AP 0873: What Do You Do with Your Profits? Reinvest in Your Business? SEO? Hiring?

AskPat 873 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up everybody? Pay Flynn here and welcome to Episode 873 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 coming in from Jackie today, but before we get to that I do want to thank today's sponsor, which is FreshBooks, one of my favorite companies because they help serve me and millions of other small businesses with helping us keep track of our business finances, from our income to our expenses, which they can do automatically by the way, by connecting with your business credit card, but also invoicing. If you do any invoicing of any kind, any billing, in less than thirty seconds with FreshBooks you can create a very professional-looking invoice, one that you can send out and keep track of. You can keep track of who paid you, who owes you, and also who has yet to open those invoices, which is super handy. Definitely check it out. What's really cool is they're offering you a thirty-day free trial here on AskPat. All you have to do is go to FreshBooks.com/askpat and make sure you enter “Ask Pat” in the “How did you hear about us?” section. All right, now here's today's question coming in from Jackie. Let's do this.

Jackie: Hey Pat, this is Jackie from ESLSpeaking.org. My question today is related to what you do with your profits. I'm currently making maybe around $2,000 a month and my expenses are something like maybe $200 for MailChimp and my web hosting, etc. I have a day job, so I don't actually need this income and I'm wondering how much of it you'd reinvest into your business if you were in my situation. I actually could afford to invest all of it, basically, into SEO or hiring a VA, hiring a content writer—things like that. What are your thoughts? Is it really worth it to invest all the money? Is that going to pay off big dividends later or should I just keep doing what I'm doing that's, obviously, reasonably successful? Thank you very much.

Pat Flynn: Hey, Jackie. Thank you so much for the question. First of all, congratulations on your success and that you have profits coming in; that's awesome. It's always great when you hear about a business that's started and they're at a point now where they can reinvest that money into other things. For me with my profits, I mean a lot of it does go into retirement type accounts, investment accounts for other types of passive income. I have an account at Wealthfront if you check out AskPat.com/wealthfront. I invest a little bit there. Then also I invest in the stock market a little bit, but I am getting into real estate as well, so paying myself first with a lot of my profits is important—after I pay my team obviously—but reinvesting in my business I found to be really important lately.

I used to try and see how little I could spend on my business to keep it growing, but I realize now over time as I've shifted from sort of scrappy entrepreneur to now CEO of my company—in terms of just mindset at least—I found that when you invest in the right things in your business it can help you exponentially grow and make even more money, but of course that comes as a result of—and this should always be the purpose—of helping more people and serving more people, or better serving my existing audience.

I've been able to invest a lot of my profits from my business back into my business in several different ways. One, hiring a team to help me do things that I A) don't want to do but also B) shouldn't do, even though I can do and even love to do, but as the CEO shouldn't do. For example, like editing my podcast, that's something I did for four to five years on my own. Even the show notes and all that stuff, publishing on WordPress: All those things I did myself and now I have other people do them for me so that I can focus more on the bigger level things and things that only I can do.

I would kind of recommend, Jackie, try to figure out okay, what are the things that you know that you can hand off or that you know you should hand off and see what kinds of team members or maybe just what one team member you could hire or VA that you can hire to solve all those problems in terms of getting those things knocked out for you so you can spend more time doing other things. I think that's a lot of where money is spent for businesses within businesses. It's where you, Jackie, can save time.

Where else could you potentially save time? I think also hiring for SEO, if you know that you need some help there as well, even getting a content audit from somebody like Sam McRoberts over at VuduMarketing.com, who did a audit for me, can be really helpful, but also you could consider a redesign if you want to do that. That's something I've invested money back into my website and how it looked.

I've invested money into other types of businesses, for example SPI Labs, which is sort of the software division of Smart Passive Income. The Smart Podcast Player was definitely something I had to invest in. We are working on other software products as well, so different product offerings you could invest in as well.

This is also courses. I've invested time and money and resources both related to team and development and just my own time, into creating more courses. For example, I have a couple courses coming out soon, one called Smart From Scratch coming out June 5th, and then another one, Power Up Podcasting, plus a few other courses coming out later this year as well. SmartFromScratch.com, PowerUpPodcasting.com for those of you who are curious about that, but yeah, reinvesting back into your business to grow and serve even more, that's really what it should be about.

But I would also pay attention to—especially because you mentioned earlier—this is stuff, this is profit that you don't need. Well, there could be other ways to diversify your portfolio, essentially. That's why I'm now getting into real estate and things like that. Just consider how you might be able to do that as well. Definitely reinvest into your business, especially if it's surplus, to see how you might be able to scale and grow and build that team out, but also to serve your audience better. That's really where it should be focused at.

Jackie, thank you so much. Again, congratulations, and I want to send you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show. For those of you listening, if you have a question that you'd like potentially featured here on the show, all you have to do is head on over to AskPat.com and you can ask right there on that page. Thank you so much. I appreciate you.

Here is a quote to finish off the day by John Berryman. He says, “We must travel in the direction of our fear.” One-hundred percent agree with that. All right, take care and I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat. Bye.