Therapy Sessions 👥 Our Journey To Seven-Figures (The Complete Story)

This is an intro. Intro, intro, intro.

Hustle and Flowchart with your boy, my.

Boy, Matt Wolf, Joe Fear.

Hey, what is up, everybody?

What is up?

Welcome back to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast. I'm your host, Matt Wolf.

Welcome.

With my co host, welcome, Joe Fear.

Oh, hey, it's me.

And this is actually another duet episode. We don't have a guest today.

No, we don't. But the guests we have are the dogs in the backyard that are hanging out with us.

Yeah. So if you hear a dog slurping up water, that's because my dog is hanging out right behind Joe right now.

No, don't put your dirty nose on the microphone. Yeah, we're hanging out in the backyard just reminiscing about the old days. The good old days. Right, Matt?

Yeah, well, we actually had. We actually had somebody say, you know what? I don't think I know your backstory. I don't think I know how, you know, Joe and Matt started working together and how you learned what you learned and how you got into what you're doing. And so we thought, you know, we actually. I think we did do an episode about that with one of our older podcasts, but it's been a long time since we've talked about it. A lot has happened since then, so we thought we'd revisit that and kind of tell the story again as best as we can recollect.

So I guess the point of this podcast, I mean, it's not all about us. That's not the point. So.

Yeah, well, we'll try to pick out lessons along the way.

Well, yeah, well, that's obviously, I think, what the big thing is. And Matt and I were just honestly preparing ourselves for this episode because, like, we even forgot most of the stuff we've done in the past. I mean, I think it's been like eight years combined. Combined.

Combined. We were struggling to actually figure out how many businesses we've been involved in, because it's been a lot.

Yeah, well, and I guess the moral of the story here is, like, if you get one takeaway, and obviously I hope you get a lot. But the big thing is that the journey is not a straight line. I know you've. You've seen, like this. I think there's like an emoji out there, or not emoji, but like a meme infographic. Yeah. Where it's like, what everyone thinks that business is going to be like. And it's going to be like, straight line, trajectory up, like a good stock graph. But it's like, in all reality, it's this crazy zigzag thing that goes up, down, up, down, and then, you know, trajectory slightly goes up.

And that's actually. That's actually the way you want it. Because those zigzags, those getting off course, those other little side projects that seem to happen, those are where all the lessons are learned that are going to eventually lead you to, you know, the thing that is the most successful for you.

Yeah.

So, I mean, every single little sidetrack, every single little business that we've had along the way, all of those experiences, all of those people we've met along the way, all of those business models, what's failed, what's worked, all of that, we learned something from that is now a factor in our current business. We've learned something that we've been able to apply to what we do now.

Yeah. So I guess that's what you should take from this, you know, or at least that's my takeaway. Even just planning for this episode is. Is, wow, there's a lot of stuff we've done and it all adds up together. Even though if we're not consciously thinking about what we've failed or did well in the past, it's still mounting to where we're at now.

Exactly.

And so, yeah, hopefully you can take something from. From this whole journey. But yeah, Matt, I mean, so what was the year that we actually started together?

You know, I'm not sure, like, officially.

Opening a blog up on.

Okay, so even stepping a little bit behind that. You and I, we had a mutual friend. We had an acquaintance. Not an acquaintance, a mutual friend. Cameron, still. Still a mutual friend. To this day, not a head, but we have a mutual friend named Cameron. We sort of met through him. I played in bands with Cameron. You played in bands with Cameron?

Yeah.

That's kind of how we got to know each other. And then I had the guitar and rocking the guitar. I had a. My family business. We had a shutter company, and I was, you know, helping run the shutter company. And at some point, my mom walked into Famous Footwear, where you were working at the time, and she thought that you were just like a very friendly person and was great at customer support. And she went, I need to have Joe at Artisan at the shutter company.

I was like, eh, I'm expensive. I didn't say that. I was like, yeah, get me outta here. Yeah.

So my mom recruited DRO over to the shutter company, and I think it was kind of coincidence. I don't even know if my mom realized that you and I, like, sort of knew each other through an acquaintance.

No, she did, but I mentioned it, and somehow I recognized her. Something. There was some exchange there where she. She knew that we were connected, but we weren't, like, really buddies. Buddies.

Now, do you remember what year you started working at Artisan?

Because I have no clue, honestly. I mean, if it's. Hold on. So I graduated. Okay, I'm just gonna do some math here. 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. 4, 5, 6, seven, eight. I would say I started there around, like, 2008 or nine. Ish.

That is incorrect.

Is it earlier?

Because we started our first blog in 2007.

Oh, okay. Oh, that's right. Because I was thinking of the year I graduated, but we were already working together for, I guess, three years. Yeah, okay. So, yeah, that would make sense. We started the blog probably a year.

After I started, so we had a blog. We started a blog called How I will Be Rich. Joe and I, we actually got really into, like, personal finance and investing. And I think we just read Rich Dad, Poor dad, and then we read the Four Hour Work Week. And that led us on this, like, path of, like, learning about entrepreneurship, learning about wealth accumulation, learning about investing. And we went, okay, what better way to truly learn this stuff and to truly lock this stuff in than to create a blog around it? And as we learn stuff, go and blog about what we just learned.

Yeah, we would, like, summarize what we learned. Yeah.

The blog started as essentially a tool for us to, like, teach what we were learning. Not because we thought a ton of people would be reading the blog, but because that helped us lock in the knowledge. And, you know, you learn the best by teaching. Right. So we started that blog as a way to teach and to sort of better educate ourselves on those topics. We knew we wanted to be consistent with the blog. Blog, like, once a week or whatever. So we were constantly learning new stuff. So we constantly had stuff to teach on the blog. And that blog was called How I Will Be Rich, and it doesn't exist anymore. That name was very influenced by Ramit Sadi. I will teach you to be rich.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. I forgot about that. That's a good book.

So, you know, we named our blog that. And we blogged on that for a little while, and it sort of grew. And we sold. We had Google Ads on that blog, and we started seeing our first trickles of money from Google Ads.

That was our first dollar made online.

Our first dollar made online. Well, that was probably from that style of business. Yeah, I'd done some service stuff in the past, building websites for people and stuff. But that was prior to us meeting and.

We started making money off the ads. And then we learned about selling actual link ads on your site. And we actually made way more money doing that than from Google by selling text link ads on our website.

You know where I actually made my first dollar online? I just, it just remember, like I reminded myself, remember those like netfire day or what was. What was that service where it was like free Internet. They gave you.

Oh, Net zero.

Net zero, yeah. So I remember having Net zero even though like my parents had Internet for some reason I chose to use. I don't know, I was like experimenting with things. But I think I figured out like the value of like advertising online back then. But I remember getting like. Remember like when you can get people to click and this is totally black hat, but I mean, I don't think it works anymore. But it was like a clicker basically software. And I was getting the thing to click on this banner all throughout the night.

Yeah, I remember those. Yeah, you set up like a little script that would like click on the link for you constantly.

And I remember and it totally like hacked. And I think the most ever made literally was like 25 bucks. And I was like, woohoo. Yeah, I got one check and then it like stopped working. I'm like, no, but that, that it was. At least it was a less. And this was like way before we ever met. But I didn't really do it. I just made.

I used to experiment with stuff like that, but it was always just like pennies, you know? Yeah, like you were getting. You'd get a check in the mail and it'd be like $7. And you're like, that's awesome. That tool cost me $10.

Right, right.

No, but you know, we started selling the text link ads on, on our site and turns out later on we found out that Google frowns upon that. And we'll sort of delist you if you do that. But that's a whole.

That was way back and this was.

Before that was an issue. And then we went, cool, we can make money with this. I think we're making like what, 50 bucks a month off that blog with.

The ads and stuff. It was like beer money.

We're like, let's clone this, right? And let's make another blog. And on this blog we'll talk about a different topic, but we'll put the same kind of ads on it. And we made Be healthy and relaxed. Which actually still exists to this day. That site's still alive.

That's true. Yeah. And that was kind of more of my baby because we kind of like decided, okay, Matt. It was like he has a financial background. He was going to school for finance majors. So I was like, okay, well, it'd make a lot more sense if you just ran that blog and I ran this other one. And we kept a consistent blogging schedule.

My wife works and still has a company in the health food space. So, like, there was just loads of information I was coming in from all the products and manufacturers she worked with. So I just pretty much learned a lot from. Because that was a side gig I was doing. I was actually demonstrating this stuff in Whole Foods, like sampling out products. I was like, a little sample boy. It's usually grandma's doing it, but it was cool. I met a lot of good people and it was like a good learning lesson for me to sell. But I transposed a lot of that content I was doing there, making money there to put it on the blog. That's how we got our content originally.

And that one, I think actually did better than how I will be Rich. I think we actually got that one to do more sales and more traffic than the first one.

Well, the thing that actually brought the most amount of traffic and it'll still to this day was a thing called the Kaiser Diet.

Yeah.

Remember that? And so basically, the Kaiser is. It's like a hospital chain out here in San Diego or West coast or whatever. Yeah, it's all over, but I think it's the same. I'm pretty sure that's where the diet came from. But I was literally, like, looking for coffee or tea in Heather's parents cupboard, like, late one night. And I pulled out this, like, piece of paper. I don't know why I even pulled it out, but it was all tattered and stuff. And it said the Kaiser Diet on top of. Yeah. And I was like, what the heck is this thing? And it looked crazy. It was like, eat one hot dog, one egg hard boiled. But it was like very specific but weird things. And I was like. And supposedly it was gonna make you lose weight and like, you know, like, be in this ketosis thing or whatever. I was like, that's interesting. So I googled it and I was like, it looks popular. But I'm like, screw it. I'm just gonna write about it.

Yeah.

So I think I posted the diet and I put my thoughts behind it. I'm like, I'm not Sure. If this thing works, does this work for you guys? And it, like, caught steam and Google.

Yeah.

And people started legitimately commenting. I think we had, like, hundreds of comments on that thing. And people are like, oh, it actually does work for me.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like this.

I'm like, what?

The same thing. We had the Google Ads, we had the text link ads. And that one is when we started to actually make, like, good adsense money. And by good adsense money, like 200 bucks a month.

I was paying for a car payment thing. Yeah, yeah. Like, sweet. Better. From beer money to car payments now.

So we had. We had How I feel Rich. And then we had be healthy and relaxed. And we're like. And I don't even know if you remember this one. And then we're like, let's duplicate it again. Let's make a website about lawn care.

I know. Healthy lawn guy.

Organiclawn guys.com.

It looks so horrible.

It doesn't exist anymore, so don't even bother going. But we created another third blog called Organic Lawn Guys. We're like, cool. We made a blog in finance. We made a blog in fitness. Let's make a blog in, like, the.

In something in a niche that we know nothing about.

In a niche that we knew nothing about.

Brilliant idea.

I think we did that. I bought my first house in 2000, 2008, and my lawn looked like shit to the day. I sold that house.

It was really hot. And San Diego really doesn't have any.

Water, and we didn't have a sprinkler system. I had to, like. I had to go out and, like, hose down my lawn every day. But I bought a book on how to get a greener lawn. And because I bought that book, I thought that was a good enough reason to start a blog on it. And we started that one, and I don't think that one ever made, like, a penny.

Well, I think we gave up on it after, like, three blog posts. And, like, we spent four hours per blog post. We're like, wow. Yeah. We really don't know what we're doing here.

Yeah. And so that. That one just failed. But the I will teach how I will be rich and be healthy and relaxed were sort of our first sort of, like, income generators. And then I think after that, we sort of split. You went to go work for the construction company? I stayed at the shutter company, but the shutter company ended up going under.

Well, yeah, I mean, we split, but the same. At the same time, I think the sites were kind of going.

They were still Going. We didn't shut them down, but the sites were still going, but they just weren't really.

I think that's when text link ads kind of fell.

Yeah. I mean, I think we've still been making anywhere from 100 to 200 bucks a month off of them maybe.

Yeah.

But we kind of split off. You went to work at a different job, Right? I stayed at the shutter company, but the shutter company ended up going under.

Well, I was still in college, so I was, like, finishing out college. I was working the construction job. I was trying to do stuff online. So I was. I was just learning more or less.

Like, I think we were still in the evenings and afternoons and stuff. We were still kind of getting together and throwing ideas around and testing stuff because those sites were still running.

Well, we actually started off. It was. Is this when Alex came in the picture? Alex Jeffries?

Oh, it might have been.

I think it was right then. So we. So basically, he's a buddy of ours now, Alex Jeffries, but he's a coach to. I mean, he's probably thousands of people at this point, but he. We're in his second annual course or whatever it was. I think he ran it, but it was all about basically making your first dollar, you know, growing an online business. And, you know, up until this point, we were kind of just experimenting and learning how. Just different tactics. We don't really know strategies.

Yeah.

And. And we. I mean, it was. It was scary because I don't know how much. The course was like a thousand bucks or something.

It was a thousand bucks.

So I did not have that kind of money in my account back then.

I used a credit card to buy it.

Oh, I definitely did, too. And I had a. Like, I remember a long conversation with my wife because just debt is not a cool thing. And like, her brain, you know, she's kind of taught that.

So we did have a website about personal finance.

Yeah. So it was crap. Do we actually fund this with, like, not our own money? Yeah, but we did. And we talked the wives into it. And like, I know during that phase, specifically because I think at that point we started kind of doing our own things, like personal branding. I know. That's why I bought Joe Fear dot com.

Yeah.

Which I still to this day don't even maintain, really. But whatever you got. Mattwolf.net I think. But that was like our starting point of branding ourselves as brands.

Yeah.

For me.

That all happened. We had our blogs going. The shutter company was about to go under. I quit, actually, before the shutter company Went under. I actually left my job. I wrote my boss like a big letter and it was basically a big fu.

Letter. That's a whole nother story.

That's a whole other story. But I quit my job the day before I got married. I was getting married on Saturday. My last day at the job was that Friday before and that Saturday when I got married. We left to go straight on my honeymoon from that, you know, from our wedding. Like that. I think we. I got. We got back to our hotel room in San diego at like 11:30pm and we had to be at the airport at like 4am the next morning to catch our flight to go down to Cozumel for our.

Our. Our. That must have been scary as. I mean, I was. I was his best man at the wedding. So it was. It was pretty cool. I mean we. Yeah, I mean just be like your best man. It's. I mean, like we got tight quick because I think we just clicked.

Yeah.

For some reason it wasn't like this is. They. Matt and I don't feel like we're like normal business partners per se. It's more like brothers that we definitely.

Act more like brothers that we haven't ever had.

Like we. Neither of us have brothers biologically. So we're like, cool. So we kind of. It. I don't know. Something clicked. And I do remember that though, like, you guys leaving, I'm like, what's he gonna do?

I know. I really went on this vacation thinking to myself, I have no clue what I'm going to do when I get back, but for the next week, I'm not even going to think about it. I don't have a job right now. I've got, you know, we had all this money from the wedding. You know, people give you cash and stuff. So I had, you know, we left down to cozumel with like $2,000 in cash. Like in our frickin. Like a wedding money. Yeah. All in ones in duffel bags. But right before I left, I bought a book. And it was just a random book. I don't even remember who recommended it or why, who I heard from, but it was called How I Made My First Million on the Internet. And it was by Ewan Cheah.

Yeah.

And that was the first book I ever read that was specifically focused on Internet marketing. Becoming a marketer on the Internet. And it was like very, very focused on list building. Growing your email list and having that asset to market to people. And this was in 2009. Growing that email list to market to people. And so I read that book on the, on the plane flying to Cozumel and that got my wheels spinning because I had like, we've had these blogs by this point for seven, eight, nine, two years, right?

Yeah.

And we weren't building any sort of email list. We just had Google Ads. That was it. That was the sole monetization. And I came back and I went, we're doing this wrong. We need to start building mailing lists off this shit. We're having this traffic and we're only getting them once. We're not. Not able to bring them back. We need to build a mailing list. And so that was sort of our first, my first entry into like, we need to focus on email marketing. That's where it's at.

Yeah.

Right. So I think we went and got like a. I think we use get response in the beginning. We went and got a GetResponse account and we put GetResponse on Be Healthy and relax and I will teach you how I will be rich. I keep on saying rich because we.

Kind of ripped off the name.

Yeah, we did. But that site doesn't exist anymore. So, you know, sorry. But yeah, so I bought that book and then we came back and just by like happenstance, I was on like Twitter or something and Justin Brooke, who's actually now a friend of ours as well, Justin Brooke. Actually I saw a tweet from him on Twitter that said if you're thinking about list building, this is the guy to check out. And he linked to Alex Jeffries webpage. And this was before I even knew what like affiliate marketing was.

Yeah.

Obviously at the time Justin Brooke was an affiliate of Alex Jeffries course and he was promoting Alex Jeffries course. I didn't realize that. I just thought Justin was recommending like this is the guy to talk to you for list building.

Got it.

And so I went, I clicked on his site and I watched his sales video and I went, this guy's going to teach me how to build a list. And I went to Joe and I said, Joe, check this out. Let's both buy this course. Let's go through it together. Let's learn how to fricking grow some mailing lists.

Yeah. And we did. And I mean in that course, not only did we learn all that stuff, we met some connections that we still have to this day. One being Josh Bartlett.

Yeah.

Who's.

And Josh Bartlett's a big part of this story that we'll get into too.

Yeah. Thrive Car Easy Video player. Sweet. So, yeah. And he's still really good buddies. Like, I wished him happy birthday yesterday. And text. And we've been texting ever since, like, yesterday, so. But yeah, it's. That was scary as hell, man, because that was us putting our ass on the line financially for the very first time.

Quit our jobs.

Well, yeah, I guess I. So you said you quit in May, I think. Yeah. Because you got married in May, so I got married in November, which I graduated college that same year, so whatever that. Actually, I graduated early, so it was right before you got married. Was when I graduated. But. No, sorry, totally take that back. It was a weird, weird time of the year. It was right before I got married. It was like September. And I remember right before my wedding, I quit college and I quit my job, my corporate job, which was at this construction company doing marketing. Just kind of different style of marketing. Not this stuff. It was like boring proposals. But I just, like, looked. I remember looking around at the job. It was a cushy job and stuff had at my own office, but everyone looked like zombies. Everyone just looked like they hated their life there. Like the guys that were like, 50 plus.

Yeah.

I'm like, do I want to be that guy? Not really. So I was lever. I got everything done quickly.

Funny story that business actually went out of business eventually too.

I was gonna say that, but. Yeah. Yeah. So Matt alluded to it, but the company went under. At least the San Diego branch. I was at, like two months after I quit.

So what you're saying is when Joe and Matt aren't involved in a company.

They go under, they go down? No, but what I was doing is leveraging that time. So I got all my shit done really quickly for that position, my marketing position. But all the other time, I was pretty much on the clock.

Learning. Like, I was going through Alex Jeffries, his course. I was reading stuff from Jason Moffat. I remember that very clearly. I think it was the profit manifesto or whatever the hell he called it, some newsletter thing he had. And I remember, like, I was like, man, this game. Moffat's got it figured out. And he's another buddy of ours now, too. It's like, it's cool to see, like, Frank Kern. We study a lot of his stuff. We've. We've hung out with him multiple times. He's. We got a lot of connections through him, so.

Name dropper.

I know, but that's kind of. It goes in the story.

No, I know. It is very relevant to where we're going to get to.

It's very interesting that this growth is A weird path. But yeah, so, yeah, we quit and then we basically. So my mom was freaking out because she's not an entrepreneurial type. My dad isn't either. But so my mom was always like, okay, Heather, my wife, how long are you going to let him do this? And because I wasn't making money for like, I don't know, six months or something and just living off of what my wife was getting paid, which wasn't really a lot at the time. So it's like, okay, yeah, yeah, no.

I say, I mean our stories along this area are both like very similar. I had some savings built up and Alana worked at State Farm. So, you know, we were living off her income for a little bit.

I didn't have more than like 2,000 in the bank. It was so stupid. When I quit, I didn't have really any much, much money at all.

Yeah. But yeah, so we went through Alex Jeffries course and you mentioned Josh Bartlett, which I do think is, you know, a big piece of our story. But I think the next phase started by being in that group. They had like a forum, they had a community in that group of all the other students in the group. And we got to know all the other students in this Alex Jeffries group, Josh Bartlett being one of them.

And so at this point, once we learned the stuff from Alex Jeffries, I think our path sort of split for a little bit, right? So like this, the story of Joe and I working together. We started out working together, we split off for a little bit, we came back together, worked together for a little bit, split off for a bit and then ultimately have been back together again for almost like two years now. But this is kind of where it split off the first time was I was.

I was building WordPress blogs for other people. I mentioned earlier I was doing some sort of like freelance web development stuff for people and I'd built some WordPress sites for other people. And we got into Alex Jeffries group and Alex was recommending everybody set up a blog, get a blog, use WordPress, get it dialed in. So I started going into the forum going, alright, guys, I got this. I know how to build blogs, I know how to set up WordPress, get your hosting, do all that, get it all dialed in. I've done it over and over and over again for clients in the past. I'll do it for 50 bucks ahead. Right? Like, obviously way undervaluing myself at the time. But I, so I went into this group and people were, you know, PayPal and me, 50 bucks, I would go and install WordPress on their site and install a theme and then pass it along. And so I started doing that, and the next thing I knew, like, people were asking me questions about WordPress and, like, hey, how do I get this plugin installed? How do I stop spam complaints? How do I build my list with WordPress, blah, blah, blah. And that's how the WordPress classroom was born. Which was my first info product that I tried to sell myself was.

I just started recording my screen. I think I used Camtasia at the time, and I just started recording my screen, showing people how to do stuff in WordPress.

What I did was I started building a list. I gave away, like, 10 of those videos for free, just for opting into my list. And then as soon as you opted in for my list, there was an upsell of it. For 10 bucks, you could get my entire WordPress training program, right?

Hot deal.

So I started telling people in the group, look, here's some free tutorials that'll get you going if you want to go to the next level. It's, you know, 10 bucks to get the full course, and I'm going to keep adding to that course.

So it wasn't even $10 a month. It was just 10 bucks.

I think when I first opened it, it was 10 bucks flat. That's great. And then I think, not even 17.

Or nine or seven.

No. And literally, I didn't even use WordPress to build the site. I actually had just, like, an HTML page with a white background and, like, a cartoon dude. And I wrote the WordPress classroom, like, on a fake chalkboard clipart. And then there was just a list of videos. If you clicked on the video, it, like, linked you to the, like, RAW video link. We gotta archive the video.

We gotta archive.

I think I screenshotted it from archive.org yeah. And that's where Josh Bartlett kind of stepped in. He reached out to me on Skype and said, dude. I don't know if he said these words exactly, but he's like, dude, your site's shit. Let's rebuild it, right? And he had designers at the time. He was working on his Easy Video Player. He had a thing called Twitter Fuel at the time. And his designs were actually pretty, pretty good and really up to date for the times. And he's like, dude, my graphic designer will do that for you in like, 15 minutes. Let me let him do it for you. Let me let that guy do it for you. So he redesigned the WordPress classroom site into something a little More decent. And then he was also the one who said, don't charge 10 bucks if you're gonna keep adding videos. Charge a monthly fee for this thing.

Yeah.

So that's when I think I changed it from 10 bucks flat to 10 bucks a month to be a member. And that's how the WordPress classroom was born. And then sort of fast forwarding a little bit, I ran that from 2009 to 2000.

I think 13. And then in 2000, I think it was 2013, Bradley Will, who ran a site called Free Blog Factory, came to me and he said, look, I've got this site called Free Blog Factory. I install blogs for people. You've got training. I really want to do training like, I want training for people who come in through my system. Is there some way we can figure out how to combine these business models? So that was how Learn2Blog was born. I phased out WordPress Classroom. Bradley and I partnered. We created Learn2Blog. So if you bought through us, you got a free blog set up, plus all this educational content. We hired our first Facebook ads guy at that time, and our Facebook ads guy ramped up our Facebook ads to $30,000 a month in ad spend. Learned a blog grew to 60, $70,000 a month in. In sales revenue. And.

Yeah, that was kind of. That was kind of the initial path.

And then, well, that was home. So let me tell my arc.

Go ahead and tell your arc, because.

Then we just covered, like, a bunch of years, actually. Yeah, but it was good because. Yeah, so Matt was growing that way. So he did. This is like. So this is. It kind of still stems to today's. Our roles. It's interesting, but our roles were pretty defined back then.

Sorry.

His dog's, like, choking behind.

But, like, it's. It's cool because we. I took a totally different path. I didn't go this info route, and honestly, stupid, stupidly, I didn't really go the list building route either. I did build a list, but it wasn't nearly as aggressive as Matt. Matt's always been the one to really focus on, and I am now. Finally, like, I paid the price for many years, but I was always focused on working with people. Like, and I know a list of people, but I was always working much more personal with people, so taking on clients and all that stuff. And so I always had a decent skill set in graphic design, slideshow design. So actually creating videos out of slides kind of perfected that at a very early age in my business career. It was around the same time, like, Video Boss was coming out from Andy Jenkins and all these big launches. But I kind of was doing that prior to that where essentially VSLs and, you know, Video Sales letters pre webinars, when people create a video, I was there creating the slides and helping people make it look cool online. And. And again, Josh Bartlett from Alex Jeffries Group, he was the one that allowed me to essentially create his sales video for Easy Video Player. So that was my first time actually doing this process and doing it in a way where like, I mean, tens of thousands of people were gonna see this video and purchase. And I believe it was that first launch. It took a span of few months, I believe, but it convert or it generated over a million dollars in sales. Like do believe.

I'm not sure.

Maybe, maybe over the span of that product.

I know Easy Video Suite definitely did millions. But I don't know if Easy Video Player initially did.

It wasn't the player. But I know that over whatever period of time, it generated a substantial amount because we did do sales videos for all those, the suite as well. But it really taught me a lot of lessons on how to work with clients, what the clients want, how to create a system with all this stuff. So the process of developing these assets, because there's a million steps, but I kind of created this agency, this video animation agency, this agency that worked with clients, helping with copywriting and graphic design, all that kind of conversion stuff. So. But that's where I did that. And it was Video Sales Lab was the name of my company doing that. And in doing that, I met a lot of guys as well, you know, and got introduced to various folks who.

So I kind of took clients and almost went further and created deeper partnerships. So it was almost like a partner with a lot of my clients. And it opened up a lot new connections. Around the time you were working with Bradley, I was introduced to a guy named Amish Shah who we had on the podcast before. And he's responsible for doing, I think it's about $8 million. When launching his Magic Bullet system, which was a software product way before I ever knew him. And I remember seeing it launching back in the day. These are the days of like the big launches of Frank Kern and whatnot. And I remember watching and hearing about these numbers. I'm like, how the hell is that even possible? I can't even fathom that number. And he did a lot of that, the bulk of that number in about 15 minutes, which is like, dear God. So I got the opportunity to actually work with him on a lot of his projects, and it developed into a partnership. And that was when I. I kind of started leveraging my time. I think better not working just partner to partner or client to client, but actually, like, working in a bigger way as leverageable partners. So I have this skill set. You have this skill set. And kind of developing something cool out of that. So we actually created a piece of training around the digital publishing industry, so Apple Books, Kindle Books and all that stuff, and sold 10 to 20,000 packages to clients.

Partnering up with them, but also teaching them how to do the same thing. So, like, we were closing massive deals with the phone team, webinars, all that stuff.

Yeah.

So it's kind of crazy. It morphed over the years, connections that way. And you were doing this thing on the side with Bradley and you sold that business. Yeah. So actually, I guess around that time is when we came back together.

Yeah, it was. Yeah, it was around that time. I mean, the. The timeline of this all is sort of fuzzy. I'm sure we could have, like.

Well, that was the EGP. So we opened Evergreen Profits originally in 2013. 2013. And that was around this time. Yeah, we came back together because I was doing. I wanted to honestly make more money, but do my own thing as well. And I was still working with Amish. I was taking on my own personal clients. You still had the business with Bradley. The learn to blog. You probably had some side clients too, I don't know. But, yeah, definitely. I was like, okay, I'm at a point where I want my own thing. And I think you wanted to. I think we both were just like, want to make more cash, Want to take more control. Let's do this thing. And we saw opportunities.

Yeah.

So we opened up Evergreen Profits for the first time in 2013, and it opened as an agency, but we had this whole vision of not only just working with clients, but partnering with them. So, like, doing, like, an upfront fee plus a percentage of their. Their company.

Yeah. Well, I feel like Evergreen profits from day one. Back in 2013, we had this sort of vision of, yes, there's an agency element to it. We're gonna make a lot of money as an agency. But it was always a thing that we built to collect assets. And even back then, because, remember, back in 2013, when we first started it, we were like, let's look into this bitcoin thing. And we were looking at bitcoin back when it was $200 a coin going, should we buy it? I don't know. Kind of kicking ourselves on that one now. But, you know, we were. We were looking at investing in bitcoin. We were talking about the real estate stuff back then. We were talking about owning the San Diego Chargers as one of our assets.

Chargers.

Screw the Chargers now. But, you know, we had. We built it with this mindset of Evergreen Profits is going to be our company that we collect assets with. And we still have that mindset to this day, but we started that as an agency. And our very first client that we ever landed as Evergreen Profits, we went in and we. We pitched them at $10,000 plus, what, 20% equity.

20 or 30. Somewhere around there. Yeah.

Yeah, somewhere between 20 or 30% equity. So it was $10,000 up front to basically build out their website and their funnels and their. All their systems and everything.

I remember being scared shitless to pitch that.

Yeah. And we pitched it in person at a coffee shop.

Yeah. I mean, it was the first time I pitched something that large in person. Usually it's been on the phone or. Or with a sales team doing it for me.

And it was the easiest fricking thing in the world.

It was like he agreed to it in 30 seconds. Yeah. Because, I mean, we knew what this guy's needs were. We knew he had the money. And it was a sweet deal, honestly. He got his investment back, and over.

Time, he made, you know, 5x what he paid us.

Yeah. But it was like. I remember walking away. I think we drew. It was in La Jolla, in San Diego here, and we're at a Starbucks. I think we were. Just pitched them. We were just sitting outside on a little patio set like we are now. And it was like the coolest thing. I remember walking away, like, on cloud nine. We're like, damn. Yeah, this is sweet. We just became a. We just made a decent amount of cash. So that just, like, funds us for like a month or two.

Yeah.

Because, like, hey, that's what you got. That's what you need. I know we could build a lot of this stuff with our own assets, so there wasn't really a lot of hard costs, but. And now we have an ownership in this company. Like, that's so cool. This is cash flow. I mean, if you think in assets and really you judge an asset by the cash flow that you can make of it, you know, and so this was one asset that we're going to build up.

We got cash up front and cash.

Flow for, you know, right on the back end.

Indefinite future.

Yeah. And we did for probably a handful of years.

Yeah. The product eventually became Outdated. It was an info product and the information eventually became outdated, so we had to sort of phase it out. But yeah, I mean, it was, it was 10,000 up front with an equity. And I remember we were like sweating and we were nervous and like we were. I think we sort of danced around the price a little bit when we were talking to him. And then when we finally said the price, he's like, wow, that was. That's a little bit pricier than I thought, but cool, let's do it. And it was literally like, that was. That was it.

Well, and the way that we even got that meeting was through something I posted on Facebook.

Yeah.

I don't know what we were talking about. I think it was something Matt and I were doing. We're experimenting. Like when we first started EGP Evergreen profits for the first time, I think we threw a case study out there or something. Yeah, I think it was about growing. We did something on, on what's that website? Udemy. I think we were growing a list or doing something like that with coupons. And this is a whole.

Yeah, we actually have our whole website flipping course.

That's what it was.

Udemy.

We're not going to even go down that rabbit hole.

Yeah. I mean like if we went into like every product we've ever put out into the marketplace.

Yeah.

This will be like podcast.

But, but the whole point is we, we b. I said something to the respect of like, oh my God, we just grew a list of like a thousand people for this Udemy course.

Yeah.

By using coupons. Like, this is craziness.

Like, I can't wait to, you know, see where this goes. And then I remember got, I got a few messages from that, personal messages. Messages. And one was him. Yeah. And like, I was like, holy crap. And then, I mean, we've tested this now multiple times. I've done it with clients, posting your results, creating case studies, testimony, whatever it might be. That's like the best way to land clients if they're watching you. And usually they can turn into really high paying people, create value for the world.

Show proof of that value created and more people are going to want you to create value for them.

So a lot of our connections from that business, we're talking about EGP version 1 days, EGP 1.0. I would say it lasted what, 2013 to 2014, 15.

Yeah, I would say it lasted probably a year to a year and a half. Yeah, we actually had a little office space up in Marietta that we, we rented out north of 400 bucks a month.

Yeah, it was cool. That was our little legit, like good.

Sized office space too.

It was, but so we were total agency. I think that was the only percentage deal we actually land. Maybe we had one more. Well, we had multiple smaller deals, but that was like the biggest. I don't think we recreated that deal for. Until like.

No, because most of what we did after that was people coming to us saying, can you just install WordPress for me or can you design this new page? And it was stuff that didn't lend itself to any sort of recurring. It was just like. It was. To be honest, it was like grunt work. I mean it was like.

I think the thing was is that it was. It became not leverageable.

Well, we got to a point where we just didn't turn down gigs. If somebody said, I'll give you money to build a website, we went, okay. And we took it.

Yeah, right.

And that was sort of the, the beginning of the end of that. The Evergreen Profits 1.0 was. We were more concerned about how much money. Like we just wanted to get as many gigs as we could and just collect, collect the money on the gigs now. Yeah, like let's just. Okay, they want. They, they said they'll give me $800, build this website. Let's take it. Oh, this person said, they give me $2,000 to build this website. Let's take it. And we just kind of took anything that came to us. And I think that was sort of the downfall is that we didn't really set standards for like the type of client we would accept, the type of work we would do for the client. You know, we actually had one gig and this was this by. From my recollection, this was probably the last gig we did for EGP 1.0 was we had a gig where somebody came to us and said, I want you to build me this custom survey funnel where they. Oh yeah, it asks them a series of questions back to back to back to back. And this was long before that book Ask ever came out from Ryan Levesque. This was like years ago before that book. And somebody came to us and said, I want to create a survey. They answer all these survey questions and when the survey finishes, it puts them on my sales page, but it also embeds like their score on the sales page from the quiz. And then I also want an email to go out with the score. And it was this very complex custom sort of funnel. At the time, nobody was doing quiz funnels. Nobody was taking the results of the quiz funnels. And embedding them on a sales page and also embedding them into the email follow ups that were going out. There was a couple people that were doing it, but not many. So we actually brought on board a custom PHP JavaScript developer to build this system for this client and it cost us a lot of money. There was a lot of back and forth with the client.

Well, yeah, we learned a lot of lessons with just dealing with people.

I think we ended up losing money all said and done because we undervalued, underbid ourself. Yep, there was, there was some differences of opinions at the end of the day and we, well, well speaking about.

That though, I think that was my biggest takeaway and obviously the money is huge. That can kill a business. But the big takeaway I had from that whole thing is that we didn't properly communicate everything on our end because it was a very complex system. I mean nowadays you can just get one piece of software and pretty much do this.

Well at the time we totally blame the client. We were sitting here going, man, this client is a pain in the ass. This sucks. I hate doing this stuff. In retrospect, looking back at it, it was 100% our fault.

Oh yeah.

Like we look back at it and we didn't set clear expectations, we didn't have proper like written agreements in place. We definitely didn't charge enough for that gig. There was a lot of things that we did wrong that led to that deal going awry.

So we. Yeah, I mean, so I guess the lesson here, if you're ever working with clients, you gotta a value yourself and know your value and stick to your value unless you somehow change your terms. But make sure you're getting what you need out of that project. And that's not just to like make a lot of profit, that's just to be surviving. Like even if you are just, I mean you don't want to just break even, make a little bit. But it's like a progression. Like every. I worked with clients for a lot of years now at this point and I've progressed with my prices. Prices have just risen way higher than most people would ever charge. But it's a confidence thing, but that comes from understanding your value.

Here's another asset that at the same time we were adding to our portfolio, we wanted a startup in our portfolio at this time. We teamed up with actually the person who was our last guest on last week's podcast, John Margalit. We partnered with him to create a business called Toggily, which was Very.

Startup E. Right. Like, it had. It had a bunch of different investors in it. You know, John was out there actually trying to raise funding.

There are about like 10 investors from.

Angel investors and things like that. We had a bunch of angel investors on board. And it was this, this photography website. It was kind of the same idea as like, like an O desk up, work, whatever it's called these days.

It's like a marketplace.

It was a marketplace for photographers, basically.

In your local area.

Yeah, Geo. Geo targeted in your local area. I don't think the site's live anymore. We tried to look it up earlier and it wasn't even loading. But we built this with, with John and a team of other people. And because we wanted this startup, we wanted another sort of asset that would pay us dividends and, and that sort of thing in the business. And we worked with these guys to build this thing. And.

Eventually we sold our shares to the rest of the guys in the company. They basically bought it back from us.

They were super cool. Luckily, like, it wasn't like a whole breakup thing where we all hated each other, which, to startups, we'll go that route. But we basically, I think maybe we're in there for like six or eight months. Like, we kind of were there for a while all the way to the launch or maybe right before the launch. And luckily they were super cool because we just said like, hey, this is where we're at. This isn't really what we want to do. We're honestly dreading this whole startup culture now that we've been in it, because from the outside, it kind of looks sexy with like, oh, you can hang out with people. And it wasn't like, we're in Silicon Valley with pool tables everywhere. We were like, still in our house working, but. But there were. I think for us it was just like so many meetings, so many people that we had to go through to make a decision where we're like, we can't do this, man.

Yeah. I mean, for me, the biggest, the biggest problem with that business was that there was just too many cooks in the kitchen. Right? There was. You know, we had an idea and if we wanted to implement it, we had to kind of pass it by other people before we can implement it. And, you know, half the people might like the idea, half people might not like the idea. And it felt very difficult to push forward quickly because there was so much decision by committee. And that's just kind of how the startup world works. It's nothing against anybody we worked with. We still Love all those guys. But you know, for the way we've always worked with our Internet businesses, it was always just go, go, go. When we wanted to build something, we just built it. When we wanted to test something, we test it. When we wanted to drive ads to something, we paid the money and drove the ads.

We didn't.

There was no sort of decision process. We just went for it. And with this, there was so many decisions, so many people that had opinions, so many different ideas, conflicting ideas, conflicting marketing strategies, and it just, it came. Became tough for us. And so during this sort of EGP 1.0 investing in toggly, we, you know, it just became too difficult for us and it wasn't the way we enjoyed working. So we basically went to them and said, hey, would you guys mind buying out our stake in this company?

Yeah, we put some money in as well as being sweat equity.

Yeah.

But so luckily they were able to. It was like, I don't know, like a handful of thousand bucks or whatever. But at the time, like, Matt and I were like, shit, that really helps. Like anything that we can get out of it was great because like, for us, we're just like, man, we. We can give value, but our hearts aren't in it. So it's not the best approach. So that was. I think that was actually the end of. It was around the time. Yeah. That's when EGP1 kind of our last.

Two projects, EGP right there.

EGP 1.0 is like survey Funnel and Toggly. No more after that. Huh.

I think. I think those two projects kind of simultaneously happening and not sort of ending the way we wanted them to end.

Yeah.

Was kind of like, okay, we're done with this client work thing. We're done with the agency thing.

Well, see, and that's around the time I think I started working with a mish again. And that this time it was more of a. It's more of a role as a project manager slash really coordinator for the whole business, like, of his business. So this. He was teaching a lot of meditation topics. It was info product based. But. But that was my point where I think. I don't know if this is me not working directly with Matt and me. Like, hey brother, I'm not gonna learn this list building. Like for some reason I had a hard time like really understanding list building in my brain. I was more of the hustle. And that's a whole hustle and flowchart. Like this is where the name kind of stems from too. A little bit. Is. I always like, like, no, I could figure out how to get more clients. I can make enough money doing that. It's very lifestyle based, esque, but definitely not systemized. It wasn't until I really started working with Amish that we. We were dealing with like four different online properties that I had to manage that I had to systemize with things like Asana, things with like he was on, I don't know, some CRM. It was like infusionsoftware ontraport. Yeah. But either way, there were systems I had to start managing that I never was responsible for prior to that. And seeing this though, and then I was dealing with a company, I was making a lot more money than I ever have as well.

Yeah.

So then I saw what was possible when you actually start creating these systems and I'm like, holy shit. I don't think I'm really that far away from doing this kind of stuff myself. And with the stuff that Matt and I have done, I mean, knowing that he's done a lot of info, product stuff, I've done a lot of this other creative work, client work and connecting. But now I'm syncing it all together in this project management role. It wasn't what I wanted to do long term, but it was a good learning time. So I wasn't scared to. And it was hard, but. And a lot of it was like I needed the money at the time, honestly. But it was a time where I was just like, I'm just gonna get paid and learn and do really good work, but know that there is gonna be an exit for me. I don't know what it's gonna be, but it's gonna be bigger than I ever been before in my previous businesses. And I don't know. That was around the time. What were you doing then?

So Learn to Blog. Let's see. I sold Learn to blog in 2015.

15 because you still had Learned to Blog around the time EGP 1.0 is going.

Yeah, Learn to Blog was still running at that time. That was just kind of like I was doing them both. That was actually sort of part of the falling out was, you know, my partner Bradley at the time wanted me to be kind of all in all focused on Learn to Blog. I wanted to kind of do some stuff on the side. So I had, I felt like I had more upside potential, more income. So I was kind of split my time between the two businesses.

So yeah, I can't remember if I sold in 2014 or 2015. Now I'm thinking it might have been.

2014 or either way.

No, it would have been 2015. Yeah. I sold it in February of 2015.

Okay.

And then when I sold Learned a blog in 2015, I immediately went and partnered with Josh Bartlett at the time. Also, this was actually after EGP sort of phased out. You were working with a niche. We weren't doing EGP stuff anymore. I sold my share and learned a blog, and then I partnered with Josh Bartlett immediately after that. And we launched a series of products and a podcast, we are beyond the Hype Podcast. We launched a product called FB Uncovered, all about Facebook ads. And then we launched a product called vidforce, all about how to make effective sales videos and that sort of thing. And that was in 2015. We did those.

Josh went off to put more focus on his software business. So we stopped making info products together around.

You know, the end of 2015 or so. I don't even think that stuff lasted a full year. So I think towards the end of 2016, he went off to focus on building things like Thrive Cart and whatever his next video platform is going to be. He started working on that a little bit more, and we kind of split ways completely amicably. I mean, we launched a couple info products together. We never really had an official partnership together. We just partnered on some projects. So we launched those two projects. He split off to Go do to build ThriveCart, and I split off and I built what was then called the Content Business Machine, but is now called the Evergreen Profits Masterclass.

Yeah. So you kind of like started doing your own info product stuff.

Yeah.

You did. Not only that course, but you had, like, a bunch of other ones that you were doing training. I think you did a group training.

Yeah, I did some coaching. I had a $3,000 coaching package that I sold. And that was. That was actually one that I started selling over the phone. So people I sent out, which if.

You know Matt, he's not a phone.

I'm not a phone guy. No.

But he made it work.

Yeah, I mean, I just. I wanted to face my fears and, you know, get outside my comfort zone. So what I started doing was mailing my list to an application, had them fill out this long application to see if they were a good fit for me. If they were a good fit, I'd call them up on the phone and then I'd close them on a $3,000 coaching package. And I did that for a little while, while at the same time doing.

The masterclass, which, by the way, that little method that Matt used, that's exactly what Amish and I used to use to close big clients for the publishing business. We had. We literally run like webinars to his list, filter people out, sell them on this application, and then like I would kind of manage and work with the sales team to close them on the phone and. And like, you could totally do this in any niche you're in.

So yeah, I launched a whole bunch of other little info products during the time too. I had my authority Insider, which was like an online membership, which was very unfocused. Whatever I felt like talking about, I'd record a video and put in the members area. I did a. Like a email consulting package where for 50 bucks a month, you had unlimited email access to me. I experienced with a whole bunch of that stuff and eventually just phased it out.

So basically you're in like an experimentation.

Very experimental. I was. I tried 10 different products at the time.

So I mean, the interesting thing here again is like you were making money getting paid to experiment, to face your fears, to sell this coaching that is still used to this day. So you built like this crazy foundation. I was on the other end working with someone who was teaching me a lot. I was kind of facing my fears in a way because I'm not usually an analytical guy. So I was working in systems and numbers and CRMs and all that stuff. I'm more of a creative type, so. But I was getting paid through that. So it was almost like this is still bubbling up. Learning, learning.

I think that was around the time when I traveled to Chicago last year, 2016.

And I was still doing video work. So I was still taking on clients at the same time. But Amish and I kind of stopped working with each other. I just wanted to kind of move on and focus more on the creative work, but also start building up my own thing with more of these systems. That's when some opportunities popped up to get back in the client game. Yeah. Which was a very difficult discussion with Matt because I knew I needed help personally because the client work wasn't like I could do client work, but a lot of it was involving stuff that wasn't in my skill set. I could sell it. So what I was doing, and this is kind of a creative way to start a business. I think we might have chatted about it a little bit, but we leveraged our friends. We knew that our friends had agencies. These were some local guys here in San Diego and they were selling. They had clients that were already paying them a lot of money. And these are like billion dollar companies. Yeah, but they needed stuff that they couldn't, that we could provide. So we provide, you know, creative work, videos, stuff like that, but also email marketing, content marketing, ads, paid ads and stuff. It's stuff that these guys didn't know to do.

Yeah.

So they hired us. So I basically was, through our connections, they wanted to work with us. And essentially we would leverage their agency because they had clients already and they would just send us the money, whatever we charged them, you know, they would obviously tack that up to their client.

Yeah. So what they were doing is they were going to these clients that were like, you know, like billion dollar companies, like literally billion dollar companies. And they would say, okay, we'll, you know, we'll do all your website building and maintenance and marketing and handle all this stuff. It's going to cost you $50,000 a month to do it.

Right.

And then what we would do is we'd go to them and we'd say, okay, we'll handle this, this, this, and this, these four things, and we'll charge you $5,000 a month. So we weren't actually having to sell to the end client. The agency was selling packages and just including us in the package.

We just, we just made it very clear of what we can create. And this was still a learning curve. We couldn't package it up perfectly at first, but we ended up closing, I think, about four of these types of clients with this partner of ours, the agency, and they grew to know what we can provide. The clients all loved us. After we, like started working them a couple months in or so they'd be like, dude, these guys are solid and we're getting great results. More organic traffic, referral, traffic, SEO, you know, content's on point, email list is growing. That was kind of our focus. And we worked with. That's where, like we've talked about it in our, in our webinars and stuff. We worked at the brain center, software companies, we worked with supplement companies, all sorts of different companies, different niches. But that was, yeah, a couple mlms. I don't think that was through them, though. But that was other.

Yeah, it was during the same era, but it wasn't sold through the agency.

So, I mean, we got our kickstart again, leveraging friends as agencies. And I think that's another takeaway that you could do is if you're starting something, you want to break into something new, leverage. Don't think you always have to sell to that end client. Obviously, you got to provide value and give a need to whoever you're partnering with. But there's a lot of money to be had with just partnering. Yeah. And it doesn't have to be like an official partnership. This was literally just like, I don't think we even had an agreement. This is another stupid idea. But. But again, it was like a really good buddy. So we just handshake deal. And he always took care of us. But. But it was good, I mean, because, like, we were able to pretty quickly become 20,000 month dollars a month in recurring retainers, plus other random projects that popped up on the sides.

Yeah. And it was around this time, after we had a handful of these clients, that we actually said, we looked at all the stuff we were doing for these clients and we went, okay, we're running content marketing for them. We're running ads for them. We're helping them grow their list. We're writing the emails that go out to their list.

We're putting a lot of effort into the marketing for these guys, and they're getting great results. And we're making a flat 5,000amonth. So no matter how much. How good we do, how much we grow their sales, we're stuck at this retainer that we've already contracted with them at. Right. So we can. We can take a company from making $100,000 a month to a million dollars a month through our marketing skills, but because we have a contract with them that says we're on $5,000 a month retainer, there's no upside for us to grow them that far. Not that we'd ever, you know, stifle their growth because of what we'd make or anything. But. But we just looked at it as, like, the potential is not 100% there. Now, what if we went down this path of doing exactly what we're doing for all of our clients, but did it as an affiliate instead of as a retainer. Right. So now what we're doing is we were looking for products that we can get 40, 50% sales commissions on, and we would do the exact same thing we do for our clients, but we would do it as an affiliate. We would build our own website as an affiliate and do all that same work, but get commissions on it this way. Now, if we took a company from $100,000 a month to a million dollars.

A month, we're getting 50%.

We're going to get 50% of that growth in our business.

And so it's a risk, man. I mean, so at that we had this realization. It wasn't like we acted immediately on it, but we definitely had that realization of, like, holy crap, there's so much upside we're leaving on the table with this, like, knowledgeable, we're very capable. We're connected because over these years, like, we've made endless connections in the industry. So software, you know, potential affiliate partners. We made connections. That is, Josh Bartlett's been a good one because we've been behind pretty much all of his products.

Yeah.

But saying that, like, we. There was still a transitional period where we. It wasn't like we just like, all right, screw client work, let's dive all in on this affiliate thing. Yeah, there was kind of this period where it was a struggle fest because it would be times of. It was around this time, actually, we did start transitioning, but that's when cash flow got pretty tight. Like, we struggled to control the cash flow. It was, I mean, inherently, when you're working with clients and we can go all day on this, we won't now. And the EGP letter, I've written a whole thing on this. But cash flow can kill a business in a heartbeat if you don't have savings or backup plans. And honestly, when you're working with clients, you can't control cash flow. You think you can control with retainers, but you're not really in control.

Well, yeah, you can have these retainers, which just means they owe you the money. That doesn't mean they're going to pay you on time.

Right.

They're going to pay you the full amount. Right. You know, we used to have to deal with clients where they would say, oh, we're going to pay you half today and half in 15 days when we get paid out by another client that we're waiting for money on. And so we were, you know, we were spending our own money to build stuff.

Right.

But we weren't getting paid by the clients on the date they claim they'd pay us on. And we were paying. We were playing debt collectors a lot.

And chase people off. And that was like, my job is like half my week usually was like making phone calls, sending emails, putting boomerang, like reminder emails so in case they didn't respond, I would still hit them back up. I got every cent that we were owed. And I'm not even that I'm not even like a bulldog. But I think I just like pestered them enough where they're just like, all right, I know you did a great job. Here's your money when they finally got it. But that whole lesson put just like this burning hole in my freaking gut Just like I know we're capable of more. We have the knowledge, we're well connected. I want to be in control. We want to be in control of our money, our cash flow. I mean, Matt bought a house in San Diego. I think at this time I was still in Chicago. I came back because I was only in Chicago for a few months. But we were renting. But either way, like, we're still growing. Like my wife's growing her business too, separately. But we're like, man, we needed to start transitioning.

Yeah.

This was the time where a couple these clients actually started dropping off from us.

Yeah.

And it wasn't for us per se. It was like. It was actually the other stuff they were doing with the partner agencies. They just didn't really have a need for them anymore. Yeah. So. Or another thing. And this is another lesson for an agency owner. If you work with a big company who has a marketing manager and if that marketing manager leaves, typically you're fired. Like you ain't gonna. Your days are numbered. So if you ever see that your marketing contact or whoever contact in a company has left, I would start, I mean I would start looking for a new replacement. Also. I'd try to save that client. That's because you gotta think like whoever's coming in new usually has their different perception of things.

That you have their guys, they have.

Their guys, their, their good old boys club that they're gonna send, you know, the project to. And you can't even. Unless you have like dirt cheap pricing, which you don't want to do. Obviously we talked about that. Then, then you're out. And that's pretty much what happened. So it's, it was cool because at this period, and this was late 2016, probably, probably this time last year, probably.

It forced us to make this transition. And fortunately this is when some of our affiliate promotions started making money for us. And it was still tight, tight times because it was transitioning, but it allowed us to save some money to create these systems like Matt talked about in affiliate marketing. And it's worked out. And that's when EGP letter was born.

Yeah, well, the EGP letter overlapped with the client work a little bit because when we first released the EGP letter, we, we basically released it as, look, we're working with these clients. Some of them are even billion dollar companies. We're building all this stuff for them. Subscribe to our newsletter and in this newsletter we're going to show you the various things we're doing for these massive companies. You're going to learn from the things we're creating and the results we're getting for these massive companies. When we started the EGP letter, that was the basis of. It was our agency and we're going to teach what we're doing in that.

Agency and over these years, and this is no joke because we did tally up the numbers and basically amounted to $100 million that we helped generate for. It's not making. It's not meaning that we generated that ourselves. We generated some of this. But. But that was for other clients that we worked with. And like we're saying we worked with multiple billion dollar companies. Obviously it's to move that needle. You can move it kind of a little bit and still generate massive gains. Yeah. But these are the types of strategies that like, we saw this potential. We're like, dear God, if we can make this kind of money for all these clients, what are we. Why. Why aren't we getting paid anywhere near that?

Yeah.

Like we're worth so much more.

Yeah. So that's where the EGP letter came in. That's where the EGP masterclass came in. And that's why we got out of the client work and started doing the same stuff we did for clients, but doing it for affiliates instead. Yeah. So now the business model today is we've got our EGP letter where we show exactly the various strategies we're using to promote affiliate products. And our own courses. We've got our own courses, you know, a chatbot course, a master. Our masterclass. We're working on an affiliate marketing course right now. So we've got our courses, we've got our newsletter and we've got our affiliate promotions. And that is the entire business model. And then the business from here, looking forward, looking into the future, is all about collecting assets.

Right.

It's all about, you know, our next sort of phase of evergreen profits is dabbling in real estate. We're looking at a property in Estes Park, Colorado. We're looking at a property up in Bozeman, Montana. So we're looking into purchasing properties around the country and using those for rental income.

You know where that says as a port. I mean, anything. Assets. Yeah, like, we're looking. You can, we can go various. Like we've.

So in the past year during all this, Matt and I have studied a lot with asset and wealth development as well. And we've kind of really honed back again on the original thing. We opened up evergreen profits about. And that was to build assets, but use business as a tool to build those assets. It's not that this business is just going to exist and this is how we're going to make our money. This money is going to be parlayed into other things that work for us and create a cash flow. So it's things as lame sounding as like funding an ira. That's something that I'm ruthless about, is maxing out my IRA every single year in index funds using Wealthfront. I highly recommend everyone to do that. Just at least check out Wealthfront because it's sweet, because you can start seeing your projection when you retire, quote, unquote, retire. Maybe you're 50, maybe you're 66 or maybe you're 70, whatever amount. But it gives you a projection on like, what's possible when you compound your money. But you could do that with any kind of asset. You can compound that with real estate. So that's why Matt said, start getting into real estate. We have a lot of partners that will invest with us. So it's like with real estate, a lot of people feel like they need to have the money themselves for the down payment and then the monthly. But it's like, no, you literally don't have to have any money up front. If you partner with folks that have money and you provide more value and whatever the sweat is or management of the property, people will partner with you. And so it's us getting creative in how to build this wealth using egp, what we're doing as a tool. Yeah, it's been a game changer. And I think this month is our best month we've ever had.

Well, we're only, what, five days into the month? We're recording this on September 5th.

September. I believe so.

So this is September 5th. Obviously, you probably know by now if you're listening to this podcast, we don't record the day they go live, but we're recording this on September 5th. And five days into the month, we're on pace to have our best month ever.

Right. Well, I guess I was gonna say, yeah, the last 30 days has been our best.

Best 30 day period. Yeah, correct. But September will be our best month we've ever had in business, so. So things are. Things are looking up and, and doing good. And I think what we should do now just to wrap this thing up is I'm going to say sort of my big lessons, my big takeaway from this whole journey, and then you could share yours. That might be the same damn thing, but I'll share mine.

We'll see.

So my sort of biggest lesson, biggest Takeaways from this journey we've been on is that you should have three focuses in business. Right. Focus number one, connect and build true relationships with as many people as possible.

Right.

Because what got us from point A to point B, where we are today has been those relationships. It's been my relationship with Joe. It's been the relationship we built with Josh Bartlett, the relationship you built with Amish Shah Bradley, will. You know, the list goes on and on and on of all these people we've partnered with over the years. We're partnered with Brad Spencer now, somebody we've talked to for years and years about partnering with. You know, everybody that we've had on this podcast are all people we have relationships. John Margalit, who we did coggly with, who knows frickin? Warren Buffett and Bill Gates and people like that.

Kind of a good guy to know, right?

He's a good guy to know. So, you know, point number one, build as many relationships and connections as you can. But strong relationships, like, become friends with the people, not acquaintances. Not just like, oh, I know a guy who knows a guy. Build relationships with people.

You know, a good way to do that. And this is what I do. And this is not because I'm trying to hack it, but literally just like, send them a text message on their birthday. Yeah. Like, it's something that sounds stupid, but if you see them on Facebook saying, people wishing happy birthday, text them. More often than not, they're going to text you right on back and you're going to be top of mind. You're breaking through that clutter and you become more of a deeper friend because you're thinking about them.

So that's. So that's my sort of number one takeaway is that, you know, build those strong connections. Number two takeaway is, you know, try to accumulate knowledge and understanding of as much as possible. And a lot of times that doesn't necessarily come from content. You know, accumulating knowledge and really trying to understand as much as possible oftentimes comes just as much from those connections as it does from the content you consume. I would say I've probably learned way more business lessons over the years from the people I've worked with than from the books or blog posts or podcasts that I've, you know, consumed. Yeah, right. I've learned so much from people like, from people like Josh Bartlett who have, you know, talked to me about different pricing strategies and different design strategies for my website and, you know, partnering with him and watching behind the scenes of him running A launch, you know, same with seeing what you and Amish have done. Same with working with John Margulit, who's in that up that, that startup world. He's not even in the Internet marketing marketing world that we tend to run in those circles. He's in this completely different sort of Silicon Valley esque, like startup world. And so we've learned totally different lessons from that side of the things. Right. We've got guys like Alan, who we're working with now, who's a big name real estate dude, and we're learning all sorts of real estate lessons from guys like him. So build as many connections as you can, try to consume as much knowledge as you can and soak it all up and try to put all the pieces together and understand as much as you can. And then the third lesson is always be focused on assets. How do I add one more thing to my business that's going to add a recurring revenue to my life?

Right.

What can, what. And it doesn't always have to be big. You know, we'll add stuff to our business that will generate an extra hundred bucks a month. We'll add stuff to our business, it'll generate an extra 10,000amonth. But how do I consistently find new assets to plug into the business that's going to add an additional recurring revenue stream? And then how do I take that recurring revenue stream and parlay it into another asset? And how do I take that recurring revenue stream and parlay it into another asset? And how do I continue continually collect and level up my assets? And those are my three biggest takeaways from this journey we've been on so far.

That's all. I'm just kidding.

Three biggest? I didn't say all biggest.

Those are pretty. Those are awesome. Yeah, I mean, I agree with all those. I think what I would add is.

Two things is really focus, I mean, focusing. And once you focus on what you truly are, confident in your path and knowing that this is the way and not. And literally putting the blinders on.

Yeah. Being unwavering with it.

Yeah. Just trust the process. Know that shit's going to get real, shit's going to get rocky. It's never going to be always easy. You know, you might have really good easy day feeling days, but don't let off the gas because you're the second you do that. I mean, you just lose all kind of momentum. But stick the course, don't give up when it gets tough. Fight through. It's true grit. John Margulit said that on his podcast as well is those are the true players that get somewhere is fight through these ups and downs. I mean literally it took us 10 years to get to this point where most people who want to start an online business will throw up a landing page and sales page and run some traffic or ask people to promote their thing and think that it's going to be the best thing ever and it flops. Makes 1000 bucks and they still can't pay for everything that month. And they expect it to just work because that's how the marketing has hyped it up to be. And that's bullshit. I mean yeah, you might get lucky, but you're not going to create a solid business that way. So the true grit putting in the work is necessary through the ups and downs and focusing on that. I think Warren Buffett even has a quote that says.

The wealthy, the truly wealthy and great entrepreneurs out there say no to more things than yes. I think that was the big thing. We were kind of yes men in a way to projects. Well, we were for sure.

Yeah. I mean if money in front of us we would.

Yeah. Opportunities are abundant and don't just take them as they are. And the last thing was taught to me by Amish Shah. And this was one of those things where it wasn't from a book. It was literally from his mouth and working with him. And he's been in business longer than us. I think he's been maybe 17 years now or more. He's still a young guy too, but I mean he's landed himself on the Inc. 500 list twice. He's done these crazy launches of eight plus million dollars at a time. But he said his whole thing that he's learned over the years is that you need to have really two style businesses or projects. One is one that's now a now thing that's going to pay the bills. So if that's consulting, we did that for a while. Well just doing it like for what we're doing right now. Affiliate marketing was how like was our now thing for a while that was helping us grow our business. That led to the future business. So this is one that takes more time to develop. So these are the two focus the now thing and the one that's kind of future. The future one was or is the EGP letter because that's a steady growth pattern. It's recurring, it's something that will overcome. It's. It's almost tied up right now. I'd say it's pretty close. But this month it may pass. It yeah, yeah. But either way, like our main goal was, EGP letter is going to be our big thing. Affiliate marketing is also big, but it's helped fund our growth for the letter. So that's kind of really my takeaway from a mish. And what I still think about all the time now with this focus is like have something that pays the bills so you're not stressing out, but focus on that future growth, that exponential growth thing that you can control that might take a year or two to develop. You never know. But, but it's going to pay off if you stick to it.

Yeah.

And that's it. Those are, I have a lot more takeaways too, but I think those are solid.

I mean, you know, you look at, you look at the EGP and what we're doing now and we're on the verge of having our best month we've ever had in business. And that is because of the consistency and focus. Right. It was when we decided, okay, this is what we're doing. We're going to create courses, we're going to promote these affiliate products and we're going to write our EGP letter every month and we're going to focus on nothing else. And we've had times where stuff has come. You know, opportunities have presented themselves. I mean, big opportunities, like five potential six figure opportunities. And we've said no, we've got to stay focused on this. We cannot diverge off this path. And it's that thinking and that sort of being hardcore about it that has led to us about to have our best month ever with the evergreen profits letter.

Yeah.

And another just sort of word of advice is don't get discouraged if you find yourself getting off course and testing different things. I mean, we would have never figured out.

The business model we're in now if we hadn't had veered off in all sorts of directions and zigzagged all over the place and tested this model, and tested that model, and tested this model. It's all of those veering off course that have led us to realize the ultimate business model is perfect for us. And we wouldn't have figured that out if we hadn't gone down some of those paths. You can't really get discouraged by, you know, going one direction, feeling like you failed and then going in a different direction because you'll never learn if you don't have some of those failures.

Yeah, yeah. And it's all learning. So keep learning on the way. They're all learning moments, they're not total failures. You Know, but just stay the path. For sure. I think that's the biggest thing. And. And we hope to do a recap episode or maybe an update episode in a couple years.

Yeah, in a couple of years, we'll have an episode called how we turned our six figure a month business into a seven figure a month business.

Yay. It's on the path, but just. Yeah, hopefully there's a few things that you picked out of this. It went a little long probably, but.

Yeah, I think this is our longest episode yet. But you know what? It was cool. Reminiscence from memory lane.

It was from popular demand.

No, this was an episode that was asked for, so hopefully you got what you were looking for out of this episode. Those of you that asked for it. And I know that was fun for us to do.

Yeah, no, we dig it. So I'm surprised we didn't have a beer in front of us, but. Because that's typically the case when we go down Memoryland.

But, yeah, I don't think I have beers.

That would have been a much longer episode if that would have turned into.

A longer episode with more double the rants.

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

Boom.