Business or Pleasure - Industry Change Episode 8

It starts when I get in the maxi taxi. I get a big taxi for my surfboards, and he says, is it business or pleasure? And I'm like, I don't know. I mean, I guess I'm doing some work, but it's a lot of fun.

It's Richard Toutounji from Comm Marketing Group and another episode of Industry Changes. I've got a special guest in a special location, James Schranco. Welcome.

Thank you.

Well, thank you. We've been here for 7 days. It's a pretty magical place, Maldives here.

Got a little bit of sun on the nose there.

Just a little bit. It's, uh, and how many surfing trips have you done in the last 2 weeks?

Well, this— I've been here for 2 weeks, so I've been surfing 32 times so far, enjoying that.

And that's what I want to talk about in this episode because James, I wanna kinda get your whole view around lifestyle and business, but before we do so, I wanted to deep dive into how you got sitting here and out of your 7-day-a-week general manager position, and what was that transition? 'Cause now you run a super successful business called Superfast Business, and you've been doing that for about 10 years, is that correct?

Yeah, so back then I had a job and I wanted to have my own business as well, 'cause a lot of my customers had their own business and I could see that, you know, they were doing things like having a day off to go play golf or coming into the office mid-morning and doing work and then leaving. And they could because they're the boss. But I noticed there's 2 distinct groups. There's the employees and then there's the business owners. Yeah. So I wanted to get a foot in the business owner door, but I didn't know what my business would be. And I really struggled to build a website because a decade ago that was actually pretty tricky.

So it was 2000s. Early 2000s?

This is 2005, I registered my first domain name. 2006, I was trying to build a website.

Yep.

And I struggled so much that after this huge trial and error and not putting budget towards hiring someone to just build it, because even if I did, I didn't even know what I would build. I ended up finding some software that made it easy to build a website and I decided to sell that as an affiliate for commission. And I started selling some of that and then I started learning all the things, how to write more compelling website copy, how to drive traffic to my website, how to convert that traffic, how to build my email list, how to make videos. And over time, I started getting really good with search engine optimization.

Yep.

And I sold a guide that helped other people who were trying to build websites and then I built a community of people who wanted business help and I realized that a lot of people in the online space don't have real business skills and I had all these real business skills from a real business. Yep. From running these huge real businesses and I found that that has been a helpful sort of service to offer people. So I've built and sold website development companies, I've had a search engine optimization company which I sold and now I just do the coaching and I have little side projects here and there but More or less, it allowed me to let go of the job so I stopped having to go somewhere else every day and just sunk my efforts into having my own business.

And I love the concept that you were actually building it as you had a full-time job. You didn't like stop and say, hey, I'm going to start my business here. You were working 2 things at the same time.

Yeah, I think it's— unless you're single and you've got no expenses, you know, like Tim Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek, you know, you can't relate to that. When you have a family, a mortgage, you're living in an expensive place like Sydney, you can't just quit for your pipe dream. I think that would be a mistake. So I'm a huge fan of setting a trigger point of where you will actually be able to build your side business up enough to say, hang on, it's crossed over that point now and I can let go of the normal job.

So what it sounds like is that you actually had a very high-up position and you had to run that every day with the stress of that. Then you actually had to build a business on the side to replace the income. Is that what you're saying?

Yeah, exactly. For a little while there, I was just working a little bit extra hard. And as easy as it's painted on all of the videos and that, that's a lot of marketing gump really. It's just— don't believe that. It is easy if you have the right path and you have some good guidance and you've got something in motion. But I find that the startup phase is Particularly difficult. And for most people, it's especially difficult because we've been locked into a certain way of thinking.

Yeah.

A certain way of living. We have this 9 to 5, Monday to Friday. We just do what everyone else does. We go to school, university, get a job. We pay our taxes. We get employed by someone else. We get told what to do a lot of time and we're boxed in. And I just wanted to just I wanted to get out of that. I wanted to design my own life and get back in control and shatter this idea that you're going to work really hard till you're 65 and then you'll have a pile of money and then you can sit around and do nothing. Because that's not practical. I'd like to live like I'm semi-retired. So now I align my interests and my passions with a way to create an income. So having a trip like this, for example.

Yeah.

If I put together a trip and I can come and do some surfing and talk about business and find other people who want to do that too. And we all chip in a little bit then we can make something amazing.

And so talk about that, we're in the Maldives, you've been here for 2 weeks, I've been here for a week and you're basically saying that you can set— like a trip like this is really important for you to actually set up your priorities and say I can actually achieve work, I can have business at the same time. So it's like you're breaking every work-life myth possible.

Yeah, I mean it starts when I get in the maxi taxi, I get a big taxi for my surfboards. And he says, is it business or pleasure? And I'm like, I don't know. I mean, I guess I'm doing some work, but it's a lot of fun. So yes, it's breaking the paradigm. It's like going to the cinema on a Monday when there's 3 people in the whole place or the shops when it's empty instead of doing the weekend thing. Living life countercyclically is extremely enjoyable and it's available to everyone, but we just sometimes don't know that that's possible.

What is the like 1 or 2 tips for a business owner that wants to get to that stage. However, to go to a movie on a Monday, they feel that anxiety or that stress or that guilt they have if they've got a team or their clients. They don't want to tag themselves in or take a picture. Like, I hear that a lot. I don't want to take a picture because someone will think I'm on holiday. How do you break that? What's the tip that you can give to break that?

Block it in your diary as if it's an appointment with a customer and pay yourself first. So for most service professionals, if they were to just block time as if they were a customer of themselves and give that customer their absolute best Yeah. Then they can start to chip away at that mindset block. It's just a mindset block.

Okay.

And what you'll find is when you go away for a little bit, your team step up, you find out who the leaders are, you find out the holes in your business that you can plug. And unless you have a business that works to some extent without you, you don't really have a business, you have a job.

Sure.

So the first time I came on the Maldives trip a few years back, I just brought my iPhone and I left my laptop at home. And I decided just to see what would happen after a week, you know, and amazingly my business didn't blow up. My team were fine, the customers were okay,

and

I realized that it was all in here, this constraint.

That's really good, that's really good. I find that your systems as well, the systems that you share on your blog and the resource that you give out all for free, a lot of it for free mind you, is that it's all around systems and it's all around structure. Can you go a little bit deeper into that? Like how do you go from— how do you really systemize and structure your business to ensure that you can take that week, 2 weeks, 3 weeks away and know that the systems and the staff and the whole routine will take place.

It's a matter of being proactive and not just being reactive. So for all the people who say, oh, I'd love to just do whatever I want whenever I want, I tried that when I first had my own business and I found that people just get in there and they're always wanting this and that because there's no deadlines or Or partitions, it's sort of open slather. So I have things like a scheduler that only opens up my calendar on a Wednesday morning and a Wednesday afternoon. So that's the time when I commit myself to giving my best to other people, which means that I get the other 6 days to myself. And so the first step is really to put in boundaries and to partition out the bits that craft a big space for yourself and then put everyone else into what's left.

I like that. So just go straight to your diary first and craft your time.

Yeah, you can You can actually take control of your life and stop being reactive all the time. And the same goes for your inbox. Your inbox is a to-do list that other people add things to, so be ruthless about who you subscribe to and who you let come into your inbox. And for anything that's not absolutely essential that it should be acted on right now, it either goes to a filter or it goes to a help desk where your team can look after the support better than you can.

Great. Because I have seen your updates about zero inbox and really keeping the inbox clean and that's a way that also I'm assuming that it clears that mind for yourself.

Yeah, I've been away for 2 weeks and I've got 2 emails in my inbox so it's easy just to manage that and a little bit of discipline like about 30 minutes a day with my phone and I can manage to maintain my business. If I want to put more in then I can grow it bigger but I think it's a choice and I put out a post about this recently. I don't think $10 million in revenue should be the goal anymore. I think we need to grow up and say, you know what, maybe an extra million dollars in our bank account isn't going to change my life for the better, but it's going to bring in more compromise and mean I have to do things that will take away from my life. And so I think maybe we should think about what sort of life do we want and then put the steps in place to go get it.

So instead of just going the financial goal, put the life goal and then see what that looks like. If it's the financial goal you want or it's that life Absolutely. That you want to balance a bit more. Those are really good tips. I want to get a little bit deeper now into— you're writing a new book that's coming out shortly. I want to kind of grab maybe a chapter or 2 around, you know, some of the strategies in that book to really get that business owner to the next level. And let's say they do have a solid business, right? And they are trying— they are thinking, hey, I want to 5x my business. And what advice are you going to be giving around that? Is that something that you talk about?

I do. I actually go through the profit formula in the book.

Oh yes, we did that last night.

Yeah, and that's just focusing on certain areas of the business where you can have easy wins. Because of all the things that you can do in your business, there are some things that are hard to do and there are some things that are easy to do. So what I like to do is go straight for the easy things to do and to get some confidence with the wins. And that's why I focus on just a few areas first and then we go from there. So the chapter on the profit formula is actually quite helpful Makes

a lot of sense. It's just the micro stuff instead of trying to get a new option all the time.

Well, most of the time we already have all the resources we need. We already have customers if we have a business so even just going back to the exact same customers and asking them to buy again is significantly easier than going and finding a whole new group of customers.

Yeah, that makes sense. The other model— one last question is that if you've got a business owner and I see this a lot, they say okay I want to grow, they invent a new product, a new service or they get into a new business or they sell the business to recreate something I've seen your formula that you're structuring it down less but tighter as well. How do you go from the model of I've got a lot of different moving parts to really streamline something that's really just tight so it does have less of your resources and time?

It's just truly understanding that not all the business models that you have are equal. And so you can't do everything. That's just a fact. You just can't do everything. So if you're going to do a few things, why don't you identify the few things that are far more effective and just zoom in on those and magnify it and you'll get a significantly better outcome than giving equal portions of your effort to things that don't deserve it.

So you would go and find the parts of the business that are taking less time or the most profitable parts and then kind of eliminate the rest?

Yes. It's— you could use a stop-start-continue. You could say which business models or units or parts of our business should we stop doing that are completely wasted time, aren't achieving the goals we want, don't meet the filters that we set. Which things are working really well that we must continue? And what things haven't we been doing that we really should start? And if you can go through that stop, start, continue, then you might actually end up finding a few tuning adjustments that get you a result.

This is really good, and I love that part because I think a lot of people go into business for this, what we're talking about right here. But I really feel that it's under-talked about once they've got the pitch as a laptop or they've bought into that dream. It's never really touched on very much at all.

Well, I don't think most business owners get there. Most business owners go broke and then the ones that aren't broke, a lot of them are struggling, not enough time, they're having hassles with staff, they're struggling with how to price their products and package them and, you know, they just never really get over those hurdles to the nirvana of having a To

the top end of it.

Yeah.

To the top end of it. Thanks so much. I know there's a heap of resources that you publish as well and I do want to touch on that before we go but it's called— one of your processes is a lot of content and I know that you're heavily involved in search engine optimization but now it's around content. Before we do go, can you give me a snippet of what the process that you do to get people to your website which is SuperFastBusiness.com?

Well, the main media channel that we use is podcasts. Yep. And we got there by doing a few different types of media channels and seeing where the buyers come from. And overwhelmingly they come from podcasting. So I do more podcasts and I stopped doing some of the other things like LinkedIn or whatever. For us, it wasn't as important. Or Pinterest, for example. So we call this Own the Racecourse. And it's saying that our website is the central place we'd like people to come to. And then we put our good content there. We make it high value. As you've mentioned, some of our content is as good as what people would pay for. And we give checklists and cheat sheets and upgrades and transcriptions that people can download, and we often ask for an email address for that. But we also publish the whole transcription for free without even an email. But if they visit the site, we can recontact them with our Facebook advertisements. They can subscribe to iTunes. They can subscribe to our YouTube channel where we're placing bits Yeah, and I

think your Own the Racecourse theory is really around a lot of marketers. We use parts of it as well and I think it makes sense if you're really producing a great business and you actually want to give value which is then all those other kind of businesses that don't want to do that, that's where they can't actually produce that.

The big thing, the most important thing is that if you just build your business on a YouTube channel or on a Facebook page, And they no longer want to support that and they turn it off, then you're gone. You're out of business. So it's about protection, it's about no compromise.

I think any business that's been through a cycle of business will realize that the SEO day might be gone, a website might be gone, Facebook change algorithms and then you're pretty much gone after that.

Yeah, or an advertising account gets blocked.

Awesome. So James, we see you here next year in the Maldives. This is a regular every annual Yeah, it's

actually— I've already blocked the week and it's 40% sold.

Perfect.

Yeah.

And just finally, where can they go and find out more information about you? Is it just the website there?

Yeah, superfastbusiness.com.

Awesome. Thanks so much, James.

Thank you.

I'll see you next week on Industry Change.