AP 0418: How Long Will My Online Business Last?

AskPat 418 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: What's up, everybody? Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 418 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always, I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions, five days a week. We have a great question today from Megan.

Before we get to that, I do want to thank today's sponsor, which is Lynda.com. Lynda.com/AskPat. You can get a ten-day free trial to this amazing online learning platform, with over 3,000 on-demand video courses. I've used a number of them to help me, teach me my DSLR Camera, to learn new software, to learn some more advanced PhotoShop strategies. I learned PhotoShop and Architecture, but I continue to learn through the content in Lynda.com. I know a lot of people on my team use Lynda as well, and a lot of you use it too. If you haven't yet, you can check it out and see what all the buzz is about by going to Lynda.com/AskPat. Again that will get you a ten-day free trial. All access to all those on-demand video courses. These aren't just little YouTube video courses either. These are professionally, studio quality, video. It's great. Check it out. Lynda.com/AskPat.

All right, here is today's question from Megan.

Megan: Hey Pat, my name is Megan. I'm calling with a bit of a different question for you. Currently I have a day job where I am the owner of a traditional product based business. I've just reached my burnout point. It’s time for me to sell the business and move on. I've begun to set that business up to be more interesting. As I purchase, I guess. In addition to that, I’m starting to pivot and brand myself as an expert in my industry. I've started a blog, where I talk about what its like to run a business in my niche.

My question for you is, I’m a little worried because, you know, when I was running a business, a traditional business, it was, you know, exit strategies I guess I should say. There has been exit strategies for centuries for commerce. Moving into the online world, you know, you and I are about the same age so you remember MySpace. I'm a little concerned about putting all of my eggs into a basket that evolves constantly, and all the time. I was just kind of curious as to what your long term plans are? If you have thoughts about running a business online for the long term. Or, just your thoughts on the best way to go about making sure that this is a continual source of income, and not just a flash in the pan for five or so years.

Thank you so much for your help. Thank you so much for Smart Passive Income and for AskPat. I binge watch, or I binge listen to them, all the time. Thank you so much for all the info you provide. Take care.

Pat Flynn: Hey Megan. Thank you so much for the question, I really appreciate it. First of all I just commend you for pivoting. A lot of people don't pivot, and they look back in their past and say, “Wow I should have pivoted there.” Here you are doing it and you're right in the middle of it and I wish you all the best of luck with, sell the business and into this new business as well. I'm gonna do my best to help you out here.

Now you had mentioned, you know, being a little bit worried about things constantly changing. I think that's actually a great thing. If you're conscious about those things, you can be ahead of everybody else. That allows you, gives you another avenue to stand out of the crowd. Megan you are coming into a space where you're teaching people how to work in this particular industry. That actually gives you an edge. As long as you are focused and maybe connected with other people out there, myself, other people in the space, where you can learn things before they kind of trickle down and get to your space, then you'll be ahead of the game no matter what. So, change is great. It gives you new opportunities to show that you know what you're talking about, to being authority, to teach, to build new courses, and all those sorts of things. It's going to give you a leg up I fell, in that regard as well.

Now you had also mentioned, worrying putting all of your eggs into one basket. Now, the beauty of online, is that there's a lot of different baskets you could put all of your eggs into, in terms of social media. You had mentioned MySpace, and yes, a lot of people have built a business specifically on MySpace, and they have since obviously disappeared, or moved onto something else. I know a lot of people who are really focusing on Facebook, and Facebook only. They're building amazing pages, with tons of people, but then Facebook has kind of annihilated their reach, because of these new algorithms. Facebook is trying to please investors, so they are making it harder and harder to reach your audience that you've built there. A lot of people have been struggling on Facebook, and that has changed as well. Twitter, who knows what's going to happen with Periscope, and so on, and so forth. There's a lot of different places you can go.

I used those different avenues as a way to build a relationship with my audience. I never “build my business” on those particular spaces. I used those spaces to communicate. To be where my audience is, and to get in front of them in different ways. Some people who find me on Facebook might not find me on Twitter, and vise versa. Periscope, some people love the live aspect. I'm on Periscope, @PatFlynn if you haven't followed me yet. That's another avenue. Again, reaching my audience, having them build a relationship with me, building trust, building authority, so on and so forth. If you want a long-term business, you need to build your email list. You need to build those relationships.

Those are the two things you need in order to have this long-term success, through any sort of changes that happen in an industry. Let me go over that again really quick. The relationships, yes. That's very important obviously. If you build an amazing relationship with anyone, you can go anywhere. A great example of this is, Cliff Ravenscraft, who started out in the Podcasting world. By podcasting with his wife about the show Lost. They were just broadcasting about the show Lost. He built up a massive audience there. Actually was able to, during the finale of the whole serious, have, I want to say, one hundred or two hundred people, actually fly out to see him and watch the whole finale together. That's how much he built this relationship with his audience. Then, you know, Lost finished and so did that show, but then he was able to move on to Podcast Answer Man, and pursuing a podcasting life. He had a number of other shows too, and people have followed him everywhere. There's some people who follow Cliff, wherever he goes. I know its the same for me, I know it's the same for a lot of people out there, brands and personal brands, and what not.

Even business. Wherever a business goes, or ends up doing, people love them and they will do, and support them no matter what. I recommend you read this article out there by a guy named Kevin Kelly, called 1,000 True Fans. This is kind of an example of that happening, all these different spaces. When you build that relationship with that audience member, and people who are your customers, they're going to follow you no matter where you go. It doesn't matter what happens, they're going to follow you no matter what. In order for them to more easily follow you, and for you to be comfortable moving forward, to move from place to place, if you should have to.

You got to build that email list. That email list is yours. That becomes your database of your people. People who have given you permission to send them more information later. Here’s a good example of how this was useful, back in March 2013, my site was hacked. It was hacked, it was attacked, I had lost access to it. All my web properties that I had control on that one server, and no this was not bluetooth, this was actually through Servint.net, went down. Servint couldn't figure it out. I had somebody else come in, and I just set up shop on a new place. It was just bad, I had lost about $10-15,000. I recouped a little bit of that through business insurance, but not even half that. It was just a bad experience, but I was still able to keep in constant contact with my audience through my email list, and have them stay up to date, apologize for the outages. Actually, my podcast continued to go up, and also my YouTube videos. I was still able to send emails and provide value through that. I was still making money, through that time period. Obviously, because my website was down not enough.

Let’s just say, for example, my site was completely hacked, and it was gone forever. Well, I have an email list of, no it’s 139,000 people, I could set up another website and i would have people there tomorrow. If all my social media accounts went down, and a brand new one went up, I could set up shop there too. Just send an email out, and say “Hey guys, this is where I'm at now.” Because I have that relationship as well, those two things working in conjunction with each other, will have you lasting forever. As long as you continue to uphold that audience member, or the audience, as your most valuable asset. And build that relationship, and also make sure to bring them off of whatever, other external sites, and bring them into your email list.

That's how you win. That's how you win long term. Megan, I wish you the best of luck moving forward. I'd love to hear from you again in the future, even if it’s through a private email, just to keep me posted. I'm really interested to see how this goes, and where you go, and how you grow. If I can help you down the road, let me know. Megan, we're going to send you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show. Thank you again for asking it. That'll be sent to you in the next month or so. You'll hear from my assistant, to collect your information very soon.

I also want to thank everybody else out there who has submitted questions. Thousands have come in. Obviously we can’t get to them all, but I might get to yours. If you go to AskPat.com you can ask a question right there on that page. Thanks to the widget from Speakpipe.com for making it easy for me to drop in these MP3 voicemails into the show here. Thank you for that. Thank you again for all the questions. The show wouldn't exist without your questions. It would just be like, Pat, and who wants to hear from Pat? No, we're here to hear from you. I'm here to talk and start the conversation and hopefully help everybody out here, who listens, doesn't even get their questions featured in the show. Hopefully you're getting a lot of value out of this. If you are, if you could do me a favor and head on over to iTunes, look up AskPat, and leave a quick review. That would help out very much. I read them all. Including from all different countries. They are just very motivational currently. You guys are amazing, just thank you so much. Head on over to iTunes. That would be very helpful.

As always heres a quote to end this episode, and this is Ken Hakuta, “People will try to tell you that all the great opportunities have been snapped up. In reality, the world changes every second. Blowing new opportunities in all directions, including yours.”

Well there you go. Cheers, take care. Ill see you in the next episode of AskPat. Thanks.