0457 | Travis Chappell

Travis hi, my name is Travis Chappell. I am the founder and host of the Travis Makes Friends podcast as well as the founder of Guestio.com and you are listening to EA Interviews.

EA Interviews episode 457, inspiration, transformation, success stories and the Imperfect Action Round. Seven days a week. Join Mario Ficcini for today's Expert Authority effect interview. Expert Authority World. Have you ever wanted to connect to the top, top 1% of people in the world? If you're trying to do something for business, you know, it's infinitely easier when you have the right team in place or you know the right people or you can put them together. And that's why I'm excited to have Travis Chappell on today's episode. He's the founder of Guestio. He has an amazing show, Travis Makes Friends and he has taught me stuff over the since I've known him in 2019 when I started my show. The level he's been playing on since the beginning has always been impressive to me. I know him on a personal level. He's a really cool guy, down to earth, very family oriented and a lot of great other things. But his business mind is just amazing. So I'm excited to bring him up right after we thank our sponsor. Every business needs a book, including yours. And that's why I'm launching my new book to help you regardless of where you think your current writing abilities are. Visit eapublishingmethodbook.com today to learn the seven steps to publish and promote your nonfiction, lead and profit generating business book in eight weeks. Once again, that's EA Publishing method book dot com. Here it is, ladies and gentlemen, Travis Chappell. Travis, how are you feeling today?

Hey Mario, what's going on, dude? Feeling all right? I'm just recovering from being sick, so if my voice sounds a little weird.

Oh, I didn't even notice, honestly. But sorry to hear that.

No, no worries, no worries. It's all good.

Yeah. So I got what gave you the idea. I know a little bit about your background, but for anyone listening who doesn't, why don't you start us there? But what gave you the idea of starting your show and just I would say, believing you could connect with such high level people. People talk about high level people all the time. I talk about high level people, but I'm still learning from you. Just amazed with some of the people you've been able to connect with. How did that all come about?

Let me pause you right there. The mic dropped.

Oh man, I.

There it is.

You Good.

Now it is.

Okay. Sorry about that. Yeah. I think this was like 2016 and I was door to door sales guy and I knew that there was, there was going to be an expiration date on that. I didn't know how soon. I just knew that it was, I was already getting tired of it. I've been doing it for like three or four years and I, I, I didn't, I didn't have any other like, skill sets to fall back on or like, you know, degree to fall back on or anything like that. So I was just like, hey, I should probably try to figure out how to make money online. Because all I knew is I wanted freedom. Like, that was, that was it. I knew that I wanted true freedom. Like, and to me, defining true freedom is like, do what you want, when you want, with who you want. It's, it's financial freedom, it's time freedom and it's location freedom. And if you don't have all three of those, you don't have true freedom, in my opinion. So like, okay, a lot of people have financial freedom. They make a lot of, they make a lot of money, but they don't have time freedom because they spend all their time making money and they maybe work for somebody else or something and they are required to work a certain amount of hours or whatever, their family.

Is the one who enjoys it.

Yeah, right, exactly, exactly. If they're lucky enough to, you know, have enough time to even spend with the family or build a family or create a family to begin with. So yeah, so there's that. And then a lot of people have time freedom because they don't have any money and they don't work and they don't have anything to do with their time, even though they have a lot of it. And then some people have time freedom, financial freedom, but they don't have location freedom. And that's kind of, that's kind of where I was. I didn't have like full financial freedom like you. I would define financial freedom today, but at the time doing door to door, I felt that way because I didn't have kids. It was me and my wife. I made six figures and I worked like 20 hours a week. And I could work when I wanted to work, I could not work when I didn't want to work. But if I didn't work, I didn't get paid. It was 100% commission. Door to door sales. Like, it's, you got to go out.

And hunt element to it.

Yeah, right, exactly. So you got to go hunt if you Want to eat? You know what I mean?

So, and then if I left, if I did go travel for a week, I didn't make money. So when. So if I was going to travel, I either worked more before I was traveling or more after I was traveling or both. But something had to happen to make up for the lack of production while I was gone. And so it was just like, okay, well, what's going to be able to make me some. What's be able to allow me to achieve this type of freedom that I want, that gives me time freedom, location freedom, and financial freedom? And the podcast came about because, you know, got delusions of grandeur from a mutual friend of ours, John Lee Dumas, when I was listening to his show and looking at his income reports and was like, man, this guy makes like, 100 grand a month on just sponsorships. That's crazy. I didn't know that. Yeah. And I didn't even know that that was a thing in podcasting. You know what I mean? So I was like, it sounds fun. It seems cool. Like, I'm just going to do this. And of course, I launched the show, and like, seven months later, I still had, like, 300 downloads an episode and was realizing that, oh, nobody wants to sponsor my show because they don't have enough, you know, traction. And so it became. It became a question of, like, well, do I just stop doing this or do I keep doing this and figure out how to make it successful? And so I opted for, you know, for that second path. And it just, you know, came together a lot different than I thought it was going to come together. So, you know, from there. From there, I did podcast coaching for a little bit, podcast consulting. Then it turned into podcast courses and Mastermind community, and then. And then moved into software, and then now we're building a marketing agency, and then we're actually going to be starting a new Mastermind soon. So, yeah, all that's happened in the last, like, five or six years, as well as, you know, over 800 episodes of My podcast, which we just recently rebranded from build your network to. To Travis makes Friends.

So that is awesome. And I'm smirking because I want to dive deeper with the please elaborate on the delusions of grandeur comment. That was funny, but why do you say that?

Yeah, because I saw how much money John was making on sponsorships, and I was like, I can do that, too. And I did not take into account any of the external factors that were existing that I didn't know existed at the time. So I think A lot of people, like, get this idea that once they start a podcast, it's going to be like Joe Rogan, or it's going to, you know, be like a John Lee Dumas and it's going to take off and I'm going to do this and that. And to be fair, like, it wasn't anything that John was doing wrong or I. I had hired a coach, Jeff Brown, that John had referred to me. It wasn't anything that any of them were doing wrong. It was just a matter of timing. When John built his show, or Jeff built his show, or Pat Flynn built his show, or a lot of these other people built their shows. It was 2010 to 2012. There's weren't a lot of competitors out there. If you did the right things, you hit the top charts, you hit new and noteworthy. You know, the sheer ratio of podcast listeners to podcast shows to listen to was so disproportionate that if you could jump onto any sort of discovery platform, your downloads would increase dramatically. So John's went from zero to, you know, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30,000 downloads an episode within, like eight months. Because he hit New and Noteworthy and became instantly discoverable to a ton of people. And he was the only show that was releasing every day at the time. So he crushed it and did everything correctly and hit like, the wave and at the right time in order to, like, ride that wave right. And then my. My coach Jeff kind of did something similar because. Because he was one of the first shows, not one of the first shows to be on it, but one of the first shows to take advantage of being on Stitcher. And Stitcher at the time was like a. Was a startup. And so he had worked this deal with them to get featured on their homepage to, like, on their business category or something. And then his. His episodes went from like 400 downloads an episode to over 10,000 downloads an episode within a couple of weeks because he got this big feature on Stitcher, and Stitcher was growing massively with the Android user base at the time. There weren't really many options for Android users at the time. Spotify didn't exist yet. So a lot of people were listening to Stitcher if they had an Android to listen to podcasts on. So, you know, a couple of these guys got these, like, big, you know, big breaks in these. In these spaces. And at the time I was just like, oh, it's just a simple formula. I do this and then I'll get on New and noteworthy, I'll get on the top charts. And then, and then that'll turn into 5,000, 10,000 downloads. I can start monetizing from there. I can reinvest at that point. And then none of that happened. Even though I did all of the work, I checked all the boxes, I hit top charts. New and noteworthy was frozen at the time was frozen for like three years.

From like 20, I don't know, 15 to 2018 or something like that. But either way, during the time that I was launching was frozen. So it was impossible to get on new, noteworthy. The shows that were in there, a lot of them were dead shows that hadn't released in two and a half years, but they're still new and noteworthy. Who knows how that happened? And Apple was just like kind of dropping the ball. They just didn't really care and they weren't putting a ton of time or effort into their podcast world, which ended up being, you know, pretty crappy for them because they gave away market share to Spotify, which is now the number one podcast listening app in the world. Even though the term podcast was literally invented by Apple for their ipods. Like it literally was. They invented the term podcast and Spotify.

And when was that? 2006 or 7?

Yeah, it was. Yeah, it was pre2010 somewhere in there. I don't know the exact year, but yeah, pretty early on, yeah, 2005 to 2007 somewhere in there. They invented this term, but they just didn't put any R and D into it. They let things happen like that where it was just completely dead. This entire thing, it just didn't seem to. It just didn't make any sense. It was like, it'd be so easy to fix these things. You're a multi billion, multi deca billion dollar company, you know, and then now you know, a trillion dollar company and like you can't just like unfreeze new and noteworthy section. Like you can't like.

I remember when I launched mine 2019, February 1st, actually, and I was just like, I think I sent them an email that's like, can you unfreeze this? Because I'm launching my show and I heard this is a good way to get publicity. And I don't think I ever heard anything back. But the crazy thing was like two, three weeks later and it opened back up again. I was like, this is it. This is the message I've been looking for. What? I don't think I may have hit it for a day or something. I don't even know if I did because a lot of people I Talked to were like, if you can hit it, by all means, go for it. It was frozen, but at the same time, if that's the only reason you're starting your show, you're doing it for the wrong reasons. I always had long term mindset, but, yeah, if you can get free publicity, why wouldn't you?

Right? And it was like, it was like the model at that point. And so, like, that's why I say delusions of grandeur, because I was looking at that going like, well, if I just do all that, I know that I can do work. You know, the. The work isn't for a lot of people. The work is the. The obstacle was like, I'm gonna do the work regardless. You know, like, I'm not afraid of investing in and making this happen and doing everything that I need to do to do it well. It was just that when I did everything that I was supposed to do, the result didn't happen. And that's when it was like, oh, shoot, back to the drawing board or quit. You know what I mean?

So do you think that knocks a lot of people out getting that? The depression or the sad? Maybe not depression, but it's like you put in all this work and it didn't work.

Yeah, it sucks.

I don't like it, but I look at it as an opportunity to go, all right, what can we do? What are we doing? Right? Because it's very rarely means the whole thing is crap, but it's usually some little tweak where it's like, what is the one thing that will get us to that next point?

Yeah, I think that's a big thing, a big reason why a lot of people stop doing it, especially if you have any success doing anything else. Like, part of the reason that I was, like, committed to doing this long term is that there was pain for me that I was moving away from. And that pain was I did not want to be doing door to door sales. I was, what, 2024 at the time? 2024 or 25 when I started my show. And at that time I was like, I don't want to be doing door to door sales when I'm 34 or 35. So I need to figure something out and pretty quickly if I'm going to move away from doing this for the foreseeable future. So there was enough pain there where it was like, I have to figure this out. There's not a like a if. It's just a matter of when. And so especially if you already have success doing something, you Got money in the bank and you don't have to see it successful. Yeah, it would be, it would be, it would be difficult to, like, put a bunch of time and energy and effort into it and then not have any results for a while. And I can see why a lot of people would quit. But that's also another reason why I, and why I really recommend investing with actual dollars. Like, to me, man, like, investing in myself has always been the best accountability partner because I put like 16 grand into like mentorship, masterminds and coaching before I ever launched my show. And at the time, I had spent $0 on, on any personal development. The only personal development that I ever did was buying like 20 bucks. So to go from 20 bucks to like 16 grand before I even launched, after I launched and it wasn't successful, it was like, oh, shoot, how do I make this successful now? You know what I mean? But if I didn't, If I weren't 16 grand in, if I had just done it the cheapest way and fastest way possible, I may not have kept going at that point because there wouldn't have been enough, like, sacrifice involved in making the result happen that I might have just been like, nah, maybe, maybe not. Maybe it's not for me. But at that point it was like, look, I'm already committed to this. I'm 16 grand into this thing. And that's just on coaching and mentorships. Like, plus I paid for artwork, plus I paid for a website, plus I paid for a microphone is like 20 grand. By the time the first year was over, I had maxed out. I pulled out a credit card, a 0% credit card, by the way. I'm not recommending anybody get in a high interest credit card debt because that's the worst kind. I got a 0% interest credit card and I filled it up as a $42,000 limit. I filled it up with credit card coaching, masterminds, events, travel, flights, hotels, websites, graphic design, at all that stuff getting my show started, $42,000 in.

So.

You didn't just kick it with a stick.

Yeah, correct. Yeah.

You didn't get the $50 mic, plug it in and go, I got everything I need to be successful.

No. Well, I mean, that actually was, though. That actually was the microphone that I got that was like the least. Like, that's the problem with most people is that they, they, they invest in the wrong things. It's like, well, I'm not afraid to invest. It's like, yeah, but you need to invest in the correct things. You Know, like I, I spent, I spent $17,000 on coaching masterminds and, you know, events and travel and flights and hotels and stuff like that. And I spent $60 on my entire equipment list. A lot of people will like, geek out about the equipment. They'll go spend five grand on a new Mac and a new soundboard and three new beautiful microphones and a new dslr, and they'll invest in all this stuff that doesn't really matter for their success. And then they won't even spend a hundred bucks to get a course on how to do this thing the right way. It's like your, your priorities are so effed up, it doesn't even make any sense. You know, that's like, that's like wanting to be a doctor and skipping medical school and buying a scalpel. You know what I mean? But it's a nice scalpel and a lab coat.

Like, yeah, Egyptian cotton lab coat.

Yeah, right, exactly. It's like, I mean, you, you, you look like you know what you're doing, but you don't. So, like, that's going to be more frustrating because now you spend all this money on equipment.

I've always been the mentorship, the training. I tell people when they want to do a book. You know, don't try doing the whole thing on your own if you've never done it. Same thing with podcasting. It's like, yeah, okay, you got the microphone, but now what?

Yeah, because you only, you only have like a cert. Everybody has their own pain tolerance. You know what I'm saying? So, so like, if you, if you're 17 and you have $0 and you have 0 credit and you have 0 way to get a coach or something like that. Okay, start on YouTube for a while, but just understand that you're probably going to take two or three years to learn the lessons that a coach could have helped you learn in two or three months. If you have two or three years, that's different. But a lot of people, like, that's why I said it depends on pain tolerance because, like, a lot of people won't make it through that two to three year time period because of how much pain and rejection is involved in that. Does that make sense?

Like, absolutely.

If you don't. So if you're 34 and you have money in the bank or you have a credit card, 0% interest, again, cannot recommend that enough. Like, my $42,000 was paid off before I paid a diamond interest. I've never paid credit card interest before, but I use you're not suggesting turn.

The 42 into 96 grand and.

Yeah, correct, correct. Yeah. But I've used zero percent credit cards several times on a couple of different businesses, just getting them going and then I pay them off with sales before I pay any money in interest. But anyway, if, like, if you're a 34 and you're doing this, like the odds of you sticking in it for three years and going through the pain of like just watching free YouTube videos or whatever, it's like you may not make it past six months because you have a lot of other demands in your time. Maybe you have a family, maybe you got a bunch of friends, maybe you're working on this other project, maybe you're working full time for whatever, a law firm or you're, you're a full time investment banker or your full time salesperson and you work 50 hours a week, 60 hours a week. It's like you can't, you, you can figure it out in three years on your own without a coach or two years or one year, 18 months, or however long. But why would you probably won't get to that point because you're going to quit before then because it's too painful to go through figuring all that stuff out. Whereas if you just paid a coach five grand, 10 grand, even 15, $25,000, like, if you are truly committed to the long term and you want it to be successful and you know that you're going to make it successful, then you know, investing in this coach is like the biggest time time collapser that there is. And like, that's, that's one thing, bro, that every successful, extremely successful person knows beyond a shadow of a doubt is that time is a much bigger asset, much more important, much more important asset than money. And they're always, you can always get the money back. Exactly. You can exchange money for time. And the way to do that is to collapse the learning curve. So if you're jumping into this new space or you having trouble figuring something out, if you pay somebody to help you do that, you know, you might get it done in one month instead of you trying to 12 different things and taking 14 months to get it done, it's like, well, what's, what's the opportunity cost in the additional 13 months? It's like, yeah, you saved money. Maybe your P and L looks a little bit better. But like, what could you have done? What other business could you have drummed up in the meantime to make up for the money that you spent on that person as well as continue to make more profit in the business.

Probably a week or two of concentrated effort, maybe.

Yeah, right.

If you have a low closing ratio.

Yeah, right, exactly. And all you have to do, bro, is go look at the people who are making a lot of money and look at how easy it is for them to make a hundred grand or something like that. Right? And I was listening to Alex Hermosi recently, and he was talking about that, about how, like, somebody. It was wild to him, you know, even thinking that somebody'd be willing to pay him $10,000 for his time. And then it got to the point where his business was so profitable, they were making like a million a week, that he had people re. He had people coming up to him basically being like, I'll give you $100,000 for coaching, like, half day or an hour of your time or something crazy like that. And it was not enough. He turned it down. And it was like, oh, my goodness. But he's making so much money doing these other things. It doesn't make sense for him to take time to do this other coaching thing. But my point is that was just a guy. He's just a guy. He's just a normal dude that learned some skills that stacked over time and allowed him to increase the amount of. Of money that he charged for his time and to decrease the amount of time that it took for him to make a certain amount of money. So it might take somebody, you know, watching or listening to this three and a half years to make a hundred grand. He could have made a hundred grand in an hour, but he didn't. He turned it down because it wasn't enough for his time. So, like, if you continually invest in you and you become a better asset, you can make the money back like that. Like, you can make it back much, much, much, much easier if you continually invest and your ability to go out there and earn more money. You know what I mean? So, like, it does. It doesn't make sense to worry about, like, oh, but I got to save this $6,000. Like, for what? What's that $6,000 going to do, like, down payment your whole year or two? Yeah, that's. That's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying is, like, you got to. You got to start thinking about, like, where do I want to be when I'm, you know, if you're. If you're in your 20s, like, where do I want to be when I'm in my 30s? Where do I want to be when I'm in my 40s, when I'm in my 50s, when I'm in my 60s, where do I want to be in these time periods? And how can I put myself on a path to get there sooner rather than later so that I have fewer things to worry about along the way? And most of the time you're going to find out it's I don't know something or I don't know someone, and paying for coaching or consulting or masterminds or events or sponsorships, any of those types of things will be able to step in and fill one of those two gaps. The something or the someone that you don't know that will help you remove the constraint and like, allow you to move to the next level on a much faster timeline than just like, I'm going to figure it out myself because that's who I am. It's like, man, you're messing up. You're messing up. Let me tell you.

You know, let's, let's talk more about that someone because I know you have this great software you created and I remember even before you launched it, you were telling me hinting at some things and it's been impressive to see you create it. I've used it both as a host and a guest and it's phenomenal. So is it safe to say this is where the idea came from? You took that time compounding mindset that we've been talking about and applied it and realized when people are looking to get on shows. And I'll also say let's throw in a precursor here because if someone doesn't realize the power of podcast guesting.

It'S what Travis is doing right now and I'm loving and it's what I do on not filming days for my show. I go on other shows as well. So if you don't know the power of it, you should be doing it and it's a good way to learn. But tell them about guestio and I want to know more about it myself. But I love what you created and.

Tell them the key feature that it's going to save them.

Yeah, yeah, sure. So Gestio is again, it's about getting people their time back. I started it mainly for podcasters and show hosts to be able to go book high level guests that they maybe would have had to take two years of clout building to be able to go book. But right now you can go book. You know Matt Barnes, who's a former NBA champion and I think I heart radio's number one sports podcaster with his show all the smoke and you can go book him, I guess you for like 500 bucks to be a guest on your, on your podcast. But he was somebody that I had to build a relationship with over three and a half years before I was able to get him on my show. But, but you can do it for 500 bucks. So Guestio was originally built for that. And the more we started getting in front of people, the more we started to realize that a lot of people there was a lot bigger market that had the problem of how do I get more traction and traffic into my business? And so we really switched the idea to like, hey, how, how do we just, how do we help guests get themselves booked on shows as a guest so that they can promote their, their SaaS product, promote their, their coaching offer or you know, their book launch or whatever else that they're, that they're trying to promote. So yeah, essentially at this point is we help guests get booked on podcasts for promotional purposes. And so we kind of look at this as like in taking, taking the place of PR or in addition to your pr. It's not, it's not the, gonna be the biggest needle mover probably in terms of like, you know, direct dollars to your bottom line. Probably something like Facebook ads or Google Ads or Instagram ads or something like that would probably be better in, you know, impressions, eyeballs, traffic and things like that. However, long term, it's a great brand building strategy. It gives you a lot of great SEO for keywords, especially the keyword being your name. It gives people a ton of content consumer value. It builds relationships on a really high level with a lot of different people. And, and there's, there's several other reasons that don't even have time to go into like, hey, it helps with your content strategy. It also helps you be able to create content for your own social channels. It makes you look like more of an authority. When you get interviewed on social channels, even if they're not big ones, it still makes you look like an authority. So there's a bunch of different reasons to be a podcast guest. And that's essentially what we started building the platform for was like, how do we get, how do we make it easier for people to become guests on podcasts, especially if they've never done it before, where they can feel comfortable and they can, you know, try to make it happen for the first time?

Yeah, and I think you're just being humble or something, but when you're saying the comment about all the ads, I know a ton of people Who. I don't disagree. However, you can also jump into ads and a whole bunch of other stuff. And if you don't have the website buttoned up, you don't have the conversion, you don't have the messaging, you don't have any authority. Building it's not going to work as well.

Yeah, agreed. I agreed. I love podcast guesting just because it can be a much cheaper solution to the same problem. Because, like, if I'm going to test, if I'm going to test a funnel, I'm going to have to invest. Either I have to build it all, which is going to take a ton of time, or I have to hire somebody good to build the funnel. Write the copy for the page, right? Like write the copy on the page or script to the VSL that I have to record and then edit or pay an editor to do the edit. And then I have to script and write and select targeting for the Facebook, Google, Instagram and YouTube ads. And then I have to test copy and images and creatives and graphics and videos on all of the ads that I'm running to the page. And then once they hit the page, then I have to optimize the page for conversions. Like, it's a much longer lead time. Is it infinitely more scalable and predictable? Yes, if you can get it to work. But it's going to take a lot of money and a lot of time to get it to work.

So I tell people all 30 to 60 days of buying data, if not longer, just to see what is working for sure.

Absolutely. Yeah. And then you have to adapt. And even if you're really good at it, you're still going to lose more often than you're going to win. So you have to, you have to, like, you have to be very fast in your next iteration and be like, okay, well, that ad's not working. Let's kill it. Let's write a new ad. That ad is not working. Let's kill it. Let's write a new. Oh, that creative seems to be working, but the copy needs to be tested. Let's try that creative with this copy. And let's try this copy with that creative. Like, you have to do that constantly, all the time to be able to have, like, predictable scalable traffic coming into your business or coming into your funnel from that. Whereas if you just go on a bunch of podcasts, you don't have to set up a funnel, like, especially your high ticket. What I did for the first, like two years of my business to get my businesses to, to, like, Where I was doing actually six figures back then, which was a big deal for me to go from like six figures door to door to six figures online. It was like a, you know, it was like a crazy feeling and experience for me to go like, oh, I can, I can make six figures in other businesses too. You know, now the business does, you know, seven figures and hopefully we'll do multiple seven figures this year. But before it was like, how do I get this thing to six figures? How do I get this to pay my bills so that I can stop knocking on doors? And when I first made that six figures, my only funnel was basically just like a type form that was forwarded from my website, like travischapel.com coaching or something like that. And then all I did was go on other podcasts and my podcast and promote travischapel.com coaching. Do you want to start a podcast? Go to travischapel.comcoaching travel.com coaching. Enough people came.

How many were you? Did you have a goal of X amount per week or per month?

I don't even remember, to be honest with you. Probably I'm pretty goal oriented guy. I don't remember anything about what my goals were at the time. But my point is, it was just so simple and so cheap. It was like if I was charging, I think I was charging four grand or five grand for coaching back then. And so if I went on a couple podcasts and I got two coaching clients a month, it was like, oh, we're at six figures now. And all I did was go on podcasts and talk about it on my own podcast. And enough people are applying to be able to pay my bills and have me go full time with this online thing. And then, you know, I went full time in, you know, 2018, 2019. And then, you know, it was like.

Oh, yeah, because I think when we connected and I love that you're talking about going to events and stuff, because I started my show and within three, three and a half weeks, I was told, you know, by John, you know, a great way to grow your show is to go to different events. I'm like, well, it looks like I'm going to this event. And that's where we met. And it was so cool. And I would have to say, if you weren't full time at the time, you definitely came off as you were.

What year was that?

February of 19.

Okay. I was full time by then. Yeah.

Okay. I was gonna say you never struck me as just like you were there to go, oh, do I need wire for the microphone. Like, really?

Yeah, no, I was like two, three months into full time at that point. I don't think I was at six figures yet. No, no. We ended up doing like a half a million in 2019, but that was like my first year doing it full time. That we did close to half a million.

Yeah. And I remember you were talking about the topgolf events and different stuff like that. It was just like ever since day one. Impressive. So for anyone that's thinking about doing the guesting, obviously that's a smart idea, but.

What would you. Who would you say is your biggest success story that's come from this? Because I know you've also done the agency side as well as the saw the SaaS.

Yeah, our agency clients have, you know, made hundreds of thousands of dollars on our campaigns, but they're typically working with, like, the best and biggest shows out there. So we've gotten people booked on, you know, Impact Theory and Ed, my lead, and.

You know.

Jordan Belfort show the. The Way of. The Way of the Wolf. Okay. The Wolf, Wall street guy. You know, we've gotten people on a ton of really big shows, and so they've had some really great results. We've also gotten people on Guestio that have booked themselves on dozens of shows by themselves using the platform, which has resulted in them being able to sell their products and services at a higher rate. So, yeah, we've.

Yeah. Remember you mentioning someone during the one training, like a year and a half ago or whatever, you said someone signed up, did like 4034 or 42 different bookings.

32 and 30 days. Yeah.

That's incredible.

For a hundred bucks.

That's incredible.

Yeah. So for reference, if you paid my agency or really any other agency to get on 30 plus shows, you'd be paying anywhere between 12 and $20,000 to make that happen. And yeah, somebody did it for 97 bucks on Guestio.

Wow, that's huge.

So there's been some solid, solid results to come from. You know, just. I just tell people, like, if you're in business, you should just be consistently going on three to five podcasts a month. It's just not a bad idea.

Yeah. If you're a podcaster, you should be doing five to 10amonth, but if you are like a business person that can do business anywhere, like, it's not going to work. Written as, like, if you. If you're a chiropractor in, you know, Indianapolis or something like that, it's like maybe, maybe not going to work unless you're trying to like sell a book or build a personal brand that's bigger than your local business, but it's probably not going to bring in a ton of local business leads.

Targeted local shows, though.

Yeah, if there, if there are like Indianapolis local shows, then yes, that could be beneficial. But on a grant, like there's probably not three to five of those, a month's worth of local Indianapolis, Indianapolis shows. So it works better for people that have brands that are, you know, scalable in every part of the country and really the world, because you'll have listeners from everywhere. So if you have, you know, course creator, you're a coach or consultant, you're a SaaS owner or founder, you're an author, you know, a lot of these ones that, if you're selling stuff on Amazon, like, if you have stuff that you sell online mostly, then yeah, I mean, three to five a month, like you should be doing these things because like I said, even if you're like. A lot of people struggle with their own content strategy. And so we have clients where their entire content strategy is. We get them booked on shows, we request the, the raw files from the host and then we give them to our client and that client's team chops up that content and puts it on social. And that's like their entire social media content strategy just being a guest of other shows because, you know, we've had a great conversation today. So, like, if my team gets this file, they're likely to go through and find something that they want to go post on social because like, oh, this is a good little 30 second clip. They'll go through and clip it. And guess who gets the credit for that? Mario. You know, so it's like, why not? You know, you can, you can do three to five interviews in an afternoon and then you're done for the whole month. And then when somebody Googles Travis chappell, now there's 13 pages of Google results literally at this point. And 80% of them, 70% of them anyway, are podcast interviews that I've done on shows. So if you would have looked up my name five years ago, you would have found probably not even my own website would have been on like page three.

But now you search when you have a podcast also, and you can link the stuff in there, not just for the social, but I've noticed eainterviews.com getting more traffic because anytime you find stuff, to me, most of it's pointing back at the show. So if you just want to guest, and I did catch what you said about if you got a book to promote, you should be guesting.

Absolutely.

But whether you have a show or not, you should be doing it. But if you have a show and you're guesting now, you're just creating this synergy snowball that's like. I mean, I. I know we could go two more hours on all the benefits of it, but.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, it brings you so many things. Managers, like I said, you don't have to go crazy and do 32 interviews a month. They can get really. It can really bog you down really quickly. But yeah, three, a constant stream. Three to five a month. Like, you just do that for a couple of years, you'll really see the benefits long term. Helps you create and craft your message better and helps you be a better storyteller, a more effective communicator. It gets you in front of a camera and a microphone more often. It helps you work on skills on purpose that increase your ability to communicate across all of the different.

I'd even say the one on one conversation, like when you're at events and people are like, what do you do? What about this? You're not explaining a 20 minute story. It's like the same succinct things you've noticed or even if you don't know what you're saying and people go, wow, I love that part when you said boom, boom, boom. It's like, write that down. If that's what they're. If people would tell you what they're picking up on. So love all the points you're making. I got to ask you a few more things and we got to go to the imperfect action round, but one real quick thing. Do you want yellow or black for the wheel of whatever?

Black.

Yes, everyone. Everyone's been saying yellow lately. And there's nothing wrong with that. But. All right, black magic question here.

Okay.

And this is fun for me because this is what you do professionally and you already know how to connect with people. But who is someone you'd love to connect with that you haven't yet?

Oh, man, there's an entire list, but.

I got a good one. Then I was gonna ask you a softball, but you're thinking.

I'll pull one out, though, because I think this would be cool to talk to and since I'm talking to another podcaster, you would appreciate it. Tim Ferriss, somebody I'd love to talk to. Somebody who used to be really accessible in the content space, who in the last like three to four years has been almost completely Unaccessible and impossible to reach. So yeah, I would love to interview Tim Ferriss if I could.

Okay, well I appreciate that he would be a good one. I didn't know he want that dark but that's good to know.

Yeah, he bounced man like once he like he just got so, he got his name got so huge. I mean it's good for him. I'm not, you know, not, not knocking him for doing that but yeah, he's.

Very much want to carve out at least a half hour with them.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I'd love to, love to sit down and have a conversation with him.

All right, we're going to thank our sponsor and come back for the real quick imperfect action round. You've heard me say every business needs a book including yours and it's true. And that's why I'm launching my new book@EA publishing method book.com so you can learn the seven steps to publish and promote your nonfiction lead and profit generating business. Eight weeks. But you know what, don't take my word for it. Take it from a few of my authors like Lori, I went from having.

An idea and a possibility to actually getting my book published.

Or Catherine, thank you for making my.

Mom number one best selling author.

Or Mary Alice, what he got done for me in three days regarding my book launch.

Unmanageable John Cody. I've worked with Mario over the phone and online and he's been very helpful in getting me where I needed to.

Go with promoting my books. Rocio, there's no way in the world I would have been able to do this with somebody else again. I've attempted it in the past, it didn't serve me. As a matter of fact I ended up more frustrated than anything. So this has been a very seamless process. Adele, if you're looking for an amazing business coach, I highly recommend Mario Ficcini or Bill Benner. I can't make a higher recommendation.

To work with Mario Ficini. He has been great for me and right now I won't work with anybody else except for Mario.

Hey, their words, not mine. Visit eapublishingmethodbook.com to get your copy and I look forward to hearing your transformation as our next video success story. Once again, that's EA publishingmethodbook.com and we are back with the imperfect action around. Travis, are you ready to take imperfect action?

Let's do it.

All right, rapid fire question, 60 second or less. What is the first path? What is the fastest path to the cache.

Connections or Time connections. I'll say.

Okay, number two, what's the biggest problem you see your prospects making in the fastest way for them to fix it?

Phoning in their content. The. The only way to fix it is to dedicate more time and energy to creating content and not just checking it off of a list. It's never going to do well if it's just part of the checklist.

Ouch. I can relate to that in the past. Good point. Number three.

What is the best way to maximize customer lifetime value?

Oh, additional products selling to the same customer base. Really, it's just like a better customer success path. If you don't have a customer success path. Like if you. If you talk to your client more before you sell them than after you sell them, then you probably need to take a second look at your customer success path and it's probably detrimental to your customer's lifetime value.

Wow, Love that. As a publisher, I gotta ask you about books. Which ones have made the biggest impact in your life?

There's so many. What, what, what category? What genre? Anything in particular?

Whatever you want.

I really like Mark Manson's books. The subtle art, not giving up, you know what. And then everything is, you know what both of them are. I just don't know if I can curse on the show, so I opted to not do it. Yeah, I just. I like Mark's writing style and I. Both of those books made an impact in kind of life philosophy and things like that. So yeah, I'd recommend those.

Excellent. I appreciate that some people don't ask, some people do. But my editors will be happy. Where would you like to learn more.

Travis?

Where would you like people to learn more?

Yeah, Travis, Chappell.com is probably the best place because it just goes everywhere. Guestio.com is where to go to find Guestio. If you're listening to this on any podcast app, then open up whatever the app that is and search Travis makes friends download. Listen to the show. I'd love to hear your feedback as a listener of podcasts. So yeah, that's probably the best place is my podcast. But if you want all my social links, email or anything else about me. Travischapel.com C H A P P E L L Excellent.

And I'll make sure the links are in the show notes on our website.

Sweet.

Travis, it's been a pleasure. Good seeing you again, my friend and look forward to hanging out in person. Got another great episode here today. Expert authority world. I'll see you on the next one. Have a great day. God bless you're already the expert, but have you transformed your expertise into a tangible asset that will generate qualified leads while increasing profit for you 247 and if so, how well are you promoting it? With my new book, the Expert Authority Effect Publishing Method, I take you through my process step by step. Visit eapublishingmethodbook.com today to learn the seven steps to publish and promote your nonfiction, lead and profit generating business book in eight weeks. Visit eapublishingmethodbook.com to get started now. Once again, that's eapublishingmethodbook.Com thanks for listening to today's episode. I would love to know what you enjoyed most from it if you haven't done so already. I invite you to connect with me on my new LinkedIn. You can go to it directly at eainterviews.com LinkedIn Once again, that's eainterviews.com LinkedIn. Lastly, check out the full eainterviews.com site for complete show notes, the full interview video experience, links to the resources we mentioned, and more. Have a blessed day and I'll see you on the next one.