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In our first episode of 2016 we’re going to go through some of our favorite Can’t Miss Moments, things that went right, what went wrong, and our goals for 2016.
What Went WRONG in 2015
- We got hacked – everything, emails, bank accounts. All of it.
- This proved to be one of the biggest challenged we have ever faced running our online business.
- Listen in on how this happened and how we dealt with it.
- Sickness slowed us down.
- October – January our family has been sick with pneumonia, respiratory issues.
- The most important person on our team left to go to another job.
- This was problematic as we didn’t create a good procedure to hand over everything the previous employee was doing.
What went RIGHT in 2015.
- We shifted our business model
- from launching products periodically to having all of our businesses operate on the recurring membership model.
- We worked less hours so that we could spend more time with our kids and attend their events.
- 40- 50 hours a week in 2014 now 10-20 hours of actual work from us.
- We hosted live events – this was a big goal that we accomplished.
Goals for 2016
- Goal to grow our Flip Your Life Community (possibly shedding some of our other stuff to focus on this)
- Hire a high-level business coach that is the level we want to be at.
- Financial Obligation = Accountability
- More 1 on 1 work with our Members
- Podcasts are going to be consulting calls with our members
You will learn
- Importance of what happened in 2015
- Creating Plans for 2016
- How Can’t Miss Moments will bring Inspiration
- Get Prepared for the bad things with better systems
- Have Backups in Place if something happens to one of your team members
- Procedures of your business is Vital
- Predictable Growth With Membership Models
- Build Your Business the Right Way allows you to work less.
- Be Around Like Minded People
- Just keep Moving Forward even with little steps
Links and resources mentioned in today’s show
- How We Got Hacked
- What You Can do to Prevent Identity Theft
- What to do when you get Hacked Podcast Episode
- Screw the 9 to 5
- Flip Your Life Community
Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!
Click here to leave us an iTunes review and subscribe to the show! We may read yours on the air!
Can’t Miss Moments
Each week Jocelyn and I share moments that we might have missed if we had not started our online business. We hope these moments inspire you to see the possibilities and freedom online business could provide for your family.
Favorite from 2015: Traveled more in 2015 than ever before – going to Ft. Lauderdale, FL when Kentucky was going to have an ice storm so the only warm place we could find in the US was there. So we hopped onto a plane and left that same day.
Ability to Bless others by creating jobs for people – surrounded ourselves with friends and family.
You can connect with S&J on social media too!
Thank you for listening!
Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show!
If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week!
Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below!
JOCELYN: Hey y’all! On today’s podcast, we take a look back at 2015 and take a look into the future of Flipped Lifestyle.
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? All right, let’s get started.
SHANE: What’s going on guys? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, and Happy New Year. This is the first episode of 2016 of Flipped Lifestyle podcast; great to be back with you again this week. Really excited about this episode, it’s going to be a little bit different format than normal. We’re going to go through some of our favorite can’t-miss moments from 2015. We’re going to talk a little bit about 2015, about our business and about our personal life, what went right, what went wrong; and we’re really going to get into our goals and what we are planning on doing here in 2016. We’re going to talk a lot about what the future holds for Flipped Lifestyle, how we’re going to do everything in our power to help you guys succeed online this year and just get our mindset right to make 2016 an incredible year for our family and for yours.
JOCELYN: But before we jump in to our plans for 2016, we are going to take a little look back at 2015. So, first of all we’re going to start out with our favorite can’t-miss moments; and if you’re a regular listener of the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, you know that every week, we talk about can’t-miss moments and those are the things that we may not have had the ability to do or at least in that capacity, without starting out in online business, and working for ourselves. So Shane, what was your favorite can’t-miss moment of 2015?
SHANE: I think my favorite thing that we got to do last year, and we got to do so much; we travelled more last year than we had ever travelled, probably combined in our entire marriage before that or even in our lives really. We put some serious miles on some airplanes last year which was really cool. But my favorite trip by far was going to Fort Lauderdale, Florida. What month was that? Was that February?
JOCELYN: Yeah, I think it was like February; maybe the first week of March last year, and we had hardly had any winter at all. So, Kentucky was like, winterless until, I guess, it was like the next to last week of February and then old man winter came back with a vengeance.
SHANE: Like a giant snowstorm was coming; and I remember, we got out of church, it was on a Sunday and we were getting in the car, putting the kids in the back; it was freezing cold. I mean, the temperature had just dropped dramatically, and we – everyone knew this like, storm of the decade was coming.
JOCELYN: Well, and it was even like, it was maybe going to be an ice storm, and we’ve been through an ice storm before; a really, really bad one and we didn’t even want to have a possibility of there being an ice storm. So, it went from us looking at generators online, wondering if we needed to order one to starting to look around and –
SHANE: We were trying to find somewhere that was warm basically.
JOCELYN: Yeah, so we honestly pulled up a map and found the one place in the United States that was one.
SHANE: It was it. The only place that was going to be like above 65 degrees in the entire country, because there was a huge cold front that went through everywhere, was Fort Lauderdale, Florida. So, we were in the car and we look at this – and Jocelyn is literally looking at this on her phone on the way home from church, and she’s like, ‘Fort Lauderdale is going to be warm.’ I said ‘Good, let’s go there.’ So we got home, grabbed the clothes, I don’t even think we got the kids out of the car. Like, we just went in and grabbed a bunch of clothes and got in the car, and we booked the flight tickets in the hotel room, basically, in the car on the way to an airport and we just got on an airplane and ran from a snowstorm; and I thought that was just like the coolest thing because it was, you know, we had nothing to do that week, we had the resources to go order the tickets and make the hotel reservations, and it was just this wild, spur-of-the-moment trip that would have never been possible just a few years ago.
JOCELYN: And one of our neighbors, she’s actually one of our Flip Your Lifestyle members too but she loves the story because she talks about how she had sent us a Facebook message like the day before, and she was like, ‘Hey, we’ve got a generator. Do you guys want to come over to our house?’ And so I write her back and I’m like, ‘Oh thanks, you know, I’ll let you know if we’re going to come there because we didn’t end up getting one.’ And she says, the next thing you know, you guys are headed down to Florida.
SHANE: The only people we really told we were leaving was my mom. I called my mom and I said, I was like, ‘Hey, we’re taking the kids to Florida,’ which she thought we were just out of our mind. But she – my mom won’t even get on an airplane. So whole – that’s another story for another day. But then, the next morning, we posted a picture; I just woke up really early, it was like, 70-something degrees and I take a picture of the sun, you know, coming up, and we were on the beach and everyone else is posed for like, ‘It’s a blizzard, we’re never going to get out. Where’s your, you know, milk and bread and –’ everybody was freaking out.
JOCELYN: Your milk sandwich.
SHANE: Yeah right, exactly; and then we were the only people – and then we used – put this thing on the beach and everybody is like, ‘What? When did this happen? When did you leave?’ And I just that was very cool. So that was definitely my can’t-miss moment. The kids had a blast and we just had a good time in Fort Lauderdale on a random trip.
JOCELYN: Gosh, we had so many amazing can’t-miss moments of 2015, it’s really hard to choose one, but for me, I think it has been the ability to bless others and what I mean by that is, we’ve built a big team this year in – or actually last year in 2015, and we have found people to help us work in our house and –
SHANE: We actually have someone here right now fixing something, which you’re probably hearing the hammering in the background.
JOCELYN: Yeah, and you know, a lot of people say, ‘Don’t work with your friends, don’t work with your family’ but we’ve actually surrounded ourselves with a pretty good amount of friends and family, and we’ve seen it just really change their lives as far as their finances and their happiness, and just things that they’re able to do and for me that has been just the most awesome thing to see this year; just seeing how this business and you know, the work that we’ve put in has that ripple effect of blessing other people who in turn can bless other people and it’s really just awesome. I mean, that’s really and truly the reason that we do what we do every day.
SHANE: Yeah, we – it’s pretty awesome seeing that pebble-in-the-pond kind of thing that happens after your online business really starts working because you know, like Jocelyn said, when we started building our team, you know, there’s a lot of places that we have to go like, you know, online marketplaces for freelancers and things like that, but we do have a lot of – we always look at our friends and family first. When we needed some, you know, help around the house for maintenance and things like that, we looked to a friend who needed – who was starting kind of a cleaning business and they wanted to get some extra money for their family and were like, ‘Hey, jump in, we’ll be, your first client.’ We have a very good friend who we just hired. She actually had a job where she had been working at for many years and she is now coming onto our team as our executive assistant. She’s here in town; and we were able to help her make more money, give her more freedom in her lifestyle and it was just awesome to be able to bless someone and bring them on to our team. And we have a host of people around us who, I mean, we’ve become, you know, our – we actually are becoming a real business now, where we do have people working for us; contractors, and we’re able to actually go out and be job-creators for people, and that’s just something that I – was never even on my radar for the last, you know, 20 years basically, of our working life.
JOCELYN: Yeah, it’s just been really amazing and that’s something that we never could have done if we were still sitting behind a desk at a school. Yes, I mean, you do influence students’ lives and that is certainly a noble thing to do, but this is just really affecting people on a different way than I really never knew was possible. So, 2015 for me was really cool in that way.
SHANE: So many good things happened this year and a lot of stuff went right, we’re going talk about the more business stuff that went right here in a few minutes, but you know, we wanted to start with a can’t-miss moment because I really think that everything in our business is built on lifestyle and on the way we want to live; and I encourage you as you’re going into 2016 and you’re setting your goals, I would like for you guys to start there too. Look back in 2015 and remember those can’t-miss moments. Think about the really, really important things that happened, the good things that happened; times with friends, time with family vacations, times you may have blessed someone else and really when you’re setting your goals for this year and you’re creating your plans for your online business, if you’ll start at the can’t-miss moments, that’s going to provide all that motivation that drives you forward when you’re in the grind of it, or when things go bad and it’s going to have – plan a real good foundation for you to build your online business on. So, it’s not all about money, it’s not all about just quitting your job, you’re really remembering the ‘why’ you want to do this. Why do you want to have a successful online business in 2016? That always goes back to those can’t-miss moments. So, if you will reflect on those of 2015, it’s going to put you in a much better place to start planning for 2016.
JOCELYN: All right, so once you finish reflecting on all the wonderful and happy times of 2015, we are going to move onto what didn’t go so well for us in 2015; and these are things in our business that happened and, you know, we’re better because of them, but at the time, they were really, really difficult.
SHANE: And that’s why it’s important to look at the bad things too, because if we look back and we try to just forget about everything bad that happened and we only focus on the good things, we’re not going to learn. Like Jocelyn said, we are stronger because these things happened. These are the things that went wrong in our company last year, but it’s important to look at them because we can look back at the lessons, we can make sure that we plan to avoid mistakes like this in the future and it also lets us create systems and put systems in place for when these problems do creep up. Bad things are going to happen and something is going to break, there’s going to be some kind of dumpster fire that you have to put out in your online business every single day, but now we can move forward with this experience and you can learn from our experiences as well, and we can be more prepared for these bad things when they do happen. All right, the first thing that went wrong in 2015 for our business, many of you have – know about this because we spent an entire month talking about it, is we got hacked. And it wasn’t just like a little hack. It was a full-blown, destroy all of our websites, crush everything, hijack our email, hijack our financial accounts, try to break into our bank, identity-theft hack. And that was probably by far, not only the worst thing that happened in 2015, but maybe the worst thing that has happened in our entire business since we started because it was just an absolute disaster. We were literally on vacation in Disneyworld in Florida when all of this started. So here we are, walking around the Magic Kingdom –
JOCELYN: Trying to have a magical time.
SHANE: – trying to have a magical time while fighting hackers with our server people and our team; and it was just – oh, it was an absolute nightmare basically. So you know, we learned a lot from that though, we learned so much more about security. Our website is better off, you know, we have more systems in place, whether it be password encryption or just better servers and better software protecting our websites all around, all of our websites are now split onto different servers. We’re not even hosted in the same place. So, that way, you know, one of the biggest problems with the hack is we exposed our self by – they took down everything at once, and now everything is separated. So, even if one thing goes down, we can’t lose every single part of our business that generates money at the same time. So, it was a really, really bad thing that happened and it was really stressful, but we definitely came out the other side stronger for it. Another big thing that it taught me, and you might be able to relate to this because something’s going wrong with your online business right now or it’s just not working is that you know, it’s – it really is like, darkest before the dawn. Like, I really looked, during that time, and thought to myself at one point; ‘This is it. This is going to destroy everything and it’s as bad as it can possibly be.’ And even in our greatest, you know, most fearful moment, we came out on the other side, we made more money in the back half of the year after the hack than that we had ever made during that time period before, and it really just refocused us and made us fight that much harder for our business. So, when you think something is going dramatically wrong in 2016, just remember back to the fact that it could always be worse, it is going to be okay and that’s a really powerful lesson for any online entrepreneur in online business because things go wrong all the time.
JOCELYN: And if you’re interested in finding out more about exactly what happened to us and how we overcame all that, we do have some podcast episodes that we will put in today’s show notes. Just head over to flippedlifestyle.com/podcast73 and you can find the links to those podcasts. All right, so moving on to the next thing that went wrong, and that’s actually still sort of, going on, and that is that we got sick, and not just a little sick, like we got a lot sick. The first thing was we headed down to Clearwater Beach in October of 2015 and Shane’s brother had come along with us and they were staying with us; and they had just gotten into town and he got stung by a stingray.
SHANE: And literally, he got out of the car and was like, we’re at the beach; and walked into the beach water and a stingray stabbed his foot and he had to go to the emergency room. And it was such a crazy thing because – I’ve got to tell this part, my brother’s kid was in the water with him, and he was like, he thought it was a shark that had grabbed him. So he picks his kid up to throw him back toward the beach, and instead he throws him straight up in the air and he throws him deeper into the water. So, here he is with the stingray stuck in his foot, bleeding out and he throws his kid back into the ocean which started this awful chain reaction maybe for him basically.
JOCELYN: So, they had seriously been there all of about 20 minutes when this happened, so you know, they’re heading to the emergency room. Well, the emergency room was really well-equipped for people waiting, because they had a video game system there, which was lovely, but along with emergency room video games systems come germs and we believe that there were some stomach viruses going around Florida. Actually we’re pretty sure of that because my sister-in-law heard people talking about it in the emergency room and someone –
SHANE: The kids picked up the germs.
JOCELYN: – yeah, someone brought that back to us. So not only did we get sick, they also got sick and luckily it was after we got home, but it still wasn’t good; and this was just a particularly horrific virus. So all of us got it –
SHANE: And we went to Busch Gardens while we were in Tampa, and Isaac was in the backseat throwing up in a cup, on the way there. That’s what – that was the “patient zero” where it all started basically, on our way to that amusement park.
JOCELYN: That was like the day before we left. So we get home and everybody starts getting sick. Well shortly thereafter, we finally got rid of the stomach virus that took about two weeks to finally clear out from everyone. Then about a week later, we started getting something else. I don’t know, some kind of respiratory issues, but pretty much, to make a very long story short, we have all been sick. One of us in our family has been sick since about October. It’s currently January. We are finally about 99% well.
SHANE: I had pneumonia for a month, and then I – it was all, I mean, just terrible pneumonia. One night I had headaches, I couldn’t breathe. The kids all got sick and had a cough, and like Jocelyn has literally – like, we kind of cleared up in that – I guess October-November, and – but Jocelyn has been coughing since November 20th.
JOCELYN: Since November 20th; and the reason I know that is because my son’s birthday is the 21st and I remember the day before that is when I started feeling sick. So, I have been coughing pretty much non-stop. I’ve been to the doctor two different times. I have had two rounds of antibiotic, two steroid shots, taking daily allergy medicine and I’m still not 100% well. But, we are pushing on, we’re not going to worry about that anymore and we have missed some podcasts along the way just because it has been crazy, but we are finally moving past it and I am very hopeful that this is it. It has been actually, in all the country, I think it has been like, insanely warm for this time of the year; and I think some of my sickness comes from the fact that things are not dying as they normally do in the winter time and finally it’s starting to get cold here, and for the first time in my life, I’m actually welcoming that because I’m so tired of all these allergens.
SHANE: Kill the germs. So, basically just you know, one thing that we’re going to take away from that next year is, just to be much more conscious when the fall is leading into the winter and try and stay like, a little bit more healthy because it can – even when you work at home, you know, people are like, ‘Oh you’re sick, but at least you get to work at home’ – no, when you’re sick, you’re in bed sick. When you have pneumonia, I don’t care if you can work on your laptop. You’re not going to be working very much. So it’s really important to stay super healthy and we’re going to really shift focus to that this year and the final thing that went wrong this year was single point sensitivity. In 2015, we had just started really building out our team, not just here at our house right now, we have someone that takes care of the inside of our house. They come in every day for a couple of hours to get the house cleaned up and you know, sort out our laundry and dishes and do all the daily chores while we’re working on the business; and now we have someone that works on the outside of our house. We have a really great maintenance guy that takes care – I just make a list every week and he comes in the following Monday and knocks those out, to make sure the house – all the upkeep is done and things like that and we really started working on our business team. We hired a person for customer service, we hired a person to be an executive assistant, and we learned a valuable lesson at the end of the year about single point sensitivity because the most important person on our team left us to go to another job, which of course, all those jobs that she was doing now fell back to us, which was the point of hiring people in the first place.
JOCELYN: So that was a little bit problematic because we didn’t really have a good procedure or situation in place where we could just hire somebody new and say, ‘Okay, you know, here are the 25 things that you need to do. Do them.’ You know, didn’t really have that in place. So what we had to do is we had to spend time and effort to work on these procedures. But now, because we have all done that, it’s going to be a lot easier moving forward.
SHANE: So, a big lesson there to learn from us is, as you’re hiring your team, try to have backups in place if possible, as soon as you can afford them. You don’t have to have exact roles in your business where this person’s job is this. If you’ve got a couple of new people in your team, cross-train them; if you’re hiring a contractor, have a backup. Just remember that single point sensitivity can be a really bad thing, if you only have one person on your team doing that specific job. If that person leaves, if something happens to them, God forbid, they, you know, die in a car wreck or something, that’s horrific and then after – the aftermath of that, when they leave, it all comes back to you and your business is going to suffer for it. So, be aware of single point sensitivity as you’re building your business, and try to have two people in place in your team or in your circles where you could immediately replace someone if they were to leave you for another job. So, those were some of the things that went wrong in our business. It’s not all sunshine and roses all the time. So, as you’re planning 2016, write down three things that went wrong in your online business in 2015 and write down the solution for them that you found, or try to come up with a solution to solve that problem if it were ever to come up again. That way you’re prepared for things in the future that might go wrong.
JOCELYN: All right, so let’s move in to what went right in 2015 and –
SHANE: More than went wrong at least; this list is longer thank God.
JOCELYN: That’s the good news. You always want this list to be longer than the other one, right? So this is – these are some of the things that went right for us in 2015 as far as business is concerned. First of all, we have just been talking about it, we built a team and we finally figured out that we cannot do everything. That’s a very important lesson to learn when you are an entrepreneur and you are trying to build your business. It is very, very tempting to say, ‘Nobody else can do this’ and that’s something that I do a lot. But I’ve finally gotten past that and I’ve realized that there are ways to outsource things to other people and doing that just gives you a lot more capacity and a lot more mental space to do the things that only you can do.
SHANE: Another huge thing that happened to us this year was a big shift in our business model. You know, when we first started out, we you know, followed a lot of, you know, the people online and to learn about online business and we got really deep into launching products, you know, periodically and trying to go for these big launches with these big numbers; and then you know, you do it again three months later, or you hope you make more sales in the future. We realize that that was great and it was very addictive because there was a high in making a lot of money, you know, in a couple of week period, but then that money runs out and you have to do it all over again, and you have to sit every day and wake up and say, ‘I hope we sell something.’ So, we decided, after going to an event, that we – and we learned some things about memberships that we would switch all of our businesses to a recurring revenue model, where we try to create forever customers. We sell it once, and people continue to pay us monthly, quarterly or annually moving forward, and we know that that’s going to happen as long as we keep delivering value. So, this has truly changed our lives. It’s changed our business. I wish that I had discovered this the day I jumped off that lawnmower and found online business; because if it – if we had found this early I know that our business would be even in better shape than it is now because we would have that consistent predictable, profitable growth in our online business that’s just not possible if you’re selling one-off products. So switching to a recurring revenue model, I think we’re approaching 1500 or so members now. We have a lot of people that – and that protects us from diversification. I mean, if you have 1500 different people paying you monthly, they’re not all going to quit at the same time. So, it’s just a really awesome thing to have in your business, that security of the recurring revenue model; and that was definitely one of the things that went right in 2015.
JOCELYN: All right, and the next thing that went right in 2015 is that we worked fewer hours. This was something that was really important to us because we are parents, we have two young children who need us to be there. They have activities in the afternoons when they get home from school, and someone has to be there to take them to all those things. And that was something that was really important to us to do. Yes, technically, we could outsource that, but we don’t want to. We want to be there with them and experience life with them. That’s the reason that we do what we do and so, working fewer hours was a non-negotiable for us in 2015 and because of the team that we built, and the things that we were able to put in place, we were able to do just that. So, let’s say we went from working probably close to like, 30 to 40 hours a week –
SHANE: Yeah, we’re probably down to somewhere around – between 10 and 20 depending on what’s going on; of actual work from us. That required us to get rid of some things we were doing; to stop doing certain things the way we were doing them. We kind of had to look at every task in our business this year and say, ‘Okay, we’re involved with that. How can we not be involved, and if we can’t remove ourselves, can we replace that task with another task that can be delegated?’ And we just started looking at everything in our business that way, and we were able to pretty much strip away most of what we were doing. That required us stopping doing some of our websites, it required us getting rid of some projects, it required us doing less in some of the businesses, but we were definitely able to get it down to where we work around, you know, we can get by with about three hours a day, four days a week or two hours a day, five days a week and easily run the business in its current form. So that – I think we were probably working 40 to 50 hours maybe, in 2014 because we were really trying to take it to the next level. So we’ve probably cut our workload in half.
JOCELYN: So, just know that more hours work doesn’t necessarily mean more success. I think that a lot of people think that and there are a lot of people out there online that are telling you that, but that’s not necessarily true. If you build your business the right way with the right systems and procedures, then you can outsource some of that to increase your capacity while decreasing your own personal hours.
SHANE: And we actually increased our hourly rate like, effectively what we make per hour. That skyrocketed once we started adopting this philosophy. So, it is possible to work less and make more money. It is not about hustling from 6 o’clock AM to 12 o’clock PM like a lot of gurus out there promote. We want to have a good life and a good family and a good business. Not the other way round. So, really think about your hours you’re working here in 2016. The next thing that went right for us is, we hosted a couple of live events. Big live events, high end live events, masterminds where we brought people in, had hot seats, broke down their business and really helped them take it to the next level. That was a big goal for us last year. So, it was one of the goals that we accomplished was we wanted to get out and meet with you guys live and have a lot of fun, and kind of get our feet wet in doing our own live events. We don’t want to, you know, our goal is to go and help people. We want to work with people pretty much you know, face-to-face, one-on-one as much as possible so that we can actually make a difference in your online business. We don’t want to be the guru on the stage, you know, speaking in a conference hall, you know, so they can have their ego feel good about themselves or anything like that. We’re not – we don’t want to do that. We want to have our own live events for our members and for our communities so we can actually make a difference in their lives. So, hosting those first two live events was awesome, and we co-hosted those with Jill and Josh Stanton, our two friends over screwtheninetofive.com and now we’re going to start looking towards transitioning into our own live events, so that we can really get in with our Flip Your Life community and everyone out there listening to the podcast And it was a big thing for us last year to really pull those off successfully. They were wildly successful just so much fun, everyone had a great time and moved their business forward for coming. So, now that we have got that out of the way and we know how to do that, the next ones are going to be even better.
JOCELYN: And speaking of those friends of ours, Josh and Jill, another thing that went right in 2015 was that we maintained relationships with other, likeminded entrepreneurs. So, we talk to Josh and Jill quite frequently, pretty much daily, and we also talk to some other friends that we’ve met at various live events and we keep in contact with those people.
SHANE: And we really surrounded ourselves with the right kind of people. It’s not jumping into a random mastermind, it’s not following some random guru, it’s not you know, trying to hang out with the cool kids. We figured out the people that thought like us believed like us, had the same values as us, and we sought them out and we built those relationships, and now we’ve got not only a team in our business, but we’ve got a mastermind team; not a mastermind where we are meeting once a week on Monday at 3:00 or anything like that. We do do some of that where we get together regularly people, but it’s just we’ve got a network of friends and entrepreneurs now that we can reach out to any time, any day with the simple message and get help on something. So that was a really big deal for us; was to kind of get that network in place, figure out not only who could help us, but who we could help and build those relationships. So, those were the things that went right for us in 2015 and you know, just like we went through, we listed you know, two to three things that may have went wrong in your business, look back and look at everything that went right; all the things from as simple as getting your first blog posts published to making your first dollar online, whatever it was for you, that went right, maybe it was quitting your job, maybe it was making enough money to pay your mortgage, whatever happened in your online business, list out as many things as you can think of that went right, make sure that list is longer than things that went wrong. Don’t dwell on all those things that went wrong. Look at all the things that you’ve done successfully and use all of those as a jumping off point for 2016 to make sure that you really plan it out, you really see what’s happening, and you can make it even better next year.
JOCELYN: I think it’s really important to celebrate these wins; I think that a lot of times we don’t do this often enough. We think, ‘Well, I’m not doing A, B, C, D and E, so I can’t celebrate F and G. But, no, you should be celebrating that because if you don’t, then you won’t be able to adequately move forward.
SHANE: I think someone in our community recently, was it emails or was it sale, I think they were saying like, it was their first emails and they were like, I’m not – they basically said – they got like ten emails or something when they first launched an opt-in and they were like, ‘I’m not sure if it’s even really good.’ And I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, you got ten real, live human beings to believe in you enough to download your product; that’s a huge win.’ You can’t compare yourself to everybody else; they might be two, three years ahead of you. Just because you know, some guru out there is posting expense reports or money report and says, ‘Oh, I made 100,000 dollars last month,’ that’s not who you should even be comparing yourself to or even thinking, there’s always going to be a bigger fish doing more than you. If you constantly chase that, you’re never going to get there. You should look at what happened to you today, in the past, yesterday; what was the good things. Did I get my opt-in done? Did I get my lead magnet to actually deliver when someone gives me their email? Did I make my first dollar? All those things should be celebrated along the way. When we made 11 cents, the first money we ever made, I was happy dancing like it was a touchdown in the Super Bowl. We celebrate the little things and then the big things come on the top of that.
JOCELYN: All right, so we talked about the things that went wrong in 2015, we talked about the things that went right, so now let’s look forward to 2016, the year that we are in now. We’ve been working on setting our goals for the year and we’d want to take a few minutes at the end of the podcast to share some of those with you.
SHANE: Jocelyn and I set goals using a guide that we developed that kind of takes us through the process of, just like we did today, looking at what went wrong, looking at what went right, and then getting on the same page with our dreams and our goals and a process for setting goals in your online business and if you’d like to get a copy of our goal-setting guide, just head over to flippedlifestyle.com/podcast73 and you will be able to download that today. This is a short guide, it will take you through the process of just figuring out exactly what you want and developing a quick plan for how to get there. It really helps us get on the same page and set our goals, we know it will help you too. So, head on over to flippedlifestyle.com/podcast73 and you can download that in today’s show notes. We have three primary goals that we are going to set with you guys here today on the podcast and we are going to kind of focus on Flipped Lifestyle, we have a lot of other businesses, we kind of have to go through each business unit and kind of set goals independently for each one. We’re going to focus on Flipped Lifestyle to let you guys know what’s coming up in the new year for us. Our number one goal this year is to grow our Flip Your Life community; that’s our membership community where we help other people start, build and grow online businesses or take their business to the next level. This has been an extremely fulfilling for us in the last six months especially as we have watched dozens of members start making online, quit their jobs to be able to stay home with their kids, and really build online businesses that are impacting the world around them. It’s by far our greatest passion of all of the things that we do online and we really want that community to grow so that we can help more people. In 2015, we actually set a goal to help a thousand families to start, build and grow an online business just because we know how much it changed our life and we want to have that legacy of that pebble in the pond, like we talked about earlier, that ripple, moving out away from us where other people are experiencing huge success. We made it probably about halfway this year, if we count the people that are in our communities, not necessarily all of you guys listening who may be out there doing great things with our free content, but we’ve had about 400 or 500 people join our Flip Your Life community. So we made it about halfway to our goal this year and we are really looking forward to taking that to the next level in 2016. So, we may even sell some of our other businesses, we’ve talked about really getting down as far as we can go, keeping the business units that are really good profit generators for us, but shedding some of the other stuff that we can give us more time, more energy to really focus on our Flip Your Life community and that’s our number one priority this year in 2016.
JOCELYN: All right, the next goal that we have, and we’ve actually already done this, but we have hired a high-level business coach to help us out and this is important to us because we wanted to work with somebody who is already at the level that we want to be at. For us, this was really, really important; we have a lot of goals, we had a lot of ideas, we knew a lot of the steps that we needed to take, it’s just that we sometimes disagree on the order that we need to take the steps in. I think disagree is a nice way to put that, right?
SHANE: Yeah, so basically we want to bring a third person; this is our negotiator, that’s who we hired actually, but we wanted to bring someone to the table that could look at everything and see the forest with the trees. That’s what coaching is really all about. It is finding someone at the level you want to be at, whether it’s you know, someone who is making ten million dollars a year, and we want to get to that point so we want to hire them, or someone that’s making you know, 10,000 dollars a month, you want to get to that level. But it’s hiring someone who is kind of been there and done that and repeated the process and can help you look through everything, see what’s happening and help you make a decision that you might not be able to come to on your own because you are in the thick of it and it’s very confusing when you are in the thick of it.
JOCELYN: It was really important to us to hire someone for this because financial obligation equals accountability.
SHANE: Accountability with consequences, that’s what we call it.
JOCELYN: If you are hiring someone to do this, then you have an actual obligation to get things done. If I join a mastermind with four or five friends, yeah, that’s sort of accountability, but it’s really not. You know, if I don’t get things done, my friends are going to say ‘Well, that was terrible.’ You are not getting your 4000 dollars a month back that you paid for your high level coaching or whatever.
JOCELYN: Exactly, and that is why it was so important to us to do it this way. You can go out there, you can join free Facebook groups, you can watch YouTube videos, you can join a million free webinars, but 99% of the people who do that are not going to make it to the next level. Disclaimer, this is not a scientific study.
SHANE: You got to have skin in the game and we always preach, bet on yourself without fear. You got to put your money down on you because if you don’t, nobody else will. So, that was a goal that we set for 2016, it was hey, we are going to go find some – we are going to figure out the level we want to be at and then we are going to go hire a person who is at that level to help us put the pieces together to get there and we took care of that right at the beginning of the year. We got our coach in place and we are working with them and it’s already paid huge dividends for us.
JOCELYN: Yes, we have already made our money back –
SHANE: For the whole year
JOCELYN: And we have been working with this person for about two weeks.
SHANE: A month – yeah, maybe three weeks, maybe at max. So, hiring a business coach, getting someone to help you put the pieces together not only accelerates your success, but it gives you that accountability with consequence like Jocelyn was talking about.
JOCELYN: And finally, our final goal for 2016, for Flipped Lifestyle is more one-on-one work with our members. Flipped Lifestyle, it exists to serve our members; that is the most important thing for us.
SHANE: And one way we are going to do that is kind of a big announcement we have here on the podcast today; these podcasts with just me and Jocelyn going back and forth are going to become a little bit farther, fewer and farther in between. There will still be podcasts like this where it’s just us maybe focused on a topic, but primarily our podcast is going to go to an entire format of Flipped podcasts where we bring members of our Flip Your Life community on to our show and we help them with a consulting call and then we let everybody else out there hear that so that we all can learn from it. These are by far, when we look at our numbers, the most popular podcasts that we release, they are most downloaded, they are the most shared, they are the most liked and it’s not even close and we wanted to create something where we could give a greater value ad to our Flip Your Life members. So, we are going to open this up to where we bring some Flip Your Life member on here every week and we are going to be helping them with their online business. We think that you guys are going to learn a ton more from this because all of the questions that are going to be asked are going to be things that everybody out there needs to know and it is going to allow us to really blow up the value of our community and provide some of that one-on-one coaching for people who might not be in a position like me and Jocelyn to go out and hire a really high-end business coach. Where we want to open the door for everybody to get good quality coaching and us help some people take it to the next level too. So, the podcast is going to be a big change this year, we are going to work one-on-one with so many more of our members giving those podcasts and those consulting calls away and you guys, I think, are going to get a ton more benefit; everybody listening to the podcast just from hearing more of those consulting calls that we air.
JOCELYN: We’re especially excited about this new format because we noticed a trend that anyone who has been on the Flipped podcast, they always go on to do something really, really cool and someone in our forums were just talking about that the other day that they notice the trend as well that the people who have talked to us before have really started pushing that domino over and knocking the other ones down. So, that is just something that is super cool for us and we are really looking forward to seeing what happens with that in 2016.
SHANE: And here’s a little piece of trivia that Jocelyn just said, ‘Push the dominos over,’ the actual, original name for Flipped Lifestyle was almost ‘push the domino’ do you remember that? Because we were going to talk about taking – because Jocelyn and I are always about taking action; like even if it’s the wrong action, as long as you are moving, we don’t care because eventually you are going to get the right action and do that more, but push the domino, we actually owned pushthedomino.com before –
JOCELYN: We may still own that [Crosstalk]
SHANE: I think we may still own that, I’m not sure. I don’t know if we let go of that or not, but someone is going to go start that now and start that now and start their own brand. But, ‘Push the domino’ was actually going to be the name of Flipped Lifestyle. I am kind of glad that we didn’t use that actually. All right guys, that’s all we’ve got for our reflection on 2015 and some of our goals for 2016; you can kind of use this episode as a guide to take you through that process and you can also use the guide on the show notes for today’s episode. Don’t get too, you know, caught up. A lot of people come out with these, you know, 500-page books on how to set a goal of my five-video e-Course on setting goals, look it’s really just looking back and saying, “What went right, what went wrong, what was really awesome that I loved and how can I do more of that?” Now set your goals for next year and then make them happen. Don’t overcomplicate the process of getting ready for the next year; just make sure that you have the resources, tools and support that you need to make it happen. All right, we got a couple of final thoughts here; these are a couple of things personally that we are looking forward to in 2016; this isn’t really business-related stuff, you know, growth of the business, just kind of the things that we are going to do this year. So, Jocelyn, what is your thing that you are looking forward to doing in 2016?
JOCELYN: I am looking forward to getting back into half-marathon shape. I have not ran a half-marathon; since 2010, I have trained for two others; one I got a stress fracture and had to stop training and the other [Crosstalk] yeah, it was like six weeks but it was still terrible.
SHANE: It felt like six months.
JOCELYN: To you, right. So, the other one, we trained to run – a friend of mine, we trained for the race and they cancelled the race. So, we were already completely trained and the race didn’t happen and we were not really able to find another one locally. So, with that being said, I haven’t done one in almost six years and so we are looking for a race to do, something to put on a calendar and that is something that I personally am looking forward to this year.
SHANE: I am looking forward to a bucket list opportunity of all bucket list opportunities. I am going to do something that I never thought was possible because I never thought I could afford the trip or find the time and I am going to WrestleMania for my birthday. I am going to Dallas, Texas in April and I am going to be attending WrestleMania. I am a huge wrestling fan, I love Pro Wrestling, I spend at least two hours a day reading news articles and reviews and rumors about wrestling. Jocelyn hates wrestling –
JOCELYN: #timesuck.
SHANE: Yeah, she hates it so bad, but like I love wrestling, I have been watching it since I was a kid, I can remember sitting on the bunk bed, and me and my brother would watch WrestleMania or wrestling on Tuesday nights or Monday nights and we had to keep it down because our mom thought we were asleep. It’s awesome because I am taking my brother with me and we are going to go and we are going to have a blast. There’s going to be 100,000 people and get to go see Dallas Cowboys Stadium. My best friend is going with us too, and it is just going to be an awesome experience and so – is that a can’t-miss moment or a look forward to moment?
JOCELYN: Depends on who you ask.
SHANE: It’s a can’t-miss moment for me; Jocelyn is missing it because she could care less. So, that is what I am looking forward to, and also finally write down something that you want to make happen next year like that. Something personal, put that bucket list together, circle something and say, you know what, this is the year we are going to make it happen and I am not going to be stopped. And if we can do anything to help you, come and get some help in our flip your life community. You can learn more about that at flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife. We are in those forums, we are helping people change their life, we see it every single day and we would love for you to come in there and get the help that you need as well. Until next time, get out there, take action, do what it takes, flip your life in 2016 guys.
JOCELYN: Bye.
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