SPI 830: Double Your Growth with a Business Buddy

SPI 830: Double Your Growth with a Business Buddy

Announcer: You’re listening to the Smart Passive Income Podcast, a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network, a show that’s all about working hard now, so you can sit back and reap the benefits later. And now your host, he takes a 30 minute power nap almost every day, Pat Flynn.

Pat Flynn: Do you remember back in elementary school when you went on a field trip?

Your teacher would tell you, find a buddy, or they would assign you a buddy. And you would always make sure that your buddy was always there with you. The teacher would ask like, Hey, is your buddy there? And you know, as long as one of them was there, you could pretty much assume that the other was, and that was great.

So when you’re a kid, you have no idea what you’re doing. You’re kind of just going along for the ride and you’re listening to the teacher. Well, guess what? When you’re going through the beginning journeys of starting a business, you have no idea what you’re doing either, and you need a guide to help you.

But more than the guide. You need a buddy. So we’re going to talk about finding a buddy today. And the reason why I wanted to share this is because it just hit me. I just finished a text conversation with a buddy of mine, a buddy from the Pokemon space. His name is Alex, and he is actually the one who inspired me to go daily on TikTok, Reels, and YouTube.

I, if you don’t know, I submit the same video across all three of those platforms, shorts and reels on Instagram and Tik TOK, and these are Little Pokemon shorts that are anywhere between 45 seconds to 60 seconds, and I open a pack of cards, and I’ve developed a sort of show, and currently I’m on episode 79 of those, but I gotta tell you, what I’ve learned from Alex, and what he’s learned from me, is we’ve both been doing this together, we share little analytics and secrets and little patterns that we find along the way. When I’m late to upload, he goes, Hey Pat, are you uploading today? What’s going on? You okay? And I do the same for him. And when one of his videos goes viral, I reach out to him and congratulate him. Or when he shows me one of his videos goes viral, I don’t get jealous.

I get stoked. And then he goes, here’s what I did to try to make that happen. You should try this too. And so we’ve been sharing a lot of these insights that we’re only finding out because we’re taking action, but we’re almost moving more than twice as fast than we would. If we were just doing it alone, so Alex, I don’t know if you listen to this podcast or not, maybe not, but I know you’re in business and you have an agency of yourself, so maybe you will, but thank you for being my buddy on this.

And it makes me go back in time, DeLorean style and think about some of the other ventures that I’ve had and some of the other buddies. that I’ve grown up with as my business journey has come along. So I think about, of course, Chris Ducker, who originally was in the Philippines when we connected. And then he’s since moved over to London, but we’ve continued to over a decade now, more than a decade, probably 13 or 14 years, not just be friends, but also share with each other what we’re up to almost like you would in a mastermind, but maybe just a little bit more casual, less structured, if you will, we connect maybe once a month at this point, ever since the pandemic, it’s been pretty sad, so we did see each other in Tennessee at the book authors retreat, but we do need to spend more time talking and now we are actually connected on the whoop app, a whoop is a little tracker and he got me onto that.

So again, yeah. We’re not just helping each other with business. Chris and I are sort of supporting each other on sleep habits and stress levels and you know, these old man problems that he and I both have and it’s great. It’s wonderful. And we do text each other every once in a while to check in on each other.

With Alex, since we’re uploading daily, we’re learning daily. We’re sharing daily. Just finished up a conversation because I noticed one of his videos today was a little bit different. So I asked him about that and he was very open with sharing, just like the other day when he asked me about something and both of our channels are growing like mad.

He’s about to cross monetization on YouTube. He’s been far ahead on TikTok and Reels, but I’m excited for him to get monetization on YouTube, but even just now saying that, like I’m, I feel joy with his success and I want him to succeed. So I would encourage you to find a buddy who’s kind of along the ride with you, right?

It’s not just like a person in the driver’s seat and you’re in the backseat. This is the person who’s in the passenger seat and then every few hours you switch seats so that you can take a nap and then they can drive, you know, that kind of person as you journey in this road to entrepreneurship together.

Now, where might you find a buddy like that? My favorite way to do this would be to join some sort of community. And yes of course I’m going to plug SPI and our communities that we have available to you because this is what we do and you don’t have to just join SPI you could find other communities that exist you might already be in some of these communities both in the entrepreneurial space or in the niche that you’re in I found a number of buddies in the podcasting space from a result of doing that.

I found a number of buddies in the physical product space when Caleb and I were together trying to figure out how to invent a product called the SwitchPod and get that thing launched. And so we teamed up and met up with other people who’ve launched things before and we were able to help out with some of their video stuff and they were able to help out with Kickstarter as we were launching that thing.

And in February of 2019. We launched to over 4,000 backers and nearly half a million dollars in earnings. Now, a lot of that was spent to pay for the molds and the, the inventory and all that stuff in the plating, everything that was required to ship it. So it’s no, we didn’t profit 500,000 overnight, but it was a result of largely the learnings from the buddies and the friends that we created along the way.

I do talk about mastermind groups quite a bit, and those can seem a little scary for people who are just starting out, right? Forming an official, formal group that meets weekly and has these hot seats and has an agenda and has like a person who rotates as the leader and then somebody’s in the hot seat and that can feel very heavy, although I do recommend that and we do actually do mastermind matching inside of our communities.

But even just as simple as finding a buddy, somebody who’s along the ride. Just like you are to both be open and share. And you know, it doesn’t have to be on any platform. I mean, Alex and I, we just text each other. That’s literally it. And then we see each other once or twice a year at my event Card Party.

And we’ve formed this friendship and we often will talk about other things. I mean, we do talk about when life gets stressful and those kinds of things pop up too, but it’s mainly just super deep obsessions and analytics with what it is that we’re doing. We’re doing something very specific, these very short videos to capture attention and generate revenue.

And we’re doing very, very good right now. And I, I have him to thank for it. So when you connect with a buddy, how would you go about initiating that conversation? Right? It’s a, it’s always a weird thing to even think about it before it happens. It many times will happen just sort of naturally when you put yourself into these communities and then you just kind of like open yourself to the idea and even share out like, Hey, I’m looking for somebody who’s also at this level that we can kind of hold each other accountable and share tips and ideas with each other.

This is something that you could do one to one. I like and prefer that way because you don’t have to worry about what everybody else is going to say. That’s not always a bad thing, but in larger communities, especially online. You know, you post a, a thing and then you get like 20 new ideas or 20 different ideas.

And it just is more confusing rather find one person who’s sort of sharing the same values as you is doing it for the right reasons, who’s at the same level as you, who you can serve just as much as they can serve you. And you kind of just buddy up and help each other out. So, so key. I was privy to this early on in my entrepreneurial days when I actually, you was a avid reader of several blogs in the personal finance space.

I was a personal finance blog nerd. I was subscribed to over 40 of them. I’d wake up in the morning. This was even before I was laid off and became an entrepreneur. I was subscribed to 40 to 50 different personal finance blogs from simple dollar to get rich slowly, NerdWallet, MyMoneyBlog.com, and, and, I mean, there were several.

And it was interesting because when I finally became an entrepreneur and I started to attend FinCon in 2011, I was asked by my buddy P. T., Philip Taylor, to speak at his event. That was actually my first time speaking on stage, so I just want to give a shout out to Philip. At that event, I started noticing that many of my favorite bloggers who were there from the personal finance world were paired up, like Trent from Simple Dollar and JD from Get Rich Slowly sort of started kind of around the same time, they helped each other out, and I just, once I started to learn about this community more and get more involved in it I started to pick up the fact that these people were paired up and sharing so much with each other and they were able to grow more exponentially as a result of the connections that they made versus just doing it on their own. And in my history with business and even non business related things, it’s always been about the other people I’ve connected with, who’ve been able to help lift me up when I’ve fallen, who I’ve been able to help lift up when they’ve fallen.

And it’s just, I feel like that’s just how the world should work. And so I’m reminded of a woman who was on this podcast a very long time ago. I’m talking to episode nine and I believe I wrote about her in a recent email, Nicole Dean and back then she was into a lot of other software related things PLR and and remember those private label rights and all this other stuff.

Anyway, she very much introduced me to the concept of and very simply it was just like if you’re on the internet, what are you doing to make the internet a better place like that should just be your goal. And I think that’s how the world and especially all of us on the internet should kind of approach it like what value have we added today?

Could you go to bed tonight, I’ve moved on from the buddy conversation at this point can you go to bed tonight and reflect on your day and find a moment where you actually added value to somebody’s life, and it could just be one person, and if you could do that, I think that’s a win. And if you can focus on that streak every single day of actually providing value to at least one person every single day, and somehow pouring into them, you’re going to find that so much more is going to pour and come back toward you, this law of reciprocity, and it’s not going to come back right away from that person.

It might not even come from directly that person. It might come from somebody unknown, but over time, the more and more you drill in just serving first and helping others and offering what it is you have to offer the world without expecting anything in return, more will come in return. It’s just a beautiful thing.

So I wanted to share that with you here. To finish up just a little update on the Pokemon YouTube channel. Let me hit my stats right now. I’m on my dashboard. We are in episode 79. I published a video 45 minutes ago. It’s at 32,000 views. So we’re pumping right now. It’s doing awesome. Latest revenue update is the last 28 days.

It has earned $11,000. We are at 327, 000 subscribers. If I go to lifetime, however, this is 79 days in, we’re at $22,000 in revenue, 158 million views, and that’s just on YouTube. That’s just on YouTube. TikTok has generated, across the last 30 days, $5,000. And that’s simply because I’ve been able to take my videos that are about 57 to 58 seconds long and extend them to over a minute to qualify for monetization on TikTok and basically just get free money.

It’s for videos I’ve already done, I spent four extra minutes, adding a few seconds in just holding that last image for a little bit longer or adding a little bit more of a gap between my last sentence and the sentence before it’s unlocked an additional 5k a month. So we’re looking at $15,000 a month pretty consistently now.

And it’s only growing because the videos stack on each other. People binge listen or binge watch these things. Yeah. Instagram is another story. I haven’t monetized. No, that’s not true. I got a 22 cent gift from one viewer, which was super kind, but I cannot monetize on Instagram like I do on YouTube and TikTok because that program that once existed for just in feed views like it is on Shorts and TikTok just doesn’t exist anymore.

So I’m still going along, still chugging along, still learning how to get even faster with my edits. I’m between 12 and 17 minutes per day. Now, I have also batch processed, I went to Mexico, which you might know because we’ve told the story of Caleb coming on as CEO, and we were in Mexico, that was the official handing of the torch from Matt to Caleb, and that was really fun.

But while I was there, I was like, okay, well, what if the internet goes out? Like I’m not going to be able to publish these shorts, and plus I don’t want to bring my microphone to do the voiceovers and stuff, so I’m going to batch process them. So the weekend before I went to Mexico for five days. I batch processed five days worth of the short videos and I scheduled them on each of those platforms and it was flawless.

They all went out like they were supposed to. On YouTube, you can schedule very easily just as you are about to hit publish, you can hit schedule instead of publish. On Instagram, it’s a little bit different. In order to enable scheduling on Instagram, I had to disable sharing on Facebook, which I didn’t even know I was doing, but I just had to toggle that off.

It just enables people to find those videos on Facebook. I don’t think it’s actually posting it anywhere, but I don’t think that was getting any views anyway. So I would turn that off and that then enabled me to click the button to schedule those Reels on Instagram. And then on TikTok, in order to schedule those, I found out that you have to go into the TikTok studio on the computer or on your laptop or desktop, you cannot schedule through the mobile app, at least as far as I know.

So, or at least the regular TikTok app that you might upload through. I just downloaded today, a recommended by TikTok app called TikTok Studio. And I’m maybe going to guess that we can schedule from there. If I were to upload from there, I don’t know. I’m still learning and I’m just learning as I go.

And if that sounds interesting to you, I hope that you can learn as you go to speaking of, I’m very proud to announce that my book that I’ve been working on for two years now that I had to rewrite and had a number of different back and forth conversations with my publisher. Again, this is my first traditionally published book.

It’s been such a fun experience. No, it is actually fun because that’s the whole reason I’m doing it to learn and I’m learning quite a bit and it’s not as simple and it’s not as smooth as if I was just self publishing this, but I am into the next phase. We are into production phase now. My manuscript was accepted.

That unlocks the next stage of the advance and that means it’s gonna get done. Like it’s through and everybody’s happy with it so far. So June 2025 people, June 2025. I’m not going to set up a wait list or anything right now, but you’ll probably start hearing more about the book starting in 2025, June 2025.

I have my eyes set on a New York Times bestseller. I think it’s possible. It’s not going to be easy. I am going to need your help. I will obviously ask you to support when that comes out. You know, this is going to be a life changing book, I think, not just for me, but for other people too. It’s a book about learning and how you can fast track your way to results by going against what we’ve learned growing up.

The fact that you don’t have to know everything and that balancing all the thoughts that come across her mind that try to stop us combined with the power of finding champions in your life, like mentors, partners, and in this case, buddies that can support you as you go. So I’m gonna leave it at that.

Thank you so much. And look out for some changes in the podcast starting in 2025. Because the team and I, now that Caleb’s on board, we’re focusing more on top of funnel stuff. That means stuff that you’re going to see from me to you, and you’ll see what those changes are very soon. And I’m sure Caleb and I will share a lot of the insights with you.

We’d love to share and want to share more of behind the scenes and some experiments we’re doing and just kind of be open and honest and transparent. You know, at one point we had dialed myself in the brand, right? From 10, it was like synonymous. Smart Passive Income was basically. Code name for Pat Flynn, right?

We dialed it down to like a one where it became a media company and we built this community and it doesn’t require me in order to run anymore, which is great. Sort of like quote unquote, built to sell. I’m not saying we’re selling this. I’m just saying there’s a, there’s a book called built to sell, meaning you structure your business in a way that it could potentially be sold such that you are able to automate more things, remove yourself from the process as much as possible, gain some time back to put into other things, have all the financials in place, have recurring revenue so that kind of can help become the engine of the business, all that kind of stuff. And that’s where we’re at now. But in order to continue to grow and serve more people, I think we need to dial back up the Pat Flynn in the brand a little bit, at least how I show up and the positioning of it, because You know, it was 10 and then it kind of went all the way down to one or two and it’s going to come back up to like a five, five or six perhaps.

So look out for that. I’m excited for it. I’m, I’m actually thrilled. So I hope you are too. I appreciate you. Thanks for letting me just kind of blabber today. I hope it was helpful and go find that buddy. Thank you, Alex. Thank you. Appreciate you. Bye.

Thank you so much for listening to the Smart Passive Income podcast at SmartPassiveIncome.com. I’m your host, Pat Flynn. Sound editing by Duncan Brown, and our executive producer is Matt Gartland. The Smart Passive Income Podcast is a production of SPI Media and a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network. Catch you next week!