AP 0158: How Do You Reinvest into Your Business?

AskPat 158 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up everybody? Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 158! I don't know why I said it like that but I'm just in a very good mood today; I'm super stoked to be here. I hope you are too and I hope you're having a great day.

Today we have a great question from Gavin but before we get to that, let's get to today's sponsor which is FreshBooks.com. It's an amazing, easy-to-use cloud-accounting solution that's helping millions of small business owners, including myself, save time with sending invoices, keeping track of money coming in, money going out; makes it incredibly easy to manage what's going on during tax season. It's so much better than what I was doing before, I was using Excel before and then I discovered FreshBooks and things became so much easier. So if you would like to get your hands on FreshBooks and give it a go for a free trial, go to FreshBooks.com/askpat, and enter “Ask Pat” in the “How did you hear about us” section.

All right, now let's get to today's question from Gavin.

Gavin: Hello Pat, this is Gavin Doyle from the Disney Dose podcast. In Episode 102, you answered a question about marketing with very little amount of money and it didn't really give any specific tactics because, with the small amount of money you were discussing, there really aren't too many tactics. But I'd like you to take a step back and think about—what do you do with the amount of money that you make from your show and from your website, because I'm in this space right now where I have a lot of money that I would like to reinvest back into the brand. What's the best way to do that, to reinvest back into your website, back into your podcast to continue its growth and make its growth more rapid? What are some examples on how you do that? Thanks so much and I hope to hear your answer on AskPat. Thanks.

Pat Flynn: Gavin, what's up? Thank you so much for the question.

A lot of people obviously see how much money I'm making online but I don't talk much about what I do with that money. I do share some of my expenses in each of my income reports so that does show a little bit of what I do with the money, in terms of building business and I'm going to go over those details with you right now.

But before that, I do want to mention that I do a lot with my money in terms of saving for my future. In terms of retirement, I do contribute to a couple of retirement accounts. I do contribute as well, to some of what I call “bucket accounts,” accounts that I'm slowly building for certain goals in life, in the future. I'm also . . . I have saved for my kids college education already, which is awesome. I do donate quite a bit as well. So yeah, a lot of it is invested personally and a lot of it is saved personally but a lot of it is put back into the business as well and there are a number of different things you can do to maximize and leverage the income that you're making while putting it back into your business.

The first thing I would recommend everybody do, is to figure out what's working and do more of that. And if you need to spend money to do more of that, do it, because that is what's giving you the results, that's currently generating the money for you, and do more of that. A good example of this is when I figured out how well The Smart Passive Income Podcast was doing in terms of building a relationship with my audience and also generating an income, indirectly, when people come back to my site, from the show notes and the links on there and all that stuff. It was doing really well, so I knew a podcast resonated with my audience so I wanted to do more of that. So I had the option of actually creating more shows for The Smart Passive Income Podcast or another show and I decided to do the other show, obviously, which is this show right here, AskPat.

I decided to spend money to hire somebody or to pay somebody to help put this together because I just wouldn't be able to do it on my own anymore. So I have Mindy, our lovely editor, happiness hero, assistant, who just puts the show together. All I have to do at this point is just record the answers and she cuts, slices, puts everything together for me and I'm happy to pay her for that. It has already come back to me in terms of sponsorships for the show and also authority and exposure and things like that. So that money put into my business has come back to me, even more so. That's one example of what's working and doing more of that.

Another thing that started working a little bit was working with a team. I hired a guy named Matt Gartland from WinningEdits.com to help me put a book together, Let Go. Since working with him, I just enjoy the process of having somebody else take over a lot of the really stressful parts of running this business, and he does that for me and he had helped put so many amazing things together since then. So I have put a lot of money into building a team lately: Building a team, and also producing a lot of products that make things more convenient for my audience as well. That's something you can ask yourself, “What can I do to make what I do more convenient for my audience, to more easily consume this content, to more easily be able to take action or connect with the community or consume my content?”

One example of this is the SPI iOS application, or the Android application which is going to be available soon. Those things weren't cheap to create and if you don't know what this is, if you go to AskPat.com/app you get redirected to what exists right now in terms of a mobile application to more easily consume not just AskPat, but the Smart Passive Income podcast and the Smart Passive Income blog content as well. Each of those things—those are two separate things, the iOS application for Mac or, excuse me, for iPhone and the Android application were both in the $10,000 range. These aren't cheap things and they aren't cheap because I wanted the experience to be great and it is great, the team did a great job and we hired some of the best developers to put that together for you.

But again, it's just making things more convenient for my audience so that they'll have a happier experience going through my content which will make it more likely that they'll see something and enjoy it and perhaps take a lot of my recommendations for products or perhaps sign up to my email list and perhaps buy a product that I come out with down the road. That's one example.

Another thing I like to do is create products, so creating products obviously takes money and time and whether you have a team working with you or not, it costs money to put something together. One example of this that I did recently was a Smart Podcast Player. This is a prime example because I wasn't able to code any of it myself so I did have to spend money and reinvest in my business. That ended up selling really well and it's still in beta right now, you can sign up at SmartPodcastPlayer.com but the first launch in, I believe, the beginning of July, it was sold out in 24 hours. 250 beta licenses sold out in 24 hours. We put a lot of money into that and into the development of that particular plugin, into all the testing, into a UX designer—that's probably been one of the biggest things for me in terms of my overall brand, is a UX designer, a user-experience designer. Somebody who goes in there with a keen eye, looking to understand how people go through this site and what's easy or what's not and what should be done. If you had a significant amount of money and could hire a really great UX, or user-experience designer, or user interface person for your products, it's an incredible investment. You've seen some of that on the Smart Passive Income blog in terms of the redesign that happened last year. You also have seen it in all the products that have come out since then. The UX designer, Dustin is his name, he's awesome. He's helped design what you see in the Smart Podcast Player, he's helped design what you see on the FoodTruckr book at FoodTruckr.com, he's helped design a lot of the components of what you see on SmartPassiveIncome.com as well, the AskPat teeshirt, its just so awesome to have somebody who knows the brand and who knows what the values and ideals are of myself and everybody who's a part of this team and who can design things that reflect that. It's such a huge investment because its a lot of money for somebody who is really good, but it always comes back and it make the brand that much stronger so that would be a good investment.

Another thing you could do, something that actually doesn't cost too much money—it does cost money and I think if you're starting out and you do have money, this is one of the best things you could invest in—is going to conferences and meeting with people who are in and around your industry. To get to know them, to build relationships with them, and that's where a lot of potential partnerships happen, friendships are created and brands become friends. You've seen it time and time again, you even notice it with me and a number of other people in this industry, myself and the guys over at Fizzle.co, myself and Chris Ducker, myself and Darren Rowse from ProBlogger, with Jaime Tardy from Eventual Millionaire, the list goes on and on. These friendships that I have with these amazing people, who are in the same space I'm in, most of those relationships happened at conferences. There's nothing like meeting people in person and so, a great thing to do is to reinvest some of your money or income from your business to go out and meet other people who are in the business as well.

Lastly, and probably one of the most important things you could do, is to just reinvest in yourself, in terms of education, leadership and any sort of skills that you feel you would benefit from learning for your business. Go ahead and pay to do that. Education doesn't stop when you graduate college, that's why they call it “commencement” because you're actually just starting your life and you can never educate yourself too much. I'm still paying for education for certain things that I'm interested in and that I want to accomplish, so I hope you can do the same as well.

So, Gavin, I hope that answers your question. If you have any more questions or anybody would like to discuss this, feel free to use the hashtag #AskPat158, this is for Episode 158, again, #AskPat158 if you would like to talk about it and again, my Twitter handle is @PatFlynn if you'd like to message me and just let me know that you listen to the show and that you enjoy it. Thank you again Gavin for the question, an AskPat teeshirt is headed your way. For those of you listening, if you have a question you'd like potentially featured here on the show, just head on over to AskPat.com, that's where you can ask a question right there on that page using the mic—that's just whatever you have, an internal mic or whatever you have on your desk, that'd be awesome.

I also want to thank today's sponsor which is FreshBooks.com. If you haven't heard of FreshBooks, you're missing out because with it, you can create professional-looking invoices for your clients, you can capture and track expenses and you can even get realtime business reports with just couple of clicks, which makes it incredibly easy during tax season. They even have an award-winning mobile app, so you can do it all from anywhere that has an internet connection or WiFi. Check it out, you can get it for free—do a free trial at GetFreshBooks.com and enter “Ask Pat” in the “How did you hear about us” section, again that's GetFreshBooks.com and enter “Ask Pat” in the “How did you hear about us” section.

Thanks so much and as always, I want to end with a quote and today's quote is from Rand Fishkin. He says “There is no black magic to successfully attracting customers via the Web.” This, I think, was in terms of SEO and search engine optimization but it's true for anything, really, there's no magic formula or potion to help you become successful. All what you have to do is get out there; you just have to do it. Cheers, take care, and I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat.