Build A Business From Anywhere Doing What You Love with Caitlin Pyle

How do you make business problems disappear? Wrap em in bacon for business owners, marketing execs, and anyone trying to grow your business, pump your profits and make more while doing less. Welcome to bacon wrapped Business with Brad Costanzo. Sizzling hot business advice guaranteed to make you fat profits. Every week, our chefs will serve you proven recipes for ramping up your revenue. Now here's your host, Brad Costanzo.

Hey, welcome back to bacon wrap business. This is Brad Costanzo. And today I'm going to be sharing a very inspirational story of Kaitlyn Pyle. And for anybody out there listening who is in a job that they don't like, they're uninspired, you're looking to reinvent yourself and start something new. This is going to be a very critical episode to listen to because it's the story of how Caitlin Pyle, my guest, was in a job that she got fired for. I believe she was proofreading and as a job, and then she decided, well, crap, I've got to do this on my own. So she started off doing this as a freelancer and having some really good success. And then she went on to teach online courses on how to work from anywhere by being a proofreader. And she did seven figures in that business. And she's gone on to create work from home, school, and work from anywhere. And it's just a really amazing growing brand where she shows that it's absolutely possible for anybody, no matter where you're starting, to reinvent yourself and create a new life teaching what you know. I've already interviewed her, so I can tell you that this is going to be chock full of awesomeness.

So.

So I'm gonna go ahead and start to play that interview right now. All right, Caitlin, are you with me?

I am with you, Brad.

Awesome. Well, so good to have you here. I'm excited to jump in today's topic and learn a little bit more about your, you know, your backstory and how you got into building not only your own business, but own businesses and how you're now working with others to help show them how they can work from home and take control of their own lives and kind of break free from a lot of the stuff that none of us liked back in the. In the corporate world and having somebody else control us. I know that's how I got out of this. You know, how I got out of corporate. I ran from it into the. Into the entrepreneurial world. But tell me a little bit more because I'm fascinated how you got started. You know, what was your journey like? From, you know, to becoming a business owner.

Yeah. So not unsimilar. Not dissimilar, I should say to you. I was kind of forced into it. I was thrown into it when I got fired in 2011. Oh, my God.

Same thing for me.

Yeah. Fired in 2011. It was not a good situation. I was 24 years old and had made some poor decisions at work. You know, I was just. I'm a rebel at heart. I don't know if you know the four tendencies from Gretchen Rubin at all, but highly recommended. It basically just tells you how you process your expectations. And I basically don't process expectations. I hate expectations, even if I make them of myself. And so I never worked well in an environment where somebody else was telling me what I had to do, even if it was me, too. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm a rebel by nature. It's my tendency. I always just like to do my own thing. And so I think in that way, I was always meant to be an entrepreneur, but that's why I broke the rules, because that's what I do. I break rules. And so I got fired for it. And I was frustrated, disillusioned. I wanted so much more out of life, but I didn't have the slightest clue where to look for that more. I wanted. But little did I know I was already kind of doing a little bit more. I had, like, a proofreading side hustle that I started while I was working at that place. And ironically, the woman who fired me, she was the one who taught me how to proofread. And so I started to grow that aspect of my business. Despite going back to school, I thought I wanted to be a personal trainer. That didn't work out. Turned out I didn't like exchanging time for money even when I was working out. So having to be at a certain place at a certain time is just not something that I enjoy.

I'm the same.

Yeah.

Let me ask you this. Were you working as a proofreader? Like you had a job as a proofreader?

I did proofreading while I was there. I was a marketing manager. Didn't pay me very much, but I did some proofreading there. So that's kind of where I got started. Just everything that left the office in terms of marketing materials and a lot of the transcripts, they saw my eyes last before they went out.

Okay, so take me through that. You've got a job. You've got. You've developed a handful of skills such as proofreading at your job, and now you get fired for stealing company pens or whatever you did, Right? So you get fired, so then what? You're at a fork in the road, you can go get another job, you can start something on your own. What did you do at that point?

Yeah, so I went to school. It was about three weeks after I got fired. I went to school for personal training and I did that. It was a four month program, so it wasn't like a weekend class. And I get a certificate. Like I did an all day, every day program for four straight months and I graduated in December and started trying to start my proofreading business or not my proofreading business, my personal training business. But on the side I had a few proofreading clients. But in my mind I had this mental block that I could only proofread a few hours a day because it was just hard work and I couldn't do more than a few hours of work on proofreading a day. But that was definitely a mindset block. But after I tried to build my personal training business and realized I didn't really like it, I didn't like the idea of paying for marketing through a company and then not really being in the hole basically in terms of what I was paying versus what I was getting out of it. And then I just didn't like showing up at a certain time. Like I didn't like those obligations, I don't like those expectations. And now I know, like everything makes sense because I know that that's my tendency naturally is to just resist all expectation. And so I started to really gravitate toward doing more proofreading. And I reached out to my, one of my two clients and I said, whom I hadn't heard from in a while, one of them, I said, hey, you know, what's going on? Where are you working now? And they're like, oh well, I'm working for this one legal support agen that they don't let me use my own proofreader, I have to use one of theirs. And so old me would have been like, oh well, that's so sad. I guess I lost that client. But something inside me was like, I need to find out how to become one of those proofreaders. And so I asked for some information and she got me the name of the person who was forcing her to use a certain proofreader. And I emailed that person and I ended up getting on as a freelancer doing quality assurance proofreading for them. And that really catapulted my work as a proofreader for Court reporters. That was where I got my main start and ended up growing a successful freelance business. I was doing between three and five thousand dollars a month as a proofreader for two and a half years. It was middle of 2012 and then all the way through 2014. And that's when I started proofreading anywhere. It was in November of 2014. So coming up on three years, how.

Much time were you spending to make the 3 to 5,000amonth in those early days?

Anywhere between 20 hours a week, up to 40, depending on how, like, it was a $5,000 month. I had to work my butt off to get there. And I was always super proud when I crossed the $5,000 threshold. I was like, wow, this is crazy. But I worked so hard to get there that it was not sustainable, Right?

Exactly. But you had the first taste of actually working for yourself and doing this on your own. So you had freelance gigs. You weren't just working as an employee for somebody else. So you could actually set your own schedule if you wanted, right?

Yeah. I was invoicing between 20 and 30 different individuals for services every month.

I love that. You know, this goes back to one of the things I always tell. The advice I give to, whether it's clients or friends. I actually did an entire episode on this, on the concept of being, you know, stop trying to be an entrepreneur and be entrepreneurial. And there's a huge difference. Right. Because everybody thinks I'm going to be an entrepreneur. I've got to quit my job and take big risks and invest all this money and hire people. And that can be overwhelming, trying to be an entrepreneur. But it's a lot easier to be entrepreneurial, which is find a problem out there, decide if you have a skill that kind of meets it, and then go create that job yourself. And that's exactly what you did. You realized that you had a skill and you found other people who needed it proactively. That's being very entrepreneurial. And then you. You created your. You created your own gig where now you could be that rebel. You could work in your pajamas if you wanted.

Right. So, yeah.

So what happened then? Because I have a feeling that there wasn't. You hit that first benchmark or that first successful thing. You're working for yourself. You're making three to five thousand a month, but you're working a lot. What was the. How did you take that to the next level?

Well, I didn't identify my as. With myself as being an entrepreneur at all. And it took me a long time to get there. But my husband did. Eventually he started listening to different podcasts and kind of discussed the world of digital marketing and being an entrepreneur online and just listening to some different personalities in the space and ended up enrolling in a program for entrepreneurs to build a software company. We ended up not building a software company. I didn't take the course with him. He took the course. But we're still considered a success story because we came out on the other side with Proofread Anywhere, which has been wildly successful. But it still took me a while because I wasn't the one in the course. I was very skeptical of online business.

Was that the foundation by any chance?

Yes, I was your foundation grads. I'm an. I'm an honorary grad because I was the one who kind of like, you know, did the Proofread Anywhere thing. But Ben absolutely is credited 100% with planting that seed because he was like, oh my gosh, this person in my mastermind or my group and the foundation is teaching a class on Udemy and He's making like $3,500 extra a month. And I'm like, what if I could create a class on Udemy, then I could make an extra $3,500 a month and maybe I wouldn't have to proofread anymore. And so the gears started turning when I started hearing real realistic figures. But there's so much out that appeared really scammy to me because I would hear stories of people making $100,000 in four months, and I'm like, that seems way out of my reach. And so I just completely shut it off. But it wasn't until I started hearing more realistic numbers that kind of aligned with what I was already earning that I was like, what if I could do something like that? And so when he was kind of nudging me, but eventually, on November 1, 2014, coming up on the three year anniversary, I bought proofreadanywhere.com and I started my website and wrote like a 30 page ebook called how to Make Money Proofreading Transcripts for Court Reporters. And it was the crappiest ebook on the face of the earth. I still have it, still have the COVID I can still like look through the whole thing. But that's what got me started, was just getting out my first. I didn't even know what it was called. You know, essentially it was an information product that eventually came my first online. Became my online. First online course.

That's. Yeah, that's fantastic. And that's such a. It's such an awesome not, I'm going to say, textbook example of how to do it. It's exactly how I did it. Kind of rewinding is I had gotten laid off from my job. I had read the Four Hour Workweek, which really inspired me that this whole world, it opened my brain to this whole world existed. And I love doing that with others. Just showing them they don't even know that this world exists. Right. That you can actually, you become magical because you can create income from stuff that people never, ever would have imagined. And I created the very first thing was it was an ebook about, you know, magic tricks. Actually, it was an ebook about magic tricks because I knew a handful of bar tricks like that I would. There were some bar tricks that I would win drinking bets with, right? And every once in a while, I would do it when I was flirting with a girl when I was single, and she'd laugh and it'd be fun. It was a fun way to flirt. And I just remembered that. Or I just thought, like, well, I'm going to show guys how to use these bar tricks and show them maybe how to. How to do it to impress women as well. So there was like, the bigger benefit, not just how to do bar tricks and win bets, but how to flirt with women. And it was funny because I didn't even think it was gonna work, But I created a little ebook and all of a sudden it worked. And then people wanted more, Right? And then you started to realize, okay, I can take this to the next step. And you don't have to be. It can be something as, like, bar tricks. It can be proofreading. I never would have in a million years guessed about or thought of to create a course on proofreading. But it sounds like you took a skill that you already had and realized that if you've got this skill and you've got this ability to go get clients, there's probably other people out there in the world who would probably like that as well, right?

Yeah, I definitely thought that to some extent. And I'll be completely honest with you, Brad. I went into it thinking that, yeah, we'll see how long this lasts. I committed to about six months. And I'm like, well, I'm going to do this for six months, and if I hate it and nothing's happening, then I will give myself full permission to quit, you know, and do something else or just go back to my normal life or whatever. I had no expectations that it would grow. But within those six months, let's see if I started in November. Then we'll fast forward to the end of April. I had. I was able to stop proofreading for money altogether because of the income we were earning at that point. Gosh. Because we launched online course in February. We'll say. We'll say by the. So the foundation had a live event in. Gosh, I think it was beginning of June. And around the beginning of June, we had done like $150,000 of revenue. And so we hit our first hundred thousand in less than 90 days. And so all the things that I was thinking were ridiculous not six months ago were happening faster for me. And I was like, what is going on? Like, I was just. My mind was blown. And, yeah, it all starts with a skill. I think a lot of people think they have to reinvent the wheel or they see somebody doing something and so they try to copy them, and they don't realize what skills they already. They think nobody's gonna want them. And I said that to myself. I'm like, nobody's gonna want this. And we sold the ebook to 15 people. And they're like, okay, well, I guess that's it. We found all the people who are interested. And then we launched to our list of 220 people, and 15 people bought that. I'm like, okay, well, I guess that's it. And then. But we kept growing it, and we started working with affiliates, and then kind of sort of started dabbling with like, Facebook ads and stuff like that, but not too much until actually, like, the following summer, we started doing more of that, but just growing our list. And then we ended up raising the price because just kept getting better based on our feedback. We were getting or increasing the amount of material in it and just making it better and better. And then people just kept catching on. And now we have two different courses and two different types of proofreading, and it just has grown and grown.

So let me ask you. Let me go back. And so for my listeners that they can really picture this, especially if they're in a job, if they're not working for themselves right now, but they've kind of got. If they're listening to my show, it's probably a big desire of theirs. So you started off, right. It was like a trickle, like 15 here, 15 there. And in that. In that February to June, you did 150,000 in revenue, but you said you only had a list at the time of like 220 people. And it doesn't sound like you started doing Facebook ads and other stuff for a while. What was the big driver for that first six figures? Am I correct? You did about six figures in five or six months?

We did our first six figures in less than 90 days.

Okay, so what was the driver for that? Was it affiliates and joint ventures? Was it. What was that?

It was largely joint ventures. So I'll tell you the first blog I got featured on, and I'm telling you, I was so green, I had no idea what any of this stuff was called. Now I know it's called Influencer Marketing. But my husband was googling work at home blogs. And we found Holly@theworkathomewoman.com and she had a page on her site looking to interview work at home women. And so we responded to that page and we said what we were doing. And so she interviewed me. And there was just like a really bad picture of me and answers to her questions on the blog. But it actually got me some customers that helped me grow my list. And then I started googling for more blogs. And at first I had the mindset of, oh man, these are competitors. They are blogging about working at home, and I'm blogging about working from home. But then I'm like, wait a second, they're not competitors. Let me figure out a way to make this a benefit to them. And so before I launched the online course, I was able to set up an affiliate platform just using like a $50 plugin, like it wasn't anything expensive at all, and basically set the commission to $75. And I think the course was $380 at the time. And so it was about 15 or 16% commission, I think is what it came out to. But $75, just some work at home bloggers. And they're not that weren't currently selling or monetizing the topic of proofreading at all. They were willing to take the risk, so to speak. And so I got on their blogs, did some more interviews. I find the interviews are very good because they're able to introduce me very nonchalantly to the audience instead of me doing a guest post where I'm like pitching my product at the end. It's just kind of weird that way. So it was very authentic. And I was able to get several different affiliates. Like one of my early affiliates was the Penny Hoarder, which is now like a $20 million a year content engine. It's definitely changed over the last two years, but he was one of my first affiliates. And now we work, our relationship is a little, little different. The way he prefers to be paid PPC now, but that's his loss. I think he'd make a crap ton more money if he stayed on as a commission, but.

Oh, well, yeah, exactly. Well, that means you keep more. So kind of. I just want to recap that. So you realized that there's other people who have the audiences out there who might be interested in this and you created the opportunity, or I mean, you created the relationship and then there was the opportunity for them to interview you, learn more about what you're doing. Exactly. Like we're doing here. And for their audience, who is probably a very likely demographic that would want to buy your stuff, those listeners would start to come over and check you out and buy. And then when you bought the blog and the interviewer got paid a commission, right?

Yep, that's exactly what happened. I made it a no brainer. Like as people started earning commission, I would write to other bloggers that maybe had guest blogged on that blog and said, hey, so and so has made, you know, three commissions and it's been a week and that kind of thing. And so I would name drop. Just made it a no brainer for them to want to partner. And obviously if I'm the one answering the questions, I'm the one creating most of the content. And sometimes I would, I would make up the questions if they had no idea. So it would really be very easy for them to work with me and then they would just get paid for me creating a piece of content. And it's just a lot better because a lot of the bloggers would do sponsored posts where they would get paid $300 to have a post up on their blog for 30 days. But they make so much more money if they have a really good offer that can be sold on Evergreen and they can just pitch it to their list on a regular basis.

Exactly. And what you did, one of the big things, I talk about this all the time. Whenever I'm trying to create an opportunity, solve a big business problem, create revenue, I always stop and I ask myself two questions, which is who else has what I need and who else needs what I have? Very, very simple. Anybody can do it. It's what I did when I started my business, it's what I've done when I've started almost every one of my businesses. And it's exactly what you did. So you said, who else needs what I have? What do you have? You have expertise on how to start a proofreading business and you identified who those people were and then you thought, well, who else has what I need. Which is exactly that people have audiences and they need content and they love money. Right. Well you certainly have content and you create that synergy there and it really can be that simple. I try to tell people all the time, so don't over complicate this, but take an inventory of either. What, what do you have, what can you get access to, what expertise can you do it, who else needs that? And then match it up. I mean that's, that's how you know billions of dollars are made like that every single day.

Yeah, it's really only just you have a skill and you use that problem or use that skill to solve people's problems and then you just keep doing that. That's all making money is, it's all businesses.

Absolutely. What kind of cost, what did it cost you from when you first. I mean obviously it didn't cost much to create that first 15 page ebook, just a little bit of typing and time. But between those first 90 days, in order to make that 150,000, what kind of startup investment did it really require from you? Because obviously you had to start a website, you had to get it designed, you had to create the courses. What do you think you put into that?

Oh man, I should show you my first version of that. We can maybe put a screenshot on the show notes page or whatever it is. It does not look like it did now. It actually took me almost a year before I had a professionally designed website. I did everything myself. I bootstrapped it from the ground up. I probably spent a total of $500 in the first four months on different things. I had GoDaddy hosting plan, just bare bones. Not because I was broke, because I had some savings and money that I could have invested. But I was so convinced that it wasn't going to pan out. I thought for sure. Well, when I bought the domain I was like, well yeah, we'll see how long this lasts. And I made the whole six month commitment thing and I said, you know, if it doesn't work out after six months then I'll just, you know, shut it down or whatever. So it wasn't because I didn't have any more money to invest, it was because I really didn't want to invest money because I didn't think it was.

Going to work out. Right. But so a $500 investment turned into six figures in 90 days.

Yeah, I would say it was a good return.

I would say so. You know what I love about stories like this is it just really does go to, to prove that you can take a concept, an idea, a skill set, and you can find somebody who wants that. And with. I mean, people don't really realize that. It wasn't until, I want to say, in the past, I guess, 15, 20 years or so, when the Internet has been really going, but maybe really in the past 10 years. I mean, I started this 10 years ago, and the tools out there were still relatively complicated. To make a lot of money online, you had to. You had to figure a lot of stuff out. It's a lot more technical, but in the past five years, one of the things I realized is that at no time in human history has it ever been this easy to create a side hustle, extra money to get paid for doing something that could be totally out of left field. That there may only be. You never would have thought there's a big audience for learning how to proofread. But when you can tap into a global audience of people who can work from home and who can do this, it just opens up the doors. And, man, I would kill to go back, you know, and start my entire career over. I'm not that old, but I kill to go do it and having all of the tools and opportunities available for us. And it sounds like that's one of the things that you're starting to do now. Like, so proofread anywhere was just really your first one, but you've created. You've created other companies, businesses, assets like this as well. Tell me about some of the other ones you've went on to create.

Sure, sure. So it was. We traveled in South America for a few months. At the time, we had said, hey, you know, we don't have to be tied down. I don't have to be glued to email for my clients anymore. Because I had, around April 2014, decided I don't need to, you know, do the proofreading thing anymore. I just have my blog, and I'm going to focus on the teaching aspect and growing that because I was enjoying it. And we decided that we were going to take our. We planned on doing like 12 months in Ecuador so we could be, like, just in South America, immersed, you know, learn Spanish, whatever. And then I would proofread as our income because our money would go a lot further in South America. And when I decided to give up the proofreading side of things and to stick with the online side of things, it changed. I was like, we don't have to stay in the same place. So we decided to go all around South America for a whole year, which really made really made a lot more sense. And so we were in Ecuador and we had made about $400,000 in revenue at that time was August of 2015. And so we had been live since February, I guess about six months. Yeah, so we're six months in and I started kind of dabbling in affiliate marketing, so looking for other offers that my audience would like. And I found like a bookkeeping course that they really, really liked. And then I found like transcription course. And I looked at this transcription course and I had been making tons of commission because it was like a really good course, but she was selling it for so little money and I was, it turns out after the fees and stuff, she was giving away a 50% commission. Like I was making more money than her selling her course. And so I went to her and I'm like, what if we partnered up? And I took care, I did the investment, you know, I paid for the website. I turned your ebook, your $100 ebook into a full fledged online course in the very similar vein that I don't with proofread anywhere. And she didn't take much. It was not a hard sell. You know, she was like, I've been waiting for something. Like this is exactly what I need. And so we've been working together ever since we've been together for two years now and that's transcribe anywhere. And so we have a revenue share agreement in place and I manage all the marketing, she manages all the student side of things and the content side or I help her with content, but we just have a fairly even split on tasks and I'm able to outsource a lot of it and so I'm very happy. It's not taking up any of my time, but we're able to benefit from that. And I invoice her once a month based on the revenue. And we haven't even touched Facebook ads yet. And We've done between 50 and 70k each month for the last three months. We're just having a really good year, just working with affiliates. We pay 20% commission and we just really grown our affiliate network. And the course is obviously very good. There's two courses, legal and general transcription. And the courses are great. She's an excellent teacher. There's success stories galore. Are actually using one of the transcriptionists that graduated from her program for a project that we're working on right now. And so it's just, yeah, you have to have a quality product. So that's actually worth saying because like you can't just throw out garbage. And yeah, my ebook was not great, but I thought it was good. It was the best I could do at the time. And I didn't know where the holes were until I let people fall in them. And so there's something to be said about getting that MVP minimal product out. Yeah, but you can't just, you know, knowingly throw out garbage and try to sell it to people. And that's scamming people, which is not what we're doing.

But there's a big difference between something. It can, it doesn't have to look like the most professional thing in the world as long as it solves the problem. Right. So if the content is good, the, the, the styling of it, the professionalism, that can come later. Like you just said, the minimally viable product. Get something out there, make an offer, and solve people's problems. Because if you're able to solve people's problems and get them results, then you've got proof of concept, you got testimonials and people talking about you, and you can take the next step. And then what I love that what you did is you took a proven process, which is take a skill set, package it up, find the audience, sell it, you know, give commissions. And then instead of doing it all over or sticking just with one horse in the game, you found other people. And, you know, I mean, subconsciously, I guess you asked the question, who else has what I need? Well, you need more content, so find people have content. Who else needs what you have? Well, you have a proven, systematic process to create an actual business around this. And it's rinse and repeat. And then you just gave yourself even more leverage by just reusing and repurposing your, you know, your systems to help other people do this as well. And now, I mean, you've got seven figure business.

Yeah, multi seven figures.

Multi seven figures. And it all started with a little side hustle on proofreading, which is one of the areas that you and I have nothing in common. I think I have some DNA that keeps me from being able to proofread anything I do.

Well, we can't proofread our own stuff. That's why you need to hire a proofreader. I don't even proofread my own stuff. I always hire multiple proofreaders.

Well, that's good to know because now I am the worst at it. I literally cannot see it. This is fantastic. And I hope that it serves as some really good inspiration to people out there that you can do this. It is not rocket science, but you can do it. And in fact, aren't you. You told me offline that you're working on creating more resources for people who not just want to learn how to proofread, etcetera, but who actually want to work from home, who want to take this step out and figure this out for themselves because they're either out of work and looking to work from home and not have to go get their resume like you and I were, or they just want to get out of that job and finally take control of their future.

Yeah, yeah, that's exactly what I'm doing. And so because I've been with affiliates and building my network from the start, it just, I've just become. And I've been very successful with proofread anywhere. I've been able to position myself as an authority as a work at home expert. And so kind of the natural evolution of the affiliate marketing and the marketing knowledge that I've amassed in my track record, obviously with proofread anywhere, transfer anywhere. And then we have. Scopeschool.com has been doing fairly well as well. What is that one? Scopeschool.com is very similar to. Yeah, yeah. It teaches the skill of editing transcripts or court reporters. So it's a much, much smaller niche, if you could imagine. It gets smaller than proofreading. It can. That's another niche that we've monetized. So that's just another one of the brands that we're working with. But yeah, so just like the natural evolution of just becoming this work at home expert on accident, then participating in other people's launches. And I've been involved in some summits like some GE had really been turning about, okay, how can I bring this together and serve my audience in a way that's just going to be a smash hit? Not just for me, not just for them, but for the people that are promoting it. Because proofread anywhere, you know, we, it's very highly academic. We provide all the support and so we don't have the bandwidth to give a. We have a pretty high. We don't have like huge. We, we have a good margin, but we don't have the margins that you would think if you're just like selling a product that, you know, there's not a lot of support involved. Like here's an ebook. We actually have tests that get graded and tons of emails that come in for support and we issue certificates. It's very academic and so we have a lot of expenses to cover. So we offer 20% commission on our courses and I want to be able to offer more than that. But I wasn't able to do it with proofread anywhere. So the gears started turning. I'd participated in some summits in the past and I won first place in a sales contest as an affiliate for Ultimate Bundles. I was selling something called the Work at Home Bundle. And my list loved that. And I just. But there were things that I don't like about the bundle model and things that I don't like about the summit model. And I was like complaining about it one day and I was like, wait a second, wait a second. Why don't I take what I don't like and make it better? There has to be a way. And I had capital that I could invest from other businesses and stuff. And I'm like, this is just either going to go to the IRS or at least 40% of it's going to the IRS or it's just going to sit here or I can invest in creating something. And so the idea for Work at Homeschool is born. And basically what that is is we are recruiting other contributors. So we're creating a multi contributor product called Work at Home School. And we are BCP Media, my company is marketing and selling that as Work at Home School. And so it's a very advanced lead generation, everybody that if you say you walk into the virtual door Work at Home School, you. There's all, you know, probably 40 to 50 doors that you walk through and then you actually our contributors will get the lead for the people who download their content. So you buy Work at Homeschool, you get access to all these courses and you walk in the door and you're like, I want to go take a course on Facebook ads. And then the person that's teaching that course gets the lead. And so if they've got other products that you know, they want to sell, then they could potentially sell to that student. So it's very advanced addition affiliate marketing, very advanced lead generation. But it's also something that's going to benefit a lot of people because there's excellent products included and you know, really high earnings potential for affiliates. We're able to offer 40% for affiliates and 60% for contributors plus a contributor bonus based on how well other affiliates perform. And yeah, it's just like we wanted to create like a win, win, win scenario because I was just so irritated with how, you know, people would run summits and then they would sell stuff on the back end and then not give the people who are speaking of the summit any chance to earn any of that money. It was just like here, you know, promote the summit. How big's your list? Your list is not 10,000 or more. That happened to me once like two years ago. Someone was like, I want you on my summit but you have to have a list of 10,000 or more. And I was thinking, oh, this is some exclusive club. And I was just naive. The reality was that they wanted my list. And so I promoted for her and she got parts of my list but I got nothing basically because I got nothing. And so, and I hate, and I hated that. And I thought I saw that over and over again. And I participated in launches where as an affiliate I wasn't treated very well. And I don't mean ultimate Bundles. That was great. It was an excellent experience. But I got third place in a really big launch earlier this year and I've since approached the product owner about becoming a work at home school affiliate. And product owner has simply ignored my emails. And I'm like, you wouldn't, I would never ignore somebody who got third place in my multi, you know, six figure launch. They always do really well, this particular person. And so I was just blown away at how I was treated. I'm like, no, I don't need this, this is not good. So I took all the things that I had hated about being an affiliate, being involved in summits and of course, you know, yes, the ultimate bundles experience was an excellent experience but I don't agree necessarily with taking $5,000 worth of product and discounting it 98%. That's not fair to the contributors at all. And it might be great for, for the consumers but they buy it and they're like, oh, it's $47, so it's $97. But there's not that motivation to be involved. You know, you just get the products, you don't get some support and the on the back end, you don't get to be in a Facebook group, you don't get any coaching calls. And so what we're doing with work at home school is we're providing what's missing, we're taking, you know, it's not just a whole bunch of stuff you bought for a little bit of money. You're going to pay a little bit more for it, but you're going to get so much more as well.

I love it. And then the users, yeah, they're going to be able to really, Are they going to be able to choose their own path and find out like you said more about. Because I mean there's not one way to skin this cat. There's many, many, many, many ways.

Yeah, that's why we're doing. We're actually launching it in January with the Work at Home Summit. And that's basically like a Meet the Teacher conference. You know, all the contributors are speaking on their expertise, and you're able to go and see what appeals to you. And then you'll be able to see what products, though, that expert has contributed to work at Home school. And you can learn from them directly, not just through a summit.

I love it. I think you're on to something really big. And it's exciting. It's exciting to see people get this and realize that the path that they've been down their entire career is not the path they have to stay on. That's when I read Tim Ferriss Four Hour Workweek. A lot of people get. It was literally, by the way, 10 years ago this month that I read that book. I still have the book. And I always write in a book like the date when I finish reading it, and it says October 2007, which makes me feel really old. But I read it, and a lot of people have read that book and they either thought, oh, I can't wait to just work four hours a week, or I can't wait to have all this money and freedom and. And all I did. Like, the thing that I loved about my introduction to this world is that it was just that, an introduction to an alternate way to live, an alternate way to write my own story, to not have to go hope that some employer can bless me as worthy of receiving a paycheck, but then expect me to sit around for 40 hours a week. And half the time I was being unproductive as hell anyway.

Yeah, that's why I got fired. I mean, I got a lot of stuff done, but I wasn't working the entire time, according to them. Like, I got done way more stuff than everybody else, but because I wasn't going to getting other people's work when I was done with my own. They said I was stealing time. And so they told everybody I was a thief and they fired me.

Well, I was the biggest. I was always cheating on my job. The only thing I've been faithful to, I think, is my wife. But, you know, I was cheating on my job the whole time. So when I had that job and I was a financial analyst at the time, it was a relatively easy job. I could kind of, you know, I had a lot of downtime. So I started investing in real estate on the side and flipping houses and I would use a. I would use company stationary. I was terrible. And then, and then when the other thing I did is I started doing external sales for another company that was totally just as a 1099 contractor. And I would, I would just do a side hustle and just find out how can I take either what I have a plethora of, which is either expertise or time or both, and go put that to work elsewhere. So always had those little side hustles. And it wasn't until I finally got pushed out the door that I realized that I can actually make this side hustle a full time thing. There's a million side hustles and they don't have to be on the side and they don't always have to hustle. That's another word, by the way, that I've got mixed feelings with. I think hustle can be a four letter word. It can be enough to kind of get you into the momentum of going after what you want. But if you try to live your life in hustle mode, like Gary Vaynerchuk or somebody else, I mean, it just looks exhausting. And it doesn't have to be exhausting.

Yeah, you're speaking my language, Brad. I am 100% on board with that. Like, it's definitely, I'm in hustle mode right now, but I also feel that there's a light at the end of the tunnel. And so I'm very much looking forward to launching work at Homeschool in January and then just being able to sit back and, you know, not work as much. I'm looking forward to that because there's got to be a balance. Life is about more than how much money you can make. Life is about more than you know. Yeah, it's just about so much more. And it's about enjoying yourself. And so if you're not enjoying what you're doing, then figure out how you can enjoy it. And yeah, if you're unhappy in your job, there are other ways out. And it's all about learning skills. So I have this thing called the simple success formula. And it's basically that your success equals, and I just write it like an equation. Success equals skills plus action. And you could call actions implementation as well, but just keeping it simple, skills plus action equals success. And so if you can manipulate the skills and actions portion, then your income is going to go up. So the more skills you have, the more money you can make. Mo skills. Mo money is basically my tagline.

Mo money.

Yeah.

Well, I love It And I really appreciate you sharing not only your journey, but your insights and what's possible with kind of a, kind of a, you know, just an out of the blue idea, the idea that somebody else might be that a, that you can proofread for other people and then other people might want to learn what you're already doing and you're kind of taking for granted and then proving the market with, you know, getting a minimally viable product and testing it out and not being afraid to just kind of put yourself out there and because the worst case scenario, like you said, spent 500 bucks or maybe a little bit more than that to make six figures. And it doesn't always happen that linearly, but the amount of money and time you risked to get that happen is like nothing. It's so worth the risk because the payoff is so high when you're able to make it. And I love the fact that you're providing these resources for people to check it out. And I'm going to give those resources to everybody. There's going to be a link right here in the show notes and you can click on that. You can check out everything that she's got on the, you know, currently as well as everything that Katelyn's got in the pipeline with work, at home, school. And if this is a direction that you finally want to kind of go down and explore that, I invite you to check it out and I invite you to look more and fall in love with the process. Not even the outcome to say, listen, I'm going to. That's. That's how I always say that I succeeded in my very well. Everything I've done is. I just said, I don't care if this very first website makes a million dollars or even gets me out of my job. It's like every now I know how to set up a basic website, now I know how to write a sales page. I just took every skill I learned was a new victory and it was. And those little victories ended up leading to many big victories in my life.

So it's like compound interest.

It's exactly like, whoops, I just knocked my headset out. It's exactly like that. But so once more, Caitlin, thank you very much for joining me here on the show and sharing your insights. And for everybody listening, please check out the links right here in the show notes and take a look at what she's got because I guarantee you that, you know, you'd be spend a lot more. I'm sorry, you get a lot more return on your time going through this kind of information than watching Netflix.

So for sure I still watch my share of Netflix.

I do too. But see, you got to be able to earn that downtime from Netflix. But thank you very much for being a guest on the show and sharing all this stuff. And if people want to reach you, if they want to email you, what's the best way to get a hold of you?

Yeah, you can. You can email me caitlincpmediainc.com you can reach me through bcpmedia inc.com you can find me on Facebook, Google me. I'm not hard to find. Just don't put any Y's in my name or K's. There's no Y's.

I love it. Well, Caitlin, thank you very much for your time and sharing this and I look forward to watching everything that you produce here and watch all the students who succeed based on your guidance.

Thank you so much, Brad. It's been a pleasure.

Now, so for everybody else who is listening and if you liked this episode, if it opened your eyes, if you want to get more things like this, you can always send me an email to ask bradaconratbusiness.com and let me know if any questions popped up. And if you want to share this on social media, go ahead and do that and tag me in it. Tag Caitlin in it as well. Let us know that you really enjoyed it and leave a review. If you're listening on itunes, leave a review on there and share the show with your friends. That's the reason I do this. It's the reason I try to bring this to you so that you can have a shortcut to a lot of the skills that it took me a lot of time and energy and money to learn. I just appreciate you listening. Until next time. I will see you on the next episode.