REVEALED: The tech you NEED for your business (email marketing, CRM, payments and MORE)

We get asked daily what I recommend a tech stack is for our business. So we wanted to share with you guys exactly what we're using right now for a tech stack.

We actually did that and they sent us an email and said it was worth like $47,000 a year in fees that we were able to pass on to our clients.

If you have to manually, like chase up invoices and constantly follow people up for missing payments, your time comes at a cost.

When you are kind of at that multi six figure stage and you want to start diving in a little bit deeper about where advertising spend is going to, there are a couple of tools I would definitely recommend. Welcome to the Success School podcast. Today we're talking to you guys about our recommended tech stack for coaching and service businesses in 2024. Welcome, Steph. It has been a week since our last episode.

It has been a week since our last episode. That's very good math. We've been practicing math lately, actually, a lot.

And if you're on YouTube, guys, we have black condoms on our microphones now. Both of us, not just one of us.

Yeah, we did one of them. We just. It's like those little things that you just keep forgetting to order. That was one of those things.

Yeah. Big shout out to all of our listeners in Great Britain and Spain. The listenership keeps increasing over there, guys. Somehow randomly. Hola. G', day, mate. That's not really.

Hola. And hello.

What's the Spanish tacos thing? Oh, wait, no, the Spanish tacos thing.

Perfect for the listeners in Spain. You would have heard that and nailed it, I'm sure.

Did you get that? Steph's just looking at me like I was speaking a foreign language.

Literally speaking gibberish.

All right, guys, personal update for me. We have been in our caravan getting ready for the Gibb river and it's been a nightmare, to be honest. No surprises there with the caravan experience for us. We are the typical all the gear, no idea type people with our handy stuff, especially me. I'll speak for myself. Last couple of weekends ago, we went out with our dogs and I didn't know, but there's a specific way to fill a water tank on a caravan, which is pretty hard to understand because it's a water tank. You just expect yourself to put a hose in, fill that thing up and then you got water. But no, there is a specific way that you need to fill up a water tank. And I fucked up. So we went caravanning on Steph's birthday, which I ruined her birthday. And we had no water, so no shower, dirty feet, nothing to clean out dishes with. It was an absolute nightmare. To top that off, Felix shit in our caravan.

That's our dog. It's not a person.

Yeah, different kind of shoots happened. This one was not in the toilet, so that's why it was even worse. And then we ran out of electricity as well, just to top it off. So we're so ready for the Give river coming up on our trip. The Give river is a four to five week trip up north. It's basically like driving from Perth to Sydney. That's how far we're driving. Steph, how you feeling about the.

Yeah, I am feeling, like, wildly underprepared, to be honest, and excited to just navigate whatever comes up. And honestly, thank you for ruining my birthday, but I just feel like that now it's just one of those things that, like caravanning. Sometimes I feel like this is just like anyone who camps for caravans will know this. Like, sometimes it hits and sometimes it sucks and. And that's just how it is. That's just how it is. Well, my personal update for this week. So I was chatting with a friend on the phone the other day and she lives in Sydney and she's also a business coach. And we were talking about this new season of life that Tim and I have edged into where we have a lot more time on our hands and we've been actively trying to kind of slow down and work less. And she was like, oh, my God, Steph, what do you do with your spare time? Like, I would be so bored. And honestly, being bored would make me so anxious. And it's true. I think when you build a business or a lifestyle around constantly going, constantly doing, you know, always wanting to grow, always wanting to do more, that when you get to a point where you actually get to do less, to be able to do more, you, it's a really hard habit to shift. And so it's really, really uncomfortable at first, of course. And so I just want to remind anyone who's out there right now that, yeah, I know that slowing down is hard when you've been speeding up, but also, you know, the best things in life are going to be uncomfortable for you. And I really think that, you know, on the other side of this discomfort, like, I've not been anxious now, I've really slowed down. It's been really nice. Tim's really slowed down as well. We still get heaps done, don't get me wrong, but we just take the afternoons off. We were kind of working for the sake of working. And it's just been so beautiful.

Yeah, it's been quite the change. Definitely a lot of anxiety and trying to remind each other that we don't have to work 12 hours a day, which has probably been a little bit surprising. All right, guys, time for lesson of the week. So we've just launched up Startup School in the last couple of weeks and honestly it's been relatively easy, which is quite a change from previously launching things. And I was thinking about why it's been a little bit easier for us to launch Startup School. A, yes, we have an audience, so it's easy to sell something, but B, I think we've just developed a few more skills than we had in recent years, which makes things easier. Which reminds me is like when you first start in business, everything is super hard, like marketing, sales, copy, client relationships, hiring, firing, all those types of things are very hard because you just don't have the skills. And I think over the last couple of years we've built up a good amount of skills which has made this launch incredibly easy. So I think we're up 50 something people have signed up already for Startup School, which has been great. So hello to you guys if you're one of those 50. Thank you so much. But I just wanted to remind everyone, guys, everything's super hard when you first get started. And once you have the skills and you nail the skills, life and business definitely get a lot easier.

I do think as well, isn't that was that five year thing, like it takes a certain amount of times to do something before you get good, which equates to like, is it 10,000 hours?

10,000 hours?

It's 10,000 hours to get good at something, to develop a skill and to become an expert at it. And we figured out that if you do an eight hour day, like over a period of time, it would be five years to get to 10,000 hours. And so that's why when you talk to a lot of entrepreneurs, they'll say from like years 5 to 10 of business, things really explode for them because you just have the fundamental. If you've worked at it really hard for the first five years, you've developed the skills, you've done your 10,000 hours. And so it gets really, it gets a lot easier to do from that point on. So if you're in the first five years, it's okay if it's hard. Just by the way, my lesson of the week this week is I kind of knew this, but I had someone reflected back to me And I thought it was really cool to talk about. So the difference between coaching, teaching and mentoring. And we. I got complimented the other day by one of our clients that I'm able to transition through all three in a period of like one of our group coaching calls. And it's something that's, that's quite natural for me. I'd say probably like an unconscious competence like that I don't really know that I can do that I happen to do quite naturally. And I think you're really good at it as well. And I think that the difference, just so you're really clear and just like for when you sign up for programs, for when you're like looking for, you know, a coach to learn from or a program to buy, there is a difference between coaching, teaching and mentoring. And so coaching is the ability to jump on a call with somebody and for them to ask you questions so that you can figure out and find your own truth and your own response. Okay, so coaching isn't just telling. Telling is mentoring. So if someone comes to me and they're like, hey, Steph, what should I do in this situation? You know, I need some advice. That would be me giving my advice on what steps for them to take next, which is, is part of mentoring. Coaching is definitely helping you to find your own answers. And teaching is. Here is this information. Here is this way of doing something. So like a module or a training or something like that would be a teaching. Mentoring is like very opinion based. Coaching effectively. And coaching is really helping you to come up with your own answers. And we do all three within success school and within our program.

Steph, tell me the what is right way coaching? Give me your definition of that and let's discuss that a little bit. I think it's important to touch on.

Yeah, yeah. So we don't believe in right way coaching. So right way coaching is when a coach or a mentor will be like, this is the only way that it's going to work. So you have to do it this way. We don't really believe in that because, you know, there's always new ways coming up in the world. Like there's always new ways of doing things that come up. There's always new trends that are happening. And I really believe that if you work at something hard enough and long enough, you will pave your own way forward. And so we never, ever, ever tell our clients that they have to do it this way or it won't work. We will help them to find a way that works for them. So if somebody' like, you know, comes to us and like, hey Steph, I don't want to sell in dms. Like, I just really don't want to start any of those conversations. I want to have any of those conversations. I don't want to do it. And they're really adamant that that's something that they don't want to do. We are never going to force them to do that. We will find a workaround that will work for them to not have to do that process. And so there's no right way. Always work. It's just about finding the right way for you. And that's where the coaching element comes in for us. It's like we want to find out, you know, your lifestyle goals, your time goals, like what do you enjoy? Like what parts of this are you avoiding? Are you avoiding them because of fear? Are you avoiding them because of doubt? Like, why are you actually not doing this thing? And then if it's really not the right way for you, because logistically it just doesn't work, then cool, let's find another way. But if it's a fear based or mindset based thing, then we might help you to work through that so that you can take action on the path that's going to be of least resistance for you.

Yeah, I'll talk about the right way in a different context. Clients obviously ask us what is our opinion on X and that could be landing page, could be an email sequence, could be a post, could be a sales methodology, could be a sales call. And at the end of the day, without concrete data, there is no way to know if it is going to work or not. Yes, we can give you best practices and we can Talk through the 16 steps that you need in a sales page and you know, features, benefits, all these types of things, but without actually trying things, you're not going to know what works. And that would be up to our definition of the right way to do things when we don't know what's going to work for you and your market. Everything is individualized in business as well. So, you know, commonly in our program we give, you know, a guideline of what things should look like, but things need to be edited to suit the individual, the business owner, et cetera. Whereas some coaching organizations and mentors and teachers and whatever it is, they will give you a their way is the right way and their way is the only way to do things, which I think is very dangerous.

I just want to touch on one more thing before I move on from the coaching conversation. If you're in a coaching container right now, please do yourself a favor and show up for coaching. Because I think a lot of people sign up for coaching programs and if you're in our coaching container, this goes for you as well. I think a lot of people sign up for group, like for coaching programs. So that's one to one, whether that's group coaching, whether that's, you know, team based, like small group, whatever it is that you sign up for membership based coaching, whatever it is, but then they don't actually show up for the coaching. And by the definition of coaching, like, you actually need to be in conversation in order to be coached. So if you sign up for a coaching program, you're like, I'm getting nothing out of this. Like, my question back to you is like, have you been showing up? Have you actually been talking to the person like on Zoom or in the channels that you're able to talk to them in to be able to get coach? Because if you're not actually jumping onto one of the calls and actually talking to the person, you're unable to get coached. It's just you're learning education information which you could probably get on YouTube. So it is really, really important for you guys, if you're in a coaching container to show up and actually get coached.

All right, guys, if you're on YouTube, make sure you hit that subscribe button. If you're not on YouTube, get on YouTube. Give this show a follow up. It could be watched while you guys are doing your nightly stretches in front of the TV with YouTube open. And you could be looking at Steph and I just presenting to you right now, which would be amazing. Anyway, into our topic. Steph, do you want to lead us in and give us the four one, one about what this episode is about?

We get asked daily what I recommend a tech stack is for our business. And so we wanted to share with you guys exactly what we're using right now for a tech stack for our coaching business. But also we have a service business, we have Tim's, we have the gym as well. And so for us, we use a few different tech stacks for different things. And we wanted to break it down for you so you know exactly what we're using. We're going to be going across lots of different categories including social media, email, how to take payments, our customer relationship management systems where we're like reviewing analytics and our podcasting equipment, which is probably our most in demand topic at the moment. Yeah, Tim, kick us off.

So we're going to talk about social Media schedulers to start. I've got two main ones and you've probably seen this one everywhere. But hootsuite, I think, is hootsuite's the original social media scheduler. So let's talk a little bit about engagement using a scheduler versus not before we dive into this too much deeper. So, Steph, I am a firm believer that using a scheduler does decrease engagement, but I am not willing to sit on the social media apps and manually post. So I'm going to take the caveat with that. What do you think?

Okay, so I have, like, I know that's you, and I want to be really clear to the people who are listening. Yes, posting through a scheduler is going to decrease reach and engagement. Like, it's. It's just not going to get as much as it could have got. However, not posting at all will get you less. And so if you like. So I recommend scheduling. Like, I reckon I schedule for years and we still grew. I schedule for years and we still got clients. I schedule for years and we still made a million dollars. Like, this is fine. What I'm saying is, like, if you are actively trying to play the algorithm and you are actively trying to go viral or to grow your audience using your content, that I would recommend posting direct on the platform. However, if you guys are. If you're barely. If you're the kind of person who's barely showing up because you always forget to post and because you never know what to create on the day and you know it means that you're showing up two or maybe three times a week or less than that, then please use a scheduling, like a scheduling option. Please make sure that you actually sit down on one day and create three or four pieces of content and schedule it out. I don't care if your reach is low because it's going to be even lower if you don't post.

Yeah, for sure. I fully agree with all those points. So our, you know, second best in class, I would say, would be hootsuite. And our best in class is later. Okay. We've been using later for years. I just think it's very easy. I've tried so many social media tools. Later is very simple. So how later works for us, or me in particular, we have a video editor and they have access to my later account. So they'll go and edit this podcast, chop it into clips, and then she'll go and drop five or six a week into my later. Okay. So all I need to do is drag it across, right? The caption I can post on YouTube shorts, TikTok, Instagram Reels, etc. So that's the crux of like how the video works. Then I'll schedule posts in later as well. So usually for me, I'm doing two a day. So I'll do 6am on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and then I'll be doing reels in the afternoon. And that's podcast clips for me. I use later 100%. We are in discussions about hiring a social media VA to post natively on our behalf. So how that would look like is all the content would be in a Google Drive and then they would go and take that content from a Google Drive and they would be looking at a Google Doc or something like that to know what to post at what times. So we could probably do a little bit of an update in a couple of weeks and see how that's going. I'm interested to see the difference.

We are trying to gain the algorithm. We are playing a bit of an algo game at the moment. And so we want to be testing all this stuff. We test this stuff for our clients all the time. So guys, just know that we're testing for you so you don't have to test and we can just tell you, which is awesome. Talk to me through email platforms. This is probably the second biggest question we get on. Like, so podcasting is number one podcast equipment. The second one is like, what email marketing software should I be using?

Yeah, so email marketing software, you know, there is a lot and there is not a lot between them. I think the main metric we should be looking at is obviously price and investment. Second, I'd say the first one actually is probably deliverability. Second one would be pricing and investment. So these two options that we're going to give you, one's a bit of a high tier and one's a bit of a low tier, but they both have very high deliverability scores, so you can check them out. So you just Google their name and then deliverability scores and they have a bunch of tables that show you them. So what happens is sometimes your emails will get sent out and they just won't get delivered due to the, you know, subscriber or the platform that you're using not following the right rules. And there's a bunch of technical stuff that goes into email deliverability scores, but you just want to essentially shit test and vet whatever platforms you're using in terms of deliverability. Because let's hypothetically say that one of these has a 70% delivery rate and you send a thousand emails, that means that 30% of them are not getting delivered, which is 300. Okay, so that's already 300 people in your thousand person list aren't getting delivered because the deliverability scores are bad. So we're going to be talking through these two. So the cheap and not nasty, but the cheap and simple version is Mailer Lie. And we actually use this in our business. At the Moment we have 9,000 people on our email list. So we use Mailer Lie. I think it's like $19, like stupidly cheap. And deliverability scores high. It's in the 96% tile of deliverability scores. And then Steph, I'll let you talk about number two here. And this is more of a higher end option.

Yeah, this is a higher end option. And the reason, I want to be really clear, the reason we went with Mailerlite was just because we have like, we don't use a really extreme amount of functionality on our email lists. Like we don't have tagging systems and like really complex. Like we tag a few people. Like if you, you know, sign up to startup school or success school, you know, we'll stop you from getting emails trying to sign up to those things obviously. But like we have some basic level tagging systems, but we don't really use an extreme amount of, of I guess, of those sorts of functions within our email marketing. And so because of that, we love Mailerlite mail. It's cheap, which we love. We don't love spending more than we have to on subscriptions. But the other option is activecampaign. So activecampaign I actually used for years prior and you did as well prior to this. We left ActiveCampaign and we were using ActiveCampaign as a CRM and an email. And it was just really expensive, to be honest. And unless you're using all of the functionality of it, I really don't think it's worth it. So what we, we moved over to Go High Level and we love Go High Level, which we'll talk about in a minute for a whole host of other functionalities. But we don't love Go High Level. Four is a mouse. Deliverability is like so off. So we transferred everything from ActiveCamp campaign to go High Level. Go High Level was great for a bit and they brought in a whole heap of new rules. They we started getting charged for sending emails they said started saying like, you need a trademark so your deliverability goes up. And it just all got really complicated. So we're like, you know, we're just gonna take it off this, put it back in Mellor light, Nice, cheap and really simple to use. And that's the tech stack that we're currently using.

Yeah. So the problem with GoHighLevel for emails is they have a company called Mailgun and they basically send emails through this company, Mailgun. So every email you send is. Is a cost. So per email. And if you've got 9,000 people on your list and you're sending an email sequence of 10 emails, that's. Where's that? 90,000 emails. And you've got to pay per. So it gets pretty expensive. So I know one month we were sending texts through GHL and that was through a company called Twilio and Mailgun and I racked up a 1500 monthly bill just from sending texts and emails through Go High Level. So it was super expensive. Steph, do you want to talk us through payment processing? This is a common one.

Yes. So we get asked this all the time, how do I take payment? We are going to tell you what we use and what we have used in the past. If you want to know a little bit more about that, I'm super happy to share it. But right now what we're using is ThriveCart and Stripe. Now I want to be really clear because I think people think that ThriveCart replaces Stripe and it doesn't. So Stripe probably most of you know and are probably using. We love Stripe. Stripe is perfect. The thing is that Stripe is having a bit of a crackdown at the moment on coaching businesses. Stripe, please don't take away our business. But we have heard that it is cracking down pretty heavily on some people in the market and like, just saying, basically, you can't use this anymore. But right now that is what we're using. The thing we love about Stripe is that it's got really great functionality in terms of obviously, like setting up a few different types of payment plans, making sure that actually direct debits the money from people's accounts if it, if it fails or if a payment fails, it will continue to chase up that payment until it gets it. So that's some of the functionality of Stripe. Some people are like, oh my God, stripe fees are just so outrageous. I don't want to pay them, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, yeah, cool, I get it. But also it's more expensive to not get your money. And so what happens is that, like, if you have to manually, like chase up invoices and constantly follow people up for missing payments, your time is, comes at a cost. So if you spend two hours doing that a week and you charge, you know, whatever you're charging per hour, hopefully upwards of 100 and, you know, 10 to $120 an hour, that's like $240 a week. Just chasing payments that you could have given Stripe very quickly to do that process for you. So the, like, what you're paying Stripe for is the convenience of getting your money. Okay. And so I personally love Stripe.

I've got a caveat to that. So you can actually pass on the fees from Stripe to your customer. So I think we got an email from Stripe for our gym payments and they were like, yeah, you can pass the fees on now. So we actually did that and they sent us an email and said it was worth like $47,000 a year in fees that we were able to pass on to our clients.

Amazing.

So 47 extra thousand dollars in our pocket in terms of profitability for no extra work just by passing on the FE, you know, for the client it's a 1%, but for you it's 1% times how many clients you've got, which ends up being a lot of percents. Yeah. So that's an option. So, Steph, do you want to talk about ThriveCart, what the benefits are, how it works, etc.

Guys, I want to be really clear. No affiliate payments, although we definitely should. So this is just stuff that we're using and why we're using it. So we use ThriveCart, which basically is a payment checkout platform. So what it allows you to do that we love, it basically still takes its money through Stripe, but what it allows you to do is have very flexible payment options. So whereas Stripe, you can set up a couple of like recurring payments or a direct debit, it doesn't give you the functionality to do things like, you know, split payments and different types of split payments and pay $500, but then don't pay anything for 30 days or, you know, pay sign up today and, and don't pay for, you know, 25 days and then go into a weekly payment plan and then pay a lump, a lump sum. Like it just is really strict on how you can take money. ThriveCart allows you to take money any which way. We love it because it has a bump offer as well. So it basically is like a little checkout. You could pay for something and then a little pop up could come up saying, hey, would you like to buy? You know this as well. And you can continue to do bump offers. The payment checkouts are really easy. It's really easy to integrate. It means that we had little T's and C's box included. So we stopped having to use things like Dubsado for contract processing or any of those contract softwares. It basically just kind of created a bit of an all in one for us which has been so easy.

Yeah, it was an incredible asset to the business. So we're going to move into CRMs now. So two CRMs that we recommend. So we've got Active Campaign and Go High Level which we use at the moment. So ActiveCampaign is a really simple option. I think it kind of starts at like 119amonth, so a little bit more expensive. I'm not sure if that's USD or audio. And then go high levels. 99, that's USD a month. So pretty similar in terms of the investments, in terms of the pricing. If I were to pick one or the other, I would probably pick activecampaign just cause it's a little bit simpler and you get a little bit more for your money in that initial stages. Go High Level is great because we can host courses. So we have startup school which is, you know, all delivered through Go High Level. We have landing pages. You can do landing page on activecampaign as well. Then we have like our sales databases, like cool dashboards. There's all these cool things that you get with it as well. It links up to Instagram DMS. It links up to Facebook DMS. You can now do AI with it as well. So they're doing AI comment replies on GoHighLevel. It's just this tool, you know, I heard our friend Ken quoted it really well. He said it does everything good, but nothing exceptional. It's just a really like quote unquote good tool. Whereas I think activecampaign is a little better for email deliverability and then just the overall CRM functions on ActiveCampaign.

I beg to differ. As someone who's used ActiveCampaign CRM, I do love ActiveCamp Campaign as CRM. It is simpler to use for sure. Like GoHighLevel is not. If you don't like tech, don't get GoHighLevel. Like it is a bit techy, not super techy, like we can figure it out but like it is a little bit techy to get started. So activecampaign, you don't really need to understand tech to be able to make it happen. Okay, so that's probably the biggest difference, the thing we love about Go High Level, the activecampaign to do is that Go High Level allows you to track lead flow, whereas ActiveCampaign really only allows you to track people once they've already submitted their email address. So what we can do on Go High Level is we can go into our Instagram DMS and we can flag people as leads and we can add them as leads into our system. Even though they haven't given us any details or data yet, we can do so much more with them. So from Facebook ads, when they submit like on a Facebook ad, it will come in to Go High Level, whereas in activecampaign it doesn't really connect with all of your other systems. So the thing that Go High Level does really well is that lead management versus Active campaign, which really does that almost like from when they're already a client or that nurture management on to like becoming a client. Go High Level has a much better and increase of functionality and Go High Level does things like it brings in your Google reviews. There's so much functionality in it, but it is a bit techy and it is a little bit complicated. I still love using it.

I just have a little bit of an inside scoop. Don't tell anyone. Guys, this is not public knowledge and I definitely shouldn't be talking about this on a podcast, but HubSpot is the other player in this game and they have been acquired by Google. So who knows where that is going to go. The HubSpot and Google essentially partnership or the takeover from there. Right? So we're going to go into analytics. We haven't been massive on analytics prior to probably the last couple of months. Probably not as much as we should have been. But for us it was about getting enough sales calls, enough appointment set, enough sales and then we could start to get a little bit deeper on the analytics of where people are coming from. You know, what ads, what organic funnels, what lead magnets, they're downloading those type of things. And that's where the analytics component comes in handy. This is probably a little bit more advanced than a lot of you guys need to go listening to this podcast. But when you are kind of at that multi six figure stage and you want to start diving in a little bit deeper about where your advertising spend is going, there are a couple of tools I would definitely recommend. We're going to talk about the same tool we've mentioned in three categories, but obviously Go High Level is, is great for analytics as well, solely because you can tag people so if they come in your CRM and they download a lead magnet, they can get tagged with that lead magnet and then you can track which tags they have and where they did come in first. So if you've got, if you're someone that publishes a lot of different content, a lot of different lead magnets, a lot of webinars, downloads, etc. Really cool way of tracking where they're coming from. It also tells you sales conversion rates, how many leads you got, how many contacts you added, all these type of things. So we have a dashboard built out in algo high level that gives us all our main KPIs and metrics. So it's really easy to test the second tool we've discovered recently, which has been incredible. It's been a little bit of a beast to set up because essentially you've got to install a bunch of tracking segments in your different CRMs and ads and ad code and all this crazy stuff like that. So it's actually called segment metrics. So seg and then metrics. What it does is it tells you exactly which advertising campaign your clients are coming from, which is ing credible. Because, you know, you can just sit on there and say, hey, we spent thousand dollars on this. And it brought us two clients that have actually signed up to our program. That means our acquisition cost of this campaign was $500. And then you start to think, all right, cool, so I've spent $500 in it and it brought me $10,000. Maybe I should increase the ad spend on this tool, which is incredible. So our marketing manager had three calls with segmetrics to properly get this set up, but now it's spitting out incredible data. So what it allows you to do is once you have this type of data, you can say, cool, we have a $20,000 budget, or 10 or five or two or three or whatever it is per month for paid ads. And then we're going to know where exactly we need to spend it to get more results. Steph, what have you kind of seen with segmetrics and me talking about it and going through it with an.

I have just seen that you are the world's biggest nerd. Guys, I was just watching Tim talk about that. He was so into it and I was like, yeah, cool. So I love it. Like, I love that we're able to really see which lead magnets are in. Which pieces of content are actually, you know, converting to paid clients. Like, I think that's really important for us. But I would say that for if you're listening to this podcast and you're earning less than $500,000 a year, it's probably not worth diving into unless you have a lot of ad spend. Okay, so, like, that really was for, like, the 500k plus businesses. The analytics you. If you are earning less than $500,000, the main analytics that you need to be measuring, like, money in, money out, how much profit you have left over, how many sales calls you've had, how many leads and inquiries you got, like, they are like the fundamental absolutely must track analytics for your business. Okay. There are a few more that you can add. And if you're in successful, we have the KPI dashboard that we give to you guys on exactly what you need to track for different stages of business. But if you're over 500k and you are doing ad spend, SEG Metrics has been epic. Like, it's. It's even better. It was way better than go high level in terms of tracking exactly where ad spend is being spent, which is so cool. Now to the area that we get asked about the most. So this is our podcasting equipment. I want to be really clear. It's taken us quite a long time to get to this point. People message me all the time like, hey, Steph, I'd love to know what you're using for your podcast set up. And I'm like, this is not a simple question because it's really extreme, actually, and it's taken us a long time to acquire all this stuff. And I want to be really clear, it's quite expensive. And so in terms of, like, it's worth it and once you have it, you can use it forever, which is epic. And whether you're podcasting or not, you know, the camera that we use, we can use it anywhere, take it on trips with us, we can go on holiday, whatever. So there's a lot of pros to it. But yeah, I guess, like, to be really clear and really upfront, like, this is a pretty, I would say, pro setup. And I. We didn't start here. Okay. We definitely did not start.

We just added one thing every, like, you know, every month or two months or something like that. Oh, maybe we should upgrade the lighting or maybe we should get a bit of podcasts or like, microphones, or maybe we should get a better camera lens. Like, that's kind of how it worked. Steph, do you want to start us off with the mandatory stuff?

So the absolute mandatory equipment we have just been having, I want to be really clear. We've just been having the biggest laugh because I actually. This is not my wheelhouse.

This is 100% nightmare of an episode. Tech stack. He's like, what does tech stack mean?

I have been trying to say this part for, like, five minutes because I don't actually know very well about this stuff. So I'm going to go through some of the mandatory stuff that you need to have a podcast to get started. Okay. This is like, not the pro level. This is the basic level. So one, you need a computer, which I could talk about. So any computer is fine. Good job. All right, the next part then. The reason you need a computer is just like, honestly, upload speeds and I sort of stuff so much better than when you're using your phone. I know a lot of people do use their phone. I highly recommend using your computer. We love GarageBand and Riverside, so GarageBand is probably better. If you want to record with two people like this, I think that Riverside would actually allow you to. The solo recording on Riverside is perfectly fine. You can use Riverside for guests. You can use Riverside for solo recording. That's how I did it for a really long time. The minute that we had two of us going through one, basically mic deck all the way through to our mixer, we had an issue with Riverside where it was only picking up the one mic as we were recording. And so now we have to use GarageBand and Riverside. The thing I love about Riverside that GarageBand obviously doesn't have is video. So what you can do is you can just go online, you can just get onto Riverside and you can record and you can have your entire podcast episode. The audio and the visual. The visual really, really easily on Riverside. GarageBand obviously doesn't allow you to do that, so. So they're the two that I actually know about.

All right. And then just on the mandatory list, guys, if your webcam is really shitty and you're doing video, there's just a bunch of, like, really cheap webcams you can get for like 100 bucks. I can't remember the name of them now.

Webcams are pretty good.

Yeah, something like that. It will just help tremendously to get the quality up. That's if you're doing a video one, you know, the next step up, you could probably spend a grand and get like an. A decent DLSR camera, connect that up with a cam link, and then you're good to go. So USB my computer, GarageBand or Riverside and then just a camera. That's kind of like the basic setup that you guys could get started with even more basic, you can literally just have, you know, Apple headphones and. And literally your phone, and then you could record on some kind of app on your phone.

Yes, but no. Yeah, let's be real. Yeah, guys, if you gotta do it.

Do it kind of shitty.

Do it properly. If you like, you can do that, and that's fine. But you will outgrow that pretty fast. Like, we're all about love, like, getting it done, getting it started, blah, blah. But, like, our podcast managers will kill us if we say it's okay to record on headphones. If you have a listen to anyone. Like, if you have listened to people who do guest episodes and they have their guests come on with headphones in like, that, the audio is really hard to listen to. And guys, if you want your podcast to do well and you want people to want to listen to it, you've got to make the audio good. Like, the audio really matters. I don't care if you. If you have no video and you just have audio, that would be preferable then the Than crappy audio. So get yourself a good USB mic, because I really think it matters.

All right, I'm going to go through the pro setup now, guys. So I would say this is probably somewhere between absolute amateur and, like, professional, you know, like, crazy setup. This is somewhere in the middle. So this would be if you're taking podcasting quite seriously and doing consistent episodes. So we have a Sony A7 Mark 3 with a good lens. So the Sony A7 was like 3 1/2K and the lens was like 2. So that's 5 1/2K just on a camera, which is quite a lot of money. So if you love the video that we're putting out right now. What's up? Hello. Like, give us some love on the video quality. Next up, we have three lights at the moment. That's essentially just to reduce the shadows on your face. So if you're watching this video and you think we look amazing right now, we're lit up like a Christmas tree right now. The light is so bright in here that I'm like, I'm squinting, basically, looking at these notes. So we have his lights set up at the moment. Next up, GarageBand and Riverside, which we have mentioned in the mandatory before, but something to record on. The problem with Riverside, it can't do split tracks when you're doing, like, local recording. So we have to use GarageBand to get split tracks. Then our podcast editors will obviously edit between the two and, you know, make the. The audio seamless, whatever they do. Next up, we have a Elgato stream deck. So I've been putting this on my Instagram stories a little bit. It's a. We're not currently using on this episode, but it's a way you can switch between camera angles, you can turn lighting off, you can make sound effects, you can do crazy stuff like that, which is incredible. So watch this space. We're going to be using the stream deck a little bit more. Then we're going to get into the audio setup, which is probably the most important part, actually, of a pro podcast setup. So we have a Steinberg URC receiver, which can take four microphones, so we could do four people. Then we have the audio Technica mics and blue extender arms that we have here as well, with these little $5 black condoms over the top of them. These black condoms are essentially to stop me from spitting into the microphone and then making these. What is it? Plurals? Plosives.

Plosives, yeah. So, Tim, just for anybody and me, can you tell me what the receiver does?

So the receiver essentially just takes the audio stuff that we talk into the microphones, turns into a digital version, and then feeds that into the computer.

And why is it better? So we have the receiver because we have multiple mics.

Yes. So these are not USB mics, so they need to be turned into a digital version. So that's kind of what it's for.

So you guys just witnessed me getting an education on our own system.

All right, guys, we're going to get into the listener question. So the first one's from Kim Glossip. During different stages of growth, there may be times of lower profitability. What's your lowest percentage of profitability and the average over a 12 month period. Great question.

It's a great question. And yes, correct, Kim. At certain stages of growth, there definitely are going to be series of, you know, periods of time where you do have a lot of profitability, depending on how you're growing. And I think that, you know, that stage typically is probably really between like 300,000, I find, and like a million is where that will typically start to take to tip over. Because in order to go from 3,000 to a million, you do have to reinvest back in your business quite heavily in order to get there. And you're going to spend a lot of money making a lot of mistakes, to be completely honest. A lot of time people hire a lot of team and then, you know, or maybe go and, you know, rent a space or potentially scale up or invest in really Expensive coaches or, you know, hire eight players. And so because of that, yeah, profitability will drop. But the idea is that at the end of the day you still have more coming in. I think where people do this incorrectly, and we have also done this incorrectly in the past and had to fix it but. And it's okay, but by the way, if you do it incorrectly, you can fix it. So if you're not profitable right now, few very easy tweaks you'll be able to make to get profitable. But I think where a lot of people go wrong as they kind of think that if I just hire more people then I'll have more money. But they're not actually factoring in the fact that like if you hire three more people, you're probably going to have to increase your prices to cover to make sure that you can not only just pay them, but you're also still making money at the end of that. So for every person that you hire, you really need to have a little look at like your profitability percentage and how does that change things for your profitability so that we don't just scale, scale, scale and kind of think on more people, more money. Otherwise it ends up being all in, all out. I don't know if you're asking us for our specific lowest percentage of profitability. For us, probably the lowest percentage of profitability that would be comfortable would be like 20 to 30% for us. But it's so different for different industries and I want to be really clear about that. Most big businesses, if you look at like especially like in the fitness industry, let's say if you look at most big box gyms, like the, you know, F45s or the, what are the other ones called? Fitness first or whatever those ones are, they're all turning over like 1 to 3% profitability and they're super happy with that. So I think it really depends on nation the average over a 12 month period for us right now, we've just massively increased our profitability and we've been taking on team members and doing a few other things. So I guess we'll know in a couple of months what that washes out to look like. But we very comfortably will walk away with a 50% profitability if not 70% at the end of a 12 month period.

Yeah. So a different way to look at this, Kim. We reverse calculated our profitability. So our goal was to make a million dollars profit. So we worked out our profitability percentage and then worked out what our revenue would have to be to Get a million dollar profit. So it would be, you know, with taxes and stuff like that would be something like two and a half million would give us a million dollar profit in our current business. Also kind of depends on what you're counting as profitability as well, because there can be profitability less. You know, they call it net owner benefit. Okay. So these are things that you invest in through the company, you know, air quotes that do benefit you personally as well. So a way that Steph and I get around this and we're not super concerned is we pay ourself a really good wage under the company. So every week we get paid on a Monday, we get a wage as an employee, so to speak. And then anything left over in the business, you know, we're not super worried about investing to grow the business, where I think a lot of people don't do that correctly. So there's a system called profit first. And profit first system essentially revolves around paying yourself first as the first employee in a company, which I strongly agree with. So I think you should be taking a wage, like an okay wage from your company, depending on what stage you're at, what the profitability is, et cetera. And then there should be a degree of investment in that as well. This is all not financial advice. This is what we do.

Yeah.

In our companies.

Totally. And I think that what's gonna be the likelihood that your business will go under is that there's only a certain amount of time that you will work for no money. Like there is only there is. And it's a short period. You know, I've heard people who say, like, oh, I didn't make any profit for the first. Like, you know, or didn't pay myself for the first six years of business. I'm like, that would have been the worst six years ever. Like, that sucks like that. Like, that's so not for us. And so my advice to you is like, find a way to be profitable early on. Like, when I first started my first business, I had no idea about business. I thought that all the money I earned was my money. I did not even think about the fact that money had to go out. And Tim was like, we don't sat me down. We ran the numbers and he was like, cool, I need you to charge an extra $5 per person. And I remember making my first $300 profit. And I was like, this is the best. I can't believe I actually get to keep this money. I still wasn't factoring in tax at that point, but there was no tax that year because I didn't make enough money. So I think at the end of the day guys like, you know, you really do have to talk to an accountant about these like get it, it's really important to have a good accountant in your corner if you don't know your numbers. But also make it your business to know your numbers because at the end of the day your numbers really are up to you.

All right, guys, bit of a tactical episode if you got some value from it. The number one thing Steph and I ask is to subscribe and follow the show. What do they need to do, Steph?

Subscribe and follow the show. Guys. We will put in the show notes for all the systems and tools that we have given you today so that you can go and have a little look and click through. But thank you for listening as always and we'll see you next week.

Thanks guys.

Sam.