Mastering Change: Unleashing Your Potential in a Rapidly Evolving World with James Schramko

In a situation where they were doing okay and then did something that's not feeling right. And the word that comes to mind is revert. Just go back to the. It's like if you're on a trail and you. You go down some side path, but you end up at a dead end. Go back down the trail to where you last were on the good path and start again.

Hey, I'm Joe Fear and welcome to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast. This is where we talk all about building businesses so they give you the freedom and fuel for your life. I'm not here to help you build a billion dollar business, but I am help you create a business with systems that work for you so you can make more money than you need just by working part time. You know, I was a chronic hustle mode kind of guy and I want to share my experiences and mentors I've met along the way to help you reframe things to be the most effective as an entrepreneur. I wish I had this guidance and insight when I was younger, so that's.

What I'm doing here for you.

Please share and enjoy.

Man.

This episode here is with a good friend and mentor of mine. This is the fourth time he's on the podcast. He is none other than Mr. James Schramko of the James Schramko Podcast. It used to be called Superfast Business and a couple other names too. This guy is incredible and we can all thank him for having this podcast still be around. I mean, he's, he's a big reason.

Why I am still here doing this.

And you'll hear how both of us.

Are going through a bunch of changes right now. That's what this episode's all about is change.

And that's a common theme I'm seeing.

In a lot of entrepreneurs across the.

Board, even once they don't know each other.

There's a reason for this need for change, and it could have been burnout or maybe a crash of the business.

Something external happening, something with your family.

Or in your life.

Whatever it is, this episode's probably going.

To land for if you feel like.

You need a little bit of change.

Or you've experienced it, he's going to give a lot of practical advice and strategies to go about that effectively and having fun around your lifestyle. So that's what it's all about.

All right, let's get into this round four with Mr. Schramko.

All right.

Hey, we're back here with another episode.

And this time I have a great buddy of mine and mentor. This is James Schramko of the James Schramko Podcast. And we're doing this as a simulcast. This is the what? Over five years or so, James and I have been doing this. I think this is the fourth episode now and a lot has changed for both of us. So I'm excited for this episode. Let's dive on in.

Well, one thing that's notable is it's just you today, Joe. Oh, you noticed in the past there was three of us. Yeah, I did notice that. I'm sharp. So obviously that's a change that could be worth discussing. And from my perspective, the name of my podcast has changed because last year I just pulled out, you know, a lot of a big bunch of paper, a huge notepad, a couple of pens, and started drafting the next version or the next iteration of my business business. And today I think a great topic would be change. Because as I've got a lot of people that I'm helping in their business, it is a constant theme. This is something unavoidable. And when I think about, for me, this is a special topic because there was a certain point in my career when I was in my 20s and that Mercedes Benz and they'd earmarked me for future leadership because I was performing really well in sales. I came first in Australia for selling and they promoted me to sales manager. And I was coming first as a sales manager, winning the awards. And they're like, okay, this guy could be running dealerships. And they took me off to some leadership change seminar sort of stuff. We had three day workshop live in, maybe it was even a week. And then we went away and then we came back after doing homework and did another session like it was pretty intense. But they gave us this book and this book was about change and it came from Germany. And I remember reading the book and, and really absorbing the message. And the message was that change is the constant. If we can actually master and embrace, even look forward to, then we'll have an advantage over everyone who's reactive out in the marketplace. And a few years later, down the track, I ended up running the dealerships. And I decided I need to go on my own. And the commitment I made myself when I quit my job was that I will be responsible to navigate myself through business as there are changes. And boy, since July 2008, Joe, I can tell you there's been a lot of changes in the marketplace. You know, in 2009, I started my membership and wasn't it was sometime around then or a Little bit after Facebook started doing groups, I was in like, probably the end of the Wild west era of the online marketing. It was really hard to build websites. There weren't social media platforms. YouTube was only new. Facebook was. I started to run ads. All these things I got to do for the first time. I remember running Google Ads in about 2006 or seven while I was at the dealership, I was bidding on keywords like Mercedes Benz.

That was the real Wild west then, huh?

With Google, it was crazy. But then every time you think, oh, well, it's settling down or whatever, there's so much more that comes. I remember, you know, retargeting came out and then they made it easier for you to build websites and funnels and campaigns and stuff. The video exploded. You know, we went from really crappy Internet speeds and difficulty to put a video on a web website. I mean, I had to hunt down for SWF players and.

Yeah, I remember that too.

Compressed videos and it was really hard. Now you can just join TikTok and be streaming videos like within a minute. So it's been so much inflation of. Of accessibility. Everybody can be a creator and it puts pressure because it just accelerates and fuels innovation. And what you're doing now is almost certainly not going to work in a year from now the same way. I think that's an emphasis because there are some core fundamentals that don't change. So that's when you, when you think about change. I think it's the Amazon guy, right? He's talking about what won't change. I think that's a good thing to remember. I still run a membership, I still do a podcast. I still feel email as a strong source of marketing, of conversions and worth doing. But then we've seen a lot of proliferation to video and so forth is taken off. You know, there was a point where we switched from audio to video for the podcast. Yeah, same for my coaching. Actually used to do all my calls on Skype via audio, and then they've ended up becoming group zoom calls. That's the change we'll talk about when it comes down to our business model changes. But I just wanted to sort of wrap this overall episode with a key line is if you choose to have your own business, if you choose to have your own business in the online space, well, you're better good with change because that's something you can count on. And right now we're seeing the AI wave. I think a year ago or so we saw the NFT wave, but this one, I think is substantially different. And it's going to move things in a way where a lot of the things that were being done before will have to change. They've already started changing for me. And I'm not by any stretch the most excited about bright, shiny objects. I wait until people using stuff for quite some time and they're proven and validated and tested. And I also, and this is very important to me to manage change, is I pay attention to my own behavior. How do I adapt, what am I doing differently? Because that's often a signal that's going to carry across to the rest, you know, to the human population in about five years from now. Although this time, the lag time between me knowing about AI and now, so far it's about six years. And that's pretty common. It's usually five or six years. Whatever I'm doing or aware of, it usually takes half a decade to roll through. But I feel like the AI thing's particularly accelera because it didn't take long from when it went public with ChatGPT until my mum and dad, my kids and my friends and normal people are talking about it and it's on the news and, you know, teachers, et cetera, are concerned about it. So I feel like it's speeding up now. For a lot of people, that scares the crap out of them. They are frightened, they're overwhelmed, they can't fully process what it actually means, but they know they should be scared about it. And hopefully this episode will give some tools at least to start dealing with it. But step one is acknowledge that it's good to be a master of change because that is a powerful weapon in this world of online entrepreneurialism.

Yeah. And we have the time for it. I think that's, you know, without resisting of it. It's welcome it welcome that change, even if, well, it should be rooted in our own principles and our values and it might challenge some of our beliefs about our business models and the way we go about things.

Hey, I wanted to pause this and give a quick thanks to my friend Greg Merrilies and his team at Studio One Design. They're the ones that built my website over@hustleandflowchart.com I couldn't be happier. They nailed it. It looks so professional. They basically read my mind on the vision and they executed it beautifully. I now have a perfect offer to display. It looks super clean. I've already been getting a lot of people asking all about it and I've been referring everybody to Studio One, so they actually put together a quiz for you if you're looking to optimize your current website or build a new one as a full quiz that gives you a ton of results on how to improve and optimize what you're doing. So go complete that quiz@studio1design.com Joe that is studio the number one design.com Joe. It'll give you a free report after you finish that quiz. He's also given away some cool bonuses, so go check it out out@studio1design.com Joe.

And yeah, at least I know over the last year, well, plus I've had a lot of changes in my side of things for a lot of different reasons. Could be external, it could be internal. So I'm kind of curious why. I'm curious, James, like for reasons of change, are there any that come to mind that you've found at least for yourself because you're, you're in the midst or you've changed a lot in your own business recently, but it's not the first time. So what are some of these common reasons you found yourself changing things up but still being holding true to your own principles?

I'm reading a book actually that talks about how thinking goes beyond the brain, that it could be they're actually trying to link it now to things like your gut bacteria, et cetera. And you know that expression, you know, have a gut feeling it, you know, there's some science to say that that could actually be a thing. Sometimes I get a sense that, that something needs to change. So I can't explain that logically, but I just know. And part of it's being in tune with your body. So if, for example, if you were doing a particular job and then you start noticing that you're not wanting to do that job or you have reluctance around like a kid on Monday when they have to go to school.

Right.

They know, they can tell that they're not wanting to do this thing. And there's, there's a, the resistance that could be a sign that maybe something needs a change. And then of course, when we're making decisions, we're making them with the information we had available at the time. But over time, we get the benefit of hindsight. The further away from a decision we get and the more we look in the rearview mirror, we can say, oh, hang on a minute, maybe this isn't the path that I thought it would be because we could only make a hypothesis at the time. And the best thing about decisions is being able to look back and then score that decision. With the benefit of hindsight. So one of the reasons I started a business brand, and we're talking like 2006 or 7, so it's quite a long time ago. I decided to pin most of my efforts around a business. This was pre social media. I think I hadn't even joined Twitter by that stage. And Facebook wasn't really a big deal. It was still probably doing universities and stuff. So I already decided to build around a business back then. But what happened is we came into an era of the personal brand, that social media ability to build a brand. And it's only even in the last year or two. I think Facebook allowed people to have subscribers to their personal profile. Maybe it's in the last two or three years. Up until then, you kind of needed a page for your own brand to build a subscriber base because you. Almost everyone in my field maxed out at 5,000 friends.

Right. It's pretty easy these days too.

Right? And then you spill over to. Back then, you couldn't have subscribers, so you had to have a page. Really was confusing. I actually had a personal page and then I went put it back to business. And then it's ended up being personal again. So if you'd go for long enough, information around you will dictate that something needs to change. So how do you know that you need to change? One is setting review points. So for me, no matter what, I still sit down. And it's usually certainly had an annual ritual around this, especially around that Christmas New Year period where everyone else is getting all pumped up about goals and whatever. For me, just my quiet. My. I have a quiet time because my clients ease off a bit around Christmas. And so I usually just pull out the paper and a pen and just sort of remap and recalibrate. And I'd say some of this exercise comes from the theory of constraints or Eli Goldratt, where he was really an innovation guy. You know, guys like Jay Abraham, et cetera, are very much into optimization. How can we improve the thing we've got? Goldrat was more about how can we completely discard this entire thing and have a new thing or, you know, take one bit of this thing and change everything fundamentally. He had this concept of inherent simplicity. So I would pretty much clean sheet my business each year. I'll just. I'll just say, okay, if I'm starting from scratch today, because this is the question every podcast to get is right. You know, if you had to start from scratch with, you know, in 30 days from now, even though It's a wrong question because I'm not building my business to be successful in 30 days from now.

Right.

I'm building my business to fuel my lifestyle forever. And I want to build a life that I don't want to quit from. So this exercise is starting from scratch. But with my experience and knowledge, you know, I can still access my customer base. I can still keep the parts of the business that are working, but I could change or discard parts that aren't floating my boat. And so I've made a lot of changes to my program over the years. So the constant is I still had a membership from 2009 to now. The change is I started it as super Fast Results. I went for three or four years. That was a partnership. I dissolved that partnership, went solo with Fast Web Formula. I then rebranded everything. Cause I had about 11 different properties into superfast business, which I'd carried that brand the whole time, but I didn't focus on it. And then last year, I changed it to my personal brand. So how many iterations is that since 2009? Right. It's a lot. And people are scared to make change, but I can assure you it's okay. And your customers will actually, for the most part, lean into it for you and with you, because they'll assume that you've done your homework and you've got reasons. And it's also good to explain it to them sometimes. But I feel like in hindsight right now, actually, as I'm at a different stage in life and a more reflective stage, and. And the stakes get higher the further you get down the track and the closer you get to the end game, it intensifies your moves because you're now dealing with a more finite period. It's like, I just read a book called Not Fade Away. It's about a guy who died of stomach cancer at about 52. He's a billionaire. But, you know, as you get close to death, he said it, everything magnifies. Even, like, looking at flowers is a beautiful experience. So for me, I'm like, I'm learning these lessons. There's a few lessons along the way. I think they're big lessons. One lesson was I was probably a little slow to move to the personal brand when the social media was like, definitively taken off and really killing it. And one thing that probably held me back a bit was my desire to have and maintain a fair bit of control over my assets. And I've still done that to this day. I still host my own podcast. I still have my Own membership and I still have my own email database. I think the email database, if you could only pick one, that would be it. So if any social influencer or someone with a huge channel, that's awesome and it's great. If you're getting 50 or 60 grand a month in ads from that platform or you're able to use that fame and fortune for other things, make sure you build that asset. And I think an email would be a good asset to build. So whilst I was probably a little too much on the control side, I've never experienced a dip that whole time online. Like since the day I quit my job, I have never experienced a dip from now till then. So my process is working well for me. Could I have made more? I think so. Could I have lost more? Most likely, if I'd gone a little more wild, I might have had some bigger ups and downs. And I'm not an ups and downs sort of person.

Right. I operate from the membership model.

Yeah. I operate from a place of calm and I've already done the high stakes repossessions and sales in the earlier part of my life. I've had all those adrenaline spikes. I like a nice steady ship here and, but at really good numbers. Right. I'm very, very happy with my business model. So it's like, I think, I think some people who are highly creative, they tend to create change for the sake of change and that's a very dangerous thing. So I don't want to overexcite someone about making changes. For me, I'm pretty reluctant to make the change unless I feel it has to be done because it's a big deal to change your brand, but you also have to throw out stuff. You know, I threw out a brand I'd built up for over a decade. I threw away some channels. I was able to rename a couple. This is a big one. If you're going to change your YouTube, you can, you can change the name, you can change your Facebook page. So don't discard them. If you're going to be somewhere in the zone, keep it and, and you know, start from, from, not from scratch. Start with, with an asset. I, I'm also, I have a leaner and more effective business model. A couple of other things that cause change. So to continue that answer. When I'm coaching people, I see behind the scenes and under the hood of other businesses and what I noticed over the last year or so is I saw a lot of inflation of coaching rates. I'm coaching people charging two or three or Five times more than me. And I felt like I started to form the opinion. I feel like I'm probably under market rate. And that caused me to recalibrate. And so I learned a valuable lesson about retention. Now, let's say retention, in essence is a function. Well, in a membership at least, it's probably a function of relationship and results. So I have amazing relationships with my members. I have members for 12 years, 10 years, 7 years, 8 years. I know my members. I've met them face to face. I've met you face to face.

That's right.

You know, I talk to people privately even if they're not paying for it. If I just see someone in need or I feel like I could help, I'll reach out. And I often see something that makes me think, okay, well, there's been movement in the market. It's like if you have a house and you're not selling it every week, you wouldn't really know if it's going up or down in value.

Yeah.

So for me, when I set my rates a long time ago, one of the main things I did was grandfather people into low rates and I was locking them in against the market. But if you do it for a long time and you're actually good at what you do, you can end up ripping yourself off a bit because you end up with a cohort or a bunch of customers, to use a less fancy term, who paying under market rates. They know they're paying under market rates and they will never, ever leave. But you're actually tying up that that hour of your life or the energy that's involved in servicing that customer could be sold for a higher rate. So, for example, if you were to buy a car today and it was on order and it's going to come in a year, the contract will say that the price of the car in a year from now will be different to today, and the model of the car might be different. Right. So you're in it, they're not going to lock it in because they would end up ripping themselves off. If there's inflation, right. If the car goes up $10,000, they will charge you the market rate at the time. So I think my big lesson, if you're really good at keeping members and you keep members for more than a few years, like when, when people talk about membership retention of three months, I always laugh because my membership retention is about five years and you can end up getting out of step with the market. So one big. The big change I did last year and I had to do this in phases so we can talk about how you roll out a change.

Right.

And I'm conscious that I'm doing a lot of talking here, but. So please stop me if. If you. If you want to come make me to come up for air.

I have a couple of notes, but, no, keep the. Keep it going. I like to sit back.

Okay. Well, you're a good man, Joe. I appreciate this. It's actually a little bit therapeutic. I don't really have anyone to talk to about this.

I think I kind of noticed that, and I was like, you know, this is great for both of us right now, so continue on, man.

I mean, it was a bit. It was such a big change, but once I decide I want to change, I'm kind of like the get it done now type person. And I'm using a 3D process here. Step one is data. I look at all the information. Step two is I start, I make my decisions. And that's not an instant thing. I marinated. I think about it when I'm surfing. It took me about six months to make that decision. But the day I make the decision, I want it done. That's the third day I want it done. Like, I'm telling my team, this is what we're doing. I'm adamant. There's no turning back. You know, burn the bridges. And then I'll even say to them sometimes if I question this later or I want to change it, can you remind me this? And I'll give them a little capsule to tell me later.

Like it. Yep.

Here's my vision.

Hold me to it.

Exactly. And, you know, like, I'm pretty. Pretty consistent with my vision, but I have to have to lay it out. So the main things that I changed, I wanted to change the name. So I wanted to just make the old brand redundant everywhere it appeared and change it to the new one. Point everything, fix it all up. So we did all that stuff very easily. I needed to. Now I had this sticky situation of having hundreds of members on old plans that were too cheap. There was about seven or eight years ago, I started doing private coaching for regular members as a test, because I noticed people wanted. They liked sharing things privately with me that they wouldn't put in a group. And I sort of kept providing, and then I never really stopped it. And years Later, I had 250 people who were able to do private coaching on a really low rate. And like, okay, this is. This is now holding me back from doing private coaching with the people who really need the help and are Happy to pay for it. So we did the unthinkable and we went in and unsubscribed hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of subscriptions.

Wow.

And. And, you know, we said schedulers, so that we do it just before it renews. And we're just like, basically, don't let people buy this again is my instruction. And we did videos to explain what's happening and why. And then so we moved across to the new name. We migrated people from our old cartoon to the new cart. When they changed to the new rates, if they want to come on board, in between that, we gave them access to both. So they had an experience. They had a full demonstration and access to what it's going to be. And then they. At some point, it could take up to a year to extinguish annual subscriptions.

Oh, yeah.

You know, they get to make a decision. Thanks. That's the end of this ride. Now we're getting onto the new train. Do you want to come on board? Thankfully, almost everyone's come across at new rates and they understand and they're cool about it. I've had zero complaints, which is good. And a few of the members who didn't come across, I wasn't sad about because they probably were the end of the line for that. And if I'm being super open because it's you and I and a couple.

Of listeners, it's just us, right?

I wasn't really planning on bringing that lower tier across at all. I kind of got to the point where I only want to work with the medium and higher level now, because at this part of my life. And the problem was I have these relationships. I have so many, you know, hundreds of relationships that. And I can actually help these people. So my solution to that was how can I make it useful for them? But doesn't drain me now that they're not getting that private coaching. So set up the option for them to have pods with each other, and that's flying. I joined myself to those pods. So it could be a couple of members and me and they're chatting to each other and I'm just sort of facilitating or supervising. And that's been amazing. The other thing that I thought was super valuable is if we're in this era of micro content and short attention span. So again, taking the cue from change, what platforms are blowing up, right? TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube shorts. It's pretty validated that people want short content. And so I'm like, okay, I don't. I don't want people to. I don't want to put a big value on my training products. I'm sick of these people selling a $2,000 or $3,000 course that just gets lumped into their G drive or they get some login and they'd never really log in probably. Why don't I just go through my own trainings and condense them down into a one sheet playbook? So I added a playbook section. And my goal, so I've got internal goals, my goal is to go through my old trainings and condense them into one page. And so the playbooks and I publish about one a week. They've just been fired. Like I give them, no pun intended, but I give them the cheat sheet of something that's working like a framework for selling high value items in a page. There's people in my membership who like, they couldn't sell a meat pie at a football match, but they go through this framework and then now they're starting to sell every single person they talk to on the phone. So it's life changing for them. So now the low ticket membership, which at the time I publish is about $99 a month. It is still like just to get a playbook each week that would pay for that. I still do a live ask me anything call every month and now people are coming to it again. A few years ago they wouldn't really bother, but that one call a month is really valuable and they can come and ask me anything they want in person live. And that's got a good vibe about it. But the real thing is the next level up that, the mentor level. I made some changes to that. There was a thing happening with my silver circle, the one to ones. Those members start off as a group in 2010 and they started going into little one to one calls. I was getting particularly good results and I keep my members forever. But again, the rates were starting to slip from what the market is. And then I did an analysis and I realized, well, hang on, I'm spending this amount of time each month with these one to one calls, but I, I have to park my life and I have to go into their life. And as good as it is for them, and interesting as it can be with some of the conversations, I need to stop this. So I kind of retired my one to one for the most part. There were 15 members. I think I'm down to five now. And I've asked them if they would come across to the middle level. And I gave the middle level the silver Circle calls, slots and then I added slots. So this is an effective hourly rate technique. I took the time that was available for the wonder ones and gave it to the group. Now what's happened with the group is it's magnifying. We've added obviously I've added in 10 members straight out of the gates. But I've also added time in my calendar for that group and I'm having now at the moment I'm up to four calls a week with that group. They could come to any of those calls and some of them come to a couple actually and just listen in or have a double dip if there's no one else there. But I put that time in my diary for them. These people are kicking butt. They are getting amazing results and they're feeding off each other's energy and that level. The time of recording is about a thousand dollars a month. So there's some big lessons here. The wonder ones cost more, but I've rolled some of them back. I'm using that time for my partners and now I'm six years down the track with the partnership. So again this the partnership success, you know, now becoming more than half my income has informed that I can make changes to what used to be my bread and butter is now no longer required. So you can bump products off to the side, you can boost the products you want and make some adjustments. So hopefully I've answered a few of the questions there. Why did I make the changes? How did I go about rolling it out? So in. In short, where I've ended up is from all those years ago when I started a lower ticket membership and then added one higher ticket, one above. I've ended up building something incredible in the middle of that. So I've ended up with the leverage of group at reasonable rates with members getting incredible results and it's reduced the amount of time. I've actually chopped about 10 hours a month off my workload which I'm now putting back into books and to working with my partners to grow up their business. And if you ever wanted to see a 644 or an 8020 distribution that the partnership's fascinating between the top performer and the lowest performer or even the top performer in the next two or three. It's is such an interesting distribution curve. It's always a reminder that within any portfolio or any product range or any shopping cart sku range there will be some standouts that need your highlight and there'll be some unproductive or not that useful things that should be eliminated. So if you're looking to change something, start with that.

Yeah. Doing a full on analysis.

And.

And I like the blank page. Yeah. Nothing fancy. Usually know what's like you said the gut going all the way to the gut feeling there's something there.

And, and almost always you're wrong when you, yeah. You're like when, when my team sends through the numbers.

Yeah.

I said pull up the spreadsheet, ask my team, can I have the numbers? You know, I need the, the revenue per product line. If it's partner, I need revenue per partner. I need the revenue for this level of membership, that level of membership, this level of membership. And then I want it year on year or even six monthly. Then I have to put in my like how many hours are contributed to each, what are my cost? Fixed and variable for each. What's the actual profit for this division and how much hours am I putting in? It was stunning. You know what the number one effective hourly rate thing that I do is?

Oh man. I mean probably partnerships.

I would imagine that's the second second most.

Okay.

Affiliate marketing.

Affiliate.

I mean partnerships.

Affiliate. Yeah. I was figuring affiliate was right around.

It's basically the punchline is performance based work.

There you go. Ye.

Yeah. So with affiliate marketing, if I can craft a good campaign or pick a really relevant offer for my audience, I don't need to spend a lot of time on it because there's really no fulfillment. It's just the creative and the promotion of it. So to craft a few emails to let people know about something that someone else has and for them to do the follow up and to take the money and provide the service can be somewhere between five to $10,000 per hour. So I'd say I know we did a whole episode on affiliate marketing back in the day.

We'll link it too in the show.

Notes at least performance based deals, the revenue share deals is really the cream now. It's so good. The good ones are fantastic. They can be ultra high. And then. So what I'm saying is if you're locking yourself into low fixed retainers, review that and just say, well should that rate change, can I communicate a message of change to my audience? Will they come with me? I was prepared to lose 151 to 1 members in the change. So I was prepared to scrap tens of thousands a month in revenue to put my energy where it needs to be. But what I, what I really realized is the relationship was so strong. Like I've actually there's only one of the 15 who's probably going on A different path. And. And in that case it's extreme because that person doesn't even have a business and hasn't had for a couple of years.

Wow.

I helped them. I helped them get out of a massive, like a over $100 million partnership. That was the main thing they hired me for and they just stayed because we were having such great conversations and, you know, sadly, the conversations will end, but it's kind of a relief in a way. It was probably the most difficult thing that I've had to do is to talk to someone when we don't really have anything specific to work on. It's a bit too soft, I suppose.

Yeah. And especially for a one on one approach.

I mean, I'm keen to know about your changes as well.

There's been a lot and you've been. I know you've been kind of watching from the sidelines on. On some of the aspects, especially last year. Yeah.

So, I mean, I observed the podcast.

Yeah.

Moved in a different direction because, you know, obviously a frequent guest and a subscriber and I don't even listen to podcasts, so that's a pretty big endorsement.

I remember you telling me that. I'm like, wow.

Yeah. I very rarely listen to any kind of podcast and I noticed it's moved into a different direction. So I was curious about it. We have a few friends in common. I kept an eye on it. You def. You went down a direction that I felt was, for me, massive, bright, shiny object. I never got dragged into it hard. I bought one NFT out of curiosity. So I could understand a platform. I spent a little bit of time with my friend Jared to make some purchases, etc. And to see how that works. And so that's the end result. And by the way, I've cleaned all that up now. I'm. I've. I'm basically just holding Bitcoin.

Yeah.

And maybe some Ethereum. Right. I'm like, it's the. It's the most simplify.

Yeah.

Vanilla thing. I have nothing fancy or tricky or shitcoins or whatever. And I felt that the general public were not talking about it and didn't understand it. And even people. I remember Gary V. Talking about the biggest problem he's having with his club was that just people don't understand how it works. The education required around. It's too high. So I thought, oh, I'm. I'm not so sure where this is going. But it turns out you've both ended up in great position. But there's obviously a story in between.

That there's definitely a story and yeah, I'm happy to share it. And you, I want to give you thanks for the fact that you planted the constant. So going back to what you said, there's that constant with a change and the podcast has been my constant for six plus years now. Email list as well.

Yeah.

So yeah, I mean the change last year, just to get everybody up to speed, especially on your podcast, you know, your folks listening. So I say we, my previous partner and co host, Matt Wolf, who I'm sure a lot of y' all know or have heard his name around, he's.

I think more people know about now than before.

Now we'll tell where, where he's gone.

And, and back to the change. He revitalized a YouTube channel that he had for probably 15 years ahead, I don't know, less than a thousand subscribers. And that thing's I think at a hundred thousand subscribers now, within a month, millions of views on that channel. So yeah, if you have an old thing like that, don't just discard that old account that might have already a thousand to give you that momentum of subscribers. But back to the story, it was at the end of 2021, I guess it was. There was starting to be a lot of friction between how Matt and I were seeing the business, our interests in what we were doing in business. And it just seemed like more friction than there needed to be. So we had some friends pop up and there was definitely, you know, the influence of web3 crypto was starting to bubble up in a lot of communities and some old marketing friends of ours, we kind of elaborated and we're like, you know what, there seems to be an opportunity here in terms of the media and what we know with content and marketing that we can apply to this industry that we are interested in. But at the same time, retrospect, I was not as much interested in the thing. So I mean, there's always this tricky play with a partnership. You know, there's, it's two people, it's like a marriage. We got to be super aligned with where we're headed. Goals, vision, beliefs, all that. And at that point there was definitely a point, you know, around December, maybe November of 2021, where there was just more friction and we're just not getting aligned on where we're going. Still love Matt. We're great friends and all of that. So it's not like we never had a blow up or anything like that. But. And this is where in retrospect we, we let things just kind of go this direction, you know, the other way without, totally without intention. I would say there, there wasn't a lot of it was shiny object just to say the least, you know. And there's a lot of things like that. We, we had the thought behind it that we could take and build a media kind of brand. We actually ended up having one called Hard Fork Media and then turned into gaming, connected with some amazing people over the short period of time of even four months. We had Justin Kahn, the founder of Twitch on the podcast. He, he's brilliant, incredible, great guy too. His co founder who was David Wirtz, he also founded Google Drive. Google Fonts gave us great feedback on actually our business model. Ironically, like months later when I asked him, I was like, hey, what's the deal? Because we were starting to work with their newer company called Fractal, who's still around and I, I believe they're doing some good stuff. They're building great tec the space. But the problem was that yeah, we were, we were focused on the media side and the way that we were approaching it, let's be honest, the, the, the audience, it isn't large. There were a bunch of scams over the year last year and hacks and things that really put a bad taste of crypto in that whole space in people's mouths. So we were in a good trajectory probably the first four months we were partnerships with some of the biggest brands. Animoca Brands is one of them. They're 5 billion or more company, massive investment portfolio. Now they're actually going into AI quite a bit huge. And they were going to us for their media because we realized no one knows marketing and content really in this space too well, or at least they don't have a great structure for it. And so we just learned a lot, made a lot of connections, use those skill sets. But at the same time it, I think there was a lot of, there was a lot of things going so internally wasn't a fit for me and the structure of what we were doing wasn't working out. At the same time, we kind of burned, I wouldn't say we burned the bridges of everything from before, but definitely did not have the communication with the audience that we cultivated for 10 years or more.

Seemed like you took the same platform and just changed the topic pretty much. And so that was for me, that was the disconnection that rang an alarm bell. I'm like, well, hang on a minute, by all means start a new podcast or a new brand and migrate. The ones who are Interested. But I like. So in my case where I changed the name of my thing, I'm still doing the same core with the same people. In your case, you kind of kept the brand, you know, with a little bit of addition, but you just changed the topic and you probably had just people like not sure what's going on or not.

That's exactly what.

There'd be other people like me who just aren't interested in that. Right.

And there were a lot of use on there that reached out and for. And this is where definitely I would never recommend anyone doing that because it's that connection. It's the bond with your people. And that's what.

That's good. Gosh. It's come up in your story and my story. The. The relationship you have with your audience to some extent is going to dictate the decisions you make. And I'm lucky that I've ended up retaining almost all of the relationships, but at a price point that I can actually continue to have a relationship with them. Otherwise I would have had to just stop it. It's almost. Probably sounds over the top, but it's almost a form of self abuse if you end up running yourself down because you. You want the relationship to continue. And see, this would translate into personal relationships. Sounds like you almost went along for the ride a little bit because of your relationship with your partner, even if it's starting to not feel right. And that's definitely. I picked up on that. I definitely sent an email to both of you saying I'm happy to chat with you if you want to talk about where your mojo is or whatever. Because I could. I could see on the surface there was. I think there was a solo episode put out at one point, like, okay, something's going down here.

Yep. I thought from the outside in definitely it was pretty obvious. And it was weird, man. I mean there was that whole. And this. I would say Matt was in similar boat is. We had this. It was this interesting like tunnel vision. But we also did it to ourselves. We definitely. And this is what. And we'll talk about the shift back too, because this was my biggest drive to get out of that business, out of that industry and really completely do a big change and realizing honestly, like what I want. Years before this, I did a lot of family things. I felt like there was tragedy, there was new. New life. I, you know, there's Foster. There was a lot of things. Things. And man, it was. It was tough and it was finding myself.

Yeah, it sounds like I reckon with the first. The first change from where you were on that steady plane to the new thing, it's almost like you're just probably just a bit overcooked with it, maybe just a bit burnt out on it or bored with it, which is very understandable. And someone who's been doing a business model for a very long time can tell you boredom was part of it. Yeah, there are times. I mean, I actually almost sold my community about eight years ago to someone they kind of sneakily. Microsoft did me a bit, I think.

They.

They made an offer to buy and they wanted to see the numbers and how it all works. And then instead of buying, they started their own community a month later. So I was a little bit. I was disappointed. Disappointed that those things can happen. But in any case, you've both found your own pathway. Matt probably went from not sure what to do to just pursuing things that interested him, regardless of any business intent. And now he's just perfect timing, perfect preparation, and he's in his sweet spot, by the. By the look of it. And I'm so excited for him in that regard. And you have done what I would suggest anybody do who is in a situation where they were doing okay and then did something that's not feeling right. And the. The word that comes to mind is revert. Just go back to the last. It's like if you're on a trail and you. You go down some side path, but you end up at a dead end, go back down the trail to where you last were on the good path and start again. And so you reclaimed the podcast, clearly. And how did that work?

Well, thank you for your guidance. I have to give you a lot of credit, man, because there was. You reached out maybe a handful, maybe it's four or five months ago or so. And that was the time where. So I quit the business Matt and I were in before those guys quit because of now it's not there. We all decided, oh, this is the right move. And really it came down to me objectively looking at, well, first, the numbers and the amount of time I was put. Putting into every single deal that just eventually all started falling away because there was no money in the industry. No one wanted to invest the. The rates that we were putting out there. And we. First half of the year, great. Second half of the year, just completely. It was just like, wow, okay, we're talking with the big dogs and nothing's working here. So I had to make that change. And this is where it was mentally for me. You know, I wrote out everything and I I probably spent a good four or five hours writing this message, but it was very specific on the numbers and my things and. And objective full, you know, across board and. And it helped them, I think, see some things that they might have not seen at the time. You know, being in our. Our little, you know, or it was a house that we were all kind of working in without a lot of input. We didn't have mentors like you, we were chatting with and other folks. You know, there were a couple times we'd reach out, but no one really got it. So after I made that change immediately, the pressure off my chest just flew off and I was like, whew. All right, did something right. That felt good. Not going to go back into the rearview mirror and drive that way. So. Yeah, and sunk cost is what comes to mind too. You know, revert is one way, but sunk cost, yeah. We could have kept pushing, pushing, pushing against that resistance. But why? And there was nothing that. That's not. Wasn't serving me. I honestly felt like I was having panic attacks and like, my chest was just tighter than ever. It was freaking me out. So on a health side of things, mental health, being away from family, grinding too much. There were all the reasons right there that felt so.

Speaking to my. With those ones, dude, it was.

Scared the hell out of me. Yeah, it really.

And you're still a young man, you know, and. And happy birthday, by the way. It's like, it's your birthday. This guy's doing a podcast on his birthday. Like, that is how. I mean, when I booked this on your Scheduler, I might add, it is true. You could have moved it if you wanted. I. I apologize for taking you away from the family on a special day. But the thing that comes to my mind is just how young you are and the different phases of life. You're in a very, very good age to slingshot the next decade, and the vast majority of your wealth is yet to come. That's the cool thing. Almost everyone's wealth comes towards the end of their earning capacity, and you're just in the middle part, so it's going to compound. It'll be ridiculous.

Yeah. And thank you for saying that, because in the midst of things, and I'm speaking to anyone who has gone through this similar approach, and that's why I want to share this so openly. And thanks for letting me do it. Yeah. It's not. It doesn't have to be that way of that hard resistance feeling like you have to beat through this brick wall or work with People that you might not be working great with. You know, life's too short for that. Your family probably wants to hang out with you more. You probably have some stuff you want to do, hobbies outside of the business that truly light you up. So it's a big assessment of where, where you want to take things in life because the business is there to fuel your life. I mean, I believe that. I believe that you. That you do as well. And yeah, man, it's. It's lifestyle is definitely key. And not everyone, everyone, whatever it is, figure out what you want. And that's when I figured out what I wanted at that time. And that's when you and I spoke. You know, you ran me up right around that, that same point. And I think maybe I reached out to you and said I did it. Like, I just, I cut it off. And I think it worked for all of us. And. And then that's when you brought up the podcast. Yeah, there was this, this analogy that you said. So I mean, it's like glued in my mind or printed now is we had this castle, we had all the gold bars and we, we chose to go play in the woods and you know, mess around out there and find, I guess, forage around or something. And then the castle and the gold bars are still hanging out over there. Go get them. And it was true. And I immediately did that. And it was a win, win with Matt. He had a path. It was great. And you gave. Gave me that spark because I knew there was something that was missing for me and I avoided for over a year or more, which are the connections to people like yourself, people. And all my connections are all right there. It just, it was up to me to reach out. Up to me to make that decision and, and show up. I mean, really, that's what it was. And take full responsibility of what I did. Don't dwell on it, but learn immensely from everything and then continue on because knowing that, yeah, I am in the. The prime years. You know, there's. There's another book I just read and I recommend it. It's Die with Zero is what it's called. And yeah, great book. And that definitely reframes, you know, like, live your life now while you are young and yeah, you're right, 38, like that's how old I am now. I. It's like the prime experience time. But you know, you're 52. You taught me and you're surfing every day multiple times maybe.

And I'm just got a full drive so I can get to Better surf spots and, you know.

Living. I'm living every single day because, you know, you read the books about these cancer things. I know about five people right now who are in pain or dying or having chemo or whatever. Even one of. There's one person in our Internet community who's. Was it? Two? Three. Three people in my own Internet community who are terminally ill. And, you know, and last week I had covert and smashed it. I am working on my health and fitness and living experiences. So I say to my, my wife, my daughter, let's, let's go on the river today. Let's go and get a boat. And they're like, yeah, let's go. And we, we, you know, my daughter's driving the steering wheel and having the best time ever and put our things in the back of the truck, drive up the beach and camp and have a surf and cook some food. It's like, you can't get that time back. You cannot. And, you know, when I had my first kids, I was working seven days a week, so I've missed some of that. And I'm not going to it. I'm not going to do it this time around. So it's. It's critically important. And I'm so glad you went back to the castle and got the gold bars, and they were there, by the.

Way, so thank you.

You were right. Well, I'm. I'm. Hopefully I'm more often right than not. But I'll tell you what, I do know that when people are a bit lost or down or feeling a bit isolated, which is very common in this field, that's when they need the friend to show up, paid or not paid. They need someone to show up, and they need to get some reassurance and some confidence in what the next moves could be and have that support through. I was very pleased to be able to help out there because I missed the podcast, I missed the old version of it, and I missed you, and thrilled that Matt has also found his thing. But now everyone's winning from this. And I had literally been through the same process of identifying, well, where's the gold? Sitting in my castle. And you're right, some people do. They just leave the castle gates wide open and head off into the forest. Like they just. They need a break. I get it. It's good to have someone in your corner to help you in those situations. So I imagine you're at this fulcrum point now where you're just going to strengthen and consolidate what your next pathway looks like and as you make the moves, remember what I said earlier to look back and just see how. Does, how does it look like it's going? Does this seem like it's working well? Is it, does it feel okay? And if I, if I had that time again, would I still make the same decision? Or what would I change? And if you would change it, why don't you change it now? That's really where you get to.

That's right, man.

So I would suggest, at the minimum, an annual review point for my clients. I do it every 12 weeks. Every 12 weeks, they get a reminder, a prompt and a couple of sage words for me to review certain aspects of, of what's going. It's not just money, by the way, because I think we hear a lot about money, we hear a lot about traffic. It's also things like reviewing relationships, reviewing their skills and what are they looking to, to improve upon, et cetera. So there's, we should always be working on something, improving something. And for me, I'm just enjoying reading more, developing skills. I want to be able to, able to hold my breath longer. I want to be able to get barreled more often. You know, I rebought a PlayStation. I hadn't had one for a while. I'd lost interest in it and got it just in time, as it turns out. To go back to the therapy tool I had back when I was selling cars was playing Gran Turismo at night. Yeah, it was my switch off. It was my switch off and my release and, and I just, I just went through and did all my licenses again. And I can actually feel that I'm driving my real car better on the road. I'm taking better lines and, and breaking in the right spots. And I wasn't interested in cars for a long time until now just because I'd spent, you know, I drove a brand new car home every single night from 2005 to, from 1995 to 2008. I was like, I got it all out of my system.

Yeah, that's great. I mean, and that was right before the money phase, right, of building your business and focusing on accumulating that part.

And then there was the surfing phase. And, you know, clearly I've, I've just about put in and hold 10 years in that. I mean, I'm nine years into that and I'm at a sort of a mature stage of that where I know exactly what's going on and I'm really enjoying it and it's, it's settled down a bit and I love It. But that's obviously the baseline. The daily surf is the reset. It's the analog activity. It's the timeout. It's where I think I've got this hierarchy, actually. I've. I've never shown this to anybody. It's a big triangle, and it's sort of where do I want to spend my time? And I want to spend most of my time thinking. You know, I just want to read books. I want to serve. I want to just think about stuff, you know, like, I follow the foundation of the triangle.

Yeah. At the very bottom.

That's the. That's where I want some. And then the next, you know, next stuff is I want to sort of research. I want to. There's a word for that, I think, like flaneuring. Just wandering around looking at things, but just, you know, being exposed to different ideas. Reading books, studying things. Then there's the drafting. Like, that's just coming up with sort of the first version of something. And then there's the editing, which is cleaning it up. You should always create in two phases. Ed Dale talked about that at my event. Draft and then edit. And then there's the doing, and then there's the tuning. So I don't want my whole life just to be grinding and doing. I'd rather put a lot more thought and research and. And drafting and editing into something before I actually do it. You do all the work here. The doing part, small. And then there's the tuning. It's just the adjusting and fine tuning it. So. So, you know, when you and I were speaking about your change, we were. We were doing some thinking together. And then there might be research involved. You might go and have a look at the numbers of something. You might go and assess different models. Then you get to the. The drafting. Okay. You'd sort of have your best guess at how it looks. Then you edit that, like, clean it up a bit before it goes out to the public, and then you do it. And then you learn from that and adjust it after that. So that's.

That's.

That's my activity. Iceberg. That's where I want to spend my time.

I saw that the iceberg. Yeah. Had a line. And I think what, the top two or three were exposed.

Yeah. The doing and the tuning. Like, almost everyone's just looking at the doing. You only see the bits I do. You didn't see the part where I was thinking or researching or drafting or editing. That's. That's silent. And people keep crapping on about, I'm going To do this, I'm going to do that, you know. You know, and they, they make these big declarations on social media. You know, don't just, just do it. Let show us, don't tell us. Right, go and do your work in the background. And then what we'll see is the part you did tell me about that.

Man, I think its name is Alan Watson. Not Alan Watts, but Watson. And he's a guy out of the uk and he talked about this hierarchy of how we essentially behave but how we think. And a big thing is get down to the physiological part of things, our body. So you mentioned, you know, the, the reset, the daily reset. And for me, I was realizing last year especially I wasn't doing that, I was just tight. I was going into grind mode every day.

You're a blunt sore, as Stephen Covey would say.

That's true. That's a. Yeah, I forgot about that term. Yeah, it's true. And I felt it. And it was just getting blunter by the day and fragile too. So now, five months later, whatever. I feel like I'm in the best shape of my life right now. I mean, I have these micro actions I, I'm doing every day. One of them's a hundred pushups. I mean, I'm always going for at least seven hours of sleep. Working out in my gym garage. Every day I'm running again, which, not far, but enough to two, three miles, let's say. But it gets the brain going. I have hills all over the place, so I do these hill sprints and live on the hills. I can't escape them. Might as well befriend them again.

Do you have a single speed bike?

I don't know if that's even doable around here, man.

That's, that's the thing, isn't it? You work out in your garage. I just have my surfboard rack and I look at them from my infrared sauna. I'm a. I have very passive garage activities compared to you.

That's true.

The most activity I do in my garage is like wax a board or screw a fin in, but, but you know, at least I go and do the activity somewhere. Like I live on a hill and I walk down to the beach, surf and then walk up. It's a great, it's a great daily walk and I walk through this national park. There's this wooden, wooden pathway through national park. Hopefully I don't get mugged after this episode. I change my path occasionally. There's multiple paths, let's just say that. And you know, as long as I don't step on a brown snake or a deadly spider, because I'm always barefoot. Walk through this beautiful national park, you hear the birds and you see the creatures, and then you emerge out onto the beach and then it's this paradise. So it's important to have that in your life.

Really is. And yeah. And I brought up this guy, Alan Watson. There's a couple videos, but essentially breaks down this hierarchy and how most of us just try to stay in the cerebral, in the mental. And maybe it's the thinking, you know, but that there's so much of these, like the emotional layer, the feeling layer, and it just goes deeper all the way down to. Let's tune into yourself first and actually take an audit. For me, I do a lot of breath work as well, and it could be from more intense stuff like Wim Hof or Tumu Tumo, I think it is originally. Or just where it's like a HRV heart rate variability. I'm very. I'm thinking a lot about that. And that's what Skyland Watson talks about. It's like breathing in six seconds, holding for a brief bit, and then six seconds out, just even breathing.

And for my adrenaline seal box technique.

Similar. Very similar. Yeah. Yep.

And one of this is one of the diving apps here. It allows you to.

You.

You hold and then counts down and then you release and stuff. And it can extend your breath. I think breathing's critical. Like people just did. Breathing, sleep and good food. They'd be a long way down the track. I think that's really. Sleep is still the ultimate performance enhancer. It's the secret weapon. Eluding a lot of people with a false belief that they can change helps a lot, too. Not having a watch helps a lot. To me, that's true. No notifications or, like, it's a bit stoic, but, you know, I've got a beautiful Rolex in my safe. I don't ever wear it because it's not important to me anymore, but it was very important to me in 1997.

You know, into this. Yeah. Status and all coming up, you know, of course. But with the metrics, it's like knowing your numbers. Just like business. I started looking at my personal metrics of sleep and, you know, hrv. All these things that are essentially gauging my energy and stress level and. And I'm all that is like the key metrics to drive me. Obviously, there's business metrics as well, but let's be honest, we are the ones that are going to fuel the business, the vision, the relationships. Without that health or your health, Our health. We got to show up somehow, and we can't show up if we're just in space or wherever the hell we laid out in bed sick. I mean.

Yeah. I've got one of those little oximeters you put on your finger and it does your pulse.

Yep.

And I try and meditate to lower the pulse to get that. Yeah. So it's, like, pretty fun.

Yeah.

Yeah. I've got a baseline on where my resting pulse is, and I can tell if I'm not right, but I can.

Tell from other things or something. Huh.

Well, if I'm tired, if I feel hungover or something because I stayed up too late, my vision will get a little more blurry or I will. My concentration won't be as good. So it's. There are indicators that I have that. Tell me if I'm not. Not right, or I'd notice a little black line under my eye or I might be irritable. These are all signs we're able to be aware of these. Do something with that information. Get that data. Make decisions. Do it. Use this cycle to continually improve. I love this episode on Change, Joe. We've both shared some sort of inside of our own world. It's not all easy. It's not all easy. This online stuff, is it. But I'd have to say we're both in a great position now, and it's been so good to bring that process out. In my case, just before my celebration episode, this. This is the last episode we're doing in this first batch of a thousand, and for you, you're just about to hit 500.

We're over 500 now. Or I am. I'm still saying we. I have a team, though now I'm accumulating my own team in systems. That's kind of where I'm at now with the reboot, but. Yeah. At just over 500. So it'll be 500 and some change on this.

Wow, that's. That's amazing.

Well, I don't know how we. Both of us, man, Congratulations to you.

Yeah. And to you, too.

Thank you. Consistency, man. It pays off.

A lot of people never really get past the first, you know, three or four episodes, so. Power to us.

Yeah. Seriously. In evolution, too. There's a lot of change in just a podcast, obviously, so it's a lot of history there.

So much. So much. And I'm about to face that. I have to record the next episode, and I have to look Back at where we're at now. I'm sure change is a massive topic. This is a really good precursor. So big, big thoughts from this episode are that it's. It's inevitable. Change is that life will punch you in the face occasionally. You're going to have to adapt. You can also preempt change by building up your change muscle, recognizing when things should change and changing before you get forced to. Having review points so that you can systematically look at things in hindsight and see what you learn from that. And if something should change forward. And of course, if you have a friend or anyone out there who you notice is going through some changes and they're not, or you feel like they could probably do some support, reach out to them and say hi, that'll always be well received. So there you go. What a great episode for me, 999 and for you did it. Well done. Thank you, Joe.

500 and some change. Yeah. Appreciate your time, man. A little extra, too. These are always fun, so I'm sure we'll do it again, please.

That'd be great.

See you guys.

All right. All right.

That's what I got for you today. And remember, it's not all about about living to work. It's all about working to live if.

You need to do the work.

But you know, work can be fun and it should be fueling for your life. So if you enjoyed what you just heard, if you got some nuggets of wisdom that you want to share or you're just noodling on right now, please go tell others. The way that people find this show and how you can help others get their aha moments is through word of mouth house. So if it is telling your friend, telling your family, send an email to your list, writing a review or whatever it might be. Everything helps. So thank you so much for listening to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast and I will see you next time.