James Schramko — Work Less And Make More By Optimizing Your "EHR"

This is an intro, intro, intro, intro.

Hustle and Float Shark with your boy.

My boy, Matt Wolf.

Hey, what's up, everybody? Welcome back to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast. My name is Matt Wolfe. I am here with my co host and business partner, Joe Fear. Joe Fear.

Today.

This is actually one of the podcasts that I was really, really excited about. This is somebody that I've followed for years and years and years and actually have modeled a lot of my previous businesses around a lot of stuff he does in his business. He goes by the name of James Schramko and he's an Australian fellow. And this podcast is really excellent. We go, we're kind of all over the place. He just released a brand new book.

Called Work Less, Earn More.

Work Less, Earn More. I read it last night right before recording this because I wanted to just pick his brain about all the stuff.

That he talked about. We both talked about. We both did.

I finished it last night.

Okay. Hey, I read probably a good 60% of it in one evening. That's. I mean, I guess the fact of the matter is, is that it's a very easy and quick read. But this thing is so dang action packed. This is ridiculous. Don't worry, we're not just like. It's not like a big paid advertiser or a free advertising or whatever for the book. This thing has so many knowledge points you could take away.

It's one of the most actionable books I've read in a long time. I even kind of compared it to the Four Hour Workweek the book. Because the. The feeling I got after reading this was just like this pumped up feeling of, I have more ideas now to cut down on the time I work, but actually make more money from it. And that's kind of the whole idea behind his book. So in this podcast we talk about, effectively, our rate, how to improve your cash flow, how to put on live events, how to run your own community. We run the gamut of how to run a killer business model and slowly back yourself out of it and work less and less. So really, really, really great stuff with James Schramko. So let's go ahead and dive right in.

Hey, James, thanks for coming on the show this morning.

Thank you for having me. It's always good to connect with new people.

Yeah, well, and we have, like you were saying earlier, before the call here we have some overlap in our customers, you know, are your coaches, sorry, some of your students from the past. So it's pretty cool, you know.

Oh, yeah, no, this is a discussion that we're very, very excited to have because you just released a book, I think as of this recording. Didn't it just Yesterday, December. Well, December 11th.

It came out yesterday and we got connected by a mutual friend who. One of my surfing friends there in Encinitas.

Yeah, Aaron. Aaron. Aaron Fletcher. We work closely with him.

Yeah, we're going to actually be putting on some live events with Aaron next year. So he's somebody that we've been working really, really closely with. And super glad he connected us because as soon as he connected us, we both picked up your book and I actually powered through the book last night. I think Joe got most of the way through the book last night and so tons of fun stuff that we're.

Going to talk about today for sure.

Well, they say it takes about two hours from COVID to cover.

Yeah, sounds about right. Sounds about right.

Well, and Matt actually posted it in our group. We have this kind of Facebook group of a lot of our subscribers and Matt was just kind of blown away and this before I even opened the COVID on Kindle because I wanted to get it instantly.

This is like the four Hour work week, but better and actionable and dear God.

Well, I wouldn't say it's like the four hour work week, but it gave me the same sort I had after reading the Four Hour Workweek. But it definitely takes a different approach on it, which we're going to get into today. You have one KPI that is your guiding light in your business. It's your North Star that you're always trying to focus on, called the EHR Effective Hourly Rate. Can you talk about that for a second? Yeah.

You need to have some measurements. Not everything can be measured, but that's certainly one that can be even if you have a job. And it's just simply a great filter to make decisions on where you should spend your time. Because we're all familiar with the 8020 rule, which I talk about in more depth. But the effective value rate is a simple calculation of the amount of profit that you're making divided by the number of hours that it takes to get that. Now, there are some advancements to this. Later on in the book I talk about different business models and. And you can build an asset to sell and maybe your effective hourly rate will be lower, but you make your money on the selling of the asset. So there are some little exclusions. But I have found that when I'm coaching people, it's a really fast way to work out if they're wasting a lot of time on something that is not that fruitful. You could think of it like if you had a farm and you have different paddocks, and each paddock had a different crop, and some of the crops are having a fantastic yield and other ones are producing almost nothing, but you spend the same amount of time on each of the paddocks. Then if you were to break it down into units, like which paddock you spend the time on and what it produces, you might say, you know what, I could forget about a good chunk of this farm and just focus on the one corner here, and my effective alley rate would go up. So, yeah, it's a good starting point. And the first time that people calculate this, often they'll figure out, you know what, I'm just not earning enough in my business the way that it is now. And it's a fantastic catalyst for change. It often has people thinking, wow, I've got to stop doing this particular activity, or I need to change my business model. Or I now see this connection that if I'm working very, very long hours and long, that I'm actually making less per hour than if I were to have a life and spend some more time with my family and to tune up my business better.

Yeah, and it's that whole mentality. You see a lot of people tout it. And I think there's two camps. There's, you know, and it's ironic, our podcast is called Hustle and Fluid Chart, but that whole hustle mindset, you know, is exactly kind of what you're speaking to, is you can have a. Sure, you can have a seemingly successful business financially, but you could be working 80 hours a week on that thing.

A lot of the people I've worked with at a high level, that is where I spend a fair bit of my energy is helping pull them back off the ropes.

They're successful in the eyes of the consumer, and maybe when they look in the mirror, they see the successful business person. But then a lot of things around their life start to fall away. Relationships, staff members, friends, passions and hobbies. Like, they forget that they used to have fun, right? So I'm pulling them back. So I do think there's two main camps. There's the extreme hard worker camp. You know, the. The Gary Vee style, where you just got to work, work, work. And that comes first above family and everything else. And then there's the. The lazy riches style. You know, the laptop hammock on the beach, biz ops sort of thing that, where, you know, it's all automated push button instant riches. And I don't think either of those were the solution that suited me. So I think I'm talking to that middle point where you know, the hustle, I think in your reference there is talking about not being lazy. I think there's going to be an amount of work, definitely. But what I wanted to do is hand people some tools and ideas to catalyze some change so that at least when they're working, they're going to be effective. So that's why the effective hourly rate is a good benchmark to keep tabs on. And it kind of helps you actually avoid being a workaholic because you start to erode your own effective value rate. If you spend the same amount of time doing a certain task, like if the time expands to do that same task, then you start to go worse off. So sometimes you better just to stop.

It's funny.

Refresh and start again tomorrow.

It's like an ego thing. You can almost have your ego say like I am worth no less than $100 an hour or $200 an hour. And then you start doing this monotonous thing that you probably should outsource. And then he drops a 75 an hour.

You're like, let's use this super simple example. I remember this very early on. I was sitting there at my computer at three in the morning and I just had this thought. Would Richard Branson be doing this right now? Would he be drafting an article for some software to put on ezinearticles? And I answered myself, I thought no, I really don't think he would be doing that. So I made a little post it note and put it on my computer. Would Richard Branson be doing this? And then I read later that one of the, one of the keys to his success is that he does virtually nothing in his business. It's like you have to hire people and you have to have everyone else doing all the other activities and then you can have your time spent on those higher level things. So it really helps you steer towards the activities where you have that real skill set and the things that you enjoy more and are perhaps the best in the world at compared to other things. And let's face it, there's a lot of fantastic talent out there to go and get access to for the things that we probably spent time on early in our business that we definitely shouldn't be. Things for me, like building my website or queuing up an email broadcast or doing bookkeeping, these are activities I used to do, but I definitely shouldn't do. Because not only is there a fantastic pool of talent out there to do it, they actually do it better than I can do it.

Sure.

Yeah.

And it's not a high value activity.

Yeah. Joe gave me a funny look because I still do my own bookkeeping.

And I literally just got him to. I was like, you need to hire her in 2018.

I'm still the guy that gets in and updates the plugins inside of our WordPress installs and things like that. So, you know, you're. You're sort of.

It does say nerd or something on your website in your profile.

Yeah, I think it does, actually.

But I think I sort of got ahead of myself for this podcast because I actually want to sort of get a little bit of your backstory and how you got to where you are today. Because from what I understand, your business is sort of built around how often can I surf? And you know, the business is built around the surfing schedule.

One step back from that. It's like my life revolves around, can I, you know, what's the best time of this day? Should I be surfing?

And then the business has to fuel my lifestyle. So that's probably where you got the connection for the four hour work week is that you can create a business that provides you the life that you want instead of that traditional 9 to 5, work till you're 65, retire do nothing idea that perhaps our parents grew up with.

Yeah, no, absolutely. What I'm curious about is I read your story. I know the path that you got there. But for our audience and our listeners, I'm curious if you could give the quick rundown of what you were doing before this and how you transitioned and that sort of thing.

Sure. Well.

After school, I didn't really know what I wanted to do and I started drifting through an accounting course and not at university. It was at a sort of the next level below that one that you didn't really need good marks for. Because I didn't go so well at school. And at an early age, sort of just after school, my parents had a financial situation, so I had to get a job. So I got a job as a debt collector. There was an economic downturn in the. It was about 1991, roughly. So there was a recession and debt collection was booming. And I went into that and I ended up on the telephone chasing bills. And from there I ended up into the finance industry. I did repossessions and then credit contracts and moved my way into the technology industry, which was very exciting. When digital telephones started in Australia.

It was actually about 1993 and that was great. And I was about 22, 23 and I got married and next thing you know we're going to have a baby. And I really needed to make a lot more money. And I'd been hanging around these salespeople in the technology company, they were the best of the best of the best. They were like the top gun salespeople in the country who were scouted by a company called Vodafone here to sell this new digital technology. But the company wouldn't let me sell because I was too valuable in the role that I was doing as an administrator. So I had to go and get a job in another company. I went across the road to a Toyota dealer and applied for a sales job and they declined. So next I was off to BMW and I somehow convinced them that I should be selling even though I was very young and had no sales experience. And from there things just took off. It turned out I was good at it and I was coming first in the country within a year and I sort of cashed that into Mercedes Benz role. And from there I just accelerated through sales management and general sales management and then general management. In the end I was running the dealership. I worked in three different Mercedes Benz dealers in Sydney, which is a pretty competitive market, it's our biggest city in Australia.

And from there I started my business on the side. And for first two and a half years I did both. And then I quit my job as soon as I was able to match my salary, which was pretty high. I was on about $300,000 a year. I quit and I reinvested those hours that I was spending in the dealership into my own business on the premise that my effective hourly rate was better on my side business. And it worked. And that was, gosh, about nine years ago from now. Wow.

Now did you just have a calling towards sales? You said you were at Vodafone and you wanted to get into a position for where you can sell. What was that calling towards I need to be selling?

I didn't, I had an anti calling for sales actually, you know, I was called a regional administrator and my job was I was basically this startup business. So I learned so much about. It was like a double whammy. It was a startup business for a massive corporation. So huge UK company starting in Australia with no cultural context, this brand new technology. So we had to, you know, I had to requisition desks and chairs and you know, storage cabinets and stuff for this brand new office, and we had brand new sales team, and I was administering this. I was handling paperwork and contracts and stock. So it was an admin role seconded to the sales manager and his sales team and a secretary. But these. These people were very influential on me. This is where I was attending the sales meetings. They were talking about SPE selling that they'd learned at Xerox, where some of them were selling $600,000 photocopiers.

Sure.

And one of them had. He had this accident. He was driving home and a lady jumped out in front of his car. And he was really traumatized by it, like she was trying to commit suicide. And my boss said, listen.

Could you take this guy under your wing and just look after him for a little while while he gets over this? Because he had a family in the country. So this guy Anthony ended up in my spare room. So my wife and I rented out our spare room to him. And he was the salesperson and I was the administrator. But my wife would call me and say, he's still in bed. He's still asleep. Okay. And then he'd get up like 10 or 11 in the morning, slap on his joggers, and walk down to the beach. She'd say, he's now he's gone up in his joggers. And then he'd phone in a couple of orders and then he'd go home, have a shower, get changed at 3 in the afternoon, and go off to the pub with his mates.

All right.

And this guy was on double my salary plus commission, plus a car allowance. And I'm like, hang on a minute. This sales thing, it doesn't seem fair. This is when I realized, hey, we're not in a communism here, that there's unjust rewards for. You could actually get paid a lot more to do a lot less. That was like a real slap in the eyes. And so this. This lady who was doing human resources was profiling people, and she said to me, what do you think about selling? And I said, I don't know. They seem kind of lazy.

And also they're very talky. I was more pragmatic and analytical. And she said, let me do a profile. So she did this profile, and she says, you've got a fantastic profile for selling, something you should consider. And I said, no, I'm not really that interested. So it was only after that that I found out that we're going to have a baby. And then I'm like, oh, yes, you know, that sales thing, I'm ready. They said, well, we don't really have a position for you because so there's only two people in the whole company who could do the job. There's me and there's this other lady. And unfortunately the other lady passed away. And then now I was the only person in this whole company who knew how to do the job. And I was using pretty sophisticated software called Oracle and it was a pretty technical job and they could not put me into sales because no one else could do the job. So I was trapped and I learned about single source dependency. And the only way for me to get a job in sales was to leave the company. But I had to got it.

Very cool.

And that's. I know you have a chapter. Was it no Compromises and Matt, that was one of your massive takeaways from the book, right?

Yeah, no, the chapter. No Compromises was the chapter that probably hit me the most was things like having that single point of redundancy or a business that's fully focused on SEO or fully focused on Facebook ads or that sort of thing. If you just have that one traffic source and if that traffic source turns off, then your business is basically screwed overnight.

We see that a lot in our market. And I think that's because a lot of people who are going well in their online business.

Probably skipped the whole management or working in a large company chapter of their life. They may be just quite good at what they do and they went straight to it. For example, imagine if you are a university kid right now and your main side hustle was investing in cryptocurrency. At the moment you would think you're a genius.

From the start of the year to the time of recording this, you would have probably made 500 to 1000% on your investment. And that's probably a single source dependent income model. Now I'm going to predict that in the future there'll be some crying about cryptocurrency, bubble bursts, et cetera, where people have put so much attention on just that thing that they forgot that it could be taken away.

Yep, I agree. And that's a perfect lesson because I know both Matt and I, we've, we both, you know, he helped run his parents company, shutter company, I did finances. You worked in a company, it wasn't massive. I worked in a few pretty large companies and I guess that's things that we forget about is imagine all the systems that are in each of those companies and what it took for a business to grow into that. You can't just assume you can run right to Facebook ads and run it to a landing page and hope you can cool. You're good on income for the year or for life.

No compromises. I know. That was a great one. Another great one was Improving Cash Flow. I think that was the name of the chapter.

Well, yeah, the reason the Improving Cash Flow chapter hit me so much is because our biggest income comes from affiliate revenue. I think you told a story in that chapter where you were making a lot of money off of affiliate marketing and that income pretty much not only stopped, but you actually lost money on it.

Yeah, it actually forced a major reconstruction of my business. It was.

You know, like, imagine this six months after quitting my job that I was going so well with affiliate marketing, and then it stopped instantly when the company went broke, that I was relying on most of my income. I basically found the Holy Grail, which was a product that converts and I'd put a lot of attention on that product. And we actually sold so much of it that they couldn't keep up with demand and people cancel their orders. And then they ended up not paying me. And that Christmas.

My account was just scraping down to nothing. Now, I wasn't bankrupt or broke. I still own property with equity. But you can't just tap equity from your house instantly. It's something that's more difficult unless you've got an offset account or something. But back then, when I had.

Assets that were tied up, it was really humbling to run into Christmas and just have that oh, shit moment where I need to do something differently. And it was not long after that that I set up my first coaching community, and that was 2009. It's been going since then, and that's been a very strong model. And it's much better to be paid by many, many people than one.

Absolutely. Now, what sort of advice would you give somebody who maybe they're listening to this podcast and they're thinking, man, 90% of my income comes from this one product.

What would be the next step? They.

I would think for most people it would be difficult to say, okay, I'm going to go start a community and create a recurring income starting tomorrow.

What sort of thing would you walk them through or tell them to do next?

Well, it also applies if you have a job, because you're probably getting 90% of your income from one place already. I would say create some competition for that single income, like start another income stream now before you need it. It's one of the main lessons I learned as an affiliate, actually, is that offers fade. Have you found that.

Oh, yes, absolutely, yeah.

Something might be hot and then it fades. So in the CPA world, you've got a limited Runway on an offer, it's going to fade. It's not even a question. So I would start working on the next one. Like, great, I've got one that's converting, but I need to find the next one now. So I'm always doing that. Actually, I think the metaphor that I like to draw on here is a catamaran. That's a twin hull sailing boat. Now, at any one time, it's usually got one hull in the water if it's really ripping along. But if you were to get a hole in one of those hulls or you run aground, you've still got another hull to float you back to shore or to keep you above water. So even now, in my business, where I've got a fair bit of my income coming from the coaching and community side of things, I still have a completely separate business unit that's nothing to do with that. That's my other hull that I could step onto if the first one sinks, which I hope it doesn't and it probably won't, but I would always have two things happening at any one time as my minimum backup. But ideally, you want to get the amount that any one customer is paying you under 30%. That would be like a safety barrier to start with because most businesses could absorb a 10 or 20% hit in downturn, but once you get past 30, depending on your business model, it can be a bit more of a panic.

That makes sense.

And I would say, yeah, try and water down that single source of income to less than 30% from any one particular customer or any one product.

And that's wise. And I know you're a big fan of, and we are as well, but recurring products. So maybe explain a little bit of what your mindset is when it comes to recurring revenue. And I'm sure you, you know, that's. You can also diversify that as well.

Yeah, recurring revenue gives you stability and it gives you predictable income so you can know what your costs are going to be. So I know that I can pay my team's wages full time for years to come just based on my recurring income. It also is good for customers, I found, that is you've got that predictable income so you know, you can allow for your costs coming through in the future because you've got revenue coming through in the future. I think it's less work to deal with existing customers over and over again than to keep Finding new ones, which is like when most people are consumed with getting leads and driving traffic. And that really is. Of the. Of the several places that you can work on your business, that's not the most effective one. I think the working on reducing churn and increasing that retention is a better place to focus your energy. And it also means that you're building good reputation because you're supplying a continuing service. So that means that you're working on doing good product and you're helping people with solutions not just one time but ongoing. So I think it's creating great value. So it's just a winning business model. It's just easier, more leveraged and safer.

Yeah, it's so predictable. And I know we had. We actually just literally transitioned our business model to open the nets wider too. We've kind of gone into a platform build stage but there is still some recurring sprinkled in there through, through some coaching things that we're doing and also affiliate marketing. So it's kind of nice that you can still get that if you are. If you don't even have your own products.

Affiliate as a recurring is fantastic. And yes, that's one of the big changes that I made because when I started out I was selling a one time product as an affiliate and I learned a lot. But the main thing I learned was that it's so much easier to sell a recurring affiliate income. And I still get checks now from companies that I was promoting my first year or two. I still get that AWeber check every single month and it's been a long time since I moved on from that platform.

That's good.

No, that's the same with me. I get an AWeber check every month and I haven't promoted AWeber in probably 10 years. That's awesome. Now out of curiosity, can you kind of give us a rundown of your business? Because I know there's a lot of elements you've got coaching, affiliate marketing, you put on live events, you've got masterminds. Can you sort of draw that picture for us a little bit?

Well, I definitely have the least moving parts of at any stage in the last decade.

I have two coaching platforms. I've got an affordable one for the masses and I've got a more exclusive one where I have pretty high level clients there. So that's super fast business and Silver Circle. And on the side of that, of course all my customers have needs. Affiliate recommendations is pretty strong for me. I've got that audience. And then to the side of that I just even above my highest level program is where I do some kind of a partnership thing on a royalty agreement where I take a percentage of revenue as my fee to help them grow the business. And that's a long term thing. It's kind of like being a partner without all the paperwork constraints of shareholding and directorship. And then completely off to the side. My team have a project they work on in their spare time that's in a different market altogether. It's in a sporting market and we do a publishing model where we sell advertising and we're building an asset there, a nice big footprint in the market and a mailing list and one day we'll sell that.

Got it.

So that's, that's sort of the main stuff. I sold off my service businesses last year. I sold my SEO business and my website development business and cashed out from those. And I still coach the people who bought those businesses, who were both students of mine in the first place.

Was that a EHR movement for you? Did you decide that was?

Well, those, you know, the SEO business was a spectacular business for me from an ehr. It was off the charts, actually one of the highest.

Okay.

Because I didn't do anything in that business by the end. And it had substantial revenue. At one point it was doing over a million dollars a year. Just that business unit and I wasn't doing anything.

Oh, so your EHR was. Yeah. Incredible.

It was thousands per hour. And it was just the right time to sell that because of one of the things we've already discussed.

Like 2010, I think. I went to Dubai and spoke there and one of the people in the audience had just been fired from a photographic studio and he wanted to do his own business and I suggested he sell services to local businesses in Dubai, which is a real emerging market. And he was so good at it that he built his business up very quickly. And by last year he was ordering about 60% of our supply. He was the number one biggest customer of my business and it just made sense. And as his coach, I said to him, look, you either chop me out of the loop and build your own team, or you buy the business and just take over this team and.

Then you can power up this business. Now I think he's doubled it again since he bought it.

Wow.

And he's using almost all the supply for his own business, which is selling to very high end enterprise customers in that market. So it was just a great success story. One of the most successful students that I've had and I've got a Few good success stories like that.

Now.

I know from this book, and I think even if you're not going to hear about these success stories, or they might not be in the millions of dollars, what I like about your book, going back to that is you have a whole. It's all kind of centered. And this is where I get really jazzed up, is knowing the lifestyle, your health, and the business. It's all kind of an ecosystem that works together. You know, it's. It's not. They're not mutually exclusive. They're always together. So you're talking about sleep and how you, you know, the importance of a routine, but, you know, not. Not working yourself to death, the, you know, the senior family.

Just all of that combined. I think a lot of people forget about when they're starting a business or trying to grow a business. They kind of silo themselves into their office by themselves.

Yeah, certainly. You know, one of my clients at Mercedes Benz, a very wealthy man, he was a. At least a Deca millionaire. He used to talk about that phase of eating beans or crawling over broken glass where you're going to have some kind of a sacrifice in the beginning. And I certainly did it. I just wanted to make at least if you're going to crawl over broken glass. This book is designed to be kind of like some gloves, give you some protection from the obvious mistakes.

Yeah. And it will. And that's the thing.

Because I know this thing. You can literally use it as a guide manual, I feel like, because you even have something in there, which we've done so many webinars. Matt and I have written those written sales pages. But you have a whole section on an offer that converts. And I was reading that, and I was like, this makes it even easier. Now I can, like, don't even have to think anymore. I'll just follow kind of the flow that you give in the book.

Yeah, well, it's, you know, that is actually.

Probably the most important chapter in the book. But I needed to stage that chapter. You know, someone had to be. Someone had to be able to get to the point where they've got time to even think about that by getting out of their own way with the first few chapters on sorting themselves out. But that really is the holy grail. If you can have an offer that converts, then you're in business and you can reinvest and you can build team, and then you can dial in your products, etc.

We did make the book extremely actionable. Every single chapter has action items, and it's all Pinned around the EHR concepts because that's just an easy thing to measure. And when I say we. One of my. I guess she's a student, but a lady who was sitting in the audience when I spoke at an event, Chris Ducker's event in the Philippines. She was so caught by the presentation, she said, let's make this a book. So I had a lot of help from Kelly to figure out the structure. So if it reads well and it's structured correctly and it's actionable, then that was definitely her influence. And it's a great example of getting good people around you to help get the best out of what you're doing.

Now with, with your business. It seems like everything that you do seems to be very methodical thought out, you know, pre planned. I'm curious, you know, you've. You've got a podcast in the superfast business podcast. I think you had one with, with Ezra Firestone, but I think I saw an email or something that you wrapped that one up and now you've got this book. I'm curious, how do these various elements fit into the grand scheme of your business?

Well, podcasting is my prime marketing channel. That's the thing I've been doing consistently for years. It started with Freedom Ocean. It was a podcast I did with an Australian podcaster called Tim Reed. He suggested we do a podcast because when I was a guest on his show, he had a big reaction from it and he said, hey, let's do a podcast. After I went on and learned about podcasts, I then retrospectively fitted my blog with the podcast, submitted it to itunes, and I already had interviews with people like John Carlton. I think he's episode number one. Wow.

Because I knew I had to do audio, even though I hate the sound of my own voice. And I was a bit scared to put myself out there. I just knew that was it. But since I don't like typing and I'm not a writer per se, talking makes sense. I used to sell for a living. I've done a lot of talking in my lifetime and I enjoy that medium. So it's just something I've been able to do that's very leveraged. I like the idea that I could talk for 25 minutes or an hour that could be listened to 2, 3, 5, 8,000 times is just phenomenal leverage. And it's easy for me to have a team surrounding me to just take that raw material and do all the magic with it, make it go on the website and send out an email to our customers. So it's been a great platform and it's been a good learning experience. The podcast that I did with Ezra.

When he came on board as a student, he wasn't yet making a million dollars a year. And he, you know, I just saw something in him. I just recognized this guy's got some magic, and I invited him to do the podcast. And over time, his business is now, I think, somewhere around $30 million a year. He's pretty busy with that, and he wasn't able to come to the podcast regularly. So it was just time to evolve and to recognize that things change. So I had a few other podcasts as well. But now superfast business is the epicenter of my podcasting, and I'm doing a lot more solo shows because I think through this process of putting out a book, it's forced me to research my own material and condense it and refine it. And I think I've got a lot of things to say now that I've been sitting on for a while, and I'm in a position of time resource, and I'm having good thoughts. You know, all this surfing is helping me think about things, and I want to put those ideas out there, and I'm ready to crank things up a little bit, but not in a. Not in a workaholic way.

Yeah, got it.

So the podcast is actually, you know that when it comes to content marketing, the podcast is the content element for your business, basically.

Absolutely. It's the test drive, it's the demonstration. It's a great medium that people can consume whatever they're doing, and it also conveys tone and intention and trust. People can hear you and learn a lot about you just from the words that you use and the way that you're using them. So I think it's a personal medium, and I think it's easier to. It's actually quite easy to put together a podcast. It's just a fantastic medium, and I've enjoyed that the most. That's the core of what we do. If we happen to do a video, then we'll put the video up, but mostly all of our written stuff, even the book, most of it came from an audio format.

That makes a lot of sense because what we do is we transcribe a lot of this stuff. They turn into maybe a free freebie opt in offer on that episode. It could be a bribe for something else to grow our email list or a webinar. Like we did one last week and transcribed that. That's gonna just be, you know, a Series of posts. So it all kind of started with audio, you know, and then obviously an outline to work with. So it's amazing. Yeah, and we're on board 100% with you on that one. Yeah.

And like every single post of ours has a custom opt in for that episode and it's worth doing.

That's exactly what we're pretty much transitioning every episode to be.

Yeah, we're just trying to build the systems, put those systems in place to make sure that happens consistently because, you know, we don't have quite the massive team yet. I think we've got a team of four total.

Right.

Well, that's what we have now. We've a team of five, runs my whole empire with a few subcontractors here and there for high end specialty things like design. And with this book, we've just started to do some Facebook ads, but we haven't really needed to do much paid advertising.

Wow.

Yeah, we have a very small team now, but at one stage we were around 65. But with the sale of the service businesses, I basically bundled up the teams for those businesses and, and move them across, which was great.

Yeah, that's amazing. Now I want to touch on your live events and just kind of, I want to see, I want to hear from you what those events are, how they fit into your business. This is something that we're selfishly. I want to know about because we're starting to do more of that ourselves.

I might have forgotten to mention those in the other products, but.

There'S two main types of live events that I've been doing.

One is the annual event for superfast business and we typically get 200 to 250 people to those events, usually in Manly, where I live, because it's a resort, beachy, surfy type thing and my members resonate with that. So they get to live the same way that I live. When they come and visit. They're out there walking along the, the esplanade. I really curate great people to speak at that event. I've had Ryan Levesque came to this year's event and Tom Breeze, who's a top YouTube advertiser. These are people who I coach often because I'm so familiar with their work. Seeing the background and behind the scenes. I can tailor the content exactly for my audience whom I survey and find out exactly what their challenges are. And I'm very connected to my audience because I also do live local meetups. For example, tonight I'm going to the Sydney meetup for my community so that's another kind of event which you definitely should consider if you're building any kind of movement or community. So I will go to Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, and then when I'm in London, I go. We have a London meetup and had meetups in Thailand, Dubai, the usa. So those ones are free for members, organized by members. The big live event I charge for somewhere between $600 to $2,000, depending on when someone buys a ticket. And we deliver amazing content. I record the content and put it inside superfastbusiness memberships so people who join that membership get the recordings from. You know, I've had guys like John Carlton speaking there and Kevin Rogers and, you know, really top people. And we do a Pro Level 2 camera setup, recording, not some little handycam on a stick in the third row. And we put that content in our membership so people can watch that. And as I'm coaching people, I might say, look, please go and watch this. And because I've curated the content, because I've pretty much prescribed exactly what I want for my audience, it allows me some leverage later when I can say, right, we've already covered this. It's exactly this. And we fully transcribe it and we strip out the audio as well. So the annual live event is the glue that holds together the membership because it's like the master meetup of people from all around the world. And they do come from America and Europe, Asia and all around Australia and they come together. And keep in mind that I've run 12 of these now, so we have a pretty tight community. Some of them have been to every single one of the events, so they're catching up with old friends. And then there's a smaller event which is my little mastermind events. So for the long, a long time, I used to run events in my house for my highest level program members. And I'd do that over two days. And I think I was partly inspired by Perry Marshall's bobsled run. Yeah, it just made sense. And they pay extra. They used to pay two or three thousand dollars and spend two days and we'd be about five or six people and we'd workshop. And one year I did own the race course, which I'm not sure if you've read yet, but that's the bonus chapter from the book that you can download from my website and that's my content module. The only reason I made it online instead of the book is I think it'll be constantly needing updating because of the tools and the tech. So I ran and owned the racecourse workshop. Had about 15 people there, paid a few thousand dollars to learn that, and I went through every single step. But now I do Maldives masterminds, and it's an amazing trip.

Oh, yeah.

So my absolute dream in life is surf every day, talk about business with good friends, interesting people. So I hire out the whole boat, and we have it for a week. And then I just sell spots on the boat, and we talk about each person's business. We have a mastermind session every single evening before dinner. I hand out a workbook, and we do exercises each night that force people to think and to innovate and to come up with cool ideas. And then during the day, people can chat with each other or work on their business, or I sit down with them and go through it. I surf every day. Some people scuba dive, other people sunbake or just read. And that has been a wildly successful trip because I'm doing what I love, it doesn't cost me anything, make a small profit, and the people come away transformed. So with that, we've done two of those now, and we already sold out 2018's trip completely, and we've got a waiting list for 2019. And this is really the direction that I'm moving to, is tailored events that tick all the boxes for me.

I can. I can hear your, like, energy level actually just rose a lot.

Like, I surfed 34 times on that last trip.

Hell, yeah.

And one of my guests used to be a top 50 surfing professional, and he would. He was paddling out beside me, giving me pointers. I came back from that trip at the. At the next level. So I had a transformation as well.

Yeah.

And we do other stuff that doesn't sound that amazing, but the guy who runs the boat is a free diving expert, and he taught us breathing techniques, like how to actually breathe, because it's something that most of us do a lot. And he expanded our lung capacity by about 30%, taught us how to breathe and to relax. And then we did some exercises. And most of the guests went from being able to hold their breath for about 15 to 20 seconds to one and a half to three minutes. And some people were crying because it was such a big breakthrough. But certainly for me as a surfer, it's handy to be able to hold my breath for nearly three minutes. Sure. Oh, yeah. Because I'm not as worried about being held under anymore. It's just given me. It's just sort of unlocked me for my ability to progress. So it's that kind of experience I think is good. And, you know, if we want to trace that one back, it came from the Hawaii retreat that I did with Ezra from our podcast. So the point here is if you have a podcast and you'd like to run an event, it's very easy to promote a small event to your podcast. Just book a house.

Or a boat or whatever. It doesn't have to be in a hotel. And that's what I really want to get away from. I hate dealing with the hotel for my annual event. They're so difficult and demanding and it's like they have never heard of Airbnb and they force you to lock down rooms and they want me to become a hotel and to take all the risk and to cover any 70 rooms a night or something. My audience is so savvy. They're like Airbnb all over the place. It's always a huge hassle.

Yeah, yeah. I imagine most people would prefer that experiential sort of event anyway. Like, you know, the way you describe it, I'm just like, man, I'd so much rather do that than sit in a hotel room all day.

I'm getting conference room all day. I would like to do is head over to Las Vegas and be locked into a hotel room. No doing the old, you know, typical three time a year mastermind, blah, blah, blah. Like, yeah, I've moved a long way away from that. It's helped my business a lot, too.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, we want to be respectful of your time. I know you've got to go take your kids to school here. So we do have a couple wrap up questions that we like to ask everybody. But first of all, everybody needs to go get the book. Work Less, Make More by James Schramko. You can find it on Amazon. But are there any other books that you find yourself recommending a lot to people?

Well, I've got a lot of books. So my next question is usually what do they want to learn? Because, gosh, I like to put in that segmentation quiz.

I'm like you, I read a ton of books and Joe thinks I'm crazy because I read almost a book a day.

I love it because I'm getting the Cliff Notes version of all this.

I probably read 15 books a month. So I'm with you on that.

When it comes to, let's just say that the type of stuff we're talking about, like increasing conversions, recurring income, a lot of the stuff that you like to talk about that you recommend, business owners do. Are there any books in that sort of vein that you like to recommend.

A lot, probably in that sort of vein. And then you'd look up someone like Vern Harnish. His books are good for that.

Was that Scaling Up?

Yeah. Or Rockefeller Habits was a good book, too.

That was a good one. Yeah.

I haven't read either of those. Check those out.

Yeah, you'll enjoy them.

Good idea. And cool. So, yeah, we already dropped the name of your book. Work Less, Make More on Amazon. Or I'm sure you can get it on your website.

No, just. I'll let them do the work.

I like your style.

I worked it out. You know, this is my.

My publisher helper, Kelly. She said, okay, now you got to order books. And I said, where are they going to be stored? She goes, at your place. Said, who's putting them in envelopes and sending them out? She said, you. I said, no, it's not going to happen. So right now, there's a box of books going from CreateSpace to her garage in Perth for Australian customers who can't get it on Amazon.com yet.

That's good. You're doing that. Cool, man. Well, where else do you want to send people to after listening to this episode?

Your website is James Schramco.com and superfastbusiness.com.

Yeah, gee, that'd be enough. Let's not overwhelm people. That's very generous, by the way.

Of course. Of course. Awesome, James. Well, I think that let's wrap it up. You can go boogie out and go get some surfing in, too.

I sure will. School run and then. And surf. We're all good. School's almost finished, too. This is the last week, so we uninterrupted surf sessions from now on.

Awesome.

I want to get out to one of your events, so we'll probably have to get on that waiting list.

Yeah, please do. Because I think you're the exact kind of people who would get a lot from an event like this. And huge compliments about your website, too. I've looked through it before this call, and it's fantastic content. And then I read that you do content marketing, and I wasn't surprised then.

Yeah, it's just going to go grow more and more with this new model change that we're going under right now, so appreciate that so much.

Well, I hope we can stay in touch.

We will.

Absolutely. Definitely. Thanks again, man.

Thank you. All right.

Hey, thank you, thank you, thank you for listening to this podcast. Now, if you want to learn more and hear from us every single month, which a lot of people do. It's pretty fun. We actually write this thing called the Evergreen Profits Letter, and that is a printed newsletter that we actually send to hundreds of people every single month to your doorstep. So you actually get it in the mail. You can read this sucker, you can highlight it, you can dog ear, you can scratch some stuff out. If you don't like that one, you say no. Joe and Matt, that's of kind not cool for me. But you can take a lot of different strategies, about 15 or so from every single single issue, and it's really cool. So basically, these are actionable strategies that you can use in your business right away to test out and pretty much build on what you already have going on. So check it out. It's at www.egpletter.com. it's pretty amazing. And you should go check it out, see what it's all about.

Boom.