Pat Flynn on #AskAviArya show

Foreign. Hey. There we go.

Awesome.

Good to see you.

Good to see you as well.

Raya. Raya. Yes, Raya. Good to see Raya.

Pat, thank you for taking the time out. This means a lot to this daddy daughter venture.

Absolutely. I'm sorry it's been very difficult to get a hold of me. It's been, been a busy year.

Oh, that's, that's, that's absolutely perfect. We'll, we'll dive right into it. I'll just give you a bit of a short background on why we're getting in touch with you and how this whole thing happened.

Love it. Hey guys. Hey. Hey. It's Pat here. My name is Kathleen. What's up? It's Kat here.

I'm, you know, as the white beard says, I'm 42 years old. Story started when I was 18, all the way back in India. Born and brought up in India, I. All I wanted to do in life as an 18 year old was to race streetcars. Dad used to go to sleep to take his car out and race cars, organize races. All of that. I thought I'm a business person. Dad didn't think so. He said ultimatum, join my business or get out of the house. I joined his business. It was a small hotel in the middle of Delhi. This new phenomenon on the market was called the Internet. Started exploring, dabbling in it for a few and we started getting some queries, got all in and to cut the long story short, business exploded in the next three, four years. That took 40 years to build his first small hotel. After I joined his business, we discovered the Internet. Next five years we built four properties. We still own and operate those properties. That changed the lifestyle, that changed everything. That changed my equation with somebody who wanted to throw me out of the house. Now is having strategy meetings with me. All of that happened. Then we started a travel company and every online business possible. I was still in my 20s by then. That's when new companies like TripAdvisor and Facebook and Google and Expedia started coming to India and they wanted me to come and speak for them. I started speaking and then people started coming and saying that we love what you're talking about. Can you do this for us? That's when in 2019 we gave birth to Internet Moguls which was a four member agency which did well in the last 10 years. Now we are a team of 225 plus one who's recently joined us. And so you know what attracted me to your podcast and all of them were the affiliate marketing. All of Them, all of them, later. But you always said you wanted to build a system to be able to work from home because you wanted to spend time with the family. Unfortunately, last 10 years, I've spent my time away from these girls growing up, and now I'm like, I'm saying, now I want to make sure I can do whatever I can to do to get them involved in the business. And therefore, this venture called the Internet Moguls of the World, where Raya and I are traveling all over the world, meeting people online and offline, and creating that book once in a. You know, once in a year kind of a book, if it does well, and hopefully every year, maybe interviewing people who we say are Internet moguls, and integrated mogul is somebody who's growing his revenue, leveraging the Internet, still spending more time at home and being able to do things remotely. So welcome to our second, third show together. We've interviewed two people and our third show together, and Raya would like to start with her questions. Yeah, so what was your main inspiration, my 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 which was really interesting. And then more people started asking for questions, and I thought, 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 my website for $19. And in the first month that I published that book, In October of 2008, I made $7,908.55, 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 podcasts, 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 the 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. Kind of combine those two things, magic can happen.

Awesome. So, Pat, now we're into. 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. 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 is anything that, you know, if they're where you want to be. Why. 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, and there's so many things, and we get overwhelmed and. 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, 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 gonna drive 10 hours to see your set. If you are a product owner, they're gonna buy every product. They don't even need to read the sales page. They're gonna buy everything from you. These are super fans. If you had a 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 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 going to have your thousand true fans. We're probably going to 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. 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 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 super fans, 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 superfans 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 you know when it comes to list building, email list building and all of that, because that's how you start. So I mean Raya and I start 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 this, 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. This is, you know, 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 is 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 going to make your messaging that much clearer. It's going to 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 build 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. 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. You know, just. I appreciate both of you for the support. It's. This was a great interview and keep up the good work.

Thank you. Thank you, Pat. Thank you very much.