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Are you lacking the confidence to make sales because your email list is small?
Maybe you’re contemplating if people would even pay for your digital product?
Put yourself in the shoes of the customer for a second and ask yourself:
When you purchase something online, do you know what you’re really paying for?
“Well, I bought this because I need to do this… or that…”
Is that really the ONLY reason behind the purchase?
Sometimes people confuse the real selling point of a digital product as just the product itself.
Yes, they need your product to do this and that, but your digital product delivers something more than what that product description is saying…
A product allows your customer to gain:
- The time to do the things they want.
- Convenience or ease of use.
- Confidence and support.
- Peace of mind and leadership.
Your product or what you’re creating / what you’re about to create, is a part of a greater purpose, which is why you should step up and share this with others who need it to improve their quality of life.
Your email list, no matter how small, have people who believe in you and the results your product will deliver. They look to you for guidance, so be confident with your role as the leader because YOU do have what it takes and YOU can help so many by leading them towards their next step.
And this is why you can still make big sales even if you have a small email list!
So, join us this week as we help FYL community moderator, Brad May, get his acoustic guitar business to the next level!
Flip Your Life.
You Will Learn:
- Why your digital product is more than just a product
- How to find the time to consistently work on your business
- How to stay on the same page with your spouse
- The advantages of focusing on one priority at a time
- Plus so much more!
Links and resources mentioned on today’s show:
Success Story of the Week:
Today’s Can’t Miss Moment is from Brad, and Brad sold his e-book while he was asleep.
His message says,
“This morning I woke up to a sale. I’ve been pressed for time lately to work on my online business, but I was inspired by Shane on one of the member calls to email my list more. So I did. I also published a blog post last night. I’ve been trying to force myself to take action, like putting my first e-book up for sale even though I’m not finished with it yet. Now that I’ve sold it, that will motivate me, even more, to get it done. Also, I only have 13 people on my list. It feels good to see things progressing. Thanks to the Flip Your Life community and S&J for all you have done to help me make progress.”
You are so welcome, Brad! We’re so happy to have you, and what Brad is talking about is that we have a bi-monthly member call every month, where we get on live and he answer your questions about online business. It’s for members only. We do it twice every month and we gave him some advice. He took action on it and he made sales. So what are you waiting for, y’all? Jump in our community!
Brad’s website: http://acousticworshiper.com/
Note: Yes, this is the same Brad on this week’s show! 😉
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 Anna’s cheerleading team winning the grand champions in the US Finals Champion’s Challenge.
I didn’t really understand all of this cheerleading stuff when we first started, so I’m going to give you a little bit of background for this.
In the world of cheerleading, there are thousands of teams and each team is in a particular division. Our division is the Level One Tiny Prep Division, so that means ages five to six, and they do what’s called level one skills. Each level has a certain type of skills that they’re allowed to do. Of those thousands of teams, there are probably hundreds of Tiny Prep teams, and there were probably a few dozen that went to this particular competition.
The US finals, there are eight different competitions all over the United States and we went to the one in Indianapolis, Indiana. What they do at the end of all of these competitions is they take the videos from each competition, each of the eight competitions, they take the first place team from each of those eight competitions. Then they judge the video, so those are all judged separately, and from those videos, they basically choose a national champion for this competition.
Anna’s team won that! The cool thing about it is they will also be receiving rings and a special banner for the gym that says that they were the grand champions of this challenge, so we just love our cheerleading team.
It is awesome, we have such great people. You would never think that a cheerleading team from such a small area could compete with big teams all over the country, and even all over the world, so it’s really cool.
It’s a Can’t Miss Moment because as I had mentioned before on the show, when we were teachers, I don’t think there’s any way we could have done the cheerleading team. There’s a lot of travel, there’s a lot of expense. You have to stay in hotels, you have to pay for all of the competition fees, the uniform — all of the things that go along with it. So I’m just very thankful that we’re able to ive her these opportunities, and that they won the championship.
Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!
Get your FREE 30-DAY Membership in the Flip Your Life Community NOW!
– https://flippedlifestyle.com/free
You can connect with S&J on social media too!
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 to the podcast right now? Check out the transcript below.
Jocelyn: Hey y’all! On today’s podcast, we help Brad take his music 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 welcome another member of the Flip Your Life community onto the show so that we can work with them and help them take their business to the next level, and let you guys listen in so you can pick up some tips, tactics, and strategies to help you take your business to the next level as well.
We are super excited today to welcome Brad May to the show.
Brad, welcome to the program!
Brad: Hey, thanks for having me, I’m excited to be here!
Jocelyn: Yeah, it is great to talk to you today. You have some really good questions that we can’t wait to dive into. But before we do that, let’s talk a little bit about you, your family and your background.
Brad: Originally, I’m from Louisiana, then I’ve moved down to Mobile, Alabama. I’ve been here about seven years or so. I met my wife here. We’re married for about five years. We actually met at church, and so that’s kind of the turning point of online business and everything came out of that. I’ve been playing guitar since year 2001, I don’t know how many years that is, but it’s been quite a while. Most of that time, I’ve been playing guitar was in a church setting, so that’s where I got the idea for my online business, to help people play acoustic worship guitar in new and better and different ways.
Shane: Do you have any kids? How long y’all been married?
Brad: We’ve married for five years. We don’t have any kids just yet, but my wife actually recently decided to quit her job and stay at home so that we can kind of work towards that, so she can keep things around the home moving well, and she’s been helping me a lot with online business stuff and the other things as well.
Shane: That’s awesome! What made her want to quit her job and transition more into that home role? Was it just stress or just she wanted to do something different or what happened there?
Brad: Yeah, it was mostly a kind of a stressful situation at her job. She had a position where she was in the middle of a lot of different things where there were a lot of interruptions and different tasks all the time. It just got to be a thing to where she was coming home tired so much where our time spent together was not as valuable as we thought it could be if she was able to focus more on us and our house, and doing things that way.
Shane: This is amazing! First of all, kudos to you because most people would be scared to give up that second income.
Brad: Oh, it was scary!
Shane: But you did it anyway and that’s amazing and you deserve to be commended for that just because you made a choice that you wanted your life to look different and you were willing to do what it took to make that happen.
Brad: Yeah. We’re kind of already lived below our means that we had the room to do that. Of course, it kind of tightened things up a little bit, but it was just something that we prayed about together and we felt at peace about it, so that’s what we did. And since that time, like so many things have gotten better and I see the difference that she’s able to make. Devoting more of her headspace to what we’re working on together.
Shane: That’s amazing.
Jocelyn: Yeah, that’s really cool. And I like how you guys said that you’re going to try this and things got better, which is awesome. I think so many times we think we’re so scared to do something and when we finally do it we’re like, “Oh, well, that wasn’t so bad!”
Shane: “This actually works! It’s not as bad as I thought it was.”
Jocelyn: Yeah. And that happened to us when we were trying to figure out, do we want to quit our jobs, do we not want to quit our jobs? I was absolutely against it. I did not want to do it. I didn’t think it was going to work. Now, Shane finally– for a nice word– talked me into it.
Shane: Steamrolled and badgered, is probably what we really should call it.
Jocelyn: Yeah, pretty much that’s more of the correct story, but now that I did it, I’m like, “Oh, well, why did I wait so long? This is awesome!”
Brad: Yeah, and that’s part of where online business really became more of a passion, too. My wife and I were talking about it and we’re like, “What do we want our kids to be able to do? Do we want them to see that there’s another option besides the standard, go to college, get a job and do all that kind of stuff because that’s just how I ended up where I’m at.” And so we’re wanting to try to create a different family tree.
Jocelyn: I love it.
Shane: Just to bring context in this discussion, because the audience might not know this, but you didn’t start an online business and it started working and then she quit her job, right? Like you guys quit your job and then you did other things to make up the income in the short term. Right?
Brad: Right. Yeah, actually I still work full time and then we build some websites together on the side for some small businesses around town. Her mother and stepfather own an ambulance company in town. They have a lot of laptops that are used on those ambulances, and from time to time those will break down or mess up or whatever.
And so since I worked with computers for a living, I’ve been able to do some side work for them, and so I’ve just got a lot of different side projects that I’m able to do which takes up a lot of time. And so whenever she quit her job, that was a lot of help going into that. We’re kind of doing a mix right now with my full-time job plus a lot of side projects, to try and see what gets traction. But my passion is the online business doing Acoustic Worshiper.
Shane: That’s awesome, dude. I’ve got a buddy and same thing. He wasn’t a tech guy. He didn’t have any computer background so he couldn’t pick up a side gig here, picking up a website or doing some social media. But man, he really wanted to have an online business and he said, “Forget it. I’m going to go. I need money to invest in this business.” He went and delivered pizzas after work every day. And some people will be like, “I’m 30-something years old, my pride kicks in, maybe I don’t want to go do that.”
But it was the same thing. He was like, “My wife wanted to do this, I wanted to do this. And we had to figure out a solution that gave us the money to do those things. So I just went down and put a pizza thing on top of my car and started throwing pies, baby!”
Brad: There you go. When my wife was considering quitting, she was kind of nervous about it and I was, too. I was like, “Well, you know what, if it doesn’t work out, I’ll go start working at Taco Bell in the night, we’ll eat in the evenings–“
Shane: Free tacos, we’ll eat good, everything’s fine. Everything’s going to work out.
Brad: Exactly. She hates Taco Bell.
Shane: I used to actually live in Mobile. I used to live down there on the coast.
Brad: Yeah, I remember hearing about that. It was across the bay, too, right?
Shane: Oh yeah, across the bay. It’s a great area. It’s an awesome place. And I got a lot of friends and there are quite a few Flip Your Life community members down in old Mobile, Alabama. So, we’ll have to hook you up with some of those people down there.
Brad: Good people down here.
Jocelyn: Alright, Brad. So we heard a little bit about what you are trying to do online, but tell us a little bit more about your website and what you are currently selling or what you plan to sell.
Brad: Okay, my website is acousticworshiper.com. So, what it is, is I take my background from playing acoustic guitar in a worship setting, and all the things that I’ve learned and the different aspects of that, and helping people develop their own skills better for that. Because I think a lot of times, especially in worship bands, the acoustic guitar can kind of get overlooked or it’s just like that background instrument that people don’t really focus too much on. I like to look at it in a different way and try to help people do the same thing.
The first product I’ve created is just a little e-book, and it’s something that did just to take action and try to follow the blueprint, get something on there so I can have a payment gateway set up, and just go through the whole process to turn it as, Shane would say, from a hobby into a business, so that’s kind of where I am now, I’ve got a small list and I think there are 14 people on my list, and I do have a product for sale. It’s for pre-sale technically, but I’m almost done with it. I’ve had one person already at a list of 13 people, already purchase the pre-sale.
Shane: I love you, Brad. You’re amazing, dude!
Jocelyn: That’s awesome.
Shane: That is absolutely amazing. When you take action, things happen, and people are like, “Well, my list is small.” I was actually at a live event in California a couple weeks ago and the guy that was there did an amazing thing. Someone asked a question and they said, “Well, my list is only a hundred people.” You know, the standard, ‘My list is small.’ He said, “What? Only a hundred people?”
And he came off the stage and he walked into the middle of the aisle, and he looked left and right and he said, “All of you, stand up.” There was about 10 people in each section, right? And he said, “All of you, stand up.” And he kept doing that, and he had a hundred human beings actually stand up. And he goes, “Only a hundred emails? Those are a hundred people. Look, here’s 100 people! These are the same people that are sitting at home, opting in and reading your content. It’s not, ‘just 100 people’. It’s not just 14 people.”
When you said that, I was like, “Man, that’s 14 people that are in their church on stage, every Sunday, playing their guitar to worship and lead.” What an amazing pebble in the pond you have. You throw that pebble, it hits those 14 people, those 14 people ripple out into their whole congregation, and who knows how big the audience they’re playing in front of them is. You’ve got those 14 people. You got a buyer. Man, I hope you get one in 14 people to buy going forward. You’re going to make a lot of money.
Brad: Yeah, I’m happy with that percentage. It’s still is, to this day. Every time, when I get a new person subscribed to the list, I go to my wife and I’m like, “Look, another human!”
Shane: Exactly.
Jocelyn: Yes, and the cool thing is, what I love about having small numbers is that you can reach out and touch them in ways that you can’t do when you have a bigger audience. So when somebody joins your list, send them a personalized video and say, “Hey, I’m really glad to have you. Thanks for joining my list.” Do things when you’re small that you won’t be able to do, and it’s going to give you a great return.
Shane: Oh, yeah. You could literally send a message to every single person every time. Be like, “Hey, where are you from? What church do you play at? What’s your favorite song to play?” You know, you can just have these conversations with people right now that are going to lay a foundation that’s so strong, that when you have those thousand people, ten thousand-people, hundred thousand-people lists, then you’ll know exactly what all those people are thinking because it’ll probably be very similar to the people you draw in in the beginning.
Brad: Yeah. I kind of do something similar to that right now, but it’s through email only, so maybe video would be better. I just have part of my autoresponder send out a survey through Survey Monkey. I’ve had two people respond to that, but I think yeah, maybe the video would be more effective.
Shane: There are two tools that you can use for this that are really, really effective. One is Useloom, and it’s a quick thing. It’s like a browser extension that lets you kind of record quick videos. It gives you a link, you drop the link in an email. As soon as you get a notification, right now when you’re letting people on your list, you could cut a real quick video, drop it in an email, email it right back and be like, “Hey, thanks for joining my list.” And I love Useloom because it gives you a lot of analytics, and it tells you when they watch it.
Jocelyn: I think it’s free, too, right?
Shane: It’s free, yeah, Useloom is totally free. You put it in your Chrome browser. There’s another tool that does cost a little bit of money, but it’s super amazing and convenient, and it’s called Bonjoro, and it’s an app. We actually use this for our members.
When members join our community, Jocelyn sends them a personalized message on Bonjoro, and it happens on her phone. We have it set up where a member joins. We get it put into a queue, and Jocelyn’s like, “Oh, Brad joined today,” and she can just hit a button on her phone and record a message for our members. She sends it out and they get it in their email. But Bonjoro’s amazing because it has a little picture of the video, like a play button.
You get an email with Jocelyn’s face and a play button and it’s like, “Wait, what? Jocelyn sent me a message?” But you could do the same thing right now early in your email list to really get that connection with your audience. Just using two really simple tools. Is Bonjoro paid?
Jocelyn: Yeah, I’m not sure exactly how much it is.
Shane: It wasn’t much.
Jocelyn: I think it’s like $20 or $30 a month. But for right now when you’re just starting out, Useloom is just fine, and it’s a great way to figure out what people need, what their problems are, how you can help solve those. I mean, when you’re small, anyone listening to this, you should be doing this.
Let’s talk a little bit about what so far has been your biggest fear, confidence issue or mindset struggle that you’ve had to overcome or you are trying to currently overcome in your Flip Your Life journey?
Brad: Well, I think starting out, I knew that I could play the guitar well, good enough, and I had skills and knowledge in that area. But I think for me the initial struggle was, “Is anybody going to pay for this stuff? Is anybody going to want to give me a real money for products that I create?” I got past that or I am getting past that from being in the community, and so I’ll post action plans and people will cheer me on.
It’s just having that accountability, and an extra group of people to help motivate me and push me along has helped. Plus, the blueprint, when I don’t know what to do, I just do the next thing on the blueprint, and lo and behold, it’s starting to work! So I mean it’s been a little bit of the confidence of, is somebody going to pay money for it or is anybody interested in it? And then getting some traction and things are starting to work out.
Shane: This is an interesting niche. It is kind of weird because you’re like, “Okay, I teach people how to do the worship guitar stuff, but people are usually doing worship guitar stuff for free, right? So the question here in your mind is like, “Oh my goodness, will people pay to learn how to do something they love to do, but they’re doing for free?”
But really you’re not really solving the problem of the guitar thing, you’re basically selling confidence.
You’re selling that person confidence when they get up on that stage at church every Sunday or whatever, that, “Hey, you can do this! You’re going to be making a difference with your guitar playing. You’re going to be confident that people are going to like what you’re doing and playing the guitar.” And, also, I love what you said earlier, like the acoustic guitar kind of gets pushed to the back in some of the bigger worship bands.
But now you’re like bringing people confidence that they are making a difference in the band. They’re not the lead singer, maybe they’re not the lead guitarist or not the drummer, whatever, that people can really hear, but they’re really important to that worship experience, and they’re making a difference in their faith.
Jocelyn: I feel like this is something that people get confused a lot. People are like, “Well, there’s so much free stuff out there and no one’s going to want to pay for this.” Well, here’s the thing: Everyone will not want to pay for it. In fact, probably about 95% to 97% of people are not going to pay you for it. But you don’t have to have a lot of people to make a pretty good amount of money.
Shane: If you’ve got 100,000 people and you can get three percent of those people to give you $50 a month, well, you just found 3,000 people to pay you $50 a month.
Jocelyn: Not bad!
Shane: 150 grand a month is not a bad day at the office. But it’s just really interesting because when we sold digital products, people were like, “How do you get people to buy lesson plans?” when we first started doing it because nobody thought teachers would buy stuff from us. They’re like, “Teachers are cheap! Whatever, all those teachers aren’t going to give you any money.” And then we realized that we didn’t have to get all the teachers to give us money. We just needed this amount of people to make a good living.
We also realized the second thing: you never sell digital products. You never sell what you teach. You never sell content. What you sell is results. And the results that we were selling to teachers was we were giving them time. We were selling them time back. They got to leave work and go spend time with their kids. They had an extra hour or two a day to take care of themselves, and that’s exactly what you’re selling. You’re not just selling acoustic guitar; you’re selling confidence, you’re selling purpose and meaning, and that’s why people are going to listen to you, and they’re going to love you because of your personality and things like that.
Have you ever thought about that?
Brad: Not until I listened to a lot of your podcasts, and one of the things that stuck out that helped me out was that when you said that there’s a lot of people out there that do certain things, but there’s a group of people that will listen to me because they liked my personality. That’s really the reason why I follow y’all, is because I like how real you are and your personality and how you are family first. Once I’d realized that, yeah, there’s probably a group of people out there that are willing to pay, and they had the same values I do and they will listen because they, for some reason, like me and my personality and so that was encouraging to me.
Shane: Awesome.
Jocelyn: Exactly. We like you, too, Brad.
Shane: We like and you say ‘y’all’ a lot, which is amazing because you’re from Louisiana, baby.
Jocelyn: Tell us about some outside influences or obstacles you’ve had to overcome so far.
Brad: Well, for me, I have a computer background. I got a degree in college in computers, and so I work actually for a web hosting company right now. And so websites are just kind of like, I know how to do it. The website and technology side of it, that’s not really hard for me, although sometimes I get distracted, and shiny objects syndrome, and I’m like, “Oh, this is neat. What about this plugin?” But I’ve kind of toned that down.
I would say really the main struggle for me is just finding the time to actually work on it consistently because I’m the type of person where, if I’m not making consistent progress in something, I feel like I’m failing. And so I like, even if it’s just little bits at a time, I’d rather be able to consistently work on something 30 minutes a day whenever I can versus taking a full Saturday, and work in eight hours on something. It’s just been trying to find the time to do it amongst a fulltime job and side projects and everything else.
Shane: Yeah. I love how you said shiny object stuff, but that is an external struggle. That’s an obstacle for most people in the beginning, it’s just all the things you can do. Then with you, with your technical background, you’re like, “Ooh, new plugin, this is amazing!” You just sit and play with it. Like, you block off 45 minutes to work on your business and you’re like fidgeting all of the little options for your plugin and you’re like, “Oh man, I didn’t do anything in the last hour.” Right?
Brad: Right. And my wife was like, “What are you working on?” “Oh, you know…”
Shane: “A sweet plugin, that’s what I’m working on, what are you talking about?”
Jocelyn: Yeah, and I think that a lot of times people will do this. They’ll find the next person that is doing something cool that they think that is really working well. Or they’ll listen to 8,000 podcasts of a lot of different people and think, “Oh, well this person is successful. I need to do what they’re doing. But this person is also successful and I also need to do what they’re doing.” I think that can get you into trouble sometimes, it’s just looking around to see what everyone else is doing.
Something that Shane and I did recently is we talked about some of the values in our business, and one of the values that we have is doing a few things well. We’re not trying to do all the things, which is hard for some of us, more so than others.
Shane: Easy now, calm down. Okay.
Jocelyn: But we’re trying to do a few things really well, and so far this has served us well. Are we the shiniest, newest–
Shane: Most polished.
Jocelyn: Are we following all the latest trends in online marketing? Not necessarily, but we’re doing what we do, and we’re trying to do it as well as we can.
Shane: It’s funny, too, because you said time. Time is our most precious resource. If you don’t do a few things well, and you constantly chase all of the latest trends, you’re never going to have time to grow your business. It’s just not going to happen because the big gurus, guys that are producing content every minute of every day and are telling to you to hustle and grind for 80 hours, and, “Oh, now I’m on Snapchat. Now I’m on Instagram. If you’re not using, bots are going to fail,” right? All the fad hoppers.
The problem is if we listen to them, we’re going to jump around and we’re going to fail because we don’t have a cushion. We don’t have the background and we don’t have $100,000,000 coming in from all of our stuff. They can hop the fads because they’ve got 47 people working for them and doing all these things. But 90% of business owners, you got to focus on the three places you can make a difference so that you can build your business.
You gotta serve your people. You’ve got to focus on one platform: are you a podcaster or are you a Youtuber, or whatever, and you’ve got to focus on your email list. Like, if you can just do those, your platform, your people and your email list, your business is going to grow. I remember we were in Florida. I don’t remember if we were going on a Disney cruise or we’re going to Disney world. It had something to do with Mickey Mouse, I know that.
I was listening to a podcast in the gym at the hotel. This was a couple of years ago and it was Gary Vaynerchuk and he was saying, “If you’re not on Snapchat, your business will fail. It’s the only platform that matters going forward in the next three years,” and literally a few months later– Snapchat– nobody was talking about it. I just thought to myself, “Man, if I had jumped on that Snapchat bandwagon, I was doing all the Snapchat and putting the little ghost around my face on all my other social media so they’d go to Snapchat, would I have kept recording podcasts? Would I’ve have kept serving my members in the Flip Your Life community? What would I have done if I just jumped on that fad, and then it all disappeared?”
So I love that you’re looking at your time and you’re being strict with your time, and it’s very self-aware to know that you love plugins, and you want to play with the plugins, and you got to avoid those shiny object moments.
Brad: I’ve been following a lot of different podcasts, and trying to read everything I could for online business in business in general. I felt like I was making an inch of progress in so many different directions. All these different ideas. And then I came across y’all’s podcast, and I was like, “Man, these are real people. They have kids. They’re doing this. They put their marriage first, and their kids first, and everything before their business.” I hadn’t heard anything like that and so I just started unsubscribing from everything else, delete podcast subscription, everything. I just, “Flip your life,” that’s where I’m at now.
Shane: Dude. Everyone should just follow us and it will all be okay.
Jocelyn: And please don’t email us and say, “Snapchat has changed my business.”
Shane: Hey, if it did, more power to you. But it didn’t change ours. One thing you did say there that would tell everybody, in all seriousness, Jocelyn and I will never say our path is the only path. Most of the time we won’t even say it’s the best path. It’s the best path for some people. It’s better for some people than others. But the most important thing you can ever do in your business is: pick a path and stay on the path and don’t be distracted by the other paths because there’s a whole lot of ways to skin this cat, and more roads than one are going to get you there. So just pick your path, stay focused, stay consistent, and you’re going to get somewhere to where you want to go.
Jocelyn: Okay. We’ve had a great discussion so far, so tell us how we can help you get to the next level and flip your life. What is the biggest question you have right now for your online business?
Brad: Well, the biggest thing I have right now as, you know, like I said before, I’m working full time. Earlier this year, my wife, we decided she was going to quit her job. And so in doing that, she’s been able to help me out with a lot of side projects. In those side projects, my wife and I, we’re the worship directors at our church, which is an opportunity that came out of online business and social media activity. We also build websites for small businesses on the side to help us pay off some debts faster.
Also, I’ve got some side work where I help to repair laptops for my in-laws’ ambulance business. So a lot of different things going on. Most of the time it feels like I’m doing so many things, I’m not making much progress. My online business is the thing that I’m most passionate about, which I would like to be doing more. My full-time job takes up most of my time, and it also pays those bills right now. So just trying to figure out how to navigate that.
Once we get out of those extra debts, is there something where should scrap all those side projects to focus on my online business, or keep some of them there that are doing and making good money or you know, how should I navigate that once I get to that next step?
Shane: All right, let’s say you are out of debt today. Let’s say you paid off the last debt, that you screamed, “I’m debt free,” all that good stuff, right? And then you looked at your wife and the next sentence out of your mouth is, what? Would you say, “I’m going to quit these other side jobs, and focus on the online business.” Or would you say, “Man, that money coming in is pretty good.” Which would you choose? Like your gut instinct?
Brad: Ideally, I would like to get more time so I would be looking at, maybe, when I can quit my main job next.
Shane: Oh really?
Brad: Really focus more on the side things, yeah.
Shane: Let me go through each thing. What’s the greater potential? Your online business or the ambulance-computer-laptop repair?
Brad: Potential would be the online business, it’s more scalable, it’s not trading time for dollars, like with the laptop repair.
Shane: If you got rid of the ambulance repair job, would you starve and not be able to keep your lights on?
Brad: No.
Shane: So what should you do?
Brad: Let me get out of that one first.
Shane: Okay. There you go. So if you start asking yourself questions like that, then you’ll start coming up to the answers that you do know is right.
Jocelyn: It comes down to what you really want. That’s a conversation that you have to have. And this is hard one sometimes because you have to admit some things yourself, and you have to get on the same page with your spouse and that can be really challenging at times, as we can tell you about.
Shane: We had these hard discussions, too, like one of the questions we asked was, when can we quit our job? Well, we kind of circled the thing that was like about a year. But then we’ve talked about it and we were like, yeah, but if we just did it in two years, this would happen. That led to deeper discussions like, well, what if we could have the life we wanted in two years, but we could still do it in a year? What would we have to do to make that happen?
Well, one of those things for us was to sell our house. We sold a brand new house, 2,400 square feet, swimming pool, nice neighborhood for a house that was built in the 30’s. It was a little older and wasn’t quite as big, but it let us quit our job a year sooner. And then when we quit our job we said, you know, we’re making this much money part-time. What if we got rid of these responsibilities? What would happen if we were doing this full time? Would we get bigger? Would we grow faster?
And then I asked the same question like, can we pay our bills? Can we keep a roof over our head, can we keep our lights on and keep us fed if we quit this job if we stopped doing these other things? And for us, the answer was, “Yeah, we’d be all right. We might not be able to do as much stuff for a while until the business grows, but we’d be all right.”
Jocelyn: I don’t want to gloss over how hard these conversations are because when Shane brought these things up, I mean he’s the one who’s the crazy big thinker in this relationship. When he brought these things up, I mean, I was absolutely opposed to them. I did not want to sell my house. I did not want to even quit my job when we did. Those were things that I was just so scared of.
But when we started laying out the whole plan, okay, well what do we want in 10 years? Well, if we want that in 10 years, then what should we do in five years? Okay, well, if we need to do those things by five years, what should we do in the next year? Like, what can move this ball faster and further? And when we started thinking about it and we just started thinking, okay, if we did these things, could we reach our dreams faster? And the answer was yes. So we really had no choice but to do them.
Shane: And it’s funny because when I asked you those questions, it only took us about 30 seconds to get to the point where you clearly said, “Well, yeah, I could totally get rid of that, and we’d be fine.” It’s serving a purpose now because it throws money at the debt. But maybe it’s just that one thing is like going to free up this much time to do this, and then it’s almost like a snowball. Then the next thing goes. Then the next thing goes.
And it sounds like to me, you’re wrestling with, “Should I get rid of all my side hustles at once?” instead of thinking of a more measured approach of, “Wait, let’s just create a plan and follow it, and eventually the online business will take over for the side hustles. They’ll go away, and then maybe eventually the big business goes.” Or vice versa. When we quit our jobs, that was pretty dramatic. When we both gave up full time, tenured positions in school districts, it was like, “There it goes all the income!” But the online business was picking up enough where we could pay the bills. Now we had all that time back to grow it.
Jocelyn: But for us, we knew that was what we needed. Like, we had to have that violent shove into it to say, “Okay, either sink or swim.” Some people don’t need that and I think you just have to decide what’s the best approach for you. You guys have to talk about what you really want. Sometimes that’s a hard question to answer. I’m having a hard time with that one right now because we have achieved a lot of things in the last six years, which is awesome.
But now I’m at a place where I’m, like, okay, what do I want next? I’m having a hard time even answering that question. Not because I have all the things I want, but I have most of the things that I want and need. Sometimes it’s hard to answer that question. So you just need to have a really honest conversation about what both of you really want.
Shane: You said something about quitting your job, like do you think you could quit your job, and the side hustles would work to sustain you? Is that what you meant by that?
Brad: It wouldn’t right away. I guess I was more thinking like, what is a plan to where I can get to that point just to try to get more time back? Because, really, my job is good. I liked the people I work with, and it’s fulfilling work but it just takes a lot of time away from other things.
Shane: I mean you’ve got the side hustles thing already plus your online business, so you could have multiple plans. You could look at it on paper and say, well what if I didn’t go to my full-time job, but I picked up 10 more jobs on my little side website hustle? Then that buys you back 10 hours a week because it doesn’t take as much time. You can still pay the bills, but then you can work more on your online business.
Jocelyn: Or could you drop down to part-time in your current full-time job? Would that be an option? So you just have to think about all of the different ways that you can make this work. And you know, don’t be afraid to ask for stuff. I think sometimes people are like, “Oh, well my boss will never let me do that.” Well, how do you know? Have you ever asked?
Shane: This happened to Jocelyn. When we were getting married, we were moving to Morgantown, West Virginia and Jocelyn, she was the marketing coordinator at a commercial dishwashing corporation. Exciting. And what happened was, though, she was like, “Hey, I’m getting married, we’re moving here.” And it was like eight hours away from the Home Office and when she was, you know, she just thought I’m going to probably quit, but she kind of, at the last minute was, like, “Can I do this remotely?”
And they didn’t want to lose her. So they were like, “Yeah, do it!” We would have never thought. It was corporate, go to work every day in the factory, whatever, at the office. And this was like in 2004 or something. So this was before the big movement of working at home and things like that. Laptops still weighed 10 pounds. But that just happened.
And we were like, “Oh my gosh, you get to work at home now!” So maybe there are other alternatives or things like that you’re not even thinking about, but if you’ll just let yourself go– Like, if what you want is, “Man, I wish I had 10 more hours a week to work on my business and still be able to pay the bills.”
Jocelyn: And figure out some way to make that happen.
Shane: Yeah, just work backwards from it, there’s got to be a way.
Brad: Sounds good.
Jocelyn: All right. Was that helpful at all?
Brad: Yeah, it is. I hadn’t even thought about trying to plan in different ways and see if maybe there are other options besides just hard stopping on the job.
Jocelyn: Yeah, we never recommend everybody to just cut off all their income streams and go all-in on online business.
Shane: Don’t buy a tiny home and live in a van down by the river or something like that.
Jocelyn: Well, if you want to–
Shane: If you want to, then go for it, nomads out there.
Jocelyn: We don’t judge you if you don’t want to do that. But be smart about it as far as, don’t have no plan and go out there and try to make it work, but just be creative about the plan and the most important thing, as we’ve said, is to be crystal clear on what you want. If you’re really clear on what you want, it’s a lot easier to come up with plans to get you there.
Shane: I had a buddy of mine the other day, and he was calling me for some advice. He had just taken a job in another city, and they were going to sell their house. They were going to move to this other city and whatever, and he was like, “You know, I’m getting cold feet, man. I don’t know if I want to do this. I mean, I’ve got a good house here. I’ve got a good life here. I’m comfortable here, and this is a great adventure. It’s a great opportunity, but I’m like getting cold feet.”
And one of the things that I kind of just communicated with him is, “Look, life is nothing but a series of check marks. You know, you go up like the stock market ticker and it’s going up. Well, maybe there is a dip because you do something that changes things. You know, we had that dip. We were going up, and we went down because we quit our jobs at the same time. We moved into a smaller house, all those things. But then the checkmark flew back up to the top of the chart because we took a chance.
If the path you choose that gets you into that dip keeps going down. Here’s the thing: all it is, is a choice to go a different direction or even reverse it. Everything besides death is reversible. So I told him, I was like, “Hey, look, don’t sell your house. Rent it out. Go try this for a year. And if you don’t like it, say bye to your renters, and move back in, and go back to the way it was.” You can probably get your old job back; you could find another job that’s similar. You can go back and change things.
We knew if we quit our jobs while we were still teachers, if it didn’t work and things were going bad, we would just find other teaching jobs or we would try to get our old jobs back or something. We could change it back. When you’re making decisions like this, like, “Do I give up the ambulance job?” Well, that’s your family. If it doesn’t work in three months, they’ll probably let you keep fixing their laptops. Right?
If you cut down three of the businesses you make websites for, well, you’re in Mobile, Alabama. There’s a lot of businesses there. You could probably pick up three to five more if that didn’t work. You’re a skilled tech guy. You could probably get a job somewhere in a different situation or your old job back.
People think we live in such absolutes. “If I do this, then everything will change forever,” but really? Not really. It’s just a checkmark. You go down, you go back up. If it didn’t work, you change directions, or you just reverse it and go back to where you were and everything will be okay. So if you can get past that fear of making those changes, and try a few of those things, you’re going to settle in, dude, to something that works. And so is everybody else that’s listening to this.
Brad: My personality type is not really to take big risks. I think it’s just I’ve been feeling like I’m not making progress. I’m like, “What can I do to shake things up?”
Shane: Hey, man, take ten small risks. Who says you got to take a big one, right? Take one small risk a month, and you’ve taken 10 combined huge risks by the end of the year, right? So maybe you don’t take a big risk, but just take a few small ones until they add up to something huge.
Jocelyn: Well, Brad, that was a lot to unpack and I think that you have a lot of work to do, but you are definitely on the right track. So with everything that we just talked about today, tell us one thing that you plan to do in the next 24 hours to make progress on your goal.
Brad: I’m going to figure out how to use Useloom and start sending videos to my small list and try to build more quality before the quantity gets too big.
Jocelyn: Alright, Awesome.
Shane: Love it, man. Way to take action? You’re going to be all right, man. You’re doing great, and you’re taking action and consistency beats proficiency every time, dude. So if you just keep taking those consistent actions, those consistent small risks, it’s going to add up to something big for you and your family, man, and we can’t wait to see where you ended up.
Brad: Awesome. Thanks.
Shane: Hey guys, thanks again for listening! We hope you enjoyed today’s podcast. If you still need more help with any of the topics that we discussed today, or maybe you have a question about something that we went over, we have all the training and support you need inside of the Flip Your Life community. With over 50 training courses on dozens of online business topics, active community forums, and live member calls with me and Jocelyn every single month, the Flip Your Life community is your opportunity to get the help and support you need to make your online dreams a reality.
And the best part is you can get started today for free. That’s right. All you have to do is go to flippedlifestyle.com/free, and you can get full unlimited access to everything we offer inside of the Flip Your Life community at no cost for 30 days. Your first month is absolutely free!
If you sign up today, you can get unlimited access to all of the courses inside of our training area, unlimited access to all of our community discussion forums, and you’ll get to attend our next two live member calls with me and Jocelyn, where you can ask questions about your online business.
And it’s all free for the first month. All you have to do is go to flippedlifestyle.com/free and start your free month today. That’s flippedlifestyle.com/free. We can’t wait to see you inside!
Jocelyn: All right, it is time to move into our Can’t Miss Moment segment of the show, and these are moments that we were able to experience that we might have missed if we were still working at our normal 9-to-5 jobs. Today’s Can’t Miss Moment is Anna’s cheerleading team winning the grand champions in the US Finals Champion’s Challenge.
I didn’t really understand all of this cheerleading stuff when we first started, so I’m going to give you a little bit of background for this.
In the world of cheerleading, there are thousands of teams and each team is in a particular division. Our division is the Level One Tiny Prep Division, so that means ages five to six, and they do what’s called level one skills. Each level has a certain type of skills that they’re allowed to do. Of those thousands of teams, there are probably hundreds of Tiny Prep teams, and there were probably a few dozen that went to this particular competition.
The US finals, there are eight different competitions all over the United States and we went to the one in Indianapolis, Indiana. What they do at the end of all of these competitions is they take the videos from each competition, each of the eight competitions, they take the first place team from each of those eight competitions. Then they judge the video, so those are all judged separately. And from those videos, they choose basically a national champion for this competition.
Anna’s team won that! We were so excited. They have been working so hard all year and they were the top grand champions of the US Finals Champion’s Challenge and we were very, very happy about that.
You can see pictures on today’s show notes at flippedlifestyle.com.
The cool thing about it is they will also be receiving rings and a special banner for the gym that says that they were the grand champions of this challenge, so we just love our cheerleading team. It is awesome. We have such great people.
You would never think that a cheerleading team from such a small area could compete with big teams all over the country, and even all over the world, so it’s really cool. We love being a part of the team. And it’s a Can’t Miss Moment because I’ve mentioned it before on the show, but before when we were teachers, I don’t think there’s any way we could have done the cheerleading team. There’s a lot of travel, there’s a lot of expense. You have to stay in hotels, you have to pay for all of the competition fees, the uniform — all of the things that go along with it.
And when we were teachers, I’m not sure we would’ve been able to do it. So I’m just very thankful that we’re able to give her these opportunities, and that they won the championship.
Shane: You know as much as we love our Can’t Miss Moments, there’s actually one thing we love even more, and that’s a success story from our Flip Your Life community members.
Jocelyn: Today’s Can’t Miss Moment is from Brad, and Brad sold his e-book while he was asleep.
His message says, “This morning I woke up to a sale. I’ve been pressed for time lately to work on my online business, but I was inspired by Shane on one of the member calls to email my list more. So I did. I also published a blog post last night. I’ve been trying to force myself to take action, like putting my first e-book up for sale even though I’m not finished with it yet. Now that I’ve sold it, that will motivate me even m, even more, it done. Also, I only have 13 people on my list. It feels good to see things progressing. Thanks to the Flip Your Life community and S&J for all you have done to help me make progress.”
You are so welcome, Brad. We’re so happy to have you. And what Brad is talking about is that we have a bi-monthly member call every month, where we get on live and he answer your questions about online business. It’s for members only. And we do it twice every month and we gave him some advice. He took action on it and he made sales. So what are you waiting for, y’all? Jump in our community!
Shane: Before we sign off, we like close every one of our shows with a verse from the Bible.
Today’s verse comes from Proverbs 4:25-27. “Look straight ahead and fix your eyes on what lies before you. Mark out a straight path for your feet. Stay on the safe path. Don’t get sidetracked.”
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’ll see you, then!
Jocelyn: Bye!
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