Flipped Lifestyle™ Podcast

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FL287 - Work From Home Jobs: How to Become a Travel Agent, and Start a Home Based Travel Business Apr 30, 2019

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In today's episode, we're going to show you how to work from home as a virtual travel agent. FULL TRANSCRIPT Jocelyn Sams: Hey y'all on today's podcast we're going to show you how to work from home as a virtual travel agent. 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 with you again today. Super excited for today's show. This is a continuation of our work from home job series. We're branching out a little bit and showing you, the listener other ways you can make a living besides starting a website or selling virtual courses or anything like that. There's so many ways to live that flipped lifestyle in today's economy. The internet makes so many jobs possible to work from home and do things at home that you can really make a living doing almost anything you want. Anything that you can dream of. We have a an amazing example of a work from home job today. Jocelyn Sams: I'm really, really excited about today's episode because this person came into my world randomly I guess you would say. A couple of years ago Shane and I were thinking about going to an all inclusive resort, I really didn't know much about it. I had heard about using travel agents before but we've never really used one. Well I'll take that back, we used one for Disney but I really wanted someone who was an expert on all inclusives and knew all about what we wanted to find in our all inclusive resort. Jocelyn Sams: I did as some people may do actually probably just nerdy people like me. I got on Facebook and I used the search feature and I typed in all inclusive travel expert. I got a lot of different people and I started looking at their pages but one stood out to me in particular. What I do is, I go on and I message people and if they get back to me in a timely manner then there's a possibility that I will work with them and there's a pretty good possibility. Well Marci got back to me right away. We have been working together ever since. This has been a couple of years ago. Shane Sams: Today's guest is a literal work from home travel agent and is actually our personal travel agent, Marci Jennings. Marci welcome to The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. Marci Jennings: Thank you so much for having me. Jocelyn Sams: We are very excited to talk to you today for a lot of different reasons. I think that our listeners are going to be really intrigued by what you do and just the types of experiences that you get to have as a part of your job. Which are really, really cool. We'll get into that just a little bit but before we do tell us a little bit about you and your background and how you got started doing this. Marci Jennings: Awesome, yes I have a bit of an interesting story I guess but I think that's, this is how most business owners are often. First of all I'm a mom. I have two kiddos, they are 13 and nine so I love having great vacation experiences, and that has evolved over the course of time. But I actually started my career in physical therapy. I came from the medical field and loved what I did but didn't love all the paper work and all of the bureaucracy that's involved in healthcare today. Over the course of time I realized that maybe I, was maybe looking for something more flexible and just something a little bit different. Jocelyn Sams: I want to know a little bit about this transition because I know that you're from a little bit larger area than we are. You're from the Kansas city area, right? Marci Jennings: Yes. Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, in our area we were teachers before we left our jobs to do this. I know that a lot of people looked at us like we were crazy. How was it when you told people like, oh yeah, I'm a physical therapist but yeah I'm gonna stop that and be a virtual travel agent. How did that conversation go? Shane Sams: Or did you, did you quit before you found this or did you just start looking? Marci Jennings: That's great questions so yes absolutely people thought I was crazy for a while. Probably some people still think I'm crazy now but yes. I did work it alongside of it when I got started. How this happened was I loved to travel. I didn't grow up traveling very much. My, I grew up in the middle of Kansas on a farm. Our typical vacation was to go to Kansas city each year. We weren't big vacationers growing up but I discovered more about traveling and became obsessed with beach vacations in my adult life so each year I would travel to a different island for a week. Marci Jennings: I just loved the process of researching different destinations, finding the best deals and finding the cool things to do on these different islands. That was my goal each year was to travel somewhere different for a week. In the process of doing this for a few years, my friends and family just started organically coming to me and asking me questions about where I had been, which one was the best place, how do I find these great deals and all these and I just loved it. During this time, I didn't actually think that travel agents still existed. Marci Jennings: I had used one back in 2000 but I kinda say that was before the internet I know it wasn't but I felt that way. In today's world I felt like there was no, it wasn't necessary to have a travel agent. They probably didn't even exist anymore but I was pretending to be a travel agent for my friends and family just because they wanted to know my expertise that I had. I loved helping people. I would tell them about the different deals that I found and all of that and that was the extent of it as I was working in my physical therapy career. Then I met someone that when I asked her about what she did she told me that she was a Disney travel agent. At the time I happened to be planning a trip for my kids to Disney. Marci Jennings: I owned a timeshare at that time so we were planning on staying in our timeshare condo. All we needed was just the tickets for Disney. I told her that she said, "Oh, well, I would be happy to help you out. If you would like to get your tickets from me it's the same price as Disney but I will also give you lots of tips about the best way to do Disney, the best places to eat and just tips to make your trip more efficient. When she said that to me I'm sure the expression on my face was just so confused because I, I said to her. Marci Jennings: I said, "How does that work? It's the same price but how do you get paid?" She explained to me that in the travel industry they've done a lot of research and they've realized that people that use a travel agent are more inclined to have a more seamless vacation experience and as a result travel more often. The travel companies like Disney, cruise lines, resorts, they all appreciate that fact and they as a result build travel agent commission into their regular prices. It doesn't cost anything extra, it's built into the regular price. Shane Sams: Wow. Marci Jennings: If you book Best trip online and you have those things online and you don't use a travel agent that is built into the price anyway. The website is just going to keep that commission instead of it being paid out to an individual agent. Instead if you run that same trip through that travel agent then the travel agent benefits from that commission that the resort or Disney or whatever has built in the price already so- Jocelyn Sams: Yes, I think they are a lot of people out there who do not understand that. I know that I didn't understand it. When we, that's the same story that I have. We were planning a trip to Disney I was completely lost I had never been to Disney in my entire life. Shane Sams: Like stressed out, hair frizzy. Jocelyn, I thought Jocelyn was gonna have a nervous meltdown when we were planning this first trip to Disney World. Jocelyn Sams: I'm asking online. I'm like, I need help I don't know what to do then one of Shane's friends from high school had reached out to me. She's like, hey I'm a Disney agent and I know everything about Disney, I've been a million times I'm a pass holder- Shane Sams: And it doesn't cost you anything more. Jocelyn Sams: Yeah so I was shocked about this. I said the same thing, how is this possible? She told me the exact same thing. Once we started looking for Caribbean vacations, I was like, okay I'm going to find a travel agent because I love doing all the research for trips and I love going on and comparing all the prices, the same things that you were talking about but my problem is I have two kids who are involved in activities. I work full-time job and I have a lot of things going on. Shane Sams: And you don't know what you don't know. One of the things, our travel agent that we used for Disney she had literally been like a hundred times. Every time they launch a new ride she goes down there to ride it and make sure she knows what's going on. We got this little book and it had an agenda. We just went to all the rides that we wanted to ride. It was the most flawless, seamless, perfect trip ever. It was crazy because when we started looking at this beach places, we had never been to any of these resorts or anything and Jocelyn's like I bet someone goes to all these places and is a travel agent just like our Disney person. She started looking and she found you. We had the same experience, you planned it, you helped us set everything up we just showed up and laid out on the beach right? Jocelyn Sams: What I love about using the travel agent is that I can tell you what I want. I love Marci because she really makes sure that she understands what I want. Instead of just saying I want a nice beach. Well, she will ask me what does that mean to you? Does that mean you want nice sand, calm water? A nice beach means different things to different people. I love that because Marci you will ask me, okay what exactly do you want? You know exactly what to find, you've done- Shane Sams: You've been there. Jocelyn Sams: You've done probably how many trips for us? I mean a lot now probably- Shane Sams: A lot. Jocelyn Sams: At least five or six. Every time it's been exactly what I asked for. Shane Sams: What's, let me ask you a couple of follow up questions here. What's interesting to me is the reason that the cruise lines and Disney and places like that, really, our first intuition is they don't want to use a travel agent because then they got to pay the commission but they've already got it worked into the price and they know you create repeat customers. In essence a travel agent, the big service that they're providing is not just planning for the person but it's creating recurring revenue for these attractions, correct? Marci Jennings: Absolutely, yes. Shane Sams: Yeah. They get to go back and over and over and over again. You're kind of, your job really not only creates magical memories for people but it also supports the travel industry, correct? Marci Jennings: That's exactly right, exactly. Shane Sams: Let me ask you this, do you only get paid commission or do they also, or do travel virtual agents get paid with perks or do they give you guys certain fees for certain things? How do you actually get paid? Is it just when you book a trip? Marci Jennings: Yes, that's a great question. We do get paid in a few different ways. Primarily it is commission and I think one of the most challenging things about getting into this industry is that you, as a general rule, you don't typically get paid until your clients travel. People are booking trips sometimes on short notice but oftentimes really far in advance, sometimes six to 12 months in advance. You do all the work first and then you don't get paid for quite a while on that. Marci Jennings: That's a challenge in this industry because not everyone could just jump in and wait that long to get paid. Commission is the primary way that we get paid. We also do get perks as well. That varies based upon what you're booking, whether it be Disney or cruise lines or all inclusive resorts. It's quite variable but they are definitely incentives out there as well because they definitely want travel agents to have experiences so that we can turn around and then sell that to our clients as well. Shane Sams: Once you get started it's kind of like the assembly line. If you start building a car on the first part of the assembly line they put the frame, then the tires, then the door. You don't have a car when the thing starts but once the first car rolls off the line they just keep rolling off the line. If you started doing travel planning now in let's say January, whatever month we're in. It's April I think we are right now. Let's say you start in January and maybe you don't get paid for that first one for three months. Shane Sams: But you've been selling other things by then so basically it will start rolling in where, oh yeah I booked this six months ago but I got paid today and I booked another one today I'll get paid for that one, six months. You can create like a stable, almost predictable, it's actually neat to be able to do it that way. Because if you book one in January for June, I'm going to get paid in June then you book one in February for July then you book one in March for, you can predict like oh starting here as long as I keep booking trips I'm going to keep getting paid every single month, correct? Marci Jennings: Correct, yes, yes. Sometimes I've had it people book it as short notice as less than 24 hours when they're departing and sometimes I'm booking things out three years in advance just depending on what it is and what the clients are looking for. There are, definitely another piece of it that's challenging from that side of things is they're peaks and valleys to this business. Marci Jennings: Even, once you've been an agent for a few years they're still peaks and valleys because we, depending on what you focus on, like for me I focus a lot on couples trips and family vacations but I'm definitely in leisure travel not in corporate travel. I'll have peaks, like spring break month will be huge for me and then summer months are huge but then there's definitely the drop off of other months where it's a lot less so you really have to be able to manage those peaks and valleys as well. Shane Sams: Every business has a cycle, right? When we were selling lesson plans as our primary income stream we were doing, we would do great in July, August, September, October, November then whoop Christmas break came and nobody was teaching. The spring was a little less and summer was really bad because there's no teachers teaching in June, right? We would have to do the same thing. We might make a lot of money one month but we had to divide that up over the next three months to pay the bills, right? Marci Jennings: Absolutely. Shane Sams: That's just a part, that business cycle. If you're going to work from home and you're going to be self-employed you've gotta learn to ride the roller coaster. You know what I mean? Sometimes there's business and sometimes there's not but what's interesting is you have total control of how hard you want to work and if you want to go out and really blow it up and…

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FL286 - Work From Home Jobs: Teaching English Online Apr 23, 2019

Show notes

In today's episode, we're going to show you how to work from home teaching English online. FULL TRANSCRIPT Jocelyn: Hey, y'all. On today's show, we're going to show you how to work from home teaching English 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, 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. It is great to be back with you again today. Super excited for this episode, because we are kicking off a new series here on The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, all about different ways to work from home and make money online. You know, Jocelyn and I and the community ... We have a lot of trainings about a lot of different things you can do online. You can offer goods, you can offer services, you can offer digital products, you can offer physical products, you can do coaching, but most of our focus is on membership-based websites. Now, I- Jocelyn: And essentially becoming a business owner. Shane: Yeah. And when you become a business owner, that can mean a lot of different things you have to learn and a lot of different responsibilities. You got to build a website, you got to manage your brand, you got to manage your social media presence, you got to create courses and content, and that can be very overwhelming for people. And a lot of people have asked us, "What are some other ways to work from home? What are some other ways to make money online? What are some other ways to live the flipped lifestyle, to get to control my schedule, to get to work when I want to and be more available for my family and for my kids?" So that's where this series came from. We are going to be bringing on a number of guests who make money online and work from home in different ways such as creating and selling courses or even owning and operating a membership. And our first guest in this series is Jocelyn's friend Gina. Gina, welcome to The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. Gina: Thank you. Jocelyn: Yes, we are excited to talk to you today. And Gina's actually someone who I know in real life. We used to work together a few years ago. And of course, we were Facebook friends, and I see she is always posting cool stuff about her job. And I sent her a message not too long ago, and I said, "Would you be willing to come onto our podcast and talk about what it is that you're doing?" So let's get into that just a little bit. Tell us a little bit about you and your family and what it is that you are doing online. Gina: Okay. I have a large family. I have eight kids at home, and I teach ... Well, English as a second language to Chinese children at home. So I have been doing that a little over a year now, and it is the best job I have ever had. Shane: I bet. Gina: It is. Shane: It's probably the best break you've ever had, as well. Gina: It is, actually, and most people would think you want to be with kids more, but yes. And I actually get up at three, four in the morning to do that. It's just an awesome job. Shane: So what is your background? Okay, we're going to get into teaching English as a second language online. So you actually do this live, right? This actually happens online? Gina: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Shane: Okay. So what is- Gina: Yes. Shane: What is your background? What were you doing before the eight children arrived or you did this online? Gina: In the midst of it. I was ... Actually, I worked at the school, and my degree is in psychology, so I had started working on my Masters a little bit, but it wasn't in teaching. And you do not have to have a teaching degree to do this, but you do need to have a degree. But I did work at the school for about six ... A little over six years, and it just ... It wasn't a lot of money. The flexibility wasn't as great. Although I was off during the summer. But I decided to stay home when my youngest one was born, and I wasn't sure what I was going to do when she got school-aged, but I knew I wanted to go back to work but wasn't sure about finding a job that was flexible enough for me to take off if I needed to ... if my kids were sick or if there was doctor's appointments or that would also compensate me for my degree. So I kind of looked into stay-at-home jobs. A lot of them were data entry. A lot of them were this and that, and I stumbled upon this, and it was just like, "Wow." I mean, it was a life-changing decision for me. Jocelyn: Yeah, that's awesome. And what Gina didn't mention is that ... Of course, we live in a super small area, so even though you've gone to college, even though you have a degree, it's not always easy to find good jobs, and particularly ones that are flexible. And that's why a lot of people work at the school system, and I suspect that's why you worked for the school system as well. Gina: Absolutely, yes it was. It was so when the kids were off, I would be off. I would have my summers off and that kind of thing. But in this situation, when I found this job, it was ... I just make my own hours, and I'm actually ... I start around five o'clock in the morning. I could work all night if I wanted to, but I start around four or five. I end around 10 am, and I'm done for the day, and I get paid really well to do that, and I get to teach children and love what I do, and I get to do it at home in my pajamas, and I don't have to get out- Shane: Without ... You don't need a shower. Just get up. Do whatever you want. Make your coffee, right? Gina: You know what, it doesn't ... Yes. It doesn't matter if I've had a shower. Nobody knows. So it's great. It's great. Shane: What does something like this pay? Let's talk about the job first. So you said you get up in the morning, and you literally are working with these kids that are in China, I guess, teaching them English. So are you on a Skype call? Is it a group call with a bunch of kids? Is it one-on-one? What are you actually doing during these hours that you're working? Gina: Well, the company that I work for will ... They do the curriculum and they do everything, so there's no paperwork on my end or anything like that. So I am one-on-one with the students. So it's only one-on-one with this particular company. And I get up, and it's like you have a teacher's portal. So you log in to the teacher's portal. I am not that tech savvy, so it's okay. But I have learned a lot, and they will walk you through ... You know, with workshops and different things to help you, but you ... It's almost like you're FaceTiming someone, but it's the student on the other end, and they are in Beijing, and ... A lot of them are in Beijing, because it's the whole country of China, so there's different cities and areas, and I have 25 minutes that I teach one student, and one class is 25 minutes long. Gina: So you teach them that ... It's a slideshow, so it pulls up on the teacher's portal. All you do is log into your classroom. They have booked your class. You don't have to do anything other than just open the times that you want to teach and that you're available, and then the company is actually the one that talks to the parents, because they can speak Chinese. I do not speak Chinese. And they book the classes for you, and all you do is you have an app. You can check who's booked your classes. You log in at the time that you have chosen to open up, and the student's right there in front of you. Shane: That's amazing. So it's like having a business, but you don't have to go find your own leads. They just find them for you and they book your calendar, and there's so many kids over there doing this, you probably just always have a booked calendar, right? Gina: Oh, you do. In the very beginning, it's almost ... You get a couple here and there trickle in. And then once they start giving you good reviews, then you just get more, and then they can ... Now I have so many wanting to book me that I can't keep up with it, and I have to close slots. It's very ... And the kids. You build a connection with the families and with the kids, and then I also ... WeChat is what it's called over in China. They don't have Facebook. But you can talk back and forth with the parents, because a lot of them do speak English, and you just get to know. You have a good rapport with the family. And I have a family that actually wants to come visit over here. Jocelyn: Oh, that is so cool. Gina: So it is very ... They send you videos. They'll say, "Look what we did today," and I have built so many connections across the world just over this job. It's pretty unbelievable. Jocelyn: Yeah, that is awesome. And you do have a little bit of autonomy as far as the way that you present the material, right? Because I know I've seen some of your videos where you've worn princess crowns and different types of things. Shane: Just fun stuff. Gina: Yeah. You do. Because the girls and boys ... They like different things, and you are to give them a reward. That's their motivation. So as you're doing the lesson, you will say, "Great job," and you give them a star, and it's digital. And they also have a ton of digital Snapchat kind of things. You can make yourself have bunny ears, and just ... It's kind of something fun. It gets the kids laughing, relaxed, comfortable, then they learn better. And anyway, they do have rewards. I'll do princesses. I can put on ... You get a crown and I'll put it on myself. Or you get earrings, and they're kind of like, "Wow, beautiful." And it's just a great connection to have as they're learning English. And they pick up quick. Shane: Tell me about the hours, then. So you do it really in the morning, but you also have a huge family, so you've got ... I can't keep up with two kids. I don't know how you're doing ... I have to be honest, you just became one of my ... We have a Mount Rushmore of awesome parents, people that have seven or more kids. You are now on the Mount Rushmore of these parents. But- Gina: Well, thanks. Shane: Did you pick the early hours, or it's just really necessary to do that because of the time zone differences, or a little of both? Gina: No, it's a little of both, maybe, but ... You have ... It's a 12-hour time zone difference, so when it's 8 AM here, it's 8 PM there. Now in China, they do ... When they get home from school, they do lessons. They have English lessons. Almost every family. It's unbelievable. But there are over 60,000 teachers that teach for this company. So they have ... They'll come home, and they'll do a class, which is just 25 minutes. So you can open up spots anywhere from 7:30 PM at this time here all the way until 10 AM. So if you want to teach from 7:30 PM until 11 ... Which it doesn't work for me, because my kids, that's bed time. But you can do that, or you can get up early like I do and teach from four to 10, or you can teach from midnight to four. It's your choice, and I have no problem getting booked at any time during, because there's always even preschool ... Because the kids were age ranged from three years old ... Yes. Some of them speak better English than my four-year-old here, but ... Shane: That's what happens in Kentucky. I'm just saying. Gina: It is, I know. It's really bad. So ... But from three all the way to 16. So you do have kids that aren't in school yet that can take a 10 AM morning class in China, and it's 10 PM our time. So you create your own schedule on what works for you, and that's why it's so great. Shane: Wow. So if you're going to be out of town or something, you can just basically block off, "I'm not going to be ..." If you're going on vacation, you can just say, "Hey, guys, I'm not going to be able to do it this week," or you literally could just bring your computer if you wanted to and do it from anywhere. You just have to have your laptop with you. Gina: There are many teachers that work for this company that actually travel around the world and teach. There is a teacher that I know that lives in Switzerland, actually, and she doesn't really live there, but she is staying there right now, and she is traveling around, and she just has her laptop. All you need is your laptop. Shane: That's amazing. Gina: So you can go anywhere. Yes it is. Shane: See, that's what we see. We call it "the flipped lifestyle." There's a lot of funny stuff of how we got that name, but what we really mean is the world tells us "You have to have a 9-5. You've got to be sitting in your desk. You have to follow the rules. You've got to build this life exactly like we say it has to be," and we're like, "No, you could literally flip that upside down and live however you want. If you want to get up at 5 AM and work and make money online, you can do it. If you want to live in Switzerland and travel Europe, all you need is your laptop. If you want to be like us, we work from home or anywhere we travel. That's what we do. We just bring our laptop with us." That's what the flipped lifestyle is. That's why we're bringing this new series in, is we want people to realize that there is unlimited opportunity to make a living online. There's unlimited opportunity to build the exact schedule you want. Shane: Like this morning ... We stayed up really late last night. My brother was in town, and I think it was like 10:30 or 11 before we even laid down. So we slept in a little bit this morning. We got up, we did a member call with about 45, 50 people at nine o'clock. We stopped and went and hung out with the kids. I rode my exercise bike, and Jocelyn made a phone call. And then Jocelyn just took off her robe as she was sitting down for this podcast interview. I'm in sweatpants and a t-shirt and flip-flops right now, and we got on the call with you. And then the next thing will be ... The next thing that Jocelyn's going to homeschool co-op next. So then we'll come back, go to a basketball game, and then maybe I'll do a little work before bed tonight. It's just amazing the life you can build because we have this crazy tool like the internet that can connect us with an entire other country that doesn't even speak our language. It's amazing. Gina: It's so ... It is amazing, because I can be teaching a student, and it's dark there, and I can show them my window and say, "Look here," and they're like, "Oh my goodness." It's amazing, because the crickets are chirping in China, and I am teaching this. Or I can be in the evening at a basketball game, and I can open some classes at 10 PM, 10:30, and I'm like, "Well, I got to go because I got to teach a couple classes," and I can pull in 10 minutes before my class starts, get on my laptop and teach and make money for an hour or two. I just get to choose that. And we have talked many times in our family ... Eventually, if the kids get older, we would like to move to North Carolina where my family is. Well, a typical job that you would have ... "What am I going to do? I've got to apply somewhere? I've got to see if I can transfer." But you know what? I don't have to worry about that, b…

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FL285 - How to Make Money Online in a Small Niche Business Apr 16, 2019

Show notes

In today's episode, we help Brad overcome fears and obstacles while scaling his business. FULL TRANSCRIPT Jocelyn: Hey y'all. On today's podcast we help Brad overcome fears and obstacles while scaling his business. 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 on life. 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 and help them take their business and their life to the next level. We've got an awesome guest today, Flip Your Life community member, Brad Grey, and I didn't even try to rhyme that it just happened, but Brad, welcome to the show. Brad Grey: Hey guys, how are you doing? Jocelyn: Hey Brad, we are excited to talk to you today. You have some really interesting things going on in your business, and I think that our listeners are going to love it. So let's dive right in. Tell us a little bit about you, your background, and what you're doing online. Brad Grey: All right. To start, I'm a husband and a father of three. Actually, I have three kids, two daughters, basically. Age seven and a four month old now, I guess. Yeah- Shane: That's a busy house right there. Brad Grey: Yeah. You're not kidding, and also a two year old son who is ... They have those terrible twos, so you've got all that going on and a dog running around. It's definitely busy. It's definitely a challenge to find that time, but I was able to kind of figure out ways to build that time with the help of you all, segmenting out the schedules and what not. I'm still a practicing biology/science teacher pretty much whatever they ask me to teach. I've been pursuing online business since about 2012 when I made a product, and I put it on Teachers Pay Teachers, and I started to blog a little bit. Just anything I could do really to make some extra money when we had my first child and every once in a while I'd get this little thing, a sale and it was like this bug just telling me, "Hey you need to be doing something else with this." Shane: It's like a virus. Brad Grey: It went on for years, and I just kept ignoring it like, it's only a couple of bucks here, a couple of bucks there but ... Then I came across your article in Forbes right about the same time I was finishing up my master's degree in curriculum and instruction and it was like a perfect storm. I was finishing up and I knew I didn't want to be the administrator, I wanted to just dive in and write curriculum. Jocelyn: I have to stop you here because in your form that you filled out it says "I knew what I needed to do, and I consumed what I suspect was at least 150 podcasts and even listened to some several times." Shane: That's amazing. You got the full Netflix binge listen of the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. Brad Grey: Absolutely I used to love going to mow the lawn just so I could get a couple of episodes in. Jocelyn: That is awesome. I love that. Shane: We need to put that in all our sales copy. We even make mowing the yard fun. Brad Grey: Yeah, tough to make that fun, but it was my only opportunity to really get out there and listen to you guys. I listen to several, some of them several times just, to help provide that motivation every once in a while you just need that kick in the butt. Listening to certain episodes helps with that for sure. It helps keep me going, and I'd listen to No Sugar Shane, telling us what's up. It helps keep us going. Jocelyn: Absolutely. So you were listening to the podcast and you decided that you needed to get this thing onto your own website and then you decided to invest in yourself and become a member of our community. Tell us a little bit about that journey. Brad Grey: Yeah, so ... Well, I had it like a wordpress.org site, or a wordpress.com site. I rolled that over and then built it up from there. I did have a couple of blog followers, 75, to be exact and that I converted over to an email list, but really what the challenge was is just finding time, finding the motivation. I took your advice, early in your community you have a breakdown of how to manage your time. Basically I just charted out exactly what I needed to do and basically looked at the end goal and mapped out what I needed to do to accomplish each day in order to meet that end goal of being able to launch a full curriculum and whatever. It was like six or nine months out. So just sitting down and mapping that all out was extremely helpful and having a goal each and every single day to accomplish to make it all happen. Shane: What's amazing is, we actually talked about when we were structuring the Flip Your Life blueprint, what's the order you need to do things in, because everybody out there is like, "Do your sales funnel, write your email list," and all this. Our background is busy working parents who are raising children. When are we ever going to find time to build a business? As we were structuring the Flip Your Life blueprint, and we were putting it in order, we were like, the first thing you have to do is get your calendar under control. If you don't, you're never going to have time to build all these things that the gurus say you have to have. We actually ... The second or third chorus is, time management. Look, got to fill this out. You've got to do this. It's not sexy, it's boring, and it takes a lot of discipline. If you don't do this part, then none of the others are ... It's like a meta skill, like it magnifies all of the other things that are happening. Shane: It's funny you ... You kind of snuck up on us in the community Brad. When I saw your success story, I was like, who is this guy? Because I was like, "Brad Grey?" You posted in the success forums, "I have 136 members," and we're like, "What is it, where did that come from?" Because usually we're like, okay, we see someone make the lead magnet, we see someone make the product, we see someone do this, you just dropped this hundred plus member bomb into the success forums one day, and everybody started chiming in and I'm actually going to ... I don't always read the success posts, but I want to read a part of yours because it's amazing. I click on the link, I go in and it says, "Hey, I'm Brad Grey. I am a lurker. period." And, that's how you start the whole thing. Jocelyn: I love it Brad, you're my people. Shane: You're Jocelyn's people, and that's why we were like, okay, who is this guy? It says, "I tend not to share much, today as a result of listening to the most recent member calls and buying a ticket to Flip Your Life I wanted to share a huge success I've had in this community." You go through and say, "I learned about the Forbes article. I wasn't a member for a long time, but then I got started, got momentum and then I did a member count today, and I have 136 members. I have almost replaced my income from my full time job. It has been truly life changing. I can't think S&J enough and the community, now it's time to level up, replace my income and get to my dream level." And then you say, "I have found 136, I can find a thousand." Shane: I was like ... It's just amazing to hear someone ... I'm sure you've got other posts in here, but I'm like, this is basically your first success post that's like really getting into the detail, and it's just like, "Hey, by the way I almost replaced my income." But that's so awesome because we forget like 80% of people are lurkers, and it's okay to lurk. It's okay to sit in the back. It's okay not to be talking about every single thing and asking a question every day as long as you're taking action and actually building your business. You've been doing that man. Congratulations on all that success dude. That's incredible. Brad Grey: Thank you so much. It's work. A lurker mostly because I got no time. There's no time ... There was no time to dwell in the community. I had work to do and a very tight schedule, so just getting focused, that's what kept me from being an overactive member in the community, but- Shane: We actually find that a lot though- Brad Grey: I get what I need and I .... It was good. That check in and being able to have someone to go to when you need help and you need it fast, it's truly awesome. Shane: That's okay though because we actually find that happens. A lot of people will at the very beginning of their journey, get into the community and use it as a resource. "Okay, I've got to watch this video, I've got to take action. I've got to jump in the forums real quick and ask a question." What happens that we see a lot in the cycle of people coming through the membership is once you get to that 100, 150, 200 member level, that's when you jump in and you celebrate. That's when you jump in and start, "wait, I'm going to chime in here. I've been through that," and you get that circle of people succeeding and helping, succeeding and helping. It creates this awesome feedback loop inside the community where you're getting what you need and you're helping other people get what they need and everybody is like moving forward and growing together. Right? Brad Grey: Absolutely. It's just really incredible how much activity you guys have been able to generate within that community. It's just, everybody's there to support each other. It's really great. Shane: Yeah, I can't wait till you actually get to the live event and you meet everybody and deepen those relationships and then you come back and you're like, oh my gosh, that's not just a picture in the forums. That's not just a person's name anymore, that's the person I ate lunch with. That's the person I sat by at the mastermind group. That's the person I jump on a Zoom call with every week now, and it becomes so much more real. Jocelyn: Okay, Brad. You've had a really exciting journey so far, but a lot of our listeners they can't really relate to the ship. Maybe they're still coming up with their idea, maybe they're just getting started. Let's take it back just a little bit to when you were getting started doing your own thing, meaning like your own website or having your own membership. What was something that was hard for you that you were able to overcome in those early days? Shane: What was your biggest challenge besides time when you first started out? Brad Grey: I think for me it was just believing that it was going to work. No, I read the Forbes article. I felt good and great about it and I followed your stories and I saw the other stories and there's always this doubt that, "am I doing the right thing? Am I investing this time in the right way when I could really be spending more time with my family?" But making those time investments early on, for me, yeah, they paid off, but it was tough to pull back and convince myself that what I was doing is going to work and also convince my wife that this is actually a good use of my time. Brad Grey: Getting the support all around was one of the biggest challenges that I had when I was going through this, because I would even ask for a babysitter so I can stay on track and meet my weekly goals of putting out content and building the curriculum. So it's not just my wife supporting me, but even grandparents supporting, just to help with the kids. There's a lot of investment there and a lot of, you just got to believe and it ends up working out. Shane: It's hard in the beginning. A lot of times people will come to us and they'll say that ... Jocelyn always says, "Well, that's great for you. It worked for you, but I don't know if that will work for me." That's one of the common things that we hear and see all the time, and when you were talking about your story there, it's not necessarily just the belief in yourself. Most people, once they get into their content and they start creating these things, the belief in the self and the actual knowledge and actual expertise pours out of you. But for the first six months you don't get feedback. Like you don't get, surveys and listeners and purchasers. There's no reward and sometimes it feels like you're digging a ditch and filling it back up, and then you're digging a ditch and then you're filling it back up. Right? Brad Grey: Absolutely. Shane: And you just ... Until you get to the tipping point, which could be six, nine months down the road ... We didn't quit our job for 13 months. It took us about a year and then in the 13th month we quit our job before we even were close and that was still after sacrificing, selling our house, getting our bills down to an acceptable level where we thought we could take the risk. We did a lot of stuff within that and you don't feel that feedback for months and months, and months. There are a lot of days and long nights where you're going to bed saying, "Man, is all this worth it? Is this going to pay off?" And you know what the ... I'll tell you what's the honest answer is. Shane: The honest answer is you never know. You kept going and you get to the point ... We know if we work as hard as we can and never give up that, something's going to come of it, but I think the lack of belief comes from that. There's no guarantees. You're just doing this work and you're just waiting for some like positive feedback. Jocelyn: I think that sometimes people think that, oh well, this person they don't support me, they don't support my dreams. It's not really from a place of, I guess, anger or hostility or anything like that. It's just from a place of the unknown. That's really hard for a lot of people. It's really hard for me. I don't like not knowing what's going to happen next. I don't think that your wife or anyone else is coming at it like, "Oh, I don't support you because you're a loser." It's more just because they don't know. They don't know what's going to happen, and that's hard for a lot of people. Shane: Is your wife on board now? Bet she's on board now. Brad Grey: Oh absolutely. Yeah. She's on board now. Shane: You just got to prove it. Like that's the thing is like ... Jocelyn, even to this day, I'll come up with some harebrained idea, which is at least like every three hours and she just looks at me and she's like, "Prove it. Prove it. If that's possible, prove it." But then you got ... It always reads. I'm actually about to teach a new training tonight for the Flip Your Life community, for the Flip Your Life members. Each week we do a training for Flip Your Life live attendees to get them ready. We're talking about these phases that entrepreneurs go through in their life. You figure out something, you yearn for more then you learn about it, then you'd go earn it and then you just keep burning it up until it makes it happen. But what's funny about being an entrepreneur, being a business owner is you go through these cycles and they keep resetting. Shane: So like your ... We're going to talk about th…

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FL284 - How a Christian Missionary Built His $4000 Per Month Online Business Around Dungeons and Dragons Apr 09, 2019

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In today's episode, we'll tell you how Matt makes over $4,000 a month selling his books on Amazon. FULL TRANSCRIPT Jocelyn Sams: Hey y'all. On today's podcast we'll tell you how Matt makes over $4,000 a month selling his books on Amazon. 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. Super excited, I am so excited about today's guest, because it is just gonna bring back so much nostalgia and my childhood and teenage years and college years back into my brain when we talk about this subject today. Our guest today is Flip Your Life community member Matt Davids. Matt, welcome to the show, brother. Matt Davids: Yeah, no problem. Thank you for having me. Jocelyn Sams: Matt, when I saw you in the community, I knew that you had to come onto our show. Because Matt works in the RPG game industry, which is ... Okay, I guess it's just RPG, role playing games. Shane Sams: Dungeons & Dragons, all these cool things. We're gonna get into this, and I'm gonna be really pumped up about it. It's awesome. Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, so before I met Shane I had no idea what a role playing game was. After I met him, I still don't really know what it is, but he is really, really excited about them and has been playing them for a very, very long time. Longer than some of our listeners have probably been alive. Shane Sams: I think the first time I ever played a role playing game, I played Dungeons & Dragons when I was like ... Gosh, like 12 or 13 years old. I've always been into creative stuff and reading, you know, like science fiction, fantasy novels, Game of Thrones kind of stuff. The game is all pencil and paper and dice, right? Matt Davids: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Shane Sams: I remember the first time I ever played we didn't have any dice because we couldn't afford to go buy the dice. We're just a bunch of kids. Matt Davids: Yeah, I've been there. Shane Sams: So we took hats and we like ... There was a 20 sided dice, so we wrote the numbers 1-20 on paper and we threw them in a hat. Then we had a six sided hat and a 10 sided hat, and that's how I cut my teeth on role playing games. Matt Davids: Yeah, absolutely. I mean it sounds very similar to me, too. I was nine when I first played Dungeons and Dragons, and yeah. I came home from that and I had to make dice, so I just wrote them on a piece of paper and threw them in a hat. Shane Sams: Oh, love it. I love it. See, I knew there was gonna be some kind of connection in this episode. I just knew it was gonna happen. Jocelyn Sams: Well, and I saw Matt in our community and I saw what he was doing, and I thought, "You know what? This is a really cool business first of all, and I know Shane's gonna be really excited about talking to him." So I knew that we had to have you on the show, so thank you so much for being here today. Matt Davids: No problem. Shane Sams: Also, too, we always say that our community is extremely unique, because a lot of other communities it's like sales and life go just until the end of the Earth, right? We have so many different people doing so many different niches and so many different business ideas that it's really cool to see like, "Man. You can actually make money doing this." And Matt is actually making four to five thousand dollars a month off of his RPG business. So without going any farther, without spoiling anything else, tell everybody a little bit about you, about your background, and about what you're doing online right now. Matt Davids: Yeah. Well, I went to college in Kentucky. I went to Asbury, which is in the little town of Wilmore. Shane Sams: When he says little, he ain't jokin. Wilmore is a little bitty place. Matt Davids: Yeah. When the college, and there's a seminary there, when they're in session, the town like ... I think it increases, like triples or something the population of the town I think. So I went there. I kind of had my hopes set on becoming a screenwriter, and I did the starving artist thing for awhile. That really didn't work out too well, so I ... At another point in my life I became a missionary and I went to Haiti. I came back from there and then I've been working in search engine optimization ever since. Shane Sams: Wow. That's amazing. That's another part that's very fascinating about your story, and I feel like the world is changing around all sorts of things, like how we used to view things. You know, like back in the '80s, I'm gonna date myself here a little bit, so anybody that wasn't born in the '80s that's listening, I'm sorry. Jocelyn Sams: Turn this off. Shane Sams: Yeah, turn this off. Jocelyn Sams: I'm just kidding. Shane Sams: Back in the '70s and '80s, Dungeons and Dragons was this taboo thing and they thought all these kids were devil worshiping and all this stuff. I am a Christian, and you were a missionary, and low and behold we played role playing games and nothing got us messed up or off the beaten path, right? Matt Davids: Yes. Yeah. Shane Sams: Now it's just such a part of pop culture. You know, you have Stranger Things where the kids are literally on the show playing Dungeons & Dragons, and then I was just reading the other day that there was this massive surge in fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons. It's up so high in sales it's overtaking other board games and things like that, like how it's surging in popularity because we're all online and we all see that this stuff is good, harmless fun, right? Matt Davids: Yeah, oh yeah absolutely and yeah to be clear, you do not have to worship Satan to play Dungeon & Dragons. You do not have to. Jocelyn Sams: There are probably people out there who do but you know... Matt Davids: There probably are. But, you don't have to. Shane Sams: There's a way to get into it that way. I think that's the first time that we've ever had to clarify that someone wasn't worshiping Satan, in their niche. Matt Davids: Yes. Shane Sams: So this is good for all you guys- Matt Davids: Yes, I have never worshiped Satan. I have never had the desire to worship Satan. Shane Sams: Okay back to the missionary stuff, let's refocus. Jocelyn Sams: Thanks for clearing that up. Shane Sams: Alright, so when were you a missionary in Haiti? Matt Davids: I was a missionary in Haiti through 2009 and 2010 and I was there during the earthquake, when the earthquake actually happened. Shane Sams: Wow, like were you in Port de Prince? Matt Davids: Yes I was in Port de Prince. Shane Sams: Oh my goodness. Like what was that like? Matt Davids: Well you know I thought I was gonna die. It was January 12, 2010, about 4:50 pm in the afternoon and there was just a kind of a quiet beautiful day. Haiti in January is beautiful because it's like 75 or something, degrees, and it's beautiful. You know I was working in an orphanage and I was sitting on the second floor of this little building that I lived in across from the orphanage and I just started noticing this little tremor and I heard some of the kids down in the courtyard just kind of getting scared about it and I walked out onto the little veranda and I remember myself saying, I was like, "Don't worry, it's just an earthquake." Well at that point the little tremor became something else. The ground just started shaking, like going just up and down, maybe like a foot and bouncing around, then the whole ground just like moved three feet to the left and I'm watching the orphanage building that's in front of me. It's a very big building, just swaying back and forth. Matt Davids: The wall of the compound, because everybody's in a compound there. The wall of the compound just breaks and collapses. The water tank on my roof of the little apartment that I was in breaks and I get hit with water. And the sound of the earth just going, you just can't imagine, you just can't even hear anything, it was just so loud. And then like, things started calming down just a little bit and I noticed the youngest girl who's in the orphanage, she was three years old and she was sitting down in front of the orphanage building and I'm just watching concrete blocks and things falling around her and I kind of got my wits about me. I said, "Okay, well I guess I'm not gonna die," and so I ran down there and grabbed her and all the other girls had run out into the streets, so I ran out into the street, got them together and I said, "Okay, we're gonna start praying," and I got a big Amen that day. Shane Sams: Wow. That is unbelievable. Like absolutely. Jocelyn Sams: Yeah like I'm kinda speechless on that one. I mean I've obviously never experienced anything like that but wow. Shane Sams: And like I guess the next few days were just like packed with rescues and helping people and all that because it destroyed like 80% of the buildings. Matt Davids: I think it was even more, I think it was 90%. Yeah like, the official death toll was like 350,000 people, so if you can even imagine that. Shane Sams: Gee, man. Wow. Matt Davids: I still can't really even imagine that. Shane Sams: Have you been back since? Or how much longer did you stay after that? Matt Davids: I stayed a few days and then we'd kind of were all, wanted to, the head of the orphanage and stuff wanted to evacuate us and stuff so, I was evacuated at that point and came back to the states but then after a few months I went back and I stayed there for a few months, tried to wrap up some of my work and that. I actually wrote a movie and shot a movie there that kinda went, I did some film festivals with and stuff but- Shane Sams: Wow. Crazy, dude. Matt Davids: But yeah it was something else, it was something else. Shane Sams: I mean, when you've faced something like that, the other challenges in life kind of get smaller, right? I mean when you really see, like true devastation like that, like gosh, you know, and once you put the pieces back together for yourself, because I'm sure that was like post traumatic stress stuff going on there. How did that kind of get you thinking about your future and what you wanted to do with your life, like did things change for you after that? Matt Davids: Yeah definitely. It just kind of really, yeah it kinda made me step back and think about a lot of things and made me take things more seriously and to be more intentional about the things I'm doing, yeah absolutely. Shane Sams: Do you have a family right now? Matt Davids: I do now, I do now. Shane Sams: Yep, yep. So do you have kids? Matt Davids: I do. I'm married, I have three boys. Shane Sams: Okay so were you married then or single? Matt Davids: No I was single. Shane Sams: Awesome, awesome. Well I'm glad you made it back, brother. I'm glad you made it through that and I'm a big believer that God puts people right where they're supposed to be at all times and hey man, if you weren't there, that little 3-year-old girl might not have got picked up and those people might not have anybody to pray with and I just appreciate you for doing that, that's awesome. Matt Davids: Thank you. Jocelyn Sams: And I love how, you said, "Oh yeah we have three boys," but what you didn't mention were how old they are. Tell us how old they are because I can relate to you on this one. Matt Davids: Okay so yeah I have a 4-year-old, a 2-year-old, and then an 8-month-old. Shane Sams: Oh my goodness gracious, you are outnumbered and they are little. Jocelyn Sams: So we also started our business when our kids were super little, so I totally understand what you're going through right now. It is not easy, it's not easy to be a parent of young children anyway, but it's really not easy to try to start a business while working full time and having little bitty children. Matt Davids: Yes. Shane Sams: What does your wife think about the roleplay? Matt Davids: Well she likes roleplaying, she actually has played with us a number of times and she enjoys it. Shane Sams: See, look at this model wife. Jocelyn Sams: Matt, gimme a break, you know. Matt Davids: The business, however, she wasn't really on board for the business. Shane Sams: Why was that? I'm looking at your sheet that says you started like 2015ish, really starting to put these resources together, getting them on Amazon. So are these like, are these roleplaying modules, are these adventures that the players go on, like what are these resources that you are selling or that you started selling on Amazon? Matt Davids: Yeah these are resources that help the game master run their sessions. So I don't really do adventures or things like that. I do some setting kind of material but basically these are, there's a lot of random tables, or different things that help the game master not have to prepare a lot before the session that they run. Shane Sams: Interesting. Matt Davids: So in roleplaying games, just to explain a little bit, if somebody out there is not familiar, there's a group of players, they create characters that they assume the role of and then there's one player called the game master, dungeon master, and they run the session. And so they present the players with obstacles and different things like that throughout the world and so running a game can be a challenging thing so I make resources for the game masters so they don't have to spend 20 hours prepping a session just to hang out with their buddies. Shane Sams: And I always equate when people are like, "What is that?" When they're talking to me about it, I always say it's like, "Remember those choose-your-own-adventure books? Well that's kind of what roleplaying games are. Like the players are all the characters in the book, the game master is kinda like the book. You're the narrator, you're like, okay what do you want to do? Go left? Or go right? Right? So it's like that, that's their job, is to weave the story and then the characters' jobs, the players' job is to live the story and actually change the flow of the story. You're not like forcing them down a path, you're giving them as many paths and choices as possible and I can tell you, I used to plan a game when I was in college and we played like every Sunday night and man, it was a lot of work. Like you had to like, really think about things and be prepared because you never knew what the players were gonna do. Matt Davids: Yeah. Shane Sams: Like, you didn't know what to do, left or right or up or down or sometimes they just go backwards. Right? Matt Davids: Yes. Shane Sams: So your resources are not full adventures then, they're not like the story, it's like maps or dungeons or whatever. Matt Davids: Yeah I have dungeon maps, so the game master can just grab a map and kind of fill it and then I have random tables that help cut down the prep of, because you have rooms or you have places and your players always want to explore those rooms and places if you don't want to spend five hours deciding what is all on that one place, you can just use my resources to roll dice and you'd figure out what's in that room. Shane Sams: So this is almost like filler. Like because the big companies, like Hasbro, who o…

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FL283 - Sales Funnel Strategy from Optin to Pitch Apr 02, 2019

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In today's episode, we help Kevin develop a sales pitch for his online membership. FULL TRANSCRIPT Jocelyn Sams: Hey, y'all. On today's podcast, we help Kevin develop a sales pitch for his online membership. Shane Sams: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, where life always come 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 a beautiful sunny day here in Kentucky, and we are super excited to welcome back a former guest on the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, a long time member, one of our moderators, and last year's Flip Your Life Member of the Year, Kevin DePew. Welcome back to the show, man. Kevin DePew: Hey, thank you. Very excited to be here. Jocelyn Sams: Member of the Year. Shane Sams: The Member of the Year. We're gonna talk about that. We're gonna talk about that in a minute, though. Kevin DePew: I'm surprised by that, yes. Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, it was really exciting. We presented Kevin with a special award at last year's live event, and we got to meet him in person for the first time. And it was just a really, really great time. We're gonna get into that just a little bit more in a few minutes, but before we talk about all that, let's get into a little bit about you, for people who maybe have not listened to your other podcast or don't know you. Tell us a little bit about you, your background, and what you do online. Kevin DePew: Yeah. My name is Kevin. I am been doing this online business thing for a little while, I'd say a little over two years we've been doing relaxandlearnguitar.com, we being my wife Vicky, who helps me a lot with this now. We are empty nesters, have had many, many years in corporate America, working with various jobs, mostly with families and children. Vicky worked with seniors for awhile. And I about three years ago just heard you guys on, I think, Pat Flynn is how I found you guys, and the tractor story, and I just kind of from there went, "This is amazing. I think this is something I need to look into." Started listening to your podcast, joined your membership, and it's been fantastic. It's been life changing, honestly. It's been really good. Shane Sams: That's awesome, man. I love to hear that. I love people who like, I literally know every minute of their story online, because I feel like I know everything you've ever done. Jocelyn Sams: And it's kind of hard not to just jump right in, because we already know all these things about you, but I just want to make sure that the listeners know how cool of a person you are. Shane Sams: When you joined the community, remember you had some crazy other idea? Kevin DePew: Yeah, the guitar thing is probably idea number four or five. Shane Sams: What was the thing you were doing when you first came in, though? Kevin DePew: Oh, gosh, it was either a combination of time management or creativity or ... Jocelyn Sams: Yes. Shane Sams: Yeah, it was something about the creativity thing, and I remember you posted in the forum one day, and you were like, "What do you guys think?" Jocelyn Sams: We're like, "No." Shane Sams: I'm like, "Kevin, man, I don't usually say this, but this is awful. This is terrible. You don't even seem like you like this. What are you doing, man?" Then I remember specifically asking you in the forums, though, "Dude, what do you want to do? What do you want to do?" And you literally were like, "Man, I just want to relax, play guitar." Kevin DePew: And now here we are. Shane Sams: And now you have a website called Relax and Learn Guitar. It's funny how that works out. Going back just a little bit, how did it help you to pick something that you wanted to do, not that you thought might work? How did that help? Because you've stuck with this now for a while. We're gonna talk a little bit about your membership growth and the future of your business, but how did that help when you made that transition? Kevin DePew: Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, first starting out, it was just in my head a lot, exactly what should I do that people are gonna look for? It was very new to the whole online business thing. It was a good part to kind of learn how to build a website and how to have a lead magnet, so I learned a lot of good stuff there, but when it wasn't taking off or getting any traction, I think what helped the most switching to the guitar stuff is just, I don't have to pretend to be passionate about it. I am, and I want to share that with other people. And when I saw that others were listening and interested and then started getting on board, it just makes it keep rolling. So choosing something that you're passionate about, but I don't think I'll ever get tired of doing. I might get tired of editing videos, but I will never get tired of playing and teaching other people how to play guitar. Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, for sure. And you know, I want people to understand too that if they haven't listened to your other podcast, that this thing wasn't exactly an overnight success, right? Kevin DePew: Oh, gosh no. Jocelyn Sams: Because I think sometimes when people listen to the podcast, they're like, "Oh yeah, this person, they started and then it just all worked out." And we've seen so many people cycle through over the past few years since you've been a member, but you have been consistent, you've been coming in, you talk, you ask questions, you get your questions answered, you answer other people's questions. And just that involvement, I mean, I've seen such a transformation over the years, just from you first coming in to now. Shane Sams: Yeah. I've never heard anyone say that before, "I don't have to pretend to be passionate," because all you hear from gurus and experts is, "Fake it till you make it." You known what I'm saying? That's an amazing way to put that, is pick something you don't have to pretend to be passionate about, or that you don't have to pretend you know something about. I think a lot of people do that too. They'll choose a niche just because other people are doing it or just ... My favorite is, "Can I teach business if I don't known anything about business?" We're like, "No, can't do that, because you'd have to pretend. You'd have to fake people out." Or be passionate about yoga, but you hate yoga. You can't do that. Shane Sams: If anyone listening right now doesn't listen to anything else for the rest of this podcast, please listen to what Kevin just said and don't pretend you're passionate about something. Pick something you can sink your teeth into. And you won't always be passionate. Like you said, sometimes it really stinks to have to edit all the videos of you playing guitar, right? Kevin DePew: Oh yeah. Shane Sams: But we just gotta do what we gotta do to get to the part that we like, and that's what it's all about. Kevin DePew: And to not give up, and to change when you need to. You gotta be persistent, or else ... And I've seen that a lot. There's the folks that I've seen, and you've listened to the podcast, or you're inside the membership, and it does look like sometimes folks are like, "Hey, we just got our 200th member." I can look back and realize what that really means. It's a lot of time and a lot of persistence and effort. Shane Sams: Well, you only see the tip of the iceberg. There's a great graphic that I shared on our Facebook page one time, and it was like first, second, and third place, like an Olympic podium. And all the people were taking the pictures of first and second place, but underneath the ground, the artist had drawn a pyramid, and it just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and it said things like "Hard work, never gave up, kept going," all those things that go into that overnight success. That's a challenge for us sometimes on the podcast, is to really ... We see the 500 forum posts and the 30 hours of trainings and all the hard work that went into building it, but we have 30 minutes to tell people the whole success story. So it does kind of seem like, "Wow, they waved their magic wand, and they tried it," but it's really there is no magic wand. Shane Sams: So where are you at right now? We're gonna talk a little bit about your progression, okay? Tell us a little bit about last year, because last year was where it really turned the corner. I remember a little bit in the forums, we were talking one time when you had just gotten ... I remember when you first started selling a few memberships, and it would tick up and down in the teens, and you kind of got stuck, right? Kevin DePew: Yes. Shane Sams: And then it really started to grow. You started to do some things. You came to Flip Your Life Live last year. Tell us a little bit about last year and the growth of the business and where you were when you came to Flip Your Life Live. Kevin DePew: Sure. I mean, that was the year folks started first joining, and it was one or two, maybe, a month for the first half of the year really. But they were staying, so I had really good retention. Folks were showing up for the live member lessons that I do. Lots of positive feedback, it was just a matter of getting more people to see what I had to offer. Signed up for the Flip Your Live event and took on the challenge. We did the calls with everybody to kind of get them ready for the event, and all the different pieces of homework, and then you guys had challenged us to have some type of product that we would bring to the event or have ready to launch. Kevin DePew: We didn't really have a beginning level or an introductory offer. I just had the membership, and it was monthly and annual. That was it. When we came to the event, we were probably up to about just under maybe 50 members. Had had some success about a month before with just an email funnel that we had built around having a half-off price for the membership and got probably 10 or 15 people that way. So we had good momentum, decided to make a beginner's course, and that's what we basically had ready for the live event. That and kind of sitting around the tables and working pressed the button to send it out there into the vast internet space and sold a beginner course an hour after we launched it. Shane Sams: That's the live event, right? During the work session you can literally we're like, we're launching this, we'll see what happens and you sold something right there. Kevin DePew: You're like, raise your hand if you had any sales and I was like, yes! Shane Sams: During the event? Kevin DePew: Yeah. Shane Sams: How did that momentum build through those courses? Getting ready...one thing we do is, and we're upping our game a little bit, too this year. We're about to start, we're gonna do weekly trainings getting people prepared. I'm gonna hand-walk Flip Your Life Live attendees through the Flip Your Life blueprint myself. In the community we have lots of trainings and things like that. We're gonna do two cycles of it to make sure that everybody gets that momentum like you're talking about. How did that help you, not only going to those trainings and picking up the pace leading up to the event but having that deadline with a consequence where you had to have it ready and you're like, "I gotta show up at this thing. We've been working on this." How did the live event, was it a catalyst for that? Kevin DePew: It was huge that way just because of having something way out on the calendar and then the monthly accountability of it's not that you just signed up and we'll see you in six months. We got some work to do before we get there kind of thing. Shane Sams: You know it's there. We can see it, it's in a Facebook group or a Zoom call so it's like you can't hide. Kevin DePew: It was very helpful for us cause we thrive with what's the next thing to do, write it down, let's do it. If it doesn't work let's write the next thing down and do that. It was helpful to kind of say have something ready. It did push me, I wouldn't have done that if you guys hadn't said, "Have something ready for the live event". If you've already got a membership it worked really well because the beginner course is now, we've sold about thirty of those and some of those people convert to monthly or annual members so that helps with the momentum of once they were in the beginner course, if they like it, then there's a chance they'll join membership later. Kevin DePew: At the end of the event you're like, there's a hundred days left in the calendar year. What are you going to do with the next hundred days? We very much took that as a challenge to ourselves and sold fifteen more courses, added about sixteen more members, and five more annual members and we increased our, almost doubled our email list. It was just very, very good. Our YouTube channel finally got to the, we're now making a little bit of money on YouTube. We're able to monetize ads there, which takes a while. Kevin DePew: The coolest part was getting involved in a mastermind. We met some incredible people at the live event and we're part of a mastermind now where we talk monthly and those guys have been a huge help to help us continue moving forward. Shane Sams: That makes my heart happy because when we decided to do the live event. The reason we did it, right? What people don't understand the cost and the massive moving of mountains it takes to pull of an event the size of Flip Your Life Live. Jocelyn Sams: I've said it before on paper it pretty much makes no sense. If we brought this into a corporate boardroom they would be like, "Get out of here, we're not doing that". Shane Sams: Go find a better idea. Jocelyn Sams: No ROI. Shane Sams: But it's our boardroom. Jocelyn Sams: As far as monetary goes. Shane Sams: When we did this, we were like, "Why are we doing this?". That's something that Jocelyn and I ask all the time. Why are we doing it? We knew, we knew that we had been to live events and the momentum before and after and the people we met. That's what changes your life. We knew that would happen for people who came to this event because we even structured it in a way that gave people a better chance for that to happen. We have all the trainings before hand to prepare you for the event. We challenge you to do things before the event. We even have icebreakers where we get forty people on a Zoom call and we sit around and have a great time and introduce everybody to anybody so you know people going into the event. Shane Sams: To hear you say that...if one person out of the two hundred people that come this year that happens for? The event's worth it. That is truly a life-changing experience. They're suddenly be surrounded virtually and in real life by people who really care about your business and they are also trying hard to grow themselves so they can inspire you to do that, too. Kevin DePew: And they understand, that's the biggest part, too. They understand what it means to put the work in or to be stuck or to keep going. Big shout-out to Chris and Leah and Lauren. They've been amazing. Jocelyn Sams: That…

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FL282 - We help Mike move from a client-based business to an online membership Mar 26, 2019

Show notes

In today's episode, we help Mike move from a client-based business to an online membership. FULL TRANSCRIPT Jocelyn Sams: Hey y'all. On today's podcast, we help Mike move from a client-based business to an online 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. 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. Super excited to talk to another member of the Flip Your Life community, and we are pumped up about today's guest because we have been trying to get him on the show for a while now. Not only is this one of our amazing international members of the Flip Your Life community, but it's also someone that actually we have met in person, believe it or not, even though they had to fly all the way across the world to do it. We want to welcome to the show all the way from Melbourne, Australia, today Mike Giuliano. Mike, what's up, brother? Mike Giuliano: Hey. Hey, guys. Thanks very much for having me. I am also super excited and pumped. And, yes, we've tried to get this going and I'm glad we're ready to go. Shane Sams: Apparently, it's hard to coordinate when you're 15 time zones apart. I don't know. It's like, what is it 7:30 AM there right now, and it's like 4:30 PM, or something like that. Mike Giuliano: It's, yeah, that's right. Shane Sams: So thank you for being the one that had to get up early. I really appreciate that, man. Shane Sams: But listen, we had a great time with Mike last year at Flip Your Life LIVE, him and his wife Pat made the long trip all the way. And we kind of followed along with their journey, because they were posting in the Flip Your Life LIVE Facebook group. Jocelyn Sams: Because they had to leave like days early, of course. Shane Sams: Right, before everybody else, where did you land? You landed in, like, Memphis, and rented a car, like drove over to Nashville, or something like that? Mike Giuliano: Yeah, that's right. So we landed in L.A. and then caught a flight over, and then got to hire a Mustang, so the convertible, that was pretty cool. And got to enjoy the south a little bit. So, yeah. It took us a while to get there, but we were revved when we got there. Shane Sams: So what did you think about the ... what's it- Jocelyn Sams: Had you ever been to the south before? Shane Sams: Had you ever been there, yeah. And then what'd you think about it? Mike Giuliano: Okay, so I've been to U.S. between 12 and 15 times. Never been to the south. First time. I've got plenty of friends in the south. And we loved it. We loved the people, we loved everything about the south. So we have dear friends in Minnesota, and they were shocked when I said, "You know what, I wanna move to the south." Shane Sams: So we have got a conversion. We have someone converting to southern life. That is what I'm talking about right now. Jocelyn Sams: Well we have other Australian friends who came over for the event, and they also loved the south. And anyone who has been to the United States from another country, you know that the south is not Los Angeles or New York, or you know ... The places people typically go in the United States. The south is very different. Shane Sams: I'm super excited that you'll be coming back to the south this year for Flip Your Life LIVE in Lexington, Kentucky, correct? Mike Giuliano: Yes sir, yeah, we can't wait. It's only a few months away, so yeah, it'll be cool. Shane Sams: Well we're gonna get more into that later and talk about your journey, what's got you to this point today, where we're at. But tell us a little bit more about your guys' background, tell us about you and your online business, and what you've been doing for a living over the past few years. Mike Giuliano: Yeah, sure. Over the last 20 years, I've been a digital strategist. So basically that's helping companies grow online. Website development, SEO services, social media, commercialization, reputation management. And I've done work for all sorts of companies. Councils, government departments, Australia Spy Agency, large corporations, small business, it runs the gamut. That's what I've been doing the last 20 years. Shane Sams: What was it like? Can you tell us what you were doing for the Australia Spy Agency? Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, that one kinda like, piques interest. Shane Sams: That one stuck out to me. I'm like, "Is this, like, covert stuff? Are you, like, classified and sworn to secrecy?" Mike Giuliano: No, so what we've got, it's called SEO, so with SEO I help them do some online marketing. Shane Sams: Okay, good. Okay. I just wanted to make sure that you weren't really secretly taping me and I was being investigated here, by the Australian secret service. Jocelyn Sams: So are you ... You don't have to answer this, but are you or are you not coming to the south as part of a witness protection plan? Shane Sams: Is this a spy system? Are you spying on us, is that what's happening here? Jocelyn Sams: You don't have to answer that. Mike Giuliano: Hey, I'll take any excuse to move to the south, so ... Shane Sams: That's right. Mike Giuliano: I'm coming to learn and grow the business. Shane Sams: Alright, so let me ... Okay, so you been doing this for 20 years, you've been helping people at SEO, working in WordPress, working in different development for websites and things like that. And this has all been one-on-one client work, like really intense, really up in each other's faces. Meetings and talking to people, and you're wanting to transition into more of an online membership model, so you don't have to do so much of that time for dollar stuff. Correct? Mike Giuliano: That's correct, yeah. Some of those contracts I've had a few years, some of them a few months, some of them are project by project. But it means that I have to go to the client, I have to be with the client, and I'm locked into their meetings and their terms. So, yeah. So that's why I want to move to a membership model, to have more freedom. Shane Sams: So tell us what your membership model looks like. What kind of service are you gonna providing, in a scalable way, charging a low monthly price? What are you gonna be doing for people to be able to transition into that? What is your new online business, what's it going to look like? Mike Giuliano: So what's happened is, over the years, I've had small businesses contact me when they had their website get hacked. When they've tried to do an update on WordPress and it's destroyed their site. So I know that there's a need out there for small businesses to have the protection that the large companies take for granted, basically, because they've got the marketing dollars to pay for that. So what I've been able to do is, get all my services, so we'll keep your website updated, we'll do your daily backups, we'll do all your plugin updates. Every day we scan to make sure your updating plugins, themes, core files, your security. We provide real time hacking protection. If you're gonna need common site real time backups. Mike Giuliano: So we package that into our membership site and we've got three different levels there. And it makes it affordable for anyone who's got a WordPress site, to have the same protection that the large companies get. Shane Sams: That's very interesting because, just today, I was answering some questions inside of the forums in the Flip Your Life community, and one of the big things that we see a lot is people will start working in WordPress, and they'll get a little freaked out. Not because of using WordPress. Using WordPress itself is really easy. It's almost like using Microsoft Word or PowerPoint, or even saving files on your computer. It's just, you know, the categories are kind of the folders, the posts are kind of the ... or the pages are just kind of saved in things. It's really easy to actually create stuff in WordPress. Shane Sams: But that's where they get freaked out. It's when those little numbers by the update buttons pop up and you got a red three, and it's like oh, you need to update this, update this, but then you click a button and everything on your site breaks. Right? Or you get in, like we did one time ... One time we logged in to flippedlifestyle.com, and instead of me and Jocelyn and our podcast staring back at us, it was a skull and crossbones and a terrorist organization, who had overwritten our page. Jocelyn Sams: That was fun. Shane Sams: That was fun. And we didn't know anything about security, anything about updating plugins or- Jocelyn Sams: You learn real fast when something like that happens. Shane Sams: Yeah. We were literally in Disney World, we were walking out the door, the kids were in a stroller. And I looked down at the site and I went, "Uh. Hold on a second." Jocelyn Sams: "We have a problem." Shane Sams: "Something's wrong." So basically what you're saying is, for someone who is scared of that stuff or is not as tech savvy to set up backups, to do those updates and to ... You're just kinda gonna be the one stop shop, click the button, here we go, we'll take care of it for you. Now you can focus on making content or products, or whatever else you're doing on your website. Right? Mike Giuliano: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And also on top of that, my experience with the large companies and government departments is, reporting's important. So on top of providing that protection, the backup, we also provide monthly reports. So every month we're gonna give the client an SEO report. So we'll tell them how they're doing with their keywords so they know if they're improving or if they're going back a little bit. We also give them a monthly site audit, so that tells them little things that they can, little and big things that can make changes to their website. So the more changes you make, the better you tweak your site, the better you're gonna rank, and the better usability experience that customers or visitors get. And the more comfortable customers feel, the more they're gonna stay on your site, take that call of action, or purchase that product. Mike Giuliano: And also on top of that, we provide back end and video tutorials as well, just to teach people that don't know certain things in WordPress, how they can accomplish certain things, and improve their site. Shane Sams: So this is amazing, because this membership is very different than a lot of the ones that we feature on the show, because it really is a service. It's not really just a content-based or a teaching or learning how to do stuff. You do have a component like that, like you just said, there's WordPress tutorials that go deeper into using the platform. But primarily, this is a service-based, scalable, monthly membership. So as you grow I'm sure you'll have a team, or I don't know exactly how you're doing this on the back end, if some of it's automated or whatever. But you're basically saying, "Well, for every one of these team members I can have X clients." And that becomes infinitely scalable without you. Shane Sams: And that's really what we're talking about about passive income. About creating a freedom online and creating a business where you're not trading time for dollars. It doesn't have to be log in, watch course, ask questions, or whatever. It can be a service. You can totally take a service that you're doing one on one now, and figure out a way to systemize it in a way where you can grow it. You can scale it, and it doesn't involve you actually touching the keyboard everyday. And that's just a really interesting concept, and I think this is gonna go over like gangbusters, actually. So, good job, dude. Mike Giuliano: Ah, thank you. Ah, thank you. Shane Sams: So tell us a little bit more about how you came up with this idea. When did you start really thinking about transitioning? When did you start thinking, putting the idea together? Or when did you just decide, "Man, I've had enough of this client stuff. I've gotta find something else." Did you hear one of our podcasts? Did you get an idea? Where did that part of this journey start? Mike Giuliano: Well see, this is the interesting thing, but also it's the embarrassing thing. I'm in the digital realm, so I've always heard of people turning an idea into a online product. I mean, me personally, I own over 800 domain names. So I'm big in the marketing sphere on line, but it's always been for clients. Mike Giuliano: So one day I was listening to a podcast, and you and Jocelyn were being interviewed. And I thought, man, number one, I love the accent. And number two, you guys were so candid and honest, and I was taken back by that. So I quickly looked up Flip Your Life and then started listening to your own podcast, subscribed. And my wife used to have a bridal shop, which was about a 60 minute commute. And we actually home school. And so, our whole family would listen to Flip Your Life. And my kids know, if there's one, there's a hundred. If there's a hundred, there's a thousand. So they can recite that. And, you know, they did caught on the southern voice a little bit as well. Mike Giuliano: So, we would listen to you guys every morning and every afternoon. Through rush hour traffic. And that's when you mentioned about Flip Your Life LIVE. I thought, you know what, this is what I'm gonna do. So I looked over at my wife ... We were actually, when we decided to go to Flip Your Life LIVE and heard about it, we were driving to a country location to celebrate our anniversary. We looked at each other and thought you know what, this is the time, let's do it. And we signed up! Jocelyn Sams: So I have to ask you one thing, because when you guys were at our event, you told me that you had gotten Pat to listen to the show, but at first she didn't really love it so much. Tell us a little bit about that. Mike Giuliano: Yes. So she said she couldn't really listen to it because she felt that the accents were a bit strong. And me and the kids love the accent. So for a while she didn't want to listen. But then she didn't have a choice. There's five people in our family, four of us wanted to listen, so we listened. Shane Sams: Love it. Mike Giuliano: But you know what, the voice kept on chipping away at her. Her guard up, and then eventually she thought you know what, these guys actually make sense. Same thing, she saw the honesty come through. And the fact that you guys genuinely care. That's the difference. I mean, you can open up Facebook, open up any website, go to Google, and see ads for heaps of programs that quote unquote teach you how to make money, but they don't care. And they don't really work. Whereas that was the difference, the fact that you guys genuinely care and you're there for the whole journey. Shane Sams: That's amazing. Jocelyn Sams: Well, what makes me so happy about that is that you guys cared enough and were willing to make the investment in time and money to fly all the way to literally the other side of the earth to come to our event. And n…

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FL281 - We tell you how to launch a virtual summit and build your email list Mar 19, 2019

Show notes

In today's episode, we tell you how to launch a virtual summit and build your email list. FULL TRANSCRIPT Jocelyn Sams: Hey, y'all. On today's podcast, we tell you how to launch a virtual summit and build your email list. Shane Sams: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, where life always comes before work. We're your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Shane 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. Super excited to bring another member of the Flip Your Life community on the show to help them grow their online business. Shane Sams: And I'm really excited about today's show. We got two guests, two great friends of ours who we've met in person and have worked with in our private mastermind, Gena and Jerry Lester. How are you guys doing today? Gena Lester: We're great. Jerry Lester: We're doing good. Gena Lester: Very excited to be here. Jocelyn Sams: Yes. We are very happy to have you. We are happy that we get Jerry to talk. When they first came on, we were just talking, and we asked, "Hey, you know, is Jerry there?" And she's like, "Oh, yeah, he's here." And we're like, "Oh, is he going to talk?" She's like- Shane Sams: Is he going to participate? Jocelyn Sams: I don't know. And I totally feel you, Jerry, I do. Jerry Lester: Hey, I'm the support. Shane Sams: Hey listen, that's how we all do, right? Sometimes you got to have lurkers that make the world go around. You know what I mean? Jocelyn Sams: Okay, guys. Before we dive in and talk about all the good stuff this episode is going to have, I want you to tell everyone a little bit about your background and what you were doing kind of before you discovered online business, this whole world. Gena Lester: Okay. I am an independent educational consultant. And what that means in layman terms is basically that I help families as they walk through the college admissions process. Gena Lester: And so I help them figure out like what the perfect college list is, how they're going to ... is the school a fit, or a great school for them. Can they afford that particular school? Are their children going to be successful? What they're going to major in, how they're going ... what essays they're going to write, and everything that goes in between that. I help them choose like what classes that are the best for them to take. Gena Lester: And I work with students that do everything from going to Ivy league schools, to learning differences, to everything in between, to schools that are just middle of the road, to families that homeschool. All of those things are included in my services. Gena Lester: And so I have been doing this for ... I've been in education for almost 30 years. And I started out running a private school and then people kept asking me to help them with their students as they were going through the college process. And so I transitioned into my own private practice. And so I've been working with kids for probably about six years now in my private practice offline. Gena Lester: And I knew that I wanted to scale my business and I didn't really want to hire ... like have a whole brick and mortar business, because I thought about that. But where I'm at in my life, it was just not the best option for me. So going and doing an online business would allow me to scale without having to bring in the whole, you know, lots of new employees and things to that effect. So that's kind of how I transitioned- Shane Sams: So basically, you were ... what you're saying is you were trying ... you were saying you didn't want to bring in a bunch of other counselors that you trained- Gena Lester: Yes. Shane Sams: ... to do what you do, to you know, say like they work in a ... I mean not a cubicle, but like offices and you're ... you didn't want to- Gena Lester: Yes. Shane Sams: ... this big thing- Gena Lester: Yes. Shane Sams: ... where just all these people showing up for work every day and you had to manage those people. Jocelyn Sams: And I totally feel you on that, Gena. Gena Lester: Yes. Jocelyn Sams: I'm of the opinion more people, more problems. Shane Sams: Yes. Yes. Gena Lester: Yes. Exactly. Shane Sams: We are in- Gena Lester: That's right. Shane Sams: ... support of small and mighty teams. That's our- Gena Lester: Yes. Shane Sams: ... philosophy. Gena Lester: And it really ... Once you have that type of a business, it ties you down to having to be there to unlock the door every day. Shane Sams: Oh yeah. Gena Lester: And I just really like having the freedom of doing it myself. And so that's why online business is perfect. Because I have more control over my time versus having to be there to unlock the door and clean the toilets for everybody. Shane Sams: Do you right now, like, meet with people virtually in your one on one stuff? Gena Lester: Uh-huh. Shane Sams: Or do you meet with people like in a place? Like how do you do it? Gena Lester: No. I actually started out meeting in a place. So I would ... I work in a co-working space. So I'd come here and I'd meet ... and I still can do that. Shane Sams: Yeah. Gena Lester: But in the last year and a half before I came ... started working toward where ... you know, the membership stuff that I'm doing now, I actually started to transition my students all to virtual because of their schedules. They're so involved, obviously, you know, with your kids, that between, you know, all of the activities that parents and kids are running between. And living in a big city, it can take 30-40 minutes just to drive five miles. Shane Sams: Oh, I gotcha. Gena Lester: Yeah. And so this allowed me not to have any breaks and I could, you know, within from student to student, and then it keeps them, they can sit and eat dinner after football practice and work with me while we're doing that, versus ... and then jump right into their homework. So I see everybody virtually. Shane Sams: So, let me just clarify this for the listeners, okay. You were in education all these years. You started helping kids one on one. You're doing this virtually, like on Skype or Zoom or whatever. Gena Lester: Yup. Shane Sams: Okay. Are you talking to the parents or are you talking to the kids? Like who are you talking to? Gena Lester: No, I work ... my private clients are actually my ... are actually students. So, parents will hire me to sit with their student and take them through step by step the process. So parents can ... I do meet with families as a whole a few times through the process. But typically I'm working straight with the student. Shane Sams: Got you. So like basically it's you ... Like are you telling them how to fill out FAFSA? Are you telling them how to get their grades right? What are you working with the student on? And like how is that going to ... How does that translate into like a virtual, you know, membership or whatever? Gena Lester: Yes. Okay, so basically what I do is because college has become so competitive and especially scholarship money and things to that effect. So, the things that I'm really known for is I am very passionate about helping kids find what makes them unique, what makes them stand out, what makes them different from every other student. Gena Lester: So, I work with them from the beginning to figure out like what their aptitudes are and what their strengths are, where they really, you know, should go as far as their majors and how that ties in to their next steps. Gena Lester: And so then what we do is we figure out those things, then we go into create a college list. I help them do the research and figure out, do their mission, just what their passions and all those things to that ... like do that line up with the college's mission. Because it may not. Gena Lester: And then from there, we go into, obviously, there are different platforms plus every college has its own platform. There's all these deadlines. If they miss a deadline, it's just done. If they miss a scholarship deadline, it's too bad. They can't go back. So I have all the- Shane Sams: So, do you provide accountability to keep them on track? Like you write down the deadlines and you're like, "Hey, Johnny, you've not turned in X, Y, Z." Or whatever. Gena Lester: Yes. I have an online system that they go in and it sends emails to their parents. They have assignments every week. They know what is due, when it's due. Depending ... Now seniors have them every week. Freshmen ... I work with kids that are freshmen. So those kids are just starting ... We're just helping figure out what they need to be doing. Gena Lester: I help them understand like what they need to do on college visits or interviews or essays. Essays are a huge part of it. So I probably edit 100 essays between November ... just the month of October, November. Shane Sams: Wow. That's unbelievable. Gena Lester: Because it's time for that. Yeah, tons of essay editing. Shane Sams: Not scalable. Gena Lester: No. Shane Sams: And it's not scalable at all. Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, this whole thing, I mean, I'm really fascinated by what you do. Because I think back to when I was graduating high school or like when I was in high school, and I really had no idea what I wanted to do. Like I was one of the first people in my family to go to college. My dad also went to college. But I was one of the first people to like actually go out and go somewhere totally far away. I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do. I had no idea- Shane Sams: And she was 17 when she went to college, by the way. Gena Lester: Yes. Jocelyn Sams: Like a baby. And I thought I was so grown up. And yeah, I had life all figured out. But really, I had no clue what I was doing. Like I just picked the college because I wanted to go there. And I mean everything worked out okay, but it's just now I'm looking back ... You know, I'm almost 40 now. Jocelyn Sams: And you know, like I'm just now starting to do some of the things that you're talking about. You know. What are my attributes? What am I good at? What should I be doing? That type of thing. Like I'm just figuring this out now. And to be able to figure it out when you're like a freshman in high school, I mean that's really amazing. Gena Lester: Yeah. People ... the families always say to me, I where ... I run into people who are, you know, in your stage of life or they've just graduated. And they're like, "Well, where were you, how come I didn't know about you?" And I think that's why it's so ... I'm so passionate about it. Gena Lester: I went into fashion design, believe it or not, when I graduated high school, because I had no clue. My friend was doing it, so I thought, "Hey, well I learned to sew, so that was great." Shane Sams: That's a good reason to pick a major. Gena Lester: But totally not, totally not what I should have been doing. And so, you know, college is so expensive. And if you're a student or your child can figure out ahead of time, they may not know do I want to be a doctor, but they may know, "Okay, I really like the sciences." Gena Lester: And so we find a major that kind of gives them some leeway there. Then they can prepare and even cut a year off of college. They can take some college in high school. Not spend as much going to college, they're not going to lose credits if they transfer, because even though everything quote, unquote transfers, it doesn't always transfer into the degree they change to. So they can lose that. Gena Lester: And then also, kids, if they stay in too long, they get discouraged and they end up dropping out. Then you've got student debt or whatever. And your student's not ... your child's not even finished college. So the whole purpose of this is to kind of keep all of those things from happening. Shane Sams: Awesome. Gena Lester: And then with the online, what I'm doing is I'm actually taking everything that I teach to the students, I'm taking that out of my head, and I've made a course, I guess basically, in there. So a parent can go through and it's designed where a student can sit and watch the classes and go through it on their own. Or a parent can sit and watch it and then sit down with their child and do it. Gena Lester: So, I kind of done it where both parent and child, depending on the dynamic of the family. Shane Sams: I love your story. Because this is the classic how to get into, like, online business. How to scale your business, how to create more ... we say passive income, but it's really just scalable income. Because you have this career, right? You've built up over 40 years in education and six years doing this one on one thing, this knowledge base, right? That only you possibly have. Shane Sams: Like this is unique. Right? Now there's other people that probably help people get into college. But your experience is unique. And you have an opportunity to teach and help other people with your unique experience. And then you decide that this needs to scale, because you don't want to hire people. That was clearly a way you could scale. Right? You could have done that. Gena Lester: Right. Shane Sams: But you want to ... you want to take it online, you want to go online, you want to make courses, you want to spread this out to as many people as possible and facilitate a more one to many instead of one on one approach. And that is exactly how you can grow a business of a thousand customers paying $50 a month or whatever. By going online. Shane Sams: So, like what made you ... Like how did you hear about us or how did you hear about this model. And like what made you say this was what I want to do. I want to create this course, I want to create this community of my own. Like what happened there? Like what was the next step to say, "I don't want the people in the cubicles, I want this." Like what happened there? Gena Lester: Well, I began probably about a year ago, at this point, deciding okay, I'm going to sit down and do that. And being in a co-working space, there's lots of different entrepreneurs here that have different businesses and so sometimes we sit and just kind of, you know, brainstorm with each other, talk about different things. And so I had been talking about my business. Gena Lester: And a friend of mine, one of the other owners here, she was listening to the Profit First podcast. Which we ... is a big thing I do, as well. And I implemented that in my business a year and a half ago, so I love that. And she was ... immediately texted me and said, "Oh, my gosh, you're not going to believe who I just ... I just heard something on his podcast and it's absolutely what you need to do." And so she immediately sent me the link. And so I listened to it. And I was like, "Yes. This is, yes." Shane Sams: Mike ... This is Mike Michalowicz's Profit First podcast, which we did an interview on air. That's where- Jerry Lester: That was the interview we listened to. Gena Lester: And so when I listened to his podcast, listened to that interview and I was like, "Absolutely, they understand education, they get what I'm doing." You know, that type of thing. And there were just a lot of different reasons that I felt really connected with you guys. Began to ... I binge listened to all your podc…

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FL280 - We celebrate Chris and Ivy's 500 member launch Mar 12, 2019

Show notes

In today's episode, we celebrate Chris and Ivy's 500 member launch. FULL TRANSCRIPT Jocelyn Sams: Hey, y'all. On today's podcast, we celebrate Chris and Ivy's 500 member launch. 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. Super excited to have another member of the Flip Your Life Community on the show, not just to help them get to the next level, but to celebrate a massive success. Our guest today recently had a launch of their membership and they got over 500 members in the first 48 hours after they launched it. So, we are super ... Jocelyn Sams: Which is awesome. Shane Sams: Go ahead, Jocelyn. Jocelyn Sams: And a husband and wife team, which we love. Shane Sams: We love that too. Our guests today we're super excited to welcome are Chris and Ivy Newport. Chris, Ivy, welcome to the show. Ivy Newport: Thanks so much for having us. We're so excited to be here. Chris Newport: Yeah, we're very excited to be here. So, thanks for having us. Jocelyn Sams: It is great to talk to you guys today. We have been waiting for this show for a long time, because you guys are just doing some really exciting things and we're just really excited to dive in and really talk to you and figure out how in the world you did all this. Chris Newport: We are too. Yeah. Shane Sams: I'm sure a lot of people listening are like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa 500? Like a 500 members? Oh yeah, yeah, I need to listen to this one." Chris Newport: I know. I know we keep saying that to ourselves as well. Shane Sams: We'll talk more about this, but like you guys are in a surreal, surreal territory. It's surreal for things to change like that fast overnight, right? Chris Newport: It is, yeah. Shane Sams: We'll dive more into that. Jocelyn Sams: All right. Well, before we get too far down that road right this second, we want to know a little bit more about you guys. Ivy Newport: I'm a creative artist and I've just always kind of been involved in creativity in one way or another, whether it was interior design or making art. It's just been a passion of mine that has just been a common thread throughout my entire life. Chris and I actually met in art school, so we're both artists, and now we're just loving running this online business where we get to provide creative education and for artists all over the world. Our core goal, I think, is just inspiring and guiding others to lead a more creative life. Shane Sams: So when you say that it's like more creative life, like just in general, is this more like doing art as a passion, doing art as a job? What do you mean? Ivy Newport: Yeah, well, we actually have students that are both. I mean, we have a lot of people that are exploring creativity and art in a new way. They might be in a time in their life where they have a little more time on their hands and they really want to explore creativity, and we have a lot of those students. Ivy Newport: But we also have professional artists that participate in our classes, and they get new inspiration. They learn new techniques, they get to connect with other artists in our community. So, we really kind of serve both kinds of artists in the community. Shane Sams: You guys have a very interesting background. You've kind of lived all over, been all over. Give us a little bit more context, like where you're from. Chris Newport: Yeah, like Ivy said, we met in art school in Florida in Sarasota, and we both had this dream of working for Disney. We wanted to be animators and so we both kind of chose the school because Disney recruited from that school. Shane Sams: Which school was it? Chris Newport: But this thing called the internet was taking off back in the mid to late 90s, and I was really curious about it, and I didn't quite get it, but I knew something was kind of happening in the background as we were going through college. And then lo and behold, Disney came calling, went to work for Disney for a little while, for a year, a little over a year, but still this internet thing was taking. Chris Newport: I just kept looking, I was fascinated by it, and I said, "You know what? I can draw Mickey for the rest of my life, or I can jump on the internet and learn everything I can and saturate myself with it." That's really kind of what took us to these different cities. I built my first website. Ivy Newport: Moved to Austin. Chris Newport: Moved to Austin. I moved to New York and then ultimately ended up ... Ivy Newport: In Portland. Chris Newport: Yeah, long story short, we ended up in Portland and continued doing web design, web development, and that's where Ivy started blogging and exploring her passions and getting back to what she does best. Shane Sams: It's neat like reading your story because you see this long process like almost to the next like step, and granted you had a lot going on in life like you're moving all over the place. Chris Newport: Yeah. Shane Sams: Where are you guys from? Where are you from originally? Ivy Newport: So I'm originally from Sydney, Australia. I don't have the awesome accent anymore because I finished high school actually in Connecticut, so I have lived all over the world and it's definitely added to my adventurous spirit, I think, in business. Chris Newport: Definitely. Ivy Newport: And yeah, so go ahead. Chris Newport: If she does go back to Australia, her accent does come back real fast, and I cannot understand anything she says. Shane Sams: That's hilarious. Chris Newport: For me, I was born in Tennessee. I moved to Texas when I was in kindergarten. So I grew up in Texas until I was 18 and moved to Florida. When I first moved to Portland, it was funny, my first meeting of the company I was at, this guy raised his hand and said, "I just want to go on record that Chris said y'all 10 times in this meeting," and over the years it's been funny. I think being in Portland and slowly losing my Texas roots, but yeah, that's what- Jocelyn Sams: That's a sad day. Shane Sams: No, no man. We got to get ... Chris Newport: I know, right? I know. Shane Sams: You need to go post, "Y'all," on your Facebook. Chris Newport: I know. You guys help me keep grounded to listen to your podcast. Ivy Newport: It still comes out. Chris Newport: Yeah. Shane Sams: It's funny that you say about her accent, because like you know people always comment on our podcast so like, "Y'all have a really deep Southern accent," but what y'all don't get is we're softening our accent right now. Chris Newport: Right. Shane Sams: We're trying so hard to like not ... If you came to Kentucky like I would go straight into hillbilly fast. Chris Newport: That's funny. Shane Sams: It'd be like a whole new language. Chris Newport: That's funny. My family is from Kentucky, so I have roots there. My grandparents are actually there. Shane Sams: I always knew I liked you, Chris. Chris Newport: Yeah, see? There you go. I knew I liked you guys as well. Jocelyn Sams: All right, so you go through all of these different things, you guys worked at a a lot of different places, you get into some web development. Shane Sams: Blogging, online business. Jocelyn Sams: And some blogging, and so how does this turn into what it is today? Shane Sams: For first of all, let's back up one second. First of all, tell us what just happened. So, you've got these blogs, you've got these courses, you're kind of doing the email things, and this is a long process of blogging and you built a following online. Chris Newport: Yeah. Shane Sams: And then you decide to launch a membership community, right? Chris Newport: Yeah, that's one of the things that listening to you guys for gosh over two years now I think and you guys discussing memberships, and it's something in the back of my head we wanted to do but we didn't have the foundation yet to do it. We didn't have the platform in place for it. We kind of had this one password access to all the classes. It's really one of those scrappy things where we, in our initial launch, what, four years ago when we first launched, five years ago, when we first tried launching, I had a team in India building this thing. It was on WordPress, and it was getting really slow because the team in India was- Ivy Newport: Basically broke. Chris Newport: Yeah, we broke it yeah like the first hour we launched. Ivy Newport: It was bad. Chris Newport: I hit update and broke the entire site. Ivy Newport: Yeah. Shane Sams: No, I've never done that. Chris Newport: Right. So, we literally started from scratch. We went to someone else's website and I just said let me look at the code. I was like okay, they're on Squarespace let's just build this thing, get it launched and see if it works. Ivy Newport: Yeah. Chris Newport: And lo and behold, it worked, and it worked really fast. We kind of kept that thing going where it's just you just keep growing and the snowball effect and you just know where you need to go but it's finding time to get the thing in place to set it up properly. So, really it's been two years of just making sure we got the right platform in place, setting up the WordPress, getting everything in place. And then yeah, once we had it ready, it was ... That was the journey itself getting it set up, but once we had it in place I knew we were ready to flip the switch. Ivy Newport: I think also I feel really connected to our students and I kind of sensed that they may want something like this. I think they were ready to hear from us on a more regular basis in a subscription format. So, it just felt right. I'm kind of the emotional one, so I go with my gut and my emotions on things and Chris is thankfully so incredibly technically savvy. So, when we kind of aligned his logic and my emotion, we knew it was the right time. Shane Sams: We're the opposite. Jocelyn's very logical. Chris Newport: That's funny. I see you guys. I know that's funny. Shane Sams: I'm emotional. I'm all gut, I think we should go left, and she's like, "You sure?" Chris Newport: I know. Shane Sams: So, basically like what drew you like ... Okay, so let me ... All right, so you go, selling courses, selling courses, selling courses. People are like, "What are these people talking about membership? Like what?" Chris Newport: Yeah. Shane Sams: Like why, and then you start thinking well maybe we should go that way. Maybe we should coalesce this audience into a community. Maybe we should stop doing one-off sales and get people to pay every month. Chris Newport: Yeah. Ivy Newport: Yes. Shane Sams: What was the draw to that though? And like what was the tipping point where you were like, you know, this way takes all this energy, this way might not? Chris Newport: It does. Ivy Newport: I think that was a huge part for me being the one that kind of is, you know, out in front of the camera and producing in that way. It was extremely draining to constantly be like, I got to come up with another class. I got to come up with another thing, and every month we were running like crazy people trying to make the numbers match up so that we could pay for our bills and stuff. When Chris started listening to you guys and talking about membership for what we were doing, it just made a lot of sense just to have a little bit more of a stable lifestyle for our family. Chris Newport: Absolutely. Shane Sams: We call that living launch to launch. Ivy Newport: Yes. Chris Newport: Yeah, and that was really oh my gosh, in the beginning- Ivy Newport: It's exhausting. Chris Newport: When we first launched Ivy's first class even that in itself one, I mean that was an amazing launch and we thought, "Oh, that's amazing," and then you realized, "Oh, that's one launch. Oh, people are going to keep coming back." They're not just going to keep reading that email over and over that you sent once. So, we really had to iron out that rollercoaster. I think between obviously listening to you guys, have fun, reading books and gosh, everything in between trying to figure out how to navigate this up and down rollercoaster and how to smooth out those peaks and valleys. Ivy Newport: I think we also realized soon, pretty quick as we started this journey, that I couldn't be the only one making classes. So, what's been another kind of facet of the businesses that we've now hired or have been doing this for now what about three years, hiring other teachers to come onto the platform and we get to launch them and they teach classes for us too. So, that's been really ... Well, it takes some weight off of me producing, but it also has been so wonderful to help other women artists launch online businesses too, which has been cool. Jocelyn Sams: All right. The next question that I would ask is, is this your full-time thing? Are you doing anything else right now? Chris Newport: No. It's been four years of yeah, us doing it. Ivy Newport: Us full-time. Chris Newport: Yeah. When we launched four years ago, I was still doing some consulting. I just left, I had a kind of in between job where I was hired by one of my clients. I just recently left that. I was consulting to help iron out these peaks and valleys of launching these classes, and once we ironed those out, I was able to kind of step away and really, that's kind of the point where I think, Ivy approached me and said, "You know what? This is working, but I think us together would really take us to the next level." Shane Sams: But you've been kind of stressful, but because you're like, okay, it's January, we just had a launch. Okay, February we have bills. So we have to have another launch and launch ... Chris Newport: Yeah. I think those first two years yeah, had a lot of like, oh my gosh, what are we doing? Ivy Newport: It was a lot of ups and downs. Chris Newport: Where is this going? What are we doing next? And oh the sale. Oh, it's Black Friday, I forgot about those. Quick, get the email or buy. Cyber Monday oh gosh, I forgot about Cyber Monday. Shane Sams: That's hilarious. Chris Newport: There was a lot of that. And then I think the last two years was really balancing that out where we had a schedule in place, we knew where we were launching other teachers, and we could kind of estimate pretty well what we're going to make each month. Shane Sams: But it's still kind of a roll the dice. Chris Newport: It really was. Yeah, because we had a couple months there where we had a couple of teachers but it was like, oh this isn't going to go well, and we were dependent on that, and we had. Shane Sams: Another problem is you can't plan ahead. Chris Newport: Right. Ivy Newport: Right. Shane Sams: Now, like if I say you know I would really like to hire someone. For example, like last year we kind of did an experiment we were like let's bring in a sales guy to sell our live event out, right? He'll follow up on leads and he'll do some things like that and it was really easy to make that call and just say yeah we'll try it for a year, because we can predict our income. We can totally do it. Shane Sams: I can tell you probably within a couple of grand what we'll make six…

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FL279 - We celebrate Eva's first five-figure month and help her hire a virtual assistant Mar 05, 2019

Show notes

In today's episode, we celebrate Eva's first five-figure month and help her hire a virtual assistant. FULL TRANSCRIPT Jocelyn Sams: Hey, y'all. On today's show, we celebrate Eva's first five-figure month and help her hire a virtual assistant. 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's great to be back with you again today. Super excited to bring you another amazing success story from The Flip Your Life Community. We've got a great guest today, Eva Klein. Welcome to The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. Eva Klein: Thank you so much for having me. Jocelyn Sams: We are very excited to talk to you today. You have been posting success stories for quite a while now, and I can't wait to get into exactly what you've been up to. Shane Sams: This is a good one. This is a big one, y'all. Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, and especially with your life circumstances because you have recently had a new baby, right? Eva Klein: Yes, I had my third son. Well, I have two daughters and now I have a son who was born in September. Shane Sams: Wow. Jocelyn Sams: Hey, that is incredible. We are definitely going to dive a little bit deeper into that. Before we do, tell everybody a little bit about you and your background and what it is you do online. Eva Klein: Sure. I am as I said married with three kids. I live in Toronto and I am the owner and founder of mysleepingbaby.com, which is a pediatric sleep consulting business where I help exhausted parents get the sleep that everybody in their family needs and I specifically work with parents that have little ones in the zero- to five-year range. I'm actually a lawyer by training and I got into this business kind of by accident after my ... When my middle child was born, unlike her older sister who was a really easy-going, happy-go-lucky baby who, of course, was a naturally fantastic sleeper. My middle child, was born two years later, was the complete opposite. She was extremely difficult, cried nonstop, and of course, sleep did not come naturally to her. Eva Klein: I've always really needed my sleep and so as the months went on and the sleep deprivation really kicked in, I was legitimately suffering. I had no choice but to actually open up all these sleep books and figure out what the heck to do so I can get my sanity back. On my own, I managed to not perfect the situation, but I managed to make it more ... I made it more manageable for myself. Eva Klein: I remember she was about four or five months and here in Canada we have 12 months of maternity leave. I was on maternity leave, and I thought to myself, "Gosh, I should launch a side business. I should ... I love what I'm doing. I love sleep. I would love to help other families. I should become a sleep consultant and just have it as a side hustle where really it's just gonna be some fun money where I get a new client and I go buy a pair of shoes. I'm not giving up law or anything like that. I mean, that would just be crazy. That would be insane. Shane Sams: Come on, who does that? Right? Eva Klein: Yeah. No, seriously, why in my wildest dreams would I ever do that? There's an ongoing theme of, "Man plans, God laughs." That was plan number one. Plan number one was I'm gonna launch a side business, keep it is a side business." Thankfully my boss had allowed me to go back to work on a part-time somewhat flexible arrangement. I'm working from home and what not, which was great. That plan quickly changed where ... When I launched my business ... This was 2014, like September of 2014 when baby was one, and someone had posted in this big mommy Facebook group that I'm in that she was looking for a sleep consultant recommendation. Eva Klein: I had just completed my certification myself and I had had a lot of volunteers that came from this group to help me complete the certification. I had messaged all of them on Facebook and I said, "Guys, check out this person's post. Can you recommend me? I helped you. Can you tag me? Can you recommend me?" I had, I don't know, over at least 10 or 15 people recommending me, and then within 24 hours, because of that single Facebook post, I had four people call me and book one-on-one packages with me, which was about $1600 in revenue. From one Facebook post. Shane Sams: Wow. Isn't it- Jocelyn Sams: Then the wheels start turning, right? Eva Klein: Yeah, yeah. That was where I'm going, "That's a lot of shoes." Shane Sams: That's a lot of shoes. That's a closet full of shoes, y'all. Eva Klein: Yeah, or one really, really expensive pair of shoes...I probably don't even need. That was when I immediately took a step back and I said to my husband ... I said, "I can actually ... I think I can make real money here." I said, "Look at what just happened." He looks at me and he goes, "All right. Go for it." Shane Sams: Wow. Eva Klein: "Do what you need to do. You've got my blessing. Go run with this." The plan changed from, "This is gonna be my fun side business", to, "This is something that I would love to build up so I can do this one-on-one coaching full time, and then when I'm good and ready, I'm gonna leave my job." Of course, I'm in control of everything, so I'm gonna leave when I'm good and ready and when I feel like my business is big enough ... For now, I'll just continue hustling on the side when I'm not working and when the kids are asleep and then decide when it's the right time for me to make the big move. Shane Sams: Okay, hold on one second before you get into that. Let me unpack a little bit of this first, okay? Eva Klein: Yes. Shane Sams: You basically decide you're gonna do something that you're untrained to do and- Eva Klein: Well, no. I got my certification. Shane Sams: Right, that's what I'm saying. Eva Klein: I did spend. Shane Sams: Before that, right? Eva Klein: Yeah, the entire ... Sorry, I forgot to mention this, that I'm not just ... I didn't just have a couple of kids and decide to become ... To call myself an expert, because the baby at the time was five or six months and I had another six months of maternity leave and she was now sleeping well, I was able to spend the next six months doing my certification online while she napped and while she slept. Shane Sams: Okay, so you went and got certified through like an organizing body or- Eva Klein: Yes. Shane Sams: Experts or whatever? Eva Klein: Exactly. Shane Sams: You are not a trained medical person. You are not a trained psychologist or sociologist- Eva Klein: No- Shane Sams: Per se, you are a lawyer who experienced something in her life, and then went out and got some training in that, but not like a full-blown PhD degree, whatever. You went to a certifying body that it does help you perfect or master what you've already figured out on your own, right? Eva Klein: Right. Shane Sams: You started a business basically by participating in another person's Facebook group it sounds like. Eva Klein: Yeah, yep. Shane Sams: You went into this Facebook group, participated, gave people advice, helped people in the group, and then when the time came to charge for it, these people were kind of like your testimonials, right? Eva Klein: Yeah, totally. Shane Sams: For everyone listening, if you're looking for a business model, I'm not saying go into baby sleeping, but I'm saying that's the classic thing that people are like, "How will I ever get a testimonial?" Well, you go help people for free. "Well, how will I ever ... I'm not an expert in this. I didn't go to college for it." So? You could probably get certified in whatever you want to do, right? Eva Klein: Yes. Shane Sams: There's so many paths that can lead you ... You didn't even expect to end up here when you started this- Eva Klein: No, no. Shane Sams: Let alone having a full-blown business and not being a lawyer anymore. Eva Klein: It was shoe money, that's what this was. It was fun side money. Shane Sams: Maybe everybody out there that's listening, that you've been sitting on the fence and you won't get in the community and do the courses and start ... Maybe you just need some shoe money, right? Maybe you just need a few more skins for your kids on Fortnite, right? Yeah, so maybe you just need a smaller goal, and when you get into it, you start making money, you realize ... We hear this story all the time. People come in, they start ... Even for a side hustle ... Sometimes it might not be shoe money. It might be car payment or insurance, whatever it is. Shane Sams: Someone just wants to make a little extra money and then they look down and they can pay their mortgage and they're like, "Whoa." That's like real money that we can actually spend on our life to stay alive and move forward and maybe even make life better. It's just ... I just love your story, how it started out as, "Yeah, I want some shoes. Whoa, hold on a second. That's like a lot of money there." Eva Klein: A lot of shoes. Jocelyn Sams: All right. You're going along, you're doing your day job as an attorney. You are doing this side hustle as a sleep consultant and- Shane Sams: This is pure one-on-one coaching, right? Eva Klein: Yes, all one-on-one coaching. Shane Sams: At this time? Okay Eva Klein: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Jocelyn Sams: What happens next? How do you decide to take this sort of to the next level? What did that look like? Eva Klein: I didn't. I went into that ... Remember, there's an overall theme here, "A man planned and God laughs." My second plan, which was, "I'm gonna quit when I'm good and ready", that fell from the wayside when my boss pulls me into the office one day and says, "We need you back full time. Full time, we can't have you working from home anymore because the nature of the job is changing and we need you. There's gonna be more team work involved." At the time, my kids were three and one and that meant ... I mean, I thought that my world was crashing before me because I wasn't ready. I was about six months in to doing this side hustle. I was not ready to be quitting my job and to have to continue to build my business while working full time, not at home, I mean, it would have been impossible. Eva Klein: Plus, given that my three-year-old was already in school, it would mean we would have to pay for a nanny, which would be a massive added expense to cover before and after care. I was- Shane Sams: At this time you're not making anywhere near your salary I assume? It's not- Eva Klein: I was- Shane Sams: Or maybe- Eva Klein: It was growing. Shane Sams: Like equivalent after taxes? Eva Klein: Yeah, it was growing, but then when I sat down with my husband and we figured out, "Okay, if I were to keep my job and work full time, but then we're dishing out all this money for all this added extra child care, we would need a full-time, Monday-to-Friday, eight-to-six nanny to cover the before and after care. It would be a lot of added expenses. Given that my business was growing and that my job I guess really wasn't, then the next plan was, "Okay, I'm not gonna do this job full time because it's not gonna work. My next plan is I'm going to say goodbye to this job and I'm gonna continue to grow my business while I continue to look for something else part time." Eva Klein: That was ... Are we on plan number two or plan number three that basically didn't end up panning out? That was the next plan. It was ... Listen, it was very, very scary because it was not what I personally had planned, but again, that's just an overall theme here. That's often how life ends up working out and- Shane Sams: Sure. Eva Klein: So I was looking for something part time and I actually had a number of leads, but then as ... It takes a little bit of time for people to get back to you and interviews and whatnot, but as time was going on, my one-on-one coaching business just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger because I had even more time now to be able to dedicate to hustling and going on all these other Facebook groups and kind of growing my I guess Facebook brand if you can call it that way- Shane Sams: You're following, growing an audience of some kind, but before- Eva Klein: For sure- Shane Sams: You were kind of ... I don't know what the right word is. You were kind of like siphoning an audience off here and there of places you were participating as an audience member, but as you had more time to put into this, you started ... I mean, it's like seeing someone around the local place all the ... It's like Norm on Cheers, right? Eva Klein: Yeah. Shane Sams: Like, "Oh, there's Eva. Oh, there's Eva. She's in every group I go to." Eva Klein: Yeah, yeah, "I've heard about her", and then all of a sudden it's, "Oh, my baby is sleep" ... I started getting referrals from people that, "Oh, you helped my friend with her baby and now I'm gonna hire you because I need help, too." Before I knew it, I didn't have time for a part-time job because I was ... My hours were filled up with all this one-on-one coaching. Shane Sams: We had a very similar experience, actually, because of the nature of teaching. We had like six to eight weeks off in the summer, right? Eva Klein: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Shane Sams: Now, I say off. Jocelyn was a longer contracted worker as a librarian, so she was in like throughout July getting the library ready for a book, and I was coaching football every day, right? Eva Klein: Right. Shane Sams: It was probably ... Instead of our normal nine-to-10 our day it was a four-hour day or whatever, you know? Eva Klein: Uh-huh. Shane Sams: As our business grew, we went about a year ... That last ... Probably two to four months of the year is where we really had massive growth in the first year, and it was like as we had more time, it started growing faster. As we started getting ready to go back to school, we looked at each other and said, "Man, if we can do this part time, what could we do full time?" We weren't ready yet. That's why we actually went back into our school year that year and we taught for a couple more months before we looked down and the money started getting crazy and we're like, "Why are we here? We shouldn't be here." It was that moment where you turn the corner that would probably have hit anyway if you had just quit earlier. You know what I'm saying? If you had never- Eva Klein: Yeah, but I don't have- Shane Sams: A part-time job or whatever, but you don't realize it till you get there or something. Eva Klein: I didn't have the guts that you guys had to be totally honest. I needed other circumstances to kind of ... I needed the stars to align differently for me because I think to be totally honest, it's very, very scary if we're to get up one day and say, "Oh, okay. I'm quitting my job", so- Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, and that's really just a mindset thing. Your mindset wasn't there yet. Eva Klein: Yeah, no it wasn't. Jocelyn Sams: It takes a while to get there. I think sometimes p…

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Important Announcement: Flip Your Life LIVE Price Increase Feb 28, 2019

Show notes

Announcement: Flip Your Life LIVE Price Increase effective March 1st, 2019

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Shane: Hey y'all! Shane here. Got a quick reminder for you that payment plan prices for Flip Your Life LIVE go up at midnight tonight. As we get closer to the event, there's less months to be able to divide the payment up in, so we have to raise the price and we don't want you to get hit by that price increase. We want you to get your ticket to Flip Your Life LIVE today before prices go up. This is the best price you're going to get all year for Flip Your Life LIVE 2019.

Shane: Remember, Flip Your Life LIVE will be in Lexington, Kentucky from September 19th through the 21st. This is a weekend event. Your ticket's going to include the welcome reception, every content session, every single Q&A, all of the masterminds and our Friday night working session too. When you buy your ticket today, you're going to get added to our exclusive Flip Your Life LIVE alumni Facebook group. That's where we do monthly training sessions live to prepare you for the event. We also do our famous icebreaker sessions where you get to connect with me and Jocelyn one on one and we introduce you to other attendees. Our goal is for you to have a host of friends waiting for you when you arrive at Flip Your Life LIVE!.

Shane: This is an open event. Anyone can attend. You don't have to be a member of the Flip Your Life community. If you're a person who is out there hustling and trying to build a business and change their family's future, we want you to be at Flip Your Life LIVE 2019. To get your ticket today, all you have to do is go to flippedlifestyle.com/live, that's F-L-I-P-P-E-D lifestyle.com/live. Go there right now and grab your ticket before midnight tonight, because tomorrow the prices go up. This is the best price, the best payment plan option that you can get this year for Flip Your Life LIVE 2019.

Shane: If you want to learn more about the event, we encourage you to go to flippedlifestyle.com/live or check out the podcast that we just dropped on Tuesday. We went over the entire event in detail to tell you everything that you're going to get when you buy your ticket. Again, prices go up tomorrow. This is your last warning. Go to flippedlifestyle.com/live, grab your ticket today. VIP tickets are almost sold out and the prices go up tomorrow.

Shane: If you have any questions about the event, we have a contact form right there at flippedlifestyle.com/live. Go and send us a message, ask us any questions you have, but whatever you do, grab your ticket today so that you can save. All right guys, that's all I've got for today's quick announcement podcast. Look forward to seeing your name appear on our attendee sheet for Flip Your Life LIVE 2019, and I can't wait to meet you there.

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Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what's possible for your family!

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