Shipyard Update: What We Learned From A $100k Studio Investment

Boom. Welcome back to another episode of the Espresso Hour, where the running joke is this is going to be much shorter than an hour because we are back. We are in Miami, filming again, hyped up on caffeine. It's been a great summer, but we're back in action. Got some good things on the horizon. Cole, how you doing?

I'm good. I'm finishing my espresso.

Okay, good, good. I just poured up a fresh one.

I ran out of cups and so all I have is this. I just have this pink, like pool cup that you like, you know, make drinks in when you're hanging at the pool. And then I have a straw that doesn't fit because I forgot to run the dishwasher. So that's where we're at. But yes, there's some exciting things for us to jam on. Nice little status update. We took some time off and now we're back and the shipyard's almost done.

Shipyard's almost done. Two weeks from today will be the official build out. So the background is done, the area where the filming will happen is done. But now it's all the tech setup and the furniture and all that. So I guess backing up, we spent. We signed the lease for the shipyard in July. So July 1st was the start of us paying rent there. But we realized that the process of building it was going to take a little bit longer in terms of getting the design working with an agency, actually flying them out to build it.

So we.

So we're going to talk about all the money, all the logistics, everything that's come into that. But I say that because it's going to be about July, August, September, three months since we signed the space until it was done. So from a timeline perspective, because we weren't going to be able to build it during the summer, I spent most of the summer in Amsterdam and Europe. You were here. Studio didn't really have much progress. So it's been like a little bit of a slog as we've waited for it to get done. So it feels good to say, okay, two weeks from today, we'll be filming out of there for the next ship. 30 cohort as well.

So excited about it. And I think why, why we wanted to break this down is I'm sure it's out there. I just haven't seen a lot of people who build things like this, build an in person studio or something like that, share what goes into it, how much things cost, et cetera. That's probably something we would have benefited from before. We started, I think we. We just sort of pulled the trigger and we're like, we want to do this. And we didn't really know what we were signing ourselves up for and just, you know, to be transparent. And so that way, if you want to do something like this, obviously we turned the volume up on some of these things, but net net, it looks like we're going to end up investing about $100,000 into building this studio. And I think if we had known that at the beginning, I could have imagined us, you know, sitting down for our Monday morning jam sesh together and being like, wow, this is going to cost 100k. Like, I don't know, should we do this now? And instead, we just sort of pulled the trigger and decided to jump in and figure it out. And I had a mentor back in Chicago who used to say over and over and over again, everything always costs twice as much as you think and takes twice as long as you think. And in hindsight, you know, when we. When we signed that lease, I remember us being like, oh, this is. We'll. We'll have this done by August, you know, and really it's not going to get done until first, like second week of October. So it took essentially twice as long as we thought. And I think when we started, we thought, well, you know, we're gonna hire an agency to help us design it. We're gonna pay for this gear, and we gotta pay for the studio. And in my mind, I sort of had the number like, this is probably gonna cost us like 50 grand, you know, and then you get to the end and it's like, oh, it's about double that. So I. I think it's sort of a good framework of. It always costs twice as much and takes twice as long, for sure.

And we're experiencing that. So just to give a full breakdown of the numbers, Studio rent, prepayment. Our rent's about 3,800 bucks a month. For the studio space. We paid two months. And then on top of insurance, that came out to like 15 to 20 right around there. The studio agency that we're working with, who is helping us build it, it was 20 grand. So 20k paid to them. That includes a videographer, includes them flying out to the space. It includes every single thing taking off our plate where basically the studio is built. Between 10 conversations of us, what we think should go here and there, us testing out things like what we want it to look like, where we want it to sit. But most of that work would have been done by Us when we had no clue how we were going to do it. So that's what we paid for was them to come in and say, we've built studios before. We're going to help you build this entire thing. All we need is your input and you make one or two key decisions and then we handle the rest. I break that down that way because those are the costs that we don't get back in the sense that those are service costs versus the gear and furniture, which I think are the other half. The gear is going to come out to around 30k for new cameras, new lighting, a fancy Mac computer. That's a big chunk of it. All of those retain their value. So those are investments in that there aren't services that we no longer gain value from. And say we move studios in the future, we'll be able to take those and move them to a new place. So I think justifying cost difference that way. And same with the furniture, all the gear, or all the chairs, the couches, the rugs, all that stuff, again, we can transfer to another place. So I think that's an important distinction where it's like, oh, 100 grand just gone. It's like, no, half of it is to set up the space and then we'll really. And then the ongoing maintenance of it. The other half is like investments in gear that we could have made for ourselves in our home studio, but we just decided to put it in an office.

That's a, That's a really good distinction. Yeah. And it's, it's one of those things that you don't. It's like you don't really know or feel the value of that now because you're, you're buying all these new things. So you're like, oh, all of this is a cost. But, but if. And when we move the studio later or anytime in the future when we shift things around, if we were to do it again, right, like, let's say two years from now, we go buy or lease a studio that's two or three times bigger. Right. It's like, yeah, those original costs of maybe, maybe designing a new space, okay, you have to do that cost again, but you're not buying the cameras again. You're not buying the computer again. You're not, you know, so you don't really feel. Feel that. The value of that in the short term, but then you would feel it in the long term. And as someone, you know, I've moved apartments or houses every one to two years essentially for the past, like 10 years. You know, I've moved a lot and it's what that's something I've felt over and over and over again is you have these pieces with you that you bought and then they stay with you for years and years and like at the time they seemed expensive, but then seven years later you're like, well, I still have this desk, you know.

And in terms of timing, I think there are a couple frameworks that we thought about with this. First off, there's never going to be a perfect time to sign something like this. We could have delayed it. We could have done it a year earlier. Honestly, we could have done it earlier like last year at this time if we really wanted to and from an investment perspective would have been able to handle it. We could have delayed it for a year. I think this one presented itself where the studio itself is literally in the basement or on the ground floor of my apartment building and a six minute drive from your apartment. And that it could not be in a better place logistically for us. So when that popped up in the market, we're like, ah, you know, we could have this and it's a real thing. And then we talked a little bit about this. But you have to make the investments that you then grow into. So when we make this studio space, it's always a bet on yourself. When you invest in an apartment that's a little bit out of your reach, or you invest in a studio space like this, that's an uncomfortably big investment because it's then there and you say, well, what do I do with this? How do I make sure I actually get the value out of this? And so we are going to ramp up content across the board, video, more podcast, having other creators there with us, where if you make an investment like this, it's very difficult to then say, I'm not going to do the work necessary to make it a positive return on investment. Right? So for us it's, we went and laid this out. Now we are going to naturally rise our level of effort to make sure that this was not a waste versus if we didn't do it, we would probably not expand into YouTube, we would probably not expand into more podcasts, we would probably not have those collaborations with other creators. So I think you have to sometimes force yourself in life, in anything with a uncomfortably large investment to then say, I'm going to rise to that level because I'm making a bet on myself.

This is a topic worth digging into for a second because two things come to mind. One, that is one of the reasons why training programs and really, you know, valuable education products are typically priced at a premium. Because part of the benefit of paying the premium for something is now you have to hold yourself accountable. You know, you're, you're like, I spent the money so now I have to go do this thing. Versus if you give someone something that is really valuable for free, chances are they don't really have the, they don't have a reason to go, well, now I have to push myself harder. Right? Like we all revert back to our baseline of comfort. And so sometimes it takes making that investment in order to actually give yourself the drive or desire to take action. The second thing is this is what makes life and essentially any version of entrepreneurship where whether it's like the most basic side hustle, you know, even if you have a full time job and you have a side hustle all the way to solopreneurship, all the way to small company, all the way up to, you know, venture back startup, it's always the same thing. And what it is is it's that push pull of I'm making a forward leaning decision, but I have to find the sweet spot. I think, Dickie, we, we talked about this in Greece where you were talking about the efficient frontier, you know, is how do you, how do you do something that's forward leaning enough where you can grow into it, but it's not so forward leaning that you've gotten ahead of yourself. You know, it's like the person who goes out and levers up and buys some piece of real estate that is way above their means and like gets themselves into trouble versus you know, I'm like, I can feel that I'm going through this. I'm planning on buying my first house next year. And I'm like, the question I keep asking myself is like, where is that efficient frontier? Like I want to buy something that I can grow into because I'm betting that my future self is going to be better than my present self. But how do I not extend so far that I get myself into risky territory? And like that decision is so difficult to articulate how to make because there's.

Too many variables too. There's your situation, there's your cash flow, there's your current net worth. Everything with money is always a multi game. But I think on the business side, the framework I've been thinking more and more about is thinking of thinking about it like climbing a mountain where when you're climbing a mountain, you don't climb in one shot. There's Stops along the way. There's base camps as you level up, climb up the mountain. And so as we've progressed, I look at what we've done these last three months is like, from really December to May of 22 or so, December 22nd to May of 23, we were climbing to a new level. And now we spent the last three months like, okay, we've reached base camp. Let's camp out here for a little bit. Let's take a look around. Where were we? Where else could we go? We need to look at how we're going to get to that next step, do some prospecting on, hey, we got to climb this way. We got to climb that way. We got to hear from other people who've climbed that high. We got to make sure that we don't forget that we started at the bottom of that mountain down there and made our way all the way here. So we take a second to kind of enjoy the scenery a little bit. We. I'm, like, going through this metaphor and saying, okay, now we're just building this foundation where I feel the climb starting. I feel the climb starting. As this studio finishes, it's like, all right, strap up, throw the gear back on. We got another. We got another level to climb. And I think you can always choose how long you want to stay at that current level. But us, it's like a little bit of rest at that new point. Let's hit that next. Next milestone. Next milestone, next milestone. But reminding myself is like, even during that climb, it's like, okay, let's make sure we're looking around and enjoying it as we're doing that as well.

Yeah, yeah. This reminds me. Small tangent, but very related. So I'm working on the curriculum for pgm, which is our premium ghostwriting mastermind that's on the back of pga. And the first module in PGM is all centered around sort of doing a postmortem on building my ghostwriting agency. Things that went well, things that didn't go well, what I would do differently. I think it just helps to give that blueprint to someone who wants to build and scale a ghostwriting agency. And one of the big things that really clicked for me is in that same metaphor of when you're building something and then you sort of stop at these base camps, those. Especially in the world of entrepreneurship or building something for yourself, those base camps are also your moments to pull cash off the table for you. Because one of the mistakes that I made building my first company was I never actually paused at different Levels. And I never allowed myself to just sit at a level and go, okay, I just reached level two. Let's let the bank account balance stack a little bit. I've been investing a lot into this business. Let me take some off the table, mitigate some of my risk for me. Because what inevitably happens is when you keep building and we're feeling it right now, Dickie, we've felt it the past two months like we have pulled a lot less cash out of the business because we've had so many more expenses and because we're investing in the future. And when you, when you do that in, in the short term, right, you're like, I got to a new level. We're going to double down. We're going to invest your business benefits, but you personally don't really benefit in the short term. And if you keep making that decision over and over and over again, what happens, and I experienced it, is we went from zero to $180,000 a month in revenue very quickly with my agency, but I never paused along the way and pulled any money off the table. So the business keeps growing, but I never really personally benefited. And then when all was said and done, I walked away with like five grand. It was, you know. And so I think part of that framework is like, knowing as you're building, it's like you're not just pausing and sort of assessing the business, but you're also mitigating a lot of your risk, being like, okay, I'm going to take some cash off the table, and then we begin our climb.

So many variables at play and why I keep wanting to write about this journey, but it's such a unique situation for every single person on their business journey, on their growth journey, income, all that, where because of the hundreds of variables at play, it's hard to give any kind of prescription. So I'm still working on what some of those frameworks could look like as you hit each income level, as you hit net worth levels, like how to think about. But obviously I have a different perspective than you, right, Given you're about to be married, all that. So interesting game, but I don't think we need to go too far down that rabbit hole on this one. For the most part, I'm fired up for the studio because the second we have it, we're going to sit down on the first day and say, let's take advantage of this thing. So some things we're thinking about already a full ramping of espresso hour, more than likely to start where it's not just us talking about what we're building on the business side, but some almost evergreen live content reaction episodes, maybe some business tear downs where we look at other digital businesses, things like that. That's also kind of a point we should touch on is because we spent the last three months not necessarily moving forward on, we were kind of building the foundation for the next one. It becomes easier to chase shiny objects. So I reflect on what we set up with the Business Bottlenecks newsletter and the idea of potentially doing some consulting around fixing your offer. We came back and we said that's not the best use of our time right now. The best use of our time is taking something that's currently working and fixing the 200 low hanging fruit that we could then go and implement. So that's another balance. It's extremely difficult because I look at like what we, what we did at the beginning of August where it's like, yeah, we need to launch this new thing with this new newsletter. It was fun and it's easy to fall into a trap like that because it's like we've hit this new not sticking point but like new run rate. Let's hang out here and then look at potentially other things we could do. But. But there's a massive switching cost of even dabbling in something new and then trying to go scale the old thing. So there's like this art of you're not actively growing the current thing, you're maintaining it and fixing the small leaks in the bucket. Not necessarily to grow it, just to maintain it, but without going and chasing other shiny objects and just getting comfortable saying gonna sit here and not do anything. There's the art of doing nothing new, which is extremely uncomfortable for us because we knew we could do more on it in the future. Which means like we knew we'd come back in September and say, okay, we need to go hire two appointment setters. We need to, we need to create a new vsl. We need to start our paid ads. Like we knew the four or five things, but because we started to think about the business bottlenecks and scale, fix your offer and those other things, there was then a switching cost to come back to the main thing that took a week or two to kind of refresh our brains on. So we're learning that of when you're in that, surveilling the new milestone on the mountain, getting ready for the next climb, it's like, how do you not go look at another mountain and say we should go switch to that one and Go start to climb that. I think there's, like, another interesting framework hidden in there somewhere.

This is what I love about Espresso Hour being focused around us building in public and sharing what we're learning along the way. Because that is a great example of how even though we know what the right thing is, we still fall into the same traps. And as a result, it's like, you know, it makes you realize, like, you have a lot of compassion for that problem, because everyone struggles with that. Even the person that you look at that seems like they have it all figured out, like they're. They're going to chase a shiny object for three weeks and then realize, oh, I'm doing the wrong thing. You know, it happens. And I also feel like what you just said is particularly true for creative people. This is something I've really had to learn how to do, especially us working together. Dickie. Because my. My default in the past has always been if there's a problem in the business or if there's. If we reach a plateau or if there's a bottleneck, because I am such a. I just operate from a place of creativity all the time. And what I mean by that is my default framework is, oh, there's a bottleneck. That means I need to create something new. So that's, like, always been my default. And something that I've learned working with you is that oftentimes that is actually less productive for the business than if you recognize that's. That's a very powerful. It's like, you know, in Fast and the Furious, and they hit the NOS button, and all of a sudden the car goes like crazy, right? If you. If you hit it too fast, you lose. And if you just hold it down and you don't time it, you know, the car explodes. And that's sort of how I'm starting to look at it, is there's a. You have a very powerful skill when you're a creative person where you can create things out of thin air. But if that's the only thing you're doing, you're constantly then creating even more things to do and more problems, and then it all starts working against you. Whereas a lot of where we've been lately is we did create something new. Amazing. Now put that skill away and go do the 200 boring things that allow that new thing that you created to flourish. And, like, learning how to push and pull that skill is really challenging.

Our income is directly tied to the amount of boring, monotonous work we're willing to do. So we came back and said, Here are the 40 low hanging fruit that we know we should fix on only the thing we currently sell. And if we do that, chances are the business could triple straight up. We made a list of like three to four key hires. 20, hey, if we had unlimited labor and unlimited leverage, what are all the things we'd go start doing just with what we currently have to offer? Let's go fix all those before we entertain anything new. And that's. So that's what we're going to do. And that the amount of boring work that comes with scaling something like this I think is really the bottleneck to anyone getting there. It's not the big new creative projects that hold people back and are. Because those are exciting to go work on. It's dang. Okay, now we're at this new level. It's going to take three months of just absolute pure monotony doing the same thing every single day, running another split test, making another cold call, making all these things that don't feel like you're moving the needle in the mo in the moment until you start to see the results two to three months down the road.

And now looking back, it's so funny. I can see how many chapters where I don't know if I knew that that was the right thing or not at the time. I just know that I avoided it. And looking back, I can see if I hadn't avoided that, oh man, that would have been more successful. That would have been more successful. So I'm glad that it's starting to really click for us and I think we're learning how to be more and more mentally disciplined. But you know, we. It's hard sometimes. And I think the moments when you're most likely. The studio is a great example. The moments when you're most likely to pursue a new shiny object is when you have a big open loop and you don't really know how to close it or it's not going to get closed. Like in the studio. It's like, we know this isn't going to be done for another two months. So you have this big open loop and it's draining your focus and you don't know how to close it or it's not going to get closed tomorrow. And almost as a coping mechanism, you go, well, let me go divert my focus and chase something else. Like that's when we're most likely to make that mistake.

And I look at, look, we've been together in person now for 15 months. So June to September, that's it right? About half the time we've been working together and I look at June through September last year was pure monotony mode. It was. We knew we needed to make these 15 upgrades to ship 30 to the marketing to all that. And then October through January was all content. It was like just ramp up content, ramp up end of the year, all of that. Then February through May was build PGA where we put an absurd amount of effort into that initial cohort into building the system. And then the two months, really three months, last three months have kind of just been. Let's see where. What's. Like what's going to shake out from this, from this big spurt of growth. Where are we like what's our natural run rate across the board here? And we had to gather data across paid ads starting across different percentages and student success rates and close rates and application like so much of that. It almost we just needed to sit on our hands for two to three months while the studio was getting built out too. So now I say we're in a monotony phase where there's really nothing new. It's how do you take what you currently have and go fix 100 things that have. You've now have enough data based on running it for six months to say, okay, now I know how to fix it. So it's like the lag time of improvement is longer because we haven't changed too much over the last three months. Now I can clearly make decisions from all the data that we've gathered. So there's an art there too of doing the same thing because you actually don't have enough information to go make a new decision on what to do next. But now we clearly have all that data in literally a spreadsheet saying fix this rate, fix this rate. How do we do that? How do we do that? How do we do that? So I've never felt clear about the exact bottlenecks of the business that we're going to go and solve. And then now we're going to be able to strike the barbell of low hanging, monotonous fruit on the business side. Brand new creative outlet with the studio. So that could be something that we lean into, right? It's like we know what to fix on this. That's boring. We know what to do on or we don't know what we're going to do with the new studio. That's going to be a lot of fun. Let's go explore our. We have like a new creative shiny object that can offset Some of the meetings and split tests and, you know, call reviews that we're going to have to do in the meantime.

Yeah. And I think it's fair to recognize that, you know, we're not machines. It's. It is hard to put yourself through those chapters of just slaying bores and doing what you got to do to move the business forward. And so give yourself a creative outlet, you know, allow yourself to do some of the other things. But the big lesson for me has been not confusing the creative outlet with what needs to be done for the business. I think oftentimes I saw them as the same thing, and I made the business my creative outlet, and then that ended up just creating more problems than it did create solutions or efficiencies. So any maybe to wrap Dicky, what. What have been some of your biggest lessons learned building this studio? Anything in particular?

Biggest lessons besides that it costs twice as much, it takes twice as long. I think it's been the first time I've walked into a place and you feel the true connection between online and offline. It's like, whoa, this place was created to enhance what we're doing online. And you do that by building. Building things offline. And I think that was really cool. I got to show Greg and Brandon and Diogo the place. And seeing other people see it, I think clicks there too, because for the most part, we've only operated on the Internet. So the realization, you put it in the notes here, that other people want to come hang out there is going to be a lot of fun. Because to be honest, most people don't build up a space like this where their creative friends can come. So I already know that's going to pay huge dividends. It already has me thinking about a bigger space. Right. Because if you can entertain that many people, like, we don't need to entertain that one. I think now that I see this done, I say there's nothing stopping us other than the upfront investment from doing another one, from building the gym next to it, if we decide to. Or in the future having all of these in one place. I'm like, okay, this was a good trial run. Let's go build a massive studio now with everything. So I'd say those are ones and then you touched on a couple other here on the open loop side, but I'll let you go.

Yeah, I mean, obviously the same. I think bringing. Having the digital world create your analog world is really cool. Very underrated benefit. I also am really glad that, you know, it's my Personality. It's like anytime I want to do something, I immediately want to do it at level 100. But I'm glad that we're starting with a very modest version of the studio because there's just so many things that I didn't even know up to this point. You know, and seeing how it comes together, seeing how the project goes, understanding how much things cost, understanding some of the limitations of the space, you know, I think it's really great to do that in a small environment and then yeah, we can grow into bigger environments later. And I also am just, I think this was our rationale for wanting to do it, was having an in person studio we know is going to amplify the quality of the content we create. But I'm very aware that I don't think that we really know how that's going to go. And I mean that in the most positive sense. Like I think even though we have that idea, we might be underestimating the impact of that. And so if you think about just different bottlenecks of the business, if us building the studio increases the quality of our content and just even the perception of the quality of our content, which ends up then causing our distribution to 2x or 3x or 5x, that's another very powerful lever on everything that we're doing. And I am very excited to see the outcome of that in the most optimistic way possible.

Me too. I can't wait. Because we have a long list of low hanging fruit videos that if we went and scripted and made a high quality version, it'd be the best Internet digital writing education there is by far in video form. So so much potential there to educate on that. I think we can probably wrap with this. But I was, I want to go re listen to. I think it was my second episode or maybe I can't remember if it was Lewis and Kyle. It was a podcast episode from like late or early 2021. And in it I said like the long term vision is to have a place that's like a co working studio slash gym. And this was like two and a half years ago and I used to tell people like this was the goal, this was the goal was to build some kind of in person, awesome place to hang out to do all this. And as I was sitting there while they were building it, I, I like got hit with a wave of emotion like damn, this is, this is actually happening. I'm glad I filmed the whole thing. I'm excited to film the mini documentary of us building it because I've talked about some of my influence, but, like, fitness YouTubers were some of the biggest influences on me. I've been watching some of those guys for 10 years, and I remember seeing the beginning of their journey and then them signing their first gym and moving it in. It was always like this small little warehouse that they documented the whole thing of building it out and, like, putting the stuff in there. And I went back and started to watch some of those videos, and it's like the second they did that, it was like a year, like six months to a year where they just blew up. And then it was like, we're moving to a bigger space. We're launching this, we're launching that. And there was something about back to the very beginning of this is rising to that new level of investment that you make in yourself. So when they signed the gym, they said, okay, now I can make better content in here. I can have collaborations. Like, I'm watching that and then seeing what we're about to start doing, and it gives me chills to think about, because I know that there's so much down the pipeline that we're excited to build. So I'm glad we're documenting this one. This might be the last one from outside the shipyard. I'm hoping we did one inside. There was very echoey. And if two weeks from now, if we don't do one next week, we'll be in there ready to rock, which is epic to say.

I'm so excited. And you're right. I mean, we. We manifested it, we worked towards it, we're making it happen. It's. It is a testament to everything we've built, and it's also a testament to just all the people who have been part of the journey, too, and who have supported it, who have gone through ship 30, who have learned and benefited from it, people who even like. This podcast is a great example. We sort of started this on a whim and then ended up getting all this positive signal from people saying, hey, this is really helpful, you know? So in many ways, the studio is also doubling down on what other people have been asking for and going, okay, cool, cool. If that's helpful for you, then we want to keep investing in that. So I'm very, very excited to see where everything goes.

Me too. So hopefully, last one, next one, we're going to be coming to you live from our new setup. Can't wait. Wait till people see it.

Man.

The container in the back. It's perfect. It's going to be so much fun. So that's all we got for today. Thanks everyone for listening. We're going to put together some kind of in person shipyard unveiling in the future. So if we keep your eye out on your inbox for us putting something together like that because I think it'd be a lot of fun if you're listening on YouTube as always, hit like hit subscribe. Leave a comment with your three biggest takeaways. We have two weeks until the next October. Ship 30 for 30 cohort. If you're interested in joining, let us know. Go to startwritingonline.com and you can learn more about Ship 30. Leave a comment because one lucky winner is going to get a free spot on board our next Ship 30 cohort. Whoever leaves a comment with their three takeaways. If you're on Spotify iTunes, number one thing you could do is leave us a five star review and forward it to a friend. If you're on Instagram and listening to this, take a screenshot, tag us. We'll repost it to our story as well. LinkedIn, Twitter, X, all those different places, let us know that you're listening. Enjoying this. A lot more to come on the espresso hour side. Lots of things in the works. Thanks everyone for being a part of what got us to here. A lot more down the in the pipeline. That's all I got. Cole, miss anything?

That's it. No. Thanks everyone and can't wait to see you in the shipyard.

There we go. All right, y' all have a good one out.