The Art of Podcasting: Lessons from a Veteran | Cliff Ravenscraft

I had just raised my rates from $150 an hour to $300 an hour. So I had effectively once again, for the second time in my life, doubled my rates as a self-employed individual. And I had a client who purchased a very large amount of podcast equipment to help him launch his podcast. So much so that my profit just on the equipment order alone was $600. And this gentleman had no technical skill when it came to any of that equipment and had no idea how to hook any of it up and asked me if there's any way that I could help him hook it up. And I said, well, yeah, I can do that. I charge $100 an hour for a minimum of 1 hour. And with everything that you have to hook it all up, it would probably take about 2 hours. And he says, okay, go ahead and put that on my invoice as well.

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Welcome to another edition of The Profitable Creative, the only place on the interwebs where you will learn how to turn your passion into profit. I am your host, Christian Brim. Joining me today is Cliff Ravenscraft of cliffravenscraft.com. Cliff, welcome.

Christian, I am delighted to be here. It was a great honor to connect with you and meet you in person at the Onward Summit in Detroit, Michigan, just recently.

Yes, it was a fantastic event at which you spoke as well, and I very much appreciated your presentation. As a matter of fact, I don't remember if it was you or Xander that I quoted the other day, but I quoted one of the two of you. I don't remember even the quote, but it was impactful.

It was impactful.

Yes, it was.

Love it.

So I didn't know who you were before I met you. You are an OG in the podcasting space. So for our younger listeners, why don't you give your bona fides there?

So bona fides, basically I started podcasting when podcasting was brand new in December 2005. I was probably one of the first 200 podcasters in the world. And my wife and I started podcasting as a hobby, just for the fun of it, about a television show called Lost. Over the course of some pretty wild circumstances, we ended up with an audience over 60,000 people in a short period of time. And we decided to launch several other podcasts as a result of the feedback that we were getting from people who were stating that things that we were sharing authentically and transparently were having a positive impact and influence on their lives. My wife and I have always had a desire and a heart for serving others, specifically from a ministry capacity, but it was clear that this was an opportunity to serve at a level that was beyond either of our dreams of the impact that we could have in the world. And so we launched more shows, and within a few years, we're reaching hundreds of thousands of people. And I one day asked myself the question, I wonder what life would be like if I did this for a living instead of what I was on the path to do, which was to take over a family insurance agency that was started by my grandfather in 1937. And I was next in line to take over from my mom and dad.

I mean, you talked about that a little bit in your speech, but that had to be a struggle in your own mind to make that decision. To pursue podcasting as a business, what, what went through your mind in that decision-making?

Well, at first, when the idea, the dream, what would life look like if I could do this, it was something that I never really spoke to anybody about because I felt pretty much ashamed of the idea. Here I was thinking about doing a hobby for a living. Whereas I had a secure job with incredibly high pay. I'm incredibly skilled at it. I'm the sole income earner for our family. My wife's a stay-at-home mom. We have 3 young children, and this is right around the— we're talking about 2007, early 2007, when I'm thinking and dreaming of leaving the day job.

And how old are you? How old are you at this point?

I'm 51 now. So however old I was 18 years ago, you're the math person.

So, or you're the early thirties. We'll go there.

Fair enough. So anyway, the situation was I was in an industry where I'm quite aware of what's going on financially in the world. And I am selling insurance policies to people who quite frankly, there's no way on earth they're ever going to be able to pay that mortgage. There's no way on earth they're going to be able to pay that car loan. And so I knew people in certain industries knew that the crash was coming in 2008. In fact, most of the tech side of the world were experiencing significant layoffs. So most of the people I knew that were friends of mine, my peers, they were getting laid off left and right. And here I was with pretty much the best job security one could ever possibly have in an industry that's certainly not going to go anywhere throughout all of this crisis, and yet here I am thinking and dreaming of doing what, my hobby for a living. And so, yeah, I didn't talk to anybody about it for a long time. However, it was, for me, it wasn't just a hobby. It was the fact that this is what I feel most called to do. It was, uh, it was something where I knew that I had impact and influence in the world, and it was beyond what I was able to do. In service to others through the work I was doing as an insurance agent, which was actually pretty incredibly high. Right. So yeah, but yes, to speak to your original question, it was a difficult decision, mainly due to the idea that I felt a little bit ashamed that everybody else is getting laid off and here I want to voluntarily leave my day job for something I don't know how on earth I'm going to make money.

Did your wife look at you crazy?

No, actually my wife is the one who suggested I leave the day job. Uh, so when I began talking about it out loud, she was one He was one of the first people I talked to. And I began to speak to some other people out loud about this dream. They were like, oh my gosh, I can't believe— yeah, of course I see that for you. And here's the things that you could do. I started to talk about it in podcast episodes. I had lots of different shows and I had a lot of personal shows where I could talk about things that I'm thinking about personally. And people who had lived their entire lives as entrepreneurs were reaching out to me and says, you could totally do this. Here are 5 different things that I think you could do to generate revenue. And every time somebody said something positive to this idea of me leaving the day job, I came home and had those conversations with my wife. And then finally one day I got so frustrated by my lack of passion for the work that I was doing in insurance because I had been all consumed with the passion for what I was doing through podcasting that I just, that I just had a string of really bad days of unfulfilling work. And finally, my wife said to me, she goes, "That's it. Tomorrow you're putting in your 90-day—" Well, she said, "You're going tomorrow to have a conversation with your dad. You're letting him know that you're quitting." And I went in the next day and gave a 90-day notice.

So your dad looked at you like you were crazy. That's what I thought.

I was like, it was pretty easy for me to make that decision because I was convinced that my dad, being a very intelligent man, was going to talk me out of it first thing in the morning. So it is kind of an easy decision to make. And I went in and I said, Dad, I need to talk to you. And he's like, yeah, what's going on? I said, I, I just want you to know I, I'm putting in my 90-day notice. I want to do podcasting as my career for a living. And he goes, I have been waiting for months for you to come in and tell me you're ready to leave.

Interesting. So he already knew.

Yeah, he already knew. And he also said these words to me. He says, you know how much money you can make if you stay insurance, right? And I said, yeah. He says, I'm going to tell you right now, if you do what you love for a living, you will make exponentially more doing that than you could ever make here.

Fascinating. Okay, so I want to fast forward and then come back. So you don't do podcasting now, correct?

Oh, I do podcasting now. Yes, you do.

Okay, I misunderstood that. So you, you're still in the podcast game? Hey listeners, are you ready to turn your passion into profit? Then grab a copy of Profit First for Creatives. Click the link in the show notes to purchase a copy. And if you're not ready to make that full commitment, you can download a free copy of the first chapter. Check it out right now.

Okay. So let's define what you mean by that and what I mean by that. So if you mean, do I teach people how to podcast? The answer to that question is no, I no longer do that. I still produce anywhere between 3 to 5, sometimes upwards of 7 podcast episodes a week, but not necessarily for business income. Maybe one could argue a significant portion of what I do is marketing for my business. So yeah, I'm in the podcasting game.

Okay, all right, so let's go back. You, you started this based upon passion, what the impact that you felt that you had and the potential for that, but you weren't sure how to make money at it. And it wasn't like, uh, as mature an industry as it is now where that, that path was, was more defined. So talk about how you worked through that, uh, how to make money doing what you loved.

Yeah, so the first thing that I will say is that when you have a significantly sized audience, sponsors are— and especially when you have an ideal target niche audience like I did— big companies are looking to advertise and sponsor said content and to get a message out to your audience. So I had the Direct Time— DirecTV, Time Warner Cable, Expedia Travel, bunch of other significant national brands come in and advertise and/or sponsor our podcast.

So they came to you, or did you have to go solicit them?

No, they came to us. There were very few podcasters in existence, and so they were recognizing that a lot of attention was being put into the listening of podcasts, and they wanted those niche audiences, so they came to us.

Okay. And so did that make you profitable from the outset?

Well, my business, my business has been profitable from day one. I, and I started the entire business, everything that I've built, and I've generated many millions of dollars over the last 18 years, and it all started with a $35 cash investment. So I took $35 out of my own personal bank account and I went to Best Buy and bought a headset, you know, pair of headphones with a little plastic boom microphone off to the side. And it wasn't— it was before USB-C or USB-A. This was 1/8-inch microphone jack and 1/8-inch headphone jack. And I plugged that into my laptop and I recorded my first podcast episode into a free Audacity software. So my business was profitable from day one because— so how it started out was I started with free equipment. I had a laptop already, $35 headset, and then all of a sudden Uh, some people said, I think you and your podcast, you and your wife should podcast together. I just went ahead and used equipment that I already had around the house. I was actually recording onto a Sharp MiniDisc recorder with a Sony microphone. Okay. In for our first episodes. And then people were listening, then they're like, hey, I, you know, have you ever thought about improving your audio quality? And I'm like, yeah, that's something that's on my list. And we're saving up some additional money to buy some equipment. And one of our listeners said, how much You know, like, are you, do you have equipment in mind? And I said, yeah. And they said, how much would that be? I said, I'm looking right around $350 for the next upgrade. She goes, well, can I get your address? I'll write you a check for that amount so you can go buy the equipment. And I'm like, sure. And that was the first donation that ever came in. And then we ended up having, like I said, multiple streams of income. So there were listener contributions came in from the very earliest days. There were sponsors that— and advertisers that wanted to get in front of our audience. Back then, there was a big thing where people were trying to build networks of podcasts, and they promised to get sponsors. And there was this one company that had a live show call-in functionality for podcasters, and they were a startup company where they had, you know, those —what do you call those—venture capital funds and stuff like that. So they had millions of dollars invested in this company. Well, they didn't have advertisers or sponsors yet, but they said, Cliff and Stephanie, we know that you've got an audience. We want you to do your live shows on our thing. We'll pay you $3,000 a month. And I'm like, okay, $3,000 a month. So they started sending me $3,000 a month. And I'm like, okay, I'm doing that. Eventually, people—here's where the money really started to roll in. And that was when people said, Cliff, can you teach me how to podcast? And I'm like, sure. And I did it for free. In fact, I was kind of shocked that people would allow me to talk to them for more than 15 or 20 minutes at a time about podcasting. See, I would go to my local church and Sunday morning people only want to talk about sports or football or whatever else people talk about. I don't even know what they talk about these days, but I wanted to talk about Lost. I wanted to talk about podcasting. I wanted to talk about that. And they're like, I got no interest in that. So people are like, Cliff, can you talk to me about podcasting? I'm like, yeah, I can. And so eventually I talked to enough people and some people said, Cliff, you've got to let me pay you for this. And I'm like, dude, I feel like I should pay you for the fact that I just got to talk about this for the last hour. This is amazing. Enough people started saying— I had one per person say, Cliff, you should try this out. Put a podcast episode out and tell people that you're going to take 10 people. For $97 and you will teach them, you know, these things about podcasting. And so I gave it a shot and this is way before Zoom, but I used some sort of feature functionality like that back in the day. And so I had 10 people pay me $97 and one of those people said, hey Cliff, can I talk to you about your webinar that you did? And I said, sure. He goes, I just got back from a conference. That is meant to help me market and promote my business and take it to the next level. And quite frankly, when it's all said and done, the amount of money I paid for the ticket and the travel and everything, we're talking about somewhere between $5,000 to $7,000 all in. I got more value out of your $97 workshop than I did the entire conference I just went to. You've got to charge more for this. And so I'm like, well, what do you think I should charge? What do you— I'm all ears. He says, why don't you do something for $997 and see what goes out there? And so I started offering things like that, and lo and behold, people started signing up for it. And it was kind of an eye-opening thing, but I still struggled with the pricing for a very long period of time. But to get down to it, I was generating somewhere between $3,000 to $5,000 a month, every single month, consistently, as a side gig for about a year before I ever decided to quit my day job.

Hey listeners, are you ready to turn your passion into profit? Then grab a copy of Profit First for Creatives. Click the link in the show notes to purchase a copy. And if you're not ready to make that Full Commitment, you can download a free copy of the first chapter. Check it out right now. Well, yes. So what you said, you do your podcast now primarily to market your business. Tell us more about that. Sure.

So by the way, the business that eventually took off— and so I thought when I left my day job, I would get money just getting behind a microphone and I'd get all these sponsors and advertisers and we'd have this premium listener contribution kind of thing. And those things are still possible today, but it became clear for me at some point down the road, while that was a possibility and it was one that was actually building great momentum, it was every hour devoted to that path was an hour that distracted me from the podcast coaching and consulting path, right? And the podcast coaching consulting path for every hour invested, I'd make 3 to 5 times more money. And so I, so I went down the podcast coaching and consulting path so much so that I, I am personally responsible for, responsible for more than 40,000 people launching their podcast. Holy cow. Yeah. So became known all around the world as the Podcast Answer Man. And I was the go-to person in the world to help you launch a podcast. In fact, most of the people who have a podcast today either learned from me or learned from somebody who learned from me or learned from somebody who learned from somebody who learned from me. So it, that, that's where I grew into as, uh, the podcast consultant that I was. Today, I don't teach people how to launch a podcast because most people fail with their podcasts, at least with what they had hoped to achieve with it. So. My promise was I will help you create a podcast. I will teach you everything you know to have a podcast and it will sound amazing compared to all other podcasts. Technically, audio quality, it will sound better than anyone else's out there. Now, what you do with your podcast is all yours afterwards, but I will teach you all of the technical aspects, right? Most people, and we're talking like 70, 80% of people, never made it past their 7th episode. They all fizzled out and died. E— all of those people who paid all of this money, bought all of this equipment, never made it past their 7th episode. And the reason why that I found is that a majority of them had either no clue why they wanted to have a podcast and didn't realize how much work goes into it, or number 2, they knew that they wanted to build a business and leave their soul-sucking day job. But they started with creating content. And because that just happened to work out for me. So for me, my story is I started podcasting as a hobby. And then all of a sudden there's this audience and now all of a sudden there's ways to monetize it. So I had told that story so many times, not trying to teach people that this is what I would prescribe for you as to how to build an online business, but what I recognize is so many people think that what I did is how you build an online business. But after a decade of teaching people how to podcast, I became very close friends with some of the most successful online entrepreneurs in the world. And I studied personal and professional development. And I learned that, wait a second, what I did was a fluke. It, it just doesn't work for everyone. Right. Right. And so what I did is I began to become a student of how have these people who are successful in businesses, how did they get started and what are the common traits? What are the steps that need to be taken to build a successful online business? And what I determined is that there are 11 steps in my, in my estimation, what I have reviewed, that if you follow these 11 steps, everyone I know who's gone through these has a successful, sustainable, profitable business. And step number 8 is create content. Step number 9 is build your audience. And so for me, what happened was people were coming to me and paying me $2,000 to teach them in their mind how to launch a successful business, but that's not what they were hiring me for. They were hiring me to help them start step number 8. Create a podcast, create content. They never did the first 7 steps. And so what I recognize is like, okay, yes, I'm making lots of money. And by the way, people, what they do with what they created, I delivered what I promised. There's nobody that was ever unsatisfied with that. But what I recognize is that, wait a second, I have an opportunity here to really help people succeed in creating what they want to create in this world, to do the work they feel most called to do in this world, to have a more fulfilling life. And helping them teach, launch a podcast, get really excited and fade out after 7 episodes isn't the impact I wanted to have in people's lives. So after a decade of teaching more than 40,000 people how to podcast, I shut all of that down and went from being known as Podcast Answer Man to Mindset Answer Man. And so I began to teach people that success in life, business, and any other area It is all about number one, knowing what to do, and not number one, but part of it is knowing what to do, the strategy, that's 20%, but 80% is mindset. And there are so many things that you're missing when it comes to these things. Sure. People can tell you all this, but you've got to get some foundational steps before you, if you're wanting to leave your day job and that steady paycheck and go out, become full-time self-employed. You need to understand there is a different way of thinking, believing, and feeling to be an entrepreneur. And that switch doesn't happen overnight. You have to know what your beliefs are. You have to change the way you think and feel about money. You have to change the way you think about sales in most cases. So yeah, and you have to have a lot of foundational steps before you ever launch a podcast. And so today my podcasts are me speaking to people who are on the entrepreneurial path. And I'm like sharing with them, if you are not experiencing consistent, sustainable revenue and profitability in your business, then you're missing some of these elements. And that's what I'm trying to do is share that. And so my podcast is my place where I encourage, equip, and educate people. And then at the end of each episode, I put calls to actions for various products and services that I create. I love that.

I didn't start my business as a side hustle. I, I just cold turkey and quit my job, borrowed money to start the business. Not ideal, but I think you raised some very, uh, valid points about people tend to skip steps. Maybe it's because they don't know the steps, but they want to go with the sizzle. They want to, they want to do the thing that they want to do that gets, gives them that, uh, dopamine rush or endorphin rush that they haven't laid that foundation right. I very much appreciated your, your presentation on mindset that you did at Onward. Because that's— I talk a lot about that in the book, about the money mindset, being intentionally profitable, and our belief system around money, what we learned in our family of origin and growing up that affects how we run a business financially. Because you can't really separate yourself from personal and business. How you run your personal finances is how you're going to run your business finances. It's the same person, right? I found the story, uh, most intriguing about the individual that paid you to consult on their, their equipment and how you struggled to, in your own head, justify sending them an invoice.

Can you share that story with us? Yeah, so this came not too long after I had a significant breakthrough on my pricing. I had just raised my rates from $150 an hour to $300 an hour. So I had effectively once again, for the second time in my life, doubled my rates as a self-employed individual. And I had a client who purchased a very large amount of podcast equipment to help him launch his podcast. So much so that my profit just on the equipment order alone was $600. And this gentleman had no technical skill when it came to any of that equipment and had no idea how to hook any of it up and asked me if there's any way that I could help him hook it up. And I said, well, yeah, I can do that. I charge $100 an hour for a minimum of 1 hour. And with everything that you have to hook it all up, it would probably take about 2 hours. And he says, okay, go ahead and put that on my invoice as well. And so I just recall, you know, again, I had just raised my rates. And so I'm like, wow, I just had a 20-minute conversation with someone. And I just walked away from that conversation with $1,200 profit. All right. The rest was all, you know, equipment that needs to be shipped and all of that other stuff. But as far as my time, I, I sure, I'm, I just talked to him for 20 minutes. I'm going to have a 2-hour conversation with him, but I just made $1,200. That is amazing. And I just remember being so excited about that at that time. So the time came along, uh, he got all this equipment. I walked him through everything and I recorded the— but this is before we had all the video stuff that we have today, but it was all in audio. I literally, I could walk in, I could walk you through this stuff blind. I can say, look for this, okay, plug it in. And I have a gift of explain it in a way that you can understand it. Not only did I help him hook it all up, I taught him how it all works. And there's an audio recording so that if, let's just say a bunch of kids came into the room and played with everything and they unplugged everything and turned all of the knobs, if he went back to the beginning of this 2-hour audio recording, he could actually set it all back up from scratch. So I'm thinking he, I'm super thrilled with what I just delivered. He is super satisfied. And I'm like, wow. I can't believe I just made $1,200 and that's all I had to do. This is unbelievable. Fast forward about 3 or 4 months later is it? I don't know exactly how much, but I got a call or got an email from me and says, hey Cliff, I'm running into some issue with some static on my telephone interface device. I can't hear people. And I said, well, you, you remember I warned you before you bought that. That there is static on the line that gets— no, Cliff, I remember that. And I, and I've, I'm dealing with that exactly the way you taught me. I'm saying to you, Cliff, the static is so loud, I can't even hear the other person and they can't hear me. That's interesting. He goes, well, hey, I'm not upset. I just wondering, can you help me troubleshoot it? Can I hire you to help me? And I said, well, you know, I'm a minimum of 1 hour for $300 an hour for a minimum 1 hour. He goes, yeah. When, how, what's the soonest I can get on? And I'm like, oh my gosh, I'm looking at my calendar and I was booked 2 weeks out. I had a, just somebody just mentioned me in their podcast and I mean literally I have no breathing room. I'm working night and day at this point. And so he's like, hey, 2 weeks is no problem at all. I don't have anything scheduled for live call-ins until, you know, such and such date. So that's perfect, Cliff, go ahead and put me on your calendar for 2 weeks from now. And I did. And then all of a sudden I'm like, man, I feel so bad that he has to wait and I— and that he's going to pay $300 for me to troubleshoot something. And it's like, all of a sudden it was on in the back of my mind. And so about a day and a half later, I emailed him and I said, hey, JK Audio is the manufacturer of this device. They have an 800 toll-free number and the best technical support and they will be able to solve this probably even quicker than I can solve it, and they won't charge you anything. He goes, Cliff, I really appreciate you thinking of me, and if it's okay with you, if you're still available in the time that we have scheduled, I'd still prefer to just wait and work with you on it. And I'm like, okay, sure. So the time comes for our scheduled call. And I was using a telephone interface system similar to like what we have with Zoom. And you can jump on a Zoom call before the call is actually scheduled. And so I'm on for about 5 minutes early and he jumps on right, like instantly afterwards. So 5 minutes before our call is ready to start. And I said, hey, you know, let's, let's get into this, jump right in. What's the phone number for your listener hotline or for your whatever? I pick up my phone, I dial it in on my cell phone, and I listen and I hear a noise. Not static. All right. Static is not the right word. I heard a crossover feedback loop. And I sit there, I'm like, oh, I said, do me a favor, reach behind the JK Audio, pull out the power cable and plug it back in. And he's like, okay, done. And I hit redial on my cell phone. Hello? And he's like, oh my gosh, I hear you. And I'm like, yeah, and I hear you. Problem solved. And I sit there, I said, let me ask you this. When, when you went out of town, by any chance did your microwave or stove have a flashing clock on it? He goes, yeah, the power must have went out while I was gone. Well, here's what happened. This has happened to me twice over the years. If the power goes out, when the power comes back on and this device is plugged in, it can send a power surge, which basically there's this fine circuitry in there that creates what's called a circuit crossover circuit and it creates a feedback loop between the separation of send audio and receive audio. That's all it was. And anytime that ever happens, just unplug it, plug it back in. Now there's still like 3 more minutes left in our— or 3 more minutes before our call is supposed to start. He goes, awesome, Cliff, thank you so much. Send me the invoice. And I could not send him the invoice. I said, no, I can't send you the invoice. I said, we still have an hour and 3 minutes left on our call though. What can I do to serve you? Cliff, I'm great. Really? That's all I needed. And I'm so thrilled. Thank you so much. Send me the invoice. I said, I could not sleep tonight when I put my head on the pillow, if I were to send you the invoice. He goes, why? I said, well, because I, number one, I should have known, you know, about that. I didn't think that that was the thing. When you mentioned static, I, it's like, and this has happened to me twice before you had to wait 2 weeks. Well, you, and of course I'm still feeling a little bit guilty about making $1,200 just a few months ago on all of this stuff. So all of those things. And then, and finally, after about 3 minutes of him begging me, right as our call is supposed to start, we end the conversation. I said, listen, the only thing I ask is, I'm not going to charge you anything for this call. The only thing I ask is if anybody ever asks you, who do you turn to for anything related to podcasting, tell them Cliff Ravenscraft. He goes, man, absolutely, no worries. So I earned $300, but in my mind, I did not earn the $300. So I refused to send the invoice. And what I shared at the talk that you were at is it was my belief system that caused me to refuse to send the invoice. My belief is that I was being paid for an hour of my time and I did not give him an hour of my time. I solved the problem in 90 seconds. I also had a belief that value is determined by how difficult something is to do. And that was not difficult at all. In fact, the more— I also had a belief that the more somebody would hate to do something, but yet they need to do it anyway, the more they should get paid to do it. And I didn't hate what I was doing. And so there's all of these different things that were building and stacking on one another that quite frankly made it impossible for me and my values and my beliefs combined to send him an invoice. And that was just one client. And I was doing very many of those kind of exchanges over the first year and a half of my business.

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And so what you realized, well, what prompted you to revisit those beliefs?

Oh gosh, there's so many different things, but I will tell you it was October 2010. So it was, I started my business in January 2008. So we're talking, what is that, 2 hours or 2 years and 10 months? Into my journey, I had finally started a mastermind group with a friend of mine named Pat Flynn. And the two of us were absolutely head deep into personal and professional development. I mean, there's very few people in this world that actually study all this stuff as much, as deep as we go. And we were just sharing notes about what we were learning. And it was a conversation about money and pricing, and there was this article titled 7 Reasons Why People Want to Pay You More. And there is a subtitle called, for this article called 7 Reasons Why Doubling Your Rates Doubles Your Success. And this is an article by Peter Shallard. By the way, if anybody wants to read it, you can go to mindsetanswerman.com/doubleyourrates, all one word, or all one phrase, all connected. By the way, mindsetanswerman.com is a domain that I own. If you just type in mindsetanswerman.com, mindsetanswerman.com, that's going to send you to me. But I will say in full credit to Peter Shallard, if you type in mindsetanswerman.com/doubleyourrates, you'll skip me altogether and go straight to Peter Shallard's article. Read that article. You will double your rates right afterwards or some short period of time afterwards. Another thing that changed my, uh, that began to help me evaluate everything was this book right here. It's called Secrets. And by the way, we're recording with video as we're seeing each other. So I know this is an audio podcast, but Secrets of the Millionaire Mind by T. Harv Eker. The combination of that article by Peter Shollard and this book, Secrets of the Millionaire Mind, radically altered the way that I view money. And as a result, I began to see I went from $100,000 a year to $200,000 a year to then $350,000 a year. And I had a year when I made $750,000. It's like just the way I thought and felt emotionally about money was completely shifted. And all of the blocks that I put up from money flowing to me went away.

Yes. And, and I, I, I don't know if you've used this term, but you know, the, the phrase I use is self-limiting beliefs. Uh, you know, what, what you're telling yourself that you believe to be true, that is not necessarily true. I mean, you make it true because you believe it, but it doesn't have to be that way. I think creative entrepreneurs in particular struggle with this because you know, going back to when they were younger, if you're, if you're doing something that's not analytical in school, you're, you know, you're, you're making music or you're, uh, drawing or sculpting or whatever, it's, it's like, well, that's not a, that's not a real thing, right? That's just some fun stuff that we do, right? And a lot of people in the creative space feel like what they do is not quote, real work, right? The reality that I've seen is the, the creative mind is actually much more valuable than the analytical mind. And in the age of AI, I, I think it becomes— that, that gap becomes even more because AI functions on analytical predictability, and, and creativity is the exact opposite of that. And this idea that, uh, the amount of effort, you know, billing, billing by the hour or the day, it's so restrictive. Like, you're, you're leaving so much money on the table by not letting the— to your example, let the person pay you what they perceive the value. Like, you know, that guy begged you to pay you $300 because that's what he felt like he got, right? That was— I mean, you set the expectation of the rate, yes, but he was happy, happy to pay it. And this, this, this mindset that you get stuck in that, well, what I did I didn't earn, has to go away. Yeah, it has to go away.

Yeah, just so you know, my thing today, if I, if I were to approach the same situation with who I am as far as what I believe and how I feel today about money and value and stuff like that. I recognized that he had already determined that, yes, I would gladly sacrifice an hour of my day and $300 to have Cliff specifically solve this issue for me. And knowing what I know today is that if I actually solved it in 90 seconds instead of 1 hour, that I actually was far more valuable in what I offered than what I actually suggested it might take. So in fact, it might be worth more than the $300. In fact, I don't charge this way. It's like, how much is that going to be? Well, it's $300 if it takes up to 1 hour, but it's $750 if I can solve it in under 3 minutes. Yes. Why?

Because it's more valuable. Exactly. And getting through this with this mindset that someone actually cares how long it takes you to do it, right? Um, they don't. They're paying for an outcome, whatever that is. And if you deliver the outcome at the agreed-upon price, then they're happy. If you do it quicker, they're happier. It's very simple.

There is, there is room for the argument of quality of the delivered goods, but, but all things being equal, yes, absolutely. Hands down. That, that is the case. And quite frankly, many times with time constraint, you can in fact bring forth more creative energy to a project and, and sometimes stretch, stretching it out over a long period of time. The longer it takes to do something doesn't always improve that quality.

No, no. My example that I've used many times is if I've got a collapsed sewer line in the backyard, do I care if it's 5 guys with shovels or 1 guy on a backhoe? You know, to me, I want it fixed immediately, right? I don't want— I don't want the sewer backing up into my house. So a guy with 5 people and shovels, he says that's going to take all day. The guy with the backhoe says, I can get it done in an hour.

And in many, and in many ways, you will pay more for 100% with a backhoe, correct? Because it's like, look, I know it's going to cost me an extra $1,500, but this is solved today instead of 3 or 4 days from now, or, you know, whatever. Yes. Yeah, I'll pay more to have it now.

Yes. Cliff, I very much appreciate your time and your experience share. Uh, thank you for joining us. Uh, cliffravenscraft.com or themindsetanswerman.com.

Did I get those correct? Take out the, the, and just put mindsetanswerman.com. In fact, I'd love to give people access to the full keynote, opening keynote address called All Beliefs Have Consequences. You got half of that talk at the Onward Summit. And if anyone wants to, you can go to mindsetanswerman.com/free. And in this 1-hour talk, you will hear me retell the story that I just told you about the, the, the guy who wanted me to send him the $300 invoice. However, what you didn't get in this conversation and you will get in full is you will learn how, number 1, to discover what your limiting beliefs are, because we all have limiting beliefs. Even today, I still have limiting beliefs. We all have limiting beliefs and we're unaware of about 90 to 95% of the way that we're we are thinking and feeling in any given moment, in any given day, we're completely unconscious of what beliefs are causing us to think and feel how we're thinking and feeling. And so you will discover how to get to the root of what is my limiting belief in, or what's my system of limiting beliefs in this particular situation. So discover what your limiting beliefs are is number one. Number 2, you'll discover the source of those. And I think it's kind of important to discover where did the belief come from for you to understand that it's not yours, that you adopted it, that you took it in, that you're holding onto that belief. And if you want, you could open your hand and drop it. So that's number 2, discover the source. Step number 3 is you will learn how to disassociate, how to actually break up with the belief and kick it out of your life, and that will never do you any good unless you go to step number 4, which is actually conditioning an empowering alternative belief. These 4 things will absolutely transform every single area of your life, including the profitability of your business. And you can get this talk for free at mindsetanswerman.com/free. And by the way, that Session 1 of 8 sessions in my Free the Dream online course, which is an annual conference I used to do. That course is normally $497. I have a system set up that if you actually get the free access to the first session and you email me— there's something that I ask you to email me— if you email me, I then give you the full course for free, no strings attached, no expectation, no obligation you ever buy anything from me. But it all starts at mindsetanswerman.com/free.

I love it. So you got the tease here, you got the hook. Now you have to go find out how to fix it. I love it. Cliff, thank you again. Uh, listeners, if you like what you've heard with me and Cliff, please, uh, subscribe to the podcast, leave a rating, uh, share it with a friend. If you don't like what we've talked about, uh, shoot us a message and I won't have Cliff back on again.

Love it.

Until then, ta-ta for now.

And that's a wrap for today's episode of The Profitable Creative. Until next time, you money lovers. And don't forget, Profit First for Creatives is live via Amazon. Link below.