Some problems are great to have, although it might not feel like it in the moment. When the business we’ve been putting valuable time into on our own finally starts to take off, it can get overwhelming. So how do we manage our schedules and continue to grow our companies?
Matthew Usherwood has a full-time job and a family with two young kids. His brand, Distance Hiker, is growing like crazy and he needs help figuring out what to focus on. Matthew is putting in evenings and weekends for now, but he wants this to become his main source of income one day.
In this coaching call, we spend some time reverse engineering what the company could look like based on that ultimate goal. Matthew is dealing with a bit of Squirrel Syndrome, so I help him prioritize the strategies that can work best for him.
Another discussion we have is about “monetizing audiences.” Frankly, that sounds icky to me. Matthew is also reluctant to rush into it and come off as salesy. That said, you’ll hear me share my perspective about products and services that offer true value and how to get them in front of people the right way.
Even if we head in the right direction, staying on top of everything is a challenge. Join us today to learn about some of the tools we can leverage along the way to take our businesses to the next level.
AP 1240: So Much to Do & Hardly Any Time—What Should I Do?
Pat Flynn: What's up everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to episode 1240 of AskPat 2.0. You're about to listen to a coaching call between myself and an entrepreneur just like you.
And today we're speaking with Matthew Usherwood who founded a website called DistanceHiker.com. He's over in the UK and that long distance walking holidays, right? Self guided, walking holidays are his niche and we might call them hiking or long distance hiking, DistanceHiker.com. And he's gone through a number of failures on his way to finding this very successful venture. And unfortunately, he's in a position that a lot of people who start businesses that finally start going well are at, which is I don't have enough time to do all the things that I think I should do to grow the business.
There's a lot of options now. There's a lot of things that are working and, and where do I put my time? Because I only have so much. So that's what we're gonna discuss today. You'll hear me unpack a lot of, well, what is taking time? And prioritization becomes a keyword that's used in this particular episode, but what are the low hanging fruits and where do we wanna go?
Where do, where do we wanna end up? What's the goal, right? If, if we're on a hike, we wanna know where we're hiking to. Well, we discovered that through Matthew's lenses today. So let's listen in, this is Matthew Usherwood from DistanceHiker.com. He's also got a podcast you should check out too. And it's currently growing at a hockey stick growth rate, which is really amazing.
And he also has some stories to share about the pandemic and what that did for his business. And it wasn't so great. So listen in.
Pat Flynn: Matthew, welcome to AskPat, thank you so much for joining me today.
Matthew Usherwood: Pleasure. Thanks so much for having me on.
Pat Flynn: I appreciate you taking the time and where in the world are you? You have an accent. I can hear it. So I'm curious.
Matthew Usherwood: I do. Yeah, I live in Nottinghamshire in the UK.
Pat Flynn: Okay. Awesome. Are you also suffering from the blistering heat that everybody else is suffering from right now over there?
Matthew Usherwood: We were, but it's dropped back down to a fairly reasonable 20 degrees now. So it's, it's quite nice again, but we, yeah, it was pretty hot the last few days.
Pat Flynn: That's good. I'm just hearing a ton about Europe right now, so I'm glad you're okay. Glad everybody's doing well. Tell me about you and, and your business. What do you do? And maybe a little bit about the background behind that.
Matthew Usherwood: Sure. Of course. I'll start at the beginning. I'm a long term listener to the Smart Passive Income, obviously yourself and you are the one who planted the seed to start an online business way back in 2013.
And the reason was you took the mystery out of starting an online business. You didn't come across a spammy and it really kind of stirred something in me. I then made a ton of mistakes, trying to actually start online. Businesses bought, uploaded domain names, tried to make websites. They were rubbish and got caught up on all the mistakes everybody simply get caught up in. And eventually I landed on a travel business that actually started to make some money. So I started a travel business in a self-guided walking holiday niche. So people wanting to book long distance trails and it actually made some money and it did okay.
I ran that from about 2016. All the way to 2020, beginning of 2020, and then a certain global pandemic struck in being a travel business. It buckled very quickly. Yeah. I got my fingers burnt with a ton of cancellations and I actually decided to shelve the business for about six months. Just to have a break from it, cuz there was nothing happening.
And after six months I figured that on the run up to the next kind of hopeful season when the travel industry and the UK was expected to boom, I started putting a lot of time back into it in terms of SEO and predominantly, and this is important, building a Facebook community. Cuz I thought I want a strong community around my business in order for it to grow.
Now when I got to 2021, all the work I'd done was looking good. I started getting bookings through again, but I got caught up on one thing and that was insurance. Because I was small and the business had previously sort of lost all of its deposits. I could not get insurance from anywhere. And in the UK in order to run a travel business, it's a bit boring this, but you need a bit of insurance, which is financial failure insurance, which protects the customer for the case of the business going bankrupt and failing.
I could not get that insurance, so I couldn't run legally any longer. And I went through every avenue, try and gets insurance, and unfortunately I could not get it. So the business failed. I had about a week off and I decided after that week to focus on building a community based on this Facebook group. By this time the Facebook group had started July previously in 2020 had actually started to grow really quickly into the thousands and was becoming a really nice community centered around long distance hiking in the UK . now while building that community of my ears to the ground, I kind of started to see a gap in the market for there being a resource website around long distance trails in the UK. And I thought, Hmm, I wanna build that. And I had the idea to build it, but I didn't wanna do it while I was running something else.
But when I was free to build that, I thought, right, this is what I'm gonna do. And that's what I started. So I bought the domain name, DistanceHiker.com and set to work building this community. Growing this website, I started a podcast. I started doing emails. I started doing all the things you meant to do.
It started to grow really nicely and continues to grow nicely. But the problem is now with this business and I've launched some products into it, which is probably important to mention, but the problem I've got now with what I'm doing is that it's gone from a hundred followers to followers in the low thousands, which is massive for me at the moment, especially with the podcast as well, which is currently getting hockey stick growth, which is awesome.
I just don't have the time to do all the things I want to do on it. And I'm stuck in terms of what do I focus on. I've got to the point now where I'm pretty good at focusing on the right thing when I know the right thing to focus on. And I'm very good at being quite productive with my time. But as of recently, I've really got stuck in terms of where to actually where where's my time best spent, what things should I focus on?
Cause I know I can't do all the things. I've got a young family. Two kids full-time job. And now I've got this as well. So I'm really stuck on, on that kind of, what do I do? Where do I, where do I put my attention?
Pat Flynn: Yeah. I mean, this is a great problem to have. Yeah. Right? It's the, it's the problems that come because of growth and success.
And, you know, it's interesting cuz we are often very surprised when we get there because we're like, oh, things are growing and things are working well, but eventually it gets to that point where either the business stalls out and stops growing, or we burn out or we begin growing and scaling our team.
Right. So there's a lot of different ways to handle growth in this kind of way. The biggest thing I often ask people first is where do you want this to go? And I'm curious about that because then we can reverse engineer . Sometimes people only want something on the side. And the fact that it's growing is awesome, but we often have this inherent feeling that we have to keep it growing and get bigger and bigger just because that's what everybody else is doing.
But you don't have to. There's a book called Company of One that really speaks to this, the idea that for whatever reason, we just feel like we have to grow and that often burns people out. But if you know what you wanna build with it and where you want it to be, then you can reverse engineer from that and at least come up with sort of a plan or at least know that you're headed in the right direction and know what to say yes to and know what to say no to. So I'm curious as far as your goals for this, like where do you want it to, to end up?
Matthew Usherwood: Sure. I've read the book. Company of One's a really good book and have thought about this. In particular, I really want the business to be eventually a full-time job for myself and for others as well.
Hopefully. So I do wanna grow it into a, into a small business that makes a good income for my family and hopefully employs other people as well, in terms of what the business actually looks like when it gets there is I want it to be a sizable and very, very helpful resource for everybody who wants to get into long distance hiking or is long distance hiking in the UK, at the moment. And for it to be a center point of the, on, on of the community for long distance hikers, that champions the, you know, the hobby in the UK. So I want it to be the go-to resource with all the things they're attached to that.
So with good email coms, with a YouTube channel, with the podcast, which I run at the moment with it. So that's very much my vision for it, for it to be sort of like the as a, an example, the Epic Gardening of long distance hiking. In the UK.
Pat Flynn: Yes. Kevin from Epic Gardening is definitely a prolific content creator and building a massive empire really around the world of gardening.
And so a little bit of a connection. They're both outdoors, both experiencing nature and, and in different kinds of ways. So he's definitely a person I would pull inspiration from. Totally. I also know that he, he doesn't have a podcast, right? He specifically focuses on one platform and one platform alone and that's YouTube.
I mean, he does repurpose some of that content and put it into TikTok and Instagram, but that's about it. And so, you know, I could imagine that he could potentially have a podcast and he is definitely leaving out people by not having a podcast about it. But I think that he would stretch himself thin if he wanted to do that.
And you know, like you, you understand that you only have so much time to give. Kevin eventually got to that point where he quit what he was doing to go full time with this. And that could be a different conversation where, okay, well, what is that point? And what does that look like? And is there a way to speed that up or, or what have you, but the most important thing is like, if you take the energy that you have and you start putting elsewhere, like into a new YouTube channel or into another social media platform. The things that you've already started are going to have less of you, right? It's just by the nature of it without hiring a team yet that, that, that is going to happen. So have you reached the point yet with what it is that you're creating your website, your podcast, any social channels that you have to a point where either it's more automated or at least it's optimized so much that you're spending the least amount of time you've ever spent on it, but it's still growing or you could potentially hire people to help support that? Are you, are you there with like, let's just take the podcast, for example, how are you feeling, okay, so my, my first recommendation would be to, with the things that you're already doing, which is obviously working, don't even think about other components yet, have those be a reward to get into those other spaces only once you optimize the things that you have.
So the podcast, for example, we'll need to figure out, okay, well, what does that look like? Eventually could get to the point where you're only just hitting record and then sending those files. And then everything else is taken care of. Right? Is it there yet or, or not quite?
Matthew Usherwood: No, not quite as well. Not at all. I'm still doing absolutely everything at the moment. The only thing I don't do, which is really helpful is because of the Facebook community I get a lot of user generated content from that. Yes. So in terms of sourcing images for Instagram, all of that, almost all of that comes from podcast clips, or it comes from photos that people are posted of their trips on Facebook, which I then reach out and say, can I share this on the group, Instagram, which obviously it's the business Instagram and the answer's almost always yes. Which is great. And the same comes to content as well.
So articles, so I put out every couple of weeks that post on the group that says, Hey, anybody doing anything interesting? If so, fill in this content submission form and it almost always get content that comes my way, or I might see somebody doing something interest that's so good. And I kind of say, Hey, do you want me to do a writeup for you?
And we, we get the content out. So I'm quite good at getting people to give me the content rather than having to do a lot of typing myself. But that's great. I still struggle with the time to kind of do all the things like I'd love, for instance, do a weekly email newsletter. With sharing all the things I've done.
Cause I got an email list of, you know, it's not massive, but it's about 2000 people and I'd love to kind of share that with them. But I managed to do that once every few months, which pains me to send out an email once every few months when I know I wanna do it every week, for example.
Pat Flynn: Yeah. So that, that makes sense.
And, and that's where optimizing things can get you time back, whether you are, you know, reinvesting some of that money to hire a team or better systems, or what have you to be able to take more of you out of that, that you can put more of you into this other thing. But if you are already doing everything, you can't do everything.
You have to pull yourself out from something or else you will break or something will break. Sometimes it's personal relationships will break. Something will break unless, you know what I mean?
Matthew Usherwood: Yeah. Yeah. I've had a few burnouts with this already. A few massive burnouts where I've just sort of hit rock boss.
I'm like, yeah, I can't do this. All it stops for two weeks grinds to a halt and they're like right. Re regather, and then get back on it. I tend to come out of those quite refreshed, but I I'd rather not have those burnouts at all.
Pat Flynn: Yeah. We don't want the burnouts. No, for sure. cause you can't create great content when you're burned out.
You can't be a good husband or, or father when you're burnt out. We just, we just don't want that. So I would say, give yourself grace, give yourself permission to not feel like you have to do all of it. You've created something already. That is beautiful. And the fact that you have a community that's willing to give and wants this community to grow even further. I mean, you could crowdsource even more if you'd like to insert itself into the newsletter, you know, maybe much of that to at least get it going once a month to start is crowdsource versus mostly just coming from you. There's also, you know, if you really wanted the newsletter to work, there might be some things to do to optimize the creation of that.
For example, I don't know if for your work, you, for example, I know some people who do this because literally they're strapped for time they're in their car or their vehicle, and they're just dictating what they want to put in the newsletter. And then they send that off to somebody to take that transcript and turn it into a newsletter.
It's while you were doing something already, right? And it's like, it doesn't have to be perfect. I don't, I don't know if that's another thing, Matthew. I know that it's very common to hear this kind of conversation from perfectionist who want everything to be like a perfect newsletter, a perfect this, where are you on the spectrum of like perfectionism?
Matthew Usherwood: Great question. I'm pretty low down on spectrum of perfectionism. I have got caught up in that trap of sort of delaying doing things until they're perfect, but actually is the podcast which a enable want me to get over that. Cuz I realized my first podcast to release kind of forces you. Yeah, for sure. And I got episode 20 coming out on the weekend, which I'm pretty excited about.
With more episode recorded and ready to go as well. And it was actually doing that. That just made me get over it. Cuz I realized the first podcast was rubbish and the 10th podcast was, was average and they, they got better progressively. So yeah, I'm not by all means not a perfectionist with this.
I'm happy just to sort of throw things against the wall and see what sticks.
Pat Flynn: That's good. Yeah. That's good. So that's the right approach for sure. What if you created this newsletter and it was once or twice a month and you just knew it was gonna be a little messy and you knew it was gonna be a little haphazard and you were okay with that.
And you just wanted to get it out there.
Matthew Usherwood: Like, yeah, I think I can be perhaps a bit more perfectionist with the newsletter, probably from a stats point of view. There's something about seeing people unsubscribe to a newsletter that that hurts, but I probably need to get over that looking into the intricacies of the analytics behind that, but yeah, for sure.
I think I could probably manage at least a once or twice a month newsletter.
Pat Flynn: I definitely think that that would be a good priority to have, you know, over starting a brand channel or, or something elsewhere because you know, as you've heard me talk about before many times the email list is gonna be where you can take that community anywhere in the future.
Right? No matter what happens if Facebook goes down or, or what have you, if another one pops up or in the future, once you optimize or get some time back, you do start really focusing on a YouTube channel. Well, now you have your email list and can launch really quickly, right from the get go. You have proven that you could be successful and you're already getting things done with what you've already created.
And I think if you started with optimizing those things first, you're gonna get some time back that you can choose to do whatever you'd like with, and the idea of really being conscious of your growth and like the decisions to lead you to where you want to go. Right?
Like if you, if you listen to SPI, you obviously probably listen to other entrepreneurial podcasts and there's a lot of hype in this space. There's a lot of exaggeration. There's a lot of, of this new tool. This thing's working over here. You gotta do this seven figure launch, yada yada, yada. Oh, yes. Oh my gosh.
Like I've had to put my blinders on every day, actually. But if you know that you are working on things that you know are ultimately serving the community, then you're doing the right thing. And for it, it just might be the podcast in the community for now. What if it was just the podcast in the community?
And you just nailed those to start. How would that feel if that's all you had to worry about?
Matthew Usherwood: I would definitely have a feeling particularly say with like Instagram, for example, where I share stuff already, that I'm feeling that I'm missing out on the community outside of that. Does that make sense?
There's a whole kind of exciting community going on Instagram, lots of sharing stuff. And I feel sometimes if we're not on there, I'm missing out on that. But in terms of the podcast and this community itself, they're probably the two aspects I do enjoy the most out of everything I do. So that in terms, I would probably feel pretty good about just doing those things and seeing those grow by themselves.
Pat Flynn: I'm not saying like ditch Instagram or get rid of your account or anything like that. I'm just saying like, let's not worry so much about it. Right? And if you happen to have an opportunity to post something cuz you have some time or because something's interesting, cool.
Let's remain consistent on the podcast and showing up in the community. The Instagram is just a bonus and you'll have, you know, the best of both worlds in that, in that case. It's, it's really gonna be a discipline situation more than anything. That's that's really what this comes down to.
That's something that takes some people took me years to figure out because I would, I would over clock. I would work too much cuz I had the time and I just did all the things. I even, I even had a presentation called how to be everywhere. It was like be on every platform because that's where everybody is.
And I actually wish I didn't do that. Or, or, you know, I, I think it's reversed now. What if you just we're fully present in that Facebook community and that's where everybody could come and rely on you and show up every day they're connecting with each other and things are happening there.
And everybody on Instagram. Yeah. They get a little bit of you, but if they join the Facebook group, then they'll get all of it and that could entice them to come over.
Matthew Usherwood: That sounds pretty good, to be honest. Yeah, that sounds pretty good.
Pat Flynn: And how old are your kids?
Matthew Usherwood: So I've got a little boy who is three and my other is my oldest is nearly seven.
Pat Flynn: Yeah, definitely like they need your full attention. So of course you don't, you can't take away time from them.
Matthew Usherwood: Yeah. Like on the, you know, ideally I'd do a bit on the weekends, but weekends is full on kids' time. So, this is really a sort of the occasional Saturday morning. If I wake up early enough, I can get away with doing some work then before they wake up, but mostly late evenings, but still trying to get sleep down.
That's the thing, cuz I've, I've made the mistake of missing out and sleep for, to try and get this done and you know, works for a few weeks and then it, you just kind of, if that, and then you just crash.
Pat Flynn: Oh, it bites you in the butt after. That's for sure. Yeah. Your work, you said you work full time. What, what do you do?
Matthew Usherwood: Yeah, so I actually work in the outdoor industry anyway. And funnily enough, this what I've done so far in the last year and a half on this has actually just led me to a career change. So I used to do customer service within the company I work for, but I've recently gone onto content marketing and I've used this as a case study to really get into that new direction.
So it's wicked cuz I'm now learning about this every single day. Yeah. And getting a real insight into, you know, marketing on a grand scale, which is allowing me to kind of feed back into this. And I kind of feed my learnings from my own personal work, into my employment. So it's a really nice working relationship.
So it's had a real benefit from that point of view, but it still comes down to that sort of time aspect. But I think what you said is, is kind of super helpful. I kind of knew I needed to do that, but I just, that kind of push to do that is really, really helpful.
Pat Flynn: Yeah. Or, or permission, you know, as we often hear on, on as pat people just are like, I knew I needed to do that.
I just needed to hear somebody else tell me it was okay. And that's very, very common here. And the other thing is, and, and where I was leading with that was like many people who are strapped for time who have full-time jobs are able to work out a situation with their full-time job to be able to either work remote one day a week or two days a week, or which may not be possible for you in the outdoor space, but two at the moment.
Matthew Usherwood: Yeah. So outdoor clothing industry. Sorry. I should have been more specific. So it's it's office based work anyway, so yeah, two days a week.
Pat Flynn: Gotcha.
Okay. So that's great because then you can get all the things you need done earlier, you know hustle on that. And then you have extra time for yourself or, you know, negotiating like a four day work week. Like again, is there a way to go and obviously you still re meet the financial goals you have for your budget and all that stuff?
Like I know some people who are like, you know what, I just wanna go halftime here so I can go double time here. Right? and it might not be time right now, but that's something that could be worked toward.
Matthew Usherwood: At the moment, probably not. But I suspect in the future, then that may well be something I go to. I mean, my partner's doing a similar thing with the business she's running where she's kind of starting to step away from her work and into her private work and that's working really well.
So that's definitely something I'd look to do in the future. But the, the other thing I, I I'm a bit stuck on as well. If you don't mind me asking, was that earlier this year I launched a product actually, no, last year. So Christmas 2021. Yeah. I launched a print on demand product to the audience that I have, which was essentially a personalized poster of a long distance trail.
Have you seen those kind of circular star charts for children that you can buy where it kind of, it plots the, the date and basically one of those, but for long distance trails. And that went down really well as an example of a product that I could launch into the community cuz long term, I want to build generate income from this base more on products than sort of advertising.
If I can. I'm not being too fixed on that, but it'd be like nice to. It did well, it made some good pre-Christmas sales and then sort of launched a tentative Shopify store after that, which didn't do quite so well. Cause I think people wanted to transact with me rather than to a store. But what I found it did was it, it allowed me to put some investment back into this.
So I upgraded my microphone, got new headphones, allowed me to pay for some decent hosting software to create better podcasts. And I think all of that helped me grow the, the show a little bit as well. And at least gave me a bit more confidence. Any money I do make from that, cuz I do make the odd sale here and there, I'm not making any money from this at the moment. I'm just sort of an audience building stage. Any money I do make from that really does help cuz it, my next purchase is background for, for this to make a better background, cuz I'd like to use the reels of some points in the future and whatnot, and it might be nicer for guests, but where I got caught up as well is I don't know whether I am rushing too much into monetizing audience.
Does that make sense? Or do I settle with the fact that I just need to grow the audience before I start sort of trying to put products into that. I'm trying to be patient with it, but I don't wanna be too patient and I don't wanna be impatient as well. So I'm trying to find that balance of when, when do I really start with sort of putting products in front of audience?
I do this for the love as well. I love doing this, so I don't wanna ruin it by making it kind of a money making operation. If that makes sense. But I also want it to be a business long term.
Pat Flynn: Of course. Yeah. I mean, it's very common for people to say something like this when they themselves have once been burned by a company that they've trusted, or somebody who they followed started just seemingly like just every email became like a sales pitch or something like that.
And, and, and we don't want to do that to our audience. Right? So we often like push ourselves away from selling anything because we, we wanna stay as far away from that as possible. And we use the excuse of well, I'm just in the audience building phase. Imagine if you, I mean, these products that you're creating, they're helpful, they're obviously loved by the audience.
Imagine that you had like a group of people standing in front of you and you had these products that would be helpful to them, but they were like, Hey Matthew, can you sell this to me? And you say, no, my audience isn't big enough yet. They're right there. They want that product. So as long as the product aligns with your audience, I mean, you could start selling from day one to the one person who visits your website.
And I think that it would behoove you to put these products in front of people. Now there's a difference between showing off what you have and sharing how cool it is and giving people an opportunity to pay you back. I mean, that's another thing. People want to buy things from people they enjoy listening to and, and trust because it shows, so it's a way to show support and you're, you're tying off that ability for, from people that law of reciprocity, cuz you've been delivering.
But secondly, people in a community want to express who they are. They want to show off the things that they're into. And so you're not allowing that to happen. And so long as you feel comfortable and use common sense to just not bombarded and put these things down people's throats every single day, and it's just there and it's natural and you mention it in a podcast organically, and it's just, again, it takes practice to know what is too much or too little, but I'm sure you would understand that.
I think even the language, like I wanna monetize my audience. Right? It's just sounds like icky. Versus. I don't think you would hold yourself back from wanting to have your audience feel like even more a part of the community or support the community or enable you to like honestly more money that, that comes your way is gonna help them even more in the end.
Matthew Usherwood: That's exactly my rationale. The more money I get for this, the more I can invest into it, if I can start to generate more income outta this. Cause I've kind of proven the concept of this. I'm definitely a proof of concept stage where everything I'm doing is working. It just needs to be scaled in some way, but I can make some more money outta this.
I can put that into creating content for the website and improv the podcast quality, you know, as you say, outsourcing. You know, somebody editing the podcast for me even, which will free me up for other stuff. So I, I know I'm kind of ready to do it, but it feels still feels a bit icky, which is weird because I've done it before I've taken transactions from people before.
But I think cuz I'm close to this community and they know me. Well, I almost feel like dipping my hand into that instead of saying, Hey, I've got something to sell you feels weird now it's sort of kind of personal.
Pat Flynn: Here's the best way to go about it. Get them involved in the process of what it is that you're creating.
When you have your audience tell you I want this, or, Hey, here's an idea and you create it, then it actually is not you squeezing money out of them because you want more money, it's actually them coming up with it and you providing for them. Okay. That sounds like it opened up something for you.
Matthew Usherwood: Yeah, for sure. Because I had an idea which I've been sitting on for a while and that's just made me really think that it could be a good idea. And the idea is creating essentially guidebooks, but kind of short guidebooks people wanting to get into first long distance hiking for the first time. So they, it gives 'em a trail they can do on a weekend.
So people, no brainer, my situation who are busy, they want to get out hiking more, a lot of walks take, you know, a week or so to do, but my guidebooks would be long distance walks. They're accessible by public transport. They can do in a weekend. And I thought, oh, I could bring people along in the journey of creating that.
But if I did that, I knew I'd have to focus on just, you know, like the podcast, for instance, in order to market that, cause I would not have time to run the blog and to do that at the same time or wouldn't, or wouldn't have time to do anything but podcast and community and that. Yeah, bringing people on that journey, I think would be really fun to do.
I think I could see myself doing that.
Pat Flynn: I love that idea. The guidebooks are no brainer. Yeah, for sure. And that is of massive service. I mean A by creating those, you're saving them time. Yeah. You're saving them money. You are actually providing more value than, than what you're charging for it. And so it's a, it's a win for everybody.
That's, that's the kind of marketing I like when it's a win for everybody. When a person gets what they want and they've saved time and money, and they've happily spent that money. And then you also get paid too. I mean, what a wonderful world, right? And that's what you could do.
Matthew Usherwood: Wicked. That sounds great. Yeah.
Pat Flynn: That's the best feedback I could ever get from a comment is like "wicked." That's the best.
Matthew Usherwood: Yeah. I I'm really glad you went to that cuz actually, I, I have been sat with that idea for a little while and like, no, no, no, I haven't got time to do it. I want to do, I haven't got time to do it, but. I think that's just given me permission to, to kind of pull a switch on that and make it happen.
Pat Flynn: Yeah. I think you do have the time to do it, but you were just using time as an excuse because you were scared to do it.
Matthew Usherwood: Yeah. A little bit.
Pat Flynn: You're not alone though. Don't worry. So that's, that's very common.
Matthew Usherwood: No, I'm sure. I know I've listened to enough of these so know I'm not.
Pat Flynn: Matthew, where can people go to check out your work and eventually get these guidebook and, and all these other things that you're offering.
Matthew Usherwood: So nice and easy, if you go onto Google type in distance hiker, then I come up. If you type in long distance hiker, I also come up. So DistanceHiker.com is the website. Instagram is @DistanceHikers. The podcast is The Distance Hiker Podcast. You get the message, Distance Hiker all over the web. Yeah.
Pat Flynn: I love the niche. Great job, Matthew. Thank you for being on the show, being vulnerable and, and I'm glad we were able to help you out today.
Matthew Usherwood: Oh, pleasure. Real nice speaking to you. Thanks so much for having me.
Pat Flynn: All right. I hope you enjoy that conversation with Matthew Usherwood again, you can find him at DistanceHiker.com, if that's of interest to you. Or even just to check it out.
I mean, it has a very old school blog feel, which I love. It's just articles and they're very personable and he's got some really helpful information too. I'm really excited to see what he does with a lot of the information we talked about today. And hopefully this resonated with you in one way, shape, or form. And maybe there was one or maybe more gold nuggets that you could pull from this. And I wanna thank you again, Matthew.
And thank you for listening all the way through. I appreciate you make sure to hit that subscribe button, if you haven't already. We have an amazing community I'd love for you to check out. Go to SmartPassiveIncome.com/community so you can see what kinds of communities we have that are available to you, cuz Matthew was talking about community for his audience as well. And ours is not on Facebook and it is something that you can be a part of and it's separate and it's private and it's safe and we'd love for you to check it out.
SmartPassiveIncome.com/community, and doesn't matter what level you're at. There's something there for you. So thank you so much. I appreciate you. And I look forward to serving you the next episode. Till then keep rocking it. We'll see you in the next one.
Thanks for listening to AskPat at AskPat.com. I'm your host Pat Flynn. Our senior producer is Sarah Jane Hess. Our series producer is David Grabowski. And our executive producer is Matt Gartland. Sound editing by Duncan Brown. AskPat is a production of SPI Media.
We'll catch you in the next session.