AP 1161: When Do I Leave My Full-Time Job to Go All-in on My Business? How Do I Know?

Pat Flynn:
What's up everybody, Pat Flynn here and welcome to episode 1161 of AskPat 2.0. You're about to listen to a coaching call between myself and an entrepreneur, just like you. And today we're talking with Matthew Gawronski, or Mr. G as his students call him. He is a music teacher who has gone online, who now helps also other music teachers. He's been doing this on the side, but he's considering going full time. And this is exactly what today's discussion is about. And we go through a number of different thought experiments in ways that we can consider when might be the right time to actually go full-time with this? Is it even something that we should even do?

And so Matthew and I discuss this together and there are a lot of great learnings out of this. Hopefully you can imagine yourself, if you also still have a nine to five job and something that you might want to leave one day, that you can work yourself through a lot of the exercises that I take Matthew through as well. I just wanted to let you know upfront that I had some microphone issues within this episode. So you'll actually hear me on a microphone it's not super great, but Matthew actually sounds tremendous. So just keep that in mind, my apologies in advance, but you can still hear the conversation and get the gist because what's most important is the transformation. So hopefully you'll be transformed as well. Here he is, Matthew Gawronski from MatthewGawronski.com. Here he is.

Matthew, welcome to AskPat 2.0, thanks so much for coming in today.

Matthew Gawronski:
Yeah, so happy to be here.

Pat:
I'm excited to get to know you and help you out. Can you tell us a little bit about what you do and how you got started with that?

Matthew:
Sure. I'm a music teacher from Long Island, New York. I've been teaching for a little over 11 years. I'm also a composer on the side and about four years ago and I started up self-publishing my sheet music online. I started my own website and in trying to drive traffic to my website, I started creating these memes, some video memes, some photo memes, and a couple of them actually went a little viral. I figured out some ways to drive traffic to my website and sales started growing. But the issue is always, with sheet music is it's limited to the voicings - I'm a choir teacher, there's only so much music you can really sell.

I decided to make digital resources specifically for music teachers. And I created my first video choir warmup and teachers love it. And I just gave it away. And I started researching different entrepreneur resources like you, your show and some others. And I started building an email list and the email list really started working and I started creating more resources and a couple years later - and this all started only about like two years ago, going into visual resources. And just this past year, things have just blown up tremendously in a good way. I think partly with the nature of COVID and online learning, a lot of more music teachers are using online digital resources. And so my website has just really just blown up. I'm super excited. That brings me here to the show right now.

Pat:
Dude, that is epic. What a wonderful job and way to go. Music holds a special place in my heart being in marching band for over nine years, including college and wind ensemble, jazz band, pit orchestra, even a steel drum band. Never did the choir thing, I don't have that kind of voice, but that's super cool. I'm really attached to the work that you do and the fact that you're online now and you're sharing this.

I had a business idea a long time ago for people in marching band, because one of my favorite things in the marching band, and later on, when I went to Cal, I was a student director and I was always looking for fun music for the band to play. And our favorite thing to play in the stands were top 40, Billboard type stuff, and nobody was creating this. And of course the internet wasn't as prevalent as it is now. It was one of those ideas I was like, I think that would work. I just didn't have the time or didn't know how to do it, or wasn't really an entrepreneur at the time, but sheet music, I love it. Fantastic. Tell us the website and where we can find you really quick before we dive in.

Matthew:
For sure. It's just my name. So it's MatthewGawronski.com.

Pat:
Nice. That's awesome. And so, what can I help you with? What's on your mind these days?

Matthew:
Yeah, a couple of questions. I'm trying to separate the explosion of growth that I had this past year and trying to understand realistic expectations for the future. I love teaching music. I love writing music, but I think on a deeper level, I believe people - like human beings are created to create. I've noticed that I love creating things and I have so many ideas and I would like to eventually, in the future, possibly leave teaching and pursue some of these other ideas of creating digital resources and other things. I guess my first question is, what are the metrics I should pay attention to, to know when I'm ready to leave my full-time job?

Pat:
Right. This is a great question. It's always sort of a reverse engineering of where you want to go. So there's going to be a lot of internal conversation that you're going to have to have with yourself in terms of what would be comfortable for you. If it's an income situation, what's that particular number? And it's interesting, because when I talk to a lot of people about the things that they want to create as an entrepreneur and what their goals are, they're like, "I want to have a seven figure business." I'm like, "Okay, that's a million dollars. And that requires a certain number of customers and work, and work and effort, et cetera. But what do you really need?" And like, oh, what do you mean by that? Tell me what your perfect day is like.

Like Matthew, if I were to just ask you upfront, if you had access to a DeLorean and you can go to any point in the future and you see yourself, the day is exactly what you would want it to be, how far in the future would you go and what would you be doing? What would you see yourself doing?

Matthew:
I love questions like this. This is great. I teach middle school, so I try and get my students thinking with questions like this too.

Pat:
Okay. Well, right back at you then.

Matthew:
Yeah. I don't know, I think I would probably go maybe about three to five years in the future and I could totally see myself creating more of these resources, not just for music teachers, but for teachers in general. Also, I'm pretty connected with my church and I've actually been creating a lot of - since COVID hit, our church wasn't able to meet and especially for the kids, my wife and I created this puppet show called Max & His Monkey, which I was actually working on right before coming here. I just love creating things. I could see myself like, call it a nine to five, working from home, creating things, figuring out how to market them online, specifically for teachers and beyond, basically.

Pat:
Awesome. Okay. Let me do another exercise with you if that's okay. We're going to go into the DeLorean. I'll drive it since I know how it works, but you can come with me, and we're going to go same timeline. We're going to go five years into the future. And we go to where you are and you see yourself and you're still working the same job that you have now. How would you feel if you saw that that was the case?

Matthew:
I don't know if I would say disappointed. I believe our future is in God's hands and I could see a whole slew of possibilities. To be honest, I could see myself still doing the same thing that I'm doing now, maybe on a slightly larger scale depending on how things grow from here on out. But yeah, I could see myself being a little disappointed in five years if I was still in the same exact situation, but that's not like a huge letdown I guess.

Pat:
Right, right. Okay, so let's keep going with this. Let's say you are able to chat with yourself and there's no broken space/time continuum, the universe doesn't explode when that happens, and you ask, "Hey, you're still doing the same thing that I'm doing right now. What happened?" And if you heard yourself say, "Well, I just never gave it a shot. I was too afraid." Then how would you feel?

Matthew:
Yeah, that would be disappointing.

Pat:
That would be disappointing, right?

Matthew:
Yeah.

Pat:
What if you instead said, "I tried. I gave it a shot. I gave it a good run, but it didn't work out the way it did, but I could always fall back on this and then I'm still happy." How would you feel then?

Matthew:
To be clear, Pat, I guess I'm the type of person, I roll with the punches, especially the nature of being a teacher. Kids can go crazy in a split second, so you have to think on your toes. I'm adaptable. I could see it going either way, I guess, to be honest.

Pat:
Cool. Okay. That was a lot of fun. I'm just trying to learn a little bit more about how you think and how you feel. This is all good. And hopefully even just these exercises are helping paint a picture of how we can reverse engineer that. I'd love to ask you what you're afraid of, in terms of making the decision to move into a different space and what might be holding you back or what is holding you back?

Matthew:
Great question. As a teacher, one of the nice things is it's a definite income. Medical benefits, I have two kids, a wife and another baby on the way, and we're a one income household so I need to be strategic about this. And that's related to I guess another question which is like, I've spent so little on ads in terms of scaling and trying to predict the future of my business, I just don't know. I feel uncertain because your typical online business, they'll say, all right, this is how much I spent on ads. I think if I inject this much capital into the business, then I'll get this much of a return.

And to be honest, I looked at my numbers and I think I've spent like less than 3 percent on my ads and I'm coming close to - the income from this business, by the end of this year will probably be, I would say 80 to 90 percent of my actual income as a music teacher, which is great. I'm super thankful, but I don't know if this is just the nature of this year, you know what I mean? Or how to predict this in the future. If I can just ask you, do you think it's worth pursuing ads with more of my income, because I can see the scalability of future sales? Is that worth pursuing?

Pat:
To me, that's not why we do ads. I'll talk more about that in a sec, but I was going to go with, well, how much would you say that we at Team SPI spent on ads this year with a revenue of almost $3.5 million? How much money do you think we spend on ads, if you know that that's how much we make?

Matthew:
Yeah. Okay. I mean, I'm totally in the dark here, but I would guess, I don't know, 20, 30 percent, I don't know.

Pat:
Zero.

Matthew:
Wow! Wow!

Pat:
We spent $0, because like you, you're building relationships with your audience. You're on these content platforms. See, here's the thing, with ads, typically, we think of ads as ways to reach people who don't know about us yet. And we always feel like we have to get new people. We have to keep feeding the funnel in order for us to get paid on the other end. But the cool thing is the way we approach our business is, let's have it from a serve first approach. So with the people who we have in our audience, how can we best serve them? We could make more money by helping one person in three different ways that solves three different problems that they have, versus just one thing that we create that we try to bring the whole world into.

We're creating our own little world. And within that world, we're creating super fans who then can grow our business for us. The hard part, like you said, is it's not necessarily "predictable" and the way that we've been able to combat this - and we've done this just this past year - is we've created a membership. This premium membership that we have called SPI Pro has added an additional $300,000 ARR, which stands for annual run rate, which means that,= that, because it's a monthly payment and there are members, and there is a predicted amount of people who we can bring in based on certain baseline members that we have and a certain number of people leaving every month, we can then now have some sort of prediction and that's feeling really good.

To solve that issue of predictability, you can have something like a membership site where you have a certain number of members and then your job is to then grow that, and that can increase the baseline monthly revenue that can come in from there. And that's a very safe type of business model to feel confident in, in terms of, well, I just need to keep members in, in order to continue this income. There's an expectation of how much you might make.

I remember when I first started, for example, I created a ebook to help people pass an architectural exam, and it was a $19.99 ebook. And I had sold several thousand of them, but every month I was like, well, I got to get new people in every month. And so how is this going to happen? And the way that I kept it going was just I kept showing up. As long as I remained somebody that was on top of people's mind when it came to, oh, who should I go to, to help me with this exam? Oh, just go to Pat Flynn's website IntheLeed.com. It was always coming. And that's before I had an email list. Now that you have an email list, you have essentially some sense of business insurance because you have now a group of people who you could go back to, to solve other problems or to see what their struggles or challenges or needs or wants or desires might be.

So it's, yes, not as predictable as a teacher job or any job that's nine to five. You work this many hours, you get paid as many hours, but the other truth is there's only so much upside in that. And the bonuses that come in at the end of each year, if they come in, and the raises that you have in the promotions can only take you so far. Versus if you have an online resource that helps a hundred people, well, what if you just add another zero, it helps a thousand people? It helps 10,000 people. Especially like software. Software is sort of the Holy Grail. It's unlimited in a way. I mean, there are variables, obviously customer service and whatnot, the more people you have in, but there's so much more upside and potential.

The thing is, the predictability can come with revenue models like in memberships or with the fact that you have super fans who are going to support you and be there for you. That's kind of where the sense of security comes from, is that I know that I'm helping people and that always pays me back in some way, shape, or form, whether it's a transaction, whether it's a share, whether it's feedback or constructive criticism, that's my thought and reaction to what you said.

And we spent money on ads last year and it wasn't to anybody cold, it was people who had once visited our website who we knew was interested in a particular topic. For example, they went to the sales page for my podcasting course, we can hit them with an ad and say, "Hey, come back here. There's a special deal going on." We don't have to fight to introduce ourselves or earn trust. We've already earned it. It's just, here's an opportunity to get in right now. That's where I feel ads are better and more well-spent versus just trying to use money to introduce yourself to new people. And it sounds like you're beyond the need to have new people find you. That happened organically.

Matthew:
That was actually going to be my question in response to what you just said. So like, what is the trick to go from the adding that zero to my, if you want to call it like a fan base... If it's not ads, you said being present, does that mean expanding to more social media? What do you mean by that?

Pat:
There's a number of different ways. So let's say that I get a hundred new customers every month, outside of what that product is or whatever. There's just a hundred customers coming in every month. And I know that maybe that came as a result of 10,000 people coming to the website. So for every 10,000 people who come to the website, I have a conversion rate of 1 percent. So, I could either double the amount of traffic, which means, okay, well, I'll have to either increase my search engine rankings or get on another social media platform to bring more people in, or be a guest on other people's podcasts. That then infers, if I can get more people coming to my website and everything else remains the same, then I know that my income will grow in that regard. That is one option.

Another option is to focus on the conversion rates. Let's say the same amount of people come, 10,000. If I want to double my income, I just have to double from 1 percent to 2 percent. So now I can focus maybe instead on, okay, well, not growing my traffic, not SEO, that's foundational, I'm not going to touch that this year, this year I'm going to focus on my copywriting and crushing the objections people have before they see the opportunity to get into my training program or my software or resources. It may be including testimonials and really getting into the story of those who I've served to showcase them and show proof that what it is that I have to offer it's going to work, and then I can actually see those numbers.

And I can see, okay, now the numbers are increasing. Or when I send an email, get twice as many people to open the email, which means, okay, for the next month, I'm going to focus on just what email subject lines work, because that's the one thing people see before they click into an email, or making people who open the email be more likely to click on the link, so then I'm going to study that. And I always come from a place of, okay, where are there opportunities? Now, let me learn about that. Who do I go to who's mastered that? What books can I read? What podcasts can I listen to that are all about that? And then I'm purposefully seeing those numbers increase, and then I can see the benefit of that on the outside or at the end of that as revenue.

Matthew:
Okay. Yeah. I think that makes a lot of sense.

Pat:
And I think you're right. I think we have to be maybe a little bit wary because this year is just a weird year. I think that making a decision tomorrow to quit might not be the right thing, but considering that in the future, maybe sooner than later it does happen, but at the same time, there's also typically family or relational-related things. And you said you had a kid coming, and yes, you want those things to be taken care of. Money is a part of that equation. Have you had conversations with your significant other about perhaps this opportunity or your thoughts about this, or is this still an internal conversation you're having with yourself?

Matthew:
Vaguely I probably referred to it, nothing serious because I think in all practical projections, I can't see myself ... For sure, I would probably at least teach all the way through the next school year just to see, like you're saying, this year is an anomaly, let's see how the business does next year at least, before making any serious decision.

Pat:
Okay. I'm thinking out loud here. There's a couple of things that are coming to mind. Number one, perhaps getting some support from your significant other, just to know what you're thinking and sometimes that can be really encouraging and can help and make you feel like, okay, well, you're not letting this person down or putting them in a state of fear if you were to do this. And so now you're in it together, and that often can be helpful. When you see that you have support it's sometimes super encouraging and you actually get things done faster, or at least can start to have conversations that can be then avoided later.

Secondly, this idea of quitting and going all-in is often not necessarily the only option. Sometimes there might be some in-betweens. There's a book called Decisive by Chip and Dan Heath that talks about just, I don't know if it's humans or what, we just have this binary approach to everything. Yes or no, black and white. Either this or that versus, well, might you be able to maybe teach part-time, thus giving you more time to create and then kind of reverse engineering, okay, what might need to happen in order for that to be true? And if you take the DeLorean and you see that that's the case, would that make you happy? There might be other options available to you.

Matthew:
Okay. That makes sense. It's just going to be an issue of time, which is why I think this is - all the answers you're giving are super helpful because the future is unknown. No one really knows. You were mentioning before about expanding, doubling down on email and copywriting and stuff. In terms of media platforms, and also, by the way, I'm blown away by the fact that you guys brought in three and a half million on 0 percent ads. That's a crazy thought to me. And also reassuring to me because I noticed that I would spend money on ads and the returns, I don't know, I felt like I could spend my time, whatever, making these memes that would go viral. I had a couple of memes that had over a couple million views. That's bringing in more traffic than me spending money on these ads. In any case, is there a particular media platform that you think is better than another to pursue in terms of expanding my base?

Pat:
Yeah. I mean, you're a creator, so this is just right up your alley. You can have some fun with it, when you get on a platform. For me, I'm particular to podcasting obviously. And as far as creation, there's a lot I can do here. I can have conversations like we're having right now. We can even add some flavor to it with some music and structure and some fun, but honestly, YouTube is also a really fun platform and there's a lot more potential to find more people on YouTube than there is on podcasting.

The thing with podcasting that I think is really interesting is that you can get really deep with individuals. There's just less individuals listening to podcasts versus watching video, and podcast findability is a little bit harder, but I love it because I'm in it for the long haul in terms of relationships with my audience. Sometimes YouTube I can get ... One of my top videos has 1.5 million views, and most of those people don't even know who I am. They just found it because it was a random search that they were looking for an answer for.

There's sort of those two things, but ideally I think a YouTuber who shows up and builds a relationship can be super creative and still solve problems and answer people's questions. You have a lot of room. I mean, the fact that you've mentioned you're doing a puppet show thing, just screams YouTube to me in terms of visuals and script writing and education and entertainment and inspiration and motivational, all wrapped in one with relation to music. I mean, audio plus video together ... I guarantee if you were to do a little bit of research and just look up things related to what you are interested in or excited about, you're going to find these creators who are just ... They're called creators because they're just creative and they're creating for others and you can build an audience base there.

And if you can attach that to the business in some way, whether it's at the end of the video saying, "Hey, if you'd like to join the program, you can get a free trial here, or you can download this thing that's free here." And then you can include a link in the description. I mean, you have that plus the algorithm, which sometimes you create a video and just like your viral videos, it's like that platform just is like, yep, we want to show this to everybody today. And you can get a huge influx of traffic there. Plus you have the opportunity to make money through AdSense on YouTube and not on a podcast. Based on what I'm seeing from you, plus I saw your video right before we hit record. Your video quality is amazing. You have all the equipment already. I could see you doing some really fun things on YouTube.

Matthew:
I really appreciate you saying that. It's funny you say that just because, like literally a week and a half ago, I just got monetized on YouTube, but the story behind that though is like, I started the school year and one of my students noticed - I had posted something, like an instructional video on my channel for the students to watch. And they're like, "Hey, Mr. G, you have a couple of hundred subscribers." I was like, "Yeah. Okay." And I started basically just sending out emails to my email, list throwing them to the channel and a couple months later, you know? Thanks to my students, they saw the opportunity where I didn't. Yeah.

Pat:
What do you think that means?

Matthew:
I've noticed - I've been paying attention to a little bit more of the analytics on YouTube and I've been seeing kind of like what you're saying. I've made some instructional video back like seven months ago or something that is still getting a couple of hundred views a day. I think that that is also something that's driving traffic to my website. So it's something I feel like I should probably more consistently create video content for, because I don't know. Like you're saying, I could just have a video that just happens to stick with other music teachers and it's a great way to expand the audience.

Pat:
And even as a by-product, if you have questions come in from your students, just go, oh, go watch this video. And it's like, you've answered their question. They get to know you and they see the fun that you're having too. It's a winner. That's really interesting that your students saw that and then I pointed it out and then here we are. That could be a thing for 2021. And of course, in terms of going back to your question earlier about like, how do I know it's time? Sometimes it's that dollar amount, not just in terms of how much you're earning, but also a safety net.

Sometimes a safety net can help you feel a little bit more comfortable realizing that, okay, I'm going to take a year and I'm going to focus on this and see what happens and hopefully get to this goal. And if I don't it's okay. I can always go back. That's the other thing. Just because you perhaps quit doesn't mean you can't ever go back either. So having a safety net that you and your family are comfortable with that you know that literally, if you were to make like $0 or make very little, you can still be okay, then it's like, wow, now I have full reign and full confidence that whatever happens it's going to happen for a reason. And God will make it turn out the way he wants it to turn out.

Matthew:
Yeah, yeah. No, I like that. Just to be clear on that, just because I've heard from different people like, well, you want to make sure you have this, I think I've heard like 60 percent, if you can make 60 percent of your yearly income, then you're ready to quit your job. You're saying there's not an exact number.

Pat:
No, there's not. People like to put an exact number to it just so they have some sort of guidance and I think that's okay, but I think it's a very personal decision that you're going to have to make with you and your significant other obviously. It sounds like you're very analytical and you know these things already, but really paying attention to, okay, well how much are we spending on all these things that are in our life right now? And making sure you at least have that plus maybe savings goals or other things that are important to you that would be otherwise left behind if you left your job and making sure you still have that too for retirement or whatever. I mean, there's just so many different components. It's hard to just be like, oh, 60 percent. I mean, everybody's different. Like a one diet for one person's not going to work for another.

So Matthew, we've gotten pretty deep today and we took some rides in the DeLorean and we had some great conversation today. I'm really excited. I know that we didn't land on, okay, here are the next steps, one, two, three, but I think that it's at least given you something to think about. How would you sum up what you're thinking right now?

Matthew:
Pat, I really appreciate it. I really believe there's wisdom in many counselors. I know you're saying what we haven't arrived on one answer, but it's given me a lot of perspective. And I think if anything, it's confirmed some things that I already thought. Super helpful. I really appreciate it.

Pat:
You're welcome. You're welcome. Do you mind if we perhaps reach out to you in the future and catch up and get a Where Are They Now? episode with you?

Matthew:
Sure. Hopefully I won't be in the DeLorean anymore.

Pat:
No, no, that'll be real time. Matthew, thank you so much. Again, one more time, where can people go to follow what you're up to?

Matthew:
Sure. It's MatthewGawronski.com and you can feel free to email me at [email protected]

Pat:
That's G-A-W-R-O-N-S-K-I.

Matthew:
That's right.

Pat:
All right. Thanks Mr. G. Appreciate you.

Matthew:
All right. Thank you.

Pat:
All right. I hope you enjoyed that episode with Matthew. Matthew, thank you so much again for coming on and wishing you all the best of luck. I hope this was helpful for not just you, but for also everybody else listening through. And I just so appreciate every guest who comes on the show who allows us to share these very vulnerable, very intimate conversations with the world, because truly it's very helpful. And I hope again, like I said, this inspires and helps you and helps you consider your path in the future too. So again, check out Matthew at his website, MatthewGawronski.com. Well done.

And if you'd like to get coached here on the show as well, all you have to do is head on over to AskPat.com. You can find the application button there to click and then send us a little voicemail about what it is that you might need help with. And down the road, I might reach back out. I can reach back out to everybody because there's way too many people, but truth is, if you don't try, it's not going to happen, because I'd love to help you, but hopefully these episodes help you too. So again, that's AskPat.com. Make sure you subscribe to the show if you haven't already. We got a lot of great episodes coming your way and I can't wait to share them with you. So thanks again, I appreciate you, take care, and as always, Team Flynn for the win. Peace out.