AP 1016: How Do I Double the Revenue on My Blogs?

About This Episode

Today I have Tom Drake on the show from Retire Happy, TomDrake.net, and MapleMoney.com, a popular personal finance blog that's known as the Canadian source for personal finance. I've had the pleasure of meeting Tom a number of times at FinCon, the financial blogger conference. Tom's got a lot going on, and he's looking to make some big improvements. He's had his online business up and running for nine years now and is a low-six-figure blogger. He still has a day job, and wants to take his business up a level—he wants to treat his blog like more of a business, monetize properly, and reduce expenses. His goal this year is to double his revenue.

Through our call, we talk through Tom's current business strategy and discuss his upcoming online course and website redesign. I give him advice for transitioning from a scrappy entrepreneur to CEO mindset, using my own story as an example. We discuss Tom's next steps, and I help him craft a prioritized game plan for launching his course, creating accountability for himself, and taking steps towards being able to leave his day job comfortably.

What You'll Learn:
Discover blueprints for launching an online course, creating accountability, and taking your online business to the next level.

AskPat 1016 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: What's up everybody? Pat Flynn here. Welcome to Episode 1016 of AskPat 2.0. This is the show . . . . where I go through . . . people's problemos, and I help . . . I'm trying to rhyme and it's not working very well, so I apologize. Hey, guys, this is what we do. We do a coaching call live, about a half hour. You're there, sitting in, listening, learning as we go. Today we're talking with Tom Drake from MapleMoney.com, a very popular personal finance blog, known as the Canadian source for personal finance.

I've actually known Tom for quite a while, and met him a number of times at FinCon, which is one of my favorite conferences, the financial blogger conference. Fun fact: The first conference I ever spoke on stage at. I pretty much threw up right before that happened because it was the most nerveracking thing I've ever done, but one of the most fulfilling things I've done, and now I've gone on to speak several times. I have an infinity and a love for the personal finance space.

We're here today to help Tom and all of you who are going through trouble with, “Okay, well, how do I double my revenue? I might still have a job and I want to increase my income, but I have all these other ideas and I'm trying to redesign my website, and there's all these tasks and to-do lists that I need to complete. Where's my money going to come from?” That's what we're talking about today.

Before we get to the call with Tom, speaking of money, I want to talk about how we manage our money. For me personally, I love the tool FreshBooks. You've heard me talk about it before if you've heard this show, because they are the sole sponsor of AskPat and one of my favorite companies, helping all of us manage our business finances in several different ways, from keeping track of our income, categorizing them properly for tax season—that's really important—for expenses and automatically tracking those expenses. They can connect to your credit cards. You can just automatically keep track of what's going on, you can go back and look at your archive and your books and just see what's going on. You can understand where you can save money from that, but they also help with invoicing. If you do any coaching or consulting, which I do, using FreshBooks makes it really easy to, literally in less than thirty seconds, create a professional-looking invoice that you can send out. They also help you keep track of not only who has yet to pay you, but who has yet to even open that invoice and see it. It makes follow up very easy, so you can get paid like you all deserve when you are helping other people, because that's what this is about, serving others.

FreshBooks does an amazing job, and they've done an amazing job for years serving the SPI community and the AskPat community. If you want to check them out, you can check them out for thirty days for free. All you have to do is go to FreshBooks.com/askpat. Just make sure you enter “Ask Pat” in the “How Did You Hear About Us?” section.

Alright. Thanks again. Enjoy the show. Make sure you subscribe if you haven't already. Here's Tom from MapleMoney.com.

Hey, Tom. What's up? Thanks for joining me here on AskPat 2.0. Welcome.

Tom Drake: Thanks for having me.

Pat Flynn: Tom, what is your business, and in the one minute rundown, how did you get started in all this?

Tom Drake: I started just over nine years ago as a Canadian finance blog. We've recently rebranded to MapleMoney. I've got a handful of blogs really, but Maple Money and Retire Happy are two that are sort of the ones that are succeeding in Canada. That's where I'm focusing most of my effort on now.

Pat Flynn: Nice. For those of you listening, Tom and I have known each other for quite a while. We always run into each other at FinCon. Were you there in 2011 when I first spoke on stage?

Tom Drake: Yep. I remember I was actually sitting right beside you when we did a, “everybody move down a seat in the tent,” if you remember that.

Pat Flynn: The networking exercise?

Tom Drake: Yeah.

Pat Flynn: Yeah. I felt totally out of place there. The nice thing was that the FinCon community and you and everybody there, especially P.T, everybody there is so friendly. You just made me feel so welcome, so thank you for that, Tom. Obviously, I've been to FinCon several years now in a row. It's a great conference. I recommend you all check it out for sure. Anyway, today is about you, Tom. Tell us what's on your mind and tell me what I can help you with.

Tom Drake: I'm looking to make some big improvements. Despite going nine years and being a low six-figure blogger, I still have a day job. Part of that is because my wife's been able to stay home with the kids, so it's great that the blog's been able to do that, but I need to take it up one more level so that I can at least have the ability to leave my day job, even if I didn't right away. Even mentally, just feeling like I could would be a big improvement. I do have a bunch of goals for this year. Basically, the idea is to start treating it more like a business and not just being a blogger where it's almost accidental success. I want to start looking at how to monetize properly, how to reduce expenses, and really look to make some income that'll benefit the family.

Pat Flynn: When you think about leaving your job now, what kind of feelings are you feeling? What is uncomfortable about that to you?

Tom Drake: Right now, I don't think the income's high enough to truly cover what would be then my wife and me not working. In reality, we probably could make it work, it just wouldn't be as comfortable. Some of that comfortability might be why I'm not always treating it enough like a business.

Pat Flynn: Mm-hmm (affirmative). I know all about not treating something like a business. I just Frankenstein-put things together, probably similar to how most bloggers do it, and then I started to see success. It wasn't until I really took that SEO, or, excuse me, not SEO, CEO—SEO's a part of it too, but bringing that CEO mindset to the business really did kind of, like you said, take things to the next level. I'm excited that you know that you need to do that, but before we go into that, I'd love to ask you . . . It's interesting some of the language you were using, like “I think” and “I might,” those kinds of things. That just leads me to believe that you haven't actually found an exact number that you'd be comfortable with leaving your day job. Have you gone through an exercise trying to discover, “Okay, well how much does the blog and my business online need to make before I feel comfortable?”

Tom Drake: An exact number? No. My goal for this year is to double the revenue. I don't really care if I make an extra penny in profit for this year, just to lay down some groundwork of getting new things in place, spending on ads as well, just to bring some extra traffic in where we've been mostly search-based up until this point. I think doubling the revenue would do a lot. Again, not so much this year if I'm not looking to make profit, but I'm thinking a year from now, where will I be? If I could then keep that same revenue, but then reduce expenses, I think that would give me the amount I need. With the expenses, I also feel like having the day job lets me be a little too loose with the expenses sometimes. I'm not making decisions as someone that really needs that income to pay the bills.

Pat Flynn: What do you feel . . . This is a hypothetical question. I'm not suggesting, and I never suggest to anybody, “you should quit your job,” because I think even though it was me getting laid off that actually opened up a lot of doors for me, I know there are people who can do both. I understand the wanting to feel secure and those kinds of things, especially related to benefits and that sort of thing. That's a whole other discussion. Hypothetically, if you were to remove your day job from the situation, how, in your words, do you think that might benefit specifically the stuff that you're doing online?

Tom Drake: I don't know if I would put any more time into the business if I were to leave my job. I'd probably get more time with my family. Basically right now, I've got the day job until 4:00, by the time I get home, I see the kids for three to four hours before they go to sleep. I might get more family time, which is part of what I mean—it would help a lot mentally.

Pat Flynn: That's important. Sure. Yeah.

Tom Drake: Yeah. Strictly as a business though, I do put a lot of time in already. I'm a 7:00 pm to 1:00 am kind of guy on the business, so I'm putting hours in every day.

Pat Flynn: Yeah. You're hustling.

Tom Drake: Yeah. I don't think I'd get more time. I might get more mental clarity. Just less things to think about might help me make better decisions.

Pat Flynn: Okay. That's good to know because now it's not a matter of . . . What a lot of people say is, “I just don't have the time to do it.” You're putting the time in. For the rest of this discussion, perhaps we can discover where should that time be put into. I'd love to unpack a little bit what your . . . You said you wanted to double your revenue. What is your current plan to make that happen?

Tom Drake: A big part of it has been some Facebook advertising just to bring in new traffic. I've been working with Monica Louie, who I know you know.

Pat Flynn: Yeah. She's awesome.

Tom Drake: She's been helping me get different ads that seem to be working, promoting some of the affiliate-related posts that I've got on the site. Then another thing is, again, maybe being too lazy the past couple years. I haven't been producing enough new content. Doing a lot of republishing and upgrading, but not brand new content. I've hired some writers for both of the main sites to start adding additional posts because to gain search traffic, yeah I can try to go from ranking number five to number three or something, but there's nothing that really beats the gain of also just having a whole new topic added to the site. I've been seeing a little bit of success with that already, just covering some new things in personal finance that didn't exist two or three years ago when I was producing more content.

Pat Flynn: Are there any other avenues of income that you had thought about before or had explored or perhaps are on your wishlist that you haven't really delved into yet?

Tom Drake: Yeah. There's a lot on the wishlist. With my partner at Retire Happy, I work with someone else on that site as well, Jim Yih, we're looking at doing a retirement-based course, especially around the weird Canadian things that you wouldn't get in a course from the States or anything. I think that'll help a lot. We're looking more at truly using the newsletter. Both of these main sites have good sized email lists—one's about 10,000, the other's over 20,000—but we haven't really done much more than just email about a new post. We don't have nice autoresponders set up or anything like that to really benefit from those new subscribers.

Pat Flynn: Then, final question before we dive in a little bit more is where is the bulk of the income coming from right now? How does it breakdown?

Tom Drake: Mostly affiliates. For quite a few years, I went mostly with AdSense and a little bit of CPM ads. That was the easy way kind of thing, not necessarily the best-paying way. With affiliates, I've got best travel credit cards, best cash back credit cards. We're doing robo-advisors now, a lot of these comparison posts where we're reviewing maybe five different services like that and choosing the best one. That's done way more for me than AdSense ever did. It was the difference between just doing okay and then getting past that six digit mark for annual revenue.

Pat Flynn: Nice. To do that through affiliates and those kinds of posts, that's really admirable. A lot of people want that for sure. I personally feel like you can completely amp things up when you begin to start, now that you have this amazing brand that you've created and credibility over the years, to create your own products. That's exciting that you are potentially thinking about doing that. Is there a plan in place for that specifically, or a timeline?

Tom Drake: Timeline's . . . I've got a few goals before that. One is relaunching new designs for both of the major sites. I also want to launch a podcast on Maple Money, not so much that that helps me with the monetization goal directly, but it's a lot of good networking and even link-building really. After that, so say summer to fall, we'd like to have the retirement course done and online. We've already tried a little bit of recording video. I wasn't too happy with the quality of it, so we're going to look at improving that first and then probably getting someone else to edit it so that it actually gets done.

Pat Flynn: Why are you focusing on the website design? Why is that a next step for you?

Tom Drake: The current site doesn't look so bad. Retire Happy's a little more dated. Both of them had a bit of the . . . It just looks like another blog, kind of. It's just the posts up on the front page, and that was pretty much it. We're trying to look bigger to match where we're at within Canada. I'm hoping that—the idea is that it adds, especially with things like credit card affiliates, that it adds trust and authority, which will hopefully then lead to better conversion there as well.

Pat Flynn: One of the things for me when I converted from more of a scrappy entrepreneur in the beginning to now a CEO mindset, a few things. Number one, it was building a team and that kind of thing. I know you have people who help you with a lot of things, which is great. You have this team of writers, which is fantastic. The other part that was very big for me was the idea that everything is done with a specific purpose, like I make this decision because I want this to happen. That was very different before because before it was just like, “Oh yeah. I'm going to write a blog post because I'm going to write a blog post,” or “I want to redesign my website because I don't like the way it looks and I just want it to look better,” but there wasn't specific goals in mind with that. I was leaning toward, “I don't know if Tom's redoing his website just because that's kind of the thing to do, or is there a specific goal in mind?”

I'm encouraged that you said something related to the affiliates and the trust that you're building. Do you have any specific results that you want to see after the design change? This is a very big question because a lot of people struggle with, “I don't know if things are going well”, or, “I don't know if it was the right move” because they're not tracking, because they're not . . . A, they don't have goals related to those decisions, but B, there's nothing to track so they don't . . . Can you ever be happy if you don't track?

I want to challenge you and ask you, do you have specific goals in mind for when you have this design change? To me, and this is just my thought, just based on our conversation, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I feel that launching a course and improving the revenue numbers and building something of your own is going to give you more ROI and a bigger paycheck versus a website redesign. When you say that you want to double your income and that you want to potentially leave your day job, those are the actions, the bolder actions, that will make that happen sooner than a website redesign or a podcast. Although it might be weird hearing me say like, “You know, podcast”—of course you should start a podcast, I sell a podcasting course, but I'm telling you, that's less important than these opportunities you have in front of you with this audience that you've built. Nine years of credibility to launch something that is your own, where you're going to make a lot more profit, you're going to help a lot more people and just have a better experience with what you're doing online. Sorry, that was a little bit of a long winded set up for number one, goals for the website redesign, and number two, do you think that that's actually more or higher priority or lower priority than, for example, something like your own product?

Tom Drake: Yeah. I don't know if I do have a true, especially monetary goal connected to the design. I'm just kind of stuck in it right now because we're just about to launch one of them.

Pat Flynn: Sure. I'm not telling you to drop that now. You've gone so far already, you might as well launch it, but I would definitely pay attention to what happens afterwards, especially when it comes to all the places on your website where you are generating an income. I would, if you're not doing it already, keep track of all those places, the most profitable pages on your website. Keep a close eye on those after the redesign to see if they are giving you more of a positive ROI or maybe it decreases—hopefully not.

To my second question there: How do you respond to prioritization? Is there something deeper here? Is there a reason why perhaps . . . It's funny. You mentioned the videos weren't good enough. That is often, I'm not saying it is, but it's often an excuse people make when it's something that's scary that they don't . . . because they've never done it before or they just aren't sure if it's going to sell. Are those any feelings that you're having?

Tom Drake: Yeah. For sure. I think one of the issues I have with that idea is being around for nine years, I don't want to do anything that comes off not good enough. That was my worry with the videos was that the audio wasn't so great. I do want a certain polished look. Same with the podcast. That's another thing where it was something I really wanted to start in January, and here we are in April when we're recording this and I haven't started it. Almost this want for, I wouldn't say perfection, but at least the upper portion towards that, it stops me from doing a lot of things. Even before that, it's easy to get distracted by things that don't matter. I've spent time worrying about social networks and getting more followers and stuff like that. That doesn't . . . It didn't help me as a business at all.

Pat Flynn: Is there a mechanism by which you can check in with yourself when you're doing something to essentially ask yourself, “Is this what I should be working on right now?” That was a really big thing for me. I even set random alarms on my phone to go off at random times during the day to basically be a check-in for myself because I was catching myself, those alarms would catch me, in Twitter world and Facebook and just completely wasting my time. That's a huge drain, especially when you have these bigger things that are going on. Maybe I can just offer you to ask yourself when you're working on something like that, “Is this actually helping me with my bigger goals?” If not, then drop it.

Tom Drake: Yeah, yeah. I think one thing I know that you're a big fan of too, is I think I need to get back to doing a weekly mastermind. I did one maybe two or three years ago, and it kind of fizzled out. I do an annual one with a group of guys every year as well, but—

Pat Flynn: Why do you think you need the mastermind?

Tom Drake: I think I need accountability. I need . . . Even just the weekly goals, the last fraction of a mastermind meeting every week, just to give goals and then be accountable to them the week later I think would get me back on track again. I saw great success with that in the past because I felt like I actually had to do the thing I said I was going to do, instead of just putting it off and spending my time on Twitter or something.

Pat Flynn: Do you feel like, that you maybe have one person who's a good friend in your space who you can go to and just essentially send an email or a text once a week just to accomplish what that mastermind call would accomplish for you? A mastermind call is often—it varies obviously, but it could be an hour long a week, which you only have so many hours with the day job as well. It's going to require a lot of that really hardcore think-tanking or the thinking brain, where when it's not your turn in the hot seat, you're going to have to step up and offer help and think and put yourself in that person's situation to help them out. That takes a lot of energy.

I'm not saying that mastermind groups are bad. I think they're incredibly valuable, but for what you need, you need that just accountability portion. Is there a friend or a person you can go to and say, “Hey. If you don't mind, can I email you just once a week or tell you what my goals are?” Just that practice alone could be something that could be really useful. Maybe there's a partner who can just do that with you, kind of an exchange.

Tom Drake: Yeah. I like that idea. I know I can think of a couple bloggers that have very similar goals to mine right now actually, right down to the doubling revenue and all that, so there's certainly like-minded people that I could probably do that, even if it doesn't become a full mastermind, but just yeah. I like the email idea. I never even thought of it. Just to go back and forth between the two of us.

Pat Flynn: Yeah. Let's keep it simple. This is a strategy I learned from Tim Ferriss recently. He said it somewhere in a video or something, but it's something that's been thrown around in the space now, and that's, “Always ask yourself, “If this were easy, what would it actually look like?” and then trying to make it that.” If I were to ask you in terms of doubling your revenue, “If it were easy, what would it look like?” how would you answer?

Tom Drake: What would easy look like to double my revenue?

Pat Flynn: Yeah. If it was like . . . Your easiest path to do that would likely be what?

Tom Drake: The course would probably do really well. That would be on Retire Happy. The email list is very responsive there. I think even an initial launch would do quite well, but there's also the affiliate side, especially with Maple Money, which is stronger on the affiliates. That's where things like new content come in. I haven't had . . . Not having enough new posts, there's a lot of new stuff that we can cover, that we can rank for relatively easily. Now that I've hired writers instead of, for years I was being a one person blog . . . Not the entire time. Earlier on I had writers, and then they kind of all disappeared too. Between the two sites, yeah, I think launching the course . . . It wouldn't be easy, I guess. It might not fit the easy term, but—

Pat Flynn: Right, right. Sorry. “If it were a simple process,” I guess maybe I should have said, but it's definitely not easy—

Tom Drake: It would be one of the best results for sure.

Pat Flynn: Okay. I would move that up in the prioritization ladder for sure, and knowing that—this was big for me too—it doesn't have to be perfect the first go around. The way that I would launch it, and there's many ways to do it, but I would actually pre-sell it. You can pre-sell it to a limited number of people, even before it's made. Just understand is this something people actually want. Some people will not want it because it's not made yet, but other people will jump on that opportunity because they'll be able to work closely with you and your partner as you build it out for them.

They're going to get early access to it, potentially a discount if you wanted to offer that, and also they're going to be able to have a little bit more access to you, which is good for you because then you'd be able to get access to them as they're going through to make the course exactly what it needs to be. The beauty of this is because it's limited, you're only working with a certain number of people in a higher capacity, and then when you go live, you're going to have x number of testimonials. You're going to already know it's successful, and it's going to give you that confidence to sell it even more. Then you can begin to inject that into your autoresponder series and all those things and utilize that email list a little bit more.

I do think that you're right. That is where the lowest hanging fruit—if you want to call it that—is in terms of getting you to where your goal is, which is doubling your revenue. I like also what you said with the Maple Money side of things. Content, I think you're right. Content is what worked for you. Oftentimes, the best solution for certain sites is to just continue to do what's already working, which is why I'm not saying that you should do podcasting right now, but get things going where you now have the room and just the space and the mental capacity to do the—because we only have so much bandwidth to do a podcast. Also realizing that that doesn't have to be perfect either.

I think that by working with, going back to your other site, a cohort of students to start with, it's going to help you on the perfection thing because you're going to see things, even though they're not perfect, helping people, which is the most important thing, as you know. Then also, it's going to motivate you because you're going to have these people who pay you who are going to be expecting the next module in the next couple weeks, and the module after that two weeks after that, or however you wanted to divvy that up. I would challenge you to after this call, we don't have to do it on this call, but to select a launch date for that, if that's indeed how you wanted to approach it. I like that approach because you get to validate it before you build it and then work backwards from there to get people excited about it and then come up with a number of how many people you want in before you say, “Alright. I'm going to green-light this and go.” Is that something that you think you might be able to do?

Tom Drake: Yeah. I think so. How do I go about getting that small group of people? Do I email the entire list and kind of—

Pat Flynn: Yeah. I would. I would say, “Hey guys.” Then I'd set up the pain or the problem and then insert your solution. You don't want to just say right away, “Hey guys. I'm working on something cool. I think you're going to like it.” You really want to set up why this thing exists. What is it, a retirement course?

Tom Drake: Yeah, basically. We might even launch it as modules. We haven't decided that because there's specific issues within retirement in Canada that most of the traffic that comes to Retire Happy is looking to solve. We think basically, we go that step beyond what's already in different posts that they're coming to the site through and give them something better. It might be separate modules at first, but maybe eventually we've got a complete retirement course after covering different subtopics.

Pat Flynn: If you wanted to do it that way, just to make it even easier and more just niche in terms of pain or problem or topic, you can just focus on that one and pre-sell that one. Yes, consider how it might fit into a much larger overall course, but you can just pre-sell that one and just get a list of people who are interested in learning more about that, and saying that there's an opportunity to work closely with you and some higher-level learning to help them through those goals. Essentially, you don't want to sell on that first email. You want to collect interest.

When you send that first email, setting up the pain, setting up the problem, talking about that, you're creating the solution, talking about what it's going to look like, how it's going to be, you just simply say, “If this is something you're interested in, hit Reply, and I'll follow up with you.” Then from there, you can either take them on call if you want, which I would recommend because first of all, it's a first cohort and so you're going to want to know as much as you can about these people who are interested. You want to learn what they're going to say, how they're going to say it, what their objections are, all those kinds of things. That allows you to better create a sales page or better send emails out down the road.

By getting them to say, “Yes, I'm interested”, you're not selling on that first email. You are asking. You're almost giving . . . “Hey. This is something I want to offer. If this is something you're interested in, let me know and I'll give you some more details.” If you don't get anybody, then you know that you just didn't say what you wanted to say correctly or that messaging just wasn't correct or they didn't want that. Then you don't have to move on to the next steps until you figure that part out. We're kind of taking this sales process and breaking it up into little mini iterations.

This is what I talk about in my book Will It Fly? If you get people who say, “I'm in”, you know they're in. They said yes once already, which is huge in marketing. One yes leads to the next yes. Then you can follow up with them and then say, “This is what it's going to look like. We're trying to get x number of people in here. If x people get in and buy, then we're going to work closely with you. If not, then we're just going to refund your money. If you're in, here's the PayPal.” You don't even need to create a sales page for it. Then you can just again, like I said, take it in iterations.

As you get . . . Maybe you get ten people in there who are interested in working closely with you. You put them all in a small Facebook group so that you can all chat with each other really quickly. You can let them know when the next module's coming out and all those kinds of things. You can have them let you know what was confusing, what was missing, and they're going to feel like they're getting this special treatment from you because you're basically building this course for them as a small representative of a much larger whole that's in your audience. This way it just becomes a nice step by step approach, but one that kind of builds on the previous step. That's how I would go about it, Tom.

Tom Drake: Yeah. I really like that. We were pretty much just going to create an entire course and then try to sell it after the fact. Your idea, not only does that give us some information up front, but I think, especially in my case, it might get the ball rolling, a little bit of momentum as we go through each of those stages.

Pat Flynn: Oh absolutely. Once you get people saying, “I'm interested,” if you're like most people who are here to serve—I can tell you are that kind of person, Tom—you're going to want to follow up and make sure that they're taken care of.

Tom Drake: Yeah.

Pat Flynn: Awesome. Tell me what the big things you learned today in this call were.

Tom Drake: One of the big things is looking at my priorities to match my goal. If my big goal is double the revenue, then I should rather obviously be looking at things that are going to improve that revenue.

Pat Flynn: Right. Then beyond doubling the revenue, imagine what that does for you. That allows you to safely quit your job or have people around you, your loved ones, be comfortable with that, that kind of thing. It's not just the income, it's what the income would be able to unlock for you.

Tom Drake: Yeah, exactly. Right now, if I were to just quit my job right now, we'd survive, but it would be a big lifestyle shock in everything from how we spend and save, because both would disappear. Right now, it just doesn't feel safe enough. One of the best things that could happen to me would be to get laid off and have a little bit of paid time to figure that out.

Pat Flynn: That's an interesting thing. I'm not saying, again, you should quit, but you said it yourself. What could that extra time and just not having to worry about the day job do for you? I'm just planting that seed for you, but you said it yourself. Prioritization, making sure everything you're doing, you're asking yourself, “How is this helping me get to my goal? How is this helping me get to my goal?” What else?

Tom Drake: That's probably the big one. Otherwise, how I can actually hit these goals. I really like the idea of maybe just a simple weekly email with someone just to focus on just the accountability portion and not necessarily the mastermind.

Pat Flynn: Yep. There you go. That's a good one. Then hopefully the course stuff is helpful too in terms of how to break that down and, again, make it simple, break it down into like step one, step two, and then write that first email and see what happens.

Tom Drake: Yeah. I like that idea. I think having the deadline for our course launch and working up to that date would not only keep us accountable, but also give us that momentum to get it done.

Pat Flynn: I love it. It's right there in alignment with your goals. Tom, hey, thank you so much for coming on and allowing me to coach you through this process. I cannot wait to . . . I know we see each other every so often. I'm going to follow up with you in person at some point and be like, “Dude, how are things?” You're going to tell me that your course launched and that it's going well. I cannot wait to hear you say those words. It'll be a lot of fun, man. Thank you again. Where can people find you if they want to learn more? Where should they go?

Tom Drake: My main website's MapleMoney.com. If people want to see everything I'm up to, I've also got TomDrake.net, which kind of links out to all the different sites and projects I've got going on.

Pat Flynn: Awesome. Hey, thank you so much. I appreciate you. Have a good one.

Tom Drake: Thanks for having me.

Pat Flynn: Alright everybody, I hope you enjoyed that coaching call with Tom. One of my favorite parts of this show is the end where I go, “What did you learn from this?” To have a person tell me what they learned is not just fulfilling for me, but I know very empowering for them because they now know—they've said it out loud—what they need to do next. Like I said in previous episodes, we're going to follow up with these people in the future, if they want, and check in on them. Tom, thank you so much for being vulnerable, being honest, and sharing a bit of information that's not only helpful for both of us, but for everybody listening as well.

For those of you listening, two things you can do right now. One, make sure you subscribe to the show if you haven't already. Just go into your device, find AskPat, and hit the subscribe button because you'll get another episode coming up your way just like this one next week with a different person going through different problems and situations in their business, all there to help you. Number two, what you can do is make sure to leave a review for AskPat on iTunes. It doesn't matter what platform you listen on—if you are listening on the website or on Overcast or some other device—heading over to iTunes will help out the most. Just taking thirty seconds or a minute to do that would be extremely helpful.

If you'd like to get coaching potentially from me, all you have to do is go to AskPat.com. You'll see a button right there in the middle of the page where you can apply. I don't select everybody, but I do select a new person every single week, and that could be you. Just go to AskPat.com. You can get a free half hour-ish—sometimes it goes over, sometimes it's less—coaching call with me. These are things that . . . I have students who pay tens of thousands of dollars to work with me a year. We have this one-on-one situation, but this is for all of you who cannot afford that, who have a problem and a pain, and I want to help you. All you have to do is go to AskPat.com and you can apply there. Again, I can't select everybody, but I hope I can talk to you in the future.

Until then, make sure you A, subscribe, and B, leave a review. Thank you so much. I look forward to serving you in next week's episode of AskPat 2.0. Again, thanks to FreshBooks for making it happen, making it awesome. You can get the thirty day free trial of FreshBooks by going to FreshBooks.com/askpat. Just make sure you enter “Ask Pat” in the “How Did You Hear About Us?” section. Cheers, guys. Bye.