James Schramko - How To Scale Memberships And Retain More Customers

This is an intro. Intro, intro, intro.

Hustle and Flow Chart with your boy, my boy, Matt Wolf. Hey, Joseph.

Hey, my man.

Welcome back to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast.

Oh, man, this is. I love this podcast.

This is. Is this our first three Pete guest?

Probably.

No, it's not. It's. No, no, because we've had. Brad has joined us a couple times for some simulcasts.

Yeah.

And Mark Sacosta Rubio has joined us a few times.

Mark Marks has been two times as solo and then once with David Allen.

And once with Steve Rudin.

Oh, yes. He's been four Pete.

Yes.

But two is a guest co host, I guess.

Yes.

Which still counts.

I don't know. All right, Mark's wins. Yeah, no, but. But James enters in a very elite club by being here today because he's one of only three people who's been on three or more episodes with us.

That is very true. All right, so we have James Schramko with us, and this is a simulcast with his podcast. This is cool because we did this last time over@superfastbusiness.com he has a podcast over there, so you'll probably hear the same exact episode over there with a little less. He called our podcast. Oh, we're way more professional because we actually do an intro after the fact, like we are right now.

Now. This one, you know, we kind of went into it planning on talking about one topic and then kind of went into some other rabbit holes. But we covered a lot of really cool ground. And, and, and what was interesting for. For this episode was it kind of started with this, like, James Schramko history lesson. He kind of walked us through his various businesses and how they got started and how he marketed them and how he's grown his current membership. And then it morphed into this conversation about retention. And once you have a membership and they're paying a monthly continuity, how do you keep these members around? What kind of things can you do to keep them around? So not only did we talk about how do you actually get people sold into a membership, he gave tons of mechanisms on how to get somebody sold into a membership, which is awesome because it's going to help the hell out of our business. But then he also.

Subscription business that you know, anyone who's.

Listening, but he also talked about how once you have the members, here's how you retain them. And I thought those two discussions were just, like, amazing discussions where I, like, he was just blowing my mind.

He also was super generous to literally open up his. His AD accounts. And his actually is his Wicked account and its email list.

Yeah.

And gave pretty much all the vital numbers you can imagine as benchmarks. And he has, like, what, over seven years of data, which is insane. And he's using Wicked reports, which is an amazing. You know, if you're looking to actually track your data properly, like, use that.

Yeah.

Because it works. We use it, and James has been using it for a very long time. And so it's like you're going to get all these crazy benchmarks, and no one shares their information like that. And James, I think the last time we had him on, he actually did something very similar. This is why we love the guy. He's just an amazing. Like, if you're not following James somewhere because he's all over the place or a member of his group, go do it. Yeah.

At the very least, go subscribe to his podcast, Superfast Business. I think by the end of this episode, it's hard not to love James.

Yeah.

So, you know, we can. We can sing his praises all we want, but he'll sing his own praises by just giving a ton of value in this episode.

That's right. That's the name of the game.

And you'll actually hear us talk about our entire business model on this episode as well. And one of those things in our business model is to create notes around each of these episodes and give those notes away for free.

You want these notes? I swear to God, you're even. James is like, I bet your note taker's probably going to charge more because we're going to get very detailed on this one.

Yeah.

So, yeah. So you get those notes.

Yeah. Go to hustle and flowchart.com comp. Get all the notes, all the tools and resources. And we. We talked about a lot of books. We talked about a lot of numbers and stats and data. You're going to want the companion for this one. So. Hustleandflowchart.com comp and support us if you.

Really like this show. Yeah. And I mean, let's be honest. And we actually talked about this. Like, it's. We have our own membership, but it's in the form of, hey, we'll actually package up all of our best content. Yeah. So all the stuff you hear on the podcast and all that, we actually send it to you in the mail in the form of something called the EGP letter. But don't be duped in thinking that that's the only thing you get, because you get a lot more. So it's. We Actually model ourselves very closely to James.

Yeah.

And there's no, no irony in that. He's one of our mentors, and we really respect him. So, you know, we're always putting new training in there. There's members in their Q&As about the episodes, and I have a sneaking suspicion that we're going to ramp things up a little bit. Yes.

So go to egpletter.com, become a member. You get access to the notes that we mailed to you. Like Joe said, you also get access to our. Which you'll hear us talk about on this show. You'll also get access to the various training and videos we do. And you pretty much. We're gonna break down our business model and James's business model on this episode, so you'll understand how it all works. But if you want to see how it all works in real Life, go to hustleandflowchart.com comp to get the notes for this. Go to egpletter.com to actually support the show. Get the newsletter, become part of the community, get all the training and all that good stuff.

You are awesome. Thank you for listening.

Let's go talk to James.

Thank you for listening. James. James from Superfast Business. How are you?

Good, thanks. Yeah, we're back with another simulcast on both our shows. For me, this will be episode 672, and I don't know where you guys are up to, but I can see you're putting a lot of podcasts out.

Yeah. Where are we, Matt?

So right now, this is actually slated to be episode 192, but I do kind of shift schedules around quite often, so I never say the number at the top of the episode just because I may move it around. Yeah.

See, I like to paint myself in a corner, and I just commit to the number. And for the first time in the history of my podcast, which has been going for about 10 years, I have a surplus of podcasts. I have, like, 20 up my sleeve, and I've. The only time I ever had anywhere close to a few in the can was when I was episode recording with Tim Reed and we had our Freedom Ocean podcast. And I think we do 3, 4, 5, or maybe 6 at once at my house because he flew up from Melbourne. But since then, it's always been, you know, published, published the next day, sort of thing on demand. But I'm not even sure how I got to this situation, especially with a newborn baby. But I think, okay, one clue is that I'm not traveling as much. I Haven't traveled overseas for about seven or eight months. So that's the longest I've been without an overseas trip for the last decade. That would be definitely one. So routine is strong and travel is an interruption to a lot of the routine. And the second thing is I've just.

Found a nice flow of balancing out things that interest me, projects that interest me.

And the timing just works. So with introductions and people I'm interested in having a chat to, or when a client has a success story and I want to publish a case study, I just say, hey, let's chat about it on the podcast. And then we make a booking. And it just seems to flow at about the right rate now. And we're now found our optimal delivery is two episodes a week. So that's. We'll publish 100 episodes in 2019. And that seems to be. It gets about twice the traffic as one episode a week. But it doesn't change much if I do three, four or five from the experiments I've done.

Yeah, that's interesting. So this show we release twice a week also, and I think I actually just counted, we have 18 episodes in the can, so we're kind of on the same page with being pretty far out in front of them right now. But we actually release seven episodes a week, if you count our other show. We actually created a second show called Hustle and Flow Shorts, which is clips from. From these longer episodes. Because a lot of these podcast interviews, they'll go an hour. We've even had some go upwards of two hours. I think that might have actually been you.

I believe it was.

But we, you know, we've, we've had some longer episodes with this show. And so we actually hired somebody to break out the show into smaller, like little 10 minute clips of like golden nuggets of wisdom. And we released that as a daily show. And we've kind of noticed the same thing is, you know, going from two episodes a week to going to that one's five episodes a week. You don't really notice a huge bump in download number. At least we haven't.

Right.

So that's really interesting because that's what.

You'Re seeing speaking with Pat Flynn about this as well. And he had the same result as me.

Yeah.

So two a week seems to be about optimal for all of us.

So I guess what I'm telling my clients is that from the data I've seen from my show and from a few other clients, is that it is worth having more than one. But there is a limit to, I think, how much people can actually consume. And then you look to the daily shows and I think there's this crossover point. And I'll talk about this in two ways. One is, I think if you start sending 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 emails now, you might start to tip into the region of. Instead of going into the prime inbox, you might now go into the marketers to look at later type box or the newsletters box. So you might tip yourself into that. And there's plenty of marketers who made it into that box in my inbox system. It's like you're going to be sending me two emails a day. There's absolutely no way I'm going to look at them every day. And it's so extreme that even the daily surf picture ones, which I absolutely adore and love, I now put into a Check it later folder.

No, well, you just check it with your own eyeballs out in nature.

So you just look out your window, right?

Well, of course. Of course I do. And, well, the main thing you do is you go for a surf and then you come back and see if someone managed to take a picture of you.

There you go.

There's nothing more valuable to a surfer than someone taking a picture of you on a wave because it's like, wow, it was captured. Yeah.

That brings up an interesting business idea. I should just go down to the beach with my dslr, start snapping pictures and then charging surfers as they walk off the beach.

Every single beach you go to, you'll find there will be a local surf photographer. They will have an Instagram and possibly an email list, and they will send out a daily email. If the surfer is noticed in the picture, they'll get in contact and they can usually buy the prints. So that is a business for sure.

Yeah.

You have to take reasonable photographs, of course.

Sure.

That's where I would fall short, I'm sure.

So the second one is when I was at an event in Colorado at Buck Risby's Health Summit, and he had someone there from Agora and they had a massive amount of research data on sending out communications, but they found there was this sort of danger zone where if you sent a communication that would usually sort of unhitch the apple cart, it would cause people to break or to stop their subscription. So they turn off all distractions and communications for a certain period during that dead zone, where any interruption to the flow is going to cause the deal to shake loose. So I thought, that's interesting. And when I'm looking at My clients retention statistics. I'm always looking for a pattern. Is there a certain point or a time where unsubscribe happen? For some clients I've found it like it might be the five month mark or we have a look at what communication is happening or what's possibly causing that. And sometimes by removing something you can actually assist the process. So it's definitely worth looking at whether you're publishing podcasts or sending out autoresponders or you've got some kind of recurring program. It's worth having a look at how much communication are people getting and what sort of frequency. And so my second podcast is the video show that we do. So we set up a super fast business video itunes channel and that's the daily short videos. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 minutes. Just little bite sized chunks. And often I'll be talking about the same sort of tips that I would talk about in a long form podcast. But as I record the podcast, I'll actually put a line down the middle of the page and I'll write Q on the left hand side and A on the right hand side. And if someone asks a question or we mention a topic that's interesting, I'll jot that down on the left and then as I answer it, I'll write the answers on the right. And I do this in my coaching calls as well. And I'll end up with 20 or 30 little Q&As that can easily be repurposed into short videos that will make their way into that itunes video channel. And with that one we send a weekly email summary instead of daily because I think daily might be too frequent. And since they're already going to be able to see it wherever they subscribe, whether it's YouTube or Facebook or itunes or my membership or our blog, there's a lot of places they can receive this. LinkedIn is actually the hottest zone for me at the moment.

You said that last time we chatted and I think we talked earlier. Was it with Mike Dillard or someone else but Neil Patel? Neil Patel, that's right. Yeah. He said the exact same thing. Is LinkedIn the video on LinkedIn is where it's at.

Well, I keep seeing Neil Patel on there, so I'm not surprised.

There you go. Well, we heard it from him.

We found the same thing with the, with the mailing about podcasts. We've actually toned that way back mailing about episodes because we, you know, we have a Facebook group and we have an online forum which is actually something I want to Talk to you a little bit more about in a few minutes here. But with our Facebook group, I've asked people, you know, do you even want to see these emails? What are your thoughts on them? You know, I often try to get feedback from the community and see what their thoughts are. And most of them said, you know, we're already the ones that listen already subscribe either on Spotify or itunes or Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. And so the ones that are subscribed are probably ignoring your emails about new podcast episodes. And then the people actually mailing to for the most part are probably the people that have already sort of consciously made the decision not to tune into your show as often. So just based on that feedback, we still mail about episodes, but we only mail twice a week about episodes instead of all the time.

Yeah, that's pretty much what we're doing. And I agree with you, there's a good chance when that email comes out, our open rates are very good because I've just whittled and whittled my list down. So they're only the most active. So we get 25% plus open rates. But the click through rate might not be as high because I think they see the email or they get a desktop notification or they get an Alert on their YouTube channel or their phone gets pushed the new episode. They don't really need to open up the email to follow through to the blog to listen to it. It's already going to be in their native environment by that time, I think. Also we tend to email out just a little bit after the podcast has been pushed out. So they've already been pinged wherever they're subscribing to that the hardcore fans for sure. So I noticed off the first couple of thousand downloads.

That will happen even without the email going out.

Yeah, yep, that's true.

We see the same thing.

We used to do a lot of mini chat broadcasts with the chatbots, but we've kind of backed a lot off of that because I know a lot of people have done just way too much. It's almost like being on a group text message chain a little bit, if you can. No one wants to be blown up on that all the time. So it's just learning how to use the medium as well in some cases.

Well, I get a desktop notification every single day from one marketer at the moment. And so the next one that comes through, I'm just going to switch it off. It's too disruptive. I think we have to take into account what is the optimal rate to communicate what we've got without pushing it to the point where it gets dismissed? That's what's the edge? Where's that edge for our audience? And there's lots of proponents for the daily emails and there's Back in my early days I would hardly send anything. I could go a month or two without sending an email. I was definitely undercooking it. I think I found my right balance. In fact, in the very early days I didn't even collect email addresses. The only email addresses I collected were buyers. My list was made up of only buyers. That was it. I didn't even waste time list building for prospects. It was like of the stages of the funnel. I was only interested in the red hot bullseye in the middle. That was it. And that was enough.

Was that strategic at that point for you?

It was pretty much like I didn't have that much time. I was doing this after hours. I had a day job and I was focused on converting people who were trying to buy software. I wanted them to buy it from me and I wanted to give them a bonus. And that's inevitably I had to get their email address to deliver that bonus. So this first hundred and then a thousand people on my email list were all people who had purchased a couple hundred dollar product. So it was a really high quality list. And you know, that's why I blow every metric out of the water in terms of dollar value per email address or whatever. I have still got a tiny list. I mean at its peak when I was on Aweber I had like 35,000 contacts. But now these days I've got about 7 or 8,000 in total in ontraport. And that is after like bumping off anyone who's ever unsubscribed, bounced or has not opened an email for a couple of months. They're off, they're gone.

That's interesting. We pretty much do the same thing. Our email list I can actually tell you because I have it open. I think it said like so the last email that I sent went out to 5,924 recipients. So you know, we hover right around that 6,000 mark for subscribers. And at our peak we had over 100,000 subscribers on our email list. But just over the years we've done the same thing. We've just whittled away and chipped away at just the highest quality people. And you know that I think that's.

Been a big factor for no difference to your actual sales or profit.

No, our open and click rate actually is consistently going up because of it.

Well, and it's also kind of like a journey, customer journey thing. Slash, what medium do people really want to consume content? And like you were saying, now we live in a way that we can communicate in all these different buckets and people can kind of self select how they want to be communicated with as well.

Yeah.

Being subscribed to podcasts, chatbots, emails.

Yeah, I call that a list guarantee. It's like just you're protected from any single source failure. Rather than being, you know, the YouTube channel dependent person or the right. The Facebook channel person or just having the podcast or just having an email. It's nice to have.

People in the right, you know, in a distribution of that where they are saying in multiple places.

Yeah, yeah, for sure.

You know, I think with podcasting one of the big issues that we run into, and maybe this is kind of one of the same things you run into, but might be an interesting topic is, is just trying. I feel like with our list, I spend so much time trying to convince people that they should be listening to podcasts. It's. It's like the people that are enjoying our shows, they're converts already. Right. They're hooked, they listen, they subscribe on their app. I don't need to be emailing those people cause they're automatically downloading it when a new episode goes live. So most of the emails I send these days about podcasts and podcast episodes is essentially me trying to convince people. If you're not listening to podcasts yet, here's one that might convert you kind of thing. So I'm curious what your thoughts are. Do you have a similar sort of philosophy?

My ontraport open rates are now in 33% range for broadcasts, which is, you know, and that's. And our client ones are very high. 65, 75%. So you know, just to support what we're saying here, if you only deal with people that are interested, I think the same is true for the way they like to consume. Like here's a fun fact, I don't listen to podcasts, which is, you know, that's just not the medium that, that I use. I have occasionally seen something that might catch my interest, but it'll be rare and generally I'll only listen to it.

If I'm going to the airport or something for a longish drive compared to my regular route. And it will probably be a surfing podcast. It won't be business related. And recently I enjoyed listening to an audio book, but I generally Consume Kindles. That's my preference.

No, that's. That's interesting. Yeah. Because before starting this podcast, I think, Matt, you are way more of a consumer of podcasts.

Yeah.

And I definitely wasn't. It was only if, like, Matt sent me something because I was more like you. And now I find myself just really attaching to things that catch my interest. I kind of pop around. It's usually like, when I work out, I'll just have it playing in the background.

Well, that's the. That's the secret. There's no portion of my life where I'm sitting around with nothing to do where I can listen to a podcast. That's why I don't listen to them. I think it's the only time.

Yeah.

If I was driving somewhere or if I was in the gym, then I might be tempted to do it, but I don't. I'm either surfing or off my computer. Like, I'm just not in the office. I'm nowhere near my computer most of the day. Every day.

Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Well, you're doing it right because you have your membership and that's. I know, something we wanted to kind of touch on with how, you know, how you kind of the inside workings of running a forum membership. I mean, you have all these different offers and your content lives in all these places. So, you know, it's. It's a really easy way to consume, even if someone's not on podcasts as their preferred medium.

Well, I know a lot of my members like to read the PDFs. So when we do a monthly training, it gets turned into. First, it starts as a video. I build out a keynote. This is because that seems to be the easiest way for me to build a training. I open up a keynote and I just add slides to it as I think of them. Certainly when I think of what the topic is, I open up a keynote and I populate it with the first ideas out of my head. Then over the next week or two, I'll just add a couple more here and there, and then the day before, I'll rearrange them and then illustrate them a bit, and then that's it. So I'll deliver the keynote as a webinar and then my team will extract the MP3 out of it because I know people like to listen to the audio because they are driving or they're walking the dog or going to the gym, and we'll then take every picture. I actually export the images after. That's my sop. After the training, I export the images and I load the video, saving that GoToWebinar gives me into a drive folder and I give that to the team. They take the images then and they put them into a PDF and then transcribe every single word. And I think they start with Otter. So, Otter, what is it?

AI IO or AI One of the.

I have a tool recommendation for you too. If you check out a tool called Designer. You know Paul Clifford, right?

Yeah, I know Paul. I used to coach him in Silver Circle.

Yeah, that's right. I knew you guys were connected. But Paul's Designer thing, the newest version, actually does that. You can upload an audio or a video file and it will actually yank out the screenshots of each slide automatically.

Very good. That's an excellent tool thing. So we've been doing that for the last few years. My team will be excited about that. No doubt you've got a link for Designer on Hustle and Flowchart somewhere on your products recommendations.

Possibly, maybe correct in the show notes.

Good. I'd be disappointed if you don't.

We learn from you, man.

So, yeah, they put that PDF up and that gets hit up a lot. In fact, my earlier sort of demographic of audience that I used to deal with, the people who were trying to build websites on Microsoft computers, like we're talking 10 years ago, they would go to the printer and have them print it out. Anything I gave them, they would print out into physical form. There's still a generation that does that.

We do that. Yeah. No, it's interesting because. So our process with our podcast, I actually don't even know if we've shared this on any episodes yet. But our process with our podcast now is we record these podcasts, they go into a Dropbox, and then we actually have a note taker that we hired who listens to the episodes and take note, takes notes on all the episodes. She actually worked with Tim Castleman when he was doing the like, traffic conversion summit notes and things like that. So same note taker who did a lot of those. Those things, she listens to every single podcast we do and takes, you know, about three or four pages of notes on every episode. All this sort of tools that we mentioned, the tactics, the resources, all that kind of stuff, she takes notes on them. So it's not transcripts, it's actual, like bullet point notes. And then that is our. Our freebie giveaway for listeners of the podcast is go opt in to get the. The sort of companion notes for the episode. And then our actual money maker piece of this is that we'll actually mail all of the notes in the mail to somebody on a monthly basis. So you sign up for our monthly membership and we're going to mail you essentially a book every month of all the notes from all the episodes from the previous month. And then you also get access to our community and any sort of new training that we're putting out and that sort of thing. But that's, that's really the whole flow is that we convert every single podcast episode into a lead magnet that people can opt into. And then the sort of pooled podcast episodes, you know, eight or nine episodes in a month get pooled into sort of like a book that we mail people each month of. Here's all of the amazing takeaways we got from our guests over the last month.

Yeah, it's a very good idea. We definitely do the notes part. And especially if there's any kind of framework checklist or step by step content, which is always good to put into an episode, they make a nice PDF and I think we have been using a tool to make those. Where it strips out, it makes a little PDF out of it. Can't remember what it's called, but that's the PDF download. So they will get the transcript, but they'll also get. Usually almost every episode will have some kind of guide or cheat sheet, but we don't print them out and send them off. That's a great addition and a really clever one, too. But for us, when people opt in for that extra value, the lead magnet, or whatever you want to call it, content upgrade, that's what starts our sequence for the sales funnel, I suppose you'd call it. Hate to use that word, but that's really the. That's the pathway that people will find out about. Coaching at Superfast Business is through that opt in. That's my number one source of lead flow.

Now, I'm curious, with your business, with the superfast business membership and, and what you're doing, how. How have you angled it over time? How is, how is the angle in which you sell it sort of developed? Because one of the things that we've run into in the past is we've had like membership sites and even this newsletter we're talking to now where it's sort of general. Right. You the person who would be interested in subscribing to our newsletter or being a part of our community. You know, we talk about affiliate marketing, we talk about traffic, we talk about copywriting, we talk about video marketing, social media, SEO. You know, the list Goes on and on. Well, we. We kind of COVID it all. We ourselves are unapologetic generalists. We kind of love learning about it all. But it also presents challenges when it comes time to sell our content. So I'm curious how you've approached that.

Well, I've got a. I've had long enough now to try a few different things because it's been going for 10 years. So in the beginning, way back, it actually started as a bonus. So the first positioning I ever had for my first community was if you buy this course. There was this course called Arbitrage Conspiracy at the time, and it was $2,000.

I said, the problem with the course is you're not going to be able to implement it easily. It's high level. This guy's making $100,000 a day as an affiliate. I'm a super affiliate. I understand his language. But I also want to help you. So you buy the course from me and I will coach you during the course for the whole duration of the course and make sure that you get success.

I took this bold move, so I picked a domain. It was super fast results at the time. And I partnered with my most successful student at the time, who was a super affiliate. And we opened up this forum and I put people on a 60 day. I think it was 60. It might have been 90. I can't recall exactly. Trial and then billing at 67 per month if they stay. And then we started. So a few things there. I started my forum with absolutely no content. So that's like the big myth. Number one, you don't need any content to have a membership because I've done it. Secondly, I had a very specific targeted audience. And I had about 78 of them from memory. Around about 80. I made some around 70 or $80,000 from that campaign because I got $1,000 commission.

Okay.

Yeah. And so I had a full cohort of similar people going through the same experience at the same time that suited where I could add a lot of value. And to my surprise, almost all of them stuck. And that was the start. And then the next thing that happened after that was I was sitting there in the desert in Baja, Mexico.

That's right.

With Joe Polish and Yannick Silva and Brad Fallon and Mike Filsaim and some of really heavy hitters at the time. And I said, I've got myself a speaking opportunity. What should I sell? And they said, sell an event. So I did. I offered an event and I went up. I spoke at the Gold coast. This was 10 years ago from now. And I spoke at this event and I offered a training, a workshop. It was a couple of day workshop and I sold about 80, really at $2,000 from stage and had over 120 people show up because some of them brought partners. I got absolutely rookie. They're like, oh, can I bring my business partner? It's like Matt buys the thing and he goes, can I bring Joe? Because you know, we're in business together and we do everything together. And I'm like, okay, but 120 people. And all I was going to do, and just for Context, this is 2009. I was going to get these people in a room and in two days I was going to teach them about online marketing. We were going to find a product that they could sell as an affiliate. We were then going to pick a domain name and register it. And then we're going to point it to my server and then we're going to log into my page builder tool and put in the domain name and keywords, our affiliate link, an image and we're going to write the sales copy, the pre sale for the affiliate program and and then we're going to hit publish and push it up to the server live. And everyone told me I was absolutely insane and crazy and it's not going to be possible. So these people had laptops, all bar one. One guy brought his PC to the hotel, he's committed.

On lunchtime on day two, we all hit published and there's like 100, it's like 80 or something websites because it's couples all live at once. It was amazing.

Wow.

I will never run a laptop event ever again.

Don't do it. There's a lot of tripping hazards. Oh yeah, but you know, so it was ambitious. But then the point of this story is the back end of the event was, hey, you've come to the event, you've built your website, you're in progress. Let me continue to help you. I'm giving you 60 days access to my membership and I want to coach you as a gift to continue this workshop camaraderie. And then if you want to stick around, you can and so forth. So for the last 10 years I've been using a campaign like that from my live events. So to answer your question, I've sold it as an affiliate bonus. I've sold it as an event back end, which by the way is like the absolute highest conversion path you can ever have. If you spend a couple of days in the room with someone, they're going to become a member. And then I've sold it as a local business marketing support thing because I was at the very early days there was this wild thread in the Warrior forum called Outsourcing Gold. It's kind of famous.

I vaguely remember that. I vaguely remember that.

So I had been selling to local businesses, like that's how I quit my job in 2008, I signed up two clients at 5,500 each and quit my job. And I was right on the cusp of that outsourcing gold thread. And off the back of that I built my website development business and my SEO business and the forum and I was just selling. So a lot of my members, initially they're affiliates and then I had more local business marketers. And then when I ran the events, I would package up the DVDs and I'd sell them for $397 and I'd backend it with 60 days access to my membership and that would sell. And then when I published traffic grab about 2012, maybe it was 2,500 copies sold of that and it backended my membership as well with a trial. And then I sold. As my partnership with Ezra became strong with Think act get, we end up with a lot of e commerce customers from his audience. And now I seem to have plenty of expert authors, membership owners. I did a tribe bonus a few years back. I picked up a lot of e commerce people. I found a fantastic audience in the blogging community when I spoke at Chris Ducker's event in Tropical Think Tank in the Philippines. I think almost everyone became a member of Superfast Business. There wasn't many people there. I can't remember if it was either around about 40. I think I had 25 or 30 members from that event. And then when I spoke at Darren Rouse's Pro Blogger event in Queensland, I ended up with dozens of members from his audience because my message is a perfect fit. It's the glove for that hand. If you're a blogger, you're already working hard, you're doing, you know, you're doing the effort. You've probably got really good creative ability or you can write or you artsy or you're talented and you know they've got lots of genius. I don't have. I'm not as talented as most bloggers, but I'm much better at making money than most bloggers.

Sure.

So if you add commercial sense to a blogging community, it's like petrol on a bonfire. And they're my perfect fit audiences. So now I bring It a sales monetization.

Tool to the blogging fight. So that's a good audience and I'm continuing to speak to those audiences. So I'm speaking at ProBlogger again and I love that audience. They're really into it. So once you find your market, what I'm saying here is my membership because it's like you, I'm a generalist. I just adapt to the audience that is in hand. And I've seen over 10 years, I've had probably five or six different audiences, but I will work with any of those audiences these days. If I had to say, the bulk of my community would be agencies like people who have services, whether they're YouTube, Facebook, AdWords, content marketing agencies. They are great clients for me and they're represented well in Silver Circle as well. And then there's the expert author educators. I've got bass guitar coaches, Learn to use technology coaches, Microsoft, Google, Apple educators. I've got lots of teachers with coaching programs and memberships. That's another strong representation. And then there's a couple of SaaS and E commerce and a few affiliates here and there.

So when you were going around doing all this speaking and stuff, you were kind of, were you creating like new presentations each time you spoke so that you were speaking right to that audience or did you have kind of a, a core presentation that you would sort of tailor to that audience?

So this is a great point. I was making a brand new presentation every single time I found a new audience. So even with the same promoter, one audience might be offer at the time it was Chris Howard, nlp. So they were personal development audience. So I spoke quite a few personal development audiences. They need a slightly more, I'll say business opportunity style presentation. I don't like that phrase and I definitely don't like that niche or market because there's a lot of bullshit in that market. But I had to educate them more on what online marketing is and why it's a great thing and so forth. And then they would also have a business audience. So I would. I actually tailored different programs for them. So to the personal development market, my event was called Underground Profit System and that was sort of the hoodie wearing work from home on your laptop or wherever you feel like it and do affiliate stuff or sell your own products. Then for the business community I did a course called Business Internet Formula and that's more how to use the Internet to leverage your business and go online. And again, the first event for that was probably in 2010 and I think it was that event where I actually created and built the first version of what became my SEO business. I literally built it in the room. And if you log into Superfast Business Membership and go down to the archives and pull up Business Internet Formula, I think you will be blown away at what we were talking about almost a decade ago and how accurate that training has become in hindsight.

Wow. All right, make a note of that, because I want to check this out. This is amazing. Interesting.

Yeah, that was good. And I ran a couple of those, and I ran, I think, four or five underground profit systems till we changed brands to fastwebformula, and we had a good run of those, and then we became super Fast Business Live. And.

Here'S an interesting thing, like what we've pulled out of this discussion. I've been podcasting for 10 years. I've been running membership sites for 10 years, and I've been running live events for 10 years. Those three pillars have been consistent, yet there have been definitely changes with positioning and angles. And I've tried selling the product with the membership as the back end. I've sold the membership as the front end and then tipped all my products in. And a big reason for that shift was the change in the way that my membership was structured, because initially, for the first four years, I had a partner, and then for the next six years, it was all mine. And I couldn't tip all my products in when it was a joint venture, but I could when it was all mine. It just made sense.

Sure, totally. Now, so to this day, is most of your sales coming from doing live events and stuff, or are you getting sales from a sales letter driven by ads and that kind of thing?

Nope, neither. So I don't really run ads much at all.

If the Internet will bear it, I'm going to pull up an interesting stat for you because I know you're going to like this.

Let's not hold our breath too much.

I'm logging into Wicked Reports, so just bear with me, guys, because this is a discovery I made recently that was kind of telling.

Yeah, Wicked Reports is fantastic. Once we got Wicked and started using it, it was kind of one of those things that we realized, how did we live without this tool?

It's like you had fog over our eyes beforehand, and all of a sudden it's clear we can see what all the connections are now.

Right. So I'm pulling a stat for.

Since I was first tracking in Wicked Reports. Right. So I don't know how long that is, but let's say that the cohort that I'm talking about, it's well over a million dollars in revenue. Right.

So the lifetime value of my clients, two and a half thousand dollars.

Okay. Solid.

For Facebook, I've spent eleven and a half thousand dollars and I've made $220,617.60 back from that.

That sounds like a good ROI to me.

Not bad.

It's.

What's.

1,800% earnings per lead is $103.00. Here's the interesting one, though. And this took me by surprise, obviously, my email. I've made half a million dollars from the email cohort. That's very strong. I have a earnings per lead is $200. And then I don't really do AdWords. So that's not. I've made $200 from AdWords so far. Cause I only started that last month and I'm just bidding on my own name. And from listening to you guys, that was just like, I can't not do that. Seriously.

Well, that was a Mike Rhodes thing, I believe too. Right. I think you were in a thread and there was something like. That is like the number one thing.

Oh, look, you know, like, I was definitely doing this a decade ago. There's just some things I stopped doing for a while. I used to spend $3,000 a day on ads 10 years ago. I was advertising on Facebook in 2009. So.

I've basically done more and then stopped doing more than most people will start. Which is why it's interesting having this little history lesson for myself in a way. What did I used to do that I stopped doing and I should do again? And AdWords is one. I think I stopped because I got banned. I think that's the real reason.

Probably about seven years ago. I think I got banned only because. Not from what I was doing at the time. But this is what happened. I was advertising on a URL, the campaign finished, I let the domain lapse, someone else got it, put something spammy on it, and then Google connected that with my historic account and slapped my account. That was, I think, a very unfair and unjust situation.

I had something very similar happen with Google AdWords and very, very, very similar thing. I had a domain, we did one thing on it. They actually penalized it for something that that domain once did before I owned the domain and got my account shut down.

That's what happened to me. And that's why I've been banging on about own the racecourse so heavily for the last seven or eight years. Because you can count on the big companies slapping you around, it's just inevitable. Anyway, they've been pestering me and pestering me with these to start an account at Superfast Business. So I did. And yeah, so I have that campaign and I've made 200 bucks already, so I'm killing it. Unpaid social.

That's the one that got me by surprise. Here are some stats right from the videos that we publish out there. We do put trackable links near the videos, like if it's LinkedIn or Facebook. And I don't care about taking them off the platform because ultimately I'm not there to fit, fatten up LinkedIn. I'm there to educate the audience there and have them be interested in buying something from me. So I've had 17,966 clicks on these trackable links, which generated 2187 leads, which generated, so far, 380 sales earnings per lead. $100. And the unpaid social traffic's just about to tick over $220,000.

Wow.

That's from those little videos. And I've been doing that for one year now.

I remember that like when you started. Yeah. Because we were doing a lot of those.

I remember you loved that video training and you ramped things up.

We did.

You know, I was inspired by your adwords, you know, bid on your own name reminder.

What I used to do. But if you combine some Facebook ads and you combine some little videos and you get. Obviously the email is my strong pot because that's where they're coming from, those transcriptions and lead magnets and turning into a sequence that will eventually create a buyer from the right prospects.

That's basically what's going down. I thought those stats might be interesting to you for benchmarking purposes at least.

Yeah, no, those will be perfect in this notes that we make. So it'll be all super clear and drawn out.

I'll have to pay the note taker more for this episode. That will be my dream goal.

That's probably true.

No, I think.

I think right now, last time we checked inside of Wicked, we were making about $35 per lead. And we thought we were just crushing it at $35 per lead. Because on Facebook and Google, we can buy leads for between five and $10. So, you know, we thought we were killing it with that. But when I hear you, like someone's getting $200 per lead based on what Wicked's saying that or just 100 organically.

Clearly I should be making less per lead and buying a lot more leads. I mean, that's, that's the outcome that I've arrived at in my business. What I've been doing lately is the start of the year. I had a big win back campaign which just did so well and I published that for members as training. If you've got existing customers and you've got past customers and you want to freshen things up, that is the best campaign to run. I caught back a lot of old customers. I've got really interesting stats on that one too. Since the time I've been tracking statistics for super fast business membership. Now that's been seven and a half years. I've got that much data.

Interesting stat. I'll just pull this one up. So I know you like your metrics. One of you is a spreadsheet junkie for sure.

That's me, it's Matt. But I appreciate all this.

So we've had, it's been going now for 86.9 months and the average retention of active members is 36.6 months.

And the average retention for non active members is 14.4 months and the average of all is 19.8 months. That's overall time. What that means in simple terms is I still have about 24 and a half percent of the all the members I've ever sold in the last seven and a half years.

Geez. Okay, you took one of the questions that I had written down here. How do you, how do you like, do you have a go to way to retain these folks and keep it a sticky environment, you know, so they just don't leave or is it just interaction?

We've got an entire training on retention. It's that that is the gold, that's the holy grail of retention of a membership is to keep members so you don't have to worry too much if you're not cranking out the traffic or finding all the discussion online is about getting a lead, funnels and traffic and conversion. What if you could actually just keep a customer for a really long time and have a fantastic relationship? That's the goal. So there's so much I do for that. I was looking at my churn percentage and we measure that both I look at annual churn and monthly churn and I chart it and I did lots and lots of things to help the churn, like everything from loyalty, price, lock ins where you give loyal long standing members a lower rate than what the public can get, whether it's slipping away, sequences paying attention as soon as people become inactive and helping them get back in and getting value. So A lot of clues come from the software as a service world. Some of the tools I use are the same that they use like Intercom, for example, segmented geospecific messaging, local meetups, for example, are very powerful. We just had our Melbourne meetup and Sydney meetup and Brisbane meetup all happen.

Within a week's space and it happens pretty much every month and that's strong glue. To go back to your other question, which I don't think we ever answered. Do I run sales? Do I run, you know, do I make all the money from the events?

Sort of. Not from selling the event tickets. I do make a profit on the front end. I sell my tickets for a good price and I get the best possible members and I'll get 150 to 220amazing people at say an average of $1,000 or more. But then what we do is we capture and record content and put that in the membership and that is, that's giving me good strong retention. Because in the lead up to the event, people will stay a member to be a part of it and to interact with people coming to the event. And in the post event phase, they're getting the content and the recording so they can recap and review and stay in touch with the people they met at the event. So there's a good six month retention sweet spot around an event if you do it right. So for me, I have a high monthly recurring income. Six months worth of retention is worth a lot more to me than trying to have a $97 ticket price and then jab everyone at the event with a $20,000 upsell, like a high ticket closer and all this stuff. I mean, I'm really against almost everything that's happening in the event industry and the online space. I just don't participate in 98% of it.

Yeah, I love that. I mean, I just like this approach because it's a gradual build. It's not, it's a compounded effort the way you approached it for the last 10 years now. And yeah, I've listened to many wealthy business owners in all different spaces and most are not saying they make their win off of a big launch or payday or sell of a business. It's this, it's this approach and it helps you keep that lifestyle too.

Profit first you discover that almost everyone's businesses are absolute train wrecks. Like you can, you can have a fancy revenue number, but there's a lot of pain and tears and heartache and denial behind the scenes. And I get under the hood of a lot of businesses and I've seen the carnage. It's rare that I'll find a business that's ticking along sweetly because people get tricked. They're overloaded and bombarded and confused as hell on Facebook. They got all these tricky bots and funnels and hacks and things tearing at them for leverage. That's ironically stealing their time and attention. That's the big thing I noticed when I went from doing two or three grand a day in ads to not being a full paid super affiliate. My life was a lot less drama and less stressful and it's hard to put a price on that. But as you get a bit older, I think you become more aware of the value of a drama free life.

Sure.

Is it so bad to be content? And when is enough so that these are the things that I think are the challenges for the online world. And if you are obsessed about getting a big email list or chasing, building out tricky funnels and stuff, you can lose sight of the whole picture.

It's kind of like a more minimal approach. But I guess I talk about this in my book as well, that I'm prepared to leave some money on the table as long as I can keep the life.

Yeah, it's funny, I kind of laughed when you said the drama thing because I would say affiliate marketing. Out of everything we do in our business, pretty much 90 plus percent of the drama comes from the affiliate marketing side of things.

Well, it's out of our control too.

Yeah, it's just. And that's a nasty little world, that whole market. There's some marketplaces with some filthy products out there.

Gold sellers. And I left that world. I made a conscious choice. One day I just logged out of one of those forums and.

I still get checks now from one of those marketplaces that I can't bank because it's so expensive to bank the check. And the checks aren't worth that much. And I can't even log into one of my seven or eight accounts to change it to a direct debit set. A new threshold. That's quite funny. But I left that world. I just switched it off and didn't go back because I wanted to level up. I wanted to be more professional and I wanted to do good for human stuff. And I think some of that stuff, definitely the products that you and I sell, like tools and software, shopping carts, et cetera, they're fantastic and good for humans. So I'm not talking about that. But it can be a slippery slope when you think, oh, there's more opportunity to get and it is a little more of an active model, I'll say that.

Yeah. And that's, I think where the stress mainly comes from us is it's very active model, the lack of control.

A less active model that's still really fruitful and rewarding is to become an affiliate of the entire business or a whole product line where you take a rev share deal instead and that opens up doors that were closed before. Imagine if you could go out and help every other shopping cart affiliate to grow that shopping cart business instead of competing with them. That's when those sort of opportunities flick the switch and your skills can become really useful. And there's more passive nature to that too, once you've got it set up right.

Yeah, you're kind of speaking our language because one of the directions we're going down and we haven't spoken about it too publicly yet, but one of the directions we're going down is to help people who have podcasts but also have like, like the podcast isn't the business, but they have a podcast and they have a business help them sort of bridge that gap a little bit. Because that's one of the areas we feel that we, we did kind of crack that nut a little bit, you know, sort of bridging the gap between podcast list. I mean you have too. And a lot of what we do is modeled after what you do. But you know, we, that that's where we want to go with our business is going directly to people that have good sized podcasts and also a good business that we can help bridge their gap between getting the most out of their podcast and then do it from an equity standpoint as opposed to an affiliate standpoint.

Yeah, yeah. The rev share. Yeah. Mainly with discoverability and monetization. Those are like the big gaps.

And yeah, it's very funny you say that. I'm literally coaching someone on the exact same thing right now. So I, I do think you're onto a good idea. But I do think like you need strong skills to make that work. So you know, in the person I'm helping has a team and has experience in shows and podcasts and will do really well with this, as will you because you have skills and that. I'm just putting that out there for the 57 copycats who think I'm going to do that too.

And some of the stuff that we do for podcasts at right now we're kind of sort of keeping under wraps a little bit. We're not going out there and really publicizing a lot of our tactics yet.

I think that makes sense. There's an iceberg in my world too. There's things that I only talk about with my silver Circle level clients that I wouldn't share on a podcast out of respect for their IP and how effective the technique is that if everyone was to do it. And face it, online marketers have a terrible habit of destroying every platform or technique or tactic known to man. So there are things that should not be published or talked about. And often when I'm coaching, I actually point this out to a student. I might say, look, is this something you feel the need to share or educate others on, or should you just use the technique for yourself for a while and really grow it? And a lot of things I share in private conversations I wouldn't publish on the podcast because that just doesn't make sense.

Well, there's something that I've been thinking a lot about in this regard is make the money, create the wealth, the passive income or the subscription, whatever the revenue is, and don't teach yet, but make enough where you can give it away for free. Give away some of these strategies freely on the podcast doesn't have to be behind a paywall. It can be, but it doesn't need to become another info product that we rely on doing a launch around. It's like we ideally want to get to the point of let's just do it really well and help the people that are a perfect fit for it and then we can just freely share it and it's fine.

Well, that's the stage I've got to with affiliate recommendations. Someone asked me the other day if I still have Buy with bonus, which was a fantastic and really profitable business model. But when I left that affiliate world and the whole bonus world and the hyped up world and so it became less relevant to me. I'd rather share an amazing resource like Designer or whatever for free and just mention it. And I won't get a clip on that. But I am helping out a prospect and they'll probably feel good about their purchase and where it makes sense to have an affiliate product recommendation, I will. But certainly I've become a lot more generous lately and I've seen examples where generosity pays big. When Justin Brooke asked the question on Facebook and Roland answered it and then I chipped in, that thing really took off and got shared into the Internet market.

And then Roland's putting it on his own page and I shared and then it's gone to medium and by adding.

A lot of value.

And generously digging deep like Roland did, where he obviously took some time out and either captured something he'd already done or did did the effort to pull up some research. That is a classic example of a rich deep share that most people would charge for, that people will share and perpetuate and it elevates. And I actually broke down why I think that was successful on a post that I did because people will see it on the surface, but it's much deeper than that. I mean so clever to put pictures of the Eiffel Tower and position himself as an OG and so forth and take that idea and run it across multiple. I saw it in a boardroom group as well. I've seen that in multiple groups and it's taken. So what Roland's done well and I think I've had a good knack with this at times is he's seen what's taking off and jumped all over it quickly. I did that with.

The online gold movement a decade ago. I knew that was going to be hot and big. I built a million dollar SEO business off the back of that industry from riding that train for a long time. But I won't do it if it's a five minute thing. But let's face it, the topic that came up of scaling and the related subset of mindset, which is where I. Yes, a little bit, is a big topic that is not going away.

This is. You literally brought up a conversation. I was trying to tell Matt because he was on a vacation and he saw the original Justin Brooke post.

Well, I saw that original post from Justin Brooke and I literally posted it in Slack and told everybody on our team read this post and read all of the comments. Yeah, because this is like an education just in the comments here.

And then as Matt's been gone, you know, the last, what, four or five days, I was like, Matt Roland's been on a tear and he's just like going crazy with the mindset thing that. And then I said that you. And I haven't even been able to keep up with all the comments yet. But I know you had a massive breakdown in terms in the comments there. You didn't have a mental breakdown.

Well, basically I identified the part that was missing was the mindset.

Yes.

And so I leveraged off the existing body of work. That's the technique. And it was important enough that, that Roland then attributed me in his post. So I got, I'm not kidding, I had like 60 or 70 friend requests within 10 hours.

I believe it. Yeah.

So that, that's how it works and we tandem, we basically tag team that like I then shared his post more. So if you generous with other marketers and you recognize like him and I, I think we recognize in each other. We both knew this was, this was hot. And it was Justin's post. Let's get this in context. Justin started it, Roland.

Destroyed it and then I just topped it up. I just tipped a little bit of fuel on top and the whole thing went bright.

Yeah.

And that's, that's what I, I did. Did similar things with some early sort of senses around products. Like when I helped James Dyson come up with optimized press and make that famous. And when I got early in on lead pages with Clay Collins I knew that thing was going to blow up. I knew ThriveCart was going to be hot. Got in an affiliate before the public program. Like when I, when I get my spidey senses tingling and I know something's going to be big, then I know it's worth spending the attention because that's exactly what I did all those years ago when I started my forum, when I started that forum and I knew that affiliate product was going to be big and I tipped all my energy into ranking everywhere for that, running ad campaigns for it and doing the bonuses for it and it turned into a business that without exaggeration has generated millions of dollars over the last decade from that initial seed.

Yeah, that's great. I remember. And I just wanted to kind of close the loop on that Justin Brooke thing because it's. You brought up the whole thing of scaling a business and I love that multiple people. I think Ryan Dyess was one of them. You might have been one of them. Roland definitely did was like why do you want to scale to 10 million? What's the reasoning here?

Yeah, I mean the motivation is a big, big piece.

That is the number one mandate when I take on a Silver Circle client. Like it's like it's an 8 out of 10 chance they'll say I want to make $10 million a year. It is a pre programmed default for an entrepreneur who's doing a couple of million bucks a year.

And I said like you be careful what you wish for. That was my actual words because.

I've seen like if you know about yin and yang and, and the black and white and the balance of things, you cannot have the 10 million without some other side effect. It's impossible. So in his case I imagine he wants the 10 million because the side effect will be significant.

Self Esteem, a feeling of og he's the king of the jungle type. That's why we want this from a mindset perspective. In some cases I said go back and look deeper into why you want it. Maybe you can find it in another way. I know in my case it's likely. If I was to like, Roland wants to be a billionaire. I think he stated that if my goal is to be a billionaire, I have a feeling it would impede with my ability to surf every day. And then I think I'd be a less happy person.

Sure.

So I think where's the limit? Like, is it okay to have a seven figure profit without too much drama and to live a little longer and to enjoy time with your baby? And so I've found my level. And the reality is I'd say a good chunk of the clients I'm coaching at the higher level have a higher revenue number than I do. But a lot of them, what they're looking from me is not just more revenue, but most definitely to actually keep some of it and have profit. And I've gotten really good at taking money from my business and transferring it away from my business into personal investments. So I have that strength and that, that no compromise rock to lean on. I could stop work and it wouldn't be an issue. Whereas a lot of people, if they stop work for even half an hour, they start to feel pressure because like the machine's going to eat them up and alive.

Yeah, well, there is no machine.

That's the point. There is a trade off. So it's not for me to say what makes someone happy or what they should and shouldn't do. Like, by all means pursue your goals and your vision. It should excite the hell out of you and you should want it. But the more I get deeper into understanding myself, the more I realize that some people are chasing goals that probably don't make sense and they may get there and then not be happy.

Yeah, for sure.

First time I heard about this concept I think was probably about 2001 when I went to some super high level training for Mercedes Benz for future leaders. And it was like this dealer principal development program and we had a mindset speaker and he was coaching people who had climbed Mount Everest. And the biggest challenge they had after climbing Mount Everest was deep, dark depression, like, okay, they made the summit. What's left? What is left for them now they've reached the summit of the most difficult, highest peak in the world. And then they felt empty and lost and black and dark and sad. That was the first time I thought, huh, maybe this, maybe pursuing. Because I was very driven and very competitive and I was a winner in, you know, in sales and management. I was in that pit bull mentality. I was like, I would demolish my competitors. We were strong. But I'm not that same person anymore. And it was funny, I had a coffee yesterday with my trainee that I hired in that year, 2001, who 18 years later, him and I were just having a coffee, reflecting on then and the craziness of it all. And he's out of the industry a bit now and I'm well and truly out of it. And a lot of people from that era are still having post stress disorder type traumas and nightmares and stuff.

It was.

It was deep and dark.

Yeah. So I have a question before we go too deep on this rabbit hole, because you just kind of opened a rabbit hole that Joe and I have been talking about.

Maybe a future episode.

I was going to say, how much, how much time do you have available.

Man? I love talking to you guys. This is like the most fun you can have on how good is it to find a way to enjoy your work where, you know, can help other people at the same time and like just sitting in a chair and talking.

Oh, for sure. We love it. And that's a dream. Yeah, yeah. And it's interesting because you. You touched on the topic of sort of depression and anxiety and. And you know, once you get to the top, where do you go from there? And that's a topic that's come up on probably the last five or six interviews we've done. And so it might be an interesting rabbit hole to go down, but I know we're kind of. We're kind of running on the long end of this episode.

Open the loop and don't close that one, because this is really the core of what I do in Silver Circle Land. Dad said at least a quarter of the conversation or more is around.

Self effectiveness. I'll call that bucket, or I literally did in my Deep Dive survey. But it's that and what I said in Roland's posts on Justin's thread. It's that the mindset aspect and the. That is the constant thing as an entrepreneur, you get a handle on that, you figure out that game. And that's the difference between having a life of joy or a life of misery. And I think a lot of people cross it. I'm thankful I never pushed it to the point where I went too far. But I could definitely tell when I was getting close and I've made massive adjustments in my life, especially in the last six or seven years. I keep refining and tuning and I've seen you guys go, I'm watching you from the beginning. I knew you were going to be hot and take off. I predicted that early and I'm still backing that because just stratospheric growth and amazing feedback. And I love working with winners like guys like Caleb o', Doud, his ROI tips, for example. I've. I was right behind that rename and the takeoff of that thing and I've watched him just explode. I can tell when it's going to happen.

To be fair, he was already incredibly successful before any of that. Working with winners like that is the best thing ever.

I think you've had those growth changes and as you change your family structure and your business preferences and you discover what you do and don't like, you know, what a ride. Let's have an episode on it for sure.

Let's do it. Let's open that loop and yeah. Because that's a deep dive. I think we just want to bring that awareness that there's so much more than just the tactics and the, you know, the day to day screen time that we, but us as entrepreneurs feel lonely a lot of times. And there's so many ways like you do it with surfing. I watched one of your short videos the other day. It was like hey, do you. Are you actually living? And it's like plan for something in your day to go out and hike or you know, surf, whatever, whatever it is. But get outside, get away from it all and get some white space to think or not think. And that's fine too. So.

Exactly.

Yeah man. Let's open that up for another time.

We'll put a pin in that one and definitely circle back around because I'm sure we could probably talk a whole hour just on the we will that mental game and sort of getting yourself out of ruts and that sort of stuff.

What's a let's do the typical like what we do on ours. Any new books or resources that you've just been referring to others or just all about?

Well, on this topic I would say profit first is a good read for that. Realizing if your business is in deep trouble or not. That's good. I've been rereading. I was rereading.

Getting everything you can out of all you've got. Cause I'm been chatting with Jay Abraham a bit lately.

Yeah.

And I just wanted to re sync back with my past and, and have a Reflection. Because I want to record a discussion with him about that. It's always a classic, that book.

Yeah.

Another one on the topic of our next episode is Wabi Sabi.

Okay.

Can you. What is that? Can you spell that? I didn't quite catch what it w.

A B I Sabi by Beth Empton. And it's a captivating concept from Japanese aesthetics, which helps us to see beauty in imperfection, appreciate simplicity, and accept the transient nature of all things. And that is a pretty good description of how I run my life now compared to before.

Wow. Okay. I'm gonna pick these. I'm gonna pick that one up, like, now. Kindle, baby. Love it. And I'm going to throw something out there. I've been. I don't think I even told Matt a lot about it, but Naval Ravikant has a amazing podcast that hits on a lot of these points you've been talking about. I think it's just called the Naval Podcast, and there's a. There's a. It's like a bunch of clips all put together, but it's how everyone can be rich. He kind of purposely made a clickbaity title, but it's all about wealth in your business and life, so I think that's a perfect extension if you want to dive deeper in podcast form on all these topics.

My old crazy mentor that I had in circa 2001, he used to drill me with this. He'd say, what is success?

And I'd say, what, you mean like owning a couple of houses? He goes, no, not money. He'd snap at me, to be rich is not money. And I know he had a really nasty divorce and an impaired relationship with his son, and he had a lot of issues, and he was reflecting because he was rich in the money sense. He owned two franchises. He had millions of dollars. He had a Ferrari, a Porsche, Mercedes Benz. Big houses.

He had material wealth, but he was emotionally broken, like, bankrupt. And it made him a very difficult character to be around. But it was such a strong lesson for me.

Love it. Yeah, there's. There's a lot more than just the wealth. Your wealth can. In success, goes all over but life.

I can catch it if I can get a barrel. That would be the richest moment in my life of any possible experience, and only a surfer would know that.

Yeah. Yeah. And it took me a second. I was like, wait, what kind of barrel does he want to have? A wine barrel? A whiskey barrel? Oh, surfing. That's right.

We're talking to James.

That's right. Being in the Tube that, that's like, that is. You can put a lot of energy trying to get that to happen and it's very elusive and difficult, especially if you start late. So that, you know, it's amazing when you have a reframe on what's important to you. You know, life takes on a different dimension.

Definitely.

So I'm going to, when we hang up, I'm going to take my little family down to a cafe and have a nice Friday. Relax. This is the first Friday I've worked in about four months.

Oh, man. Don't blame us. Don't blame us.

I'm not going to blame you. I actually really looked forward to this. Get a little early morning session in and.

Awesome. Thank you, man.

It's just been wonderful to chat. Yeah.

Well, let's do it again very soon and we'll will be more active in the forum, I promise.

Let's throw some URLs out there for anybody listening. So you're@superfastbusiness.com. is there anywhere else you want people to go check out?

I like it simple.

Superfastbusiness.com you can pretty much find anything.

Check out our new design. We did a new design that looks good actually.

I popped over there earlier today and I was like, hey, his chooser is a lot more fancy looking at it.

Before we jumped on.

No.

Good work, website design. I've got some new images just about to arrive and new copy. So like complete. Just a strengthening and doubling down of what's really working well. Just enhancing it.

Love it. And we're@evergreen profits.com if you're listening on James's show.

That's right.

That's pretty much where you can. That's our jumping off point where you can find our podcast and training and everything else we offer.

So keeping it simple. All right, James, appreciate your time, man. Go have some fun with the famous.

Thanks, Matt and Joe. See ya.

See ya.

Thanks everybody for listening to this episode of the Hustle and Flowchart podcast, for taking the time to listen. We want to give you something a little bit special. Every single episode that we do, we actually have somebody on our team take notes. We basically have a Cliff's Notes version of every episode where you can go and find all of the tips and tactics that they laid out, all of the resources that they laid out, all the good stuff from this episode. We actually have a nice simple notes version that you can find on our website. So go to evergreenprofits.com, find this episode that you just listened to and give us your email address and we'll send you the notes. Thanks for listening.

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