SPI 789: The World of High-Value Business Exits with Nick Bradley

Nick Bradley: When you go into a sales process, the thing to understand, is that you're dealing with people who do this every single day. Most people will never even do an exit, but you've got people doing it all the time, they're pros. And what we often say is, in private equity terms, if someone doesn't know what they're doing when we acquire them and we can manipulate the situation to our benefit, we call them the prey. I often articulate it like going into the gladiator's arena. There's a person there that's done the reps for years, and you're turning up there doing it once. Not a smart move.

Pat Flynn: Selling your business can be an incredible moment, a once in a lifetime moment, a moment that can help generate generational wealth for you and your family. But when you look a little bit deeper into this world, there's a lot of layers to how this all happens, the world of mergers and acquisitions the world of exits. And today we have Nick Bradley who is an expert who has had his hand in over five billion dollars worth of exits with 26 different companies He has effectively helped over a hundred different mergers and acquisitions across his clients and today we're going to talk about this world and what it's like because I mean, it's ruthless.

And we use those words. He uses words like prey, because private equity groups sometimes consider their potential sellers as prey. But how do we position ourselves if we were to sell our business as not the prey, but rather the prize? And how do we position ourselves so we're not being taken advantage of? How do we set up our businesses for success, for an exit?

And we talk about all of those things and more and the things to look out for the 15 things that we talk about at the end that if you have in your business would make it very difficult to sell. So make sure you stick around for that and more. And I got to thank my coach, James Schramko for introducing me to Nick.

Cause Nick is just a wealth of knowledge in this world. And it's again, some you'll hear in my questions, just, I have no idea what's going on. So I just dig deeper and I ask more Nick delivers for sure. So enjoy this episode with Nick Bradley from High Value, Exit or his podcast Scale Up.

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, after coming home from Japan for the first time, he was quick to install a bidet in his bathroom. Pat Flynn.

Pat Flynn: Nick, welcome to the SPI podcast. Thanks for being here.

Nick Bradley: Hey, it is great to be here, Pat. Thank you very much for having me.

Pat Flynn: We are talking about selling companies exits, something that you are very familiar with. I see here that you have sold 26 plus companies for over 5 billion. That's with a B. It's a B. That's, that's crazy. Is that all companies that you have owned or you've helped through this process?

Nick Bradley: I would love to say that I've owned all of those companies and you know, I'm sitting here about to buy a sporting team. I'd love to say that. The truth of the matter is I sold my first company when I was 21 years of age for 3000 Australian dollars. So that was my first exit, the last business that I was involved in selling sold for 2.3 billion in 2018. So I always, I like to say I redeemed myself through the years, but to answer your question, some of those are my companies. Some of those are businesses that I've been brought into by investors to turn around. Others are bigger companies where I was on the senior leadership team, simply participating in the preparation and the exit.

And then some of them are people that I've worked with more recently as clients, helping them achieve a high value exit in their company.

Pat Flynn: What's the most exciting part of exits to you? I mean, you've built your whole brand around this. You have a book coming out in the future, you have programs and such.

I mean, highvalueexit.com, definitely check it out, everybody. But why the focus on this? What excites you about this kind of work?

Nick Bradley: I, I got kind of exposed to it sort of through my career, right? So I'll give you the short version of it. I was involved in kind of the corporate world for a long time and the obsession there was really growth, right?

Scales are more, scales are like a sexy word for growth that's predictable, right? But back then it was growth. You know, I'm a, I'm not a young guy. I may look young, but I'm almost 50 and I was involved in, in lots of growth. And then. I was involved in M&A sort of at the middle point of my corporate career.

And I didn't quite understand what that was about. I didn't understand that you could, you know, scale a business quickly by buying another business and bolting the whole thing together. And where it really came to sort of hit, if you like, it was a big exercise involved in in 2008, just before the market crash.

And it was the breakup of a big media company, a company called EMAP, East Midlands Allied Press in the UK, which was the second biggest consumer publishing group in the UK at the time. And it was one of those kind of corporate raider takeover things. where someone came in, broke the company up and it got sold to various components.

And I just kind of, I was involved in the whole process, but I watched what happened. And I saw two things. Firstly, I saw how ruthless the world can be when there's a lot of money at stake. But then I was also a bit younger and I was quite intoxicated by that thought as well. Not so much the money, but just the, the level of, of kind of activity that happens when you get to that outcome.

And that took me into the world of private equity for over a decade where I was involved in multiple acquisitions, effectively over a hundred. And that's when all the exits happened. And I just couldn't believe that you could create an asset, right, a business, and then sell it for millions, billions of dollars, and the whole thing was just crazy.

And then I realized the growing a business is great, you know, being an entrepreneur is great, but you have this ability to not only change your life, but change other people's lives by creating these big liquidity events. And I just became obsessed with that world, being really honest on this show, like self serving me to some extent for a number of years.

But then after a while, I realized that there was a bigger, bigger piece to this, which is kind of what I'm more focused on now, but it's still, it's still in this lane of how do you, how do you create this event?

Pat Flynn: And we're going to talk about that, what we can do to set up our businesses for a potential exit and maybe even a little bit about if you were to buy a company, what would you want to look out for?

And we're going to talk a lot about like the maybe not so great parts of this world. And you had mentioned ruthless earlier in some of these bigger deals. Like what does that mean? What is, what does ruthless mean in the world of mergers and acquisitions?

Nick Bradley: When we talk a little bit more about private equity specifically, you'll see exactly what I mean.

But it comes down to this. When there are such large sums of money, sitting on the table, you know, and, and to some extent it aligns with power as well, right? Wealth and power can be very addictive things. And if you put both of them together at the same time, it can conjure up all sorts of characters and it can change people.

And what I've seen is when there's a large check sitting on one side of the table that someone can take they may come across as the most integral person, like, you know, having the best ethics and character and values. But when there's a big check, hundreds of millions sitting on that side of the table, you start to see different behaviors, right?

And maybe it's being a little bit primitive, right? And going back to sort of caveman times, if you like. But people will literally kill people, right? Sometimes for that check. Or certainly do things which are crazily unethical, however you define that. And I saw all of it. I saw some pretty horrific things happen when there's a big check there.

Pat Flynn: Well, let's hope none of us get into that sort of situation. So maybe we could begin talking about our own businesses and what even would make our business a viable business to sell. Like, what is a company looking for or a private equity group looking for when it comes to the businesses that we're creating big or small?

Nick Bradley: I should contextualize this by saying I focus now on helping entrepreneurs create eight to nine figure exits to what I call sophisticated buyers. And the most sophisticated buyer is a private equity firm. And what you've got to understand first is. Anyone who's going to pay eight or nine figures or more for your company is buying an asset, basically a transferable asset that they can then grow into the future and get a return on.

So this is not you buying your mate's business down the road for a packet of chips or whatever it is. This is, this is seriously high stakes stuff. There are a number of things that are important there, right? And this is where a lot of business owners who have smaller businesses or businesses that are scaling, they don't appreciate the fact that they have to build the business a certain way.

You know, I call it being built to sell. Even if they have no immediate intentions of selling it, they have the option to have that event at any point in time. And what does that look like? Well, firstly, if you're the founder of a company and you know, most of the key operational activities rely on you, right?

You know, you're out there doing marketing, you're out there doing sales, you're doing delivery, you know, you're making the product. If that exists, even if you're like an eight figure company, if you're still the cog in the wheel, that business is very hard to sell. It could still be sold, but it's going to be a lower multiple valuation than if that business is a well oiled machine where it's not reliant on you or any one person to operate.

Right, that's what I mean, a transferable asset. The other thing that we do certainly from a private equity standpoint is we like to mitigate risk as much as possible. So if you take the concept of recurring revenue, subscriptions, long term contracts, things like that, if I'm going to buy a company that, you know, has to go out there and hunt for what it eats every single day, because it has to go out there and grow by one customer at a time.

That's risky, right? It's risky because I don't know where my next meal was going to come from, so to speak, right? But if I have a business that's, you know, repeatedly, predictably and sustainably driving revenue and growing that revenue every single month, I can then model that out for the next period of time, three years, five years, 10 years.

You know, I'm going to hold a business for about five years in private equity and try and sell it again. And I can see where I can pay more for that company because I have a very clear line of sight of how that's going to grow. And there's about 15 or so characteristics like that, that when I was in private equity doing acquisitions and things that I would be assessing when I'm literally sitting across the table from a founder asking them about their business.

And I'll talk more about that at the end, because I definitely have some resources that I can give to your listeners to let them understand this a bit more, but it's quite, it gets quite technical and complex, but you've got to think of it from the idea that the business has to exist without you. And it has to have a lot of characteristics which make it extremely valuable for that transaction to happen.

Pat Flynn: Is there a scenario where a solopreneur is able to sell their business and maybe they because they are still the center of the cog and then, you know, they're kind of necessary to still run the business, but they can still sell the business and kind of then work for the company that that buys them.

Is that a scenario?

Nick Bradley: Yeah, it happens. It happens a lot. But remember, if I put my private equity hat on, right, you know, when I was in that environment, I'm going to try and mitigate the risk of, you know, I've just given you a check of tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars. Right. Your life has just changed.

And I often say that, you know, selling your company is usually a once in a lifetime event, and it's probably the biggest financial transaction you'll ever experience unless you do it again. Right. But the point of that is that I'm going to get you there sticking around maybe for a couple of years. And I'm going to make sure that you're locked in to stick around to some handler transition, but I'm not expecting you to necessarily be that engaged.

At that point, the only time that changes Pat is if you have the ambition to sell your company again. And so sometimes there's a thing here where you can roll over equity. So let's say I buy your company. It's worth a hundred million dollars. You walk away with say 60 or 70 million once the transactions happen, but you've got that extra 30 million or so that's still owed to you.

You may decide to roll that investment into the new entity because remember, a private equity firm is going to grow and scale and want to exit again. We can get into what that looks like. In some cases, you could sell your company again through those shares and actually make more money than what you did on the initial sale.

So in that situation, you're incentivized because you're partnering with the sophisticated buyer for that outcome. That makes sense. It's very clever stuff when you get into it. And when people start to understand this, they can then start to make decisions about what sort of exit or what sort of transition works for them

Pat Flynn: On these deals that are done, how does the conversation even begin? Are you as an entrepreneur who has a business perhaps that is set up for sell it is built to sell It does have recurring revenue. For example, are you shopping around? Are there agencies are there? Is there like a shark tank situation?

Nick Bradley: Oh, it's it's it's full on. It's full on. One of the one of the businesses I'm working with at the moment that's very well, well, it's a great business and it's becoming a better business because of some of the stuff we're doing with it. We had 15 approaches last week from private equity firms literally cold calling outreach.

Pat Flynn: Cold calling. Wow.

Nick Bradley: Yeah, and what I often say there's there's two things I like to tell business owners is If that's happening to you, obviously you've created something that people are interested in, particularly that level, right? Private equity firms are always out there looking for deals because it's a competitive market.

There's something like 6,000 at last count private equity firms in North America. There's a lot of big ones. There's kind of league tables within that. Again, we can get into it. You're not going to sell your business on one of those outreach calls. That's the worst way you can do it. The other thing that lots of business owners do, which I advise against is they, they decide one day they want to sell for whatever reason and they go and hire a broker or an investment banker. And nothing wrong with, with those, those entities and particularly investment bankers can add a lot of value. But if you haven't prepared your business in advance to give yourself a high degree of certainty that you're going to get the number that you want, more often than not, those business owners are leaving money on the table.

And sometimes they're going into a situation with sophisticated buyers. They just don't know how to play the game. So if we want to go through how it works quickly, cause I think it's important to, so people understand this. I'll start with the tiers, right? And, and the levels where the game is played, and this is a really important thing for people to get.

So if you want to sell your business and let's say you're doing. seven figures of revenue. Now, not many businesses even get to that level. So congratulations to even get to that level, but your profit is probably going to be, if you're lucky, 1 million, 2 million, that sort of level. And that's, that's a great business.

You can get good income from that, all those things. The problem is it's too low, too small for most of the private equity firms to be interested in. The thinking behind that is it takes just as much effort to do a small deal as it does do a bigger one. So you have to have a certain amount of scale. And I say that the minimum threshold that you should be looking at is about four to 5 million of EBITDA net profit, because that opens up the world of what we call the lower mid market and the mid market private equity firms.

And that's where, if you think of a bell curve, the top of the bell curve is in the mid market. There's more private equity firms, but there's also a lot more capital. At last count, there's 2 trillion in North America sitting in the mid market of private equity undeployed. 2 trillion. We played around with a billion before and now we're getting into trillions.

Pat Flynn: Yeah. This is, this is unknown to me.

Nick Bradley: It's going to, well, it blows my mind too, but here's the thing. If you get to four to five million of EBITDA and you're in a, in a certain market, let's say it's an education market, right? In an education market, businesses there sell for anywhere from five times to 12 times EBITDA.

Okay. And we can talk about the difference of why a business would sell for five and 12 a bit later, but just think about this. Let's for round numbers sake, say you've got 5 million EBITDA and you sell at the bottom of that range in that market, you've got an enterprise value of 25 million you've created.

If the business is built a bit better and structured a bit better, let's say you get a 10 X or 10 times that EBITDA, you've got 50 million now that's life changing money for people. So what I say is, you know, if you've got a business that's doing 1 or 2 million of EBITDA, if you can grow it, you know, really intentionally scale it to getting into what I call those swim lanes of the mid market private equity, you've now created the option of a very significant capital event.

Pat Flynn: EBITDA being earnings before interest tax and amortization. I think.

Nick Bradley: Yeah. And it's, I always get it confused. It's debt. Exactly that. But it's the way to think of it is it's, it's your net profit, right? So it's the way that we calculate the net profit of the business.

Exactly. Right.

Pat Flynn: Get to five-ish, because that'll put you into this part of the private equity arena that, you know, the numbers really start to multiply and start to exponentially grow at that point. If you are in the one to two, better off trying to scale that to that point versus just selling at one or two.

Nick Bradley: Well, I'll give you the statistics on it, right? The broad statistics are that if you are in the seven figure revenue range or in that EBITDA range, which is lower than where the mid market opens up, you have like a two in 10 chance of selling your company successfully. And certainly to a number that you would be satisfied selling it for, right?

So therefore most founders say, well, I'm just going to keep the business and then they can't sell it. So they have to close it down or do something else later on. And that happens all the time. If you want to get to that point of significant, you know, potentially even generational wealth kind of creation, my advice is do some things to grow it a bit bigger and there's lots of clever things you can do, like you can buy other companies, you can do your own M&A to create, you know, these kind of groups and structures, but you're sitting on a very big windfall and the statistics, just to give you that it's something like 70 to 80 percent of businesses that get into that, that swim lane I mentioned before. So, so that's the difference between the delta.

Pat Flynn: Mm. That's huge.

Nick Bradley: Crazy, isn't it?

Pat Flynn: Yeah. But that's, that's good perspective though. And you're right. I mean, that's life changing money at that point. And I'm curious, like in what little I know about this world, I often hear about how important the story is, the story of your company.

Does that play a role in the selling and the multiples that, that occur in this? world? Incredibly so. It does.

Nick Bradley: And it's, it's a great question there. I look at when I left private equity sort of six years ago, I took away from that, what I call a playbook. And I thought about this and I thought, you know, what are the, what did we do?

So when we used to buy these companies, right, and the whole game of private equity is to buy low to sell high. And we want to take the company off you in very clever ways for the lowest price we can, but still keep you involved for long enough for us to not need you anymore. Part of the example of ruthlessness.

Yeah. Right. And after we get the company, we want to do certain things to it. But here's the three pillars that I took away from that experience of private equity. The first thing we always did was, was strengthen the foundations of the asset we acquired. And the way I kind of articulate that to people is most businesses, even if they're at sort of, you know, seven, eight figures, there's still, you know, what we would call good businesses.

They have what I call organized chaos going on. So it's not things happen and things, you know, create good results, but it's not usually very precise. And what we used to say in private equity is we need to go from this organized chaos to a well oiled machine. Right. And the way that we did that, the way we strengthen the foundations, three main things, Right people, right seats, right?

Really intentional organizational design. But not just the leadership. We would look at the key people in the business, driving the strategy, right? As I go through this, if any business owners are listening, you can do this now. Right? So the stuff I'm talking about now can actually apply this to your business.

It's, it's useful stuff. Second thing is systems automation, you know, making sure that everything is documented in processes and where we can take efficiencies out using technology, we do that. And then the third thing is data driven decision making. Now, what's interesting about all three of those when you put them together, and I, I impressed this off when I work with founders, I say.

If you're stuck in your business right now, and your ultimate goal is to create a bit more freedom from your business. If you go deep into those three areas, what you're really doing is creating your first exit. You're removing yourself from the important running of the company, the day to day operations.

And you know what? Sometimes people, when they work with us, they actually do that. And that's enough for that point in time. That's when we talk about creating the option because we're, we're reducing reliance on any one person. So that's the first piece, right? That strengthen foundations. The second part is around scale, but not just scale. We call it profitable scale. Most businesses, when we acquire them have inconsistent growth patterns. So they might be focusing too much on organic growth. They're too much, too much reliant on paid media for their marketing. For example, many of them don't have any recurring revenue in there. And I mentioned before how much of a risk that is.

Most businesses don't know how to scale properly through joint ventures, partnerships, and acquisitions. And most are very inefficient with how they manage margin. Give you an example of that. They won't know things like customer profitability or product profitability. They're not getting granular enough.

So the second thing we do is we start to change those areas and affect those areas. So we're driving as much profit as we grow as possible. And making the business like super efficient. Okay, the third part, and I'll just go through this is what we call the actual sales process, which comes to your exit story piece.

Every time a private equity firm buys a company, they already are reverse engineering the exit from day one. And sometimes they'll buy a company knowing that it's going to be disruptive enough in a market that it's going to get bought by a big public company or whatever else. And they, they do it for that reason.

But when you go into a sales sort of process, the thing to understand, and this is super important I think for people as well, is that you're dealing with people who do this every single day, like I've said I've done 100 acquisitions, 117 actually, most people will never even do an exit in their life, let alone do one, but you've got people doing it all the time, they're pros, right, there's a very clear game around that, and what we often say is, in private equity terms, if someone doesn't know what they're doing when we acquire them, right, and we can manipulate the situation to our benefit, we call them the prey.

Pat Flynn: The prey.

Nick Bradley: I'll get into this in a bit more detail.

Pat Flynn: So that makes you the predator.

Nick Bradley: It's, it's a game. It's, I often articulate it like going into the gladiator's arena. There's a person there that's done the reps for years, and you're turning up there doing it once. Not a smart move.

Right, you need to learn how to play the game, but there are times when, in my experience in private equity, where we would have businesses that would turn up, we'd find them, they were beautifully prepared, incredibly well positioned. The founder had educated themselves on the world of M&A. They had a compelling exit story and an exit story to come back to your question is, I have a growth plan for this company that is super exciting, super clear.

I'm not just selling my company to you. I'm bringing you in as a partner to take the vision that I've created to its next step. Now, as a private equity guy, I look at that and go, wow, this is great. I don't have to go and recreate the strategy. All I need to do is implement it. And in a situation like that, Pat, we would say that's a prize business.

So some businesses are a prey, a business like that is a prize. Equally as compelling for us. We're going to pay a lot more money for it, higher multiple, but we need to do less work. Both are good. I want to get across here that as an ex private equity guy, you know, I'd buy the prey business as much as I'd buy the prize business, but I'm just going to pay a lot less money for that prey business.

And if you're listening to this, you want to maximize your output your return by flexing that multiple in that way.

Pat Flynn: Be the prize,

Nick Bradley: Be the prize, and you can do it with enough runway and enough education, knowledge of how to do that.

Pat Flynn: About how long would it take a business that is set up to do something well in terms of an exit, perhaps, and become that prize?

What's the runway look like? What's the timeline look like to get things prepared, to get that story ready, to then get to the point of exit, or at least a pitch?

Nick Bradley: The maximum, I often say, it depends on the number you're going for, to some extent. Like, I often believe, well, I believe two things. Any business can be built to sell, right?

As long as you've got the runway to do it. And any number can be achieved if you've got enough, again, runway capital around it. And then there's plenty of examples of that. I often say it's between six and 36 months. Now, I'm working with a business right now that I recently started helping and I came and sort of kicked the tires on that business.

It's ready to go. It's ready to go. The number is clear that the founder wants to hit. The foundations are strong enough. It's got a very, very clear, profitable scale strategy. Ready to go. Other businesses, they've got more work to do. So that's where the 36 months comes in. But it doesn't take as long as you think it takes when you start to understand the different levers that you have to pull.

And a lot of those levers business owners don't know about, or they're not understanding enough about it to be able to execute like that.

Pat Flynn: To go back to my question earlier about story, in my mind, when I was asking that question, I was asking about the story of the brand, the sort of brand reputation, and sort of, here's how I got started, and here's where it's going, but that maybe plays a little bit of a role, and you can tell me yes or no.

Nick Bradley: But I think you're on the mark here, Pat.

I think you're on the mark. I mean, you're When I say exit story, we would never use that term when we're going through a process to sell a company or get positioned. What we're talking about is all of the things that make the business what it is. So brands, culture, those things come into it. The way to think about this is, and as I said, I'll, I'll, I'll share later on kind of the 15 different things and give that to your listeners.

But, you know, within that a unique and remarkable brand that is top three within its defined market is a hugely attractive thing. A defined culture where the behaviors are clear, not just the values and it's driving performance. And you can prove that hugely valuable thing. Referenceability of clients.

So some businesses work with blue chip clients as their businesses or customers. Hugely valuable thing because they're hard to get. All of that builds. So there's two parts of the exit story to use that term. It's everything that you've created that is a win theme that got you to where you are today to that point.

But it's everything that the business can continue to do because you've got it to that point in the future. Because the key thing is this, when someone puts a big multiple in front of you, remember they're paying somewhere between 10, 15, the highest multiple I've ever been involved in was a 36 times EBITDA.

That's 36 years of profit paid in one day. So for someone to be comfortable with that level, they have to see that compelling future and some certainty around that. And that all comes down to how you pitch it, how you prepare and how you position.

Pat Flynn: Yeah. And that sounds like why, if you already have a plan in place to scale that to go along with the pitch and it's like, Hey, this is how we can get to this next level.

We just want to bring you on as a partner. We need some resources. We need some connections, which you have let's get here together. Exactly.

Nick Bradley: That's the prize conversation, Pat. And I tell you, there's a couple of little tricks here that I sometimes employ. If you buy, let's say an acquisition, like the thesis in private equity is buy and build by, as I said, as cheap as you can, like we call it by intelligently, but whatever, and then buy other businesses and create a group.

Now, if you go and buy a business, let's say you buy a small supplier or a competitor, and you do that in the last, say, 12 to 18 months before you go to market, private equity guys are going to go, Hey, this business has the capability to do what we're about to do with it. If you're a bit more established, international expansion is another thing.

That last big exit that I was involved in, I mentioned in 2018, I was actually acquired into that business. I was in the UK and we were the only international acquisition. And I didn't realize at the time that we were going to sell the whole group so quickly. They didn't tell me that, which is great. But anyway, the point is they bought the business that I was running so that they could show they have a beachhead internationally.

So there's things like that, that if you know how the world plays, you can do things and it doesn't have to be as complex as maybe that sounds, but that's how the game is played in the sophisticated capital markets.

Pat Flynn: It's almost like playing 4D chess. You kind of have to think outside of the box and position things again for the cell, because ultimately the private equity group just wants to come in at the lowest cost possible and then build it out and sell it again at a much higher profit. Right. That, that's ultimately their goal.

Nick Bradley: And I'll give you the stats on this a little bit, cause I think it's interesting. And we, I joke about this sometimes. So, and the numbers will blow you away, but this is why there are more billionaires in private equity than real estate or anything like that.

Right. So there's a couple of metrics that private equity is measured on. Right. One is called IRR, which is internal rate of return. And that is effectively how long a private equity firm holds onto money from investors before the investors get a return. So that means that private equity have to buy and they have to scale and sell quickly.

You can't just hold onto an asset for 20 years. That's why the average hold time is, I think it's around five to seven years, but usually a private equity firm wants to get out in and out quickly. The second one's kind of where you were alluding to. It's called MOIC, and it means multiple of invested capital.

And the way to think of this is, let's say I buy your business for $50 million and then I put another $50 million in on a buy and build. So you've now got maybe three or four companies in a group now for me to get the return. You might think in a kind of normal world, well, you know, you've put a hundred million in, maybe you want to get a a 50% return, maybe a 20% return.

We want a 300% return as minimum. Geez. Now here's, here's, here's the funny bit. I was measured, my bonus, right was on at least a 300%, so a three times MOIC. But what they really wanted was closer to a five times MOIC. Now, just think about this for a second. It does. This is kind of the blow your mind thing, right?

I've put a hundred million dollars in. I expect to get at a minimum, 300 million bucks back, possibly 500 million bucks back within a three to five year window.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, you're not gonna get that in the S and P.

Nick Bradley: Isn't that crazy? Isn't it mental? I'll tell you the joke very quickly. There's some very expensive wine clubs in London and the sort of places that you would never have a sign on the door and it's like secret knock. In my book coming up later in the year, one of the chapters, I kind of expose what private equity is by saying, I'm going to take you into one of these clubs for a night. And you're going to sit there like a fly on the wall. And I'm not joking. Like if someone came in and everyone knows the deals that people are working on and transactions, it's not that discreet.

People know, like if someone's had a great win or they've had, you know, a poor performance and, and it was kind of a bit kindergarten at times. Like, you know, if someone came in and they'd had a fantastic exit, like they'd be cheering and all sorts of crazy stuff. Again, if someone came in, it was poor. Like, you know, there'd be a bit of a laughter in the room.

It's a bit horrific when you think about what's going on there, but that's, that's what the game was like, you know, crazy.

Pat Flynn: That is crazy before we get into the 15 things. And I know you have a, I definitely want to point people toward an episode that you had me listen to 15 reasons why your business won't sell to private over on your podcast Scale Up.

Well, we'll definitely link to that in the show notes, but I want to ask you about. After the sale, how often the seller business owner feels. I mean, it's a life changing amount of money, but does that do anything for those people? I mean, I've heard some stories of people who sell and they instantly regret it, or they start going into a spiral because they have all this money and it just money amplifies who they are.

And then they spend all this money on bad things. Do you get to hear the stories of what happens after the sale?

Nick Bradley: Yeah. More so now. Because I'm now working as I said, I work exclusively with business owners. Now I don't work with private equity more because my belief after going through some sort of personal things was that the people who created all that value need to realize that value.

They need to harvest that value because private equity is not structured for that to be the outcome. So it's about leveling the playing field, right? I see different patterns. One of the reasons why businesses don't sell. One of the big reasons is that the seller gets cold feet and that sounds crazy right when you think about life changing money, but one of the things I spend time with people I'm working with is about what we call the next act or again sort of compelling future and If you get someone who's you know, maybe a little bit older they might be in their sort of 60s or whatever else and they've had their business for 30 or 40 years, you can't disassociate their identity from it.

It's very hard. It's like losing someone in your family. And sometimes they don't even realize that they're sabotaging the transaction through the process, particularly when it heats up and it becomes stressful and emotional. And then private equity prey on that again, not, not, not a nice thing. So you get that situation where people just don't go through with it because it becomes too painful for them.

The antidote to that, as I said, is to create your next act, work out what you're going to do next. Not so much about the money. The money's part of it, but you know, you might want to go and do more philanthropic things, or you may want to kind of invest again. There's lots of different things, but that's important.

So you have that characteristic for sure. I've had situations where someone's gone and bought the Aston Martin before the transaction is actually completed. And then, yeah, I had a really bad situation once with a company where the guy thought he was going to sell out for 60 odd million pounds. He ended up selling the business for 150,000 pounds.

So was it two years later because he made some very critical errors in the business and, and there was some government changes around regulations. So there's all those things, but the ones that I like to work with and what I see the most of is people that they have a different perspective and a different level of kind of feeling once that financial piece is ticked off.

Most of them go off and do more impactful things. So when they invest, it's not just about making more money. A lot of it's about making a bigger difference. And you actually see that with some of the, the sort of deck of billionaires in the world too, you know, there's a balance between that. Others want to go out there and build empires.

They've had one big exit. They're now going to go out and have, you know, multiple ones. And I have people come to me and say, I want to sell my business for a hundred million dollars. And I'll often say to them, I'm not going to judge your ambition, but you know, if you haven't got 20 million in the bank right now, sell your business for a number, that's going to change your life first, because then you're going to be more expansive with your thinking.

And then maybe the second or third place to get into that nine figure threshold or more, but it's a big thing. And the other thing I'll say just to finish the point is sometimes people don't have any friends anymore, and this is going to sound bizarre, but not that they change, even though I'm sure they do change, but the perception of them changes and I get a lot of people have to find a new peer group, right?

And they're like, where do I go now? I can't hang out with my mates down the pub anymore because they just act differently around me.

Pat Flynn: Wow. That's crazy.

Nick Bradley: These are all important characteristics that can sometimes happen when you go through that event.

Pat Flynn: Yeah. Things to think about. I mean, we often fear success as much as we fear failure because of those changes, but I, I love the idea of thinking about your next act and some of the other things that you can do that maybe weren't even possible before, especially providing more value out there and the philanthropic stuff. That's really exciting to me.

Nick Bradley: I still believe, and I've had this belief for a long time that entrepreneurship is a force for good.

It has the power to change the world if pointed right in the right direction. And the more that entrepreneurs can be successful through what we do through exiting that option to exit my belief, maybe it's a little bit kind of rose tinted glasses at times, but. I do believe that the people do go on and do great things and make bigger change.

Pat Flynn: For sure. And much of our audience here are those kinds of people who would do that. So again, I appreciate you for sharing the insider scoop on what happens in this world. And before we get into some of those points that we want to make sure we get the reasons to sell or things why it wouldn't sell. I know that you, in terms of helping people who want to get to work with you a little bit more closely, can you explain a little bit more about what that might look like? And perhaps where people can go get access to that or see what you got going on.

Nick Bradley: Yeah. So to give you a little bit more context, I left private equity during that last transaction.

I had a bit of an epiphany really about, I was a guy that was, well, hunting businesses for a living is probably the nice way to say it. Right. You know, I was, Kind of out there trying to buy these business in and exploiting the people who created them and I had a situation where I realized that that was firstly I was gonna go to hell. But I wasn't showing up as who I wanted to be.

I wasn't particularly well health wise and I made this big change I made that big change actually because I ended up going to a Tony Robbins Unleash the Power Within. And I sat there for four days. And if anyone's ever experienced anything like that, I remember crying my eyes out actually, and seeing the world very differently.

But he put up a, a quote, which was from Zig Ziglar, which was, you know, if you can help enough people in the world, get what they want, then you'll have everything you want. And it sounds like a very simplistic quote, but really it smacked me in the face because I, my whole system, if you like my programming up to that was, I'm just going to take from you.

And the more I take from you, the more I have, it sounds very primitive, but that's, that's what it was. Anyway. I share that because I jumped on that other side of the table and I didn't know what I was doing right in terms of what am I going to do now? Right? I mean, private equity, I made some money and I, and I have these, you know, I have an income through private equity.

How do you replace that? And I started doing one on one consulting and coaching. And over the last six years, that's become full. I can't do it anymore. And, and that's a great thing to, to be, but I, you know, my mission is to help a million business owners create high value exitable companies in the next decade.

And so as a result of that, we've just launched what we're calling the High Value Exit accelerator. And it's our first, I'm calling it a group coaching membership, because as you asked the question, how long does it take? Well, you know, people can be in our coaching membership for as long as it takes. And we coach around those three areas that I spoke about previously, you know, the strengthening foundations, the scaling value and the selling smart, the selling intelligently, all with the premise of making sure that we can guide and support people who have the intention and want to create the option to exit, to be able to learn from someone, you know, who's been on that side of the table, ultimately the person who is going to buy your company, so you have that support before you go through that process. So very excited about it. And it's taken a bit of time for me to get it to what I want it to be, but we've just launched that.

Pat Flynn: Well, congrats on that. If I don't know if when people listen to this, they'll be open spots available or, you know, whenever the next cohort is or whatnot.

Nick Bradley: We run cohorts every two months. So there will be that, but definitely reach out. I mean, our website has details on that. So, you know, as you, as you mentioned before, highvalueexit.com. Plus what we talk about next in terms of the blueprint, as I call it, the Exit for Millions Blueprint. I'll, I'll put a link here for anyone listening to the show to get access to that because it's, it's a bit of a mini diagnostic on the 15 things that make it very challenging to sell your business to sophisticated buyers. And I think if people can assess their business in advance, they know the gaps, then there'll be primed perfectly for a conversation about how we can obviously support them.

Pat Flynn: Amazing. We'll put all the links in the show notes for everybody, but let's finish strong with, with these 15 things, the blueprint.

Nick Bradley: Sure. We've touched on some of them and I'll go through them quickly because you know, once you start going through them, you can dive deeper into each of them. But the first thing, these are the things that make your business unsellable to a sophisticated buyer like private equity. And as I'm going through them, what I'd like your listeners to do is maybe give a scoring, like a red, amber, green around where they're at.

And what you want to get to, you know, to create the option of a high value exit is you want to get to about 80 percent of them being green. They don't all have to be green, but if you've got like that 70 or 80 percent of green, your business is going to be at the point where the multiple can be maximized within your market.

Okay. So the first one is your business is generating low profit or minimal growth. So some people get a bit funny about this. I'm going to just a bit of explanation because you see businesses that don't make any profit being sold on things called revenue multiples, right? It doesn't happen as much as people think.

And the times when it does happen is when it gets slammed into another business and someone's always thinking about where the profit's going to come from. Okay. So, you know, at the end of the day, if you, if you're not growing or you're going backwards or you're not very profitable, you're not going to be very valuable.

Okay. The second one, which we touched on. Is that your brand or your offering is commoditized, right? You don't stand out in your market. You're in what we call the red ocean. Anytime where you have to compete fully on price, not good. Okay. Third one is your leadership team is either non existent or has gaps in key functional areas.

Okay. It comes back to my point beforehand. You're buying a transferable asset, so you have to have the right capability in the right areas. Aligned with that, you have talent gaps across and through your organization. So what I like to say here is that you've got a strategy, right? But if you've got key roles that are not aligned to the strategy and you can't demonstrate that again, I'm going to assess that as risk.

Fifth one is your culture is not driving the right levels of performance. Okay. And you see examples of that with businesses that look impressive from the outside, but they have a cultural issue. I think Uber had that recently, a few years back, things like that, but you have to define your culture. It's a really powerful thing, particularly now that we operate more remotely.

Right, so people are not always in the same space, so it has to be through principles and behaviors. The sixth one is your business is too reliant on the founder. We touched that. And sometimes that's because the founder is a micromanager as well, right? But what I do here, and you'll laugh at this, is when I work with businesses and I get to a certain stage, I say to the founder, you now have to go away for six weeks.

Right. And I go, what? And we do this towards the end, by the way. And they're quite appreciative of the fact that when I say that in the beginning of working together, and that might be, you know, 12 to 18 months before they're ready, they can't even realize how that's possible. But it's a testing. It's a pressure testing the business.

The seventh one is your business relies on one to two main channels for acquiring customers. So we like to have at least three to four customer acquisition channels or lead generation ways in your business. And you don't want to be kind of relying on referrals, obviously, right? You know, you want to have something that's predictable, repeatable, sustainable, like I mentioned.

Number eight is your business has no recurring revenue. Okay. We went through that in quite a bit of detail. Nine is your business relies on only a few customers driving the majority of your revenue. This is a huge one. So if you have a business that say has 10 customers, And 80 percent of your revenue comes from three or four of them and they go, or they're not locked into long term contracts or whatever. Of course, I'm not going to pay you the value of the company because again, there's too much risk.

Pat Flynn: Yeah. Super risky.

Nick Bradley: Okay. Number 10 is your business lacks documented systems and processes. Comes back to that sort of automated processes piece we talked about in the Strengthened Foundations. 11 is your business is not tracking or measuring performance effectively across and through the organization again, so it doesn't have this bias towards data and metrics.

The best businesses I work with have very simple dashboards that clearly articulate the key things that make the business operate. 12 is your financial accounts are not audit ready. Again, a big one. When you sell a company, particularly an eight or nine figure exit, the private equity firm is going to do what's called a quality of earnings analysis.

They're going to look at how the business makes money. And if you can't demonstrate that that's independently validated, A, it takes longer to sell a business because it makes the due diligence process longer. But remember, the majority of the value is still going to be in the financials. About 40 percent of the value of your company is in the numbers and about 60 percent is in these intangible areas.

So you still have to show that they are as beautifully put together as possible. 13 is your business has no established board or external advisory team in place. The first thing a private equity firm is going to do as soon as they acquire your company is put a board around it. Right. You'll be on the board as the founder, but there'll be an operating partner.

There'll be a couple of people from the private equity firm themselves. And the reason this is here is that if you can show that you can operate with a level of governance, professionalism in the business, it proves firstly, that that's going to be easy to transition to the private equity firm equally.

If let's say you're a founder, that's never had a boss for years. You've suddenly got a boss. So you want to demonstrate that you're mature enough to be able to deal with that situation as well.

Pat Flynn: That makes sense.

Nick Bradley: Last couple 14, your business has subscale profitability to be attractive. Now we talked about the four to 5 million threshold.

So, you know, if you're not really at that level, You can still be acquired, but it's a much tougher game to play. So you want to get to that four to 5 million that I mentioned previously. And then the last one is your business is not ready for strategic scale. Now strategic scale is either it can do acquisitions or it can do international expansion.

It can do partnerships. So again, as a business owner, listening to this, these are things that you can put in place well and truly before you start a sales process. And they're all kind of little tricks, if you like, that as soon as you start talking to private equity or those sophisticated buyers, you know, their eyes are going to be lighting up as you go through answering these types of questions, because you're literally singing to the choir in terms of what they want to see.

Pat Flynn: Amazing. Thank you for that rundown. I'll get the link on the show notes page for where you can get that.

Nick Bradley: And ExitForMillionsBlueprint.com, but we'll give you a link for that as well. But yeah, the PDF on that goes through all of those with a bit more explanation. It also has the ability to do the scoring that I mentioned beforehand and people find it very valuable just to kind of do a temperature Check of where they are in their business.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, what was that link one more time?

Nick Bradley: It's ExitForMillionsBlueprint.com.

Pat Flynn: Thank you The the last question i'll ask is and this is something that just came to mind when you were talking was You You know, in terms of the seller being able to choose the buyer, if there is an opportunity for a seller to understand like, yes, this buyer, this private equity group, they're going to take care of my customers.

Like I've built this business. I care about my audience. I care about the perception of the brand. How can I be sure that a private equity group or any buyer would do right by what I've created or whoever is selling?

Nick Bradley: Yeah, very good, important question, because if you go through some of the stuff that I've covered today around making your business, the prize, people want the prize, multiple people want the prize, right?

So, you know, you are a unique thing. And in that situation, you, you create what I call sell side control. So, whereas you're going up against these sophisticated buyers, they know how to play the game. You stand out as something unique. You then flip the script to some extent on that whole thing, and you start to, to some extent, earn the right to select who you want to partner with, and you get to interview them.

Now, that does happen all the way through the process, but you've suddenly turned, as I said, the tide on kind of the whole thing. What does that look like? Well, let's say you hire an investment banker, a good one, and they run a process. I won't go through the process cause it's a whole nother probably conversation, but you're going to get to the end where there's going to be, let's say, anywhere between probably five, I had seven in the last transaction I was involved in, suitors. And at that point in time, they all want your business and they're going to put a price in front of you. But what I always encourage business owners to do at that point is don't just go by the highest price. There's a thing called terms as well.

Price and terms. Terms is how they're going to pay you the money and all the other things they're going to do as part of the transaction. And when you're negotiating the terms, you can start to be a bit more explicit about what you want things to be going forward, because you've earned the right to do that because you're the price.

So my advice here, just to finish this is pick the partner. That's going to give you the best balance of those things. Pick the partner. Who's going to do the right thing by your people, pick the partner. Who's going to take the vision that you've created and really scale it into the future. If all of those characteristics are important to you.

And one thing I fully believe is, you know, I hate it when business owners, they get to this part of the process, and I won't work with them, I'll be really clear on this. And they're like, I don't really care about all the people that got me here, I just want to get the money. That's the worst situation.

And I know people listening to this are probably not those people, but you want to very much remember how you got to this place because you're about to create this event and it's a super important thing to make sure you protect everyone and reward and incentivize everyone who's got you there.

Pat Flynn: Yeah. A hundred percent.

Nick, this has been an incredible conversation. Thank you for the deep dive and helping us get into the rabbit hole a little bit here with this world and everybody should definitely check up Scale Up on your favorite podcast app. There's so much gold there. Nick, this has been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for this.

One more time. Where can people go to follow along and get all the good things?

Nick Bradley: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I just want to say thank you very much. I've enjoyed the conversation. We've gone down a little bit of the rabbit hole.

Pat Flynn: Oh, I'm sure

Nick Bradley: There's more to go back. But I said, my main thing now is just making sure people are aware of their options and their opportunities around this sort of stuff.

So I'm grateful for the opportunity. So I just want to say thank you, but yeah, people can reach out to me. So firstly, my practice, if you like, my consultancy is High Value Exit and it's highvalueexit.com. You can also reach out to me on LinkedIn. I'm on LinkedIn all the time. So it's real Nick Bradley, I think is the URL there, something like that anyway, but you'll find me.

And then, as I said, the, the blueprint, as I said, will be very valuable to people listening is ExitForMillionsBlueprint.com.

Pat Flynn: Amazing. Thank you, Nick. We appreciate you and all the best.

Nick Bradley: Thank you.

Pat Flynn: All right. I hope you enjoy that episode with Nick Bradley, founder and CEO of High Value Exit. And man, this is a, this is a crazy world, but when you compare the possibilities of what a business could turn into in terms of the revenue that you could generate from just a single day's exit, which of course will take years to get there and perhaps a 36 month runway to get there from where you're at now.

I mean, there's, there's a lot of, this isn't an overnight thing obviously, but compare that to a lot of investments that we normally think about that help us generate wealth from real estate to investing in the market, retirement plans, et cetera. I mean, building a business to scale and to sell seems like it would be worth it.

And if this episode interests you at all, and you want to see how to take the business that you have or an idea that you have and get it to that point, well, Nick is definitely the person to follow. Again, you can follow him and find them at High Value Exit. On LinkedIn, Nick Bradley. And we'll have all the resources and links mentioned in this episode on the show notes page at smartpassiveincome.com/session789, again, smartpassiveincome.com/session789.

Thank you, Nick. Thank you for listening all the way through. I hope this was a interesting dive into a world that we don't talk often about, but it's there and man, we're talking billions and trillions of dollars available, amazing opportunities.

Best of luck to you and I look forward to serving you in next week's episode.

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. Our senior producer is David Grabowski, 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!

SPI 787: The Secrets of Creating (and Joining) a Podcast Network with Hala Taha

Hala Taha: I'm thankful for all my failures. I'm thankful for all my experiences because it's those skills that I learned back then that I'm now making millions of dollars off of. So even though I got rejected, and even though people hurt me, and the gatekeepers told me no, and everything like that, I still gained so much out of those experiences. Even though I didn't make a dollar back then, I'm literally making millions of dollars a year now with those same skills that I learned back then.

Pat Flynn: Some of my favorite success stories are the ones that follow a journey to somebody's dream. They actually reach that point of achieving their goals and then realize that maybe that wasn't the right path for them. Either that or they get kicked out like I did in the world of architecture and then discovering a new version of themselves, a better version, and using a lot of those talents and things that were learned into something new that can help not just themselves live a better life, but several other people too.

And that's exactly what our guest has done today. She was in the entertainment industry. She had actually been on the radio, been on television and realized that, well, that's not the path that she was going to go down in the future.

Because she had bigger dreams, in fact, and she's realized those dreams today. You could find her at Young And Profiting, which is another podcast hosted by Hala Taha. She is an incredible force. She has interviewed so many incredible people and she's created one of the top podcasting networks that is out there.

We're going to talk a little bit more about networks today. In fact, that's what we're going to focus on because whether you want to start a network of your own, something that combines forces inside of the space that you're in, bringing together people, partners to reach a bigger goal to combine forces and reach bigger advertisers to quite honestly make more money together.

Either that or how might you approach becoming a part of an existing network and what qualifications do you need? What do you need to bring to the table? And how might you position yourself in a way that would get a person who owns a network or who is starting one to say, absolutely, yes, I want you to be a part of this.

There's a lot of pros. There's a lot of cons. Hala is going to break it down for us today. So I hope you enjoy this session. And this is session 787 of the SPI podcast. Here she is, Hala Taha from Young And Profiting.

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 thinks the name microphone isn't a good name. Because it's not actually that small. Pat Flynn.

Pat Flynn: Hello, welcome to the SPI podcast. Thank you so much for being here.

Hala Taha: I am so excited.

Pat Flynn: I was grateful to have been a guest on your show, and I wanted to return the favor as quickly as possible because you have so much knowledge.

You have a vast number of experiences that have led you to where you're at today, and especially your podcast network, your successful business, your team of 40, and all the amazing things you're doing. Plus you are a rock star on LinkedIn. I mean, we could go anywhere. Stick around because we have a very particular place we're going to go.

But I do want to start with your story. I know you were in the entertainment business for a while. Tell me about what that was like and why you're out of it.

Hala Taha: Sure. So I actually started my career in radio. I dropped out of college for an internship at Hot 97, which was the number one hip hop and R& B station at the time.

This was over 10 years ago. And I was actually Angie Martinez's assistant for three years. And I didn't get paid a dime. And I did this for three years because in the radio world, you really got to pay your dues. And my goal was to be the next Angie Martinez. And they were basically priming me for that.

So I actually dropped out of school to take this internship full time, whatever that means in terms of a free paid internship. And once a paying job opened up, I really wanted to start getting paid to be the producer. Unfortunately, I didn't get the job at Hot 97 and I got pretty upset and I got fired from my unpaid internship.

So that was like my first like big rejection and that one really hurt because I had like really identified myself with Hot 97. My social media handles had Hot 97 and so that was super devastating. Once I got let go from Hot 97, I didn't let failure kind of keep me down. And I decided that I was going to start this female movement called The Sorority of Hip Hop.

And I decided that I was going to launch a blog. And so I went back to school to graduate. I started recruiting girls on Twitter and Craigslist, and I started this website and I figured out how to hack Twitter where whenever we'd put out like a blog post about like a rapper or whatever it was, we would add their name and I connected all of the girls profiles, and I had 150 girls in and out of this organization over three years who blogged for me for free. And we would go viral because like Drake would see like a hundred pretty girls tweeting him and he'd retweet one of us and then we started to go viral and we were the first ones to do that. Now everybody does that, but I was the first one to do that on Twitter.

So we caught notice from MTV. They wanted to shoot a pilot with us, a reality TV show just three months into me creating this website. Like we were already one of the biggest entertainment news sites just three months into me creating this blog. So suddenly the same DJs like Angie Martinez and Funkmaster Flex and Saifah Sounds, all the same DJs that didn't give me a job at Hot 97 started calling me up and asking me to host parties with them.

So my blog started to turn into this like event business and we were like hosting all the coolest parties in the city and getting paid for it. And like, it just like started to blow up into this whole movement. And then about three years into or two and a half years into it, MTV reached back out to us and they're like, okay, like, we really want to do a show this time.

They signed six of the main girls. They got us a studio on Broadway and they filmed us the entire summer. So here I was thinking, finally, six years into it, basically working for free, doing odd jobs in marketing and stuff to make money in these events and whatever, but didn't really have much security at this point or success.

I thought MTV was my golden ticket. Finally, I made it, right? They shot us all summer. I was the lead and I was so excited. And two weeks before they're supposed to air the show, I get a call from the producer. I still remember this conversation and she was like, hola, I'm so sorry. We're pulling the plug.

Pat Flynn: No.

Hala Taha: And I was like, Oh my God.

Pat Flynn: That was going to be your break.

Hala Taha: I know. And I also was co host on Sway in the Morning and Sirius XM. Angie got me that opportunity and Sway didn't like me. And so like two weeks into it, I was fired. So I got rejected from terrestrial Radio, satellite Radio, and TV. So at that point, I was like, all right, this is not for me, obviously.

Like, I'm never going to make it. All my siblings were in med school. I was like the black sheep of my family, like at one point living on my brother's couch, like trying to make it. And so I was like, okay, I'm just going to go back to school, be a normal person, go into corporate. I got my MBA, got a 4.0 that gave me my leg in the door at Hewlett Packard.

And then I just, went into corporate for four years. And when I was in corporate and I was getting bored and I was basically doing the same. I was doing really well in corporate. I was the same person, just this like intrapreneur within the corporate world. I was upset about an opportunity I didn't get.

And then I started my podcast and that's what set me back off. And this time around I struggled.

Pat Flynn: So, yeah, and the podcast has been incredible, Young and Profiting. Y'all got to listen to it and get on that. And it's on YouTube as well, which is really great. And it feels like now. I mean, where you're at now and what I know about you and your brand, you're using a lot of the same superpowers you had back then with networking and getting your foot in the door, but you're using that in a different space and now on your terms, tell me if you could go back and talk to your younger self, like what would you say in terms of like, Hey, maybe that's not the path.

Cause I mean, So many people get so into Hollywood and that path, and it's very attractive for obvious reasons. But if you can go back and tell yourself like what to avoid or what to look out for, what really means success to you, what would you say?

Hala Taha: Yeah, it's so interesting that you ask this because I've been thinking a lot differently about my past lately.

I used to get on these interviews and I used to actually feel really upset from Angie Martinez. Because I'm her age now when I was her intern. And I have Interns and young employees myself. And I know I pay them so well, they have benefits and all this stuff. And I used to get really resentful. Like, man, Angie never gave me a dollar.

She fired me from a job that I quit school for. You don't keep somebody around for three years if you don't like them. You know what I'm saying? And so I used to feel really resentful, but then I talked to Laila Hormozi on my show and she said something to me that really opened my eyes. She was like, you know, like there's research that goes on that like, 50 percent of what you remember of your past is like not accurate.

Like you just remember it from your perspective. Like you don't have the full picture of what happened. Right, so I look at my past more with more like empathy towards the people who didn't give me opportunities because I may have thought I was ready for the producer job, but looking back, I was 23 years old, like, you know, probably not ready for that opportunity.

And like, maybe I thought it was better than I was. Yeah. At the end of the day, I'm thankful for all my failures. I'm thankful for all my experiences because it's those skills that I learned back then that I'm now making millions of dollars off of. So even though I got rejected, and even though people hurt me, and the gatekeepers told me no, and everything like that, I still gained so much out of those experiences.

Even though I didn't make a dollar back then, I'm literally making millions of dollars a year now with those same skills that I learned back then. So, hopefully that helps answer your question in terms of like, if I was to look back and give myself advice, I wouldn't tell myself to not do those things. I think I did the right things.

I got experiences. I explored things. I figured out what I was good at, what I wasn't good at. And I really did lean into my strengths of like community building and being tech savvy and everything like that.

Pat Flynn: So you might say to yourself, hey, things may get rough in the future, but you're going to find yourself wherever you need to be is where you're going to need to be, but just keep going for it.

And versus like, don't do that because like you said, the experiences are important and it's like dating, right? Like you figure out what kind of person you don't want to be around, and then you can kind of use that knowledge for the next decision or the next person that you work with. It reminds me a lot about my story as an architect.

When I got laid off, I was so upset at my boss. I was like, how could you? And like you said, looking back now years later, a little bit wiser, I go, well, he had to fire me. Like there was no way he could keep me because of the recession. And like, he probably felt bad, right? Yeah. So you're absolutely right.

It's all about perspective. And that's the biggest thing here. You say now that you're making millions of dollars. What is the business model that you are working with? And then we'll dive into a particular component of that that I'm very, very curious about in just a moment. But millions of dollars coming from what?

Hala Taha: Yeah, so I have many different businesses. The first way that I started to monetize my brand was through my social media and podcast agency called Yap Media. So the guests who would come on my show at the time, I had a top 10 podcast two years into my podcast. The guests who would come on my show would always be like, who does your LinkedIn?

How'd you grow that? How did you create this podcast? Who does your videos? Your videos are awesome. And at the time I had a volunteer team. I had 20 people working for free for me while I was working full time at my corporate job, helping me run this top podcast.

Pat Flynn: Okay. For free?

Hala Taha: For free.

Pat Flynn: Okay. Hold up. How do you do that?

Like that's a dream to have people do a lot of that production work for you for free. They couldn't. Like what, what was in it for them?

Hala Taha: They learned, right? So I, I think one of my biggest superpowers, and again, why I don't regret all these crazy experiences that I had as a younger person, is that I'm really good at motivating people and bringing people towards a common cause and working for free.

Because almost all the organizations that I had in the past, this blog, I was also like, president of my alumni association and the young employee president at Hewlett Packard. It was all recruiting people for free, so I'm very used to doing that. Okay? So it was actually the super fans on LinkedIn who would reach out to me and they'd be like, Oh my God, your show changed my life.

There's nothing else like it. How can I help you? How can I get the word out? I just want to help. I just want to learn from you. Okay. And so I knew all the pieces to the puzzle. I could audio edit, video edit, create websites, blog, hack social media. So just teach people how to do each thing, and once they mastered it, I'd let them run with it and keep teaching them more stuff.

So as long as you keep teaching people, they're willing to work for free. Actually it's harder to motivate people once they start getting paid, I found. It was like very easy to motivate a volunteer team because I wasn't getting paid. So it's like everybody's just doing this for the, out of the goodness of their heart, you know, and that motivated us.

Pat Flynn: Wow. It's a little counterintuitive, but it makes sense when you understand that, okay, you are helping these people learn with you. And as you go along, there's a common goal here that we're working toward. I know that the audience is going to be like, like, let's talk to them right now. The audience is thinking there's no way, like you should pay people for that kind of work.

But what would you say to that person? Who's thinking that, how do you share the value of the education that a person would get working with you for free? Which I know can be more valuable than money, but what do you say to a person who is a little triggered by just wait, wait, hold up, you're like you're, you're taking advantage of somebody, you know?

Hala Taha: Yeah, and I knew that that might be a thought, but in my mind, I never wanted to monetize this podcast. I was putting out this podcast just to help people and that's why everybody wanted to help me. So I actually had no goals of monetizing. Everybody just thought I was this awesome, not just thought, like I was just trying to put out good content.

I had this other job and I was a failed entrepreneur and actually pretty scarred about all my failures in the past that it took me so long to actually quit my job, even when we were making over a hundred thousand dollars a month with our agency, because I was so scared of failing again, right? Really now I would never, because my company's making money, you've got to at least pay your interns a stipend. Yeah. Right? But we weren't monetizing, so that's why I was able to just have volunteers. Once we started monetizing, I started paying everybody. So that's the distinction there. It's like, if you're already monetizing, you've got to at least pay a stipend.

But we were, at this point, it was just a hobby that we all had. And we were just a group that motivated each other and taught each other stuff. So I put everybody in a Slack channel and I taught everybody different aspects of how to produce a podcast. So anyways, the first way that I monetized my show was the guests at the end of the show would always ask me the same question.

How did you do this? How can you grow your LinkedIn? How did you grow your podcast? Can you do this for me? And for the longest time I was like, no, I'm so sorry. This is just a hobby. This is just a passion project. I have a volunteer team. They can't help you. We're busy as it is. And then finally COVID hit and I found myself with no commute, all this free time, and pretty unmotivated. I was at Disney at the time and I felt pretty unmotivated at my job. And I just said, okay, let me give this a shot. And I turned my volunteer team into my agency. That's Yap Media. So my social media and podcast agency started there. And then I started hiring, right? So that, that's the first way I monetize.

Once we started to grow the social agency, all of a sudden I had this money to invest in growing my show. So I started to figure out media buying, and what does that mean? I was doing a lot of trades with different podcast players like Castbox and Player FM. They were sponsoring me because I'm one of the biggest influencers on LinkedIn, and I was doing all these trades with them, leveraging my LinkedIn audience.

Then I realized that you could pay for this. And I started just leaning into paying in media buying. Then I started to grow my show. Then I started to get sponsors. Okay. Then I started to grow other shows this way. And I grew three other podcasts my size and I started to get them sponsorships. Before I knew it, I figured out how to create a podcast network.

And I started recruiting big podcasters that already had a lot of downloads and started getting them sponsorships as well. So that was the birth of the Yap Media Network about two years ago, when we're the number one business and self improvement podcast network now.

Pat Flynn: Incredible. It's no wonder why podcasting is always something you speak highly of.

I mean, like your start was because of the podcast and it wasn't because you immediately had a ton of downloads, but you built these connections and relationships and literally the people you spoke to because they enjoyed the conversation so much, they wanted to work with you. I mean, that's clear to client from the podcast right there.

And then of course it just grew and expanded from there. So let's talk about podcast networks because this is something that we hear a lot about and it feels like it's something that's only available to the top 1% of 1%. It's like, Oh, you have to be in public radio or something to be a part of a network or the New York times or whatever.

But how could a regular person podcast or some brand recruit people, first of all, like how do we attract the right people? Who do we say yes to or no to? But even before that, like what is the podcast network exactly? Like in your words, like what does that even mean?

Hala Taha: Yeah. So podcast network, basically their primary job typically is to grow and monetize.

The podcast and their network. So typically you're reporting over podcasts to your hosting provider, like a network hosting provider, and you're actually flighting ads and doing all the reporting and the tracking with the advertisers. You're pitching the show to different brands, creating proposals and things like that, RFPs, and then you're communicating the information to the podcaster, giving them talk points, doing air checks, flooding the ad, reporting the impressions and results to the brands.

So it's basically facilitating ad flighting and booking sponsorships. And then all the podcast networks have varying degrees of this, but there's also like growth involved. So like cross promotion on other podcasts, getting you guest interviews on other podcasts. If the podcast network is also associated with radio, getting you like radio commercials.

So there's also growth aspects related to it.

Pat Flynn: It almost feels like you are in service to these other podcasts because, you know, you're helping them book ads, you're helping them with the ad reads, you're almost sort of like a middleman, but not really, it's like those opportunities wouldn't come their way if they weren't a part of this network, right?

You have the relationships, you have the connections. And in addition to that, like, do you pitch the network overall to advertisers versus the individual podcast. Cause it would make sense if you had 10 podcasts, each with a million downloads, you could easily pitch a bigger brand and say, Hey, we got 10 million downloads in our network.

For example, is that, is that kind of an advantage you have as a network as well to, to kind of attract bigger sponsors and advertisers?

Hala Taha: You can do that, but the advertisers are not really biting on that right now.

Pat Flynn: Okay.

Hala Taha: That's not really how it works right now.

Pat Flynn: How does it work then?

Hala Taha: So typically advertisers are working with agencies.

So there's like many different layers to this, right? So there's lots of different agencies, like for example, Ad Results, Veritone, Wine, Gumball, Advertise Cast, right? And these agencies work with brands and many of these brands give them like a monthly budget. In terms of the shows they want, then they give them like demographic information that they're targeting.

Any sort of criteria, like they're looking for women, audience, like with this household income or whatever it is. Then these agencies, because they know that we've got podcasts en masse, now they're not going to go to individual podcasters, to your point. They're only going to, they want to be time efficient, so they're going to work with networks who have a lot of podcasts.

And they'll say like, Hey, we've got this brand. They're looking for this. People send us the shows that fit. And they give us an RFP that we fill out and give them the shows that fit. Okay. So on the agency side, it's more of like them telling us this brand has this budget looking for this. And we have to give the information that we have with podcasts that are a fit.

Pat Flynn: Okay, that makes sense.

Hala Taha: But for direct. opportunities. So there's also like working directly with brands. These are typically people who are new to the podcast space, maybe slightly smaller companies or even super large companies that do a ton of podcast buying that have an internal team to do their podcast ads.

And so in this case, we might be more customized. Hey, you know, we've got these three podcasters that would be a perfect fit for your beauty brand. And we might pitch those three podcasters. So in that case, you can kind of do what you were saying before and sort of pitch in mass to a specific brand.

Pat Flynn: Got it.

When thinking about building the network, how do you determine what other shows should be a part of it? Do you have a filter system or some sort of application process? Like, how does it, how does that work exactly?

Hala Taha: Yeah. So for us, like there's minimum download requirements and this is pretty much across the board on the industry.

Now, the Apple iOS update happened in November and most podcasters lost 30 percent of their downloads or more. Especially the older the podcast and the more frequent their episodes per week, the more downloads they lost. So some people lost 50 percent of their downloads. So these numbers, I say this because things are changing now.

The numbers don't mean the same thing anymore because a lot of people's downloads decreased. Right now, our minimums at Yap Media is about 80,000 downloads per month. So 20,000 downloads per week and we sell dynamic ad insertion. So that means we, we monetize new episodes and back catalog episodes with new sponsors, if that makes sense.

So about 80,000 downloads a month would be the minimum. Now, if you are somebody who has a big social following or a big email newsletter list, you might be able to get in the door at a network because of your other channels because it's becoming more common to do these cross channel sponsorships where it's not just about your downloads, it's also monetizing your social and your email and your YouTube and all of that stuff.

So if you also have a big social presence, you might be able to join a network even with less numbers, but typically it's about 80,000 downloads a month is the minimum for most of the network.

Pat Flynn: Got it. That's super helpful. And thank you for the industry wide numbers too. That's, that's super valuable. So, you're also saying that, let's say you only get 40, 000 downloads a month, but you have an email list of over 100,000 or 80,000, like that's going to be attractive and could lend itself to still being in a network because it's the whole brand, not just the podcast download numbers.

Hala Taha: 100%. And I would say like, smaller networks that are not as established, not the Yap Medias and Wondereys of the world, or they might be willing to accept smaller podcasters because they've got more time on their hands. For a bigger network, it's kind of like the same amount of work for a million downloads per month podcast for, you know, some, somebody that gets 50,000 downloads. So it doesn't make sense to do that work.

Pat Flynn: If I'm a podcaster and I want to position myself in the best way possible, you know, I have decent numbers. I have decent, like everything's kind of mid and average across the board. You know, there's other podcasters trying to fight for the same spot. How can I best position myself, my podcast to be attractive to perhaps a network that I would love to be a part of?

Hala Taha: Great question. First of all, face on your podcast cover. What I've noticed with podcasters that join my network, if you don't have your face out there on social media, on your podcast cover, even if you do get signed to a network, brands don't want to bite on you.

They want to know what you look like. They want to know what you stand for. They're going to associate what you look like in terms of what your audience looks like. So I do find that when you don't have your face on your podcast cover, one of the first changes I do for people is put, I'm like, Hey, we got to put your face on your cover if you, if you want to get sponsors, because some sponsors are literally only looking at that. That and deciding if that's, if they're going to book your show. So you want that emotional connection with your face on your cover. The other thing I'd say is reviews. So one of the first things that I look for is I go on your Apple and if you've got, you haven't had a review in a year, that's a really bad sign.

I'm like, your audience is not engaged. You're not doing activities to try to get your audience to engage. It's like a real red flag, right? So proactively getting reviews and really striving to get recent reviews. That's going to really help the social proof of your show. So making sure that you got ample amount of reviews because these things are not a publicly visible, like your downloads are not publicly visible.

If somebody lands on your Apple page, the only way they can judge your podcast size is literally by the amount of reviews that you have. And like I said, if you've got a bunch of old reviews, then it means that your show's kind of stale and you don't really have an active following. So those are two big things as well as having an established social media presence, it's becoming more and more important.

It's. It's super rare for somebody to have especially a new podcast, right, to not have a social following. Some of the legacy podcasters like JLD, you know, those types of folks, he doesn't really have much of a social presence, but he's been doing it for 15 years, so he can get away with that.

But nowadays, you've got to have like, you've got to have your Instagram popping, you've got to have your LinkedIn, and at least those two. And YouTube is great, too.

Pat Flynn: Okay. That's really exciting. Does it get to the point where you ultimately want to be on a call with the network and try to get face to face?

Would that position yourself well and give yourself a good opportunity? Is that, is that pretty, Is that pretty, Normal for a network if they're going to have somebody in their network.

Hala Taha: Yeah, 100%. So it's like, usually there's like a pre vetting form and you probably have to send like screenshots of your monthly downloads to prove that you meet the minimum requirements.

You might have to give them links to your social platforms and tell them your impression counts for your posts and things like that. And then typically what would happen is that if they want you, they're going to the podcast network is going to try to sell you. They're going to have a discovery call with you.

Go over like the tech aspect, go over the rev share, go over the way that they work and communicate with you and they'll give you a contract and you've got to review it and sign it and then you're signed to the network. So that's, that's typically how it works. And something we didn't talk about is that this is all rev share based.

You don't pay to be a part of a network. It's just, you get a rev share based on the sponsorships that they book. So typically it's 70-30 is, is the industry standard. If there's no production work involved where the network is not doing any production work, it's a 70-30 split where the host gets 70 percent of the revenue.

Pat Flynn: Incredible insight. Thank you. What are the downsides. I mean, you have a network, you obviously believe in the, in the model, but you know, for a podcaster out there, who's like, Ooh, this sounds interesting. I know it's also not for everybody who is a, or what is the network not for? Who is it not for?

Hala Taha: Well, here's the thing it's hit or miss with these networks.

I have to say, like, I feel like we're doing so well at Yap Media because we're one of the only networks that has a podcaster as the CEO and I've been on other crappy networks, so I know what I don't want, you know what I'm saying? So one of the things is that. You're signing exclusively typically, which means that if they don't sell ads, you don't make any money and you can't do anything about it.

So I remember I signed to a network, my first network that I signed to, I signed my whole network to it. It was like we were doing so well and we were getting all this attention and I was like, well, I'm going to sign with this big brand because they're going to 10x everything we're doing. They've got a whole sales team.

We got on their network and they did nothing. And my hands were tied and I couldn't sell my show or the other shows and we lost all this money. I had to get out of it because they were tying my hands because they weren't doing the work. So it's like, first of all, you want to make sure that the network is actually going to sell because what these networks do is they get lazy and they just turn on programmatic ads.

So programmatic ads are these pre recorded canned ads that is more like automated. Whatever open inventory there is, if you're on like Megaphone, which is a hosting provider, there's Spotify Ad Network. Any open inventory Spotify puts it in, but it's really low CPM. So the industry standard CPM is like $30.

Spotify Ad Network is like a $5 CPM, sometimes $2. So it's like so bad for the podcast because it's like hurting the listener experience. You're getting these pre recorded ads, not making any money, and you can't do anything about it because you're signed to this contract. So that's a negative right there.

So it's like vetting the podcast network. If you can get like a test trial with them or put it in the contract that you want to have opt in or opt out of programmatic ads, that if they don't hit a certain amount of revenue that you can leave, like put things into protect yourself so you don't, what happened to me doesn't happen to you where you sign and you're doing so well.

And then suddenly you're not getting ads because they're not doing any selling. So that's number one. So be careful of that. In terms of that, there's no other cons because unless you are going to figure out the whole industry and you know, do direct selling and like go crazy with email campaigns, the other option for like independent podcasters might be to like sign up for Gumball and AdvertiseCast.

Then basically you're working with like a middleman who works with the other agencies. That's pretty accessible for independent podcasters. So you could do direct sponsorships and work with like a gumball or an advertised cast and you can manage it on your own, but a network is going to get you those other opportunities because typically the network is working with like all 40 agencies that are out there and getting you all those opportunities.

Pat Flynn: Got it. Biggest lesson there and I can speak from my own experience is to read the contract or have your lawyer read it, understand what the implications are, and there is room for negotiation.

I mean, we've had to negotiate as well because we didn't want to be locked into something or we wanted to make sure there was a way out if it wasn't working. That's probably the biggest thing. So I appreciate you plus wanting that.

Hala Taha: The other thing is asking other podcasters in the net. I think this is a big one.

Ask other podcasters in the network. You can see who's on the network and be like, how are they doing with the sales? How has it been for you? How many downloads are you getting? How much money? Just ask those questions because that's going to be your like foolproof way of knowing if it's a good network or not.

Pat Flynn: For sure. That is great advice. Wow. Let's go into owning a network. I'd love to listen and learn a little bit about what it's like to actually run a network. I know some people who have started some and failed, some who have done it, but are like a little overwhelmed with a lot of the. Ins and outs of that.

Like, what does it really take to own and create a successful network if they want it to?

Hala Taha: It's a lot. There's a lot going on. I would say, first of all, you need to have the right teams. So some of the teams that we have on our network is an ad operations team where they're responsible for all the tech. So flighting the ads, porting over RSS feeds to our hosting provider, coordinating and sending out talk points, sending out financial payout information, and keeping financial trackers updates, and things like that. So ad operations is like something that you'll need to stand up and standardize and create SOPs for when podcasts is ported over.

Also, like preparing the podcast. Most people are doing dynamic ad, so the podcasts that are coming over probably are not doing dynamic ad insertion. So that means cleaning up all the past episodes, taking out the embedded ads, inserting the insertion markers and getting that podcast ready to do dynamic ad insertion where the ad gets flighted across the entire catalog and you've got to like set it up.

So creating all those different processes are super important. Then you've got the sales side. Getting in contact with all the agencies, figuring out, like I would never give that secret away, all the different agencies that exist out there and all the different account reps and what brands they manage and getting all of that organized and making sure that you haven't like, the biggest thing is just being top of mind for them.

So having like upfront calls and quarterly calls with them and, and checking in and sending them gifts and wining and dining them. Right, so it's just like, Keeping those agency partner relationships super deep and fresh and understanding what brands they manage and who's buying when super important.

Right. And making sure you've got all the processes for those ad relationships. Then you've got the direct side because podcasting is super cyclical. Okay, so a lot of the ads happen during upfront season, which is around October, November, December, where people are doing annual buys. And then there's like a testing period throughout the year, but then there's dead points in the year.

And so you need to be really good at doing direct reach outs where you're reaching out to like new advertisers who have never done podcasts before who don't align to the cyclical aspect of podcasting and the agencies, right? So making sure you've got email campaigns and you have different tools to find brands like that and you're being creative.

Then you've got the recruitment side of everything. So you got the ads and the getting sponsors, but then you've also got to recruit podcasters. So what are all the processes with that? How are you going to find those podcasters? Are you going to have a niche podcast network? Or are you going to go broad?

Like who are you going to focus on and how are you going to recruit them and find that information and reach out to them? Right? So for us, actually, I think one of the best skills that we had as a team that enabled us to become a network is we did guest outreach services. As a podcast production agency.

And basically I've taken that skill of doing guest outreach, which is a lot of email campaigns and reaching out and finding information. We took that skill and we turned it into the network because it's the same skill that you need to get sponsors and get podcasters.

Pat Flynn: Right. That's super smart.

Hala Taha: Then it's like communication, right?

Communication to the brands. We have an industry newsletter. We have an internal network letter. We have a marketing ops performance communication update every month. We have a finance update every month. So getting all your communications together to be super transparent, the payout processes, the invoice processes with the brands.

Paying out the podcasters. So there's so many things going on. Also like the marketing materials, right? Creating a website, a catalog. So there's lots going on. You definitely need to like think through it. But what I would say is like, do it for yourself first. I would say figure it out for yourself first, get your feet wet, sign up to Gumball, sign up to AdvertiseCast, do some direct outreach, start to get your feet wet with yourself, maybe set up your own podcast for dynamic ad insertion on Art19 or Lispin or something that's accessible to an independent podcaster and try it out first for yourself.

Then you'll know all the aspects it takes to do one show. And then you'll be able to hopefully figure it out for other shows as well. I think the big thing would be agencies and getting networked with them once you actually have an established network with other shows.

Pat Flynn: That's perfect advice. You know, doing it yourself first is always best because then you understand what works and what doesn't and what your own style is like.

And I feel like if you're in a super niche, part of an industry, your ability to be the one to step up, to then bring everybody together, to be the hub is something that could work really well. However, if you feel like maybe you are in an industry that is maybe pretty saturated, or there's a lot of people out there and you want to be at the top connecting with an existing network is great because obviously you just heard all the ins and outs that go into that, and you might not have time for that.

And that's the benefit. That's the, that's the relationship that's created between network and podcaster. And I appreciate you coming on today. This was super informational. You went really quickly through a lot of stuff that I'd never heard of before. So I appreciate you. Why don't you do a little pitch for, for Yap and what people can discover over there and where you want people to go to, to find out more info from you.

Hala Taha: Pat, thank you so much for your time today. If you guys want to check out Young and Profiting podcast, it is my baby. I've been doing it for six years. I interviewed the brightest minds in the world. I've interviewed Pat on that show. Just check out Young and Profiting. You can find it everywhere. If you want to check out information about my network or my social agency, you can go to YapMedia.io. And if you want to follow me on social media, you can get me on Instagram at @YapWithHala or LinkedIn. You can search for my name. It's Hala Taha.

Pat Flynn: You are incredible. Thank you so much for coming on today. Appreciate you. And we'll put all the links in the show notes for everybody and all the best of luck.

Thank you again.

Hala Taha: Thank you.

Pat Flynn: All right. That was an incredible episode. I learned so much about podcast networks. And if you want to start a network of your own, whether it's a podcast network, a YouTube network, a blog network, a TikTok network, whatever it might be, this is an episode that can help you understand the ins and outs of that.

Or if you want to join a network, like we talked about, now, you know what it takes and what you can bring to the table. So it's not just about your numbers that you have on the platform. It might be all the other numbers that you have combined behind that as well. So keep that in mind. And Hala, thank you so much for coming on today.

Definitely check out and subscribe to the Young and Profiting podcast. You can check out Yap media as well, and the network over there and just. Man, she's got so many amazing things going on. I'm so grateful for her and I'm so grateful for you for listening all the way through. I appreciate you and be sure to subscribe so you don't miss out on the next episodes coming your way soon.

Cheers. Thanks so much. And all the best to you. See you in the next episode.

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. Our senior producer is David Grabowski, 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!

SPI 773: How to Write GREAT Copy in Today's World with Ray Edwards

Ray Edwards: Even in the offer, don't just say you get eighteen lessons, there's a one-hundred-and-fifty-page workbook because people are not really buying the stuff you're giving them. They're buying the transformation. It should be something more along the lines of, you're going to go from total podcast newbie to actually knowing how to create a podcast your listeners are going to want to listen to, you're going to have their attention, which is the most important asset in this economy.

You're describing the benefits of not what they get with your training, or your book, or your course, or your coaching, you're describing what it does for them.

Pat Flynn: Copywriting and what is working today. That's exactly what we're going to talk about, especially because we're in this world now with AI. And I brought on an expert, the expert Ray Edwards, as we call him sometimes the Godfather of Modern Copywriting, for helping us share our message and help us to serve others more with the words that we choose to put on a sales page or in our emails or in our social posts.

And Ray's going to give us a framework, a framework that he's been on the show before to teach, but it's adjusted a little bit for the time. So we're going to go through his P.A.S.T.O.R. Framework and we talk about each little component of the P.A.S.T.O.R. Framework to help you with your copy and get into the weeds of it.

And this is going to be one of If not the most helpful workshop that you'll probably hear in a very long time here on the podcast with Ray. And we also talk and get some interesting insight from him as a professional copywriter, what it's like in the landscape of AI and how to use AI, not disuse it or just shy away from it, but actually use it to our advantage to create excellent copy, because a lot of us are using AI to generate copy.

But as he calls it, as you'll hear, we are just increasing the speed to mediocrity in our writing. But we need to take a couple more steps to take it to great. So this is session 773 with Ray Edwards from RayEdwards.com. Enjoy.

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, his toxic trait is thinking he can hit a fastball from a major league pitcher, Pat Flynn.

Pat Flynn: Ray, welcome back to the SPI podcast, man. I'm so happy you're here. Thanks for taking the time today.

Ray Edwards: Thank you. I'm so thrilled to be back.

Pat Flynn: A lot has changed since you've come back on the show. I know things have happened personally, but also in the world of business. I mean, any quick updates on life and how things are going and what you're excited about these days?

Ray Edwards: Well, on life, I had brain surgery. So that was a big deal.

Yeah. Many people probably know I have, or maybe not. I have Parkinson's disease. And I had brain surgery, which turned the clock back about eight years on that. And I'm able to do things I couldn't do for the last seven or eight years. So that's exciting. I'm very excited about that. I'm excited about where technology is taking us.

AI played a part in my brain surgery. The device that helps stimulate my neurons is governed by AI.

Pat Flynn: Wow. That's actually really amazing because a lot of us hear about AI and in our industry, it's pretty scary and also exciting, but I think a lot of us forget about the actual life changing things that can happen with this technology.

And I was at social media marketing world in 2023, and I saw you give an incredible presentation on stage and not only did you give an incredible presentation, but you literally jumped off the stage in excitement, which wasn't even a thing you could even think about doing prior to your surgery.

Ray Edwards: That's exactly right. I think I, I know I panicked my assistant. She was, she had no idea I was going to do that, but it was, I was so overjoyed to be there to be serving people. Oh, it would have been more clear. on what I'm doing and why I'm doing it and what, why the things we all do in our businesses and our lives are important. And I don't, I don't want to take any of it for granted. I don't want other people to do that either.

Pat Flynn: Ray, you had mentioned on stage during that talk, you know, before we get into the tactics and strategies of, of copy about a letter. Can you tell us about this letter and the significance of it and the lessons we can learn from, from such an exercise?

Ray Edwards: Yeah, I wrote a letter to myself. I, as a copywriter, I've written lots of sales letters, designed and written and crafted to get people to do something, to get them to buy something, believe something, take some action. And I reached a point that the progression of my disease had gotten to a place where I was almost completely disabled and I was in lots of pain, physically and psychologically, and I actually considered not being on the planet anymore, taking an exit.

And I realized that was unacceptable that might have alleviated my pain, but it would have caused other people so much pain. I could not contemplate doing such a thing so I wrote myself a letter a sales letter to myself to demonstrate why I needed to change my life and my thinking and why I must do it and the headline of that letter was read this or die. And I borrowed that headline from the work of a dear friend of mine who's passed on now.

His name was Jim Rutz, one of the greatest copywriters who ever lived. He wrote a piece called Read This or Die. It was about a health newsletter. So my subject matter was different, but the point of the letter was the same. I was writing to me to get me to change my life. And I wrote it in a very blunt and very forceful way.

You might think that the headline itself sounds a little rough, but I know me, I knew what kind of talk I needed to hear for myself to get me to change the elements of my life that needed to change, which was basically everything. My relationships, the way I eat, the way I exercised or didn't exercise, the way I thought about things.

I had reached a point where I was out of get out of jail free cards and I had to realize there were more days behind me than there are ahead of me. Even in the most optimistic way of looking at things, I had to change or I was going to leave behind a string of broken promises to people I cared about.

I couldn't do that. So I wrote that letter and I did the things that I told myself I had to do and it changed my life and it ultimately led me to making the decision to get the surgery I had. And that was scary. It was the scariest thing I've ever done, to go in to have brain surgery. Because, think about it, I mean, your brain is who you are.

And I was going to let people inside there, and there was no predicting exactly what the outcome would be. We hoped it would be good, and it was fantastic. And had I not been through the writing of that book, and publishing the book, I don't think I would have been able to develop the courage to go ahead.

Pat Flynn: Wow. And the book Read This Or Die is available and you can go check it out and we'll link to it in the show notes. And since you have had that surgery, I remember you had documented some of the results of the surgery on your TikTok and your social media platforms. And some of those posts went absolutely wild.

I mean, can you give us a sense of how far reaching those posts had been and what happened since then are there opportunities that came about as a result of sharing?

Ray Edwards: Yeah, absolutely It was it was crazy and kooky because the book is a weird book the publisher was like this is the oddest book we've ever published because it was about how I used my copywriting framework the P.A.S.T.O.R. copywriting framework to write the letter to myself that leveraged me to change and make a decision like having the brain surgery So I, I did that, I went through the surgery and the video that posted on TikTok was shot on my wife's old iPhone 8 and I just clipped it together.

This goes to show I've spent thousands of dollars creating videos with a team and editors and the one I put together for my wife's iPhone on the spur of the moment after I left the doctor's office is the one that went viral. We had over a million views. Almost instantaneously. And it was a before and after.

It was me going into the clinic. I was barely able to walk. I could not get myself to go through the door. If you have Parkinson's, you often have freezing where you, you, in confined spaces or stressful situations, just freeze up. So I froze in the doorway going into the clinic. And I went in, I sat down, in the video I'm sitting, I'm vibrating like, like I'm on a bucking bronco. And the doctor turns on the neurostimulators that have been installed into my brain in surgery a month before that. He switches them on and instantly I stopped tremoring. I stand, he says, can you stand up? I not only stood up, I jumped up out of the chair and walked out of the room. And he's like, Whoa, hang on.

So the, his staff was amazed. The doctor was amazed. And then because of that video going viral, I was contacted by Boston Scientific. Who made the equipment that's been implanted inside my body. And they said, Hey, it seems like, you know, a little something about marketing, your video went viral. Can we talk to you about what we might do to get the word around about this surgery?

Cause so many people don't know about it. It's not experimental. It's proven it's been around for 30 years, but we'd like to get more people to consider having the procedure. And I'm like, I will, I'm already doing it. I've, I've talked to. Probably two dozen people as a result of that video who just contacted me out of the blue to say, I have my father or my grandfather or my husband or my wife has Parkinson's.

So I've talked to many people on the phone about the things that you consider and why they should go consider having the procedure. And I've talked to about 10 of those people so far who went and had the surgery and had similar results to me. And it's been the most gratifying thing I've ever done online.

To be able to see people's lives transformed by something like that procedure.

Pat Flynn: That is incredible. Ray, I want to talk to you. And we have spoken in our mastermind group for a very long time about your progress with that and where it could potentially even go, but that might be a great transition for us because a lot of the audience wants to change the lives of our members, our students and our customers, yet we don't know how to get the message from our brain or what we know can help out there into the world so that they can see it and they can understand what we have to offer them that they see the value and what it is we have to give.

Copy is the way to do that, but copy is scary. Copy is an art and it's something that you have mastered. And I'd love to dig into how we, those of us just starting out with copy can wrap our head around it. And you'd mentioned. Earlier, the P.A.S.T.O.R. model, and that is a model that you've come on the show to share before.

Perhaps a quick little overview of that would be great to start out with, and we can kind of dig into that a little bit, if, if indeed that is still the framework that is recommended today for, for how to get that message out there.

Ray Edwards: Yes, it is. And I'll go over that quickly. And then I'll have a few things to say about the context that we're in today, because it's the times have changed.

There's some things that are different. The human nervous system is not different. The way we are persuaded is not different, but the environmental changes we need to talk about. Let's go over the P.A.S.T.O.R. framework first. This is a framework, not just for writing sales copy. It's for influencing people to take any direction, making a decision.

If you're writing a blog post or you're trying to talk your wife into where you want to go have dinner, you can, you can use this framework. So P.A.S.T.O.R. P stands for person, problem, and pain. Those are the first three things you need to know everything about them you can. The person to whom you're writing, the problem you help them solve with your product or service, and the pain they feel in the way that they feel it.

And that's very important because we often think they should feel pain because of one thing, when the pain they feel is different. So, we find ourselves needing to understand how they feel it, like, if somebody wants to lose weight, lose fat off their body, we might think, if we're the expert, you need to do that because it's good for your cardiovascular health, it's good for your blood sugar levels, it prevents diabetes, it may help you avoid things like Alzheimer's or dementia.

But what they're thinking about is, the pain, the way they experience it is, I want to look good in a bathing suit. And we might think that's kind of shallow, or not, we might make a judgment about that. But we need to address the pain they're feeling, the way they're feeling it, and then we can help them understand why there's a deeper need for them to make the change we're seeking to get them to make.

So it's a case of selling to them based on what they want, but making sure they also get what they need. A is amplifying their pain and speaking to their aspirations.

And here's a shift I've made that I think is because of the shift we've seen in society since the unpleasant events of 2020 took place. That is, I'm putting more and more focus on the aspirations and less on amplifying pain. So I don't mean you shouldn't amplify the pain of not acting, not solving the problem.

So if the problem is I'm trying to quit vaping and I know it's not healthy, there is a place for us to amplify the consequences of not stopping vaping. The damage that can be done to your lungs, the bad things that can happen to you if you continue that habit over the long haul. But I don't spend as much time on that as I used to.

I focus more on the aspiration. The aspiration is, when you quit vaping, you're going to have more energy, you're going to have more cardiovascular health, you're going to be able to breathe deeper, you're going to stop. You're not going to be endangering your lungs. You're going to be living a healthier lifestyle, getting more oxygen to your brain.

There's all these good things it does for you. You're going to be able to live a life where you're healthier, feel younger, and you're able to do more for longer periods of time.

Pat Flynn: It's really interesting because for a while it felt like amplifying the fear, in fact, was what was going to work more. But can you speak to maybe why you made that transition to focusing more on aspiration?

I would rather focus on the positive. However, I know that people act because of what they're afraid of. However, that might be changing because I mean, this is just a hypothesis, but there's so much negativity in the world at this point. It almost all gets mixed in that we're looking for the small moments of joy.

Is that, is that true? Or do you, can you speak to that?

Ray Edwards: I think that is true. Now I mentioned earlier, the human nervous system doesn't change when we know through basic neurophysiology that we're wired, we're hardwired to avoid pain and to seek pleasure. However, that doesn't change. However, we've become so oversensitized to negative fear mongering and anger generating ideas and rhetoric that we now, we're turned off by it in a way we didn't used to be, we actually have the ability to turn off the pain signals and focus on something else. That's not new. That's why we eat chocolate cake in abundance when we shouldn't. Because it feels so good. However, what we've learned is that through all the negative stuff that's happened, we've become more sensitive to that.

And we all are seeking a more positive way of living and perceiving the world. And the little psychological trick, if you will, is this, aspiration contains within itself pain. Because if you aspire to something, why is it you aspire to it? You don't have it. So, when we speak to aspirations, we're focusing on the positive, but we want to focus on the positive in such a way that it makes it clear that the person reading our copy or watching our video realizes, well, I'm not experiencing that now.

That's not what's going on in my life now. I want that. So they're, they're experiencing the discomfort they want to move away from, which is, I want to stop vaping. I want to stop eating too much sugar. I want to be more fit. I want to have more financial resources. And they move toward their aspiration and away from the pain.

So it's the same maneuver with a different emphasis.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, that's a, that's a great nuance. It's as if like we're, if we're trying to help a person understand that a podcast is worth worth doing, it's not, Hey, if you don't have a podcast, you're going to be left behind, you're going to not get customers and your competitors are going to be much further ahead.

It's rather, you could be a celebrity in the space that you're in, and your audience can build a strong relationship with you by listening to your voice all from the comfort of your own home. And that makes a person go, wait, I don't have that right now. There's a, there's a delta between me and that status, the positive status that was shared.

Therefore, I want that, or you have my attention at least at this point, which is, as I know, the first part of this framework is, is we need to grab attention, right? And we can get more nuanced with the headlines and those things in a minute, but let's continue on with the model. So thank you for that deeper analysis of amplify and aspirations.

What comes next? The S, right?

Ray Edwards: The S, yes, is the story of your struggle, the solution and the systemization of the solution. So for many of us, there is a story about how we personally struggled with creating our podcast or building our online business or beginning to invest. And we went through a struggle and we maybe even had some failures and then we developed a solution.

And not only did the solution work for us, We found out we can help other people solve that same problem. And we developed a system because people not only want to know that you know how to solve the problem and that you solved it for other people, they want to know you can solve it for them and that they can achieve the same kinds of things you did.

If they do what you did in your own solution, that's the value of the system. So the story about how you struggle I think is important because it lets people know you're not some ivory tower guru saying, look, I'm perfect. You can be perfectly like me. You're saying I'm a human being. I understand how hard it is.

I've been through the struggle. I lost my job. I, I had business problems. I had relationship problems. I solved those problems, and here's the story of how to do it. And the story doesn't have to be long, it can be a couple of sentences, but it needs to be real and raw and true. And people sense, can sense the truth of these stories, but I think they're important to allowing them to relate to your, to your story, situation, your solution that you have in your product.

Pat Flynn: How do you tell the story well, right. We could easily say, Oh yeah, we went through this too, but is, is there a way to finesse that story or choose the right words to really make a connection? How, how does one go about choosing the right words? I guess, let's get a little into the, to the details now.

Ray Edwards: And a bit, I want to talk about AI, but for right now, I'm just going to pretend AI doesn't exist. Okay. I think the, the best way to tell a story, it's with meaningful specifics. So it's tempting to want to do what one of my colleagues, John Carlton, likes to call throat clearing copy, where you're just talking to get started.

You're like warming up. It's like clearing your throat before you do a speech. But you want to jump in with the details. Like on March 12th, 2013, I decided I was never going to be in want of money again. I was never going to be unable to pay my bills again. And so I made myself a promise. I was going to read every book on finances I could find.

I was going to find the answer to how to not only pay my bills, but amass a savings account and investments. So I had money earning money for me. And that's what I did. Here's the story of how it happened. So it's a meaningful specific in time and place and an event that happened. There's a, there's a maxim in writing that says, show, don't tell.

Because when you tell, you just talk about it in a passive, like, removed from the action sort of way. When you show it, people can picture you on March 12th, on that date, you sat down with books and a notepad and pen and started writing out your plan. So, keeping it brief, but keeping it narrative. Stories have a beginning, middle, and end.

Donald Miller, a mutual friend of both of ours, has a book called Building a Story Brand. And he gives a great definition of a story. And the story is, there's a hero who has a problem, faces a challenge, a guru or guide appears, offers him a path, he follows the path or she follows the path to either success or failure.

And we're, we're showing them the path to success, of course, but that's the shortest definition of the story I know. It's one of the best definitions I know, but details and careful crafting of the words are important. There's no fast track to great writing, but there is a quick path to writing a pretty good story.

And that's it.

Pat Flynn: Putting the words on paper or typing them out can feel very heavy. You know, as somebody who's written books and is in the middle of my fourth is, there's like always doubt that comes into, well, I don't know if that's the right word or, you know, maybe there's a better way to do this, or this doesn't sound good.

And, you know, the traditional, you know, we don't do this anymore, but you roll up the paper and you throw it into the bin and then the pile just gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. Might you have any, strategies and tips for, I guess that's called writer's block, but you know, just that slog that we have to go through when we begin putting words to sales page, if you will.

Ray Edwards: I think the, the key is to get your inner editor to sit down and shut up while you're writing and just get that first draft out on paper or on the screen for your keyboard. There's a book by Anne Lamott called Bird by Bird, which is a great book. If you're aspiring to write better stories I recommend that book.

She refers to, you gotta be okay with writing, we'll call it, poopy first drafts. That's not what she said exactly, but something like that. We call it, in my company, we refer to it as, this is equally as gross. We call it the vomit draft. Just vomit it out onto the page. You know it's bad. It's okay. Get the bad draft out on the page.

Because you can always clean it up. But it's very hard to clean up a blank page. So, getting it out the first time, and then refining it, and being okay with rewriting it over and over again, especially the story part of your sales copy, is important because every word is important. And you want to craft it carefully, but Stephen King says, writing is rewriting.

And as Stephen King has to rewrite, so do you.

Pat Flynn: I love that. And a person I got to know quite well recently, Rory Vaden, said it in a different way, but it really stuck with me. And it was like, you gotta show you're ugly. Like, you just gotta show you're ugly first. And I love that. It just stuck with me. And it's also a little gross when you think about it, but it's true.

Okay, that's really helpful. And so I appreciate that. And the story, with a little bit of struggle, relatable, and then the systemization of a story. Solution. Is this at the point at which we're like, and this is how it's done. And this is my program. And this is where this solution exists,

Ray Edwards: Right. If you think about it, you've done this. I'm sure you're conscious of this with your podcasting course, your other courses, where you show people how to do things you've done, and you've been very personable in sharing your struggles in the beginning, as you learned. How to do it the right way. And that's what's powerful and gets people engaged in the idea of learning from us or working with us.

And then the T in P.A.S.T.O.R. Is for transformation and testimony. So here's where you're showing the transformation in your life and in the lives of your customers, your clients, how they change their lives by doing the thing you teach them how to do, or by taking your advice or following your system and the testimony is. It's them telling those stories in their own words. about how they found your instruction, how they found your course to be helpful to them, how they were able to change their own circumstances. Because there's a, there's an ancient book of wisdom that says, don't praise yourself, but let the list of others praise you and you'll be elevated.

This is what having other people give their testimony about how your stuff has worked for them does for you. We all tend to believe what comes from the lips of others about a person more than we believe what the person says about themselves.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, I mean, amen to that for sure. I mean, how often do we look at Amazon reviews before we purchase something?

It's the same kind of thing. We want validation that, okay, other people have done this too. I don't want to be the first, but that begs the question, what if you don't have any customers or students yet? It's the first time you're selling something, does that mean testimonials don't exist yet? What do you do in that situation?

Ray Edwards: I don't think you're, you're stuck at all in that situation because the presumption I have is if you're going to be teaching something, you've, you've helped other people with it before, even before you made a course or wrote a book, or had a coaching program you've helped people in your life. And so I just was talking with someone in our mastermind group about this yesterday. And she said I don't have any customers yet.

And I said, do you have people you've helped? She said well just with advice over the years. How many people are and she said probably a dozen and I said, well, there you go Just call those people and say do you remember when we worked together? Do you remember what that was like when I helped solve that problem?

Yes. Yes. What happened after that? Get them to tell you the story, get them reinvested in what happened, and then ask them is it okay if I summarize that and maybe use that to help people understand how I can help them with this problem. Almost always the answer will be yes. You get them to either write it out or you transcribe it and edit it and write it out for them, get their approval.

Now you've got a testimonial that's real, that's true. You don't say they bought something from you. You don't ever tell a lie. You simply say, these are some comments from people I've helped with this problem in the past, and this is what they have to say. It's as simple as that. And if you haven't helped people, go help them.

Go help some people.

Pat Flynn: That's so perfect. I mean, and I've shared this on the podcast before. It's like, go get one result, like the changes, everything. And you don't even need a website or a product yet to just help somebody that can then be used and utilized and showcased later.

I'm curious, Ray, your thoughts on, well, what makes a great testimonial? Because the generic Ray was amazing. I highly recommend this to everybody is what we're going to get. Typically when we just say, Hey, can you leave me a testimonial? How do we. A, what is a great testimonial look like, and how do we honestly have another person on the other end, a student or a person who we've once helped before, how do we get them to say those things?

We don't put words in their mouth, but there are, I assume, questions we can ask to set that up.

Ray Edwards: I would ask questions like, describe to me what your life was like in relation to this experience. Problem you're trying to solve. Like before you knew how to make a podcast, what was it like before that? Then how did you find out about my podcasting course?

And then what were any fears or hesitations you had before you signed up? And let them answer those questions. Then ask them, well, after you signed up, what was the experience of going through the course? Like, what'd you discover along the way? And then afterwards, what's it like now? And what you'll get is something like this.

It'll be some kind of edited together response to them saying, well, before I found Pat's podcasting course, I wanted to have a podcast, but I thought it's impossible. I don't know technology. I don't know anything about audio. I don't think I could sit and talk for an hour. I know how to do any of that stuff.

I found Pat's program. I was a little hesitant. I thought this is quite a bit of money for me to invest. I don't know if it'll work, but I trust Pat. He's got a guarantee. I'm going to, I'm going to give it a shot. I'm so glad I did. The course was fun. It was informative. It was in bite size, easy to understand bites.

And I didn't have to be a techno wizard. He had answers to all my questions. I put my podcast together. I published my first three episodes. I actually got people listening to the podcast now. I'm so glad I did this. This is where I'm getting all the new leads for my new business. So that's a podcast. It's not the typical.

It was amazing. Pat's the greatest. I mean you are the greatest but for your testimonials, you want more detail than that.

Pat Flynn: And don't worry, audience, I'm not, even though that was a perfect testimony, I'm not going to clip that and use that because it was just an example.

Ray Edwards: It's all true.

Pat Flynn: Ray said it, not out of nowhere.

I'm, I'm going to, I appreciate you, man. That's, that's really, first of all, kind, but also really, really helpful. And I really love those questions. I definitely want to encourage the audience to head over to the show notes page. We'll have the resources and we'll share some of these things so that you can kind of easily digest them.

Ray, let's continue on because there's still some letters left that we need to uncover. AI as well, which I'm also curious from my perspective, speaking to a copywriter and with the noise out there about AI replacing copywriting. And I'm curious your thoughts on that, but we'll get to that in a minute.

But for right now, let's talk about the next letters. So T O R.

Ray Edwards: So T is transformation and testimony. O is the offer. This is where you tell people, this is what I have for sale. This is what you get, how it helps you, and what it costs. And even in the offer, one thing you want to be careful of is don't just say you get 18 lessons and they're 20 minutes long each and there's a 150 page instruction manual or workbook because people are not really buying the stuff you're giving them.

They're buying the transformation you bring about. So, it should be something more along the lines of in this five module course, you're going to go from total podcast newbie to actually knowing how to create a podcast, you're going to want to listen to, they're going to eagerly anticipate each episode.

They're going to listen. They're going to comment. They're going to respond. They're going to engage. You're going to have their attention, which is the most important asset in this economy you could possibly get is the attention of other people. So even as you're giving them the details of the offer you're describing the benefits of not what's what they get with your training or your book or your course or your coaching you're describing what it does for them. That's what's so important.

Pat Flynn: Before we move on, Ray, there was a good analogy I, I once saw, and, and we teach this in our heroic online courses course, because we, we talk a little bit about sales pages and, and writing copy.

And you're so right. The transformation is what you're selling. People don't want to buy the course. They want to buy what ultimately the course can give them. And sharing that in the sales page has been so important. And there's a good analogy of your student is like, okay, Mario, like the original Mario game, 1985, right?

And let's say that you have a company that sells Mario's, these little power ups, right? That can make them grow bigger and, you know, shoot fire and stuff, right? What you're selling is not the flower, right? Oh, this is a flower. It makes you shoot fire and all this kind of stuff like that's that's the feature.

The benefit is this will allow you to go through the level much faster and kill any enemies without any worry. And then the ultimate dream is you'll get to rescue the princess at the end, right? And reminding them about that sort of bigger reason why this is important. And you just said it in the framework perfectly.

So, I mean, that doesn't mean we don't talk about, how many videos there are or what the lessons and modules are, right? We still, we still bring that up, but do you follow that up with, you know, module one, how to get your equipment for your podcast so that you'll sound better than everybody else in your space?

Like, is that so that like a good framework for bringing the benefit in?

Ray Edwards: So that is one of the things we actually teach in our copywriting course, because and not only gives the reason why you want to do the thing you're talking about, it gives the benefit. So you, you definitely want to talk about the modules, the workbooks, all the assets you have, they're going to help them. And you want to talk about the benefits and why they're important. That's all true. Very well said.

Pat Flynn: What I found is interesting when, when going through that exercise with some students, Ray is like, when we go, okay, well here you've shared the features of your course.

That's great. But can you write the benefit of each particular module and lesson and why it should, why it exists? And it's funny because almost every time there's a couple lessons in there that they just don't have a read, like there's no benefit. And then I go, well, then why is this in the course? And they go, well, I don't know.

Should we take it out? Yeah. Why is it like, yes.

Ray Edwards: If you have to ask the question when I was in the course, take it out for sure.

Pat Flynn: So that's a, that's a great exercise. I appreciate that. So that's the offer. And then R is for what?

Ray Edwards: Request a response, ask them to buy in the real world of selling. The number one reason salespeople don't get the sales because they don't ask for it.

It's the same thing online. If you're selling a product or a coaching program or whatever. If you believe it's really going to help people, you owe it to them to tell them with conviction why that's true, what they're going to get, and how they get it. You don't have to be salesy or pushy, you just have to be direct and clear.

So click on the button, fill in the info, And you'll be in the members area five minutes from now, ready to start your course or your training or whatever.

Pat Flynn: So when a person is maybe selling something for the first time, I know there are often a lot of icky feelings, right? The worry that you might upset your audience because you're now monetizing them as we say, or it's just, it feels slimy because you have to, you know, now there's money involved and there are tactics that are great to use.

It's like creating urgency and, you know, webinars and, you know, but it all sounds so, so slimy for people. How do we, in our mind, approach selling in a way that allows us to understand that this is actually a good thing? Like, it can be done in a, in a way with grace, but Still, with that ask, if you go through the entire P.A.S.T.O.R. framework, but you don't request that sale or the call to action at the end is missing, then it's all for nothing.

And this is the most important part of this to finish it off. Yeah, this is where we go. Okay, well, let's just hope that they'll click the button because I said everything else before this. How do you ask?

Ray Edwards: It has to come from a place of real belief on your part that you have an answer that will help the person who's considering making the purchase.

And you know that it'll help them. You more than likely have a money back guarantee, so you know they're not risking anything. And being able to look into their eyes and say, look, I want to help you. I can help you. If it doesn't work, I'll give you your money back. So you have nothing to lose. Let's go ahead and get started.

Let's do this and make it work for you. And if you can say that and mean it, it may feel a bit uncomfortable, but when you begin seeing people's lives transformed, I'm sure you can attest to this, Pat, when you start getting the feedback from people saying this changed my life, changed my business, helped my family have more time together, whatever the case may be for the transformation of that particular person, It really makes you understand what you're doing is important and meaningful.

And you don't have to be salesy to do that. You just have to believe. Zig Ziglar said that selling is really merely a transfer of enthusiasm. That doesn't sound pushy to me.

Pat Flynn: That's great. And you're not the first person to come on to say that is this. I mean, Michael Hyatt has come on here. Chalene Johnson has come on and have each said similar things that when you know that what you have to offer is helpful the selling just becomes so much easier. That's where I think a lot of the slimy feeling comes from is, is the lack of confidence in what you have to offer. And guess what? If you work a little bit upfront to get some results for people, that sliminess, that sense of, well, I don't know if this is actually going to help people goes away almost instantly.

And I remember a time when I started selling the podcasting course, Power Up Podcasting, And I saw the results come in from people. That it was a weight lifted off my shoulder in terms of putting myself out there. I mean, I scheduled like six months worth of webinars right after that because I was like, let's go.

This is working. So get to that point of clarification in your mind. And if you have to go out and get some results first, like, do that. It's similar to, I think it was Ben Franklin who said, like, if you don't have a good story to tell, like, go make the story happen. That's probably not the exact quote, but I love this.

Ray, you're simplifying a lot of things. of marketing and sales for us today. And the P.A.S.T.O.R. Framework is indeed the way that you would kind of craft a message on a sales page, is it not? Like it starts with the person and the problem and the, in the pain, and it goes through the rest of the, like, this is a sales page that we've built out essentially, right?

Ray Edwards: Yes, absolutely correct. And it can also be an email or a blog post, but in the simplest expression of why I created it. It was to help people write sales pages and take away. You can get very deep into the details. This there's lots of nuance. There's lots of expertise and things to learn, but for most of us, we're trying to sell a product that solves one particular distinct problem.

This is an easy and simple way to write a persuasive, it'll sell your product or service, and you can do it without feeling like you're being a pushy salesperson.

Pat Flynn: Let's progress into a conversation about AI. When ChatGPT came out a couple years ago, what were your initial thoughts as a copywriter on what this was going to do for the industry?

Ray Edwards: I've been through some cycles. I started with skepticism. Then I was, I had my oh crap moment. Where it was like, Oh, this is actually pretty good. And it's gotten better. What, what I held to from the beginning and hold to even more closely today is first of all, it's amazing. AI is amazing. It's already enabled us to do amazing things that are beneficial to people, to organizations and to the planet.

I've personally benefited from it. As I said, said earlier about my surgery. That's only going to get better. They're, they're doing research now with AI technologies that are going to help people use similar neural implants to the ones that I have that are helping people already to walk who were paralyzed with spinal cord injuries, help people to move their hands and fingers.

And they couldn't do so before we can all see that and say, yeah, it's a good thing when it comes to creators like videographers, photographers, copywriters, It's, it can be a little unsettling. What I've discovered is, this is how I put it. It's raised the floor on mediocrity. You can now be a mediocre copywriter faster and easier than ever before.

Because as the best AIs I've used, write pretty darn good copy, but if a human being who understands the nuances and the craft of copywriting, takes that copy and rewrites it, It's almost always better than once the AI generated. And I believe that will continue to be the case. Now, maybe I'm wrong. If I am, we'll have to adjust and move along, but I also write fiction as a hobby and I've used a bunch of different fiction writing AI tools and it's the same thing.

I see there's, there's a certain level of mediocre writing you can attain. And I think we're going to see is a lot of low effort, low quality or medium quality content generated over the next few years. And people can smell it. I mean, has your experience been that there's there's certain things you see people publish and you just think, Oh, that's AI.

I recognize the way that's phrased. It just feels like ChatGPT.

Pat Flynn: Yeah. I mean, absolutely. People are pretty perceptive of, of those kinds of things. And I remember it was the first episode of 2022, I believe Roberto Blake, great YouTuber came on the podcast and we were talking about this idea of saturation and he, he fired back with, well, is the market that seems saturated, saturated with amazing things with greatness. No, not at all.

Ray Edwards: I love that.

Pat Flynn: Yeah. I loved it too. I mean, that's stuck with me for sure. And it pertains to the conversation now, because like you said, and I love the way you phrase it, there's just like a plethora of pretty good stuff coming out now as a result of AI, but what makes something great are those little details and the human connections, and maybe AI one day could catch on and understand, but in current day, no. And this is why you can't just use a tool like ChatGPT to have it write something for you, and then you can just copy and paste it. But, in your words, is it still a tool we should be using?

And then how do we go from a mediocre draft from a tool like this to greatness?

Ray Edwards: Yes, I believe we should be using it. I saw an interview with Seth Godin yesterday and he was saying everybody should use AI at least 15 minutes a day, every day. To understand what it's really doing, what's possible. And I use it every day.

We created our own copywriting AI trained on a body of my copy and templates and things like that. And I use it every day, but I don't let it write the copy for me. I use it as a first draft tool. You can do this with any AI, you can use Chat GPT, you use Claude, Gemini, whatever you prefer to use. Use it as a first draft tool.

And the keys to me about for using it in the best way possible, it's good for speeding up the process. If you get into great, what I call breakthrough copy. Mediocre copy is pretty easy to generate. With or without AI. Breakthrough copy, copy that makes people's brains spin and makes them say, I've got to have this thing you're selling me.

I must have it and just order it like crazy. Breakthrough copy takes creativity and the human inspiration that makes those things happen. So here's how I use AI every day. Maybe that's a more useful way of saying this. I'll generate my first draft, and it starts with making the prompt better. If you write terrible, lazy prompts, you're going to get terrible, lazy copy out of whatever AI you're using.

If you write thoughtful, carefully constructed prompts, you'll get results from AI that are thoughtful and carefully assembled. And then you take it and you begin to customize it, and what I do is after I get a good draft in AI, I put the AI draft on the left. I put a blank document on the right hand screen.

I began rewriting every word of it from scratch myself. It all passes through my keyboard or through my lips if I'm dictating. And then I've got something that I wrote myself. I let AI write my first draft, my vomit draft, if you will. And now I can work from that. And I'm looking for those breakthrough ideas.

Plus, there's one other thing. That is, there are just moments of inspiration where you have these ideas and you realize AI could never come up with that idea like the book that I just published called Read This Or Die was originally entitled Your Beliefs Are Not Working. Your beliefs are not working. That doesn't sound like a very exciting book title. It's only through a lot of discussions with my collaborative writer that we came up with the Read This Or Die title and it was just one day in the conversation I was telling Jeff my co writer about My friend, Jim Rutz, who had written this thing, the headline was Read This Or Die.

And Jeff said, wait, that's the title of your book. Now, AI is not going to do that. Those, the serendipitous convergence of thought moments that only human beings can have, but AI is a useful tool. I recommend using it with caution and ethically and not using it as a shortcut, just copy and paste. Not the least reason of which I've seen several well known people, lately using AI to post their social content. How do I know? Because they posted along with the post something like this. Why yes, Ray, that's a great idea for a post. I'll be happy to write that for you. And I recognize the language from Chad GPT or Claude. And they posted that right along with their content and social media because they weren't paying attention.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, it's not worth the risk to kind of pretend or, you know, it just takes a moment to kind of lose trust with people. And so I love how you have this exercise of still using ChatGPT but you still have the screen on the right hand side and you're still writing, you're still allowing for those moments of serendipity to come through and the collaborative efforts on top of that just multiply that opportunity.

And I think that's really smart. As we finish up this conversation, Ray, you know, a lot of people in the audience don't have either the chops and therefore are going to use some of these tools and the advice that you've offered if it had been has been really great, or they don't have the time to do the copywriting themselves.

I know you have a solution on your end that you'd love to share in terms of if anybody in the audience is looking for some copywriting help. You have a number of different resources for people at different levels, but you just spend a moment to share where they can learn more and kind of discover what you have.

Ray Edwards: Sure. Thank you for that. I have a book. How to Write Copy that Sells. It's probably the lowest barrier to entry way of getting more information about writing copy. We have a copywriting AI called ClarityScribe. So if you go to ClarityScribe.com, you can check that out. There's no credit card required. Just try it out.

We've built wizards in there for writing different pieces of copy you need, like sales pages, landing pages, social posts. First drafts, not copy and paste. Pay attention. Do what I was just telling you about. And then we have a membership where you can get to copy, writing AI, and training and other things.

It's available at RayEdwards.com/copyai. Those are just a few of the resources that we can help you. I mean, this is my thing. Somebody asked me yesterday, what do you do? I said, I teach people how to write the words that sell their products, services, and ideas. That's what I do. And I love doing this.

So if nothing else, go to RayEdwards.com, RayEdwards.com. I have plenty of free resources that I'd love to share. If you wrote back to me and said, I didn't ever spend the time with you, but I made $100,000. That makes me happy too. So please do that.

Pat Flynn: This was an incredible workshop, honestly. Thank you so much for this.

And we'll be sure to share it out with as many people because there's so many amazing people in the audience who have these incredible things to share. And after today, they'll have had now a better opportunity to do that. So thank you so much for that. I appreciate you and your time and congrats on everything and looking forward to the next mastermind call with you.

Ray Edwards: Thank you, my friend. Appreciate it.

Pat Flynn: All right. I hope you enjoyed that interview and workshop with Ray Edwards. The P.A.S.T.O.R. framework is amazing. We'll have all the things on the show notes page, smartpassiveincome.com/session773. And be sure to check out Ray and rayedwards.com.

And you might stumble upon him on TikTok or Instagram. Find that video. It's so inspirational. The one we talked about in the beginning, where he's like, He stopped his shaking and walked through the doors and just surprised all the doctors. Just an incredible story and I'm so glad that the brain surgery went well so that we could have him on the show today and he can continue to help others and in his zone of genius of copy and the P.A.S.T.O.R. Framework.

I have it written right in front of me when I am working on sales pages and working on emails and such because it is so powerful. So great. Thank you so much for today. I appreciate you and thank you for listening in and we have more episodes coming your way and be sure not to miss them. In order to do that, just hit that subscribe button.

That's it. Look forward to serving you in the next episode. Cheers. Have a good one.

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. Our senior producer is David Grabowski, 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!

SPI 709: What Most People Aren't Doing That You Should

Dan Franks: That year that you keynoted was like our most stacked lineup because we had you and John Lee Dumas from kind of like that business entrepreneurship side of speaking. We had Sarah Koenig, the host of Serial. We had Mark Maron, who had just interviewed Obama. It was, like, a crazy lineup, and we lost so much money that year.

So, like, that was the come to Jesus moment, so to speak was, like, "Hey, this event that was just so awesome and, like, star-studded and all this, like, Whoa, we lost money." And that's where we all kind of took a step back and, put our business hat on instead of our fun hobby hat on.

Pat Flynn: There's something that only a few people are doing out there, but those who are doing it, especially those who are doing it right, are getting incredible results with their business. And results meaning a ton of brand loyalty, a ton of exposure, a ton of authority in the space, ton of growth. And if those are things that you are interested in, well, this is definitely an episode for you.

And we're going to be talking with Dan Franks. Now, Dan Franks is somebody who I got to know a long time ago. In fact, he and his partner, Jared, Put on an event called Podcast Movement. If you've been a podcaster for a while, you know about Podcast Movement. Dan is one of the masterminds behind putting that event together.

And I wanted to bring Dan on because he and I just worked together on Card Party, a big event for my sort of side gig over in the Pokemon space that was tremendously successful as well. And now we're seeing even more opportunity, more growth and yes, it was difficult to put together, but the opportunities are right in front of us for many niches, for many markets.

And we want to talk with you today specifically about Dan's journey, getting started, what mistakes he made and what he would do differently if he were starting over today, specifically with creating live events. And as you'll hear in this episode, a live event doesn't necessarily mean you need thousands of people.

I know that can be very intimidating. But like many of us, we start with just a few. And we're gonna talk about Dan's start, we'll talk about Card Party as well, and all the things that went well, all the things that we want to do better. And this will be a fun behind the scenes insight into podcast movement, into Card Party.

And Dan and I have been working together for very closely now for the last year. And now we're putting together card party Gen 2 so you'll hear a lot of what's going on anyway. Thank you. And appreciate you being here for session 709 of the Smart Passive Income Podcast. This is Dan Franks over at Podcast Movement.

Enjoy the show.

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 still hasn't gotten a deal with 3M yet for all the posted notes he uses. Eh, but maybe one day. Pat Flynn.

Pat Flynn: Dan, welcome to the Smart Passive Income Podcast. Thank you for being here, man.

Dan Franks: Thanks, Pat. A dream come true. Long time coming. First time we connected was almost 10 years ago. So it's funny to be able to do this now.

Pat Flynn: Dude, that's crazy. And now you and I are working very closely together on another event that you and I both put on called Card Party.

And we'll get to that in a little bit. But what's really interesting is you have invited me on your stage several times. I've keynoted Podcast Movement a couple times, and it's just been such a amazing journey to be a part of that with you. And now you're on my stage, my virtual stage, the podcast, and I'm excited to dive into your story a little bit.

So I'd love to learn about where this all started for you. What's your background and how did you get into events in the first place?

Dan Franks: Yeah. So, I mean, you're, you are involved in this depending, I don't know how much of that, you know, or not, but I, my background is accounting. So I'm a, I'm a CPA, still certified, haven't practiced in a while.

Spent nearly 10 years doing taxes, mainly small business taxes, and through that, one of my co workers and I decided to start a podcast, and that happened over lunch when we were talking about podcasts we listened to and podcasts we liked, and yours was the common ground between Joe Cassandra, that's his name, he's kind of a little Twitter celebrity now, but he and I started talking and decided like, hey, we can, we can kind of do what Pat does, but we can do it different so that we're not copying Pat like some of these other shows we've seen.

So we decided to start a podcast and that was 2012, 2013. And through that we had you on the show and that was my first personal connection to you. And then through that, that podcast we had, we started going to New Media Expo, which you were heavily involved with at the time, 2013, 2014, those years. And that's where I met, or kind of reconnected with Jared Easley, who was one of the co founders of Podcast Movement. And that's the event where we were looking around and we're like, wow, there's a lot of podcasters here, but there's a lot of content for bloggers. And that's where we noticed that disconnect at New Media Expo in 2014 was, there needs to be something like this, but for podcasters specifically.

And, you know, not to get too far ahead of it, but that's where the idea of Podcast Movement came from. And then it just took off from there.

Pat Flynn: That's incredible. I mean, It was obvious that podcasting was growing quite quickly, but nobody had really stepped up to create, like, the de facto podcasting event yet.

And so you saw that opportunity and you decided, hey, let's go and create it. So what happens at that point, you and Jared are like, hey, let's do this thing. Like, how do you even begin to wrap your head around, like, how to put something like that together? Because you hadn't had, really, event experience prior to that. So what did you do? How did you make it work?

Dan Franks: Yeah, you know, we we all kind of went with the ready fire aim approach in that sense. Just saw something we wanted to do and just decided to do it. And probably our ignorance was a good thing that we didn't know what we were getting into. But it was Yeah, myself, Jared Easley and then a gentleman named Gary Leland and Mitch Todd.

The four of us were the ones who thought We're kind of there that first year in Dallas trying to plan everything. So yeah, that was January and 2014 New Media Expo where we came up with this idea. And by February, it was actually February 14th, easy to remember. Cause it's Valentine's day. That was when we launched the Kickstarter to raise money for that first Podcast Movement.

So, I mean, it was like, it was just over a month from the time we were in Vegas like thinking of this to going live with like, hey, we're doing this give us money. And you know, the interesting thing was none of us was Pat. None of us was the big names then Cliff Ravenscraft, John Lee Dumas, Andrew Warner like those were all people we wanted involved, but like none of us were them and none of them were endorsing it or promoting it.

So this was really as grassroots as it gets in the sense of, Hey, here's four random guys who are somehow tangential to this podcasting world who have this idea now give us money. We've never done events before. We're not known in podcasting really, but give us money and we'll do this thing. So yeah, from that point on, it was just learning as we go, flying by the seat of our pants, figuring out how to run an event.

And the closest thing I had done was I planned my wedding. My wife didn't do it, I did it. And I do remember that several people were like, Oh, you should, you should consider doing this for a living. This was a really good wedding that you put together. And I was like, well, I'm not gonna be a wedding planner.

But little did I know, like, there's, there's some similarities to what I, I ended up doing.

Pat Flynn: What made your wedding special from a planning aspect, I'm curious, do you think?

Dan Franks: Not what made it special but what made it difficult was our venue that we were supposed to be at shut down like a few months before our wedding and anyone who's planned a wedding knows sometimes you plan these like over a year in advance so we had everything lined up for this one location and then a few months out it's like oh that location's not there so we ended up having to find this kind of warehouse photo studio type place that had no set up for a wedding and work with all kinds of vendors to pull together the furniture and the lighting and, and everything that was supposed to be provided by the original venue.

And so I guess that was what made it special was it was, it was nothing. And then it was something.

Pat Flynn: That's cool. That's amazing. Okay. So first year of Podcast Movement, how many people were there? How did you even get people there? Kickstarter, I remember that now I'm curious how much money did you raise and I'm just if you are willing to share what it took to put that on as far as cost.

And I just want to know kind of like what happened. So how many people cost and how much did you raise on Kickstarter?

Dan Franks: Yeah, I mean, that's another ignorance is bliss kind of situation. So we we thought, okay, if we could just raise, I think it was like five or 10,000, then we'll be able to host this event.

Like we thought we had found a venue and we thought we had like price things out. And we're like, cool, this is what we need to run this event. And good thing was we like tripled what we were trying to get to. So we ended up getting over 30,000 raised, which we're like, wow, we've, we've got a made right?

Like we thought we needed five or 10,000 and we've tripled that. Like, like we'll, we'll be able to roll in this, but what happened was the venue that we thought we needed for, you know, a couple hundred attendees, we ended up needing like three times that size. So we ended up having almost 600 attendees.

So we had to change venues like two or three times leading up to it. Just cause we kept outgrowing what we were, where we were going to do it. I mean, yeah, so to answer your question, we ended up like 550 to 600 people. It's not bad. No, it was, it was really good, like more than we expected, more than anyone expected.

And I, I don't remember like money. I remember it was. Basically break even but one of the cool things coming out of it was was we had invited you to speak you weren't able to and I think there was probably a little bit of like wait and see from not just you a lot of people that we invited to speak in that 2014 event but then we from there we invited you like even before that event actually happened once like people started talking about it and people could tell okay this actually might be something legitimate I was looking back through emails we invited you a few weeks before you that 2014 event to be the keynote speaker for 2015.

So then at the event, we could announce like, Hey, come back next year. There will be a next year. And you know, here's who the headliner is for next year. That was kind of like that strategic thing. And a little bit of that validation before it happened. Now, I'm sure if it flopped or something, there would have been, you know, some fallout from that.

But, but to answer the original question, while we didn't make a lot of money, there was enough evidence there that like, okay, this is something that like we can, as long as we break even can, can keep going into the future.

Pat Flynn: Oh yeah. And I remember coming to the event in 2015 and that was magical. That was my first time really being the headliner at a big event and doing the keynote and I wanted to bring something special.

That was in, was that? That was in Fort Worth. That was in Fort Worth. Oh, okay, right, right, right. Yes. There was just, you know... At that point, it felt like it was a real event. I know the first year was sort of like a test and an experiment, but very quickly it was validated. And then of course, the next year, how many attendees did you have in year two versus year one?

Dan Franks: We doubled that year. So we were almost 1200 that second year in Fort Worth and the financials didn't work out that well. That time we kind of got ahead of ourselves and that was that year that you keynoted was like our most stacked lineup because we had you and John Lee Dumas from kind of like that business entrepreneurship side of speaking.

We had Sarah Koenig, the host of Serial, who was like, that was like, the year. That's right. We had Mark Maron, who had just interviewed Obama. We had Aisha Tyler, who was a huge comedian podcaster there, still is. I mean, it was, it was like a crazy lineup, and we lost so much money that year. So like, like, we're like, after that first year, we're like, okay, we know what we're doing now.

Like, now we can just blow it out. And then. Like, the bad thing is, my background as an accountant, for whatever reason, I just never saw that in those early years as a business, I never saw Podcast Movement as a business, it was like a fun thing we were doing, so I just, like, the same approach that I would talk to all my clients about on the accounting side, like, I just didn't take that approach in those early years of the event, just because, like, I wasn't trying to make money, therefore, therefore, I proactively wasn't like trying to figure out how to not to lose money. And yeah, like we got so backwards in that event and it was like the most amazing event in terms of the lineup and the, you know, we threw, we paid for a big party, like all this stuff. And then when we're reconciling the end of the year, it's like, Oh my gosh, we like have to put money into this thing.

So yeah, that was like the kind of, you know, come to come to Jesus moment, so to speak was like, Hey, this, this event that like, was just so awesome and like star studded and all this, like. Whoa, we lost money. So that was a, that was a learning experience for sure. And that's where we all kind of took a step back and, and got into the, you know, put our, our business hat on instead of our, like our fun hobby hat on.

Pat Flynn: I remember that year, Aisha, I got to meet her. She was amazing, and I recognized her from, she was a, a, a guest star on Friends actually. And it was just like, I was like, how did you in year two get all these big names in? Was it, was it, literally throwing money at them and saying, Hey, we'll pay you to come.

And that's where a lot of the money issues came from.

Dan Franks: Yeah, it absolutely did. So that was, I think that's when podcasting was really getting into the mainstream. And what was happening at that point was all these podcasters were now hiring agents and these agents were representing these podcasters. So, you know, instead of like going to a podcaster and just trying to figure out like how to make it work for them at this event that they might like want to be a part of anyways. And now it was like, okay, this is like a revenue source for me because instead of doing a standup show at this night, I'm going to go do a speaking gig, but I'm still going to get paid as if I were doing a business transaction.

So that was the first year we noticed that where it was like, Hey, all these podcasters are now like Hollywood people, so to speak.

Pat Flynn: How much does it cost to hire? If I'm going to put on an event and it requires like celebrities, you know, that you see on TV and stuff to come or famous podcasters or whatever it might be like, what range are we talking about as far as like how much they would ask for?

I mean, obviously if you're getting somebody like Obama to come and speak at your event, I mean, that's going to be hundreds of thousands, but like a celebrity, I'm curious, like what range were you paying these, these guys?

Dan Franks: Probably, and this was, you know, and I can, I can explain how we, how it works now a little bit more, but back then, I mean, it was anywhere from 10 to 40,000 for a, you know, 30 minute talk.

Some of them were like Sarah Koenig from Serial, her talk was like a canned talk. It was just, she was taking that talk on the road and doing it in different theaters. And she just so happened to do it at Podcast Movement. Wow. I didn't even know that. Yeah. So that, that was more of a show than like a, a special for Podcast Movement kind of thing.

But you know, it was, it's interesting kind of seeing this, this how this thing works in different waves and kind of a cycle here, and I don't say this to brag, but I say this now, like our arrangement with speakers is different now, because oftentimes now networks will come to us and say, Hey, we have this celebrity podcaster that we really kind of want involved or we have this new talent that we just signed that we'd love to have involved. So now kind of that that onus and that payment i'm imagining is happening either on that network side as like hey, we're getting spotlight on our person or it's just built into their contract that they're going to do a certain number of things. So for instance several years ago We had Will Ferrell keynote Podcast Movement Evolutions in Los Angeles, which like for me was like I won't even call that a bucket list.

It's like nothing that I would have put on my bucket list because but he had just launched a podcast network inside of iHeart and iHeart's like, hey, it would be really cool while we're in Los Angeles to get one of our bigger names on stage. And I was like, heck, yeah, to Will Ferrell. So to your question, like having Will Ferrell speak if we went to his agent would, I would guess, be six figures if it was even something we could get, whereas in this instance, it was not.

They were coming to you. Yeah. So, so that's kind of how, how it's turned. So people, we'll sometimes look at our lineup up and be like, Oh my gosh, like you're paying these speakers so much and sometimes we are because if we proactively invite somebody, then it's a typical speaker payment arrangement. But if it's coming to us, not so much.

And you can't really tell the difference from the outside.

Pat Flynn: Now that's something you can't do in the early days of an event typically because you don't have that name yet or it's not known as sort of the de facto event. At what point in the journey of Podcast Movement did it did it start to really feel like holy crap, this is like the big event that everybody is gonna be going to every year. And this is this is like more than just for fun now. This is a real serious thing I know you started taking it seriously after you saw the money loss after year two, but when in your mind was it like this is like Comic Con now for podcasters.

Dan Franks: Yeah, I would say so, 2015 was that year we had the big loss. And I would say like 2017, 2018 was the year where it really started to feel different. Where we started going from kind of a gathering of friends, and then that grew into a gathering of friends and people that know those friends. Until it became like, hey, there's more people here that I don't know, that I don't recognize, that I've never heard of then there are people that I do know, like that first year, everyone who was there, I either knew their podcasts, I knew their name, or I, I knew something about them. So it was kind of when the tides turned to where, okay, now there's more people here. I don't know. Yeah. And to be like more people here who don't know me, which is fine.

Cause I've never like tried, none of us have tried to be like the face of it. We've kind of wanted the brand to stand on its own, but still people kind of recognized us. And then when I got to the point where I could walk down the hall and nobody knew, Hey, there's. The guy who's the president or whatever you want to call it of the event.

That was where it was like, okay, this is like a much bigger thing than just us putting on something fun.

Pat Flynn: What values does Podcast Movement have for your event that allow it to have the feel that it does? You know, there's a lot of events that happen and they're not very well run or it's just not a great experience.

I'm curious, like what, what values did you and your team and your other members of your, your squad kind of come at it with to ensure that it continued to remain this this great event. I know a lot of events that started off great, too. And then just like, you know, they get so persuaded by money or there's too many spots like it totally changes the feel.

But over the years, despite Podcast Movement growing beyond sort of just group of friends, it still feels like it's great, a worthwhile event to go to, how did you approach the event as it was growing to ensure that it was still within your values and still something that, you know, would be valuable to the community?

Dan Franks: Yes. I mean, I think the first thing we did was like, make sure it was actually a good event, a well run event to start with. So those first few years there was tons of logistical issues. So longer lines to pick up badges and disorganization and things like that. But the concept and the newness kind of dragged it through and kept it going. But at some point, it's like, okay, these aren't the this isn't a new event. They're not just learning like this is something that's legit. So making sure that logistics were were smooth and this is all like the team. We've assembled an awesome team and this is all thanks to them, but making sure that badge pickup is smooth and entry and exit is smooth and try to do our best in terms of signage and communication, making sure everything starts on time.

That was huge. If we say that the keynote session starting at 8:30. Then at 8:30, that opening reel better be running or else than everything else, the rest of the day is affected. So like, that's a huge thing. So all of those things, making sure first and foremost, it's an event like that's, that's well run.

But then beyond that, something that's been very important to us as the events evolved from that gathering of friends to, you know, more corporate feel is that like we wanted the entire ecosystem of podcasting and podcasters to feel welcome at the event. So even though, okay, wow, now Spotify and Apple are hosting, like they're off sites in conjunction.

Like, okay, that's very corporate-y, but also like, Hey, the same ticket that they're buying is the same access that they're getting to the event is the same access that anyone that's a podcaster can buy and get access to. So that was huge for us was to make sure nobody was excluded from anything we were doing.

And, you know, you, you have an executive from a big network sitting in a session next to somebody who has a bird call podcast or, or something like that. And they're like talking with one another and like kind of mixing with one another and like that type of thing. We never want that to go away as the events evolved.

And some people might say. Okay. It's not an, it doesn't feel like an event for me anymore. That will just happen always as events evolve. Sometimes people will feel like they're more included and sometimes they'll feel like there may be less included. We want to proactively try to make sure it's an event that anyone involved in the ecosystem can come to and feel and be a part of.

So that's kind of been the biggest thing is just kind of proactively like trying to design it that way. And again, naturally the different things in the industry and, and things will pull it in other directions. But we're trying at least.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, I love it. And since you and I started working together on Card Party, it's been very clear that the organization that you and your team bring to an event is of utmost importance.

I mean, people saw it and felt it and experienced it at Card Party, and that was one of the comments that we got. More than anything was like, this was just such a well organized event. It didn't feel like a first year event. And then I tell people, well, it was the first year of Card Party, but it was Dan and his team's, I don't know, 10th year of doing this.

And, and how many events are you and your team running per year now? Because you're not just Podcast Movement anymore and you're not just obviously Card Party. You're you, you have an event management, essentially company now. And I'd love to know kind of when that all started to happen because you know, you could very easily just stick with the Podcast Movement and do that for the rest of your life perhaps, but what made the change and what was that change?

Dan Franks: Yeah, so I think in 2017 is when I left my day job at that point I was working for Mid Roll Media doing some of their event type things. That's when I was like, okay I'm quitting this because podcast movement is like a real thing that could pay bills and could be a career, you know, move and Jared, my co founder, did the same thing. So we both went all in. So at that point, it's like, okay, now it's time to actually build a team. Like we're kind of accidental event people, but we need like real event people to help elevate us. And that's where the team came along. So Chris Hartnett's the first one who joined.

He's someone that had worked with us on a contract basis. And we were able to have him come on full time. And then almost everyone we've added since then has been somebody who worked with us part time, worked with us on a contract basis. And we were like, hey, this person is like really good, a really good events person, can continue to level up.

So every, that's kind of how we've grown is very organically. We've never gone out and been like, hey, we need to hire four people to run our event. So that's how we were able to grow from doing our own one event. And then we expanded to doing our own two events, and that's when some people in the podcast space started coming to us and saying, Hey, can you, can you run our events?

So a few things that we picked up that way was something called the Pod Front. So anyone who's familiar with, with Upfronts and like the TV industry where TV networks will unveil their new shows coming out in the fall and then try to get advertisers excited to buy ads on those shows. Podcast industry decided to do that and asked us to be the producers of that.

So that was our first. That's cool. That was our first experience of like doing something that wasn't ours for other people, but it was still tangential to podcasting through those connections, the, the Ambie awards, which the podcast academy puts on and has been putting on since I think 2021, they asked us to produce their award show.

We had produced our own award show for several years, so we had some experience. But then we started doing that every year, and, and now it kind of follows around our Evolutions event every spring. The night before that kicks off, the, the Ambie Awards take place. This past March, and we were in Las Vegas at the theater that Elvis performed at for years and years and years, the International Theater. That's where we hosted the Ambie Awards and our team put that together. And that was, it's like a theater stage show. That's very different from Podcast Movement, but most people are surprised to learn like it's our same team that does our conference, but they're producing this award show, this high production award show.

So that was cool. So those were all of the things we were doing all still tangential to podcasting. But when we started discussing doing Card Party, that was the first time it was like, Oh, okay, this is something that's not podcasting. Similar to what we do, but such a different audience, such a different market, such a different subject matter.

I feel like that was our first time to kind of step out of our, our, our safety net, our, our comfort zone and do something special. So, I mean, yeah, at this point we've got those things going on, but still very close. We don't consider ourselves like a production company for hire is something that we have to feel very close and connected to for us to hate to say, get excited about participating in.

But that's that's where we're at.

Pat Flynn: I'm curious because I remember last year you reached out to me. You're like, Hey, Pat, are you running any events? And I know there was some connection because I'm a podcaster and I'm sure that you had expected that I was going to be creating another Pat Flynn entrepreneur sort of based event, which would have made sense for your team.

But when I said, well, not really, you know, I tried FlynnCon and that didn't work out long term because of the pandemic. And just, I decided to scrap that even though it was a great experience. There was this Pokemon channel and I had this idea in the back of my head to create an event for the for the Pokemon community there. What made you say yes to working with me on that because that's that's totally out of left field like you said so I'm curious what was going through your mind and why you decided to take a chance with me on that.

Dan Franks: Okay, so this one would 100 like I don't know what you call it like fate or or whatever that is but like I literally and this was you know coming out of the pandemic things were starting to get a little better and I was like for some reason, I was like, I wonder what Pat's up to, you know, as you like, change your listening habits and stuff, you don't listen to the same shows you did, and I was like, I haven't, like, checked in and seen what Pat's doing in a while, and that's when I found you were doing Deep Pocket Monster, and you had that YouTube channel that was, like, growing, like, it wasn't super early on, but it was, you know, smaller than it is now, and yeah, that's I can't remember if I like subscribed and then put on alerts and you were doing something live and there was a chat and it was like a Q& A type thing or people were asking you questions and you were responding and at that time, the one I tuned into someone asked like, Oh, have you thought about doing like an event for your channel or something like that?

Wait, I didn't know this. Yes. Someone asks, like, have you ever thought about, and you said, well, you're like, we did an event and you know, it was difficult. I'm not, not sure if that's something we're going to do, like never say never, but you know, it'd be a lot of work. And then you moved on to the next question.

And when I heard that, I was like, like, not right away, but like a few days later Jared and my, my co founder and partner in Podcast Movement and I were talking and we're always just like brainstorming ideas and I was like, you know, here's something weird, you know, Pat is doing this thing now. And he's like, why is Pat doing Pokemon?

I was like, I don't know, but that's doing Pokemon now. And I told him about that comment and he's like, well, let's let's Jared's like, let me reach out to Pat. And I was like, okay, it can't hurt. And that's where it all started was like, yeah. That check in, and me looking at that time and hearing that, and that's what triggered it all.

So yeah, that's, that's kind of the, the weird, random way that it all got rolling.

Pat Flynn: I did not know that. That is so cool to hear. That that, it was kind of randomly fate that that, that happened. But yeah. Even then, like, obviously Pokémon is way different than what it, what it is that you guys were used to doing.

Was there a... a yearn for something new? Was there a need on your team to just mix things up a little bit? Or, or was it just kind of just, let's just gamble and see what happens.

Dan Franks: There definitely was. We had actually, because we had assembled this awesome team and then we had assembled such an awesome team that there was like slower parts in the year for lack of better term.

So it's like, okay, we've got this team, but we have the capacity to do more so that we were looking around and we had looked into maybe doing like some government events because governments we were told by this advisor this consultant or something that government will pay a lot of money for for vendors to do things and like pay over market so we kind of got sucked into this idea of like bidding on these events to try to produce them and we kept losing these bids and losing these bids and finally we kind of took a step back and we're like are we going to get excited for doing a conference for like the plumbing industry are we going to get excited and like We're like, okay, are we doing that for, for the money or for fun?

And like, so that's when we kind of took a step back and we're like, okay, we can do other things. We do want to do other things, but it needs to be something that's not driven by like just the business motive. It's got to be something that we will have fun participating in. So that's kind of why we were going down that path anyways of brainstorming things to do.

Pat Flynn: That's cool. Now that we're on the opposite end of Card Party, I mean, it was a lot of planning, new stuff that I've never been involved with, obviously, so it was really neat to sort of be involved with the team in the way to see how, like, the sauce is made, it just so happened to be my own ingredients, if you will, but it was fascinating, and it sounds like you guys had some fun, like, I heard from Jess on your team and several others that they were just, this was like the most fun they've ever had at an event, and you know, I think that that Is what a lot of attendees said as well, and I think what was amazing was we were able to almost combine like your world of business and organization of events, and also my experience at those kinds of events too, as a speaker, as a, as a person who gets invited to speak at a lot of those events, I, I see it a lot. I see a lot of things that maybe just regular attendees don't. So I get to experience it and I get to experience it as a creator or a speaker there. So I know what that sort of part is like as well, but all that that you have to bring combined with just the nerdiness and fun of Pokemon. Like let's let's smash these things together. And it was cool because we came at it Where it was just like, let's just build the event that we would all want to attend. You know, it was like, we did some research and we went to other events to kind of explore what those were like, and they were all basically the same, a large venue with a lot of vendors and it's by cell trade.

There might be a panel here. There might be some activities. If there's any celebrities, they're usually behind some red velvet rope and you have to pay to get them to autograph your thing or take a picture and it's just like long lines comic con style. But we wanted to provide a space where very similar to what you said earlier about podcast movement and the values you had there like let's, let's put all these people in the room and like, we're all the same kind of people. We all speak the same language, whether you are a YouTuber with millions of subscribers or just a person who's just entered the hobby. Like, let's all, we're, we're all the same kind of people. We're all humans who just are nerds about this thing called Pokemon.

And we were able to create a completely different experience for people. I mean, I told you and the team this, and I've gotten a lot of feedback myself about this, people who go to these collection events all the time came up to us and said. I've never experienced anything like this before and because they're so used to it being a certain way so that was really neat to kind of bring something new and what was the thought process that you and your team had coming into a brand new space like Pokemon but having your event experience coming into it like what was your approach what were you telling yourselves and how did we set ourselves up for success here.

Dan Franks: Yeah, I think when we first started, we very much took the approach of like, okay, we're going to stay in our lane and we'll let Pat stay in his lane. And that's how this like partnership will be like, we've, we know how to run events. We know how to run the logistics of events. We can go a few different ways based on like the vision, but ultimately like we, we can do what we can do and Pat will do what he does.

And I think where it really got fun was where like the line started getting blurred and maybe fun and like having to build a little bit of trust there as well, where we started kind of veering into each other's lanes. So I think that's where it really got, got a little more interesting and maybe created a little, like, either apprehension or just unsureness on both sides of like, Oh, okay. Like, you know, we, we know how to do events like our, our planning documents, everything looks like they've looked like for years, but the actual, what that manifests in the event is going to look completely different. And that's where we started.

Like I said, it got, it got a little exciting and fun for, for us was starting to stray out of our comfort zones a little bit. So, I mean, I think that was our approach was just, Hey, we know how to do events. We can, we can do this event too. And ultimately, like, yes, a lot of the things, if people went to a Podcast Movement and then went to card party, they would notice some similarities and, and structure and like organization and logistics, there was like zero crossover, which was awesome.

It's like, Hey, cool. We can, you know, do the same thing for a different group of people and get a completely, like a very successful result, but a different result. And I think that's. I at least didn't realize how much fun it would be doing the event until actually being there. Because like I said, the planning process, all the logistics, like it looks the same on paper.

It looks the same on computer programs. You know, we have our, our different documents, but then actually being there and just seeing like the excitement and that's nothing to take away from like Podcast Movement, but Podcast Movement is very much closer to a B2B event where, you know, people that are to conduct business or network more as this, you know, there were certainly some of that, but like, people were there to have fun, and like, make the most of their time, and like, just actually being there and doing it was, like I said, a very pleasant surprise, and like, made it even more exciting on site, and then planning for the future.

Pat Flynn: Dude, it was such a, like, honestly, it's like a life changing event for me, and I think it was the same for a lot of attendees. And for you and the team not having really any experience with Pokémon, I'm curious to know your thoughts now, post event, like, are you... Into Pokemon now? Are you exploring it? Are you and your kids doing anything with that?

I'm curious. There were so many attendees who came, like adults who came with their kids, and they came because their kid is into the channel and into Pokemon, and they're like, yeah, I'll chaperone. And now those people are into it, and they're, like, they had a good time, and they were making friends, and they were opening packs and stuff.

So how are you feeling now about Pokemon because the planning process you're right like it's just the same on paper But now that you experience the event and got to literally be in the community for a short moment Like how are you feeling now?

Dan Franks: Well, first I discovered through the process that several members of my team had more Pokemon knowledge than maybe they let on. Like as we're planning and like they would like drop a word and it's like wait I don't know that word or I don't know that character.

I don't know that terminology and you do. And I thought we were on the same page here. So so there's a little bit of that where it's like, Oh, okay. Maybe they're younger. They're younger experiences started coming through, but like, no, for me personally now, I'm like, Oh, what's, you know, what's Pat's latest video?

Like what? What's this collection? He's like opening now and my wife will be like, Oh, are you into Pokemon now? Like kind of like being funny, but also like, Hey, these are, these are like fun videos to watch. So she doesn't mind when I put them on. That's awesome. But yeah, totally. And I, and I brought both of my daughters there.

I told them they couldn't come until the second day because I was like, okay, you guys, you got to stay away while things are like the hectic first few days, but they came and they both went home with some stuffed animals and some packs. And that's something else that I noticed about this community is like how, how giving it was. Like my girls, one of them was walking around with like a stuffed Pikachu and like she'd go to random like vendor tables and they'd be like, Oh, I got a card for you. And they'd give her a Pikachu card or, or my other daughter was like super into Jigglypuff. And so I was like, Oh, I saw a Jigglypuff in the, in the bulk bin.

So they went and like dug, dug through it and found it for like, not even ask, just like proactive. And it was like, so cool to have that, whether it was other attendees that were just being like nice to other people, whether it was the vendors that were just doing that just to, you know, just to make sure people there have a good time.

That was really cool. And like you said, with the emails we got after of a dad who happens to be a teacher, and went with his son and they learned they learned how to play Pokemon like they went to the the turn they played in the tournament and went to some of the training and then the dad went back and decided like he was going to start doing this as an activity with his class so he was starting to buy cards and buy packs so that he could then like integrated in his, in his studies next semester, like that kind of thing was really cool and it's just stories that like you don't know what's going to come out of these events, but hearing those stories after it was just like really awesome and, you know, made, made an event that, you know, logistically went well and it just takes that to a whole nother level.

Pat Flynn: Yeah. And it'll be exciting to see what happens for Gen 2. We're in the middle of scouting a location right now. The demand is really high. What's also really cool is because we featured a lot of the creators in this space, and especially the smaller creators, I mean, they're the ones stepping up to really talk about it all the time now, which is amazing.

And, and that was all a part of what I knew the experience would be like for, like a speaker at an event. I've gone to events where nobody paid attention to me at all. And it's just like, okay, well, I guess I'm just coming to speak. And then other events where I'm not even the biggest speaker there, there's like bigger names, and I'm treated like royalty.

And that made me fall in love with that brand and those companies even more. So we wanted to go the latter route, and a lot of those creators have published videos and are still talking about it, are inviting their fans to Gen 2, and are doing some special events in and around whenever that happens, wherever that happens.

It's just really neat to see and it's becoming this sort of event that people can now look forward to every year where they can come together and really meet the people that they all talk with online all the time, but in person. I think that that's what was special about Podcast Movement for me over the years as I've gone is that's where I get to meet my friends in person and hang out and have coffee with them, have dinner with them, be on stage with them, be in the crowd with them. And I think that's something we all as humans sort of just continually yearn for, and as more and more things go online, as more and more communities are built online, I still think there is... Necessity for the in person event. And, and hopefully this encourages you to, as a listener to perhaps even think about how you might be able to, to run one of these things, whether it gets to be as large as Card Party or Podcast Movement, or even just a small event in your community with five people, 10 people, there's just something special.

As we finish up, Dan, you know, it wasn't all perfect. Nothing is, but we definitely made some mistakes and learned a lot. And I wanted to end with this because I think it's important to show that, you know, you don't have to be perfect in order to run a successful event. Maybe we can go back and forth for a little bit, but what were some of the things that you think we could have improved on or maybe made mistakes about in year one that we can sort of hash out and do better in year two?

Dan Franks: Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of it was just the learning of like, hey, we have this new event for this new community. We don't know exactly what they want. We don't know exactly where they're going to see the value in. So for example, one of my takeaways was because Podcast Movement is so content focused and we have so many things happening on stage because that's what people want was that like, hey, we just need stage stuff happening all the time. Lots of seats. things for people to sit and watch, but then as the event went on, it's like, Oh, okay, these attendees are more excited to kind of like what you were just saying, be around each other, get to know each other, meet their friends, hang out with their friends, create content with their friends.

And yes, they wanted the opportunity to go to some panels and hear some, you know, things on stage, but they didn't want that all day, every day. So that was takeaways for me is like, Hey, this is how this event is different is people want to interact. There was times we had a stage in the expo, which was a small stage.

You know, we kind of considered a secondary stage and then our main stage, which was going to be kind of our bigger name sessions and panels and stuff. A lot of times people gravitated toward that small stage, not because what was actually happening, but just, it was such a more lively area. So that was one of my first big takeaways just from like the event production standpoint was like, hey, maybe there's a different need or desire from this type of event than what we're used to.

Pat Flynn: For sure. Take away that I had was some of the larger named youtubers that came, you know, they might need a little bit more protection, if you will. Nothing terrible happened, but you know, they could get swarmed and we're lucky that no really incidents happened this year.

But as the event continues to grow, I want to make sure that our creators are safe and having them with handlers or some security or something just to kind of keep them safe is, is really important to me because if we don't do that, then eventually the event will turn into what those other events are, which is okay.

The creator's behind a table and it's one person at a time. And there's like a, a boss man there who's like directing traffic and you only get one second with them. And we don't want it to go down that direction. And so keeping those people in mind and keeping their safety in mind, cause they stepped up.

I mean, I, I was so surprised. Actually, I'm not surprised, but I was very pleased that, you know, we had the space where the creators could go to sort of like escape if they needed to and spend some time away from the crowds. Every time I went in there, it was mostly empty. The creators were In the middle of the crowds, signing autographs, and taking pictures, like, unprompted, no payments necessary, and it was just such a fun thing to see, and so many people appreciated that, I mean, I had so many people talking about the fact that there's one creator, Danny Phantom, who is literally on the hotel floor trading with kids for three hours straight, and several parents just saying, Danny, that was amazing, thank you, and like, this made my son's year, and all that kind of stuff, and Pokey Rev, who's like, one of the bigger names, His meet and greet line was like four hours, and he sat there for every single person because he wanted to, and I talked to him afterwards, and he was like, that was amazing, like, thank you for putting this together, and it just like made my heart so happy, so, but I want to keep them happy too as the event grows.

Dan Franks: Yeah, no, that's a good one. Another one was speaking of keeping people happy is I didn't realize how Like, because when we talked about it, it was like, okay, fans, creators, collectors, a little bit of everything there. But our expo hall, our vendor area, was like slammed from the time the doors opened to the time the doors shut.

And we kind of anticipated like the vendor area, I don't want to say it would be secondary, but we were like thinking like, okay, what, what can we do in the vendor area to like get people to go in there? Like we were trying to, you know, sometimes in like bigger expos, it's like, okay, how do you get people into the expo hall?

How do you get them to stay there? Like this was the opposite. We were like, okay, how do we get people out at the end of the day? And how do we keep them out before the doors open? So that's something that we're going to have to go back to the drawing board on. We've already got some ideas of like, okay, how do we add some more hours here?

How do we give these vendors even more value for, for their time and their efforts and their investment being there? That was a big one for me as like, Hey, this, this thing that we thought would be secondary was like a very, very primary focus of the event.

Pat Flynn: For sure. And then, you know, there was a lot of learnings about food, right?

Food is important at events like this. And I'm grateful that there was food available. However, there were some comments about the food and the cost. I mean, the merch might have been a little bit too expensive. And, you know, we're going to readjust for Gen 2 and a lot of this comes from feedback from the attendees and the creators.

And this is something that it's really important to be open to that feedback. I know that me by default after something like this, we'll just want to not hear anything because I'm like tired and I'm exhausted and I'm like, I don't want to hear about anything bad because like, you know, I just just want to walk away from it.

But that's the time, especially to step forward and be like, okay, give it to me. Like, I want to listen. I want to know what what happened and what I could do better for next year. And so we're literally in the middle of that process right now. And we'll be incorporating a lot of things into Gen 2.

What's maybe one thing that we know we want to do again for next year, you think, and why?

Dan Franks: Yeah, we definitely want something that's a centrally located, like, place that people can come. And if they want to come there and stay from, you know, Thursday or Friday all the way through the end of Sunday, like, they can.

So, you know, treat it like we're at this year, like a hotel setting where a lot of people stayed on site and a lot of people wish they had stayed on site. That direction is something that we... Going into the event, we weren't sure, like, hey, does Gen 2 need to be at a convention center? Does it need to be at some other kind of place?

Like, does it really need to be at a hotel? And then, having been there and seeing so many people hang out, like, literally all hours of the night, I don't know when the last person on, you know, Thursday, Friday, Saturday night went back to their room. But like all hours of the night, people were trading on the, like you said, on the floor and every couch, every surface.

So that like reinforced, like, no, no, no. And you and I talked about that pretty early on, like after the event was like, okay, that is a feeling that we want to recreate and keep going. So that was like my, you know, one of my biggest takeaways was like, Hey, that feeling of like, Hey, we're all here. Almost like a summer camp kind of thing that that needs to go on and we can't do anything that like pulls away from that.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, like just a large convention hall is not going to have that same feeling, which makes it more challenging for us. But again, it just shows that we're trying to keep it great as we go along and not just grow because it can grow. I think that's a big problem that a lot of other events have had that I've seen where it just it grows so fast because they can.

And they've proven it. And now it's. It's not even the same thing anymore and, and, you know, people start leaving it. So anyway, we could talk for days about this, Dan, I want to respect your time and I got a lot of things to do as well, but hopefully this was very insightful and inspiring and, you know, informational, educational for everybody listening.

What might be one final tip you have for somebody out there who's like, Oh, this sounds interesting. And I think there's definitely room in my space for it, my niche for it. What's one tip you would have for them as they start to begin to think about creating an event like something like what we've created for their community?

Dan Franks: A start small, but just start. That's very basic, but like podcast movement. And I didn't quite get into this, but like the first thing Jared and I, before we ever did anything at New Media Expo was we did a meetup. He was coming to town. to Dallas for an event. He had a little listener base here and I had a little podcast and he's like, Hey, let's just do this meetup and get people together.

That was the first event Jared and I ever did. I think that was 2012 or 2013. And it's led to this conversation we're having now. So like, like you said, that power of in person events, whether you call it networking, whether you call it, you know, whatever you want to call it. Just the power of like doing something.

And to your point about if anyone wants to start something for their community, for their show, for there's something like, don't be afraid to start small and don't be afraid to do it at a restaurant on a Saturday and not tell the restaurant you're going to do it because they might say no, like just do something, put a free event, right together, put a meetup page together and just see what happens.

Cause you never know where it's going to lead.

Pat Flynn: I love it, man. Dan, thank you so much. Where can people go to follow up on your work or, you know, where do you want to point them to?

Dan Franks: Yeah, everything we do, the big stuff we do is at podcastmovement.com. And then of course, stay tuned to card.party because lots of fun stuff coming there in the the days, months, weeks, years, all that.

Pat Flynn: Thank you, brother. I appreciate you.

Dan Franks: Thanks, Pat.

Pat Flynn: All right. I hope you enjoyed that podcast and conversation with Dan Franks. Thank you so much for coming on. And it's been really, really a pleasure to, over the past year, get to know you even more. I mean, we've worked together. You've always been really helpful.

That you and your team would do an amazing job with Card Party, but I don't think anybody knew how well organized you and your team are. And if any of you have a chance to go to Podcast Movement, it's an amazing event, especially if you're a podcaster, obviously. But a lot of people who aren't podcasters go there because they want to meet podcasters and those creators and be guests on their show.

And, of course, don't just go there and ask. Go there to serve and befriend people, and those opportunities might happen. Card Party Gen 2 coming up, Card.party if you wanna check it out. Anyway, thank you so much. I appreciate you. If you wanna get all the links and resources mentioned here in this episode, head on over to smartpassiveincome.com/session709.

Again, smartpassiveincome.com/session709. Peace. Thank you so much and be sure to subscribe 'cause we've got a lot of great stuff coming up for you now that we're in the seven hundreds of Smart Passive Income, which is absolutely wild and we're not stopping anytime soon. So I appreciate you.

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. Our senior producer is David Grabowski, 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!