SPI 849: Big Update on How SPI is Changing in 2025

SPI 849: Big Update on How SPI is Changing in 2025

Caleb Wojcik: Discovery via podcast is still a tough thing to do. It’s easy to reach a plateau with an audio only podcast. But, you know, with something like YouTube or other video platforms that are more short form there’s way more discoverability.

There’s way more times that people go to those platforms and just get stuff either fed to them through the thumb scrolling or, you know, they go to the homepage and they pick something. But I don’t really ever open a podcast app and then go look for something to listen to.

Pat Flynn: Happy Wednesday, and if you’re listening to this on the day it comes out, Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and even if you don’t celebrate, just I want to wish you and your families all the best this holiday season as we come in to wrap the year. And that’s kind of the theme of this episode here. Caleb and I are going to be discussing some of our plans and decisions and thinking behind some of the changes that you’re going to experience here as a listener of the show.

And I know some of you have been listening for over a decade. Some of you 14, 15 years since episode one, which is actually insane. And it’s also insane because starting in January, mid January, next year, we’re changing the format of the show. So we wanted to talk about that and the why and the decisions behind it, but also get you excited because we’re excited about it.

I am absolutely thrilled and bittersweet as well, because it’s been this sort of same format, same intro music, same voiceover guy, John Melley, who guess what, is our guest for next week’s episode. To sort of cap it off, I wanted to invite him on because he’s a very special character on our show here, the voice guy, since the beginning.

He knows so much about me and it was a beautiful way to wrap. And you will no longer hear these fun facts about me on our episodes here, 850 total facts next week being the last one. So we’ll have John in the show is just an incredible way to cap it off. And I am thrilled to have this conversation with him that you’ll be able to listen to.

But for today, our CEO, Caleb and I, we’re going to discuss the future. So let’s chat. 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 broke his arm in the first grade trying to impress a girl, Pat Flynn.

Pat Flynn: Caleb, welcome back to the show.

Caleb Wojcik: Yeah, thanks for having me. I feel like I get to come out a lot more and share what’s going on with SPI. a part of the team. Thanks for having me again.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, and we’ll have you on more when it makes sense. This kind of has to do with a lot of the changes that we’re making.

Good changes. In fact, exciting changes. I’m thrilled. I’m I’m stoked. We’re gonna talk about what all of you can expect here on the podcast for next year. What are thinking is behind that? But before that, you know, Caleb, you’ve came on mid year and then kind of came on as CEO a little bit later. You’ve made some major changes.

How are things feeling on your end at this point? And what were those changes in case people need a reminder?

Caleb Wojcik: Yeah, I mean, the biggest change is I’m trying to bring you back into the brand more. You know, the, we tried to have SPI be a little bit bigger than you, you know, maybe take your face off of things a bit more, try to scale it as a media company, bring other faces and voices into the brand a bit more, but part of what I’m trying to do is lean back into you as a personal brand and that being a strength of SPI in general, and I know from speaking with past course customers and meeting people at events and people inside our paid community that they’re attracted to how you talk about business. They’re, you know, they’re interested in how you’ve, over 10, 15 years, been able to spin up different businesses and sell some or shut them down or, you know, kind of always coming up with new ideas and just kind of your business brain in general.

They’re attracted to learning from you. And so I’m trying to lean back into that strength of the brand.

Pat Flynn: It’s interesting that had been the bread and butter of SPI when it first started, right? It was, it was just me and what was going on, the scrappiness of it, the here’s what’s working, here’s what’s not, the income reports, those kinds of things.

Yeah. And then around 2015, 2016, 2017, that’s when there was just this trend for creators to create like a bigger businesses, businesses bigger than themselves. And we were trying to go with that trend and what we felt now and I’m so grateful that you’ve come on sort of like from the outside. What’s cool is you’ve always been a part of the brand.

You’ve always been filming stuff for me and understand the courses. You know very well who our audience is. You were in fact a part of our audience to begin with back when you found the podcast a while back. You came in, you were like, Hey, this is not what it once was. And I think we need to go back to that in some way, shape or form.

And people are already starting to get that feeling right inside of the community, but also on the outside. I’m being a little bit more prominent with behind the scenes on social media, on the X and Instagram, and especially on LinkedIn as well. I’m actually really enjoying my time on LinkedIn right now.

The experiment will probably run for three to six months starting in January, really kind of going daily, trying to understand what I can bring to that space that’s different, but also feels like how SPI once used to be very behind the scenes, very more personable. I don’t feel like just regurgitating information, even though we are an authority is going to work as well.

Already I’m starting to see some movement there, which is kind of cool.

Caleb Wojcik: Yeah. And I feel like you mentioned the other day that. LinkedIn right now feels like what blogging used to feel like a bit. Like now I feel like blogs, like they don’t have comments on anymore. People aren’t like going to check blogs or use RSS readers to like, like we used to do in the early, well, that’d be like 2010s.

Yeah. Like that was what I used to do at work when I was done with my work is I would like pull up a Google Reader and I would look at your site and Simple Dollar and Get Rich Slowly and like art of nonconformity and all these like entrepreneur personal finance websites. Just kind of see what was new.

And I feel like, I feel like people have moved that writing into like their own private newsletters or into a place like LinkedIn.

Pat Flynn: We’re still in the middle of this transition. I mean, there’s some things that don’t yet have as much of me as we do want to have, like the website. Can you go through your thinking behind like putting me back as sort of like the face of the brand, but back then it was just me.

So it was like easy to do that. Now we have this entire team that you’re leading, you know, 10 people. What is it feel like on your end to then put me on the brand, even though it’s our company, it’s a little bit different of a feel. I’m curious your thoughts on how do we approach that?

Caleb Wojcik: Yeah, obviously, because the brand is Smart Passive Income, and it’s not just your first and last name, like some personal brands are just that.

You know, those also end up being hard to have that person be removed from them. So there’s always the balance as someone that starts solo grows, this thing, people get to know them, then they hire a team of help, and then they want to go do something else, or they maybe want to sell it and they can’t remove themselves.

This is a common, you know, creator business problem in general. And so there has to be a mix of like, clearly there’s more than you working on this business. Now there’s people inside the community running events. There’s people helping to write marketing copy. There’s people doing all the operations and the finance, and there’s a team of 10 people here, but what’s attracting people to the brand is usually someone that’s the face of it. And so there’s a balance between, you know, the whole team’s on the team page, the whole team gets introduced when you get into the community and that sort of thing. But most of the public facing content. Is you and your face and your voice and you filming videos and your photo on things?

Pat Flynn: Yeah, and I think that is an advantage we have, you know, i’ve been in this space for quite a while I’m pretty good at showing up and connecting rather quickly with people on public platforms and that has proven to be the case again in the pokemon space with the Pokemon thing so Bring that back to the SPI front is, is really, really exciting to me.

And it’s also going to give me more room to just be creative again. I always felt like when we were going more media company that I was a little bit, this might sound harsh, but a little bit trapped in terms of what I could and couldn’t do, or how fast we could move. That’s another thing that, you know, you’re going to see from us next year is a little bit more, not creativity, yes, creativity, but also speed, right? Like if there’s something happening in the world that is relevant to us entrepreneurs, I shouldn’t have to feel like I, well, I don’t know if I could talk about this right now because we have a two month process of, you know, recording something and then having it go through.

And then we have this backlog of things. By the time it comes out, it’s not relevant anymore. I never felt like I could just kind of on a whim, create something and have a discussion about it on the SPI front. The community helps with that a lot because we can just have chats every day about certain things, but on the public facing side, top of funnel, trying to get new eyeballs, that was always very tough.

And I feel like that’s going to be a lot easier for us next year.

Caleb Wojcik: Yeah. And there are certain formats that that lends itself to short form is obviously that because you can make it quickly, you can post it quickly, and most of short form content stuff kind of spikes when it comes out and kind of goes away, you know, some stuff has longer tail, but, you know, more current event related stuff or talking about things that are happening right now, it’s more interesting in the moment, you know, how many people are going back seven years to watch highlights of the NFL game?

No, no, nobody really. Maybe me, but back if your team had glory days, you know, you’re looking back and like, Oh, well, remember when we used to win things, but people want to watch stuff right when it happens, huge spikes in whatever’s currently going on and being talked about. So short form is good for that posting, you know, longer written things on LinkedIn or wherever else we’re going to experiment with that.

But some of the things that are more evergreen, those can go on the website. Those can be full length YouTube videos. Those can be guides and downloadable things we make. So there’s gotta be a mixture of things that are a little bit more ephemeral and you know, we can move quicker on and then some of the things that are like, okay, this is going to be something we refer people to for years, like the podcast tutorial on YouTube, for example, ends up over time, just getting hundreds and thousands of views.

You know, we put a little bit more time into that. We think about how to make it evergreen. So it’s going to last for a few years, right?

Pat Flynn: Yesterday, the team came together. It was a couple of days ago to talk about our new lead magnet strategy. So we’re thinking about instead of, you know, we’re discussing all these things in a way, almost feeling like we’re starting from scratch again, you know, and it’s really exciting.

I feel like there’s more room to play, more room to be creative. And building these systems and, you know, for example, with these lead magnets, creating a template so that we can kind of turn them out a lot faster, but still make them valuable is a discussion that for whatever reason we haven’t really had yet until now.

So again, 2025 is going to be a big year. How will the podcast listeners especially be affected? The podcast is changing next week. In fact, you’re going to hear the final episode of the year. And not next week, this coming Friday. So the 27th, we have a special guest on the show. It is John Melley, the voiceover guy who has been voicing the intros and outros of the show for 15 years will be on the show to sort of cap it off. And don’t worry, the show’s not ending, but our random fun facts at the beginning of each episode, those are ending. And so I wanted to bring him on to sort of talk about what it’s been like on his end and his life as a voiceover person and how he’s seen SPI change and how he’s seen me grow.

In fact, I can tease a little bit. He remembers certain fun facts about when my kids were born and now like my son’s in high school. And he’s like, Oh my gosh, like I’ve seen you through these random facts. And yeah, he probably knows a lot about me more than most people. In fact, just because.

Caleb Wojcik: I’ve wanted to make some merch for SPI where there’s a shirt that has all of them on it, like has 850 facts about Pat on this.

Like he’s such a small font. Yeah, this like long sleeve, you need the extra sleeve length, you know, maybe it’s like a snuggie. So it’s like a body suit. So we can have enough room to print all of them or jacket and the insides lined as well. Oh, oh yeah. Like a fancy liner that has like facts about you.

Pat Flynn: That’s so random.

What can the podcast listeners expect in 2025, the first episode of the year, we have a special one with Ramit Sethi. I asked him some pretty tough questions about his political stance and how he has brought that into social and what’s positive and negative about that. So look out for that. Subscribes, you don’t miss those starting in late January, February.

We’re going to get into this new mode, new system. What can people expect?

Caleb Wojcik: Well, we’re going to experiment a little bit. I mean, you’ve been 15 years of running the podcast.

Pat Flynn: Interview show like everybody else has now.

Caleb Wojcik: Yeah. A lot of interview shows, a lot of episodes. You’ve been experimenting with the solo ones as well.

You know, once a week too. And I feel like people are gravitating towards those solo ones. We can see it in the download numbers.

Pat Flynn: I was going to say, we know that. People have been saying it and the analytics tell us as well.

Caleb Wojcik: Yeah. And so unless we are going to do something extremely unique on the interview side and maybe go to in person video and do the production value of that, or we’re going to like bring in people unique to somewhere else, like we need to do something different, unique and kind of kind of shake it up.

Pat Flynn: So I’ve always had this idea to do a live interview show inside of a DeLorean. I’ve pitched this to you before, right?

Caleb Wojcik: Pat to the future.

Pat Flynn: Yeah. Pat to the future. That’s right. But I don’t know if that’s the end of it, because that would be, that’s, it’s not about me. It’s about the person we’re interviewing, where I’m sitting next to them in a DeLorean.

Part of the problem is it’s a small car, so if it’s a big person, that might be tough. But, If you imagine the time circuits, I can go, Hey, Caleb, what happened on beep, boop, boop, boop, beep, boop this date. And it’s like, you could see me typing it into the little keypad. That would be so sick. That would be unique, right?

That’s like a hot ones kind of unique take on interviews with hot wings, right? I think that something like that is almost necessary. It doesn’t have to be a schtick it could be the way you ask questions or, or what the theme is, that is the thing, but there has to be something right? Like just a regular interview show is just not working anymore.

Caleb Wojcik: Yeah, just something in, in the broad niche of entrepreneurship or business, you know, and every show could work in a very specific niche, you know, cause you have experts about a specific thing, but for, for us to stand out, we’re going to, we’re going to try something different. We’re going to experiment a little bit and we’re going to actually go video first with our podcast, which means we’re going to publish it on YouTube as well is the plan, and we’re going to think through how the content can perform on that platform, but also be digestible in an audio style as well.

Pat Flynn: Don’t don’t be scared when we say video first, doesn’t mean you’re being left behind or audio a second. It just means, well, we need a video component and then we take the audio from that and put it here.

But I’m also very conscious about not doing things on the video that if a person is just listening to the audio, they would feel like they’re left behind, right? So this is going to be challenging for us, and I’m up to the challenge to create a presentation that can be both as valuable on video and audio, where if there are any visuals, we’d still want the audio to be just as relevant and useful.

So that will be the challenge. This also doesn’t mean that every episode will be just me. It just means that’s going to be the sort of primary method. We’ve experimented with that type of content on the video channel before, and it’s done very, very well. I mean, significantly well. So we’re bringing some of that over, and we will still have people as guests on the podcast.

I think it would be not a smart move for us to just say no more because of a number of things. I mean, there’s still a ton of valuable information that I and I just wouldn’t be able to share in the same kind of way the relationships that are built with people who are on the podcast and those kinds of things, supporting our colleagues and friends who have supported us by helping them with their book launches and really trying to extract things that maybe other podcasters could not.

That’s still important, but this approach of I would say I want to make every episode, I wanted to get back to kind of, again, what it was back in 2010, 2012, where it was like, Oh, nobody’s really talked about it like this before. Right. And that’s become harder because everybody’s talking about everything now.

Caleb Wojcik: Yeah.

Pat Flynn: But presentation style where it’s like a keynote almost. It’s like you’re sitting in an audience or you’re listening to me at an event with a keynote, which means I’m going to have to do a little bit more work and I can’t just kind of show up and ask questions anymore, which I got really good at, but I want to show up and present something in a way that maybe you haven’t heard before or something unique, something that you want to talk about with others. So this is the stance we’re taking. This is the approach I’m taking, and I’m again excited about it. It does mean there’s more work on my end, but I think it’s going to be fun, and that’s what’s driving me into it.

The creativity again, the room to play, the freedom to kind of try things and see what works. So yeah, that’s, that’s kind of the approach.

Caleb Wojcik: If you position it kind of as like you’re doing a little mini TEDx talk every week about a specific topic, you’re going to come to that with a certain set of preparation.

You’re going to come to that with the quality of the content should be should be higher and focused on how how that can help someone that’s working to become a full time entrepreneur beyond. As opposed to when you, you kind of hand off control a little bit in an interview show, you know, you have control over who you bring on and the questions you ask and things like that, but having full control of like, no, I’m, I’m going to own this.

I’m going to share what I think people need at this stage of entrepreneurship that I’m trying to help people at. And you can even lay out a program over a year of like, if you watch from January to December. This is kind of a path that I’m going to take you on.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, we used to have that, actually. I think it was episode 13, 14, and 15.

So this is like way back, right? Those were the first episodes where I was like, Hey, if you want to like literally start from scratch, those three episodes are a series that you should listen to to help you with figuring out your idea and it goes over the different ways to generate passive income and the sort of difficulty level for each.

And it was like, okay, I could always tell people these three episodes go listen to it became almost like a lead magnet inside of a podcast when people wanted more and it became very shareable, very intentional, right? And like you said, with a interview, it’s the guest, there is intention, hopefully with kind of what you want to extract out of that conversation, but that could go anywhere.

And you’re not quite sure what might come out of it, which for the longest time was the advantage that I had. I had connections in the space, relationships that were built, and I invited a lot of people on the show before a lot of other people were able to get access to them. But now everybody’s interviewing everybody.

So now it’s like, okay, let’s kind of zag, right? We zigged for a while. Now we’re zagging going back to what is now our unfair advantage, which is How long I’ve been in the space and the things I’m learning from all these experiments and other industries that I’m a part of these advisership opportunities that I have, which gives me an insider seat in some of these tough conversations that people have in the boardroom, those kinds of things.

That’s an advantage that nobody else has now. Everybody now has access to a microphone and other people. So what can I do now to bring something unique to the space? So we’re kind of reinventing in that way. And I’m, again, so excited about it and we’re going to see how it goes. We’re going to do it for a year, commit to it.

It might start off slow. It might start off, you know, not great, but we don’t want to just be reactive. It’s like the scientific method. Here’s our hypothesis. Here are the steps we’re going to take. And then we’re going to come to a conclusion and determine whether or not that’s something we should continue or adjust, stop, start, continue, and then go from there.

And I’m excited because that just, again, gives us an opportunity. It’s us placing a bet that should, if it does well, give us a nice return, return on more people discovering us, more people talking about us, something unique in a space that’s different that you can get excited about.

Caleb Wojcik: So, yeah, I’m sure you’ve talked about this before, but discovery via podcast is still a tough thing to do, you know, like it’s easy to reach a plateau with with an audio only podcast because of discoverability and some of the things just with the platforms, you know trying to find it and you know, you can get word of mouth and things like that But you know something like YouTube or other video platforms that are more short form there’s way more discoverability.

There’s way more times that people go to those platforms and just get stuff kind of either fed to them through like the thumb scrolling or you know, they go to the homepage and they, you know, they pick something. But I don’t really ever open a podcast app. And then go look for something to listen to, you know, like I have shows I like, or if someone recommends something, they’ll text it to me, you know, like there’s that kind of discoverability.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, the word of mouth. And again, that’s what drove the podcast early on because people weren’t necessarily searching for things, but they were discovering it through word of mouth or other means, me being a guest on other people’s shows and those kinds of methods. And then downloading and listening because there wasn’t anything else like that.

But now, like I said, things are saturated. It doesn’t mean that podcasting is dead, not at all. We’re just trying to discover ways to get more people to find it. And what’s beautiful about this is this experiment, as we always do, we want to share the results and we’re marking this episode as sort of like a stamp in time for the before picture, and hopefully we can come back mid year, next year, Caleb and chat about what’s been working and what hasn’t been working, and we can then authoritatively with a case study, teach these things based on real things that we’re doing versus just regurgitating things, which is what most others are doing.

So creating our own case studies, that’s, that’s really the name of the game.

Caleb Wojcik: Absolutely. Yeah, I’m excited for it. I’m excited to have the consistency back on your YouTube channel. At any time we’ve been consistent there and publishing, weekly or whatever cadence we we choose. It’s grown. The videos have reached more people and You’ve been so consistent with the podcast I want to see that on the video side of things too and see the results of it.

Pat Flynn: For sure. But we’ve had some great episodes this year.

I mean, I would definitely recommend going back to the library from recently with like Jenna Kutcher, or Jax’s story, Plastic Action, the guy who’s gone viral on social media for creating stop motions with toys. We’ve had some new faces here, like April Lynn Alter, who is a sort of new YouTuber who since then, that was back in March, has Absolutely exploded.

And she’s incredible. We’ve had Rory Vaden in his personal branding talk. That is probably the one that gets spoken about the most here this past year. We’ve also had some great case studies like court from the station bakery and Becky and her cleaning, sort of niche business. And then we’ve had Shane Sam’s back on Grant Baldwin.

I mean, so many great episodes. And again, I would hate to stop the opportunity to still connect with people in that way, but we want to provide the best value for you. Yeah, I think that’s all we need to say. I mean, we could talk about the same thing over and over again, but it’s Christmas and I think we just wanted to set the tone for next year for you.

And, and of course. With us with the SPI community, I mean, what we’ve had to do this year to get to where we’re at now has been a huge lift, a big mountain to climb, but we’ve climbed it and we’ve made those things easier to understand. Now there’s one community with different tier options, depending on where you’re at versus these two separate ones who are kind of like had this wall between them.

So commend you for that, for seeing that and pushing us to move on that fast before the end of the year. And. You know, new partnerships with kit. You still have a few days to take advantage of that creator deal that we have. SmartPassiveIncome.com/kitdeal. If you’re listening to this in the far future, there’s still going to be a deal there, but not this crazy one that we got because I was able to swing a deal as an advisor with them.

So definitely check that out. SmartPassiveIncome.com/kitdeal before the end of the year. That’s when it expires to stand store coming on and being this incredible resource that we can now share with others. And you’re going to hear more about that as we start to teach sort of a proprietary method next year.

And you’ll hear more about that later, but Caleb, why don’t you sign us off? You know, I hope everybody has a wonderful Christmas and you don’t celebrate Christmas have a awesome Wednesday and happy new year and happy holidays to all of you. Stay warm and we’ll see you on the flip side.

Caleb Wojcik: Yeah. Thanks everyone for joining.

And as you go into the next year, you know, What can you shake up? What can you change up? What’s not working or what’s kind of plateaued for business or life? And, you know, do the cheesy New Year’s resolution thing and come up with something to change and make it the best it can be.

Pat Flynn: Follow through. That’s, that’s the big thing.

Caleb Wojcik: All right. Thanks, Caleb.

Pat Flynn: Appreciate you. See ya.

All right. And again, Merry Christmas. Happy holidays to you and your family. Thank you so much for supporting us here at SPI. We are here for you, and I hope that you will consider, if you haven’t already, SPI Community being a part of your journey next year.

The SPI Community, it’s been a highlight for the last couple of years, and especially this year with its reformatting, again, Caleb coming on to change things up, to make things better. It’s just fantastic, and the feedback we’re getting, even from, you The members who were members before the change are just like, this is amazing.

Some Thrive members just absolutely thrilled with the changes. People who didn’t get access before who were like, Oh, I could afford now to come into the start tier. And then of course, our accelerator tier and all the group learnings and cohorts that we take people through and the events and workshops.

It’s just fantastic. 2025 is set up to be incredible and we want to take you along for the ride. So if you haven’t done so already, smartpassiveincome.com/community. And again, be sure to subscribe because next week’s episode with our voiceover guide, John Melley is going to be maybe for some of you, maybe a little bit of an emotional one.

It was for me. So anyway, thank you so much. I appreciate you and all the best.

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!