The 2018 EGP Gameplan 👥 Create Amazing Value And Build A Platform

Boom, boom, boom, Boom, boom.

What's up, everybody? You're listening to the Hustle and Float Shark podcast with your boys, Mount Wolf and Joe Fear.

Hello, hello, hello. This is Joe Fear, and I'm with my handy dandy partner.

I thought you're gonna say handsome partner.

In your wildest dream, sir, Mr. Matt Wolf.

Hello.

He's slightly handsome when he shaves, but he never does.

I thought you were gonna say he's slightly hammered.

Damn.

See my brain going in a completely different direction.

Where do you want me to take this conversation? Do you want to get hammered? Do you want to be handsome or sheep? I don't know. All right, so this is the Hustle and Flowchart podcast. Of course. You are in the right place.

You are in the right place. And this is actually our last episode of the year.

No, actually, that's cool.

This is our last episode of 2017. It's been a really, really good run of the podcast, and we're actually planning on ramping up the podcast even more in 2018. Maybe. Maybe more than one episode a week. Dare I?

I think it's. It's pretty fair to say that that.

Will probably happen, that we'll be ramping up the podcast even more with more episodes, more great guests. We've managed to continually, like, get up level. Well, I don't want to say up level because that sort of discard the people.

Sorry, Aaron. He was number one. But, hey, we had him on back, though. So, yeah.

Really, really good, successful guests on our show, and I don't want to discredit any of the guests we've already had because they've all been amazing. But no, it's been a great year of podcasting and thought we'd do one final duet episode of the year and sort of recap on the year and kind of talk about what we're going to do going forward and then along the way, give you some takeaways and tips and things that we think you should implement in your business.

Are you going to duet with me?

Let's duet together.

Okay, cool. Let's do it.

This.

Yeah. So I think our biggest intention in our last. Literally in this last 15 days.

Yeah, sounds about right.

Well, maybe even 12 days. We've officially changed our models focus.

Yeah, well, we made the decision in November. We implemented. Actually implemented the changes in December.

Yeah. So, yeah, basically, yeah, beginning of December, we. We pretty much. We're putting our asses on the line with a whole new direction.

That's an understatement.

Yeah.

Literally turned off A massive revenue stream.

We're putting our houses on the line, our kids food, you know, their stomach and their.

Please buy our stuff.

Yeah, so. No, but what. Basically what I'm trying to say is that this has been like a radical shift. It's been on our minds for a long time, Matt and I, but to cut to the chase, basically we're shifting into this new business that we're going to get into in a second, but we're shifting away from selling our own products, our information products in the marketing space.

Right?

Yeah. And that includes, you know, all these courses that we've had online, but also the egp, the evergreen profits physical newsletter that was being sent every single month and had hundreds of people on there. So, yeah, for the most part, we've.

Shut down the entire paid information side of our business. So we're. We no longer have any online courses for sale. We're no longer selling our print newsletter. The only information we still sell to this day is the books that you can find on Amazon. Right. And we are probably going to write a few more books. So we will still technically sell information in the form of books, but we're not selling any more online courses or our print newsletter or any of that kind of stuff. We've decided to shift out of selling information and instead just give that information away for free. We wanted to ramp up the blog, ramp up the podcast, ramp up the amount of value that we put out into this world at no cost. Because when we started this, we wanted to help a lot of people. We decided we have this knowledge on, you know, how to ramp up businesses, how to do online marketing, how to build systems, affiliate marketing, content marketing, et cetera, et cetera, mindset, all that stuff. Right. We have all this knowledge and it sort of got to us a little bit that we were putting it behind a paywall. The only people that were going to be able to get this knowledge from us were the people that were willing to pay us a minimum of 100 bucks a month. And that always sort of ate at us that the best stuff that we're producing, the best content that we can possibly produce, is seen by the most minimal amount of people.

Yeah. And that was stifling our impact to the world and to the community.

Exactly.

People like you.

So, you know, we shifted into this thinking of, let's make all of this stuff available for free. Let's start putting the same quality of content, the same depth of content out into the world for free, make it widely available and totally shift where our income comes From. So our income streams used to come from selling these info products, and we turned that off. Literally, one day it was on, the next day it was off, and that income stopped, cold turkey, gone. So we are, like Joe said, we are putting our asses to the fire. And we just put our back up against the wall and said, all right, let's figure this out. Let's make this work. Our backs are against the wall. We gotta generate an income.

Yeah. And it's turning into this platform. So that's where our shift is going in 2018.

And this isn't a radical. It is a radical shift in terms of how we're getting paid, but the shift isn't massively different because we've always been wanting to build a platform larger and larger. This podcast you're listening to is part of the platform. So is our blog, so is our Facebook groups, our page, our ads. It's all basically feeding into this big ecosystem, forever green profits where we can then, you know, provide value in all forms, all sorts of ways. Video, audio, written and more. Now in the future, turning into more things like consulting events, more deeper partnerships, ways that we can really put our fingers kind of deeper in people's businesses. That was weird.

I gave you a dirty look because I thought you were going somewhere else.

That was weird. Words coming out of mouth, stream of thought. But so your takeaway, and I don't want to make this podcast all about us, and that's the whole big thing, is like, yeah, we're talking about our experiences and this massive shift that we're literally saying, but I want you to get takeaways out of this whole thing.

Yeah. So I think the takeaways are going to come from the explaining why we shifted this and what we're shifting to. That way, if you want to sort of follow along and use some of the models we're shifting into for your own business, you can do that. And so I think that's where the big aha moments could come for a lot of people, is the why and the what we're going to be doing next. So, you know, yes, we're talking about us and our business, but hopefully some people are going to get some takeaways from this on things that they could maybe implement or shift into in their business. And a big turning point for me, and I might all link to this in our show notes, was I listened to a podcast by Ryan Moran and I, and it was very impactful for me. So I actually went and took notes on that podcast and shared my notes so I'll share my notes to that episode in the show. Notes. But Ryan was talking all about building a platform for his business and creating as big of a megaphone as possible. You know, he does podcasting, he does blogging, he puts on live events, etc, etc, all the same stuff that we do. And he's grown it to a point where he can go up and mention a product and just by mentioning the product, that product is going to have a massive amount of sales. Right. He can go step up on stage and say everybody needs to get this tool for their business and everybody in the room wants that tool. All of a sudden. Tim Ferriss is a great example of somebody who is probably one of the most successful people I can think of that's built a platform that all they have to do is mention a product name and that product's going to sell out on Amazon.

Oprah Winfrey, she's actually probably the.

Well, at one time she was. But yes, I feel like. Is the new Oprah Winfrey.

Yeah.

So he, you know, he can go and invest in a company and then talk about that company on his podcast. And just overnight, just that little bit of marketing of talking about it on his podcast, that product will probably sell it on Amazon. I've seen it multiple times where he's mentioned something on his podcast. I went on Amazon to buy it, sold out.

I buy stuff from him just without even looking at what I'm buying. Yeah. And so I believe him now. You know, I trust him.

When we talk about building a platform, that is exactly what we're talking about. We're talking about building that megaphone across our blog, our podcast, our live events, our YouTube videos. What else?

You know, it's what I was saying. It's, it's Facebook, it's even ads. It's. It's all of the different blog posts we're putting out, the, the Facebook Live videos. It's these events, it's. It's meetups, masterminds, it's all stuff. Anything that I see a platform as anything that inputs into where you can provide value in some way, some way that you could provide value and you could talk either one on one or to the masses, that's part of a platform. And it's anything that you can somewhat control, even if it's on like a different website, like even medium.com will repurpose or write things or you like to go to Steam it.

Yeah, Steam it lately.

Like that's a platform. You're linking into our ecosystem from there.

Absolutely.

It doesn't have to be one where you actually have to own it. But the thing is, if you extend your reach, and that's exactly what we're doing with now, taking down all of our paywalls. It's allowing us to. Now we can not only teach some of those concepts we had in there, maybe repurpose some things as well. All of these things now is like ammunition that we could just freaking let go all over the interwebs. Matt, get your freaking head out of the gutter. But here's something we noticed, and this is kind of taken from Tim Ferriss and probably someone else. But if you're, if you have a product that's around and you actually go a little higher than this when you, when you were explaining it to people. Matt. But like, if you're in like the 50 to $100 range, you're even going up to a thousand, I think you get out of that. I think that's too high. I think maybe under 500.

Yeah, I don't. I was. Well, so we've had products that we've sold for $1,000 and I was considering the mid range pricing. Anywhere from 50 to $1,000.

I guess it could be mid range. Yeah, it's, it's debatable. I guess it doesn't matter.

It's relative. It depends on your personal situation. For a lot of people, a thousand dollars is cheap. For a lot of people, a thousand dollars is whatever. You know, I couldn't even imagine spending that kind of money, you know, so.

So what we realized is that we were playing right there in that kind of like battlefield. And what Tim Ferriss was saying is like, if you're in that field and then that's your only source of income, like you're relying on those kind of price points for your sole income, you are going to be in a bloodbath. Like you are in constant. You're going to get refunds, you're going to get chargebacks, you're going to get fricking customer support, you're dealing with the most amount of competitors and it's hard to differentiate yourself because you're caught up in the masses. Everyone else is competing right there. And it's a mindset thing too. We've experienced it from all price points in that range. And not saying that, I mean you get amazing customers, but you get a high percentage depending on the price range of customers that you just don't want to deal with and they should just go the fuck away. And I am going to be brutally Honest. Because you need to know that if you're selling shit in that space, you better have a great support staff and you better have a. Like, you better. You better be like steel when you're seeing some of these chargeback requests. And I just. I'm kind of fired up right now because there was one where, lady, literally, whatever. I'm not gonna. They're dumb. They're just really insane people sometimes.

And it's just that price point, you know, so, you know, there's sort of this, like, tiered pricing, right? Not even pricing. So when it comes to content, we decided we're gonna operate on the extremes, right? And by extremes, I mean, you could either get our stuff for free, or you can work personally really closely with us, and it's gonna be, you know, pricey.

We're on the edges. We're playing on the edges.

We're out on the edges. We're. Anything for in that $50 to $1,000. We're not selling anything in the $1 to $1,000 range.

Information. Yeah, information.

We're not selling anything in that range whatsoever. We're operating at the extremes. Our content is mostly available for free. And if you need some extra handholding, if you want us to work personally in your business, if you want us to look at your business, dissect it, put together like a tailored business plan for you, well. Well, you can pay us to do that, right? Everything else you're going to get for free. So all the people that are out there that are the sort of shiny object chasers, the ones that are looking for that $50 product, that $50 fix, and they. They get the product, they consume it, they take no action, then buy the next product. You know, that type of content we're making available for free, you know, the shiny objects that we're putting out into the world are free shiny objects. If you need extra personalized help to ramp up your business, those are the people that we're gonna make our money with.

And to you listening, like, I think you should ask yourself a question, like, how do you play at the edges? Like, how can you. I'm not saying copy the same model, but you totally could. We know a lot of very smart friends of ours in the marketing space or just business owners who play in these edges and they do extremely well.

And saying that we're not only playing in the edges, we are playing in that war zone. But that war zone for us is our affiliate products.

Well, yes, and that's where we were going to get to. But. But Just think about your, your business right now for a second that before we get into like, how we'll actually monetize a lot of stuff.

There'S some. Before you get too deep, or maybe you realize that, you know, it's getting harder to sell in your niche, whatever your niche is, there could be a good reason for that. Not just competitors, but just maybe it's your customers finding information for free on YouTube now. I mean, if you just think about it, there's so much damn information out there. For years now it's been just people get bombarded and, you know, more podcasts popping up, YouTube videos, blogs, all that stuff. So think about ways that, you know, play it, like, get ahead of the curve. I think that's the big thing is if you build a platform, it gets this momentum, a snowball effect where you can't really turn it off after a while because people are talking about you and spreading what you're creating more than you can even do yourself. And that's where it's really cool. It's kind of like this podcast.

Yeah.

Like the listenership, you know, the amount of people really like recently is like started to exponential. Basically.

It's like every month. It's not like double the last month. It's like, you know, it's, it's compounding. It's compounding each month.

And we're not doing anymore.

No, we're doing the same level of work. Yeah.

So. Yeah.

Yeah. And I mean, so really the model now is we're focused on building the platform and then we're also going to be doing the consulting and coaching and live events for that, you know, that higher level sort of price point for the people that need that extra hand holding. And should we, should we shift gears into how we're gonna monetize all let's do business?

Yeah. Cool.

So what basically we have four points of monetization right now. Affiliate revenue currently is our largest driver of revenue into our business is the affiliate marketing stuff. That's not necessarily what we want to be the largest driver of income in our business, but it is what it is right now and we're looking to divide, diversify that over 2018 by adding in more consulting. We do have a handful of consulting clients now, but we're going to add more consulting clients in. We've been getting more demand for it, more people asking about it. We're going to start putting on live events. When we had Aaron Fletcher on the podcast, we, we spoke with him quite a bit about actually partnering up with him. To put on some live events and then also partnerships. We're looking for people who have existing businesses, you know, software businesses, info products outside of the marketing world, things like that, that they've got great products, but they don't have great marketing behind them. We're looking to find people that we can partner with, bring our magic special sauce to their business, sprinkle some marketing dust on it, and help ramp up their. Their business.

Yeah. And that's. And the bigger thing is not to. Yeah. We looked at. So going back to what Matt was saying about the affiliate stuff too. Like currently, that is, I guess now that we canceled all the subscriptions. That is our only income, affiliate revenue. But we looked at our previous business and we were spending like 80% of our time on the stuff that would make 20% of our income. Which in the grand scheme of things, that's not smart business. Like if you go back to the James Schramko episode.

Yeah. From a few weeks ago.

Yeah. Like, he talks about his effective hourly rate. His, his ehr, our EHR on our own internal products and selling stuff was probably like, I mean, I don't know where it was. It was low. It was probably under $100 an hour.

Yeah.

And that's nowhere near where we need to be. Whereas the affiliate side is 10x that or, you know, it's. It's radically different. And it comes down totally to that 80, 20 kind of rule where affiliate income is bringing 80% of the revenue and we were doing about 20% of the work.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Another takeaway right there. Audit what you're doing in your business and go to listen to James Schramko's podcast episode. That's another little takeaway because learn what that effective hourly rate is.

Yeah, for sure. For sure. Yeah. I mean, that's spot on. You know that when we were talking about why we made this shift, you know, a few minutes ago on this podcast, we didn't even bring up that. That aspect of it was the newsletter really did take up 80% of our time. That was what we spent most of our business focus on messing, you know, dealing with those customers, customer support on that, you know, trying to bring new people into that, that system. And it was just the most time consuming thing we do. But when we look at our, you know, we run spreadsheets every month of, of where the revenue is coming. In our business, it was only accounting for maybe 20% of our income, if that around there. And so we decided, you know what, 80% of our income comes from affiliate marketing and 20% comes from the newsletter. But 80% of our effort goes into the newsletter and only 20% of our effort goes into the affiliate marketing. Imagine what kind of income we can make off affiliate marketing if we put 80% of our effort into the affiliate marketing stuff. Right. So that was sort of where our head's at making this shift, going into the affiliate marketing and then also, of course, ramping up the consulting and making that available to people. Because we do. We want to help as many businesses as possible. And the best way for us to help as many businesses as possible is to make content available for free. And then the people that actually need specialized help for their specific business can work directly with us. That is how we're going to make the biggest impact.

Yep. And in doing this, you're going to see in 2018, we're shooting for hopefully March ish with Aaron Fletcher. And you know, if you haven't heard of Aaron Fletcher, he has two previous podcasts. One of the. I think it was the first one or second episode of this whole podcast and one episode. But yeah, whatever it was. Yeah, go just look up Aaron Fletcher. He's getting good stuff. We highly recommend him. And the Fletcher Method course, we'll probably link that in the show notes here too, because that's pretty much where we. It's kind of funny because we even said this and in full honest honesty to him, I think he can just do it way better than we could do in terms of teaching. But also laying out kind of like a framework thing for sale. Like if you actually are looking to purchase a training and need someone to kind of guide you through those steps for a fee, because you're getting, I mean, a crap ton of, you know, very focused. He's. He's the one to go to.

Yeah.

That obviously is. Is right in line with what we've always done with EGP ever getting profits. That's why we're going to team up for events in 2018. And some of these events we have kind of two styles that we're shooting for one that is, you know, a lot. Maybe it's a little bigger, a couple hundred people or so. That one is going to speakers, kind of the whole nine that you're used to. But the other thing, and this is where it really jacks Matt and I up. And I think Aaron as well is creating an event that's more like a retreat, something that's experiential. Yeah, it's a lot more. It's like 20 people max. You're on a, you know, in a badass location, a badass house or wherever, something that it feels like a vacation, but we're masterminding all the time. It's very high level. But at the end of the day, people have this crazy experience. Partnerships lead from there. Like, if you could just start, like, seeing how things connect. And that's why we wanted to lay out our model to you. This isn't much different than where we're at. We're just literally widening the net where it all leads. At the end of the day, what we want to love to do is just basically sit around, have a good life, talk marketing, grow some businesses, and have cash flow kind of coming from multiple assets all over the place.

Absolutely.

Yep.

That's the goal, and that's where we're going in 2018. It's all about building this bigger platform, ramping up the sales of products as affiliates, ramping up our consulting and putting on events and finding some really great strategic partners. So, you know, if this is, you definitely reach out to us. You know, email us infogreenprofits or go to evergreenprofits.com and hit up our contact form. Email us and let us know if you're interested in working directly with us or if you have a product that you know is a good product but you don't have the marketing skills to get it out into the world. Those are the type of people we're looking to work with and partner with starting in 2018. So exciting times. A lot of big moves, A lot of scary moves for us. Our backs are literally against the wall. We cut a lot of revenue out of our business to make this move, but we're absolutely confident that we're making the right decision. Like, there's no doubt in our mind that we're making the right decision. Things might be tough for a few more weeks, but we're making the right decision.

Yeah. So it's exciting and we want to hear your feedback too. But like Matt said, if you are one of those people who are looking for higher touch consulting coaching, we're doing some group coaching as well. And in obviously any kind of partnerships, keep your ear to the ground for the event dates and whatnot. We're still ironing out details for all that stuff, but either way, the end of the day, you're gonna see a lot more from us. We're gonna be everywhere.

Herpes.

Herpes. Herpes. Of Internet. Of the Internet.

Let me give a little more. Yeah, we can't just say herpes.

That's weird. Yeah, I know.

So Scott Oldford, somebody who I've actually interviewed him a couple years ago and he be on our podcast again in 2018. He had this concept of once somebody lands on his website, he's like herpes. You can't get rid of him. He's going to be with you forever. Meaning that if you visit his website, he's going to retarget you on YouTube, on Facebook, on Google, on Twitter, you name it. You can't get rid of him now. He is everywhere. He is now herpes. And that's his term, not ours.

I'm just quoting him.

And with our platform, that is the direction we're going. Once you land on our website or listen to our podcast or hang out in our Facebook group or consume anything we put out, you're going to see us everywhere. So that's where we're going in 2018.

But that's all something you can do for yourself too. So just think about it. I mean, that's back to the takeaways. Think about what you could do in building a platform. I think it's always key. It will be key for any business. And this is back to James Schramko too. Don't, don't focus on one revenue stream. And we've even said that on our podcast many times. The second you start just like honing down on one income stream. So if it's like one, one affiliate offer, one product, one coaching offer that you have, the second that goes away, what are you gonna do? So the platform allows you to just open up your opportunities and then increase the amount of cash flow with all those various assets you have out there.

Absolutely.

That'd be dad.

Absolutely. So yeah, if you're interested in working closer with us again, hit up our contact form on evergreenprofits.com.

Anything else we want to cover before we close out this year?

I don't believe so. It's been a good year because we've learned a lot. This podcast came around in 2017.

Yeah, we started in January. So our one year anniversary episode is going to be in like two weeks or something.

Right. So we've done a lot and we've had a lot of cool people. And it's like you were saying like the, the guests. People. Yeah, it's cool because these guests are just referring their friends or people that we don't know. So I mean, that's another takeaway is like if you don't have a podcast by now or, or if you're not working on expanding your Personal network, your personal platform. You know, like, get out there and just start talking to people. I mean, you don't have to have a podcast, but at least, like make a schedule. Just call people up, touch base with people. Even if you don't see a direct line to income or whatever, they can introduce you to someone who can help you out drastically.

I do have one ask of the audience, and we literally have never asked this of our audience in one year of podcasting. But if you enjoy our podcasts, do us a huge favor and subscribe to it on itunes or Stitcher or Overcast or wherever you like to listen to podcasts. Subscribe to it, leave a review, let us know what you think of it. Hustleandflowchart.com It's a real easy domain to remember, is where you can access the podcast and share it with other people, tell other people to check it out. We really, really need your help to grow this podcast, get more ears listening to it and, you know, help us build the platform, the EGP ecosystem. You guys, the people that are listening to this now, where, you know, you are the ecosystem, you are who we are creating this for. And we could really, really use your help expanding that network. So tell your friends, subscribe, review. It would really, really help us out a lot.

Cool. That was perfecto. So thank you so much. 2017 has been amazing. You are amazing. Talking to you, the listener, not you, Matt.

Dammit.

You're all right. And 2018 is going to be badass for everybody. So thank you for so much and.

Have a happy and safe new year. We'll see you next year.

Adios. All right, thank you.

And I hope you just enjoyed this episode you just listened to. Now, right now, before we sign off.

I have a few things I would.

Love for you to do. So the very first thing is go find our guest on Facebook and tell them that you loved their episode with us. That's going to help them just feel good about themselves, but also it's going to spread the word a little bit more for us. Go find them on Facebook, everybody's on Facebook. And go say that you love their episode. And maybe one cool thing that you learn there. The second thing is to go to itunes and subscribe to our podcast. Just look up Hustle and Flowchart and hit the subscribe button. And the very last thing, the third thing, is to leave us a review on itunes or wherever you're listening to this podcast and help us spread the word more. That's how more people are going to get this awesome knowledge, this, this cool podcast training, and a whole bunch of other cool free training that we give out@evergreen profits.com. so that's about it. Go find them on Facebook, go subscribe on itunes and leave us a review. You would be amazing if you did that, but you're always amazing. So thanks for listening and we'll catch you in the next episode.

You're awesome.