The Yin And Yang of Joe and Matt

Yeah. I would say the yin and yang thing is the biggest because we talked about this yesterday.

Actually, we were talking about it yesterday.

It's perfect timing because we, you know, we're supporting each other in our own ways. So yin and yang almost feel like there's like this tug and pull kind of thing always happening. You know, if it's something new, let's say if it's a new project or a new idea or a conference we're going to speak at. You know, some are just like a hell, yes, let's do it. And other ones are just like, there's a debate happening.

This is an intro. Intro, intro, intro.

Hustle and Float, Shark. With your boy. My boy, Matt Wolf.

Joe.

Hey.

Hey, there.

Hey. Hey.

So this is gonna be a different one, huh?

A little bit.

Things have changed in today's plans a little bit.

Yeah. So for this episode, yeah, this is gonna be a little out of the norm because it's one of our Tuesday episodes, which is usually you and I just talking to each other, but. But this time we decided to use an interview of somebody else interviewing us. But this interview was never gonna see the light of day otherwise.

Correct.

We really liked this interview, and we.

Wanted it to see the light of day. We're like, wait, wait, wait.

There's a place for you.

Content never dies. Yeah. So, yeah, what we. So, a little backstory for you. And there's a reason why you see the name Stefan Spencer attached to this episode along with us on a day that typically is just Matt and I chatting with you and talking about whatever internal struggles and wins and external. No, it's just. It's our chance to yak about what's happening, really, and our thoughts, our trends, you know, perspectives on things around the world, what we think, things coming up. So Stefan had us on his podcast called Get Yourself Optimized. He's also the host of Marketing Speak, two great podcasts. This guy has been phenomenal in terms of. Well, so many things. I met him over 10 years ago at a Mastermind locally here, but since then, like. Well, since his podcast, he's referred so.

Many people our way.

Yeah.

Some amazing people that you've had or that we've had on this podcast that you've heard, and a lot of that, that is from Spencer. So we just publicly want to appreciate you, man.

Yeah. And if you want to, he's. He's also just an SEO wizard, and we did an episode with him a little while back where he broke down all of his SEO wizardry. So we'll make sure we link that up. So if you want to kind of get Stefan's backstory and learn what he has his expertise in, definitely go check out this episode or that episode. But this episode, we're going to focus on us.

Yeah. So this episode, we're on his podcast today. Basically, a little background is we had some video issues. Yeah.

There's a tech snafu.

Yeah. So the tech snafu caused us to. We have another day on the books.

To record, redo that interview.

But we're like, hey, we like that audio.

So let's put that here.

Yeah.

And we had a little bit of video. It was just kind of so throughout. So we have some that will publish to Hustle and Flowchart, assuming that we can get the video to go. Right. But it's on a. Or, sorry, it's on hustleandflowchart TV on YouTube. So, yeah, we just figured, okay, so this interview, it's still, I guess, about us and our perspectives and stuff, but we just happen to have Stefan as.

Interviewing us for this whole thing.

Well, I really liked his line of questioning, and, you know, we'll talk more about our thoughts on the conversation in the outro of this episode. But I really liked his line of questioning, and it really kind of like he stumped us on a few questions, too, which, you know, was cool because it makes us jump off the episode and think a little bit deeper about some of the questions he was asking.

Yeah, he asked amazing questions. So it's kind of nice to have him. Yeah. From a totally different perspective. He's a deep thinker. He's well studied. He's knows a ton of people. So his perspectives are just vast.

Yeah.

And his shows are really interesting, too, like marketing speak. It's a lot of business and marketing. And then you have get yourself optimized, and it gets a little bit down.

The wormhole, a little bit like.

It's almost like a blend of our two.

Of our show in a way.

Two shows of his.

I don't know, like, the topics, you know, we.

We blend a lot. So, yeah, all that to say is, I think you'll enjoy this episode. You're probably going to want some action guides or the action guide from this episode. They are free right now. Don't wait more than two weeks. And then they go away. They're not free after that point.

Flowchartgroup.com is where you get those. You can join the Facebook group, and when you join the Facebook group, we'll ask you for your email if you give us that email, we'll give you the action guide. So that's good trade.

Good trade.

Flowchartgroup.com. go do that. And also we have an amazing sponsor of this episode. So hear about them. Let's talk about them right now.

Yo, Matt. All right. How you doing?

I'm all right.

All right, cool. Yeah, yeah, like you care.

Well, I know you're right. I'm just moving on to the next thing, so just kidd.

All right. We recently did a full on audit of our site.

We did.

And we saw SEO audit specifically. Yes, SEO audit.

And we had some issues. We had some issues.

So walk me through this. We used Ahrefs.

We did use Ahrefs. And when I ran our site through Ahrefs, I found all sorts of little calamities.

Calamities, yes. So Ahrefs, it was nice enough to give us the advice on how to fix these things, I believe. Yes.

Ahrefs tells you, hey, look, this should be HTTPs, but you've got it as ht. Maybe go fix that. Hey, this link is porting to a 404 broken page. Maybe go fix that one. Hey, this URL here is redirecting like four times before it gets to the final destination. Maybe that's something you could fix.

Right?

And you go and fix all those things and the next thing you know, your site actually ranks a little bit better and goes a little bit faster.

So the point is we should probably be paying attention. Everyone you listening should be listening. Listening.

Monitoring your SEO health, right?

Yes, you should be monitoring the SEO.

Overlord over here, at least of the two of us.

You should be monitoring your SEO health. If SEO is important to you in.

Your business, yes, definitely you should. We get most of our new traffic through SEO. We do, and it's fabulous because it's free traffic. But we position our content in a way where it's attractive to Google and you the listener, if you came through SEO, maybe. So Ahrefs is hooking you up though, because they still have their normal Ahrefs, which we highly recommend.

We've still used to this day for.

Years and years and years on end. Every other SEO expert that we've had on the show also uses it. Well, now they have a free version that is actually a. I think that's going to monitor your, Your, your website for its health, 100 SEO issues and more backlinks, like you'll know who's linking to you and all that stuff. There's opportunities for you to do stuff there. And then of course all the keywords that are ranking for you. You can get this for free.

Yeah, it's free. Like we talk about Ahrefs. We've been talking about Ahrefs forever. They now have a new thing called Ahrefs Webmaster Tools. You can find out about it over@ahrefs.com AWT that's a H R E F S.com AWT.

Tools. It is a free version of Ahrefs. So go check this thing out. Best conversion rate you're gonna get. Monitor, SEO, health, backlinks and keywords for free. Check out ahrefs.com awt woo hoo.

That was a good one. Yeah, I like it. I like it a lot.

Those guys are awesome. So let's go jump in and have Spencer, not Spencer, Stefan Spencer, talk to us.

Mr. Spencer to you.

I was gonna say let's talk to Stefan Spencer, but Stefan Spencer's more talking to us. I don't know.

Let's find out.

Let's just go.

In this episode we're going to talk a little more kind of business metaphysical, not just marketing. We'll touch on marketing. But I want to go a little more off script for this episode. And plus, it's been a couple years since we did that interview. So yeah, great to have you here. Let's first of all, if you could share a bit more of your lessons learned, maybe the more painful lessons learned in your journey of entrepreneurship and podcasting and.

Networking and consulting, all that sort of stuff. Mastermind, running, etc.

Yeah. Excuse me. Like when I think of some struggles, I'm like, huh. Well, about 10 minutes ago we were just like looking at affiliate marketing and tracking and pixels and things are dropping right now. We're like, oh great. This is a new endeavor that we have to deal with in our type of business. So that's the latest struggle, if you wanted to know.

But that was really fresh. That's an open wound.

That's an open wound right now, unsolved. But we'll talk to you next couple of years or so and bring up how we solve that problem.

But yeah, Matt and I, to take it way back, like we might have talked about on marketing speak, is we're kind of brothers from other mothers. We've known each other for almost 20 years and.

Things have changed a lot in that span of time. Being from bands, we played a lot of music separately, but similar group of people. But I worked for his parents and during that time, that's when him and I got the bug to start creating content online and Kind of. We read Rich Dad, Poor Dad, Robert Kiyosaki, and that was our purple book that got us all started and opened up the perspective of what's possible and what we enjoyed doing, which was kind of curating content. And I feel like our business has developed as curators. We haven't realized that we were actually curators until, like last year. And we're like, oh, that's what we've been doing kind of, I guess the, the natural path. And it's just developed from there.

Yeah. I think when we really leaned in and decided, you know what? I think where our sweet spot is is just as curators. Curators of smart people, curators of cool tools, curators of ideas. You know, it almost takes a little bit of pressure off of us in the sense that we don't have to be the gurus, we don't have to be the people, you know, plowing the path for others. We can just be the people that are going, hey, here's what you should be paying attention to right now. And I think that was a big aha for us. And when we leaned into that, then I feel like business and life got a lot easier. I would say from a more like, you know, maybe mental standpoint, it's kind of cliche, but just figuring out how to enjoy the journey, stop. Like, I think that's been a huge lesson for us, figuring out how to stop looking farther into the future and going, that's where the goalpost is now. So let's, let's sprint to that goalpost and starting to have this realization that, like, we just need to be enjoying what we're doing every day. When we wake up and we come into the office, let's make sure that that day is a day that's really, really fun and enjoyable for us. And let's stop looking at, we'll be enjoying this in two years when we get here, and let's start figuring out how to enjoy every single day and make the whole process fun. Make it all about the process instead of the destination. And I think that's been a big sort of mindset shift for us that we've had over the last 3ish years where we've really kind of went, let's figure out how to make work fun every day. We literally have a sticker right here in front of us that says, this is going to be fun. And we read it, like, right before we get on podcasts, right before we get on interviews, we're high fiving each other. We're like, let's do this. And we just kind of get into this, like, fun mode. And that's kind of what business has turned into for us, is like, figure out how to make what we're doing on a daily basis as fun as possible. So we're just super pumped to get in here every day and just do our thing. So enjoying the process and not waiting for some destination to finally enjoy the process is. I think that's been a big lesson.

That's an ongoing thing in its own path.

Well, you guys mentioned goal posts and having fun. Well, what are you doing to celebrate some of these goal posts and give our listener an example or two of some goal posts that you've recently hit and what you did to celebrate those?

Yeah, it's a great one. Our biggest goalpost, I would say, is this studio that was traveling for a long time. We were chasing it for a long time. That is.

We've been talking about having a studio like this for probably eight years now. And we finally did it three months.

Ago, and we scored a spot that is way too big for us. So we kind of celebrated in that. I mean, obviously there were some opportunities with commercial real estate in open spaces. So we're like, okay, well, now's our time, I guess. So we chose it as a place to. The primary reason was, of course, to make content like this and use video content. And this is just like beta version of the studio. It's going to turn into way more. So the way that we celebrate is the fact that, like, how we show up here is a celebration. It's like a micro celebration every day in a way, when our heads are finally geared this way. It wasn't always like that when we moved in here, kind of. There is a lot of hiccups with this, but I'd say the celebrations are honestly the time of just chilling out and feeling like we're just hanging out and we have these conversations with no ending. Like, there's no container really, other than, like, this time we'll head back home, you know.

But, like, I also think we started to, like, celebrate the mini. The mini wins for us too. Right? Like, we've. We started doing a lot more stuff where it's like, you know what? We just did a live stream with X amount of people. That's awesome that we just did that. I mean, five years ago, we would have been looking at people doing these live streams going, one day we're going to be doing live streams to that many people. And we literally just did that an hour ago. High Five. And we'll put on music and, like, get California burritos.

Yeah.

We get ourselves all pumped up and excited. So I think we've done a much better job since. Especially since Joe and I are in the same place. Before he was working at his house, I was working at my house. We were kind of in a different location all the time. And the fact that we're in the same place, we've really started to celebrate the little stuff a lot more often because we're both right next to each other.

And I got a good one. Yeah. So we've established no worky Wednesdays. That's true. We don't really have a working title, but that's basically. Yeah. We take Wednesdays off from work. And when I say off, there's no calls that we're scheduled for, no meetings, nothing like that. And the day, it's almost like a mini weekend, and we're checking in, maybe clearing out some stuff in the morning. But what we've contained our work is to the other four days of the work week. And basically this is the day I spend with my daughter almost all day long. And I get to do that and kind of take my mind off of things. And you're doing all sorts of stuff. You consume a ton of content. But we chose to sell. This is a huge celebration, is because now we can let our mind off the hook kind of in the middle of the flow of everything. And it's allowed us to 80, 20, or even go deeper on the key actions that we should be taking. And it has us really focused in and dialed in or planned out in advance like we've never been before. Yeah. So it's. It's been great on the mind, I would say more than anything, that's the celebration.

And the productivity has been, like, huge, too. Like, condensing our work week down into four days.

It.

You know Parkinson's law.

Right.

You figure out how to get everything you want to get done done in those four days now instead of five days. And it's. And it feels like we have two Fridays. Every Tuesday, we're kind of leaving the office going, what are you doing this weekend? And same thing on Friday. Right. So, like, it feels like we have two ends of the week where we're kind of looking forward to not coming to the office and not getting any work done, just spending time with the family. So, yeah, that's. That's been a really big one, too.

Yeah. So. So let's take an example of a goal post where you hit maybe a Financial number or.

Some. Yeah, let's say, for example, find that okrs. Are you familiar with that term, objectives and key results?

I've heard of that.

Not the.

Okay, but you know, KPI's key performance indicators. So what would be an example of a KPI in your business? And what did you do when you hit that number in terms of celebrations and changing the way that you operated the business from that point forward?

That's a great question. I can think of a micro one and that's.

I think we had a promotion around Pod Hacker. So our newest training. And if we met, I forget exactly what the goal was, but after this promo, if we get this Mini, we're going to go buy a Mac Mini and some other tech for the studio. So that would allow us then to essentially walk into the studio, click a couple buttons and we have our studio ready to record content. And that used to be a friction point for us to do that kind of thing. That was a big piece of it. But specifically some of this equipment that we ended up buying, we're not like we couldn't buy them before, but I think we kept it as a goalpost, so it allowed us to kind of use it as motivation. And we know now our workflow is much smoother because of it. That's obviously a micro one. I don't know if there's another bigger one that comes out.

Yeah, I'm trying to think. I don't really feel like we celebrate numbers too much.

Like in our business with the goal post as being. I would say one was maybe in the email marketing side of things, like we. I don't know if that would actually count too much. Really Good question, Stefan. Did the Mac Mini, do you think.

That'S kind of answered that one counts? Is there a number that you want to or that you're willing to share with our listener in terms of a number you're very proud of, like hitting a certain number of email list subscribers or number of monthly downloads or number of downloads per episode or total downloads of all time or anything like that.

What lights you up.

Yeah, it's interesting because in our business we're not really the numbers guys, right? We've got our content manager who runs our podcast and YouTube channel. He's paying attention to the numbers there. And then we've got our email automation guy who pays attention to all the numbers there. And so we've kind of positioned ourselves in this place where our goal, our focus, our mind space is always on how do we create better content, how do we Create better content and we kind of just live in that world.

Engagement, I would say would be more the KPI and to be honest, I think that's where we're, we're still figuring out what that, how to measure that perfectly because engagements all over the platforms, they, they track it in different ways. But I mean our, our focus is really our audience. At the end of the day, that's our connection. You know, I'm more the connector and, and you are more the systems. But we're, we're looking at behavior patterns along the way so we know if the money's coming in, if the KPIs are looking good in terms of our email systems and our, yeah, our download numbers are like, I know we celebrate every basically 10,000, you know, leap I would say in downloads per month. Yeah, that's a big deal. Every time we go up by about.

10,000, we kind of make a big deal around it.

I would say that's like a mental like celebration or a goal post that we always have in mind. It's like these 10k increments and I would say email is probably right around maybe it's a little lower because we know we can do a lot with a little amount of people as well with segmentation. So yeah, I feel like the big.

Wins that we tend to celebrate are more around like, oh, we just, you know, we just got Robert Cialdini on the show. That's a big win for us. So we get, you know, it's interesting because we tend to, I feel like we get more lit up around things like that than we do numbers.

We're less at least for me. I know you are more analytical, but yeah, I guess the numbers specifically, I like perspective changes and the ability to kind of release the need to focus on something that might not be so natural for me or have a flow state kind of feeling attached to it. So that's why I won't naturally gravitate to doing some deep level systems or analytical type work. I want to be out there connecting and finding gaps or ways for us to do cool things with others or even think differently and not do as much and you know, open that time up and give value somehow else.

Yeah, yeah.

That's your unique ability. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So if we were to, let's say, take a book that's been pivotal for you rich dad, poor dad, and apply some of the learnings that you got from that to your business and how it's shaped your business today, what would be some of the key takeaways or.

Teaching points for our listener on that.

Yeah, yeah. When Rich Dad, Poor dad came out or not when it came out. When we read Rich Dad, Poor dad, when we discovered it, it came out long before we discovered it.

But when it.

When we discovered it, we were both working in day jobs. We kind of were on the rat waste nine to five, Monday through Friday. Like, that was kind of our world. So I think the reason Rich Dad, Poor dad, we both kind of talk about how impactful it was for us. It was more. It gave us this perspective shift that, this idea that, you know, you can go and actually create income outside of time constraints. You could, you can create an income stream that, that, that, that pays the bills and not have to work from nine to five or some, you know, some set of hours. I think it was really, our minds hadn't been open to those kinds of possibilities yet. Like we, it was just like a new world that opened up to us of like investing and passive income and being an entrepreneur. It just sort of opened our eyes to that kind of stuff. And we went, oh, this is something we can kind of get into.

And I would add on to that because the first thing that comes to mind is a specific takeaway is getting out of the hourly rate thing, period. And that might even be the CPM rate. It's almost like get out of the whole rate thing and maybe do more of a flat rate approach and get out of. You almost create your own way of quantifying your worth. And because we do that with our podcast sponsorships, we break out of the whole CPM rate there and earn dramatically more because we're bundling in different audience groups for our sponsorships is like an example of that. It's project work rather than doing hourly work for a client. Or it's creating a lot of income streams that are, you know, a lot of affiliate dominant. But also there's a lot of other, you know, like, sponsorship type things that are happening or partnership deals where I feel like there's not typically a rate associated with it. I think that was kind of like a mindset that at least I was stuck in for most of my life.

Yeah. One takeaway I got from that book many, many years ago when I read it, was that anything that puts money in your pocket as an asset, anything that takes money away out of your pocket is a liability, and therefore the house you live in is a liability, not an asset. And so many of your business quote unquote, assets are actually liabilities. Right. Pimp out your new laptop. So that it's the most extravagant laptop possible and it's not actually any more productive. Like my laptop that I have now, which is a M1 MacBook Pro, is as slow as my three year old MacBook Pro. That's intel based. That was top of the line back three years.

Really bought it.

It's just as slow.

Wow.

Very frustrating. So I pimped my expenses, to use a term, from Keith Cunningham or from rich dad, poor dad. It was a liability instead of an asset getting that, that new laptop. In retrospect, now, it's not to say that I wouldn't still buy it all over again because I do like having a brand new laptop, but at least I'm thinking about these sorts of things before I make a purchase. Is it an asset or is it a liability?

Thank you, Robert Kiyosaki, for that one.

Yeah, thank you.

Yeah. So what has been.

The greatest gift and the greatest struggle? Having.

Both of you as the business owners and the co hosts of the podcast and just.

It's a business marriage and it can go very badly. And you guys are wired differently. Matt is more of an introvert. Joe, you're more of an extrovert. And so.

What'S been on the positive side, a big win or a lesson. And then on the negative side, big struggle.

Yeah. So on the positive side, I feel like there's a yin and yang thing. Right. We shore each other up in the areas where the other one is not quite as strong. So when it comes to the business specifically, I'm much more, I'm much stronger with like the technical type stuff. Like I, I know a lot of the tools, the integrations, like what softwares to use, like what, how to do the tracking, the workflows, building a lot of systems, stuff like that. And so Joe kind of leans on me for a lot of that kind of stuff. But like you mentioned, I'm also a little bit more introverted. I like my, my natural tendency isn't to want to go to conferences or networking events or get on podcasts or do live streams or speak on stage or any of that kind of stuff. And Joe's kind of the first one that when the opportunities come along, he's like, yeah, let's go for it. It sounds like a good opportunity. So, you know, we kind of pull each other up in those two areas. Like he'll pull me up on stage with him and I'll systematize the heck out of what he's doing so that I make his. So his life's a little Bit easier. But we both kind of shore up those areas. And I think that's probably the biggest sort of positive. And it's not just those areas. Those are two examples of, like, there's a very yin and yang kind of thing going on where, like, my strengths are his weaknesses and vice versa.

Yeah. I would say the yin and yang thing is the biggest because we talked about this yesterday.

Actually, we were talking about it yesterday.

It's perfect timing because we. He's always. You know, we're supporting each other in our own ways. So yin and yang almost feel like there's like this tug and pull kind of thing always happening. You know, if it's something new, let's say if it's a new project or a new idea or a conference we're going to speak at, some are just like a hell, yes, let's do it. And other ones are just like, there's a debate happening. And I feel like now we know where our strengths lie and I know where. I'm not going to say I'm the best one to say. That's the way to go. So, like, if it's a systems thing or if it's a tracking thing or, like, yeah, all that tech stuff, maybe deeper strategy in terms of specifics, I just lean on Matt, but at the same time, I feel like what I'm. So you put a lot of containers, like, on our schedule. The whole reason we're not working Wednesday is really you. You know, but that's something I know we've wanted to do for a long time. So I think I wanted to put a lot of different ideas and connect things that might not be so visible in the current state. So it pushes both of us further. Like, I want to run and sprint, but Matt's kind of like, okay, hold on, let's put some. Figure out the right shoes to do that, you know, so we slow down, figure out, you know, like, pick. Okay, let's choose the tool and the time to do this, and then we kind of do that thing together.

Yeah.

So there's always that yin and yang happening.

Yeah.

It came from really understanding, I think, just a bunch of time. Like you said, a relationship.

Yeah. I mean, as far as the downsides, I feel like we've gotten pretty good at communicating with each other and, like, working together. And sort of, like a lot of times if I bring a question to Joe, I kind of already sort of know how he's going to answer and respond to it. And I'm pretty sure it's the same way the opposite way. Like, we just know each other's personalities now. So, like, if I piss off Joe, I probably did it on purpose because I know what buttons will piss off Joe. Right.

That's actually extremely accurate. That's funny. It could go the other way, too.

Yeah, it does. But I would say for the most.

Part.

We have a pretty good relationship that has very few cracks. Every once in a while there might be scenarios where like, I'm just exhausted from yesterday or Joe didn't get a lot of sleep and maybe one of us comes in a little bit grumpy. And that sort of, you know, that sort of brings down the energy of, like, the collective that happens from time to time. But I also think both of us are pretty good at snapping the other one out of it too.

Now. Now we are. Yeah. I think this whole resetting and this whole thing of this is going to be fun. Changing the mindset of this place that we're in and him and I being together and actually communicating not just through slack, because, like, I think that was like a point. I think communication has been the biggest thing to work through for both of us, but it's also understanding ourselves. So to, you know, we were talking about breakthroughs and stuff like that before the call. Like, I feel like this year has been a lot of that for us mentally and like, what we actually desire. So we know how far we should probably push it with each other. And then we already know how to talk with each other. So, you know, there's no reason in keeping us in the muck. Like, let's. Let's raise each other up and have fun with this whole thing.

Yeah. Cool. And you guys are 50, 50 partners?

We are, yep.

Yeah. Yeah. So that's high stakes sort of type of partnership because, boy, if you guys come to a disagreement that becomes untenable, it's just a fight to the death sort of situation. Unless somebody just voluntarily walks away, nobody has the upper hand.

And I think that's okay. Well, I mean, it's obviously, yeah, we can have all these crazy agreements and stuff and we have legal stuff out there all, you know, like, we're comfortable with each other, but at the same time, I don't know the way that we've. We've always supported each other, even outside of an official business, you know, our current business, we're 50, 50 partners. Anytime we've partnered up. We have been. But there are a lot of years still that we were just supporting each other on the side, you know, with our own endeavors, him doing Websites, me doing a lot more of the sales videos and consulting that way. And, you know, it's. It's kind of always felt like this. We always know where to show each other up. And I don't know, there's always. I feel like there's always going to be this sense of collaboration, no matter what happens. And, I mean, that's how our business is built anyway. We just collaborate with other people like yourself and. Excuse me.

Like, it's kind of like a. I.

Don'T know, I just feel like that's. Even if we did have to break up or something happened, we kind of have our lane and we still have that going along with it. And the style business would be pretty simple.

I don't feel like either of us feel trapped or anything like that.

I feel like, you know, both of.

Us are fairly confident in the longevity of the relationship, but we're also both fairly confident in that if we ever decided the path we're on, we can't. We can't agree on. We'd probably like. We're both the type that we'd probably come to some sort of amicable conclusion.

The whole thing. It's a good thing that neither of us are really, like, money hungry. Like, that's not the thing. It's not like business.

Yeah, I mean, that's probably very clear when you're like, you know, asking about numbers is that money is not really the motivation for us anymore. It's more motivated by, like, how do we. How do we enjoy what we're doing when we do come into the office, but then also, how do we make a lifestyle where we don't have to come into the office as often?

Yeah, no worky Wednesdays.

Yep, no worky Wednesday. Joe's trying to get that to catch on with me.

That's two days in a row I've mentioned it. So it's going out there.

It's kind of a thing. I think registered trademark is next.

That's right. I like it.

So how did you guys meet? Was it some sort of synchronicity? Some sort of.

Magic.

I don't know, introduction or something that made this happen.

Lit walk on the beach.

For sure. There probably have been some of those. But that wasn't the meeting.

No, it was. So we had a mutual. Still have this mutual friend, but my singer at the time, a guy named Cameron, I was in a band and I think he had a party and he was like, hey, you gotta meet my buddy Matt. He's into that kind of. I think we're into still like a little bit of business y type marketing.

Cameron was also a singer in a.

Band that I was in. And that's right.

So not at the same time, but like he was in a band with you as a singer. He's in a band with me as a singer at different times.

So yeah, that was the meeting, but it was like, I think that was a light meeting. And then I was working at a famous footwear. So Hawkins Shoes. And then his mom came in the door and I helped her out and she introduced herself as like, hey, I'm Matt's mom. And I was like, okay, great. Great to meet you. And I guess she really liked me there. I helped her out and she was like, yeah, you should work for us. Yeah, like, huh, okay, that's probably better than this. And chatted with them and essentially it was working with them. That's where we became really closest friends.

Yeah. Yeah, we worked at a shutter company. It was actually the family business. I kind of ran the factory side of things and Joe kind of ran the front office side of things. And yeah, we got like, we were kind of acquaintances through that buddy Cameron. But that's where we like really kind of got to be buddies and partners during that time. So in 2007 was when we actually, I think, I don't know if we had just read like the four hour Workweek or something like that. And we went, you know what, we should start a blog. Like, it might not make money, but.

At least like, we could teach all.

This Internet marketing stuff that we're learning along the way.

We're just nerding out reading forums of the times and what were some of that. We were reading Lifehacker, Lifehacker, the Remit.

Cities, I'll teach you to be Rich, Shoe Money. We were in the warrior forum a lot at the time.

It was kind of that blend. So I think that that really put a lot of seeds in our minds. And a lot of those folks we still, you know, like, we follow, we still read their stuff. Some of them we've had on the podcast, like Michael Gerber when we read the emyth. We've had him on the podcast. And it's really cool now to actually have some of these legends that helped us, you know, bring ourselves up and. Yeah, very cool. That's our.

That's our meeting.

Yeah.

Have you had Robert Kiyosaki on?

We've actually had a couple people offer to introduce him to us, but it's never actually happened yet.

So.

It will happen. It just hasn't yet.

That's right. Putting it out there in the vortex.

It's in your vortex.

It's always in there. Oh, we got it.

My man. Awesome.

And thank you so much for everything you've always done to help us too, bringing some of these legends to our front door.

Yeah, of course, of course. Now, Joe, you had a baby not long ago or your wife did, more technically correct.

She did.

That's a good correction. 20 months ago.

Yeah, 20 months ago. So ours is 22 months. So that was pretty similar time frame. And I just wanted to throw this out there especially for any parent listening, not just for Joe and Matt. Are you a parent too?

I am.

I have an eight and a six year old.

Okay. So more relevant for the really young ones. I interviewed Janet Doman recently on this podcast. She is phenomenal. She runs the Institutes for the Advancement of human potential. IAHP. So it's IAHP.org and what I learned from her is how to multiply your baby's intelligence or in this case, toddlers. Because I'm not quite a baby anymore. And like today, for example, I was going through hundreds of cards with my little David. Everything from dinosaurs to.

Leaves to plants and mammals and reptiles and polygon and everything. And everything.

Yeah.

And he is so adept at identifying things. So you have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of these cards. And so that is just one concept that I learned from Janet, taking her and her team's 40 hour course, which was just gifted to us. It was an amazing, amazing blessing. Came out of nowhere for us and for our little one. So check out that episode with Janet Doman because we go into more detail on some of the stuff you teach your baby how to read. You can teach your baby to do math. And it is, it's a game changer. It's a game changer.

I'm worried how advanced we can make these babies before they're. No, I'm just kidding. I love that because we're. Yeah, we have. The babies are going to take the world.

Yeah.

I mean we already have our, our little one, McKenna in preschool because she's. Yeah, she was pushing for that whole. She's definitely advanced, like, and she needs some social time. And it's, it's crazy. The difference so far just with that and like the way they're doing things through Montessori schools. It's a Montessori school, so it's a different way of teaching and all that. But yeah, I'll check out Janet's episode. I love all that stuff, man. Thank You.

You bet. Yeah. So Montessori, Waldorf or Steiner philosophy? These are fantastic alternative approaches to educating your child. And I have three adult daughters who went to Waldorf school when they were kids and that was fabulous. And Montessori is great too. They're different, but both really great alternative.

Types of programs for teaching. But.

This program that I took with IAHP and Janet is other level, so definitely check it out.

Perfect. Will do.

Yeah. So let's talk about how to.

Enjoy the journey in.

More. Let me rephrase that. So let's talk about lessons and opportunities missed in the journey. So we've talked about celebration and making the journey feel more fun and exciting and positive as you're going through it. But what about all those missed opportunities? What about the screw ups? What about the broken relationships and all the things that didn't go well?

Challenges that have been.

Very difficult. So what do you tell our listener about how to enjoy or relish or gain value from these things, even if they're really, really painful and awful?

Yeah, let me see. Kind of thinking about some context here. Well, for some reason, the very first thing that comes to mind in terms of our business.

I wouldn't say it's awful, but it was definitely a learning lesson. Is that Startup Toggly that we were.

A part of, We've had so many like that too.

I know, but that one was the first where we actually had investors attached to it and we saw what happens when it's not our money and it's not like it was like horrible or anything, but we just started to. This was how many years ago? Like six, seven.

This would have been about 2012, 2013, somewhere in that range.

It was pretty early on in our entrepreneurial career where I don't think we understood enough principles that would help us probably navigate that. Like now we would not join it, but back then we're excited. Shiny object like, oh, we can be an investor or a founder. Yeah, Founder, equity holder of this company that's backed by people in Sony and, and all these other. It was a photography based company and yeah, I don't know that one comes to mind as one that was brand new. But it was this big lesson and we ended up actually bailing out of it and we were friends with the founder and we were able to basically buy back our shares and release our requirements there because we.

Other way around. We sold our share.

Oh, we sold our share. Yeah, there you go. Wasn't a lot of money, but still we're like, you know what, let's Just get this. It's almost like this energetic pole that was just sucking our resources and taking away from our own business.

Yeah. Well, I would say, like, the more macro of what you're saying, too, is that we have had a tendency over the years to simplify our business. Right. We'll systematize our business. We'll take things off our plate, we'll make our lives easier, and then we'll notice.

We'Ve got some gaps. Right. Right now we've got. What do you call it, week? Wednesday. No, working Wednesday.

Right.

So it's like we've got this gap and opportunities would present themselves and we go, we got a little bit of time. I mean, we can. We can take on another opportunity. And then we add stuff into the mix and, you know, next thing we know, we're. We're spinning multiple plates going, we've got too much on our plate. Again, why are we so stressed out all of the time? And it's because, like, whenever we create free space, we tend to find ways to fill that free space with new opportunities. We've done it with Toggley back in the day. We did it with a site, Homebrew Academy, which was a site about how to brew beer.

We've done it with a couple of.

SaaS companies that we were in for a little while and then realized, okay, this is taking up way too much time. And then we backed out on these various SaaS companies. They're still SaaS companies that sell right now. So I don't really want to talk too much about them, but, yeah, I think that's one of the things that we tend to do is we tend to create space, create systems, make our life easier, and then fill those gaps after we've created them. And I think that's something we've gotten better at doing. I mean, within the last six months or so, it's. It's kind of a fairly new realization, but.

But it's the first time we've had this realization as well. Yeah, it's been. It's. Now we see it that we do this kind of ebb and flow thing. You know, I think it's the pull back to our personalities again. You know, like, if it was up to Matt, he'd probably just blog and have affiliate marketing products around the whole thing. Probably go on email list. Yeah, yeah, like.

But it sounds a bit like Parkinson's Law. So you free up some time, you build some systems, and like, oh, I guess we can fill some of that space. Yeah, right.

100%.

That's it, and that's not workable because then you get to overwhelm and stress and discomfort, and you gotta pull back.

I feel like we've gotten really good lately at pretty much saying no to opportunities, even when they look like really good opportunities, so many times.

That's very good. That's discernment, and that's very important.

I will add one more thing, and this is a belief that we've talked about quite a bit, but this guy Ryan Berman, that we had on the show recently, I think articulated it really well, is that.

For the longest time, we were trying to figure out what our North Star was. Where are we trying to go? What is the goalpost we're shooting for now? What is the next big thing that we want to achieve? And we're constantly trying to achieve this North Star. And when you get close to that North Star, you go, we could push a little harder. And you push the goalpost out, and then you get closer to that goalpost, and you don't actually reach the goalpost, but you see more potential. You push the goalpost out further.

Right.

And we're constantly trying to find this North Star, and then we're trying to push that North Star even out further. And I think the solution, the reality is that the North Star is like this internal thing. The North Star.

Is the contentment in today. The North Star is going, okay, that might be what we're striving for, but I'm happy with what I get to do today. I'm happy with the stuff I'm gonna do when I get to the office today. I'm gonna have a good day. It's gonna be fun. I'm gonna look back at today and go, that was a good day. And the North Star has become. Having more of those days and less of this thing in the future, that's.

Like being in the present moment.

That's a really good idea.

So tough, man. Yeah, yeah.

Let's circle back to this idea of curating people, tools and ideas.

Sure.

So how are you so good at it? Is it that you're tuning into your intuition? Is it that you have a big network and you just sit back and wait for things to show up from that network or doing a lot of hard slog or what?

I think it's really a blend of our two personalities and our two strengths. So, like, for me, I kind of keep my finger on the pulse of the latest tools and software and tech. Because I'm a systems guy. I want to know how to make my life Easier. I want to find shortcuts for the stuff I'm already doing. I'm constantly looking for systems and ways to make the things I'm already doing easier. And so that's kind of the world that I live in. I'm watching YouTube videos, reading blogs, reading books, listening to podcasts. Like, I kind of stay immersed in that world of, like, kind of tools and technology and systems and things like that, where Joe is really like, the connector. Like, he's just constantly meeting new people, getting on calls with people every day, asking for introductions. You know, like, that's kind of the world that he always lives in. So I feel like what we've actually created is just kind of the marriage of those two worlds.

I would say it's accurate. Yeah, that's pretty much it. And I think we plant a lot of seeds because we genuinely want to work together and hang out with the people that we like, you know, and the people that we. A lot of our friends are folks that have crossed through our podcast. You know, they're. They're our email partners now, have become good friends of ours. They actually came through our podcast. I feel like there's a lot of just connected things that have happened over the years that, you know, and you have been so amazing, too, as to introducing us to many people. And you and I met, I think it was back at Think tank, you know, DK's event, David Klein. I don't know what year that was.

But like, 2010 or something.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, that was very early on in what I was doing, but, you know, I was working with key people like dk. But from that point, you know, I met guys like Mike Koenigs, Amish Shah, and those two people alone, like, Dan Ryan. Dan Ryan. Yeah. And like, all three of those people I think I've chatted with this week. And there's still great referral partners. We do business together. There's. But that was planted. Yeah. Over 10 years ago now. So I think just a lot of that has happened on my part. Yeah, you're always so up on all the content. What's fresh right now?

Well, and we've both had. We've both had this kind of, like, personality trait of, like, we love to show off what we think is cool. Like, the way I've always been my whole life is I would get, like, a new gadget, and I would want to tell everybody about it. I'd be like. I'd get a new camera, and I'd tell, like, my parents and my friends and I'd be like, dude, this is the coolest thing. Check out what I could do. And let me. Let me show you this button. Did you see what this would do? And then, like, I would get, like, a brand new game and I would. And I would be like the evangelist for that video game. I would tell all my friends, you got to get this game. This is the coolest thing. Everybody's got to check this out. I've always been that person that, like, when I discover something that's really cool for me, I want everybody to experience the same joy that I'm getting out of it. So I just naturally want to tell everybody about it. And I feel like we've built a business that just puts structure around that.

Well, you know, it's funny, you're making me remember myself now because just like, over the last handful of years, and I don't know if it's become more of the podcast, but I think it's always been. I always like to teach people about new things I've learned. For me, it's not as much techie. It's like, hey, check out this. I don't know, maybe it's like a breathing meditation that's doing this, like, holy crap, this thing. Maybe you got to check that thing out or I'll nerd off on some topic about. I don't know, maybe there's some investment stuff talking about different structures that you do stuff. And I think just, yeah, that's a natural thing that you and I both just love to do. And it comes out through the podcast as our main vehicle. And I think our. Both of us, we reframe this. The curator concept actually popped in both of our minds around the same time separately, weird enough. And that's where we're like, oh, like, our podcast is just a curation of the best minds that are in our network are ones that we're seeking who we want to display or maybe a new tool or something that we want to curate, something novel that we know our people are going to like, and it's going to create a better experience, a life for entrepreneurs. I feel like that's really what we're after, is to curate what is going to make the entrepreneur like us. Ten years ago, what would we have wanted to know or who would we would want as a legend to pull us up or bring us up to where we're at now and beyond and be happy to enjoy the journey along the way? I feel like that's what we're trying to get across in our podcast. As it stands now and into the future. Yeah.

It's like we want to share the joy that we find in the things that bring us joy. So something might bring us joy, like a new conversation. Like, this person's really fascinating. We got to tell the world about this person. Right. I feel like there's a handful of people we brought on the podcast that nobody knew who they were. We brought them on the podcast, we helped give them a little bit of a platform, and then they did a lot of the work themselves beyond that. But, you know, they went on to do an amazing spark, and, you know, like, I feel like that's what we like doing with tools, with people with new ideas and concepts, all of that kind of stuff. We're just like, this thing brings me joy. Like, this makes me really excited. I really like this thing. How do I make sure other people know about this? You know, so, like, when people come to us and say, you know, you guys are really good at affiliate marketing, what's your trick? That's the trick right there is like, loving the stuff you're talking about.

Yeah. Yeah. That reminds me of the book the Life Changing Magic of Tidying up by Marie Kondo and how the concept is, if it doesn't spark joy, get rid of it. Now, that applies to books and knickknacks and everything else, but it also applies, I think, to relationships and to where you put your time and attention in the work world that so many aspects of life could apply this spark joy concept to. So that's one thing that I thought one book and concept, and another, as you were talking, both of you, was the Tipping Point, the book by Malcolm Gladwell and how he describes mavens, connectors and salespeople. And to me, clearly, Joe, you're a connector, and to me, Matt, you're clearly a maven.

I don't know if you. Have you guys read that book?

I've actually never read the Tipping Point. I've heard about it a million times, and I feel like it should be in the list of books I've read, but it's one I've never actually done.

Yes. That is absolutely crazy. Yeah.

No, I don't.

I don't know as well. And that's why I was just writing these down. I was like, okay, I need to dive in because I think you have a really good intuitive sense as well stuff, you know, just from hearing this.

Yeah. So I would check that out. And if you don't have time to read the book, just get the Kindle version and Search for the phrase sales.

No maven. And then connector.

Yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah.

There's a whole section about that in the book. Another thing that. This sounds a little crazy, but it actually works. You don't have to read an entire book. You can just grab it and with an intention, like, connect to above, right? To the higher realms, to the Creator and to the fabric of creation. Just open the book with that intention to get whatever I'm meant to get. And it has blown me away time after time, what I get by just randomly and I'm using air quotes. Opening a book up to some spot and just finding exactly the thing I needed or for somebody that I was talking to, family member, whatever, like, wow, you really are in a situation here. Let's see what we can find as some guidance. And I'll grab a book, like a Deepak Chopra book, or that person will have that book handy, and then I'll ask them to open it randomly, and it'll be like, bam. Exactly what they needed to hear or read.

Yeah.

It's so powerful.

That's cool. So it's just. You just pick it up and essentially take it all in and connect and essentially what? Randomly open it up and boom. Yeah, okay.

I like.

You could do that with a course even. You could do that with anything where you're needing to learn something and you're like, I am too overwhelmed to go through this entire piece of content.

Yeah, yeah, that's my style. I mean, I'm in for that. I'll try.

I never finish books. Very rarely 1 out of 50 books will I actually finish, But I get what I need out of them almost every time.

That's a beautiful thing. And then maybe this is me in my brain is like, yeah, for a lot of times, I beat myself up over not completing books, but I'm like, man, if. Yeah, I've taken your approach. I'm like, man, I've cranked through so many books, it's ridiculous. Got to give myself a little bit.

More credit there and know that your higher self is, you know, helping you to circle back and get to the things that you missed because you just happen to miss them, Right? So if it's something that you really needed to get from that particular book and you didn't get all the way through it, and you just randomly got bits, but it's not random. Of course, nothing's random. Then your higher self is going to nudge you or, you know, the creator, get you to go back and get that thing that you missed.

Yeah, yeah. It's gonna be there and I'm gonna know where to seek or know where to pay attention to when it does show up right in front of me again. Yeah.

And I love, by the way, Joe, you mentioned a breathing meditation. Because I'm getting into breathing myself more. I mean, breathing is kind of what you have to do to live.

I love it. Yeah, I'm getting into breathing.

Yeah, I'm totally. I'm totally into getting consuming calories and to breathing air. Like. Okay, yeah, right. No, but the WIM HOF breathing method that I've been doing multiple times a week, I'd like to get to the point where I'm doing it daily. It is amazing. Have you ever tried it?

Oh, it's a game changer. I've been doing that for. Well, that's what got me on this, I think love affair of breath work is him. Yeah, The Iceman. So we've yet to bring him on the podcast. He's scared or his team is scared of the marketing approach. So I've been in touch with him and we're trying to get him. So let's see. But yeah, he is absolutely amazing. And that was like five years ago, I think six years ago or so. I stumbled across him and he's blown up ever since in terms of popularity. So it's great. It can be aggressive for some people. I've seen that kind of almost like bring on almost reactions in bodies that are almost too much for people to handle. So, yeah, when doing it, it's like you said, kind of easing into it. The way that I use WIM HOF is if I. My body, if I need to ramp up, you know, if I feel like I'm just kind of sluggish and just out of it, that's. That's a good, you know, hey, pump a lot of energy into my body and kind of chills everything out at the same time. It's this cool flow state. Happens.

Yeah.

One more I'll recommend, and this is a. It's actually someone I connected with a long time ago and just happened to stumble upon his stuff, but now he's kind of blowing up in the breath workspace is called Soma Breathing S O M A Breathing. And you can find it on YouTube. Tons of cool things. It's a mixture of some. You could use it as a visualization thing. I don't. But there's a. It's. It times up breathing with musics and music and beats. So you're actually breathing to the beat of a music, you know, so it's like four beats of a music in a music, a song, and then. And then eight beats out. So, like, that exhalation is the part that really chills you out. So if you're ever feeling anxious or pent up, like, an easy method is just. Yeah, breathe in four beats and out eight. And soma breathing, it's really cool. You could do them for two different reasons. The WIM HOF is cool for a lot of stuff, and then the soma one is like, you just apply it, and it's almost like you could walk around with earbuds in if you wanted to, and no one would ever know you're doing breath work. And you're just kind of keeping to this rhythm and keeping your mind and body in a good spot.

Very cool. Very cool. So are you familiar with the book Breath by James Nestor?

Nestor.

Yeah.

Yeah. That's a good one. That opens your eyes to oxygen.

Very, very important book to read.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. He would be one. He would be a great one for the podcast. See, it's like people like that who can apply, like, okay, let's talk about how things that we might take for granted or not apply to business and marketing. And then like, hey, let's use this as a tool as everything is. You know, if you apply it that.

Way, that's a wrap.

That's a wrap.

Almost.

Except for this outro.

Yes, exactly.

We promise to have a lot more goods for you as well. Should we get some love for easy webinar really fast?

You just want to go straight to the easy webinar love.

Just a little. Just a little love to give them some love. Why the heck not?

Let's do it.

I mean, hey, well, you know, easy webinar, we always kind of reserve that after our little banter. We'll keep it quick, but, like, hold on with us, because we got some cool stuff for you in a minute. Easy Webinar, that's our jam when it comes to webinars. It is not easys. It's easy with a webinar, you know? Yeah, just.

I mean, I have a list of things that are easy, and then I put webinars on the list because I have. Easy webinar.

Right, yeah, it helps. So easy webinar does everything it says it does. It makes everything about webinars easy.

Yeah. Does the lives, the automateds, the hybrids, automateds, the lives, say the lives twice the pages.

There's a lot of different types of lives you could do, though.

You can.

You could live streams, you can have.

Like four or five, like a zoom room type thing. That's kind of cool. I know you said your kids have used it before. So it's a widespread technology that's trusted.

By educators, and their landing pages look really good. And you can have people schedule what time they want to view your webinar and make it convenient for your customer or your.

All that's to say is if you're ever thinking about using webinars or if you're using webinars right now and you're not using easy webinar, you're obviously not using using the easiest solution. You just like working hard for maybe, huh?

It's got funky easy in the name, which you know is saying something.

They're hooking you up with a fatty discount. So go over to EasyWebinar.com hustle and you will get a fat. A substantial discount. Yeah, it's actually. Yeah. It's worth checking out the page because there's a lot of other things you'll learn about easy webinar that you're not learning right now. So easywebinar.com hustle. We'll hook you up. And also the action guides of this.

Episode we talked about a lot. Yeah.

Flowchart group.com Stefan extracted interesting things from our minds. We were not expecting to go there.

Nope.

But I think there was some intangible things. Huh?

Yeah.

But we went there.

So. Flowchart group.com flowchartgroup.com what do they do there, Matt?

Go to Flowchart Group.

They're staring at me awkwardly.

I thought you were gonna finish the call to action. But I'll finish it.

Please do.

If you go to flowchartgroup.com youm, you can join our Facebook group. And when you join our Facebook group, we'll ask you for your email. If you give us that email, we'll hook you up with the action guide.

We would greatly appreciate the email, but I'm pretty sure you'd greatly appreciate the notes.

Yeah, it's a fair trade, I think.

So.

Flowchartgroup.com come on. So let's talk about the thing we just talked about.

We talked about things. This was an interesting turn of events that this became our own episode. Yes, it was, but thank you, Stefan. And again, his marketing speak podcast is obviously a lot about marketing. But then he has Get Yourself Optimized as well. Well, it's just called Get Yourself optimized podcast. And those are his two shows. Go check them out.

And he's also got a YouTube channel at Stefan Spencer. You search up Stefan Spencer and you'll find his YouTube channel. I don't know the URL to his YouTube channel. Yeah, but it's Stefan Spencer. You'll find it. But, yeah, if you're just jumping in later, you skip the intro. You're obviously not jumping in at the outro, but if you skipped the intro. Basically what we're doing, what we did with this episode was we were interviewed for Stefan Spencer's podcast, and then there was a little tech glitch, and we weren't able to actually use that audio for his podcast. So we said, hey, can we share that audio on our podcast? Because we really, really enjoyed the conversation. We love the questions you asked. And so he graciously gave us the audio, and we turned that into a podcast that you get to hear. Cause it was never gonna get heard otherwise. And we actually really liked it. We actually really liked what came out in that conversation. So we wanted to make sure we shared it with you. For sure.

Yeah. I mean, I don't. I don't know. We talked about a lot.

And honestly, we're recording this, you know.

Maybe 30 minutes after.

Yeah, Already.

I'm.

At least.

Yeah, yeah, Already Kind of forgot a little about some of these. But I know, like, a big thing that has recently been, you know, something we've been thinking about is kind of like. Yeah. Celebrating the stuff in the now along with our journey, you know, and, like, the whole fun experience, like, creating fun experiences throughout everything. You know, we talked about blocking off fun and, like, looking at actions that we're taking. And I feel like it's a lot of stuff we've chatted about here on the show before, but I think that it's crystallizing even more so of how you can really engineer this.

If I'm honest, I feel like on that call, you and I sort of, like, worked out some stuff, Right?

Like what?

Like what?

Well, no, like, I think there was some stuff on the call where we were almost, like, coming to realizations as he was asking the questions. True, Right. So, like. So, I mean, it's stuff that we've talked about, but I feel like there's stuff that we kind of further solidified during the conversation. Like when we were talking about how we're curators, he kind of dug in on that, and we kind of got deeper and deeper to the root of what makes us curators. Right. Like, we got kind of to the root of the fact that, like, I've always kind of paid a lot of attention to the tech world. And what's going on in, like, the technology space. And you're kind of a connector, and you've kind of always kept your finger on the pulse of the who, and I've kept my finger on the pulse of, like, the what kind of stuff.

Yeah, that's true.

You know, and so we kind of uncovered that sort of thing on the episode and went, okay, well, that's kind of why the curation model makes the most sense. It's like, we knew the curation model made sense for us, but I think we almost kind of, like, uprooted the why that works for us on that episode.

The who, what, why all came out. But, Matt, I'm sorry to say, unfortunately for you, they wrote a book already. Dan Sullivan wrote a book. Who not what.

Who, not what. Yeah.

Or who not how. Who not how.

Yeah.

Damn it. I was trying to think it was the what. You're the what guy.

Yeah, it's who not how.

Yeah. All right. My brain misfired. Bummer trying to get you.

It happens.

No, a lot. But what? How? Yeah, yeah, no, it does. Or the why. The Y. But basically. Okay, damn it. That reference failed.

Yeah. It doesn't matter.

But, yeah, he.

There was an attempt.

He extracted some stuff. You're right. I think he did, like, extract these details and nuances that we might have taken for granted, you know, with our personalities and, like, the stuff that we're interested in and how we push each other in different directions, where it's like a. You know, it's a yin and yang thing. We're talking about this a lot yesterday, like, not on a podcast anywhere, but of how. Yeah, it's. It's like we're rooted in. I feel like some of the best. It's. It's rooted in our best selves separately. But when we realize that we are working together in this, like, this thing that's constantly ebbing and flowing is. But. But listening to, like, the systems and the constraints that you might put on things, but how we can optimize those things and maybe make them run smoother and add a couple things that are gonna be automated to that or whatever it is. That compliment, I feel like that's how we've naturally grown. And I don't know. I guess we're realizing a lot more of the details than ever before.

Yeah. Well, I also think it's interesting, too, because he was sort of asking about numbers and stuff, right? Like, what are the KPIs, what are the milestones we were going for? And it was kind of Interesting in the moment because back in the day, let's just say four or five years ago, we would have been really hung up on numbers, right? We would have been watching numbers like a hawk and going, okay, once we hit this number then cool, we've, we've made it or we're going to buy this thing or we're going to do this thing or whatever. Right. Like, we were very focused on numbers and KPIs. And I feel like over time our business has shifted to like, less about the numbers and more about like kind of how our business makes us feel internally, like how we enjoy our business, how we, how we figure out how to do our day to day stuff, but also monetize doing the stuff we want to be doing. And so over time, I feel like we've had this shift and I'm not saying this is a good or a bad thing, I'm not saying everybody should stop paying attention to numbers or anything, but I feel like we've had this shift where we've prioritized the sort of lifestyle and we've prioritized the enjoyment, we've prioritized the sort of inner portion of it more so than we've prioritized the numbers.

Yeah. And I think that's probably the best way to put it is that the priorities have shifted because we're, I mean numbers obviously are important because, you know, to an extent. But yeah, it doesn't. That's not our, that's not our mile marker. Like our goals aren't set in numbers. And yeah, as before, you know, it's. I think we've had a realization that like. Yeah, like for me personally, I think the realization I showed to you yesterday is my mind always had this, like, what's my next goal? What's the next place I want to move to? What's the next thing? The car I want to get or not like I get. Well, I mean, I cycle. So I've had the habit over the years of basically cycling through a new residence every three years or so. And it's like I'm already at that point in the house that I own now. And I'm like, wait, hold on. But I like this house a lot. But my brain's telling me I need to be searching for the next big like thing that I should upgrade my life to for some reason. But it's like, yeah, but that's not, it doesn't need to be in the.

Form of another house.

Yeah, it could be in the form of just optimizing what I Got and really appreciating it. And I know Stefan said it on there, it's like, oh, focus on the presence.

Like.

Yeah. And it's so damn hard sometimes, especially when you have a business that's driven by numbers. Yeah. I mean, like, because to your point, it's true. I feel like we prioritize that big time. But then the numbers are 100% things that, like, you know, we are still looking at all the time, obviously, and they're extremely important. But it's cool, is that we have the KPIs for, like, Joe Kearns, and the team.

Is working all these different. And I say the team, Mike, Joe and Mike, but they have KPIs. We have our team, sue and Jacob, the internal content team and support team. They're looking at their numbers and reporting back to us with certain things, which keeps us all in the loop. And.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's been working out better that way. I felt like when we obsessed over the numbers. Yeah. Maybe it was just like this kind of anxiety would kind of linger there because we'd feel like we always got to like, okay, it's like a sprint all the time to hit that target. But it's like, I don't know. I just feel like now with the systems and the right people that we are hitting the targets and we're not so stressed with, like, I guess, growth to the next big, big move.

Yeah, yeah. No, I think. I think we're like, it's not like.

Say, I guess it's not like we.

Don'T want to keep growing and get the business bigger and make more and more and more money and all that kind of stuff. Like what you're talking about lifestyle creep of like, as you make more money, you get. You get a bigger house, you buy, you know, nicer cars, you start buying new computers, new gadgets. Next thing you know, like, the cost to run your life. You still have very month. The same amount of money left over at the end of the month because your lifestyle went up with the income.

Not in habit, at least. Yeah.

And I feel like just in our business in general, we've kind of. It's not really lifestyle creep, but like the business, we've kind of let it stop creeping in the sense of, like, we're not looking for more new. More opportunities to pursue. In fact, we're actively, like, trying to repel ourselves from talking about that on. We did talk about that. Yeah. It's like opportunity creep is no longer a thing for us. We're not letting more stuff Creep in unless it really, really makes sense. And it's not going to super negatively impact our day to day and the lifestyle that we've created for ourselves.

We have like hard, we have constraints on very key things now and we don't let. Yeah. And I think that does shut down our brain to a lot of the things that we were just letting creep in. Yeah. And it would occupy our mind space and take our minds off of things like the numbers.

Because the things when we look at.

The numbers, that's when you and I are getting together in a few focus time to really study these things. It might be in our team meetings or looking at the analytics when they send them over or chatting with Joe Kearns and Mike and you know, about very specific things. But we know the categories that we're looking at and the drivers. Like, you know, we see the downloads on all of our, like the engagement on the channels that we're talking about. Like we know that that's the input of new people or people keeping attention on us.

Yeah.

Email list, growth, engagement rate there. And it's like all that's going to have the effect of, of revenue and other things. And obviously we optimize conversions and things like that. But it's not like we have to constantly be stressing over the numbers. Nah.

Yeah. Naval Ravikant has a quote and I'm gonna butcher the quote. I don't know the exact word for word quote, but he has a quote that something to the effect of don't set goals, build systems. Because if you're setting goals and you're saying that.

This is the goal I'm trying to achieve, I'm trying to get to a half a million dollars by.

The end of the year.

That's the goal I'm trying to achieve. Well, if you achieve it, you're probably going to move the goalpost and want more than that. If you don't achieve it, you're going to beat yourself up for not having achieved the goal.

Right.

But if you create systems that every day you're moving a little bit closer to the goal, you're less concerned about actually getting to the goal. Your main concern is creating the system that makes this thing happen. So don't really worry about setting a goal way out into the future. Create a system now that's gonna get you to where you wanna get and ideally you'll even surpass it.

You're creating your journey, basically.

Yeah.

And you're creating other mechanisms to help you, you know, shore up your journey or make that lifestyle Possible for you along that way.

Yeah. So, like, when. When Stefan was kind of digging in on, like, the numbers, the KPIs, the systems, I think in my head, I'm kind of thinking to myself, like, there's not a specific number we're shooting for. And even for the past several months, there wasn't a specific number we were trying to get to that we were happy when we get it. Instead, our brains are kind of focused on what system can we create that's going to make our life easier? What system can we create that's going to add a recurring revenue stream to our business every month? What system can we create that's going to make sure that the email list keeps on growing so we have a market to promote to? Like, we're very focused on, like, the things that we do that can be systematized. And we're not focused at all on the. Like, we're shooting to get to $100,000 a month. No, we're focused on, like, if we add this element to our business, this piece to our business, our business is just going to forever be, on this point, be a little bit bigger than it was before.

Well, this should be a. I feel like this should be a tease. This episode's a tease of the next one we'll do about our takeaways of the. The Psychology of Money.

Yeah. Which was actually supposed to be out.

Yeah.

Today's episode. But this episode made, I think, more sense in a sequential fashion.

So, yeah.

Especially with, like, what's been going on in our lives and our business and the Psychology of Money. I mean, there was a lot of elements that, like, moving the goalposts and things like that we've hinted at already here. But yeah, man. I mean, that thing, I think that book, along with some of the other mentals, like what talking with Angelo Cisco, we had on a few weeks back, a couple weeks back, doing training with the Alpha Hippie crew. Like, we're going.

That episode's come out by now. I'm not sure now that we're recording the schedule that we're on, it gets confusing for us to know whether episodes have been out yet or not.

But. Okay, so if it's out or whatever. Yeah, there is a new one. There's an older episode. But yeah, the mention is, like, we've been doing a lot of work with them as well. And I think it's just like a really cool time right now where we're having a lot of aha. Moments where we kind of can just like, let the Let go of a lot of crap that just doesn't serve. And I say crap in, like, the, I guess, the nicest way, but I feel like at the same time, it's like, man, there's just. We all experience a lot of noise and without the right filters and without the right mindset, set up partners, understanding of each other, communication, all this stuff. Like, it's so easy to just kind of just get caught up in it all.

Yeah.

And then you quickly go like, oh, what the hell am I doing now? I don't know. So. Yeah, it's cool. So wealth about. Oh, and that's the thing.

The.

The Psychology of Money book, I think, is really rooted in having enough. And that's where we've reached, I think, in this business now is prioritizing lifestyle and that and optimizing for the future.

And having enough doesn't necessarily mean, like, you're not going to gladly accept more. We're still building. We're still growing this thing. Yeah. We're still on a rock.

When I say having enough is like, okay, now, the gains, the increases are invested in many other ways in our life.

Yeah.

And it's not always. It's monetarily as well, but it's also investing in relationships with our family. I know we're like, hanging out with our family much more because we're engineering that, like on Wednesdays and on the weekends, like, there's not a lot of. Or any work creep, really, on those days. And even the other days of the week, like, we're actively trying to shorten those, too.

Yeah.

So I think that it's like there's wealth being built all over the place for us.

Yeah.

But it's. It's been a, I guess a different approach. So next time we chat about the Psychology of Money. Yeah. We'll go deeper on that.

Yeah. If you're a really fast reader, go grab that book before next week's episode and you can follow along. Yeah.

Pretty sure it's like, what, audible? I think it was like six hours or something like that.

I mean, I read the Kindle version and I think I read it and two, maybe three sittings.

Yeah.

So maybe three sittings of like an hour and a half each or so.

Yeah, I guess. I think it's short. If it's an audio, I mean, that's pretty damn short. But yeah, I mean, it's 200 pages.

It's not a long book.

That's true. So get the book. Psychology of Money is a great one.

And we'll talk about it more in the next episode. Yes, but spoiler alert, we're going to recommend it.

No.

Worst book ever.

What else? Anything else?

Nope.

Missed anything.

That's it. Go. Leave us a review.

Love to read some.

Yeah, we'd love to read some, but.

I don't.

It's either Chartable or Apple's not report. I've tried to log in other countries. You know, we tried to go to Australia. I know we have a bunch of reviews there in the uk.

We need to just pay for Chartable again.

I think it's like 50 bucks or something. Okay, well, there you go. So sorry. Sorry.

If you have Chartable used to give us that information for free and apparently now you have to pay to get it.

Okay, so they're changing stuff on us so we don't have a review prepared, but we'd love to read yours if you post one. Yeah, and we would gladly appreciate if you shared it around to your friend or your fellows.

And one last reminder.

Yes, Flowchart group dot com. Ah, that's a good spot to be community notes. You can pick Matt's brain and ask him anything. He'll he's required to give you an answer. The correct answer, that is, or the.

Answer of I. I.

How do you type that out? Like what? How do you spell that?

I, space, U, N, N, O. I unknow.

Uno.

I unknow.

I unknow.

Yeah.

Okay, cool. It's like that. That should be the title of this episode.

I don't know.

It's going to light up. Everyone's got a light up. Yeah.

Super Hot Topic.

I don't know.

I bet we could rank for it.

Is the dot com available?

I don't know.

That's right.

What are we gonna have for a late lunch? I don't know.

Hmm.

Okay.

All right.

Well, what are you gonna do this weekend?

I don't know. See, Joe wants to get shirts on him that say y' all, and I wanna get shirts now that say, I don't know.

Let's just get em anyway.

We'll just wear em and then.

And then we can have also a shirt. Wait, this.

Wait for this.

A shirt that says, I don't know, y'.

All.

People would buy that. You'd buy that, wouldn't you?

Let us know in the form of a review.

I thought you were gonna say in the form of a rubber stamp. I'm like, what the hell are you.

Talking about, a rubber stamp? I couldn't get the R's out.

It was a tongue twister. And I was not expecting that one. But yeah, in the form of a review.

There we go.

Well, we have legitimately been talking about selling merch and stuff again, but we'll get it at a different day.

We have resources.

Yes, we should. We should do that.

We're. We're also getting. Should we hint that we're doing some changes on our website?

No, we should not hint that we're doing some changes on our website.

Okay. We're not doing anything. So until next time. We'll speak then, I guess.

Bye.

Bye. Awkward ending.

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

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