AP 0852: What Are Five Business Lessons You’ve Picked Up from The Walking Dead?

AskPat 852 Episode Transcript

Pat: What's up, everybody? Welcome to Episode 852 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.

Today we have a great question—actually really fun question—from Maverick, aka The Zombie Master, but before we get to that, I do want to thank today's sponsor, which is FreshBooks, one of my favorite companies simply because they help me not only organize my bookkeeping, so the income and expenses that I have, but also my invoices. They make it super simple. Within 30 seconds I can create a professional looking invoice that I can send out to my students or the companies that I consult with, or any of these things. It makes it really simple, easy to keep track. I can see who opens those invoices, who's already paid, all those kinds of things. I highly recommend you check them out. To do that for free for 30 days, all you have to go to is FreshBooks.com/AskPat. Make sure you enter “AskPat” in the “how did you hear about us?” section. All right, now here's today's fun question from Maverick.

Maverick: Hello, Pat. This is Maverick, Zombie Master from HellisFull.net. I have a fun question for October and Halloween and everything. I remember you said on either AskPat or Smart Passive Income that you've been to the Walker Stalker Con. Being as that it would seem you're a fan of The Walking Dead, I was wondering what five business tips you could give us that you've picked up from The Walking Dead. Have a great day.

Pat: Hey, Maverick. Thank you so much for the question. You know, I know you recorded this back in October. This is how many questions we get. It's April right now at the time at which this episode comes out. Just yesterday, I watched the season finale of season seven, which was just insane. This is definitely at the top of my mind. Great timing on this one. Thank you for this question. I don't get fun ones like this very often. Although, I do love answering all the questions that are here on the show. What five business tips can I pick up from The Walking Dead, which is one of my favorite shows on AMC? I'm not going to get into what that show's about if you don't know what it is, but here's what I learned.

One of the reasons why, this is number one, The Walking Dead is so popular is because they do a great job, similar to what you talked about, the Walker Stalker Convention and all, so with Talking Dead with Chris Hardwick afterwards, they do a great job of showing what happens behind the scenes. That's the number one thing that you can do in your business to really start to build raving fans is to get people to know what's happening behind the scenes. Who are the actors in your business? How are the sets put together in your business? All those kinds of things. The more you can do that, the more people are going to fall in love with you and what you do and share what you do with others and just want to be a part of it. Get people behind the scenes, number one.

Number two, stay alert at all times. They're in a zombie world where walkers can come out of any corner, so you must be alert at all times. With business, you can't be complacent. With business, yes, there are ways and times at which you can sort of take like what Tim Ferriss calls mini retirements, which are totally okay. Those are planned times and moments when you take a breath from your business and you can focus on personal development or being with your family or whatever. You can take time off from your passive income business for sure, but you always have to come back to it and be alert at all times because you don't know right around the corner when they're just walking through the forest, right behind that tree there could be a walker.

Having a team there behind you can help you also look out for what's going to happen to you. That's sort of the third thing, having a team to help you and taking shifts and having responsibilities and roles when they're taking night shifts and when they're standing guard and all these kinds of things. They each have their own specialty and all those kinds of things. Of course, Rick, being the leader, you've got to step up and always be somebody who yes, you're going to have to make tough decisions at times, but you're going to have to be somebody who also can trust those other people in your party or in your team or the people that you work with or other colleagues in your space who when you're all working together are working toward a much bigger cause, which is then their survival but also for us in our business survival and thriving as well.

Number four, having a filter is really important. This is important for when you create a business or a new product, making sure that it's one worth moving forward with. This is why I created my course, SmartFromScratch.com. It's that filter. How does this relate to the show? Well, here's the thing. When Rick finds anybody new, this is Rick, the leader of the main group, when he finds anybody new in the show that he's trying to figure out whether to trust this person or not, he asks this person three questions. It's his way to determine based on their answer if this is a person worth trusting or not. The same thing, when you have a product, ask yourself questions about it, maybe not these exact questions that I'm about to share, but go through the filter process, go through Smart From Scratch to make sure it's one worth moving forward with. If you're going to work with a partner, make sure you don't just jump in and trust them right away, but you actually work with them a little bit to get a sense of their vibe and to ask them questions. You want to make sure that with anybody you work with you make sure that they're somebody worth working with.

Here are the questions that Rick asks others. That is three questions. First, how many walkers have you killed? Walkers are the sort of zombie creatures. Number two, how many people have you killed? That's an important question. Then the number three question is why? It's such a great sort of almost philosophical thing that happens here in the show, but that last question why. Maybe he killed zero people. Well, why? He can gain a lot of insight from that, or maybe the person that he found has many. Well, why? Again, filter the people. Have methods and things in place to filter the actions that you take to determine whether or not they're right for you and your business and also the people that you work with as well.

Then number five, this is something that I learned that specifically relates to something that I've done that has worked out very well. That is The Walking Dead Story Sync. That is not a tool, but it's almost like a web application that is shared before each and every episode of AMC's The Walking Dead. They say, “Hey, go to The Walking Dead Story Sync and you can get your behind the scenes, going back to number one, companion sort of viewing screen to go along with your episode.” What happens is you turn this on and then start the episode at the same time and while the episode is going, you're getting information on your computer screen about things related to that episode, stuff related to the show, but also behind the scenes stuff. Really cool.

It was that that inspired my Will It Fly? companion course. That's a course that goes along with my book, Will It Fly?, where chapter by chapter it lays out everything that happens. The links that you have to click on in the book, they're all there in the course. The instructions that I give you in terms of printing out worksheets, well, all those worksheets are available in that course. The processes that I share with you in the book, well, I have videos that show you how I go through these processes in the course, which is laid out in the same chapters and parts as the book. I use Teachable to help set that up. It's been very successful. Tens of thousands of people have gone through that now, so I know that people have read the book, but also have gotten access at this course. I know exactly what kind of people they are because this book is very specific for a very specific kind of person. That's where Smart From Scratch came from because I'm serving that particular group of people, even more now with more hand holding and accountability and sort of group coaching along the way. You can all check that out, SmartFromScratch.com. If you want to check out that companion course, well, it's linked to several times and mentioned in my book, Will It Fly?, which you can check out at WillItFlyBook.com.

Maverick, thank you so much for the question. A lot of fun, I appreciate it. I look forward to sending you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show. We'll send that to you as soon as we can. Again, thank you. That was a lot of fun. For those of you who have a question that you'd like potentially featured here on the show, just head on over to AskPat.com and you can ask right there on that page.

Thanks again once again to FreshBooks for being awesome and offering a 30-day free trial to all the AskPat listeners. All you have to do is go to FreshBooks.com/AskPat. Then finally, here's a quote by Babe Ruth. I love this one. That is, “Yesterday's home runs don't win today's games.” Boom. All right, guys, take care. Thanks so much and I look forward to serving you in the next episode of AskPat. By the way, if any of you know how I can get on the set of The Walking Dead and become a background extra, that's like one of my bucket list items. That would be super cool. Anyway, just wanted to share that. Thanks guys, take care. I'll see you in the next episode. Bye.