Flipped Lifestyle™ Podcast

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Best of: Our Story – Chapter 1: Love at First Sight Aug 31, 2019

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In this Best of Episode, we re-visit Chapter 1 of the "Our story" series. We'll be sharing our entire "Our Story" episodes in the Saturday "Best of" releases over the next few weeks. You don't want to miss these! We'll be giving you all the juicy details of who we are, where we began, and how it all happened! This episode was originally published on October 10, 2017. You can check out the original episode here: https://flippedlifestyle.com/podcast164/ FULL TRANSCRIPT Shane: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast where life always comes before work. We're your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. We're a real family who figured out how to make our entire living online. And now, we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? Alright. Let's get started. What's up, everybody? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. Great to be back with you again today. This is going to be a solo show with just me and Jocelyn. We are not going to have a guest on the program today. As we continue to tell you a little bit more about our story, about how two normal people from Kentucky were able to start an online business with no money, no time, while working full-time, raising kids, and basically, how maybe you can do it, too. That is what we are doing today, we are talking about the next chapter in our story. Last week, we told you a little bit about our early life about where we came from, where we grew up, before Jocelyn and I knew each other. The next chapter in our story is actually about how we met in college at the University of Kentucky. Jocelyn: Alright, in our last episode, we were talking about how young I was when I went to college. At the time, I thought I was all grown up and independent but looking back now, I realized how incredibly young and naïve I really was. Shane: You technically were not even legally of age. You are not even 18 years old when you moved away from home. But could not even vote when you moved out of your hometown and moved to the big city in Lexington. Jocelyn: And the scary thing about that is I think about how my son is eight. I was nine years older than him when I went to college. That is just scary. I can't even picture my son being that age. I know there is a big difference between 8 and 17. But still there is not as big of a difference as you think. Shane: It is scary. There is no way we would ever let our kids– like Jocelyn, her birthday is on March 27th. My birthday is actually on March 28th. Funny story about that, we will talk about that soon. I will tell you about that later. Jocelyn was born on March 27th. She turned 17 on March 27th of her senior year. Did you move in June? Or when did you move? Jocelyn: I think it was probably like early August of that year. Shane: Yeah, okay. Jocelyn: When I moved into the dorms. I could not wait, I was counting down the minutes. I was just a very independent person. I knew that it would not be a problem. Honestly, I never even really went home. I went home sometimes. You know how sometimes people in college, they will go home every single weekend? Yeah, that was not me. I went home maybe once a month if I had to. Again, it is not because I had a bad home life or anything like that. I was just that fiercely independent. I just wanted to do my own thing. Shane: So you graduated in 97? I had already been in college a year then, right, when you came to college? Jocelyn: Yeah, you were a sophomore when I got there. Shane: I graduated in 1996, and I was kind of the same way. I had a dream my whole life to go to the University of Kentucky. Jocelyn: And I did, too. Shane: Which is hilarious because I didn't really work hard enough in school to actually get the grades to go to college anywhere. But I wanted to go to the University of Kentucky. I refused to go anywhere else, on any college visits, I didn't go look at any other schools, didn't go anywhere. I just wanted to go to the University of Kentucky because I love Kentucky basketball, I loved Kentucky football, and I just really wanted to go live in Lexington. Jocelyn: For me, I just really wanted and escape from small-town life. Most people where I am from, they went to either Western Kentucky University, which is actually where I had my Master's degree from. They went to Murray State University; both are fine schools, nothing wrong with the schools, nothing wrong with them at all. It is just I did not want to go there. I wanted to get away. I wanted to get out of small-town life and experience something new. Funny story is, I even got a scholarship to Murray State University. I had applied to two places, I applied to Murray State, and I applied to UK. I wasn't able to apply for scholarships for UK because you had to have a 28 on the ACT. Shane: So she was just a little shy. Jocelyn: I took it four times, and the highest I could get was a 27. Shane: But she could've went to school for free at Murray. It was like dorms and television, or something. Jocelyn: Part of it was covered. I can't remember exactly what it was. Shane: Would have been a lot cheaper though. Jocelyn: Yes, it would have been a lot less expensive but I talked to my parents and they basically said, "Look, you worked really hard all through school. You should do whatever you want to do." And so I did. Shane: Thank goodness she did. Jocelyn: I felt like that was just where I was supposed to be. Shane: I wonder if it was because I was there. The fates were telling you, "The love of your life, the shining star of your universe, is waiting for you at the University of Kentucky." Right? Your knight in shining armor riding the white horse. But I actually wanted to go to UK really bad, too. To when I graduated high school, I had no scholarship offers, I had absolutely nothing. Jocelyn: How'd you even get in? Shane: I barely made it in. Like seriously, I had the exact GPA where you could barely every once in a while apply and get in. Actually, I did not go straight to the University of Kentucky. I did go live in the dorms my first year and I lived on campus. There was a community college that was attached to UK– Jocelyn: So you could still live in the dorms. Shane: Yeah, you could live in the dorms, you could go to UK, but you went to the Lexington Community College part which was over by the football stadium. I actually went to that first. That was my first year. My shining principles as a student, and just the excellent student I was, of course, I did not barely ever go to class. I had a crazy roommate who ended up failing out of school which was a whole other ball of acts. I was around some people who were not the best examples of human beings that you could probably hang out with in your life. I did not go to class very much, and I almost failed out. My first semester, I made all D's and one C or something. I actually dropped a course instead of failing it, so I only ended up getting 12 hours that semester. I actually came home, and one day, my dad put me in his car, and he goes, "Hey, come up to the office with me." And I'm like, "Alright, I'm home for Christmas or something. I will ride up there with you." My dad gets of the car and then he goes by his office, and I kind of look over at him and I'm like, "What are you doing?" He didn't say anything, did not say a word. He just goes and gets on the interstate. And I'm like, "Oh man, he got my report card. He knows my grades were terrible. This is what this is all about right here." He takes me 30 minutes south to this really teeny, tiny town in the middle of nowhere that has this little, bitty NAI college tucked over in the mountains. It was probably not a thousand, maybe at this time a thousand people went to the whole school. He just pulls off the interstate, and he starts driving around campus. For like 20 minutes he wouldn't say a word to me, and finally looks over at me and goes, "Pretty campus, huh? If your grades aren't better next semester, you are going to be going to school here. So get used to it." And then he just drove me home. I literally almost screwed it up before you even got to college and would have never met you in the first place. And you almost went to Murray. Our paths, legit, we were almost that Ships in the Night song, just crossed. I got my act together, I met this girl that helped me get through algebra the second semester, and then I actually studied as much as I could, and did a lot better my second semester. Not my best semester ever, that was when I met Jocelyn. But that got me through my freshman year. You lived in the dorm next door to me when you were a freshman and I was a sophomore, right? Jocelyn: Yeah, I lived in the building that was like adjacent to where Shane lived. Shane: We looked back on it now, but we didn't meet until Jocelyn was a sophomore because we ended up both moving dorms, and we lived in the same dorm. I can think back, and I think there were two places where our paths kind of crossed. One night, I was over at another girl's room. A friend of mine from high school, and Jocelyn lived next door to her. I was sitting on the bed, and– Jocelyn: This story dates us a bit. Shane: This story dates us a bit. There was a knock on the door, there was a bunch of us in there, and this beautiful girl came to the door. I was like, "Who was that?" I just caught a brief glimpse of her, and she was coming to borrow the phone book. Jocelyn: That's right. Shane: That's right. An actual, like, the phone book, like you had to flip through. Jocelyn: Some people listening to this podcast probably don't even know what a phonebook is. Shane: Yeah, some of you may not even know what a phonebook is. But we had phonebooks, okay? She came by to borrow the phonebook to call a pizza place or something, I don't know what it was. But I remember just asking my friend. I was like, "Who's that?" And she was like, "Oh just the girl who lives next door." Didn't think anything of it, and then that winter, there was a huge snow. It was the only time our entire college career. Jocelyn: Classes actually got canceled, which was unheard of. Shane: Yes, classes got canceled at UK. People were everywhere having snowball fights. Me and some buddies were outside having a snowball fight and a bunch of girls walked out of your dorm. I think you were one of them, and I think we started throwing snowballs at you guys or something, trying to get you guys to join us. Jocelyn: We're not 100% sure. Shane: But something like this happened, but we were pretty sure that our paths kind of crossed a couple times. What really happened was the second year Jocelyn was there, my 3rd year, I moved to a dorm that was called, "The Wellness Dorm" because it had a gym in the basement. Jocelyn: And I also moved to that dorm because it had a gym in the basement and because there was no smoking allowed, because at that time, smoking was still allowed at dorms. Shane: That time, you could smoke right out in the dorms in the college. We ended up moving into the same dorm. We were there for a little while, and I was still kind of wild, and I was actually going out one night with my friends. We would drive down to Richmond, KY to go hang out and you know– Jocelyn: Dance clubs. Shane: Dance clubs and college stuff. Me and two of my buddies were getting ready to go out. I lived on the second floor, Jocelyn– I didn't notice it at the time, but she lived on the third floor– and my buddies lived on the first floor. I was getting dressed up, sprayed my $10 Walmart cologne on so the ladies would be smelling good– Jocelyn: That is what stopped me in my tracks. I'm just saying. Shane: That's right, that $10 Walmart cologne, baby. I think Gravity is what it was. It's, like, Gravity. Go get yourself some of that Gravity, guys, I'm telling you. Brings the ladies in like crazy. Flies to honey, I'm telling you. Anyway, I go out of my dorm, I will never forget this moment in my life. I walk down the stairs, and as I'm going down to go with my friends to chase women, basically, Jocelyn walked in. She was coming up the stairs. Where were you coming from? Work? Jocelyn: No, I had just come from the gym. I had been working out. Shane: Okay. Jocelyn was coming up the stairs. I had to talk to her. I had to stop her. There was something about that moment was just like, I had to stop her. She walked up the steps a little bit, and I kind of walked a little bit past her. I turned as I passed her, and I said, "Hey, what is your name?" And Jocelyn turned around and said– Jocelyn: "My name is Jocelyn." Shane: Jocelyn what? Jocelyn: Jocelyn Hyravi. Shane: Here name was Jocelyn Hyravi. And I said, "Whoa, where are you from? Is that foreign?" And she is like, "Kentucky." I thought like 'Hyravi' sounds like some kind of foreign, exotic name. Jocelyn: And it is, it's Czechoslovakian. Shane: Czechoslovakian, yeah. I thought to myself, whoa, I got this exotic foreign woman walking into my dorm, but it turns out she was just from Western Kentucky. Anyway, I was going out with my friends, and I didn't have time to talk to her and I don't really remember exactly what happened after that. We just kind of exchanged names, and said, "Hey, kind of hope we run into each other at some time." She went up, and I went down. Did you think anything of that first encounter lesson, like, at all? Jocelyn: Who is this creepy guy talking to me at the stairs with the terrible cologne? Shane: "Man, that guy smelled terrible. He buys his cologne at Walmart. What a cheapo." Jocelyn: No, I mean, I remember it but I don't know. I guess I didn't– Shane: It was kind of passing and passing, so it wasn't that big of a deal. But it definitely left an impression on me because I went to my friend's room, they were downstairs, and I was looking down at the ground shaking my head like, "That girl was awesome." And I sat down on my buddies bed and they were like, "Dude, what is wrong with you?" At that moment, just knowing Jocelyn's name, I looked at my friends, and I said, "I just met the girl that I'm going to marry. I know it, I don't know how I know it, I don't know when it is going to happen, I don't know what is going to happen, but I just met the girl that I am going to marry." And they're like, "All right, shut up, let's go." So, we go on, we go out. We come back, and I don't know how long it was between we ran into each other again. Jocelyn: Probably like a week or maybe two, I don't know. Shane: Yeah, it was pretty good. I was standing in the lobby talking to a buddy of mine who was working at the desk. Jocelyn: It was a mutual friend. Shane: Yeah, a mutual friend. Jocelyn comes in the door on this day, and she comes up and she says something to the guy. I was like, "Hey!" And she was like, "Hey!" And we kind of remembered each other. Jocelyn and I started talking. We did the classic, 'What's your major?', 'What are you studying?' And Jocelyn says, "Computers." She said she is studying computers. I'm like, "Really? Because I am having some computer problems and since you are a pro at computers, maybe you can totally help me with that." I'm like, "I have a printer. I cannot get my printer to print. Could you come up to my room and check out my printer, maybe?" Jocelyn: And being the nerd and the nice person that I am, I said, "Sure, I'll be happy to help you." Shane: Did you go back to your room first, or did…

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FL304 - How to be 100% positive your idea will make money online Aug 27, 2019

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In today's episode, we help Brian figure out if his business idea will make money online. FULL TRANSCRIPT Jocelyn: Hey y'all, on today's podcast we help Brian figure out if his business idea will make money online. Shane: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast where life always comes before work. We're your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. We're a real family that figured out how to make our entire living online. Now we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? All right, let's get started. Shane: What's going on everybody? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. It is great to be back with you again today. Super excited to talk to another member of the Flip Your Life community. You'll have to bear with us. Jocelyn and I are just getting back from a conference, and both of our voices are a little shot. We're still a little jet lagged, but that's not going to hold us back from helping today's Flip Your Life community member, Brian Kelley. Brian, we're tired, but welcome to the show. Brian: Thank you. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. Shane: And Brian's on the road too. He's on the road too. Brian: I absolutely am, yup. Shane: He's in Chicago at a conference, so he might be a little tired too. We're going to go through this now. We're going to fight through it together. How's that? Brian: That sounds great. Jocelyn: We're excited to talk to you today, Brian. You are coming to our event, which is coming up very, very soon so that is super exciting. And I know that you have been taking a lot of action lately which is how you got on the show today, so congratulations for that. And we can't wait to hear a little bit more about it, but before we get there let's hear about you and your background. Brian: All right. I work in restaurants. I've been in the restaurant industry for about 25 years, and I actually love it. I love my job. I'm married with two kids, and the issue I tend to run into is that I'm concerned about our financial future. I like what I do, but both of our kids have special needs, and it requires extra planning for the future. I don't think that there's a way for me to get my family where we ultimately need to be at retirement with just our incomes. So I'm looking to supplement it with something online. Brian: And then the other reason that I've been pursuing it is just because I think it's a lot of fun. I've listened to your Podcast for a long time now, and I've actually been a member for a year. Everything that I learn that's new and sitting down and actually creating a website and stuff is really intriguing to me. I find it exciting, and I like it, so that's kind of why I chose this path. I'm just looking for any bit of success at this point. I think I've done a lot of the base level stuff. I'm up and rolling, and I'm just trying to get that first dollar made. Shane: Dude, I get it, man. I sat there for months and months waiting for any amount of money to flow into my pocket. And what's crazy is we ask our guests on the show, we look for people in the forums who are taking action, filling out success stories, helping other people, and you have just had this flurry of activity. You've been taking all the courses, talking in the forums, coming to the live event in September, and all of this stuff lately. And that's kind of how we were like, "Whoa, what is this guy doing? He is doing everything. We've got to get him on the show, we've got to help him because we really want to reward action takers in the community." What caused this flurry of activity. You said you've been in the community for a year now. What's happened lately or changed or how'd you [inaudible 00:03:42] to get moving forward in your business? Brian: It was two things. It was, one, probably first and foremost, a new idea for a website. And secondly was I just got really angry that I hadn't finished my last idea, that I hadn't succeeded with it. I got mad and determined because of that. So I just committed and said I was starting again and going to try to do it again. Shane: And are you looking to create a full time income right now or is it more like a side hustle like you love your job? Are you looking to create something on the side that's more like, "Hey, now I can make a lot more money and still do this job that I love, and then maybe someday I can use it to get some time freedom back?" What's the ultimate goal right now? Brian: The ultimate goal is to create a full online business. Shane: Right, right, right. Brian: [inaudible 00:04:39] I want now like I really meant it when I said I think this stuff is really fun, and I'm extremely dedicated to it. I don't have to have ... I'm not beating down the door to escape my job. I love it. I love the people I work with. It's not an urgent need, but there is that need. It has to happen over the next 10 to 20 years for sure. Shane: For sure, yeah. Recently I met this guy named Mark Mason. He has a Podcast called Late Night Internet Marketing, and his story reminds me of yours a lot. He was like, "I love my job. I've got a great job. It fulfills me. I love the people I work with. But I like other things too," is what he said. And he's like, "And of course, if anything ever happened I've got this other thing. It's sitting there waiting for me. I've got choices in my life." And that's what online business can do for you. It gives you choices, and it gives you exactly what you need in the moment. Some people may love their job and just want some extra money or some people may love their job, but they're not quite sure how it could handle a recession, so they want to have something in their back pocket to do that. And some people are like, "Man, I love my job right now, but I'm smart enough to look into the future and see I'm going to need something different later," right? Brian: Yes. Shane: All of us should be doing that. Even in our online business right now we do that a lot. We look into the future and be like, "What is our business going to look like 10 years from now? What does it need to look like based on our needs, our kids' needs, our future needs as we get older or whatever?" And we have to think about those things, and it's really cool that you're seeing the flexibility here of, "Hey, let's not get desperate. Let's not get crazy. Let's just build something cool and have fun with it, and it will be there for me if I need it and my kids need it. Brian: Yes. Jocelyn: All right. So you like your job now, but you want some options as far as making extra income, which I think is a great idea. I actually used to work in the restaurant industry too years ago. I don't know if you've ever listened to our Podcast where I talk about I used to work for a commercial dish machine manufacturer. Shane: She puts your dishwasher in the back room is what she did for them. Brian: Right. I heard you say that on the Podcast. I think about it every day when I walk by a dishwasher]. Jocelyn: Yeah. Shane: That's hilarious. You might be the only person that sees a dishwasher and thinks- Brian: I know people who sell this equipment. That's right. Jocelyn: So I actually didn't do a lot of end user work. It was mostly to manufacturers' representatives and that type of thing. But anyway, so yeah I know about the restaurant industry. I've been to many trade shows and all that kind of thing, so I know a lot about restaurant stuff. Anyway, I love that you are trying to branch out and do something different. Let's talk a little bit about that. What have you tried before, and what are you doing now? Brian: Okay. As far as what I've tried before there's probably a list of five or six, maybe more, things going back 10 years all the way starting with Etsy and just trying to make products for Etsy. I looked into doing drop ship stuff for a little while and decided that totally wasn't for me. Most recently when I joined the community I had an idea for online fishing tournaments. I thought it would be really fun to do online fishing tournaments. I have a lot of friends and family that are competitive at fishing, and I thought it was going to be a great idea. The issue I ran into was two-fold. One, it really wasn't ... What I had created wasn't conducive as it was, so the membership model and I really wanted to do that, and it required so much involvement that it just was never going to work with my schedule. I didn't have the time to execute the operation, so I kind of let it die, and I got discouraged because that was my favorite idea at the moment. Shane: What is an online fishing tournament? How would that even work? Would I fish at my house and you would fish at your house and we'd take pictures? Jocelyn: No, this is what I think of. Do you remember there used to be the Nintendo Wii that had those little controllers. There was a fishing tournament on there. Shane: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Jocelyn: That's what comes to my mind. Shane: Oh yeah, we would compete on ... What was ... Brian: Actually it was like real fishing, and it's modeled after the capture, photo, release style of fishing, which is what a lot of kayak fishermen do. So instead of wait it's on links, so I built an app and people could just take a photo of the fish they caught on a fish ruler and upload it. And basically it allowed people to compete wherever they were on the same species of fish. Shane: That's actually a really cool idea though. Brian: It is, but the problem is I had to be there to launch the tournaments, and I had to be there to judge the tournaments, so there were specific times where I would have to wake up at like ... Fishermen wake up at, like, four in the morning, right, to launch a tournament. And then I had to judge it, and then there were issues with faking species. Shane: Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. Brian: There's some logistics that ... I still have that website. I have not thrown it away. I still have an e-mail list for it. There's a ton of interest in it. I just can't execute that right now. Shane: Interesting. We'll keep that one in your back pocket, okay? Jocelyn: I have never heard of an online fishing tournament. This is a first. Shane: My nephew comes over. We've got this lake behind our house. And he'll just sit here and catch fish for five hours. He's all by himself, but I could picture that being like what if he was virtually with other people fishing at the same time? Brian: And could win money for if he caught a big fish. It makes it a lot of fun. Shane: What a cool idea? That's an amazing idea. What else did you try? Brian: Oh gosh. We were doing ... I was trying to do something connected to restaurants so I modeled a website after some others I had seen that were basically just promoting websites kind of like an affiliate except it was locations and venues would pay a fee to be listed on the website, and the website would market to people that were traveling to the area, give them itineraries, lists to view, things like that. Shane: That sounds cool. What was the holdup there? It's too hard to get every restaurant in the world on it kind of deal or ... Brian: No, it was honestly ethically I didn't want to promote ... I work at a restaurant. I didn't want to promote my competition, and I didn't think that was the right thing to do. And it was honestly that started out as a way for me to gain a marketing strategy for my own restaurant briefly, and I just didn't feel okay doing that. And also there's a reason that ... I'm very experienced in the restaurant industry, but there's a reason that the things that I'm choosing to do are not related to the restaurant, and that is because I don't want burnout. Restaurant hours are long, so if I were to tackle more restaurant stuff after that I just feel like it's restaurant all the time, and that's just too much for me. I think I'd burn out because [inaudible 00:12:11] something new. Shane: For sure. A lot of people come into the community, and one of the things that you hear online a lot is, "Chase your passion and the money will follow." And there is a lot of truth to that, but like Jocelyn and I usually try to start with something you're more familiar with because it's actually a lot easier to create something and make money with something you're trained for or that you know. But if someone doesn't want to do that there's lots of other alternatives. You don't have to do that, and I totally get the burnout stuff. Shane: Even as much as I used to love football coaching, like I loved it. I ate it, I breathed it, I slept it. I was always on football coaching. But after you start a community for football coaches, you talk to coaches, you go to work and coach, you come home and coach, and you make playbooks, and you go study playbooks, then you use your playbook on Friday night I really felt the burnout. It didn't matter how much I loved or was passionate about coaching football, at the end of the day you've got to do something else, like you've got to do something else. I can totally get onboard with that. Shane: Tell us about your idea now and how did you switch to that, and when did you start it? Brian: All right. My ideal now is to educate people on credit card points, travel points and miles that you can accumulate spending on credit cards and how to cash them in for maximum value to book free trips and vacations. So my website now is learnthepoints.com, and there is a strategy in there which we teach people so they can earn eight to $10,000 worth of free travel in basically nine months. So that's my goal is to have people that are willing to pay for a monthly membership for even if it's a short term be educated on the best way to accumulate these points and to redeem them for the most value. Shane: And also, too, make sure you're paying off the credit card, staying out of debt? Brian: Yes, 100%. Shane: It's always free money, right? Brian: It's free money. Don't spend anything that you weren't normally going to spend and set up automatic payments, pay everything off every month. I came up with this idea. I got shocked, honestly, just recently. My wife and I do not have any debt. It took us a while to get there. We're very credit card averse. I had just never looked into credit card points before. I had heard people talk about miles and flying and all of that stuff, and I just assumed in my head that these were people that fly all the time, and that's how they do this or they're on these big corporate accounts, so that allows them to rack up all these points. And that's just something that's not for me, and I don't apply for credit cards, so when offers come by I don't look into that stuff. Brian: But what happened was we went through a dark time in December as a family, and when the end of the school year was rolling around and it was summertime was coming up, and we were like, "We need a vacation." All I had set aside for vacation for free money was, like, 500 bucks, which is not bad. We can have fun as a family on 500 bucks, no problem. But all of our other money goes to saving. It all goes to retirement accounts or education accounts or you name it. So we've never really taken a really awesome vacation. Brian: It was kind of out of desperation or just, "You know what? I'm going to lo…

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Best of: Our Story – Prologue: A Couple of Kids from Kentucky Aug 24, 2019

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In this Best of Episode, we re-visit the Prologue to: "Our story." We'll be sharing our entire "Our Story" series in the Saturday "Best of Episode" releases over the next few weeks. You don't want to miss these! We'll be giving you all the juicy details of who we are, where we began, and how it all happened! This episode was originally published on October 3, 2017. You can check out the original episode here: https://flippedlifestyle.com/podcast163/ FULL TRANSCRIPT Shane: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast where life always comes before work. We're your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. We're a real family who figured out how to make our entire living online. And now, we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? Alright. Let's get started. What is going on, everybody? This is Shane and Jocelyn here, flippedlifestyle.com, super excited to be back with you for another podcast today. This one's going to be a little different than our normal podcast where we're helping our people take their online business to the next level, members of our Flip Your Life community. Jocelyn and I actually are having a book written about us. An author is writing a book about our story and a part of that process is we are recording our story on audio for her to listen to, to go through, kind of like in an interview style format. Jocelyn and I were sitting here recording, and we thought, man, what a great opportunity to fill in the gaps and a lot of you listen to our podcast for online business advice and things like that. But what a great opportunity to share our story with you, how, basically, two normal people from really, really small rural communities in Kentucky over a period of time– we went through our careers, we learned about online business, and we ended up creating this amazing life that we didn't even know existed a few years ago, and maybe just let you guys in on that, and let you walk that journey with us, listen to it, and listen to our story, let it inspire you, and let you know that you can do this, too. Jocelyn: Today, we are starting out with our early life. A lot of you guys have listened to us on other podcasts and you've heard a lot of our story from the past five years, but what you really don't know is more about us from the past 35 years or more. Shane: That dated us, Jocelyn, you totally had dated us right there. What we're going to do is we're going to release these every week as we record them and we're going to let them roll out, and this is going to be our story, our journey how we got to where we are, literally, right now today from A to Z. We're going to look back and connect the dots. We were writing an outline for today's podcast and it's mind blowing when we were reading it. We both just stopped, and we're like, "This doesn't even sound real, it doesn't even sound possible," like, it's incredible when you see looking back with 20/20 hindsight how all of the dots aligned and everything, and all the puzzle pieces came together. What we want you to do is listen to these podcasts. You are going to get a ton of information out of them that is going to help you succeed in your journey, too, and it's going to help you see those dots in your own life, and see how you have all the puzzle pieces right in front of you, and you just have to move them around and connect them together. Alright, so we're going to jump right into it. You want to start? Jocelyn: Oh, we were just having a conversation who was going to start, and Shane's like, "You start." And I'm like, "No, you were born first." Shane: So, this is like those board games we play with Anna Jo and she gets really upset if it's the youngest person first to the oldest person first, so I think we have opened the box to a board game where the oldest guy in the room gets to start off the deals. My story basically starts in a really, really small-town in Southeast Kentucky. Very much a coal town, we're a railroad town, we have a depot here and basically all the coal that comes through the mountains of eastern Kentucky comes through my little town. That was kind of the industry: the railroad, the coal miners, we had less than 5,000 people in my town as we were growing up. Really, just a very rural childhood. I lived in the city limits, what we call a city– it's not really a city. But I lived inside the city limits. I didn't live out in the country, but a very rural upbringing, not anything remotely related to technology or big business or anything like that. Basically, the people were schoolteachers, coal miners or they worked at the retail stores, like Walmart or something like that– Jocelyn: Or maybe at the hospital. Shane: Or maybe at the hospital. Yeah, things like that. That's the kind of jobs that we would have around here. I'm actually the 4th of five boys. My parents have five kids, huge age differences between us. My oldest brother is 19 years older than me. I've got another brother that is 18 years older than me, and then there was a gap between the middle of all five of us. The next brother up was nine years older than me, and that I have a little brother who is about three and half years younger than me. Huge span of children in my family, and lots of different age groups. It was kind of weird because when I was born, two of my brothers were not even in the house and one of them was in college. When I was nine years old, he'd moved off. By the time I could remember things and I was a kid, three of my brothers were gone, so it was kind of like I was the oldest, it's me and my little brother. It was just a bizarre kind of family dynamic and that. Jocelyn: I actually grew up in a small town in Western Kentucky, very flatland. Shane: Still a coal mine in place though. It's a big coal mine place. Jocelyn: Definitely, coal mining is the major industry there. I was born in 1980. Shane: Oh, yeah, I was born in 1978. A child of the 70s. Jocelyn: Barely. My parents, they were really young when they had me. My mom was just out of high school. Actually come to think of it, I think she was in high school. They started from a very young age, they worked very hard to make sure that we had everything that we needed. I have a sister, she is three years younger than me and we grew up in just a neighborhood, we had a lot of friends who lived next door. They were probably, I would say, maybe 30 houses in this neighborhood. It was the 80s, we all ran around and played together — Shane: — Rode bikes — Jocelyn: — Went out at breakfast time, and came in at dinnertime but it is just what we did. I spent a lot of time outside and a lot of time playing. No iPads or technology at that time. I feel very fortunate to have grown up in a time like that. Shane: It is pretty cool. I think we had similar childhoods growing up because we both grew up in very traditional Southern-type towns, went to church on Sundays, hung out with the neighbors, both of our mom stayed home while our dads worked. It was just like good, slow-paced, southern life before the Internet, before we had all this technology and stuff. My dad worked really hard, too. He was an insurance agent. He had his little independent office where he sold auto insurance. Had his own business. It was kind of cool I think that was maybe where the seeds of entrepreneurship kind of were born in me because I can remember my dad telling me about jobs he had had. Used to drive to Chicago from Kentucky to work in the steel mills during the week and they would drive back to Kentucky. This was before the interstates, basically, were really in place. He would come back on the weekends to come down here and he always told me about these grocery stores or restaurants or places he worked. Jocelyn: And he would sleep in the steel mills. Shane: Under the boilers. Jocelyn: He's told us about this before. They would drive up there to Chicago, they would sleep in the steel mill, and then they would drive home to Kentucky on the weekends. Shane: Yup, they'd work there all day, sleep under the boilers at night where it was warm, and then they would get up and work, and they would come home, after they just did that. But I would remember that because he would always tell me growing up, I was like, "Well, dad, why do you do this? Everybody else has a job, what are you doing?" He goes, "Well, I just decided that I would rather be broke and work for myself, and have my time freedom and be able to go to your ball games," or something like that. That always kind of stuck with me a little bit, and he just said he had worked for other people and he decided it was just better through the ups and downs that they could go at it on his own. That is what he did. Jocelyn: He's made it a long time. He is still there today. Shane: Still in business. Jocelyn: Still doing very well. Shane: He's 77 years old, and he's still going in every day. He loves what he does. Other than that, he was just very traditional. Grow up, go to ballgames, played baseball in the summer, played basketball in the fall or in the winter, play a little football in the fall. We never really traveled much or did anything. I didn't really know of a lot about I guess the rest of the world other than what you saw on TV or something. Really, until I went to college, the farthest we ever really drove was maybe up to Lexington Kentucky or down to Knoxville. That was the big city for me, 250,000 people that was my New York, I guess, growing up. I did not even fly on an airplane until I was in my 20s. Just a very small-town, sheltered kind of life. Jocelyn: My dad was a cable engineer. He has been doing that for a very long time. Shane: He was the cable guy. Climbing poles, and hooking up cable systems and all that good stuff. Jocelyn: My dad, he is super hard working person. Just something I really respect about him for sure. I can remember that he always worked extra jobs. He was an engineer, super smart guy. People would hire him to do things on the side. I remember he installed satellite dishes and he worked with a guy who did audiovisual type things for a while. I could remember going places with him sometimes at night like when he would install somebody's satellite or something like that, that would be how we would spend time together a lot of times. I remember those types of things as I was growing up. My mom, she helped us do everything. She helped us with our homework when we came home, make sure we were reading, which really wasn't a problem for us because we loved to read. Shane: But she probably helped you learn that. Jocelyn: Oh, of course, she would always work with us and make sure that we had everything we needed for school and take care of all the grocery shopping, and the cooking it, the cleaning and all those types of things that had to be done. My parents, great people, really appreciate everything that they've done for me growing up. We also did not travel a whole lot. We would go to the surrounding larger towns which in Western Kentucky are not very large. Shane: There is like, two of them. Jocelyn: Pretty much. Yes. Shane: Bowling Green yeah, that is about it. Jocelyn: Owensboro, we would go places like that. We would do that. We didn't get to take a lot of vacations, far away. We, instead, would go camping. Those are some my fondest memories growing up. We started out tent camping. We had a boat so we would take it on the lake and we eventually were able to get a camper, which was awesome. We had an old black-and-white TV. Shane: Was it like a pop-up camper? Jocelyn: No, it was a regular camper. Shane: That little square thing you hook up to the truck kind of deal? Jocelyn: It was orange and white, I remember that. We would pull it with this old green and white truck; we called it Alice. Shane: I think it was the 80s, so weren't all campers orange and white back then with the big stripe? Jocelyn: Yeah, probably, I don't know. But we would take our camper down to the lake. We would go out and ride in a boat, those were some of my most fun memories growing up. I could just remember going to the campgrounds, we would go to the pool. We would swim in the lake. I was saying we had an old black-and-white TV in the camper, and we thought that was the greatest thing ever because there was no Internet, there was nothing back in the 80s and before when we were tent camping, we just had our books which was awesome, but then when we had this black-and-white TV, we were really high-tech. Shane: High-tech, all three channels that you picked up on the airwaves. Our upbringing was kind of cool because I would never say we were poor-poor like we were farming for our food or anything. We were middle class. We just did not have a ton of stuff. I grew up in a two-bedroom, one bath house. We, finally, when I was in high school, I think my sophomore year in high school, maybe my freshman year, we built onto our house, and it was the first time I actually got my own room because I had to share a room with my little brother. But I did get to see our parents as I grew up, they worked so hard, and they built on to their life. I saw the value of how working hard works. My dad had this little bitty office that was seriously– how big do you think that building is? It couldn't be 15 x 15, maybe? It was really tiny. Had this little bitty, tiny office, and for the first 10 years of my life, I could remember going out into that little office after school. My dad would put my Legos up on the shelves. I loved going into his office, but it was this little bitty room. It was probably about as big as the room we are in right now in our house. I can remember when he upgraded to this bigger space, this bigger office, and I thought, "Man, that was the coolest thing ever," because you could see the fruits of his labor. I remember when we built onto our house, basically my five brothers and their families and everybody came over to this little, bitty, tiny house. We actually had this room we call the back porch. There used to be a back porch on it, and my that mom and dad built walls and made it like a sunroom. We kind of took it over as the kid room because it was extra space, then we closed in the area that was between the patio in the garage, this big living room. I got a room on the back, and it was cool watching that progression of, we started with very little, and as I got older, things got better because they worked so hard. I think it was cool that I didn't necessarily have everything growing up that I wanted, but we always had our needs met, and I got to see my parents build a life, and I think that that definitely had an impact on the stuff that we are doing now. Jocelyn: I definitely had a similar situation. When my mom and dad started, like you said they were super young. I can't even imagine my life right now, just the way they had started out versus the way I started out. It is crazy, but they started out, in a trailer, just in the middle of nowhere. Shane: Stereotypical Kentucky trailer kind of deal. Jocelyn: Yeah, not too much after that, they were able to get a house. They, later, built a house. Shane: And when we say built a house, Jocelyn's dad literally poured the concrete, hammered the wood, put on the roof, pretty much built the house the they have now by hand in his spare time, when he wasn't being a cable guy. Jocelyn: He did a great job on that, and they still live there today. It is a beautiful house, so they have just worked hard and– Shane: Basically from nothing. Jocelyn: Yeah, and they've done a great job. They've built on what they had, the same as Shane's dad's insurance age…

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FL303 - How to Grow Your Membership From 0 to 100 Members Aug 20, 2019

Show notes

In today's episode, we celebrate with Kevin for crossing the 100 member mark. FULL TRANSCRIPT Jocelyn Sams: Hey y'all. On today's podcast, we celebrate with Kevin for crossing the 100 member mark. Shane Sams: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, where life always comes before work. We're your hosts Shane and Jocelyn Sams. We're a real family that figured out how to make our entire living online. Now, we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? All right, let's get started. Shane Sams: What's going on everybody? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. It is great to be back with you again today. And we are super excited for a number of reasons in this episode of the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. Yes, we have a member of our Flip Your Life Community back on the show today. It's a guest that we have had before. He's actually the most prolific guest in Flipped Lifestyle Podcast history. This is his fourth appearance on the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. And this one is going to be a great one because we are celebrating a major milestone in this member's life. His online business, his membership has just crossed the 100 member mark. Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, our good friend and member of the year at last year's Flip Your Life Live, Kevin Depew. Kevin, welcome back. Kevin Depew: Hey, what's going on guys? It's great to be here. Jocelyn Sams: We are so excited to talk to you today. We got a message not too long ago from Kevin. And he was really excited saying he had crossed over 100 members. And I think that it's safe to say, Kevin, that this was definitely not an overnight success. Kevin Depew: Yeah, this would be the polar opposite of overnight success. Shane Sams: Hey, success is success, right? And it usually takes a long time to become an overnight success. So, real quick, tell us a little bit. How many members do you have now? And- Kevin Depew: We're at ... Go ahead. Shane Sams: How many members do you have now? And tell us a bit about what your business is. Just remind everybody what's going on. Kevin Depew: Okay. Yeah. We are at 105 members. We run a website, relaxandlearnguitar.com where I teach folks over 40 how to play guitar, so they can relax, have fun, and be part of a great online community. Shane Sams: Man, I see your stuff in my newsfeed all the time because you know you see the stuff from your friends and stuff? And I just always see ... like, you always make me want to play guitar. I need to relax and learn ... I need to relax a little bit. I'm a little high strung. So, maybe I need to learn it. But man, that is so incredible just knowing your journey and knowing how long it's taken you to get to that 100 member mark. And that's a really big number for us because we tell everybody if you can get 100 people to give you $50 a month or 200 people to give you $25 a month, you can make real money. You could make $5,000 a month, $60,000 a year. And just getting 100 real people to give you money and you give them value and you make a difference in their life. Like, imagine if you were in your living room and you had 100 human beings pile into your living room right now, what would that look like? Your house would be spilling out into the streets because you couldn't fit 100 people into your house, right? Kevin Depew: Yes, very crowded. Shane Sams: Yes. And you've got 100 people that are in your thriving guitar-based community, man. And how long ago did you start Relax and Learn Guitar? What year did you start that in? Kevin Depew: So, my ... Let's see, a bunch of pivots and a bunch of changes. And Relax and Learn Guitar, first member was December of 2016. Shane Sams: Wow. Kevin Depew: Yeah, two and a half years. Shane Sams: Wow, that's amazing. And I love how you said many pivots because you had another website. I remember when you joined the Flip Your Life community. And in the show notes for today's episode, we'll put all of Kevin's other podcasts. Just a little reminder, I remember you came in and you said you posted your first idea in the forums. And I remember reading it, distinctly yours for some reason, I remember reading it and thinking, "That's horrible." Kevin Depew: What? Yeah! Shane Sams: "That is terrible. What are you ..." What was that idea? Jocelyn Sams: But of course, we never say that to our members. We say- Kevin Depew: No. Jocelyn Sams: "You might want to try something else." Shane Sams: I'll tell you what, I said it in private this time, Jocelyn. I'm going to be open and honest here, no sugar. I went to Jocelyn and I went, "No, Kevin." What was that original idea? Kevin Depew: Yeah. Well, I had a couple before I even joined the Flip Your Life community. The one that was original was a time management website, and then I was working with caregivers. I did a few other things. I was very much focused on the things I'd done in my work life. And then when I switched to, you would ask, "What do you want to do?" When I switched to something I was passionate about, that's when it really became much more clear what to do. Shane Sams: Yeah, it became easier. I always felt that after you ... Like, when you switched off of the work thing and you did go after something that you like, you know? Because I remember saying, "What do you want to do?" And you were, "I just want to help people learn how to play guitar because they need to relax, they need to chill out. This is my meditation, right? What if I could help other people do that?" And you were then on fire. And that kind of gave you the energy and the perseverance to kind of stick with it because your membership didn't take off right out of the gate, did it? Kevin Depew: No, not at all. It was very slow. Shane Sams: How long did it take you to get your first member, do you think? Kevin Depew: That was almost three months to get the first member. Shane Sams: Wow. Kevin Depew: And then it was kind of one or two a month for a while for a long while. And I just kept at it with creating content consistently and trying to be really responsive to folks I did have, answer their questions. Did a lot of phone calls with people just to talk to them. It was probably six or seven months before we started kind of seeing the Facebook ads start to work and get more emails that then led into the membership. Shane Sams: Interesting. Jocelyn Sams: Imagine that. You put in the work and good things happened in time. Wow. Kevin Depew: Yes. They are, it's pretty exciting now. Shane Sams: So, let's walk through this because I want to take everybody kind of today on a journey to 100 members because a lot of people listening right now, they're just like where you were. They have no members. Jocelyn Sams: And it sounds like such a lofty goal, you know? If you're just getting started, 100 members, "I don't even have one member, you know? How am I going to get 100?" Shane Sams: Right. So, let's kind of walk through that a little bit, and we'll bring it up to today and figure out how you actually crossed the century mark and you filled 100 people in your house, okay? So, you get your first member, right? We talked about that back on an earlier episode of the podcast. What was it like after that, though? Because you said it took like six or seven months before any kind of traction started building, even after you got that first member. What kind of kept you going in that phase? Because we've got a lot of members that post that first sale success story, but then they get really frustrated because it's like they've tasted the promised land, but they can't get in, you know? Like, they can't build momentum on it. So, what kept you going after you got that first sale and then that huge gap until some traction started building after that? Kevin Depew: Probably two things. Somewhere along the line about learning how to celebrate even small wins. So, even though you don't have your second, third, 20th customer who's paying in your membership, if you've got emails coming in with people asking questions, you have people sharing some of your information, you have people thanking you for what you are doing, that's probably a big part, celebrating kind of the small things along the way. And then, honestly it's probably the ... It was the Flip Your Life community I was really active in there and talking to other people that were on the same kind of journey and same questions and just kind of learning from them. And just kept trying. It wasn't really ... For me, it's never been a matter of if this is going to happen, it's always for me been, "When is this going to happen?" That's just my mindset. So, I'd say those two things. Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. I love how you talk about celebrating those small things. I think that's something that we are really bad at. I've talked about that on the podcast before because I think that we are such ambitious people. We've had such success in a lot of different areas, and we think that everything that we do is supposed to be a home run. And when it's not, it's so disappointing, you know? We feel this immense failure. And that's not a great way to be. And I love how you talk about just knowing that you're affecting one person, you're affecting four people, you know? Just all those little things adding up to be something really awesome. Shane Sams: Yeah. I love how you talked about the community too because that's a good filter, you know, when you're struggling in your business or when something's going wrong, as you're kind of surrounded by other people. And when you have a question, like, "Why is this ad not working?" But then you see someone else ask that question, you can kind of think to yourself, "Oh, it's not just me. Someone else is struggling with getting their ad to work, so maybe we can combine forces and work together." Or when you are not having success and then you log in and you see 10 success stories posted last night, right? Then you get to be like, "Wow, it is real. There's other people doing it. And I just have to keep going because my success is somewhere under one of these rocks. I've just got to keep flipping rocks." Kevin Depew: Yeah. My wife was much better at, and still is, about the celebrating part. And another kind of shift there was when she kind of saw, "Okay, this might work, there's people actually paying us," because it's all been ground up. She always says, "You built this from the ground up. You made the website, you've created the membership area. You're doing the videos. Be proud of that because a large amount of people don't even get to that point." So, she's much better at reminding me to celebrate small wins. Shane Sams: Yes. Most people don't even create their first course. It's just always an idea, right? It's a dream that's kind of stuck in your head. And until you get it out there and you build it brick by brick or you grow a grassroots following, it's never going to become a reality. But the cool thing about when you build a grassroots following is your business has deep roots and those people are loyal to you and those people care about what you're doing, and they feel a part of your community, right? Like, sometimes success can come too fast, and then it flames out like a forest fire. And that's not what we want. We always say we want to be a glacier. We want to build strength and size snowflake by snowflake until we are an unstoppable, immovable force just roaring down the gorge, right? And as you build that momentum, and as you build that foundation, your house is built on rock, not on sand. You can say, "Hey, I've got 105 members today. Tomorrow I'm going to have 110. And then the next day I'm going to have 120." And you just keep stacking those bricks until your foundation is so strong it holds this big huge awesome online business and you've got this amazing worldwide community of second life halfer guitar players chilling out around the campfire. Kevin Depew: Yes. Shane Sams: So, the ads start clicking, okay. What kind of happened next? So, when you saw the ads start to work, what happened there? Did you get to like 20 members or 25 members? What started happening with your ads? Kevin Depew: Yeah. I would say ... So, once the kind of cold ads started getting traction, then it was making the warm ad, repixeling. And I've just slowly moved it from $5 a day, $6 a day. We're at about $20 a day now on the ads. And it's just a cold ad and a warm ad to get folks onto the email list. I would say we got to probably 30 members by the end of 2000 ... See, I have to go back a little bit, end of 2017, I guess, about 30 people we had in the membership. And most of that was just paid traffic and ads was the primary way to get them. Shane Sams: What do you think was the biggest difference to where the cold ... That's that hard one, right? When people learn about us, warm ads, you can upload your email list, you can find people that follow you and target them. Jocelyn Sams: The people who have landed on your website. Shane Sams: Yeah, yeah, people who know about you. What do you think the difference was in getting a cold ad to work? Was it just targeting? Was it the ad itself? What do you think helped you turn the corner and get some traction there? Kevin Depew: When I had enough traffic to make a lookalike audience that was big. And then, doing a video. Video has been everything. So, when I was first starting out, and it seems kind of ironic, I'm playing guitar, but I didn't really have a YouTube channel. And yes, I mean, I built the website, I built the membership. And then everything else kind of came after that. But once I kind of embraced the live video, I was doing live video on Facebook. And then it's moved to the live video on YouTube. And once the ad changed to a video ad, that's when it moved. Shane Sams: Wow, that's amazing because people saw you playing, they could hear you playing. Kevin Depew: Yeah. Shane Sams: There was proof right there that you knew what you were doing and could teach someone. Jocelyn Sams: Well, and it also gives you somewhere to send people. So, like if somebody messages you on social media and says, "Hey, I found your stuff. It's pretty cool." You can say, "Well, check it out. I also have a YouTube channel." Kevin Depew: Yes. I always joke and say, "If it wasn't for Johnny Cash, I would not have a membership." Shane Sams: Why? Because that was the- Kevin Depew: That's the one ad. That Johnny Cash ad has done very well as far as learning how to play. Yeah. Shane Sams: Everybody wants to be Johnny Cash. Kevin Depew: Yeah. I do. Shane Sams: You've got to burn that ring of fire, man. You've got to burn that ring of fire. It's interesting you say that now for just everybody listening who's a beginner, cold ads are to people who don't know about you. The main thing for a cold ad to do is to create awareness and hopefully create an opt-in, where they can become more familiar with you, they can build that relationship with you. And cold traffic is everything. It's the life blood of your business. You have to be found by new people before ... to be able to grow your business and get more members because you can't just stay static. You can't just protect what you've already got. You've got to grow. So, the cold ad started c…

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Best of: How to Get Traction in Your Online Business Aug 17, 2019

Show notes

In this Best of Episode we help Kevin gain traction for his guitar tutorial website. This episode was originally published on August 9, 2016. You can check out the original episode here: https://flippedlifestyle.com/podcast103/ FULL TRANSCRIPT Jocelyn: Hey y'all! On today's podcast, we help Kevin make a pivot to a new online business. Shane: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, where life always become work. We're your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. We're a real family who figured out how to make our entire living online. And now, we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? Alright. Let's get started. What's going on everybody? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. It is great to be back with you as always. This week, we've got a beautiful sunny day out the window here in Kentucky at the podcast, and we are excited because we are welcoming back a former guest and friend of ours, Kevin Depew - a Flip Your Life member who has been on the podcast before, but we have something we've never done that's happening here on the podcast today. We are going to help someone pivot from one online business idea to another. So, Kevin, welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. Kevin Depew: Thank you. Great to be here. Shane: And, it was very interesting watching the progression of Kevin's online business since he was on the podcast. What episode was that Jocelyn? Jocelyn: I think it was 79. Shane: Episode 79, so if you want to check out his first episode to kind of partner with this, go back to flippedlifestyle.com/podcast79. Kevin had an online business that was totally different than where he is today and where he is making progress. So, Kevin, tell everyone a little bit about, just quickly where you were when we last spoke. And, maybe what your avatar was, what you were trying to do, maybe a couple of, you know, little problems that you had with that and then, tell us about your business and your avatar now. Kevin Depew: Sure. So, that was back in late January – so, January, February when I had my first call with you guys. I was really new. I had turned a blog in November 2015, just kind of getting idea to want to do online business. And, at that point I had come across you guys through I believe it was from Pat Flynn's podcast, really felt like you guys were some real folks I could learn from. So, I jumped right into the community and I think I did my phone call with you guys. I was maybe in there a week and a half… Shane: All right. Kevin Depew: Yeah. Got an email and said, "Yes. I'm going to – I will talk to people in person about online business. What the heck?" Shane: I probably will. Kevin Depew: At that point I was doing the blog with createsometime.com and it was a tag blog. So, let's just say that. The avatar was everyone living in America, basically Shane: Right. And literally you said that. I'm pretty sure you're like, "Yes, I just wanted to help everybody." And I'm like, "No. That's not how this works, man." You know? Kevin Depew: Yes. I learned a lot. So, at that point... I mean I have strengths in being creative and art, and music, that kind of thing. And I'm also really good at time management. I've worked my entire career, 25-plus years administration, children and families, multiple projects, you know, hiring and training and working with multiple people. Shane: Right. Kevin Depew: So, it was very broad. That first phone call – we really narrowed down how to choose a more specific avatar, which I was kind of... what ended at that call was figuring out a more specific avatar and a more specific problem. Shane: And, we really niched down to you were trying to help older people who had parents that were caregivers for their older aging parents and you were going to help them control their time, basically. Kevin Depew: Exactly. So, we narrow it down to that demographic and just kind of myself as the avatar and things I've learned from that. And then, you know, step off from there with the blog post, the lead magnets, time management, -- the stress and issues that caregivers have -- did some Facebook ads, learned a lot of stuff. And, you know, it wasn't really gaining any traction. So… Shane: Sure. Kevin Depew: ...there was a lot of involvement with the help of you guys. Jocelyn was very, very patient and very helpful. So, I will say that for sure. Jocelyn: Yes, Kevin, we definitely did a lot of soul searching on the old action plans forum. Kevin Depew: Yes. Jocelyn: We talked together a lot, I know. And one of the suggestions that – I'm not sure if it was me or another community member had, was for you to actually sit down with a person and to see what they were willing to pay for and if there were people willing to pay for something. So… Shane: Like this avatar, basically. Jocelyn: Yes, so I think you actually did that. And, tell us a little bit about that and how that led to change in direction a little bit. Kevin Depew: Sure. Yes, that was in May pretty much. I did meet with about five different people, face to face and had asked them a couple of questions about how they would like to get content, whether it be a free blog or through a community or through a course. And, just found on that topic, there's a lot stress and a lot of time that people are trying to spend better in taking care of themselves. But, it's really something they felt like they weren't really jazzed about paying a lot of money for. So, you know, my wife and I are trying to figure the stuff out. And she's like, "You know what? You're creative. You're giving a guitar lessons to people. You love music. What about that? That seems a little more concrete." So, that was two months ago. So, since then that's been the major shift to working on a website that's teaching people how to play the guitar and then moving the direction of a membership site for that topic. Shane: That's good, man. And like this is so interesting. Like when I was talking to you come back on the show, I was fascinated about this because nobody talks about pivoting. Everybody is always just like, "Chase your dreams. Get an idea and hammer it until it works." You know, it takes a lot of courage to pivot and you did that. And I've seen how much easier the last couple of months was than the first six months, because it's just flowed out of you because you're finally kind of hitting your stride. You may have been through it once before, you know you've created the blog, you've kind of done all the growing pains stuff, learning how all this fit together and it seems like it's been a little bit easier for you to pivot into this new idea, where you do seem to be getting like more personal traction in it. Does that make sense? Kevin Depew: Oh, absolutely. I will say I totally agree with that. And a part of me is like, "I'm just not doing this right." You know what I mean, I'm starting to self-doubt and kind of figure out... and I'm a person who kind of once I get my mind set to it, I'm going to figure it out. Shane: Sure, sure. Kevin Depew: I felt like I can't be really wrong. Let's just try something else. Shane: Exactly. And, that's where most people I think really fail at online business. You know, we tried different things before things worked. Most successful people, anybody that you find, whatever they're doing online now, they were not necessarily doing that in the beginning. The beginning was where they had their first ideas, they tried and they learned and they made some mistakes. And, eventually, you find your way to that idea that does stick and you know how to act on that better because you figured all the other stuff out. So, it's a lot easier, you know, the second or third time to try something, but most people just quit because they stopped their blog and two months later they're not quitting their job and that's just not how you do it. Kevin Depew: Yes, yes. That'd be nice. Jocelyn: Yes, for sure. Alright, Kevin. Let's jump into some questions for today. Let's fast forward a little bit to what you're working on now and what is your biggest challenge right now? I know that you've just started kind of recently. So, you have your website up and I think that you have your opt in bonus going. Have you had people opt in? Shane: Yes. And also to tell everybody your domain name and then maybe narrow down the avatar a little bit.. It's not just all people that want guitars. Who are we speaking to here? Kevin Depew: Yes. And so, the website is relaxandlearnguitar.com and my avatar is that – I'm going just say affectionately – the middle-aged person... Shane: Right. Kevin Depew: ...like myself. And recently, maybe the empty nester or those who have more time to themselves to learn to play for the first time or maybe they've done that in the past and life got in the way and they wanted to pick it back up and start again. Those looking for ways to enjoy, have less stress and just have better health – mental health-wise by learning an instrument, which I think is a very powerful thing for folks who do that. Shane: That is an awesome avatar, awesome avatar. Where are you at right now like Jocelyn said? then if you want to go ahead and tell us what your biggest challenge is with this new direction. Kevin Depew: Sure. The website is one-week old. So, I have revamped everything. And you're totally right, man in "the second time around." I've got these pieces like WordPress or AWeber or Leadpages. I've got that under my belt. So, it was just a matter of kind of redoing these things. It didn't take me as long as I thought it would. Shane: For sure. Kevin Depew: So, I have a website, I've got a blog. There's probably eight or nine posts on there, there's a couple of free lessons, there's an opt in. I did have to learn Vimeo because obviously with this avatar, that's going to be huge of how that's going to be delivered. Shane: Sure. Kevin Depew: So, you know, a little learning curve there. But, I have a YouTube channel now, too. It's one week old. I've not have any new opt ins, but I have not done any kind of like paid promotion. And that's kind of first question like – I know I need to work on and I've started just beginning with video taping those first kind of core membership video series I'm working on. Shane: Sure. Kevin Depew: And, while I'm doing that I'm also kind of promoting the website too before there's an actual paid piece to it. What does that look like? Shane: Right, exactly… Kevin Depew: So, how do I gain traction, I guess? Shane: Well, I think that you do have those first few lessons done. And the big selling point in any membership like this, we find this a lot – and a lot of our people who'd come through better in the arts or in like teaching music or teaching people how to draw, stuff like that - The powerful thing is going to be… not only the community that you build, but working directly with you like people want how-to videos but there's how-to videos all over the place. I would even argue in your space, what you're doing here. The stuff that goes in an organized fashion inside your community, like you're going to have like lesson one, lesson two, "Start here. Go there." That's all going to be inside your membership in a nice, neat orderly fashion. I think most of your videos you're going to be able to just release on YouTube anyway. And that's going to get you a lot of traction. Because just let the videos be free and let people come in, and start picking up the guitar and learning from you. What you're going to offer people is come into the community, record yourself playing, share it. Let me come on as a teacher and record myself, telling you what you need to do or talking in the forums about what you need to undo to improve your video. I think that's what you're going to find is more valuable here for the membership not just the content. You want to get your content out there. You want people to say, "Dang it. Kevin taught me the guitar." You know what I mean? and then, "But I want him to help me get better. I want to be around a lot of other empty nesters. I want to be a lot – around, you know, 50 to a 100 guys that are doing this with me and we're all doing it together. I can see where they messed up, I can see what they do or I can write a song and go share it with them in a safe place. And Kevin can come in and kind of help me a lot on that journey." So, I would actually argue if you'll just set your forums up, you're not going to need a ton of content in there. As your content gets out into the world, people are going to start coming there for you. There was even a coaching component to this. You know, one of the fastest ways to make money is to just go one-on-one and do what doesn't scale first. As people discover you, let them just come in. Do some Skype lessons. Jump on Skype, see them play, help them out, talk about video one that they found and then move forward into that with them. So, you're really a lot closer than you think. You do have a paid product, you've got you. Kevin Depew: OK, yes. That's shift the there. It's a lot of competition with a lot of talking in the forums, I operate under the premise that what folks are going to do is be there for the relationship and with myself, more so than the actual – because you can get free guitar lessons, you get free lessons on a lot of stuff online. Shane: Yes. Kevin Depew: So, yes, that makes sense so it's kind of this recapping on. I've done five or six lessons already that were going to be on the membership site. Just go ahead and put those on YouTube now and have it lead back to the website. Is that… Jocelyn: Yes, I think that's what you should definitely do. You need some free content out there. You need to be bringing people back to your site so that they can opt in and hopefully join your membership off that. Shane: Like it doesn't matter how good your lessons are if no one sees them. So, like, yes you're going to be able to offer things in your membership later. Like when these people really get down the road with you and invest in you, they're going to say, "Teach me something high-tech. Teach me something awesome. What can I play when I'm on the beach with my grandkids for this vacation this week that's going to impress them?" Those are things you can offer in the membership but like basically right now, you can just say, "Let it all go, man. Let it all free." Now, this is another trick to – no, it's not a trick. It's like a way to leverage your content. Like things you release for free can be out there. But, then you can still use those in a paid area because you're going to organize them and guide people through them in a certain order. That's how you monetize your content. You know most of the information, when we give advice on here that we could get probably charge for, if we were doing like consulting calls. But, we let it go out there because information wants to be free and we want people to see that they can come to our membership to get direct help. So, that's exactly what you're doing here. Be that guy for these people in public as much as possible. Get a following and then draw them back into your membership where they can get actual one-on-one help. Kevin Depew: And that's what they're paying for is the direct one-on-one help. Shane: And the community and the relationshi…

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FL302 - We Help a Manly Truck Driver Find His Touchy Feely Niche For Men Aug 13, 2019

Show notes

In today's episode, we help a truck driver start an online business. FULL TRANSCRIPT Jocelyn: Hey, y'all. On today's podcast, we help a truck driver start an online business. Shane: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast where life always comes before work. We're your host, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. We're a real family that figured out how to make our entire living online, and now we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? All right, lets get started. Shane: What's going on everybody? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. It is great to be back with you again today. We are super excited to have another member of the Flip Your Life community on the show, so that we can help them find their idea, start, build, and grow their own online business, just like we have, and just like hundreds of other people have in the Flip Your Life community. Shane: Super excited to welcome our guest today, Bryan Goodwin. Bryan, welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. Bryan: Hey guys. I appreciate y'all having me on here today. Shane: I think this is a first Bryan because ... we're going to get into your story in just a second. Bryan is a truck driver, and we are actually recording this podcast, he is in his truck on the side of the road right now. Right? Jocelyn: Not driving. Shane: Not driving, he's not driving, but this is the first time I think anyone has ever recorded a podcast with us inside of a semi truck, so I'm pretty excited about that. Bryan: Well, actually I've heard just about all y'all's episodes, so its ... I think yeah the first one y'all had someone that was a truck driver or is a truck driver. No, there's a truck driver in the forums. Shane: That's right. There is. There is. I remember that podcast, but they were not actually in their truck. Bryan: Yeah, they weren't actually in the truck. Shane: That's where you took it to the next level, Bryan. You took it to the next level. Bryan: Glad I could do that. Jocelyn: I'm just curious. I know you spend a lot of time on the road. I'm sure that you listen to a lot of different stuff, but how did you discover us, and have you listened to everything? Bryan: How I actually found you, I'm not a hundred percent. I believe what happened is I was just looking for a business podcast. I was looking for some more information on businesses, because I listen to the (inaudible) and things like that. Y'all's came up, and so I decided let's give them a try, started listening and, I don't know, got all the way up to one particular episode, and I was like, "All right. Well, they've got me pretty much sold. I've got this, but I want to see what else I can learn," so I jumped all the way back and started with episode one, which I actually had to manually download the first 30 because y'all had already cleared the 300 mark- Shane: Right. Bryan: -by that time, so I had to manually download the first 30 and then go from 30 all the way up to what I had listened to at that time. Shane: Love it. Bryan: I've listened to a whole lot of Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Jocelyn: Bless your heart. Shane: Right, bless your heart, man. I know we had you hooked here because I've heard you say y'all about five times, and as soon as you heard that hey y'all at the beginning of the show, you're like, "Wait a minute." Bryan: Oh, yeah. Shane: These are my people. These are my peeps. I've found my people. Jocelyn: Yeah, so I was curious about that because I know you spend a lot of time driving, and you probably spend a lot of time listening. Shane: Well, I'm glad that we have kept you company on many miles of road. Bryan: Yep. Shane: Hopefully, we can help you take everything to the next level, what you're doing. Maybe someday we'll get you off the road. Bryan: Well, that's the objective. Jocelyn: All right, so you are a driver right now, and tell us just a little bit more about your life, about your background, and then we'll get into more of the business side. Bryan: Okay. I've been driving truck for about 11 years now. I drive for the oil field. I actually just hauled what's called frack sand from quarries and stuff like that and take them out to where they do the hydraulic fracking at, and they use the sand actually as a means to prop the cracks and the rock up. I won't go into the details on what fracking is because that just goes completely off rails, but- Shane: We've been known to go off the rails a little bit here on the show, man. That's okay. Bryan: So- Jocelyn: This is all Greek to me. I have no idea what all this means. Bryan: Yeah- Shane: Jocelyn, I just heard sand and I was like, "Sweet. Sand. Okay." Jocelyn: Okay, I can call it that. Shane: There's a big truck of sand. Bryan's at the wheel. Here we go. Bryan: Yeah, so the issue that I run into is that I'm subjected to the swings in the market, so if oil fields, natural gas, and oil prices are getting really high, then yeah I get to have steak and go out and have fun, but if they fall through the floor, I'm eating Cheerios out of a tinfoil bowl. There's a lot of feasts and a lot of famine, and you don't really know when one is going to come upon you, and when the other one's going to leave, so just the swings, and I'm not enjoying the trucking life anymore. Bryan: I've always wanted to get myself out of the truck after about, I don't know, probably about seven years of it. That's when I really started diving into podcasts and started trying to come up with different ideas. I've ran podcasts and blogs for probably about 10 of those years, but just I'm to the point now to where it's like, "All right. I've got to start trying something. I've played at poking the bear a bit. Now, let's go ahead and let's wrestle the guy down to the ground." Jocelyn: Yeah, exactly. Well, tell me about your driving? Do you drive for away? Is it mostly more locally? I know you live in Oklahoma, right? Bryan: Right. It's mostly just regional. There's been a couple times where we've had to go grab sand at some really odd places, all the way up from Oklahoma all the way to Pennsylvania to pick up a load- Shane: Whoa. Bryan: -get halfway ... yeah- Shane: My gosh. Bryan: -go and get halfway back for the oil company that we were hauling for to go, "Yeah. That sand you got, nevermind. We don't need it. Go take it back." Shane: Oh my Go-. I think you just also set the record for the longest commute of anyone who's been on the show. I got this 24 hour commute, guys, and I'd really like to show you...so maybe this aha business thing can open some doors for me. Bryan: Open some doors, exactly. So, it was - but most of the time it's just around the western Oklahoma area, western Texas, Texas panhandle area, may go up into Kansas just a little bit, but most of it's Oklahoma. Shane: Just a lot of moving down the road, man. Bryan: Yes, sir. Shane: Lot of lonely times on the road, right? Bryan: Yep, lot of I-40. Jocelyn: All right, so you've been doing this driving thing for quite awhile. You decided, okay this is not the life that I want long term. So tell us a little bit about how you decided to start something online, and what it is that you're doing. Bryan: All right. Started out - one of the podcasts I listen to is Late Night Internet Marketing, and Mark Mason is the host there. And he had talked about how he was doing drop ship. I was like all right, hey...cause I'd kind of heard about it and I'd wondered how do you get into drop shipping, thinking that would be better than having a room in the back packed full of inventory. Shane: Let me explain what drop shipping is, because some listeners might not know. Drop shipping is basically where you are responsible for selling goods, but they're kept at another location. So if you fulfill - you may have a big inventory that's kept at a factory, and you just sell it online - the order goes to the factory, or the warehouse or whatever, they send it out. You're just responsible for basically selling it. You buy the goods, they're kept somewhere else, they're shipped from somewhere else, and so you never touch the stuff, you're just responsible for the marketing, and the sales, and getting it actually ordered by people. Bryan: Precisely. And so I thought, that would be a great idea. It's really easy to get it all set up. So I went over to one of the little online store areas. You can set one up for about 30 bucks a month, and tried that out, and just through 3-6 months worth of 30 dollar payments out the window. And didn't make sale. But, I liked what the premise was about, but just because I was focusing more on the guy lifestyle - just being the guy. That's kind of what I've always... Shane: What kind of products were they, that you were trying to sell? Bryan: Well, they were anything from some of the unique whiskey glasses and decanters. And so you had kind of like the smoky bar room vibe to it. Shane: Gotcha. Stereotypical man stuff. Bryan: Yeah, stereotypical is the best way to put it, yes sir. Stereotypical man stuff that was neat looking - wasn't just a normal glass, it was like a glass looked like it was kind of twisted - things like that. Bryan: Anyhow, went from that and just realized I wasn't making any money, wasn't making any sales. The closest I'd get - the software that was in the background would say that the sale was done in a very sketchy way, and so it was probably a stolen credit card, so I was like all right, I'm not going to set here and put myself at risk and be on the hook for a bad sale. Shane: Right. Bryan: So I went ahead and I decided I'll ditch that and go back into what I really like to do. I like to write, I like to blog, like to write. And just kind of start go blog and do affiliate marketing, things like that. And that's where Relaxed Male come from. And it's just kind of progressed, and every time I progress a little bit, about once a year it, seems like I'll get a little more focused, and a little more focused. So it was guys lifestyle, and I was like, no, let's talk about guys and getting them leadership and keeping the outdoor element to it, because I think getting people outside and being outdoors and stuff like that is really important for people as a whole. And for men more in particular. Bryan: And so I've gotten down to where now it's men's coaching. Men's outdoor coaching is what I'm focusing into. Shane: I love this journey, okay. Cause you said some really interesting things there. Shane: One, just like, to combat stereotypes a little bit. So, since we're stereotypically talking about men's stuff we're selling, let's combat some stereotypes. You wouldn't think, you know, you talk to a truck driver - we all have this Americana image of a good 'ol truck driver driving down the road, a manly man, working with his hands and all this stuff. But you're like, I'm a truck driver, and I love to write. I like that. It's like, I thought about what I really like to do, and I was waiting for you to be like, fix diesel engines, or something like that. But you're like, I just love to write. And I just want to blog. Shane: But it's so funny, we live in this weird world now where that is true. We all are a weird conglomerate of interests now, because of the internet, because of online, because of the way the world works now. And it's like, yeah man, a truck driver can love to blog, and he can get his message out there. And this driver - you know, you probably have a lot of anxiety about meeting deadlines and stress getting the sand where it needs to be, and there's people yelling all this stuff. I'm like, man...you just go home on the weekends, you're like, I'm getting out, I'm going outside, going for a hike. I'm going to hunt, fish, whatever you do. You do something outside to relax. You've learned how to manage this crazy lifestyle of driving to Pennsylvania from Oklahoma every once in awhile, right? Bryan: Right. Shane: And you've learned how to manage this, and now you want to mentor other men how to do this, right? Bryan: Right. Jocelyn: And I think it makes a lot of sense, I mean, there's also a lot of family stress I would imagine that goes along with this type of job, too. Shane: Yeah, just being away from everybody and stuff like that. Bryan: Oh yeah. That's one of the big things about in oil field, is you're on call. It's not a - it's Monday morning, it's time to hop in the truck and go drive around. It's all right, it's time to head out and it's 11 o'clock at night and they're like - hey one trucking company messed up so they're needing some loads. So I need you and about five other guys to hop in those trucks and head out to go grab some sand. Bryan: So, it was always...it was kind of a running joke at the company - which is an amazing company, I'm not disparaging them in the least, because the company I would drive for, they're great folks. But, there was more than one time where I would be two hours down the road going to the city, and I would get a call just as I crossed into the city limits, and they'd be like, we need you to go ahead and go on a run. And it was like, oh man, all right, I'll be there in two - I'll be back in about two hours. Shane: Crazy, man. Bryan: Cause we'd sat there for two days beforehand with nothing, so it was like, all right, let's get some errands run. Shane: But the crazy thing is though, Bryan, this is the life that a lot of people live, and there's millions of truck drivers. There's millions of people that are on call. Everybody from truck drivers to doctors. And that disruptive, not being able to plan things ahead lifestyle can make you feel out of control. Shane: I'm sure there's a lot of people listening right now, you don't feel like you have control of your schedule. You feel like you're at the whim of the markets and everybody else. And that's just - the world works - we all got to grind, we all got to do things. We all have to meet expectations of others and ourselves. And managing the anxiety of that, managing the stress of that is really half the battle toward living like a flipped lifestyle. Shane: We've talked a lot about this lately. I don't want to pigeon-hole the flipped lifestyle into totally 100% you've quit your job, you're making money with digital products, whatever. Jocelyn: Life is good. Shane: Yeah, life is good. That's not what it is. It's more like being able to create a life where you feel in control. That's the flipped lifestyle. If you could just manage your anxiety and stress, that might be the first step of hey, I've got joy back in my life to enjoy what I'm doing now, and then I can do something else later too, and change what I'm doing. Shane: So, I think it's a super worthy mission, and I think it's an amazing idea. I love that you're - I can just picture you driving down the road in your semi-truck, but your wheels - you listen to a podcast and you just turn it off, sitting in silence thinking about your next blog post. For some reason, that makes me really gloriously happy. That's awesome. Jocelyn: Your website is relaxedmale.com Shane: Which is a great two-word domain name, by the way. Jocelyn: And you've tried a couple different things on this, ri…

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FL301 - How Your Hobby Can Make Money Online Aug 06, 2019

Show notes

In today's episode, we help Kevin decide between a course and a membership. FULL TRANSCRIPT Jocelyn Sams: Hey y'all, on today's podcast we help Kevin decide between a course and a membership. Shane Sams: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, where life always comes before work. We're your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. We're a real family that figured out how to make our entire living online, and now we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? All right, let's get started. Shane Sams: What is going on everybody, welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. It is great to be back with you again today. Super excited to help another member of our Flip Your Life community take their online dream to the next level. We're really excited because we have met this member in person last year at Flip Your Life Live. Our guest today is Flip Your Life community member, Kevin Crowe. How you doing, Kevin? Kevin Crowe: I'm doing good, how you doing? Jocelyn Sams: We are great. It is great to talk to you today. Love Kevin's story, because he came into the live event last year, and it was so funny because he and another member of our community, Nick, they came up to me, I think it was at the reception, and they're like, "Hey, we're introverts too." Shane Sams: It was all secretive like, "There's a club. We're the introvert club, and we're in it. So, we're all in it together." Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, and I was pumped. I just ... I always will remember that, because it was just awesome. Like coming up, and they're like, "Hey, we're kind of like you." So, it was kind of cool. But you'll be really happy to know, Kevin's coming back to the event this year, and we're thinking about even doing an introvert room. Shane Sams: Yeah, we're going to have it at Flip Your Life Live, dude, we're going to call it The Quiet Room. Kevin Crowe: That's awesome. Shane Sams: Yeah, it's going to be off over to the side, so during the working ... So, how Flip Your Life Live works, for everybody that's not been, Jocelyn and I get up on stage, we answer questions from the audience, and do all of our content, but then we actually have breakout sessions where we work on what we just learned. It's really chaotic when you put 100 people in a big room. Shane Sams: It can get loud, people are talking, there's some music playing, but this year we're going to have the spa room, the quiet room, where we have the lights turned down a little bit, and it's like you go in there's going to be a sign that says, "Shh, online businesses being built." So, there's going to be an introvert room, man. It's going to be awesome. We thought about you, Kevin, when we came up with it. Kevin Crowe: That sounds like paradise. Last time we just kind of tucked ourselves away in the back corner table. Shane Sams: It was ... Everybody's just got their hoodies on just looking down. Shane Sams: It's alright. Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, exactly. I was talking to Shane earlier, and he's like, "Oh, you know, two introverts, it's going to be ... I'm going to have to talk a lot this show.", and I'm like, "Listen, introverts are not necessarily shy, they just need to be alone to process things, and to gain their energy back, that's all." Shane Sams: Yeah, we were having a meeting yesterday, Kevin, you might be able to relate to this, and Jocelyn, I was like ... When I start talking I don't stop, which everyone- Jocelyn Sams: Well, if you listen to our podcasts- Shane Sams: To our podcasts you know, but as I was ... We were writing ideas on Post-it Notes, and I looked over at Jocelyn, and she was carefully writing these ideas on her Post-it Notes in perfect handwriting, and I'm just flying Post-it Notes out, I've got like 25 Post-it Notes, she's on the third one, and then when we started talking about them, I just start laying out Post-it Notes, and she's like, "Dude, calm down, one at a time. Let me process this. Let me see what your first Post-it Note is before we're on Post-it Note 12." Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, Shane, he wants to hit me with this firehose of information at all times, and I'm like, "Bro, I have to process this.", and then he wants to ask me questions, and me to just spit something out, and that's not how I roll. You know this, Kevin, that's- Kevin Crowe: Oh yeah. Jocelyn Sams: ... we have to think about it- Shane Sams: You got to absorb- Jocelyn Sams: ... and process it, and- Shane Sams: ... all the information, basically. Jocelyn Sams: ... Yeah, all right, well, it is always good to have a fellow introvert on the show, and we're excited to talk to you today about moving your business forward. You've had some really interesting things going on, and we will get into that just a little bit later. But first, tell us a little bit about you and your background. How did you get into all this? Kevin Crowe: Yep. So, I live in Calhoun, Georgia, about 50 miles north of Atlanta, just me and my two dogs. No wife, no kids, just a girlfriend. But, I was born in Michigan, but I've lived in Georgia most of my life, so I definitely say y'all. I've worked in shipping and logistics for most of my life, and right now I'm working for a logistics company up in Chattanooga. But, I recently changed jobs there. I was working in operations for a while, but now I got a new position in marketing, and I'm able to work from home most of the time. I might go to the office maybe one day a week. So, that's really helped me to start the flip my life process. Jocelyn Sams: So, tell us a little bit about that process. I'm assuming that somebody in your company didn't just come to you and say, "Hey, Kevin, you seem like a good candidate for working at home." Shane Sams: And that's pretty amazing too, because one thing we've talked a lot about this year on the Flipped Lifestyle podcast is flipping your life means taking control of your time more than anything else. That's like if someone asked me, "What does flip your life mean? What is the flipped lifestyle?", it's you get to wake up and choose what you do. Yes, we all have things to do, and we have deadlines, and we have all this stuff, but you get to pour your coffee, you get choose where you go during the day, you get to pick when you work, and you kind of created that even before your online business is off the ground. So, how did that happen? Kevin Crowe: Yeah, exactly. I've been listening to you guys for years, and a bunch of different online podcasts, so I've learned a good bit about online marketing. Not enough for my own business to take off yet or anything, but I noticed a need with our company that we didn't have much of an online presence, or weren't really doing much with marketing, so I approached my boss and just, I told him the things that I saw, the needs in our company, and he basically just created a position for me, and now I'm working at home, I'm loving this job, and just taking the things that I've learned. Shane Sams: How often do you actually go into the office. Kevin Crowe: Well, the last time I was actually in the office was about two weeks ago. Shane Sams: That's amazing. Kevin Crowe: Yeah. It's just kind of ... I go when we need to have meetings and stuff like that, but other than that I can do my job completely from home. I got a pretty sweet home office setup, and I just chill here with the dogs. Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, that's awesome. Kevin Crowe: They're asleep under my feet right now. Jocelyn Sams: That sounds like my dream job. I'm here with my dogs right now, we've got two labs, but yeah, so this is actually very similar to something that happened to me a long time ago when I still worked in the corporate world. I had been there I guess about four years, and there were some changes going on in my life. Shane had moved to Alabama for a time, and if you guys have listened to our backstory podcast you know all about that, how we sort of went our separate ways for a little while, and then we decided we couldn't do that anymore. He got a job opportunity in West Virginia, and I was still working the corporate life, and I'm like, "This is not going to work.", because my company was in Kentucky, and we were going to be living in West Virginia, and so- Shane Sams: It was like a ... How long a drive was that? Jocelyn Sams: Probably about six or seven hours. Shane Sams: Yeah, it was really far away, like a really long drive. Jocelyn Sams: So, basically I just went in, and I'm like, "You know, I'm going to be moving, so is there any way that we can work something out?", and at first they're like, "I don't know if that's going to work.", and after thinking about it for a while we were able to come up with something that worked for everybody. Shane Sams: This was back in like 2000 and ... was it 2005, or? Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, 2004 I think. Shane Sams: 2004, or 2005 when it wasn't normal to work on the internet, or work at home back then. So, it was kind of radical that Jocelyn would even ask this, but she was the marketing coordinator. So, literally all she did all day was call people, coordinate projects, work online, send files, do things like that. So, it was actually like, "Man, you could totally do this over the internet." Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, and so I just asked. I'm like, "What's the worst thing that can happen? They might tell me no." I loved the way that you did because you had a plan, you wrote something out, or I assume you did, and you went in, and you're like, "Hey, these are the weaknesses I see, this is the benefits that I can bring, and is there a way that we can work this out?", and I think any smart business owner would at least consider it. Shane Sams: Yeah, for sure. What did your boss say when you asked him that? Kevin Crowe: Well, he said that it's been something that he's been thinking about for a while with our company, and he saw the need too, he just hasn't really had time to address it, and he was thinking about going outside, making an outside hire, but that he was excited that I was excited about it, and he just said that he would rather have somebody who's already been experienced at the company to take that role over anyways. So, it worked out well. Shane Sams: Wow. That's awesome, dude. Well, good job, and anybody out there listening, have the courage ... Some of you are like, "Man, I really wish I just had more time." We hear this story actually happen time and time again in the Flip Your Life community, people will go to their boss and say, "Hey, can I work remotely two days a week? Hey, is there a new need for a new position? Hey, what can we do to give me a little bit more flexibility?", and then they free up time all of a sudden to do their side hustle, or gain control of their life, or get some more freedom to be able to spend with their family, and that's really the goal. Jocelyn Sams: And I think though sometimes people are just so scared to ask. We had a member not too long ago who worked for like the federal government, and she was like, "There's no way. They definitely won't let me do this.", but they did, they let her go part-time. I actually planted that seed ... It's Wendy, you guys might have heard her podcast, oh, she's been on the podcast before, but anyway, I planted that seed. I had met her at an event, and the two of us were talking, and I was like, "What are the possibilities ...", because she was driving, I think it was like ... Was it like 90 minutes, or something? Shane Sams: It was ridiculous. Her commute was insane. Jocelyn Sams: It was a crazy commute, and I'm like, "What if you could work it out where you could only go a couple days a week?", and she's like, "Oh no, that'll never happen.", but then she contacted us not too long after that, she had a conversation with them, and they said yes. Shane Sams: Yeah, so, I mean, the worst they can say is, "No.", right? Kevin Crowe: Exactly. Shane Sams: 99% of the time they're not going to be like, "I can't believe you asked that, you're fired.", you know what I'm saying? Jocelyn Sams: No, and I think that what you can do also, just for anybody out there listening, is just reassure them, "Hey, I'm not planning on going anywhere, but I thought that this would be a really good opportunity.", blah blah blah. There's a way that you can present it where it doesn't sound negative like, "I hate this job, and I'm getting out of here if you don't let me do this." Shane Sams: So, what a huge change it's going to ... just to give you more ... You're not driving to work every day, if that alone saves you the time and energy to start to be able to start your own side hustle and things like that, what an amazing opportunity it is. But I'm going to tell you here, Kevin, when people listen to this back you're actually going to get in trouble, because a few minutes ago you said, "I live down here with my two dogs, and no wife and kids, just a girlfriend." Jocelyn Sams: I know, I caught that. Shane Sams: I can't wait until your girl listens to this, and goes, "Oh, I'm just a girlfriend, Kevin? That's all I am, just a girl. Just a girlfriend over here on the side." So, what's her name? What's your girlfriend- Kevin Crowe: Yeah, woops. Annalise. Shane Sams: What is it? Jocelyn Sams: Annalise? Kevin Crowe: Her name's Annalise. Shane Sams: Annalise, when you listen to this, I'm just telling you, I called him out. Kevin Crowe: Well, I just meant that she doesn't live here with me. Shane Sams: Right, I got ... I understand. I'm just trying to dig you out of a hole that you dug- Jocelyn Sams: Exactly. Kevin Crowe: Thank you, sir. I appreciate that. Jocelyn Sams: Okay, Kevin, so now we are ready to hear a little bit about what it is that you are doing online. What made you decide to start an online business, and what are you working on? Kevin Crowe: Okay so, I've been thinking about online business for years. A long time ago I started a football blog, not really having much of a direction or knowing where to go, but as I got to thinking about what I could do online I realized that one thing that I love that I'm good at and that I know a lot about is fantasy football. So, a lot of my coworkers would ask me about fantasy football advice, or what it is, how it works, and that just sort of made me think that I could do something with that online. Shane Sams: What's your blog called? Is the blog the same site as your online business now? Kevin Crowe: Yep, it's thefantasyfootballcoach.com. Shane Sams: Oh wow, that's a good domain name. That's really cool. Kevin Crowe: Yeah, I was surprised that it was still available. Shane Sams: What's your background with fantasy football? Were you old school, doing it on paper before you could do it online and stuff? What got you into fantasy football, and how did you become the go-to guy at the water cooler to see who's starting their quarterback this week? Kevin Crowe: Yeah, well I just love football, and most of the people who know me know that I'm pretty obsessed with football in general, but I don't quite go back to the paper days, but I did start back in like 2001, 2002, so it's t…

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FL300 - Entrepreneurship, Paralyzing Anxiety, & Redefining Success Jul 30, 2019

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In today's episode, Jocelyn and I reflect on the past, talk about our fears and struggles, and discuss plans for the future! FULL TRANSCRIPT Jocelyn Sams: Hey y'all. You're listening to episode 300 of the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. Shane Sams: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, where life always comes before work. We're your hosts Shane and Jocelyn Sams. We're a real family that figured out how to make our entire living online. And now we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? All right, let's get started. Shane Sams: What is going on everybody? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. Super excited to be with you this week for episode 300 of the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. It's just me and Jocelyn today for episode 300. And if you're wondering what we're going to talk about on today's podcast, on this milestone episode of the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, episode 300. If you're wondering that, good, because so are we. We have no plan, we're going into this ... We tried to come up with some stuff and we just couldn't think of anything or figure it out. Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. We had all kinds of ideas of things that we wanted to do. We've been talking about it forever. And a couple days ago our assistant emails us and she's like, "Hey guys, just wondering if you have anything for episode 300?" When in the back of her mind I know she's thinking, this episode is supposed to come out next week, get this done. Shane Sams: We're batched ahead on all of our interviews before and after, but you guys have not recorded episode 300. And we started talking about it a little bit and we're like, why can we not think about this? Why can we not figure it out? Maybe we should have a guest on. Maybe we shouldn't have a guest on. Maybe we should talk about X. Maybe we should talk about Y. Maybe we should talk about Z. And we just could not come up with any topic. So what we decided to do for episode 300 is one, explore a little bit why we couldn't figure out what we wanted to talk about. Two, talk about some of the projects and things that we're doing right now and how that's going to impact what Flipped Lifestyle looks like in the future. And then we're actually going to go through the same questions. We're going to interview each other a little bit and talk about those internal fears that are holding us back. Those external obstacles that are getting in our way. And we're going to talk about our biggest business questions that we have for growing and scaling our business. Because we are not immune to fear, we are and not immune to the obstacles, and we are definitely not immune to all the questions that rise up. And we find ourselves right now in kind of a weird limbo in our business. Shane Sams: We've got this huge live event coming up, Flip Your Life LIVE. It's happening September 19th through the 21st. We've got new projects that we've started. We recently acquired back some ownership in another company that we owned. So we're going to be able to grow that thing and make it more profitable now. And we've just got a lot going on and it's kind of left us in this weird paralyzed place. Have you ever felt that way in your business? Have you ever felt like there were things happening and you felt busy and you felt like things were going on, you had a lot of ideas, but you were just kind of stuck or plateaued? And that's kind of where we feel right now emotionally, mentally, and everything about our business. Jocelyn Sams: Yeah we thought we would just give you a little bit of insight into what we're thinking, what we're working on, because we really haven't done that I guess in a while. And I was just thinking today that in August this is going to be five years of this podcast, which is kind of crazy. Shane Sams: Unbelievable. Jocelyn Sams: So we've come kind of a long way but of course there's a lot of things that we still want to do and a lot of places we still want to go. So we're just going to kind of explore that a little bit and just give you guys a little bit of an insight into what we're thinking. Shane Sams: All right, so the first thing we want to talk about is Flip Your Life LIVE. And yes, we want you to come to Flip Your Life LIVE. It's in the teens, however many tickets are left right now. I'm not exactly sure what the count is. We've not met with our live event coordinator in a couple weeks. But we've only got a few tickets left and we really want you to come to Flip Your Life LIVE. It's September 19th through the 21st, it's in Lexington, Kentucky, and it's going to be an amazing event where 100 entrepreneurs from all over the world are going to come together and work for a couple days to build and grow our businesses. We've mentioned this on the podcast a couple times, but we want to explore it a little bit. We are not doing Flip Your Life LIVE in the big conference style event that we've done for the past couple of years anymore. There will not be a Flip Your Life LIVE in 2020 or 21. Jocelyn Sams: And we've had a couple questions about this. I've had a couple of personal friends message me and they're like, "Is everything okay? Why aren't you having an event?" And yes, everything is fine. It has nothing to do with any type of crisis or anything like that. It's just that this event, it just takes a lot of work and a lot of bandwidth that's taking away from other things that we do. Shane Sams: As we explored ... Our first initial idea for Flip Your Life LIVE was let's create a family reunion for the Flip Your Life Community, for our Flipped Lifestyle podcast audience. Let's create an event, a place where people can go and they don't have to worry about constantly getting pitched every hour on the hour. They don't have to worry about hearing a bunch of speakers talk about the crust of whatever they do and then sell them the rest of it. Let's create an event where people come and learn real deep content. Let's create an event where people have time to work on that content together and individually at the event. And then let's create it where it's a Q&A with S and J every hour on the hour. You can ask questions about everything that we talk about. And we wanted to make it a catalyst for people on their calendar where they're like, "I've got to get stuff done before Flip Your Life LIVE. And when I leave Flip Your Live LIVE, I'm going to be super hyper crazy excited and make massive strides to make progress in my business." And we did that. Shane Sams: Last year's event was incredible. This year's event has been awesome. We've done live trainings every week for our attendees. And everything is just really coming to a head. But, Flip Your Life LIVE had an unexpected consequence or two. One, it sucked up all of our bandwidth. I mean from January 1st until September 19th. Every day, almost always, every morning we get up and we look at each other and we're thinking about Flip Your Life LIVE. We're planning meals with our person, we're planning content, we're talking to people in the Flip Your Life LIVE Facebook group. We're just constantly thinking about the marketing and the sales and how to get people to come to Flip Your Life LIVE and we just did not expect it to take up so much bandwidth. Even the stuff we've outsourced. Like our live event coordinator handles all the meals and planning what people are going to eat and all the logistics in the hotel, but you're still thinking about it. You just can't put it up because it's such a big deal and it's such a big event. And people are coming and you want to put on such a good show that it actually pulled us out of the Flip Your Life Community. It pulled us away from our Q&A's. It pulled us away from our Flip Your Life Community forums a little bit. And it actually impacted the reach that we could have. Shane Sams: It even pulled us away a little bit from podcasting. We used to be 12, 13 weeks ahead on our podcasts, and now we're only staying about three or four weeks ahead, because instead of a podcast, we have to record a meeting about Flip Your Life LIVE or we have to talk to each other about something that's going on with the event instead of going on other people's podcasts. We used to do interviews all the time. We've done dozens and dozens of interviews in magazines and on other people's podcasts and those were really good to spread our message and get our word out there, but we've not been able to do that for two years because we don't have time to do that. Shane Sams: So Flip Your Life LIVE was an amazing event and it is going to be an amazing event this year. And we kind of looked at ourselves last year when we were getting ready to walk on stage and said, "Did we really do this? Did this really happen? Did we really pull this off?" Like how did a couple people from Kentucky who started a podcast four or five years ago get 100 people to fly in from the world to change their family's future? And it was awesome. But it's just really kind of holding back our business right now and other things that we want to do. So we decided hey, let's blow this one out. Let's make this one bigger, double what it was last year, awesome. And then we're going to go in another direction. Jocelyn Sams: So for me, the event is amazing. I mean it was my idea to begin with. I had gone to another event that was sort of similar to this and I thought it was really cool. And I thought wow, it would be awesome to bring our people together. But what I really didn't anticipate was, first of all, the massive expense that it takes to put on a live event. There are of course benefits to doing that and there are drawbacks to that. I've mentioned it before that we pretty much make zero profit on the event, which means that we do all this work and we don't make any money. And of course it's not all about the money, but it's hard to put so much time and effort into something that you're getting no financial return on. Now are we getting other types of return? Yes. There have been people who have done really amazing things leading up to the event, following the event. I'm not saying that it wasn't worth it, but it's just been really difficult for us trying to sell this thing, trying to coordinate everything, and just keeping those wheels in motion all the time. Shane Sams: Yeah, and we are a profit first company. Jocelyn and I don't do anything unless it is going to be profitable. And when you hear the work profit, it's not just like oh, we made more than we spent. That's not what profit is. You have to also take into account opportunity costs. Like every time I'm doing a Flip Your Life LIVE training, which I love to do, that's my energy, I love it every week. It gets me hyped. Jocelyn doesn't come around me for three or four hours because I'm like a nuclear bomb generating heat after I get off the mic talking to our Flip Your Life LIVE attendees. But that could be a webinar where we could put another 100 people in the Flip Your Life Community. That could be a coaching call where I can help one of our Flip Your Life Community members go to the next level one on one. So there's a lot of other things that we think we could do with our time that would make a bigger impact on more people and it would actually make more money and put more money in our pocket which is what business is all about. Jocelyn Sams: Does that mean that we are never doing a live event again? Not necessarily. We will probably not do the large scale one for quite some time, maybe ever. We don't like to make promises or bold statements like we will never ever do this event again. Shane Sams: Never say never. But for right now, it is definitely not on our mind. It is not in our plans for next year, the year after, or on the horizon. And we've started thinking about some other things that we could do. Jocelyn and I used to go around the country. We've been to Chicago, San Diego, Tampa, and we've had small mastermind style live events where we have maybe 15 to 20 people in a room and we just really get into the weeds with them about their business. Those were really, really successful. Much more profitable than the big live event. And we got a lot of great results out of them too. Jocelyn Sams: Another thing that we have considered and that I'm actually really excited about, is a destination style event. So what I mean by that is maybe we would go to an all inclusive resort where there will be childcare and everybody can just hang out together and we would do it more like a vacation and also a mastermind event. So one of the things that I wanted to do with our podcast listeners is I would like for you guys to fill out a little survey. So if you're a listener and you would like to share your thoughts on what we're doing or what we might be doing, we put together a little survey over at flippedlifestyle.com/survey. And we would love for you to answer a few questions and just tell us some feedback about some of the things that we talk about. Are you interested in a smaller type mastermind event? Are you interested in a destination type of live event? And that would help us as we sort of make plans for the future. Shane Sams: And the reason we came up with those two options as some kind of live event thing, because live events are one our big core beliefs. We are going to a live event, actually as we are recording this, we are getting ready to fly to San Diego in a couple days. And we are going to be appearing on stage with Pat Flynn at his first live event, FlynnCon. And we're going to be going to that event, it's going to be an amazing event, we can't wait to do it. By the time you've heard this we've already done it so you can probably go to YouTube or Twitter or somewhere and you could find video of the event and what we did. But live events are really important to us. We believe in live events. We go to live events and we want to host some kind of live event. But, we started looking at some of the problems or objections or the things that made a huge conference hard for our people. And two of the biggest objections were, number one, traveling to the live event. It's a big deal to go to a live event. That's part of the reason why you take so much action before and after a live event, is because you've invested so much time and money to get there so you want to get your ROI. Shane Sams: But getting to the event was hard for people. And so we said hey, we need to maybe go back where we can go to them. If we did two or three smaller masterminds we could probably reach as many people as our big live event and we could actually come to them. So if we come to your town it's a lot easier to attend a mastermind or a live event than it is to go all the way across the country to a big thing. The second biggest reason was, I can't leave my family. I can't leave my kids. I can't find a babysitter. I can't find anything else. And so we said hey, a destination live event ... You know if you go to an all inclusive in Mexico, they're, one, half the price of any hotel in America. Two, they've got kids clubs, they've got childcare. If we all go on a Disney cruise or a Royal Caribbean cruise or a Carnival cruise or something, they all have kid's clubs. They've got childcare. So you can get away to master…

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FL299 - How to Overcome Your Fear of Selling Jul 23, 2019

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In today's episode, we help Sarah sell without being too salesy or spammy. FULL TRANSCRIPT Jocelyn Sams: Hey y'all, on today's podcast we help Sarah sell without being too salesy or spammy. Shane Sams: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, where life always comes before work. We're your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. We're a real family that figured out how to make our entire living online, and now, we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? All right, let's get started. Shane Sams: What's going on everybody? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. It is so great to be with you today. Wherever you're listening to the show, thank you for listening. We're really excited to welcome another member of the Flip Your Life community onto the show, so that we can help them overcome fears, breakthrough obstacles and take action on the next steps in their online business. Our guest today is Flip Your Life community member, Sarah Cottrell. Sarah, welcome to the show. Sarah Cottrell: Hi, thanks so much for having me. Jocelyn Sams: Welcome Sarah, I'm actually sensing a little theme here in the podcast. If you listened a couple weeks ago, we had another attorney on, and Sarah of course is an attorney. Tell us a little bit about you, your background and your online business. Sarah Cottrell: Well, so I worked as a lawyer for the last decade. I graduated from law school in 2008, and last summer, after the last of our kids was born, I left my legal job to stay home with them. My path through being a lawyer was a pretty common story. This is true for a lot of lawyers, which is that I started practicing, and pretty early on realized it was not for me in the longterm. However, we had a lot of student loan debt, and I say we because my husband is also a lawyer. We actually met in law school and combined between the two of us, we had over $400,000. Jocelyn Sams: Ouch! Shane Sams: Oh my God. That is a lot of scary mountainous debt, especially when you're like, "I'm not going to use this degree anymore," right? Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. It's basically like you have a mortgage, except there's no asset associated with it other than your own blood, sweat and tears. Shane Sams: Wow, that's unbelievable. Are you still in debt? Sarah Cottrell: No, we paid off all of our debt last June, so June of 2018. Shane Sams: Well done, congratulations. Sarah Cottrell: Thank you. Shane Sams: I can't even imagine having that much debt coming out of college. Jocelyn Sams: What a weight lifted, oh my goodness. Sarah Cottrell: Yes. I was about two years in to practicing when I realized, "This is just not for me in the longterm." When you have over $400,000 in debt, you can't just chalk it all and leave. We had to make a plan to get out, and it had to be a longterm plan. You know a lot of personal finance guru types will say, "Do all these things and cut everything down, and then pay off your debt in like 5 months and then you'll be great." Well, when you have a mortgage size level of debt, you have to have a little bit of a longer term plan that is survivable for five or 10 years in my case. That's what we did. Sarah Cottrell: We made a plan and got out of debt, and that enabled us to be in a position where I was able to stay home with our kids. I also have started doing some writing on the side, which is something that I've always been interested in. With a full-time job and young kids, especially a job that was a lot of research and writing, not a lot of time for writing. Shane Sams: Well for one thing, what's crazy when you were telling your story I was like, "How was 2008 over 10 years ago?" I saw this thing on Facebook the other day, and it was like, people of a certain age you always think the 70s are 30 years ago. I do think that. I'm like, when was 1970? What, 30 years ago? When was 1980? What, 20 years ago? Really, 1980 was like almost 40 years ago and it doesn't seem like that in my brain. Sarah Cottrell: Oh yeah. Shane Sams: When you said, 2008, I was like, how was that 10 years ago for one thing. Then getting out of debt in that short amount, that actually is a short amount of time to me to get out of $400,000 in debt. That's crazy that you did that. That's one of the things that hang people up that we always find coming into the community, is like, "Well, you know I got this college degree. Then I was in this career, and I've got so much time invested in this career, that I just don't want to pivot." I'm like kudos for you for having the guts to say, "Yeah, I'm not going any further. Two years is enough, even though I've invested all of this, I'll figure out how to use this later in my life." Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. Well, and I think for lawyers in particular, you are trained to be extremely risk averse. What you're talking about the sunk costs fallacy that I have all this money and time invested into it, so I can't leave, that's a very strong, mental obstacle for many lawyers. Shane Sams: For sure. Sarah Cottrell: For us, I mean I'm two years in I'm thinking, "I don't want to be a lawyer forever," but I still worked as a lawyer for another eight years. Shane Sams: You had an end game in mind. Sarah Cottrell: Exactly. Shane Sams: That's institutionalized though in almost all businesses and industries. The day I resigned from my job, I slid the letter of resignation over to my principal and he looks at me and he goes, "Man, are you sure?" I'm like, "Oh yeah, I'm 100% positive." Then he goes, he's like, "But how long have you been teaching?" I was like, I said, "Nine years I'm going on my tenth year." He goes, "Nine years, and you're just going to throw all that away? You're just going to throw all that retirement away?" I looked at him and I was like, "Yeah, but there's 18 left before I can retire. I'm not just going to sit here for 18 more years." Sarah Cottrell: Exactly. Jocelyn Sams: Just because we put nine years in, I mean. Shane Sams: Yeah, I don't care how much time I've got put in it, I've got the rest of my life to live. Anybody listening out there, you know Jocelyn and I full degrees, masters degrees, all this education. Taught for almost a decade, we bailed, because we wanted to go a different direction. Sarah was a lawyer, she didn't want to be. $400,000 invested in her education, and decided to do something different. Jocelyn Sams: Well, and I'll tell you, I was looking yesterday because I have one pesky student loan left, and it doesn't have a large balance, but we have one left. Shane Sams: The reason is, I'll tell you why we keep that loan, this is so morbid. If you die, those go away. Sarah Cottrell: I feel you, yes. Shane Sams: We're like, we could pay it off early, or we could just use it as a reverse insurance policy if something ever happens. Totally morbid logic for why we still have the student loan. Jocelyn Sams: Well I was looking yesterday just to see how much was... Jocelyn Sams: Not that much left on it, but anyway, that loan is for an MBA that I never finished. To this day I am paying every month, it just comes out automatically whatever, I pay every month for a degree I didn't even get. You know what, it's part of my life experience. It's part of the reason that I am the person I am today. I don't have any regrets. I'm not sitting here every month going, "Oh you know I'm still paying for this degree that I don't even have." I don't even think about it. It's just part of my life, it's something I did. Jocelyn Sams: Somebody, is it Dave Ramsey that calls it the stupid tax? It's a stupid tax, we've paid a lot of stupid tax in our life. Shane Sams: We've paid a whole lot of stupid tax in our lives. It's all part of the story and it gets you to where you're supposed to be at. Sarah Cottrell: Exactly, yes. I mean to me, and this is part of why I created Former Lawyer, just because you put a lot of time and money into something, if it's not working for you, to say, "Well I'm just going to keep doing it for another one, two, three, maybe even four decades," is actually crazy. Especially because lawyers are so risk averse, it's very hard to get over that hurdle and say, "I'm going to spend the next five years getting myself out of this situation into a better situation, even though ultimately that's what's going to be better for you in the long run." Jocelyn Sams: Okay, so you mentioned just there in passing what it is that you're doing now. You left your job and you started a website. Tell us a little bit about that. Sarah Cottrell: The site is called formerlawyer.com, and the purpose or the overall purpose of Former Lawyer is to provide support and inspiration to unhappy lawyers, who want to make a career change. Right now what that looks like is, there's a blog. There's a podcast I'm actually starting to record episodes this week. What I'll be doing is, in each episode I'm going to be interviewing a lawyer, a former lawyer, someone who used to work as a lawyer and now works in some sort of other career. Sarah Cottrell: My goal is also to have some membership component, but that's the piece that I am still working on. The other pieces I have a little bit more clarity. Shane Sams: For one thing, that's an amazing domain name formerlawyer.com. That's a masterclass in naming your business, because it's helped everything about what it is. Like the Former Lawyer Podcast, the Former Lawyer blog, formerlawyer.com. It's just so tight and good and it's a two word domain. Jocelyn Sams: That two word .com, like that is almost impossible to come by. Shane Sams: That is an awesome domain name and a name for your business. It's when you say it out loud, I can envision it like a miserable lawyer is driving to court to represent some dude or a lady in a divorce, that he just doesn't even want to be in court that day. He's listening to your podcast, interviewing someone who broke out of the prison. He hears that, and she hears that, and it's like hope. I could totally do that. Shane Sams: You said something interesting in your intake form that you filled out before you were on the podcast. "I don't see myself as a guru that tells people, "Do this," and end up where I am. This is more of just a John Lee Dumas model where you're not claiming to be the guru. You're just interviewing people who have done this and giving people ideas, and pushing them out that way. Is that what I'm getting from that? I'm I hearing that correctly? Sarah Cottrell: Yes. Part of that is, every person's issues are so individualized. There are strengths, there are financial situation, whether they have a spouse or don't have a spouse or a significant other. There are just so many things that impact when you're making a plan for example to get out of debt, how long it will take. What it is that you actually want to do, and so there are some people out there who are former lawyers, who do specifically career coaching, where they're telling someone like, "Here's what you need to do. This is the job that you should be looking for," and those sorts of things. Sarah Cottrell: What I see as a need is, less so the, "Here let me tell you exactly what you specific person should be doing." More this idea of, it can feel really lonely. One, because you're like, "I'm I the only crazy person who doesn't actually want to be a lawyer? Is thinking about walking away from this thing that I put all this money and time into?" Also, it can feel like a lot of... My family and friends who are like, "What are you doing? You're throwing away this thing that they perceive as though great, because they don't necessarily understand all of the drawbacks of what it is to work as a lawyer. Shane Sams: For sure. Sarah Cottrell: Then also it's just the length of time. I mean, again, we're not necessarily talking about someone saying, "I want to get out," and they do three months and they're out. We're talking about sometimes two, three, four, five, 10 years. That's a long time to be doing something on your own without other people saying, "Hey, you're doing great, you're going to get out. Keep going." Shane Sams: Sure. I think that's really good, that's really, really good. It just fits the motif of the Former Lawyer. People will look at you like, what was the guy's name? What was Morgan Freeman's character's name? Gosh from Shawshank Redemption? Somebody go send me that on Facebook message. Oh Andy Dufresne. It's like you're Andy Dufresne, you got out. You got out of the prison, you're in Mexico on the beach. It's like whatever. You're the other side of where they want to be, like the story. We always say instant street cred, you did it once, you don't have to do it more than that, right? To be this expert that can actually present this story, and then show other stories of other people who've made it. That's awesome. Shane Sams: You've got a lot going on. You've got a lot of stuff that you've created, and you're already creating content. How many blog posts do you have on formerlawyer.com? Sarah Cottrell: I think that there are about, I want to say eight or nine currently. Shane Sams: Good. Sarah Cottrell: I have stuff scheduled to post three times a week. I'm currently only batching like for a week ahead. Shane Sams: This is still in the beginning of everything, right, it's all been created? Sarah Cottrell: Oh yeah, like June, it all launched in June. Shane Sams: When did you buy that domain name? Sarah Cottrell: Oh years ago. I mean before I even knew when I was going to be getting out of the law. Shane Sams: Give me an estimate of when you bought that. Sarah Cottrell: It was three to five years ago. Shane Sams: All of you people sitting on your old dusty domains that you bought five years ago, dust them off and get to work. You all get some blog posts going, it's time to start building that online business. Jocelyn Sams: Okay, so you started working on content. First of all three times a week is very ambitious, and I applaud you for trying to do it. I don't know that it's 100% necessary, like it might take some pressure off you for now just to schedule the post out for like once a week. Shane Sams: Yeah. I would not go... Sarah Cottrell: Okay, sorry. Shane Sams: Be prolific with your promotion, not necessarily your content in the beginning. We have three rules, like one, be consistent with your content, for us that's a weekly podcast. Could be more, could be less, but we're going to have a podcast. Two, be prolific with your promotion, that's like sharing and ads and things like that. Write one post and promote it for seven days, then write another post. Then relentlessly sell, like sell every day to your list. Sell everyday on your social media. Sell every time somebody asks you a question, because everybody's only one question away from giving you money. Shane Sams: Think of it that way like when you're thinking about being consistent and being prolific, especially in the beginning. Like Jocelyn said, you can burn yourself out really fast, and we don't want you to be formerblogger.com in about six weeks. Sarah Cottrell: I thin…

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FL298 - How to Monetize a Podcast Jul 16, 2019

Show notes

In today's episode, we help Marty monetize his golf podcast. FULL TRANSCRIPT Jocelyn: Hey y'all. On today's show, we help Marty monetize his golf podcast. Shane: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast where life always comes before work. We're your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. We're a real family that figured out how to make our entire living online and now, we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? All right, let's get started. Shane: What's going on everybody, welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. Great to be back with you again today. Super excited to welcome another member of the Flip Your Life community on to the show. Really excited about our guest today because he is a golfer and I love me some golf. So, welcome to the program, Marty Griffin. Marty, welcome man. Marty: Hey, thank you so much for having me. I'm always happy to talk to anyone who's interested in golf, especially people who have kids who are interested in golf. Jocelyn: Well, that would be us right now because our 10-year-old son, Issac, he has just started getting interested in golf a little bit. We did a golf camp this summer and he was really, really excited about it. And we should also mention that Marty is a fellow podcaster. So, it's always exciting to talk to someone who podcasts on our show. Marty: Yeah, it's a ton of fun to do both of those things. I saw your picture of Issac at golf camp, and I was just like yes. Shane: I think it's a sign. Issac's getting into golf. We've got a golfer on the show. All signs are pointing to getting him out on the range and out on the lakes this summer. So, we're going to do that and we're going to talk about golf later on today. But, Marty, tell us a little bit about you and your background and your online business. Marty: I'm, like a lot of your community members, I'm a husband. I'm a father of two girls. We call them Moose and Goose. They're six and 10. I've been playing golf really, pretty much forever. I had some health issues early in life, and I actually had a couple open-heart surgeries. When I was 12 years old was when I had my second one. And the doctors told me that I couldn't do any of the sports that I was currently doing, which was wrestling and baseball. Marty: So, I happened to follow my dad to the driving range one day and I had enough of a knack for it, and I enjoyed it enough that he saw that interest and he got me lessons. So, that was every single waking moment for about 15 years of my life was golf. I'm talking 16 hours a day over the summer, taking lessons, playing in national tournaments. I even tried to go pro for a little while. Marty: So, I decided that in terms of my online business, like our good buddy Pat Flynn says, use your unfair advantage. I got 23 years in the bank doing something that I love that a lot of other people love, so I wanted to really flex that unfair advantage and really get into the golf side of things with my online business. Shane: That's amazing. I played a lot of golf too, when I was a kid. I started playing when I was like 13. The first time I ever swung a club, my brother hands me a driver. I'm like, what do I do? And he goes, well, just hit it like a baseball, but point down. That's what he said. I'm like, okay, whatever. so I watched him swing for a minute and they showed me how to grip the club. I just torched this thing. It left the driving range straight ahead and I was just addicted. The first time I ever swung a club, this happened. Shane: I got really into golf. We went every single day after school, me and my buddy. We would get straight in his car and drive to the next town over to the golf club that we played at. And I bet you for four straight years, I played golf every day it wasn't freezing outside. The best job that I ever had, I was a lifeguard at a country club. There were three holes, seven, eight, and nine, wrapped around the pool. Shane: So me and my buddy, I got paid to do this, this is incredible. For two straight summers I worked at this golf club. I would sit in the chair for 45 minutes and he would go golf those three holes. And then he would get in the chair and I would go golf those three holes. And then when we got off work at the end of the day, we would go play nine holes. So we would play like 27 holes of golf every single day. And half the day we were getting paid to do it. It was unbelievable. How can I get that job back? Marty: That's dream job stuff. That's the real flipped lifestyle Jocelyn is playing golf and being a lifeguard. Jocelyn: Now, did you make any money at that job? Shane: No, I made like minimum wage, but man, it was a good, hard-earned minimum wage. I think I lowered my handicap by about 10 that summer, so it was worth it. Marty: You got yourself a tan and a pretty draw. Shane: Exactly. Jocelyn: It will take me about 10 seconds to tell you about my golf experience. We lived in a townhouse on a golf course when we lived in West Virginia, so there's that. Shane: That was pretty much it. I think Jocelyn came out one time and we walked three holes, and I think she swung the club once. I actually got you a set of golf clubs one time for Mothers Day. Jocelyn: Yeah, and I'm pretty sure they never got used. But, actually, when I used to work in corporate, I would go and ride along with people, because you know in the corporate world, golf's a big thing. I did actually try to play a little bit then, but it was pretty laughable. So, anyway, tell us what is your website and your podcast. Marty: I run a podcast called Golf Strategy School and the website is golfstrategyschool.com. It's been going since, I want to say I launched it in January of 2015. I initially started out trying to be like the John Lee Dumas of golf, where I was going to interview pros and coaches from around the world. And I did that for about the first year. It just didn't get the traction that I wanted. Marty: So I took advice and niched down further. I just kind of kept niching down further and further and further where I could see the opportunity for it and the listenership kept growing. It was a nice kind of feedback point. But I want to say around late 2016, early 2017, I wasn't getting any traction from my audience. My listeners were kind of just non-responsive. So, I actually hung up the microphone, I guess you could say it that way, and walked away from the podcast for a while. Marty: It wasn't until into 2018 about this time, June 2018, I started to get some emails from people who had found the podcast saying, hey, is it on hiatus, are you coming back? So, I started to kick around the idea of bringing it back. Shane: Did you leave the website up, though? So, you left the podcast on iTunes, you left the website up. You just stopped making new episodes basically, for a year, something like that? Marty: Yeah, correct. It was about a year. I just stopped producing new content. I just kind of felt like it was a one-sided relationship between me and my audience. I was just kind of shouting into a black hole. Shane: But you were getting downloads, you were getting listens? It was like pulling teeth to basically get them to talk to you. Marty: Exactly. I was getting downloads. If I went in a regular month, I might get 4,000 downloads. When I wasn't producing, I was still getting 2,500 to 3,000 downloads. Shane: Jocelyn, what was it you were looking at the other day? It was like 90% of the podcasters were getting less than 200 downloads a month or something like that. Jocelyn: Yeah, I'm in this group, it's a podcaster group on Facebook and they were doing a poll. How many listens do you get when your podcast comes out each week. The options were like 1 to 100 or 100 to 200. And then the final one was over 1,000. And hardly anyone was over 1,000. Shane: Over 90% were like less than a hundred. You're getting this many downloads, that's a lot of people paying attention to you. That's 2,500 to 4,000 human beings that are literally listening to you every single month. Jocelyn: And the thing about it is like, I think you were kind of even new on the podcasting game. I guess you could say you were ahead of your time. And I think really we were too, because podcasting is just now starting to become a mainstream-type thing, I feel like. Jocelyn: I was walking yesterday with a friend of mine. My daughter has cheerleading practice and I was walking with one of the other moms and she was like, tell me what a podcast is. And I was like, wow. Shane: And this is a smart, connected, professional person. It's not like this was someone who didn't have an iPhone or something like that. They knew technology. She works in a place where they use technology. It's just not the thing yet. Jocelyn: And I don't really say that to make fun of people or anything like that. I'm just saying, it's just now starting to hit where people are like, oh, yeah, I know what a podcast is. It's starting to become more everyday knowledge rather than just sort of like people who are nerds, I guess, because that's what I am. I've been doing this podcast for a long time. Shane: We've been doing this since like 2012. Shane: Let me ask you this. There's an interesting twist here in the story. Even though you were not getting a lot of feedback, or maybe you just weren't doing it right where you were reaching out correctly or getting them to opt-in correctly. There was some kind of disconnect between you and your audience, even though they loved your content. Shane: But, you actually started making money off of your podcast, correct? Marty: Yeah, that's the interesting thing. So, I had done an interview in 2016 with a couple of guys who had invented a product. And I was told by my fellow golf podcasters that I should interview these guys, they're very charismatic. And they were. And they offered me an affiliate relationship on their product. They only make one thing and it's designed to help you swing your golf club faster. So, I interviewed them and they gave me a promo code. I'm thinking, wow, man, I've really made it I have a promo code. Shane: Not even an ad, it's just a promo code. Marty: Exactly. It's not an ad, no one's paying me to put anything out. It's just there's a promo code out there that's loosely related to my industry. I remember I got a paper check from them the following month for like $28. And I wanted to run up and down the street like I made I, I did it. It was my 11 cents. Shane: You generated money from your words that came out of your mouth. Marty: Exactly. I went right up to my wife, I'm like, see, people do pay me to talk. Jocelyn: Totally killing it. Shane: Crushing it. Taking you to Applebee's tonight, baby. That's right. $28 bucks. Jocelyn: Appetizers on me. Marty: I was going to say, we're going to have to split that appetizer. Shane: Split the appetizer and we're drinking water, but we're paying for it with this check. Marty: So, a couple months later the affiliate revenue died down because I was still producing content. Well, after I had hung up the microphone. Out of nowhere, I got some email from PayPal saying, hey, someone gave you money. I look, and it was the company that I had my affiliate relationship with. Marty: And first month it was like 48 bucks. I'm like, hey, that's more than I got before. That's awesome. The next month, July rolls around, hey, you got like $97 from that company. I'm like, no way. August comes by, I got like 150 bucks. It just kept growing and growing and growing until I'm fairly business-minded. I knew the fourth quarter was coming up. Marty: Lo and behold, December rolls around, I get like 900 bucks. From this company. Shane: That's insane. From one podcast, one affiliate. Marty: One day's worth of work. Shane: That's amazing. Marty: and it just keeps paying. So, I'm thinking to myself, okay, that was Christmas, that was all Black Friday, Christmas, all that rolled into one. January rolls around, 1,100 bucks. February, 1,248 bucks. That was the peak that I hit was 1,248. Shane: And that was this year? Was that in 2019? Marty: Correct. That was 2019. So I'm getting this giant red flag being waved at me by my PayPal account saying, hey, these people want you to do more things. So, kind of buckle up and let's do it here. So, I decided to re-launch the podcast. Shane: That's awesome. So, there's some interesting things here. And we'll go deep into this. Okay, there's some red flags here too. One, it's really a testament to everybody out there listening to create some freaking content. This is ridiculous. If you create it, you've got a chance. You created this content way before the money ever started rolling in. But then it just started rolling in and it was true passive income. Shane: Somehow that episode got ranked or that coupon code got put into what's it called, Honey, is that that app? The Honey app picked your coupon code. Something happened, and you got found in a search engine. That's what happened. How many episodes did you record before you picked it back up again? When you stopped? Marty: Before I relaunched. I stopped at about 70 episodes. Shane: See, you put 70 episodes in and one of them hit. That's just a great lesson for everybody out there, that if you're not creating consistent content and you're not prolifically creating content and you're not putting things in there that can make you money. That episode had the coupon code that made you money. That's just like selling something. You gave yourself a chance to make money online and lo and behold, you did. Shane: So, what if all 70 episodes were giving you a chance to make money? Maybe there'd be something to that. Marty: Yep, that's exactly what I started to do. I started to make advertisements for myself in my podcast. Shane: Exactly. That's the good thing. That's the lesson that I want everybody listening to the podcast to get today is go make 70 podcasts, I don't even care if you know what you're doing yet, just figure it out. You've got to niche down, you've got to figure it out. If you're not doing it, you can't niche down. You can't figure that out. Marty: Yep, you've got to start. Shane: Here's the second thing. If that algorithm changes, you will go back to zero because you don't know exactly where it's coming from, how it's being found. There's ways that we can look into that. You can research that a little bit on your site. You can look at your top pages and what keywords are driving. Do you have Google Analytics on your website? Marty: I just set it up maybe about a month ago. Shane: Good. That's going to give you some data and kind of maybe figure out what people are typing in to find you. If the promo code itself was picked up in that Honey app or some other app that might be a little harder, but you could get some clues. Shane: It's kind of like living on rented land at this point. You've got this podcast, these guests came on. It's working, but if anything outranks you, you're done. I've got a buddy who ranked number one for a very prolific term. He gets like a million hits a month on his website. Crazy traffic. He was number one for a website and he was making like 60,000 off this one page on his website. Just all kinds of affiliates and things like that that he had on the page to monetize it. It was a big operation. It was designed SEO-wise to be number one. Well, he got knocked to third place, an…

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