90:10 Rule Of Success By Pat Flynn😎 | IMOTW

Yeah, my main goal was actually survival because I grew up wanting to be an architect and I actually went to school for architecture, went to college for architecture, graduated got a really good job as an architect, and I thought that's what I was going to do for the rest of my life. After a couple months, I got an email from a woman named Jackie, and she said that she was studying for this exam for like a year until she finally found my guide, studied for two weeks and passed. She was so thankful, so happy. She got a job, she got a promotion, and she got a raise. She was like inviting me out to dinner, like, thank you, I'm so thankful. And I was like, wow, okay, this is incredible. But at the end of the email, she said, pat, I'm a huge fan, thank you. I got this from Gary Vaynerchuk, it's called the 90 10. And that means with what I have responsible for, 90% of my time should be used for what I know needs to be done. So if my primary focus is for video, 90% of my video related things are going to be for YouTube. I'm going to leave 10% for new things. When you build a business on Instagram, when you build a business on Facebook or Twitter, you're building on somebody else's sandbox, right? And they could do whatever they want with that sand. When you're building an email list, it's yours. Sounds great.

What was your main inspiration and like goal to how you started? Like, where did you originally start? What was the main goal?

Yeah, my main goal was actually survival because I grew up wanting to be an architect and I actually went to school for architecture, went to college for architecture, graduated, got a really good job as an architect, and I thought that's what I was going to do for the rest of my life. But in 2008, I got laid off, so I lost my job and I had to figure out how to survive. Nobody was hiring any architects at the time. So what I did was I got inspired by a podcast that I heard about this thing called the Internet. And you can create a business on the Internet and help people and get paid for it. So I then took some knowledge I had about an exam that I took as an architect. I put it on a website and I was spending 12, 16 hours a day, not only putting information on that website, but also being very involved in forums. So there's a lot of architecture forums and a lot of people were trying to figure out how to study for this exam. And I would just spend all my time answering as many questions as I could. And the funny thing was, I started to be seen as an expert on this exam. I didn't pass with flying colors. I barely passed the exam. But because I was the one publishing and because I was the one researching for everybody, I was seen as the expert. And then all of a sudden, I started to notice that when people were asking questions about the lead exam, other people would come in and say, oh, just wait for Pat. He'll come on and answer it for you. Which was really interesting. And then more people started asking for questions, and I thought, hmm, maybe I can package this and sell it in some way. So I put all that information that I knew about this exam in an ebook, and I sold that on a webs on my website for $19. And in the first month that I published that book, In October of 2008, I made $7,908.55 from a $19 ebook. And it just blew me away. I didn't realize this was possible. And so from there, I started to add more products. The business started to grow, and then it was about not survival anymore, because I was actually making more money doing that than I was in architecture. It was about thriving. How can I then form this business in a way that will allow me to spend more time building other businesses? And then I started a family. How do I spend more time with my family? So I started to learn about how software can be used as a tool to help you automate things, how hiring other people can help you do things so that you don't have to do them. And oftentimes they can do them better and faster than you. And over time, I've just started to build this empire of new businesses and then building out smart, passive income, which is where a lot of people know me from now to share everything I've been learning. And that's where most people know me from now, from my podcast, my books, my blog, my YouTube channel, and my speaking. And I'm just. I'm just here to help other people realize that we all have the power to do this. I think it just takes a combination of, number one, knowing the knowledge that you have that you could share with others, and number two, really going out there to find the people who need that help and then just marrying the two, and then that combined with, you know, wanting to make sure that you spend time in your life doing what you want to do. Because I know a lot of business owners who are successful. They have a lot of money, they have a lot of employees, but they're not happy. And they're not happy because they're not spending time with their families or they're in a business that they don't enjoy. And so in addition to helping people solve their problems, you need to also understand, well, what would make you happy. And when you can kind of combine those two things, magic can happen.

Awesome. So, Pat, you started all that while ago. Now we're in 2019. The Internet in many parts of the India still seems like it was what it was 15 years ago. A lot of people are still discovering newer opportunities. You know, vernacular languages, smaller towns, smaller cities all over the world. But at the same time, there's enough information on YouTube from channels like yourselves. The overwhelm that I've seen is people go to hundreds of channels, millions of conferences, and then eventually end up doing nothing. Would you. Is there a roadmap or a blueprint you could suggest saying, you know, follow three people, follow their guidance for three months. If it doesn't work, then go to somebody else. Because I see people going all over the place, you know, like, info bct, if that's the right word.

Yeah. This is very common, and it's. We are in the era of information overload now. And the way to battle that is to pick one person who is where you want to be and just learn everything you can about, you know, them, how they got there, and see if you can get involved in anything that they might have to offer, whether it's products, courses, coaching, just anything that, you know, if they're where you want to be, why would. Why would you go anywhere else? Right. And the trick is it's hard because there's this other person who's doing good things here, and there's another person over here doing really good things. And this person and this person. There's so many things that we get overwhelmed. And you might pick and choose a little from here and a little from there and a little from there. When you focus on one, you will benefit from having all your energy going toward one path.

Got it.

But it's hard to let go of this person here who's doing cool things. It's hard to ignore this person who's doing good things. So we have fomo, right? Fear of missing out, and we have this fear of, like, oh, this person might be the next key. This person might be the next key. You got to pick that one person and then not have fomo, but have Jomo did the joy of missing out J O M O and actually feel grateful that you can make A decision to. I'm not going to pay attention to this other thing right now because this is my path. Oh, that other thing looks cool. But you know what, My time is precious. I'm focusing on this path. You got to stay on that path and that's going to be the key. And that's where you're going to excel much faster than somebody else who's kind of just all over the place. I mean, you think about a car, right? You mentioned a car earlier. If all the tires were going in different directions, which direction would you go? You go nowhere. It's when all the engines and all the tires are pointing in the same direction and you have, you know, four wheel drive, then you're off to the races. Right? Yeah.

Okay, so my next question would be, where was the idea? Where did you get the idea of your book Superfans? And what was like the original goal or message you were trying to get across?

Yeah. So two things related to that and thank you for asking about that. So back to my architecture website, right? I was helping people pass this exam. After a couple months, I got an email from a woman named Jackie. And she said that she was studying for this exam for like a year until she finally found my guide. Studied for two weeks and passed. She was so thankful, so happy. She got a job, raise, she got a promotion and she got a raise. She was like inviting me out to dinner, like, thank you, I'm so thankful. And I was like, well, okay, this is incredible. But at the end of the email, she said, pat, I'm a huge fan. Thank you. And I was like, huge fan. Like, how could you be a fan of I just helped you pass an exam. I'm not a musician or athlete or artist or anything. But over the next two months, I noticed that there were about 30 customers who came in from her same firm. And what I realized was that she was such so thankful that she actually convinced every other person in the office to also buy my guide. And she didn't have to do that. She could have just given the guy. It was an ebook. She could have just given it to them. But she wanted to repay me so that one person turned into 30 new customers. And it was because of the experience that she had on my brand. And I remembered that when she was still studying for the exam, she sent a couple emails. I answered them right away. When she passed the exam, she sent me an email and I said, congratulations. Like little touch points here and there made her become a fan of me. And that's how I Teach and how I run my business now, I create for those super fan like moments because it just takes one person like that to spread that message across so many different people. And that combined with. There was an article when I was first starting out that I read called A Thousand True Fans. It was by a guy named Kevin Kelly. And his article, his essay was really inspiring to me. And what it basically said was in order for you to create a very fulfilling life and have a very successful business, you don't have to have a blockbuster hit. You don't have to have a business with a million customers or a million followers. You just need a thousand true fans. Because a thousand true fans, true fans being, you know, if you're a musician, they're going to drive 10 hours to see your set. If you are a product owner, they're going to buy every product. They don't even need to read the sales page. They're going to buy everything from you. These are super fans. If you had just a thousand of them and they were paying you $100 a year for your art, your creative, your products, that's already a six figure business. And that's a fan a day for less than three years. Some people spend years, years or a whole lifetime trying to build a very successful business. But in less than three years, if you focus on creating one fan a day for less than three years, you're gonna have your thousand true fans. We're probably gonna pay you more than $100 because I mean, I've spent tens of thousands of dollars on Back to the Future stuff because I'm just a big fan of the movie, right? And how many people spend money on Harry Potter stuff or you know, Marvel stuff or whatever. So this really brought to me the perspective that wow, you don't need to change the whole world, you need to change somebody's world. So pick a little world like what I did with the architecture exam and just be their go to person and create those experiences, those magical moments, those Disney like experiences to help people. Not just get help and not feel just inspired, but feel inspired to go out and share that message with everybody else too. And this is how I feel businesses should be run today. Especially in today's crazy environment of social media. There's algorithms getting in the way. There's a lot of people who are subscribed to my YouTube channel, but they never see my videos because that YouTube doesn't want them to. They want me to either pay for that or create 10 videos a day to make that happen. And I'M not going to do that. So when you have superfans, however, they're going to consume everything and they're going to go out of their way. This is your insurance policy for business. This is no matter what happens to technology, your super fans are going to be there for you. And not only that, you can then do bigger things with them. Like, I've been able to build schools around the world because of the superfans that I've built on my one business. We rallied together, we build schools in different parts of the world. And like your mission becomes much bigger than your business when you have superfans. It's amazing. So this is why I feel superfans is much needed in today's business environment. And when you think about it, this is like how business was done before the Internet. It was about people, it was about creating those experiences. You would go and buy from Bob's bakery, because when you walked into Bob's Bakery to get bread, say your name and they would say, how are the kids? How was the soccer game last week? Even if a supermarket opened up and the bread was cheaper, you would still go to Bob because Bob and you have a relationship. We're forgetting about that today, but I want to bring that back.

Awesome, awesome. So Pat, you know when it comes to list building, email list building and all of that, because that's how you start. So I mean, Rai and I started a new venture and we have list building. So we are currently using a 52 week webinar strategy. Every week we're doing a webinar, we're building lists, answering questions and all of that list building is still as efficient as it was earlier on to be able to start a business.

I think it's even more important when you build a business on Instagram, when you build a business on Facebook or Twitter, you're building on somebody else's sandbox, right? And they could do whatever they want with that sand. When you're building an email list, it's yours. And no matter what happens in social media, you can always take them with you. This is also the first impression that often a lot of people have with your business and brand and it becomes a good opportunity for you on a one to one personal email to email level. Really provide a ton of value in a quick moment to help them realize that you're the person that they need to continue to open emails for that you're the person to continue to buy from, that you're the person they should listen to. And really what we have available to us now that makes this so powerful is segmentation. It's when you can understand within your email list who is there, because not everybody's the same. Even if you niche down your business, even in your niche, not everybody's the same. There are sub niches within there when you can focus on those sub niches. For example, if you were a photographer and you were helping people with photography, if you understand who in your email list is a Canon user, is a Sony user, and a Nikon user, when you have a coupon for Canon, you can just send it to all the Canon people and they're gonna feel like they got something just for them. If you were to send it to everybody, your Nikon and Sony users would be like, this isn't for me. So when you can understand who's in your list and the kinds of problems that they have, or who they are, or what their interests are and how they differ from the other sub niches, it's gonna make your messaging that much clearer. It's gonna feel like every email was written just for them. This was a big discovery for me over the recent years because my email list was just one big bucket before, and I would come out with advanced articles, like advanced SEO, and I would send it to everybody. But of course, the people who were building a business for the first time, they would get overwhelmed by that and they would leave because they would go, I'm not ready for that yet. And then the other way around, if I built something for the beginner and I sent it to my advanced people, they would go, oh, I'm way past this stuff. I've. I guess I've outgrown Pat Flynn now, but now that I have these buckets, I'm sending messages that are directly for them. I'm speaking their language, and my open rates are much, much bigger now. I used to have open rates of 20% universally. Now I have open rates of 60, 65% within those buckets. It's a game changer when you understand not just, yes, you need to get people on your list, but which, which sub niches are there too.

So in 2019, to be able to hear that there is, you know, personalization and actually loving the people that you're working for can lead to 60% open rates. Just blows my mind, because that is amazing. But obviously that means a lot of time and investment put into understanding your audiences and how they react to different messages of yours over the years.

Exactly. And that comes down to conversations, like literally one on one conversations. Even though I have an email list of 220,000. I still continue every month, have 10 conversations with brand new subscribers on Skype. Some of those calls are short and they're not. They don't know what to say. But some of those conversations go a couple hours and I ask questions like, what are you struggling with right now? If you had a magic wand, what would be here to help you? Would you? Like, what have you tried to solve your problems with and why didn't it work? So I can just understand more about my audience. And the beauty of that is not only do I hear about the problems they have, not only do I understand the language they're using, which is important because that, that ends up in your sales copy and your emails and your messaging, but I also now hear the real life stories and I can empathize with them. I can go, wow, Jane had this problem and oh my gosh, her family needed this help and now it's not a made up person. Now, like when you learn business, sometimes they teach you the avatar exercise where you create like a made up person. And that's okay to do that because you have an ideal customer. But when you want to ask that made up personal question, you can't. But when you have a real person, Jane, who you spoke to last week, and then you have an idea, you go back to Jane and go, jane, I hear you. I'm thinking of creating this course to help you. Is this something that would be helpful for you? Would you want to be a part of it? Would you want to be in our beta group to test it out and see if these results work for you? Now you have real people who you're dealing with and that's what, what will make you stand out because it's real lives at State.

Well, you know, one thing that's always stood out about you is two things, actually. You've always had a format or some kind of a process to say, I'm going to allocate this much time to this, 8 o', clock, I get up in the morning, do this. And at the same time, I've always never seen you amongst the other marketers in the ecosystem. I've never seen you to be someone who's in a hurry to amass followers and all of that. So you have a process and you're getting there more successfully than most people, but you never seem to be in a hurry. How's that? How does that balance work?

Yeah, well, I'm on the west coast of the US So we're all kind of chill over Here we're not like in New York York and always trying to go faster. But no, you know, I'm patient. I think that's the big thing. I'm in this for the long game and I would much rather spend more time up front getting to know somebody and then having a subscriber subscribe to me because they know me now versus all right, I can get a thousand followers tomorrow if I just do this strategy. But then like are those going to be people who will follow me long term? I'm in this for the long game, which means I'm creating fans and, and that will continue to support me as long as I stay true to who I said I was. And there's no rush. I mean the cool thing is, you know, people might, might follow me today and not buy from me until two years from now or five years from now. But you know what will happen is they will tell their friends about me and their, their friends will tell their friends about me because they can trust me, because I'm not in a hurry, because they know I'm in this to actually help people.

Right? So, so when it comes to a process or a system, you when you were a solopreneur and now obviously you have a team. So you is, is your process obviously evolves over time but there obviously comes a time when you're like, you know what? I've mastered my 222,000 people on the list now they know me 60% open rates. Now I think it's time to go to YouTube. But hang on, I think IGTV is also happening. So what do you tell yourself? Forget IGTV, it's only YouTube for the next six months.

No, here's I got this from Gary Vaynerchuk. It's called the 90 10. And that means with what what I have responsible for, 90% of my time should be used for what I know needs to be done. So if my primary focus is for video, 90% of my video related things are going to be for YouTube. I'm going to leave 10% for new things. This is how Gary is able to be on the forefront of brand new platforms because he's actually on them trying them when they're new being okay. If they fail, then for me the 10% is 10% of my time, my energy, my money will be used for new things in case they might be wins. But if they fail, that's okay because I have the 90% that I could rely on the 90% of my responsibilities and 90% of my time and effort. And my team goes into this. An example of this recently was my latest invention. So I invented a physical product for vloggers as a tripod that can open and close really quickly. I have one here.

Yeah, we'd love to feature it here as well.

Oh, thank you. Yeah. So this was. I have a problem in the video space that that little gorillapod thing wasn't doing the job for me. So me and my videographer invented this tripod that opens and closes the tripod really quickly like that. And that's what 10% of my time was being used for the last six months. And we launched that on Kickstarter in February of 2019 and raised a half million dollars. About to be shipped out to people worldwide now. And now it's for sale on B and H, photo and other places. And it was an experiment. If it failed, that's okay. I got experience, and it's only 10% of what I'm all doing. And the 90% of my time is going to things that I know are already working. And that way I can devote my time for maybe one new thing at a time, which scratches my creative itch. I'm a creative. I'm a visionary, and I want to try new things. That way, I'm never like, no hundred percent this stuff, but, oh, this is exciting. I give myself permission to try, and I give myself permission to fail, but I have the 9010 so that if I fail, it's still okay.

That we asked for 30 minutes, but we started slightly late. Is fourth, are you okay with extending another five minutes, or.

Yeah, totally, totally.

All right, great.

So my next question is, what are your two tips for, you know, following your dreams and kind of tips for success in the podcast world.

So tips for following your dreams. Number one, you really have to define what that dream is. I think a lot of people think they know what their dream is, but they don't really actually consider it. What I mean by this is I've asked a lot of people what they want out of success in life, and they go, I want to be a millionaire. I go, okay, why? Oh, because I think I'll have you know, I'll be able to go on this trip and I'll be able to do this. I'm like, okay, well, what's stopping you from doing those things now? Well. And then they calculate it. Well, I guess I could do that if I wanted to. Well, if you really wanted to, then do it. You don't need to be like, we have this just idea that you need seven figures to then unlock all these things. And then in reality, you know, when I have these discussions with people, I go, okay, well how much money would you actually need? Because it is about the money in some cases, most cases. But then they go calculate it and they're like, oh, I only need to make $5,000 a month. That's 60,000, like $60,000 a year. Well, that's very different than a million dollars. And what you do to get there is very different. If you need a million to do whatever you want to do, then go, then that's great, you're going to have to do a lot more. But if you only need 60, then why are you waiting until a million when you only have to get 5,5k a month? So it's like really starting to analyze what your goals are and what would allow you to get that. And it's funny because a lot of people can have their goals now. They just don't think they can because of some, something, their stigma or somebody told them they weren't good enough or you know, they feel like they have to reach the seven figure mark, which is just an excuse in most cases. So that's number one, like very clearly defining what your goals are. This is why in my book Will It Fly. The first part of the book is not about how to validate your business idea. It's irrelevant to the business idea. It's what do you want? And that's hard. That's a hard question to answer for some people. If you ask any of your friends, most likely they just go, yeah, I don't know, you know, I want to go to the beach or whatever. But like, nobody really knows what they want because we don't actually spend time to think about it. So that's number one. Because then that determines the direction you go. That determines how much you work or what you work on. It's like putting the address in the navigation menu in your car, right? So that even if you get off track, it'll say like, oh, make a U turn up here to get back on versus what many people are doing are like, oh, I think I have to drive this direction. They drive and they drive, oh, maybe this way, maybe this way they're losing all that gas and they're getting wear and tear in their car. We're using a lot of car analogies today. But then they, then they end up maybe with a junk piece of car somewhere because they're tired and in the middle of nowhere, versus if you know which way you're going, at least you have the direction. And then secondly, in the podcasting world, oh, man, I'm so excited for the podcasting space. Did you know there are less than 1 million active podcasts right now? Still? There's only 700,000 active podcasts. Compare that to 500 million YouTube channels and 500 million. There is less than 1 million podcasts. And right now we're starting to see a lot of money move around in the podcasting space, which is really cool because that means there's a lot more people, bigger players now with a lot of resources, putting time and effort into making it even better. More findability, more access, more search engine optimization. So many great things happening in podcasting. My biggest thing for you in the podcasting space would be for right now, determine what would make your show worth listening to. And within the first minute or two of your show, really get people to pay attention to why they need to stick around. You want to get to that magic moment when a person pops on that show, they're making a decision, should I move on to the next show or should I put my phone in my pocket and go with it? And that's when you can really bring them in because you're going to, you're going to get them listening for 30 minutes, 45 minutes, an hour sometimes.

You know, Raya's always had this dilemma. She's like, you know, because I'm 13 years old, she's hustling hard, she's got a productivity list. She's definitely a special 13 year old. She's got a plan. But she's like, you know, because I'm not an expert at anything yet, should I just vlog about my struggles as a teenager who's trying to make it in life, or should I think about an expertise which I think that I don't have? And I think that question is relevant for many other teenagers.

Yeah, I think, I think the biggest thing is there's no way that you would need that. You would 100% know what you want to do right now. I think the most important thing is you need to develop the skills of sharing ideas, of communicating with people, of building a following. And you're going to start to find that just your voice is going to come out over time. There's no way you would know that right now. It's just like when you ask a five year old, you know, hey, what do you want to be with your grow up? It's such an unfair question to ask because that 5 year old has no idea what is out there. Right. So what you're doing is you're just putting yourself out there and you can experiment. This is your time to try different things. Experiment. You don't have to pick one thing now and go. You can pick one thing for a while, test it out, experiment, see if you see if you like it or not. And then you can go deeper with it or you can go somewhere else. It's called exploration. You're exploring, and then once you find that land that you want to dive into, that's when you do the deep dive.

Okay, so what are. What were some struggles that you had getting from the architectural world to now the podcasting world that you haven't really spoke about a lot or that only.

Want to speak to Raya?

Yeah, I mean, I think the biggest struggle for me was mentally understanding that I was supposed to be an entrepreneur because I went to school for five years for architecture. It's who I thought I was supposed to be. It's what my parents paid for, you know, what I was good at. And it wasn't until I got let go and couldn't find another architecture job and then started seeing success in the entrepreneurial world that I realized, wow, maybe I wasn't supposed to be an architect. And that's okay. A lot of people don't know this, but even after my business was going well, I still was looking for architecture jobs because I just couldn't. I just couldn't let go of the idea that I wasn't supposed to be an architect because of all the time that was put into it. But just because you put that time into it doesn't mean it's going to be wasted. It just means it's the next stepping stone. And it took me probably seven to eight months to realize that I can make a shift, and that's okay. And I think that, you know, it goes back to just how we are when we're growing up and what our parents tell us, what society or teachers tell us. Like, you pick one job, you do it, and you do it for 40 years, and that's. That's it. Times are changing, and I think that. I think it's becoming apparent now, and I think that's to our favor because we can bounce around and find out where we want to. Where we want to be, and ultimately what will make us the happiest. Sam.