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Need ideas on building solid foundations for your online business?
Listen in as we help today’s guest strategize and lay the foundations for their online business.
Joining us in this week’s podcast, we have Ryan and Hannah O’Flaherty, two determined individuals ready to flip their lives to the next level.
Ryan & Hannah are Australians who moved to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam in order to pursue their passions, Ryan as a Golf Professional and Hannah as a Primary School Teacher.
As young professionals and volunteers, the two have set out to help others by sharing their expertise as well as providing support and opportunities.
They recently joined the Flip Your Life community to get their online business started on the right path. Ryan has created a website called, Flats Golf n Fitness, where he shares coaching and training programs enabling golfers to improve their game and get results.
They currently have a few eBooks and content rolling, but Ryan & Hannah are still in the infant stages of turning this website into a reliable source of income.
Join us as we help them prioritize, strategize and lay the foundations for their online membership and have it anchored to Ryan’s expertise.
You don’t want to miss this!
You Will Learn:
- Why you should give away some free content
- How to write a blog post for your professional-based audience
- The “Unexpected Bonus” & The “Wow Bonus”
- What is an Introductory Offer
- Plus so much more!
Links and resources mentioned in today’s show:
Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!
Click here to leave us an iTunes review and subscribe to the show! We may read yours on the air!
Can’t Miss Moment:
Today’s Can’t Miss Moment is volunteering at Anna’s school, making some rain sticks for a program that the Kindergarten class presented to the rest of the school. This is something that we do occasionally. We go to the school, and we ask the teachers what kind of help do they need, and our kids love it when we come.
Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!
Click here to leave us an iTunes review and subscribe to the show! We may read yours on the air!
You can connect with S&J on social media too!
Thank you for listening!
Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show!
If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post.
Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below!
Jocelyn: Hey y’all! On today’s podcast, we help Ryan and Hannah start their online business and figure out how to make money online.
Shane: Welcome to Flipped Lifestyle podcast where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams.
We’re a real family who figured out how to make our entire living online. And now, we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? Alright. Let’s get started.
What’s going on everybody? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. As always it is great to be back with you this week. For those of you who may be new to the show, welcome, we are so glad that you’ve tuned in. You’re going to notice that this show is a little bit different than other online business podcasts. We don’t bring on a lot of expert guests or people promoting books or products. We focus on real people building real online businesses, and we try to help them right here on the air, take it to the next level, and we let you guys listen in so that everybody can learn from the discussion.
Really excited about tonight’s episode. And I say tonight because usually be record during the daytime but we stayed up late. It is dark outside to get this one, because we are welcoming guests who live in Vietnam onto the show today. As excited as I am for this, I have been dreading it too, because I have to pronounce their last name. We want to welcome to the show Hannah and Ryan O’Flaherty. I got it okay. I told them a second ago, I said, “In Kentucky, we’d say O’Flirty,” you know what I’m saying?
So, guys, welcome to the program!
Ryan and Hannah: Yay! Hi, thank you.
Ryan: Hi guys.
Jocelyn: We’re really excited to have you guys who’ve just joined recently, and this is one of our favorite times to talk to people is when they are just starting, and trying to figure out exactly what it is they’re really wanting to do. We are really happy to have you here. We love Aussie’s. We have lots of Australian friends.
Shane: Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention that. They are from Australia living in Vietnam, talking to people in Kentucky.
Jocelyn: Now, are both of the guys from Australia? I didn’t pick up on that.
Ryan: Yes we are, we’re both from Australia.
Jocelyn: Okay, sweet. Well, we have a lot of Australian friends. I’m sure you’ve heard some of them on our podcast. That is super cool, and we look forward to diving in, and talking to you guys today. Before we get started, let’s tell everybody in the audience a little bit about you guys. We’ve kind of told where you are in the world, but tell us a little bit more about your background, and what you are kind of thinking about doing online.
Ryan: Well, I am a Australian golf professional, and a fitness trainer. I have traveled around, very fortunate enough to play golf tournaments for a while and do a lot of coaching up on the last seven or eight years. That is what I’ve been doing.
Hannah: I’m a primary school teacher, so I studied with my bachelor, and then I’ve been teaching part-time, and then we came over to Vietnam.
Shane: How did you get over to Vietnam?
Jocelyn: I’m hanging out in Australia, let’s go over to Vietnam!
Shane: You know, I’m in Australia. I’m just going to move to Vietnam. Why not? How did that happen?
Ryan: Well, we were kind of a bit stale, with the… not necessarily the 9-to-5 life but that sort of stereotypical lifestyle. We didn’t want to get stuck in that. Our hours weren’t necessarily that, but we could see ourselves getting stuck in the regular theme of life and we wanted it to experience we wanted to be out on– we’ve had plenty of older friends who’ve gone overseas and had a great time. We went, “Hey, we want to do it as well.” We saw Vietnam is a great opportunity for us to not only work, but also we have a heart to help people and we wanted help the poor part of the community. Help educate, help teach them life skills and we thought that Vietnam would provide us with this great opportunity.
Shane: That is awesome. How old are you guys?
Ryan: I’m 28.
Hannah: I’m 26.
Shane: 28 and 26. And to you guys have kids yet, or no?
Hannah: Not yet.
Ryan: Not yet.
Shane: Not yet. I love the yet there underlined, underscore, exclamation point.
Jocelyn: I actually love that because I think that you are just in such an awesome place right now.
Shane: Oh, what a great place you guys are in.
Jocelyn: I wouldn’t change anything about my life, but in hindsight it would have been really cool if we would have started this before we had kids, and all that.
Shane: Yeah, just to even know that this stuff existed before you do get into that. When you have kids, it kind of forces you into a different mindset. It is not just the security and things like that, but I’ve got a buddy, and we were talking last week. We were like, when you have kids, it’s like you lose six hours a day because you have to stop and feed them. You have to keep them alive, too. When we only had to keep ourselves alive, I wish we could’ve moved to Vietnam, and started an online business. It’s amazing. That is absolutely awesome, you guys got a great mission, you are in a great place right now. A lot of people would actually look at you and say, “Wow, you guys are young, you’re overseas, you’re during your thing.”
Jocelyn: “You’ve got it made.”
Shane: “You get to make a difference in the world. You’ve got it made it.” Tell us what is your why. Why have you focused on online business, going forward, as maybe the thing that takes your life to the next level?
Hannah: Yes, we are really passionate, honestly, about the things that we are qualified in. I’m a teacher, Ryan is a professional golfer. We love people, we love giving our time to people. But like we said, as you guys probably know, Australia is expensive and we love it there. We love the community. But we just got unsettled, and we wanted something different, and we were young– well, we are young –we don’t have kids. You know what, let’s just do this and let’s go overseas. Honestly, we kind of had this idea of an online business that kept coming up throughout last year.
We had gone overseas, did some missions work and we would kind of come back and forward. But it was always in the back of our minds that what if we take this passion that we have online, but never had the time, that too many people say, we never had the time to actually invest into it. Then we came home and knew we were coming to Vietnam, let’s just do this. It was really confirmed for us through Australian friends who said, “Try this thing, it’s a Flipped Lifestyle, you will love it. They will take you through every step,” and we were like, okay, it was like the fourth time we’d heard it.
Shane: That’s right, that’s amazing.
Hannah: Yeah, and so we were like okay let’s just give it a shot. So, basically we didn’t sign up straight away, but I just started listening to a podcast. I think I just kind of got hooked, and I was like you know, they are so genuine, and you guys you know you’re real. You are not this artificial person talking at the end of a computer, but you, your family– there’s something about it that you really do want to help other people grow.
I think for us that was just the main thing that kind of started it, and pushed us. Now we’re here, we have time, which we are very fortunate. Yes, we are on the other side of the world and it is amazing. But, we have time to invest into this online business, and yeah, we are really excited about it.
Shane: You know, a lot of people, when they make the leap, when they decide to do this, it does matter, you don’t have to move to Vietnam. You can just decide to do this. When you make that decision, there is an all-in aspect to it. You can’t dabble in doing this. You have to dedicate yourself to trying. Hey, it may not work, but you’ve got to go all in. I really feel that ever since the first post you guys made, I’ve always felt like you guys were all in.
I am really looking forward to this discussion because you’ve got some great ideas, you’ve got the energy. You’ve got the passion. And you are just there. Let’s transition here a little bit. Let’s jump into your questions because you are right at the beginning, and let’s figure out what your next steps are. Let’s not worry about the big picture, we’re going to worry about making a full-time income over time, but right now, we’ve got to do what is next on the list. So, what is next on the list for Hannah and Ryan?
Hannah: Okay, so, we had this mentality of a membership website, which we still definitely is there. As I kind of looked into it, and Ryan was like, “What does it look like?” We think maybe the next step is just taking or going back to the beginning, and going through the baby steps of, “Okay, what is our avatar? Who are we would actually reaching out to?” and then we started creating e-books. We’ve just completed three in the last two days. We just had heads down, and got them all done.
Shane: That is amazing.
Hannah: We had a website originally, and that was kind of, “Let’s just do it, let’s just have it there.” And then we were like, wait, maybe we should actually use it because, obviously, you guys promote the whole, “Don’t just create something and don’t do anything with it,” so I had that, and I did not know where to go with it. Now, that is kind of where we are at. We have big visions, but I think it is just now about doing the one thing at a time.
Shane: Was this about golf or was this about education? The e-books?
Ryan: This is about golf and fitness.
Shane: Okay good, because our audience doesn’t know that. This is about golf and fitness. Now, is this fitness specifically for golf, or this is just, “Hey, get in shape.” Which one is it?
Ryan: Yeah, this is golf-specific fitness. It is straight in relation with golf.
Shane: And what is the domain name of the site that you have up right now.
Ryan: It’s flatsgolfnfitness.com
Shane: F-L-A-T-S golfandfitness.com?
Ryan: golf ‘n’ fitness, yeah.
Shane: We have three e-books created, and I assume you’ve started creating blog posts for everybody out there listening, right?
Hannah: So-so. I mean, I would have to be writing most of those blog posts, which is great, but then obviously, I have to then sit next to Ryan. It is kind of like both of us at the same time, getting that out. We’re mostly just writing everything down in documents. That is just what we’re trying to do it now, and say, what do we want to talk about? What are the areas of focus? Not so much blog posts because I was one thing I was a bit confused about. I love blog writing, we have our own for our family and friends back at home. But I was like, “How do you do this for an audience who you don’t know in an area that is professional?” That is what I’m not sure about.
Shane: You’ve made a really good choice that most people mess up. That is why I said, I assume you started creating content, because most people jump straight into content.
Jocelyn: And then they never make a product.
Shane: And they never make a product. You’ve actually created a product. Now, is this a paid product? Maybe some of it is, but these e-books usually are things that you can use to spread your message and gain leads.
Jocelyn: Or at least a part of it. If it is like 100 pages, then that is probably a little long.
Shane: Exactly. But if these e-books teach one specific thing, or get people into your content, they can lead to other things like a community, or training videos that match up with the e-books. I did this for my football playbooks. I was a football coach, and I started selling an ebook that was a playbook. But then, I realized, if I would give the playbook away, I could go make a video for each chapter and teach it, and put that into a course, and that actually turned into a course that I sold for $200 a pop.
This e-book, at first, helped me gain some leads. I did sell it for a while, make a little bit of money off of it, but I made way more money giving it away. All I did was go through the chapter, basically. I think that is what you are going to do, initially with these e-books. We need to look at them like Jocelyn said, and see how long they are, but I think that gaining leads is what your number one priority is right now.
Jocelyn: Did you have something already that was a lead magnet, or were you planning on using part of what you’ve already created?
Hannah: We’ve created a typical five-tips-to– whatever it is, whether it is just golf or both, fitness and golf.
Shane: Those are the e-books, right?
Hannah: it’s like a one-page, two-page e-book document like a little summary, if that make sense.
Ryan: If someone was going to come and say, “See me for a lesson,” like I used to do when I was working in a golf course, it is pretty much a summary of that lesson in a way. That was kind of going to be our lead magnet where we could sell the book as something, you know, give one or two away, and then leads on to purchasing more e-books or the whole thing. All the e-books together. We plan on creating 15 or 20 e-books.
Shane: That is a great strategy. Right now you can even start doing that. In our email training series, there are two points where you give away things that we call the ‘Unexpected bonus’, and the ‘Wow Bonus’. What happens then is you give them this value, and it leads to what Jocelyn calls the ‘Introductory offer’.
Jocelyn: Yeah, that is like a small offer to see if someone will purchase something, and if they do then there is an even greater chance that they will take a bit bigger offer later on down the pipe.
Shane: Basically, I think what we could do is, now that you have things that you can sell or give away, the next thing that you should create before you even do blog posts is the email autoresponder sequence. When you get an email they go through this process, and I’m thinking that maybe you give away the five tips, they opt in. Maybe you give away one of those e-books as your bonus, but then as an introductory offer, just something really easy like $9.95, or something like that, you sell the other two bundled together. That way, when you go back and eventually and you create this bigger thing, where there is like, 20 e-books, or there are 20 videos that teach them how to golf from scratch, you already have paying customers. You already know who is willing to give you money, and it is already in place from day one when you start writing your content.
Hannah: Yeah, you’re not starting the big goal from scratch where there is no one there to sell to.
Shane: Exactly. That is what this is going to be used for. But I do think you’ve got some paid stuff here, and we just need to look at that. It would probably be good if you posted these in the forums, and let us take a glance at them, and we’ll say, “Okay, give this one as the Unexpected Bonus and then use these as your introductory offer.”
Hannah: Yeah, because they’re like almost 15 pages long, some of them.
Shane: Exactly.
Jocelyn: That’s perfect.
Shane: As long as they are delivering value, that is like what I’ve seen people sell two-page documents for $100. The value that person needed was in that document.
Jocelyn: We’re not saying that’s what you should do, necessarily. We’re just saying people can do that. Let’s take a look at those and see what we think the most logical order would be.
Shane: Does that make sense to you guys?
Ryan: Yeah, that’s good quality. That’s good.
Shane: Let us resolve this question. Then, the very next thing we are going to do is we’re going to go in and first take the email autoresponder course, and write all that down. There is a template in the community, too, you can download. It helps you write those emails. We will help you. We’ll look at each document, and we will say, “Okay, use this one here, use these two here, set this price here and now let us move on to the content and the bigger product.”
Ryan: Sounds good.
Shane: Now that we’ve got what we’re going to do with these e-books, what other questions do you have that you need help with right here at the beginning of your journey?
Hannah: Basically, we wanted to have a membership website. But the whole point of having an online business is you don’t want to be sitting in front of a computer. You don’t want to be spending hours talking to people. That is part of it, yes, but how would you keep people engaged, month by month, without having to spend so much time investing into people when you have either a community of a hundred or a thousand plus.
Jocelyn: Yeah, this it can be tricky and this is one of the reasons that people are kind of scared of membership sites, because it seems like you do need to constantly be interacting, and interacting as an important part of it. But we do this a lot in batching, which means that we sit down — I’m usually in our forums for about 60 to 90 minutes a day and I do it all at one time and then I’m finished for the rest of the day until the next day. That is one way to do it.
Another thing that we do here at Flipped Lifestyle is we have, what is called a Live Member Call. We do that 2 times a month. That is a good way for us to interact with a lot of people without having to personally sit down and type to every single one of them. It reaches a point where it is not very scalable anymore, meaning that you can only interact with so many people.
Shane: We actually have built our other memberships, totally passive. There are still communities involved, like Jocelyn has a community of Elementary Librarians, and they all talk to each other. She has automation setup that gives some content and things to talk about.
Jocelyn: I will occasionally give them prompts, but I don’t often go in and interact with them.
Shane: Exactly. Totally passive, 100% like that. Basically, what you have to do is, you have to set parameters for yourself. You might say, “How much time do I want to spend on this?” It is a myth that you can make something that is 100% passive income. You are going to have to stoke the fire at times. But if you create a membership community, people pay for memberships for a lot of reasons. Maybe it is just for the community, maybe it is just for access to these lessons, to these things about golfing throughout the year because if they don’t pay, they lose access to the stuff. You just have to set up like how many hours do you want to spend on this a week? If it is two, that is great.
Now, figure out a way that you only have to do that. Maybe we need to make a lot more videos. Maybe we need a really, really robust email system that we can automate all these communications ahead of time so that every time someone joins, we know for 200 days, they are going to get an email. There are all kinds of automation you can put in place. One of the things that we’ve started doing is the Flipped Lifestyle community has just exploded and grown too big for us to manage everything, and we have answered hundreds of questions in our forums.
We can take a VA, and if someone asks a question that we’ve already answered it, they can go look it up and give them that answer so that we don’t have to answer the same question over and over and over again. But the important thing is, we get our person an answer. Because that is what people want, is a result. You’ve got to start from the beginning, and say, this is how many hours we want. This is how much money we want to make. Let us look at this and figure out how we can put that together. Golf is a worldwide sport; there’s millions of people playing it.
There’s a lot of competition online to teach this stuff. That is fine because some people are going to relate to you guys better than the other people. I would go join a couple memberships, people selling this as a monthly membership to get some ideas of what they are doing and how you can improve on the model in your space. We do this all the time. We join memberships all the time just to see what other people are doing so that we can figure out what is working and what is not working and we can come up with ideas that may.
Jocelyn: Yeah, and one size does not fit all. Just because we do it one way or somebody else does it another way it doesn’t mean that that is the way you have to do it. You have to figure out exactly what you want, and the best way to make it work.
Shane: And the key is there, what YOU want.
Hannah: Yeah okay. That is good.
Shane: That was a lot of information. Do you have any follow-up questions to that, or did that make sense to you guys?
Hannah: No, that totally made sense. Would you say, where we are at, obviously membership is a long-term thing, would you say right now like kind of put that on the shelf but would you say that membership is the best thing for this type of area? Golf and fitness, there is not much of it. Because of the type of thing it is to have a membership or would you say no?
Jocelyn: Really, that is a question that only the audience can answer. I know that people hate to hear that because they want the answer. But you have to start finding people who are interested in what you have to offer, and have to ask them, say to them, “This is what I’m thinking. What do you think? Is this something that would be beneficial for you? Would you rather see my content brought to you in a different way,” and that is pretty much the way you have to approach it. You can have an idea, but you need to make sure that that is something that your audience wants.
Shane: A great way to attack this, guys, is to look at the calendar. Look at the 12 month of the year: January, February, March, April, May, all the way to December. Basically, what you do is, you say, “Okay, what is a golfer doing in January? How could we serve them?”
Jocelyn: This may be different for different parts of the earth.
Shane: Exactly. Yeah, totally. Also, that is a whole different can of worms. When it is winter here, no one is golfing. But when it is winter here, it is summer in Australia and people are golfing.
Hannah: And in Vietnam, it is hot all year round.
Shane: In Vietnam, it is hot all year round. You’ve got global places that you can target here with this. But if you’ll go through the calendar and if eight out of the 12 you are like, “Man, I can deliver value that is time-specific to this person,” then you’ve probably got a membership on your hands.
Ryan: Yes.
Shane: Now, there is a second phase to this, too. I think people get confused when we say membership, and with product delivery. You can deliver products using membership tools. All our a membership is, really, is you pay me, I give you a username and password and you get to log into my content area. Right? If you build it like that from the beginning, even if it is just a one-off product of, “Hey, here is $200, let me into your content area, I get a username and password.” Later on, you can just say, “Alright, let’s just make it monthly, and we can change it.”
You can deliver content in the exact same way. How do you deliver a video course? You put a video on a page, and you protect it behind your area. I always recommend that people build it in that way where it is like for you login. It is not like where you buy something and get an email, and you get your delivered product. It is, you get your username and password, you login to my member area and then you have the option forever to make it a membership if you want to later on down the road, or if you figure something else out.
Hannah: Yeah, I really like what you guys have done, too, with your whole forum thing because the sense of community, it feels supported. You can post something, and it’s not necessarily that you guys will answer, but even someone else from the community will answer and be like, “Yes, that’s exactly–,” someone understands what I am going through or they have already found the answer so, therefore, it must work. You know, I think that is a really cool aspect to a community and to a membership. It is not just me and then you guys. It is me, everybody else going through the same stuff, and then you guys supporting it. I love that.
Jocelyn: Different areas of our markets responded to that at different ways. Like our Flipped Lifestyle community is very engaged. People are in there talking constantly. My Elementary Librarian community is not as engaged, and I feel like I have to kind of incentivize them more to participate, and I think it just depends on who the person is, and what they’re really looking for. Again, that is something that you just really have to ask your target market.
Shane: When you start online business stuff, you always hear these clichés like, “Content is King,” and “The riches are in the niches,” and all this stuff. But content is important and content is how people find you. Content is what you offer to people to give you money originally. But the problem is, they don’t stay for that. How many courses do you think they’ve bought and never logged into twice?
But if you create leadership and community, or both, leadership or community and both, people will stay for leadership. People will stay to get help. People will stay to not feel alone. If you can create that around your product like in this golf thing, then you will do that. For example, if we turn this into the membership, just off the top of my head, let’s say people come to play learn golf better.
Then you teach them, “Here is the problem guys, your golf game, you can be skilled and you can practice, but until you eat right and until you get your body right where you can control it and you are fit, and you stop taking the off-season off yet– winter is for three months — well guess what? Here is your winter fitness program so that when you hit the links again, you are going to be at the top of your game.” That is what creates the leadership, the community that goes beyond just, “Watch my course on how to have a better backswing.”
Hannah: Giving them advice as well then they might be feeling like as a point of, “I don’t know what to do. I’ve hit the wall. I don’t know what to do next.”
Shane: What if they could film a video, and just post it into your community, and you, as a golf professional, could go watch it and tell them what is wrong?
Hannah: We just thought about that, yeah.
Shane: Yeah, that is even scalable because later on, let’s say you get 1,000 members, you can’t watch everybody’s video, but you could hire two or three golf pros to look at videos for you, and pay them to help you manage your community. That membership becomes scalable.
Ryan: That is good, and that is something else that I was keen to ask. Is there a point where you would suggest, because obviously golf is a very personal. Every swing is different, but then like a membership level of where they get face-to-face sort of time or something where they can post their swing, and get that feedback from myself?
Jocelyn: Yeah, I’m really glad you mentioned that, actually, because I love a tiered membership, meaning that you have a more passive level for you, and then you have a moral active level for you, and the gate is to charge more for it. It makes a lot of sense for what you do, it makes sense for what we do, it really makes sense for pretty much what anybody could do, I think. I think that there are ways to scale pretty much any type of business.
Shane: Every dime that is spent online is paid for access. You may be paying for access to content, to a service, you may be paying to leadership or software or a community. You only have 24 hours a day. Eventually, if you get big enough, you are going to have to put gates up to protect that time. That time is usually for paywalls.
Jocelyn: But I will say that when you are starting a membership, I generally recommend for people to be as involved as you possibly can with your initial members, because you really want to foster that sense of community, and let them know that you are there for them. You don’t want to just bring them in and be like, “Well good luck to you, I will be here.”
Hannah: “Here is everything. Goodbye!”
Shane: “Best of luck! I’m gonna go golf.” Right? “If you need me, ninth hole.”
Jocelyn: Yeah, but that’s sort of the way that we approached Flipped Lifestyle. When we started out, we answered every single post. And now, we are growing to a point where we still answer a lot of posts but our members come in and they take care of a lot of the posts.
Shane: Yeah, it is going to build momentum to a point where you won’t have to do that all the time. Then, you can start tiering off those services like where you were specifically involved to do that. In the beginning, you have to do what does not scale. It is going to grind you, it is going to frustrate you. You are going to sleep less than you will sleep 10 years from now. You have to do what doesn’t scale in the very beginning to get momentum, and then your content and your community, and the leaders that you hire under you to help you will help other people get the result. Once again, I go back to, yeah, they want to talk to you, but they really just want to golf better. And you’re just the person they’ve picked to help them do that.
Jocelyn: I feel like this is a lot of stuff that we are throwing out here, and I just don’t want you guys to feel overwhelmed because you have a great start. I think that you have a solid plan. What I am saying is just kind of what the blinders on right now. Don’t get distracted by all these other things that we are saying because they aren’t things that you’re going to do right this second.
Shane: Yeah, one thing that I do, even now– we have a team of people that work for us, we’ve got all of this stuff rolling. But right now we still have to say, “What is the next thing that I have to do?” So we actually have Google Keep, which is an app kind of like Evernote. I just throw my ideas, anything I think of into Google Keep, and then shut the app as fast as possible. Because if you start thinking about, “Oh, what if I offer this? What if I offer this?” Then you don’t offer anything because you never actually do all those things that you were thinking of.
Jocelyn: So just put it down somewhere.
Shane: Yes, all these things you’re thinking of.
Jocelyn: And come back to the later.
Shane: I think right now, let’s get your autoresponder done. Then we’ll take the next step, and the next step, and the next step.
Hannah: Yeah, that was basically what I was going to ask. We are in a very unique situation where we have time. A lot of these people doing online businesses, they’re working around their 9-to-5 to then get out of their 9-to-5. We are very lucky now that we have so much time and space and less distraction. Yes to the autoresponding emails and things, but what would you, in terms of day to day, what would you say: just kind of focus on one thing? Because I find myself– both of us kind of getting a bit like, “Let’s do this, let’s do this–” and you just, you know, I get so excited.
Shane: First off, I would tell you, you are not lucky. We all make choices. You have chosen to put yourself in a position to do this, and that is awesome. And for anybody that is listening to this podcast right now, don’t say someone is lucky because they made a choice, and you are making a choice, and we’re all making choices, and we all make choices every day. You are doing a great job, and it is awesome that you went like all in with this.
Another thing, too, is I love that you are focusing totally on this golf thing together because if you can figure out– and I know you have other things in the back burner, I know, that is okay– I think that if you keep moving toward this– “You do this, and I will do this,”– you need to divide up what each of you is going to be responsible for, and then attack it together and whatever you delegated to each other, don’t get into each other’s way. We always tell people, you do the next thing next. You’ve got a yellow notepad, you write a list, and you do the top one and everything else is blacked out until you get to it. If you start doing all these things and try to have too many pots on the stove, we are all going to boil over.
Ryan and Hannah: Yes.
Shane: Focus on the next thing, and then we will focus on the next thing.
Jocelyn: And if you’re not sure, if you have a couple that you think are tied in your mind, just put them over in our community, we will be happy to look at those, help you prioritize. That is something that I am really good at, usually, is looking at everything that has to be done and putting a priority on it. I’m happy to help you do that.
Shane: You can also rank things on your list. A lot of people do this, and this is the A, and this is the B, and this is the one– they try to rank them in order but then they end up with four one’s. What you want to do when you are ranking things is you want to ask yourself questions, you don’t want to rank them. Each task needs to do one of four or five things. Does this task get me closer to making money right now?
The second thing it needs to say is, does this task take care of a current customer and make them happy? Because happy customers keep paying you. Does this task help me promote my brand? Is this something that can be automated? It this task something that could save me time or money? If you could look at every task and you can rank them by those things, you will notice that things will happen like, “Well, wait a minute,–” like these e-mails. Well, this gets us closer to making money. This also is something that we can automate and create a process that will do it for us.
That is two priorities. If you find that it is ranking in three or four different things, that is really obvious that’s the next thing you should do. Write down all your tasks, and say what makes money. We don’t have customers yet so that one don’t count. What promotes the brand because we need to get customers? What can we make into a process, and that will help you on your own rank it without having to wait for an answer, too.
Ryan: Yeah, okay. That’s good. Obviously, we try and prioritize our things, but say something that does not hold as much weight on that list, if you are super motivated to go ahead and you can see, you can really get on sale for right now for me for those e-books I’m really motivated to get them done. It is a priority. But I’m also like everyday, when I wake up, it’s like, good, I want to get out at least one or at least two. Maybe three, start a third today. Would you say that while that motivation’s is running hot, would you encourage someone to go after that?
Shane: That’s just batching and you are confusing the priority list. You think each e-book is a priority that is not what is a priority. Your priorities are much more general right now because your task on your plate are, “do I build my website, do I create content or do I make products?” That’s the only three things on your list right now. But those things have sublists underneath them so when you look at those three things, if you look at it, be really honest with yourself, if I don’t have a product, I can’t make money; therefore pour everything into the ebooks and get them done and create the product.
Jocelyn: As far as when you are motivated, absolutely. Push that gas down as far as it will go. I love the beginning stages of when you start working on your business because I guess you don’t really know that things are supposed to be taxing or hard or frustrating. You are just excited about it and so you are like, “Yes, this is amazing, I get to work all the time.”.
Shane: “Do all the things.”
Jocelyn: And I just remembered when we were first starting out, I just remember having that feeling. I still do sometimes but, I don’t know, sometimes they get overwhelmed by everything that needs to be done. If you’re feeling it that day, go for it, yes.
Shane: You have to capture that when it’s in the moment. We just went to a live event a few weeks ago, and I’ve seriously recorded probably 30 hours of audio.
Jocelyn: I think he’s done more work since we’ve gotten back.
Shane: I’ve done more work in the last three weeks than in the last three years. On the same way, I was like, “I’m motivated to do this one thing.” We revamped all the courses in our community so that we can really spell it out, A to Z, this is what we did. I was motivated, so that’s all I’ve worked on in the last couple weeks. You’re in the same exact place.
Jocelyn: I guess we should have gone with A to Zed, right?
Shane: Yeah, we totally should have said A to Zed.
Jocelyn: Alright guys, it’s been a really fun chat today. I think that we’ve gotten a lot of things out of the way and kind of just cleared a path for you guys to really start working on that product, and getting something available for sale, I’m really excited for you. Unfortunately, we are about out of time, so we always like to end our calls by asking people what is an action step, something that you’re going to do in the next little bit based on what we talked about here today?
Hannah: I think we’re definitely going to set up those autoresponding emails and I think just a list. Write down what we need to do and prioritize that just to get a clear mind frame, and just get focused and continue to be motivated.
Shane: I love it. Real quick tip here, go as low tech as possible on that. Get a stack of Post It notes, and hang them on the wall. Just start moving your tasks around by priority. It’s so much more fun to do it that way, and you’ll be shocked when you look at it, and say, “Wow, that was really easy to put everything in order.” And I would also say one more thing. I think you should divide and conquer. I would send Hannah toward the e-mails.
Hannah: Yeah, I was thinking that.
Shane: Ryan, you need to go keep cranking out that product and use your unfair advantage that you guys are on the same page and working together to 10x your success. Okay?
Hannah: Yeah. Do two things at once.
Shane: Exactly. Alright guys, it was a great show, thank you so much for being here. We cannot wait to help you take this thing to the next level.
Hannah: Thanks, guys.
Ryan: Thank you.
Shane: Alright, guys, that wraps up another call to one of our Flip Your Life community members. If you would like to become a member of our Flip Your Life community, head over to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife, and we can help you with your online business as well.
Jocelyn: Alright, next we are going to move into our Can’t Miss Moment segment, and these are things that we were able to experience recently that we might have missed if we were still working at our normal 9-to-5 job. Today’s Can’t Miss Moment is volunteering at Anna’s school, making some rain sticks for a program that the Kindergarten class presented to the rest of the school. This is something that we do occasionally. We go to the school, and we ask the teachers what kind of help do they need, and our kids love it when we come.
Shane: This was a cool one because there was one other parent there in the whole kindergarten class helping with this project, and we had to make all these little rain sticks. They were doing a Native American rain dance or something, so they needed all of these things, like props and stuff. The teachers are just so thankful when any parents come. They know that a lot of parents work, a lot of parents can’t find time in their schedule to do that. We actually had another teacher come in while we were there, and be like, “Oh, you’ve got great parents in your class.”
It just felt really good, not only to give our kids the support they need, but also to support teachers. We were teachers and we know that they don’t get a lot of extra help, and instead of our child’s Kindergarten teacher having to go home, take four hours out of her kids’ lives in the evening to make all these rain sticks, we were able to go in and help her do that, and save her that time.
Jocelyn: We love to volunteer at their school. It’s just a nice way for people to know that you’re around. People always ask us a lot of questions like how are you here, how are you both here. It’s a little bit confusing for people sometimes.
Shane: Although, sometimes they look at me like unemployed. Like, “That bum, he’s always here. Why don’t he get a job?” Because they don’t understand.
Jocelyn: It’s mostly because you don’t shave.
Shane: Probably. But I don’t have to because we work at home.
Jocelyn: Yeah, going to work at school, good time. Kids enjoy it so, so much.
Shane: Before we go, we like to close every one of our shows with a verse from the Bible. Today’s verse comes from Proverbs 10:2, and the Bible says, “Tainted wealth has no lasting value.” Keep that in mind while you’re building your online business guys. Always treat every customer with honesty and fairness. That’s all the time we have for this week. As always, guys, thanks for listening to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, and until next time, get out there, take action, do whatever it takes to Flip Your Life.
Jocelyn: Bye.
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