All right, it looks like we are live. Okay, so Facebook, how's it going today? I'm doing, for having done this in a long time, but we're going live to record one of our podcast episodes for Be Battle Ready, a business-focused podcast, talking about how can we make businesses more battle ready, too, so what I call going to war in the marketplace and win. And I have an awesome guest.
We're going to have to drop some of his videos in the comments because pretty talented dude. Of course, he's Italian. You know, we kind of have that connection, so, you know. But I want to welcome today Matt Givinisi onto the podcast, and I'm going to let him introduce himself so that he can do the best justice for him because I'm not that guy.
So I'll ask you some questions, but, you know. Yeah, forget about it. Forget about it. Forget about it.
Hey, that's two Italian boys doing a Facebook Live. What could go wrong? Hey, not much, you know. You know, just this and that.
Oh, boy. I feel like I'm back in my Thanksgiving Christmas time in my grandma's den. Yeah. They don't know about growing up in an Italian family, right?
They don't. If you want to bust some balls, we bust some balls. We bust some balls. I was just home busting balls.
I was just back in Philly busting balls and eating gababiles or cavatelli or mozzarella. I don't know. I'm half Italian. Just half.
I'm a quarter, so. But I'm, you know, we're Sicilian, so it's like, we're going to throw away. Yeah, so. But, yeah.
Well, welcome, man. I appreciate it. We're going to focus a little bit on, a lot of it on, Marty. Yeah.
You have some awesome, you know, a number of things going on, but let's just jump in to introduce you. Yeah, my name is Matt Gimaneci. I'm half Italian. Some call me a serial entrepreneur.
I just call myself a business owner. Happens to be online. Must be an Italian thing. Yeah, must be.
Entrepreneur is too French. So, yeah, I have a site called MoneyLab.co where I talk about my business experiments and my challenges I do to make more money online. And I kind of just, I don't, I'm not a guinea pig in that. I know people like to say that.
I am just a dude who builds websites and other things and I kind of put everything out there to show you how I do it and then broadcast the results when they're done. Kind of like I start with a hypothesis and then I end with, you know, did this work or not? You know, yeah, yes or no. And I try not to be educational.
I try not to teach anybody or be, I try not to, I guess, like give advice. I just kind of showcase what I do. And so that's MoneyLab.co. There's a podcast as well where I just have conversations similar to this one about business.
I talk to my friends about how they do business, how I do business on the internet specifically. And yeah, it's a super casual conversation there. And currently I'm working on a, so most of my businesses that I have, like so many labs just really just like a, what do they call it? It's just kind of like a live blog on what I actually do for a living, which is I run a site called swimuniversity.com where I teach people how to take care of their pools and hot tubs.
I make most of my income through affiliate marketing and product sales, info sales, info product sales at that website. And I've had that for 10 plus years. And then I started, I did part of that into some other affiliate marketing sites such as rosycoffee.com, which I recently sold and brewcabin.com, which is a site about homebrewing. And yeah, so then I kind of like document in one place using WordPress.
So that's kind of, I think that's it in a nutshell. Classic, classic, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And you know, they were sent over some video.
You have this video of, explain this video that you sent. It was pretty interesting. So there's a couple of them. I believe the one that you saw was the podcast rap where, so that one, because I'm just remembering like the links that we sent over.
So yeah, I kind of for a while, I did a series of rap videos in all different industries. In fact, I've been, I'm a musician first and foremost. It's kind of what I was born doing. And I tried to be in a band.
I tried to be a rock star. I tried to get signed for a long time. And that clearly fell through. So I'm on a tour bus right now.
And it lasted longer than what my buddy invited me to. He's like, hey, come play bass for us. Here's a bass. I played with him for like a day.
And they're like, ah, I'm just kidding. Yeah, not you. No, no, no. So I was the lead singer, guitar player, we did original music.
And again, I tried to be signed and tried to get signed. And at that time, we needed a website. This is before MySpace. So there was like no social media really at the time.
And we needed a website. And I decided that we couldn't, well, I didn't decide. We literally couldn't afford a website designer. I didn't really know much about computers at the time, but I decided to learn HTML and CSS and build my own website, which got me a job at a website.
I was in the pool industry since I was 13. And like during that time, I was trying to get signed as a musician. And I went and learned HTML and CSS to design a website. And I ended up getting poached to work at a website design firm.
And then I kind of came back and forth from the pool company over to website design. And I eventually just ended up parlaying this website design thing into a career. And I made like a legit living at that, you know, meaning I had a day job designing websites and doing marketing for this local pool company. And I ended up, so I ended up marrying those two things together.
I married the idea that I know how to take care of a swimming pool with the fact that I can design websites now. So that's the birth of a university back in 2004, something like that. And yeah, so I've been, so the point of that story is I also have this music career. And so, you know, later in my, when I was going to a university, I'm like, I need to get some traffic.
I need to get some buzz built about some university. And so I decided to marry another love of mine, which is music. And I'm not really a rap person. I don't really like rap that much.
I'm like, there's very few rap artists that I really listen to. But I've always enjoyed making rap music. And so I decided to like write a beat, write a song about, a rap song about taking care of a pool. And I filmed a video and that sort of went viral in the pool community, in the pool industry, which got me, which at the time, I'm like, I just want people to know about some university.
But what it really did was because it was a YouTube video, a lot of these pool companies were embedding my video on their websites and giving me credit in the form of backlinks. So I ended up building a lot of relative, relative or relevant black backlinks from all of these pool companies. And so I was like, oh shit, I'm going to keep, I can't answer myself as much as possible. But I, yeah, so I basically did this rap video and got a bunch of backlinks.
And so I was like, oh, I'm going to use this to my advantage. And so every single project from there on out that I could film a rap video about, I did. And one of them was, I've done a couple podcasting rap songs, only one video. And yeah, they've all, some of them have been duds and some of them have done really well.
And so the podcast one did really well. I did a song called Hashtag Hustle, which was a sort of tongue-in-cheek rap song about this online marketing space. And yeah, and that's kind of where my career ended. But after the podcast rap, I was like, all right, I think I peaked.
Nice. Hey, that's awesome. It's always, you know, great to have those little wins. Yeah, for sure.
Is there any way that you can see, was it just a stumble-upon thing or is it something that you could go back and say, well, besides rap, like what else could you creatively? Yeah, so I actually have a, I used to spread this philosophy as word around a lot, which was passion mashing. And the idea that like, okay, I have a website, it's just a basic ass website. It's a site about pool care, right?
We're talking about a really boring subject and the question is like, how do I use my unique skill set or just things that I'm interested in in my personal life to sort of carve out this like USP, right? This like unique service provider. That's not right. What is that called?
Thank you. Yeah, I'm a marketer, right? So this idea that you could marry two different things together and create something completely unique. And I thought, when I did the pool rap video, I had a lot of friends who just said like, this is you.
This video just encompasses you in a nutshell, which is like, you know about pools, you do this rap thing, you're willing to do this weird, why would you, who would ever do that? Why would you do that? And so I've done that a few times. Like I know on Swim University, we try really hard to incorporate a lot of humor, which is something I'm interested in comedy and comedy writing.
And so it's just something that I think, okay, well, what if a pool website was funny? Or what if, you know, the videos were not just a guy, like a pool boy, like what if it's something different? And so, and it's like, and the reason why I spread that message is like, well, it's so easy for you to just be like, well, I do X. Like I'm already doing something.
I'm already like interested in video, right? I'm already somebody who's done that for his whole life as something you do with no money involved in it because I like making videos. And so I'm like, why am I not, why don't I just like marry these things together and maybe something comes out of it, maybe it doesn't, but at least if I do it, I'll have fun and perhaps I can make it sustainable in the future. Yeah.
And do you help anybody out with this? Like passion mashing? I do. I mean, no, I don't think I, I don't consult it.
That's the question, but I don't, I don't like look at what other people are doing and say like, oh, you know, it'd be good. I know you're really good at snowboarding. So like if you just married snowboarding and coffee, which I've done once, like that's going to work. It's just, I think it's just interesting to incorporate something that you're good at into something that would make you money.
And it doesn't mean that you, I'm not suggesting that you turn your passion into a business. I don't recommend that ever. I recommend taking something that you're passionate about and somehow marrying that with a way to make money. I think it'll just be, it's a little bit more sustainable as a person.
And it makes it easy. You can have fun with it. And it's just like easy marketing too. It's unique.
Yeah. I get it. You know, I mean, I think having, sometimes if your goal, your passion is drinking beer for everything. I mean, it's pretty, you're going to be pretty far away.
But yeah, I mean, anytime you can blend those things. I learned myself for a year. So it was a passion and it was a successful business. Yeah, we've done that too.
Like that exact example is, yeah, drinking beer is my passion and I'm a home brewer. It's like, I hate the fact that I love it so much because it is damaging to me, but it's like, I love it. I love it so much. And so like, I've ended up incorporating that aspect of my life into a podcast that I run, which is called This Money Matters.
Every single episode, we drink beer at the beginning of the episode and it's sort of an icebreaker for the two of us and for our guests. And that was totally, that wasn't a moment where I was like, oh, I'm going to marry these two things together. It just kind of happened naturally because we were doing it and now it's become part of the show and people send us beer in the mail to drink on the show. So it's like, now I'm getting free beer from doing this.
So it's kind of like, and it makes us unique. In fact, there's so many copycats now who've done shows that now they kind of like forcefully drink at the beginning of the show because I believe that we were the first two people to drink on a podcast, but we definitely made it a part of the intro in a personal finance podcast, which doesn't really fit. You know, it's like, Ramsey's like, what are you drinking today, man? It's like, all right, well, that's weird.
Yeah. That's awesome. What's your beer? I had this random, I was so anti, I get really anti like the mainstream stuff or like how hot and awesome IPAs are and I just can't take them.
I'm like pure wheat beers and I was like, I'm going to start something where we can't drink IPAs. So IPA is definitely probably my favorite beer. As a lot of people are in the industry and I would say, other than that, I really like beer flavored beer. I like Kulsh's, I like Pilsner's, I like, you know, lagers, just, you know, it's not that it tastes like beer, but isn't made by the main, the big companies, like the embeds of the world, you know?
Yeah. With your content, like you have this big content focus and we can dive into importance and, you know, especially people are like on, I don't see why you'd be on the fence now today on content marketing, but where did you get introduced to content marketing? Like, I know where I first was like, oh, I'll tell you about that, but where did you get introduced? Honestly, I don't know the answer to that question.
It was, it was so long ago. Oh my God, that's a great question because it was, I remember just having this moment of, I'm going to, I'm going to build a website and I'm going to teach people how to take care of a pool through articles and that was it. That was pretty much, what year was that? 2004, maybe 2003.
Yeah. And I was like, at the time there were blogs, there were, that was a thing, my site's worth a thing obviously, but that was, and affiliate marketing was a thing then too. And I remember going, but that's how I'm going to start making money. I'm going to start by recommending products through my educational articles and I'm also going to try to sell advertising.
That was it. And I didn't, at the time I wasn't really looking up to any, I wasn't a real website for it. Like I wasn't an internet. I didn't have a computer until 2001.
You know, for a personal computer, I mean like my own computer, like we had a family computer, play video games and shit on it, but I didn't have my own computer until like I went to college. And what's funny about that is like, I failed every English class I ever took in high school except creative writing. And then I went to high, I went to college for two weeks twice. So the first two weeks I went, calmed out like this sucks.
Why am I doing this? I have a job. I'm making money. Like what do I need this for?
And I've been bad at writing for a long time. And yet here I am trying to make money and start a business where the sole thing I have to do is write. And I absolutely hate it. And I've never been good at it.
So why I chose it, I think it was more, it was less about just being a click. I think nowadays people sort of envy the content creator or like the YouTuber, you know, they call them creators. And I think people envy that. I want to be a content creator.
And at the time I'm like, no, I just want to fuck a business. I want a business that makes money on the internet. So I don't have to go into a job anymore and I don't have a boss anymore. It wasn't about, you know, I had no pie in the sky dreams of being like an entertaining content creator, even though like I was in a band and that's what I wanted to do there.
And so once the website got off the ground, I was really trudging through writing. I hate it. I mean, you write about polology and tell me how you feel at the end of the day. So yeah, it's not a glorious job, but you can, I mean, I tried to make the most of it by being as entertaining as possible and using those skill sets and making videos.
And like my first video that I did for university was completely scripted. The 20 minute TV show that I scripted completely and I was like, and that was obviously unsustainable at the time just needing a video camera, but I was trying to be that later down the road, but in the beginning, I was just, I just wanted a business. I just wanted something that would make money passively and I didn't really look up to anybody at the time until I decided that I wanted that and then I went seeking, you know, people that I could learn from on the internet. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, 2004, I think back to what I was doing in 2004. I mean, you were probably, when did you graduate high school? 2001.
2001, yeah. Okay. So I graduated in 99 and I think that after my senior year, I got my first computer. I remember just having music on it and that was it.
And I was like, AOL and all this other stuff. I had no idea, you know, it was okay, I got to go to college and, you know, I'm playing either football or rugby at the time. Like, and I'm like, I had no clue about that until I got into my, you know, starting this. gin on my garage and i was in this networking group and this guy uh realtor's like hey i want to come interview you on camera and i was like why why do you want to interview me and he basically read crush it at that time right and and all that and i was like oh this is a thing like so yeah it was like my first introduction that was like 2000 yeah 2009 like yeah you know i mean that's about when it like that's when it started picking up scene for sure because like when gary d really hit the scene and was starting to transition from doing his wine tv wine library tv to actually educating people on content creation that's when things really started picking up scene i think that that's really when i was able to focus like i had it for a while and i was doing it on the side because again i was working at a pool company and then coming home and having to work on my internet pool company so it was just like a recipe for burnout and uh yeah it wasn't until like 2009 2010 when like i was i was really doubling down because there's so much more information out there and that's when i went full-time with it too so it was just like yeah let's let's make this a thing yeah it likes for sure well cool so i mean it's involved ever since then since you were starting 2004 like but what's relevant today like and i would say there's probably macro principles that are still like relevant from then yeah that i don't think that they're really going to go away but what's relevant today since you are involved in you know marketing services seo things yeah um probably that this entire time it's always been about people and uh the visitors you know there's actual there's actual people uh behind the numbers in google analytics you know um in the beginning when i first got started with seo i was really writing for google that was that was who i was trying to please and had i been writing for people and just sort of like pleasing google after the fact meaning you know writing something that people would really like and resonate with and then sort of massage it so that google could find it um if i had done that from the very beginning i'd be much further along than i am now i spent a lot of years really just kind of doing what at the time was was normal but it was today considered black hat or gray hat and so what does that mean um i guess what it means is like not best practices you know and the idea that like there are again there were people behind the computer screens and it's so hard especially with all this technology to kind of forget that and i think that's why for the most part we are alone as a culture because it's like yeah we're talking we were talking right now but you're not here no i mean um it's like i feel like there's a disconnect and so whenever i when i was doing that kind of work i was just writing to a vacuum um and then it was there was a moment in probably 2008 or 2007 where a friend of mine was like you know through all this seo stuff man like i that was when i think penguin or one of the google updates came out and just crushed my site because i was what year i think it was 2007 because i was doing a lot of i was doing a lot of work that was and here's the thing at the time it wasn't like i went out into the workplace going like i'm gonna try to screw the internet and and get what's mine by doing these like black hat techniques i was being trained on this through people who i still respect today so it was like they didn't even know at the time it's just what everyone was doing is how we were actually getting traffic things have changed so much since then but had we been doing um more you know had we been writing for human beings we would have been able to accomplish those same things just with a little bit of research and so um it wasn't until this one day my friend's like don't you know you're not writing for the search engines you're writing for people now search engines are gonna find those things but ultimately people are what's typing things into google and google's just serving up what's relevant and so if you just if you'll use tools keyword research tools specifically and find out what human beings are searching for and then write something that is so fucking good then i don't mean like you can't just write something you have to write you have to really try i mean i don't i know that's not good advice because it's like it's not very actionable but to be very specific what i like to do with seo is i go out and i you know first i research what people are searching for that's it it's one word and i go for big words i'm not going for little micro words or these long talk keywords if someone's searching for how to you know how to make coffee with a french press like i'm looking for french press like i'm going after the big one right and so my goal with that specific article is to go how can i make the best french press article what does that entail and so with all the website design stuff on the side because let's assume in this case that like we have a nice design website it loads very quickly it's user friendly it's good for the human beings what's good for humans is good for google now because google's basically a human being just it's just ai right so if you so like i would go and research like every single article i could possibly find on the internet about making french press coffee and i'd be taking copious amounts of notes on okay well you know how are they organizing it what are they talking about what are the h2s and h3s the categories the subcategories what are they mentioning what can i talk about that's slightly different what do people really want to know let's survey some people let's go to our audience and say what do you want to know what are some questions you're having and you compile it's a research paper you're compiling all this information and then really the hardest part like obviously anybody can do research you have to do a lot of it and then it's like taking all of that research and going okay how do i organize it how do i make it read well how do i keep people's attention because everyone nowadays is trying to do well i got 12 000 words i got 15 000 words like no my shit's 20 000 words dude no one gives a fuck about 20 000 words write a book get off the internet please we have no patience and so i think what i try to do is take 12 000 words and make it 3 000 words because you can take all the information that's in 12 000 words and get it done in half if not more than half of the amount of time and you can make it really funny and you can punch it up and you can add multimedia elements which you can't do in a book and so i try to take that idea and distill down and so that when you see this piece it's like there is no other piece this is the only piece it has everything it's covered every single piece and so that always ranks it just does and i've never had a problem with you know people saying that i've never had a problem with ranking and i all i do is that research the keyword part and then the content part and then i don't even fucking promote it dude i put it out on the internet and it goes and they take time because i don't promote it but it always goes and that's because i spend more time on the content than i do on the promotion because that is where my value lies anybody can post it on facebook twitter youtube's whatever not youtube probably instagram whatever but really the hard part is actually creating the thing and that goes for video too i think you know it's a really good point is you know i know i get caught in that trap just to produce you know just produce produce produce you know and um you know i can see the value in actually going that deep on something yeah right yeah and and figuring that out and everything else like um so but you don't have to be the one to do it that's the thing like the thing that i've learned i mean look i've been doing this for a long time in the beginning i was doing everything now i don't really do everything i mean i still have my place but i've you know i don't have to go out and do keyword research anymore i don't have to go out and do content research i don't even have to write anymore you know but i'm still doing videos because it's my face and it's my voice you know i'm still doing podcasts because i am that entertainment factor there but with writing i have i've hired really good people to kind of take what i've done over the last 10 years and replicate that and you have to look at it like yeah you have to do everything yes it's going to suck and that's like if you're trying to bootstrap then that's yeah i mean for sure that's what i did at a certain point though you start to remove yourself from individual pieces not that it doesn't say you have to hire a million different people to do all these things but you just get somebody who can help you with that and all of a sudden you know that constant wheel of production doesn't burn you out right it doesn't become like oh shit i gotta get a podcast out today oh my god i have to get a video out today oh my god this article needs to get published yeah you'll do that if you're in charge of everything and if you're saying you know but if you have a system down or a system of a down whatever you whatever you're into uh you will get you will get things done it'll be it's it's you'll grow you know it's just um and as a content creator myself like i'm now i guess a youtuber if you want to call it that like i put videos on youtube every week uh for swimming pool care um to get a system that's you know tight but i'm working an hour a month on youtube so what does that look like so part of one of the things that you know i help when i'm working with business clients outside of their you know two different areas personal like light coaching stuff and then because dude for me the business is the fuel for the rest of it is what feeds it so um and we're probably on the same page with that uh but what does that system look like because there's a couple things that people are like scared to you know actually hire they have scarcity of time scarcity around money yeah and you know there's all these blocks and then the other thing i think is especially when you get into creative spaces they think they need to touch it right yeah the ad guy needs to go and touch it he can't pass it off because it's so special and you know the graphic designer this and that and i'm like uh i just ought not to start breaking things up you know that's how i naturally work but you know even the coaching i came from a physical you know cross-style coaching oh i can't let go of that and i'm like no it's it's like you're you're over you're bringing a bazooka to a nightlight and there's no need for all that so true but also you're not special yeah just just practice some hubris or anti-hubris whatever the idea that like i look i can make a rap video right i can do it super nuts does that make me the greatest rapper in the world no make me the greatest beat producer in the world no i'm just a guy who can do it and it cannot sound like shit um does that mean i can't hire somebody else to write lyrics for me i'm like yeah 100 i can you know i can hire another beat writer i can hire all these people to do things the question becomes like should i even do it and i think the processing thing came much later in my business and i think that everyone has to go through their high school career before they hit college in any business you have to go through four years of getting the shit kicked out of you and and understanding and growing into your body and just trying to figure out like what it is like where i belong with where do i do what am i good at what classes do i like what teachers do i like you go through this four-year phase and at the end of four years you start to just get more mature and this is all a metaphor for business i'm not saying that this is absolutely right okay i know yeah so i'm not saying that day one i'm sitting here got a process in place i got four people on my team i'm doing all these things that's not what happened i started with zero people and zero dollars and in fact i had a in order to make money i had to actually go out and do client work while i was doing my own thing so i was doing two jobs at the same time technically three because i had a job and i was doing website design and i was trying to build some university at the same time granted i didn't have any kids or a wife or anything so i did have a lot of time on my hands but uh you know that was sort of by design and so i i think it comes with time you know this idea of processing but there was a moment five years ago probably six where i sat there and i said out loud to my girlfriend no one can write pool articles the way that i can i thought in that moment i'm a special i'm i'm the only person in the whole world who can write funny how-to pool articles because look who else knows how to write has a website and also has been the pool industry for 20 plus years who's where i'm gonna find that special person i am that special person and then she was like you're not special anybody can do research man like anybody can pull up google and find out how to get rid of pool algae you're not the only friend and so i okay so then i sat down and i kind of like let go i was like fine i will i called a friend who knew a writer i said you know give me this email i sent him a headline i'm like i need this article written i'm not giving any direction i just need to see what comes out and what came out was something that wasn't my voice wasn't something i would write but it wasn't that it was good in fact and i was like whoa there are other people who don't own some pools and haven't been in the industry for 20 plus years who can write this stuff well that really challenged me in my thought process because i had to see it and seeing his believing i was like okay and then slowly but surely i kept passing him more work and having him write more articles until the point where i was we had we had it down so we were using asana at the time and we had this process down where like i was basically had nothing to do because i'm like he's doing all this work and i'm like this is great and it is obviously has evolved from there but the first thing you have to do is let go of the fact that you're not special yeah you might be talented and you might think that and what you touch may actually be better than what the sum of all your teammates touch will turn into but if that's true that's always true measure that because you could be you know i could put out a video and go like well i put my hands in that because that's why it has 10 million views and then i could do a video next week where i didn't touch it all and has 11 million views but yeah right away it's like let's call your bs because it's like maybe it's not true or let other people have a shot and also let other people grow into that it's you're you didn't you weren't born with this ability to make rap videos or to make videos or write articles about who care you weren't born with that and neither is anybody you hire they're not coming into this going like yeah i've been doing this 20 years like move over let me do this let them you have to let them grow into it and so that's why i usually don't hire like um i don't outsource you know in quotes i don't like to hire people like robots i want to hire people who and it's a time i can't afford it you know it's not i had to build over time so i got somebody very very part-time and i worked with them i talked to them and i they were you know they spoke my language and we were we were and we were figuring things out and i turned to them and asked their advice and we instead of me just being a boss and going you do x now i said what do you think we should do like maybe maybe you can find a better way what the fuck do i know and it but that took so much time right but in that time i basically built this company where everybody who has ever worked with me still works for me and it's a very collaborative space it's all online none of these people live near me but yeah so there's a few things in there like yeah it's like a lot of times you know as a leader you think or you hire somebody and you think like you need to hover over or you need to micromanage or you need to be involved yeah and it's like a lot of time just step back like i had this amazing experience with like this transition where we were kind of producing content and i was helping out you know and then i was like i'm just gonna have all my teammates like everybody on my team produce one piece of content for me each week and i was like 2012 2013 yeah like that was part of their weekly duties it's like write something right a lot of them were the coaches but now you know my office manager because she was on her own journey speaking to somebody else and like you know how liberating and like from a sense of just seeing other people rise right yeah it's seeing the whole tide rise together because they're doing yeah and it's so amazing another time i was working collaborating with a content creator like a writer write one blog a week and we can we kind of was like let's just do these rules i just threw these like let's do these like it allows them to huge like 22 this 22 that right the list 22 things are doing xyz right but it was for a cost of it and it was like uh 22 rules of like in a crossfit gym and i was like you know i was like here's the rules you just fill out the rest and dude it has like 150 200,000 views yeah for for a gym that was in hines beach california that just got shared everywhere yeah other content creators ripped off our you know our rules and stuff like that but you know it's going to show you that like it had nothing to do you know you've got to allow yourself to step back and the only way in a leadership position to really allow the full boat to rise without the tide rise you you Thank you.
to step back and allow that to happen step back and ask ask for opinions and permission i don't you know it's it's it's sort of like you're not there's so many things to like hover over like one um i couldn't afford my first writer he was part-time one article a week and he was he was in california and i spoke to him you know it's like i talked to him and i'm like look i can only do one a week i'm honest i'm like but like i promise you that if this works and we keep going and you keep working with me like i can i can give you more work like i'm promising that to you and so and that was i can only do that if i'm talking to somebody and saying like look i i need help and i can't really afford it but i can afford one article a week or one article a month maybe you just work like you do two articles i'll do two articles and so they're kind of splitting your time so the idea that you can't afford it is false because if your time is worth something and so like just give that money to somebody else for half the time even or a quarter of the time yeah if it's a side hustle i mean it sounds like what you did is you worked other places and then funded this back i mean that that is an amazing strategy i mean go find a way to fund it yeah where you take what you do the first like however many months it takes you to get to a spot where you're making money and then you use that money to funnel back into the business to pay the next person yes it may be many years it was many years before i literally took a paycheck but that's how you grow a business if you're just bootstrapping obviously you're not bootstrapping there's different ways of doing it but the thing about like hiring people and not to say you have to do that day one because i certainly didn't but i think it's just letting go of the fact that you're not special and you're not and i'm not i'm not just a guy who just has a good work ethic i do yeah so i'm like hey and i enjoy what i do and so and i want to build a business i want to make money on my own i don't want to boss and so those are the things that drove me to doing this stuff but i'm not special i might be i might have quality control if there's anything that i will touch heavy heavy air quotes there um it would be just being the filter that everything passes through i don't need to block it i just need to filter it and so and that's quality control that's just making sure the products are going out the door whether blog posts you know actual products or you know videos i get to see them and go hey i you know and just give me direction if things are not up to par and then not only am i giving direction i'm setting the standard for the next time we do the video i have to go in and update a document and make that canon so that next time it passes through me i don't have to say anything because look we've made we've made a canon you know we know that this is working um and that's like that's so hard because it's as a person who makes content you have to do you have to be the person who makes the content and then you have to be the person who is the ceo who decides like you have to look at it from a more holistic perspective every once in a while make sure that the process is smooth you know sometimes you can be putting doors on a car on the factory floor but then sometimes you gotta get up to the top and look at the whole factory and go what that guy's doing is holding things up let's go fix that yeah you fix that and you step back and look at it again you just keep you just keep greasing the wheels more and more yeah you know the other thing you said earlier was about how you brought somebody on two things to that like i call it a fractional team right you can literally you know i use your revenue you're generating to start outsourcing or bring on team members in a fractional role yeah have a team right um the other thing was is that you said you didn't bring them on and was like there you go no i've actually seen that like talking with an agency owner i was like listen to his problems i'm like you probably need a project manager so he goes out hires a project manager doesn't work i've done that well i think it was the right role but he didn't he didn't take the time to like okay let's let's see if you could just do one thing right let's get you good at this one thing and then let's get you good the next thing right it's that coaching and training because like you're you gotta realize like you hire somebody and you're they're not exact fit it's not you're not a big ceo or a big 500 company you don't hire like a business development and they just hit the ball right now you know what to do where you're a small business you gotta take like you really gotta take raw material in a sense and form that raw material into what you need right yeah well somebody has to yeah somebody has to define what the role is and if you're just a person you're just a guy or a girl who's starting a business you are the project manager that's what you do so what you have to do in that moment is go yes i it's being like self-aware like business self-aware like i know that i'm the project manager what do i do every day what's my process even if i it's all in my head i better write it down because some because just knowing that in the future one day someone's going to take over the job even if they never do because there are things that i do in my business that i have written down i have sops for myself i plan on never hiring another person to sit in front of the camera or to be on my podcast like to be me as a host but i have those things written down in case one day i'm like you know what i'm done anybody can host a show here you go here's the paperwork get in get in here's also here's 500 uh episodes that's your homework before you get this job right and i always and that's what i'm doing the video right now where i i did every single piece of it i did everything and i had to learn i had to learn you know video editing after effects uh script writing audios like i had to learn all of it just so i knew that when i hired somebody and i heard their work or i saw their work that it was up to my standards at least as best that i could do and i wrote every single piece down every decision i made i wrote down because i'm like i i don't know you know and so even when i talk to my editor right now video editor i don't give direction i don't say oh put this here or do this here or edit this two seconds earlier i go i try to give overall direction and then if i give something that is specific i write down that decision that like oh this is the kind of thing every time you know we show this on the screen we make this sound effect or every time i i keep telling him to make a punch here what do i mean by punch here what does that actually look like tactically so i will go through and do that work myself and go okay i understand now what i'm trying to get out of myself write it down and go here's what i mean and then i it's and then you just you're just greasing these wheels that make things easier plus you you know i hired an editor i'm asking him his his not permission sometimes my uh my website editor i ask permission i'm not allowed to touch wordpress i'm like can i go in and do this it's my own website can i go and do that she's like yeah do that okay because i don't want to step on her toes it's kind of her world um but my editor my video editor it's like i'm trying to not give very specific direction i'm giving overall direction what do you think about this what if we tried this instead of saying do x what if we it's always a question because then one if there's a response right and maybe just maybe and this has actually happened a lot what if they have a better idea because what if i say you know if i just give a direction they can't have an idea if i say what if this and they go yeah but what if that i'm like oh that's way better yeah yeah absolutely that's what like you know like go back you're not special if you've hired somebody that's just an editor yeah and maybe you're good but you know that's what they're there for yeah maybe they're not as good as you but they'll become you have to work with them and there are some people and i will say this there are bad things that that is true um i've hired my fair share and lessons learned from those experiences and you have to know but i gave them their fair shot at least i give everybody about six months before i'm like all right it just feels like i just can't break through as much as i'm trying and maybe it's me maybe it's maybelline maybe it's them i don't know so i but i just again i i take full responsibility for my business because i'm a business owner and it's my job to make sure that everybody's happy it's my job to make sure that everyone is heard it's my job to make everybody has their own ideas and at the end of the day we all have the same job we all want the same thing which is to produce content get traffic make sales that's it we all otherwise we don't but none of us get paid for sure well let's transition a bit to um you know like what what are you like you know what who are you looking for what clients are you looking for what are you working towards right now um right now so in the beginning of 2019 i made this conscious decision that i wanted less stress in my life and i wouldn't call myself a stressed out person before i don't handle stress very well i've had anxiety um i had anxiety uh it's very well managed but i just really wanted um my business to be more fun you know um and i had to say that out loud in the beginning of the year and i and one of the things that makes me really comfortable is that i just do what i do and i do it the best that i can because when you're an entrepreneur kind of the sky's the limit right and when you can do everything you forget to ask yourself if you should do everything and obviously everything is an opportunity there's and when you're not one or they come more frequently because you're constantly thinking about it you know i have a pool website should i be doing lead gen hell yeah if we were doing lead gen okay well what is what that what we have to do i want to hire software developer to develop this lead gen software and here's what i want and and then like meanwhile what what got you here in the first place you didn't do that and you may not i may do that one day but it's i haven't honed in the thing that we are very very good at and so the beginning of the year i sat down and i was like what is what does my business do and not like what do we do like here we do this we do that we do this no what is the one thing that we do and yes anybody can say make money but that's that's the that's the byproduct of what you do and so we i came down to we make um digital we do digital publishing but like we build um informational multimedia products that and those products can be blog posts they can be articles they can be videos they can be courses but they have to be digital they have to be informational and have to be entertaining and so the question becomes well do we do software no we might have software to deliver those products we don't make and sell it because that would make us a fast company and it's like oh well are we a drop shipping company no because then it means we're in customer service and we're doing we're doing you know products actual physical products we're a digital company and so like i once i kind of figured out what i what our company did i said no to all these other things and so i cleared i cleared the way and i'm like here's what we do we do it really really well and let's just master that so i got rid of a lot of people at the time because there was a lot to manage and we kind of like went down to the uh the essential people and we just really pushed this idea that like let's pump out the jams let's make let's make a lot of products and let's make a lot of good products and that has grown our traffic significantly and the products that we actually sell to earn a profit on are digital as well and we worked really hard on those and so if we just keep doing that we will that's what our company does you know make money as a byproduct of those things you know no one makes no one prints money they make a shoe and then that shoe is sold to somebody who needs a shoe and then money is a byproduct of that shoe right so you get so you get really good at making shoes and making shoes that people want and that requires research there's research development there's production and then there's marketing right there's the actual promotion of that thing and we just i just want to get really good right now i'm kind of really good at the first two and then once the first two are just like i just don't feel that they're 100 there yet and again i've back and this is the problem with being an entrepreneur who works solely for himself and only has himself to rely on and blame is that i've done so many of these shiny i've chased so many shiny objects that like just now i'm getting to the point where i'm like okay let's master the three-part process of what we do i'm mastering the first two and then the second the third one which is the marketing promotion that we don't have an engine there yet and that's the third piece of it all and so once we master the first two which should be another year um then the third one's gonna come in and that's just gonna that's a hopefully a skyrocketing event but we'll see so yeah i just think it's and then what's so great about that idea is that like i could say no to so many things i fucking love saying no it's so great i hate it but when i do i'm like thank god i didn't do that that would have been terrible because i've said yes to pretty much every opportunity that's come across my desk and now i'm like i hate saying no but when i always i always love the idea that like when i do say no i always feel so much better because i just focus on like making videos making articles making a fast website delivering quality products to the people who need them the most which is our customers that's it yeah i mean it goes back to you know chasing chasing the money right versus actually staying within this and you see a lot of like young entrepreneurs or people trying to break from their job into some type of this lifestyle you know they think multiple streams income they think all this other stuff and even inside your business like you know i mean there's there's so many up until 2012 like we were four years in a business and we only offered one technical core service that was drained and we had micro services along that that would be a challenge or something like that and then it was 13 and we launched a couple more things right and you don't understand you know the amount of bandwidth it takes oh yeah to get that done like you know you want to create that like you know you want to keep that predictability i mean that's one thing in running a business you need predictability that's why you're doing your slps and keeping yourself accountable in the inside of those yeah um you know it's cadence like it's like it's like a good song right running a business i was trying to word this in a way you know in a post and i never got through it but it was like you know running a business is like a good song right there's a there's a predictability to it there's rhythm to it you can remember it like you know on a monday morning what happens you know on a tuesday morning what happens at what time like it's just it's a nice tempo and rhythm to the how everything happens so yes yeah and and there's some unexpected surprises too there's some weird bridges that we weren't expecting you know there's some like yeah it's um yes but i agree that um you know it's some people think it's less fun you know to have like a predictable business um i don't know i don't think that's fun i guess i mean daredevils you know entrepreneurs tend to be risky and they want to take all these risks uh i did that i feel like but at this point i really just want things to be predictable i want things to be sustainable i want to produce as much possible content as i can that is still high quality and that means having processes in place because otherwise you're not gonna be able to you can't do everything yourself i mean look at all these youtubers that are burning out because they're doing everything themselves yeah they just treat it like a business instead of like i've got to do everything and i've got to hustle and look don't get a video editor and like get your life back well they're all i mean they're special so if they don't they're special then they can hire some additional help and i think like yeah you can i mean look you're always going to think that your edits better than your editor you're always gonna think that you that's unless you're not an editor but if you're you know if you've been for a long time or even writing articles for a long time you're always gonna think your stuff is better and that may even be true but because you are the person you are always gonna think it's better so therefore like you are getting in your own way if you don't let others like produce content for you with you so yeah and that's the thing like you know that's what i do that's kind of marketing i do is putting out really good stuff and i'm not saying it's perfect i'm not saying it's great i'm saying it's really good and it's it's got that little bit of extra thing that i can spin on it which is i know it looks good i know it sounds good i have taste and so i try to bake that into my business i try to like turn that into an sop because it's hard to like take taste and really like make a like format it but i've tried to do that i think i've done especially i've also hired people who have similar taste to me and that's important too that's how i hired my first real um full-time team member was and i asked her to i asked a bunch of people um but she was a clear winner of this idea like what do we have in common as people not you know can you do the job anybody can do a job right anybody can be taught anything but do we have the same sense of taste do we have the same sense of humor do we think the same things are good in life and if we do then we can find a lot of common ground on how to educate each other to make something better together instead of be going like well i am the tastemaker i think this thing is great that's not collaborative that's really just ego and it needs to be put aside and that's um that's kind of what i've done this year i've literally had the best year of my life not just emotionally um but monetarily as well because i've kind of like cleared all the space and just focused on the things that we do and the money that we make and try to increase that by doing those jobs better because i have more bandwidth to focus on those things yeah awesome go ahead yeah uh depends it depends on where you go if it's like we're just having a conversation like and i haven't drank today so just hear me nice well awesome people get a hold of you um yeah so i probably did a bad job of promoting but um if if you want to learn more about me and like just entrepreneurial things in general online business stuff moneylab.co i also have a podcast which is similar we do conversations about specific topics and i have a if you were an affiliate marketer which i mentioned earlier that that's where i make majority of my income um between affiliate marketing and digital products uh i built a plug-in with friends with a separate company um and it's called getlasso.co and it's for wordpress websites and it is a just kind of like an advanced affiliate marketing plugin that'll help you organize all your affiliate links in one place and it'll help you make more money with your affiliate links by helping you add more affiliate links and add more affiliate links that convert with display boxes and basically if you ever heard of a site called wirecutter it's like probably the most popular affiliate website on the planet the most popular authority site we're trying to turn every website that we touch into a site as as good as wirecutter and to create stuff that's really rich affiliate links okay awesome and how are you did anywhere you're on twitter you're not on facebook yeah i'm on twitter i mean i spend most of my time i mean the best place to find me is moneylab.co that's kind of like my home base it's where i do uh it's where i write i film videos i'm doing challenges if you're interested in the show trust me you'll like moneylab cool yeah we'll link that up and uh keep that all set up yeah thank you so much appreciate it yeah for sure and i'll talk to you soon all right later