S E762: From Zero Net Worth to a Publishing Empire: The Reality of Bootstrapping with Tim Lindsay

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What's getting more better is people are realizing what can and cannot be done with a book. So if your goal is just to sell a bunch of books, that's actually super hard to do. It's hard to do when you're competing against a couple million other books, plus the streaming platforms, all the other entertainment that's out there. But when you understand what you can do with a book, which is you can get more visible, you can use it as a marketing tool, you can use it to get credibility, to, to tie into things. Like media to speaking, to promoting a consulting business and so on, then you can focus on that and actually set more achievable versions of goals.

Step into the world of success with Your Brand Amplified, the ultimate podcast designed to unravel the intricacies of thriving businesses. I'm your host, Anika Jackson, and I'm on a mission to uncover the stories, strategies, and secrets that have propelled entrepreneurs and business leaders to To success. When you quit your job, do you have a financial runway? Savings for 6 months? A spouse's income to fall back on? Tim Lindsay quit with negative net worth at $0, sometimes less. And instead of panicking, he bootstrapped a self-publishing company that's now pulled over 6,000 books in 11 years. This isn't a story about lucky timing. It's not a story about a silver bullet business idea. It's about building repeatable systems, making hard decisions about people and priorities, and also getting back up when your business nearly collapses. In Tim's case, doing a 128-day NICU crisis with his newborn. Tim Lindsay today is founder and CEO of Tellwell Publishing, and he's joining us to talk about what it really takes to scale from nothing, how to position a book as a tool for authority and visibility, and the publishing landscape as it exists today. Which, spoiler alert, looks very different than it did when he started. Tim, I'm so thrilled to welcome you to Your Brand Amplified.

Thanks for having me here, Anika. I'm excited to see where the conversation goes.

Me too. And I, I really love the beginning of your origin story, right, for the publishing arm, because I've walked away from really well-paying jobs with no savings, no 6 months, no backup plan, not really knowing what I was necessarily I don't know that a lot of people do that, have the fortitude to say, I need to be doing something different. So take us back to that moment. Talk about what that was like. What prompted you to make a shift?

Okay. So you're talking about the moment when I quit my day job and went into business and you're saying I had like zero or negative zero net worth, but you make it sound bad for me, this was like the highlight. Because at the time I had $50,000 of credit card debts after school and I was slowly— there's a sort of a moment where I was actually before launching the business, there was a moment where I actually went and I was curious about credit counseling. I'm like, because all my credit cards were close to max because I had been struggling with self-employment. So I had managed the campus newspaper for a couple years and that led led up to 2008, 2009, the financial crisis. And so that's when I was originally sort of forced into self-employment and had a go at it. And that didn't turn out into anything, but that was still, you know, that was a struggle I experienced working from home, trying to do sales from home, trying to develop my skills. And so fast forward several years to that moment, I was actually getting to zero net worth, but I had been chipping away for 2 years to get rid of all my debts. I was actually more responsible. I was more, prudent in my mind. So when I quit my day job, as I was reaching zero, I thought I was soaring high, getting above air from instead of having all this debt. So I did do it somewhat prudently though. So I quit my day job. I had worked in this world of self-publishing and publishing, so I knew it really well, and I had built some skills that were fundamental. I had learned some sales. I was someone like many people who grew up not liking the idea of sales. Sales and marketing is like, oh, these are icky things. And I had all those attitudes. I was very against sales, the idea of selling. And so when I was ready to leave that day job, I did it. I had been doing a bit of a side hustle for a few months and I had planned to be more calculating about when I would leave. Like but I was getting, I had the intuitive sense I was starting to get clients and then I was starting to get busy. And when you have a full-time job, that's quite a few hours. And I was doing another 100 plus. I know I was tracking it very closely. I had an app where I would track exactly how many minutes and hours I spent on marketing, on sales, on service development, and then on delivering service. So I had started to, you know, I threw up a website, I threw up some advertising. I started all of a sudden giving those inbound inquiries, started to talk to authors, and I knew that world really well. And it's a funny thing when you start a business, it's so hard, but you have imposter syndrome. But I actually, what's the movie with the sports agent, Tom Cruise?

Oh yeah.

Who's representing the underdog character. I actually had an author who referred to me that way and it's, surprising how people will actually really be interested in working with a small company where it's very personal, as long as you know what you're doing. And so I had people who would come to my little apartment and just to meet me and boom, they were very happy to work with me and they were very happy with the service. But yeah, that's a big leap going from where you decide, you know what, you You're starting to generate revenue, but to just give up your day job, boom, that income every 2 weeks, twice a month, the cash that's going into your bank, that's just not going to show up anymore. And you're making, you're sort of saying, well, my time is actually more valuable, but it's, we like to say our time is more valuable, but is it actually going to bring in, in the dollars? So yeah, so that was a tough little leap, but it was worth it. And there was definitely a prehistory leading up to that where I had slaved away, failed at self-employment, taken a day job where I wasn't making much money, but you can learn a lot in an industry through working a day job. If you look at it that way, instead of paying for schooling, you are working a job, but you're learning an industry, you're building skills. And I certainly saw it that way.

Yeah. Well, and I appreciate the way that you're framing it because You know, I, of course, I was being a little dramatic, but it is often the case there are people who leave mid-career who've maybe built up some equity and then they finally find that pivot. And then there are people who just can't take it anymore and say, I need to, I need to really go all in on myself. And so that failure, as you called it, isn't really a failure from your first time being an entrepreneur, being a, you know, owning your own business. It's really lessons that you're able to take into. The now and into what you did eventually become really successful at.

And not having so much to lose as well, right? As life goes on, you start to worry more about security, you have more responsibilities, you have family and so on. But, you know, when you're a little bit earlier in your life, you may have nothing, but you also have less to lose, right? So had that going in my favor.

Yeah. And, you know, I, I think it's such an interesting moment to pick self-publishing And to dive in, you obviously, you said that you had some experience in this, but you knew you could do something a little bit differently. What was it that you saw that was missing from the market?

Yeah, I mean, it depends how much you know about the market, but there was the traditional model of publishing where you try to get a publisher to invest your book. Yeah. And that was the way it was done for years and years. And for a long time there was a stigma that was put on self-publishing. It was called vanity publishing and it was stigmatized and there was a lot of downsides to doing it. And the people or the companies who tried doing it, it didn't work very well cuz in those days you had to do a big print run. You have all these books, they're in your basement and your garage and you're car, you have no access to bookstores, you have no access to the sales channels. And the traditional route, you had to get an agent, then to get a publisher, and then they have to try to get you into bookstores. So there's a lot of gatekeepers to get to a final reader. So what happened was in the mid-1990s, the internet happened. More specifically, amazon.com was launched in 1995. And at the same time that happened, print on demand had happened, so you could print one book. So the combination of the internet plus print on demand meant that a lot of the barriers to selling your book to distribution had vanished. Add to that ebooks not too long after, and then audiobooks. The industry had changed, but still the industry, the way it worked is like you had a choice. You could try to go self-publishing. But if you wanted help with self-publishing, the businesses that were established just hadn't set it up in a way that you got the advantages of self-publishing, which are many. So the advantages of self-publishing are you can decide, you're in control of the decision to publish, you're in control of the timeline, you're in, in creative control, you control the pricing of your book, and your royalties are 5 to 10 times higher. So there's a lot of advantages to self-publishing, and in this new industry, the, the downsides of traditional publishing were more evident. It's a long sales effort to try to get an agent, to try to get a publisher, and the rejection rate is really high. And it's rejection not because your book has no value or you don't have something worthy, but it's just kind of the business reality. So I spoke to a few publishers. They say 3 times a year they open up for submissions. They get about 500 submissions. And they publish about 5 each quarter. This is a smaller publisher, but it's the same thing at a larger scale. So imagine you had to pick 1 out of 100 manuscripts. It's not necessarily the best manuscript, or, and it's not to say the other 99 don't have value, but you're gonna try to pick people who maybe have their, a platform of some sort.

Yeah.

Somebody who you've almost got guaranteed sales, right? Because the author knows how to market themselves. They have a platform, so that's, how that model works. So when I was coming into the space though, I realized people, so more and more people wanted to go the self-publishing route, but they didn't wanna do it all themselves. And the current state of the industry was that if they tried to get help from a business, they would be giving up a lot of the benefits of self-publishing, the flexibility, the ultimate control, the creative control, having access to keep all your royalties and and so on. So what I realized was people just, they wanted to publish. They're motivated by a bunch of things besides just the bottom line. So people often get confused like, ah, is it worth publishing? Should I publish? And they may have a very narrow sense of like what a traditional publisher is thinking, which is, can I make a profit from this book? But when it comes to why everyday people consider publishing or entrepreneurs or coaches, their thinking about why they're publishing is broader and it's more about humanity. And we could get into it, but it's a, it's a mix of sort of what they can do with a book as an act of service, what they can do as with a book as an act of strategy or authority for business or for as a tool to build something. And then there's this third stream of motivation in publishing, which is more about the journey itself, the learning, the expression, the connection, the pursuing a passion. And so those are three very different lines of why people publish books that are a very different way of looking at it than just a, a bottom line approach to whether or not a book should be published.

Yeah, I really appreciate that. Particularly I've, I've heard in the traditional publishing, you know, world that even if you get a book published, sometimes they're not going to market it as much, depending again on who you are, what kind of name you have. I've heard things about getting on these bestseller lists for the New York Times and the credentials and the things may not mean that you are actually a bestseller at that moment. There could be this entirely other criteria that those things are being based on. Uh, so I'd love to hear a little bit more, dig into the three things that you're talking about. What the motivations behind writing a book that are, yes, we wanna make money, but there are also a lot of other great things about writing. And where is your sweet spot?

Well, I think it's important for the author to understand their own motivations and their own goals so that we can assess if we can help with that. For an example, maybe a, a story can illustrate it. One of our authors was from South Sudan. And he was 10 years old, living like a rural area, like farming, very poor. And there's a bunch of meetings in his village. And then basically some people came up to his door and they were from the People's Liberation Army. Gotta put a good name on a nasty civil war situation. And they were basically, his parents had a choice of which of their children, of their boys, to to pass over to become a child soldier. And so he was 10 years old. That's why his book is called The 10-Year-Old Man. He had to grow up very fast, and for 10 years he was in that situation, very harsh, using burlap sacks for shelter and, you know, working, just being a child in that sort of environment. Uh, but he survived for 10 years and escaped to Kenya where there was a refugee camp and had a little bit of hope. Finally, 10 years later, escapes to a refugee camp. There's 800,000 people there, I believe. And 1 year turns to 2 years, turns to 3 years, turns to 4. Finally, he's on an airplane going to Australia. He lands in Australia. He says he cries the first day he gets there, just wondering, you know, why did people he doesn't even know decide to help him? And he had this dream at the time of having a cell phone, having a, a roof over his head, and, and there he is in, in Australia and So moving on from that, he starts writing his book. He integrates into society, and when he's writing, at first he's just, it's like catharsis. He's trying to make sense of this crazy life he's had. But as he writes, it starts turning into this story and he realizes that, okay, this isn't just about him. There's some themes in here about being a refugee, about resilience. And so he starts to think not just about himself anymore, about writing for the healing, and there's actually some interesting work on what writing can do to help heal and, and help you make sense of your life and so on. People write for those reasons. But then he starts writing, he realizes there's these themes that have broader significance to public policy, to helping people overcome very challenging life experiences. And then of course, what are you gonna do? He finishes the book, he gets it professionally done, he works with an editor. And then, well, what are you going to do with that? He starts to transition to do public speaking, to speaking at major conferences. And you can see him in a suit and a tie, and he's talking about these important themes. And now he starts to become a professional speaker, and this is part of his career or entrepreneurial path. You know, he did build a career in health and safety in the mining industry in Australia and built a family. It's a— it's an amazing story. But so his book is started out in this sort of catharsis healing sort of writing. Then it starts to be, okay, wait, this is actually a book with a real audience and it can serve, it can be of value to someone. That's the service why. And then the last piece is, wait, using the book as a tool to further sort of a strategy as in his entrepreneurial, in his career, becoming a public speaker, becoming an advocate, those sorts of things. So those are the 3 broad motivations. I use 3 words: give, build, become. The service-wise, give, what are you doing of value to your reader or to society? Build is about using a book as a tool. Doesn't necessarily, I don't like the word selfish. It's like, why, what are you doing with the book for yourself? Because building a business is also an act of service. It can also have benefits to yourself. But, you know, it's hard to know someone's deepest, you know, who's to judge what's the true motivator. Most businesses I find are really rooted in service, but then, you know, we all struggle with being a good person. And then that third piece though is the journey. And I like to compare the journey. So it's like, well, is a book worth doing if it's just for the journey of it? Is that a good enough reason? But You can unpack that. It's like for expression, I like to compare it to how else you could use your time. So a lot of people spend time consuming media, getting angry, getting polarized, being separated. And so a book, even if it is a passion project or a side project, it can be a better use of time and money if you're investing in, in things like editing than the alternative, right? Even if you have. A day job and this is your side passion project where you're providing entertaining storytelling or you're doing local history or you're exploring a topic that's important to you, that can be a more meaningful use of your time than a lot of ways we can waste time. So to me, that journey why is not something to just be dismissed.

And yeah, I, I think that's a really interesting point and one that people probably don't think enough about because I, obviously I'm in the world of business. I know a lot of people who write a book or who want to write a book who are, they have either an entrepreneur or they're a founder or they're working, they became a really big C-suite level person at some big company. But I also know somebody who doesn't even have a LinkedIn, doesn't really do a lot so on social and is writing a book right now. Because she wants to get this story out and she already has the second book in mind, right? And so that's kind of some of the things that you're talking about because she's really writing it for herself and for other people who might be, have families with mental health issues and some of the things that her family struggled with that she had to deal with as a child and as an adult. But that's also, that's a story, even though she's writing initially for herself, it is a story just like the example that you just gave of she can do so much more with this afterwards because it will help people.

Well, that gets to the decision of whether you're gonna publish it or just write it. 'Cause you can write a diary, you can write a journal, you can get all sorts of benefits from writing. But then when you start to get to, okay, am I going to publish it? Then you should probably start to be thinking about, it's not just about your own journey, your own experience. Once you decide it's worth publishing, presumably that's because you think it could be of significance to someone else. And that someone else doesn't have to be a vast audience. It could be if you are not doing it for money per se, but you would like to make an impact, it could be the impact on one person's life. Like we've had, well, one of the first authors I worked with, I remember when I was still at home on, on the balcony and still had a day job, I, I think was writing a book about a mother duck losing her feathers. And he was writing this book because his wife was going through breast cancer treatment and they had two little girls or two little children that they had to try to explain what was happening as she's losing her, her hair. So he's, his main audience maybe is those two children, but then he's also thinking, well, what about other children who have parents who are going through cancer treatments? Wow. And so, you know, then you're thinking, okay, it's for my children, but maybe there's another niche audience. Out there. And so that's, that's the motivation. So what's the impact though? Is, is it gonna make a lot of money? Most books don't, but could it change one person's life by they have a better understanding of how a family goes through cancer treatment and so on? You know, having a major impact on one person can be quite motivating for some people. Some people don't like me saying that cuz they're like, well, no, you, You, you gotta, gotta be going for more. That's just an excuse to be aiming low. But certainly people's personal stories and then, you know, just the human nature to try to help other people. A book can be part of that, but a book by itself doesn't promote itself, right? So that's, that's where it's like, well, can you go from one, learning how to be an author, and if you're gonna do it, you should, it's nice to learn how to do it well and not spend years and years what you could do in a matter of months or, or a year and so on. But then it's this question of like, can you build, can you maybe grow as a person and grow your skills? And okay, how are you gonna promote your book? That might not just be this scary thing that you don't wanna deal with, this pain in the butt, but it could be another opportunity for growth. Are you gonna learn how to do podcast interviews? Are you gonna learn how to Are you going to learn how to connect with other people through events and workshops? So it can be the beginning of another journey. Yeah. Get that Amex Gold Card ready. I'm too tired to cook.

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So talk about that first journey, that first step, those first few months of hanging your own shingle. You said you already had some clients, you're already kind of doing this work, but what was it like? You know, did you have— even though you already had all these skills, did you feel like an imposter? Did you feel like, no, this company is going to work because I have the motivation, I have the passion, I have the skillset, and I'll stop there cuz I have like 5 other questions to follow up on that.

So yes, and I'm a huge supporter of entrepreneurs or people who try to be entrepreneurs. And of course authors, it's often an entrepreneurial project. So it was scary. It's honestly a blur and it gets busy really fast. Like I said, I started myself, I was bootstrapping. And then very quickly I was trying to hire part-time people or, and so later that year we did get an office. Hiring the first half-time employee and then hiring the first few full-time employees was a big commitment. One of the skills I had learned was to do sales and ask for payment upfront to sort of get cash flow working in your favor. That can lead to trouble down the line if you don't use that money prudently. So we scaled up. I was trying— we scaled up to about 12 people within a year or so. And to me, that's— I've spoken to many entrepreneurs who don't want to hire other people, and I get why. People often say, you know, the great thing about business is like the idea of the business, then you have customers and employees. And if, if you could just get rid of the customers and employees and investors, if you go that route, and I didn't go the route of investors. If I was doing it again, maybe I, I would, I would see it differently, especially if you ever get into financial trouble and, and you realize you can lose your business to debtors just, just as much. But to me, there's a, a unique, so you have to make a decision that you're willing to try to build a team. Mm-hmm. And many people don't, and that's great for them. And that's a personal choice, right? I would say kudos to the people who are willing to try to build a team, right? You're creating jobs, you're creating opportunities for other people, you're sharing your skills, you're training people. To me, there's a very unique stage, which is from 1 person to 12 people. And to me, that whole stage went pretty well. It was sort of hectic. It was, it was crazy. It was very exciting though. You're adding people to the team and when you're adding people and adding clients, there's a sense of. Momentum and progress and excitement. And that, I would call that the honeymoon startup period. It went pretty well for us. There's a lot of chaos, a lot of sort of like you're trying to get your plane, fly your plane and you're on the runway, but you're sort of putting on the wings as you go. And, but going from 12 people up to sort of 20, 30 people, that to me is the most difficult period. 'Cause at that point you have to try to build a management team, but when are you, when can you afford to do that? Really, you have to, from those first 12 people, you're trying to start to build managers. So it can be very, very difficult cash flow-wise as well. So, but very exciting to put up the signs, set up an office and put yourself out there.

Yeah. Well, and was your team primarily, or is it primarily in person? Is it a little bit of a hybrid?

At that time it was. In the early stages it was.

Yeah.

Yeah. But managing cash flow, that's tricky. And setting up software for me, we were trying to build a bit of software to keep our system strong, but we couldn't really afford that until you get to about 12 people and then you can fit in one, you know, infrastructure person. But the thing is, it's also communication, right? 12 people's like a volleyball team. It's like many sports team. Communicate, you all get together in a room and you do a huddle. Boom. It's easy to communicate, right? Plus you have the energy, you're all there together. As you start to get around 20 to 30 people, you know, then you start having groups and teams and, and you really need to build that functional management team. And that's just really hard, especially if you're bootstrapping to go from the little startup team where everyone's pretty pretty new and to then trying to learn how to manage and lead a team and do things like HR. I, I don't like the term HR cuz it connotates to me things like rules and so on. But I think I made some mistakes there cuz we had that first, we had almost no turnover in that 0 to 12 people in the first couple years. And then there's just a certain moment where you're growing and then you have turnover. And then you have to hire, but you, you have to hire quickly because you've got clients to serve and then you hire too quickly and you don't necessarily hire the right people or you don't onboard them well or you don't support them well. You've, I have to own the mistakes that we made. So, and then if you don't hire the right people, then you start having client issues and that creates more work and the more work. Means there's less time to manage well, and you, and then you start having customer issues and there can be sort of a downward spiral where if you make a wrong decision, then it results in upset customers, which results in lower morale, which results in more turnover, which results in more scrambling, and then maybe more bad decisions. And there's definitely a period kind of in the 2 to 3 years into the business where we're still trying to grow. Where all those— there's sort of the, the, the risk of the flywheel operating in a negative flywheel where you just burst into flames and, and collapse. And, and I've seen it happen in our, our industry. But when you're starting a business, it's kind of like a crisis situation in, in from the get-go. But again, you, you've got things working for you, which is customers can really like working with a small company where everybody knows each other's name. You're working directly with the founder and so on. So yeah, so there's definitely some, some crisis moments in the first few years.

Everything that you're saying, I'm just thinking about when I accidentally started a PR firm during the pandemic because I kept getting client referrals. It's like I have to build a team now and it happened so fast and organically. I didn't have all the systems, all the processes in place. The team worked really well. We got really great results for our clients, but I did make some decisions that were hired more on, hiring more on vibe than, you know, and, and perceived skillset versus on what people actually did bring to the table. I love that you said you get clients to pay some upfront because that's another thing. If you have a client who's like, oh, I'm just, I'm gonna get this grant money in and then something happens, they don't get it or they don't pay you with it. So, I've made all of those mistakes myself, just be, you know, being upfront and realize the systems and the processes are such an important part of setting that strong foundation so that people feel like they have ownership. They feel like, you know, they have the go-ahead that they know their role in the organization. They know where they can grow. They know what they need to go to you or to other leaders for.

Yeah.

And it's tough though for Founders, because how much do they know and how much experience do they have? I think that speaks to getting some support, some coaching, some advice, which is something we were fortunate to have. We joined a local accelerator. We, we had some co— we've had various coaches along the way, and I think it's something that applies to all areas of life. If you have the right advisor at the right point in time, it can accelerate you.

100%.

And save you. A little bit or just, yeah, allow you to get through things a little better. And that was for us even in when we had our, our first child born in the NICU, as you mentioned in the beginning, in that environment we had support, we had a team, you know, medical support. And I find there's a lot of common denominators between trying to have, start a family, trying to start a business, and trying to start a book. A book, a business, and a family, all three of them have a lot in common. They all sort of start premature. You're, you've gotta take steps before you're ready. You've gotta learn as you go. You are gonna be a little embarrassed. The first version's never gonna be the best version. And then having the right team in place to support you, to complement your strengths. And ideally having some form of advisor or coach to, with a proven pro process and a playbook to guide you through quicker than you could do just figuring it out. Yeah.

Well, and you could have chosen to only publish other people. You could have just chosen to publish things that you wanted to write cuz you are also an author and you've chosen to do both. And from looking at your website on my other screen, you know, you have a lot of services, you have a lot of packages, but I think it's interesting that you've narrowed focus to children's publishing, regular and premium nonfiction. What distinguishes like regular publishing from premium nonfiction?

It's actually really interesting, even children's books and business books. So we do work across genres. The four big ones are like nonfiction entrepreneurial or self-help. Then there's fiction, then you've got children's books and you have memoir. Those are kind of the four groupings, but it's funny, even at children's book and business books. You would think they would be opposites, but really almost anything you can do a business book on or a nonfiction book on, you can do a children's version of it. So it's like I could do a business book on how to write and publish a book, but then it's like, well, you could do a children's version of that as well. And the advantage of a children's one is you read it over and over again. So you can have your core message. So yeah, it's interesting. We're at a point where we have a large enough team that people have different passions, but those, the themes that I mentioned about what, what motivates people to publish the service, and in fiction is more of like entertainment value as opposed to advocating for a cause or helping somebody through a transformation, but those cross children's books and nonfiction. And the steps involved in publishing a book. I wrote a book called The Call to Authorship, and I did focus more on nonfiction books, but a lot of the steps are the same across genres. So you could simplify it. You gotta plan, write, publish, promote. I break it into 10 steps further where you edit, design, distribute, and, and so on. Those steps are the same for different genres. They just are different in some of the nuance. Like some editors will specialize in, in young adult versus nonfiction, and some of the marketing methods may be different, but there is a, an, a lot of overlap across the different genres. Okay.

Fantastic. And if anybody's watching this, The Call to Authorship, the lovely Orange and Blue is right behind Tim's Shoulder. So talk to us about the process of deciding to write that book.

Well, a little bit of practice what you preach, and you would think we had published thousands of, of books at that point, including some big names like Lamar Jackson, the most valuable player in the NFL. His story is incredible. I mean, he, he lost his, his— he was daddy's boy playing football in the backyard and lost his father to a car accident and his mother stepped in and reignited his passion for football. And, you know, fast forward, if you're a football fan, she ended up working as his— when he negotiated his big deal for $260 million over 5 years, his mom was his manager, not an agent.

It's amazing.

So definitely a super mom who stepped in and was supportive, but for me it was also a little bit of practicing what you preach. But there's also still some gaps in my own knowledge cuz on the one hand I'm supposed to be an expert. On the other hand, I'm busy. You're busy building a business, right? So the things I, I should know. So, but it really allows you to, when you do a nonfiction, you can simplify it. People's strategic goals are often to build authority. To create visibility and to promote a business, to like generate leads and so on. Those are very common often to get into speaking. It gives you credibility, but when it gives you credibility, it's, it's not just like a business card or a fake credibility. Actually, the process of writing the book, it actually makes you credible cuz you're, you know, you're outlining it in detail. Even myself, like I had knowledge gaps here and there, and when you're outlining your book, you, some of it you might be like, oh, I know this stuff. I'm gonna write my book. I know, let's do it. The 7 principles of this or the 8 steps to that. And it might be easy to write if you've been doing it for years and you can fill in that knowledge, but you may find gaps in your knowledge as well. And I certainly did. There were some areas where I was weaker. So for me to go through the process of writing a book, it ended up taking almost 2 years to get it done. And it's hard, right, to do it. I did it off the side of my desk, really. I didn't tell the team. I was kind of secretly doing it at first, but it's one of the big barriers people think is they don't have time to write a book. One of the biggest reasons they don't is like, oh, I'll do it in the future when I have much more time. But for me, it was, I just needed about 30 minutes a day. And my habit was before I have my first sip of my second cup of coffee, I'm gonna write at least my first word on the manuscript. And when you do that, you can actually get it done. But the key is you're not trying to write the whole book. You're just trying to write small little pieces and have a habit that you can stick to. And when you do that, it's like 500 words a day becomes 50,000 in 100 days. Just with, if you can find that 30 minutes, which is not easy in everybody's life. If you have kids, if you have a business, if you have a job, can be, that can be a whole process trying to get that habit in place. So, but it can get quite rewarding once you get momentum, you're tracking your, your word count and you, you're making progress. So I found it a, a super enjoyable process and I've learned a lot doing it.

I think that's a really good tip for anybody who's listening who aspires to have, you know, who is called to authorship but doesn't know when they're gonna find the time. And I particularly like that you said before you have your first sip of your second cup of coffee.

So it really shows Exactly.

It's where you're putting that in. I, I do wanna go back a little bit because a lot of times when we're faced with something big in our lives, that's the inflection point when it, we leave our jobs, right? But you had this point of your crisis in the NICU with your child in the early years of your publishing company. So that's a, a personal, you know, test. It's something you have to deal with emotionally, physically, mentally, but it's also a leadership test. So how How did you figure out how to run this company, continue to keep it up and running and expanding while also dealing with something very personal that would derail a lot of people? Mm-hmm. Yeah.

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Yeah, I mean, it's— it was a challenge. So, so our child was born at 24 weeks and 5 days, and we were telling ourselves it wasn't gonna happen. Long day at the hospital, it happened. And then you've got this, you know, he was less than 2 pounds, maybe a pound and a half. And, and it's just one thing after the next, after the next in terms of like everything they do to help the baby carries with it its own risk. And you just have to go with it. You have to accept what you can control and what you can't control. And we went through that, that pretty well, I, I think. Although 128 days later when we left the hospital, it's the first day not having like all the, the heartbeat and the oxygen levels. And we, we felt like imposters there. We're like, we're allowed to just take the baby and out of there. And, uh, now he's 9 years old, is amazing kid. He was just did track and field. He did his first track and field event last week. He came in last place, as you know, but he was super happy and had a good, good experience. So yeah, to do business at then that was, that was tough because it was right at that growth, that stage of going from the sort of 10 people to 30 people, which it sucks cash out of the business. You have to take risk. Every person you add to the team, you kind of have to, you know, they have to add value right away. So, and then we got married that year as well. We had, you know, a month after getting out of the hospital, we had a wedding. Update, which is, which is wonderful, right? But it's also a lot of work. Thank you, Monica, doing most of the planning work. So that was amazing. And then it was later that year that I knew, I sort of saw, it's like, oh, once we pay GST, which is the, the value-added tax in Canada, I'm like, once we pay that— and at that point we just had to pay it I think once a year, and then it becomes quarterly— once you— I was like, we're gonna be tight on cash. So So it came down to just, well, yeah, to maintain, to not burn out. That's the question. How do you not burn out? And maybe your business fails and people have businesses fail and move on and start another one. It can be, but it's tough when you've built a team and you have a bunch of clients, because you know, if this business fails, it's going to hurt not just yourself, it's going to hurt a bunch of customers. It's going to hurt a lot of employees and so on. So. Yeah, you feel the pressure. That's why kudos to entrepreneurs. That's why, you know, I just am so supportive of, of entrepreneurs when they, they take those steps. But I'm just gonna say the obvious things, like it's like competing in sports. You need to be healthy.

Mm-hmm.

So sleep, diet, and exercise.

Mm-hmm.

And I found one of the most painful experience when I had to let somebody go who's really core to the business. But it was just clear that it had come to a point where it was no longer the right fit. It was time to separate. And, but it was going to be a really, really painful process. And I knew I wasn't going to sleep and it was going to be a longer process in this situation. It was going to take, you know, a month or two. And so when you're gearing up for a stressful phase of business, which I mean, many phases of business are, but especially when it involves people, I think that Depends on your personality and your makeup. But if, if something's gonna involve conflict with other people and they're not gonna be happy, like, ugh, that's gonna be draining, right? You're, even if you're being as healthy as you can be, it's gonna be weighing on you and it's gonna be hard to sleep. And, but you kind of accept that. It's like somebody who's gonna go into a fight or a boxing match. I personally drew inspiration from, I mean, Olympians. Fighter, like fighters for— in Canada we have Georges St-Pierre. He's a martial artist and, but a very principled martial artist, a good career. He got the athlete of the year in, in Canada, a very respected person. But he talks about getting ready for a fight, like in that business, it's, it's not a fun day at the job, right? Is it? So he, you know, and he talks about, you know, positive self-talk and something, but still leading up to something, it's really stressful. It's going to be painful. So I think trying to be healthy, Eat, sleep, exercise, being physically healthy, and that will help you get through a period where you're gonna be losing sleep. You're gonna be, and then it's how you frame things, right? How do you frame what you're doing and are you tying it to a purpose, right?

Mm-hmm.

Often as an entrepreneur, it's supposed to be your job to make everybody feel like the work you're doing is purposeful and Ultimately, you have to convince yourself that what you're doing is purposeful, right? That can be a dilemma people go through. It's like, is this worth it? Is this the right— that's this idea again for authors as well as for entrepreneurs. It's like, what's your calling? What is going to be worth suffering for is kind of the question, right? Because when it means something to you, that helps you get through it, right? That helps you be stronger. It helps you get through the tough times. So trying to decide what you just want to do, the kind of want that's like dopamine, maybe just a shallower want versus a deeper form of want where you can go through the slog. I think that's something we have to just try to discern in our lives, the difference between the two and try to find that calling that helps us get through the tough times.

Yeah, I think that's really important, staying focused on what's really important. And I'm sure you had to do that when you're managing the business, you're living in the NICU, you're trying to figure out, you know, do you have the right people? I'm sure at that point you weren't getting enough sleep, you weren't eating enough, you weren't doing the things that you're telling us right now are important to maintain your sanity and your health when you're going through difficult times and difficult decision-making processes.

Even if you do them, it's still gonna be tough. You're not, you're not gonna sleep as well, but you'll sleep a little better than you otherwise would, right? You'll be a little bit more resilient.

You're based in Victoria, which is on Vancouver Island, which is a really, really beautiful place to visit. I'm sure it's a very beautiful place to live as well, but it's not something we think about as like a bastion of publishing, right? You were talking about the New York publishing houses earlier, and you have published over 6,000 books, which is I don't know many smaller or independent publishing houses that have had that quality and quantity, and your authors are all over the place. So can you talk to us a little bit about that? What's your secret sauce that helped you grow? You know, what is it about the systems and the team that you built who can handle that many authors at a time? Because certainly you can't touch every single one of those authors and those books yourself at all times.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, there is a funny— I mean, there is a bit of backstory in Victoria specifically where in the early stages of self-publishing, there were 3 companies in the US, one in, I think, Pennsylvania, one in California, one in maybe Tennessee. I might get that wrong. And then there was one in Canada, in Victoria, and there were those 4, the sort of 3 American companies and one Canadian company. They ended up I mean, it, it ended up going all over the place, but so we do have that bit of local history where then there was a, another entrepreneur that used to be involved in that first business. He started a second business and then, and I worked at that, but that was one part of my career path where I, I worked in that while it was still in its sort of 2 to 3, 4 years into business. And so I'm sort of third generation evolution. So there's a bit of that. Publishing newspapers, publishing magazines, publishing books, they do have certain things in common, right? Editing, design, distribution, printing, marketing. But yeah, to really hone it, to know your customer, to make it something that can scale. The piece that I mentioned that where a business needs a coach and someone starting a family in, in especially starting a family in the hospital, you need a coach. This is something I, I've been very passionate about, which is the guide function. So it's like the coach function. If you're gonna start a business, if you could just have that one person who just can guide you along. And so on the one hand, yeah, to do a book, you need to edit it, design, distribution, market it. When you add it all together though, it, I try to make it sound simple, but there's a lot of different pieces. The missing piece and the piece that we've tried to do in a special way is what I call the guide, that guide function. And it, it's not just like a person's role, it's like the piece that just ties it all together and holds someone's hand. It's a mix of advice and support, encouragement, quality control, and project management. I just said 5 things. They're all 5 very different things, but how do you, how do you do that? And you have to meet people's expectations, so it's like, Our philosophy is when we meet with somebody, we talk to them, we get excited about their goals, we talk to them about what we can do. One of the most important things we do is rigorous client feedback, and we do that at the end of the process as well as at various points throughout the process. But our goal is that when we finish, that people look back at everything we said we would do and they say, well, you guys did exactly what you said you would do and you followed through on it. So that's one One of the key ways we measure success, but again, it comes down to that guide role. Like, how do you do, especially for adults, like it's like adult education, different personalities, different stuff. And we can't tell them everything we know at the beginning cuz that's fire hosing too much information. They won't get it. We need to tell them just the right amount of information and we need to empower them and guide and support. Sometimes it's just that. Someone having trouble logging into an account or like using a word processing tool, or it can be getting help with the silliest thing, or it can just be that little extra check-in, like, how's it going? We're here, we're rooting for you. That bit of encouragement, right? That encouragement to be, to take the next step and to know what that next step is. So for us, it was just really taking that guide role that the piece that ties it all together and supports the author. In a special way and, and treating that as a special thing. Cuz there's people in the industry who'll say, ah, you did just do it all yourself. And doing it all yourself can work for some people. I'm not, I'm not opposed to the traditional publishing model. I think it's great when it works. You can go more do it yourself. You can also do it where you manage every piece as an author. So that's where the author is basically wearing the project manager hat for their book. And that can work well for the right person who wants to do that, who has the skills to do it, and who wants to kind of learn as they go. So I'm not opposed— that model I think is great for that particular person. But then there's other people who just, they want that support and guidance and then they want the benefits of, of self-publishing. So that's what we try to do well for people.

Yeah. You try to thread that needle. That's amazing. What do you think is easier for authors today than it was when you started? Because as I mentioned at the beginning, the industry has certainly changed a lot.

What's easier today?

Hmm.

It's interesting cuz on the one hand with when it comes to promoting a book, there is less opportunity in some ways, like all the, there's less opportunity in the big media, but there's more opportunity in the small media. So what I mean, there's less opportunity in terms of like, there used to be book sections of newspapers and, but nowadays in the fragmented media space, there's so much opportunity. I think what's getting more better is people are realizing what can and cannot be done with a book. So if your goal is just to sell a bunch of books, that's actually super hard to do. It's hard to do. When you're competing against a couple million other books, plus the streaming platforms, all the other entertainment that's out there. But when you understand what you can do with a book, which is you can get more visible, you can use it as a marketing tool, you can use it to get credibility, to, to tie into things like media, to speaking, to promoting a consulting business and so on, then you can focus on that and actually set more achievable versions of goals. So people are often like, ah, I'm gonna like get on Oprah, I'm gonna become famous, or I'm gonna make a ton of money on royalties. I was like, no. I mean, maybe, maybe, but there's a more realistic version of most of those goals, which is like, I'm gonna get on Oprah. No, but if with a little guidance, if you know, you know, in your space, the podcast space, if you learn how to do it, you can certainly become more visible in your niche. Yeah. And that can be very valuable. It's hard to make a lot of money just on royalties. You can certainly try, but you can tie a book to speaking, to workshops, to services and so on. And that's where it, it can actually help quite a bit, especially when tied to the visibility and so on. So I think nowadays having more clarity about what you can and can't do with a bull and, uh, with a book and using it strategically has made things better. Beyond that though, just distribution. So. Like I said, the whole print-on-demand ebooks, audiobooks, that's way better than it was at least a couple decades ago.

Yeah, I feel like we're just skimming the surface because I've been able to ask you a lot of questions about different areas, but there's so much more depth to that we could get into. And certainly we'll have to have you back on to have another conversation if you're willing. But I'd love to hear what advice would you give yourself if you Go back in time to when you decided to launch your own business, this business specifically. Is there any advice, anything that you do differently?

I don't have any regrets. I don't have any regrets. I mentioned I don't like HR. I don't like rules. I, we learned how to be better managers. We learned how to, we've done like every different personality exercise, the importance of cohesion. That's, that's the piece. So when it goes to like building a, a functioning management team, I had no idea how to do that. And I did it wrong before I did it, did it better. And what I didn't understand, and it relates to HR though, is cohesion. When people are just joining your organization, they're so receptive, right? They're receptive to any messages you give, right?

The newness, the excitement. Yeah. Yeah.

So they're like sponges. They're willing to, so you, as long as you set expectations well. During the hiring process and during the onboarding process, then you can kind of orient people to not mislead them. But the cohesion piece was something I didn't get. Like in business, you've got the hard parts of the business, the numbers, the cash flow. It's gotta make strategic sense. It's gotta make business sense. And they have the soft side of the business, the human stuff, the purpose, the culture, and the cohesion. So the cohesion I just didn't get. I didn't. Get that it's, it's, it's not like something you do at an annual retreat once a year where you fall backwards and you have to catch the person and build trust. It's really, it's, it should be every day, every, those just small little interactions to get to know each other. The, yeah, trying to get to know each other, trust, build trust, know your weaknesses, know each other's weaknesses. That's hard to do. And you know, if you have 10 people on a team and then you go to 11 people, like adding that one person. You have to start from square one and get to know each other, and it's an enjoyable process, but it takes time and it's something you have to just like constantly do. And we're trying to do it in a remote work environment too. You can still do it, but it's, it just means constantly doing little activities. Like we start almost every meeting with just like either a good news, something personal or whatever, but those activities to get to know each other, to, to to start to drop your guard. I didn't get how important that is, but if you don't have a certain level of cohesion and knowing each other at a personal level, then you may not communicate very well and you may not make good decisions as a business. Yeah.

Yeah.

Fascinating.

Obviously I said, you know, we, we have a lot more we could discuss and get into, but for now we'll just leave this teaser for the audience and your Tellwellpublishing.com and Tellwell Publishing, I think on all the socials. And then of course your book called Authorship.com, and you do have a free guide as well.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, we have a guide to self-publishing. It kind of walks you through some of the big questions people have, like the difference between traditional and self-publishing. What are the steps that you take to publish and so on? So we'll, we have that free guide. It's a great way to start.

Yeah. So it's a free guide to start, but I think it's particularly helpful that you position your company as guides to help people, because I know a lot of us have ideas for books inside of us for whatever the reasons are, and we don't end up doing it. We don't end up finding that time in between, you know, the first and second cups of coffee to start the process. We don't know where to start. We don't know what we don't know. As you said, when you wrote Call to Authorship, The Call to Authorship, there are some things that you still didn't know and you had to learn. And I think that's really important also, is to be a founder who's always seeking to learn more, right? Seeking to get better at our crafts and to figure out how could we continue innovating and helping people bring their messages forward.

So absolutely.

Yeah. So Tim, of course, my last question, do you have a favorite quote, mantra, verse, poem, family motto? Or in your case, even a favorite book that you think everybody should read?

Well, for developing a habit, I recommend Atomic Habits by James Clear. It's, uh, I mean, it's not like he hasn't sold enough copies of that, but it's for a reason. It's for a reason. Poet William Blake— I was inspired by him as a teenager— 'To desire— he who desires but acts not breeds pestilence' is a quote. It's kind of an intense one, but the idea is like And this isn't like— it's the difference between a calling and a more shallow desire. You have to look at it that way. But if you have something inside you that it keeps coming to you and you, you feel called to do it and you keep ignoring it and ignoring it, if it's something that you discern to be important in your life and you keep ignoring it, that's not healthy. So I think it's trying to listen for that emotional side something that's calling to you and listening to it and discerning if it's important, and if it is, to take action on that while ignoring the, the base desires that we, we also have that are being addicted to our phones and so on. So discerning between those two. But William Blake, uh, quite a character. That's a quote I'll leave you with.

Amazing. Yeah, pretty intense, but also something we need to hear and something that's true. So love that ending. And to everybody who's listening, I know I have 5 books inside me, at least, of all different genres that I've— because I, I wanted to be an author when I was younger. And of course, we go on these other journeys. But think about what you would write and who you could impact with your message and how it could help you beyond the accolades of money from book sales or being, you know, that number one bestseller on Amazon or whatever the case may be. And just sketch that out for yourself, see what you come up with, and you know who to reach out to if you decide to move forward. So thank you again for joining me on Your Brand Amplified, Tim Lindsay, and to the audience. I'll be back again with another amazing guest to share their story and their journey very soon. Thanks for listening or watching to this episode of Your Brand Amplified. Don't forget to leave us a rating or review on your favorite podcast listening platform. And if you want to learn more, check us out at yourbrandamplified.com.

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When she said I don't dance now, I make money moves. That was a mission statement for a whole new generation.

Respect, but that's not the Mount Rushmore. Listen, "Cash rules everything around me," when that line dropped, it changed the whole hustle. The greatest tracks are never finished. They're just debated forever. Introducing the Sprite Living Tracklist. 50 tracks that shaped the culture from 6 decades of hip-hop. Scan the QR code on a Sprite or Sprite Zero Sugar to see the full breakdown. Obey your thirst.

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