James Schramko — Lifestyle Freedom With Leveraged Businesses

This is an intro. Intro, intro, intro.

Hustle and float Shark with your boy, my boy, Matt Wolf.

Hey, welcome back to the Hustle Fast Business Flow. Business podcast.

Is that what we're calling this?

I don't know.

That was the worst name in the history of podcast.

Came up with that on the spot for James.

Super Fast Flowchart.

Ooh. How about the Hustle? No. Hustle.

Hustle.

Nah, we're. We're over the Hustle now. Huh? We're. We're optimized business, living the good life, going out in the middle of the day, surfing.

We're rebranding this podcast as the no Hustle and Flowchart.

No, there's. Hey, you hustle on the good stuff, right? I think that's actually the core of kind of what we're talking about here. That and some podcasting stuff.

Is it? But if you're hustling on the stuff you love doing, is that a bad thing?

No. Yeah. So you're hustling through life, but hustle's not a bad word. It could be a bad thing. If you're staying up all night doing that thing, though, maybe that's not most effective for your life. Right. But, you know, that's beyond the point there.

Well, what are we doing here? So today is going to be another interesting episode because this one is more of like a. I wouldn't really say we're interviewing James or James is interviewing us. It's kind of a. More of a discussion between the three of us, literally, about kind of what's working now in business.

Three pals in a room, just shooting it around about. Yeah, kind of what we're doing now, what's hot, what's working, what's not.

Yeah. I mean, James definitely gave us a lot. A lot. A lot of tips and advice and cool things that are working now that he's seeing among his members. I would say that the kind of core, the essence of this episode is really focused around two elements. One being podcasting and unique ways to use podcasts and how us and James are using podcasts to grow our business. And it's not the traditional way that most people think of podcasts. And then the second thing is really about, like, systems and backing yourself out of your business. I mean, he's got a book called Work Less, Make More. Or is it Make More, Work Less? I don't remember the order, but it's one of those.

Sorry, James, look it up. It's in the show notes.

Yeah, it's in the show notes, but you know, we're talking about that. Backing yourself out of your business, how to build systems, how to, how to work and work to a place where you can go and surf every single day of your life.

Well, yeah, and here's the thing. I know we talk a lot about podcasts, how to leverage podcasts, how to grow traffic and like keep listening because this is something, even if you are not a podcast tour, you can definitely leverage the power of these things as a fabulous medium to get exposure and grow your business. But also the whole thing about systemizing your business or at least your life, your day, backing you out of maybe some roles that you might not that you shouldn't be in. I know we've started kind of chatting a lot more about that because ironically that's what we're focused on. But that holds so true even if you're starting out or if you have a team of a hundred people or something like, I mean you can, there's a point and we really hone in on this, that, that entrepreneur, you as a leader, CEO, especially if you founded the business, you're gonna, it's like your baby. It's pretty hard to detach sometimes with some roles. But James gave us a freaking awesome exercise with some post it notes and you know, things like that. It's, it's a. He digs into some exercises that we're definitely gonna walk.

Absolutely. Yep. Nope, this is a great one. And we. A few other little teasers. I'm going to open some loops here.

There's a lot of loops.

There's a lot of loops open. We talk a little bit about creating 1 minute videos to drive traffic and.

How Instagram is the big winner.

And Instagram.

No, no, sorry, my bad. LinkedIn. That's what I was thinking of for those videos.

Yes, LinkedIn. We actually talk about LinkedIn and how LinkedIn has been effective for driving traffic.

We talk about how James is the newest Instagram fan, famous star influencer. Just kidding.

We do talk about Instagram. We do talk about LinkedIn. We do talk about book publishing, we talk about podcasting. We talk about creating systems.

We talk about simplifying your business so you can work just three days a week.

List growth. There's strategies on building your list in here. We talk about traffic strategies. So it's just kind of tools. We talk about various tools.

There's rev share deals like partnerships.

There'S teams, who to hire, who's like this thing, how to drive traffic, affiliate marketing. And we talk about continuity and membership sites and how to sell Cars.

Seriously, we got it all here. So I think we should probably just head to the episode.

So lots of good stuff and hopefully we opened some loops that now you need to listen to this episode to close.

That's right. All right, let's dig into it. All right, I think we're live, guys. How's everyone doing? How you doing, James?

Good, thanks. So we're doing this simulcast episode. It's going to be on your podcast and my podcast this time.

It was kind of like a last minute decision. We're like, should we do separate podcasts or should we just mash them up and see what happens?

Yeah, no, I think it'll be fun. I think we could cover a lot of ground and just less interview, more just a really cool discussion, I think.

Yeah.

We've been popping up lately in each other's feeds and I've seen you inside my own community and I like what you're doing with your marketing.

Just about to buy one of your courses, actually, because you reminded me of something I used to do a lot of, which was driving traffic to my site and then using emails and reviews, et cetera, to drive affiliate sales. It seems like you've been doing quite a lot of that lately.

Yeah, and that was actually. It's cool. You mentioned that. That's where the traffic strategy came from, was purely promoting affiliate marketing. And obviously you can use for any kind of branding or marketing. We do it for the podcast now too, which is really cool. Just kind of different angles, different ways.

Yeah, yeah. Our latest traffic course, I mean, it kind of stemmed from the fact that for a long time our model was essentially do this podcast, put content out there, and then based on whatever content they listen to, whatever podcast episodes they listen, we're then gonna retarget them and promote offers to them on our list. But the podcast almost acts. A, it's a traffic tool, but B, it's also a segmenting tool. So anybody who listens to our stuff, we're gonna put different affiliate offers in front of them based on what they listen to. And then what ended up happening is we did that, and I guess we were doing pretty well with it. Cause we started to get people emailing us saying they're seeing us everywhere. And they asked us to teach it. And that led us to making a course on how we were actually doing that thing.

Right. Of course. It's how I started out was selling one product as an affiliate. And from that one product, it kind of forced me to learn absolutely everything else from how to build the website. To writing the sales copy. Incredibly and embarrassingly, I used to do my own design and everything, and I'm absolutely not a designer. I had to figure out how to embed an opt in form and make a WordPress blog and make videos. So this whole thing, I think it was about the only thing I was selling for the first couple of years. Just one product. It went, what do you call it? 1 inch wide and a mile deep.

Yeah, yeah.

And then of course, that's so useful for everything else. I by accident discovered SEO and got quite good at that.

Then you can apply that to just about everything else. That's why if you go down the track 12 and a half years later, almost 13 years later now, I have still got a strong interest and benefit from SEO, traffic and email systems and short video and long audio media platforms, they're all driving that. But with my site, the way it works is most of the traffic is coming to some kind of a podcast. And most podcasts have, at the minimum, they have a PDF transcription, but the enhanced ones have some kind of a checklist or additional rich sort of content that's really useful for that person. And that will trigger a sequence for people who are not already a member of superfast business membership, which is really, again, back to one product to sell, more or less, depending on what level someone is at. If they're at a higher level, they've got one solution for that. If they're at a lower level, they've got one solution for that. If they're not at either of those levels, I generally would prefer they'd buy my book or something. Let's make more. Then that sequence offers people to go into the waiting list for the membership, which then opens and then a percentage join. So I know the numbers.

Of each part of that process. But the game is simply to keep creating really useful content that's good for my audience and then to have people coming at that content from different places. And I know you've seen a little training that I did, how I've been doing the little videos each day and I've seen you've been doing them really well and you've interviewed other people who have been doing them well to sell things. They're very powerful. And I really like the idea that you've gone into micro conversions, little traffic plays to bring.

Just the right customer means you're not spending a huge budget. And it's always relevant for them. They've got context. And you've also tapped into one of the fantastic gold mines, which is the Tools, it doesn't matter how long you're in the business. It seems to be the perennial question is what tool do I use for this?

It's true.

And tools sell well, they pay well for affiliate commissions and we all need them. And gosh, I look at our tools costs on a monthly basis and they do all add up once you have all the tools you need to run an online business. But compared to a shop or a store or a physical product business, you know, like manufacturing cars or having a furniture shop, we get off pretty light, I think in the expense.

Oh yeah, we're lean and mean, man. But you're right, they do add up. The more you accumulate or the deeper you go into business, the more team you grow around you. It all requires these extra little tools and automations and even zapier, you know, like you start paying for that, you kind of start off using the free plan. You're like, oh crap, gotta pay for that now.

Yeah, it's interesting because as you're talking about this, I'm actually, I don't know why it hasn't totally clicked with me until just now, but I'm realizing how similar the business models are. We're both very focused on podcasting and creating a lot of content through podcasting. We're both focused on making these little tip videos to sort of raise awareness and help grow our brand. We both have kind of a singular main flagship product that we're promoting. I mean there's, there's just so much.

Similarity there on that whole way you're segmenting your audience as well. You have your own ways of directing them to a product that best suits them. And that's how we're doing kind of behind the scenes as you are with, you know, the transcription opt ins and the chooser you have on the front of your website. All this, all this mini segmentations that are happening really create a big change. It makes it a lot easier to sell product too.

Yeah, I'm actually curious about the podcast stuff because I know we're both in that world.

How long have you been doing your podcast? I know you mentioned you're on 600 and something, so quite a while.

602.

This would be episode 602. It's not all the podcasts I've done because I've had four other ones. There was Think, Act, Get Freedom, Ocean, Sales, Marketing, Profit and Kicking Back. So if you were to add all of those up, I think you'd be getting closer to probably. And let's not even talk about guest appearances. Definitely in a thousand. To answer your question, the big initiative for me started when Tim Reed approached me to do Freedom Ocean. And that came about because.

He has a fantastic podcast in Australia for small businesses. It's called Small Business Big Marketing and it's often been at the top of the charts. And he had a co host back then called Luke Moulton, and Tim and Luke invited me to be on a podcast. I didn't really know what that meant. I didn't know if it was live or if it was, because it wasn't sort of podcast geeky. And I think we're talking about 2000, 10 or 11.

Yeah, it's pretty fresh.

I went on the show and I talked about my thing at the time, which was called Fast Web Formula. And fastwebformula was this amazing mind map and also had become a workshop. It was one of my earlier events. I've been running events for 10 years now, almost 10 years.

It was actually invented because I'd been speaking on a platform for a promotions company here. And one of the speakers is a mega famous NLP guy, was enamored with the way that I was running my business. And he asked me to get on a coaching call with his team, who are all around the world. I got on a call with the team and I took them through this mind map and they loved how simple I made it. And so I turned that whole thing into a course. Anyway, I got the recordings from the course, I mentioned that on this podcast, and I gave these guys an affiliate link. And the next thing you know, they were making a fortune. They had meltdown. People were buying this product. It was about $399, and it also included 60 days free for my membership at the time was called Superfast Results, which is today called Superfast Business. And Tim said, look, this has been amazing. How do I do something with you? So we created this incredible podcast together, which had 84 episodes and it went all the way through to last year. But I think episode one, gosh, that was 2011. But then what I did, and this is really important and it's a huge.

Opportunity because I had already been recording audios with people because I knew from the beginning when I came online, I knew that I had to. I knew I had to be brave and put myself on audio because the people I was listening to, like Jay Abraham and I think back then it was Yannick Silva.

And so forth, and people who I was reading books about Aussie business, coaches like Brad Sugars, they'd all had this story of sitting in a room, a bedroom, you know, with nothing but a tape recorder, even Anthony Robbins.

And just recording their information as an information product and getting leveraged. So I knew that I had to do this. I'd already tracked down some expert on pay per click marketing that I met at a conference. So that's where you meet people. And I went and purchased for a few hundred dollars recorder that I sat on a desk and I interviewed this guy and made a product from it. And then I started when I was speaking, of course, you're on platform with other experts, like John Carlton, for example. So I said, john, could I come up to your hotel room later? And we have a little chat. And he looked at me a bit funny. I said, about business, and if I could record it, that would be great. And he said, yeah, sure. So I'd already been doing this.

For my blog and I was putting the recordings on my blog, but I wasn't in itunes and it wasn't called a podcast. They were just audio interviews. So when I went to itunes and submitted my blog, it retrospectively posted all the previous episodes where it was pulling the media from. So this is the big takeaway, guys. If you've already got a blog and you go on, and if you happen to have audio, you can submit it and then it will just backdate all your posts. You could literally have five years or 10 years worth of content overnight, as if it was always there. So technically.

My first podcast episode dates back to 20 and 9.

I love that.

Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. It's interesting because we have. We have similar stories with our podcast. We started in 2010 with the online income podcast. That was our first show, and it made a grand total of three episodes of it. And then we kind of abandoned it for a while. And then I think in 2011, we circled back around and created a podcast called the Evergreen Wisdom podcast. Because by that time, we branded ourselves as evergreen profits. So we had the Evergreen wisdom podcast. That one, I think we lasted what, 15 episodes?

Roughly? Yeah, somewhere around there.

And then it wasn't until about, I don't know, 2014, 2015, that we decided, let's get serious about this podcasting stuff. And now we're really kicking ourselves because back in 2010 when we did our first podcast, we could go to the top of the charts by having like 70 downloads a day. We'd be at the. We'd be ranked in the top, like 10 in the business category. With that kind of download numbers. Now it's like we can Be put getting a thousand downloads a day and we won't even pop into the top 200.

Well, that's very interesting because I've noticed that sort of shift too. We dominated the charts. Freedom Ocean was always at the top, in Australia especially, and it still drives good traffic. In fact, when I look at my podcast history, Freedom Ocean and Think at get dominate the first 20 or 30 listings for total downloads and usually episode number one of Thinkat gets has had the most downloads of any show I've ever done. The one with Ezra Firestone, which was a good talent pick on my behalf.

Oh yeah.

In hindsight, how far he's gone. And.

Yeah, the charts thing, you know, I was always in the charts. In fact, when Sales Marketing Profit came out, it went to number one everywhere, even the United States initially when it launched off one episode, which broke all the myths and.

Lies about how many episodes you have to launch with. We had one episode and it hit the top of the charts. And then now my show doesn't really appear in the top charts. I noticed that too. It might hover around up close to the 200 mark, but at the same time, here's the really interesting thing. I'm not looking for it. I think I haven't looked where it is in the charts for about two years. Because it doesn't matter. What really matters is to get those core subscribers, the thousand or two people who sit on that feed waiting for the next episode, the ones who email you if you haven't published for a little while to just check if everything's okay. You're hyper fan. I've got one amazing super fan, Greg Merrilies. And he will, he will nudge me on our coaching call. He'll say, haven't published anything lately.

He's craving the next delivery of content. So it's great when you've got the core, you don't need it. And I think in one of the trainings that I released recently in the membership that you've probably seen the email one, I was showing my members just how small my email database is and how it doesn't matter when you see all these people talking about list size of 800,000 emails or if they're such and such ranking on the charts or they have X number of fans or followers. It's mostly just vanity metrics really. Just need the core following. And I think if you have your business model right, you can still have a very decent seven figure income from tiny, tiny numbers. Probably the poster child for that is Andre Chaperone. He Has a very small database, but it's hyper super segmented. There you go.

I felt the wrath of Andre's email list once. We were both promoting a product a couple years ago and I was number two and he was number one on the leaderboard and in his emails he was talking about how he's only sending this email to like 300 people and yet he's just destroying me and I'm mailing a list of 70,000.

Yeah.

He'S got it all figured out with the emails there you might like. When he came over to my event and spoke there, he went through how those emails cascade. And I am willing to bet that it's very similar to what you've got going on with your behind the scenes tool series and the videos in the membership there. You might probably enjoy watching it.

Yeah, yeah. That's because that goes with podcasting too. And this is why a lot of people, they might hear how it's hard to put a podcast out there and get visibility. But the grand scheme of things, there's so many little niches and micro niches and you can go down the wormhole and really pick a group of people to speak to and then direct your marketing at them. And maybe some other ways outside of itunes, of course, to kickstart.

Here's the important point with the podcast, okay. That it doesn't have to be ranked at the top of the charts for it to be useful for you. You don't have to have more than 70 listeners. In reality, the podcast is what's going to help you get a reply to an email when you're speaking to someone useful who you'd like to chat with or learn from especially. I think you guys do that really well.

Yeah.

And I learned this lesson the most when I was chatting to this young Australian guy called Nathan and had Magcast, which is a fairly difficult platform to make good money from unless you've got a rabid market of low level customers like cooking products, that sort of stuff. He managed to snag an interview with Richard Branson, which was just a text interview, mind you, but that cover of Richard Branson, it's been on my feed for, for years now. And when I was speaking to Nathan on his podcast, after we hung up, I said, nathan, I don't know if you're going to make all your money from this magazine. I think use that authority you've built from that one interview and make your own membership, monetize it some other way. And he did that and he came back onto my show. Years later and gave me credit for that advice. And that's really the same deal with the podcast. And to a large extent, I think a book, and probably even a larger extent, the book has to be the biggest bang for your buck in terms of authority building. You wouldn't have to sell even if you sold one copy in seven different countries.

Now your books sold in seven different countries.

Like it's pretty easy to claim wins from a book, but even if you don't, the implied authority is there. I just spent near on a week with Dean Jackson who visits Australia each year and one of his business models is a 90 minute book. And he gets people to go from zero to published very quickly. And it's about speed and it's about getting that document out that can credentialize you in your market so your perfect answer to the prospect's problem and you can get started. So that's the short way to get into the market. And for that first small fee. When he told me the price, I was shocked because it was very low. They actually listed on Amazon and get your own ISBN number or whatever and it's all like it's published. And then usually he doesn't even use the physical book in his business model. He's driving ads on Facebook, lead ads that can get put into his email system. And then Dean is a lethal weapon with email. From the email he can turn that into all sorts of things with his super signature. It's a very interesting conversation we had there sitting at the Sydney Opera House where we go and watch movies just next to that. And each year it's like a tradition and we're talking about that versus the ego book thing, which is more like the way I've done it, which is slower, a little more expensive. And he said, really, if you're going down that path, it's just ego. If you want to have the book air quotes, the proper book, it's going to take an extra year to publish and that's lost money in the meantime. And then we came to this fantastic conclusion that it's good to do both, that his type of book is a fantastic minimum viable product. It's a great way to test where you're at and by all means do the bigger, more authoritative bestseller, airport, whatever book. And while we're on that subject of books, which we didn't even have on our short list here, my big tip here is make sure if you have a book, do the audible, because since my audible went out, it's smashing it and I suspect it's because I have a podcast audience and it's racking up sales like nobody's business. And I wish I'd done it a little bit earlier.

How are people finding, like, are you actively pushing people that way, or do you think it's just a natural thing?

Push is such a vulgar word, my friend.

Pushing, pushing.

I would say occasionally I'll share a screenshot of the COVID or something, just letting people know that it exists. So for me, I do a lot of that sort of stuff from the signature link in my emails, which, if you have, say, a weekly podcast, on average, at least your audience are getting to know that there is this option. Because one of the big questions we got in our support desk over and over and over and over again is, is it on Audible? They were begging me for Audible, and when it went on Audible, we make sure we tell them it's on Audible. And then once I went out to social media, it made sales. When I put a new cover and put a picture of the COVID it made a big wave of sales. I go on Pat Flynn's podcast, I get a big wave of sales.

That's a big traffic tip right there. If you can be lucky enough to find a good traffic source where all of your potential customers already subscribed, that's the jump start to a wave of traffic. And I've done that a few times. I found out whose audiences are good for me.

I know for a fact this podcast is very good for anyone who appears on it. There's always an after effect for whoever comes on this show because I'm not ranked in the top of the charts. I suppose the people who are listening are dedicated listeners who are enjoying the content. And trust me.

And same goes for our podcast, if we're speaking our little halvesies part here, since it's a combo cast, is exactly what you just said.

You have the most loyal listeners. And every single time it's cool when I talk to someone for consulting or just somehow I'm communicating with a potential client or.

One that's been around forever. They always say the podcast is the number one thing they love the most from us.

Yeah, I mean, I can't even count how many times we've had guests who, you know, a year after their episode was released, still come up to us and say, man, I'm still getting people that come to me saying, I discovered you because of that podcast. I mean, the thing about podcasts, too, is this content lives forever. I mean, this episode, two years from the time we're recording It. Somebody's going to be listening to it and discovering it and finding out about James or finding out about us. I mean, it's just this. This ever evolving compounding effect that happens.

Yeah. And I don't listen to podcasts much. I listen to one surfing podcast and I listen to your podcast. That's it. You have a fantastic podcast.

Let's do a high five really quick.

Matt, you know, I actually discovered your podcast by accident.

Did you? How do you. Do you remember how or just.

I remember how because as part of my onboarding process for Silver Circle, one of the things I asked for is if people own their trademarks and I go and search for them, and I had a client with a very similar name to your name.

That's right. I've seen that guy in your forum, actually.

Yeah. His business is Evergreen Profit without the S. Right, Exactly. Yeah. We've actually been thinking about reaching out because it's a different business model. So we were thinking, hey, maybe we could reach out and just collaborate so there's less confusion. But we haven't yet.

Oh, you should. He's one of the nicest people you could ever possibly meet. Big shout out to Justin. He's remarkable for a few reasons, but one. One is, aside from being a customer of mine for near on a decade, he never wears shoes, and he lives in a rural part of southern Australia in Victoria. There's. And that's, you know, that's tough. And when we went to the Maldives a few years back, we were at the airport in the Maldives collecting our things from the conveyor belt and like, we just walked through customs. He's still bare feet.

Wait, so he's legitimately always barefoot then? Wow.

He somehow went from his rural Victorian house to the airport in Melbourne, flew to Singapore, and then went from Singapore to Mali with no shoes.

How many times did he wash his feet is the question.

The next time I saw him internationally, I did spot a pair of flip flops and I said, what's going on? Because he came back to Mount Ives again, as they often do, and he said they forced him to wear them at the airport because of safety.

Bummer.

Anyway, you should definitely reach out because he's got great service. He's been on this show as well, on my show, and. Yeah. So I was looking for his name to check what's his footprint, how much of his branding and marketing does he own? And you guys popped up, and then I, rather than look at you guys like an evil enemy encroaching on my fantastic customers, IP I thought these guys have got a pretty similar thing going on to the sort of stuff that I like. And, yeah, as you mentioned earlier, we have so much in common. The other thing you didn't mention that's kind of the iceberg part for both of us probably, is our interest in mergers and acquisitions and joint ventures and revenue deals and buying and selling and trading of businesses. That sort of stuff.

Yeah. And that's definitely something that you've helped us a lot with a lot of your members. I mean, your community alone, I don't even know how many deals have been done just within there. But also just the advice that definitely helped us figure out, okay, how do we approach deals? Because you could really screw yourself if you just kind of go in with an idea that I'm gonna take 30% of this business and make a bunch of money because I can grow.

I'll also say this one thing that we've learned from you and that we've definitely taken away from being a part of your community and watching how you do things is also an element of simplification. We did have a point there where we're like, oh, we've got this course and this course and these 10 affiliate products. And we're also working on this acquisition deal, and we just recently acquired this business. And I remember Joe posted something in the community and your first sentence was, wow, sounds like you guys are doing a lot.

And just looking at the simplicity of what you're doing with your business, we actually decided to kind of, you know.

We trimmed a lot.

Yeah. Trim a lot of that stuff back and just kind of go more simple.

We legitimately trimmed every single product except for the traffic course. Everything else.

Traffic course, Amazing. Like I said earlier.

I've got two courses here on my list to buy. I'm not buying. I'll tell you why I'm not buying it today, because I'm heading off on an airplane tomorrow for a week. So I have this little rule that if I buy a course, I have to consume it immediately. If I can't consume it immediately, I don't buy it. So I'm not just like stockpiling courses, because that could be a bad habit.

Right, Right.

But your course is so good. I want to buy it, so that means it's a great course. The other thing is, my most successful course ever was called Traffic Grab. You really can't lose with a traffic course in our market. It's a fantastic topic. I went on a domain buying sp and I bought hundreds of domains that revolve around the name or the idea of traffic. I've since sold quite a few of them because I've simplified. When I look at what everyone else is doing, I've already been there. I've had 2,000 websites, I've tried most business models and I'm looking for what can be removed. The beautiful thing is we can pretty safely do it knowing what we know about that 64. 4 idea. And that is that 3/4 of the results you're getting are going to come from 4% of the stuff you're doing. So it means there's a lot of stuff we're doing that really isn't adding up to much. So I'm interested to know, since you started pruning back and simplifying, have you made more or less money and is your life become easier or more difficult?

Oh, you know the answer to that one. Yeah, no, we definitely have made more money and have a lot more, I wouldn't say time off, but it's more focused time. So rather than a lot of the doing tasks all over the place, million, you know, to do lists, we typically stick to three core items that we want to complete that day, large or small. Doesn't mean that these are massive things, but we're focused on the. The core driver of our business, which is usually it's content. Production is the core of everything we do. Podcasting, email, blog posts, even the ads. Matt's totally dialed in on ads now, so we've kind of segmented our roles really well in the business and our team's roles too.

Yeah. And so we're recording this kind of at the beginning of September. Well, August was the best month we've ever had in our business. And prior to that, July was the best month we've ever had in our business. So, you know, the sales are growing in the business by actually focusing on less things. And for us it's been the traffic course and just a handful of affiliate products. Instead of spreading wide with affiliate products and promoting 50 different tools, we have like three tools that we went really, really deep on and are just promoting those really heavily but also creating a ton of content around it. We actually recently had Mike Michalowicz on the show. He did Profit first and his new book called Clockwork. And one of the comments that he made about it was I bought a product through your affiliate link and I was just blown away by the fact that it's not even your product but you guys provided additional support and additional help.

He said, we provide a better support than a typical product owner would do for their own product.

I was like, and that's just us going more simple but deeper on a small amount of projects instead of adding projects. We do have two acquisitions that we've done recently that we're focused on, but we've sort of committed to, let's not get involved in any more acquisitions unless we're purely an advisory role. Because the couple of acquisitions that we did do in the last few months have kind of become more stuff stacked on our plate and almost more of a nuisance than a blessing.

That's such good news.

I remember one year I was asked to present at the Entrepalooza conference and share with them how I was promoting ontraport so effectively. And it was using an email signature line and a dedicated sequence. If you can provide better support than the original company, then that's going to be really helpful for affiliate sales. That's what I used to do with the software that I sold. For the first few years, I became like the biggest fish in the pond for that software. And constantly the manufacturer company would lean into me and ask me for ideas and they would start putting the things that I was offering as a bonus into their products. So it's kind of this arms war, but it definitely wasn't the first time that that happened. I remember it was about 1995.

And I got a call from this guy called Martin who was the marketing manager for BMW Australia. And this was my first sales job at BMW 1995. I'd just become a salesperson. I was about to be a parent. Can you believe my kid just turned 23?

I just did the math on that. I was like, dude, you look like you're in your 30s somewhere.

So my kid just turned 23, but he wasn't born right. When I got this call from Martin and he said, james, do you mind if I just have a chat to you for a minute? And I was like, almost a bit scared. Like, why is this guy calling?

Because.

Just wanted to find out from you regarding 316. Is that was that little compact BMW? I'm not sure if you've ever seen them.

I'm sure.

Anyway, he said, you've sold more 316i's than anybody in Australia. And not just by a little margin, but by a huge margin. And I said, really? Yes, yes. So what are you doing?

And I'm not going to tell you.

And I came back the next day and I wrote out a marketing Plan for the 316i with all these recommendations of what I was doing and how I'd sell more if I was. And then he took the prescription and rolled it out. Exactly. And didn't credit me at all, of course. And this happened many, many times in careers.

This.

It's one of my absolute pet hates. And in fact, here's an interesting bit of trivia. The reason I left BMW to go to Mercedes Benz is I got manipulated on a sales contest.

This team in the city, they got all the people in the office to put together to pull their orders and give it to the guy who was coming second in the nationwide contest.

Oh, so they were screwing you.

Yeah, I was coming first in Australia and I saw an ad for Mercedes Benz job, and I initially sort of did the T balance account and decided, you know what, I'm coming first in the country. I think I'll just stick where I am even if I'm not getting paid as much. And then the report came out for the sales contest and this guy beat me by. It was like 12 points per car, and he beat me by two points, like by a bumper bar in this report. And I was so enraged, I found the paper again, looked up the ad, called them, and I went and I got the job. This is 1997 by now. And that's why I switched across, because of corporate hijinks. And it was the factory store too, so I was just so annoyed. But really, the thing there is, once you dial in what's working better than anyone else, the gains are not just slight, they are disproportionate. And going back to what you said before, I had a call with one of my clients this week and they were just trembling with excitement. They're literally jumping out of their skin because in January of this year, they made $50,000 and that was their biggest month ever.

But it was off the back of a huge launch campaign and this big challenge and they were working like crazy. And then the next month there was like, nothing. And they're now delivering on all the stuff anyway. Last last month, they had their biggest month ever. They exceeded their 50,000. The only difference was there was no launch, no challenge. They're now on autopilot, renewing subscriptions, they've got webinars working properly. They are not working anywhere near as hard. And the three months prior were building up was like in the 40s and then they got to the 50s. So the flick of a switch of a business model to something that works really, really well.

Is so profound. And the great and exciting thing about it is it doesn't mean you have to do more. It just means to.

Bother to find out where the little leverage points are, zoom in on those and then you can discard the rest quite comfortably.

Yeah, and you're right because it doesn't take a massive offer or thing to show you like hey, we can create a system around this or a process that we could just slowly optimize every day to continue to grow those sales. And if your offer is a continuity or a recurring type product, all the better. You can compound your efforts then. I mean you wrote a lot about that in your book.

But yeah, if you could dial in these mini optimizations, these small hinges swinging the big doors for our business, like I said, content is a massive part. So being consistent with our podcast episodes and then Matt does a lot of the traffic and constant optimizations, little tweaks here and there on Google, on Facebook, on Taboola, all these different ad platforms we're on each day and these conversion tweaks just test a new headline, test this variation of a sales video. And then there's the sales with me and kind of more the front facing and communication with the customers always kind of improving, optimizing that process. That's how we've been seeing these percentage gross of just consistent ranging from on average about like 20% every single month or more. But it's consistently growing. It's not this massive spike and then a plummet. And that's a sustainable business, especially with the continuity.

Yeah, and I think one of the delicate tricks is when you, when you do dial in an offer that converts when you are finding the stuff as you're talking about sitting down, running through the different ad platforms. When, when I was, when I quit my job and I was now doing CPA marketing every day at 2 o' clock I'd pull out this huge A3 spreadsheets like poster size pad and I had all my traffic sources and I'd log into each one, check the campaigns. It was like seven search, adbrite, Google, I think maybe even Facebook by this stage. I was one of the very early Facebook ad guys every day and I was spending thousands of dollars a day on traffic and I had to see if I was ahead or behind. Sometimes I'd find someone's replicated my entire ad set, that sort of stuff and it's a lot of work. So often when I'm talking to my clients I'm finding that they found their offer that converts and they're now in that phase. Where do they go further into it because it's such A big opportunity or would that be a trap and they start to lose themselves again? So you've got this precipice. Quite often I like to go broad and then pair off the ones that are not quite as optimal and just stick to the top few traffic sources or the top two conversion devices. That's how I've kind of ended up with podcasts supported by video and mostly emails, and mostly not involving my personal time and then the back end affiliate stuff, because they're the leverage points. And I haven't really pursued the traffic anywhere near the extent that I used to. Almost. Almost not at all. I might occasionally boost a Facebook post because they're so seductive the way they suggest it.

I would hope that, you know, and with this, the traffic course, our course, I mean, a big thing you would do immediately is, you know, shore up all those people that are just listening to the podcast and then from there.

That'S like so obvious. That's the 80 20. Let you guys, like, you do all that stuff.

What are you doing right now to get more attention on the podcast? I know the podcast is a big driver of people discovering you and your courses and what you do.

What sort of efforts are you putting in to get people paying attention to the podcast in the first place, like new folks?

I'm probably very conservative with that.

I'm not prepared to do some of the things that I could do to get greater awareness around that. But for me, I know where the 8020 is. It's being on other people's podcasts is very good. For me.

Just looking after the customers I've got is my number one strategy. Right now I've got this Silver Circle member who is so excited about the results he's gotten. He's just throwing people at me. Like every week someone's trying to join, he's lined up four people. And if I did no other marketing than just look after my customers, that's enough for me to do just fine. I'm conscious that if I were to put too much petrol on the fire, I'm just going to burn the logs too fast and I might even get burnt. I've got this good organic flow. If we're talking about a metaphor. My business now is like a diesel locomotive that can cross from one side of the country to the other, back and forth for the next 20 years without any challenge. Whereas some people are running these supercharged nitrous rotary engines that are just going to blow up on the starting line.

They might win a couple of races, but they'll be mostly in the garage in pieces because it's too high pressure. You see this all the time. People approach their whole business like that. It's like, like high pressure, high stakes. I love just shattering the conventions. I like showing people that.

They don't have to be in the top of the charts. They don't have to have a massive list, they don't have to have affiliates, they don't have to do launches, they don't have to run paid traffic, they don't have to have super tricky, amazing, incredible, complex funnels. They don't have to have a thousand different email segments. They don't even have to have a dozen products. You could do a lot with a very good core product for just the right person, getting them a good result and then just slowly building on top of that over and over and just adding pieces. So when I do add a book or an audible that just feeds the machine, if I appear somewhere else on a podcast, then it just grows organically, but the numbers in the business are still constantly improving as I refine and refine and tune the machine.

Yeah, yeah, I mean, I was going to say that the whole burnout, really fast thing, that's kind of how I see that whole launch model where you see the people that put together the big contests and they get 100 affiliates on board and then they launch their product and then they say it's going to close in five days and then they turn it off. And to me, that's just the most bizarre concept is to spend all this time on a launch, then turn it off. And then all of your affiliates, not only are you paying them whatever, 50% commission, but then you're going and spending another, you know, 25% of your entire sales revenue on paying them in bonuses. And next thing you know, the product creator doesn't make very much money. But they just, you know, destroyed themselves to do that launch.

Oh yeah, it's stressful and they have.

A service debt now. They have to provide whatever they sold and hyped up and there's a place for launches and you know, if you're putting out a movie or a PlayStation game or you've got a brand new product, by all means, the closest I come to that is when my live event goes on sale. You know, I'll let people know about it. That's, that's kind of like. But I tend to be more of an announcer. You know, I release products or courses. I don't push or promote. I've never done the big launch. Just why I don't have a massive list, but I haven't had the big bills to hold onto 500,000 email subscribers with a single digit percentage open rates. I'm so ruthless with my list that we delete records who don't open after three months.

How often do you do that on your list?

Every three months?

Yeah, constantly. If there's a hard bounce or they unsubscribe or they don't open for three months, they're out. So we have like a 30 something percent open rate on our email newsletter.

But you're not doing that double check every three months. Right. You're just kind of looking like what, maybe once a month to see who hasn't subscribed in three months. Yeah.

We've created this segment that captures them and then we send them an email letting them know that if they don't want to be on the list, that's fine. If they don't open the email or click on the link that we're going to remove them from the database and then if they click on it, then they get out of that segment. If they don't, then they're gone. My webmaster will do this on a continual basis.

Yeah, no, that's so smart. It's interesting because our list is.

From the ego standpoint, our list is well over, probably 100,000 subscribers. But when we actually mail our list, we're actually only mailing about 3,000 people at a time. That's it. For the same reasons you talk about, we don't actually delete them from our list. I just tag them if as like an unresponsive tag. And then, you know, maybe once every six months or something I'll mail our unresponsive people and see if I could re engage them. But I'm not saving my money on the autoresponder like you are.

Right.

Yeah, I just, I, for me, I'm happy that I've. I've probably got them subscribed somewhere else anyway. Whether it's YouTube, iTunes, Push Crew.

Facebook, Instagram.

You have the app, right?

I'm really into Instagram. That's my favorite platform at the moment. I'm not worried about the others. I'm also, while we're on that, I think I mentioned something just before that was quite handy. If you do have recurring tasks in the business. What, what we do is just set up a slack reminder so the bot will remind us to do something. That way we don't have to write a detailed or lengthy sop. We don't have to have project management software. We don't have to make a diary note. The tool will just remind us to do certain things at certain times of the day, month or year.

I like that. The Slack reminder. How about Instagram? I'm kind of actually curious about that because we're still a little newer. We're on there. But what are some strategies there you found really effective for you?

Firstly, I'm no Instagram expert, but.

One.

Of my clients put me onto this a couple of years ago, Betty Rocker, and she's very good at it. And she gave us a few tips at a Silver Circle event that we had.

The main ones were.

Like, don't post too often. Some people, I saw some lady the other day, she put like 17 posts in the space of two hours. So I immediately just unfollowed like, you can't be spamming people's feeds with too much. So like one post a day is probably fine. And.

I guess for me, Instagram is for my personal account. It's the place where I can be reasonably vulnerable. So my.

Call to action for people in my membership is if they want to go behind the scenes, that's where they're going to. That's going to. They're going to see stuff that's not purely business. I share stuff about my surfing there and me as a person, my business channel, it's got the daily videos.

And a quote. So they mix a quote and a video and a quote and a video. At the moment I've kind of got a similar numbers and not many by the way, for both channels. So people want strictly business content, they've got it. If they want to know more about me as a person with a little bit of business, but that's me as a person anyway, then my personal channel. So I really don't know the answers yet. But I do know that I don't want to be on Facebook. I could care less about the dribble that's running on the feed. And I don't know if it's just my friends, but I suspect it's just Facebook.

I think it's Facebook.

I don't want to. I don't know what want to know what my porn name would be by mixing my pet in my first suburb, which is, by the way, it's usually a password phishing scam anyway.

I didn't know that, but makes sense.

Yeah, that's, that's why they put these sort of posts because people who are trying to hack you are going to probably get questions like what was your Pet's first name and what. What was the address you grew up on and all that. That's why it's there.

Yeah, that makes sense.

That just gave me a new perspective on those things that I hadn't really.

Thought about before, all those quizzes out there. Right.

But aside from that, I mean, to me, that just seems like it's just really dumb.

Yeah, no, it is. And we've had, like, the same realization. We have a business Instagram account, and Joe and I both individually have personal Instagram accounts, and we've kind of taken the same approach. The personal accounts, we post personal stuff. The business one, it's videos.

You have two podcasts.

No, we've only got the one.

Well, so you might be thinking of Multiply Authority, potentially.

Yeah. I think when I was searching for you, it came up with a couple of options.

Yeah. So the Multiply Authority, that podcast was my old podcast before Joe essentially was co hosting. So this one was just like a continuation of that show. We just rebranded it and Joe joined me.

Well, it's the one I like the most. That's why I send you guest recommendations.

Yeah. You didn't like the math solo?

You do a better job of having guests on there than I do. You have fantastic promotion of it. I think it's best in class, so there's no wonder that it's going well.

Yeah. I think with our podcast, we've. We kind of do things a lot differently than most podcasters. We have almost a completely different take. It's very similar to your take. I think it's different than most podcasters. In fact, we were talking about this with somebody yesterday.

Steve Ulcer.

No, I was. I was talking with the guys from the Optimal Living Daily Podcast yesterday. And most podcasters take podcasting as, like, the artist approach. This is my art. I don't really care if I have listeners. I'm doing this for myself. This is, you know, they're not focused on growth. They're doing it for the art form of podcasting. And we obviously all take it as a piece in our marketing, a piece in our bigger business system. But as far as what we do with the podcast, again, the podcast acts for us as a segmentation tool and also a tool to connect with as many people as possible. And then the things that's happening behind the scenes that most people aren't seeing is if they listen to an episode, they're being added to retargeting campaigns. If you've listened to one of our episodes and then go on Facebook, there's a good chance you've seen one of our little tip videos or one of our silly videos where we're like running for the train or like, you know, some fun behind the scenes video that we made. And you may not know why. Well, it's because you listen to our podcast and then anybody who watches any of those videos, they get retargeted with our offers. So it's like this indoctrination sequence that doesn't require email. So you listen to our podcast, you get into our ecosystem, you start seeing branding videos from us. If you watch those branding videos, then you start seeing links to podcast episodes and you start seeing links to.

Offers. And so we created this whole indoctrination sequence where we don't email and people sort of self select what they're going to get by what actions they take on our website.

Yeah, it's very smart. And I think there's another category of people definitely like, I wouldn't classify myself as a podcaster, by the way. They are other people in my mind.

Oh yeah, they are.

I'm just a business person who uses audio medium. There's the other kind, which is like the entertainer who's not doing it because they creatively want to do their thing. They're not doing it because they're commercially savvy. They're doing it to do some kind of a dog and pony show of whatever they think their audience wants them to do. They're always asking.

Which cover do you prefer? Or what would you like to see me do the next episode on? It's like they think they're giving their audience what the audience wants, but really they've just decided not to. To me, it seems almost inauthentic. It's like, I'm an actor. What, what play would you like me to perform? I'm like, I don't really get that model at all. And it's. They have a lot of followers and a lot of subscribers. But then I wonder when, when do they actually have their personal life or when do they. When can they be themselves and not some Internet presence that they've. The role that they're playing? And it's fascinating.

It is. And I wonder if that's just the way that they think they should be. And it's. I feel like, you know, it's a.

Newbie or way girls doing Instagram selfies.

Down at the beach or a makeup tutorial.

When I go down to surf, sometimes on the rocks to the side, there's, you know, all these teens holding out the camera. Doing, you know, tossing their hair and doing like. I'm not kidding. They did like 50 shots.

I believe it. They're in a row getting everything.

I'm like, what are these people doing?

It's kind of sad.

It is, yeah.

And they're not doing anything with it either. In fact, we had a guest on our show, a guy named Mike Matus, and we were talking about this, this Instagram topic, and he was telling us that most of the people on Instagram who have, you know, a hundred thousand plus followers have never made a dollar off of their Instagram account.

Oh, but they're getting free yoga pants.

But yeah, they might get free yoga pants from Lululemon or something because they, they have a hundred thousand followers on Instagram and it's just, it's so bizarre. These people are. It's an ego thing. They're building it because they just want the likes.

My favorite, my favorite clothing brand, Lululemon.

Yeah, I mean, there's nothing wrong with Lulu. It's a fine pair of clothing. But yeah, these folks. So Mike Matuse, this guy that was on our podcast, he's really in the health and fitness space. And I mean, that's probably the biggest you could see. You know that. And you have yoga people, all these lifestyle, and a lot of them are just doing it for the merch. Free protein powder. Maybe if it's surfers, maybe a Free Surfer surfboard get sponsored.

I can imagine you go down to the supermarket at the checkout and they say, that'll be $370 or whatever. You say, great, I've got 100,000 Instagram followers. So what? We're still going to need some cash.

I think that could fall under the category of.

Wrong goal.

I was blown away by how many people, based on the stats that Mike was telling us. How many people have, you know, 100,000, 200,000 all the way up, like past a million Instagram followers and they're getting free protein powder.

Well, they have a day job still.

And they're working in a day job, sleeping on their parents couch still, and they've got, you know, a half a million Instagram followers.

But therein lies that opportunity there, if you can, maybe.

I think that reinforces the point that we're making that you don't have to be big to do well. You just have to be relevant and find the parts that are working. So of the hundred thousand, which segment.

Has the money? That's a discussion I had during the week with another client. Is.

The big reason that their business is Going so much better now is they've had to let go of their original core audience because their original core audience is a lot of their time poor and money poor. And ultimately.

Whilst it's lovely serving them from a charity benefit, they're not going to be the right audience to take these people to the next stage. So we created a product for the next audience along that has more time and more money and lo and behold, it's significantly more lucrative with less effort, less work. And I found the same to be true in my own business. In fact, next week in the Maldives.

My audience there, they're paying significantly more than the lower tier members and it's a joyful week that I look forward to immensely because it combines a lot of the elements that for me make it a great combo and they'll enjoy it too. And partly because it's such a significant experience for them. It's kind of weird, but some of your customers will expect something to be expensive. I know it's covered in Cialdini. I was having this great pricing debate with a friend of mine. He's trying to. His friend was convincing him that he's selling so much more at 4,995 than 4,997. And I said that sounds ridiculous because unless he's selling tens of thousands of it, probably it's not statistically valid data anyway.

Right.

I said, and you're starting getting to the point where a customer would probably rather spend $5,000 than 4,995 because they'd like to think that it's something worthwhile. That's why my price on the higher level Item starts It's $10,000 even it's not 9999. I'm not going to insult a $10,000 customer with the dollar off thing. You get to the point. And I think this comes from Mercedes Benz background. At some point it's okay to have a premium positioning and that's what the customer wants. In fact, they won't be interested in it if it's not expensive. And that being said, I'm not talking about just having a big high price. You have to deliver.

Oh yeah.

And you've got to deliver substantially more than whatever you charge is probably a really good sustainability practice.

Yeah. I'm actually curious really quick about how you deliver because I know in your forum and we're only in just one of them, probably your lower level there. You're in there every day. You respond to everyone. You have these daily videos. What does your typical day to day look like in your business?

Well, I stack my week to Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday where I'm doing my peak load and the four other days, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday. For those who aren't familiar with the calendar, they're my light sort of days where I'm not doing any. There's no scheduled calls and that means the only job I have is to log into my forum and answer questions, which I do about 1,000 posts a month, 900 posts a month. That separates me from just about any other community person because most people don't show up for their own business, which I think is extraordinary. And that was the problem I solved when I created my forum nearly 10 years ago, is I want it to show up. So I do show up every day. I've been doing it for a long time and I've built it into my routine so that it's almost non existent.

I can also multitask. I can answer posts while I'm watching Netflix these days or I can be having a chat to someone on the phone and answer posts. So I don't mind doing that if it's low level stuff. The typical day for me is glass of water, coffee, check my phone usually to scan for any my team, I go to Slack and I check the help channel. Is there anyone that requires me? Only me. And then I'll just see if there's any emails for me. And usually that's because if I have a scheduled call, if it's a Tuesday or Wednesday or Thursdays when the schedule calls are, I want to see if someone's changed the appointment, you know, canceled or can't make it or whatever. And I'll usually check the surfing conditions. That's like priority one. Which part of the day am I surfing? Am I going now or later?

Every single day I surf, that's really the non negotiable.

And that's been what, two or three years for you? It's been.

I've been surfing for five years now. Okay, coming up to five years at the end of this year.

That's amazing.

And that's really the core driver of my entire life is the surfing aspect. Everything around that, the nutrition and the fitness, the sleep, the work has to fit around that because that's why I'm planning to look younger each year because my body's getting fitter and, and more flexible and more aware.

So I'm curious, what did you do five years ago then like prior to five years, did you just hustle? Hustle and grind? Did you have another activity that you were looking forward to.

Five years ago I worked at least double what I do now. And five years before that, probably quadruple. So you know, I quit my job 10 years ago. Before quitting my job, I was doing the general manager by day, probably.

Sort of eight, eight till.

Six, five or six days a week. And then I was doing my home business from 9:30 at night till about 3 in the morning. So I did that for two and a half years. So you know, when I've seen the Vac Vaynerchuk and all those guys celebrate workaholism and work ethic and you know, 19 hour days you can do it, but not for long. I feel sorry for people who keep doing it after they're multimillionaires because probably they're going to die younger or something. They don't look too good. I saw Arianna Huffington slammed Elon Musk recently about this. It's not cool to overwork if you don't have to. Just saying. The first five years out of quitting my job, I did hustle and worked really hard to make sure that I had a sustainable business that I would never have to go back to working. And then the last five years, that's when I moved to Manly. I reset my whole life around the beach. I started to pull back a bit on the work and then the hardest thing I've done in the last few years was really just putting together the last bits of that book. And once that was done, from December on.

I've literally had a couple of years off guys, where I'm more or less semi retired and I no longer feel, I don't feel like I need to say I make $10 million a year to feel significant.

I don't need to have the most impressive business. I'm happy with a humble seven figure income that I can do at my own pace. I put a cap on my working hours per week. I'm not going to do more than 25 and it's typically 20.

Wow.

And to answer your routine question, mostly there's a little bit of work in Tuesday morning and a little bit on Tuesday night for Silver Circle and then Wednesday and Thursday, I've got a block in the morning and a block in the afternoon. Those two days where I do a couple of calls and then I have most of the day off and then a couple of calls. And the secret there is if you block your day with a batch in the morning and then a batch in the evening and you take the middle of the Day off. You will find by the afternoon, not only will you barely remember whatever you did that morning, it feels like you've had the whole day off anyway. Because let's say I do a call at 8am and then 9am, so I'm basically working from 8 till 10.

After that I can have my avocado on toast or coffee. I do a lot of cooking, by the way. I'm cooking like two or three meals a day.

Really?

Yeah.

And then I will go and surf and then I'll. Then I'll. Then I'm cooking lunch and then I'm doing Netflix while I watch lunch. And then later in the day, maybe I'll have a call at 5 till 6 and then 6 till 7, and then I'm into dinner preparation. And then I'm going to watch Netflix, answer a couple of forum posts and go to bed. I love it. That's my busy workday. And then the days off, like Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, that's going to be. Surf is the number one focus. Could be first thing or could be during the day. And then it's time. With my wife, we spend so much time together, it's amazing. Like pretty much 99.9% of the time. And she schedules her calls when I schedule my calls because I share my calendar. So if I'm doing an interview or a podcast or a call, that's when she does her calls for her little business. So it works out great. And then the rest of the time we, you know, we're just doing stuff together. And when I surf, she. She does things like plays piano and whatever.

That's cool.

She will kill me if she discovers that I've mentioned this. But anyway, nice knowing you guys.

Well, she'll kill you when you realize that this is Saturday for you, that you're recording this podcast.

But, you know, yeah.

Special exception. First Saturday I've done for years, probably because I know you've had stuff going on as well. And.

Flexible. The truth is, when she goes away, I tend to. I can easily slip back into just catching up on stuff, you know, I'll absolutely purge my inbox back to zero. I do answer every forum post every day, except for the occasional time if I'm traveling or whatever.

There's definitely some efficiencies you can use to do that. I wouldn't recommend it for someone without good support.

You need to be the right kind of person and.

You need to be able to really.

Build up a body of work that you can refer people to. If someone says, what's the best way to.

Drive traffic to my business, using short videos. I'll go, okay, well, I've got this great training we did just last month that shows you how to just, in eight minutes a week, have a daily video going out across your five favorite platforms. Go and watch this or read it or listen to it, and come back here and let me know what you've discovered. So that's. It doesn't take long to answer that because I've already done the work. You know how we're talking about leverage points. Building that body of a training library is the leverage point for me. I've got almost a decade's worth of training that I can now point people to. It's like a supermarket. They come into the supermarket and I say, what do you want to cook? And they say, we want to make a nice pasta. I say, great, here's what you need. Some garlic, some tomato sauce, some pasta, some olive oil, a fry pan and a spoon.

You'll need a plate and a fork and spoon and maybe some cheese on top when you're finished. Okay, let's check out. Boom, we're done. We don't need to go down the pet food section. We don't need the ice cream freezer. We don't need any. Just get in and get out. In consistent with this theme of helping people do less, I find out what they're trying to achieve, and I only show them what they need. And we can ignore the rest because there is I don't know how many gigabytes, but I think there's probably more than a terabyte worth of recordings in there.

Oh, man, I love it. Because you basically built just a library. You have a reference library where if somebody asks a question nine out of ten times, you've already answered that question. You just go to your library.

Exactly. So my main job is to help people move around the library. And some people, like, in society, are really good at finding their own stuff and they just help themselves. Like, some people aren't in my face every day because there's so there's 500 odd members. I wouldn't say they're odd. Certainly some of them. It's about 500 people. There seems to be the core people who I'm talking to regularly. Some people come back every few days. Some people come back every day. Some people come back every week. Some people every month. Some people leave it to six months. Some people I'll never hear from ever. And I do everything in my power to engage them and bring them in but it works out. And this is the thing. The people who are asking for my help every single day are pretty much being subsidized by the ones who never show up at all. So it sort of balances out in the end anyway. But what it all comes down to is that effective hourly rate at the end of the month. How much revenue did that membership bring in? Divided by the number of hours I spent answering posts, which usually is 30 minutes a day, sometimes an hour. So even If I spent 30 hours in a month on that membership, and if I made $30,000 for the month, that's still $1,000 an hour.

Wow. So just doing that EHR in your book, you line it out perfectly. But just that formula right there, I mean that, that is a sustainable business that, you know, you won't get tired of. It's something you can always be fresh. So you're not overworked, you're not stressed out doing a million things. And I love that you're. You're focused on the one to one. You know, I'm sure your team supports you and all the other stuff. And they kick out emails all the time about the podcast.

I don't have log into ontraport. That's the other key. You have to have a. Someone else got to be doing all the other stuff.

Mm.

So I'm not fiddling around with WordPress. I'm not playing with traffic campaigns. I'm not doing any social media other than my Instagram. I'm not doing the. I'm not doing the forum back end. I'm not doing the weekly newsletters, I'm not transcribing, I'm not editing my podcast, I'm not updating hosting and all that. So if I'm not doing any of that stuff, then all I have to do is answer some posts and turn up for podcasts.

Yeah, no, I love that. I mean, that's definitely a nut we're still trying to crack in our own business. We're still pretty in deep with a lot of this stuff in our business. We did recently hire an operations manager. And this podcast that we do is completely hands off. I mean, we do our recordings, throw them in Dropbox, and then as far as we know, everything's up, other people are taking care of the rest. But, you know, from our actual business standpoint, I'm still the one who runs the ads. Joe's still our main sales rep in the business as far as closing sales over chat and through email and occasionally over the phone and things like that. So we're still, I would say we're still about eight hour a day, Monday through Friday kind of work. But that's kind of the next phase of our life is okay, we've got this thing pretty well systematized. How do we start backing ourselves out?

Yeah, you've got an amazing core to work with there and you'll find the leverage points. It's like for each thing you do.

What'S the big leverage point? And if you zoom in on that and cut some of the other or just have an amazing team, like for context, I've got five people in the background and they've been with me for a long time, between five and nine years.

Wow.

They're so amazing and talented and autonomous and we've gotten to such a great relationship. Now again, I'm not doing a lot of the stuff that most business leaders or managers would do. We don't track days off, sick leave hours. I'm not paying by the hour. I don't tell them what tasks they have to do by when or any of that stuff. They just, they just run it. They know what to do. They're like a thinking brain.

That's, that's perfect. I mean, that's, that's the ideal scenario. And like you said, it's leverage points, so. And it goes back to us personally. It's content. So it's like, hey, if we could be really freaking good at content. And then everything else on the fringe that supports that content goes with any other business owner. Listening to this. Figure out if you went, if you.

Go and buy a big stack of Post it notes and every time you do a new task.

Write that task on the Post it note and just collect them until you're not adding any more Post it Notes. It might take you a week or a month. And then you can just put Joe and Matt up on the whiteboard and put the Post it notes under you that only you can or should do. Might be doing this podcast, for example. Then the rest of Post it Notes, try and stick them somewhere else, put them under someone else's name. If you don't have the someone else, then get the someone else. Whether it's a service or you hire internally or you have a part time contractor or whatever, or if you can put the Post it note in the bin, that's an easy win. You know what? We don't even need to do this at all. And then.

That'S the easiest possible system to do a task transfer is become aware of the tasks and then transfer them either delete or someone else, and then just keep the ones that you want. Really, the glue that helps my business stay together is knowing who does what and trying to keep my list quite small.

Mm. Well, it allows for you to think and design the business. You know, you are the visionary. So without you, I mean, it sounds like your team's got it pretty systemized, but, you know, customers will notice and probably start to drop away.

Almost always, my innovations and ideas come to me while I'm surfing.

Sure.

So. Because that's when I'm. There's no phone in my hand, there's no computer in front of my eyes. There's nothing in my ears other than earplugs. It's just me in the ocean. And that's when you get the idea. That's when I think about it. That's when I saw it. You know what? I've just looked at the pricing matrix on memberships, and I've noticed a trend here. So I've scrapped the six months option. I'll decide it while I'm out there. And then I come back. The first thing, I write it down, I'm still dripping wet. I write it down my pad, and then I go and have a shower and whatever, come back, hop into Slack and say, let's do this. And then I'm on to the next thing. So it's really important. And I can't emphasize this enough to have time outside of your business. And I think most top CEOs spend at least half their time thinking there's closing the doors, turning off the interruptions, and just thinking.

Yeah, Like Perry Marshall, he talks about what he calls Renaissance time.

Right.

Which, you know, I think. Doesn't he talk about that in the context of 80, 20, where it's like 80% of his time he calls his Renaissance time, which is a lot of it, not actual work. It's, you know, out thinking, riding a bike, you know, doing something active away from the business. He actually, I think, says he spends 80% of his time focused on that kind of stuff and 20% of his time actually in the doing.

It sounds a lot like you, James. And yeah, I mean, it just allows you to think clearer and deeper. I'm just imagining the post it note exercise for one. We will do that and we'll report back to you. But I almost want to stick those all over the wall so they're just, like, glaringly obvious. You're like, holy crap, I do all of that in a week or in a day maybe. You gotta be like, okay, that's gotta change. That's why I'm overwhelmed.

That's the thing I often talk about. If you could just use a mirror, that's a good tool. Look yourself in the face. That person is the person responsible. Like you're the vehicle and the operating system for all the results you're getting. You can change that more easily than any external factor.

I think we grow up with this operating system. It was installed by our parents in our society and school and everything else. You can change the operating system. Just before this call, I changed the software on the recording tool that I'm using. You can upgrade it so it's constant upgrade. Maybe listening to this podcast, you have a software upgrade on the task management activity. And the more willing you are to look under the hood and confront yourself about what you're actually doing, the more progress you'll be able to make because you've got the truth. It's like when you cast a reporting tool over all your traffic campaigns and you realize where the sales are coming from and you could safely let go of the other ones that aren't performing. Turning off a bad ad will tip more profit back into your profit pool and then you can put that money back to the good ad and you get compound expanded results.

Yeah, I mean, that's pretty much the gist of what I'm doing in the ad platforms almost every day is turning off losers and putting more money towards winners.

That's why when I start talking to somebody about their business, it's pretty easy for me to say. That's a lot of stuff.

I had this lady recently, she posted in my private forum section. She posted like 17 business models that she's trying to run at the same time right now. And I said, hang on a minute, this is way too much stuff. You've got almost no chance of having success in any one of these because you split across so many different things. So I went through the list of 17 things and I said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, yes, no, no, no, no, no, yes. And then a week later, she's written her new sales page on her new site with her new offer and stopped all the other stuff. And she's already pre sold it. She's flying because we just finally. It's like carrying around a backpack full of lead. It's pointless. It's like when you go to the airport and see people wheeling suitcase the size of a mini bar.

Fridge. Yeah.

Oh, yeah, fridge. Like a refrigerator on wheels. And you think, what are these people taking on their holiday like, why even travel if you need to take all this stuff? There's really no difference in living at home. Let some stuff out of the backpack, travel light, you know, buy stuff when you, when you need it and free yourself up of the burden. And we do that in business. Too much. We're trying to carry too much. Same. Remember I talked about my rule of buying a course? I'm not buying a course unless I can sit down and go through it on the spot because I know it won't get done otherwise. So I travel light and then once I'm done, I can release it.

Yeah, yeah, you've expended the energy, whatever that's needed at the time, and let it sail away. You don't need it anymore. I love it here.

I could just get you guys to come on a podcast and tell me all your secrets. Now I probably don't even need the course.

Probably true.

Don't worry, you'll be getting that course shortly.

We can give you the Cliff Notes later on.

Well, for anybody who's listening, we actually do have like sort of a Cliffs Notes version of our traffic strategy. We actually made a special link@evergreenprofits.com superfast.

That's right.

So we actually did. We actually did put together a little cheat sheet that explains our traffic strategy even without having to the full course.

Nice.

Yeah, so we'll be giving that away for you guys there. And James, I don't want to take your Saturday too much, man. You've been super generous already to us.

It's probably still pretty early. You still probably need to hit the waves.

Oh, yeah.

You don't get bonus points for that guess, though.

Bad guess, Matt. Well, this is fun, man. Anything else that you top of mind right there? Before we maybe wrap it up here.

How about some random things that have been floating around my high level group?

Yeah, that'd be great. The trends?

Well, we've already covered a lot, but just a couple of things. Some people are having tremendous success with on demand webinars. So if you're doing those webinars where they're like three times a week and a few days from now, or live ones, try ones that start in the next 15 minutes. Those ones work well, apparently.

Other things is how can you shorten the path? I'm seeing people go from paid ads to a webinar registration to a webinar to an application to make the sale. How can you drive someone from an ad to an application, like chop out the whole webinar, for example?

I've seen People remove some links from the chain and get to the same result or better result faster.

I like that. Yeah, because that's. I mean, just that alone, it's a lot of work to build that whole chain there because people think they have to.

Well, most people never get to it.

Yeah.

Like one of my students. Also.

We'Ve skipped a whole business model for him. He started training with me about three months ago and the goal then was to build a membership.

But he had this opportunity to come along for a deal and he asked me how he might go about it and I suggested a revenue share deal and we went through the pros and cons of that. He landed that and then he added another two more within a week or so because he now knew the model and had the benefit of the experience. We've decided that he doesn't really need the membership, which he thought he did. He thought that was going to be the prime business model and income and way of getting deal flow. But we were able to remove that piece of the puzzle. So we've now figured out how he can get deal flow and then move straight to the end game, which is the revenue share deal.

That's probably going to save him three or four years and get him to a much higher profit level faster for the business. That really suits his skill set.

Yeah. Yeah, I love it. All right, so what else you got there? I know we have some. We could probably throw some stuff into the mix, too.

Well, you've talked about getting a project manager and I certainly have the team pushing projects around my business. I think that's a hat that too many business owners wear. That will be a good. If you can get someone really high on follow through. Even my team, they will chase me for content. If I'm not giving them a podcast to publish or enough videos, they'll demand it from me. So get someone, empower someone in your team to project manage you. The entrepreneur who tends to be. Tends to break all the rules because we're the boss. You get someone to project manage you and the rest of the team, that's a good win.

It's huge. And that's.

Yeah.

Our hire is Shannon. She probably is listening to this right now. She gets some shout outs recently and. And she definitely does exactly what you just said. Like this morning, she was like, all right, guys, gonna need some more social media videos from you starting Monday. And it's things like that. But to take it even a step further, what we've been doing the last month, month and a half is pretty much Capturing all of the repetitive tasks that both Matt and I are doing. Patty, who writes all of our show notes, kind of manages our content, and Shannon and some other outsourcers. So capture that. And then Shannon, our ops manager, will kind of throw it into a doc as an SOP in written form and videos attached still in there if you need to see some visuals. But that way we're organizing based off of different kind of areas of our business. There's like a sales bucket, a deliverable bucket, admin, you know, kind of like the final just wrap up stuff, taxes, stuff like that. But the cool trick, and this is something we just Learned from Mike McCallwit's clockwork in his book, was to, you know, once you capture that video, throw it in an sop and maybe you assign that to someone else on your team, have them try to almost break that process, at least follow along and they're going to find those little gaps in your process because you might be a little too close to it, especially if you're delegating something and then have them rerecord, recapture that process with those added in steps. And not only is your SOP and all that stuff going to improve, but that person you're delegating to will take more ownership of the task.

Well, and you also learn the things much better by teaching them than you do by just.

Either just reading about it or even just doing it. When you go to teach it, that's when you probably learn about it the best. So what Mike was suggesting, we were talking to him, is keep making your videos that show the various processes in your business. But once you've made that video, pass it over to the team member that's gonna do it, have them do it, and then have them remake the video in their own words because now they're becoming the teacher of that process. And they're also probably improving that video by talking about steps that you may have missed in the first video.

Yeah, I've got a few thoughts on that. One is with SOPs, most of the time I'm not creating them in the first place, which is good. I'll just ask the team to do. All they do is make sure they put a Google document with the words SOP and whatever the SOP is about and then they share it with whoever's going to be using the sop. And that way I can search in my G drive for SOP and it pulls up all our SOPs. And if they build the SOP, then it's definitely ownership is happening. The Keys to bring together all the stakeholders who are going to be involved in the process. Have everyone put down like guess what all the steps might be and then put them in order. It's another post it note exercise if you're doing it face to face. By the way, I used to bring together my SEO team and we say right, what happens from start to finish? What happens to this there, who's involved with what? And we put a post it note and we line them up in order and then someone documents it and shares it with everyone involved. And it worked really well.

That's good.

Same happened in the car dealership actually years before I'd pull everyone into the boardroom and say from when we sell a car to it drives out the door, paid for what has to happen. So I had the financial controller, I had the pre delivery people, the parts department salesperson, sales manager, the receptionist, everyone was there and we created a deal pack which was this one page that had a checklist from the time it was sold to. Registration papers filled out, stamp duty, paid check, encumbrance on trade in vehicle number plate issued floor mats, polished detail fuel paid for, blah blah blah, all the way from start to finish, signed off by the various managers in their segment. And for a car to be delivered, it was really simple. Every box had to be ticked and it was signed off. That way we would always make sure we got paid for the car and quality control.

You have a little rule in our business is you can't check your own work. So they have to cross check. Like in the airplane when they say cabin crew, cross check doors where they go and check each other. So if you can't check your own work, someone else has to do it. So it's usually going to get picked up before it it gets to me. I don't want to be the checker. That's my mandate. Don't make me the checker. Check it before it comes to me. Then we use a for approval thread in Slack. Anything they want to publish or do, like the video descriptions or the blog posts, they put the title description bullets, calls to action, blurb, whatever, they just paste it into that and if I don't touch it, they publish it anyway. If I want to change something, I just change it. And that way I'm not the log jam, I'm not stopping the machine from working, which is very common in a business where the owner is holding everything up because they want the final say or the approval. The more of a perfectionist you are, the more likely this is going to happen. So creating this conveyor belt, it was kind of like a conveyor belt with a glass window. It's rolling out through the front of my office. I can look up and see what's going through, but I don't have to go out there and pick it off the line and check it myself. I can see it. And over time, you build up a fantastic machine that way.

I like that visual, actually. Yeah. Just that you got a glass wall, you can't do anything, but you can kind of observe and I mean, I know we've been too close to our business. We still hold on to a handful of roles that we're really close to. But yeah, it's a process. I mean, it's. That's probably one of the hardest things as business owners is letting go and knowing when to let go as well. You can't just let everything go all at once and then you're like, oh, crap, sales just stopped. Like, if I just walked away tomorrow, like, yeah, sales aren't going to stop at all, but we're going to see something change there. And same with Matt.

It also helps to classify which things are irreversible and which things are easily changed. You can easily change a blog post of some words on a blog post. It's harder to change a physical book once it's printed, so probably requires a higher level of focus before you sign off on that one. Blog post is pretty easy to change. Audios, definitely. We've occasionally logged in and changed an audio snippet. We tried some sound effects one episode, people didn't like it, so we just re edited it and uploaded and just overwrite the old copy and away you go. You know, very few people will ever have heard the original one.

That's funny. The sound effects, I like that idea. I haven't thought about that. For podcasts.

Yeah, we just beatbox in ours, right?

You've got a catchy thing. We put a bit of bass guitar in the episode with Scott Devine, and that was really appropriate and excellent. I actually was sharing with my team one of the other podcasts. This is the only other podcast I listened to and it's got a lot of sound effects and stuff, but it just didn't work for my audience. They were confused by it. They didn't understand it, and that's okay. They try this stuff. I said, just play with it. Check it out. And they did. And I said, the market will tell us. I got three or four emails. Hey, what's going on with this? What's this all about, okay, let's just do what we normally do.

Stick to basics. That's cool. Do you have anything else on the list from your membership there?

I think we've talked about most of the others. There's been an awful lot of insights here. I think that should get a starting list for potential change in the business. So I think I'm happy with where we went today. We've covered a broad range of topics and it's always a pleasure speaking to you guys because you have a real affinity for the same sort of stuff that I'm interested in. And I think what you're doing is so well executed that it's a great example for people. It's where I'd send someone to say, look, this is how you do it. Right.

Thanks for sharing your valuable insights with me today. I really appreciate that.

Thank you, James. Yeah, and I know you mean that, and I mean to be very extremely honest. The same thing goes right back to you. Because exactly how, James, I mean, the members that are listening to you on your podcast, they already know this, but you are the real deal when it is that one to one connection. And I pull a lot of that in terms of how I help serve our community and, you know, in my role specifically, which I take like, I remember joining your membership and the very first thing, I think it was a Sunday or Saturday night, you shot me a personal video and you probably said Joe and Matt, because we're kind of a duo here. But the same thing is I was like, holy crap, he just fired over that video. To me, I think it was definitely the weekend and it was just a really cool personalization. And that's one of the things that I'm now taking in sales. I actually create little loom videos sometimes for folks and people are constantly blown away. And that's something I learned from you.

Well, in your forum too. The way we use your forum is, you know, we're not in there very vocal all the time, but pretty much anytime we've had a question, we're like, hey, let's go check James's forum. And we do a quick search. And we've never had to ask a question because it's always in there somewhere already. So, you know, we've been basically using it more as like a personal library than we have. Let's go ask our questions. Because the questions are already pretty much answered in there for anything we've come up with.

I learn most of the stuff. I learn about where things are up to and what tools are great and Stuff from my members. They're incredibly resourceful and well connected.

Yeah.

I think the other thing that you might be using there is my monthly training because when I'm putting those together, I'm using you as my avatar.

Really? Is that true?

Yeah. Damn.

I'm thinking that's so cool, man.

If this training is going to be interesting for you, I think it will be interesting for every other member. It forces me to make sure that I'm on point. And I think the monthly trainings have been getting better and better.

They're amazing.

Each one will end up being a chapter in a book or an entire course of some kind eventually. They're all like the first version. And I think that's a great way that people use the membership is just to get that one or two hour digest of what's really working well from something that's already proven and tested. It's not theoretical at all.

No. And it's not. You can size it in a way where like you said, Sometimes it's like 45 minutes, but it's great because you'll dive deep on that one strategy or topic and you have marching orders. After watching those videos, there's never any big questions and if you do, you can ask.

I'm also trying to create. I'm trying to create episodes that will be good to point members too. Of all the typical challenges they have, whether it's their emails or their video marketing or. The last time was running in person events. Everyone in my high level group is or should be running high level events. And I get asked all the time and I've created this master checklist over a decade and I finally just put it together into a short presentation and that one's been really well received. But I've been asked like three times this week in my high level group about a mastermind or an event and I say great, watch this. Yeah, it saves a lot of time.

And that's. That was actually one of my points I wrote down for just the things that we're doing, just the affiliate products we're selling. I mean there's a lot of time involved in there because it's very personalized selling if they're chatting with us. But you know, there's definitely. We can create FAQs or a repository of videos. Kind of like how you've done it with your forum. You can apply that in different variations. Even if you're in a sales role and you want to maybe give an example or a case study.

The sequence that worked really well for me with the affiliate one was a PS that.

Was very specific to the target person who was having the challenge that my product recommendation solved and they would click on it and they would get taken to a post that outlined all the reasons why I chose this tool, what I was using before, what was on my mind, what I compared it with and then how I ultimately made the decision and then the follow up sequences in that email sequence which is now tagged with interested in such and such a tool offered them training with that tool. If they got the tool through my link, I was happily send them all the lessons that I discovered after I used the tool. That would give them a quick start like you said, complementing what the manufacturer sells, but doing it even better than they do. And that was a very successful campaign.

Awesome. I love it. And that's what I love about affiliate marketing too is if you find some great products to get behind and you use them, you have your stories, content just flows and you have no shame to just go out there and help and give all of your successes or failures and things to for people to avoid. It makes selling those products honestly kind of a no brainer. Obviously there's still work involved but. But you kind of mastered a lot of it just by using the things.

Yeah, I know. I still have. I would still have tremendous shame around any of my failures really. Try, try hard to avoid.

It's also partly in the framing. We don't mind, you know. Was the sound effects on the podcast a failure?

Not really.

It was just an experiment. It was just try something else. I'm happy to innovate and be open minded to try something new.

I really embrace change. Change is my friend. I celebrate it. I seek it out because that's my weapon that I can compete with anyone on a change landscape. The people who are going to fall down are the ones who get stuck and can't change.

You're speaking our language when it comes to something like traffic. That was actually one of the biggest things is you see these folks dealing with just Facebook traffic, for instance. It's like spread the deck. So the way. That's why you hear us, we're constantly talking about all these different platforms and how to connect them all properly or how to segment in each one of them. They all have their own rules. But if you are kind of you spread the deck. Obviously focus on the ones that are working now. But you know, Facebook changes their terms overnight. Our business will not die. But a lot of others will.

And they will and they will. It'd be foolish to Think that's going to ride forever?

I think in five years from now, it's definitely not going to be what it is right now.

No way.

What it will be, not so sure. But I don't think it's going to be at the peak that it was before. And a constraints exercise, which I learned from from Li Goldrat, is put Facebook up there on your traffic streams on a whiteboard and then put a fat line through it and pretend that it's now illegal to use Facebook. What would you do? And do that constraints exercise. So remove that as a possibility. You can't use Facebook at all. Not allowed. What would you do? Chances are I'll be generous and say Concealer's Instagram. But would you do a podcast? Would you have some kind of show on YouTube? Would you speak on other people's podcasts or whatever those answers are? You write those down and then the question is, why don't you start doing that anyway, as if Facebook isn't an option? And then just add them into the mix and find out if you can discover a new fantastic traffic source. Then after you've tried a few, then send the herd again. But now you might have two fantastic platforms. That's like, I'm using the combo of podcast and short videos. That combination works really well for me. And my short video combo is most definitely not single platform specific. I'm killing it on LinkedIn, strangely enough, which I had ignored from my last round of tests five years ago. But it's back in the mix. It's somehow gotten stronger and cleaner and leaner and meaner than it used to be.

One we're not on our podcast episodes are shared to it. But just. Yeah, we never really gained off of it.

Yeah. Yeah, that's pretty cool because I've heard some people recently talk about LinkedIn as well. Just for posting.

I might get. If I get 80 views on a video on Facebook, I'll get 2,000 views on LinkedIn. It's like, what? And you see the people who are clicking on it, and it's my kind of people. Which is really interesting. And it was a member of superfast business who opened my eyes to that, who said, don't write off LinkedIn. Try it again. I'll even hop on a phone and talk you through how it works. She did. And we tried it again and away it went. So big lesson there is.

Go wide and then go deep and then go wide and then go deep and then go wide and then go to put it on a cycle, Put on a Repeat. Because that's, that's how you're going to deal with change.

Yeah, I love it. And you're setting yourself up with safety nets, you know, when you go wide. So that's where it's that expand contract. When I said that, you know, we trimmed all of our products except for, I think one or no. We had our affiliate products. We had no products for a while, but we knew what was working and where we wanted to head. And it was scary. But at the same time, we knew we had our plan. We had a little backup foundation there. So, yeah, it gives you more confidence, that's for sure. Moving ahead.

All right, guys.

Well, this is good stuff.

We should do these little chats. I mean, you've been on my show before. It's great to have a series like this. And, and I'm glad that we decided to share this episode because I would have hated to have this conversation twice.

See, that's what I was thinking. I'm like, I think we should just match these.

And it's more free flowing. You never know what's going to pop up. So we love that. All right, man. James, Have a great trip, dude.

And let's give call to actions.

Oh, yeah, probably be a good idea.

If you're listening to our podcast, definitely check out superfastbusiness.com and then again, we did put together a little cheat sheet for. We actually have a team member who creates cheat sheets for every episode. We do like little cliffsnotes versions of what we talked about. So anybody who listens to the episode and wants to kind of go back and get like a quick refresher, we put together those cheat sheets. So we'll have that and a little traffic. Cheat sheet available@evergreenprofits.com superfast that's it.

Nice. Awesome. James.

Can't really add anything to that.

Profits.com and superfastbusiness.com mashup this will be episode 602 on my site. I'm sure my team will put together something as well. And either way, it's been a wonderful collaboration. I hope we can do more of these. If the, if our listeners enjoy it, then that would be great.

Definitely. We'll give it a shot and we'll figure out the feedback there. Thank you, James. We'll make it happen again. All right, thank you. And I hope you just enjoyed this episode you just listened to. Now, right now, before we sign off, I have a few things I would love for you to do. So the very first thing is to go find our guest on Facebook and tell them that you loved their episode with us. That's going to help them just feel good about themselves, but also it's going to spread the word a little bit more for us. Go find them on Facebook. Everybody's on Facebook. And go say that you love their episode. And maybe one cool thing that you learn there. The second thing is to go to itunes and subscribe to our podcast. Just look up Hustle and Flowchart and hit the subscribe button. And the very last thing, the third thing is to leave us a review on itunes or wherever you're listening to this podcast and help us spread the word more. That's how more people are going to get this awesome knowledge, this cool podcast training, and a whole bunch of other cool free training that we give out@evergreen profits.com so that's about it. Go find them on Facebook, go subscribe on itunes and leave us a review. You would be amazing if you did that, but you're always amazing. So thanks for listening and we'll catch you in the next episode.

You're awesome.