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In today’s podcast we’re going to help Scott and Alyssa figure out how to balance work life while growing their online business – Happen to your Career.
Every couple and parent has similar questions to Scott and Alyssa.
How do you record a podcast with kids?
When do you work on your business vs. play with your kids? (when you’re also working a full-time job)
How do you build lasting relationships with other people online?
We’re going to cover all of those and more to help them figure out where to focus on in their business to see the greatest returns.
You will learn
- How to work together as a married couple.
- The importance of delegation and automation.
- How to schedule priorities so you know when it’s time to work. (and not)
- What kind of live events to attend to build better relationships.
- Where you should be investing your business profits.
- The importance of batching your content.
- Why you shouldn’t “Be Everywhere”.
Links and resources mentioned in today’s show
- Scott and Alyssa’s website happentoyourcareer.com
- Jill and Josh Stanton – Screw the Nine to Five
- Live event we hosted in San Diego
- Chris Ducker – Tropical Think Tank
- Flip your Life Program
- Jocelyn’s Elementary Librarian Website
- Apply to be on the show
- If you’re interested in a consulting call with us
Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!
Click here to leave us an iTunes review and subscribe to the show! We may read yours on the air!
You can connect with S&J on social media too!
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’re going to help Scott and Alyssa take their online business to the next level.
Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us, each week, as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? Alright, let’s get started.
JOCELYN: Hey guys, welcome back to another Flipped Lifestyle podcast. We are super excited today to bring you a Flipped podcast and today’s guests are Scott and Alyssa Barlow. We are very excited to have you guys today, welcome to the show.
SCOTT: Thanks.
JOCELYN: And I want to just say that our Flipped podcast is where we bring people on for a consulting call, and they ask us questions, and we help them to either get started in the online business or in this case, with Scott and Alyssa, to really try to work to take that to the next level because they’re already having some success online and we are going to get into that in just a little bit later. But first of all, tell us about yourselves, where you are from, and anything that you want to share with our listeners.
ALYSSA: Okay, I’m Alyssa and we are from Moses Lake, Washington, located in Central Washington State; if you don’t know where that is, it’s a pretty small town. We both graduated from high school here, left for a few years and then eventually made our way back.
SCOTT: We tried to get away, it didn’t work.
SHANE: It always sucks you back. It does.
SCOTT: It always sucks you back.
ALYSSA: We have three children, our oldest is seven, we have a six-year-old and a four-year-old. So, they are all in a pretty tight span there.
SCOTT: Boom, boom, boom. Three in a row, 18 months apart, each one.
ALYSSA: And I am a former teacher, I guess, you could say. I still work a lot in my mom’s classroom so I’m still immersed in there, but I’ve been home for three years now?
SCOTT: Yeah, it’s been about three years; we’ve paid off a whole bunch of debt from –
SHANE: How much did you pay off?
SCOTT: 133,000 dollars [Crosstalk]
SHANE: Wow! How long did it take you to pay that off?
SCOTT: Three and half years.
SHANE: Let me ask you a better question: how long did it take you to build it up?
SCOTT: Oh man!
ALYSSA: Probably about –
SCOTT: Six years or so.
ALYSSA: – six or seven years.
SHANE: You got out in half the time.
ALYSSA: Yeah.
SCOTT: Yeah.
SHANE: That’s a short sentence man, the judge was easy on you, you know what I mean?
SCOTT: Yeah, so then we got all that paid off and then we are thrilled to pieces to bring Alyssa home, and then she’s been able to be home with the kids, and then yeah, about a year and a half ago, started the business, and that’s been in transition. A new adventure, I guess you could say after getting all the debt paid off.
SHANE: So let me ask you this, so do you work anywhere Scott, besides your online business right now?
SCOTT: I do. I have a full-time job; I work with a company doing HR work for them.
SHANE: Okay awesome. And then tell us a little bit now about your online business, what you are doing, how much you are making, and also like what do you want to use this business for? Like how do you want this to flip your life?
SCOTT: Yeah, absolutely. So really what we do is we help people make crew transitions and crew changes. We help them stop doing work that they don’t want to be doing, and then figure out what they actually, really do want to be doing, and then build a plan to be able to get there. So, our business is called ‘Happen to Your Career’, happentoyourcareer.com but that’s what we do in a nutshell. And the real reason – and it might be a little bit different for both of us, so I might be interested in hearing Alyssa answer on this too, but I mean, for me, it was a case where, I think it was like three or four years ago, we went to our oldest little soccer game, like soccer-tots, you know, it wasn’t even real soccer, they had hula hoops and all that kinds of stuff.
SHANE: Right.
SCOTT: And they are chasing the ball around and everything, and I was there in the middle of the day ‘cause I was traveling. We were supposed to be travelling later that day and at that point in time, I looked around, and I think I was the only dad there. And my kids are running over to Alyssa and me, and they are like, ‘Hey dad, look at this!’ kick the soccer ball, completely miss it, whatever. And then that’s kind of the point in time for me, where I realized that I wanted to be there for not just the big things like the plays and the events and everything, but I really wanted to be there for the small things too and have that flexibility.
SHANE: Awesome, that is awesome. So your website is called happentoyourcareer.com?
SCOTT: Yes.
SHANE: So basically instead of your career happening to you, kind of thing, right?
SCOTT: Exactly.
SHANE: Yeah, and it’s funny you say those small moments, because like that’s the kind of – like we always talk about our can’t-miss moments at the end of all of our shows, and it’s so funny because at first we were like, ‘Oh, these will be cool to be going to like Disneyland and things like that’ but it’s so funny how the vast majority of them are just like you said, we always notice like I’m the only dad that’s dropped Issac off at school, or the only couple that comes together. It’s always either one parent or the other in every other car, and here we are, we got our whole family there to drop Issac off. Those are really cool little moments and that’s an amazing reason to flip your life. So, let’s talk a little bit about ‘Happen to Your Career’; where are you right now as it comes to like, audience size, maybe a little bit about – you don’t have to be like specific, but how much money it’s making, like monthly or kind of ballpark and tell us where that is right now.
SCOTT: Yeah, no, I don’t mind being specific. So we have a mailing list of about well, let’s see, some of it is redundant but it’s a little bit over 1000. Realistically, if you take out the redundancy, it’s probably about almost 700 or so.
SHANE: Okay.
SCOTT: And then last month was our largest month and we made a little bit under 3000 dollars, but it hasn’t necessarily been consistent. I mean, it’s been up and down and a little bit of coaching revenue here, and then, little bit of online stuff. Had a membership site at one point that we shut down just recently. It was profitable but it took so much time and it wasn’t really scalable for as fast as it was growing. So, shut that down and moved completely to courses at this point, and now we are just really putting a lot of time and effort into trying to figure out how to make those grow.
JOCELYN: Yeah, absolutely. You guys are already having a good amount of success, so let’s see what we can do to hopefully get you to the next level. So let’s go ahead and just jump into your first question for us today.
SCOTT: Yeah, and we’d love to ask you about what are some of the best ways that you found, I’m putting the business aside for a second, but what are some of the best ways you have found to work together as a couple with an online business?
SHANE: Alright, that’s a great question, we’ve talked a lot about this in various podcasts and we’ll link to a few of those in the show notes where we have talked a lot about how we share calendar, we schedule, and we do things like – all those things to organize kind of our planning time together. And that’s the biggest thing that we probably do just to make sure that we are always on the same page because especially when you are working with your spouse, if you get off of the page in your marriage, everything is going to derail. It’s just going to cause problems everywhere, and when you add a business to the mix, you just have like double the chance to screw everything up; you know what I mean?
SCOTT: Yeah.
SHANE: But the biggest thing that I think that we do is that we really try to delegate and stay out of each other’s way because if we try to – we have learned that if we try to work on the exact same thing at the exact same time, that we usually end up in conflict because Jocelyn and I are very different. We have very different ways of looking at things, very different beliefs on how something should be accomplished in our online business, and we just realized that we cannot do that anymore. So Jocelyn and I, probably over the last two months, have really been working very hard at delegating to each other and completely letting go of certain parts of our business. So we are gonna go over a couple of things that we’ve done recently online. So, things we are talking about kind of like, putting off on the other person, and maybe that can give you some ideas how you can kind of divide the labor in your own online business.
SCOTT: Perfect.
JOCELYN: Okay so just today, we were talking about some things that we wanted to do to our website, and Shane and I were really in a conflict about that because we just have a lot of different ideas about you know, what makes a good, nice-looking website, things like that –
SHANE: Or a solid user experience, just what we want to kinda present our brand out there to everybody.
JOCELYN: Yeah, so we had some conflict about that and I was – as I was laying awake at like 3:30 this morning, because I couldn’t go back to sleep, I was thinking about this whole user experience thing. So when Shane woke up, I’m like, ‘Okay, I’ve got all these ideas, you know, here they are’ and he’s like, ‘Yeah, I don’t know’. And I was like, ‘Okay, we have got to divide this out because this is just never gonna work’. And you know, Shane’s good at a lot of things and I’m really good at a lot of different things; so we have decided that we just probably need to draw a line there and say, okay, I’ll take care of all the design and user experience aspects of our business, and then he handles some other things.
SHANE: And that’s tough. The tough part is you don’t ever want to let anything go. Both of us wanna control everything.
SCOTT: Yeah.
SHANE: And it’s just like marriage; like you know, both of us have an idea how we want to discipline our children, both of us have an idea like where we want to live, or how we want to move around, or what we want to do and there has to eventually become a point where you’ve said, okay, this is going to have to be your decision, or this is going to be your decision. My – what I’m doing right now is, I’m handling all of our sales and marketing funnels; like I’m setting up all of our back end stuff, how the emails deliver, how our messaging looks in our brand when it comes to emails and things like that because Jocelyn absolutely hates doing that stuff. She hates the tediousness of getting in there, and I really love it, it’s like kind of my thing and we – the same thing, at first we were like, okay, let’s – ‘what if we do this?’, ‘what should this email say?’, ‘what should the subject be?’, ‘how should we word this?’ ‘Where are we going to link them to?’ and it was just a giant, cluster mess, you know what I mean?
SCOTT: Mm-hmm.
SHANE: So I think when you are working with your spouse, the number one piece of advice, besides being on the same page schedule-wise, ‘cause if you take care of that first, that’s going to eliminate a lot of the junk. The biggest thing is, take all the tasks in your business and whether you are perfect at them or not or whatever, delegate it to each other and get out of each other’s way. Don’t try to come in behind and look it over, don’t try to throw in your two cents; just say, this is yours, this is mine, go. Let’s do this together.
SCOTT: That’s ridiculously helpful. I’m thinking about some invoicing and stuff that we just did for coaching and you know, Alyssa took care of it. I came in behind, it really probably wasn’t that big of a deal but I’m like ‘Oh, I think it should probably say this; could we tweak like these three words –’ or whatever? And they had already been paid for and –
JOCELYN: Exactly.
SCOTT: So it wasn’t that big of a deal.
JOCELYN: Yeah, it’s so hard to let stuff like that go and I’m the person in our relationship who has to come behind and say, you know, what about this, or you didn’t do this right or you didn’t spell this right, like, my name or things like that.
SHANE: Like today, when she woke up, she literally woke up at 3:30 and couldn’t go back to sleep ‘cause it was on her mind and this morning, she was like, ‘Listen, I got to take over the website design. I know you want this, and you want that but I’m changing everything and I got to do this.’ I’m like, ‘Alright. [Crosstalk] I didn’t care; you know what I mean? It’s like it’s a little bit easier for me to let go of that, you know?
SCOTT: Yeah.
JOCELYN: Yeah, and it really does help; I mean, it’s kinda hard to do sometimes to let that go but it really is more helpful when you do. We have been pretty successful at doing this lately. This is actually a biblical principle that we go by on this too because in the Bible it says, ‘When two work together, they get a greater return for their labor’ and it’s because each is pulling his own weight. And your combined effort, when you are both putting in all of your energy, is going to have a greater yield on the back end. But when you are both pulling the same rope, it’s not going to work. You are not going to get that same, multiplier effect alright? Well, let’s get to your second question guys, hope that was helpful on the first one.
ALYSSA: It was, yeah. So how do you guys go about prioritizing time with family, versus time spent on the business? So right now, Scott said he has a full-time job, so he does leave the house for that. I am here all the time and then he is also working on the business; so how do you guys prioritize the time difference?
JOCELYN: This is definitely tough and we understand where you are coming from because we also have a six-year-old and a four-year-old, we also were both working full-time jobs in 2012 and 2013 when we were first getting started in online business. So we have been here before and we know how tough it is. The thing about it is, you really need to schedule everything, and I know that that’s sort of like a flipping remark; a lot of people talk about this but it really is true. We have a calendar, and pretty much every single block of time is taken with something because the thing is that people in general, are not good multitaskers. Like nobody is. We think we are good multitaskers, but we are really not.
SCOTT: That’s one person hearing that more than the other in this conversation. [Crosstalk]
JOCELYN: Yeah, exactly. And you know, this is something that I had to teach myself too because I thought that was good at multitasking, but the thing about it is, if you are sitting on your computer and you are doing a lot of laundry, you’re doing a lot of dishes, you are kinda sort of playing with your kids a little bit, you know, you think you are doing all of these things and getting all these things accomplished, but you are really not. So we have even scheduled things in like playing with our children, which sounds ridiculous, but if it’s scheduled in, that means that I’ll play with them distraction-free. I don’t do laundry, I don’t do dishes, I don’t pick up around the house, I don’t do anything but play with my children during that time. I schedule in time to do house work. So if I’m scheduled to do house work, I don’t play with my children and I don’t work on my online business. I do housework and you know, that makes it a lot easier for me to say it as a mom, ‘Hey, mommy’s got something I have to do right now, but our play time is in 30 minutes’ or whatever the case may be. So that is kind of the way that we have been doing this and it’s been pretty successful so far.
SHANE: And also too, we prioritize that in our schedule and we even did this like, when we were working full-time – like, right now, it’s a little bit easier for us because you know, Issac gets home at 3 o’clock and Ana goes to a babysitter during the day, and she comes home at 3 o’clock. So both our kids get here at the same time and we always block off right now, 3:00 to 7:30 and that is family time, period. We stop working, we stop doing cleaning everything and we spend time with our kids. Now sometimes, we are watching TV with them, it’s not four straight hours of playing chiefs and ladders, you know what I’m saying, but like I’m just saying that if our kids come up to us during that time and wanted to read at that time, or do a coloring book, or whatever, we’ll stop what we are doing and play with them or whatever. But we would prioritize our time even when we were both working full jobs. We would look at the schedule – there were things that were non-negotiable. Like you have a nine-to-five job that pays your bills, you have to go to work, but to me, that just meant that that time did not exist to me. It was gone time. I couldn’t schedule my kids there or you have a PTO meeting or whatever, there’s church, things like that, that have to go in the schedule that are non-negotiable. But then you look and you say wait a minute though, all of the hours from 5:00 o’clock to 10:30 before I go to sleep, are free. So you totally have control how you choose that time. So we would go in and schedule time with kids, this hour and then we would work on our online business after they went to bed. Or we would say, take the kids, you know, down to McDonalds, put them in play land or whatever; right? And we would schedule that first and what that did was, even if it was only 30 minutes to 45 minutes, of actual, hardcore, focused playtime, number one, we knew we were gone get them in because that was the first priority on our list and number two, they got total, undivided attention during – even if it was a short time. So they felt like they were the number one thing in that situation. So that’s always the advice we give to everybody is, prioritize what’s the most important first and write that in your calendar, and then fill in when you are going to work on your online business and everything else.
SCOTT: Love that. Well, we schedule everything else, we’ve got like Google calendar set up and everything else but what we don’t do is, we don’t schedule out when we are going to play with the kids and we don’t always do that first. So that’s phenomenal. I love that.
JOCELYN: Yeah, I love that part because it gives me permission to not have to do everything because for me as a mom, I feel like I need to do this list of 500 things, and if I’m not doing at least ten of them simultaneously, then I’m a bad mom. So that’s really given me permission; it’s been freeing for me to know that it’s okay that I’ll let everything else go for an hour or two hours or whatever time that I have given myself to spend time with my kids. So I think that’s so important really for all of us to do.
ALYSSA: Kind of along the same lines with that question, just out of curiosity for us, like our kids we’re watching them play outside at the park right now across the street with the neighbor babysitter, but what do you guys do with your kids while you are recording? I mean, most of the time, Scott’s in here by himself recording and I’m trying to [Unclear 0:17:08] kids and keep them quiet, but when your children are home, what do you do with them while you are recording?
SHANE: The first thing we do is we always try to – any time that the kids are going to be home, we always try to schedule to record when they’re asleep. Just like right now we are talking to you guys, we’re on a Sunday night here, 8:30, our kids are unconscious upstairs right now.
ALYSSA: Okay.
SHANE: But sometimes –
JOCELYN: Because they are sleeping.
SHANE: Because they are sleeping, not because we knocked them out; you know what I mean? But that’s happened before though, we’ll be recording and they’ll sneak in and kinda and just sit down and just look at us; and we’re like, ‘Please don’t start screaming’ you know what I mean? We just kinda roll with it if that happens but when we do record during the day time, and this is probably another great point that anybody could hear out there is, listen, we use child care. If we can’t find someone to keep the kids, we have a babysitter every day, Monday to Friday, we take Ana – we take Issac to school at around 7:30, and we drop Ana off somewhere around 7:45 and then both come home at 3:00 because just going back to that focused time in getting things done, we can’t work when they are here. We just can’t do it. And we told ourselves very early that as long as our priorities are intact, we are doing this for our family’s future, we are doing this for our kids, and we are going to allot time where everything is going to be perfectly about them, but they are going to understand that we do have to make a living, and we are not going to feel guilty for getting childcare to give our kids a better life. So if you need to record and you wanna do some things like that, and you are having trouble doing that, even from a stay-at-home mom standpoint, if you want to jump in and do some things on the podcasting, get a babysitter for two hours and don’t feel guilty about it because you are getting all of your work done faster, distraction-free, and that’s going to make it so much easier later in the day when you are playing with your kids that you don’t have all that on your mind. You don’t have to be distracted; you can focus on them when you are actually with them. So, we use childcare and we are very unapologetic about that. Some people sent us messages like, ‘I can’t believe you work at home and you send your kids to a babysitter’, and I’m like have you ever tried to record your podcast with a four-year-old in the room? It doesn’t work very good.
SCOTT: Clearly not.
SHANE: So, that’s what I would say to that question.
ALYSSA: Oh, that’s awesome.
SHANE: Alright, what do you got next for your online business guys?
SCOTT: So how about – what advice do you have for building relationships in the online industry? And then really balancing that against everything else that needs to be done; because I really feel like I’m choosing constantly and we are choosing constantly just – I mean obviously there’s so much that needs to be done. I know that’s important, and I want to continue to do it, and somebody has to put out the podcast, and the blog post and everything else along those lines –
JOCELYN: I would say the number one thing that we absolutely recommend, are live events. And not just any live events, you need to have an intimate live event that doesn’t have 500-1000 people at it. I mean, that’s not to say that you can’t get any kind of benefit from those things because I’m sure that there are people out there that get tons of benefits from it but for us, the best thing that we have ever done, and the bus money that we have ever spent is going to live events with maybe like 20-50 people, where you can really get those close relationships, and really build relationships for people that you can have accountability with later. I’m actually talking – I have a Facebook conversation going on right now with a friend of mine that I met at a live event, and we’re going to be accountability partners this week. We both have something that’s really pressing that we need to get done, and so I just sent her a little quick Facebook message and said, ‘Hey do you want to be my accountability partner for this week? I really need somebody to hold me accountable to get this done by Friday.’ And she was like, ‘Yeah, I need to get this done by Friday’. So I mean, just those little things, it seems so basic but going to live events, it has really, really changed the way that our business has operated.
SHANE: And like Jocelyn said, it’s also like, you know, how to go to like a big names live event. Like, we’ve been to big-name live events, we’ve been to small live events, you know, from lesser people too. The most important relationships we’ve built are with other people that are at or a little bit ahead of us at our level of you know, our business and you just – and that’s the people you get close with. That’s the people you build mastermind groups with, that’s the people that – you know, we have Jill and Josh Stanton from screwtheninetofive.com, we met them at a live event, and we talk to them every single day. I mastermind with Josh, and Jocelyn and I mastermind with Jill and Josh at least every week. And we just help each other move forward in our online business, and that would have never happened just being in a Facebook group, or being on – you know, talking on some guru’s Facebook page with other people. We’ve met them in person, we ate dinner with them, we had a good time, we got to know each other, and then we stayed in contact after and that’s really where it’s all about, is going to those intimate live events. But I would also say too, like you said something I thought was interesting there like ‘But somebody’s still got to do all these other things –’ and blah-blah-blah, right?
SCOTT: Yeah.
SHANE: So how do you go to a live event when you got other stuff that needs to be done in your business? Well, especially you guys, because you are a making a little bit of income off this website now, you need to take about a third of what you are making and you need to start hiring VAs. I mean, you need to start finding automation tools that are going to help you get some of that stuff off of your plate. We’ve got probably four or five VAs that we work with, at any given time; we just are switching to Infusionsoft to make sure that we are automating – we are automating every single thing that we can automate. You’ve got to batch content, man, you’ve got to get down and say, I’m gonna go two days and I’m gonna come out of this with 20 podcasts or something crazy. And you’ve got to get all that stuff off your plate so that you can free yourself up for that time to go on those trips. And another thing too is, like, on those trips, you actually get a ton of work done on those trips because a lot of times, you know, the kids are staying with the grandparents, you go by yourself – we work on the plane, we work at night in the hotel room, we get a ton of stuff done when we actually travel at live events.
JOCELYN: Yeah, and I just wanted to throw in there that live events are a tremendous motivator too because you don’t want to show up to this intimate live event and be like, ‘Yeah, I haven’t been really doing too much – ’
SHANE: I’m a bum. I got a website on that Geocities thing, [Crosstalk] you know what I’m saying?
JOCELYN: Yeah, and I mean, there’s nothing that lights a fire under us personally than knowing that we have a live event. I mean, we are just so motivated right now, we’re like, ‘Okay, what can we do? What can we do to get ahead and you know, just really show people that we have been working hard?’ And it’s just – it’s an awesome, awesome thing; if you can go to any live events, I highly recommend it.
SHANE: And it’s another thing like Jocelyn saying, be motivated, we always want to be at a stopping point before we get to a live event. Like in this Infusionsoft switch and all these things, our core businesses are not Flipped Lifestyle. We got a lot of other things going on and so like when we go to live events, we usually don’t talk about Flipped Lifestyle, we talk about our other businesses ‘cause they make a lot more money. So like we are going to go to this event, we made a plan back in like February, where do we need to be at when we sit down at this live event and start masterminding with these really high-level people? I want to hand them a piece of paper and say, here’s where we are, draw on it and show me what to do different and better. So it motivates us to get all this stuff done before we even get there, so we know where we wanna go and have some goals in mind after we do the live event. And with all that being said, we have to say that we are hosting another live event –
SHANE: Exactly, I like that.
JOCELYN: But seriously, the reason that we starting having live events is not just like as a moneymaker, I mean, that part’s great, but the most important thing for us is that we wanted to give people the same kind of opportunities that live events have given us. And we just had one a few weeks ago, back in San Diego, and it was amazing. And I’m not just saying that because we hosted it, I mean, the people there were just unbelievable and we just had the best time and people are still – I mean, weeks later, people are still active in the Facebook group, they are still fired up about their online business, they are forming their own masterminds, I mean, it’s just amazing.
SHANE: Another thing too is that at live events, you know, you always look online, you’re like, ‘Hey, you can go to Social Media Marketing World of 5000 people, or I can go to NMX with 30000 people, you know, and like someone wrote a question to us one time that said, ‘How to do find these intimate live events?’ And we were like, man, that’s a good question because it was hard to find them. We were lucky enough to find a couple with 20 people here and – one was 300 people but we got to like interact with about 20-30 people later that night. But like we said, we need to do our live events and we need to have them for like 20 people and we need to have these in other places besides California because it seems like every live event in America is in California. So we are really going to focus on doing them on the East Coast and the South and try to provide these opportunities to get people together there that are at the same level, and get those relationships, you know, stuck together where they can really move forward. So that’s kind of to answer that question about relationships is number one, batch your content, get some VAs, use a little bit of that money, invest it back in your business and free your time up, and then find you a great live event, with a good host that is going to really connect you and help you move forward with your online business.
SCOTT: Super-helpful because I sort of, feel like, I don’t know, Alyssa and I have talked about it a whole bunch but I sort of, feel like, I don’t know, taking the time and money and everything else to go to a particular event, I feel – I don’t know, almost feel guilty. That’s not the right word for it –
SHANE: You can’t do that, you cannot do [Crosstalk] it’s just like the thing we talked about earlier with having a babysitter. You can never feel guilty for taking – ‘cause you are investing time so that – it’s like ‘live like no one else so later you can live like no one else.’ We are going to the Philippines to Chris Ducker’s ‘Tropical Think Tank’ and we’re going to be gone from our kids for seven days and like eight nights. It’s like the longest we have ever been away from our kids but I know that that is what we have to do right now because we need to get around some really high-level people that put their money down, travel halfway across the world to be at this event, because they are serious and they are going to help us get to the next level that we want to be at. And you know, our kids are going to have a blast with their grandparents, they don’t care. They are going to go, ‘Man, dad’s back, dang, I got to leave grandma and grandpa’s.’ You know, what I mean, so don’t ever feel guilty about this.
JOCELYN: And in my opinion, there is no substitute for a good live event; I mean, there’s just not. People will tell you that yeah, this Facebook group, or this forum or whatever, but honestly, we’ve done all kinds of things like this and there is no substitute.
SHANE: Alright guys that was a great question. I think we have probably got time for two more if we could squeeze them in here real quick. So what is your next question?
ALYSSA: Alright, how do you guys balance putting out really good content versus working on things that are paid for? I know you kind of delved on that a little bit with the VAs and stuff like that, but how do you balance the content that you are putting out for money, versus just good content?
SHANE: Alright guys, that’s a great question; I did touch on this and the last question you asked was the biggest thing we do first of all, is we batch content as much as possible. On our schedule for April, for example, we are batching content over a two-week period and we should have our podcast and all the content for Flip Your Life – I’m sorry, Flippedlifestyle.com including Facebook posts, emails, everything done through September and the reason we did that was because our other businesses get really super-busy in July and August and we are afraid – ‘cause that’s our teacher base – we own teacher sites so that’s going to be like a really busy time and there’s a good chance we are going to get behind our podcast. So we just said, you know what, let’s just record everything through September, well be done, and we’ll be coming off the off ramp for school starting and we will be able to jump right back on Flipped Lifestyle and it’s only a few weeks our really when you look at it. It’s not – nothing is going to be outdated by then, all the information that we give out. The second thing that we do is, whenever we have a conflict in content creation, the thing that always wins is, what will make us more money. So like for example, couple of weeks ago, we were working on some different products, we were working on some different content streams, different things like that, emails and stuff, and we looked down and we said, you know what, we have an unfinished e-course on how to do – use WordPress to build a website. That’s kind of the next phase in Flip Your Life that we are working on, and then we also had an unfinished course on how to build e-courses. Like how to actually make a course where you know, you record videos, you’ve got modules and things like that because we always want to focus on digital products in our business. And we are like, now we got these two half-finished products, this is stupid. So we just stopped doing everything else for a few days, and cranked out the videos to get those products done because it goes back to everything we teach in Flipped Lifestyle: If you don’t have a product, then you don’t have an online business, you have a hobby. A podcast is not a business, blog posts are not a business, YouTube channels are not businesses, nothing maters unless at the end of everything you do, you got something that you can sell; that’s just the way it is. So, we always give priority to things that will make us money and we get those off our plate first, and then we create the marketing for those things so we have something for sale, and then we worry about the rest of our content.
JOCELYN: Yeah, and another thing we do that’s been super-helpful with Flipped Lifestyle is we only concentrate on one thing. So on Flipped Lifestyle, our primary forum of communication is our podcast. We occasionally write a blog post, but recently, I don’t even know that we have done that. And what we do is we have the podcast transcribed so that Google knows what we are talking about, and can bring people in that way. But, we don’t spend a lot of time, you know, we have to write a blog post on this day, and we have to record a YouTube video on this day, and all that kind of thing. Those are all the kind of things we would like to have happen down the road but we just put on our blinders, and we have tunnel vision, and we say, okay, right now, our podcast is the content that we are going to concentrate on.
SHANE: Going back to this question, whenever this question gets asked to us, and I start really probing in people’s business, I always catch a little bit of the ‘Be everywhere’ syndrome in them. ‘Be everywhere’ is a really important concept for later in your online business when you have the money and resources to build up an infrastructure to support that. But most people cannot be everywhere for a long time in their online business. You got to be somewhere before you can ever be everywhere. So a lot of times, it’s like, we are having trouble getting a product made, I’m like why? ‘Well, you know, on Monday I work on my blog, and on Tuesday I record my podcast, and on Wednesday, I got my YouTube video, Thursday, I get on Facebook and I got my Pinterest strategy on Friday –’ What are you doing dude? Calm down, go back and pick one social media network. Go back and pick one form of content, do that, and grow your business. Get a product out there, start selling and expand later. And that’s what we really find with a lot of people when they ask this question. So I think the biggest thing is, you need to pick a few things, you might need to trim the fat a little bit if you are feeling really overwhelmed. Take some things off your plate, you don’t have to do everything. Pick the things you like the best or that your audience responds to the best and only do those ‘cause we were filling it with Flipped Lifestyle man. We were writing blog posts, and doing podcasts and even that like with our other businesses going on too, was too much. And we just said, why don’t we just record a podcast, we’ll hire somebody to do show notes and we’ll transcribe it. That’s more than we ever would have wrote in a blog post anyway. So Google is going to love it, it’s going to have a lot of text, it’s going to be really relevant and we only have to do one thing; social networks. We communicate on Twitter and Facebook that’s it, period, because we don’t have time to be on LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube everywhere, Instagram. We just got an Instagram account and I only got three followers, it’s unreal. But like – you just can’t do everything. There’s no way you can. So, try to scale back man, if you are having trouble, like conflicting with your time, get rid of a bunch of stuff, pick what you want to do, and then get your products, focus on them, pick one channel to communicate with your people and move on. Don’t feel bad about it.
SCOTT: I think the biggest place where that comes from is growing the email list and growing – I guess, doing the things that are going to grow the audience rather than doing everything.
JOCELYN: Exactly and sometimes it’s really hard to decide what you want to do but you know, when we have trouble like that, we just list everything out on a piece of paper and we put priorities about stuff. You know, we’ll put like the task that we think need to be done, how much money we think it could possibly generate, when it needs to be done by, and then we just put a number by stuff.
SHANE: If you are talking about growing audience, dude, you got 1000 emails, send an email and say, ‘What do you like to do the best; video, blog, podcast?’ If 65% of the people in your audience say they would rather watch you on YouTube video, then don’t do anything else. Make YouTube videos, get them transcribed so you got a blog post and move on with your life because, your audience is going to grow faster if you can create more content quickly. So don’t get overwhelmed by that other stuff. If 65% of your audience right now would rather consume your video, just do video and don’t worry about it right now. You can grow later. Your audience is still going to grow, you know what I mean?
SCOTT: Yeah.
SHANE: Alright guys, I think we have time for one more quick question and we are going to probably have to wrap it up ‘cause we are getting close to our – our podcast editor is going to be looking at us going, ‘What are you all doing man? You are talking for two hours?’ But it’s a great call.
SCOTT: Yeah, I really appreciate it.
SHANE: So what you got, one more?
SCOTT: So how about where have you spent the very best money for your business and what would you suggest for our business? You already kinda delved into this a little bit with live events, but where else?
JOCELYN: Yeah, I would say live events is probably the number one thing for me, but we have already talked about that a lot, so I am going to throw in here also my virtual assistant for my Elementary Librarian site. I actually hired an American virtual assistant and it has been amazing. I have really trained her, and I pretty much do very little on that site right now because I have such a wonderful VA and that has been just an incredible load off my mind, and I highly recommend that.
SHANE: Yeah, it was a ridiculous investment, Jocelyn was so stressed out about the librarian site, and like another thing too, like every once in a while, you get some haters, or you get some – you know, someone that’s really like mad about – couldn’t get something to download or something like that and Jocelyn was taking that really personally. So like hiring the VA was awesome because now she never sees that stuff. So not only did it take the workload off of her back but all the negativity disappeared from her life when we did that. So that was really cool. And I think recently the biggest bang for our buck that we are getting is Facebook ads. I mean, we are getting ridiculous returns on our investment; we’ve spent like – Jocelyn just did an ad and she spent less than 100 dollars and made 4000. And I mean, we can’t replicate that yet perfectly but we’ve seen crazy numbers like that like spin 300 and get 3000. It’s on a smaller scale, we have not really figured out how to say, ‘Okay, I’m spending you know, 300 dollars, could I drop 3000 dollars on that and make 30000?’ We’re not kinda there yet, we are still testing, but Facebook ads have been an amazing return on our investment just because of the targeting. We can go in and we can find exactly who we want, we can really break it down, we’ve got that avatar so well-defined of who we want to talk to, and we can just get – we know we can make our money back on Facebook every time we start an ad; it’s just a matter of getting that replication process where you can keep an ad going, ad nauseam every day, and get that back. So that’s probably the two biggest bangs for our buck, or actually three; live events, virtual assistants and Facebook ads in particular for our business right now.
SCOTT: Very cool.
JOCELYN: Okay guys, I hope that was super helpful for you, and I like to end most of our consulting calls with a question and that is, what are going to take action on, or what was your biggest takeaway from today’s call?
ALYSSA: I think for me, the biggest takeaway was that, you know, even though I am a stay-at-home mom, and I left my job as a teacher to be home with my kids, that it’s still okay to schedule time to do things with them and without them. So I really liked that scheduling the playtime in there and scheduling the other stuff so that I can have devoted time for them, and that it’s okay that even if we are both working from home, to send them to a babysitter sometimes so that we can actually get distraction-free work done.
SCOTT: I think for me – I was already going to go with that but she said that, so I’m gonna go with the live events because well, particularly, I loved what you said about the smaller live events because those are the ones that I’ve been to in the past that I have really enjoyed more anyways and get those deeper connections with people. So I think that’s a huge takeaway for me, but also just that I don’t have to feel guilty about it and that it really should be a priority in my business, and I haven’t always – we haven’t always made that a priority. Like we are both nodding at each other, you can’t see that – air nod.
SHANE: That’s a great point guys, and the thing is, if you two go to a live event together, and the kids are with the grandparents’, wherever they go, man, you are going to have a great time, you’re going to feel refreshed coming back because you’ve had some time alone to talk about your business, to relax with each other, go do dinner and to do a live event. So there’s a lot of benefits for doing that, and we highly recommend everybody go do it, especially our live event which is like the best live event ever. I’m totally gonna put a promo on the end of the podcast later when the music starts queuing. No, I’m just kidding, but that’s awesome takeaway guys. We just want to thank you all for being on the show, this was a great call, enjoyed it. You asked some great questions, and we really look forward to seeing where your business goes in the future.
SCOTT: Thank you so much, this has been awesome; I really appreciate it.
SHANE: Oh, what a great call with Scott and Alyssa guys, that was just an amazing podcast; awesome consulting call, what great questions. The biggest takeaway for me too, I want to throw this in right here at the end is, I always hear people feel guilty about working on their online business, and if you are going at it from a weird direction, you are just trying to do something on the side, I can see maybe why people would do that but if you are trying to provide a better future for your family, and your trying to do something that has great meaning and substantial you know, value that you can deliver to people in your life, you should never feel guilty for taking time to work on your online business as long as you are prioritizing the things that really matter. Put your time with your kids on the schedule, get those things out of the way first and then attack the online business so that you can give them even more in the future. We would love to help you guys; if you ever want to talk to us on the Flipped podcast, you can fill an application to that over at Flippedlifestyle.com/flippedpodcast. And we also do have very limited consulting hours that we do meet with people, a couple of times a week, to help them one-on-one with their online business. And if you want so sign up for one of those calls, you can do that at flippedlifestyle.com/talktous. Until next time guys, as always, we will catch you on the flipped side, thanks for listening.
JOCELYN: Bye.
Amy says
Who do you use to transcribe? Thank you for mentioning this often, but I am not seeing this in your resources.
Jocelyn Sams says
Hi Amy! Transcription is included in our podcast editing service. We use Just Hit Publish. Hope that helps.