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Cheers to another month full of new content and insight!
Our Flip Your Life guest member this week is Clinical Psychologist, Human Leader and Keynote Speaker, Dr. Jeff Van Meter.
Jeff started his career as an engineer with about 4 years of field experience before going back to school to pursue clinical psychology. His career shift led him to the Chicago suburbs where he eventually settled down and had a family.
Dr. Van Meter has had reasonable success in his 25 years of clinical practice and as an entrepreneur. One of his unfair advantages is his innate penchant for public speaking which has allowed him to go on several leadership oriented speaking engagements.
With 3 children almost ready for college, Jeff’s entrepreneurial spirit kicked in. He started looking for other potential streams of income that’s not tied to government and insurance regulations since this has had a negative impact on his paycheck. To start his online business, he needed something that won’t burn him out, but still gave him the opportunity to change the lives of as many people as possible — something that would take his family’s life to the next level.
He created several websites, attended several masterminds, followed a lot of advice from other well-meaning mentors, but this just blurred his focus and now his brand is suffering online identity crisis.
Join us as we help Jeff consolidate his websites, highlight his strengths as a seasoned keynote speaker, and get his sales funnel back in shape.
It’s time to transform ideas into action, and you know, we’re always here to help you find better ways to take action. So, don’t miss it!
You will learn:
- How to deal with online identity crisis
- Taking control and staying focused
- Using your online influence to boost your offline engagements
- Sales funnel and webinar basics
- Plus so much more
Links and resources mentioned in today’s show:
- Dr. Jeff Van Meter’s Website
- US History Teachers
- Elementary Librarian
- Michael Hyatt
- John Lee Dumas
- Aaron Walker
- Flip Your Life community
- Flip Your Life LIVE in Nashville!
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!
Success Story of the Week:
Today’s story comes from a brand new member of the Flip Your Life community. Her name is Shelly, and the subject in her post in the Success Forums says, “I finished my course guidebook!!!” She’s super excited about this one.
Shelly says, “I just finished my guidebook for my course, which is a huge accomplishment for me. I also finished creating the PowerPoint presentation for my videos, which I’ll be recording next week. I can’t tell you how wonderful it feels to have the content of the course completed. Thank you, S & J, for all your encouragement, motivating podcast, and helpful tools. 2018 is going to be phenomenal!”
I love this post, because Shelly just joined our community and was an action taker from day one; talking in other threads, replying to people’s topics, posting action plans, posting her success stories, and this success story is amazing, because you know we always celebrate getting new customers, making more money, getting closer to replacing our incomes, quitting our jobs and changing our lives, but it’s those little things you do along the way that you’ve got to celebrate if you’re ever going to make it to your end goal.
Finishing an opt-in,finishing a course, or finishing a guidebook, like Shelly did, is such an awesome thing to celebrate because it motivates you. It gets you excited to take that next step and you would think, “Oh, well, she finished a piece of content.” Well, there are tons of members in here that are partying with Shelly that she got the next thing done.
There’s a comment from Kat that says, “Excellent news.” Jeanette says, “Congratulations!” Jackie jumped in and said, “Fantastic.” Jocelyn was in here earlier and said, “What a wonderful start for the year.”
Man, it’s just awesome to not only see people celebrating those little baby steps that are getting you closer to your goal, but seeing an entire community of people rally around each other and help each other move forward.
We would love to help you write the success story for your online business.
At the end of today’s show, head over to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife where you can learn more about building and growing a successful online business with the help of our Flip Your Life community.
Can’t Miss Moment:
Today’s Can’t Miss Moment is getting a new game table and setting up our dream game room.
This is something that Shane has wanted for a really long time, and our kids, they love to play board games. We have a lot of board games. So part of our house renovation that we’ve recently done was to buy a big shelf and storage area for the games, and now we wanted to have somewhere to play the games.
I’m a nerd. I’m a total nerd. I love games, and I’ve always wanted like a game table, where you could play board games, cards, and stuff like that. I’ve always wanted this to be like the centerpiece of a big game room, this was like a bucket list item.
I can remember when we moved into a house about six years ago, the house before we sold our house and quit our jobs and all that stuff. We had a basement and I really wanted to get a card table and I specifically remember us not getting that table, because we couldn’t afford it. We just cannot afford it. There was this big open space where the kids’ toys were, I always dreamed of that card table being there, but these things are like $2,000 or $3,000 — they’re not cheap.
But when we moved to our forever home, I remember when we finally got all the other furniture that Jocelyn wanted for the house, I said, “Hey, let’s go get the game table.” And she was like, “Cool, let’s go!”
So we jumped in the car, rode up to a furniture store in the next town over and we picked out my dream game table. The game room, like Jocelyn said, has got this big shelf of cubes full of board games. There was a couch over there to just sit and relax while everybody else was playing games. There’s like a little table over to the side if you want to have some snacks or something like that.
And it was just really satisfying. Just got done playing a board game with the kids. It’s just really made me happy. I don’t know if I ever would’ve been able to buy a purchase like that if we had not started our online business, so we’re just overjoyed that we get to do what we want and have all the things we used to only dream of, all because we did whatever it took to flip our life and dreamed big.
Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!
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. See y’all next week!
Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below!
Jocelyn: Hey, y’all! On today’s podcast, we help Jeff take his leadership coaching business to the next level.
Shane: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams.
We’re a real family who figured out how to make our entire living online. And now, we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? Alright, let’s get started.
What’s going on, everybody? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. It is great to be back with you again this week. We are super excited to help another member of our Flip Your Life community take their online business to the next level, and help them flip their life right here on air.
We’re super excited to welcome Jeff Van Meter to the show today.
Jeff, welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast!
Jeff: Hey, thanks for having me, guys! I’m really excited.
Jocelyn: Yeah. I’m excited to talk to you as well because Jeff is originally from my neck of the woods over in Evansville, Indiana. I’m originally from Western Kentucky, which is not far from Evansville, so we used to go there – I told him – a lot for fun. It’s not the most exciting place on earth.
Shane: How bad is your hometown that you got to go there for fun?
Jocelyn: Yeah, my hometown’s pretty bad.
Shane: It’s really easy to figure out where your neck of the woods is when you call it ‘your neck of the woods.’ Jeff is from Evansville.
Jeff: Yup!
Jocelyn: All right. Before we dive in, we want to know a little bit more about you, Jeff, your family and your background.
Jeff: Yeah. So I did grow up in Evansville and I went to Purdue University. Not IU, so you don’t have to hate me. I graduated there with an engineering degree, worked in that field for about four years and then went back to school and became a clinical psychologist. That landed me in the Chicago suburbs and I got married. I have three kids. They’re three teenagers, a senior, a sophomore, and a seventh grader.
And when I turned 50, which despite what Oprah says, is not the new 30. I just had been working in the field of psychology for about 20 years and I wanted to reach a broader audience. Also my wife had gone back to work and she wants to come back home and with kids heading into college, I’ve got tuition and then that sort of thing. My psychology practice, we can struggle through and come out the other end with tons of debt.
I need to find something else and I’ve always been very entrepreneurial.
Shane: You’ve created a business, you’ve got a practice, but you are saying basically, you need something that’s going to scale to a broader audience, so not only can you make a bigger impact, but you want to be able to make more money. It’s hard to make money when you can only have people in your office every day. Right? You can’t really take that up.
Jeff: Exactly, and we are constrained by what the insurance companies will pay, and you can only do so much.
Shane: We hear that a lot, why people want to start online business. They kind of hit a ceiling on what they think they can make and the growth doesn’t really look like it’s going to happen the way you want it to. We did that with teaching. We figured out, probably about my eighth or ninth year in, you’re pretty much on a staircase that doesn’t change until you retire. There was no possible way to scale it except for taking tickets at the basketball game. A lot of people do come to the conclusion, “Hey, online business does scale. You can reach the entire world online.”
Jeff: Yeah, exactly.
Jocelyn: All right. So we know a little bit more about you and your background. Tell us a little bit about your online business idea.
Jeff: So yeah, that goes all over the place, I’ve got to tell you. My dream– I’ll just go there. My dream would be to have a membership community where the leaders in their business could come, they could talk to me and get advice, and they could also talk to each other very much like I’ve watched your membership community grow where you’re still kind of the experts, but there are so many people in there who knows so many things and they talk to each other and they share with each other.
My dream would be to do that and then I could also offer things like live events where we come together and we actually solve specific business problems they’re dealing. Kind of, my expertise is how to help you as the business owner understand your employees and yourself. Yeah, I’m kind of good at that.
Shane: So you want to take that online and create a community based around this idea. But you’re also very passionate about speaking and going out and every conversation we’ve ever had is very much, “Man, I want to be in the room with people. I want to talk to people.” And then you want the online version of that to not only augment the live stuff, but to be like a virtual representation of that, right?
Jeff: Yes, very much, I do. Surprisingly, I’m actually an introvert except for when I’m on stage.
Shane: And we hear that a lot actually.
Jeff: Yeah.
Jocelyn: All right. Tell us a little bit about where you are in your journey. Do you have a site yet? Have you set anything up? What’s going on as far as getting started?
Jeff: I have a couple of websites, and one is me as a brand drjeffvanmeter.com, and then the other is my service or my product, which I call, “The Human Leader.” They’re good. I think they’re pretty good sites. Beyond that, I don’t have a list. Well I have 167 people. The friends and family list, they’re not really my clients.
That’s about it. And so it’s out there. I have given a couple of talks. I’ve actually gotten paid a couple times and it’s how do I get that to be more consistent and regular and then grow it?
Shane: I want to stress something here, too, that I hear from you, that I hear from a lot of people is, “Oh, I don’t have a list.” Well, some of those people are probably not your friends and family. It’s 167 humans that will sign up for your list, so maybe there’s a couple in there that are finding your site.
Jeff: That’s true.
Shane: And number two, you have built websites. Do you know that you are farther ahead than 90% of people? There’s a lot of people listening to this show right now and some of them are like, “I wish I had a website.” Some of them are like, “Man, I need to build a website,” but you have taken huge strides. You’re building products, you’ve put yourself out there on stage.
Jocelyn, I talk about this all the time. We’ve got to celebrate all the wins.
That’s a very good job that you’ve done and we just want to call that out. Don’t think it’s just a website or, “I think it’s pretty good.” You’re farther ahead than 90% of people will ever get.
And for all you people listening out there on the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, why have you not built your website yet? Why have you not created your product?
I’m just throwing that out there to kind of throw the gauntlet down today. Good job on building your infrastructure, because now you can actually have these conversations of, “What’s the strategy, what’s next? How can we grow this thing that we’ve created? How can we make the seed grow?”
Jeff, let me ask you a question really quick before we move on. Why do you have two sites? Why do you have a personal branded site and then an entirely a new site that’s set up just for your product?
Jeff: That’s a really good question. I know how it happened because I’ve always been a little bit reticent to put my name on things. Even like my clinical practice, it’s not Van Meter and Associates, it’s got a separate name. When I started this I thought, well I need to develop this brand and I call it The Human Leader, or The ‘Human’ Leader is probably a better way to emphasize it.
But then as I got into it, I realized that, wait a minute, actually I am the brand. When I go out there speaking and that sort of thing, they don’t really care that it’s this thing called The Human Leader. They want Dr. Jeff Van Meter. So if you look at the two sites, their focus is so different and I thought I was going to make the membership site all around The Human Leader. I mean that’s kind of what the idea has been.
If you go to Dr. Jeff Van Meter, there’s like a link to find out how to be a part of the community or something. Then somewhere along the line in the last year, it just all kind of got muddled in my head and muddled with what I was going to do. And I said, “Okay, you’ve been part of this community, you really need to get over yourself and reach out to these two Kentuckians.”
Jocelyn: So, essentially you’re having an online identity crisis.
Shane: Online identity crisis, right yeah.
Jeff: Yeah.
Shane: It’s totally a new phenomenon. Yeah. I think that’s a good thing though you’re wrestling with. And I think that sooner or later, everyone struggles with this is, am I building a brand that stands by itself or am I the brand? The naming and stuff, people get so caught up in this and like what we should do and what we shouldn’t do. Our education brands were very much like, US History Teachers. That’s not Shane Sams. Elementary Librarian, that didn’t have to be Jocelyn, but like our Flipped Lifestyle is Shane and Jocelyn’s brand. That that’s how that works.
You can have product brands within your name brand, right? We know a lot of people like Michael Hyatt. Michael Hyatt is a very famous online entrepreneur. He is the brand, but he has products like Your Best Year Ever, and stuff like that. Right? So I think that it is cumbersome to have more than one website. You can totally do it all under your name. And I think that the kind of business you’re getting in, I think you should really probably think about consolidating that just under your name, and then use your branding for your products. What do you think, Jocelyn?
Jocelyn: Yeah, I think so too. I think that what you have right now is just a little bit complicated and cumbersome and we need to figure out a way to pair that down and figure out what’s really important and get it all on one site. I think that it’s a little bit disjointed right now.
Shane: We have an intake form that everybody who comes on the podcast and fills out and when we were reading through yours, we saw all these things, and like one of the common themes that we saw was like overwhelm a little bit in what you were saying, telling us. It was kind of getting exhausting, taking care of all these things, and that’s usually because you started 12 sites. That’s what most people do. You know what I mean? Like if we could consolidate, that would be a lot easier to make good decisions going forward, basically.
Jocelyn: All right. Jeff, what outside influences or obstacles have you had to overcome so far in your journey to flip your life? Maybe things like time, technology, people? What things have you had to overcome?
Shane: Like, things outside? You know, we’ve talked a little bit about how you’re overwhelmed, or confidence in putting your name on things. That’s internal stuff. Like what’s the outside stuff that is giving you problems so far?
Jeff: For me it has been the classic Shiny Objects Syndrome as far as ideas. Somebody will say, “Oh, you know what you should do–” and I’ve spent tens of thousands of dollars in trying to pull this together. Every time I’d get with somebody not even like a scammy type expert but a true expert, and they would say, “You need to do this.”
And then I would chase that down for a while, but it didn’t seem to feel right. I think I would get off my core idea, my core message and sometimes just trying to chase something to get the quick dollar in as opposed to the long road. That has been really big for me. I’ve been in different mastermind groups. I’ve always lurked around the edges of Flipped Lifestyle; I don’t know why. And then I’d go off and do something else and then I come back to you guys. Then I go off and do something else, and then come back to you guys. I’ve always struggled with the forums. And as the forum with Flipped Lifestyle got bigger and bigger and bigger, I just froze. It’s like, I don’t know what to do with this.
Shane: What you’re saying is very important. And I think it’s because– and trust me, I’m with you, brother. I mean, I’m the shiny object king. I’m the squirrel sitting on the top of the tree with the nut crown. You know what I’m saying? With the shiny objects though.
I know exactly what you’re saying because when you go out and you look at all these things, you see all these people doing stuff and everybody’s telling you to do all these things–
Jocelyn: Which are probably not bad ideas.
Shane: Not bad ideas, not bad ideas necessarily. Or you try to copy all that, “He was successful this way. Let me chase that buck.” “She was successful that way, let me chase that buck.” Or when you go into the forums in our community, and you see tons of people doing tons of different things, it gets you confused and it gets you frozen. I have felt the paralyzed feeling that you’re talking about because we have so many ideas.
Jocelyn and I just went through a phase like this back in December of last year when we had all these ideas. We had all these things that we wanted to do and we got totally froze for a couple of weeks because we were like, “What are we doing? We’re getting away from what we love and what we want and what we actually want to do because all these people are telling us what they think we should do.”
Jeff: Good-hearted.
Shane: Yeah, good-hearted, exactly. I mean, you see all these people being so successful and doing things that are awesome and you’re like, “Man, maybe I could do that. Maybe I could do that.” Because it goes back to those internal confidence issues, those internal fears of, “Well, maybe my idea wasn’t good enough. Well, it didn’t get traction fast enough, and then that person’s idea did. So maybe I’ll just do whatever they did.”
Jocelyn: I feel like probably what you need here is some type of accountability partner to say, “Okay, Jeff, let’s pull back the reins a little bit. We need to concentrate on this idea.” You also have to think about, it sounds really simple, but you have to think about what do you really want? Like what is your real objective? We go back to this all the time because we tend to do the same thing. Some of us more than others.
Shane: Hey, come on, now! You’re talking to the squirrel king here, baby.
Jocelyn: You know, we tend to do this and we say, “Oh well, you know, this person’s doing this and this sounds really cool and it would be cool if we did it, too.” But then we think, “Okay, well do we really want to do that?” Like, “Is that really what we want our business to look like?”
Shane: And everything you add like that pulls you away from your core mission. That’s what was killing us. It’s hard when you know you can do some of those things because you’re like, I can do that opportunity. And you go and you’re like, “No, I’m getting away from what actually can flip my life and actually build the life that I want.”
Jocelyn: I think I’m just going to play this part of the podcast on repeat when you start getting these ideas.
Shane: Like, it’s in the car on the MP3 player and like when we get in, that’s like the first thing we listen to every time we’re driving around.
Jocelyn: When you say daily or at least weekly, “I have an idea!” I’m just going to play this back.
Shane: Right before I get the backhand. “No! Bah! Slap!” And you cannot do the backhand.
Jocelyn: No, we have a deal in 2018, no new projects.
Shane: No New Projects. Jocelyn came up with one idea, I have one idea and those are the only two things that we’re working on, so we’re focused on our Flip Your Life Live Nashville event in September and we’re focused on getting as many members in the Flip Your Life community as possible. Nothing else, no new things, no new things.
So it’s hard. It’s a hard life. Jeff, when you have shiny object syndrome. It’s a clinical condition, but I do totally see what you’re saying. It’s like you see so many other people doing so many things, when yours doesn’t ignite and take off like you want it to– I’m harnessing my inner John Lee Dumas here, “We’re going to ignite today!” — but like when that doesn’t happen, it’s like you start looking around at other things.
That’s OK, man! That’s OK. And I think you do have some great things going on. I think you’ve got more great things going on than you think you do. I think once we go through some of your questions that you’re going to figure out, “Hey, I need to focus on me and my thing.” There’s so many paths to victory in online business, you just have to pick a path and walk your own path.
Jocelyn: All right, we’ve talked about our struggles. So let’s talk about how we can help you get to the next level, and flip your life. What is the biggest question you have right now in your online business?
Jeff: I think my question is where do I focus to get paying clients? I’m two-thirds finished with the book, I have two websites, I want this to have a membership component. I love speaking and I feel called to speak. Where do I focus?
Shane: I think that you’ve already got clues in this conversation that we’ve talked about. The thing I want to focus on is the offline component today, and that’s your speaking career. Every time I’ve ever heard you say anything about speaking, it’s not just a, “Yeah, speaking is something I could do.” It’s, “Love speaking! I really want to speak! I had a great time speaking! I love being with people!”
When you email me or you Skype us, it’s like LOVE, and what most people don’t realize is sometimes an offline component is the core of your online business. I think that you should really lean more toward, “How can my website drjeffvanmeter.com, get me more speaking jobs?” and then your sales funnel would look like this.
You use your website and leverage your online presence to get more speaking gigs. For example, you just told me you got a speaking gig, you got paid well for it, and if you’ve got a video of that or some film of that, you can create like a sizzle reel to show you speaking for a couple minutes.
Use your website to leverage opportunities to get more speaking gigs, where you talk to leaders, because that’s who you want to focus on and you’ve got this clinical background that you can help them with. That’s a huge unfair advantage. All your education and your 20-something years in practice.
You are an expert. Bar none. No one can ever take that from you. But once you get on stage, you become elevated. When people see people speaking on stage, it doesn’t matter what their degree is, they have become an expert in their mind. Then you can take those leaders will say, “Hey leaders, do you love this experience of me helping you? I have a community of leaders online. Doesn’t matter where you are in the country, where I can help you become a better leader.” And that’s where your membership comes from.
Your speaking then augments that online component, and what we have found with speaking people is this: people say, speaking is great. I love speaking, but it can become a grind. You can speak a lot less when you’re putting people in your membership every time you speak because you go to the speaking gig, you get 10 members; you go to the speaking gig, you get 10 members.
Well, you look up and 10 months later, you got 100 people paying you $50 a month. I think that’s really where you need to focus is, consolidate and get this speaking thing going because you love it, and that’s what’s going to drive you forward, and then build the membership like off the background of that.
Jeff: Yeah, that makes sense. That makes it a lot of sense. It’s, “Do this to drive that,” as opposed to, “Yeah. I think what I was focusing on is I have to build this email list in order to get people into my membership.” But the stuck point was, they don’t understand why they would want to be in this kind of membership because they don’t see what I can do.
Jocelyn: Yes, and that’s the point. You know, it’s like everything that you do needs to lead to the same thing. I feel like right now, you’re starting people out on a road, but they’re going to 10 different destinations. You need everyone going to the same destination.
Shane: This is a classic sales funnel. People get confused where things go sometimes in the sales funnel. We have a training in the community called The Sales Chain, where you analyze what’s happening and what’s working in your sales funnel. Yours just looks a little different. Whereas, ours might be a big audience, we have something for them to opt in online, and then they come into our community and we eventually show them a webinar, or we do something live.
Yours is more big audience, go speak, get those highly focused leads onto my email list, and then they opt in. You just flipped what’s happening. You can even do this online. There’s a version of this you could do online. You love speaking. You would probably love doing live webinars every single week because you’re a speaker. That’s what you do. It’s almost like your own stage so you can actually drive ads to business leaders to come to your webinar on whatever you teach, and now you do your live presentation just like you would on stage in real time.
Now, they’ve opted into your list for the Webinar and now you can follow up and say, “Hey guys, I’ve got a membership community. Do you love this training you’re getting right now? Let’s go do this one-on-one. Let’s go do this as a group. Let’s go do this in videos, and I can help you become a better business leader.” I think you’re just looking at your sales funnel a little backwards and that’s what’s causing the log jam.
Jeff: Interesting. I hadn’t thought of it that way. I always thought I “need to do webinars,” but I couldn’t figure out how, because I’m used to seeing webinars that drive you to a type of product where it’s, “Do this and do that,” and I do something a little bit different.
Shane: Yeah. I told a lot of speakers this who are in our community. A webinar is, you’re just making your own speaking gig. It’s your own event. It’s really no different than you showing up at a live event.
Jocelyn: But if you’re going to do an online business, I want to emphasize the business part of it and everything that you need to do ultimately needs to lead to some type of paid product. Does that mean that you have to be spammy and sell stuff 24 hours a day? No. You need to provide value. You need to bring people in who want to consume your free content, and then people can decide at that point whether they want to become a customer or whether they don’t.
But everything needs to have that end goal in mind and you just need to take steps along the way and think to yourself, “Okay, does this support my end goal?” which is to make money online.
Shane: Right now, I’m looking at this list you just gave us. You said, “I’m two-thirds finished with a book, I have two websites, I want this to have a membership component.” A book is not a product. A lot of people think it is. They want to be millionaires writing a book. A book is not a product. A book is only a product for one percent of one percent of one percent of people. That guy who released that Fire and Fury book, that guy is making a living on books; 99.99% of authors aren’t.
Books are lead magnets. That’s what your book is. Wouldn’t it be awesome, big audience, get in front of them on stage or a webinar, give away your book for the cost and now you’ve got leads. And those leads come into your membership community where you’re having weekly meetings with business owners across the world and things like that.
There a guy named Aaron Walker who does something very similar to what you’re doing. He might be a great person for you to check out online and kind of model. What he does is, he is a business leader, he was a businessman for 20 something years. He’s got all this expertise, and he just started creating mastermind groups. They all meet online. He charges a couple hundred bucks a month, I don’t know exactly what he charges.
But he’s got a hundred people paying a couple hundred bucks a month. It’s just a membership, is all it is and he meets with these groups. He has group meetings. He works one-on-one with some of them and I think that’s where you’re going. He very much does the same thing model-wise like you’re doing. He goes on podcasts, he goes and speaks on stage and he gets members that way.
It’s not so much as a huge internet thing. It’s getting in front of the right people, doing what you love, speaking on stage, then get their contact information to guide them down your sales funnel into your membership.
Jeff: That makes sense.
Shane: I hear you writing. Everyone’s like, “I’m writing things down and I’m like, “It’s recorded.” This is recorded. We are recording this right now. Are we getting some clarity now? What we’re really saying is keep the main thing the main thing. Make speaking the top of your sales funnel, and everything else falls in line under it as you consolidate your website, use the book to get leads, and then guide people into an actual paid product. Does that make sense?
Jeff: Yeah, yeah. It’s more than just the clarity. It feels right. It feels better. It just feels like this is the way that I am supposed to do this.
Shane: It totally makes sense because I feel like a lot of people always say, “Well, that’s what the guru told me makes sense.” And you’re saying, “No, no, no. I feel like this makes sense.” For everybody listening, until you get to the point where it makes sense for you, you’re not going to be successful. You have to do what you want to do.
Jocelyn and I realized this a long time ago because we were doing a lot of things. People were telling us in the beginning like, “Hey, you guys aren’t working eighty hours a week. You can’t build a business that way. You guys aren’t putting your business above everything else in your life.” And we were kind of like, we don’t care.
We tried that and it just made us resent things and it got us burnt out and we were like, no, we want to put our kids on the calendar first, we want and put each other first and then we want to work on our business x hours and maybe we don’t grow to $20,000,000. Maybe we only grow to a million dollars, but guess what? That’s great. You have to do it your way or you’re not going to stick with it in the long term anyway.
Jeff: Yeah, very much. And I totally resonate with that, too, because I’ve had a lot of different well-meaning gurus telling me to do this and do that, and I would start it and it’d be like, “Well, you seem really energized around this,” and I’m like, I do.
Jocelyn: But I’m really energized about everything.
Jeff: Yes, exactly. And then I go home and it’d be like, well, this isn’t what I want to do. I don’t want to write that thing, that’s not what I’m trying to do. And I kept feeling like they just don’t get me.
Jocelyn: Something that’s important, especially in this part of your journey, is that you need to shut out all voices except for maybe one or two voices. You need to stop doing things that you love to do, maybe it’s listening to podcasts, maybe you listen to 10 different podcasts, maybe you read books all the time to get new ideas.
You know the thing about idea people– and I’m actually an idea person, too, believe it or not, but the thing about idea people is that we love ideas. We love to learn about things and figure things out, but when you’re constantly doing that, you’re not doing the most important thing which is to get stuff done towards your main idea.
Shane: And it’s so easy to say, “That works.” But the problem is we all leave out the last part of the sentence, “That works for me.” That’s what you have to find when you’re starting an online business and flipping your life, is what works for you and your circumstances. People will succeed in the Flip Your Life community, and they’ll come to us and be like, “Is it time to quit my job?”
That’s kind of the line that we don’t cross even though we’ve helped so many people do that. We don’t ever say yes, because we don’t know every variable in your life. We don’t know where you are. We don’t know where your spouse is. We don’t know your kids’ situation. There’s no way we can know every situation, so only you can make that decision, and I see a lot of people out there, guru-wise like, “Quit your jobs before you do anything,” and crazy stuff. We’re like, “No, you have to do what’s right for you. You’re just consolidating all the things you learn into one place.”
Jocelyn: But as I was saying before, I think something that’s important for you right now at this step in your journey is to find someone who can be an accountability partner for you. Someone who is not like you, okay. Someone who can get things done, but maybe they need help in the dreaming area, you know. They’re a doer, they need a dreamer. And then you’re a dreamer, you need to a doer.
So I would go into our community and just say, “I’m seeking an accountability partner to help me to stay on track for my online business.” And I think that’s a great place to find somebody.
Shane: Here’s the problem with a mastermind. I heard you say you were in a few masterminds, this, that, and the other. Here’s the huge problem with masterminds. People go into masterminds, and they started asking each other what they should do. That is never how a mastermind should work. A mastermind should always work like this. “Hey, are you doing what are you doing? What are you doing? What are you doing?”
Not necessarily to get permission or ideas or anything else, but then it’s like, “Okay, when are you going to do it? When are you going to do it? When are you going to do it?” Okay, we will all convene back here and we will make sure we get all this stuff done. When, if not, we will hold each other accountable by, “Hey, you’re dropping the ball.”
People think that masterminds are to get answers, masterminds or not to get answers. They’re to get accountability partners. They’re to do life together and do business together.
It’s almost like a small group at church. I see a lot of masterminds do more harm than good because everybody starts thinking about what everyone else is doing, tries to do it and spins their wheels instead of doing what they should’ve done in the first place.
Jeff: Preach it.
Shane: I’m victim to it.
Jocelyn: I’m going to play this podcast back later.
Shane: Jocelyn, all this is gray. I’m sneaking up on 40, and the gray is coming, it’s wisdom that’s popping out of my skull right now! You know what I mean? These are lessons that we’ve learned the hard way. It’s not like just stuff we’ve come up with, so when you do that accountability, seek an accountability partner, not a mastermind to run ideas by. Running ideas by people is dangerous.
Jocelyn: Especially for people who are prone to shiny objects syndrome. That can be one of the worst things you can do.
Shane: We have a hashtag in the community forums that says, #nosugar. Jocelyn and I really try to not sugarcoat anything, because the only time you should be asking for advice is somebody who’s way ahead of you in the game. That’s when we come in and we’re like, “No, that is a dangerous path. You’re going to screw that up.” We’ve done it before. We know from experience.
But the problem is when you get a mastermind, everybody’s kind of on the same level and if you all start asking each other what to do, nobody really knows. So it’s more like, let’s all do these things and try them and see what works and hold each other accountable to meet our deadlines and then we’ll say, “Okay, that didn’t work,” so then we’ll all know in the future. But if people do it backwards, they try to hypothesize what will work and that’s totally dangerous.
Jocelyn: All right. It has been a fun conversation today, but we are just about out of time. Before we go, we’d like to ask our guest, what is one thing that you plan to take action on today based on what we talked about?
Jeff: I think the first thing I’m going to do, because I was already kind of trying to figure out this two-website thing, is that I’m going to combine them into one, and focus on the Dr. Jeff Van Meter, move all of my blog posts and everything over there. And actually to be frank, I’m not going to do it. I’m going to have my web person do it. That’s the number one thing. Get that done before the end of the day today.
Shane: I think when you do that, it’s going to be so much clarity because then you can be like, “Okay, the next thing I have to do is find some more speaking gigs.” Now, once you secure those, it becomes simple. Get leads at those for your membership and you’re good to go. When a sales funnel clicks together, it’s like Legos, baby. Just stack them and it all works well.
Listen, Jeff, thank you so much for coming on the program today. Thank you for your transparency. We love the Flip Your Life community, because everybody is so open and truthful. You know, I feel like when you go into another community or guru space, everyone’s trying to like show off and hide all of their weaknesses. But it’s awesome to see people who are willing to be like, “No, this has screwed me up. I’m struggling with this. I can’t figure this out. How do we get this working, and how do we get this straightened out?”
And, man, it’s just awesome because when you share that stuff, other people hear it, they get inspired, they can overcome their struggles, too, and we all get to move forward together.
Thank you so much for being on the podcast today!
Jeff: Thank you guys, too, you’re awesome!
Shane: Alright, guys, that wraps up another call to one of our Flip Your Life community members. If you’d 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. 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 jobs.
Today’s Can’t Miss Moment is getting a new game table and setting up our dream game room. This is something that Shane has wanted for a really long time, and our kids, they love to play board games. We have a lot of board games. So part of our house renovation that we’ve recently done was to buy a big shelf and storage area for the games, and now we wanted to have somewhere to play the games.
Shane: So my entire life, I’ve been an avid gamer. I love board games, I love card games–
Jocelyn: (cough) Nerd. Sorry.
Shane: I’m a nerd. I’m a total nerd, but I love games, and I’ve always wanted like a game table, like the big round, you know, eight-person, poker-looking table, where you could play board games or cards or have friends over or play with your kids. I’ve always wanted this to be like the centerpiece of a big game room. So this was kind of like a bucket list item.
And I can remember when we moved into a house about six years ago, the house before we sold our house and quit our jobs and all that stuff. We had a basement and I really wanted to get a card table and I specifically remember us not getting that table, because we couldn’t afford it. We just cannot afford it.
There was this big open space where the kids’ toys were, I always dreamed of that card table being there, but these things are like $2,000 or $3,000. They’re not cheap. By the time you buy the chairs and everything else, it can get really cost prohibitive. I remember when we finally got all the other furniture that Jocelyn wanted in the house, I said, “Hey, let’s go get the game table.” And she was like, “Cool, let’s go!”
So we jumped in the car, rode up to a furniture store in the next town over and we picked out my dream game table. The game room, like Jocelyn said, has got this big shelf of cubes full of board games. There was a couch over there to just sit and relax while everybody else was playing games. There’s like a little table over to the side if you want to have some snacks or something like that.
And it was just really satisfying. Just got done playing a board game with the kids. It’s just really made me happy. And I don’t know if I ever would’ve been able to buy a purchase like that if we had not started our online business.
The Flip Your Life podcast is not just about our Can’t Miss Moments, guys. We’re all about our members’ success and we wanted to share a member success story with you today. So before we go, we wanted to share an actual success story from the Success Forums in the Flip Your Life membership.
Today’s story comes from a brand new member of the Flip Your Life community. Her name is Shelly, and the subject in her post in the Success Forums says, “I finished my course guidebook!!!” She’s super excited about this one.
Jocelyn: Shelly says, “I just finished my guidebook for my course, which is a huge accomplishment for me. I also finished creating the PowerPoint presentation for my videos, which I’ll be recording next week. I can’t tell you how wonderful it feels to have the content of the course completed. Thank you, S & J, for all your encouragement, motivating podcast, and helpful tools. 2018 is going to be phenomenal!”
Shane: I love this post because Shelly came into our community and just became an action taker from day one, talking in other threads, replying to people’s topics, posting action plans, posting her success stories, and this success story is amazing, because you know we always celebrate getting new customers, making more money, getting closer to replacing our incomes, quitting our jobs and changing our lives.
But it’s those little things you do along the way that you’ve got to celebrate if you’re ever going to make it to your end goal. Finishing an opt in or finishing a course or finishing a guidebook, like Shelly did, is such an awesome thing to celebrate because it motivates you. It gets you going. It gets you excited to take that next step and you would think, “Oh, well, she finished a piece of content.” Well, there are tons of members in here that are partying with Shelly that she got the next thing done.
I got a post here is that’s from Kat that says, “Excellent news.” Jeanette says, “Congratulations!” Jackie jumped in and said, “Fantastic.” Jocelyn was in here earlier and said, “What a wonderful start for the year.” Man, it’s just awesome to not only see people celebrating those little baby steps that are getting you closer to your goal, but seeing an entire community of people rally around each other and help each other move forward.
Before we go today, we like to close every show with a verse from the Bible.
Today’s Bible verse comes from James 1:19 and it’s all about patience. In the Bible it says, “Understand this, my dear brothers and sisters: You must all be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to get angry.” When I read this Bible verse, it really makes me relate to the entrepreneurial journey. You know, things are not always going to happen as fast as we want.
We’re not always going to know exactly what we need to know to get to the next level. Sometimes, it’s going to be frustrating and it even may make us angry, but we’ve got to push through that frustration, we have to find the answers to our problems and we have to not let anger hold us back from what we’re trying to accomplish.
So heed the advice here in James 1:19, and as you’re moving through this entrepreneurial journey, be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to get angry, and keep pushing and don’t let anything stop you from achieving what you’re trying to do.
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.
We will see you then!
Jocelyn: Bye!
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