AP 0446: How Safe Is It to Share Detailed Financial Information with My Audience?

AskPat 446 Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up everybody. Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 446 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always, I'm here to help you by answering your online business-related questions, five days a week, and we have a question today from Jordi, but before we get to that, I do want to thank today's sponsor which is FreshBooks.com.

FreshBooks makes it incredibly easy for you to manage your business finances. They serve over three million other small businesses, including my own. It just makes it really easy for you to manage your income. Your expense, I don't know why I said it like that. Income. Your expenses, and they make it really easy for you to do invoicing as well. So if you have any clients, or if you have any students, or you're doing any consultation work, or coaching, or anything like that, it makes it really easy and professional for you to get paid by others, and it's all interconnected, plus they have an award-winning mobile app. So you can check your balances and all those sorts of things on the go. So again, if you want to check it out for 30 days for free, go to GetFreshBooks.com, enter “Ask Pat.” Again, that's GetFreshBooks.com, enter “Ask Pat.”

Alright. Here's today's question from Jordi.

Jordi: Hey Pat, how are you? I hope you're doing great. My name is Jordi. I'm a graphic designer, and I have a question for you, but first, I wanted to thank you for all of your material. It's really amazing. Just saw your keynote, and I loved it, and you're being a real inspiration for me, and I even want to do something similar to what you do, and my question is kind of in that direction, because as I said, I'm a graphic designer who's had a number of successes in the past year.

Ever since I quite my job, I started making like 10 times more than I used to make before, and a lot of my peers, and friends, are asking me a lot of questions, and looking for my advice, and I want to help them, and I want . . . I don't want to help them when they want. I want to do something like what you do, and my question is, is it safe to share the amount of money you do, or the details of your business? Because I really want to be really, really transparent with everyone, but I'm in Mexico, and security here is not that great, and I'm wondering if maybe I will attract the wrong kind of attention. So I'm really struggling with this, and I'm not sure what to do with that. In the meantime, I'm already working on my website, and on the copy and everything, but I wanted to check with you, and see what your thoughts are on this. I hope you can get back to me. Thank you again for everything, and have a great day.

Pat Flynn: Hey Jordi, what's up? Thank you so much for calling in, and I really, really appreciate your kind words. I'm so glad that you are getting a lot of value out of the show here, and Smart Passive Income, and whatever else that I do that you consume. Just thank you so much for taking the time, and again, congratulations to you for all that you've done. I mean, you've 10X-ed your revenue by quitting your job, and by doing your own thing as a graphic designer, and that's great, and a lot of great things happen as a result of that, and the other thing that happens as a result of that is you get a lot of attention on you, especially from the people who are close to you, who are maybe in their nine to five job still, or might be struggling, and they want out. And they see you doing what you do, and they want help, and I think it's very, very gracious of you that you want to help, and I think it speaks a lot about who you are.

And I think it's wise to ask this question, because, especially in your situation, where you live, and security. I totally understand that. It's definitely something that, if I were in your shoes, I wouldn't actually share those things. Obviously, if you have people around you who you completely trust, and you know that they're not going to share that information, or maybe a close friend or two, who you all help each other out in sort of a mastermind kind of way, then you know, it's up to you, how you feel comfortable. I would listen to your gut on that, but . . . So I want to give credit to Nelly Odessa on Periscope who, and these are on the lines of what I was thinking, there are different ways to share success other than money, or income.

It could be time-related. It could be related to email subscribers, or number of customers, or how much traffic you had today, and that will lead to income. And of course, as you probably know, Jordi, when you serve your audience, your earnings become a byproduct of what you do. So your earnings are a byproduct of how well you serve your audience, and if you teach that to the people that you're teaching this to, then it doesn't necessarily become about the money. The money is the result of all the things that you're going to teach them, and of the other things that happen along the way. All of the milestones. So, traffic to your website, email, and marketing, open rates, subscribers, clicks, and conversions, and all those sorts of things, percentages, those are other things you can share that other people who are going through this, or who are going to go through this can relate to. That shows proof. That shows that they're making progress, and you don't have to reveal how much money you make.

Now, for those of you listening, if you don't know, and I actually do share how much money I make, which is probably where this question is coming from, in a monthly income report on SmartPassiveIncome.com. Now, why do I do this? Just really quickly, I do this because I believe in full transparency online, and especially as somebody who's teaching other people about online business, and the space, and you know, it's only right that I do this, because when I got into this space, everybody was talking the talk, and nobody was really proving themselves. Nobody was sharing the numbers. Nobody was fully honest, and if you want to trust somebody, how can you trust somebody who's not completely, and fully honest with you.

And plus, you know, I feel like, in sort of a way, it is also like the stock market in the US. In the stock market in the US, companies share their earnings reports every quarter, and the reason they do that is just to show investors, potentially future investors, whether investing in that company is a smart idea or not. You know, it kind of gives them a snapshot of the health of the company, and that's kind of what I'm doing with my income reports too, and you know, the income doesn't always go up. Some parts of it go down. Sometimes it completely disappears, some parts of it, and so it's really important for me to share that, because that's truthfully what happens. But also share why, and that's the biggest thing about my income reports.

It's, again, it's not about the numbers. It's just the . . . it's about the why, and what happened as a result, or what made those numbers move the way they did. So, again, this is sort of a shorter episode, because I feel like I've already answered your question, which is, you know, is it safe? In some cases, it is, and for me, it's been perfectly safe, and nothing terrible has happened as a result of it, and it has only motivated people, motivated myself to help me keep track of it. I hope you keep track of it as well, over time, for your own personal reasons, and for own personal motivation, but there are other ways to motivate other people as well, and to show that they're making progress too. So again, use your gut, and I think it's totally okay to teach other people business, but only if you do it in a completely honest, and authentic way.

And what I was saying earlier, when I got started in this space, there was a lot of people who talk the talk, not really many people who walk the walk, which is where I found my position. That was my position. The honest, authentic, transparent guy, and that's kind of who I am by nature anyway, but I make sure that that's known and prominent, because that is my brand, and that's kind of why I do what I do, and why I continue to do what I do with these income reports and things like that. And it's funny, because those people who talk the talk, they talk the talk really, really well. You know, they hired people who specialized in talking the talk, or you know, copywriters. They would spend millions of dollars on copywriting to say exactly what they needed to say, and for me personally, I'm not a good copywriter. I'm not good at sales, but I am good at leading by example and sharing case studies, and again, a lot of the case studies I share don't necessarily share the income. It just shares the progress, or the results, or the graphs of income, or not the income, but the traffic, and social shares, and other sorts of things. So you can totally help at other people without having to share the money. You don't have to do that. Again, totally up to you, but that's where I'm coming from, and I hope you take this, and use it for what its worth.

So, Jordi, thank you so much for the question. I really appreciate it. We're going to send you an AskPat t-shirt down to Mexico free of charge, shipping included, on us, and if you wanted to share a picture of that on Twitter, that'd be awesome, @PatFlynn. We've had hundreds of people send in tweets of their pictures wearing the AskPat t-shirt, which is pretty cool, and 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, and you can ask it right there on that page. Thanks to the widget from Speakpipe.com which allows me to collect these voicemails, and again, thank you to everybody who's asked a question, because this show obviously wouldn't be available, or exist without you, because this is AskPat, if there was nobody asking questions, it would just be Pat, and that'd be weird. I mean, I already have Smart Passive Income, which is me, but other guests. Anyway, going down a tangent here. Thank you guys for your time today.

I also want to thank FreshBooks.com for being a sponsor on this particular episode as well, making it incredibly easy for us to manage our business finances, and you know, I know it's October right now, it's October, 6th, for those of you who are listening to this when this comes out. Tax season isn't that far away. I mean, it's like six, five months away, and plus, the end of the year is coming. You can make it much easier on yourself in the future if you get set up with something like FreshBooks to organize everything. So that come taxes, and you can just click a few buttons, print out a few reports. Give access to your CPA, or tax person, and it's all taken care of, and all gravy from there. So if you want to check it out for free, and give it a test drive for 30 days, go to GetFreshBooks.com, and enter “Ask Pat” in the “How did you hear about us?” section. Again, that's GetFreshBooks.com, enter “Ask Pat.”

Thank you so much again, and here's a quote to finish off this episode from Don Tapscott. He said, “All one needs is a computer, a network connection, and a bright spark of initiative and creativity to join the economy.”

Cheers. Take care, and I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat. Bye.