift and a very annoying superpower.

Shane Sams: The most annoying superpower you could ever have.

Jocelyn Sams: You have to have those people in the world.

Shane Sams: It's funny because I'll send an email and Jocelyn's like on the list so she'll see it after the fact. She'll be like, "Really, you sent this to humans? You let people do this?" I'm kind of like, whatever, there are 90% of people like me that don't even read it. I'll be kind of like, all the grammar Nazis will just unsubscribe and leave. I'm just kidding, don't unsubscribe and don't get mad at me if you love grammar, Jocelyn loves grammar.

Jocelyn Sams: And if you get an email with a misspelling or an incorrect pronunciation, just know it wasn't me.

Shane Sams: It is not Joc. She actually at one part wanted me to put down at the bottom, like typed by Shane so no one would judge her for any of my spelling errors, right. Because I sign things Shane and Jocelyn, so anyway, but the point is, like it is those external expectations, that's the feel here.

Priscilla Y.: I totally identify with that.

Shane Sams: Yes and it can make you put things off because you're afraid of getting judged. We had a problem with a local business recently and Jocelyn had been telling me about it and telling me about it and telling me about it and telling me about it and I was like, can we just say something to them? And she's like, no, because then the external conflict would come in or the judgment or the, what if they don't agree with us. Right. And I finally just sent an email because I was just like, and I sent Jocelyn a text, I said, I sent an email of everything you told me, no mercy. And she was just like, "Oh my gosh, I can't believe you just did that." But anyway, it's like sometimes you just, the only way to beat this fear is to just do it and be scared and absorb any negativity that comes. And that's really, really hard.

Shane Sams: So being a perfectionist is really hard, but I find that the best thing to do in this situation, when people start doing things consistently, you overcome it. Like let's say you're afraid to do YouTube videos. Well, let's just use this as a fear, right? Because you're, you're a perfectionist. You want to edit them. You want them to look as good as everybody else's. The way to beat that fear is to do live Q and A's or videos, 10 minutes a day, every day for a month.

Jocelyn Sams: That cannot be edited.

Shane Sams: That cannot be edited. That cannot be stopped, once you turn the camera on, it goes. They may not be the best videos you could ever release, but you'll get so used to doing that thing that it'll eventually feel like habit and you won't even care anymore.

Jocelyn Sams: And just become the person who's perfectly imperfect, that's what we try to do, I mean, we sit here and record this podcast every week and we're very unapologetic that we're not perfect. If you're looking for somebody who is super polished, we're probably not the people for you.

Shane Sams: Yeah. We have an editor and we have our little rig here, like basically you have this little bitty soundboard with two mics and it's plugged into a USB port. We don't have the fancy editing and maybe our audio is not the best of some other podcasts, but the point for us is to help as many people as fast as possible, right? So we don't have time to deal with the perfection and the audio files and all that stuff, like the content's where the money is, that's where the gold is. That's where the help comes from and we can't be slowed down by our perfectionism. If we're going to help as many people as possible.

Priscilla Y.: So that's also what makes you guys so relatable too and I guess I'll have to remember that in my business is that really, I want my audience to relate or I want to be able to relate to them and they're not perfect either.

Jocelyn Sams: Absolutely. And something that helps me a lot is just thinking about how no matter what, no matter if your content or whatever you're doing is as perfect as you want it to be or as perfect as you think someone else wants it to be, there's always going to be somebody who's not going to like it and it doesn't matter. Like you could halfway do it and someone's not going to like it. Or you can do it 150% and someone's not going to like it. So just knowing that always gives me a little bit of sense of ease just knowing that. There's always going to be people out there in the world who are going to be negative about whatever it is that you're doing. You just have to brush it off and move on.

Priscilla Y.: I can do that.

Shane Sams: All right, now that we've punched perfectionism in the face, let's go on to fear/obstacle number four on Priscilla's list.

Jocelyn Sams: All right, number four it says until the fall when my daughter goes to school full time and I get a part time nanny for my son, time is a major challenge. I have about three hours a day I can dedicate to business since I'm still working with clients that time also has to be used for back office hours for my current business.

Shane Sams: Okay. So this is the kind of fear I don't have enough time to get everything done. Is that what you're saying here?

Priscilla Y.: Yeah. Absolutely.

Shane Sams: Where does that come from though? Because three hours is a lot of time. Like if you point that way, do you feel like you should be doing something else that you're not doing enough? Everybody has the time veer for different reasons. It might be like I've only got one hour a day and maybe I'm using that and I should be holding my kids or playing with my kids or hanging out with my spouse or whatever. Or maybe I should be taking care of myself and relaxing like what's the fear there? Like why do you feel like that's not enough time?

Priscilla Y.: So I think the fear goes back to fear number two which is about the tech stuff, or not feeling tech savvy enough. It's taking me so long to learn some of these things or I feel like it is, that a big chunk of that time that I have is just spent learning. And I know you guys say that it'll go by faster and I believe that. But I'm learning a lot of this on the fly, and so I feel like that's the part that makes me feel like I'm just learning and not creating and therefore I'm not putting stuff out. And so it feels like not enough time.

Shane Sams: The fear of time usually comes from looking at other people and comparing what they're doing or seeing what's possible or trying to get there as fast as possible. And one of the biggest mistakes that we see beginners make, or even entrepreneurs at a higher level, is trying to get to the next level like it's a race, right? Because in reality some people may feel a desperation to get out of their job or a desperation to get to the next level or they're really inspired because they see someone made something happen, right? But then, and then it all of a sudden turns into a race.

Shane Sams: But it's not a race. It doesn't matter if it takes you one year, two years or three years to get everything done. Everyone's going to do this at a different timeframe and everyone has to learn how to do the next step before they can take the next step, right? So it's not about like getting there as fast as possible. It's really just about getting there, in my mastermind this morning, we were sharing like we had a little, one of our people in our mastermind in my mastermind asked where were you 10 years ago? Right? And it was crazy because one guy was like, man, 10 years ago I had just moved to a new town and gotten a job and I was making $2,000 a month and my wife and I was making nothing but, and then he said last month was our first six figure profit month, but that was 10 years ago.

Shane Sams: And it's not like he was like looking at the span trying to get there in 10 years or it was the same journey we all take. We're inspired because we see somebody else, he had started three other businesses before this one worked, but he had stuck with it for 10 years and he had gotten to the promise land. Right? And that's really what everyone has got to. It's just like the Bible says, you've got to run your own race, right. And if you start comparing yourself and you start feeling the pressures or you start feeling that desperation, you're going to try to rush through the process and then that's just going to make you run off the rails. If the train goes too fast, it's going to crash, right? So try to reframe it as not that I don't have enough time, I've got plenty of time because I don't have to finish in a year.

Shane Sams: I don't have to finish in two years. I've just got to take the next step and learn it. Maybe that's what you do today and then tomorrow you do the thing and then you learn the next step and just slow down and get it right before you try to get it done quickly.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, and I would just encourage you to make sure that all of the things that you're thinking about are actually important, and I say this because it's something that I struggle with a lot of times. I will look and say, okay, well, our landing page has a problem and our SEO is not 100% optimized.

Shane Sams: You didn't put a period at the end of that sentence, Shane when you wrote that copy.

Jocelyn Sams: We need to be on Pinterest posting regularly. We need to be on Instagram, we need to be on Facebook. We need to be figuring out where we are in the rankings for this keyword. I have all of these things in my mind all the time, but they're not always important. All of them.

Shane Sams: Especially like when you get sucked into a podcast that talks about a new tool you've never heard of and you're like, "Ooh, I bet that would help my business." And like really? I was talking to somebody the other day about needle movers, the only needle movers really in your business are that you're creating valuable content. You're getting Opt-ins for leads and you're telling your leads about your product to sell. There's really nothing else you really need to do in your business. If everyone would just do those three things every day. Create a piece of content, release it, make sure the content points to an Opt-in, get the email.

Jocelyn Sams: Tell those people-

Shane Sams: Tell those people you have something for sale.

Jocelyn Sams: ... You have something cool that can solve their problem.

Shane Sams: Yeah. That's the needle movers man. All this other stuff. Yeah. After that, if you've got time, you share it on 100 social media networks and you do all these other things but focus on the needle movers so you're not caught up in learning so much stuff, right?

Priscilla Y.: Grow the needle movers.

Shane Sams: Yes, exactly. Yes. It's all you got to do. Okay?

Priscilla Y.: Got It.

Jocelyn Sams: All right.

Shane Sams: Fear or obstacle. We've made it to the fifth thing on the list and then we can get back to technical questions. Okay. But we're just, we're busting through the walls of fear today y'all so what is fear number five on the checklist?

Jocelyn Sams: All right, it says, I'm not sure if I should create a course to sell product at a membership etc. The content has to be easy to digest yet actionable.

Shane Sams: So is this basically you've got your lead magnet and you're kind of not sure what to do with, like what to sell to them?

Priscilla Y.: Yeah, I mean I feel like my avatar is somewhat unique and I'm sure everybody says this, but busy moms tend to have very little time, and I see it a lot in my service business where follow through is really difficult. So a course sounds great but then my worry is will they complete it? A membership sounds amazing, but then my fear is will they interact with it? And so I guess it's kind of a fear that I'm not going to create the right content for my avatar.

Shane Sams: This is actually a really common fear that a lot of people get stuck at this point. They're like, okay, what are they going to buy? Right? There's two parts of this and some of this is going to sound counterintuitive. Okay?

Priscilla Y.: Okay.

Shane Sams: The first thing you have, you do have one, it is awesome that you're thinking about how your people are going to consume the content. That's a big deal because you do have to create something that people can get results from or why create it. You got to care about how your people's success. Now the problem is when you go too far down that rabbit hole, you take all the responsibility from them taking action and put it on to you and you hold the weight and the anxiety of all of that. But here's the truth. It is your customer's responsibility to take action on what you're giving them. It is not your responsibility. If you buy a jug of milk, it's your job to drink it before it spoils. That's the truth. Or you wasted your money, right? And anyone who's going to sell online has to realize that maybe half your people may not take advantage of what you give them. They may come in, they may buy your thing and they may just not use it, and that's on them because all you can do is show people the path, right? You can't make them walk the path. It's the old horse to water. You can't make them drink. Right?

Shane Sams: So that that's how you overcome this fear is to realize that in in any time you're coaching or teaching or providing a course or a membership, you're all your half is to give them the opportunity. It is their responsibility to take advantage of that opportunity.

Jocelyn Sams: So the amazing advantage that you have right now is that you already have an audience. You have people following you on email, you have people following you on social media. The best thing to do honestly is just put it out there. Say, "Hey guys, I'm thinking about creating something really cool for you all and I was just wondering what would be the most beneficial to you? Here are a couple of ideas I have, what do you think about these or do you have any additional ideas?"

Shane Sams: And also not getting caught up in what other people are doing, right? For example, like we sell video, we have video courses with PowerPoint slides, right? But if you'll notice inside of the flip your life blueprint, we also have Mp3s that you can listen to the course, right? We also have workbooks that you can download and write in and print things out. Okay, so you say people are busy. Well, what if your entire product that they bought from you was literally podcast they can listen to on the way to work on the way to the soccer game and it was telling them what to do when they got home to organize something and then it was like a Facebook group that they're already on Facebook. That's where your community lives. It doesn't have to look like what the experts do or me and Jocelyn or anybody else like if you talk to your audience, you can build the product that they're more likely to consume, right?

Shane Sams: So you overcome this fear in two ways, what product should I create? One, what do your people say they want? Two, I am not responsible for their actions and success. I'm only responsible to lead them and give them opportunity. Once you embrace those two things, it's pretty easy to get over the fact and just go create the product instead of sitting around and worrying about it all the time.

Priscilla Y.: That's so helpful.

Jocelyn Sams: All right Priscilla, I hope that you feel a little bit better about some of these fears and mindset struggles and please don't think that we are picking on Priscilla because we did ask her if it was okay to kind of poke fun at her a little bit and she said-

Shane Sams: It's all her fault. She's the organizer and she sent us a check list. And we got to go through the check list. That's just the way it is.

Jocelyn Sams: So we are now going to jump into what you have been working on and how we can help you move forward.

Priscilla Y.: Thanks you guys. I actually hearing all that stuff to me actually made me laugh too. I don't feel picked on at all and I just hope that it helps other people out there who might have at least one or two of those fears and I so what's next for me is I have this lead magnet now and I need to figure out what's next. Where do I focus next? I think it's creating content, but I'd love to hear from you guys where you would go.

Shane Sams: The thing that we always say is product first, right? When we say product first we, what we mean is you create a lead magnet, which is a product that you exchange for contact information and you create a product that you can exchange for money. Okay, so you've got your lead magnet, you're getting emails, you're getting a social media following kind of built up here. The next step for you is to go to those people that are following you and for anybody listening, I don't care if you've got 10 emails or 200 emails or 2000 emails. If you have 10 people paying attention to you, you got an audience, right? Let them kind of tell you what they need, what should the course look like? Ask them specific questions. Do you want a video course that shows you how to organize your kitchen? Do you want me to do some kind of virtual coaching thing where we FaceTime and you walk me through your house and I create a plan for you from the comfort of my own home? Do you want me to create audio files that you can listen to and then take action?

Shane Sams: Or do you want to actually see me cleaning a house and fixing up the organization in the bedrooms? Go to them and ask them what they want and then create the smallest version of that product so that they have something to buy.

Jocelyn Sams: And always remember that just because you ask someone a question or they give you an opinion, it doesn't mean that you have to do it. If they say something and 10 people agree that they want to see you do A, B, C and you don't want to do A, B, C, then don't do it. I think sometimes people feel a little bit of pressure when they say, okay, what do you want me to do? And if Shane and I were to ask that, a lot of people would probably say, do one on one coaching. Well we don't want to do one on one coaching right now so we're not going to do that. So ask people but then also determine based on what they told you, like what fits in with your life and what you want to do.

Shane Sams: And the key here again is create the simplest version of that product that you can put a price tag on, right? I mean it may be something as simple as people want to know how to organize their bedroom because they feel discombobulated and uncomfortable and they're not resting well because they don't have this oasis to retreat to at night, right? It could be something like that. Maybe you just create that. You do a one week bedroom challenge. You have a video that shows you the 10 steps of straightening it and you just make that and charge 25 bucks for it. It's just something to make money, right?

Shane Sams: But get your product done. Because what happens is when you have a way to get leads and a way to sell something, now you have a place to point all this content you create to and that's how you make money online. And realize that it's going to evolve. This is not the product that's going to call the shot for the Babe Ruth home run. This is the first product and then you'll learn and then you'll make the second iteration and then you'll learn and eventually you'll have this big thing that can be sold for a couple of 100 bucks. It's really convenient for your audience. It's convenient for you and all of a sudden you've got a way to scale that income past those 20 hours that you're actually able to work a week.

Priscilla Y.: I like that a lot, I feel like it just took so much off of my plate or off of my shoulders hearing that I don't have to make the big product right now.

Shane Sams: No, you just have to make the first. Jocelyn created the biggest product I've ever seen when she made her one year lesson plans. Right. And, but she did it one month at a time and sold it one month at a time and then the next year-

Jocelyn Sams: I had the whole package-

Shane Sams: Ready to go. So people think we just wrote a bunch of lesson plans in a month and we sold all these things. That's not what happened. It was like a one year epic process plus an entire summer of putting it back together into something that could be sold in a big product. So it's like this is a process. It's not a race. When you're done, you'll know it because things will start happening. You just have to slow down and take the next step and get something for sale. Once you get something for sale, it's off to the races.

Priscilla Y.: Okay.

Jocelyn Sams: All right. Priscilla. Normally in this part of the show, we ask people what your action step is going to be, but I'm actually today going to give you some homework and your homework is to ask your audience what they would like see from you as a paid product.

Shane Sams: And then you will know your next step and you can go build that thing for them and put a price tag on it. And like honestly, I'm challenging you to have this done in like 30 days. Put a time limit on yourself. Get this first thing done and out there based on that feedback and see what happens.

Jocelyn Sams: And he's just talking about a product, not the final product. Right?

Priscilla Y.: I got it. Yeah, I think, I know I can do that.

Jocelyn Sams: All right. We're excited. We can't wait to see what happens next.

Shane Sams: Well, listen, Priscilla, thank you so much for being on the show today, man. We always thank people for being so transparent with their fear, but you were transparent with five or six fears, so thank you so much. I'm sure that everybody out there listening probably got so much value from this show just being able to bust through those fears and ready to take action for themselves.

Jocelyn Sams: And I feel you sister. I'll see you at the 12 step program. Okay.

Priscilla Y.: Thanks Jocelyn. I feel like I'm in good company.

Shane Sams: Wow. What a great episode of the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, man. It was awesome going through all of those fears that were holding Priscilla back, but they really hold us all back. Just slamming those fears in the face over and over and over again. Guys, if you can get over your fears, if you can get over your obstacles, you can do all of the other stuff that really makes it happen in your online business. That's what we do inside of the Flip Your Life Community every single week, we work together to overcome these fears, push through all of the obstacles, get all of the little things done that build a business, that build a life that change our family's future, and we do it together. We would love to help you get past your fears, obstacles, any difficulties you're having, in your entrepreneurial journey inside of the Flip Your Life Community.

Shane Sams: You can learn more about the Flip Your Life Community at flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife. We have courses and trainings and a community that is constantly talking about how to get past these things and how to get to the next level. We'd love to have you inside there as well. That's flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife. All right, guys, before we go today, we'd like to close with a Bible verse. Jocelyn and I draw a lot of inspiration from the Bible, not only in our life but for our business. Today's Bible verse comes from Proverbs 13 verse 11 and it says, dishonest money dwindles away but whoever gathers money little by little makes it grow. Just like we talked about in the show today, guys, it's not a race. Baby steps will get you closer to the goal than no steps at all, but the point is to move forward little by little, until we find that success, until we flip our lives and we change our family trees forever. That's all the time we have for this week guys. Until next time, get out there, take action, and do whatever it takes to flip your life. We'll see you then.

Jocelyn Sams: Bye.

Links and resources mentioned on today’s show: * Priscilla's Website * Flip Your Life LIVE 2019 Tickets & Registration Information * Flip Your Life community

Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!

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In today's episode, we help Lori start an online business.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jocelyn: Hey y'all! On today's podcast we help Lori start an online business.

Shane: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, where life always comes before work. We're your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. We're a real family that figured out how to make our entire living online. And now we help other families do the same. You ready to flip your life? All right, let's get started.

Shane: What's going on everybody? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. It is great to be back with you again today. Super excited because we've got a guest from the Flip Your Life community, an actual member inside of our community who is starting their online journey.

Shane: They are starting an online business, and we wanted to talk to her right as she's getting ready to get out there, right as she's ready to launch this thing into the world, so that you guys out there who are listening who are also starting an online business, kind of listen in and bust through some of those fears, overcome some of those obstacles and take your next steps as well.

Shane: Our guest today is Flip Your Life Community member Lori Pyne. How are you doing Lori?

Lori: I'm doing great. Good morning.

Jocelyn: Good morning. We were really happy to have you here today and to help you get started on this journey. I understand that, you've gone through a lot of different things in your life. And because of that, I think that it's going to make it even more sweeter, I guess you would say. No, that's probably not-

Shane: More sweeter?

Jocelyn: That's probably not correct English. It would make it sweeter once you reach that finish line, because you've gone through all of these different kinds of things. So go ahead and tell our audience a little bit about you, your background and what you are starting online.

Lori: I have been in the legal field for 30 years. I started it when I was two years old, you understand that of course.

Shane: Right.

Lori: And while I was being an amazing paralegal supporting my attorneys, I ended up having an amazing son who came into the world with, oh my goodness, a handful of challenges.

Lori: At that time I was able to find angels. Truthfully angels who helped me help him. My family, my friends. I met therapists and doctors, nurses, all of who helped him become the miracle baby he is.

Lori: He's now 18 years old and we're getting ready for the next change, which is being an adult when you're six foot tall and five years old developmentally.

Shane: What happened? What happened when he was born?

Lori: He was born with ... They detected a problem. Actually when I was 18 weeks gestation. I don't know if you guys know how tiny your heart is at that point. I don't even think it's the size of an almond. But they saw something and they took another peak, and did another test when I was 24 weeks and my son was assigned a pediatric cardiologist at that point. He had a heart defect.

Lori: He has a pulmonary valve that wasn't working right. His pulmonary artery was not pumping in ... Was too small, so he wasn't getting enough blood, and they anticipated birth and then surgery. He had to be five pounds, one ounce to be able to have surgery. And he was born exactly at five pounds, one ounce, he fooled them. He's a tough little guy, was able to make it to four months before he had to have his surgery.

Lori: He was a bruiser at 10 pounds. And at birth he had oxygen deprivation and at his surgery, nine hours afterwards when it finished, his heart stopped. It had never worked that hard, never had that much blood flowing. And he ... Our doctors are amazing, I have to tell you. His recovery room was a mini operating room. So they operated on him, his second heart surgery in the recovery room he was in at the hospital.

Lori: It was very odd. It's a little graphic, so sorry for anybody who's a little queasy. But they left him open in case his heart had more problems and they just covered him with a plastic sheet. And they had him obviously sedated, so he wouldn't move. And I was not allowed to talk around him, because everyone else could talk and he would ignore them. But he'd been hearing my voice his whole little bitty life, and he struggled to try, and get to me out of the sedation.

Lori: Anyone who knows me, I'm a little chatty person and I had to sit there with him in that state without saying a word.

Shane: Wow.

Jocelyn: Wow.

Shane: That is an unbelievable story. We were talking off air and I actually have ... We have a heart kid. We call them heart kids because they're like ... The heart community is amazing. It's just a whole other world of people whose children have had heart surgery. Have had heart defects at birth and they just know everything about the human body. It's unbelievable talking to the heart moms.

Shane: My brother called me and the same thing happened ... Not the exact same condition, but he turned purple, and then they had to have heart surgery two days later. And we went up there and he had all these tubes attached to him and his chest was cut open. I couldn't even fathom it being his uncle, let alone being the parent.

Shane: And just to overcome something like that, it kind of puts everything else in perspective, like life, business and moving forward and things like that, doesn't it?

Lori: Absolutely. In fact, I have a life motto, if you will. When he came into my world, how do they call it, mature mom. I was a little older when I had him. I know in my heart of hearts that he is going to live longer than I am, and he will always need to have somebody help him.

Lori: So my goal was to make sure that he thrives when I am gone. And people find that a little morbid and I don't understand it. It's reality. The opposite is for him not to live longer than me. And that is every parent's nightmare.

Jocelyn: Absolutely. For sure. How did his condition and having to just be a parent to a kid with special needs, how did that influence your decision to get into online business?

Lori: I had thought that as he got older, I don't know why I never consulted with anyone. I just was under the impression that once we got past the scary start, we weren't sure he was going to make it, then the helping him be able to do the basics. Eat, walk, talk, then school what could he do, it would get easier. In a way it's more complicated. It's not as scary. The beginning was just scary.

Lori: But I have to help him become the most independent person he can be in our community. And I know people have very strong feelings about schools and how they take care of our kids and all that. But I have to tell you, other than a few less than great people, I've had amazing help through our school district. They take such good care of my son. They helped me become the best mom I can be. All the therapists work with me, the teachers.

Lori: But once he's out, it's us. There is a community, we're in California and I think all states have it, we have a resource But I have to be more available to him to help him become the best him he can be.

Shane: So basically you've been a paralegal for all this time. Are you still a paralegal?

Lori: I am.

Shane: And you're trying to transition out of that nine to five lifestyle because up until this point, you've had the support of the school system-

Lori: Exactly.

Shane: But as he ages out of that, you don't have that exact support network anymore.

Lori: Exactly.

Shane: So you're going to have to pick something more flexible, because if you don't, then you're not going to be available when he needs you basically. 'Cause maybe you do find some help but it's from 1:00 to 4:00. What are you going to do in the morning from 9:00 to 12:00 or something like that?

Lori: And I'll be honest. Right now and all the men in your audience will understand what I'm saying. I have an 18 year old in body and a five year old. And five year olds have temper tantrums. And so, finding help that you aren't trained, the school trains people. It's very difficult.

Lori: So we basically have our family. And our family, my mom is amazing. She's been there every step of the journey like a great mom would. But up until recently we've been able to hire somebody to help us. And he's going through a really tough change with his hormones and wanting to do things and literally not being able to, and he takes this frustrations out sometimes in scary ways.

Lori: Imagine, a six foot tall ... I'm 5'6. This is six foot tall person having a five year old temper tantrum. So that's one of the reasons I need to be there.

Shane: It's an unbelievable reason, it's an amazing reason to have that kind of motivation to start this online business. We get caught up when we think about why with want to start an online business. We do want to maybe quit our job because of a bad boss. Maybe it's because you want to travel more. Maybe it's because you want to homeschool your kids. And sometimes it's because, man I need to be there for someone that needs me. And this is the path that can get me there and the path I'm on won't get me there. So you have to make a change.

Shane: And I'm sure there are people out there listening right now to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast cast that have kids with special needs that are motivated by this. Because maybe they think I've got to work, I've got to make some money. I got to do this. I got to do that. But it's not just about your dream sometimes. Sometimes it's about necessity.

Shane: And thank God that we live in a time in history where work from home jobs are possible. Travel jobs are possible. Flexible jobs are possible, because these options were not on the table even 20 or 30 years ago. And now you've got a chance to really do something and be there for the person that you love to help them when they need you most.

Lori: Absolutely.

Jocelyn: Yeah. I mean there's really just no better reason, so I love this and I'm really excited to dive in and help you get this thing started.

Jocelyn: So tell us a little bit about what you are planning to do online and what you have done so far?

Lori: Shane has actually helped me be focused because I came to him at one of our trainings with "I have three things I'm working on." And he was very nice and he mailed be back or in the chat said, focus on one.

Jocelyn: I'm surprised that he had that advice for you. Pretty surprising!

Shane: My great problem is not focusing on one but I know when I do it, I become prolific. And that's usually our ... The great battle is the shiny object syndrome, when you start your online business especially. But if you don't do one thing, you can't do the next thing. So you've got to do the first thing first.

Jocelyn: So because of that advice, you have decided-

Lori: That I am going to take my skills of taking care of amazing attorneys and I had one fabulous attorney who told me that in her view, she does what only an attorney can do, and her support staff like paralegals and all, we do everything else. So I've taken that mindset, and it's kind of like, well I can do all of that for somebody, either an attorney or a business owner. They can focus on what literally only they can do, and I can take care of everything else.

Shane: So is this like a virtual assistant path where you're going to have clients and you're going to be working flexible from home, but you're going to be taking things off of their plates. Are you going to do the same thing as you were doing as a paralegal, you're just not going to go to the office every day. You're going to have more virtual clients. Is that what you're doing?

Lori: Well, that's how I'm starting out because I was told I had to focus on one thing.

Shane: Perfect. We actually had a member that was on the podcast a few months ago. Her name was Christal Harahill, and she created a very, very similar business. What podcast was at Jocelyn? I don't remember what number it was.

Jocelyn: I'm not sure. I'll have to look it up.

Shane: But she actually did a virtual ... She served realtors kind of in the same way in the office as support staff. And she had some things going on. She wanted to go home and there were some other things happening and she was like ... And she realized that probably 80% of what she was doing in an office working for a broker or realtor she could do at home. She could literally contract out to other real estate agents and just do a lot of those tasks for them online.

Shane: So she just kind of wrote the list, and maybe there was 20 things on the list that she did and she looked and said, well, I can't do these four things unless I'm with them. So she scratched to those off, and then that was her package. She just kind of built that out as, I'm going to offer this to serve people. She went to networking events and she built this entire book of business right from her home or anywhere, as long as she had her computer that she could do just by eliminating the office work and only focusing on the things that she could do as a VA.

Jocelyn: And that is episode 265.

Shane: So you can can go to flippedlifestyle.com/podcast265. My point in bringing that up is there is a template for making this happen, which will springboard you to the next thing, which is more passive. Does that make sense?

Lori: Yes. And that is actually one of the questions that I had asked you was, can you create recurring revenue from a service based business, and you reassured me yes, that you can.

Jocelyn: Absolutely. All right Lori, before we dive into the specific questions that you have about your business, let's talk just a little bit about fears or maybe a mindset struggle that has been holding you back. What is worrying you? What's nagging you in the back of your mind saying can you really do this?

Lori: I think my fears are not extraordinary, which makes me happy because other people have overcome them. But I have a fear of do I know enough. I've been studying a lot of the different technologies that are used in more of the online world than in an office. I'm very versed in the technology used in an office, but obviously I now need to become versed in online. And which will make people kind of laugh at me, but imposter syndrome. Do I know enough? Can I do this? Will I be able to succeed? I have lots of wanton voices in my head telling me that I have never been my own boss. That I don't know what I'm doing. That I won't be able to find anybody. All of the fears that nip at our heels while we step out onto a new path.

Jocelyn: Well, I want to say first of all, after 30 years in this area, if you don't know enough then I'm not sure anyone else does, Lori. Because that's a long time to be in an industry and just soak up all that knowledge and that information that you have in your head. That's really valuable. And I think sometimes people underestimate the value of the things that they know, especially with that much experience.

Jocelyn: I would say as far as like your expertise and knowledge, I definitely would not worry about that. When I started my library site, I had been a librarian a whopping four years and two months. Actually, I'd been a librarian three years when I started the site. So, I just kind of dove in and shared my experiences. And I think people even like to hear that you're a little bit vulnerable sometimes. That maybe you are a little bit scared to put yourself out there. I mean we say it sometimes. Anytime I do a video or a live training of any kind, I will always start out with that. So that way I don't have to worry about it. People already know that I'm feeling this way.

Shane: Yeah. I mean it's funny how we view ourselves in that way. That imposter syndrome is insidious, because it never goes away. It just never goes away. And no matter what, because you're always worried about what other people are going to think about us. It's not really do we doubt ourselves? You can look in the mirror and go what are you talking about? You've been a paralegal for 30 years. And you know the factual, rational part of you says, I can do this. But then you're like, but what if that lawyer thinks I can't. What if that person that contracts me is unsatisfied or doesn't think that it's valuable or whatever.

Shane: And we still get that. When we speak at events, there's still that moment right before we go on stage where I'm like, do we really need to be out here doing this? Or when we get interviewed on a podcast that we've heard other people interviewed on. We say, man, do we really belong here?

Shane: I had a funny situation. I went to Wrestlemania last month because that's what I do, 'cause I love professional wrestling. And I actually got to go to the hall of fame pre party with all the wrestlers. So a buddy of mine works for the wrestling organization, his wife wasn't going to go and he let me go with him. So it was ridiculous-

Jocelyn: So Shane was a date-

Shane: I was a date. I was a man's date. Just don't go down that road, you know what I'm saying? But like, it was crazy because I was on this bus and I was sitting behind Sergeant Slaughter. I look over and all these famous people are all around me. But it was really like magnified version of imposter syndrome. Because like everyone else in the room was a wrestler or a family of a wrestler. But it made me feel the exact same way as when I'm about to do a new training. Do I really know enough to train people on this?

Shane: Or when somebody asks me a question that I'm sure of, but I'm like, is that the right answer? And it was this magnified version of, do I really belong in this room? And we've all felt that and that's natural. I hate to tell everybody this, but it's never gonna go away. So the best way to get over that is just keep doing it anyway. Just keep going. You do belong. We all belong, our experience is all valuable, especially to people who are less experienced than us.

Shane: Or in your case, if you go out and work for an attorney, maybe an attorney can't afford to have enough paralegals in office, but they could have a part-time paralegal like you working virtually for them. And that's extremely valuable.

Lori: Thank you. I said I know people will laugh, but it's still one of the fears.

Shane: Everybody's got it. Everybody's got it. You're listening right now Flipped Lifestyle audience. I know you got it. You're good enough. What was that old saying in the live skit. You're good enough. You're smart enough and doggone it, people are going to like you. So go out there and make your stuff.

Jocelyn: And it's also being okay with the fact that everyone won't like you. There are some people out who are going to say, well this is ridiculous and this is stupidest advice I've ever heard. But to be honest, the most knowledgeable person in the world on any topic, will still get that kind of hate.

Shane: Yeah. And they don't know everything either. So it doesn't matter.

Jocelyn: So it's all good. You just have to be okay with that.

Shane: As with the tech stuff, this is another one that's ... I remember having a great ... And I'm pretty good with technology. I've got a background where I've used computers, stuff like that. I wasn't an expert or a programmer or anything. But I did have a background where I had dabbled with some html. I'd done some things just playing around in college. And I remember the technology did scare me to death in the beginning. Because when we started to having to like ... I realized I had to build a website, I had to be connected to all these tools and it was really scary. It was really, really scary. Because I was like, man this is all brand new to me.

Shane: And I think the newness is really the problem, not necessarily the tech, because once you get in to most of these things, it really kind of works like Microsoft word. If you can use a word processor, then you can kind of use Wordpress, which is how you build a website. And when you start connecting things, it's really just copying and pasting codes into boxes. The challenge is getting over that initial hump that says, I don't know if you can do that, and saying, really that's only 20% different than the software that I already know how to use, and just kind of diving in.

Shane: I actually think that people who have never had any technology experience do better when they get into the building of the websites and they're doing all the technology things like setting up calendars and schedulers, because they're like, it's like a kid. You don't know what you don't know and you don't know what you're not supposed to know. So you just dive in and you do it and you're like, oh cool, I did that, I learned that. But someone else has to kind of unlearn the fact that they think they can't do it.

Shane: So technology is the same thing. Keep it as simple as possible. That's the biggest way to overcome that obstacle. Don't listen to what the gurus are doing, don't listen to what the experts are doing, because they've probably got teams where they've been doing it for a long time and they've already went through process of figuring it out. Just do it one step at a time as simple as possible.

Shane: If you have a website to advertise your services, start with a one column blog with a contact form. Don't overcomplicate it. And then you can promote that and you can kind of grow over time. Don't try to do too much at once. That makes sense?

Lori: That makes complete sense. And I will say as somebody who is just starting this and just learning the technology, and I told my husband this who's in the IT world. I have told him and I will ask him for help, but it's mine and I have to first learn it myself. I'm sort of stubborn. It's now the technology is at my level, if that makes sense. You don't have to code. I told him with great excitement that it's now the technology has gotten to my level, it will now be usable for anybody. And I mean for your audience, will probably be able to figure it out if I did something for 30 years, I'm not 30 years old.

Shane: You had him going Lori, you ruined it. You had them going!

Lori: And I know people my age can often be a little bit more intimidated by we're not digital natives and blah, blah, blah. But I just want you to know I'm doing it, and it's now doable. Even if you don't know how to code or speak tech language.

Shane: A couple of weeks ago we had a travel agent her name is Marci Jennings. She's a work from home travel agent. That's what she does for a living. That's how she built her flipped lifestyle, works full time by herself on a computer. And she doesn't even have a website. She completely advertises ... Service based businesses really lend themselves to just Facebook page. Websites are better because you can get scheduling into it and you can do all these other things, like to plan your meetings and stuff. People can click a link. But the technology could be as simple as just being public and being present and you'll be able to do it.

Shane: We have a form that everybody fills out before they come on a podcast. You said something really interesting here. That it's hard to stay focused because you get so overwhelmed by the huge mountains of unknowns, and that keeps you from understanding what the next step would be. And as we talked through these two fears that you have, that's really all any of these fears or obstacles. It's just the fear of the unknown. It's just the fear of what do we do? When we change our price, it's not really a matter of if people will pay it or if they won't. It's just unknown to us.

Shane: Humans don't like the dark corner that you have to turn around and the blind spot, you can't see it. So learning to wrestle with the unknown and kind of honor the unknown, because it's all unknown. Jocelyn and I talk about this all the time. We're in totally uncharted territory of anything we ever dreamed possible. We don't even know what the next level looks like for us. And that's unknown. And I think that's what holds all of us back at any level. Beginner, intermediate, advanced, is just the unknown of kind of what's next.

Jocelyn: It's like I said before. It's just learning to be comfortable with discomfort and that's hard for a lot of people. But if you can do that, if you can figure out how to solve those problems that seem impossible, it makes you feel like you can do anything. Because really you can. All right, Lori, I know that you've been working through the weekly trainings for the live event, right?

Lori: Yes.

Jocelyn: So let's talk a little bit about what you have done so far and what your next step is, what your question is for your next step.

Lori: What I have done so far is been focused on my one and to let the other brilliant ideas that I have rest in my back pocket for a while. And ... I have had to look for a product to sell, for a lead magnet. And I actually had real difficulty with that. And I came up with an idea 'cause I haven't yet done it. I'm one of the ones who did not have it done by Monday. I was thinking that I can create things to help people be more efficient in their office. I've worked in lots of offices. I've seen efficiencies and I've seen things that are not.

Lori: What do you think about that kind of expertise? Do you think that would be helpful?

Shane: Let me define that. You want to get leads for your service?

Lori: 'Cause I have none.

Shane: Exactly.

Lori: I'm starting at zero.

Shane: I promise you you're not the only person who listens to this podcast that has no leads ... A lot of you guys have been listening for two or three years, and you still have a lead magnet. We'll talk about this.

Shane: That's why one of the things we do, Lori's coming to Flip Your Life LIVE 2019 in Lexington in Kentucky on September 19th through 21st. Get your tickets at flippedlifestyle.com/live, how do you like that? But she's coming and we do a weekly training. I get on every Monday and challenge people to take their next step. I give them a next step. They go do their next step.

Shane: Last week's was how are you going to get leads? What's your next lead magnet or your first lead magnet? Let's get this thing done. So the key there is understanding who are you going to serve with the core offer with the product? Now you're doing a service based thing. You want to work from home doing a service based thing where you can serve people in their office but you're doing it virtually. Is that correct?

Lori: Correct.

Shane: Okay. So you want your lead magnet to give them some tips on efficiencies to make their office better. With the hopes that they do what? What's the next step after the lead magnet? That they go be more efficient and they realize that you can teach them how to be efficient? Or do you want them to get on a call and try to hire you as their virtual paralegal?

Lori: What a good question. I hadn't yet thought that far. I was starting just even what I would create.

Shane: Exactly. Well the thing about lead magnet-

Lori: So then the efficiency of having somebody who's a virtual person that can work off of your plate.

Shane: Okay. So the lead magnet is the first step of your core offer. That everyone, no matter what you're selling, you get the lead usually by giving them the first step to that. So you have to know what the next step is or you're not going to have to create an effective lead magnet.

Shane: For example, one of our lead magnets is just usually what we give out when we go on guest appearances is, and we call it the online business starter kit. It's for people who are totally beginners. And what it is, is it's a course that helps you come up with your idea. 'Cause if you get an idea, then your next step is to create the idea. Well guess what? We do it in the Flip your Life community every day. We make ideas become realities and turn them into businesses that make dreams come true. That's the first step. That's what I got to give you.

Shane: Maybe your first step is you've already done all that stuff and you come to us and you're like, my next step is email marketing. And then the next step after that is putting people on my email list. Well we might give away a course about email marketing with the next thing we sell them as, hey, did you know we also have a course about how to grow your email list? So like that's what you had to think about when you're thinking about these lead magnets in the very beginning is, what could I give to someone that would literally make them want to hire me next?

Shane: So maybe it's not something they can do, maybe it's just a brochure. Maybe it's a list of your services that you provide. Maybe it's ... And then the next step is, let's set up a call and talk and see if we can work together. A lead magnet can be valuable to just tell people what they're going to get. Not just here's something that you can go do for 24 hours. That makes sense?

Lori: Okay. I'm writing notes while we're talking.

Shane: We're recording this so you can totally go back.

Lori: I know.

Shane: But you're ready to take action as soon as you get off the call.

Lori: I'm a student at heart, we take notes.

Jocelyn: Okay. So we're working on a lead magnet. What Shane says is absolutely true. We definitely have to think about the next steps. I think there are a lot of people out there who don't really think about their next steps, and they have a lead magnet, which is really nice-

Shane: Which leads to nothing.

Jocelyn: Yeah. But if you don't-

Shane: The lead magnet leads to nothing.

Jocelyn: If you don't have anything for sale, then what really is the point of a lead magnet, right? So you definitely need to get that sorted out next.

Shane: Have you ever been on a job interview to be a paralegal?

Lori: Oh gosh, yes.

Shane: Okay. What do you think is one of the most common questions that a lawyer asks you when they're hiring you as a paralegal? What is-

Lori: You mean beyond the, tell me something about you?

Shane: Yeah. What do they really want to know, you know what I'm saying, before they'll work with somebody. I mean you may not have this question off the top of your head right now.

Lori: Oh, I do. I've had lots of interviews, and I've had to interview other paralegals. As you probably can figure out, in a legal department or in a law firm, it's a very deadline driven endeavor. And you're often tasked with doing more than is humanly possible each day. So one of the things that everybody wants to know is how do you handle stress? How do you handle having too much work? How you handle different priorities? You have different attorneys asking you to all get something done today, all of which will take three days. And that answer actually tells you a lot. The best answer is, you talk to them, you communicate. You let them know what is on your plate so they then are part of solving the problem and helping you decide. Not, I'm just going to get through it, and who needs sleep.

Shane: So going back to the efficiency thing that you were kind of drawn to, I would guess that that's why that bubbled up to the surface. Because you're like, oh well the paralegals gotta be efficient so I'm going to do something to show them how to be efficient. Maybe your lead magnet is actually, how ... I'm just going to use our paralegals as some verbage here. I'm not going to say how I do it, you might say that. But how our team gets the work of three paralegals done in a day or something like that. And maybe you could just give them a one page workflow of what's it called Jocelyn? Where you ask like yes and no's.

Jocelyn: Or even a communication guide. We're just talking about the communication. Like what's the best way to communicate with your paralegal and vice versa so you can make sure everyone's on the same page and going in the same direction.

Shane: And you can have a little flow chart. It's like task, yes or no. It all kind of bubbles as it moves around. And it just demonstrates that you have clearly thought about this. So the lawyer is like checkout our paralegal efficiency system or whatever. This is how I work through problems. This is how I'm able to get the job done. Three days of work done in a day. It's a process that they could implement with their paralegal staff, but really it's an evaluation tool that lets them know, this person's thought about this. Wow, we don't do this. Man, I need to bring this into my team even if it's virtually, because this is amazing.

Shane: And then maybe a part of it. You kind of bend toward the advantages of why it's better to do this with an online virtual assistant. Better than somebody in the office or whatever. So you can kind of worm that in there to where the next possible question is, how do I get you on my team? 'Cause that's the next step. That's what you want them to do is let's do some kind of interview. Let's do something virtually. Let's try to make this happen.

Shane: Instead of saying, here's three ways to organize your desk. This is no, this is what I do, and this is what I can do for you if you'll just take the next step and talk to me about it and we'll go forward.

Lori: I like that.

Jocelyn: Okay. So you're feeling pretty good about that, right?

Lori: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Shane: This is the key to building a good lead magnet. Is it's not just jab, jab, right hook. It's not just give the next step and crush it, right? It's not do a lead magnet and we get a four hour work week. That's not how it works. It's strategic. What is the end game? What are the five steps to get to the end game? And the first step is probably the lead magnet. That's how everybody should be thinking about their business when we're trying to get lead.

Jocelyn: And you also have to go into the mind of your ideal customer. What are they really looking for, and what can you do to convince them that you have the answer that they're looking for in that lead magnet?

Shane: So your lead magnet could be called ending your annoyance ... These are not the right words. Like, I would say lawyers are often annoyed with the communication breakdowns between them and their paralegal staff, because they're stressed out, their paralegals are stressed out and nobody's talking correctly to each other for expectation. It's just, here, do this, here, do this, here do this. I've got to go to court. So I would say that that creates frustration or annoyance or something in the office. So you would call your lead magnet, like how to stop being annoyed with communication breakdowns in your law office or something.

Jocelyn: That's not a good name-

Shane: It's not a good name but that's the start of it. That's the evolution of what it sounds like.

Jocelyn: I suggest you can make it a little-

Shane: Sexier or whatever.

Lori: Well, and actually I can help you here, 'cause I actually do know something about attorneys and how to reduce the potential malpractice caused by miscommunication.

Shane: There you go. That's it. That is brilliant. Now you've scared them and showed them a benefit.

Jocelyn: So we've talked about the how to without statement before on different trainings and possibly podcasts too. So whenever you're trying to come up with a name of something, something really easy to do is how to ...

Shane: Avoid malpractice.

Jocelyn: Well how to do their greatest desire without their greatest fear.

Shane: So it's how to improve communication. You can also use so that instead of without. So that you can avoid malpractice or something like that, basically.

Jocelyn: I think that was backwards.

Shane: Or something like that. But you just got to massage it until it works, then try it.

Lori: Okay.

Jocelyn: All right. So we got that working and you're going to get started on that. I can't wait to see how that turns out. What other questions do you have today as you're getting started?

Lori: One of the questions that I had was, the thing that really excites me about the business you guys are helping us create is having revenue that happens when you're not working. I don't know how, do you say it. You're not-

Shane: Passive income.

Lori: Thank you. You're not exchanging dollars for dollars. And I was wondering if you could do that with a service based industry since this is the first business I'm going to be focusing on as a service based business.

Shane: Usually when you're in a service based business, the way that you can make it passive is by building a team. For example, if you can get your systems down for being a paralegal, you could hire other virtual paralegals and your main job would be getting leads for them to do the work and you take a cut. It's kind of like you're the broker and then they would become the realtors or whatever. That makes sense?

Lori: Or like an agency.

Shane: Or like an agency. That's what it'd be called. So basically, you're the figurehead, you're the original paralegal. Let's say you build a book of five clients. Eventually what you would do is maybe get two other people under you that you could train to do this virtually from home and you don't have to have an office or anything like that. But then you pass your clients through to them to do some of the work.

Shane: And a lot of times the lawyers don't even know who's doing the real work. So it's like you can build that out and what happens is, all of a sudden you get six, seven, maybe 10 maybe you have two or three people under you, and then you're just at the top. So you spend maybe 10 to 20 hours a week getting leads and marketing it. Getting the actual customers and then you've got a team of support staff doing the actual work behind you.

Jocelyn: First of all, remember that no work is totally passive ever. I know that you know that. So even though people make passive income, nothing is 100% passive. Well I won't say nothing. Never say never. But there are very few things in this world that are completely passive.

Shane: Next week we have a lot of members, so we're going to Disney world next week. We will make money everyday we're in Disney world even though we're not working. Does that make sense?

Lori: Yes.

Shane: So like, but we put in the work before, and if we stopped promoting it, it would die. Service based businesses usually follow that agency, employee model. But you could also create trainings for paralegal staff. You could have courses. You don't have to have ... Some people think your whole business is passive or it's not. But that's not true. Our business, we're here right now working with you. We're spending time to do this. Later in the day we'll be doing other things and we'll make passive income.

Shane: But it's more of a mix. So you can have these clients and then maybe you create a paralegal training system for people to work efficiently for their staff. And you could train people once a month, and then you've got a little passive income working off those courses on the back. Maybe you build a 60/40 service based/passive income business to where you have the hours that you want, but you still put in the hours to make everything grow and support yourself.

Jocelyn: The good news is that you don't have to decide the exact business model you want to do right this second. Nothing is to say you cannot later change. You just have to decide what works for you. Everything has pluses and minuses. If you work with yourself doing the services, the downside is that you have to be physically present and kind of-

Shane: Doing the work.

Jocelyn: ... Trading that time for dollars. However, if you go with an agency model later down the road, and you start hiring people, then you have to manage people. And so that comes with its own set of challenges. So those are just things to consider as you start to build your business. But don't let those things stop you. Just because you don't know what it is ultimately going to look like, don't let that be a roadblock for you. Go ahead and start. Start with the service based business if that's what makes sense for you and that's what you know. Then learn from your customers. Hey, how can I support you better in the future? Or, I'm thinking about going into a more passive model. This is what I'm thinking. What would you like to see?

Shane: Yeah. You'll figure that out as you go. All businesses start completely work driven. And they become passive later. Even a course driven business, you're going to be putting so much energy into launches and getting recurring customers and doing things like that, that it's not going to be totally passive.

Shane: The passive income myth is I set it and forget it and the ads run and they drive leads and they make sales and it just works all the time. Well if that was true, then all the people that preach passive income would not have podcasts and Facebook ads every week. You know what I'm saying? Like you ever thought about that? I had a guy once and he was trying to get someone on their podcast and the podcast was talking about courses and all this stuff and how they just set it and forget it and barely work and all this stuff. And that guy would, every time we tried to get him on the show he was like I can't, I'm too busy. And he's like, wait a minute, I thought you didn't work. You look at Tim Ferriss, somebody writes a book called The Four Hour Workweek. That dude is constantly on ... He does 10 hours of his own podcast every week. He's not working on a four hour work week.

Shane: But the key to passive income is really that you can make money 24 hours 'cause your store's always open. Like last night, right before bed, we did a training last night for our Flip Your Life Live attendees. and I don't know what time it was over about 10:00 something like that. We started at 9:00, got done at 10:00. I stayed up for about 30 or 45 more minutes. Right before bed, somebody signed up for our membership. New member. I wasn't doing anything. It was just there. And they found the page and they bought it. And now that person will come into the community and they'll talk and they'll attend member calls and I'll show up for that. It's like the circle of life more than it is set it and forget it.

Shane: It will evolve into something that you can control. Right now the most important thing is you control when you're working, not necessarily how much work you're doing.

Lori: True.

Jocelyn: Okay. It has been a really fun conversation today. I can't wait to see what you're going to take action on. And on that note, we always like to ask people at the end of our call, what is one thing that you plan to do in the next 24 hours based on all of the awesome things we talked about today?

Lori: I am planning to work on my lead magnet and my strategy. Why I'm creating it and what it is leading to.

Jocelyn: Love it.

Shane: I love it when everything just kind of comes into focus. Isn't that amazing? Because when you know what to do next, you can actually take the next step. And that's half the battle online is just beating that unknown of what to do next.

Shane: Lori, before we go, I want to talk to you a little bit about Flip Your Life LIVE. Now you're just dipping your toes into the online business waters. You're a member of the community. That's an awesome, amazing first step of getting into the trainings, getting to meet some people who are doing this too, people who are just like you who are just starting out, attending member calls, getting your questions answered, but why did you take the next step? Why did you decide to come to Flip Your Life Live? We get a lot of questions from people that say, I'm a beginner, is this right for me? Is this going to be over my head? What am I doing? What made you take that next step and grab a ticket to Lexington's Flip Your Life LIVE event this fall?

Lori: Actually a handful of things. I like the way you teach. There's no nonsense, there's no sugar. And I know I have never had my own business. I have been a really awesome employee, but there's a difference when the buck stops with you. I know I have a lot to learn. I think you guys are going to teach me a lot, and you already have in our trainings. I take copious notes as you probably could gather. The other people in our community are teaching me, and it'll be an intensive work ... We'll be working the whole time, which is what attracts me to it. I also like being in an audience where somebody is telling me something and I'm learning. But I do best doing, and I know I'm going to get so much done by the time we get to the event, and then even more after, if that makes sense.

Shane: It does. That's one thing we really try to do. When we used to go to live events, we would buy our ticket in January and then June would roll around. We'd go to the event, but we had never heard from them or talked to them or done anything. And I think I counted it up the other day. We're going to have 17 training sessions before we even get to Flip Your Life LIVE. We do icebreaker sessions where we introduce everybody to everybody. We get on a big zoom call, and Jocelyn and I go through and ask people icebreaker questions so that everybody learns a little bit about everybody that's coming. And we really tried to build it where you get more value before the event than any other event you could ever buy a ticket for.

Lori: And I already have. What are we into end of April?

Shane: Yep.

Lori: Because each one is so focused it gives me a thing to work on now. And then next week I will have the next thing to work on. That just really works for me.

Shane: And it's designed to take you through the blueprint before you even get to the event, so you're not just showing up confused and disoriented. You're going to know ... I remember last year we looked down from the balcony as people were checking in. Nobody knew we were there. And we were watching, we were kind of spying on everybody. And I just saw so many people hug people in line. They were in line hugging and taking pictures and I've never seen that in an event. Usually you're just in line waiting for your pass. You're just kind of a number as you're checking in. But we saw this community, these people coming in and hugging and meeting people in real life for the first time, and that really sets the tone for how our event works too. Because it is a work based event.

Shane: Usually what we do is we come out, we cover content and we say, you've got 30 minutes, let's get to work, let's mastermind together. Let's take action on this next step. Then me and Jocelyn come out and say, now that you've wrestled with this topic for 30 minutes, what are your questions? We do live Q and A's with S&J. There's like eight or nine of them all through the event. And then we say, all right, now let's do it again. Let's get back into the weeds and let's finish this thing. And then we go to the next step.

Shane: And that's how the whole event is designed, is not just the sit and soak. Not just to dream big and get motivated. That's a part of it. I might've made a few people cry, I made a whole lot of people laugh last year. I'm just saying. We're pretty good at that. But the main mission is for you to take action and actually change your life.

Shane: I'm just really so glad that you're going to be there Lori. It's going to be an amazing experience and I cannot wait to meet you in person. Give you a hug.

Lori: I know. I was just thinking, you're not building a community, you're building a family.

Shane: We like to call Flip Your Life LIVE ... I'm so glad you said that. I did not prompt you to say ... with actually refer to it as kind of me and Jocelyn and Amber, our live event coordinator, we call it the Flip Your Life family reunion. That's what we call it because that's the feel you're getting. Everybody's eating country food and we're just hanging out and sweet tea's being poured in every glass. But it really does feel that way to us, and I cannot wait to see you at the family reunion.

Lori: Exactly.

Jocelyn: All right Lori. It has been such a fun conversation and I even hate to see it end, but before we go, I know that you had a special Bible verse and even a prayer that you would like to share with our audience So we would love to hear it.

Lori: My Bible verse is addressing fear. So it's from Psalms 34:4. I sought the Lord and he answered and delivered me from all my fears.

Lori: But the prayer I say every day, and I have been saying this prayer ... It's my private conversation between God and I ever since my son came into my life and I pray every day for strength and courage, patience, help, and ... I'm always very grateful and I always say thank you. Because I have been given amazing strength. I have done things I never knew I could do. Courage to face some pretty serious fears. I have much more patience than I ever thought possible, and I have been sent amazing, amazing help family, friends, everything, and I'm very grateful.

Shane: That is awesome. And that's what going to carry you to even more success when you go forward. I love ... What is it the Bible says? Fear not 365 times? Whatever they say. God gave us a lot of reasons not to be afraid, because fear is going to try to stop us in whatever we're doing. And we just can't let it do that.

Lori: What I try and do every night is I just give God my fear to take care of while I'm sleeping.

Shane: Amen. I'm just going to throw an amen out there on the Flipped Lifestyle podcast this week. Well listen Lori, thank you so much for your transparency. I know there's a lot of people out there listening that are just starting out that are facing some of those same fears, hopefully we overcame those today.

Shane: I know there's people out there with a lot of challenges in their family with their children, things like that. I know that your transparency is going to help them and inspire them to take action. I love the fact that you're ... I don't know the best way to say it, so I'm just going to say it the way I say things. I love how you don't let the challenges in your life hold you back. Even with a special needs son, you've got this dream. You've got this thing. You want to be there for him.

Shane: A lot of people are like, well I got kids, how am I going to go to a live event? You made it happen. I got financial needs, 'cause of these medical issues, so I'm still going to go and invest in myself and get the training that I need to do what I want to do. And I just want to say especially after talking to you now in person, I admire you, I respect you and I just really appreciate you for coming on the show today.

Lori: Thank you. I enjoyed myself. And I learned something. You always teach me.

Shane: All right guys, what an amazing conversation with Lori today. So glad that she was able to overcome some of those fears and figure out her next steps. That's what we're here for guys. We're here to teach you what you need to move forward. We do that in a couple of ways.

Shane: One is inside of the Flip Your Life community. We would love to have you as a member of the Flip Your Life community. All you have to do to learn about all of our programs, all of our courses, all of our forums and all the great things that we do for our members every single month, is to go to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife, that's all one word. That's F-L-I-P-P-E-D L-I-F-E S-T-Y-L-E.com/flipyourlife. And you can learn everything about how you can become a member of the Flip Your Life community. How you can start your journey just like Lori is and just like so many other people are inside.

Shane: And we would love for you to join us and join Lori so that you can meet us in person and meet her in person at Flip Your Life LIVE September 19th through the 21st in Lexington, Kentucky. Tickets are on sale right now but they are selling out. VIP tickets are gone. General admission tickets are almost gone. Don't miss your opportunity to be at this life changing event. All you have to do to get your ticket right now is to go to flippedlifestyle.com/live, L-I-V-E. That's flippedlifestyle.com/live and you can grab a ticket. And you can be at the next Flip Your Life family reunion with us and Lori and all of the other community members who are going to be there.

Shane: That is all the time we have for this week. Thank you guys so much for tuning in. We hope that it was helpful to you. Until next time, get out there, take action, do whatever it takes. Flip your Life!

Jocelyn: Bye.

Links and resources mentioned on today’s show: * Lori's Website * Flip Your Life LIVE 2019 Tickets & Registration Information * Flip Your Life community

Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!

Join the Flip Your Life Community NOW for as little as $19 per month!

https://flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife

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In today's episode, we welcome back Mark to celebrate his success and help him determine his next steps.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jocelyn Sams: Hey y'all, on today's podcast we welcome back Mark to celebrate his success and help him determine his next steps.

Shane Sams: What's going on everybody, welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, it is great to be back with you again today. Really, really excited about today's guest. This is someone who's been on the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast before. It's someone we have met in person at one of our Flip Your Life live events, and it's someone who's doing some amazing things in the online business world. Our guest today is Mark Taylor. Mark, welcome back.

Mark Taylor: Thank you so much. I really appreciate you having me back on the show.

Shane Sams: Now, remind everybody where you live at? Because it's definitely not Kentucky from the sound of your accent, you know what I'm saying?

Mark Taylor: It's not. It is the UK, but it's not the University of Kentucky, which I think we were talking about last time. Yeah, I live in a village called Rode, which is about 60 miles just north of London over here in Great Britain.

Shane Sams: I think it's amazing that you live in a village. We don't have villages, we've got towns, I wish we had villages.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, we've definitely not used that word, village. But I am quite obsessed with the UK actually. I think we might have talked about this before. I've actually traveled there once and I would love to go back again some time.

Shane Sams: I think we're going to come soon Mark.

Mark Taylor: Great.

Shane Sams: They're about to pass all those laws.

Jocelyn Sams: About the visas.

Shane Sams: Where we've got to have visas now, the United States people to go to the EU, but I know England's going to let us in once they get out of there. They're Brexiting.

Mark Taylor: Absolutely, I think everyone will be welcome.

Shane Sams: We'll just come to England, we'll just hang out with you.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, so I love British culture, I'm kind of obsessed with it. I'm a big tea drinker. I drink English Breakfast every morning, so I feel like I have a real kinship with you.

Mark Taylor: Yeah, sure. I do the morning breakfast followed by the mid-morning breakfast, followed by lunch, followed by afternoon.

Shane Sams: Second breakfast, third breakfast and tea.

Mark Taylor: Yeah, sure.

Jocelyn Sams: Believe it or not, southerners, we are big tea drinkers. It's more iced tea usually but I do drink a lot of hot tea.

Mark Taylor: Yeah, love it.

Jocelyn Sams: All right, well let's jump into a little bit of background for the listeners, for people who maybe have not listened to a podcast with you on it before. Tell everybody a little bit about you, about your background and what you've been doing online.

Mark Taylor: I obviously live here in the UK. My background's in music. My passion is music, I'm a professional musician. Moved to London and went to music college and studied there and I've had the great honor really to play with many of the UK's leading orchestras and organizations. Through that I've had the opportunity then to become an educator, teaching drums, teaching music and played all over the world and extensively also through the UK.

Mark Taylor: What's been really exciting is I've been able to transfer that passion into my online world through Education On Fire. I live here with my wife and we've got three children and we have a really lovely life. We talk a lot on the podcast about the ability to have that sort of balance in life and I've always had that. My wife and I decided always that we wanted to split the childcare and that she spends a lot of time and we've always managed to do that, being freelance and a musician means that we have a little bit of control of our schedule but of course, if you're not actually away touring or you're not away working then you don't quite have the financial freedom that you might have, which is where some of the online ideas came from, in terms of trying to monetize the sorts of things that I was doing. My life really fits into that three pattern really. It's music playing, music education and then the music and the online education, through Education On Fire.

Shane Sams: The last time you were here, which was, what was that podcast?

Jocelyn Sams: It's 189.

Shane Sams: All right, for those of you who want to catch that episode, it's at flippedlifestyle.com/podcast189 but we talked a lot about your podcast, Education On Fire. Now at that time it was more just a passion project, right? It was just something almost like a hobby that you were doing because you had something in your life going on that you really wanted to get involved in the education space, correct?

Mark Taylor: That's exactly it. I had three children going through different parts of the education world and as we know in the media, and the kind of thing, education's got a bit of a downer at the moment. There's lots of testing, lots of people taking their kids out of school and homeschooling. You're not quite sure how it fits in with the modern world and the passion project really came from the fact that because I was going into schools delivering music workshops, I was also seeing some fantastic teaching going on, some fantastic ideas and things being very creative.

Mark Taylor: What I wanted to do was just really to flip that slightly and the podcast came out of, I want to share inspiring, creative ideas that people were actually doing, so yeah, it was literally a passion project just to support my kids and to support other teachers and people involved in education to feel like, ah there's great stuff going on over there, maybe I can copy that, maybe I can replicate some of these things and actually make my school a different environment based on what I'm hearing from other places.

Shane Sams: Yeah. But like all passion projects, they take time. There eventually comes a point when you're like, okay, if I'm going to be putting so much time into this I'm going to need to monetize it. We need to figure out, well how can this not only support the passion, not only support the listeners and not only support the kids, but how can it support and my family a little bit better? That's the gist of the last episode. We talked about that, tell you a little bit about what's happened since episode 189 when you came on, what did you do differently after that episode and how have you grown the original podcast?

Mark Taylor: It was really your input and your suggestions. I wasn't sure what to do, where to head, even where to structure my thought really and you said, speak to your audience, see what it is that they need, see who they are, which is something I found really interesting because I thought well, of course, they're teachers, they're people working in schools. I did exactly that, I tried to get some information, ask some people who were listening that I knew and they said, "Well actually some of us are teachers but actually, some of us are parents and actually, I really enjoyed sharing some of this stuff with my adolescent children because actually they're struggling sometimes and actually were quite interested in the fact that you're talking slightly differently. You're talking about things that are outside the box or things which aren't restrictive. You're talking about being creative and inspiring.

Mark Taylor: I thought, well that's really interesting but what I do from there? I could create the odd bonus episode but my Education on Fire podcast, as it originally was, was themed seasons, so if I was talking about English or talking about PE, I wasn't quite sure how I was going to fit that in, bar the odd extra episode. Luckily, the platform that I was using, I was chatting to them about it and they said, "Well, you can have a separate feed and why don't you actually niche down even more and actually create more than one podcast?"

Mark Taylor: So out of that came Learning on Fire, where I basically share conversations with people who are successful partly, but really about living life on their terms. They're fulfilled in what it is that they're doing. Some of those interviews are multi millionaires and some of them are actually just people living their dream, doing everything in a very small way, but they've actually found a way of creating the life that they want. Just through a series of questions and a conversation, we get to hear a running theme often, about people following their passions, the sort of advice they've been given, exactly where their journeys went. Actually whether it was in a straight line, which of course we know is very rarely the case. It just veered off and so from that, this brand new podcast opened up and I essentially just found myself running a network of two podcasts.

Shane Sams: You accidentally started a podcast network.

Mark Taylor: Yeah.

Shane Sams: I don't think anyone's ever done that on the show, man. You just accidentally fell into that.

Mark Taylor: Exactly. Yeah, I just thought that running one podcast was so much work that the easiest thing to do was to start another one.

Shane Sams: Oh right, exactly, it's so simple.

Jocelyn Sams: Totally logical.

Shane Sams: Yeah, we've had to do that in past though. One thing we started doing, especially on our YouTube channel, flippedlifestyle.com/youtube, take you right there on the redirect. But we actually had to divide up our stuff a little bit because Flipped Lifestyle is very much helping people start podcasts start their content, start their business. Do the next level things, and we thought that the travel stuff would compliment it, but we found the people that were watching our travel videos were not always interested in the entrepreneurial space. So we actually re-categorized the place on our blog just for those, our YouTube videos, it's got its own playlist where we just put all the travel review videos. We really don't even talk about those much on the show because it's related enough and you think it's related enough but like you were saying, maybe I'll throw in an extra episode for two different segments and you realize nope, I'm just going to start this over here and go a different direction. Once you get your workflow, it's not that bad, right?

Mark Taylor: Yeah, absolutely. It's interesting because I think inside my mind I went from being just sort of a passion project and doing something on the side, to people suddenly taking a bit of notice and saying, well actually you've got a network so therefore you must have something to say. Of course, as soon as you start generating more podcasts and there's more show notes and more blog posts, all of a sudden your website looks quite authoritative.

Shane Sams: That's right.

Mark Taylor: All I was doing was the same stuff. All I love doing is chatting to people and sharing their stories. It grew and grew and grew and I was really lucky, at the same sort of time I was involved in a charity called the National Association for Primary Education and I loved being involved in that because not only are they trying to support teachers and parents and everyone involved in education really, from birth to 13, they also have, because they're a national organization, they do have conversations with ministers, they have a certain amount of influence, as much as anyone does on policy and where education was going. Then I thought this is great because I'm actually able to talk at that level, I'm also able then to talk to teachers and schools and now I've got this Learning on Fire podcast, which is for parents and their kids.

Mark Taylor: Then they were just wanting to grow their audience, their membership. They wanted to get their message out there and they said, "Well, you're already doing this kind of thing." I said, "Well, yeah I am really. Why don't we just combine the whole thing?" Two was fine, but why not have a podcast network of three? I said, "Let me produce a podcast for you and then we've got all these things then running through this network." Then they said, "Well that's great." I said, "It is quite a big time commitment and it's really going to need some professionalism really, just to make sure we can keep the regularity and equality going." They said, "Great, well how about we sponsor the whole network and then we can get our message out through the stuff you're already doing and then you've also got our individual message by the podcast you're producing specifically for us." Education on Fire effectively then became a three podcast network all in the space of a few months really and then it's almost like a full time job, but also it's part of my professional playing and my teaching as well.

Shane Sams: That's incredible, and it's also because really this all came from just a discussion, a simple question like I'm doing something, I'm creating something, how can I make this something that becomes professional and makes money? Well, you grow your audience, you get multiple channels, multiple segments, a big organization takes notice and they're willing to give you money to be the advertiser on the show. Now you get to make cash from doing this podcast, which is incredible. Tell us a little bit more, you came to Flip Your Life Live last year. You won the award for the longest travel person. No, it wasn't.

Jocelyn Sams: No, the Australians.

Shane Sams: It was really close, there were some Australians. We had some Australians, you were from England, so you were the European representative of Flip Your Life Live last year. But you had some things that were going on before that, how did that play into getting the sponsorship and professionalizing this network to where you are making money. You're talking about living the dream, you're getting paid to podcast, that's pretty incredible.

Jocelyn Sams: To talk about something that you love talking about which is really cool.

Shane Sams: That's right, exactly, so how did that play into everything?

Mark Taylor: Well, I think part of it is like you said. It was a passion project that moved in, and what's really exciting is I was kind of doing what I was talking about, which is that you don't know where these things are going to head. Follow your dream, follow your passion and see what happens. I was getting to meet so many amazing people. What Flip Your Life Live really did for me was the fact that it just made me think about how you can combine the two. It's not like if it's a passion project, that's okay but don't really talk about it. Or your professional life is like this and you don't really talk about it. It was the fact that there were so many similarities in everything that was going on. In terms of if I want to grow my audience I want to do this, if I'm thinking about email marketing, if I'm thinking about social media, I'm thinking about how to build a community.

Mark Taylor: All these things were going on within Flip Your Life and then through the live events and all the prerequisites that you were doing it was like, ah I suddenly start to see how it's about relationships, how it's about bringing people together, how it's about just getting that message out there and actually how you do that. It was those skills that I was learning that I was then able to speak to the National Association and say, "Look, I understand what it is that you're trying to do and I think we can do this, this, this and this. I think actually that's going to make a difference to what you're doing." There's no guarantees, we don't actually know, but I was able to articulate it in such a way by talking in the way that we've been doing and how we've been chatting within the community and certainly on those Zoom calls and just be able to think, oh actually I really understand it. I can actually see it and because I now understand it, I can get that message across.

Mark Taylor: They jumped onboard and said, "That sounds great. We've got no idea how to do that but you're already doing it. Let's go for it." It really is just that sense of the skills that you need to actually created a thriving business, whatever that happens to be, whether it's online or not actually are often the same in many ways.

Shane Sams: Oh yeah, for sure. What Mark's talking about here is our live event works really, really differently than other conferences. We actually have weekly now, well we did monthly trainings I think the first year that we did Flip Your Life Live and now we're doing weekly prerequisite trainings where I am personally guiding people with accountability, through the Flip Your Life blueprint. We get deep into marketing, how to talk to your potential client. Your potential client was this charity. They wanted to sponsor your podcast. Selling an ad is no different than selling a shirt or selling a digital course. How you market that, how you present that, building community around it.

Shane Sams: In the modern world, if you're not building a community around what you do you're not going to have a sustainable business. Why do you think 50 million people watched Game of Thrones last week? Because they've built this community around this show, around their network and that's what you're doing there. I'm just glad that all this has blown up man, because like you are one of the nicest people we have ever met. You're just a great guy and a lot of people say they have a passion but I've always felt like you really are truly in depth passionate about this topic. Even, you were an overnight success because you got this sponsorship and it started paying substantial money each month to be able to sponsor a show but you built these two podcasts and you got deep with your audience and you communicated with them even before it was monetized. How long did you do the podcast before you made this sponsor agreement with the network?

Mark Taylor: It must have been, I think I launched originally in December 2016. 2016, yeah that's right. Then the sponsorship came through just as we were going to Nashville, so that was August September 2018, so a good 18 months or so.

Shane Sams: You're an 18-month overnight success.

Jocelyn Sams: How does that make you feel, Mark?

Shane Sams: How does that make you feel? Everyone else is looking in and being like, "Wow, you met the right guy at a party and got a sponsorship in one day for podcasting." You're like, "No, that is not what happened. That is not true."

Mark Taylor: Yeah, I think maybe I'm getting better though because it was like a 10 year success to become a professional musician, so maybe I'm getting the hang of it a bit better.

Shane Sams: Hey, once you do it once you can do the next thing faster. That's what we always say, right?

Mark Taylor: Yeah, for sure.

Shane Sams: When people come into the community, sometimes they'll say, "Boy this is a lot of work and I just don't know if I'm going to ... what if I put in all this work and I don't make it?" We're like, "At least you learned all the skills."

Jocelyn Sams: What if you do?

Shane Sams: Yeah, what if you do make it? But at least you learned all the skills so your next pass is a month instead of year, when you try to build something new.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay Mark, it's been really exciting watching your journey so far and we are just really proud of you and I can't wait to see what is next. With that in mind, let's start talking a little bit about how we can help you to grow to the next level you would like to get to.

Mark Taylor: Yeah, so having been to the live event and I really had a really good think about what it was that I wanted to do, what I wanted to focus on and of course, keeping that passion going as well. Being a musician, I decided that I was going to create something music related. The one thing I'm always really grateful for is the fact there was so much music going on at my school that without that, I just wouldn't have even had the opportunity.

Mark Taylor: I wanted to do something to support teachers and certainly here in the UK there's a lot of places where they have to teach music but they're not particularly trained and primary teachers here have to do of course, the whole curriculum, and it's really quite scary and fearful to suddenly have 30 kids with instruments and know what to do with it. I decided I'd combine the passion that my expertise and I've created Primary Music on Fire which is really that initial hand holding teachers into the first things that they can do when they want to do music and giving them some resources and a community where they can come together and just take the fear out of exactly what those initial stages are. That launched in February this year and we've had a few members coming. We have one member join before it even launched. I managed to do all the marketing in the way that we talked about in Nashville and amazingly it worked even before the launch day.

Shane Sams: It's amazing what happens when you take action on what we say on stage. I tell everybody that, because we had people making sales in the room at that day, during sessions people were like, "I just made a sale because I did that last slide." It's like, when you do it, it's crazy what can happen.

Mark Taylor: Yeah, it really is. It was just amazing, it was that kind of, ah. That intermediate result, which like you say, is sometimes the overnight success takes many months or years. Even though it had taken me a few months to put the whole thing together and to kind of work it out and get all the tech in place, I felt like it was a natural progression because it's still under the Education on Fire brand and I was able to tag everything within the website.

Mark Taylor: I just thought it was a way of me, I've been talking about creative and inspiring things and following your passion and I thought well, this is a way for me to say, "Hi I'm a musician and I'm a music educator. This is me doing my passion stuff where I can actually give you direct access to me and also a community and the skills that you'd need just to do that." It can be just as simple as you're really scared about doing music tomorrow, come in, sit the kids in a circle, here's a whole load of rhythm games you can do, which over the 20 years or so I've been doing it I know they love and they get so much stuff. I can talk about how you put that into the curriculum, various things.

Mark Taylor: It's really exciting. We've had a few members in there, we've done a beta launch and just make sure everything works, which it is. Now I'm literally thinking right, how do I move this forward, how do I get more people in, how do we get people excited about it and start to grow it?

Jocelyn Sams: Okay, so in terms of monetization, what is going on right now? You have the membership, right?

Mark Taylor: Yeah.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay, and you've officially launched that to your podcast and to your email list?

Shane Sams: Who did you launch this to? Just people who raised their hand that they were interested?

Mark Taylor: Yeah, initially it was the people that I'd had on my email list to say look, this is coming up and people that had been listening to the podcast. Then I did a short podcast season just basically counting down to the fact it was going to be live and people who wanted to be involved. That's where I got my first few people in from, and so now I'm comfortable that I kind of know how it works, the sort of things that are going to happen, I'm ready to open it out even more.

Mark Taylor: I did start to do a few Facebook ads, which work really well, grew the email list a little bit, so that seemed to be working well and now I can just sit back and see if I can tweak a few things with that and just decide where to go from then. Because one of the interesting things was the fact that when started to talk about this with people they were saying, "Oh that would work great actually in my school." Then I had some other people through the podcast saying, "I'm a homeschooler and actually I'd really like to learn the ukulele because I could actually do this and learn it with my kids. The other thing I can do is I can then learn a little bit of the basic music stuff, so I don't need to get an expert into my house to teach it one on one, I can actually do it online."

Shane Sams: Yes.

Mark Taylor: I thought that was great because they came to me to talk about that and it's suddenly taken me in a whole different direction, so I'm thinking maybe doing a five day challenge to learn the ukulele. I've got someone who does this locally and we've got a few videos that we're working on and just get that going. Then we can incorporate that into the membership as well.

Shane Sams: How much are you charging a month for the membership right now?

Mark Taylor: Well, this is a big thing, is that at the moment all we're charging is 4.99 a month.

Shane Sams: Is that pounds or USD? What are we talking about here?

Mark Taylor: It's pounds, but it doesn't make that much difference.

Shane Sams: That's right.

Mark Taylor: The reason behind that was because there are organizations and there are things out there which charge, even the most full kind of membership or place where you can get content for music over here are around 250, maybe 300 year. It's not a massive market and school budgets are what they are. What we found when people were asking us about it, it was often the teachers saying, "Look, we don't know we what to do but we want to do something." They were going to put their hands in their pocket to do it. It was really testing the water to see whether actually for the price of a cup of coffee, you could get somebody in to see it and then start to grow it from there. I wanted to start it small enough that we could just test it and get people to go. I fully expect it to go up but I don't know how much that will be for.

Shane Sams: For sure. You can do a series of raises, like you can go $9, $14.

Jocelyn Sams: Pounds.

Shane Sams: See how far you can push it before sales stop and then you just dial back one, you know what I mean? We're homeschoolers and we usually look for resources that are in that $10 a month range because we signed up for, what's it called, Reflex?

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah.

Shane Sams: Reflex Math. It's like math games. There's another one coming out next month called like Adventure Academy, we're looking at to give kids that supplemental thing. As a homeschooler, that stuff adds up. If you're doing a Math one and a Science one and a Music one and an English one, all of a sudden you're paying 50 bucks a month on a $5 a month thing. I think it is smart to keep it low because the market's infinite. It's the schools, it's the teachers, it's the homeschool market. You've got a ton of people, you're only going to need ... if you get 1000 people in the world to do this thing then that's still four or 5000 extra dollars a month of top of what you're already doing, basically.

Mark Taylor: Yeah.

Jocelyn Sams: I feel like with your experience with the sponsorships, you might even be able to get people to come in and do sponsorships on the site. A lot of times, people who do lower-cost recurring revenue models, they will supplement with other people advertising on their platform. Maybe it's companies who sell to educators who might be interested in doing that, if that's something that you might be interested in bringing in to supplement that.

Shane Sams: Or even like instrument companies or you partner with somebody and if you can grow this thing to 100 people and you tell the ukulele company, "Hey, why don't you be the official ukulele of Primary Music on Fire? I'm in all these schools, I've got all these teachers." Then all of a sudden they're like, "Yeah, I will do that for another couple of hundred dollars a month." Basically, at the beginning of your lesson like, "I got my ACME ukulele here." Whatever, you just give a little pitch. It's almost like a product placement. It's unlimited how much you can do with it once you get inside.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, you don't want it to be a total pitch fest the whole time. I hate it when I pay for something and there's still super intrusive ads. I don't like that but I feel like if you can say to people, "Okay, I play this particular instrument, I really like it. I do get an affiliate commission from this if you purchase it but it costs you no extra and it helps to support the site." I'm okay with that.

Shane Sams: Tying that back into your sponsorships, let me ask you this. Currently you have a sponsorship with this one company for your podcast, is that exclusive? Is that completely exclusive?

Mark Taylor: It's exclusive for the first year. Amazingly, they wanted to do this for the long haul, which I'm really pleased about because the organization needed a bit of support from a tech point of view, so I helped them do that as well. I said it's going to need time to grow, so they're an exclusive sponsor for this first year, which will finish in the summer but then as they start to bring their sponsorship level back a little bit, the agreement is that I can then open it up to new sponsors as well, so yeah it does certainly infinitely give me more and more opportunities.

Mark Taylor: One of the great things I like about the idea of the instrument sponsorship idea is that I'd thought not so much about that, the affiliate thing a little bit more, because it's actually such a low entry level I thought actually that kind of being able to promote resources that I use all the time in schools would be a good way of doing that, and actually having a bit of an affiliate income coming through that. But actually having a specific sponsor for the various things that we're doing is a brilliant idea.

Shane Sams: Yeah, if the drum lesson was 100 bucks a month and then you had the ukulele was 100 bucks a month and then something else was ... all that adds up over time. Let me ask you this, you said you promoted this Primary Music on Fire though within the network, correct? Even though they're the exclusive title sponsor that's paying you this four figure a month income, you still promoted Primary on Fire on your podcast, correct?

Mark Taylor: Yeah, that's right. The National Association for Primary Education, they're the official sponsor, they're the ones that are the guiding light at the moment for this year, but I was still able to bring Primary Music on Fire there as my own kind of sponsor, as it were, just to show that that was the case. I've got a few intros, a few outro sponsorships that I can do for their own it and it's quite prominent on my site as well. I think of that feeds itself because I've got people coming into one part of the podcast listening about English and then they're thinking, oh, there's a bit of music there. I think that sort of cross-promotion seems to work quite well.

Shane Sams: See, one I would talk to your sponsor about this too, but they seem to be okay with you promoting your own stuff, right?

Mark Taylor: Yeah.

Shane Sams: Not as an external sponsor. I would really start thinking if you want to really grow Primary Music on Fire, and at the same time prepare for the big revenue increase, which is when your exclusivity ends and you can go out and basically find three more title sponsors at that price and then work out where you put your spots in the show to be able to advertise all these things. Once that ends, which is this summer, in a few months, you're literally going to be able to go out and find two or three more sponsors and boom. Your income is going to triple, just like that.

Shane Sams: But the real growth is if you can put 5000 people in your membership, that's huge. You could go ahead and start working within that framework, which you're already in right now and really formalizing where ad spots go, not just the title sponsor, where do you read them at? Do you talk about them at the beginning, or what do you do?

Mark Taylor: Yeah, it's really at the beginning. A little tag at the end and then they're on the show notes.

Shane Sams: Okay, perfect, so what do you need to do is leave them at the beginning right now because they're the exclusive sponsor. I would dedicate a whole middle spot to Primary Education on Fire every week and maybe give out a free lesson to get the opt in. Then I would probably formalize the ending into less of a throwaway, oh and don't forget our title sponsor. That's a third commercial spot, basically and you really treat it like an official place because what's going to happen is basically you're going to bid out the next sponsor and if they pay more, they become the front sponsor. Your thing goes in the middle and whoever's left goes on the end, or wherever you want to put them.

Shane Sams: You could even rotate them through the different shows, every sponsor doesn't get every single episode. It's more like, okay, this package we're doing one a week for three shows, so this package includes 10 spots. You may have a total, if you do three, four, 12, you may have a total of 12 spots and they can buy a package of six or 10 or whatever. That's where the real money is going to come from, but you can go ahead and start practicing this now and put two spots in for Primary Music on Fire every single episode. I bet you can go ahead and start pouring more of these next level beta members in to really push the ramp up. You could even go ahead and raise your price and try now and just use that as a commercial, treat it like a sponsor is paying you to do that spot. Don't just mention it like, "Hey, I'm launching this other thing." That's how you instantly start getting more people because this is just an awareness thing. You've go three podcasts that people are actually listening to, so every podcast they just need to know about the ways that they can pay you and you're going to be off to the races with that. What do you think?

Mark Taylor: I think that's great, and interestingly, it feels exactly the same as when I finished the podcast we did before. It's that kind of, oh yeah, it's taking me to a new professional level in the way you're thinking about that and actually placing it and feeling like every bit has its own place in how you utilize that. Interestingly, one thing which I thought was a negative a little while ago, as I started to have marketing people contact me and say, "I've got so and so who wants to come on your show." I was like, well I'm not quite sure if they're an exact fit. But having got some on, they've been brilliant guests and they've really bought into the whole ethos of what I was doing. A lot of those people are working with companies who have got things that they want to promote, so it feels like there's going to be a natural progression and a way of working with these people, going forward, and I think the sponsorship idea, like you say, once it starts to really feel like it's something they can get into, will be fantastic.

Shane Sams: They key is right now, imagine Primary on Fire is led by the CEO Mark Taylor and another Mark Taylor is running the podcast network. You literally have made a deal with Primary Music on Fire, just like you did with this charity, to be a title sponsor. Now how would you treat that ad spot now? You wouldn't treat it as, oh Mark I've got this new thing. I'd like for you to try it, if you're interested, you can if you want to, go email, whatever. It's now like, "And remember, today's episode is also brought to you by Primary Music on Fire, another part of the network." Another thing that you do, do you advertise your other shows on each show? Do you do that?

Mark Taylor: Not on each show. I've got better at cross promoting it in a more natural way throughout the conversations, so that's been a bit better and then I've occasionally done the odd specific show just to say, of course I'm doing this, this and this. But actually not as an official short pitch on each episode.

Shane Sams: I would formalize that process because that's the power of a podcast network, that's where the leverage actually comes from. Every podcast in the network promotes every other podcast in the network, which grows every other podcast in the network, and that way you have more leverage when you're negotiating these advertising fees. Then try to figure out a way to get three to four spots in, maybe one of the spots is to promote one of your other shows, "Don't forget we also do Education on Fire if you're an educator or you know an educator, go do this. Advertise your own thing and then you can have two title sponsors, your prices will probably go up as the audience goes up. All of a sudden you're looking down and you may have a five figure podcast instead of a four figure podcast, just like that.

Mark Taylor: Yeah, I think that's great and it's perfect timing I think because like I said, I've got probably another three or four months at the most before the exclusivity finishes and if I start thinking about putting those foundations in place now I can really hone that ready to open the doors later on in the summer.

Shane Sams: You should start finding advertisers right now, even though you can't advertise them yet. You don't want to wait until you can lose the exclusivity, you want to have it ready to go out the gate, you know what I'm saying?

Mark Taylor: Sounds fantastic.

Shane Sams: All the negotiation's done, the contracts are signed, you have a start date, it's all good to go.

Mark Taylor: Brilliant.

Shane Sams: How else have you decided to monetize the podcast?

Mark Taylor: Those are the main ways of the moment. I did wonder, because I've had so much positive feedback from parents through the Learning on Fire podcast, because they're just wanting to support their teenagers, they know the sorts of angst that they go through, they know how difficult it is to impart what we deem to be really great information. I always think of it as if it's really a half an hour conversation where you're trying to give all the great advice and things that you've learnt, to your children in one go. It's that sort of fireside sit down chat, but we know in reality, certainly with two teenagers in our house, it's very difficult to have those conversations sometimes.

Mark Taylor: I was chatting to someone the other day and they were like, "Yeah, it's almost like what we want to be doing is we want to be sitting in the car listening to the podcast." A few things get brought up and then the conversations just start to come. "Oh, I hadn't thought of that. Oh yeah, I've read that book or I listened to that podcast. This or that advice that was given to me by a mentor that I was doing. That's brilliant, how does that work?" Then they were just saying it's much more natural feel. I wonder whether creating something like Patreon or including something like that might be a way of being able to give my audience a chance to buy into what I'm doing, because I really feel like they're really feeling like it's something that they want to be able to support their children with.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, I like the idea of trying it. It really can't hurt anything to try it and see what happens.

Shane Sams: This does seem like a place where it would work.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, I agree. I think that it could definitely work. I would definitely try it. I love the idea of having multiple revenue streams, I think that they will feed off of each other, like you were saying. I can't wait to see what happens, I think that you're onto something really cool.

Shane Sams: The thing about Patreon really in this case because you don't have to do much to make it work, you could even just have a simple, you get to listen to all the podcasts a day early if you support me on Patreon.

Jocelyn Sams: There's one podcast, I'm obsessed with True Crime podcast, so there's one podcast in particular that I support on Patreon and pretty much the only thing that they do is they release it one day early for people who support them on Patreon and it's also ad free. That's a very simple thing that you can do.

Shane Sams: Ooh, yeah.

Jocelyn Sams: But for me it's worth it because they come out every Monday and by the time Monday rolls around I am freaking out because I want the podcast to come out so bad, so for me it's worth it because I get it that one extra day early.

Shane Sams: You can even do something like, especially I feel like you're feeling this is more the parent angle, that's what it sounds like when you're talking about this. Would the parents be more likely to support you on Patreon than say, buy the thing.

Mark Taylor: Yeah.

Shane Sams: You could do, "Hey, you love listening with your kid on the thing, well guess what? There's an ad free version on Patreon. You get to listen to the ad free version a day early and then maybe you just record one bonus episode a month that's really geared towards that thing that they like that you get to say in front of your kids, you know what I'm saying? Maybe there is that bonus episode. You could even call it the Kids in the Car episode. You've specifically made this thing for them to listen to with their kids in the car. Like a sneak attack on their kid for wisdom. But that's all you've got to do, it's not any extra work at all, you just have someone edit the commercials in one episode, out the other and you just post it in different places and people are more than willing to pay for that stuff, absolutely.

Mark Taylor: Yeah, it's like the Stealth Learning Podcast.

Shane Sams: It is, and again, that's another fake ad. It's not a fake ad but it's another ad spot that you could even go ahead and implement right now, like your next podcast could have Primary Music on Fire in the middle, don't forget to support us on Patreon at the end and then you're already ready to show advertisers, hey I've got multiple ad slots here for you.

Mark Taylor: Yeah, brilliant.

Jocelyn Sams: All right, Mark, it has been a really fun conversation with you today and we're really, really excited to see where this thing goes to next. But before we go we always ask our guest what is one thing that you plan to take action on in the next day or so, based on what we talked about here today?

Mark Taylor: I think the thing I'm going to do straight away is actually segment down the ideas of how I can make the advertising work, how I can put the pitches in place, using what I already have and then I think, think of that as that next professional level, in terms of how I can then grow that going forward. I think that's going to be great advice and something that's going to work really well.

Shane Sams: There's a strategy out there called the Dream 100 strategy. If you just sat down one day and were thinking about it, who are the 100 perfect sponsors? You may not get to 100, you may only think of 20 but think of the 100 perfect sponsors for your audience and your topic, write all those people down and then start reaching out to them and see if you land four of those 100 perfect sponsors that you've identified as perfect for your brand, that way you can pitch them exactly like they need to be pitched to realize they're perfect for your brand. If you land three or four of them you've basically four extra business overnight and all you've got to do is put in a little bit of legwork to reach out to them. You're good to go.

Shane Sams: Now if you've got the platform ready when you reach out to them you can say, "Hey, I've got a spot at the 10 minute mark that I'm using right now but I would love to plug you in there. It's 1000 bucks a month, it's 2000 bucks a month. It's whatever it is a month, then you're ready to roll and you're going to be able to knock those sponsors out really quick too. That might even be something you can do next level, once you figure that out, who are the 100 perfect sponsors for this podcast? I'm going to reach out to every single one of them.

Mark Taylor: Yeah, absolutely love it. I think that's a great idea.

Shane Sams: All right man, well listen, thank you so much for coming back on the show, Mark, man, it was good to catch up with you, haven't talked in a little while, haven't seen you since Flip you Life Live so it was great to hear your voice again and man, thanks for sharing your success and sharing your transparency and sharing the fact that it takes a long time to become an overnight success. Man, just keep going because I think you've stumbled into something that has unlimited potential if you just keep pushing it.

Mark Taylor: Thank you so much. I really appreciate it and thanks again to the community for everything they do and supporting inside there. My lasting memory of Nashville, I think the first time I saw you I was on my way back to my room, we were just walking along the corridor and you're like, "Hey, Mark," and gave me a big hug. I was like, ah I'm in a community that I love here. This is fantastic.

Shane Sams: I'm a hugger, Mark. I'm a hugger man.

Jocelyn Sams: We're very happy to have you as a part of it.

Mark Taylor: That's very kind of you, thanks so much.

Shane Sams: All right guys, what another great discussion with Flip Your Life community member, Mark Taylor. Man, he is doing great things. He's taking massive action and he's building a business that he loves. We want you to do the same thing and the best way that you can take your online dreams to the next level is to join me and Jocelyn at Flip Your Life Live in Lexington, Kentucky this September. Maybe you will run into me in the hallway and I can give you a hug too. We would love to see you there. It's an amazing event. We are right now starting our weekly prerequisite trainings. We train our members on how to get the most out of this live event. Nobody else, no other business conference does this. You're going to get weekly training, weekly accountability with us so that we can help you be prepared to take advantage of Flip Your Life Live and then take your life and business to the next level after the event.

Shane Sams: You can learn more about Flip Your Life Live 2019 at flippedlifestyle.com/live. That is F-L-I-P-P-E-D-L-I-F-E style, S-T-Y-L-E.com/live. Go to flippedlifestyle.com/live to see if there are any tickets left. We are almost sold out of the event so you want to make sure you go there today, you secure your spot and we will see you in Lexington, Kentucky this September. All right, guys that is all the time we have for this week. Thanks for listening. Until next time, get out there and take action. Do whatever it takes to flip your life. We'll see you then.

Jocelyn Sams: Bye.

Links and resources mentioned on today’s show: * Mark's Website * Flip Your Life LIVE 2019 Tickets & Registration Information * Flip Your Life community

Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!

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In today's episode, we're going to show you how to work from home as a virtual travel agent.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jocelyn Sams: Hey y'all on today's podcast we're going to show you how to work from home as a virtual travel agent.

Shane Sams: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast where life always comes before work. We're your hosts Shane and Jocelyn Sams. We're a real family that figured out how to make our entire living online. Now we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? All right. Let's get started.

Shane Sams: What's going on everybody welcome back to The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast it is great to be with you again today. Super excited for today's show. This is a continuation of our work from home job series. We're branching out a little bit and showing you, the listener other ways you can make a living besides starting a website or selling virtual courses or anything like that. There's so many ways to live that flipped lifestyle in today's economy. The internet makes so many jobs possible to work from home and do things at home that you can really make a living doing almost anything you want. Anything that you can dream of. We have a an amazing example of a work from home job today.

Jocelyn Sams: I'm really, really excited about today's episode because this person came into my world randomly I guess you would say. A couple of years ago Shane and I were thinking about going to an all inclusive resort, I really didn't know much about it. I had heard about using travel agents before but we've never really used one. Well I'll take that back, we used one for Disney but I really wanted someone who was an expert on all inclusives and knew all about what we wanted to find in our all inclusive resort.

Jocelyn Sams: I did as some people may do actually probably just nerdy people like me. I got on Facebook and I used the search feature and I typed in all inclusive travel expert. I got a lot of different people and I started looking at their pages but one stood out to me in particular. What I do is, I go on and I message people and if they get back to me in a timely manner then there's a possibility that I will work with them and there's a pretty good possibility. Well Marci got back to me right away. We have been working together ever since. This has been a couple of years ago.

Shane Sams: Today's guest is a literal work from home travel agent and is actually our personal travel agent, Marci Jennings. Marci welcome to The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast.

Marci Jennings: Thank you so much for having me.

Jocelyn Sams: We are very excited to talk to you today for a lot of different reasons. I think that our listeners are going to be really intrigued by what you do and just the types of experiences that you get to have as a part of your job. Which are really, really cool. We'll get into that just a little bit but before we do tell us a little bit about you and your background and how you got started doing this.

Marci Jennings: Awesome, yes I have a bit of an interesting story I guess but I think that's, this is how most business owners are often. First of all I'm a mom. I have two kiddos, they are 13 and nine so I love having great vacation experiences, and that has evolved over the course of time. But I actually started my career in physical therapy. I came from the medical field and loved what I did but didn't love all the paper work and all of the bureaucracy that's involved in healthcare today. Over the course of time I realized that maybe I, was maybe looking for something more flexible and just something a little bit different.

Jocelyn Sams: I want to know a little bit about this transition because I know that you're from a little bit larger area than we are. You're from the Kansas city area, right?

Marci Jennings: Yes.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, in our area we were teachers before we left our jobs to do this. I know that a lot of people looked at us like we were crazy. How was it when you told people like, oh yeah, I'm a physical therapist but yeah I'm gonna stop that and be a virtual travel agent. How did that conversation go?

Shane Sams: Or did you, did you quit before you found this or did you just start looking?

Marci Jennings: That's great questions so yes absolutely people thought I was crazy for a while. Probably some people still think I'm crazy now but yes. I did work it alongside of it when I got started. How this happened was I loved to travel. I didn't grow up traveling very much. My, I grew up in the middle of Kansas on a farm. Our typical vacation was to go to Kansas city each year. We weren't big vacationers growing up but I discovered more about traveling and became obsessed with beach vacations in my adult life so each year I would travel to a different island for a week.

Marci Jennings: I just loved the process of researching different destinations, finding the best deals and finding the cool things to do on these different islands. That was my goal each year was to travel somewhere different for a week. In the process of doing this for a few years, my friends and family just started organically coming to me and asking me questions about where I had been, which one was the best place, how do I find these great deals and all these and I just loved it. During this time, I didn't actually think that travel agents still existed.

Marci Jennings: I had used one back in 2000 but I kinda say that was before the internet I know it wasn't but I felt that way. In today's world I felt like there was no, it wasn't necessary to have a travel agent. They probably didn't even exist anymore but I was pretending to be a travel agent for my friends and family just because they wanted to know my expertise that I had. I loved helping people. I would tell them about the different deals that I found and all of that and that was the extent of it as I was working in my physical therapy career. Then I met someone that when I asked her about what she did she told me that she was a Disney travel agent. At the time I happened to be planning a trip for my kids to Disney.

Marci Jennings: I owned a timeshare at that time so we were planning on staying in our timeshare condo. All we needed was just the tickets for Disney. I told her that she said, "Oh, well, I would be happy to help you out. If you would like to get your tickets from me it's the same price as Disney but I will also give you lots of tips about the best way to do Disney, the best places to eat and just tips to make your trip more efficient. When she said that to me I'm sure the expression on my face was just so confused because I, I said to her.

Marci Jennings: I said, "How does that work? It's the same price but how do you get paid?" She explained to me that in the travel industry they've done a lot of research and they've realized that people that use a travel agent are more inclined to have a more seamless vacation experience and as a result travel more often. The travel companies like Disney, cruise lines, resorts, they all appreciate that fact and they as a result build travel agent commission into their regular prices. It doesn't cost anything extra, it's built into the regular price.

Shane Sams: Wow.

Marci Jennings: If you book Best trip online and you have those things online and you don't use a travel agent that is built into the price anyway. The website is just going to keep that commission instead of it being paid out to an individual agent. Instead if you run that same trip through that travel agent then the travel agent benefits from that commission that the resort or Disney or whatever has built in the price already so-

Jocelyn Sams: Yes, I think they are a lot of people out there who do not understand that. I know that I didn't understand it. When we, that's the same story that I have. We were planning a trip to Disney I was completely lost I had never been to Disney in my entire life.

Shane Sams: Like stressed out, hair frizzy. Jocelyn, I thought Jocelyn was gonna have a nervous meltdown when we were planning this first trip to Disney World.

Jocelyn Sams: I'm asking online. I'm like, I need help I don't know what to do then one of Shane's friends from high school had reached out to me. She's like, hey I'm a Disney agent and I know everything about Disney, I've been a million times I'm a pass holder-

Shane Sams: And it doesn't cost you anything more.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah so I was shocked about this. I said the same thing, how is this possible? She told me the exact same thing. Once we started looking for Caribbean vacations, I was like, okay I'm going to find a travel agent because I love doing all the research for trips and I love going on and comparing all the prices, the same things that you were talking about but my problem is I have two kids who are involved in activities. I work full-time job and I have a lot of things going on.

Shane Sams: And you don't know what you don't know. One of the things, our travel agent that we used for Disney she had literally been like a hundred times. Every time they launch a new ride she goes down there to ride it and make sure she knows what's going on. We got this little book and it had an agenda. We just went to all the rides that we wanted to ride. It was the most flawless, seamless, perfect trip ever. It was crazy because when we started looking at this beach places, we had never been to any of these resorts or anything and Jocelyn's like I bet someone goes to all these places and is a travel agent just like our Disney person. She started looking and she found you. We had the same experience, you planned it, you helped us set everything up we just showed up and laid out on the beach right?

Jocelyn Sams: What I love about using the travel agent is that I can tell you what I want. I love Marci because she really makes sure that she understands what I want. Instead of just saying I want a nice beach. Well, she will ask me what does that mean to you? Does that mean you want nice sand, calm water? A nice beach means different things to different people. I love that because Marci you will ask me, okay what exactly do you want? You know exactly what to find, you've done-

Shane Sams: You've been there.

Jocelyn Sams: You've done probably how many trips for us? I mean a lot now probably-

Shane Sams: A lot.

Jocelyn Sams: At least five or six. Every time it's been exactly what I asked for.

Shane Sams: What's, let me ask you a couple of follow up questions here. What's interesting to me is the reason that the cruise lines and Disney and places like that, really, our first intuition is they don't want to use a travel agent because then they got to pay the commission but they've already got it worked into the price and they know you create repeat customers. In essence a travel agent, the big service that they're providing is not just planning for the person but it's creating recurring revenue for these attractions, correct?

Marci Jennings: Absolutely, yes.

Shane Sams: Yeah. They get to go back and over and over and over again. You're kind of, your job really not only creates magical memories for people but it also supports the travel industry, correct?

Marci Jennings: That's exactly right, exactly.

Shane Sams: Let me ask you this, do you only get paid commission or do they also, or do travel virtual agents get paid with perks or do they give you guys certain fees for certain things? How do you actually get paid? Is it just when you book a trip?

Marci Jennings: Yes, that's a great question. We do get paid in a few different ways. Primarily it is commission and I think one of the most challenging things about getting into this industry is that you, as a general rule, you don't typically get paid until your clients travel. People are booking trips sometimes on short notice but oftentimes really far in advance, sometimes six to 12 months in advance. You do all the work first and then you don't get paid for quite a while on that.

Marci Jennings: That's a challenge in this industry because not everyone could just jump in and wait that long to get paid. Commission is the primary way that we get paid. We also do get perks as well. That varies based upon what you're booking, whether it be Disney or cruise lines or all inclusive resorts. It's quite variable but they are definitely incentives out there as well because they definitely want travel agents to have experiences so that we can turn around and then sell that to our clients as well.

Shane Sams: Once you get started it's kind of like the assembly line. If you start building a car on the first part of the assembly line they put the frame, then the tires, then the door. You don't have a car when the thing starts but once the first car rolls off the line they just keep rolling off the line. If you started doing travel planning now in let's say January, whatever month we're in. It's April I think we are right now. Let's say you start in January and maybe you don't get paid for that first one for three months.

Shane Sams: But you've been selling other things by then so basically it will start rolling in where, oh yeah I booked this six months ago but I got paid today and I booked another one today I'll get paid for that one, six months. You can create like a stable, almost predictable, it's actually neat to be able to do it that way. Because if you book one in January for June, I'm going to get paid in June then you book one in February for July then you book one in March for, you can predict like oh starting here as long as I keep booking trips I'm going to keep getting paid every single month, correct?

Marci Jennings: Correct, yes, yes. Sometimes I've had it people book it as short notice as less than 24 hours when they're departing and sometimes I'm booking things out three years in advance just depending on what it is and what the clients are looking for. There are, definitely another piece of it that's challenging from that side of things is they're peaks and valleys to this business.

Marci Jennings: Even, once you've been an agent for a few years they're still peaks and valleys because we, depending on what you focus on, like for me I focus a lot on couples trips and family vacations but I'm definitely in leisure travel not in corporate travel. I'll have peaks, like spring break month will be huge for me and then summer months are huge but then there's definitely the drop off of other months where it's a lot less so you really have to be able to manage those peaks and valleys as well.

Shane Sams: Every business has a cycle, right? When we were selling lesson plans as our primary income stream we were doing, we would do great in July, August, September, October, November then whoop Christmas break came and nobody was teaching. The spring was a little less and summer was really bad because there's no teachers teaching in June, right? We would have to do the same thing. We might make a lot of money one month but we had to divide that up over the next three months to pay the bills, right?

Marci Jennings: Absolutely.

Shane Sams: That's just a part, that business cycle. If you're going to work from home and you're going to be self-employed you've gotta learn to ride the roller coaster. You know what I mean? Sometimes there's business and sometimes there's not but what's interesting is you have total control of how hard you want to work and if you want to go out and really blow it up and work and make a lot of money during those peak times it's gonna easily cover you for the down times.

Marci Jennings: Exactly.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay, let's go back a little bit because we jumped ahead a little bit. All right, you worked with a Disney travel agent and you were like, okay this is pretty cool. What happened next? You're still working in the physical therapy practice, right?

Marci Jennings: That's right, yeah. Exactly yes, yes. Basically the conversation ended after I took this Disney trip and she assisted me. I said to her, I said, "I think this is fantastic what you do and I feel that I already do this for my friends and family but I love beach travel." Her company at the time was doing exclusively Disney destinations. I said to her I said, "If your company ever decided to expand out I would love to know about the opportunity because it might be something that I may be really interested in." I went on my merry way, back to my physical therapy job. About a year later, it was somebody that was, a friend that I would see intermittently. I ran into her again a little over a year later and she said guess what? Our company just decided to expand to all destinations, here's the contact information for the owner if you would like to contact her and see if it might be a good fit for you.

Marci Jennings: That's what I did. When I met with the owner, I laugh about it now because I feel like she must have looked at me and thought I was crazy. Because at the time she's sitting there with probably about, I would say maybe 25 agents at the time. They all worked from home. They all had a major passion for Disney travel and that's all they knew. They didn't do anything else even though they were saying they wanted to expand out to that. I was the first person to come into the company and saying that I wanted to do it differently. Be a beach destination specialist. I'm also saying to her at the same time that all of my experiences have been in these various island destinations staying in condos which is also not really a big market but obviously she saw something in me.

Marci Jennings: I'd only at that time I had only traveled to one all inclusive resort ever. It wasn't that great of an experience in comparison to the other travel that I had done in these different islands in staying in condos. She said let's give it a whirl and in my mind I had always been such a planner and just always so strategic in everything that I did. It was strange to me that I just basically, I guess I think it was because I felt like I was already doing this for my friends and family and getting nothing out of it just loving it that I just said, why not? I did start working this alongside my physical therapy career. I was working part-time. I think I was working around 20 hours a week as a physical therapist and then I jumped into doing this. Maybe my biggest thing that I did to get started was I just over and over and over again explained what I said earlier in this recording about how it doesn't cost anything extra to use a travel agent.

Shane Sams: Right.

Marci Jennings: Really just hammered that home more than maybe necessary. I feel like sometimes when people hear something they don't hear it the first time. I just kept reiterating that and that, and just putting a lot of information out there about what I did now at the time then grew it from there.

Shane Sams: Who was your first client? Like when you put this stuff out there and you're like, I'm a travel agent now, it doesn't cost anything to do this you're going to pay for it whether you get help or not so you might as well get the help. Do you remember how much was your first commission or who did you get that first time where you're like oh my gosh this real, this actually happened.

Marci Jennings: Right right. Yeah, great question. I can remember my first two clients. My first, I believe the first one actually closed the deal on, was a trip to Grand Cayman. It was for a family that I knew through my daughter's softball team. Our daughters played softball together. She was already looking for a trip and I stepped in to assist her and I've been there a couple of times to that island before so I had knowledge of it and got her this great package that she said was actually lower than what she had seen when she was researching it herself.

Marci Jennings: She was happy about it, I was excited about it. I really was not focused even on what the commission was going to look like but then when I finished booking the trip, I think maybe the agency received about $600 in commission off of this package that I put together for her and I thought, whoa. I would have done this solely for discounted travel at the time. I would have been in just for that because I loved it so much. I thought okay wait there might actually be something to this.

Shane Sams: Did you, the agency that you were working through got 600 and then you get a part of that or something like that?

Marci Jennings: Exactly, exactly.

Shane Sams: It's kind of like a real estate agent the broker gets a part of the commission and you get the rest of it basically.

Marci Jennings: Yeah, exactly.

Jocelyn Sams: Let's explore that just a little bit because there's probably people out there thinking okay I love to travel this sounds like an awesome job for me.

Shane Sams: I mean I could book four trips a month and make a couple grand. It's crazy when you think about the math when it starts to add up.

Jocelyn Sams: The question that I think our audience might be asking right now is do you have to work through an agency or what are the benefits of working through an agency?

Marci Jennings: Yes. That's a great question. There are lots of different ways that people would do a career as a travel agent. I choose to go through an agency like this and affiliate myself with an agency because they basically take care of all of the contracts. Because as your, there's so many different entities that you can book through. Each individual cruise line, Disney, all these different resorts. The possibilities are endless. They manage all of the contracts on the backend of that and keep track of all the commissions coming in because when I say that you get paid on the time of travel that's not an exact science they all pay at slightly different intervals but that's kind of an average.

Marci Jennings: There's all these back office stuff that comes through and I just decided that wasn't really something that I wanted to focus my time on. They already had all of that set up. From that perspective that's an advantage. The other advantage is that the way that those contracts are set up and the amount of commission that you get is based upon the volume of bookings. If you're with an agency that is selling quite a bit of travel you're commission level is going to be higher per booking.

Shane Sams: Oh I see. Yes. Because there's other people in there selling too so it's like our agency sold 10 Disney packages instead of your individual self sold two you're going to a lower commission than someone who is selling 10 or whatever.

Marci Jennings: Exactly yes, yes.

Shane Sams: Got you.

Marci Jennings: That's definitely an advantage of that of going through an agent.

Shane Sams: You're outsourcing the backend is what you're doing. By giving up a little bit of commission you could earn, you're either going to pay someone to do that and hire someone to do it or you're going to do it yourself anyway.

Marci Jennings: Exactly.

Shane Sams: It's like I choose to make a little less per sale to not have to mess with all that backend work.

Marci Jennings: Exactly, yes.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay. Let's talk a little about your actual day-to-day. You do work with an agency but you do work from your house, right?

Shane Sams: You're your own boss kind of, you're like a sales, it's basically sales and planning, right?

Jocelyn Sams: Yes, yes. I'm an independent contractor affiliated with an agency and we all work from home and in fact the entire company is just based out of a house too. There's no Brick and Mortar Business associated with this whatsoever.

Shane Sams: That's what we like to hear. That's the flipped lifestyle right there. That's all, people get confused I think when we say, we probably don't do a good enough job at this. We talk a lot about starting your own business, we talk a lot about being self-employed, we talk about being independent a lot but really what we're just saying is, can you construct a life where you have total control of your time everyday, right? Where you get to dictate what you do. Where you get to choose how much money you want to make. Some people don't realize that when you do go down this path this flipped lifestyle path, this work from home path.

Shane Sams: That you don't have to go make a million dollars. If you're happy, if you get to a certain level and be like I'm going to make X dollars as a travel agent and then I'm gonna go travel, right? I don't want to grind 90 hours every single month of the year. That's really what it sounds like you're doing as an independent contractor. You get up and you decide when you want to make your calls, when you wanna email people, when you wanna plan a trip. If you got a soccer game you go, if you want to, we were in Jamaica. Marci planned a trip for us in Jamaica and we look over and she shows up. She walks into the restaurant at the resort. I'm like, that's awesome. She just decided to go to Jamaica and she did.

Jocelyn Sams: It's hilarious because we live in, Marci lives in the Midwest, we live in Kentucky and we're like lets meet up in Jamaica. That's-

Shane Sams: That's where we met each other.

Jocelyn Sams: ... where I met you in person.

Shane Sams: Am I right?

Marci Jennings: Yes that was the best.

Jocelyn Sams: Not the worst life ever.

Shane Sams: That's right. What does that day-to-day look like? Just on a normal, let's just say we can talk peak not peak whatever but like, just a general day happens as a virtual travel agent when you wake up what do you do?

Marci Jennings: Yes, yes. Just like you were just saying Shane it is, the benefits of this is definitely the flexibility. As I mentioned in the beginning of this podcast I do have two kids and they are involved in a lot of activities. My day-to-day never looks the same. That can be a blessing and a curse. I feel like as a business owner most people struggle with that. The different things that are always a part of my day and what I need to juggle as an agent is, new business. Producing quotes and talking to different clients that have reached out to me for new business. Servicing current business, the people that are about to travel. I'm preparing itineraries for them, making sure their questions are answered, emailing the resorts for any special requests that they have. Managing those people that have already booked travel with me and getting that going.

Marci Jennings: I also do some marketing which, the different avenues I use for that is, going to networking groups and then using social media so creating my content in regards to that. The majority of my time is spent on the computer. Doing primarily everything through email. In this industry and I think many others anymore is you're juggling the various ways in which people prefer to communicate. I think that's one of the things that you definitely have to get used to too. Is that some clients are texting me, some of them are Facebook messaging me on my personal page or business page. Emailing me, calling me, there's a variety of ways in which people communicate. That's something that I feel like is hard for some people to get used to too.

Shane Sams: Do you have a home office or do you just primarily work wherever your laptop is? Do you coffee shop it up? Do you work at home most of time? How do you prefer to work.

Marci Jennings: Most, right. Most of the time I work from home because I prefer quieter environments so when my kids are not here it's a quiet environment but not always. Occasionally I go to coffee shops too, I do a little bit, I mix it both but primarily home.

Shane Sams: That's an interesting challenge because it's so funny how different work from home business work. Jocelyn and I have very much tailored our business in a way that we control communication as much as possible, right? We do two member calls with our community every month. Those are an hour and a half each. We have forums that we can go in and check every day and that's the only way to communicate with us, correct? We also do have an email, we have a tier where people can email us once a week, right? It's funny because we have, our business tightly controls this way people can communicate

Shane Sams: Your business is the main thing is, everybody communicates differently. I'm always fascinated by how different work from home jobs can look, right? How different challenges creep up in different things to where, some people, I love to communicate like this. Jocelyn likes tight communications where nobody can get a hold of her notifications, no nothing. I like, I'm on Voxer, I'm talking to you on a podcast, I'm going to type you an email. You can build it and lean toward the work from home opportunity that you really want to do.

Marci Jennings: Right. Yes, yes. Yeah and I think that part of why there's, it would be difficult to create that tighter way of communicating is because almost everyone that works in travel, when you start with your warm market and lose the people that you've, that you have as clients from the beginning are people that you know very well. Your friends and family. Especially because it's not something that, there's no additional cost to it. If your friends and family are gonna travel it's a no brainer why would they not use you. I would say, still today the majority of my clients are people that are friends.

Shane Sams: Do you have a lot of repeat business? Is there a lot of repeat business?

Marci Jennings: Yes. It definitely is.

Shane Sams: Outside of, I know we're repeat business. We're calling you like every three months.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, we've also sent a lot of friends your way as well.

Shane Sams: Oh yeah. We're like, you gotta call Marci she's the one to do it.

Marci Jennings: Yes.

Shane Sams: Do you ever work while you're traveling? Does Disney or a resort call you to come down but you're like, oh man I've got like a client that I've gotta really plan a trip for but I also want to really be on the beach in Grand Cayman.

Jocelyn Sams: Or are you at an all inclusive resort and annoying clients are texting you all the time. I mean I don't know who that would be.

Shane Sams: Exactly. Jocelyn's harrassing you. But, do you do that? Do you sometimes, you just take it with you and you're like, man this is amazing I can go do my travel agent job at the resort I'm planning for someone basically.

Marci Jennings: Yes, absolutely. At this point of my business I travel so much that there's no way I wouldn't be, that I can get by not working during some of my travel. Sometimes it's just by choice because I can work from my house or I can work from my balcony at on of my favorite destinations especially in the winter-

Shane Sams: I feel you, yeah.

Marci Jennings: ... that would be my choice.

Shane Sams: Location independence is amazing. That's one of the craziest. I love what you, I've never heard anybody say it that way but I totally felt you when you said that I have total flexibility but it's a blessing and a curse, right? Because we struggle with that all the time. When you wake up and you literally can do anything you want sometimes you really want to go anything you want but you got work to do. It's like, when do you do it, you're constantly juggling back and forth between activities.

Shane Sams: Like we got up this morning we started home school, I checked my emails and then we did more home school, then I went out for a paddle on the lake on my paddle board and Jocelyn was inside doing something then we came and do a podcast. Sometimes that can get very confusing or it's hard, it is a struggle to find the discipline to get all your stuff done. Freedom is amazing but it's also hard to master, right?

Marci Jennings: Exactly, yes, yes. I feel that for most people that's a constantly evolving process because especially when you have kids your schedule is constantly evolving. I mean, my schedule today and what it looked like four and a half years ago when I started this business, I mean it's not at all, there's very little similarities to what it looks like.

Shane Sams: How old did you say your kids were? I forgot how old your kids are.

Marci Jennings: 13 and nine.

Shane Sams: Do you, our kids are 10 and eight, right? We're kind of right behind you on the scale there but I swear it feels harder now to manage life with older kids than it even did when they were babies, right? Because it's like they have so much more stuff going on. They can think and fight back so much more, right? It's hard to juggle everything because my schedule feels different every six months because they play a different sport or they-

Marci Jennings: Right. Same here.

Shane Sams: ... do a different activity. It's almost harder, I don't want to say that, someone is going to write me and go, I've got a baby it's hard. I know babies-

Jocelyn Sams: It's all hard.

Shane Sams: It's all hard. Everybody, what we're saying is it's just a different kind of challenge at this age and I'm so thankful that we're self employed because I don't know how we would have managed it if we were being forced to be somewhere else all the time, right?

Marci Jennings: Right. I think the same exact thing all the time. Hey, I don't know how I would do it. I'm definitely, I definitely feel very blessed to have the flexibility but it's something that you constantly have to-

Shane Sams: Earn.

Marci Jennings: ... Figure how to manage.

Jocelyn Sams: Let's talk just a little bit about how did you know it was time to make this a full time thing? You were working physical therapy, you were working part-time travel agent. When did you decide okay this is viable and I can go all in on this?

Shane Sams: Or even I want this more even if I make less for a while. Like how did that thought process work out?

Marci Jennings: Yes. I can't remember exactly when the timing of that worked out for me. I can't tell you exactly when because the blessing also that I had was as a physical therapist I at that time I was at that time what we call PRN which means I was called in on as a needed basis. The company I was working for needed me kind of routinely about 20 hours a week. It was in that place where as I got busier I could say you know what? I don't need to be here this much let's tone it down

Shane Sams: Cut it back a little bit.

Marci Jennings: ... a little bit. I was able to really wean it back slowly. I would say that it was probably a year to a year and a half into my travel business before I was really able to really completely set that aside and feel comfortable with it.

Shane Sams: That's the time we usually find happens. It's somewhere between a year to 18 months that you can look down and say, I want this more even if it doesn't make sense to everybody else right now. Right?

Marci Jennings: Right. Right.

Shane Sams: There's nothing wrong, you had an unfair advantage you had put in all the work to become a physical therapist to give yourself that kind of opportunity. Everyone has unfair advantages, Jocelyn and I talked a lot about how even as teachers we did have a little extra time off, right? We could get some stuff done. We always had weekends off. As a football coach, I had a choice whether to stay in the office until seven o'clock or leave right after practice, right? We all have these unfair advantages and you capitalized on it to be able to build something that you really wanted.

Jocelyn Sams: We don't have to get super specific here but as far as an income were you able to replace your physical therapy income with being a travel agent. Were you able to exceed that? What did that look like?

Shane Sams: What does an industry person, what can you make as a travel agent?

Jocelyn Sams: What's an average in other words?

Marci Jennings: Yeah, great question. I'll tell you a little story back from when I interviewed with the owner of this company. She knew that I was coming to the table as a physical therapist and she pretty much knew what kind of income that produced. In the conversation with her because she never really had anyone, she had very few agents that were full-time. A lot of them were teachers and loved Disney and did that on the side.

Marci Jennings: I remember her saying to me, she said, "Well, if you think you're going to love this that's fantastic but just so you know we haven't really had anyone that's really made more than about $30,000 doing this so I just want you to be aware of that because I knew you're coming from a different place a different income level and I just want you to be realistic. I said, again, ironically I was like, I don't care, I'm in. But as I built this business and it did not happen overnight but over the course of time I was definitely, I was able to exceed what I used to make as a physical therapist even when I worked full-time.

Shane Sams: That's amazing.

Marci Jennings: It is something that the more you work it, the more time you put into it the more effort, the better you are at it. I'm trying to say you can write your own paycheck. There's no range for sure, I would say probably some published average out there would probably say $30,000 but-

Shane Sams: I read, I was researching it right before we got on and I read that part-time people hit around, can hit around 30 then the industry median was like 80 something thousand. For people who are totally full-time like all in, you know what I'm saying? But that's incredible because you have no commute. You have no boss, you have no whatever it's just do you want to roll up your sleeves and go make an income and do it from the beach.

Jocelyn Sams: You travel to exotic locations all the time and it's part of your job. It's not the worst job ever.

Marci Jennings: Right.

Shane Sams: Our friend Susanne who does our, who did our Disney travel for us, she literally goes to Disney every month. She goes to Disney, not just Disney. One month's Disney, the next month she's probably walking around the Millennium Falcon getting ready to open Star Wars right now. She goes to the one in California, they just got to these places and have these events. Even those side benefits and she's just rushing it too like planning trips.

Marci Jennings: Right, yeah.

Shane Sams: It's just amazing, it absolutely is.

Marci Jennings: I always think of the contrast, people that would create and start a traditional business, most people have to immerse a lot of money into something like that and then you should turn a profit from three to five years. While, I caution people when they are looking at this industry that they have to work for a while before they really see, before they get paid. Still there's no overhead and you're not waiting three to five years to turn a profit.

Shane Sams: If you're consistent and prolific one you get there, it just will happen every month. It's actually kind of a benefit at some point because if I book a trip in June and I know I'm gonna get paid in January for a trip that they're taking, that's pretty sweet. Even that is flexibility because you might be like I'm gonna take a vacation and I booked these three trips back in May and they're going to feed here so I'm just going to go on vacation then, right? So, there's even some planning there.

Jocelyn Sams: Do you have a website or are you primarily on social media?

Marci Jennings: I just am on social media. Our agency has a website but I would say that probably very few people come through those channels-

Jocelyn Sams: I like that because I think that it's a good lesson and we talk a lot about online business but online business doesn't necessarily mean that you have to have your own website. I mean-

Shane Sams: You just have a Facebook page and like Instagram.

Marci Jennings: Yes, I just solely do Facebook at this point.

Shane Sams: Wow, that's amazing like your whole, that's incredible.

Jocelyn Sams: But you had the foresight to say, okay social media is a powerful platform I'm going to get on here. I'm going to post regularly I'm going to show people what I'm doing, where I'm going. I'm going to keep posting and things happen. Like I found you just from a random Facebook search.

Shane Sams: Yeah.

Jocelyn Sams: That's going to happen sometimes.

Shane Sams: You don't need a website, right? I mean it's like you just need a way for people to find you and that's one of the key components of our courses is it's just about putting yourself out there. It's just about starting. It's just about doing it because if you say on Facebook, hey I'm a travel agent now if anybody wants me to plan a trip you got a chance that someone will reach out to you.

Jocelyn Sams: But if you say it one time-

Shane Sams: They won't.

Jocelyn Sams: ... People will forget.

Marci Jennings: Exactly.

Jocelyn Sams: You need to remind people, hey I'm here I do something really cool then that is going to get them an opportunity over and over again to come and use your services.

Shane Sams: Do you get most of your customers through referrals or do you get them on Facebook or, like how do you find, that's the hardest part in any business, any work from home job is how do I find people to pay me, right?

Marci Jennings: Yes.

Shane Sams: How do you find most of your customers?

Marci Jennings: It's primarily through referrals. Some of those started as, they found me on Facebook just like the two of you. Then they referred me out from there. I would say my two primary ways was just word of mouth and secondly through Facebook. I did a lot of going back and forth between marketing through my personal Facebook page and my business Facebook page in the beginning. I never, I always caution all business owners to be careful about not spamming their personal Facebook page all the time with business things.

Shane Sams: For sure.

Marci Jennings: But also I'm pretty blessed to be in an industry where nobody gets tired of seeing pictures of beautiful beaches and videos of amazing things, right? Everyone likes to look at those types of things. That's our industry, it's a flashy photo that draws people in. Bridging and reminding people over and over again on my personal page and linking that over to my business page really helped me get a consistent audience there. Again because I travel so much now it's probably now on average about every six weeks to a different resort then people see, all the people that I'm friends with they see my personal travels on there and they see a business page as well.

Shane Sams: Exactly. Basically, how many, just to start closing this up a little bit.

Marci Jennings: Sure.

Shane Sams: I can see where someone could get into this maybe and even start making a couple of hundred bucks a month which is really, we always say that $500 is a car payment that could change someone's life, right?

Marci Jennings: Right.

Shane Sams: How many people do you really think, when you said it took you about a year maybe a year and a half like how many people does it take to support. If you have a good book of business of about 20 families. Is that, are we talking 20 families? Are we talking, like what would it take to make a living someday doing this? Just to give anyone that might pursue this path a goal, just to have that good recurring base of a good steady income where you know people are going to call you at least once a year for vacations. What do you think a number would be someone could shoot for?

Marci Jennings: Yeah, that's a good question. That really depends on if somebody is looking for a $30000 or a $80000 income. That really looks different.

Shane Sams: Let's say 30 because I'm sure there's thousands of people who are listening right now that'd be like, I would love to have 30 extra thousand.

Marci Jennings: Right, right. Yes. You would probably on average need about 75 clients or families to produce that. You might have 10 in one of those months just like we talked about earlier those peaks and valleys, two in another month and 20 in another. It's not always even. It should organically grow over time. If you work-

Shane Sams: It stacks on top of each other basically.

Marci Jennings: Yes. If you work it consistently and you find your niche and you're passionate about what you do. It will at some point grow to the point where you couldn't stop it if you tried.

Shane Sams: Awesome. Sounds amazing.

Marci Jennings: That's where you have to then figure out what you want to do with it. Where you want to go with that.

Shane Sams: That's awesome. What an amazing thing though. A lot of the time, one of the things I say a lot on the show is you only need a 100 people to pay you $50 a month to make $60000 a year. That's a thing we say a lot just to drive home the fact that you really, it doesn't take a lot of mountain moving to make a living working from home, online, as a travel agent, as an online business owner, as whatever. What you just said was, if you had just 75 people book a trip in a year you could add $30000 to your life. That is life changing money. Even if you don't pursue it full-time. Like you said it, once the, it's like a dynamo once it starts, once the avalanche starts, it might be a snowball at the beginning but you're not stopping it once it gets going and it's just amazing to see what you've built in your life, it's unbelievable.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, it's super cool. We're so glad that you've come on today to tell our audience about what you do and just all the cool benefits of being a travel agent. We want to give you an opportunity to let people know where to find you. If someone's interested in booking a trip. I know you do all different kinds of travel, you specialize in Caribbean all inclusive, right?

Marci Jennings: That's right. Yes Caribbean and Mexico.

Jocelyn Sams: Yes. If you're interested in learning more about Marci, where would they be able to find you?

Marci Jennings: My business Facebook page is Off to Anyland Travel by Marci.

Jocelyn Sams: Your name is Marci with an I,

Marci Jennings: Marci with an I that's right.

Shane Sams: All they have to do is go to Facebook search for Off to, what was it?

Jocelyn Sams: Off to Anyland.

Shane Sams: Off to Anyland or Marci Jennings and they would be able to find you online. We will put links to that in the show notes as well. I am actually also going to put together, I'm gonna have to research this a little bit. I'm gonna put together a little guide to anybody who might want to pursue being an online travel agent.

Jocelyn Sams: Totally free.

Shane Sams: Totally free, this is a, it's not even in the community or anything like that. I'm just going to put it with this podcast. You can go to flippedlifestyle.com/travelagent. That's F-L-I-P-P-E-D L-I-F-E-S-T-Y-L-E.com/travelagent and we will have a little information packet there so you can learn more about maybe pursuing this as your version of the flipped lifestyle. All right, Marci well thank you so much again for being here. We don't have a lot of quote on quote experts on the show. We're trying to bring a different kind of expert, people who are literally out there doing things for a living. That are just making everybody else look at them like they're crazy. I look at your Facebook feed all the time because we're friends and I think you're crazy but it's the best kind of crazy because you're crazy on the beach, you're crazy on an all inclusive.

Jocelyn Sams: You're our people Marci.

Shane Sams: You're our kind of people because you are truly living the flipped lifestyle and it's absolutely amazing to watch. Thank you so much for being transparent, just sharing your story with everybody today.

Marci Jennings: Thank you so much.

Shane Sams: All right guys that wraps up another great episode of The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. Thank you so much for listening today. Man what an amazing story hearing about another way you can work from home. Another way that you can make money online. Marci does, has an amazing job as an online virtual travel agent and we would love to help you learn more about that too. Again, go to flippedlifestyle.com/travelagent or if you want to pursue any other work from home opportunities we teach a lot of different paths inside of the flip your life community. We would love to help you find your path to freedom just like we found ours. Just like Marci found hers inside of our community.

Shane Sams: All you have to do to learn more about that is go to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife and you can learn all about the flip your life community. Before we go we would love to close with a bible verse, Jocelyn and I grab a lot of information from the bible and we want to share some of that with you today. Today's bible verse comes from Psalm 18:36, the bible says, you give a wide place for my steps and my feet will not slip. Go out there, travel, do what it takes to build a business that can give your family freedom and change your family tree and your future forever.

Shane Sams: It's out there. There are so many, different ways. It's not just build a website, it's not just be a travel agent, it's not just teach online. They're so many paths to give you and your family the freedom that you deserve if you just get started. Until next time, get out there, take action, do whatever it takes to flip your life.

Jocelyn Sams: Bye.

Links and resources mentioned on today’s show: * Off to Anyland Travel by Marci * More Info on How to Become an Online Travel Agent * Flip Your Life Community

Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!

Join the Flip Your Life Community NOW for as little as $19 per month!

https://flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife

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In today's episode, we're going to show you how to work from home teaching English online.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jocelyn: Hey, y'all. On today's show, we're going to show you how to work from home teaching English online.

Shane: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, where life always comes before work. We're your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. We're a real family that figured out how to make our entire living online, and now we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? All right. Let's get started.

Shane: What's going on, everybody? Welcome back to The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. It is great to be back with you again today. Super excited for this episode, because we are kicking off a new series here on The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, all about different ways to work from home and make money online. You know, Jocelyn and I and the community ... We have a lot of trainings about a lot of different things you can do online. You can offer goods, you can offer services, you can offer digital products, you can offer physical products, you can do coaching, but most of our focus is on membership-based websites. Now, I-

Jocelyn: And essentially becoming a business owner.

Shane: Yeah. And when you become a business owner, that can mean a lot of different things you have to learn and a lot of different responsibilities. You got to build a website, you got to manage your brand, you got to manage your social media presence, you got to create courses and content, and that can be very overwhelming for people. And a lot of people have asked us, "What are some other ways to work from home? What are some other ways to make money online? What are some other ways to live the flipped lifestyle, to get to control my schedule, to get to work when I want to and be more available for my family and for my kids?" So that's where this series came from. We are going to be bringing on a number of guests who make money online and work from home in different ways such as creating and selling courses or even owning and operating a membership. And our first guest in this series is Jocelyn's friend Gina. Gina, welcome to The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast.

Gina: Thank you.

Jocelyn: Yes, we are excited to talk to you today. And Gina's actually someone who I know in real life. We used to work together a few years ago. And of course, we were Facebook friends, and I see she is always posting cool stuff about her job. And I sent her a message not too long ago, and I said, "Would you be willing to come onto our podcast and talk about what it is that you're doing?" So let's get into that just a little bit. Tell us a little bit about you and your family and what it is that you are doing online.

Gina: Okay. I have a large family. I have eight kids at home, and I teach ... Well, English as a second language to Chinese children at home. So I have been doing that a little over a year now, and it is the best job I have ever had.

Shane: I bet.

Gina: It is.

Shane: It's probably the best break you've ever had, as well.

Gina: It is, actually, and most people would think you want to be with kids more, but yes. And I actually get up at three, four in the morning to do that. It's just an awesome job.

Shane: So what is your background? Okay, we're going to get into teaching English as a second language online. So you actually do this live, right? This actually happens online?

Gina: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Shane: Okay. So what is-

Gina: Yes.

Shane: What is your background? What were you doing before the eight children arrived or you did this online?

Gina: In the midst of it. I was ... Actually, I worked at the school, and my degree is in psychology, so I had started working on my Masters a little bit, but it wasn't in teaching. And you do not have to have a teaching degree to do this, but you do need to have a degree. But I did work at the school for about six ... A little over six years, and it just ... It wasn't a lot of money. The flexibility wasn't as great. Although I was off during the summer. But I decided to stay home when my youngest one was born, and I wasn't sure what I was going to do when she got school-aged, but I knew I wanted to go back to work but wasn't sure about finding a job that was flexible enough for me to take off if I needed to ... if my kids were sick or if there was doctor's appointments or that would also compensate me for my degree. So I kind of looked into stay-at-home jobs. A lot of them were data entry. A lot of them were this and that, and I stumbled upon this, and it was just like, "Wow." I mean, it was a life-changing decision for me.

Jocelyn: Yeah, that's awesome. And what Gina didn't mention is that ... Of course, we live in a super small area, so even though you've gone to college, even though you have a degree, it's not always easy to find good jobs, and particularly ones that are flexible. And that's why a lot of people work at the school system, and I suspect that's why you worked for the school system as well.

Gina: Absolutely, yes it was. It was so when the kids were off, I would be off. I would have my summers off and that kind of thing. But in this situation, when I found this job, it was ... I just make my own hours, and I'm actually ... I start around five o'clock in the morning. I could work all night if I wanted to, but I start around four or five. I end around 10 am, and I'm done for the day, and I get paid really well to do that, and I get to teach children and love what I do, and I get to do it at home in my pajamas, and I don't have to get out-

Shane: Without ... You don't need a shower. Just get up. Do whatever you want. Make your coffee, right?

Gina: You know what, it doesn't ... Yes. It doesn't matter if I've had a shower. Nobody knows. So it's great. It's great.

Shane: What does something like this pay? Let's talk about the job first. So you said you get up in the morning, and you literally are working with these kids that are in China, I guess, teaching them English. So are you on a Skype call? Is it a group call with a bunch of kids? Is it one-on-one? What are you actually doing during these hours that you're working?

Gina: Well, the company that I work for will ... They do the curriculum and they do everything, so there's no paperwork on my end or anything like that. So I am one-on-one with the students. So it's only one-on-one with this particular company. And I get up, and it's like you have a teacher's portal. So you log in to the teacher's portal. I am not that tech savvy, so it's okay. But I have learned a lot, and they will walk you through ... You know, with workshops and different things to help you, but you ... It's almost like you're FaceTiming someone, but it's the student on the other end, and they are in Beijing, and ... A lot of them are in Beijing, because it's the whole country of China, so there's different cities and areas, and I have 25 minutes that I teach one student, and one class is 25 minutes long.

Gina: So you teach them that ... It's a slideshow, so it pulls up on the teacher's portal. All you do is log into your classroom. They have booked your class. You don't have to do anything other than just open the times that you want to teach and that you're available, and then the company is actually the one that talks to the parents, because they can speak Chinese. I do not speak Chinese. And they book the classes for you, and all you do is you have an app. You can check who's booked your classes. You log in at the time that you have chosen to open up, and the student's right there in front of you.

Shane: That's amazing. So it's like having a business, but you don't have to go find your own leads. They just find them for you and they book your calendar, and there's so many kids over there doing this, you probably just always have a booked calendar, right?

Gina: Oh, you do. In the very beginning, it's almost ... You get a couple here and there trickle in. And then once they start giving you good reviews, then you just get more, and then they can ... Now I have so many wanting to book me that I can't keep up with it, and I have to close slots. It's very ... And the kids. You build a connection with the families and with the kids, and then I also ... WeChat is what it's called over in China. They don't have Facebook. But you can talk back and forth with the parents, because a lot of them do speak English, and you just get to know. You have a good rapport with the family. And I have a family that actually wants to come visit over here.

Jocelyn: Oh, that is so cool.

Gina: So it is very ... They send you videos. They'll say, "Look what we did today," and I have built so many connections across the world just over this job. It's pretty unbelievable.

Jocelyn: Yeah, that is awesome. And you do have a little bit of autonomy as far as the way that you present the material, right? Because I know I've seen some of your videos where you've worn princess crowns and different types of things.

Shane: Just fun stuff.

Gina: Yeah. You do. Because the girls and boys ... They like different things, and you are to give them a reward. That's their motivation. So as you're doing the lesson, you will say, "Great job," and you give them a star, and it's digital. And they also have a ton of digital Snapchat kind of things. You can make yourself have bunny ears, and just ... It's kind of something fun. It gets the kids laughing, relaxed, comfortable, then they learn better. And anyway, they do have rewards. I'll do princesses. I can put on ... You get a crown and I'll put it on myself. Or you get earrings, and they're kind of like, "Wow, beautiful." And it's just a great connection to have as they're learning English. And they pick up quick.

Shane: Tell me about the hours, then. So you do it really in the morning, but you also have a huge family, so you've got ... I can't keep up with two kids. I don't know how you're doing ... I have to be honest, you just became one of my ... We have a Mount Rushmore of awesome parents, people that have seven or more kids. You are now on the Mount Rushmore of these parents. But-

Gina: Well, thanks.

Shane: Did you pick the early hours, or it's just really necessary to do that because of the time zone differences, or a little of both?

Gina: No, it's a little of both, maybe, but ... You have ... It's a 12-hour time zone difference, so when it's 8 AM here, it's 8 PM there. Now in China, they do ... When they get home from school, they do lessons. They have English lessons. Almost every family. It's unbelievable. But there are over 60,000 teachers that teach for this company. So they have ... They'll come home, and they'll do a class, which is just 25 minutes. So you can open up spots anywhere from 7:30 PM at this time here all the way until 10 AM. So if you want to teach from 7:30 PM until 11 ... Which it doesn't work for me, because my kids, that's bed time. But you can do that, or you can get up early like I do and teach from four to 10, or you can teach from midnight to four. It's your choice, and I have no problem getting booked at any time during, because there's always even preschool ... Because the kids were age ranged from three years old ... Yes. Some of them speak better English than my four-year-old here, but ...

Shane: That's what happens in Kentucky. I'm just saying.

Gina: It is, I know. It's really bad. So ... But from three all the way to 16. So you do have kids that aren't in school yet that can take a 10 AM morning class in China, and it's 10 PM our time. So you create your own schedule on what works for you, and that's why it's so great.

Shane: Wow. So if you're going to be out of town or something, you can just basically block off, "I'm not going to be ..." If you're going on vacation, you can just say, "Hey, guys, I'm not going to be able to do it this week," or you literally could just bring your computer if you wanted to and do it from anywhere. You just have to have your laptop with you.

Gina: There are many teachers that work for this company that actually travel around the world and teach. There is a teacher that I know that lives in Switzerland, actually, and she doesn't really live there, but she is staying there right now, and she is traveling around, and she just has her laptop. All you need is your laptop.

Shane: That's amazing.

Gina: So you can go anywhere. Yes it is.

Shane: See, that's what we see. We call it "the flipped lifestyle." There's a lot of funny stuff of how we got that name, but what we really mean is the world tells us "You have to have a 9-5. You've got to be sitting in your desk. You have to follow the rules. You've got to build this life exactly like we say it has to be," and we're like, "No, you could literally flip that upside down and live however you want. If you want to get up at 5 AM and work and make money online, you can do it. If you want to live in Switzerland and travel Europe, all you need is your laptop. If you want to be like us, we work from home or anywhere we travel. That's what we do. We just bring our laptop with us." That's what the flipped lifestyle is. That's why we're bringing this new series in, is we want people to realize that there is unlimited opportunity to make a living online. There's unlimited opportunity to build the exact schedule you want.

Shane: Like this morning ... We stayed up really late last night. My brother was in town, and I think it was like 10:30 or 11 before we even laid down. So we slept in a little bit this morning. We got up, we did a member call with about 45, 50 people at nine o'clock. We stopped and went and hung out with the kids. I rode my exercise bike, and Jocelyn made a phone call. And then Jocelyn just took off her robe as she was sitting down for this podcast interview. I'm in sweatpants and a t-shirt and flip-flops right now, and we got on the call with you. And then the next thing will be ... The next thing that Jocelyn's going to homeschool co-op next. So then we'll come back, go to a basketball game, and then maybe I'll do a little work before bed tonight. It's just amazing the life you can build because we have this crazy tool like the internet that can connect us with an entire other country that doesn't even speak our language. It's amazing.

Gina: It's so ... It is amazing, because I can be teaching a student, and it's dark there, and I can show them my window and say, "Look here," and they're like, "Oh my goodness." It's amazing, because the crickets are chirping in China, and I am teaching this. Or I can be in the evening at a basketball game, and I can open some classes at 10 PM, 10:30, and I'm like, "Well, I got to go because I got to teach a couple classes," and I can pull in 10 minutes before my class starts, get on my laptop and teach and make money for an hour or two. I just get to choose that. And we have talked many times in our family ... Eventually, if the kids get older, we would like to move to North Carolina where my family is. Well, a typical job that you would have ... "What am I going to do? I've got to apply somewhere? I've got to see if I can transfer." But you know what? I don't have to worry about that, because I could go anywhere, and-

Shane: Your job comes with you.

Gina: I don't have to ever leave.

Shane: Right. Your job comes with you, basically.

Gina: Yes. So I can go anywhere. I can go on vacation. When I go on vacation, I can close it out like you had asked. I make my schedule two weeks in advance. If I know something's coming up, I just don't open those slots, so they're not available to students to book. But if something happens, you can cancel. You can cancel things. They like you not to, but. But if you're going on vacation, you just don't open slots. So you get to control that. It's amazing. It really is.

Shane: Yeah. What's amazing about hearing your story is it's so different than what we do. Because we have a lot ... I feel like we have a lot more moving parts, but it's also other stuff that we like to do. I like to go out and try to find new clients. I like to ... The lead-generation part is something that I really dig. That's my jam. That's what I like to do. But you were kind of like, "I don't want to own this whole business. I just want to be a part of something that I can control my schedule." And there's so much flexibility and freedom to just build whatever you decide. You don't have to do what me and Jocelyn do. You can do what Gina does. You don't have to do what Gina does. You can build it like another way.

Jocelyn: Yeah, and I just ... I have loved watching all of the stuff that you post. It's very obvious to me that this is something that you just really, truly enjoy. Tell people about your set-up, where it's at, because I get a kick out of that too.

Gina: I am in the laundry room. So I actually sit right by the washer and dryer, and I just have a little desk and my laptop, and a bunch of my kids toys' are different props. Which I've not spent any money on actually, but a whiteboard. And nobody sees what's around. Now I will say that there have been times that I have had the dryer going, and it goes ... My kids are like, "I hear something." I'm like, "It's the dryer." And they think it's so funny.

Shane: That is hysterical.

Gina: But yeah, I teach from the laundry room, and it's just ... I can go anywhere. Sometimes I can take my laptop and move it with my camera and show them Christmas decorations that we do with the Christmas tree, and they're like, "Whoa."

Shane: Do you just shine them at a wall or something so it looks like you're ... [crosstalk 00:16:59].

Jocelyn: Well, she has decorations.

Shane: Oh, like behind you. So you've got the ... So it's just like a set. It reminds me of ... You know what's his name, Bear Grylls, Man Vs. Wild? You ever seen that show where the guy-

Gina: No.

Shane: Okay, so there's this show called Bear Grylls: Man Vs. Wild. He goes out into the wilderness, and he's like, "Here's how you survive in the Arctic," and "Here's how you survive a volcano," and all this stuff.

Jocelyn: He drinks urine and all this.

Shane: Yeah, he drinks urine and eats spiders and all this crazy stuff. He looks like he's actually out in the wilderness, but I watched this expose on him one time, and there was this one where he looks like he's climbing a mountain, and they pan back, and he's laying flat, and they just turned the camera sideways so it would look like he's climbing the mountain. And there's a road right behind him. And you're like, "I'm teaching in my classroom, but I'm really doing laundry at the same time."

Gina: Yeah, it is essentially kind of the same, because I have a board behind me, and it's got the ABCs and it's got some of my things. But honestly, three feet over is a pile of towels and a bunch of clothes.

Shane: So how-

Gina: Dirty clothes.

Shane: So tell us again, how much can someone expect basically to make an hour during this? Now, this particular job, the company that you're working for does require a degree, some kind of college degree, right?

Gina: Yes. You have to have some kind of college degree and at least two years' teaching experience. Now you don't have to be a teacher in the classroom. Two years' teaching experience could be homeschooling. It can be coaching if your ... It can be Vacation Bible School. It can be Sunday School classes.

Shane: Just working with kids basically.

Gina: Anything like that. Yes, some kind of teaching. That's what you need in order to get the job. However, what you make is ... Everybody's brought in around about the same amount give or take 50 cents or a dollar an hour, but you make about 20-25 dollars an hour, depending on the class you teach. So if a student books you within 24 hours, you've opened a slot, it's not been booked, and you only have 24 hours to prepare for that class ... Which you really don't have to prepare, honestly. But you only have 24-hour notice. You get an extra couple dollars on the hour. So if it's a class that is ... It just depends on which kind of class you teach on how much you're getting paid. So it's sometimes 22 an hour, sometimes it's 24, sometimes it's 20. It fluctuates depending on what you were hired in at.

Shane: But it's over 20. That's insane.

Gina: Oh, absolutely. Yes.

Shane: Jobs in our area ... And I know in a lot of areas, you can't just go out and get a 20-dollar-an-hour job. That just doesn't happen. And to be able to do it online, to do it from home, control your schedule, and ... I mean, if you just got ... If you only work 20 hours a week, that's like four or five hundred dollars a week in extra money for your family. $2,000 a month. You said something like ... You said homeschool. I was just imaging the millions of homeschoolers that are out there that are looking for ways to make money. What an amazing experience to teach kids English in China, and your kids might even get to talk to them and meet someone from abroad and understand that the world is a bigger place.

Gina: Oh, absolutely. Yes. You can do that, and I mean, yes. And with teaching ... There are lots of teachers that homeschool, actually. There's a Facebook group with this company where you can support one another, talk about different things, and there's homeschooling teachers, and there's teachers that travel, and there's teachers that ... with this company, and so it's such a neat experience to be able to control it all and do what you want to do and like I said, not have to get dressed. You don't have to worry about gas money, clothes money, lunch money. You're right there. It's ... You can ...

Shane: That's something that we often talk about with each other, the hidden benefits of working for yourself, and especially if you can work from home. Because you don't realize how much of your life gets poured into traveling from point A to B, or how much gas money you actually spend until you don't have to spend gas money anymore, and you don't realize even the time just to get ready every day, just to prepare your food, just to leave work to go to lunch or ... Man, you get two, three hours of your life back every single day just from working from home that you can then pay forward to your kids, pay forward to your spouse, or even invest back into yourself.

Jocelyn: Yeah, and I know that you do a lot of volunteering at school and you're very involved in your kids' lives outside of at home, which is really cool.

Gina: Yes, and I don't know that I would be able to do that if I was doing a nine to five desk job. I'm absolutely positive, I wouldn't be able to do as much. I don't feel-

Shane: Let me ask you this.

Gina: Go ahead.

Shane: Could you ever go back to a nine to five job now?

Gina: No. No. I wouldn't.

Shane: Emphatically no, right?

Gina: I absolutely wouldn't. Nope. And I've had people ask me, and I actually even tried at one point to maybe try to do another job and then this. But of course, I was hired because I was getting up extra early, but it was just draining. It was getting up, getting ... I don't know, I've been spoiled, okay? And I make good money doing this, and it's just great. And my husband will sometimes say, "Oh, I need to get a sick day, or do this," and I'm thinking, "Sorry," because I don't have to ask anyone for a sick day. I hate that. I don't have to ask permission for anything, because I'm my own boss. So if I'm not feeling well, then I don't open classes. It's just that easy.

Shane: This is an interesting take, too, because a lot of people are learning that those college degrees they may have gotten ... Some people are going to have a college degree in history, but not a teacher. They can't be a schoolteacher. Or somebody might have a degree in business, like a general business degree.

Jocelyn: Like me.

Shane: Like-

Gina: Or psychology.

Shane: Or psychology. There you go. And they're having trouble finding a job. But now you have something that any college degree could apply for and you could go to and you could do.

Gina: Yes. I actually ... They do provide workshops, and they're all free. So once you're hired, you can take different things to get certified in different levels, and it's just free education that they help you attain while you're teaching. So I kind of feel like ... I know many teachers now, and actually one in particular, that is retiring soon, and she cannot wait, because she loves to teach, but she feels like that you can't teach as much now in the classroom as you could because of the testing and the paperwork and the discipline that you have and the classroom to deal with, where she does this on the side, and she said, "I cannot wait to retire, because I get to do this all of the time, and make extra income, and I get to be home, and I get to do what I love because it's ..." We don't do curriculum and paperwork and such like that. We do our own thing. You get to do what you love. It's just-

Shane: And you get to work one-on-one with students. That's what's amazing to me. Because that's the joy I got as a ... When I was a teacher and a football coach, that was where the joy came from, where it's the one-on-one interactions with the kids, and when you're really just throwing stuff at the group, it's not as fun, because the kid's sleeping in the back, got to fill out the papers ... But it's amazing you can just have these one-on-one interactions with these kids, get to know them, and what a difference. If you teach 20 kids a week, you're teaching 20 kids to speak a second language. Who knows what doors that's going to open up for not only them but the world just interacting back and forth.

Gina: Oh, it is. And it's very interesting, because they are very disciplined and diligent about their education over there. So they are ... They ask you questions. The parents ... And feedback ... will ask you things like, "Little Johnny is throwing tantrums," and they like to spank, and they're very hard on them.

Gina: So it's just like, "What do you suggest to help?" And sometimes I'm like, "Winston, he's only three. It's okay. He's doing well." But ...

Shane: They're so competitive there, they're probably freaking out. And ...

Gina: They are. They are.

Shane: It's amazing to me, too. A lot of people ask us, "How ... ?" Some people actually want to go down the "entrepreneur" route, the "business ..." "I want my own business, I want everything else," but when they're starting out, they're not making enough extra money to pay for things like website hosting or to pay for advertising, or ... They always say, "I just don't have enough money," and we're like, "There's a lot of other things you can do online to make money. What if you taught five classes a week, made 100 extra dollars a week, 400 extra dollars a month to invest in the other thing that you want to build? There's just no excuse.

Jocelyn: Yeah, that's a ... It's a great side-hustle, as people say, just start it up, work as many hours as you can, maybe it would give you the opportunity to quit your nine to five job.

Gina: It could, because I tell you, that happens a lot. What I've seen is ... You will think, "Oh ..." Because when I started, I thought, "I'd just like to make an extra 500 a month." And that was my goal. Well now, I can pull in almost 2,000 a month, and it's just working part time. So it's money that's been able to give me to do things with the family and vacations that I would not have been able to do before and I would have had to have worked full-time at a desk job to make what I'm making now and still have the flexibility.

Shane: So let me ask you this. So what are ... ? So for someone who is thinking to themselves, "Look, I want to make money online. I want to work from home. I know that we can change our family's future and all this opportunity is in front of me," and they say, "I do want a business, maybe. Maybe I don't want to grow a business. Maybe ... I don't know exactly what I want yet, but this sounds amazing." So what are three to five tips to get started in this? Just how to succeed in it, just preparing your degree, you just fill out an application, do you just ... What are your tips for success for someone who's going into this? How can they stay organized? How can they set it up? What kind of computer do they ... ? Whatever. Just what do they need?

Gina: Right. You really all too begin with you need is like a headset, which ... I just got a $25 headset at Walmart. But a headset, a whiteboard just from the dollar store and a computer. I had a hard ... I didn't have a laptop when I first started. The computer was as large as my washer, almost. It was just awful. It was ... You can have that. You would fill out online the application. It's just a basic information and YouTube videos is what I went through. There were YouTube videos of some teachers that worked there, and they, as part of their ... another business that they do, and you ... They kind of walk you through the lessons that they teach, so you can get an idea of what you would be doing, what they look for.

Gina: It kind of walks you through the introductory lessons, like showing flashcards and rewards, so you can feel comfortable even before you would do an interview. Because the interviews are live, so when you first fill out an application, they will send you an email. They would say, "You want to do a little live interview." It's like five, 10 minutes, and it's over the internet, like FaceTime, like a class would be. And they send you the link and you can schedule the time, and you can do a little interview telling them about yourself, and then you'd move on to teaching a lesson, and they send you those materials and you can ... I would say watching YouTube, talking to other teachers, joining the Facebook group for this company and feeling around with other people's experiences.

Shane: So do they ... So you actually do do an ... How ... You do do an interview with the company, and then you move on to actually teaching.

Gina: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Shane: So if someone started today, how long would it take them, basically, to teach their first class, theoretically?

Gina: Theoretically. It takes them as long as they would like it to take them, honestly. Some of them go really fast through it. Some of them, I think, have a lot of anxiety on teaching a lesson, and so they book their time. I know a couple who have ... I was hired pretty quick, but some will say, "Okay, I don't want to schedule. I'm not ready for two or three weeks." Some it's been months, and they're still not hired, because they keep canceling their-

Shane: But in theory, if they ... Yeah, if they wanted to, they could say, I can apply, I can do my interview, go teach my first course within a couple weeks, basically.

Gina: I would give yourself maybe about a month for all of it, just because once you first ... Even if you're hired within a week or a week and a half, with setting up everything, then you want to open your slides, and sometimes it takes a couple weeks or a week or two to get bookings, because you got to do your profile, you have to do a little video of yourself, like "Hey, I'm Teacher Gina," and tell them about where you're from. So to just create all of that and get booked, I would say max about a month.

Shane: Yeah. There's always a barrier to entry. If you want this job, if you want to make money, if you want anything good to happen in your life, there's a barrier of entry, because if it was easy, everybody would do it.

Gina: Well, right.

Shane: You've got eight kids. You've got a family. You had to go through the process, and if you could do it, I would say anybody with less than eight kids ... So that's what-

Gina: Absolutely. And I did my interview at 1 AM when I knew no one would bother me, and I scheduled it at that time, and yes, it is ... The first month, I made $10. So I thought ... Everybody starts out somewhere. But it was $10 I didn't have, and then the next month, it was like 500, and then the next month, it was 1700, and then it was ... So it kept increasing to where now, whatever I open gets booked automatically, and it's a fun job. It's amazing that-

Shane: Do you have a waiting list or something? You said you're just over ... You can book any slot you wanted. Can the teachers refer to each other? If you have a friend, can you be like, "Oh, I don't have any slots, but my friend Jill does," or whatever. Or like ...

Gina: Unfortunately, no. I would love that, though. We have talked about that before. It would be great. If there are different parents and families that have different ... that like different teaching styles, so that's where this company is the liaison between the teachers and the parents. They will ... There are people called LPs which are called Learning Partners, and they speak Chinese and English, and they will facilitate back and forth, "This teacher is really animated," and then "This teacher's more of a low key," because you don't have to be a certain personality. Everybody has different likes.

Gina: So they kind of book ... You can't refer another teacher because there's no communication, really, between when they book. Now, there are called priority bookings, and the priority bookings are where the parents can say, "She doesn't have this slot open, but I really would love for my child to be taught at five," and they can send it to you, and you can say yes or no. You can say, "No, I'm sorry. I just don't want to get up that early." You can say whatever you want.

Shane: What's crazy is there's a billion people in China. You know what I'm saying? There's no shortage of students. That's like 20, 30 thousand people per teacher that's doing it now. What'd you say, 60,000 people or something like that?

Gina: There's over 60,000 teachers right now, yeah.

Shane: And even that's not close to enough to serve a billion people. So you couldn't book everybody's schedule, even if you wanted to. It's just a matter of-

Gina: You couldn't.

Shane: ... system, you know?

Gina: No, you couldn't. And there's just ... There's so ... The kids ... They're actually expanding now to 300 more countries, so it's an expanding business that's going to be other countries. It's not just going to be China. So it's just ... They're constantly ... They push, push, push to refer friends, or if you know anybody that has ... that's interested because the interview process can be a little grueling, but it's cake once you get hired.

Shane: Yeah. It's just getting over the obstacle, and once you get past the speed bump, it's smooth sailing from there.

Gina: Absolutely. Yes. Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yes it is. That's what I tell people. It's just so worth it. It really is. I ... My husband will say, "Are you teaching again?" And I'm like, "I think it's almost addicting," and I've never had a job where I feel like-

Shane: Well, they send you money for sitting in your laundry room.

Gina: Yeah.

Shane: Pretty awesome.

Gina: I know.

Shane: Let's be realistic

Gina: I'm like, "Sorry, going to the laundry room."

Shane: That's what we tell everybody about online business, is it's hard in the beginning. There is a barrier to entry to all of these things, like different ways to make money online. But gosh, the reward is something that didn't even exist for humanity 20 years ago. That's what people don't get is like this is the first time in human history a life like this was possible, and it's crazy to just waste away in the way we've done it for the first 10,000 years when you could do it the way you can do it now.

Jocelyn: For sure. And we ... I mean, we definitely want people to be able to get more information from you, so what we're going to do is we are going to set up a page-

Shane: Yup. It's at flippedlifestyle.com/teachingenglish, and that's all one word. So T-E-A-C-H-I-N-G-E-N-G-L-I-S-H. Flippedlifestyle.com/teachingenglish, and if you are someone who is stuck right now and you don't know what you want to do next-

Jocelyn: Yeah, if this sounds appealing to you-

Shane: If you're looking at making a little money to support the bigger business that you're building, maybe to get some ad revenue going, pay for hosting-

Jocelyn: Or maybe you just don't want to be business owner. Like it's just not something that really appeals to you, but the idea of making some extra money is something that really appeals to you.

Shane: Then go to flippedlifestyle.com/teachingenglish, and we will have more information there, and we will connect you directly to Gina. So she's the expert. She knows about this field. We're so thankful, Gina, that you came on the show and were so transparent and just giving your time away to us to tell people about this opportunity. So we will connect you with Gina, and she will guide you and tell you how you maybe can get online, teach a few classes today, and make 20, 25 bucks an hour that you can use however you ... So again, that's flippedlifestyle.com/teachingenglish. And you can get all that information.

Jocelyn: All right. We are going to wrap this up for today. Gina, thank you so much for your time, and sharing your experience.

Gina: Thank you.

Jocelyn: It's been awesome to talk to you, and I can't wait to hear about your next adventures with your students.

Gina: Thank you so much, guys. Thank you.

Shane: All right, guys. That wraps up another episode of The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. What an amazing opportunity and story that we heard today from Gina, being able to work in your laundry room and talk to kids on the other side of ... literally, on the other side of the planet, exactly 12 time zones away, and make money online. Make money anywhere in the world, be able to make more time for your kids and your family. There's so many opportunities to make money online and work from home right now. It's crazy not to explore all of your options. We cover a lot of options, how to make money online and work from home inside of the Flip Your Life community. We would love to have you in our community so you can explore all the different opportunities and options and find your path to change your family's future.

Shane: To learn more about the Flip Your Life community, go to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife, all one word. That's F-L-I-P-P-E-Dlifestyle.com/flipyourlife. And you can learn about all of the courses, coaching, and community options that we have available for you. Our mission is to help you start an online business, make money online, work from home, and flip your family's life just like we did. We can't wait to see you inside. That's all the time we have for this week. Until next time, get out there. Do whatever it takes. Live your life.

Jocelyn: Bye.

Links and resources mentioned on today’s show: * Click here for more information on how to teach English online * Flip Your Life Community

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In today's episode, we help Brad overcome fears and obstacles while scaling his business.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jocelyn: Hey y'all. On today's podcast we help Brad overcome fears and obstacles while scaling his business.

Shane: Welcome to The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast where life always comes before work. We're your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. We're a real family that figured out how to make our entire living on life. Now we help other families do the same. Are you ready to Flip Your Life? All right, let's get started.

Shane: What's going on everybody? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. It is great to be back with you again today. Super excited to talk to another member of the Flip Your Life community and help them take their business and their life to the next level. We've got an awesome guest today, Flip Your Life community member, Brad Grey, and I didn't even try to rhyme that it just happened, but Brad, welcome to the show.

Brad Grey: Hey guys, how are you doing?

Jocelyn: Hey Brad, we are excited to talk to you today. You have some really interesting things going on in your business, and I think that our listeners are going to love it. So let's dive right in. Tell us a little bit about you, your background, and what you're doing online.

Brad Grey: All right. To start, I'm a husband and a father of three. Actually, I have three kids, two daughters, basically. Age seven and a four month old now, I guess. Yeah-

Shane: That's a busy house right there.

Brad Grey: Yeah. You're not kidding, and also a two year old son who is ... They have those terrible twos, so you've got all that going on and a dog running around. It's definitely busy. It's definitely a challenge to find that time, but I was able to kind of figure out ways to build that time with the help of you all, segmenting out the schedules and what not. I'm still a practicing biology/science teacher pretty much whatever they ask me to teach. I've been pursuing online business since about 2012 when I made a product, and I put it on Teachers Pay Teachers, and I started to blog a little bit. Just anything I could do really to make some extra money when we had my first child and every once in a while I'd get this little thing, a sale and it was like this bug just telling me, "Hey you need to be doing something else with this."

Shane: It's like a virus.

Brad Grey: It went on for years, and I just kept ignoring it like, it's only a couple of bucks here, a couple of bucks there but ... Then I came across your article in Forbes right about the same time I was finishing up my master's degree in curriculum and instruction and it was like a perfect storm. I was finishing up and I knew I didn't want to be the administrator, I wanted to just dive in and write curriculum.

Jocelyn: I have to stop you here because in your form that you filled out it says "I knew what I needed to do, and I consumed what I suspect was at least 150 podcasts and even listened to some several times."

Shane: That's amazing. You got the full Netflix binge listen of the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast.

Brad Grey: Absolutely I used to love going to mow the lawn just so I could get a couple of episodes in.

Jocelyn: That is awesome. I love that.

Shane: We need to put that in all our sales copy. We even make mowing the yard fun.

Brad Grey: Yeah, tough to make that fun, but it was my only opportunity to really get out there and listen to you guys. I listen to several, some of them several times just, to help provide that motivation every once in a while you just need that kick in the butt. Listening to certain episodes helps with that for sure. It helps keep me going, and I'd listen to No Sugar Shane, telling us what's up. It helps keep us going.

Jocelyn: Absolutely. So you were listening to the podcast and you decided that you needed to get this thing onto your own website and then you decided to invest in yourself and become a member of our community. Tell us a little bit about that journey.

Brad Grey: Yeah, so ... Well, I had it like a wordpress.org site, or a wordpress.com site. I rolled that over and then built it up from there. I did have a couple of blog followers, 75, to be exact and that I converted over to an email list, but really what the challenge was is just finding time, finding the motivation. I took your advice, early in your community you have a breakdown of how to manage your time. Basically I just charted out exactly what I needed to do and basically looked at the end goal and mapped out what I needed to do to accomplish each day in order to meet that end goal of being able to launch a full curriculum and whatever. It was like six or nine months out. So just sitting down and mapping that all out was extremely helpful and having a goal each and every single day to accomplish to make it all happen.

Shane: What's amazing is, we actually talked about when we were structuring the Flip Your Life blueprint, what's the order you need to do things in, because everybody out there is like, "Do your sales funnel, write your email list," and all this. Our background is busy working parents who are raising children. When are we ever going to find time to build a business? As we were structuring the Flip Your Life blueprint, and we were putting it in order, we were like, the first thing you have to do is get your calendar under control. If you don't, you're never going to have time to build all these things that the gurus say you have to have. We actually ... The second or third chorus is, time management. Look, got to fill this out. You've got to do this. It's not sexy, it's boring, and it takes a lot of discipline. If you don't do this part, then none of the others are ... It's like a meta skill, like it magnifies all of the other things that are happening.

Shane: It's funny you ... You kind of snuck up on us in the community Brad. When I saw your success story, I was like, who is this guy? Because I was like, "Brad Grey?" You posted in the success forums, "I have 136 members," and we're like, "What is it, where did that come from?" Because usually we're like, okay, we see someone make the lead magnet, we see someone make the product, we see someone do this, you just dropped this hundred plus member bomb into the success forums one day, and everybody started chiming in and I'm actually going to ... I don't always read the success posts, but I want to read a part of yours because it's amazing. I click on the link, I go in and it says, "Hey, I'm Brad Grey. I am a lurker. period." And, that's how you start the whole thing.

Jocelyn: I love it Brad, you're my people.

Shane: You're Jocelyn's people, and that's why we were like, okay, who is this guy? It says, "I tend not to share much, today as a result of listening to the most recent member calls and buying a ticket to Flip Your Life I wanted to share a huge success I've had in this community." You go through and say, "I learned about the Forbes article. I wasn't a member for a long time, but then I got started, got momentum and then I did a member count today, and I have 136 members. I have almost replaced my income from my full time job. It has been truly life changing. I can't think S&J enough and the community, now it's time to level up, replace my income and get to my dream level." And then you say, "I have found 136, I can find a thousand."

Shane: I was like ... It's just amazing to hear someone ... I'm sure you've got other posts in here, but I'm like, this is basically your first success post that's like really getting into the detail, and it's just like, "Hey, by the way I almost replaced my income." But that's so awesome because we forget like 80% of people are lurkers, and it's okay to lurk. It's okay to sit in the back. It's okay not to be talking about every single thing and asking a question every day as long as you're taking action and actually building your business. You've been doing that man. Congratulations on all that success dude. That's incredible.

Brad Grey: Thank you so much. It's work. A lurker mostly because I got no time. There's no time ... There was no time to dwell in the community. I had work to do and a very tight schedule, so just getting focused, that's what kept me from being an overactive member in the community, but-

Shane: We actually find that a lot though-

Brad Grey: I get what I need and I .... It was good. That check in and being able to have someone to go to when you need help and you need it fast, it's truly awesome.

Shane: That's okay though because we actually find that happens. A lot of people will at the very beginning of their journey, get into the community and use it as a resource. "Okay, I've got to watch this video, I've got to take action. I've got to jump in the forums real quick and ask a question." What happens that we see a lot in the cycle of people coming through the membership is once you get to that 100, 150, 200 member level, that's when you jump in and you celebrate. That's when you jump in and start, "wait, I'm going to chime in here. I've been through that," and you get that circle of people succeeding and helping, succeeding and helping. It creates this awesome feedback loop inside the community where you're getting what you need and you're helping other people get what they need and everybody is like moving forward and growing together. Right?

Brad Grey: Absolutely. It's just really incredible how much activity you guys have been able to generate within that community. It's just, everybody's there to support each other. It's really great.

Shane: Yeah, I can't wait till you actually get to the live event and you meet everybody and deepen those relationships and then you come back and you're like, oh my gosh, that's not just a picture in the forums. That's not just a person's name anymore, that's the person I ate lunch with. That's the person I sat by at the mastermind group. That's the person I jump on a Zoom call with every week now, and it becomes so much more real.

Jocelyn: Okay, Brad. You've had a really exciting journey so far, but a lot of our listeners they can't really relate to the ship. Maybe they're still coming up with their idea, maybe they're just getting started. Let's take it back just a little bit to when you were getting started doing your own thing, meaning like your own website or having your own membership. What was something that was hard for you that you were able to overcome in those early days?

Shane: What was your biggest challenge besides time when you first started out?

Brad Grey: I think for me it was just believing that it was going to work. No, I read the Forbes article. I felt good and great about it and I followed your stories and I saw the other stories and there's always this doubt that, "am I doing the right thing? Am I investing this time in the right way when I could really be spending more time with my family?" But making those time investments early on, for me, yeah, they paid off, but it was tough to pull back and convince myself that what I was doing is going to work and also convince my wife that this is actually a good use of my time.

Brad Grey: Getting the support all around was one of the biggest challenges that I had when I was going through this, because I would even ask for a babysitter so I can stay on track and meet my weekly goals of putting out content and building the curriculum. So it's not just my wife supporting me, but even grandparents supporting, just to help with the kids. There's a lot of investment there and a lot of, you just got to believe and it ends up working out.

Shane: It's hard in the beginning. A lot of times people will come to us and they'll say that ... Jocelyn always says, "Well, that's great for you. It worked for you, but I don't know if that will work for me." That's one of the common things that we hear and see all the time, and when you were talking about your story there, it's not necessarily just the belief in yourself. Most people, once they get into their content and they start creating these things, the belief in the self and the actual knowledge and actual expertise pours out of you. But for the first six months you don't get feedback. Like you don't get, surveys and listeners and purchasers. There's no reward and sometimes it feels like you're digging a ditch and filling it back up, and then you're digging a ditch and then you're filling it back up. Right?

Brad Grey: Absolutely.

Shane: And you just ... Until you get to the tipping point, which could be six, nine months down the road ... We didn't quit our job for 13 months. It took us about a year and then in the 13th month we quit our job before we even were close and that was still after sacrificing, selling our house, getting our bills down to an acceptable level where we thought we could take the risk. We did a lot of stuff within that and you don't feel that feedback for months and months, and months. There are a lot of days and long nights where you're going to bed saying, "Man, is all this worth it? Is this going to pay off?" And you know what the ... I'll tell you what's the honest answer is.

Shane: The honest answer is you never know. You kept going and you get to the point ... We know if we work as hard as we can and never give up that, something's going to come of it, but I think the lack of belief comes from that. There's no guarantees. You're just doing this work and you're just waiting for some like positive feedback.

Jocelyn: I think that sometimes people think that, oh well, this person they don't support me, they don't support my dreams. It's not really from a place of, I guess, anger or hostility or anything like that. It's just from a place of the unknown. That's really hard for a lot of people. It's really hard for me. I don't like not knowing what's going to happen next. I don't think that your wife or anyone else is coming at it like, "Oh, I don't support you because you're a loser." It's more just because they don't know. They don't know what's going to happen, and that's hard for a lot of people.

Shane: Is your wife on board now? Bet she's on board now.

Brad Grey: Oh absolutely. Yeah. She's on board now.

Shane: You just got to prove it. Like that's the thing is like ... Jocelyn, even to this day, I'll come up with some harebrained idea, which is at least like every three hours and she just looks at me and she's like, "Prove it. Prove it. If that's possible, prove it." But then you got ... It always reads. I'm actually about to teach a new training tonight for the Flip Your Life community, for the Flip Your Life members. Each week we do a training for Flip Your Life live attendees to get them ready. We're talking about these phases that entrepreneurs go through in their life. You figure out something, you yearn for more then you learn about it, then you'd go earn it and then you just keep burning it up until it makes it happen. But what's funny about being an entrepreneur, being a business owner is you go through these cycles and they keep resetting.

Shane: So like your ... We're going to talk about this in a little bit. You're at this stage now where you've reached this point and you went through that first cycle where you wanted something, you put in the work and you weren't saying anything, you didn't believe it was possible, and you had to keep going anyway. Then it happened and now you see what's possible, but the next level, that's an even higher mountain and it starts over, right?

Brad Grey: Absolutely, yeah.

Shane: You just keep resetting the process, and that's something that we've really been stressing to people lately is, people will say like, "Well, I'm scared." I just ... I know somehow if I believe this is possible for me, and we're kind of like, that never goes away. If you want in the game, if you want to be self employed, if you want to stay self employed, you want to make money online, you want to work from home, you want to be location independent, snapping the Instagram pictures on the vacation that you've never been on before. Right? You've got to get in the game and that fear stays and that uncertainty stays and that hustle stays and everything just keeps like going on and on forever but once you cross the line it's worth it.

Jocelyn: The only certainty is that if you do nothing, nothing will happen.

Shane: Right. That's exactly right. And you've done a lot ... I love your story too because it's like, "I am a lurker. Nobody knows I've been in here all this time incognito, making things happen." But you made it happen. You were doing it and you look like an overnight success, but people don't realize there was a moment where you didn't believe. There was a moment where you had to keep going. There was a disagreement with your wife on whether you should do it and like, "am I doing the right thing?"

Shane: I remember specifically when Anna Jo was really little, when we started out. There were many nights when we were grinding and I was like, "Man, like I'm losing an hour today that I could be playing with her," or, "I'm losing an hour today while I could be playing with Isaac," but now, I spent this morning ... I just spent two and a half hours of my kids homeschooling. Cool, right? I bought ... I spent the hour then to get the two and a half hours back today. That's really where the investment comes from. That's what overcoming the belief, the lack of belief, the fears and all that comes in is, hey, do it a little bit now so you can have a lot more later.

Jocelyn: Okay, Brad let's jump a little bit forward to today. Let's talk about what's going on as far as your mindset or what types of fears are holding you back right now.

Brad Grey: All right, currently I'm at about, well, I think 143 I checked right before this call in terms of numbers, my goal by the end of the year is to get to 500. Right now, I guess I'm just stuck. I know that my current strategies for growth aren't going to get me to that 500 mark. Just knowing my numbers and knowing how quickly I can build up my list, so I guess I'm just stuck in terms of how to get to that 500 number and what strategies I need to do in order to get there.

Brad Grey: I've done a webinar, one, in my house with my three children. It's really a struggle to find time to have that quiet time to really be able to run a webinar from my house. Again, that could be a mindset issue. I know I was able to do it once, I could probably do it more, but it is a challenge. That's one aspect that's kind ... That I feel as though it's holding me back and just not knowing what direction to go. Like Shane was mentioning before you, you reach this point where you made it over the first mountain and now I feel like I'm at the bottom of the other mountain and I'm not sure which direction to go to get to the top.

Brad Grey: I also feel like my niche ... I get concerned that maybe my niche is a little bit too small to get to my dream number or even my end of year number of 500. I know there's 550,000 biology teachers in the US and I have about 5,000 on my list. Getting to that 50,000, I pretty much need every single biology teacher in the country to hit the goal that I want to hit.

Shane: Well, let's work backwards here. We'll talk about ... We'll go back to the time then ... Let's talk about that size of the niche problem first. You have a hyper targeted niche and anybody with a hyper targeted niche is going to be able to convert a lot more of their list, than someone who's like in a really, really broad niche because the people that join your email list or join your thing, they are biology teachers. It's not like I'm passing interest in email marketing or I'm passing interest in painting pictures, so I join some artist's email lists to learn how to paint more. It's not a hobby, that is their career. They are this, they need it, they want it. That's why they're in.

Shane: So it's not above and beyond the expectation to say you could easily convert 10% of your list, which is 5,000 emails, that's 500 people. That is not like rare air for a hyper targeted niche. When every single human being that joined, pretty much a biology teacher or teaching biology in some way, it's just a matter of giving them more opportunities to buy. You can get 500 from the 5,000 people that have already found you. Okay?

Brad Grey: All right.

Shane: We see that over and over and over again, so don't let that limiting belief or ... Sometimes we hear these statistics. We usually throw out general things like the 5% rule. Like if you have 1,000,000 people listen and 5% might opt in and 5% of them might open your email, then 5% of might buy, whatever, it just keeps going. We throw that out there as a baseline, but it's not the truth in every single niche. Your niche is temperate targeted. The goal there is focus on those 5,000 and figure out why 136 have joined, and where are the other 464 or whatever it is, that was 364. Figure that out, focus on marketing to them. If you can increase ... Increasing conversions is 100 times easier than increasing traffic and opt ins. So let's just get more of those people out. That is 100% possible.

Jocelyn: I would just say too, one size doesn't fit all. You have to remember that whatever your goal is, the reason that you're wanting 500 members I presume is to hit a specific income goal, right?

Brad Grey: Yes. I think that's an appropriate amount for me to be able to have more flexibility and I desire to quit my job.

Jocelyn: Just remember that there are other ways to reach that goal and one way is to retain more people, another way is to increase your price. There might be other ways of doing it, like selling one off products. There are other things that you can do, so don't feel like you're totally constrained by, "I must fit this exact mold."

Shane: Yeah, a simple price increase could bring the number down to 400. You just do the math and you're like, "Wait a minute. It might be easier to get 400 people, so what would the price point be to get that and reach the same financial goal?" Don't get pigeonholed into yourself thinking your niche is small. I'm telling you right now, guys, if you've got 50,000 people doing something, 500 will pay for it, so you've just got to be able to increase those conversions, do more to give them more opportunities to buy and get more involved in the increasing ... Increasing conversions is way more important than increasing traffic. Our list is not huge, Jocelyn and I don't put a lot of effort into like huge ad campaigns and traffic and things like that because we convert podcast listeners into email subscribers, into members really, really well. We do it at a high clip.

Shane: Our business has grown something now like 18, 19 months in a row with very little ad spend because we focus a lot on giving people opportunities to join our membership. We say it every week on our podcast, I PS it on every email I send out and like we just focus on converting more people and that's going to produce a lot more income. It doesn't mean that other stuff's not important, but if you start thinking and trying to do the math, "Oh well there's only so many of these people in the world, I can't get there," your brain's going to subconsciously believe that and you won't get there.

Brad Grey: Absolutely. I really like your ideas with the changing things up a little bit in terms of mindset, like selling a one off product to my list or just working on retention. That was something.

Jocelyn: Just think outside the box a little bit. You can figure out other ways to make this happen, but don't get distracted by a lot of unnecessary things. As far as like what to do next, you already have an offer that's clearly converting, so I think the next step for you is really probably just finding more people. So I would concentrate maybe on some advertising. The good thing about the education space is that it's really easy to advertise and fairly inexpensive because there aren't a lot of people doing it.

Shane: And with finding more people means from your list. Like, it's ... All those, there's probably right now 200 more people that will instantly buy your product, if they don't know it's there, so you can upload your list and advertise to those people. You can go in and just advertise straight to your email list about your members. They've already signed up.

Jocelyn: A price increase is a great way to do it.

Shane: Yeah.

Jocelyn: Shake people out who maybe wanted to join but they didn't for whatever reason. Oh well by the way, I'm getting ready to do a price increase.

Shane: Yeah, "We're raising prices next year, but you can lock it in now, you've got 72 hours to do it," send that out to your list and you just shake the apple tree. That's how you find more people for your membership is in this audience that you already control. There's other things you can do like on Teachers Pay Teachers. I know you've got individual lesson plans uploaded there, correct?

Brad Grey: Yes.

Shane: The strategy here for everybody listening at home is, I have a core product that I sell on my own website, but then I find a third party marketplace to go sell my products individually to get discovered, to make extra money. It's a great strategy to boost your income. My lesson plans in Teachers Pay Teachers are structured to make sure they know that there is a ushistoryteachers.com. There's a copyright with my domain on the bottom of every paper, the last slide of every single slide deck and any PowerPoint that I sell on Teachers Pay Teachers always is a sales page for the membership. I've injected sales copy and these things in there to make sure that anyone who buys any resource knows there's another step. There's another place to go get these things, to build memberships.

Shane: So just a little bit of strategy. You could probably go out and get 10, 20% more members right now, and then with a little more application you can get in front of the people you already have that already know about you, and let's just convert. Let's get the 300 members out of that list as soon as possible before we ever go to the big task of how to ... You created the biggest mountain possible. You said this earlier, "I have to get every human that's in my niche on my email list by the end of the year." That's not going to happen. When we create these ghosts and these demons that we have to fight it does become oppressive. It does become very hard right to actually do those things. The better thing is to say, "Well, wait a minute, what do I already have available and what am I not doing to maximize that?" That's what we need to do in your case too.

Brad Grey: Awesome. Thank you so much. I love some of the ideas that you shared there. Price increase is always get people to jump ship-

Shane: Always.

Brad Grey: It's crazy to see. Kind of in line with what you've mentioned I think a good transition would be ... I was talking, tossing around in my brain the idea of introducing another curriculum because a lot of teachers at the high school level teach multiple subjects and another one might be, for me, environmental science. I was thinking about ... I think it would be relevant to my current list as well, so I was just curious what your thoughts were on doing that because I know you always hit the nail on the head, hit the nail on the head. Just curious if you think that would be advisable to invest time into creating that or just keep building the current curriculum that I have.

Shane: I would not do that yet, because you've got so much more potential on this email list that you've already got that you haven't even tapped into yet. There's at least enough people there to get to 250. It's going to be so much easier to just get really consistent and prolific marketing what you already have to people who are already interested than to hope that they want more and move heaven and earth to create this thing. This is the knee jerk reaction to most people when they hit a plateau, is, "I've got to create something new, this thing's not working as good as it was anymore because whatever," but really it's just you haven't squeezed that rag dry yet. If you just put your effort into that for maybe another year and really zero in and laser dial in on focusing what you already have, it's a lot lower energy, it's a lot easier and you're going to get to a higher point where then maybe you can go hire some support to create the new thing instead of you doing all the work by yourself.

Shane: I created most of the trainings in the Flip Your Life blueprint that exists the way it does now, was that in 2016 or 15?

Jocelyn: 15.

Shane: In February of 2015 I sat down and said to myself, "What are the most evergreen concepts that everyone has to know that even have a chance to succeed?" Like if a family comes in and they want to change their future, I need to know exactly ... They need to know exactly what are the steps to get there. The steps that will always exist. Create an idea, get an Avatar, go out and create a product, market your product. How do you market that? How do you use advertising? How do you do these things? How do you build recurring revenue? How how do you do all that? How do you research to make sure your idea will actually make money in the marketplace? I wrote all these things down and I started looking through it and I took out some of the tactical stuff that was really like, well, this is how Leadpages works today, but then they change in six months. We threw that out. We said, "What are the core evergreen principles that you have to do to make this work?"

Shane: I created all that in one month. I created like 30 or 40 courses in one month. I only now update videos when members specifically need them. Does that make sense? I'm doing a training tonight, it's going to be really, really important for the Flip Your Life live attendees, and it's a course that we've been meaning to add. We're just adding on top. We're just a little sprinkle. We'll sprinkle on top of the cupcake. That's the ... We're adding these courses as we go. We don't move heaven and earth but every like five years. Our main goal is to say, "Hey, we've created this amazing thing that we know works. We've seen hundreds and hundreds of people start their business, quit their job, do all these crazy things with it. We just need to tell more people about that."

Shane: That's it. That's our job. Tell more people, spread the word, get the message out, and that's what your job is like right now. That's what you have to do, and this actually goes back to that first question you asked about, "Well, I'm having trouble getting this webinar done, I've got a lot of kids, the kids are in the house. I've to find a time when they're quiet, for my audience," and stuff like that. I feel you're at ... You're bucking up against the wall and you really need to just juggernaut through the wall right now because none of that matters. You've been to our member calls and you've seen us in our community, our kids are eating bags of chicken in the background, there's dogs, like my dog has a sledge hammer on her head and if we lock our doors she just keeps ramming it until it opens because she wants to get to us.

Shane: There's ... You've never seen anything perfect from us, that includes on our webinars. We were at ... We were doing a webinar one night and it's like pack of dog's was like barking outside or something. This was a sales webinar but it sold just as many as anything else. So do you want to get in a quiet room? Yeah, but you don't have to worry about the kids being asleep. You don't have to worry about background noise. Nobody cares. I read this awesome thing the other day, but like said, "You're so busy worrying about what," like when you go to a party, "You're so busy worrying about what you look like and stressed out and anxious, but the thing is everybody else is so worried about what they look like, they don't even look at you because they're just worried about themselves."

Shane: The person that shows up at your Webinar, they're not there for you. They are kind of ... They're kind of there for you. What they're really there for is how can this make my life better? That's what they're there for. They're not ... 90% of their attention is on you, not the baby crying in two rooms away. You know what I'm saying?

Brad Grey: You're absolutely right.

Shane: Yeah man. It's just like, just do it. We've done it right. I did ... Where was I doing that Facebook? I did a Facebook live the other day on our Flipped Lifestyle page. I was in the kitchen, our assistant was here and she was cleaning and doing something in the kitchen, unloading groceries or something, Jocelyn was talking to her, the kids were walking around playing with the dogs and watching a TV show in the living room, and I didn't even use a microphone. I just turned it on and I needed to do that video, I needed to do it right then it was to promote something so I just did it. Not one person said, "Man, could you tell everyone in the background to be a little quieter." No, they were like focused on what I was talking about and you just got to do it.

Shane: You just got to do it. It doesn't matter. Doesn't matter it's perfect, you'll make so much money someday you can go buy an office and you can go get a loan and have a quiet room that's soundproof. Right, but right now you just got to kill it. You just got to crush it. You got to be consistent. You got to be prolific and you got to be relentless. I always throw that one in because you can't let stuff like that hold you back.

Brad Grey: You're definitely right. Hearing no sugar, Shane. Tell it how it is, is really what I needed right now to help me break through this wall here.

Shane: I do that from time to time, except for Jocelyn because she tells me how it is and then I've got to back off because Jocelyn, Jocelyn's it's no sugar Jocelyn, at our house.

Jocelyn: Pretty scary individual. Okay. I think we have some good ideas as far as like mindset and just getting ready to go into this next phase of growth. With that in mind, what question do you have for us that we can help you with as you enter this next phase?

Brad Grey: I guess what specific growth strategies do you or members in the community seem to be getting the most success with right now?

Shane: For us it's promoting live type webinars, like live events. It's the easiest funnel to create to get to consistently work. You basically advertise or promote the webinar. So you would email your list and maybe start an ad with your uploaded list. Again, like let's just target those 5,000 people until we get everybody that we can in the membership. Every week, same Webinar, post it, they go and they register. Some of them show up, you pitch and they buy, and you'd do it again and again and again and again and again, because 90% of people on your list won't show up for this webinar this week. So let's go back and get those 90% to maybe come next week and then maybe the next week and then maybe the next week and doing them live really does make a difference because you're there, they see you're real, you're calling them by name and when you ask them to join, it's like inviting them over.

Shane: You also then, they raise their hand and say they wanted more information, you know the hottest people on your list. You have three or four followups to pitch them afterwards just via email automated. So there's nice automation to it, it really only takes a couple hours a week to be able to set up and it's just the easiest way to grow your business. It really, really is. Now, when you get more advanced, you can do things like evergreen webinars where people go to watch an on demand training. So you sell it like Netflix at that point, but if you really want to go to 100 to 500 people, 252 webinars in a row relentlessly and watch your business grow, it will happen. It can't not happen when you're constantly doing the work like that.

Shane: So for teachers, your needs are specifically to teachers, you would think about their calendar and you would say, "Hey, these people are off on Sundays and they're probably dreading work on Monday because they've been at the AAU basketball league or the cheerleading or the dance or the baseball park all weekend. They've been doing all these other things with their family and stuff. It's Sunday, they don't have a lesson for Monday. "Hey, come and do a free,"" call it a professional development, speak the language of your people. Talk about a topic to get them through, that leads to the pitch of, "Hey, get in here and get this curriculum, teacher your students, they'll improve, you'll improve. You won't be planning lessons all the time." You can go sell it to them and, hey, maybe 20 show up every Sunday. Maybe you get 20 people on your entire list to show up on every Sunday night.

Shane: If you do that, 20 people times 52 weeks in the year, that's 1,040 teachers. 1040 people in your niche from your list that would show up, and hear you give this speech every single week for 52 weeks in a row. If you can convert 20% of those, you would have 208 more members just like that.

Jocelyn: This is a really effective thing to do right before the beginning of school. So I would wait until summer is winding down, so maybe like mid July to late July type time. That's when people are really starting to be like, "Oh brother, school is getting ready to start. I haven't done anything this summer. I need to get with it." I've always had a lot of success doing education related trainings right before school is going to start.

Shane: Because we're playing that calendar. If you started this on July 15th and you went every week of the school year and what you do then is you just maybe give it a little flavor. You don't have to change the webinar, but you can give it a little flavor, like maybe certain things are taught in biology in September, certain things are taught in November. You can give it a little flavor to make it more relevant with your subject lines and stuff but it's basically the same thing. It's basically like this is how to do this. You can have a couple of webinars if you wanted to do two or three and rotate them. That's a powerful strategy. If you can ever get three or four webinars that you rotate and are all relevant to your list and you're just constantly every month in your list. Then you just grind it out man. You will get more than 20 people a webinar.

Shane: 50 people are probably going to show up. If 50 people show up to every webinar, now you've got it 408 or 400 and something new members, which gets you to your goal, 500 members. The moral of the story is, this is probably the best thing that's working right now, and it just ... You got to roll up your sleeves and you've got to do it right. You just got to roll up your sleeves and make it happen, but once you get in a rhythm, it becomes easy. You know what I'm saying?

Brad Grey: Right. Like anything else. No, I really like the idea of webinars. Now, I've been thinking about them a lot, obviously. One thing I like is even if people are not showing up, they're at least seeing that you're hosting, one. I think it ups your credibility at least a little bit.

Shane: You're top of mind.

Brad Grey: Top of mind as well. I also like ... You made a light bulb go off in my head when you said, I have 5,000 people on my list, but you've said it before, over and over again, not everybody's seeing all of your emails and retargeting those people in different ways, even though I'm sending those emails, I can look at my stats and I know that not everybody's responding to the emails but I have the ability to retarget them in other ways too.

Shane: You have to plan all your stuff out to support each other. Every Saturday or most Saturdays I send out like a little newsletter to our email list and it has like, it's all the stuff that we did that week. If I did a YouTube video I put it in there, if we had a cool Facebook post that ... We would do a prayer thread every Sunday, if you're not following us on Facebook and you got to flippedlifestyle.com/facebook or facebook.com/flippedlifestyle, we do a prayer thread every week. If our community needs prayer, like we pray for every one of them. We go through and Jocelyn and I read all those and it's just something we do, but we promote that in our email list because you want everything to be a big circle.

Shane: If you're on my email list, I also want you over on Facebook. If you're on Facebook, I'd like to have you on Twitter. If you're on Twitter, why don't you follow us on Instagram? Because we want as many places to reach you as possible. Flip Your Life live attendees, we have a special, exclusive Facebook group for them that's outside of the membership. Why do we do that? Well, I need ... If I'm doing a training, I need to be able to post in the Facebook group, send you an email and I'll go post it inside of the community. I know I got three chances to hit you instead of one, and I'm telling you, you got to contact people every day. I don't know if it's on social, I tried to do it on email every day.

Shane: You got to contact people constantly. If they unsubscribe, let them go, they weren't going to buy anyway, but you've got to constantly. You can't just say, "Well we're doing our monthly sale and now we're going to have a business." Nope. We're going to sell daily to our list, daily in our ads, weekly on these webinars and daily we're going to promote it. If you do that, you can't help but succeed over time. It just ... Not everybody will do it. There's a lot of people listening right now, you're shaking your head, you're driving in your car down the freeway, you're stuck in traffic, you're on the treadmill, you're sitting there right now going, "Man. Yeah, that's what I got to do." But not everybody's going to do it. The people that do, do it are the people that get to 500 members, that get to quit their job, that get to replace their income.

Shane: They get that trade that one hour now to get that three hours back later with their kids and their spouse. You've proven time and time ... Again, you're the guy that's going to do it. You just got to do it, man.

Brad Grey: Absolutely.

Jocelyn: All right Brad. It has been a lot of fun talking to you. I know that you are an awesome action taker, so I cannot wait to see what happens next in your journey, but before we go, I just want to ask you what we ask most people on the podcast, is what you plan to work on in the next 24 hours or so based on what we talked about here today?

Brad Grey: I think it's going to have to be just buckling down and starting to schedule out some webinars. I purchased EverWebinar and WebinarJam a long time ago and I've used it once, it's sad. So I have the tools to do the job, I just need to buckle down and just really start hammering through some webinars and maybe create a couple of others to go along with the ones that I already have so I can mix it up a little bit and just squeezing my list and trying to hit them in a lot of different directions in terms of just being top of mind, making sure they know I have a product for sale.

Shane: Yeah man, don't be shy. That list exists for one reason, to buy your stuff. That's why you created it. So go out and get it. Don't be afraid to ask your list for money. That's why it's there. That's like not asking an apple tree for an apple, that don't make no sense what's growing on the apple tree? Apples. They taste good. You're not just going to sit and watch them. Like, "Man, I'd love an apple today, but I only pick apples on Mondays." All right? Right now you walk over to the tree and grab an apple. That's what you've got to do to your list all the time.

Shane: All right, well listen, Brad, man, that was an awesome chat. Thank you so much man for being on the show today. Thank you for being an amazing member and thank you for shining the light on the lurkers cause there's a lot of lurkers taking massive action in the Flip Your Life community. We see you, we know you're there guys. We know you're doing it and then not everybody's going to be up and just talking about all this stuff they're doing all the time. But man, you've done a lot of great things. I have no doubt that you will do many great things in the future and also I have no doubt that what you share today, it's going to help a lot of people listening right now to take action and change their families future too. Thanks again for being on the show.

Brad Grey: Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate all that you guys have done and are doing.

Shane: All right you all. Thank you so much for tuning in today. What an amazing chat with Brad. He's doing great things in his business and we expect you to take what you learned today and take action and go out there and grow your business so you can change your family's future as well.

Shane: Before we wrap up, we want to leave you some wisdom from the Bible. Jocelyn, I get a lot of our information, a lot of our inspiration from the Bible. There's a lot of great Bible verses that are directly related to building and growing businesses. Today's Bible verse comes from Romans 8 verse 18 and it says, "I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us." Listen guys, whatever you got to do, whatever you got to suffer through, whatever you got to go through right now to build your business, to change your family's future, it's going to be worth it, and it will not even compare to what you're going to see on the other end of this journey.

Shane: All the things that Brad went through in the beginning, don't even compare to where he is right now or where he's going to go. All the things that we suffered through when we started our online business don't even compare to the amazing life that we have built today. So whatever you are doing, whatever you are grinding through, whether it's trying to find that idea, building your product, getting that WordPress website set up so that you can build a membership and build recurring revenue. It's hard. It is going to be difficult. You're not going to see the rewards right away, but all of that will not even compare to what your family's future is going to look like.

Shane: All right guys, that is all the time that we have today. We would love to have you inside of the Flip Your Life community. You can join Brad in there. It doesn't matter if you're a lurker, it doesn't matter if you're a question answerer or a question asker, whatever you are, we want you in the community right where you're at. Go to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife and you can learn all about the amazing training, forums, community and resources that we have inside and if you would love to meet Brad and meet me and Jocelyn at Flip Your Life LIVE 2019, go to flippedlifestyle.com/live and we would love to see you there. That's all the time we've got for this week guys. Until next time, get out there, take action and do whatever it takes to Flip Your Life. We'll see you then.

Jocelyn: Bye.

Links and resources mentioned on today’s show: * Brad's Website * Flip Your Life LIVE 2019 Tickets & Registration Information * Flip Your Life community

Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!

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View Details

In today's episode, we'll tell you how Matt makes over $4,000 a month selling his books on Amazon.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jocelyn Sams: Hey y'all. On today's podcast we'll tell you how Matt makes over $4,000 a month selling his books on Amazon.

Shane Sams: Welcome to The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, where life always comes before work. We're your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. We're a real family that figured out how to make our entire living online. Now, we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? All right, let's get started.

Shane Sams: What's going on everybody? Welcome back to The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. It is great to be back with you again today. Super excited, I am so excited about today's guest, because it is just gonna bring back so much nostalgia and my childhood and teenage years and college years back into my brain when we talk about this subject today. Our guest today is Flip Your Life community member Matt Davids. Matt, welcome to the show, brother.

Matt Davids: Yeah, no problem. Thank you for having me.

Jocelyn Sams: Matt, when I saw you in the community, I knew that you had to come onto our show. Because Matt works in the RPG game industry, which is ... Okay, I guess it's just RPG, role playing games.

Shane Sams: Dungeons & Dragons, all these cool things. We're gonna get into this, and I'm gonna be really pumped up about it. It's awesome.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, so before I met Shane I had no idea what a role playing game was. After I met him, I still don't really know what it is, but he is really, really excited about them and has been playing them for a very, very long time. Longer than some of our listeners have probably been alive.

Shane Sams: I think the first time I ever played a role playing game, I played Dungeons & Dragons when I was like ... Gosh, like 12 or 13 years old. I've always been into creative stuff and reading, you know, like science fiction, fantasy novels, Game of Thrones kind of stuff. The game is all pencil and paper and dice, right?

Matt Davids: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Shane Sams: I remember the first time I ever played we didn't have any dice because we couldn't afford to go buy the dice. We're just a bunch of kids.

Matt Davids: Yeah, I've been there.

Shane Sams: So we took hats and we like ... There was a 20 sided dice, so we wrote the numbers 1-20 on paper and we threw them in a hat. Then we had a six sided hat and a 10 sided hat, and that's how I cut my teeth on role playing games.

Matt Davids: Yeah, absolutely. I mean it sounds very similar to me, too. I was nine when I first played Dungeons and Dragons, and yeah. I came home from that and I had to make dice, so I just wrote them on a piece of paper and threw them in a hat.

Shane Sams: Oh, love it. I love it. See, I knew there was gonna be some kind of connection in this episode. I just knew it was gonna happen.

Jocelyn Sams: Well, and I saw Matt in our community and I saw what he was doing, and I thought, "You know what? This is a really cool business first of all, and I know Shane's gonna be really excited about talking to him." So I knew that we had to have you on the show, so thank you so much for being here today.

Matt Davids: No problem.

Shane Sams: Also, too, we always say that our community is extremely unique, because a lot of other communities it's like sales and life go just until the end of the Earth, right? We have so many different people doing so many different niches and so many different business ideas that it's really cool to see like, "Man. You can actually make money doing this." And Matt is actually making four to five thousand dollars a month off of his RPG business. So without going any farther, without spoiling anything else, tell everybody a little bit about you, about your background, and about what you're doing online right now.

Matt Davids: Yeah. Well, I went to college in Kentucky. I went to Asbury, which is in the little town of Wilmore.

Shane Sams: When he says little, he ain't jokin. Wilmore is a little bitty place.

Matt Davids: Yeah. When the college, and there's a seminary there, when they're in session, the town like ... I think it increases, like triples or something the population of the town I think. So I went there. I kind of had my hopes set on becoming a screenwriter, and I did the starving artist thing for awhile. That really didn't work out too well, so I ... At another point in my life I became a missionary and I went to Haiti. I came back from there and then I've been working in search engine optimization ever since.

Shane Sams: Wow. That's amazing. That's another part that's very fascinating about your story, and I feel like the world is changing around all sorts of things, like how we used to view things. You know, like back in the '80s, I'm gonna date myself here a little bit, so anybody that wasn't born in the '80s that's listening, I'm sorry.

Jocelyn Sams: Turn this off.

Shane Sams: Yeah, turn this off.

Jocelyn Sams: I'm just kidding.

Shane Sams: Back in the '70s and '80s, Dungeons and Dragons was this taboo thing and they thought all these kids were devil worshiping and all this stuff. I am a Christian, and you were a missionary, and low and behold we played role playing games and nothing got us messed up or off the beaten path, right?

Matt Davids: Yes. Yeah.

Shane Sams: Now it's just such a part of pop culture. You know, you have Stranger Things where the kids are literally on the show playing Dungeons & Dragons, and then I was just reading the other day that there was this massive surge in fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons. It's up so high in sales it's overtaking other board games and things like that, like how it's surging in popularity because we're all online and we all see that this stuff is good, harmless fun, right?

Matt Davids: Yeah, oh yeah absolutely and yeah to be clear, you do not have to worship Satan to play Dungeon & Dragons. You do not have to.

Jocelyn Sams: There are probably people out there who do but you know...

Matt Davids: There probably are. But, you don't have to.

Shane Sams: There's a way to get into it that way. I think that's the first time that we've ever had to clarify that someone wasn't worshiping Satan, in their niche.

Matt Davids: Yes.

Shane Sams: So this is good for all you guys-

Matt Davids: Yes, I have never worshiped Satan. I have never had the desire to worship Satan.

Shane Sams: Okay back to the missionary stuff, let's refocus.

Jocelyn Sams: Thanks for clearing that up.

Shane Sams: Alright, so when were you a missionary in Haiti?

Matt Davids: I was a missionary in Haiti through 2009 and 2010 and I was there during the earthquake, when the earthquake actually happened.

Shane Sams: Wow, like were you in Port de Prince?

Matt Davids: Yes I was in Port de Prince.

Shane Sams: Oh my goodness. Like what was that like?

Matt Davids: Well you know I thought I was gonna die. It was January 12, 2010, about 4:50 pm in the afternoon and there was just a kind of a quiet beautiful day. Haiti in January is beautiful because it's like 75 or something, degrees, and it's beautiful. You know I was working in an orphanage and I was sitting on the second floor of this little building that I lived in across from the orphanage and I just started noticing this little tremor and I heard some of the kids down in the courtyard just kind of getting scared about it and I walked out onto the little veranda and I remember myself saying, I was like, "Don't worry, it's just an earthquake." Well at that point the little tremor became something else. The ground just started shaking, like going just up and down, maybe like a foot and bouncing around, then the whole ground just like moved three feet to the left and I'm watching the orphanage building that's in front of me. It's a very big building, just swaying back and forth.

Matt Davids: The wall of the compound, because everybody's in a compound there. The wall of the compound just breaks and collapses. The water tank on my roof of the little apartment that I was in breaks and I get hit with water. And the sound of the earth just going, you just can't imagine, you just can't even hear anything, it was just so loud. And then like, things started calming down just a little bit and I noticed the youngest girl who's in the orphanage, she was three years old and she was sitting down in front of the orphanage building and I'm just watching concrete blocks and things falling around her and I kind of got my wits about me. I said, "Okay, well I guess I'm not gonna die," and so I ran down there and grabbed her and all the other girls had run out into the streets, so I ran out into the street, got them together and I said, "Okay, we're gonna start praying," and I got a big Amen that day.

Shane Sams: Wow. That is unbelievable. Like absolutely.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah like I'm kinda speechless on that one. I mean I've obviously never experienced anything like that but wow.

Shane Sams: And like I guess the next few days were just like packed with rescues and helping people and all that because it destroyed like 80% of the buildings.

Matt Davids: I think it was even more, I think it was 90%. Yeah like, the official death toll was like 350,000 people, so if you can even imagine that.

Shane Sams: Gee, man. Wow.

Matt Davids: I still can't really even imagine that.

Shane Sams: Have you been back since? Or how much longer did you stay after that?

Matt Davids: I stayed a few days and then we'd kind of were all, wanted to, the head of the orphanage and stuff wanted to evacuate us and stuff so, I was evacuated at that point and came back to the states but then after a few months I went back and I stayed there for a few months, tried to wrap up some of my work and that. I actually wrote a movie and shot a movie there that kinda went, I did some film festivals with and stuff but-

Shane Sams: Wow. Crazy, dude.

Matt Davids: But yeah it was something else, it was something else.

Shane Sams: I mean, when you've faced something like that, the other challenges in life kind of get smaller, right? I mean when you really see, like true devastation like that, like gosh, you know, and once you put the pieces back together for yourself, because I'm sure that was like post traumatic stress stuff going on there. How did that kind of get you thinking about your future and what you wanted to do with your life, like did things change for you after that?

Matt Davids: Yeah definitely. It just kind of really, yeah it kinda made me step back and think about a lot of things and made me take things more seriously and to be more intentional about the things I'm doing, yeah absolutely.

Shane Sams: Do you have a family right now?

Matt Davids: I do now, I do now.

Shane Sams: Yep, yep. So do you have kids?

Matt Davids: I do. I'm married, I have three boys.

Shane Sams: Okay so were you married then or single?

Matt Davids: No I was single.

Shane Sams: Awesome, awesome. Well I'm glad you made it back, brother. I'm glad you made it through that and I'm a big believer that God puts people right where they're supposed to be at all times and hey man, if you weren't there, that little 3-year-old girl might not have got picked up and those people might not have anybody to pray with and I just appreciate you for doing that, that's awesome.

Matt Davids: Thank you.

Jocelyn Sams: And I love how, you said, "Oh yeah we have three boys," but what you didn't mention were how old they are. Tell us how old they are because I can relate to you on this one.

Matt Davids: Okay so yeah I have a 4-year-old, a 2-year-old, and then an 8-month-old.

Shane Sams: Oh my goodness gracious, you are outnumbered and they are little.

Jocelyn Sams: So we also started our business when our kids were super little, so I totally understand what you're going through right now. It is not easy, it's not easy to be a parent of young children anyway, but it's really not easy to try to start a business while working full time and having little bitty children.

Matt Davids: Yes.

Shane Sams: What does your wife think about the roleplay?

Matt Davids: Well she likes roleplaying, she actually has played with us a number of times and she enjoys it.

Shane Sams: See, look at this model wife.

Jocelyn Sams: Matt, gimme a break, you know.

Matt Davids: The business, however, she wasn't really on board for the business.

Shane Sams: Why was that? I'm looking at your sheet that says you started like 2015ish, really starting to put these resources together, getting them on Amazon. So are these like, are these roleplaying modules, are these adventures that the players go on, like what are these resources that you are selling or that you started selling on Amazon?

Matt Davids: Yeah these are resources that help the game master run their sessions. So I don't really do adventures or things like that. I do some setting kind of material but basically these are, there's a lot of random tables, or different things that help the game master not have to prepare a lot before the session that they run.

Shane Sams: Interesting.

Matt Davids: So in roleplaying games, just to explain a little bit, if somebody out there is not familiar, there's a group of players, they create characters that they assume the role of and then there's one player called the game master, dungeon master, and they run the session. And so they present the players with obstacles and different things like that throughout the world and so running a game can be a challenging thing so I make resources for the game masters so they don't have to spend 20 hours prepping a session just to hang out with their buddies.

Shane Sams: And I always equate when people are like, "What is that?" When they're talking to me about it, I always say it's like, "Remember those choose-your-own-adventure books? Well that's kind of what roleplaying games are. Like the players are all the characters in the book, the game master is kinda like the book. You're the narrator, you're like, okay what do you want to do? Go left? Or go right? Right? So it's like that, that's their job, is to weave the story and then the characters' jobs, the players' job is to live the story and actually change the flow of the story. You're not like forcing them down a path, you're giving them as many paths and choices as possible and I can tell you, I used to plan a game when I was in college and we played like every Sunday night and man, it was a lot of work. Like you had to like, really think about things and be prepared because you never knew what the players were gonna do.

Matt Davids: Yeah.

Shane Sams: Like, you didn't know what to do, left or right or up or down or sometimes they just go backwards. Right?

Matt Davids: Yes.

Shane Sams: So your resources are not full adventures then, they're not like the story, it's like maps or dungeons or whatever.

Matt Davids: Yeah I have dungeon maps, so the game master can just grab a map and kind of fill it and then I have random tables that help cut down the prep of, because you have rooms or you have places and your players always want to explore those rooms and places if you don't want to spend five hours deciding what is all on that one place, you can just use my resources to roll dice and you'd figure out what's in that room.

Shane Sams: So this is almost like filler. Like because the big companies, like Hasbro, who owns Dungeons & Dragons, like, betcha didn't know that, folks at home. The same people making the Uno cards are making the other stuff too. They sell the big adventure but you're like the side adventures that randomly pop up, kinda deal.

Matt Davids: Yes. Kind of. And just also to fill in extra, just extra flavor or if... I also find a lot of game masters don't even like to run some of the big published adventures. They kinda want to do their own thing but they don't want to spend four evenings planning for two hours with their buddies, so they wanna, they just wanna be able to come in and you can just grab my books and just roll that and just roll dice on those tables and that and you know exactly what your, get items and things right there.

Shane Sams: That's amazing, yeah.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay so tell us a little bit about what you're selling right now. So know that you're selling the books and the resources, but how are you selling those?

Shane Sams: All on Amazon? Every bit of it?

Matt Davids: No, I'm selling some on Amazon and then there's a third party marketplace for roleplaying games, it's called DriveThruRPG and then of course I have my own website which is, DiceGeeks.com. And it's just the word "Dice" and the word "Geeks" just kinda squished together.

Shane Sams: Which is the greatest domain name I have ever said out loud on this broadcast actually.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah we were discussing that earlier. But like that is an amazing domain.

Shane Sams: So is the bulk of your income from Amazon?

Matt Davids: Yes.

Shane Sams: Okay. It is just interesting. I want to break this down for a lot of people, because we just went into game speak, we went into the table, y'all. That's where we went right there. But like this is really fascinating how these templates can be applied to all businesses. Like because you're selling, we'll say Amazon is your primary place you're selling. But you have a website and you're kinda selling it in multiple third party market... that's what Amazon really is, right? You're selling it, people are searching for stuff, you're selling stuff there, you're selling stuff on this third party market, you've got your website, that's your thing and you've done this consistently over time and it's built this... A lot of people would love to make $4- to 5,000 doing something they love, you know?

Shane Sams: And it works that way in almost every business, like we see, like we have our education websites. We have our website where we clearly sell lesson plans for teachers, we have third party markets, we have this one called TeachersPayTeachers, where we actually sell lesson plans on and you just kind of find all these places. Really, all you've done is you've created a resource that saves people time, which is one of the best things you can do in any niche... if you can save people time, or get people somewhere faster, you are going to make money, okay? So and then you found third party markets and you've built your own site and if everybody would just do that, consistently, they'd eventually make a little money and that feels pretty good at the end of the day to wake up and see that somebody bought your books overnight, right?

Matt Davids: Yeah absolutely, absolutely.

Jocelyn Sams: So tell us a little bit about, what are the challenges that you're facing right now? So I know that you're making some money on third party sites. What are you doing on your own website right now?

Matt Davids: Well yeah, not too much actually. On my own website, you can see the products which lead you to the marketplaces and of course I collect email addresses and I am also, I blog about game master tips, so tips and things like that to improve your games and cut down your prep time.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay.

Shane Sams: And that, the sales there like what would you say is the percentage of traffic in sales that your website is actually delivering right now?

Matt Davids: Oh gosh.

Shane Sams: Just ballpark it, doesn't have to be perfect.

Matt Davids: Yeah probably like 5% or less.

Shane Sams: Interesting.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay.

Shane Sams: So what's your greatest fear right now that you're just relying too much on Amazon and these third party markets?

Matt Davids: Yeah absolutely, absolutely.

Shane Sams: Yeah because if they change the algorithm you could be bottom of the list or.

Matt Davids: Yeah I know.

Shane Sams: Have you seen spikes like that in your revenue? From a month-to-month basis?

Matt Davids: Yes, yeah I definitely see sometimes and then also just like, listening to some self-publishing podcast or whatever hearing people talk about what's going on with Amazon or something like that. I can definitely track when they're changing things, absolutely.

Shane Sams: Do you find that, are your sales very seasonal? Like you average maybe four or five thousand, but like, you find like, is Christmas time really big and other times very slow or anything like that?

Matt Davids: Not yet and the reason for that is that, I've really just, in the last six months or so, really started getting consistent income. And like I mentioned before, I said my wife wasn't into it too much as a business at the beginning, because at the beginning when I started in 2015 really trying to do something like this, I was going to my day job, coming home, working on this until late into the evening and stuff. And I would make like $5 a month or something like that.

Shane Sams: Hard to generate the belief when you're bringing home-

Matt Davids: Exactly, exactly, so...

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah it's a bit of hard sell when you have a new baby, because at this time I assume that you had a pretty brand new baby.

Matt Davids: Oh yes, yeah our first son was just a few months old at the time.

Shane Sams: You're like, "Check this out baby, I got $5, that's at least three diapers."

Matt Davids: Yeah and it only took me a month to make $5.

Jocelyn Sams: Yes, listen I totally understand what your wife was thinking at that time.

Shane Sams: Yes.

Jocelyn Sams: She's like, this is ridiculous but the cool thing about it is that you keep going and you keep making sales, which is really good.

Shane Sams: Because you had some consistency. I'm looking at your sheet again, it says that you got 10 books for sale on Amazon, right?

Matt Davids: Yeah.

Shane Sams: And you've got four...

Matt Davids: Eleven. I just launched one a couple weeks ago.

Shane Sams: Oh, prolific. We're getting prolific around here. You've got 49 resources available for free on the marketplace, now is that just to generate leads?

Matt Davids: Yeah most, not all 49 are free, but probably, yeah probably 40 some are free and there's a few paid ones that I have on the marketplace.

Shane Sams: Right so generally what you've done is you're finding your traffic from these marketplaces and then trying to, and they buy your books and then hopefully they buy more. How big is your email list right now?

Matt Davids: My personal email list is getting close to 4,000.

Shane Sams: Oh wow that's amazing, yeah. Now is that coming from your website?

Matt Davids: That comes from my website, yeah. I've done some Facebook ads just to drive some traffic to a lead magnet.

Shane Sams: Perfect. But you've not really sold a lot to them or do you just sell them to the Amazon links?

Matt Davids: Yeah I sell them to the Amazon and to the DriveThruRPG links.

Shane Sams: Okay gotcha, okay interesting. So your blog is generating leads and you're driving traffic to these third party marketplaces and a lot of your sales are also coming from just people searching for this stuff, right?

Matt Davids: Yeah.

Shane Sams: Okay, so what do you think is next then, like what would make you happier, make you feel more diversified, make you feel safer about your income or even growing or maybe like what's holding you back from doing something like a membership or a recurring revenue type thing?

Matt Davids: I think the only thing that's holding me back from doing kind of recurring revenue or membership is that, I can't, I don't really understand the model, like I don't understand what exactly I would offer in a membership and I just, I have a hard time understanding like, community building and stuff. I mean it's just, I don't know, I try to look at it and I try to understand it but it's just hard for me to get my head around some of that. So that's kind of a big thing but you know I did create, I created a PDF on self-publishing, with like a strategy that people could use on the third party marketplace DriveThruRPG and I've tried selling that, I just don't really know exactly how to market that very well, but I mean another thing though is, it's just like, I love creating the books, I love creating the books, so like creating something about, self-publishing or business strategy just doesn't do it for me and so I'm just kind of struggling with some of those things.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay. Well the good news is that if you don't love doing something, you don't have to do it, so that's something really exciting. One thing that I wanted to kind of pull out of this questionnaire, we have everyone fill out a little questionnaire and one thing that you didn't mention is you say that, "I don't know if there's a need for a recurring model in the area of roleplaying games", I found that kind of interesting.

Shane Sams: Oh, Matt.

Jocelyn Sams: And I think that's a big assumption that a lot of people have that is not necessarily true, it's a story that we tell ourselves.

Shane Sams: That's right. And also too like, of course there's hobbies and things like that, but man, D&D is like golf. If you're into golf, you're buying golf stuff. You know what I'm saying?

Jocelyn Sams: And not everyone is going to be into it.

Shane Sams: That's right, but if you're into collectibles, you're collecting everything. That's what that game really is, like people buy the miniatures, they buy every book they can get their hands on and it just becomes this passion, right? And that's usually some of the best, like you don't need a new putter, but you gonna buy one when Nike releases a new one, right? Like that's what golfers do. And it's the same thing with gaming stuff, there really is probably a need for this and actually it's very interesting because the game master's job is often the hardest in the game and two, they're the ones who are usually the most obsessed with roleplaying games, they're the ones paying the most attention, spending the most time on it and that's usually the person that you really need to give something recurring, something because they need their fix, you know what I'm saying?

Matt Davids: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Shane Sams: Which is, I would be willing to bet that a lot of people that buy your books buy a lot of the other books, like you have repeat buyers in that Amazon system somehow because they're like "Whoa, this book was cool, I'm gonna go buy five more of Matt's books." Right?

Matt Davids: Yeah.

Shane Sams: That's all recurring revenue model is, is how you bought the one thing, it was so good you're gonna give me money the next month and I'll send you the next thing. Right?

Matt Davids: Yeah.

Shane Sams: So let's talk about that a little bit, let's talk about how we can, one, maybe up some of the sales on your own site, but two, create a membership or recurring revenue out of this, okay? Because wouldn't it be nice to know you're making $4- to $5,000 a month instead of, "I made $4- to $5,000 last month." Like that's why we shift to the recurring revenue model, like if I know that I have enough members to give me $5,000 a month, and I know my average member stays for six months, let's just guess, okay? Now that your whole equation changes to the future instead of the past, not, "well the last couple months I've made $5,000 a month." It's "wait a minute, I can predict now that I will make $5,000 a month for the next six months, which lets me buy ads to grow that and get it to $10,000 before I get there."

Shane Sams: Does that make sense?

Matt Davids: No, absolutely.

Shane Sams: And like that's what you really want, is that's why we're so, a lot of people get mad at us sometimes, like some of the only criticism we really get for the podcast is, "man y'all talk about memberships every time." Well like yeah, because that's how you're free and that's how you have predictable, stable income for your family and that's how you know that you can invest into ads and hire people and grow to whatever you wanna become because you've got money that you know is coming in and you don't have to worry about paying your lights. Right?

Matt Davids: Yeah, absolutely.

Shane Sams: So one, you touched on this a little bit, about the community aspect. Which really surprises me that you went down that path because dude you're a game master, that's all you do is create community every Friday night when your buddies come over, right? So it's like, you're just trying to create that for DMs, like I can imagine like a space of those dungeon masters in a colloquial terms, alright. But you're just, your community would be something where, I would guess that you would come on and talk to these people about being a game master, like these tips you send out or these emails that you're like, "Hey here's a tip or here's a blog post about the tip." You really would just go on live and discuss that with people, right? And share that with people. It doesn't even have to be a big forum, it can be just a Facebook group where you go live every other week or something like that.

Shane Sams: But I was talking to Jocelyn in the car on the way back from an appointment we had earlier and we were talking about you and your business and I'm like, this has to almost be like a physical thing if you were gonna do a recurring membership, like because that's one thing in roleplaying games people love is to flip through books, right? Love the paper, love the pencil, love to flip through books, like, I'm almost even thinking like some kind of monthly printed newsletter, where you send them a resource or you send them ideas and you send them maybe even a little worksheet that they get to pencil in some stats or something, right?

Shane Sams: And I can see people paying for that, man. If I was a game master and I was really fired up and I was like, "Man, twice a month, I get to go hang out and geek out with other dungeon masters, right? I get to be led by this guy who's wrote 11 books, you know? And then I get that Christmas present in my mailbox once a month, not my email inbox, like a physical printed thing that I get every month. I think you could charge anywhere from $50 to $100 for something like that a month. And it would only take a hundred of those game masters in the world and there's a lot more than a hundred of them, so all of a sudden we're double your income. And be consistent with it. Have you ever thought about doing anything like that?

Matt Davids: Yes, absolutely. I've definitely thought about it and that was actually kind of what I had been thinking about, was something that was recurring and that was physical that they could have. Yeah I'm just kind of struggling with the idea of just then producing... cause I can launch a book now on my own schedule, if I had to do something every month, I'm just kind of struggling with some of those things. Let's like, how do I create processes to get that out every month? How do I create engaging content and then how do I find those people that are willing to pay, if you're saying $50 or $100 or something like that a month, where do I find those people because in a lot of the forums and stuff that I hang around in, people are complaining that they have to pay $4.99 for D&D Beyond, which is just launching and just things like that that.

Matt Davids: So I just keep kind of struggling with how to make it work, but I mean I think the idea is sound, it's just like I don't know how exactly I can make it work.

Shane Sams: Well for one thing, the only people that post in those forums complaining are the people who are cheap, that are freeloaders.

Jocelyn Sams: Who are freeloaders.

Shane Sams: And that's why they're in the forum, freeloading and complaining.

Jocelyn Sams: And you know what? That's fine, like there are always going to be those types of people in the world, it's not a big deal. There are always people who think they should get something for nothing.

Matt Davids: Yeah.

Jocelyn Sams: But thankfully, there are a lot of other people who believe in paying, trading money for value.

Shane Sams: Yeah you only need 50 people to pay you $50 a month to make $2,500 a month right?

Matt Davids: Yeah.

Shane Sams: I would be willing to guess that somewhere in the world, as big as this thing is...

Jocelyn Sams: Probably on your email list.

Shane Sams: Right, exactly, you got 4,000 people who have opted in, who have said, "I want more game materials." Now, maybe 3,500 of those people are cheap and they are gonna complain about it, right? But maybe there's 50 to 500 of them that aren't and they just love the game so much and they're older, they've got good jobs and they just do this as their hobby for fun and they love it, like it's the same thing as the golfer analogy. They're gonna go pay for it, right? And a lot of the people, like, what's that famous show now that's on, it's a huge podcast and they just did a KickStarter to raise money, they actually have a podcast where they play D&D every week and it's like...

Matt Davids: Critical Roll.

Shane Sams: Critical Roll, that's what it is and they bring in famous actors, these, some of them play, some of them... like these are like, world-class A-list actors that come in and play these games.

Matt Davids: Yeah they're voice actors.

Shane Sams: They're voice actors, right, exactly. And some of them are learning D&D, some of them are playing D&D, but they do it every single week and that podcast has millions of listeners and they did a KickStarter. They raised enough money to make an animated movie about their game. Listen, there's people throwing money at them just to go make a cartoon.

Matt Davids: Yeah.

Shane Sams: There's gonna be somebody that's gonna be willing to pay for this, so you gotta get past that block immediately.

Matt Davids: Okay.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay, so as of right now, you have 4,000 people on your list, if 200 of them, that's 5% of your list, bought something from you right now, which is a totally doable number, I mean that's a lot of money.

Shane Sams: That's like 200 times, let's say that you charge something like $29 a month, what's 200 times 29, Jocelyn? Let's do 200 times 30. That's $6,000, right?

Matt Davids: Yeah.

Shane Sams: So it's like...

Jocelyn Sams: So that's on top of the money you're already making for your books.

Shane Sams: Yeah this is not a mountain that we have to climb, it's really just like a hill we kind of have to pop over.

Matt Davids: Okay, yeah.

Shane Sams: Okay? Now as for the logistics, like the logistics is probably as easy as... are you in St. Louis? Isn't that where you work?

Matt Davids: Yeah, St. Louis.

Shane Sams: Alright you're in a big town, man. There's a print shop somewhere that will do this for you, all you have to do is upload a customer list once a month and the file. Usually it's just go to the local print shop and say... a lot of times, these print shops will actually handle the mailing for you, like there's online places too but...

Matt Davids: Yeah there's online places that do it. Yeah I've looked into it, so yeah.

Shane Sams: For sure. So I mean just check around, I actually recommend going a little local even if it costs you a little more per unit because it's just nice to be able to walk in, have somebody to talk to, you know? But online's fine, whatever you wanna do.

Matt Davids: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Shane Sams: Basically it's as easy as create PDF upload, create Excel customer list, upload and you do that once a month. And then if you, then it's just about showing up, maybe once or twice a month, maybe once a month, right, just to talk to GMs, give them some tips, let them ask you some questions, right? Be their leader. So it's not like you're, this is not a huge ask in hours. The only hard part is the content, but luckily you have 11 books and 49 other resources online right now that 90% of your list has probably never seen, right?

Matt Davids: Yeah.

Shane Sams: So you can just repackage and re-shift around things, maybe it's five resources a month, so that's 60 resources a year. You already have 49 and 10 books, like you could pull things from other things you've already done and put together a nice 10-page newsletter type thing which is more than enough content for a GM to flip through, get a few great ideas, go have a blast over the next four weeks with their friends and then look forward to the next one. Or they're not even gonna be able to use all those ideas in one month, right?

Matt Davids: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Shane Sams: So like they've got this library, like I subscribe to this email newsletter that's like, it's all about subject lines and copy and all this amazing stuff and I've got this, what do you call the little things that sit on your desk where you put folders in... just like a file holder or something and I have the last two years of them and I can just go flip through them. I love that file folder.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah it's like a, how many pages would you say it is?

Shane Sams: It's an 11-page, stapled thing on paper and I paid $99 a month for it and it's worth every penny. Like when I get it, it's the happiest moment of the mail of the month, you know? And like that, that's what you're trying to create here, is Christmas every month for these GMs and a nice place they can go talk to somebody that gets them and they don't have to talk to their players and they can just geek out about being a dungeon master for an hour and a half.

Jocelyn Sams: And you don't need everyone, you just need a few. To make a really good living. Okay. Everyone's not gonna like it and that's okay. We've talked about that over and over on the show, you know.

Shane Sams: And if you're worried about the hours you're gonna put into it, it's really not gonna take that much time every month. Because if you show up for an hour and a half member call, you spend about an hour and a half getting the newsletter ready and you're pulling from resources you created, maybe you create one new thing a month, just to kind of add something, you know there's always something new in that thing, right?

Matt Davids: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Shane Sams: And then the rest of it is fleshed out with stuff you've made in the past that's spread out through different books, like, man that's really probably about five, six hours of work a month, to set this thing up.

Matt Davids: Okay. I mean it's...

Jocelyn Sams: Matt, you don't sound very convinced.

Matt Davids: Well I'm just, I'm thinking pretty hard over here. Cause I have thought about it but yeah I'm just trying to go through it in my head again, just trying to see how I could make it work and...

Shane Sams: What scares you the most about it? Because something's holding you back, I can feel it.

Matt Davids: Yeah, yeah something is. Pretty much for all of 2018, I released a lot of free content on my blog, I put out dungeon maps, city map and a free random table and I was just dumping content and I did a like a Patreon launch for it. If you're familiar with Patreon, and I thought producing that much content, I could get some Patreon followers and I got like a couple.

Shane Sams: How much were your tiers?

Matt Davids: It was like, $2, $5, $10, $20, and like $50 ones or something.

Shane Sams: Right. But see like, look at the difference though. You got all this content and you're asking people to support you and that's fine but man there's a big difference than what's behind the platinum wall. There's a reason people drive by the country club and they want in, right?

Matt Davids: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Shane Sams: It's because it's premium and it's exclusive and it's like, you could call it Elite Game Masters and make people feel really - or something - and make people feel really good about themselves and like...

Jocelyn Sams: Dice Geeks Elite.

Shane Sams: Dice Geeks Elite.

Jocelyn Sams: That's pretty good.

Shane Sams: Only the best. You could make people apply, like alright you have to fill out an application to even get in, right? And then you can look through them and send them a sales pitch, but it's like, they got to tell you how many hours a week are you playing? How much time do you really put in your game? Right? You know like whatever, you could come up with something fun to make it cool but there's a big difference in saying, "Hey, I'm already gonna make this stuff, if you'd like to come support me, come support me." Then, "I'm making amazing stuff and you can't get it unless you pay at the front door" right? And that's what pushes people, it's why people line up around the block to get the new iPhone that costs $1,200, which really only has two new apps than their last iPhone. It's like they want anything they can get that other people are not getting right then. Right?

Matt Davids: Yeah.

Shane Sams: Like that's kinda what you're trying to create, is some kind of exclusive. This is the elite thing, this is what real, if you're a real G, if you're toying with this, buy my book, but if you're in it for real, come on down. Right. And you could do things for them too like you could tell them, like every month I'll send you a PDF copy of my paperback books. Right. That in of itself... how much do you sell the books for?

Matt Davids: Right now they're, the smaller books are $7.99, although I'm gonna raise those prices here and then a bigger book is like 15, $14.99.

Shane Sams: So man you could say like, "When you join, every month I'm gonna send you the PDF of this book, right? Cause now it's $29 to email them the PDF and you're gonna get the printed newsletter, right? And that printed newsletter is gonna cost you $5 to ship, so you're gonna be making like $25 a member, every month. So like you've got all this stuff, you're not really putting the extra work in, but you're making it feel good, like a club, like a belonging, like a community, I'm elite and that's why they will give you money for it, right.

Shane Sams: Now are we really gonna have to work on this launch? Forums and you need to go through some of the trainings on like, cause this is gonna take a email campaign, this is gonna take a launch campaign, it's gonna take probably some kind of live webinar to sell this thing and get these people in there.

Matt Davids: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Shane Sams: But once you've seeded, it's gonna stay full and you've got an endless supply of customers.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay so let's pump the breaks just a little bit, because I feel like we're getting a little bit overwhelmed, so let me tell you what I would do if I were in your situation right now.

Matt Davids: Okay.

Jocelyn Sams: So what I would do is I would start emailing my list. Do you email them very regularly now?

Matt Davids: Yeah once a week.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay. So what I would do, is I would sort of put some feelers out there and I would say, "Hey guys, look I'm really excited about something that I'm getting ready to start. I'm going to be starting my Dice Geeks Elite, TM." I'ma trademark that. Sorry about that, Matt.

Matt Davids: Oh, no.

Jocelyn Sams: I'll send you my marketing bill, okay?

Matt Davids: Oh that's great.

Jocelyn Sams: Anyway, I would just say, "I'm planning on starting this, this is what I had in mind. What else would you like to see? What are you interested in?" See who's opening that, see who's clicking it, see who's responding. Those are the people that you really want to start targeting with future messages toward that. There are gonna be some people who write you back and say, "This is stupid and I'll never pay for anything." Remove them from your list because...

Shane Sams: Bye.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. And that's the beauty of being a list owner, okay? But most people are gonna write you back and be like, "This is amazing, I cannot wait, this is what I would like to see you do." Okay? And that's not scary, right? You're just telling people you have an idea and you're asking them what would you like to see?

Shane Sams: And then you start dripping out after the fact. Let them tell you, you'll have people write you back, you'll have people complain, blah blah blah.

Jocelyn Sams: You could do a survey, you can do a Google forum.

Shane Sams: Like get them involved, they can feel like they're... what do dungeon masters love to do? Create things. Help me create this. Then you start sending them back a thing that says, "What if you could get a weekly, or monthly thing? What if you could get all of my books? What if you could get this, that and the other? People are gonna be like, yes yes yes. Whatever it is, right. Once in a while send them a D20. Doesn't matter. Just like, all this stuff's going on and then when you launch, you've got all this hype built up and you'll find those couple hundred people that are hiding in the weeds you know.

Matt Davids: Okay.

Shane Sams: I just did some math, okay?

Matt Davids: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Shane Sams: Alright. I'm actually looking this up right now with actual public data from a publicly traded company. Alright, so it is estimated that 20 million people in America today have played Dungeons & Dragons. Okay.

Matt Davids: Yeah.

Shane Sams: It is estimated that 6 million people in the world play it regularly. I think regularly is once a month on this. Okay. Alright. If the average play group is four people, that means there are 1.5 million people out there running games. You need 200 of them to make $6,000 a month.

Matt Davids: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Shane Sams: That make sense?

Matt Davids: Yeah.

Shane Sams: So like don't be afraid. 99.9% of these people can hate paying money for anything. That's true for all people. It's 80/20, right.

Matt Davids: Yeah.

Shane Sams: We just have to find the ones that are willing to do it, right.

Matt Davids: Mm-hmm (affirmative) Yeah.

Shane Sams: I think you could do it. You got such a great following, you got such a huge product library. And man if you just say, "I've written 11 books about this," that's giving you so much more street cred than anybody else could ever have. You're perfectly qualified, you're perfectly positioned and we just have to put it together and make it happen. Doesn't have to look exactly like me and Jocelyn just laid out, it's just how we would do it.

Jocelyn Sams: And you don't have to do all this stuff tomorrow, okay? Sometimes I think people feel like, "Oh if I'm gonna start, I have to go all-in." Basically right now, all you need to do is just gather some information and figure out what people want. That step alone is going to help you immensely.

Matt Davids: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Shane Sams: Yeah and we're recording this podcast in March and you told us off air some exciting news though, you're gonna go all-in on this in April, right?

Matt Davids: Yes I am.

Shane Sams: You're leaving the day job and you're like, flipped lifestyle, here I come. Now let's grow this thing and ready to go, right?

Matt Davids: Yeah absolutely, yeah. I am ready to do this. I want to work for myself, I want to do what I love and it's just amazing that this time in this place in the world that I have this opportunity, it's just amazing.

Shane Sams: Yeah, Matt, to be able to take something that you've grown up with, that lets you be creative, that you're passionate about and actually put food on the table with it.

Matt Davids: Yeah.

Shane Sams: That is the opportunity that everybody listening to this podcast right now has, you just have to go out and make it happen. It might take time, remember, Matt's been doing this for what, since 2015?

Matt Davids: Yeah.

Shane Sams: Right but and you've gotten to the point now though where in a few days you're gonna have total control of your life and your family's future. That is absolutely amazing. Let's just take it to the next level and we'll help you do it. Okay?

Matt Davids: Okay.

Shane Sams: Alright man, what a great conversation. I am so glad that I literally got to geek out, not only about online business today and I actually got to geek out about geek stuff and talk about Dungeons & Dragons on this podcast, so I appreciate you for giving me that opportunity.

Matt Davids: No problem, that's why I'm here, Shane.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah thanks for putting that in his head too, I'm sure he'll start that up again soon.

Shane Sams: And I'm just saying, I'm looking for a play group. I'm just saying.

Matt Davids: Oh well there you go.

Shane Sams: Have a go. I mean I may be jumping into the game here man. Honestly man, thank you so much, just for coming on the show, being transparent. Our podcast is so bizarre, because a lot of podcasts, the guests are used to being podcast guests, but our people, everybody that comes on this show is just a real member of the community, a real person out there with their own idea, their own niche, making it happen, and it's hard to open up, tell everybody, like "oh this is going on and I might be quitting my job next week and I wanna grow," and it's hard to talk about that but I really do appreciate you and all our other guests because without you guys being that transparent, all the people that listen to our podcast can't be inspired, can't learn, can't grow too, so thank you for doing that, man, I really appreciate you for being on the show.

Matt Davids: Yeah no problem. Thank you for having me on.

Shane Sams: Alright and then we got one more thing. Since you were a missionary, and we always ask all of our guests, would you like to share a Bible verse? And I would guess that a former missionary would probably have a Bible verse that brings them a little inspiration that they might just share with the world, so you have a Bible verse for us today?

Matt Davids: I do, I do. It might sound a little negative at first but I can explain it just a little bit. But there's proverbs 18:9, and it says, "One who is slack in his work is brother to one who destroys." And like I said, you might seem a little negative but just thinking about that and just kind of thinking about where I was when our first son was born and I was working a day job that my wife left her job and because that's what we wanted to do. And just realizing that I wasn't making enough money and kinda just looking at my life and realizing that I was coming home from my day job saying that I was spending time with my family but I was spending an hour on Facebook or an hour here on YouTube or something like that and just the idea that it was just, that I was slack in my work, that I was no better than somebody who destroys something and so, just some things with the earthquake and some different things that happened in my life, it's just I realized that it was time I needed to get to work and really put some food on the table for my family.

Shane Sams: Ah dude, that inspired me. When I hang up, I'm gonna go work. I told Jocelyn before I got here, like I think I'm gonna take the rest of the afternoon off but now you said that, I'm like, nah man I'm gonna go write five emails. Because I don't want to be slack in my work. Thank you so much for sharing that verse. That is an awesome and powerful message.

Matt Davids: No problem.

Shane Sams: Alright guys, that wraps up another amazing episode of the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. Take everything that you learned today to heart especially that last thing about being slack in your work. You've gotta put the work in and you've gotta get started and you've gotta keep taking those baby steps forward if you're ever going to get to a successful place. Like when Jocelyn and I started out, it took us 13 months to even be in a position to even think about quitting our job. Matt started back in 2015 and he's just now quitting his job and ready to grow in scale this amazing, passion-based business and you could be in the same place a year from now, two years from now, three years from now. If you get started. If you put in the work. We never sugarcoat anything here on the podcast, guys. It takes effort, it takes commitment, it takes dedication to change your family's future, just like we did and just like Matt did. We know you can do it too.

Shane Sams: That's why we make this podcast and that's why we have the Flip Your Life community. If you need help coming up with your business idea, if you need helping taking your next steps in your online business journey, we would love to help you inside of the Flip Your Life community. To learn more about the Flip Your Life community, go to FlippedLifestyle.com/flipyourlife. That's all one word. Flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife. We have plans starting as low as $19 a month to give you all the training, all the community, all the support you need to start your online business, become and stay self-employed and flip your life. That's all the time we've got for this week. Tune in next week, we're gonna have another great guest from the Flip Your Life community. Til then, get out there, take action. Do whatever it takes. Flip your life.

Jocelyn Sams: Bye.

View Details

In today's episode, we help Kevin develop a sales pitch for his online membership.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jocelyn Sams: Hey, y'all. On today's podcast, we help Kevin develop a sales pitch for his online membership.

Shane Sams: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, where life always come before work. We're your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. We're a real family that figured out how to make our entire living online, and now we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? All right, let's get started.

Shane Sams: What's going on, everybody? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. It is a beautiful sunny day here in Kentucky, and we are super excited to welcome back a former guest on the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, a long time member, one of our moderators, and last year's Flip Your Life Member of the Year, Kevin DePew. Welcome back to the show, man.

Kevin DePew: Hey, thank you. Very excited to be here.

Jocelyn Sams: Member of the Year.

Shane Sams: The Member of the Year. We're gonna talk about that. We're gonna talk about that in a minute, though.

Kevin DePew: I'm surprised by that, yes.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, it was really exciting. We presented Kevin with a special award at last year's live event, and we got to meet him in person for the first time. And it was just a really, really great time. We're gonna get into that just a little bit more in a few minutes, but before we talk about all that, let's get into a little bit about you, for people who maybe have not listened to your other podcast or don't know you. Tell us a little bit about you, your background, and what you do online.

Kevin DePew: Yeah. My name is Kevin. I am been doing this online business thing for a little while, I'd say a little over two years we've been doing relaxandlearnguitar.com, we being my wife Vicky, who helps me a lot with this now. We are empty nesters, have had many, many years in corporate America, working with various jobs, mostly with families and children. Vicky worked with seniors for awhile. And I about three years ago just heard you guys on, I think, Pat Flynn is how I found you guys, and the tractor story, and I just kind of from there went, "This is amazing. I think this is something I need to look into." Started listening to your podcast, joined your membership, and it's been fantastic. It's been life changing, honestly. It's been really good.

Shane Sams: That's awesome, man. I love to hear that. I love people who like, I literally know every minute of their story online, because I feel like I know everything you've ever done.

Jocelyn Sams: And it's kind of hard not to just jump right in, because we already know all these things about you, but I just want to make sure that the listeners know how cool of a person you are.

Shane Sams: When you joined the community, remember you had some crazy other idea?

Kevin DePew: Yeah, the guitar thing is probably idea number four or five.

Shane Sams: What was the thing you were doing when you first came in, though?

Kevin DePew: Oh, gosh, it was either a combination of time management or creativity or ...

Jocelyn Sams: Yes.

Shane Sams: Yeah, it was something about the creativity thing, and I remember you posted in the forum one day, and you were like, "What do you guys think?"

Jocelyn Sams: We're like, "No."

Shane Sams: I'm like, "Kevin, man, I don't usually say this, but this is awful. This is terrible. You don't even seem like you like this. What are you doing, man?" Then I remember specifically asking you in the forums, though, "Dude, what do you want to do? What do you want to do?" And you literally were like, "Man, I just want to relax, play guitar."

Kevin DePew: And now here we are.

Shane Sams: And now you have a website called Relax and Learn Guitar. It's funny how that works out. Going back just a little bit, how did it help you to pick something that you wanted to do, not that you thought might work? How did that help? Because you've stuck with this now for a while. We're gonna talk a little bit about your membership growth and the future of your business, but how did that help when you made that transition?

Kevin DePew: Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, first starting out, it was just in my head a lot, exactly what should I do that people are gonna look for? It was very new to the whole online business thing. It was a good part to kind of learn how to build a website and how to have a lead magnet, so I learned a lot of good stuff there, but when it wasn't taking off or getting any traction, I think what helped the most switching to the guitar stuff is just, I don't have to pretend to be passionate about it. I am, and I want to share that with other people. And when I saw that others were listening and interested and then started getting on board, it just makes it keep rolling. So choosing something that you're passionate about, but I don't think I'll ever get tired of doing. I might get tired of editing videos, but I will never get tired of playing and teaching other people how to play guitar.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, for sure. And you know, I want people to understand too that if they haven't listened to your other podcast, that this thing wasn't exactly an overnight success, right?

Kevin DePew: Oh, gosh no.

Jocelyn Sams: Because I think sometimes when people listen to the podcast, they're like, "Oh yeah, this person, they started and then it just all worked out." And we've seen so many people cycle through over the past few years since you've been a member, but you have been consistent, you've been coming in, you talk, you ask questions, you get your questions answered, you answer other people's questions. And just that involvement, I mean, I've seen such a transformation over the years, just from you first coming in to now.

Shane Sams: Yeah. I've never heard anyone say that before, "I don't have to pretend to be passionate," because all you hear from gurus and experts is, "Fake it till you make it." You known what I'm saying? That's an amazing way to put that, is pick something you don't have to pretend to be passionate about, or that you don't have to pretend you know something about. I think a lot of people do that too. They'll choose a niche just because other people are doing it or just ... My favorite is, "Can I teach business if I don't known anything about business?" We're like, "No, can't do that, because you'd have to pretend. You'd have to fake people out." Or be passionate about yoga, but you hate yoga. You can't do that.

Shane Sams: If anyone listening right now doesn't listen to anything else for the rest of this podcast, please listen to what Kevin just said and don't pretend you're passionate about something. Pick something you can sink your teeth into. And you won't always be passionate. Like you said, sometimes it really stinks to have to edit all the videos of you playing guitar, right?

Kevin DePew: Oh yeah.

Shane Sams: But we just gotta do what we gotta do to get to the part that we like, and that's what it's all about.

Kevin DePew: And to not give up, and to change when you need to. You gotta be persistent, or else ... And I've seen that a lot. There's the folks that I've seen, and you've listened to the podcast, or you're inside the membership, and it does look like sometimes folks are like, "Hey, we just got our 200th member." I can look back and realize what that really means. It's a lot of time and a lot of persistence and effort.

Shane Sams: Well, you only see the tip of the iceberg. There's a great graphic that I shared on our Facebook page one time, and it was like first, second, and third place, like an Olympic podium. And all the people were taking the pictures of first and second place, but underneath the ground, the artist had drawn a pyramid, and it just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and it said things like "Hard work, never gave up, kept going," all those things that go into that overnight success. That's a challenge for us sometimes on the podcast, is to really ... We see the 500 forum posts and the 30 hours of trainings and all the hard work that went into building it, but we have 30 minutes to tell people the whole success story. So it does kind of seem like, "Wow, they waved their magic wand, and they tried it," but it's really there is no magic wand.

Shane Sams: So where are you at right now? We're gonna talk a little bit about your progression, okay? Tell us a little bit about last year, because last year was where it really turned the corner. I remember a little bit in the forums, we were talking one time when you had just gotten ... I remember when you first started selling a few memberships, and it would tick up and down in the teens, and you kind of got stuck, right?

Kevin DePew: Yes.

Shane Sams: And then it really started to grow. You started to do some things. You came to Flip Your Life Live last year. Tell us a little bit about last year and the growth of the business and where you were when you came to Flip Your Life Live.

Kevin DePew: Sure. I mean, that was the year folks started first joining, and it was one or two, maybe, a month for the first half of the year really. But they were staying, so I had really good retention. Folks were showing up for the live member lessons that I do. Lots of positive feedback, it was just a matter of getting more people to see what I had to offer. Signed up for the Flip Your Live event and took on the challenge. We did the calls with everybody to kind of get them ready for the event, and all the different pieces of homework, and then you guys had challenged us to have some type of product that we would bring to the event or have ready to launch.

Kevin DePew: We didn't really have a beginning level or an introductory offer. I just had the membership, and it was monthly and annual. That was it. When we came to the event, we were probably up to about just under maybe 50 members. Had had some success about a month before with just an email funnel that we had built around having a half-off price for the membership and got probably 10 or 15 people that way. So we had good momentum, decided to make a beginner's course, and that's what we basically had ready for the live event. That and kind of sitting around the tables and working pressed the button to send it out there into the vast internet space and sold a beginner course an hour after we launched it.

Shane Sams: That's the live event, right? During the work session you can literally we're like, we're launching this, we'll see what happens and you sold something right there.

Kevin DePew: You're like, raise your hand if you had any sales and I was like, yes!

Shane Sams: During the event?

Kevin DePew: Yeah.

Shane Sams: How did that momentum build through those courses? Getting ready...one thing we do is, and we're upping our game a little bit, too this year. We're about to start, we're gonna do weekly trainings getting people prepared. I'm gonna hand-walk Flip Your Life Live attendees through the Flip Your Life blueprint myself. In the community we have lots of trainings and things like that. We're gonna do two cycles of it to make sure that everybody gets that momentum like you're talking about. How did that help you, not only going to those trainings and picking up the pace leading up to the event but having that deadline with a consequence where you had to have it ready and you're like, "I gotta show up at this thing. We've been working on this." How did the live event, was it a catalyst for that?

Kevin DePew: It was huge that way just because of having something way out on the calendar and then the monthly accountability of it's not that you just signed up and we'll see you in six months. We got some work to do before we get there kind of thing.

Shane Sams: You know it's there. We can see it, it's in a Facebook group or a Zoom call so it's like you can't hide.

Kevin DePew: It was very helpful for us cause we thrive with what's the next thing to do, write it down, let's do it. If it doesn't work let's write the next thing down and do that. It was helpful to kind of say have something ready. It did push me, I wouldn't have done that if you guys hadn't said, "Have something ready for the live event". If you've already got a membership it worked really well because the beginner course is now, we've sold about thirty of those and some of those people convert to monthly or annual members so that helps with the momentum of once they were in the beginner course, if they like it, then there's a chance they'll join membership later.

Kevin DePew: At the end of the event you're like, there's a hundred days left in the calendar year. What are you going to do with the next hundred days? We very much took that as a challenge to ourselves and sold fifteen more courses, added about sixteen more members, and five more annual members and we increased our, almost doubled our email list. It was just very, very good. Our YouTube channel finally got to the, we're now making a little bit of money on YouTube. We're able to monetize ads there, which takes a while.

Kevin DePew: The coolest part was getting involved in a mastermind. We met some incredible people at the live event and we're part of a mastermind now where we talk monthly and those guys have been a huge help to help us continue moving forward.

Shane Sams: That makes my heart happy because when we decided to do the live event. The reason we did it, right? What people don't understand the cost and the massive moving of mountains it takes to pull of an event the size of Flip Your Life Live.

Jocelyn Sams: I've said it before on paper it pretty much makes no sense. If we brought this into a corporate boardroom they would be like, "Get out of here, we're not doing that".

Shane Sams: Go find a better idea.

Jocelyn Sams: No ROI.

Shane Sams: But it's our boardroom.

Jocelyn Sams: As far as monetary goes.

Shane Sams: When we did this, we were like, "Why are we doing this?". That's something that Jocelyn and I ask all the time. Why are we doing it? We knew, we knew that we had been to live events and the momentum before and after and the people we met. That's what changes your life. We knew that would happen for people who came to this event because we even structured it in a way that gave people a better chance for that to happen. We have all the trainings before hand to prepare you for the event. We challenge you to do things before the event. We even have icebreakers where we get forty people on a Zoom call and we sit around and have a great time and introduce everybody to anybody so you know people going into the event.

Shane Sams: To hear you say that...if one person out of the two hundred people that come this year that happens for? The event's worth it. That is truly a life-changing experience. They're suddenly be surrounded virtually and in real life by people who really care about your business and they are also trying hard to grow themselves so they can inspire you to do that, too.

Kevin DePew: And they understand, that's the biggest part, too. They understand what it means to put the work in or to be stuck or to keep going. Big shout-out to Chris and Leah and Lauren. They've been amazing.

Jocelyn Sams: That's awesome. That's the whole reason that we did this. I love it. I love it that you guys have just really pushed forward and you're making stuff happen. It's really awesome. Let's talk about where we can go next. You guys had some good success. I love how calmly you say that, "Yeah, you know, we added a bunch of members".

Shane Sams: How many members are you up to right now?

Kevin DePew: We're at 77 members now.

Jocelyn Sams: That's awesome.

Shane Sams: 77? That's crazy. You remember the struggle?

Kevin DePew: We're never gonna get over 20.

Jocelyn Sams: Yes!

Shane Sams: You're adding one or two a month for the first month when this thing launched. We were just like, keep going, keep going. You do a couple things that matter and all of a sudden, bam, you're almost to a hundred. And a hundred's where things get crazy, right?

Kevin DePew: I'm ready.

Shane Sams: When things really, really happen. That's why your the member of the year, Kevin. Let me tell what it was. We didn't tell anybody we were doing this but one thing that we, our community is really about, Kevin's a moderator in the forums, Kevin's just a super-active member and he not only goes in and takes massive action, he helps other people a lot. A lot of people will get up on stage at a live event and they'll give awards based on well this person's got four commas and they're millionaires or whatever. This person, he's made all this money and he did this and that. We just didn't wanna do something so superficial and basic.

Shane Sams: When we were in our meetings one day and we said how are we gonna reward people? We really wanna reward people? We came up with this, we have this little running joke a little bit. We call it the 'Flip Your Life Hall of Fame'. Me and Jocelyn have this virtual list we talk about, the 'Flip Your Life Hall of Famers'. We started talking about those people and it wasn't just people who made money or just people who quit their jobs. It was people who really gave back to the community.

Shane Sams: We said, let's reward people by how many times they've replied to other people's forum posts. That means you're not just in there talking on your own topics. You're not just in there lurking and reading. You're literally taking time to help another person succeed. We started looking, we keep track of how many topics people start, how many replies they have and we give these things called 'coins'. We could've called them a ton of different things but we figured you flip coins so it just made total sense for the Flip Your Life community. You get coins, you get one point for starting a topic. You get two points for replying to another post and you get other coins for doing other actions. Clicking on trainings, things like that.

Shane Sams: Kevin blew the second place person out of the water. We gave an award out for everybody in the top ten. The ten most helpful people in the community. When we were looking at it, it was just like, who's number one? It was you. It was the highlight of the event, giving you that award. Bringing you up on stage and sharing that with everybody because you really have helped so many people. I don't think you understand the ripple that you've caused by throwing your pebble into the pond, inside of our community. I want to acknowledge you here in front of everybody, too, not just the people at Flip Your Life Live cause you deserved that award and, based on what we're seeing in the forums, you might get another one cause you're just crushing it.

Kevin DePew: Yeah, I was totally shocked a little bit. No idea you guys were doing that.

Shane Sams: Your wife was shocked, too.

Kevin DePew: She was.

Shane Sams: I think she cried.

Kevin DePew: There might have been some tears. It just hit me like, wow. Of course she's seen me, how much I've been on there. But it was kind of, just getting the recognition was very cool. That's not why I did it, obviously. Very neat to get that, that award and to be a part of the event and to be so shocked.

Shane Sams: Helping other people, helps you, too though. That's the good thing. We tell people that. The more you help others, the more you will figure things out cause you'll talk through something with someone, like a mastermind in the community and all of a sudden you figure it out. You know what I mean?

Kevin DePew: Absolutely.

Shane Sams: Let's figure out what you're going to do next. We're sitting at 70-something members, we see a hundred on the horizon and we know that a hundred's when things get crazy and we start getting massive momentum. How can we help you take your next steps? What is it gonna take to get you over that hump, to grow your business, to make things happen. What are you struggling with right now?

Kevin DePew: The biggest struggle up until a week ago was, I've been, we've been really trying hard and we have. We've done YouTube Live's every week and then also did some workshops live on YouTube where I run ads to those and was using it like a webinar. Gathering email addresses to get people to sign up for the workshop. Folks were coming to those and they were going pretty well but no conversions. Just stuck there. I felt like, how is it, the way I'm pitching this? Is it the way I'm talking about how to join a membership that's not. It's not aspirin, it's definitely a vitamin. It's not, it's a hobby for people.

Kevin DePew: Obviously there's a need for, working with folks over forty to play guitar and have fun with it because there's some who have joined. The webinars weren't really working so great so I gotta shift gears.

Shane Sams: Was that an Evergreen webinar you said?

Kevin DePew: We're live every week.

Shane Sams: Live every week. And it was on YouTube only or you were doing them through another thing?

Kevin DePew: It was just YouTube, it was not with webinar software.

Shane Sams: You weren't making people email register for these things, it was just you were going live, talking about the stuff and doing it that way.

Kevin DePew: Right, I would broadcast out to a list. We got a few emails through the Facebook ads we ran, signed up for. Lauren helped us with the Facebook campaign to have, there was a cold ad and a warmer one and then sign up for this workshop. Like I said, pretty good. What I found though is that the folks that end up joining a membership, if I can 1) talk to them live, even better. One of our things in our auto-responder is a free twenty-minute phone call to help you with what you're stuck with. I've got about nine or ten phone calls and three people have joined right after the phone call. I know that's big.

Kevin DePew: I feel like they just gotta warm up to me after awhile. It's a very much, not like a come to one thirty or forty minute lesson and join. We've shifted things to do a challenge. Let's try a five-day challenge. It was a lot of work, did a lot of preparation for that kind of breaking it down, thinking about what's something very quick each night that they could learn, have some success with. It's the curse of knowledge, right? I wanna show them all the stuff, but I really gotta break it down. Sent that out to the list. Also, we're gonna have a Facebook add to that, got some more emails that way.

Kevin DePew: Had two hundred people sign up for the challenge. This was just a week and a half ago. About 130 of those folks joined the private Facebook group where the challenge was taking place. I knew it was a good sign on Wednesday of that week, folks were asking how to join the Facebook membership, I hadn't even pitched it yet. Coming to this stuff, asking questions, they were involved. Some of those, of the 130 people, there are about twenty that are actual members that just like it. That helped me a ton. They were in it sayin', "This is cool. Hey Kevin, what's going on?". That was very helpful, too.

Kevin DePew: I followed that challenge up with five days of emails. An email each day for five days. Answering questions, dispelling fears, that kind of thing. We got fourteen new members from that challenge.

Shane Sams: So you got fourteen out of 120 and you got 200 basically leads. Did you run ads for that or just invite a list and things like that.

Kevin DePew: I did ads, I boosted a post. I did an ad and boosting posts and just promoting to the email list.

Shane Sams: Wow. Jocelyn loves challenges. She's big on challenges.

Jocelyn Sams: I think that it makes a lot of sense, especially for the type of thing you're trying to sell. It's like a hobby product, I think that people do typically have to get to know you a little bit before they're going to go all in with you like that. I think it makes just a lot of sense for you. This is the first one you've done, right?

Kevin DePew: Yeah, we've just done one.

Jocelyn Sams: I'm assuming...

Shane Sams: When are you going to do it again?

Kevin DePew: We're planning on one the third week, end of April. We've got, my other life. My full-time plus job is a little nuts right now and we're also taking a week off to go to Florida in April so we're looking at the end of April.

Shane Sams: That's good. That's an 11% conversion rate. You converted 11% of the people who came into the challenge.

Kevin DePew: It was very positive. If I can somehow figure out how to replicate that...

Jocelyn Sams: I like the way that you're waiting a little bit, too though. I think sometimes if you do them too often then people don't really wanna join your membership because you're constantly doing a challenge. If you do it a little less frequently I think it makes sense.

Shane Sams: You might need, if you did it once a month you would need two different challenges to rotate or something. Because that way, just the content, just what you're doing. Are you doing these live all five days? You going in the facebook group?

Kevin DePew: Yeah, I am.

Shane Sams: That's brilliant. I think that's an awesome strategy.

Kevin DePew: It's a lot of work and planning a lot ahead of time. Having emails finished and just plugging them into the broadcast, having all the PDFs. Every morning I got an email saying, "Hey, I'll see you tonight for this lesson. Download this PDF and we'll work on it live tonight and I'll answer your questions". Did that for five straight days.

Shane Sams: Did they post videos or something of them playing guitar?

Kevin DePew: No. That could be part of it. They would just come to those live at night and I'd tell them, make sure you have your, bring your exercise and chords and metronomes and rhythm, that kind of thing. The last night was, here's what song we're gonna learn. The ending, the last one, was an actual song they get the tablature and the print-out for that song.

Shane Sams: Isn't that what your friend does, Jocelyn? Who does the fashion stuff, people post in the challenges?

Jocelyn Sams: It's more like a course and they post pictures of themselves in a Facebook group, wearing different outfits.

Shane Sams: This is the same thing, though.

Jocelyn Sams: There's definitely different ways that you can do it but if that works for you, I would do it the exact same way.

Shane Sams: The only thing, I don't think your pitch is bad here. I don't think that's the problem. It goes back to the numbers game again. If you can look at this thing and say, okay my baseline is 200 signed up but only a hundred of those made it to the Facebook group. The first thing I would do is, where are the other 80-100 people that didn't make it to the Facebook group. You may need to do something, I don't know where you had the link to the Facebook group but one thing we've been doing a lot lately is putting links like that on the thank you page, not in their email.

Kevin DePew: Oh, yeah, I can do that.

Shane Sams: Because that email may never make it to their inbox. If they clicked the thing and it says, "Stop. Step One: Join the private Facebook group." That is gonna give you probably forty more people out of that hundred that are gonna make it to the Facebook group which is potentially five more sales. This is probably, I don't think it's the pitch, I think it's just the structure.

Shane Sams: The only thing I would criticize you a little bit about your pitch is, I think you're too convinced that this is a hobby. You're too convinced that this is a vitamin and not an aspirin. Your website is called "Relax and Learn Guitar" and when we built this thing and we talked about it and planned it, it wasn't just learn guitar, it was why they're learning guitar. They're empty-nesters. They're stressed out, they need to relax after work and they can't calm down. They have anxiety and this is the thing they've always wanted to do and they've always regretted putting it off. That's where your pitch is. Not just hey, I'll teach you to play "Stairway to Heaven".

Shane Sams: That's probably where your pitch needs to go. You're not selling just playing guitar, you're selling getting rid of regret of something you never did and you always felt like you should have and when you come home and you can relax, leave the stress of work behind and the kids and the college payments and all that good stuff, that's where your pitch, I would probably say, needs to go.

Jocelyn Sams: I would just ask you, too, are you using testimonials so not about how much people learn about playing the guitar from your courses or your membership but are you really hitting those pain points of hey, I was stressed out all the time. I was sitting at home wasting away watching TV or on Facebook or whatever but then I discovered this course and because of that I found some kind of purpose in my life.

Shane Sams: If you could find one, too I think a regret. If you could find someone who was like, man I put off learning this thing, I had, I got one, I started playing with it and I put it in my closet when I got married and got a career and I never touched it again, you know what I'm saying? I'm sure someone in there is like that. That's a big deal. That's a really big deal for people. That's so much, that's so important. Everybody's so into meditation or exercise or all these things, that might be the thing that does free somebody to get rid of all their stress and anxiety.

Kevin DePew: Self-care kind of stuff. I could definitely hit the testimonials. The ones that have been pretty powerful aren't exactly more relaxed and more stress-free now. I really hit the ones that I've always wanted to play guitar and now I played at granddaughter's birthday party.

Shane Sams: Yes.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, I love that.

Kevin DePew: I joined my church worship group, I never thought I'd play guitar now I'm on stage in front of my congregation.

Jocelyn Sams: Yes, absolutely. I love that. We're just throwing out ideas. Obviously you know your audience a lot better than we do. I love those, I think that's great. The more you can use stuff like that the better.

Shane Sams: Let me ask you this, at the end of, you did a five day challenge, I'm assuming it's Monday through Friday, right?

Kevin DePew: Yes.

Shane Sams: You start on Monday, you come on the Facebook live, you're teaching them these things. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. On Friday, when you turned on that Facebook live did you do your webinar?

Kevin DePew: What do you mean?

Shane Sams: That fifth day, that should be your webinar. You should be doing a webinar that day.

Kevin DePew: A little. I see what you mean. I did the whole lesson and then I probably did, I feel like I just need to get more comfortable. I maybe rushed through the sales pitch at the end. I try to be more aware of that and at the end of that five day, that fifth day, I did go into kind of the structure you guys did at the live event where you talk about testimonials, people that are in the membership, questions about the membership they might have. I had some written down in case they didn't ask any. A little, but not as much as I should.

Shane Sams: I think you should probably restructure. What you should do is call it a five day challenge and then on the fifth day say, I'm putting a bonus lesson in tomorrow. Bonus challenge. I said it's a five day, I'm gonna give you six. Then you show up, or re-structure it like it's a five day challenge but you do it all in four days and you tell them to come back the next day for a bonus lesson and the fifth day I would do your whole webinar, straight up. I would probably go in and change that a little bit. What are your fears you have to overcome? There's an internal, what is the internal fear or the external obstacle that's holding you back that you cover in your webinar?

Kevin DePew: Pretty much age is the enemy. We're doing this to prove that you're not too old to be able to accomplish playing and finally learning this.

Shane Sams: That's a good one, yep that's a good one. That could kind of be external, like an obstacle because everybody thinks they're too old to learn new tricks, you know what I'm saying? I think you should probably re-insert in there the fear of regret. Don't you wish you had done this your whole life? How much better would your life be, you could be like Andy who played at his granddaughter's thing. You could be like Jim who was on stage and got to worship in a way he never dreamed possible. He didn't even sing before but now he's playing guitar.

Shane Sams: Put that in there and attack that and it leads right into it's not too late. You're not too old to do this. That way you can capture some of that in there. If you add the pitch and you change your thank you page to get more people in that Facebook group quick. I'd probably even have some re-engagement campaign for the, after three days anyone who, when you're starting it try to email those people again and get them in there.

Kevin DePew: Right.

Shane Sams: Then you'll have more people in, you'll have more people participating, and you'll have a true sales pitch that attacks what's holding them back at the very end of the challenge. This challenge has one goal: to get people in your membership. It's not just to get people on your list. It's to get people on your list and then day five I have one mission in life today. I have 112 people, I want fifty of 'em in my membership tomorrow is your plan. I bet you will double sales on your next one, percentage-wise.

Kevin DePew: Let me ask you this and I think Jocelyn answered this before. I was going back and forth on, I still have this relax and guitar/acoustic guitar challenge Facebook group and there's still 130 and people have asked to join us when it finished and went ahead and approved them. Why not? You can sit and wait for the next one. For this and I've got, I use AWeber so I've tagged these folks, this is kind of nitty-gritty questions. I tagged them as people interested in the challenge so when I launch this next challenge I'm gonna hit all those people again, they might have been there, they might be members already. I'm still saying here's the next challenge, you should come to it.

Shane Sams: There's two ways to do it. You can put everybody in a new challenge or you can put everybody in the same group every time and just build this massive group that constantly does it over and over again. We kind of prefer the second because it's one less thing to manage and how many people joined, fourteen, that what you said?

Kevin DePew: Yeah, we had three annuals and eleven monthly members join.

Shane Sams: Sounds like to me there's about 86 more people that need to hear that pitch again. Why not just let 'em go through it again? If you rotate 'em you can even say "Hey you may have missed this challenge, I've got a new challenge. You wanna be at this." They'll come back. Then you do your webinar and you can pitch 'em over and over again.

Jocelyn Sams: It doesn't hurt anything to just leave them in there.

Kevin DePew: I'm gonna go, you said that and I'm gonna definitely want to do this and we figured out let's keep doing this until it doesn't work anymore.

Shane Sams: What you've discovered is a lead strategy. You have found a way to get people to sign up for your email list and do a challenge with you. This is not a sales strategy. The sales strategy is when you get leads you pitch them on that live webinar presentation at the end. You were just disjointed. You had your webinar, well this wasn't really getting people to sign up. You had your thing which is getting a lot of people to sign up but you weren't really selling to 'em too hard. Now it's smash them together and get a bunch of leads and pitch 'em, hard at the end. Go change their life in your guitar membership.

Kevin DePew: Very cool. I was happy to hear that cause the work I had ahead of time, now I feel like I can change the song basically and use the same emails, use the same posts, change them up a little bit, change the landing page a little big. I've got it all, it's built already. I'm excited about, maybe I can poll the folks that are tagged and say, what would you like the next challenge to be?

Shane Sams: Nah, man. Same thing, different song. You could change, you could change the song every-

Jocelyn Sams: Do it until it doesn't work anymore.

Shane Sams: Yeah, do the same thing. Hammer the nail.

Kevin DePew: Stay on track.

Shane Sams: Changing the song is genius because you've already got everything done. Now you just play a different song when you turn the camera on.

Jocelyn Sams: If it's not broken, don't fix it.

Jocelyn Sams: Alright, Kevin. As always, it has been a lot of fun talking to you today. We always like to ask people: what is one thing that you plan to take action on in the next day or so based on what we talked about today?

Kevin DePew: I would say I can go fix that thank you page to have a link to the Facebook group. Hopefully I would get a lot more conversions there so that's probably the number one thing I would do. Then revamp that pitch at the end of the challenge.

Shane Sams: That's perfect. Just those little tweaks are gonna make a massive difference in what you're doing. I have no doubt Kevin DePew will take massive action and get this done. I can not wait to see the results of this inside that success form, inside the Flip Your Life community. Listen, thank you so much for all you do in the community. We appreciate you so much. Thank you for being on the show and being so transparent and sharing a part of your journey with everybody. I can't wait to see what you do next.

Kevin DePew: Same, thank you guys so much for everything. It's been a great ride and I can't wait to see where it goes next. Your help and guidance has been huge.

Shane Sams: Alright guys, that wraps up another amazing interview with our incredible Flip Your Life community members. What a great guy Kevin DePew is. He is just a shining example of what can happen if you roll up your sleeves, you get to work, and you never ever give up. He was a rock star at Flip Your Life Live. You heard about all the great things that happened at Flip Your Life Live. Kevin meeting people, getting a mastermind together, connecting with other like-minded entrepreneurs, taking massive action before and after the event and getting those results inside of his membership.

Shane Sams: We want those results for you. We want you to be at Flip Your Life Live 2019 in Lexington, Kentucky. You can get your ticket over at flippedlifestyle.com/live. That is flippedlifestyle.com/live. Hurry up, the VIP tickets are almost gone and general admission tickets are selling out fast. We want you to be there, you need to get your ticket today so head over to flippedlifestyle.com/live and we'll see you in Lexington.

Shane Sams: Before we go, we'd love to share a Bible verse to you guys. Jocelyn and I draw a lot of our life and business inspiration from the Bible and we've got a great verse for you today. In Exodus 35:35 the Bible says, "He has filled them with skill to do all kinds of work as engravers, designers, embroiderers...all of them skilled workers and designers."

Shane Sams: You have a God-given talent that you can share with the world, just like Jocelyn created a business around lesson plans. I created a business around football playbooks. Kevin created a business around playing guitar. You do have something that you can offer the world and you can use to make money online, work from home, become and stay self-employed. Don't let those talents go to waste. Get out there, take action, and do whatever it takes to flip your life. We'll see you next time.

Jocelyn Sams: Bye!

Links and resources mentioned on today’s show: * Kevin's Website * Flip Your Life LIVE 2019 Tickets & Registration Information * Flip Your Life community

Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!

Join the Flip Your Life Community NOW for as little as $19 per month!

https://flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife

View Details

In today's episode, we help Mike move from a client-based business to an online membership.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jocelyn Sams: Hey y'all. On today's podcast, we help Mike move from a client-based business to an online membership.

Shane Sams: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast where life always comes before work. We're your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. We're a real family that figured out how to make our entire living online. Now, we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? All right. Let's get started.

Shane Sams: What's going on everybody? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. It is great to be back with you again today. Super excited to talk to another member of the Flip Your Life community, and we are pumped up about today's guest because we have been trying to get him on the show for a while now. Not only is this one of our amazing international members of the Flip Your Life community, but it's also someone that actually we have met in person, believe it or not, even though they had to fly all the way across the world to do it. We want to welcome to the show all the way from Melbourne, Australia, today Mike Giuliano. Mike, what's up, brother?

Mike Giuliano: Hey. Hey, guys. Thanks very much for having me. I am also super excited and pumped. And, yes, we've tried to get this going and I'm glad we're ready to go.

Shane Sams: Apparently, it's hard to coordinate when you're 15 time zones apart. I don't know. It's like, what is it 7:30 AM there right now, and it's like 4:30 PM, or something like that.

Mike Giuliano: It's, yeah, that's right.

Shane Sams: So thank you for being the one that had to get up early. I really appreciate that, man.

Shane Sams: But listen, we had a great time with Mike last year at Flip Your Life LIVE, him and his wife Pat made the long trip all the way. And we kind of followed along with their journey, because they were posting in the Flip Your Life LIVE Facebook group.

Jocelyn Sams: Because they had to leave like days early, of course.

Shane Sams: Right, before everybody else, where did you land? You landed in, like, Memphis, and rented a car, like drove over to Nashville, or something like that?

Mike Giuliano: Yeah, that's right. So we landed in L.A. and then caught a flight over, and then got to hire a Mustang, so the convertible, that was pretty cool. And got to enjoy the south a little bit. So, yeah. It took us a while to get there, but we were revved when we got there.

Shane Sams: So what did you think about the ... what's it-

Jocelyn Sams: Had you ever been to the south before?

Shane Sams: Had you ever been there, yeah. And then what'd you think about it?

Mike Giuliano: Okay, so I've been to U.S. between 12 and 15 times. Never been to the south. First time. I've got plenty of friends in the south. And we loved it. We loved the people, we loved everything about the south. So we have dear friends in Minnesota, and they were shocked when I said, "You know what, I wanna move to the south."

Shane Sams: So we have got a conversion. We have someone converting to southern life. That is what I'm talking about right now.

Jocelyn Sams: Well we have other Australian friends who came over for the event, and they also loved the south. And anyone who has been to the United States from another country, you know that the south is not Los Angeles or New York, or you know ... The places people typically go in the United States. The south is very different.

Shane Sams: I'm super excited that you'll be coming back to the south this year for Flip Your Life LIVE in Lexington, Kentucky, correct?

Mike Giuliano: Yes sir, yeah, we can't wait. It's only a few months away, so yeah, it'll be cool.

Shane Sams: Well we're gonna get more into that later and talk about your journey, what's got you to this point today, where we're at. But tell us a little bit more about your guys' background, tell us about you and your online business, and what you've been doing for a living over the past few years.

Mike Giuliano: Yeah, sure. Over the last 20 years, I've been a digital strategist. So basically that's helping companies grow online. Website development, SEO services, social media, commercialization, reputation management. And I've done work for all sorts of companies. Councils, government departments, Australia Spy Agency, large corporations, small business, it runs the gamut. That's what I've been doing the last 20 years.

Shane Sams: What was it like? Can you tell us what you were doing for the Australia Spy Agency?

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, that one kinda like, piques interest.

Shane Sams: That one stuck out to me. I'm like, "Is this, like, covert stuff? Are you, like, classified and sworn to secrecy?"

Mike Giuliano: No, so what we've got, it's called SEO, so with SEO I help them do some online marketing.

Shane Sams: Okay, good. Okay. I just wanted to make sure that you weren't really secretly taping me and I was being investigated here, by the Australian secret service.

Jocelyn Sams: So are you ... You don't have to answer this, but are you or are you not coming to the south as part of a witness protection plan?

Shane Sams: Is this a spy system? Are you spying on us, is that what's happening here?

Jocelyn Sams: You don't have to answer that.

Mike Giuliano: Hey, I'll take any excuse to move to the south, so ...

Shane Sams: That's right.

Mike Giuliano: I'm coming to learn and grow the business.

Shane Sams: Alright, so let me ... Okay, so you been doing this for 20 years, you've been helping people at SEO, working in WordPress, working in different development for websites and things like that. And this has all been one-on-one client work, like really intense, really up in each other's faces. Meetings and talking to people, and you're wanting to transition into more of an online membership model, so you don't have to do so much of that time for dollar stuff. Correct?

Mike Giuliano: That's correct, yeah. Some of those contracts I've had a few years, some of them a few months, some of them are project by project. But it means that I have to go to the client, I have to be with the client, and I'm locked into their meetings and their terms. So, yeah. So that's why I want to move to a membership model, to have more freedom.

Shane Sams: So tell us what your membership model looks like. What kind of service are you gonna providing, in a scalable way, charging a low monthly price? What are you gonna be doing for people to be able to transition into that? What is your new online business, what's it going to look like?

Mike Giuliano: So what's happened is, over the years, I've had small businesses contact me when they had their website get hacked. When they've tried to do an update on WordPress and it's destroyed their site. So I know that there's a need out there for small businesses to have the protection that the large companies take for granted, basically, because they've got the marketing dollars to pay for that. So what I've been able to do is, get all my services, so we'll keep your website updated, we'll do your daily backups, we'll do all your plugin updates. Every day we scan to make sure your updating plugins, themes, core files, your security. We provide real time hacking protection. If you're gonna need common site real time backups.

Mike Giuliano: So we package that into our membership site and we've got three different levels there. And it makes it affordable for anyone who's got a WordPress site, to have the same protection that the large companies get.

Shane Sams: That's very interesting because, just today, I was answering some questions inside of the forums in the Flip Your Life community, and one of the big things that we see a lot is people will start working in WordPress, and they'll get a little freaked out. Not because of using WordPress. Using WordPress itself is really easy. It's almost like using Microsoft Word or PowerPoint, or even saving files on your computer. It's just, you know, the categories are kind of the folders, the posts are kind of the ... or the pages are just kind of saved in things. It's really easy to actually create stuff in WordPress.

Shane Sams: But that's where they get freaked out. It's when those little numbers by the update buttons pop up and you got a red three, and it's like oh, you need to update this, update this, but then you click a button and everything on your site breaks. Right? Or you get in, like we did one time ... One time we logged in to flippedlifestyle.com, and instead of me and Jocelyn and our podcast staring back at us, it was a skull and crossbones and a terrorist organization, who had overwritten our page.

Jocelyn Sams: That was fun.

Shane Sams: That was fun. And we didn't know anything about security, anything about updating plugins or-

Jocelyn Sams: You learn real fast when something like that happens.

Shane Sams: Yeah. We were literally in Disney World, we were walking out the door, the kids were in a stroller. And I looked down at the site and I went, "Uh. Hold on a second."

Jocelyn Sams: "We have a problem."

Shane Sams: "Something's wrong." So basically what you're saying is, for someone who is scared of that stuff or is not as tech savvy to set up backups, to do those updates and to ... You're just kinda gonna be the one stop shop, click the button, here we go, we'll take care of it for you. Now you can focus on making content or products, or whatever else you're doing on your website. Right?

Mike Giuliano: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And also on top of that, my experience with the large companies and government departments is, reporting's important. So on top of providing that protection, the backup, we also provide monthly reports. So every month we're gonna give the client an SEO report. So we'll tell them how they're doing with their keywords so they know if they're improving or if they're going back a little bit. We also give them a monthly site audit, so that tells them little things that they can, little and big things that can make changes to their website. So the more changes you make, the better you tweak your site, the better you're gonna rank, and the better usability experience that customers or visitors get. And the more comfortable customers feel, the more they're gonna stay on your site, take that call of action, or purchase that product.

Mike Giuliano: And also on top of that, we provide back end and video tutorials as well, just to teach people that don't know certain things in WordPress, how they can accomplish certain things, and improve their site.

Shane Sams: So this is amazing, because this membership is very different than a lot of the ones that we feature on the show, because it really is a service. It's not really just a content-based or a teaching or learning how to do stuff. You do have a component like that, like you just said, there's WordPress tutorials that go deeper into using the platform. But primarily, this is a service-based, scalable, monthly membership. So as you grow I'm sure you'll have a team, or I don't know exactly how you're doing this on the back end, if some of it's automated or whatever. But you're basically saying, "Well, for every one of these team members I can have X clients." And that becomes infinitely scalable without you.

Shane Sams: And that's really what we're talking about about passive income. About creating a freedom online and creating a business where you're not trading time for dollars. It doesn't have to be log in, watch course, ask questions, or whatever. It can be a service. You can totally take a service that you're doing one on one now, and figure out a way to systemize it in a way where you can grow it. You can scale it, and it doesn't involve you actually touching the keyboard everyday. And that's just a really interesting concept, and I think this is gonna go over like gangbusters, actually. So, good job, dude.

Mike Giuliano: Ah, thank you. Ah, thank you.

Shane Sams: So tell us a little bit more about how you came up with this idea. When did you start really thinking about transitioning? When did you start thinking, putting the idea together? Or when did you just decide, "Man, I've had enough of this client stuff. I've gotta find something else." Did you hear one of our podcasts? Did you get an idea? Where did that part of this journey start?

Mike Giuliano: Well see, this is the interesting thing, but also it's the embarrassing thing. I'm in the digital realm, so I've always heard of people turning an idea into a online product. I mean, me personally, I own over 800 domain names. So I'm big in the marketing sphere on line, but it's always been for clients.

Mike Giuliano: So one day I was listening to a podcast, and you and Jocelyn were being interviewed. And I thought, man, number one, I love the accent. And number two, you guys were so candid and honest, and I was taken back by that. So I quickly looked up Flip Your Life and then started listening to your own podcast, subscribed. And my wife used to have a bridal shop, which was about a 60 minute commute. And we actually home school. And so, our whole family would listen to Flip Your Life. And my kids know, if there's one, there's a hundred. If there's a hundred, there's a thousand. So they can recite that. And, you know, they did caught on the southern voice a little bit as well.

Mike Giuliano: So, we would listen to you guys every morning and every afternoon. Through rush hour traffic. And that's when you mentioned about Flip Your Life LIVE. I thought, you know what, this is what I'm gonna do. So I looked over at my wife ... We were actually, when we decided to go to Flip Your Life LIVE and heard about it, we were driving to a country location to celebrate our anniversary. We looked at each other and thought you know what, this is the time, let's do it. And we signed up!

Jocelyn Sams: So I have to ask you one thing, because when you guys were at our event, you told me that you had gotten Pat to listen to the show, but at first she didn't really love it so much. Tell us a little bit about that.

Mike Giuliano: Yes. So she said she couldn't really listen to it because she felt that the accents were a bit strong. And me and the kids love the accent. So for a while she didn't want to listen. But then she didn't have a choice. There's five people in our family, four of us wanted to listen, so we listened.

Shane Sams: Love it.

Mike Giuliano: But you know what, the voice kept on chipping away at her. Her guard up, and then eventually she thought you know what, these guys actually make sense. Same thing, she saw the honesty come through. And the fact that you guys genuinely care. That's the difference. I mean, you can open up Facebook, open up any website, go to Google, and see ads for heaps of programs that quote unquote teach you how to make money, but they don't care. And they don't really work. Whereas that was the difference, the fact that you guys genuinely care and you're there for the whole journey.

Shane Sams: That's amazing.

Jocelyn Sams: Well, what makes me so happy about that is that you guys cared enough and were willing to make the investment in time and money to fly all the way to literally the other side of the earth to come to our event. And not only did you do it once, but you found enough value in it that you're going to do it again.

Shane Sams: Yeah, that's incredible.

Jocelyn Sams: And for me, that is just the ultimate, I don't know what you would say, I guess compliment, to what we do, is that you were willing to do that not just once, but you're willing to do it twice. And that just makes me really happy.

Shane Sams: Yeah, I've got an awesome picture of me and you and Jocelyn and Pat sitting at a table at the event. And it really ... You know, we took hundreds of photos at the event. And I love all of, I mean I really appreciate every photo that I have with every member and every listener that was there. But that one really did stick out to me when I was looking through it, because every ... I actually have it, I think it's on the sales page right now for next year's event. And I've actually got it in my ... I keep a folder that's the main items from Flip Your Life LIVE last year. And that one just really is the one that reminds me that we really can reach out and impact people all over the world. And that you can. You can help anybody with a WordPress website anywhere in the world. And if anybody listening to this podcast right now, if you'll just pick your rock up and throw it in the pond, you're gonna ripple out and impact somebody, somewhere, that you just could never do if you didn't start an online business.

Shane Sams: But I really do love that picture of all four of us, 'cause it just encapsulates everything that we wanted to do with the Flip Your Life community and Flip Your Life LIVE, and that was bring together family-focused like minded people, to really push their business and their life forward.

Jocelyn Sams: While we're on that subject, we've started selling tickets for next year. We are almost sold out of VIP right now, and we're still working on selling general admission. But as you were the person who probably traveled the furthest of anyone else at our event, if someone was thinking about should they come or should they not, what would you say to them?

Mike Giuliano: Yeah, book it in. Definitely, it's a no brainer. From my personal perspective, it was really what I ... It was the kick in the pants that I needed, to move from having to do work for clients to having the freedom. And now, like you said, we've signed up for September coming up, 2019, and now it's about growing what I've created through being inspired through you guys. And I was, I tell you what, when you were sending out those emails saying, "Okay, we're gonna open registration," I was just hanging out. And being in Australia, I know I'm the last one to get the email. And I wanted to be the first one to book into VIP. As soon as I saw it, I booked it, man.

Shane Sams: Nice man, that's amazing. That's awesome

Jocelyn Sams: We love it. And we're so glad that you guys came, we're so glad that you're coming back.

Shane Sams: We just had a VIP meeting too, Mike, and we've got so many ...

Jocelyn Sams: We've got some surprises for you.

Shane Sams: We were actually looking at each other over this meeting, with our live event coordinator the other day, we were looking down going, "This is ridiculous, what the VIP people are gonna be getting." So, it's gonna be phat. You're gonna enjoy it.

Shane Sams: So once you signed up for the event, now this is where you started thinking about your idea, and you really took some action and started putting this together. 'Cause that's one thing we really focus on with Flip Your Life LIVE, is getting stuff done before you get there. Like, I'm actually, at the very beginning of April, we're about to start going through the entire Flip Your Life blueprint, live with me, with the attendees, to prepare everybody for the event. Everybody always asks us, "What if I haven't gotten anything started? What if I haven't got an idea yet? What if I've not done anything?" Well that's okay, 'cause you're going to get a live walkthrough of the blueprint, and we're also gonna do a business audit, for our more advanced members that maybe already have a successful membership. And we're literally preparing every week, doing these live trainings with the attendees, to get stuff done before the event. So what did you do before Flip Your Life LIVE last year?

Mike Giuliano: Before Flip Your Life LIVE, obviously the first thing was to think of, okay, what can I provide, what service or product can I provide to help people in business? And using my skill set for the last 20 years, I came up with WP Safe Care. So first was coming up with that concept.

Mike Giuliano: And then the next thing was mapping out, okay, how is it gonna roll out, and what am I gonna offer. Now, what I didn't do is really attend to those early calling sessions being provided, the live sessions. I needed to do more of that. And that's where last year's Flip Your Life I fell a little bit short, and I encourage anyone listening that if you booked in, please please please, do your homework, attend every session and every recording, because it will make your life easier at the actual event. So, yeah.

Shane Sams: Yeah, that's what we talked about at the event. You were running the idea by us, me and Jocelyn were sitting with you talking about that. And we were going through that, and I was like, "You've known about this for months, what are you doing? Like why don't you just build this thing?" And you were like, "I know, I know, I know."

Mike Giuliano: Yep, I know. It was crazy, and probably because I was sort of stuck in that rut, and having to do work for clients, and maintain the clients that I had. But yeah, even if your listeners take an hour every day to work on their project leading up to Flip Your Life LIVE 2019, it's definitely well worth it.

Shane Sams: Now, I know you have taken massive action since Flip Your Life LIVE, because you left with momentum, you got home, and you really really started making this transition to, "I have to build out everything so that I get to leave client work and do this membership site" So, tell us where you are right now when it comes to building this thing, getting it ready for launch. What does it look like now, is it all done, is it all finished?

Mike Giuliano: Yeah, so everything's completed. I actually took the files off the site last night, so it is live. I've got a handful of clients that I've been doing this for, testing the system and testing the concept, and that's working really well. So I am ready to go.

Shane Sams: Awesome. So we're ready to launch then. That's what we're really gonna talk about the rest of the podcast, is how to get this thing launched, okay? So basically, someone could give you money today and log in and use this service, correct?

Mike Giuliano: Absolutely. Yep, it's ready to go.

Shane Sams: Alright. See, that's the magic time. That's the product first mentality. Once you get to that point, everything else is just finding people to buy it. That's where that saying comes from, "If you can find one, you can find a hundred and one or a thousand and one." You know? So that's what we've gotta do, is get this thing out there. So what is your ... We might have a couple questions here. We're gonna talk through launching this thing, rolling it out, but ... What is your specific question right now that you might have. Let's just start with the first one.

Mike Giuliano: The first question would be, I've got three membership levels. It's what do we call them? So we had a contentious discussion, a heated debate in the household. So I've got three, I've given them certain names, and some people said I should call them Bronze, Silver, and Gold. And other people said I should call them Small, Medium, and Large. So it's, what do I call my three levels?

Shane Sams: What do you want to call them?

Mike Giuliano: What I have called them is Pinello, which is the $59 a month, and you get a certain amount of service. Arcano, which is $79 a month, and you get a few more things. And then Di Fara, which is $99 a month, and you get some more syncing and some more reports.

Shane Sams: Okay, Mike, I'm just a simple man from Kentucky. I don't-

Jocelyn Sams: We're both sitting here looking at each other like, what?

Shane Sams: What are those words, what do those words even mean? Like, what are those words? I don't ...

Mike Giuliano: So, my daughter was the only one who liked them, everybody else hated them. These are three incredible, famous, New York pizza makers. I love making pizzas, I've got a massive pizza oven in my back yard, and that's what I try to do every week, make Napoli style pizzas. So these guys are my pizza heroes.

Shane Sams: Those are your pizza heroes, okay. Okay. So, well ... I've never-

Jocelyn Sams: This is the first time I've ever seen Shane speechless on this podcast.

Shane Sams: 'Cause you're saying those words, and I'm like, "Man, I don't understand the words that are coming out of your mouth." I don't even know what that meant. I thought you were speaking a different language, and I thought, "Man, I thought Australian's spoke English." I didn't know what was going on. Okay.

Mike Giuliano: They're all Italian surnames, that's what they are.

Shane Sams: I got it, okay. Italian sur, okay. What do you think? What do you think about naming?

Jocelyn Sams: Okay, here's the thing. No matter what you call them, people probably won't know the difference. And they're going to refer to them to whatever they feel like referring to them. So in other words, what I'm trying to say is, I think that you are making a big deal out of something that's not really a big deal.

Shane Sams: So basically it's, yeah. There is some argument, I think, for clear naming. Our plans are, we have a standard plan, a premium plan, and we used to call it exclusive, but now we changed it to accelerator, or whatever.

Jocelyn Sams: But most people probably wouldn't know that.

Shane Sams: They still don't know what it means, they just know that one's cheaper and one's more expensive than the other. Right?

Jocelyn Sams: And so, if someone wrote in, they might say, "Hey, I'm on the middle plan, or the higher plan, or the basic plan," or whatever. So what I'm trying to tell you is, don't let this get in your way. Call them whatever you wanna call them, and it really doesn't matter.

Shane Sams: It will not impact sales. It actually could be a good thing, 'cause people will be like, "Oo, fancy." Right?

Jocelyn Sams: But these are the types of decisions that people let stand in their way when they're trying to start selling something, when they're trying to change something. They let little things like this just stop them in their tracks. So you know, you could have been marketing this forever, but you haven't done it because maybe you didn't think the names were a hundred percent right. No one will remember them anyway.

Shane Sams: Yeah, I mean basically, the list of services is what people are gonna read. And they're gonna click the price that makes the most sense to them. So, I wouldn't worry too much about the naming. If you wanna have fun with it, it's your business. Have fun with it. If you fall on the more logical clear side of small, medium, large, there's nothing wrong with that either. And anybody out there that's naming anything, I don't care if it's naming your domain name, naming your business, naming your product, naming your course, whatever it is. Just name it. It doesn't really matter, that's not what's gonna sell product.

Jocelyn Sams: You can always change it. If later on there's some kind of a issue with it, then change it. We've changed our product names a million times. It's not a big deal.

Shane Sams: Yeah. And I don't even know ... The correct technical coaching answer, what I would give you is, "Well, sir, you should split test that. You should have a page where half the people go to, with the fancy fun pizza names. And half with the other names." So there is a merit to that, if you want to do that later. But, bro, I mean it's ... I don't know. I kinda like it. I kinda like the crazy names, myself.

Mike Giuliano: Yes.

Shane Sams: Maybe your niche can be Pizza Fan WordPress Users. It's only people who know the greatest pizza people in the planet. So, okay.

Shane Sams: Alright. So we've cleared up the name issue. So let's go deeper. So what else do you need to work through to get this thing really launched and start promoting this thing hardcore?

Mike Giuliano: Okay, so I've three price brackets that I feel are reasonably priced. Just not sure how the market's gonna accept that price bracket. Apart from providing all the security and the updates and backups, we also evaluate by providing the reports. It's a holistic service to help someone grow, but doing graded online business and WordPress site, but doing it on a mass level. So just the pricing bit was the other sticking point.

Shane Sams: Okay, so you've got 59, 79, and 99.

Mike Giuliano: Yes sir.

Shane Sams: Usually I don't really worry about the middle price, 'cause a lot of times people are drawn to it just for what it is. But what is the major difference between 59 and 199?

Mike Giuliano: Okay, so 59, you get all the-

Shane Sams: I'm sorry, 99. I meant 99.

Mike Giuliano: Yeah. So all three of them, you get all of your backups, updates, real-time hacking protection, and real-time backup. You get that with all of them. You get the SEO report and the side order report and you get tutorials with all of them. With the 99, if you're a product-based business, an eCommerce site, we'll sync all your products through Root Commerce. We'll sync it with eBay, Amazon, Facebook, Google products. And we also provide you three competitor analysis. So you tell us your three competitors, and every month we're gonna give you an SEO insider report on those competitors, so you know what they're doing. So that helps you stay sharp on your game.

Shane Sams: Hmm.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay. Yeah, that sounds like a lot of value.

Shane Sams: Yeah, so what do you get on the middle plan? What's the differentiator in the middle plan?

Mike Giuliano: The middle plan, if you're an eCommerce site, if you got Root Commerce, then we do eBay product syncing and Amazon.

Shane Sams: Okay. So-

Mike Giuliano: We've had clients in the past where they'd dedicate one staff member just to do eBay, or just to do Amazon, whereas we automate this process. The site maintains their products in Root Commerce, and then we sync it with those different channels.

Shane Sams: The thing that I'm hearing that kinda scares me with the way you've divided up this pricing is, it almost feels like, hey, all WordPress users can use the 59, but it sounds like 79 and 99 are both really really focused on eCommerce. You know?

Mike Giuliano: Yeah.

Shane Sams: And I'm afraid that you've almost got two products here. That might be why your pricing feels a little wonky. So if I come to you and I'm a WordPress person and I'm selling courses. I'm not even gonna look at 79 and 99. And that's not what the point of having three prices is. The point is figuring out what people can afford, and giving them the value that matches that. So I'm wondering if you shouldn't move all of the eCommerce type benefits up to that $99 level and maybe charge 199 for that. And then do something else for the other two. Like the other two could just be, like 59 for just the protection, or 79 for protection plus reports. And then you've got this big package that says the eCommerce Pro Package, or whatever. 'Cause, right now, if I'm not doing anything on eBay or any of that other stuff, I'm gonna just overlook any other benefits of the other two packages. Does that make sense?

Mike Giuliano: Yes, absolutely.

Shane Sams: Yeah. So I wonder if you could do like 59, 99 and 199.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, I think the 99 sounds a little low for the type of value that you'd be providing with the upper limit package. But the beautiful thing about this type of service is that there are a lot of similar types of service. Not exactly to what you're doing, but people who provide maintenance or different services for WordPress sites. So that gives you a really good place where you can go and look and see what other people are doing in similar spaces.

Shane Sams: I can tell you right now, we have paid up to 199 a month just for updating plugins.

Mike Giuliano: Yeah, yeah.

Shane Sams: We have a business that's doing that, but everyone won't be able to do that. Some people would only be able to pay maybe 59 for updating plugins and stuff. What I'm saying is, you're giving so much value, and some of it might not be relevant to all WordPress users in those other two packages. So you gotta figure out a way to go 59, 99, and something bigger for all that other stuff. And you'll make more money that way, for sure.

Mike Giuliano: Yeah, that's gold. That's brilliant. I'm gonna do that, absolutely.

Shane Sams: So basically let's say this ... In general, I'm trying to think of a way to theme this for everybody listening. So basically your core service is usually that lowest price. And then your core service plus a bonus is the middle price. So the bonus there is the reporting, right?

Mike Giuliano: Yeah.

Shane Sams: And then the big package usually has extra services. Right? So for example, if you look at our package, we have a standard membership, that's our lowest price. Like 19 a month right now. So you can go in and watch videos and talk on the forums. Right? Okay?

Mike Giuliano: Yeah.

Shane Sams: So our bonus that comes in the middle package, our premium package, which is I think $49 a month right now, is you get two member calls with me and Jocelyn every single month. And you get to actually come ask us questions on those member calls. Right? So see, what we've done is, that applies to everybody. You know what I mean?

Shane Sams: Now our third tier has things like access, additional resources, and that's really what this eCommerce really bonus package thing is, right? And what it'll do, you're almost having three options but two products, really. 'Cause that eCommerce people are gonna jump on that last package every time. 'Cause they know the value. So that's really what you're doing with your tiers, is you're trying to figure out a way to get people to move up the ladder, or to buy a different product completely. So you need to package it that way so it's not so much conf ... 'Cause if I was on your website and I just had a WordPress website, I'd be like, "Ah, man, I can totally get away with 59 bucks, I don't even need to think about the other two. I'm not on eBay." Right?

Mike Giuliano: Yeah, you're right, yeah.

Shane Sams: So if you wanna open this up to the masses, you're gonna have to change that just a little bit.

Mike Giuliano: Yeah, absolutely, will do. I'll get that done today.

Shane Sams: Okay? Alright. So I think we've figured out how we've named your pizza packages, right? We've got some pricing things figured out, we've talked a little bit about how to structure a three-tiered offer. So what do we need to do now to launch this thing? You've opened the doors, right?

Mike Giuliano: Yeah.

Shane Sams: So we can't just build it and hope people will come. What's your plan going forward now, to roll this out to the masses?

Mike Giuliano: Number one, I'm gonna start providing hints and tips on SEO. So basically providing light coaching on how people can grow their websites from an SEO point of view. So I'm gonna be publishing that on the different social media channels. I'm putting together a report that people can download that will summarize, okay, an action plan of what you need to do. So everything will be actionable items to help you grow your ... That's the whole thing. Helping you grow your business online. So I'm providing that content for free. To get the WP Safecare branding out there, and the packages out there.

Shane Sams: I wonder if you should actually say how to grow your business with WordPress. Instead of how to grow it online? 'Cause that's really the goal, right? Is WordPress.

Mike Giuliano: Yeah, yeah.

Shane Sams: So like, how to grow your business using WordPress. There was a discussion today in the forums actually, like should I build my website on ClickFunnels, should I use WordPress, WordPress scares me. That's really the exact conversation that you're trying to have here, right? Is like, "No, WordPress is awesome, let me just show you how to keep it safe so that you can grow your business effectively." You know what I mean?

Mike Giuliano: Yeah, yeah.

Shane Sams: What's your opt-in gonna be? What are you gonna be getting leads with? What's the free deal?

Mike Giuliano: I'm putting together a free report on some actionable items to move forward with your WordPress.

Shane Sams: Security or just using WordPress?

Mike Giuliano: From an SEO point of view. And what you need to do to your WordPress site to grow from an SEO point of view. Because that's the foundation. If you're not seen on Google, well, you're not seen. Normally. So that's gonna be the, providing that free report and getting people in like that.

Shane Sams: I have an idea, but it might freak you out.

Mike Giuliano: Freak me out. Go for it.

Shane Sams: I wonder if your freebie should actually not be all of your WordPress training.

Mike Giuliano: Yep, okay.

Shane Sams: 'Cause all your stuff is SEO, but at the end of your article, imagine if you said, "Oh yeah, you gotta do this, this, and this, oh but by the way, if you're not using WordPress, doesn't matter anyway." You're not gonna be ... You need to use WordPress, don't worry, I'm gonna teach you how to use WordPress completely. 'Cause people sell that. Like actually sell courses how to do that, right?

Mike Giuliano: Yeah.

Shane Sams: So if you became this person who was the go-to person to learn how to use Word ... You can learn how to use WordPress and still not know how to protect it and back it up and do all those things. I'm talking about making good posts, SEO posts, the difference in posts and pages, and even deeper stuff. Like sidebar structures and how to use widgets. All the things these videos you've got teaching people how to use WordPress. That still doesn't infringe on your core offer. Like at all.

Shane Sams: So I wonder if you shouldn't be like ... You can still write about SEO and write about using WordPress and maybe be like a little news person, who, anytime something updates in WordPress you have an article about it or whatever. You just type up a little blog post about 5.03's release or whatever. Or you have a plugin of the week. Whatever it is. You're just really focused on helping business owners use WordPress better. You can dabble in marketing, dabble in SEO, but like ... Man, if you were sitting there and you were like, "Do you wanna get more out of WordPress? Well, join our free community and get access to a hundred videos learning how to use WordPress."

Shane Sams: Now you definitely have a business owner that's interested in WordPress, probably using it, definitely needs your service. And it feels like you're stripping value out of your product, but you're really not, 'cause that's not your offer. Your offer is WP Safe. Right?

Mike Giuliano: Yeah.

Shane Sams: So why not just be the ultimate guy for business owners using WordPress? And then bam, secure, secure ... Your list would probably explode 'cause you could ... Like, "Join my community for free. Get access to all of our WordPress trainings." Boom. And now you just follow up with, is your WordPress site safe? Right?

Mike Giuliano: Yeah, yeah. That's awesome.

Shane Sams: Does that scare you? Does that scare you to let all that content out?

Mike Giuliano: Yeah, well it's funny because the video tutorials are part of the packing, but I could take them and make them free and get people in like that. And the crazy thing is, because I've been doing this for so long, I've created training manuals for my large corporates teaching this stuff on how to use WordPress. So I've actually got a lot of the content already.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, and you don't have to feel like you have to use every single bit for free, either. Maybe you could use part of it for free and then have the other behind the paywall, and that's totally fine.

Shane Sams: Yeah. And it's just the way you present it. All content wants to be free anyway. Everything in those videos, I hate to tell you, is on YouTube, and I could go find it. But I gotta find it. That's the problem. Right?

Mike Giuliano: Right.

Shane Sams: So your offer is you get to get it not free, but here's what you put in your package. Priority support and content coaching. And they can go ask, "Hey, where's a video about setting up a new sidebar or a specific page?" Oh, yeah. Well, priority support will answer that question for them, but it won't do it for the free level. So you could draw your line there too. If you want help going through the trainings, that's inside the $59 thing. Whatever. But then if you just wanna use it yourself, hey, DIY community, people can get in there and talk to each other. But you have guaranteed people using WordPress. That's amazing. Right?

Mike Giuliano: Yeah. Fantastic.

Shane Sams: How many videos do you have?

Mike Giuliano: Over 100, I think about 125, something like that.

Shane Sams: You have 125 blog posts written if you do this too, because every week you could release one training with a blog post, maybe a transcript. And at the bottom it can say, "Hey, we have 99 more of these inside the community." 'Cause they're all spread out among your website, they can dig and hunt, but they're really all in one place with a nice organized system if they were starting from scratch in the community. So they're basically getting curation in the free level, but you can use those as blog posts now everywhere. Upload them to YouTube, whatever. Build your audience.

Mike Giuliano: That's fantastic, yeah. That's brilliant.

Shane Sams: Love it.

Jocelyn Sams: Alright. Well I think that you have some solid direction. I cannot wait to hear bout your launch. When is that going to be?

Mike Giuliano: Okay, so I'm gonna put all those things in place. Change the pricing, change the name. Not the name of the levels, but have an eCommerce level and then the other two levels. So I'm aiming to go full on live in two weeks.

Shane Sams: Alright. So are you gonna launch, real quick, with a webinar? Are you gonna do just adds to your site? Or are you gonna just kinda slow roll it out, everything's ready to go, and you're just gonna start cranking out content? What's the plan?

Mike Giuliano: I'm gonna be running ads.

Shane Sams: You're gonna be running ads.

Jocelyn Sams: Alright, awesome. Well, I cannot wait to hear more about it in the community. I know you will be posting a success story so we can all live through you vicariously. It is going to be awesome.

Shane Sams: And we are going to celebrate massive business ... What do you have? You've got like, what, 16 weeks? No wait, you got about 20 weeks between now and Flip Your Life LIVE. So you gotta be rolling into Lexington, Kentucky, man, like, "Guys. Went on the podcast, dropped a hundred, two hundred members. I found one, and then I found a hundred and one, and then I found whatever and one." Right? We're gonna be celebrating that downtown Lexington this September. Sound good?

Mike Giuliano: Sounds good, looking forward to it, man. That's gonna be awesome.

Shane Sams: Alright guys. That was a great conversation with Mike, today about his business. Talked about a lot of things we don't get to talk about sometimes on the podcast. Service-based memberships, getting into those price points. And even some of those things that hold us up, like naming. I can't wait to see what Mike does over the next few months.

Shane Sams: And we would love for you to take massive action over the next few months as well. And we'd love to see you at Flip Your Life LIVE to celebrate all of the accomplishments, all the things that you're gonna be doing in your online business over the next few months. If you'd like to meet us, meet Mike, and meet everybody else that's coming to Flip Your Life LIVE, this is an open event. Anybody that's listening, anybody in our community, anybody anywhere in the Flipped Lifestyle universe, can come and hang out with us and Mike at Flip Your Life LIVE 2019. All you have to do is go to flippedlifestyle.com/live. That's L-I-V-E. And you can grab a ticket to the number one event for family-focused entrepreneurs. Man, it's gonna be a great room, a lot of great people are gonna be there, and we cannot wait to introduce you to our hometown, basically, where Jocelyn and I met. Lexington, Kentucky. It's gonna be an amazing event. We can't wait to see you there.

Shane Sams: Alright guys, that is all the time that we have for today. Thank you so much for listening to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. If we can help you in any way inside the Flip Your Life community, we would love to do that. But until next time, get out there, take action, do whatever it takes to flip your life.

Jocelyn Sams: Bye.

Links and resources mentioned on today’s show: * Mike's Website * Flip Your Life LIVE 2019 Tickets & Registration Information * Flip Your Life community

Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!

Join the Flip Your Life Community NOW for as little as $19 per month!

https://flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife

View Details

In today's episode, we tell you how to launch a virtual summit and build your email list.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jocelyn Sams: Hey, y'all. On today's podcast, we tell you how to launch a virtual summit and build your email list.

Shane Sams: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, where life always comes before work. We're your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams.

Shane Sams: We're a real family that figured out how to make our entire living online. Now, we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? All right. Let's get started.

Shane Sams: What's going on, everybody? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. It is great to be back with you again today. Super excited to bring another member of the Flip Your Life community on the show to help them grow their online business.

Shane Sams: And I'm really excited about today's show. We got two guests, two great friends of ours who we've met in person and have worked with in our private mastermind, Gena and Jerry Lester. How are you guys doing today?

Gena Lester: We're great.

Jerry Lester: We're doing good.

Gena Lester: Very excited to be here.

Jocelyn Sams: Yes. We are very happy to have you. We are happy that we get Jerry to talk. When they first came on, we were just talking, and we asked, "Hey, you know, is Jerry there?" And she's like, "Oh, yeah, he's here." And we're like, "Oh, is he going to talk?" She's like-

Shane Sams: Is he going to participate?

Jocelyn Sams: I don't know. And I totally feel you, Jerry, I do.

Jerry Lester: Hey, I'm the support.

Shane Sams: Hey listen, that's how we all do, right? Sometimes you got to have lurkers that make the world go around. You know what I mean?

Jocelyn Sams: Okay, guys. Before we dive in and talk about all the good stuff this episode is going to have, I want you to tell everyone a little bit about your background and what you were doing kind of before you discovered online business, this whole world.

Gena Lester: Okay. I am an independent educational consultant. And what that means in layman terms is basically that I help families as they walk through the college admissions process.

Gena Lester: And so I help them figure out like what the perfect college list is, how they're going to ... is the school a fit, or a great school for them. Can they afford that particular school? Are their children going to be successful? What they're going to major in, how they're going ... what essays they're going to write, and everything that goes in between that. I help them choose like what classes that are the best for them to take.

Gena Lester: And I work with students that do everything from going to Ivy league schools, to learning differences, to everything in between, to schools that are just middle of the road, to families that homeschool. All of those things are included in my services.

Gena Lester: And so I have been doing this for ... I've been in education for almost 30 years. And I started out running a private school and then people kept asking me to help them with their students as they were going through the college process. And so I transitioned into my own private practice. And so I've been working with kids for probably about six years now in my private practice offline.

Gena Lester: And I knew that I wanted to scale my business and I didn't really want to hire ... like have a whole brick and mortar business, because I thought about that. But where I'm at in my life, it was just not the best option for me. So going and doing an online business would allow me to scale without having to bring in the whole, you know, lots of new employees and things to that effect. So that's kind of how I transitioned-

Shane Sams: So basically, you were ... what you're saying is you were trying ... you were saying you didn't want to bring in a bunch of other counselors that you trained-

Gena Lester: Yes.

Shane Sams: ... to do what you do, to you know, say like they work in a ... I mean not a cubicle, but like offices and you're ... you didn't want to-

Gena Lester: Yes.

Shane Sams: ... this big thing-

Gena Lester: Yes.

Shane Sams: ... where just all these people showing up for work every day and you had to manage those people.

Jocelyn Sams: And I totally feel you on that, Gena.

Gena Lester: Yes.

Jocelyn Sams: I'm of the opinion more people, more problems.

Shane Sams: Yes. Yes.

Gena Lester: Yes. Exactly.

Shane Sams: We are in-

Gena Lester: That's right.

Shane Sams: ... support of small and mighty teams. That's our-

Gena Lester: Yes.

Shane Sams: ... philosophy.

Gena Lester: And it really ... Once you have that type of a business, it ties you down to having to be there to unlock the door every day.

Shane Sams: Oh yeah.

Gena Lester: And I just really like having the freedom of doing it myself. And so that's why online business is perfect. Because I have more control over my time versus having to be there to unlock the door and clean the toilets for everybody.

Shane Sams: Do you right now, like, meet with people virtually in your one on one stuff?

Gena Lester: Uh-huh.

Shane Sams: Or do you meet with people like in a place? Like how do you do it?

Gena Lester: No. I actually started out meeting in a place. So I would ... I work in a co-working space. So I'd come here and I'd meet ... and I still can do that.

Shane Sams: Yeah.

Gena Lester: But in the last year and a half before I came ... started working toward where ... you know, the membership stuff that I'm doing now, I actually started to transition my students all to virtual because of their schedules. They're so involved, obviously, you know, with your kids, that between, you know, all of the activities that parents and kids are running between. And living in a big city, it can take 30-40 minutes just to drive five miles.

Shane Sams: Oh, I gotcha.

Gena Lester: Yeah. And so this allowed me not to have any breaks and I could, you know, within from student to student, and then it keeps them, they can sit and eat dinner after football practice and work with me while we're doing that, versus ... and then jump right into their homework. So I see everybody virtually.

Shane Sams: So, let me just clarify this for the listeners, okay. You were in education all these years. You started helping kids one on one. You're doing this virtually, like on Skype or Zoom or whatever.

Gena Lester: Yup.

Shane Sams: Okay. Are you talking to the parents or are you talking to the kids? Like who are you talking to?

Gena Lester: No, I work ... my private clients are actually my ... are actually students. So, parents will hire me to sit with their student and take them through step by step the process. So parents can ... I do meet with families as a whole a few times through the process. But typically I'm working straight with the student.

Shane Sams: Got you. So like basically it's you ... Like are you telling them how to fill out FAFSA? Are you telling them how to get their grades right? What are you working with the student on? And like how is that going to ... How does that translate into like a virtual, you know, membership or whatever?

Gena Lester: Yes. Okay, so basically what I do is because college has become so competitive and especially scholarship money and things to that effect. So, the things that I'm really known for is I am very passionate about helping kids find what makes them unique, what makes them stand out, what makes them different from every other student.

Gena Lester: So, I work with them from the beginning to figure out like what their aptitudes are and what their strengths are, where they really, you know, should go as far as their majors and how that ties in to their next steps.

Gena Lester: And so then what we do is we figure out those things, then we go into create a college list. I help them do the research and figure out, do their mission, just what their passions and all those things to that ... like do that line up with the college's mission. Because it may not.

Gena Lester: And then from there, we go into, obviously, there are different platforms plus every college has its own platform. There's all these deadlines. If they miss a deadline, it's just done. If they miss a scholarship deadline, it's too bad. They can't go back. So I have all the-

Shane Sams: So, do you provide accountability to keep them on track? Like you write down the deadlines and you're like, "Hey, Johnny, you've not turned in X, Y, Z." Or whatever.

Gena Lester: Yes. I have an online system that they go in and it sends emails to their parents. They have assignments every week. They know what is due, when it's due. Depending ... Now seniors have them every week. Freshmen ... I work with kids that are freshmen. So those kids are just starting ... We're just helping figure out what they need to be doing.

Gena Lester: I help them understand like what they need to do on college visits or interviews or essays. Essays are a huge part of it. So I probably edit 100 essays between November ... just the month of October, November.

Shane Sams: Wow. That's unbelievable.

Gena Lester: Because it's time for that. Yeah, tons of essay editing.

Shane Sams: Not scalable.

Gena Lester: No.

Shane Sams: And it's not scalable at all.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, this whole thing, I mean, I'm really fascinated by what you do. Because I think back to when I was graduating high school or like when I was in high school, and I really had no idea what I wanted to do. Like I was one of the first people in my family to go to college. My dad also went to college. But I was one of the first people to like actually go out and go somewhere totally far away. I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do. I had no idea-

Shane Sams: And she was 17 when she went to college, by the way.

Gena Lester: Yes.

Jocelyn Sams: Like a baby. And I thought I was so grown up. And yeah, I had life all figured out. But really, I had no clue what I was doing. Like I just picked the college because I wanted to go there. And I mean everything worked out okay, but it's just now I'm looking back ... You know, I'm almost 40 now.

Jocelyn Sams: And you know, like I'm just now starting to do some of the things that you're talking about. You know. What are my attributes? What am I good at? What should I be doing? That type of thing. Like I'm just figuring this out now. And to be able to figure it out when you're like a freshman in high school, I mean that's really amazing.

Gena Lester: Yeah. People ... the families always say to me, I where ... I run into people who are, you know, in your stage of life or they've just graduated. And they're like, "Well, where were you, how come I didn't know about you?" And I think that's why it's so ... I'm so passionate about it.

Gena Lester: I went into fashion design, believe it or not, when I graduated high school, because I had no clue. My friend was doing it, so I thought, "Hey, well I learned to sew, so that was great."

Shane Sams: That's a good reason to pick a major.

Gena Lester: But totally not, totally not what I should have been doing. And so, you know, college is so expensive. And if you're a student or your child can figure out ahead of time, they may not know do I want to be a doctor, but they may know, "Okay, I really like the sciences."

Gena Lester: And so we find a major that kind of gives them some leeway there. Then they can prepare and even cut a year off of college. They can take some college in high school. Not spend as much going to college, they're not going to lose credits if they transfer, because even though everything quote, unquote transfers, it doesn't always transfer into the degree they change to. So they can lose that.

Gena Lester: And then also, kids, if they stay in too long, they get discouraged and they end up dropping out. Then you've got student debt or whatever. And your student's not ... your child's not even finished college. So the whole purpose of this is to kind of keep all of those things from happening.

Shane Sams: Awesome.

Gena Lester: And then with the online, what I'm doing is I'm actually taking everything that I teach to the students, I'm taking that out of my head, and I've made a course, I guess basically, in there. So a parent can go through and it's designed where a student can sit and watch the classes and go through it on their own. Or a parent can sit and watch it and then sit down with their child and do it.

Gena Lester: So, I kind of done it where both parent and child, depending on the dynamic of the family.

Shane Sams: I love your story. Because this is the classic how to get into, like, online business. How to scale your business, how to create more ... we say passive income, but it's really just scalable income. Because you have this career, right? You've built up over 40 years in education and six years doing this one on one thing, this knowledge base, right? That only you possibly have.

Shane Sams: Like this is unique. Right? Now there's other people that probably help people get into college. But your experience is unique. And you have an opportunity to teach and help other people with your unique experience. And then you decide that this needs to scale, because you don't want to hire people. That was clearly a way you could scale. Right? You could have done that.

Gena Lester: Right.

Shane Sams: But you want to ... you want to take it online, you want to go online, you want to make courses, you want to spread this out to as many people as possible and facilitate a more one to many instead of one on one approach. And that is exactly how you can grow a business of a thousand customers paying $50 a month or whatever. By going online.

Shane Sams: So, like what made you ... Like how did you hear about us or how did you hear about this model. And like what made you say this was what I want to do. I want to create this course, I want to create this community of my own. Like what happened there? Like what was the next step to say, "I don't want the people in the cubicles, I want this." Like what happened there?

Gena Lester: Well, I began probably about a year ago, at this point, deciding okay, I'm going to sit down and do that. And being in a co-working space, there's lots of different entrepreneurs here that have different businesses and so sometimes we sit and just kind of, you know, brainstorm with each other, talk about different things. And so I had been talking about my business.

Gena Lester: And a friend of mine, one of the other owners here, she was listening to the Profit First podcast. Which we ... is a big thing I do, as well. And I implemented that in my business a year and a half ago, so I love that. And she was ... immediately texted me and said, "Oh, my gosh, you're not going to believe who I just ... I just heard something on his podcast and it's absolutely what you need to do." And so she immediately sent me the link. And so I listened to it. And I was like, "Yes. This is, yes."

Shane Sams: Mike ... This is Mike Michalowicz's Profit First podcast, which we did an interview on air. That's where-

Jerry Lester: That was the interview we listened to.

Gena Lester: And so when I listened to his podcast, listened to that interview and I was like, "Absolutely, they understand education, they get what I'm doing." You know, that type of thing. And there were just a lot of different reasons that I felt really connected with you guys. Began to ... I binge listened to all your podcasts, I think in about a month period. And I was like, "Yeah, I'm jumping in." And I don't even ... I mean, I know I signed up for the trial, but it was ... I don't even like wait for it was over. I think I sent a message to the community person, said I want to do the whole year in this. I'm going to do this. It's ... yeah. You know, and I ... definitely, it's been a road. Because I realized there's a lot more involved than I thought.

Shane Sams: Sure.

Gena Lester: But, that's okay. You know. So it's been a great, you know, year. I think my year renews in April. So in a year, I'll have been end of the year in April.

Shane Sams: That's awesome.

Jocelyn Sams: Awesome. And not only did you guys commit, we love it when people commit. Not just for financial reasons, but because that means that you're really invested and that you're determined to do what it is that you set out to do. So we love people who make that type of commitment. And also, not only did you join for the full year and the community, you guys also made the decision to come to the event in September. So let's talk just a little bit about that. Like what made you make that decision, and what are some things that have come out of that?

Shane Sams: And also, too, like because I love when we do the podcasts, because the hard part on our side is we know your story. Like, right?

Gena Lester: Yes.

Shane Sams: So then I'm like trying to peel the onion back and reveal your story to everybody.

Jocelyn Sams: But it's so exciting.

Gena Lester: People-

Jocelyn Sams: We just want to tell people.

Shane Sams: I know, right. Like I want to just say, like, "Here's all the things that they did." Right. It's hard to do that. Like when you signed up for the event, at this point it was more like you were in the creation phase, right? Like that was kind of the catalyst or the anchor on your calendar. The goal was to do X, Y, Z, before the event.

Shane Sams: So, what did you do before the event? What did you create and like leading up to the event, how did you prepare for that?

Gena Lester: Well, I started out really ... I had a website. It was on Squarespace, though, so I shifted it over to WordPress, which I did. Tried to do on my own for the most part, but decided I ... I did hire somebody to help me with that. Because I got a little stuck there for ... that probably was a-

Shane Sams: Outsource that every time you get a chance.

Gena Lester: Yeah. I wish I had done that earlier. But anyway. It was great, because I was able to create what I wanted. And I really liked the flow of how your website looked. And so mine's different, but it still was kind of ... that helped me ... I'm a visual person, as well. So that really helped me to be able to see, okay, this is what I need to do.

Gena Lester: And then began to really set up the membership site, set up like the classes. I think, for me, the time consuming has been the classes. Because I ... it's more difficult for me not to ... and I'm getting better at this. But I wanted to not just ... I needed to have more classes in there. Because I felt like what if a senior joins. And they're in the middle of the process and I don't have those classes created. It's going to be stressful. So I wanted to make sure the senior year was completely done before I really launched. And so now I've got almost all of the freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior completed. So it was a learning process for the, you know ...

Gena Lester: I had to get comfortable using video and audio and feeling comfortable doing YouTube. And so I definitely learned a lot in that respect. So all of that kind of stuff helped me lead up. I had never ... all of my business had grown organically. I had never ran an ad, I had never had to market or sell anything. My business was always just full just from word of mouth.

Shane Sams: Yeah, this is a different animal now, though, right? Because it's online.

Gena Lester: Yes.

Shane Sams: Totally different animal.

Gena Lester: Now it's like fun. I'm like, I don't feel awkward ... I mean, I guess I feel a little awkward every now and then. But for the most part, it's like really ... you know, I've gotten more comfortable with it. I've gotten more confident. And I'm like, "Yes, I can do this."

Shane Sams: And I bring that up, because ... okay, so I'm just going to fill in some gaps here as we get to the next ... because we ... You have some amazing questions that we want to talk about. And you did some amazing things after the live event.

Shane Sams: So we got to the live event, and we have a really strong philosophy in the Flipped Lifestyle, you know, universe, of product first. Like you really want to get something to sell. Like that's our mission. Because if you can't take money and you can't give something of value for the money, you don't have a business. You have a hobby. Like that's it. And everybody else teaches build your Instagram account and build your this and build your that. And like there's nothing there. You don't make any money, you don't do anything with it.

Gena Lester: Right.

Shane Sams: So you basically get all these products done, you're building this membership community type thing out, you're getting the infrastructure finished. We get to Flip Your Life Live, we get to meet in person, we get to talk, and you joined our private mastermind. And the first question that you basically gave us was, "All right, now who's going to buy this?" Like how do we grow an audience, right?

Gena Lester: Right.

Shane Sams: And your situation was really interesting because, you know, a lot of times we talk about, you know, okay, we can go the organic content route, we can show a lot of ads, we can do a lot of things like that.

Shane Sams: But as we worked with you and we listened to your story, I kind of realized that you had a lot of connections with people in the college space, there was a couple other members of the community at Flip Your Life Live that were kind of in your space. And we kind of connected you guys with them. And this, that, and the other. And we kind of came up with this virtual summit idea.

Shane Sams: And so, like, first, how did you feel when I said, "Hey, Gena, I want you to host a virtual summit with like 20 speakers. How does that sound?" Like, what did you ... how did your heart explode when I said that to you?

Gena Lester: Actually, it did. I was like so excited. Because I knew what a virtual summit was. I had just never thought about doing one. And it, you know, when I ... When you said it, I was like, "Oh my gosh." I mean, my mind went in just a million directions. And so I literally sat down and immediately went to work. You know. And started putting it all together.

Gena Lester: And it's funny, because I started a private school back in the '80s for students that homeschool. And at that point, there wasn't anything for them. So this was a way for me to offer something. And I had no clue what I was doing, I just went out there, put an ad, and had 80 kids sign up in the first like week. So I was like, I should find a building.

Gena Lester: And so that's kind of my personality. So when you said it, I was like, "Oh, jump off the cliff." And I was like, "I can do this in like three weeks." And Jerry's like, "You probably want to give yourself a little more time."

Jocelyn Sams: The voice of reason.

Shane Sams: The voice of reason, always.

Gena Lester: The voice of reason. So like, yeah. You're right. So I kind of backed out like, because it was right in the middle of Christmas as well. And just when would be the right time for it. And so I was like ... it was the greatest ... It was a genius idea for me.

Shane Sams: I love the conversation thread. We talk on Voxer in our private mastermind. Like I can ... like it's funny, like I see the ... It's like a little graph that goes up and down. And like, I know when we've hit a chord, because like the messages immediately get longer. And it's like I can scroll back through. And I'm like five minute, five minute, five minute, five. Like this was a good conversation. You're excited.

Shane Sams: Probably explain a little bit, first, what a virtual summit is. And a virtual summit is basically where you get a bunch of experts together and you basically do a ... It's like a glorified webinar, is what it really is. So you're not going to be live, you're going to record all of these interviews ahead of time. But you're going to release them like on a certain day. You could do it live, I guess. If you wanted to.

Jocelyn Sams: And some people do.

Shane Sams: And some people do. In this case, we decided that Gena would go out and get interviews from all these experts in the field. So it might be in her space it might be like an admissions counselor or someone who was really good at, you know school aid or someone like an expert of the SAT or whatever. Just anything in her space that was related to this summit. And a summit is like bringing people together to speak. Right?

Shane Sams: So basically, then all the people involved in the summit will all email any list they've got. Share it anywhere they've got. Run ads to anywhere they got. Drive traffic to one page to register. And the goal is to combine the efforts of as many people as possible to build a huge email list and then everybody gets to share the email list and they can go do what they want with it, like after the event. Right?

Shane Sams: And this is a great way to build an email list fast if you have good connections, if you've got some people that you can get to do a virtual summit with. That might even have an audience, and we're gonna talk ... some of the people had really big audiences that you worked with. And then ... but also, it doesn't take a lot of time. But you don't have to put a lot of ads into it. You divide up the resources between everybody. And you don't have to create a ton of content yourself. You just interview people, basically.

Shane Sams: So, you have your summit, and you ... how many emails ... like what happened to your email list? How'd that work out?

Gena Lester: It definitely blew up. I mean, I went from having zero to having 400 and something.

Shane Sams: Oh man. That is absolutely amazing. Absolutely amazing. 400 emails.

Gena Lester: Just by doing the summit. Which was phenomenal. And I will say, you know, we talked about originally sharing those emails. But one of the things I found in my industry was that some of the people were concerned about sharing ... like the people coming in and sharing those lists. So everybody actually asked me not to share them and for me to keep the emails myself. I know. I was shocked.

Gena Lester: But everybody totally promoted it. I ... yeah, I was just amazed. And everybody had a speaker page. So they all had a link to a free something, so that then people could go in and opt in to their stuff. And that way if somebody wanted to know about what one person had or another person-

Shane Sams: Perfect.

Gena Lester: So, it ended up for me ... I think it could be done either way. Because originally that was my first thing. And when I started talking about it, I was like this is what I'm going to do. And then there was just ... I think maybe because of my space, that there was just a concern among everybody, like-

Shane Sams: Privacy, basically.

Gena Lester: Yeah, the privacy basic. Part of it. So I ended up not sharing those emails with anybody just based upon the speakers' request. So that was kind of amazing to me that that even happened. And they were like ... My speakers were emailing me every day saying I had given them a list of emails that they could send out. A lot of them actually took them and even went a little bit further. They were sharing it on their social media, sending them out to their group. And then asking how statistics looked. So I was able to go in and share and say, "Yeah, the statistics look great, there's a lot of people." I think every speaker had over a 100 views.

Shane Sams: Wow.

Gena Lester: Which was pretty amazing. Yeah.

Jocelyn Sams: That is awesome. And I love how you did it that way. You know, it just goes to show you that you don't have to do things a certain way because other people do it that way. If it doesn't feel right to you, change it around. We do stuff like that all the time. So I love it that you guys said, "Hey, I don't feel right about just putting all these emails together. Let's have everybody opt in separately." I think that's totally fine.

Shane Sams: And you created a baseline. Like our baseline was, let's present it like this and see ... and then you see what it's turned into. And that's why you ended up with 400 emails. And like you ... and it's still reciprocal. Like that was ... you found a way to make it reciprocal, though. Because they had the opt in page on their speaker page.

Shane Sams: But the cool thing about a virtual summit, people are going to share it. Because it's status. It's like, "Look at me. I'm speaking at this virtual summit." It's like if you're speaking on stage, it doesn't matter who or how many.

Gena Lester: Right.

Shane Sams: Like I'm speaking at this event. So like it just creates this like reciprocity between everybody and there's kind of an ego thing that gets some energy behind it. And people feel good about the content they create. And so like they're going to promote it. Right?

Gena Lester: Right.

Shane Sams: It's even better than like an affiliate thing. Where it's like, "Oh, you sell my thing for me." No, this is more just, "Let's all do this together and have fun."

Gena Lester: Exactly.

Shane Sams: And support our industry. And like 400 emails is nothing to sneeze at. Like I'm telling you, like ... I mean if you could convert 10% of that at $50 a month, that's 40 people paying you $50 a month. Like that's good, talk about real money. Right? So I mean, that's an amazing ... I think we had less than 400 when we first launched our first product. It was like under 300, I think. So like a huge business can be built on the back of, you know, 400 emails.

Gena Lester: Yeah. And you know, I ended up setting up a Facebook Live ... Facebook group. Where everybody gave them a link, they all ... like I would say, probably about 130 people from the summit joined the group. And then I went live twice a week. Because what I did was I dripped out a different speaker every day. Even though they could see them all ... you know, the members or the people who signed up could go in and watch whatever they wanted at any time. But every day I focused on a new speaker. So I said-

Shane Sams: Oh, that's smart.

Gena Lester: "This is this speaker and here is their information. And here's a link straight to their stuff." And so then that speaker also then was promoting their stuff out that particular day. I actually figured out how to do Facebook, YouTube, and them inside of a system which was kind of ... the first one was a little rough. But then I figured it out and we got it going.

Gena Lester: But people were asking, you know, questions and it was like really interactive. And so those people will still be part of that group. You know, since the summit.

Shane Sams: So you're saying that's like 130 additional contacts on top of even all the emails? Or it's at least another channel to get-

Gena Lester: Yeah, I think it's more of another channel. I did promote it out. And so they're ... I got to put the link on my Facebook and different things that say even if they didn't sign up for summit, they could come. So I think there are some new people in it, as well. But a lot of it is the same ... the people who were from the summit that joined.

Shane Sams: That's amazing. Yeah. I mean, that's just an awesome example, guys, of you don't have to do it like we do it. You don't have to do it like anybody else does it. And you can just go out and build your list. You just have to find what works for you. If you know 10 people, if you know ... If you're a networker, like somebody who knows people or you've developed a network over years and years, why would you not do a summit? I mean, why would you not work together to move mountains? Right? And go build that email list up.

Shane Sams: And you guys are a prime example of how something big can happen really fast, right? Like I mean, it's only a few months. And bam, 400 emails. Went from zero to 400 like it was nothing. So.

Gena Lester: Right. And what was cool is that I had ... I wanted to do 15 speakers. And I have a lot of connections in every different like discipline. But then I would speak to somebody and they're like, "Oh, you have to have this person." And so I ended up only using maybe five of my own contacts and so I've already had people saying, "Are you doing this again? Are you doing it in the Fall? How are you going to," you know, so I know that this is something that will happen ... like I can take it and do the same ... now that I've got the system down, I can do it again. I can do it twice a year and still, you know, add to my email list.

Shane Sams: That's amazing.

Gena Lester: So, that's exciting.

Shane Sams: It's like automatic emails without spending money.

Gena Lester: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Gena Lester: It was.

Shane Sams: You know what I mean. That's great.

Gena Lester: It was.

Shane Sams: Okay, so first of all, you guys are awesome. I love you guys so much because you don't mess around. You are decisive, you take action, you get on ... you get on a plane or a car and you go to live events.

Jocelyn Sams: You don't worry about if it's perfect.

Shane Sams: That's right. You don't worry about if it's exactly like the experts said to do it. You know what I mean?

Gena Lester: That was ... I edited it myself. And I can tell you, it's not perfect.

Shane Sams: Exactly. That doesn't matter. But it worked. It worked.

Gena Lester: It did.

Shane Sams: Right? And now, we have 400 emails that we get to market to of people that are directly interested in exactly what we're selling.

Gena Lester: Right.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay, so you did the summit. You got some emails. And where are you at now? Like what's your ... What's your next thing? Have you tried to sell them anything?

Gena Lester: No. So I did on my page, I did put like a link to ... you know, to my EPC campus, but I haven't really used that ... the summit yet as that selling tool. Because I knew that would be the next step I wanted to get them in, and know my content, and know me first. So, yeah. Now I need to launch and I need to get members into my campus. So that's where I'm at now.

Shane Sams: So, basically, though, you've got the campus ready. It's just that you've got the sales page ready, you just got to figure out a way to bridge the gap between, okay, I now know about Gena's universe and I am into her product.

Shane Sams: Well, you've done everything perfect so far. And I've no doubt you're going to be successful at this. Because you had a real world experience, you had an idea, you turned it into a course. You figured out a way to grow an audience and get emails. And now it's just a matter of marketing it to them. Okay.

Shane Sams: So, usually in this case, especially since you have this new email list that's right in the universe, the world ... I keep saying universe today. The world that you're in. You've got them. Like they're fresh. Right?

Gena Lester: Right.

Shane Sams: The next step, usually with a really fresh email list, is something live. Right?

Gena Lester: Okay.

Shane Sams: You want to do a beta group. I probably do not recommend getting 100, 200 ... I mean, it sounds great to have a ton of people come in at once. But you don't know yet what's going to happen when people start interacting-

Gena Lester: Right.

Shane Sams: ... with the content, asking questions, so-

Jocelyn Sams: You need to get a few super fans in to break things. Because they're very forgiving.

Gena Lester: Right.

Jocelyn Sams: They will be cool with it. Like even if you screw it up, we do this all the time.

Shane Sams: Like, they'll say this link's not working, this video won't play. Something, you know, something you missed.

Gena Lester: Right.

Shane Sams: Usually we recommend a beta list of about 20 people, a beta group.

Gena Lester: Okay.

Shane Sams: Get 20 members ... What are you going to charge for your membership?

Gena Lester: I have it at 599 for a year or 54, I think, per month.

Shane Sams: So basically like if they buy the year, they save a month or two, basically?

Gena Lester: Yeah.

Shane Sams: So I'm just going to use ... I'm just going to say 50 and 500.

Gena Lester: That's fine.

Shane Sams: Okay. So basically, like join and save two months for free. Or whatever. So beta group members probably need to come in cheaper at like a dramatic discount on the first round. Like maybe like even like $25. Like it's going to be 50, but you can get in for the whole time you're here for $25 a month. I would probably go ahead and say $250 and not do like a monthly with that level. Because these are people that will graduate out eventually.

Gena Lester: Right.

Shane Sams: So, maybe do an annual of like, look, it's going to be 500, I'm going to let you in now for 250. You're going to get everything for the thing, but I need you to come in to help me develop it. You're going to ask me questions, I'm going to make stuff for you that nobody down the chain will ever get.

Gena Lester: Right.

Shane Sams: And Jocelyn was talking earlier, right before we got on the call, about doing maybe an email launch and then something a little more low key live, because these people are kind of already with you.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, so because you have the emails, like I think it's important to kind of indoctrinate them into your universe and what you're planning on offering. And maybe you've done this already, this is something that you've already done. Like have you sent them any emails?

Gena Lester: No. I've sent them emails that are strictly based upon the summit. So like these are the speakers, yeah.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay. Yeah. So what I would probably do is just do a little bit of warming up. And what I mean by that is just kind of talk to them. And be like, "Hey, thanks for attending the summit. I am Gena, I want to get to know you a little bit better. I want you to know more about me. Here's a little bit about my background."

Jocelyn Sams: And just sort of get into a little bit of that. Talk about some success stories of people that you've helped along the way. Like let them get to know you, let them get to know things that you do, and as you go along, I would probably ... I might even go ahead and pitch them in the email sequence.

Shane Sams: Yeah.

Jocelyn Sams: But then you can also have something live as well. Like to answer people questions. So basically, let them know, "Hey, I'm here to help you. Here's the way I'm going to do that. And I have a really unique opportunity for you. This membership is very new. I am developing it now. And I know that with your help, it can be something truly amazing. So for a limited time only, I'm offering this beta program. It is available for X dollars for Y amount of time. And you are going to be able to help me create this and make it the amazing place that it is going to be when I open it up to the whole world."

Shane Sams: So, basically, this is ... we kind of ... When Jocelyn and I talk about this with any new email lists we create, like if we do a promotion, let's say we get 500 emails. Right? We know there's low hanging fruit there. We know there's probably 20-50 people that would just buy the thing because it was in front of them.

Gena Lester: Right.

Shane Sams: Okay. So what you're going to do now first is scoop them up. Scoop up that low hanging fruit. Like there's people that are just excited coming off the summit. All they need is one little jump to know more about you. Like, "Hey, I'm Gena, I created this summit. I led this summit. I'm the expert that brought all the experts together, because I've been doing this for 40 years and I've been teaching people for six years."

Shane Sams: And then the next email, like that's like email one. That's like your ... about you. Right? And maybe you close that one with, "Hey, if you have any questions about the college process, hit reply and email me back right now." Okay.

Gena Lester: Okay.

Shane Sams: Anyone that emails you back, you immediately offer them to join, okay?

Gena Lester: Okay.

Shane Sams: One on one. The second email, then ... well, actually, this is exactly like our indoctrination for our webinar we're doing right now. The second email is a true case study. Like an amazing case study. Like this kid would not have went to college if it was not for me. Period, right?

Gena Lester: Right.

Shane Sams: Like I helped them. If I had not helped them, they would have not made it. Do you want your kid to go to college? You may need to talk to me. Right? Whatever.

Gena Lester: Okay.

Shane Sams: Okay? And then the third email is basically just, "All right, I'm opening this up, I'm only taking 20 people. This is being sent to 400 people. You have 48 hours to join. I'm going to remind you tomorrow or the next day."

Jocelyn Sams: Once it's full, it's full.

Shane Sams: Once it's full, it's full. And what you do is like at 9:00 the night it closes, you send an email that says, "I'm live right now doing a Q and A for anybody that wants to know about my beta program."

Jocelyn Sams: And you may be sold out by then.

Shane Sams: You may be sold out by then.

Jocelyn Sams: That would be cool.

Shane Sams: Then you don't have to do the live.

Gena Lester: Right.

Shane Sams: You know. But you're trying to just scoop up low hanging fruit first. Now, after you get this beta group, you're going to have to go back to this list. You're going to keep feeding them information and good stuff for a while. There will be a full-blown sales webinar, but we can create that in the trainings in the community. Right?

Gena Lester: Okay.

Shane Sams: So, like that's down the road. Right now, we need to say can we get 10, can we get 20 right now at 250 a year, period. Right?

Gena Lester: Right.

Shane Sams: Let's just get them in there and start breaking things.

Gena Lester: Okay. So Thursday of this week, I'm doing the final Facebook live in the group-

Shane Sams: Perfect.

Gena Lester: ... for the summit. So should I pitch it there?

Shane Sams: Yes. Yes.

Gena Lester: Okay.

Jocelyn Sams: Absolutely.

Shane Sams: Yes. You should say ... Here's what you should say, okay. "Hey guys! Thanks for attending the summit. This was an awesome experience. All that information is still there for you to get into. Don't forget to log in and keep access." Whatever. "Here's my special thing that I'm doing. I'm about to email this out to hundreds of people."

Jocelyn Sams: But because you're here on my Facebook Live, I want to let you know about it right now. This is an amazing opportunity.

Shane Sams: You've got the first chance.

Gena Lester: Right.

Jocelyn Sams: I'm doing this for the first time ever. I'm opening up the doors. And you have the opportunity to be a part of it right now.

Shane Sams: And then they'll click a link to a sales page, basically. And you can say, "This is 50% off." I would even say, like ... what do you charge to do this one on one? Like ...

Gena Lester: Oh, it depends. I mean, it can ... like for one year it's about ... it's like $3,800.

Shane Sams: Okay. You need to tell them that.

Gena Lester: Yes.

Shane Sams: You need to say, "Look, I charge my one on one clients 3,000," don't say 38 hundred. Say, "$3,800."

Gena Lester: Okay.

Shane Sams: Say, "I'm going to charge members who join this later over $500."

Gena Lester: Okay.

Shane Sams: But if anyone wants in tonight, they can get in for this, 250. I'm taking 20 beta members. I'm going to work ... I'm going to work. It's almost going to feel one on one, I'm going to work with you so much over the next few months. Because I really want your feedback about this. And then you try to drop 10, or 20, or 5, or 10 or whatever.

Jocelyn Sams: And you say, you know, because this group is so small, because I'm opening it to such a small number of people, you guys are going to have access that other people who take this course in the future will not have, because I'm going to work really closely with you. You're going to help me develop types of materials that you need. And I'm really excited about this opportunity, I can't wait for you to join my community.

Gena Lester: Okay.

Shane Sams: And then I would probably go back to that group. I would do the beta for like four weeks with 20 people. And get your feet wet managing the community and the ... you know, just all those questions and whatever happens. Just see like ... there's no way you can be prepared for everything that's about to happen. Right?

Gena Lester: Right.

Shane Sams: You got to go through it. But like for ... I would do a live every week, and just jump on and say something. Like even if it's just, "Hey, don't forget, this is happening on the calendar." Whatever.

Gena Lester: Right.

Shane Sams: Like, keep the live group kind of fresh. And then maybe even come back again and be like, "Beta group two. Wow, what a successful beta group I had." You're trying to scoop up some more people, but it's not as good a discount next time.

Gena Lester: Right, right.

Shane Sams: Like 25% off instead of-

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, I think that I believe you're going to sell it out.

Gena Lester: That would be great.

Jocelyn Sams: Like I think your little updates each week should be like, "Hey, I want to let you know what's going on in my beta group." You know.

Shane Sams: Oh, yeah. That's true.

Jocelyn Sams: Like, "I launched this awhile back, we totally sold out. But, these are some of the things that I'm working on, these are some of the things that my members are helping me to create. And I'm going to be opening again really soon and I cannot wait for you to be a part of it, too."

Shane Sams: So you use the Facebook group weekly. And you're emailing these same things to your list, too. Well, after you all close the beta. Right?

Gena Lester: Right.

Shane Sams: and Facebook, right? And you're going to go on and say, "This happened in my beta group this week."

Jocelyn Sams: Or, "This person had a success."

Shane Sams: Yes. Like look what's happening. I'm going to open this back up. You just keep saying the date. And then like a month later you do it again, now you got 40 members. Right?

Gena Lester: Right.

Shane Sams: And off to the races.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. And I would absolutely repeat the summit again. I mean, get some more of those leads. You know, come up with a good time that people are thinking about stuff like this. It's nice to know when that time is in your space, but right before it. That's a great time to do it.

Shane Sams: I would ask, too, that on the summit, like you probably had more people that could have spoke that didn't, right? Like did you-

Gena Lester: Oh, yeah.

Jerry Lester: Oh, yeah.

Gena Lester: Absolutely.

Shane Sams: I would create a new round. And I would not be afraid to do that quarterly. At least like three times a year. I wouldn't do it two times a year. I'd do it at least three times a year. Because-

Gena Lester: Yeah, because I was going to say, I can do it in the ... like parents think about it like at the ... especially junior parents, at the end of school year. Like all their friends are graduating. And they're like, "Oh, no. My child's a senior."

Shane Sams: Yes. Like-

Gena Lester: ... again. And like the early Fall. Like they see their kid. The senior's starting to get ready. So the younger ones are like, "Oh."

Shane Sams: And then there's probably the procrastinating parents and the ... their senior year in December, and they're like, "Oh, no. My kid's got to go to college." Right? So like-

Gena Lester: Exactly.

Shane Sams: There's three perfect places to do this.

Gena Lester: There is.

Shane Sams: And you can rotate through different speakers, so it's never the same. Right?

Gena Lester: Right.

Shane Sams: And you can ... because your ultimate goal now, that you ... this is how it works. You get a product, you figure out a way to get leads, and then you sell the leads the product, and then you repeat the cycle. That's all business work.

Gena Lester: Right.

Shane Sams: So you've figured out now, you've got this product that you know is good for people. You know this summit works, right?

Gena Lester: Right.

Shane Sams: So, this cycle that you're going to get into is, okay, do the summit, get a bunch of emails, open the door, get a bunch of people in, okay. I may have exhausted those thousand people, but now I do another summit, get a new thousand people. Do another summit. And you just keep stacking, brick by brick, all of these members.

Shane Sams: So like you get 50 members out of this crop, right? And then like, okay, let's say 10 leave. You keep 40. Then you do the summit again, you get 40 more. Now you got 80.

Gena Lester: Right.

Shane Sams: You lose 10, you go to 70. But then you do another summit. You get ... oh, we're at 100. And it just keeps stacking every quarter, or whatever, this way.

Gena Lester: Right.

Shane Sams: Pretty cool.

Gena Lester: Perfect.

Shane Sams: Okay. Well, listen. This has been an awesome chat. And I think all you guys got to do is roll this out. And let's put those first members in. And let them break some stuff.

Gena Lester: Yes.

Shane Sams: Then we put it back together. We see what happens next.

Gena Lester: Right. I'm very excited.

Shane Sams: It's amazing.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay, guys. It has been super fun talking to you, today. I'm really excited about all the stuff that you're doing. And I can't wait to hear more about the members that flood in when you put this offer out there. I know it's going to happen. I just feel it.

Jocelyn Sams: So, very excited for you. Congratulations on everything that's happened so far. But before we go, we always like to ask, what is one thing that you are going to take action on in the next 24 hours or so based on what we talked about here today?

Gena Lester: Definitely, I am going to launch the beta group. I'm going to get that ... kind of tweak my sales page, I think, a little bit. Get that pricing. And I'm going to definitely put it out Thursday during my live Facebook group. And then start that email chain. So I think that's like definitely the next step for me, is getting that out there so I can put some people in the community.

Shane Sams: Start making some money, right?

Gena Lester: Exactly.

Shane Sams: All right, guys. That wraps up another interview with one of our Flip Your Life community members. Super proud of Gena and Jerry for everything they have accomplished. We know great things are ahead for them and their online business.

Shane Sams: And we know that great things are also ahead for you and your family and your online dreams, as well. We'd love to help you take your next steps in your online journey. All you have to do is go to FlippedLifestyle.com/FlipYourLife. And you can learn how you can join the Flip Your Life community today.

Shane Sams: And we know that one of the greatest catalysts in Jerry and Gena's story was attending Flip Your Life Live. Flip Your Life Live is our family reunion for our community that we have every year. And that is happening in September of 2019. You can learn more about Flip Your Life Live over at FlippedLifestyle.com/Live, we hope to see you there.

Shane Sams: All right, guys. That is all the time we have for this week. Until next time, get out there, take action, do whatever it takes to flip your life.

Jocelyn Sams: Bye.

Links and resources mentioned on today’s show: * Gena's Website * Flip Your Life LIVE 2019 Tickets & Registration Information * Flip Your Life community

Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!

Join the Flip Your Life Community NOW for as little as $19 per month!

https://flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife

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In today's episode, we celebrate Chris and Ivy's 500 member launch.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jocelyn Sams: Hey, y'all. On today's podcast, we celebrate Chris and Ivy's 500 member launch.

Shane Sams: What's going on, everybody? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. It is great to be back with you again today. Super excited to have another member of the Flip Your Life Community on the show, not just to help them get to the next level, but to celebrate a massive success. Our guest today recently had a launch of their membership and they got over 500 members in the first 48 hours after they launched it. So, we are super ...

Jocelyn Sams: Which is awesome.

Shane Sams: Go ahead, Jocelyn.

Jocelyn Sams: And a husband and wife team, which we love.

Shane Sams: We love that too. Our guests today we're super excited to welcome are Chris and Ivy Newport. Chris, Ivy, welcome to the show.

Ivy Newport: Thanks so much for having us. We're so excited to be here.

Chris Newport: Yeah, we're very excited to be here. So, thanks for having us.

Jocelyn Sams: It is great to talk to you guys today. We have been waiting for this show for a long time, because you guys are just doing some really exciting things and we're just really excited to dive in and really talk to you and figure out how in the world you did all this.

Chris Newport: We are too. Yeah.

Shane Sams: I'm sure a lot of people listening are like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa 500? Like a 500 members? Oh yeah, yeah, I need to listen to this one."

Chris Newport: I know. I know we keep saying that to ourselves as well.

Shane Sams: We'll talk more about this, but like you guys are in a surreal, surreal territory. It's surreal for things to change like that fast overnight, right?

Chris Newport: It is, yeah.

Shane Sams: We'll dive more into that.

Jocelyn Sams: All right. Well, before we get too far down that road right this second, we want to know a little bit more about you guys.

Ivy Newport: I'm a creative artist and I've just always kind of been involved in creativity in one way or another, whether it was interior design or making art. It's just been a passion of mine that has just been a common thread throughout my entire life. Chris and I actually met in art school, so we're both artists, and now we're just loving running this online business where we get to provide creative education and for artists all over the world. Our core goal, I think, is just inspiring and guiding others to lead a more creative life.

Shane Sams: So when you say that it's like more creative life, like just in general, is this more like doing art as a passion, doing art as a job? What do you mean?

Ivy Newport: Yeah, well, we actually have students that are both. I mean, we have a lot of people that are exploring creativity and art in a new way. They might be in a time in their life where they have a little more time on their hands and they really want to explore creativity, and we have a lot of those students.

Ivy Newport: But we also have professional artists that participate in our classes, and they get new inspiration. They learn new techniques, they get to connect with other artists in our community. So, we really kind of serve both kinds of artists in the community.

Shane Sams: You guys have a very interesting background. You've kind of lived all over, been all over. Give us a little bit more context, like where you're from.

Chris Newport: Yeah, like Ivy said, we met in art school in Florida in Sarasota, and we both had this dream of working for Disney. We wanted to be animators and so we both kind of chose the school because Disney recruited from that school.

Shane Sams: Which school was it?

Chris Newport: But this thing called the internet was taking off back in the mid to late 90s, and I was really curious about it, and I didn't quite get it, but I knew something was kind of happening in the background as we were going through college. And then lo and behold, Disney came calling, went to work for Disney for a little while, for a year, a little over a year, but still this internet thing was taking.

Chris Newport: I just kept looking, I was fascinated by it, and I said, "You know what? I can draw Mickey for the rest of my life, or I can jump on the internet and learn everything I can and saturate myself with it." That's really kind of what took us to these different cities. I built my first website.

Ivy Newport: Moved to Austin.

Chris Newport: Moved to Austin. I moved to New York and then ultimately ended up ...

Ivy Newport: In Portland.

Chris Newport: Yeah, long story short, we ended up in Portland and continued doing web design, web development, and that's where Ivy started blogging and exploring her passions and getting back to what she does best.

Shane Sams: It's neat like reading your story because you see this long process like almost to the next like step, and granted you had a lot going on in life like you're moving all over the place.

Chris Newport: Yeah.

Shane Sams: Where are you guys from? Where are you from originally?

Ivy Newport: So I'm originally from Sydney, Australia. I don't have the awesome accent anymore because I finished high school actually in Connecticut, so I have lived all over the world and it's definitely added to my adventurous spirit, I think, in business.

Chris Newport: Definitely.

Ivy Newport: And yeah, so go ahead.

Chris Newport: If she does go back to Australia, her accent does come back real fast, and I cannot understand anything she says.

Shane Sams: That's hilarious.

Chris Newport: For me, I was born in Tennessee. I moved to Texas when I was in kindergarten. So I grew up in Texas until I was 18 and moved to Florida. When I first moved to Portland, it was funny, my first meeting of the company I was at, this guy raised his hand and said, "I just want to go on record that Chris said y'all 10 times in this meeting," and over the years it's been funny. I think being in Portland and slowly losing my Texas roots, but yeah, that's what-

Jocelyn Sams: That's a sad day.

Shane Sams: No, no man. We got to get ...

Chris Newport: I know, right? I know.

Shane Sams: You need to go post, "Y'all," on your Facebook.

Chris Newport: I know. You guys help me keep grounded to listen to your podcast.

Ivy Newport: It still comes out.

Chris Newport: Yeah.

Shane Sams: It's funny that you say about her accent, because like you know people always comment on our podcast so like, "Y'all have a really deep Southern accent," but what y'all don't get is we're softening our accent right now.

Chris Newport: Right.

Shane Sams: We're trying so hard to like not ... If you came to Kentucky like I would go straight into hillbilly fast.

Chris Newport: That's funny.

Shane Sams: It'd be like a whole new language.

Chris Newport: That's funny. My family is from Kentucky, so I have roots there. My grandparents are actually there.

Shane Sams: I always knew I liked you, Chris.

Chris Newport: Yeah, see? There you go. I knew I liked you guys as well.

Jocelyn Sams: All right, so you go through all of these different things, you guys worked at a a lot of different places, you get into some web development.

Shane Sams: Blogging, online business.

Jocelyn Sams: And some blogging, and so how does this turn into what it is today?

Shane Sams: For first of all, let's back up one second. First of all, tell us what just happened. So, you've got these blogs, you've got these courses, you're kind of doing the email things, and this is a long process of blogging and you built a following online.

Chris Newport: Yeah.

Shane Sams: And then you decide to launch a membership community, right?

Chris Newport: Yeah, that's one of the things that listening to you guys for gosh over two years now I think and you guys discussing memberships, and it's something in the back of my head we wanted to do but we didn't have the foundation yet to do it. We didn't have the platform in place for it. We kind of had this one password access to all the classes. It's really one of those scrappy things where we, in our initial launch, what, four years ago when we first launched, five years ago, when we first tried launching, I had a team in India building this thing. It was on WordPress, and it was getting really slow because the team in India was-

Ivy Newport: Basically broke.

Chris Newport: Yeah, we broke it yeah like the first hour we launched.

Ivy Newport: It was bad.

Chris Newport: I hit update and broke the entire site.

Ivy Newport: Yeah.

Shane Sams: No, I've never done that.

Chris Newport: Right. So, we literally started from scratch. We went to someone else's website and I just said let me look at the code. I was like okay, they're on Squarespace let's just build this thing, get it launched and see if it works.

Ivy Newport: Yeah.

Chris Newport: And lo and behold, it worked, and it worked really fast. We kind of kept that thing going where it's just you just keep growing and the snowball effect and you just know where you need to go but it's finding time to get the thing in place to set it up properly. So, really it's been two years of just making sure we got the right platform in place, setting up the WordPress, getting everything in place. And then yeah, once we had it ready, it was ... That was the journey itself getting it set up, but once we had it in place I knew we were ready to flip the switch.

Ivy Newport: I think also I feel really connected to our students and I kind of sensed that they may want something like this. I think they were ready to hear from us on a more regular basis in a subscription format. So, it just felt right. I'm kind of the emotional one, so I go with my gut and my emotions on things and Chris is thankfully so incredibly technically savvy. So, when we kind of aligned his logic and my emotion, we knew it was the right time.

Shane Sams: We're the opposite. Jocelyn's very logical.

Chris Newport: That's funny. I see you guys. I know that's funny.

Shane Sams: I'm emotional. I'm all gut, I think we should go left, and she's like, "You sure?"

Chris Newport: I know.

Shane Sams: So, basically like what drew you like ... Okay, so let me ... All right, so you go, selling courses, selling courses, selling courses. People are like, "What are these people talking about membership? Like what?"

Chris Newport: Yeah.

Shane Sams: Like why, and then you start thinking well maybe we should go that way. Maybe we should coalesce this audience into a community. Maybe we should stop doing one-off sales and get people to pay every month.

Chris Newport: Yeah.

Ivy Newport: Yes.

Shane Sams: What was the draw to that though? And like what was the tipping point where you were like, you know, this way takes all this energy, this way might not?

Chris Newport: It does.

Ivy Newport: I think that was a huge part for me being the one that kind of is, you know, out in front of the camera and producing in that way. It was extremely draining to constantly be like, I got to come up with another class. I got to come up with another thing, and every month we were running like crazy people trying to make the numbers match up so that we could pay for our bills and stuff. When Chris started listening to you guys and talking about membership for what we were doing, it just made a lot of sense just to have a little bit more of a stable lifestyle for our family.

Chris Newport: Absolutely.

Shane Sams: We call that living launch to launch.

Ivy Newport: Yes.

Chris Newport: Yeah, and that was really oh my gosh, in the beginning-

Ivy Newport: It's exhausting.

Chris Newport: When we first launched Ivy's first class even that in itself one, I mean that was an amazing launch and we thought, "Oh, that's amazing," and then you realized, "Oh, that's one launch. Oh, people are going to keep coming back." They're not just going to keep reading that email over and over that you sent once. So, we really had to iron out that rollercoaster. I think between obviously listening to you guys, have fun, reading books and gosh, everything in between trying to figure out how to navigate this up and down rollercoaster and how to smooth out those peaks and valleys.

Ivy Newport: I think we also realized soon, pretty quick as we started this journey, that I couldn't be the only one making classes. So, what's been another kind of facet of the businesses that we've now hired or have been doing this for now what about three years, hiring other teachers to come onto the platform and we get to launch them and they teach classes for us too. So, that's been really ... Well, it takes some weight off of me producing, but it also has been so wonderful to help other women artists launch online businesses too, which has been cool.

Jocelyn Sams: All right. The next question that I would ask is, is this your full-time thing? Are you doing anything else right now?

Chris Newport: No. It's been four years of yeah, us doing it.

Ivy Newport: Us full-time.

Chris Newport: Yeah. When we launched four years ago, I was still doing some consulting. I just left, I had a kind of in between job where I was hired by one of my clients. I just recently left that. I was consulting to help iron out these peaks and valleys of launching these classes, and once we ironed those out, I was able to kind of step away and really, that's kind of the point where I think, Ivy approached me and said, "You know what? This is working, but I think us together would really take us to the next level."

Shane Sams: But you've been kind of stressful, but because you're like, okay, it's January, we just had a launch. Okay, February we have bills. So we have to have another launch and launch ...

Chris Newport: Yeah. I think those first two years yeah, had a lot of like, oh my gosh, what are we doing?

Ivy Newport: It was a lot of ups and downs.

Chris Newport: Where is this going? What are we doing next? And oh the sale. Oh, it's Black Friday, I forgot about those. Quick, get the email or buy. Cyber Monday oh gosh, I forgot about Cyber Monday.

Shane Sams: That's hilarious.

Chris Newport: There was a lot of that. And then I think the last two years was really balancing that out where we had a schedule in place, we knew where we were launching other teachers, and we could kind of estimate pretty well what we're going to make each month.

Shane Sams: But it's still kind of a roll the dice.

Chris Newport: It really was. Yeah, because we had a couple months there where we had a couple of teachers but it was like, oh this isn't going to go well, and we were dependent on that, and we had.

Shane Sams: Another problem is you can't plan ahead.

Chris Newport: Right.

Ivy Newport: Right.

Shane Sams: Now, like if I say you know I would really like to hire someone. For example, like last year we kind of did an experiment we were like let's bring in a sales guy to sell our live event out, right? He'll follow up on leads and he'll do some things like that and it was really easy to make that call and just say yeah we'll try it for a year, because we can predict our income. We can totally do it.

Shane Sams: I can tell you probably within a couple of grand what we'll make six months from now. Our numbers are pure. When you launched the membership and you get 500 and something people and you're like ... This was just last month y'all, like we just record ... This is not in the moment. We're still like, you know, whatever recently, then the next last month or two.

Chris Newport: Yeah.

Shane Sams: Now you're like, "Wait a minute. At least 90% of those people are probably going to pay me next month," right?

Ivy Newport: Right.

Chris Newport: Right.

Shane Sams: How did that feel, like when you realized that?

Chris Newport: It was amazing. I mean, I think we just kind of both looked at each other like this is-

Ivy Newport: I think we're both in shock still.

Chris Newport: We're still in shock.

Ivy Newport: It's like a dream.

Chris Newport: I think in the forum I said, because, like I said, I have everything kind of planned out for the month and I thought maybe 300 might buy in for the first month, for the entire month, and we blew that out in 24 hours by far.

Shane Sams: Yeah. Have you reached the first renewal date yet?

Chris Newport: Not yet. Next week I think, yeah.

Shane Sams: The glorious day that will be.

Chris Newport: I know. I know. Yeah, I'm looking at it. I just can't believe it.

Shane Sams: I was telling you guys before the show like we launched ... When did we launch Flipped Lifestyle?

Jocelyn Sams: The membership?

Shane Sams: Yeah. I don't remember when the membership was.

Jocelyn Sams: Maybe 2015.

Shane Sams: 2015?

Jocelyn Sams: Maybe,

Shane Sams: Anyway, I know it was on the 24th. You know why I know it was on the 24th? Because even like three, four years later, there's still like a spike on that day. That was almost like, you know, like 200 people in the next 48 hours joined or whatever right?

Chris Newport: Right.

Shane Sams: We still see that. It's like my favorite day of the month. I don't have to work, like I know I'm not doing anything today.

Chris Newport: Because it's selling out. I know. I know. I love it. Every time we get a new member, I always mention we get a pay raise.

Ivy Newport: Yeah.

Chris Newport: That's a pay raise.

Shane Sams: I always tell people, give yourself a raise every day, every time.

Chris Newport: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Ivy Newport: That's right.

Shane Sams: Brick by brick baby, just give yourself a raise.

Chris Newport: It is brick by brick. It really is. I think even this whole journey is just brick by brick.

Ivy Newport: Definitely.

Chris Newport: Yeah, so it's been ... Yeah, once you put it in place, and we went through the ups and downs of me wanting to throw my computer out the window a couple times setting it all up. Yeah, it's so great to see it all working.

Jocelyn Sams: All right, guys. Well, let's talk a little bit about how you got there. Meaning what have you overcome along your journey? Like what kind of fears or mindset issues did you have, and how did you work to overcome those?

Shane Sams: Especially moving from a launch model that was proven even though it was high energy and hard, to this brand new all in membership model.

Ivy Newport: Yeah. Well, for me definitely some of the fears I've had to face are just kind of getting over the vulnerability of being on camera and being out in front of this audience of students. I'm definitely like a pleaser personality I guess you'd say, and so I worry about disappointing people. I worry about not making quality stuff. I always have a really high expectation set.

Ivy Newport: So, that's definitely been challenging, and Chris has been such a great, you know ... I think Jocelyn mentioned Shane being her lightning rod sometimes, and he is that for me as well and he will kind of absorb any of the negative comments because you guys know being out there online, you get the occasional negative comment or whatever, and it can be hard because you are putting yourself out there. So, getting over that and just pushing through that fear is for sure a big thing for me.

Ivy Newport: And then in terms of switching from the launch model to the subscription model, to me it's almost more intimate connection with the students that I need to serve them on a higher level month by month and really connect with them in a different way. So, I think that adds a little bit of pressure. I mean, I'm super grateful for the cash flow, but I know I want to keep my connection with them really strong. Just kind of meeting that goal every month for me is a little bit scary, but I'm ready for it.

Chris Newport: I'm always amazed at Ivy pushing through some of these obstacles or overcoming some of her fears. She's just always been able to put herself out there, and I've just always been impressed with her.

Shane Sams: That is the biggest difference in a membership, you know. If you buy my product and you leave with my product, bye. I hope you come back.

Ivy Newport: Right, exactly. See you.

Shane Sams: This is kind of like dating.

Ivy Newport: Right.

Shane Sams: Like when you have a membership, you're in a relationship. Like you are.

Chris Newport: Yeah.

Ivy Newport: Yes.

Chris Newport: It's true, this is a friendship. We got each other's back.

Ivy Newport: Right.

Chris Newport: I got to be there for you because you're there for me every month when you pay your membership, right? Like there is a different mindset to it for sure.

Jocelyn Sams: Absolutely.

Chris Newport: We've been talking about that like gosh, why do we feel this what I know ...

Ivy Newport: We both started grinding our teeth again.

Chris Newport: Yeah. Like we're not stressed but what is this thing that we're feeling? I think and to your point Shane, yes we were-

Ivy Newport: The responsibility.

Chris Newport: Yeah, it's like we were launching all these classes. But you know, it's like that one-off, right? You don't really have that deep connection.

Ivy Newport: It's a deeper commitment.

Chris Newport: Yeah, yeah.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, I totally understand what you're saying. And I think sometimes it's hard because like our customers don't always keep up their end of the bargain. For me, I feel responsible for that. Like if people are paying for their membership and they're not doing anything like, I feel like it's my fault.

Ivy Newport: Right.

Chris Newport: Right.

Jocelyn Sams: Even though it's not my fault.

Ivy Newport: Yeah, I hear you.

Shane Sams: But it's hard not to do that when you are in a relationship, right? Because relationships are built on reciprocity, right? I give you the opportunity, you give me opportunity, we help each other like ...

Ivy Newport: Sure.

Shane Sams: And it does weigh on you when you've got so ... Because like, I don't think we're evolved to recognize, you know, I got 500 people depending on me now. You know what I mean? Who want me to help them with their hopes and dreams and their futures and their creative outlets like whatever and that can be very overwhelming, especially in the beginning.

Shane Sams: It's why some people ... Some people, we always trade one set of problems for the other. Every choice you make is not getting better. It's just trading a set of problems that you like better for the old set of problems, and some people are so comfortable in their set of problems that they're afraid to change. So you feel comfortable in your high energy launch dopamine rush.

Chris Newport: Yeah.

Ivy Newport: Right.

Shane Sams: Crash and then do it again that we're like, "Yeah, but at least I know this." And then you get to the other side and you're like wow yeah there's responsibility, yeah I got to show up a couple of times a month for member calls, but my energy dropped and now I can focus more of that energy somewhere else. So, it was kind of worth the change, right? That's the hardest part like about making the switch.

Shane Sams: Sometimes I feel like it's easier for us to convince people that have nothing to do this than it is for us to convince people who've made money in another way to do this. And then of course they get to the other side and they've got 500 members and they're like, "Wow, I got ..." They're like, it's harder for us to move people from that end of the spectrum than it is just people starting out.

Ivy Newport: Yeah, it makes sense.

Chris Newport: That does make sense. Sometimes I think too the journey of it all. It's easy to you know, we did launch this under a month ago, but gosh, the journey to get here and overcoming those obstacles along the way. I mean, once you overcome that one hurdle, you get to the next hurdle and you overcome that hurdle, the next thing you know, you've built something that's pretty amazing.

Shane Sams: What was the biggest obstacle like technically, like you had to overcome?

Chris Newport: Oh my gosh, I don't even know where to begin. I mean, I can tell you a story. When we were launching, we had the emails teed up to go out at 3:00 a.m. for this membership and I hadn't fully tested the eCommerce side of it yet. I was like, "Oh, it's WooCommerce, it's kind of plug in with membership, everything worked great right?"

Chris Newport: Then I was testing it and it was like 2:00 in the morning and so the emails are going to go out in an hour and I kept telling Ivy, I was like, "I don't think it's working." It's canceling the membership like two days later, and I was just worried. I was just, "Oh my gosh, I don't think it's working," and I started to do some more research and this one line in this entire document said this email or WooCommerce subscription is not compatible with the membership. I just threw my hands up and I think, "Oh my gosh," so I turned everything off. I shut it down. I went to bed. The next day I woke up and magically pulled it all together.

Shane Sams: When you say you turned it off, like you canceled all the emails?

Chris Newport: Yeah, cancel the email, I sent the email, it didn't go out.

Ivy Newport: We didn't launch. Yeah.

Chris Newport: We were going to launch it on Thursday, we usually-

Ivy Newport: We had to delay the launch.

Chris Newport: Yeah, we usually send emails out on Thursdays just to any kind of sales oriented thing.

Shane Sams: What was it I did last year, Jocelyn, when I started the ... I started I set up the order forms for the live event because I just didn't want to wait for the person who helps us. I don't think anyone got tagged. Nobody got an email.

Chris Newport: Oh no.

Shane Sams: It was basically like Jocelyn was like, "Wait a minute, you sent the email out with the sales? I'm like, "Yeah, we sold like 50 tickets." She's like-

Jocelyn Sams: I go, "That's great. But we don't even know who's coming."

Chris Newport: Oh no.

Shane Sams: I had no way to search, there was no way to do anything. I didn't connect the emails right.

Jocelyn Sams: We had to go through and manually give everybody tags.

Chris Newport: One by one.

Jocelyn Sams: Oh my goodness.

Shane Sams: Just the other day, I set up a new membership tier for Flipped Lifestyle. One of the things we really are trying to do is democratize working from home, like we want ... I get so sick of all these thousand dollar, $10,000 courses. Real people can't afford that and those people are just trying to get money off that first sale. I want people to be able to get access at least to our courses for like a good affordable price.

Shane Sams: But I set it up and I tested it with someone who wanted it, and I don't think anything happened. They didn't get a username. They didn't get a password. I think they actually got an email that said username and password, like the words, and so you know.

Chris Newport: Yeah.

Ivy Newport: You have to have a sense of humor, that's for sure.

Chris Newport: You do. I know. Even then, even when I tested it the next day and okay it's working, the email went out at 3:00 a.m. I think I went to bed at 2:00 a.m., but I woke up at like 3:05 a.m., you know? I was like, "Well, I can't go to sleep." And we had like four sales, five sales. I was like, "Okay," I'm just watching it and making sure it's all working. Yeah, that's just nerve wracking. Yeah.

Shane Sams: Yeah, but the funny thing is, though, most people would have done what you did. They'd have freaked out and bailed, right? And they would have waited for the next month to launch.

Chris Newport: Right.

Shane Sams: The important thing to remember is that it did eventually work and you only had to stay up till 3:00 that night. Now you have 500 members.

Chris Newport: Yes.

Ivy Newport: Right, it was all worth it.

Chris Newport: Yeah.

Shane Sams: Yeah. If you lose 20 and you gain 21 next month, you grew right over like once you made it through the problems.

Chris Newport: Yeah.

Shane Sams: So many people give up before the problems and like I love you all's story, because it's like a lot of people hear these stories and like there is always context behind launches, right? Like any kind of launch is what it is. It took you years to get to this point. You blogged first, you tested email marketing, you sold some courses, you sold a lot of courses, you had launches, you didn't have launches. Even eight years later, when you finally turned on the membership, something still broke because it changes. You don't ever figure this stuff out.

Chris Newport: That's so true.

Shane Sams: Just keep going forward. Keep doing it, and sooner or later, you look up and you've got 500 people paying you $50 a month or whatever, pick a number 25, $100. I don't care what your membership is, it's just the income.

Ivy Newport: Right, exactly.

Chris Newport: Exactly.

Shane Sams: Your family's going to eat, you're going to serve and it's going to be awesome, right?

Ivy Newport: Absolutely.

Shane Sams: If you don't want to work tomorrow, well you'll have renewals or you know I would highly recommend renewal day taking the whole day off.

Ivy Newport: That's a good idea.

Chris Newport: That's a very good idea.

Shane Sams: Don't even look at the numbers till about 8:30.

Ivy Newport: I'm going to force Chris to take the day off because he never takes a day off.

Chris Newport: Yeah, she's always on me about that.

Shane Sams: It's hard to take a day off when you're in what we do.

Ivy Newport: It's true. It's true.

Chris Newport: It is. It is.

Shane Sams: Jocelyn said the other day, she said, we were both just working all the time and looking for the next thing to do, and like we got bored one day and Jocelyn just goes, "Oh, passive income sucks." She's like, "I'm going to go do something," and she just like started working on stuff.

Chris Newport: Isn't that funny, that the passive side of it sounds like it is ... I mean, it is a different type of passive, right? It's, you work so hard for it. It's a different type of work. And I think that's one of the things I enjoy most especially after consulting for so long and the dollars for hours that I was just trying to get rid of that, and to be here now it's ... To do what we enjoy and to work so well together, yeah, it's just a lot of fun.

Ivy Newport: It's a lot of fun. Yeah.

Chris Newport: Yeah.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, for sure. No, that's really exciting. I'm so excited for you guys.

Ivy Newport: Thank you.

Chris Newport: Thank you.

Jocelyn Sams: Let's talk just a little bit about looking back, how did our community help you? You guys have been members for a little while now, and I shared about your success story posts which is how we select people to be on the podcast. But tell us a little bit about like how did you go through the courses and like how did the community support you?

Chris Newport: Yeah. I think for me was well I mean to back it up even just to the podcast. When I was listening, when I heard you guys on Pat Flynn after studying so long of just email marketing and everything and just we're doing these things but then when you guys discussed ... Something you guys said and everything just kind of gelled for me. When I joined the Flipped Lifestyle Community I think I jumped to the email marketing and the sequencing and the oh gosh, the sales funnels.

Shane Sams: Right.

Chris Newport: That in itself I think to me really just coalesced everything that I think that we are ... We were doing a lot of things email marketing, lead magnets, but we didn't know they were lead magnets, we just add, "Hey, subscribe to get your free video."

Ivy Newport: We didn't have the strategy.

Chris Newport: We didn't have the strategies behind any of this and what just for us you know setting up, understanding Facebook ads at a deeper level, understanding what a cold, warm, and hot lead is, and how to tailor your message to those audiences specifically. Jocelyn, your video on uploading our subscriber list into Facebook ads was game changing.

Ivy Newport: Oh yeah, that was huge.

Chris Newport: That was just one of those moments when-

Ivy Newport: That blew Chris's mind.

Chris Newport: I was like, what? You can do that? You can actually target people?

Shane Sams: You can open these emails and still advertise to them?

Chris Newport: Yeah, oh my gosh, it just floored me. I jumped on that probably the ... Out of everything we did that was probably the first thing I implemented was just took our email list and uploaded it to Facebook. What it did was allowed us not only to send these emails out for our prelaunch and early bird specials, things like that, but we could target those people within Facebook and get recurring revenue from that as well. So it was just-

Ivy Newport: We saw the impact right away.

Chris Newport: Oh my gosh.

Shane Sams: Imagine all the people that hadn't opened one of your emails in months, but then they saw the ad and they remembered.

Chris Newport: Oh, yeah, we had people all the time. Like, I didn't get the email. And I go and check and they're like oh, it's because you unsubscribed, you know. Just because they unsubscribed doesn't mean they don't want to follow you anywhere else. It just means that they choose to follow you on Facebook.

Shane Sams: That's why we like ... When we took courses when we started, we would always find things in pieces. It was like we were on a scavenger hunt, right? That's what online business felt like to us. When we created our community, we were like we need a path, we need like a ... That's why we call it a blueprint, but it's really like a path right? I love how you said I jumped ahead because you were already up to that point. You'd already been to things like you knew who you were selling to. You knew what your products were.

Ivy Newport: Right.

Chris Newport: Right.

Shane Sams: You get to this point where you're like, "Well, wait a minute, you mean someone can discover me and I can actually hold their hand all the way until they buy something?"

Chris Newport: Exactly.

Shane Sams: And then like all those people that discovered me before that I've lost track of, I can go find them again? It's just following this. That's the biggest lesson we try to teach inside of the community is you got to have a strategy, you got to have a plan, and if you have a plan and you stick to the plan, the plan eventually turns into a 500 member launch, right?

Ivy Newport: Right.

Chris Newport: Oh yeah.

Shane Sams: And now for next month, the plan is easier because we have momentum, like a huge momentum now moving forward, and it's not as ... And you know what strategies work, so like you could rinse and repeat this once a quarter.

Chris Newport: We do talk about that a lot. It's like we enjoy this now. We know, okay we're going to set this cold lead, and we're going to drive them to that lead magnet and they're going to get to know Ivy even more, but we're going to come back around and run a warm lead ad because we know they went to our website, we know who they are, we can target them in a new way with a new message, and we just know it works. That's just I mean-

Ivy Newport: We can communicate with them so much more effectively too. That part's really fun.

Chris Newport: Yeah.

Shane Sams: It's interesting, you said something very interesting there, we enjoy this now.

Ivy Newport: It kind of felt like-

Shane Sams: That implies that while it was fun before, there was stuff that was not good.

Ivy Newport: It felt a little random.

Chris Newport: It did.

Ivy Newport: It was kind of like shooting in the dark, and now I feel like we have a lot of clear vision of how we want to communicate, how we want to drive our consumer and what their experience is going to be.

Chris Newport: Yeah, and to share one other story. Once I got all excited about uploading our subscriber list, I went back and set up cold and warm leads in Facebook. The great thing is, Ivy is so prolific with the content creation that it was really easy for me to just pick this video and this content. But setting up the cold and warm leads and then drive them back to the website, in the first two months we generated over 2,500 new subscribers to our list.

Chris Newport: So, it was one of those things that's like oh my gosh this works. This is amazing, and it's all because of the Flipped Lifestyle blueprint, it really is. Like what you said Shane of, there's a lot of stuff out there, but it's like oh my gosh I think I know what they're talking about Facebook from this podcast but I don't know exactly how they implement it.

Ivy Newport: Kind of piecemeal.

Chris Newport: I don't know what cold, warm, and hot leads are. I don't know any of this. I don't know what it means. Then to have that step by step process in the Flipped Lifestyle blueprint really helped everything come together for us.

Jocelyn Sams: Awesome. Data nerds unite!

Chris Newport: Completely, completely.

Shane Sams: Jocelyn is definitely the ... Jocelyn basically organizes everything and then she makes me create something. We love listening to you guys talk because it's like Chris was like okay I'm going to structure all this, I'm going to set all that.

Chris Newport: Yeah.

Shane Sams: Ivy is prolific. You create the content. I'm going to make all this in this order.

Ivy Newport: It's a good combo.

Shane Sams: It's just a miracle when you get on the same page.

Ivy Newport: Totally.

Chris Newport: It is.

Shane Sams: Staying on the same page is the hard part.

Chris Newport: Staying on the same page.

Ivy Newport: Yeah, that's tricky.

Jocelyn Sams: That's where we are right now. Some days are better than others. We'll put it that way.

Shane Sams: I'm on page 34, Jocelyn's about 57. We're just no.

Chris Newport: That's right. Right.

Jocelyn Sams: All right guys. Again, we are like super proud of you. It's been just a really exciting journey so far for you. And we're so excited to have you in our community. So, we're getting ready to come up on the one month, I guess anniversary of this thing launching.

Chris Newport: Yes.

Ivy Newport: Yeah.

Jocelyn Sams: I know that you guys have some big plans for it. So, let us know kind of what is happening next, and what can we do to help you get there?

Ivy Newport: Well, it's tricky. I feel like we're still really trying to fully embrace what's going on with the subscription. I mean, basically, we've started an online magazine and that is kind of the experience that we're delivering to the students every month, which is really awesome. I hope that we'll be able to expand and bring in people to contribute to that and have other artists come on and contribute to the magazine. But honestly I'm trying to just still wrap my head around it.

Chris Newport: I think, to Ivy's point too, yeah because she's doing a lot of the work to keep this magazine going smoothly. It's part of the monthly membership they get access to this online magazine, online journal, and it does require quite a bit of her time, a lot like launching classes and so our goal and I think in the short-term is to start bringing other artists, other creative minds on to contribute on a monthly basis, which will help I think scale us a little bit more but also just I think what we talked about earlier too is hiring and letting go. Letting go of some of the things that we do on a daily basis, the editing, the video content, creating the websites, creating the classes-

Shane Sams: Are you still editing everything? Are you still editing?

Ivy Newport: Oh yeah.

Chris Newport: Oh yeah. We are two person show.

Ivy Newport: Yeah.

Shane Sams: Okay. Yeah, okay. It's going to be very tempting to try to hire all the people. You probably shouldn't do that, right?

Ivy Newport: Yeah.

Shane Sams: You really want to go slow now. It's kind of like, there's kind of a mentality here like of winning the lottery, like what happens to all lottery winners. They win a million dollars, they spend it all, right?

Ivy Newport: Right.

Shane Sams: When you do the next one, you go to the next level. We've done this multiple times. Like we hit a next level and we're like, wow, let's go, and it's always a mistake every time you go too fast. So, I think your heart's in the right place but your mind's got to slow down your heart, right? And it's like, okay, getting rid of little low level tasks that anyone can do that you literally could replace someone in a minute is where you probably need to start. You should not be editing your own videos, like you just shouldn't. Even if you think you're the best at it, right? It doesn't matter because no one knows that, right? Like 85% of what you think is the best is perfect for everybody else.

Ivy Newport: That's true.

Shane Sams: Get rid of a few of those tasks right now.

Ivy Newport: Yeah, that would help.

Shane Sams: But try to keep doing what you've done to get to this point for the next three to six months. Don't take your foot necessarily off the gas with the journal and the magazine, or even like get ready for that next open and close or that next, you know, quote unquote you know, "Hey, don't forget we have a membership in three months," or whatever, you know what I mean?

Chris Newport: Yeah.

Ivy Newport: Right.

Shane Sams: You should not pull back now even though it's tempting to do so.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah.

Chris Newport: That's good advice.

Shane Sams: Because I've been there and last year Jocelyn and I hit a big plateau and we were like, or a big peak, and we were like, "Let's hire all the people," then like 12 months later, we were like, "Let's fire all the people."

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, pretty much.

Chris Newport: At my last job, I was managing 20 employees I think it was at that time, and yeah, there's a lot of hesitation on my end of hiring.

Ivy Newport: Yeah, and even with the editing, I'm such a control freak about what I want people to hear and how you know, because I'm teaching online, so I want them to make sure that they're getting the right parts. I'm always worried someone's going to edit it and cut out some point I had. I don't know. It's like a fear.

Chris Newport: Yeah, we are perfectionists, and I think it just comes from our design and ...

Shane Sams: Stop watching your own videos. I'm serious. There's no reason to now. You know what I mean?

Ivy Newport: That's true.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, I very rarely listen back to this podcast. Just because I know that if I do, I won't be satisfied with it.

Ivy Newport: Right. You just got to let it go.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah.

Shane Sams: Yeah, and not only that, here's another thing you're going to find that's really cool. Just like you know how in your marriage you kind of, for good or bad, you lose filters, right? Because you kind of know the other person is going to forgive you if you do some stupid. If you say something bad, it's like your kids. Like your kids will fight back with you and talk back with you, but it's just because they know that you love them. There's more forgiveness in a relationship, right? Whereas, you know, like any one-off interaction like if somebody holds you up in a line at the ticket booth, you're going to be mad. You're going to be like, "What are you doing? You suck at your job."

Shane Sams: You go to a fast food restaurant, you're all mad because they won't do this whatever like ... I feel like everybody gets frustrated because it's like a one-off interaction and you don't really care about the person. But like if the same thing happens when you build a true community, the relationship is great because you get to serve them, but they're also more forgiving.

Ivy Newport: That makes sense.

Shane Sams: It's why you can be like we did a member call this morning, I mean we were at our kitchen table, I was in a sweatshirt, I had no shoes on. I mean we were just talking to dozens of people and answering questions, right? But if I was going to do a webinar, I probably wouldn't show up like that because it'd be new people. So, you can probably kind of let yourself go a little, not let yourself go, that's the wrong word, but like don't worry so much. Just worry about being delivering value and not as much about what it looks like for your community. Inside the community is much more forgiving than outside of the community.

Ivy Newport: That makes sense.

Chris Newport: That's a lot of truth. Yeah, yeah we never really thought about that.

Ivy Newport: No. We're just super hard on ourselves.

Chris Newport: We are. We are perfectionists.

Jocelyn Sams: It happens. It happens.

Chris Newport: Yes.

Ivy Newport: Yeah.

Jocelyn Sams: I feel the same way, so I totally get it but I think for right now like what you guys need to do is just concentrate on serving your community, delivering what you promised them, and looking at trends. So, let's see what's happening for the next few months, how many people are staying, how many people are coming in new, and you know let's like kind of refocus on what goals you want to have for the next six months to a year.

Shane Sams: Yeah, because if you try to like just keep pouring people in, which is good, I mean there's nothing wrong with that you know, but like Jocelyn said, you really need to know now like what does it look like three months from now? That's going to be important, right? Like, what does it look like six months from now? Do people stay that long?

Shane Sams: Once you figure that out, it lets you kind know how hard you have to work to get new members you know, because growth is not hard once you establish a good baseline. If you have 500 people, they're all not going to quit next month, just not going to happen.

Chris Newport: Right.

Shane Sams: Now, will 50 of them quit? Maybe.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah.

Shane Sams: Okay? So, it may drop from was round numbers 500 to 450 whatever. Yeah, but now you only need 51 like it's like you know what I'm saying like you don't ... Maybe it drops 20, now you only need 21 or 20. So, like you're really just in a keep the momentum moving mode and resist the urge to just pour gas on the fire, get to ... You could but I mean, like, you know, keep making new stuff. Like this journal thing, have you released one single issue of this journal yet?

Chris Newport: Yeah.

Ivy Newport: Yes, we have.

Shane Sams: Okay. So people kind of have a standard for that then, right?

Ivy Newport: They do.

Chris Newport: They do.

Shane Sams: Don't feel like you have to push ...

Chris Newport: Yeah, that was our ...

Ivy Newport: It's kind of high.

Chris Newport: Yeah, that was a big one, that was one of those we went from we'll give them less than a month or a live Q&A too.

Ivy Newport: I'm like crazy idea.

Chris Newport: Ivy is like, "Hey, I'm thinking about doing an online magazine," and I kind of looked at her-

Shane Sams: What all is in it? Is it just like a magazine or what?

Ivy Newport: So, I love to write. Yeah, it's kind of like that, and it's articles on creativity, it's writing prompts, it's sketchbook explorations, then to close it out, there's one lesson, video lesson, from me. There's curated music, curated resources. It's like a little mini magazine.

Chris Newport: That's a lot. She did a good job with it.

Ivy Newport: It's a lot, but I love creating it. It's just I think ...

Shane Sams: The good thing is that you don't have to promote it now, it's a part of the membership right?

Ivy Newport: Well, and part of what we did to get I believe this affected our launch is that we allowed access to all of our subscribers, all of our email list into the journal, so on the 1st of January, everyone got access to that brand new magazine and then-

Shane Sams: But you just launched it. They've seen one episode of that, right?

Ivy Newport: They've seen one episode, yeah.

Chris Newport: Right, right. Yeah I was busy finishing it all up, and then Ivy had this hot idea to go, "Hey, why don't we give it to everyone for free?" Like, "But I'm not finished yet."

Ivy Newport: I'm like well, hurry up.

Shane Sams: That's a good line.

Chris Newport: So there you go. So, it definitely lit a fire to get it done. It was a great launch, because just letting everyone get into it and have access to that first launch.

Shane Sams: How long does it take you to create it?

Ivy Newport: I would say maybe two to three weeks.

Shane Sams: You can't always make the thing you've done in the past the standard especially when you've only done it once.

Ivy Newport: Yeah, true.

Shane Sams: I'm pretty sure that if you thought about it, you could figure out a way to create a version of that in one week.

Ivy Newport: Yeah.

Shane Sams: It might not be as big as the first one.

Ivy Newport: Right.

Shane Sams: But you can't just be like, I promise you that thing is not the reason 500 people joined. It's a part of the reason.

Ivy Newport: Sure.

Shane Sams: But in your mind, you put so much energy in it you think it's like, "Whoa, if we don't do this every month, no one will ever ..." you know what I mean?

Ivy Newport: Right.

Shane Sams: I wonder if you could even think about it in terms, what if you split that in half, and like half of it came one month and half of it came the next. I don't know if that actually structurally would work. But I'm just saying like, sometimes that even works better because people ...

Ivy Newport: Right, deliver it out in chunks.

Shane Sams: Yeah. There's a different way to do that.

Ivy Newport: Sure.

Shane Sams: Be careful. One of the biggest problems people have what we see when they go into their membership and they get a launch and they get a bunch of members is they want to really over deliver, which you should, but always remember you're 10 steps ahead of the game as the people that are paying you, and what you can do in a month, they can't, right?

Ivy Newport: Right.

Shane Sams: It might not even be possible for them to consume that. So, maybe find a way to kind of let that thing evolve. I'm not saying go up or down or less time or more time you enjoy, but don't feel married to anything in your community. We've done all kinds of stuff in our community and you probably don't even know they're gone, right?

Shane Sams: Honestly, it's just like member calls like we do two member calls a month. That's pretty much it. That's what we focus on. We've done workshops in the past, we've done big challenges in the past, we try things, but we're not going to just sit and you know ... We don't have to add things, like what we do gets people moving down the path.

Jocelyn Sams: I would just about bet that if you cut out that part of it next month, most people probably wouldn't even notice.

Shane Sams: Yeah, seriously.

Ivy Newport: Yeah.

Shane Sams: That's not saying it's not worthy. Like we look at everything in like 20, 20, 20 like 20%, right? When I view our membership, I think about five things like okay, member calls are like 20%. 20% of the people probably come to that and like that, another 20% only look at our forums, another 20% only watch our courses, right? And it's like another 20% just like to hang out with everybody else. They don't even care if they talk to me and Jocelyn. It's true.

Ivy Newport: Yeah.

Shane Sams: If you think about it that way, it keeps you from getting too hyper all in on like one deal. You know?

Ivy Newport: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, and I don't want to burn out producing it. So, it makes sense to think about it.

Chris Newport: Yeah, and definitely always keep my eye on that one because Ivy definitely likes to deliver. So like I said earlier, we're already starting to think of how can we pull others in to help contribute in different ways.

Ivy Newport: What do you guys think about opening and closing memberships? Do you think there is any advantages to building that sort of, I don't know, that exclusivity or anything like that? We've seen other people do that.

Shane Sams: I think it's fake. I think it's fake. I think it's totally fake. Most people who do that it is fake. It's like, "Oh, it's open. It's closed. Get on the waiting list. Oh, but you get on that email three days later," you know what I mean?

Chris Newport: Right.

Ivy Newport: Right.

Shane Sams: I don't want to stop people from giving me money, and I can create urgency in other ways. We can do sales, like I can ... We have a quarterly offer that we only release on like webinars. The only time we ever do it is when we do a live webinar or a live Q&A, right? It's cheaper, it's a little bit less expensive, it saves you some money if you invest. We like to reward people that commit to us. That's an offer that we would only open here and there, but the membership itself the monthly membership, we just keep open.

Ivy Newport: Got it. Okay.

Shane Sams: Just because, I'm a big believer in sending out an email every day and asking people to join every single day. I'd rather them join every day. I was telling you guys off air I had a strategy I wanted to share with you guys. So, this goes back to the renewal date, and it kind of goes back to this open and closed deal, right. It's not about opening and closing it, it's about promoting it and what you said was the 4th, was it the 4th?

Ivy Newport: Yeah.

Shane Sams: That's your day, right? That's the launch?

Ivy Newport: That's our day.

Chris Newport: That's our day.

Shane Sams: Okay, so the 4th is going to be awesome, right? If you really thought about it, couldn't you do a webinar every week and just pick a different day of the month for 30 straight whatever's, like 30 straight weeks, and then every day would be like that?

Ivy Newport: Yeah.

Shane Sams: You know, and it's like just promote and leave it open all the time and get every day to be amazing like that, and don't open and close it. If you're really opening and closing it for a reason, like I can't handle an influx of this many people.

Ivy Newport: Got it.

Shane Sams: One, your membership should look differently because you should be able to handle as many people that come in, okay? You got to strategically plan it that way. But you know the second thing is I mean, do it. If you say I want 20 people a month and I cannot take more than 20 people a month because I don't feel comfortable with more than 20, open and close. Open it every 4th, and forget about it. But if it's digital and it's a community and people want to get in, you got to open back, right?

Chris Newport: Let them in. Yeah.

Ivy Newport: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense too.

Jocelyn Sams: There are different ways to structure it too. If you want people to come in on, say you lost a bunch of members and you want people to come in like you can offer bonuses. There are other things that you can do aside from just saying you know the card is closing in X hours.

Shane Sams: Yeah. You could say like for example we have all of our videos from Flip Your Life live last year right? And then Flip Your Life live this year we'll have more session recordings and all this other stuff. We could get on a webinar and like we don't put those in the community because we really want that to be like an exclusive thing that live event people get right?

Chris Newport: Right.

Ivy Newport: Sure.

Shane Sams: But we could use those as a bonus to say look if you join today quarterly price is going to save you 15% or whatever and we'll throw in these videos that are not available to anybody but the live event attendees and people on our webinar. That's something that you can hold back if you wanted to create scarcity and some urgency. That open, close thing though just doesn't make sense to me. I mean, it's like we're closed. No, I don't want your money and you're going to have to wait 30 days to succeed.

Ivy Newport: Yeah, totally.

Chris Newport: We keep adding new members every day, so it'd be definitely difficult to shut it off right now.

Shane Sams: I like to give myself ... We like to give our family a raise every day.

Ivy Newport: There you go, yeah.

Chris Newport: Yeah. That's pretty nice.

Shane Sams: I love waking up and three people joined overnight and I didn't do anything.

Ivy Newport: Yeah.

Chris Newport: Yeah.

Shane Sams: That's what it's all about, you know, and just build it. I think people keep open and close too because they like the adrenaline dopamine, crack themed rush. It's like you do get there is a high coming out of a webinar where hundreds of people join. It's sometimes hard to create that but we're the glacier. We're unstoppable, 500 years before you stop us. I'm not a prairie fire. I don't want to burn out. You know what I mean?

Chris Newport: No.

Ivy Newport: That's right.

Chris Newport: Yeah. We have some ideas about how to create a little bit more, like you're mentioning, create some urgency or getting people kind of offering some unique items to kind of get them to join us in the membership.

Ivy Newport: Yeah.

Shane Sams: In your marketing, you can create urgency every day, you can only create scarcity in a limited amount of time, right?

Chris Newport: Very true.

Shane Sams: If you rely totally on scarcity, it's going to be very hard for you to continuously grow. You have to rely on urgency but not scarcity. So, that's just the path that we kind of ...

Chris Newport: That's interesting. I always say, I think maybe we might have put those two together I think over the last few years.

Ivy Newport: Yeah, I think we have.

Chris Newport: Yeah, yeah. So, getting them a separate makes a lot of sense.

Jocelyn Sams: All right guys, it has been a lot of fun talking to you today. We are so proud of you, and we cannot wait to see what you do next. But before we go today, we always like to ask our guests, what's just one thing that you plan to take action on in the next 24 hours or so based on what we talked about here today?

Chris Newport: I think we're going to try and pull back a little bit on the membership as far as the journal.

Ivy Newport: On the journal?

Chris Newport: Yeah, yeah.

Ivy Newport: Yeah, maybe. Maybe we're going to rethink how we're delivering the content and maybe space it out so that it can be a little bit more doable for us in production.

Jocelyn Sams: Absolutely.

Shane Sams: I would challenge you to say, "I have one week to create this."

Ivy Newport: Uh, okay.

Chris Newport: Oh, that's a good challenge.

Shane Sams: If I could create this ...

Ivy Newport: I have to sleep, right?

Shane Sams: You have to sleep, yeah. Seriously build your limits and then try to do it within those limits.

Ivy Newport: All right.

Shane Sams: Imagine if you had to get it out in a week, like you literally had to do it, or 500 people would be disappointed. Like, what would make the cut? And then do that and then see if anybody notices.

Ivy Newport: That's a good challenge.

Shane Sams: Do it for a month and see if anybody cares.

Ivy Newport: All right.

Jocelyn Sams: Just remember, it's your business like if something is not working for you. If you're not liking something, change it. If people don't like it, then they will quit, but chances are the entire membership is not going to say, "Well, because you didn't deliver this magazine, I'm out."

Ivy Newport: Right.

Ivy Newport: Yeah, that's great.

Chris Newport: Very, very good advice.

Ivy Newport: Yes, thank you.

Shane Sams: All right guys, what a great conversation. Listen, we are so proud of you and like the launch was amazing, but where are you guys at right now in your membership?

Chris Newport: Yeah, like you said, it's been an amazing almost month. As of this recording, we are now at 783.

Jocelyn Sams: Whoa.

Chris Newport: Yeah.

Shane Sams: Yeah, you guys are going to be ... So your goal is 1,000, which means you got about two weeks.

Chris Newport: I know. I know.

Jocelyn Sams: Guys better hurry up, right?

Chris Newport: I told Ivy, wouldn't it be great if we get to 1,000 before we get on the call?

Shane Sams: But you're going to get there eventually. That's what matters, right?

Jocelyn Sams: Yes, absolutely.

Chris Newport: Yeah.

Shane Sams: Listen, that's amazing. That is absolutely life changing. Know that we will be here to help you continue wrapping your brain around that as we go.

Ivy Newport: Thank you guys so much for having us, and it's been so awesome to talk to you.

Chris Newport: Yeah, thank you guys. And thank you for everything you've done inside the community. The things we've learned have been able to apply to our business has just been astonishing to us, so thank you.

Ivy Newport: Yeah, so grateful.

Shane Sams: All right, guys, that wraps up another episode of the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. We are so proud of Chris and Ivy's success, but the main reason they are successful is because they get in the community, they look at courses, and they take action on what they've learned. So if you're listening to this and you're thinking man that would be amazing. Man, I would love to have 500, 700, 1000 members paying me every month.

Shane Sams: It won't happen unless you get started, and we would love to help you get started with your online business too. To join the Flip Your Life Community, all you have to do is go to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife. That's flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife. We would love to help you get started with your journey today. That's all the time we have for this week. Until next time, do whatever it takes to Flip Your Life. We'll see you then.

Jocelyn Sams: Bye.

Links and resources mentioned on today’s show: * Chris & Ivy's Website * Flip Your Life LIVE 2019 Tickets & Registration Information * Flip Your Life community

Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!

Join the Flip Your Life Community NOW for as little as $19 per month!

https://flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife

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In today's episode, we celebrate Eva's first five-figure month and help her hire a virtual assistant.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jocelyn Sams: Hey, y'all. On today's show, we celebrate Eva's first five-figure month and help her hire a virtual assistant.

Shane Sams: What's going on, everybody? Welcome back to The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. It's great to be back with you again today. Super excited to bring you another amazing success story from The Flip Your Life Community. We've got a great guest today, Eva Klein. Welcome to The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast.

Eva Klein: Thank you so much for having me.

Jocelyn Sams: We are very excited to talk to you today. You have been posting success stories for quite a while now, and I can't wait to get into exactly what you've been up to.

Shane Sams: This is a good one. This is a big one, y'all.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, and especially with your life circumstances because you have recently had a new baby, right?

Eva Klein: Yes, I had my third son. Well, I have two daughters and now I have a son who was born in September.

Shane Sams: Wow.

Jocelyn Sams: Hey, that is incredible. We are definitely going to dive a little bit deeper into that. Before we do, tell everybody a little bit about you and your background and what it is you do online.

Eva Klein: Sure. I am as I said married with three kids. I live in Toronto and I am the owner and founder of mysleepingbaby.com, which is a pediatric sleep consulting business where I help exhausted parents get the sleep that everybody in their family needs and I specifically work with parents that have little ones in the zero- to five-year range. I'm actually a lawyer by training and I got into this business kind of by accident after my ... When my middle child was born, unlike her older sister who was a really easy-going, happy-go-lucky baby who, of course, was a naturally fantastic sleeper. My middle child, was born two years later, was the complete opposite. She was extremely difficult, cried nonstop, and of course, sleep did not come naturally to her.

Eva Klein: I've always really needed my sleep and so as the months went on and the sleep deprivation really kicked in, I was legitimately suffering. I had no choice but to actually open up all these sleep books and figure out what the heck to do so I can get my sanity back. On my own, I managed to not perfect the situation, but I managed to make it more ... I made it more manageable for myself.

Eva Klein: I remember she was about four or five months and here in Canada we have 12 months of maternity leave. I was on maternity leave, and I thought to myself, "Gosh, I should launch a side business. I should ... I love what I'm doing. I love sleep. I would love to help other families. I should become a sleep consultant and just have it as a side hustle where really it's just gonna be some fun money where I get a new client and I go buy a pair of shoes. I'm not giving up law or anything like that. I mean, that would just be crazy. That would be insane.

Shane Sams: Come on, who does that? Right?

Eva Klein: Yeah. No, seriously, why in my wildest dreams would I ever do that? There's an ongoing theme of, "Man plans, God laughs." That was plan number one. Plan number one was I'm gonna launch a side business, keep it is a side business." Thankfully my boss had allowed me to go back to work on a part-time somewhat flexible arrangement. I'm working from home and what not, which was great. That plan quickly changed where ... When I launched my business ... This was 2014, like September of 2014 when baby was one, and someone had posted in this big mommy Facebook group that I'm in that she was looking for a sleep consultant recommendation.

Eva Klein: I had just completed my certification myself and I had had a lot of volunteers that came from this group to help me complete the certification. I had messaged all of them on Facebook and I said, "Guys, check out this person's post. Can you recommend me? I helped you. Can you tag me? Can you recommend me?" I had, I don't know, over at least 10 or 15 people recommending me, and then within 24 hours, because of that single Facebook post, I had four people call me and book one-on-one packages with me, which was about $1600 in revenue. From one Facebook post.

Shane Sams: Wow. Isn't it-

Jocelyn Sams: Then the wheels start turning, right?

Eva Klein: Yeah, yeah. That was where I'm going, "That's a lot of shoes."

Shane Sams: That's a lot of shoes. That's a closet full of shoes, y'all.

Eva Klein: Yeah, or one really, really expensive pair of shoes...I probably don't even need. That was when I immediately took a step back and I said to my husband ... I said, "I can actually ... I think I can make real money here." I said, "Look at what just happened." He looks at me and he goes, "All right. Go for it."

Shane Sams: Wow.

Eva Klein: "Do what you need to do. You've got my blessing. Go run with this." The plan changed from, "This is gonna be my fun side business", to, "This is something that I would love to build up so I can do this one-on-one coaching full time, and then when I'm good and ready, I'm gonna leave my job." Of course, I'm in control of everything, so I'm gonna leave when I'm good and ready and when I feel like my business is big enough ... For now, I'll just continue hustling on the side when I'm not working and when the kids are asleep and then decide when it's the right time for me to make the big move.

Shane Sams: Okay, hold on one second before you get into that. Let me unpack a little bit of this first, okay?

Eva Klein: Yes.

Shane Sams: You basically decide you're gonna do something that you're untrained to do and-

Eva Klein: Well, no. I got my certification.

Shane Sams: Right, that's what I'm saying.

Eva Klein: I did spend.

Shane Sams: Before that, right?

Eva Klein: Yeah, the entire ... Sorry, I forgot to mention this, that I'm not just ... I didn't just have a couple of kids and decide to become ... To call myself an expert, because the baby at the time was five or six months and I had another six months of maternity leave and she was now sleeping well, I was able to spend the next six months doing my certification online while she napped and while she slept.

Shane Sams: Okay, so you went and got certified through like an organizing body or-

Eva Klein: Yes.

Shane Sams: Experts or whatever?

Eva Klein: Exactly.

Shane Sams: You are not a trained medical person. You are not a trained psychologist or sociologist-

Eva Klein: No-

Shane Sams: Per se, you are a lawyer who experienced something in her life, and then went out and got some training in that, but not like a full-blown PhD degree, whatever. You went to a certifying body that it does help you perfect or master what you've already figured out on your own, right?

Eva Klein: Right.

Shane Sams: You started a business basically by participating in another person's Facebook group it sounds like.

Eva Klein: Yeah, yep.

Shane Sams: You went into this Facebook group, participated, gave people advice, helped people in the group, and then when the time came to charge for it, these people were kind of like your testimonials, right?

Eva Klein: Yeah, totally.

Shane Sams: For everyone listening, if you're looking for a business model, I'm not saying go into baby sleeping, but I'm saying that's the classic thing that people are like, "How will I ever get a testimonial?" Well, you go help people for free. "Well, how will I ever ... I'm not an expert in this. I didn't go to college for it." So? You could probably get certified in whatever you want to do, right?

Eva Klein: Yes.

Shane Sams: There's so many paths that can lead you ... You didn't even expect to end up here when you started this-

Eva Klein: No, no.

Shane Sams: Let alone having a full-blown business and not being a lawyer anymore.

Eva Klein: It was shoe money, that's what this was. It was fun side money.

Shane Sams: Maybe everybody out there that's listening, that you've been sitting on the fence and you won't get in the community and do the courses and start ... Maybe you just need some shoe money, right? Maybe you just need a few more skins for your kids on Fortnite, right? Yeah, so maybe you just need a smaller goal, and when you get into it, you start making money, you realize ... We hear this story all the time. People come in, they start ... Even for a side hustle ... Sometimes it might not be shoe money. It might be car payment or insurance, whatever it is.

Shane Sams: Someone just wants to make a little extra money and then they look down and they can pay their mortgage and they're like, "Whoa." That's like real money that we can actually spend on our life to stay alive and move forward and maybe even make life better. It's just ... I just love your story, how it started out as, "Yeah, I want some shoes. Whoa, hold on a second. That's like a lot of money there."

Eva Klein: A lot of shoes.

Jocelyn Sams: All right. You're going along, you're doing your day job as an attorney. You are doing this side hustle as a sleep consultant and-

Shane Sams: This is pure one-on-one coaching, right?

Eva Klein: Yes, all one-on-one coaching.

Shane Sams: At this time? Okay

Eva Klein: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jocelyn Sams: What happens next? How do you decide to take this sort of to the next level? What did that look like?

Eva Klein: I didn't. I went into that ... Remember, there's an overall theme here, "A man planned and God laughs." My second plan, which was, "I'm gonna quit when I'm good and ready", that fell from the wayside when my boss pulls me into the office one day and says, "We need you back full time. Full time, we can't have you working from home anymore because the nature of the job is changing and we need you. There's gonna be more team work involved." At the time, my kids were three and one and that meant ... I mean, I thought that my world was crashing before me because I wasn't ready. I was about six months in to doing this side hustle. I was not ready to be quitting my job and to have to continue to build my business while working full time, not at home, I mean, it would have been impossible.

Eva Klein: Plus, given that my three-year-old was already in school, it would mean we would have to pay for a nanny, which would be a massive added expense to cover before and after care. I was-

Shane Sams: At this time you're not making anywhere near your salary I assume? It's not-

Eva Klein: I was-

Shane Sams: Or maybe-

Eva Klein: It was growing.

Shane Sams: Like equivalent after taxes?

Eva Klein: Yeah, it was growing, but then when I sat down with my husband and we figured out, "Okay, if I were to keep my job and work full time, but then we're dishing out all this money for all this added extra child care, we would need a full-time, Monday-to-Friday, eight-to-six nanny to cover the before and after care. It would be a lot of added expenses. Given that my business was growing and that my job I guess really wasn't, then the next plan was, "Okay, I'm not gonna do this job full time because it's not gonna work. My next plan is I'm going to say goodbye to this job and I'm gonna continue to grow my business while I continue to look for something else part time."

Eva Klein: That was ... Are we on plan number two or plan number three that basically didn't end up panning out? That was the next plan. It was ... Listen, it was very, very scary because it was not what I personally had planned, but again, that's just an overall theme here. That's often how life ends up working out and-

Shane Sams: Sure.

Eva Klein: So I was looking for something part time and I actually had a number of leads, but then as ... It takes a little bit of time for people to get back to you and interviews and whatnot, but as time was going on, my one-on-one coaching business just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger because I had even more time now to be able to dedicate to hustling and going on all these other Facebook groups and kind of growing my I guess Facebook brand if you can call it that way-

Shane Sams: You're following, growing an audience of some kind, but before-

Eva Klein: For sure-

Shane Sams: You were kind of ... I don't know what the right word is. You were kind of like siphoning an audience off here and there of places you were participating as an audience member, but as you had more time to put into this, you started ... I mean, it's like seeing someone around the local place all the ... It's like Norm on Cheers, right?

Eva Klein: Yeah.

Shane Sams: Like, "Oh, there's Eva. Oh, there's Eva. She's in every group I go to."

Eva Klein: Yeah, yeah, "I've heard about her", and then all of a sudden it's, "Oh, my baby is sleep" ... I started getting referrals from people that, "Oh, you helped my friend with her baby and now I'm gonna hire you because I need help, too." Before I knew it, I didn't have time for a part-time job because I was ... My hours were filled up with all this one-on-one coaching.

Shane Sams: We had a very similar experience, actually, because of the nature of teaching. We had like six to eight weeks off in the summer, right?

Eva Klein: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Shane Sams: Now, I say off. Jocelyn was a longer contracted worker as a librarian, so she was in like throughout July getting the library ready for a book, and I was coaching football every day, right?

Eva Klein: Right.

Shane Sams: It was probably ... Instead of our normal nine-to-10 our day it was a four-hour day or whatever, you know?

Eva Klein: Uh-huh.

Shane Sams: As our business grew, we went about a year ... That last ... Probably two to four months of the year is where we really had massive growth in the first year, and it was like as we had more time, it started growing faster. As we started getting ready to go back to school, we looked at each other and said, "Man, if we can do this part time, what could we do full time?" We weren't ready yet. That's why we actually went back into our school year that year and we taught for a couple more months before we looked down and the money started getting crazy and we're like, "Why are we here? We shouldn't be here." It was that moment where you turn the corner that would probably have hit anyway if you had just quit earlier. You know what I'm saying? If you had never-

Eva Klein: Yeah, but I don't have-

Shane Sams: A part-time job or whatever, but you don't realize it till you get there or something.

Eva Klein: I didn't have the guts that you guys had to be totally honest. I needed other circumstances to kind of ... I needed the stars to align differently for me because I think to be totally honest, it's very, very scary if we're to get up one day and say, "Oh, okay. I'm quitting my job", so-

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, and that's really just a mindset thing. Your mindset wasn't there yet.

Eva Klein: Yeah, no it wasn't.

Jocelyn Sams: It takes a while to get there. I think sometimes people don't really get that or they ... I guess they don't recognize it in their own life. Maybe they've been listening to this podcast for years and they think, "Oh, well, these people have something that I don't have." No, it's just that we were able to wrap our mind around it and figure out that it was possible and that it is something we could do.

Shane Sams: Also, too, a lot of people ... There is a lot of motivation and inspiration stuff. People look for that. Like, "I want to be more inspired. I want to go listen to somebody and be more inspired or be more motivated." A lot of times it does take a catalyst. It takes an outside force to push you so far out of your comfort zone that you can't help but make a change or you have to. In your case, you had no choice. It was like, your time or you're not.

Shane Sams: In our case, it was like this really cruel experience from a boss that made me like hate my job and hate the people that were over me so bad that I was ready to get out. I was not there before that. Before there, I was cruise control, retirement when we're 55, whatever. Just like, "Let's go." It took a catalyst to even force us down a different path. You had a catalyst that kind of made you make a decision you weren't ready for, but that's kind of like how all of our decisions in life ... Like, are you really ready to get married ever? Are you really ready for the first kid? The second kid? The third kid? Right?

Eva Klein: No, never.

Shane Sams: I mean, you're never ready for it, and we need those kind of pushes to ... That's why we surround ourselves with great people who will push us, 'cause sometimes we don't have catalysts in our life. Listen, some people are listening right now, their job's secure, they're comfortable, that's why they're not hungry enough to go out and build the thing that they've got this dream, but-

Jocelyn Sams: They kind of want something else.

Shane Sams: Yeah, they kind of-

Eva Klein: I would tell those people, "Don't quit your job. Don't do something drastic. Start something from the side and see where it takes you."

Shane Sams: Exactly.

Eva Klein: That's all that you need to do. That is ... It's a risk-free move and I happen to be fairly risk averse when it comes to these types of life decisions. If it happens to be ... If I had told my husband, "I don't want to go back to work. I just want to do sleep consulting full time", he probably would have given me his blessing, but I don't tick like that. I needed to do things my way, where I'm going to go back to work and have my steady paycheck, but then hustle like crazy on the side, because that is technically as risk free as it gets.

Shane Sams: It's kind of like the story of the farmer who's working hard and planting seeds and it's been dry for months and months and months or whatever. Someone ... His neighbor's like, "What are you doing?" He's like, "I'm preparing for rain." If you start your side hustle, if you get the thing ready, if you do a couple of things, just experiment and have some fun and have some shoe money, if and when the catalyst comes, at least you'll be ready for it. You know?

Eva Klein: For sure.

Shane Sams: That's why we always have multiple revenue streams. We've got different ... We got a couple little side businesses off of our side businesses because you just never know what's gonna hit and you never know what's gonna hit you. If you're risk averse, it's actually crazy to just be all-in on one thing like a job. Why not have a side hustle? Why not have your own thing? Why not have something else to kind of protect you from all these contingencies?

Eva Klein: Right.

Jocelyn Sams: You go back into work. They're like, "Hey, come in full time." You're like, "Yeah, no, I'm not doing that."

Eva Klein: Not happening.

Jocelyn Sams: Keep building up this consulting thing. What form has it taken now? I know that's probably about the time you came into our community, right?

Eva Klein: Yeah. Well, so 2015 was the year of, "Well, Eva, so you're not going back to law. You're actually doing this full time? Wow, that's crazy. Good for you." That was 2015. 2016 was, "Okay, what's next?" I've ... This is ... I haven't looked back. I'm not going back to law ... I mean, not at this point, anyways ... I'm pretty full time when it comes to all this coaching, but there is ... When you're working in the dollars-for-time type of business model, there is a maximum amount that you can make, really, 'cause there's only 24 hours in a day and-

Jocelyn Sams: You can only raise your prices so much.

Eva Klein: Exactly. It's exhausting because when literally you don't work, you don't get paid, and so it's a very stressful situation to be in. Beginning of 2016 was when I started to try and figure out, "Okay, what's next? How do I expand my brand? What do I do?" I thought about maybe adding some extra service providers under my brand and maybe adding in some night nurses or maybe training some other sleep consultants, but that didn't really excite me so much. I'm gonna be totally honest, I came across your Forbes article, where it was talking all about how you guys made money selling digital products. That's when I went, "That's it! That's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna create an online sleep program. That's it!" It was like, "Huzzah! That's what I'm gonna do."

Shane Sams: You're the first person that's ever said "huzzah" on The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast.

Eva Klein: Really? No one's ever said that before?

Eva Klein: No one-

Shane Sams: No one's ever said it. I say it personally 'cause I love that word, but never heard it on the podcast, so ...

Eva Klein: I was so excited because this was the first time that I had ... I was toying with so many ideas in terms of expanding, and none of them excited me. That was when ... That was my real aha moment. "Okay, this is what I'm doing next." I'm just warning you, when I tell you how long it took me to launch, I'm gonna give you guys a mini heart attack, because I know that you're all about put a couple of things together and launch. I did the complete opposite where it took me a year and a half, and it's not because I was slack. It was because it took me months and months and months to come up with all the content and another year to film it and put it together and do ... It was beyond ridiculous. Edit the videos and then add headlines underneath and subtitles underneath the videos. It was a little bit ridiculous, or a whole lot.

Jocelyn Sams: Not to mention that you're also like birthing babies during this time.

Shane Sams: Yeah, right. Exactly.

Jocelyn Sams: You had a few things going on in your life.

Shane Sams: Children are being born, things going on.

Eva Klein: Yeah, it was-

Shane Sams: Kind of put a damper on it.

Eva Klein: It was insane, but anyways, long story short, it beta launched in December 2017 and fully launched in January. It's been running now for just over a year.

Shane Sams: It's so funny, 'cause I remember the aha moment that I had, too. I was riding a lawn mower, listening to a podcast, and I heard a guy talk about a PDF that he was selling for $49. People would pay him and he'd email it to them, right?

Eva Klein: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Shane Sams: It never ... I just remember telling Jocelyn, "How did this never occur to me before? Why do we not see the thing ... We're already ... We're teaching people, we're saying the same things over and over", and sometimes it just takes like an example, right?

Eva Klein: Yeah.

Shane Sams: Someone just asked me the other day, "Why do you guys podcast?" It was like a little round table discussion, right? There was different answers, "'Cause I love this subject matter", there was this that and the other. I said, "I want to show people what's possible." If you can't see what's possible, it can't click, right?

Eva Klein: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah.

Shane Sams: If I'm frazzled 'cause my baby won't sleep, which I've been there, terrible, right?

Eva Klein: Yeah.

Shane Sams: If I don't see you holding a baby that's sleeping and you're like, "Look, I've figured this out. This baby just slept for nine hours", whatever, I don't know it's possible, right?

Eva Klein: Right.

Shane Sams: It's amazing to me that it just clicked and you attacked it and you built this course. Even if it took you 18 months, like errors, I mean, in theory, Flipped Lifestyle took us, what, two years to get to before we actually ever had a course or anything. We had talked about it, but people don't see that. They only see the moment after you launch, right?

Eva Klein: Right.

Shane Sams: I mean, you only get to experience the rest of your life. You can't worry about ... What did you always say about trees? Like the ...

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, it's like there's a saying. The best time to plant a tree was a hundred years ago, the next best time is today.

Shane Sams: Right. It doesn't matter how long it takes you to do it as long as you do it.

Jocelyn Sams: Just get started.

Shane Sams: I know there's one more layer to this. We're gonna talk about that in a minute with the membership and things like that, but when you launched your course and you start selling your course as you start moving out, 'cause you still do coach, right? You still do-

Eva Klein: Yes, yes.

Shane Sams: Okay. Did you feel relief? Did it feel better? Were you like ... Did you see like a path forward now where you could start moving that sliding scale? Like, "Okay, well, right now, 90% of my revenue is this, but man, last month was 10% of my courses. Man I could see now I could get a thousand people to buy this course and it's gonna start moving that bar chart down." Right? Like, it's gonna start-

Eva Klein: Yeah.

Shane Sams: Yeah. Well, what happened after you launched your course?

Eva Klein: Well, I think the biggest ... I mean, I launched ... Yeah, I launched it immediately as a membership and I think the biggest sigh of relief was that I had all the ... I had this extra revenue that meant that I could justify not taking on as many one-on-one clients that month.

Shane Sams: Yes, and it's a little bit more predictable, right? You could-

Eva Klein: Yeah-

Shane Sams: It's like, "Oh, I've got 50 members. I'm probably gonna have 48 next month at least, and I'll go get a couple of more." It's like, "Can I hire a virtual assistant? Could I actually do that without worrying about someone bailing on me or a launch not going good or my courses not selling or a one-on-one client leaves?" It creates more stability in your thing.

Shane Sams: Now, obviously, this was about a year ago, right? This was like December of 2017?

Eva Klein: Yeah, that was when I beta launched.

Shane Sams: You've been doing this for about a year now, with coaching and memberships and courses running side by side, right?

Eva Klein: Yes.

Shane Sams: You recently had a huge win, you had your first five-figure month, correct?

Eva Klein: Yes, yes. In November ... I should mention the baby was three months, two and a half months at the time, yeah, was my first five-figure month.

Shane Sams: It's actually grown since then, we talked about a little bit.

Eva Klein: Yeah. Yeah, and then January it was still a five-figure month, but a bigger five-figure month.

Shane Sams: That's amazing.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, that is so awesome. What was the sentiment in your house? How did you feel? What was your husband saying about this?

Eva Klein: My husband was just ... I think he was just also relieved that I finally got there, 'cause he knew it was just a matter of time.

Shane Sams: Yeah. It's funny how that works, isn't it? Like at first you're like, "Can I make any money doing this?" Then you're like, "Wow, that's a lot of money. That's not just shoe money." Then you're like, "Wait a minute, this could actually pay our bills." Then you're like, "Where does this stop?" At that point when you start asking yourself like, "Where does this stop?" And it just keeps growing, it kind of ... I don't want to say you get numb to it, because when you hit your five-figure month it's like, "Whoa, five-figure month."

Shane Sams: I mean, there's a lot of lawyers not making five figures a month. I'm just saying, and there's a lot of people in the legal industry not making that much money. It's like ... It does kind of get an almost expectation, like "No, I can scale this. No, I can do this." You get more confidence as you go forward on through these milestones. To me, the first money we made online always was my most exciting moment. Even more than massive numbers that we've hit in the future, you know what I'm saying?

Eva Klein: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Shane Sams: It was almost like your husband expected you to do it, and you kind of expected to do it. Now it's like, "Okay, how many people can I help? How many people ... How much money could we make?"

Jocelyn Sams: Okay, Eva. All of this is awesome, obviously, but I know that there are probably a few people out there saying, "Okay, well, this is all sunshine or roses, and is it this easy?" Tell us a little bit about some things that have happened along the way that maybe made things difficult or some kind of obstacle that you have had to overcome along the way.

Eva Klein: I guess ... I hate referring to my third child as an obstacle, because he's so cute, but let's be real. I mean, babies take up time, and as you guys always say, you've got either time or you have money. Those are your two main currencies, no pun intended. I think until I had him ... My girls are seven and five, so throughout a lot of this process they were either in school or daycare or something and I was able to have the full work day to commit to my business.

Eva Klein: When I had my baby in September, that changed, and he happens to be, thank God, a very easy baby, but it does take up time and it does mean that even though this is what I do for a living, he's only five months and his sleep ... He's not sleeping 12 hours through the night just yet. It's just not expected for a lot of five-month-olds, and so because of that, it's obviously challenging. It hasn't been ... Not challenging ... It hasn't been possible for me to get everything done that I used to be able to get done before he was born.

Shane Sams: Yeah, and that's ... We always joked when I was sitting in the locker room. I remember this one time this guy had ... He had two kids and he was going to three, and we always joked that he was going from man-to-man to zone coverage, which in football is harder. It's a lot easier to pick your guy and run beside him. It's a lot harder when there's another one moving around and you gotta figure out where the third one is and like ... It's just like you still got all these responsibilities that already existed. You do have another huge responsibility that's just come into your life and you don't get to ignore that, right?

Eva Klein: Right.

Jocelyn Sams: People out there, and Eva included, with three or more children-

Shane Sams: God bless you.

Jocelyn Sams: I mean, props to you because I'm struggling with two kids, okay? I just ... I don't even know how it happened. Especially when they start getting older and they're involved in different activities. How in the world do you get them there? That's just the only question I have.

Shane Sams: It's amazing, though, because you actually have ... There's a really good piece of wisdom there. As your pie gets thinner ... Each slice of the pie gets thinner as we move through life, right? It doesn't matter if it's a kid or a new job or other responsibilities. Maybe an aging parent. Your pie is always getting cut thinner as you go, right?

Eva Klein: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Shane Sams: We all try to keep doing all the things that we're doing or try to do all the new things and that's what we want to do, but what you said was, "I can't do it all. I just can't. I've got it" ... There are trade-offs and things we've gotta do to delegate, to let things go, to make the most important things happen. Talking to you off-air a little bit, that's what you've been doing. You've been ... You've still been making things happen. Your business is still growing, even though you may not be doing all the things that you want to do yet because you do have a new baby.

Jocelyn Sams: You put together all that infrastructure and you started it years ago, because you sort of baby stepped this thing along the way, you're now able to have this growing business that is sustainable that maybe even just a couple of years ago, you might not could have had. You had your baby a couple of years ago, it might not have happened. It's just the way everything worked out, and because you got started and took the steps that you needed to take, now you have something that is a legitimate business.

Shane Sams: Well, listen. It is ... I am always amazed when people come in and have these incredible success stories of just taking what life gives you and going forward and doing whatever it takes to reach the next level, even when you got things in your life, like a new baby or a bigger family or a job that's changing. When we read your posts in the forums and we said, "Wow, five-figure month." That is absolutely incredible. Before we go any farther, we just want to say congratulations. You are awesome.

Eva Klein: Thank you.

Shane Sams: You're amazing. You inspire us 'cause-

Eva Klein: Thank you.

Shane Sams: You've got the kids, you're killing it.

Eva Klein: Thanks so much.

Shane Sams: What we really want to do for the rest of the call, though, is see how we can help you grow this even more. See how we can help you get more free time back with your family, and see what your next steps are. What questions do you have for us on how to grow what you've already created?

Eva Klein: Yeah. My first question has to do with hiring a VA. For very obvious reasons, my business is getting bigger and the amount of time that I have is shortening ... Is lessened because of my baby. It was just a very obvious next move that I needed some help, outside paid regular help with my business. I have someone that I'm gonna hire on for about five hours a week and I'm just trying to figure out I guess what specific tasks ... Like how to prioritize the tasks to give her that I'm no longer able to do.

Eva Klein: For example, so I'll tell you the main things that I was able to get done before the baby was born that I just have not been able to do on a regular basis or at all to begin with. Before the baby came, I was blogging every week. I have not created any new content since he was born. I was posting on social media every day. That has not happened. I still post on social media, but it is not regular because of sheer time. I have been able to still email somewhat regularly. I mean, that's been my main priority, but the new content creation and as you guys like to say, showing up ... Show up in social media ... In email and social media. I think I have been sort of showing up in email, but I haven't been showing up in social media nearly as much as I could or should be.

Eva Klein: I'm at this point trying to figure out if I got someone for five hours a week, how do I figure out what are the most important tasks for her to be doing?

Shane Sams: I would be really careful adding back in things that you have not been able to do because what we have always found is ... Like let's say we are crunched for time. Let's say something happens. For example, right before we did our live event last year in Nashville, we basically had a complete turnover of staff. Over like a two-month period, we lost four people, okay?

Jocelyn Sams: We fired two people, and then two people quit 14 days before the event.

Shane Sams: Out of nowhere. Right. We were kind of scrambling. We had all this capacity that disappeared over a week or two period, right? What we did was, we said ... We basically sat down, pulled out a notepad, and said, "What can we do if it's just me and you and the people we have left?" We found that we got all the things that really needed to be done done, and all the things that kind of went to the wayside, we didn't really add 'em back 'cause they didn't help us and we still grew the business and we still succeeded. We had kind of created a bunch of jobs for other people that didn't even ... Were not even necessary.

Shane Sams: I would really evaluate more so what you should be doing, which is probably the things that you've held onto at the fringes when you got ... If you've got like one hour a day, you're gonna do the most important thing, right? I don't know if I'd start at the things you're not doing, and just think about the things that you know grow the business. For example, when you do launches, you do webinars, you do email launches, what do you do that gets the most members? What do you that grows the membership? That's the goal now is ... Right now, you're ... Part of your business is memberships, part of it's the coaching.

Shane Sams: We might want to slide that membership farther up so we'll grow revenue and get time back as we lose one-on-one clients. What does that? Is it social media posting? Maybe it is, but it's probably not because your business grew without it, right? Is it blogging every week? Maybe, maybe, but it might be blogging really, really good once a month, okay? That means freeing you up to do something more prolifically, which means that person that comes in might need to do something else like maybe they can handle your schedule for your one-on-one client. Maybe they can handle some of the marketing and some of the ads and some of the stuff like that. You really need a task list of everything you're doing right now, and then you need to say, "What can only Eva do? That's what Eva should do." Right?

Eva Klein: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Shane Sams: That person's gotta take over other stuff. Be very careful whenever you hire someone to just give them a bunch of tasks or try to ... Or you realize you're not doing something and you give them all the tasks back because they may not ... You might not even need those tasks, right?

Eva Klein: Right.

Shane Sams: What do you think think is the most important ... If you could do three things every week, what would those three things be? Like you didn't have time to do anything else, you have no help, you've got six hours this week to work. You can get three tasks done. What would you do right now?

Eva Klein: Well, I guess number one is I have to respond to my one-on-one clients' emails. That's absolutely mandatory because that's the service that they're paying for. They're paying for daily email support from me when they're utilizing their sleep plan. Nobody else can do that except for me. I think the second thing is regular emails. Giving emails, having a VA write my emails doesn't sit well with me. I'm sure there are people that do it, but it doesn't feel authentic, so I need to be the one, especially because I get very personal in my emails. I talk ... I give over personal anecdotes about my kids and-

Shane Sams: I'm with you. Yeah, I-

Eva Klein: It would be very strange to have somebody else-

Shane Sams: I would rather someone actually do our blog posts or our podcast rather than write our emails, 'cause those come from us.

Eva Klein: Right, exactly. Exactly.

Shane Sams: Right, so one-on-one response to the client, emails to your list, I assume to sell more stuff.

Eva Klein: I guess the support within my membership. People are posting questions every single day and they are expecting expert feedback from me on their specific situation, so nobody else can do that except for me.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay, so then that leaves some other things such as customer service. Is that something that you think that you'd have your VA do?

Shane Sams: Are you doing ... You're doing all that right now I assume, like-

Eva Klein: Yeah.

Shane Sams: "I can't get logged in, I can't do this, I can't do that." Okay.

Eva Klein: I guess customer service I could give to her.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, that's one thing I would definitely offload. One way that you can do that, and you can start now, is by moving to a ticketing work system. The reason I think this is important is because right now you can answer the tickets and the good thing about the ticketing system is that it will save those responses so that when you hire someone they will be able to search and see responses that you have given.

Shane Sams: Do you use a ticketing system right now? Or is just a contact?

Eva Klein: No. No, I don't. They just contact me through email.

Shane Sams: We use Zendesk is what we use.

Jocelyn Sams: There are other ones out there.

Shane Sams: Yeah, it doesn't matter-

Jocelyn Sams: That are totally fine. They are relatively inexpensive to use. You can have one user usually for around like $5 a month.

Shane Sams: Yeah, it's super cheap.

Eva Klein: Oh, okay.

Shane Sams: Like Jocelyn said, the main reason to do that is just so like as you hire other people or other people are doing it, they have like a bank of easy to get to responses so they don't have to come up with new answers every time.

Eva Klein: Also if you have turnover in staff for any reason, all those responses are still there. You can go in and look ... See what people are responding-'

Shane Sams: Everybody gets a little number so like they can say, "Oh, this is referencing ticket 3947382, just like you would if you called your insurance agent or whatever. That's one thing.

Jocelyn Sams: I would go ahead and start doing that now.

Shane Sams: What else are you doing?

Jocelyn Sams: Before that person even gets started.

Eva Klein: What else am I doing that you're saying I could give to someone else? I mean, the one-on-one ... The actual consultation that I do with my one-on-one clients, to actually sit down and come up with a plan, that's only me. I can't give that to anyone else to do. I am posting. I am showing up on social media, I'm just not doing it regular.

Shane Sams: Does that make you money?

Eva Klein: I think it does. In other words, I'm actually on my Google Analytics page right now and social is the second ... No, hold on. It's the third-most popular way that people get to my site.

Shane Sams: What's first and second?

Eva Klein: First is organic, and the second is just a direct link. The third is my newsletter. No, the fourth actually is Facebook.

Shane Sams: O'kay. I mean, I would probably have her spend maybe a little time scheduling, but I'd be careful with that.

Jocelyn Sams: That would probably be a back burner item for me, honestly. If you have extra time ... Say you're at four hours and 30 minutes and you have extra time, then that would be something you could do.

Shane Sams: You're still gonna have to create the posts, I'm telling you. You're gonna have to create 'em and she can schedule 'em.

Jocelyn Sams: The way that I've done it in the past and something you might want to consider is I have written out a big spreadsheet of posts and I used to have my VAs go in and schedule. I would just write them all at one time and then they would come in and schedule them.

Shane Sams: There's all kinds of tools like ... You can ... Like, MeetEdgar is a tool that will allow you to fill up ... That you could take one day, do a hundred posts, and they'll keep recycling through stuff. If you've got 50 blog posts, you could put them all in MeetEdgar in one day and they would just post to social media for you over time and then just start over. We do that on my U.S. History site. We have like 150 memes, funny things about school, and it just keeps recycling through 'em twice a year. People still share 'em and laugh 'cause they don't remember the last time it got posted, you know?

Eva Klein: Right. I guess I could have her ... I guess I could have her do that.

Shane Sams: Well, sure she could.

Jocelyn Sams: Absolutely.

Shane Sams: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Jocelyn Sams: When you have a limited amount of time, like when you're hiring someone and you have a limited amount of time such as five hours a week, I would just put together the priorities, and that's what that person works on. Customer support, that's probably gonna be your number one priority because you want to make sure people who are paying you are happy. You start there, and if you spend three hours a week that week on customer service, then you only have two hours left to do whatever else. If you spend one hour that week on customer service, you have four hours left to do everything else.

Shane Sams: I would even push back a little bit ... I'm looking at your list here. I do think as long as you have a one-on-one business that is gonna be only you, unless you hire another coach on your staff, right? I do fully agree. It doesn't mean someone couldn't do your marketing emails better, but like I get the emotional connection to writing your own emails. That's ... We do that, you know what I'm saying? I would have a hard time letting that go myself, okay?

Shane Sams: I would push back about supporting your forums and your membership because that is a limiting belief that will stop you from scaling eventually. What people want from you is not always exactly you live, they just want an answer to their next question, okay?

Eva Klein: Right.

Shane Sams: You could train this person. If she spent ... I'm assuming ... Is it a woman?

Eva Klein: Yeah.

Shane Sams: I keep saying "she", I don't want anybody hating on me on Twitter 'cause I'm just assuming things, right? I'm assuming that she could do customer service and go into your membership and like, for example, someone asks a question that's clearly answered in one of your courses, you don't need to answer that. You just need someone to say, "Hey, Eva answered this in module three." What you need is someone who learns your course inside and out. The person you hire needs to watch all of this and know it and know where these things are, and that'll help her in customer service. It'll also help her in your ... You could turn that over, which would allow you to do what I would say is more important, which is creating that content again. Creating those blog posts, creating that prolific, really good stuff that's free to draw in more members, to share on social, to email your list, m'kay?

Eva Klein: Right [crosstalk 00:42:25]-

Jocelyn Sams: Just remember that it doesn't have to feel icky, because I know that you have a lot of personal contact with these people and you feel like they want to talk to you. I totally get that because we're in the same position, but where I have ... What I have my assistant do is she ... She doesn't post as me, she posts as herself, but she will go in and she will answer people's questions. She'll say, "Hey, so and so asked this question a couple of months ago and this was the response that Shane or Jocelyn did." Or, "Shane covered this in the module about your idea. Here's a link to it."

Shane Sams: Just like your one-on-one capped and you felt that, right? If you ... The point of the membership is to give people a community, not to give them you, 'cause then you have hundreds of people that can help each other, not just you, 'cause we don't have all the answers, either, right?

Eva Klein: Yeah.

Shane Sams: It's to bring together dozens that ... If you've got someone who's had three kids and been through your course three times and they're still a member of your community 'cause they're on their third baby, they're gonna be able to help probably in your group just as much, right? Or if you have a customer service person that's trained to know where everything is, 80% of those questions are gonna be answered.

Shane Sams: Now, what our assistant does ... I just got a message from Kathy the other day, she said, "Hey, you need to post on this." Sometimes Jocelyn will drop me one or I'll drop her one, 'cause it's like something that we haven't ever talked about, right?

Eva Klein: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Shane Sams: Maybe someone said "huzzah" for the first time, whatever. We'll go in then and now we've got that answer, so the next person that comes up with that, our assistant can point them back to it. If you don't do that now when your membership is young and growing, what'll happen is you're gonna hit another number. It might be 200 instead of 20, like with one-on-one coaching, but there will be a number where you're gonna look back and go, "I can't answer any more questions. I just can't do it."

Shane Sams: You're gonna have to do this eventually no matter what, and that mindset hurdle might need to be jumped now when there's less people instead of more. Remember, you feel like you've promised them your whole soul and presence, but that's not what most people expect. They expect an answer and a solution and a result. However you deliver that in your membership is gonna help them.

Eva Klein: I think the main challenges I have with having someone else support ... Answer questions in my community is because unlike with your business where there technically isn't a wrong answer, as long as you do something with your particular online business, something is better than nothing, right? Versus with my people and my business, there is a wrong answer. You could put your baby on the wrong schedule, which could make things worse.

Shane Sams: That's not a question-

Eva Klein: That's the issue.

Shane Sams: That's not a question they would answer. For example, I'm just gonna make something up here. This is probably not related to anything in your program, but I'll just talk to you about what we did, okay? One of the things that Jocelyn did with our kids was she would keep them awake and not let them go to sleep with like a wash cloth at certain times.

Jocelyn Sams: After eating.

Shane Sams: After eating.

Jocelyn Sams: When they were tiny babies.

Shane Sams: When they were tiny babies. Regardless if that's right, wrong, or indifferent, we learned that from a book, okay? The answers that can be answered by your courses that already exist are not ... It's not your assistant answering the question, it's you. They are not giving them the wrong answer.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, and like ... Okay, here's the thing. In your business and our business and everyone's business, everyone thinks that their situation is unique. Most people's situations are not unique.

Shane Sams: That's right.

Jocelyn Sams: 90% of the questions we answer are the same.

Shane Sams: Same questions.

Jocelyn Sams: Stuff we answer over and over and over and over again.

Shane Sams: This is true in every niche that we've ever encountered. Like 80% of the things you're telling people are probably something that someone else has already asked you or you've made a course for it.

Jocelyn Sams: Your assistant is not giving an opinion. Your assistant is pointing someone to a question you've already answered.

Shane Sams: That's right. This might not happen exactly perfectly right now, but if you ... We've created systems to track all of our courses when we've answered questions. We've got a sheet of all the questions that have ever been answered on a member call, right? That like if someone says to me something that does have a very right answer like, "How do I install Paid Membership Pro?" There is only one answer to that in WordPress, right? That does have a direct answer. There's no way I would answer that question 'cause I answered it once. Now it's in our spreadsheet and now our person can say, "Go listen to this member call at the five-minute mark. Shane and Jocelyn answered that question."

Shane Sams: The fear here is that you're not answering the question, but the truth is you are answering the questions.

Jocelyn Sams: Someone else is just pointing someone to your answer.

Shane Sams: To your answer you've already done, and you'll find ... I would bet if you went and looked at every question that someone's asked you, you would find common thread, right? Things that ... Another thing, too, is a really wise mentor told me one time, "Don't rob people of all their problems by spoonfeeding them all the answers." You have to get people in ... You may have a course that generally talks about the topic they're dealing with that might not be the exact perfect specific thing to them, but that's okay, because only your client has all the variables anyway. You're just trying to give 'em the general practice that's the best and they're gonna tweak to get where their answer is. They're gonna have their aha moment through your answer, right?

Eva Klein: Right.

Shane Sams: Just try to move away from that a little bit. I would much rather you get some of that time back and not be answering the same questions a hundred times so that you can go create amazing content or something to get you found by hundreds of more people who need your help. If you could help 2,000 families get through this, but you've created artificial limits that cap you at helping 200, there's gonna be 1800 families that never get helped by you and your program. Does that make sense?

Eva Klein: Yes.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay. Hopefully that gives you a little bit of direction as far as your virtual assistant goes. I think we have time for just one quick little thing else. What else did you want to ask about today?

Eva Klein: Yeah. I would love to get some direction from you both on how I can I guess better perfect my I guess you can call it the elevator pitch, the way I describe and really market the program, because I'm not quite convinced it's as good as it could be because I do get quite a bit of people that come to my webinars and who open up my emails and follow me on social media. While I recognize it, it can take a long time for people to buy in. A lot of the time when I ask people why they haven't joined, it's because they're not convinced that this general program can help them with their specific issues. They're convinced that they need specific one-on-one help from me because, as you said before, they're convinced that their situation is unique and different from any other situation.

Shane Sams: Sure.

Eva Klein: How do-

Shane Sams: What's your 30-second pitch now? Go.

Eva Klein: My 30-second pitch now is that the ... My Sleep Bible Program, it's an audio/visual step-by-step online sleep program and community to help fix your little one's sleep challenges for little ones ages four months to five years and keep them sleeping. That's in essence what the pitch is.

Shane Sams: I would focus probably ... The only thing I hear wrong with that probably is the getting the baby to sleep is not the result they want. They want to sleep, and the baby is keeping them awake.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, and I heard also in that, the nuts and bolts of your program, people don't care about that. People care about, are they going to get the result that they want for their problem.

Shane Sams: Yeah, so it's more like, "Has your baby ever kept you up all night 'cause he or she won't sleep? Well, this program will put your baby to sleep all night-

Jocelyn Sams: So you can get the rest you need.

Shane Sams: So that you can feel rested at work tomorrow. That's what they really want to hear. All they need to hear ... They don't need to hear step by step, hold you by the hand ... Some of that's important sometimes. You can use it in different contexts, but they basically just want to say like, "I'm tired. I don't want to be tired no more. Wait, Eva, your program makes my baby sleep so I'm not tired anymore?" That's where you gotta focus all your ... The next step is fears and obstacles. Your FAQ is more important than your elevator pitch, right? Your FAQ answers all of their objections. That's where ... Don't worry too much ... This is just to get people to come to the door, right?

Eva Klein: Yeah.

Shane Sams: It's just, "Man, you're tired. I can fix that. I'll see you at my webinar in an hour." The webinar answers all their questions, like all, all their obstacles, all the things where they would say, "Yeah, but my baby's different." Not really. "Yeah, but my schedule won't let me do these things." Yeah, not really. You're just answering all of these things. "Yeah, but if I don't work directly with you" ... "No, trust me. Try this, then I'll work with you if it don't work." You're just answering all these questions as you kind of spiral down the rabbit hole. That make sense?

Eva Klein: Yes. Yes. Okay, so I kind of need to add much more on to my FAQ section and just make the elevator pitch a lot more simple and straightforward?

Shane Sams: The farther we go down this path in online business, the more we realize that our webinars need to be short and our Q&As need to be long because that's where the money's made. Same thing with yours, too.

Eva Klein: Short webinar, long Q&A.

Shane Sams: There you go.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay, Eva. It has been a great conversation today. I feel like we've been on here like 10 minutes and it's been like a really long time, but it's been super fun. Thank you for being here. Thank you for sharing about all your successes and I can't wait to see what happens next for you. Thank you so much for being here today and for sharing with us.

Eva Klein: Yes. Thank you so much for having me, guys, and thank you again for creating The Flipped Lifestyle Community. I wouldn't have my online business if it wasn't for you guys, so thank you.

Shane Sams: All right, guys, that wraps up another awesome talk with one of our real Flip Your Life Community members. We would love for you to try out The Flip Your Life Community as well. Go to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife and you can join right now for as little as $19 a month. That's flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife to check out all the great programs we have to help you take your life and business to the next level.

Shane Sams: Until next time, guys, get out there and do whatever it takes to flip your life. We'll see you then.

Jocelyn Sams: Bye.

Links and resources mentioned on today’s show: * Eva's Website * Flip Your Life LIVE 2019 Tickets & Registration Information * Flip Your Life community

Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!

Join the Flip Your Life Community NOW for as little as $19 per month!

https://flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife

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Announcement: Flip Your Life LIVE Price Increase effective March 1st, 2019

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Shane: Hey y'all! Shane here. Got a quick reminder for you that payment plan prices for Flip Your Life LIVE go up at midnight tonight. As we get closer to the event, there's less months to be able to divide the payment up in, so we have to raise the price and we don't want you to get hit by that price increase. We want you to get your ticket to Flip Your Life LIVE today before prices go up. This is the best price you're going to get all year for Flip Your Life LIVE 2019.

Shane: Remember, Flip Your Life LIVE will be in Lexington, Kentucky from September 19th through the 21st. This is a weekend event. Your ticket's going to include the welcome reception, every content session, every single Q&A, all of the masterminds and our Friday night working session too. When you buy your ticket today, you're going to get added to our exclusive Flip Your Life LIVE alumni Facebook group. That's where we do monthly training sessions live to prepare you for the event. We also do our famous icebreaker sessions where you get to connect with me and Jocelyn one on one and we introduce you to other attendees. Our goal is for you to have a host of friends waiting for you when you arrive at Flip Your Life LIVE!.

Shane: This is an open event. Anyone can attend. You don't have to be a member of the Flip Your Life community. If you're a person who is out there hustling and trying to build a business and change their family's future, we want you to be at Flip Your Life LIVE 2019. To get your ticket today, all you have to do is go to flippedlifestyle.com/live, that's F-L-I-P-P-E-D lifestyle.com/live. Go there right now and grab your ticket before midnight tonight, because tomorrow the prices go up. This is the best price, the best payment plan option that you can get this year for Flip Your Life LIVE 2019.

Shane: If you want to learn more about the event, we encourage you to go to flippedlifestyle.com/live or check out the podcast that we just dropped on Tuesday. We went over the entire event in detail to tell you everything that you're going to get when you buy your ticket. Again, prices go up tomorrow. This is your last warning. Go to flippedlifestyle.com/live, grab your ticket today. VIP tickets are almost sold out and the prices go up tomorrow.

Shane: If you have any questions about the event, we have a contact form right there at flippedlifestyle.com/live. Go and send us a message, ask us any questions you have, but whatever you do, grab your ticket today so that you can save. All right guys, that's all I've got for today's quick announcement podcast. Look forward to seeing your name appear on our attendee sheet for Flip Your Life LIVE 2019, and I can't wait to meet you there.

Links and resources mentioned on today’s show: * Flip Your Life LIVE 2019 Tickets & Registration Information * Flip Your Life community

Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!

Join the Flip Your Life Community NOW for as little as $19 per month!

– https://flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife

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In today's episode, we discuss one decision you can make that will help you achieve incredible success in 2019.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jocelyn Sams: Hey y'all. On today's podcast we'll discuss one decision you can make that will help you achieve incredible success in 2019.

Shane Sams: What's going on everybody? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. It is great to be back with you again today. We've got a special edition for you guys this week. A lot of people ask us, "What's the secret to your success? What's the one big thing you guys did, or have done, or continue to do to move the needle and achieve all of the things you've done online?"

Shane Sams: And while there are a lot of things that we could point to, one of the biggest catalysts for us both in the beginning and still to this day for achieving online success for being able to make enough money online to quit our jobs and build this life that we dreamed up a few years ago is attending live events.

Jocelyn Sams: Live events have definitely always been a huge catalyst for us just throughout the journey. Even at the beginning when we were really scared to death to go to one because it is a big investment in both time and money. But going to them, putting ourselves out there and deciding to do it has been huge for us many, many times over the years.

Shane Sams: In fact, if we had not started going to live events, I'm not even sure one that we would be here right now doing Flipped Lifestyle. But two, that our business even would have made it. You know, after we quit our job back in September 2013, things went pretty good for the first few months.

Shane Sams: But then as the spring hit, and our niche kind of dried up a little bit, our revenue dropped dramatically. We had achieved a huge amount of success in the fall of 2013 and we had created kind of an emergency fund in case the business didn't work later.

Shane Sams: But after we quit our jobs, we were on our own, no paychecks. And all we had was the money that was coming in each month, and this little kind of nest egg that we had set aside and saved after our big August, this big launch that we had in case something went wrong. Well, things went wrong, dramatically wrong.

Shane Sams: Like, we were really were not making enough each month in February of like 2014 to really even pay the bills. And it looked like we were gonna need to dust off our resumes and go look for jobs again in the summer because revenue kept dropping.

Shane Sams: We didn't know what was wrong. We didn't know why our marketing wasn't working. We didn't know why our list had suddenly dried up. And we were all alone. It was just me and Jocelyn trying to figure this out. And it was a really, really scary period in our business.

Shane Sams: At that point I knew we needed some kind of help. But we didn't know where to reach out to. There was nobody around us that really got what we did. Nobody that we knew was doing anything online. And we were totally unconnected to the industry save for listening to podcasts and hearing about other people who were doing what we were trying to do.

Shane Sams: So one night I saw that Pat Flynn was going to have a live event in San Diego, California and it was gonna be in June. And there was only a very limited amount of spots to get into this event. But it was gonna be really, really strategic, really tactical.

Shane Sams: It was gonna be other entrepreneurs flying in from all over the country. And there were gonna be experts there with Pat. And they were gonna talk about your business and teach you strategies to kind of take your business to the next level.

Shane Sams: And I knew this had to be the next step for us. This had to be what we could do next was to go find someone that knew what in the world to do next, to show us what we were doing wrong so that we could take our business to the next level.

Shane Sams: The problem was, we already weren't covering expenses good enough. Our nest egg was kind of dipping down. And this was gonna be a really expensive trip. I mean, we were gonna have to fly across the country.

Shane Sams: We were gonna have to get a hotel. We were gonna have to pay for the event itself. And you know, it was gonna take time away. We were gonna have to find someone to watch our kids. But I knew this had to be what we did.

Shane Sams: So I took this to Jocelyn. And not for the first time in our relationship she looked at me like I was crazy.

Jocelyn Sams: Guys on paper this was not a good idea. So I look at it. I see how expensive it is. You know, we're gonna have to fly. We're going to have to stay in a hotel. We're going to have to eat meals there, and all these types of things.

Jocelyn Sams: And you know, we've never been to San Diego before so I want to see a couple of things. And if we're gonna go I maybe want to stay like one extra day and do a couple things.

Jocelyn Sams: So I was like, there's no way we can do this. Like, this cannot happen. And Shane's like, "Oh no, we're doing it."

Shane Sams: It was a blanket No. I mean it's one of those times where Jocelyn's like, "No. We're gonna have to figure something out. Maybe we can buy a course. Maybe we can do something." But I just really felt like we were at a brick wall. And we couldn't get to the next level alone.

Shane Sams: I knew there would be benefits for going to the event afterwards. We would meet more people. We could connect. Maybe we could form a mastermind. Maybe we could build relationships, other opportunities would open up. But the bad part was, if none of that happened, we would probably run out of money.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. So in the end I did what I do a lot of times. And I said, "You know what? This is crazy but you're driving me crazy trying to talk me into it. So let's do it. And if it is a complete disaster, it's going to be your fault."

Shane Sams: So we buy the ticket. We get the plane tickets. We get the hotel ready. And we go to San Diego, and we attend this event. And I have to say it was the opposite of a disaster. You know, anytime we think about doing something new, fears are gonna creep in, obstacles are gonna appear in our way. And we start telling ourself all these ghost stories about the worst possible things that can happen.

Shane Sams: But when you take action, when you put yourself out there, good things happen. When we went to this event, we got to meet Pat. We got to meet experts that helped us exactly where we were. We actually took advice that we learned at that live event, came back, took action, and implemented it.

Shane Sams: And we blew our business into a place that we didn't even know it could go to. We had a six figure month right after we came back from this event just on the stuff that we learned while we were there. We met some of our dearest friends in the industry that we still talk to, to this day.

Shane Sams: And we formed masterminds. And just so many good things came from this live event. It really was one of those catalyst points, a turning point in our business. And it really got us kind of hooked on going to other live events.

Shane Sams: We made it a point to start going to three or four live events every single year as a part of our growth, as a part of our development, as a part of our business to make sure we were always taking those next steps.

Shane Sams: And every single time that we have ever went to a live event, we've learned something or met someone, and came back and took action on that thing we learned, or on that relationship. And we've taken our life and our business to the next level.

Shane Sams: Live events affected our business in such a positive way, we knew when we started Flipped Lifestyle that eventually we would start having live events of our own because we wanted to give our listeners, we wanted to give you an opportunity to attend these live events. And we didn't like some of the things that were happening at the live events that we went to. We thought that we could do it better.

Jocelyn Sams: Over the years we've done a series of smaller events. We did one out in San Diego where we met with people and talked about their business there. We've done one in Tampa, Florida. And we also did one in Chicago not long ago.

Jocelyn Sams: But I had gone to another event of a friend of mine in late 2017. And this was sort of a larger scale event. And I started looking around, and I knew that this person had a similar sized audience. And I thought, you know what? If she put this many people in a room, we could probably do that too.

Jocelyn Sams: And I guess to that point, it had never really occurred to me to do that. And when I was there, and I saw the interaction of all the different people who were at that event, I was like, "Wow this is really cool. We need to do this. And we need to get our people together."

Shane Sams: When Jocelyn came back from this event she was really excited about doing a larger scale event. And as we talked about it, we realized that we could probably even improve on all of the live events that we had went to.

Shane Sams: We felt like some of the content wasn't actionable at some of these events. And we felt like some of them were more like cheerleading pep rallies than they were actually getting into the trenches with people and helping them make their dreams come true, move their business forward, and take their life to the next level.

Shane Sams: So on a whim we decided that we would do our own huge live event in Nashville, Tennessee. And before we had even signed contracts, before we had even paid any of the bills, we did what we usually do. We created an order form and we told you guys about it last year.

Jocelyn Sams: And we said, "Do you want this or not?"

Shane Sams: Prove it.

Jocelyn Sams: Yes.

Shane Sams: Buy it with your wallet. Get your wallet out and pay for it.

Jocelyn Sams: And people did.

Shane Sams: People did. We had over 100 tickets sold. People from 30 states, over five countries came to Nashville for Flip Your Life Live 2018. And it was one of the greatest experiences of our life. We had three days to spend together building our businesses, sharing moments, talking about our families. And really just building deep connections with all the people there.

Shane Sams: So many success stories happened from Flip Your Life LIVE 2018. We had people blow their businesses up from 100 members to 500 members. From zero emails to 400 or 500 emails on their list. To having no product to launching a product. We actually had people launch products during the event and make their first sales while we were sitting there in the room together.

Shane Sams: And it was a lot of work. It was a lot of effort behind the scenes to pull something like this off. You know, we had no idea how much goes on to put on a live event for 100, 200, 300 people. We had no idea how much it cost to do this.

Shane Sams: But when we saw all of these success stories happening, we knew we had done the right thing. We knew that we had to keep creating experiences like this for the people in our audience and in our community so that we could see these people keep succeeding in their online business.

Jocelyn Sams: Leading up to last year's event, there were times that we definitely looked at each other and said, "Okay this is not happening again next year."

Shane Sams: What have we gotten ourselves into?

Jocelyn Sams: It was stressful. We made zero dollars off ticket sales. We actually lost money last year. And we just kind of looked at each other and we were like, "This is a lot of work. Like, this is intense. Are we going to do this again next year?" And honestly, before the event we were kind of like, "I don't know. I don't know if this is gonna happen again."

Jocelyn Sams: But then after we got there, after we saw everybody, we saw the types of connections that were being made. We have talked to people on the podcast the past few weeks. I think just about everyone on the podcast has been someone who attended the live event.

Shane Sams: And had a success story from it.

Jocelyn Sams: And just seeing what these people have been able to do before the event, leading up to it, at the event, after the event, all of those things together, we just kind of looked at each other again and said, "You know what? We have to do this again. We can't not do this again." And like I said, it's not a money thing for us. We are not making money off this. Or very little if we do.

Shane Sams: We actually as we were starting to plan for Flip Your Life Live 2019, we really wanted to even lower the ticket price. We wanted to make it more accessible to more people because we know how much this has impacted dozens of peoples lives. And we want Flip Your Life Live to be the event that impacts your life. And impacts hundreds of other lives.

Shane Sams: So after many conversations, and many meetings with our live event team, we are proud to announce that Flip Your Life Live 2019 is happening again. And it will be in Lexington, Kentucky on September 19 through the 21st 2019. And we want you to be there.

Shane Sams: We have launched ticket sales. They are available right now at early bird pricing until March 1st. And we do have payment plans available so you can kind of put it on layaway guys. You can put some money down now, pay it off between now and the event. You don't have to come up with the entire amount all up front. But if you do it will save you a little money.

Shane Sams: And to get your ticket all you have to do is go to flippedlifestyle.com/live. That's, F-L-I-P-P-E-D lifestyle.com/L-I-V-E. Flippedlifestyle.com/live. And you can get your ticket to Flip Your Life Live 2019 before they sell out and before the price goes up.

Shane Sams: Now we have already announced this to the people who came here last year to Flip Your Life Live. And over half of them have already bought tickets to the event. So we are not going to have a lot of tickets available when you hear this podcast.

Shane Sams: This is a limited seating event. We kind of call this the Flipped Lifestyle family reunion. But we don't have room for everybody in the family, in the venue hall. So once tickets do sell out we are not gonna be able to add anymore.

Shane Sams: We have limited space for the event. So if you're planning on attending you really need to do it right now. You need to go get your ticket at flippedlifestyle.com/live as soon as you hear this podcast.

Shane Sams: Flip Your Life Live is a unique and amazing experience in this industry guys. You know, it's how we bring our members and podcast audience together each year to meet each other in real life, to meet us in real life.

Shane Sams: You know Jocelyn and I go down into the audience and we work with the people who are there. We answer questions after every single session to make sure that you get the exact information and training you need to take your business to the next level.

Jocelyn Sams: Guys we even have a photo booth. We will take a picture with you in the photo booth. We'll hold up a sign. You can make Shane say something crazy. You can make him wear a hat. I don't know.

Shane Sams: It's all recorded on video.

Jocelyn Sams: But it's really fun. We get down in there. We really participate with the audience. We have opportunities to learn not only in the information sessions, but we also do a night of working.

Jocelyn Sams: So it's like a working session where we get together at night. People go to tables. They get their laptops out. They get out some big Post Its or those big pieces of paper you stick on the wall. Whatever you want to write on. You get together. You hang out with people. We have snacks. It's an amazing event.

Shane Sams: It's not just sit and soak. It's not just preach and teach. It's interactive. It's working together to figure out exactly what you need to move your life forward. Last year we watched in the working session as masterminds formed.

Shane Sams: I can't tell you how many stories that we've got of people that send us emails saying, "I met these five ladies." Or, "I met these four or five men." Or, "We met these other couples and we still talk to each other every single day since the event. They've become some of our best friends in our mastermind. And these people have really rallied around us and helped us achieve all this success."

Shane Sams: We want you to go there. We want you to meet people. We want you to form masterminds so that you can not only get what you need there. But you can take it with you after the event.

Shane Sams: Another reason you really need to get your ticket right now is because Flip Your Life Live is not just a weekend event. It's not just three days on your calendar. It is a year long experience.

Shane Sams: One of the things that frustrated us about every other live event we had ever attended is after we bought our ticket, we felt like the event coordinators kind of just dropped us. Nobody told us what to do to prepare for the event. Nobody told us how to meet people or interact with other individuals who were actually going to the event.

Shane Sams: And that's something that we solved when we planned Flip Your Life Live. We do monthly trainings every single month, all year long leading to the event. We help you with prerequisite trainings. We tell you exactly what you need to take action on, what you need to finish before you come to the event so that you can get the most out of the event while you're there.

Jocelyn Sams: So in other words, that's means if you don't have a single thing done, and this is a question we get all the time. "Can I come if I don't have anything done yet." Of course you can. We want you to be there. The whole reason that we do this is to get you started, to kind of push that domino over so that you guys will start realizing that you can do this.

Jocelyn Sams: That's the reason that we do this event. That's why it's so important to us that people sign up. Like I said before, we are not really making money off this thing. We do this because we want to help you succeed.

Shane Sams: So if you don't even have an idea yet don't worry. I'm gonna train you how to get your idea ready before you come to Flip Your Life Live on these monthly trainings. If you don't have a product yet, we're gonna talk about that. We're gonna fix that. We're gonna start outlining that, and maybe even create that before you come to the event.

Shane Sams: Maybe you've not launched yet. We can help you launch your product before the event. We had people last year use the event as a motivator, as an anchor on their calendar, as their goal to say, "I'm getting this thing done before I show up so I at least have some data and I can talk to some people when I come."

Shane Sams: And heres the deal, these prerequisite trainings are starting now. You need to go get your tickets so you don't miss a single one of these trainings in the exclusive Flip Your Life Live private Facebook group.

Shane Sams: Make no mistake this is a beginner friendly event. We are gonna help you take action and move past that beginner stage, so that you're ready to take your steps into online business.

Shane Sams: Another big problem that we have with live events is, we just felt alone. We didn't know who was going. We didn't know anybody when we got there. It was really nerve wracking for us to just show up and see a bunch of strangers sitting in the room. So that was one problem we really needed to address with Flip Your Life Live.

Shane Sams: We do that with icebreaker sessions. Last year Jocelyn and I hosted multiple icebreaker sessions on Zoom, on a big conference call for all the people that were coming to the event. So what we did was, Jocelyn and I got on a Zoom call, everybody connected.

Shane Sams: You could see 50 or 60 people in the room each call. And you could see everybody's picture and everybody was laughing and having a good time. And Jocelyn and I went around the room and talked to every single person that showed up on an icebreaker call. And we introduced them.

Shane Sams: We said, "Hey what's your name? Where are you from?" We could ask them funny questions like, tell us your favorite job, or the worst job you ever had. And we all had an amazing time, laughed. And got to know each other before the event.

Shane Sams: Jocelyn and I also facilitated connecting people who we thought would be good to meet each other at the event. So this is not an event where you sign up and you show up, and you don't know anybody.

Shane Sams: You're gonna feel like you know people as soon as you walk in the room. You're gonna feel like you have relationships as soon as you get to Flip Your Life Live in Lexington, Kentucky. And it's gonna be an amazing, comfortable experience right when you walk in the door.

Shane Sams: Jocelyn and I last year as people were registering, we were like on the eighth floor looking down and nobody knew where we were so we could spy on people as they were signing up.

Shane Sams: And it was so awesome to watch people hug, people see each other and smile and go, "Hey Jim. Hey Sally." Or whatever your names were. And they started hugging and they had a good time. And you know, they were meeting and already talking before they even registered.

Shane Sams: I've been to so many events where I felt like a number in a line. And I didn't know anybody. And there was nobody helping me. But our event really felt like old friends seeing each other again. And that's what we do for Flip Your Life Live attendees.

Jocelyn Sams: You guys don't want to miss these icebreakers. They are a lot of fun. We did them usually on like Friday nights. We'd pour a glass of wine, and just sit down and just talk to everyone, get to know them. People have some crazy stories and you do not want to miss out on those. It's so funny. And you'll have a major case of FOMO if you don't show up at the icebreakers because we had that happen last year. People were like, "I can't believe I missed it."

Shane Sams: And they were so successful. And that was probably the highlight of the pre live event, events, was getting people connected together. And I've even added an additional icebreaker session to make sure that we get through everybody that's gonna come to the event, and everybody that wants to has a chance not only to talk to me and Jocelyn, but to get to know all of their other fellow attendees.

Shane Sams: Nobody else, there's no other live event in the industry that you can possibly attend guys that is going to prepare you with monthly trainings leading up to the event. Is gonna help you meet people before you even show up to the event. And not some nameless, faceless, Facebook group. I mean, actually connect you with people and help you meet us and them before you even get to the show.

Shane Sams: Another big problem we had with live events was a lot of the attendees there just weren't our people you know? A lot of events we went to they were just full of single millennials with not a care in the world, and no real responsibilities except keeping themselves alive every day.

Shane Sams: We went to some that were really stuffy and very business like. And everyone was really professional. We want to make sure that we're connecting you with like minded people. People that get you, get your life experience, get where you are so that you can build those real authentic relationships.

Shane Sams: When you attend Flip Your Life Live 2019, you're gonna be surrounded by people that understand you, people that are going through a lot of the same things that you're going through, real families.

Shane Sams: Maybe people that are working full time, people who really want this online thing to be their families future. People that have kids and understand real responsibilities and all of the things that we're juggling while we're trying to build a successful business.

Shane Sams: Our audience is really curated guys with a lot of people just like you. And they're all going to be at Flip Your Life Live.

Jocelyn Sams: And this event is for people at all stages of business. So we mentioned before that if you don't have a single thing done, this event is for you. If you are a seven, eight, nine figure business owner, this event is for you.

Jocelyn Sams: We will have people in the room at all different income levels, all different stages of business, and we're going to really make an effort this year to do a good job of like segmenting people.

Jocelyn Sams: So when we have our work sessions we're going to have beginner tables. We'll have intermediate tables. We'll have advanced tables. So there's going to be something for everyone at this event.

Jocelyn Sams: So I don't want you to think that because you're an advanced person, maybe you've been doing this for a few years, that this event is not for you because it is.

Shane Sams: And some of y'all out there think you're advanced but you're not. We had some people last year that were like, "You know, I think this event might be too beginner for me. I don't know if I'm gonna really come." And I like, "Well one, no it's not. This is gonna be an actionable audit of your business. And we're take massive action on your next steps while we're there."

Shane Sams: But then I said, "Well what do you thinks high level?" And they're like, "Well you know, I've got 50 members. I've launched my product." I'm like, "No, that's not advanced." And some people were like, "Well I've got 200. I've got 300 members." And we're like, "What about 500 or 1000? Let's get you to the next level."

Shane Sams: That's the whole point of Flip Your Life Live. We didn't want it to be cookie cutter content. This is exactly what happens. No. It's supposed to be like a checklist where you can look into a mirror through the entire event and say, "Is my marketing where it needs to be? Is my content where it needs to be? What's the next step for me in my marketing, in my content?"

Shane Sams: That's the kind of things we do at the event. We're not just rah rah. We're not just motivational speaking. We're really looking deep into where you are right now, and figuring out your next step.

Shane Sams: We had a Flip Your Life community member last year that was making around $4000 a month. And she was kind of stuck there. But she was "Not a beginner" right? Not an intermediate even. She was making money online. She was doing it full time. Had a decent membership base. Not bad.

Shane Sams: She signs up for the event. She learns something on one of our prerequisite trainings. We talked to her in the icebreaker session. She gets inspired. She takes action right before the event. And she blew her business from $4000 up to $17,000 a month. And now she's approaching $30,000 a month in her business.

Shane Sams: And if she had just blew this off as oh well these events they're just catering to the beginner, they're just gonna be a bunch of motivational speakers, she never would have had that aha moment. She never would have had that epiphany. She never would have been motivated and held accountable to take action.

Shane Sams: And she sent me a message just the other day and she said, "This is getting into I can't believe it money." Right? And that never would have happened if she had blew this event off and said, "This is just like the other events. This isn't for me. I'm not gonna go. I'm not gonna do it. It's all beginners." Blah, blah, blah.

Shane Sams: That's not true. It's designed to help you where you are. We have helped thousands of people guys. Everybody from I don't have an idea, to how do I become a millionaire. We've helped so many people.

Shane Sams: And we are really, really good at helping you figure out what you need to do next to go to the next level. And you need to be a part of this so you can have that same kind of aha moment that she did.

Jocelyn Sams: One of the things that I am really proud of from last year is that some of the top earners that were in that room, they have already purchased their tickets for this year. So that just goes to show you that those people are finding value in what we did last year.

Jocelyn Sams: And they can't wait to get here again this year because they know that what is going to happen at that event is going to continue to change their business. So don't let this opportunity pass you by. It is a really good event no matter what level you're at.

Shane Sams: As we've kind of slowly rolled this out to our audience, we allowed the people who came last year to go ahead and buy their tickets first. And then we rolled it out to parts of our email list who were already on the waiting list for this year's event. It was fun to watch those first people buy.

Shane Sams: One of the first people who bought was one of our more advanced members you would say. Her name is Jennifer. And she bought her ticket. I saw her come through as soon as the tickets were available.

Shane Sams: She came last year, had some massive growth in her business. We added 200 people to her membership after the event within a couple of months. And now she's just killing it. She's getting over 500 members. She's marching towards a thousand. She's already launched a new product. And right after she joined, I saw her name come through again.

Jocelyn Sams: And we're like, "Oh no we got a double payment."

Shane Sams: Double purchase.

Jocelyn Sams: How did we screw this up?

Shane Sams: She clicked the button twice. So I send her a message. I'm like, "Jennifer did you know you bought two tickets?" And she said, "Oh yeah I did. It was so awesome, I'm making my husband come this year. He's got nothing done. He's just starting out. But I'm making him go so that he can launch his own online business in 2019 with that event on his calendar to work toward."

Shane Sams: And then right after she joined, we got one of our most advanced people. She's forcing her husband to come who's never done anything. And then I see a guys name that I know. He's a guy I actually grew up with. His name is Fred. And I see a message.

Shane Sams: And right when I was going to send him a message I saw him post on Facebook, "I don't have anything. I have not even started. But I've been kicking around this dream for a year and a half. And I'm sick of hoping and wishing for something to change. I'm gonna make it happen. So I bought my ticket to Flip Your Life Live. I don't even know what's gonna happen next but I'm going. And I'm starting my online business."

Shane Sams: And he's been crushing it watching courses in the community. He was at our first prerequisite training. And man he's just been really killing it. So it's amazing to see the span of people who come to this event and how that they do and get out of it afterwards.

Shane Sams: If you're one of those people, go to flippedlifestyle.com/live as soon as you hear this. Pull over on the side of the road if you're in your car. If you're in the gym, get off the treadmill, go in the locker room and order your ticket. If you're at home go get your ticket so that they don't sell out before you have a chance to attend.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay, so at this point you may be asking some questions. So we're gonna try to address some of the questions that we've had so far in the next parts of this podcast. The first question that we want to talk about is why Lexington? So a lot of people want to know why aren't you doing this in Nashville again? Was it something that happened? Or what's going on?

Jocelyn Sams: So there are actually a few different reasons that we decided to do it in Lexington. First of all, you guys know that we are from Kentucky. We have an extreme fondness in our hearts for Kentucky. Shane and I met there in 1998 at the University Of Kentucky.

Shane Sams: Which is in Lexington, Kentucky.

Jocelyn Sams: Yes. It is so beautiful. If you've never been to Kentucky before, Lexington is just fantastic. You are going to love it. There are three airports nearby. There's the Lexington Airport with the code LEX. There's the Louisville, Kentucky airport which is about an hour away. It's code is SDF. And there is the Cincinnati Airport which is about 90 minutes away. And it's code is CVG.

Jocelyn Sams: So as you're looking for flights, kind of pricing things out, I would definitely recommend checking out those three different airports. Totally aside but there's also an app called HOPPER, H-O-P-P-E-R. And you can put those flights in. And based on historical flight data, it will compare the prices of booking it now. Or it will tell you to wait and book it later.

Shane Sams: So this is another good reason to get your ticket right away because if you go ahead and get your flights booked, it's gonna save you a ton of money doing it ahead of time than waiting until the last minute and seeing everybody going to the event and saying, "Man I wish I went. Okay I'm going." And getting your ticket and then you have to order a plane ticket at the last second.

Shane Sams: Also, Lexington, Kentucky is within driving distance I think of like 70% of the US population.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, like 2/3.

Shane Sams: Yeah you can get there within like 10 hours from anywhere. So if you're anywhere in one of the surrounding states, I think more states touch Kentucky than any other state. Like we're land locked or surrounded. But for all of you people who are around us you can just drive there.

Shane Sams: It's a really easy drive. I-75 runs right through Lexington, Kentucky. And it's just one of the most gorgeous cities you've ever seen guys. It feels like a small town. It's modern. It's new. There's so much going on around the city that it's just an incredible place to have an event.

Jocelyn Sams: The weather is pretty much perfect in Kentucky in September. There are tons of things to do outside the event. You can take a bourbon distillery tour. You can visit a horse farm. There's a shaker village nearby. There's a ton of shopping. That's one really good thing about Lexington.

Shane Sams: Lots of shopping.

Jocelyn Sams: There are stores everywhere. Very, very affluent area for the most part. It is just an incredible place to visit if you've never been there before. And pretty much everything is less expensive than it was in Nashville. And that includes the ticket prices for this year. That includes your hotel.

Shane Sams: Flights.

Jocelyn Sams: Things like parking. If you stay in the event hotel, which we highly recommend, I believe that the parking is free to park in the garage. So just all of those little things add up over time. And we really wanted it to be an affordable event for everyone. And we wanted people to be able to come to our home state and see where we really live.

Shane Sams: You know as we looked around the industry, to kind of compare our event to other events and see what the costs were for attending these events for people, we started seeing a trend of all of the major events in the industry their prices keep going up.

Shane Sams: I looked at Social Media Marketing World, almost all of their tickets were over a thousand dollars. Funnel Hacking Live which has become one of the biggest events in the online business industry over a thousand dollars. Some of their ticket packages were in the multiple thousands of dollars.

Shane Sams: Even the less expensive events they just were giving no value. Sometimes it was just to get into the conference hall for keynotes. You didn't even get to do the side events. And when we were meeting about Flip Your Life Live 2019, we said, "How can we bring the cost down a little bit? How can we help our members get there for less so that they can do more at and after the event?"

Shane Sams: And we're really proud to say that because we moved it to Lexington, Kentucky, because we did a lot of other things, we think we're gonna have a bigger and better experience. And we were able to actually get your costs down. We've lowered ticket prices over a hundred dollars this year.

Shane Sams: The hotel is less expensive than last year. And all of the other expenses that people had for coming to the event whether it was eating out with friends, or going to a local attraction, all of those were going to be a lot less expensive in Lexington.

Shane Sams: The city itself is just as easy to get to as Nashville. And it's going to be a unique experience that you cannot get anywhere else, any other trip that you take in the industry.

Shane Sams: All right. We've talked a lot about before the event. What we're gonna do leading up to the event. How this event becomes an anchor on your calendar to give you the accountability and motivation you need to succeed this year.

Shane Sams: But let's talk about what happens at the event, all right? Now we wanted this event to be really, really different than other events. So when we looked at other events what we noticed was, most of the other events in the industry they hire a bunch of "Keynote speakers, experts in their field."

Shane Sams: They get on stage. They give the same speech they give at every other event. And then they pitch you something at the end of almost every session right? Nobody went deep into what the topic was that was being covered. And we didn't want this to be that way.

Shane Sams: So we decided when we started Flip Your Life Live, that it would be us leading the sessions on stage. And we are going to do deep dive content sessions that really audit your business, audit your life, audit everything you're doing. And we help you identify what you need next.

Jocelyn Sams: And the best part about it is that if you go ahead and purchase your ticket now, you can actually influence that content. So we don't decide, we're going to do A, B, and C content. We ask our attendees, "Hey, what do you guys need help with?" And based on those responses, that's how we develop the content for the event. So as of right now, as of this recording in February, we don't even have the content 100% nailed down.

Shane Sams: We just have an outline basically set up and now we need you the attendee to tell us what you need. And we will look at the group, and we will pick the topics that we think will help everyone in that room succeed.

Shane Sams: Our event is also set up in a way where you can take action immediately on what you learn. We don't want you just filling up a notebook and going home with a bunch of great ideas. We want you to sit through a content session, be able to get your questions answered. And then take action.

Shane Sams: So that's exactly how we built every session of Flip Your Life Live. We come in, in 90 minute blocks. The first 30 minutes is content. Jocelyn and I go deep into a specific area of your business and we talk about it in our content session.

Shane Sams: Next we come off the stage, down into the crowd and we answer as many questions as we can get to in that 30 minute Q&A session. If you've got a question you'll be able to ask it at the event.

Shane Sams: And then after that, we break down into 30 minute masterminds so that you can take action on the answers you just got. You can take action on the content you just learned. You can open your computer.

Shane Sams: You can sit with your friends and family members in the Flip Your Life community. And you can actually do the thing. You don't have to wait until you get home. You do it right there in that session.

Shane Sams: Not only that, but Friday night we have a working session. Basically after dinner we open up the ballroom for everybody to come back in. We've got internet. We've got power cords ready to go. And we work into the late night on your business.

Shane Sams: Everybody comes in mastermind, sits down. We take all the stuff that we learned that day, all of the stuff that we couldn't quite get finished in the mastermind sessions. And we do it together, right there in that room.

Shane Sams: Last year we saw people launch products. We saw people start sales. We saw people fix sales pages. We saw people come up with new ideas for their business. And they implemented them and took action.

Shane Sams: One of the most hilarious stories that we saw last year was a member named Brenda. I was walking back to the room. It was almost midnight. And there was like five of us that had just shut down the place basically. And she came up to me with another member named Kathy. And she just was shaking her head. And I'm like, "What's going on?"

Shane Sams: And she goes, "Well I realized today during one of the content sessions that I was doing something wrong in my membership. And basically all my content was basically out there for free. And luckily my friend that I met at this event helped me figure it out. And they just rallied around me for the past two hours and helped me fix my entire website. So now I'm gonna be able to move forward and actually be able to sell this thing. And that was the reason I wasn't making any sales because people were finding it for free."

Shane Sams: So if she had never come to the event, and she had never went to the working session, and never had those people rallied around her, she may have never even figured out that there was a problem. But that came out of the working session.

Shane Sams: So Friday night the working session. And on Thursday we have this huge party for everybody at the event.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, so this year it's really exciting. It's going to be a dessert social. So we're going to have all kinds of different desserts on Thursday night. There will be a bar there. There may or may not be some live music. You never can tell. There's always surprises around every corner at our event. So we can't wait to just hang out with you there.

Jocelyn Sams: We will be there on Thursday night. We will be there on Friday night. And it's just really exciting. I mean I get so excited just even thinking about this because last year was so amazing and I just know this year is going to be even better. So you need to be in the room.

Shane Sams: It's going to be a three day working party basically from Thursday to Saturday night. And it's just gonna be so much fun. One of the highlights of my life last year was just being able to experience all the little things that happened at Flip Your Life Live.

Shane Sams: And I cannot wait to experience it again this year. We're gonna have more people at the event. And we've learned so many lessons from doing this once that we're really gonna take it to the next level the second time.

Shane Sams: All right, so we're gonna lightening round a few of these other frequently asked questions that we've been getting from the people who have already seen the ticket page for Flip Your Life Live 2019.

Shane Sams: One of the biggest questions that we've gotten so far is, "What if I came last year, should I come again?" And the answer is, emphatically, 100% Yes. One of the biggest problems that we saw going to all of these live events, and we've spent literally almost probably over $100,000 going to live events in our career so far.

Shane Sams: And one of the biggest things that we saw is we started hitting the circuit and seeing different people and different speakers, at different events is, we noticed that everywhere we went and saw the same speaker, they gave the same speech. And they gave the same pitch. So it wasn't really anything new that they were teaching on stage.

Shane Sams: And that's one thing that we said we will not do at our event. We are going to evaluate the content, tailor it to all the people who are coming based on what they ask for and they need. And this will be a completely different content experience from the stage of Flip Your Life Live.

Jocelyn Sams: And if for no other reason, come to experience Kentucky because it is amazing. We are going to be doing different food and beverage. And there will be different experiences than what we had last year.

Shane Sams: The theme will be a little bit different this year for sure.

Jocelyn Sams: And you just need to be there. It is going to be so fun. And I don't want you to miss out. So if you were there last year, get your ticket while you still have the opportunity.

Shane Sams: There will also be a lot of new people at the event that you can make more connections with. You can use the event like that family reunion and make deeper connections with the people that you met last year.

Shane Sams: And again if you want to be a person that's influencing the actual content of the event, and telling us what you need, you need to go ahead and get your ticket right now at, flippedlifestyle.com/live.

Shane Sams: Another big question that we've been getting in our email inbox lately is, can anyone come to this event? Or is it only for people who are in the Flip Your Life community?" Flip Your Life community members did get first dibs at the tickets okay? So some of them have already bought their tickets.

Shane Sams: But this is an open event for everybody. This is for everyone who listens to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. Everyone who's a fan of Jocelyn and myself, and what we stand for. It's for anyone who wants to put an anchor on their calendar that they can strive toward to change their life and their families future.

Shane Sams: This is an open event. You don't have to be in the Flip Your Life community. It would be better if you were a member in the Flip Your Life community because you can go ahead and work in the forums. You can work through courses.

Shane Sams: And you can enhance all those prerequisite trainings that we do in the private Facebook group. But by no means do we force everyone to show their Flip Your Life membership card if there was such a thing.

Jocelyn Sams: There totally should be.

Shane Sams: There totally should be a Flip Your Life membership card. We need to send everybody one of those. But you don't have to be a member of the Flip Your Life community to attend this event. This event is for anybody who wants to start building, grow an online business, change their life, and change their families future.

Shane Sams: So even if you're not in the community, go get a ticket to Flip Your Life Live. If you are in the community, you really should be there to take that experience to the next level. And anyone who came last year you really need to be at this event. It's gonna be bigger. It's gonna be better. And it's gonna be even more tailored to the exact things you need.

Shane Sams: The next big question that we've been getting is, what's included with my ticket price? And what's not included? As soon as you order your ticket to Flip Your Life Live, you will be added to our exclusive, private Facebook community.

Shane Sams: That's where we talk to our attendees, where we poll them and ask them what they need. That's where we do all of our live trainings. And that's where we do our icebreaker sessions. So you really want to be in that group as soon as possible.

Shane Sams: There's already dozens and dozens of people in that community right now. And we really want you in there as soon as possible so you don't miss any of the extra stuff that you get for buying a ticket to Flip Your Life Live.

Shane Sams: Your ticket price also includes all of those monthly trainings. These are exclusive trainings that will only be available to Flip Your Life Live attendees. We do not take these courses down. We do not put them anywhere inside the community. They're only for Flip Your Life Live alumni.

Shane Sams: Your ticket price includes all the virtual meetups and icebreaker opportunities to connect with me and Jocelyn, and other attendees before the event.

Jocelyn Sams: Your ticket also includes your Thursday night entry into our party, our welcome reception that we are going to have. And there will be all kinds of Kentucky related desserts there. They are going to be super tasty so you don't want to miss out on that.

Shane Sams: Your ticket price includes all event sessions, all Q&A's, all mastermind sessions. It also includes lunch. We think it's really important that we all break bread and eat a good meal together. And we will have all day beverage service in the event for Friday and Saturday. That's gonna include soft drinks, water, coffee, things like that.

Jocelyn Sams: And if you take our VIP option, we have a very few VIP tickets still available.

Shane Sams: I think there's like two left.

Jocelyn Sams: If you are interested in that, you need to book it immediately. But if you have taken that offer we're gonna have a couple of surprises for you. And possibly some extra meals and things like that. We're still in the process of working all that out. And we will get those details finalized as soon as possible. But just know that if you buy VIP ticket, there may be even some more bonuses thrown into that.

Shane Sams: And there's also a general admission plus option for the tickets that will include recordings of every video session, and every Q&A at the event. Last year we sold those for about $500.

Shane Sams: But you can get a huge discount on the videos upfront if you order now. But that ticket option will go away before the event. So you want to grab that ticket now if you want to grab those video options too.

Shane Sams: So you might be asking, "Wow this is a huge deal. There's a lot of stuff included. How did you guys come up with the price?" Well it's really simple. We basically estimated the cost for a certain number of people that we want to attend the event guys, and we divided it by that number.

Shane Sams: We want this event to be as close as cost for you as possible to make sure that you can attend the event. We're not trying to make a huge profit off live events. For anyone who has ever hosted a live event, you know it is not a huge profitable exchange. This is our celebration for our community to get everyone together in the same room.

Shane Sams: So we've done our best not only to get that as close to cost as possible for you, but to lower the cost over last year. Early bird pricing right now is $100 cheaper than it was last year. And the payment plans are divided over more months and a little bit cheaper as well because of that. So if you really want to get in at a great price, now is the best time to do it.

Jocelyn Sams: And I want to speak just a little bit to the cost of the ticket because I know there's some people out there that are like, "Wow this is really expensive. You're telling me you're not making money off this?" We really don't because everything at a hotel is super expensive.

Jocelyn Sams: What you have to remember about hotels is there are a lot of benefits to having events there. But there are some drawbacks as well. And one of those is that every price that they give you, you have to also pay a service charge plus tax.

Shane Sams: And you have to buy everything from the hotel. We have food and beverage minimums that we have to meet. We have to pay multiple tens of thousands of dollars just to be in the building. We have room allotments that we have to fill.

Shane Sams: There's a lot of things going on in the back end to come to that exact price point. And we basically estimated the cost and divided it by the number of people that we think are gonna attend.

Jocelyn Sams: And it's crazy what all you have to pay for. I mean we have to pay for a stage to be built. We have to pay for music in the venues.

Shane Sams: Projectors.

Jocelyn Sams: We have to pay for lighting. Like all of these little things start adding up. And we just took what we did last year. We made some changes to it. And that's basically how we came up with the pricing for this year. And there's certainly ways that we can make it super cheap. But we don't want to do that. We want our attendees to have a particular type of experience.

Jocelyn Sams: And I think if you would talk to anyone from last year, they would say that it is well worth it considering all the time that we put in ahead of time. Everything that we do at the event. And things that happen after the event, just the relationships that they have I don't think you will talk to a single person from last year that said, "Oh it was way too expensive."

Shane Sams: Yeah everything Jocelyn and I do, we try to do it world class. And we try to do it better than anybody else. And I am proud to say that our event was the best event that I've ever been to for sure.

Shane Sams: And somehow this year we got it cheaper than the first live event that we ever went to when we went to San Diego. It's not even in the ballpark of what we paid for that. So we're really proud of this event. We're really excited about this event. And we really want you to be at the event.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay, now some of you guys are sitting here listening and you have already written us off because you went to the page, you saw the price, and you said to yourself, "Nope, can't do it. Can't afford it."

Shane Sams: I can't do that.

Jocelyn Sams: Guys that is a fixed mindset. We have been talking about this some on the podcast recently. That means that you say, "These are my circumstances. My circumstances cannot change. And I'm not going to this event for sure."

Jocelyn Sams: Okay, I want to talk to you right now. And I just want to say that if you've been listening to this podcast, maybe you've been listening for years. We've been doing this podcast I think for almost five years now.

Jocelyn Sams: Maybe you've been listening for five years. Maybe you've been listening for five months. Maybe this is your first episode, and you're still sitting at your nine to five. And you're wondering when things are gonna change. 2019 is your time.

Jocelyn Sams: What I want you to do, is I want you to do what you have to do to make this happen. I want you to stop making excuses. And I want you to make it happen. You can do this.

Jocelyn Sams: So I want to tell you a story from not too long ago of something that I did because I wanted to have my house decorated for Christmas. Shane said-

Shane Sams: We're being frugal. I don't want to pay someone to decorate a Christmas tree. I don't understand why we need to do that.

Jocelyn Sams: Because this kind of decorating that I was wanting done you know it's-

Shane Sams: It was a fancy tree.

Jocelyn Sams: It's not like 50 or 60 dollars okay? It's alot more expensive than that. And Shane said, "Absolutely not. We are not doing that this year."

Shane Sams: I just didn't see the value in decorating a fancy, tall Christmas tree.

Jocelyn Sams: However, I did. So what I did, I said, "You know what? If you are not going to say, okay let's do this, I'm going to find a way to make it happen."

Shane Sams: Because we like to agree when we spend money. Jocelyn and I we're very conservative, frugal people at times.

Jocelyn Sams: At times.

Shane Sams: Except for trips, when we go out of town. But other than that-

Jocelyn Sams: So I said, "You know what? I'm going to make this happen. I will show you. I will raise the money to make it happen." And he was like, "Okay whatever."

Shane Sams: What are you gonna do a Go Fund Me to have a Christmas tree? Like, what's gonna go on?

Jocelyn Sams: No. So I got into my closet. I started digging around into my kids closets. And I found enough stuff to sell on Facebook to make really more than enough money that I needed get my house decorated for Christmas.

Shane Sams: Hundreds of dollars. I don't know where she was pulling stuff out of to get this thing to happen. And I'll tell you what, when I walked in and saw this ... How tall is that tree?

Jocelyn Sams: Like nine feet.

Shane Sams: Nine feet tall. It looked like something out of a Macy's catalog or something. I was like, wow that was really worth doing that. That was pretty awesome. So she made it happen. And she just said, "I'll go do it." And I think back to the first live event that we went to.

Shane Sams: And when we signed up for the tickets we spent the money. And we looked at our bank account and we said, "What did we just do?" But we've got to make that back. We weren't getting a lot of sales online.

Shane Sams: Things weren't going as good as we'd hoped they were in the spring of that year. But when it warmed up a little bit ... We lived on this big hill in our old house. And it was like, what do you think, 50 yards, 50 feet? I don't even know how long it was.

Jocelyn Sams: Something like that.

Shane Sams: It was a long walk down to the bottom of that hill. And I remember one day we just started taking everything we had and putting it down at the bottom of our driveway and putting prices on it. And we had a yard sale to just sell everything that we truly didn't need.

Shane Sams: I mean we just purged our entire house to make back the money to pay for that live event. And it has paid us back in spades hundreds of times over because we took that risk and we made it happen.

Shane Sams: And we tell people this all the time in the community. Successful people don't say I can't do that. Successful people say, "How can I do that? Because if they did it, then it's possible. And if it's possible, that means its possible for me too."

Shane Sams: And that's what we're really telling you guys for this, make it possible. Find a way to make it happen. You can do this. It won't be easy. And it might take sacrifice but you can do it if you want to.

Jocelyn Sams: Look at that treadmill that's sitting there collecting dust, or collecting laundry. Can you sell it? What about that elliptical machine? Can you cancel cable for a few months to make this happen? It's not for us. It's for you. We want this to happen for you. We want you to be one of our success stories in 2020.

Jocelyn Sams: Don't let time keep slipping away. This is your opportunity. We do a lead up to the event. We hang out at the event. And you will come back so energized. We want this for you, not for us. We want it for you.

Shane Sams: Yeah if this was for us, we would just do virtual memberships and not show up live anywhere. Like I'm not saying that to be spiteful about it. I'm just saying, it's not about just making money, or growing the business, or doing X, Y, or Z. It's what can we do to make sure more people have the opportunity to find the freedom that we did through online business?

Shane Sams: And we think this is the biggest possible thing we can do. We have thousands and thousands of people that listen to the podcast. Hundreds, and hundreds of people in our community. But we can get 200 people or so in a room and really drop that nuclear bomb on their life and their business. And make things change. And that's what Flip Your Life Live 2019 is gonna be.

Shane Sams: So if you want to get your ticket right now, go to flippedlifestyle.com/live. That's, F-L-I-P-P-E-D lifestyle.com/live. And get one of the tickets. This is the lowest price it's gonna be all year.

Shane Sams: Ticket prices go up on March 1st. And the payment plan ticket options also increase because as we get closer to the event there's less months to divide the total by. So ticket prices are gonna go up. The payment plan prices are gonna go up. This is the best price you're gonna get.

Shane Sams: You can go out and start planning the trip. You can get that hotel room. The block filled last year as soon as the podcast came out. And we had to add a few more rooms. We're not gonna be adding a ton of rooms this time.

Shane Sams: So if you don't want the hotel to sell out on you, if you want to make sure you can get the best possible price on the ticket, on your flights, you need to get that right now. So go to flippedlifestyle.com/live and get your ticket.

Shane Sams: We cannot wait to work with you in the private Facebook group. We cannot wait to see you on one of our icebreaker sessions. And most importantly, we cannot wait to meet you in person, to hug you, to shake your hand, and see you at Flip Your Life Live 2019 in Lexington, Kentucky on September 19th through the 21st.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay guys, that is all the time that we have for today. We cannot wait to see your name on our guest list for Flip Your Life Live 2019. Remember, head over to flippedlifestyle.com/live to join us.

Jocelyn Sams: VIP tickets are almost sold out so run, run, run if you want one of those. And we are just waiting to see your name come across that general admission list. You've got this. We want you to be there. We want you to change your life forever.

Shane Sams: All right guys. That's all we've got for the podcast for today. Until next time, do whatever it takes. Get out there. Take action. Buy your ticket. Flip Your Life. We'll see you then.

Jocelyn Sams: Bye.

Links and resources mentioned on today’s show: * Flip Your Life LIVE 2019 Tickets & Registration Information * Flip Your Life community

Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!

Join the Flip Your Life Community NOW for as little as $19 per month!

– https://flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife

View Details

In today's episode, we talk to a high school senior who launched his own business and made money online.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jocelyn Sams: Hey, y'all. On today's podcast we talk to a high school senior who launched his own business and made money online.

Shane Sams: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast where life always comes before work. We're your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. We're a real family that figured out how to make our entire living online. And now, we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? Alright, let's get started.

Shane Sams: What's going on everybody? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. It's great to be back with you again. Today, super excited to have another guest on the Flipped Lifestyle podcast and help them taking their online business to the next level but this is a special episode. Normally we have our Flip Your Life community members on the show. We help them with a consulting call. We answer their questions and we take their business and take their life to the next level. And usually the person that's on the show comes from our success forum. We really single out and focus on our action takers inside of the Flip Your Life community. We see those success stories happening in the community and when they happen, we invite them on the show so we can magnify, multiply everything that they're doing in their online business.

Shane Sams: Well this is a special success story because this is my own flesh and blood. Our guests today are actually my nephews Dustyn and Devyn Sams. Dustyn, Devyn, welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast.

Dustyn Sams: Hey guys. Thanks for having us.

Devyn Sams: Hey guys.

Shane Sams: Now, I know you think they might be plants, which they kind of are, but they have had some recent success because about a year ago I started badgering these guys to start an online business. Do something online because they're both action takers, they're both entrepreneurial kids, and I just knew that they had talent and they could do something out there and make some money online. But they resisted and they wouldn't do it. Then finally we got them to take action and some amazing things have happened in their online business.

Jocelyn Sams: I actually have a fun fact for you guys. The very first time that I ever visited Shane's family here in southeast Kentucky, it was for Dustyn's first birthday.

Shane Sams: All right. So wait, Dustyn, how old are you right now?

Dustyn Sams: I'm 21.

Shane Sams: All right. And what grade are you ... You're in college right?

Dustyn Sams: Yeah. I'm a junior in college in right now.

Shane Sams: All right. And Devyn-

Jocelyn Sams: Was not even alive.

Shane Sams: Devyn was not alive when Jocelyn started coming around here y'all. But Devyn, how old are you right now and what grade are you in, in high school?

Devyn Sams: Currently I just turned 19 years old and I'm a senior in high school.

Shane Sams: All right. So, guys, you know where this is going today. A senior in high school started an online business, got his brother in college to help him and they've made money online. So I'm not sure what you're waiting for. But we're going to talk more about that.

Shane Sams: First, tell everybody guys, about your online business itself. What you've actually created online before we talk about sales and stuff like that.

Devyn Sams: We created a guitar beginners video course that teaches people who are struggling to learn how to play the guitar or just people in general who want to learn how to play the guitar. It actually teaches them in-depth through a five step process how to play the guitar.

Shane Sams: And what's your domain name?

Devyn Sams: Our domain name is conqueringguitar.com.

Jocelyn Sams: Tell everybody a little bit about why you started this particular business. What does this mean to you? What is your background as far as playing the guitar?

Devyn Sams: We just created it because number one you guys challenged us and from the beginning we were really confused about what y'all did. You guys started donning on us and so we were like, "Hey, if they're making money online, why can't we just go ahead and start it?" So, we created the website and here we are.

Jocelyn Sams: All right. So the whole guitar thing. This is something that's meaningful to you also. Tell everybody a little bit about that.

Devyn Sams: Oh, right. I taught myself how to play the guitar when I was around 13. I actually bought a guitar with my own birthday money and I actually taught myself how to play. It took probably around two to three years to actually teach myself how to play and I was just thinking, "You know, what if I was the next shortcut to help people play the guitar?" So, we created the website and so forth.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay, great. Now, I want to ask you this because I know that there are probably a lot of people out there thinking, "Oh, well these guys, they're in high school and college. They have nothing else to do. They're just sitting around making websites and stuff." I want you to just tell everybody a little bit about what really both of your involved in. Let's start with Devyn. What else were you doing in addition to school and creating this website?

Devyn Sams: First and foremost I was a football player by heart, so I was always at football practice. Other things I was in, I would have church, homework from school. So I was a pretty busy dude.

Dustyn Sams: He played in two state championships.

Shane Sams: That's right he did. That's right he did. That's the genetics coming through right there. But you worked too, right Devyn?

Devyn Sams: Yeah, I did work.

Shane Sams: Also, not only that, you're selling yourself short here. One, when he says he taught himself how to play guitar guys, it means no lessons. He got the guitar and just started figuring it out and started listening to songs and sitting around and playing for hours and hours and hours at a time. Okay? And number two, when he says he was a football player, he was a starting football player. A leader who was at practice all the time. Probably three and four hours a night after being at school all day long. And when he says he played guitar at church, he's literally leading 1200 people every Sunday in worship. He is up there with the song leader, he's the lead guitar, he's up on a mic, and he's working with the group and he's practicing all the time to be ready for these big services on Sundays. So this is not a guy who's sitting around playing Fortnite eight hours a day. That's not what's happening here.

Shane Sams: And Dustyn, now what do you do? Devyn is basically ... Devyn you do all the courses and you're the front of the business, right? You're the show? Correct?

Devyn Sams: Correct.

Shane Sams: Now, Dustyn, what are you doing in the business right now with Devyn?

Dustyn Sams: Particularly, I'm the better looking brother but I'm not out front. No, I'm just joking. But basically I have my own photography and videography business, so I have a lot of background in technology and stuff. So, I've basically been the one who's made all the courses and recorded all the videos. Basically just built the website and membership site.

Shane Sams: You did that mostly with our courses, correct?

Dustyn Sams: Yeah, yeah. Definitely. I just go on the ... I finally convinced y'all, or I didn't convince y'all but I finally got a membership from you guys and then I went through all the videos and taught myself how to make a website through those. Basically through brand design and Canva and all that it worked out.

Shane Sams: What's funny you say that is, we have been harassing you guys to do this for 18 months. It's been a year-and-a-half ago you all would come over and you'd be hanging out at our house. You'd look around and be like, "What do you guys do again? How is all this possible?" And we would tell you start an online business. Start a website. You're like, "That's not what you do. That's not what you do." And we kept harassing you and harassing you. I remember that you guys wanted to tip toe into it but I wouldn't let you because we hated giving things away for free and I didn't feel like you guys were ready. You really just weren't going ... You weren't serious enough or us to give you the opportunity yet. Does that make sense?

Dustyn Sams: Part of it personally was I feel like we were just so young. We weren't mature enough to understand. And then now that we're a little older, we actually understand what's going on and it's helped us out a whole lot.

Shane Sams: Let's talk about that a little bit because even as you were building this stuff out, there was a lot of disbelief, a lot of this can't be real, a lot of this isn't possible. But Dustyn actually was the videographer last year for Flip Your Life LIVE. All the commercials, all the videos. All the things that you see on our Facebook page and online, Dustyn came in and filmed those, edited those. What did you ... How did that event really fire you up? Because when you came back from Flip Your Life LIVE-

Jocelyn Sams: I'm not really sure you knew what to expect when you went. You're like "Okay, this is an event. I don't know what this is going to be."

Shane Sams: "Just shooting or wedding or whatever. Just another thing." What happened when you got there and you saw all that. You saw these hundreds of people from all over the world coming in. You saw what we were doing on stage and you heard ... I mean you were in the room for every session. Right? When you came back, you were on fire. You guys really went after it, really got on it. What changed after you went to Flip Your Life LIVE?

Dustyn Sams: Well, going in Flip Your Life LIVE, it basically was another event for me just as a job I'd say. But I also knew what you guys had done since you're my uncle and aunt. I knew that I wanted to learn a little bit more about that, so I was very interested in going to that. On that part of the half anyways. So when I got there, not only did it turn out being a job but it was basically like I was a member in the community with all the other people. I really just learned a whole lot about online business and I knew that even though I'm going out week in and week out filming and videoing, it's a lot of hard labor work where I could be doing this online and making money another way.

Dustyn Sams: So really, that event just inspired me to take action and get Devyn onboard and we made something work.

Jocelyn Sams: It was really funny because I remember at first you were out there mostly videoing stuff. And then later in the event, I just saw you writing. All the time.

Shane Sams: Taking notes, baby. I'm like, "Damn it. I'm paying. Dustyn, I'm paying you here. Pick up your camera. Start taking some more photos, man."

Jocelyn Sams: I'm not insinuating that you weren't doing any work.

Shane Sams: No he did a great job. The videos are amazing!

Jocelyn Sams: It just makes me laugh because at first you were like, "Oh, video." And you're like

Shane Sams: "I gotta write this down this is something I can do later." We brought all of the staff that helped at the end of the thing and I asked you on stage, I was like, "You didn't really know what we did. Now what do you think?" And I remember your eyes just got as big as saucers and you were like, "This is crazy. I can't believe all these people are actually doing this." It was just cool when you got back.

Shane Sams: All right, let's talk about ... All right. You guys piddled with it. You're taking the courses. You're building some stuff. Then you see it's real because you're in a room with real people and you're like, "Man, there's other people doing this. Not just Shane and Jocelyn. If they can do it, we can do it too." You come back, you guys really hammered down. You guys were making courses, putting up courses, getting stuff out there, toying with some Facebook ads, sharing stuff. You all were just crushing my Facebook newsfeed sharing stuff locally. It was ridiculous. Telling anybody you could. I kept getting messages. Everyone in our family would be tagged in them. Dustyn and Devyn were like, "Hey guys, could you share this everywhere that you talk on social media? That'd be awesome. Thanks." You guys were really just hustling.

Shane Sams: And nothing was happening. And nothing was happening. I remember Devyn, talking to you a couple of times here and there, you're like, "We got stuff out there. The course is ready. I just want someone to buy this. I just want someone to tell me it's real."

Jocelyn Sams: Some of you guys have been there before, people listening to this right now are thinking, "I have so been there. I just want somebody to buy it." So we just keep saying, you have to be patient. You have to wait. Everybody wants to build it and then overnight they get 4,000 people to buy their thing. And it doesn't work that way.

Shane Sams: And then the other night I get a rampaging, crazy, all caps text message. I can't remember who text me first. I think it was Devyn. So, Devyn, I'm going to lead this over to you. What happened the other day in your online business?

Devyn Sams: You know, I was getting frustrated. I was getting frustrated and frustrated and more frustrated because no one was buying it. Right? But I kept listening to ... It's funny because I kept listening to your guys' YouTube channel and your podcasts. You would always say, "Be persistent and prolific and something will happen and take action." You know, I just kept doing that. And then that night, I made my first sale.

Shane Sams: You sent me ... You FaceTimed me three times. I'm like, "Leave me alone. What are you doing?" And you sent me the text and I call you back. I started snapping pictures because we were both so excited.

Jocelyn Sams: I was in a different room and I kept hearing screaming. I'm like, "Okay, what in the world is going on here?"

Shane Sams: I'm like, "Devyn made his first sale! Dustyn made their first sale!" I remember it was funny because the two weeks before that, I went back and just looked at our ... I thought about our conversations at church or when we were together. I looked back at some texts here and there. I started piecing together a progression. Something was heating up because you would tell me we got some traffic. Hey, someone signed up for our email list. Hey I sent an email out and two people opened." Right? And then finally that one person bought. Where was that person from? Don't say their name, but where were they from?

Devyn Sams: They were from Australia.

Shane Sams: All right. So we got two guys in Kentucky. We got a high school senior, and a 21-year-old guy in college that threw up this website and literally started from scratch. Devyn you don't even know how to use the website still, right? You don't even know what-

Devyn Sams: Right.

Shane Sams: All you know how to do is play guitar. Is that what I'm feeling right now? All right. Dustyn, you barely know how to do it because, what was it? A week or two ago you all were sending me a message and something broke on the website?

Dustyn Sams: Yeah. It was ... Yeah.

Shane Sams: What happened? Someone couldn't buy or the buy button wouldn't work?

Dustyn Sams: I still don't fully know what happened but I fixed it. Somebody was trying to sign up for the ... And this was ... Don't get me wrong. This was the day we got our first member. Somebody messaged me and was like, "Hey, I'm interested in buying the course, but I want to sign up for your free version first." But he said for some reason when he signed up it sent him to a link to the back end of WordPress. I texted Shane and I said, "This is a problem. I need to figure out what to do."

Jocelyn Sams: We were actually in the car. Shane was driving and you guy were texting him and calling him. Basically he said ... He was like, "I'm not going to help you guys." I felt bad! I was like, "We have to help them." He's like, "No. They have to figure it out on their own." I was just saying the other day in a Facebook group, I don't even remember which one it was now but somebody was asking what's the number one skill that you need to have in online business or a business of any kind? My answer was problem solving. Problem solving skills. That is the most important thing, I think, to having any type of business. That's exactly what he said. He said, "They have to figure it out on their own."

Shane Sams: Because I said, and I remember in the car, this was after I hung up on you and told you to figure it out yourself-

Jocelyn Sams: And that really happened.

Shane Sams: That really happened. I looked over at Jocelyn and we were talking about this. I'm like, "Look. This is the place where people get beat. Something gets hard and they have a choice. To quit or to fight." I said, "If they figure this out," and like Dustyn just said, he's not even sure how he fixed it. That happens all the time in your business. There's stuff going on in our community all the time, in the forums, I don't even know why it works, but it does. If you fight through that, you realize that you can solve any problem and still make money. Even if it's not perfect.

Shane Sams: But a lot of people, the tech gets hard and they quit. Or they run out of money and they don't want to sell anything else. Or they don't have enough time, and they don't want to sacrifice Netflix. If you can't get through those problems, if you can't figure out how to make time in your schedule for the online business, if you can't figure out how to find money to invest in your business, and if you can't overcome tech challenges because no matter how many people you hire, no matter how long you're in this, every day is a tech challenge. I was dealing with a tech problem just yesterday in a hotel room in Indianapolis because I couldn't figure something out. If you can't get past that, you'll never get to the promise land.

Shane Sams: So, you guys fought through it. Because I didn't rob you of your problems. I always want to help and give people direction and give you guidance, but I don't ever want to rob you of your problems. Because I can't do it for you. I can't run your business for you. Jocelyn can't run your business for you. Only you can. If I helped you and saved you every time you needed it and me and Jocelyn get hit by a bus tomorrow, who's going to help you the day after that? Right?

Shane Sams: You got through this, you make your first sale. It didn't stop there. What happened after that first sale came in just out of nowhere?

Devyn Sams: We got that first sale and about I would say two hours later, I looked at the email and boom. There was another person that bought our membership.

Shane Sams: And then what happened?

Devyn Sams: And then another.

Shane Sams: And then what happened?

Devyn Sams: And then another.

Shane Sams: It's funny because I kept telling you there's a tipping point. You just gotta go. You just gotta go because if you can find one, you can find more than one. You might even find 101 or a 1,001. They come in bunches. All of the sudden people kept going. It was funny because after you guys sent me the message, that first sale got y'all fired up. Y'all started sharing stuff and there was ads going, we're going to start a Facebook ad. You all were hunting every conversation you had ever had with anyone in your email and your Facebook just trying to figure out where you were getting traction. I could just feel that first sale excitement from you guys. Because that's what makes it real. Right? When you made that first sale.

Devyn Sams: Right.

Shane Sams: I remember back when we made our first sale. We got to that point too in our journey where we almost gave up. When I first started doing this online thing, I didn't know how people were making money. I didn't know if it was real. I didn't know if it was some kind of scam, like an MLM or something. I didn't know what was going on. I just knew that people were saying they were making money online. I kept trying to get Jocelyn on board and she just kept saying, "Prove it. Prove it's not a scam and then I'll believe it. But until I actually see you make money, I'm not wasting my time on this." Right?

Shane Sams: So I tried and tried and tried and tried and tried to make money. I was about to give up. One night right before bed, I went to brush my teeth and I said a little prayer. I said, "God, is this real? Are these people scamming me? Is all the stuff I'm reading online, all these things people are telling me, is it true? Because I'm about to quit. I've been trying for months. Nothing's happening. I've put hours and hours and hours into this and I just don't know if I can do this anymore." I went back to bed and right before I went to bed, I opened my computer. I went to my analytics and I hit refresh. Where there was a zero in my analytics before, no money, no sales, no nothing, when it came back there was 11 cents in my account.

Shane Sams: It's funny because at the time the only way I knew to monetize anything was with ads. What had happened I had created something, put it on my website, someone came to that page through search to read it or whatever and they happened to click an ad on that page. It's funny because that doesn't seem like a ton of money, right? 11 cents. That's a dime and a penny. But it was proof that I could create something and get money back. So how much was your first sale? How much was this first sale that you all made?

Dustyn Sams: Well, initially ... Okay. I'm going to go off on a little tangent here to set the stage. Back in the-

Shane Sams: Can you tell that he's my nephew?

Dustyn Sams: We got to be visual here. So, back in the summer is when me and Devyn really took off on the idea of getting this up. It wasn't until Flip Your Life LIVE that we actually got serious about it. But I started building this site back last summer around ... I was traveling in between mission trips and I remember sitting on a plane editing all these videos and me and Devyn were trying to come up with a price. Initially, we created a price of $97. We thought that was going to gain us some traction.

Dustyn Sams: But through all this time, we did not make one entire sale until just recently. Devyn actually came up to me. He's like, "Hey, we're not getting any sales." I was being stubborn. I was like, "No. I've done all this work. You've done all this work. We have to make this work." He said, "We need to lower the prices a little. Maybe have a Christmas, New Year's sale or whatever." I said, "Okay. Let's figure it out and we're going to do $19 or ..." It's actually $20. So we did that $20 and that was our first sale. Then from there we've hit the ground running really.

Shane Sams: That's literally and my math may be terrible here, but that's like 2,000 times more than my first money I made online. Because I made 11 cents, bro. Right? Look at it in perspective. You guys made 2,000 times more money on your first money online than I did. You guys are going to be probably passing us up here in a couple of years.

Shane Sams: There's something else I want to really highlight in that story. Fearless changing and testing of prices. Because that's a huge problem that a lot of our older members, like pretty much everybody else that's a member of the community but you guys, have. Scared. They're really scared to change anything or try a new price or to even set a price for the product. And you guys were just like, "Ah, 100 bucks. Let's try it. That didn't work. $20. Let's see what happens." But that fearless changing of the price, that you might not even have a clue you were doing, that's what made you find the first price that would work. Now you are in the ballpark and you can try different things. You can go up. You can down. You can go monthly. You can do some other things to test that thing out.

Shane Sams: Anybody out there, if that's holding you back, listen to these guys. Just try something and see what happens.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah and the thing about it is people are always scared to change their price. "Oh, well, I've already told people it was $99." Well, nobody bought it. So ... there you go.

Shane Sams: Even if they know, they didn't react to it. It doesn't matter.

Jocelyn Sams: Chances are people don't even care what it was anyways. You could email them six months ago and say, "They it's $97." You could email them again and say, "Hey, we're having a special sale and it's $20. Here's what you get." People probably don't remember that first email anyway. And if they do, well, they'll be happy because you lowered the price.

Shane Sams: Also too, let me ask you this guys, you had this discussion, you talked back and forth and you decided to try something new. You used a holiday as a sale. What a great ... That was another great decision. Just, "Okay, we got a holiday. That's an excuse. Let's lower the price." But did you just pull $20 out of your hat? Did you just try something? Were you just throwing mud on the wall to see what stuck? How did you go from $100 to $20? Just because one was high and you wanted to try low? What was that thought process?

Devyn Sams: We were just thinking $97 hasn't got us jack and so let's just come up with some random number that someone may happen to have. A $20 bill in their pocket. A $20 here, a $20 there. We just came up with $20 and thought it would be the best.

Shane Sams: That's amazing.

Dustyn Sams: I think it's really cool because we're not stopping at that $20. As soon as we made our first sale, I talked to ... After we got done celebrating with you, I talked to Devyn and I was like, "Okay, so you know we can't stay at $20 forever because this is obviously worth a lot more than $20." So, I think what we're going to ... We made a deal after our first five members or so that we were going to make it $20 a month. So I think pretty here soon me and Devyn are going to make it $19 a month recurring monthly payment to us, so it's worth our while. But those first five members really gave us a lot of traction I think.

Shane Sams: Right. That's what we teach in the community. Find the price that people are wiling to pay and then find the price somewhere near that, that they're willing to pay monthly. Because monthly recurring revenue is where you build a stable online business. You can't just rely on random people finding you for sales. You gotta turn it into something where people pay month, after month, after month, after month so that you can go get your 100 people paying you $19 or your 1,000 people paying you $19 to get access to that product.

Jocelyn Sams: We talked about this already with you guys, but your main objective right now is to really over deliver for those people who bought. Get a solid testimonial, preferably on video from those people and that is going to help you. There's social proof as you move forward and try to start this recurring revenue stream.

Dustyn Sams: Yeah, definitely. And that's something ... I actually just whispered over to Devyn. I said, "Write that down."

Shane Sams: Listen guys, you're paying attention and you're taking action fearlessly. Right?

Dustyn Sams: Yeah.

Shane Sams: And that's what you have to do if you're going to make it online. So, before we get going guys, listen, I'm really proud of you two. Honestly. It's hard enough for us sometimes to convince people out there that ... Got people in their 30s and 40s to go out and try this. But to see a high school senior with stuff going daylight to dark do this and base it around something that they knew about, that they felt like they could go out and reach out and maybe hit an avatar that nobody else could do and to see you guys work together as brothers, because that's not easy. Right? I'm sure there's been some heated conversations.

Jocelyn Sams: As someone who's had a sister or still does have a sister, yeah, that would be very difficult.

Shane Sams: Right? And also too, I don't want to sell short Dustyn's role in this. Dustyn, he is a full-time college student, pre-law. He has a full-time business that he's running on the weekends basically flying around doing weddings and editing all week during that time. You guys really have a lot going on but you made it happen. You took action. You got a result and now you've got a fire lit. And fires get bigger when you pour gas on them.

Shane Sams: With that being said ... Oh, one more thing. Everybody listening to this out there, I got a high school senior and a sophomore in college building an online business. What are you waiting for? Gotta get out there and get ... You gotta get off the bench y'all. You gotta get on the field and you gotta try. Maybe your prices are locked in. Unlock them. Maybe you need to go to Flip Your Life LIVE this year, so that you can get inspired too and you can see other real people doing this. You can learn from me and Jocelyn live. But you can do this. Anyone can do this. Even if you don't know how to do the technology. They figured it out. Even if you don't know how to do all the pricing and the sales and the marketing. You don't understand how social media ... It doesn't matter. Start and figure it out. Maybe you're stuck on some technical problem because your website broke down two weeks ago and you just gave up. Well, go get back under the hood and figure it out because you can do it if you keep moving forward.

Shane Sams: Let's talk about getting you guys moving forward. How can we get you to the next level? What is your question on your next steps now that you've got your first few members?

Devyn Sams: All right, one of the big questions that I've been contemplating on asking you guys is, how can we get more organic search to our website? Right now we're running Facebook ads. Some of the members that we have gotten, we've had to pay for through the Facebook ads. We're looking for ways to get those members without having to pay for a Facebook ad or getting so many members off of one ad itself.

Shane Sams: Sure. Okay. There's only two ways to get traffic online. You can open your wallet or you can roll up your sleeves. That's it. One takes time and one takes money. So the one you're talking about, Facebook ads, take money. Which if you have some decent ... If you have some money each day, we highly suggest that you always use some kind of advertising. Maybe five bucks a day, 10 bucks, whatever you can afford. Figure that out. But if you want more organic traffic, that means rolling up your sleeves and being extremely consistent in prolific in content creation.

Shane Sams: If you want more organic traffic, you're going to have to go create a ton more content. That might mean getting on YouTube for 15 minutes a day to teach something. Every day. And then taking that and putting it on your blog and writing out a blog post. Right? To talk about what is in the videos, so that people can actually find it and search.

Jocelyn Sams: It can be super quick. It doesn't have to be an hour long training session or anything. Just show people how to play a chord.

Shane Sams: "Today's thing, I'm going to show you how to play Mary Had a Little Lamb." Whatever. You do it and you say, "If you want to learn more about this, click here. Here's your quick tip for the day." Bam. "I'm Devyn. I'm out." Then you go in, you type a blog post.

Shane Sams: Maybe you carve out one hour every day and that's the hour that you're going to do a YouTube video, embed it in a blog post, type it and go. This is a long-term play. It's hard. I'm not trying to ... You guys are young. It's hard for you to see long-term. Because you're always looking at what's going next. Let's go. Let's keep moving forward. Right? But this is a long-term play. You're going to make a 100 of these videos over the next 100 days and you're not going to see anything from it. But next year, this same month, those videos you made in those first 100 days are going to start getting traction and you're going to start getting more traffic. Maybe they're getting 10 views a piece a day. But then you do a 100 more and then they stack. And then you do 100 more, then they stack. And then all of the sudden, 10 of your videos get 5,000 to 10,000 views and drive a bunch of traffic.

Shane Sams: But if you don't have a lot of money, which you guys don't, if you don't have a lot of resources, then that's the route you have to take. If you want organic traffic, you're going to have to put in the work. You're going to have to create content.

Jocelyn Sams: As you're planning this content out, one of the things that you really want to keep in mind is who your customer avatar is. For you, it is people who are just starting to learn to play the guitar. Is that accurate?

Devyn Sams: Right. Beginners who are wanting to play the guitar.

Jocelyn Sams: Exactly. So what you don't want to do is you don't want to create a video or a piece of content that's, "The best guitars to buy when you lead worship at church." Well obviously these people aren't going to be leading worship at church, so that content doesn't make sense to create. So, what you want to do instead is maybe, "The best guitar for beginners." And talk about what kind of guitar you would recommend for people who are learning to play guitar. "How to clean your guitar." You know, think about things who people who are brand new they would have no clue, and that's the type of content.

Shane Sams: How to change a guitar string. Jocelyn's got a really good avenue for you guys here. When you're making this free content, you don't want to hard teach. That's not how you get traffic. You get traffic by all the other stuff that people wonder about, about their thing. Then they come in and learn how to do it from you. But you just tell them what to do around that. "How long should my guitar strap be?" "Where can I hold my guitar?" "I need a guitar case." Maybe somebody gave them a guitar and they don't even have a case. "Here's a good guitar case." Show them yours. Doesn't matter what it is.

Shane Sams: Inside the Flip Your Life community there's a course that shows you how to research content. One of them, I got two courses, one is what kind of content you should create and how to do it free to make sure that you're not giving away your best stuff. And then another one is how to research what real people are actually looking for. That's our keyword. Research tutorial. You need to watch both of those. You need to be strategic just like you would a game plan for a football game. You're not going to go in without a game plan. You need to know what you're going to create over the next month and then you gotta sit down and do the work. You just gotta get out there and start creating videos. It won't happen overnight. It's going to take time.

Shane Sams: But that is the only way to create traffic organically. To create a lot of content. We were looking the other day. We have basically almost 300 podcasts. We have something like ... Jocelyn and I are releasing around 1,000 videos on YouTube this year. It's all old content that we've cut up and sliced up. We're going to roll it out on YouTube. But we've been creating content for like four years to get to the point where we're going to roll this out on YouTube. Did we see any benefit from that over the first four years? No. We've been recording all these things. All these Q&As and all these things that we've been doing for years and now we've cut them up, and we're going to use SEO, Search Engine Optimization, to go out there and put it on YouTube and grow our YouTube channel.

Shane Sams: But we're playing the long game. We're the glacier. Not the prairie fire. We're an unstoppable force moving forward that will be here 10,000 years from now. Not an amazing fire that burns out and goes away. That's how you build organic traffic online. It's the only way to do it. And people try to be viral. "Ooh, I'm going to make something viral. This video's so good it's going to go viral." What they don't see on most of those viral videos is that that person made 400 other videos before that one went viral because you can't guess that game. You just gotta throw stuff out there and see what gets shared.

Dustyn Sams: Yeah. Sweet. I guess on the opposite end of the spectrum, one side is rolling up your sleeves, the other is spending money. Basically the question I had was how can we ... Because I have a good video background but wedding videos are a lot different than business videos or advertisements. So, what would be some tips you guys could give for us to make the best ads to put out there on social media to get the best bang for our buck?

Shane Sams: Well, the first thing we would tell you is professional looking videos don't always work the best.

Jocelyn Sams: Especially in this space. Because you're really trying to teach people who want a DIY. So I wouldn't make it too polished.

Shane Sams: Yeah. Videos are more like ... Have Devyn just sitting there in front of the camera a be like, "What's up. This is Devyn. I'm going to teach you your first chord. Right now. In this video on Facebook. All right here we go. Get your guitar out. Get the fingers where they go." Whatever blah, blah, blah. And you show them that one chord. That's the basis. And be like, "Watch this. Now if you know this chord and you know these other two, you can play this song." You play a little song. Then you're like, "If you want to learn the next two chords, click the link in the description. I'm going to go." But it's just a video there.

Shane Sams: Your best thing to do is make sure your audio sounds really good. Right? But think about how people are using the platforms you're advertising on. If you're advertising on Facebook, if I'm scrolling through my newsfeed, if I see some super slick, polished thing that's clearly an ad, not a highlight reel, not a good video on teaching something, it's clearly and ad, I'm just going to scroll on by it. But if I see a guy playing guitar and in the description it says, "Learn your first chord." And look over at that guitar sitting there, I'm going to maybe watch it. That's what you're thinking more of. It's not really just the video production that matters. It's what you're actually teaching.

Jocelyn Sams: I would even say it might be a cool idea to get either a picture or a video of somebody that you worked with in the past. Maybe even a kid. Somebody young. Because that shows people that hey, if this person can do it, if I can teach this person, I can also teach you.

Shane Sams: Another thing too is your demographics of the people that are buying matter. You need to figure out how old those people are. Have you talked to any of the people that have bought?

Devyn Sams: I've actually talked to two of them.

Shane Sams: Okay. Do you know how old they are?

Devyn Sams: I don't really know but I can guess on their age.

Shane Sams: Okay, guess. What do you think the one in Australia is?

Devyn Sams: I'm going to say she was around 40.

Shane Sams: Okay. And then there was another kid, another mom bought it for her kid. Correct?

Devyn Sams: Right.

Shane Sams: Okay. So, you got two little hints there. That's not enough data to matter, but it can give you some clues going forward. For example, you're a young guy teaching people how to play guitar. What if you played on that. You're like, "Hey, my name's Devyn and I would love to teach your kid how to play guitar." Because you're talking to the ... The only person you talk to in an ad is the person who has the wallet. You don't care about who you're actually teaching. You're like, "Hey, I'm Devyn. I got this testimonial here of this kid I taught guitar." Maybe you get a picture of her playing guitar. Edit that video in there real quick. Then you're like, "I would love to teach your kid." If I saw that, I'd probably be interested. If Isaac wanted to play guitar and I saw this young guy ... I don't want some creepy old person or somebody trying to teach my kid guitar. I mean seriously. I don't know this person but I see this young guy and he's teaching another kid how to play guitar. That's trustworthy looking.

Shane Sams: That's the kind of advertising you gotta do. Keep it real. Use the picture as a 1,000 words. Show them who you help on the video. Show them who you are and show them who you help. Once they see themselves in your marketing, they'll react better to click through. Also, you're not just selling your product. You're selling the next step. Your ads should go to opt-ins. Your opt-ins should sell the product.

Jocelyn Sams: And your ads can also go to content. As you start creating these little mini pieces of content, say so many times a week, you can also put some money behind a post about that. So, "Hey guys, I did a post today about the best guitar for new players. You can check it out here."

Shane Sams: All those things stack. It's just like you did when you launched. We always tell everybody to start product first. You guys listened and did it in order. You created the course, you created the website, and then you started promoting it. Because you had something to sell. That's why you're where you are right now. Content will work the same way. Don't worry if your ad or your content is right. As you do them, you will start to feel what's working and you can pivot and you can move. Don't get so caught up in data and perfect testing one ad versus another. There is a lot of art and science to this. Most of it is just doing stuff. That's why I email our list every day because I can see the replies. I can see what got opened on Tuesday and what didn't get opened on Wednesday. I can start feeling and moving and bobbing and weaving.

Shane Sams: It's like our ads. We usually start a bunch of different Facebook posts or a bunch of different tweets in the week and if I see one that's getting a lot of traction, I'll go put ad money behind it to get in people's newsfeed more. Does that make sense? The more you do this, the more you will feel it for your business. That's why we're really adamant, "Do it." Don't worry what's right. Don't worry what's wrong. And don't even worry if your ads aren't perfectly bringing back a good return right now. It stacks. Six months from now, a year from now, you'll start making so much money monthly that any money you might have invested early will come back to you in spades. Right?

Jocelyn Sams: And the one thing that I would say too, just on that note of trying things and seeing what happens, is just don't get stuck in the cycle of learning. We see this happen all the time with people who come into community. They want to read all the books and take all the courses and make sure they're doing things "Correctly." But then they never do anything. Because they're just paralyzed by, "Okay, well, I don't know. This person said I should do this. This other person said I should do something different. So which one would I listen too? I don't know. I better do some analysis on this." I say this to myself too because I get in the same type of situation all the time where I want to analyze everything and research everything. I would say just don't do it. Keep doing what you're doing. You got here by trying things, seeing what worked, and trying something new. Keep doing that.

Shane Sams: And you guys have an unfair advantage that there's two of you. Right? What would probably be good is for ... Devyn, you should really figure out a way that you can create content without Dustyn. That means you're going to have to learn a little more about how WordPress works. Do a YouTube video. Learn how to embed it. And you're going to have to type out the blog posts. Okay?

Shane Sams: Dustyn, you should probably go to the ad side because it is a little more technical anyway and you could probably figure it out. But let one of you handle the paid part and one of you handle the content creation part. One of you can get over here and open the wallet a little bit. And I'm not saying a lot. Do it two bucks a day. Three bucks. Just enough to poke the fire and keep it going.

Jocelyn Sams: Let it run for a little while and see what's working before you turn it off.

Shane Sams: Try one ad a month. Three to five bucks a day. Whatever. Y'all just made five membership sales. You got 100 people. There's $100 for ads next month. Invest everything back into your business in the beginning. Don't keep it. Don't go out and take your girlfriends to the movies at 50 bucks each. Go bum some money off your mom and dad. Do that. You can still do that.

Jocelyn Sams: Good luck with that.

Shane Sams: So do that. Put that money back into the business. That's your ad money for next month. Dustyn, your challenge is to make more than $100 back, so you've got money for the next month. Go make $150 back but spend $150. Then go make $200 and then spend $200. Then go make $400 and spend $400. Then go make $1,000 and spend $1,000. Oh, now we're making money. Right?

Shane Sams: While you're doing that, Devyn you're over here creating content and you're just going to create a schedule. I don't care what you pick. Like three days a week, five days a week every day. Do whatever you want. If you went crazy and made a video every day for a year, I promise you somebody's going to pay attention. You know what I mean? So you guys divide and conquer a little bit and go promote this thing that you know will sell for that $20 bill but make it $19 a month. Then you're going to be on your way.

Devyn Sams: All right.

Dustyn Sams: Okay. That sounds good.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay guys. We have had a lot of fun talking today. We are really, really proud of you guys. You've done something that so many people who listen to this podcast or just in general are either too scared to do or just have not taken the next steps to doing it. So, we love it. We can't wait to see what happens next and we hope to bring you back on again when this thing really blows up. Hopefully that will be sooner rather than later.

Jocelyn Sams: But before we go, we want to ask you what is one thing that you plan to do? What do you plan to take action on based on what we talked about here today?

Dustyn Sams: Well, the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to go back and write an essay on the Rwanda genocide, but the second thing I'm going to do ... And then the second thing I'm going to do is I'm really going to focus on creating an ad that will drive traffic to our free opt-in We have a guide that has ... Is it ... How many videos?

Devyn Sams: It's like five or six.

Dustyn Sams: It's like five or six videos that teach people some chords to play. I think I'm really going to focus on driving traffic to that, so we can get more people on our email list. Because that's ... Once we started emailing our list really hard, that's when we got our first member.

Shane Sams: Awesome. Devyn?

Devyn Sams: The first thing I'm going to do is probably work on some stats homework because I've got a big test come up. But other than that, I'm going to probably write a blog post or start filming some videos teaching people how to play the choruses of some popular songs.

Shane Sams: I'll tell you this Devyn, for you especially, don't record the videos and let Dustyn edit them. Go to YouTube Live and do a live video and it'll be on YouTube already.

Jocelyn Sams: Even if you mess up.

Shane Sams: Even if you mess up, just do it live. Give yourself a time limit. 15 minutes for each video. You don't have time to wait for him to edit your videos, right? So just go do it live and you'll be able to crank that stuff out a lot faster.

Jocelyn Sams: Another thing I wanted to say is I want to see you do some research on what people are searching for too. It's one thing ... It's okay to just blindly create content sometimes just because you want to or because you feel like it may be something that people are searching for. But it's really a good idea to do a little bit of research. See what people are actually searching for and design your content around that. A great way to do that is to ask people what they want to know. So if you have a Facebook page, if you have an email list just say, "Hey, I'm working on creating some new free content. What do you want to know about?

Dustyn Sams: Right, right.

Shane Sams: All right guys. Great talk today. Man, what an awesome and inspiring story. You know, Jocelyn and I draw a lot of our inspiration from the Bible and we love to give our guests an opportunity to share one of their favorite inspirational bible verses. What bible verse do you guys have to share with our audience today?

Devyn Sams: Today we have a bible verse out of Galatians chapter six verse nine. It says, "Let us not become weary in doing good for at the proper time, we will reap a harvest if we do not give up."

Shane Sams: Wooh! That kind of applies to your story. I'm just saying. Hey guys, listen, great job today on the podcast. I didn't know if you guys were a little nervous. Didn't know if you knew what to expect when you got on here today. I know you've listened, but man it's a whole different thing when you're on the other side of the mic. We're just really proud of you guys. You guys are killing it. This should be an inspiration to everybody out there. If a high school senior and a college student can do this, you can do it too. So thanks for coming on the show guys. We can't wait to have you back when you get your first 100 members.

Devyn Sams: Yeah, thanks for having us.

Dustyn Sams: Awesome. Thank you.

Shane Sams: All right guys. That is all the time we have today but what an inspirational story to hear a high school senior and a college sophomore taking massive action, working month, after month, after month and overcoming technical problems, a lack of finances, lack of time, and getting to the point where they made that first sale. And then the second sale. The third sale. The fourth sale. The fifth sale. And on, and on, and on it goes. You can do this too guys. Anybody out there can do it. If a high school senior can build an online business, you can build an online business too. We can help you do it. We have all the training, resources and community support that you need inside of the Flip Your Life community to take your business and life to the next level.

Shane Sams: All you have to do to find out more is go to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife. That's F-L-I-P-P-E-D Lifestyle.com/flipyourlife. You can learn everything about the Flip Your Life community and our plan to start building and growing an online business to flip your life blueprint. Go to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife and join today.

Jocelyn Sams: If you need a little bit extra motivation, we would love to see you at Flip Your Life LIVE in Lexington in September. You can join Dustyn. He will definitely be there. We'll even try to get Devyn to come so you guys can meet them in person. Come on over to Flip Your Life LIVE. You can learn more at flippedlifestyle.com/live. We hope to see you there.

Shane Sams: That's all the time we have for this week. Till next time, get out there. Take action. Do whatever it takes to flip your life. We'll see you then.

Jocelyn Sams: Bye.

Links and resources mentioned on today’s show: * Devyn & Dustyn's Website * Flip Your Life LIVE 2019 Tickets & Registration Information * Flip Your Life community

Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!

Join the Flip Your Life Community NOW for as little as $19 per month!

– https://flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife

View Details

In today's episode, we help Brenda take her art business to the next level.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jocelyn: Hey y'all. On today's podcast we help Brenda take her art business to the next level.

Greeting: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, where life always comes before work. We're your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. We're a real family that figured out how to make our entire living online, and now we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? All right, let's get started.

Shane: What's going on everybody? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. It is great to be back with you again today. We are super excited to have another member of the Flip Your Life Community on so that we can help them take their business to the next level. Now a lot of people ask us, "How do you pick who gets to be on the podcast? Which members come on? Is there an application process, is there something else that you do to let people come on the show?" Well, really, honestly, it's action takers in the community who we bring on to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, and we look for people who are asking great questions in the forums, and we really look hard at our success story forum. And we had an amazing success story that we wanted to share with you today.

Shane: Flip Your Life Community member, Brenda Mullard said, in her subject line, "So much can happen in a short amount of time." I was like, "Oh that's interesting, let's open that up and read it". Brenda said, "Hi everyone, I was reflecting on what has happened with my business since Flip Your Life Live, and I thought I'd share my success and all that has happened. So much can happen in such a short amount of time, just about four months. When I left Flip Your Life Live I had a website and membership that was literally broken. I mean it was open to everyone and anyone, but it wasn't working. I was frustrated, sad, and disheartened after our working dinner at Flip Your Life Live, but I thought I would just hire it out and get it all fixed. The quotes were thousands of dollars. I looked at myself and said, 'Wait, um, what?' I thought to myself there was no way I could afford to do that."

Shane: "So with the help of my new crew, that I met at Flip Your Life Live, I changed my website theme to a new theme, I learned the new theme builder, and redesigned almost all of my webpages, over 100 pages of content. I created new opt ins, a sales funnel, and an email sequence to bring people through the process. I've added more regular lesson plans, presentations, posters, and resources to my membership. I've batched blog posts ahead of times and free downloads for the next few months, and I'm ready to go. I ran my first sale, and I raised my prices. I now had eight members in the Visual Art Academy Membership and excited to add more. As much as I feel like things move slowly, looking back, I realized I have really moved the needle. I feel like I have a very solid foundation created now, and the next move is to try to get more eyes on what I have to offer."

Shane: "This is what I need to learn more of, and I'm about to throw my ... as I try to throw my fear aside. So even when you don't think you have a whole lot done, then stop and reflect a little bit, and you'll probably surprise yourself."

Shane: So we read this amazing success story.

Jocelyn: I was so excited. I was like we have to have her on the podcast.

Shane: We've got to have Brenda on the podcast. She's taking action, she came to the live event. We got to have her on, so Brenda Mullard, welcome to the show. We have you on the podcast now.

Brenda: Well thanks so much for having me, you guys.

Shane: That was an inspiring success post, by the way. And I actually noticed something about your account too when we were reading this right before we came on air. I looked at your, your stats are over like under your name, you know like where it has the topics, replies, and coins and things. And what I love about this is you have six times the replies as topics started. And what that really tells us is not only are you taking action, but you're also like talking to other people, answering other questions, and helping other people sort out their problems too, so we're super glad to have you on the show today.

Brenda: Well thanks. I know I appreciate it when people answer my questions or just give me a little bit of a boost, and you can do this, and so I really try to do that for everybody else in the community too. I think that's really important.

Jocelyn: Absolutely, I love that. This is one of those shows where we have actually met Brenda in real life, which is awesome. She came to our event not too long ago, in last September in Nashville, and has done just some amazing things, and we're just really excited about all of the things that you're working on, and the action that you're taking, and all that kind of stuff. So now it's our turn to kind of give back to you and try to help you take the next steps in your journey, but before we do that, let's talk a little bit about you. Tell people about your background and about what you do online.

Brenda: Okay. Awesome. Well, I have three kids. I'm married, I have one husband. My kids are 17, a daughter who we are getting ready to send off to college next year, so we're getting all the applications and scholarships and all that kind of stuff going. I have a 14-year-old son who's a freshman in high school, and an 11-year-old son who is in fifth grade. I have been in the arena of art education for the past 20 years, and so I have moved within the past year from just a regular classroom into teaching part-time, but then also taking on an integrated arts program at one of the middle schools as a fine arts coordinator. So I kind of have two part-time jobs which are really actually two full time jobs, as well as my family.

Brenda: And then we kind of joke because my mom is ... I have an elderly mother who has a lot, a lot of health issues, and so we kind of joke that she's our fourth child, because I cook, clean, shop, do everything that I do for my children, only she just doesn't live with us. So, having that on top of everything is pretty, it's a pretty crazy busy life right now.

Shane: So I would say that that probably has a lot to do with why you're trying to build this online income that's more manageable, more passive, more controlling would be safe to guess?

Brenda: For sure. Yep. I, to be able to have the flexibility of a schedule and to have more time to do the things that I feel that I need to do, versus what I have to do, would be just phenomenal. So, yep, that's exactly why I'm working on doing this.

Shane: How did you first discover that online business even existed, or decided you wanted to do it? We all have different stories, because this world is kind of hidden from people, when you're in the 9 to 5, or even when you're in a government job or an education job or something like that. How did you discover online business?

Brenda: Well, about oh, I would say 14ish years ago, when my son was born, I kind of got exposed to working smarter not harder with my artwork, and so I was using my artwork and putting it, putting it on greeting cards, through a few different companies, and doing things like that, and all of the sudden realizing like oh, I made 42 cents today from selling two cards that had my design on it, and I designed it once and it sold multiple times. Just that idea that I could make income from content, or things that I produce, and then it's used over, and over, and over, and over again by multiple people, and you continuously get paid through that was really the first kind of exposure that I had.

Brenda: And then when I found you guys, I had tried doing some online, my lesson plans and things all on my own, and I probably for like two years or so just kind of waded through the whole internet business courses, process of all different things, and until I figured out and started learning from the community I just got a better idea of what it all took. Because people that do this online business entrepreneurial stuff, when you first begin, you don't understand how much goes into being successful in a business. Like you always use the iceberg scenario and that's so true. You only see the very top when people are really, really successful. You don't see all of the different layers and all the different work that goes into getting to that top peak.

Shane: But that's what you hear when you first discover it, right? Everyone is like, "Oh, I read a book, and I started a blog, and the next -"

Jocelyn: And they're making millions of dollars.

Shane: "And next thing I knew I had my own jet."

Brenda: Right. Exactly. I quit my job after five months of all this stuff, and it was so easy, and anybody that's, anybody that's actually doing it knows that that's not true.

Shane: Especially in the beginning. There is a ... What's it called? A dynamo, is that what it's called? When like the energy takes over and it just keeps running or something like that.

Jocelyn: Yeah, that's something, I don't know.

Shane: Science, yeah. Physics.

Brenda: Ignorance, ignorance on fire.

Shane: Ignorance but right, its like something happens when, I guess momentum, like there is a point where you'll get momentum where things get ... It's like a fire, you stoke the fire and it keeps burning. You just throw another wood, you don't have to like, it's harder to start the fire than it is to quit going. And like there is a point of that, but man those first, that first two years is really like you've got to decide that you're in it to win it or you're not going to win it. You know?

Brenda: Right, right.

Jocelyn: Okay, so tell our listeners what your business is.

Brenda: I have a website, and membership, that has secondary art education lesson plans and classroom resources for art teachers.

Shane: Okay.

Jocelyn: Okay, awesome.

Shane: And you actually have a following online. You have a Facebook group?

Brenda: I do. I started a Facebook group about, about a year and a half, two years ago. It's called Art Teachers Teaching Art, and actually, Shane, you gave me that title, which is awesome. It has over 6000 members in it right now, and it is a super, super active community. I mean I, I have probably if somebody posts a question, or is looking for something in there, I have six or seven people that immediately jump on and answer that question. It is a free group, but it is a super active, and it's really, really good group.

Shane: And I usually, I talk to a lot of people about building an audience through some kind of group or something, a page, whatever it is they manage, and we always pick, everybody's always well what should I call it? And people want to brand it and stuff, and I'm like, "No, what would people search for?" People would search for Art Teachers Teaching Art. They would not search for the Fantabulous Artsio Community or whatever. They wouldn't look for that. You've got to name that, that's, naming is really important and sometimes simple is the best. And Art Teachers Teaching Art is pretty straight forward, but you know what everyone in the group is doing. And when people find it they're like "Yeah, I shouldn't join that, because I'm not an art teacher teaching art, so I'm going to back out of this one."

Brenda: Right, and it started out with, I just started the group, and I literally started it out with just art teachers that I knew. I mean I threw it out to six art teachers that I knew were on Facebook, and that I knew personally. And within a year and a half, I've got over 6000 members where people have spread it to other people, and it's just kind of spread like wildfire across the masses. So that's pretty cool to think about that from people all over the world.

Shane: And the key is now though ... We talked about this a little bit off air, which we're going to get into some fears, and obstacles, and some other things that are holding you back in your business. You've done the hard part, you've gotten 6000 people to pay attention to something you've created for free. And the key is where, somewhere in there, there's 100 people that want to pay you monthly. You just have to convince them why and we'll talk more about that.

Jocelyn: Okay, so before we get into all that, I do want to talk a little bit about coming to the live events. So you attended our live event in 2018?

Brenda: I did.

Jocelyn: And I want to talk a little bit about what made you decide to do that, and by making the decision, what changed about the way that you were approaching your business, or like how did it benefit you in other words? Because we're starting to sell this thing again, there are probably a lot of people out there listening thinking, "Oh, you know, I don't know for sure if I want to do this." You know, "I have to take time out of my life," and all these types of things.

Shane: It's not cheap.

Jocelyn: Yeah, I mean.

Shane: It's not cheap to make a trip like that.

Jocelyn: There is an investment involved, and I just want you to talk a little bit about why you made that decision and what happened after you made that decision.

Shane: How, this success story was clearly sparked by people you met at the live event. All these things and people helping you, so how did that kind of change things for you?

Brenda: Absolutely, so wow, this is really hard to talk about, but literally when I, I signed up to go, I thought this is going to be the make or breaker. I have this website ... And I had paid to have it fixed and changed, a while ago, and little to my knowledge that it wasn't fixed and it was still broken. It was open to everybody, so I was in a point where I was super frustrated. I didn't know the next steps, even though we have the great community, and we have all the courses and things in there. I just felt way overwhelmed and way bogged down, and just didn't really know where to go from where I was at. And so I kind of thought all right, I'm going to go to this event. I've been to live events before, I know that I've always learned something, and usually there's a sit and get kind of things, where you go in, and you sit, and get information and then you take it home and try to implement, but the way this was set up, being a teacher myself, I loved the way that it's taught.

Brenda: There's questions, and then you do it. And so that was a huge part of how I think the success kind of started rolling. I also met people that I had talked to in the community online. A few of them we had had phone calls back and forth and things, but I think meeting those people in person, and having them be like, "Oh, this is what I do," and then show me, because I'm very visual. I'm a very visual learner, and so to have them actually sit down and show me some of the things that they were doing, where like keyword search and all these other things was so, so helpful. It was so helpful to me, and after our working dinner, realizing that my website was literally broken. Like I, and my membership was open to the world, anybody could get in, anybody could see anything. They could download everything and -

Shane: Didn't we talk about this like -

Brenda: We did.

Shane: Walking back to the elevator? Yeah.

Brenda: We did.

Shane: I remember this now. Because you were like, it was you, and who were you with? Kathy? And like ...

Brenda: Kathy, yep.

Shane: Yeah, Kathy Martin.

Brenda: Kathy and Evan.

Shane: Yes, Kathy and Evan, and we were walking back to the elevator, and I was like, "Brenda, what did you get out of the working dinner?" And you're like, "Yeah, everything's broken. Everything, everything. Start to finish." And I was like, "Oh, well, that's, well at least you know now." I do, I remember that conversation.

Brenda: Yep, yep, yep. You were like, "Okay, well we got to fix that."

Shane: "We've got to fix that. We've got to do something about that. That might need work there." And I love how you're not the only person who's said to me, "I got to the point where I was so frustrated and overwhelmed I just was about to quit. And this was my moment." And then clearly when you put that line in the sand, after the live event, you didn't go the other way and quit. You kept going, right?

Brenda: Right.

Shane: You changed your price. You got some members. You fixed your site. You know?

Brenda: I do.

Shane: And it's always amazing to me when I hear these stories that come out of live events, especially like ... It's not just us promoting Flip Your Life Live. Yes, we want everybody to come, it's awesome, but the reason we put the event in our schedule, and our calendar for everybody else, is because we know that the three biggest moments in our life came after we went to a live event. Like that's what changed the game.

Jocelyn: And it wasn't something magical about the person who was hosting the event -

Shane: Or even the information.

Jocelyn: Stuff they were talking about on stage. That type of thing wasn't the magic. And so yes, I'm telling you that Shane and I are not the magic, okay. That's kind of weird to say, but like that is not the magic of going to live events. It's just all of those connections that you make. It's having that anchor on your calendar, just knowing that you're going to this event, and you don't want to show up and have nothing done, or nothing to show for it, and I think just by taking that step and doing that, I think it's fair to say that you think it has been a, it's made a huge impact on your business.

Shane: And I, and it's also to just like the reason our event was changed, like Brenda you said we take action. How our event works is we do a live, we do a session, Jocelyn and I do a quick training, 20 to 30 minutes. We open the floor for the entire room for 20 to 30 minutes for questions. Make sure that everybody gets what we're talking about. And then we have a mastermind session immediately where we implement the thing that we just talked about. Even if it's just getting the plan in place and we did that on purpose, because we knew what really changed the game was taking action on what we learned at the live event. And we didn't like those sit and get things either, because you go home, you've got a 16 page notebook full of notes, and you don't know what to do. You're just more overwhelmed.

Shane: But if you learn, take action, learn, take action, learn, take action. That's when your website gets fixed. That's when you get some members. That's when these other things happen that happen in your story. You tell it in the forums.

Brenda: Right, and the crew that I sat with at the working dinner, I don't, I don't know exactly how we all kind of came together. We had been talking in the community prior, and Joanne and I had been friends back and forth online, and it just, it all just came together that night, and those group of ladies had surrounded me with so much support. Once they saw what had happened, and what was going on, it wasn't like oh poor Brenda, it was oh shoot, now what do we do to fix this? Let's help her fix this.

Shane: Yeah, I love, the we word that you just used is amazing. Like we, how do we fix this together, right?

Brenda: Yeah, and it was totally, it was a we. I did not ever feel like it was a me. When I got home and started trying to find someone to help me with fixing my website, and adding a new theme, and all this other stuff, I had, I have over 100 pages of content, and I was quoted between four and $6000 just to have five to seven pages of my website transferred over into a new theme. And I thought there's no way that as a teacher I'm going to be able to afford that. There's no way, and so that's where I had to roll up my sleeves, and I had the same crew of ladies rallied around me again, and were like this is how we've done it. This is what you do. Jump on, and they sent me videos on how they've done it and it was just, it was just the fact that I never, and I still to this day, do not feel alone.

Brenda: We are, we have a Voxer group that we kick each other's butts, and we hold each other accountable, and we help each other when we need help, and it's just ... It's an amazing group of people that I would have never ever, ever met if I wouldn't have gone to the live event.

Shane: And that's what I love is like, it's like I love, that's the iceberg. We already talked about it a little bit earlier, but you just said, "Man, I've got this amazing group of people now, and we got to the live event and we all just ended up together." But before the live event you were in the community, you had seen each other in the forums, you had talked on Facebook, maybe connected an ad at each other. And then you get to the live event, you all gravitate, "Hey, Kathy." "Hey, Joanne, hey Brenda," and then you kind of end up together. And it feels like the universe pulls you together, but it's all of this stuff you had done before that. All the frustrations, all the overwhelm, all the questions in the community, all the replies in the community, all the logging in and just seeing Kathy's face and recognizing her. You know what I mean?

Brenda: Yep.

Shane: And that's what leads to that moment where you're in the battle together for two days. You get it done, you help each other, and then all of the sudden the relationship deepens, and that doesn't happen unless you get in person live. All these other things are amazing. We've created this support network because we know what it takes to get people together. It is different when it's live. It just really is.

Jocelyn: Yeah, that's, I just love it because the whole reason that we do this is to get people who are like-minded together. The people that you were in a mastermind with are the people that you talk to on Voxer. Those people have what's called a growth mindset. I've been reading a lot about this mindset stuff lately, and the people that we surround ourselves with in our everyday lives oftentimes have a fixed mindset. If you would have told someone, maybe a friend of yours at school, "Hey, my website's broken," then they might have said, "Oh, well, that website stuff's crazy anyway. Like why don't you just give it up, just close it down?" But the people with the growth mindset say, "Oh no, we can fix this. We can help you fix it, and it's going to be amazing when you get finished." It's just surrounding yourself with those people, meeting them in person. It's cool to talk online, but meeting in person is just so much more impactful in my opinion.

Shane: And there's no end game to this online business thing either. You don't just succeed and make it. Something good doesn't just happen and it moves on. Even today when we were getting ready for your call, like Jocelyn was, we had like two calls today, so we were like, "Hey, who's on the schedule today?" And I'm like, "Oh, it's Brenda." "You know, remember? Yeah, Brenda. Remember? Yeah." But like we know you. I know what you look like. I've talked to you in person. I stood there at midnight, after four hours of everyone masterminding, and talked to you about your site being broke.

Shane: It's a different level than when we interview somebody that we haven't met in person. And it's just cool to see everybody triumph. There's one thing I love about our community, and we've researched a lot of communities. We've been a part of a lot of communities, and the one thing I'm most proud of about the Flip Your Life Community is just how everyone tries so hard. Not just for like themselves, but each other. And I just, I really feel that coming from your group. And even just seeing your interactions that I'm not a part of. And that is amazing. It's amazing.

Brenda: Honestly you guys, Jeanette and Kathy, and Joanne, and I, the four of us are like tight. Ever since we're that, that's our Voxer group and I don't know. I seriously do not know how I would have ever made it without them, and I still, I still I don't know, because every day we kick each other's butts. It's awesome. I love it.

Shane: That's what people don't realize. If you don't have that, you don't make it. Just getting everything you did before that moment, then now that you have that, you have everything you need now to make it. You're going to make it. It's just, but you couldn't have done it without all that frustration, all that hard work, and without surrounding yourselves with these people.

Jocelyn: And you know people are always asking about masterminds, like how do I get in one? How do I create one? But the thing about it is like you guys did what it took to get together in person. It was facilitated by our event, but everyone there made the investment, everyone there traveled to the event, so you know those people are in it. They're going to do what it takes to get to the next level, and that's the kind of people that you want to surround yourself with.

Shane: But it really is true ... Every day we get up, we look at each other and we're like our job. People think that our job is to teach them how to do online business. That's part of our job, I guess. And then like, and how to help them figure out what to do next, but that's a part of our job. The way we actually view Flipped Lifestyle, the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast and the Flip Your Life Community, and Flip Your Life Live is, our job is to give everyone the opportunity to go succeed on their own, because they don't realize that they have the opportunity. We just got to put it in front of them.

Shane: And but if we can do a live event, but if you don't come to the live event, you don't have a Voxer mastermind after the live event. You don't have these ladies in your life, and that's really what the live event is. It's the ultimate opportunity to give yourself a boost to actually succeed.

Brenda: Right, exactly.

Jocelyn: All right. We -

Shane: Ooh, okay, all right.

Jocelyn: We've gone, we've gone on and on about how amazing Flip Your Life is. Flip Your Life Live. And if you're not coming, you can find out more about that at flippedlifestlye.com/live.

Shane: Good segue. Good segue.

Jocelyn: We'd love to see you there. And let's jump into a little bit about what's going on. Okay, so we talked about your success story. We talked about how you have some people in your membership, which is awesome.

Shane: And you've actually pulled the ship around and fixed the broken things, right?

Brenda: Yep.

Shane: That's always good.

Jocelyn: All right, and so that is past you now, which is awesome. It's always good to get past those technical things. Let's talk about what is going on as far as growing the membership. What types of fears, or mindset issues, or obstacles, are holding you back now?

Brenda: I feel like I, I've really created a really good foundation. I have lots of content, I've got opt ins, I've got sales funnels, I've got my email list, I've got my Facebook group. I have all the right things, I feel like, in place. Clearly I can always add more opt-ins and things like that, but every week I publish a blog post, with usually an opt in and a catch to it, and then brings them back to the website. And so I guess I'm looking for ways to well, obviously grow the membership, but I feel like there is a missing link somewhere to where I'm not getting enough fresh eyes on my website, or the people that have been involved with the Facebook group just aren't purchasing. And just finding out why they're not joining the membership, or what is it that I'm missing that I need to add or do, or change, or whatever to change that so that there are more members coming into the membership.

Shane: All right, so I am pulling up Art Teachers Teaching Art, the group, right now. Let's see, is it private?

Brenda: It is.

Shane: Okay, hold on. So I'm going to hit join group, could you approve me?

Brenda: Yep, let me see if I can do that right now?

Shane: Don't hang up. We're -

Brenda: No.

Shane: We're live, folks, right here on the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. Admins have got it. I don't think I've ever, I don't think I've ever joined a Facebook group live on the podcast, so this is a first.

Brenda: I don't think I've ever okayed a member on a podcast either.

Shane: All right, so what I want to see is, I want to look, while you're looking for that.

Brenda: Yep, there you are, I've got you.

Shane: I got me, all right, here we go.

Brenda: You're on, you're in, you're in. You're in like Flynn.

Shane: All right, so I'm looking at the group here. And what I'm seeing is what I thought I would see once I got in. So I'm going to count one post, let's see, you were doing a Facebook live. I see a quote, two, three, four, five, six. I'm six posts in, I see no promotion. I see welcoming art people, seven. I see a good start question, starter with some comments. Okay, so I'm 10 posts in before I saw the first thing that said anything about adding packets to the art thing, and it's a link to Teachers Pay Teachers, which is a third party marketplace for lesson plans. Okay?

Brenda: Right.

Shane: Now that was on, let's see, that was about, looks like about four days ago. Three of four days ago. Now I'm going to keep going back, I'm going to keep scrolling. I see you're just giving, you've got a lot, there's so much value here. There's just so much conversation going on, you're this, you're doing a great job leading this community. People clearly feel a part of it. But I have to go all the way back to, oh gosh I'm back into December. We're recording in January. I'm still not seeing another promotion. So what I'm getting at here is you're not promoting the membership enough. You're leading your community, you threw something to a third party marketplace, but you're not doing the thing that actually builds your business which is getting more members.

Shane: That's where we got to look at is your promotion strategy for the membership. I had another Flip Your Life member, her name's Jennifer, that I was working with in our private mastermind group. And she had this really huge fear holding her back of ruining her third party market sales, and she didn't want to promote her membership, because she was scared she would ruin her one off sales. And I was like, "You've got to get over that. Like the thing that builds your business is building your business, not building the third party marketplaces business." And she, so basically she did a mindset shift in eight weeks, she added like 300 people to her membership. And you may know Jennifer from the live event, of course.

Brenda: I do, I do.

Shane: Yeah, exactly. So what I'm saying is, this is a decision to promote your membership every day. Does that mean you have to post about it in your Facebook group every day? No. But it's just a decision, I'm going to promote this thing relentlessly until I have 100 people in it. And how we do that, we can talk about strategically, and make a decision, but you're just not promoting it.

Jocelyn: It doesn't have to be a big spam fest. You don't have to go in there every day and be like join my membership. You can do it in ways that are more subtle than that. And that's the way that I always like to do it on Elementary Librarian, and especially if you have been ... Okay, so if you've had this group for a long time and they're not used to a lot of sales pitches, you don't want to go in there every single day and hit them over the head with this thing, because that's going to kill your group. But what you want to do instead, is making sure that you're giving them plenty of value.

Shane: Which you are.

Jocelyn: And I know that you're already doing that, and then you're going to go to them, and you're going to be subtle about selling. So yes. So the way that you're going to do that is you are going to present something to them of value, and you're going to say, "Hey, if you like this free thing I have much more of this in my membership, and you can find more information about how to join that here."

Shane: Yeah, you've got to move them not to the quick, I gotta a couple sales on a third party marketplace mindset to, "Hey guys, here's a free thing. Click here to get it for your classroom." And you've got to move these 6000 people to 6000 emails which get automated emails to sell them your thing. Right?

Brenda: Right. Right.

Shane: And you've got to have some kind of regular promotion, that you do live, probably for the next, I'd say two quarters. I would go at least like 24 weeks in a row, of every week. One night doing a live webinar, and at the end of your webinar you sell your monthly membership, period. And like -

Jocelyn: That's a great way to get emails, so just in your group say, "Hey guys, I'm having a free training on ... " Make sure that it's the people that you want to attract to your membership, so I think that we had talked a little bit earlier that you do more middle and high school ages, is that right?

Brenda: Right.

Jocelyn: Okay.

Shane: But you're getting a lot of requests that you think a lot of the people in the Facebook group are elementary, correct?

Brenda: There's a, there's quite a few that are elementary, but it's a lot of K through, like K through 8, so they do, some have to do some of the intermediate lesson plans, but also a lot of elementary as well.

Jocelyn: What I would do, if I wanted to attract primarily the people who teach upper grades, is I would say, "Hey guys, I'm having a free training for upper grades art," and some relevant topic. I'm not very artistic, so I can't really throw any examples out there. But like maybe something to do with Valentine's Day.

Shane: Calligraphy, I don't know.

Jocelyn: Yeah, like something. And so that way it tells people hey, this is for people who teach upper grades. Does that mean that no one else will register? No. But it's a good way to get relevant people on your email list.

Shane: It's stuff you've already created.

Jocelyn: Because it's a free training, they're going to tell their friends about it. And you can even suggest that. Like, "Hey, do you know anybody else who can benefit from this training? Let them know about it," and they will proceed to share it. But I would call it a training, rather than a webinar, because teachers don't know what a webinar is."

Shane: Yeah, and you're going to have to be prolific at this. Like that's what you're missing. You've been consistent, you've worked through the struggles, but you're not being very prolific, and your promotion of all this cool stuff, no one knows all this amazing stuff you have, because you're not telling them about it.

Jocelyn: And just because you posted about it six months ago in your Facebook group, doesn't mean that everybody saw it. And there's been a lot of people who have joined since then.

Shane: Yeah, you really do have to get, and this is for everybody listening to this show right now. If you don't have a mindset of daily promotion, your business will not grow, and when I say daily promotion there's a lot of ways to do that, but you've got to say, "I'm going to give myself a raise every day." Every time someone joins your membership you've got to raise that day. How many, how long do we have to wait at our normal nine to five jobs for somebody to give us a raise? But if I go get five members at $50 a month, I just gave myself a $250 a month raise.

Shane: So you've got to give yourself a raise every day, and that means maybe every day you promote this free training that happens every Sunday night for the next 24 weeks. And maybe you rotate it, do what Jocelyn said with the secondary people, because you can get them in now. But for your elementary stuff, you can do a great promotion. You could say, "Hey, this is the webinar, this ones for K through 6 only." So you get all those K through six people in there, that are looking through this stuff, and then because there was a lot of K through six teachers, elementary school that are teaching art. And so all of them show up for this one, and at the end of it you're like, "Hey guys, here's the deal, if anyone joins tonight, not only do you get this great rate on my monthly membership, but I'll let you personally request a lesson plan and I'll create it for you."

Shane: And they'll tell you all of this new stuff you need to create. They'll tell you exactly what they need, as you fill in the gaps in your content, and you'll be like, "Oh, these five people joined and they all five gave me a great idea for my next five packets that I'm going to create." So they just tell you what to do, and then that's going to make the next person buy better, because they're going to, you're already going to have then what they ask. You can do all these different ... You can rotate, like one week do the upper, next week do the lower, and that way your webinar's different every week. And you just every day, "Hey guys, I'm doing this training on Monday. Don't forget to register tonight," and you just do that every day in your group. It's really passive.

Shane: Maybe you give them a free resource for registering. "Hey guys, anyone that registers for my training, even if you don't make it, don't worry, I'll send you a replay, and I'll send you this free thing that's only found in my community." And you just constantly grow that list, and you transfer these people from Facebook to your audience, to the webinar, to your membership. And then you just get real prolific. You just say, "I'm going to do this. It's 24 weeks of my life to set up the foundation of the rest of my life, and I'm just going to knock it out, and I'm going to run on a sprint, and then I'll throttle back and we'll do some things that we grow a little more passively." But that's really the only component you're missing. That missing link is prolific promotion of all this amazing stuff that you've already created.

Brenda: Okay, that sounds terrifying to me, but I'm going to do it.

Shane: Scary. What's terrifying about that? Honestly, what's the, what's the scary part? The work, or the promotion, or the what?

Brenda: No, definitely not the work. The promotion part, yes, is a little bit scary. But I've had some pretty mean people send me messages, or send me things, of just something that they didn't agree with, or something that they didn't like about something, or something that they had seen and didn't agree with, and people can be pretty brutal when they're hiding behind a computer keyboard. So part of doing something live like that for a group of our teachers, I mean I have to think in the grand scheme there are maybe one or two that are just rude and mean, but in the grand scheme, there are going to be a lot more that won't be.

Shane: I actually discovered a really good tool to deal with people like that. It's called the door. So what I do is when anyone, if I read a sentence and it starts getting really mean in one of my Facebook groups, I just show them the door. Like you're, this is your group. You're in charge. Just drop the ban hammer and bye. You're kick, just kick them out forever without remorse. Nobody will even know they're gone.

Brenda: I have done that within the group, but I've had people send me the private messages too, that is just like crazy horrible things that people say, which I know it happens to many people and it's happened to you guys. I know that for sure, but it's just that fact of you could have 100 people telling you this is awesome, and it's that one person that says, "You suck, and you should get out of the profession now," and you know.

Shane: Someone told you to retire, that's awesome. I've never heard of that one before.

Jocelyn: Here's the cool thing about the electronic world, is that we have the capability of blocking people now. If someone does send you a hateful message, just block them.

Shane: And do it, and don't read the whole message. The second that I recognize someone's being a troll, and hateful, and not being constructive at all ... Like this morning I got an email, and this, this lady had, what she did was she went to our web page and she signed up for a free trial. Well she started the process, but she didn't finish it. We have a trigger, like after three hours, if you haven't finished the form, that it sends you another email. Well she sent ... The email went out, somehow the timing worked out where she finished the form right after that email went out, and then she saw the email. She wasn't like hateful about it. She was just like, "Hey, I think there might be a problem with your automation because i got both these emails." It was super nice, but I've had other people that are like, "I know this isn't a real person, and I hate you and you're the devil- I just hit delete.

Shane: As soon as I feel that negativity, you just got to get rid of it, because if you don't it will eat at you, like we're all human. We evolved in ways to go run from danger. The scary things matter more, and it's like you can't let that eat you alive, and the best way to do is just to ban them and let them go.

Jocelyn: Yeah, and one thing that I have done in the past, when I still used to answer customer service, and when I check my own email and stuff like that, I would do something that I would call the worst case scenario. I would just imagine what's the worst thing that someone could say to me, and maybe it's something that somebody has already said to you. Well, first of all, like Shane said, if they're being a troll for no reason but just to be mean, then kick them out immediately. But if they do have something to say, that you feel like you need to respond to, write a message before you even get that message, or that email.

Jocelyn: What I used to do is, the example I always use is when I raised my prices for Elementary Librarian, because I didn't just raise them a little bit, I raised them a lot. I pretty much more than tripled my prices. And I knew that one of the things that people would say is, "Hey, this is too expensive, why did you raise the price so much?" So what I did, is I wrote out a response before anybody even said it. That way, if I got that message, all I would have to do is just copy and paste. I didn't have to think about it, and my mind had already sort of dealt with that worst case situation, and that's something that really helped me.

Shane: Like if you come up with, come up with what are the ten worst things anyone's ever actually said to you.

Jocelyn: Or even like the three worst things.

Shane: Yeah, the three whatever, and then just like, you probably have a couple of examples. Go and just type a response out to that person, whatever they used to say and deal with it. And now just never deal with it again. It's been dealt with. And if there's 100 people just like them.

Jocelyn: And I'll say always remember the screen capture rule. You don't ever want to say anything to anyone that can be used against you. Just remember that people can screen capture, so I'm always very cordial. Thank you for your email, I understand.

Shane: 99% of the time we don't write back though. I can't tell you how many people in my Facebook, our Facebook page, I'm just like delete and ban. Delete and ban. Because it's just not worth it. You're not going to change their mind, nine times out of 10 they're just trolling.

Jocelyn: Like they're never going to become a customer, most likely, so block and move on.

Shane: I can usually tell the per- I've had a couple incidents where people wrote me, and I started reading the first couple sentences, and it was definitely hate, but it was almost like desperate help me hate. And there's a difference in that, and just you all suck, and talk funny, and you're from, you're hillbillies from Kentucky, why would anyone listen to you? Stupid crap that people say, compared to someone who's lashing out because they're frustrated.

Shane: And you've probably heard that, maybe they are frustrated because they can't pay your prices, or because they wish they had the ethic to go out and put this out there and sell it. That actually is jealousy. But ban hammer. Ban hammer.

Shane: Or you, and what you could do too is, you know like pay someone 50 bucks once a week, to go through all of your messages before you read them, and delete the bad ones. I mean, just find someone, give them 50 bucks and say bye. Delete all the bad one. Now you go in after them and check all the messages, and you only get to see the good ones.

Jocelyn: Yeah, we've done, we've done that in the past. It's totally okay to do that. But just know that you don't owe anything to anyone. The only person that you owe anything to is your paying customers and that's it. If somebody is complaining about something free, or some type of value that you're giving in your group, and it's not good enough for them, then don't let the door hit you on your way out. We don't have time for that. We don't have time for that kind of negativity.

Jocelyn: It's just like this podcast. We give, give, give. We do not have any commercials, other than sometimes we mention a URL for our own stuff, but other than that we have no sponsorships. We have no interruptions. We bring you content once or twice every single week. And we ask for nothing in return. I mean, the only thing we ask in return is please start a business, or please make some, take some type of action.

Shane: Right, exactly.

Jocelyn: That's the only thing that we ask from our listeners. And so when people complain, we're just kind of like whatever.

Shane: Jocelyn had a good point up there to though. Where you do want to listen to the complaints and the negativity is if a paying customer finds something wrong. You've got to be able to not associate that with anything personal, it's for some reason they feel let down and we've got to address that. Now, it's still going to come up sometimes, half the time where that's going to be like okay, that might be unreasonable, or that might not be what's happening, they're just confused but we still have to, we have to address paying customers because they pay. But that's a different kind of animal. But in that free group, if someone's going to complain that you're going to give a free training, and get email opt ins and sell something at the end of it, come on bro.

Jocelyn: And they don't have to sign up.

Brenda: And they can leave at any time. They can turn it off.

Shane: Yeah, it's not like you're holding them hostage. Ha ha, I got you in the group. Like you can't get out. Everybody grab your markers, art class, go.

Shane: I know that that's an easy answer to a not easy thing, because that is ... It's not like you're just going to walk out of here with a ban hammer strapped over your shoulder. And you're just like ready to kick people out of your group. But you're awesome, you've got something that people bought. You found members. That means there's 100 more members, let's worry about those people a lot more going forward than the negative people and just do it.

Shane: And here's another thing too. If you'll do what I told you to do for the next 24 weeks, like what is that? Two quarters? If you'll do that, I promise you by about the fourth week, you're just going to be over, you're going to hear all the things you could possibly hear, and you're just going, it's going to become so much habit of just doing this every week, and it's just over, and you just grow your business and you're not going to care. When 10 people join at your first webinar, and then 10 people join at your second webinar, and then someone sends you hate mail, you're like, "I got 30 members now, I don't care." Right?

Brenda: Right.

Shane: That's where it'll just all go away.

Jocelyn: Okay, Brenda, we have had a lot of fun talking to you today. We want to know what is one thing that you plan to do in the next 24 hours or so based on what we talked about in this call?

Brenda: Well I am going to grab a calendar, and I am going to map out one live webinar, or training, a week with probably three or four different subject areas that I'll touch on. And then I'll be able to do those lives and then repeat those lives at different times, and with tweaks, and everything, after I kind of figure out how to do the first couple of them.

Shane: That sounds, hey listen, that's ... Being prolific in that way is going to grow your business like you couldn't imagine. The first couple might be hard, but then it's going to be like this is working. This is working. And don't forget I have a webinar training in the community, so like it's got a Google Drive sheet, you can download it, and I have every slide with notes on what should be on that slide.

Jocelyn: And you can just edit it.

Shane: You can just edit it, and fill it in, and make your webinars that way.

Brenda: Perfect. That's awesome.

Jocelyn: All right. I see here that you also have a bible verse that you would like to share with our listeners. And tell us what that is, and you can go ahead and read that.

Brenda: Sure, it's Isaiah 40:31. And it says, "But they that weighed upon the Lord shall renew their strength. They shall mount up with wings as eagles. They shall run and not be weary, and they shall walk and not faint.

Shane: That is a really good verse for entrepreneurs. Because sometimes it feels like you're waiting for a while. But then you figure out you're on the eagles back and everything's okay. So good stuff. That's a great thing.

Brenda: Yep, and I'm surrounded by eagles.

Shane: Oh, she's got them eagles out. They're listening right now, you know that, right? They're going to hear this podcast. We're going to give them a shout out. Real quick just give a, give your group a shout out. Who are they? They've all been on the podcast I think.

Brenda: Yep, yep. Joanne, Jeanette, Kathy, and I'm going to even give a little shout out to Evan, because he's helped me quite a bit too.

Shane: Evan Burse, the man, the myth, the legend. Good stuff.

Brenda: Yeah, another fellow artist.

Shane: Another fellow artist. He is. And he's over at the cartoonblock.com. All right, listen Brenda, thank you so much for being so transparent, so open with your fears, your struggles, your frustrations, and really just giving us all an insight on how to get through those things because they don't go away, and we really are better together when we're all walking down this entrepreneurial road. Thank you so much, and I cannot wait to see how your webinar series goes.

Brenda: Thank you so much guys, I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with me today.

Shane: All right guys, that wraps up another great episode with one of our Flip Your Life community members, and man what an awesome discussion we had today with Brenda about Flip Your Life Live, and the impact that it had on her life and her business.

Shane: We would love to see you at the next Flip Your Life Live, this September 2019, in Lexington, Kentucky. You can learn all about that event at flippedlifestyle.com/live. That's F-L-I-P-P-E-Dlifestyle.com. Tickets are selling in an amazing rate, and VIP tickets are almost sold out. So make sure if you plan on attending, or would just like to look at it and try and attend, that's flippedlifestyle.com/live. We'll see you there.

Shane: All right guys, that is all the time we have for this week. Until next time, get out there and do whatever it takes to flip your life. We'll see you then.

Jocelyn: Bye.

Links and resources mentioned on today’s show: * Brenda's Website * Flip Your Life LIVE 2019 Tickets & Registration Information * Flip Your Life community

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In today's episode, we help Wally grow his life and business strategy podcast.

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Jocelyn Sams: Hey y'all. On today's podcast, we help Wally grow his life and business strategy podcast.

Shane Sams: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, where life always comes before work. We're your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams.

Shane Sams: We're a real family that figured out how to make our entire living online, and now we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? All right, let's get started.

Shane Sams: What's going on everybody? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. It is great to be back with you again. Today, super excited to talk to another member of the Flip Your Life community and help them take their life and business to the next level. I'm really excited about today's guest because I was once featured on his podcast. It is the host of the Men of Abundance Podcast, Wally Carmichael. Wally, what is going on, my friend?

Wally C.: Man, just living a beautiful life, living my best life, brother. So excited to be talking with you.

Shane Sams: You are the most positive person in my Facebook newsfeed. I just wanted to tell you that. You make me happy, man. You're like a ray of sunshine beaming into my social media account every morning.

Wally C.: I greatly appreciate that. That's the intent.

Shane Sams: But you do make me jealous, though, because you refuse to live anywhere but a place with a beach, and you're just always showing those beach pictures. So I'm a little jealous sometimes. I'm jealous, but you know, we need a little envy to drive us forward sometimes.

Jocelyn Sams: Hey, I'm looking out at a beautiful bluebird right now, so.

Shane Sams: What'd you say, Jocelyn?

Jocelyn Sams: I'm looking out at a beautiful bluebird right now, so it's not so bad.

Shane Sams: Yeah, there's a bluebird flying around in January, so we're doing good up here in Kentucky too.

Wally C.: Wonderful. Yeah, you guys got that beautiful lake up there too. That's just cool.

Jocelyn Sams: Well, it's great to have you here today. We're really excited to talk with you. Let's give the audience a little bit of background information. Tell us a little bit about you and what you've been doing for, well, your life, and what you're doing online.

Wally C.: Yeah, absolutely. So I grew up in a trailer behind another man's house. We didn't even have the money for a trailer park. Pretty rough lifestyle. I won't get into all of that, but that led to me just realizing I can't live like this my entire life. A lot of bad things, drugs, alcohol, fighting, all kind of stuff, and my uncle came home one year from leave. He was in the army, and I dropped out of college because I run out of money for school, for college. He said, "Join the military. You'll get some education along the way and travel the world." Basically, I said a few words. I said, "That's not happening. That's not my dream."

Wally C.: I had no desire to do that. Well, after working two full-time jobs and realized it ain't working. It's just time to do, so I walked into the recruiter's office, signed up as a combat medic, and traveled the world. Did 25 years, retired about, goodness, time is passing so fast. About four years ago now, maybe, and retired in Hawaii. We had been there about ten years, and my entire life, even as a young man, I've always been entrepreneurial. I've always wanted, just like everybody else, I've been that man. I say I've been ungratefully chasing a six and seven figure income for the wrong reason.

Wally C.: One day, I'm sitting on the gazebo right there from where you and I were texting that one point Shane. It's Saturday morning. My son's playing in the water, and he said, "Dad, dad, come and play." But I'm sitting there listening to another podcast to learn how to make more money and live this best life that I dream of, and when his face changed from excitement to disappointment, it just hit me like a brick. My wife's voice always telling me, "Wally, what the hell are you chasing?" It was just loud and clear like she was standing right there, but she was still back in the house asleep.

Wally C.: I took the headphones off, I set them down, and from that point on, I just decided. Here I was, sitting on the beach in Hawaii in front of my house. Had a six figure income, not a huge six figure income, but living pretty darn comfortable, and I'm wanting more. I was just so ungrateful for what I already had, so I started this whole journey of, so much more. I just decided I'm living a life of abundance. I don't know that I said those words specifically, but it just hit me, and as soon as I started being more grateful for what I had and it was a process, so much more started coming into my life. So then I just had an idea to write a book, Living Your Life of Abundance, but I didn't want it to be about my life. I wanted to do other people's lives in there as well.

Wally C.: So I started the Men of Abundance podcast, and then I started getting introduced to people like you who are just living an amazing life and somehow paying it forward to the community. They all got kick in the gut moments, and that's what I'm seeing that you talk about on the show, but in a nutshell, almost 50 years worth. There you have it. That's basically where we're at, kind of where we're at today.

Shane Sams: Well, we all hit, we call that the catalyst, your kick in the gut moment, right? What we've realized in almost every person's story that we come in contact with in the Flip Your Life community is there is a catalyst moment that kind of wakes them up. I hate to get into, I'm not saying "woke" like the kids do these days, but it just kind of makes you open your eyes and be like, "What am I doing? What am I really here for?"

Shane Sams: Being in the entrepreneurial world, we're surrounded by a lot of really successful people and there's a lot of people that are trying to do really cool, great things. I don't ever want to discount what anyone else is doing, but you can get lost in that ego-driven shuffle of, "Am I important enough? Am I reaching seven figures, eight figures, whatever," right? Then you don't realize, oh my gosh, but then I haven't seen my kids and I missed that recital and I didn't go to that ballgame. What am I doing? I didn't go jump in the water with my kid when he wanted to swim with me because I was too busy trying to make the next dollar.

Shane Sams: That's really what we talk about when we say Flipped Lifestyle. Even in entrepreneurship, you gotta be careful not to fall into the world standards of what's successful. You gotta go build your own success, and you gotta build a life that makes your kids and your spouse and your family happy, and you got that balance where you're not trading one rat race for another.

Jocelyn Sams: I love what you talked about about truly being thankful and grateful for what you have. I've been doing some reading lately, and that's a big theme in a lot of the books I've been reading is just making sure that you are doing that so that you can continue to grow. I think that maybe I've kind of let that get lost along the way the last few months and I'm trying to be intentional about being in a place of thankfulness more often. So that's really cool that you-

Shane Sams: It can all, because you can lose it quickly, you know what I mean? You can just lose that gratefulness and that thankful, like being in the military. You've seen all these places. You remind me of Jocelyn's dad a little bit. He was in the military and he's been to all these countries, and you and him are probably the two people I know that have been to the most places, maybe. You know what I mean? And it's like, but you can lose sight of that, and it almost, when your life becomes routine even when you've got some success, you can become unhappy in the middle of all your success if you're not careful.

Wally C.: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I have conversations with guys all the time that are in that very situation, and we'll get into the whole business side of it, but that's how I started the business side of it. A couple of guys about eight months into my podcast started asking me, "Do you coach people in living a life of abundance?" And I was like, "No, that's not even where I planned on this going." But then a spouse contacted me and she's like, "Look, I've been listening to your show. I love the conversations you have. I love your lifestyle. I love your mindset. My husband, we make plenty of money. He makes plenty of money. He's just not here. He comes home every night, but he's just not here. He's disengaged. Will you coach him?" I'm like, oh man. He's gotta want that first, but that really got the ball rolling and my mind kind of spinning.

Shane Sams: Well, let me back up for a second then. So you're entrepreneurial, but you had this career in the military. You retired, and you basically just started this podcast to have these conversations with people, and it sounds like the kind of, after you had that little catalyst moment where you saw your son's face get disappointed, it was almost more just to explore this in your own life, it sounds life.

Wally C.: Exactly.

Shane Sams: You started the podcast, you started talking to people, reaching out to people, and you've kind of fallen into this entrepreneurial stuff of wait a minute, this could be my second career. This could be my second income. My content has kind of moved me toward maybe having an accidental business on my hands.

Wally C.: That's exactly what happened. I originally started the podcast to gather more stories for the book that I still haven't written, although I've written a book since then, but I haven't written that book. Now, as it stands at the time of this conversation, I'm 100% working from home, and I have been for a while. I've been teleworking, but now that's a done deal. So I'm focusing on that.

Shane Sams: What's interesting is we were talking the other day on Facebook, because after, we've kind of developed a little online friendship since I talked on your podcast. I noticed that you have had some struggles with even turning this into a business, like charging people and is it good? Is it bad? I've seen you post some very interesting poll questions like that too, and I know that a lot of people kind of struggle with that, right? Because sometimes, you have a mission in life, and you're like, but do I charge people for my mission? Is that just going back to those old ways? What do you think about that in your journey right now?

Wally C.: Yeah, that's exactly one of my biggest struggles is just that, and it's kind of evolved a little bit because of one of the coaches that I hired, quite frankly. He kind of made some sense in the whole process of, "What are you gonna charge for and should you charge?" I made the decision that quite frankly, I have to charge for much of it, but I still struggle with it.

Shane Sams: Yeah, and one thing that we got over that originally was you almost owe it to people to charge people, because if they don't invest in themselves, they will not do things, right? Think about everything you get in life for free. You get a free sample or you get a little toy trinket from an arcade game or that your kids get and they throw it away in five seconds. You get the Happy Meal toy and it's lost in a week. Think about how kids interact with free things, right?

Shane Sams: Almost everything like that goes away because there's no investment. People have no reminder. They have no ouch that says, man, I've got to take advantage of this so that I can do something with all this coaching or information or whatever I'm learning. I had a buddy, or Jocelyn had a friend the other day that was selling a course. What was that course about, Jocelyn? Was it about clothes or something?

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, so I bought a course from Kelly Snyder. She's actually a friend of mine, and she does a course that is called Adore Your Wardrobe. It is all about finding the type of clothing that looks the best on your body type. So I actually purchased this and it just started today, so I'm really excited about that. But yeah, I just bought that.

Shane Sams: Kelly sent her a message though right after she bought it, and it was like, "Oh, I would've given that to you. Blah blah blah. You're my friend." But it's kind of like no, if she didn't pay for it, she's not gonna use the course, right? It would just be like, oh, someone gave me something for free. I'll check it out later.

Jocelyn Sams: You just don't feel the urgency to actually do it. If she were to give it to me, then I'd be like, oh, well. I'll just put it off and do it later, but because I've made the investment, I'm like, okay. I need to get this done. I invested in this and I need to do the coursework. It's the same thing with us. Any time that we've ever given anyone our courses or our community, I don't know of anyone that's actually doing anything with it and actually made it work.

Shane Sams: Yeah, it's never been good when we've given stuff away. It wasn't good for them, because they just didn't do it. Your story is really interesting, but I think there's something deeper underneath even that struggle, with that kind of fear. You started creating content, which is the first thing we almost tell everybody to do. Hey, look, we're gonna figure out your idea. We're gonna figure out your avatar. We're gonna figure out your product. We're gonna do those things, but why not just turn the YouTube camera on? Why not just turn the Facebook Live on? Why not start a Facebook page or a blog or something, just start throwing things out there, right?

Shane Sams: You did that. You just like, ah, I'm gonna start a podcast. I'm gonna write a book. I don't know what it's gonna end up, and then these opportunities started showing up because you took action and you created things, right? Sometimes, it just takes that doing of the thing to kind of open doors for later to have a business, to have influence, to have impact on the world.

Wally C.: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Once I started doing that, initially because I was gonna have guests on, it was like maybe the first month or two was a little bit of a struggle getting guests and contacting people, then after that, I turn people away. I'm literally booked out into April, almost May.

Shane Sams: Isn't that funny how that works out?

Wally C.: It's crazy.

Shane Sams: When I first started my first podcast, it was a football coaching podcast called The Coach XO Show, and I didn't know how I was gonna start. I didn't know who I was gonna talk to. I was just this little football coach from Kentucky. So I actually reached out to a guy I went to high school with who coached seventh grade defense. He wasn't even the head coach on the middle school team. He was the seventh grade defensive coordinator. He's like fifth in command on the middle school team, right? And I was like, but I need somebody to talk to, and he knew a lot about the 6-2 defense, and we had jammed about it at church before. So I said, "Hey, man, do you wanna be on my podcast?"

Shane Sams: So that was my first guest, right? Well, literally within eight weeks, I had talked, my guests went from the seventh grade middle school coach, right? To Hal Mumme, who is one of the legends of college football, one of the greatest offensive coordinators of all time. Then I talked to this guy down in Louisiana who had just went viral because his team never punted. He had just been featured on ESPN, right? I sent him a message and he talked to me on my podcast. Then I talked to this other guy who had been an NFL veteran for 12 years, and he was a weightlifting guy, Crossfit guy. Really famous Crossfit guy.

Shane Sams: So within eight weeks, I went from the middle school coach to three really, really super high profile guests that I had no business talking to, but it was just because I took action. It was because I created something, and I kept creating something, and it's just unbelievable, the doors that open when you do the thing, not when you dream the thing, right?

Wally C.: Yeah, absolutely.

Shane Sams: And I love watching your journey. I kind of feel like I've seen your journey from the beginning, because we kind of crossed paths early when you started doing this, and I said to Jocelyn just the other day, but I think before you'd even scheduled this. "Man, Wally's starting to evolve. Look at this. Look what he's doing. Look at his podcast. Look what's happening here." Right? Like we could see that happening, then when you came into the community and we started talking, I was really excited to do this podcast.

Shane Sams: So let's talk a little bit more about the business aspect. So what is Men of Abundance evolving into? So you've had these people wanting you to coach, but that's a real, broad, general term, right? You don't just coach everything. You coach something, right? So where do you see this evolving into a business, like into a coaching business? What exactly are you gonna talk to these men about? And you are gonna, it's men, right? That you're really focused on.

Wally C.: Correct, yeah. That's right, yeah. I'm primarily focused on men, and I could niche down even more on specifically veterans because I'm big in the veteran community, of course. I'm part of a couple different organizations involving veterans, but the way it evolved is as I started the process and talking with the other coaches and figuring out how to coach living a life of abundance. As I started getting into it, I was realizing that yeah, a lot of guys want more in their life in family, faith, finances, and fitness, but they don't, one, most of them aren't willing to pay for it because they don't want it that much. They're not willing to put in any real work towards it.

Wally C.: So one of the coaches I was talking with, he pointed out that, he said, "Well, who are the people that you talk to that you know that would pay for such a service?" Bottom line, we booked it down to business owners, entrepreneurs, because they're forward movers. They're constantly progressing in life, and they know the benefits of personal development. So I already had some business skills because I've had many different businesses throughout the course of my life, and I knew the basics, a little bit more than the basics of business and marketing than the average guy out there, like your average plumber, chiropractor, dentist, child psychologist, AC type business. They're great at what they do in business, but they really, they're not great at marketing. They're not great at business strategies. So that's where-

Shane Sams: Or balancing life, maybe.

Wally C.: Exactly, exactly that. All of that, so that's what I decided to do was that's why I called it the business side, abundance and prosperity mastery, because a lot of these guys don't want to get coached in living a life of abundance and the mindset stuff, but I've developed a way that I'm able to give them the strategies and show them the strategies they need to greatly increase the revenue and profits within their business. Oh, by the way, as I'm having conversations with them, I'm changing and I'm enhancing their mindset through the words, because I'm correcting the words that they're using, and I'm giving them a few soft skills that they don't realize I'm actually putting them on. They think it's more strategies, and you and I know all the entrepreneurs we get a chance to talk to, anything that you gonna succeed in life, business, it doesn't matter what it is. It's 80% mindset and 20% strategy.

Wally C.: I just give that to them, and I'm seeing that they're having results in that, so now, I've been working with a couple guys kinda just trying them out, guys that I know that are gonna do what I ask them to, we're gonna work together. They're getting benefits. They're getting, their life is improving. They're spending more time with family, more quality time, because what happens with a lot of business owners is when they find that they're not making much money, they want to put more time and money into the business, taking away from their family, faith, and their own health.

Shane Sams: So what does abundance mean to you? Because that's important because these definitions matter. Jocelyn and I struggled with this for years with Flipped Lifestyle, not just defining what the Flipped Lifestyle looked like to us, but really being able to tell people what we do, right? We always try to use the words "so that" in everything, at the end of every sentence in our sales copy because it's not enough to say, "We'll help you start an online business." We'll help you start an online business so that you won't have to work for anyone else and you can be your own boss, so that you can control your time and take your kids to school in the morning. So that you can not miss the dance recital and the thing, right?

Shane Sams: When you throw out big words like abundance, that can mean a lot of things, right? And you're clearly, from what you've just told me, you're not just saying, "I know everything about business," right? It's more like, you're kind of just using business as the vehicle to insert these mindset shifts. So what is abundance to you and what you're trying to tell these guys?

Wally C.: That's a great question. That's actually one of the last question I ask every single one of my guests, is what does abundance mean to them and for me, it means one, having enough resources in my life to live the way that I want to live and where I want to live, but also having enough to be able to pay it forward and contribute to others, whether it's time, treasures or talents. It's not always about money. It's about resources, and resources is not just money. Don't get me wrong. I'm all about making money because it's a tool, and it's a very powerful tool, but too many people just want to, I just had a conversation recently. A guy who said, "I want to be a billionaire." Well, why?

Wally C.: When you break it down, it's all because they want what you and I have. Time freedom, live where you want to live, and do the things with your family that you want to do. It doesn't take a billion dollars to do that.

Jocelyn Sams: Exactly, yeah. I think that's something that we've realized even in just the last couple years is that there is a limit to how much we want to scale. It's different for all people, but for us, we don't enjoy managing people, and because of that, we don't want a team of a bunch of people. It's just one of those things. You have to make that decision, what do you want to do? I think sometimes, Shane's like, "Well, we need to make $8 billion," and I'm like, well, why? Because I don't-

Shane Sams: Well, I get caught up in that trap all the time. I've got to constantly, we have calibration in our house. That's something that a lot of people don't have, but when one of us is getting too far one way, we can pull each other back. I do get into that comparison is the thief of joy kind of situation sometimes because we see something else and we think that's the road to get to what we want, but it's not really the road to what we want when we really look at it.

Shane Sams: Jocelyn and I wrote down goals, if you listened to our podcast a couple of weeks ago, the good, the bad, and the future is what we called last year. We really said no to a lot of things this year. We've taken some things off of our calendar, we've not pursued some opportunities we had after a conversation very similar to that. We don't need that much money. We don't need that person. We don't need that opportunity. We're happy with our kitchen table business. I dig it. I posted a picture right before we started. I'm sitting in a chair with my feet propped up on a stool. Jocelyn's in her robe and a blanket. Are you wearing your robe or is that a sweater?

Jocelyn Sams: No, I'm wearing pajama pants.

Shane Sams: She's wearing pajamas.

Jocelyn Sams: And a sweatshirt.

Shane Sams: And we're looking out a window at this crisp, cool lake. That's our kitchen table business. We don't need a studio. We don't need a producer. We don't need, I emailed you back and forth and told you we're gonna be a minute late today, right? I don't need an assistant doing that for me. That's not the life we want.

Jocelyn Sams: If people want that, that's cool. I don't judge them for it, but it's all about figuring out what you want and how you want to run your business and run your life, and as long as what you're doing is in alignment with that, then theoretically, I would call that abundance for that individual.

Shane Sams: Here's where people mess this up. You can attest to this, Wally. People mess this up because they figure out what they want, but then they'll take anybody into their business as a customer, and they don't just go find their 500-1000 people that want the same thing, right? If you define abundance that way and a guy comes in and he really does want to be the guy on the high rise and he wants to work 70 hours a week and he gets meaning from the Harley Davidson in his office or the Ferrari in his garage. That's cool. That's his choice, but that's not the abundance or the coaching that you're providing, right? So you gotta be really careful who you're letting into your world too, you know what I mean?

Wally C.: Yeah, absolutely. I'm very selective about things that I say yes to, and I get asked to do quite a few things here recently. For instance this morning. I ride my bike to my son's school and I ride over to the little beach area that we have over here, and then I do my little priming stuff and prayers. I do my workout. I come home. If I feel like taking a nap, I take a 15, 20 minute nap as my wife get up.

Shane Sams: That's a pretty good day, man.

Wally C.: We're going on a dinner cruise, or we had a dinner cruise scheduled for this evening but it got canceled-

Shane Sams: And again, it costs nothing to ride your bike.

Wally C.: Exactly.

Shane Sams: You know what I'm saying? Have you ever heard the story of the business man and the fisherman? You ever heard that story?

Wally C.: Oh yeah, absolutely. I love that story. I love that story.

Shane Sams: I love that story. So there's this fisherman and he's sitting on the dock, and man, he's just pulling fish in. This entrepreneur guy comes up and goes, "Man, you're a really good fisherman. You should start a business selling fish." He goes, "Why would I do that?" And he goes, "Well, what else are you doing?" The guy goes, "Well, you know, I come out. I fish. I go back home. I take a siesta, take a nap, and I get up and eat lunch and hang out with my wife. I may come back out and fish again in the evening and then I go and light a fire and sit and eat dinner, and I go to sleep and rest and relax."

Shane Sams: He goes, "Oh, no, that's a waste of time, man. You need to hire some people and teach them how you fish and get them out there on your boat, and you need to get two or three boats and you need to grow this and get a fishing cannery set up over here. You can run that and do that. You could make millions of dollars. 30 or 40 years of that, you'll be able to retire a rich man." The fisherman looks at him and he goes, "What would I do then?" And he goes, "Well, you get up in the morning. You fish a little bit. You go home, take a nap, hang out with your wife, and do it all again the next day."

Shane Sams: And the guy was so blind by the ambition that he didn't see the dude already had that life. Why would he work 30 years to get that life when he already had it, right? And we do all do that, man. Everybody does that. We always want the next big thing and we don't look around and realize, I've got the big thing right in front of me. I love that story. I don't even know if I told it right.

Wally C.: I do too. No, I've heard it so many different ways, but the one thing, I told that story one time and somebody pushed back on me and said, "But that doesn't add to the part. My definition of abundance is being able to give to other people, because by that definition, this guy's not giving to other people." I'm like, "Well, is he or isn't he?"

Shane Sams: He's giving to his wife. He's given-

Wally C.: Exactly. He's probably given to his faith, and other people see his lifestyle. Just by that definition, just by that example, he is giving a lot.

Shane Sams: I find that, that's an excuse that people use a lot.

Wally C.: Oh, absolutely.

Shane Sams: That's an excuse, because the people that say that usually don't give anyway. You know what I mean? We had a good piece of advice given to us one time that said, "You can't help everybody. It's not physically possible and we're only here for a blink of an eye when you look at the whole time of the universe, right? But you should help people. You wish you could help everybody, and if you just did that as many times as you could over your lifetime, think how much better the world would be, because if everybody did that two or three times in their life, then we would all be paying it forward." That's really what everybody's trying to do their business.

Shane Sams: We go back to the million dollar thing. I get caught up with money sometimes too. Everybody does, but the big goal that we have for everybody is get to 100 people paying you $50. That's $60,000 a year. I promise you, in most places in the United States, $60-100,000 can give you a really peaceful, calm, good life with a lot of time control, without want, staying warm, dry, and fed, being there for your kids. You don't need millions of dollars to make it, to make the life that you want possible.

Shane Sams: Everybody gets caught up with that. We get caught up with it, and you just can't do that if you're gonna make it online.

Jocelyn Sams: Well, let's talk a little bit about, okay, so right now, you have your podcast. You are bringing people onto coach them, and I know that you said that your schedule is pretty full, right?

Wally C.: Well, actually, the schedule's primarily just for the podcast. I do interviews on Tuesdays and Thursdays and quite frankly, my podcast has been down. There's an itunes issue for the last three weeks, but just on my podcast only. There's several hundred thousand podcasts that are out there, but we got it figured out. But right now is where I'm actually taking on, I'm starting to take on one on one clients, and now I'm kind of considering the whole, I want the member's site for a specific reason.

Shane Sams: So what is your question today then? Okay, you're doing the right thing getting a few one on one clients to really have those relationships and learn, but you're wanting to scale your influence with a membership site? Is that what I'm hearing?

Wally C.: Right. Right. Well, what I'm finding is with men specifically is one on one coaching's great, but when we get a group of men together in a tribe, so to speak, is one of the common terms these days. But when we get common minds together and we start collaborating, then people will just feed off of each other, and we want to be the best, especially a bunch of usually alpha guys are trying to help each other out and hold each other accountable. So that's kind of where I'm at and what I'm wanting to do because there's groups out there that are doing things like this that are trying to prove, or the leader will go on rants about why this and that about masculinity and how it's under attack, all stuff.

Wally C.: That's not what I'm subscribing to. What I'm subscribing to is just taking those men who feel they're doing all the right things in life and in business. They're just not pushing through the, they're just not getting ahead. They just feel that they're not ... They feel they're doing the right thing in life, they're just not taking it to the next level.

Shane Sams: They're alone. They feel alone, right?

Wally C.: That too. They feel alone. So many guys feel they have to do this stuff alone, and I want to create a community, an abundance and prosperity mastery tribe, if you will, in a group and have all of us feed off of each other and share these amazing strategies that I have access to that will just propel most any brick and mortar style business.

Shane Sams: Yeah, I love the commercials of the guy that throws the rich guys onto the beach, like navy SEALS, and he just beats them up for like three days. He's like, "Yeah, now we're men and we're accountable." I've seen a lot of that stuff.

Wally C.: I know exactly who you're talking about.

Shane Sams: I'm not gonna say names.

Wally C.: I'm not either.

Shane Sams: But I'm just saying, I'm not scared to say things certainly.

Wally C.: And on top of that, never been military.

Shane Sams: Yeah, right, and it's just-

Wally C.: I know what you're saying.

Shane Sams: I saw one thing this guy was talking about, how he wanted to quit smoking, so the dude shoved Vaseline up his nose and kicked sand in his face and was like, 'That's what it's gonna feel like when you're 70." I'm like, someone paid 10 grand for someone to kick sand in their face. Anyway, all right, so-

Wally C.: I got paid to do that, so I'm just saying.

Shane Sams: Right?

Wally C.: Not to be the instructor to be the different kind of abuse.

Shane Sams: Yeah, whatever. You don't have to do that to get abundant, guys, if you're listening to this. Anyway, so what you're saying, it's almost what you're making it sound like is you want to create a very similar dynamic to a small group, or like guys that meet at the coffee shop. They talk about their life and they realize they're not alone and they share strategies for life. Your business sounds like it's going to be a facilitator to this accountability group, right? You're the conduit. People go through you but they get everybody else, right?

Wally C.: Correct, correct. On top of that, they get access to all of the business strategies that I have. One of the questions that I have in reference to the platform is I have a platform that's an eLearning platform that has literally, just millions and millions of dollars are done for you, templates and strategies and videos and workbooks, and it's all, you go in and you answer a few questions about your business, and then you get a road map on where to start with all of this information.

Wally C.: Then you follow that roadmap and then I facilitate that depending on what level of package that you get started with me. Either you do it yourself or you're gonna partially work with me or you're gonna be complete one on one. But-

Shane Sams: So right now, your thought is one on one, you can see that one on one won't scale and you just need to scale it.

Wally C.: Correct. Because I can only, honestly, I'm capped out. When I do cap out, I will, five one on one at $2,000 a month, and it doesn't matter if it was $5,000 a month. I don't want to do more than that because I enjoy my lifestyle. I like driving to Disney during the middle of the week and hang out with the family or something.

Shane Sams: Oh, without question. Yeah, we do the same thing with one on one stuff. There's only so many-

Jocelyn Sams: There are some people who are always gonna be willing to pay that premium price to get one on one attention, and that's totally fine. But then there are a lot of other people who want to DIY or maybe they want less interaction with you, but they want some interaction with you. That's exactly the way we set up our community.

Shane Sams: Yeah, so let me ask you this. So your struggle is how do I build, what do I make this thing look like, is that correct? Like how do I move from the one on one to the group stuff? Is that what your biggest struggle?

Wally C.: Right. Yeah, that's pretty much it.

Shane Sams: Yeah. Sometimes it works backwards. You build the smaller tier first, and then you work up and find the people that are willing to pay the premium, and then you balance that against your time. But you're kind of doing it a little backwards. You've got these one on one people and it's working, but you're like, okay, but my impact has capped at five people or whatever. So you gotta move it into the thing. I would suggest probably not going all the way to a digital community yet. There's probably gonna have to be another shift in the middle there where you set some kind of lower tier at like 50 people where you are interacting with them, but it's in a more one to many setting, right? Right now, do your one on one clients have any interaction with each other?

Wally C.: No.

Shane Sams: Okay. Probably what I would suggest that you do is ask those guys that you're already coaching. "Hey guys, I'm gonna add something to what you're already getting. I'm not changing it. I'm not taking anything away, but I'm gonna add a one hour monthly call with all my clients. You don't have to participate, but I'm gonna go ahead and do this. I'm gonna go ahead and add this on." Maybe two of them do it, three of them do it. Maybe two of them are like, "Nah, man. I'm really cool with this one on one stuff. I don't want to talk to anybody but you, Wally." That's cool. That's fine, right? Some people value the privacy over the impact, you know what I mean?

Shane Sams: So that's what I want you to do. First of all, say, "I'm gonna add this," and maybe three of them show up, right? And it's you and three other guys, literally like a Mastermind, okay? You just make it really casual, like introducing each other. "Hey, guys. We're here. What's the biggest win we had last week?" Maybe the next time you do it, it's like, "What's the biggest struggle you had last week?" We all just share it. Tell them, hey, look, you can say a business struggle or something simple. You don't gotta say, you know, you were having an argument with your spouse. It doesn't have to be personal. It's just, what's something you're struggling with, right? Make it real easy and see, and you need to get a feel for that group interaction, okay.

Shane Sams: Then what you do is you start turning these into a bimonthly thing. Every two weeks, they get together. Every two weeks, they get together. What happens next is, you add a tier that's more like, "Hey guys on the podcast. Listen, I know one on one coach is not great for you guys, everybody, but I do have a little meetup that we do every week, right? This is x dollars a month. You get to come to the meetup," and maybe you expand that to 20 people. "I only have 20 spots. Here's a nice little group thing." And you start doing these meetups, like you do them in cohorts, like ten of them meet on one week, ten of them meet on the other. That'll give you about three to six months of feeling what it's like to manage a group, and also create these, a better revenue stream where it is more, not passive, but it's spread out more. You see what I'm saying?

Shane Sams: Because if you go straight into the group dynamic of a huge membership community with all these digital resources, it's so different than what you're doing now, it's gonna be hard. You're gonna be managing two businesses. You need to move that way first, because then you can take all those people and say, "Hey guys. I'm gonna add another thing for you guys." You're adding to the people you've got now, not taking away or moving away from them, right? Then you can add it into more of a group dynamic, like a Facebook group or a forum or whatever, and then it's just off to the races at that point, right?

Shane Sams: So you could tell this next cohort, "Hey, we meet twice a month. I'm gonna do a little training, take two or three questions." It's kind of like our group calls, like our members call that we do, but you're kind of moving opposite direction from us. You're going from one on one to doing some group calls with maybe 10-20 people to then opening more of a bigger membership type thing, right?

Shane Sams: It's just, I've seen a lot of people fail going straight from one on one coaching to a membership community, and I don't want you to do that without kind of learning how to manage it. Does that make sense?

Wally C.: Makes perfect sense. That's exactly why I wanted to have this conversation, because I know you guys have the experience in this area.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay, so as you're thinking about starting to go into that method or that mode of business, what other questions do you have about that?

Wally C.: Well, at this point, really just kind of what type of platform would I use, because the unfortunate part about the eLearning platform that I have is there's no chat capability in there, no way for members to communicate or even for me to communicate with the members. So I do have access to another members platform that I would be able to set up similar to what you have already within the Flipped Lifestyle, but is there a specific platform or anything specific that you would recommend that I use as I start transitioning into that? Or would I just use Zoom calls or something like that?

Shane Sams: Yeah, keep it simple. If you'll notice, on our group calls, we use YouTube Live. We just embed it in the forum, right? And the reason we do that is because we know it's simple. When we do Flip Your Life Live, three months before the event, we have three, what we call icebreaker sessions where we bring attendees onto a Zoom call, and there's literally 50 people on the call, right? We go through each person for like two minutes each, you know what I'm saying? Over like a couple hours, and we're all just having a good time and we ask them icebreaker questions.

Shane Sams: We just do it on Zoom. We don't do it on some big fancy membership platform or anything we've got to invest in. It's just, let's just use a Zoom, Zoom's the easiest. YouTube Live's the easiest. Don't make it overcomplicated because then you'll just confuse your user. Everybody knows about YouTube Live, right? Everybody knows about YouTube, so if you're like, "Hey guys. I'm doing a YouTube Live. There's a chat box. Go to this link. I'll see you there." Or Zoom, same thing. Go to a link and I'll see you there.

Jocelyn Sams: Ultimately, do what makes sense to you, what you like to use and-

Shane Sams: Or you know how to use.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, exactly. Just keep it simple. I think people put too much stock in this. Oh, I don't know which is better, Zoom or Facebook Live or whatever and they sit there in this basically vortex of indecision for six months, and they don't get anything done.

Shane Sams: That's a great quote.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah.

Shane Sams: A vortex of indecision. Dun dun.

Jocelyn Sams: It's really true, because you want to make sure you're doing the quote, "right thing." Well, there is no right thing. Just make a decision and move on it.

Shane Sams: We just spent about three weeks. I looked down at our business last year, and I said to Jocelyn in the car one day. It was like, "Man, look at all the third party apps and things that we're paying monthly for that have wormed their tentacles into our business and are hanging on for dear life, right?" And it kind of reminded me of barnacles on a ship. You gotta get all the stuff that grows on the ship off of it.

Shane Sams: It took me like two or three weeks, and I just went straight back to nothing but WordPress and Infusionsoft and now that I'm looking at it, I'm like, why did I allow that to happen? It was the same mentality of, oh, that's a fun tool. That makes my life easier. They said so right on their sales page, right?

Wally C.: And the next guru is using it.

Shane Sams: Yeah, right, exactly. The main thing is just do the easiest thing that works and gets the job done. We're talking on $60 Amazon microphones and they're plugged into a $100 mixer, and somebody told me once that that if we didn't get a Heil microphone that was $600, no one would ever be able to listen to our podcast. The audio would be garbage, and I'm like, bro. This Audio-Technica's 60 bucks. I'm going with it.

Shane Sams: It was hilarious, one time we did, I can't remember who it was. Someone was like, I can't remember if it was Mixergy. I don't remember what it was. They said, "Man, your audio. You have the best audio that any I've heard in months on my podcast." And this person interviews big people, right? And we were like Audio-Technica 2100s baby. Had them since 2014, going strong.

Jocelyn Sams: We did have to replace one.

Shane Sams: Yeah, one of them broke, but we got another one.

Wally C.: When you and I had our conversation, Shane, I was overlooking the ocean sitting in the cabin of my Toyota Tacoma with a $50 microphone plugged into my Macbook.

Shane Sams: Hey, there are great acoustics inside of a car, I'm telling you. If you're having trouble, if you don't have a microphone out there and you just want to record with your laptop, just go out in the garage. I did that all the time for our first courses, because the kids would be going crazy and it was a detached garage. I would go out in the garage, get in the car and shut the door to record, because I didn't have a good microphone then. It sounded fine. Everything worked good.

Jocelyn Sams: All right, let's jump into our action step. We want to know based on what we talked about here today, what is something that you are planning to take action on?

Wally C.: Well, I'm gonna start getting with the, doing exactly what Shane said. I ask questions because I want the answers and I'm gonna take action on the suggestions, so it's exactly that. I'm just gonna get with these guys and find out who would like to participate in just a monthly call, see how that works out, and then start transitioning that just exactly the way Shane said to do it. Just follow the steps.

Shane Sams: Do the first two with just your one on one guys even if only two of them want to do it, okay? Be like, "Hey, I'm adding something to what I'm giving you. It's included in your cost. I'm gonna start doing a meetup of my coaching clients. You don't have to come if you don't want to." My guess is they all will, right? Because they probably are craving something like that in their life with just a group of guys on a call. Then roll it out on your podcast with a nice, simple price tag. We can talk about that in the forums what the price will be, and see if maybe 10 other guys want to join this call. See if you can turn it into something. Then three months, six months down the road, we start saying, okay, how can I add 500 men to this and change their lives too?

Wally C.: Yeah, I like that, and one other thing I'm gonna do is based off of the members call that you had the other day is I've sent in the request I guess to start doing YouTube Live, because I've done many YouTube videos. I just post them or they automatically post from my Facebook Live onto YouTube, but I'm just finding my clients or anybody that wants to work with me in this arena are not on Facebook. My wife quite frankly pointed that out. She said, "What are you doing? You're gonna get no response off of that." But I know they're on YouTube. I know guys are going on YouTube looking for business strategies and stuff.

Shane Sams: I think 72% of people that use YouTube are men or something like that. It's some kind of weird, it's really skewed, the audience on YouTube toward men.

Wally C.: Yeah, that's pretty much right. I was just with Chris Krimitsos. Being here in Florida, he runs the Podfest, and we have a members, a meetup group out here. He's been talking a lot about YouTube and having experts come on of the YouTube. So that's the other thing. Once you guys were talking about-

Shane Sams: You can search easier, too. It's a lot easier-

Wally C.: Yeah, absolutely.

Shane Sams: To search out your information.

Wally C.: Yeah, right.

Jocelyn Sams: All right, well it has been awesome having you here today. I see here on this list of questions that we had sent to you that you do have a bible verse that you would like to share, so we would love for you to read that for us.

Wally C.: Absolutely. So this is Jeremiah 29:11, and quite frankly I got this because my son bought me a journal and this is the verse that's right on front of the journal. "For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord. Plans to prosper you and not to harm you. Plans to give you hope and a future."

Shane Sams: Love that bible verse man. Well, listen Wally, thank you so much for sharing with everything today. People don't realize when they come on our podcast, they get help, but they help so many other people just by being open and transparent and vulnerable and asking questions. We learn stuff from every single one of our guests just like hopefully they learn from us. So man, appreciate you coming on the show, and tell everybody real quick again where they find you online and your podcast.

Wally C.: Right, absolutely. The podcast is at menofabundance.com, and the business side, the eLearning platform and everything else related to that is at apmasterycoach.com.

Shane Sams: All right guys, that wraps up another awesome interview with one of our Flip Your Life community members. Maybe you're a coach, maybe you're creating digital products, maybe you're selling physical products online, maybe you're doing a service based business. Maybe you just need a little help getting started. We would love to help you get started inside of the Flip Your Life community. Come join us, come join Wally inside the Flip Your Life community. We have a brand new level of membership that we would love for you to take advantage of. It's only $19 a month. You get complete access to all of our community forums, and you get access to every single training course inside of the Flip Your Life blueprint.

Shane Sams: All you have to do is go to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife, and you can join the Flip Your Life community now for as little as $19 a month. Flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife. We cannot wait to see you inside.

Shane Sams: All right guys, that is all the time we have for this week. Until next time, get out there, take action, do whatever it takes to flip your life.

Jocelyn Sams: Bye.

Links and resources mentioned on today’s show: * Wally's website * Flip Your Life LIVE 2019 Tickets & Registration Information * Flip Your Life community

Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!

Join the Flip Your Life Community NOW for as little as $19 per month!

– https://flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife

View Details

In today's episode, we help Melissa take her writing business to the next level.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jocelyn Sams: Hey y'all. On today's podcast, we help Melissa take her writing business to the next level.

Shane Sams: What's going on everybody? Welcome back to The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. It is great to be back with you again today. Super excited to be helping another one of our amazing Flip Your Life community members take their business and their life to the next level. We are super excited today to welcome Melissa Webb to the show. Melissa, welcome to the podcast.

Melissa Webb: Well, thank you so much you guys. I am so excited. This is such a big deal for me, and I can't thank you enough for having me on.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. I have been, seriously, waiting for this podcast for weeks, because I have an amazing story to tell about Melissa. We actually have not met Melissa in real life just yet, but she did sign up for one of our coaching calls. We do a limited amount of one-on-one coaching, and Melissa had signed up to talk to me.

Jocelyn Sams: This is kind of interesting because I do a lot of calls in the evening because my kid is doing gymnastics and it's in another town, and it really isn't a long enough amount of time for me to drive all the way home, so I sit in a parking lot while I wait for her.

Shane Sams: Oh my gosh. This story's amazing. I forgot about this. Oh, guys, buckle up. This is the best story ever.

Jocelyn Sams: This is actually my first evening call that I had done since we started doing the one-on-one calls. I thought, "Hey, I'm going to have something to do while I'm sitting here waiting. This is not the worst thing, make a little money and hang out and talk to somebody in our community." Like, "Pretty good night."

Shane Sams: She does it in a parking lot because in this little, small Southeast Kentucky town, literally, the only place you can get enough Internet to make a call is in the Walmart parking lot, so that's why she's sitting in a parking lot making this call.

Jocelyn Sams: This is pretty much as like Podunk, small town as it gets, okay?

Shane Sams: I love it! You said, "Podunk."

Jocelyn Sams: This is, okay, I just want to like also say that this is not even a Super Walmart, okay? This is like a-

Shane Sams: It's an old school Walmart-

Jocelyn Sams: Old school.

Shane Sams: It's like 1987 Walmart is what we're talking about here.

Jocelyn Sams: Yes. Okay, so I'm sitting in the parking lot and I just connected up to Melissa, who's in California, right?

Melissa Webb: Yes.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay. I just connected up to her in California. I go to the parking lot and I find a place to go, which is underneath a big light pole, so I think, "This is fine." Let me just say also that I have sat in this parking lot, literally, like hundreds of times, completely uneventful.

Jocelyn Sams: I go and I connect up on this call to Melissa. I park in the middle of the parking lot under a big light pole. We had, seriously, been on the call maybe about 60 seconds when this, as I call it, van full of rednecks pulls up beside me. When I say beside me, I mean like within probably 50 feet. Not even that. I'd say about 20 feet from me.

Jocelyn Sams: Not only was it a van full of rednecks, they have the doors, like the side doors are all open. They are yelling at someone in a pickup truck across the parking lot, and not only are they yelling at them, this crazy woman gets out with a baseball bat, a baseball bat. You cannot make this up, and starts waving it at this man in the parking lot.

Shane Sams: A fight breaks out in a Walmart parking lot, led by a crazy woman with a baseball bat and it's a van full of rednecks versus a pickup truck.

Jocelyn Sams: I could nearly, I could almost reach out and touch them. I'm on this call, that someone has paid for, Melissa has paid for, and I'm like, "Uh ..." I don't even know what to say. Because I'm just like, when on earth are you in this situation? It's not like anything has prepared you for this situation.

Shane Sams: Yeah. Has anyone else ever had to ... You had to move your car. You had to move it.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, so I'm like, "Uh, okay. I know this sounds really weird, but like there's these people beside me ..."

Shane Sams: There's a street fight breaking out next to me, Melissa, and I got to go to the other end of the Walmart parking lot. At this point, Melissa's probably like, "Maybe I signed up for the wrong first step."

Jocelyn Sams: No, listen. She was like so nice to me. She's like, "I just want you to be safe."

Shane Sams: Melissa, what were you thinking when Jocelyn was like, "Hey, look a street fight just broke out between this woman with a baseball bat and a dude in a pickup truck, so could you give me five minutes-"

Melissa Webb: Oh my gosh.

Shane Sams: ... "and start the call?" Like what were you thinking at this point right now?

Melissa Webb: I was thinking like, "Okay, I could totally write a story here."

Jocelyn Sams: Exactly.

Shane Sams: You couldn't make it up, because nobody could imagine something like that happening.

Jocelyn Sams: No, you can't make this stuff up.

Melissa Webb: Totally, so from my perspective, it was fantastic. Like I have told this story so many times because on my end, so here I was, I put down a good chunk of change to like have some valuable time, one-on-one with Jocelyn, and so she was right. Like 60 seconds in, she's asking me some questions, I'm giving her some feedback and then she's like, "Um, hang on just a second. There is a person wielding a bat next to me."

Shane Sams: Wielding a bat. This is-

Melissa Webb: I'm like, "Jocelyn, just call me back." Like, "Drop the phone, go. Go be safe." Like, "Go take care of yourself." She's like, "No, hang on just a second," and like I hear the phone like fly out of her hand, like probably into the passenger seat. The car's moving.

Shane Sams: Oh my god.

Melissa Webb: I'm just like on the line, like hanging on. Like, "Is she okay? What's going on?" All of a sudden, like I don't know, seconds go past and she comes back on, totally collected herself. She's like, "Okay, that was interesting, so that's what we were talking about."

Shane Sams: Task switching at its finest right there.

Jocelyn Sams: Oh my goodness, so-

Shane Sams: She's also simultaneously texting a friend of hers-

Jocelyn Sams: Yes.

Shane Sams: ... to dial 911 to call the police because there's a fight breaking out in Walmart's parking lot.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, because I'm on this call and I've already been like, "Hold on just a minute." I don't want to be like, "Hold on, let me call the cops."

Jocelyn Sams: Being the like ever-present professional that I am, I get on my computer and I typed to my friend on text, because her uncle is like the Police Chief of this town. I'm like, "Can you please call the police and tell them to come?" The police do come. They talked to the people. No one was arrested because, I guess, no like physical ...

Shane Sams: She didn't swing her bat.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah.

Shane Sams: Apparently, so no.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, and they're like, this whole thing, they're like yelling profanity. I mean, this was like, you cannot make this up. I mean, you just can't.

Melissa Webb: No.

Shane Sams: The moral of the story is if you want to be on the most entertaining coaching calls in the history of the world, be a part of The Flip Your Life community and you might grab one of these street fight calls with me and Jocelyn. You know what I mean? Like-

Melissa Webb: Oh my gosh. It was awesome.

Shane Sams: She sent me a message-

Melissa Webb: I was awesome.

Shane Sams: She sent me a message-

Melissa Webb: It was awesome because it all ended well.

Shane Sams: Yeah, no doubt. Nobody hit the ... Broke our windshield with a baseball bat to prove they could swing it. Like, the funny thing was that Jocelyn also text me. She sent me this weird text.

Shane Sams: It was like, "Talking to Melissa. Just called the police on a big woman with baseball bat." I'm like, "What?" Like, how ... I didn't even know what she was talking about, so I didn't hear this story 'til later, and oh my gosh. I laughed for hours and hours and hours about that call, so ...

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, so there's never a dull moment.

Shane Sams: We decided to bring you on the podcast for surviving the street fight at Walmart.

Jocelyn Sams: Well, I just wanted to say that I did over-deliver for this call. We talked for a really long time because I felt really bad about this.

Melissa Webb: It was the half hour session and she gave me a full hour.

Shane Sams: Oh, I love it.

Jocelyn Sams: Exactly.

Shane Sams: See, that's how you-

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. It all turned out okay. We talked through some stuff. I think that we had a good ending, and you've actually had some successes since, so I can't wait to dive into that. Let's kind of bring this thing back around a little bit. Tell everybody a little bit about you and like your background and what you're doing online.

Melissa Webb: Oh, absolutely. I do have to say I'm very happy to know that you're recording this in the safety of your own home.

Shane Sams: Right, exactly.

Melissa Webb: Okay, so yes. A little bit about me. As anybody might see on my Instagram profile, I am a bold believer and I am a very happy wife of pretty much the world's must supportive husband. I hear people talk about not having that. I'm so grateful I have that. I am a loving mom of three spectacular boys. Our youngest is now 15 years old.

Melissa Webb: I am a very passionate teacher, especially when it comes to writing. I will geek out over course standards and things of that nature. I am the creator and owner of WriteOnWebb.com. I am a huge fan of home schooling moms everywhere, they are the unsung heroes. Jocelyn, you are joining those ranks, girl. In the spring of 2019, I'm also going to be a published children's book author, super excited for that. As of January 11th, 2019, I will be unemployed.

Jocelyn Sams: Wow.

Shane Sams: That's crazy. Because that's happening in like what? Three weeks? Is that what-

Melissa Webb: Yes.

Shane Sams: Yes, wow. Now, are you unemployed or unemployable? There's a difference there, you see what I mean?

Melissa Webb: Oh, good.

Shane Sams: Unemployable is like, "I'm going to go make my own money and not work for anyone else." That's like what unemployable is, correct?

Melissa Webb: Yes.

Shane Sams: My mom and ... Jocelyn's grandfather, I tell this story all the time. When we quit our jobs ... Like he's an old guy, worked in the coal mines. Didn't really get it, what we were doing. Right?

Melissa Webb: Yeah.

Shane Sams: One time, we went home and he reached over and slipped me a 20 in a handshake and he pat me on the shoulder and he goes, "I know you're not working now, son, so there's a little gas money to get home." I'm like-

Jocelyn Sams: Which was so sweet.

Shane Sams: It was so sweet, I was like, "Do I want to break this guy's heart?"

Melissa Webb: So sweet.

Shane Sams: ... Or just be like, "Thanks, papa," you know what I mean? Like I just took the money. He didn't realize I was unemployable, not unemployed. Does that make sense?

Melissa Webb: I love it.

Shane Sams: Awesome.

Melissa Webb: I love it. It was by my choice, in fact. I've been a teacher for 26 years and I have worked for an amazing charter school, Julian Charter School in San Diego area, and love it. I'm happy to be leaving on excellent terms.

Shane Sams: Awesome.

Melissa Webb: I'm actually kind of switching hats. I want to be a vendor of theirs, so I can still support their home schooling families in the area of writing. It's all good, it's just I kind of feel like I want to throw up and jump for joy at the same time.

Shane Sams: For sure. It's a big change.

Jocelyn Sams: Yes.

Shane Sams: Any big change like that is going to be, not disruptive, but just like riding a new wave. Right?

Melissa Webb: Yes.

Shane Sams: It's going to be scary to go out and do something different. Does your online business, this Write On Webb, it's supporting home school co-ops and home school teachers for writing, or is it bigger than that? Like what's ... Or is it a bigger, broader scope than that? Like what exactly is Write On Webb?

Melissa Webb: I directly work with home schooling moms, who want to teach excellent writing but they're, honestly, they're overwhelmed. With the whole Common Core and course standards, all students are supposed to understand the difference between persuasive and expository and narrative and then understand what descriptive is, and then all of the subcategories under that. It's a lot.

Melissa Webb: It's what I love to teach, and so I actually am happy to teach it, so that they can take something off their plate. They know that everything I put out for them ... I use Teachable to house all of my lessons, so I have all the videos are embedded in that. I think the biggest difference that people love about what I'm doing is that I create a community of these young writers in grades three through eight.

Shane Sams: Got you.

Melissa Webb: They love that. Like the kids, like I have a joke of the week every week. It's a Q&A time and we go live. It's the one thing that in a home school environment, if a family is not using co-op for things like that, then who's their audience?

Melissa Webb: The child needs an audience and as great as mom is, that's a tough one. You need other children to be around and you get that in a traditional class, but when you're home schooled, it's like that missing piece, and I provide that and have so much fun doing it.

Shane Sams: That's awesome. We just started home schooling about two weeks ago.

Melissa Webb: I know. I'm so excited for you.

Shane Sams: It's been really, really good but really, really challenging. Not hard. Like there's nothing been hard about like ... Like hard is laying bricks or building a ... You know what I mean?

Melissa Webb: Yes.

Shane Sams: It has been ... You got to be more intentional. You really got to control your schedule. There is a lot more responsibility feeling to it, right?

Melissa Webb: Oh, yes.

Shane Sams: You know what I'm saying? Writing was one of the things Jocelyn was worried about. Like getting that writing experience. Like we live in a small area.

Shane Sams: There are some people working together, but it's not like in a bigger city or like a San Diego where you're going to have these co-ops, you're going to have these schools, you're going to have all these resources, so we've definitely turned toward these virtual type things for different subjects, like what you're doing.

Melissa Webb: Yes.

Shane Sams: There's millions of kids being home schooled. Like people don't realize how many people are actually being home schooled out there. You know?

Melissa Webb: Yes.

Shane Sams: This would even be good ... This is like, this could even be supplemental to kids who are struggling with writing in regular school though too, right?

Melissa Webb: Absolutely. I've actually started from my monthly live courses, I've created stand-alone versions so that people can do just that. I've already had a few sales of that. I think you're absolutely right. Then in the summer, I usually do ... I actually did a, I did a really fun book club last summer. I did invite Isaac, by the way.

Jocelyn Sams: Oh, okay.

Shane Sams: Oh, you did? Was it virtual? Was it an email? Okay.

Melissa Webb: I was like, "Hey, Isaac should join." For some reason, you were busy or something.

Shane Sams: Oh, yeah. Okay. We will definitely look for that this year. We get a lot of messages, Melissa.

Melissa Webb: You think?

Shane Sams: You can imagine what our inbox looks like and all that.

Melissa Webb: Oh, I can only imagine.

Shane Sams: We may have missed that one. I love that, because you've got so much opportunity to make money year-round with something like this, and you can just-

Melissa Webb: Yes.

Shane Sams: ... kind of pass through different seasons of different people's calendars and make that happen.

Melissa Webb: Yes, well, okay. In the forum, which, okay, can I just say how much I love your forum? Because it is gold. I just, I have to say, so at first, people will, obviously, want to listen to your podcasts, because your podcasts are just free value.

Melissa Webb: I heard you first on Pat Flynn, and I haven't stopped listening to you since. That was like, I don't know ... The one I heard, because I think you've been on a few times, was back in May 2017. I think it was his number 265, I think.

Shane Sams: Oh yeah, that was-

Melissa Webb: Anyway, yeah. I started listening, I haven't stopped. At first, I was like, "This is awesome. It's all free stuff. This is really great." You are so generous as individuals. Like you can just tell it's from your heart.

Melissa Webb: I was just gobbling up all of your free information and making huge progress until finally, I was like, "I really love this forum that they're talking about. I like the idea. I want to get in there and check it out." I'm going to tell you, like people don't get how much they're missing. Like not only do you have your blueprint, which has like all of the video lessons embedded in there ... That's where I got my idea.

Melissa Webb: Like, I was like, "Ah, I love how they have this here. They still have live components, but they have all these resources that I can go to on my own time and my own schedule." Then, I jumped in and started talking to other like-minded people, and amazing, amazing. Then I heard, do you remember Cory Doohan?

Shane Sams: Oh, yeah.

Melissa Webb: He was on your number 190. He was the auto detailing expert.

Shane Sams: Yup.

Melissa Webb: Yeah. He and this other guy Nick Robishaud and then another gentleman by the name of Mike Henry. We all put together a Mastermind and we still meet. It's been like eight months. We were just figuring it out, how long it's been. It's been eight months. We meet every other week-

Shane Sams: Wow.

Melissa Webb: ... in a Zoom room. We hold each other accountable-

Shane Sams: None of you knew each other beforehand, right? None of you knew each other before the forums. You met each other like in the community and started getting together and all that.

Melissa Webb: Yes. It was your community. Yeah.

Shane Sams: Isn't it cool though, like to have like ... We always view like everything ... We try to always view it like a ... When we say community, we don't just mean like, "Oh, you're in our online membership." It's literally like a community.

Melissa Webb: Yes.

Shane Sams: You've got your family, you've got your friends, you've got your extended network. We really, like we even call our live event, the big one that we do every year, we call it the Flip Your Life family reunion when we talk about it. Like we don't actually call it like the live conference or some business thing, we call it the family ... "What time's the family reunion? Yeah, we're starting at 3:00." Like we actually talk about it like that.

Melissa Webb: Oh, absolutely.

Shane Sams: It's amazing how many of these little pockets of Masterminds do happen. They're all over the place.

Jocelyn Sams: Probably some we don't even know about. Like I know that there's one that meets in Ohio. There's several ladies who get together.

Shane Sams: One up in Cleveland. Yeah, that group. One in California. You guys are meeting online, virtually.

Jocelyn Sams: There are a bunch of people who do like Zoom calls and things like that. I mean, we would love to know about these. Maybe we should start a discussion in the community.

Shane Sams: Yeah. We need to get a list of all of them. Like it's crazy how ... Jocelyn and I always talk to each other about like, we talk to, yeah, we actually had someone on the podcast though today that lives in Saudi Arabia. Like what are chances that two people in Kentucky would connect on a business call and a podcast with someone on the other side of the planet.

Shane Sams: Then we hear about you guys meeting each other, and like one's in California, one's in Canada, one's over here, one's over there. It's like these connections would never happen in some random course. It's happening because this community is a living, breathing, actual place for like-minded people, family-focused entrepreneurs to connect.

Shane Sams: Yeah, it blows our mind every day when we hear stories like this. There's a funny story about Nick Robishaud. Nick came to our live event. I don't know if you know this story. I don't know, did he tell you about what happened in the moderator thing? Did he tell you guys about-

Melissa Webb: Yes.

Shane Sams: Okay-

Melissa Webb: He was so stoked about that experience.

Shane Sams: We have moderators in our community, people who are really active. They're in there, they're helping a lot of people. We give them a few perks to help us kind of just moderate and manage forums, just like any community would have online.

Jocelyn Sams: In September, one of the things that we offered for our moderators was when we had our live event, we had like a little special-

Shane Sams: Like moderator meetup, but with us.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, so we met them like before we met everyone else, just as like a little perk of, to say, "Thank you for being a moderator."

Shane Sams: I'm standing there, and we have a lot of moderators so it's hard for me ... We have, there's so many people we have to manage, it's hard for me to remember every single person, every single minute. Nick walks up to me and I don't really recognize him. He's got a thing on that says "moderator." It says "Nick Robishaud."

Shane Sams: Like sometimes, like our assistant will hire a moderator and then we'll find out about it later, and then we'll talk to them. It's like all kinds of different ...

Jocelyn Sams: We're giving out these invitations, so when people checked-in, they got a name tag that said "moderator" if they were a moderator, and then they got an invitation to tell them where and when to go to the party.

Shane Sams: Nick comes up to me, goes, "Hey, Shane." I'm, "Hey, Nick." I thought he might have been a brand new moderator or something like that. He goes, "Shane, listen. I feel bad." I go, "Why do you feel bad, man? We're here to have a good time." He goes, "No, man. Let me tell you something." He leans in and he goes, "You see, I'm not really a moderator." I go, "What?" I go, "What do you mean?"

Shane Sams: Now remember, this is only for moderators. There's 20 people in this room, all by ourselves. I'm like, "Did this guy beat up a guy in the elevator and take his pass?" Like, "How did he get in here?"

Jocelyn Sams: The funny thing is, we never would have known.

Shane Sams: I never would have known if he had never said anything.

Jocelyn Sams: We never would have known.

Shane Sams: I would have found out later, but he goes, "Yeah, man," he goes, "I got to the sign-in table, they handed me my name badge and they handed me this envelope. I open it up and it's got my name on it and it says 'moderator.' I thought, 'Oh, no. They've accidentally put me on the moderator list.' I went over to the side and I called my wife and I said, 'What do you think I should do? Do you think I should tell them or do you think I should just go to this party so I can hang out with Shane and Jocelyn?'" She was like, "Go to the party."

Shane Sams: He just went with it and he just walked in and he was like, "Yeah." He goes, "I just, I'm sorry. I just could not pass this up. I had to come up here and talk to you guys."

Jocelyn Sams: We laughed so hard.

Shane Sams: I laughed so hard. I actually was so impressed that he did that, because that's exactly what I would have done. Like I would have totally went over to Jocelyn and like, "Look ..."

Jocelyn Sams: You would have no conscious about it.

Shane Sams: I would have had no conscious about it. I wouldn't have asked her, I'd have told her, "We're going to this party because we got in." He came upstairs, and we hung out. If anyone ever makes a mistake, they give you the key, walk through the door.

Jocelyn Sams: Exactly.

Shane Sams: It was absolutely-

Melissa Webb: Gosh. Yeah.

Shane Sams: I actually opened my computer and I made him a moderator right there. I just said, "All right. Now you're really a moderator, so you're here legally, Nick."

Melissa Webb: I love it. I love it. Well, and when Nick was telling us the story, because it is like the best story, he was saying like at one point he was like, "You know what? I know if this happened to Shane, he would totally go to this party, so I'm going."

Shane Sams: 100%. Without-

Jocelyn Sams: Absolutely.

Shane Sams: Yes.

Jocelyn Sams: Yes. Nick, he's one of my introvert friends. I had this conversation with him. We talked about being an introvert and all the different challenges of it. Awesome person. So glad that I had the opportunity to meet him in person.

Shane Sams: You got a good group. I would keep that group together as well.

Jocelyn Sams: They are amazing.

Shane Sams: Okay. All right, let's turn back to you now. Let's talk about your business.

Jocelyn Sams: All right, so we talked a few weeks ago and-

Melissa Webb: Yes.

Jocelyn Sams: We talked about some different things that you were working on, and we talked about kind of what next steps you were going to take. Let's start there and talk about like what were you doing before? What have you done after? Then, we'll sort of get into your next steps.

Melissa Webb: Absolutely. When I talked to you, one of the ... Well, one of the issues that I was having at the time and I know a lot of people struggle with this. I had so many ideas going around in my head that I really didn't know what to do, like in what order.

Melissa Webb: Lots of people will tell you, "Just write it all down." Okay, great. Now those ideas are out of my head but they're still staring at me, glaring at me on this piece of paper. I still don't know what I need to do first, second, third, fourth. Again, the list felt like it was 20 ideas deep.

Melissa Webb: What I loved about our conversation, Jocelyn, is that you were ... It was so, it seemed so simple to you to be able to just say, "Okay, so out of all of these things, it sounds like first we're going to want to help you grow your list, but before we do that, let's take a look at your Google Analytics. You just, you had these few steps for me to do.

Melissa Webb: One of the things that I had said is that, I really wanted to grow my home schooling audience and I wasn't sure really how to that. Obviously, I did the Facebook things and some of the social medias. You had also suggested putting things on my website, some free giveaways, things that would really draw a person in.

Melissa Webb: That whole thing about it's important that, you have to realize if people don't know you, they don't trust you, and they don't like you yet. You need to let people know you, trust you, like you. I thought, "That is a great idea. I'm going to put some things on there that are just like those giveaways, and that the course comes with an exchange in email." I did all of that.

Melissa Webb: Then you suggested I start listening to like podcasts of home schoolers, so I started looking at some of those. Then I was like, "I really want to find out ... I don't want to just, out of the blue, go to these people and say, 'May I be on your podcast? I really want to bring value to you and to your community.'" How do I ... I just felt so lost. I really appreciated that you gave me some steps in doing that.

Melissa Webb: That's where I am right now, is where I really want to continue. The question that I have or the advice that I need is if I were to approach a podcast host, what could I offer or suggest that might interest them in having me on?

Jocelyn Sams: Okay, we will get into that, for sure. I want you to talk about, a little bit, you posted a success story. We talked like, I guess it was about a month ago. We're recording this in like mid-December right now. Talk about your success story. You did these things. We talked, you did the work, and what happened?

Melissa Webb: A lot happened. I actually, since we talked last time, I have gone up in 50 ... I have 50 new subscribers and so my email list has grown. I ended up doing another ... I just have to tell you, so Jocelyn, you motivated me to like work, work, work, work, work. I think I put a few success stories in there, so I'm not even sure if there's a specific one that you're talking about.

Melissa Webb: I most recently did the KingSumo giveaway, where I was giving away books. I got more people that way. I mean, the whole thing, the whole idea, and you guys are so big on this, is it takes action people. Like you can't just think it and want it, you have to do it. I've just been doing. Like since we got off the phone, I stayed up another four hours that night, you had me so motivated.

Jocelyn Sams: I love that, I love that.

Shane Sams: Basically-

Melissa Webb: Everything's off like crazy. If there's a specific one you want to know about, you just tell me, but I just don't stop.

Shane Sams: Basically, what happened was, you talked to Jocelyn. The big thing was, is growing your list. One of the strategies she talked about was, well, if you go out and go on 20 of these podcasts, we'll probably get a bunch more emails. Right?

Melissa Webb: Right.

Shane Sams: You started ticking off all the other ideas, like putting thing actually on your site, they can opt-in when they find the site. Going out and offering some kind of benefit or opt-in or something like that. Low and behold, you did that and your email list actually started growing.

Jocelyn Sams: The one that I was talking about specifically is the one where you talked about getting 10 new members in December. Like that's crazy. A lot of people think, "Oh, December is so busy. It's Christmas time," whatever. You said, "No. I'm not going to use that as an excuse. I'm going to create some type of value for these people and pitch them something." Low and behold, what happened?

Melissa Webb: I did. I got 10 more. I now have 70 students-

Shane Sams: That's amazing.

Melissa Webb: ... total in my online writing business.

Shane Sams: It's cool because, like after you talked to Jocelyn, like all ... These things are cumulative. That's what people really don't realize. I think that's what Jocelyn's trying to get to.

Shane Sams: Basically, if you do these five actions steps and you just get them done, regardless of it's the right order or the wrong order, the end different order, doesn't matter. Things happen. Like if you had 10 members, you add 50, 60 something, you added one-seventh of your membership in one month, right?

Melissa Webb: Yes.

Shane Sams: Well, like what if you do that again and again and it keeps getting cumulative? Then you start going on podcasts, and then it starts all adding up to where you get this snowball effect, this avalanche happens where you make things happen, right? That's where we go back to the 20 thing list that you had. You were paralyzed and not doing anything, looking at the 20 thing list on paper, right?

Melissa Webb: Yes, yes.

Shane Sams: That's where most people really fail when they try to change their life, is they see all the things and they get paralyzed, when really, if you'll just do some of the things, you'll move forward and things will happen and that cumulative compound interest effect happens until you get to the point where you can do whatever you want.

Shane Sams: I talked to ... I had a call this morning with somebody else in the Flip Your Life community and we talked about that exact same thing. They were paralyzed, they were frozen, they weren't doing anything. They were like, "Why is nothing happening?" I'm like, "Because you're not doing anything. You've got this giant list, you've got all these things, but you're not enjoying the compound effect.

Shane Sams: " Then they said, "Well, wait. Well, how much time you think we're going to put into this? How much time did you and Jocelyn put into it at the beginning?" I said, "Well, we worked from 7:00 to 5:00. We came home, we went back and forth with the kids. We stayed up 'til midnight. For seven days a weeks, 365 days for the first year, we did not get good sleep or any good rest, but now we sleep in as long as we want to." Because the compound interest is coming to fruition. We're getting that effect later.

Shane Sams: That's what we told them, and I told them earlier, and that's exactly what you're saying now. It's like, "Oh, I was paralyzed, and nothing was happening." "Oh, I got, a log jam broke free after this call, and now I got 10 members just like that." That's what we want you to do next.

Melissa Webb: That's ... Yeah.

Shane Sams: Let that loose and get even more members.

Melissa Webb: That's exactly what she did for me. Like that whole paralyzation, like that's the key word, you hit it on the nose. I felt paralyzed.

Melissa Webb: Once I started doing one thing, that is the amazing thing that I would say to anybody else. "Don't really worry with the first one or two, three things that you start. Just start, because that will motivate you to do whatever's next. Then when that ball starts rolling, it just goes. Just do not, do not stop."

Shane Sams: This, just, Jocelyn and I are like two ends of the spectrum. Like she's very much like order and I'm very much like chaos. Sometimes, when we get stuck, like Jocelyn has like ... Almost dies, because I'll just go do anything.

Shane Sams: Like the other day, we were frozen in a conversation talking some different things about membership offers. Like how we were going to move some things around in the membership itself and we were totally paralyzed. I sent an email to the list and said, "We're going to do these three things." Jocelyn goes, "Have you even made the order forms for those? Have you even made the page for those?" I was like, "Nope, but now the ball's rolling."

Shane Sams: Like we just ... Like it drives her crazy when I do that, but sometimes that's the only way you can get past the impasse is to just announce and say and do and, "What if it breaks? What if doesn't?"

Shane Sams: What was it last ... Oh, last year, when we sold the live event, I sent an order form out and I didn't connect it to anything. Jocelyn was like, "You know we have to have a survey for these people, and we have to figure out their dietary restrictions, and have to do all of these things." I'm like, "Ah, whatever. We'll do it later." Then it got it unstuck. Like we had to launch it out or it wouldn't work, right?

Melissa Webb: Right.

Shane Sams: Yeah. It's so scary to do that, but if you don't, oh my gosh, you'll just sit there forever and wonder, "What if?" as you look back on it.

Melissa Webb: I totally agree, and I think too that the live component is so huge. Because, like I said, I'd written my list. I'd written my list many times, but talking to Jocelyn and then like sharing my success stories in the forum, a live person encouraged me. A live person said, "Go do this."

Melissa Webb: I think that a lot of people, if all you're going to do is just go read a book and go study under some other great coach, that's fine but until you get that live person who cares about you ... Jocelyn cared. Like I could tell her sincerity was authentic. She was like, "Melissa, this is going to be great. You're doing awesome." Like it was so motivating.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, and I don't even know that it's that you always have to talk one-on-one, because some people might not be able to make that investment right now, but there is something that you can invest in to get you to your next step. Maybe it is just joining a community like ours. I mean, I would love to have anyone as part of our community.

Shane Sams: Or getting in a Mastermind where you see other people doing it. It might even be telling you what to buy sometimes.

Jocelyn Sams: Maybe it's buying a book, maybe it's going to an event. Like there's different kinds of investment for different stages of your business. If you're not doing any of them, I got a spoiler alert, you're probably not going to make much progress. You have to invest time, you have to invest money to be able to move forward in anything that you do.

Shane Sams: That's why we did home school. Like we would have probably never done it, especially when we did it.

Melissa Webb: Right.

Shane Sams: Because we actually brought two experts on the podcast who had written a book called 5-Hour Home School Week. It was, how do you pronounce their last name? It's Kaleena and Aaron ...

Jocelyn Sams: Oh, I don't know.

Shane Sams: Oh, it's Amuchastegui or something like that.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah.

Shane Sams: They're on the podcast. Go listen to it. It's already aired.

Melissa Webb: They were great.

Shane Sams: Yeah. We actually brought them out and talked to them for two hours. We needed to hear and see someone else do it. Like, we need that. It's not like we're just sitting here figuring everything out on our own, right? We draw as much inspiration from other people as they do from us.

Melissa Webb: Right.

Shane Sams: That's just a part of it. Let's go back, let's circle back around to this question about the podcast. Because this was a very interesting question because we always ask people about fears and obstacles, and then we talk practically about what to do next for business. This is the ultimate question that, basically, rolls all of that into one.

Shane Sams: It's like, "How do I approach someone else to be on their platform?" Because that in itself brings all of your insecurities, all of your doubts, all of your disbeliefs to the front. Then on the back side, it's also like, "Then, how do I use that opportunity without being a selfish user, and I'm just using someone else for their audience?" Right?

Melissa Webb: Yes, yes.

Shane Sams: It's like, "How do I overcome the insecurity? How do I deliver value for the audience? Then how do I ..." Selfishly is not the right word but I'm going to use it, just because it's close enough. Basically, "Pitch my thing at the end." Does that make sense?

Melissa Webb: Yes, yes. That's exactly where I am. Because by nature, I'm a giver. Like I can be almost too generous. It's so funny, in our Mastermind group, Corey is constantly saying, "Melissa, you're not charging enough. Melissa, you're in this to make money." I'm like, "Okay, okay. Well, let me just make a straight tutorial."

Shane Sams: Right.

Jocelyn Sams: Exactly, yeah. A lot of people have that situation. We live in a culture where people think, "Oh, well, all information is free online." Well, I mean, that is true to an extent but-

Shane Sams: It's not curated correctly. It's not organized.

Jocelyn Sams: Exactly. You are delivering value to people and so there has to be some type of value exchange.

Shane Sams: Always remember this, okay?

Melissa Webb: Okay.

Shane Sams: No one succeeds alone. The people ... The big online viewers that make it look like it's all about them. I don't know, like the Gary Vs and the Tony Robbins. It looks like it's all about them, but none of them succeeded without some kind of reciprocal relationship helping them all feed into this loop that keeps everybody kind of moving forward. Like you can't ... That person can't grow their podcast without great people on their podcast, right?

Melissa Webb: True, true.

Shane Sams: You can't grow and go into new territory without someone introducing you to other people. Correct?

Melissa Webb: Correct.

Shane Sams: Just by going on their podcast, you are already helping them because it is really hard to carry solo shows. It's really hard to be the only person every day talking by yourself. Like even people that look like they do that, that have their own show where it's just them and they're just talking, they've got a team behind them doing research, helping them write the script. It's not just one person alone and they're growing forever. Does that make sense?

Melissa Webb: Absolutely.

Shane Sams: That's how you've got to approach first asking to be on other people's platforms is, hey look, this person is more than likely looking for really interesting, really helpful people to come on their show. They're looking for people that want to help their audience, because that makes them look good, and it is a status thing. It is an ego thing. It is a, "Hey, I can't do this alone. I need guests." Right?

Melissa Webb: Right.

Shane Sams: One reason that we do our podcast the way we do it is because after about 40 solo shows in the very beginning of our podcast, we realized that we would not be able to do this forever. Like we could not just come up with topics and write scripts and do it just me and Jocelyn all the same ... There was no way that's how this podcast was going to work.

Shane Sams: At the same time, we didn't really want to bring on like expert guests and just rehash the same podcast that everybody else is doing. We thought, "Hey, people ask us great questions in our Flip Your Life stuff. Our coaching clients, our members ask great questions. Why would we not just have them on, let them ask their question, and we can talk, and it's going to help them too?"

Shane Sams: You coming on our podcast helps us because we don't have to sit for six hours and script a podcast. We just get to tell our stories and talk about our relationship and then help you move forward. We need you to help us create good content.

Melissa Webb: That's a great point of view. Yeah.

Shane Sams: You're helping the podcast as much as they're helping you, basically.

Jocelyn Sams: Exactly.

Melissa Webb: Okay.

Jocelyn Sams: Like as long as you're not approaching it from a selfish point of view, just go to them and say, "Hey, I have some really cool content, and I can help people teach their children at home how to write better."

Shane Sams: Yeah.

Melissa Webb: Okay.

Jocelyn Sams: I feel like you're already in that frame of mind in that you want to give to people, so just take that and run with it.

Jocelyn Sams: I just encourage you to look at other people in your space. What podcasts have they been on? That's a good place to start looking and say, "Hey, this person teaches home school writing, and they've been on podcasts x, y and z, so I'm going to go and say, 'Hey, I do something similar to this person.'" Or maybe have them introduce you, if it's someone you know.

Shane Sams: Being strategic is not being selfish. Like that, people confuse that. They get really confused and like, "Well, if I'm ... This is all about me and I'm being so strategic. I've picked, I've identified these hundred targets, these podcasts that I'm going to reach out to because I know they've got home school families listening, and it's going to put me in front of the right people." No, like that's the reciprocal, working together agreement.

Shane Sams: That podcast introduces you to the home school people who get value from you and really appreciate the podcast host that introduced them to you, so they come back and listen to the next episode to find more help, right?

Melissa Webb: Yes.

Shane Sams: Everyone wins in that feedback loop, every single person. The listener wins, because they get the information they need to solve their problem. The podcast host wins, because they created good value for their audience and they introduced them to the right person. Then you win, because you get to go and put your stuff in front of people who pay you so that you can not have to go do another job and can keep creating resources for them.

Shane Sams: Then that person comes back to listen to that person's podcast again next week, where they introduce them to a new person, which provides values, which helps them solve problems, which makes them come back and listen again. Being strategic is not being selfish. It's the way that we all help each other. Like society needs that, we have to do that or it just doesn't work.

Melissa Webb: I love that.

Shane Sams: Go out and ... You almost owe it to the podcast person to ask them to be on their show. Right?

Melissa Webb: That's fantastic. Yes.

Shane Sams: I think where people get confused is it's like the podcast host ... Well, a hundred people ask them to be on, they only have 10.

Melissa Webb: Yes.

Shane Sams: That's not because they don't care about what you have to say. It's because they can only record 10 episodes a quarter. Like there's a limit in time, that's why you strategically and tactically have to go out and ask 50 people to be on their podcast to get on 15 of them. Right?

Melissa Webb: Yes.

Shane Sams: It's not because you're being rejected. That's just the limitation of time. We can't have every single person on our podcast from the community. We can only have 52 people a year on this podcast.

Jocelyn Sams: Well, and then that's where you have to start getting into systems. Like our system is we look for people with success stories or people that we know in-person, people that we've talked to on coaching calls. We look for those types of people because we know that they'll make a good guest because they're actually doing what it takes to get to the next level.

Shane Sams: Yeah.

Jocelyn Sams: They probably have those types of systems too, but just look for one, look for podcasts or opportunities where you can provide value and then you can get value in return. That's the way the world works. There are going to be a lot of people who don't take you up on your offer, and that's fine.

Jocelyn Sams: Like there are thousands of people who listen to our podcasts every week who have never paid us a dime, and that's totally fine. Like that's just the way that it works. Then there are some people who are going to find enough value in what you do to want to give you some type of monetary exchange, and that's fine too.

Shane Sams: There's other kinds of value too. Like there's other ... Like we don't, like not everyone will pay you, right? Some people will listen to you and some people will use your stuff, which might give you a testimonial. Some people might ...

Shane Sams: I did a think recently where I wanted to speak at an event. I emailed our list and I just asked them to go nominate me to speak. Like, "Hey, you may not be in the community. You may not buy anything from us, but if you enjoy our podcast and you want some reciprocity, would you please go nominate me for this, or go do it?" Like, "I give you free content every week, you go do this for me." Like that's just the way the world works.

Shane Sams: I think the world makes us feel like we're not supposed to ask for anything, because like bosses don't want people to ask for raises. It's like, "Don't ask for what you want. Don't be an advocate for yourself. Don't do that." Like that's what the world tells us to do, but that's not really how we should do it, because that doesn't really help in any way.

Shane Sams: Some people are ... There's going to be some podcasters that are like, "Hey, I have a $500 fee for my podcast." That's the reciprocity they want. Maybe you're like, "Wow. They have 100,000 home school listeners. Maybe that's worth $500." Right?

Melissa Webb: Right.

Shane Sams: It's not just an exchange of information pool. That's called a negotiation. That's what they value. Maybe you should pay it. You know what I'm saying?

Melissa Webb: Right, right.

Shane Sams: There's lots of different ways that people build in these relationships. You just have to figure out, strategically, what works best for you, and don't feel selfish about. Like why would you not want to be on their podcast? Does that make sense?

Melissa Webb: It's such a great mind shift for me, when you shared it in that perspective. That's fantastic.

Shane Sams: Yeah. Don't feel like you're bragging about yourself or that you're like, "Oh, I don't want to ... What do I have to offer them?" Well, an hour of your time. You don't get that hour back, so that's really valuable. Okay?

Melissa Webb: Right.

Shane Sams: Now, on the podcast, what you have to do is your part is deliver the value, right?

Melissa Webb: Right.

Shane Sams: Deliver the value and then don't be afraid to tell people their next steps. So many people want to get their pitch right when they go on the show. Like at the end, "I got to spin everything back to my pitch. I got to spin everything back to my opt-in. I got to spin everything back to make sure that everybody who listens goes to my site and give me an email," but that's really, that's not how you do that.

Shane Sams: You deliver value for that person and help them. That's what takes people to want to go to the next step, and they'll like and trust you, and all that good stuff.

Melissa Webb: Well, and that's true from a consumer point of view as well. You've had amazing people on your podcasts, and I've never gone to their site because they pitched it. I've always gone because I think it's valuable.

Melissa Webb: Like that would be the reason why I would go somewhere else, so that's something that I certainly want to keep in mind as I do the same thing. Like I'll offer the value that makes somebody want to go there.

Jocelyn Sams: Exactly. The people who are most willing to buy from you, they will find you whether you give a URL or you don't.

Shane Sams: That's true. If you'll go back and listen to almost any podcast we've ever done anywhere else, we never, almost never talk about ... Like spin things back to what we're selling or anything. We don't even say ... Like sometimes I've ... When was ...

Shane Sams: I was on Michael O'Neal's podcast. I did an interview on that for a second time. I forgot to even tell our URL or our anything at the end. Like we just had a conversation for like 45 minutes, and we talked. I totally forget.

Shane Sams: I got of the call, I looked over at Jocelyn, I went, "Did I tell anybody about our website or anything?" We're like, "Nah. Forgot it." People wrote us and said, "I heard you on this specific episode and I sought you out." If you're delivering enough value, that will happen automatically. It's not about your technique or, "How do I strategically, tactically get the most opt-ins off of this?" It's like be yourself, tell your story, deliver value and people will come. They just will.

Melissa Webb: I love it.

Shane Sams: Yeah, and you got to convince them to join your email list, when they get to your website, right?

Melissa Webb: Got to have a call to action.

Shane Sams: Yeah. Actually go out and say ... I'll tell you a different way to even find the podcast. Go find the 50 home school podcasts that you genuinely think you can help the most. Don't look at their audience size, don't look at their social media following, don't do any of that. Right?

Melissa Webb: Okay.

Shane Sams: One thing we do do is when we're trying to go on an interview ... We do try to find people that have over 50 episodes because we know that person's in it for the long-run, because 90% of all podcasts stop at episode 30. Okay?

Melissa Webb: Wow. Yes.

Shane Sams: Look for people who have actually been in it, and are in it, and are staying in it, because you don't want to just jump on anything that might not be there in a year.

Jocelyn Sams: One that comes out regularly. I mean, you don't want one that comes out once a week and then like-

Shane Sams: Last episode's been out six months ago, or anything like that.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah.

Shane Sams: Yeah. Yeah, so make sure people are consistently creating content before you go on it. Then, look for the ones you think you can help the most. Don't just look for the biggest ones. Okay?

Melissa Webb: Love it.

Shane Sams: Yeah. That will make it ... It'll make it a whole lot easier to pitch your stuff.

Jocelyn Sams: It'll just make it feel better for you. Like that you're really in it for the right reasons.

Melissa Webb: It will. 100%.

Jocelyn Sams: All right, we have had a lot of fun talking today. We've had some crazy stories. This has been a very unusual episode, but I hope it's been fun.

Shane Sams: Very interesting. Yeah, it's hilarious.

Jocelyn Sams: We always ask people before we finish the episode, what is one thing that you plan to work on in the next 24 hours or so based on what we talked about here today?

Melissa Webb: Well, without a doubt, we're going to end this call and I am going to go find those 50 home schooling podcasts that have had at least 50 episodes themselves, and ones that I really, truly believe that I can bring value to their audience.

Shane Sams: I think that is a tremendous goal. Based on your track record, Melissa, I have no doubt that you will go out and make that happen today. You may just be calling us in a week going, "Hey, guys. I'm on 10 podcasts. It's going to be amazing. I'm going to help a lot of people." That is awesome.

Shane Sams: Melissa, we appreciate you for coming on the show. We know how hard it is to go on a podcast and share your story and be transparent. We also know how important that is for all of our listeners out there to hear not just us, not just experts, but just other real people who are out there making this thing happen.

Shane Sams: I have no doubt that your story is going to inspire a lot of people out there in our audience. We have another inspirational thing to share with you. Because Melissa is going to share our bible verse today. Jocelyn and I draw a lot of our inspiration from the bible for our life and our business. We know that a lot of people in our audience do as well. What verse will you be sharing with us today?

Melissa Webb: I'm going to be sharing Psalm 118:24. I have to say this, before sharing it, that it's like such a blessing that we are given the ability to have our own thoughts. We're not puppets, that we are allowed to believe what we choose to believe. I just think that's one of God's greatest gifts. Why not choose those positive thoughts?

Melissa Webb: For years, I have just made it a very intentional first thing that I think as I'm waking up, as my eyes are opening. I just claim this verse every single morning. "Today is the day the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it."

Shane Sams: Love it.

Jocelyn Sams: Love it.

Shane Sams: Absolutely love it. I actually, when I'm feeling bad ... It's funny. We all grab onto different verses, but I can't tell you how many times when I'm in a bad mood, that's the verse I always fall back to.

Melissa Webb: It's an awesome one.

Shane Sams: Just to be grateful. Just to be grateful that we're alive and things could always be worse. Let's be realistic, right?

Melissa Webb: Yes.

Shane Sams: Man, today is the day. Rejoice. That is an awesome verse. Listen, Melissa, thank you so much.

Melissa Webb: Thank you.

Shane Sams: Cannot wait to hear you on all those other podcasts and to share this with our audience out there as well.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, and I can't wait to see this success story. Definitely come back and let us know how it goes.

Melissa Webb: Thank you.

Shane Sams: All right, guys. That was another great episode of The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. Another amazing conversation with a real life Flip Your Life community member. Maybe you're out there right now and you feel alone. Maybe you're looking for that forum, that community, that group, that Mastermind, just like Melissa was and you need some help putting that together. We would love to help you do that inside of the Flip Your Life community.

Shane Sams: You can join the Flip Your Life community right now for free over at FlippedLifestyle.com/free. That's F-L-I-P-P-E-D Lifestyle.com/F-R-E-E. We would love for you to start your Flip Your Life journey today, and maybe someday we can share your success story as well right here on the podcast. That's FlippedLifesyle.com/free. We cannot wait to meet you and talk to you inside.

Shane Sams: All right, guys. That is all the time that we have for today. Until next time, get out there and take action, do whatever it takes to Flip Your Life. We'll see you then.

Jocelyn Sams: Bye.

Melissa Webb: When you guys have talked about numbers, like I used to think I needed like 10,000 people to find me.

Shane Sams: No.

Melissa Webb: Then you guys one time were talking about like, "Do you guys realize, you really don't need that many people?" If I had 250 people ... Because I don't want to be huge. I like the community piece.

Shane Sams: Yup.

Melissa Webb: If I had 250 people paying me $100 a month, yeah, so much for teaching.

Shane Sams: Exactly.

Jocelyn Sams: Exactly.

Melissa Webb: I never made that much in teaching.

Shane Sams: That is an amazing statement. I love hearing people say that. "If I just had x people ..."

Melissa Webb: Yes.

Shane Sams: ... "Paying $5 a month, I could put my child ..."

Jocelyn Sams: It's such an eyeopening thing. Like people, when they finally realize that, I mean, there are like seven to eight billion people on the earth. Like you don't need that many of them.

Shane Sams: That was the biggest epiphany. That's what really, I think, is the formula that really led to our success is us in the car one day, and me looking over and just saying, "We only make like $5,000 a month." Like, "What if we had a 100 human beings send us $50?" Like, "That literally would be as much as we're making now killing ourselves at work," right?

Melissa Webb: Right.

Shane Sams: That's the formula. How much do you want to make? How many people times what dollar amount makes that happen? What value can you provide to earn that money?

Melissa Webb: Yes.

Shane Sams: If you can figure that out, you win. Like you're going to succeed and it's going to happen.

Links and resources mentioned on today’s show: * Melissa's Website * Flip Your Life LIVE 2019 Tickets & Registration Information * Flip Your Life community 30-day trial

Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!

Get your FREE 30-DAY Membership in the Flip Your Life Community NOW!

– https://flippedlifestyle.com/free

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In today's episode, we help Shira grow her membership site for behavior analysis professionals.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jocelyn Sams: Hey, y'all. On today's podcast, we help Shira grow her membership site for behavior analysis professionals.

Shane Sams: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, where life always comes before work. We're your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. We're a real family that figured out how to make our entire living online. And now, we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? All right. Let's get started. What's going on, everybody? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. It is great to be back with you again today. Super excited to bring on another member of the Flip Your Life community. And we have a huge success story to share with you guys today. We are super excited to welcome Shira Karpel to the show today. How you doing, Shira?

Shira Karpel: Hi, guys. I'm good. Thanks for having me.

Shane Sams: Shira told me to pronounce her name just like the Masters of the Universe Shira from our childhoods. So I tried to do that as best as I could.

Jocelyn Sams: From, as our children say, the 19's.

Shane Sams: From the 19's. Back in the 19's.

Jocelyn Sams: One time they said to us, you were alive in the 19's?

Shane Sams: Isaac asked me the other day, he said something like hey, Dad, how old were you when they invented electronics?

Shira Karpel: That's hysterical.

Shane Sams: That's hysterical.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay. Well, we're happy to have you today. We're really excited about your story. You had written into us not too long ago to let us know that you have been a part of our community for a while, and you've been using our resources to grow a membership site for behavior analysts. Is that correct? And so what I want you to do is tell us a little bit about that. How did you get started in this? What's your background, and what is your business?

Shira Karpel: So behavior analysis is the science of behavior, and it's looking at how the impact of the environment affects behavior. There's so many applications to ABA, which applied behavior analysis. The most common application is with kids who have autism, who might be getting 20 to 40 hours a week of ABA therapy, and that's an intensive application of ABA. So I would say that's the most common application of ABA. I got into ABA, I have a masters in education. And then I went on to get a board certification, which is another degree on top of that. So I'm BCBA certified. And I've been training and practicing ABA here where I live. And as a BCBA, that means that we assess children who might need either behavior therapy or ABA therapy. Either that's because they have autism, or they just might need some help managing their behavior, either in a classroom or at home.

Shira Karpel: So we do the assessment. We would do supervision, and then we would very often put a team in place who carries out programs that come from us. So we would create the programs that are individualized for the student. And then there would be a therapist who's there daily carrying out the programs. And everything we do is data driven. So she'll be taking data and recording data, and then we'll review the data to make changes and updates to the program.

Shira Karpel: So that's what I've been doing as a career. And then we got to the point where unfortunately, there's a huge need for ABA therapists and BCBA's because of the need for children who have autism and other difficulties. But we found that there was only so much time in the day, and even if we would hire more therapists and have more staff, the amount of work that would take of us to scale just wasn't going to be worthwhile. We don't like charging families an extra amount of money so that we get a cut of what the therapists are doing. It just doesn't seem right to want to scale in that direction. And then I kind of came across this concept of online business through another therapist's website that enlightened me into this idea. I never thought that my field could actually do something like that. And started the website maybe about a year and a half ago. Our website is howtoaba.com. And that's where our blog lives.

Shira Karpel: And the blog is geared towards training other AB professionals, just giving them good tips. We also share a ton of free resources. So every blog has its own unique opt-in. So there might be, for a blog that's talking about one topic, we create an opt-in for that topic specifically to help them.

Shane Sams: Super smart.

Shira Karpel: Either a data sheet or a resource or a worksheet or something that's very specific so they opt in to that. So we get a lot of good traffic on our free resources page. So we've been doing that blog. And then we also found that a lot of professionals, because of the way of getting into the field, a lot of it is hands on training. So there are courses that you take, but a lot of it is just exposure in the field, and a lot of people feel untrained or unprepared or really just thrown in without being totally prepared.

Shira Karpel: So we found that sharing our resources was something we wanted to do to the greater community so that people can come together and help each other and feel more prepared once they are working with a kid, because you often are on your own. You don't really have another support system where you're working. So then we started a membership about a year ago. And the membership is called the Behavior Resource. Beyond the free resources that we offer on our blog, we actually offer the real programs that we use in programming for the children. We share that with all of our members. So they're able to download if they're teaching a topic with a student. They could just download that program, and it has everything you need, the data sheet, the explanation, all the criteria that we're required to have on a program description.

Shira Karpel: And we also offer monthly continuing education webinars, so we are certified through the international board to provide continuing education units.

Shane Sams: Love it.

Shira Karpel: So we do that once a month. Currently, we're only able to provide them for people who attend lives because of just the requirement. We're hoping to get to the point where we can create quizzes for each one, and be able to know if people watch them. But maybe that's like a software thing we want to look into. I'm not really sure how to do that. Because we do store the recordings in the resource, and people watch the recordings, but they can't the continuing education for that. And I know that that would be a big attraction if people could get the units for the recordings.

Shane Sams: So how much is the membership? How much do they pay per month?

Shira Karpel: So we have three options. For $12 a month, you get access to all the downloads, like the program descriptions, the graphs, data sheets, anything like that. For $19 a month, you get all of that plus any recorded video or live video. And then we have a yearly, which is 199.

Shane Sams: And how many members do you have right now?

Shira Karpel: We have 87 plus 48, whatever that is.

Shane Sams: So you have over 100.

Shira Karpel: Our current members.

Jocelyn Sams: So like in each category, yeah.

Shira Karpel: Yeah. In total, we service 178 have come in and out the door.

Shane Sams: Awesome.

Shira Karpel: We have a high retention rate. Not a lot of people cancel.

Shane Sams: That's amazing.

Shira Karpel: Yeah. We have almost 140 current.

Jocelyn Sams: So let's kind of back up just a little bit. You do have a business partner, right?

Shira Karpel: Right.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay. Now, is this someone that you have worked with in the past? What's your relationship with your business partner?

Shira Karpel: Right. So when I got into the field, she was really the one who trained me. We kind of worked together for about six to eight years, building our Toronto business. And a lot of the resources, she's trained me on, or she's created, or we've created together. And so when I came up with this idea, I thought she would continue to do that and offer more of the mentorship in the community, and I would do a lot of the marketing and settings things up from a technical perspective.

Shane Sams: That's amazing. So this thing is really young then. You just launched it this year, correct?

Shira Karpel: A year ago.

Shane Sams: And then when you were blogging, did you start blogging with the idea of an online membership or an online business, or was it basically like okay, let's just blog and then let it grow. What brought you to Flipped Lifestyle? Did you try something before that? How did you end up in the Flip Your Life community?

Shira Karpel: The Toronto business had a blog, and that was more to drum up local business.

Shane Sams: Yeah.

Shira Karpel: And it was around for a long time, so it did get a lot of good hits. So I started on that blog, and then when this became its own entity, we decided to give it a new name and move the blog over. So already then, we had the intention of starting the blog with the plans for something. I really struggled with how to turn this into a business, because I don't feel like ... I tried some other online resources and how to sell online and all that stuff, and a lot of what people said was you have to give people a solution to their problem. And I didn't feel like I could bring people from A to Z and say I'm solving your problem now. You can leave. I didn't feel like I could sell them a course, and at the end of the course, they would have a solution to their problem.

Shira Karpel: So I had tried that before I came to you guys, and I offered ... I launched a webinar, and I offered, I think, a four to six week course, and we're going to take you through ... I don't even know what it was. But I didn't feel good about it, because I didn't feel like I gave them the solution. Because at the end of the day, they're still in the same job. They're still in the same profession. They still have the same struggles, and they just need more resources. So then I kind of came across you guys, and I felt like what you offered in terms of the membership solution was really a great solution for me. I also like the idea of ... I feel like I'm providing a lot more value than even the $19. I do feel good about what they're paying for it. I don't feel like I'm ripping anyone off. I don't feel like they're paying too much for what they're getting. I feel like it's something I would have paid a lot of money for.

Shira Karpel: So when I found you guys, and you kind of pushed me to do this community idea, I just feel good about it, and it seems to be working.

Shane Sams: How many ABA professionals are out there? Do you know that number?

Jocelyn Sams: Is this something that's mostly a Canadian thing? Is it an international thing and pardon my ignorance on this, I just don't know anything.

Shira Karpel: It's an international thing. The board is located in the United States in Florida, and it's becoming a lot more common. There's lots. I don't even want to guess the number, but I would say hundreds per year.

Shane Sams: But this has greater reach, too, right? Anyone it seems like in special ed could use resources like this like in schools, like teachers. For example, like what you're saying about the programming sounds very similar to what elementary school special education teachers use for their behavior problems.

Shira Karpel: Right.

Shane Sams: Not behavior problems, but behavior therapy, right? This has reach that trickles down through the professional into the school system and these resources can even be deployed through other people under the supervision of someone, like an ABA professional, basically, right?

Shira Karpel: Yeah, for sure. And the other thing is like in countries where they may not have access to a BCA or an ABA professional, there's a huge need to access good resources, because there's countries in Europe and Asia and everywhere. We're actually getting a lot of those where they don't have someone who's able to provide that supervision.

Shane Sams: Okay. First of all, congratulations. You sent me an email a little while ago, and I read it, and I read it to Jocelyn out loud when you sent us the email because you said something very interesting. You've been in the community for a while. You're not super active in the forums or anything like that, but you're there. You're listening. You're taking action. You're going forward. And you've built this amazing business. This is amazing. This is just the foundation of what could easily become 1,000, 2,000 person membership that you're serving one to many. And you're really throwing your pebble in the pond and causing a massive ripple because you're training the professionals that train other people that help all these kids.

Shane Sams: So if every one of those people reaches 100 kids, like oh my gosh, what is the impact of this business? And it's not like a course where you're just like watch the course and move on, you're like literally helping them throughout their whole struggles, throughout their journey. You've kind of opened the door and asked questions, which is what we do. That's our job.

Shane Sams: We realize this, too. You can't just solve someone's problem with a course. What you really can do is solve someone's next step. But you have to have a dialogue back and forth to know that person's next step, and that's kind of what you've done here is you've created this bank of resources, which is basically a bank of next steps. You've opened the door for communication so people can clarify next steps. And you've created this thing that could just go out there and help as many people as possible. This is a world changing business you guys have created on top of the fact that you've successfully created financial gain from it. And that's what it's all about. That is exactly what my business is all about.

Shira Karpel: Right. When I first came into the community, I was really struggling with whether I should create this resource for parents or for professionals, because I felt like parents also need some sort of support and help and all of that, but professionals, you know, there's that attraction of helping so many more people. And on one of our first calls, I think you, Shane, encouraged me to start with the professionals, and you said just do it. Do it for three months, and then reassess. And we had members. So I just kept going.

Shane Sams: That's how it works.

Shira Karpel: And I like the idea that we can affect so many more people.

Shane Sams: I love how you said that because my brother and I were actually ... my brother lives in Cincinnati, and I'm down in southeast Kentucky. The only way we ever talk is we play Xbox together a couple nights a week.

Jocelyn Sams: Nerd alert.

Shane Sams: Yeah, Jocelyn, she just called me a nerd. You didn't hear that. But anyway, we were talking and hanging out, and I was talking the other day, he was like how many people listen to your podcast, how many people do your stuff, how many people listen to your lesson plans and all that stuff. And I got to thinking about my US history site. I got to thinking about Jocelyn's elementary librarian site, and we were trying to do the math of all the people that had read our articles or listened to our podcast. It's insane to think about how many students have literally read our lesson plans in the country and around the world and how many people have heard our message and our podcast.

Shane Sams: I think one of our Forbes articles is over half a million people have read it. You just don't realize, and it doesn't really settle in until you look down, and you say, I have a ... I mean, what was it 170 something professionals have been through this thing, and those 170 people have probably touched 50 to 100 kids in the last year or whatever, and these numbers become exponential how much influence you can make in the world sitting in your office in Toronto.

Jocelyn Sams: But the thing about it is if you never would have made a decision, and you never would have gotten started, none of this would have started. You could have been sitting here saying, oh, well, I don't know which avatar to choose, so I guess I won't do anything.

Shane Sams: I'll just stay paralyzed right here where I am.

Shira Karpel: Well, I did that for a long time until you pushed me off the cliff.

Shane Sams: I'm good at throwing people off the cliffs. I'm not the best at parachutes. That's Jocelyn's job in our relationship. That's why we always do the member calls together. So I can throw people off the cliff, and Jocelyn can throw in a parachute on your way down. But your parachute opened, and you were in total control of the landing now, and that is amazing.

Jocelyn Sams: The good news is you got past the mindset struggle of I don't know what to do, so I'm not going to do anything. You got past that. But let's talk about maybe something else that you've overcome along the way. So when everyone gets started, there's a number of mindset problems that we have that make us think either we can't do this, or we shouldn't do this, or something like that. So what is a mindset issue, a fear, or an obstacle that maybe held you back in the beginning that you've overcome.

Shane Sams: Or it could be something that maybe you ... maybe there was a roadblock between you and your business partner. That's another dynamic that comes in here. After you got this launched, you got your first members. What else kind of tripped you up along the way?

Shira Karpel: Well, I will say that part of my hesitancy in choosing to launch is definitely a little bit of imposter syndrome, which I probably still struggle with, because part of me going into the professionals was well, what if somebody comes and says, no, you're doing everything wrong, or you don't know what you're talking about, and who am I to be telling other professionals how to do their job and all of that. So that was scary, and sometimes opening my emails sometimes and just waiting for somebody to respond and say how dare you recommend this, or why would you say that?

Shane Sams: Which will happen eventually, if it's not already.

Jocelyn Sams: Oh yeah, it's going to happen.

Shira Karpel: Yeah, but you know what, I'm still waiting. I haven't gotten anything like that. The feedback we've gotten has been so positive in the way people respond to say, wow, you've helped me in my profession, and I feel so much more equipped, and the feedback has just all been positive, which I know may not last forever, but that's okay.

Jocelyn Sams: No, definitely won't last forever.

Shane Sams: And even if it does, that's a good example of how few and far between it is, but how the one out of the 100 can impact us, right? Because we don't get that many either. We say that jokingly all the time, like it's coming. It's really literally one in 100 messages that you get.

Shira Karpel: Yeah. So that's great. And in terms of like ... I would say the struggle with having a partner. It's been great. We've done great at dividing and conquering. We get along really well, and we really set out our intentions from the beginning. We knew what we wanted out of this. But it's difficult because we are both very limited with time. Our schedules are very different. So any time we want to do any kind of live webinar or marketing or even recording videos on our blog and our YouTube channel, it's been very challenging. We can only really, at this point, get together, not even once a month, we're able to find time to get together and record videos. Even if we batch them, it gets really tricky.

Shira Karpel: So time is a huge issue in terms of having time for both of us to do things together in terms of marketing and doing videos and that kind of thing.

Shane Sams: Sure. I totally get that. That's actually a struggle for us. The partnership dynamic we don't get into a lot. Because we haven't really had a lot of people with partners on the show. But even Jocelyn and I being married and living together, it's hard for us to coordinate that perfect time where we're both dressed, and we're both ready, and the lighting's right. That's a huge struggle coordinating, you know what I'm saying, like getting everybody on the same page at the same time. But there's also something interesting you said there about you're so limited on time, but you're still able to build a business of over 100 members. Like that's insane. That's a big thing that people worry about, like well, I've got a job, and I've got a family, and I've got all these things. Well, you guys did it, so why can't anybody do it? It doesn't make sense why some people say ... some people say there's no time, and that's a non starter. But even saying I've got limited time, at least you're spending some time on it, and you're doing it, and it's growing, and you're making it happen with what you have.

Jocelyn Sams: And you didn't make it a roadblock for you. You didn't say well, we're not able to record these videos, so I guess we'll just wait until we have more time. No. You'll never have more time.

Shane Sams: Right. It was a speed bump, not a road block, basically.

Shira Karpel: I will say it does get draining, because at this point, it's been a year. I have three children.

Shane Sams: Yep.

Shira Karpel: I don't have Sundays with them. I'm usually working on my business because I work full time during the week. My evenings are really taken up by my business, but I am a little afraid that I'm going to burn out at some point soon. So that's concerning.

Shane Sams: Well, that's what we're here for. That's why we're talking today. We're going to figure some of that stuff out.

Shira Karpel: Yeah. And the nice thing about the membership is it has been somewhat low maintenance. Once the professionals are in, they do ... and we've taken surveys and everything. They are using the resources. They're not always asking a ton of questions. So I guess one of my struggles is maybe I just feel like I have to put more in, but maybe there's just enough there, and I don't need to be so worried about it. I don't know.

Shane Sams: I think that probably spills back into the imposter syndrome, because you feel like ...

Jocelyn Sams: You need to prove yourself.

Shane Sams: Yeah. That's a good way to say that. You need to prove yourself all the time, like you keep flooding resources and keep doing all these things, which keeps you going, which eventually like burns you out. You know?

Jocelyn Sams: People are probably happy with what you already have. You just have this personal thing where you think you have to provide more for them.

Shane Sams: Yeah. I love the imposter syndrome question, too, because I actually used this analogy with someone the other day. They were really struggling with imposter syndrome, to the point where it was like they couldn't move forward, right? They were like no, I'm an imposter, right? I'm not the best at this. Who am I to teach this? Right?

Shira Karpel: Right.

Shane Sams: What I said to them, it was like my son, Isaac. Isaac plays basketball. We're in a small area. We're in Kentucky, so everybody thinks they know how to play basketball. But you know, he's got a coach who's on this team. And it would be kind of like saying only Steph Curry, the greatest three point shooter in the history of the NBA can shoot my son how to shoot a three pointer. Like it would be like that guy saying, well, I'm not Steph Curry. I'm not the best at this. I can't teach this kid how to do it. And we know on that level, that that's not true, right? He can teach my kid how to dribble. He can teach my kid how to play defense. He can teach my kid how to shoot a three pointer, because Isaac is behind him in the journey. And like that's what I always go back other with coaching even.

Shane Sams: Me and Jocelyn are not Fortune 500 billionaires, right? There are plenty of people with bigger online businesses than us by choice or by ability, you know? But that doesn't mean we can't help everybody else who's getting started, who's growing, who's building the thing, and I feel you're getting there, and you still struggle with it a little bit. And we do, too. We struggle with imposter syndrome, too, at times. When we did the live event last year, we really struggled with live event. We were like, are we really the people that should be doing this? But we did it. It wasn't the biggest live event ever, but we thought it was the best, but there was some imposter syndrome there.

Shira Karpel: I work here in Toronto, and although it is an international certification, I don't know how people practice in other countries, so is my stuff really going to be helpful for them, do they do things differently in other places.

Shane Sams: The good thing you've done though is you're letting them make that choice. And that's actually how you beat imposter syndrome is you put it out there, and you don't choose for people what's the best information for them. You're like this is what I offer. Here it is. On my history site, all the time, I get messages that are like, this is not the quality of stuff that ... this is not good enough for my class. But then I'll get a message the next day from another person that'll say this is exactly what I was looking for. So it does it. There's no real answer if it's good enough or bad enough. It's just that person it was good enough for them. This person, it was not good enough for them. But I'm here to give you a choice, right? And that's what you're doing. And I think you guys are wrestling with that really well. It's pretty awesome. A lot of people never make it to that point, Shira, where they are brave enough to bust past through imposter syndrome to launch. So kudos for you guys for getting through it.

Shira Karpel: Well, thank you.

Jocelyn Sams: All right. Let's jump into some questions about how we can help you guys get this thing to the next level and grow it. What can we help you with as far as that goes?

Shira Karpel: Okay. So I'm struggling with how to phrase this to in the marketing. Because like I said, I don't feel like I'm solving an actual problem, that people come in, they get their problem solved, and they leave. In a lot of my copy and marketing materials, I'm not sure how to sell it so it sounds like I am solving a problem. So I struggle with that.

Shane Sams: This one is actually kind of easy. It's that you sell the support, not the content. This seems like a field, based on what I know about education and also medical stuff, a lot of times these people are working with these kids alone, or they're working in an office where they're alone most of the day, and maybe they've got a team. Maybe they're in a school. Maybe they're in something. But this is such a hard field. Let's be realistic.

Shane Sams: It's working with kids. There's some behavioral problems. It can be frustrating, and you're alone a lot of the time in the execution of it, or at least with one or two other people. So it's like that's usually how things like this are marketed best is you're not alone. You're going to have leadership. You're going to have community. Don't focus so much on the resources. Use that as more of a ... what do we call it? Gravy or icing on the cake.

Shane Sams: Not only that, we've got everything you'll ever need resource wise. So there's a real tendency for people to only want to promote their content and what people can download. But people don't care about that. They don't care about the stuff. They want the stuff, but what they really care about is that they have support, and they feel supported.

Jocelyn Sams: And really, truth be told, they don't care so much about you, not in a negative way, not saying that you're not important. But they care that they get their questions answered. And one of the coolest things that you can market on this is that you have ABA professionals from all over the planet who can help answer their questions.

Shane Sams: Yeah. I would be willing to bet if you looked at those 100 and something people, some of them are going to be close to each other, and they don't even know it. They're might be two people from Florida in that list. Just knowing that there's people from however many states. We have members from 25 US states and four Canadian provinces, like all over the world. Just hearing that information is not marketing spin or anything like that. It's hey, you're not alone. There's people around you going through this, and we can connect you to a bigger world, and you can get ideas that you're not getting, because your states doing one thing, and our province is doing the other. That's where the promotion needs to really focus on.

Shira Karpel: The reason I think I've been hesitant to do that is because there isn't a lot of activity happening in terms of community and questions and I'm not ... we're not engaging that often, which I expected to, but we're not getting a lot of people, I think, wanting that part of it. I think they're happy to go in and get the downloads.

Shane Sams: Sure. But perception is reality. Let me take your example. When you sent me your email, you don't usually use the forums a lot. I don't know exactly what you've done in the courses or anything like that, but I would assume you're so busy with your membership that you're really not getting in there a whole lot, right? But it's kind of there. And the one thing you pointed to in this whole conversation was man, I remember that one time I needed this one thing answered, I needed to be pushed off the cliff, and I asked Shane, and he told me, and I did it, and look what happened. Like that one thing is worth it, right?

Shane Sams: And a lot of times, we say people come for the content and stay for the community. But in some places, they come for the community and stay for the content. It doesn't matter what they do when they get into it. You gotta speak to people where they are when they're trying to find the solution. And the frustration with most people is they're all alone creating all these resources. They're all alone with this kid. They're all alone in this setting.

Shane Sams: And they don't even know that that's the real problem. They think they just need to go download a worksheet, right? But really, what's driving them is that aloneness, is that need for leadership, is that need for community, is that need for someone to just make it easier for them, right? And that's what you're providing really. You're not really providing downloads. You're providing ease of use. You're providing a little relief from that loneliness.

Jocelyn Sams: A place for people to ask questions. Just because they're not asking questions doesn't mean that the place isn't there for them to ask questions, right?

Shane Sams: Yes. Sometimes, that's their security blanket, you know what I'm saying?

Shira Karpel: So even though it might not be me personally engaging.

Shane Sams: That's right.

Shira Karpel: All that stuff that's in there would still be considered support and community.

Jocelyn Sams: Absolutely.

Shane Sams: It's the way you're presenting, even the worksheets and stuff ... or not worksheets. I say worksheets, but all these tools and resources you have for them to download. Even that can be presented in more of a you don't have to do this by yourself. We're going to help you with these resources. So now, it's not, we have 4,000 downloads for any project you do. It's like no, we thought about you, and we knew you would need this. And we made this for you, and we put it in one place, just like a library made just for you and all the people around you that are like you so that we can all go in together, and do this together.

Shane Sams: So that's how you ... one, that pushes you out of the forefront a little bit because you don't have to be I'm Shira, and I'm the person who knows all the answers. It's just no, we got a place where we're all finding answers and creating answers together, and it's there for you when you need it. You may only need it once a month. But it's there for you when you need it. And that's going to tap into that loneliness a little bit and show people, like that's the problem you're solving is you're making it easier, and they're not alone. You're not answering all of their perfect technical questions basically.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, and it's actually a big benefit. When I still had Elementary Librarian, I would say you have the support of hundreds of elementary librarians. It's not just me. It is my website, and I created it, but I created it for you so that you would have an opportunity to get input of hundreds of librarians. I don't have all the answers. But here's a bunch of people from all over the planet who are all doing the same thing, all going the same direction and all here to support each other. Just because they didn't ask 10 questions today doesn't mean it's still not a place that we can all support each other.

Shane Sams: I have an old Facebook group for football coaches about a very specific football topic. And it's amazing, it keeps growing years after I ever started it. What happened last week, or probably the last two or three weeks, I noticed that dozens of people were joining. I think over 100 people have joined since November 15, just out of nowhere, randomly.

Shira Karpel: Wow.

Shane Sams: But here's what happened, as people started losing, and their seasons started ending, they're left with questions. They're left with wow, did I do my best this year? Man, we were five and five, what is this, what is that. So what did they immediately do? They immediately started seeking out like minded people, groups for football coaches, so they could go in and have somewhere to go talk about this stuff. They weren't looking for the answers. They weren't looking for the solution for next year's problem, like the playbook that would change their life. It was just like man, I've gotta go surround myself with people who might know what I can do to do better, right?

Shane Sams: And it's kind of the same thing here, like that's how you gotta market. That's why we market the community way more than our courses. If you go to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife right now, that's our sales page for what we sell. Go look at it. We do not list our courses. We don't even list it, because we know that what people really need to know is we do have a plan for you that's step by step. Here's the broad swipe of what it does, and we have a community of literally thousands of people from all over the world working to build a better life for their family with online business. That's what people really need to know.

Shane Sams: The content's there. I don't gotta list all the content for you. It's there when you need it. It's like a supermarket. You go in and get milk if you're out of milk, right? But what really is there is twice a month, me and Jocelyn are going to be there on a premium member call. The forums are open 24 hours a day seven days a week, and there's a huge bank of resources to go pull a book off the shelf when you need it.

Shane Sams: So that should help your marketing a little bit to be able to present that, and maybe even lessen some of that imposter syndrome.

Shira Karpel: Yeah, that helps. That does clarify things for me, makes me feel better about it.

Shane Sams: Is it overwhelming a little bit? How does that compare to what you were doing to present it? Were you presenting this as all the resources or as you and your partner as the expert? What were you doing before?

Shira Karpel: I think we were presenting it a lot as the support, like we're providing support. Like what we say is resources, community, and support for AB professionals. So the resources was first. But we were always including the community and support. I guess I felt like if I was claiming to provide support, then I should be there more often providing actual support. But I guess it's still considered support, the fact that they can go in and get what they need.

Jocelyn Sams: Absolutely, yes. And that's the thing is you just have to frame it in the way you want your people to think about it.

Shane Sams: What we have realized with Flipped Lifestyle, even, of course, Jocelyn and I lead the Flip Your Life community, but what we noticed as the community really exploded and really grew to the point where we couldn't possibly answer every single question was that it really didn't matter as long as people got an answer to their question. Like that's the goal, right? That's the goal is to point people in the right direction.

Shane Sams: So one thing we've even strategically planned out is how we can hire more support in the community to make sure people get the answer. Jocelyn just this morning, we were talking about this, and she was like look, I don't care if it's our courses, or we find it for them on Google and point them in the right direction, like that's the point is to help people figure out what to do next. So we've even thought about 24 hour support, maybe, like have people in the community forums, like three shifts, eight hours a time, hire people around the world to where there is always someone there to help them find an answer.

Shane Sams: Because it doesn't matter if it comes from me and Jocelyn. It just matters that they find the answer, right? And that's kind of where you are at, too. It doesn't really matter if you answer their question even. It's like is the answer there for them. And a lot of times, it's going to be, so you don't have to worry about it.

Jocelyn Sams: All right. Let's talk about where we're going, as far as like members. What's your plan to continue to grow the membership?

Shane Sams: Let me ask you this. Are you planning on replacing the other business with this, or is always going to run side by side?

Shira Karpel: I think I will continue ... I don't plan on leaving my job. No. I would like it to continue and this to be more of a side thing.

Shane Sams: All right. What if you had 5,000 members paying you $20 a month, then what?

Shira Karpel: Um ...

Shira Karpel: That is really tempting, I would consider it.

Shane Sams: Right, right.

Shira Karpel: Like I said, it's not demanding a lot in terms of maintenance of the membership on me right now. So other than the technical things, like updating the website and making sure that everything is working. I don't feel like the members are time consuming.

Shane Sams: Okay. So what is ... you said earlier, you were feeling like you're getting a little bit burnt out though. The marketing thing is easy. We're going to take action on that, just change some copy. But like, how do we prevent you from becoming burnt out, because I feel like you're feeling it. You're looking ahead, like man, I got three kids, I'm working full time, and I'm running an online business. You can't do everything all the time forever. Where are you feeling the most burn out?

Shira Karpel: Right. So I feel like for the past year, I've been trying anything and everything, which is great, because I've been learning so much. But I can't figure out what is that one thing that I should just do more of, and that's kind of that switch that I can just increase or decrease.

Shane Sams: Where did you get the members? Where did the members come from?

Shira Karpel: That's the thing. I don't really know. I use Convert Kit, so I can see if they've signed up from my email list, if they've been on my email list prior to them joining a membership. Sometimes they haven't. Sometimes their first thing in Convert Kit is the membership, and they just joined. And I don't know how they came across the sales page. I do Facebook Ads, but I find it to be very overwhelming, and I can't quite figure out how to track conversions, because once they pay through PayPal, I feel like Facebook loses that conversion at some point. It can't track whether the payment went through once it goes to the PayPal page.

Shira Karpel: Sometimes when I promote the next webinar that we're doing in the membership for the CEUs, sometimes that brings in a lot of new members, if I send out an email to my list, saying, oh we're doing this month's topic whatever. That will bring in a lot of people. I've tried doing a one dollar trial. I've tried doing a coupon code. I've tried doing a weekend flash sale. We've tried doing ... live webinars, I know, can be effective, but they're just so time consuming.

Shane Sams: For sure.

Shira Karpel: That I don't know if it's something I could commit to doing on a regular basis in terms of sales. So I want to find what that sales thing is, and once I figure it out and put a proper system in place, I feel like I'd be a lot more comfortable.

Shane Sams: So there's a thing there you're kind of getting a little crossed. There's a difference between what causes someone to join, like a dollar trial, a free trial, a webinar, whatever. There's a difference between that and where they come from. You have got to talk to these people who are in your membership and figure out how they found you, because that's where the funnel starts. We did a survey recently, and we found out that probably 80% of people who find us heard about us in another media, like either one of our ... we've been in Business Insider and Forbes, like articles. We've probably done probably near 100 podcasts in the last couple years, other people's podcasts. And that's how people find us is we go get interviewed.

Shane Sams: So our strategy for next year starts there. We have got to get on more interviews, because that's the best way to grow our brand, right? So you've gotta know where these people are coming from. It may be search. If it's Google search, then you can probably pinpoint how they're searching for you and then run ads toward that, and then you don't have to worry about all these live webinars and stuff. You may just be able to drop them straight to your page. They realize it's there. But you've gotta figure out where they come from before you figure out what makes them convert.

Shane Sams: That's a different part of the chain, you see what I'm saying?

Shira Karpel: Okay.

Shane Sams: And you're kind of talking about them in the same vein, like oh the dollar trial makes them come, or the webinar makes them come. But that's not totally true. It's where they're coming from is the most important thing, you gotta figure out first. So that's probably really your next step is maybe a good survey.

Shira Karpel: So I do have a survey that I've sent out to the members. Not a lot of people respond. I only have a couple responses. And a lot of them came through a free webinar, which I do have a free webinar that's recorded.

Shane Sams: How did you promote that though?

Shira Karpel: So the one that was recorded, I had a Facebook Ad going to it for a long time, and they could just opt in and just see it whenever they wanted. The ones that are live also was promoted through Facebook.

Shane Sams: And how many members did that produce? We don't know that.

Shira Karpel: That's the thing, I don't know.

Shane Sams: So we gotta figure that out. That's where you've got to look at in isolation is how did someone get to that webinar. It's even back one beyond that. Was it the Facebook Ad? Did you send an email list about the webinar? Because some of them came from there, which probably just came from general blog traffic. We're not going to be able to figure that out right here at this second, but that is what you have to know, because that's what's going to eliminate all this nonsense. It's just oh, most of my people come through search. Okay, then how can I capitalize on that? I'll create an ad that goes to an evergreen webinar from search. If it's from Facebook Ads, well, I need a Facebook Ad that goes to the evergreen webinar that does this. And like you've gotta know where they're coming from. And the only way to do that really is to talk to those people. You gotta figure out a way to stir them up. Maybe do a live thing. Don't do a survey. Like hey, I'm answering questions live. And one of the questions you ask, maybe 20 of them show up. Ask them, how did you hear about us? I'm looking at the chat right now. I'm going to read them out.

Shane Sams: And just let them participate in that way to get some kind of data, and then anyone that joins in the future, I would do exactly what Jocelyn does. Record a quick video. There's a tool called Use Loom. U-S-E L-O-O-M. And it's a browser extension. You click a button, you record a video, and it emails them. Every time someone joins, turn that on, say hey, welcome to the community. How'd you hear about us? Email me back.

Jocelyn Sams: And you will start to see a theme.

Shane Sams: A trend. Yep. It'll appear quickly.

Jocelyn Sams: That's what you need to do more of.

Shane Sams: If you can get 20% of the people's data on this, you'll know pretty much the rest of them true. So if you can figure out how about 20 or 30 of them actually came to the community, you can kind of guess it's probably going to be close.

Shira Karpel: And I'm finding out how they found our blog, not necessarily the membership.

Shane Sams: How did you hear about us? How did you find out that we existed? Period. Because that's where you've gotta focus your ... right now, you've got a big flashlight that's spread out wide. And you've gotta laser beam down on the one thing that really matters the most and hammer it, like a nail. And that's what we're trying to figure out, where are people coming from. That's where ad dollars go. That's where time is spent. That's where the funnel starts. And then you start working, on well, the dollar trial works better than the free trial or the year works better than the month, or should we raise our price, probably. $19 is really low. You know what I'm saying?

Shane Sams: There's actually a video in the Flip Your Life community called the sales chain, which goes through this step by step. And it kind of shows you. It's a 30 minute video. So you might want to go play that in the background.

Jocelyn Sams: All right. It has been a great conversation today. I loved learning more about your business and what you guys are doing and your next steps.

Shane Sams: And we're super proud of your success because you should really pat yourself on the back. Not everybody gets to 100 members, and that is awesome.

Shira Karpel: Well, thank you.

Shane Sams: That's the springboard to 1,000 members, which is life changing. Okay?

Jocelyn Sams: So let's think a little bit about your immediate next steps. So we always like to ask people at the end of the show based on what we talked about here today, what is something you're going to work on in the next 24 hours to move your business forward?

Shira Karpel: So I think I will look at my sales page and try to make the copy sound more like we're selling the community and the support, and I will have to figure out where people are coming from.

Shane Sams: And that's a process. But hey, the process has to start somewhere, right?

Shira Karpel: Yeah.

Jocelyn Sams: Well, thank you so much for sharing your success story with us today, and we cannot wait to see what happens in the future.

Shira Karpel: Well, thank you guys so much for playing a part in our success.

Shane Sams: Hey, guys, that wraps up another amazing interview with one of our Flip Your Life community members. Man, Shira and her partner did amazing stuff because they took action. They were decisive. They didn't know the right answer. They just knew it was in front of them, and they took action, took the steps, and they went forward, and they made it happen to build a membership over 100 members. Imagine what you could do if you had 100 people sending you money every single month. You could build a business where you can work from home, work for yourself, and change your family's future. We would love to help you just like we did them inside the Flip Your Life community. All you have to do is go to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife. That's F-L-I-P-P-E-D lifestyle.com/flipyourlife, all one word. And you can check out our community. Check out all of the great courses that we offer to help you start, build, and grow an online business of your own.

Shane Sams: Thanks for listening today, guys. We'll talk to you next time. Between now and then, get out there. Do whatever it takes. Flip your life.

Jocelyn Sams: Bye.

Links and resources mentioned on today’s show: * Shira's Website * Flip Your Life LIVE 2019 Tickets & Registration Information * Flip Your Life community 30-day trial

Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!

Get your FREE 30-DAY Membership in the Flip Your Life Community NOW!

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In today's episode, we help Rocio transition her freelance business into an online business.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jocelyn Sams: Hey, y'all. On today's podcast we help Rocio transition her freelance business into an online business.

Shane Sams: What's going on everybody? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. It is great to be back with you again today. Super excited to have another member of the Flip Your Life Community on today's show, and we love shows like this because it's someone we have actually met in person. We're going to be celebrating a little bit of a success story today too, so let's welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast Rocio Baeza. Rocio, welcome to the show.

Rocio Baeza: Hey, guys. Thanks for having me.

Shane Sams: We practiced. We've had a lot of hard names lately on the podcast, and we had to practice this one for a little while.

Jocelyn Sams: I know, which is actually really cool because that means that our audience is from all different places.

Shane Sams: Everywhere. That's right.

Jocelyn Sams: They are of all different nationalities, and we love that. We think that is amazing. We had to figure out how to say this name because, poor Shane, I mean he especially butchers this kind of thing.

Shane Sams: I'm pretty much going with ... You say it. Say it out loud. Say it yourself.

Rocio Baeza: Rocio Baeza. Like you said, Shane, like rodeo but with an S.

Shane Sams: Rodeo. Yes, exactly. It's so much more beautiful when you say it.

Jocelyn Sams: Yes. There you go.

Shane Sams: When I say it, it sounds like some butchered redneck with a bunch of rocks in his mouth. You know what? It is what it is, and that's how we're going to go with it.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay. We need to know a little bit about this name and where you come from, so tell us a little bit about you, your background and what you've been doing so far in your day job and online.

Rocio Baeza: Sure. A little bit about myself, so I'm based in Chicago, and I am a wife, a mom of two. My professional background is in the cybersecurity space. For the last year I've been doing freelance work, so basically picking a project with tech companies where I help them figure out, all right, what do they have to do around security to protect the information that they have, and also, how do they get started and what are all the steps that they have to do in order to put together a cybersecurity program.

Shane Sams: You also do some compliance with the GDPR stuff?

Rocio Baeza: Yes.

Shane Sams: You do that too?

Rocio Baeza: Yes.

Shane Sams: What do you do in that, just make sure that they know what they're supposed to be doing with their data to be compliant with the European laws?

Rocio Baeza: Yes. A lot of the cybersecurity work, my experience has been that it's usually driven by compliance, so an organization has to comply with a specific law or regulation, think HIPAA, think GDPR. I've focused work around GDPR since it's the acronym that we've all heard since May, and it's something that I realize that organizations are going to need help in the area. Since this is just released, I figured it would be a good way to more or less ride that wave.

Shane Sams: Sure. Yeah. It is so new. I was reading an article just the other day actually where all this stuff with Facebook especially where our data has been compromised, and they're just hammering them. I would not doubt that America's about to pass something like GDPR because Facebook has been so hammered. I was watching a tech company CEO the other day. I think it was Salesforce's CEO, and he came out and said, "It's over. We've got to do something like GDPR based on this last thing that happened with Facebook."

Shane Sams: This privacy, handling people's data, all that stuff is going to be a really big deal going forward in the future, and you've done the right thing. You've jumped on what's on top of mind, and that's really, really important.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, I love that. I want to go back just a second to we were talking about before the podcast, you said that your family's originally from Mexico, right?

Rocio Baeza: Yep.

Jocelyn Sams: Did they move here before you were born?

Rocio Baeza: Yes.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay.

Shane Sams: You moved to California? Is that where you're from originally?

Rocio Baeza: Yeah. I was born in California, but I was raised in Chicago.

Shane Sams: Got you.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay. I love that. I think honestly being bilingual could be an unfair advantage for you as we move forward.

Shane Sams: Oh, yeah.

Jocelyn Sams: I've talked to people about this in the past, and there are a lot of Spanish-speaking people in the United States.

Shane Sams: Spanish business owners who might need some of this. If you're not focusing a little bit on that, that might be a good little angle to pick up extra people as we build out more passive income streams and freelance streams and things like that.

Rocio Baeza: Yeah. I never connected the two dots there, so yeah, it's something for me to consider.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, for sure.

Shane Sams: What is it, Hispanics are like, what, 30 million people in the United States?

Jocelyn Sams: I don't know.

Shane Sams: Or something like that.

Jocelyn Sams: It's crazy.

Shane Sams: I'm not sure if that's the right number. Someone's going to send me a hate mail on that one, but I'm positive that there are hundreds of thousands of Spanish-speaking business owners who do not even realize they're not GDPR compliant, would you say?

Rocio Baeza: Yes.

Shane Sams: Now, did you do anything before you freelanced? That's what's really interesting to me. Did you work in corporate?

Rocio Baeza: Yeah.

Shane Sams: How did you get into freelance? Because freelancing is a kind of flipped lifestyle. We always talk about online business. Jocelyn and I love online business, but we help all kinds of people create online businesses and freelancing and being a virtual assistant and just doing other things using the internet that's not selling courses. How did you get into freelancing exactly?

Rocio Baeza: Yeah. I got into freelance when I got laid off about a year ago. Let me walk you through how I got there. Coming out of school, I entered the corporate world. I was basically doing IT work, product management work for about seven years. It was during that time that I got involved with helping with security audits, and that's something that I just fell into. My manager at the time, he needed some help with that. It's something that was new for me, and I said yes.

Rocio Baeza: Through that process, my company at the time decided to invest more in the data security space. They brought in an experienced person, and she basically became my mentor. She mentored me. She showed me the ropes in the cybersecurity space. Once I felt that I had reached the ceiling at that particular organization, I entered the consulting space. After being seven years working in the corporate world, I transitioned over to working for a consulting firm, a local consulting firm here in Chicago where I was basically helping other organizations with very specific cybersecurity projects.

Rocio Baeza: I did that for two years, and we reached a point where the sales pipeline dried up. I found myself being at a crossroads where I was laid off on a day, and I did not see it coming. I did not have a backup plan.

Shane Sams: Wow.

Rocio Baeza: I realized hey, I could either scramble and try to get another job at a company. Luckily for me, the job market in the cybersecurity space is very good, so I didn't have concerns that I would be able to get a job after being laid off, but I also realized that hey, I could try to do something on my own.

Rocio Baeza: My manager at the consulting firm, he allowed me to see everything that happened behind the scenes with sales, how do you win a client, how do you build relationships, how do you structure a project. It was these baby steps that I said, "All right, let me take the courage to see if I can do this on my own. I think that I can, and if I can't, then I'll just find a job."

Shane Sams: Amazing.

Rocio Baeza: Yeah. That's how I made it to the freelance space.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. I love that.

Shane Sams: Wow.

Jocelyn Sams: May I just say that if I had lived in a city when I first got out of school, your job would pretty much have been my dream job because, I don't know, I love everything, like technology and IT. When I was in college, that's really what I wanted to do. I started out in computer programming. I know that many people who listen to the podcast probably would totally get this because I'm a bit of a nerd, but I mean, I just love that kind of stuff.

Shane Sams: Jocelyn used to work at a computer lab when we first started dating, and I was like, "You work at a computer lab? What do you do?" She's like, "Oh, yeah. I help people check their email and all this stuff." Jocelyn when I first met her worked two jobs. She worked at Toys"R"Us and in the computer lab. She put together bicycles, believe it or not.

Jocelyn Sams: Really did.

Shane Sams: She would go to school during the day, put bikes together in the afternoon, and work in the computer labs at night. Needless to say, we didn't have a lot of time to go out on dates and stuff, so sometimes I would go pick her up from Toys"R"Us, and we would go sit in the computer lab. She would sit at her little desk, and I would just sit at a computer over beside her. That's how our romance bloomed.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah.

Rocio Baeza: Nice.

Shane Sams: In the dimly lit, musty computer lab of the engineering building at UK.

Jocelyn Sams: Actually, it was the chemistry and physics building.

Shane Sams: Chemistry and physics, that's right.

Jocelyn Sams: But we were way before our time, I just want to say, because we used to chat on Instant Messenger. What was it called, the one that we used?

Shane Sams: We used, it was the MSN one. Wait, no, maybe it was AOL Instant Messenger.

Jocelyn Sams: I can't even remember.

Shane Sams: No. It was MSN. It was the one that used Hotmail. I'm pretty sure.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. I can't even remember what it was called, but like ICQ maybe?

Shane Sams: It was ICQ. That's what it was, ICQ. Jocelyn was ...

Jocelyn Sams: We're dating ourselves now.

Shane Sams: Yeah, I know, right. People are going to be like, "What are these people talking about? They don't even know how to use modern computers." Jocelyn lived on the third floor in our dorm, and I lived on the second, and we would talk, like instant messaging on ICQ.

Jocelyn Sams: But we were way before our time, I'm just saying.

Shane Sams: Way before our time.

Jocelyn Sams: Nobody else was doing this.

Shane Sams: I remember one day we did this for weeks when we first started dating, and we would just sit there and talk back and forth for an hour or two hours at a time. Finally, it was just like, "You know we're in the same building, right?" Literally, we're 100 feet from each other. But now it's funny because we text each other in our house. I'll be in the living room, and Jocelyn will be in the bedroom, and I'll be like, "What are you doing?" She'll be like, "I'm reading a book. What are you doing?" "Making the kids some Cheerios."

Jocelyn Sams: No. I actually like talking via text because you don't argue as much. You can't talk over each other, so it works really well actually.

Shane Sams: It removes the emotions from everything.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. It really does. Yeah, that was, as my kids say, back in the 19s.

Shane Sams: Back in the 19s, turn of the century. Anyway, let's get back on track.

Jocelyn Sams: We'll get back to the 2000s, okay.

Rocio Baeza: Okay.

Shane Sams: Okay. First, that's amazing that you had the courage to do that, and I love the mentality of hey, if it doesn't work, I'll just go back and do what I was doing before. That's exactly the conversation that Jocelyn and I had when we quit our jobs. We're like, "Look, worst case scenario, we go teach again." Kudos for you for even having the courage to go freelance and flip your life in that way.

Shane Sams: Now as you've joined the Flip Your Life Community and you've gotten into the Flip Your Life Community, it's more about building a passive version of this, correct? That was your goal was to build some kind of courses or DIY or a membership community based on where local businesses or small businesses could do this without a consultant. Is that what you're doing now?

Rocio Baeza: Yes. I think it's important to say that in the freelance space, so you don't really know when your projects are going to trickle in. You might have a sense depending on how active you are with sales, but at the end of the day the timelines are being controlled by the client-

Shane Sams: Got you.

Rocio Baeza: ... and by the urgency of the client. With building an online business, I want to smooth out those edges so that I had more predictability as to how much I was going to be able to bring in.

Shane Sams: Yes. That's why when Jocelyn and I started Flipped Lifestyle and we started teaching online business, we have focused so much on recurring revenue. We get actually knocked for that quite a bit. We get messages all the time like, "Why do you talk about recurring revenue so much? Why do you talk about membership so much?"

Shane Sams: It's not just selling digital products. It's even in freelance services, having a steady, consistent monthly fee from somebody. Because if you can't predict your income, you don't really have a steady income. You're making money. You're working, but you can't look ahead and say, "Well, I know my rent's going to be paid next month. I know I can invest in more ads. I know I can invest some time into sales processes," because you can't look ahead and say ... You don't know month to month what you're making. That's why it's so important to create that stable, predictable income. What is your domain name right now?

Rocio Baeza: Yes. The online business is GDPRStandUp.com.

Shane Sams: Okay. GDPRStandUp.com. Now, you started working on this, I think, maybe about, let's say, six months ago, give or take. You started building the site in the community, putting things together, getting everything outlined. Then you came to Flip Your Life Live, but you did not have this thing launched before Flip Your Life Live, right?

Rocio Baeza: I had a website, but I did not have a virtual community that I can open the doors to. Right.

Shane Sams: What made you want to come to our live event? What was important for you to be there for that event for the launching and the next steps in your business?

Rocio Baeza: Really, I just wanted to be around people that had a similar goal and a similar mindset as I do. I thought that it would be fun going out to an event where I'm looking to educate myself, motivate myself. Just from the way that you guys would describe the event, it sounded like it was going to be very different than the conferences that I would go to back in the corporate days where you basically, you fly into a nice hotel; you're basically in a room for the whole day. You're listening to people speak, and you have this overload of information, but then you fly back home and then everything continues as normal.

Rocio Baeza: The way that you guys were promoting the event, it sounded like it would be an opportunity to be around other people that wanted to build an online business and provide us with that space and access to you guys to help us move forward.

Shane Sams: Okay. I'm going to plant a question here. Was it different? Was it what you thought it was going to be when you got there, and what did you think about the event? We love hearing this just because we're trying to always be better ourselves, and we want to make the event the best thing possible for our members. What did you think about the event, and was it different?

Rocio Baeza: I loved it. We hadn't checked out of the hotel for the event when I had already told my husband that I was going to come back for next year.

Jocelyn Sams: Awesome.

Shane Sams: That's amazing.

Rocio Baeza: Yeah. I didn't even get an opportunity to tell him how awesome it was, but I told him, "Hey, we have to budget for this for next year, so I'm just letting you know."

Shane Sams: What was your favorite part about the event? Was it the content? We had work sessions where we had 30 minutes in between each content session where we were actually putting things in place. We had a big six-hour working dinner where we all built websites and launched products and did that. What was your favorite part about the event?

Rocio Baeza: My favorite part was the Q&A after each of the sessions.

Shane Sams: Awesome.

Rocio Baeza: I liked that it was learn, ask questions and then do in the breaks. By us having the opportunity to ask questions based on our challenges right now, I felt like it was very helpful so that whenever we had those 20 to 30 minute breaks we could put it into practice what we just learned and what we just got guidance on.

Jocelyn Sams: Absolutely, yes. Well, one thing, I want to back up just a little bit because you told us something before we started talking. You were actually getting ready to have a baby before this event, right?

Rocio Baeza: Yes.

Jocelyn Sams: And not just a little bit before this event. The event was in September, and you had your baby in August, right?

Rocio Baeza: Yes.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay. The first question that I have is, did you know that you were pregnant when you bought the tickets?

Rocio Baeza: Oh gosh, I don't remember when I bought the ticket, but-

Shane Sams: It had to be January.

Jocelyn Sams: They went on sale in January.

Rocio Baeza: January. Then, yes. Yes, I knew that I was pregnant before buying the ticket. Yes.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay. I love how you operate because you're kind of like us. You're like, "You know, one-month-old baby, I totally got this."

Shane Sams: I got this.

Rocio Baeza: Oh my gosh.

Shane Sams: Nothing. You did something pretty drastic to make sure that you could be present and at the event though, correct?

Rocio Baeza: Yes. What happened was I basically ended up changing my birth plan so that I would be fully present for the Flip Your Life event. Some background here, right now I have a daughter and now my son. My daughter, she was born as a C-section. My doctor said that my son would also have to be delivered as a C-section because blah, blah, blah, that's how you do things here in the US. I remembered it took me a long time for me to recover after the birth of my daughter. I felt like a zombie, and it was very difficult for me basically to get back into the rhythm of things.

Rocio Baeza: I realized that if I was going to have a C-section with my son plus my five-year-old plus being a wife plus having my business, it was going to be very difficult for me to be mentally present at the live event. So I ended up firing my doctor, and I found a doctor that was VBAC friendly where they were open to trying delivering the baby naturally so that my recovery time would be smaller and I could actually retain the information at the event.

Shane Sams: You had your baby in August, and you came to the event in September, correct?

Rocio Baeza: Yes. That's correct.

Shane Sams: This is getting way personal. Did you go into labor, or did they induce it on a date or something like that?

Rocio Baeza: No. I went into labor. Yeah.

Shane Sams: But you planned all this out and like, no, I am firing my doctor and changing my birth plan so I can be at this event and learn how to take my business to the next level?

Rocio Baeza: Yes.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay, my friend.

Shane Sams: Is there anybody listening to this right now feeling bad? I feel bad. I was like, man, I should've been working harder for this live event now. Gosh, that's insane. That is an amazing story.

Jocelyn Sams: Somebody changed the way their baby was going to be born to come to this event.

Shane Sams: To give that baby a better future. That's what it really is, right? You were dedicated like, no, I'm going to do this because I have to. What forethought and planning. So many people are like, "Well, you know, I just can't. I don't have time to plan all this out." You're like, "No, no, no, no. You don't get to say that to me because I changed my birth plan to be at a live event."

Shane Sams: This is where we're going with this, tell them what happened after the live event because that's the most important thing. All right, so you had your baby after changing the birth plan. You came to the event fully present and ready to work. You asked questions. You listened. You did the work at the event. What happened when you went home?

Rocio Baeza: Yeah. I went home. I knew exactly what are the things that I need to focus on, and I basically said, "Hey, the members aren't going to come to me. I have to go out there and find them. I have to form a beta group so that I can build more momentum here." I would say it was two to three weeks after the live event that I was able to form a beta group with five paying members, and that's how I launched.

Shane Sams: Wow. That's amazing. I don't know how to say this without sounding bad about it, but Jocelyn and I talk about sometimes why we actually love our podcast. It's just amazing when I hear a real person with a real family who's really going out there and hustling in her freelance business, makes huge life decisions with the future of her family in mind, and then goes and takes action and it works.

Shane Sams: When we get to hear these stories on our podcast, it really inspires us. That is an amazing story of accomplishment, not only just the courage to freelance and the courage to make that decision with your baby and actually take charge of your life, fire the doctor, get on an airplane, go from Chicago to Nashville just to be at a live event, and then to come home and actually take action. You just really deserve that beta group success, and you deserve everything that's going to happen in the future.

Shane Sams: Some people want that success. There's a lot of people listening right now. I'm talking to you in your car or on a treadmill or wherever you are right now, you want this story to be yours. You want the result to be yours, but this is what it takes to do it. What she just said is what it really takes to make it happen.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. There are people out there who make excuses. There are a lot of people out there who would say, "Oh, I'm pregnant now, and my baby's just going to be a month old. There's no way that I can go to an event. I'll wait until next year. I'll just go next year." We did have one person who was pregnant with a high-risk pregnancy, and she didn't end up coming.

Shane Sams: There are circumstances, of course.

Jocelyn Sams: We understand that. I'm not trying to say if you have that kind of circumstance that that's a bad thing, but there are so many people who would let that be a roadblock. And I love it because you just said, "You know what? I'm not going to let this stop me. I'm going to figure out a way."

Jocelyn Sams: The people who figure out a way are the people who make it, and the people who are going to say, "Well, I have this excuse, so I'll just wait until next year," or "I don't have the money to make this investment," or whatever, find a way. If you really want something to happen, you will find a way.

Shane Sams: I heard a great thing on a podcast the other day where someone said, I can't remember what I was listening to, but they said, "There's a difference between a reason and an excuse." Sometimes there are reasons that delay things, but if we're all honest to ourselves, 80% of things that we use as a reason are actually excuses.

Shane Sams: Just being able to take action after the event, it's one thing to do all the work, build your website, go to the live event and come home and do nothing, which is what probably half the people do anyway, but man, you just did it. You got your beta members, and now you know what we say. If you find one, you can find 101. There's other people out there, and you found five.

Rocio Baeza: Yes. I found five.

Jocelyn Sams: Yes. And not to mention, you still have a newborn. It's not like you came home from this event and was just like, "Okay, well, I'm going to get started. My baby, don't need to worry about him." You still have him. He's still a newborn who probably doesn't sleep well.

Rocio Baeza: Yes.

Shane Sams: You launched your beta group with a newborn baby in the house. I'm sure someone's listening right now, and they're like, "Man, I'd start this online business, but I've got a newborn." But here, you can do it. Rocio did it, right?

Rocio Baeza: Yes.

Shane Sams: I mean, anybody can do it.

Rocio Baeza: It's very hard, very many sleepless nights and frustration, but yeah, it's doable. It may take longer with a newborn, but it's definitely doable.

Shane Sams: I'll tell you another thing too, and I really want to get into your questions. I want to take this to the next level for you, and we want to help you get this to where it needs to be. But I want to comment on what you just said was very interesting. You're like, "A lot of sleepless nights, a lot of frustration, but it's doable, and it's worth it."

Shane Sams: Everybody always tells us, we talk to people, and we hear all of the reasons or excuses. We hear a lot of the reasons, and a lot of times it is young children. Well, first, Jocelyn and I also did this, we had an 18-month-old child when we started our business. We were still very much in the sleepless nights, the terrible twos and all that stuff. You've got two examples right here on this mic, us and you. If two people are doing it and you're not doing it, that's a choice. That's not a reason.

Shane Sams: Another thing is, there is never really a time where that frustration and stuff stops. You just replace one phase with another. We're in a very frustrating time of parenting right now ourselves with our 10-year-old and our seven-year-old. It's just all of a sudden it snuck up on us. We felt really confident, I think, last year, and then they changed. Our 10-year-old boy, his mindset, his attitude, the way his brain is processing things totally changed. Our little girl, she's about to turn eight, and it's totally changed.

Shane Sams: I would say actually I've been more frustrated as a parent in the past six months with our kid and not being able to figure out what buttons to push, but they know exactly what buttons to push in us because they're thinking now. They're getting strategic. They know what they're doing. I think I'm more frustrated now than I was in that first six months of their life.

Rocio Baeza: Wow.

Shane Sams: If you're waiting for the right time or your kids to get a little older or things to get easier, I'm telling you from experience right now, you might as well start because it's not going to get an easier. It's just going to get harder. That's not an excuse that you have little kids. It's not an excuse that you got a 10-year-old. You just got to do it anyway or it's never going to work out in the first place.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay. Well, you've had a successful launch after the event, which is awesome, and you are serving your members, I presume, in this beta launch, right?

Rocio Baeza: Right.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay. The question that I have for you now is, what can we do to help you take this thing to the next level?

Rocio Baeza: I would say I'm having a hard time finding the discipline to consistently do the things that are super important. I know that I need to find the discipline to build that consistency and just repeat it so that I can continue to serve my members but also grow that. I think the things that are tugging at me are things like dealing with the newborn, picking up my six-year-old from school, getting her ready in the mornings, washing bottles, doing client work for my freelance business.

Rocio Baeza: I find myself creating a checklist of all the things that I have to do. I knock one or two out, but then I'm pulled in all these different directions. When I come back to my to-do list, I usually scratch off that to-do list. I create a new one, and I find myself moving, stopping, moving, stopping. I want to be able to build that discipline to do things more consistently.

Shane Sams: This is a hard part of entrepreneurship, and you know this from your freelance gig too, right? You're already feeling that there. It's even harder in online business because at least with the freelance thing, you got to show up for somebody. You're talking to someone. You're moving with people. Sometimes online business can feel really separated, and it's harder. Our brains have not evolved correctly to deal with all this online stuff that we do.

Shane Sams: We can't really separate or we can't really keep it in our mind that those people are real sometimes because we only interact with them virtually. It can be harder to have discipline there because there's not an expectation. We don't feel the same expectation in the online business as we do offline or in our family or in our kids. When the kid's crying, you have an expectation to go to their room, but when you know someone's in your forums or you know someone's in a Facebook group or you know they're watching your course, you don't always feel that same tug.

Shane Sams: What we've had to do is build in consistencies, build in one thing at a time brick by brick that we do. For example, last year I decided that I was going to email our list every day. That was my goal. I'd say I've succeeded at that goal at least 80% of the time this year. It was the same reason I actually set that goal was I felt all these things that I was having to do, and you said, "I've got this big to-do list. I only get through two of them." Well, that's because two or three of them are actually the only important things. You just have to pick which ones are important and forget the rest.

Shane Sams: This year what Jocelyn did really consistently was Jocelyn was in the forums pretty much every day. She also, what do you use to send welcome videos? You do something.

Jocelyn Sams: Bonjoro.

Shane Sams: Yeah. We use that app called Bonjoro, and everybody that joins Jocelyn sends a welcome video. We picked these two things. She was going to welcome people and be in the forums, and I was going to email our list every day, to contact our list. We just didn't even care if any of the other things were right or wrong because there is no right or wrong. There is no right or wrong answer; there's just an answer. There's just an action step.

Jocelyn Sams: I think going a little bit deeper into that is that we had basically two objectives for this year, and those objectives were to get more members, which Shane did by emailing and reminding people to join, and we also had the goal of keeping the members that we already have and making sure that people feel welcome.

Jocelyn Sams: One of the things is when you join our community I don't want you to feel like you're just another member to us. I want people to feel like we see you; we know that you joined, and we appreciate you. Those are the things that we decided to focus on for this year. Does that mean that other things aren't important? No, but there's only so much that we can do, and we have to figure out-

Shane Sams: There's only so much bandwidth.

Jocelyn Sams: ... what are the priorities. What are the two or three things that you have to do, and everything else is just a bonus.

Shane Sams: Also too, that's an interesting way that you said that, like what are the two things you have to do? What are the three things you have to do? We get this question a lot, what are my priorities? What is the right thing to do? We don't actually approach it that way. We just say, "What are the two things we're going to do?" I'm not saying that emailing all the time is right. I'm just saying I knew that it was something I would do.

Shane Sams: Jocelyn's not saying that hey, these welcome videos are the exact thing you should do and because you heard that on your podcast what you should do. It's just a thing we picked, and we decided last year, right, wrong or indifferent, we weren't going to write a to-do list that was that long. We weren't going to look down at a to-do list every day of 14 things and say we didn't get 11 of them. That's just making yourself feel like a failure. We were going to pick the two things that we knew we would do every day, and we were going to do those. Once we built that capacity, we might add another thing.

Shane Sams: Next year, I really, really, really want to add YouTube videos every day. I just want to wake up at 6:00 in the morning, do a 15-minute YouTube video every single day, and that's the thing I add, and then I'll write my email. I think I can do that now.

Jocelyn Sams: We did pepper some of that in this year. We tried some of that out. We still post on social media. There are still other things that we do, but we primarily do the two or three things that we set out and said, "This is our priority for this year."

Shane Sams: Yeah. It's also people get so caught up in their to-do list. You're caught. You probably feel bad because you're not getting these other things done, and it's starting to weigh on you, right?

Rocio Baeza: Right.

Shane Sams: But people need to think about what they need to do in more categorical terms and not worry so much what's right and wrong. Because if you think about this, okay, I have an online business. There's really only three things that we have to do. One, we have to promote it. Two, we have to create content. That's just a part of it. Three, we have to interact with our people. It doesn't matter how I do those three things. Okay. Content, well, should I podcast or YouTube channel? It doesn't matter. Should I blog or should I write books? It doesn't matter.

Jocelyn Sams: Whatever you'll do.

Shane Sams: Just do content. Promotion, should I email my list every day? Should I run Facebook ads? Should I run YouTube ads? Should I go on other people's podcasts? It doesn't matter. Pick one that you're promoting. We promote by going on other people's podcasts, and we promote via email. That's just it. I know we'll do that, so we do it. Should I do webinars? I don't know. Will you do it? Didn't do it. Pick one.

Shane Sams: Serving your members, like Jocelyn serves our members by being in the forums. I serve our members by sending them valuable content and motivation in an email. It's the categories that matter, and it's that you're doing things within the categories, not what you're doing.

Shane Sams: The problem is you've got people like Gary Vaynerchuk and all these other knuckleheads running around out there telling you to work 80 hours a week, and if you don't do 100 social media posts, you're a failure. And if you're not on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, if you're not on all these things, and that makes people like us feel bad, make you feel bad because you're not achieving ... You're not ticking off the to-do list. That's all a mirage anyway. That's all fake. That's all what they present to the public world.

Jocelyn Sams: What I would ask you to do is to identify the two or three things that are most important to you. Maybe it's growing your membership, so you need to figure out a consistent way to do that that makes sense for you to do and that you know that you will actually do. Maybe it is serving your current customers, so you need to figure out a way to do that consistently.

Shane Sams: Usually, pick one thing, and until you've mastered it into a habit, don't worry about all the other stuff. You just got to pick the thing that will serve them best.

Jocelyn Sams: Then everything else is just a bonus. Does that make you feel a little bit better about being spread too thin?

Rocio Baeza: Yes.

Shane Sams: Let's talk about your categories though. Let's talk about you, okay?

Rocio Baeza: Okay.

Shane Sams: Okay. I gave three things there. These are the three things we think are the most important, promotion, content creation and retention. Those are the three big things that you really have. What really is the one thing that you could do to promote your business that you like to do, like to get new people to discover you and to keep reminding people to join your membership?

Rocio Baeza: Yeah. I would say doing live short videos on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is where my avatars would be hanging out at, so that would be one area. Then the second area for promotion, it would be just running ads. Before I started GDPRStandUp.com, I initially was trying to build a virtual community to serve the entire cybersecurity market. Looking back, that was a very dumb approach. I was trying to serve everyone, but at the end of the day I wasn't serving anyone.

Rocio Baeza: It was through that trial that I figured out how to do a Google ad campaign, and I was able to set it up. I ran a few ads, but I've never actually tried that for GDPRStandUp.com. As you're asking me how can I promote my community, Google ads is definitely something that I learned how to do, but I haven't implemented that for GDPR.

Shane Sams: Okay. Let's imagine this. You're going to take one day a month and work on Google ad. Then three days a week you're going to do a 15-minute LinkedIn video. That's 15 minutes, let's say, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and one day a month you just got to block it off, go get alone in a coffee shop somewhere and get your Google ad for the month set up. Let it run. You're not going to work on it every day. You're not going to look at it every day. You're going to set it and forget it until next month. Then you're going to evaluate and change.

Shane Sams: Now look what we've done. We've got one day, and then we've got a commitment for a 15-minute LinkedIn video on something topical that you can talk about for 10, 15 minutes. This is totally like when I say 15 minutes, I mean you get a piece of paper and pencil, you write down three bullet points you want to address about a topic, and you turn the camera on and just talk.

Jocelyn Sams: The way that I do it is on Post-it notes, and I just stick them to my computer.

Shane Sams: Okay. This is just content right now. There's promotion, done. That's what you're going to do. That's what you're going to do. All right, now what about content? What other content are you creating beside these videos? Do you blog? Do you do videos, podcasts? What do you do?

Rocio Baeza: Yes. I am now doing podcasts. The idea is record an episode, get a transcript, convert that into a blog post.

Shane Sams: Perfect. That's what we do.

Rocio Baeza: Yes. It took me a while to figure it out and see how simple it can really be, how you can create an explosion of content just doing things strategically.

Shane Sams: What is your recording schedule? Do you batch these?

Rocio Baeza: Yes. It would be once a month I batch four sessions at a time.

Shane Sams: Okay. That's cool. Let's just do that. I think you're feeling a little overwhelmed. It might be better to do every two weeks do three. Because what's going to happen is every month you're going to do six, you see what I'm saying? You won't have to do so many at once. You can just do three and then three and then three. Eventually, you're going to get so far ahead that you can actually take two weeks off and start doing it less again.

Shane Sams: What I want you to do is, all right, let's go back. Monday, Wednesday, Friday, let's say you're going to do a LinkedIn video. Every other week on Tuesday and Thursday, just record some podcasts and make it real consistent. That's all you're going to do. That's the only content you're going to create. That's it, period.

Shane Sams: You can take those videos from LinkedIn and embed them on your site, but that's it. Don't do anything else. Don't worry about what everybody else says you should be doing, you should be blogging, you should be YouTubing, you should be doing ... You're a podcaster. Just do that for a while.

Rocio Baeza: Okay.

Shane Sams: Then retention, how are you serving your members?

Rocio Baeza: That's rolling out a course on a weekly basis.

Shane Sams: Why weekly? Are you just not done with the whole course yet?

Rocio Baeza: I am not done with the whole course yet, and I figure that weekly would be a good way of just providing value to the members and holding myself accountable of building a product or a set of products.

Shane Sams: When does that end?

Rocio Baeza: When does that end? I don't have an end date yet. The interesting thing with GDPR, Shane, is it's still very new. It's something that I'm still learning, so I'm learning.

Shane Sams: How many courses? How many videos do you have so far? How many videos do you have?

Rocio Baeza: So far I have about eight. Eight.

Shane Sams: Okay. You're going to get to 12, and then you're going to change it to where it's a Q&A every two weeks. The Q&A questions will become your content. That'll still be relevant, but you're going to stop trying to figure out what people want. You're going to just let them ask you, and then you're going to tell them. If they ask you a question that you don't know, you'll say, "I'll look that up, and at the next Q&A we'll talk about it." You see what I'm saying?

Rocio Baeza: Oh.

Shane Sams: I feel like that's where I see your energy drain now. It's coming from what's next, what's next, what's next, and that's overwhelming everything else because you're trying to figure all this out in your course. There has to be an end date on your course. You've got to have the basics covered, and then you've got to figure out what people need. That's why we do Q&As.

Rocio Baeza: Got it.

Shane Sams: Because I can't guess what Rocio needs. You've got to ask me what you need.

Rocio Baeza: Got it.

Shane Sams: Once you ask me, I know, and that's no energy on me. If I spent eight hours today trying to guess what you were going to ask us, my energy would be shot for anything else. But I just showed up, and you asked me, and now we got an answer. That's where you've got to get to.

Shane Sams: Let's cut it off at 12. Anybody that joins, they can go start taking those 12 courses, and then use Q&As to ask them anything else. That way you got an end date for all that content. Now, if you come up with something and if you see somebody asking you, if you have 10 people in 10 straight weeks ask you the same question, what should you do? Make a course.

Rocio Baeza: Build a course.

Shane Sams: That way when they ask it the next time, you just say, "Hey, click this link and watch the course."

Jocelyn Sams: But for the most part people over-complicate this. You think that you have to come up with some amazing piece of content for a community every month. Chances are they don't even know what's in there to begin with. That happens to us all the time. We'll say, "Oh, well, did you know we have a course about this?" People are like, "No."

Shane Sams: No, but they freak out, and they're like, "Oh, that's amazing. I can't believe it's still there."

Jocelyn Sams: But people love the Q&As. They have an opportunity to ask a real-time question. You answer it. There's no preparation on your part, and people just show up. It's awesome. We've been doing it for a long time now.

Shane Sams: Okay. That's your to-do list, those three things, period.

Rocio Baeza: Okay.

Shane Sams: Let's go forward with a little clarity, and let's commit to trying this for six months. Let's see how things grow, and then we'll make some pivots and change and evolve as we go. Now it's not about, you don't have to find discipline. You just have to decide what you're going to do and do it, and if it doesn't work, we'll just go back and do something else. Okay?

Rocio Baeza: Wow. Okay. That sounds like a plan.

Jocelyn Sams: All right. Well, we have had an awesome chat with you today, and we would love to know in the next 24 hours or so, what are you planning to do based on what we talked about here?

Rocio Baeza: I'm going to make a list of the last four courses that I'll be recording, and I will create a schedule as to when I will be creating it so that I can make that mental shift to just focusing in on the Q&A.

Shane Sams: That is an awesome plan. All right. Before we go, we love to share a Bible verse with everyone out there in the Flipped Lifestyle audience. Jocelyn and I get a lot of inspiration from the Bible for our life and our business, and we're super excited because Rocio has a Bible verse that she would like to share with you guys today.

Rocio Baeza: That Bible verse is Proverbs 29:1, and it says, "For people who hate discipline and only get more stubborn, there will come a day when life stumbles in and they break, but by then it'll be too late to help them."

Shane Sams: That was a perfect verse for today's discussion as you were actually wrestling with discipline. I think, hey, now we're going to have the discipline and do the things we got to do and keep moving forward, right?

Rocio Baeza: There you go. There you go. Yes.

Shane Sams: That's a good job. Well done. All right, guys, thank you so much for tuning in again today to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. What a great talk that we had with Rocio, and I loved how she used Flip Your Life Live as the catalyst not only to get everything prepared but to take action afterward and launch her online business.

Shane Sams: We would love for you to have that kind of inspiration, that kind of motivation on your calendar as well, and you can do that by joining us at Flip Your Life Live 2019. It's going to be in Lexington, Kentucky from September 19th through the 21st, and you can find out all of the information about Flip Your Life Live at flippedlifestyle.com/live, flippedlifestyle.com/live. Go there right now, check out everything that we're going to be doing there.

Shane Sams: It's going to be an amazing event. We're going to have people from all over the world, all over America there, family-focused entrepreneurs building a better future for their families. That's flippedlifestyle.com/live. We can't wait to meet you in person this September. That's all the time we have for this week. As always, guys, thanks for listening to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, and until next time, get out there, take action, do whatever it takes to flip your life. We'll see you then.

Jocelyn Sams: Bye.

Links and resources mentioned on today’s show: * Rocio's Website * Flip Your Life LIVE 2019 Tickets & Registration Information * Flip Your Life community 30-day trial

Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!

Get your FREE 30-DAY Membership in the Flip Your Life Community NOW!

– https://flippedlifestyle.com/free

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In today's episode, we help Kahkshan choose a direction for her online business.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jocelyn Sams: Hey y'all, on today's podcast we help Kahkshan choose a direction for her online business.

Shane Sams: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, where life always comes before work. We're your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. We're a real family that figured out how to make our entire living online. Now, we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? All right, let's get started.

Shane Sams: What's going on, everybody? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. It is great to be back with you again, today. We are super excited to welcome another member of the Flip Your Life community on to the show, and we're talking to someone literally on the other side of the planet today. So let's welcome Kahkshan Ali from Saudi Arabia. How you doin'?

Kahkshan Ali: Fine, thanks. Great to be here. Thanks so much, Shane, Jocelyn.

Shane Sams: We worked about 30 minutes on pronouncing your name. Even though, we've talked forever. You're so good to me when we talk on coaching calls, 'cause you just let me butcher your name 'cause I'm from Kentucky and I can't speak.

Kahkshan Ali: Yeah, no, it's fine. You guys actually said it very well, so thank you, I appreciate that.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay, awesome! We love talking to people in our international community. We have people from all over the world, and we love to travel, we love other cultures. We're fascinated by them, so we just love talking to you every single time, and we can't wait to dive in here with you today.

Kahkshan Ali: Great! Me too.

Jocelyn Sams: All right, let's jump in and talk a little bit about you. Tell us about you, your background, and what you're doing so far online.

Kahkshan Ali: Okay. Well, I'm actually a dentist, and I was really interested in doing something online for a couple of reasons. I know there's a lot of information available on the internet, but I felt that trying to come up with a course for moms and parents with young kids. Having something all in one place with some fun videos and some things that are a little bit more interactive. I wanted to try and do something like that just to be able to educate and help people, because I get questions anytime I go to like a dinner party, "Oh, you're a dentist. Oh, do you mind?" So it's like, "Okay."

Kahkshan Ali: So I thought it'd be nice to maybe try and provide some valuable information online. Which, is where everyone is going nowadays.

Shane Sams: So this is basically, this is a career offshoot type path that you've started with. So there's multiple paths that people start with online business. Some people, they go really into the passion. Some people, they go really into the hobby. Some people, they go into entertainment, but a lot of people, this is how we started out, we looked at our work. 'Cause it was where we knew the most information about a topic, period, when we started. I was a football coach. Jocelyn was a librarian. It was just a natural way to say, "Hey, I know this. I'm trained in this. I can create content fast, and I can try this out."

Shane Sams: Probably in the dentist office, just like it is when we go anywhere in a business setting, when people find out what you do they think that you have all the answers. Then they always ask you the same questions. I would guess you were getting the same questions from every parent and every kid, and you're like, "Man, I could totally make a course about this, and tell everybody what to do with their kids and their dental hygiene", right?

Kahkshan Ali: Right, exactly. Yeah, the same thing. I thought to start off it would be easier and, as you said, faster. Just because this is my field of expertise. I've been a dentist for 25 years now. So I thought this would be a good place to start, and then could move on after I did this to see what else I can maybe try. 'Cause I do have other hobbies, and other passions and things. I do love dentistry, but then the future, there's so many other things that there's so many other possibilities when you're doing online digital courses and stuff.

Jocelyn Sams: Absolutely. I want to go back just a little bit further, because people who are listening to this might be thinking, "Okay, well, she doesn't sound like she lives in Asia." So you have a very American accent, so tell us a little bit about that. How did you get to where you are now? Where all have you traveled and lived in the world?

Shane Sams: How long have you been in Saudi Arabia too?

Kahkshan Ali: Well, I've actually been working here for 20 years, but my family, we've been living here for about 43 years. So we've moved here when I was in fourth grade. My dad got a job. He actually had two options. We were in the states, so that's why I have the American accent, 'cause we actually moved from America here.-

Shane Sams: Since you were four, right?

Kahkshan Ali: So we lived in the Midwest.

Shane Sams: You were in fourth grade, right? When you moved from here?

Kahkshan Ali: No, actually I was born in Pakistan, and we moved to the states when I was three and my dad was getting his training. He was an otologist, so he was doing all his residencies and stuff. So we lived in Illinois for three years, Massachusetts for a year, Buffalo, New York for a year. Then when my dad was done with his training he got a job offer in either Louisville, Kentucky, believe it or not, or Saudi Arabia. I actually wanted to move to Kentucky, because I wanted horses. My dad's like, "Well, if we move to Kentucky, you can maybe have a horse." I'm like, "Oh yeah!"

Kahkshan Ali: We were just planning to move here just for two years, just to kind of try it out, and also be able to travel and see other places and stuff. My parents ended up ... We liked it, and we've been here now 43 years. So I've been going back and forth between the states for all my training and education, and stuff like that. I actually have been living and working for the last 20 years here.

Shane Sams: Wow, what an amazing life experience to be able to bounce all over the world like that. I remember when we first met you and you first joined the community, and every time you would post, or we would leave a message, or we would talk on a call, it would be like, "Where are you now?" 'Cause you were just like bouncing back and forth from the United States over to there. You were traveling so much for trainings and conferences,-

Kahkshan Ali: Oh, that's right. That's right.

Shane Sams: ... and other stuff, I never knew where you were. I just assumed we were talking in an airplane in transit somewhere, basically. Let me ask you this. We're gonna go some different directions later in the podcast. You did pick this direction, and you said something very interesting, 'cause you wanted to go in and just start doin' something, and figuring it out. So many people won't do that, because they want to pick the perfect idea, but what have you learned since you just got started?

Shane Sams: You started with the dental thing, you wanted to go, there's other things you might go into. You might push this a little more down different directions, but how has it been a benefit for you to just get started even though this wasn't your quote/unquote home run, final idea you may ever do?

Kahkshan Ali: Well, what's been so great is that you guys have so much information available on your website and everything. So that was one of the things that's really been helping, because as you said, I'm thinking to do other stuff later, and partly maybe even do some coaching. You can use all of the material and everything really for anything. Once you get all the tech stuff out of the way, and how to setup and do one course, then you can just do other courses even if they're in different subjects, or something.

Kahkshan Ali: So to me, that's what's been so beneficial, because even though I was starting off trying to figure out what I wanted to do, now I've just realized that for someone like myself, some people already know exactly what they want to do. They want to stick with it, they've got their business, but for someone like myself, who really was still trying to figure things out, this has been so helpful-

Shane Sams: Just to start and basically figure out all-

Kahkshan Ali: ... just to start, exactly. Yeah, exactly.

Shane Sams: ... the tech, and all the courses. 'Cause the building blocks are the same. It doesn't matter what you're doing online. You're gonna create a video, you're gonna create a handout that goes with the video. Once you know how to do that, it might take you a few months the first time, but then it takes you a month the second time, right?

Kahkshan Ali: Exactly, and you guys have everything. You've got how to do an ebook. How to, as you said, the funnels. How to do WordPress. Everything is here in one place. Which is amazing, because before I was trying to find things all over, and it was getting really frustrating. So when I came across Flip Your Lifestyle, I'm like, "Oh my gosh! It's all here in one spot!" It was awesome. I was like, "Yes! Finally!" It's such a timesaver.

Shane Sams: How did you come across? There's a little delay to you guys in the podcast today, 'cause we're so far apart. So we may talk over each other a little bit. We'll try edit it out, but that's okay. How did you find us? Just listen in on another interview, or in an article, or like ...?

Kahkshan Ali: It was an article I was doing on Google search. I don't even remember what words I had typed in. Something came up about 'Oh, there's these two teachers'. I think there was a couple articles in some of the news. I was reading the article, and it said, "Oh, Shane and Jocelyn. They've been doing this for ... And they were two teachers, they've quit their jobs, they're doing really well financially, and their lives have totally changed." I thought, "Oh, wow! That's really great. That's the great success story." It wasn't just one article, there was several places, 'cause you don't wanna be ...

Kahkshan Ali: Obviously there's so much out there, and you're like, "Oh, is that really true? Is it something that's gonna work for me? Is it just working for them?" And that kind of thing. There was multiple places where I was finding information about you guys, and I'm like, "Okay, so this sounds good." Then when I went to the website and I saw it, I'm like, "Ah, okay. This is the real deal."

Shane Sams: It's amazing to me that we live in a world ... I'm actually preparing a talk for something I plan on speaking at next year, and it's about rural opportunities; because in Kentucky, and in a lot of rural places around the world really, the world is changing so fast, a lot of old legacy industries like coal, and fossil fuels, even just factory based things, a lot of things are changing and leaving, and being replaced by robotics and all of this stuff. There's a really big void. People don't understand that there's, or that people don't see opportunity because all the old ways are changing, right?

Shane Sams: One of the things that we're talking about lately is, guys, we live in literally the most remote place in Kentucky. We're surrounded right now by a forest and mountain. I'm looking out my window, I don't see other buildings. We are as rural as it gets, right? We have this ability to create, right here, we're connected to the internet, and reach out and someone on the other side of the planet in Saudi Arabia, can find us, connect with us, and work with us. The same thing where you are, you are in another country, but you literally could have a thousand clients in America, and it could all be done from your living room.

Shane Sams: It's just amazing that we live in a place where you can find each other, we can connect with each other. You can research and make sure each person is legit, right?

Kahkshan Ali: I know, exactly.

Shane Sams: All that opportunity is just out there if people would just take it.

Kahkshan Ali: Well, I think that's what I also really liked was like in the beginning when you're doing the blueprint that you guys offer, what I loved was that the first thing you did was having the big goals, and dream bold dreams. You really have to have that right mindset, and start taking that action. You have to go through that step first. It's really easy to kind of poo-poo, and be like, "Oh well, you know, do I really need to do that? I'll just move on. I'm gonna just move on to the tech stuff. Let me just ..."

Kahkshan Ali: So I really like the fact that you had that as the first part of the blueprint. I thought that was so helpful to write everything down. It really gives you that clarity of what you really want to do.

Shane Sams: You can't hit what you don't aim at, right?

Kahkshan Ali: Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Shane Sams: So you gotta aim first, basically.

Jocelyn Sams: Yup. You gotta know your destination before you can decide on the journey to get there, and I think a lot to times, like you said, people skip over that step and it's so critical. Let's talk a little bit about that. Let's dive in to what you want. What is your ultimate goal with starting this business?

Shane Sams: Because you are a dentist, you've had a great career. You're within a great career, right?

Kahkshan Ali: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Shane Sams: So by any stretch of the imagination, or anyone looking outside in, professionally you're successful. What makes you want this to be your next step, and where do you want it to go? What is your destination?

Kahkshan Ali: I'm actually planning on leaving dentistry in about a year and a half. The reason being, it's been a great career, I've really enjoyed it, but I've been working in a hospital as an employee. Which is great, but I've got an eight year old daughter, I feel like she's really missing out on mom spending more time with her. She's really saying it, and things like that. So to have that freedom, to be self-employed, to be able to spend more time, and to be able to work from anywhere in the world, that's what I was looking for. I thought, "What can I do that gives me that capability?"

Kahkshan Ali: That's the reason that I'm actually trying to get courses and other things, to try and make a passive income eventually. So that's my primary goal when I joined Flip Your Lifestyle, was to figure out how to do it, get all the steps, and then hopefully make that a success. My daughter, like your son, I think you were saying, she enjoys ... She's like, "Come on, let's do some YouTube videos, mom." So she enjoys that kind of interaction and doing that stuff with me, and I thought, "Well, that's really nice that's something we can do together also." So building on that. I thought, "Why not?"

Kahkshan Ali: So that's what I'm planning to do, right now, as I said, to do the dentistry. First of all because I do want to give something back to people, and just I know that there's a lot of sometimes misinformation, or people just don't really know where to find it. Just like that's what I liked about your website was everything's in one space. I'd like to build up, hopefully, and have everything in one place. One location for people to be able to find answers quickly, easily, and in a bright, more video format versus just reading.

Shane Sams: Sure. Jocelyn and I were talking about this. We were taking Anna Jo to her cheerleading team's practice last night, and we were talking on the way like, "What is the real appeal?" It is making money, and it is doing all those things, but the universal truth for everybody in the world is time and control of that time; and like you said, control of that location. That's really what the value is of what we do, is we get to work from anywhere. We get to work from home, and we get to control that time with our loved ones. Last week, my mom, I got a phone call, and my mom had fallen and broken her back. When we got there, me and my oldest brother got there first.

Shane Sams: We found her laying on the floor, and she was paralyzed. She was completely paralyzed. She couldn't move.

Kahkshan Ali: Oh my god.

Shane Sams: Yeah, and this was a Monday. It was crazy because for the last year Jocelyn and I have been wrestling with starting a homeschool for Isaac and Anna Jo. This was the first day of homeschool. We had just-

Jocelyn Sams: We finally pulled the trigger, and then the very first day-

Shane Sams: The very first day.

Jocelyn Sams: ... we get a call two hours later that his mom is laying on the floor.

Shane Sams: It was unbelievable.

Kahkshan Ali: Oh my gosh!

Shane Sams: We had just finished with our second lesson ever, and my mom called me on her phone and said, "I've fallen. I'm in the floor. My back's ... Something's wrong." So I throw on my sweatsuit, I race over there, find my mom. We call an ambulance, we take her to the emergency room, and they're like, "Her back is broken. We have to drive her to this other hospital. It's about an hour away. You can't go with her, we'll meet you there." I went with her, and I ... Was I there for three days, Jocelyn?

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. I think you stayed three days.

Shane Sams: Yeah, I was there for three straight days. On the way there I shot a message to our assistant, said, "Cancel all of our calls, we've got an emergency." Then it hit me as I was driving back on the fourth day here. Where I kind of made the tag, and I traded out with another one of my brothers so that I could come home and whatever. Then when I got there, as soon as I got there, I went and got a hotel room. Didn't even think twice about it. That was like the home base for everybody to take a shower and go back and forth. I stayed with mom one night, and I realized driving home, online businesses and self-employment gave me the freedom to stop and take care of that, right?

Shane Sams: It could've been a disaster. It could have been scheduling work. It could have been not having enough money for the hotel room. It could have been all of these things, but all of the stuff that we did five years ago, where you are now, figuring this out. What direction are we gonna take? Led to that moment, where not only did we have so much control of life that we could homeschool our kids, and work from our living room, but when someone needed us, we could be there. That was our big goal, and our bold dream when we started. Was to be able to be there when someone needed us, right?

Shane Sams: It's just an amazing thing to see. We always hear that over and over again. It doesn't matter how much money people want to make, or what their goals are, it always comes down to that. My eight year old daughter needs me. I wish I could be there more for my mom and dad. If there's not a motivation to make online business work, that's it. That's what you gotta move onto to make it happen.

Kahkshan Ali: Exactly, yeah. When you're being asked of your why's, I think that's what really it is for most people, is having that freedom of time and being able to, as you said, to be there for your loved ones when you need to be.

Jocelyn Sams: Absolutely. Well the cool thing is, that you know where you're going as far as you have a goal, you have a destination in mind. So let's talk about actually getting there. I know that you've been doing a lot of training, and that you're just preparing and trying to figure out what you wanna do. Let's talk a little bit about what's holding you back right now. What kind of fear, or mindset struggle, or obstacle is holding you back and making you kind of paralyzed from moving forward?

Kahkshan Ali: Originally it was that whole perfectionism, it's just so hard to get rid of. Kind of like, "Oh, well, it's gotta be perfect, and I've got to do everything perfectly. If it's not perfect I can't move forward, and I'm just gonna stay paralyzed, basically, unless I figure it out." So that's what was originally was holding me back, just trying to do everything just the right way. Instead of just saying, "Okay, you know what? I can take some action, even if it's imperfect action, but that's what I need to do to keep moving forward."

Jocelyn Sams: I think that that's really interesting, because I feel the same way, and I think that this is partly due to ... I don't know if I want to say our upbringing and our education, but in the education system that I grew up in, and I assume you probably did too, it's like everything is graded. So you know how close you are to perfection. Does that make sense?

Kahkshan Ali: Yeah, exactly.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. So I was just thinking about this. As you grow up, and you're in school, you make an A, and I don't know if you're anything like me, I assume that you probably were, you want to get all A's. You want to make sure that you're checking all the boxes, and you're doing everything correctly, right?

Kahkshan Ali: Exactly.

Jocelyn Sams: Then when you get into entrepreneurship, or starting to build a business, there is no checklist. You can find a checklist, but it's not necessarily right. You get into a situation where there are a lot right answers instead of one right answer like you've grown up to know your entire life. I think that's hard for some people. That's hard for me, because I like to know the expectation, and work towards the expectation in the structure that has been set out for me. When you get into this stuff, there is no structure set out for you. So you sort of have to pave your own way. That's hard for a lot of people. It's hard for me.

Shane Sams: It's also like, look at your background. You're a dentist. You kind of need some perfectionism there.

Kahkshan Ali: Yeah, exactly!

Shane Sams: "You know, I got like four of your teeth straight, but this one's a little crooked, but you know, it ain't gonna matter.

Kahkshan Ali: Right. Oh my god, I know!

Shane Sams: "It's just gotta be done."-

Jocelyn Sams: And there's probably-

Shane Sams: That doesn't work there!

Jocelyn Sams: ... there's probably some ambiguity in dentistry, just like there is in everything else, but for the most part there's probably a set set of procedures that you follow for the most part, right?

Kahkshan Ali: Exactly, and I love doing cosmetic dentistry. That's my favorite. It's just so gratifying to have people who hated their smiles, weren't smiling, and it's just tremendous. I'm so picky about when I'm doing that kind of work. So then to come to this, and be like, "Okay, now what do I do?"

Shane Sams: There's a fundamental thing there you said about that word ... I've never thought about this, but this is fascinating what Jocelyn just said, 'cause I never thought about that either. We always have this perfection that we're trying to push up to in society, and then when you're an entrepreneur, that goes away, and you get to define it, right? But that word cosmetic, cosmetic, you do have to go into that perfectionism. You gotta get it as close to perfect as possible to make it look good for the person.

Kahkshan Ali: Right.

Shane Sams: But what we do online, and what we do to help people solve problems is not always cosmetic. Sometimes it's really fundamental. Some people it's cosmetic, "I've got to do this", but for my mom last week, it was like, "Oh my god, let's not end up in a wheelchair." That's mission one. Well, mission one is don't die. Mission two is don't end up in a wheelchair. Mission three is, can she get up and walk around her house by herself? When we're solving big problems, sometimes that's where the perfectionism doesn't have to be there, it's just, "What's the next step? What's the next improvement? How can we get a little better each day, and then how can we help someone else get a little better each day?"

Shane Sams: We do this all the time because we're talking to you today about we're getting ready to fork that road in the direction, right? We got a message last night from a member of the Flip Your Life community who just went over a million dollars. They crossed over the dollar amount and said, "I just made my first million dollars online-

Jocelyn Sams: Which is amazing.

Shane Sams: ... through the Flip Your Life community." So their next step is something totally different than your next step.-

Kahkshan Ali: Exactly.

Shane Sams: The cosmetic person is totally different than the fundamental person who just needs a change, right? Our job as leaders, and your job when you start leading people is just to say, "Hey, what do they need from me? What's the next step for them? That's what I got to give them. I don't need to give them my version of perfect, or the world's A+, 100, or anything else, it's just the next step. If you can do that, you can make an income for yourself, you can spend more time with your daughter, and you can help a ton of people.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay, so we're definitely going to work on overcoming that, and knowing that perfectionism is one of those things that really, most of the time, is just an excuse for people not to move forward. So knowing that, what else can we help you with to help you move this thing forward?

Kahkshan Ali: For me, honestly, at this point I probably need a little bit more help with tech stuff, but that's why I've got that coaching I'm getting from you. It's just fabulous, I can just pick up the Voxer, and call like, "Help me. I can't figure this out."

Shane Sams: It's awesome that you're in the all-access program too, 'cause we talk over an app called Voxer, which is Asynchronous communication back and forth. When you're dozens of timezones away, that's really beneficial.

Kahkshan Ali: Although I'm not sure if Shane appreciates it, I think it was Thanksgiving, I'm like, "Shane, I hope you're not at dinner yet, but ..." He's like carving the turkey.

Shane Sams: I love it. I love it 'cause I was bored waiting on dinner. So I had something to do.

Jocelyn Sams: We work all the time, because we love what we do. So it doesn't really feel like work. Sometimes you hear from us on holidays ...

Shane Sams: I rode to practice last night, and I was looking at my schedule all day with homeschool and everything else, and I looked at my schedule, and I said, "When am I gonna talk to all the Voxer people?" And Jocelyn goes, "While driving to practice." I'm like, "Oh, yeah." So I just penciled it in, in the car.

Kahkshan Ali: I think, for me, now would be like the course is almost finished, and then just to learn, because even now when I'm reading stuff on the website, and looking at all the different information you have I'm just trying to actually how to get the sales funnel, how to get people to it. For me, that's like the next area that I'm not really too sure. How do you get that membership list? I understand that you want to try and get people's emails and stuff, and get a list so you can send them more information. I think that's, if I've got it in my mind, if that's the correct steps.

Kahkshan Ali: I think for me that's, right now I just want to learn all the ... as we were talking before, just learn all the steps. Just 'cause it's totally new to me, this area, just be able to on that once first short, whatever course, just get it out there and start just finding out. In terms of, I'm not so worried about whether it's working or not working, but just to know that there's actually people out there who I'm reaching. Even if it's a small number to start off with.

Shane Sams: I love the way you asked that question, because, and this is true for everybody, it sounds like you're really confused about what even to ask for help next, right?

Kahkshan Ali: Yeah, kinda.

Shane Sams: And that's okay. So many people think they got to figure it out, but they can't even figure out what they're supposed to ask to do next. It's kind of like when you go, you probably see this in your dentist, you go to the dentist, and you're like, "My tooth hurts, I think. Something's hurtin' in my mouth. I don't know what's goin' on." And they don't even know what to ask you, like, "Hey, do you think it's a cavity, or could it be my jaw muscles are tight and causing tooth pain?" They don't know what to even ask, and then that's why you have us!

Kahkshan Ali: Yeah, exactly!

Shane Sams: 'Cause what you're saying, you got to the point where you're like, "I kind of want to know people are looking for this, or whatever." But what I really heard, 'cause I've heard a thousand people ask me that same question in that same way, is, "I've got to figure out how to go find people for my product, because eventually I'm probably not gonna sell this dentist product, but if I have the skill of creating traffic and driving it into a sales funnel, I know that I can sell that other thing too." That's really where you're at right now.

Kahkshan Ali: Yes, yeah.

Shane Sams: The basic flow of everything that goes find a problem you can solve, create the solution, or at least outline the solution that you know you can create, right? That's the faster way to it, but whatever. Then create the product, and then you go find existing traffic who is looking for your product. Then you create something that you can throw in front of them to make them stop, right? Imagine there's a road going by, and you're like, "Man, everybody in the car driving on this road is exactly my perfect customer, but the problem is they're all going 80 miles an hour past me and they don't even see me."

Shane Sams: So we have to figure out a way to insert a red light, or insert a stop sign, or least put a yield up to slow em' down enough to take a glance in our direction. That's where you're at now is that, "How do I get in front of existing traffic? How do I go out and say, 'Where are my people already hanging out? Where are my people already searching for information, and how can I do something to stop them?'" If the same reason there's big trade shows, and ten thousand people will show for a ... I don't know. Jocelyn used to go to trade shows for commercial dishwashers.

Jocelyn Sams: It was super exciting.

Shane Sams: It was exciting.

Jocelyn Sams: Actually they were food shows and they were kind of exciting.

Shane Sams: Yeah, it was.

Jocelyn Sams: 'Cause there was food everywhere.

Kahkshan Ali: Yeah, food shows I can ... Yeah, I'd like some food shows. We just had a chocolate ... I couldn't go to it, and I was so bummed, but they were having this big huge chocolate expo here in Riyadh.

Shane Sams: You can just eat all day, you know what I mean?

Kahkshan Ali: Yeah.

Shane Sams: Then over in the corner of the chocolate expo was Jocelyn's commercial dishwasher example.

Jocelyn Sams: Which, was clearly the coolest space.

Shane Sams: Clearly the coolest space. Basically she knew that there were people there that owned restaurants that needed that dishwasher, and she was the marketing coordinator. So that's where the traffic was, and now she's gotta figure out a way to make some of that traffic stop. Well the first thing she's got to do is be in the arena. So she goes and buys a booth. She puts her dishwasher in, then she's gotta figure out a way to stop them. How do you get the people that are literally walking by to stop and look at your thing?

Shane Sams: That's your next step is find where those people are looking for this stuff, right? It might be YouTube, it might be Google, it could be podcasts, it could be a thousand different places online, right? Then you have to figure out how to make them stop and look at you. That's where promotion, ads, and things like that come in. Anytime you get your product then the next step is find your people. I love that this time of year ... Football coaches are a weird creature. They're so busy from August to November, they're like, "Nothing matters but the football season."

Shane Sams: Well last week a hundred people joined one of my football groups on Facebook. You know why? They all got beat, and they're playbooks didn't work. So guess what they're doin' right now? They're looking for Facebook groups about new playbooks. I know where they are, I just have to get them to stop, and that's kind of where you are right now. So that's what we gotta do next for this particular business, is figure out where people are looking for this information, and how can we get in front of them?

Kahkshan Ali: Well, that sounds ... Yeah, as you said-

Shane Sams: How does that sound, honestly?

Kahkshan Ali: That sounds awesome, because as you said, even just the terminology for me, when I hear you talking about, "Okay, well we've got get traffic into the sales funnel", I'm just like, "Okay, all of that stuff ..." I'm getting a little bit used to hearing a little bit more, but when I first had joined I'm like, "Sales funnel?" I'm going, "Funnel?" All I could think, honestly, it just sounds so ... It's kind of embarrassing to say this, 'cause I feel like I'm an educated person, but I thought of, I'm just like, "The only funnel I know are funnel cakes at a carnival."

Shane Sams: They're delicious, by the way.

Kahkshan Ali: I'm like, "Funnels?" Or like, "Tornado funnels? I don't know. What is a funnel?"

Shane Sams: We put the fun in funnel. That's what me and Jocelyn do, right? It is confusing, all those terms. That's why we use analogies so much, because it is really hard to wrap your brain around what ... I didn't know any of that either when we started. What was it, six years ago now? We didn't know what sales funnel was. We didn't know what email marketing was. We use all these terms, and throw them around like they're easy now, but nobody's really ... you're clueless on it. Even from that trade show example, most people have not been to a trade show, but everyone's been to a local carnival, or an amusement park.

Shane Sams: There's people there wanting to spend money to have fun. So what is the guy at the dart booth with balloons do? "Hey come over here! You wanna have fun! Five dollars, you can throw five darts at the balloons!" Or the guy you by, it's like, "Five bucks, two shots, hit a three pointer. If you hit one you win a basketball." That's what you're doing is you're going where people are already ready to do what you want them to do, and then you just say, "Hey! Look over here." That's all marketing is. It's getting people's attention, but you want to get the right people's attention.

Shane Sams: If Jocelyn took her commercial dish washing booth to a football coach's clinic, she set up over in the corner, and she was like, "Hey, head coaches, come over here and look over at my booth!" She would never sell a commercial dishwasher at a football clinic, right? So you just gotta pick the right place you're trying to get traffic, or you don't listen to everybody and say, "Facebook's the greatest thing ever." Well, maybe not for your audience. Google's the greatest thing ever. Maybe not for your audience. So we got to pick the right place, and find out where your people actually are, and then we create the quote/unquote sales funnel that funnels them down to your product.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay, once we get that research, and you figure out where you're gonna go as far as finding people, what is your next step after that?

Kahkshan Ali: I feel that this is really gonna help, because I'm planning on getting certified in high-performance coaching through the Brendon Burchard group. I'd actually like to then use all the stuff that I'm learning to probably set up some courses for my clients, because other than just the actually one-on-one coaching calls that I would be doing with them, I'd like to have an area for them to go and ... Oh my god, I'm just coming up with this idea right now, actually. I'm having a sort of A-ha moment, which is great talking to you guys.

Shane Sams: That's awesome.

Kahkshan Ali: Yeah. I'm just like, "Oh my god, I'm getting like ... Oh this is awesome!", because I've been going through the coaching, I've been getting a lot of training done and everything. You don't even have to take notes, but I find that little missing piece for me, I'm also a visual person, and I really enjoy looking at YouTube's, tutorials, and videos. I've got lots of things, I've signed up at Udemy. So for me, if I was a client, I think I would really like to have a place where modules are set up with some of the information that I'm getting from my coach, I can review it and see stuff visually, and really be able to master that material even better.

Shane Sams: Yeah, and who do want to coach in your coaching practice? In High-performance ... What is it called, High-performance ...?

Kahkshan Ali: High-performance Coaching, yeah.

Shane Sams: High-performance Coaching is from a guy named Brendon Burchard, who's a really great speaker, and he trains people with really evidence-based, scientific-based processes for coaching people in any field. Whether it's business, or whatever. Who are you wanting to coach when you set this up?

Kahkshan Ali: I want to coach people who either want to change careers, or they're at a point in their lives where they want some change. 'Cause for me personally, that's what happened, and also some of the other people that I met who've gone through the coaching program, things just weren't feeling right. There's another lady that I know that's done the coaching also. She was a successful musician. She works in an orchestra in one of the cities, so all that was well and good. Just like myself. Professionally I'm happy, but as I've said, I want to move on now to something else. So to have coaching available for people who really just need some clarity as to what they want to do with the rest of their lives.

Kahkshan Ali: I also don't really feel that it's ... For me personally, it can happen, 'cause I'm talking to a lot of younger people also. I don't think it necessarily is people who are older, who are mid-career, or end of their careers. I think even for younger people nowadays, there's so much opportunity out there. It's kind of like the shiny ball syndrome. It's like, "Oh, I could do this. I could do this." Even just to help the younger age group.

Shane Sams: So basically take a younger person ... Basically you've done this for 20 years, and you're like, "Man, I want to do something different, but what if I could catch somebody before they were doing something different, and they could make a different choice, or whatever." You want to have a 30 year old person make that decision instead of a 50 year old person make that decision.

Kahkshan Ali: Yes, and really be able to help them make sure ... There's so much pressure that comes sometimes from parents, or family, or society, just whatever, things we've built up in our minds. I just want to really make sure that people, when they're choosing what they want to do, that they really, truly are happy and passionate about it. It can really help them be able to choose everything. It's not just looking at, let's say, a good income. You can make some great incomes, but then you might still be a nine to five employee. Is that what you want?

Kahkshan Ali: Everyone's different. Everyone's comfort levels are different with different things; or do you want a lifestyle like the one that we're pursuing with doing digital. Just to be able to give them the choices and help them to get that clarity, and pick what they really want to do.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay. I guess the question that I would have is, where does this fit in? Is this something that you plan to do soon, or are you going to try to finish your other project first?

Kahkshan Ali: I'm actually gonna try to finish the other project first, because my training is not gonna be happening till April.

Shane Sams: And we're talking right now in December of 2018.

Kahkshan Ali: So in April of 2019 I'm gonna be getting certified. I'm not gonna be able to do any coaching until the certification process is over.

Shane Sams: But you really want to be prepared out of the gate 'cause you're working on this stuff right now. This has been about a six month process. You're learning all the tech. You wanna finish learning everything, and then get onto the point, right?

Kahkshan Ali: Right, and just like you said, if I learn how to do sales funnels, and marketing, all that stuff how to get traffic so that when I do set up the next course, all that stuff I'll be able to do that much faster.

Shane Sams: Okay. This is a good example then of putting the thing you want later until you're ready to actually go get it, and doing what you do now. I would set a goal at least eight weeks out from when you know you're gonna get certified and be confident. This is more, I wouldn't call what you're wanting to do Coaching as much as Mentorship. There's a difference. Mentorship, Coaching, and Consulting are three totally different things. This is more of a mentorship thing, it's letting someone be able to get that 20 year head start based on your wisdom, right?

Kahkshan Ali: Yeah.

Shane Sams: Before you do that. So you should probably set a goal about eight weeks out. Which would be what, February-ish? Of, "I need to transition, not away from this thing, but this thing needs to be on its own and done so that I can start building everything up." 'Cause you don't want to wait until you're ready to something to do something, you want to have the foundation built. It's like you don't show up for the first game and just go out and try to play, you practice it before the first game, right?

Kahkshan Ali: Right.

Shane Sams: So you're ready for the first game. Maybe that would be a good goal to set here towards the end of this podcast, is look, let's finish learning all the things you need to learn. Let's create an eight week plan from now that says, "Okay, I'm gonna learn these remaining skills that I want to learn. I'm gonna spend X time on each one of them, and then at this point this thing is gonna go into more of an automation, not back burner, but side burner kind of thing. I now have learned everything that I need to know. I go finish my certification and then I launch the next day." It's not like, "I wait till June."

Shane Sams: It's like, "I got it in April. My website's set up. My thing's set up. My payment's set up. I've started already writing blog posts and building traffic for it, and I am now ready to take my first customer immediately." Right?

Kahkshan Ali: Yeah.

Shane Sams: If you plan for that then out of the gate you can go get those first four or five clients, you're ready to rock, and you can start promoting it from there.

Kahkshan Ali: That's great, thank you, because I would have been like, "Oh, okay, well ..." Then that's that perfectionism part coming back in, like you gotta just do it in a certain way, and, "Well, I can't do anything until I finish my certification." Kind of thing.

Shane Sams: That's like saying a lawyer doesn't get know what law firm they're gonna work at until after graduation. They all know! They've already been hired! 'Cause they just tell them, "I'm graduating whenever." So same thing here. What's the saying? You gotta prepare for rain. You got to plant the seeds now so when it rains the seeds will grow, and it's gonna rain sometime in April.

Jocelyn Sams: All right. We've had a very interesting conversation today, and I can't wait to see what you do next. With that in mind, let us know what is the one thing that you plan to do within the next 24 hours or so based on what we talked about here today?

Kahkshan Ali: I think for me, the next step really would be to go back to the Flip Your Lifestyle blueprint, and I just want to review some of the stuff regarding sales funnels and the marketing aspect. Also, how to find where my people are.

Shane Sams: There is a training in there on traffic.

Kahkshan Ali: Yes, exactly.

Shane Sams: There's another one about researching first. There's a key word research video, and then the traffic video. So you can go through it in that order.

Kahkshan Ali: Yeah, and then there's that sales funnel master class you guys have too. I want to do that in the next 24 hours, review all that information, and then to Voxer you, and be like, "Okay, now what?"

Shane Sams: That's what it's there for! Awesome. Well, listen, this has been an amazing conversation. One thing we love about you is you are an action taker, and you are patiently unstoppable force moving forward. You're a patient unstoppable force moving forward towards your goal, and that's really what it takes to succeed. It's gonna be one of those situations where you're eventually gonna get to a tipping point, and people are gonna look up and go, "Wow! An overnight success!" They're not gonna realize, "No, it took a long time to be an overnight success!"

Shane Sams: So thank you so much for coming on the podcast, just being so open and transparent, and just sharing your journey with everybody else 'cause I know this podcast is gonna help somebody out there that's listening.

Kahkshan Ali: Well, thanks so much for having me, and yeah, I hope that someone who's just starting out like myself will be able to realize that this is a great community, a great place to get all that help. So thank you so much.

Shane Sams: All right, guys, that wraps up another episode of the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. Thank you so much for listening. Hey look, maybe you're like Kahkshan, and you don't know exactly what to do next. Maybe you can't even figure out the questions that you need to ask to take your online dreams to the next level. Well, we can help you inside of the Flip Your Life community. Not only do we have amazing courses covering almost any topic in online business, but we also have a super active community forum. Jocelyn and I do two live member calls every single month, and you can come in and get the help you need.

Shane Sams: You can ask the questions that you need to ask, or maybe even get the help coming up with the questions you need to ask so that you can do what's best for your family. All you have to do to start a 30 day free trial right now is go to FlippedLifestyle.com/free. That's F-L-I-P-P-E-D Lifestyle.com/free, and you can start your free membership today and get the help you need to take your dreams to the next level.

Shane Sams: All right, guys, that is all the time we have for now. So until next time, do whatever it takes to flip your life.

Jocelyn Sams: Bye!

Links and resources mentioned on today’s show: * Flip Your Life LIVE 2019 Tickets & Registration Information * Flip Your Life community 30-day trial

Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!

Get your FREE 30-DAY Membership in the Flip Your Life Community NOW!

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In today's episode, S&J resume their recap of 2018, the good, the bad, and the future.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jocelyn Sams: Hey y'all, on today's podcast we recap 2018, the good, the bad, and the future.

Shane Sams: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, where life always comes before work. We're your hosts Shane and Jocelyn Sams. We're a real family who figured out how to make our entire living online, and now we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life, all right. Let's get started.

Shane Sams: What's going on everybody. Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. It is great to be back with you again. Today this is part two of our 2018 year in review. On Tuesday this week we did part one, and we talked all about all the things that we got to do this year that were good. We really focused on the highlights of 2018 for us, and I hope that that inspired you to go back and look at your own year. You know, sometimes we forget how good the year really was, and we forget about things that we might've done like last January of February. I've got a friend of mine, and he always goes back to Facebook, and he looks all the way back into each month, then he writes down all of the great things that he did. So that he can kind of remember like, "Man, this was a great year. Yeah, there was one or two things that kind of stood out that might've not went right, but man look at all these amazing things that we did."

Shane Sams: So go back and look at all the good things that happened to you this year. It's really important to kind of reflect back on that.

Jocelyn Sams: I saw this thing on Facebook the other day where every week you're supposed to write down the best thing that happened that week, and then you put them all in a jar, and on the very last day of the year you get them all out and you read all the cool things that happened through the year. I thought that was a really good idea, even for us, because we just are typically not very good about just looking back and remembering all the good things.

Shane Sams: But we also know that it's not all sunshine and rainbows out here in the adulting world, and there were some things, there are always things that go wrong, or go bad, and it's also important to remember those as well because you can reflect back and look at the mistakes that you made, look at the things that kind of went off the railroad tracks and ask yourself, "Did I have control over this? Are there things that I could do differently, or landmines that I can avoid in the future so that next year can be even better." That's what we're going to focus on for today's podcast is we are going to first look back at some of the bad things that happened. Some of the things that we did wrong, because we make a lot of mistakes, and we want to share those with you guys as a part of our journey and a part of your journey too, and let you know that you're not alone.

Shane Sams: You're not the only person messing up this online business stuff. Just today, I was trying to create the sales page for Flip Your Life Live 2019, which is on sale now at flippedlifestyle.com/live, and I had two tabs open and they were both the editor on the sales page. I accidentally saved the one I was not editing in, and I basically erased six hours of work writing copy for this sales page, because I closed all the tabs and everything else and I lost it. And I didn't know how to get it back, so I had to sit down and do the whole thing over. So lest you think Flipped Lifestyle world is a mistake free world, you are wrong. It is not. We've made a lot of mistakes, and we want to talk about some of those today, and we want to also talk about the future. Some goals that we have for this year individually, as a couple, and some goals that we have for you and your future, and the future of your family as well.

Jocelyn Sams: Before we jump into this, what we call the bad things, I do want to preface this by saying that a lot of these are what people would consider to be first world problems. So if you're listening to this expecting that we're going to go into something really crazy bad that happened, you know I'm really ...

Shane Sams: Some of them are. There are some bad things in there. There are some catastrophes as well.

Jocelyn Sams: But I'm really happy to say that most of our problems are the first world kind, but they're still problems nonetheless. I think sometimes people wanted to shove those under the rug.

Shane Sams: Or trivialize them or something.

Jocelyn Sams: Oh that's not a big deal, but they can be a really big deal, and we'll kind of jump into that a little bit more. It can affect you physically, it can affect you mentally, which affects other areas of your life as well so I just wanted to kind of throw that out there. I don't want to get emails and say, "Well, you think that's bad. Well all this happened to me." We're not trying to say that our life is bad or anything like that. For all intents and purposes, we have an extremely blessed and fulfilling life, but there are things that do go wrong.

Shane Sams: The stresses do add up, especially when there's a lot of little things happening at once, and we're going to try to explore some of the causes for these stresses, and these bad things that happen in our business, and hopefully that will give you guys some insight into how to deal with some of these as your own. So one of the biggest problems that we had last year, probably as a couple. This one's probably of the marriage variety, and I'm sure many of you will relate to this whether or not you're in business with your spouse or not, but Jocelyn and I found ourselves not on the same page many, many times.

Jocelyn Sams: Most days.

Shane Sams: This year. I think we were most of the time in the same book, but definitely at times we were not even in the same chapter. That caused a lot of tension. We had probably the most marital tension that we've had in our relationship since we started our online business this year because so much changed so fast last year. We sold one of our businesses. Prior to 2018, Jocelyn and I had Flipped Lifestyle together, but we each had our own kind of things going on as well, and that kind of spread out the, what would you call it? Tension? Or spread out the opportunities for us to work together, I suppose. It created, I guess a little more individuality in the business, but once we stopped or sold off everything else, and focused all of our energy on Flipped Lifestyle, all of our energy on the Flip Your Life community, it kind of pushed us into this mold where we were used to making decisions about certain things on our own, and now we had to make every single decision together.

Shane Sams: That's a business, that's life, that's parenting, and it happened so fast it created a new kind of friction in our relationship.

Jocelyn Sams: I think at the beginning, like when we were starting out, we had teeny, tiny kids for one thing, who didn't even sleep through the night and all that kind of stuff. Some of you guys can relate to what I'm talking about right now. We had full time jobs. We were trying to do this thing in the evenings, and on the weekends, on breaks, and we were basically just in survival mode. We were just making it to the next day.

Shane Sams: We didn't even have time to argue about things, because there was no time to argue. It was either make a decision, or don't make the decision.

Jocelyn Sams: I think also at the beginning that our mission was really clear. Our mission was to make enough money to leave our jobs. Once we did that, I don't know that we've ever done a really good job since then redefining our mission, because ...

Shane Sams: Or our goals even. What's the next level look like?

Jocelyn Sams: I just, I don't know even know that I knew what my life today would look like. I guess it's hard for me to look in the future and say, "Oh well, I'm at this level. Now I want to go to this next level," because I don't even know what that looks like. I think it's just kind of hard. It's like we have these sort of intangible goals, or goals that we don't really talk about. Like maybe Shane has different goals than I have, and because we haven't done a good job of talking about those goals, for whatever reason, we just have a lot of tension because our expectations just aren't lining up.

Shane Sams: Yeah. It's like, it's crazy what you said about what your life could look like, because now we've kind of stretched to the point of the end and the edge of our imagination what life actually could look like. Because when we were establishing our dreams we were like, "Man if we could just make enough money to quit our job," right? Well I can picture what that looks like. Jocelyn can picture what that looks like. You can picture what that looks like. I need this much money to quit my job. But then you quit your job and you're like, "Well, I wonder if I could pay my house off in a couple years?" We can picture what that looks like. You can picture what that looks like. Okay, and then what? Maybe I can find my forever home, my dream property and I can have the place that I want to grow old and retire at, and sit on the porch and look at the sunset.

Jocelyn Sams: And go on so many trips a year. That was always our thing, and now we're there. So it's like, now what?

Shane Sams: What's next? What does that look like? Because there's only so much stuff that you can really buy. You know, I was talking to somebody the other day, and they were like, "Man, if I had this much money I would do all these things." I was kind of laughing because I was like, "No you wouldn't. That's not what you would do." That would be so unfulfilling what they were kind of describing. There has to be more to that. That's really why we sold off our other business, and got rid of some other things that we were doing, because the mission of helping other people do this, other people working from home. Other people controlling the future outcomes for their kids, like in education, or just in their lifestyle, that really gave us a lot of purpose. But even that, we don't know what that looks like yet.

Shane Sams: We're still evolving, and still learning what the Flip Your Life community could actually be, and the impact that it could actually make. The stories that we hear are incredible, and some of the things that we kind of think this should look like are happening. We've talked about, on the podcast, how people are sending it in. They've quit their jobs. We've had multiple people now tell us they've made over a million dollars because they've been a part of the community, or listened to the podcast. We've had people, even recently, just we've only been home schooling now for a month, and we've had people say, "That gave me the courage to try it." You know, so it's like all these things are happening, but we don't really have a firm grasp of what we really, totally want that to look like.

Shane Sams: That is not resolved, would you think, that's not resolved. Would you say that's resolved?

Jocelyn Sams: Definitely not. I mean, we kind of talk through it sometimes, but I don't know that we've had an official thing where we say, "Okay, this is what we want, and this is what we're going to do to get there because ...

Shane Sams: This is the clear vision for the future.

Jocelyn Sams: I just think it's still a little bit cloudy right now, so that's something in 2019 that I think really needs to be a big goal for us. Just figuring out what are our goals, and now it's more in terms of ...

Shane Sams: Impact.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. How far can this thing go. It's not so much about financial gain for us, I mean that is a part of it always because we're not a charity organization, but it's like when you reach a certain point, that's pretty much what you have left is what impact can you make in the world. I think that's the point we're at, and we just sort of have different, what would you say, like different ideas of ...

Shane Sams: Different paths to the same city on the hill. You know? What does it actually look like, and one thing that we struggle with a lot too is our roles in our marriage, in our business, in the schooling of our children, in our parenting because we just both have a lot of different opinions, and we're both very different people. There's no manual for the way that we've chosen to live our life. You know, one of the crazy things about the community is how many different people are in there, and how all the marriages look different. All the businesses look different. All the parenting looks, like everybody's doing everything differently.

Shane Sams: Some people choose to really allocate roles. We've got friends who one spouse takes care of the kid, the other spouse is the CEO. That's both ways. We have couple friends where the wife is the CEO and the husband is managing the house. We have friends and community members where the husband is the CEO and the wife is managing. It's amazing watching people do it in different ways. We have people like us where, you know Jocelyn and I really strive for dividing and conquering our life in every area. So when we say we're in business together, we literally say, "Okay, here's all the things you do. Here's all the things I do." We run this business together. When we say we're going to parent together, well I handle certain things and she handles certain things. We divide that up. Even our house, home school.

Shane Sams: We've been doing that lately. I'm focusing on these subjects. Jocelyn's focusing on these subjects. We're thinking about outsourcing some of the subjects. Math, need to hire someone to come in and do that please.

Jocelyn Sams: Please.

Shane Sams: Because it's hard y'all. It's hard to do math, especially that fourth grade stuff. But we're really doing it that way, and there's really no manual for it, and when there's an opportunity to argue, or there's an opportunity to go left or right, it's really hard to make that call because we're completely in unchartered territory, it feels like all the time. So I don't know where this is going except just to caution you. One, be careful what you wish for, right, because it's going to happen if you work hard enough to go get it, and two, be prepared for a lot of change and uncertainty as you pursue your goals in 2019. Understand that confusion is a major part of success. If we knew that going into it, I think we may have been able to maybe avoid some of these pitfalls a little bit in the last year, but it's really hard to prepare for anything until you go through it. It's been interesting.

Shane Sams: One thing that really changed though was after the live event. We were really, really, I don't know how to say this without saying, we weren't at each other's throats, but we were really frustrated with each other a lot because of all the moving parts that were happening until the live event happened, and then I think we got a little bit of clarity and we could look back and say, "Holy man, we accomplished something there. How did we even do that, and what could we do going forward if we were more on the same page, had a clearer vision, and could get some of that tension out of the way?"

Jocelyn Sams: I just want to say that, I think for the most part, we do a pretty good job of navigating this. I mean, as you said, there is no manual for this. We're just sort of going into it blindly, and doing the best we can, and I think overall we're doing a pretty good job. We're staying afloat. It doesn't mean that everything's always perfect, and that we never argue or fight or anything, obviously, but it just means that for the most part, I think that we're going the same direction. We just have different, we have different ideas about what should happen. I think we're both sort of controlling people, which is hard sometimes because you want to do things your way, and I want to do things my way, and sometimes we're like, "Okay do it your way," and the other person's like, "Okay do it your way."

Jocelyn Sams: But a lot of times we're like, "No it's going to be my way, or we're not doing it." That causes problems sometimes too.

Shane Sams: I think we're both, there's a problem too with entrepreneurs, we're kind of both relentless. We dig in a little bit, and what's crazy is, this is something that we've probably just realized in the last month. For anybody out there with getting your spouse onboard with your online business, or anything else you're wanting to do in life, we're kind of both, have realized that we're both a lot of times right. There's way more than one right answer. Success is so easily defined in multiple ways, and it's not like we're trying to pick the right thing. It's just we're trying to pick a thing, or maybe which thing we do first. Which thing we do second, and that's where the confusion comes in. Because maybe at the beginning of 2018 it was more like, "I think this is the right way." Jocelyn was like, "I think this is the right way."

Shane Sams: There was a tug of war over that, but now, especially after the live event we've been more like, "Man there's more than one right way. Look when you were right here. Wow you were right here. This would've been right if we'd done it this way." Maybe we both tried a way, and they both worked, right? We were starting to realize that it's really just more important to come to consensus, have a clear goal, have a destination. If you can agree on that, the ways you get there kind of melt away because if you take enough action it's going to happen for you.

Jocelyn Sams: I think a lot of tension too comes from the fact is, that as you said earlier, we have to make decisions about all the things. So, people who work nine to five, and then they just parent together, and they have a relationship together. You only argue about those things. Theoretically, you won't argue about your business unless you work at the same place because that person doesn't have a dog in that fight. But because we do everything together, that makes it that much more difficult because we both have different ideas about everything. We have different ideas about work, home schooling, parenting, our relationship, whatever. It just makes it that much more difficult. So one of the things that we kind of talked about earlier in the year in 2018, was taking some of the stress off of us by hiring people to do some roles in our business.

Shane Sams: That's what I'm feeling, more than anything else, as we kind of wrap up this year is decision fatigue was a major theme this year. There was so many things going on, it was overloading our brain, and the only people we've ever had to offload, and download all of our problems to was each other, right? So it started becoming this bounce back and forth feedback loop of all the bad things, and all the decisions, and everything was becoming extremely overwhelming. We just relaunched the live event, and we were commenting just this weekend about how easy it was because there were no decisions to be made. It was all kind of like, "Oh, well here's what we did last year. Let's just do that again." It just worked so much more seamlessly.

Shane Sams: That's what I've really learned from going through a very difficult and stressful decision filled year, is that once you do something once, it becomes a lot easier on the backside. If we would just stop reinventing the wheel it would become a whole lot easier. When you go to your job, when you go to work with somebody, a lot of decisions are made for you. Like when I went to school, it was decided when the bell rang. It was decided when we went to a staff meeting. It was decided what we were covering at the staff meeting. Heck it was even decided what I taught in class. I had a curriculum map, but now every single day is so full of decisions. If we don't offload some of those, it's going to lead to a short circuit and overwhelm.

Jocelyn Sams: So at the beginning of the year, well really even before that for me, but we started realizing we have made some poor hiring decisions, but instead of saying, "Okay let's fix this," well we sort of did say that. But instead of saying, "Lets try to find the right person," we said, "Okay, well these people aren't doing what we want them to do, let's hire a manager for them." Because that makes sense.

Shane Sams: Let's hire more people for that person to manage, and I think in our heart we were like let's offload a lot of these decisions. Let's offload a lot of these tasks, and we started looking at all these other "successful gurus", and they were saying, "Build your team. Make it huge. If you want to really run a company, you're going to have 20 employees." We saw other people that we thought were "successful" then when we dug below the surface they weren't as successful as we thought. They had hired 20 or 30 people, and well that has to be what our success looks like. We're so stressed out, that's the solution is to go hire as many people as possible.

Jocelyn Sams: One thing that we realized that we really dislike, and still to this day dislike, is managing people. We just don't enjoy it. We want to do the creative, fun visionary part of our job, and we don't want to manage people to get stuff done. We just want them to get stuff done. So, to make a long story short, we decided to hire a couple of different people in 2018 to help us. So one of the things that we did is we hired someone to help out in our community, and then we also hired a manager to manage all of the staff members. I just want to say that these people are amazing. The people that we hired. There is nothing at all wrong with them.

Shane Sams: Great people. Great people.

Jocelyn Sams: They did a great job for us, and I don't want to take anything away from them, but it was not the right choice for us to hire anyone. We needed to go back to the basics and figure out what we were doing before we started just hiring people to fix problems. Hiring people to fix problems does not fix problems.

Shane Sams: No you should fix the problem first, and once it's working, then hire someone to take if off your plate. That's probably the lesson that we really learned, but we don't hear that in the business world. None of us know that. None of us in high school are trained on how to hire people, how to fire people, how to fill your team correctly. None of us are taught that in college. You have to go through that and almost figure it out on your own a little bit to know exactly what you truly need. We've actually cut our staff down to like three people now, and our small and mighty team is infinitely less stressful. Our business is growing faster than when we had a sales person, and a community manager, and an editor, and customer service, and a manager for all these people, and a project manager to manage the manager.

Shane Sams: Right? It just got so convoluted so quickly, that it actually slowed us down. It actually caused more stress than it eliminated. So that was a really bad thing that happened this year was we just hired too many people too fast. Grew too big too fast. Listened to too many "experts" tell us that we had to have a team, and we'd see someone on a YouTube channel saying, "I've got 100 employees," and then we would say, "Well maybe we need 100 employees, and that's what will eliminate all of our stress and tension because we won't be doing it." But that's not true. That's not what happened.

Jocelyn Sams: For us, more people is more problems. Now, I'm not going to say that's true for everyone. There are some people who love managing a team. I have a good friend who I go to Mastermind in Cancun every March with. She loves managing a team. That's her favorite part about what she does, but for us, it is not. We do not enjoy that part at all. So what we did is we decided okay, we're going to scale down to three amazing people.

Shane Sams: As few people as possible.

Jocelyn Sams: Who absolutely know how to do their job. We communicated our expectations to them, they understand what we expect, they do what we expect, and everyone's happy. So that is how we solve the problem. It was a very long, difficult, and expensive lesson that we learned.

Shane Sams: Yeah. Tens of thousands of dollars.

Jocelyn Sams: Again, I don't take anything away from the people who were working with us. If they are listening to this, they did a great job. They did what they were supposed to do, but we ...

Shane Sams: It just wasn't working for us.

Jocelyn Sams: We had to take a good, hard look in the mirror and say, "What is wrong in this situation." It wasn't them. It was us.

Shane Sams: So I guess our lesson here is, and this is a lesson that we want to pass on to you is this, the first lesson from this podcast was get on the same page with people you're working with. Whether it's your spouse or somebody else, so that you all have a clear destination. The second lesson that we learned here is don't hire people unless you've got it figured out. You know, everyone always comes to us when they're stressed out in the community and they say, "Well, I'm just so stressed out. I can't do everything. I need to hire somebody." Then we ask them deeper questions like do you even understand the systems in your business?

Shane Sams: Because we didn't when we started hiring people and that was a mistake. Do you have all of those systems documented? Because we didn't, and that was a huge mistake in our business. Now as we've learned that, we're telling you if you don't know where you're going, and know what you want people to do, and can clearly tell them their expectations, and have documented things that show them what you want them to do, it's not going to work. Hiring people is not a magic bullet. It is not. It causes as many problems as you have now, they're just different problems. So which problems do you want? That's what you're going to have to ask yourself when you're hiring people. Don't think for a minute that your success is totally determined by people that you hire.

Shane Sams: Because it's not. Everybody's going to tell you that. Everybody's going to tell you you need all these gatekeepers, and you need all these things for positioning, and if you try to get a client, and you don't have five employees, and you don't have a secretary, and you don't have an assistant that they're not going to hire you. Don't listen to all those things. We listened. We made the mistakes. We went through it for a year. Spent tens of thousands of dollars on it, and we're telling you right now, go slow. That's how you avoid the basically 2018 problems that we had.

Jocelyn Sams: On that same note, during the summer we talked about this extensively in our post live event podcast that came out probably in October of 2018, but right before our event we had several different things happen. So we parted ways with our manager for a variety of different reasons. Our editor and customer service person, they kind of had, I don't know some kind of crisis mode in the summer. They were unhappy. We were unhappy. Just no one was happy, so ...

Shane Sams: We had to let them go.

Jocelyn Sams: We parted ways with them in the summer of 2018 for a variety of reasons. Then, so you know we're approaching this live event. We have just a very few people remaining on our team at this point, and we're trying just to survive until the live event. We know that things aren't really working the way that we would like them to work, but we're like, "Okay we have this event coming up in September. Let's not make any more changes. You know we've already had to let two people go months before this event. We really need to just keep the ship moving forward until this event is over."

Shane Sams: Hang on. Just get into the parking space basically.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. We had a lot of pressure on us. We needed to perform at this event because this is our first one. Our first big event. We want to make sure we do a good job for these people who are coming, and we just really, really want to stay focused. Well, things were going okay until about two weeks, like two weeks to the day before this event, we get a notice from two more people and they're like, "Yeah, we're out. See yeah."

Shane Sams: These were people that had already had jobs at the event. It was like, they didn't even put in a two week notice. They just left. That was our last customer service person. That was our, we had another person on our staff that was handling like customer relations, some community management stuff, sales.

Jocelyn Sams: And things before the event.

Shane Sams: Things before the event. Yeah. They had things they had to create, and it was just gone. So it basically came down to me, Jocelyn, and one person.

Jocelyn Sams: And Kat.

Shane Sams: And our Kat, our assistant. Yeah, our executive assistant. The manager of the whole thing, which was awesome because Kat's like 15 people in one. She's amazing, but it just was crazy because all of that happened. And you're standing there looking going, "Well we built this thing and we can never do it without them," but we still pulled it off, and it still worked great. It kind of taught us that lesson that hey, you don't need everybody that you think you do. But that led to additional stress, which led to lots of stress eating. We've been really healthy and good all year, and all of a sudden it just all fell off the wheels and we were like, "We need comfort food as much as possible."

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, so it's funny because the only people who started and ended 2018 that worked for our company is me and Shane.

Shane Sams: I never thought about that before, but that is true.

Jocelyn Sams: So, I mean, things just it went crazy, you know? We're heading into this event, and all these people are quitting. We're having to fire people, people are quitting. We're having to just basically just survive, I mean from day to day and figure this out. We're still trying to put finishing touches on speeches, and get people's shirt sizes, and make sure the shirts are getting there on time, and make sure that we have all the stuff for the event.

Shane Sams: While being married, and parenting, and getting ready for back to school. Just all the madness of life, though it was crazy.

Jocelyn Sams: So like a lot of people, I think, I tend to eat my feelings. You know, if I'm stressed, I'm going to eat a lot of food. So we had been doing so good. I started the ketogenic diet back in April of 2018. I was just doing so well. I had lost 17 pounds, and then all this stuff happened. So by the time the event rolled around, I mean I had gained back like five or six pounds. That is not good at all.

Shane Sams: Yeah, our health kind of went down there. We kind of let that go, and it's funny because what I've realized from this, what I really learned from that episode was you're going to break somewhere. In your relationship, you're going to break. Yelling at your kids, you're going to break. Your business is going to fail. You're going to break in your health. If you just keep pushing against the wall, you go too far beyond.

Jocelyn Sams: Something's gotta give.

Shane Sams: Something's gotta give. So that was pretty bad. Our health, I feel like I'm, I started out the year really healthy feeling good about myself, and kind of ended the year not feeling so good about our health. So I'm going to do better next year.

Jocelyn Sams: We're trying to get back on the wagon.

Shane Sams: We're going to get back on the wagon. We're going to do the New Year's resolutions, so everybody jump back on the wagon with us and we will all exercise, and eat healthier, and be less stressed next year. All right, so another thing that we decided to do this year, because why not do some kind of drastic life changing thing on top of all of the other drastic life changing things, is we started to home school our kids this year. We've been wrestling with this decision for about a year now for a whole lot of reasons. We talked about this on a podcast recently a couple weeks ago about making the decision to home school, why we wanted to do that. We decided to just pull the plug and go for it. We were going to wait until 2019, going to wait until the second semester, but Jocelyn and I are not very good at waiting for things. We kind of want to see how things work.

Shane Sams: So we started home schooling and amazing and a catastrophe all at once. Literally the first day of home school, we woke up. Everything was going great from like nine to 12, and I got a phone call at about 11 o'clock am from my mom. Actually it was my mom's cleaning lady. She had come over to help mom clean up the house, and my mom had fallen and broken her back. So, right in the middle of the day we took our kids out of school. We had just sent the letter to the superintendent. Everything was rolling. We had this massive catastrophe. Mom was laying on the floor paralyzed, in massive pain. I ended up going to the hospital with her. We rode to another city that was about an hour away. Met her there, and I ended up staying over there for like four days. So all of this fell on us right in the middle of managing home school, managing our business, and Jocelyn was kind of just like, I don't think I saw you.

Jocelyn Sams: Kind of stranded.

Shane Sams: Yeah. For like a week.

Jocelyn Sams: It was funny because I really, so we took a vote. Shane was determined that we were going to quit school after Thanksgiving. I was determined that we were going to wait until the Christmas holidays, which was only like a few weeks in between those two things.

Shane Sams: We landed somewhere in the middle. It was a pretty good compromise actually.

Jocelyn Sams: We took a vote. We did go back after Thanksgiving, but then the next week he's like, "We got to do this now." I'm like, "Well, let's take a vote. Who wants to do it and who doesn't?" Well it was three to one.

Jocelyn Sams: I was the one in favor of holding out.

Shane Sams: We don't normally give our kids equal votes in everything, but in this we wanted to make sure that they were ready to do it.

Jocelyn Sams: So, here I am, and of course I wanted him to be there for his family, but I'm like, "You're the one who wanted to do this, and now I'm here by myself with them for like three days trying to figure all this out." So you know, it's just one of those things. I'm like, "Is this a sign universe, I don't know." But it's worked out okay. I mean we're still kind of getting a feel for it and figuring out ...

Shane Sams: It's only a few weeks down.

Jocelyn Sams: What we're going to do.

Shane Sams: It's a totally overwhelming experience to home school your children. It's good. The kids have done great. I used to ask the kids all the time when they would get in the car from the bus stop, I would always say things like, "Hey, what'd you learn in school today?" They would both literally just say, "Nothing. I don't know. I don't remember." They didn't remember anything. I've continued doing that since we've started, and they actually, every day tell me some amazing thing they've learned, or they remember. So they're retaining things better. They're both much more well rested, and kind of more laid back a little bit because they're not so pressured to be at school at 6:30 and all the stuff that goes with that.

Shane Sams: So its been a good experience, but its been really, really hard, and that on top of it, like Jocelyn said, "What's the universe trying to tell us here?" Sometimes I think the universe throws you a big curve ball when you're on the right path. It's like somethings trying to scare you from a better future. Scare you from moving forward, and I was questioning it that way too. Like oh my gosh, this massive thing happened. I got to help my dad. Got to help my mom. All my brothers are pulling together. We're trying to work this thing out, and thank God my mom did have surgery and she's walking on walker now a few weeks later. So just a miraculous healing in our life and her life there, but man it was really, really hard. That was really, really probably like the most stressful week. The least amount of sleep. Jocelyn as the reluctant hero did an amazing job that week, but it was just really, really touch.

Shane Sams: So I'd say my moms injury and that experience was bad, but a lot of good things came out of and everybody's going to get back on the right track. Sometimes you just got to deal with that stuff. Don't let it hold you back. We didn't send the kids back to school just because something bad happened. We fought through it, we toughed it out, and we're going to be home schooling next semester. Something bad may happen again, but it's just like your business. Just like everything else, you can't let a few bad things, or a really, really bad thing stop you from moving forward.

Jocelyn Sams: All right, switching gears a little bit. We're going to talk a little bit about something that some of you guys probably understand, and that is loneliness. I know that sounds really crazy. I mean I'm probably talking to like thousands of people right now, which is crazy. You know we have an amazing business, we have an amazing community. We have so many things that are going right, but sometimes this life can be very, very lonely. I say that because, especially in my personal life, there just aren't a whole lot of people who can, first of all, wrap their head around what we do. It is very confusing to people in this area. They don't understand working online. They don't understand decisions that we make.

Shane Sams: Or like thought leadership, and having a podcast, and some people don't even know what a podcast is.

Jocelyn Sams: A lot of people around here, it has never occurred to them to even think about doing something outside of their nine to five. It's just ingrained in them that this is what you do. You do this until retirement, and you ride off into the sunset, you know? Any alternative way of thinking is just something that people, a lot of people in this area, just do not understand.

Shane Sams: And shy away from, you know? People have pulled back away from us, because of the way we structure, I guess our business, our marriage, our life. You know, when we pulled our kids out of school, I got word that someone was like, "I can't believe they did that. Why would they do that? Are they too good for the school? Is the school not good enough for them?" This was someone I know personally, and is really somewhat close to me. So things like that happened this year, even in our business relationship, we had some friends really withdraw and pull back from us. It's like the bigger we got, the more successful we got, the more some people pulled back. We feel like people are constantly coming and going in our life now at a pace that's like not natural.

Shane Sams: You know, people come into our life. We're really good friends for a while, then they flare out and go away, or people come into our life, and we go different directions, and it's just it ends really fast. Normally that happens, like oh high school, college, business, and these relationship stay and were stable for a long time, but it's harder and harder to do that in our life now.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, and I think that we're just, we're having to learn a lot of things the hard way. It's just like we had to learn the hiring process the hard way. Now we're having to learn that sometimes people want to be friends with you because it benefits them in some way. I like to think that we're not that type of people, you know I mean ...

Shane Sams: There's reciprocity in all relationships. You're going to be friends with people who do benefit you, but ...

Jocelyn Sams: If that's the only reason your friends with them.

Shane Sams: Yeah some people want to use you for different reasons like that. You know, when someone hasn't called me in years, and all of a sudden they read an article about us in Forbes, and all of a sudden they're like, "Hey, love to take you out for dinner and catch up old friend." That really isn't, and a lot more of that's happened lately.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, we just have to, you know we just find ourselves being really overly cautious if someone wants to hang out with us, or whatever. We're like, "Okay well why? Do you really want to be friend with us, or are you trying to get information from us, or whatever?"

Shane Sams: We understand that some of that's a part of the deal. When you know something someone else doesn't know that's part of life. But it's just this year has probably, we've probably talked to and interacted physically, and virtually, with more people than every other year of our life combined. I would say that's probably true, wouldn't you? Just live events, online, everything. The size of our audience. Everything like that, but then at the same time, it's like our real relationships have shrunk. Our old relationships have faded away, and it's like it's become lonelier, and lonelier this year, which has probably compounded the problem of the tension that we've had trying to work together on everything. So now we really are all we've got in a lot of ways.

Shane Sams: Yeah, that's been tough. It's been a lonely year, but we've also developed more relationships with some people too, being closer with them than ever before, but they're not here. They're far away, so it's like hard to ...

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, no I mean we have combated that in some ways. Like we go on trips with people now, which is really fun. We've done some things like that. I think last year we did not really travel a lot, which is how we meet a lot of the friends that we have. We didn't do a lot of that last year because our kids ...

Shane Sams: Just so busy.

Jocelyn Sams: And our kids had a hard time what in 2017, so we kind of shied away from going away for too long in 2018. So I think some of that definitely plays into it, and I think that also people change. I mean I think people even not in this space have that happen too. People just drift apart, and come back together from time to time.

Shane Sams: It just happens so much faster now though, than it used to in our life. That's what got me is like I had to get used to this year, things will change every three months. Like everything in our life changes, it feels like, almost every quarter because we are in a fast paced business. We have so many of these things, moving parts, it's just that's what's hard to get used to from a mindset issue is that the more successful you get, the faster things are going to go, and you better be ready to deal with it. You know the loneliness stuff wasn't the only mindset stuff. We had a lot of old issue creep back up this year. One was uncertainty. You know, for four or five, about four years there we felt very certain in what we were doing, and then this year was just packed with uncertainty. Which is good, it pushes you forward, but it can cause some problems too.

Shane Sams: We had a lot of comparison, well I would say that, Jocelyn probably didn't. This was probably more on me, I really fell into comparison syndrome at the beginning of this year especially. Was I doing what all these other people I saw were doing? Was I as successful as someone else? Was the definition we had written for our success as good as someone else's success, and I think that led to a lot of friction and bad decisions on my part. Just a lot of doubt, like can we pull these big things that we're trying off? Is the next level out of our reach? We couldn't even imagine what the next level looked like before, and now we're getting a glimpse of what it could be. Is that even possible? Are we up to the challenge? Who are we? What is our, I don't know, what is the definition of what Shane and Jocelyn, and the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, and the Flip Your Life community is?

Shane Sams: We struggled with all these mindsets, and a little bit of imposter syndrome. Like who are we to be on stage for two straight days, right? And teach all these people, like all of those doubts that we thought we had put in our rear view mirror really creeped back in. It was just crazy how everything compounded, but you know what? Overall 2018 was a great year. Our business grew. We made some major decisions for our family. We watched the Flip Your Life community grow bigger than we ever could've dreamed possible, and you know it was just really good to think back about all the good things, the bad things, and just kind of absorb all of that so that we can get ready to do great things next year.

Shane Sams: That's really what we do when we reflect back on last year, is we prepare for next year. So 2019 we are expecting some great things, and that's what we're going to wrap this show up with is looking ahead a little bit to the future.

Jocelyn Sams: All right, I'm really looking forward to the upcoming year for several different reasons. One of the things that I am really looking forward to is exploring some new options for creativity. I mentioned earlier in the show that I've been, for lack of a better word, a little bit bored with what we're doing. Not because of anything to do with our members, or anything like that, it's just because we do the same thing a lot of the times every single day. I'm looking into doing some different things like learning about some other business models. I have considered learning about selling physical products. One of the things that we are really working on right now is investigating different types of work from home opportunities to share with our members. Those are anything from working as a service based business, and not necessarily becoming a business owner, or like creating a digital product.

Jocelyn Sams: We want to start to explore some of those types of opportunities to let people know that there are other things that you can do from home. I have also even considered doing some brick and mortar marketing, like looking into some of that. So those are just some of the things that we are considering for the upcoming year, and ultimately what that means for our members is that we are going to be looking at making some new courses, and some new materials. For some of you guys who maybe you've been listening to us for a long time, and you think you know that sounds really awesome, but I don't really want to start a website, or I don't know what to make as my digital product. Well these will be some opportunities for you if you are in that position, and you want to work from home but you're just not sure what to do, we're going to be looking at some other ways to help you.

Shane Sams: And another big focus that we've been talking about in the last couple weeks for our business, for our family, for everything is saying no a lot. We spent a lot of energy in a lot of unfruitful places last year. We chose to do a lot of different things that really didn't pan out, or really didn't you know they looked like great opportunities going into them, and we didn't want to say no to what we thought could be a great opportunity so we did them and nothing happened. So we're going to really pick and choose our opportunities a lot better this year. We're going to say no as much as possible. We're going to stop trying to do what other people who we perceive as "successful" are doing, and not chase so many shiny objects.

Shane Sams: Whether it's hiring new people. Whether it's going to speak at certain events. You know, we're not going to go out and pursue all these opportunities. All the opportunities that we have is right here in front of us, with our community, with our people. The more opportunity and success that we create for our members, the more opportunities for success that we're going to create for ourselves. So we're really going to say no to a lot of things this year, and just zero in and focus on the things that we really know work. We're going to take all of that energy we save by saying no to all these shiny objects, and we're really going to put it into our family. One of the things that we are going to do more of this year is we're going to travel with just us again.

Shane Sams: I think our kids are a little bit older. The last time we went on a big trip our daughter kind of had a freak out, and I think we're past that stage. I think we're over that now, so we already have a couple of trips just for us, me and Jocelyn, on the calendar. We're really going to focus more on getting back to each other, and focusing on each other. Not just in a business, not just in a life capacity, but as a married couple. That's really, really important to us to do that. We're going to take that extra energy from saying no to other things, and focus it on our kids. We're pulled our kids out of school now. We are home schooling, so really this is the year that we're going to learn that process. It's not going to be perfect.

Shane Sams: It doesn't have to be. We really don't know what it's going to look like by the end of 2019. We don't even know what it's going to look like at the beginning of 2019, but we're just going to take that energy and push it right back into our family, and figure that process out this year. One of my personal missions for 2019 is to stop looking at what everyone else is doing. You know we used to do this in the beginning. We used to not look at anybody else, we did our way, and the farther we've gone, and the more complicated, and the more complex our business has become, we started looking outward again, and I'm pretty sure that caused more confusion than it actually cleared up. So we're really focusing right now on what do we want everything to look like?

Shane Sams: What do we want to create? What do we want to make? What do we want our email list to see when they get our emails? What do we want our courses to look like? Everyone's telling us don't do this. Stick with digital products, that's what got you here. We're kind of like no, we want to do physical products. We want to do service based businesses. We want to do all of these other things, and we're going to kind of get back to doing it our way, and stop, I don't know, like almost asking permission from the people who are "more successful" than us to tell us how to do things, or what our things should look like. That's really what we want for you in 2019. We want you to stop looking to the world asking permission. We want you to stop worrying about what other people are doing, or if you can do something, or if you can't, and we want you to take action. We want you to go out there and make 2019 your best year ever.

Shane Sams: We want you to take charge of your life. To build the business that you want. It doesn't have to look like the business that Jocelyn and I created. It doesn't have to look like anybody else's business out there. You don't have to chase the gurus with their Lamborghini's, and the big people getting off their private jets. You just have to create the life that you want next year, so that you can give your family the future that you want them to have. So one of our goals is to expand the trainings in our communities. To help more people figure out what their work from home, flipped lifestyle looks like. We want to make our trainings, and our community more accessible to more people than ever before next year. We want more people to be able to take our courses, and take all of these new trainings that we're adding into the community, so that they can build the life that they want.

Shane Sams: We want more people in our community. More people talking in our community. More people asking questions, and connecting, and creating mastermind communities locally in the real world through the Flip Your Life forums. Just like we knew going into this year we were going to have to change some of our content. We knew we were going to have to change some of the things that we were doing in our marriage, and parenting, in our kids schooling, in our business, we know that means we're going to have to make some big changes in the Flip Your Life community to continue to grow. So in a few weeks, we are going to announce some big, big changes to how the Flip Your Life community and the Flip Your Life blueprint work. Those changes are going to impact every single person that hears this podcast. We're not finished with it yet.

Shane Sams: We don't know exactly what the end product is going to look like, but we know we are going to make some huge changes in the Flip Your Life community. They're going to make it more accessible, that are going to make it more affordable, and it's going to make starting your own business easier than ever before. We know there's a lot of reasons, a lot of hang ups, a lot of things in your past that are holding you back from going out there, from taking action and building the life that you want. Really chasing that flipped lifestyle. We know there's things that are holding you back from working from home, from taking control of your life, and from changing your family's future. We want to remove all of those obstacles from your path.

Shane Sams: The changes that we're going to make to the Flip Your Life community next year are going to give you the opportunity to do so. If you want it, it'll be there for you. If you don't want it, you'll find an excuse, but you're going to have no reason not to take advantage of everything that we have to offer inside the community next year. So you'll have to stay tuned for that because that is a subject for another podcast. We are going to wrap up this podcast right now. Jocelyn and I are packing right now because we are kicking off 2019 with a couples trip, without the kids, just us, and we are heading down to Florida for a week of sunshine and warmth so that we can relax a little bit and really enjoy the first week of 2019 together, and get our plans kicked off and going in the right direction.

Shane Sams: So we have to finish loading up our suitcases now. We've got a flight to catch tomorrow, and we will be back with you again next week for another episode of the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. We'll get back into our normal format where we're talking to a Flip Your Life community member and helping them take their online dreams to the next level. Stay tuned. We will be having more solo episodes like this next year, and we will be announcing all of the changes inside of the Flip Your Life community very, very soon, but until then we want you to kick off 2019 in the right way. Set a big goal. Dream a bold dream. Get out there and take action. Let's do whatever it takes this year to flip your life. We'll see you next time.

Jocelyn Sams: Bye.

Links and resources mentioned on today’s show:

Flip Your Life community 30-day trial
Flip Your Life LIVE 2019 Ticket Information & Sales

Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!

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In today's episode, S&J talk about 2018, the good, the bad, and the future.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jocelyn Sams: Hey, y'all. On today's podcast, we recap 2018, the good, the bad, and the future.

Shane Sams: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, where life always comes before work. We're your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. We're a real family that figured out how to make our entire living online. Now, we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? All right, let's get started.

Shane Sams: What's going on everybody? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast and happy new year on this January 1st edition of the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. Jocelyn and Shane here, all by ourselves today. We do not have a guest for this episode of the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. This is just a solo show with me and Jocelyn, and we wanted to recap 2018 and start looking toward 2019. We're going to talk about all the things that happened last year to us, the good, the bad, and then we're going to transition a little bit to talk about the future for the Flipped Lifestyle podcast and the Flip Your Life community.

Jocelyn Sams: We don't really have much of a plan for this podcast, to be perfectly honest. We just sort of opened up a Google Drive document and did a brain dump of all of our thoughts, so who knows what this is going to turn out like. It's just something we felt like kind of talking through and just sharing with you guys as we think back on the past 365 days and also to the future.

Shane Sams: The reason we're doing this is, one, we really want to stress the importance to everyone who listens to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast of reflection and looking back on what you did right, what you did wrong, and bringing that all together to make good decisions going forward in the future, and also to let you guys know that a lot of things do go good in our business, a lot of things go good for our family, but we've had a lot of bad things happen, too. Sometimes, we don't get the chance to really talk about that a lot on the podcast because it's so focused on helping the Flip Your Life community and all the people in it succeed. We don't get to really show you that part of our journey. If you follow us on social media, you do get to see a little bit of that, but we want to let you know that things are not always perfect for us. Jocelyn and I are just like you. We're normal people, we're married, we have kids, and we have all the stresses that go along with life, just like you do.

Shane Sams: We wanted to just share some of that and let you know that you're not alone when you struggle on this journey. Every day we get up, there are things that go good, there are things that go bad, and we have to react to all those things. We wanted to share some of that with you guys in this episode and let you know how that goes.

Shane Sams: All right. We decided to start with the good. We looked back and wrote down all of the highlights that happened over the last year, and there were quite a few of them. It's really important to latch onto those. Every Sunday, when Jocelyn and I journal together, we actually ... The first thing we do is write down 10 good things that happened in the week prior because we want to start off anything we're doing, planning with a good frame of mind, and to let ourselves know, "Hey, don't focus on the negative things." There are a lot of great things. There's usually more good things than bad things, so we wanted to start this podcast off that way.

Shane Sams: The most recent good thing that happened to us actually happened yesterday. Jocelyn and I were taking Anna Jo to cheerleading practice together. Isaac was staying at his grandparents' house, he was chilling out over there and didn't want to drive and sit in the car with us. We took the time to go grab something to eat, drop her off, do a little cheerleading, and hang out, and we got a message from a Flip Your Life community member. This is the first message of this type that I've actually gotten directly from a member. We kind of know some stories of some other people that have done some great things, but this was the first time a member had ever reached out to us and said, "Hey, guys. I just wanted to let you know that my husband and I have went over the million dollar mark in our online business since we joined the community."

Shane Sams: This was the first time a Flip Your Life community member had literally wrote us and said, "Thank you guys. You helped us make a million dollars." It was really overwhelming in the car. We couldn't even comprehend that. It's one thing for you to hear about somebody online making a million dollars, because we all ... If you were working, making $40,000 a year, it would take you dozens of years to actually get to the point where you actually had made a million dollars in your lifetime. Then, when you start an online business and you make a million dollars yourself, it blows your mind because it's just almost a number that you can't even comprehend until you see it actually happen. Then, for someone to write in and say, "You helped us make a million dollars," that's life-changing. We can't wait to see what the future brings.

Shane Sams: It was really just mind-blowing. We didn't even really know how to respond to it in the moment.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. The cool thing is that these people actually live kind of close to us, so we're actually going to go hang out with them and celebrate this, which is really cool. Yeah.

Shane Sams: If you ever make a million dollars, let us know. And contribute it to the Flip Your Life community, we might fly in and have lunch with you, but you're paying because you made a million dollars. I'm just saying. I'm not paying for that one.

Jocelyn Sams: Oh, goodness. Yes. That ... It was just so cool. I don't even really know what to say about that. I'm just kind of at a loss for words when I think about the impact that our community has had. It's just really cool.

Shane Sams: A million dollars is a lot of money, and it makes me think back a little bit, Jocelyn, to last year when we were selling one of our businesses. In 2017 ... What month was that? Was it August that we sold elementarylibrarian.com?

Jocelyn Sams: I think it was July, actually.

Shane Sams: It was July. In July of 2017, we sold elementarylibrarian.com. It was our first big business that really took off and was really successful. We did that. It was over a million dollar contract. I remember thinking about that number, that million dollar number. Here it was. In one day, you sign a contract and someone deposits a ton of money in your account. The reason we did that wasn't just to make the money. That business was very passive. It made a ton of money. We could have just kept it and kept it going. The reason we sold that was because we wanted to go all in on Flipped Lifestyle, all in, changing people's lives, helping other families do what we did, replace your income, quit your job, work from home, have the freedom to make choices in your life.

Shane Sams: When someone writes you in and says, "Hey, I started my business," or, "Hey, I quit my job," or when they write us in and they say something crazy like, "Guys, you helped us get to a million dollars. You helped us experience a million dollar moment, and you helped us not just change our future or our family's future, but make a generational change. We're going to be able to go out and build something that might leave an inheritance to our children's children." That's really overwhelming, and it's also really fulfilling for us to know that we made the right decision.

Shane Sams: When we sold this passive income cash cow that was kind of our safety net for a while and really made us feel comfortable about what we were doing, but we said, "No, we're going all in on Flipped Lifestyle," and a year and a half later, someone writes you in and says, "We just went over the million dollar mark," it's just really inspiring, and it really keeps us motivated and pumped up to keep going and keep helping more people. We may not help everybody get to a million dollars, but if we could help everybody start something that would give them margin in their life, make their life easier, then going all in for Flipped Lifestyle was really, really worth it.

Shane Sams: Also, on a personal note, one of the things that Jocelyn and I discussed was would we even be able to replace the income from elementarylibrarian.com if we sold it. It's really hard to build one business to six figures or seven figures or to sustain you and your family and be able to create an income. Could we do it again and again and again, and especially could we do it with Flipped Lifestyle because there's so much competition, there's so many gurus out there that are just dominating the landscape and spending all this ad money and doing all these things. A year and a half after we basically went all in on Flipped Lifestyle, we've tripled revenue, almost 2,000 people have joined the Flip Your Life community, and it looks like there might be no end in sight to how far we can take this thing and how big we can make this brand and how many people we can actually impact.

Shane Sams: We're seeing so many more people join from all over the world. We just recorded a podcast this morning with a Flip Your Life community member in Saudi Arabia. To even think about that a year and a half ago or two years ago or five years ago is just absolutely mind-blowing. It was really good to see, at the end of 2018, all those risks that we took in 2017 really started to pay off.

Jocelyn Sams: Another thing that we did in 2018 is we decided to host our first major live event. We did that just a few months ago. It was a little bit crazy. If you listen to our podcast about post live event, if you listen to that one, we had a lot of crazy things happen. We questioned it a lot. Was this the right decision? I think that, at the end of the day, we decided that we were really, really happy we did the live event.

Shane Sams: Yeah. It basically consumed our life from the day we decided to release it, which was ...

Jocelyn Sams: January, I think.

Shane Sams: Of 2018.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah.

Shane Sams: Yeah. In January, we announced it. We almost sold it out in the first week. That was really good that we actually sold out, because we were like, "We're going to announce this an 10 people are going to come and we're going to be on hook for all this stuff, these contracts that we were signing up for with hotels and venues and all this stuff.

Shane Sams: To see what happened at the live event, to see all the progress that the attendees made coming into the live event. We did these ice breaker sessions where we had 40 or 50 people who were coming to the live event on and we talked to every single one of them. We saw so many people launch products leading up to the live event, get their business, make their first sales. We had one member that changed her membership pricing model right before the event after a coaching call and she made $17,000 in recurring revenue in one thing. Then, after the event, seeing members take action. We had another member that's added 200 members at $39 a month in just two and a half months since the live event based on what the plan she made there.

Shane Sams: The live event was a catalyst moment for us to realize how important community is to everybody's journey. To see 100 people fly in from five countries, 30 different states, just to see us, because we were the only show. We did all eight sessions, we led the panels, we stayed up all night with everybody working at the work session on the first night to get their plans ready and helped as many people as we could get around to. Just to see that community really come together live is just a different feeling than in a forum setting or anything else. To see how close the Flip Your Life community is, and, really, it made us proud of the culture that we've really built in this brand and how we're bringing together family-focused entrepreneurs to a point where they would actually get on an airplane and fly to Nashville, Tennessee, not only just to see us but to see each other and to make progress in their business, was absolutely mind-blowing.

Jocelyn Sams: There are so many people, even after the event, who have gotten together. They're in masterminds together, they're working together, they're talking on Voxer, they're meeting once a week. Just to see all that and know that it came from something that we started, we knocked over the first domino and they've kind of taken care of the rest, it's just really cool to see. I've talked to so many people that are like, "Thank you so much for doing this event. I'm making progress in my business that I never would have made otherwise." That just made it all worth it. It was a lot of work and it was a lot of just, I guess ... I don't know if I want to say heartache, but just a lot of ...

Shane Sams: I think there was definitely some heartache involved in that because it was a rough deal.

Jocelyn Sams: It was a labor of love for sure. I think that, at the end of the day, we can say that we're really glad that we did that.

Shane Sams: What one ... I'm trying to speak at an event and one of the topics that I want to talk about is how online business can not only change your life and the individual's life but really communities. It can change world communities. Anywhere you are, if you have internet access, you can reach out and touch the whole world. I don't think people realize that. Flip Your Life Live was kind of the exclamation point on the end of our sentence that said, "Hey, this is real. You're two people in rural Appalachia, southeast Kentucky, where you have really slow internet, you don't have all the resources that some people have in California or on the coasts or in big cities. Basically, you can just get online. You can say something into a microphone, record it, and get it out there, and you can influence people all over the world. You can help people from anywhere. That's just never been possible before, and it is possible now.

Shane Sams: We kind of, after the live event, we realized how much of a ... What would you say, responsibility it is to actually do that, not just for us and the Flip Your Life community, but for you. You're listening to this, which means you're somewhere out there in the world with an internet connection where you could download this. If you could download this podcast, you could upload you're own, or you could upload your own course, or you could connect over Skype and be a virtual assistant, or you could download an audio file and transcribe it and make money and help make someone else's life easier. The live event, being in person and seeing how much influence we were having really made us realize this is the craziest time in human history. If you're not taking advantage of it, it's your fault. You've got to get out there and do something, and we've got to do more with the platform that we've built and the responsibility that we've been given.

Jocelyn Sams: Lots of people have asked us about the live event, will you be doing one in 2019, and we are going to do one in 2019, which is actually now. The dates for that, this is the first time we've announced that, is going to ... We will have a party on Thursday night, September 19th, and we will have content on Friday and Saturday, the 20th and 21st of September, 2019. Definitely go ahead and get that in your calendar if this is something you're interested in attending. We would love to have you there. We are making plans to have even more people being able to be in attendance this year and we cannot wait.

Shane Sams: We have chosen a city for the live event this year, as well. It is going to be in Lexington, Kentucky. We really wanted to bring this event to Kentucky. Kentucky is an amazing place, especially Lexington, Kentucky, to have events like this. It's within driving distance to millions of people, so, for those of you who can't make the flight, you can jump in your car and you can be there in just a few hours. They also have an amazing airport that you can fly right in. There's two other airports in the region, Louisville and the Northern Kentucky/Cincinnati Airport.

Shane Sams: It's a super easy city to get to. It is by far one of the most beautiful cities in the South, and it's kind of our second home. Lexington, Kentucky, is where Jocelyn and I met, so that's kind of where it all started, so we're taking it back to the place where all of this actually began. It'll be in Lexington, Kentucky, and it was the 19th through the 21st, is that what you said?

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah.

Shane Sams: It'll be the 19th through the 21st. We would love to have you guys there. All you have to do is go to flippedlifestyle.com/live, F-L-I-P-P-E-D lifestyle.com/live, L-I-V-E. Go to flippedlifestyle.com/live right now. There is a waiting list up as of today.

Jocelyn Sams: But, depending on when you're listening to this, it ...

Shane Sams: Tickets could be on sale.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah.

Shane Sams: Yeah.

Jocelyn Sams: Definitely grab one if you're interested in coming. There is a very big chance we could sell out again. We sold out last year very unexpectedly.

Shane Sams: The waiting list is bigger now already than it was when we launched last year. In our surveys, 85% of people, I think, said they are coming back, so those tickets will go fast. We are going to add a few more tickets this year. We don't know the exact numbers yet. We have to meet, I think this week, with the venue to find out the final totals that we can fit in the room. Then, we will be launching that very soon.

Shane Sams: Another big highlight for us this year was the 200th episode of our podcast.

Jocelyn Sams: 200.

Shane Sams: We have been doing this for a long time now, years and years. The podcast has been our primary means of building our audience, building traffic, growing our community. It's just really the heart and soul of every single thing that we do, is the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. To hit 200 episodes ... I read ... The other day, there was an article I was reading that was about podcasting. The vast majority, like 90% of all podcasts that have ever been released on iTunes, it said flame out between 20 and 30 episodes. 90% of podcasts that people launch flame out because they give up, they get tired of it, they get bored with it. It's called pod-fading is what it's called. The podcasts just kind of start and then they fade out.

Jocelyn Sams: I like how we just invent words now. What is that called, Urban Dictionary or whatever?

Shane Sams: Yeah. I didn't even know that word and we've been doing this ... How long have we been podcasting now, five years at least?

Jocelyn Sams: Four years? Five years?

Shane Sams: Six years?

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, I don't know.

Shane Sams: Well, we had our other podcast, we had our librarian.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, like five years.

Shane Sams: Yeah. We've been podcasting pretty much since podcasting got big and I had never heard this word until probably 48 hours ago. It was called pod-fading. To think that we made it this long and we make our full-time living podcasting now, basically, and we hit 200 episodes, and we're getting close to 300. We're getting very close to 300 now because we've started going to two podcasts a week. That was just a really proud moment for us, that we hung in there, we stuck it out, and the end is nowhere in sight. We're just going to keep going with this because podcasting is the best way that we can get our message out to as many people as possible.

Shane Sams: Also, to realize that so many people have found us, not only through our podcast but going into other people's podcast, telling our story. That's how one of our favorite members, Jeanette Stein, found us. We mention Jeanette a lot because she's such an inspiring person in her own right. We've seen what she's accomplished. She came into our community, she was making almost no money online, literally pennies, and I think within about three or four months of joining the community, she had built a membership community of her own and quit her job. She has an amazing story. It's awesome to see how just her finding our podcast changed her life.

Shane Sams: Then, we saw the ripple effect of what putting your message out there, making content, can actually do. Jeanette sent us a message this year. It was the picture of a little baby girl named Caitlin from the Philippines. We sent her a message back, we were like, "What is this?"

Jocelyn Sams: "Why are you sending us a picture of this baby? I don't know this baby."

Shane Sams: We're just ... "I don't know this baby. This is a random baby. Why are you sending this?" Then, she sends us a screenshot from a conversation that she was having with her virtual assistant who lived in the Philippines. Her assistants name was John and it said, "Ma'am Jeannette," because that's how anybody from another country always says mister or miss or sir or madame or ma'am before your name.

Shane Sams: They say, "Ma'am Jeanette. We just wanted to thank you for helping us bring baby Caitlin into the world. You see, before we met you, we couldn't afford health insurance. We had tried to have kids before and two of our babies died because we didn't have health insurance and we couldn't get them the medical care they needed. We couldn't get the medical care we needed. Because you hired us, we got health insurance and we were able to go to the hospital and baby Caitlin was able to be healthy and be born and come home with us. We just wanted to thank you for that."

Shane Sams: I'll never forget the message that Jeanette sent to us after she showed us this picture and she showed us the screen capture. She said, "You helped me so I could help them." That really brought it home to ... It's not just about the money, it's not just about the entrepreneurship, it's not just about growing the business. Those are all important things. We should think about those things, we should try to make more profits, we should try to grow revenue, but everything we do is kind of like throwing a pebble in the pond. When that ripple goes out and hits someone else, they get to pick up their pebble and throw it farther than you could ever throw it by yourself, and they get to hit somebody else with their ripple. It just keeps going and going and going.

Shane Sams: To think that two people from Kentucky started a business that helped someone else start a business that allowed them to hire someone else on the other side of the world that allowed a baby to be born is just really, really overwhelming. That was really one of my proudest moments in 2018, is just knowing that something like that could even happen if you just take action. If you just actually make the first move and you pick up your pebble and you throw it in the pond, the ripple can go out. Until you do that, nothing happens. It's just a reminder for us to keep taking action. We have no idea what good could be done in the future with our business unless we keep taking action, keep trying, keep doing all those other little things that grow the business to allow moments like that to happen. That was really just one of the highlights for us, is to learn that our podcast had done something like that.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. It was just ... It was very overwhelming. When I realized what she was trying to say after she sent me the picture and I'm like, "Okay, who is this? I'm a little bit confused," and she explains it all to me, those of you who know me personally know that I'm not much of a crier but I might have cried a little on that one. That was just a really cool and just unexpected thing that we just never could have anticipated when we started this podcast.

Shane Sams: With that being said, we hear all the stories in our Flip Your Life community, we get a lot of messages from you guys, we see all these messages all the time, but we know that there's a lot of stories out there that we haven't heard. We would love to hear your story, as well. If you have an amazing story from our podcast that you took action and you did something, we have people that write us all the time and say, "Just from listening to your podcast, I got my business started and I'm making my side hustle work and I've got money coming in and I'm getting ready to take it to the next level," or, "This amazing thing happened," like with baby Caitlin, "just from going through your thing."

Shane Sams: Those messages really drive us to keep going, to keep bringing you this kind of value and this kind of information every single week on our podcast. It's really the fuel for our fire. We would love to hear your story, so, if you have not told us your story, the best place for you to do that is over on iTunes. It's the easiest place for you to go in, you can tell us how the Flipped Lifestyle podcast is impacting you, your life, your business. All you gotta do is click "write a review," leave us that five star review, and tell us your story. Write in there a paragraph or two about how this podcast, this community, how me and Jocelyn or anybody in it has changed your life or is making your life aim in a different direction and how you're making progress toward your goals. We would love to hear those stories from you guys. All you have to do is go to iTunes and type in the Flipped Lifestyle podcast and you'll find us. Click on it and leave us a review.

Jocelyn Sams: I also learned something recently. You can tell Siri, if you're on an Apple product, "Siri, follow or subscribe to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast," and that will actually work. I didn't realize that until just recently.

Shane Sams: They can just click the button and say, "Siri, follow ..." What is that? "Siri, subscribe to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast."

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. Apparently that works. I don't know. I heard this on another podcast.

Jocelyn Sams: One thing I wanted to say about podcasting while we're on the subject is that I've been listening to a lot of podcasts lately. It's something that I really didn't do for a long time, but I've kind of gotten into it recently. We are one of the few podcasts ... I don't know that I've heard a single other one that is not supported by ads or by something. We bring this content to you guys two times a week with no ad support. We are just doing this ...

Shane Sams: We don't even do affiliate launches, nothing. We are ... You support us, not only with your encouragement but, in the Flip Your Life community, we are 100% dedicated to you. It's crazy.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. I think it's kind of crazy that we've made it this long, we've it 200 something episodes without doing sponsorships. We never say never. I'm not going to say that we are never going to do anything like that. I don't know what the future holds. What I'm trying to say is, if you can't join our community, if you don't have the money for it right now, we get it.

Shane Sams: We've been there.

Jocelyn Sams: The one thing that you can do, though, is go onto iTunes and leave us a review and let people know what this podcast means to you. Let us know what the podcast means to you. It just really helps us keep going in times that it's hard to keep going.

Shane Sams: Yeah. Tell other people about it. If you know other people that are into this kind of thing, let them know that we're here every week, twice a week, one on one helping real people change their lives and helping you change your life and helping you change your family's future, and we can help them, too. Whatever you can do, we'll keep coming to you guys. We really appreciate all those reviews, they really keep us going.

Jocelyn Sams: All right. That was kind of some of the business highlights of 2018 for us. We also had some personal highlights that we kind of wanted to go through. We are not typically very good at kind of patting ourselves on the back or really celebrating anything. We're just very ambitious people and we're always kind of looking to the next thing, but we wanted to look back and kind of pull out some good personal memories.

Jocelyn Sams: I would say first of all, for me, 2018 was a lot better than 2017 as far as my mental state. At the end of 2017, I had a really rough year. We sold the business and it's the business that I pretty much built from the ground up almost by myself. It was almost like a death. You kind of go through those phases of grief. It was really happy because it was a great website ...

Shane Sams: The business had lived a good life. It was like the celebration at the funeral. It was like ... Then it just went post depression, basically.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. I had to deal with some people along the way with the sale and they were a little bit difficult. It was just kind of a bad end of the year for me. I won't say bad but it was just a challenging end of the year.

Shane Sams: You underestimate it. I'm going to call you out a little bit here because Jocelyn was in such bad mental state after the sale, and really there was a really, really rough person to deal with. They were heart ... They were just not nice. Jocelyn usually avoids those people at all possible but she had to deal with this person in the company. Physical manifestations started coming. Jocelyn's neck and stuff got so stiff that she would have to ... It would almost twist her head to the side because the stress of the sale and dealing with that person and everything was so bad.

Jocelyn Sams: I went to chiropractors, I went to physical therapists, I went to get dry-needling, which is sort of like acupuncture.

Shane Sams: You got counseling.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, I went to a counselor. I did all of these different things to try to make this physical pain stop and, really, the only thing that helped me, honestly, was I started doing some meditation, which sounds a little crazy and something like I would never do, but that was the one thing that sort of got me out of this just terrible physical shape. I didn't really realize how much stress could manifest in physical problems but I really experienced that firsthand in 2017.

Jocelyn Sams: I'm just so thankful that I didn't have to deal with that quite to that extent in 2018, which was really, really awesome.

Shane Sams: Another great thing that we did probably for the first time in our entrepreneurial journey is we kind of crossed a line this year where we felt like we had surrounded ourselves with really good people. They always say you are the average of the five people you talk to and hang out with the most. It took us four or five years to really network and meet and find the right group of people that we could surround ourselves with where we knew they were all going forward. They were not perfect people, they made mistakes, they weren't the top achievers financially or whatever, but it was like they were all dedicated to moving their business, their marriage, their kids forward in a really good way, spiritually, mentally, financially, everything.

Shane Sams: I fell in with a group of guys who I really talk to almost every single day now. We take a trip every year together, go out on his houseboat. I'm just really thankful that God kind of put these men in my path and helped me see other high achievers, but also see that their life wasn't perfect, and to be transparent enough with each other to be like, "Gosh, man. Today was a rough day with the kids," or, "Not getting along with the old wife over here sometimes," which happens sometimes.

Jocelyn Sams: What?

Shane Sams: Just to talk about real things with real people and know you're not alone, and to be able to actually trust a group of people in that way, too.

Shane Sams: Jocelyn kind of fell in with a group of ladies, too, doing the same thing. They take a trip every year, as well. I think you have a trip in March, don't you?

Jocelyn Sams: Yes. I went in March of 2018 to Cancun with a group of ladies. It's something that I had envisioned a while back, actually back in 2016, 2017. I tried to get a group together. It just didn't work out at that time. I happened to go to a conference in late 2017 last year and I met a couple of people there and we just sort of started talking. It turns out that one of them had the same idea, so me being the action-taker that I am, I talked to my travel agent. I'm like, "Look, I need you to help me get this trip together. Let's make this happen," and we did. I meet up with two ladies from Texas, one from Oregon, and one from Kansas. We all got together in Cancun last year, and then we are getting together again this year, which is really, really cool.

Jocelyn Sams: In 2018, we spent several days on the beach. We went to an all-inclusive. We did every mom's dream, which is to lay on the beach and chat with other ladies while people bring you food and drinks on the beach.

Shane Sams: And your awesome husband was back home with the kids.

Jocelyn Sams: Yes.

Jocelyn Sams: There's no one saying, "Mom, I need this," or, "Mom, take me here," or, "Where's my whatever?" Those words were not said during that time, which was so amazing. We went to the spa, we spent time on the beach, we laid in the pool. We pretty much did nothing on a beautiful Cancun, Mexico, beach and I cannot wait to do it again in about 90 days.

Shane Sams: 2018, other than those trips we took with our mastermind groups, was really a good year for us relaxing and entertainment-wise. We got to take the trip of a lifetime to Jamaica. We took the kids to Jamaica after our live event to really just take a week to unwind. We got to go with one of our dear friends, Kat, who many of you know from the Flip Your Life community, and her husband AJ. They had their little baby there. Our kids got to play with their little baby on the beach. We swam with dolphins and we went to this amazing school in Jamaica with all these little kids to let our kids kind of see a school in another country. We just really won a trip that would have never, ever, ever been possible without our online business. If we had been in our old life and our old jobs, making the money we were making, we probably could save up for that trip over a 10-year period.

Shane Sams: That was amazing. We got to take a lot of awesome trips to all of our kids' activities. Isaac plays basketball on a travel team and Anna does travel cheer, so got to see a lot of cool places through that. We bought a new car, only our second car ever.

Jocelyn Sams: Our second new car ever.

Shane Sams: New car ever.

Jocelyn Sams: Brand new.

Shane Sams: Right. By far one of the craziest purchases we've ever made but we've drove that around, we've wrecked it once, got it fixed. Still driving that. Got a lot of cool travel going on. Right now today, while you're listening to this, we are going to be at the University of Kentucky football bowl game versus Penn State, which is our first New Year's Day bowl game in 20 years. We're huge Kentucky fans. This is actually the best football season of my lifetime and I am a longtime Kentucky faithful football fan, so it's pretty amazing what we're doing today.

Shane Sams: Just had some amazing experiences. We bought jet skis for our lake. We have a little private lake behind our house. I don't know if there was a day this summer we didn't get on those jet skis and pull the kids on the tubes.

Jocelyn Sams: We had people over constantly.

Shane Sams: All the time.

Jocelyn Sams: This was party central this summer.

Shane Sams: We really didn't get to enjoy our house last year because ...

Jocelyn Sams: We were building decks.

Shane Sams: We were building decks and docks. It was a construction zone.

Shane Sams: We just really got to actually enjoy life, maybe kind of for the first time since we actually quit our jobs. We've done a lot of cool things, don't get me wrong, but this was kind of the first year we felt totally in control of everything.

Jocelyn Sams: Nothing was being decorated. The house was finished being decorated, the construction was finished, everything was finished and we were actually able to live in our house, which was a really nice feeling.

Shane Sams: It was like the spoils of the last five years. We've worked so hard to build this new life for ourselves. It finally hit. That kind of touches back on it takes a long time to be an overnight success, but then it even takes a long time to enjoy the success that you've earned. It took us 13 months to really get to a point where we could even think about the decision to quit our jobs. It took probably another year almost from that before we really felt secure, not stressed about the whole thing was going to collapse. Then, it took us probably another two years to wrap our brain around what was possible, because what we do now is ... I don't even think I could get in a time machine and go back and explain it to myself five years ago, where we've ended up at.

Shane Sams: When you're on this journey and you're looking to the future and you've got these big goals, be ready. Everything is a learning experience. It's like they always say those ... When someone wins the lottery, they spend all their money in a month and they end up right back where they were. You have to wrap your brain around what's possible and wrap your brain around what you've accomplished, and wrap your brain around how to even enjoy it, and then you finally get to a point where you can settle in and say, "This is the new normal." We kind of reached that point in 2018, so that was pretty cool.

Jocelyn Sams: One thing I wanted to throw in was an exercise goal that I set for myself. I know this is kind of random, but ...

Shane Sams: Jocelyn actually kept a New Year's resolution, y'all. This is amazing.

Jocelyn Sams: I did. I normally don't do New Year's resolutions, I'm just not that kind of person, but I was kind of really frustrated with myself in 2017 because I didn't really work out the way that I would like to work out. We were really sick. Shane and I got very sick in the end of 2017 last year. We had the flu. I then got a ...

Shane Sams: I had pneumonia.

Jocelyn Sams: I got a sinus infection. It was just yucky for a whole month. I go back on my Apple Watch, I have an Apple Watch and I'm obsessed with the activity app. I go back and look at last year and I'm just like, "Oh, my goodness," because I think I worked out maybe three or four days in all of November and December last year. At the end of the year, I was just really, really frustrated with myself and I was like, "You know what? I'm going to set a crazy goal. I'm going to say that I'm going to work out 300 out of 365 days in 2018."

Jocelyn Sams: I really didn't realize what a crazy goal it was until I went back and counted my days for 2017. I'm embarrassed to say that, in 2017, I worked out just over 100 days. In 2018, I decided, "Okay, I'm going to work out 300 out of 365," which, when you think about it, there are probably some of you guys listening being like, "Oh, gosh, that's such a lame goal. I can easily do that." For me, that was a huge stretch. That's three times what I did in 2017. Most people would look at it and say, "There's no way this can be done," but I'm happy to say that I did it. Not only did I do it, I beat the goal. I said I was going to work out 300 days. I ended up working out 305 or 306 days.

Shane Sams: Wow.

Jocelyn Sams: I define working out by the activity ring on my Apple Watch. If you don't have an Apple Watch and you want to be more, I guess ...

Shane Sams: Aware.

Jocelyn Sams: Aware of your physical activity, it is a great way to do it. It really, really motivates me.

Shane Sams: Especially when you tag it with your friends and they can ... They finish their workout and it sends you a notification and you're like, "Curses. I was going to take today off but now I can't because someone just did her work."

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. We share activity with several different people and, yeah, it's very, very motivating. I just wanted to throw that out there, that, if you're thinking about doing something, whether it's starting a business, whether it's working out more, whether it is spending more time with your family, whatever it is, set yourself a big goal and don't be afraid of it. I could have just said, "Oh, well, I'll work out 150 days." Well, yeah, that would have been easy. I decided to make it something really challenging, and there were days during this year that I really didn't want to work out, but I was ...

Shane Sams: There were also days when you had one minute to go on your activity and Jocelyn would come running through the living room and she would do laps around the bar in the kitchen, and then she would just stop and start doing jumping jacks and the dogs would freak out because they thought it was playtime. I'm like, "What are you doing?" She goes, "I got 30 more seconds. It's 9:00 p.m." and she would knock it out.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. I did some crazy stuff this year but, overall, it was really good.

Jocelyn Sams: Another thing that I did, on a personal note, is I really started trying to watch my eating in April of 2018. We started doing a ketogenic diet in April. We did really well on that through about July, and things got a little bit stressful, which we are going to talk about much more later, but I had ... I'd say I probably had about six months of pretty good healthy eating and about six months of not.

Shane Sams: That wasn't your goal. The goal was fitness last year. Now you can focus totally on nutrition.

Jocelyn Sams: Yes. During that time, though, I was really proud to say that I did lose 17 pounds. I have not maintained that. We'll talk about that more later. I did lose 17 pounds, which was really awesome.

Shane Sams: Which shows it's possible.

Jocelyn Sams: That was one of the goals that I had. I just want to encourage you, if you're listening to this, set yourself big goals. Don't be afraid of it. Worse case, if you don't work out 300 days, well, what if you worked out 250 days? That's still better than 100 that I did in 2017. Set yourself a big goal and don't be afraid of it.

Shane Sams: The last of the good things that we're really going to talk about today is homeschool. Jocelyn and I probably started having this conversation maybe at the end of 2017, early 2018. What would our life look like if we homeschooled? Jocelyn and I have kind of freed ourselves from the world, from the system. We make our own living, we don't work for anybody else, we have all this time freedom.

Jocelyn Sams: It felt really good until you start thinking about how our life is pretty much still dictated by a school schedule.

Shane Sams: Yeah.

Jocelyn Sams: We're not teachers anymore but we still have to ...

Shane Sams: We still had to get up at 6:30, gotta get the kids to school.

Jocelyn Sams: Yes.

Shane Sams: Gotta get them out at 3:00, gotta pick them up from the bus. We started feeling really oppressed by this schedule. We also started seeing changes in our kids that we didn't like. Being oppressed by that school ... Isaac would actually come to us and say, "School feels like jail. You're not allowed to go anywhere until they tell you you can. There was a bell that rings. You get to eat at certain times. There was just no freedom." Also, too, God love the teachers in this country but it's just really hard to keep 30 people on pace. They're teaching 30 something kids a day, they teach something once, they give a quiz, the kid gets a 50 or a 60, and they move on without them.

Shane Sams: We really just felt like our kids weren't getting what they needed in school. We ... Our personal life and our professional life, even, when we podcasted, when we did anything was totally dictated by the school schedule. Our afternoons were very low quality with our kids. They would come home exhausted. It was a fight to make them do even more homework, even though they had already been at school eight hours a day.

Jocelyn Sams: We had to do nightly reading. I was always fussing with them, "Have you done your nightly reading? Have you done your math? Have you studied your spelling?"

Shane Sams: All these expectations. These expectations from someone else were just invading the personal time that we had with our kids. Night times were becoming a nightmare because, as our kids have gotten older, they've gotten into more activities, and as older kids' activities happen later. Anna Jo's cheerleading schedule ended up being at 7:00 at night this year. It's 30 minutes away in another town, so she was getting home at 9:30, wasn't going to sleep until 10:00, waking up at 6:00 the next day. It was just this endless cycle of our kids being tired.

Shane Sams: I remember looking at Isaac one day and he had deep, sunken-in, tired eyes, dark, dark bags under his eyes from this sleeping schedule, from all this madness, from the stress and all the expectations of school. He was starting to feel really bad about himself and we just had to do something different.

Shane Sams: As you heard last week on the podcast, we reached out to some experts, we talked a lot about homeschool and if it would be right for us, and, really, should entrepreneurs homeschool, what were we going to do, when would we work, when would we teach them, who would teach them, how would me and Jocelyn balance that and our relationship and everything else, because we were used to having all this time free in the mornings. We decided to pull the trigger.

Jocelyn Sams: After a lot of back and forth, we had considered it many times before, we backed out for a variety of reasons, and, finally, we just decided, "Let's give it a shot." Worst case, we go back to what we're doing now.

Shane Sams: It was crazy because you wouldn't think ... You would think two people who were schoolteachers who had total time freedom would have the easiest day of homeschool ever, but it was really hard. We didn't know exactly what curriculum we were using, we had differences in opinions on how we were going to structure the day. The first day of homeschool went really well. The first two or three hours, the kids did their work. They sat there with me while I worked on some stuff. I helped them with some things.

Shane Sams: Then, we had this disaster strike. My mom fell at her house and broke her back. We've talked a little bit about this on the podcast before. Right in the middle of the first day of homeschool, we get this call that my mom is laying on the floor paralyzed. I leave, I go with my brother, we find my mom, we call 911, we get her to the hospital, we had to take her to another hospital an hour and a half away. I end up staying in another town for four straight days with my brother and my dad and my mom as she's having surgery, all while we're in our first week of homeschool.

Shane Sams: Kind of looking back now, it was probably the best thing that ever happened because one night, Isaac came with me to stay with my mom overnight in the hospital. What an amazing experience that was for him. We didn't have to worry about going to school the extra day. It was kind of one more thing off of our plate. Even though it's hard, even though it's a challenge, even though we are nowhere near figuring it out, it's been a really good thing so far, and I can see how it can be a good thing in the future. Does that mean our kids will never go back to school? I don't know. They may want to when they get to middle school or high school.

Shane Sams: It was just really cool to find the courage to do that because we were scared. Don't you think you were scared to do it a little bit?

Jocelyn Sams: I'm still scared now.

Shane Sams: Yeah. I know, right? It was terrifying a little bit. We wanted to do it but it was almost like quitting our job. That's the only thing I can even compare it to, is I don't know if it's the right thing but the only way we'll know is to try. We may fail miserably. Actually, quitting our job might have been easier, because, if we failed miserably then, we could just go back to work. If we do this for five years and we screw up our kids, they're pretty much behind forever. That's kind of terrifying to say out loud. It's not really true, but that's the only thing I can really compare it to.

Shane Sams: We will finish up the good stuff with we are homeschooling now. We're going to travel a lot more with the kids, we're going to do a lot more with the kids, we're going to spend even more time with our kids coming up here in 2019. We're really excited to where that part of our journey takes us.

Shane Sams: We are going to tell you more about 2018. Coming up next, we're going to talk about all the bad things that happened. We're going to get into a bunch of mistakes that we made that we really want you guys to hear, like hiring and firing employees, building your team. We had a massive amount of turnover this year and we made a lot of mistakes in the hiring process that we want to share with you guys. We want to be really super transparent and clear about our relationship. Jocelyn and I had our moments, let's say. Jocelyn always says ... What is it you always say?

Jocelyn Sams: Usually, we bring out the best, and occasionally the worst. I think that might have been opposite in 2018.

Shane Sams: I think it might have ... Yeah. I think usually we brought out the worst in each other but occasionally we brought out the best and it was really good. We're going to talk about some marital strife in the Flipped Lifestyle headquarters, Sams household this year, but all good things that made us grow, and some of the things aren't even resolved. Just that struggle that we all go through and working together and what that kind of looked like.

Jocelyn Sams: People ask about that all the time so that one should be really interesting for people.

Shane Sams: Yeah. We're going to get into more detail than we've ever gotten in that.

Shane Sams: We're going to talk about some severe loneliness that Jocelyn and I both felt this year. We've really reached a new level of let's say notoriety in our business. We lost some relationships this year and we wanted to talk about how there is a price for success. There always is a price that you have to pay and it's not all sunshine and rainbows. We want to get into that a little bit. Talk about some mindset struggles, everything from doubt in our own abilities to boredom, and also just some different things that kind of went wrong in the business and in our life in 2018.

Shane Sams: We also want to talk about the future. Jocelyn and I have huge, huge plans, not only for ourselves in this upcoming year but for you. One of our main missions in life is to make sure as many families as possible have the opportunity to start an online business, to start a side business, to work from home, to change your life and your family's future. That is a passion for us. It's almost like our mission in life is to be able to do that, to get our message out there to as many people as possible and make it accessible. You go out there and you see all these people selling $10,000 courses and all that. Every day, we say, "How can we make this more accessible and more affordable to more families?" We've got some huge announcements that we're going to make about Flipped Lifestyle and the Flip Your Life community.

Shane Sams: We are going to do that on Friday. We're going to cut this one off. We're already 50 minutes into this part of the podcast, so we will continue this discussion, our 2018 review and a look into the future, 2019, on Friday. Make sure you tune in to the podcast for the rest of that.

Shane Sams: Don't forget to head over to flippedlifestyle.com/live and get on the waiting list or check out all the information about our live event for next year. We're going to have a lot more about that coming up in the next couple weeks so make sure you get the preview. Tell us your story. Leave us a review over on iTunes. We want to hear how the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, how our message of hope and freedom, and how our community online has impacted you in the last year. How did our podcast inspire you, motivate you to even think about or dream about it in your car on the way to work, a different future for your family? Go leave us a review over on iTunes. Tell Siri subscribe to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, then click over and leave us a review.

Shane Sams: We will continue this discussion, which should get very, very interesting, on Friday. Until then, get out there and do whatever it takes. Take action, Flip your life.

Jocelyn Sams: Bye.

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Hey Y’all, welcome to another Flipped Lifestyle Podcast Q&A w/ S&J!

In the Flip Your Life Community, we hold a members-only Q&A twice a month where we answer online business questions of our members live on air!

This podcast episode features some of the highlights of these recent live member Q&As to give you a glimpse of how we help the members of our community, and help you as well in online business by listening in.

Today’s Q&A highlights answer the following questions: Question One:

"Should I launch my course without finishing up my email sequence? I already have an audience that gave me the course idea and content. I just haven't done the autoresponder side."

Question Two:

"What if you launch and can't get your next month's content out in time or decide to pivot to something else?"

Question Three:

"I'm selling my courses a la carte, but I'm wondering if I should quit that and only do the membership?"

Question Four:

"Can you please give us a quick rundown on how you go about planning your video courses? And how long does it take you to research and prepare your outline per video?"

Success stories mentioned on today's podcast: "I just got my first paying member! I got the notice as I was feeding my baby, and I'm so glad I didn't drop him when I read the message!" - Rocio

"I have 232 people who have registered for my webinar! I call that a success. As I wondered what topic to pick for awhile, Shane told me to just do it. I think his exact words were something like, "if you can't make a home run just try to get a base hit." So, I picked something I thought my people would like and took action. Take action people, stop analyzing and just do something." - Janet

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In today's episode, we discuss, should entrepreneurs homeschool their kids?

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jocelyn: Hey, y'all. On today's podcast we discuss, should entrepreneurs homeschool their kids?

Shane: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, where life always comes before work. We're your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. We're a real family that figured out how to make our entire living online. Now we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? All right. Let's get started.

Shane: What's going on, everybody? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. It is great to be back with you again today. And we have a very special episode of the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. For those of you who've been listening to our podcast for a long time, you know that normally we do not have expert guests on the show. It's usually a member of the Flip Your Life community who comes on the show, gets a consulting call. We do that on air and we share it with everybody so that you can benefit from the conversation. Actually, the only other guest who's ever been on the Flipped Lifestyle podcast is Pat Flynn, from the Smart Passive Income podcast.

Shane: And this one came out of nowhere. Jocelyn sent me a message the other day because we have been discussing whether or not we were going to take our kids out of public school and homeschool them next semester.

Jocelyn: We've been discussing it for a year.

Shane: Yeah, we've been discussing it off and on forever, and the other day a friend of ours sent us this book. What's it called, Jocelyn?

Jocelyn: So it's called The 5-Hour School Week. A friend of mine just kind of randomly sent it to me and said, "Hey, you might be interested in checking this out," because she knew that this is something we've sort of been tossing around for a while.

Jocelyn: So, you know, I downloaded it, being a former librarian. I had to jump online and get that thing.

Shane: And Jocelyn devoured it and read it in like 30 minutes or something like that because she can read way faster than us.

Jocelyn: A little longer than that.

Shane: We decided that this was actually a really big issue, not only for us, but for other entrepreneurs out there because as we built the Flipped Lifestyle and we define the Flipped Lifestyle, and we teach other people how to flip their life, a big part of that is freedom, especially time freedom and control of your schedule. That has been a really big problem with us over the last couple of years as entrepreneurs, people who work at home and have total control of our life, it's really been difficult to send our kids to school, where they're in this structured environment and they're sitting in rows and they're on the bell schedule like a factory.

Shane: Then also, having to work our schedule around getting up so early to go to school or even if we want to take a trip, wrestling with do we pull our kids out? Do they get behind? Do we have to ask permission to even do that? As we've talked to other entrepreneurs, we realized, especially with people that already work at home or want to work at home, that this is a major problem.

Shane: So we reached out to the authors of this book and asked them if they would come on to the show. not only to discuss homeschooling, discuss entrepreneurship and how that all fits together, but also to answer some questions from entrepreneurs in the Flip You Life community and that's what we're going to do on the podcast today, is we're really going to wrestle with this question. Should entrepreneurs homeschool their kid, and if they do, how does that work? What does that look like? That's a really scary proposition.

Shane: So without further ado, let's stop talking. Let's invite, let's welcome our guests to the podcast today, and I'm actually just going to say your first names.

Jocelyn: We'll let you guys say your last name, okay?

Kaleena: Sounds good.

Shane: And I am good at butchering names and I want you guys to say this. So we have Aaron and Kaleena.

Kaleena: Amuchastegui.

Shane: What is it? Say it again?

Kaleena: Amuchastegui.

Shane: All right. We have Aaron and Kaleena-

Kaleena: Amuchastegui.

Shane: Amuchastegui. Okay. Welcome to the show, guys.

Aaron: Awesome. Thanks so much for inviting us to come on. You know, from you guys getting to talk about what you do and we're really excited to be able to share with you and your community. We're entrepreneurs as well, and we had to do some crazy flips in our life too, so we're super-excited.

Kaleena: Yeah, super excited.

Shane: I do want to stress that we are not affiliates, we're not getting any benefit for this, you know, financially.

Jocelyn: We've met them for the first time, like a few minutes ago.

Shane: Yeah, exactly. So we are literally here just to help entrepreneurs in their journey and to help people who are really struggling with this question about homeschooling. So if you could, you mentioned you were entrepreneurs, tell us a little bit about your background as an entrepreneur and then maybe you could go into that decision-making process that led you guys down this homeschool route.

Kaleena: Yeah, absolutely.

Aaron: Sure. We've been entrepreneurs for almost 10 years now. So originally we were full-time workers. I worked for a residential home builder. Kaleena worked for various offices, different things like that. Back in 2009, that was kind of that first moment of quitting our jobs to become entrepreneurs. Part of that was what everybody wants to try for, is trying to get more freedom, more life, more things like that, but our first couple of years of that was we thought that we were going to get a lot of our time back, but our first few years of entrepreneurship was just really, really long hard hours.

Aaron: The businesses that we had chosen, there was 50 and 60 hour weeks and we were buying and selling and flipping houses and doing construction. Kaleena ran a big real estate brokerage. It was a really good experience for us, so we started, after a lot of hard work, we got the money and the finances that entrepreneurship was supposed to bring, but we hadn't quite figured out that freedom part yet because we were working and working a ton.

Aaron: Then several years ago, we kind of had those years where there's nannies raising our kids, working way too much around the clock, and just kind of came to these, this kind of different experience where we started to, as entrepreneurs, that way working too much. Our marriage wasn't really going very good, we had nannies raising our kids, they were going off to school and we were really, really unhappy. Then we had kind of some really come to moments. We started adjusting that, changing that business, had to get recycled and back in 2013 Kaleena said, to kind of take a different angle.

Kaleena: Right.

Shane: You mean when you made it financially, everything didn't work out perfectly?

Kaleena: Yes. Exactly.

Shane: Come on, that's what everybody thinks, though, right? Once you get that.

Aaron: It's so heartbreaking, though.

Kaleena: It's super heartbreaking.

Aaron: Like when you finally make it to what you think you're supposed to get to and you're still like, "Wait, we're still miserable." That's a sad, sad moment, really.

Kaleena: Yeah.

Shane: You know what though? That's a part of everyone's journey that we talked to that's made it is ... I think we were actually kind of fortunate in this regard in our journey because Jocelyn used to work in corporate, like the ladder. I mean, you're climbing to the top and you kind of get to a point and you realize, "Wait a minute, you mean if I get the promotion I'm still not happy?" and I did college football coaching and football coaching and things like that. So we kind of had these 70 hour work week experiences before we became entrepreneurs, and I think that kind of tempered how we walked into entrepreneurship. Now, granted, we had the 70 hours weeks when we were working full time, raising kids, trying to build a side business, right?

Kaleena: Yep.

Shane: But you do realize on the other side of that that it's not just the money. The money can create some opportunity, but it's the time. That's really what you got to get back or everything kind of falls apart.

Jocelyn: Yeah, and it's just like part of the whole value. You realize that money is important, but time is even that much more important.

Kaleena: That's true.

Jocelyn: So it's kind of crazy. It's like a journey. You have to go through the journey to get there to understand that, I think.

Shane: So as you're doing this with nannies raising your kids and things like that and you have this come to Jesus moment, like, "Oh my gosh, this is not what we want."

Kaleena: Yeah.

Shane: How old were your kids in 2013 when that kind of happened?

Kaleena: So we have four children all together and I had three girls that were three and under. So I had a three-year-old, a one-year-old, and a newborn and when things really kind of hit the head, we had just had our third baby. She was maybe like a year, year-and-a-half old. Really, we just kind of self-imploded. Our marriage was failing. We were both making six figure incomes, but we were miserable, like I've never been so discontent in my entire life.

Kaleena: So it's just those moments that bring you to your knees that you're like, "Okay, we've got to change some stuff." So Aaron went on this mission in growth, like a growth mindset kind of mission, where he started reading Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod. He read the 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss. Aaron went on this new mission and I started really scaling back my work. I started hiring people, which we hadn't done. I'd been carrying like 30 to 40 transactions at a time completely by myself.

Kaleena: So we started outsourcing some of that work and getting rid of the nannies, and me stepping back into the role that I knew was going to make me happier. So that happened over the course ... I mean, it took a lot of work. I don't want this to sound easy. It took time. Like we were probably a full year in to some serious, serious life changes and business changes when we had this epiphany that things weren't ... We weren't being taken to the level we wanted to be taken to because we couldn't get our kids there with us.

Shane: Love that.

Aaron: Yeah you know, when we made that first shift to go from 70 hour work weeks to trying to live a four hour work week lifestyle, we made those big changes over that six months to a year, and it really started working. We really started to find where I could travel for work and do things that we could no longer do in California, and then I had a chance to open up - I was doing all these deals again in Texas so I talked to Kaleena and I said, "Hey I need you to open up a brokerage account." Like hey, we've got our family back, we've got our lifestyle back, but now I'm paying 30,000 a month in commissions to other people, I need to go open up a brokerage account.

Aaron: And luckily she was super smart and just said, "You know what, we're not gonna work together now. I'm not gonna choose to go back to that lifestyle, we'll make up the money some other way. But I want to raise our kids."

Aaron: At that time we weren't homeschooling yet, it was just as entrepreneurs the best lifestyle for us was for me to be running a business and for her to be able to focus on the family. But still at that time she was taking the kids to school and going through that process.

Kaleena: Right, and essentially what you were talking about, that 70 hour week but with my kids in school.

Shane: That's amazing, and for us we've kind of come to a point about the school discussion. When we quit our jobs, we went into it working together. But we've kind of set some limits in that place, we were working like, during the kids' school hours. So, we'd take the kids to school, we would work from - I don't know. We'd come home, we'd go to the gym, we'd come home, we'd work 10 to 2:30, and then go pick the kids up.

Shane: But then we started asking ourselves, is that really what we want for our family? Do we want to drop the kids off and not see them all day? Do we want to have no say in their education? And we realized, I think in the last year, we traded our freedom back to society. Because we are just locked into this school schedule and school cycle now, and it really came to a head this summer when we had to write an essay to get permission to miss a week of school to take our kids to Jamaica.

Shane: And I'm sitting here like, what's a better experience? Getting on an airplane and flying to another culture, or sitting in a classroom? And why am I having to write a five paragraph essay to get permission from anybody? We have total control over our lives. We control our finances, we control our schedule, we control everything. What have we done that we've given all our freedom away again?

Jocelyn: If that wasn't bad enough, then my son missed a week of school, which was excused by the way because we got it excused from the school, but then he misses a week of school and he gets a little bit behind. And one of the teachers has the nerve to say to him, "Well if you weren't spending so much time in Jamaica, then maybe you would've learned this material."

Jocelyn: And I'm like, "What?"

Kaleena: Ugh.

Shane: Like that is not an either or, you know what I'm saying? Like, life is not either or, even though society wants us to think that way.

Kaleena: Right.

Shane: Why couldn't we do that and then get caught up and then do something else, or if we had -

Jocelyn: Or why wasn't that considered a valuable learning experience that you went to another country, and experienced things that most of these kids in this school may never experience in their lifetime? Why is that not...

Shane: And you could bring that back to share it with the other students.

Kaleena: Yes, exactly.

Jocelyn: Yes.

Aaron: I mean, you've read the books so you know, that's the whole basis of the five hour school week, and where that five hour school week came about. It was the same issues of dropping the kids off at school.

Kaleena: Right, it was like, "Hey, we're refusing to jump through the hoops of life. We're not entering the rat race. We refuse, as adults, to live this way." And yet we were sending our kids right into that

Shane: Oh my gosh.

Kaleena: -same rat race that we were rebelling against so strongly.

Shane: I'm so glad that you said that, because we literally had this conversation probably about two weeks ago.

Jocelyn: This is what our entire brand is about. Our entire brand is about putting family first and not living the way that the rest of society says to live, yet that's exactly what we're doing every single day.

Kaleena: Every day.

Shane: I got to thinking about our lives. We come home, we've worked hard to build this life for ourselves, in the morning we get up, we go to the gym, we work on what we want to work on, we don't work when we don't want to. I play a little Xbox in the morning I ain't gonna lie.

Kaleena: Yeah.

Shane: We've kind of built this thing to do what we want to do with our life. And then our kids are just locked into this, every 45 minutes. Like Pavlov's dog a bell will ring, and you will go to the next place, and you will learn what you learn. And if you can't keep up with those other 30 kids that were randomly put in your classroom, because they're your age, and you get behind, you're screwed.

Shane: It just really doesn't jive, not only with what we're doing, but really what we should be doing. Schools were invented 100 years ago to provide childcare for factory workers in Chicago and places like that, and also to train people to work in those same environments. I'm just not sure that's the way the world is anymore.

Shane: I heard this story, Jocelyn told me this quote the other day that said, "A time traveler came to the future, and was so confused by all the things that he saw. He saw iPads, and the internet, and space travel. And he felt really scared and uncomfortable, but then he went into a school and said, 'Thank god some things haven't changed.' "

Kaleena: Oh man, yes.

Shane: That's kind of where we find ourselves, at a crossroads. Are we really pursuing freedom if we keep putting our kids in this environment?

Jocelyn: We've been wrestling with this forever. Another part of it for me is what you talk about in the book, you talk about how you get what's left over for your kids. They give their best hours to school, and by the time they get home, we're tired because we've been working all day. They're tired because they've been working all day. We don't really spend quality time together.

Jocelyn: And what's sad is, we spend more time with our kids than probably most of their peers' parents spend with them, and still it's not even quality time. Sometimes it is, but not always.

Kaleena: Right well a lot of the time I'm guessing it's staying on top of them to get their homework done, I'm guessing you're having to urge them to get that reading in, even though they just sat in a desk for seven hours.

Jocelyn: Yes.

Kaleena: So you are having to now work for the school system and really be kind of a command sergeant, and instead of getting to love on your kid and pour into their life, instead you're like, "Get that reading slip done, make sure that homework gets done, even though I only get to see you for four hours tonight." And let us squeeze all that in to this teeny tiny bit of time we have.

Shane: Also, then you take them to their sports, or some activity at night time.

Jocelyn: Yes, we have extracurricular activities.

Kaleena: Yep so do we.

Jocelyn: My daughter, she does an all star cheer team, and it's 30 minutes away from our house. So by the time we drive the 30 minutes she has practice for two hours, and we drive back. That's over three hours of time. How in the world are we supposed to do reading at that time?

Shane: And then she goes to bed at 9:30 and we have to get her up at 5:30 AM to go to school because they tell us to be there at 6:50, or whatever.

Kaleena: And what about if cheer is her passion? What about if she is going to make it as a professional cheerleader, and you're having to squeeze her passion into that teeny tiny bit of time. Because she spent so much time focusing on stuff that does not fill her up. If she was at home, she could be perfecting and mastering cheer. Or perfecting and mastering where her passion lays. That's the biggest disadvantage, that our kids are spending time on things that are not going to add any value to their life.

Kaleena: We are spending 40 hours a week with our kids teaching and shoving things down their throat they will never, ever use.

Shane: Yeah, and like. Go ahead.

Aaron: We had a couple big moments of that, where it was like hitting us, what are we really doing? I was speaking at a conference and I was on stage telling people about the four hour work week. I said, "Hey you guys work too much. This is how you can work in just a couple hours a day and finish your work day and be successful. Know that the five people you hang out with the most are who you're going to be like, so only hang out with winners."

Aaron: And a lady stood up at the end and goes, "Hey that's great. So how does this apply to your kids in school?" And we were like...

Jocelyn: Ouch.

Shane: Uh....

Kaleena: Yeah.

Aaron: Yeah, and I was telling people, "Hey do this, this, and this." And we were sending our kids off... and we had a big moment that night where we were like, "Whoa!" We had experimented with some different things, but that was a big moment.

Aaron: And then just like another evening, going to bed again after school, and extracurriculars and we're telling our daughter, "Hey you need to go get your reading done." And she's in tears, like, "Why? I actually earned a free pass from something else so I don't have to." And we're like, "No, you have to." Because we were brainwashed, too.

Aaron: And then we tell her, and we lay down in bed and we're like, maybe she's right. What are we doing? We've done everything we're supposed to do. We've checked the boxes, and we got successful, and Kaleena is still a stay at home mom at that time and we're still not even getting enough time with our kids, and not doing it, and really starting to push, you go, hey there's something really wrong here. Kaleena really started educating herself on it.

Shane: And I want to stress here some really important facts. Because I know people that - this podcast is going to be controversial. I know it is.

Kaleena: Oh yeah. Yup.

Shane: But we have a really good school and a great community. We have really hard working, dedicated, good teachers.

Jocelyn: Who care about our children.

Shane: Who love our kids, and they work within a system that they don't always have control over. And also if you look at the entire span of human history, it is a miracle in the United States, it is a miracle in the United States that every child does even get to go to school, good or bad.

Kaleena: Absolutely.

Shane: It is an absolute miracle of humanity, if you just look at it throughout history.

Shane: However - and the opportunities that we have to be entrepreneurs, to work on the internet, to build a life that we want, and even to educate our child at home, is all built on the fact that that was available for the past hundred years. That being said, somethings wrong. Something has changed in the way that we're all living that has to be corrected. And the system that we're using now is just not working - for our kids, for families. For anybody. Especially for entrepreneurs who do have that freedom.

Shane: One of our things is travel. Whether we're speaking, we do live events around the country. Whether we just want to take a trip for educational purposes, or fun. What happens when you want to travel during the week? What happens when you want to get away for a couple weeks in the winter to keep from getting Seasonal Affective Disorder? All these things that you can take into account, you've still got school to contend with. It is trapping you there just like a 9 - 5 job or like a rat race.

Shane: What about your kids who are having their creativity stifled? What if your kid hates math? But they can grasp it, they can do the math that they need to do. But what if they are musically inclined and they're only getting 20 minutes of music a day?

Shane: Isaac is taking coding in one of his classes, and he's really disappointed because he's cycled out of the coding class, and he was really getting into it. And I'm like, "Oh my gosh, you mean that opportunity disappeared because they can't get everyone through because they only have 12 computers?" Like, what if he wants to keep doing that? He stayed at home sick today and he's up there coding right now.

Shane: Where are those opportunities for that? That's where we kind of are at right now. Can we pull this off? Can we do this? But that leads to a whole other set of questions.

Aaron: We should say, too, that we absolutely loved the school our girls were going too, too. And the teachers loved our kids. It wasn't that the school we were going to was broken, the system was broken for us.

Kaleena: Yes.

Aaron: It wasn't a good match for who we wanted to be and what we were trying to do of excelling to these different levels. Then that basis of what you said, the whole idea behind the five hour school week is you can spend an hour a day doing all that normal schoolwork stuff, and then the rest of the day is whatever they want. For travel, or focusing on coding. One of our daughters took coding classes for a while, too. And being able to find that passion. The little details with some focus, they can do all the stuff that everybody else has to do in school, and then they can spend the rest of that time they've saved now on stuff they love. Whether its cheerleading or soccer, whatever.

Shane: We've kind of noticed too that school is - and this goes back to there's a problem with how the actual thing has evolved - school's not realistic. It's not realistic to how life actually works. So we can get into the life skills, and balancing checkbooks, and all that's fine. We all have jobs to teach our kids that stuff to.

Shane: But when you put 30 people in a room and you teach a lesson once, and you expect all 30 to be able to get there in one class, that doesn't happen. That's not realistic. People learn and grow on their own path. Our son came home the other day and it broke our hearts. I was sitting there talking to him and I said, "Are you okay, did you have a bad day?" And he goes, "I just feel dumb." And I go, "What do you mean?" And he goes, "I'm not understanding area and perimeter, and they only talked about it one day and we went on to something else. But they keep testing me on it." And I'm like oh my gosh, he got to watch the guy do it on the blackboard. But if he was at home, he could watch the lesson over and over until he got it.

Jocelyn: And that's how these guys got started, like I know reading in your book that's what was a light bulb moment for you, right? Helping somebody with a math problem.

Kaleena: Yeah, so it's interesting. We went on a trip. We started hearing people speak about unconventional education ideas. In fact the vice principal from our private school was leaving to go start an Acton Academy which is an entrepreneurial based school that goes from kindergarten all the way through high school. It's a really incredible program.

Shane: We looked at it, we almost thought about moving to a city that has an Acton academy.

Jocelyn: Yeah one of our friends, her children go to one.

Kaleena: They're incredible. So he's leaving this school, because he's saying, "I have kids and I can't actually send them to the school that I'm a principal at." And so I loved and respected this man. So we were hearing from him, other entrepreneurs were homeschooling their children, and I'd started reading some new material, like Free to Learn from Peter Gray. And so we started slowly tiptoeing into this new territory.

Kaleena: So we were like, we're going to pull our kids out of school for a week and go to Yosemite. And I don't care what the school's going to say, we're just gonna go do this. So we're gone for the week, we forget the kids' homework. We think it's going to be a catastrophe. We have this beautiful family vacation. The girls, and we, learned so much together just about the park, about nature. We're doing open air bus rides, and all the things. We're doing campfires with the rangers. We are learning in real time, and making incredible family memories.

Kaleena: And so then after a week we get home, and what's waiting for us? A week's worth of homework. And just the fear, and the anxiety sets in and its like panic in my house. And so I start unloading the car and Aaron's like, I'm gonna sit down with the girls, we're gonna knock out homework.

Kaleena: Our oldest, Maddy, is stressed. She has to learn long division. They're gonna go over long division this week and she hasn't done it, and this is so terrifying. No exaggeration, Aaron sat there for two hours with all three of our girls and knocked out a weeks worth of work, including teaching Maddy long division. Where she could just sit and independently do problems.

Aaron: Its such a fun conversation with you guys, because you guys could've written a couple chapters of our book.

Kaleena: Right.

Aaron: The same problems you guys are talking about is what's there. We discovered some of it by knowledge, some by seeing it. Those couple hours when we got back, it's the four hour work week principles. If you're really focused and you have no distractions and you're going to the task at hand in the most productive manner, you're gonna be able to finish a whole bunch of stuff in a short amount of time.

Aaron: One of the big problems with school like what you said, is that they teach in one method. Which is going to be slower than the fastest person in class and faster than the slowest person in class. So it's really only the perfect speed for a few of the students. And it's only in that subject. So it's not the most efficient way.

Aaron: The most efficient way to learn is as fast as that individual can learn. Maybe this kid has to go over perimeter and area ten different times, but in this other subject they get it like that. And so the way we have it set up is that it's that quick focus and then - I take Maddy back to school the next day. We drop her off and she's relieved. We got to pick her and and we go, "Hey how was your day today?" And she goes, "Dad, I was the only one that knows how to learn long division, they didn't even get to it this week."

Shane: Wow. Isn't that crazy?

Aaron: It is.

Shane: You know what's funny though? You still had to deal with all the stress and anxiety. She was so worried about this artificial deadline or consequence that society and the school had placed on her. It's subconscious, they don't know they're doing it. This fear and anxiety was over nothing.

Shane: Where is the joy in just, holy crap I know how to do long division. That's miraculous, that we can do these mathematical things, and that's gonna pay dividends down the road. But she got to - what if she had just entered that weekend with, "Oh we just went to Yosemite. Hey what are we studying this week guys? Long division? Cool, let's figure that out." Instead of, "Oh my gosh if I don't learn this tomorrow I'm a failure." And all these consequences, and all these bad things.

Shane: You got the result, but you had to deal with all the problems. When you could've just eliminated the anxiety and the problems.

Kaleena: Right. Then the problem continued, because for the next three to four weeks the school was still going over long division and Maddy had mastered it and was bored out of her mind.

Shane: And that's our daughter's problem right now. She's having the opposite problem. In her class in her grade, not that she's any more smarter or more capable than our son, but she's younger and she's the faster speed right now in her topics.

Jocelyn: And she says she's bored.

Shane: And she's bored out of her - she doesn't want to go to school.

Jocelyn: Basically during a big portion of the day she takes accelerated reader tests, which I don't really have a problem with accelerated reader or anything like that, and I'm not saying anything bad about her teacher. Her teacher is catering to those who haven't mastered whatever it is she's trying to teach, and so because my child has she spends her days reading books and taking tests on them.

Kaleena: Right. Oh I know.

Shane: She's reading easy fun books and doing nothing. So it's just this weird environment. I go back to, school is not realistic of the real world.

Shane: When I wake up every day, I'm looking at the next thing I've got to do to grow our business, to improve our marriage, to help our kids, to help the people in our community, to record podcasts for our audience so they've got something to spur them. I'm always looking at the next thing, there's never a time where I just stop and I'm like, I gotta wait for everybody else to catch up.

Shane: That's not real, that's not how life actually works. Looking at how school functions - how old are you guys?

Kaleena: I'm 36.

Aaron: And I'm 38.

Shane: Okay, so I'm 40. Jocelyn's about 30, so we're the same age. We talked to somebody a couple weeks ago, we talked to a guy who was like 31. Right? When we had a live event a couple months ago we had over a hundred people that had flown in for a conference that we put on. There was everybody in that room from age 30 to 60.

Shane: But you go to school, and it's the only 18 years of your life where you're trapped with people who are the exact same age as you. And now the schools have become such bubbles. The seniors are kept away from the sophomores. And the sophomores are kept away from the freshman. Everybody's compartmentalized and even the arbitrary - deadlines are one thing - but these arbitrary, weird deadlines, like if you don't figure this out on time, not if you don't do something on time, it's just not real. It's just not the way the real world actually functions in 2000 and whatever.

Kaleena: Yeah.

Aaron: It's completely unrealistic and totally inefficient.

Kaleena: Yeah.

Aaron: It's the least efficient way to learn, is the way that they have it set up. It absolutely takes the fun out of it because they are forced to learn for a certain amount of time, all the time. It is so much less fun whereas instead of being excited about learning long division, it's like checking a box.

Kaleena: Yep.

Jocelyn: Exactly.

Aaron: By doing classroom time less, now when they do learn, they want to. They love it. Because they aren't forced to do it all day long, they're choosing to more and more often. And they're getting to choose what they learn more.

Kaleena: Right, we're not learning for a grade and we're not learning to pass a test, we're learning for the sake of learning. Which is totally different. This isn't me shooting down education, I love education. I think learning should be a life long journey. From the day that we're born, until the day that we die, we should be learning something new every single day. Not stop when we get a degree, not stop when we get all A's. It's absolutely crazy that we say, get that bachelor's degree and you're done. We're done learning? Are you kidding me? It's crazy.

Shane: School's over.

Jocelyn: That's just our natural tendency as people, especially as children. That's their natural tendency, to want to learn.

Kaleena: Yeah absolutely.

Jocelyn: And I think that sometimes in school we kind of stifle that. If we'd mastered whatever it is that we're teaching that day, read some books and take some tests. You know?

Kaleena: Yep.

Jocelyn: While that is learning...

Shane: It fills the time to find something else.

Aaron: Yeah, fill the time.

Kaleena: Yeah, fill the time.

Shane: Okay so let me go back real quick, and then we have bunch of questions. One of the great opportunities we have because we have an audience is, we reached out. This is a hot topic. I want to stress, too, that Jocelyn and I, we do work together in our business. You guys have divided this up.

Shane: We both have been successful in our different business pursuits. But we have friends that homeschool from every economic status point. So there's no restriction, we always kill excuses. That's our number one mission in our podcast.

Shane: Anyone listening to this, I don't care if you're just starting you entrepreneurial journey, I don't care if you've made it, I don't care if one of you is an entrepreneur and your spouse isn't, I don't care if you're both entrepreneurs, this is one of those things if you want to do it and it's important to you, you'll find a way. And if it's not, you'll find an excuse. So we just want to slam that door shut, and if anybody's thinking that right now, "Well that's great for you guys to talk about this. Shane and Jocelyn got this big podcast. You guys are doing real estate and stuff." No, there's no excuse not to do this if you want to. Okay?

Shane: So when you guys made the call - just real quick before we get into a bunch of questions - where did you make the call? How did you make the call? Did you do it in the summer, Christmas time? Just out of nowhere? What was that conversation? How did you execute that? And how did you end up where you're actually homeschooling?

Kaleena: Yeah, so a lot like you guys. We talked about it for over a year. Aaron was ready on week one. The minute I started the conversation, Aaron's like, "Pull the trigger, let's go, I'm in."

Shane: "I'm ready to go right now. Let's do it."

Jocelyn: He's with ya.

Kaleena: Right, yeah. I, however, sat in a whole pool of fear for a decent 18 months. Freaked out. Like, my kids are going to be home all day, every day, and -

Jocelyn: You're my soul sister.

Kaleena: Yes. Like, I don't have a college degree. Yes, I built an amazing real estate brokerage, but what am I going to teach them? Am I gonna mess them up? How are they gonna socialize? If there is a question out there, I had it. And I was terrified of it.

Jocelyn: Do you live in my head? Because I was reading the first chapter of your book, I'm like, "I'm pretty sure she was at my house this morning."

Shane: Jocelyn, she gets this book, she just walks in here and goes, "I'm calling these people, we're talking to them, they're going to be on the podcast." And I was like, "Oh, what? What are we talking about?"

Kaleena: What are we talking about? Exactly.

Kaleena: So Aaron was ready, and I sat in and sat in it, and we had in incredible summer. So we ended the school year and it was pretty miserable. We went into the summer and we were living our best life, and we are living to the highest of our abilities. We're traveling, we're killing it at business, we're killing it at parenting, our marriage is thriving, and it's the middle of August and I'm writing a tuition check to send my kids back to school because I'm terrified of like, what are they gonna say? What are my friends gonna think? What's going to happen?

Kaleena: So I put them back into school in September, mind you I get elected as the PTA president this year, I'm super involved in our kids' school. I volunteer, we're huge contributors. That's the other thing. You're like, "Oh my gosh all these people that depend on me, what are they gonna say? How are they gonna feel?"

Kaleena: So we go from September into November and it was miserable. I can't think of very many weeks that I wasn't going to bed crying, our children-

Aaron: She was so caught up though, like caught up in the moment. As soon as school started again, they were all 100 percent back in it. She was there, it was the long days, it was doing all the extracurriculars, it was setting up fundraisers and things like that. I could see that it was killing them.

Kaleena: We were falling apart. We were self imploding, literally. Every day I was dropping them off and it went against everything that was in my gut.

Shane: This is November right now for us-

Jocelyn: I know we were feeling the same way.

Shane: And when you said that, I thought to myself that is the exact experience that we have had.

Jocelyn: We seriously hate it every day. We hate it.

Kaleena: I know. I do know.

Aaron: We ended up - it was an accidentally pushing it a little further... I saw what was going on so I scheduled three weeks of vacation in November.

Kaleena: Yeah.

Aaron: So it was coming up to November first and we realized that I was on a business trip somewhere, and Kaleena is getting ready to write the November check and realizing that they're only going to be at school four or five days that month.

Kaleena: Right. We had a couple of business trips, and we decided to mix in going and seeing the volcanoes in Hawaii as an educational piece. So we were gonna be jumping across the country for three weeks and the kids weren't gonna be in school. Because there's also Thanksgiving holiday. It's parent teacher conferences though, and Aaron's in Florida working, and I just call him on the way to parent teacher conferences and I said, "Unless I get a different feeling, I think I'm pulling the kids out right now." And he's like, "I've got your back, I support you, I'm so proud of you..." Whatever.

Kaleena: I walked into parent teacher conferences, and the first one was for our oldest, Maddy. And she was a fourth grader. And the teacher said, I'll never forget this conversation because it just solidified what I was doing that day, she said, "Your daughter is incredible. She's so amazing, all A's, the kindest girl in the class, helps people that are below her." All the things you want to hear as a parent, and then she followed it with-

Aaron: Reading at a seventh grade level.

Kaleena: Right, she's a brand new fourth grader reading at a seventh grade level. And then, I can still hear it in my head, "But, we need to push her a little bit further. We need to get her where she's reading at an eighth grade level. Let's just push a little bit more."

Kaleena: And I just kept hearing, "But, but..." And I'm sure she went on and said a lot of things, but all I heard was "but." And I'm like but, nothing. She's having anxiety attacks every day that I'm bringing her to school and she's an all A students. But you want more?

Kaleena: I just looked at her and she was like the nicest, sweetest, kindest, great teacher. And I said, "Thank you so much. Maddy's not coming back, I'm starting to homeschool."

Jocelyn: Hmm, ouch.

Kaleena: Right? And then I did the same thing - honestly the kindergarten and first grade teacher, she was like, "We wish we could do the same with our kids. If there was a way we could make that happen we totally-"

Shane: I'm sure everybody had an opinion.

Kaleena: Oh yeah. Everybody's all in or thinks you're absolutely nuts. There's very few middle ground to this.

Shane: Yeah.

Jocelyn: We're used to this.

Kaleena: Yeah, you know exactly.

Jocelyn: When we decided to quit our jobs in rural, south Kentucky in the middle of the school year, people thought we were absolutely nuts.

Shane: People thought something had happened, people came up to us like, "Is your marriage okay?"

Kaleena: Right.

Shane: "Is one of you getting indicted for something?" We went home one time to Thanksgiving that year and Jocelyn, God bless him, her grandfather came up to me after dinner and we were getting ready to drive back home across the state. And he reaches out, he's old school, he's an old coal miner guy. He was going to shake my hand before I leave, and I looked down and he had put a 20 in my hand, and he goes, "Now son, I know you're not working now, so you need some gas money." And I'm like, "Bro I made last month as much as I made in a year teaching." But he didn't get it.

Kaleena: Oh really.

Shane: They just-

Kaleena: Right no, they don't get it.

Shane: If you do something weird like homeschool, like be an entrepreneur, do something to change your life even as radical as, we shouldn't work 70 hours a week because it'll affect our marriage, but isn't it what we're suppose to... Those things really get to people.

Kaleena: Oh yeah.

Shane: And they don't understand it or have the wherewithal to go do it.

Kaleena: Yeah.

Shane: So I could totally see - this is crazy too, I haven't had this moment in a while. Because we've been rolling now for six years doing what we do, right? But I remember when I read 'The Four Hour Work Week', when I read these other books about entrepreneurship and when I found people that had the guts to go be successful, or at least try and fail. Right?

Shane: I remember thinking, "I want that."

Kaleena: Yeah.

Shane: And, "maybe I'm not to the point now where I can go all in, but I want that." And when you said, "She's not coming back." It just made me, again, feel that I want that. I want to have the guts to say that. I think we're-

Jocelyn: If it were up to Shane this would've happened, probably year ago.

Shane: You know what's funny though? Until both us are at that point, I think that's how marriage works.

Kaleena: Right.

Shane: The reason I don't do it is because we are not there yet, and that's an important part of the dynamic is you both gotta get on the same page.

Kaleena: I think for me, I needed it to hurt that bad.

Shane: You need a catalyst.

Kaleena: I did, because, mind you this is us living our best life, but that doesn't mean it's easy. Just like entrepreneurship, homeschooling is the same. There are days when you are digging in deep, and you better remember those worse days that were behind you. I'm sure you thinking back at working for the school system. I'm sure you -

Shane: What we look back on, for us, the nutshells version of our story is our son was being abused at a day care center. They were locking him in a bathroom for hours at a time to punish him in the dark. I found this out one morning, and was stuck between a rock and a hard place because I'm a teacher, there's 30 kids in my classroom, I have to be there. There's legal ramifications if something happens and I don't show up.

Shane: So I dropped Isaac off somewhere where he could not stay for more than a couple hours. I asked my boss for time off, and my boss told me that I would have to handle my personal problems after work because she knew my son needed me, but my job needed me, too. That's the moment. Every day it gets hard, every day I think about that, I am like, "I'm not ever going back"

Kaleena: Yes.

Shane: That's where we are at school. When my kid is downcast, shoulders turned, saying he feels dumb, I can't send him there anymore.

Kaleena: Yeah.

Shane: That's what you have to reach back for.

Kaleena: Yeah. It needs to - I'm really grateful for that pain, I am, because it is what reminds me that this is why we're doing it, this is why it's different, this is why we chose this lifestyle. The timing was perfect for us, even though it felt like a long drawn out process.

Aaron: A lot of biggest decisions, we do wrestle with them for a long time. Even when it was entrepreneurship, it was six months or a year of telling Kaleena, "I need to start my own business, I want go do this and and be..." And when our second daughter was born six weeks early and I was staring at her in the incubator, that's when I was like, "Oh man, this is my fault, Kaleena was working nights, I was working days. I need to do something better for my family now."

Aaron: There are a lot of those moments where we think we want to go, and we're learning, and it takes that bigger catalyst to go, here's the moment. And Kaleena was so close, and then it was putting them back in school, those feelings every morning were still there. The big catalyst of going, "Hey your daughter's perfect, but let's push her really really hard." And it was like, yeah.

Shane: We've coached thousands of people through our community, and we've seen so many people succeed, so many people fail. Everybody's in between, like every journey. But the people who really have that catalyst are the ones that we find really make it the fastest, because... it's not just something you want. I want a lot of things, but I'm not gonna go do those things.

Jocelyn: It works better when you don't have a choice.

Kaleena: Yeah, absolutely.

Shane: Even something as simple as, we encourage people to do all of their videos live because you have no choice but to get it out. You can stop on a recording. But you can't do that when there's people watching.

Kaleena: Yep.

Shane: When our kids are watching, when our spouse is watching, when we're watching each other, it just pushes you to a whole new level. So we've talked a lot about some definite benefits, especially for entrepreneurial people who want that freedom lifestyle doing homeschool, but like everything in life it's not all sunshine and rainbows. A lot of times when you make decisions, it's not that you're really even making a decision on which one's the best. Which set of problems do I really want to deal with?

Kaleena: Yes.

Shane: So what are the, just from a general-

Jocelyn: What are the challenges, let's not say problems, let's say challenges?

Shane: -yeah the challenges, the negative things that arise when you choose to homeschool?

Shane: How long we got?

Kaleena: Right. No, that's not true. But I love that you say that's it's a different sort of - it's different challenges.

Kaleena: Your kids are home all day for the most part, so just start there and really let that sink in to what that is. Your kids are home all day. So we've talked about all the pros that come with that, the cons are, if you're anything like I am, I'm an incredibly busy person separate from just being a mom. I have my own passions and my own stuff, so it's about finding a balance that works for our family. I think that's probably the number one challenge, is that not only are my kids living their best life, but that I'm not sacrificing my best life so that they can have theirs.

Jocelyn: Yeah.

Kaleena: Right? This isn't supposed to feel like, I'm giving up my life so that my kids can live their best life. This is supposed to be as a family, we are performing at the very best level that we can perform at. And if I'm not taking care of me and I'm not living into my best self, then all of that kind of falls apart.

Jocelyn: Yeah. If I'm being really honest that is the number one hold back for me, that is the reason that I have been dragging around on this for approximately 12 months is because - we talked about this during the break, we just had a break a few minutes ago - but really what it is for me is that I am a very ambitious person myself. I am very interested in business, I want to do the business we are 50/50 partners, we do everything together.

Jocelyn: While that's awesome, I can just see that my kids being at home all the time... when they want something and they're at home, they say, "Mom, mom, mom, mom." That's who they want. They know that I'm gonna do whatever it is they want me to do to get them off my back.

Shane: Also that's biological, I think, to an extent. You know what I mean? Kid goes to mom.

Jocelyn: Yeah. I'll be super honest, that is a huge concern for me because I don't like where we are right now because I feel like I have very little, I guess you would say, genuine interactions with them. It's all about "Get your homework done, get a bath, get ready for bed."

Shane: "Get ready for this thing we have to drive you to."

Jocelyn: Yes. It's like I have no time that I get to spend with them, so that bothers me. But it also bothers me, the thought that, what I feel is my God given reason for being on this earth, which is to help people figure out ways to get out of their daily grind, I feel like I need to be equally there for my children and equally there for that. So that's really hard for me.

Shane: And you're also an introverted person. You recharge by being alone, and now we're having less alone.

Kaleena: Yes, absolutely.

Aaron: I think one of the challenges, too, is we talked about needing unschooling. Changing the old train of thought. The old train of thought is that the kid need to sit in a desk for eight or ten hours a day, and needs to be working the whole time or they're just being lazy. Right?

Kaleena: Right.

Aaron: So we have a lot of people that Kaleena coaches, and they get started doing it and go, "Well I do the curriculum and he finishes it in the first hour and then he just wants to go play all day." And we go, "Yes, exactly, and then you're supposed to let him."

Kaleena: Right.

Aaron: And then the parent is like, "Wait" and you have to unschool that and it's sometimes it's a challenge to them, they're like "Wait what do you mean?" Part of the problem is that old belief, when you do start to get those genuine experiences with your kids. After they finish that, it's like, what do you want to go learn about now? What do you want to go do now? When they get to see that they're in control of so much more of that, whether it takes them an hour or three hours to finish it and then they get to start having more control of their life. Then your time is a lot more of the genuine conversations, "How are you doing?" That sort of thing.

Aaron: A change in mindset is a challenge for a lot of people.

Shane: We have to remember, we both went to public school, we both got to this point. We have a friend who has a podcast called We Turned Out Okay, and it's hard even if you want to break free from it to break free from it. Because you start thinking about, well look at all the best memories of your life, they were kind of forced upon you because you were at school, but some of the best memories of your life are at school. That's just real life, its hard to let go of that.

Jocelyn: I think it's to a lot of the known vs the unknown. This is something people struggle with with entrepreneurship, too. Your current life is not great but it's what you know, it's something known.

Shane: And it could be very good, it's just not the highest level you could achieve.

Jocelyn: Yeah, and the unknown is this new thing. Whether it be a new business, whether it be a new schooling method, whatever. Sometimes people just cling to what they're already doing because its something that they know, it's like they don't have to think about what could happen or what might not happen. I think that comes into it as well.

Kaleena: I also think that it's a lot of work. It's like, you are having to be incredibly intentional with this lifestyle. In the same way that you're intentional about being an entrepreneur, you are going to need to be completely intentional about how your kids are learning. Now, that doesn't mean that all the work falls on you.

Kaleena: Here's some really quick hacks, because Aaron talked about unschooling. There is this period for kids who are sitting in a school system, in a traditional classroom and have been for years. Like, my oldest sat in a school for six years from the time she was - we started early preschool. Right? Full day early pre school.

Kaleena: We have to untrain that behavior, so is there this six month to year long period depending on how long your kids were in school, where literally you're gonna have to de-school them. Just breaking down those habits, those habits that I kind of feel are unhealthy habits, we had to break those down.

Kaleena: I'm gonna tell you the easiest way to do that is just let them play. Give them freedom and let them step into being kids again. We really try to overthink it, I think, as homeschoolers. Like, they've gotta learn this, or we've gotta keep up with what their friends are learning in school, what they were learning when we pulled them out. That is not the point here. We are not pulling them out of school to teach them what they were just learning. We are trying to breed something different than what the school system was breeding.

Kaleena: We want something different, therefore we have to do something completely different. So it's like literally taking a deliberate jump in the opposite direction. So if you can stay with that mentality in the first part of it, it really really helps.

Shane: That's an amazing tip by the way. That blew my mind. That just crushes - it's taking the con, or the negative -

Jocelyn: The challenge.

Aaron: It takes the pressure off.

Shane: And flipping it on its head, it just removes all those obstacles because we are all socially conditioned for a hundred years, five generations of people basically in a society, that your kid does this at this grade to 18 and this must happen, or you fail. And that's where all these challenges come from. These ghosts, we call them ghosts in entrepreneurship when we talk to people like, don't invent ghosts. Its not that we're inventing ghosts in this situation, we've been told the ghost stories our entire life.

Kaleena: Right, yep.

Shane: And when we want to do something different, we still remember the ghost story that's been told like it's real. And it just becomes this haunting this that one, keeps you from going into the forest in the first place. Or, two, keeps you anxious and terrified when you're passing through.

Kaleena: Oh absolutely.

Shane: Okay let me ask you this, what was the biggest mistake you guys made at the beginning? Because the beginning is the hardest part.

Kaleena: Yes.

Shane: Once you get past the beginning, y'all, it's alright. You can figure it out. So you're not going back, you tell them this, you show up Monday morning and you're like, "Oh wait, we're home, what do we do?" What's that biggest mistake the first few months that you guys made?

Kaleena: So honestly going back to what I just said, it was really I planned too much. I put this really big expectation on what it was supposed to look like. So my plans was, because I had seen all these commercials all over the TV for like, K through 12, homeschool your kids at home, it's free. We're gonna give you a stipend, just sign up for our government assisted public school. You can school at home. And I'm like, perfect. That's awesome, they're gonna do all the work for me and I get to have my kids at home. Right?

Kaleena: Okay so I'm sure there's a lot of good for those programs for other groups of people, and some of them might work like that and be awesome. The one in California was, you need to log, I think it was a minimum of five hours day. They were keeping attendance. You had to pass standardized testing. So I had this very grandiose, original thought of what my homeschooling journey was gonna look like and on day one it blew up. Because it wasn't what I wanted.

Kaleena: So here's what I did that people think is absolutely crazy. I just took the next six months off. I would get up on a Monday and I would ask my kids, "What do you want to learn?" And then we would write it on a white board, and then we would go learn those things. And I literally kept it that easy.

Kaleena: And if we had a trip coming up we would learn about where we were going. If they would ask me a question when we were driving down the road, I would hand my 11 year old my phone and I would say "Google that, let's learn about that right now, let's answer that question."

Aaron: You guys did a lot of Khan Academy.

Kaleena: Right. And we would play around with different curriculums and different apps and stuff that were out there. So, Khan Academy is great and it literally takes you from preschool, where you can get a masters, they take you all the way through college on Khan Academy. Every program, every class. Amazing teachers. The whole thing.

Kaleena: So I'm looking at that, I'm looking at Adapted Mind. We're doing some time for learning, I'm downloading apps. I'm familiarizing myself with programs that are out there, and I'm just kind throwing them at my kids. "Hey try this, how does this work for you?" And I set up, I made this thing called the buffet of learning, where I would just set out their computers every day, and set books and activities and things, and just let them pick, what do you want to do today? What are you gonna do in your hour today?

Kaleena: And we just played. I didn't put a lot of conditions on that. I wasn't trying to see a result, I just wanted to get to know how my kids learn and what they wanted to learn.

Shane: I love it.

Aaron: Yeah.

Kaleena: And it changed everything, really.

Aaron: So much of the book is trying to encourage people to find their way. Try this, then try this, try this. Your situation might look a little different than ours. Kaleena can individually tell people, break it out. But a big concept at the beginning was learning life skills, the stuff they don't really teach in school. The value of money, making good risky decisions. There's a lot of stuff out there. So when we go on the trips to Canada, converting Celsius to Fahrenheit and things like that.

Aaron: So part of that mindset, too, was the shift in going, alright let's learn some life skills too. When you do go on those trips, when you go to Jamaica, things like that. There's still other, worldly things that they get to learn. So it was a lot more of a focus on learn all that stuff while she was experimenting with the book work balance.

Shane: It's amazing. This sounds like, it's the flip your life blue print. It's exactly what we tell people. People always want to come into the flip your life community, and they say things like, "If I can get my idea and I can get my product and it works then I will continue," or, "If I just had the exact plan and I knew this is what I need to do to be an entrepreneur I would do it." That's big objection.

Kaleena: Right.

Shane: That's not how it works, that's not how business works. You have to try it and get crushed, or try it and succeed and fail. You have to go out and do. One of the things we encourage people to do is, your idea doesn't matter in the beginning, you just have to go do it to learn all the foundational stuff. And then your next idea gets better. I heard one guy say, "When you start this you're going to suck, but if you're doing it you're going to suck less, and eventually you'll suck so little that you'll actually be kind of good, and then you'll get to great.

Kaleena: Yeah.

Shane: That's kind of like what you're saying here. Our big thing is, the only thing we've talked about lately is what curriculum are we gonna use? What product are we gonna sign up for?

Shane: That's not even the right question at all. You won't know until you try.

Kaleena: That's the thing is you won't know and here's the other thing, what works for you in September, it may no longer work for you in May. It is constantly evolving and changing. You have to just be, in the same way that you're flexible with your business and you're constantly listening to the client and figuring out what the trends are setting. All the things, right? And then you're also doing the same thing with your kids, going oh this is what we're into.

Kaleena: So our oldest Maddy, when we started this, was all about coding. Coding, coding, coding. Building web pages, marketing, she was so interested in it. So we found Hackingtons - it's like a hacker lab. So we would take her to classes at Hackingtons and she would learn how to code through them, and she would come home and she would do Minecraft. She would do all these different things to learn how to code and perfect that skill.

Kaleena: And after three months of just passionately coding, she's done coding. She was just done. And I couldn't believe it, I was like "What? No you're gonna be a master coder, you're gonna build the best websites and the best apps. And you're gonna become a millionaire doing it. What do you mean?" And she's like, "I'm done with coding, I'm not really into it." And she started sewing. So I bought her a sewing machine and she started sewing.

Kaleena: Because she was 10 and she's trying to find her way, and if we provide this environment for them then instead of finding their way at 30 or 40 or never like so many of us, we are providing this environment that maybe when she's 18 Maddy's gonna know what she masters, what she's passionate about, what she's so good at. And she's gonna be, 10, 15, 20 years ahead of all of her peers.

Aaron: The old mindset was push and push and push them. Now if next month she decides she doesn't want to sew anymore, like right now if there's a hole cut in anything we go hand it to her and say, "We need you to fix this." Or her sisters say, "We need Maddy to go sew it."

Kaleena: Yeah.

Aaron: She's good. And Maddy's also started a bunch of little business that have been successful. She's a total entrepreneur at heart already. But the big part is, next month if she wants to do something different, instead of getting discouraged and going, "Oh she doesn't follow up with anything." It's like going, "Okay, let's see what's next."

Aaron: They did TaeKwonDo for a couple years, they loved it, and all the sudden they were like, you know what I think we want to do dance or something instead? And as parents we're used to going like, "No you have to keep going." Now we try to understand and we're like, "Alright cool, let's find your passion."

Aaron: Because as an entrepreneur, and as adults, if we didn't like something anymore we wouldn't do it anymore.

Kaleena: Right.

Kaleena: How many times have we drawn businesses, Aaron and I had seven failed business before we had a successful one. What if we had just stayed in those failing businesses instead of walking away from them and starting it new? Like you've just gotta keep throwing it at the wall. And it isn't about being lazy, and not pushing my kids for excellent. It's actually the exact opposite. It's really encouraging them to step into who they were created to be.

Kaleena: I think that that's a thousand percent about the environment. They just need our support. They need us to facilitate that. It's not about doing it for them, that's the last thing you want to do. They need to -

Shane: It's also not like, "Stay in your lane." There is a point where some of that's valuable, like okay I do have to push past something that's hard.

Kaleena: Right.

Shane: That's not the same thing as losing interest. Totally different.

Kaleena: Yeah. Whenever I think that this is, "Oh I don't want to go through it because it's a challenge," or, here's the other big one, "I don't want to go through that because I'm scared and fearful of what's on the other side." Whenever I think it's fear based or challenge based, there's a little more motivation. Right? Like you just know your kids, or hopefully you know your kids. That's what-

Shane: Or you will.

Kaleena: Or you get to know your kids, I guess. Because I didn't. I didn't know that fear was driving my kids in so many areas. It's like learning that, learning how your kids respond to certain things and then providing the correct amount of motivation and the right environment so that they can learn.

Shane: So what you're saying is, in reality, that the fear for us is - and this is a weird fear for us because literally we both have masters degrees in teaching children.

Jocelyn: Yeah.

Shane: Like honestly, she's elementary, I'm high school. You would think that we'd be like, "Oh we got this."

Jocelyn: We got the teaching part.

Shane: But the fear part, really for us is, we sit and think back to kind of where we were teachers and we were teaching every day, we think that's what it's going to look like at our house. But we're not really, as a homeschool parent we wouldn't be the teacher, we would be the guide.

Aaron: You'd be like a facilitator, actually.

Kaleena: Yeah.

Shane: Be the person that recognizes, okay this is a loss of interest, I support you moving on, instead of, "No you hit a brick wall and you just don't know how to do that, and you're giving up" Or, if you're afraid to go to the next level. That's really what the homeschool parent's role is. It's not to, "Alright kids here's the blackboard, and we're going to sit here for six hours together." Like you would've done at school anyway.

Kaleena: Right.

Aaron: Right, and let's say they're on Time for Learning going through math. And they're learning math and they've got their headphone on and they're doing some regular curriculum stuff on their computer, I think it's just nearby doing their own thing.

Aaron: They're clicking away and they're clicking away, and then they get stumped, and they rewatch the video and they still get stumped, and they say, "Hey mom I need your help." She comes over, gets to re explain in a different way. They go, "Okay I got it now." That's the most efficient way to learn.

Aaron: As soon as they have a question that's specific, then they get that help, they get it - so you guys will be able to answer those questions- they get right back on track. Then most of the time you're sitting back waiting for the problem, and they can actually learn a lot on their own.

Shane: And for us, if we weren't full time paying attention to them, because we podcast, that's what we do. We talk to people like you guys all the time, our kids right now, we just told them, "You can't come in here during the podcast." Which they listen to about half the time.

Jocelyn: Yeah, it's like 50/50.

Shane: Izzy's on almost every podcast that I've ever done.

Jocelyn: Yeah.

Shane: We would just have to create new structures that work for us, like, "Hey you need to keep your questions because we will go over those between one and three." Or something like that.

Kaleena: Yeah, absolutely.

Shane: We've even thought about hiring tutors, or monitors to help us manage that a little bit in the home. They would come here, because there's going to be subjects that I don't know and she doesn't know and you could get some help, you gotta find a way to get around the system, basically.

Aaron: Yeah.

Kaleena: Yes. So 100 percent I say it's all about being creative based on what your needs are for your family. Because the reality is just, it differs from community to community and state to state. But there are options out there. You're talking about charter homeschools, or you can do a hybrid homeschool situation, for a couple hours a day they go hang out in a homeschool classroom, there's charters that have homeschool classrooms your kids can go to get tutoring help and be with other homeschooled peers.

Kaleena: Like, our kids go to a free to learn co-op. It's an agile learning center, its based on the free to learn philosophy where play is how you learn. So they go there twice a week for a few hours a day so I can do life. There's extracurriculars like Hackingtons and they still have their soccer. So we have just built a formula, I guess, that works for our life.

Kaleena: And I've seen families with two working parents that make it work. You really can build it, it just depends on what your needs are and how creative you're willing to get, honestly.

Shane: The most important thing I've gotten from all these things that you've said is one, that you can build it yourself. But two, the biggest fear is, "What if my kid gets behind?" But that's not even a question.

Kaleena: Right. Behind what?

Shane: Behind what? What are we comparing them to?

Kaleena: Right. Behind your neighbor? Because that's the fear. Your kid is gonna be no less than the kids on their soccer team.

Shane: It's a status thing.

Kaleena: It's a a status thing, right.

Shane: And we're worried about that. Its like saying in a business, I would never, ever advise any business owner to compare themselves to their competitor, or another business, because that just gets you in a world of trouble. Like, oh they work 70 hours a week so I need to do that.

Shane: Or, well they make more money but I'm pretty happy with the money I make, why do I need to go make more? You don't compare yourself to other people, you write down what you want and you make that.

Kaleena: Yep, yep.

Shane: And that's kind of what we're doing here with the homeschool situation.

Jocelyn: It's funny though because that's something that we talk about in business all the time but I just never really thought about applying it to this. But it all applies, its the same thing.

Kaleena: Yep. It all applies, it's life in general.

Shane: That's what this actually looks like, is life.

Kaleena: Yeah, it looks like life. Yes.

Shane: Okay so, I've got a bunch of questions here from our flip your life community.

Jocelyn: We'll try to go through them like rapid fire here.

Shane: Yeah, it's a couple questions.

Jocelyn: Okay.

Aaron: We're not very rapid fire.

Shane: That's okay. Here's what's great, it's our podcast we'll do whatever we want.

Jocelyn: And if you don't like it then we have like 250 other episodes you can go listen to.

Shane: We have an hour to go.

Shane: Those are off the record.

Aaron: If people don't want to home school they can listen to one of the others.

Shane: That's right, you're out. We'll catch you next week, see y'all later.

Shane: So I went through these dozens and dozens and dozens of questions and I kind of consolidated. I'm gonna ask a question from Blair but I think 10 other people had this question. But these are the big ones, and I think if we can knock these out it's gonna really help people. Not only to just really wrestle with this and think about it, but to get the resources and... this could change peoples lives. Not just your kids, but yourself.

Kaleena: Yeah.

Shane: So our first question comes from Blair, and Blair says, and I want to stress that Blair is a very successful, professional woman in our community. She's grown her business into a 20,000 dollar a month business. Just a rockstar professional, and identifies herself as that. So there's the context. Alright, "I love the idea of homeschooling but I'm concerned about two things. Is this actually, all caps, going to become another full time job for me? As someone in the medical profession I would also be concerned about my kids not having access to advanced placement things and to a college credit."

Shane: So she has two problems. She's really professional, really career oriented.

Jocelyn: Very driven.

Shane: Very driven. Has a professional medical practice, and an online business. And she's worried that this is gonna become a full time job. And even you guys, you made the decision one of you is gonna focus on this, one of you is gonna focus on this, even though we both are capable of doing either job, right.

Aaron: Yeah.

Kaleena: Yeah.

Shane: So what would you say to someone who says that. First, is this gonna become a full time job for me?

Kaleena: I don't- oh go-

Aaron: I think it's more like a passion project.

Kaleena: Yeah.

Aaron: It's less of a - because it's not meant to be eight hours of classroom the way that we see it.

Kaleena: Right.

Aaron: Do you feel like it's a full time job?

Kaleena: No. I don't think that it turns into a full time job, but I do think that it turns into a lifestyle. So, it doesn't have to be - I don't spend 40 hours a week teaching my children.

Aaron: You spend an hour or two.

Kaleena: I spend an hour or two a day teaching, like sitting down and facilitating, sitting down and we're doing actual learning. But we do live a lifestyle that promotes learning on the go. Learning in our environment. Learning real life stuff.

Kaleena: So I would even say to you guys that work at home, make your kids a part of that business. Let your kids be a part of what you're doing to see if that's where their passion lies, and for them to figure out like, "Oh no this isn't the direction, maybe this is the direction." So no I wouldn't say that this is a full time job, but for somebody that works full time and doesn't have a partner or somebody else that can support. Like you said, you can hire somebody, you can bring somebody in, get creative. But if you don't have that person I would find that to be a little bit more difficult.

Shane: It's also when you choose one thing you lose another.

Kaleena: Absolutely.

Shane: There's always a trade off in life.

Kaleena: Right.

Shane: I promise you I have a job right now driving my kids around. Two hours of our day is taking our kids to school and picking them up.

Aaron: That's the equal flop right there.

Jocelyn: So really in the time that we drive them we could probably get it done.

Kaleena: Yes absolutely.

Aaron: That was for us the beginning, too. You have that hour of prep, the hour after, you actually get so much of your life back. You already lost those two hours, now you're focusing on them, and then you get the rest of your day.

Shane: You get to choose when you spend them.

Aaron: The second part of your day-

Kaleena: Right.

Shane: You get to choose when you spend those two hours, we're all spending the two hours, but do you want to do it when someone tells you to do it, or when you want to do it?

Kaleena: Exactly.

Aaron: Now it's like 9 a.m. after everybody's had their breakfast, and they're rested. The second part of Blair's question is an important one, she asked about college and college credits and what's gonna happen.

Aaron: There's a couple of different kind of philosophies and thoughts on that. One is, so community colleges, if your kid's at a high school level and you want them to have AP, there's nobody saying that if you're homeschooling you can't drop them off for AP math so they can get some college credits. If going to college is really important to them and that's what they really want.

Aaron: Also getting accepted into college, when it comes to - one of our first things early on is if we do this, our kids - people are gonna think they're weird, they're not gonna get into college. Right? Because they're not gonna get accepted, because will they look at this school the same?

Aaron: The more people we talk to the more they said, "Kids with like 4.5 GPAs are a dime a dozen. Kids that get 1450 on their SATs, dime a dozen."

Kaleena: Yeah.

Aaron: Hundreds and hundreds and thousands of those kids are applying to schools. Kids that have, by their sixth time they're 16, they've gone to 25 countries, or they've done mission trips, or they have these side gigs that they do, or they've started businesses, those are the kids that colleges want. They don't want someone who's just really good at school with good grades anymore, they want somebody that's really interesting, has lived a big life, has those life skills. That's where I think that people doing the five hour school week mentality, if college is where they want to go, we think that they're actually way better off doing this. Because they'll be able to scratch off, that yes we're capable, by the time they're high school age they can do some of those college classes. And when they go and and do their application and they see, wow this isn't a normal kid, this kid's done some amazing, amazing things, they're the one's that are gonna get accepted.

Shane: And you can prep, like you said. But when your kid is obsessed with a biology thing and they want to go into biology and pursue those kind of things like medical, you're going to facilitate them having the opportunity to get the background needed to succeed.

Aaron: Just like dropping them off at a coding class now, it's like alright we'll go to the community college and they can go do biology class where they dissect animals there.

Shane: Awesome. Alright, so Jocelyn, read that next question.

Jocelyn: Okay, the next question is from Wendy. She wants to know about what about kids with special needs like ADHD or medical problems, how can we give them the same support they get in schools?

Shane: And there was a related question that Tabitha asked, "What resources are available if we discover our child is ahead or has special learning gifts?" So you've got basically, what about kids at opposite ends of the spectrum that are really gifted or really challenged? Why is this a good decision for them?

Kaleena: I love this question so much. I just spent some time at a home school convention a few months ago, and I'm gonna tell you, the majority of what makes up those kids are those two groups right there. Most homeschool kids actually fall in that group of ADHD, on the spectrum, kind of the outcasts of the schools that have a really difficult time fitting in and conforming.

Kaleena: Or you have the kids that are ultra bright and are so incredibly bored and ostracized because of their intelligence. So I find the homeschooling community to be so encompassing just for those reasons. As far as resources, I don't have- I have kind of like the middle of the road kids. I have very easy situations with my children. But I know that the amount of resources are endless, and it differs from state to state and city to city.

Shane: And this is also, like you said, you think the kids have all these gifted resources.

Kaleena: Right.

Shane: But I've been in a school, and I'll tell you right now, those kids in those classrooms are just as pigeonholed as the other kid. You're still having the problem of, well how do you accommodate this kid in this way, and this kid in that way? And they come up with a general accommodation that might work for the most of them.

Kaleena: Right, there's no real solution. I have a niece that's on the spectrum and she goes to a public school, and there's so many kids in her class that are on the spectrum, you're talking about probably 20 percent of the class. The resources to fund the actual help that these kids need, the extra time that needs to be given, is not in the public school system.

Kaleena: Your kid that is on the spectrum, or is ADHD, all your school is going to do is, they're gonna hand out the prescription. And they're gonna send them back to their test. Or they're gonna send them to the principal's office. Or they're gonna call you to come and pick them up because they can't control them.

Kaleena: So I think its really important when you have those severe, these ultra smart kids or these kids who need a little bit of extra time, homeschooling actually helps them in the most incredible way because they get to be exactly who they were made to be, and learn in the way that best suits them.

Kaleena: I know that there's help - my sister in law - I know that there's specialists, and even state programs to help bring people into your home and help, and with homeschooling and education going through a revolution right now, more and more of those programs are becoming available.

Shane: Awesome.

Aaron: I always say too, self paced learning is gonna be the most effective, best way for them to learn. Whether they're way up here, they're just gonna be going, they're gonna figure out, in an hour they're gonna do 20 different lessons and things like that. If they're taking longer they might only finish one a day. But self paced is the fastest they're going to have, it's the most efficient. Whether they complete one or 20, that's based on them.

Shane: Well if they're at home, that might actually eliminate some of the problems you're having, because their frustration may be coming from the fact that they just can't do it the way the school has it set up.

Aaron: Yeah.

Kaleena: Right.

Aaron: You can try all sorts of different ways. Like standing or sitting, whatever.

Jocelyn: Right. I wanted to throw in here, too, for people that might be listening to this and thinking, "Homeschool is probably not an option for me." I want to say to look also at your school district, because our school district actually has several programs that I didn't even know existed. So one of them is for special need kids, and if they are from certain age to certain age, they have a special program just for them. I had no idea about this.

Aaron: It's based on homeschool - we actually do have a pretty progressive district they're trying to create more home school opportunities that do support people. They even have a program where one day a week you can go and get tutoring.

Jocelyn: And we're looking into this right now. But what I'm trying to say is, if you have a child with those needs look and see what your school district has to offer, you may be surprised because we were very surprised about that.

Kaleena: Yeah absolutely.

Shane: Okay so, Shane, not me, Shane asks, "How do we balance different learning styles and different grade levels at the same time. Is this a curriculum problem? Or is this something I have to figure out?"

Shane: Our son is in fourth grade. We have a son who is shier and I would say is more like Jocelyn than me. And he's in fourth grade. So we have an older son who's shier. And we have a younger daughter who's insane. She's so extroverted and so up in your grill, there as far different of human beings as you can be. So, how do you, and I'm sure you have the same problem -

Kaleena: Oh yeah.

Shane: - because your daughters are all different ages, how does that work in the homeschool way?

Kaleena: So in the way that we learn, because we self direct, that doesn't really fall on me. So we've taken that time for them to establish their best learning style, where they like to learn, do they want to learn on the computer, do they work better with work sheets? I have one that's an avid reader, I have one that would prefer to work on an app. So we've taken the time now, we've taken that first year to deschool, and really that's not on me anymore now that we've figured it out. We set our intentions, we set our goals, and my kids kind of go after those.

Kaleena: It can be challenging. I don't want to make this sound like a fairy tale. You're going to have to invest some time in the beginning especially to figure out how it falls into an organic pattern for your lifestyle, but it will. Its going to take some trial and error, but you're going to start to see like, oh my son, he works so well in the computer, like going through we use Time for Learning as a curriculum program that I use, and I have two kids that really excel in it. They go through all their work, they check all the boxes, they love what they're learning, they change up what they want to learn, like math and science.

Kaleena: Then I have one who does not like learning on a computer right now. It makes her super uncomfortable and so we have worksheets. It takes, learn what that style is and then all the work is going to be done for you.

Aaron: When it comes to the difference in ages, too, there's also group projects.

Kaleena: Yes.

Aaron: There's gonna be group projects all together with all three of them are going to work together and sometimes they'll even bring their two year old brother into the mix, and the coolest thing about group projects at different ages and different abilities, that is way more real world experience.

Kaleena: Yep.

Aaron: Way more real world example. So if you give the three of them a project, we go, hey we want you guys to research this and give us a report on it. When they do it, each of them is gonna do it a little bit different. Each of them is gonna focus on the thing that they're good at. So the ones that really like typing and doing the computer, they're gonna type into the computer, and the ones that like drawing are going to draw, and the ones that like to do the research... so there's a lot group projects, too, and as an extra side benefit of the group project, is the kids start teaching each other.

Aaron: Our oldest daughter starts teaching our youngest daughter, re-explaining - and because she's closer in age, she might even be better at explaining it than we are.

Kaleena: Yeah.

Aaron: She remembers how it recently clicked for her. So having various kids in all different ages and different levels, there's actually a huge benefit to that, too. When they do different projects, they'll go off and do it all by themselves with no interaction and they'll learn from each other and really get to build off each other as well.

Shane: So this is also, you keep saying unschooling and deschooling, it's kind of unparenting, because you can't - I can't look at my kid, he's a fourth grader, as the government told me he was, and she's a second grader, as the government told... it's more like, no, we're learning.

Kaleena: Right.

Aaron: Great point, yeah. It's a totally different goal in mind now.

Kaleena: Right.

Shane: That's amazing. Alright let's see. Would you read that?

Jocelyn: Yeah. It's like on a small writing

Shane: Jocelyn's gonna help me out here.

Jocelyn: Alright, Samantha would like to know -

Shane: Samantha

Jocelyn: What do I do on the tough days when homeschooling is just not working? Do I stick to the routine or do I give up and try again tomorrow?

Kaleena: You give up and you try again tomorrow, and you don't give up in a bad way, you go do something fun. You go for a nature walk, you get out of the house, take them to a movie at 11 o'clock in the afternoon when nobody's there, you lean in to the good stuff. You lean in to why you homeschool, and you throw whatever that plan was completely out the window. Because I promise it'll come back tomorrow and you'll have a fresh mind, and it'll be better than it was gonna be if you just sit there and try to force it.

Aaron: One of the biggest points was getting the best time of the day back with our kids.

Kaleena: Yeah.

Aaron: We didn't like the time when we were conflicted with them, we wanted it when it was fun. So it's not fun and its not exciting, go do something else. A quick little added benefit, homeschoolers, you don't go out on the weekends, because everybody does. We go do stuff on Tuesday.

Kaleena: Yeah.

Aaron: Just like entrepreneurs, we go out on Tuesday and Thursday when everything's closed and everybody's in school. You go to the theme parks when everybody else is in school and you have the theme park to yourself.

Shane: Have you watched our videos? Have you seriously because you're saying the same things we do.

Jocelyn: We are so spoiled now, so when we go places with other people we have to go on the weekends because that's when they can go, and then when we go places we're just like, "This is terrible."

Shane: Why do we travel on Saturdays?

Aaron: Because there's other people in here right now.

Shane: We went to an indoor water park one time, we went on a Thursday. We were in this massive indoor water park, there's probably 20 lifeguards, and us. Nobody else was there, we were just like, "Wave pool is ours!"

Kaleena: "It's ours!"

Kaleena: Yeah. Absolutely. We love it.

Aaron: Its the same thing, the way that we do homeschooling is what we learned in entrepreneurship and applying it to our kids' education.

Shane: Alright so, okay this one I kind of consolidated this. But there was a conversation that I thought was interesting that I wanted you guys to comment on, so Kim said on our Facebook page, she was a homeschooler, she said, "I did a lot wrong in the beginning, but I will never regret a minute of it." And then Brant came in and asked Kim, he said, "What's the biggest thing you did wrong?" And Kim said, "I think I didn't put enough focus on math and science, my son loved arts, English, and history and I do, too. So I often avoided the subjects that I was not very good at. I think this made him a little weak in math when he did decide to go to college," because they do make you, in college, do liberal arts, you're doing a little bit of everything in the beginning. She said he did fine, but he ended up being a copywriter so it doesn't matter, he doesn't use math much anyways.

Shane: So the question here would boil down to, how do you give your kids that broad opportunity -

Jocelyn: A well-rounded education.

Shane: I don't want to - and how do you keep yourself from avoiding exposing them to stuff? I guess letting your own biases into the education.

Kaleena: Yeah.

Aaron: So, we'll say that sometimes one of our kids could go months of doing just math and no reading and English, and they're allowed to do that. And they might go two months of doing just science and not doing any math. And then the idea is then they're going to learn the most efficient because when they do go back to math its because they want to, and they're excited.

Aaron: I also totally get her question and her comment of saying, hey they took some time off from math and then when he needed it he was a little behind. When you're at the end of her story it doesn't really seem like it hurt him that much, and it also depends on, as you get older you have to plan a little bit. If going to college is the end goal then as they get a little older having to do a little bit more focus. I could see that.

Aaron: So much of it is, you kind of adjust. What do you think?

Kaleena: I think it's really important to remember, I always go back to a story of when it comes to reading. Because we didn't used to start teaching kids to read until they were like seven or eight. And now in most public school systems we really start focusing on like, four and five year olds to start teaching them sight words and vocabulary. And then I hear stories of people that grow up as homeschooling or in these Acton type schools, some of them don't learn how to read until they're eight, nine. I've heard of ten year olds that are still learning how to read because it just wasn't something that they were interested in.

Kaleena: That kid that didn't learn to read until they were 10 became just as successful if not more successful by the time they were 18 as the person who learned how to read when they were five. I think it's really important, when you are ready to learn something and you're going to need that, that is something that is going to take you further in life, you will go after learning that like you've never gone after something.

Kaleena: So when he learned, hey I need to know this math to get through this class, then he probably went over into that math with, like, okay I have a goal now to pass this class and learn this math. Until then, why would he have learned that? He didn't need than until up to that point.

Shane: There's also a reckless question behind that, the real question here is how can I prepare my kid for every situation they will ever get in in college?

Kaleena: You can't.

Shane: You can't. When I took Asian history class, I was a history major, and I took Asian history. The only thing I knew about Asian history going into it was that the Chinese had a revolution and that the Japanese were an axis power. That was it, know what I'm saying?

Kaleena: Yeah.

Shane: I had no reason to learn that, but I figured it out and I made an A. You can't prepare for everything even if it is something you love, so why are we trying to prepare them for every single situation, calculus and all this stuff anyway?

Kaleena: The other thing I'm sure you know and that you've learned is we learn all of this stuff, but we don't actually remember or retain a lot of the stuff that we are taught. I find myself relearning so many things right now as I'm going through it with my kids, because I never used it, it didn't bring a lot of value to my life, or whatever it is.

Kaleena: Really learning in the moment when that's gonna bring the most value to my life, I need to know this type of map so that I can build this business, or make this demo, or whatever it is. I need to know this because it's going to make me more successful, then you're going to learn that with such a passion that it's ingrained in you at that point.

Jocelyn: It reminds me, the other day, my fourth grader. He was learning about the types of rock, or something, and I'm just like, "Why do we need to know this?"

Shane: Somebody needs to know that.

Jocelyn: Yeah, geologists need to know that.

Kaleena: Right, yes.

Aaron: Building on top of the rock...

Jocelyn: But when have you ever needed to know about metamorphic rock or sedimentary rock? Have you ever needed to know that?

Shane: I don't-

Aaron: In fourth grade you especially don't.

Jocelyn: Right.

Kaleena: He totally doesn't.

Jocelyn: I was looking at that page and he was upset because he got a bad grade on it, and I'm like, "Who cares?" This doesn't even matter.

Shane: I thought about this the other day. When Isaac was struggling with area and perimeter, I was sitting there thinking, "My job every day as a communicator and a wordsmith, that's pretty much what I do - I write emails, I write ad copy, I create courses, I communicate on our podcast. We built this deck out here, we were trying to figure out how big and what dimensions...

Jocelyn: And by we, we don't mean we.

Shane: And I was like, I thought to myself, "I don't know how to do this, I don't remember." I could probably look it up on Google and figure it out, but I was like, "No I'm gonna hire this dude name Jeff." And Jeff came and built my deck, and I never did anything with the deck until I walked out and walked on the deck.

Shane: Like you said, do we need foundational skills? I think we all agree, yes.

Kaleena: Yes, absolutely.

Shane: Reading, math, the fundamentals - we need those. But these advanced concepts, as we keep branching out we don't need to all learn all the things.

Kaleena: Absolutely.

Aaron: Yep.

Kaleena: And jumping on to your deck story just really quick, if you wanted to build the deck, let's say you couldn't financially pay somebody to do the deck, I'm gonna tell you that if you got on YouTube somebody on YouTube, maybe 500 people will teach you how to build that deck, and you will learn that day instead of spending six months learning area and perimeter, and all the things that you need to learn to build a deck.

Shane: Might need to learn.

Kaleena: Or that you might need to learn, you're gonna learn in real time as you're building that deck, by somebody who has built a deck before.

Jocelyn: And then you'll know problem solving skills.

Kaleena: Right.

Jocelyn: I had to learn this for this purpose, oh wait I can do that again.

Kaleena: Right.

Shane: And YouTube and access to information was not democratized a hundred years ago, or even 25 years ago when we went to school.

Kaleena: Exactly.

Shane: So it's a totally different ball game.

Kaleena: Yeah it absolutely is.

Aaron: A way to blow people's minds, which is really where it goes into you can learn it on YouTube. If you've got a 10 year old today, by the time they're 18 their average job hasn't even been invented yet. The highest paying, most common jobs that are gonna happen 5 years from now haven't even been invented yet. We're living in this crazy world but there isn't much in the way to plan, there isn't curriculum that's going to train you for the perfect job 10 years from now. Because everything's changing.

Aaron: Like, will my youngest kid ever need to know how to drive a car? Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe they'll never need to learn the skills to drive a car, but they're gonna have to have skills on a different level.

Shane: That's a good point.

Jocelyn: Alright next question is from David.

Shane: This is a really good question that I've never heard anyone address on homeschooling.

Jocelyn: Are you ready?

Kaleena: Alright let's do it.

Aaron: Alright.

Jocelyn: Okay David says, "How do you make the transition from public school to homeschool easier? It's all my kids have known. They want to homeschool but they get sad about missing teachers, friends, and I'd say even the routine they are used to. Also how do we make it easier for our kids' teachers and their friends? How do we maintain those relationships since they will no longer be in the classroom every day?

Shane: Isaac actually asked me this the other day, and we like to sprinkle it in.

Jocelyn: We planted the seeds.

Shane: So they're kind of warm to it, but he started - he got really teary eyed and he really loves his teacher, she was his third grade teacher, she moved to fourth grade and he got back in her class. So he has this really strong - and he's a really empathetic, passionate kid so he's attached to her and he's worried he's not gonna get to see her anymore.

Kaleena: Right, yeah.

Shane: How do you deal with those kind of issues when you're doing this?

Kaleena: I love that question and not enough people ask it. I think that for us it's just been being really intentional and also just figuring out what works best for our kids.

Kaleena: For us, Aaron coaches soccer and a lot of the kids that have been on his soccer team, the girls went to school with. So he's been coaching that soccer team for three years. When we pulled the kids out of school, they still had soccer season and a lot of their friends were still gonna be there. When we're in town, we travel a lot, a lot of our program is based on travel. But when we're at home, I'm crazy intentional on - we have an amazing church, our kids go to youth group on Wednesday night, they do their soccer practices, I set up play dates.

Kaleena: And then here's the part that people just don't like and I'm gonna be really honest about. Sometimes when you leap in another direction, change is change, and change is hard. You are going to leave behind some things that you think you need to have in your life. I will tell you that if you are following your gut, you are leaping into your life's best purpose, then you don't necessarily think you need the things you think you do. You don't need the things you think you need, necessarily.

Aaron: And now you get to choose, so there's probably 10 or 15 kids they hang out with at school, and there's 5 that they hang out with that they kind of like, and there's another 5 they like, and there's 5 they're really gonna miss. Well now they can actually focus their interaction on just spending time with the ones they were really gonna miss. Now you can set up those play dates and set up those activities, so they get more real experiences with the ones they care the most about.

Aaron: People will say like, "Aren't you gonna be weird? Isn't that gonna be different how you do it socially?" And we like to challenge them and say you know, I graduated from high school with the same kids I went to kindergarten with. From a small town in Oregon, so I knew everybody for 18 years and then when I went off to college, I didn't know anyone. I didn't know how to meet people.

Aaron: They talk about how, what really is normal or what really is healthy? So some people say your social relationships as a homeschooler are not healthy, and we would probably argue that the way the traditional school is set up, that relationship is unhealthy. You're forced who you hang out with, forced who your friends are, forced to where you're gonna socialize. And the teacher that he really likes, I'm sure there's a way you can find time, and the friends they really like, but you will have to be intentional for the ones that are really important. There will be some other that you're like, oh we thought that was gonna be important.

Aaron: One of our daughters is super social, would love to hang out with her friends all the time, and the other ones, she would be the one that needed more play dates, and then two of them that didn't need as many play dates.

Shane: That's amazing. We tell our kids all the time, and it remind me of a real life example of this. When we started this online business, and when I was about to quit my job, I had a really weird dynamic because I was the defensive coordinator on the high school football team, and I had to go tell my principal that I was quitting my teaching job that day. But then my head coach, I had to tell him, "Hey bro I ain't leaving I'm staying for the season. I'm not gonna leave these kids, I'm not gonna leave you." It was just weird. I had to come to school every day, I had already quit. And all these - just weird.

Shane: But I remember, he got really really sad and he was like, "Man it just sucks because I love being around you," because I live 30 minutes from that school, he says, "I know we're not gonna be around each other." This is my friend, the guy that hired me, got me the job, said this to me, and it's so funny that that is true. Those were great moments of my life, sitting around the locker room, winning ball games on Friday with that guy. Our families knew each other. And honestly I don't think I've seen him twice in the last six years since we left that moment, and really in the last four years probably not one.

Shane: It's not like that's diminished, how good that moment was in my life. And it does stink a little bit that we don't get to hang out, but I would never change what we did, because we got so much more for us on the other end of it. That's just part of life and you gotta deal with it, sorry.

Kaleena: It is.

Kaleena: Yeah, it is.

Kaleena: Right well there is that, nothing changes if nothing changes. I do want to tell one story because it is so important, because I think parents think their kids need 30 friends or whatever and that their kids actually crave that. Something that happened for us, I don't share this very often, but something that happened for us is after we left the school our oldest would get invited over to a slumber party or to a birthday party, and all of her friends from her class were gonna be there.

Kaleena: And I'm like, "oh this perfect, this is exactly what she needs, she's gonna be with her peers again." And after a couple months Maddy got really comfortable with me and she goes, "I don't want to go to that slumber party. I like that girl, and that girl's really nice, but the other girls that are at that party, they don't make me feel good about myself, or they're not the type of person that I want to be." And all of the sudden my daughter got to measure her friendships and she got to choose the people that were gonna be in her life, and that was a freedom that our kids usually don't get.

Kaleena: Where you think maybe you're doing a disadvantage to your kid by pulling them out and they're not gonna be with all their friends, you don't actually know how your kid feels about all those kids. When you get to selectively choose the people and the influences that you put in your life, I know as adults and as entrepreneurs you do that, you hang out with winners, I know you choose positive people in your life the same way that we do. That is the freedom we need to be giving our kids. It's one of the biggest things that school completely takes away from them.

Shane: That's mind blowing.

Shane: Our next question comes from Jeff.

Jocelyn: Jeff says, "I've seen a lot of homeschool families get judged for the decision by their friends, family, and even other kids. This worries me. Will my child, or even me, be excluded for our decision? How can we avoid that?"

Jocelyn: Good question. I don't want my kids to be outcasts and frankly I don't want to be judged, I don't know how you deal with that part of the decision.

Jocelyn: I laugh because we get this question all the time.

Kaleena: My only answer is go scared. You go. If those people are gonna be judging you and telling you you shouldn't be doing that, do you really want those people in your life? Where is your group of people that are raising you up because you're homeschooling? Where are the other entrepreneurs? Where are the people that are going against the grain? If you want to do something different, then you're gonna have to be something different. Not everybody's gonna like that or agree with that.

Aaron: And at the same time, homeschooling is now, its not what it was ten years ago. Its definitely not what it was 20 years ago. There are more and more cool people that do this as their lifestyle and they love their life. Any decision that we make in life, we do get people that are gonna push back and not... so yes you have to be questioned on what's more important.

Kaleena: Yeah.

Aaron: And for the people that that's more important then they'll stay with that.

Jocelyn: Those bold decisions like that, like for us quitting our job, taking our kids out of school, doing something different that is not what society typically does, you're always gonna get some kind of push back from that. There's no way to avoid that.

Shane: Its kind of like, too, I heard this really harsh criticism, I can't remember who said it, but it was - oh I know who it was it was Brendon Burchard I was at a Brendon Burchard event, super positive guy motivational speaker dude. He said, and I've never heard anyone confront the audience with this, he's like, "I hate to tell you this, but if you're 35, 40, 50 years old and you're really still worried about what other people think to the point that they're stopping you, you have much deeper issues than staring a new career or homeschooling. You've gotta deal with that because it ain't about your kids, it's about your problem.

Kaleena: Yeah.

Shane: Because that's some truth. Whether it's starting your online business, quitting your job, changing careers, talking to your spouse about problems, all these things can't let the judgments of other people dictate your behavior.

Jocelyn: You just gotta rip the band aid off.

Aaron: It is a legitimate fear that stops a lot of people from homeschooling them. It is a shame to think that the fear of what other people think stop us from doing them. But its very valid, we get it.

Shane: Alright, we got two more questions. The first one comes from Darren. I'm very interested in this one.

Shane: What about sports? Won't my kids miss out on opportunities to play team sports or get athletic scholarship opportunities?

Shane: Also what about things you can only get in high school, like prom? School Spirit? Will my kids be connected to the community? Those unique things that are coming of age experiences that come from school.

Aaron: It was two different questions, sports and then the -

Kaleena: You take sports.

Aaron: The sports one is actually a pretty simple answers. For us, soccer is through our city not necessarily through our school. When I was growing up there was a kid that was homeschooled that got to play on our elementary school team. So homeschoolers are allowed to play on any of the high school teams. They can try out and be a part of, in most cases, they can be a part of the bigger program. Whether its affiliated with the school or extracurricular. Where we live here, you can sign up for basketball, soccer, all sort of different sports, and its not affiliated with the school, it's affiliated with an after school program.

Kaleena: Right so you have city leagues and you have private leagues. I want to say its up to 17 states that schools have to be inclusive to homeschoolers to let them try out and be on their team. So I don't know what Kentucky is like, but I know that as a homeschooler if I want my son to play on a public school's football team then he has the right to try out.

Shane: Oh okay I see.

Kaleena: So it is like that in California and I think it's like that in 17 other states. It also changes city to city, a lot of communities embrace homeschoolers and letting them on their team. Some of them not so much.

Shane: We can't get caught up in like - that worries me a little bit, but how do you even know your kid wants to play?

Kaleena: Right.

Shane: There's very few sports that you can't do outside of that environment.

Kaleena: Right absolutely.

Shane: You're not gonna be playing on Friday nights. Football is the big one.

Kaleena: It is the big one for most people.

Shane: Associated to school. And there's not really school leagues after middle school.

Kaleena: Yeah.

Shane: Other than that scholarship thing, I was a college football coach, you have a one percent of percent chance to get a college scholarship. If that is really what's holding you back I don't know that that's even a discussion. Because its like 99.99 percent of kids won't get an athletic scholarship who actually play another sport.

Aaron: And if they're that good, extracurriculars, they'll still get it.

Kaleena: If you have a kid that's headed to the Olympics, home school them, get him in private school, let him do it six seven hours a day. Simone Biles. She was a homeschooled kid so that she could practice for seven hours a day. Her passion to become an Olympic gold. It just depends on where your kid is headed I guess.

Shane: Do you think that this is kind of an excuse that you see people make?

Kaleena: Absolutely, yeah.

Shane: Do you think people are on the verge of homeschooling and they're like, but what about the pigskin on Friday?

Kaleena: Oh right.

Aaron: We used to say it. I used to say.

Kaleena: Aaron used to say it but its less about, oh I want my kids to do it, I think it's a lot about our glory days. Our gold old days. I went to prom. I sat on the bleachers, I caused a lot of trouble in those bleachers and I was not living my best self at prom. So yes, in our head we're like those are amazing life - like you have to have those moments. Why do you have to have those moments? We take our kids to Haiti. Our kids aren't in school but we're taking our kids to Haiti. We're going to Finland and Iceland tomorrow.

Kaleena: Its about choosing what memories you want your kids to have. If getting drunk and making out with a boy is the childhood memory that they have to have then go for it. But for us I'm like, I think I can actually provide a better memory and a better thing to think back on when I was 16.

Shane: Even football, because I'm deeply ingrained in football.

Kaleena: Right, I get it.

Shane: It was my career. My life until six years ago. I even worry about this question because we put a lot of emphasis in it, and sports are important.

Jocelyn: We enjoy sports, we like to watch sports, we went to the University of Kentucky, we support University of Kentucky sports. There's a lot of influence of sports in our life and I think sometimes we find ourselves being like, our son for instance, he's not very interested in athletic things. He's just not.

Jocelyn: So we're looking at each other like, what's wrong with us? Why is he not interested in sports?

Shane: But he will go jump on a trampoline for three hours non stop. So its not, we have this inherent, you won't play a sport and therefore you're lazy and not good enough because society demands sports in America.

Kaleena: Right.

Shane: No. He will go jump on a trampoline, literally, three straight hours and sweat dripping, lost 40 pounds of water weight. That's what he was wanting to do, but I was like if you don't go do a sport people won't value you. It all goes back to status thing. Do I really want the peak of my daughter's life, or my son's life, to be man that high school team we were on my junior year was great?

Shane: Its hard to fight that because that is American culture. That's how we go to war. How do we overcome that?

Jocelyn: Sadly for a lot of people those are the best years of their life. And they look back on that and think I have to have this experience, and I'm not saying that about Darren or whoever asked this question, I'm just saying like a lot of people they were doing things that maybe they don't have the courage to do now, and they look back and think if my kids don't have this experience then they'll never have anything else to look forward to in their life.

Kaleena: Exactly.

Aaron: I was super worried about that. I used to say, many years back, we can never homeschool because high school football games. I remember being at the bleachers, and there was some stuff where we had to look back and go... Some stuff you'd be able to replace. There's some home school things out there, they'll do some dances and there's some co-ops and there's ways to have similar experiences and a lot of that stuff. But you will miss out on some of those, but are they really detrimental?

Shane: Even if it's good, who cares? Just because that was a great experience and was positive and had benefits, so are other things.

Aaron: Right, there's plenty of other stuff.

Shane: Its not like you're gonna miss out. Okay there's a hole there for four hours on Saturdays where they had to sit in a dark closet because - you know, you replace it with something beautiful.

Kaleena: Yep. Absolutely.

Shane: Okay good question. So the last question, there were a couple more but we already talked about them, this one's very interesting. Nick says, "Public school is free. What costs are involved in this? Is this going to be a burden on our limited budget?"

Shane: So what are the costs, because you keep talking about curriculum, you gotta go on trips and field trips, you gotta create experiences, let's be realistic here that takes money. Then how to manage the money part of it.

Kaleena: I love this question because just like everything else you get super creative with home school and there's some awesome opportunities out there. So most states have government run charters, and they will pay you to homeschool your child. They will give you a monthly stipend, they will pay for curriculum, they will hook you up with free curriculum, they will pay for gymnastics, they will pay for karate, they will pay for music classes, they will send your kid to crossfit. Whatever it is you can get monthly stipends to pay for curriculum and extracurriculars. Number one.

Kaleena: A lot of those programs don't have the same requirements that school does. So you're gonna hand in two or three assignments a month, so they'll allow you to have that same sort of freedom while they're paying you to facilitate for your kids. So most of the people that I coach actually close to 80 percent of them, that is the path that they take. A homeschool charter that pays a stipend.

Kaleena: Also so many of these curriculums are completely free. Anything that you want to learn you can learn online at no cost. Khan Academy is completely free and it has all educational values, literally everything that your child needs to go through even a doctorate. I'm not even exaggerating. Listen to Sau Khan's Ted Talk, so good. Mind blowing. I have my kids on a curriculum for Time for Learning, it's like 10 dollars a month.

Kaleena: When it comes to travel, travel is a part of our five hour school week. It doesn't have to be everybody's. We have families that farm, and that's why they're doing the five hour school week, because their kids work with them every day. It just depends on your lifestyle what you plan on doing with it. You can really do it for less money than what it's taking you to drive your kids to and from school. I know a lot of people actually homeschool because financially it sets them up better.

Aaron: Yeah.

Shane: There's expectations too, right?

Kaleena: Yes.

Shane: Like I shouldn't compare my kids' homeschool to yours, you shouldn't compare yours to mine.

Kaleena: No.

Shane: And no one should... everybody has to create their own experiences anyway. So its just making it work for you.

Kaleena: Absolutely.

Aaron: And we aren't through one of those charters that reimburses us, but only because we knew that we'd be pretty extreme being able to even follow into the stuff that they needed for us. But our expenses was buying each of the girls 150 dollar laptop, and making sure they had headphones, and then the monthly costs of 50, 60 dollars a month for the different curriculums. And then there's different times that yes we'll go spend more on craft projects and different things, but I love your comparison for a similar amount of what it was costing to drive to and from school and pay on school events too.

Jocelyn: Yes, and I was gonna say at the fundraisers, all that mess, the book fairs, all these little extra things that you pay for all the time in school, you're not gonna be paying for that anymore. I think that it could even out.

Jocelyn: In our district, there's a program that we're looking into, we don't know much about it yet, but I think we pay 50 dollars a month per child and we get access to a teacher one day every week and we also get access to all of their software that they have. So I think that's a pretty good deal. We're gonna go talk to them about it and find out more information and what the requirements are.

Jocelyn: Just look in your local area, there probably are opportunities, you may just not know about them.

Shane: You don't know what you don't know.

Kaleena: Exactly.

Shane: We could all sit here and say this looks expensive. But that's only because you've never looked at it. When you start looking at it, it changes the whole dynamic and what you said earlier, there's your zero time replacement. There's the two hours getting the kids to and from school, that just becomes two hours of time that I work with the to help them. We're all together anyway, same thing.

Shane: Same thing with the money, you think well that's gonna cost me 100 dollars a month, but then you realize I'm already spending $250 because of that book order, and because of this, and because of that. You're just not comparing apples to apples really when you look at it that way.

Kaleena: Yeah. It's totally different. And it doesn't have to be expensive at all.

Shane: Well listen, we have taken up a lot of your time.

Aaron: This is our longest podcast by far.

Shane: I had a feeling. I think we just recorded two podcasts actually, so we may make this a two parter.

Jocelyn: Yeah this is our longest podcast, too.

Shane: I think it is.

Kaleena: Oh my goodness.

Shane: I knew this was gonna go this way when we were talking off air before we started recording, because I just felt the Flipped Lifestyle spirit in you guys. You're doing the homeschool thing for the right reason. There's so much embroiled in the argument of should I send my kids to school? Is homeschool better? Are charter schools better? There's so much political and all kinds of overtones on the discussion that it's just amazing to hear reasons why you should think about it. And hear some truth spoken to the argument of is this right for my family?

Shane: It may not be, that's not the point of this podcast, to convince anyone that they should do it. I have a friend, I told her we were gonna do this podcast today, and she said, "You know we've really considered it, we explored it, we tried it with one of our daughters." And they went the private school route, they just felt like that was better for them at this time.

Shane: That's cool, but at least we're thinking about it. Right?

Kaleena: Right.

Shane: Like what is the best for our kids and our family? That's really what we're all trying to do. I just really appreciate you guys writing this book. That's why it's so important, back to our podcast listeners, oh my gosh why are you not creating something that someone else needs? Because you can't have this discussion and think these processes through unless people are out there creating and being entrepreneurial and sharing what they know with the world like you guys are doing.

Jocelyn: There's somebody who needs your information, there's someone who needs Kaleena and Aaron's information. There's someone who needs your information.

Shane: Nobody's got it all figured it out. Everybody always asks us that, "How'd y'all figure everything out?" And I'm like, "We don't, that's why we're reaching out to people the write books." There's always something we all don't know, it's just amazing that you guys are doing this and helping people in this space.

Aaron: Well thanks. It's how it all started. Kaleena was just doing pictures and videos and people just kept asking her questions. Like, "Hey what are you doing?" And its like, "You know what we gotta write this stuff down."

Aaron: We'd love for people to come follow along, be able to either find us online with social media. You read the first chapter or two and said "Hey this was our life," this morning. If they go to our website, if they go to five hour school week and join our mailing list, they'll get that first chapter emailed to them. Its a quick 20 minute read and they'll get to decide, do I want to learn more about this or not? It's a pretty fun, exciting first couple chapters.

Shane: Is it five like the number five or the word five?

Aaron: We were so worried about that we got both, so they go to the same place.

Shane: There you go.

Kaleena: Yeah.

Aaron: Fivehourschoolweek.com, join the mailing list, study the first couple chapters of the book and hopefully the love it as much as you guys did. We're so glad you read it and reached out and we're so excited about it.

Shane: I just want to say, we don't recommend anything to anybody.

Jocelyn: Very rarely.

Shane: And you are the second guest ever on the show, and I would highly recommend everyone view their work. We will never receive any benefit from this, but you guys might receive a great benefit for you and your family.

Shane: Thank you guys so much for being on the show. Thanks everybody for listening in, we hope that this was a good episode for you guys. Til next time, do whatever it takes you flip your life.

Jocelyn: Bye.

Kaleena: Bye.

Aaron: Bye.

Links and resources mentioned on today’s show: * The 5 Hour School Week by Aaron & Kaleena Amuchastegui * Flip Your Life LIVE 2019 Waiting List * Flip Your Life community 30-day trial

Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!

Get your FREE 30-DAY Membership in the Flip Your Life Community NOW!

– https://flippedlifestyle.com/free

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Hey Y’all, welcome to another Flipped Lifestyle Podcast Q&A w/ S&J!

In the Flip Your Life Community, we hold a members-only Q&A twice a month where we answer online business questions of our members live on air!

Today’s Q&A highlights answer the following questions: Question One:

"I'm a Certified Infant and Child Sleep Consultant and I have a membership to help parents get their little ones asleep for babies ages 4 months to 5 years. Many parents have asked me to create a program for newborn babies. My main concern with doing a sleep program for newborns is that I can't really talk about results in a black and white manner, the way I talk about results for older kids because they're newborns. While there's lots that parents can do to establish healthy sleep habits from day 1, there's still so much in the air when dealing with newborns. So a parent could easily purchase this newborn sleep program, follow everything, and still not see any results. If I were to move forward with this product, how should I take this concern into account?"

Question Two:

"I'm thinking about downsizing my job to help free up more time to focus on this community and my online business. Thoughts?"

Question Three:

"Do you have any tips for how to approach people to become a podcast guest?"

Success stories mentioned on today's podcast: "First I want to give a huge thank you to Shane and Jocelyn for all of the hard work they put into FYL Live. It was at this event that I was able to finally see the mission and vision for my business clearly. Once I got clarity on these important foundations everything started to click. Before I even left the live event I put together a plan for promoting my online membership community. For 3 days in a row I promoted it and I created more than $800 in new membership sales in just 10 days after the event." - Amanda

CLICK HERE to get your FREE 30-DAY Membership in the Flip Your Life Community NOW!

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In today's episode, we help Christal take her virtual assistant business to the next level.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jocelyn Sams: Hey y'all, on today's podcast, we help Christal take her virtual assistant business to the next level.

Shane Sams: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast where life always comes before work. We're your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams.

Shane Sams: We're a real family who figured out how to make our entire living online. Now we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? All right, let's get started.

Shane Sams: What is going on everybody, welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. It is great to be back with you again today. We're super excited to have another member of the Flip Your Life community on the show so that we can help them take their business and their dreams to the next level. Our guest today is Christal Allen Harrahill. Christal, welcome to the show.

Christal H.: Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Jocelyn Sams: It is great to talk to you, we saw you not too long ago at Flip Your Life live, which was awesome. If you've watched our highlight video, you may even see me chatting with Christal a little bit at the event. So definitely look for that. But yes, it is great to have you, we are really excited to talk to you today.

Shane Sams: How awesome was Flip Your Life Live by the way, was that not amazing?

Christal H.: It really was, I was so amazed at the organization of it and how much I actually got done while at the event. I've been to a lot of conferences in the past and that was rare.

Shane Sams: Yeah, we tried to make it a working event because we looked back at all the live events we had ever been to when we were planning and creating Flip Your Life live. That was what we said to ourselves, we looked at each other and we're like, man if you don't get anything done, what's the point, you're just going to a party, and you can have a party at the house.

Jocelyn Sams: Exactly, I mean it's nice to get all the information, but then if you don't do anything with it, what was the point.

Christal H.: Exactly.

Shane Sams: We were talking before we actually started recording. We just released the highlight reel for Flip Your Life Live, which you might have seen that on social media or somewhere out there in the internet sphere. But we were talking about how we got emotional, 'cause we were like oh, I miss everybody. Like it was so fun, like where is everybody.

Shane Sams: So luckily there will be another Flip Your Life Family Reunion next year, we'll be all over that.

Christal H.: And the food was amazing by the way, I'm still missing that hot chicken.

Shane Sams: Oh man, we're southern people, and when we get that southern food going, we're not holding back.

Jocelyn Sams: When you come to a live event in the south, you've gotta have some good southern food.

Shane Sams: Yeah, you're not just getting wraps from some takeout joint. We're going southern fried chicken and hot chicken, all that good stuff.

Jocelyn Sams: So if you come for nothing else, come for the food okay.

Shane Sams: We actually went before we planned the event. We drove down there to taste the food.

Jocelyn Sams: Because it was very important to me. When we went down there, I was like there will be no frozen biscuits or nothing from a mix. These things have gotta be homemade. Some of these people have never had biscuits before.

Christal H.: That's right.

Shane Sams: The chef that ran the hotel, he's like, you want me to do what. I'm like we want grandmamma's southern biscuits, you are not a grandmother, he was a dude. I was like, you're not a grandmother, but I want it to taste like my grandmamma made them biscuits.

Jocelyn Sams: And y'all I got a good southern pallet here okay, you better be making those biscuits from scratch, and they had better be appropriately salted and they better be good.

Shane Sams: So the dude walks out in the thing and his first try at a grandmamma southern biscuit. He actually made this, looked like a cake, it was like as big as my head. He made this giant biscuit and he was like, I was just trying to mess around and get it right. Then he made like some other biscuits at the thing.

Shane Sams: But he had made this huge biscuit, he was like man I never made a biscuit like that before. He got it right though.

Jocelyn Sams: We actually went down there, we drove four hours to taste these biscuits.

Shane Sams: We drove four hours to taste the biscuits.

Jocelyn Sams: To make sure they're all right. Well that's a lot of talk about biscuits.

Shane Sams: Let's drag it back around here. You wanna try a Flip Your Life biscuit, you gotta be at Flip Your Life live next year.

Jocelyn Sams: We gotta bring it next year, we gotta make sure these are good again.

Shane Sams: I know right.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay, well I'm sure the listeners would like to hear about something more than southern biscuits. So let's start talking a little bit about you. Let us know who you are and a little bit about your background and what you are doing right now online.

Christal H.: Well, my story really begins in my previous career in higher education. Towards the end, I found myself driving myself to the emergency room for the second time in two years. That really was my wake up call. I was under a lot of stress and I just found myself in a toxic situation. Not to say anything bad about higher ed, it was just a very specific situation.

Christal H.: I love higher education, I'm always an advocate for it. But that really was my wake up call that I had to make a change, and I had been feeling that it was no longer a good fit for me anyhow. I've always wanted to be in business. So I took a step out on faith, and I started a personal concierge business, where I would literally drive around town and take kids to ballet practice, drop off dry cleaning, and then I also had a client who was in town, but I worked for him virtually.

Christal H.: So after a couple of months, almost nine months of doing the business as I just described, I realized that the driving around part of it wasn't really the best way to make money. I decided to transition that to where I only work virtually so I could stay in one location and serve a lot more clients. My general virtual assistant business was then born. But as I just mentioned, it was general, and I served a lot of different clients, I had a personal chef, I had a virtual CFO, I had franchise consultants that I served and it was a great learning lesson, but I finally came to the realization after a lot of research and soul searching that I really needed to niche down. That came in the form of serving realtors and managing their transactions.

Christal H.: That's what my virtual assistant business looks like today, and in the meantime, I also married my neighbor and had a baby.

Shane Sams: Throw that in there, just some minor stuff by the way.

Christal H.: Just the minor things, you know.

Shane Sams: Did you say you married your neighbor?

Christal H.: I did, my husband and I, it was just one house in between us and we lived next to each other for six years without paying attention to each other.

Shane Sams: One day I went to a barbecue and there was Jim standing there and I said hey, I should have married you. That's a crazy story, how did you guys meet?

Christal H.: He sent me, I guess he noticed me walking my dog every now and again, then one day our street was repaved and we all had to park like a couple blocks away and we found ourselves walking next to each other. Then probably about a couple months later, I came home from work and found a basket on my door and it was a gift basket from him. It was like fruits and nuts and sweets and I went next door to thank him and it started from there.

Jocelyn Sams: The rest is history.

Christal H.: The rest is history.

Jocelyn Sams: Well at least he didn't tell you his printer was broken because that's bad news. Avoid those weirdos.

Shane Sams: Yeah that's how I got Jocelyn to hang out with me.

Christal H.: Oh, that's how you got Jocelyn.

Shane Sams: She was walking in the dorm and I saw her and I was like whoa, that girls' ... she was walking up the stairs and I was walking down the stairs. I was like holy smokes that girl's good looking and what's your name Jocelyn. I was going out with my friends and she was going up to her room and I didn't get to talk to her there. I left and I couldn't stop thinking about her and then a few days later she walked like into the dorm. So we did the classic hey, what's your major and all that good stuff.

Shane Sams: She goes computer science, and I'm like, my printer is broken, you're a computer person, you should come and fix this for me. But she got in the room and the printer worked. It was broken, but I thought-

Christal H.: But you were quick on your feet with that answer, that was pretty good.

Shane Sams: But moving on, I'm glad you threw Jim in there as a p.s., that whole story.

Jocelyn Sams: All right, and you've got a new baby, which is awesome.

Shane Sams: That's awesome.

Christal H.: Yes.

Shane Sams: Let me ask you a couple follow up questions real quick. What was the stress and the health problem. Was it a panic attack, or like what.

Christal H.: It exactly was that and I had never had one before. So if you've ever had one before, you think you're having a heart attack. The chest pain is intense and I was driving home from choir practice, and I had almost made it home and was literally like a couple miles away from the nearest hospital and I ended up calling my grandmother and just saying hey just stay on the phone with me until I make it to the hospital.

Christal H.: But yeah, it was a situation where I basically just, like I said it was toxic and I really at that point in my career hadn't really learned to use all of the maybe the resources and tools at my disposal, and didn't really have the support system that I needed to get help in that situation and didn't really ask for it as much as I should have. It was tough, it was really tough.

Shane Sams: It's amazing what we do to ourselves in the modern world like falling into societies norms and getting in lock step and doing these things where we push and we push and we push and we push ourselves until the point where we literally get sick. We feel like we're dying and it's all because of stress. It's because we get so caught up in the momentum that we can't stop ourselves and we feel out of control.

Shane Sams: I was reading a book the other day and it was talking about how in the modern world we're so stressed all the time by all of the expectations and social media and the internet and all these things that are really powerful tools that have made our lives better are also kind of slowly killing us because no matter how good we do, we can now see people all over the world.

Shane Sams: So we will always be able to find someone doing better, which makes us feel worse and gives us more stress and then all of a sudden we have a panic attack and it was talking about how the stress hormone cortisol that we're all releasing into our bodies more often than we ever have in human history. That's what makes you old, and that's what makes your body fail, and it's just all because of this crazy rat race that we put ourselves in. Even in the last 25 years because of how fast society works now.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah I saw this quote on Facebook actually this morning. One of my friends has posted it and it said, survival mode is supposed to be a phase that helps save your life. It is not meant to be how you live.

Christal H.: Oh wow, that's powerful.

Shane Sams: How many people right now listening to this podcast are just living in survival mode every day of their life. That's what me and Jocelyn have really talked about a lot lately with our mission for Flipped Lifestyle.

Shane Sams: It's always been about online business and then it expanded past that. Things like even service based businesses like you're doing with this personal concierge, this virtual assistant stuff. But really it's just about taking control of your life and being able to work for yourself, work from home, and get some of that life back so you can live a few hours a day not stressed out. Not freaked out by everything because if you don't ... if it doesn't kill you, it's at least gonna make your life miserable. That's not good because we only have one life.

Christal H.: Amen.

Shane Sams: This personal concierge business, this is brilliant. You're amazing, ever since the first time I ever talked to you. We had a coaching call a few months ago and even just me seeing you in the forums and your posts, it's amazing what you did to build to the point you are now. You said this is too stressful, you're in higher education, it's probably a pretty good job.

Christal H.: Right.

Shane Sams: You got benefits, you got things like that, it's not like you were digging ditches. But it's the same thing for us. We had good education jobs, tenured, all that good stuff. But you said this is too much and then you went and you invented this job. This personal concierge where you're literally doing these errands for people, but you built a business out of it.

Shane Sams: So many people want to jump straight to the full blown like impressive income and it's all perfect. But you're like no, I'm gonna create something new, I'm gonna get in my car and drive around. My dad always told me if the economy ever went bad, he's like we'll just start washing people's cars. We'll go to people who still have jobs, and we'll wash their car right in the parking lot. We'll bring a bucket of water with us.

Jocelyn Sams: Sometimes we'll play that game. We'll be like if everything falls apart, what will we do. We just kind of play that game, there's no way we could go back to regular jobs now.

Shane Sams: Oh no.

Christal H.: Same here.

Shane Sams: But like you just invented this thing, but then you evolved it, and you went to the next level and you said okay, now I'm gonna be a virtual assistant. How did you find gigs for that, 'cause I'm sure there's a lot of people out there that are like hey, I can do that, I can be a personal concierge or I could be a virtual assistant. Did you go to Upwork or other places like that to find gigs?

Christal H.: No I didn't learn about Upwork until some years later, oddly enough. So I just networked within the city. So even though I knew I wanted to work virtually, yeah, I networked locally. I went to Chamber of Commerce and other ... yeah-

Shane Sams: It's a hustle.

Christal H.: Meetup and other networking events and just-

Shane Sams: See man, there's so many people listening to this right now and if Christal's not your role model at this point of the podcast, I don't know what you're listening to because you're sitting there listening going, man I wish I could change my life. But I don't know what my digital product would be.

Shane Sams: Well, how about don't do a digital product. Go to the Chamber of Commerce, or go up and down Main Street, knock on every door and be like hey, is there anything you'd like to outsource to me, I'll even pick up your dry cleaning.

Christal H.: Yeah.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, you know we're trying to talk about this more and more now because I feel like this idea of "passive income" has become so romanticized, especially in this space. People have this, I don't know, like vision of going to sleep and making millions of dollars overnight while they're asleep.

Shane Sams: I'm sure somebody's doing that.

Jocelyn Sams: While that is possible-

Shane Sams: Like it or not.

Jocelyn Sams: While it is possible, like it's not the only way to make things work.

Christal H.: That's right.

Jocelyn Sams: I just love what you're doing and I love that message that if you really want to make something change badly enough, you'll make it happen.

Shane Sams: Yeah, I actually told a guy the other day, we were talking to ... he was trying to get to that point where he had some things he wanted to do. He's one of our all access mastermind clients, and he had this big thing he wanted to do and he wanted to get there and he wanted to choose his life. That's kind of where you are now, you're kind of like man, I've got some choices now, because I put in all this work. Because I went through this process.

Shane Sams: I've got this online business idea, I've got this expansion idea, I've got an idea or two to create some passive income and start scaling. He wanted to get to that point, but he wanted to skip all those things you've already been through Christal, like me and Jocelyn have already been through.

Shane Sams: I told him during our first session, I said, until you change your life, you don't get to choose your life.

Christal H.: I love that.

Shane Sams: That's what you did, you said, I'm dying from stress, and I've gotta make a change. So you physically went out and hustled your way into a change. Then you changed it again to make it even better, and now all of a sudden these choices are opening up before you, but it didn't happen until you made that decision to change, and change your life and do something different.

Christal H.: It really didn't, and there were times where I thought, is this really gonna go anywhere, and it was definitely scary to transition to working just virtually, because I wasn't connected to the online virtual world the way that I am now. I didn't have a Rolodex of people to reach out to, so you're right, I really did have to go out there and hustle.

Christal H.: It ended up with me eventually working as Natalie Egdall's executive assistant, and then through her I heard of you and Jocelyn and then got connected with you, and then used your tools and the membership community and the live event to help my dream of helping other people do what I do.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay, so lets sort of walk down this path a little bit. So we've told this story of you had a bad experience in your work, you started doing some side jobs like in real life. Kind of branched out into the virtual world, and so where are you today. What iteration has this taken now?

Christal H.: Sure, so right now I still have my virtual assistant business where I serve only realtors, and I have six clients that I serve and I do that by managing their transactions. Then obviously I'm working, my side hustle is building the membership community for virtual assistants who find themselves not being able to have enough hours because they're general and they haven't really looked at a specific industry. So I can help them learn how to get in this business of serving realtors.

Christal H.: Then also, working with stay-at-home moms who want to bring in income into their home or maybe they just want more than the title of mom. Sometimes I think women, we feel bad for wanting that. I wanna encourage women that you can do work that matters and have some self-fulfillment in addition to being a wonderful mom.

Shane Sams: Yeah, for sure. I love the way you've niched down because a lot of people do wanna be a virtual assistant, there's a million different ways to be a virtual assistant. We have virtual assistants that are editing our podcast, we have an administrative virtual assistant who's like our right hand woman, and she's making everything happen behind the scenes.

Shane Sams: We've had project managers, we've had all these people who work for us virtually, and I love even, like you think well how is Christal only gonna serve realtors. Well there's 1.1 million licensed realtors in the United States, according to this thing I just pulled up.

Christal H.: You got that right Shane, that's right.

Shane Sams: You only need like 10 of them.

Jocelyn Sams: And it's a really good living.

Christal H.: This is true.

Shane Sams: Like this is an awesome thing, and also it's controllable. That's the difference in the economy now and in the past is, you had to go to work for somebody 40 hours a week in the past. But you can build the life you want, like you just said, at home. Because what if you just got 10 hours a week that you were helping realtors and it helped your family move the needle a little bit financially, like you said, gave you that fulfillment.

Shane Sams: Maybe your kids are about to graduate high school, then it's wow, I can turn that into 20, 30 hours a week after they leave.

Jocelyn Sams: There are so many people out there who want to do something different, but they don't necessarily want to be a business owner. They don't necessarily want to be a CEO in charge of-

Christal H.: Right.

Jocelyn Sams: Different people. I love this because it just gives people opportunity where they might think, well there's no other opportunity out there, I have to go to this nine to five, no, there are other opportunities.

Shane Sams: Not everyone's gonna be a course teacher online. Like that's a good goal to get to, but man do not ever discount the ability to control your life through service based work on the internet.

Christal H.: Absolutely.

Shane Sams: Out of those 1.1 million realtors, I'd say some of them haven't sold anything.

Christal H.: This is true.

Shane Sams: There may be some realtors' people in the industry right now that are working in the industry and thinking wait a minute, you mean I can just serve the realtors, stay in the industry. What a selling point if you're a realtor and you're having trouble with the sales part. You know the industry, you know.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah.

Shane Sams: You could go serve them through their transactions.

Christal H.: That's right.

Shane Sams: In any niche you're in, there's some way to serve someone virtually. With the marketplaces we have now, like Upwork.com and things like that, that's a great entryway into online business and building your own thing. You're awesome Christal, so.

Jocelyn Sams: Well we're very excited about this subject. Like I said, we're rally trying to talk more about services and less about just things that are, I guess you would say intangible.

Shane Sams: Also, the combination of the two, which is where we're getting to in your business like you've done the service thing. You're not gonna stop just doing the service thing, but you have this education thing now where you can help other people do what you're doing, you can help them make money like this virtually through these real estate offices. That's where your courses and stuff are going now online, correct.

Christal H.: That's correct.

Shane Sams: Okay, Christal, tell us a little bit about what your product offering looks like right now.

Christal H.: Sure, so right now I have a couple ways that people can work with me. They can work with me through a strategy session, where I take 45 minutes of their time, and we take a deep dive into their business and they leave with an action plan. Or what they can do is work with me through my membership community, which is where I have the TC, which is the transaction coordinator, master class located.

Christal H.: In that master class, they will, after taking that course, they will know how to start the foundational work of the actual business. Which means, how to find realtors, how to set up procedures for your business, how to charge, different documents and resources that they should use when starting their business. Checklists, community, I give bi-monthly coaching calls, so that's really the most important way that I'm excited about serving people is through the membership community. So I just need to grow that because I'm so excited about it.

Shane Sams: Okay, now have you done strategy sessions with people?

Christal H.: I have and I love them Shane.

Shane Sams: How much did that cost?

Christal H.: They're $137.

Shane Sams: Okay, that is amazing. So that's ... this is the whole gamut of nine to five to hustle and grind in a service based thing, to learning how to do it and making a living for yourself, to coaching, which you've already got people doing it. I hope everybody's taking notes. You all need to pull over wherever you are right now. If you're on a treadmill, get off and go-

Jocelyn Sams: If you're on the lawnmower-

Shane Sams: If you're on the lawnmower, get off. Now, you created a course before you launched the membership, correct?

Christal H.: That is correct, I did have a beta group. So I had a beta group of six people and I had a very small email list at the time, I think of like 33 people or something, plus a YouTube channel. I launched the beta group, and got six people to sign on before I'd even created the class. I literally hadn't even created the first lesson yet.

Shane Sams: There's presell.

Christal H.: Yes.

Shane Sams: We got it, you must be going through the Flip Your Life blueprint right now.

Christal H.: Yeah, you guys taught me.

Jocelyn Sams: You've been listening, I like that.

Christal H.: I have been.

Shane Sams: How much was the course when you sold it?

Christal H.: I just did it for $55 each.

Shane Sams: That's fine, yeah that's perfect. Gosh you got six people to get ... you made 300 bucks just for recording some videos, is that not amazing.

Christal H.: It was, yeah.

Shane Sams: And you had a list of 33 people?

Christal H.: A very small list, and to be honest with you, we'll probably talk about this, but my list is not that big right now.

Shane Sams: Right, so basically, let's see, what is the percentage on that Jocelyn, this ones math.

Jocelyn Sams: That's math, I can't do, you know that.

Shane Sams: Let me do some math here, divided by 33 equals ... you converted 18% of your list.

Jocelyn Sams: Which is pretty darn good.

Shane Sams: So you can go get 1,000 people on the list.

Christal H.: Yes, I need to do that, you have to help me do that.

Shane Sams: We will do that. The membership it's how much right now?

Christal H.: So the membership will be $57.

Shane Sams: And this is brand new correct?

Christal H.: That is correct, I just launched it three weeks ago, and as of right now, I don't have any members in it. So it's $57 a month.

Shane Sams: Then what was the deal you offered for the launch?

Christal H.: So the launch, I offered the beta members that monthly price of $19 a month for the six beta people, then $57 for everyone else.

Shane Sams: And no one has took that yet, correct?

Christal H.: That is correct, and I do have to tell you that I honestly haven't really promoted it as much as I'm going to and I know I should have. But I think I got to a point where I was really grinding and staying up late. This was also during a time when my baby was young and he would wake up during the night to feed.

Christal H.: So I was pretty exhausted, and I told myself when I went to Nashville, that after leaving that event, I would absolutely launch the membership community. Then I just needed to listen to my spirit and just be quiet for a little bit. I know it sounds kind of counterproductive, because I had all this momentum leading up to your live event, and I learned so much, and I really did implement some things. But I just needed to listen to my spirit and just be quiet for a bit.

Christal H.: I did, I took time and I went to bed early and just really took care of myself the way that I probably should have been doing before.

Shane Sams: That's perfect.

Christal H.: Yeah

Shane Sams: Yeah, there's nothing wrong with that. I love that mentality, that's the counter of what everyone else says, like work all the time period. That's what you got away from.

Christal H.: Yes, exactly.

Shane Sams: You've actually created freedom in your life to be able to choose that, and really everyone has that choice, they just don't acknowledge it. I love it, I love that, is that why I was looking at your form here. You launched this, when we're recording this it's November, you launched this, was it in October that you launched it?

Christal H.: It was.

Shane Sams: But the deadline was like December something, right?

Christal H.: Yes, that's when I told the beta group that they had to use their coupon code. They had until the end of the year.

Shane Sams: Yeah, perfect, so that's why no one's took it by the way. If you'd made it 72 hours, someone would have already bought. That's just the way it works. So when you start sending emails out, like before December 31st, especially these people that have already bought the course.

Jocelyn Sams: They will jump on board.

Shane Sams: They will jump on board.

Christal H.: Okay.

Shane Sams: Humans do not do anything until the deadline arrives. That's how we are. Until we have to disrupt stasis and the status quo we're not going to.

Christal H.: Okay, yes.

Shane Sams: So you pushed that deadline out so far, that's why that. But I love that, once again, we might just talk all day. These are good decisions you're making, like you don't have to be ruthlessly efficient and ruthlessly productive and ruthlessly moving forward at all times in your life to make progress. What an amazing lesson you've learned through this whole journey.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay, so you have a lot of amazing things in place already as we have mentioned. Let's talk a little bit about what is kind of holding you back a little bit. So talk about, maybe it's a fear, maybe it's some type of mindset issue or like maybe even an obstacle that's holding you back.

Christal H.: I know that I struggle with marketing to my tribe. I think that comes in the form of knowing that this is a business that you can't leave your nine to five on Friday, start on Monday and make a five figure income for that year. It doesn't happen that quick. You do have to put some effort and some time into really making it happen. Those are only the people who I wanna serve with that type of mindset.

Christal H.: But how do I communicate that to them in my marketing, also, there were some lifestyle changes that I had to make when I transitioned to virtual. Like for example, I had to work on getting rid of credit card debt. I went to try to pay my car off, the kind of personal decisions that I've made that allowed the virtual business to be more obtainable, because I didn't have so much debt weighing me down, for example.

Christal H.: But how do I communicate and work with people through that without taking complete responsibility for them to do that.

Shane Sams: Yeah, there's a couple things here. One, you have to let go of that word responsibility for other people. Jocelyn and I always say that it is our mission to give people the opportunity to change their life. This in the beginning wasn't the way we would word that. We said we want people to change their life, but we realized that no matter what we did, we could always lead that horse to water, but we couldn't make it drink.

Shane Sams: In reality, we could take the 20% of the people that would take action, and then take the 20% of those people and you can keep dividing down. There's always gonna be a minority of people that make it. Because honestly, not everyone is willing to do what it takes to change their life over time. It's not as important for you to take responsibility for other people, or convey that as much as it is for you to realize it's not up to you if they succeed. It's only up to you to provide opportunity. Quality of opportunity is all that matters in the world, we all have it, we all make choices, and we all have choices every day.

Shane Sams: Until that person decides not to buy your course, but to take action and try your course, they're never ever going to make it anyway. So anyone teaching online has to ... I'm not gonna say you go as far as letting go of the outcome that people get. Because we really do wanna study that and see how we can improve the possibility of a good outcome.

Shane Sams: But you've gotta let it go totally or you're not gonna be able to move forward. 'Cause you're gonna take it so personal when people fail, and I'll tell you right now, the majority of every niche will fail, that's just the way it is. But the people listening to this, and the people listening to you have to decide is if they're going to be the one that fails, because that's their choice.

Christal H.: That's true.

Jocelyn Sams: With all that being said though, there are some things that you can do in your marketing to help people to draw that line, and that's something that we're gonna be working on in the very near future. You can tell people, hey, I'm giving you all of this opportunity, but if you haven't made up your mind to do it yet-

Shane Sams: Don't take it.

Jocelyn Sams: Then, it's just not gonna be right for you. So in other words, you can say things like, if you're coming here looking for the easy button, this is not it.

Christal H.: Okay.

Shane Sams: You've gotta be overt with that. You can still present the dream because you have to present the dream. You have to show people what's possible or they'll never attain it.

Jocelyn Sams: And back it up with evidence, other people who have done this. People you have helped yourself. Show people the evidence that it is possible, it can be done. But there's nothing you can do to make something happen. I could meet with you every single day for the next month, and if you haven't made up your mind to do something, it's still not gonna work.

Shane Sams: It's like climbing Everest, or running the four minute mile. You see the guy do it, but still a minority of humans will ever go up that mountain. Still a minority of humans will ever run the four minute mile. But it is possible, there are steps to get you there, and then you're gonna need a little bit of good fortune, and you're gonna need some help along the way. But it's possible, and that's really what you're trying to tell people.

Shane Sams: I got this amazing email I wanna real read quick. I was trying to look for it here while Jocelyn was talking. I pulled it up, actually posted this on Facebook. 'Cause I got a very similar ... this might help you with the verbiage of how to respond to this.

Christal H.: Okay.

Shane Sams: I got an email the other day and it said, "Hey Shane, I have a question for you about your Flip Your Life community. You have a 30 day free trial. In that 30 days do you think someone that has no clue how do to this type of stuff, can start something and get it up and running and make money in the first 30 days. The reason I'm asking you is, me and my wife live paycheck to paycheck. I've seen all you and Jocelyn did, my big worry is that I'll try this, and when it's time to start paying for things, I won't be making enough money to cover the monthly fee."

Shane Sams: So this is the exact question you're talking about. This is the, you think I can do this, is this the magic button, is this the magic pill. Am I gonna be making plenty of money to cover all my business expenses and be making a profit in 30 days.

Shane Sams: So here's my answer. The very first sentence says, no period. Like it just says no, like not hey thanks for your question, it's just no, that is not possible. I go on to say, it took me six months to make our first money online. From our experience, the vast majority of people will not make money in their first month. But I do know this, you could and if you don't start, one month from now, six months from now, 12 months from now, you definitely won't be making any money, because you never got started.

Christal H.: That's right.

Shane Sams: We bought our first courses by having yard sale, canceling cable, we stopped eating out, we sold our house, we shopped at Aldi instead of Kroger, we resold clothes. I've even heard of people giving up all of their hobbies and free time to take a pizza route or driving for Uber to make the investment in their online business.

Shane Sams: The free trial exists to get you started, to get you involved, to get the ball rolling. There are months, maybe years of success, failure, trial and error after that. No other expert will tell you that, but me and Jocelyn will. Victory is long fought, hard earned, but well worth it.

Shane Sams: So I challenge you with this, if this is important for you to change your life, to really learn this, to do this you'll find a way, and if not, you'll find an excuse. Half the battle is shedding the belief in your past limitations, we hope to see you inside, good luck. Then I put a little P.S., everyone who has ever succeeded online at one time lived paycheck to paycheck.

Shane Sams: So you can see-

Christal H.: That's good.

Shane Sams: We don't shy away from this. We make it a part of everything we do because it's the truth and that's our most important thing we can do when we start teaching someone is to tell them the truth. So that's how you handle that Christal. You don't sugar coat it.

Jocelyn Sams: And you can say it in a nice way. I mean you don't have to be like, if you're here looking for an easy button, get out. You don't have to be rude about it, but there's ways of saying things that lets people know that hey this is not easy, it is going to require some work, but here are the testimonials, here are the people that we've helped, and they will tell you that it's worth it.

Jocelyn Sams: So yeah, it's just a mindset thing, it's a mindset thing for your audience. You just have to let them know hey, I want you to understand that this is not something that you can just do overnight.

Shane Sams: The fear here Christal, really, and a lot of people go through this when they're teaching online especially. The fear here is that if the people that are listening to you discover that one person or ten people failed when they tried this, that it makes what you're saying not true, and it makes it not possible, and it makes it not real and we feel like we're lying.

Shane Sams: In some ways it's a confidence issue, 'cause we look back when we do succeed at something or when we do learn something and know something, and society beats us back of bragging about that. We don't believe what we've accomplished. It's like you look down and you think how in the world did I create a top personal concierge service by showing up at a Chamber of Commerce, and then walk around town and convince people to let me be a virtual assistant, and then expand to a worldwide market and be able to do this from home.

Shane Sams: Like how did I do that, and we wonder was it luck, did I do something special, is this possible for other people. We get scared to tell people the truth, that it was really hard and it was a big fear and that's what you've gotta get through. The more honest you are, the more successful you'll be when it comes to online business.

Christal H.: Okay, I can do that.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay, so we talked about some of the mindset issues that have to do with your audience and even yourself, like in moving this thing forward. What else is going on that we can maybe help you move past to get to the next level?

Christal H.: I have had to realize and acknowledge that I'd been having these moments of entrepreneurial loneliness. I don't know how to get over it, it's not constant, but I do feel moments where I feel really lonely in doing this.

Shane Sams: Do you feel like that's holding you back. Is it making you question things, are you saying to yourself ... is it making you question if you want this or is it making you not motivated to build your business, but you know it's worth it, you're just like, man I'm lonely and I'm not motivated, how is that specific thing stopping you? Do you think that's what lead you to the point where you needed a little break?

Christal H.: I think it is, and I think it's the latter description of I love it so much. I love teaching and those strategy sessions, they really are my favorite because I really get to work with people one on one. But I do realize that it's hindering ... the loneliness, those feelings, it really is hindering my motivation. So it's not like a long run of motivation, it comes in spurts I have found.

Jocelyn Sams: I totally get that because I'm right there with you. Where do you live, I can't remember?

Christal H.: I'm in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay, well we live, of course, in the middle of nowhere in Kentucky.

Shane Sams: Literally in the middle of nowhere, if you found nowhere and went to the middle, that's where we live. I'm looking out our back window right now and there's nothing but trees and water.

Jocelyn Sams: I feel the same way sometimes, I am an introvert, which means that I get energy from being alone. But, sometimes I do like to talk to other people and I was actually talking to a friend of mine last night. My daughter, she's on the cheerleading team, and they got a bid to a competition called the Summit, and it's like a really big deal. I was looking for people to tell about it, and I was like, I don't really have anybody. I told Shane about it, and I told my parents about it, and then I was like, well who else do I talk to. I don't even have a friend to share this with really.

Jocelyn Sams: I'm just saying that I go through this too, and it is like a really hard thing because there are very few people in the world who do what we do right now. There are even fewer people in our local area, so this is definitely something that can be concerning.

Shane Sams: When you have your own business, when you have your family, the older we get the more responsibility that we take on, our circle shrinks. Like when you're a kid, your circles' huge until you're in your 20s, but then you get married and your circle shrinks. Then you have kids and your circle shrinks, and all these things that start taking a piece of the pie, especially working on a business take up a lot of time.

Shane Sams: That doesn't leave you time necessarily to go get that social interaction. But the good thing is, you can build this into your business and into your life because once you take control, once you work from home, one you're self-employed, you're one choice away from changing the dynamic of how your day goes.

Christal H.: That's true.

Shane Sams: You're doing some of the things I think already that would help with that. Like going to live events, maybe that's something you need to schedule more of. Get out and do those things. Maybe some of the old things that you did before, like getting out and going. Working in a coffee shop instead of working at home. Finding out where some people you know hang out and work out there where you have a chance to run into people.

Christal H.: Yeah.

Shane Sams: Go back to those Chamber of Commerce, maybe even doing local workshops at your library for free to let people come in and give you that ... maybe you do a bi-monthly once every other week interaction for free just to serve your community and let people come in and create leads for yourself.

Christal H.: I like that, yeah.

Shane Sams: You'll be able to work with people, maybe scheduling more one on one calls, maybe promoting that a little bit more. That's one reason why I started our all access thing. The way our all access mastermind works is, we use an app called Voxer. People get it on their phone and literally they can send me and Jocelyn a message in real time. But I love that program, and the reason I wanted to do it is because I love to talk to people. That's my favorite thing on the planet.

Shane Sams: I get to talk to like 30 people every day. So it kind of dulls some of that. Our friends really live all over the world. Jocelyn talks to people in Michigan, Australia, like, that kind of-

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, you should see people in the stores. Last night I went to Lowe's, I was looking for some Christmas stuff to put in my house. I was playing out Voxer, and my friend from Australia, Kat, I was playing her messages, and people were just looking around like what is that. Because in the middle of Kentucky, you don't hear a lot of Australian accents.

Christal H.: Exactly.

Shane Sams: One reason we did that was because we couldn't find masterminds here, we had to solve that problem. The way that we talked to our masterminds is on Voxer 'cause we don't have time for one on one meetings, we don't have all four get together on a zoom and do a hot seat.

Shane Sams: We can talk to each other whenever we want. I wake up every morning, I got a buddy of mine, he sends me a message every day and he's like my brother from another mother. I get it every morning, but we've created these systems in the last little bit to kind of fight that loneliness. Because that is one of the drawbacks, when we trade our problems in our life for a new opportunity, what we're really trading it for is a new set of problems.

Shane Sams: That's how life works, you're not really getting rid of anything, or reaching Utopia, it's do I like this set of problems better than this set of problems. Can I overcome this set of problems and this way of life more than I can overcome these problems.

Shane Sams: So there's all kinds of things that you can do to combat that loneliness, but the first thing you have to do is realize that it's just part of the deal.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, and I would say also take some personal responsibility in it. I think sometimes when this happens, we'll sit back and be like oh, woe is me, I don't have any friends. I know this because I do it, oh you know nobody's coming to me, whatever. Well maybe I need to be more proactive about it. This is something that we try to do. We do things that other people won't do.

Jocelyn Sams: I can remember one time we were over in western Kentucky visiting my family and there were some people who we were like acquaintances with online, and they live just a couple of hours away. We reached out to them, we were like hey do you guys wanna meet us somewhere and like just hangout and get to know each other, because we had never met before. So they were like, well we would love to, but we can't leave right now, so can you maybe come to us.

Jocelyn Sams: We're like well, I mean I don't see any reason why we can't. So we drove like two hours out of our way.

Shane Sams: We stopped in a cornfield and had to stay at a random Super 8 because we were so tired coming home.

Jocelyn Sams: But that guy is now one of Shane's best friends. He talks to him every single day. So we took an opportunity, we took a chance, but we didn't know for sure if it was gonna work out, but it did and because we took that chance, now Shane has a really good friend.

Shane Sams: And going out of your way to connect with people and talk to people. Another one of the people that we met online actually through the Flip Your Life community, I met him, talked to him, we had a lot of similar interests, and we started going really out of our way to see each other. We would fly to places to meet at live events, just 'cause we knew he was gonna be there.

Shane Sams: I've got a four hour drive here in December that I'm gonna make just to hang out with him, I may drive there and drive back just to see him in real life. But, that dude flew to our live event, and was literally the MC that introduced us. But it's like getting up and changing the dynamic is always the right answer.

Shane Sams: I think that's what Jocelyn was saying like, that loneliness is totally 100% in your power to fix, and no ones gonna come running to your door to be like, I heard you were lonely. I'm here-

Jocelyn Sams: Let's hang out.

Shane Sams: Let's hang out. So if you don't fix it, nobody will.

Christal H.: That's right.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, and that's why we're so passionate about going to live events and actually meeting people in person, because there's no substitute for that. I'm not just saying that 'cause I want you to come to our event, but I do because it was awesome. But I want people to go to events and meet up with people because that's where you're gonna find your people. There are people that we've met all around the world that we still talk to to this day. I mean we've met them years ago.

Shane Sams: I would venture to say actually the only friends ... let's draw a line here. There's a difference in friends you go to church with, or the parents of your children's friends. Isn't that how all of our friends end up, we only see people that are the same age as our kids, right. 'Cause we go to practice and we go to all these things. Once you have kids they just consume every aspect of your life.

Shane Sams: That's your like who your acquaintances right, but your business friends, your entrepreneurial friends ... I'd say every person we talked to on a daily basis is somebody that we've had to get on an airplane and drive to and meet.

Christal H.: Wow, okay.

Shane Sams: 'Cause they just don't get it, nobody else is gonna get what you do now, except those people. Like you guys, like the Flip Your Life community, those are the people we interact with now because they get it. They understand and some people just won't.

Jocelyn Sams: You get to a place where you really have to guard your friendships too. Because you don't wanna be around people who discourage what you're trying to do or they're overly negative. I'm not saying that we shut those people out of our lives, but that's something that really, really brings me down.

Jocelyn Sams: If I'm around people who just don't get it or they don't care about what we're doing or they don't understand what we're doing, that makes it really, really hard for me. So I'm still friends with those people, I still love them, but honestly, I don't spend a lot of time with them because I need to be around people with that big vision who totally understand what we're doing.

Shane Sams: Going down that a little farther and it's so interesting, that's why I love talking to our members, because your journey and our journey is pretty much the same, and I think that's where you're gonna have to ... like people go okay, I have this full-time job, it's killing me, or it's not conducive to my life. I changed my life and I would say if you go back to your job, toxic situation or not, jobs in the past you've had you weren't as lonely because you go to work with people every day.

Shane Sams: So when you make that change, I guess loneliness is just a phase we all have to go through if we're gonna make it.

Christal H.: Okay.

Shane Sams: You just have to have those strategies in place to fix it because it's part of it.

Christal H.: That's helpful.

Shane Sams: So what do you think that you could do in the next two months to remedy some of this?

Christal H.: Well I already know one thing that I'm gonna do for sure, I'm gonna add a personal coaching service on, where we do Voxer just like you do with your group. I think that would be wonderful to have a group of people who I work with and they have access to me via Voxer and I can shoot ideas to them and support them. I think I would really thrive in that, that would be great.

Shane Sams: Yeah, you could even offer that for 50 bucks a month right now until you get to so many people, then you can raise the ... you're gonna have to raise the price later because when you have hundreds and hundreds of people vying for your time eventually, which you will, right. Gotta slice that up because you can't talk to everybody every day.

Christal H.: This is true.

Shane Sams: Every day. But yeah, that would be a great thing to rollout like right now. What about in-person, 'cause you live in a pretty big area.

Christal H.: I do and-

Shane Sams: What are the opportunities there where you could be like, man I can get out twice a month and go to X.

Christal H.: Right, and I think it's actually a couple of things like you mentioned. It's going back to how I got started and that's doing networking in person and really finding some opportunities to teach workshops, I really like that idea.

Jocelyn Sams: Absolutely, and that's an unfair advantage that you have, like you've had that prior experience. Really latch onto that.

Christal H.: Okay.

Shane Sams: Moral of the story is, don't build yourself a black and white online business, no gray, it must be all courses, it must be all this. Like build the life and the business you really want to experience every day.

Shane Sams: Kind of step back and say am I really building what I want, or am I building what I heard some expert build or told me to build or this is what worked for that person. We have total control to build anything, any life that we want to build if we'll just do it.

Christal H.: Yes.

Shane Sams: You don't have to follow anybody's rules, right.

Christal H.: Yeah, I think it's like the old ways, they kind of seep back into your mindset sometimes. It's hard to get those bad habits and that bad mindset out.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, it's so important. I know probably some people are thinking, wow, what a first world problem, like you guys don't have any friends. But it is a first world problem, but first world problems are still problems. If you don't get past them, you won't move forward in your business.

Shane Sams: So get out there and just do it.

Christal H.: I will.

Shane Sams: I want you to schedule, we usually don't tell anybody what to do at the end of the show, we ask them what they're going to do in the next 24 hours, but I'm gonna tell you what to do. You should go right now and look for something in person within the next week and put yourself on your calendar. That way the ball is rolling. Because if you put it on your calendar, it's real. Plans don't matter unless they are on the calendar or have a deadline.

Christal H.: That's right.

Shane Sams: So just go out there and try to find something to kill that loneliness and find those people to surround yourself with. 'Cause if you don't, it will kill your business.

Christal H.: Okay.

Shane Sams: Because you won't like your business, and we don't do things as humans that we don't like.

Christal H.: That's right, yeah, I can do that. I'll make it happen.

Shane Sams: Wow, I'm serious we could talk forever, Christal is

Christal H.: Yeah, this has been amazing.

Shane Sams: Amazing conversation and I love it when we get to talk to people that we know so well, 'cause we have interacted with you so much it's just, man so much truth can come out when people are just sharing their experience and being real. So thank you so much for being so real and just transparent today because I know this particular episode of the podcast is gonna help a lot of people.

Christal H.: Well thank you.

Shane Sams: Before we go, we always like to share a bible verse, and we are super excited today to let Christal share a bible verse, Jocelyn and I get a lot of inspiration for our business, for our life, from the Bible. Christal has an awesome verse that she would like to share with you guys today. That gives her a lot of inspiration too.

Christal H.: I would like to share Proverbs 3:5-6, and this particular scripture really I can lean on it no matter what I'm going through in my life. It reads, "Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight."

Shane Sams: Love it, that is so powerful and I just love the verse. Just cling to it in those moments where you're just feeling inadequate.

Jocelyn Sams: That's why we ain't never alone baby, Jesus' is with us.

Shane Sams: That's right. All right guys, that was a great talk with Christal. What an inspiring story of someone who was in a bad situation, made the choice to change her life and continues moving forward, making progress, and evolving into a life that she really, really wants.

Shane Sams: We would love for you to experience that journey too, and we'd love to help you do it, inside of the Flip Your Life community. You can start your 30 day free trial right now at FlippedLifestyle.com/free, that's F-L-I-P-P-E-D Lifestyle.com/free. We'd love to help you get started, we'd love to help you come up with an online business idea, we'd love to help you find customers for that idea and create products to sell them, we do all of that inside of the Flip Your Life community.

Shane Sams: We will see you there, until next time, get out there and do whatever it takes to Flip Your Life.

Jocelyn Sams: Bye.

Links and resources mentioned on today’s show: * Christal's Website * Flip Your Life LIVE 2019 Waiting List * Flip Your Life community 30-day trial

Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!

Get your FREE 30-DAY Membership in the Flip Your Life Community NOW!

– https://flippedlifestyle.com/free

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Hey Y’all, welcome to another Flipped Lifestyle Podcast Q&A w/ S&J!

In the Flip Your Life Community, we hold a members-only Q&A twice a month where we answer online business questions of our members live on air!

Today’s Q&A highlights answer the following questions: Question One:

"I'm just starting out, so what should I focus on? I would really like to get a beta launch for my membership up before the Christmas holiday. I'm planning to post on social media everyday. Create a worksheet as a lead magnet for getting people on my email list. Work on getting my website up and running (from scratch). Does this sound like the correct order?"

Question Two:

"How do you launch a membership site to your email list when you haven't emailed them anything in the past couple months?"

Question Three:

"I have a question about an introductory offer. I'm confused about whether I should create a product first (I know that you've mentioned "product first" philosophy), but I've also heard you say about having an audience and finding out what THEY want. I've been focusing on building an audience and getting email subscribers so that I can ask them what they want. I do have a product available, which is career coaching calls, but should I create a digital product now (I have an idea of what I'd like to create) or wait until I have feedback from an audience so I create the right product?"

Success stories mentioned on today's podcast: "I asked for feedback on my sales pages about 2 months ago and got some great feedback and Jocelyn asked some really powerful questions. I changed one of my sales pages based on Jocelyn's suggestions and CHA-CHING. Four subscribers in three weeks!" - Stephanie

CLICK HERE to get your FREE 30-DAY Membership in the Flip Your Life Community NOW!

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In today's episode, we catch up with former guest Daniel Hulsman after his membership launch.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jocelyn Sams: Hey, y'all. On today's podcast, we catch up with former guest Daniel Hulsman after his membership launch.

Shane Sams: Welcome to the Flip Lifestyle Podcast, where life always comes before work. We're your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. We're a real family that figured out how to make our entire living online. Now, we help other families do the same. You ready to flip your life? All right, let's get started.

Shane Sams: What's going on, everybody? Welcome back to the Flip Lifestyle Podcast. It is great to be back with you again this week. I am really pumped up today because we are welcoming back a former guest, who was previously on the show. He's now launched his membership, launched his business, actually has customers, and this is even a more special former guest, because he is our favorite former troll. It's our good buddy, Daniel Hulsman. Daniel, welcome back to the show, man.

Daniel Hulsman: Hey, Shane and Jocelyn. Thank you for having me.

Jocelyn Sams: Yes, absolutely. We are happy to have you.

Jocelyn Sams: ... here, again, today. We have some exciting stuff to talk about, some, kinda, hard stuff to talk about. We just got a really good conversation brewing, today. So we're really excited about this. We've been following along with you after your membership launch. You've had a few ups and downs, I would say.

Daniel Hulsman: Yeah. Just a few.

Shane Sams: Now, let me get everybody caught back up 'cause I think this is airing somewhere around December, January. I'm not exactly sure. So, Daniel was on the show back in July of 2018. It was episode 212. Right, Jocelyn?

Jocelyn Sams: Yep, flippedlifestyle.com/podcast212.

Shane Sams: So the interesting story behind Daniel even appearing on the show is Daniel didn't come to the Flipped Lifestyle community or podcast in, what I would call, the normal way. Daniel actually sent me some scathing hate mail at one point.

Daniel Hulsman: Oh. It wasn't that.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay.

Shane Sams: It gets worse every time I tell the story, though. You know how it goes.

Jocelyn Sams: In his defense, it's not the worse thing we've ever gotten.

Shane Sams: It's not the worse thing we've ever gotten.

Daniel Hulsman: It was definitely saucy.

Shane Sams: It was saucy? It was quite the criticism. Okay?

Daniel Hulsman: Yeah.

Shane Sams: As I'm known to do, I like to engage with people online whether it's via email or fan mail or not-so-fan mail. Right? I actually got into a great discussion with Daniel and, kind of, challenged him to come in and actually look at our community, check us out, see how everything's going. Anyway, long story short, I've even invited him on the podcast. I said, "I'll tell you what. Come on the podcast. We'll talk about it," and we did. Right? Daniel's been a member, now, for a while, in the Flip Your Life community and just an awesome guy, just a great heart, and I am so glad that we became friends and that we got to be doing this online business stuff together.

Shane Sams: So, long story short, we talked to you about your business and all that good stuff. Tell everybody a little bit, real quick, about your business, the nutshell version and, kind of, what's happened since you've joined the Flip Your Life community since that podcast. Tell them just a little bit about your business and where it ended up at, at this point, today.

Daniel Hulsman: Sure. Yeah. So, in a nutshell, I run a website called Video Game Music Academy which is a resource for new and aspiring composers looking to break into the video game industry which is something that I wanted to do when I was younger but there was never any resources. So I decided to make one in ... I believe we talked July 1 when we recorded that episode. On that day, I was just starting off with a 21-day challenge then at the end of that, I launched my membership website.

Daniel Hulsman: So on July 1, I had no plan to launch a membership website. On July 21, I launched a membership website.

Jocelyn Sams: It's, kind of, funny how that works. You know? A lot of people who know us, they're like, "You know what? I didn't really plan to have an online business but, then, I talked to you guys and y'all have one.

Shane Sams: It's funny when people talk to use. They'll come to use with a timeline. They sometimes say, "Yeah, I'm thinking about doing this three months from now."

Jocelyn Sams: We're like, "Yeah, I know."

Shane Sams: We're like, "What about three days?"

Daniel Hulsman: Yeah, that kind of insanity was very motivating. I like that aspect of the challenge when it seems a little bit crazy. So, yeah, the kind of insanity of that short timeline was a great motivator. Since then, I'd say that my website has gone from what you really could've called a hobby, 'cause it wasn't really producing in any meaningful way, to a business where I've got an LLC now and I think that launch gave me a little over 30 members. I launched again for another week, and now the membership part of the website has 58 paying members.

Shane Sams: Amazing.

Jocelyn Sams: Wow. That is awesome.

Shane Sams: That's awesome, Dude. That's like a high. Right? Now, everybody thinks ... Let's look forward. One, congratulations. That's amazing. All right? We're proud of you for doing that. There's a lot of people listening to the show right now that wanna reach through and grab you and take your 58 members for themselves. Right?

Shane Sams: It's hard. It's hard to launch a business. It's hard to build a following and it's hard to convince 58 people to give you money every month. Right?

Daniel Hulsman: Yeah.

Shane Sams: I'm sure that that was, kind of, of a high like one of the craziest best days of your life kinda deals.

Jocelyn Sams: Well, and I know that I was so excited when I saw this success story come in. You know? I check our community, pretty much, every day. When I saw that come in, I was like, "Oh, my goodness. I'm so happy." That was awesome. So, we're so pumped. Then, real soon after that, tell everybody a little bit about what happened.

Shane Sams: What happened ... Now, so you got members. You've got this active community. You've taken the leap from hobby to business. What happened next? How did it go next? What's happened since that day?

Daniel Hulsman: Well, I got hit with what I think I described in the membership community as soul-crushing lack of motivation.

Shane Sams: Don't sugar coat it now. Tell me how you were doing.

Daniel Hulsman: Yeah. No. Yeah. The soul was definitely under the heel of the boot there. I don't know what it was. Part of me suspected that ... One thing about me is that when I have a big challenge, that excites me, but when I see that I can attain the challenge, when I see that it's doable. If I've done step one and I see that I am capable of completing step 10, then it becomes a big demotivator for me. It's not as exciting anymore. I think that was part of it. Then another part of it was just that I, kind of, got hit with a little bit of the overwhelm, a little bit of the imposter syndrome. It's like all three of those things, sorta, hit at once.

Daniel Hulsman: I, kinda, went into a slump for a few weeks really ... right after I'd launched my membership site. It was really tough to get things done and to decide what the best thing to do was. It was really hard to dig myself out of that. It took me about a month, I think, to really dig myself out of that completely.

Jocelyn Sams: I love the conversation that came out of that in the community because I feel like there were so many people who jumped in and just said, "Hey, you're not alone," and I really loved that because you're not alone. In fact, I was thinking about that earlier today because one of the things that we did that was really big, recently, is we had a big live event. We thought, "Oh, this isn't possible," and we had this big build-up toward it. We did the event, and now we're, kinda like, "Okay. Well, now what?"

Shane Sams: Like you pulled something off that you really-

Jocelyn Sams: You really shouldn't have been able to do.

Shane Sams: ... really shouldn't be able to pull off. At least, that's what we're taught. Right?

Daniel Hulsman: Yep.

Shane Sams: You know, it's like we do that and then you're like, "Whoa." Then, on top of that, you're still working full-time. Right?

Daniel Hulsman: Yeah, and it was actually interesting. Usually, you expect, when you get a launch and paying members, that that extra money would feel pretty good. But, in this specific case, I was transitioning between two teaching jobs. So my one contract ended at the end of July, and my next contract started at the beginning of September. So I ended up having a month where we just lost my income. That was the money from the website, really, started coming in which was great. It was really needed at the time ... super helpful but, at the same time, it also dulled a lot of the excitement because, instead of feeling like icing on the cake, it felt more like a patch on... a big hole. So-

Jocelyn Sams: Well, thank goodness for the patch, though. Right?

Daniel Hulsman: Yes. Without the patch, it would've been massive panic attack.

Shane Sams: Yeah. You know, it's crazy what people forget when they think about starting a business, being self-employed, or even moving toward that kind of mindset and lifestyle, is just because you're doing that and just because you're succeeding in one area, you still got work. You still got family. You still got kids. All those things are still there and every time we add something, it cuts us a little thinner. You know what I'm saying? It's like in "Lord of the Rings," when he says, "I feel like butter spread too thin on toast," or something. Right?

Daniel Hulsman: Yes.

Shane Sams: That's what happens, especially early on, not just when you start building the online business, 'cause it's easy to get distracted when you're building everything. You know how you get in those modes of creation where you lose track of time and you look up and it's six hours later and you've built something. Right?

Daniel Hulsman: Yep.

Shane Sams: It's, kind of, like that when you're building the online business but, then when you launch and it goes out there, now you've actually added one more thing on your plate. Right?-

Daniel Hulsman: At least.

Shane Sams: ... and we just keep getting ... At least ... and we keep getting sliced thinner, and thinner, and thinner. That can add to the overwhelm. Right?

Daniel Hulsman: Oh yeah. Felt like it. That's for sure.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, and I think that this is part of just being, I guess what you'd call a budding entrepreneur. It's because you have all of these things going on. You still have all of your personal life things going on. You still have all your work things going on. Then, you also have the membership community and once you've sold something to someone, you can't just be like, "Okay, guys. Take a little break. See ya." It doesn't exactly work that way. You have to be there for those people, too, which is really cool but it's also a little bit scary when you have so many other things going on, on all the other burners and you're like, "Okay, well, now what?" It's a weird middle ground between starting out and having, I guess what you'd call, a big business where you have people to help you.

Shane Sams: So where are we now? So we've got the soul-crushing motivation kicked in. We all had a pow-wow about that in the community. Right?

Daniel Hulsman: Oh, yeah. Jocelyn's been like my personal cheerleader, among a lot of people but-

Shane Sams: Exactly. So we've gotten to the point where we're, kind of, grinding forward and moving, but where are you right now, just mentally and emotionally when it comes to the business and everything else? You're back in the classroom. You've got your new job. You've transitioned there. Right? So, at least, some of those spoils from that monthly membership feel a little better now. Right?

Daniel Hulsman: Yep.

Shane Sams: What's happening that's, kind of, stalled you out right now in your business and causing confusion?

Daniel Hulsman: Yeah. So, I just opened up the membership again and closed it on October 31. It was open for about 10 days, and got my new members in. So it's only be about a week since I closed the doors, and I know that this is a very critical time for the new members, and also know that I really want to kick things up a notch in terms of content creation inside of the membership community in terms of educational resources. I also know that in January I'm gonna be doing another quarterly challenge or just that 21-day challenge that I use to ... it's been my main source of leads that have turned into sales.

Daniel Hulsman: So I've got all these three different things. So I feel like I've got ... I really want to make sure I'm nurturing the community. I really wanna make sure that I'm preparing the website to scale a little bit more, and I also wanna make sure that I'm not just going to assume the funnel is going to be similar in January. I've gotta feed that funnel for the next challenge because I've now put my current list through that same challenge twice in the past six months. So I need to get new people coming in, new people on the list so that I've got more fresh blood in the challenge to go down that funnel towards the end.

Daniel Hulsman: On top of that, on the personal side of things, I've transitioned into a new job which is still very high energy. Beginning a new teaching job is tough, learning 500 students' names and blah, blah, blah, a lot of things that go with a new teaching job. I also have some things going on in the family that I'm not gonna go into, but it's been tough on the family and good news, on the positive end, we have our second son. He's gonna be due in early February.

Shane Sams: You got about three months, then.

Daniel Hulsman: Yeah.

Shane Sams: You're like a quarter away from having another human in your life.

Jocelyn Sams: And I love how you work, Daniel, because you're, kind of, like us. We're like, "Oh, we have a three-year-old and an 18-month-old. Let's start a couple of businesses. Yeah, that sounds like a good idea, sounds like a good time. Like, yeah, totally doable. You know, sometimes, people are the way that they are is, like, you have to have a lot of things going on in order to get things done. I feel like you're probably one of those types of people. I think I'm like that too.

Jocelyn Sams: I remember the only time in college that I got all A's was when I had 18 hours and two full-time jobs ... no, two part-time jobs. Sorry. So it ended up being like a full-time job. Then I had 18 hours of course load.

Shane Sams: The only time in college I got all A's was the semester I met Jocelyn, to impress her.

Jocelyn Sams: 'cause we went to the library all the time.

Shane Sams: Once I felt like I was in, I just, kinda, slacked off a little bit. You know what I'm saying?

Jocelyn Sams: Which is so true.

Shane Sams: I'm listening to ... going back to the soul-crushing motivation moment. Right? Even over the last two months, when you were talking earlier about feeling spread thin, man, I don't blame you for feeling ... You should feel spread thin a little bit, Dude. You've got your day job. That's taking bandwidth. You've got things going on in your family life that you gotta deal with. You got a baby coming. Dude, that's like on your mind three months from now. Right?

Daniel Hulsman: Yeah.

Shane Sams: And then you've got this business that was, just for some more background for the listener ... it was just a Facebook group and some challenges. Right? Now, it's like this public Facebook group, this free opt-in email list, these challenges, this membership area, new content, promotion. You went from two things to 20 things overnight. Right? It's very, very oppressive. Entrepreneurship, in general, and life, in particular, is oppressive. It's really, really, really hard. Right?

Daniel Hulsman: Yeah.

Shane Sams: You can't feel upset about yourself for, maybe, taking your eye off the prize here and there or getting that soul-crushing motivation because, honestly, humans are not made or equipped to deal with this very well.

Jocelyn Sams: I'm just gonna put it this way. Right now, I feel like you're in survival mode, and you know this means because you have another child. Right?

Daniel Hulsman: Yes. Yeah, I got a three-year-old.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay. Yeah, so you know what this means. Survival mode is when you don't even know how you got to work. You don't even know what you did while you were there because you're so blasted tired from not getting any rest and just, basically, sleepwalking through life because you have to. It's out of necessity.

Shane Sams: Like your brain won't turn off. I bet your brain won't turn off right now, very well. Will it?

Daniel Hulsman: You have no idea. I had just got home from teaching all day, and I just had a chaotic last class. So my brain is like firing in 20 different directions right now.

Jocelyn Sams: Well, there's some good news. So you work for public schools. Right?

Daniel Hulsman: Yes.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay. So the good news is you have some breaks coming up.

Daniel Hulsman: Oh, yeah.

Jocelyn Sams: That's good news for a couple of different reasons ... first of all, because you get a break from these crazy kids, but second of all because you're gonna have some bandwidth back to concentrate on some things that you really need to concentrate on. I feel like that is the thing that is really missing, right now. I just feel like you don't have that bandwidth there.

Jocelyn Sams: What I'm trying to say is you're gonna have to really take advantage of these breaks. What I mean by that is getting some rest, but I also mean you're gonna have to, kind of, push the pedal to the floor a little bit in this business, I feel like.

Shane Sams: Yeah. That's what, kind of, is the bad part of what we all do. Right? We're all trying to build a better life for our family. Right?

Daniel Hulsman: Yes.

Shane Sams: But that's hard-won territory. It doesn't come easy or everyone would just go do it. Right? There's a lot of times where we need that personal cheerleader like you were talking about, Jocelyn. You go post in the forums and 20 people rally around you to lift you up. Right?

Daniel Hulsman: Yep.

Shane Sams: Then there's another part of us that just has to say, "Life is manufactured of facts and these are the facts that I'm dealing with right now and no matter how I emotionally feel, I factually have to figure out a way to deal with every one of these variables. Right?

Daniel Hulsman: Yeah.

Shane Sams: And that sucks. That really does, sometimes, suck. It really does, especially when things are swirling around us in all aspects of our life.

Jocelyn Sams: And some are just completely out of our control.

Shane Sams: And some are really good. I think that's what people discount is ... sometimes the good things overwhelm you to the point where it breaks you. You know?

Daniel Hulsman: Yeah.

Shane Sams: Like the baby coming or all these different things, like a business taking off. Right? Those are good things but, factually, they're also hard things and overwhelming things. So planning, like Jocelyn said, and resting are probably your two biggest things that we've gotta do next for you. Or you're just gonna break, 'cause you're just gonna try to get up everyday and juggle and you can't do that.

Daniel Hulsman: You two get me.

Shane Sams: Yeah.

Jocelyn Sams: I really get you because I have a feeling that we're a lot alike. So-

Daniel Hulsman: Yeah, I feel that same thing. When you're-

Shane Sams: I got 20 years of experience dealing with people like you, Daniel. So I think we can figure this out.

Jocelyn Sams: I also know that, because we are alike, that you are way too hard on yourself. I know that because I'm very hard on myself. If I let one little thing fall through the cracks, I just can't handle it and I feel like that you're probably my soul brother on that.

Shane Sams: It's easier, sometimes, to just turn that thing off than it so keep it going. Like you just lost a membership and you're like, "Oh, my gosh. No." Right? It's just like-

Daniel Hulsman: Yeah.

Shane Sams: Flip the switch.

Daniel Hulsman: Yeah, it's really easy to find all sorts of things to fidget with, especially once you've just built a website that could be a lot better. I found a lot of ways to not move the needle in terms of-

Jocelyn Sams: Absolutely.

Daniel Hulsman: ... my member experience. Then, it just got to a break point with that or, one night ... I think it was like one a.m. or something ridiculous like that I was up because I was up. I was just finishing all of the things I had to do for the day. I sat down at my laptop and I opened up the membership community because I had been, kind of, avoiding it 'cause I'd been feeling so cruddy. Then I just, kind of, laid it all out there. Then, once I did that, I felt like I had a path forward, but it took a lot of pain to get me to that point where I felt like I could push myself through and pick it up. So, like you said, I know myself pretty well, especially having gone through these last three months and I wanna be really careful and really deliberate in terms of what I plan for myself. I feel I really wanna be prolific, but I also wanna not overwhelm myself and shut down.

Shane Sams: That's a good point, man, 'cause I do say a lot, "The key to really hyper success is being consistent and prolific." Right? But, man, in the times where you're overwhelmed or tired, the prolific thing has to go to the wayside. You know what I'm saying? Sometimes you do have to figure out the bare minimum things to be consistent with and take that step back so that you can go take two steps forward and not feel guilty about it. Right? Even in a membership, you feel like it's like constant growth. There might be a time where you don't open the doors for a month or two, and even if you do have a little attrition, that's okay because you're just finding your equilibrium again. Right? Maybe there are times where you ... maybe you don't open a challenge and you do something different. Maybe you change the way you interact. I do this with a lot of people who have Facebook groups. I join groups. Right? Everybody in the community, I usually jump into their groups. I'm a member and I can, kind of like, spy on what's happening in their Facebook.

Jocelyn Sams: See if you're really doing what we tell you to do.

Shane Sams: See if you're really doing what I tell you. I'm in your group. One, your group is fascinating, video game composers. That's, kind of, my third-wheel house. Right? I see you doing a lot of things in your actual Facebook group that really seem like they should be reserved more. You know what I'm saying? For paid customers ... that's a way to get some bandwidth back is change the way you're interacting with your free customers. Change the way you're interacting with your audience, in general. Right?

Shane Sams: I would rather you step back and get bandwidth back and become consistent at fewer things, even if it slows the growth a little, than to be so prolific that you burn yourself out. That's not gonna help you, your family, or anybody going forward.

Jocelyn Sams: So, I'm glad that you jumped into that because that's, sort of, the same thing I was thinking, too. At this point, I think we need to give you some homework and, more importantly, I think that we need to give you some permissions. What I mean by that is permission to not do some things.

Daniel Hulsman: Okay. All right.

Shane Sams: So, what are the things in your business? Let's just forget about the life stuff right now, because life stuff is much more organizational and there's so many things you're negotiating with other people. Right? Even your kids and your spouse and everybody else-

Jocelyn Sams: Let's go with things that are completely under your control.

Shane Sams: Completely under only Daniel's control. He's the only person that is even involved, which would be the video game academy. Right?

Daniel Hulsman: Yep. The Vide Game Music Academy.

Shane Sams: So, what do you think are three to five things that you have to do right now or everything will collapse and fall apart? What do you think those things are?

Daniel Hulsman: Ah, Geez.

Shane Sams: It's usually the things that have been overwhelming you the most, like in the last week.

Daniel Hulsman: I think it's stuff because I feel like this doesn't feel like everything will fall apart, but I feel like this will make everything slowly grind to a halt, later and this what I'm talking about is new free content creation to feed the top of my marketing funnel. I started this whole membership site journey with a pretty sizeable email list. I started, I think, with 26 hundred people on my email list that I had been building up for years. Now, it's even bigger which is great. But it's also something where I wanna make sure that I'm putting people in with content and not just the challenge. I don't know. That's my intuition anyways, but...

Jocelyn Sams: Okay. Let's stop right there for one second. Okay. My first question to you is how long have you been sending people this content? How long have you been creating content, in other words?

Daniel Hulsman: On the one hand, so I've got my blog which ... and the Facebook group, and there, I've really not been doing much in terms of content generation over the past year. So an extremely minimal in terms of the 21-day challenge. That, I did it in July and I did it in October. That was the second and third time I've done the challenge, total. Then, through those 21 days, not only are people interacting online in the community, but they're also getting emails from me with writing prompts or they're getting tips for composing and things like that. So they're getting content.

Shane Sams: All that's already done. Right?

Daniel Hulsman: Yeah, all that's already done-

Shane Sams: Real time. You're just repeating that process for people. Correct?

Daniel Hulsman: Yeah. I'm repeating it and I'm tweaking it a little bit, too.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay.

Shane Sams: So do you feel like you have to create more content on your blog and the Facebook group to get more new people ... to get more in the challenge? Where do you think you need to create this content?

Jocelyn Sams: And what's on your website now?

Daniel Hulsman: Sure. So, yes, to answer that. I do feel like my blog is almost inactive. So I feel like I need to get people to the website and basically give myself ways to interact with people who've never encountered my brand, other than that 21-day challenge in between the 21-day challenges. They have them quarterly so that's two months in between there, and I feel like-

Shane Sams: Okay stop.

Daniel Hulsman: Okay.

Shane Sams: I'm gonna give you a permission here.

Daniel Hulsman: All right.

Shane Sams: You don't need to create any more content right now because creating content is high bandwidth work. Okay?

Jocelyn Sams: You've gotten all these people without doing that.

Shane Sams: Well, and you've got other content, now. You just said what you actually need to do, which is promote existing content. Okay? You just said, "I've got all these people who I need to bring in new to interact with my content." Well, that's really what you need to do. Promotion is lower impact because promotion is really just starting an ad and letting it run or sharing in different places content you already have.

Shane Sams: If you had a list of 14 places online that were great places to share all your content like Tumblr, StumbleUpon, Facebook, Twitter ... things like that ... then, all of a sudden, instead of sitting down and creating content and figuring it out, you just say, "Oh, that was a good blog post I wrote back then. I'll update it for five minutes and then I'm gonna share it in these 14 places. I'm done for the day. Right?

Shane Sams: If you can make a process, and systemize sharing old content, that is a lot less energy than, "I have to create all this content." Right? It's a lot easier to tell the same speech to a new audience than it is to write a new speech and find a new audience. Does that make sense?

Shane Sams: So, right now, you could probably just eliminate new content creation-

Jocelyn Sams: For now.

Shane Sams: ... for now, and just say to yourself, "Man, I just need to promote some of my best stuff. What if I just took my three best posts that anyone's ever reacted to, and I just rotated those and shared the crap out 'em every three weeks, for the next three months, that's going to bring in more people. That make sense?

Daniel Hulsman: Yep. That makes sense.

Shane Sams: So let's just eliminate creating content for a while. Does that mean we're never gonna come back to it? No. Three months from now, you're gonna be in a different state. Well, three months from now, you're gonna have a baby. So six months from now-

Daniel Hulsman: I'll be in a very different state-

Shane Sams: Well your brain-

Daniel Hulsman: Tired is the state.

Shane Sams: Yes. Once you get past that, and start sleeping for six hours. You know what I'm saying? Okay, so there's one.

Jocelyn Sams: Then, we have the promised land of summer which is music to an educator's ears.

Shane Sams: So, does that make you feel a little relief that you don't have to do that?

Daniel Hulsman: Yeah, it does. That's a lot of noise that I can put away.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay, and let's put that on the back burner until summer because summer is when you have a big chunk of time. You can work on things more. You can batch it up.

Shane Sams: For people who are not teachers, that might be our weekend. It might be your vacation time. There's always times that you can block off for new content creation and then promotion's a hundred times more important anyway. So, there's one thing. What's another thing that's overwhelming you?

Daniel Hulsman: Creating course content within the membership community.

Shane Sams: Okay. So how are you doing that now? What's in there right now? Just ballpark, how many courses? What's in there?

Daniel Hulsman: So, there are three video courses that I put together in there, so far. I will skip over one criticism that you've already given me the podcast episode I was into last week. That was about ... you mentioned how much time you can sink into a slide show. That's been a real sticking point for me where I've gotten stuck working on slide shows and making it perfect when, really, I could just talk and either pay someone else to make the slides or just make them stupidly simple with just like an outline and not worry about the animations and what things look like.

Jocelyn Sams: Could you do this? Could you have your people meet you live and say, "You know what? Today, we're gonna talk about this particular topic, and I'm going to answer your questions."? That's no preparation for you. You can record it on Zoom and have it there. That's content for your community.

Shane Sams: Yeah, the hardest part about content is the preparation. That's where the mental bandwidth and space really comes from. Right? You gotta plan. You gotta get a organized thing, whatever, or you could just say, like Jocelyn said, "Here's the topic. I know you have questions like, 'Where do you submit your music to get it to the video game companies?'" Maybe you just talk about that topic. Right?

Jocelyn Sams: That's no preparation. People ask the questions for you. This is what we do. If you guys haven't noticed, this is what we do.

Shane Sams: We have found, too. I haven't made a course in, like, a year and a half because ... We do trainings, where we talk to people because it's way more beneficial and people can take action way better when you just answer their questions. Right? So it's better for your member. It's better for you. I'm not sure if you ever really have to create any more courses. You could just have a conversation once a month with your members. That gives them a huge reason to stick around. Instead of going 10 hours, it's one hour of your life.

Daniel Hulsman: The one trick with that, and I agree with you. I think actually found a solution for this trip-up here. But the one trip-up here is that I am personally not a working composer. This is something that I wanted to do and saw a hole and so I started educating myself and piecing things together. In terms of some of the expertise that people may ask me about on those live calls, I don't have it.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay. Well, how about if you have a special guest on?

Daniel Hulsman: That is what I have done, actually. I was feeling like I should do something like that, but I was really anxious about answering the questions myself. So I'm gonna try to do these monthly. I'm doing industry expert calls, so I'm having them come on.

Jocelyn Sams: I think that's perfect.

Shane Sams: People are there to actually ask the questions, too. Right?

Daniel Hulsman: Yep, yep. Yep.

Shane Sams: I will say this, though. Just from a mindset issue, anyone who's holding any kind of member calls, you're never going to have all the answers.

Jocelyn Sams: We definitely don't have all the answers.

Shane Sams: If you listen to alot of our member calls, you will find many times where we say, "I don't know." It's the most powerful three words you can say in the human language. Anyone who says they've got all the answers is lying. Right?

Daniel Hulsman: Yeah.

Shane Sams: There's nothing wrong with saying, "I don't know, but I will find the answer for you."

Jocelyn Sams: You know what the beautiful thing is. A lot of times on our member calls, we won't know the answer. Then there will be other people in the room that are like, "Hey, I had this experience, and this is what I found out." They'll talk to each other, and you can say, "Hey, Jane said that she did x-y-z.

Shane Sams: You can also do this like this. "Hey, I don't know the answer, but I know a guy who does. So how about next month, I get him on here or her on here, and we'll talk to them about it." Then they're like, "Sweet. I'm paying another month 'cause I wanna come back when you get that next special guest." Right?

Jocelyn Sams: That's part of the allure ... is that you probably have industry contacts that they don't have.

Shane Sams: Look how low-energy this could be right now. All right. "I don't have to create any content anymore." There's bandwidth back.

Jocelyn Sams: I find somebody to help me answer questions that I don't know the answers to.

Shane Sams: I systemize promotion where Monday, Wednesday, Friday, these are the tasks that I do with old content. I'm done. Right?

Daniel Hulsman: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Shane Sams: I stop thinking that I've gotta create a training every month, and I just literally schedule one hour of my time to do expert interviews or one-on-one calls. I still think you should not be scared to go by yourself. Okay? Even finding a guest requires bandwidth. Okay? So if you can go one month with a guest, one month without, you buy yourself all that bandwidth back. Okay?

Shane Sams: So what's next, what's the third thing that's just ... other than that?

Jocelyn Sams: What about interacting with your group? We, kind of, talked about that a little bit earlier. Is that something you would say?

Daniel Hulsman: Yeah, I've got a pretty tech-savvy group on a pretty not-so-attractive ... or even super ... it doesn't even work that great, forum website. It works. It is like if you saw, "Pirates of the Caribbean," the dinghy ship that he comes in on at the beginning of the movie that's slowly.. Yeah. It totally got him there. You know? And it's getting people there.

Daniel Hulsman: It's also something that I've gotten feedback on and that it has taken some time in terns of me troubleshooting it. So, to drive to my answer here, I would love to make the website work work a little bit better so that I don't have to spend as much time troubleshooting things or fixing things when I ad more people in January.

Shane Sams: So, have you researched any solutions for that?

Daniel Hulsman: I have. A couple of them, I've tried, and shouldn't have and undid those.

Jocelyn Sams: You're not alone.

Daniel Hulsman: Yeah. You know? That code doesn't look that scary. I'll copy and past things and see what happens.

Jocelyn Sams: Have you ever broken your website at least once? You're not a real entrepreneur-

Shane Sams: You're not alone.

Daniel Hulsman: Yeah. Backup your website, people. Back up your website, people. Backup your website. Just like there's a learning curve. There are times when I think something's broken, but it's not actually broken. So It's just a lot of things have come up, but I've fixed a couple. There are a couple that I've not been able to fix. There's one big one that I'm ho[ping a buddy of mine is gonna fix for me tomorrow. So, I'm trying to get there. I've got actually a tool I'm really excited about that's gonna help me fix the look and feel without me having to actually code anything, which is great.

Shane Sams: This is interesting. So ... and this is important for people to remember ... Sometimes there's no solution besides grind. Right? This is an issue that you're just gonna have to get past or, I promise you there's stuff in our forums that break. Like there's one thing that was happening to our moderators. Every time something happened, it would knock them back in the normal participants. Right? It's bizarre. It was terrible, though, because the moderators would log in and everyday you had to turn them back into a moderator or they couldn't do that they were doing.

Shane Sams: Here's the deal. We found out it was a glitch within the software itself and there was no fix for it. Now, we could've said to ourselves, "Well I gotta fix this. I gotta change everything. People are complaining about it." Whatever, or we could say, "Here's the deal. When it happens, we're going to turn your moderator light back on." It's someone human is just gonna have to touch that thing. Okay? And we get someone to program it and fix it.

Shane Sams: Just accepting the warts and all of the things that we use, because no system is perfect. Everything's got glitches. Everything screws up all the time, and it's just true. That's a fact. Accepting that can give you a little bit of bandwidth back, even when it's frustrating. Right?

Daniel Hulsman: Yep.

Shane Sams: Just knowing that, eventually, you might evolve into something different will be fine.

Jocelyn Sams: I know that you are dying inside.

Shane Sams: Oh, yeah. It's like all, Daniel hears is a fork on a chalkboard with the words that are coming out of my mouth.

Jocelyn Sams: I totally know that that is what you're feeling right now because this is what I feel when he says this to me.

Shane Sams: But, in reality, you just gotta accept it and you gotta move forward with what you got because ... and I always challenge Jocelyn 'cause she brings these issues to me, as well, all the time. I always look at her and I go, "How many members do we have? How many people have actually complained about it?" Nine times out of 10, that's a single digit percentage. Right?

Daniel Hulsman: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Shane Sams: So, unless 30 members are like, "This is terrible," it may not be as big a problem as you think it is. It's just something you're latching onto because it feels good.

Jocelyn Sams: So, for right now, we're asking you to be like Elsa and let it go.

Shane Sams: Let it go.

Daniel Hulsman: Wow. That just happened.

Shane Sams: That just happened.

Daniel Hulsman: Did you just frozen me?

Shane Sams: I just frozen you.

Daniel Hulsman: We are parents. If it's not obvious, we are parents.

Jocelyn Sams: Parent life.

Shane Sams: Anyone with a child in the last ten years knows what we're talking about. Okay, so let's just look at these three things. The list can keep going. This gives us a framework. Right?

Daniel Hulsman: Yep.

Shane Sams: Getting bandwidth back, in those first two things, gives you a lot more bandwidth to deal with that third thing. Right?

Daniel Hulsman: Yep.

Shane Sams: Really, it's just about listing all those tasks out, Dude, one at a time and saying, "What can I control? What can I not control? What can I let go of? Do I need to do anything else besides just keep hammering what worked?", which was doing the challenge, getting more members, doing the challenge, getting more members, dong the challenge, getting more members, doing the challenge, getting more members. Anything else, really, probably, just needs to be let go because you've got so much else going on.

Shane Sams: What happens is you get to a critical mass point where it's like, "Man, I've been doing this long enough, now," and it's working, and you look up and you're like, "Oh, wait. I may not have to go to that job anymore," or, "I may be able to let something go," or "Maybe I ought to turn this over to somebody else 'cause I can afford to hire somebody." Then it starts getting easier. Right?

Jocelyn Sams: So, basically, for everything, you just need to ask yourself, "Will this move the needle?" That's not a hard question to ask.

Shane Sams: Or, "Will it remove a little bit of this weight off my back"? That's an important question, too. You know. Entrepreneurs are all success-driven, but, man, sometimes, it's just like, "You know what? It ain't worth it and I'm not gonna deal with it, and I need this off my back 'cause it's stressing me out. So I'm just not gonna do that thing." When you do that, you get lighter and everything else becomes good again. That's where we want to get you to ... is that place where everything's good again.

Daniel Hulsman: Okay. Yes. Still, I feel anxious.

Jocelyn Sams: Well, Daniel, if you're anything like me, and as I said before, I suspect that you are, you will probably always feel anxious.

Daniel Hulsman: Yeah.

Shane Sams: You felt better in the first two answers. Then the last one, you're like, "Oh, anxiety."

Daniel Hulsman: Well, it's that feeling of disbelief. It's like, "If I really let those things go, it's really not gonna fall apart." All that's going through my head right now is if I'm not creating content in the way that I've got stuck in my head ... If I'm not sending more emails, if I'm not doing that kind of stuff content-wise for my members, am I really going to keep growing the number, or is the trend number gonna grow?

Shane Sams: May not grow as fast. You know what I'm saying? It it's really bothering you, take your calendar and figure out a week where you can block some content creation and, at least, you'll offload it onto that calendar and you'll know there's a point where you'll come back to it.

Jocelyn Sams: Things like content creation, that has to be batched. You hear us say that all the time. You have to get it. Maybe during Christmas break, choose one day and say, "Okay, I'm gonna spend this whole day making content, and then I'm done."

Shane Sams: And it's over. Then you not gonna worry about it. Just schedule it, and it's done, and it gets it off your plate. Even then, it doesn't always have to be done. There's days we don't create content.

Shane Sams: I email people most days, but I think yesterday, I didn't send any emails out. I might've. I can't remember. You know, some days I wake up and I'm like, "Man I got a lot of other stuff going on. My son's got this. My daughter's got that. Me and Jocelyn gotta be somewhere. We're gonna have three podcast recordings." It's just like, "Man, something's gotta give." It has to. Can't do it all. Right?

Daniel Hulsman: Yeah.

Shane Sams: So, it's just about getting to that point where this is all a slow roll forward. That's what being in business for yourself really is, and, as long as you keep moving forward, sometimes you can slow down. Sometimes you can speed up. I read a great quote the other day that said, "Even when you fall on your face, you're still moving forward."

Daniel Hulsman: Oh, I like that.

Shane Sams: Isn't that a good quote? That's, kind of like, where we're at is like, "Just move forward right now until you get the energy back or other things clear up in your life or your work to give you enough bandwidth to focus more on the one thing." It's not a race. It doesn't matter when you get to a hundred members. It just matters that you get to a hundred members. If I get there in six months and you get there in 12, well, 12 months from now, we're still sitting around going, "Hey, good job." We both got to a hundred members, but don't put so much pressure on yourself to succeed so fast. Another thing, too, that ... the highs and lows, man, like dealing with the dopamine rush is part of being an online ... You just got your first taste of the high. Right? Well, the next high will be higher 'cause something's gonna happen and you're gonna have another breakthrough, and all of a sudden, 200 customers show up. Then the crash after that's a little bit harder. Right?

Shane Sams: It's like last year when we sold out our live event in a week. We were like, "Oh, best thing ever." Then, literally, a week later, we're both in this existential crisis of life, like, "What are we doing?" You know, like-

Jocelyn Sams: Like we find things that are wrong. If things are going well, we're like, "Oh, well this one thing's not," and it's just like something totally ridiculous. We're like, "Why do we do this?"

Shane Sams: Our brains are always seeking that ... our brains hate change, whether it's good or bad. Right?

Daniel Hulsman: Yep.

Jocelyn Sams: Subconsciously, people always try to get back to the status quo.

Shane Sams: And we don't want you to go back to the status quo. You've come too far to turn back now. Right?

Daniel Hulsman: Yep.

Shane Sams: Awesome. Okay, well let's zero back around. This is deep conversation. A lot going on. A lot to unpack here, as the gurus like to say. What do you think your focus should be? Usually we ask 24 hours, but because you've got so much going on, and we've got about six weeks left in the year ... or seven ... What do you really, really the one thing that should really get your attention in those next seven weeks? What do you think that is?

Daniel Hulsman: I think I should not create content on the blog. I should not deliberately not think about that and deliberately not beat myself up for it. I guess what I need to do is I really need to repurpose existing content and, maybe, that's externally for non-members and, internally for members, I need to just loosen up. Make things a little bit more casual in terms of the content like the monthly calls things. That works well. Even, we've got this chat thing that we run Discord for gamers, and it's a Discord server. It's like a chat server. I drop audio files, of me just talking, in there. People love that. So just like doing that, just me talking, answering a question directly, and posting ... kinda like you're doing now in the forums. It's like I saw a question I might post a video response. Like doing that kind of stuff. Keeping it a little bit less formal, but a little bit easier for me to just bang out whatever I can.

Jocelyn Sams: Absolutely. I love that.

Daniel Hulsman: Yeah. So, I guess-

Jocelyn Sams: People will find value in that.

Daniel Hulsman: Yeah. Whenever I've done that, people have really enjoyed that. That happened one day where I just got in there and was just typing responses quickly. I guess someone was in the middle of a negotiation, and they wanted advice. Everyone else was in there. It was like, "This is gold." I was like, "Oh."

Shane Sams: There you go, man.

Daniel Hulsman: Okay. Great.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. So there's the training, right there.

Shane Sams: Let me challenge you really quickly to do one more thing too. Okay?

Daniel Hulsman: Sure.

Shane Sams: When are you gonna do your next challenge? How far away is that?

Daniel Hulsman: January 1, it should start, keeping schedule. Yep.

Shane Sams: I really wanna challenge you. You just, basically, had three categories. You had non-members. You had members. Then you have your challenge coming up. Okay? I really wanna challenge you to only spend about four hours a week on your online business. Now, when I say that, I don't mean like the little thing you just said where you were chatting with them and dropping in thing. That sounded fun to me ... like you were, kind of, geeking out about doing that. Right?

Daniel Hulsman: Yep. Yep.

Shane Sams: You were talking about something you love. I'm talking about actual work.

Jocelyn Sams: Like work that feels, kinda, heavy.

Shane Sams: Work that feels like work. Right?

Daniel Hulsman: Yep.

Shane Sams: Divide that up however you want. Right? It can be an hour on non-members, an hour on members, an hour on your launch, then an hour for something else each week. Okay?

Daniel Hulsman: Okay.

Shane Sams: Really, really challenge yourself to put four hours on the calendar and don't work past that on this online business. Okay? Really discipline yourself to do that. The other stuff's fine, like if you're just sitting around, watching a TV show, and you're like, "Hey, I wonder what's going on in this work group?" Right?

Daniel Hulsman: Yep.

Shane Sams: That's different, totally different. That's fun stuff, but put it on the calendar. Stick to it and every other minute of your calendar, give to all these other things that are coming. You got a baby coming. You got other things. You got work. You got all these other things.

Jocelyn Sams: You have a very pregnant wife who needs your help.

Shane Sams: Yeah, right, exactly. That's important.

Daniel Hulsman: Yes.

Shane Sams: Even like coming home today. I know we had this podcast. Just communicating that you need 30 minutes of quiet or whatever to recharge or letting yourself know that and take back some of the time. You'll find it's gonna be like putting a magnifying glass on those four hours.

Jocelyn Sams: And you will automatically prioritize because you have no choice.

Shane Sams: You have no choice. You have to cut things out in that way. All right?

Daniel Hulsman: Okay.

Shane Sams: All right, man.

Daniel Hulsman: All right.

Shane Sams: Daniel, I'm so thankful that you came on the show today, that you were super transparent, and you got a lot of stuff going on. People always wanna think that, "After I launch and make my money, everything's gonna be okay," but that's, actually, when it gets hard.

Jocelyn Sams: It also gets super rewarding. There is something good on the other side. It's just like you have to go through some pain to get something beautiful.

Shane Sams: Yeah. When it ends up being 500 members and life looks really, really different and things really, really get to the point where you're in control again, it's gonna feel a lot better. I told someone, just the other day, this. When you get your business going, the first thing you have to do is change your life, and that's really, really hard. Right? It's really getting everything in place to change your life, but after you do that, you get the choice of what the rest of your life looks like. It feels so out-of-control when we first launch, when we first make money, when things really start happening 'cause all these moving parts enter our life that weren't there the day before the launch. Right?

Daniel Hulsman: Yep.

Shane Sams: Eventually, somewhere down the road, you it a point and you're like, "I have a choice. I have a choice to do anything I want with everything else for the rest of my life," and it was totally worth it. You're almost there, Dude. You just gotta keep going. Okay?

Daniel Hulsman: Sounds good.

Shane Sams: All right.

Shane Sams: All right, guys. That was a great, great conversation with Daniel. We cannot wait to see what he does next in his online business and we cannot wait to see what you do next in your online journey, as well. We hope that you would allow us to be a part of that journey inside of the Flip Your Life community.

Shane Sams: You can start a 30-day free trial to the Flip Your Life community, right now. All you have to do is go to flippedlifestyle.com/free. If you're out there. If you're grinding, and you feel like you're alone and you need some support and you need some help, like Daniel did that day when he felt that soul-crushing lack of motivation, everybody rallied around and picked him up. Jocelyn came in and cheered him on. We would love to be that for you, as well. So go to flippedlifestyle.com/free, and start your 30-day free trial today.

Shane Sams: All right, guys. That is all the time we have left for this episode of the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. We cannot wait to be back with you again next time. Until then, get out there and do whatever it takes to flip your life.

Jocelyn Sams: Bye.

Links and resources mentioned on today’s show: * Daniel's Website * Flipped Lifestyle Podcast 212 * Flip Your Life LIVE 2019 Waiting List * Flip Your Life community 30-day trial

Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!

Get your FREE 30-DAY Membership in the Flip Your Life Community NOW!

– https://flippedlifestyle.com/free

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Hey Y’all, welcome to another Flipped Lifestyle Podcast Q&A w/ S&J!

In the Flip Your Life Community, we hold a members-only Q&A twice a month where we answer online business questions of our members live on air!

Today’s Q&A highlights answer the following questions: Question One:

"Per the new autoresponder suggestions - we should now immediately deliver a link to the product on the thank you page and up sell. My question - For the up sell should it be our normal 50% off the first month of online training offer or should it be something exclusive, not to be found or offered anywhere else?"

Question Two:

"I know we talked about PASPY at Flip your Life LIVE but are there any specific words or phrases that you use when you are selling on video to get people to buy?"

Question Three:

"Should the main opt-in on my website be broad to cast a wider net (and appeal to more people) or should it be very specific to catch only those who are my super target audience?"

Question Four:

"My husband and I are adopting a baby, so in about a month I'm going to have a newborn for the first time. What do I need to do for my business now so that it keeps running while I'm focused on the baby? I'm at a stage where I'm trying build an audience and get members."

Success stories mentioned on today's podcast: "I decided today was the day that I would be raising my membership price from $29 to $39 a month. I also did away with the $10 trial membership after today. I had 4 people join the membership rate at $39 a month getting in while the getting was good." - Brenda

"In the last 4 weeks, I've been booked for three speaking engagements totaling almost $16,000!" - Jen

CLICK HERE to get your FREE 30-DAY Membership in the Flip Your Life Community NOW!

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In today's episode, we help Jeff find a profitable niche.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jocelyn Sams: Hey y'all. On today's podcast, we help Jeff find a profitable niche.

Shane Sams: What is going on everybody. Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. It is great to back with you. Again, today this is our favorite day. It is recording day. It is a day we get to sit down with another member of the Flip Your Life community and help them take their business to the next level. And we're really excited today because this is another member who we have met in real life, Jeff Slaughter. Jeff, welcome to the show.

Jeff Slaughter: Thank you. I'm so glad to be here.

Shane Sams: Let me tell you something, Jeff makes a mean chocolate bar. I'm telling you. He made some chocolate for our live event. Man, it was good.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, we were very fortunate that he brought a lot of chocolate along with him. He shared with everybody in attendance, which was awesome. My favorite were the ones with the little, it was the lip print, I think. I think they were some kind of salted chocolate. I don't know, they were really good.

Shane Sams: When we met Jeff, he was like, "I'm a chocolatier." I'm like, "Man, that's a fancy way of making chocolate, but I like it." That's good stuff, man.

Jeff Slaughter: Yeah. Well, thank you. It was a lot of fun to be able to share that.

Jocelyn Sams: Alright, well let's talk a little bit about ... Well, first of all, how did you get into making chocolate? Tell us a little bit about you, your background, your family and what you're doing online. Let's kind of just smash all that in here.

Jeff Slaughter: Okay. Well, we moved to Europe in 1998 to serve in missions and landed in France and a couple years later, moved to Belgium. Was doing various mission projects there and wanted to start an online business to kind of help our funding.

Jeff Slaughter: So I started one about Brussels and in doing that, I learned a lot about Belgium and Belgian chocolate. And became interested in ... Why is it such a big deal in Belgium? How do you make that? I discovered an online course I could take. Took a three month online course to learn how to do it. Was in Belgium at the time so I could get all my supplies and chocolate and just spend a couple years doing it as a hobby and then when we come back to the U.S., we would do it as a fundraiser.

Shane Sams: To support your missions? Like that's what-

Jeff Slaughter: Yeah. Exactly. It was a great way to ... Kind of a great conversation starter as you saw it, Flip Your Life Nashville. It's interesting. It's not something a lot of people do and it was related to where we were. So it's been a really fun thing to do. It's definitely a side hustle. It's seasonal. I live in Louisiana, it's very hot and so-

Shane Sams: The chocolate melts.

Jeff Slaughter: Yeah.

Shane Sams: Right.

Jeff Slaughter: So you have about five or six months out of the year where you can do it without worrying about it melting in your car. I do continue to go back to Europe. I'm there now about four months a year.

Shane Sams: Doing missions still? You still doing missions?

Jeff Slaughter: Yeah. Our daughter started having children and my wife felt the call to be a grandmother. So we moved back to the U.S. and based here in Louisiana and I travel back and forth. What I do now is I do worship conferences all over Europe and digital media conferences for churches and ministries. So when I'm there, that's pretty much what I'm doing, going from country to country doing these conferences. Organizing them and making them happen.

Shane Sams: Do you have just one child?

Jeff Slaughter: We have three.

Shane Sams: Okay.

Jeff Slaughter: We have a daughter, who has two birth children and a foster daughter. And then two sons.

Shane Sams: Well, you are busy. You are jumping back and forth across the pond chasing grandkids.

Jeff Slaughter: Yeah. In fact, I just got my ...

Jocelyn Sams: Making Belgian chocolate in Louisiana.

Shane Sams: Making Belgian chocolate when you can.

Jeff Slaughter: Uh-huh. Yeah.

Jocelyn Sams: Alright, well you have a very interesting life here Jeff.

Shane Sams: I know, right? Let me just give you some context here. Meeting Jeff in person, he's just this sweet, good, kind-hearted, normal guy, right? And then like, "What do you do?" "Well, I fly over to Europe, I make chocolate." It's amazing.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. I feel like you are short changing yourself, you know? You're just like, "Ah, yeah. I kind of just make some Belgian chocolate on the side."

Jeff Slaughter: That's not how-

Shane Sams: "I fly to Europe a couple times a year. I live in Louisiana, whatever. That's just what I do."

Jeff Slaughter: It is an interesting life. I was in healthcare marketing before Europe, for 12 years. In a way I feel like I flipped my life on April 1st, 1998 when we moved to Europe. Because I had left what had grown to be a grind to me and was entering something that was life to me.

Jeff Slaughter: And it still is 20 years later. I'm still enjoying it and all, but now ... I want to get into position to be able to support ourselves and not have to worry so much about retirement. Although, I don't plan on retiring until I'm in the box.

Jeff Slaughter: I need to do something for the future. That's why I'm wanting to do something online that's substantial that we can build an income that will support us and let us continue to do what we're doing in Europe.

Shane Sams: You know what's amazing about what you just said, and people really miss this sometimes I think, when we say, "Flip your life."

Jeff Slaughter: Mm-hmm.

Shane Sams: Flip Your Life doesn't mean make a million dollars online. It doesn't mean get famous online or anything like that. What it means, is taking control of your life and being in control of your future. Now, you said you did that when you went into something that gave you life, right? It doesn't matter how much money you're making if you wake up every day and you know that you're living a life of purpose, and that's what you did.

Jeff Slaughter: Right.

Shane Sams: And when you know you've got control of tomorrow, that's what flipping your life means. When we flipped our life and quit our job, we had made a lot of money the month before, but we actually had no clue if we were going to make money the next, the month after that, during February and the slow months. When we did it and we were home that first day, we looked at each other and said, "Honestly, we'll never go back. I don't care if we're broke, if we can just pay the bills, we are staying right here in freedom."

Shane Sams: I love when you said that about you felt like you already flipped your life and now you're just looking for a little more control of the future. And you want to support your missions.

Jeff Slaughter: Right, exactly.

Shane Sams: Without having to ask other people to help you do it kind of deal.

Jeff Slaughter: Yeah. I mean, support raising isn't easy and you tend to lose some over the years with attrition. I just feel like I can figure out a way to make it happen on my own.

Shane Sams: That sounds like a membership. That's what it sounds like.

Jeff Slaughter: It does.

Shane Sams: You lose a little on attrition, you got to go find more, you know.

Jocelyn Sams: Well, let's talk a little bit about what you've been doing so far.

Jeff Slaughter: Okay.

Jocelyn Sams: You have the chocolate business and I presume that's something you do locally, right?

Jeff Slaughter: Yeah. Although, I do have an online presence. I have about 400 email addresses and I sell online. I do some markets, although markets aren't that great for me.

Shane Sams: You sell the chocolate online, not how to do the chocolate online?

Jeff Slaughter: Right, I sell chocolate. I'll just make it and sell it. Christmas is a big time of year, Valentine's kind of ... Probably from about November through April, Easter, are my biggest sales months. I also do workshops. I go out and do workshops in homes and church kitchens and what not. I've done parties before. That kind of thing. Just trying to be creative in ways I sell it.

Jeff Slaughter: But not in stores yet. Not really at that level of production yet to make a lot to be in stores. The profit margin is a lot smaller because you have to give up 30 to 40%.

Shane Sams: Right.

Jocelyn Sams: And I personally can attest that the chocolate is very tasty, so if someone is interested in checking out your chocolate site, what is that URL?

Shane Sams: Okay, it's www.chezslaughterchocolate.com and Chez Slaughter is spelled C-H-E-Z, Slaughter as in S-L-A-U-G-H-T-E-R.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, there's not a lot of times people come on the Flipped Lifestyle podcast talking about something called "Chez", okay?

Shane Sams: Chez chocolate.

Jeff Slaughter: People usually say, "Chez" and the funny thing about that-

Shane Sams: Oh, that's all we say down here, bro.

Jeff Slaughter: I know.

Shane Sams: People would be like, "Chez chocolate, Chez Slaughter? Who's that guy?" Right?

Jeff Slaughter: People have called me Chez.

Jeff Slaughter: It's actually a play on words because it's a French word that means house or place and so basically, it means slaughterhouse chocolate.

Shane Sams: That is great.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay, okay. That's pretty cool. Alright, well, it is really tasty so if you guys want to check that out, definitely do that, alright

Shane Sams: Tell us about your other online business.

Jeff Slaughter: That's my Christmas play business.

Shane Sams: Tell us a little bit about that.

Jeff Slaughter: Sure. When you guys announced Flip Your Life Live Nashville back in January, I was so excited to be able to come to something like that, I signed up as soon as I could. I loved the Facebook group that we had. Because it really pushed us towards being prepared to come and actually make something happen. And make something happen before you came.

Jeff Slaughter: So many conferences you sign up for, you just go and sit and wait for words of wisdom to fall out. But this one was really ... You know, vintage Flip Your Life is, no, you got to roll up your sleeves and do the work before you come. Then when you come, it'll be more worth your time.

Jeff Slaughter: I knew I needed a project and I wasn't really to commit to something ... the big idea. So I decided, well I have this Christmas script I wrote. I've had it on my website for a few years. It's never really gone anywhere. Let me put the Flip Your Lifestyle spin on it and see what I can do.

Jeff Slaughter: So, that's what I did. I followed how you guys were teaching with Facebook advertising. I redid my website. Basically, started advertising mid August and it went through into September and during that time, I got about 200 downloads. I had 800 landing page views, 200 downloads. I've sold 8 scripts so far.

Shane Sams: Amazing.

Jeff Slaughter: So, it's not a huge amount of money. Not a huge amount of scripts sold, but, I guess it's about 4% of the script downloads, converted to sales.

Shane Sams: That's amazing.

Jeff Slaughter: What I learned is that ... I mean, this was a very small project, but I took what you guys taught and was able to get through it really quick and learn a lot in the space of six to eight weeks. That really taught me a lot. I now know I can take on something bigger and push it through easier and more confidently because I just took the steps of just doing a small project.

Shane Sams: Amazing, and these are Christmas scripts for churches to do a play or things like that?

Jeff Slaughter: Yeah. Well, it's Christmas play. It tells the Christmas story through the eyes of the innkeeper and his family. It kind of brought them to life, basically just told the Christmas story through their experience.

Shane Sams: How does-

Jocelyn Sams: And it's called Christmas at Bethlehem Inn, right?

Jeff Slaughter: That's right.

Shane Sams: Yeah, I love this story because you took the first step that most people won't take. And I'm really calling anybody out there right now that's listening to this in their car or at the gym or maybe on a walk, and you're not taking action because you're looking for the perfect idea, you're looking for the home run and you're sitting there saying yourself, "Well, if I just knew what to do."

Shane Sams: But that's the thing is none of us know what to do. The only thing we can do is try. And we encourage so many people when they come to the community, like, "What's your idea?" "Well, I got this but I don't know about it." And we're like, "Do it." Because you're going to learn the process. You're going to take action. You're going to move forward. You're going to figure out all the stuff so that the next idea, which is probably the better idea, is going to be easier, faster to implement and you're actually going to give yourself a chance to succeed.

Shane Sams: I think that's what people really ... Most people only see success on the other side. They see us and they're like, "Okay, well you had this business and it worked." Well, did you see the four things we tried before that failed? That's what everyone listening has to do. If you don't ever try anything, you'll never know if it does or doesn't work. And that's really all we're trying to figure out is. If it does or doesn't work.

Shane Sams: It's like the light bulb. Edison didn't just be like, "Well, this one is good." He had a thousand of them that failed until he figured out the one that did work. And you got to go into online business, you got to go into self employment thinking to yourself, "I just have to start and take step after step and when I take two steps back, take three steps forward and get back on the wagon and go try the next thing." Because sooner or later, something will work and the people that get rewarded online, are the people that start.

Shane Sams: So kudos to you dude, for just starting something even knowing that it might not be the home run. What if it is? What if a month from now and it's Christmas and like, "Whoa, I sold a hundred of these things." You never know and now you're ready to take the next step as well.

Jocelyn Sams: Well, the beautiful thing about that business is, it's there. You have that script, it's always there. So even if you do decide if you want to move onto something else, you've already done that work. It's just going to continue to work in the background, which is really cool.

Shane Sams: Hey man. Jesus' birthday comes around once a year and there's always an innkeeper in the story last I checked.

Shane Sams: That's evergreen content at it's best.

Jeff Slaughter: Exactly.

Shane Sams: Right?

Jeff Slaughter: What I learned was that if I ... You know, I sell the script right now for $97 and it comes with four bonuses. I just got two more sales on Saturday, which is really funny because they came within three or four hours of each other. And I was like, "Okay, it's the end of October. People are getting nervous about not having anything. They're making their decision." Which was sort of interesting to me.

Jeff Slaughter: Basically, it's costing me about $40 as script to market it and to pay a fee to Gumroad to host it. So now I know for every $40 I spend, I'll make $50 or a little bit more than $50.

Shane Sams: Hey, I'll trade 40 for 100 every day of the week. I'll do it every time. Every single time.

Jeff Slaughter: It's a great lesson, it really was. Plus, I'm connecting with people and seeing my play live, which is important to me on a personal basis, more than the money really. So it's all good.

Jocelyn Sams: Alright Jeff, well you have a lot things already in place, which is really cool, but I understand that you're wanting to maybe think about where you're going to go in the future. Would you go in a different direction? Or do you have a different plan? So let's kind of dive into that a little bit.

Jeff Slaughter: Okay. Well, I did a website. I had website about Brussels for several years and this is back in 2008. Never really got off the ground. Made maybe 70 or 80 dollars in Google ads. I've done the Christmas side. I do the chocolate. So I've learned a lot over the years, but now I don't feel like I've hit a home run. I want to hit a home run with online business. And I don't want to just continue ... This has been 10 years I've been working on different things and I really need now to find something that will create substantial income. Yeah.

Shane Sams: So you want to ... You're looking for the home run, right?

Jeff Slaughter: Right.

Shane Sams: Well, let me ask you a question, okay. A lot of people say this, like, "I want substantial income. I want to do this, I want to do that." But until you define what the home run looks like, you're never going to be able to hit it, right? What is a home run? How much money a month do you need for you to consider it like, "Wow, home run, I'm comfortable. I can support myself, my missions." Things like that.

Shane Sams: What does that look like? Because you already have the attitude and the mentality, that Flip Your Life mentality, of, "I'm going to live life on my own terms. I'm going to go to Europe and be a missionary for four months. Even if I have to go raise money. I'm going to sell chocolate." The other time .... Whatever, you're kind of doing some that part, but what does a home run look like financially?

Jeff Slaughter: Well, I like what you say when you say, "You know, you just need a hundred people paying you $50 a month to make $5000 a month. That's really what I want to do. That would be my big goal. And if I reach that, I would dream bigger, but right now that's the goal and that's reachable.

Shane Sams: That's $60,000 a year for anybody out there that's bad at math. You know, it's just a hundred people, right?

Jeff Slaughter: Right?

Shane Sams: We just have to create something that's valuable enough and is built in a way that will keep them paying that month after month and year after year.

Jocelyn Sams: But I just want to say as an observation, I feel like you're sort of shortchanging yourself.

Shane Sams: 100%

Jocelyn Sams: Because the things that you know and the experiences that you have, I feel like that you already have everything that you need. I don't think you need a new idea.

Shane Sams: Yeah.

Jeff Slaughter: Okay.

Shane Sams: And the mindset issues that's holding you back is I think you're ... You said something very earnestly in that last statement is like, "You know, I've been trying for 10 years and I've not hit the home run yet." It's almost like you want the home run but you don't think you can hit it. You know what I'm saying?

Shane Sams: I used to tell my football players, they be like, "Coach, we want win Friday." And I'm like, "Really? Because you don't act like it on Wednesday. You know? Okay, because we're at Wednesday practice, you're not really paying attention. I'm just saying." Like the guy that's sitting over there, like do you feel like you can do this? Honestly?

Jeff Slaughter: Well I think that would be my greatest fear and that I can't and that I'm going to continue doing this for another 10 years and go, "Wow, Shane and Jocelyn, it's been 20 years." You know?

Shane Sams: Alright. Let's get into the business questions here and let's figure this out. Okay. What do you think you should do next? Okay, you've done these things. I feel you going up very seasonal because your life is kind of seasonal.

Jeff Slaughter: Yeah.

Jocelyn Sams: But I feel like you need to, instead of trying to run from that, I almost feel like you need embrace that.

Jeff Slaughter: That's good.

Jocelyn Sams: Because that is your life. That's who you are. Why are you trying to go against it? Let's go with what you already know, okay. Well, you have a chocolate business, which is good in, say the winter months.

Jeff Slaughter: Mm-hmm.

Shane Sams: Why are you not teaching people how to make chocolate by the way?

Jocelyn Sams: Yes, I was going to ask the same question. You have an unusual life experience. You are an American who lived in Belgium. Who has that experience?

Shane Sams: Yeah.

Jeff Slaughter: Yeah.

Shane Sams: Also too, you're a missionary who has actually supported his mission through fundraising, right?

Jeff Slaughter: Right.

Shane Sams: I know ... I can kind of see where this is going and it's going to be one of those weird shows where ... Usually, we're like be laser focused, go crazy on one thing and hammer down. But I'm almost like, "Man, what if Jeff had ... " So you know how we say, "You can get a hundred people to give you $50 a month", what if you had 10 things that gave you 10 people for $50 a month, right?

Jocelyn Sams: It's the same thing.

Shane Sams: What if you had a chocolate thing and it was ... Okay the chocolate business is big during this time. What if you taught missionaries how to do fundraising better, right? What if a hundred missionaries paid you 9.95 a month? What if a hundred-

Jocelyn Sams: What if you ...

Shane Sams: What if 100 people paid you $9 a month to learn chocolate? What if a hundred people ... Then what if people bought your scripts?

Jocelyn Sams: What if people bought an Easter script? What if you wrote an Easter script?

Jeff Slaughter: I have an Easter script.

Jocelyn Sams: There you go.

Shane Sams: That's what I'm saying. You've got all these assets. Assets are the most powerful thing in online business, that's what people don't realize. When you look at unfair advantages, when we look at you and we look anybody else, we say, "What are the assets this person has?"

Shane Sams: One of the assets me and Jocelyn have is we've lasted in the game now in online education longer than most people have. We've been here for six years now and we've got a good audience. We're killing it. What we've done more than anything else and anybody out there, no expert can match us at this, is we've answered more questions for more people than probably anybody else in the industry.

Shane Sams: Because we have member calls. We have Q&As publicly. We have Facebook Lives, YouTube Lives, everything. Right? What we realized this year is that we've got 1200 questions that we've answered on video that have never been released publicly. So we've been cutting those up and putting them on YouTube. That's an asset that nobody can match.

Shane Sams: Any competitor can come up to us right now and say, "We're going to be like you guys. We're going to try to compete with you guys." And we're going to look at them and go, "Yeah, but we have a thousand videos that are coming out on YouTube in the next month. Can you do that?"

Shane Sams: That's what you've got to look at. Sometimes everybody ... Listen like, "What are things I do have that I can bring to the table right now?" Sometimes that is ten different courses or something like that.

Jocelyn Sams: And I just want to say this too, like I've said this before on the podcast, if you want to make serious money, you have to solve a serious problem. So look at the things that you're already doing. Look at the experiences that you already have. What is a major problem that someone has that you have the experience to solve? I feel like you already have all these tools. I feel like you're making this way too hard.

Jeff Slaughter: Mm-hmm.

Shane Sams: Yeah. Sometimes when we look for the home run, we're looking for that perfect pitch, right?

Jeff Slaughter: Mm-hmm.

Shane Sams: And it never comes. They're all just right down the middle so just swing, swing, swing and keep hitting them, right? You know, you hit 10 singles in a row as a baseball team, that's going to do more than any single home run could ever do. Because you're going to drive in more runs than a single home run could ever drive in. So you may just need to keep swinging. And just swing better at the right time of year, right?

Jeff Slaughter: Yeah. Yeah, I think you guys are right. I think that the problem I have is overwhelmed with all the different things I do.

Shane Sams: Well that's organization. That's all we have to do is figure out your calendar. Jocelyn and I always look at our calendar for us and our avatar. And we want to make sure that we're matching up with our avatar and what they're thinking about, right?

Shane Sams: When we promote our membership, we're going to promote different things at different times of the year. So next month, we're recording this in October, we're going to promote Black Friday stuff. Like, "Hey, I have a video, I have a course about Black Friday sales." We got a podcast that we did about Black Friday sales. What am I going to promote publicly in November every year? Black Friday stuff, right? How can you maximize Black Friday?

Shane Sams: In January, what are we going to ... We're going to push our goal setting thing. I'm actually ... I've had our goal setting course inside of the Flip Your Life community. I've turned that into an e-book. We took the transcript, cleaned it up. Put in some workbook type activities, going to throw in some pictures and that's going to be a book basically that we release around that time.

Jocelyn Sams: On Kindle or some other third party marketplace.

Shane Sams: Kindle or something like that.

Jeff Slaughter: Right. Alright.

Shane Sams: Okay? And we're going to promote that when our audience is thinking about it. What's cool about your thing is one, what is someone who wants to get into making chocolate thinking about throughout the year? I don't know. What is someone who's a missionary thinking about fundraising throughout the year?

Jeff Slaughter: Yeah.

Shane Sams: What is someone who's wanting a play, a Christmas play, a other play. Maybe you can do something for VBS, right? Vacation Bible School. You have all these assets in your brain. We just have to organize them and bring them out at the right time and that's going to take some planning ahead a little bit.

Jocelyn Sams: And when you're thinking about it, if you are a person who has a lot of interest, like Jeff does, then think about what is it that really lights you up? What is it that you're just dying to work on and you want to help people with? Maybe you find yourself dreading working on one those. Don't work on it. Work on something else.

Shane Sams: As we've learned ... Dawson was getting onto me the other day about this. I've been getting into this online book publishing stuff, because I think it's a really good lead tool, right?

Jeff Slaughter: Right.

Shane Sams: But it could be a great money making tool. We have a friend who released 30 or 40 books on Kindle and she makes her living like that now. As I was looking at it, she was like, "Why are your old football things not in Amazon?"

Jocelyn Sams: So he's obsessed with making all these new Amazon books and I'm like, "Dude, we already have content."

Shane Sams: You legit have three books you've already written. I've got two playbooks. I've got a January to March weightlifting manual and then I've got a summer time, or an August installation. Like when people start practicing. Basically, I have something that can be sold for at least seven months out of the year and I've just never thought to put it out there. It's an asset that I'm sitting on that could be making me money.

Shane Sams: Sometimes those assets are in our head, not created. We need to figure out for you to do. So sometimes when people get into this thing and we really know what they should do but we got to figure out how to do it, I like to roll forward and fast forward a hundred days, okay? I don't want to think about what your audience is doing next month, because you've already had this Christmas thing that can be sold next month. And you've got chocolate going on right now too, right?

Jeff Slaughter: Right.

Shane Sams: The back end that you need to be thinking out is 90 days from now, 100 days from now, like in February, what is someone thinking about that you know you can help them with that thing, right?

Jeff Slaughter: Mm-hmm.

Shane Sams: So what would that be? Either a missionary or a chocolatier or another play. What's happening in February in your world?

Jeff Slaughter: Well, I mean, you know people are thinking about Easter. I don't know the percentage of churches that still Easter type pageants, presentations and all that. I hear people say that those things are kind of not as popular as they once were with the more contemporary services and things like that. So, don't know what the response would be to something ... To an Easter play.

Shane Sams: Well listen, there are tens of thousands of churches, you only need a hundred of them-

Jocelyn Sams: Probably hundreds of thousands.

Shane Sams: -to buy your product, right? Every year. So it's not like you have ... It doesn't matter what the big churches are doing. Somebody wants it. There's a hundred churches in America that are doing an Easter play.

Jocelyn Sams: And if you already have it done, what do you have to lose, you know?

Jeff Slaughter: Right.

Shane Sams: Now, what you need to be thinking about is, "Okay, my goal was a hundred people to pay me 50 bucks." Right?

Jeff Slaughter: Right.

Shane Sams: But you sell your plays for 100 bucks, right?

Jeff Slaughter: Yeah.

Shane Sams: Okay, so you only need 50 people that month to buy your Easter play. What if, in February and March, each month you sold 50 plays? Then you made your five thousand bucks. Right? And then you can re-market your Christmas plays to them later, okay? Now, once you figure that out, what happens after that in your life? What are people ... What is someone in your space thinking about in the summer.

Shane Sams: This might be something you need create. It might be something like Fundraising for Missionaries Community, right? You were good at that, dude.

Jocelyn Sams: So I think what-

Shane Sams: Chocolatiering. When would you sell that? We need to lay this out in the calendar and then what we've got to do now, 100 days out, is create the thing that's going to happen in 100 days so that when you get there, it's ready and you can, in the back side, work on the next hundred days to get the next thing ready.

Jeff Slaughter: Okay.

Jocelyn Sams: I think what would be beneficial at this stage, is to print out a calendar with just blank months on it. Not days or anything. Just kind of write out, "Okay, what does my calendar look like?" You know, what does a calendar look like for people who are making chocolate? What does a calendar look like for people who are missionaries? What does the calendar look like for people who are doing plays in their church? And sort of just look at it and say, "Okay, what do I already have that I could put out there?" Or-

Shane Sams: What do I already know that I could create something for before we get to that point? Right?

Jeff Slaughter: Mm-hmm.

Jocelyn Sams: Exactly.

Shane Sams: Then it's project based. It's AAA, BBB, CCC. If a hundred days from now it's Easter, then what you should be working on now for the next hundred days is ... The day you get to February 1st, you turn on your Easter promotion and it rolls. Right?

Jeff Slaughter: Right.

Shane Sams: You give market to all your emails list that have bought your Christmas play. Anybody that's bought that, anybody that's been on the list for that you start putting ads out for churches and pastors and things like that. If they need a play, you're ready to go. Right?

Shane Sams: And then what happens after that? That's what you work on then. We're always working on the next thing. That's what me and Jocelyn do. Yesterday we planned out the next eight weeks. The next two things we're working on are our Black Friday stuff. We'll be done with that this week. Then we're going to work on our affiliate program that we're going to roll out next year.

Shane Sams: Those are things that we know we're going to be doing next year, but we're already doing them now so that when we get there, we're ready, right?

Jeff Slaughter: Yeah.

Shane Sams: If we can get four or five of these things rolling ... There's nothing wrong with piecing that stuff together so that you can market.

Jocelyn Sams: I don't think it's the right answer for everyone. What I don't want to happen is for people to think, "Oh, well, they're saying I have to start order for businesses."

Jeff Slaughter: Right.

Jocelyn Sams: And that's not necessarily true. But for you, because of the way your life is, because you have so many varied interests and you just do so many different things, I think it just makes sense to you. Do you feel that way?

Jeff Slaughter: I do. I mean, I think that's probably been the reason why I haven't moved forward with anything because I'm ... I don't know what you call it but just having so many things that I do, just creates this barrier, like which one do I focus on?

Shane Sams: Any plan will work. As long as the plan happens, right?

Jeff Slaughter: Yeah.

Shane Sams: And sometimes some people do need to go this route in your ... This may be why you're stuck as a listener if you're listening to this podcast right now, because you're trying to get so laser focused you can't do it. Or your thing is so niche, that it really is seasonal.

Shane Sams: There are seasonal businesses. We have friends in western Kentucky and every year they open a Halloween costume store. They only open it for two or three months. It is really seasonal. They tried it for opening it for a year one time, but it was just so seasonal it really worked really well in those couple months and there was no reason to do it any other time.

Shane Sams: Then in the other parts of the year, they found other ways to make money. Like making t-shirts or doing something different. Right? Sometimes, businesses are just like that. Sometimes, people are just like that. But you don't have to fall into the shiny object camp, just because you have multiple interests. As long as you're focused on working on one thing at a time to execute it correctly until it's time is done, you can still make plenty of money.

Shane Sams: It's okay to think, "I need a spring, summer, fall and winter business." And just do those four things. There's a lot of people that do that.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, I think that's totally fine and I think the next question that we need to address, because I'm just thinking if I'm the listener listening to this show, then my next question, and probably Jeff's next question is, "Okay, well, where do I start? How do I know what to start with?"

Shane Sams: You start on the next thing. That's why the calendar is so important.

Jocelyn Sams: That and also really defining what it is that you want. What is it that you want? What makes you happy to work on it? What makes you excited to work on? If you think of two or three things you're interested in and one of them you're just kind of like, "I really do not want to do that." Then that probably isn't the logical place to start.

Shane Sams: Yeah.

Jeff Slaughter: Mm-hmm.

Shane Sams: Yeah. Have you ever thought ... Let me ask you two questions because you've not went down this road and I want to know why. Why have you not taught people how to make chocolate? Okay, for one thing.

Jeff Slaughter: Okay.

Shane Sams: Because you could literally just film yourself making chocolate and create a YouTube channel that people would watch, you know what I'm saying?

Jocelyn Sams: Do marketing for it.

Shane Sams: Because you're already doing it, right?

Jeff Slaughter: Mm-hmm.

Shane Sams: And then, why ... You have clearly been a successful, organizer and fundraiser for abroad missions. Why have you never thought to create a community to teach other missionaries, a paid community, on how to teach them how to fundraise? Because I would say that's really hard to do.

Jeff Slaughter: Yeah. Well, with the missions, I worked hard in the beginning then really the thing that I've done the best is just keeping really in touch, close in touch, with our supporters. With lots of newsletters and emails and that kind of thing. My retention rate has been really high over the years. I haven't gotten a lot of new supporters over the years, but I've retained many of them because of my communication skills and commitment to stay in touch with them.

Shane Sams: Don't you think a 25 year old missionary would need to know that?

Jeff Slaughter: Yeah.

Shane Sams: You know what I'm saying? You got a guy struggling but he's called to be overseas on mission. He's struggling to make money and keep money because he gets over there and he gets busy and he doesn't know how to organize it all. That's a powerful thing to mentor. And yes, that's worthy of charging for. Dave Ramsey charges people to get out of debt.

Jeff Slaughter: Okay.

Shane Sams: Right? If a guy can pay you 29 bucks a month and he can go out and make and retain 2500 bucks a month, that's a no brainer investment that he should make to get your wisdom. To get you mentorship. To get your advice. Right?

Jeff Slaughter: That is, yeah.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah and I think that, again, I think that you're shortchanging yourself. You think, "Well, this information is okay, but will people pay for that?" Yeah, they will.

Shane Sams: If you frame it right.

Jocelyn Sams: We think that what we know and the things that we are good at, we think they come easy to everyone but that is not necessarily the case.

Shane Sams: How many missionaries have you personally known, that got into it and five years later, they were out of the missionary field because they couldn't raise the money? A lot.

Jeff Slaughter: Yeah. A lot of them. Yeah and a lot of them struggle on the field no matter what.

Shane Sams: Wouldn't it be amazing, if a young missionary, who was trying to fundraise, had a resource center that he could go to that literally told him what to do in January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November and December every year that literally gave him template and schedule of when he should send things out. You got those in his inbox and told him what to do. It was all automated and he had a guy that he could reach out to, in a Facebook group to talk to, who's been there and done it. Wouldn't that be valuable?

Jeff Slaughter: It would be.

Shane Sams: Yep.

Jeff Slaughter: It would be very rewarding personally.

Shane Sams: Exactly.

Jocelyn Sams: Alright. Let's jump into the other question.

Shane Sams: The chocolate.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. Have you ever considered jumping into the chocolate as far as like teaching people how to make it, or teaching people how to market their business? Things like that.

Jeff Slaughter: Well, I have. And with chocolate, I guess the thought there is that it would be ... I guess my thought is that it's a very small niche. I've looked for ... You guys have suggested look for books on Amazon to see if people are publishing books. Really there have been none about making chocolate at home or that type of thing. Except one just came out. So maybe it's going to become a thing now.

Shane Sams: Okay, when I type in how to make chocolate in Google, there's 961 million results, okay? There are four advertisements How to make chocolate on the top of the Google results. There is a website-

Jocelyn Sams: If people are advertising, spending money, they're typically making money.

Shane Sams: That's right. There is a website called ... I'm not going to pitch another chocolatier online. I'm not going to tell you the domain but I'll put it in the chat later.

Jeff Slaughter: Okay.

Shane Sams: There's an ad on the top and he's got an academy to teach people how to make chocolate.

Jeff Slaughter: Right.

Jocelyn Sams: You are a guy who has lived in Belgium.

Jeff Slaughter: I know.

Jocelyn Sams: You know how to make Belgian chocolate. That is a skill that not everyone has.

Shane Sams: That's like going to a dojo in Japan to become a ninja. You're not like the guy who's taking karate down in the shopping center, right? You went to a dojo. You learned how to do the dojo.

Jeff Slaughter: Right.

Shane Sams: you know what I mean?

Jeff Slaughter: Right.

Shane Sams: You have an unfair advantage that no one else can ever claim. Learn how to make Belgian chocolate from a guy who lived in Belgium and he's a trained chocolatier who has actually made money selling chocolate.

Jocelyn Sams: And makes money selling it.

Jeff Slaughter: This is true, yeah.

Shane Sams: Right? And even just like ... what if people could make chocolate and go down to their local farmer's market and sell it on the weekends. You know how many people do that?

Jeff Slaughter: Right. Now, there is a difference in making chocolate. Some people say, "Oh, you make chocolate." They think I'm going and getting the beans and roasting them and doing all that. I don't do that. That's for someone who's really serious about and almost scientific-

Shane Sams: Let me tell you something, 90% of these people are not searching for that, okay?

Jeff Slaughter: Okay.

Shane Sams: Alright. I just did another search in a keyword research tool that I have, okay.

Jeff Slaughter: Right.

Shane Sams: How to make chocolate at home is searched-

Jeff Slaughter: Oh, really?

Shane Sams: Listen. Is searched for 681,818 times per month.

Jeff Slaughter: Wow.

Shane Sams: Not per year, not per decade, per month. There's over half a million people looking for that stuff. So massive audience there and maybe they just want a recipe. Maybe this just ends up being a recipe book.

Jocelyn Sams: But I think it could be a cool lead in. You teach people how to make a Christmas recipe or something. Then you say, "Hey, did you know that you can make money selling your own chocolate? Here's how."

Shane Sams: You could even talk about ... This could even become a course in your ... There's crossover with your missionary stuff. Like, "Yo, I make money selling chocolate. It's great for fundraising. I do little things like this to get to know people and build relationships."

Jeff Slaughter: Mm-hmm. That's true.

Shane Sams: There's so many searches for this. I mean, it's just the way to do it. The next steps probably are for us to get you organized. That's what we need to talk about in the forums, on member calls.

Jeff Slaughter: Okay.

Shane Sams: In the community. Hash that out. Create a really good plan. You know, get in there and get into the planning guys, the calendar guys and say, "Hey, this is what I'm doing for the next two months. This is what I'm doing the two months after that." Really get that spelled out so that you always know the next thing you work at. Even if you shift gears, you can go work on the next thing and start creating all these assets, in a year from now, everything looks totally different.

Jocelyn Sams: Usually at this point, we ask people, "Okay, well what's your action step?" But I'm going to tell what your action step is, okay?

Jeff Slaughter: Okay.

Jocelyn Sams: You may have to think, your action step is going to be to get really clear about what it is you want. And you kind of told us a little bit about that but I want you to really think about it. What do you want?

Shane Sams: Paint your life picture basically.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. Then you're going to think about all the skills that you have, that we've talked about here today and you're going to think about which one makes you excited to work on.

Jeff Slaughter: Okay.

Jocelyn Sams: Which one has a good search volume? Which one is ... Something that you think you can work on for a sustainable period of time.

Jeff Slaughter: Okay.

Jocelyn Sams: And that's what we're going to roll with. We're not going to think about it. We're not going to say, "Well, you know, I kinda want to do this, but I kind of want to do this." No. We're going to choose something and we're going to move forward.

Shane Sams: So what will happen is if you've got that core thing. All these seasonal things, I really feel them ... I don't know, you said it would be really fulfilling to help other missionaries do what you've done, right?

Jeff Slaughter: Yeah.

Shane Sams: I'm not saying that's it, but it's more like instead of your just one thing, it's almost like that's your sun and all these little things that you're creating seasonally are just rotating around that, right?

Jeff Slaughter: I see. Yeah I see.

Shane Sams: It's different than what we normally say, "Go straight ahead, be one thing." You're still going to have an anchor product, right? Something in this mix is not seasonal, that might be it, right?

Shane Sams: What you're going to do is create all these other things to take advantage and leverage all these assets and experiences that you have and that's going to keep lifting that boat higher and higher, so that you've got stability plus big things happening throughout the year. Okay?

Jeff Slaughter: Okay. Well, what's so interesting about this is that it actually just makes so much sense. And I think that's the problem is I had been trying to find the one thing and for me personally, it's just not one thing.

Shane Sams: Yeah. It's hard for us to ... You know this Jeff.

Jeff Slaughter: Yeah.

Shane Sams: We work with so many people every day, right?

Jeff Slaughter: Yeah.

Shane Sams: And people on the podcast don't always get to see what's happening in the Flip Your Life community, at our live events and things like that. We do harp on a lot of people. A lot of people don't have the life experience to pull it off or the focus to do it.

Jeff Slaughter: Okay.

Shane Sams: To be able to do multiple things or have different things rolling in the background and kind of roll through things throughout the year, right?

Jeff Slaughter: Right.

Shane Sams: But you do. You do. You need to tell people that.

Jocelyn Sams: And you've already proven that.

Shane Sams: Sometimes that's a good thing to do. You know? We can pull off multiple things at once because there's two of us. And we've been doing this for six years and we've helped thousands of people. So we've seen every angle of it, right? We can pull off a couple things at once.

Jeff Slaughter: Yeah.

Shane Sams: Some people can't and we're going to tell you exactly what you need right now and this is really what you need to do to go forward. Right?

Jeff Slaughter: Yeah. It's been great.

Shane Sams: Alright guys, great call today. Jeff, man, we've made some major progress in your business. This was a super inspirational call, but we want to get into some inspiration from the bible right now.

Shane Sams: Jocelyn and I draw a lot of inspiration from the bible in our business and our life. And we are super excited because Jeff actually has a scripture that he wanted to share on the call today. So Jeff, take it away.

Jeff Slaughter: Okay. My scripture comes from Proverbs three, verses five and six. And it says, "Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will direct your paths."

Jocelyn Sams: I love it when the verse goes so perfectly with what we've been talking about. I mean, I don't know that you could've picked a more perfect one. And this was ... You chose this before the call.

Jeff Slaughter: Yeah.

Jocelyn Sams: That is so awesome.

Shane Sams: It's like trust him in all the things.

Jeff Slaughter: All your ways. All your businesses.

Shane Sams: And all the paths, right? And that's what we've been talking about the past forty-five minutes.

Jocelyn Sams: And that's the thing it's like God made us all. We're all unique. We all have different gifts and talents and sometimes he gives us multiple gifts and talents.

Jeff Slaughter: Right.

Jocelyn Sams: So maybe it's that we need to serve people in multiple ways.

Shane Sams: Boom!

Jeff Slaughter: And I feel today you guys have just given me permission to be who I am, rather than trying to find this person that's not even existing inside me.

Shane Sams: That's right.

Jocelyn Sams: Absolutely.

Shane Sams: That's awesome.

Shane Sams: Somebody out there listening to this right now, is feeling the same way and they're going to go home and take action because you were transparent and you were open and you helped us today, Jeff. So thank you so much friend for being here.

Jeff Slaughter: Awesome, thank you guys.

Shane Sams: Alright guys, an amazing call with Jeff today. Man, we really got some great focus and clarity and we know exactly what he is doing next in his online business. Jocelyn and I would love to help you with your next steps as well. Whether you're starting, building or growing an online business. We have all the training, community support and coaching that you need to take your life and business to the next level.

Shane Sams: We want you to get access to all of that right now absolutely free. You can try one month free in the Flip Your Life community. Right now if you go to flippedlifestyle.com/free that's F-L-I-P-P-E-Dlifestyle.com/free. And you can get a 30 day, all access trial to the Flip Your Life community.

Shane Sams: Not only will you get to get in there and get access to all that great stuff but you'll get to hang out with me and Jocelyn on our next live member call. Come and ask your questions and we will help you take it all to the next level. That's flippedlifestyle.com/free. We cannot wait to help you.

Shane Sams: Alright guys, that is all the time we have for this week. We cannot wait to see you next time. Until then, get out there and do whatever it takes to flip your life.

Jocelyn Sams: Bye.

Shane Sams: Guys one thing we are super proud of is Flip Your Life Live. You heard about the great progress that Jeff made at this year's live event. We want you to have that experience as well. We are doing it again next year. Flip Your Life Live 2019 and we want you to be there. Go get on the waiting list right now so that we can notify you as soon as Flip Your Life Live tickets are on sale. You can do that at flippedlifestyle.com/live. Get on the waiting list, get on the newsletter so we can keep you updated. So that you can be at next year's life changing event. That's flippedlifestyle.com/live. We can't wait to see you there.

Links and resources mentioned on today’s show: * Jeff's Chocolate Website * Jeff's Christmas Play Script Website * Flip Your Life LIVE 2019 Waiting List * Flip Your Life community 30-day trial

Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!

Get your FREE 30-DAY Membership in the Flip Your Life Community NOW!

– https://flippedlifestyle.com/free

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In today's episode, we talk about how we help Jennifer overcome fears and create a plan to quickly grow her membership by the end of the year.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jocelyn Sams: Hey y'all. On today's show, we help Jennifer take her education business to the next level.

Shane Sams: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast where life always comes before work. We're your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. We're a real family that figured out how to make our entire living online. And now, we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? All right. Let's get started.

Shane Sams: What's going on everybody? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. It is great to be back with you again this week. We have a beautiful day in Kentucky and we have an amazing guest. Another member of the Flip Your Life community. On the show today, we want to welcome Jennifer Bradley. Jennifer, welcome to the podcast.

Jennifer B.: Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to talk to you guys.

Jocelyn Sams: It is great to talk to you again. Jennifer is someone we have actually met in real life, which is really exciting. You guys know that I love it when we have people on that we have met in real life. This is a really good show for me.

Shane Sams: And I was telling Jennifer off air, we may know Jennifer better than anyone who has ever been on the show because she's also a member of our all-access mastermind. I literally talk to Jennifer every single day on Voxer.

Jennifer B.: Yes.

Jocelyn Sams: And we chose Jennifer to be a part of the podcast because she is a community member who believes in posting her success.

Shane Sams: And taking massive action in her business.

Jocelyn Sams: When we look for people to be a guest on the podcast, we look for people who are really taking action, who are letting other people know about the successes that they're having. And that is why she's here today.

Jocelyn Sams: Let's jump into a little bit of that. Start out by telling everyone about who you are and a little bit about your background and your business.

Jennifer B.: I'm Jennifer Bradley and I'm from Michigan. I have three little kids at home. Ages seven, four and two. And then I'm married to my high school sweetheart. My business is I'm a speech therapist. I started out selling on a third-party platform Teachers Pay Teachers. I'd just sell therapy materials that I have created. I recently, about a year ago, turned it into a membership platform. I have all of my therapy materials in one area for speech therapists to use.

Shane Sams: And how has that gone? I know a lot of people that is a scary transition. They'll go to a third-party marketplace, they'll make a little money online, whether it's putting a book on Kindle or selling something on you-to-me or in another place like that. Then it's like, "Oh, man. If I go offline, how am I gonna find customers?" All that thing. How's your membership going?

Jennifer B.: It's going great. At first, it was a little scary. A little bit daunting to have my own website and send traffic there. But I'm really seeing the benefits now because I own it and as a third-party website I'm on there and I have no control of changes that are made. Since I'm always selling one-off products, I have to continuously sell and sell because most of my products range from $3 to $10. Where the membership is growing now, I'm having members and I'm in charge of my own destiny. It's been an amazing transition.

Shane Sams: How many members do you have now?

Jennifer B.: I have 380 members now.

Shane Sams: Oh my goodness. That's insane.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, that's awesome.

Shane Sams: Just think about what you said out loud. We don't get too far into numbers for people, but I'm gonna paint the picture here for everybody. What if you had 380 people paying you 25 bucks a month or 50 bucks a month or 100 bucks a month. That's a crazy amount of customers and really all they're doing is logging into a community and getting access to your resources, right?

Jennifer B.: Mm-hmm. Yeah. They just log in. They have access to all my therapy materials that were on TpT.

Shane Sams: But we sat down at Flip Your Life Live last year and I worked with you at our table for a little while. You were telling me so many amazing things that I hear from so many people, "Oh, my gosh. I was afraid." You had something making money. This third-party marketplace. It was making good money too, right?

Jennifer B.: Yes.

Shane Sams: And you're like, "Oh my gosh. What if I stop promoting that? Is that gonna die? Am I gonna give up a good thing? A bird in the hand is better ..." All those fears that we have. I remember we were talking about your promotion strategy and you were still really promoting even the third-party marketplace. I looked over and I'm, "But the membership's making as much money as that. Why would you just not promote the thing that's passive and create stable predicable income?" And we were like, "Yeah. That's probably what I should do." Right?

Jennifer B.: Yeah. I needed you to knock some sense into me because I was only pretty much promoting TpTs little one-off sales. Since starting to work with you guys, I have gone up almost 100 members in a month. I needed that.

Shane Sams: That's incredible.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay. That's awesome.

Shane Sams: That's why we love bringing success stories on because most of the time people know what to do and they do just need to talk it through with somebody and see the fork in the road and be like, "Yeah, I've been down this road 100 times. I'm telling you, it's the right thing." But the most important thing is you actually took action on it. That's why you got 100 members in a month is because you said, "Yeah. That's the path I need to go down. I just need to hammer down on it." And that's what we love about you, Jennifer. 'Cause you put in the work. You do what it takes. It takes some risks. It takes a little discomfort at times to make it to the next level.

Shane Sams: We were just meeting with our live event coordinator for next years live event. We were like, "Could we double or triple the amount of people who come to Flip Your Life Live?" I looked over at Jocelyn and I said, "This feels really scary. Though, it's probably right." That's where you were. Do I go all in on the membership and leave behind what got me here to get to the next level? And that was scary, wasn't it?

Jennifer B.: Yes, it was very scary. Because TpT was a big income for me. To just let that do its own thing without promoting it was a very big jump. But it's been working out really well.

Shane Sams: Now, you're full-time online. I know you do go in to the school every once in a while just for a couple hours to keep your toe in the water, but you are full-time online correct?

Jennifer B.: Yes, yes.

Shane Sams: Well, I just want to first, before we got on, 'cause we're gonna try and help you get to the next level. That's always our goal. There's always a next level. There's always a way to raise the bar. But congratulations for flipping your life because it takes a lot of energy and effort and courage while you've got three kids under the age of seven at home to do what you've done. And we never want to shortchange that. It's so easy to get complacent and it's so easy to always look ahead. But sometimes look back and say, "Wow. I've done something that 90% of people are not doing." And you've done a great job of that, Jennifer, so congratulations.

Jennifer B.: Thank you. Thank you.

Jocelyn Sams: I think that it's important to recognize that Jennifer didn't wave her magic wand to make all this happen. There was a lot of hard work and energy that went behind it. But I think that in hindsight you would say that it was worth it.

Jennifer B.: Oh, yeah. Definitely. I didn't watch TV for three years, but it paid off in the end.

Jocelyn Sams: Exactly.

Shane Sams: I love it when people say that because we gave up cable for two years. I remember the day I turned cable back on and I just sat there flipping through the channels and I was like, "I get to do this for the rest of my life now. And I don't have to worry about it anymore."

Jennifer B.: Right. Exactly.

Shane Sams: What brought you to the Flip Your Life community?

Jennifer B.: I heard you guys on Pat Flynn. I had been a part of another membership community to grow memberships. It was a great community, but it wasn't as family focused. It was more technical focused. I liked that you guys had the technical part but also you were a family. You were a husband and wife team. It was very focused on the community and the members helping each other and I really liked that aspect of it.

Shane Sams: You know, that's one reason we started the Flip Your Life community in the first place. Because when we were out trying to start our online business, we found the same thing. We found a lot of courses. We found a lot of people telling you how to do things. But we didn't find anywhere where we felt like people were focused on the real issues that were holding us back. The things that held us back were not we couldn't grind though and figure out WordPress or we couldn't grind through and figure out how to take payments for a product. Those are all solvable issues. It was we've got a four-year-old and two-year-old and they're screaming while we have 30 minutes to work. What do we do? We had to stumble through all those problems ourselves and when we decided to start teaching this, we were like, "That's where we need to focus our energy. Helping people deal with the real issues that hold them back.

Shane Sams: It's why we love people that come on with three, four, five, six, even seven kids. Because it just proves out there, look, Jennifer has three kids. Jennifer has a life. Jennifer was working. She built a business online. There you go. Why are you not doing that? I just want to encourage anybody that hears this. You can do this while raising a family working full-time. You just gotta take the inspiration and do it.

Jennifer B.: That's what I liked. You guys talk a lot about the mindset and the fears. I think that was more my big thing. Getting over that stuff than anything.

Jocelyn Sams: That's one thing that we've just really learned through the years of doing this. Usually, things boil down to something that we're afraid of. Maybe it's something that we think we can't do. Or some kind of self-limiting belief is what causes a lot of people's issues.

Jocelyn Sams: Let's dive into that a little bit. Let's explore what's going on with you as far as what is holding you back right now? If you were to look at something and say, "I'm worried about something. Or I'm afraid I can't do something." What might that be?

Shane Sams: 'Cause the fears do not go away just because you become successful. In fact, they may get bigger and you just have to keep overcoming that next obstacle. That next fear. That next mindset issue every step of the journey. I don't want anyone out there to say, "Wow. Shane, Jocelyn and Jennifer have made it. They're never afraid again." Right? We all have fears that are holding us back. What's challenging you right now?

Jennifer B.: I think the fear of overall being judged by selling things or I'm being too pushy and just having that being judged by the speech community. Because it's a smaller community of professionals. So, I don't want to have ... I'm afraid of getting judged about being that pushy sales person I guess.

Jocelyn Sams: I totally understand that. I've definitely gone through that as well. I think in the education space especially you can have these types of fears because a lot of people offer things for free because it's education. You have this mindset that, "Oh, nobody wants to pay for anything." Things like that. Would you say that that is part of it?

Jennifer B.: Yes. Definitely part of it. Like I should be giving away things for free instead.

Shane Sams: What happens here is it's a lot like everything else in our society in 2018 basically. The loudest voices come from the fringes. Right? And when you get the person who's really bitter and is a taker and wants everything free and really doesn't respect. I find that a lot of people that write us hate mail or something because we charge for our products or something like that, they're usually coming from a place of disempowerment and they're really mad and bitter. And they almost feel entitled like someone should either give them everything or maybe they're just frustrated and they can't achieve it and they wish they could have it, but they're not really willing to do what it takes, so they want to complain about it. Right?

Jennifer B.: Right.

Shane Sams: What we have found is those loud voices from the fringes are the ones that derail us the hardest. We look at our comments all the time. We look at our Facebook posts. We look at the emails that we receive. We look at our ... Even our reviews on our podcast on iTunes. Probably 1% of them are actually complaining or actually negative. But they are so loud and so mean that they just override ... You have 300 and something people paying you money every month without complaining. But that one comment on the webinar in the chat box ... wants to make you just bash your head through the wall.

Jennifer B.: Yeah. Exactly.

Shane Sams: It's just really important to keep that in context that we live in a world where anybody can scream as loud as they want and holler as loud as they want. But the people who recognize our effort and recognize our work-

Jocelyn Sams: And find value in it.

Shane Sams: And find value in it. And not only that, have found a way to believe in themself enough to bet on their own life. To bet on their own future with their money and their time. Those are the people we've got to really focus on. Because if we focus on the bad people that are judging us, how can we help the good people that aren't?

Jennifer B.: Right.

Shane Sams: We struggled through this when we were about to host our live event. We were like, "Who are we to host a live event? Everybody else goes and speaks at live events. You have 10 speakers on stage. We were like, "No, we're gonna host our own. We're gonna speak on stage for two straight days and interact with over 100 people. That's what we're gonna do." We had some negative comments. We had some negative things that we had to deal with. But look at all the good that came out of that live event. Just for you and for other people. If we listened to those negative voices, then we don't get to help all the people that really need it.

Jennifer B.: Yeah. That makes sense. Yes.

Jocelyn Sams: Sometimes it's hard to listen to that voice. Especially when you have these people who are saying, "Oh, well, your product's too expensive." Or, "I don't want to join your membership because it should be free. I can get better stuff like this for free." Well, you know what? That's fine. They're not your people.

Shane Sams: Go do it, dude.

Jocelyn Sams: Go for it. Do it. Spend your time looking for it. It is out there. But if you want to spend your time and effort doing it, then you're not my customer. I think that it just takes a little bit of time just to get used to the idea. It used to bother me a lot more than it does now. When somebody would be super negative or say something that just bothered me or whatever. It doesn't bother me as much anymore. I think just being okay with everything not being perfect.

Shane Sams: And also too, Jocelyn and I are bothered by hate in different ways. I really bow up and want to fight them. I write them back sometimes and I'm, "Bring it. Let's go. I'll joust with you." And Jocelyn, it gets her really, really down. Like, really, really down and doubting. But it does affect us both really negatively. The biggest thing that we've learned over the last couple years is you gotta ignore it. You just gotta ignore it. It's gonna come. You have to accept it, that it's gonna happen. And the more you can delete it, the better. Right?

Jennifer B.: Yes.

Shane Sams: You just gotta let that go. Because, gosh, you just can't make everybody happy. You know that. You're selling to schools.

Jennifer B.: Mm-hmm. And yeah, I'm like Jocelyn in that it gives me doubts. I'm like, I can't be scared to do things. You had told me to send out three emails a week and I thought I was gonna get a bunch of hate mail from people. I think I overreacted about that. So, I'm trying to get my head around the fact that I'm just overthinking.

Shane Sams: Once you get over the fact that it's going to happen, that doesn't really make it easier to deal with, but you can create systems. That's the real practical thing that we've done to shield ourselves from it. It's really important once you have enough money to get someone to take some of that off of you. You need a customer service person. Or if you have a business partner, like Jocelyn, before we could afford customer service, I would check the messages first to delete the hate mail before Jocelyn saw it because it was such an energy drain on her. Right?

Jennifer B.: Yeah.

Shane Sams: And then we have systems in place like Jocelyn, even with me, "Don't write them back. I know you want to, but don't do it. Don't waste energy on that. We've got bigger fish to fry."

Jocelyn Sams: Well, and I always say, "Be careful of screenshots." Because if you do get a hateful email and you fire off a big hateful response, then they're gonna post it on Twitter or whatever and say-

Shane Sams: And that's gonna create more energy drain.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. "This person's a jerk, don't join their community." You don't want that to happen either. One of the things that I do to deal with this, especially when I was still answering my own customer service a lot, is I would say, "Okay. Well, what's the worst thing that can happen? If I send out this email asking people to buy something, what's the worst thing that can happen?" Well, the worst thing is maybe someone would say, "This is a rip off. It's way too expensive. And this website is a joke." Then I would write a little response to that. And it would say something like, "Hey. Thank you for your email. I understand that you think that the product is too expensive. I totally understand. There are lots of free resources available online. Feel free to use those and I appreciate you writing in." Or whatever. That way, my mind had already dealt with it.

Shane Sams: It's a canned response. Sends the same thing back to everybody, so she doesn't have to waste any energy. But she also feels like she answered the person that was mad at her.

Jocelyn Sams: For me, I felt like I was prepared for it that way. And really, I only had to send it out one or two times. In my head, I'm thinking I'm gonna get 100 responses that say this and I got two.

Shane Sams: Let's put this in context too because sometimes the criticism that we get is harder than we think it is. Right? What's the meanest thing anyone's actually ever said to you in your customer service? What's the meanest thing that you can remember right now, seriously, that anyone has ever said to you?

Jennifer B.: It's kind of sad 'cause there's something ... We'll it's not sad, but there hasn't been anything totally mean. I think the worst thing I've heard is, "I don't like your materials." Which I took personally. Which is actually not that mean, so I don't know why I have this weird fear of people being me. But, yeah. It wasn't ...

Shane Sams: It's like that fear of something that could happen has almost over ... You can look back and say, "Literally, that has never happened to me." My mom, I was sitting there last night at my mom's house. And it's almost Halloween when we're recording this. My mom was like, and God love her, "Now, you're gonna take the kids' candy up to the hospital right?" I was like, "Why would I do that?" She goes, "Well, they'll run that right through the x-ray machine to make sure nobody's putting razorblades in your Reese's cups. I said, "Mom. Let's be honest here. Do you know any human being, in person, that that's ever happened to?" She said, "Well, no. But I read about it in the paper one time." Right? We laugh at that. You know what I'm saying? We hear that one thing or we imagine that one scenario and it becomes this overriding thing in our life that we think's gonna happen and then it's almost real. And then keeps us from doing something that could cause that. Right?

Jennifer B.: Mm-hmm. But yeah, I like that idea to pre-make your emails. I feel like that would make me feel better.

Jocelyn Sams: Yes. It's just one less thing to think about. You just know that if that situation happens, you have a response for it. You don't even have to think about it. You can just put it outside your mind.

Shane Sams: And your brain will deal with it.

Jocelyn Sams: One thing to remember is just that people ... There's always gonna be someone who doesn't like you. If everyone likes you, then you're probably not polarizing enough. You need to find someway to make it, not controversial, but just let your real personality come out. If you're not doing that, then people probably aren't really connecting with you.

Shane Sams: We had a guy write us in one time and I'm reading verbatim his email that says, "Well ..." It was basically helping ... We were just doing a webinar. We were trying to ... We wanted to help people learn how to make money online. We were doing this webinar and I'm sending an email out to our list and I get a replay back that says, "Well, aren't you guys fancy. So basically, the goal in life is to sloth around the house all day on your laptops while other people work their butts off and live their life for you. You are possibly the least inspirational and most phony entrepreneurs I've ever seen. You are elitists bragging about being elitists while attempting to make more money off others. You guys are gross."

Shane Sams: That's an actual email.

Jennifer B.: Bad day.

Jocelyn Sams: Who reads their hate mail on the air? Nowhere but the Flipped Lifestyle podcast.

Shane Sams: But that guy sent that around and was so bitter and hateful and he didn't look up and say, "You know, these guys have 4,000 posts in their success stories forum." Think about that. He was so blinded by his own bitterness that he just had to be hateful instead of realizing that we had something that could possibly help him. That's what you've got to ... Your materials not only are helping teachers have the better work experience, helping them be happy at work, helping them be happy at home because they're not spending time on lessons, and think about all the kids and people who are gonna be impacted over the years by all the lesson plans that you're putting out there and everybody out there who's doing something with their life and putting things out on the internet, you're bringing value to the world. Never let those negative voices hold you down. Okay?

Jennifer B.: Yeah.

Jocelyn Sams: All right, Jennifer. We've talked a little bit about what's going on inside your head. What can we help you with as far as working on the nuts and bolts of your business to help you move it forward?

Jennifer B.: I am the type to see something and want to do it. So, I buy too many courses because I want to prefect this and I want to perfect that. I'm just everywhere with everything and I don't know where to focus my time. Do I focus my time on blogging more? Do I focus my time on creating ads? Do I focus my time on Instagram or email marketing or ... I'm all over the place with what I should do next I guess.

Jocelyn Sams: All right. I feel like probably a big part of the problem is that you're not clearly defining what you want. A lot of times, people, they want all the things. They want to try to concentrate on all the things. And we have a tendency to do this sometimes as well. But what you have to do is say, "Okay, in this year, I would like to do X. And then you back up and say, "Okay, well how am I going to do that?"

Jennifer B.: Okay.

Shane Sams: What do you want right now? What do you want to spend your time on and where do you want to go? The easiest thing to do is set a member goal or a money goal. Right? Then how do I get there, or how do I want to get there? What is your next goal right now for you?

Jennifer B.: My goal would probably be I would love to have 500 members by the end of the year. Yes, that's my goal.

Shane Sams: We've got about two months to get there. That's good. Ambitious goals are what you need. You want to stretch. Right?

Jennifer B.: Right.

Shane Sams: How do you want to get there? If you said, "Man, any path I pick will work. Anything I do will work because if I put the effort into it and I've got a plan, if I execute the plan, it will work. What's your easiest path mentally to get there?

Jennifer B.: Probably for me probably more Facebook ads or Instagram ads 'cause I know them decently. It's an easier way for me to, I think, to advertise I guess.

Shane Sams: Okay.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay. So, really that means that you think that you need to either promote to your current audience or grow your audience. Which one of those would you say is accurate? Or both?

Jennifer B.: I think grow my audience. I recently got an email from somebody telling me that she was so excited to join. That I need to promote more because she didn't know about me. I guess that's them telling me. I feel like I need to get my name out there a little bit more.

Shane Sams: Okay. This is a very similar place that we found ourselves earlier this year. Okay? I just want to go back to what we just said because it's really important for anybody out there listening about working backwards. You said 500 people. And then we said, "What's the best way to get there?" You said Facebook ads. Right? And then that led to an anecdote that proved it in your system. You have a person that told you, a customer, that was, "Wow. If I'd known about you sooner, I'd have done this." And you've been in the game a little while, so you've got plenty of things that you've already done that you can go ahead and promote. It's not like you've gotta reinvent the wheel every day or create new blog posts or create new content. You just have to activate all this amazing stuff you've already got.

Shane Sams: But working backwards from the goal, your plan is basically, "Okay, I need to get 100 more members. I need to promote my most popular stuff to new people on Facebook." That's it. That's all you have to do for the rest of the year. You don't have to create anything new. You don't have to reinvent the wheel. You've just gotta go do that.

Jocelyn Sams: It may also mean some repurposing. What I mean by that is can you create a short video about one of the things you've written a blog post about and post it on YouTube?

Jennifer B.: Okay.

Shane Sams: Our priority list always goes in this order. We look at every task and we dive down into tasks. Yesterday Jocelyn and I were planning out November and we said, "What is our goal for November?" Well, we have to get our Black Friday sale ready, which we're gonna be selling our videos from Flip Your Life Live, the video package. We said, "Okay, what do we have to do? What are all the tasks that we have to do to get that done and repurpose that content into a product?" So, we're wrote down all those tasks. But then we look at those tasks ... For us, the next step is for me and Jocelyn is we say, "Okay, who's gonna do what?" But for you, you're just like, "What order am I gonna do the tasks." Right?

Jennifer B.: Right.

Shane Sams: But back up a little bit. Before we decided that was the thing we were doing in November, we had four other things that we could do that would do different things. Like making YouTube videos, making podcasts, doing all these things. We always give them little ... We draw little icons behind them. We say, "This one would make money immediately. What's the fastest one to make the most money? This one would keep current customers happy. This one would be promotion. This one would be a process that we could delegate. This one might be something that we have to do on a repeated basis." The things that do money always win.

Jennifer B.: Right.

Shane Sams: When you tell me, "Well should I make more blog posts?" My first question is, does it make you more money? Maybe in the long-term. But you already got blog posts that you can promote. Why not just promote them and send that to your list? Now it's making money and it's promotion. You're ready to go. That's how you have to look at things. What makes me the most money this quarter. Period. Do that. If everyone just makes that decision, your long-term plans will automatically stack up and work in your favor because you're making money as you go.

Jocelyn Sams: And be decisive. Usually the reason that people bounce around from course to course or community to community is because they're not really decisive on what they want. Truth be told, they don't really believe in themselves to do whatever it is that they've set out to do, so they think, "Oh, well, if I just take this ads course, this is gonna solve all my problems." No. You already have everything that you need to be successful. Stop hiding behind courses and do the work.

Shane Sams: That's a good quote. "Stop hiding behind courses."

Jennifer B.: It is,

Jocelyn Sams: Well, it reminds me ...

Jennifer B.: I have like 10.

Jocelyn Sams: Well, I have this friend, I'm not gonna name her as she listens to the podcast, but I have this friend and she texted me a couple weeks ago. This was when somebody was doing a big launch. Everybody's launching this particular product. She messages me. It's a friend of mine, so she texted me and she's like, "Hey. Have you ever worked with this particular individual? Would you recommend this program?" And I'm like, "No." I was like ...

Shane Sams: This was $1,000 too by the way. This was not a cheap course.

Jocelyn Sams: Nothing against this particular program or this particular person. I don't know anything about them. But I'm like, "No." This person has probably taken 100 courses. They have implemented some things, but I'm like, "You already have all the knowledge, all the information that you need. It's right there. You don't need another course. Stop hiding behind courses." Anyway, that's what I'm trying to say is that you already have everything you need. If you are not taking action, you need to do a little bit of internal work. What is stopping you? What is making you think you can't do it? There's something inside that's making you want to take another path or basically just delay the inevitable. Stop delaying it. Get the work done.

Shane Sams: Some people too, we do this all the time, we'll do something and it'll work. And we'll be like, "Whoa! That worked? That's amazing! It worked!" And then we're like, "What do we do next?" The answer is usually, "Why don't we just do more of what just worked?"

Jennifer B.: Yes,

Shane Sams: This worked. This worked. Why would I not just do it over and over. And I get the feeling that you're like me. Sometimes we get bored with the, with what's working.

Jennifer B.: Yes.

Shane Sams: But just do it. Just keep doing that. Keep shooting free throws and keep scoring points. Because that's all you gotta do to win.

Jocelyn Sams: Sometimes it's easier to look for an alternate path than to stay on the path that you're already one.

Shane Sams: Because that require discipline. And discipline-

Jocelyn Sams: And it also requires some work. There's some brush in the path. You're gonna have to clear that off. There's some things that you're gonna have to do. But if I just find another path, it might be better.

Jennifer B.: I think you guys both hit it. I think sometimes my fear of the getting judged thing and not selling I'm like, "Oh, I'll buy a course to do that. To learn how to do that more." And then Shane, like you just said, I think sometimes I get bored to. I'm like, "Ooh, this course looks good. I'll do this." And I have 10 courses that I haven't taken yet.

Shane Sams: Oh, without question. I buy books all the time and I'll read a chapter and I'll get really excited. But then I get bored. I don't even do what the chapter told me to do.

Jocelyn Sams: We seriously probably have over 100 books on our bookshelf. We've probably read about half.

Shane Sams: The shelf is ending in the middle. Right? And I'm not saying that's not valuable. We get things out of them. But it's ... I bought this book the other day about YouTube. And I know our YouTube strategy. We have a plan for next year. It's repurpose it. We have over 1,000 videos of questions we've answered over the last few years on online business and we want to roll those out onto YouTube individually. We have a live strategy to answer questions from the community. One a day or one every other day. And then put that question as an answer. We'll take that answer, give it to the person who asked the question, who's a member, but then we'll just do it on YouTube, so it's more content.

Shane Sams: I know this strategy. I know it'll work. The numbers don't lie. I'm looking at the stats and I'm like, "Okay, well, we'll have 1,000 videos by the end of next year. If all those videos are getting 10 views a day, we're getting 10,000 views a day." It's not hard. And then we just pitch something at the end. That's what we have to do. But I bought this book about YouTube 'cause I'm looking for the magic. When really, the magic is roll up your sleeves and do it and a year from now amazing things will happen.

Jocelyn Sams: Imperfect action always beats no action.

Shane Sams: That's right. That's right.

Jennifer B.: Right.

Shane Sams: And the book was so bad. I'm not gonna name names. But this book was, "Start your channel. Create a playlist." There was nothing. It was supposed to be the best book ever. The reviews. All these experts were on the front saying it was the most important YouTube book that had ever been written. And it was literally like, "Start your YouTube channel." That's what the whole book was about. We're always looking for the magic pill, but the magic pill is us. The magic pill is work. Just gotta do it and grind. I'm gonna help you create a lot of Facebook ads between now and the end of the year.

Jennifer B.: I know. The things that you've been giving me since I joined your private coaching, I'm like, "This is scaring me." But it's all good.

Shane Sams: But it's all worked, right?

Jennifer B.: Yeah.

Shane Sams: It's all worked so far.

Jennifer B.: 100 members in a month.

Jocelyn Sams: All right, Jennifer. I've really enjoyed our conversation today about just the different fears, mindset issues and trying to move forward in your business. What is one thing that you plan to take action on in the next day or so based on what we've talked about here today?

Jennifer B.: I am going to do the working backwards thing where I'm gonna figure out how I can get another 120 members by December 31st. The specific tasks that go into that. I know it's ads, but I gotta figure out my strategy for it.

Shane Sams: The most important question in any ad strategy is where you're sending people. That's something that me and you can hash out in the private mastermind. What are we going to promote? We're not gonna promote 40 different things. We're gonna figure out a good strategy and stick to it and just promote it over time to beat those members out of the bushes. Okay?

Jennifer B.: Right.

Shane Sams: All right. What an awesome call, Jennifer. Man, that was just some amazing stuff and you have an amazing goal that's gonna take you forward. Before we go, Jocelyn and I love to share a bible verse with all of our listeners. We get a lot of our inspiration in business and in life from the Bible and we're super excited today because Jennifer has a verse that she would like to share with everybody listening to the podcast.

Jennifer B.: All right. The one I like is the Proverbs 21:5. It is the plans of the diligent lead to profit as surely as haste leads to poverty.

Shane Sams: Ooh. That is deep.

Jocelyn Sams: I love it. I think that it really echos what we've talked about here today. There is no magic wand, there is no magic pill. If you are going to live the life that we live, you've gotta do the work.

Shane Sams: That's such a clear example for all business owners. The plans of the diligent. That means you plan it and then you do the work. Right? But then the plans of the hasty, they're just trying to look for the magic pill and they fail. What an awesome verse. Listen, thank you for sharing that verse today and thank you just for being so transparent. Coming on the show and sharing what you're doing and all the members and really being open and honest with your fears. That's gonna resonate with somebody today. That's gonna help somebody else move forward in their business. That's what we're all about. Throwing that pebble in the pond and letting that ripple out. Thank you Jennifer for sharing your story today.

Jennifer B.: Well, thank you guys for having me. This has been amazing. I have some work to do.

Jocelyn Sams: All right guys. If you need help building your online business, getting those members just like Jennifer did, we would love to have you inside our Flip Your Life community. The first 30 days are totally free and you can learn more at flippedlifestyle.com/free. We hope to see you inside the community real soon.

Shane Sams: All right guys, that is all the time that we have today. Thank you so much for tuning in to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. We will see you next time. Between now and then, get out there and do whatever it takes to flip your life. We'll see you then.

Jocelyn Sams: Bye.

Links and resources mentioned on today’s show: * Jennifer's Website * Flip Your Life LIVE 2019 Waiting List * Flip Your Life community 30-day trial

Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!

Get your FREE 30-DAY Membership in the Flip Your Life Community NOW!

– https://flippedlifestyle.com/free

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Hey Y’all, welcome to another Flipped Lifestyle Podcast Q&A w/ S&J!

In the Flip Your Life Community, we hold a members-only Q&A twice a month where we answer online business questions of our members live on air!

Today’s Q&A highlights answer the following questions: Question One:

"How can we build an email list while we are still finishing course content, website, etc?"

Question Two:

"I have 5500 members on facebook, what strategy should I use to convert them into email subscribers? I have only asked for subscribers once and we got 100. On a typical post, it shows it was seen by 600-750 people and 1300-2000 on live videos. What is a creative way to keep it front of them to continue to get more email subscribers?"

Question Three:

"How much content should be in place on the website before launching the membership? Currently there is plenty of content on social media places, but not much on the website. I have focused my efforts to make up a minimal product as a lead magnet. So how can I launch the membership before writing much or blogging?"

Question Four:

"One of the services you offer FYL members are the member call replays. I really value this and want to offer the same for my community. Will you share exactly how you do it, including the tools you use? Is it just Youtube live and vimeo? How do you get the chat under the live video?"

CLICK HERE to get your FREE 30-DAY Membership in the Flip Your Life Community NOW!

View Details

In today's episode, we talk about how we helped Blair with a pricing change that resulted in $20,000.00 in recurring revenue.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jocelyn Sams: Hey y'all. On today's podcast, we talk about how taking one risk made Blair $20,000.00 in recurring revenue.

Shane Sams: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, where life always comes before work. We're your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. We're a real family who figured out how to make our entire living online. Now, we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? All right, let's get started.

Shane Sams: What is going on everybody? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. It is great to be back with you again this week. And man, we have got an amazing success story for you guys. It is going to inspire you to take massive actions. Maybe to go in and take some of those risks that you've been avoiding, and just show you what is truly possible when you're all in, online.

Shane Sams: I wanna welcome to the show today, Flip Your Life community member ... Oh wait, hold on. Pause. Blair, how do you pronounce your last name?

Blair T.: Thielemier. The H is silent.

Shane Sams: Okay. Thielemier.

Blair T.: Yes.

Jocelyn Sams: Yes.

Jocelyn Sams: Tea, like I drink every morning. Tea.

Shane Sams: Because I was about to say Thielemier.

Blair T.: No.

Jocelyn Sams: I can only imagine what you get called.

Shane Sams: Wanna welcome to the show today, Flip Your Life member, Blair Thielemier. Blair, welcome.

Blair T.: Thank you for having me.

Jocelyn Sams: It's so exciting to have you on today. This is my favorite kinda show, as you know, if you listen to our show very often. I love it when we have people on that we have met in real life. And I have actually spent time with Blair a couple of different times. So, it's really cool to have you on today.

Blair T.: Yeah, yeah, so I got to meet you last year in Southern California, at a Women's Leadership Conference. And then, again at Flipped Life Live. So that, was really exciting for me, too.

Shane Sams: Yeah, Flip Your Life Live was incredible, because it was just this overwhelming emotional experience, meeting people who ... that weird feeling. It was like the Facebook affect, almost. You feel like you know each other in real life already, and then you're actually in the same place. And our brains have not evolved properly, to handle all these social media connections that we have, or these community connections that we have online, so then it's just a surreal experience, isn't it? To get in the same room with people you feel like you already know personally?

Blair T.: And I really loved what you guys did with the Facebook group. Most conferences that you go to, once you buy your ticket, it's like, you don't get to meet anyone til you get there. But with Flipped Life Live, we had the Facebook group, and that, for me, 'cause I didn't know anyone, was really helpful to get to put names with faces, and not feel like I was going in, not knowing anyone.

Shane Sams: Now, I really do feel like, that we knew you quite personally before the event, because we had worked together, and we had done some coaching calls. We had talked to you in the forums about some different things that you were doing online. And we kinda made some radical changes in your business. And we say radical changes, but it really was just changing one thing, right? We just kind of switched the way you were presenting an offer. And it led to this massive amount of success that we're gonna talk about in a few minutes.

Shane Sams: But tell everybody a little bit more about you, your background, and your online business, leading up to that point where we had that coaching call.

Blair T.: Okay, so by training, I am a Pharmacist. It was 2014, and I was pregnant with my daughter. And I got the news that the small hospital that I was working for was facing some budget cuts. And I essentially lost all my benefits and full-time status. So that, led me to scrambling, trying to pick up some different work at local community pharmacies. And through that, and because of my clinical background, they had asked me to do some clinical services for them in the pharmacies.

Blair T.: So I did that for about a year. And then, in fall of 2015, I started working with a business coach to build my online business. I had people reaching out to me, asking for help, so that they could create these clinical services in their pharmacies. But I didn't know how to create a program around that. So we started with three one-on-one coaching clients, and then from there, I started building an email list, and building the website that was ... I was blogging about what I was working on, and so that was how people were finding out about MTM Consulting, which is what I'm known for.

Shane Sams: And basically, this is just ... it's a way that Pharmacists can add more services to increase revenue. That's really what it is, right? Is that what it is?

Blair T.: Right. So, pharmacy's typically seen as a product-based business. Retail pharmacy. And there's only so much you can do, as far as profit margins for medications, because there's laws, and insurance companies, and all that. So what we're seeing now is, more pharmacies adding in services, and becoming a little bit more service-based, like you would have in a physicians office. And these could be weight management courses, they could be ... like, I do genetic testing on people, to tell them which medications and supplements are best for their genetic makeup.

Blair T.: So this, is what I've became known for, was people were wanting my advice on how to create these services, and then also, create consulting businesses around these services for themselves.

Shane Sams: Interesting.

Blair T.: So, yeah. I began by building an email list. And I said, "When I get to 100 members, I'm going to create a course for these people." So, that's what I ... sorry, 100 email subscribers. So, I had a very small list, and-

Shane Sams: What year was that?

Blair T.: It was December of 2015, when I launched the course for the first time. So, out of the hundred email subscribers, eight people took me up on the beta offer for the equal-

Shane Sams: How much was that?

Blair T.: $197.

Shane Sams: That's awesome.

Jocelyn Sams: Wow!

Blair T.: Isn't that full circle?

Shane Sams: I know, right? I know, that's a great trailer for what's to come. I like what you said there. Everyone remember, $197. This is gonna be a magic number, when we get to it later, okay? How did you feel when you got eight people to buy something for $200 ... that's $1,600.00. And for everybody listening, that's just 100 people on an email list. That's not a 10,000 person email list, right?

Blair T.: Right, right. You gotta start somewhere, so it's funny, my web developer actually charged me $1,500.00 to build the course, so I actually kind of pre-sold it. And so profitability wise, I only made about $100.00 off of it the first time.

Shane Sams: Hey listen, it's revenue. That's a start, right?

Blair T.: That's right. But that was the first, the beta test. And then, I created each lesson, each week. It was like a dripped course. And each week, I would create it. I would send it out to them. I would ask for their feedback. And then, by the end of February, we had all six lessons created, and I launched it again. And I got, I think 15 more members join in the course.

Shane Sams: Wow, that's amazing.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, that's awesome, because it just says, "Okay, these people do want this. People do want this product."

Shane Sams: Yeah. And it's amazing, I love what you said, too, you're like, "Well, I made $1,600, but I only profited $100 off that first beta, right?

Blair T.: Right.

Shane Sams: But now, you've got a course that you can sell over, and over, and over again with the same infrastructure, so when you get the next 15 people, it's all profit. And the next 15 people, you might buy some ads or something, but it starts stacking 'cause you've created something you can sell for two or three years without even worrying about it, right?

Blair T.: Right. And then, so these people that had bought the course, really enjoyed it, but they wanted more. The course was very basic about starting a business. So we started from LLC versus sole proprietorship. I mean, we started from the very beginning. And as people went through the course, they wanted more and more specific information about billing for the services, like if the Pharmacist was gonna work in a Physician's office, there's certain billing codes we could use.

Blair T.: And so, I thought, "I'm not going to create lesson seven, and then charge them for that. So how do I do this in a way that continues to pay me for my time, in creating these new products?" So, I was working with Natalie E., and she turned me onto the Flipped Life podcast. And she said, "There's these people, they do membership sites. I think this might be the right direction for you to go."

Blair T.: And that's how I got introduced to you guys, probably in April of 2016. And we went ahead probably April, May, June, that was the transition into the membership site, so then after that, it was still $197 to join the course, and then after three months, it would roll over to a recurring membership of $27.00 per month.

Shane Sams: Now, things ... how did that go, when you first did that? How did it go when you started saying, "Here's the course, and then you get the membership." And then, later on, you raised the price. Didn't you ... you did something radically different. You had a big join fee, or something like that?

Blair T.: Yeah, so as we kept building, now we're at 11 lessons in the course. And then, we had forums, and we had monthly member calls. And so, each thing I added, changed the price a little bit, so we worked our way up. By 2018, we were at $997 to join the course, and then $97 a month in recurring, to continue the membership.

Shane Sams: So, this was interesting, because this is, kind of, where ... Jocelyn and I, earlier in the year, starting doing more one-and-one work. Right? Where we had some times open in our calendar, where we could come in and really take people ... Jocelyn and I are always on the look for somebody on the verge. They're stuck, right? And there was this moment where you were kinda stuck. And the membership got to a certain point, got to a certain number, and you were only getting a couple people a month, right?

Blair T.: Right.

Shane Sams: So that's what we talked about on our member call. What made you charge a thousand dollar join fee. When did it go from your mind, like, that's what you called it, when we first talked, to a join fee, compared to buying the course. Right? Because that's a huge amount of money for someone to come out, just to walk in the door, let alone, what they're gonna pay monthly, after. What was the thought process behind that? Where did you get that from?

Blair T.: I mean, you know, the gurus say, "If you do an online course, $997."

Jocelyn Sams: They have to be right. I mean, hello?

Blair T.: And that was essentially the reason. I mean, Jocelyn, when I talked to you last November, at the conference, you kinda said, "That's interesting that you're doing it that way." And I was like, "Yeah, eventually, I'd like to transfer to just doing a monthly membership."

Shane Sams: What kept you from doing that? That's interesting you said ... So, you talked to her in November. You talked to us in the summer of next year. What was the delay? What was the fear of taking the join fee off? What was keeping you from doing that?

Blair T.: So, to me, these people that were my current members, they had paid the $997. And to me, it was almost unfair to take that away, and then, to offer it to other people at just a monthly price. And to do away with that join fee. And I drug my feet on changing that price from November 2017, until September 3rd of 2018, when you and I had the one-on-one conversation on Labor Day.

Shane Sams: And it's amazing you say that, because we all get these things in our head. Right? One, that everybody's paying attention. Two, that it's not fair. Three, that, "Well, I can't change anything, 'cause everyone in the past got it one way, and no one in the future will ever get it differently." Right? 'Cause we struggle with that, too. Jocelyn and I just had a conversation this morning about some changes that we're throwing around, for our membership. And we had that same conversation. "Well, what about everyone that's paid this? What about everybody that's done that? What if we make this available in this tier, and we don't make it available, and it's been available for everybody else, what's the incentive to keep moving forward?" These are always conversations that we have in our head, and it's almost like we're afraid we're gonna break something.

Shane Sams: But your case is very interesting, because when we went through the numbers, your membership was stagnating, literally. It was like, no one was joining. What was it? Like, single digits, right? A month, or something like that. And we said to ourselves, when we look at these numbers, we're like, "Man, this massive wall that you have built around your castle, is literally preventing," ... you dug a moat. That's what I told you, on the call, around your castle. You're like, "Man, look at this city on the hill. Look how awesome this is. But now, no one's allowed in." Right?

Blair T.: Right.

Shane Sams: And we keep adding value, over time, which is just a natural evolution of all of our products and membership, and we feel like we've gotta keep charging more, and keeping more people out, when really, the more awesome your stuff gets, it's almost like it should get more accessible. Right? And that's kind of what we talked about on our call, is how do we make Blair's membership more accessible? So I told you, I said, "What if we just dropped the join fee, all together?" And I remember, you gasped, on the call. But there was a catch, 'cause I wanted to address that real fear you had about people who had paid more. Right?

Shane Sams: So what we decided was, this thing was really valuable. It was an amazing opportunity for pharmacies to make more money, and it really was worth a lot of money, so we were gonna double your monthly price, right? So all the old people, who ended up paying the join fee, that's fine, but they were paying a little bit lower price, because they've been with you longer. They deserve a lower price for being loyal, right? But now, the new people get in cheaper, up front, but it's actually charging what it's worth, $197. So, go back to that call, how did you feel about that, after we worked out this ... it's not really a compromise, but a solution to that problem?

Blair T.: So, I knew I wanted to talk to you before Flipped Life Live, 'cause there was definitely some shifts that I felt like, it wasn't working. We were stuck on 40 members, and I felt like the whole year, we were, like you said, we were stagnating. And, it was that mindset, exactly what you said, that I felt like I was, somehow, taking value away from the other members, if I was technically decreasing the price to join, but increasing it, if you look at it over, say, a year. And when you reframed that, and made that shift for me, you said, "Now you have the infrastructure built. When you first started, you were really one-on-one. It took a lot more of your time, and so that made sense for you to have that. But now, you've got the infrastructure in place. You've got the team members in place. Now, you want to let these floodgates open, and let people in, because they deserve to be able to have access to this information. So when you said that, it was a total shift in my mindset. It's like, "I'm actually cheating all of the people that are on the other side of the drawbridge in my castle." So that, was really what I needed, to make that change.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, and so you did change, and rather quickly, too. So, you had this conversation, I think, on Labor day. Our event started on the ... what was it? The 18th, the 19th of September?

Shane Sams: I think it was the 19th, was the first day of the actual event, yeah.

Jocelyn Sams: So basically, there were two weeks in between this span. So tell us what happened in those two weeks.

Shane Sams: I'll tell you what happened first. Blair's like, "Yeah, I think I could do this by new year. By the end of the year," or something. And I'm like, "No."

Jocelyn Sams: No, that's not gonna work.

Shane Sams: "You're gonna do a webinar in two weeks, and you're gonna come to Flip Your Life Live, and I'm going to announce, on stage, the results. Good or bad." So, how did that go over, when I said that to you?

Blair T.: So, you gave me 13 days, 'cause you were like, "Do it on a Sunday night. That's a good time for people." And I was like, "Okay," so the Sunday night before Flipped Life Live, is when I planned the webinar. And I had done some live webinars in the past, but not really the same structure as this one, so that, was really helpful. You helped give me a framework to use for the webinar. And so, I did the webinar. I actually had shot a YouTube video, calling it the Drawbridge Special Webinar.

Jocelyn Sams: You're welcome, for that.

Shane Sams: Yeah, right.

Blair T.: I talked about this-

Shane Sams: My mouth can come in handy, every once in a while.

Blair T.: Yeah, so I talked about my business coach from Kentucky, who's making me change my prices. And this was gonna be a really good opportunity for people. And I was very open and transparent about why I was changing my prices, and what I was doing, and what I hoped to achieve from this. So, it just blew me away, the results I got, and the response I got from that webinar. So, we registered about 300 people. About 135 people showed up live. And about 50 people took me up on that initial offering.

Jocelyn Sams: Whoa.

Blair T.: The initial offering.

Shane Sams: So, let's do the math here. So it's 50 people, basically, times $200 a month. 50 people who couldn't get in before, because they had this big $1,000.00 wall.

Blair T.: Right.

Shane Sams: And really, these people were already there. They're there.

Blair T.: Right.

Shane Sams: You were keeping them out. But now, you opened the door, and out of nowhere, in one webinar, you've got $10,000.00 in monthly, recurring revenue, night one of the change. Right?

Blair T.: Right, so I-

Shane Sams: How did that feel, compared to the eight people at $200.00 a month? 'Cause remember, it was $197 for the course. So, we're full circle. You take this $197.00 lifetime course, and you've evolved it into a $197 per month, recurring revenue business. So what were you feeling when you got off the webinar?

Blair T.: Oh, I was blown away. I mean, we had, that night, probably about 26 people join that night, immediately after the webinar. And then, the next day, another 24 or 25 people trickled in. And so then, I waited til Wednesday to ... 24 hours had passed, and then, I had sent a Facebook message to you, and was like, "We added 50 members off of that webinar." You were like, "Oh."

Shane Sams: Oh, we were celebrating. I honestly-

Blair T.: Like, I was just real calm about it, like, "Oh by the way, we added 50 members Sunday night."

Shane Sams: I was sitting on the couch, and I distinctly remember this. Jocelyn was going from the kitchen to the back room. I don't remember what she was doing, but she was leaving the room. And I was sitting on the couch. I had my feet propped up, and we were getting into everything, and I yelled, "Oh my goodness." And Jocelyn's like, "What?" I'm like, "Look at this." And I flipped it around, and showed it to her. And man, I mean, we were ecstatic, because that's just awesome, because I mean listen, it's scary to change your prices. Right? Especially something you've sold in the past, because you did get people. I mean, even a couple a month, you're getting people, hey, they paid two grand, there's two grand in the pocket, right? They're $100.00 a month members, so there's a couple hundred bucks a month. Like, it's kinda working, even though it wasn't growing where you wanted it to, so that's a scary proposition. Especially when you've got it in your mind, all the gurus are doing this. Right?

Blair T.: Right.

Shane Sams: But you did it. I mean, it was crazy how fast you moved, once we got off that call, to make all this happen. So how much of that actual fear I was going to call you out on stage, and actual excitement like, "Wow, this might actually work. I might as well try it." What pushed you so hard, to get it done so fast, besides the deadline of, "I'm showing up at Flip Your Life Live."

Blair T.: Right. And I think it was you two saying, "What's the worst that could happen?" And that's something that I really struggled with. Like you said, I didn't want to do this until the first of January of 2019. But having that deadline that you were going to ask me about it at Flipped Life Live, and I only had 13 days to put it together, and then I was gonna see you at the end of the week, it was really what I needed, to give me that push.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, and you didn't need three months to get that together. You did it. You made it happen. So this story isn't over, though. So, once you get to the live event, I remember the night of the dinner, you were like, "Hey, so I have this replay. Should I send it out?" I'm like, "Yes."

Shane Sams: "Should I let anyone else watch the Drawbridge Webinar?"

Jocelyn Sams: "What do you think, is this appropriate to do?" I'm like, "Send it out immediately." So, tell everybody what you did then.

Blair T.: Yeah, essentially, it was at the working dinner at Flipped Life Live, and you were like, "Yes, you have to send it out. Do it right now." And so, I did. I sent it out at ... it was like, 9:00 at night or something, and Nikki was sitting beside me. She was helping me with the copy of the email. And it was one of those things that I probably wouldn't have sent it out, if I hadn't been there, and you guys had been telling me, "Yes, you need to send that out." So, I think we got another two or three people who weren't able to attend live, that watched the replay, and then joined the Academy after that.

Shane Sams: So, you just sat there and got a $400.00 raise. Like, I always say this. I always reframe monthly memberships into this, is who just can give themselves a raise? You can't just walk into your boss and be like, at a nine to five, and go, "Yo, boss. $400.00 more a month, right now. Let's go."

Jocelyn Sams: Like that's gonna happen.

Shane Sams: Literally, that's what you did. That's what you did at that table, was you said, "I'm gonna give myself a $400.00 a month raise. And I'm gonna do it right now." And bam, it worked. And then, since Flip Your Life Live, you've been a part of our All Access Mastermind. And we've been pushing you to do more webinars, do more live things, do more things. And I think your revenue, pretty much, has grown to around $20,000.00 in a monthly recurring revenue now, correct?

Blair T.: Right, right. We're right about $20,000.00 a month in revenue, so-

Shane Sams: I love how casually you said that.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, you just throw that out there.

Shane Sams: Like, literally two months ago, you were like, "Man, everything's stagnant. I've got some people in there, but nobody's doing it." Now you're like, "Yeah, we're at 20, heading to 50 by next month. Whatever."

Blair T.: You presented with a unique struggle, because I had already set my 2019 goals, and my 2019 goals were to get to $10,000.00 a month in recurring revenue. And so, pretty much, we blew that out of the water by September.

Shane Sams: So, whenever you need to move ahead with something in your life, you just come over and talk to Shane and Jocelyn. That's what she's saying.

Blair T.: Right, right.

Jocelyn Sams: Basically, that's what you're trying to say.

Shane Sams: That's what you're trying to say. We skipped over something. My favorite part of this whole story ... And of course, well, we'll talk about it in a minute. But my favorite part of this whole story, and I can't remember exactly when you told me this. I don't remember if it was on Facebook, or on Voxer in the Mastermind, or maybe even when we were together, live. It may have been at the live event. After your big ... the webinar, the 72 hours, whatever, you get this $10,000.00 a month, that you didn't have the month before. Right? Whatever. You told me you woke up ... 'cause you still work in clinics, and do things like that, right? You still go-

Blair T.: Yeah, like one or two days a week.

Shane Sams: Exactly. So, you still do that. And I remember you said you got up, and your husband looked over at you, and he said ... tell us what he said.

Blair T.: So yeah, I think I sent you, in a Facebook message, because I was actually at work whenever i was telling you about the results of the webinar and stuff. So, I was at work, and I said, "Oh, by the way, this morning, my husband, when we were getting ready, and I was about to walk out the door, he was like, "So, are you still going to work today?"

Shane Sams: What an amazing question. That is awesome.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, Shane was so pumped about that. He talked about it on the stage at the event, because he was so excited. So yeah, that is awesome. I love that so much.

Shane Sams: "Are you going to work?" Isn't that the question that we all wanna ... anyone who's starting an online business, that's the moment you wanna get to, is that moment where you say, "When is my last day at work?" But it's not even like, "If you choose to do," ... Like, I've got a buddy, he's got an amazing online business. He's built it into a half million dollars in revenue a year. Great profit margins. He's doing an amazing job, but he really liked his job. He really liked what he was doing. He stuck with it a couple more years, but it was like, he always had the option, at any time he wanted, to say, "I don't have to do this." And isn't that really the point we're getting to, it's like, it's not necessarily if you do, or if you don't. It's, "I have the power to choose," like you could've literally said, "Nope. Not going anywhere today." Or you could say, "Hey, I'm gonna keep doing this, 'cause I want to," or whatever. There's all kinds of reasons we have for the way we live our live. But that's just an amazing power to have, is to say, "I don't need the other people. I don't need the employer. I can choose to stay home if I want to."

Blair T.: Absolutely. And I think it makes me a better Pharmacist. It makes me better in my community that I'm here because I wanna be here. And I really enjoy, I personally identify with being a Pharmacist, and so, it's optional for me. And now, as the membership is growing, and I'm getting more busy, it might be that I'm forced out of being able to go to my job and work, because this other thing, my members, need me more.

Shane Sams: Well, and also, too, what you really identify with, 'cause for anybody that doesn't know what our All Access program is, we talk every day, literally, through an app. But it's like messages. It's like a running conversation that never ends. Right? And what I always feel from you, is what you really care about, is serving Pharmacists. And that's really where your passion is, is helping these Pharmacists do this thing that you teach. And before, you were doing a lot of good in the real world, as you had very few members. But now, you have so many members, the good you can do, is kind of shifting that way. Right? So, it's not really a choice of doing one thing you love over another, it's making the most impact, where you can make the most impact. And right now, that's starting to look like your membership.

Blair T.: And that really resonated with me, too. When we changed the prices, I took that risk. I had always increased my prices, so it was very scary for me to decrease that price, and take that risk. But the reason I did it, and the whole reason behind everything, was I wanted more people to have access to that information.

Shane Sams: And you've gotta be careful, too. There's a very bad problem, especially in online marketing right now, called Vanity Pricing. Everybody's telling everybody, "Charge 1,000 bucks. Charge 5,000 bucks. Charge what you're worth," right? But that doesn't take into account ... that's a lot of ego-driven pricing. And that doesn't take ... one, you should charge what it's worth. The value of it. Right? But that doesn't take into account the actual market. It doesn't take your mission into account.

Shane Sams: One thing we talked about at Flip Your Life Live a lot, was mission. And your mission was to get your message to as many people as possible. Well that, requires you to remove barriers. Right? So, you've gotta find that sweet spot between making great income for yourself, and reaching the masses, which is what you wanted to accomplish. You know what I'm saying? So, you've gotta be careful with all ... yes, we are for raising prices when ... And you did kinda raise your price. 'Cause you raised the monthly price. You just lowered the barrier to get in-

Blair T.: Right.

Shane Sams: And killed two birds with one stone.

Blair T.: Right. And it was the right move, and it was the right thing to do. And now, with the extra revenue I have, I'm looking at putting on some in-person events for women in Pharmacy leadership conferences.

Jocelyn Sams: I love that. I think that's a great idea. I wanna dive into something that we were talking about before we started recording, because I think a lot of times, people think, "Well, Blair, she's making great money now. Everything is a breeze, and she's walking on Easy Street," right?

Shane Sams: I'm walkin' on sunshine.

Jocelyn Sams: So, let's dive into that a little bit, and just talk about how have things changed? And what are you going through right now, as you're trying to level up again?

Blair T.: So, Shane and I were talking about this on Voxer the other day, and I just said, "I feel almost more pressure now that I have this huge responsibility, that I want to continue making this better and better for people, but now that the revenue has multiplied, now the opportunities are multiplying, and I have to be very intentional with what opportunities I'm saying yes to, because there's an opportunity cost for every decision I make now, so it almost feels like there's more pressure.

Shane Sams: Sure. And I love the way you frame that, because that's not how you presented it in the conversation the other day. But we were talking back and forth, and you were like, "Okay, I think I'm gonna do this, now. And I think I'm gonna do this now. And I think I'm gonna do this." You kept telling me, every message you sent me that night was something new. Right? "I'm gonna redesign my website. I'm gonna redesign my sales page. I'm gonna go do this. I'm gonna do that. I'm gonna go do this." And I remember, 'cause we went through this. This is a true thing that will happen when the launch finally turns that corner, and oh my gosh money, right? You know what I'm saying? And it's like, Mo' Money, Mo' Problems. I literally said that to you on Voxer. I was like, "Mo' Money, Mo' Problems, Blair."

Shane Sams: At first, in many of our decisions, we start our online business, we've got a fork in the road that we've gotta take. It's a right or a left. And we think, if we take the correct road, it will straighten out, and we move on railroad tracks straight ahead. Right?

Shane Sams: But the problem is, if you take that correct path ... you know, if you take the wrong path, you'll get a dead end, you've gotta go back through the fork, and go take the other path. But if you take the right path, up ahead is a better choice. So, you might have three ways to go next time. "Do I go left, do I go right, do I go straight." And then, if I take the correct one there, I go forward, and two of those paths may be right. You don't know. Then there's five choices, and 10 choices. And it's like the farther you go, the more choices you have to make. And it can get really, really overwhelming.

Shane Sams: But in your case, you are on a path where we have an offer that converts, and we have a great promotional tool that is still converting, 'cause every time you do a webinar, you get more members. Right?

Blair T.: Right.

Shane Sams: And I kinda remember us speaking to you, to this, "Let's just stay on this path for a little while. All of these other forks in the road are fine, but let's just keep going on this path, or we'll eventually take another path. We can choose that other path." Those opportunities are not gonna go anywhere. Right? Roads don't disappear. And we'll just keep hammering the nail until we get to a certain point where we can start experimenting more, and the risks aren't as big. They don't matter as much. So how did you feel when I was like, "Blair, stop looking at all the paths. Just keep doing what you're doing until we double it again."

Blair T.: Yeah, I mean, that's what I needed to hear, because I do get into this content creation, new products, new ideas, and I start thinking about, "Oh, I could add this, and then I could add this other thing." And you were like, "You've got this one thing that's working, why don't you see how that plays out for the next six months, before you do anything else? Before you add anything else." And I was like, "You know what? He's right. He is definitely right."

Jocelyn Sams: And I think a lot of what it is, is that we're not sure of where to go next, once we get to that point. And because of that, we start looking at things that we can control. That we know how to control. "Okay, well I know how to control what my website looks like, so let's start tinkering with that, because that makes me feel like I'm doing something," but it's not really moving the business forward. And I say this because I do this, too. Okay? When I'm not sure what to do, I start saying, "Well, this sales page is converting at X percent. I really want it to convert at Y percent." You know? And when we start doing that, we start really taking the focus away of growing, and making more people aware of your product, and serving people in the way that they need to be served.

Shane Sams: And what I'm guilty of, is something along this same line of what y'all are talking about, is you made a ... even though, it was a simple decision. It was really just, hit delete three times, and change your price. Really, honestly, and then present it a different way. It was a dramatic decision. It was a major moment. And there's a high to that. There's a dopamine hit that hits the day after a $10,000.00 monthly recurring revenue launch. Right? And you think to yourself, "What else could I change? What else could I do dramatically, or drastically, that could cause something like that to happen again?" Because you're looking for that spark, right?

Shane Sams: And really, it's like peaks and valleys. Now, it's time to grind, and consolidate those gains, and make it work again. Over, and over, and over. Just keep hammering it, and keep doing that same thing. Be consistent, be prolific with that thing, 'cause eventually, that thing will probably level out again, too. And then, we have to make another decision, right? Just like at first, we you had this big join fee. It didn't kinda work for a while, but then it just stagnated. Right? All things eventually do that, but we wanna jump to the next thing so fast, 'cause we want that high again. That's why people get addicted to affiliate launches, and things like that, because it feels so good, and you're trying to get to the next hit as fast as possible, when really it's just like, "Why don't I just start stacking bricks, and building a higher wall," right?

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, I think this is a particularly relevant message to us today, too, because I mean, I'm just sitting here listening to us say this, and I'm like, "Oh, we've just been talking about this all morning," like, "What if we change this? And what if we change that?" Well no, we don't need to change anything. Keep moving forward. Stay on the path. When you start hammering the nail, and it's not all the way in yet, you need to keep hammering it.

Shane Sams: And I'll tell you another thing, and Blair, you can speak to this. Things that sound hard, become easy and mundane as soon as you do them, right? It probably sounded like a mountain when I said, "All right, two weeks, we're gonna launch a webinar. You're gonna change your price, you're gonna do this." Then, you did it, and the webinar's done. And you can pretty much turn it on whenever you want now, like a light switch, right? So, doesn't it feel easy now, compared to how hard it was when we first talked about it?

Blair T.: Yeah, and maybe there is something to that. It's like, "Oh, it's almost too easy, so I need to make it harder on myself. I need to spend more time doing this, or that, or creating a new product," or whatever. So, I think it's a mindset thing, too, is ... And like you said, the dopamine rush of, "I did this thing, and it worked. And I achieved my goal, and it was amazing." And then, there's the, "Okay, well now, what's the next challenge?" Because I'm a person that, I like to set goals, and I like to achieve them. And I like to challenge myself." So though, I do struggle with that. It's not necessarily shiny object syndrome, but more like, "What's the next thing that I can get to?"

Shane Sams: I like how you basically just flippantly rolled past this ... in your sentence, you said, "Yeah, it's almost too easy to do a $10,000.00 monthly membership. It's just too," ... I could just imagine, that was three months ago, this happened. It wasn't like ... actually, it was two months ago. It wasn't an eternity ago. But like, man, things get easier, but it doesn't get easier, as you get more and more in your business. And the lesson for everyone who's hearing this, 'cause we're talking some high dollar stuff here, right? But the lesson for anyone who's listening to this, maybe doesn't have their idea flushed out yet, or maybe is really overwhelmed with the tech, and getting their website set up, or maybe they just don't understand how to do a sales funnel, or marketing. The thing you're at, is where Blair was. It's where we are. That's just the thing that's in front of us, right? Getting out your idea is really hard, until you get the first one. And then, it becomes easy. And setting up a website is really hard. Until you do it. I could have a website up in 30 minutes, right now. The first website I set up took me probably 30 days. Okay?

Shane Sams: But it just, every step you take, when you look back on it, does become mundane. Does become easy. And the key is, just doing it, and figuring it out, even if you fail a little bit. I mean, you have this model for a year or two before you finally changed the one thing that made the difference. But now, you know what to change. So going forward, it becomes easier.

Jocelyn Sams: And the thing you have to do, is make up your mind that you're not going to be stopped. You can find an excuse to stop you, or you can decide, "No, I'm making this happen no matter what." And then, it doesn't matter what comes up. You have to do it. It's like, where we are now. We can't just say, "Oh well, this online business thing is pretty hard. We're just gonna stop doing it." No, that's not an option, because this is how we make our living. So, you can decide. You just have to make that decision, and everyone has to make it at some point. Are you going to make this happen? Or are you not?

Shane Sams: Right.

Blair T.: Right. It took me three years to become an overnight success.

Shane Sams: It's a Blair bomb. You just dropped a Blair bomb now. Three years to become an overnight success. Yeah, it's so funny you say that. And I wanna get to what you're doing now, because we always wanna move people forward. But I send an email out this morning, to our list, because that's how I roll. I send emails out to our list. But Jocelyn actually had the idea for it. Jocelyn's been doing a lot of stuff on social media, and we were talking this morning about my email. And we decided to send out a fill in the blank. So, the fill in the blank was ... I sent it to everyone who was not a member, had never joined the community, and I said, "I have not joined the Flip Your Life community, because of," blank. Right?

Shane Sams: Well one message in particular, and I hope you're listening right now, 'cause I'm pretty sure you listen every week, and I know who you are. Just listen to us. It was a fill in the blank was literally like, "Oh, I can't do this one thing, I can't do that." It was a 14 paragraph, four point novel.

Jocelyn Sams: Manifesto.

Shane Sams: Manifesto, that they wrote back to me. And it was just excuse, after excuse, after excuse. And stuff like that, gets me really fired up. So, I hit reply, to email this person back. And I basically said, "Look, you just sent me a bunch of excuses," and I straight told this person, who I've seen post on our Facebook page, and has replied to some emails before, I just said, "You are not going to make it, as long as all those things are on this list. And there's nothing we can change, to take those things off your list, because they're fears, and obstacles, and things that every single one of us have to deal with.

Shane Sams: And I started going point by point, and I showed him how me and Jocelyn overcame every issue that he had wrote down on that list. And we made it. And we had all the exact same obstacles. The difference was, we did what Jocelyn just said. We decided-

Jocelyn Sams: We decided.

Shane Sams: We were not going to be stopped. We made the choice that we weren't going to quit, and he was letting all of those things blow him up. And that's what I love about you, is you said, "All right, I'm at a point where I've gotta make a decision, I'm gonna do something different, or I'm gonna make this membership thing work." And you made a decision, and right, wrong or indifferent, you did it, and it worked. So now, you can make your next decision.

Shane Sams: So, awesome discussion, man. Great success story. First of all, before we go forward, congratulations. Life-changing numbers. Life-changing actions that you took are really paying off. And it's opening doors. These doors that are open are overwhelming, but gosh, Blair, a year from now, I have no idea where you're gonna be. You may pass us up, and everybody else that's listening.

Jocelyn Sams: We hope so.

Shane Sams: And we hope so.

Jocelyn Sams: That'll be awesome.

Shane Sams: So, totally, congratulations for everything you've accomplished.

Blair T.: Thank you. I appreciate that.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay, Blair. We've had a really interesting discussion today about just mindset, and making things happen. But we wanna know how we can help you move forward now. So what's something that is maybe something that you're struggling with, something that you need to move forward on that we could help you with today, on this call?

Blair T.: So, I think continuing what Shane and I have been talking about is ways that I could still offer one-on-one help to my members. So, we do the member call, and we do the forum call. So what he and I were talking about, was doing something along the lines of the Voxer Mastermind, like I've been working with you guys. And so, looking at, "Should I just continue doing the monthly membership? Making that offer right now, and should I put this VIP package thing on the back burner for a little while?"

Shane Sams: You know, I was told by a mentor of mine one time, the way you grow a million dollar business, a consistent million dollar business, is you sell people one thing, and then you sell them something else. Right? That's where a lot of people get stuck is, they get that idea, they sell one thing, and then they make it, but they don't have anywhere else for anyone to go. Right? I'd say, in the last year of our business, we've developed different places for people to go. At first, it might've been an annual plan, right? That was higher than LTB of the monthly plan, or Flip Your Life Live. Right? That's another place for people to go. That's why we introduced our All Access Mastermind, which is what we do now, is because that's another place for people to go when they're ready. Right? It's not just get them there, just to sell them something. It's, "Hey, what would be next for the person at my current level? How can I offer that?" So that's really the question that we have to ask is, is that truly the next thing, after your monthly membership?

Shane Sams: If it is, then maybe that is what we create, on a small scale, to test it.

Jocelyn Sams: Well, and I would say two things. First of all, the reason that we started this Mastermind, is because that's what our people were asking for. Okay? So we had people saying, "Hey, we want the opportunity to work with you more closely." And we said, "Okay, well how can we provide that?" And this is what we came up with. But it's a combination of that, and also, what do you want?

Jocelyn Sams: So, is this something that you want to do? Or is it something that you feel like you need to do, because someone else is doing it? You have to really look and say, "Okay, is this something I want? Do I have the time to do it? And are people asking for it?" So, it's sort of a combination of all those three things for me."

Blair T.: I think that's good advice, too. And so, I think the answer is probably putting it on the back burner until people are consistently reaching out and asking me for more one-on-one time.

Shane Sams: What would be, right now, though ... Okay, that's awesome. See, it's amazing to think about that, because it's like, just because you can do it, doesn't mean you should do it. You know? You could totally do this. We've talked about this, how you actually have a couple people that you could totally offer this for. Right? And maybe there is room to beta something like that, but you don't have to, just because you can. Right? That's what opportunities are.

Jocelyn Sams: And I think you could even put that word out there, so maybe on your member calls, say, "Hey, I've got a couple of people who have asked me for this. Is this something that other people would be interested in? I'm just trying to get a little bit of interest, and see who all's interested." It could be something that you email out, like you segment people off, and just know that those people are interested-

Shane Sams: And you still know how to do it, though, right? You could just say, "Are you interested?" Like, when we did ... when we first emailed out the live event, we just said, "Do you guys want us to have a live event?" And people said, "Yes." Then, we started thinking about actually offering it, but we still know it was on the table. Right?

Jocelyn Sams: And you know we baby step everything. I mean, for the live event, we said, "Hey, we're thinking about doing this. Are people interested? And of course, hundreds of people were like, "Oh, yeah, yeah. We're interested." And then, it came time to, "okay well, we think enough people are interested, so let's start crafting an offer." So, we start looking for a city. We start talking to a venue. All these different types of things, we find a date, and then we send it out again and said, "Okay, well you told me you were interested, so now show me that you're interested. Put down a deposit, or pay for this thing." And people did. So, you can do it in stages like that. That's the way that I like to do things. I don't like to just create a whole big thing, and hope that people sign up for it. I like to do it in baby steps like that.

Shane Sams: And I wanna stress this, too, when you're thinking about this, this isn't something that's totally easy to come up with, right this second. Right? But when you're asking those questions that Jocelyn laid out, "What do I wanna do? What are my people asking for? And what do people actually need?" 'Cause you know that. They don't. You're the doctor, they're the patient. Right? When you're starting to look for that, it's like the Venn diagram, and that balance between those three things. Sometimes, all people need is to keep going. You've got all these people in this membership, and you've got this thing. Maybe it's as simple as, "I just need to get in there, and keep them going so they keep paying every month." Right? And work on that retention.

Shane Sams: So, you said something else about a live event, too. Doing live workshops, or something like that. We gotta figure out that perfect blending of what you want ... I feel like you want to work closer with people. You don't just want a huge community. You want there to be a personal element to it, so maybe you just say, "I'm going to do a personal element. I'm going to set a goal to have this ready in three months, but I'm gonna spend the next three months with these people, and figure out where that intersects of what they need, with what they want, with what I actually want to do, maybe I experiment one person at a time, within this." You see what I'm saying? And then, we answer that question, and we actually build it in the next quarter, or something like that.

Shane Sams: And while we're doing that, we go add another hundred members into your membership. And then, it's like, it doesn't matter what you do at that point. It'll work. It's all going to work. Right? It's just finding that sweet spot of what you want, compared to what they need, compared to what they're asking for, that makes you successful.

Blair T.: Sounds good. Well, I will shelf it til first quarter.

Jocelyn Sams: All right. I like it.

Shane Sams: Well listen, Blair, first of all, you're amazing. You're absolutely amazing. You amaze me every day. The action you take is just what's making everything happen in your life. I'm glad that we get to be a part of your journey, and we get to watch all this amazing stuff. And also, too, thank you for coming on the show today, and letting us be transparent, and open. I know it's not an easy thing, to come share success, or even hear someone bragging on you. I know we're bragging on you right now, but you deserve it. And you're gonna do some amazing things going forward. And I know a lot of people are gonna be inspired by this episode, and go take some action. So thank you so much for being on the show today.

Blair T.: Thank you for having me. And thank you guys for everything you do, and putting on the Flip Life Live. I think that was such a great event, and it really gave me a reset point, and something to strive for, to achieve my goals before I got there.

Jocelyn Sams: All right guys, you heard it from Blair. Flip Your Life Live 2018 was amazing. If you are interested in getting on our waiting list for the event in 2019, we are in the middle of planning it right now, and we would love to see you there. If you would like to learn more, head over to Flippedlifestyle.com/live to get on the waiting list.

Shane Sams: All right guys, that is all the time we have for this week. Thank you so much for listening. And until next time, get out there and do whatever it takes to flip your life. We'll see you then.

Jocelyn Sams: Bye.

Links and resources mentioned on today’s show: * Blair's website * Flip Your Life LIVE 2019 Waiting List * Flip Your Life community 30-day trial

Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!

Get your FREE 30-DAY Membership in the Flip Your Life Community NOW!

– https://flippedlifestyle.com/free

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Hey Y’all, welcome to another Flipped Lifestyle Podcast Q&A w/ S&J!

In the Flip Your Life Community, we hold a members-only Q&A twice a month where we answer online business questions of our members live on air!

Today’s Q&A highlights answer the following questions: Question One:

"If someone loves people empowerment, what are the possibilities online? Can you be a life and/or business coach without certification? If yes, how is the best way to do this building an online business from scratch?"

Question Two:

"First, what is the best month to run a membership drive to teachers now that school has started? Second, my new membership area launched a few months ago. I have one customer that is downloading everything possible. I sent her an email thanking her for joining and asked if we could talk to get feedback on how we could better serve her. She agreed. Is there anything particular I should ask to keep her instead of having a monthly subscriber quit after she gets it all?"

Question Three:

"I'm having trouble defining my avatars' "problem". Their "pain" is really more of an aspiration. My business, Undersea Naturalist, is focused on helping my avatars' learn about and appreciate marine life. They would have been folks who were fans of Jacques Cousteau's TV shows."

Question Four:

"We are planning on launching our membership. Right now we are adding content month by month, would it be strange to have a yearly purchase option or should we stick to a monthly purchase option?"

CLICK HERE to get your FREE 30-DAY Membership in the Flip Your Life Community NOW!

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In today's episode, we help Janet overcome obstacles and set goals to focus on increasing membership revenue.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jocelyn Sams: Hey, y'all on today's show, we help Janet take her Spanish education business to the next level.

Shane Sams: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast where life always comes before work. We're your hosts Shane and Jocelyn Sams. We're a real family that figured out how to make our entire living online. Now, we help other families do the same. Are you ready to Flip Your Life? All right, let's get started.

Shane Sams: What is going on everybody? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. It is great to be back with you again this week. Super excited to have another real member of the Flip Your Life Community, a real person out there starting, building and growing their own online business so they can change their family's future. We're here to help them take their business to the next level and let you guys listen in so that you can take your online business to the next level as well. We are really, really excited today because we have Janet Jimenez on the podcast. Janet, how are you doing?

Janet Jimenez: Good. Thanks for having me.

Shane Sams: Did I say that right? Jimenez or Jimenez? How do you say it?

Janet Jimenez: You're pretty close to it, it's Jimenez.

Shane Sams: Okay. Janet Jimenez. How do you spell that for me? Spell that out for us.

Janet Jimenez: Okay. It's got a J, J-i-m-e-n-e-z.

Shane Sams: So before I got on air, I just went straight Kentucky, uneducated redneck on Janet. I said, hey Janet, I'm going to introduce you as Janet Geminiz, and she was like, no, that is not.

Jocelyn Sams: except you're not, 'cause that's not my name.

Shane Sams: Except you're not because that's not how we pronounce that at all.

Janet Jimenez: Well, I thought for a big sports fan. You would know how to pronounce the last name there.

Jocelyn Sams: No, actually. I probably would have because I like to talk about how I did take four years of Spanish in high school. Unfortunately that was 20 years ago and I remember very little of it, which is sad, but I do remember that.

Shane Sams: Jocelyn is amazing because she can read it and understand it, but not always speak it in like, so we'll go places where there's like Spanish speaking and she'll kind of know what's going on. But she doesn't ever use it so I can't even imagine how good she would be at it if we just dropped her into a Spanish speaking country for a year. She could probably be fluent.

Janet Jimenez: Oh yeah. To just be immersed and then you'll pick it up.

Jocelyn Sams: yeah exactly. I love going places though and just trying to see if I can read things. A lot of times I can still read. It's just the Kentucky Spanish that I learned, I don't think the speaking was always very accurate.

Shane Sams: That's where we know the Geminiz not Jimenez, you know what I'm saying?

Jocelyn Sams: Well my teacher her parents were from Puerto Rico, so I mean hers was really good but just trying to learn it was kind of hard. All right, well let's jump in. I love these kind of podcasts because we've actually met you in real life, which is super cool.

Shane Sams: Janet is also a member of our all access mastermind. So we get to talk to her quite a bit over the phone.

Jocelyn Sams: And I love talking to people that we have met in real life because you just already have a rapport with them, which is really cool. So let's jump into a little bit about you, your background, and what you are doing online.

Janet Jimenez: Sure. So I am a mom of six. I have five children plus a stepson. My husband is from the Dominican Republic, so an island in the Caribbean and a Spanish speaker and I am a teacher. I have worked as a teacher for 13 years in Spanish immersion school, so that's basically elementary school in Spanish. And I have a business that sells educational resources to busy bilingual and Spanish teachers.

Shane Sams: And what is your domain name?

Janet Jimenez: Oh, it's spanishprofe.com.

Shane Sams: And that's p-r-o-f-e? Is that right?

Janet Jimenez: Correct.

Shane Sams: What does that mean?

Janet Jimenez: It's just like professor but I guess it'd be-

Jocelyn Sams: In Espanol?

Shane Sams: in Espanol.

Janet Jimenez: Yeah in Espanol exactly.

Shane Sams: I want to go back here real quick because I always do. You have six children, right? You have five and one and you're still building an online business and working full time, correct?

Janet Jimenez: Yes. It is chaotic, but it's getting done.

Shane Sams: And your online business actually does make money, correct?

Janet Jimenez: Yes. More than my day job.

Shane Sams: That is amazing and I always point that out because the biggest thing that we hear from people is well, you don't understand how busy I am and I know that worked for you guys, but it doesn't work for me because of X, Y, Z excuse. And most of the time the excuse is family stuff, work stuff. I just don't have time to do this. But we've got somebody here that's making money, working full time, raising six kids. So anybody out there listening, six or below, you lose. Janet wins every time. I'm just saying.

Jocelyn Sams: I need to know a little bit about how you met your husband because there's some gaps here that I need to fill okay. So He's from the Dominican Republic?

Janet Jimenez: Yes.

Jocelyn Sams: You are from where?

Janet Jimenez: I'm from Minneapolis.

Jocelyn Sams: And so how did you get interested in Spanish, is this?-

Shane Sams: How did you meet your husband?

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah.

Janet Jimenez: Well I was in high school I was exchanged into Argentina and then I kind of got the travel and live abroad bug from there. And then in college I studied abroad in Spain and in Brazil. And then I wanted to keep traveling. So I had a friend, she's Dominican and I was visiting her and she is actually married to my husband's half brother. So that's how I met him through my friend.

Shane Sams: Where do you live now?

Janet Jimenez: Just outside of Minneapolis.

Shane Sams: Is your goal someday maybe to go back to the Dominican Republican and live?

Janet Jimenez: Yes, so we are building a house there.

Shane Sams: Oh Wow.

Janet Jimenez: We are hopefully moving there for a while. We have one way plane tickets for June 13.

Jocelyn Sams: Oh wow.

Shane Sams: Oh my goodness.

Janet Jimenez: But nothing has been totally determined yet. But yeah, we would like to have our kids grow up at least for a few years in the Dominican Republic so they can be fully bilingual. Right now they speak and understand some Spanish but not up to our expectations totally.

Shane Sams: This just turned into an episode of House Hunters International. It's like you're going there, you're picking your house you're getting ready to move, the one way ticket. You're never coming back.

Jocelyn Sams: We love House Hunters International. We watch it all the time.

Shane Sams: Yeah, that's like our favorite show.

Janet Jimenez: Yes. That is a fun show.

Jocelyn Sams: I hear wonderful things about the DR. I have a friend who lived there for a while and I mean she just loved it.

Shane Sams: How was the internet compared to the states? We were just in Jamaica not long ago. Which is a Caribbean nation. It's like, no, the Internet was really, really good. Like way better than Mexico or other places we've been abroad. How's the internet and then the infrastructure in the Dominican Republic?

Janet Jimenez: Actually the internet installed in our house there was faster than my internet here.

Shane Sams: Wow.

Janet Jimenez: Yeah. And they do have fiber optic in some of the neighborhoods. So it's good. It's perfect. Sometimes though the electricity does go out but there are backup plans for that in the Dominican Republic.

Shane Sams: Isn't that amazing though that this online business that you're building, you can just pick it up and take it with you and not miss a beat as long as you've got the Internet where, as a lot of people they have the nine to five job, that's all they do. And if they moved to a new place or if they want to go abroad and want to do something, it's like gosh I've got to find work when I get there and this, that or the other. But man, if you just build this online business, you can just leave and you just show up and it's like nothing is different.

Shane Sams: We have some friends in California and they're taxes and the housing costs and everything is going up so high they've been looking at other places around the country. And I was just talking to my friend the other day and he was like, man, we can just move and it's like nothing changes when we get there.

Janet Jimenez: Yeah exactly. That's one of the main reasons I got into online business and then I guess the only thing we have to consider is our kids and moving at appropriate time during the school year. But besides that, yeah. It's awesome that you can do whatever you want.

Shane Sams: What brought you to the Flip Your Life Community? What brought you to what we do online and our courses and things like that?

Janet Jimenez: Well, I connected with you guys just because you were teachers and since I am an educator as well I felt like we're on a similar path and then just you selling resources or educational resources is what I do. So I felt like it would be a good fit for me.

Shane Sams: Did you ever look into anything else or did you just want to go straight into digital products?

Janet Jimenez: I actually had a previous business online, but I kind of changed directions. I wasn't in love with that idea I guess.

Shane Sams: You weren't passionate enough to kind of keep it going. And this is something that you really feel strongly about. You want it to go deeper into and it was. And it's something you clearly have expertise in 'cause you teach it, right?

Janet Jimenez: Yeah. I mean what I do now is what I've been working in for the last, I don't know, 13 years. So I really like it, the subject matter and my previous business I was doing well but it wasn't what I liked.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. So I just want to dive into that just a little bit because I was talking about this yesterday on a YouTube video actually about how your first idea is not always the idea that you're going to go with. And I just love that you said that. I think a lot of times people think, well if you're doing well in the online business space it's because you waved your magic wand and fell into a vat of money. No, that's not how it works. You tried something, you decided you didn't want to do it for whatever reason, you changed direction and now the thing that you're starting to do is starting to have some traction.

Shane Sams: And then that thing before. I bet it was easier the second time you set everything up and tried something different, wasn't it?

Janet Jimenez: Oh yeah. I mean I was able to develop all the skills of blogging regularly and social media and all those skills could be instantly transferred to my new endeavor.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah so I just wanted to kind of talk about that a little bit because I think that sometimes people think, well, if I try one thing and it doesn't work, then it's over. And that's not true.

Shane Sams: It's funny because out of all of our friends who are in the online space and then all of the hundreds of people who come through the community, if I'm sitting here realistically saying off the top of my head who succeeded on the first thing they ever did as a couple or as an individual or as an entrepreneur. I can't think of a single person where they just jumped in and they made it on the first thing. They may have made some money, they may have done okay. They may have done this, I may have failed, but whatever that first scenario is, almost every single person I've ever encountered online eventually evolves into something else.

Janet Jimenez: Yeah I think people just learn and are able to pivot and go where they want to. Yeah. That first idea isn't set in stone and you can change and do whatever you want whenever you want. That's the beauty of the internet.

Shane Sams: Just like you're getting ready to move to the Dominican Republic. Whenever you want.

Jocelyn Sams: Exactly.

Shane Sams: Let me ask you this, so your specific thing, is that used in classrooms, you said it was bilingual kids or is it for homeschool people? What's the market that you're going for before we jump into all your questions?

Janet Jimenez: Sure. So my resources are used by the teachers. So it is resources that the teachers use in the classrooms.

Shane Sams: Okay. Perfect.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay. Let's talk a little bit about what you have going on so far. So I know that you're selling in a third party marketplace.

Shane Sams: Where's your income coming from?

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah how many resources do you have? That type of thing.

Janet Jimenez: Okay. So I have been a seller on Teachers Pay Teachers a third party marketplace for educational resources since August 2015 and I have I think over 320 resources posted on there.

Shane Sams: And you didn't start that way. You just kind of built it up over time, right?

Janet Jimenez: Oh yeah, no I started with like two and then just keep on, keep on swimming, keep on adding more resources.

Jocelyn Sams: So then you also had-

Shane Sams: Finding Nemo reference there.

Jocelyn Sams: You also have a website then, right?

Janet Jimenez: Yes. And then on my website I have products. Most of my products listed for sale on a one off stores. So you could just purchase the same as you can in the third party marketplace and a membership with all everything packaged together and curated.

Shane Sams: Now this is the newest part of the program though right?

Janet Jimenez: Yes. All the same materials just packaged differently in different places.

Shane Sams: And if I remember correctly from the form that you filled out for the podcast, the third party marketplace that you started first represents about 75% of your income. It's like 20% is on your single seller one off store. And then we've already got some members in the membership. It's about 5 to 10% right?

Janet Jimenez: Yeah. Just about that. Though in the last month since attending the live event, my members have increased. I think I went to the live event with 11 or 12 members and I now as of this morning have 34.

Shane Sams: Whoah! Wow! We got the percentages shifted. That's the live event, Flip Your Life LIVE, it's all Flip Your LIfe LIVE, every bit of it.

Jocelyn Sams: Let's speak to that for just a second.

Shane Sams: How did that happen?

Jocelyn Sams: Not to make this like a total advertisement for Flip Your Life even though it kind of is. Like, what do you think was the big catalyst from that? What did you learn there that you kind of brought back and said okay, I'm going to change the way I'm doing things and make this different.

Shane Sams: 'Cause that's like 300% growth for your membership in two months.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah I feel like you say that so casually, like oh yeah, like I just grew this membership.

Janet Jimenez: No, in one month and two days, Shane. In one month and two days.

Shane Sams: That's one month. You just kind of were like yeah tripled my membership in a month.

Janet Jimenez: I honestly haven't done that much but what I have done is made a few small changes to my website. So I made that join button, a different color that popped kind of like websites and then I changed the header and worked a little bit with Shane on the wording on the header on my website and then I did my first Webinar as well. So just small things.

Shane Sams: Don't undersell yourself. That's a lot. That's more than some people would do in their online business in the next three months because they're just scared to change anything and like we had a working dinner at Flip Your Life live and I sat at Janet's table with her and I remember looking through your stuff and we had our screens there and there was another member sitting beside us in a similar space and we were looking back and forth and going over each website. And just calling attention that you offer a monthly membership like that was a big deal because I'm looking at your site and I'm like, does anyone even know you have this membership right? And you're talking about adding a join button, making it pop, changing your header, even changing your language just to hey buy my products to hey join the membership. Things like that. And then doing a webinar like showing up live.

Shane Sams: I mean if everyone listening would just do something live and promote it once a month, you know their business would grow. So I don't want you to like shortchange yourself because those are also scary actions like changing your website to where it's kind of working. I don't want to mess, I don't want to break it, but you change it and try something new and even just showing up live like that's a hurdle that most people don't really get over. So don't shortchange yourself there. You did a great job at that. Your actions are ... Even the small ones made the huge difference that added to your membership.

Jocelyn Sams: I think really the biggest lesson or takeaway here is just the momentum that you gained from that event. I mean, do you think that's fair?

Janet Jimenez: Yeah I mean I think just being with other people who are doing the same thing I do makes me realize that it's more possible and I can get where I would like to.

Shane Sams: Awesome. And how intense was that day that we did that working dinner? Because it could be started at like 8:30 in the morning and we all walked out of that room at 11.

Janet Jimenez: It was a long day, but it was definitely worth it.

Shane Sams: Awesome.

Jocelyn Sams: All right. Let's jump into a little bit of what's going on now. Let's talk about a fear, maybe an obstacle or a mindset issue that is currently holding you back, like you're making some progress, but as all of us do, we start taking a few steps forward and then we're like, oh okay. I'm a little bit scared. Let me take a few steps back. So let's not do that. We want to stop where we are and help you to move forward. So what is holding you back right now?

Janet Jimenez: I think just putting myself out there. So like I said, I did my first webinar and that was my first ever video or live anything. So just kind of putting a face to who I am and also within my space I am not a native Spanish speaker. And for some that is a big deal. For others they don't care because they just want the resources and don't care who made them as long as they're good.

Janet Jimenez: So I think that's kind of my biggest hangups right now is putting myself out there and so people know who they are working with.

Shane Sams: Yeah. This is something we hear a lot of and this was a huge fear for us when we were getting ready to launch this podcast. Because every other podcast who are in the space is either from New York or from California and they've got this millennial cool vibe or whatever. And we're like man, we're from Kentucky. We talk funny, we're from the south. And there were like no other really southern sounding people in the online space and we're like, who's going to listen to us? People are going to hear us and immediately turn it off because we're not this uber hip, millennial, former employee of Google or something on the coast. Right. And what we decided, we were talking about it before we ever recorded the first podcast and we said man, we need to just embrace that and we need to just forget about all those people.

Shane Sams: If they don't like what we have to say, that's their problem because they're confusing intellect for dialect and they're going to miss something that could change their life and there's going to be millions of people that could hear this in the south. There's 40 million people in the south. They may love it and they want somebody like us and as you said that kind of even the truth kind of came out and how you were saying that. Some people, it's a really big deal, but a lot of people don't care. And that's where all of your mental energy, all of your passion, all of your power needs to go to is those people that don't care. 'Cause I'd say there's a lot of people teaching Spanish that are not native Spanish teachers. When I was a teacher in high school, three doors down was the three Spanish department or whatever, like three classrooms for Spanish.

Shane Sams: And I think only one of those out of the three teachers was an actual native Spanish teacher. One of them was just like you. She went overseas, got the bug when these Spanish speaking teachers came back and got educated as a teacher. So I would say embrace that and turn that around to oh, I wonder if somebody will care to, I don't care if you care and I'm going to find the people that absolutely do care.

Jocelyn Sams: I think it's all about finding a way to make that a positive. So just tell people straight off like hey, I'm from Minnesota. And I started traveling abroad and I love the Spanish language and the Spanish people so much that I decided to become a Spanish teacher. And I love what I do. I'm so happy to do it every single day. I'm not a native Spanish speaker, but I'm so glad that I was able to immerse myself in this culture. I was able to learn this language and I was able to bring that passion for it back to my home state of Minnesota.

Shane Sams: You could even be more overt on sales pages and even in your normal content, because you could literally just say, "I'm not a native Spanish teacher, you're not a native Spanish teacher, but we are both teaching Spanish together" and you could just call it out and be overt. And that way the people that get to your page or see your ad never click it, that don't care, and the people that do, do because there's millions and millions of people out there that don't really ... That doesn't matter as much as you think it does to, and they'll actually identify better with you because of those exact reasons. We have another member in the Flip Your Life Community who she works with bilingual parents like you situation where you have one person speak Spanish natively. One person doesn't. They're raising their kids together bilingually.

Shane Sams: And that's something that she talks about in her brand is this is the way it is and if you don't like it, don't worry about it. Right? This is the way I teach it and if that's not for you, it's just not for you and if you embrace that, I bet you your brand would grow even more because you would call out that identifier instead of kind of being like generic bilingual Spanish speaking education. You're just, whoa, I'm in your face. I'm not a native speaker and you're not either.

Jocelyn Sams: Sometimes our fears about these things, they come from something that we are self conscious about. I know this because I speak from personal experience, that's what I worry about. I worry that somebody is going to say well, okay you have a funny accent or you don't say this word right or whatever.

Jocelyn Sams: Those are the types of things that I worry about when instead what we should be worrying about are the people who get us and they love us and we just had to push the hate aside. It doesn't matter what you do. You could be the most perfect version of yourself that you think you could be and somebody is not going to like it. So be totally yourself and the people who don't like it, they'll go and listen to someone else.

Shane Sams: Even in this episode today, I on air called out ... I thought her name was Geminiz. That's just a part of who we are and I'm not going to sugarcoat it or hide it for anybody. There's probably somebody listening to this right now going, well, I can't put believe he couldn't pronounce her name. Why would he even say that out loud? I would never call out my fault and they're going to stop listening maybe, but you know what, that's not our Avatar by don't let the door hit you where the good Lord split ya. You know what I mean? It's just a part of the deal. And if you embrace that, I think your brand will actually grow faster.

Janet Jimenez: Yeah I mean working with bilingual kids, our goal in the end is that they speak both languages fluently. So, since I can do that being a native English speaker, I think that that speaks to the resources and the angle for all the educators I work with.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah and I've actually worked with a mindset coach on similar things to this and what she told me is that you need to tell people what you want them to think. So I actually did this before our live event. That was one of the things that was really hard for me because I have a hard time putting myself out there too even though the people who were coming to this event, I mean they obviously know us. They obviously love us or they wouldn't have been traveling to Nashville to see us. But I was still just having a hard time. I was like what if I'm not what these people think I am or whatever. So I just did a video and I said, look, these are some things that I'm struggling with right now. I just want you all to know that really nervous about meeting you because I'm afraid that I'm not going to match up to your expectation of what you think I'm supposed to be.

Jocelyn Sams: And even that, just saying those words, it helped me to think, okay, these people know that I'm nervous about this. And now we can move on. I think sometimes just saying it and telling people what you want them to think. I think that you guys are gonna feel this way, but what I want you to know is that I'm really nervous about talking in front of you and it's going to be a little bit hard for me because I have to expend a lot of energy and there are a lot of people in the room.

Shane Sams: Have you overtly, Janet have you overtly blogged about this? Have you ever wrote a blog post or anything that's like I'm not a native Spanish teacher, but I teach Spanish, something like that. Have you ever overtly done a video or a blog or anything like that before for?

Janet Jimenez: No, not for, no.

Jocelyn Sams: I think sometimes even just speaking those words or writing those words is helpful. Like even if all of your audience doesn't even read it, just knowing that you've addressed it and you can just-

Shane Sams: And it can just stay on your blog or you can share it at any time in point.

Janet Jimenez: Okay. Maybe I will. I will add that to my to do list.

Shane Sams: I would also love to see you add this to your Webinar. One of the biggest things that we can do in any sales webinar is help people overcome the fears and objections they have, to buying our products. Right? And I would guess that some of the people listening to your webinars on your email list or reading your blog are exactly like you. They're native English speakers who went and learned Spanish, maybe they traveled abroad they came back, became these teachers and they struggle with this as well. And if you would address that in your sales presentation, right? It would probably just put people at ease and would also be a definer. Let's say 50 people show up on your Webinar. Let's say 25 of them are native Spanish speakers who speak English and 25 are native English speakers who teach Spanish.

Shane Sams: If you just addressed to this, who cares if those other 25 people check out? You now know exactly who the people are that you want in your membership. Right? So that could be a very powerful thing to address in your sales presentation is like anytime ... I was reading a copywriting book the other day 'cause I'm just a nerd and I sit and read about copywriting all the time. It said something very interesting about talking about yourself and it said, be very careful when you're talking about yourself. You don't want to be bragging about what you do or what you've done or anything like that. But the general rule of thumb is it's always okay to speak of yourself and about your fears in a negative light. Anything like that. If you talk about, man, I worry about this. It almost always makes people relate to you more and makes them even more receptive to your sales message when you get there. So that might be a way to really blow up those webinars and improve them too.

Jocelyn Sams: And people they appreciate vulnerability. Like everyone has something that's vulnerable about them. So when you show them, hey, I'm a real person who has fears and I have vulnerabilities, people like that. It's like why you're drawn to anyone that you're drawn to. You don't want to think that the people that you follow are perfect because that's like an unattainable standard. So show people your vulnerability, show people your fears a little bit and they'll be drawn to you that much more.

Janet Jimenez: Yeah I mean, no one is perfect. Everyone is improving. Yeah, I think that's a great idea to show what my hangups are and maybe I'll attract more people just like me.

Jocelyn Sams: Exactly. Okay. So we have talked about your mindset struggles. What else is going on in your business? What can we help you with to move it forward?

Janet Jimenez: So I am trying to balance out my income streams. Kind of make them a little bit more equal. So that since I have a large family, I can rely on the three different income streams just than heavily on the one the Teachers Pay Teachers. I would like to increase those other income streams. What would be the best route to do that?

Shane Sams: Yeah. So you have three things. There's different advantages and disadvantages to each of your revenue streams. Okay. And this is true for any online business. So you have a third party market that's like you sell your stuff on someone else's store, right? So it's like you're putting your stuff in Walmart or something like that. That's a great way to make money because usually those third party marketplaces have bigger audiences that are already looking for your products. Okay? So that's one way you're making money. Another way you're making money, is your own one off store. That's another great thing. It's like opening your own store on the corner or in the shopping center, you've got your own place. People come in, there are some disadvantages there. You're controlling all the overhead. You got to get traffic to it and all that good stuff.

Shane Sams: And then the third way is you got this membership, this recurring revenue where the steady income comes from. And it's like, okay, every member, I get stacks on top of each other, but I've got to get people to kind of commit to it, right? So your gut instinct I'm hearing in all of your questions is how do I kind of balance those out? 33, 33, 33, whatever, right? Where it's like, okay, if one goes bad and one goes good, it kind of works itself out. But that's intuitively where most people go to. But in almost every situation that we've seen or coached over the last few years, it's almost always better to actually put all of your effort and energy into really blowing up one. And the one that creates the most stable income is that membership. Okay? And other avenues are actually used for different purposes.

Shane Sams: So let's take the third party marketplace, what we do in our education businesses with a Teachers Pay Teachers or there's another one, I can't remember what it's called offhand. That's almost where we get discovered. We want people to find those lesson plans. We actually lowered our prices a little bit and then we re geared all of our downloads to where it has a link back to our sight, right? And we want people to find us there and that's great. We promote that still, we use that still, but we don't want to rely on that as income because what if they shut the store down? What if you can't promote correctly or they show somebody else in the search results? You don't get to control their algorithm. You can't control anything on that. The same thing goes for your actual website where the individual lesson plans are. Do you have all those in like a store? It's just a storefront where you click on them and go through on your website?

Janet Jimenez: Yes. On my website yeah. There is a storefront and then also the place where you would join the membership.

Shane Sams: Right. So what we did in that regard is we realized we had a storefront at one time where you could buy lesson packs and things like that. But it was kind of like all on one or two pages. And we were like, man, we're getting no traffic on this. So we actually wrote a blog post for every individual lesson, especially on US history teachers but we had a link to buy the product, right? So that way we wanted to have a better SEO strategy for each individual plan to help people find our stuff better. So, even our individual sales there, were still promotion. There were still SEOs still something that we could promote. Like I could share a link to that blog post that was like let me tell you all about Abraham Lincoln lesson plan 101 or whatever. And then at the end of it they could get the plan if they wanted. It was descriptive, right? And then we focused almost all of our energy on growing our membership because that's that steady predictable, long term revenue that you can look at, and you can even see now that you're getting 30, 40 members, you're like wow, that's pretty cool that most of those people are going to pay again next month. And I don't have to worry if I make individual sales. I don't have to worry if somebody finds my site every month.

Janet Jimenez: Oh yeah. It's very rough in the summers just because my income goes from $4k or $5k a month to like $600.

Shane Sams: And that's 'cause of the one off sales and nobody buys those one off sales?

Janet Jimenez: Exactly.

Shane Sams: So what you can do is, with the membership is you can get annual sales, you can get monthly sales and they keep paying through those months and that dip is not as bad. So it makes more sense to just focus totally on the membership.

Jocelyn Sams: And I'm okay with people buying things one off. Are you sending them an email sequence once they buy something from you just say hey, I have a membership. You paid X dollars for this product, but for only so much a month you can get all of these products?

Janet Jimenez: Yup. So when they open my product before they even see the product, they see the advertisement for my membership. So yes, that's the first page they see before they see what they purchase.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay. That's good. I like that.

Shane Sams: But if you were bringing, if you were inviting everyone that made an individual product purchase to an actual live training every month, right, and you were really like, okay, let's see, last month I sold 100 one off products. This month now let's all come to a webinar I'm gonna do a training. It's going to be free for you guys and then you sold the monthly membership. This is another mistake people make too. We've done this in the past, so I don't want to say it's always wrong, but trying to sell that annual, trying to get that big hit, trying to get that whatever. We would much rather stack monthly members and give ourselves a raise every day. Like every time we get a new member to the Flip Your Life Community or on one of our other websites, I look over at Jocelyn, I snap my fingers and go, we just got a raise today 'cause that's one more person paying me every single month, right?

Shane Sams: If I have a $50 membership and I had 10 members in the month, I gave myself a $500 raise this month. Right? And who gets to give their self a raise? Most people are like, I don't get a raise. I get like a 3% increase a year. You can give yourself a raise every day when you're giving yourself a monthly membership 'cause now you're going to get that money again next month too. So if you could rejigger your funnel that's a good Kentucky word, rejigger. If you could rejigger the funnel and you could say, hey, everything that happens, whether it's on Teachers Pay Teachers, on my individual one off sales or even on my email list is funneling to that live thing where I pitched the monthly membership, unlimited access. I'm going to help you all that. You get really excited about it.

Shane Sams: And you're going to start saying, okay, 10 more members, 500 more dollars, 10 more members, 500 more dollars, 10 more members, and all of a sudden you look up and it's like $10,000, $15,000 a month because you keep adding people on top of what's already there. Instead of saying, hey, you bought something and now you're gone.

Jocelyn Sams: But on the flip side of that, I do think that it's important to offer the annual membership to purchase order sales. Are you doing purchase orders sales right now?

Janet Jimenez: Yeah. So I have had a few purchase order sales as well.

Jocelyn Sams: That's another thing that you can really push even on the webinars. So once you get done pitching the monthly membership, the people are kind of like, well that sounds great but I can't afford that. Then you can say, oh well you don't have to because your school can pay for it. That's your next step. So once they come to your Webinar, once they open your emails, once they reject that monthly offer, then you go back to those people and say, oh by the way, did you know that I accept purchase orders?

Shane Sams: So a purchase order for everybody listening to that is how government institutions buy products. So a school or even like city hall before they can buy something for their employees, they have to create a purchase order. And this is actually in a simple form, it's an objection. So there's a lot of objections people have, like, I won't buy that by myself. Well, in any online business or anything you sell, could their company pay for it? Could the government institution pay for it? Is there another way to get somebody else to pay for it? Another way that a lot of people are like, well, I can't necessarily buy the annual plan, but I'd love to save the money. Or they might say I can't afford your monthly price. Well they could finance it on their credit card. That's a purchasing objection that you can overcome by saying, hey, there's other ways to pay for this besides just straight cash out of your wallet that you open and stick in an envelope and mail to me. Okay.

Shane Sams: So always be thinking about why people are saying no. And that's what Jocelyn is saying here. If they're saying no because it's their money, in your space, is there a way they can spend someone else's money? Because a lot of people do you have access to do those things?

Janet Jimenez: And then also thinking I get about 60% of my traffic is actually coming from Pinterest to one off products. So, I was trying to think of a way, be it a pop up or something that kind of once they're on a product that would kind of pop up and say, did you know that you can access everything for this price?

Shane Sams: Yeah. My favorite way to do this is to actually make it a button beside product that costs the same as the price. How much do your products cost?

Janet Jimenez: Well, it varies, but anywhere from a dollar to $20, but the majority are $3 to $5.

Shane Sams: So what I would do then is probably put, there would be three options on every page in your cart. So like if you actually go to our website, flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife. You'll see this down at the bottom. We've got the monthly option, the annual option and the free option. There's actually a free trial right there beside the other two options, right? Our main objective is to get people to try our membership because you can attest to this. Once you get in the community, once you see how many courses there are and once you get to work with me and Jocelyn, we know people are going to stay, right? So that's what we want. Is we want that free trial by the month, but some people jump in the monthly and the annual 'cause you can save on the annual plan, but a lot of people will just go ahead and take that free option.

Shane Sams: So this is the same thing you're doing. Let's say they land on a sale on I don't know like a random worksheet that's $5, right? All right, so it's five bucks here, but then you have a thing right beside of it that says or you could join the monthly membership for $19 a month or whatever, and you can say get everything for this and then you've got the annual plan right beside it. So now they've got three things buy this one time one product, monthly membership or annual plan. You've got all three options on the page ready to go, boom. And now it's like a choice. It's not like oh, there's a popup. This thing's kind of over here. I'm looking at it now. It's like oh, I can get this worksheet this way or I could get it this way or I can get it this way. And just put them all on the same page together and then they've got it's right there in front of them staring them down.

Shane Sams: Yeah and if your cart won't support this as the membership product, all you gotta do is have a button that goes to another page that they can order the membership.

Jocelyn Sams: And also don't underestimate the power of advertising on your own site. I did this on Elementary Librarian. You know, how you'll go to people's sites and see ads for something on Google or something on Amazon or whatever. Make your own ad. Put a block of graphics or whatever on your site that says, hey, join my membership, so many materials, hundreds of materials for a low monthly costs, whatever.

Janet Jimenez: I have that now, but I was thinking of changing it to like for less than a dollar a day or something more attractive to a teacher who is working on a fixed income.

Jocelyn Sams: Yes, absolutely.

Shane Sams: Yeah. Anytime you can relate your price to something like in real life. We always call it, especially in the teacher space, we call it the happy meal pricing. If I can get my prices somewhere around what people would pay, like for you with six kids it's like $47 to get them a happy meal.

Janet Jimenez: Less than school lunch.

Shane Sams: Yeah less than school lunch. Make it relatable to them that's something that sounds affordable. And people will really react to that. But the key is just promote. You can't promote 97 things, right? This was a mistake that a lot of people make. You can't say like an ad for this, an ad for that ad for this. You have to set things up in order like steps for people and you got to concentrate on promoting the one thing the most, if you're going to make it the most important thing. So, if you can just ... That's why you would put the monthly, like if they were to buy a lesson plan, the left option is the one off plan. The middle one's always the monthly membership.

Shane Sams: 'Cause that's what you're promoting, right? Like what are they staring? And you put best deal at the top of that one, that way they're like, this is the thing you should buy 'cause it is. It's the most affordable plan to get everything, right. So in all your ads, don't advertise 20 different one off product., One thing membership all over the place. They're going to land on that page through search and through social to get the individual thing. That's how people find individual stuff. They don't look around your website, but when they get to your website, what's your one goal for them to take next? Yes, it's to buy a product, but really is to join that membership. So you've got predictable revenue that you can count on.

Janet Jimenez: Okay.

Jocelyn Sams: All right Janet, we've had a great conversation with you today. I think that you've got some really actionable ideas to take advantage of and just run with. So let's talk about one thing that you are planning to do in the next 24 hours or so based on what we talked about here today.

Janet Jimenez: Well, I'm going to do two. So I'm going to make a blog post about not being a native Spanish speaker of bilingual students. And then I am going to find out a way to put that buy button next to my one off products so that they know that they can access everything instead of just getting that one product.

Shane Sams: That is absolutely amazing. Imagine just putting that button on every single product you have. Just doing that it's got to take ... the action steps going to get people to buy more memberships because it's more available. It's every time they see the button they're going to be able to do that. So thank you so much, Janet for coming on the show today and being so transparent. We're so appreciative and grateful that our members will do this, will come on 'cause we know it's kind of scary to come on a podcast and there's thousands of people listening. But like man, what we talked about today is going to help somebody out there and we're just so thankful that you did that.

Janet Jimenez: Yes. Thanks so much for having me.

Shane Sams: What a great interview with one of our Flip Your Life Community members today. We hope that you got something out of that that can help you take your business to the next level. Before we close our podcast, we always like to end with a Bible verse Jocelyn and I get a lot of our inspiration from the Bible and we wanted to share some of that with you today. Our verse today comes from Ecclesiastes 11 verses four through six, and it says, "Farmers who wait for perfect weather never plant. If they watch every cloud they never harvest, just as you cannot understand the path of the wind or the mystery of a tiny baby growing in its mother's womb, so you cannot understand the activity of God who does all things. So plant your seed in the morning and keep busy all afternoon for you don't know if profit will come from one activity or another or maybe both."

Shane Sams: So what is the Bible saying here, guys? Get out there and take action. Don't be afraid. Don't wait for perfect. It ain't gotta be perfect, it's just got to be done. And if you take that mindset into your online business, you will be successful too. And if we can help you be successful in your online business, we'd love to do that. All you have to do is join our Flip Your Life Community. We have all the training, coaching, community, and resources you need to take your business to the next level. You can have a 30 day free trial right now, at flippedlifestyle.com/free. That's flippedlifestyle.com/free. Go there and start your 30 day free trial today.

Shane Sams: All right guys, that is all the time we have for today. We are so thankful that you tuned in. Whatever you do between now and the next time you hear this podcast, get out there, take action and do whatever it takes to Flip Your Life this evening.

Jocelyn Sams: Bye.

Links and resources mentioned on today’s show: * Janet's website * Flip Your Life community 30-day trial

Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!

Get your FREE 30-DAY Membership in the Flip Your Life Community NOW!

– https://flippedlifestyle.com/free

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Hey Y’all, welcome to another Flipped Lifestyle Podcast Q&A w/ S&J!

In the Flip Your Life Community, we hold a members-only Q&A twice a month where we answer online business questions of our members live on air!

Today’s Q&A highlights answer the following questions: Question One:

"I formed my beta group with 4 members, yay!! We kick off this week, with weekly live lessons and live office hours, running for 10 weeks. What should be my #1 focus here? My head wants to spyder out to do ALL the things, but I want to make the most out of this opportunity to retain these members and grow that. I think my focus should be to be there for my members, teach, answer all their questions, and regularly ask them what they want next. Interestingly, the 4 members are not at all the avatar I had pictured in mind. So I feel like I have to roll with the punches to morph my membership site to what they asking for."

Question Two:

"I just gave birth to baby #3 6 weeks ago so I temporarily closed registration to my membership to keep my life from getting too crazy. I'm now feeling ready to get back in the game, open up registration and re-launch. I currently have about 50 members and I'm considering creating some kind of affiliate program for a few members who have been in my program for long enough to vouch for it. My question is- how do I figure out a revenue sharing arrangement when people are paying a monthly fee- and some members stick around for a month, while others stay for a year? It's obviously more straightforward when selling a course for a 1-time fee. Also- given that I'm a certified sleep consultant for babies and kids, and given the fact that I now have a 6 week old at home, how can I leverage my current situation to connect with my audience and add value to my membership? In my membership, I've already started giving them regular updates as to his sleep and what I'm doing so that they can follow my journey with him!"

Question Three:

"My site’s mission is helping people learn God’s way with money and create financial margin so they can give more generously and start enjoying life again. Product plan is to create courses/lessons on many biblical finance topics from big picture like financial freedom and treasures in heaven to practical topics like tackling debt and biblical investing and generosity. Some will be directly motivational, others may actually be church-style bible teachings. Three brief questions: Do I have to do the get out of debt piece because it’s an ‘aspirin'? Does the word ‘Courses’ convert better than ‘Lessons?' I’d like to eventually charge $49/mo, is that realistic when members may be in financial hardship? Do I have to focus on debt because it is the really hard hitting pain point?"

Question Four:

"Are there key things you like to do when you are holding a coaching session? I'm offering these for sale and would love to know what are your top priorities for making sure that you help someone who has paid for your time. My top guess would be; LISTEN, ask them what they are having TROUBLES with, ask do they have a SUGGESTION or plan, give your suggestions, make an ACTION plan."

CLICK HERE to get your FREE 30-DAY Membership in the Flip Your Life Community NOW!

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In today’s episode, we help Dan determine next steps in moving forward and growing his online business that teaches birth professionals about how to effectively operate a successful small business.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jocelyn Sams: Hey y'all. On today's show we help Dan take his birth consulting business to the next level.

Shane Sams: Welcome to The Flip Lifestyle Podcast, where life always comes before work. We're your host, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. We're a real family that figured out how to make our entire living online. Now, we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? Alright, let's get started.

Shane Sams: What's going on, everybody, welcome back to The Flip Lifestyle Podcast. It is great to be back with you again today, we're super excited to welcome another member of our Flip Your Life community onto the show today to help them take their business to the next level and really, really especially excited today because we have a great friend of ours, someone who's been in the community for a long time, hung out with him in person numerous times and can't wait to help them today, Dan Dekker is on the program. Dan, what's up, man?

Dan Dekker: Giddy up, giddy up, let's make some money. Woo!

Jocelyn Sams: That's probably the most energetic introduction we've ever had.

Shane Sams: I always love talking to you 'cause I know it's gonna be entertaining, especially when you do something like this. When I was reading your form that you filled out to be on the podcast, I love how ... Where it said like talking about your family, and you put three offspring. And I'm like, "Only Dan's putting offspring instead of children on the show, man." But Dan's got an awesome story, awesome business and we've had a lot of good times with Dan. So we're gonna ramp up everything that's going on in Dan's life today. So, Dan, tell us a little bit about you and your family and your online business.

Dan Dekker: Well, first of all I like to pretend I'm from Kentucky but I wasn't actually born there so unfortunately I don't really have that accent. But yeah, my wife and I, Rebecca, started ... She started an online business 4 or 5 years ago and it really took off. I'm kind of in this weird spot where like, yeah, we flipped our lives, we have an online business that fully supports us and our family now, which is totally awesome.

Shane Sams: Amazing.

Dan Dekker: And now I'm kind of starting my own thing so it's this weird mix of, I've seen it happen and was sort of along for the ride but for myself I'm kind of starting from scratch and having to do it all myself, which has been definitely a learning experience. But I have my business degree. I always did accounting work for different businesses up until four years ago when I quit to do mainly the accounting and helping with our website full time and to watch the kids full time. So, I did that and now just recently ... Well, I should say our business is a childbirth-related business. My wife started it. It gives education materials to childbirth professionals. So for the last 4 or 5 years we've been dealing with these childbirth professionals on a regular basis.

Dan Dekker: And that's where I kind of came up with this idea after meeting with all these doulas and midwives and childbirth educators, and realizing that a lot of them were really good at their jobs, were great at dealing with moms and families that are having babies, but they weren't all that great with the business side. You know, they get lots of training about how to help deliver a baby but no one tells them how to run a business. And so that's where this idea came from and that's what I'm starting as. It's a training class, kind of starting with the very beginning, for birth professionals to train them how to run a small business.

Shane Sams: So, Rebecca's business ... She is an expert in the birth and babies field, right?

Dan Dekker: Right, yeah.

Shane Sams: And her main priority is getting the research and the information to these nurses, doulas, you know, midwives, people who are helping people have a baby, right?

Dan Dekker: Correct. Yeah.

Shane Sams: And you have been kind of on the backend doing the accounting, taking care of the book work so she can focus on the research and getting this content to her audience. And as you were doing this, you were like, "Wow, that person is the best midwife ever, but, her books are in shambles and she has no idea what to charge or how to collect money or do anything like that so she can't sustain her business which would let her help other people, basically."

Dan Dekker: Exactly, yeah. Rebecca kept getting questions from people 'cause they see her running a successful business and she starts answering these business questions for them just 'cause they don't know where else to turn and she was able to help with these questions, so yeah.

Shane Sams: And I'm sure it's like many businesses, you know? Every field has its nuances, right? There's like, certain lingo, a certain tool, certain things you buy that some other businesses wouldn't buy, right? And you wouldn't understand exactly how to write it off or how to file it under your taxes or do things like that. But you guys literally have been in this field now for so many years that you're like, "Yeah, I know all that stuff." And you just wanted to turn that into kind of a course and hand it out there, right?

Dan Dekker: Yep, that's exactly it. So ... And yeah, just last night we launched the class a couple of weeks ago, and just last night I had my first webinar so-

Shane Sams: Awesome.

Dan Dekker: It went really well.

Shane Sams: Now, let's back up a little bit, let's talk about this.

Dan Dekker: We don't need all the details.

Shane Sams: Let's go back into the details here.

Jocelyn Sams: Well, first of all, before we get into all that, I just wanna say that I feel like this fits into a little box all too conveniently. So, can you talk a little bit about how you arrived at doing this? Because you didn't start out doing this birth business thing. You were gonna do something totally different. So, can you kind of take us down that road a little bit and like what made you decide to go this way?

Shane Sams: Yeah, what was your first idea that you kind of had a couple of months ago?

Dan Dekker: Well, if you back up even a little before that, it was on a member call or somewhere. We were talking to you guys and we're like, "Hey, we got this one business, Dan's thinking of starting his own business, should we do it?" And you guys were like, "No, don't do it, just go all in with the one business."

Shane Sams: Stay in the field, right?

Dan Dekker: And then we went to a business conference and Seth Godin was speaking there and he had a Q&A and so we were like, "Hey Seth, we got this one business that's going good. We're thinking of starting a second one." He was like, "No, you shouldn't do that either."

Jocelyn Sams: So, naturally.

Shane Sams: See, Seth agrees with me as always.

Jocelyn Sams: So, naturally, you decided to do what?

Dan Dekker: So, I just went for it anyway, yeah.

Shane Sams: I did not listen to Seth Godin or Shane and Jocelyn.

Dan Dekker: I got a lot of good advice and then I ignored all of it.

Shane Sams: That's how most people do man. So, tell us about that business and what happened, okay?

Dan Dekker: So, I started a travel website. Since we flipped our lives and we don't have ... We've so much more free time and we really love traveling ... So that's been a big thing for us. My family is still in Michigan. So we go up there several weeks a year and we've been using all this time we have now to travel 'cause we can work from wherever. So I'm like, "You know what? I'm gonna start a site helping families learn how to take these longer vacations, basically." So, I did that, I got a website up, I wrote some articles. Worked on it a little bit and just went totally nowhere.

Jocelyn Sams: What? You built it and people didn't come?

Shane Sams: I know, right?

Dan Dekker: That's right. Yeah, they lied in the movie Field of Dreams.

Shane Sams: He's a liar, that Kevin Costner, you should never trust him, ever.

Dan Dekker: Sketchy.

Shane Sams: He's sketchy, man.

Dan Dekker: So, yeah, I did that. I had a Facebook group. I think the only ... Like, actually I had to tell Rebecca to join my Facebook group. I'm like, "I have no members. And even you haven't joined."

Shane Sams: I love it.

Dan Dekker: But yeah, it was a big flop in the end of it. But, I'll tell you the nice part was when I had this new idea, all this stuff that I learned from the first one, like-

Shane Sams: That's right.

Dan Dekker: Setting up WordPress, setting up ConvertKit, which is our email provider, all those things ... I wasn't intimidated or worried about all of that. I was just like, "You know what? I'm just gonna work on the class and I can stand up a website and do all of that real quick." So that was the one good part about it. It got me-

Jocelyn Sams: So you-

Dan Dekker: Past some of those initial hurdles.

Jocelyn Sams: Learned things by making mistakes.

Shane Sams: Yeah, that's right. That's right.

Jocelyn Sams: Hmm. Very interesting.

Dan Dekker: That's right. And I actually tried something and failed, but I learned something.

Shane Sams: That's okay. And I like ... What's cool is, you know ... Here's what ... We like to watch ... In the community we see this happen all the time. When you're doing the travel thing ... Like, once you decide to do it, we're onboard with it. We're like, "Okay, if you want to do it-

Jocelyn Sams: "Like, we support you."

Shane Sams: "We support you. Whatever you want to do, man." You know? So it's like, "Watch the WordPress course, do the thing, do this, and we'll be here when you're ready to pivot, okay?" And like, as you're doing these things, I remember you come back later and we start talking again about how kind of like the travel thing's not going and this. But like, it's not that we didn't want you to start a business, right? We wanted you to start a business, but to capitalize on all of the things that you already had in place. You know, you have these skills 'cause you've been working on the business. You've been doing the accounting. You're like the master of the backend of this business that you and Rebecca have created. And she already had an existing audience, which is the most powerful thing. The most unfair advantage that anyone can have when they're starting out is if they've not made a dime, is they have an audience to market something to.

Dan Dekker: True.

Shane Sams: And that's kind of what we really wanted you to do was like, "Man, take advantage of the advantages that you have. Don't just seek something brand new." Because that's the hard, hard, hard road. And what you want to do in online business is you want to hit something and then go back and hit it again. And you want to find that nail and hammer it some more instead of just starting from scratch every time. 'Cause we see that happen all the time in the community. Someone will get the shiny object itch and they'll be like, "Hey, I travel. I'll take pictures and do the same thing. I'll make a travel blog, right?" Like, they all-

Jocelyn Sams: That's not to say that's a bad business-

Shane Sams: It's not.

Jocelyn Sams: It just maybe wasn't the right fit for you.

Dan Dekker: No, and definitely the thing that surprised me most about a travel business is I felt like I was pressured on vacation to do all this business stuff, you know?

Shane Sams: Oh, yeah.

Dan Dekker: Like, we were going, for example, into Memphis for spring break and I'm like, "Alright, we gotta hit all these like major attractions in Memphis or else I'm like not doing my job. And I'm like, "That's not what vacation's about." You know?

Jocelyn Sams: And a lot of people [crosstalk 00:09:44] might not know, but we have a YouTube channel and we do some travel reviews. Just more as like a lifestyle type thing.

Shane Sams: But I've started like blocking off three-hour windows for like, "Okay, guys. I've got everything written down we're gonna get at the hotel. Alright, go play on that playground for 25 seconds." You know, and like-

Jocelyn Sams: We really do this.

Shane Sams: Like ... 'Cause I record a lot anyway. And our goal is to get a film crew to come with us. That's our ultimate goal.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. So eventually we're gonna

Shane Sams: That may workout next year, you know?

Jocelyn Sams: Have the whole ... Yeah. The whole crew come along with us. And like, you know, they work some.

Dan Dekker: 'Cause it is super distracting. And you're like ... And the kids want to do it so bad. They want to see themselves on YouTube.

Shane Sams: Show their friends and stuff. Yeah, it's annoying when you get there.

Dan Dekker: Okay, so let's fast forward a little bit. Okay, so the idea re-materializes. We kind of pivot. We reached out for you and like, "Okay, maybe I should focus on what I'm really, really good at and market it to all of these people who have already bought things in this space."

Jocelyn Sams: We're on a member call and you're like, "Should I do this?" We're like, "Yes!"

Shane Sams: "Yes! That's what we want you to do." That's what we're talking about. If you'd asked Seth, he would have told you the same thing, okay?

Dan Dekker: Yeah.

Shane Sams: Alright, now ... But, even though ... I love this story. This is amazing. Even though you've been in The Flip Your Life Community for ... I don't know how long-

Jocelyn Sams: Like pretty much since it existed.

Shane Sams: Three years or something like that, right? Even though every time you all do something, we talk about it, it always happens and works and explodes and goes crazy. Which I know y'all have another big win that I'm gonna ask you about in a minute. But like, you still hesitated. I felt this hesitation coming from you of getting in this and like, "Okay, I can make this course. I can teach these people. I can help them create sustainable businesses that throw the pebble in the pond and the ripple is a lot of babies are healthy and born and families are happy and they're not worried." But you were just ... What was the hesitation to launch? Even just a couple of weeks ago?

Dan Dekker: I realized I had ... I struggle with doing some of these new things. If I don't know exactly what to do, it's like just enough to stop me from fully going through with it, you know?

Shane Sams: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dan Dekker: Like the best analogy I could make is ... I don't play many video games, but when I used to, I knew these people, they'd play a game one time and they move on to the next game. And like that was never me. I'd play one game and I'd learn it and then I'd play it like a hundred times. And I'd do it slightly different every single time, you know?

Shane Sams: Oh, I gotcha. Yeah, oh yeah.

Dan Dekker: And that's kind of what it is with me, you know? Like, when I worked in IT company, we had this special software and I learned the software and I got so into it. I became like the office guru. I went to conferences for the software and everything, you know? Like, that's me.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, I get you, man. I get you-

Shane Sams: You and Jocelyn are the same soul.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay, I really do. No, I love that. I love to refine. I love to make things better. Like, that's who I am.

Dan Dekker: But then it's like, "Okay, but I have to go learn all this new stuff. I have to learn how to use Zoom or like do a webinar", which I'd never done before. And that's where I just almost subconsciously hang myself up. So yeah, I spent most of the summer just trying to design this PowerPoint to get it ready to record to make a class.

Shane Sams: Alright. It's all good. This is the perfect segue into where I'm going with this. Okay. So Dan is totally stuck and Dan comes to Flip Your Life Live in Nashville.

Jocelyn Sams: This was like three weeks ago.

Shane Sams: That's right. So Dan comes there and the first day we had a long day of learning and Q&As and Masterminding and just working together. And the first night we had a working dinner, which was from seven till 11 o'clock. Everybody, the entire conference, was in one giant room. We ate dinner and we all just stayed in there until we almost collapsed working on whatever we were taking action on.

Jocelyn Sams: Literally almost collapsed for me.

Shane Sams: Literally. Jocelyn almost did collapse. She actually went to bed right before me and I was like stumbling up the stairs about to pass out. And then we had to speak all day the next day, too. So it was madness. But anyway, so I'm walking around helping different tables. And I sit down and ... Across the table ... There was a round table, there was about eight people there. Dan was directly across. I mean, we couldn't have sat more perfectly across from each other. And when I sat down, I was going around and I was talking to a couple different people. And I think I helped someone else at the table first. And then I look over and I make eye contact with Rebecca, Dan's wife, who is sitting beside him. And this is no lie-

Dan Dekker: I did not know this part of the story, by the way.

Shane Sams: No, this is no lie. So Rebecca ... I make eye contact with Rebecca first. Rebecca was already ... We had kind of talked before the event a little bit on some member calls and stuff and she was working on a book. She kind of knew what she was going with. They were getting ready to launch a live event. She kind of knew what she was doing. But I looked at her first and she leans back behind Dan and she looks at me and I could just see in eyes and she kind of shook her head like, "Get him, Shane. Get him. No mercy. No sugar. Tell him how it is."

Jocelyn Sams: This is the beauty of working with your spouse.

Dan Dekker: Oh my goodness.

Jocelyn Sams: I totally get this, you know?

Shane Sams: She knew it. She set you up, dude. And so then my eyes kind of snapped back to Dan. And he kind of like leaned back like, "Oh, gosh."

Jocelyn Sams: "It's coming."

Shane Sams: "It's coming."

Dan Dekker: It's like in school. I looked down, like, "Don't make eye contact." Right?

Shane Sams: Right. And I ... So Dan ... I can't remember what we said first. But we said ... I said, "Dan, what's up with you right now?" And you were like, "Well, I've got this course and I think I'm gonna launch it in like January and I'm gonna get-

Dan Dekker: Moving my vacation to January so [crosstalk 00:14:48]-

Shane Sams: Perfect ... Yeah, February, right? I'm gonna be putting it off.

Jocelyn Sams: And if you know anything about this podcast, if you're a frequent listener, you know that this is not gonna fly with us, okay?

Shane Sams: This is not going well. This is not happening. And so I look at Dan, I said, "Why don't you launch it next week?" Just ... His eyes get real big and bug-eyed. And I'm like ... He goes, "What?" I'm like, "Yeah. Just write an outline. Sell it. You got an audience. Pre-launch it, tell 'em what it's gonna be. Tell 'em it's a beta and they'll get to work with you. And you'll do the courses live over the next few weeks." And the look ... I wish that the photographer and the video people were at that table at that moment just to capture ... 'Cause Rebecca just is like leaning back snickering while I'm telling you this. And she's sitting there shaking her head. And so what were you thinking when I was like, "Dan-

Dan Dekker: I probably had a glazed [crosstalk 00:15:35] look like, "What excuse do I have? Is there a reason that I can't do this?" You know?

Shane Sams: And was there an excuse?

Dan Dekker: Of course not.

Shane Sams: There was not. So what happens next? So you go out and ... How did you launch the thing? What did you do after the next week or two?

Dan Dekker: So your challenge was I think start the waitlist before we left the conference and launch a week later. And so the conference was on a weekend or at the beginning of the weekend. And so we spent the drive home ... We composed some emails and I set some stuff up on Sunday. 'Cause I had to like switch my ConvertKit account to the new website and get the domain going, all that stuff. So there was some technical junk I had to get out of the way.

Dan Dekker: Well, we got the email ready. And then Rebecca knows her people and says, "You know what? If I send it Sunday night, no one will read it. So I'm gonna send it Monday morning." So we launch Monday morning. We got I think about 60 people the first day join the waitlist right away. I ended up with like 80-some over that week. And then ... And I'm losing track of the days now. And then it was just over a week later I finally ... I got everything set up to actually sell it. I had to set up a payment plan and all that stuff. So a week later I sold and the first day I sold 20-some and by last night, you know, someone bought 30 minutes before the class started.

Shane Sams: Oh, that's amazing. So you got how many?

Dan Dekker: 35.

Shane Sams: How much did you charge for that?

Dan Dekker: The class is listed at 150 and I gave them 50% off their part of the beta group. So that's awesome.

Shane Sams: So you sold 35 people-

Jocelyn Sams: And that's-

Shane Sams: Let me do some math there. Yeah, hold on-

Dan Dekker: A little over $2500.

Shane Sams: Woo-hoo! That's amazing. And you've got buyers. I mean, you've got people in hand and they're gonna buy the next thing. And maybe you can offer coaching. And maybe this evolves into like the group thing where you get a monthly recurring revenue off of this. And now you guys have this whole second thing of income.

Jocelyn Sams: And let me just ask you. Like, how much of the actual course work do you have done?

Dan Dekker: Well, I had had to teach one class, so there's one class done.

Shane Sams: Exactly-

Jocelyn Sams: Okay, so-

Shane Sams: You had nothing when you sold it, right?

Dan Dekker: Oh, not at all. I mean, I made the joke to Rebecca. I was like, "Alright, what did we promise these people?" So I had to go to my own sales page and see what I promised to like fill out the PowerPoint, you know?

Jocelyn Sams: Oh, Dan. We have done this so many times.

Shane Sams: If I had a nickel. If I had a nickel for every time I said that Jocelyn before a member call.

Jocelyn Sams: You know, I want people who are listening to know that it's not being like dishonest or anything. You are going to create the course. Like, I feel like sometimes people are like, "Well, you know, that's really shady." But people [crosstalk 00:18:03] know that's the reason you're discounting them because the course isn't finished. You're going to finish it with their assistance.

Shane Sams: And like what Dan said a few minutes ago was, you know, "I spent all summer working on this PowerPoint." Right? But like when you sell something and they're showing up in a week for the first class, you don't have all summer to make the PowerPoint. You gotta go. And then you gotta just ask them questions and let them ask you questions and answer their questions. And that's gonna build the content. It's gonna be a better course than what you ever could have created-

Jocelyn Sams: The beautiful thing about-

Shane Sams: All summer on a PowerPoint.

Jocelyn Sams: Doing it this way is that people will ask questions and you will answer those questions as things that you never would have even thought of.

Dan Dekker: Right, yeah. When I had them sign up, they got a thank you or welcome email and it said, "Hey, reply to this email and let me know what your big problem you're having is." So I got a lot of great feedback right away by doing that.

Shane Sams: Yeah, how did the first course go? Did they ask questions during it, too? Like a lot of questions?

Dan Dekker: Yeah, I spoke for like 45 minutes and then they had questions for like 20 minutes at the end. So ...

Shane Sams: That's awesome.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, that's-

Shane Sams: Did anybody ask something you had not thought of? Like during either those emails or the thing? Or did they ask it, maybe you thought of it, but it was like, "Oh, I was gonna teach that four weeks ago but they asked tonight"? You know?

Dan Dekker: There was definitely some stuff I fleshed out more. Like ... It was able to ... I could tell what their actual problems were rather than just more guessing what their problems were. And so it wasn't for this class, but a lot of them had problems like knowing how much money to save for taxes. I'm like, "Alright, we definitely need to really flush out this whole tax session while saving money for taxes."

Shane Sams: Well, that might have been a-

Dan Dekker: "I don't know how much save?" To, "I'm behind on my taxes. I'm trying to catch up and save and all."

Shane Sams: So that might have been a throwaway line in one of your PowerPoints, but now it's like, "Wow, that might need to be a whole course."

Jocelyn Sams: That needs to be a whole course. Yeah.

Shane Sams: You know?

Dan Dekker: Yeah. At least it's gonna be the majority of that session, and it's all about taxes and stuff.

Jocelyn Sams: So I just really want to pull this thing out for people who are listening right now. Like, if you're sitting there trying to finish your course or your membership area or whatever it is, if you are spending months and months and months doing this before you have customers, chances are you're not even giving them what they really want. So then when you try to launch it and they're saying, "You know, I don't really want this", well, the reason why is because you didn't develop the course with your people in mind and with their help. So that's what we're trying to say is that just go for it. Like, what do you have to lose?

Shane Sams: And also, too, there's something else I want to unpack here a little bit. This is not just, "Rebecca had an email list", okay? This is the same exact thing as, "I know where my avatars' hanging out." They were hanging out over with Rebecca. Like, you knew where these people were. It's no different than if you knew they were in a forum, if you knew they were on Facebook, if you knew they were on Twitter. And when you launched, you just had 80 people on your list for this specific product. 'Cause every product is its own niche, right? And 35 people out of those 80-something people jumped on this.

Shane Sams: So there's a lot of people out there ... You're sitting there going, "I've got an email list. It's only 200 people. It's only 160 people." That's twice as big as Dan's first list, right? And he's helped 30-something people and now he has buying, paying customers. So don't ... Go find where your avatars' hanging out. Get some of them on a list and launch as fast as possible so that you can start building your core, start growing your business a year from now instead of finally launching, "Where is this gonna go?" Right? Like, this could be a huge thing for you guys on the side and it gives you a second income stream, which Jocelyn and I, you know, one thing we probably don't talk about enough is we're really big on having multiple income streams, you know? That way you got ups and downs. Every business has ups and downs and-

Jocelyn Sams: And-

Shane Sams: Things can go wrong. And you need that little extra protection in your business for more security and be able to invest things.

Jocelyn Sams: And let me just throw in a disclaimer, that's if you already have something that's successful. We don't like you going in 15 different directions if you don't have one thing that's really started to take off yet.

Shane Sams: That's right. Yeah, the natural progression is to expand into new things and other things. Like you ... Also, like keeping alignment with the thing that was working. That's really what you have done here is instead of just starting a random new business, you said, "Okay, well, this is in the same vein. We can talk to each other about this. We can understand it. We can serve the same person, but in two completely different ways." And that's how you keep stacking and building on successful ... Like, that's why we added recently ... Jocelyn and I just launched a new program called S and J All Access, which Dan and Rebecca are a part of of. And it's a Mastermind where people can literally send us a message on the phone, right? And we get back to them as soon as possible on the phone.

Shane Sams: And we did that because a lot ... Our goal had always been to graduate people, to flip their life and then turn them loose into the wild. But a lot of our students and ... Kept coming back. I mean, like, "Now what? What's next?"

Jocelyn Sams: We don't want to leave you.

Shane Sams: Right, exactly. So we had ... We wanted to offer a higher ... This was a completely different segment avatar than what we normally teach. But it's in alignment with our brand. So it's kind of like a different business, different product. It's just now we can serve two different people. And that's kind of what you've done. You're serving the same people in a different way.

Dan Dekker: Yeah, we've ... I, of course, was hesitant to join the All Access. But Rebecca talked me into it. And it's been awesome. And I was gonna tell you, if anything you're underselling it. Because when we first signed up it's kind of like, "Yeah, this whole walkie-talkie talk to you guys thing." But then day one, you send us this huge form to fill out and it's basically like, "Tell us what Point A is, tell us what you want Point B to be. We're gonna help you get there." And again, I'm leaning back like, "Whoa, whoa. Let's like slow down." But ... Right? It's way more than just talking to you guys. It's like you're helping us set goals and actually find things we're gonna accomplish in this finite amount of time.

Shane Sams: Yeah, it's deep-level stuff. That's what we really wanted to get into with that. And I need to sell this more apparently. Dan's telling me we need to get out there. We need to get out and promote this thing. We kind of got it hidden right now. It's like, "Okay, you gotta be a member and-

Jocelyn Sams: Well, it's kind of a beta right now, really.

Shane Sams: Yeah, it's kind of in a beta. We gotta be a member and there's only like one page you can get to it. So maybe we'll roll that out more. Dan can be our ... We'll use this as our first testimonial, Dan. How about that?

Dan Dekker: There you go.

Shane Sams: Alright.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay. So let's get into what you need help with next. Okay, so you had a really super successful launch. And what's going on right now? Like, where are you stuck?

Shane Sams: We overcame the launch fear, right? But I'm sure it was replaced by others fears, obstacles, or mindset issues. I remember you sending me the thing, "Okay, I'm about to do this class. And I'm kind of freaking out right now." Right? So like what fear, obstacle, or mindset issue has replaced the fear of launching now?

Dan Dekker: Being past that first class was a big one, so I'm really glad to be past there and I'm glad this podcast happened like right after that. So that was good. So I'm teaching two more podcasts in the next two weeks, so that'll happen. After that ... Now, when we emailed Rebecca's list, we didn't sent it to the whole list. We just sent it to a smaller subsection. It was really just a couple of hundred people. So now we've got ... After the first class is done we're ready for the big list. And, I mean, I don't know that my same format ... I mean, it'd be cool to teach it live, but if I've got a hundred people or more in a class, I don't know if doing like a Zoom meeting is gonna work or if I just need to sell them the recordings.

Shane Sams: Yeah, I think ... So basically it's like how to push it forward, right? I tell you what we did. And you don't have to do it this way, but what you're creating right now will be good enough to sell by itself passively. Especially since you have a much bigger list now. But, it might be beneficial to do like two more passes at kind of a beta type group and let more people in it. Let more people come through, let more people ... Like, don't rush it, you know? We always say, "Be the glacier, not the forest fire." The forest fire looks spectacular, but then it goes away, right? Well, like the glacier is an unstoppable force that keeps moving, keeps building power going forward.

Shane Sams: And when we did Flip Your Life, we did like three sessions in a row over like a six-month period to really get more people in, get more feedback. See what more questions were. And refine our own talk. You know, this first time you do it's gonna be great, but then the second time you do it's gonna be better. And the third time you do it's gonna be really, really good and you're gonna have like probably a hundred people go through this course to help you build it. And then when you sell it, now it's like, "Hey, guys, look. This is what went into this. This is now $500, not $150 to buy this course that you can buy passively." And then you can start putting it into other funnels and things like that.

Shane Sams: So I would probably recommend doing two more beta launches and beta groups so you can perfect the system and perfect the courses and perfect your speech. And then it's awesome and you can sell it forever.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. Sometimes people have this misperception that, "Okay, I have to go with a small subset, then I have to go with the whole rest of the list." Well, that's not true. Like, go with a small subset. Go with another small subset. Go to another small subset. You know, like make it where you're comfortable. Don't just say, "Oh well, you know, I've already launched once so now I have to launch to everyone."

Dan Dekker: M'kay.

Jocelyn Sams: Does that seem less overwhelming?

Dan Dekker: Yeah. I mean, I really like teaching it live, I think there's a lot of benefit to teaching it live. So to do that ... I mean, this is kind of a sensitive area where like we're trying to minimize the emails Rebecca sends to her list because they didn't necessarily sign up to hear about this. So should we blast everybody and get all those people on a new waitlist? 'Cause all the people who didn't get the first email from Rebecca don't know anything about this class. So I could kind of do like another first waitlist email just to thousands of people?

Jocelyn Sams: Yes. I would try to segment somehow.

Shane Sams: Yeah, you could send-

Dan Dekker: And then maybe only sell a certain number of seats in the first class? Like-

Shane Sams: Yes.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah.

Shane Sams: That's what you would do 'cause then you're gonna create more demand. 'Cause there's gonna be a lot of people that can't get in 'cause it'll sell out, you know? I tell you what you could do, too. You know what I'm gonna say about the email list. It's ... They're not gonna worry about it. I would set up a good rotating schedule for this waiting list every two weeks. One day every two weeks on Rebecca's email list where it's like, "Hey, guys. We're opening the waiting list again for Dan's course if you want to run a better business." And let every couple of weeks let more people get on that so you can start kind of filtering those people out as you go. 'Cause new people join the list all the time. 90% of people probably didn't even see the first email. So don't assume that anybody does or does not want that list.

Jocelyn Sams: And, you know, if it starts to become a problem you can also put on an opt-out for that particular thing. So you'll see people send emails sometimes that say, "I want to let you know about X, Y, Z. If you don't want to hear about X, Y, Z, click here, but you want to stay on my list." You know?

Dan Dekker: Okay, yeah.

Shane Sams: Most things have like when they click on "subscribe" it can go to a thing and you can have a menu. And there's like on and off. I think ConvertKit does that.

Jocelyn Sams: But I wouldn't worry about it. Like, this is a benefit for them.

Shane Sams: Oh, yeah.

Jocelyn Sams: And like if one or two people get mad about it, whatever.

Shane Sams: Yeah, you gotta explain-

Jocelyn Sams: They can go away.

Shane Sams: To them why it's good for their business. And then also focus on their mission. I would say most of the people that do that job are there to really help families and babies, you know? And if they go out of business, they can't complete their mission. And that needs to be told to them over and over and over again. And it's not a get up to the bat and swing and go with it, it needs to be in the autoresponder. Every single person that ever signs up for the list needs to get the email that says, "Hey, we also have business services. Would you like to sign up for this?" Like, it just needs to be added into everything and-

Dan Dekker: Okay, yeah. That's a good idea.

Shane Sams: And like-

Jocelyn Sams: If you-

Shane Sams: Lost that fear of ... You should tell them about this. It's important, you know?

Jocelyn Sams: If you come to people from a place of genuinely wanting to help them ... And I know that you guys do, just like we do ... They know that. And there are gonna be a couple of people who complain and whatever. But they're not your people. People know that you have a genuine art for wanting to help them move their business forward so that more babies can be born in the way that their mothers want them to be born or like what the evidence shows is the best way for them to be born. You know, that's your greater mission. So as long as you're moving towards your greater mission with a genuine sense of purpose, then people know that. They can just sense it.

Dan Dekker: M'kay. Yeah, I like that. I think it's a good idea.

Shane Sams: Yeah. And going back to the course itself, I know right now it's a course. Like, we're gonna sell it as a course. And that might be what you do passively to sell it as a course. But there's a really easy way to do recurring off the backend of something like this. So what you could do is I really want you to try to highly value this course at at least 500 to a thousand dollars when it's done, okay? And I know ... He's shaking his head, look at him. If you're watching this on YouTube ... We put the podcast on YouTube now, so you can see Dan going, "Are you serious?" Like, right? Like you-

Jocelyn Sams: We're always serious.

Shane Sams: Right? So this is a very valuable service. If they do your course, they're probably gonna save thousands and thousands of dollars every year going forward-

Jocelyn Sams: Or make thousands and thousands of dollars-

Shane Sams: Or make thousands more dollars.

Jocelyn Sams: Like, it's really free to them.

Shane Sams: So it's an investment is what they're really making in themselves. Not just buying your course, okay? But if you do it three or four times and it's really good seed and it's really powerful, okay, and they got this course, what you sell off the backend is a lower tiered kind of membership that's more like 19 bucks a month. Not really super expensive where you do a once-a-month member call. And that's it, right? There's no more like ... You don't have to add courses 'cause most of this is evergreen. This is financial stuff. It's like-

Jocelyn Sams: If it's not it should be.

Shane Sams: Yeah, exactly. You gotta keep looking at it and make sure that you're not ... You know, tax stuff's gonna change every year, but the basics are there, right?

Jocelyn Sams: Principles are the same.

Shane Sams: So off the backend of this 500 to thousand dollar sale you sell this little $19 a month membership and then you just figure out, "Okay, well, I know I'm gonna do one call." Then they can come and ask, "Oh, man, I had this problem this month with my build. Then I had this" ... It's just a safety net where they've got someone to go talk to and go ask a financial question once a month. It's easy, it's a good downsell. It's simple. You could even like get with a local print shop and put together a little paper newsletter. And you could say ... 'Cause that's totally easy to automate. You just go down and give 'em a list and they send it every month for you. And it might cost you a dollar a person, right?

Shane Sams: But it's like, it's a little thing from Dan that they get it in the mail, they open it and it's like, "Hey, it's January. You need to be worrying about X, Y, and Z this month." Or, "Hey, it's December. Maybe you should saving some money here and there for this or whatever." And just a little something to give 'me a safety net and a reminder that they're paying you that 19 bucks a month and it's worth it. And you get a thousand people in that and all of a sudden you're talking big money.

Dan Dekker: Sure. M'kay. I was hesitant for a membership idea originally. I mean, I kind of like that idea mainly because the goal would be learn how to do it and then you don't need a membership anymore. But I can-

Jocelyn Sams: But you do need it.

Dan Dekker: See, yeah, the continued questions.

Shane Sams: There's always gonna be ... People always have questions and people are always one question away from their next paying you.

Jocelyn Sams: And I can see it as even being maybe like an upsell for Rebecca's, too. Like, do you want to join both of these things? You can join this one for X dollars a month, or you can join this one for Y dollars a month. Or you join both for whatever, you know?

Shane Sams: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dan Dekker: Yeah.

Shane Sams: You can cross-pollinate easily. I think what's gonna happen is I bet you there's a ton of people on that list ... Even though they're birth professionals, even though they're end of the free content or end of the thing they got off the thing ... There's probably some people that probably are like, "I'm very confident in this part of my life." They would buy your thing and not buy hers. I bet you there's people on that list that are in that same boat. And you're gonna be able to now maximize that list better. But you've gotta be able to like ... There always needs to be a recurring component. Either before a product or after a product.

Jocelyn Sams: It could be an upsell. It could be a downsell. Like, I see so many different areas of potential with this.

Shane Sams: And memberships don't have to look like the Flip Your Life Community where there's hundreds of people and 30,000 questions and all these things going on in there. It can just be, "Hey, for 19 bucks a month, once a month, I'm gonna get on a call for an hour and answer questions." That's it. Nothing else. You could totally do that and it would be just enough for people to pay. It would be worth it. Like, wouldn't you when you were starting out have paid 19 bucks to talk to a professional to tell you something? Right? That could save you a thousand bucks. Which is what you're doing. So ...

Jocelyn Sams: Okay, let's not build the entire city right now.

Shane Sams: Alright. Five years from now, here's where you're gonna [crosstalk 00:34:23] be at, Dan. Okay?

Dan Dekker: So corporate offices. What should I be looking for?

Shane Sams: I think ... Yeah. That glass building over on Man o' War looks pretty nice, you know what I'm saying? The blue one? Okay.

Jocelyn Sams: So we are getting way down-

Shane Sams: Way down the road here. Okay, so let's back up the truck. You know we ask everybody, what are you gonna do in the next 24 hours? What are you gonna take action on to move you toward your next steps based on what we talked about today?

Dan Dekker: I don't know. It sounds kind of hard. I think I'm just gonna quit.

Jocelyn Sams: That is not the correct answer.

Shane Sams: That is not the correct answer.

Jocelyn Sams: Sorry.

Dan Dekker: Well, I need to teach my next two courses. That's definitely gonna happen. So I gotta finish this first round with this group before I can really do a whole bunch more. But I think the next thing after that will be getting an email ready to go to Rebecca's ... The rest of her list and getting them on the new waitlist so I can plan the second and third class to teach.

Shane Sams: You should set the date, too, for when the next course is going to roll out, right? Live, which might be ... Did you say you're going on vacation in January?

Dan Dekker: Yeah.

Shane Sams: Okay, so you'll be done with this one, though. You could do it ... You might be able to do it in December, just to get a few more people in [crosstalk 00:35:39] and get one done before the end of the year.

Dan Dekker: Yeah. Maybe early December.

Shane Sams: Yeah, 'cause you could schedule it even. You don't have to schedule it one week apart. Once you've done it once, you could do like, "Oh, I've got to do three courses again. Let's do it Monday, Wednesday, Friday in one week." With your next beta group and do it faster. And that way you're not getting into the holidays, right? And that way, when you send the waiting list out you can say, "Look, this is launching on December 1st. If you're not on the list you're gonna miss your chance to get in it." So it creates some urgency to get on that waiting list, right?

Dan Dekker: Yeah. I was just thinking. I could pitch it like a, "Get yourself all set up to start 2019 right", or something.

Jocelyn Sams: Yes, absolutely.

Shane Sams: Exactly. Perfect, yep. And then what you do is in February you do your third pass when you get back from vacation. And you're like, "Has 2019 not started off the way you wanted it to? Are you freaking out 'cause taxes are in two months? Here we go." Right? I mean, you can get 'em in on that way. And now you're ready during ... The second quarter you're gonna be launching the course, you're gonna have the nice, easy passive income stream where you can start setting that up. And then you can start downselling some other stuff to it, okay?

Dan Dekker: Cool.

Shane Sams: Love it, man.

Jocelyn Sams: Alright, cool.

Dan Dekker: Hey, I'll tell you one more part of my motivation for doing this is Rebecca always said, "If you ever start something yourself you can spend that money however you want." So-

Shane Sams: Oh, there you go. See?

Dan Dekker: Daddy's getting a new subwoofer soon.

Shane Sams: That's right.

Jocelyn Sams: Yes.

Shane Sams: But is she just setting it up where she gets to spend all the other money by herself?

Jocelyn Sams: Exactly.

Shane Sams: I think she's hoodwinked you here, dude. I think she's hoodwinked you.

Dan Dekker: She's already thrown out there there's gotta be some upper limit to this arrangement. But ...

Shane Sams: Alright. So before we go, we always like to share a Bible verse at the end of our podcast. Jocelyn and I draw a lot of inspiration from the Bible. There's so much business and financial and life advice in that book that you can pull out of it and really take it to the next level. But today we have Dan. Dan is gonna share his favorite verse with us on the podcast today.

Dan Dekker: Alright. Psalm 15. "Lord, who may dwell in your sacred tent? Who may live on your holy mountain? The one whose walk is blameless, who does what is righteous, who speaks the truth from the heart. Whose tongue utters no slander, who does no wrong to a neighbor, and cast no slur on others; who despises a vile person but honors those who fear the Lord; who keeps an oath even when it hurts, and does not change their mind; who lends money to the poor without interest; who does not accept a bribe against the innocent. Whoever does these things will never be shaken."

Shane Sams: Ooh, I love that verse. I was telling Dan when he told me what the verse was gonna be ... I was reading that on Sunday. And that part where it says like, "who does what's right even when it hurts" ... Oh man, if that's not a ... If every business in America would just do that, we would live in a really, really cool place.

Dan Dekker: Oh, yeah. It's to do right when it's easy. But doing it when it hurts is the trick.

Shane Sams: Alright, man. Well, listen, dude. Great, great time today on the podcast. Cannot wait to see what you guys do next. I love you guys 'cause you're action takers. For example, Dan and Rebecca just launched a live event and they sold it out in 24 hours.

Jocelyn Sams: Just amazing.

Shane Sams: Which is amazing. Over a hundred people coming to y'all's live event. You guys are just action takers. I know you're gonna do great things. And I know this thing is gonna be a huge things for you guys as well.

Dan Dekker: Awesome. Thanks so much.

Shane Sams: Hey guys. Thanks for tuning in to today's Flip Lifestyle Podcast. We're so glad that you listened to our interview with Dan and heard us help him take his business to the next level. We would love to help you take your dream, your idea, your business to the next level as well. And we do that inside of our Flip Your Life Community. If you would like to ask me and Jocelyn a question inside the forums or on one of our member calls, all you have to is join, be a member. Show up on one of those calls and we will get to your questions.

Shane Sams: Well, you can do that for free right now at fliplifestyle.com/free. That's fliplifestyle.com/F-R-E-E. We've got a 30-day free trial waiting for you and we would love to see you and help you inside of our community. We have all the training, coaching, and community and accountability that you need to make your dream a reality. That's fliplifestyle.com/free. And until next time, do whatever it takes to flip your life.

Jocelyn Sams: Bye.

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Hey Y’all, welcome to another Flipped Lifestyle Podcast Q&A w/ S&J!

In the Flip Your Life Community, we hold a members-only Q&A twice a month where we answer online business questions of our members live on air!

Today’s Q&A highlights answer the following questions: Question One:

"I am getting ready to launch my membership in the next 2 weeks. My list is about 2000 people and my open rate is typically around 20%. I know this must vary based on how niche you are, but how many people typically covert into customers from an email list?"

Question Two:

"How do you plan for attrition in your membership site when creating your business plan?"

Question Three:

"Hey y’all :) what’s your opinion on giveaways to build an email list? I feel like it could be a good way to build quickly as long as what I’m giving away is true to my niche. Thanks!"

Question Four:

"I've been doing weekly blog posts plus youtube videos for a month, there's not much change in my website views and no opt-ins. What am I doing wrong? Do I need to be more patient?"

SUCCESS STORY:

"SUCCESS! I received an email from someone this morning with questions about my class, I answered the email and 30 minutes later she bought the class!" - Dan

"SUCCESS! I put on some of my social media platforms that Becca & I are going to be offering some courses for photographers this Fall. I got 25 emails within 24 hours!" - Matt

CLICK HERE to get your FREE 30-DAY Membership in the Flip Your Life Community NOW!

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In today's episode, we help Treasure create a plan to increase cashflow and grow her online college planning business

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jocelyn Sams: Hey y'all, on today's podcast we help Treasure take her online college planning business to the next level.

Shane Sams: Welcome to The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast where life always comes first. We're your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. We're a real family that figured out how to make our entire living online, and now we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? All right, let's get started. What's going on everybody? Welcome back to The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. It's great to be back with you again. This week we are super excited to have another member of the Flip Your Life community on the show so we can work with them one on one and help them take their business to the next level, and this is a special show. This is the first recording that we have done after our massive live event, Flip Your Life, live in Nashville, and we are happy to say we have now met and hugged this person in real life. Our guest today is Treasure Redmond. How you doing, Treasure?

Treasure S.-R.: Hey, hey Shane and Jocelyn, how are y'all doing?

Jocelyn Sams: We are great. It is so good to have you here today. We knew when we met you that you had to be on our podcast. So thank you so much for being here today.

Shane Sams: We were preparing for Flip Your Life Live, Nashville, one of the things that we did that a lot of people don't do for live events is we had ice breaker calls where everyone could come and me and Jocelyn literally went around the room and just talked to every single person on a conference call. I'll never forget Treasure rolling up to the room because she didn't know her mic was off and everybody else was muted, we were talking to somebody, and just like we started this show, she came in, goes, "Hey, hey everybody!" And she starts screaming into the ... It was absolutely amazing and I looked-

Jocelyn Sams: We seriously cracked up.

Shane Sams: Oh, I laughed so hard. Everybody was just dying laughing, and man, you're just light in your personalty. Just, in person, online, anywhere. I'm just glad that we get to share you with the Flip Your Life audience today.

Treasure S.-R.: Well thank you, and light attracts light. So I'm so glad to be here.

Jocelyn Sams: All right, well let's dive in a little bit. Tell us a little bit about you and what you're doing online. You can share your website if you would like to.

Treasure S.-R.: Sure, my name is Treasure Shields-Redmond and I am known as the debt free degree expert. I help busy parents of college-bound teens secure top-tier education without massive debt, and I do that at gettheacceptanceletter.online.

Shane Sams: Tell us a little bit about your background too. How did you get into that? That's such a worthy mission by the way, because debt is crushing college students around the country and all of us who had debt at any given time for our college degree know how much of a weight that can be, but how did you get into that?

Treasure S.-R.: You know, I earned my credentials through a 20 year teaching career. So I went to undergraduate and you know, took out too much debt as a lot of us do, went on to teach high school English for about a decade, and then moved over into the university arena and became a college professor and was an assistant professor of English for about a decade, and I was always teaching kids who were headed to college, or who had just entered college and freshman writing classes. I started to see the same patterns that happened with me repeat themselves. You know people with a lot of ... with a wonderful resume, but didn't know how to use it to get scholarships, and who had families who had a vision for their lives but didn't have access to information. So, I started at first helping people privately for free, and it grew into the business.

Shane Sams: And this has basically grown into a consulting business that you're trying to move more like mass online so you can reach more people and do things like that, right?

Treasure S.-R.: Yes. I mean. I've opened the subscription community. I'm online.

Shane Sams: That's awesome.

Treasure S.-R.: So I've made the transition, and I follow y'all's blueprint and I have my now 15 members.

Shane Sams: All right!

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah!

Shane Sams: That's amazing. Awesome.

Treasure S.-R.: So I'm just looking to serve more college-bound families.

Shane Sams: Now I have to back the truck up a little bit here. We need to rewind because I know your story a little bit more and I just want to share this to everybody. You originally were not going into education, you were more in the music; music-type of atmosphere and career, like when you were in your younger days, so like tell us a little bit about when you used to be a rapper back in the '90s, because I think everyone needs to know this. Everyone has to hear this because it's incredible, and somehow you got involved with Amber or something? Like-

Jocelyn Sams: We need to know this story.

Shane Sams: We need to hear this, Treasure.

Treasure S.-R.: Yes, well you know being a rapper is like being a Marine. You're never not a rapper. So, I'm still a rapper.

Shane Sams: They don't let you out once you get in. Right?

Treasure S.-R.: Right, right, right. I might throw down some verses for you in a second, but long story short, I started rapping when I was in junior high school. My partner and I formed a rap group that was called The Sonic Inseams and we became like tri-state favorites. We released local records, we were on the radio, we performed at our prom. We were living the dream.

Jocelyn Sams: And this is like huge then, you know?

Shane Sams: That's big time!

Treasure S.-R.: Yes.

Jocelyn Sams: This I like the early '90s, right?

Treasure S.-R.: Yep. Definitely. Early '90s.

Jocelyn Sams: I mean, rap was huge. Rap is still big-

Shane Sams: Hip hop's taking off, rap's taking off-

Jocelyn Sams: ... like, it's huge.

Shane Sams: ... like it's just taking over pop culture basically.

Treasure S.-R.: Oh most definitely, and we got an opportunity to audition for MC Hammer, who signed us on the spot. And the way it dovetails to college is I had already been accepted to my undergraduate institution, to Jackson State University. I went for a semester and then left, because of course, I was going to be on MTV Cribs.

Shane Sams: Right. You got signed-

Treasure S.-R.: Priorities here. See you later, losers! It didn't work out like that. Spoiler alert; I'm not a famous rapper. But, you know what? I learned a lot and it really was my first insight into the power of marketing because MC Hammer was a master brand strategist and marketer at the time.

Shane Sams: Awesome.

Treasure S.-R.: So, I was able to recover and return to college as a quote, unquote "Older student." I was five years older than most of my freshman class and you know, it resulted in a really targeted, mature, freshman who had a great undergraduate experience, albeit late, but a great one.

Shane Sams: That's amazing, and I love how you circled that story back to where you are today because Jocelyn and I talk about this with each other a lot. Like, sometimes you look up and you're like, "Well how did I end up here at this stage in my life?" But everything we do now we can trace back to things we were doing in our early 20s, in our 30s, and it all does lead you to a point where you're capable to do what you want to do. Like, when we first started our online business I did all of the editing. All of the video and audio and stuff like that, but I learned that in my 20s as an assistant football coach at a high school. Right? And even marketing and being able to present yourself publicly, when I was a high school football coach I had to talk to the newspaper, and I had to kind of craft the brand image for our football team and what we were doing and things like that.

Shane Sams: You know, it's just everybody gets kind of upset sometimes when they look back at their failures, or even their successes. They're like, "Man I just wish I had done this different or that different," but no. That is such an important part of everyone's story, and without those building blocks you can't really take the next step.

Jocelyn Sams: And I think there's really another lesson in here too. It's like you took the chance. You could have stayed in college and played the safe route, but you took the chance. You did something that most people didn't have the opportunity to do. Did it turn out the way that you thought it was going to turn out? Maybe not, but you learned things along the way and it made you a better person in the long run, right?

Shane Sams: Yeah. And like could you imagine sitting here now and looking back and saying that you got signed but didn't go? I mean, can you imagine not have done in that? Like imagine how different your life would have been. The person you became would've been ... like who's to say you wouldn't have went to college and you weren't mature enough and you would have failed out of school or done something else and it just would've totally changed everything, but you did it anyway. Right?

Treasure S.-R.: Mm-hmm. So true. You know what, if people want to look up that old group, it was called One Cause, One Effect.

Shane Sams: Oh listen, we're going to have this video embedded in your show. So you just go on over to flippedlifestyle.com. We'll have all the video ... we'll do the work for you because I've seen the video and it is absolutely great. Right? So, let's come back to today and leave the '90s in all of their glory behind for a few minutes.

Jocelyn Sams: The '90s were awesome.

Shane Sams: Why did you come to the Flip Your Life community? Why did you pick our program? Maybe you got this membership launched now, we've been working with you in the community, you came to Flip Your Life Live, like what drew you to our community and to me and Jocelyn?

Treasure S.-R.: Mm-hmm. You know, like I said earlier, I had transitioned to a one on one consulting business, so I thought that I was just going to ride off into the sunset with high ticket one on one consulting services, working closely with families and then I quickly discovered that I would have to work 24 hours a day in order to meet the goals that I had. You know, and someone that is parenting alone that just was not viable for my life. So I was on the lookout for another model, another way and some competent guides that could show me that other way. That's when I heard you guys on the [Pat Flynn Podcast]. I could tell from you being southerners, from you being former teachers, and from your own description of your journey, that our journeys were just similar enough that you could help me.

Shane Sams: That's awesome.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, that is super cool.

Shane Sams: Well I'm so glad that you found us. Not only just because you're in our community, but just like the friendship that we have and just meeting you and it's just ... All the people that we meet in the Flip Your Life community it just blows our mind how awesome people are. We're just really glad that you're here. Tell us a little bit about ... How old are your children?

Treasure S.-R.: I have a ... Well, I was about to say 17. He just turned 18 and he's a freshman in college.

Shane Sams: All right.

Treasure S.-R.: He's one of my-

Shane Sams: He's going to be debt free too, right?

Treasure S.-R.: Of course!

Shane Sams: Yeah, he's going to be-

Treasure S.-R.: Of course he's debt free, and I have ... So, he's away at school and I have an 11-year-old daughter who's in 6th grade.

Shane Sams: Awesome. So you've got your hands full. So we got to free up some more time for you to help that college kid and that 11-year-old.

Treasure S.-R.: Yes.

Shane Sams: So you're making some money and you're not overwhelmed with your time, okay?

Jocelyn Sams: Okay, so before we dive into your questions about your business today. Let's talk a little bit about things that might be holding you back right now. All of us have either mindset struggles, some type of fear, or some type of obstacle that holds us back. What is going on with you today that we can maybe help you with?

Treasure S.-R.: You know when you guys asked us to fill out the questionnaire in order to prepare to be on your podcast and you asked me to write out my story. I realized that I had been holding back on some of that story, and you know I consider myself very open and gregarious, you know an extrovert, but that was really the first time I had written down that I was raised in the projects, that my mother had struggled with mental illness, that the execution hadn't been in my primary home for college access, and that it was the village, you know it takes a village to raise a child, that kind of came in and supported me toward college entry and it really made me ask myself, "Have I been putting on some kind of persona in some way online? And if that was blocking some of my sales?"

Shane Sams: So basically like you're presenting yourself as this professional expert person. You've got this wall built of "Oh everything's ... My college career was perfect, and everything was perfect and that's how I ended up here so I can help you too," instead of saying, No, this is my real origin story. This is who I really am, and this is why I can help you." So you're saying maybe that persona is the disconnect between you and maybe some of your target audience?

Treasure S.-R.: Yeah, I really think so. I think that I've been really worried about a slick looking website and a slick sounding story, and things being really beautiful, even though that website isn't that beautiful, but ...

Shane Sams: Design doesn't matter as much as you think it does. You know what I mean? That's what I always say to Jocelyn. Don't worry about that.

Treasure S.-R.: Yeah, and I noticed that after I wrote my story to you guys, I came on my live channels on Facebook and Youtube and I told the story and it's been one of the higher engaging videos that I have had.

Jocelyn Sams: Absolutely. Yes, I love that. You know I think that sometimes we think as people who are trying to put our life out on the internet, "Oh, well I need to make sure that I look this certain way, or that I sound a certain way," or whatever, and I think that what really draws people to us is when we are our authentic selves. It's a little bit scary because sometimes that's going to push people away, but more often than not it's going to bring the right type of people to you. Are you going to have haters because of it? Probably. But you're going to have haters anyway.

Shane Sams: Yeah.

Jocelyn Sams: And we are too, you know? That's the thing, it's like you just have to be okay with it and it takes a while. It takes practice, It takes putting yourself out there again and again and again and that's kind of scary.

Shane Sams: It's how we react to imposter syndrome. Like imposter syndrome is that doubt we get, like where we say ... You know we talk about this a lot. "Am I good enough to do this? Who would listen to me?" Right? And there's kind of a fork in the road when you're dealing with imposter syndrome. You're either going to become an imposter and make this shiny, fake, sterilized, branded version of yourself, or you're going to go the other way and you're going to be your authentic, true self who goes out to help those people who really need to hear your story. Because that's the only way anyone connects with you is they connect with your story. Like you just said why you came to us. Like, "Man, you were southerners and your story was just close enough to mine where you could understand where I was going." It's not even like helping you or doing the next level or whatever it is. It's like "No, they get me." Right? And that's what people have to hear from your story is like they have to know you get them or they're never going to get your product.

Jocelyn Sams: And you will do your best work if you are your authentic self. If you're always trying to like put on an appearance for people then you're not going to do your best work. This reminds me of when we were at our event last week, or a couple weeks ago. People kept asking me, "Were you nervous to talk in front of all those people?" Because I'm not a person who loves to get up in front of people, but honestly I was not nervous and I said, "I think the reason why is because these people know us. They already know my faults. So I'm not nervous about trying to put on some type of show."

Shane Sams: Cover it up, yeah. Yeah. We actually ... Jocelyn and I were just talking about this yesterday. We had church yesterday and I was reading my Bible yesterday and I hit this Bible verse that literally said, "Don't try to impress anybody." Right? You will impress people with your story. Like if you tell your story and it's authentic, and it's you and you're telling the truth and you're speaking truth into their lives so they'll go to the next level, they're going to be impressed enough to take action, but it's when we try to impress someone with the slickness ... I love that word that you used. You know like the slick website, this slick persona, and we hide those bad things, that's where we've got a problem and it's cool that you discovered that filling out that form.

Shane Sams: That form is not just for us. It's for you. We have a mastermind that we do and everyone has to fill out a super detailed version of that form, and it's amazing how many people come back and are like, "Wow. Forcing me to wrestle with all of those questions may have just changed the direction of my life," because we don't want to deal with it sometimes. So imposter syndrome, being authentic, those are things that we all wrestle with and I think you're doing a great job being yourself and moving forward. Now what was the other problem that was holding you back?

Treasure S.-R.: Well the other problem is that I'm really cash poor at the moment, and unable to spend money on Facebook ads and Google ads right now. I'm worried that the minimal momentum that I have that I'm going to lose because I just don't know ... I just don't know how to market effectively. I do pieces that are like spot fires. They flare up with good results, and then I don't know how to replicate it. I need a system of marketing.

Shane Sams: Right. So this is more towards your business question not just the fear and the obstacle. It's like, "Look, I've got to market this business with a very small budget."

Treasure S.-R.: Yes.

Shane Sams: "I've got to fan the flames but I can't find any firewood laying around." Right?

Jocelyn Sams: I just want to say too that we have been here before. Like we used to be teachers. Teachers don't make a lot of money, as you know. So we had to find very creative ways to get things done. So I think sometimes people want to think, "Oh, well you guys had it all together from the very beginning." No. We have been here before too, so I totally understand what you're saying.

Shane Sams: Yeah, we were cash poor when we first started our online business too. I always tell people we live paycheck to paycheck, but we got paid on Friday and usually the paycheck ran out on Wednesday.

Treasure S.-R.: Yes.

Shane Sams: You know, so it's kind of like you're kind of just spinning your wheels and what we learned through the process of doing this was there's only two ways to make a living online, or to make money online. You roll up your sleeves or you open your wallet. Well if you open your wallet and it's empty then you got to go back to rolling up your sleeves. So what we kind of do is create creative ways that you can invest time, instead of money, prolifically ... That was a key word that we used at our live event ... prolifically, to get in front of more people with your message. Because it's not enough to just say, "Well, I'm going to buy attention." Sometimes you got to go out and get it, and that may mean doing something radical; doing something crazy. It may mean I'm going to do a Youtube video every day, period, on my Youtube channel. I'm going to create so much content that people absolutely have to listen to me. Someone's going to find it, right?

Shane Sams: It may mean doing like what I did, to grow my football coaching brand. I wasn't an elite football coach. I wasn't a Super Bowl winner. I didn't have an audience or a following, so I had to go and literally almost virtually knock on doors to find football coaches. We would lay down in bed at night and I would look at my phone. Jocelyn would go to sleep, the kids were asleep and from like 9:00 PM until like 2:00 AM I would type in "football coach" into Twitter. Then I would sit and look through people's pictures looking for anyone that was actually standing on a football field, a football player, or whatever, and I would friend them and send them a message. I did this and grew my Twitter following into the thousands, hour after hour of grinding and knocking on doors, and it was like cold calling, but it was cold Twittering is what I call it. Right? That's the kind of things we're going to have to figure out is what kind of content do you like to create? How can you do it prolifically? And then the system is consistency. It's not necessarily that you're doing the magic thing, the system that makes it work, it's that you're doing the one or two things that can move the needle for you but you're going to do them twice a day, every day, moving forward.

Shane Sams: It's like maybe you only get one view today. Maybe you get two tomorrow. Maybe you get 10, but that's your option because the other option, the cash option isn't available right now.

Jocelyn Sams: Maybe you look for podcasts to be on. You know, podcasts about debt, podcasts about college, things that your avatar would listen to. Maybe try to find podcasts to go on.

Shane Sams: And that gets you in front of audiences, but that requires, "Oh, I've got to email a hundred podcasts to get on five of them." Right? You see what I'm saying? These are the things that you're going to have to figure out, is how can I use my time to go get more people? Maybe it's "I'll look at my email list. I've got 200 people. Maybe I'll do a video for all 200 of them to try to squeeze 10 more members out," which might make a little money for more advertising.

Jocelyn Sams: Maybe it's hosting in-person workshops in your community to get people more aware of your brand and what you do.

Shane Sams: That's something that sometimes when people are transitioning from offline to on they really want to abandon their offline practice, but a lot of times you've got to double down on what's working offline in the short term, to get the long term goal of giving yourself the resources to push. You don't want to just say, "I'm online," or "Offline." We're like, "We're just like every line. It doesn't matter." Give me any line, give me any money, and I'll want to go out and try and do that because if we abandon one we might be leaving a revenue source that creates ads for the other one.

Jocelyn Sams: I also want to throw in there let's think outside the box a little bit too. That's one thing that Shane and I did at the beginning that most people probably wouldn't be willing to do. We sold our house. Like, we said, "Okay. We're not just going to stop going through the drive-through and save a hundred dollars a month. We're going to really cut expenses and we're going to sell this house."

Shane Sams: Like for example, of course this is ... we've got to talk about schedules and what you have time to do, but let me ask you this: you were a teacher in college and high school, right?

Treasure S.-R.: Yes.

Shane Sams: Could you go sub one day a week? That'll pay you 80 to 100 bucks and now you've got Facebook ad money to drive traffic for your online business. Like just a random 100 bucks, like can you make it? I had a buddy, he's created a million dollar business, it's an amazing thing, but what people don't realize is he was working like two full-time jobs and delivering pizzas, and the pizza money paid for his first advertising and creating his first website, right? He just did whatever it takes to make it happen. Like, can we come up with something creative and throw it in there and say, "Well now we do have ad money. There we go"? We can get attention and get some stuff like that.

Jocelyn Sams: You know I would even say too, like look around your house. I mean if I look around my bedroom here I can probably find two or three things I could sell on Facebook, you know?

Shane Sams: I could find seven or eight things to sell on Facebook that we've ordered in the last month.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, just be creative. I think sometimes people are like, "Okay, if I don't find this magic button, this specific Facebook ad strategy that's going to work for me, and I don't spend exactly this much money per day on ads then this is never going to work." No. You have to find a way to make it work. If it's not working the way everyone else says to do it, then you have to find what works for you.

Shane Sams: So let me ask you this, like let's take ... We just threw a lot at you, but now evaluate. Just kind of think back about your schedule, your life, can you be more prolific in any certain area? Or, is there actually a way to go make that extra ... I mean you only need like 10 bucks a day.

Treasure S.-R.: Mm-hmm.

Shane Sams: Is there a way to do that, do you think, in your schedule or your life?

Treasure S.-R.: Oh most definitely. I mean, a lot of the things you mentioned I've done, but not consistently. And you know what? I've been invited to give in-person workshops and both of them resulted in a sale.

Shane Sams: There you go.

Treasure S.-R.: I did run a sale here recently that I sent to my list and I got three more sales. So, I just ... I need to-

Shane Sams: Zero in.

Treasure S.-R.: Yeah, zero in, write it down, do ... and also, I have a podcast. It's called Get the Acceptance Letter.

Jocelyn Sams: That's awesome.

Shane Sams: Is that coming out every week? Is that coming out every week?

Treasure S.-R.: Yes, every week.

Shane Sams: And are you selling every episode? Because I promise you I'm going to pitch the free trial of our membership on this one. Right?

Jocelyn Sams: Flippedlifestyle.com/free.

Shane Sams: Flippedlifestyle.com/free. Go sign up.

Treasure S.-R.: Right, right.

Shane Sams: Are you doing that every week?

Treasure S.-R.: And actually I'm going to answer you by saying this: I'm not sure if I'm selling every episode, and here's why I'm not sure. You guys have taught us about cold traffic, warm and hot. Right?

Shane Sams: Right.

Treasure S.-R.: So, oftentimes when I create some content. Whether it's the video or the podcast, I'm not sure if I should ... Should I just be going for the jugular right now and be like, "Y'all sign up-

Jocelyn Sams: Yes ma'am.

Shane Sams: Okay, this is why-

Treasure S.-R.: Or, is this cold traffic and I should just say, "Check out my website where I have this free thing"?

Shane Sams: Yes, okay.

Jocelyn Sams: You should do both.

Treasure S.-R.: I don't know ...

Shane Sams: Okay, here's what you do. Okay? When in doubt, get the lead. When in doubt, get the lead. The most important thing-

Jocelyn Sams: If it doesn't feel good to you to push it hard-

Shane Sams: Yeah, email, free trial.

Jocelyn Sams: ... selling, try to get their email.

Shane Sams: Yeah. See what we do is ... and this is how our strategy is evolved over the years, not perfect for everybody but it works for us, the reason we do a free trial is because it becomes an opt-in. I know that any podcast interview we do, if we get an article written about us in a magazine, if we get on our show, whatever I do as long as I just say, "Hey, go do the free trial," I'm still ... I'm selling the lead. It's no risk, free trial, why would you not do it? And that gives us the email, that gives us the contact information. So in effect when I do a Youtube video, I did one yesterday, I'm doing one every day for the rest of this year as a challenge that me and buddy were like, "Okay, we're throwing down. Every day we're going to do a Youtube video for our Youtube channel." And at the end of every one of them I was going to pitch the free trial.

Shane Sams: Some people are warm, some people are going to be cold, they're going to find it in search, but I know that I'm going to get an opt-in and now I have an opportunity to sell staying in the membership to that person for 30 days. So, when in doubt get the lead, get the email, and then let your marketing kind of take over like [inaudible 00:27:30].

Jocelyn Sams: But I like to do sort of a hybrid, you know? Like sometimes sell something.

Shane Sams: Yeah.

Jocelyn Sams: Sometimes try to get people on your list. Like there is no wrong answer, just do something. Doing something's better than doing nothing.

Shane Sams: When we launched Flip Your Life Live we said, "Okay, we're going to stop pitching the membership and the free trial," or the dollar trial or whatever we're doing at the time because we only like to sell one thing at a time. When we say "Sell something," we don't mean like actually a monetary thing. It's like you're pitching something. It may be an opt-in you're pitching.

Jocelyn Sams: It may be a free video.

Shane Sams: It may be a paid prize.

Jocelyn Sams: It may be a webinar.

Shane Sams: Yep. It's just their next step. You see what I'm saying?

Treasure S.-R.: Yes.

Shane Sams: So yeah, I would ... Whatever your best free thing is for people that would probably be a great thing to pitch on your podcast.

Jocelyn Sams: Especially as you're growing. Like as you're growing I really like the idea of pitching free things. So free training, free webinar, free video, free checklists. Whatever it is, I really like the idea of doing that.

Shane Sams: And what's the next step for your customer? If they're listening to your podcast, the next step is probably get on your email list. So like if they're on your email list the next logical thing is to buy something. So, you're always thinking ahead of what you can pitch. Does that make sense?

Treasure S.-R.: Mm-hmm, yes.

Shane Sams: So here's what I want to do. Jocelyn and I, we want action. We want to make it happen. We want to plan. So what we're going to do is we're going to figure out what you need to do more prolifically for sure, and what you can do more consistently to get those numbers. so let's try to make a checklist here. So number one, we know when you record that podcast you're pitching an opt-in every time. Let's just say it's an opt-in for now. No confusion, you're just going to pitch that opt-in from now on.

Treasure S.-R.: Okay.

Shane Sams: Okay? How many times are you emailing your list a week?

Treasure S.-R.: Once.

Shane Sams: You're going to do it Monday, Wednesday, Friday from now on.

Treasure S.-R.: Okay.

Shane Sams: And every single Monday, Wednesday, Friday you're going to mention your membership to your email list, okay?

Jocelyn Sams: So you're going to give them some value, which means you're going to point them to a podcast, you're going to point them to a piece of content, you're going to say, "Hey, check out this free thing I've created for you. Oh, by the way, did you know that I have a membership community?"

Shane Sams: So basically, here's what your three emails look like ... What day does your podcast come out?

Treasure S.-R.: Usually on Thursdays.

Shane Sams: Okay. So Friday's email is basically announcing there's a podcast because you just had one come out the day before. Hey guys, here's my podcast, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. P.S. don't forget about my awesome membership so I can help your kid get into college and you won't have to pay for it; neither will they." They'll be debt free, or whatever. All right, so there it is. Now, Monday. Okay, how many podcasts have you released?

Treasure S.-R.: 44.

Shane Sams: Okay, so for the next 44 weeks on Monday you're going to refer back to one of your old podcasts. You're going to write a little description and say, "Hey, did you miss this episode of the debt-free college podcast?" Whatever, like, "Go back and listen to it."

Treasure S.-R.: Okay.

Shane Sams: Okay?

Treasure S.-R.: Mm-hmm.

Shane Sams: Now, on Tuesday because you've got to become more prolific, right? You need to be jumping on Youtube and you need to be doing some research and you need to be doing a Youtube video, and then on Wednesday you can promote that Youtube video, okay?

Treasure S.-R.: Okay.

Shane Sams: So now we've created a prolific content strategy.

Jocelyn Sams: That's not too hard.

Shane Sams: That's not too hard.

Jocelyn Sams: You've already got a lot of the work already done.

Shane Sams: Yep. Yep, and you're just going to sit down and make that happen now. Okay?

Treasure S.-R.: Okay.

Shane Sams: Now, I want to address the money problem because you've got to solve the money problem, okay? So I wanted to ... let's circle back for two things. One, can you do more in the offline consulting part of your business to make a little bit more money? And not as much, "I'm online all the time"? Is there a way you can get more clients? Can you do more of these workshops? Can you get those consistently to make a little bit more cash?

Treasure S.-R.: Probably. You talked about substituting. I have put those ... I've applied for substitute teaching. I turned on the Lyft app.

Shane Sams: Nice. Like Uber, right? Like Uber-

Jocelyn Sams: Yes.

Treasure S.-R.: Right. We're both-

Jocelyn Sams: Absolutely.

Treasure S.-R.: We're all southerners here. We come from working class stock, so I'm not afraid to work.

Shane Sams: I'll drive anybody around they give me some money. I promise. I'll do it right now.

Jocelyn Sams: No, I love that, and you know we had somebody on a couple weeks ago who was doing Uber and Lyft. I love that.

Shane Sams: Yeah.

Jocelyn Sams: I think it's awesome. Like what an opportunity we have now. An opportunity that we have never had in years past. You know there's so many different things that you can do, and I think sometimes people who listen to this podcast or other podcasts, they think, "Oh, well you know if I don't find this perfect online product that's totally passive I've failed. If I don't find this perfect membership site I've failed." No. The whole purpose of what we do is so that we don't have to work for somebody else. It doesn't matter what that looks like. Maybe it looks different for other people. Maybe it's a means to an end like what you're trying to do. I love it. I think it's great.

Shane Sams: My job, like I go back to coaching, and my first job was an unpaid internship at a high school. My next job was a pretty ... I got like 200 bucks a month to be a graduate assistant in college, right? I was working from 7:00 AM to 11:00 PM seven days a week for like three years of my life. But that led to me being a head football coach. That led to me being a defensive coordinator, which led to me having a sales page that could show my expertise and sell a playbook that made a lot of money online. So like that's where you're at right now, is yeah if Monday, Wednesday ... Imagine this: imagine this is your online business right now. Okay, are you ready? Let's say that Monday, Wednesday, Friday you get up, and you write your emails because that's what you're supposed to do, right? Maybe Monday you go ahead and record your podcast. Maybe after you do your podcast you go ahead and you knock out the Youtube video and you've got it. Okay? So now, all you have to do the rest of the week is Wednesday send an email about the Youtube video, and Friday send an email about the podcast.

Shane Sams: Then take like Saturday, Sunday to, you know, serve your members in your community, right? Tuesday/Thursday sounds like a good day to drive for Lyft and go to substitute teach.

Treasure S.-R.: Right.

Shane Sams: Right? And you immediately inject more cash, you're immediately ... you're still growing your business. Maybe you find 10 more members quick, and now we're like, "Okay. We're going to solve the problem. We're not going to talk about the problem." Right?

Treasure S.-R.: Mm-hmm.

Shane Sams: And if you do that consistently, and ... Let's just imagine if you did that from now until next year. Let's just imagine that was your life in the next year. Is your business going to grow? Is your online business going to happen? Are you going to find more ... If you create 50 videos and 50 podcasts and write 150 emails over the next 52 weeks, everything's going to move forward. It's just a matter of doing it. Right? And not getting lost in all the shiny objects and things like that. So you're going to have more cash. One day for subbing is for you and your family. The other day for subbing and Lyft driving is for ads for your business to make it grow, right? Cash comes up, content comes out, consistency. You're being prolific, and if you just do what it takes for a year from now it's like eating good and working out, you're going to look better. Right? Your business will look better if you do that too. So ...

Treasure S.-R.: True, true, and it's ... What you're saying is really resonating with me because it's almost like I have this incredible present that I want to give to people, but I can't get in their houses to give it to them because when I got that zero balance sheet from my son's school, it was like a hallelujah, you know time of rejoicing.

Shane Sams: His acceptance letter? Is that what you mean? His acceptance letter?

Treasure S.-R.: Not just the acceptance letter. The fact that he would not have to pay anything, Shane.

Shane Sams: Yes.

Treasure S.-R.: I built a system that guess what it's called? The Get Debt Free Blueprint, wonder where I got that from?

Shane Sams: Rob us blind baby, rob us blind. It don't even matter.

Treasure S.-R.: It's designed to help you get your kid into college and do it debt free. I am fanatical about getting it into the hands of parents. So, if riving for Lyft and substitute teaching is going to give me a way to get in the door and serve people then that's just what it's going to have to be.

Shane Sams: Yeah. I read a ... There's an amazing book ... Aw gosh, it's like ... Aw I can't remember this. It's like the Greatest Salesman and it's about this boy who's the apprentice for a merchant back in like biblical times. Right? So one of the things this merchant sells is this expensive like silk robe, right? Great book. It's only like a hundred pages. Ogden is I think his name or something. But it's called The Greatest Salesman. But anyway, you can download it for free if you're listening to this too. Just type in The Greatest Salesman. So he gets this robe and he's like, "Okay, you're going to go sell this and if you want to be my apprentice you have to prove that you can sell this coat." So he's about to go out into the big city and he wants to go to all these rich neighborhoods and the guy kind of grabs him by the shoulder and turns him and goes, "No, no, no. You're going over there to that city." And he's like, "That's the poorest, dirt-poorest city. Everyone in that entire community couldn't possibly pool their money and buy this coat." And he goes, "They won't even listen to me."

Shane Sams: He basically says, "They won't even let me in their house," and the mentor basically looks at him and says, "You don't know that. Go knock on every door and see." That's what you've got to do right now is you've got to go knock on every single door until they let you in and you can give them that present, and you've got to go ... Sometimes you've got to beat the doors down to make your online business ... It ain't Field Of Dreams. It ain't "I'm going to build it and they're all going to come." No. Everybody's over there, you've got to go to them just like I did on Twitter, just like that shepherd guy did in The Greatest Salesman, and just like-

Treasure S.-R.: Right.

Shane Sams: Hey listen, every time somebody gets ... if you do Lyft, every single time somebody gets in your Lyft car look back at them and go, "So, you have kids going to college?" You know what I'm saying? Be like, "Let me show you how to do it debt free."

Jocelyn Sams: Or, do what Shane does and every time someone gets in your car make it your goal in life to get your podcast on their phone.

Shane Sams: Every time I get in an Uber, Lyft car my number one ... I always sit in the front. Jocelyn kills me. I'll leave her in the back. I get in the front with them and my goal before I get out of that car is to hit play on the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. I'm like, "You're an entrepreneur, you like driving around, what if you could do an online business?" And I'm 100% in Lyft and Uber vehicles getting my podcast. I leave and the first thing you hear is, "Hey y'all ..." and we get out the door. Oh my god.

Jocelyn Sams: This really does happen.

Shane Sams: Hey man, ABCs.

Jocelyn Sams: If you're an Uber or Lyft driver that we have been in their vehicle, and this happened, then-

Shane Sams: Shoot us an email.

Jocelyn Sams: ... sorry, not sorry.

Shane Sams: Yeah you're listening to this right now. Okay, so let's go back. Okay. Now, overwhelming, but a plan, but the most important thing is always what you do next. So what's something you're going to take action on in the next 24 hours to make this a reality? To make this plan happen?

Treasure S.-R.: In the next 24 hours I'm going to record my podcast, but I'm going to make it be a special podcast where I tell my story. Then I'm going to email my list about the podcast.

Shane Sams: Nice. That's awesome.

Jocelyn Sams: Love it. I think that is a great plan.

Shane Sams: All right guys. Treasure, that was a great conversation with you today. I know you've got an amazing action plan and also ll the things that you talked about and shared, I'm sure there's a lot of people out there that are listening to this podcast. They're going to get a lot of value out of this show today, but before we leave we always like to close our show with a Bible verse. Jocelyn and I get a lot of our inspiration from the Bible and the teaching and God's word, but we are super excited today because Treasure has an amazing Bible verse that she wanted to share, so we're going to turn the floor over to her to do that.

Treasure S.-R.: Yes. You know, there are no coincidences, and this Bible verse was given to me through something I was listening to this morning. It's Proverbs 31:16 through 18 and it's about a wonderful woman and what she does, and it reads: "She considers a field and buys it; out of her earnings she plants a vineyard. She sets about her work vigorously; her arms are strong for her tasks. She sees that her trading is profitable, and her lamp does not go out at night."

Shane Sams: God knew we were going to have a plan today about getting in Lyft cars and subbing and making things happen!

Treasure S.-R.: Yes! (singing) Come on.

Shane Sams: He knew we were going to tell you that.

Jocelyn Sams: Having church in here!

Shane Sams: He knew we were going to say that and he put that verse in front of you this morning to prepare you for this podcast. I know he did.

Jocelyn Sams: I love it.

Shane Sams: I know he did. That's amazing. Well listen, Treasure, we are super proud of you for what you've already accomplished. It is no small feat to get 15 members in a membership site and we always say, "If you can find one, you can find 101, 1001," so we just got to go find 1500 of those people. So not only you can make a living and you can do it, but you can help them and give their kids a future too. Awesome stuff. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast today and sharing with everyone.

Treasure S.-R.: Thank you guys.

Shane Sams: All right guys, that wraps up another episode of The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. What an awesome, awesome story of perseverance and an awesome plan of action that Treasure's going to be on, and we know that she's going to be super successful. We know that you can be successful too in your online business and we want to help you change your family's future. All you have to do is go to flippedlifestyle.com/free. That's flippedlifestyle.com/ F-R-E-E and you can start a one month free trial in our Flip Your Life community. We have all the trainings that you need to start build and grow your own online business just like we did, just like Treasure is doing and we will be in the forums on the podcast and on the member calls to help answer your calls, help you figure out what to do next. That's flippedlifestyle.com/free to start your one month free trial today. You can cancel anytime. There's absolutely no risk. No reason for you not to get started on this amazing journey. We will be there to help you take action.

Jocelyn Sams: Bye.

Jocelyn Sams: Are you okay with us mentioning your former rap career?

Treasure S.-R.: Oh, of course.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay.

Treasure S.-R.: Shout out to the '90s, they shaped us all. Right?

Jocelyn Sams: That's right.

View Details

Hey Y’all, welcome to another Flipped Lifestyle Podcast Q&A w/ S&J!

In the Flip Your Life Community, we hold a members-only Q&A twice a month where we answer online business questions of our members live on air!

Today’s Q&A highlights answer the following questions: Question One:

"Hi guys I’m really trying to get back onto the online business wagon after falling off for the last month, and posted an Action Plan as such this morning. Beyond the action plan forum, getting a legit accountability partner is something I’ve mulled around but haven’t seriously pursued yet. For someone who struggles with consistency, do you think this (getting an accountability partner) would be worthwhile, and if so, how should I go about finding the right person for that role? Thanks! "

Question Two:

"You have previously said that you often do a video and then overlay a presentation over it for your trainings. What software do you use to overlay your audio onto your presentation? If it's a mac software, is there' something comparable in a pc?"

Question Three:

"We have 5000 email subscribers who opted in to receive our free math resource. However, only 8 people bought our one-off product which is a $40 bundle of math resources in our initial autoresponder sequence. What are ways to improve conversion rates on autoresponders? "

Question Four:

"My husband is starting up a business for basketball out of bounds plays. He's had 30 plays professionally recorded by a videographer of the plays being demonstrated. There will be voice over recording describing the plays and how to best utilize your players in their positions. He has one free play to use as a opt in. Our biggest question moving forward is pricing. He's stuck on how to price the package of 30 plays. Any advice would be awesome. Thanks!"

SUCCESS STORY:

"SUCCESS! Just got a speaking gig while on this call. Most I've ever been paid so far. I bumped my fees after FYL LIVE just because. I think the higher fees made me more credible." - Jeff

CLICK HERE to get your FREE 30-DAY Membership in the Flip Your Life Community NOW!

View Details

In today's episode, S&J talk about lessons learned from the biggest risk they ever took.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jocelyn Sams: Hey, y'all. On today's podcast, we share the lessons we've learned after hosting our first major live event.

Shane Sams: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, where life always comes before work. We're your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. We're a real family that figured out how to make our entire living online. Now, we help other families do the same. Are you ready to Flip Your Life? All right. Let's get started.

Shane Sams: What's going on, everybody? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. It is great to be back with you again this week. We've got a special episode for y'all. We do not have a guest toady. We will not be doing a Q&A. We will be doing a lot of reflecting back on the lessons that we learned from hosting our first major live event. Not long ago, about three weeks ago, from the time that we're recording this actual podcast, Jocelyn and I hosted an event in Nashville, Tennessee, for over 100 members of the Flip Your Life Community. We all came together over a three-day period to build our online businesses, to grow our online businesses, and to take massive action on changing our family's future.

Shane Sams: It was an incredible event, and it went off better than we ever could have dreamed. But as with any major undertaking that Jocelyn and I take on, we like to look back and reflect on the things we did right, the things we did wrong, and try to make things better, make things bigger as we go forward in the future. So, that's what we're going to do today. We're going to share all of these lessons and things that happened to us over the last year of planning and executing this event, so that you can take some of those lessons, take some of those strategies, take some of those things that we've learned, and apply them to whatever your next big project is for your online business.

Jocelyn Sams: And many of you have probably seen our pictures on our Facebook page, and just some of the things that we've posted about the event. You've seen the glossy exterior, but we're going to dive into some of the not so pretty things that we encountered on the journey to get there.

Shane Sams: Let's take you back to where the birthplace of Flip Your Life Live in Nashville came to be. Last December, about a year ago now, Jocelyn, out of nowhere, came to me and said, "We need to host a major live event, like a big one. Like, over 100 people, and we need to do it all by ourselves. We're going to plan it ourselves. We're going to pay for it ourselves. We're going to be on stage the entire time, and we're going to go ahead and do it next fall. It's going to happen."

Jocelyn Sams: For those of you all who know me, it wasn't completely out of nowhere. I had been to another event in the fall. I thought it was really cool, and I was like, "Hey, this is a really good sense of community. I really think that we need to bring our people together." And we had sort of been, not really against it for a long time, but just a little bit uncertain about it for a long time.

Shane Sams: I'm going to vote that I was scared to death to try. This is a total role reversal in this situation, because usually, I'm the one coming to Jocelyn going, "Okay, here's the airplane. We're going to jump out of it. We'll sew together a parachute on the way down." And this was totally out of nowhere, because Jocelyn came up to me and said, "We're going to do a live event. There's going to be over 100 people there. It's going to be amazing." My first instinct was just to freeze up, and what are we going to do? I can't do this. No way.

Jocelyn Sams: We talked about it a little bit, and as we usually do, one of us has some crazy, big idea. The other one's like, I don't know, but okay, I'll go along with it. That's kind of the way that it worked here.

Shane Sams: The reason that we really wanted to do this, Jocelyn and I have hosted small live events before, more mastermind intimate settings, where we're us and maybe 15 to 20 people in a room. Those went really, really well, and we saw the people that came to those smaller events achieve massive success, take massive action after they left, and made great things happen in their business and for their family's future.

Shane Sams: And we have been to so many live events in our online journey, and every single one of them was a milestone for us that took our business to the next level, that pushed us out of our comfort zone and gave us great results. We wanted to provide that kind of experience and that kind of environment for as many people in the Flip Your Life Community as possible. If we kept having small 12 to 15 person live events for the rest of our career, we wouldn't be able to reach as many people as fast as we wanted to. So, we said, hey, let's jump into the hundreds. Let's see if we can get over 100 people to do this, and then watch what happens to those hundred people after the event.

Jocelyn Sams: And the cool thing is, based on our experiences that we've had going into different live events and seeing how other people do things, seeing things we like, seeing things we didn't like, we sort of brought all that together and said, okay, well, let's do it our way,

Shane Sams: Actually, what Jocelyn actually said was, "We've been to a lot of events, and I'm pretty sure we can do it better. We can make this happen. We know what was good and bad, and we can take it to the next level. We can give people the experience, not only that we've had, but that we have always wanted to have." And that was kind of the mindset going into the planning for Flip Your Life live. We said, let's dream as big as possible. Let's make this as life-changing as possible. Let's not worry about getting speakers and who is famous that we can put on stage. Let's just get onstage, go eight hours a day both days, and teach people what they actually need to learn to flip their life.

Shane Sams: That was kind of the context as we sat down in our first planning meetings with coffee, tea, and a couple of notepads, and some pens, to come up with the biggest, baddest, bestest live event that anybody had ever been to. We really wanted to ruin all other live events for people. We wanted to create an event that was so good and so impacting and so life-changing that, when anyone went to any other event, they would be like, "This is pretty good, but it's not Flip Your Life Live." That's how we started the process.

Jocelyn Sams: The next step is that, we have to figure out how to sell the same. Because in typical S&J fashion, we're not going to create anything before we sell it. We're just going to have an idea and throw a sales page out there. But before we could do that, we needed to try to start estimating the cost. And as you know, with any big thing, whether it's building a house, whether it is doing anything that involves a lot of money, you're going to estimate it, and probably you're not going to estimate it correctly. So, we start trying to estimate this thing. We come up with a number that we think is going to work, and then we add like 10% to it. Because you know we'll probably go 10% over at least.

Shane Sams: At least. We ended up going like 20% over. And as we start doing this thing, we start writing down all of the figures, we're looking at six figures. This is going to cost nearly $100,000 just to open the doors and get people in. There's so many hidden expenses when you're starting a business or any kind of live event. You don't even realize, you have to pay for AV and microphones and cameras and screens and stages and party favors, and all the way down to the candy that people eat on our table. All that has to be accounted for. And we started looking at it and said, hey, how much are we going to have to charge people a to put this thing on and have a presale for it, to see if we can even do it in the first place?

Jocelyn Sams: So, we threw it out there in January of 2018 and just said, okay, guys, if you want to come, put your money where your mouth is. Put down a deposit, pay for it, let us know that you're interested. And people did.

Shane Sams: Yeah, this is the first lesson in any online business that we want to give you from just doing this live event. Because the live event, really, if you think about it, is a product. That's what we're really doing here. We kind of created this live event that was the product, and we're sort of building a side business around these live events. It's not even really a part of flipped lifestyle anymore. It's more like, this is our live event company, this is our live event business, this is the product that we're putting out there.

Shane Sams: And we always let people vote with their wallet before we create any product. Just like a digital product, where you may charge people 100 bucks to get it, we're going to put that out there and say, hey, it costs, almost a $1,000 to come to this event if we do it. Do you want to buy it? And we were shocked, because the darn thing almost sold out in the first week. We kind of looked at each other and said, well, I guess we're on the hook now. We have to make the product. We have all these people that are waiting for it, so they know what the date is. They know when it's going to happen, they know where it's going to happen. We've got to make it happen now.

Jocelyn Sams: And here's a little lesson for you, too. We didn't even sign the contracts with the hotel until people had already paid, which is a little bit scary, because you're kind of putting it out there. We did have it on hold, so the hotel couldn't give it to someone else without letting us know first. But I just said, look, we're not signing any contracts until I know for sure that people are planning on coming.

Jocelyn Sams: We had all of the initial stuff drawn up and we gave people a date, we gave people a place, and we just said, you know what, we're going to make it work. So, even if this hotel doesn't work out, we'll find another one and make it work. So ,that's what we did. Because, I've known people in the past who have got in trouble. They've signed all their paperwork before they sold their product, and then, on the back end, they were really, really in trouble, owing a lot of money. So, I didn't want that to happen. My goal was to at least break even on this event.

Shane Sams: Yeah. The thing about any product that you create, whether it's a live one or something else, too, as Jocelyn said earlier, there's going to be hidden costs that creep up to you, and you may even have to make some cuts to beat the budget later on, because everything costs more. Everything takes more time than you think it does. This is why a lot of people fail in business, not just online business, business in general, because they don't account ahead of time for that extra cost. They don't build in flexibility in their budgets. They don't build it into their goals to make more money than they actually need, and they try to kind of skate by.

Shane Sams: That's what Jocelyn was saying about adding 10%, adding 20% to what you think it's going to cost. That's not just in money. That's in time. What we did not account for as we planned this new product, as we planned this new business venture, was the opportunity costs. We tell our kids all the time, if you choose one thing, you lose another, and we didn't realize how much time we would lose in the planning of this event, in the making decisions, choosing what color the banners are going to be, what words are going to go on the signs, who's going to work the desk, who's going to work the tables, all the experience.

Shane Sams: Every minute has to be planned with these people, but then you also have to do things like, plan speeches and plan events and plan contingencies. What if something happens? What if the food runs out? What if X, Y, and Z? We got into a huge task last January, that pretty much took us nine months of dedicated attention to figure out. So, as you're planning for your business, whatever it is, whatever your next product is, whatever next thing is, always think about those opportunity costs, because there definitely were some for having Flip Your Life Live.

Jocelyn Sams: And to be fair, we did hire an event planner, and she took a tremendous amount of workload off of us. But, because this was the first time we had ever planned anything of this size, of this magnitude, it did take a lot of our energy. She needed to know, do you want these tablecloths to be black or white? Do you want this color banner to be on the table, or this color napkin to be on the table? What kind of flowers do you want? These are all questions that we had to answer.

Jocelyn Sams: And, yes, I could have left it up to her to choose it. But we really wanted the very first time that we did this to be an experience that was really representative of us and what we wanted. So, we had a meeting at least once a month with our event planner and sometimes more often, especially toward the end. We were meeting like once a week. And not only did we meet with our event planner. We would do Skype meetings. We have Voxer meetings, we had a few in-person meetings. We also drove to the hotel two different times, to meet with staff, to try food. This is, four hours there, four hours back, to go and meet with these people. Those were just some of the things that we had to do to get ready for the event, physically.

Shane Sams: There's a hidden lesson there, too, for any venture or any business. So many gurus and experts are like, hey, you shouldn't be doing that. Hey, that's not something ... You're the CEO, you're the boss. You shouldn't do those things. But no, it's your company. It's your vision. And sometimes you do have to roll your sleeves up and get in the nitty gritty, and you've got to go make things happen. Especially when you're in a training season, when you're in a vision casting season, when you're in a creation mode. You have to put your stamp on these things so that you get what you want on the back end of it.

Shane Sams: It's just like, sometimes the manager at a restaurant ... Manager of the restaurant may have to go out and help serve sometimes, because they want it done a certain way, or they're training a new person. You've got to be willing to step in, especially in the first iteration of something, to make it happen.

Shane Sams: Next year, when we do Flip Your Life Live again, we're going to try to make it bigger. We're going to try to make it better. We want more people to come to this event and experience this life changing moment, so that they can build their online business, change their family's future, and get into that sense of community. But we're probably going to be able to turn a lot more over to the live event coordinator and be less involved the second time through, the third time through, the fourth time through, because we got so involved in the beginning.

Shane Sams: It's an investment. Anytime you start a new project, anytime you do something new, you've got to invest your time upfront, so that you can save time and magnify, and get a return on that time later. That's why we were so heavily involved in the planning and preparation for this live event the first time.

Jocelyn Sams: But it wasn't just the planning for the logistics of the event. There was also a lot of other things that went into this. One of the things that was really important to us to do is that, we had interaction with people who were coming to the event, prior to the event. We did that by having a private Facebook group.

Shane Sams: We wanted Flip Your Life Live to be an experience. Not just an experience the day you arrive, or the day you attend, or even the day you go home. We wanted it to be an experience from the moment you bought your ticket over the next six, seven, nine months until you got to the event. So, this Facebook group became this little community where, we did so many things with our people. Every month, we did some kind of training with our attendees to get them ready for the event. That was something that we never had before.

Shane Sams: When we showed up to our first live event, we were like a deer in the headlights. We had no clue what was happening. We didn't know what we were supposed to learn, what we were supposed to write down, what was our result. We didn't know how to set goals. We didn't know necessarily how to meet people, and we wanted to fix that for our attendees so-

Jocelyn Sams: Sometimes people would have a Facebook group for their event, but they would basically just dump you in there and be like, okay, well, here's where we tell you about logistics.

Shane Sams: And we're not even going to show up to do anything worthwhile, and sometimes they don't even do logistics. They just say, "There, you can all talk to each other, and we'll see you at the event.

Jocelyn Sams: Our goal for the event was not to bring people in and look good on stage and make lots of money. That was definitely not our goal, because we didn't accomplish that one. But anyway, that wasn't our goal, to make ourselves look good or to make ourselves feel better. We want our people to take action, and because of that, it was really important to us to get this Facebook group going, make sure people understood what they needed to do and what they needed to have accomplished before the event.

Shane Sams: So, what we did was, have trainings we called prerequisites. It was exclusive for these Flip Your Life attendees. They showed up every month, and we kind of let people take action on each step along the way, because I knew what I was going to teach the very first session we. We knew what we were going to go through over those two days in an outline format. So, if we could get them to the point right before that, we knew that they would have a great chance of success when they showed up.

Shane Sams: Another big problem that we have, and a lot of people have when they go to live events is, you're nervous. You don't know anybody. Kind of awkward those first 24 hours as you meet some people and get to know some people. We wanted to make sure that we introduced as many people to each other as possible before the event. So, we had discussions, polls, things like that, in our community group for Flip Your Life Live. And we ran icebreaker sessions where, we got 40 or 50 people on a Zoom call, and Jocelyn and I went through every single person and let them introduce themselves, tell what their online business was about. And we did these random questions like, what's your favorite food, what's the worst job you've ever had? And some of the answers were absolutely hilarious, and everyone had a great time, and it created this sense of community before we even got to the event. So, when we had the pre-live event party, everybody just kind of came in, and everyone's laughing and having a good time and hugging. It was like they knew each other before they went in.

Shane Sams: This was a lot of work leading up to this. We had to plan these things into our calendar. We had to make the time to do them, and that was time we could have been spent doing other things, like selling memberships, doing webinars, creating new products, other than this. But once you commit to doing one thing in your business, you kind of have to lose your focus on other things, because you can't do it all, and we were all in on the live event.

Jocelyn Sams: Not only did we have all of the pre-event stuff to do, and all of the decisions to be made on what was actually happening at the event, we also had to play the actual event. And that was kind of a really big deal. We wanted to make sure that the content that we were creating for the event was the type of content that people wanted to see at the event. So, Shane was mostly responsible for that, and I was more responsible for some of the backend things that happened behind the scenes.

Shane Sams: The biggest problem that we've always had with live events is, the content is terrible. It's not really actionable. A lot of times you get six to eight speakers on a stage, and their main goal is, at the end of their presentation, to sell you a book, or to get you to opt into their list, and they're really just scratching the surface. And we didn't want this to be a scratch the surface event. We wanted this to be a life changing, a momentum building event, for every single person that attended.

Shane Sams: As Jocelyn was handling the logistics and making sure that everything was getting done, I locked myself in my room, in front of the computer, and for weeks and months, just started thinking about this content. What was the journey we wanted to take people on? What did people really need to know, that we could teach them within 48 hours, to get them to be able to take action and grow their business afterwards?

Shane Sams: It's one thing to have to create a speech for an event. A lot of people are speakers. They go out and they do their speech. They put a lot of effort into that. Some people are keynote speakers, and they go give the big talk, you know, the 45-minute, big explanation. They get onstage in front of everybody and they do it and they're done. But we basically decided we were going to do eight keynote speeches over two days. We were going to deliver everything. We were going to make every slide, write every word, and then get up and do it.

Jocelyn Sams: Which is actually a little crazy in hindsight.

Shane Sams: A little crazy. I got some good friends who do public speaking for a living, and they just shook their head and like, "You're nuts. You're crazy. I don't know anybody that would try to pull that off." But that's usually what me and Jocelyn try to do.

Jocelyn Sams: When people say we can't do something, that's when we try to do it.

Shane Sams: Yeah, we try to do it.

Jocelyn Sams: I've been working on things for months. Shane's been working on things for-

Shane Sams: Weeks.

Jocelyn Sams: ... about a month. Maybe days.

Shane Sams: Yeah. I was basically, for the first six months of the event, in charge of running the Facebook group. I was doing Facebook Lives, I was doing polls, I was doing questions, I was doing icebreakers.

Jocelyn Sams: Figuring out what people wanted to learn.

Shane Sams: Figuring out what people want to learn, polling the audience, getting a feel of where everybody was. And probably about six weeks out, I start really getting serious about starting the skeletons of all these PowerPoints.

Jocelyn Sams: Mostly because I was driving him crazy that, if he didn't get started, saying I was going to kill him.

Shane Sams: I need the pressure of a deadline, also, let's be realistic here. So, we created all of this content back and forth, talked about it. Then, we practiced in the car while we were driving. That was the only time we actually had to do it, because the closer we got to the event, the more it consumed our life. It got to the point where, about eight weeks out it, was literally the only thing we could work on in our business. We could barely do anything else but member calls and jump into the forums everyday. Customer service suffering. Things started falling apart in other part ...

Shane Sams: We would have pages and pictures crash on our website, and we'd be like, "Leave it. We'll deal with it after the live event," because we had to get all this content done. We would drop the kids off at school, and on the way home, I would start going through the PowerPoints on my computer and figure it out. Or, we would go to Knoxville or go to Lexington, the shop or to eat or to do something, and we would read through a PowerPoint on the way there, and we would have these disagreements about what we were going to say, and what we're going to talk, and how we wanted to be. Some of these car practices ended up being me slamming the computer and throwing it in the back seat and being like, I'm done. I can't deal with it anymore.

Jocelyn Sams: This totally happened numerous times.

Shane Sams: Numerous times.

Jocelyn Sams: But let me just say-

Shane Sams: Because there was so much pressure to deliver, because we were the only people on stage.

Jocelyn Sams: I'm sitting here on the outside kind of looking in, and I know a lot of you are probably thinking, oh, well, you know, you work from home. You had to plan an event, whatever. Well, lest you think this planning process was perfect. So many things happened against us during this time, especially right before the event. We had our event in late September. In early August, Shane got rear ended. This was our brand new car that we had had for approximately four months.

Shane Sams: Yeah. A guy crashed right into me. There was a cop chasing a boat. Some guy had stole a boat and a police officer was chasing him, so I pulled over because this guy pulling a boat was going by me at 100 mile an hour. I saw the police car, heard the siren. I pulled over, and the guy behind me was just rubber necking the cop, and the cop saw him hit me and had to break off the hot pursuit of the guy that stole the boat, and come back around, had to be the witness for our event.

Jocelyn Sams: You can't make this stuff up, people.

Shane Sams: I was sitting in the vehicle, and I wasn't really hurt or anything. It just kind of jarred me, and I sat there and just looked down, because we just bought this brand new Lincoln Navigator. The guy comes up and he goes, "Are you all right?" And I'm like, "Physically, yes. But just, before I go look at the damage on this vehicle," because-

Jocelyn Sams: I just need a minute.

Shane Sams: I need a minute to kind of take my breath away. So, that happened.

Jocelyn Sams: We're trying to come up with all of this stuff for the live event. We're trying to make all the final preparations, and now we're having to deal with the insurance companies. We're having to deal with the car repair, and all these different types of things that you have to deal with. But we're in the midst of planning this huge event at the same time. So, that was one thing. The next thing that happened was that, we had some staff turnover, actually a lot of staff turnover.

Shane Sams: Oh my gosh.

Jocelyn Sams: We had a couple of staff members who were very unhappy, and we just weren't meeting each other's expectations. So, we kind of moved apart from them.

Shane Sams: This was critical. This wasn't just people answering tickets, or easy to replace people. This was our main customer service person and our main podcast editor. We just decided that we had to go part ways. Right in the middle, like two months, three months out from planning this huge, the biggest thing we've ever done ... We've already sold all the tickets. We've already got everything in motion, there's no turning back. We don't have a podcast editor. And for those of you listen to our podcast, we have to have a podcast or we don't even have a business.

Shane Sams: That's why all these people are coming to our event. We don't have anybody in customer service. So, I go into full time mode, trying to get somebody to edit this podcast. [crosstalk 00:24:02]

Jocelyn Sams: I'm answering customer service tickets.

Shane Sams: Jocelyn's answering customer service tickets. We're planning the live event. She's doing logistics. It was just an absolute a mess. Then, like two weeks before-

Jocelyn Sams: 14 days.

Shane Sams: 14 days before the event, out of nowhere, our sales guy and another customer service person quits out of nowhere. They just totally quit.

Jocelyn Sams: No notice. Just, we're out.

Shane Sams: Didn't even put in a two-week notice. They just said, "Today's my last day. I'm done." And it just happened all at once. So, now we're just looking up going, okay, well, this is it. We just got to [crosstalk 00:24:34]

Jocelyn Sams: We're in. We have no choice. We have to get this done. And a lot of people, I think, at that point, would just go into their shell and say, woe is me. This business thing is not for me. I'm hanging it up. I just can't do it anymore. But we didn't have that option. We have this live event coming. We have a business that has to run. We have no choice. So, I told Shane, I said, when life gives us lemons, we don't make lemonade. We start a lemonade stand.

Shane Sams: She literally said that one. I remember when the second people quit, and she said that. I was just like, yeah, we do. Because I was really down at the time. I was like, man, this is totally soul crushing and overwhelming, not just because of all the work that we have to do. But thing that Jocelyn and I really believe is that, this is our mission. This is why God put us on this earth and has had given us all of our life experience, up to the point where we launched our podcast, was to go out and help people, and to help people free themselves and find financial independence and change their family's future.

Shane Sams: And we say to ourselves every morning, we look at ourselves in the mirror and say, who needs us today? Those people at that live event aren't coming for entertainment. They're coming because they need us to help them take their next step. You don't listen to our podcast just because we talk funny and say silly things sometimes.

Jocelyn Sams: Some of y'all probably do.

Shane Sams: Some of y'all probably do, yeah. But you're here because, you have a desire to make a change in your life, and you need help doing that, and that's what we're here for. So, there was no turning back. There was no shutting it down. We just had to suck it up and move forward. We really did go into a huge, stressful grind there for that last month, that started really affecting even our health.

Shane Sams: It's probably the most stressed out ever been in my entire life. I don't get stressed really easily, and when I do get stressed, I usually get over it pretty fast. But I started having some health problem, because of the stress coming into this live event and running the business and doing customer service and editing my own podcast, and all these things that hadn't happened in years.

Shane Sams: I actually suffered hearing loss a few weeks out from the event. It sounded like I was underwater. I would look at Jocelyn, and I couldn't hear what she was saying, and started getting some medical help, had someone look in my ears, and started researching it. And apparently, if you have too much stress for too long, it can actually affect the hairs in your ears that help you hear. And I started slowly hearing worse and worse and less and less, and I realized that it was from stress. And I had to take a deep breath and take a step back about a week before the event, and start doing some things that would help me not be as stressed. It was crazy.

Shane Sams: As soon as the live event was over, two, three days later, Jocelyn and I were on vacation. We took the kids to Jamaica for a week to have some fun and just get away from work and just relax. Two, three days into this trip, it was like I could hear again. It was like I came up from underwater, and it was just because that stress lifted off. And it really made me think like, man, we need more redundancy. We need to protect ourselves better and we need to have better systems in place to manage our stress.

Jocelyn Sams: And for me, I had been doing really well. I was on a new eating plan. I had been doing it since like April. But once all this stuff started happening, like in July, my eating started kind of moving a little bit toward not so healthy. And right before the event, I had put on like four or five more pounds that I had lost. That was a little bit frustrating for me, because I was really trying to move toward a goal and I didn't get it.

Jocelyn Sams: And at this point, we're just sort of looking at each other thinking, okay, this is hard. This is really hard, and it's frustrating to know that we're doing all this work and we're basically not making any money off this event. This is a break even event at best, and we're doing all this work. Is this even worth it? We started really questioning it.

Shane Sams: Then, we started looking, what was happening to the people who are coming to the event. We started looking at their businesses, at their wins. People were posting success stories in the Facebook group that we set up for Flip Your Life Live before the event even happened. People were quitting their job, people were launching their memberships. People were doubling, tripling, selling more and more.

Shane Sams: I remember, one of the attendees, we did a quick coaching call with her. She was coming to the event. She wanted to jump on a coaching call with us before the event to get a little bit of advice. She wanted to take action before she got there. We sat down and talked to her for a few minutes, and she launched a webinar. I told her, you've got to get this event done in 12 days. You got to plan the webinar and do it, because I want you to launch the Sunday before the event.

Shane Sams: She goes out and takes action on everything we had talked about in the Facebook group, everything we'd done, prerequisites, everything we had done on this call, and she had a massive win and created like $9,000 a month. Not at once, but a month, in monthly recurring revenue, before she even got to the event. And we started looking at all these success stories and all this action and all this activity, and we realized that Flip Your Life Live had become their anchor. It became that place, that thing that they were driving toward, that motivated them, that gave them the will to go take action and do things. They didn't want to show up at the event with nothing done.

Shane Sams: They wanted to be prepared for the event, because they knew it was going to be epic and change their life, and they wanted to be ready for that. When we started seeing all of these crazy things happening in all these peoples' lives, we realized it was totally worth it. It was totally worth it to give all of these people, over 100 people, from all over the world, 30 US states, five different countries, an opportunity and a goal and a chance to succeed. And really, it was the thing that we had been missing in our business. All this time, we didn't even realize it yet.

Jocelyn Sams: That's what kept us going, guys. Those messages that said, hey, I'm doing this because of this event. I'm taking action because of this event. I'm hitting my goals because of this event. That's what keeps us going. And if you ever think to yourself, oh, well, I listened to this podcast, or I subscribed to this blog, or whatever, and I've thought about emailing the person or leaving them or review, but they don't need to hear from me. They do need to hear from you.

Shane Sams: Yeah, we need it. Definitely. That's what keeps us going.

Jocelyn Sams: We need to hear from you. Other people need to hear from you. They need to know what is working, based on what they're telling you. Because, some days, that is all that you have, is just what other people have to say, just to lift you up. So, I just encourage you. It has nothing to do with this, right this second. But if there's somebody who encourages you, who says something to you, who makes a difference in your life, let them know about it.

Shane Sams: Yeah. Send them an email, go just shoot him a Facebook message, leave them a review. Do something and just let them know, because they may be having a really stressful day, and they need you to pick them up. It's kind of circular. We know that a lot of people rely on us for that motivation, that encouragement, that hope, that there is a better life for their future. But we rely on that feedback, as well, from you guys, to let us know that what we're saying is being heard, and people are taking action on it, and that people are out there and changing their life.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay, so back to the story. At this point, the preparations are pretty much over. Well, I say that. I'm pretty sure Shane was working on the speaking on the way there, on the way there.

Shane Sams: I think I was working in the car, on the way there, because I kept having more ideas, and I was changing things. Literally, two of the presentations, we didn't even have time to practice, because ... We know our content so well, we didn't really need to, and half of what me and ... We're totally ad libbing this podcast right now, by the way.

Jocelyn Sams: We have an outline. That's it.

Shane Sams: We have an outline, but we're just going back ... That's what we do is, we're just so much better when we're playing off each other. So, we didn't need to rehearse it as much as some people would have to, I think.

Jocelyn Sams: All right. We have, at this point, got all of the preparations done, most of the content done, and we're now starting to get ready to go. We've Band-Aided customer service, we've Band-Aided podcast editing, we've put Band-Aids on all these things. We've figured it out, because that's what we do. That's who we are. And at this point, we have to start the real work, which is packing. People, we brought the entire house. One of the things-

Shane Sams: Literally, we brought ... All the furniture and stuff people saw when they walked in was from our house. Jocelyn brought all of our pillows, and was putting them in chairs around the hotel, around the check-in areas, that said, hey y'all. It was stuff from our actual, decorations off the walls.

Jocelyn Sams: And one of the things that a lot of you who were at the event will notice about our live event coordinator, Amber, she's very good at this type of thing. She really wants people to feel at home and at ease, and she really wants it to be like us. So, one of the things that we decided to do was, to get things from around our house that we could sit around kind of as props. So, you might've seen the little state of Kentucky with a heart on it, and we had little signs that said, welcome, y'all, and a little coffee sign, like, coffee is always a good idea. And all those things actually came from our house.

Jocelyn Sams: So we had a huge box of stuff, just packed up, just for decoration. We had all of the items, like the promotional items, the pins, the shirts, the backpacks, all of the little things that you got when you checked in. And that thing was a laptop sticker, by the way. We gave the sticker, and I don't think anybody knew what it was.

Shane Sams: People were like, "Sweet, a sticker." We're like, no, it goes on the back of your computer.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. We need to put one on ours, too. Anyway.

Shane Sams: No wonder nobody knows what to do with them. They're not even on our computers yet.

Jocelyn Sams: Exactly. So, we brought the entire house.

Shane Sams: We're new to the swag. We're new to this stuff.

Jocelyn Sams: Not only do we have to pack all of the stuff for the actual event, we had to pack all of our clothing and all that kind of stuff for one trip. But, also had to pack my kids, because they were staying with Shane's mom and dad for a while, and we were also going to Jamaica the next week. I knew that, if I didn't pack everything, then it will be really hard when I got home. So, not only did I pack for one trip, for me and the children, and Shane packed his stuff.

Shane Sams: We also had to pack all of it again for Jamaica.

Jocelyn Sams: We also had to pack for Jamaica.

Shane Sams: For the vacation.

Jocelyn Sams: So, this was a lot of work to do in the days leading up to this.

Shane Sams: And it's a total first world problem. We know some of this are first world problems first world problems, but first world problems are real problems, y'all. Anything that's adding to taking away from your time, or planning on top of everything else, and you're stressing out, and you're thinking, like, oh, man, I got to be in front of 100 people. We've got to run the show, and there's all these moving parts. So many moving parts. It really takes a toll on you.

Shane Sams: You guys know this. We all get up every day and we take our kids to school, and we go to work, and we go to practice, and there's three kids, and they're going every which direction, and then you've got your in laws or your parents or your brothers or your sisters or your friends, and everybody's always pulling on all of our time. There's only so much that anybody can handle when you're doing all of these things. So, it can be really, really stressful in the moment.

Jocelyn Sams: And everyone has hundreds of moving parts every day, that you have to manage. Everyone has this, but this is like that times about five, because we're trying to prepare for this event. We're trying to get our kids together. We're trying to make sure customer service is being answered. We're trying to make sure we have enough content to last us while we're gone, all of these little things.

Jocelyn Sams: Make sure that we have all of our vacation documents, make sure we can find our passports. It's just all of these little nuts and bolts that have to be turned, that are all coming together in like one or two days. So, it's a lot to have to deal with, especially when you're on stage. You got to make sure you have all your clothes. We had to try on our clothes several times, make sure we didn't clash. All of these little things that you have to do.

Shane Sams: Yeah. Most of our date nights for the two months leading this event were, trying on clothes and standing in front of a mirror, so I would know if I matched ... Not matched. What do you call it?

Jocelyn Sams: It's coordinated.

Shane Sams: It's coordinated. We had to coordinate all of our clothes together.

Jocelyn Sams: We had to coordinate all of our clothing, make sure they didn't look bad together. So, we get to the event, and we finally got all this done. We get there and everything is pretty much ready to go. We got there on Tuesday. Everything started on Wednesday. What do we do the first day? I can't even remember.

Shane Sams: We got there on Tuesday, and we saw Amber, and we had a little meeting, to make sure that everything was going smooth, and that everybody knew where they were supposed to be and what times they were supposed to be there. And at that point, things just kind of started rolling. We had done the preparation, we had done the work. Everything was ready to go. The first thing that happened on Wednesday was actually a pre-party. We had a big party for everybody. We had a bluegrass band, and we kind of rolled in, and they had surprised us.

Shane Sams: The bluegrass band learned the Flipped Lifestyle theme song. So, that was playing live when we walked in. Everybody had a great time, and we went around and just hugged and met everybody, and we all had just a great time at that event. I remember, we went to bed that night, on Wednesday, after the party, and we had so much fun and we saw these people and we kind of looked at each other and realized, we have to be on stage eight, nine hours a day. Because, not only were we doing all of the content in these 30 to 45 minute teaching session, but we did a Q&A with S&J live after every single presentation.

Shane Sams: So, we were on our feet eight, nine hours a day, answering a dozens and dozens of live questions about the content we were teaching. That was something that we had never seen any expert do at an event, other than maybe a question or two. But we went deep and answered 10, 11 questions for every single session. We were preparing for that. We were getting ready to be on stage.

Shane Sams: I've been up late at night before a lot of big ballgames when I was a football coach, or maybe we had a big thing going on in our lives. And I remember being nervous and remember not being able to sleep. But when we laid down that Wednesday night when we were getting ready go on stage, I think we both just kind of passed out. I slept so well, because I knew that people were already changing their lives. We were going to get on stage and change some peoples' lives. Our content was true and sound and battle tested over hundreds of entrepreneurs that have been through our program before, and that we were going to be able to just really help people move the needle.

Shane Sams: We woke up the next day and my most ... The thing I was worried about the most was, it was our first introduction, that they would play the music at the right time. I remember, that was what was stressing me out more than anything was, oh, man. They got to hit our theme song at a certain point, so it looks good on video. Yeah. But other than that, we just got on stage and it just rolled. The content came out of our mouth. The questions were awesome, and we answered a bunch of questions. And I don't ever remember feeling stressed during the actual content of the event or anything like that.

Jocelyn Sams: My favorite part probably was the hair and makeup application. One of the things that I did for the event is, I hired someone to actually come to the event. She was dedicated to me, with hair and makeup, and-

Shane Sams: She did take a little time to dust me up a little bit.

Jocelyn Sams: Shane got a little man glam.

Shane Sams: I got a little man glam going, I'm not going to lie. You're under the lights. You don't want the sheen. You don't want the glowing skull blinding everyone in the first row.

Jocelyn Sams: I'm now obsessed with hair and makeup. I just want to say that is one of my new goals, is to have someone to do my hair and makeup, at least for my videos and stuff like that. Because it was so amazing to just wake up and let somebody just make you look good.

Shane Sams: Yeah. The event just rolled pretty peacefully, because of all the work that we did. And so many people came up to us and they said, oh, we loved the content. We love the Q&As. We did mastermind sessions where people worked on the things that we actually talked about. We didn't just do content and teach you what to do. People also had a workbook that they filled out while we were doing it.

Shane Sams: We answered their questions, and then there was like a block of time to sit down and do the thing, like the take action, to take the next step. So, the whole event was just rolling. The first night, we had a working dinner from 7:00 to 11:00, where Jocelyn and I were in the room. All the attendees were in the room, and everybody was just working on their business and taking action and making things happen and getting things done.

Shane Sams: Then, the last day of the event, we actually wrapped up with a priority session, where we taught everyone in the room how Jocelyn and I go through our priority list, from a week to week or month to month basis, and figured out and put on the calendar for the next seven days what everyone was going to work on, so that we could leave the event with a great momentum. And it was kind of over before we knew it. We didn't want it to end. Everyone was having such a good time. We were having such a good time, that we kind of wished we had planned it maybe for an extra day or something like that.

Jocelyn Sams: And a lot of people ask me, "How did you like it?" Because, I am an introvert. It is hard for me to manage my energy ever those days like that. I thought it was great, actually. The time that we had built in ... We built in time for people to mastermind together, which meant that we got a little break, and could just sit and kind of decompress for a few minutes. That really saved me, I think, just from having to talk the entire time. It was hard, doing all the content. You don't often see people do that, and we really felt it was important for us to do that this year. And my back hurt the end of it. I was like, oh, my back hurts. I'm not used to standing up that much.

Shane Sams: For carrying Shane all this time.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, that's right. No, I'm just kidding. But for me, really, the hardest thing about it was that dinner. The dinner was awesome. We got to talk to so many different people about their businesses, got to answer so many questions. But that was a little bit hard for me, when you sit down at a table with like seven other people at it, during a normal conversation, everyone will talk to each other. But during this particular situation, everyone wants to talk to you. So, that was kind of hard for me to manage that. It made me really exhausted at the end of that long day.

Shane Sams: That's probably the one thing, logistically, I wish we had done a little differently, just because it was ... Jocelyn and I kind of divided and conquered, and I'm usually Jocelyn's heat shield in situations like that, where I take most of the conversation so it's not draining her energy. But at this event, we kind of separated so we could talk to more people. But it was really hard to talk to everybody and have deep conversations. With 100 people in the room, it's just really hard to get into that. So, that's probably the one thing I think I would change a little bit, just to make it better, not only for the attendees, but for us as well, managing our energy, and being able to keep up with everybody.

Jocelyn Sams: But overall, it was amazing. I felt good the entire time. I really think I was less nervous than Shane was.

Shane Sams: I was nervous in the very beginning, but it was like a ... It was running out of the tunnel for a football game nerves. That was the exact feeling I used to feel before we came out of the locker room on Friday nights or Saturdays, to have a football game. And I kind of liked it. It was kind of awesome. You know?

Jocelyn Sams: But I think what it was for me is that, in this situation, you guys who were there, you already know us, you know our faults, you know our flaws. So, I didn't feel like I needed to hide anything, and I think that was really cool for this type of event, because-

Shane Sams: We could be real.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, and everybody does know us so well, and that was kind of cool. So, the event was awesome. I can't say enough wonderful things about it.

Shane Sams: One of my favorite things, too, what we did at the event is, we did kind of an award ceremony where ... One of the things that's different about Flip Your Life and different about Flipped Lifestyle is, we've really built this up on our expertise, on our advice, but also, on the community. That's what we wanted to create when we started Flipped Lifestyle, was a community, a worldwide community of family-focused entrepreneurs, people who really had their priorities in mind. They wanted a better life for their kids. They wanted a better marriage at home. They wanted more control over their life.

Shane Sams: Not this superficial, materialistic view of what online business or success should be. But really had their priorities in place, and wanted to go on a mission to help their customers, and change the world, and get their message out there. To see that community form, and to watch our community and how much they help each other. It's not just me and Jocelyn answering every single question. Usually, someone will post a question in the Flip Your Life forums, and there's nine people that have jumped in to help before Jocelyn and I even get to read it. So, it's this real community of people helping each other, and we wanted to kind of reward and give back to the people who were really serving other people in our community. So, we started looking back at the last year, at all the replies.

Shane Sams: Like, who had replied to the most forum posts, who had helped the most people, who had encouraged the most people who had answered the most questions, we wanted to give awards for that. So, we brought 10 members onstage, and we gave them a stone that was engraved with Flip Your Life put on it. Because one of our big themes for the event was, throwing your stone, taking action, skipping stone across the water, and watching it ripple out, and that ripple effect changing peoples' lives. That's how Jocelyn and I get up every day, is we're going to throw our stone and hit somebody, and ripple it out and, and really impact as many people as possible.

Shane Sams: And who knows, where that ripple is going to go to? So, we gave everybody this engraved stone for the Flip Your Life community, and we got to name our member of the year. It was Kevin Depew. Kevin is an amazing member, and far and away, other than me and Jocelyn, he's replied to the most people in the Flip Your Life community, and helped as many people as possible. And not only is his business growing, but he's helping other people as well. That was kind of my favorite part of the event, was just being able to give back and reward some of those people for being awesome community members, and just being excellent servant leaders inside of Flip Your Life community.

Shane Sams: So, that was cool, that we got to do that, and just meet all these people in real life, who we feel like we know, and we know their businesses, and we know their families, and we know what they're all about, and to really be in the same room and give each other a hug. That was just one of the best things for me about the event.

Jocelyn Sams: All right, so we told you a little bit about how we felt about the event. So, let's dive into a little bit about how our attendees felt about the event. One of the things that was really important to us is getting feedback as soon as possible ,in order to have the best event for next year. So, we sent out a survey on Monday. The event finished on Friday, and first thing in the morning on Monday, attendees got a survey.

Shane Sams: We were blown away by the responses that came back, because 99% of them were absolutely 100% positive. We had a think to kind of rank the event, five, or four, or three, two or one, and nobody ranked it under a four, and almost every single person put it a five. It was life changing, best event that they had ever been to. We got dozens of testimonials in text and on video from the event, of people saying how much it really impacted them. Not only that, but just some confirmation about the things we had done.

Shane Sams: So many people commented on the icebreaker sessions to introduce them, and how comfortable they felt when they got to the event. People loved the prerequisites and all the things that we did to get them ready for the event, and how the content was world class, and it really helped them make some epic decisions about what they were going to do next. Then the feedback that we got about the things that we could improve was so constructive. Sometimes people will go in and, there's some negative people that just say bad things to say bad things. But all of the constructive feedback that we got, we really shook our heads and we're like, yeah, that could have been made better.

Shane Sams: We could do that next year in a different way. And it was just really amazing to see, not only the outpouring and gratifying to see that we had done a good job for these people that came to the event, but also, that they were really invested and talking about coming next year. Something like 88% of all the people who filled out the survey said they were coming back next year. And that just really made it all worth it and made us realize, hey, we had done a good job, and this was actually something that our community not only needed, but really wanted us to continue.

Shane Sams: We always viewed Flip Your Life live as the Flipped Lifestyle family reunion, not as much the business conference for Flip Lifestyle. And that was really the feedback that we were hearing back from all of these people who filled out the survey.

Jocelyn Sams: I've got some news for you guys. A lot of you have come to an event for the first time at Flip Your Life Live, and you're pretty much going to be ruined from all other live events in the future.

Shane Sams: That was the goal. That was the goal, like, you're going to go ... I bet some people have already signed up for it. It's like, man, that was cool. I'm going to do another one, and they're going to get there and be like, wait, where's the Facebook group? Where's all the people talking to me? Where's all this interaction with the people on stage? What's happening around here? So, yeah, sorry. We apologize in advance for doing that.

Jocelyn Sams: And what's funny about surveys is, a lot of times, there's such conflicting feedback. Some people were like, oh, this was really cool. And other people were like, yeah, I didn't really like that. So, it's just funny. You just have to look at all of the different responses and figure out, what are most of the people saying?

Shane Sams: Someone said they didn't like the chicken. And we're like, you're in Tennessee. That's Southern fried chicken. What do you want us to put on your plate? I guess because it wasn't grilled or something like that. But those are the kind of comments, you're kind of like, okay, well, next year, we'll have some grilled chicken with the fried chicken. We'll have a couple options. We actually looked at like four or five things we really wanted to improve on, because we didn't do everything perfectly.

Shane Sams: One of our goals that we always have is, to be as accessible as possible. That comes from, a guru told us one time, at a conference, yeah, once you start getting enough people listening to your show and doing things like that, you got to make yourself not as accessible for positioning. That's just not who me and Jocelyn want to be. That's not who Jocelyn and I really care to be known as, as the un-accessible experts on stage. So, we tried to make ourselves as accessible as possible. We're really open with talking to everybody. We tried to walk around, hearing masterminds and talked to as many as people as possible.

Shane Sams: There was over 100 people at the event, so it was almost nearly impossible for us to talk to every single person individually. I know some people didn't come up to talk to us. We couldn't get over to talk to them. While, that's something we hope that we can do better, I think we're going to do a better job next year of communicating, because we do plan on growing the event. We do plan on selling more tickets. And we don't want anyone to think, hey, there's going to be a line where, you get to come and talk to us for 10 minutes, because if we [crosstalk 00:51:11]

Jocelyn Sams: That would be the entire event.

Shane Sams: That would be the entire event. It would just be a table where, everyone wrote rotated through. That's not what we're doing. We want to really set up the event more of a one to many approach.

Jocelyn Sams: And the people who were at this event are amazing. It's not just about talking to us. We want to talk to as many of you guys as possible. But I think, sometimes, what ends up happening is that, you guys listen to us every week, and you feel like you know us. You feel like we should be best friends, and maybe we should. But it's hard when there are 100 people, 100+ people, who-

Shane Sams: Who all paid money to get in the door, and deserve great content, and things like that.

Jocelyn Sams: But they also think, hey, let's be besties. And I'm like, uh, just met you. You know?

Shane Sams: It's not even that. It's like, we can sit and answer everyone's question. I'll tell you what was really surprising. We probably got there, I think we counted there was 48 different people, I think, asked a question. But that means there was over 50 people that didn't. But we had at one session at the end, where we were like, this is the last Q&A, if anyone wants to ask a question.

Shane Sams: When you go to a live event or when you come to Flip Your Life Live, make sure you're taking advantage of every opportunity you have to step up and ask a question. We were at the party for probably about an hour, and there were some people that didn't get to come up ... didn't come up to us and talk to us. So, you got to take some initiative, too, at live events, and make sure that you make things happen, that you want to happen, or they're not going to happen.

Shane Sams: If we could do it over again, we would probably position certain events differently, one, to make sure that everybody did have a chance to come by. We did have a picture session at the end, and Jocelyn and I took like 50 pictures in a row with everybody that came, as many people as possible, that came to the event. The Q&As, if we structured them just a hair differently, where we could get through to some more people, or maybe we could offer people an opportunity to write a question and we can answer some of those, because not everyone wants to step up to the mic and be in front of people or on camera.

Jocelyn Sams: We're considering maybe adding a VIP option, where you would have more opportunities to spend time with us. So, there are different things that we're considering for the future, to try to address this issue that several people did bring up.

Shane Sams: Another thing, no matter how well you think you plan or have the logistics figured out, you're still making estimates and guessing, especially the first couple times you do anything. One of the mistakes that we made, one night, I think we ran out of food, and Amber and Kat were running in the back going, "Make some chicken fingers and french fries. I don't care what you do! Put it on the bar. We got to get some food out there," because we actually ran out of some of the food at one night. So, there's things like that, that we learned, logistically, that we're going to get better at.

Shane Sams: That's another lesson for anybody making any kind of product. You can't guess everything. You've just got to do it and see what happens, and then you make it better and better and better, and you let it evolve. So, we're going to get better, we're going to evolve. And we're not going to be satisfied just because we had such an amazing feedback. We want to take it to the next level, as well, next year. Even though this live event is over, we want to always improve everything that we do.

Shane Sams: You would think, after the event, that we collapsed. But Jocelyn and I are all about the can't miss moments. We're all about living life. It's not just about changing lives, not just about work. It's all about our family and our future and our fun, and really experiencing this amazing world that God gave us. Most people would look at me like I was crazy, and Jocelyn, like she was crazy, if they knew what happened after the event. We left the event and drove from Nashville back to our home in Kentucky, like five or six hours.

Jocelyn Sams: On like 11:00 PM Friday night. This was late, late Friday night.

Shane Sams: Yeah. We got home really, really late, and collapsed into our beds. But we had to go to Jamaica, so we had ... We were going on vacation. We went with Kat and her husband and her daughter. Kat is our right-hand woman in the Flip Your Life community, has been forever now. She's one of our best friends in the world, and we had planned this trip together. We were flying out Sunday, but I actually went to the University of Kentucky football game the next day.

Jocelyn Sams: This was Saturday.

Shane Sams: Saturday. So, I woke up, got in the car, went to the game. Jocelyn drove the kids to Lexington, Kentucky, where we were flying out of the next morning. So, I went to the hotel after that, we got up the next morning, and went on this 24-hour trek. It took us forever to get down there to Jamaica. We took the kids, went on vacation, had an amazing time. The kids got to see another culture. We swam with dolphins. [crosstalk 00:55:34]

Jocelyn Sams: We needed it, because the kids were sort of, not really on the back burner, but they were maybe on a side burner for a while, as we were trying to clean up this huge mess.

Shane Sams: Oh, yeah. I'd say the last one. We probably didn't hang out with the kids for a week or two. And we were up front with them, and told them, guys, Mommy and Daddy have dreamed big, planned big, and we're going to go do something big, and we're going to make it up to you on the backside of this. But every day can't be eight hours here and eight hours there. We had to pick this. If we want to do this great thing to give you the life that we want to give you, we all have to make sacrifices. So, we planned this trip with them to kind of make it up to them after that.

Jocelyn Sams: Jamaica was amazing. I think it was the perfect exclamation point to just an awesome week, and just a nice reward for a lot of hard work. And that's something that we typically don't do a very good job of, is rewarding ourselves. So, I think that this was a great opportunity to say, hey, we put in the work, and we made it happen, and so now we are going to have this awesome vacation.

Shane Sams: And as we finish up this podcast, kind of recapping everything that happened at Flip Your Life Live in Nashville, it really got us reflecting back on our online journey and how we got to that point. How did we go from the very beginnings of Flipped Lifestyle, to this point where we're onstage in front of 100 people from all over the world, helping people change their lives? There were a lot of reasons why we did Flip Your Life Live. We talked about those earlier, to help people, to really cement that community that we've created over in the Flip Your Life community online. We wanted to bring that offline and just to help people move forward and make their dreams a possibility.

Shane Sams: But sometimes, we do things for ourselves to see if we can do it, to raise the bar, to prove to ourselves that we're worthy, that we're good enough, that we're capable of making these things happen. You know, doubts hold a lot of people back. Has anybody ever made you feel like you were not good enough to do something? Something that you knew in your heart, you were kind of destined to do? A lot of times, we let other peoples' words kind of hold us back from achieving our dreams.

Shane Sams: When Jocelyn and I launched the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast back in 2014, people started recognizing us at live events and conferences we attended. And time after time, those podcast listeners told us, "Man, we would love to hear you guys speak at these conferences." Sometimes they would even come up to us and ask us, like, "Hey, are you speaking?" And we were like, "No, we're just attending like you guys." And they're like, "Oh, I listen to your podcast. I'd love to hear what you have on stage."

Shane Sams: We didn't really think much about speaking until something crazy happened to us, actually, at a live event that we attended back in 2015. Like a lot of people that came to Flip Your Life Live, Jocelyn and I put this event on our calendar. We were really looking forward to it. We knew it was going to be an inspiring thing to work toward, and it was going to generate a lot of momentum after. It was the highest level live event that we had ever been to at the time. It was definitely the most expensive. We had to fly halfway across the world just to attend, and it had a great slate of speakers.

Shane Sams: We were really, really excited to pick up a lot of tips and grow our business and take it all to the next level. Not just, Flipped Lifestyle, but our other businesses, our education business, selling playbooks, all of that stuff. And, to our surprise, when we got to this live event, half the room already knew who we were. Many of them had listened to our podcast, or they had heard us interviewed in other places by other online business experts. One attendee was surprised, and actually a little disappointed, that we were not speaking, and another attendee said to Jocelyn, "I was looking forward to meeting you guys more than some of the speakers at the event."

Jocelyn Sams: To be honest, I wasn't even sure how to respond to that. I was a little bit shocked.

Shane Sams: This particular live event was actually a working conference. Some speakers would take the stage all morning, and in the afternoon, there were scheduled masterminds where, people can not only work on what they had learned during the day, but each speaker had a table, and you could go around to the speakers and ask them questions about their specific expertise.

Shane Sams: When you walked into the room, each table had a sign or something on their table, that said who the speaker was, and that way you could kind of rush in and figure out where your speaker was going to be that you wanted to talk to, and you could sit with them. There were some really big online personalities in that room, guys. People like Lewis Howes, James Schramko, Darren Rowse, John Lee Dumas. All these people were in this room, and they had tables where, you could go talk to them and meet with them.

Shane Sams: When we walked into the room, we were ready to grab a spot at one of their tables. We kind of knew who we wanted to talk to, so that we could learn a little bit, and take our online business to the next level. But, to our surprise, a dozen or so people had gathered around an empty table, and they had hand crafted a little table tent sign and folded it in half and sat it there, and they had wrote, Shane and Jocelyn Sams, on the table. Two of the people walked over, that were sitting at that table, stopped us, and said, "Could you guys sit with us first, and lead our table, and help us with our businesses?"

Jocelyn Sams: And we were a little bit shocked by this, also, but we did what we do. We sat down and we answered peoples' questions.

Shane Sams: I remember, we answered questions that were very specific things we had already been through, simple stuff, like how to set up your website, how to do this, how to do that. We encouraged some people. They weren't taking action, so we really were just like, man, you need to get started. You need to do something. And a couple people were already successful, and they didn't even realize it. So, we celebrated that with them, and told them, hey, reward yourself. You've done a good job. Now, just take it to the next level.

Shane Sams: And a lot of people that sat at that table with us, after the event, took action and built thriving businesses, really changed their life. The event organizer took notice that this was happening, and he saw that those people really wanted to talk to us. The next day, before dinner, he kind of came over and privately asked if we would like to speak at next year's event, and we were taken aback. We were blown away, because we had never even had any opportunities like this before. We'd never pursued any speaking opportunities, and Jocelyn and I are not usually the kind of people that say no to new things. So, we looked at each other and looked back at him and said, sure, we'll do it.

Shane Sams: It was an awesome opportunity. What better way to get our message of hope and freedom out there than onstage at a big live event? As we flew home, we kind of dreamed about speaking at the conference next year, and we thought about how we would prepare for the opportunity. We had like a 12-hour flight back from this event. So, it was really important to us to pencil it out. We were really excited about it. That excitement didn't go away. We kept thinking about it, kept dreaming about it until a few days later. We woke up, made our coffee, made our tea, opened our computers. We were checking our email, working together, like we do most mornings.

Shane Sams: I had a message from the event organizer. I kind of smiled to myself and I thought, sweet. This is going to be an itinerary. It's going to be a venue. It's going to tell us our next steps for our first big speaking gig, but it was none of those. It was actually kind of a slap in the face. To paraphrase, the email said, "Hey, Shane and Jocelyn. Unfortunately, I'm going to have to take back my offer to speak at next year's event. After meeting with my team, we've decided we only want real speakers or more successful entrepreneurs on our stage. Sorry."

Shane Sams: Kind of thought to myself, real speakers? What does that mean? More successful? We knew half the people on that stage that year made less money than us, had smaller audiences than us. But here was this person telling us, you're not good enough. You're not good enough to speak at my event. You're not successful enough in my eyes. You're not doing what I want you to do to get your next opportunity. I was really mad in the moment, like furious. Like, punch through the computer mad. But Jocelyn was livid. She was so angry and insult ... Jocelyn doesn't get mad that often, but when she gets mad, you better watch out.

Jocelyn Sams: I was Southern Momma mad. That's some serious mad.

Shane Sams: Yes. Slap some taste out of someone's mouth, mad.

Jocelyn Sams: I was more just insulted, I think, of, this person doesn't think we're good enough. I think a lot of people out there will be like, oh, well, maybe they're right. But that's not really the mindset that we took.

Shane Sams: I thought to myself, and as we talked back and forth with this, we were kind of like, real speakers? What about the real speakers that all those people walked past to hand craft a sign at our table, that wanted to hear us? Was that what being a real speaker meant, that people would ignore you when they had a chance to talk to an event, to talk to someone else? At first, we got mad. But just to keep it real, y'all, it hurt. It was like massive rejection, and we got kind of down on ourselves and said, maybe we're not good enough. Maybe we're fooling ourselves to think that we can be experts, and build a brand that reaches thousands and thousands of people. Or, maybe we don't belong on their stage or any stage, for that matter.

Jocelyn Sams: I think everyone has to cross that bridge at some point. You have to figure out, is this for me? Am I good enough? And you have to make that determination that you are.

Shane Sams: After a long discussion, we decided that, we would make a lemonade stand again. If he didn't think we were real speakers, if that person thought we weren't good enough, we would prove them wrong, and we would become real speakers. Maybe, eventually, we would get that opportunity back, or an even better opportunity. We prepared talks. We brainstormed what we could talk about onstage, if Jocelyn could talk by herself, I could talk by ourselves. We could talk together sometimes.

Shane Sams: We reached out to our network, we practiced, and even started applying for speaking gigs. I sent out an application for [inaudible 01:05:32] Con, this big conference, and got rejected. I applied for two other big conferences and got rejected again and again, and just started applying for every conference I could find, big conferences, little conferences, known conferences, unknown conferences, conferences in the United States, out of the United States. It didn't matter. We had a large audience. We had a good message. But over and over and over again, people wouldn't let us on their stage. They just wouldn't let us have that opportunity.

Jocelyn Sams: It's sort of like the job thing. When you're a job candidate and you have no experience, everyone wants experience. But you can't get experience unless someone hires you. Sort of that same type of thing. They would say, "Well, you don't have speaking experience." And we're like, okay, we know.

Shane Sams: And we're like, yeah. But we have thousands of people that might come to your conference if you'd let us on your stage. It just didn't make any sense. We started asking ourselves questions like, well, maybe we just don't know the right people. Maybe we're not running in the right circles, or maybe we are not good enough to do this. So, for a quick minute there, we data ourselves, our mission, our worth, our goals.

Shane Sams: Then, we got mad, and we just ignored what everyone was telling us, and we decided that we would create our own opportunities. If we couldn't get speaking opportunities from other people, if these people wouldn't let us on their stage, wouldn't let us speak at their event, wouldn't give us an opportunity, we would have to create an opportunity for ourselves. And that's how we started hosting these many live events.

Shane Sams: We had a live event in San Diego, for about 20 people. We did another one about a year later in Tampa. We had another small event up in Chicago. Then, when Jocelyn came up to me last December and said, "Let's hold a live event for over 100 people in Nashville. We can do this. We can do it all by ourselves. Just us on stage, the entire time. We don't need other speakers. We don't need anybody creating opportunities for us. We are more than capable to carry the show." I was on board. Scared to death, but said, dang right, we are. And that's what we did. We launched it, almost sold it out in a week. We had over 110 family-focused entrepreneurs from all over the world show up to watch us speak on stage.

Shane Sams: And the best part is that, our stage was bigger than that first event that we got rejected from. It was a better production. It was higher quality. It was better content, and we had more people in attendance at the first big event that we hosted than what would have been at that event we didn't get to speak at a few years ago. So, what are we saying? What's the moral of this story, this big, long podcast, that we just recorded?

Shane Sams: Don't fall into the world's trap. So many people think the gurus and the experts and everybody out there has it all figured out, and that they somehow hold the keys to success, and that you have to go and beg them. You have to go ask them to give you the opportunity to succeed. And what we want to tell you is, don't waste time begging experts for those keys. They don't really even have them. Most of those experts want you to think they have the keys to either stroke their ego or hold you back.

Shane Sams: You don't need anyone to tell you that you're good enough. You are good enough to do whatever you want to do, online or off. You already have everything that you need to be successful within and by yourself. You are the actual person that holds the key to your future, not them. You don't need them to make you feel real or affirm your success. You are more than capable of doing anything that you set your mind to. It's your dream. It's your path, and nothing can stop you if you'll just have a plan, take action, and do the work.

Shane Sams: We want to encourage you today, coming off maybe the biggest win of our online career so far. If you run into a gatekeeper, then just lower your head and crash through the gate. If you run into a naysayer, just prove them wrong. And if someone won't let you on their stage, do what we did. Build your own. All right, guys. That wraps up the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast for this week. But before we go, we want to let you know, we are 100% doing Flip Your Life Live again next year. It's going to be bigger, it's going to be better. It's going to be more life changing than even this year's event, and we would love are you to be there.

Jocelyn Sams: Tickets are not on sale just yet, but we do have a waiting list right there for you. You can find it at flippedlifestyle.com/live. If you are interested in hanging out with us next year in 2019, for our Flip Your Life Live event, head over to the waiting list and get on it right away. Flippedlifestyle.com/live.

Shane Sams: Remember, this year's event nearly sold out in the first week. So, you want to make sure that you're on the waiting list, because anyone on the waiting list will be notified first. Before we notify anybody else on our list, we will always send that out first to the waiting list. So, if you want to come and hang out with us and attend Flip Your Life Live, 2019, next year, we'd love to see on that waiting list, and we'll let you know as soon as tickets go on sale. But until then, whatever you do, get out there and work on your online business. Build your stage. Go out there and take action, and do whatever it takes to give your family a better future, and flip your life. We'll see on the next show.

Jocelyn Sams: bye.

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Hey Y’all, welcome to another Flipped Lifestyle Podcast Q&A w/ S&J!

In the Flip Your Life Community, we hold a members-only Q&A twice a month where we answer online business questions of our members live on air!

Today’s Q&A highlights answer the following questions: Question One:

"I would love some tips for making sales videos. I like the script, but I look so stiff on video or super hyper with a bouncing head. LOL. Any tips?"

Question Two:

"if doing a joint webinar, what is the best way to pitch products - repeat the webinar and do a separate pitch each time or just pick smaller products so attendees can just choose what works best for them? we do NOT want to try to bundle and split payment... too complicated"

Question Three:

"How is the free trial going vs. a $1 trial? I'm concerned people won't take action if they don't have skin in the game."

Question Four:

"To get the most out of my ad spend, could I run an add to two closely related topics/pain points for my niche... So when they click on the ad, they can opt in to one of two webinars (instead of just opting into one). Is that a thing? Do people do this? Like instead of deciding to register or not, it would be... Which one WILL they register for? Trying to get more out of my ad spend by offering two webinar options from one landing page. "

SUCCESS STORY:

"SUCCESS! I crossed the 20-member mark (and briefly had 21). I think adding webinars and member calls is next. - Paul"

View Details

In today's episode, we help Court plan his organic content strategy for his youth sport coaching website.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jocelyn: Hey you all. On today's podcast, we help Court take his youth sport coaching business to the next level.

Shane: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, where life always comes before work. We're your hosts Shane and Jocelyn Sams. We're a real family that figured out how to make our entire living online, and now, we help other families do the same. Are you ready to Flip Your Life? All right. Let's get started.

Shane: What's going on everybody? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. It is great to be back with you again today as we talk to another member of the Flip Your Life community, and I'm really excited about this interview because this is a guy after my own heart. This is a coach.

Jocelyn: Is there something I should know?

Shane: A sports coach ... No! Stop saying that. No, no. I mean we're just attuned in our souls in the sports coaching world, Jocelyn, because my heart is only for you, baby. All right, in our podcast today, we want to welcome Court. Court, welcome to the show, man.

Court: Hey, thanks guys. This is really an honor to be here. I really appreciate it.

Jocelyn: We are excited to talk to you today. We know a lot about the coaching world. We have been sports coaches-

Shane: Oh, so deep into it. So deep into it.

Jocelyn: Sports coaching wives for a long, long time before we started doing online business, so we totally get it. So tell us a little bit about you, your background, and how you got started with your website.

Court: Yeah, so real quick, I grew up playing sports. I played everything. If it had a ball. I played basketball, football, baseball, golf, and when I went to college, I went to Kansas State University and had an opportunity to work with the football team there, and I started as an equipment manager, and I worked up to being a student assistant coach. And I really had a passion for that, and I thought that's what I wanted to do after graduating, but I think Shane kinda what maybe you discovered. The pay was not good-

Shane: No, it was not.

Court: And I knew I was gonna have to move all over the country. Didn't wanna do that, so I decided to, my undergrad degree was in education, so I became a English and Journalism teacher and I coached football and track for about 13 years. And then about five years ago, I went through a divorce and I realized spending time with my kids, I was spending more time coaching. Practice was going until 7:30 every night, and then my kids were already in bed. Or on weekends I was working all weekend and I wasn't able to spend time. So I stepped away from coaching, stepped away from teaching, and took a new job in the business world doing social media. So I really have a background there in marketing and social media.

Court: And then when I started coaching my kid's kindergarten soccer team a couple years ago, I said, this will be easy. I've coached high school. I've coached college. This will be no problem at all. And I realized it was a whole different world, and I'm sure you've probably experienced the same thing. So that's what led me to, I said, other moms and dads need support and help to figure out how to coach their kid's teams. So that's what kind of led me to come up with this idea to start youthsportscoaches.com.

Shane: Awesome. Yeah, and it's funny, your story is so-

Jocelyn: I'm wondering if you guys are the same person.

Shane: I know, right? It sounds so familiar, and because I look back at our journey and where we are now compared to where we've been in the last 15 years, right? And there were really two things that happened to us that I think started our Flip Your Lives journey before we even knew it was started. One of them was exactly what you said when we were like chasing the success ladder, and it doesn't matter if you're trying to be a college football coach and climb the ladder, or if you're trying to be in the corporate world and climb the ladder. Even if you're in like a government job and you're trying to move from teacher to principal or whatever, right?

Shane: There comes a point when you're chasing success when you look over and say, I haven't seen my wife or kids in a few days, right? And you start questioning, is that worth it? And I can remember me and Jocelyn sitting down and I had a chance, I had a good friend of mine that recommended me for a job, and I literally had a job at Bowling Green University, right? We were in West Virginia at the time, and I had it. No, I was at Eastern Kentucky at the time, and he calls me, and he's like, you don't even have to interview it. I've already told him you're the guy for the job. You just have to show up.

Shane: And this was a big job. It was a good job. But me and Jocelyn looked at each other and we said, do we really want to go down this path? Like what about having kids? What about seeing each other? This is committing to, I'm in this now and it's my full time career, right? Now I'm working 12 hour days, and we decided at that moment that we were gonna go into high school or teaching or whatever to do that. Because we just said hey, I don't want to go and not do, be able to ever see you again. We gotta go a different direction to find some more time. And it's funny because then you get into high school, and you're like, I'm spending more time with everybody else's kids than I am my own kids.

Jocelyn: And you're getting paid even less.

Shane: Even less to do it, right?

Court: Yes, and that's what I figured out too is I think coaching football I made $3,000 a year, but you know it's a year round thing. I mean, it's summertime all-

Shane: It's like a $1.30 an hour is what it is.

Court: Oh, it's even less than that.

Jocelyn: If it's even that.

Shane: I mean it's absolutely ridiculous. And-

Court: And so yeah it's just not worth it. You don't see your kids. You don't see your family and you're working with other people's kids all the time, which is great, but-

Shane: Oh yeah. There's a place for it. I'm not saying that. You know what I'm saying?

Jocelyn: And you know what? I have a lot of respect for people who do it.

Shane: Yes, and I still step up and coach sometimes today reluctantly, although whenever anyone asks me to coach anything locally, like any kind of teams, I'm like, I'm retired. Sorry. I'm not going. But then the other day, I-

Jocelyn: No, we end up doing it though.

Shane: I ended up doing it anyway. I was at basketball practice the other day, and the coach, his son did something to his tooth and they had to take him to an emergency dentist, and I'm standing there looking around. I'm like, give me the ball. And I coached basketball for two hours. It's ridiculous because once you are a coach, you're the default coach. There's still this old guy that sits in the front of my church, and whenever I walk in he always goes, hey Coach Sams. How you doing? I'm like hey, Bob. Haven't coached in ten years, but whatever, you know what I'm saying. All right, so let's talk about youthsportscoaches.com a little bit-

Jocelyn: First of all, I love this idea. Shane had actually talked about it years ago.

Shane: Oh yeah.

Jocelyn: Like wouldn't it be cool if-

Shane: Because I coached tee-ball for the first time, and I thought the same thing you did. These are kindergarteners. It's gonna be simple. I've handled college people with egos and everything-

Jocelyn: But then you realize that it's like herding cats.

Court: Yes.

Shane: Yes, and they beat you into submission mentally by the time you're through with practice. SO what do you use on youth sports coaches, like what are you teaching? What are you talking about? Is it fundamentals of the sports? There's a lot of youth sports. Or is it more like just the mindset of it?

Court: Well, this is exactly, I only started this probably a month and a half, two months ago, and so I'm still in the building stage, and that's one of the things I want to talk about is when I started coaching soccer, I did probably like what most parents do. I went to YouTube, and I just started searching for videos, and they were scattered all over. A lot of them were for older kids and didn't really apply to kindergartners. And so, and I would watch other parents struggle at practice not really knowing what to do, and it just basically became throw the ball out there and let's scrimmage for an hour, which it doesn't do anybody any good.

Court: So my idea, and this is what I'm debating right now, is there's lots of sites out there where they go a mile deep and an inch wide in one sport, and it's the super competitive teams that travel. That's not what I want to talk to. I want to talk to the dads and moms who are just getting started and they're like, it's herding cattle. I don't know what to do. I need basic drills. I need practice organization. I need to know how to organize my team in the preseason. They've been thrown into this role either voluntarily or someone kind of asked them to do it, and they just need help and guidance.

Shane: Yeah. And-

Court: So that's where I kinda am, trying to figure out what my model is.

Shane: Yeah, that's cool. Even stuff like, one of the key words you said there was organizing practice. Dealing with parents, figuring out who's bringing the juice packs on Saturday to the game, right? Like stuff like that that people just aren't equipped to do, they need somebody to show them how to do that.

Jocelyn: I was gonna say how to start your team's Facebook page. Should I start a Facebook page? All of these things, I think are really important and things that people probably leave out. I feel like probably actual mechanics of the game, drills, things like that, those are kind of covered, not necessarily for your age group, but I feel like maybe those other things get kinda left out.

Shane: Yeah, for sure. It's easy to find out how to kick the ball into the goal. It's hard to figure out how to handle all of the logistics that go along with being a youth sports coach.

Jocelyn: All right, so before we dive into nuts and bolts here, let's talk a little bit about what is going on inside your head as you're starting this. So everybody has some type of fear or something that holds them back. What is yours right now?

Court: It's probably a little bit of imposter syndrome maybe that you guys would say, and like I said, there's lots of coaches out there that go really deep into this. My background is, that I think I can bring to the table, is that organization and the logistics that you just mentioned. How to bring in those parents and see the value in it because I worry that people won't see a value and wanna put their money where their mouth is for this type of product.

Shane: Sure. It's interesting you say that because whenever you come from a higher level, what we perceive as going down to a level, like we know the value of organization because we've been on a football field with 100 players. If you're not organized by the minute and practice, you've got problems. And that's not what we're saying you're going to bring to these youth coaches, right? But it is block time, organizing, getting logistics.

Shane: One of the things that we did on our tee-ball team is, because we had a technology background and an organizational background in sports coaching. I was still a defensive coordinator in high school when I coached this tee-ball team. Is we had a Facebook group that we set up the day that we started coaching that baseball team so that we could coordinate with everybody there, and people loved it, because they knew what was going on. So it was the only team they ever knew what was happening, because we communicated with them, right?

Shane: But when we go down, we're like, are they gonna get this, nobody else is doing this. Are they gonna understand? And that'll be part of your marketing is bringing people in in what they do understand, like they understand looking up drills. That's why people go to YouTube and say, they don't type in soccer practice. They type in soccer drills, right? You'll use those kinds of methods to bring people in and then it will be your job to explain the value through your marketing so that they will put their money where their mouth is.

Jocelyn: And honestly, I think you're thinking too small. I see this as more of a system that you sell to cities, to organizations who do youth sports-

Shane: Oh yeah. We got-

Jocelyn: Maybe the churches. Because here's the thing.

Shane: Yeah, that's true.

Jocelyn: What is the number one problem that organizations have when they're trying to do youth sports? They don't have enough coaches, right?

Shane: Coaches.

Jocelyn: Okay, so if you could sell this to them as hey, I have this system and all you have to do is tell the parents, okay, we have the whole system. We have practice plans for you. We have organization plans for you. All you have to do is show up and follow this script. Like how much easier would that be? If somebody came to me, as a parent, and said, hey, look. We really need coaches, but you're gonna have to figure everything out yourself. I'd be like eh, no. That's too much to do already.

Shane: But how much does Upward Basketball or something need this? Like I coached Upward Basketball last year, undefeated champions. I'm just saying. But anyway, I coached Upward Basketball, but there was a lot of, they did their best. Everybody did so good. It was for the kids. It was for a good reason, but it was confusing. And there was a lot of confusion with coordination and communication and things like that. And Upward gives you some things, but it's mostly drills, right? But it's not how to get your parents together, how to organize practice, how to take them out to pizza, stuff like that. And you could just go to an organization that already has 100 teams and be like, hey. Why don't I just, 20 bucks a team? You got it. Boom, there's two grand.

Shane: So yeah, that's a really good idea, Jocelyn. There's a lot of things around this I don't think you're even seeing, and you just have to explain it. You gotta convey it. Everybody says, man, I just wish people would see the value in this and buy it, when they really need to say, it's my job as a marketer to tell them the value and convince them to buy it, right? So-

Court: Well, you guys are in my mind. Yeah, you guys are in my mind. I had a conversation with a local rec commission about this, and they were really interested, and I told them I needed beta testers right now to get in and help me figure things out. And they're like, yeah, our parents don't know what they're doing. We tell them just to go to YouTube but they don't wanna coach because they don't feel like they know what they're doing. So you're exactly right. I'm already thinking that. My question is how do I make those sales without just cold calling people. I don't know how to get them into my sales funnel.

Shane: I gotcha. I gotcha. So are there any technical things that are holding you back besides mindset? Number one, please don't let imposter syndrome hold you back because you have coached college football, right? You have coached in high school. You know what it's like to organize a large group of people and from a coaching standpoint, and you can really help. 99% of people don't have that experience, right? So you are more than expert enough to do this, right? Even if somebody's listening out there, even if you had been a youth coach for ten years, I remember there was this old coach when I was growing up, and he coached the same basketball and football team every year for my whole life and the whole life of my brothers. He had literally coached the Nuggets for like 20 years in football and basketball in our community, right?

Shane: That dude was a pro youth football coach. That guy was a pro youth sports coach, and just having that kind of experience and being able to do it well at a high level is gonna more than make you qualified for the guy who didn't know he was coaching soccer until Thursday, and shows up on the field Saturday.

Jocelyn: Well, and not to mention you've also coached youth sports, so you know the challenges. You know what people are thinking inside their head, because you've been there before. If you have had one day of experience coaching kindergarten soccer, you have more days experience than I do.

Shane: Exactly. So you're more, don't worry about the imposter syndrome. But is there anything else that's holding you back from a technical standpoint? How was the website creation? Any external obstacles that you're dealing with?

Court: Well, like I said, I have a really good background in technology. I have the website up. I have my email sequenced, Leadpages AWeber going. It's getting people into my sales funnel right now. I just started writing a Facebook ad just the other day, and it's not really converting. And so how to get those people in my sales funnel, and who to target on Facebook, because it's moms and dads between, I think I said 26 and 42. I drilled down to parents, but then I also used interests like ESPN and college football, because it would be people who are interested in sports. But I don't know how to target youth sports coaches, those moms and dads who are getting into it.

Shane: Yeah. Well what you wanna, let's just go straight into that then. Let's talk about how. One, your site is so new, the first place I would actually start is your organic strategy, not your page strategy. We'll talk about both though, okay? But how are you creating consistent content right now? Do you have, are you putting out blog posts? Are you making YouTube videos? Because without a foundation of organic traffic, you can't do paid traffic, because until you see what's getting traction organically, you don't know what to pour gas on, right? To make the fire bigger. So how are you doing that right now?

Court: I've been podcasting. I've batched. I'm up to six episodes. I've released three. I've got it on iTunes. I think I have five or six blog posts, started a Facebook, so yeah, that's what I've been really focusing on. Lead magnets, I have lead magnets on each blog. So that's what I've been doing so far.

Jocelyn: Okay.

Shane: So you've got a good, consistent strategy of releasing content regularly.

Jocelyn: Which is awesome.

Court: Yes.

Jocelyn: But what I was gonna say is, okay. I don't know what your podcast format is, but what a perfect vehicle to talk to some of these people in these youth sports organizations.

Shane: Oh yeah.

Jocelyn: Ask them to be a guest on your podcast-

Shane: And at the same time-

Jocelyn: And oh, by the way. Let me sell you something.

Court: Yeah, I just did one of those.

Jocelyn: Yeah, exactly.

Court: I just did one last week, so yep.

Shane: Well, let's talk about this real quick too. Okay so you've got a good, consistent thing on your own terms, but I just went into iTunes and typed in youth sports, okay? And I literally just found probably 100 or more youth, there's youth, winning youth coaching. Actually, this guy's name's Craig. He would actually, I've been on his podcast before. And he's been in the community. Youth baseball edge. Youth baseball talk. Coaching youth soccer. You might want to go and reach out to these people to be on their podcasts, because they're always looking for guests, I'm sure, right?

Court: That's a good idea.

Shane: So if you could go be on their podcasts, maybe they can come on your podcast. You start building an audience faster because they've already got an audience or they wouldn't be podcasting. They've got somebody listening to them, so that starts magnifying your message, right?

Jocelyn: Here's another pro tip for that. Find someone who is a competitor to you and see what podcasts they've been on.

Shane: Exactly. So you can type in their name and say, whoa, here's ten more places that they've been. And for example, this coach Carl for coaching youth soccer, random plug for a random podcast on the show.

Jocelyn: We've never listened to it, so.

Shane: No, we've never listened to it before.

Jocelyn: So don't be mad if it's terrible.

Shane: But it looks like a lot of these are really focused on developing skills, right? And you're not a competitor to them. You can just call them and be like, no, I just help people organize practice and stuff and organize their team and learn what to do and all that. I've got some drill stuff, but hey, you might find promotional opportunities here or learn more about it. So go out and try and get your name in front of all of these people that are already talking to youth coaches and youth parents, okay?

Jocelyn: I think really one of the best things that you can do is to get parents interested and let them know that hey, we offer discounts to youth sports programs, because they become your best advocate. That's what happened to me on Elementary Librarian. I decided I was going to take school purchase orders so that way people didn't have to spend their own money, and then they market it for you, because they don't want to spend their own money.

Shane: So your marketing can, when you're talking on it, you're talking to the youth coach, but when you get a youth coach customer, instead of cold calling organizations, well, their youth coach, they're in an organization. Hey, could you tell the director of your youth program that I'd offer a discount if he wanted to buy it for everybody in the organization. And now you're not cold calling anymore. You're going on other podcasts. You're getting customers as coaches, and then you're figuring out through them who they're coaching for, and then that's how you connect with the directors to buy it for the whole program, basically.

Court: That's a great idea. So what I'm hearing you say, do you think I need to stay away from the drills, because that was one of my questions is do I even give a baseline of drills for those sports?

Shane: What a good question from today's guest. We will get to the answer of that in just a moment. But first, did you know that you can get the answers you need to start, build, and grow your online business too? All you have to do is join me and Jocelyn and all of our other members inside of the Flip Your Life community. You can get all the training, coaching, and support that you need to build and grow your own online business. The best part? You can get started today for free, absolutely no cost to you. All you have to do is go to flippedlifestyle.com/free, and you can start your one month free trial right away.

Shane: Join hundreds of other family focused entrepreneurs from all over the world inside of the Flip Your Life community. You can learn how we've started an online business, replaced our income, quit our full time jobs, and now we get to work from home. You can build a life that you want and you can get started today at no cost. Just go to flippedlifestyle.com/free and start your free month today. Now let's get back to our show and back to our guest's question.

Shane: No, you can do that. You can totally do that-

Jocelyn: I think you do because-

Court: Okay.

Shane: I think you have to do that.

Jocelyn: I think that's what people are partially looking for.

Shane: When I was selling playbooks, I couldn't figure out how to get coaches that were looking for my system, right? But what I did know is that every day at the beginning of every practice in America coaches did drills, right? So I started writing articles about quarterback drills. I didn't coach quarterbacks. I coached the offensive line and linebackers, right? But I would write some basic articles, and that's how people would find me, and then they would realize I was selling the other thing. So that's how you're gonna get some of your traffic is by writing the best five drills for a new coach in soccer, or the best five drills for a new coach in basketball.

Shane: And then they will find you and realize you're helping them become a better coach, and even though you're only offering simple drills, you're offering so much more on the other side.

Court: Yeah, and that's why I think this membership model really makes sense is because I think parents coach multiple sports. And so my idea is soccer season rolls right into basketball season, and so they would stay for the community, but then have drills for each of those sports, if that makes sense.

Shane: Yes, and also too, there's different challenges in being a soccer coach to a basketball coach to a football coach. Even a baseball coach. Rain affects all four sports differently. Practice for basketball is different because it's, like we're on a basketball team with Isaac right now, our son, and it's really hard to find gyms to practice in. That's a totally different challenge then hey, let's find grass to kick go kick the soccer ball on, right? So you're dealing with these different challenges that they deal with in every sport as they go through it. It's a perfect membership model.

Jocelyn: Well, and the thing about that is that people help you create your content. Like they start talking about their problems, and you can say, oh, well. What knowledge do I have that can help them solve this problem?

Court: Yes, that makes a lot of sense.

Jocelyn: Yeah, and therefore bring more people into my funnel.

Shane: So when you're thinking of your organic strategy, think about what people are looking for first. They're looking probably, their first instinct is probably to look for drills, right? And then you market-

Court: Fun drills.

Shane: Fun drills. Stuff like that. Then your marketing is to convince them that the next step is your product, right? They know their first step or they wouldn't be searching for it. They're looking for the next step after that, because that's where they get confused, and that's what you're gonna sell. And then your promotional strategy, you've got to go out and find people that already have audiences and get in front of them right? That's where all these other pod ... and you have a podcast so it's really easy for you in this stage in your business to say, hey, let me be on your podcast, then I'll let you be on mine, right? So you can just do a nice little exchange there, build relationships, and you can just grow your audience more organically that way.

Jocelyn: I would do maybe like a download of a checklist of some kind, like a youth sport coaching checklist, like things that you need to do. Things that everybody needs to do, like get people's shirt size, find a way to communicate with the parents. Simple things like that, that could be a good giveaway for you as you're starting to go on to other people's podcasts. And then of course, you would have deeper trainings-

Shane: About all the things that are on the checklist. The checklist is one page, do all these things. Set up your Facebook group. Okay, wait a minute. How do I do that? You've got a little link at the bottom that says, I'll show you how to do that whenever you download it, you see? And that's how you guide people back.

Shane: All right, let's switch back to the page strategy now. So you've already got some ads, you're playing with it, and you started targeting people. So you said you targeted by age. You targeted these parents of kids from 0-12, whatever, right? And then that's the things you're targeting. The next thing I heard you say was a common mistake though. You said, okay, I'm just targeting people that like sports, right? You can't do that because it becomes way too broad and you waste money. I did this with football. I thought at first, hey, I'll target football like college football, NFL. Surely coaches would love those things.

Shane: But here's the problem. So do drunk college kids. So do weekend warriors, fans of sport, alumni. And you have to dial down and drill down even more, and youth sports is really not that bad of a thing to look for, because you have big things you can target like USA football, which is the big youth football organization, right? You have, there's soccer organizations. There's other things you can target-

Jocelyn: But I would even be careful with that because here's the thing. If somebody asked me to coach, I don't like any of those things on Facebook. I might do it because I love my kid, but I know absolutely nothing about it. I personally like sports, so there's a possibility I might like those on Facebook but probably not. So you have to remember who you're going toward or who you're looking for. I think probably for you, a better strategy would be to get emails for people like offer a lead main, get some emails, and then maybe do a local audience type thing.

Shane: Yeah. You could also, too, look at the different Facebook groups that are out there and just join them. There's a lot of Facebook groups.

Court: Yeah, I'm in those.

Shane: And then you can organically connect with people. But even targeting, trust Facebook's algorithm. People think you've got to go in and get your ad perfect, but sometimes you can just go in and be like, hey, I want people who are 25 to 45 and have kids that are under 12, and then I'm gonna write copy that's about youth sports, and I'm just gonna trust the algorithm to start figuring it out for me, because the algorithm learns. It learns as you go, and the people that respond to your ad, Facebook can look and it can say, wait a minute. These other people are like these people. So I'm gonna stop showing it to the people who aren't clicking and I'm gonna start showing it to people like the ones who are clicking.

Shane: You don't have to drill down and get all those interests perfect. You can just start with an age range and the kids, right? You can also start in a demographic, maybe like $30,000 to $100,000. That's usually the youth coach, the youth person who's hustling and driving their kid around, you know what I'm saying?

Court: Right. Married.

Shane: Yeah, married. Yeah, people like that. Or here's another thing that you could focus on too that I like. It's not necessarily married because there's a lot of single parents, divorced parents who are trying to get multiple kids to different sports.

Jocelyn: So just don't-

Shane: Those are challenges you could talk about.

Jocelyn: Yeah, don't drill down too much, and another thing you can do is add people who are competitors, people who do the same type thing as you do. See if you can add their audiences in. You know those people are interested in youth sports, so.

Shane: So basically, you could have two lines here. It's like lines of play in sports. I like that. But one is set up an ad that does target youth sports organizations, like AAU, UA10, UA15, soccer, things like that, right? Upward Basketball. There's a lot of people that like Upward because they're participating in it. Some of those are coaches, right? Target some people by interest, but then set up another ad and just let it go with the age and demographic, and then eventually when you get your email list big enough, upload that and let Facebook go find people that are like them, right? That's the, you gotta try a little bit of all three of those things. You can't just say, I found people that like sports. That's just too broad.

Court: Well, so before I added all those sports things, it was like 100 million people. It was a huge number when I just went off of age, some of those demographics. So you say that's okay?

Shane: Yes.

Court: With it that big?

Shane: It's okay, because Facebook will figure it out.

Jocelyn: Yeah, once people start responding to the ad, they'll show it to more people like them.

Shane: Like those people.

Court: Okay, all right.

Shane: And it'll actually dial down. And also too, you start a little broad, and then you can figure it out and move it down as you go. Try to find all the major youth sports organizations though, because some of those people, that will at least tell Facebook-

Jocelyn: Some of them will like those things.

Shane: It'll tell Facebook that those are youth people, but set up a different ad that's just for age groups. You don't have to worry about it. Also, too, on your advertising, you need to be really season specific and not general. Like right now is baseball season, right? There's a lot of baseball going on. A lot of travel basketball going on right now too. Those are the kind of ads that need to run this time of year. When August and September get here, you need to be having football pictures-

Court: Soccer.

Shane: Soccer, things like that. The swimming in the Spring. That's, January, February, March is like swimming, right? USA swimming. So your pictures need to identify with people what they're going through right now. So you need to be really in tune with the calendar and your ads, because if you've got a picture of someone coaching a ... If you've got a baseball coach at first base and it's the middle of winter, not many people are gonna relate to that.

Court: So my kind of tagline or motto, I think, needs to change, because it was kind of experience of coaching you're, make coaching your kids a fun and rewarding experience. Because I want, that was what I was playing on was coaching your kids, but it-

Jocelyn: No.

Court: But it sounds like I need to change it more to the organization side.

Jocelyn: This is, I would say it's even different than that. I would say survive coaching your kid's sports team this season.

Shane: Yeah, that's who needs this thing. And it's almost like you're trying, they want to have a fun experience with their kid. Don't get me wrong. Okay? That's gonna be a part of your message-

Jocelyn: But that's a vitamin. Nobody's gonna pay for that.

Shane: That's a vitamin. It's more like, don't look like an idiot in front of all the other parents, right? How to keep parents from getting mad at you. These are the things that they're really worried about that they need the help with. It's like the, what's it called? Oh, status. It's their status. People want to look competent.

Jocelyn: How to run your kid's team like a pro when you have no clue what you're doing.

Shane: Yeah, stuff like that. That's your messaging is, that's what you're trying to tell the parent, is ... Now the benefit, the added benefit is you're also going to have a great time with your kid, right? That's cool, but man, when you're overwhelmed and you've got parents yelling at you and you don't know who's bringing the snacks, and you don't know if Johnny's even gonna be there because your communication was terrible.

Jocelyn: If you're stressed, you're not gonna have fun coaching your kid. So that is the-

Shane: Stress free youth coaching.

Jocelyn: Yeah, that's what you're selling is take the stress away.

Shane: Yeah.

Court: Okay. Very good.

Shane: Okay? So where do you think this goes next? What do you think your next step is both, either, just in your promotion or advertise. What do you think you need to do next to kind of take this thing to the next level?

Court: Well I think change some of the messaging, but then I need to, I have the infrastructure I bought for the membership side from my sub domain. I need to start building that out, and building the membership, the courses. And then get beta testers in there to help me. And so that's my goal here in the next month before fall sports start is to do that.

Shane: Yeah, this is gonna be a process, too, man. It's not, because it's almost like when Jocelyn launched her first lesson plan site, she did one month at a time, and you're kind of, right now, like one season at a time. Because you gotta get some beta for football, get some beta for soccer, get some beta for baseball, the big sports first. Soccer, stuff like that. Then you can start adding maybe some things for some other things. But you gotta go through these seasons, get through this process. That doesn't mean you can't start selling and adding people in, right? You need to start selling it season by season, but don't feel like you've got to have every single sport in the world covered right now.

Shane: It's more like the next sport is your focus, and then the next sport is your focus, and maybe you pick up three or four people here, pick up four or five people here, pick up 10, 20 people there. You're good.

Jocelyn: But I like what you're doing with the beta testing. Those testimonials are really, really important. Especially if you're trying to sell to organizations, you need some very strong testimonials.

Shane: Are you in a, what's the population like in your area? Like where are you at?

Court: Kansas City. I mean, I don't, it's huge.

Shane: Yeah, yeah.

Court: Yeah, there's lots.

Shane: Of course.

Jocelyn: Yeah, you can get all kinds of people just right there probably to help you pilot this thing.

Shane: It might even be good if you wanted to target some ads just at Kansas City and maybe you target and you say, even almost like a speaker thing. Like let me come in and talk to your coaches, right? That would be a really good thing to do locally, because there's probably so many sports organizations. You could reach out locally, not cold calling, like I'm Court. I'm right down the road. I specialize in helping youth organizations get their parents on the level they need to be at, right? So that you have a better-

Jocelyn: Or more importantly, help your organization be able to easily find volunteers.

Shane: Yes, exactly. Because that's a problem you're solving for the youth director, right? And tell him, hey, I'd love to come in, and your coaches come in, and let me take them through a process for an hour so they'll have a great season you'll have less headaches. And as you do that-

Jocelyn: You'll get their questions, you'll find their objections.

Shane: Yep, and you'll be able to talk to a lot of parents at once without having to travel or do anything crazy.

Court: Right. So what do you think pricing both for beta and for once I get into a membership? What do you think the value is of this?

Shane: The value, I think you're probably gonna sell more like season passes than monthly memberships, and it would almost, you would call it a season pass, but it would kind of be quarterly, because the person right now is in the moment. And if, like my brother does this to me all the time, because he runs a youth organization here. He comes up to me, he's like hey, hey. You're gonna coach baseball, right? I'm like what? I hate baseball. But he, that's what happens, you know what I'm saying?

Shane: And I'm only think, I'm not thinking about my son's basketball season when I'm doing baseball. I'm in the moment. So it's almost like season pass is now available for the baseball season or whatever, for summer. Season pass available for the fall, right? I'm thinking some kind of quarterly price, and I think maybe you start at like 100 bucks a quarter, or something like that?

Jocelyn: Yeah, I think it's gonna have to be fairly low because-

Shane: Just to start and see.

Jocelyn: People don't really want to do it anyway.

Shane: Right, exactly.

Court: Right, and that's, that's my thing.

Jocelyn: Yeah, I mean-

Court: They're not gung ho about it.

Shane: But everyone won't be, but there's a million youth coaches. You only need like 1% of them to want it.

Jocelyn: So don't make it way inexpensive. Make it something valuable, but make it affordable for people who don't really want to coach anyway, but they're reluctantly doing it. Again-

Shane: Like if I ended up coaching a sport that I knew absolutely nothing about. For example, I'll give you a better example. If I ended up coaching one of my daughter's teams, like I know a lot about coaching dudes and guys, right? But if I was in middle school and somebody wanted me to help with a youth girls' basketball team, right? I don't know, coaching girls is not the same as coaching guys, right? That might be some, but I'd pay 100 bucks for that. So you don't need everybody to do it. You just need somebody to do it.

Jocelyn: But I think your big money is going to come from organizations, and then I think that later on, there are some upsells that you could do to kind of maximize that customer value, but that's something that we need to save for another conversation.

Shane: But think about this though. Even if it's a quarterly thing for 100 bucks, right? All three months for 100 bucks. They're getting access to everything, but you found 500 people, that's $50,000 a quarter, right? So that's still big money, but it just fits in the mindset better of, oh, I can buy this just for my kid's season and then I can get out if I don't want to coach the next sport, right? And that's really what you're looking for. And then they'll come back next year and join it again.

Jocelyn: But I can see other opportunities down the road for maybe consulting large youth sports organizations, maybe doing some speaking if that's something that you might be interested in. There are other opportunities.

Shane: Also too, I'll tell you one thing that frustrates me, even coaching Upward last year. The guy who ran the organization was a coach guy, sports guy. I was a coach. There was a couple other people who really had a lot of experience coaching. It's really frustrating when you know how to run a team and a coach, and 80% of the other coaches in the league don't.

Shane: So there's a huge pain point there to harp on, man, you can find these other coaches who become advocates and evangelists for you because it's like, let's get all these coaches up to speed so that we all have a great year, right? So you've got easy pitch to all these big organizations.

Court: So do you think the buyer would be the league, or do you think they would help me sell it to the individual parents?

Shane: You would have two funnels. You'd have both.

Jocelyn: Yeah, I think you do both.

Shane: Because some leagues will want it, some leagues will want to help you, and some leagues won't care.

Jocelyn: And some of them will refuse to pay for it, but parents will find you and they will be willing to pay for it themselves.

Shane: Yeah, that's right. This is not, don't [inaudible 00:38:17] down too far. You don't have to segment everybody apart. It's the same thing you're selling to everybody. It's just, am I selling it to a group, am I selling it through the group, or am I selling it to the individual? It's like my history lesson plans. I could sell them to homeschool teachers. Doesn't matter, right? I just, so I don't want to, don't pigeonhole yourself into, I only sell to this. John is my avatar, and John is a parent of age 24 to 32. Don't do that to yourself. Just open up all opportunities and try to get the content out to as many people as possible.

Court: Very good.

Jocelyn: We've had a lot of fun talking to you today. I think that you have a lot of great potential in this site, and I can't wait to see what you do with it. Before we go, we always ask people what is one thing that you plan to do in the next 24 hours or so based on what we talked about here today?

Court: Well, I think changing that messaging of making it stress free youth coaching, kind of changing the direction of the site and then building those lead magnets around it, and making sure they're sports specific by the season is, and then start writing those ads like we talked about.

Shane: Yeah. One more thing I wanted you-

Jocelyn: That was like four things.

Court: Oh, sorry.

Shane: That's okay. He's giving you the order. He's [inaudible 00:39:28].

Jocelyn: No, I'm just saying, I want you to make sure that you're doing it in little bite-sized chunks. Don't overwhelm yourself.

Shane: Right now we're recording this in July, right? We're about six weeks from football kicking up, okay? It would be really good to reach out over the next six weeks to all the football youth groups around you and try to get something like we were talking about put together. One, I'm sure they would let you, because all you gotta do is say hey, I coached at Kansas State. I coached in high school. I've done the, and it sets your wheelhouse, because you've got so much football background anyway. It'll be really easy to probably get in with one of those organizations and if they could just get you in front of 20 parents, how valuable would that be? Not only to pitch something, but to just talk about their questions. And kind of get in front of their audience too. So that might be something good you could do after these next 24 hours to set you up for success, okay?

Court: That's great.

Shane: All right. Court, we've had a great time talking to you today, man. Can't wait to see what you do with your business. Thank you for coming on the show and being so transparent and helping everybody out there get better as well. Really appreciate it.

Shane: All right guys, that wraps up another call to one of our Flip Your Life community members. Today's bible verse comes from Luke, chapter 12, verse 15. It's all about contentment. And in the bible, it says, "Beware and guard against every kind of greed. Life is not measured by how much you own." Guys, don't get caught up in what the world says is right. Don't get caught up in what the world says to do. Don't get caught up in constantly chasing more and more and more money.

Shane: Your life is built out of can't miss moments. Your life is built out of the relationships that you have with other people, and it's built by the way you serve others through your online business, so keep everything in perspective while you're building your online dreams, while you're flipping your life, while you're living that flipped lifestyle. Build the life that you want, that lets you have those can't miss moments. That is how you find true contentment and true happiness in your life, not by becoming the next internet billionaire, gazillionaire. Not by becoming some Bitcoin investor that thinks he's making hundreds of millions of dollars and getting rich quick. It's about building a business and building a life that you want to live and that lets you be a blessing for other people.

Shane: That's all the time we have for this week. As always guys, thanks for listening to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, and until next time, get out there, take action, do whatever it takes to flip your life. We'll see you then.

Jocelyn: Bye.

Links and resources mentioned on today’s show:

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Hey Y’all, welcome to another Flipped Lifestyle Podcast Q&A w/ S&J!

In the Flip Your Life Community, we hold a members-only Q&A twice a month where we answer online business questions of our members live on air!

Today’s Q&A highlights answer the following questions: Question One:

"I am launching registration for my big conference next week. My wait list is going great-- 600+ people say they want to come, there are 150 spots. Any tips for promoting sales? also, I'm going to use a Membership plugin to take registrations (MemberPress) because then I thought attendees could use that to login at the conference and get their handouts, etc. Does that sound okay, or should I use a specific event type registration plugin, or something like Eventbrite?"

Question Two:

"First of all, FYL Nashville Live was AWESOME!! Thanks S+J and team for making this happen. Now, on to my question: You have been offering a free month to the FYL Community. If you're comfortable sharing, what kind of results are you seeing? My membership site is ready and I'm forming my beta group. I am considering having a "free" membership tier, as a way to get folks in the door and get to my first paying customer. Do you think this is a good approach to get my first paying members? Or would you caution away from that?"

Question Three:

"My question - i am planning on running an evergreen webinar "in the background" while I continue to blog, provide value, etc. Any tips on how to running an evergreen webinar strategy? I am using an old webinar that I have done live over the summer on classroom management that I feel would be really beneficial to teachers now school is in full swing...I am planning on using FB for ads and letting my email lists know that I have this webinar going on...would love any tips and advice and how to maximize this strategy. Thanks, ya'll...gotta get back to my classroom ;/"

Question Four:

"If you had a medical condition and limited energy, how would you prioritize your time for building and running your membership?"

SUCCESS STORY:

"SUCCESS: Since the Nashville, I started a waiting list, and yesterday, launched my new class! I have 12 people signed up already. I'm teaching the first webinar one week from today!"

CLICK HERE to get your FREE 30-DAY Membership in the Flip Your Life Community NOW!

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In today's episode, we help Jen create a weekly webinar strategy to grow her membership!

FULL TRANSCRIPT
Jocelyn Sams: Hey y'all, on today's podcast we helped Jen take her membership website to the next level.

Shane Sams: What's going on everybody? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. It is great to be back with you again today as we have another member of our Flip Your Life community on the show to celebrate success and to help them take their business to the next level. We're really, really excited to have Jen Camel on the show today. Jen, welcome.

Jen Camel: Hey, thank you so much for having me.

Jocelyn Sams: We are very excited to talk to you today. You have a very interesting business that I can't wait to dive into a little bit.

Jocelyn Sams: Before we go there, tell our audience a little bit about you, your family, and what you're doing online.

Jen Camel: I live in Southern California with my husband and my two kids. My background was in commercial real estate doing GIS analysis for companies. Then we decided to start a family, and I got pregnant, and I had planned a completely normal delivery. Never even occurred to me that I would have a c-section, but I was one of those 20% of first-time mothers who had a c-section with her first child. Going through that experience made it very clear to me how difficult it is for parents to find good information on VBAC.

Jen Camel: As I dive even deeper-

Shane Sams: What is-

Jen Camel: ... I saw-

Shane Sams: What, what does VBAC mean?

Jen Camel: Oh, good segue there. VBAC is vaginal birth after cesarean. So I had just collected a bunch of information for myself and after my VBAC realized how many other parents were seeking this same level of information. So VBAC Facts was born. As the website grew and I collected more of an audience I saw how many birth professionals really had a hard time staying on top of the evidence themselves and really wanted a more in depth understanding of what the research actually said so they can effectively guide their clients.

Jen Camel: VBAC Facts was really born again when I started my membership site about four months ago.

Shane Sams: Let me ask you this ... Okay, this is a big leap here. You went from commercial real estate to vaginal birth education, right? And it was basically because of this personal experience that you had. You had a c-section with your first child, but when you had other children you wanted to have it the natural way, correct-

Jen Camel: Exactly.

Shane Sams: ... is that what I'm [crosstalk 00:02:40]. Okay.

Jen Camel: Exactly, yeah.

Jocelyn Sams: You primarily target birth professionals then?

Jen Camel: I do. A lot of parents come to the site as well and there's a ton of information online for parents, but I found that birth professionals are really the ones who were interested in diving deeper and were interested in the higher level of analysis that I offer.

Shane Sams: Parents are like my wife's had to have a c-section so now you're like looking for information but it's not like you really want to buy something to really dive and get into it. But for the birth professional are we talking midwives, and doulas, and nurses, and people like that?

Jen Camel: Exactly.

Shane Sams: They want to go farther, right?

Jen Camel: Exactly. I do have online classes for parents available for those who do want to dive deeper. But I just found that birth professionals were really the ones who were interested in that level of information.

Shane Sams: Jocelyn, when we had our first child, had to have a c-section. It was scheduled. Was it because he was late or because-

Jocelyn Sams: No, it was because of his size. I don't know. It's kind of a long story, but my doctor said, "I'm not going to use any instruments because he's just too big." So we just made a decision to do that. My other child, she was breach.

Shane Sams: Yeah, so we had to do that. I remember though, you talk about parents like this, I remember I was like, "Oh my gosh, you got to have a c-section. What does that even mean?" I'm a football coach and when a football coach has a game he watches game film to prepare for it. I remember before Isaac was born I was sitting there on YouTube and I was watching c-sections, mildly horrified, but kind of just intrigued by it. I was like, "Jocelyn, come over here and check this out." She was like-

Jocelyn Sams: I'm like, "Absolutely not."

Shane Sams: She was like absolutely [crosstalk 00:04:26]. It's funny, because you said the birth professionals would be interested in this. I remember after I watched a couple videos it was just kind of like, "I'm over it." That's the surface knowledge that I need to help me go forward. But I could also see it was very scary because you don't know what it is until you have to go through it, right?

Jen Camel: Yeah exactly. With parents in particular it's trying to help them eliminate those unknowns so they can go in and they have an understanding of the lay of the land, and what this means for their future pregnancies, and what their future options are so that way they don't feel so trapped in it. Sometimes parents are told once a c-section always a c-section and that's just not the case.

Shane Sams: You basically did a ton of research on this. Are you a nurse, are you trained?

Jen Camel: I'm not a nurse.

Shane Sams: Okay, perfect.

Jocelyn Sams: I love that.

Shane Sams: I love that, that's awesome.

Jen Camel: I'm a consumer advocate.

Shane Sams: That's awesome.

Jocelyn Sams: I love it.

Shane Sams: That's a great way to say that for anyone out there listing who thinks you've got to have some kind of crazy professional degree. It's a consumer advocate, that's an awesome term.

Shane Sams: You built this information for yourself. Started blogging, sharing this on your website and it grew into an audience of birth professionals who were leaning kind of on your research and your efforts to curate all the latest facts into a nice, neat package where they could go consume it, correct?

Jen Camel: Absolutely. My first step was actually, I went immediately to speaking around the country. I grew the website when my son was about three years old, my second child. I started traveling around the country and presenting a six hour program that I had developed. Then I digitized that program online. Then I had other offerings, other courses, I had handouts. Then I about four months ago decided to just package all of that, except for the parent course, within the membership site. Then I have additional offerings for members.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay, I love that idea. I think that it's really cool membership.

Jocelyn Sams: We love to start all of our calls by celebrating a win and you recently shared a success story with us our community. Tell everybody about your recent win, what did you share with us in the community?

Shane Sams: You just told us about your membership, you launched your membership, how did that go?

Jen Camel: Well I was super thrilled to have 17 people join on my launch.

Jocelyn Sams: That's awesome.

Jen Camel: Yeah, yeah, it was pretty exciting. Then in the last few months it's grown to 33 people.

Shane Sams: Wow.

Jocelyn Sams: Sweet.

Shane Sams: That's incredible. How much revenue did that generate, adding a membership to everything?

Jen Camel: Total, it's been $7000 over the last 3 or 4 months.

Jocelyn Sams: That's fantastic.

Shane Sams: Isn't that amazing that you were a commercial real estate professional who had a life experience and you accumulated enough knowledge to be not only an expert, but expert enough to teach professionals about this topic. Now you've created this thing online that can generate $1000s. Is that not absolutely mind blowing that's even possible in this day and age?

Jen Camel: It really is and it's super exciting because it just goes to show that if you are super motivated and if you ... I'm just a naturally curious person and that's how this whole thing developed is I was just like, "Well I want to know all this stuff inside and out for myself." Then as I developed products and I had doctors look at it, and I had nurses look at it, and they would verify, "Yeah, you're on course." Then as I would learn how to analyze medical research, which is a massive learning curve, so much opens up for you if you're able to just be willing to learn and also have the time to do it, which is always the consistent struggle.

Shane Sams: It's like the people that you're teaching, what's amazing is we think about experts and we put people on this pedestal. But a nurse or a birth professional is kind of a generalist. They're dealing with multiple topics and they don't have the time to dig deep into this one thing, vaginal birth after caesarian section. You have dedicated yourself because of a life experience to doing that. You're serving them. You're helping them give better care to their patients just because you're giving them the right amount of information. That's amazing.

Jen Camel: Absolutely. Everyone's busy and when you're working full-time, and you have a family, and you have friends, and you might actually want to have a hobby or exercise, or do something for yourself, there's just not time in the day to stay on top of the mounds of medical research that are published every month. Then you couple that with the political realities of VBAC. We think medical care is like okay, you have XYZ symptom, you're going to be given the risk and benefits of your options, and then you're going to make a decision. The truth is, maternity care is nothing like that. Maternity care there's a whole lot of other factors that impact how those risks and benefits are relayed to patients. For providers and birth professionals to have a solid grasp on the research, it empowers them to be able to have confident conversations with their clients about the latest research so their clients can make truly informed decisions.

Shane Sams: That's amazing. Let me ask you this, are you still doing real estate or do you only deal with your blog, and your speaking, and your membership?

Jen Camel: This is all I've been doing for the last 10 years is VBAC Facts.

Shane Sams: So you basically built this speaking career type business and you put yourself out there with these trainings and now you're trying to transition that into this more membership model, more home-driven kind of business. Why are you making this shift? If you had this speaking, you were kind of renowned as an expert, and your blog took off, what's the point of changing it to digital delivery, membership site, connecting professionals around your trainings? Why are you doing that?

Jen Camel: Well when I first started speaking I was traveling quite a bit and it just was really hard to travel so much. Then also, you don't have the time to create, I didn't have the time to create other offerings because I was so busy traveling.

Jen Camel: I still travel and I still speak. In fact, this past weekend I was in Florida, but transitioning to the membership site enables me to offer more to my audience. What that looks like is offering a monthly literature review for my audience, as well as flushing out my patient handout series and offering other continuing education trainings online. It just enables me to reach more people and provide a higher quality of information with me not spending so much time traveling.

Shane Sams: That's awesome. I'm sure some people would look and say, "Oh you're a speaker, what a cool thing. You get to do that."

Jen Camel: Oh it is, it's super cool.

Shane Sams: And it is.

Jen Camel: It's awesome, it's-

Shane Sams: But then they don't realize you have bigger mission, which is to help more people with this thing that you've become passionate about.

Jen Camel: My mission is to increase access to VBAC. So every parent who's pregnant after a caesarian knows that they will be able to have a respectful birth.

Jen Camel: The truth is, there are 100s of 1000s of parents in the United States right now who are pregnant after a caesarian and they're filled with anxiety and fear because they are told that you either have to have a repeat caesarian or they have to have an out-of-hospital birth, an unassisted birth, or travel 100s of miles to another facility that supports VBAC. Not only does that put parents in a dangerous situation, but it also denies their right to make their own medical decisions about their body.

Shane Sams: Wow. What a powerful mission. That's just awesome. This is why I love online business because it just gives you so much power to do that.

Shane Sams: Jocelyn and I have a mission to help 100,000 families learn how to start an online business. I love what you said there, just to know it's possible. You don't have to do what the world told you to do your whole life. You don't have to do what society says is a good job. You don't have to go to law school if you don't want to just because your mom and dad wants you to. You don't have to go climb the corporate ladder. I just love how you said that, your mission is to empower people with this knowledge that you didn't have when you entered into this situation and you're using online business to do that. It's amazing.

Jen Camel: Yeah well it's the constant stories that I get from parents that drive me and the reports that I get from birth professionals on the political nature of medical care in their hospitals that just continually reinforces how important it is to get this information out there.

Jocelyn Sams: I love how you just started it and just didn't really care that you weren't a medical professional because that's a problem that we hear a lot of people say in our community. "I'd love to start my own business but I don't really know anything or I'm not an expert in anything." Well become an expert. That's exactly what Jen did, so I love that.

Shane Sams: Were you afraid when you first started? The first time you ever spoke or anything did you have any fear? We usually ask people about their fears and obstacles and you've come ... You're pretty advanced in your business right now, which we're going to talk about here in a few minutes, but did that worry you a little bit where you were "I'm teaching medical people about medical stuff?" How did you get past that?

Jen Camel: Of course you are always concerned that you want to make sure you're saying the right thing. You want to make sure you're expressing it the right way and so I had my little test groups of people who would review my materials and when I would present I would have providers, especially when you have obstetrician come up to you afterwards, like this past weekend, and tell me that was the best presentation on VBAC he's ever seen, and he was also a math major before he went into to medical school and he loved how I explained these complicated statistical concepts in a way that anyone can understand. So that's validating.

Jen Camel: As I spoke more and I got more and more feedback from doctors, and nurses, and midwives, I knew I was on the right track.

Shane Sams: The moral of the story there is hey look, if you're scared that you're not an expert enough go do it enough until you're an expert. Eventually, you're going to do it so much that you just know it inside and out and that was has basically happened with you and your business. It's amazing.

Shane Sams: Let me ask you something else here before we get to your question today. A lot of people in the forums this is one of the most common questions that we get in the Flip Your Life community, on the podcast, in any coaching that we do is what about liability, what if I get sued? What if someone does this? What about my disclaimers? What about my terms and conditions? It's funny because the people writing this are usually teaching people how to play an instrument or maybe I had a football coach one time and he was worried about getting sued because he was selling drills. But here you are literally giving people information in kind of a life or death situation. How did you overcome that fear of I'm not going to get totally legally ran over or how did you figure out what to put in your terms, and conditions, and disclaimers? What do you do about that in your business because it is medically related and I'm sure that there's other people out there listening to this that that could help them?

Jen Camel: Well there are multiple levels to that answer. The first one is be very clear that I am not a medical professional. I am a consumer advocate and I have that in my bio. I have that all over the place that I am not a medical professional. It's also in my terms of service that it's very clear that I'm not giving medical advice. Even if someone is a doctor, or a nurse, or a midwife in my community forums they're not qualified to give anyone medical advice because they don't know your entire background. I actually went through my terms of service with an attorney and have them go over that with me, so it's just crystal clear that who I am and what I'm doing is I'm sharing information and it is the obligation of the people who are collecting that information or absorbing that information from me to review it, particularly if you're a parent, to review it with your birth professional or your medical provider, and review in their individual situation. What is right for one person isn't right for another and only their medical provider can tell them what are the risks and benefits in their individual situation.

Jen Camel: What I'm sharing is more of a higher level information. Then how it applies to someone individually is a conversation they have with their medical provider. I'm very clear about that throughout all of my trainings and my materials is you have to talk about this with your provider because you, as someone who is not a medical professional, may not be able to apply this information effectively to yourself.

Shane Sams: Yeah, that's another thing that we have too is like in our terms and conditions ... Another big question that we get, because a lot of our community members succeed and so every month we get people that write us and they're like, "Is it time to quit my job?" We're like, "We give you a lot of information." We point people in the right direction. We do a lot of things for people, that's the one place that we never go is it's time to quit your job because I don't know what's in your bank account. I don't know all of the information in your situation. All I know are these snippets where we can help you take your next step. That's usually where we're at, but you've got to make those big decisions and that's true in every business. For anybody out there worried about the legal stuff, don't let that be a road block, you can figure that part out just like we all have.

Jen Camel: Well and talk to an attorney, that's the big thing. Talk to an attorney and understand what your level of exposure is and then decide what you're comfortable with.

Jocelyn Sams: All right, you've had some great insights so far. I think this is going to help people a lot who are trying to start out and they have these mindset struggles. Let's move on to your question about what could we help you with to help you get to the next level. What is your question today?

Jen Camel: Well I've heard a lot about growing your business with weekly webinars. My question is, how do you structure the marketing? Am I emailing my list every week regarding the webinar with a heads up email and a last minute email? Am I creating Facebook ads? How many emails am I sending after they register and follow up?

Jocelyn Sams: That's a great question from Jen today. We'll get to that answer in just a moment.

Jocelyn Sams: But first, did you know that you can get the answers that you need to start, build, and grow your online business too? All you have to do is join us inside of Flip Your Life community where you can get all of your training, coaching, and support you need so that you can learn how to start and grow your own online business. The best part is you can get started today for free. All you have to do is go to flippedlifestyle.com/free and you can start your one month free trial right away. You can join 100s of other family-focused entrepreneurs from all over the world inside of Flip Your Life community. You can learn how we started our own online business, replaced our income, quit our jobs, and we work from home every day. You can get started right now at no cost. Go to flippedlifestyle.com/free and start your free month today.

Shane Sams: All right, this is a question that we've really not covered a lot on the show, so I'm really glad that you asked that because it can be confusing to hear, "Do a webinar all the time," and you're like, "But who's going to come to the webinar?" How do I get people to the webinar? How often do I promote the webinar? What do I do with the webinar?

Shane Sams: It's important to not focus on the actual webinar and to focus on what the webinar is. The webinar is actually [inaudible 00:19:54]. It is a sales tool and you are going to sell on the webinar, but the main thing that you're trying to do is to find people that will buy your product and get them on your email list, right?

Jen Camel: Ah, okay.

Shane Sams: When you're doing webinars as a strategy, and that can be monthly, that can be weekly, whatever it is, it can be evergreen, it can be live, it doesn't matter. The number one thing you got to focus on is the ad campaign that gets people to register for the webinar because that's an opt-in. You are going to have ads going all the time. If you're going to do this like ... How often do you plan on doing it?

Jen Camel: Well I mean I was thinking maybe starting off with monthly and maybe going to weekly. I'm not sure. I'm just concerned about slamming my current email list and so-

Shane Sams: Yeah, don't worry about that because the goal is to flood new people in and invite people who are on the list to the webinars, okay?

Jen Camel: Okay.

Shane Sams: What happens is usually you start a ... Let's say we're going to do one once a month for right now. No, let's do this, let's play once a week to get over that fear of slamming your email list, all right?

Jen Camel: Okay.

Shane Sams: Let's say you're going to do a webinar every week, even if you don't. It can be the same webinar first of all. You don't have to do a different topic, you don't have to do a different thing every week because remember, if you've got 10,000 people on an email list and 100 show up to your webinar there's still 9,900 people that did not see that webinar, so what does it matter if you promote it every single week? It doesn't matter until they all watch it, so don't worry about that because you're never going to have your whole list show up for the webinar and get bored with it.

Shane Sams: What we've found is when we do the same webinar twice we have a lot of repeat people come and see it again because they like going to the Q&A because the Q&A and is always different, they want to see the same topic over and over again.

Shane Sams: Basically, if you're going to do a webinar let's say you're going to do it on Sunday night, on Thursday you start ads. You run ads, you try to get them to a page where they register for the webinar, they pick the time, they get the reminders and all that. Then you're going to send followup emails at 48 hours, 24 hours, and an hour before the webinar. What happens is let's say I see your ad on Thursday, I register. "Hey thanks for singing up, we'll send you reminders to let you know there's going to be a webinar." The reminders are, "Hey, we're going to have a webinar tomorrow," that comes out 48 hours before. "Hey, we're going to have a webinar tonight," that comes out the morning of. "Hey, we start in one hour." That's your basic reminders. Now some people do one like, "We're starting," as well. Now, you don't have to send all of those to your entire list every time. That's for the people that registered during that week or whatever. Anybody else on your email list, just send a message out the morning of, "Hey, I'm having a webinar tonight," and then, "Hey, we're starting." Then you can pull in people that are already on your list that way. That's pretty much the flow that we use when we have webinars, so don't over-complicate it.

Jocelyn Sams: I like this idea of maybe doing ads too to people who have been on your page, maybe that aren't on your email list, but they're interested in your website. So you could also invite them via an ad.

Shane Sams: You can also upload your email list and just say, "Hey, I'm having a webinar," and let them re-register. Right? See what I'm saying? Then you don't have to email people a 1000 times, you get them in another way. They know you. They're on your email list and it's like, "Hey, this is Jen from VBAC and I'm having a webinar this Sunday that you've never been to. You need to be there." Just let them re-register and tag them in some way.

Shane Sams: What do you use for your email provider?

Jen Camel: ConvertKit.

Shane Sams: Oh yeah, perfect. ConvertKit can tag them.

Jen Camel: Exactly [crosstalk 00:23:38].

Shane Sams: That's how you reach people without having to email them 100 times every week. You're not going to send the reminders for the webinar to your entire email list every single list, but you can in a P.S. mention it [crosstalk 00:23:53]. Say, "Hey, I'm having a webinar, have you registered for it before?"

Jen Camel: Yes, yes.

Shane Sams: Find other strategic ways to let them know because that is actually a mistake that a lot of people make with webinars. They'll only remind people that signed up that week. No, why would you have a list if you weren't going to remind them every time you were doing something cool? I send an email out every time I go on Facebook or YouTube Live. I'm like, "Hey guys, I'm going live in 15 minutes," just because I want them to be there. There's other ways that you can get to them that way.

Shane Sams: Focus on leads Jen because most of the people ... let's say you get 1000 emails and let's say 100 show up, for easy number. [crosstalk 00:24:32] in that case, you're probably only going to sell 5 to 10. But the point is, you have 90 other interested people who you can market to through your email list, through your other things to get them to buy, through your specials, through your sales, through whatever. It's those other emails that are the real value in doing the webinars because you have leads.

Jen Camel: Yeah exactly, exactly. Then what your follow up email sequence after the webinar? What do you recommend?

Shane Sams: Usually we just send out a simple one email, "Hey, here's the replay if you didn't come." Then I just let them go into my general auto responder and my general list [crosstalk 00:25:12].

Jocelyn Sams: Depending on how many people are there, how many people sign up we've even started doing some things that don't really scale like sending them personal videos. Like I might send a video and say, "Hey Jen, noticed you registered for my webinar but you weren't able to come. I was just wondering if you had any questions. Let me know."

Shane Sams: If you have 100 people at a webinar and 10 of them buy you have 90 people left. What if you sent 90 people a 1 minute video. It would take two hours to do that and you're saying the same thing every time, you're just like, "Hey, Jocelyn." "Hey Shane." "Hey, Jen." But you're actually taking the time to personally do that on video and they see you, that two hours may produce 5 more sales and if you're selling a $1000 product that's $5000. Those little things like that to follow up always usually pay off.

Jen Camel: Okay, that's a great idea.

Shane Sams: How did you envision this? Where were you stumped on this question? Where did it have you paralyzed or where were you overwhelmed with it compared to what we just said?

Jen Camel: For me really I was worried about slamming my list. I was wondering how often should I be emailing my list about these webinars. Then I was also just thinking through the technical back end of setting all of this up in ConvertKit, like if I set up a sequence for people who registered on week one, if the register again on week two ConvertKit isn't going to send them that sequence again.

Shane Sams: Right, I see what-

Jen Camel: You see what I'm saying? It's just a little bit of those technical details of trying to figure out, well I guess those people would just receive the email that goes out to my entire list that second week rather than ... See, I'd still have to figure out that sort of technical part.

Shane Sams: Yeah. Look, there's always going to be a hiccup where some people don't get the email or some people get an email they shouldn't, that's impossible. What you have to do is create something that actually makes sense in your brain. Here's what makes sense, I'm going to get a new person to register. I'm going to remind them the day before and I'm going to remind them the day of. That makes sense. Now, if they opt-in three times for the same webinar and all the sequences get screwed up that's probably going to happen sometimes. Then, in the second tier you say, I'm going to tell my whole list every week that there's going to be a webinar. That's okay, they're not going to get mad, they're not going to unsubscribe if you present it correctly. "Hey guys, here's that webinar." You can also exclude people that have been.

Jen Camel: Yes, exactly, yeah I would do that.

Shane Sams: You can exclude people that have been if that's really a worry, but I would just remind everybody because they may want to come back, they may want to do it again and you want to keep it simple. How simple is a broadcast on Sunday morning or on Friday night, or whenever you do the webinar? The easier you can make it in your brain the easier it will be when you build it in your tool.

Jen Camel: What are your feelings about presenting it live versus having them access a prerecorded webinar?

Jocelyn Sams: I think it really depends on your goal, you can do it either way. If it's something that you can do regularly you can do it live. Live ones will get a better conversion typically, but, you can't do them as often because your schedule doesn't allow it. The cool thing about an automated webinar is that you can do it as often as you want, but the conversion might not be quite as high as it would with a live one.

Shane Sams: Also too there's a hybrid way. We have a really good friend who does the live webinar, but basically the whole webinar is recorded. He shows up, welcomes everybody, hits play, and then he shows up for the Q&A and answers it live. That removes some fears about a good presentation or a good sales pitch because you can do it really good one, but you're actually there too to help with the sale and the conversations, right?

Shane Sams: Listen, there's no reason you can't do both. This is something that a lot of people don't realize. What if you did one live one and then the other two weeks of the month you did evergreen ones, you just played a replay of one you did before? Just be really open and honest, and transparent, this is not live. Put it in big red letters above it, this is a prerecording, but you're here. You can run both so you can get the best of both worlds. This is not really an either/or. It's basically what you want to do.

Shane Sams: For me and Jocelyn we really don't love doing live webinars because one of our most important things to us is flexibility with our schedule, that's a value. I would rather get lower conversion rates and just play stuff evergreen, or we've even kind of fallen back to just promoting content like sending people to our YouTube videos, sending people to an old podcast because we just value our time differently. We like live webinars. We try to do one every month or two, but it's not a priority for us. But, if it is a priority for you and you like doing it live ... My guess is you're a speaker so you're going to be really good at this, that you probably would do really, really well for a while doing some live ones and then take the best ones and turn them into evergreen on the backend.

Jen Camel: I love presenting. The issue is always time. That's always the issue.

Shane Sams: When would you schedule them? When would you-

Jen Camel: Well I'm thinking of maybe having it at a different time every week. The thing with the schedules of birth professionals is that often they are very unpredictable because people go into labor and they might have something scheduled and they can't attend. I think also offering people maybe a followup email offering them a link for those who couldn't attend live, a link to the recording.

Jen Camel: In the webinar are you offering a special for them to sign up and it's only valid if they sign up then or are you honoring that after the webinar is over?

Shane Sams: It would be honored in the replay period. Let's say here's a replay or we're going to honor this for 24 hours, or you could just not even rely on scarcity. Jocelyn and I don't really open and close things. What we do is we have special kinds of offers that we offer on our webinars so we don't have to do the in 24 hours you'll miss out and we may never do this again.

Shane Sams: For example, one of the things that we usually sell on our webinars is a quarterly price for our membership. We have a free trial, that free trial turns into a monthly, and then we have an annual if you want to save like 50%. Those just always exist, but the only time we ever really offer a quarterly price is on our webinars, so it's easy for us to say, "Hey, this thing is usually X dollars a month, but here's the quarterly price. It will save you this percentage. This is only available on this webinar." Even if you see the webinar in replay it's still only available on that webinar. That's how we've done that in the past because we hate the launch model. We love scarcity and timing because it does work. But we try to get our scarcity based around more like sales, like Black Friday or there's a reason for it, not we're on a magic webinar and you happen to tune in at the right time, and it may or may not be live, and here's the timer.

Shane Sams: It's just easier to offer something that's only available there instead of only available for a limited time, especially in your niche because way to know your avatar, because I never would have even though, "Oh man, what if somebody shows up to the webinar and they got to run out and deliver a baby?" Right, like [crosstalk 00:32:36] concern for your people so if you're like, "You've got 30 minutes," and you're like, "But she's only dilated to 9."

Jen Camel: Yeah, exactly [crosstalk 00:32:44] and so that's part of the challenge with the whole scarcity thing is because if someone's at a birth for 36 hours and they miss that window-

Shane Sams: God bless that women and family-

Jen Camel: Exactly, I know, I know. Offering something during the webinar that is not typically available. I'd have to think about what that is.

Jocelyn Sams: It could be like bonuses. There's different options of things you can do.

Shane Sams: Do you have your-

Jocelyn Sams: You don't have to just discount.

Shane Sams: Do you have your speeches filmed or whatever?

Jen Camel: Well I don't.

Shane Sams: Let me just tell you where I'm going here. If next time you speak have someone record you or record yourself, and get three or four of those, and just put them together in a little package that's not in your membership, and just say, "Hey, anyone who joins on this webinar will get unlimited access forever to these three talks I did." That way you've got a little bonus thing that you kind of keep out of your membership, and there's a reason to keep it out of your membership is you want people to go see you live. Those are out and to reward people for showing up at your webinar you let them have this thing just like if they would have showed up at your life event. That's a little something you can keep back. That's a good tactic for bonuses is to keep something out of your membership that you can use only on webinars and anyone that signs up then gets that and you can't get it anywhere else. That's evergreen, that's just three videos on a page with a link. So they get an email with a link to those and they've got it at the end of the webinar. There's lots of ways to create scarcity besides putting a timer on it.

Jen Camel: Yeah exactly, exactly. I'm trying to think of what bonus I would offer in the meantime before I get those three talks recorded.

Shane Sams: Well you have your talks prepared. You could just set up shop one day and record them.

Jocelyn Sams: Just do a screen capture video.

Shane Sams: Are you speaking again anytime soon?

Jen Camel: Not until December.

Shane Sams: Okay, well just do three little things that aren't in the membership for now.

Jocelyn Sams: Just don't make it so hard.

Shane Sams: Yeah.

Jen Camel: Okay.

Jocelyn Sams: Do a screen capture video of one of your talks that you did.

Shane Sams: Yeah, that's all you got to do.

Jen Camel: Okay, awesome.

Shane Sams: Does that dispel a little bit of your fears about the webinar process and how it's not as complicated as you think?

Jen Camel: Yes.

Jocelyn Sams: All right, great questions today Jen. I can't wait to see what you do taking action on these.

Jocelyn Sams: With that in mind, let us know what you plan to take action on in the next 24 hours or so based on what we talked about today.

Jen Camel: Well I am going to schedule my first webinar and start setting up all that back end. As you know, it's so time consuming to get all of the tags set up and all of your sequences set up. Just to get all of that foundation down, so that way when I want to schedule my weekly webinar it's all ready to go.

Shane Sams: Awesome. Hey, you invest your time now and you never have to do it again, right?

Jen Camel: Exactly.

Shane Sams: Hey listen, you've done so much, we just want to first of all say congratulations on building a viable online business that is making money and you've really flipped your life. You are in total control of your life, you get in total control of your business. We are super proud of you and we cannot wait to see what happens next when you start doing these webinars.

Shane Sams: Thanks again for coming on the show, and being so transparent, and just letting everybody listen in today so that they can build their business as well.

Jen Camel: It's been my pleasure and I'll see you guys in Nashville.

Shane Sams: That's right.

Jocelyn Sams: Yay.

Shane Sams: All right guys, that was another great call with one of our Flip Your Life community members. Remember, you can join right now for free and become a member of the Flip Your Life community and flippedlifestyle.com/free. We would love to have you in our forums. We would love to see the successes that you're having in your online business. Who knows, maybe someday you'll be a guest on the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast.

Shane Sams: Before we close up we like to close all of our shows with a verse from the Bible. Today's bible verse is Proverbs 12:11. The Bible says, "A hard worker has plenty of food, but a person who chases fantasies has no sense." So just like we talked about on today's show guys, get out there and do the work. Invest the time, invest the effort, invest the money in your business so that you can have success. Don't chase all these gurus, don't chase all the fantasies, don't chase the get rich quick schemes out there. Do the work and it will pay off. Until next time, get out there and take action, do whatever it takes to flip your life.

Jocelyn Sams: Bye.

Links and resources mentioned on today’s show: * Jen's website * Flip Your Life community 30-day trial

Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!

Get your FREE 30-DAY Membership in the Flip Your Life Community NOW!

– https://flippedlifestyle.com/free

You can connect with S&J on social media too!

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Hey Y’all, welcome to another Flipped Lifestyle Podcast Q&A w/ S&J!

In the Flip Your Life Community, we hold a members-only Q&A twice a month where we answer online business questions of our members live on air!

Today’s Q&A highlights answer the following questions: Question One:

"I am looking into buying a new website/business to enhance my current membership. I currently sell a meal plan subscription, this business would do the same, but add more products for me and help me to close the sale to those that may not have bought as the members could pick their own meals and won't have to have them chosen for them. It's a great enhancement to my site, but I don't know if I should spend the money or add the work, when I still have room for growth on my current program. Advice?"

Question Two:

"My content for my blog also needs to be designed nicely. I do not know how to do design. Write it then outsource?"

Question Three:

"Talk to me about Evergreen webinars and how I can use them to sell my membership and get more members. How would you suggest I incorporate an evergreen webinar into my current email nurturing sequence for people who have opted into one of my freebies? Or should I have it as a separate freebie, as a separate funnel on my website? Jocelyn, I'd love to hear how you successfully used evergreen webinars for Elementary Librarian "

CLICK HERE to get your FREE 30-DAY Membership in the Flip Your Life Community NOW!

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In today's episode, we help Luke grow his audience to get more consistent membership sales.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jocelyn: Hey, y'all. On today's podcast, we help Luke take his education business to the next level.

Shane: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, where life always comes before work. We're your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. We're a real family that figured out how to make our entire living online. Now we help other families do the same. Are you ready to Flip Your Life? All right. Let's get started.

Shane: What's going on everybody? And welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. It is great to be back with you again today. We are super excited to have another member of the Flip Your Life community on today's podcast, on today's show. And we're going to celebrate some big wins with them and help them take their business to the next level. Our guest today is Flip Your Life community member Luke Reed. Luke, welcome to the show.

Luke: Hey. Thanks for having me.

Jocelyn: It is great to have you today, Luke. And we are super excited because just a few minutes ago before the show started, I heard some gentle mooing in the background. And we determined that this is the first ever cow appearance on the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast.

Shane: Yeah. [inaudible 00:01:08]. As we talk to Luke, and he is standing outside in a cow pasture apparently, right now. You're going to hear some mooing. Our dogs are in the house. They may come in and start barking at the cows mooing through the microphones.

Jocelyn: And you know what, it kind of surprised it's taken us over 200 episodes to get cows on the podcast because-

Shane: I know. Right? We lived out in the country.

Jocelyn: Kentucky.

Shane: We have a cow pasture. We should go out, Jocelyn, to the cow pasture next door. And maybe our cows could talk to Luke's cows. That would be amazing.

Jocelyn: You can never have too many cows on a podcast. Right?

Luke: Why don't we try it, see?

Shane: Where are you and why do you have so many cows surrounding you right now? And should we be worried for your safety?

Luke: No, I am perfectly safe. But I'm in the middle of a cattle ranch, so there are cows about 200 yards away from me right now.

Shane: Nice. Okay. Well, if they charge, you let us know and we'll pause the recording. And we'll edit out any trampling that happens. Okay?

Jocelyn: If this whole cow thing doesn't work out for you, we need to know a little bit more about what you're doing online, so tell us a little bit about you, your family, your background, and your online business.

Luke: My online business started as many of your members, after listening to Pat Flynn and hearing your story on Pat Flynn's podcast. And I heard your story, and it just sounded so real. It really resonated with what I wanted to do and the freedom that I wanted to try and build for my family. I really took off after listening to that. I'm in the education business, so I was able to model a lot of what I've done after what you started with, with Elementary Librarian and US History Teachers. And it's gone pretty well. In, let's see, it's been just about exactly one year, I found a business partner to do the curriculum side of the business. And we built the website and put together the curriculum. Now we've got our first few sales already, so it's gone pretty quickly.

Shane: Tell us a little bit about your family and where you're from. Where are you at? What is your background? Like you said, you're in the education field. Tell us a little bit more about that. Tell us about your wife, kids, stuff like that.

Luke: Okay. I'm in Central California. I was born and raised in a little town smack dab in the middle of California. Grew up here and went to school here. Got my degree at the most recent University of California campus, which opened just as I finished my bachelor's, so I went on and got graduate degrees done. My wife is the reason that I'm now renting a house in the middle of a cattle ranch. Her father is a rancher, so she grew up raising cows, working cows. And it turns out that her dad and herself, they have a genetic mutation that causes heart failure, early onset heart failure, so part of my reason for wanting to do the online business is that. I want to be able to have freedom to spend more time as my wife goes through the health problems that she's dealing with.

Luke: And we've got two little boys. Our older son is our biological son. And then our younger son is adopted, so we just recently finished that adoption process, so got two boys now. We really like the bigger family. Two kids is just so different than just one.

Shane: Oh, yeah. My father-in-law always used to tell me, and I'm sure this is going to offend someone out there who only has one kid. My father-in-law used to tell me when we had our first kid. I was like, "Yeah. I'm a parent now. I'm a real grown up." Right? That's how I felt. He'd just laugh at me. And he would go, "You've got one kid. You're not a real parent until you have at least two." And I used to get so mad at him for saying that.

Jocelyn: But then after we had two we're like, "Oh, he's kind of right."

Shane: We were like, "You were right, bro. Pops, come on, man. You were right." It's hard.

Jocelyn: It's true.

Shane: I can't imagine going to three or four. I can't even fathom that.

Jocelyn: I can't either. Two is good.

Shane: I'm not tough enough for that. I know I'm not. I am not man enough to go. I'm running man to man coverage right now. I do not want to have to go to zone. You know what I'm saying?

Jocelyn: A couple of things kind of struck me about what you were talking about. First of all, that you live in a cow pasture in the middle of California. People probably weren't expecting that.

Shane: People are like, "Wait. There's cows in California?"

Jocelyn: There are because I've seen those commercials about cheese.

Luke: Yeah. The happy cows.

Jocelyn: That's right. Happy cows in California, so Luke's cows are happy I guess. Another thing that you said that kind of struck me was that you are in California, which means that it's like 6:00 AM there. Right?

Luke: Yes. Well, 6:20 now, but yeah.

Shane: You're doing what it takes to get up and make this online business thing happen. That's why we love you, Luke. That's why we wanted to bring you on the show too, just because I know you're doing the work. And I know you're dedicated. And your why is so powerful because you've got this really real threat in your life to the health of the person that you love. And to be able to say, "Hey. It would be really cool not to go to work," and be able to come home, and to be able to work with your wife, around your wife, and spend more time with your wife as she deals with these health problems. That's a really, really powerful way.

Jocelyn: Right now you're still working. Right? Tell us a little bit about that.

Luke: Right. I have a job as a lab coordinator, instructional lab coordinator, actually at the school where I got my degree. I finished-

Shane: What's your degree in? What is your degree in?

Luke: My degree's in chemistry.

Shane: Chemistry. That's right.

Luke: I work as lab coordinator there. And it's actually a really good job. It's very flexible. Working at a university is pretty friendly towards the workers. There's not a lot of hostile environment of get more work done and make us more money. But it is still a job and you have to go there. You have to be there. You have to do what other people want you to do. If I can move on from that at some point, I would really like to. And that's the goal.

Shane: Awesome.

Jocelyn: Lately we have been making some changes to our podcast. And what I mean by that is that when we started the free trial in our membership, our members started growing, so we have a lot of people in the membership now. And when we first started out, it was sort of just like a perk for being a member for so long that you got to be on the podcast. But now that we have so many members, we can't really do that anymore. So what we've decided to do is, we look for people who are posting success stories regularly. And the reason that we do that is because we know that those people are doing the work. One of the ways that we know Luke is doing the work is because he is posting regularly in that success stories thread. And recently you told a success story to us that I would like for you to share with the listeners.

Shane: It blew our mind when we read this because this was like the epitome of online business. Right? This is why you do it. Tell us a little bit more about that success story that you shared.

Luke: Yeah. It was my first online sale. And it was for an annual subscription to the lesson plans that I've made with my business partner. And it actually happened while my wife was in the hospital recovering from a blood clot that lodged in her kidney. So we had been there. Let's see, we got there on a Thursday. And they got her in, they got her into her room. Got her pain under control. She was there for four days. And on that fourth day, I had gone to my parents to see my kids, take a little break from the hospital environment. And as I was there relaxing, I heard notification come through on my phone. I went and checked it. Thought it was just going to be another email. And I pulled it up, and it says, "You just received a payment, $397 for an annual subscription."

Jocelyn: Yay. There was a celebratory moo.

Shane: Instead of celebratory mood. [crosstalk 00:09:44]. The cow is happy. You're happy. We're happy. The listeners are happy. This is the best podcast we've done in weeks. Amazing. Yeah. When you saw that, did you feel like the magnitude of, I have spent the last four days taking care of my wife in the hospital, and in the background my marketing, my website, my social media, everything kept working for me? Even though I couldn't pay total attention to it, even though I could only check it here and there from the hospital room, did it hit you? Like man, if you could make your whole living like this, then all of these things, your kids getting sick, your spouse getting sick, you would be able to deal with those things instead of business.

Luke: Honestly, it didn't hit me. That was the reality. But what actually hit me was pretty much complete freak out moment. This can't be right. I don't know what's going on. I think I need to contact this guy. And he probably wants-

Jocelyn: Somebody accidentally typed in their credit card numbers.

Luke: Yeah. Yeah. I think what I really realized instantly was that, oh my goodness, I've got a horrible problem with fear of success. And it took me another day and a half to settle down and be okay with the fact that somebody sent me money. And then it started to sink in. Oh, this works no matter what you're doing.

Shane: Did you tell your wife? Did you call her immediately and like, "I just made a sale"? What was that?

Luke: No, actually I waited until I was ... I processed it and I was over the initial reaction of this had to have been a mistake. And I told her a couple days later, and she was feeling a bit better. She could handle some news at that point. So it wasn't until a couple days after it happened that I told anybody. And then she just kind of looked at me like, "Okay. Well, you've been working on it, so there you go. What's the big deal?"

Shane: Right. Exactly. You know?

Jocelyn: I'm reading through some of the things that you wrote here. And I love what you said. It says, "Anyone who says they don't have time for online business doesn't want it badly enough. If I can use the time waiting for my wife to be out of surgery to answer questions and work on blog posts, anyone can find some time."

Shane: Wow. That's deep, man.

Jocelyn: That's very profound.

Shane: And it's also powerful because we've had family members get sick. And their spouse had to go to work to be able to pay for their bills, to be able to do ... And they literally, someone has to go and sit with the spouse while their husband or wife had to go to work. Right? And it's just incredible to hear that I can sit in the hospital, in the room, and work on my business while taking care of my spouse. My family member can go to surgery. I can take care of my things, but be there when they wake up for surgery. And these opportunities that we have to take control of our lives are just amazing. And we have to take advantage of them because 20 years ago, people didn't have that opportunity. Right?

Luke: Yeah. Yeah, it is quite an opportunity. You can do it anywhere, whatever's going on. If you can sit down and focus for a few minutes, you can get something done. It's quite an opportunity. And it would be a shame to just let it go by.

Jocelyn: I totally agree. You clearly don't struggle with time. That's something that a lot of people say that they struggle with, so that is really cool.

Shane: Well, first of all, congratulations for everything that's got you to this point, and on getting that first sale, especially such a big sale. I think back at our 11 cent moment. The first money we ever made online was 11 cents on an ad click, and I thought that was the greatest thing ever. And you're dropping $400 bones in your back account like nothing. Right? But I want to go back and just point out you have been an active member in the Flip Your Life community. You post your success forums. You post your action plan posts. You go in there and ask questions. You did a workshop with us. You worked with us. We worked with you one on one a little bit in coaching and call environment. And you've really put in the effort and the investment to get to that point of that first sale, because I don't want anyone out there to listen and say, "Well, he started a website, and someone found it. And he got lucky." Right?

Shane: Because Luke did not get lucky. Luke put in the work. He put himself in the right place at the right time so that someone could find that product and make that purchase. You need to just look in the mirror and say, "I deserve success," because you're putting in the work. And some people get really overwhelmed when people send them that money and think, "Wow. Do I deserve this? Am I expert enough? Is this really me?" And then imposter syndrome kicks in. And we've got to kick that to the side right now because if you can get one person to give you $400, then you can find 100 people to do it. You can find 1000 people to do it because there's more people out there just like that buyer. And it's just amazing watching your journey. And when we see these success stories in the Flip Your Life community because Jocelyn and I know all the background. And I just wanted to really bring that up because the listener may not know that, that you've done the work. And you deserve this, and you deserve everything that's about to happen in your business going forward.

Luke: Thank you. Yeah. It's definitely a lot of work. Everybody hears the polished side and sees the stories. But yeah, there's a lot of work that goes into it behind the scenes.

Jocelyn: Definitely. For sure. All right. Well, let's talk a little bit. You've already overcome so many things to get to where you are now. But let's talk about what is going on inside your head, or maybe something else that's holding you back right now. Do you have any fears or mindset issues, maybe something else that you think is keeping you from reaching the next level?

Luke: You know, I think there is some of the imposter syndrome. Every time I sit down to send an email out to the list, I struggle with that because my business partner is actually the one who does all the teaching and does all the curriculum. She's the one with the experience. And when I send the emails, it's hard because I feel like I'm saying things that aren't really from my background, so I feel that imposter syndrome. That's a challenge. Communicating to these people, I have about 300 people on the email list now. Sending emails to them, I get so nervous every time I sit down to do that.

Shane: Interesting. What are you sending? And this is really good because a lot of people pick a niche where they're not necessarily an educated degreed person and you get to do this. I have a master's degree in that subject. That's not what's happening. A lot of people pick a niche because they know a little bit about it. They do research. They learn more about it and they become a teacher in it. Right? What are you sending people? Just like, hey, here's a cool resource. Are you just relaying information from your business partner? What's in these emails that's making you so nervous?

Luke: It's just relaying resources for the teachers to use. And of course I've got high school teachers that are signing up for the emails. Sharing resources, sharing stories from my business partner's past and experience, sharing blog posts that we put up, just things like that. And I can't tell you why, but it just really feels like it shouldn't be me sending the email. I think that's what it is.

Shane: Basically because you're not the teacher when you send the teacher stuff. Even though you're just literally relaying information from someone else, that freaks you out a little bit because you're afraid people are going to be like, "Well, the person that hit send is not the actual expert." Right?

Luke: That's correct. Yeah.

Shane: This reminds me. Okay. Let's say you're walking down the street. Right? And I see you. I'm new in town and I'm lost. So I pull over, I'm like, "Hey, buddy. How're you doing?" You walk over and say, "Hey, man. I'm just out walking my cows. Moo." And I'm like, "Hey. Can you tell me how to get to the next town?" And you're like, "Sure. All you've got to do is go down this road, take a right, and go this way." Right? Or maybe you don't know where it is, so you pull out your phone. And I don't have a GPS, so you pull up your map. And you're like, "Okay. Here's a map I got for you. So you go down this road, you go left, and you go straight." So you give me those directions. Right?

Shane: Wouldn't it be ridiculous if I looked up at you and said, "That's great. But are you a cartographer? Did you make that map? Did you literally draw that map that you just showed me? Are you a member of the Army Corps of Engineers that built these roads that get me to the next town? Are you really an expert at that?" That would be ridiculous. Right? But that's what you're doing. You're like, "I'm not the guy that drew the map, so I can't show anyone how to use the map," and you're not even involved in the expert enough. And you can even be honest with this and be like, "Hey, this is Luke. Here's my business partner," whatever. You could even make up a persona if she doesn't want to identify herself. And be like, "She wanted me to send you this thing." You could even put a buffer zone in between. But don't ever be afraid to relay information, to curate things and give it to people because nobody cares. They just want the answers. They just want the solutions.

Jocelyn: And I think probably the story that you're telling yourself is that somebody's going to ask you a question you don't know how to answer.

Shane: Ooh, that's deep.

Jocelyn: Or somebody is going to say, "Hey. Who are you to say this to me? You're not even a teacher. You've never even been a teacher." Is that part of it, do you think?

Luke: Oh, yeah. It is. Definitely.

Jocelyn: Yeah. Sometimes you have to kind of dig underneath the surface and figure out what's really going on. And I think that might be what it is. What you have to do is, you have to rewrite that story and say, "If I don't know the answer to a question, or if someone says, 'Hey, you're not a teacher,' then you're going to tell them." Hey. I don't know the answer to that question, but I'm going to find it for you. Or no, I'm not a teacher. But my partner, who works with me, is and she's an expert in this area.

Shane: Yeah. That's also, we invent problems before they happen. And then our mind has to deal with them. And that's a problem, and that's something that me and Jocelyn really fight against is what ifs. What if someone sends me a question that I don't know? What if someone calls me out? They send me a reply and they're like, "You're not even a teacher. I can tell"? What if? What if? But until it happens, it's not really a problem. We can prepare for that. Like Jocelyn said, you can have the script ready. You can rewrite it in your brain. But until it's a problem, don't make it a problem because we have enough problems to deal with in online business and any kind of venture, that are real, that we have to deal with today, to invent problems that may never even exist.

Jocelyn: And that's something that is really effective for me. I was just saying to go ahead and prepare for that. It's something that I've done a lot. When I was doing Elementary Librarian years ago and I was raising my prices, I was raising them from $89 for the full year, which is insane, to $400 and something for the full year. And I knew that when I did that people were going to be upset, that they weren't going to like that because they're used to paying this price. And now they're going to have to pay a new price.

Jocelyn: One of the things that I did is, I wrote a response because I knew I was going to have people say, "Hey. Why did you change this price? This is bad. I don't like this." I went ahead and wrote a response to those people. I had not even increased the price yet. But I knew that I was going to have a problem with doing it because I perceived that people were going to be upset. And how many times did I have to use that script? Maybe two or three, maybe. But it made me feel better to know that I was prepared if someone had that response.

Shane: Your brain kind of dealt with it. You just kind of dealt with it. So maybe you could write down the four things you think someone ... What are you afraid of that people are going to send to you? Like, hey, are you even really a teacher? What's your response to that? And then categorically like: Why should I pay for these things? You just write a response for that. Maybe if you just do two or three of those, you've got them in your back pocket, and then you can say, "Now forget about any other ghosts that I'm imagining. I'll deal with them as they come." Right? But at least you'll have a couple responses to the big one. And you can just kind of move on.

Luke: That's a good idea. I like that. I had not thought of doing that.

Shane: Yeah. From talking to you so much in the community and on member calls and in our workshops and stuff, I feel like you and Jocelyn are kind of on the same wavelength. You know?

Jocelyn: I'm sorry, Luke.

Shane: Yeah, right. Yeah. But I don't deal with things like Jocelyn does. I'm kind of just like, "I don't care. I'll just deal with it when it comes." Like that, but that's how I mentally deal with, because I have the same struggles. I worry about people doing this. I worry about people thinking that. My solution is just ignore it until it becomes a problem, and then fight it then. But I think you're more of the, hey, I want to be prepared for this. I want to dot my Is, cross my Ts. So maybe think of the four big things you are afraid of, that you think people are going to call you out for in that imposter syndrome. Go ahead and write a quick two paragraph email for each one of them and have it ready. And then forget about the rest until you move on.

Luke: Okay. I will do that.

Jocelyn: Okay, Luke. We talked about some fears and obstacles that you're having in your business right now. Let's talk about how we can help you grow more. What is your question for us today?

Luke: I think my question kind of centers around sales. I had the first annual sale. And then there was a bit of a pause. And then a few more sales came in. Now I've got actually three annual members and five monthly members, so it's growing and it's moving. But it's not as quick as I'd like it to be. And I'm struggling with knowing what's next. What lever do I pull next to get things flowing more effectively? Do I do more ads? Do I send more emails? Do I do a bit more of everything? What should my focus be? Where should I put my efforts?

Shane: What a great question from today's guest. We'll get to the answer of that in just a moment. But first, did you know that you can get the answers you need to start, build, and grow your online business too? All you have to do is join me and Jocelyn and Luke and all of our other members inside of the Flip Your Life community. You can get all the training, coaching, and support that you need to build and grow your own online business. The best part, you can get started today for free, absolutely no cost to you.

Shane: All you have to do is go to flippedlifestyle.com/free, and you can start your one month free trial right away. Join hundreds of other family focused entrepreneurs from all over the world inside of the Flip Your Life community. You can learn how we started an online business, replaced our income, quit our full-time jobs, and now we get to work from home. You can build a life that you want, and you can get started today at no cost. Just go to flippedlifestyle.com/free and start your free month today. Now let's get back to our show and back to our guest's question.

Shane: All right. The interesting thing about your story, Luke, is where you're at because you've been doing this now for a while. You finally made the first sale. You finally made the second, the third, the fourth sale. You're getting some traction. You're getting that monthly recurring revenue going. And even though you feel like you've been in the game for a while, and you want things to accelerate so fast, you're just at the beginning. Everybody thinks the beginning is the day that they sign up for the Flip Your Life community, or start their website, or make their first product. But all of that other stuff is just preparing you for the beginning. I kind of think of it like an athlete. An athlete start ... Our kids play sports. Anna Jo does gymnastics and cheerleading. Issac does basketball. They're both really young right now. They're just in lessons to learn how to do the flips and learn how to shoot the free throws and learn how to do the lay ups. They're just starting to play in their first games and do things like that.

Shane: And then they're going to go to middle school. Then they're going to go to high school. And let's say that some day they get to go and play in college. Right? Well, really the first day of your career as an athlete starts there. All that other stuff has been leading up to that moment to get you ready for your actual career. And that's kind of where you are now. But the problem is we want it to happen now fast. You want to go straight to the NBA. Right? You're like, "I'm ready. Let's go pro, coach." But it's like, it can't happen that way. You've got to kind of look at yourself and say, "No. I'm still in ... This is the beginning. This is the true beginning, the foundation of my business."

Shane: It's not like you're going to be able to pull a lever and just wow, 500 members in the next three months. What we've got to do is, we've got to figure out a progression. We've got to figure out drills, those everyday things that you do to start adding this thing brick by brick. And I say that only to get you ready for this mental shift of, I've got to be happy with being the glacier and not the forest fire. I want to be a slow moving thing that adds something every day to my membership. Maybe it's a little bit of ads. Maybe it's a little bit of promotion. Maybe it's a Facebook Live. Maybe it's an email, whatever it is. But we've got to get you mentally shifted to now growing slowly because the turtle always wins the race every time you read the book.

Shane: We don't want to burn out. We don't want to get 50 members and then it dies. We want to build an everlasting, long running, stable, successful business. That's what I want you to be really focused on first is that mental shift of, it doesn't have to happen fast. It doesn't have to accelerate, especially now because this is really your first step, is getting these first few members. Next year is where you might make a 10X growth. You know what I'm saying? That's what we found. We were steady Eddie for the first year. And then month 13 is where we accelerated. Right? And I don't want you to go into this thinking, "Why do I not have 100 members? I'm a failure. Why didn't everything grow? Why didn't everything happen?" It's because this is really just the first step.

Jocelyn: With that being said, there are definitely some things that you can do right now to grow this thing already. And I imagine that you're already doing some. You're clearly ... You said you have ads on Google. You have Facebook. You have Pinterest, which is great. But I think right now what you need to do is figure out a way for the people who are already at your website to kind of spread the word for you. And the way that you do that, especially in this education field, is to find a way for them to share you without, first of all, blatantly asking for it because nobody likes that. And second of all, a way for them to increase their status.

Jocelyn: The way that I used to do this on Elementary Librarian is that I would offer free trainings. It would be something that they wanted. For instance, right now is back to school time, so for librarians, I made a webinar about open house, some tips for open house, things that you can do. It's very timely. It's relevant. They want to share it with another librarian. It's totally free. It's something cool. It's something that everyone needs, so right now is the perfect time to do that. I'm not saying that open house is the right answer for your audience. I'm just saying find something that they would think is really cool and they would want to tell their friends about it.

Shane: We grew our history business Facebook page to almost 5000 people, not by sharing cool lesson plans, not by running ads to sell them things, but we developed a strategy about two years ago. And we just made a commitment to we are going to share a funny meme every day that only a history teacher would really get. Right? And the result wasn't, hey, I want to grow my Facebook page to 5000 teachers. It was: Hey, what can we do to get people to share this page that are probably US History teachers? You have to focus on the steps and not the result. Everybody gets so into goal setting. And everybody writes their goals and puts their post-it notes on their mirrors and all this crap. Nobody ever does anything because they say, "I want to quit my job," instead of saying, "Hey, if I did X, Y, and Z every day, I would eventually get to quit my job." Everybody says, "I want to lose 50 pounds," instead of making a commitment to working out and eating healthy every day. Right?

Shane: I'm going to eat ... I'm going to only drink water every day. If you did that, a year from now, you would look very different. Right? Same thing here. If you make a commitment to two or three actions to grow your page, to grow your site, to do what Jocelyn said, to give people status. The reason we picked memes is because people love to share funny stuff because then someone says, "Hey Bob, thanks for being funny and sharing that meme with me." They get the credit for it. Right? You've got to think outside the box and quit thinking about your content. And think, "How can we share? How can we grow? How can we do what it takes to get more eyeballs?" Because more eyeballs equal more money. Right? And then put the daily things in place and say, "I'm going to share a meme every day. I'm going to do like Jocelyn said. Maybe we'll do a free training once a month." How involved is your partner? Is she doing things live, or is she just making content? She doesn't want to be on camera, or what does she want to do?

Luke: Primarily she just makes content. I don't think she really wants to be on camera.

Shane: Okay. Then what you want to focus on is stuff like blog posts. That could be very interesting for teachers. So instead of a live video training, maybe you get her. Say, "Hey. Would you write me a blog post? Five tips for blank."

Jocelyn: Maybe it's about new standards come out all the time. I don't know for sure if there are any new science standards right now. But maybe it's a guide to new science standards, something that people need and something that they would feel good about telling their friends about.

Shane: And then maybe you could have her send you funny things that she sees about teaching because I'm sure she's in teacher circles. Your business partner's around people. They're probably sharing stuff with her. Just be like, "Hey, if anyone sends you anything hilarious, send it to me." And then what you do is, you take it and you kind of fudge it to whatever your people are. What we do is, one of the big things is, I can't wait until back to school, said no teacher ever. Right? What we do is, we say, we just take that same meme and we'll change the picture of it a little bit. And then we'll put, "Said no US History teacher ever." Or we'll just kind of bend it a little bit over to our thing to kind of focus our message in, and make sure that it's history teachers [inaudible 00:32:58].

Shane: One of the things I shared this summer was we had Independence Day, July 4th. Right? People share American flags and something like that. And I put a British teacher sent me this, and it was a British flag. And it said, "Happy Traitor's Day," or something. I don't remember what it was. But it was just like something that only a history teacher would actually laugh at and share. Think of things outside the box. You've done so much content work now. And you guys are really focused on education and curriculum. Now you have to build a tribe. If you sent a thing to all these email lists, you've got 300 emails. Right? Are they all biology teachers, chemistry teachers, science teachers? What are they?

Luke: High school biology teachers.

Shane: Right. Send them an email that's funny. If you see one of these memes about biology teachers or something. I'm sure there's something funny about a dinosaur or something you can figure out and find. Right? Don't be afraid even to email all 300 of those people this funny picture just to brighten your day. And it says something funny. And then put, "Forward this to all of your teacher friends," because there's probably more than one science teacher in the building. Do the same thing on social media. Find a strategy that lets people want to share your stuff, and not just, hey, I have a lesson plan for tomorrow.

Jocelyn: But the big key for me is to do it in a natural way. You don't want to say, "Share this with all your friends." Don't do that.

Luke: Especially on social media.

Jocelyn: You want it to be something that they're going to share on their own without being asked to do it.

Shane: Yeah.

Jocelyn: All right. I would start there. I think that is a great way to grow your audience, mostly just by serving them. Think about what they want, what they need, and what they would be willing to tell their friends about.

Shane: What ideas have you guys had, have you had, to grow your audience? Forget about sales right now because if you focus on audience growth, the sales will come. Right? Forget all the ads. Forget all the promotions. And forget all the flash sales and Black Fridays and all that stuff. How have you thought to grow your audience in this space based on what you've learned about them in the last year?

Luke: You know, honestly, I don't think there's been a real focus on how to grow the audience. It's been on content creation and ring ads and the technical side of the website and some blog posts, but no real focus on: How do we grow an audience of high school biology teachers?

Shane: Right. And that's what you've got to figure out next because if you don't get more eyeballs, then you can't possibly have hands attached to them that can reach for their wallet. Right?

Luke: Right.

Shane: Ads can be a part of the strategy. There's nothing wrong sometimes with promoting stuff that's not necessarily sales related like a good blog post that only a biology teacher would care. Those are things you can promote to create awareness, to get more people on your list. And then once you get people on your list, you can sell to them. But no audience, no growth, no business.

Jocelyn: Just knowing you like we do, because you've been part of our community for a while, you're willing to do the work. You just need to focus on promotion now.

Shane: Yeah. I think the main thing here is, and this is the lesson to take away. What could you do every day and every week and every month? And if you just did it consistently, you would have no choice but to grow your audience. Things that we've chosen in the past, like our daily thing was a meme. Our weekly thing was a piece of content. And our monthly thing was an ad campaign or a webinar. That's something we've done in the past. And it's like if you just do that every day, every week, every month, and you just say, "Hey. This is the path. I'm just going to do this. My business can't help but grow." Six months from now it's going to look really different. You're going to have 3000 people on your list instead of 300 because you did those things.

Shane: Think about: How can I get more people to like our Facebook page? How can I get more people then to click something to give me an opt in? And how can I do that every day, every week, moving forward through this year to build this audience that will create explosive growth next summer, or as we go along? Right?

Luke: Okay. Consistent, steady growth of audience and a little less focus on making more courses and more material and more content.

Shane: Yes. That's always. Anytime anyone says, "Should I make another course?" We usually nine times out of 10 say no because you've got tons of curriculum. And also too, she's making the curriculum, your business partner. You know what I'm saying? You don't even have to worry about that. You just need her input so that you can get creative and say, "How could I do X every day?" And maybe it's a five minute thing. Maybe if you schedule it on Sunday night and just something happens every day. But every day, your biology teacher audience has an opportunity to share something. Because if you don't give them the opportunity, they can't do it. If you're not doing something every day, they can't do it. That's why I email my list every day, because if I email my list every day, and I give them value, and then I give them a link to click and make them pitch something ... Or to pitch something, they then have an opportunity to go join the free trial or buy something from us.

Shane: If I don't do it that day, I did not give anyone an opportunity to buy something from me. If we share a meme every day on our history site, well, every single day all those history teachers have the opportunity to share that. I think one of our last posts got like 1000 shares. And it's because we gave them the opportunity to. Really, you've just got to give people an opportunity to become a member of your audience. And then you can give them an opportunity to buy your product.

Luke: Okay. Seems so straightforward when you put it out there for me.

Shane: It usually is. People want the magic button. They want the magic tool. They want the magic whatever. But really, it's like if you just did these things consistently and prolifically every single day, your business couldn't help but grow. You couldn't help but lose the weight. You would overcome the obstacle if you just did it step by step over and over. And also, that mindset shift of be patient. It's not time yet for that growth. That growth usually happens at a tipping point. You get the snowball. You roll it down the hill. It looks like a snowball. It looks like a snowball. Whoa, it's getting bigger. Whoa. What happened? All of a sudden, now it's like 2X, 10X. It's an avalanche. That's kind of what online business has to do to run its natural course.

Luke: Huh. Okay. I'll stop looking for the avalanche.

Jocelyn: Exactly.

Shane: Yes.

Jocelyn: Well, you can look for it, just not right this second.

Shane: Yeah. The avalanche isn't caused by the avalanche. The avalanche is caused by the gust of wind that blew the first snowflake into the snowball. Right? And that's how the avalanche starts. Or it's the guy that yelled, and it echoed and it rumbled. And then it all came down the mountain. That's what you're trying to do right now.

Jocelyn: But keep doing what you're doing because I think sometimes people are constantly looking for something new to do. But you're doing a lot of the right things. You just need to do more of the right things.

Luke: Okay. Yeah. That's been another one of the shiny object syndrome. It's like, okay. Check mark. Got that one. Sale made. What's next?

Shane: Yes. And like really, that's usually where most entrepreneurs fail because what you should say is, "I got the first sale." And then you got three more. What caused those sales? Do that every day for a year. That's all you've got to do. That's why we switched our business model to this free trial thing because we were like, "Okay. What if people got in our membership? They would see how awesome it is and they would stay." Right? The answer was let's just let everyone into our membership for free for a month. And then they'll see how awesome it is, and they'll stay. And that's what happened.

Shane: But now it's commitment though. You can't ... If you're going to do one thing, you've got to do one thing. We've got a sales page up, but you can go in there for free and you'll see what it's going to cost the next month. But everything's free. Everything points to the free. Everything does that. Whatever caused that thing, hey, I ran an ad that got this, that did this. I shared something that got shared that did this. Just do more of that. Find what works, find the nail and just hammer it until it stops working. And then you find something new. Shiny object syndrome says, "That thing worked. I wonder if something else will work too." [crosstalk 00:41:22].

Jocelyn: And we deal with this too. We were just talking about this the other day.

Shane: All the time.

Jocelyn: Shane's like, "What about these 18 things?" And I'm like, "Well, the business is not broken right now. Let's just do more of what we're already doing." He's like, "Oh, yeah."

Shane: Right. I'm just passing on Jocelyn bombs. She told me that two days ago. Right?

Jocelyn: Yeah. Sometimes I think we try to invent problems, even though we really don't have any problems. You're getting members. You're getting paid members. You don't have problems. You just need to keep it going, grow more.

Shane: And also too, it's like a mentality of it's now or never. It always feels like that, doesn't it? In your online business, it's like, if I don't do it in August, I'll never do it. If I don't do it in July, I'll never do it. If I don't do it in September, I'll never do it. I'm getting sales now. I need more sales now, or it's going to all fail and go away. And it always feels now or never. But that's not really it. It's just like: What's the strategy this month? It might change a little next month, but it's going to be the same things with different content. Right? You've just got to get that mentality of one step at a time, baby step it, keep going forward. Okay?

Luke: Okay.

Jocelyn: All right, Luke. It has been a fun conversation today. I have loved the mooing especially. Before we go, we always ask our guest: What is one thing that you plan to take action on in the next day or so based on what we talked about here today?

Luke: I think what I'm going to go and do is sit down and face my imposter syndrome and find out. Make some templates. Make some emails, some responses to questions that I'm afraid of having in my inbox. And just let my mind be okay with the fact that they may come, but if they do, I'm ready.

Jocelyn: Exactly. I love that. I think it is a really important strategy even if no one ever asks the question. And they might not. At least you're prepared. It just makes you feel like you have a mental check box that you've checked off.

Luke: Yeah. It sure does, so I like that plan.

Shane: All right, man.

Jocelyn: All right. Thank you for [crosstalk 00:43:14].

Shane: We've got another call. And I've got one at my door, so we're going to jet. You take care of those cows, and we'll talk to you soon, brother.

Jocelyn: Bye.

Luke: Thank you. Bye now.

Shane: All right, guys. That was another great interview with one of our Flip Your Life community members. Before we go, Jocelyn, I always like to share a Bible verse at the end of all of our podcasts. Today's Bible verse comes from Proverbs chapter 13, verse 11. And in the Bible it says, "Wealth from get rich quick schemes quickly disappear. Wealth from hard work grows over time," so do what it takes to build a stable, successful, growing business. Put in the work. Make the investment. Don't look for the get rich quick schemes. Don't listen to all those people out there that tell you, you can do it fast. Build your business so it will be there for you and for your family in years to come. Until next time, do whatever it takes to get out there and take action.

Jocelyn: Bye. I hear some gentle mooing in the background.

Shane: I do hear gentle mooing. Are you near a cow pasture by any chance, Luke?

Luke: I live in a cow pasture.

Jocelyn: That's fantastic.

Shane: I think that's a first on the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. Mooing. We've had dogs barking. We've had kids walking in eating bags of chicken. We've never had a cow. Never had a live cow on the show. Good job, Luke.

Links and resources mentioned on today’s show: * Luke's website * Flip Your Life community 30-day trial

Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!

Get your FREE 30-DAY Membership in the Flip Your Life Community NOW!

– https://flippedlifestyle.com/free

You can connect with S&J on social media too!

  *Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show!*

If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post.

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Hey Y’all, welcome to another Flipped Lifestyle Podcast Q&A w/ S&J!

In the Flip Your Life Community, we hold a members-only Q&A twice a month where we answer online business questions of our members live on air!

Today’s Q&A highlights answer the following questions: Question One:

"Question: What is the best way to do a beta launch for piano lessons? I plan to have around 6-8 lessons finished when I launch. Each lesson has multiple videos and worksheets? I’m thinking $19.99/month for Beta and $29.99/month for regular members. Then having a discounted annual price."

Question Two:

"I'm worried my niche is too vitamin-y...while sustainability in and around the home is important and something more people should be doing, it's not necessarily a requirement. How do I make a pitch that's more aspirin-y? - try to appeal to any money-saving tips (even if there's only a few of those) in order to draw people into the site/mindset?"

Question Three:

"I would like to begin adding products inside my membership. What is considered enough at the beginning phase because I do not want to overwhelm my members with too much! Also, I’d like to have beta testers, but I don’t know how I should go about asking them to become testers. What are some offers that I could entice my subscribers to become testers? Thank you!"

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This is a very special episode, we celebrate our FIVE YEAR anniversary of quitting our jobs to work on our online business full time.

We asked our Flip Your Life Community a question:

Imagine, Shane and Jocelyn are travelling back in time and are talking to the Shane and Jocelyn from 2013. (Stay with us...) They're standing in a room together and it's right before they quit their jobs. What would YOU want to ask the five year into the future S&J if you could be in that room?

We answer those questions on today's episode.

Question One:

"How did you ignore the endless amounts of personal/household to do's and actually get work done?"

Question Two:

"How do you just go for it and know that there’s not a steady paycheck coming anymore? It’s so much easier in some regards to keep this as a side hustle while getting guaranteed pay from a company...How did you know it was time to QUIT?"

Question Three:

"With everything being so new to you at the time.... How did you determine what goals to set along the way? Did you find that your goals were too conservative, too crazy, focused on the wrong things?"

Question Four:

"What would you do different when starting from square one to bring in $$$ quicker?"

Question Five:

"What mindset did you each need to have to make the transition in the beginning? What mindset did you need right after you quit? What did you do immediately to develop systems, processes, etc to keep money rolling in and increasing over time?"

Question Six:

"What is the way you WISH or fantasize about REALLY quitting your job? Like do you wish you could have told them how horrible they were for keeping you from your kids and that you are going to do everything in your power to make sure no one is a teacher again and say I quit and throw glitter at them as you walk out."

Question Seven:

"What has the transition from a Full Time J-O-B cost you, that you never anticipated? Examples: physical, social, emotional, family, relationships, perspective? How did you cope with those consequences, or how are you accepting that?"

Question Eight:

"You know what I’d love to hear from 2013 S&J? Where they would hope to be in 5 years and how that compares with now. I think as I set goals it’s be helpful to hear others’ reflections of what they were and weren’t able to accomplish and what they couldn’t even imagine."

Question Nine:

"What did you say YES to in the beginning, that you would say NO to now?"

Question Ten:

"What TECH would you have spent more time adopting in the beginning to grow faster? What TECH would you get rid of now that you shouldn't have used in the first place?"

Question Eleven:

"What were the unexpected outcomes that 2013 S&J didn't even think would happen? What was the biggest worry/fear in 2013 that had absolutely zero impact on anything?"

Question Twelve:

"How do you continue to make progress and smash through roadblocks in business? What tips do you have to stay CONSISTENT and keep growing step by step?"

Question Thirteen:

"Did you worry about paying for insurance vs. your employer paying for it? What about retirement and all the tax stuff your job usually takes care of for you? Is it as scary as it sounds (asking for a friend ;))"

Question Fourteen:

"How has investing in coaching helped YOU TWO get to where you are? Looking back, do you think it's necessary for success?"

Question Fifteen:

"What is the biggest challenge you overcame, before making money and gaining traction?"

CLICK HERE to get your FREE 30-DAY Membership in the Flip Your Life Community NOW!

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Hey Y’all, welcome to another Flipped Lifestyle Podcast Q&A w/ S&J!

In the Flip Your Life Community, we hold a members-only Q&A twice a month where we answer online business questions of our members live on air!

Today’s Q&A highlights answer the following questions: Question One:

"Hi guys! My question is whether or not I need to optimize all pages on my website for SEO--for example my landing pages, sales pages etc. I ensure that I optimize all blog posts etc, but Yoast SEO is telling me that my SEO and Readability is bad on these other pages, but I'm not sure if it matters."

Question Two:

"I had mentioned my use of a TOUR instead of a WEBINAR and it worked, and someone suggested I shared what I did. You agreed. However, I don't know where would be a good place to share because that particular thread was in the Success Stories and I am not sure how useful it would be there. So where would you suggest that i share that for more people to benefit from it?"

Question Three:

"I am about to take a break from promoting so I can focus on taking care of my students. After 3 months of HARD WORK with webinars, facebook ads, live events I am closing my summer with almost 100 members/students :) SUPER HAPPY!!! Now what? Should I focus on preparing for the next promotion? Focus on creating systems to scale more? Should I focus on webinars? or Free Facebook live? So much to do! Gracias"

CLICK HERE to get your FREE 30-DAY Membership in the Flip Your Life Community NOW!

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In today's episode, we help Laura get new members and also retain current members in her education business.

Jocelyn: Hey, y'all. In today's podcast, we help Laura take her online education business to the next level.

Shane: Welcome to the Flip Lifestyle Podcast, where life always comes before work. We're your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sam. We're a real family that figured out how to make our entire living online, and now, we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? All right, let's get started.

Shane: What's going on everybody, welcome back to the Flip Lifestyle Podcast, it is great to be back with you again. Today, super excited to be with another member of the Flip Your Life community. This is a great episode, because this is a success story episode. This is a story with someone who has flipped their life. We're talking to Flip Your Life member Laura Keybart today. Hey, Laura, welcome to the program.

Laura: Hey, thanks for having me, today.

Jocelyn: Yes, we are so excited to talk to you, especially with this awesome success story. We look for cool success stories to find people to be on the podcast. This one was one we did not want to miss, for sure. So before we jump into all that, we want to know a little bit about you, your family, and what you're doing online.

Laura: Okay, sure. So I have a wonderful, supportive husband who has been behind me every step of the way that I've been going through this journey. I'm a step mom, I love dogs, I'm a distance runner, always running marathons, training for something. I've always got something on the calendar. We love traveling, we love planning vacations and different experiences around running events like those. So while I run while he watches football or visits a history museum.

Shane: Me and your husband would get along, dude. Like, if he's watching football, I just went to Philadelphia, and I hit like five history museums. He should have went with me, I'm just saying. He should have went with me.

Laura: Yeah, yeah. Well, when I ran the Washington DC, the Marine Corp marathon, he was hitting the museums and visiting those places. So yeah, it works out.

Jocelyn: Cool, cool.

Laura: So I just completed my 18th year in education as a teacher. I taught english/language arts, which is reading and writing for, oh gosh, 15, 16 years, grade 6th through 12. The past couple of years, I was an instructional coach working with teachers at a local school district. Most of that was great, I love teaching and working with kids and teachers. But, it's kind of the same thing that we all experience. We become fed up with terrible bosses, all the crazy workplace drama, mind numbing, ridiculous meetings and committees that go nowhere, and you start just kind of looking around.

Laura: What else could I do? I went through that. Is there something remote I could do? Something online I could do? Maybe I could teach myself how to code and build websites? Which, that was a joke, I tried that for a month. That's not me. But what could I do so that I have a purpose, I can serve people, but I can also bring in an income that I can live on? What options are there? So I started listening to podcasts around setting goals, and working remotely, maybe even working for yourself. I would listen to all of these podcasts while I was doing my long training runs. That's about the time I stumbled upon your podcast, it was maybe around episode, I don't know, 40 or 50 or so, starting binge listening. I thought, okay, that makes sense. This whole thing makes sense now. I think maybe I could do that. Maybe one day, I can quit my job. That sounds crazy, but so was running 22.6 miles. That's ridiculous too. (Full transcript at flippedlifestyle.com)

Links and resources mentioned on today’s show: * Laura's website * Flip Your Life community 30-day trial

Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!

Get your FREE 30-DAY Membership in the Flip Your Life Community NOW!

– https://flippedlifestyle.com/free

You can connect with S&J on social media too!

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Hey Y’all, welcome to another Flipped Lifestyle Podcast Q&A w/ S&J!

In the Flip Your Life Community, we hold a members-only Q&A twice a month where we answer online business questions of our members live on air!

Today’s Q&A highlights answer the following questions: Question One:

"What do you do if nobody buys during a sale ? I held a 24 hour flash sale last week and nobody bought . My back to school sale starts today and I am freaking out that no one is going to buy .

I emailed my list of about 1600 people posted on Facebook page and my Facebook group Fingers crossed I am panicking for no reason"

Question Two:

"Should I do a google ad to my webinars? I've been doing them to my website."

Question Three:

"I've been doing Facebook advertising for 2.5 weeks now. After some trial and error I've been generating 40-50 landing page views a day with a 16-18% conversion rate. Today things hit a lull - have spent half my daily budget and only have 8 landing page views but a 40% conversion rate. While that conversion rate is amazing, I'm surprised there have been so few landing page fews.

Is Facebook running out of people to show my ad to? FB says my audience is 'fairly broad' but it shows only 13,000 in the audience. I know the training says my audience should be bigger but this is what I've been able to come up with so far with children/youth/worship pastors and a couple of related ministry magazines.

Is it possible to exhaust your audience reach?"

CLICK HERE to get your FREE 30-DAY Membership in the Flip Your Life Community NOW!

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In today's episode, we help Carla and Al grow their fitness membership website You Will Learn Why a free consultation may make a bad lead magnet Shane's tips for running facebook ads and why frequency is something people always get wrong! How working together as a couple can be awesome and challenging at the same time FULL TRANSCRIPT Jocelyn Sams: Hey y'all, on today's podcast we help Carla and Al take their fitness business to the next level. Shane Sams: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast where life always comes before work. We're your hosts Shane and Jocelyn Sams. We're a real family that figured out how to make our entire living online and now we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? All right, let's get started. What's going on, everybody? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, great to be back with you again today. Super excited to welcome another member of theFlipped Your Life community and, in fact, we've got two members on today. We've got a couple with us to take their online business to the next level, it's Carla and Al. Carla, Al, welcome to the show. Carla: [00:00:30] Hey. Alan: Hey. Carla: Thank you for having us. Jocelyn Sams: All right, guys, we are excited to talk to you today. We have actually talked to you before on a workshop that we have done, so that is very exciting. You guys are taking massive action. Shane Sams: Massive action. That's why you're on the show, by the way, that's why you got the invite, because we're like, every day Jocelyn goes, "Have you seen this Carla and Al? They are posting every day. They are success stories all the time, they're killing it. Let's go. Let's talk to them." Jocelyn Sams: [00:01:00] Yeah, and a lot of people, they think that we don't come in the community or whatever, but we do. And we look to see who's taking action and who's posting regularly and those success stories and that's how you guys got here today because I said, "These guys are action takers and we want to talk to them." So, we are glad you're here today. Carla: Awesome. Alan: Awesome. Carla: Well, we wouldn't be having all those success stories if we hadn't of found you all. And we'll get into it a little later, I know, but part of the reason why I've been posting so many of those success stories is just because of you all and just pushing us to do more. Jocelyn Sams: [00:01:30] Love it. Shane Sams: That's our job. Push people off a cliff, baby, and I taught you to shoot down on your way. Right? Jocelyn Sams: You may or may not have a parachute. You know, whatever. Shane Sams: That's right but whatever. It doesn't matter. Jocelyn Sams: All right, well let's jump into a little bit about you guys. Our audience would love to know a little bit more about you, your background, and what you're doing online. Carla: [00:02:00] Well, it's the both of us but it started out just being me at first and I honestly, I had a daycare for 20 years. A very successful, in-home daycare, a waiting list, you know. There was nothing to complain about in that business at all other than the fact that I was home-bound all the time. So, even though I was able to be here with our son when he was younger at home, once he got to school, I couldn't be involved in school and all of those things because I had to take care of everybody else's kids. And then transitioned out of daycare when I was going into ministry, I was actually, my degrees are in Christian ministry and Biblical studies but then I was going on to seminary and that was going to require daytime classes out of the city, so I was going to have to travel to go. So transitioned out of daycare thinking that I was going to be going into full-time ministry in a local church. Carla: And while I was in school, I ended up, I decided, "I need to lose this weight." I had gained a bunch of weight in school with studying and snacking while I was studying and it's lik...

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Hey Y’all, welcome to another Flipped Lifestyle Podcast Q&A w/ S&J! In the Flip Your Life Community, we hold a members-only Q&A twice a month where we answer online business questions of our members live on air! This podcast episode features some of the highlights of these recent live member Q&As to give you a glimpse of how we help the members of our community, and help you as well in online business by listening in. Today’s Q&A highlights answer the following questions: Question One: "Here's my questions... I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed at the moment. I have a LOT going on right now with my business. I'm excited, nervous, and stressed all at once. A lot of stuff is about to take off. I'm piloting a new in-person workshop for nurses this weekend (it's sold out!), and I'll be rolling it out to my Instructors next year. My childbirth class has 30 Instructors signed up to train to teach it in November. I need to finish my book before Nashville, too. I just need some words of encouragement." Question Two: "Hi Guys ... I finished my product revision and bonuses and started advertising on Facebook over the weekend. I'm selling a Christmas play script and four bonuses for $97. I'm targeting worship pastors and children's pastors right now - those were the only groups I could find in the FB audience. So far, I've spent $15.00 and have had 31 clicks to my website with three of those people submitting their email address to read the script. So far no sales, but I'm not surprised as it often takes time to make a decision to choose a Christmas play script and it often has to go through committees or pastoral approval. (I am running a drip campaign to follow-up with them.) My question is this: so far, each script download has costs me $5.00. Is that normal? No idea what my actual cost per lead will cost until people start buying. Maybe it's too early to know whether or not the $5.00 per lead is worth it?" Question Three: "I was recently approached by a publisher about writing and publishing a cookbook the traditional route. The publisher is distributed by a large, familiar company, so I'd have the opportunity to be in all of the bookstores, big box stores, etc. On one hand, I like the idea, because it gets me out in front of a different audience and is a way to get my name out there and give me even more authority than I already have. On the other hand, it's a ton of work, for sometimes little pay (depending on the advance that is negotiated and how long it takes you to start earning royalties) and I've heard that in many cases all that you ever end up getting paid, is the advance. Do you have any advice for me?" CLICK HERE to get your FREE 30-DAY Membership in the Flip Your Life Community NOW! You can connect with S&J on social media too! Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show! If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post.

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Hey Y’all, welcome to another Flipped Lifestyle Podcast Q&A w/ S&J! In the Flip Your Life Community, we hold a members-only Q&A twice a month where we answer online business questions of our members live on air! This podcast episode features some of the highlights of these recent live member Q&As to give you a glimpse of how we help the members of our community, and help you as well in online business by listening in. Today’s Q&A highlights answer the following questions: Question One: "One of the things that has been holding me back is concern about legal issues. So, I have two parts to this question: 1. How do you protect yourself from concerns over copyright issues? If a course offers advice that is similar to other information someone puts out in a book, for instance. Can the person sue you for copyright infringement? I’m obviously not copying anyone else, but there are times where my advice may parallel someone else’s advice. So, how similar is too similar? 2. Also, I have trademarked my business name and submitted my ebook for copyright, and I’m wondering what other legal issues I may need to consider." Question Two: "I was wondering if you could delve into the topic of creating urgency with your offer versus always being open? I know you guys advised me last time to become prolific with my webinars and one-dollar-trials, but there’s so much emphasis on creating urgency as a means of pushing potential members through the door and converting them to paying customers. It almost sounds like becoming prolific with my webinars and creating urgency are two conflicting strategies and I need to choose one over the other. How does one figure out the right strategy for them and rectify these two seemingly important yet conflicting strategies" Question Three: "The last two months, none of my almost 30 members have attended my monthly Q&A member calls. I’m going to email my members and ask what they want the call to look like or if it’s just a scheduling issue. Do you have advice on ways I could structure the call? I did it similar to how you have yours set up, but in Zoom. I wanted to give them some ideas of what it could look like in order to get them thinking about what they want." CLICK HERE to get your FREE 30-DAY Membership in the Flip Your Life Community NOW! You can connect with S&J on social media too! Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show! If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post.

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In today's episode, we help our Flip Your Life member Nicola to refine her message and get more website traffic. You may remember Nicola from Episode 160 of the podcast! Her online business, Forever Young Autobiographies, focuses on helping folks write their life story, get it self-published and preserve their key memories to pass on to the next generation. Having braved Facebook live for the first time Nicola is looking at maximising the impact her content is having. She wants more traffic to her website and to build her email list faster. In this episode Shane and Jocelyn help Nicola strategise ways to refine the message on her website and figure out how she can get more visitors. You Will Learn How we all struggle with technical issues and what we can do to move past it How laying out a blog is just like laying out a newspaper! Tips for what matters the most on your website, especially that one sentence at the top Learn why you aren't getting as much traffic to your website as you would like How to get prolific with your content Don't forget to look out for the "Jocelyn bomb" in this episode! Links and resources mentioned on today’s show: Nicola's website Flip Your Life community 30-day trial Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family! Get your FREE 30-DAY Membership in the Flip Your Life Community NOW! – https://flippedlifestyle.com/free You can connect with S&J on social media too! Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show! If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week!

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"Here's three lessons I leaned from crashing and wrecking my hundred thousand dollar car." In today's episode, Shane talks about his crazy car wreck story that happened this week. Find out the three lessons that Shane learned from crashing and wrecking a hundred thousand dollar car. Learn why life is not what happens to you, it's how you deal with it. Hear how realising that bad things are going to happen to all of us can help you mitigate the potential for disasters. Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show! If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. CLICK HERE to get your FREE 30-DAY Membership in the Flip Your Life Community NOW! You can connect with S&J on social media too!

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"If I'm being really honest, the thought of hanging out with over 100 of our members for 3 days makes me extremely excited and...extremely nervous." In today's episode, Jocelyn talks about a mindset issue she is having with the upcoming FYL Live Nashville event. Jocelyn talks about her biggest fears for hosting a live event. Hear what Jocelyn's mindset coach suggested will help her move past those fears. Learn why she may disappear from time to time! Discover why Jocelyn says that "I like to think of Shane as the Salt and I'm more the Pepper!" Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show! If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. CLICK HERE to get your FREE 30-DAY Membership in the Flip Your Life Community NOW! You can connect with S&J on social media too!

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In today's episode, we help our Flip Your Life members Sarah and Ryan push past a plateau with their membership. Sarah and Ryan are a couple who've been married for 22 years and have 7 kids (who she home schools)! A few years ago Sarah started a blog to share their experiences, sidetrackedsarah.com and now she and Ryan run a successful membership website. They are currently dealing with hitting a plateau in their membership and aren't sure how to boost their numbers. In this episode Shane and Jocelyn help them strategise ways to take their membership to the next level. You Will Learn How to push past a membership plateau when you feel stuck at a certain number of members How to more effectively communicate your value to your customers to improve membership sales and retention How to tell if you have a marketing problem or a content problem How to manage a price increase and push past the fear of emailing your list too often How to plan out your membership promotions for each month Links and resources mentioned on today’s show: Sarah's website Flip Your Life community 30-day trial Success Story of the Week: Today's success story is from Stephanie. Stephanie says, "I'm excited to share I shipped my first subscriptions out today to my first 5 subscribers! I did a Facebook live about it, which was about 20 seconds, and it's getting great traction so WIN-WIN! Getting this business - an online food subscription business - up and running has required a LOT from the perspective of certifications, inspections, insurance, contracts, you name it. Plus the usual marketing and back-end technical stuff. I'm happy with where I'm at and have such a clear picture for what's next. I'm most excited to start get amp-up with creating content and MARKETING more heavily! Thanks to everyone here and S&J for the content. Shane said something in one of the master classes about "do AAA, BBB, CCC; not ABC, ABC, ABC" and that has been what I've aligned to over the last month and it's really paid off. I was spreading myself to thin to really make headway and now I'm in a great position to make this business pay off." Stephanie, we are proud of you! We would love to help YOU write the success story for your online business, learn how https://flippedlifestyle.com/free Can’t Miss Moment: Today's Can't Miss Moment is planning our live event in Nashville, Tennessee with our live event co-ordinator. The very first FL live event was planned entirely by Jocelyn! This time we are grateful to have our live event coordinator handle all of the details and make sure the event goes off without a hitch! We have a few tickets remaining if you would like to join us in Nashville. Head to flippedlifestyle.com/nashville for more details. Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family! Get your FREE 30-DAY Membership in the Flip Your Life Community NOW! – https://flippedlifestyle.com/free You can connect with S&J on social media too! Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show! If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week!

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In today's episode, we help our Flip Your Life member Allison Lopez. Allison has a career in education as a teacher, and an instructional tech coach as well. She also has experience working in IT consulting before. She had transitioned from one career into a teaching career because that is where her real passion lies. Having this experience, Allison wants to help other people make a career transition into teaching based on her knowledge and experience of the process. This is why she created her website, seconcareerteachers.com. She is currently dealing with some challenges to move her online business forward like time management, mindset issues, and specifically finding the right audience for her niche. Join us in this episode as we help Allison with strategic ways to find her perfect avatar by putting herself in their shoes to find out what they are looking for and where they hang out. [Tweet "If you've done it, and someone else hasn't done it, you are an expert and you can help them"] [Tweet "If you're finding excuses about something, then it's really not that important to you."] You Will Learn How to effectively find your audience in places where they hang out How to use strategic keyword research to find what your avatar is looking for How to find time to work on your online business How important your "WHY" is to help you focus on moving forward in your online business The importance of dealing with mindset issues first before anything else Links and resources mentioned on today’s show: Allison's website Flip Your Life community 30-day trial Success Story of the Week: Today's success story is from Melissa. Melissa says, "I would never talk to someone the way I talk to myself. Over the past two weeks, I've been busy with my family and many fun end of the year activities. Late at night I'd crawl into bed with heavy eyelids and a battered spirit. I tried, but I just couldn't get it all done for my website. There weren't enough hours of the day, and I got really down on myself. I found myself talk being some of the most discouraging conversations I've ever heard, and it was all in my own head. Never, not ever would I speak such defeating statements to a fellow entrepreneur. I recall hearing Shane and Jocelyn speak of this and suddenly I knew, truly knew what they had meant. I can see where a person might want to throw in the towel, but sometimes life is just that busy. Step 1 - sometimes life is just going to get in the way Step 2 - forgive those moments of self sabotage. Instead, i engaged in my family time festivities and thoroughly enjoyed those can't miss moments. Yay for me! Now Step 3 - back to work." Melissa, we are so proud of you! This mindset shift is so important for anyone who is starting a business. You can't let negative talk get in your way, and I'm so proud of you for recognizing it and changing that pattern. We would love to help you write the success story for your online business. At the end of today’s show, head over to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife where you can learn more about building and growing a successful online business with the help of our Flip Your Life community. Can’t Miss Moment: Today's Can't Miss Moment is a final trip to Toys R Us. Most of you know that Toys R Us is in the process of closing all of their stores. Shane had the opportunity to take the kids to Toys R Us one last time because who wants to miss Toys R Us closing? The kids got to buy one final toy, and that was a good time. Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family! Get your FREE 30-DAY Membership in the Flip Your Life Community NOW! – https://flippedlifestyle.com/free You can connect with S&J on social media too! Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family!

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"How can I be sure my idea is going to work?" In today's episode, Shane talks about finalizing your online business idea -- overcoming any fears, obstacles, or doubts about your idea. Your business cannot go forward until your idea is finalized. You might have an idea figured out, and are looking for your next idea. You might have too many ideas and could not decide which one to commit to. You might have external factors, fears, or obstacles that prevent you from deciding on an idea. Shane talks about the reasons that get you stuck when deciding on an idea, and the steps to take to overcome these obstacles and move forward in your online business. You can also watch this episode on our YouTube channel: FL 222 - How To Finalize your Business Idea Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show! If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. CLICK HERE to get your FREE 30-DAY Membership in the Flip Your Life Community NOW! You can connect with S&J on social media too!

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Hey Y’all, welcome to another Flipped Lifestyle Podcast Q&A w/ S&J! In the Flip Your Life Community, we hold a members-only Q&A twice a month where we answer online business questions of our members live on air! This podcast episode features some of the highlights of these recent live member Q&As to give you a glimpse of how we help the members of our community, and help you as well in online business by listening in. Today’s Q&A highlights answer the following questions: From Eva: "There are some loose screws with my sales funnel and I’m hoping you could pinpoint what might need improving. I’m feeling very stuck with my membership and not sure how to move forward and grow it further. My site has tons of opt-in opportunities offering freebies. I have an active Facebook and Instagram group with lots of followers. I have an email list of over 1,700 subscribers. I have an automated email nurturing sequence for any new subscriber. I’ve been emailing my list every 2-3 days and often posting the email copy on my social media platforms, each of those emails and posts has a pitch about my membership somewhere. I started doing keyword research to properly name and describe my YouTube videos and blog articles. I do a Facebook Live every Friday, answering one mom’s question posted in the FB group- I always promote my membership on the FB live as well. I then upload the video to YouTube, create a blog post out of it with freebie opt-ins and send it to my email list and social media following. I’ve been doing monthly webinars on Facebook Live, promoting a $1 trial for 5 days of my membership, where I get anywhere from 5-15 people opt-in for the trial, and half of those people usually stick around for at least a month. The vast majority of my members come from the $1 trials. Almost every time I post in my members-only Facebook community, I remind them about the quarterly and annual membership options. So as you can see, I’m really doing a lot here but can’t seem to figure out where the funnel is breaking down! Please help. From Janet: "Question about sales pages. How long does it need to be? I've seen many that have tons of copy, testimonials, etc. It a super long sales page more effective than a shorter one?" You can also watch this episode on our YouTube channel: FL 221 - Sales Funnels + Sales Pages + Sales Chain CLICK HERE to get your FREE 30-DAY Membership in the Flip Your Life Community NOW! You can connect with S&J on social media too! Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show! If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post.

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Have you ever thought, “There’s gotta be more to life than this.” There’s gotta be more to life than just working and getting that next paycheck. There’s gotta be more to life than just grinding your days away for the benefit of someone else. There’s gotta be more to life than just sticking through and doing all of these mundane routines. If you have, then you are correct. There really is more to life than just that. We believe that EVERYONE HAS A CALLING, a purpose, and we want you to believe in your purpose too! YOU can change your fate. YOU decide what to do. Open yourself up to all the amazing possibilities because without knowing and understanding these possibilities, you can’t act on them. When you do not act, you stay stuck where you are, always wondering what “more” feels like. Find the courage to put yourself out there, follow that tug towards your life’s purpose, towards something amazing -- something only YOU can do BECAUSE you are your own person, and no one else can ever be YOU. Whether it be to create, to fix, to teach, to lead, or to listen… We are ALL here to make a difference in the world, and that won’t happen unless you break free from your hesitations, the doubts, and the fears. To help you find the inspiration to take your next step is an amazing woman who has gone through and has overcome so many struggles in order to pursue and act on her possibilities. Joining us today is Flip Your Life community member, Wendy Zanders. [Tweet "“We have got to do something different in order to start living a life of purpose.” - Wendy"] Wendy is the wearer of many, many hats. She is a wife, mother, Ex-Unit Supply Specialist and Unit Armorer in the United States Army, Executive Assistant and Project Manager, who was diagnosed with ADD in her mid-thirties after recognizing some of the symptoms from her son’s ADHD assessment form. From an outsider’s perspective, this highly driven, bubbly and resilient individual, is living what most people would call "a good life". But after an unexpected loss in the family, she fell into a deep depression and all of a sudden everything became a blur. It took a while for her to recognize the symptoms, but she knew something was off. She knew she needed help, so she sought it. The healing process wasn’t easy, the battle felt long and hard, but she did it. Nothing is going to hold her down, nothing will dim her light. Wendy wanted to get her life back on track, she made a choice to do everything to make that happen. Things started to fall into place, she learned so many things, and she eventually found her calling as a Professional Home Organizer, and this was how FunctionalOrganizingwithWendy.com was born. Her mission is to share her functional organizing strategies with professional women struggling with ADD, depression, and anxiety so they can enjoy being with their family, love their homes and their careers -- helping them collect memories and not things. Her online business journey has just begun, so we’ll be helping her take her online business to the next level by sharing our insight on how to beat imposter syndrome, and how she can confidently embody her brand. We enjoyed recording this interview and we're sure you will too! [Tweet "“Just put yourself out there and stop hesitating.” - Jocelyn"] [Tweet "“Don’t be afraid to be the leader your people need.” - Jocelyn"] You will learn: How to transition your “real world” business online Advertising and marketing concepts How to deal and overcome “Imposter Syndrome” Being and building your brand Plus so much more! [Tweet "“If you're not aware of the possibilities, you can't act on the possibilities.” - Shane"] [Tweet "“It's going to take a lot of guts to do what you're going to do next.” - Shane"] Links and resources mentioned on today’s show: Wendy’s website Flip Your Life community 30-day trial

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Sometimes people think that they are unmotivated, when in reality they've never really defined a meaningful end goal for what they're doing." Today's episode answers a question from Jonas: How do you motivate yourself to produce content when you are brand new and no money is coming in yet?" In this episode, Jocelyn talks about the secret of motivation, the type of motivation that could get you going, and how to stay motivated so you can Flip You Life. You can also check the video of this episode on YouTube here: FL 219 - How to find motivation Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show! If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. CLICK HERE to get your FREE 30-DAY Membership in the Flip Your Life Community NOW! You can connect with S&J on social media too!

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Progress is better than perfection... And ANYTHING is better than NOTHING. In today's episode, listen how these words of wisdom was demonstrated and experienced by Shane in a pretty drastic situation (hint: almost getting hit by lightning?) in his quest to improve his stand up paddle boarding. You'll have to hear it for yourself! 2 Facts of Life: The day ain't over It's a new day The second part of today's episode talks about an important mindset to have when things don't necessarily follow your set schedule or plan. Real life things can derail us sometimes, but having the right mindset and optimism can get us back on track. Let today's episode motivate and inspire you, to help you Flip Your Life! You can also watch this episode on our YouTube channel: FL 218 - Progress is better than perfection + The day ain't over Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show! If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. CLICK HERE to get your FREE 30-DAY Membership in the Flip Your Life Community NOW! You can connect with S&J on social media too!

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Hey Y’all, welcome to another Flipped Lifestyle Podcast Q&A w/ S&J! In the Flip Your Life Community, we hold a members-only Q&A twice a month where we answer online business questions of our members live on air! This podcast episode features some of the highlights of these recent live member Q&As to give you a glimpse of how we help the members of our community, and help you as well in online business by listening in. Today’s Q&A highlights answer the following questions: My product is priced way higher than my competitors' ($39/month, $300/year), but as a result I'm not getting sales. I ran a massive discount for this week only to match my competitors' prices ($9/m, $99/y) and am happy I got a bit more sales (7 monthly, 7 yearly sales at it's almost the end of discount week), but going forward plan to continue selling at my high price, but with the $1 dollar trial for 2 weeks. What can I do to convince people that my membership has value compared to my competitors'? It's terrible not getting sales for weeks at a time because of the high price, and significant number of people have dropped out after the 2 week trial because of financial reasons. And because my niche is on a volunteer basis, people do cancel their memberships because of reasons like "lack of time" when they stop serving in church for the season. - Sandra I have a question about retaining my monthly members and upgrading them to a quarterly or annual membership. As of now, I've managed to upsell a handful of my members to an annual membership, but for the most part, most members leave after 1-2 months when their baby or toddler is sleeping beautifully thanks to my program! I've been trying to communicate the message that babies are always going through transitions, milestones and regressions- and therefore, you should upgrade your membership so that you know what to do during every single change and keep your little one's sleep in tact. However, for the most part, the message falls on deaf ears. I really tried to increase the amount of times I repeated this message. It just seems to be a really tough message to get across. One idea I had was to send out a monthly newsletter summarizing what they can expect of their baby at that age in the sleep department, and what potential issues they can potentially expect down the road (hint hint- don't cancel!) Any other concrete advice or ideas? - Eva You can also watch this episode on our YouTube channel: FL 217 - Offer + Pricing + Internal & External Marketing (Q&A w/ S+J) CLICK HERE to get your FREE 30-DAY Membership in the Flip Your Life Community NOW! You can connect with S&J on social media too! Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show! If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post.

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Are you lacking the confidence to make sales because your email list is small? Maybe you’re contemplating if people would even pay for your digital product? Put yourself in the shoes of the customer for a second and ask yourself: When you purchase something online, do you know what you’re really paying for? “Well, I bought this because I need to do this… or that…” Is that really the ONLY reason behind the purchase? Sometimes people confuse the real selling point of a digital product as just the product itself. Yes, they need your product to do this and that, but your digital product delivers something more than what that product description is saying… A product allows your customer to gain: The time to do the things they want. Convenience or ease of use. Confidence and support. Peace of mind and leadership. Your product or what you’re creating / what you’re about to create, is a part of a greater purpose, which is why you should step up and share this with others who need it to improve their quality of life. Your email list, no matter how small, have people who believe in you and the results your product will deliver. They look to you for guidance, so be confident with your role as the leader because YOU do have what it takes and YOU can help so many by leading them towards their next step. And this is why you can still make big sales even if you have a small email list! So, join us this week as we help FYL community moderator, Brad May, get his acoustic guitar business to the next level! Flip Your Life. [Tweet "So many times, we get so scared to do something, and when we finally do it we're like, "Oh, well, that wasn't so bad!" - Jocelyn"] [Tweet "You don't sell them what you teach, it's something bigger than that, what you're selling are results! - Shane"] [Tweet "Looking around, trying to do what everyone else is doing can get you in trouble sometimes. - Jocelyn"] You Will Learn: Why your digital product is more than just a product How to find the time to consistently work on your business How to stay on the same page with your spouse The advantages of focusing on one priority at a time Plus so much more! [Tweet "Focus on the 3 places you can make a difference so that you can build your business. - Shane"] [Tweet "You have to decide what's the best approach for YOU. - Jocelyn"] [Tweet "If you don't want to take a big risk, then take a few small ones until they add up to something huge. - Shane"] Links and resources mentioned on today's show: Brad's website UseLoom Bonjoro FYL Community: 30-Day Free Trial Success Story of the Week: Today's Can't Miss Moment is from Brad, and Brad sold his e-book while he was asleep. His message says, "This morning I woke up to a sale. I've been pressed for time lately to work on my online business, but I was inspired by Shane on one of the member calls to email my list more. So I did. I also published a blog post last night. I've been trying to force myself to take action, like putting my first e-book up for sale even though I'm not finished with it yet. Now that I've sold it, that will motivate me, even more, to get it done. Also, I only have 13 people on my list. It feels good to see things progressing. Thanks to the Flip Your Life community and S&J for all you have done to help me make progress." You are so welcome, Brad! We're so happy to have you, and what Brad is talking about is that we have a bi-monthly member call every month, where we get on live and he answer your questions about online business. It's for members only. We do it twice every month and we gave him some advice. He took action on it and he made sales. So what are you waiting for, y'all? Jump in our community! Brad’s website: http://acousticworshiper.com/ Note: Yes, this is the same Brad on this week's show! ;-) We would love to help you write the success story for your online...

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People don't want you to do something because they're too sacred to do it (themselves) sometimes.” In today’s episode, Jocelyn talks about how to explain your business success to family and friends without alienating them, and how to deal with the ones that are negative towards your success in what you do. Flip Lifestyle Podcast listener asks: How do you explain your business success to family and friends without alienating them?” You can also check the video of this episode on YouTube here: FL 215 - How to explain your business success to family and friends without alienating them Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show! If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. CLICK HERE to get your FREE 30-DAY Membership in the Flip Your Life Community NOW! You can connect with S&J on social media too!

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What do you do when you don't get those miracle mornings? Sometimes life gets in the way and derails us from starting our well-planned day perfectly, and there's nothing we can do about it. What should we do when that happens? Tune in on today's episode where Shane talks about a very important skill entrepreneurs (or anyone else) should have to deal with situations like this. You can also watch this episode on our YouTube channel: FL 214 - The most important thing an entrepreneur needs to succeed Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show! If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. CLICK HERE to get your FREE 30-DAY Membership in the Flip Your Life Community NOW! You can connect with S&J on social media too!

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Hey Y’all, welcome to another Flipped Lifestyle Podcast Q&A w/ S&J! In the Flip Your Life Community, we hold a members-only Q&A twice a month where we answer online business questions of our members live on air! This podcast episode features some of the highlights of these recent live member Q&As to give you a glimpse of how we help the members of our community, and help you as well in online business by listening in. Today’s Q&A highlights answer the following questions: I would love your thoughts on the optimal content plan for starting out. - Jennifer Do you have a course or can guide me to learn how to make a cover template/thumbnail for my YouTube videos (like you have)? And if there is something else I should be doing that can be automated each time I upload my daily videos? I have already been using the free version of Tube Buddy. - Cynthia I need to make videos -- both lectures & labs -- where? Thinking about putting up a whiteboard in my very cluttered office and just showing me and the whiteboard. Thoughts? - Monte I am actually encouraging my 13 year old to start a YouTube channel, any tips on how to name a channel and how to title the video? This will help me too. - Maribel I am reactivating a site that has not been updated in a few years, and am ready to get it up and going... I stopped right before really doing any promotion. What would you recommend using to deliver my content (video courses)? I was using Zippy Courses Plugin, but that no longer is being updated, so I need to change those video's over. And I have a free video course for my lead magnet as well... would you do that as an email course? Or use some kind of course platform? - Stephanie My plan is to do 2 month-long series over the summer on 2 things specific to my niche. I’m wondering, how do you feel about series of episodes dedicated to one subject? In this case July will be about “how to handle weeknight chaos with little kids“ and August I’m doing a month long Back-to-School Boot Camp. July is typically a pretty slow month in my niche, I thought the weeknight chaos thing would be interesting for them, but I am wondering if 4-5 shows on one subject is too many shows? - Karen You can also watch this episode on our YouTube channel: FL 213 - Content + YouTube + Holidays! (Q&A w/ S+J) CLICK HERE to get your FREE 30-DAY Membership in the Flip Your Life Community NOW! You can connect with S&J on social media too! Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show! If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post.

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Our guest this week is someone who wants to help new and aspiring composers succeed in the video game industry, the man behind Video Game Music Academy, Daniel Hulsman. Daniel is a 33-year-old father of 2, living in Boston with a huge passion for music. He received his Music Education degree from the University of Delaware, but due to the economic crash, (Hint: Most art-focused people's careers suffered) he had to shift careers and find a job that can support his family. He had worked for several corporations that allowed him to learn more about marketing and management, which he has found useful when he started building his own website: VGMacademy.com Daniel currently serves a public charter school as a Music Teacher for the past 4 years, all while managing a choir that records professional video game soundtracks twice a year. (Recording professional video game soundtracks? Oh, you mean, THE COOLEST JOB EVER?!) Ultimately, his goal is to create a stable, recurring stream of income online so that he can focus on his family, especially since his children are both still very young. But here's the thing, his website isn't gaining as much traction, and sales are mostly from selling semi-related products -- y'all know how frustrating that can be, right? So what does he do? Daniel sends us some hater-ade, a long email detailing his doubts, frustrations and surprisingly his hope that maybe - just maybe - we could help him become a successful online entrepreneur too! We can tell a troll from a critic, and this man was no troll, he really wanted something better for his family's future. How would you respond to someone with this sentiment? Well, look no further because this week's episode is all about how YOU can turn a critic into a customer, why you are not for everyone and why that's okay, and how to dispel that voice saying you are not expert enough. This podcast interview is PUMPED y'all! So much action, insight and real-life struggles, it's far too good to miss! ;-) [Tweet ""The next step is always the most frustrating." - Shane"] [Tweet ""You are not for everyone, so find the people who fit your mission." - Jocelyn"] [Tweet ""Capitalize on the things you already know versus starting from scratch." - Shane"] [Tweet ""Your struggles are just as valuable as someone who's got it all figured out." - Shane"] You Will Learn: The difference between a troll and a critic How to turn a critic into a customer Are you expert enough to lead? Understanding your mission online Plus so much more! [Tweet ""Being part of a community bring out your strengths & helps make up for your weaknesses." - Jocelyn"] [Tweet ""Focus on the things you can solve, instead of getting bogged down by the things you can't." - Shane"] [Tweet ""Do not be selfish with your gifts; your gifts are meant to be shared with others." - Jocelyn"] [Tweet ""Giving people the opportunity to change their lives, gives them a chance to succeed." - Shane"] Links and resources mentioned on today's show: Daniel's website FYL community FL 200 - Goodbye Grant Baldwin: The Speaker Lab Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family! Get your FREE 30-DAY Membership in the Flip Your Life Community NOW! – https://flippedlifestyle.com/free You can connect with S&J on social media too! Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show! If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week! Can’t listen to the podcast right now? Check out the transcript below. Jocelyn: Hey, y'all! On today's podcast, we help Daniel decide if he's expert enough to start his online business.

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If it is important to you, you'll find a way. If not, you'll find an excuse." In today's episode, Jocelyn talks about what you should do if you're having trouble finding time to work on your online business. Flip Your Life Community member Fatima asks: How do you manage your time with everything else going on?" You can also check the video of this episode on YouTube here: How to start a business when you don't have time CLICK HERE to get your FREE 30-DAY Membership in the Flip Your Life Community NOW! You can connect with S&J on social media too!

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How much do you charge or ask for the value of what you actually provide? Are you selling yourself short? Your digital products might be undervalued by the price you are charging. YOU might be undervaluing yourself. What are you really worth? A successful life doesn't happen by accident! If you want to make great things happen, you have to do these 3 things. Listen in on today's episode to learn how successful people think, take action and achieve great things! You can also watch this episode on our YouTube channel: FL 210 - What Are You Really Worth? + 3 Tips for a Successful Life Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show! If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. CLICK HERE to get your FREE 30-DAY Membership in the Flip Your Life Community NOW! You can connect with S&J on social media too!

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Hey Y’all, welcome to another Flipped Lifestyle Podcast Q&A w/ S&J! In the Flip Your Life Community, we hold a members-only Q&A twice a month where we answer online business questions of our members live on air! This podcast episode features some of the highlights of these recent live member Q&As to give you a glimpse of how we help the members of our community, and help you as well in online business by listening in. Today’s Q&A highlights answer the following questions: Should I pre-sell a membership before membership area is ready/setup with "special pricing"? Or just launch and say that things are being added daily? (It is a teacher/education niche) - Janet I've gotten a bit behind in promotion of my Launch - Online Training Workshop - promotion. It's scheduled for 6/24, I was planning on doing the 2weeks of promo email, Facebook ads and Google ads. I'm concerned about delaying the launch versus giving enough time for promotion. What do you think would be best? - Jennifer I've written about 75% of my book. I'm going to self-publish. What would a realistic timeline be to complete a book, tweak it and get it ready, and get it out to the public? Is January 2019 a good deadline to get it on Amazon and being sold? - Rebecca Can you talk about how I should think about YouTube for: YouTube Lives, my Launch Webinar (embedded into a LeadPage), monthly Member Calls. Do I used the same channel profile for all of those? For YouTube Lives, do I use a "reusable stream key" link, so I can use the same one each time? Do you use an encoder? - Jennifer Shane, you mentioned Dan Kennedy's quote that it's easier to find new audience than to write a new speech when it comes to doing weekly webinars. How does it work if we want to do weekly webinars on the same topic on YouTube Live though? Say you guys do "How to start an Internet Business" webinar every week. It'll be the same content every week! I know the value is in the interaction and Q&A, but why would people still bother to sign up for the next run of the same-titled webinar if they could just watch the replay and learn the contents? Wouldn't this be a case where it might be necessary to "write a new speech"? Also, there's 1 thing I don't get. I do YouTube Lives for my webinar. I'll announce when my webinar will be (say, coming Monday 9am) but anyone could watch the webinar without needing to opt in, since it will be available for anyone's viewing (since they could just click that "Live" video from my YouTube page). I know I want the emails, but I don't get why anyone would want to opt in if they could just join us as a general YouTube subscriber? - Sandra I paused all my auto-webinars during my spring membership drive. I need to re-start them, but I'm not happy with my current auto (Recorded) webinar software, EverWebinar. I recently left WebinarJam, and I'd like to leave EverWebinar, too. Any suggestions for which software to switch to? Is anybody else using anything that seems to work smoothly for doing automated, recorded webinars? - Rebecca You can also watch this episode on our YouTube channel: FL 209 - Launching + Ebooks + Webinars (Q&A w S&J) Get your FREE 30-DAY Membership in the Flip Your Life Community NOW! – https://flippedlifestyle.com/free You can connect with S&J on social media too! Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show! If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post.

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Our guest this week is a man with the passion to design landscapes that are beautiful, eco-friendly AND easy, FYL community member, Ben Hale. Ben and his family live in Ohio, where their house sits on a half-acre lot. He has a degree in microbiology and works full-time at his corporate nine-to-five job. It is his goal to make it online to provide for his family and share his passion for eco-friendly and hassle-free landscaping, he created AestheticEcosystems.com but could use some help with his promotion strategy and branding. Join us as we help Ben with his online promotion and marketing strategy while diving deep into how to target the right avatar with promotions and optimized branding principles. If you need insight on how to promote and rebrand your business, then you should not miss this episode! [Tweet "Find a way to do it and take action! - Shane"] [Tweet "If you're putting more time into the work side of your life, then something else has to be smaller. - Jocelyn"] You Will Learn: How to work on your online business without disrupting your priorities at home Social Media Promotion: Debunking a major myth How to target the right avatar Fixing promotion strategies and branding issues How to pivot your online business Plus so much more! [Tweet "Your avatar will either search for what they care to know or what they need, so give them what they want. - Shane"] [Tweet "Change what needs to be changed, as long as it serves your customers better, they’re not going to mind. - Jocelyn"] Links and resources mentioned on today’s show: Ben’s Website FL Time Management Lifehacks Flip Your Life community Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family! Get your FREE 30-DAY Membership in the Flip Your Life Community NOW! – https://flippedlifestyle.com/free Success Story of the Week: Today's success story is from Lynda and Kevin and it says, "Finally, our first video." "We've been talking about video for a while now, but we struggle with equipment and other issues like fear of the camera, etc. We finally invested in some better equipment and made a video of one of the recipes in our newest cookbook. After overcoming some tech issues, we dove in and made a great video. I quickly picked up editing skills, and cut it mostly together the same day. We still have a couple of things to add. We're really happy with what we did. The best part though was involving our 16-year-old in the process. I named him assistant director, and really took some time to explain the equipment and our process. I put together a quick shot list, was turned out to be super helpful, and our son was able to help us move from one thing to the next. Overall, it didn't take nearly as long as I thought it would, and we conquered some of our fears in the process. We loved how our son took to it, and feel we gained miles of progress with just this one video. We can now see how this will work in our business and we're supercharged to make 100 more." Lynda & Kevin’s Website: http://kevinshealthykitchen.biz/ Great job, Linda and Kevin, we are so proud of you, and we cannot wait to see what you do next! We would love to help you write the success story for your online business. At the end of today’s show, head over to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife where you can learn more about building and growing a successful online business with the help of our Flip Your Life community. Can’t Miss Moment: Today's Can't Miss Moment is working at our church's Vacation Bible School. So, Shane and I volunteer each year to work at our church's Vacation Bible School and this is something that we've been doing for a really long time, probably almost 10 years. It's really cool because when we worked at school before, even though it was the summertime, we still had a lot of stuff going on and it was just really stressful to think abo...

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You're not broken because you're an introvert... ...a lot of successful people are introverts, we're just a little bit quieter about it." In today's episode, Jocelyn talks about some of the challenges of being an introvert and an entrepreneur and how to overcome them. Flip Your Life Community member Trista sent in this question: I'm very interested to hear strategies for overcoming my introversion. I'm a teacher, and that trade has been one of my toughest challenges to overcome. At the end of the day, between interacting with hundreds of teens and standing before an audience, I've always felt so exhausted and stressed. This 10th year I opted to teaching virtually, and now I'm even more out of practice from speaking publicly." Jocelyn provides some great insight on this question, as well as debunking some myths about introversion like: All introverts are shy Introverts don't like people Introverts can't be front and center in an online business Jocelyn also talks about the importance of personality tests, and mentions a free online personality test called Personality Max that she took, where she openly shares her test results that you can check out here: Jocelyn's Personality Max™ Report Join us today to have a better understanding of introversion -- the myths, the truths, the nature of an introvert -- and how introverts can be successful entrepreneurs as well. You can also check the video of this episode on YouTube here: Being an Introvert and an Entrepreneur Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show! If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. Get your FREE 30-DAY Membership in the Flip Your Life Community NOW! – https://flippedlifestyle.com/free You can connect with S&J on social media too!

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Dealing with haters in your online business? This episode talks about how to overcome the fear of criticism, and ignoring the voices that hold you back (including your own). Listen to a real life example on how one of our members had her first hater in her online business, and experience actually ended up making her money! Learn social media marketing in this social media marketing course and Q&A! We've packed this tutorial with social media marketing tips for small business, and updated everything for 2018! It's time to create your social media marketing plan, watch and ask questions in the comments! This stuff is working NOW! Watch and take your social media marketing to the next level. Get your FREE Social Media Sales Funnel Template you can download NOW to take your social media marketing to the next level. Get it Here: FREE Social Media Sales Funnel Template You can also watch this episode on our YouTube channel: FL 206 - How HATERS Make You Money + Social Media Marketing Course Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show! If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. Get your FREE 30-DAY Membership in the Flip Your Life Community NOW! – https://flippedlifestyle.com/free You can connect with S&J on social media too!

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Hey Y’all, welcome to another Flipped Lifestyle Podcast Q&A w/ S&J! In the Flip Your Life Community, we hold a members-only Q&A twice a month where we answer online business questions of our members live on air! This podcast episode features some of the highlights of these recent live member Q&As to give you a glimpse of how we help the members of our community, and help you as well in online business by listening in. Grill the hotdogs!" - Shane This is an actual online business advice for one of today's featured questions. Listen in and find out why it's important. Today’s Q&A highlights answer the following questions: "I wanted to ask your opinion about my lead magnets. I came up with three lead magnets and plan to choose one from the list below and record the training video or write an ebook. Which one do you like better? I feel option 1 and 2 provide a lot of value even for a paid content.1. Questions to ask during the first three dates to see if you could be a good match to find your dream husband in short time. 2. Ice breakers and questions to ask during the first date to find your dream husband in short time. 3. Tips on clearing your mind and lifting your spirit to find your dream husband in short time. - Svetlana "I have a question about my lead magnet and opt-in sequence. Currently, the lead magnet is a set of 6 short science videos about one topic, which would be equivalent to one lesson plan. I’m wondering if six videos is too much information for them to process in the first email. Should I give them just the first video as the lead magnet, and then divide the rest into two follow-up emails? Also, for the WOW bonus, they’re getting 4 sets of video lessons (4 topics; each has 6 short videos). Should I give away this much? Or change it to one set of video lessons about one topic (which would be 6 short videos)?" - Jennifer "Please help me figure out how to start! I really want to teach parents how to use audio books and read alouds to make parenting easier and why how books trump technology. I want to teach them how using the right books can help make parenting easier because of bonding, character building, and getting to tackle important issues with their child through fiction. Is this even a good idea? I am struggling with the pain point and if people are searching for a solution. I am thinking the symptoms are disconnection, feeling too busy, feeling like you are failing as a parent, using screens to keep kids busy, etc. Can you help me get see a direction to go with this?" - Danae "My question today is about free Facebook content and lead magnets. I do understand the aspirin and vitamin analogy but I'm still struggling with what to giveaway in social media, and lead magnets, what to give away in e-mail and what to hold for paying customers only for my particular industry. I get more diet related questions from people than anything, yet the workouts/personal training are what I consider the core of my memberships." - Carla You can also watch this episode on our YouTube channel: FL 205 Lead Magents + Opt ins + Hotdogs? (Q&A w/ S&J) Get your FREE 30-DAY Membership in the Flip Your Life Community NOW! – https://flippedlifestyle.com/free You can connect with S&J on social media too! Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show! If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post.

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Joining us this week is the proprietress of MomKnowsCollege.com, Flip Your Life community member, Lea Saccoman. Lea is very passionate in serving her membership community. She leads and supports moms of high schoolers who need help with the college planning process. This includes a Facebook group where she coaches them directly, answering questions as to what they should know and what they should be doing to get their kid into college. She also has training videos, tools and other resources that are useful for planning and organizing each step in the process. Having done all that, she now wonders what her next focus should be, how to tie it all together and grow her online business. In this episode, we’ll help Lea prioritize tasks that are critical to her membership’s success and conquer those self-sabotaging mindset hurdles. Tune in to get that push you need to move yourself and your online business forward! [Tweet "“Our goal is to show our kids what’s possible, that there’s opportunity & freedom for them as well.” - Jocelyn"] [Tweet "“Better is better than best.” - Shane"] You Will Learn: How to stop self-sabotage Jocelyn’s prioritization system Critical tasks that keep your business running The 4 things every entrepreneur should focus on Plus so much more! [Tweet "“Stop thinking about it so much, just go and get it done.” - Jocelyn"] [Tweet "“The most important accountability partner you have is your customers.” - Shane"] Links and resources mentioned on today’s show: Lea’s website Flip Your Life community Asana Headspace Bonjoro Sandra Chen’s FL podcast episode Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family! Get your FREE 30-DAY Membership in the Flip Your Life Community NOW! – https://flippedlifestyle.com/free Success Story of the Week: Today's Success Story is from Carolyn Lincoln. Carolyn writes, "My Beta launch ended at midnight with not one membership as I'd hoped, but seven. As I put in a redirect to send people to a waiting list, another slipped in making it eight members. Yay! So now the work really begins to make and keep them happy. I have a call set up for today at 1:00 and I have more plans to. I hope to do a bigger launch for the membership in the fall after getting it organized and more success stories, too." Carolyn’s Website: https://playtobehave.com/ Way to go, Carolyn, we are so super proud of you! Carolyn has been working on her membership site for a little while now, and she has done great work and is bringing people in to figure out what they want, solve problems for them, and make this available to lots more people. We are super proud of you for those eight members and we cannot wait to see what you do moving forward! We would love to help you write the success story for your online business. At the end of today’s show, head over to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife where you can learn more about building and growing a successful online business with the help of our Flip Your Life community. Can’t Miss Moment: Today's Can't Miss Moment is welcoming our amazing new Flip Your Life moderators! One of the things that we have done recently in our community is we have appointed people to become moderators because Shane and I are having a hard time keeping up with all the post ourselves. We still do comment on a lot of them, but we knew that it was time to start bringing in some help. One of the things that we do is we look for people who are especially active in the community, and also regularly posting success stories, and we appoint them to be moderators of the community. There are many benefits to being a moderator. One benefit is that we have a private Facebook group for moderators only. Another benefit is that we do a quarterly success call or a quarterly Q&A with moderators only,

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Outsourcing is the key to taking your life and business to the next level. In today's episode, Jocelyn talks about tips for outsourcing your life to free up time for your business! What is holding you back from outsourcing your home management? Do you find yourself answering with these statements? "My parents didn't do it, so I shouldn't do it." "I'm lazy if I can't manage my home and my business (at the same time)." "Only rich people could afford this." Or thoughts along these lines? The (outsourced) person won't do it my way. I don't wan't anyone to see my mess. I would never let someone else touch my laundry. Well, you are not alone because these are the very reasons Jocelyn struggled with in the beginning. Listen in as Jocelyn debunks these myths and mindset issues, as well as share tips on outsourcing in your home to help you take your online business to the next level. You can also watch this episode on our YouTube channel: Outsourcing Secrets (Start at Home!) Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show! If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. Get your FREE 30-DAY Membership in the Flip Your Life Community NOW! – https://flippedlifestyle.com/free You can connect with S&J on social media too!

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Your job is NOT safe. Do you ever think “What would I do if I lost my job?” You should. You could lose it at any time. Let me explain why, and show you a better, safer way to earn a living. Most people think that you just need to get a good job, and you can live happily ever after. It is super risky to get employed by just one person and have everything on the palm of their hands, you don’t have real control of your life. Work for yourself Give yourself the power to succeed or fail. The only people we could count on are ourselves. True security and safety starts with learning how to do this with the right knowledge, support, and tools. We have a great advantage living in this age because we have the Internet. There will always be people who want to give you money online, out of the 4 billion people with access to the internet. We can help you do that. Have you experienced someone not showing up for a scheduled appointment? As an online entrepreneur, your time might be very limited and valuable, but the reality is things are not always going to work out as you want them to. In this video, Shane shares an important mindset and attitude to have when someone pulls off a NO SHOW on you. SHOW GRACE Have grace and empathy, everybody’s time is finite and valuable Sooner or later it could happen to you Don’t think that your time is much more valuable than anyone else’s time REDEMPTION Always offer people a chance of redemption We all make mistakes You’re going to need a second chance too someday “Do unto others what you want them to do to you” MOVE ON QUICKLY Have a “Rain Plan” – always plan what to do in case the person does not show up and your appointment does not push through Don’t wait around Do something productive instead Don’t let other people disrupt you Don’t let circumstances ruin your whole day HAVE PERSPECTIVE Don’t be driven by ego Respect other people’s situations You can also watch this episode on our YouTube channel: FL 202 - Your Job is Not Safe + Dealing with NO SHOWS Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show! If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. Get your FREE 30-DAY Membership in the Flip Your Life Community NOW! – https://flippedlifestyle.com/free You can connect with S&J on social media too!

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The 200th episode is finally here. Can you believe that it’s already been four amazing years since we’ve started this podcast? Thank you so much for supporting the podcast and listening to us each week! This episode marks a huge change for The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, our family, and our business. Brace yourselves. We have three huge announcements that you shouldn't miss. They could have a huge impact on you and your family's future! It's GOODBYE to the old and HELLO to the new on today's show! Listen now or read the transcript below. Enjoy the show! - Shane & Jocelyn Get your FREE 30-DAY Membership in the Flip Your Life Community NOW! – https://flippedlifestyle.com/free You can connect with S&J on social media too! Transcript: Jocelyn: Hey, y'all! Welcome to the 200th episode of the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. Shane: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. We’re a real family who figured out how to make our entire living online. And now, we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? Alright. Let’s get started. Shane: What's going, everybody? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. It is great as always to be with you again this week, and we are so happy to be celebrating our 200th episode. That's right! This is episode 200 of the Flipped Lifestyle podcast with Shane and Jocelyn, and by far, this is the biggest, most audacious, craziest thing we've ever done on the show. Jocelyn: And that's saying something because we've done some really weird stuff over the past six years. Shane: We've done some weird and crazy things, and we are confident that this is going to be one of the biggest and awesomest things we've ever done. We have three huge announcements that are not only going to change everything that we're doing professionally in our business life, but they are going to change everything for you and your family, too. Jocelyn: Some of you may be wondering why on earth we titled the 200th episode, "Goodbye.” Are we stopping the podcast? No, we're not stopping the podcast, but we are saying goodbye to some other things in our life, in our business. Shane: So don't worry, we're sticking around. We're going to keep coming to you every single week and helping you flip your life with online business. And just like we're sticking around, we want you to stick around for this entire episode. You're going to want to listen to every single minute because as we say goodbye to the past, you may be saying hello to your future. So sit back, relax, you may want to take some notes because this is going to be an awesome ride for the 200th episode of the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. Jocelyn: Alright, before we reveal what it is we're saying goodbye to, we're going to talk a little bit about our last 200 episodes. It's been a wild ride! We started out as two people from Kentucky, just behind some microphones, and here we are 200 episodes later, which is pretty cool. Shane: And it's always good, whenever you're making huge changes to your life or to your business, to kind of take a breath and sit back and look back at where you've been because that's always the foundation of where you're going. So for those of you who may be new to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, or maybe you've been listening for a while, but you weren't with us since the beginning, our story starts back in 2012 when we were school teachers. Jocelyn: We were like many of you. We went to work. We came home. And for all intents and purposes, we were happy enough. Shane: And then one day we found out our son, Isaac, was being mistreated at his daycare center and I asked for the day off to go deal with this situation. My boss was extremely cruel to me, told me that I could handle it after work and basically said,

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Have you ever just looked at your to-do list sometimes and say, "Alright, there are so many things to do, but my gut instinct is telling me that these 2 things are really important right now. So..." Has this ever happened to you? Life gets pretty crazy sometimes and you can find yourself juggling too many things, too fast, all at once, next thing you know you’re so overwhelmed and stuck right where you are! The good news is you have the option to do something about being stuck, and this is why you’ll find great insight and inspiration in today’s guest, Oleg Leontovych. Oleg is one of our International Flip Your Life members, and he’s here to ask his next level questions to flip his online business to the next level. A quick look into Oleg’s online business journey… Oleg is originally from Ukraine, but had moved to Canada and served the I.T. industry for 18 years where he focused on software quality assurance. He has changed employers in several industries, survived 3 layoffs, and eventually gotten so frustrated with the job itself due to the overwhelming fear that they can let him go despite his position. He has been reading into online business, getting himself acquainted with things like passive income and learning how to start his own business since 2013, but lacked the motivation to pursue it any further. This all changed in September 2017, when he decided to go all-in on creating a stable, passive income online after getting laid off. Now, he calls the shots and has made up his mind to finally pursue something he is really passionate in: gardening and teaching others how to enjoy the literal fruits (and vegetables) of their labor! But something is still missing from his equation, and that’s where we step in. Join us as we help Oleg refocus and work on his first paid product to give him the momentum he needs to grow his online business! P.S. Stick around and tune in, don’t miss out on all the amazing tips we’ll share with this week’s guest! You Will Learn: Best way to overcome the common fear every entrepreneur has to face How your calendar will help you prioritize and let you take that next step “Comparison” Syndrome and why you should avoid it Language barriers and why your voice is unique The power of creating consistent, quality content Plus so much more! [Tweet "“Sometimes people think they only have one chance, and if they fail and don’t get it right the first time then the opportunity is lost -- this is not true.” - Jocelyn"] [Tweet "“Everything that you do, even if it's not incredibly successful from a financial standpoint, is successful from a learning standpoint.” - Jocelyn"] Links and resources mentioned on today’s show: Oleg’s website - https://gardenhowto.com/ Flip Your Life Community - http://flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife Join us at FYL Live 2018, Nashville, TN! - https://flippedlifestyle.com/nashville [Tweet "“Being self-employed online is so cool because you can change things and pivot so fast. You just gotta decide to do it!” - Shane"] [Tweet "“Consistency in creating content is what builds wealth.” - Shane"] Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family! Click here to leave us an iTunes review and subscribe to the show! We may even read yours on the air! Success Story of the Week: Today's Success Story from our Flip Your Life community is from Cynthia, and Cynthia's post says, "I quit my day job." Now, listen, when we log in, and we see one of these, "Quit my day jobs, I flipped my life, everything has changed, not only in my life but my kids' life, my kids' kids' lives, everything going forward," that's when we take a big deep breath and are like, "Wow, man, that is unbelievable!" So, we logged into the forums today, clicked over to the Success Forums, and I always try to start my day with all these positive posts in the success forum,

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Today’s guest is Flip Your Life community member, Julie Halitzka. Hailing from Louisville, Kentucky, Julie loves singing and plays a number of musical instruments. She has worked with youth in various roles as a worship leader, play & music teacher, and youth counselor for over 10 years. She decided to take her business online to change and improve their current financial circumstances. Julie created an early childhood music curriculum (for children ages 0-6) called Rockin’ Rhythms Music. After starting her website, she had the original intent of marketing this curriculum to teachers. This proved to be a bit of an adjustment from her job as a music teacher, where she is mainly marketing to parents. Not having a well-established email list yet, Julie struggles with the question what a lot of online entrepreneurs have with their digital product -- “Will people buy this?” -- and the fear of not finding the right people to sell to. Join us today as we help Julie reframe her avatar, grow and build her email list. We also help her with improving content strategies for better efficiency, prioritizing and time management when “life gets in the way”, as well as accountability. [Tweet "Live video is much better when you’ve already filtered out your audience."] [Tweet "Create static content based on what people are actually looking for."] [Tweet "Just because people are not on your list does not mean those people don't exist, they're out there somewhere."] You Will Learn: The importance of knowing the potential scope of your digital product to be targeting the right avatar How to create content more efficiently Overcoming the overwhelm of time management when life gets in the way Creating content based on Keyword Research Content strategies to build and grow your email list Plus so much more! [Tweet "Prioritize and make things that are the most important stay on top."] [Tweet "Sometimes it's going to get derailed, but we don't have time to not get this stuff done."] [Tweet "Show them what to do before you sell them your detailed plan on how to do it."] Related Links: Julie’s Rockin’ Rhythms Music website The Duck Song How busy parents can find the time to start, build, and grow a successful online business The Flip Your Life Community Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family! Click here to leave us an iTunes review and subscribe to the show! We may even read yours on the air! ? Success Story of the Week: Alright guys, we got a cool success story this week from a Flip Your Life community member named Elle, and Elle posted in our success for them this week and said, "I finished my course." Her actual post title says, "Champagne Moment." Elle says, "It's so great to log in and see so many of you doing well." She's talking about our Success Forum. "Typically when I'm working on a major project, I go into hiding. Well, I'm out of the cave, and I wanted to share my champagne moment with you. For the past six months, I had been planning, creating and building my membership site. Today, I finished the course that is a huge selling point in my membership site. The course consists of five modules with three to five lessons in each module. What a relief and an accomplishment. Along with a major course, I filmed videos for a video library, created and designed worksheets, and I've recruited four influencers to be interviewed as guests on a recorded Q&A for members. My launch date is coming up soon. I have 20 people signed up for Beta memberships at a discounted rate." Elle's website: http://www.thenurseconsultantnetwork.com Man, that is an awesome success story that not only has she pre-sold and got all these members and Beta people signed up, but she's done with her course. That's a huge load off your back when you create something that's evergreen that you can sell for years.

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“How do you encourage young children to have the entrepreneurial mindset?” Well… you can get them a cool book about starting a business! Sounds like a good plan, only this genre doesn’t really sound very appealing to kids. Oh! How about sending them to one of those fancy, super rare business schools? Yeah, this would work EXCEPT your state probably doesn’t have one OR it’s too far and too expensive to send your child / children there. So, what’s a parent to do to get their children interested in flipping their life in an amazing and non-traditional way?! 2 words... BY EXAMPLE. Think about it! Children, by default, look up to their parents and want to do what they’re doing. “But why? Being an adult is boring and monotonous.” This is where it gets awesome, y’all! Kids are absolutely fascinated by everything we do. They think we’re this super high leveled person who CAN DO ANYTHING -- AND THEY’RE RIGHT. So show the budding entrepreneur in your life that you are a dedicated action taker. Because the fastest and easiest way to encourage your kid-entrepreneur to take that next step toward pursuing their online business dreams (or achieving anything in life for that matter) is for them to see YOU TAKE CONSISTENT ACTION. Put yourself out there. Be passionate and compassionate! Do better than you did the first time, every single time. Have faith and take courage to act on your goals and dreams. When YOU show your kids what TAKING PERSISTENT ACTION does, they’ll be less afraid to take action themselves. So, help them find what they’re good at, hold their hand and take the journey with them, it will be a good bonding experience for both parent and child (or children). Online business is for everyone. Online business isn’t just for adults, kids can be just as successful online too! Which brings us to our guest this week and what she is hoping to build with her triplets. We have strong-willed, widowed single mom of 11-year-old triplet girls, with over 20 years of accounting experience, Regina Drury. Regina has 2 bachelors degrees, one in business management and another in accounting, and also an MBA. Her husband passed away when the girls were just 3 years old, and for most of the girls’ younger years, she had to overcome so many struggles personally and financially as a single parent. The triplets are almost teenagers now and Regina is determined to build a sustainable income online so she can be more present in her children's’ lives, especially since they are in their formative years. Now, Regina isn’t new to the online business scene, she has tried several times to generate income online. First, she had the Biz Geek Podcast that geared towards finding other geeks in the business space and create a place where they could chat about business and their geek passions while being this community. Awesome as it is, it, unfortunately, did not generate her income. Then she briefly did a podcast for parents of multiples and had hopes of starting something with that, but that didn’t gain much traction either. Though she does have much experience in accounting, it isn’t something she is very passionate about, but was more of a necessity through the years. After one of her girls got diagnosed with thyroid cancer, there’s now an even greater urgency to be physically there for her triplets. But don’t worry! The apple… err… the apples didn’t fall far from the tree! The kids are as passionate and tenacious as their mother, in that they, too, want to start their own online business together. So, join us in this week’s episode as we help Regina find her momentum and help her girls start, build and grow their online business as a family. If you have a kid (or kids) that you want to encourage to become an entrepreneur… or if you ARE wanting to be an entrepreneur yourself, then don’t miss this great podcast interview!

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Do you find yourself holding back from taking the next step because you’re terrified it might not work? Maybe you’ve seen other people do it and you’re pretty sure you can do it too, but sometimes there’s just this weird nagging feeling that’s weighing you down. Well, we’ve been there before too (most entrepreneurs do)! We struggled with confidence issues, wrestled with mindset hurdles, and we definitely didn’t know everything we do now. The thing is, we are where we are because we took action. Because if you want to do something so bad, then you would go out there and do what it takes to go after it, learn it, and make it happen. We have the perfect guest to share their journey to show you what’s possible when you put yourself out there! This week’s guest is Flip Your Life community member, Marcy Travis. Marcy is a 60 years young, married empty-nester, who lives in very rural town much like ours. Marcy and her super supportive husband have 3 adult children together, and 3 wonderful grandchildren. She had recently retired from her 21 years of service in the employment sector but finds her greatest passion pursuing her coaching career online. As a Certified Career Coach, she helps her clients identify their strengths, reframe their ideas and perspective so they can focus on finding a practical action plan that will allow them to achieve their career goals. Marcy has been steadily growing her content for 4 years and has been working on turning her passion project into a reliable source of income to supplement her retirement and give her the freedom to travel with her family. She has already found some success with a few members, but now it’s time to take that next step and grow her community. Join us as we give her insight on how she can grow her email list and how to implement marketing strategies even if she’s not what she calls “Sales-y.” Time to mine for nuggets of wisdom, so don’t miss this episode, y’all! [Tweet "If you put yourself out there to the world, the universe will answer back. - Shane"] [Tweet "The numbers don't lie. - Jocelyn"] [Tweet "Every time you move to the next level, you almost have to relearn how to be a new kind of business owner. - Shane"] You Will Learn: Things you can do to grow your email list Different avenues to get your name in front of your audience Marketing strategies you can implement on your site Plus so much more! [Tweet "If you’re scared doing new things, try doing things differently in ways that would work for you. - Jocelyn"] [Tweet "If you're determined and make a commitment to do it, you'll find a way. - Jocelyn"] [Tweet "Be overt, be open, let people know you have something for sale. - Shane"] Links and resources mentioned in today’s show: Marcy’s Membership Site Flip Your Life community Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family! Click here to leave us an iTunes review and subscribe to the show! We may even read yours on the air! ? Success Story of the Week: We got an awesome success story this week from one of our Flip Your Life community moderators, Kathy Martin! For those of you who don't know, we have a huge community, we call it the Flip Your Life community and we've got a lot of great leaders in our community that we have promoted to moderators. And they're in there, not only so they can build and grow their online business, but they're really in there on the front lines helping other people too. Kathy's one of our absolute rock star members. She had an awesome success story this week titled, "I got four new members from my five-day challenge." Kathy says, "I'm pretty excited that after my five-day challenge last week, I was able to convert 10% of my participants to my membership, three monthly members and one annual. I learned a lot after these five days, and maybe I'll post about the process if anyone can use that ...

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Do you have something that you’re passionate about and want to build an online business on, but fear you might not know enough to actually do it? Maybe you feel that you’re just not credible enough for people to pay you for what you have to offer online? A lot of online entrepreneurs feel this -- it’s called, “Imposter Syndrome.” It’s exactly what you might be struggling with if you answered “yes” to our questions above. Even after validating your idea and digital product, even after making sales and gaining customers, this is a problem that holds many online entrepreneurs back from growing their online business. We will tackle this mindset issue in this week’s episode, as well as share the amazing success our guests have achieved in their online business within a short span of time despite their mindset hurdles. Our guests in this episode are couple-preneur, Amanda and Joe Nibley. Living just outside of Atlanta, they are parents to two young children and are both working in the insurance industry (yes, they have their day jobs, two children, AND an online business!). Amanda has always had a passion for health and fitness, and because of that, they achieved a profound change in their overall health and lifestyle by changing their relationship with food. After helping family and friends get in tune with healthier eating habits, they realized that they've found their calling and their passion to help others grew bigger and bigger. And this is how they're online entrepreneurial journey began. It was this passion that gave birth to their online health and nutrition business! Now, Amanda and Joe had transitioned into a membership site after doing some successful challenges for their niche, and earned over $3,000 on their membership launch! Their membership site helps people cook and prepare healthy meals, learn more about clean eating, and living a healthy lifestyle. They have helped their members tremendously, and Amanda even got a certification in functional nutrition just recently! But even with their recent success, Amanda still talks about her mindset struggle and confidence issues regarding her expertise and passion. Join us as we help Amanda and Joe tackle these mindset hurdles to take their online business to the next level. We also share strategies for consistent content creation, as well as creating strategic result-oriented lead magnets. So don’t miss it! [Tweet "“You are going to have haters, but always focus on the successes.” - Jocelyn"] [Tweet "“Consistent action is better than perfect action.” - Jocelyn"] [Tweet ""Results come from doing something, not doubting it."- Shane"] You Will Learn: How our guests were able to have an online business while both working a day job Dealing with and overcoming “Imposter syndrome” Roles in your business with your spouse (and the importance of having your spouse on board) The importance of consistent content creation Strategically creating results-oriented lead magnets and opt-ins PLUS SO MUCH MORE! [Tweet "“For every 1 hater you get, there will be 90 amazing messages from people you helped.” - Jocelyn"] [Tweet ""Tell them why, tell them what, but sell them how." - Shane"] [Tweet "“All you have to do is make more right decisions than wrong ones. If you're 51% right, you win!” - Jocelyn"] [Tweet "“Don’t show people what you know, show them results.” - Shane"] Links and resources mentioned in today’s show: FL 183 – How Sandra made over $700 a month in passive income while raising a newborn and fighting breast cancer The Flip Your Life Community FYL Live in Nashville Amanda and Joe’s website Related: FL 192 - How to be Lucky FL 03 – How to Work Together, Without Killin’ Each Other FL 06 – 5 Tips for Getting Your Spouse On Board with Your Online Business Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!

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Isn’t it frustrating how we tend to be hypercritical about ourselves to the point that we sometimes end up walking away from those rare, life-changing opportunities? Think about it. WHY are we inclined to be more supportive, if not tolerant, of other’s quirks than we are of ourselves? “But it’s true, I’m not good enough at…” Pause. Hold it right there, buddy! Just because you’re not the best at everything, doesn’t mean you’re not good at something. The first step to unlocking your potential is to acknowledge that YOU HAVE POTENTIAL! You don't have to stay stuck there, being a peg in the machine, because YOU are more than capable of overcoming ANY obstacle. You just gotta take initiative and put yourself out there because nothing worthwhile comes to us without putting in the necessary time and effort. But don't fret, there's a way to make this journey a whole LOT easier! "What do I need to do?" BE KIND TO YOURSELF. BELIEVE IN YOURSELF. BE YOURSELF! "I'm not exactly sure how I can do that." Okay, how about we try this little exercise? Remember this every time that voice starts bringing you down: “It might take me longer to achieve the results I need, it might not even be as perfect as I've pictured it to be, but I am not alone and there's help where it is needed. As long as I keep putting one foot in front of the other and do what it takes to flip my life, I’ll eventually find the road to success.” Or do what Jocelyn does! She stuck purple Post-it notes on her computer to remind her that SHE CAN DO IT. If you still don’t believe the power of TAKING ACTION and how it leads to success, then you really need to check out this week's guest! We have none other than, Flip Your Life Community Moderator and the man behind RelaxandLearnGuitar.com, Kevin Depew. Kevin has been a long time FYL member, who was promoted to a leadership role in the community forums, but he didn’t start his journey knowing everything he needed to take his next steps. In fact, as with any budding online entrepreneur, Kevin had his share of struggles too! From identifying what he was good at, to who the target audience is, to what’s he going to sell and how he’s going to sell his solution -- he had to keep going, he had to endure the hardships and evolve to find and figure out his true calling online. After months and months of learning, trying and moving forward, he finally tasted some hard-earned success in his "second-halfer," guitarist-based online community -- Kevin now has 29 paying members!!! Now, you know what we say here at Flipped Lifestyle, “If you found one, you’ll find a hundred.. (a thousand, even).” So, how will he find the right people to join and grow his membership? Get ready for our action-packed, next level strategies that will help Kevin find more organic traffic and overcome the fear of not finding the right people to join his membership. We’re talking about member engagement, live events, tools and goal-focused mindset shifts that are going to get your momentum to full swing. Don’t miss it! [Tweet "“The only way to overcome fear is by taking action.” - Shane"] [Tweet "“Nobody knows what your “perfect” looks like except you.” - Jocelyn"] You Will Learn: Member engagement and why it’s the strongest foundation in your community Why live events are beneficial for you and your online business How isolation ends up eating your confidence Overcoming the fear of not finding the right people to join Strategies on how to get more organic traffic and subscribers Plus so much more! [Tweet "“When you hit a plateau that might mean you've hit the peak of what you're doing now and need to do change something.” - Shane"] [Tweet "“We can’t be the best at everything, so pick the few things that matter the most and concentrate on those.” -Jocelyn"] Links and resources mentioned in today’s show: Kevin’s Website

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Getting started with your online business can be overwhelming for a number of reasons. Do you find yourself creating your content, but unable to finish because of endless revising and refining? Do things always get in the way of your time to work on your online business, even if you set a schedule for it? Of course, we want our digital products to be good, or perfect if possible… but how perfect is perfect enough to stop and do the next step? How long will that take? Scheduling time to work on your online business is to be expected, but why doesn't it always work? These are just some of the reasons we feel stuck in our online business, and it can be very frustrating. Well, hold your horses, y’all, because in this week’s episode we will help our guest tackle and overcome these issues to help him start and grow his online business. We're sure you’ll learn a lot in our brainstorm and it's going to help you take your own online business to the next level too! Our guest today is Dan Franz. Dan is a general practitioner in Psychology and does mental health counseling. His wife is a teacher, and they have two children. Dan did a group practice for 5 to 6 years working with and supervising other therapists, but recently switched back to doing his own one-on-one practice after the technicalities of having a larger practice deemed quite taxing. Since the beginning of his mental health counseling, he started writing-related blogs to give him an online presence with the goal of leading people to his one-on-one practice. This got him to acquire a list of about 800 people from his online writing, how awesome is that?! And now, with his growing desire to help and reach more people, as well as have more time to spend with his family, Dan went on to take his business online (with an advantage of already having an existing following from his online presence). With the majority of his digital product outline already done, he struggles with its completion due to constant revising and refining. His work time for his online business also seems to get interrupted a lot, causing a delay in his progress. But hey! Everyone needs a little help to get back in the right direction and get to that next step... sometimes even counselors need guidance. :) So, join us as we help Dan overcome these setbacks -- dealing with the overwhelm, prioritization, having the right mindset -- as well as discussing strategies and direction on creating and selling his digital product. [Tweet "“When you see some system is failing, you have to change something.” - Shane"] [Tweet "“If we all just try a little better, we’re going to find the time to make our lives change.” - Shane"] You Will Learn Overcoming perfectionism Dealing with overwhelm in your online business Time management -- setting a backup time and buffer time Having the right mindset How to sell your digital product online without overcomplicating things The importance of accountability and community The importance of getting audience feedback [Tweet "“Don’t let technical overwhelm become an excuse.” - Jocelyn"] [Tweet "“It doesn’t matter what others are doing, what matters is what you CAN do.” - Shane"] Links and resources mentioned on today’s show: Dan’s Website Building A Story Brand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen by Donald Miller Flip Your Life Community RELATED: FL 182 – How busy parents can find the time to start, build, and grow a successful online business FL 184 – Our TOP 7 Time management tips that actually work for busy entrepreneurs FL185 – We help Debi understand key strategies to successfully launch her online community Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family! Click here to leave us an iTunes review and subscribe to the show! We may even read yours on the air! ? Success Story of the Week:

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This week, we’re going to talk about being LUCKY and our take on the entire concept of LUCK. You probably know this already, but we are not a huge fan of the word, “LUCK.” “Oh! Your business took off? You’re SOOO LUCKY!!!” “WOW! You must be so lucky to be able to buy a new car on a whim!” (buzzer sound) WRONG. Luck had very little to do with what we’ve achieved in life. To put it simply, we worked very hard to place ourselves in front of those rare opportunities. But we didn’t get to where we are now because our first attempt worked. People think that you need to succeed the first time you try when in reality, it will take you multiple attempts before you get enough experience to get to the next step. It’s the same with us, guys! We had to learn the ropes. We had to put in the time and money. We had to stay focused and do whatever it took to make it online, not just for our sake but for our family’s future. It’s funny how success is often perceived to rely on luck. Luck isn’t bad, y’all! But using it as an excuse to justify your inaction is. “Oh, I’m not lucky like they are, how can I possibly succeed?” See what we mean? So, if you’re looking around for ways on how to be lucky or how to increase your luck, you’re not going to make it far. Think about the “Law of Attraction.” The more you focus and take action on the things you want to happen, the more you attract opportunities and situations that will make you reach that goal. Anyone can succeed, it’s just not everyone is willing to do what needs to be done in order to succeed. So, tell us, how will you attract success if you’re not doing anything? We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again (and again and AGAIN)... ACTION BREEDS SUCCESS. Stop wasting your precious time searching for blog posts on HOW TO BE LUCKY IN LIFE! Don’t let the concept of luck hold you back from creating the life that you want your family to have. YOU are responsible for your success. Not luck. Not anyone else. JUST YOU! You might not know it or believe it, but you have as much potential to succeed as everyone else. So, work towards your goal, build and foster relationships, do whatever it takes to change your life. [Tweet "Put yourself in the right place, so when the time comes, you can seize the right opportunity. - Shane"] [Tweet "Success likes those who work hard for it, those who prepared to meet and reach it. - Jocelyn"] [Tweet "You have to go out of your way to connect, build and foster genuine relationships. - Shane"] [Tweet "More luck doesn’t mean more success, you need to take action to make that success happen. - Jocelyn"] You Will Learn: Why we dislike being called, "LUCKY" How the concept of luck is holding you back The beauty of connecting, building and nurturing good relationships Plus so much MORE! Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family! Click here to leave us an iTunes review and subscribe to the show! We may even read yours on the air! ? Success Story of the Week: "I completed my Facebook page!" Nichola says, "I just want to share success news that I now have a Facebook page! Please take a look because I've already put up a few posts up there. I was able to work on this page after I batched 6 months of blog posts. Thanks Shane & Jocelyn for encouraging me to batch process and take action!" Nichola's facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/foreveryoungautobiographies Ain't that an amazing what-happens-when-you-batch story? When you batch content you're free to do all sorts of things! It's wonderful how we celebrate these successes, every step, every milestone in the Flip Your Life community, all these people rallying around you, encouraging you and supporting you so that you can build a better life for your family. We would love to help you write the success story for your...

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“I got this idea, but I don’t know if it will make me money.” Does that sound like a familiar statement? Have you ever come up with an online business idea, but thought “Nobody would ever pay for that!” Well, don’t dismiss your idea so quickly because the internet is an amazing thing. The internet changes everything and you could make thousands of dollars on almost anything you could think of selling if you just take action! Yes, you’ve heard of so many business coaches, life coaches, social media coaches, and similar types making money online… well, today we have something different, and you’re in for a treat! In our Flip Your Life community, we have a lot of different people with different niches, but this one is one of our favorites! Today’s guest is Teresa Perleberg. Her online business? How about “Shearing sheep and turning their wool into a statue!” Okay, that may be oversimplifying it, but it just gets better! Teresa lives on a North Dakota farm with her husband and 4 kids, 93 sheep, 50 cattle. Her husband had worked multiple jobs to provide for their family, she wanted to help out while still being able to stay homeschooling the kids. It turns out that her discovery of an amazing craft (that utilized her sheep wool) would be the solution to this. She does something really awesome called needle felting. You’ll have to listen in to hear Teresa explain what that is in detail, but we absolutely love it! She started selling her needle felted art on Etsy in 2008, then transitioned into making needle felting kits and selling them. And because her audience had shown so much interest in taking their needle felting to the next level by learning more techniques, Teresa had started a membership business on Needle Felting. Her online business has grown to have a stable income which was enough for her husband to quit his night shift job and have more time with the family! Now her husband and the kids all help out on her online business, working together as a family. That’s Flippin’ your life, y’all! Join us as we help Teresa on her membership retention strategies, audience engagement, overcoming technical problems, and growing her membership. Anytime we can talk about shearing sheep in a podcast is always a good day! [Tweet "First, you make money by what you do, then you make MORE money by what you know."] [Tweet "You can literally make thousands of dollars off of any idea if you just take action.”"] [Tweet "When you raise your price, what you’re saying to the world is “I am more valuable than this.”"] You Will Learn: Strategies for membership retention How to connect more with your audience, get them involved, and get them to know you Overcoming technical problems and not getting caught up by it How to keep your members paying and not have too many customer service problems Live video and audience engagement strategies Plus so much more! [Tweet "Successful people find a way to solve the problem, not just talk about the problem."] [Tweet "People with a wealth mindset don’t say “I can’t afford that”, they say “How can I afford that?”"] [Tweet "Whatever is easiest and the lowest energy for you and your members, that’s what you should do."] Links and resources mentioned on today's show: Teresa's Needle Felting Website Carolyn Lincoln's Dog Training Website Beth Bohnert's Cashmere Goats Flip Your Life community Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family! Click here to leave us an iTunes review and subscribe to the show! We may even read yours on the air! ? Success Story of the Week: This week's success story comes from Flip Your Life community member, Carla White! Carla's title for her success story forum post says, "I rebuilt and re-launched my website!" Carla says, "As I sat at my husband's hospital bedside for an outpatient iron transfus...

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“What can I even do online? I don’t have any special skills, I’m a nobody.” Does this sound familiar? If you told us 5 years ago that we’d be making thousands of dollars online, we probably wouldn’t have believed you. Because when we started out, we didn’t know what we were exceptionally good at either! We didn’t know how to sell a product online. We didn’t even know if anyone would buy anything from us. We were just normal school teachers from Kentucky! How could we possibly create something no one else had already done? See, that’s the thing! Even though there’s already a seemingly endless river of content online, we took action and focused on what we can do. Ask yourself, “What can I create right now?” You don’t have to be the leading expert in something to start, build and grow your own online business. The way you present things will be slightly different from everyone else’s because YOU are unique and whatever you create will be a reflection of how you perceive the world. You don’t need to have the perfect idea to change the world because there’s nothing perfect online -- everything is open for improvement. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, because it’s all about being resourceful! We’ve noticed that people won’t always have the resources to succeed, but whatever they lack in that department, they make up for by being resourceful. Resourcefulness is the ability to find quick and clever ways to overcome difficulties. It opens us to opportunities that wouldn’t have been available to us had we relied on just having all the necessary resources. It keeps us on our toes and allows us to think outside the box. As entrepreneurs, you will find this skill to be particularly useful since most complex problems often require such “outside the box” thinking. Speaking of “outside the box,” our guest this week is someone who took initiative and was resourceful enough to find success in his auto detailing business. We have Corey Doohan on the show and this is his story… Corey Doohan was born and raised on a dairy farm in Wisconsin. He received a scholarship to go to Oklahoma, where he met his wife and got a degree in business. But y’all know the struggle that comes to every graduate. “What on earth am I going to do next?” Corey didn’t know what he was going to do to earn a living post-graduation but soon realized that he might as well start somewhere. “What could he do?” Well, he knew how to detail cars! And that’s exactly how he started to work in the auto detailing business. After years of hard work, expanding his expertise and growing his clientele, he was able to open his own auto detailing shop. He goes on to run this business for 5 solid years before selling it in December 2017, when they had to move to Minnesota with their 4-month-old son to be closer to their family. Corey now works as an internet sales manager for Camping World. But this isn’t where his story ends. New baby, new State, new house and a new career? This just gets Corey even more fired up to find a better way to provide for his family AND be able to spend time with them. He takes his first steps in his online business journey by starting his website, autodetailcourse.com, and a blog, detaillikeapro.com. Several courses and blog posts later, he realizes that it’s not gaining as much traction as he expected and goes on to call the cavalry for help. (Clue: We are the cavalry!) What do you do when you’ve got content created and no one’s paying it any attention? In this episode, we’ll dive deep into how you can target your audience using keyword-rich content and why it’s important to speak the right language when you’re marketing your brand. Tune in and find out how we help Corey take his online business idea to the next level. [Tweet "“A lot of us don’t have enough time and money, but if we’re resourceful we can make things work.

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Everyone has at least one amazing teacher in their life. Right? You know, someone who went above and beyond to help you see your potential. The person who pointed you in the right direction to find the missing piece of the puzzle. This might be your parent, a sibling, a friend, or it might, quite literally, be your school teacher - it could be anyone! But just as someone sparked change in your life, isn’t it just absolutely mindblowing how YOU have touched other people’s lives too? Think about it. With or without you knowing, you’ve become a “teacher” and shared your wisdom, experience or maybe expertise to flip another person’s life for the better. Now, you probably don’t even remember all the people you’ve helped. Probably because you didn’t feel like you’ve done something big enough to elicit change. This is a problem. Why are we so obsessed with acknowledging only big changes when even a little bit of change goes a long way? We often say, “Celebrate all your successes, yes, even the little ones; because no matter how small you think that is, it will prepare you for even greater opportunities.” The same thing applies to change! Don’t just brush off the small changes when it has the potential to lead you to your greatest achievements. Which is also why you being “the teacher” is no coincidence. Every life you touch, every problem you help solve, takes the world one step closer to another piece of the puzzle. Embrace your every opportunity of being “the teacher” for the people around you. Great things await those who accept and pursue their passion. Which brings us to this week’s guest, we have a professional percussionist who has pursued the education scene in hopes to spark positive change in the way we educate our children. We have Mark Taylor on air, and this is his story… Mark is a husband, and father of 2 teenagers and a pre-teen. He has played drums and percussion for a living, where he has gotten the opportunity to tour the UK, Europe and the United States. He had also found teaching to be his other passion at age 40, thanks to his children. Mark is also part of the National Association for Primary Education in the UK which helped him understand the issues surrounding people involved in education, not just the amount of work and stress closely tied to this profession, but also because of certain limitations in the school system makes it difficult for them to deliver the kind of learning the children deserve. His podcast, Education on Fire, launched in December 2016, where he helps fellow educators discuss ideas and share resources online. But having the freedom to pursue his passion for music and teaching doesn’t come without a price. You see, time flexibility can be a double-edged sword. When you agree to one opportunity, you will have to turn down another, simply because you can’t be in two places at the same time and exert the same amount of effort to accomplish two different tasks. Being a father, professional musician, primary school teacher AND a podcaster is no easy task. Pursuing his music or teaching career will have its own benefits, but he has found great interest in podcasting and how it can help him have the freedom to spend more time with his family. He has already found a good audience through sharing his insight as a primary school teacher on his podcast, so how can that help him make money online? If you wanna know how we helped Mark, then don’t miss this episode, we’re going to dive deep into several fantastic points that will help take his online business to the next level and it can help you too! [Tweet "“Teaching a child brings the best out in humanity.” - Shane"] [Tweet "“Reaching out is one of the most powerful things you can do.” - Jocelyn"] You Will Learn: The concept of opportunity & opportunity costs Why people will listen to you Refining your avatar

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Do you believe in your goals and dreams? Are you confident in your capability and capacity to achieve success? Now, the answer to these questions may vary, but one thing is certain: Confidence and action go hand in hand, y’all! “How so?” you might ask. Well, we believe that: Confidence inspires us to take action, and taking purposeful action helps make us even more confident. You move forward and take action because you feel certain you can accomplish the task at hand, having this level of security allows you tune out the doubts and fears that holds you back from actually doing something. Now, as entrepreneurs, we lead our people based on the strengths we possess. “But why are we so compelled to follow someone confident?” The thing is, people are attracted to confident people because confident people are action-takers. You’re probably thinking: “Well, that makes sense but it’s hard enough trying to be confident without being an online entrepreneur...” We get it, harnessing self-confidence can be a struggle. We understand, we sometimes feel this way too! Jocelyn actually has a sticky-note on her computer that says, “I am a good leader” to remind herself every day. But hey! Just because she doesn’t feel like a good leader sometimes, doesn’t mean she isn’t one. Those who are struggling with self-confidence have as much potential as those who exude self-confidence. “But still, why do self-confident people get more out of life?” Because they just go out and do things. Think about it this way: Confidence is like a door. You open it, you close it -- it’s up to you. Each one of us has the ability to control this door. A door to new experiences and opportunities. A door that will help you mindfully say, “Yes” or “No.” A door that attracts action, growth, and change. Confidence is the door you have to open so you can meet your amazing potential. WHO WOULDN’T WANT TO OPEN THAT DOOR? So, if you’re struggling with self-confidence, we want you to know that you can do something about it. Because we know you can do whatever it takes to flip your life. We know you can deliver results. Now, it’s time to become more confident! In this episode, we’re sharing the top 5 confidence killers and how to defeat them. Confidence Killer #1: Lack of Knowledge Your Weapon: Get training You have access to a device (or devices) that allows you to consume all sorts of information, in all sorts of ways, you have to take advantage of this. Use it to learn and understand more about your chosen topic/field! Don’t just sit around and sulk that you don’t know how to do something. Seriously, go find out how it’s done and learn how to do it yourself. There is NO EXCUSE. Confidence Killer #2: Competition Your Weapon: Perspective Okay, so there are a lot of other people out there offering the same solution. Why would they choose you? Well, why wouldn’t they? There are more or less 4 billion people on the internet, there’s bound to be someone who will find YOU and choose YOU over everybody else because they relate to YOU and believe in YOU. Don’t fear the competition. Learn from their success, what worked for them and how it worked. Remember: Competition is good! It shows you that someone has already succeeded and that you can too. Confidence Killer #3: Avoiding Change and Seeking Comfort Your Weapon: Surround Yourself with Change-makers Avoiding change and seeking comfort is your brain’s way of protecting you from getting hurt. It’s going to stop you from jumping off the diving board because you might get hurt. But you know what else it stopped you from experiencing? It stopped you from the thrill of diving in the refreshing water. It stopped you from making new memories with friends. It stopped you from conquering your fear of the unknown. It stopped you from the opportunity of experiencing so...

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“I really, really want to help people and do something to make their lives better BUT I don’t think I’m even qualified to do it.” Does this sound familiar? This is like saying, “I have superpowers and I want to help but I don’t think I should because I’m not really a certified superhero.” WHAT?! This is a mindset issue. It’s sad that you feel this way when deep down you know: “I CAN DO SOMETHING.” RIGHT. NOW. “But… b-but…” But what? Why do you let these excuses run your life? I don’t know about you but it sure don’t look like excuses are what the world needs right now. Excuses won’t make your life worthwhile. And it is NOT what your people need to move their life forward. In Luke 12:48, the Bible says: “From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked. For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more.” Let that wisdom sink in, y’all. Now, are you ready for the big epiphany that you’ve probably (secretly) knew all along? YOU have a wealth of skills and talents that can solve people’s problems. Yes! We mean, YOU, reading this right now! The opportunity to move forward and succeed is right in front of you. So, what are you waiting for? Do the thing you said you’d do! TAKE ACTION and STRIVE FOR THE LIFE YOU WANT. Don’t take your gifts for granted, don’t waste your potential, and don’t kill your purpose. Let everything you do, everything you are and everything you will become be for the greater good. Be in tune with your superpower, embrace it! EVOLVE. And then never stop evolving, dreaming and doing. Our guest this week is someone with an amazing “superpower.” We’ll be helping out a real-life cowboy get his horse training business online and overcome his aversion to technological know-how, so he can take it to the next level. It’s going to be a huge transition but since training horses and cowboying it up are his superpowers, nothing’s going to stop him from understanding the fundamental principles in building the foundations of a successful online business. And now, without further ado, here’s David Neasons’ story… David is a father of two teenage kids, married to his amazing wife, Katie, and is a day-working cowboy. Before we proceed, let’s debunk the common misconception that cowboys equal to rodeo. There are different kinds of cowboys, with different skills that are remarkable labors of love. To cut it short, not all cowboys do rodeos, y’all! Some herd animals, some do the field work, and others are more like horsemen. Take David as an example, he is a working cowboy who specializes in horse training. Growing up in a family of cowboys, he started his first colt when he was in high school, and also trained several horses for other people to make some money while he was in college. But despite being a Texas A&M graduate, he found it difficult to decide which career to pursue, the world was changing and there were a lot of different paths to choose from. With tons of encouragement from Katie, David went on to start his career on horseback as a Feedyard Cowboy. He loved this job and immediately regretted leaving that for a nine-to-five career. By 2005, he decided to leave the office, pick up where he left off as a cowboy and help raise the kids at home. So, how exactly did he start going online if he's a full-time cowboy and horseman? Working with animals that weigh about ten times more than him, he is met with a lot of near misses and near death experiences on a daily basis. So, he goes on to share his daily escapades with his family and friends, to the point where it’s almost a running joke that he almost always has at least one close call a day. But leave it to his wife to set the stage!

Flipped Lifestyle Podcast: Recent Episodes

Shane & Jocelyn Sams