SPI 394: Organizing Your Life with April and Eric Perry

Pat Flynn: One of my absolute favorite things to do is to feature some of you, the audience, team Flynn. We have two members of the community today, April and Eric Perry, from LearnDoBecome.com who are going to share with us their origin story.

Pat Flynn: But also April and Eric are experts in organization in terms of architecting your life, how to become more organized and more productive. And April has become quite known in the space of productivity having a community of tens of thousands of people who follow her work in order to get out of the mess, to get out of the piles of rubble and paperwork and all the stuff, email inboxes included.

Pat Flynn: So, please make sure you pay attention because we’re going to learn a lot from April and Eric and how they do what they do.

Pat Flynn: But they were also attendees with their kids at FlynnCon this past year and they wanted to offer some advice for all of you, whether you come to FlynnCon or not, just any time you go to a conference April has a system for how to get the most out of it.

Pat Flynn: And after listening to this episode, I got to tell you, I’m going to start adopting this exact strategy too. So, you got to make sure you stick around. Make sure you hit subscribe if you haven’t already. And before we get into anything, here comes the intro.

Speaker 2: 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, he can’t grow a beard even if his life depended on it, Pat Flynn.

Pat Flynn: Hey, what’s up? My name is Pat Flynn and welcome to Session 394 of the Smart Passive Income Podcast, we’re here to help you make more money, save more time, and help more people too.

Pat Flynn: And there’s no better couple that I can imagine bringing on the show to talk about exactly those things than Eric and April Perry. So, without further ado, let’s get into the episode right now. Here they go.

Pat Flynn: April and Eric welcome to Smart Passive Income. Thank you so much for taking the time to be here today.

April Perry: We’re so excited Pat.

Eric Perry: Thanks for having us Pat.

Pat Flynn: I’m so stocked to chat with you about your journey and also, you had both attended FlynnCon this past year, which was really amazing to see you there and you have a lot of advice for people because you go to these events quite often and you’ve been able to figure out how to get the most out of them. So, stick around because we’re going to talk a lot about that.

Pat Flynn: But I want to talk a lot about both of you first, you have this amazing brand at LearnDoBecome.com. And you teach a lot of people how to essentially stop drowning in all the mess of life sometimes and all the piles of stuff that kind of pile up in our lives. How did you both get started in doing this?

April Perry: Okay. Well, I grew up drowning in piles in my home growing up. Great family but we didn’t know what to do with stuff. So, we just moved things around in circles. And when Eric and I got married we started the same thing. I would move his files so he couldn’t find anything.

Eric Perry: It was not a good working system.

April Perry: And really I feel like we can relate so much to the Smart Passive Income community and we are a part of that community because when you are trying to raise a family and you’re building a business …

April Perry: Eric was working full-time, we’re building a business on the side, we’re learning how to work together. So much going on and it just felt like the stress was getting so, so bad. We didn’t know what to do.

April Perry: So, I started using a planner when I was 13 years old. Always loved organizing. But I started just creating lots and lots of lists and trying to work from lists and trying to do everything I could to get some kind of clarity and order so I could get things done. But it was so, so hard.

April Perry: Then I read the book Getting Things Done by David Allen about 10 years ago and it kind of locked into place everything that I had been learning from productivity seminars and books and things that I went to.

Eric Perry: I came home from work one day and she was just bubbling, gushing about this 300 page corporate book that she’s read. It’s like, “It’s all so clear now. I get it.” Right? I’m like “Wow, okay.”

April Perry: So, I spent a week literally in my pajamas serving the family cereal for dinner and I built my command central. It was this little system to handle all of the papers and tasks and projects and got the emails to zero. And from that point on, I felt like my mind could finally rest and I could get things done consistently even with the family.

April Perry: And I just started teaching people just for fun. I had friends over, like 10 people came in my living room and I just taught them just for fun. I didn’t charge them.

Eric Perry: Because she doesn’t want to pull the house and have an organizational class on the floor.

April Perry: I just thought it was so great and then I started writing articles and I started just teaching people. And Eric meanwhile, he was born an entrepreneur and he’d gone to business school and he had just a lot of business experience and he said, “April, how about I help you and we get this out to more people and we actually build a business on this?”

April Perry: So, LearnDoBecome is about more than just organizing, but how we start is helping people get out of the piles. So, we have helped hundreds of thousands of people with our trainings and have had tens of thousands of people now come in to our community and learn how to build a command central.

April Perry: We’re working on 25,000 step command centrals all over the world right now, and it’s so, so fun to watch how it’s just taken off.

Pat Flynn: That’s really amazing. Eric, I’m curious, at what point did you see this as a business opportunity when you saw April sort of bringing her friends over and stuff? When did it click for you or was it always something that you thought it might go down that route?

Eric Perry: Yeah, that’s a great question. I think always I’ve seen kind of potential in the things that she’s thought of and done. But she had found the solution to her own pain point, right? Kind of be able to scratch her own itch. That was really how the whole program started. It wasn’t necessarily to have something to market or to sell or build a business around. But it was just really fun to watch.

Eric Perry: When a person can identify something they’re passionate about, they’re good at, and they want to do something with it, most people around they want to encourage that and support it.

Eric Perry: So, she’d done some of these trainings in informal ways in the community and online and a few places with some friends, but then she realized people really want this. So, she formalized it.

Eric Perry: In fact, funny story, she actually built this to make it sellable the first she put it all into about a 30-page PDF, right? And people would email a little bit of money, whatever we were charging back then, and we would manually send it back to them one by one.

April Perry: They just send the money to PayPal and we would email them the link to the PDF.

Eric Perry: Right, right. So, I’ll remind you the story of when you had that lead exam, when you saw those first sales are coming in, and you start seeing an ability to kind of help promote that a little bit more. So, we talked about the ability to kind of do some classes, maybe do some online technology to teach a live class.

Eric Perry: And as we did that, we realized wow, there is something here. People are really excited to learn these principles. It’s a very simple eight module process that every little step of the modules are just 10 minute micro verse, we call them.

Eric Perry: So, people were coming in, they were getting these quick wins like you talk about in Super Fans. We were helping them get success early on and they could see their way through to building this system and getting their lives back on track and getting a handle on them.

Eric Perry: So, then we kind of explored getting into Facebook advertising and starting to create more opportunity, people kind of coming to the class we were teaching. I remember one of the first webinars I ever went to about how to set up a webinar or Facebook ads was from a friend of ours, Rick Mulready down there in San Diego.

Eric Perry: And it’s just so funny because this little class I took taught me how to start using Facebook advertising and some paid advertising to kind of start generating more and more people, finding those people who would have that need and come in and sign up for the class. And these classes are stand-alone, kind of 45 minute class where four steps are taught. That’s as far as they want to go, that’s wonderful. They’ll learn a ton.

Eric Perry: But we had so many people at the end of it. And April kind of had the concern about oh, I don’t want to feel salesy, I don’t want to push anybody. It got to a place early on in our webinar experience teaching these lives classes where we taught the four steps and then we said, “You know, if this is all you need, that’s fine. We’re so grateful to have been able to serve you. But if you want to go further and you want more, we have other resources we’d like to offer to you if you’re interested.”

Eric Perry: And that right there, being able to come from a position or a perspective of service and helping people move forward, offering it if they wanted, really changed the game for us.

Eric Perry: So, as we had all these people come through, people were just so grateful. There wasn’t a high pressure sales pitch. There wasn’t an expectation, a requirement to have to buy something to get information, results. They love what they got and then so many people would come through and also want to become part of this step community, steps to everyday productivity is the program we call it.

Eric Perry: It has been so rewarding just to watch tens of thousands of people over the years come in, go through these eight modules. People will always put in the step mastery Facebook group that we have the before and after pictures and just show us where they were starting from.

April Perry: Nibs of a button.

Eric Perry: We always encourage take a before, right? Because it’s one of the things you can actually physically take a picture of, and then send us your after as well. So, people are so proud, so excited to share what they’ve achieved, what they’re accomplished, how their lives are transforming from that.

Eric Perry: So, a kind of a long winded answer to your question. I always saw there was an opportunity there. I wasn’t necessarily trying to capitalize it on just a business perspective, but also I think from the influence, right, how do we help make people’s lives better, how do we help them solve this major pain point so they can move in the direction they want for their lives.

Pat Flynn: I love that. I mean this is exactly the kind of stuff I really get off on because you’re helping people and you’re making money at the same time. April I want to go back to you when you invited your friends over for this and you just wanted to offer that to them for free because I think those little micro tests offers so much value.

Pat Flynn: And it reminds me of when I was really big in the food truck space kind of building FoodTrucker.com, that little niche site that a lot of you know about. A very popular way that food trucks get started is these chefs who just have this amazing cuisine, they cook for their friends, they invite their friends over and their friends kind of see the idea that hey, you know what, this should be a business. You can make some money off of this. And that’s a lot of how those food truck start. And this sounds like a very similar start.

Pat Flynn: But there’s a difference between having friends come over and teaching them for free and then having other people outside of your network and reaching out to them, trying to attract new customers.

Pat Flynn: In your mind, how did you get over the difference between hey I’m just sharing something for free with friends versus hey I’m here to actually provide something of service to you stranger, but I’m going to ask you to pay for it as well.

Eric Perry: Right.

April Perry: Okay. Well, when I first invited my friends over it was purely because I had finally found relief and my brain wasn’t stressed anymore and I just wanted my friends to feel the same way.

April Perry: So, I wasn’t even thinking about it like oh maybe I’ll do a business about this some day. I just honestly thought everyone needs to know about this and I’m just going to send an email to all the people I know in my neighborhood and just bring them over.

April Perry: So, I set up chairs and I think I was even sick that day. I could barely talk but I had three pages all typewritten. I was so excited to show them. The problem was when I showed them, I gave them a little bit of information, they all were like oh, thanks so much. They hadn’t paid anything to come. It was just a night at my house.

April Perry: But when they left I realized they didn’t catch it as much as I wanted them to catch it, because I could see this is life changing. This is going to change the world, that’s what I thought.

April Perry: So, then I thought, okay, I’ve got to do a better job showing people what this is going to do. So, I started putting more effort into creating the information. Yeah, we sold a little 30 page PDF. We even said you can buy it for $30 or you can get it for free if you tell 30 friends about it and then just let us know you did.

April Perry: So, we had these auto responders set up an email. But what started happening was then people said, okay, this is actually really working for me. The more I clarified what I was trying to teach and showing people the vision, the more other people started getting success.

April Perry: Then they started sending me their before and after photos and then I knew okay, this is actually working for other people too. So, then we created more of a formal program that had a log in and then we were trying to build more simple ways to get it done and we kept getting feedback from people.

April Perry: And as it takes more time and energy and resources and all that’s required to run a business, then I couldn’t just keep doing it for free. It needed to be something that was going to sustain our family and start really sustaining the business.

April Perry: But what was so interesting is when Eric came and started working with me, I feel like that’s where things really clicked. And this is what I want to emphasize because I know there are so many people out there with amazing information who are creating courses that can change people’s lives and can really serve a lot of people.

April Perry: But if you don’t have a system where there is consistent traffic coming in, and you don’t have a consistent sales mechanism to help people learn about it and buy, you’re just going to feel stressed out always trying to build organic traffic or always trying to have sales or reducing the price or trying to figure something out to make it work. That’s really stressful.

April Perry: But when Eric took the Facebook ads course and he’s like, “Okay, April, you’ve already taught a webinar a few times, how about we’ll bring Facebook ad traffic. Now we have consistent numbers and you can help people to be able to come into the program if it’s the right for them.”

April Perry: He even had on our bathroom mirror with a dry erase marker, he was writing the numbers for the funnel. Like, “Okay, here is how many leads. Then let’s talk about conversions.”

Pat Flynn: In the bathroom.

April Perry: Yes, in the bathroom.

Eric Perry: Super crazy.

April Perry: I like the bathroom totally clean and the mirror always had these funnel numbers on it. But he was showing me, hey April, it’s not just about doing a good job teaching people how to get organized, it’s about actually looking at the numbers and how much our lead is going to cost, and then what could the conversion rate be.

April Perry: And at the same time it was never looking at our community as numbers.

Eric Perry: Not at all.

April Perry: It was always looking at you have a mission and you want to serve, you’ve got to have the business and the numbers to back it up. That was something I wasn’t naturally good at, but he was.

April Perry: So, I feel like when we combined my passion and my excitement for helping people to get organized, with his passion to help actually create a solid business under that, then the magic started happening and now we’ve taught, literally we have hundreds of thousands of people, and our Facebook posts reach millions every week. It’s pretty amazing.

Pat Flynn: That’s crazy. How does that feel, this question is for both of you, to know that you have this much of a reach, and you’re helping this many people?

April Perry: I get a little nervous sometimes to be honest. I sent an email this morning to 120 people and as I’m pressing send I’m like that’s a lot of people that I just emailed, you know? We had a good open rate and so there’s a lot of people who are going to be reading that.

April Perry: Or when I see numbers that have an M, that million next to it, sometimes I feel like wow, that’s a lot of people. But I think what I’m learning is that when you have a vision and you have a heart that wants to serve, and I think that’s who you attract in your community, then the more people you can reach, the more people you’re going to serve.

April Perry: So, now I feel like I just feel happy and excited and grateful. How awesome that we have technology that let’s us do this.

Eric Perry: You’re just stealing my words now. You’re stealing my words.

April Perry: Sorry. You go ahead Eric.

Eric Perry: My two words were going to be excited and grateful. So, you just did both of those. Because there’s usually excitement, right, when you realize how you combine your passions, your interests and abilities up in a way that’s going to truly serve people, help make their lives better, help them make their own lives better. It is such a beautiful feeling. It’s wonderful, it’s fulfilling.

Eric Perry: Then there’s that sense of gratitude because we know, April and I, we haven’t done this all on our own, right? There’s definitely higher power. There’s a huge community out there. A lot of things that are working to help make this happen. So, we’re extremely grateful for our community and the things that are happening there.

Eric Perry: And it really it’s coming at it from a perspective of serving first. In fact, our two sons often now go to school wearing to serve first t-shirts they picked up at FlynnCon.

April Perry: Yeah.

Eric Perry: We’ll talk about that a little more later in the show. But I love it because it’s influencing them now and how they think about how they maybe contribute to some things we’re doing in our business that we run from home.

Eric Perry: Or even our 11 year old started a couple it’s kind of yard care or lawn care business and he said, “Dad, I really just want to serve and take care of them and make sure they’re really happy with what I’ve done. And so that they can get the result they want and they’re happy to have me come back.” And I’m like these are wonderful lessons for them to learn.

Eric Perry: So, I just love that that’s been able to help increase the reach and help more people have those lives they want.

Pat Flynn: That’s so amazing and I got to meet your kids at FlynnCon as well. They’re wonderful and they’re going to do great things and they have great parents to learn from obviously.

Pat Flynn: I want to go back to the business a little bit more before we dive into some interesting stories that we have to tell about how we first met and connected back in 2014 actually and how that sort of plays a role in today.

Pat Flynn: But with the business, and for those … the listeners out there who they’re just so inspired right now, they want to be where you’re at, helping loads of people, generating good income, being with family, but they’re struggling, they’re stuck, they’re not feeling it, they’re trying, they care, they actually care about their audience but it’s just things aren’t working. Is the answer do Facebook ads, or that was something that was an accelerator for you.

Pat Flynn: But what do you both believe is the one or two things that people who are at that level who want to get to where you’re at can do that would move more than anything.

April Perry: That’s a good question.

Eric Perry: That’s a good question, yeah.

April Perry: Well we just had dinner actually with some friends who were in that spot right now where they have a course that they’ve just created and they’re starting to get out there, but there are so many options. Like well what do we do? Do we just go buy ads? Do we just … What do we do?

April Perry: And as Eric and I, and actually we’ve been talking with a lot of different couples and different friends who are trying to do something similar. And the first advice that I give is you have to have a product and a process to purchase the product that gets your customer so excited to come in.

April Perry: If you don’t have that, it doesn’t matter how much money you spend on Facebook ads, they’re just going to flop because people aren’t super excited. So, I think the number one thing that helped us be able to accelerate is we learned how to discuss the pain point.

April Perry: For example, I’ve been teaching how to organize papers and emails and files and things like that for 10 years. But just a few years ago I went to a conference and I thought, okay, I really need to get my message. Actually it was Don Miller, StoryBrand, he was speaking at a conference and he said okay, you need to be able to explain who you serve and what you help them do so that what? What’s this kind of elevator pitch you can come up with.

April Perry: I used to tell people, oh we help people get organized so they can strengthen their family. That was how I explained it. People would say, that’s nice. Get organized, strong family, that’s great. But they weren’t super excited about coming in or didn’t know if it was the right fit.

April Perry: So, I started practicing different phrases since I would talk to different people. Then I told people, somebody asked me, okay, what do you do? I said, well we help people to stop drowning in piles of clutter.

April Perry: Then everyone’s eyes lit up and they said, “Have you seen my desk? Have you seen my bedroom? Have you seen my house? We have piles everywhere. We’re moving piles.” And everyone started talking about their piles.

April Perry: So, we were like okay, maybe let’s try that. So, we put on our class, it’s called how to finally stop drowning in piles, and then all of a sudden people just started really resonating with that. So, the name was huge.

April Perry: Then the second thing that we did is inside of our class we had to figure out what is a special bonus that we could offer that helps people make the decision right now? Because Eric and I serve people who are chronic procrastinators. So, it’s a little difficult when you’re serving procrastinators to say, “Hey, do you want to buy now?”

Eric Perry: Well people who feel overwhelmed with anxiety, yeah.

April Perry: Or do you want to buy later? It’s just …

Eric Perry: I will buy later, for sure.

April Perry: We even have that joke, how many of you are professional procrastinators? And everyone is like me, I’m so good at procrastinating. So, we had to come up with an offer that felt so exciting to people, but no risk, and felt good on both sides.

Eric Perry: And no pressure.

April Perry: And no pressure because I want people to know hey, we can help you change your life, and you don’t have to do it today. You can do it some other time if you want. But if you want to do it today here’s what we’re going to do for you. And then give them really special benefits so that they can join now and feel good about it and feel excited about it.

April Perry: So, once we figured that out, then we had the messaging, we had the sales mechanism in place and then as we got the Facebook ads coming in, those just became …

Eric Perry: Do you want to share the secret sauce or no?

April Perry: You can share the secret sauce. Do you want to share it?

Eric Perry: So, if your audience wants this, this is actually something that just made the world of difference for us, in terms of yes sales conversion on our classes, but it also helped people get the results and set them up for success.

Eric Perry: So, we tried a number of fast, what we call fast action bonuses and digital business, that just encouraged people to make that move, right?

Eric Perry: To take the step and come in and try the program. We offer a 60 day money back guarantee, which we easily and fully honor, right? We want people to know the risk is on us. They can come in risk free.

Eric Perry: But we went through five or six of these, and finally, I think it was April’s idea, she said, “What if we tried this.” So, we brainstormed that a little bit more. But what we do is we have a mastery program and a self-study program, right?

Eric Perry: Self-study is just the eight modules on their own. The mastery has a bunch of additional resources and community that make it easier to get the results faster with community support.

Eric Perry: What we did is we said if you buy during our class right now, the first five or the first 10 whoever, however big the class was that day, the first to buy a mastery will get a free self-study to gift to a friend.

Eric Perry: That made everything change, right? Because people get really excited about being able to come into a program. They now have something they can give to somebody else and now they’re benevolent, right? They’re the gift giver.

Eric Perry: It builds in a form of accountability partner, someone they already know, love and trust, they can work with and help them get the results that they’re getting as well and they realize it’s going to help make it easier because they’re going to help them understand how to do it.

Eric Perry: So, there are so many, and we don’t market to those people, we just say give us their name and email address, we’ll send them a log in to their free account. And also it doesn’t cost us anything because it’s a fully digital experience in a digital program.

Eric Perry: I will tell you the conversion rates, the experience, people success rates and getting the results in the course and making things happen, it just took off, like off the charts and it was just so awesome because people wanted to come in.

Eric Perry: We’d often have to extend it to more people in our classes because people were like, “Is it too late to get on that? I really want that.”

April Perry: I have a sister who needs to send a friend.

Eric Perry: I have a sister, I have a neighbor. And what’s really cool about it, though we don’t market to them unless they come and they want to do more with us or want to upgrade into a different program, we don’t market to them, but they’ll be connected to us, right?

Eric Perry: They’ve actually helped us find another population of people who have those same needs, those same pain points and as they’re able to get results like we’ve seen tremendous growth in our business just from that side.

Eric Perry: And yeah, a whole population of people we never even really known about or had connection to necessarily, has now come in and they have the ability to learn and develop these abilities and get those results.

Eric Perry: So, that right there in terms of taking your major offer and it really skewed, I’ll just give a little bit of a percentage, it moved almost all of our buyers about 85% to 90% of our buyers moved up then to become mastery buyers. We had a small few who would buy self-study but people wanted to get all that was being offered there.

Eric Perry: So, that was something that these people were considering what their product offering might look like, might be something to consider.

Pat Flynn: Yeah. I haven’t ever heard of anybody doing that before. So, people who get the mastery early or fast will get a free self-study to give to somebody else. I could see how that could definitely help. You said that was limited to a certain number or is that?

April Perry: Here we would say if you buy during this class or if we had a huge class we would give it to the first certain number. And so we could kind of put it together so that there was an incentive to buy.

Eric Perry: Yeah.

April Perry: And the other thing is some people would say oh, I’m really not concerned about a free self-study for a friend, I just want the best pricing.

Eric Perry: Yeah, that’s fine.

April Perry: We’re like great, you can buy tomorrow.

Eric Perry: Yeah.

April Perry: Or the next day before this specific offer expires. And we do change our offers. So, sometimes we’ll offer a special bootcamp bonus or we’ll give a special bonus in their library or something like that. So, the people who bought long ago they get grandfathered in to everything, and it’s awesome.

Eric Perry: Yeah.

April Perry: And then people who are buying now we just let them know hey, you’re going to get the best ever. But if you want to wait and join in future totally fine. Just know that the offers and bonuses change.

April Perry: So, what’s that done is we’ve had some people who have come back three or four times to our classes and they’re like, “Finally I’m ready to buy.” But that’s great because we let them know we’ll always make sure it’s worth 10 times what you pay or more.

Eric Perry: Right.

April Perry: So, we just feel like we’ve got the offer done in a really good way that feels good to us, feels good to them, and it honors where they are in the process. You know not everyone is ready to buy right that minute, and that’s okay.

April Perry: But we let them know, hey, when you come back we’ll still have great offers for you, but you’re going to want to buy now if you can.

Eric Perry: Yeah, and we’re there to nurture our community at whatever stage they’re at. Whenever they’re ready, that’s great. We never want to have any pressure there. And we share some of these tips to kind of answer that question you asked Pat because people might be really struggling or frustrated with this isn’t taking, this isn’t happening.

Eric Perry: Let me just point out, that keep in mind, this took us a process of months of even a couple of years to keep honing in and refining the message of what the class taught or the webinar, be able to get the right offer or the right way to present the offer.

Eric Perry: And I would just say don’t … one of the piece of advice I would give is just don’t get distracted or don’t get discouraged and give up because if you know that you’ve created a program or a course or an offering that really is solving a pain point, it’s really going to help people, I think it’s believe in that and let that sustain you and keep experimenting, right? A little micro tests and things like that to be able to know what’s going to happen there.

Eric Perry: One other thing I’m just going to throw out and it’s just kind of that Venn diagram that Jim Collins puts out in his book Good To Great, it’s making sure that what you do have truly is hitting that point for your perspective customer or your perspective community.

Eric Perry: I remember being in a marketing conference once and heard the phrase that people don’t buy products, they buy feelings, experiences and identity. I think you’re trying to have whatever messaging you have around the offering you have, help those people identify how it’s going to help them to feel better, to be happier, to have better experiences and truly the identity they want.

Eric Perry: And just the Venn diagram from Jim Collins is just making sure that whatever you’re going after in terms of what you’re offering and the business you’re building centers on kind of the intersection of three major things. One, you’re passionate about it, right? You can’t hear any passion in April’s voice about helping get organized, getting out of physical, digital and even most of the mental files.

April Perry: I could talk about processing papers for the rest of my life.

Eric Perry: She loves that. She just loves it. There’s a passion. So, number one is passion. Number two is that you’re good at it, right? Jim Collins says be the best in the world at. That feels a little intimidating but as long as you’re really, really good, that the world around you would say hey, I would love to learn from that person.

Eric Perry: Then the third part is making sure there’s an economic engine to it, right? That people would pay for that service, that product. You can find the alignment of those three things, passion, being world class, and having people being willing to pay for it. You really have found your sweet spot.

Eric Perry: And then it’s just being patient but persistent and finding the right way to message and market, share that with people. And you asked really quick about the paid advertising, I think that’s helpful if you can do some of that, but I think involving people, sharing that opportunity organically there’s a lot of ways to bring people and get them excited and encourage them to share with their friends like we did.

Eric Perry: That sounds kind of crazy. Tell 30 of your friends and we’ll give you the program, that it really does start to create a little bit of a ground slow.

April Perry: It’s a proof of concept.

Eric Perry: Right.

April Perry: I think first of all. Then once you have that proof of concept and you know that people actually want it and that they’re getting benefit from it and they’re using it well, then it gives you more confidence because there is a little bit of a pressure.

April Perry: When we first started doing paid advertising I remember Eric said we did three webinars a week, and Eric said, “Okay. Our advertising costs were just paid for by this first class. So, now the next two classes this week will be profit.”

Eric Perry: Or will help us cover our other costs and profit.

April Perry: Right. But I was really nervous because I thought well what if anybody buys other classes two and three? What if we just wasted all this money? I was super stressed. But Eric had all the numbers written on the bathroom mirror, and he was like, “April, we’re going to be fine,” because we had the numbers to support.

April Perry: We knew okay typically this percent will purchase. Typically, this is how much we spent on ads. So, we had the numbers working. And I love that Eric has been so solid on the numbers. He’s really been a strength to me because I know a lot of entrepreneurs who just kind of pay a lot of money and then hope it all comes back. And that’s not a solid business. You’ve got to have the numbers.

Eric Perry: Yeah. I would say invest a little, do those micro tests even in Facebook advertising, you do stuff on very small numbers and then as revenue does start to come in, contemplate what percentage that you want to reinvest back in.

April Perry: Yeah.

Eric Perry: That’s what we’ve done. We’ve really bootstrapped from a small beginning, little by little, year after year. We’ve been at this now since 2015, almost five years.

April Perry: But no debt. We went to not debt for this.

Eric Perry: We were trying to be very careful, no debt and just little micro investments and then scaling those up little by little. Then for those who might be looking at paid advertising, just a quick little tip that I’ll throw out that was also really helpful to us, as we wrote really good ads, some good copy and we’ve used a lot of before and after images. There was actually one before after image we used probably for four years that just people loved.

April Perry: Everyone loved it.

Eric Perry: It was just one image and we could just keep running it. But one thing I would try to do with every ad we put up with different audiences or different targets, I would be the first commenter, right? So, you’re trying to invite engagement, right?

Eric Perry: People sharing what it is they’re overwhelmed by or what they would like to get from the class or just any questions they might have.

Eric Perry: But if you put up a paid ad or whatever it is, Facebook or elsewhere, be the first commenter and elicit people’s contribution. And it’s something, an idea you talked about several times in super fan, it’s just hearing from them, opening the doors, right, being out there to greet and connect with them because I was amazed how many people in cold traffic would actually come in and start dialogues.

Eric Perry: We’ve got a couple of amazing people in our team as well as us that would be out there answering questions and responding and just connecting with people on our ads and it just created that sense of okay, I really do want to learn from you with you.

April Perry: Someone is taking care of me from the beginning.

Eric Perry: Yeah, these are real people and it creates that real human connection. So, I know it sounds like maybe a strange little tip, but be the first commenter on some of our ads and posts inviting questions and comments and engagements. It really does make a huge difference.

Pat Flynn: Love that. We’ve dropped a lot of resources here during this conversation already, I want to reiterate some of those. Good to Great by Jim Collins. You were talking about something called the hedgehog concept in those Venn diagrams, so, if you want to look that up you can.

Pat Flynn: We also give a shout out to Rick Mulready who has been on the show before. He’s a good friend of mine here in San Diego and he’s all in on ads and such. And you also talked about Super Fans and I appreciate you for that.

Pat Flynn: And you are doing a lot of the things that I talk about in the book. Even the whole before after thing, that’s about my chapter drive that DeLorean. Show people what things can be like in the future and you have to really paint that picture for them because they’re going to want to have that.

Pat Flynn: And from the interactions to the audience and the community that you’re building, it’s all the amazing things. And this really takes us back to you had mentioned this before we hit record, 2014, when you first saw me kind of talk on this topic. Do you want to speak on that a little bit?

Eric Perry: I would love to, and I hope I don’t talk too much about how much we love you and admire you. But yeah it was a pleasure. I got a chance to go to NMX, a conference back in 2014. And Pat was one of the speakers there or one of the keynotes. And he did such a great job and there were so many things.

Eric Perry: It’s interesting. I went back and looked at my notes back in NMX 2014 and April has me organized, right, so I can find them. But I actually pulled them up and I was just going through the principles that you taught there and the topic was how to convert your casual readers, this is back more in the blog days, into raving fans, right?

Eric Perry: And I love it. It’s now become super fans. But the very principles, I was just looking and I want to make sure it’s very clear. We’ve been influenced by Pat Flynn and a lot of amazing other individuals who have become now friends as we’ve worked and grown.

Eric Perry: And a lot of the things we’ve done, a lot of things we’re learned and tried have come from, they’re a great influence.

April Perry: Yeah.

Eric Perry: So Pat, we sincerely thank you for that.

Pat Flynn: Thank you.

Eric Perry: It’s been fun to be part of team Flynn, part of that community SPI and the other stuff you’ve done earlier and just learn and grow over the years together.

Eric Perry: But yeah, it was just funny because I was looking at the forming points, you said ask for the answer, community involvement, create gigs and events, and reach out and highlight community members.

Eric Perry: So, many of these principles, they’ve been in our subconscious for five plus years as we’re really striven to … Or strove, striven.

Pat Flynn: Strived?

April Perry: Strived?

Eric Perry: Strove, striven.

Pat Flynn: I don’t know.

Eric Perry: As we have strived to build this community, it’s really as we call our community, community. Call our team members, team members, right? Because they’re not followers. They’re subscribers, right? They’re customers.

Eric Perry: I love how you have those crossed out on the cover of your book. We are looking to build a community because they have that subtitle, the easy way to stand out, grow your tribe and build a successful business.

Eric Perry: And successful business is kind of the third point there because you really are trying to grow the tribe, serve them, and make an influence in their lives. So, yeah, I just remember the chance to hear from you and I remember, I hope I don’t give away too much, but he had this amazing way to kind of start, and an amazing way to end. He actually involved the audience with this amazing magic trick that he did.

April Perry: Yeah.

Eric Perry: That was so cool. I won’t go into deep detail in case Pat wants to use it again.

Pat Flynn: I stopped.

April Perry: You stopped the magic trick?

Pat Flynn: I stopped. This presentation I did at New Media Expo, which is a blogging conference that no longer exists. And it’s just so crazy because that was the first time I did this presentation, that’s formed and reformed itself many times over as a result of a lot of people knowing that this is such an important topic that they’ve invited me to speak on their stages.

Pat Flynn: I’ve probably given this talk 15 times all around the world including Australia and other places. And I’m so thankful that one of my good friends Jay Bear convinced me to write a book about this topic and right now as many of you know Super Fans is now the book and where this concept came from was 2014 in Las Vegas there like Eric was talking about.

Pat Flynn: And the magic trick was something I did at the end to get everybody involved because that was one of the principles. Get everybody involved, when you get everybody involved they become invested in you and your stuff. And I had learned from a magician this magic trick that would involve the entire audience and it was just so stressful that it was like I don’t think I could do this everywhere all the time.

Pat Flynn: It involved a can of pineapples and stuff and I was like I don’t know if I could find pineapples in Australia. It was like I don’t know.

Eric Perry: Well you pulled it off masterfully. It was awesome.

April Perry: I love it.

Eric Perry: And I loved it because I read over my notes how you’ve taken each chapter to be able to expand more deeply because some of the examples you use in the book where you were sharing and teaching back then, and I love how you’ve amplified it.

Eric Perry: So, if any of Pat’s listeners, anyone out there hears this and you haven’t had a chance to pick up this book, not to shameless promote it, but he is phenomenal and yeah, all three of the books that he’s written.

Eric Perry: It’s been so fun to read through and just Pat has such a conversational friendly style about him and everything that he does, but his writing is the same way. So, it’s just been so much fun to read through and go deeper.

April Perry: Well and I just want to add something on the hope that this brings. I feel really, really excited to be here on your podcast.

Eric Perry: Honestly.

April Perry: Because we’ve been listening to you for a long time and I just think back to, I guess maybe it was 2014 we started listening to his podcast. ’13, ’14.

Eric Perry: ’13, ’14. I would go jogging around our neighborhood listening to Pat Flynn, John Lee Dumas and a few others out there.

April Perry: Yeah.

Eric Perry: Just, and I would run faster with you guys in my ears because-

April Perry: Yeah, new idea.

Eric Perry: Kind of like when we’re talking about the Shane Sams, right? He jumps off his lawn mower. He runs and-

April Perry: He gets excited.

Eric Perry: This is going to change our life. I would come home from runs.

April Perry: He would be so excited.

Eric Perry: And I got awesome times and tell April.

April Perry: And five years ago when we were going to this, five, six years ago, I couldn’t quite imagine the life that we have now. I didn’t … I knew that there were good things ahead, but I didn’t know how good it could be and I didn’t know 100% that we could replicate what we were learning.

April Perry: But Eric would come home so excited and say, “Okay, you got to listen to this. You got to listen to this. Look what they’re doing.” And he’d be showing me and creating this vision. And then we started going to the conferences and we started implementing what we were learning and it was pretty amazing how it didn’t happen overnight.

April Perry: We spent a lot of time learning and tweaking and figuring out and getting on the phone with clients and talking to people afterwards. Eric would be on the phone and helping people, okay, what do you need? What would be more helpful to you? How is the class we taught?

April Perry: Eric was with our clients really making sure we were doing things well. But you guys who were kind of paving the way and doing this before us, really gave us hope and we’re hoping that we can help provide that for other people who are listening right now thinking I want this too, you know?

Eric Perry: Absolutely. But one thing I would just say, one of the many things that we admire about you, and it was really something that was really helpful to me early on, is that you were so transparent, so open.

Eric Perry: I know that you share so much of how and what you do, helping people learn from your experience. I think one of your earliest phrases on the crush test dummy, right, for online business. And it was so helpful to know, okay, he’s out there trialing and erroring, making mistakes and helping us learn so we don’t make the same mistakes.

Eric Perry: And just that transparency even with some of the things you’d share about business processes or kind of income reports and things of that nature. It just gives the ability to say it’s replicable, right?

Eric Perry: And I know you talk about that in the book, giving people the factory tour and kind of opening the doors to people around you because we do have a curiosity to see how could I do that.

Eric Perry: I think it creates that hope, right, and a vision and a dream where people could see how they could then adopt those principles to their own success and their own process.

Eric Perry: So, what you’ve shared, what you’ve done over the last five years, six years we’ve been exposed and connected to you, it has been life changing. We are sincerely grateful for that.

April Perry: Thank you.

Pat Flynn: Thank you both so much. You both attended FlynnCon and your family was there as well, your kids. And you had mentioned before we started recording that you would love for this episode to be something that perhaps at this point that people could listen to when they come to FlynnCon too or go to another conference because …

Pat Flynn: And we’re speaking to professional organizers here who go to conferences quite a bit and then can kind of distill and take that information and execute on it. Obviously they’ve done that.

Pat Flynn: So, I want to kind of spend the rest of the time here to provide a resource for people when they go to a conference, how can they make the most of it from your perspective having done this many times and with your expertise on top of that?

April Perry: Yes.

Eric Perry: So, April is the expert on that. I’ll let her speak on that just one second. Before I have her jump to that, let me just talk about just briefly how much fun and how much we loved FlynnCon. We took our three youngest children, they’re between the ages of about 11 and 17, because when I saw Pat put that information out about this first ever FlynnCon and it was going to be a family friendly event, and yes there was a lot of stuff we could do with our families, we had always admired your kind of focus on balancing your life and your work with the needs of your family and what they would benefit from.

Eric Perry: So, we took our three kids. We had a great experience down there. There was actually a track and some activities for teenagers and kind of tweens and it was just awesome. Our kids loved it. And a lot of the speeches and the sessions as well were just phenomenal.

Eric Perry: And maybe the highlights or any of the teenagers or youth listening out there, this past time, there was this awesome arcade set up in one of the side lounges and they had kind of a super Mario Brothers or Mario Kart tournament and it was awesome. They had people qualifying for it, and one of our … our youngest son was actually fortunate to qualify for that.

Eric Perry: And Pat invited the four finalists up on stage to play for the championship there. It was just so much fun.

April Perry: It was the highlight of his whole summer.

Eric Perry: He’s seriously still talking about it.

Pat Flynn: That was so cool. That was something.

Eric Perry: It’s such a great experience.

Pat Flynn: And that’s going to happen again next year, just so you know.

Eric Perry: Awesome.

April Perry: It’s so great.

Eric Perry: Awesome. It’s such a family friendly event. We love you and we’ll take our children there. And honestly because we wanted them to see what it was we did. We went to conferences, who we were meeting, the types of things we were hearing, and letting it be a little bit more on their terms. So, thank you Pat for putting that together.

Pat Flynn: Yeah.

April Perry: Okay. So, I have three tips though. Okay, sorry. What were you going to say?

Pat Flynn: No. I was just going to say you’re welcome. I designed it for this exact purpose, so you could bring families and have everybody understand kind of what’s going on, because we entrepreneurs we often, number one, feel alone, so we want to go to these conferences. But then we also leave everybody else behind when we go.

April Perry: Yeah, yeah.

Pat Flynn: Why not all just go together. So, that’s really cool.

Eric Perry: Absolutely.

Pat Flynn: Thank you for that and I’ll send you your check later for all the amazing testimonials and such.

Eric Perry: No.

Pat Flynn: But no, I’m just kidding. But April, why don’t you take it and tell us, and this is for me too, when we go to conferences, how do we make the most of it?

April Perry: Okay. So, this is so important because when you invest the time and money you want to be able to get a positive ROI. And we’ve gone to a lot of conferences, and I can 100% say I get a positive ROI on every conference, and this is the exact process that we follow.

April Perry: So, I’m going to give you the secret, it’s just three really simple steps. Okay. So, first step is you need to come with your questions or your outcome. What is it that you are looking for in the conference? Is it simply mindset? Is it figuring out how to make a funnel work better? Is it figuring out your product? What do you really want?

April Perry: And even writing down one to four or five questions and having them at the top of your notes is going to help you give direction to which classes you choose to attend, to who you wanted to speak to during the breaks, things like that.

April Perry: And most people don’t go to a conference with actual questions written down. They just go kind of thinking well, let’s go to this conference and see what I get out of it.

April Perry: All right. So, then point two is that we want to be able to take our notes using certain symbols that will help us to later extract the best points from what we learned. So, I have five little symbols that I use in my notes that help me.

April Perry: So, as I’m taking the notes I am essentially highlighting, and I’m making it simple. So, at the end, when we move into point three, it’s going to be really simple to do that.

Eric Perry: We have a little visual photograph of those.

April Perry: Yeah, we’ll send them to you.

Eric Perry: We’ll send those to Pat, he can put up on a post if he wants. Do we also have a free printable of kind of conference notes that we can …

Pat Flynn: We’ll put in on the show notes for everybody.

Eric Perry: That would be great.

April Perry: Awesome. Okay. So, I’ll just briefly explain what these five symbols are, and of course people can edit them to meet their own needs. But these are five that I found work really well and I’ve used them for years and years.

April Perry: Okay. So, the first one it’s a question mark with a circle around it. That means these are questions to think about because a lot of times you’re going to hear a speaker and you’re going to think, oh, that was a really good concept or oh yeah, I really need to consider this more.

April Perry: Am I really living my passion right now? Or am I trying to live up to some image of success that someone else has created for me?

April Perry: Those are some of the deeper questions that I thought of when I was at FlynnCon. So, you write down the question and you put little question mark with a circle around it.

April Perry: Then next one is just a little arrow that means first priority. Sometimes you hear something in a conference and you think if I could do this right away it would totally double my business. Or it would take away the stress or whatever. So, a little arrow for that.

April Perry: Then I just have stars for great ideas and then I have a little image of a book for any books that are recommended because that’s what I love about conferences is people will say, oh, have you read this, have you read this? So, I put a little book.

April Perry: Then the final one is I have little brackets. And I put brackets around anything that’s more of just an executive summary of what I would want to talk to Eric about. Let’s say he’s not at the conference with me or maybe a team member.

April Perry: So, that way when your team member or your spouse says, hey, how was the conference, you don’t say oh, let me sit down with you for three hours and I’ll read you all my notes. You just say, yeah, let me give you the top five things that I thought that you would really appreciate.

Eric Perry: It’s usually about four.

April Perry: Because Eric likes the executive summary version rather than me talking for hours.

Eric Perry: Can we go a little deeper on key points there?

April Perry: Okay. So, does that make sense?

Pat Flynn: It makes notes. I think I heard Eric say he wants to go a little bit deeper on a couple of those points.

April Perry: Yes. Well I think he meant as I’m giving him the executive summary.

Pat Flynn: Okay, got you.

April Perry: Then if he wants to go deeper.

Eric Perry: That was helpful, then I say oh, I’ll go deeper on that one and that one as opposed to hearing oh these are the ones.

April Perry: He doesn’t want me to reiterate everything because most people, when you look around, most people at conferences either sit there and don’t take any notes, or they write everything down. But then they get home with a big notebook full of stuff and they don’t know what to do with it. Okay.

Eric Perry: Well actually, just a quick aside. Actually after one conference we went to a few years ago, the conference had ended and people were starting to kind of part ways and stuff and I found April sitting on a couch for just 15 minutes and she was kind of like give me 15 minutes and she was doing kind of this breakdown, a quick.

April Perry: That’s step three. I’m about to explain.

Eric Perry: She’s explaining. But when you do what she’s about to explain, literally she gets so much out of every conference because of this, it’s amazing to watch. I don’t do it as well as she does or all the time, and she’s getting so much more mileage out of what she does in her conferences.

April Perry: Okay. Have we built it up enough now for step three.

Eric Perry: Step three.

Pat Flynn: That was a good teaser, yeah.

April Perry: Okay. So, step three is where we create a one page sheet with your key takeaways. And the important thing is this has to be done before you get home and you get back into your email or back into your family life because you’re not going to remember everything or you won’t be able to prioritize as easily.

April Perry: But I would do it sometimes on the plane ride home or if the conference is close to home I would sit down in a corner somewhere, or if I knew I was jumping into something right after that I would make sure I had some quiet space to write.

Eric Perry: Because what happens after a conference is something we call …

April Perry: Post conference let down syndrome.

Pat Flynn: Let down syndrome.

Eric Perry: You get back to life and everything comes rushing after you, right? All the emails, the calls, the family, the …

April Perry: You’re like why do I have a vision at all?

Eric Perry: You can make those 15 minutes after the conference on a flight home you will extract everything and get the results.

April Perry: So, this is why we have a worksheet to help you to do. So, I can put the link to the worksheet on your show notes as well. But essentially you just have one sheet and you divide it into three sections.

April Perry: So, top left is as soon as possible. This is where I have maybe 5 to 10 things that I want to prioritize. They’re going to go right into my command central right when I get home. So, like for example we met Brandon at your event and he was going to help us do some SCO work.

April Perry: So, we already had an appointment with him, hired him, worked with him, it was awesome. And that was something I wanted to do really quickly because we’re getting ready to do a site redesign and that was really important. So, you have yeah, top left corner is as soon as possible.

April Perry: Then the top right corner is kind of like well this is some day soon. So, it’s kind of like the next tier. It’s not essential. We don’t need to do it right now but these are the key ideas that I really don’t want to forget.

April Perry: Then at the bottom it’s just great ideas, thoughts, other things that I enjoyed from the conference. More like the inspiring quotes or just something that I learned there. Here is a principle that I learned or here is something that I remembered that I want to continue to remember.

April Perry: So, when I go through all my notes and I extract, like I go through the arrows that I put into my notes that were first priority, those typically go in the section as soon as possible. The little books that I’ve written down, some of those will go into yeah, some day soon or here is some other books to kind of put in my list for later.

April Perry: But I take all of those symbols that are in my notes, I quickly go through and find the most important things that I learned, put them into this one page summary, and that’s what I process when I get home.

April Perry: So, we have our whole command central process where we go through and we organize what are my current projects, what are my next sections, what’s going on on the some day list. And you get everything organized.

April Perry: So, that way every conference that I attend, I’ve been able to get the best ideas, put them into my system but then all the other good ideas are saved, they’re organized, I take a photo of this one page sheet, I put it into Evernote and then I set little calender triggers to review a month out, three months out, six months out so that I can continually go back and say okay, what did I learn at FlynnCon? Let me go look at those notes again and see if there’s anything else I want to put into my system.

April Perry: I have these calendar triggers set up so that FlynnCon isn’t just helping me for a week, it’s helping me for the whole next year and I’m continuing to go back to those notes and I have it all simply digitized, easy to pull out the action items and then I actually implement it.

April Perry: And really, I will 100% say that has been what’s helped us to scale our businesses. It’s the conferences we’ve attended, implementing it, buying the software, hiring the contractors, reading the books, figuring things out.

April Perry: And as we put those things into practice, the results started coming, not just financially, but really helping us in all areas of our lives.

Pat Flynn: Wow. People are going to have to re-listen to that because that was amazing.

April Perry: I have it all spelled out. I’ll give you the link to the post.

Pat Flynn: Okay, perfect. A couple questions for you starting with the first point, which was go to a conference with an objective and understanding sort of what you want to get out of it and what not, which will help guide what talks to go to, especially for those larger conferences where sometimes they have 20 going on all at once. So, I think that’s really key.

Pat Flynn: However, if you were to finally sit down and do this, which I know like you said most people don’t, they just go oh cool, that’s kind of my people so I’m going to go there and we’ll see what happens.

Pat Flynn: If you aren’t able to come up with an objective that aligns with that conference, does that mean to you like hey, maybe this isn’t a conference we should go to?

April Perry: I think that’s a really good point.

Eric Perry: It is.

April Perry: I think of course there’s power in getting out there. But if someone’s just starting a business and they don’t have either the money or the time to waste, I wouldn’t do it. I mean everything that Eric and I do is with a purpose. We have a deliberate purpose for going to FlynnCon and we usually not only have one purpose, we have multiple purposes.

April Perry: Like FlynnCon wasn’t just to help us with business ideas. A lot of it was to help our children. You really created that environment where we wanted our teenagers to come and see what’s possible.

April Perry: I actually asked our children to do this before we went into FlynnCon. I had them write down on a piece of paper what do you want to get out of this conference? What are you hoping to learn?

April Perry: And their questions were different. It was more like well what ideas are there for a business?

Eric Perry: Right.

April Perry: Or what kind of business could I maybe do some day. So, their questions were different. But I wanted our children, even though they were there because we told them to go there. They hadn’t signed up.

Eric Perry: We invited them.

April Perry: Win the Mario Kart competition.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, yeah.

April Perry: Whatever it was. But I invited the children to do that too. So, I think it can work either way. But I know that there are a lot of people who literally spend thousands, tens of thousands, I even met someone who had already spend $100,000 on courses and conferences and had never made a penny in her business.

April Perry: So, there are a lot of people who just like going to conferences. And if you have the money for that and that’s your entertainment, that’s fine. But if you’re trying to get results, I think you’re absolutely right, if you don’t have specific things that you want to learn or get out of it, I don’t know if that’s the best investment.

Pat Flynn: Right, thank you for that. Then the follow up question I had was related to point number three, which was giving yourself time to sit down and understand what the key takeaways were. I like how it interacts with your second step and the keys and the ledger that you created, I think that’s really smart.

Pat Flynn: Do you do this at the end of each day or only at the end of the conference? And second part to that question is how do you have the energy to do that because usually by the end of these days we’re so drained and that’s the time at which people go man that was a long day, let’s go to happy hour, let’s go out to the restaurant and then you don’t want to be left behind.

Eric Perry: Well, let’s see if I can speak to that and answer you. Great, great point Pat. Because I think April is an introvert and so being at conferences and I know others out there are probably in a similar category that they are sometimes depleted and exhausted, they’ve been doing a lot of listening, learning and interacting.

Eric Perry: And I will promise you though, knowing that that’s her personality type and kind of how she gets her energy, watching her sit down, even if it’s just a little bit of I’m going to take these 15 minutes just 15 minutes to sit down and be able to process and kind of decompress and kind of put it into that format, into a one page, you don’t have to get everything down but it’s a good start if not completed by 15 minutes.

Eric Perry: Then you can go off to that happy hour or that social or whatever it is you’re going to go do, and I think there’s a lightness and an energy that’s there because you know, you can start to capture.

April Perry: Clarity.

Eric Perry: Clarity and focus and being able to know okay, because I’ve been here. And it will actually inform a lot of what you just choose to converse about or the things you do at the happy hour, not that it’s always going to be business building or relationship connecting.

Eric Perry: But I’ve watched her just come out of that 15 minute session after a long conference and she’s actually re-energized because she’s got that clarity. It has been a cool thing to watch.

April Perry: Yeah. And I’ll add to that. So, what I do is at the end of each day I review my notes and look at what I’ve done so far. Sometimes I do start building that one page summary based on it, but it depends on how long the conference is.

April Perry: If it’s a super long conference I wait till the end because I know I might get even better ideas the second or third or fourth day.

Eric Perry: Right.

April Perry: But what I do is I look at my notes for the day and I then I go back to my questions I wrote down at the beginning and see how far I’ve come.

April Perry: So, if I’m oh, I haven’t gotten any answers to any of these questions, tomorrow I need to be a little bit more deliberate about that. How could I do that?

April Perry: So, I’m always connecting it back to my questions. But what I found that’s the key, and it’s okay, if you decide you want to do it the next morning or whatever, it’s up to you how you want to create this one page summary.

April Perry: But you want to do it when the vision is at its peak. Because what happens is when you’re at a conference that’s usually when your vision expands and you think, oh my goodness. And you’re kind of out reality for a moment because you’re not in your email.

Eric Perry: You’re actually stepping away from the forest or the trees to see the whole valley of the mountain.

April Perry: Right. It’s like this moment.

Eric Perry: You want to capture it then before you get back into the forest and only can see the tree.

April Perry: Right, you almost feel this elation and you feel like anything is possible. And that’s when you want to build it, is when you feel like anything is possible.

April Perry: If you wait until you got home and then one of your kids is sick and someone just broke their leg and then something happens technologically in your business.

Eric Perry: Or a tech issue came up in your stuff, yeah.

April Perry: Then your vision just all of a sudden shrinks and you don’t feel as hopeful. So, even if I’m tired I capitalize on the hope and the vision. So, then what’s really awesome is when I go back and look at my one page summary I think yeah, that was when I was in that space where I could see.

Eric Perry: It’s kind of your higher better self talking to you kind of from that conference over time as you go back and revisit it. And you asked the question, day by day, typically those symbols that she gave as you’re taking notes throughout, those become kind of your markers day by day and then at the end you can say what were the best nuggets and pull those forward.

Eric Perry: One thing we did at FlynnCon that was the end of each day before we went to bed in our hotel room, is we just asked our kids, okay, so what was one thing that really stood out to you? One thing you were really impressed out or really kind of connected with you.

Eric Perry: It was really interesting to hear the things they’d share. One example is two of our children the day that both children joined you on stage, they talked about that and that interaction and the things that they were doing, right?

Eric Perry: Even at such a young age is just awesome because you’re helping them recognize what are they getting out of the conference little by little as they go through.

Pat Flynn: That’s really … Man, now I’m getting inspired. I need to make my one pager from this and all the new ideas I have for FlynnCon next year too and I just can’t wait to see everybody there and just do it again and do it even better.

Pat Flynn: My team and I did we did a very similar, we ran the conference and then two days after, after a day off, we got together and spend six hours in a … we work right next door to just jam on what went well, what we could do better for next year.

Pat Flynn: And thankfully we sold nearly 100 tickets even before that conference ended for next year already. So that validated the round two and here we go.

Eric Perry: Absolutely.

Pat Flynn: Thank you both for being here and for sharing not only your journey and how you got to where you’re at, but how SPI and being a member of team Flynn and Super Fans and FlynnCon has been a part of it for you too.

Pat Flynn: That just makes me so happy, and this is why I do what I do to inspire others and create that ripple effect because now you’re helping others as well and this is tremendous.

Pat Flynn: And I highly recommend everybody go and check out your material. You had mentioned a number of things that we couldn’t go deep in today like the command center and a lot of the other stuff about how you help people stop drowning in piles of stuff.

Pat Flynn: So, what was really cool is you offered to have a resource for people to go and check out more of your stuff. If you all go to SmartPassiveIncome.com/stopdrowning, you can get into their program and kind of see what’s that like if you also feel like you’re drowning and stuff.

Pat Flynn: Obviously, we have the experts on today to help you and you can tell they really truly care about serving you. So, SmartPassiveIncome.com/stopdrowning. That is an affiliate link if you do move forward and go into their program.

Pat Flynn: And thank you guys for that. But any final words, maybe a quick word from each of you for the audience that’s listening in and they’re inspired coming out of this podcast?

April Perry: Yeah, I just want everyone to feel hope because I understand exactly where you might be right now. We were trying to build a business, working together, raising a family. Eric had a full time job. I was taking care of all the kids. We were trying to figure out how to make things work.

April Perry: And so many times when you’re trying to build something on the side or build something better or move towards goals, you start feeling kind of weighed down by all the things that need to be done.

April Perry: Now, not only do you have great resources with Pat and so many other great people that he’s brought on his podcast, people you’ve met in the industry, but also we just want you to know that there is really a lot of support available in having a system that helps you to prioritize and get things done.

April Perry: So, I just feel like my contribution to the world is to help people not to feel overwhelmed and really to be able to create a system to support you so you can do what matters most.

April Perry: So, I’m just thrilled to be able to help however I can and so appreciative of the opportunity to be here. Eric?

Eric Perry: Yeah. So just to echo a lot, everything April said right there. As you come over, and you check out a class we teach, it’s a free class, there are four stand alone steps that really are going to help you get a handle on the projects that are important in your life, get your life more organized.

Eric Perry: There is no need or requirement to do anything with us, or buy anything from us. We just want to teach that class and offer these resources like with the conferences to help people really identify what they want to do with their lives and move forward.

Eric Perry: And in that vein, I would just encourage you, many people are out there either starting or just kind of in that messy middle as it’s sometimes called, if you believe in the concept you have, and it’s kind of invalidated, believe in yourself and keep going forward, right?

Eric Perry: Put your best effort, your best thinking into it, and then yeah, gather around you the people who are there to support you. That could be family or friends. That could be online resources or communities like these with team Flynn and Smart Passive Income.

Eric Perry: But just look for those people who are going to be there to help you and expand your thinking to really keep that mindset positive to believe in yourself and put in the work. I’ll promise you, it doesn’t happen overnight.

Eric Perry: But if you have the desire to serve people, if you really are finding a way to help them solve the pain points that they have, to move their lives in a positive direction, we promise you it’s possible to create an amazing community and super fans of people who really become your friends. People who you love and really want to do things for to help serve and support them.

Eric Perry: That’s what it’s really all about, is helping people move their lives in a positive direction so that they and those they love can be happy.

Eric Perry: So, we’re just so grateful for the opportunities we’ve had to build what we’ve been able to build so far, for the influence of Pat and others who’ve really inspired us along the way, and really hope and wish the same for you.

Pat Flynn: Thank you both so much. I appreciate you and I look forward to chatting with you both again soon and seeing you both again soon.

Eric Perry: Yeah, absolutely. We look forward to it.

April Perry: Yes absolutely. Thanks Pat.

Pat Flynn: Wow. I hope you enjoyed that episode with April and Eric Perry. Again, you can find them at LearnDoBecome.com. And also of course their special offer, which you can check out at SmartPassiveIncome.com/stopdrowning. One more time, SmartPassiveIncome.com/stopdrowning.

Pat Flynn: And thank you all for listening in today. I appreciate you so much. Make sure you hit subscribe if you haven’t already. Check out the show notes on the website, SmartPassiveIncome.com/session394 and I just appreciate you team Flynn you’re amazing.

Pat Flynn: Eric, April, I know you listen to the show, you guys are incredible. Your family is incredible. I hope to see you at FlynnCon again. And for everybody who wants to check out FlynnCon as well, you can go to FlynnCon2.com and get tickets if there are any left.

Pat Flynn: They are just hot off the press because we sold about 100 from the event attendees last year. We opened it up and ticket prices go up every single beginning of the month.

Pat Flynn: So make sure to check it out, FlynnCon2.com and we hope to see you in San Diego July 24th or 26th next year. Chose to take care and as always team Flynn for the win.

Speaker 2: Thanks for listening to the Smart Passive Income Podcast at www.smartpassiveincome.com.