How To Build a Content Engine & Grow Your Business For Impact | 105

I had really just fallen into some pretty serious workaholism. I wanted a shift. I wanted more time doing the work that I loved. I wanted more time back in my life.

You've built something that works and people trust you to deliver. And now you're wondering, how do you reach more people without sacrificing the quality or the values that got you here? That's where Rob Yench is today. He helps education leaders design better learning experiences for underserved students. But he knows he could help far more people if he shared it online. You don't have an online presence. Is that something that you would like to have?

I would love that.

So the things that we need within this, we need a platform that we're choosing to focus on. We need a habit. We need ideas. Specificity breeds universality. I need a feedback loop. The fifth thing that you're going to need is promotion. And then the sixth thing is you're going to need—

I've been waiting for it.

Let's go to the flywheel. As we serve our clients, we're getting great ideas. That's generating the fuel for our content. We're getting feedback on it. As we post that content, we're driving to newsletter subscribers. The newsletter subscribers are gonna drive back to—

So good. That creates so much freedom.

Rob, welcome to the show.

Thanks, Nathan.

Okay, so I want to start with the big question.

All right.

What do you want in life?

I want more students around the world to have a remarkable education that changes their life outcomes and trajectories for the better. And I want more school system leaders to feel confident and equipped to design for that. Okay.

I've had a lot of people on this show. That is probably the biggest statement that I've heard. And when we were talking earlier, you know, in a random question like that came out and I was like, okay, we have got to lead with that because that is powerful. So I want to back up.

Sure.

Because someone doesn't come from, you know, just any old background and end up with that, like, this is my goal. This is what I want. What led you to wanting that into this life experience?

I had an opportunity from some volunteer work I'd done in my community to go and live in rural El Salvador to support a women's public health organization. And that was a fundamentally transformational experience in terms of seeing that talent is universally distributed, but opportunity is not. And I thought, wow, it would be really neat if more students had access to a great education. And then I finished undergraduate My dad's health took a turn for the worse my senior year, and I had imagined going back and living in Central America or elsewhere and doing development work with a focus on public health and education. Teach for America recruiter got in front of me and said like, oh, you can't talk about rural poverty and not know it in your own state, in North Carolina. Like, you should go back, you should teach. And I did, which allowed me to be closer to my dad in his last years of life. And it also gave me an opportunity to teach at a really remarkable school. The term has fallen out of favor, but they were called high poverty, high performing schools. And so we served a population from a county where the college matriculation rate was at or below 10%. The national is about 35%, excuse me, college matriculation and graduation rate. And our students were doing about 6 times the county average and about double the US average.

And So they're at 70%?

Yeah, a little over 60 at the time.

Okay, a little over 60. That's amazing.

Yeah, it's phenomenal. There's a couple of books about it. It's a remarkable campus.

So they're expected to be at a third of the national average and they're instead performing at almost double.

Right, right. And they're coming from these sort of legacy sharecropping fields of soybeans and peanut fields living on trailers and coming and getting these remarkable results. And the public school systems, this was a public charter school, so we had some more autonomy over teacher training, curriculum, and time in the school day. And our school got phenomenal results. And these same students' siblings and neighbors were going to public schools not 5 miles away and were part of the same statistics of the rest of the county. And I got obsessed with this question of how do you provide a high-quality educational experience for students growing up fairly removed from access and opportunity. And taught there for a number of years. And then that question led me to want to look at more schools around the world and to kind of bet on curriculum. So I wrote curriculum and I was an early digital nomad and I backpacked around Africa and Europe and checked out a bunch of schools and educational programs and was shipping curriculum in. Started to run out of money and had a longtime fascination with a lake in rural Guatemala called Lago de Atitlán. So I moved there because rent was cheap and I'd always wanted to live there. And I was writing curriculum and occasionally I'd go back in the US and I'd see the curriculum implemented. And I thought, well, curriculum's not a silver bullet.

There's— You thought you were putting out great curriculum.

Yeah, right.

It's not implemented and you're like, well, okay, that wasn't what curriculum was.

Exactly, exactly. So there's like a, there's a missing piece here. So I got obsessed with this idea of like, all right, well, teacher training. So I took a job with a management consulting firm that helped school systems design teacher pipelines and train teachers. And I had some expertise having having moved from highly ineffective to fairly effective as a teacher in my own trajectory. And so I got a job working on teacher pipelines in Baltimore. So I'd go out and I'd check on our teachers in schools. I had a team of coaches and I'd meet with principals and say, how are things going? And what I heard over and over again was like, central office is terrible. Like they don't understand the needs of schools and they just keep like shoving initiatives down our throat. They don't make any sense. I worked in central office, so I was a Salt and— but what was interesting is, so I had my office in central office, and it'd be like 7 o'clock, 8 o'clock on like a Thursday night, and I'd look across and most of the office lights and most of the cubicles would still be occupied with lights on. Like, people—

there's no laziness here.

Zero laziness. And I'd go and I'd talk to people, um, and I'd be like, you know, what are you working on? And like, everybody had a great idea, was highly passionate, had like a research base for it, and And what occurred to me is like, all right, so there's this liberal argument that folks aren't from the community. So I'd ask, I'd be like, so where are you from? Oh, like down the street. So it's like, all right, so we've got like lots of local people who are deeply passionate about the city's kids, who are really well trained, and they're burning the midnight oil, so to speak.

So you should have all the ingredients for success and it's not.

And it's not clicking. And in fact, not only is it not success, but like when you go and talk to people, it's like, these people are horrible. Like they have no idea what they're doing. You know, it's like, well, they're highly qualified. And they're working their tails off. So what's the disconnect? And the disconnect was disconnect itself, right? So a total lack of coherence. So there's high churn in school systems, uh, and, uh, different officials in the school district try to design a program that makes sense, import a program that makes sense, and the collection of uncoordinated programs leads to disjointedness and overwhelm. And so I got obsessed with this, this next question, which is like, is anybody focusing on coherence? Like, it's not sexy, but like, does anybody think about coherence? And this, this led me into kind of like business strategy, human-centered design, like how do you make a system work? Because this idea of like just importing individual initiatives is not, it's not it. Um, so how do you make the system work?

So, well, I want to jump in for a second because, uh, I mean, there's so many things here, but I was thinking about Elon Musk's biography. And, uh, there's actually, if someone doesn't want to read the whole biography, which they should, but there's an episode of The Founders Podcast, which is titled How Elon Works. I think it's episode 399. And one of the things, like one of his core principles is that engineering, design, and manufacturing all have to be deeply connected to each other. Because what would happen, and this is remarkably similar to what you're describing, is the designers and the engineers would either in a vacuum come up with these things that wouldn't work together, or they would work really closely together and be like, we have designed the perfect solution and all of that. Now you over there, the battery factory outside of Reno, we're in Fremont, you're in Reno, like you design it or you manufacture it. And they would, like it wouldn't work in practice and like in reality. And there was no communication. And so Elon would always tell the engineers and the designers like, you must be on the factory floor. Like if something in your design does not work, you need, like the person implementing the manufacturing has to be able to walk over and be like, hey man, love your idea, doesn't work. You know? And it has to be deeply integrated. And that's the exact same thing that you're running into.

That's so interesting. And I talk to people about that all the time. Like, you can have a great car. You know, let's say it's a Porsche. You can have a great, uh, EV. Let's say it's a Prius. You can't put the Prius inside of the Porsche and expect the Porsche to perform really well. And that's kind the ongoing issue in education is we design components, but we don't think about deep integration. Uh, and often we ask ourselves, like, what's a good engine or what's a good curriculum? And a good curriculum, a good engine, a good anything helps a user through a set of experiences that allow them to learn something that is useful to them. And so it really needs to be user-specific and outcome oriented. And so many, so often we're just asking, is this good? But for whom and under what circumstances and to what end? And so education, I think, is often a collection of good disjointed parts that aren't designed for the user in pursuit of a result that's meaningful to them.

I'm thinking a lot about the creators who are watching this, and many of them are, whether on purpose or not, curriculum designers, right? Because they are teaching content and they're saying, hey, how do I package up this thing that I'm doing and reach thousands or tens of thousands of people? And they're probably missing like the hands-on application and really like that design thinking. Is there anything that you would say to that group of like, okay, if you're making a million dollars a year as a course creator, like make sure to do this thing?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I've got a framework for that. I mean, it's, kind of a few simple questions. So the first thing is, what is the outcome that you want? At the end of this, what should the competencies be so that whoever you're serving with your curriculum, whatever, at the end of it, what do they know and are able to do without referencing the materials? So you're designing for competency. Then what is their starting point? Then the next question is, for users, for people who are going on that journey, What are the most common and important benchmarks that they pass through in order to get there? And what are their most common pitfalls that keep them from starting here and ending there? And if you can answer that set of questions, what do we want them to know and be able to do? Where are they starting? What are the most important through points or benchmarks along the way? And what are the most common pitfalls? It's pretty clear what you should teach, right? And what to focus on and what to double down on. And so if you, if you can focus on kind of getting to the essence as opposed to everything that you know.

The laundry list.

Yeah, right. 'Cause that's the same thing in public speaking, right? It's like people ask themselves like, "Ah, like what should I say?" It's like the wrong question. It's like, "What does your audience need to hear in order to do or know or feel what you need and want them to be able to know and do and feel?" And like planning from the user is a huge, I think, design mind shift that's helped me help a lot of folks with educational program design.

And then I think as more people go through that programming, then if you're actually having that from a design thinking or user-centered design perspective, you're doing the interviews and you're saying, are we creating the outcome that we set out to do? Know what tweaks to make and having that iterative process is going to make a big difference.

Yeah, totally. Well, that, and that's the big thing is like, you got to be curious and talk to people the whole time. I mean, about what they want. Talk to people. Yeah, right.

Groundbreaking ideas that almost no one does.

Right, right. But they really matter. And that's the, I mean, so rarely are, I mean, we talk about student voice all the time, but very rarely are we really sitting down with students as design partners in their own education. And that's a, that's a—

Okay, so I want to get into your business. Yeah. Um, and I'm going to see if I can be a design partner for you in, in your business in a little bit. We'll get up on the board and dive into that. But take us through the path from this experience of seeing what curriculum works and all of that through to the business that you're running today.

Yeah, so spent about 10 years in management consulting building out a team that helps school districts do this, be coherent, focus on students. And About a year and a half ago, I wanted 3 big shifts. One, I wanted more time with my family. I was at that point flying around the country trying to do business development. I had built a team that was, and I think this is, I hear about this a lot from friends who are independent consultants, right? You have this industry experience or this consulting experience and you've kind of worked yourself out of the day-to-day work of consulting and now you're in charge of business development or administration. So this very thing that you and built out a team around, yeah, you no longer do it. And it seems like you can either move up if you want to be on like a leadership trajectory, an income trajectory, et cetera, move up and out of the work that you love, or you can go try to do it on your own as an independent consultant. And so I wanted a shift. I wanted more time doing the work that I loved. I wanted more time overall back in my life. So I wanted I had really just fallen into some pretty serious workaholism, and I wanted to get back on physical health, mental health, and more than anything else. I had a young kid at the time. Now I have two young kids, and I really wanted more time with them. And then third, everyone that I had talked to that I'd had deep partnership with felt excited, energized, renewed about the tools and methodologies that I was sharing, and I wanted to figure out a way to help them reach a wider audience. And so on the first two, I give myself a pretty high score. I'm working a lot less than I used to and thus spending more time with my kids, which is awesome. And I am shoulder to shoulder with a lot of phenomenal leaders doing important work. And on the third front, like figuring out how to get it to more people, I have not gotten there yet. So that's, that's, that's one of the places you can help go.

I know a thing or two about that.

Perfect.

You've come to the right place.

Yeah. Yeah.

Well, let's, let's jump up on the board and just kind of talk through where you're at now and where we're trying to go.

Yeah, that sounds great.

Let's start with the business today. Okay. How much revenue did you do in 2024 and what are you expecting to do in 2025?

2024, a little over $200 2025, a little over $300,000. Okay.

And I'm curious, it sounds like you grew up in fairly similar financial circumstances to me and, uh, were like, that's a lot of money. Is that what you were expecting to make coming into this? No.

And I started my career as a high school, as a borderline volunteer in rural El Salvador, and then as a high school teacher with my first big job. So I, I did not.

What did you make as a high school teacher?

Third, low 30s.

Okay.

Yeah.

So we're, we're right in the 10x ballpark. So we've made some progress in the journey.

Highly unexpected.

I love that. There's just like making money is something that, you know, it's a skill set that you hone over time. And I always like to reflect back on that because, you know, same thing for me. I look back and I'm like, me 5 years ago, me 10 years ago would be like, you're kidding, right? And even as we have plans to grow, it's fun to anchor in, in that aspect of it. Okay, so I want to break down where that revenue is coming from and then we'll get into like what we want to tweak in the business. Sure.

And that's not all take-home, by the way.

Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's business revenue.

Sure. Yeah.

So yeah, there's, um, there's expenses within that. So where, like, where does that money come from? Is it high-end consulting projects? Is it the long tail?

All that. Yep. So in the last 22 months, I've had 14 different entities as clients. I've had 3 that are above $50K each and they, no, I've had 4 that are above $50K and one of them above $100K. And so the majority of revenue is coming from 4 of those 14 clients. And there's 10 at roughly like $5K and $15K. Okay. And they are like, they tend to be small nonprofits trying to innovate and do something really cool for a population that's pretty far removed from access and opportunity historically and currently. So I feel a lot of passion for them, but not only are they paying less, they're also taking a lot more of my time. Okay.

I wanted to get to that of like the, the time aspect is interesting. So if we were to break it down, and I wrote this not quite right, within the 4 that are $50K plus is also the 1 that's $100K, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, right.

So these are bracketed together.

Yeah.

But if you were to, I guess from an income perspective, we're at 80/20.

Yeah, that's about right.

From the income side.

Close enough.

The math, you know.

Yeah, close enough.

Isn't exact, but then from a time side, Where are we at?

Probably 40/60.

Okay, yeah, so it's, it's inverted.

Yeah. Might not be exact 80/20 this way, but like it's—

You know, we're getting—

Yeah.

So basically 80% of your income is coming from 40% of your time.

That's right.

And then 20% of your income is coming from 60% of your time.

That's right.

Conventional wisdom in this would be, I'm not going to do it, but would be to just draw a giant line through all of this. And say like, we don't do that anymore.

Yeah.

Now we can't do that. We're not going to do that because there's another phrase written up at the top here of design for impact. Tell me about that.

I have an MBA. I know about the line. Yeah.

You're like, I've done management consulting. Thank you for paying me $50,000.

Yeah, right. Done. Right. Yeah, exactly. I know about the line and you're 100% right if what I was designing for was profitability. Um, but what I'm designing for, I hope, is impact. And so I think I've got a toolkit. I think I've got a set of, um, processes that really help folks design phenomenal, uh, life-changing educational trajectories for students. I don't have a design. Like, I don't have something to copy paste, right? Like, I don't, like, this isn't the solution to having, to having a phenomenal education. Uh, but I, I think I've got a process for helping folks pretty reliably design and implement, um, something pretty special.

Yeah.

And what I'm really interested, Nathan, and like, you know, the, the, the reason we're here I think is like, I have no idea how to more effectively reallocate this 60% of time to serve not 10, but like 100 or 1,000. Organizations that might not be able to handle like a bespoke high ticket, at least in the education sector. I realize these aren't in management consulting, crazy high contracts, but yeah, like how, yeah, how, yes, perfect.

You've got to return that 10 into 1,000 plus.

That's right.

All well, I'm going to switch colors just because it's fun. Now like we want to decrease What amount of time would you like to spend serving that group? Or is it actually a decrease?

Yeah, so I'm working low 50 hours per week on average right now. I'd love to get that to mid-30s and spend even more time with my kids. So if we could get this to, if this could be, all right, so 40 hours a month. So if this were 16 hours, sorry, 40 hours a month, this were roughly 16 hours a week and this were roughly 20 hours a week, but I could serve 500, 1,000, 1,500 education leaders who are like out there in the trenches with a million pressures, uh, on them to just like do everything at once. If I could help them cut through that noise and find the signal and design something phenomenal, like even, even if it couldn't be at quite this level of depth, like that would be be my third thing, right? Like I'd spend more time doing work that I care about, more time with my kids, and figure out how to reach a larger audience in a meaningful way.

Okay. I like that. So we're not trying to decrease time a substantial amount. No. But, you know, get from the 50 hours a week to the 30, 35.

Yeah.

But significantly increase impact on that group. What do you think of this model of continuing to make the bulk of your income from the few large projects and then freeing up lots.

Love it.

Okay. This is fantastic. We don't want to change. Because some people would see this and be like, oh, I don't like how consolidated I am with these handful of clients. Yeah. No, good. And so then it's like, this is just a big, a gift, basically, of work.

And if I'm making like $150K or $200K a year on 40% of my time, like I'm playing with house money. Like that's like, wait, I do what I love, serve clients well in 40% of my available work hours and making $200K a year or in rent. Like that's so above and beyond like my wildest dreams even 7 years ago, you know?

So usually people come onto the show and we're like, all right, how do we turn this $300K into a million?

Yeah.

Now, from us talking like last night at dinner and beforehand, like you would like to do that.

Like if I have a million dollars, like I have plenty of like good ideas for what to do with it.

But it's not a key thing that we're optimizing for. It sounds like a byproduct of the impact, not a—

That's right. Okay.

That makes sense. Something else that's interesting to me about all of this is you don't have an online presence, at least that I could find.

Yeah.

You have some on LinkedIn. Right. Do you know how many followers you have on LinkedIn?

I have a little over 3,000 connections.

Okay.

And the reason for that is in May, I had somebody told me, was like, oh yeah, you should focus on getting online. And I was like, yeah, that makes sense. So I asked my assistant to just identify superintendents, foundation leaders, et cetera, just like a quick role match and just add 10 every morning. So that's what he's been doing. So I'm at like 3,000 now, but I don't post. It's not like a real content creation.

There's no monetization. No.

Oh, no.

Okay. Yeah, there's that. So is that something that you would like to have? I would love that. Okay.

If it helped me serve 1,000 people better.

Always the goal.

Right, and I don't know. Right, I mean, we've got this powerful tool called the internet that's been around, and I'm not leveraging it.

Maybe we should use it.

Right, right, yeah, it's just like, There's an obvious platform.

Right. Okay. So if we were to list out what are we optimizing for, or I don't know if it's optimize the outcomes we're trying to create, something like that. And we were to list out 3 of them.

Yeah.

Building an audience is one of them.

Yeah.

I mean, so it's really scale impact is one.

Yeah.

Or maybe I'm trying to decide scaling impact might be the overarching thing. Like that's sort of a given in the conversation. Maybe now let's get more specific into how we're doing that.

Okay, perfect.

So you say audience, I think like give them tools, frameworks, products.

I'm not sure.

Like the group that you're serving right now, you know, this 15 clients, 10 are in the long tail. Do you feel like if you produced a course that would serve them, like give them what they need, or do they really need someone like they need more than that. They need like hands-on, you know, like a lot more help there.

There's a spectrum within that type.

Okay.

There's a spectrum within that tail. Yeah.

So my gut feeling is like for this group of the long tail of consulting clients, you don't want to abandon them.

Right. Actually, I want to serve more of them.

You want to serve more of them. Serving them, in the way that you're 60% of your time on 10 clients for that amount of money, right? You can't pay someone else to serve them. There's not, there's no profit there to do that. You're like, you know what, I'll scale a team. I'm losing money in this group and so I'll just make it up on volume. Like that will never work. And so I think what we need is we need to productize. Um, and so we need to create those outcomes at some level of scale, right? Within this framework of things we could solve for, solving for you having an audience, solving for you productizing this part of the business, is there a third thing that we want to solve for?

The MBA in me wants to say monetize, but I think if I had more, from a flywheel perspective, if I had more money, I could reinvest it into the business and reach more people more effectively. Um, and so I think like there is something around monetization, not, not, not because like I'm not thrilled with, with, with my current circumstances. Yeah, but the money to reinvest, uh, I think that's like, it's got to be part of the, it's got to be part of it, right?

I heard this quote this weekend and now I've quoted it 4 times since hearing it. And that it's from Seth Godin. And I had just quoted on a previous podcast, I was listening to every podcast, like, yeah, Nathan, I heard this on the last one, but it's Seth Godin quote and he says, profit is just permission to do it again tomorrow.

Yes. Yeah, I believe that. I believe that. I believe that.

So we're not optimizing for profit.

We're insuring it.

Yeah, we're giving this foundation. So the things that, the options I want to write here are a flywheel of some kind of like, how do we close this loop and accelerate what we're doing? Money can be a great loop closer. The other one is time.

Right.

Like really, you know, a theme through all of this is like, how do we do the best with the time that we have?

Right.

And then the third option would be like the monetization profit aspect of it. And that all could fit in within the flywheel. I'm gonna write down 4 things. We're gonna go time and then flywheel.

Okay.

Okay. They go, all of these go hand in hand. Sure. As we dive into solving these 4 things, I just wanna orient for you, like this session is entirely for you. So are we headed in the right direction? Like, is this resonating? If we could solve these problems and focus on decreasing time?

Yeah, 100%. 100%. Because look, I'm good with spending 40% of my time serving 3, 4, 5 clients really deeply with bespoke work. And leveraging those learnings to then share and improve myself. And I think this, this really is it. Like, so that leaves us with 60— well, I want to work a little bit less. So this leaves us with the balance of my time, right? Half my time to move from trying to serve 10 organizations, 10 system leaders well to 1,000 well. And yeah, I mean, I think that, that is, that is exactly what I would love to do.

Okay. That sounds good. Well, let's first start by productizing. We're gonna start on step 2. Okay. And, uh, I'll explain why. Sure. It'll be obvious a little later.

Sure.

Um, so the pro— productizing is taking, really just taking something and packaging it up in a way that can be repeatable. So if you and I sit down for a consulting session, I'm like, help me design great curriculum, help me design these outcomes in the school, and you spend 8 hours walking me through exactly how to do that.

Yeah.

That was wildly helpful to me.

Yeah.

And no one else. Well, besides the thousands that I will then go impact, right?

Right.

Um, and, but then if tomorrow Kara, our producer, is like, now do it for me. You're like, great, let's do the exact same thing over again. There's no, nothing's productized in this.

Correct.

And so that's what's happening, right? There's nothing productized for these 10 people. So what I want to do is design a program.

Yeah.

Where you could have as big of an impact on everybody that you have now with significantly less time spent. And so the things that come to mind are all of these, you said $5,000 to $15,000, are all of these custom negotiated packages?

Yeah.

Okay, so that's the first thing we want to change, right? Is we want one standard offer.

Yeah. So, Can I ask a question?

Yeah.

Okay. You can cut this if it—

No, you can ask whatever you want. It's your session.

Okay. So here I, in this, I have a mix of school districts, education nonprofits, and foundations. And I love serving all three. I think all three have a very similar issue, which is how do we design effectively for students and cut through the noise and the pressures? Right. However, I do think on these custom, there's some slightly different through lines in those 3 segments.

Okay.

So I don't know if that means I have to pick 1 offer to match to 1 niche. Probably, right?

Maybe. So let's say, could you get down to 3 through lines?

Yeah. Okay.

So then we're great. We've gone from 10 bespoke things to 3.

Sure.

So it's already a significant reduction.

Yeah.

So that would be helpful. What I would wonder is if— actually, maybe one question. Would these people benefit from learning from each other, or are their problems different enough that they wouldn't learn anything from each other?

So the segments, yes, but then within segments there's levels of readiness. So in some cases, yeah. And in other cases it's the blind leading the blind. So I think there's There's a range there. Okay.

So what I'm wondering is if within this one offer—

And that's not the blind leading the blind on everything. Yeah, there's highly competent people who are doing a great job leading through complex change, but in terms of readiness to leverage some of the methods that I have, I think in some cases, lots to learn from each other, and in some cases, need to build up a foundation first.

Yeah. What I see here is like, what if you had one offer? So it's like, this is for $10,000 a year.

Yeah.

I did just make you raise your bottom price slightly.

Yeah.

Well, double. But yeah, you know, for $10,000 a year, we will solve this problem. And maybe the solution is different within each of our three tracks, but like the packaging of the offer.

Yeah.

Is similar.

Yeah.

Would that work?

Yeah. Okay.

And so then you're trying to standardize as much as possible. The analogy that I've seen is like, I don't know where I want to do this. Maybe I'll put it down here. You're doing this totally custom bespoke thing and this totally custom bespoke thing and that, and there's no replication to it. It's different every time. You can't clone that. And so what you're trying to do is like exactly the same, exactly the same, exactly the same, right? Like we can, we can make a factory that makes this over and over again and probably creates like better outcomes because we've standardized a lot of that. And then, you know, if you need to help someone with the edge cases, you can because you freed up more time to be able to do that.

Right.

Um, and so that's what I want to see is like, A single price point.

Yeah.

Um, and then you just say, okay, what is different to create the best outcome? Cool. We're now 70% the same and the last 30% is different.

That sounds good.

Okay. So if we want to offer, then we need a format. Do you have a sense of a productized format that would serve like this group of people? and would let you scale to 20 or 40.

It sounds like group coaching, right?

I think so. Yeah.

Um, where there's like some prerecorded content, some prompts that everybody works through individually, and then you come together to learn from each other and have like office hour spot checks, right?

I think there's going to be onboarding as well.

Say more about that.

Or how do you do the onboarding? I imagine you have like a custom methodology in all of this. Right. Were you telling me earlier that you'll do these workshops with someone where you'll sit down and train them. What I'm wondering is if you could train a cohort instead, could you train 4 organizations simultaneously? And maybe they would act, I think they would learn more as long as they're within the same track. They would learn more from the questions that they ask. I was at this event the other week where all of these great founders. I'm used to being at something where people are asking me questions and there was just this great group of founders. And actually there were 3 guys sitting at the breakfast table. One was 60 years old, the other was 70 years old, and the other was 80 years old. And I did not say a word. I was so thrilled to listen to everybody else ask them great questions. I was like, that was amazing. I wouldn't even have thought to ask that. I just wanted to hear everyone else's questions. And then this incredible wisdom from these 3 leaders. Um, and so I feel like I learned so much more from other people's questions.

Yeah.

And so being in like an onboarding cohort, I think would be really interesting because I would learn, right? There's like what I got stuck on. And then, oh, you got stuck on something. I didn't even realize I was stuck on that until you asked that question. Like, you know, that sort of thing.

Right.

Um, and so I think that could help a lot. So could you do like a quarterly a quarterly onboarding where you spend 2 days with, you know, whether it's 4 new organizations or 8 new organizations, would that work?

Probably. Again, it depends a little bit on the segment. Foundations and nonprofits have time. School superintendents are pulled a million different directions. Like, holding 2 days is pretty tough, but possible.

Okay.

Possible.

How do you—

But that might be the 3 tracks and the—

How do you onboard them right now? Right? If it's bespoke for the school superintendents, like, how do you get time on their calendar?

Yeah, it's like 2 hours, like every 2 weeks or something, you know, it's like, it's a, it's a slow drip.

Can you actually serve them?

Yeah, they might need a different offer.

But like, even if they're, are, are you effective in creating impact in their organizations when they aren't able to allocate time to like learn the methodology and All of that?

No.

Okay. If we're designing for impact, like what I'm wondering is some of these like pushing a boulder down the hill and then like this one category, you're like pushing the boulder up the hill. Yes. Okay. If you had to like let go of serving that group, what would it, what would it mean for you?

There's a lot of kids in public schools that are run by superintendents who have an insane set of operating conditions. You know, like 12 bosses who don't agree with each other, i.e., a school board.

It sounds like a very challenging job.

It's incomprehensible quite what they're up against. So I think like for me, it's a, like I want to serve them well. And I don't think I've figured out how to do it well yet. And I'm not confident they're productizing It's going to work. It's going to work. Yeah. But I'm—

it's a tough problem.

It's a tough problem. Yeah.

Because there's, there's so much leverage in this, right? Because if you can positively impact these few individuals, they will then impact thousands.

Right. That's right.

But they're so hard to reach. One thing that, that I'm wondering, tell me if this resonates at all, is if you could set the boundaries on what it means to work with you.

Yeah.

And so someone says like, you know, I'd love for you to come in and show us what to do and all that. And I got about 45 minutes next, not next Friday, but the one after that. Sound good?

Right.

And if you were to say, man, I totally see how important it is for you to create this change and I see your passion for it and I see how hard your job is.

Yeah.

Here's the thing. I have good news and bad news. The good news is this methodology works. We can create change. We can help solve so many of these problems. The bad news is it's going to take a commitment from you. And it's not going to be 45 minutes every Friday. In 2 Fridays. In 2 Fridays. It's going to look like whatever this is. And when you are ready to dedicate the time, I would absolutely love to work with you.

Right. So I think, yeah, I think that's right. And I think that basically means that segment dies in the short term. But my long-term hope, and maybe this is a pipe dream, Nathan, is we build an audience to such a, we get a platform big enough that a superintendent can be like, oh, we have the opportunity, my firm's called ADGN, right? We have an opportunity to work with ADGN if we can allocate the time, and then the school board and everybody else is like, yeah, well, of course, if we have that opportunity, we'll create the time. That's a distant dream. But I do think I need the brand cachet in order to be able to say that to them. Does that make sense? Yep.

Because audience is going to get you reputation.

Right.

That you have in these circles, right? Your whole business is driven on referrals, all of that. But you don't have a reputation at scale. Right. And so the superintendent heard from someone else, they're like, oh, we have to work with them. And the school board's like, never heard of them. Yeah. Who cares? And so if the school board is like, wait, really? I saw their— I just listened to a podcast or whatever, then yep, that makes sense. So one thing that I've found is often in sales, when you're willing to do everything to make it work, you gradually erode your own credibility. I would not be surprised if within the same group, even before you have reputation from the audience? If within the same group you said, this is what it looks like to work with us, and they're like, ah, you know, I can't and all that, but we can do this. And you're like, this is what it looks like to work with us. And they're like, ah, and you keep coming back to it. I would guess that a lot of people would say, I can't do it this month because whatever's happening in the school year, you know, any of these things, but I will make time to make that happen. And so my guess is that conversions would ultimately go up because you said our program matters. It happens under our rules. There's a reason for it. You care about impact as much as I do. These are the circumstances which we create the most impact.

Yeah, I think I've been allowing like a false dichotomy between empathy and standards to like take root. I think what you just said is a really good push.

It's like, I mean, it's boundaries in any relationship.

I used to talk about that with teachers all the time, right? It's like your empathy is like your empathy, like you lowering the bar for these kids is like keeping them where they're at. Whereas when you say like, no, like this is what a good paragraph looks like. And like, nope, like you're going to keep rewriting. Like I'm going to keep giving you feedback until it's good. Then like people rise to the challenge. And I think like in my own consulting, I've allowed myself to be like, oh, but like, their circumstances are so difficult that let me bend and do some stuff that's not going to work.

There's a Greg Popovich quote, which I'm going to totally butcher. The gist of it is basically like, I hold these standards because I care about you deeply and I know you're capable of hitting it.

Right. Right.

And so it's that, exactly what you're saying. You see it all the time with students where you're like, oh, if I lower the standard and I cater to them, I don't teach, but I have 3 kids. Oh, you're a total teacher. And so, you know, you just see like there's times where it kills you to enforce the consequence or the boundary or whatever. And you're like, yeah, we'll let it slide this time. And you know, like, wow, that is such a huge disservice to them.

Yeah, that's a nugget, man. Yeah, I mean, that's a word. Like, yeah, if I leave with nothing else, that's like a critical refr— and I've already left with other stuff, but like, that's a critical refrain.

Hmm. Okay. So what I'm going to put in here is I'm going to write down, um, boundaries. Okay. So we've got a lot to cover. So in the interest of time, offer the format. Um, I think the onboarding cohorts are going to be good. Basically, we're just trying to standardize everything because the more we standardize, group things together, not only do I think we can increase impact because people will learn from each other, where we can substantially decrease time.

Love it.

And then when someone's like, hey, when can you start working with us? You say, yep, our next cohort starts in 3 and a half weeks. Would love to have you in it. Um, I would just need the commitment from you, you know, by the end of this week so I can save your spot. Love it. Right? Um, so that's going to be really good. As we're productizing, let me draw this arrow. What else are we missing to productize?

So this is all paid content. Like I would, I don't know. And like maybe this is for another day or another year, but like I would love to have free content.

Yeah. So we'll get to that. That'll be the audience.

Okay, great.

We'll get to that.

Great.

I think the third thing, I don't know what to call it. I'm going to write down learning. Um, that might be the wrong thing. Let me talk through it to make sure it's right. What I want you to get out of this, obviously you're going to get money out of this. And you're going to help people, right? We're getting money and impact. But as we transition into audience, we need learning ideas, pain points.

Yeah.

We need fuel for our content. Maybe that's what it is. I'm just gonna write down fuel.

Love it.

Um, so now like what I want you to have is like, as you run this, you make this whole process, you have this track running in the background. That is continually harvesting what's your biggest frustration as a school superintendent? What problems do you run into? All of this, right? And you're just harnessing the language that someone used, all this. Every one of these onboarding calls is recorded, every question, all of that. And you're, you know, using your custom, the transcripts and your custom AIs to mine for all of this and put it in a place because that's what's gonna give us the fuel for authentic content. Love it. Okay.

Love it.

All right. So as we talk about audience, what I want to do is define a few of the ingredients for that. Yeah. And then let's also get into our time commitment. So as you were breaking down these elements, we're talking a 40-hour work week, then I don't know, say we're spending 15 to 20 here on the consulting aspect of it.

Yeah. Highly high-end bespoke. Yep.

And then if we could be 10 hours a week on our productized offering.

Yep.

You think that's possible?

I mean, it doesn't exist yet, so I—

So anything's possible.

Right.

That's the concern that we design with it.

Right.

And then 10 hours a week. For the audience. So why don't you write audience up here and we'll start to break it down. Great.

That sounds good.

Okay. So the things that we need within this, we need a platform that we're choosing to focus on. We need a habit, right? So how are we showing up consistently? The time block, all of that.

Love it.

Uh, we need ideas.

Fuel.

Yeah. Fuel. Because that's what's going to make the time spent, uh, much more effective.

Yep.

I think we need a feedback loop. Let's just talk through these and see where that ends up. So let's, yeah, let's just say audience in 10 hours. Love it. Right off the edge of the board. All right, so an audience in 10 hours a week. That's our constraint.

Okay.

All right, so let's first talk platform. The people that you're trying to reach, what platform, Instagram, LinkedIn, all of that, do you think they're most on?

Professionally? Yeah. LinkedIn.

Okay. So that's easy. We got LinkedIn. The habit. How do we make content creation for LinkedIn a consistent habit that you're excited to do and showing up consistently for?

I think it's all interconnected. So I mean, I get stuck on ideas, I get stuck on platform. So I think constraints are helpful. Constraints unlock creativity sometimes. So constraints. And I think time held sacred. And I think that's a matter of calendar blocking. It's a matter of, right? I mean, it's a virtuous cycle in the sense that right now this creeps into, right? I have all of these clients who I have such a heart for and I'm not doing a good job of setting boundaries. Right? And so that eats into the time. So I think Calendaring is big, constraints are big. I think accountability. I think I thrive with gamifying, I don't know, a way to win.

I mean, you could do the old Tim Ferriss thing where you're like, if I don't show up and write 3 days a week in this period of time, then you as my best friend take this $1,000 and donate it to this organization that I despise. Donate it in my name to this organization, like put some stakes to it.

Yeah, that's good.

I've never personally done that. Like it scares me a little too much. A simpler version, you know, I'm writing a book right now and a simpler version is I will post, you know, like I took 3 days off of my normal work and said my number 1 priority is to make progress on this book. And I, you know, posted on Instagram and I was like, this number is currently 22,000 words. It needs to be 30,000 words by the end of this week. Hold me accountable. And that helped.

I mean, that would work for me. Doing anything publicly, I'm like, all right, let me step it up.

Okay. So I think you need some public accountability and then you probably need a peer, like someone that you trust who is going to call and be like, hey Rob, how's it going? Did you do the thing? Yeah. So I think those two things will create the habit. Obviously, if we were designing a true habit in a Atomic Habits style, we'd want the cue and other things. Those are two great places to start from. Okay, number 3, we need ideas. So the hardest thing, this is where I think the habit breaks down to the point that you just made, is when you don't have ideas, you sit down and you're like, okay, my calendar says right now I should be writing. I should be creating content, but I don't have that. What am I going to do it on? And so you need that fuel consistently coming in. And so that's where if we can build into our flywheel right from the offer, that every time we're having these calls, we have a system that's logging all of the ideas, the pain points and all of that. And then I am just coming to that and saying in this 90-minute block of content creation time that I have, Yeah. I'm just picking from this list of what I'm going to actually write.

Yep. I have no system for that right now.

I guess just to talk through it really quickly, it's record the calls, make a custom GPT that takes the recording of that. So we're recording in Grain or Fathom or whatever else. And so then Zapier or Notion has a recording tool.

Right.

You're just putting it in a set spot. And you're having your Claude project read out of that and its job is to then summarize and say, uh, these are the pain points that were identified. Great. And you'll, you'll tweak that prompt over time and you'll read through it and you're like, oh no, it missed one. Why did it miss one?

Yeah.

Going from there. So you might set that up combination of Zapier or some other tools, but like, uh, and then you would constantly have pain points logged and then you're going to have that place stored in there. So the things that you think of, Right. You're on a call that's not recorded, maybe with a more enterprise client or, I mean, I would record all the calls.

I do already. Yeah. But I've got 20 minutes of them in Fireflies. Yeah.

And mine all of that. The other thing that I do a lot is I use the Whisperflow app. And so it's a text to, or a speech to text. It's really, really good. If you use a Mac, like you can press the function key on your keyboard and just get perfect speech to text. It transcribes it immediately. Uh, you like the delay is 1.2 seconds or something like that. And so it constantly tells me like, using speech-to-text, you type at 100, it's the equivalent of typing at 150 words a minute. It's like, I don't type that fast. You know, um, it's great. So anyway, use that, but then there's an iPhone app. So in the car, I use it all the time where I will turn it on as I'm driving and then speak to a prompt or that sort of thing to mine ideas. And so really just have the place that you log all your ideas for content and you summarize all your pain points and frustrations that you hear from your audience.

Love it.

Okay, so next is the feedback loop. What you're going to find. Yeah, go ahead.

Quick question. So do the ideas have to feed into the coaching? Does everything that I post have to in some way sell or underscore problems or solutions within my group coaching offer, or is it fine to serve a longer tail with a broader—

Yeah, it's fine to go broader because you're still within education, creating great outcomes for kids.

Great.

All of that. It's just that this group, you're going to have a front row seat to their problems. Great. And I would bet a lot of money that their problems that are wildly painful to them are pretty universally applicable to the rest of your audience.

That's right.

And so there's this idea that Tim McRawl taught me. He's a really great writer and book launch expert and all this stuff. And he always says that specificity breeds universality. So like the more specific you can be to a certain person's pain point and all of this, the more universally applicable it'll be. That's great. Okay, so the feedback loop. The hard thing here is you're going to publish content that's not going to resonate. Because it's not very good, right? And how do you know whether it's good? A lot of people use views as their metric, like, and that, like, that's some element of a feedback loop. I post on LinkedIn, did it work, did it not? And you track that and you learn. But I think you also need a few peers. You need people who are on the journey together who maybe are providing some accountability. They're providing some feedback. Hey, does this Is this a good post? Am I still writing like I did when I was in corporate or management consulting? Or am I writing for hooks and retention and all of that? So do you have any ideas of who you could form a group with, or does anyone come to mind who is good at this kind of thing that you could get feedback from?

Not really. It's kind of an empty space out there. I mean, I'm not on there regularly, so sorry if I'm offending somebody who's got the most amazing content in the world in this space, but I don't hear a clear voice that's speaking to the pain points and desires and actual workable solutions for any of these three mini segments within education leaders.

So I would go outside of your core audience then.

Okay.

And I would say, so the principles are the same, right? So in the same way that if I'm teaching software engineering and I don't know, you're teaching math or all of that. A lot of the principles of how we engage in a classroom, all of that, create the learning environment are the same. In the same way that if we're both trying to get attention on the internet and I'm doing it in one category, the principles of hooking content, maintaining, those are the same. So I would join a group like Jay Klaus's The Lab. Um, or I would try to find other creators to be around. I would come to Craft and Commerce, okay, Kit's event, and, you know, meet people, but like form that small group of people that you can turn to who are on a similar journey. Um, and get that feedback loop. You can even see if there's someone that you can hire, maybe a copywriter. Hey, can I pay you $500 a month on retainer or $1,000 a month for you to just like Give me feedback on every post before I put it out.

Yeah.

And that would be well worth your time. You might only do it for 3 to 6 months.

Be well worth it.

But I bet your learning curve would be really good.

Okay. I love that.

And then track all your numbers, right? Because then you'll see like, oh, this worked, this didn't. I really like having a spreadsheet that— oh, here's a little secret about the internet. You can repost content. So I thought if you wanted to build a big audience on social, you had to every week come up with the best content. Turns out you can create lots of content and find the best ones and then repost them every 6 months or so. And so if you're trying to post weekly, it doesn't take you that long before you could actually be like, oh, I'm set. I don't need to write any more content. Because my reposts keep performing well. Because you really shout, like, imagine a crowd of people going by, right? You know, if the difference between like standing behind a pulpit and lecturing the same group of people versus like a crowd of people going by in an airport, the algorithm is really a lot more like the airport situation. And so if you repost, if you say things over and over again, you're reaching new people rather than like, oh, I said that I, you know, once 2 years ago, I can't ever say it again. So what that means is that you end up creating a spreadsheet that's like all your best ideas. And then, you know, so you post these and like those 2 did really well. It's like, great. In 6 months, you know, I'm going to be waiting like on the calendar.

Right.

And I'm going to have a date later on. That that's going to get reposted.

Right. So if they can get to, what's half a year?

180 days.

If you can get to 180 great pieces of content, then you would—

Yeah. And you don't actually need to post every single day.

Right.

I would go for quality over quantity to an extent. The huge caveat on all of that is that quantity often leads to quality, especially when you're early on.

Right.

So I would probably look for a cadence of publishing 3 times a week. On LinkedIn and see what can you do within that quality bar, especially because remember we have our constraint of 10 hours. Right. And then there's a whole, I guess the fifth thing that you're going to need is promotion. So why don't we write that one down in your fancy orange marker. So the promotion piece is really important because a lot of people put out the content and they don't put in that work. So there's three 3 main elements of promotion that you're going to do. One is that we're looking for is comments. So these are people that you can connect with in your community. You're trying to grow together. They're commenting on your things, you're commenting on their things. Comments is what primarily drives the algorithm. It adds credibility, all of that. We wanted that reputation. Yeah. So really try to find a handful of people that you could grow with who will do that. The second one is going to be partners. And so what you want to do—

Is it important that the commenters are in the same space that I am?

No.

No.

It just should be, they should genuinely find your content interesting. Okay. But yeah, they don't need to be in that space. Um, so the partners is basically like who already has your audience that you could go out and write to. And so if you were publishing 3 times a week, and I would probably do 2 to your own audience and then 1 that you're trying to partner with someone else. There's a really great creator. His name is Brian Harris. Uh, his website is growthtools.com and he has this whole group coaching program and all that where he's teaching like experts how to grow their audiences. In the only method they teach, right? He's done all kinds of stuff. He was telling me he used to have like 95 playbooks for growth. Now they have 4. Like the only thing they teach is partnerships. Go out and identify potential partners, pitch the partnership, make it happen. So that is coming on someone's podcast, doing a webinar together, writing a guest post for their blog, doing a swap for newsletters, right? All of those things that you're happening, having happen over and over again. And then the 6th thing that I'm realizing you're going to need is you're going to need emails.

I've been waiting for it. I was going to be so disappointed if you didn't. I was going to ask you and then I was like, oh, is Kara going to get mad at us? Yeah, exactly.

All right. Because we need a way to capture this attention. So what you're going to do to get people on your newsletter is going to be lead magnets. Cool. So what you want to do is take the most— we've identified pain points, right? That's in our fuel. And so we're going to try to take the most painful problems that people have, create a lead magnet around that, and then in our content, we're going to drive people back to that. Um, and then when you— another way to get comments is when you have that newsletter. And if it's, if, uh, weekly is too often to send a newsletter, you can send it monthly. You can start with like more casual cadence and build up to it. What's going to happen is as you build the newsletter, you can actually drive them back to the comments on your posts and say like, uh, hey, we're doing this big discussion here. And, uh, you know, I'd love to hear your thoughts, right? What's your biggest pain point here? What's the solution here? Tell me a story about the time when, and that will drive comments interaction because you just took 100 people or 1,000 people, emailed them and said, go to this LinkedIn post, right? And so you end up in this Flywheel. So I guess to wrap up, because I've thrown a lot at you all at once.

So good.

Let's go to the flywheel. This is just in the interest of time, I'm going to give you the most basic version of the flywheel.

Yeah.

But as we talk through this, we're trying to create a virtuous cycle, right? The more that we do something, so with more time I'd figure out a better one, but what it is is As we serve our clients, we're getting great ideas for what their true pain points are. Yeah, go for it. Write anything down you want.

Okay.

And so then from there, that's generating the fuel for our content. We're writing all of those posts to the highest quality that we can. And maybe there's a mini feedback loop in that of like, you know, we're getting feedback on it from, you know, on our ideas.

Yeah.

But then what we're doing is as we post that content, we're driving to newsletter subscribers and then the newsletter subscribers are going to drive back to find clients to— yeah, there's two loop closers that you go with. There's actually a bunch.

Okay.

Becoming clients would be one of them.

Yep.

And that would work well. We could also drive back to our content, which helps boost the reputation.

Yeah, no, this is like a mini loop within it or no?

Yeah, so maybe let's just go newsletter subscribers back to new clients, right? That's the simplest.

Okay.

And what you'll find is that's the main goal. This is a flywheel to drive new clients. What I was trying to close it in is a flywheel to drive more audience growth? Because from listening to you, I believe you care more about more audience growth than you care about more clients.

That's true.

In this moment.

That's true.

But more new clients will get you more people to serve, which should get you better ideas, which, you know, so like they go hand in hand.

Yeah.

Okay, so there's a lot of iterations of this. I would test this flywheel and try to measure it. And then I would play with, oh, is my loop closure a little different? Over the next 6 months, swap out some of the things in the flywheel. So now let's take a step back.

Yep.

What we're optimizing for, audience. We've got a clear idea of how we're going to do that. Productizing, right? We've got the 60% of our time that's going, it's not making that much money. So how do we scale the number of clients while decreasing the amount of time? I think productizing the offering is going to do it, especially because we're standardizing, we're going into a lot of other— we're maximizing our time in that. We also have a tie-in for where the fuel goes into the audience. From a time perspective, I'd really encourage you to focus on this calendar element and say, hey, how do I time block for not just the writing, but for each thing, be like, how does this all fit together in a given week? And so you're saying, okay, once a quarter I'm doing onboarding, so I'm going to have these 2 days blocked out. Once a month, or, you know, every other week, I'm doing these office hours. You know, you can make a puzzle where it all fits together. And then try to leave at least like 10-20% margin for other things. Um, but then you get to the point where I think you hit all of your time goals and hit your impact goal. And a lot of that is driven by number 4, which is the flywheel of, you know, we've got each of these aspects of it all fitting together and feeding on each other because, you know, the fuel from the audience, the audience is going to drive more, um, conversions into the coaching program. And honestly, the big anchor clients are going to continue to provide great revenue all the way through.

Right.

Okay. I just threw a lot at you. Thankfully, we wrote it all down and recorded the whole thing.

Yeah.

Any takeaways? Any things that like especially stood out to you?

Boy, a lot. I mean, I think just like retaining some clients that are high ticket, highly bespoke, and provide a ton of fuel for great ideas like that, like like, and that like, that creates so much freedom because then I can reallocate the balance of time, um, to growing the audience. And I think the reframe around like, it's not actually about not serving these folks. It's about serving more folks better is really helpful. Um, and then I like the audience building. Like I'm, you know, I came in here with like zero, I mean, totally clueless. And this is I mean, it makes a ton of sense. Makes a ton of sense. And that feels approachable. Yeah. Within 10 hours a week. A question I have.

Yeah.

Like, what would happen if I put this on pause for 6 months and then 20 hours a week here and 20 hours a week here and like just focused on growing audience and subs, knowing that I had like 3 or 4 here while I built out?

It could be a great use of time.

Or is this a critical building block to this?

No, I don't think so. The thing that's critical is the fuel. So if you have—

Right. I get it.

But if you have enough of a back catalog and you have enough from there, then that's great.

Yeah.

I mapped out the productized aspect of it. We really talked through that because that felt to me like a non-negotiable in the impact that you're trying to have in the world.

Well, that's probably true.

Now it might be a non-negotiable. We might just need to think about our time horizon.

7. Right. Right.

In 3 years or over the next 3 years, it might be a non-negotiable. In 3 to 6 months, that might be something that you're willing to put on pause.

Yeah.

Like that's a trade-off you might be willing to make to have a much bigger impact long-term.

Yep.

Right. And so the idea, if in a given week you're like, I'm going to spin up a new audience in a new offer, I'm going to have 3 different tracks and onboard, and I'm going to pull it off all simultaneously. You're like, No, there's no chance that works, right? So putting things in sequence rather than doing it all in parallel might make a lot of sense.

Okay.

This month I'm going to get really good at the habit of creating content. Next month I'm going to get really good at the feedback loop and I'm going to stack that on my habit of creating content. The following month I'm going to get really good at promotion. Okay, so now I've spent 3 months on audience and I've sort of stacked these skills and I've just said the one thing at a time. Success in month 1 is just showing up. Did I do my, uh, you know, 3 times a week of writing for 90 minutes each time, right? Yes or no? And you're like, but it didn't do well on LinkedIn. Doesn't matter. First, did you build that habit? And then the next month you layer on the next one and up from there. And then you might say, okay, I have this dialed in at least to a level that I'm happy with. And now I feel like instead of it taking 20 hours a week to do all of this and 80% of my mindshare, now it's down to 10 hours a week and 40% of my mindshare. Because now I'm just like, we're at a rhythm and now I'm ready to layer on the next thing.

I love that. That feels way more like accessible, doable.

Maybe as a final thought, I'm just curious how you felt coming in to this and how you feel now.

Came in feeling both overwhelmed and hopeful, and I think I'm leaving feeling much more equipped and hopeful.

I love it. So I always ask guests this question. Normally they have an audience already, but if people want to follow your journey, see what you're doing, like where should they follow along? And I just chuckle because you don't yet have this. Right. Yeah. But where is it going to live? Yeah.

Well, my last name's hard to spell, so I'll write it here. Rob Yench, and I'm on LinkedIn, and you can find me at rob@adgneducation.org for, you know, reaching out for anything. And always helpful, always excited to, partner with anybody who's trying to make a difference for kids.

Sounds good. You're doing very important, very impactful things, and I'm thrilled to play a small part in it. So thanks so much for coming on.

Thank you so much, Nathan. I really, really appreciate it. It was really cool.

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