SPI 390: Scott Voelker and The Take Action Effect

Pat Flynn: I coach a lot of people with their business, and our special guest today does so as well. It’s interesting because we started chatting and we found a very, very common denominator between people who are just struggling. And that is they don’t realize, you might not realize, you’ve actually done, and I have accomplished so much already that there is no reason why you can’t accomplish even bigger things with this brand new business idea that you have or this new business venture that you want to go down.

Pat Flynn: For whatever reason, we get so scared we get in our own way. We block ours our own selves from moving forward and those are the kinds of things we’re going to be talking about today. How to remove those blockers and actually take action because there is something that happens when you do that. Even that first step, no matter how small it is, things begin to happen after that. Our special guest today, Scott Voelker from The Amazing Seller and author of the brand new book Take Action Effect is here today with us and we’re going to jam on this. Let’s do this.

Announcer: Welcome to the Smart Passive Income Podcast, where it’s all about working hard now so you can sit back and reap the benefits later. And now your host, the most important metric he tracks are the thank yous, Pat Flynn.

Pat Flynn: What’s up everybody? Pat Flynn here and welcome to Session 390 of the Smart Passive Income Podcast. My name is Pat Flynn, here to help you make more money, save more time and help more people to, and to help you take action. Today we’re going to be speaking with Scott Voelker . Got a new book out. He’s a good friend of mine. He’s in my accelerator program. I’ve been a fan of his for a while as well. I just love the way he does business. He does it in a very similar way as me, which is he actually cares about the results of his people.

Pat Flynn: The cool thing about this is he’s been talking a lot about brand lately. He’s been on the show recently also to talk about brand. What is a brand? A brand is what people say about you, how they recommend you to others and those things that you want to be known for. And this is kind of with Scott’s jam is now as well.

Pat Flynn: But it always stems down to before branding, before selling, before marketing, it always comes down to what happens up here. That’s me poking your head a little bit. Boop, boop, boop. That’s the sound it makes for some reason.

Pat Flynn: But anyway, it’s what happens in your mind and it is the things that happened in there that actually reflect what happen in reality. And today we’re going to talk about how to take action, what is blocking us and some of those moments that have happened in your life, we’re going to have you reflect back on some of the things that you’ve already accomplished that prove that you can do some of this stuff that you want to do. All of it really. And today we are talking about Scott Voelker again. So let’s do it. Here we go.

Pat Flynn: Scott, welcome back to the SPI Podcast. Thanks for joining me today.

Scott Voelker: Yeah, it’s great to be back. Excited.

Pat Flynn: You have a new book coming out, which is exciting and it’s all about what you stand for, which is about taking action, which is what we’re going to be talking about today. You were on pretty recently talking about branding and selling digital products. You told your story about how you started in the photography space and then started selling online at theamazingseller.com. SO if you want to hear Scott story, go back and listen to Episode 333.

Pat Flynn: But today going to be talking about tips and tactics and strategies for you, somebody who’s living a life who wants to live the best life possible and wants to take your skills that you have and put them out and they’re out there in the world and how to actually do it. Because I think a lot of us want to do it and we have these certain things that we want to actually take action on, but we don’t. I just want to hear straight from you, the take action experts, what gets us to take action versus what gets us to not take action even though we know we want that thing?

Scott Voelker: Yeah. Well, you and I have been talking even privately through this whole process of me writing this book and finally figuring it out for myself through years of trial and error and mental hurdles and everything else in between, and figuring out we have these certain things internally, these moments that we do something, we act on something. And then you have this effect from that action that you took. So that’s where the idea came from, from allowing me to share my story with the world to let them know, yeah, you can go out there and build a business and we all want to be doing that. But there’s these action steps that are required to do it. And if we don’t take these action steps, we’ll never know.

Scott Voelker: So for me, the book has really allowed me to open up my story even deeper and even helping people go through that process mentally because that’s the biggest hurdle I see with people, is they can’t get out of their own way because they don’t think they have the skillset, they have limiting beliefs. Maybe they’ve tried something before and it so-called failed, which you and I both know that’s just a learning experience. But really this here for me is a personal thing for me, that I want to be able to go out there and help people that were like me that didn’t believe I had the skill set because I didn’t have the education or I didn’t have the network or I didn’t have the following or whatever. I want to be able to go out there and really help people with this message. So that’s really what the book is supposed to be doing here.

Pat Flynn: Well, I mean, I think everybody who’s listening to this wants to help others. They’ve heard me say time and time again serve first and you’ll be rewarded for that. But I think you’re right. We get in our own way all the time. I love the idea of thinking about, okay, well what’s the first domino in the string of dominoes and all these amazing things that can happen. It always starts with the beginning. And as we all know in physics, an object at rest tends to stay at rest, otherwise acted on an outside force.

Pat Flynn: So in your eyes, what are those outside forces that can help us get started and just get us to finally take action? So many people listen to so many of these episodes and yet their next action is to play the next episode. What’s going to get them to actually do the things that we’re teaching them to do?

Scott Voelker: Well, I think people need to realize they’ve already won at something in life. They’ve already accomplished something big. It might be someone like you, that went to college to be an architect and graduated and was able to become an architect. That’s a huge deal. You worked your butt off, you probably had limiting beliefs in the beginning. Can I do it? Can I make it? It’s scary. What if I fail? What are my parents going to think? All these things, but you still did it because you seen what you wanted at the end of the journey in a sense or to that point.

Scott Voelker: And I think for people, we need to go back. I want people to right now just think to themselves, there’s something that you’ve done. Even if you’re going back to when you were in little league. You tried out for a team, were scared. Oh my gosh, I don’t know if I’m going to make it. And you did it and you’ve trained and you did your best and you showed up and then you made it.

Scott Voelker: And so there’s a lot of this in our own world right now that we’re not giving ourselves credit for that we need to because I believe if you come in with the right mindset, that’s step number one. We have to have the mindset. And I know we hear this all the time. I want this to be that moment for you right now that you’ve been listening to all these podcasts and Pat’s and whoever else’s, but I want you to come back to this one and be like, that’s that take action moment that that guy was talking about. Here it is, I get it.

Scott Voelker: So for me, it’s the moment that you’re deciding to do something. We’ve already done that. A lot of us have already done it. You’ve done it to get to where you are today and there’s constantly new ones. There’s always new ones that are coming on the horizon, but then once we do it and we prove it to ourselves, then from there we’ll have the confidence to try something else even though we’ve never done it before or maybe we’ve never succeeded at that one thing in the journey yet.

Scott Voelker: But if we can get you to at least make that first step, take that action step, then from there you can see the effects from that as long as you continually take that action.

Pat Flynn: I think it’s important to allow yourself and even plan for the idea of going back into your history and thinking about those moments that you’ve had. Because we take this action all the time and sometimes it’s the ones we don’t even know we took that made the biggest difference. And we have to think back and those ideas. And one moment for me, I remember where I made that commitment. TO me, take action as is another word for you’re committing and you’re moving forward.

Pat Flynn: I remember when I started my business selling an architectural guide to help people pass an exam, even though, and I haven’t told this to a lot of people, even though I had a business that I was making five figures a month, I was still looking for an architecture job because I wasn’t sure how long it was going to last. But I remember getting a call from my boss, the same one who let me go and he offered me this amazing position, a raise and office even offered me a year’s rent for free. That was the moment I knew I had to make a decision. Am I going to go down the road of architecture with this new opportunity, with this raise and an office and a year’s rent for free? that. What an amazing opportunity. Or am I going to go with this other direction that I’ve started but I haven’t fully committed to?

Pat Flynn: And so I weighed that decision in my head and I rather quickly made the decision to be an entrepreneur. It was only then, then and only in that moment that I realized that I was meant to be an entrepreneur and I started to do things as an entrepreneur. I held back a lot before because I was like oh what if I just go back to architecture? But it was after that moment. That was my commitment moment for me. I don’t know, do you have a certain commitment moment, because I know you weren’t always an entrepreneur. What was that commit, sort of take action moment for you back in the day?

Scott Voelker: There was so many, now that I look back. I think people should go back and retrace their steps. So for me, right out of high school, I went in and started working for my father’s construction company. I thought I was going to own that company and I talk all about this in the book, but it was that thing that I thought, and I think a lot of us, we think that’s the career. We think that’s going to be the thing. And then about six years in, I seen that the business really wasn’t all that great and the partnership that my father had wasn’t all that great and this probably wasn’t going to be business I was going to own one day.

Scott Voelker: So then all of a sudden I felt deflated. I felt like oh my gosh, I put all this time in, this effort. I thought I was going to own this thing and now I’m just going to have to go get a regular job or go work for myself doing construction.

Scott Voelker: And that moment for me was when my wife and I were talking about it. And my whole thing was I just wanted to work less, not like less, less than 60 hours a week because back then, I was working then. But it was how can I spend more time with my family? How can I take my kids to school? And so my wife had this idea of starting a photography business and I’m like I have no idea about photography, but if you want to give it a go, I guess.

Scott Voelker: And so that was a moment in time that it shifted for me. And I said let’s just kind of go for it on the side. We did and we started to build some momentum. And once we built momentum, I felt competent to leave my job. And then we left the job and then that turned us into a a six figure business locally, brick and mortar. And then that led us to the online space where then that turned into a six figure business. So all these little moments created the effect from taking those actions and those chances really. And the risks really.

Scott Voelker: But the reward is the why. And we’ve talked about that a lot and that’s something else I talk a lot about in the book is we need to understand what the why is. Why are you doing what you’re doing? So yes Pat, there is that moment. I can see it right now, myself sitting in a chair in the dining room. I still see the room, I can still see the furniture, I can still see just the knickknacks, I can see everything because I felt a failure in a sense, because I didn’t know what I was going to do. And we had that conversation. That moment right there changed everything for me.

Pat Flynn: When you hear somebody say, yeah, I kind of accidentally fell into this business or I accidentally started doing this work online, do you really believe that? That it’s kind just like oh, it just kind of happened. I don’t believe that because I always think there has to be that moment of commitment, even though it doesn’t mean you’re going to do everything right and usually you won’t. But I just love your opinion on that because that’s the opposite of taking action. That’s just getting lucky if you will. But I don’t believe that that’s ever the case. What are your thoughts on that?

Scott Voelker: So are you referring this to you and me or just someone in general?

Pat Flynn: Just anybody in general. But some people tell me oh, you’re so lucky. You just fell into this. And I’m like no I didn’t. I’ve worked my butt off, I made decisions. But we hear all the time people say that. I’m an accidental entrepreneur.

Scott Voelker: Yeah. What they don’t realize is everything that led up to that moment, and I mean everybody. Look at Gary Vee, Look at Grant Cardone, anybody that’s massively out there today, they still started at the bottom and they just worked their butt off. But you’re just seeing this and you’re comparing yourself, which you shouldn’t do that either.

Scott Voelker: But no, I agree with you 100%. There’s a lot of ups and downs along the way, but I wouldn’t change it because it led me to where I am now. But yes, I would agree with you that it takes work and it takes commitment. To me, it takes the mindset. That’s why the mindset is so important, to be in that mindset that I’m going to go ahead and I’m going to commit to this. Like you said, you have to commit to it and you have to give it enough time. You can’t sit there and say, I’m just going to go ahead and give this three months and see what happens. I was building the photography business on the side late at night, doing our stuff for how to get clients in the door. I was doing all that stuff then going to work the next day. So it wasn’t something that I just automatically just left. I was doing it on the side.

Scott Voelker: Then when I started doing the online stuff, I was building that. I was learning that. I was a student. I was going through trainings. And then as launched my first product. That was the time that I was like, Holy crap, this actually works for me too, you know? So then I built up a little bit more confidence and I said let me go ahead and dig a little bit deeper. And then it just started to really just, again, create that effect of just constantly wanting to grow and expand and do better.

Scott Voelker: Yeah, it’s not given to anyone. If you’re thinking you’re just going to go out there, you see all the ads all the time, Pat. It’s start selling on Amazon today and be rich tomorrow. I don’t promote that. You don’t promote that. We both know that’s not the truth.

Pat Flynn: Right. Now, when you speak about how you would stay up late and work on your business and you committed all this time and energy into it, I think that scares a lot of people. It’s like oh, well I don’t have the time or I don’t have the energy to do this. And I’d love for you to speak to those who are saying that to themselves right now. Oh, you pull these all nighters and I can’t do that. I have a family. And there’s all these excuses. It’s all mindset you said, but the truth is to take action effect isn’t started with something huge. It’s not the Big Bang Theory that things are only created in this one explosive moment. It’s a small thing. But how do we find that small thing to do? What is that first action we should take? How do we know?

Scott Voelker: Let me go back to, because I get that all the time too. It’s like well what if I only have an hour a day or what if I only have a little bit of time at night or I don’t want to not spend time with my family? I’m that guy. I’m that guy. And I say, actually I was on John’s podcast recently and we talked about this. I said I was in the construction business working 60 plus hours a week at 20, I started at 21 years old. I was building a house on the side after my work hours when I was 23. I built that house in 11 months by myself. The only thing I had subbed out was the foundation and the drywall. Everything else we did ourselves, myself, my father and a few friends. Did that at night. I built my own home.

Scott Voelker: So that’s work. All right, that’s sweating. My father broke his arm trying to pull down a tree. We worked our butts off. So anyone that says that they don’t have time, the why is not big enough. You need to establish your why. Why do you want to, instead of saying, I want to make $100,000, what’s that going to do for you? I really talk about this in the book. I go through the deepness of the why. How do you discover the true why? Instead of saying I want to make $100,000, why do you want to make that? Well, I want to spend time with my family. Why do you want to spend time with your family? Because I don’t want to miss my kids’ baseball games. Why don’t you want to miss kids’ baseball games? Because I don’t want them to look at me when I get older and say that I was a bad father.

Scott Voelker: Whatever it is, get to the root of it that will drive you to stay up till 2:00 in the morning occasionally. Not every night, but occasionally because you’re looking for what it’s going to give you on the other side.

Pat Flynn: Well, and you’ll also find out through that sort of self reflection and questioning, holy crap, I don’t need $100,000 to do all these things that would make me happy. I could do that right now. And I think, I mean, this is an exercise I run with a lot of people and they go, I want to be a millionaire. I’m like okay, why? And then they finally realize, wow, I actually only need $5,000 a month, which is a completely different business model.

Scott Voelker: Oh God, yeah.

Pat Flynn: You know what I mean, than earning $1 million a year. Why do you think we kind of have these goals that aren’t really our goals? Where’s that come from, you think?

Scott Voelker: Comparing people, with people, other people. You’re on social media, we’re all on social media. We compare ourselves, and I’m guilty of it as well. I mean we all, you would think, Pat’s at a certain place. I’m in a certain place. You’ve got it all figured out. You don’t ever compare. There’s times that you see stuff and you’re like should I be doing that? They’re doing that. I should be doing that. Because if I’m not doing that, I’m not going to serve my audience. And they’re going to give the audience the bad message because it’s not the right message, it’s constant. So you’re going to still have those. But the other thing is, is you are part of that.

Scott Voelker: I hate to say it, but you have to almost give yourself a very small amount of time to be on social if you can, because when you’re building a business that could be the most distracting thing because you’re going to see sales numbers and you’re going to see shiny cars and Lamborghinis and all of that stuff. So to me, it’s all about comparing. If you’re comparing yourself, then that’s going to be bad. Because then you’re like well, I should be making $100,000 or I shouldn’t be making seven figures because everyone else is saying that they are.

Scott Voelker: It’s like you said, you said it perfectly. Figure out what your number is and then go after that number.

Pat Flynn: Right, right. And the comparison game is important, but you shouldn’t be comparing yourself to others. You should be comparing yourself to yourself.

Scott Voelker: Yeah, yeah.

Pat Flynn: That’s how you grow. I still want to tackle specifically, how do we know what our first action is? With so much that we could absorb out there, so much content, so many people saying this is first app, or no, this is your first step. How does one know, if they do know their why, what their first steps are?

Scott Voelker: Well, again, the second part of the book was after we’ve tackled the all of the mindset stuff and everything, they get you prepared for those action steps, and you’ve covered a lot of it and I’ve covered a lot of it. It really comes down to you need to think to yourself right now, what are you going to be able to show up every single day for let’s say the next 12 months and to work on something that you genuinely enjoy? And once you enjoy that process from there, you’re going to learn. And then if you want to pivot later, you can.

Scott Voelker: But if you’re just going to go after the money and you’re going to be like, well, I’m just going to go sell a random product on Amazon, that’s my world. People are promoting just go find a product and you’ll be rich, that’s going to get old, it’s going to get frustrating and you’re not going to stick with it. We need to find something that you are either passionate about or you’re interested in or that someone else is really passionate about that you can help them grow their business. A lot of people don’t talk about that.

Scott Voelker: I actually have a guy that I met at Seller’s Summit and we had a great conversation after hours at the bar and he was telling me he’s struggling with his niche. He’s like I’m just not sure what I want to do or what I’m going to do, but I want to get into this. I want to get out of the corporate world. And he started telling me about his wife, that she runs a speech therapy business, brick and mortar, and he loves what she’s doing and he loves the change in these children.

Scott Voelker: I said well, there it is. Why don’t you help her get her message out there? You’re the guy maybe behind the scenes that really helps everything get attention. You help to bring new people into the ecosystem so that way there you can nurture them and then eventually they will want to buy from you or they will go through an affiliate link for a product that’s going to help with speech therapy. And his light bulb was just glowing like oh my gosh, this is crazy. I didn’t think of it that way. And I go in in the process you’re learning what it takes to start and run an online business.

Scott Voelker: Anyone that’s listening, you’ve already heard it 100,000 times probably, but you just need to get started. And the map is there for you. You don’t have to over complicate it. It’s really as simple as knowing what your market is, your niche is. From there, find out where they’re hanging out, get the attention and then show up and deliver value. And then from there the money will follow. I mean it is that simple Pat. You know it, I know it. It’s not easy, but it’s that simple.

Pat Flynn: Right. I think we often over try to complicate things and it’s definitely, I’m thinking back to when I first started out and I was writing my ebook for my architecture website. I mean, it did seem so far away. It did, because it was just so different and it’s so unusual. We’re used to working 9:00 to 5:00. . You work for X hours, you get paid for those X hours. And creating something and spending a month on writing an ebook for example, and then selling it without knowing whether or not it would sell or not, was one of the scariest things.

Pat Flynn: So when it comes to, okay, maybe we do have some of our first steps. We know when we need to go get stronger and lose weight, we need to go to the gym. And so the first step is you get in the car and you go to the gym. But it’s scary. You go to the gym and there’s all these buff people and you don’t know how to use the equipment and then you kind of just shell up and go home and you’re like okay, that was uncomfortable. I’m never going to do that again.

Pat Flynn: It’s the same thing with business. You try to build a website and you’re like oh my gosh, this is like learning a new language. I don’t know how to do this. And you don’t have enough money to hire somebody to do it for you. So you’re bootstrapping. How do we, as we are taking those first steps, keep going in addition to obviously remembering why you’re doing it? But how do we get help through this?

Scott Voelker: Well, I mean there’s a ton of resources out there. I mean, we live in a day and age where we can get almost too much information at times. So I would pick someone to learn from. Pat, learn from Pat. You’ve said something to me that really resonated with me and I share it at any conference that I’m at, that I’m speaking or even on other people’s podcasts, just in time learning. And you learned it from someone else but then you passed it on and I so agree with that because you don’t have to know how to connect your shopping cart to your website if you don’t have products for sale. So don’t worry about that.

Scott Voelker: The first thing that you need to worry about is really creating your home base and that is your website/blog and that’s it. Figure that part out and to me you can have that done on Fiverr. You can have it done on a third party service, you can get that set up pretty inexpensively and then just start publishing. Start publishing, getting used to it. If your audience is on Facebook, show up on Facebook, start interacting with people, go to other people’s groups and just get comfortable with taking those actions.

Scott Voelker: But if you have a clear vision of where you’re going, and I think that’s a big one, sit down, map it out. What does your plan look like? And you might be thinking well, I don’t know what my niche is. Sit down and brainstorm. What would that look like? If you could sit there and talk about something every single day or what do you talk about now at parties and people always ask you questions? Or what is something that you just to work on on the weekends that gets your mind off work?

Scott Voelker: Whatever that is, just you got to make the first step. But my thing is is you just got to get started with something. And we’re going to need a home base. We’re going to need a website. So that would be first step. And it doesn’t have to be a fancy website. It could be even the 2019 or 2020, whenever you’re listening to this, a theme that WordPress gives you. I wouldn’t over complicate it in the beginning. Just get it up there and get it started and then just continually show up and start producing some content and serving a market.

Pat Flynn: I love that. And when it comes to serving that market and getting involved in that market, I mean going to places where those people exist is hugely important. It’s one of my, building your online business can be done offline and should be done offline. That’s actually what’s going to help you stand out a little bit more. And today, for people who are just starting out today, Scott, I mean you’ve been doing business for a long time. I’ve been doing business for a long time. Starting a business today is different than when we started it back in the day. What would you recommend people do to help grow their business?

Pat Flynn: So maybe they get a few people connected. They have this market that they’re interested in helping and serving and they have solutions in their head that they want to create. How would you recommend a person grow their business, expand their business, start to actually plant that flag on who they are and what they believe in and and what people can come to them for? How do you build a brand today?

Scott Voelker: Yeah, it’s a great question. Again, I to keep things simple and really it depends on what is your platform of choice, or what is your medium of choice? Do you to talk like you and I do? Then it’s podcasting. If you like to write, do a blog. If you like to be on video, do a video. In a perfect world, I would like, and I’ve seen this happen numerous times, and this was actually the advice I gave to the guy with his wife for the speech therapist, is I said start creating video as soon as you possibly can. And just start posting that on YouTube and then post it on a Facebook fan page and then take that video from the YouTube and then embed it on your blog, write a blog post about it, and then just keep repeating that process.

Scott Voelker: And then once you get into that rhythm, number one, you’re creating an asset that just doesn’t reside on Instagram. Instagram isn’t as evergreen as a blog would be or as YouTube would be. So that’s where I would get. I would start building that out because now I feel I’m building assets that one of those assets can hit.

Scott Voelker: I had a listener of mine, and he did something very similar to what you’ve done, and he’s really just documented his process. He’s like I want to get started, but I don’t want to launch a product because I’ve got invested in the inventory, blah, blah, blah. So he’s like I’m going to go and do what Scott said and just start publishing content about me learning how to distill alcohol. That’s what he said. It’s almost beer crafting. He’s like I’m going to document me learning how to do it. And he did. He said, I’m going to commit to 52 weeks, one video a week. He’s in his basement doing it.

Scott Voelker: First year he said, if I got 500 subscribers, I’d be happy. Well, he got 15,000 subscribers, making $1,200 a month on ads, on sponsorships, on donations. And now I just looked after I interviewed him back on my show, he’s over 27,000 subscribers in less than two years. So that’s just for documenting the process, documenting the process weekly.

Scott Voelker: So anyone can do that. If video is scary, then don’t do video. Just write about it. Just blog about it at least once a week. So that’s what I mean. there’s really no excuse in today’s day and age that we can’t get started. The biggest thing is not getting distracted with the shiny objects, knowing what you want to do and what platform you’re most comfortable with and then just commit. Just commit to it. And from there, I promise you that you’ll learn a ton, you’ll get progress moving forward and you’ll get that take action effect that I talk about.

Pat Flynn: I’m just trying to think of obstacles as people are going through, because we’re making it sound very simple. It’s not easy, it’s simple. There’s not a ton of steps. You just go do it. But there’s other obstacles that can get in the way that can really derail us. For me, it was some of my first failures. But other than that it was also other people, external people. Haters, trolls, but also they were, and luckily it wasn’t so dramatic for me but I know this has been the case for some others, is you don’t get the support from the loved ones around them. They might think you’re crazy. Oh go get a real job. Or what are you doing? You’re distracting yourself from what you should be doing. Or even a spouse perhaps.

Pat Flynn: How does one manage those relationships when it comes to taking action on something new and trying to build something different?

Scott Voelker: Yeah, that’s a tough one. It really is. And it’s hard. Before you got married, if you didn’t already know that you weren’t going to have a supportive wife or husband, that’s kind of tough. The thing is I would have a heart to heart. I’d have to have that. Luckily, I mean, I’ve been married for over 25 years. I have a supportive wife. She’s my best business partner, friend, everything, my supporter. So I’m very, very lucky to have her. My father has always been a big supporter of me.

Scott Voelker: But there’s also been times Pat, that I’ve went out there and made a fool of myself in front of my family. Remember Amway back in the day? I went out and solicited all of my relatives when I was 20 years old thinking I was going to be this Amway success and I embarrassed myself and I found out very early, lesson there was I did not want to bug people to buy from me. I wanted to have people come to me.

Scott Voelker: And so that was a big lesson there. It was really humiliating to be honest with you. I put a suit on and went to my cousins for dinner, which I never wear a suit. I still don’t wear a suit, because they told you at one of the meetings that you should go there in a suit and you should dress a certain way. I did everything by the book. And she’s an older cousin, so she was really nice to me. I mean, I left. I felt so, so embarrassed.

Scott Voelker: But I still took lessons away from that now, looking back at what happened and it taught me. I read a book, How to Win Friends and Influence People. So that was a big takeaway and just some really important lessons. But you do need to get around some people. Nowadays it’s so easy. You can go to meetup.com find someone in a local area, maybe start your own entrepreneurial group, maybe in your local area. I know you do that Pat. Maybe online in a Facebook group. Find out who else is kind of where you are or maybe a little bit further and see if they want to have a little accountability group.

Scott Voelker: It’s easier now than ever to be able to find people that you can at least bounce ideas, feel supportive, pick you up when you’re down. That is important. I mean, I’ll be honest, I had a bad week about a week and a half ago and because of my support network, they pulled me up. I just had a lot of stuff going on and I was feeling the pressure. Then we just kind of, we took a step back and they helped me. My wife helped me.

Scott Voelker: But it’s one of those things. It’s going to happen no matter where you are in business. We’re talking about getting started and feeling embarrassed because you’re starting something or maybe your wife isn’t supportive and you have to prove it to her first. Come up with some type of agreement, have her agree to allowing you to try this thing for six months or something that. A friend of mine actually was a listener, he took his referee money that he was refereeing on the side and he said honey, I’ll use that money to start my business, that way there I don’t interfere with the house account. And she was okay with that.

Pat Flynn: That’s cool.

Scott Voelker: Yeah, he started a business. Now he left his job after two years of starting that business. So yeah, if that is a hard one, Pat, it is. And there’s not really a simple solution because I think everyone’s relationships and people in lives is different. But hopefully that helped. I mean, the biggest thing is just be honest and open with the loved ones that you are calling on for support and letting them know the big vision. Hell, have them be part of the process, have them be part of the grand vision, have them be part of the dreaming process.

Pat Flynn: Oh I love that. Yeah, including those around you that that you know re to be affected by your decisions, it’s really important. I mean it would be kind of terrible that just kind of act without considering how that actions would impact others. So that definitely, and I think involving them in the process and sharing your why and why it aligns with what you feel is best to. And if you have to come to some agreement to, I think that’s perfect.

Pat Flynn: It reminds me of Darren Rowse from ProBlogger. He tells a great story about when he started, he made a deal with his life that was time based, he had a certain amount of time to make a certain amount of money or else he would have to go back and get a regular job and that motivated him too. So I think that’s important.

Pat Flynn: What else are we missing here in the take action effect? And you talk about this, all these things in your book obviously, but what other highlights can we look forward to reading and what can we talk about?

Scott Voelker: Yeah, really, I take people through in the second half of the book is really uncovering themselves. Let’s unpack you. Let’s first off in the beginning let’s figure out what’s holding you back, what’s held you back in the past? And let’s bust through those. Let’s get very clear why. Let’s get all of these supporting mental things in order so then we can go ahead and start to create that business plan. And then from there, we are going to go through and really uncover what it is we’ve talked about here. What is it that you could start a business around. And a lot of people are like well, I don’t know if I could start a business around that.

Scott Voelker: Most of the time you can. Some of the weirdest things. We have a a mutual friend and someone part of our accelerator, Cassidy, who started a business in succulents. Who would’ve thought?

Pat Flynn: She’s been on the show before. She’s awesome.

Scott Voelker: Yeah. So don’t think just because you think that it’s a weird niche or there’s no one out there that would be interested, you’d be surprised. So really it’s about unpacking yourself, sitting down with a little bit of a long time and mapping out what your perfect day would look like. Dream a little bit. We so hold ourselves back because we limit ourselves to what we can achieve. I don’t mean achieve like I want to go out there and be a multi a millionaire. It’s more of what’s the lifestyle you want to create? And you’re going to realize it’s not actually as hard as you think to achieve those numbers if you create the plan.

Scott Voelker: And so I would say figure out what market you are going to start in or that you’re going to continually grow in. Because we’re talking to like you’re starting. I know people right now that are in business that they’re kind of stuck where they are in business. If you haven’t added the component of building a relationship with your market and with your customers, that’s step number one. You have to start building the know, like, and trust. If you don’t, your competition is. And so you don’t have that advantage. And that means follow up with email and being more active on social maybe or doing a podcast that maybe you didn’t think that you would want to do. I mean, I know you and Pat, we both agree. I mean, podcasting has been huge for us.

Scott Voelker: So, yeah, I think the thing that we’re not really missing but that people need to understand is we have to figure out the front part, which is the mindset and really giving yourself credit. If I could just get you to walk away and say oh my gosh, Scott just brought up a great point. I did this one thing and I’m so proud of that. Give yourself credit for what you’ve already done because you know what? You can do anything you want to do as long as you want it. And that’s where creating your why comes in. And then from there, figuring out what market you want to serve, how to get attention in that market, and then from there, how to serve that market on a regular basis. And then really how to serve them with not just content but also products and services that they can buy to help them in that market. So I mean that’s the simple.

Pat Flynn: Yes. I love that man. Thank you for that. Where can people go get the book? Where’s it available?

Scott Voelker: Yeah, I mean it’s available on Amazon and pretty much every other outlet. But you can just go to, also you can go to takeactioneffect.com. I’ll also have some bonuses and stuff over there because I know that a lot of people want a checklists and worksheets and also some videos. I’ve also got some case studies from other people that have really had their own take action moments and have turned that into a business. I think that’s always kind of encouraging to see. But yeah.

Scott Voelker: And again, I just want everyone out there to realize even this here, this book, and you know what Pat, this is something I never thought that I would do. And here we are because of the moments that led up to this. And then creating the moment or the take action of creating this book and now getting it out to the world. That’s what I’m most excited about right now.

Pat Flynn: Love it, man. Dude, well I’m stoked for you. I’m excited to be at your event this year. And I mean, just excited for the book. And we’ll get it out there. I think it’s can help a lot of people and thank you for what you’re doing man. I love how you’re expanding outside of the Amazon space because you truly actually care about people and their success too, because you have all this amazing experience to share. Again, excited to jump into the book and congrats again.

Scott Voelker: Pat, I want to thank you once again too. And again, this book, also I feel is also partly due to following you for so many years and you inspiring me and then everyone else that you are. So I just want to say, again, thank you so much. I appreciate you and I appreciate you having me back on.

Pat Flynn: Oh man, that was so good. Thank you Scott for coming on again. I appreciate you so much for delivering value. I’m happy to support your book. I can’t wait, like I said, to dive into it. And for everybody who wants to check it out, all you have to do is go to smartpassiveincome.com/takeaction, one word. It’ll redirect you to where you need to go to get that book. And Scott, proud of you. I was there when you started writing this book. So proud of you for putting it out there and events you put on. It’s just you and I are so aligned, man. I’m so thankful to have you in my life and to have you here on the show to share more ways that you can be nice, you can care and you can do this the right way and that that’s what this is all about. And that’s what we teach.

Pat Flynn: So I’m so thankful that you’ve come on as another example of that. And hopefully you can all learn from myself and Scott and his book and taking action I. And what we talked about earlier in the show about thinking back to those moments where yes, you’ve accomplished things and that led to one thing which led to another thing. This is why that first step is so important. And even if it’s not the right first step, at least you’re taking steps and you can learn from those mistakes.

Pat Flynn: For me, another big take action thing is also building relationships. This is why I go to events, why I throw events, so that these relationships can happen because you never know the next person you meet, the next person you say hi to and share information with could be the game changer. That take action, that little first step of saying hello could lead to so much stuff. And that’s why I implore the three second rule, because I’m an introvert and meeting people is tough for me. But if I go hey, you know what? I’m going to play a game with myself, I’m not going to let myself go more than three seconds without saying hi if I want to say hi to somebody, and that usually is not enough time for me to to psych myself out of it. So a little another tidbit for you to help you take action. If taking action means getting to meet people, which can be very helpful.

Pat Flynn: Anyway, Scott, thank you so much. Appreciate you. Smart passive income.com/takeaction. All one word. And finally, if you want to get the show notes for this episode, all the links that were mentioned and the direct link to Scott’s book, smartpassiveincome.com/session390.

Pat Flynn: Cheers. Thanks so much. Team Flynn for the win. All the best, peace.

Announcer: Thanks for listening to the Smart Passive Income Podcast at www.smartpassiveincome.com.