SPI 835: Turn Your Expertise Into Content That Pops with Chris Lysy

SPI 835: Turn Your Expertise Into Content That Pops with Chris Lysy

Chris Lysy: Sometimes the poorer drawings are even better. People just have to relate to it. They have to relate to the message, and it has to stand out. It could be a stick figure with some writing alongside of it but if people can tap into the message, it’s going to stand out because you’re not seeing that kind of thing.

You’re seeing a lot of professional stock photos. That’s what people share because they feel like it needs to be polished. And then you have a crude drawing, a stick figure with some handwritten caption, it’s going to stand out. It’s going to feel more authentic. It’s going to feel like a person actually drew this and wrote this. So people connect to it.

Pat Flynn: One of the easiest ways to generate revenue and quickest ways is to do something like consultations. But consulting for a company, which can land you top dollar could also leave you into a lot of traps. And today we’re going to be speaking with Chris Lysy, who is an SPI Pro member, who we have a chat with here, who does some really amazing things.

In fact, his story is really interesting. He uses cartoons in order to get in front of people. And he’s not a cartoonist per se. I mean, he is a cartoonist, but he wouldn’t call himself a world class artist, I’ll say, but he’s doing the job. And we’re going to talk about those cartoons, how they work and get into a story.

But near the end of the conversation, you’re also going to hear some of his best advice for what you could do as a consultant to make sure you get great deals. You still live a life of freedom, even though you are working for other people in that regard and how to get paid top dollar. And again, some of the traps to look out for.

So, look out because Chris is here and Chris, you can find over at FreshSpectrum.com He’s got a lot of other things going on too. You can find him on Twitter, @clysy is his username. And @FreshSpectrum on Instagram. Anyway, let’s get into his business, how he got started. And let’s talk about consultations and more.

Here we go.

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 says that you have to be cringe before they binge. Pat Flynn.

Pat Flynn: Chris, welcome to SPI.

Thank you so much for coming on the podcast today, my friend.

Chris Lysy: Thanks Pat. Thanks for inviting me.

Pat Flynn: Of course. It’s been fun to see you inside of the SPI Pro community and I’m excited to pull out you here on the podcast today to learn a little, even more about your story and what you have going on. So if somebody were to come up to you on the street and say, Chris, what do you do and why do you do it?

What’s your answer?

Chris Lysy: I am an independent consultant. I design websites and reports most of the time these days. So reports. Yeah, reports. What do you mean by that? Exactly. Web report designer. Essentially, I was a program evaluator and a contract researcher for years. And the kind of product, the end product for most of those things so whether it’s research or evaluation is a report that gets sent to a client and okay. For years and years, that report is a PDF and it’s essentially written in Word, pretty ugly, turned into a PDF, sent to the client. Over time, they’ve gotten sleeker, better designed, more visual. What I do nowadays is bring them to the web and share them as WordPress sites.

Before I was doing this, I started my career as a contract researcher working on kind of large federal research studies. So like large scale data collections nationwide, in home surveys, that kind of thing, working on the survey development side, the data analysis side.

I did that for years, but over that time, I also started developing design expertise on the side. It was kind of just started blogging back in 2008, started doing data visualization stuff, training and that sort of thing. And it slowly over time became kind of my thing. So it was bouncing back and forth between the data worlds and the design world.

And that kind of shifted and became my career.

Pat Flynn: Yeah. It kind of merged the two. That’s cool. I would imagine that not a lot of data analysis and people who deal with data all the time are that good at, you know, also making them pop visually and, you know, how to understand all that for somebody who may not be so as data inclined.

So what is the big challenge there for you when you’re working with clients in terms of the balance between data and graphic design? Like, how does that go through your head? Because data is so important. I think all of us know this, but there’s so much data out there. We can’t read it. Somehow you take it and turn it into something manageable for a client.

What’s your secret to doing that? Like, is there anything we can learn from that?

Chris Lysy: One of the things is that most of the people in the data world, so in research evaluation, they tend to have like master’s degrees, PhDs, that sort of thing. And when you go for a PhD, And you spend a lot of time in school. You, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the TED Talk by Ken Richardson on schools kill creativity.

Yeah, it’s a classic. So by, what’s the extension of that? So schools kill creativity. And you have people who’ve been in school for 20 years, you know, they spend so much time. And academics and that kind of thing, they have not had any kind of design classes. They have not had any kind of copywriting classes, no graphic design, no web design, illustration, none of that.

So when it comes time to go out in the world and do the work, you know, they’re, they’re kind of missing that whole skill set. There are a lot of people who start kind of realizing that getting into data visualization design that’s like the gateway into rediscovering your creativity on the academic side.

And that’s who I tend to work with are a lot of people who’ve kind of start to recognize kind of what they’ve lost as kids and they start developing that again. So it’s, it’s really working with a lot of people who already feel more of a kind of creative reawakening inside themselves anyway. And I get to, I guess, do training and then do client work and I draw cartoons for them too.

I have a weird mix of things that I do to connect with the people that I work with.

Pat Flynn: That’s what I love about it. You know, it’s different. I mean, you feel, it feels like you’re kind of a unicorn in the space in a way to have this sort of balance between the vision and the data and to be able to relay that to other people.

And so tell me about how you are getting in front of your audience. Cause this is something that a lot of our audience members can potentially relate to the idea that they might have this specialty, but they’re just not so clear on how to get it out there and how to find other people who they can serve.

How have you been able to do that?

Chris Lysy: It started when I started blogging, I had no kind of, no thought that I would ever turn it into a business or that I would ever even go into kind of a business. I just thought I’d continue working in contract research and evaluation, but it was kind of through blogging and creating that, just creating blog posts. So at first it was kind of like there are conferences and as researchers and evaluators, you’re kind of encouraged to submit to journals to present to conferences, but you can present the same kind of information via blog or on Twitter back in the day when it was still Twitter and reach more people over time.

So not just once a year. And that was my thing for years is like, well, we should just turn our presentations into blog posts because not enough people were doing that early on. And how do you start doing that? Then I started drawing cartoons as part of that. And over time, it just kind of started developed a following. So people would follow my data cartoons and they became my audience. They also stayed for teaching data visualization design and creativity and that core sort of thing. And a lot of it is kind of like the same kind of stuff that you do at SPI. You look at people who are coming in and they’re like, okay, how do I do YouTube?

Or how do I do email marketing? Well, the same thing can be true for like research and evaluation side, still just communicating with people. So how do you do that? If you’re, you know, not even intending to build a business, but you’re just trying to reach more people with ideas or data or information, how do you kind of go through those pieces?

And that’s what I tend to blog about. Over time, the whole idea about web report design is just a niche within a niche. It’s a way to have a very specific kind of consulting product in an area of need. But my audience themselves are much broader because they follow my evaluation comics. It’s kind of like the idea of no like and trust.

It’s transferable. Like, they can know me as a cartoonist, and then over time, they become my clients. And it’s a really interesting transformation.

Pat Flynn: That’s so cool. That’s an amazing journey. How long until you started to notice that this audience was being built, that you had some loyal following from the work that you were doing and the cartoons that you started to create?

Chris Lysy: Yeah, it was just kind of like playing at first. I was already blogging. I was interested in blogging. I started, you know, there was an evaluation association I belonged to, the American Evaluation Association. And early on they had like a blog roll, you know, where it was just a list of links.

Pat Flynn: I haven’t heard that word in years.

Chris Lysy: Yeah, exactly. And you go there and you start clicking on the links and like most of them are dead or like websites that used to exist or maybe people that put one post. Yeah. So the first thing I did is I created an aggregate blog where I just kind of mix the feeds for all those and created eval central where I just pulled all those feeds together and created one thing that you could follow and the most recent post would come out and invited the evaluators who are already blogging.

And that’s how I started connecting with people that led into one of my first conferences, going there and getting my first iPad and starting drawing pictures. Cause I was bored in between sessions on the plane and that kind of thing and sharing them on Twitter. And all of a sudden, like if you’re following Twitter at a conference where everyone’s following a hashtag, but you’re the only one with illustrations, they start to kind of get shared a lot more and connected with.

So it, it started, I guess, early on, people really started loving the idea of cartoons and within this stuff, because there’s not a lot of illustration. It’s like a big gap where there are not enough pictures. So if you can fill the world with kind of simple pictures that are creative, people gravitate towards it.

And I caught that early on and continued to do it, even though you know, you don’t go into cartooning to make a lot of money. Even really successful cartoonists are very few that make very much money, but it can be really easy to use comics as a way to reach large audiences and then figure out a way to sell to them later if, if you need to make money.

Pat Flynn: Yeah. Especially if it’s in a very particular niche, the cartoons are just there to support the ideas to capture attention on social. And, and I know you’re active on Twitter and, and is Instagram a large platform for you as well, since it’s very cartoon based and visual?

Chris Lysy: Nowadays, it’s LinkedIn, really. LinkedIn, yeah. Well, that makes sense. I find that my comics tend to work best in places where it’s not, you’re not surrounded by visuals. So if you’re surrounded by like boring business posts, and then you drop in a cartoon, then people like that.

Pat Flynn: Kind of like the conferences. Yeah,

Chris Lysy: like conferences, just like that.

Pat Flynn: Very good. Were you always a artist or a cartoonist and knew how to draw? Or was that something that you were just like, I’m just gonna figure this out as I go?

Chris Lysy: I was, as a little kid, I was always drawing pictures. I was never, I loved art, but I was good at math. So I was encouraged to go down the math route and go into engineering and that kind of thing.

I ended up kind of failing out of school, like almost failing out of school for engineering and then getting into social sciences and sociology and following my interests more. But it wasn’t really until I had my daughter back in 2007 that I started getting back into my own kind of creative side of rediscovering that part of me.

You know, because finally we had crayons in the household and we were drawing pictures and that kind of thing.

Pat Flynn: Oh, that’s amazing.

Chris Lysy: And I think that really changed and brought, brought it back to me. It had been lost for years.

Pat Flynn: That’s incredible. And so for the cartoons that you were drawing, obviously you could draw anything, but when you are a cartoonist and you’re trying to support content, like how do you know what to draw and what do you do to get inspiration?

Where do you even begin for you as a process? I mean, everybody’s process is different. I’m just curious how you come up with, well, like of all the things, here’s what I’m going to draw a picture about. And like, do you try to add some comedy in there? Or is it more just like. This is how it is. Tell me a little bit about your process.

Chris Lysy: I tend to kind of play off the absurdity of life and the profession in general and people’s experiences with the profession. So most of my inspiration comes from people and it comes from having conversations, struggles, problems, challenges, they make the best cartoons. And because you’re not trying to provide an answer, you’re not trying to even, you know, just tell a joke.

It’s more like, can you tap into that, that challenge or problem or struggle that people have? And if you can tap into that and create a visual that goes alongside of that, which cartoons work really well for that, then it invites people to read on. To click the link, go to the post, read the email, whatever it is.

And it also creates this element, this artifact that then people can download that and put it in their own presentations. So then it starts to spread in weird ways. You just put your link on every, I signed with my, my website link. That’s usually my process is to talk to people about what are the absurd things that they’re seeing in their data deck.

What are the challenges that they’re facing? The struggles that they’re having, and then use that to inspire the cartoons themselves.

Pat Flynn: It’s interesting. Cause that’s what the exercises when coming up with copy for a sales page or a headline for an email. And you’re doing the exact same thing, tapping into those human primal things with your cartoons, which allows for people to connect with them more and share them.

They’re going to be shared more when, when they kind of touch people in that way. Can you think of an example of a cartoon that you’ve done from the past or even that you’re working on right now and how it kind of does that like talk it out? Cause I know many people are just listening to this. I mean, I, you look behind you for those of you who can’t see there’s like, there’s this board of cartoons in his background.

I asked him actually before we hit record what those were. And those were some of his cartoons. So I love. The visuals look really great.

Chris Lysy: I was looking back, not as like, Hey, people should see it, but more like, okay, reminding myself of like, what’s, what’s like a cartoon. Yeah. Yeah. One of them is, hi, it’s just a person on a phone and I have a newer one in my background, but the older version, when I, I couldn’t really draw in the beginning.

I, they’re really bad drawings, but it doesn’t really matter. But the person says, hi, I donated 5 last year. Can you tell me how many children I’ve saved? And it’s just kind of playing at the idea. That’s it. And it’s just this idea of like expectations from an evaluation, kind of sort of side of things, what people expect.

But people gravitate towards that one.

Pat Flynn: That’s a good one.

Chris Lysy: I have another one on causality, that’s kind of like, my stomach hurts, I ate a bad tuna fish sandwich yesterday, I ate a bad tuna fish sandwich earlier, but I don’t have a control group, so now I’ll never know. Oh yeah. Those are really good. Because one of the things In evaluation is that there’s this idea about what, what are the methods that you want to go with?

And, and a lot of people are like, you have to have this, a control group and you must have a control group, but there are all sorts of ways to evaluate things where you don’t have a control group, but you can still figure out what’s going on or get an idea for that. And those kinds of cartoons just tap into those ideas and invite people to explore it a little bit more. Those are the ones that spread.

Pat Flynn: I love that. And you said the drawings don’t have to be great. Why is that the case?

Chris Lysy: Sometimes they, the poorer drawings are even better. People just have to relate to it. They have to relate to the message and it has to stand out.

When you’re sharing with an evaluation crowd or a contract research crowd and you have a cartoon that’s just a crude drawing, it could be a stick figure with some writing alongside of it. But if people can tap into the message, it’s going to stand out because you’re not seeing that kind of thing.

You’re seeing a lot of professional stock photos and those kind of things. That’s what people share because they feel like it needs to be polished. But if you have something, so if everybody’s trying to create something polished or they’re not adding images to their posts, and then you have a crew drawing a stick figure with some handwritten kind of a caption.

It’s going to stand out. It’s going to feel more authentic. It’s going to feel like a person actually drew this and wrote this. So people connect to it.

Pat Flynn: And not AI even, which is, it’s so easy to prompt something now like that. But like, there’s, there’s so many metaphors in what you just said. It’s not just a cartoon you’re drawing.

It’s the video you’re creating. It’s a podcast that you’re coming out with. It’s the website that you’re publishing. As long as you have that message. And you understand who it is that’s on the other end. I mean, it doesn’t really matter what it looks like in the end. I think that’s a huge important lesson.

I’m grateful that we ended up there in this episode today. I’m curious, Chris, okay, a person sees a cartoon of yours on social or, you know, visits your blog, sees one, relates to it. How do they eventually end up becoming a client of yours? Like what’s the customer journey that they’re on with you? And then what’s it like to work with you after?

Chris Lysy: Usually what happens is someone sees a comic, they, it’s kind of like your super fan model, right? It’s, I have super fans of my cartoons. And over time, like, okay, well, the cartoons are one thing, but when I’m actually writing about, you know, so I start writing about data visualization design and that kind of thing, because it’s, I was interested in it and design in general.

So I write posts about design for data people. So then I start training and I’ve taught courses and done training on data design, data visualization, design, report, design, data storytelling, these kinds of things. So that becomes another step along in the process where, okay, there’s something I can sell as a product.

But as a consultant, some of the easiest way to make a good deal of money in this kind of area in research and evaluation is to do consulting with larger projects because you can get much larger budgets than I could get for any of the other stuff. And basically you’re just tapping into a need. So you have this broad, right?

I know that there are many of the people who follow my cartoons who develop reports on a regular basis, and they might have a budget to hire a designer to help them with their reports. And some projects might have a budget to hire a web developer for a report. So who are they going to hire? And then if I just put that kind of thing out there, and somebody needs it, or it hits the right, right thing, I can have, you know, 2,500 people on an email list, but I really only need a handful of clients.

So I can be really choosy when it comes to clients, when it comes to developing out what I’m offering. And then it’s just working with people and finding ways to get something that’s worth their time and money and creates value. And that’s kind of how the business set up.

Pat Flynn: Love that.

I heard recently somebody say it was a famous investor who had called his shots really well across the years, predicting the future and saying, you know, in 50 years, everybody’s going to own their own thing. Everybody’s going to be their own boss in 50 years. And it’s all about the micro entrepreneur, right?

Getting a person who is a specialist in a very small space to have just even a few clients to work with them and to support their business and support their life is a great example of that because it’s like most people probably listening didn’t even know that this was a thing that was possible and to say that you only need a few clients to really, you know, support you and like you can be choosing. You can live this fulfilled life by, you know, doing what you love and not overextending yourself, but also getting to work with who you want to work with. And I absolutely love that for people who are like, Okay, I need to know where I can find out more.

Where can people go to your website and blog and kind of read about this? Cause I’m, I’m sure people are going to want to explore a little bit more.

Chris Lysy: Sure. My blog is Fresh Spectrum and I wish I had known that it would become a thing when I created that name because I have a lisp. And it’s hard to say Fresh Spectrum in a clear way, but FreshSpectrum.com, my workshop where I teach data design is DIYDataDesign.com and my reporting agency, my web report design agency is ReportPress.net, but it’s all just me. And it’s layered.

Pat Flynn: So Chris Lysy, everybody definitely check out those links and we’ll put ’em in the show notes. Chris, if you don’t mind me asking, I have a couple selfish questions to ask for myself and on behalf of the audience, if you might still have a little bit of of time.

And that is on the idea of sort of design and the data and what can we publish to better portray our ideas online. You know, I think I’m, I’m more and more now in the camp of, you know, it’s one thing to just. Tell people things in a blog post or in a podcast episode, but it’s important to, you know, take these concepts that we’re talking about and portray them visually because they’re sticky that way.

They get shared more often. You can often really hit home a point when you see like, you know, a pie graph, for example, and I know that’s a very rudimentary sort of visualization, but that is an example that shows like, okay, 99 percent of people are this and 1 percent is this. It’s like, okay, that portrays an idea based on data that really hits home a point I’m trying to make as a creator.

Yeah. What are some tips that you might have, or how do we even get started with diving into this world of data visualization to better position ourselves as experts, to better, you know, get our point across on the web, because it’s, it’s easy to see and it’s clear that it works, but it’s not so easy to get started on how we might be able to do that.

Is that like, where do we even begin with that?

Chris Lysy: I mean, there are a few things there. It’s kind of like are you drawing attention? I mean, everyone’s overwhelmed, right? It doesn’t matter where you are in this world. You’re probably overwhelmed.

Pat Flynn: Completely.

Chris Lysy: Yeah. So, first thing you have to do is capture attention.

Then if you can connect to the kinds of things that they’re looking at, then you can engage them to read on and look forward. It’s, it’s kind of like the whole copywriting, philosophy, but you’re just using pictures in there too. So the same thing goes with visualization. There are a lot of people who build data dashboards and other things.

And I do more of like New York times would approach a data story where it’s a mixture of narrative and charts and those kinds of pieces where you’re annotating the charts and you’re trying to pull people along and tell them a story or a larger story and connect on something. It goes along with any other kind of piece of content.

When you’re working with data, it’s usually, you have expertise, you understand the data, so you’re trying to share something with your audience that you think they might resonate with, or that could be interesting for them. So you have to find a way, and what is the reason that the audience is looking at your stuff?

And then go from there. So it’s just kind of like, it’s connecting with people and trying to figure out ways to kind of pull them in. So it works with data just like it works with anything else. And making it so it doesn’t feel so overwhelming is the biggest challenge with data. Because data can really easily, feel overwhelming when people are already overwhelmed.

So you start small and you create little rabbit holes that pull them in deeper and that’s the goal. It’s just kind of like give them something little, give them the quick wins and then pull them deeper and give them more and more with an idea of like, what are you offering them? What’s the value for them coming in and looking at this stuff or understanding where you’re coming from, why does this data matter to them? And asking those kinds of questions can really help kind of guide your own process, your visuals and that sort of thing.

Pat Flynn: Thank you for that. For example, when I’m watching a lot of people give live presentations, a big pet peeve of mine is when they share data on the screen and it’s like just this wall of text and numbers and colors.

And it’s like, I don’t even know where my eye is supposed to go. And like that is something I see online as well. And it’s like, okay you’re expecting me to burn calories to try to figure this out when it’s you the creator who’s supposed to be telling this story here. So what, what should I be looking at here?

And it’s those kinds of things that just I think take practice. And, you know, do you have any favorite, resources obviously besides your own websites on where we can see good visualizations happening and we can learn and kind of get inspired by that.

Chris Lysy: I think newspapers do a better job like data visual data journalists in terms of pulling out narrative storytelling and pulling you in and giving you data that fits kind of within your context.

So going to like New York Times or, or like The Guardian or, or some other kinds of news sources that share data.

Pat Flynn: Well, they only have so much room to work with, right? That’s why they have to have those graphics be good.

Chris Lysy: Yeah, and it’s, it’s not just that, it’s, yeah, they, they only have so many pictures that they can share.

I think one of the, there are a couple of challenges when it comes to data visualization in general is that you have a lot of data analysts and researchers and evaluators who spend a lot of time with their work but they don’t feel like they can just share a message. They’re like, I have to share all the data.

And then you can come up with your own messages, right? You can figure out what this means to you, but it’s not my role to tell you what this means. It’s my role to let you see all this data. The challenge is that’s not where people are. You have to give them a little bit more of narrative, a little bit more structure.

So it’s making that connection. That’s hard for a lot of people. It’s, it’s almost like. Something they’ve been taught through school, that they should just share all the work and not really impose their beliefs on other people, when it’s really just guiding them through the visual. And like, here’s what, what you should be looking at.

You know, arrows, annotations, those kind of things can really pull people through. And then building it out like a storyboard can really pull the people through. Before we go off, I should give you my consulting model if you want it. I want it. Because I, I started my business twice. I shut down my business and then started back up.

I went back to a job because of like family tragedy, all that kind of stuff. And then I went back out. And my first business was kind of a failure because I was all over the place. And I think people who are going into consulting tend to get a lot of bad advice. Or not bad advice, but just. Not necessarily all that helpful.

And some of the things that they focus on is that they spend too much time focusing on rates when rates don’t matter. Budgets matter more than rates. So it doesn’t matter if you’re offering something at 250 an hour versus 70 an hour. If you only offer that thing for a few hours, you’re not making very much money.

You’re not going to get enough clients that you really have to focus on budgets and finding markets is another thing people are really bad at. And the idea that really as a consultant, your job is to kind of be paid for 10 days out of 20 days of the month of work time. And if you can do 10 days at an, at a day rate of a thousand dollars and you do that over and over again, you can get to 120,000.

And then You still have enough time left over that you can keep pushing that up and get to a couple hundred thousand dollars as a consultant without changing anything about the rate or anything. You just kind of build it into packages and different products and deliverables and asking for that much money is really hard for people.

I didn’t figure that out the first time around and I went all over the place doing little projects for lots of different people on lots of different things. You end up getting overwhelmed and falling behind and not being able to kind of get by, but if you can just find a few clients that will pay you more money and just make sure that, you know, your goal is 120 days a year, if you can get that paid for, you can do pretty well.

Pat Flynn: Amazing. That is hugely valuable. Chris, how do you recommend finding out what the budgets are so that you can be working with the right people who will pay you the right amount?

Chris Lysy: Sure. Then there are all sorts of things like everything that you do, there’s a market rate. It’s like when you go to, go to a restaurant and you see the market rate next to like a menu item or something.

But there’s a market rate for everything from infographics, to videos, to websites, to consultants. So you start kind of fishing around. I tend to kind of package things around specific products and deliverables with the idea it’s, it’s kind of like you sell the bread, not the baker. So you come up with this idea around these different packages, like what would you do for 25 days or $25,000?

What could you do for 10 days or $10,000? What could you do for five days or $5,000? Ask yourself that. Create the structure, kind of those three different levels. And then you put it out there and you can start seeing, finding their rates because people will gravitate towards package. If their package, if they have a bigger rate, if they have a bigger budget, they’ll gravitate towards the higher level packages.

And you can keep experimenting like that. And set project minimums, that’s the other thing. It’s like, I stopped going under like five grand for a project because you’re not going to be able to handle that many clients, even if you could be really successful. Unless you have somebody who’s going to pay you a couple thousand over and over and over again.

If they’re only going to pay you once every couple years, it’s not worth it.

Pat Flynn: How do you get over that idea of like, feeling like you’re charging too much, or that you won’t get hired because you’re charging too much? That mental hurdle is the biggest hurdle. And so I’d love for you to speak on that from your own experience.

Chris Lysy: Yeah, from my own experience. I mean, that’s definitely where I started. It was kind of like, Hey, I can do this. I can do this. I can do this. Okay, well, pay me 100 an hour, pay me 70 an hour, whatever you can pay me, I’ll do it. And just, I don’t think I ever put out for a project that was like over five grand.

And then when I came back, I’m like, this is crazy. I know they have a big budget, this one organization, so I should just go big. And I put out a bid with like $100,000 a year. Like just some, something that sounded crazy and I went for it. What’s weird is we spend all this time, like you’re going for jobs.

People go for jobs all the time and they come back and they’re like, well, I got $80,000 a year for this full time employed job. And then they’re checking out consulting or trying it out. And they’re afraid to, you know, sell their stuff for more than a thousand dollars or something. And it’s like, well, you know, this client, the, your employer is paying you $80,000 plus benefits to do this.

So they’re giving you a hundred grand a year to do this. And you can’t ask for 20 grant? Of course you can. That’s a part time job for other people. It’s, it’s just kind of like changing your mindset. The budgets exist. If they can hire full time people to do this kind of work. They have a budget to do something.

So all you’re asking for are part time hours. And all the way up to a hundred grand, a couple hundred grand sometimes, like, you can get bigger projects. You just have to shoot for them,

Pat Flynn: shoot for them. And what’s the worst that can happen? I mean, you’ll learn a lot and, you know, you can come down later or find another company that has a bigger budget.

I love that. And like you said, just working with a few select companies that you want to work with and not feel like you’re just kind of handing yourself out to everybody. And I love that. The bread, not the baker. Productizing your services so it’s clear what you have to offer. And then, you know, the more reps you get in, likely the easier it is to just do and you get even more time back.

And then the idea of, okay, I got more time back. Let’s not overextend ourselves and try to, you know, serve twice as many clients, but, you know, enjoying that freedom that you get with it. And I think that’s, that’s key. Chris, this has been a tremendous conversation. Thank you for, for that. And I look forward to hearing the response to this and, you know, we’ll talk about it in Pro, I’m sure.

One more time, where can people go to find you and your services?

Chris Lysy: Just head to my website at FreshSpectrum.com and you can reach everything else there. My workshop’s DIY Data Design, my agency is Report Press, but Fresh Spectrum is my blog. I actually, I have a download of all of my cartoons. I, I put them all out there in a Dropbox folder.

Pat Flynn: Oh, nice.

Chris Lysy: So it’s, that’s my lead magnet for my cartoons. I just give them all out, but it pays dividends in the long run.

Pat Flynn: I love it. Will we one day see like a coffee table version of your cartoons?

Chris Lysy: I put a book out a few years ago and people like it. It’s really just about, do I, is it worth it for me at the moment?

It just depends on how many I have in my archive. But well, your super fans will love it for sure. They do.

Pat Flynn: Yeah. Yeah, that’s true. That’s awesome, Chris. Hey man, thank you so much. I appreciate you.

Chris Lysy: I appreciate you. Thanks a lot.

Pat Flynn: All right. I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Chris Lysy chris, you are amazing.

Thank you so much. Everybody again, check out FreshSpectrum.com or head on over to the show notes at SmartPassiveIncome.com/session835 for all the links and those fun things to you again, SmartPassiveIncome.com/session835. And what a wonderful story. I mean, Chris is amazing with his, just not just his cartoons, but the fact that he’s helping other people and can help people like us even here on the podcast with things like consultations and some of the best practices too. So thank you.

And this is the kind of person that you can see inside of SPI Pro. So if you go to SPIPro.com you can apply there and you can see the other kinds of entrepreneurs that you can connect with from all different kinds of businesses and niches. And like I was saying in the episode, the micro entrepreneur is the future, the specialty entrepreneur who isn’t building a trillion dollar business, but is building something that supports their family, that is something they love and that they can control.

And that’s what it’s about. So thank you, Chris, for being a prime example of that and for your time today. And thank you for listening all the way through. Again, you can apply to SPI Pro at SPIPro.com. And I look forward to serving you in the next episode. Until then, keep rocking. Cheers.

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. The Smart Passive Income Podcast is a production of SPI Media and a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network. Catch you next week!