SPI 593: Inside an Audience Member’s Business & How It Works with Greg Langston

SPI 593: Inside an Audience Member’s Business & How It Works with Greg Langston

Greg Langston: What happens is, at the end of our process, the student has to present to their accountability partner and to their parents to say, “Mom and dad, these are my strengths and weaknesses as accounted by eight trusted advisors. These are my values and this is why they’re important. This is my secret power, my distinct natural ability. These are my lifetime goals in the areas of health, wealth, wisdom, and relationships. These are my three majors that I’m going to have.” And it’s kind of a drop the mic moment because that drives the accountability because the parents go, “How did you do that?”

Pat Flynn: So that was Greg Langston from College Flight Plan. I actually interviewed him first for Ask Pat, and he actually asked for some coaching and for some help and when I discovered exactly what Greg does, I knew I needed to bring them on to the Smart Passive Income Podcast. Why? Because not only is he a successful business owner, but he’s helping a lot of people and the passion really, really shines through and the positioning of the business relative to who it is that he’s serving, both students and parents is really interesting and really intricate and amazing. And I 100% know this is going to inspire you. So I’m really looking forward to having you listen to this show.

In fact, we’re about to begin. So sit back, get that popcorn ready. Go out on that run. Maybe not at the same time. Anyway, I’m just so grateful you’re here and I’m so grateful for Greg Lanston from College Flight Plan.

Announcer: Welcome to the Smart Passive Income Podcast, where it’s all about working hard now, so you can sit back and reap the benefits later. And now your host, he used the pandemic to learn that slowing down is the best way to speed up. Pat Flynn!

Pat Flynn: Greg welcome to the Smart Passive Income Podcast. Thank you so much for being here.

Greg Langston: It’s great to be here.

Pat Flynn: This is your second time with me, first time on the show, but you were with me on Ask Pat recently and I was so enthralled. I was so excited about what it is that you do. I just needed to bring you here so I can uncover more about how you’ve gotten to where you’re at and I wanted to amplify that message for you, because I think it’s really special what it is that you’re doing.

Can you tell everybody what it is that you do?

Greg Langston: Sure. And it’s great, it’s a privilege to be here on the second time and I’m the co-founder of College Flight Plan. And in a nutshell, what we do is we help students figure out what their core values are, what their strengths are and what their weaknesses are, what they’re passionate about and naturally gifted to do so that they can choose a college major or a vocation. If they do choose to go to college, we want them to graduate in four years and have a fulfilling career. Now, why do we do this? The fact is that only 40% of college graduates graduate in four years, fully 60% of college students graduate in six years. And that’s because they’re changing their majors at least three times.

And so as we help students go through this process, we find them experiencing a transformation where they get clarity in the sense that they know what their values are, what their purpose is, what they should study. They gain a sense of confidence by saying, “Hey, listen, this is how I can articulate myself through my elevator speech or through a written admissions essay.” And they also have a sense of control because they say, “This is my plan. This is what I want to do. I don’t have to run around with my hair on fire or my parents for that matter.” And in, so doing, they might be able to save themselves and their family between $50,000 and $160,000.

Pat Flynn: Yeah. A lot of money in that decision making process, for sure. At what age do you start working with the kids on this?

Greg Langston: Typically sophomores. Although we have some students, we have one student right now who we’re working with, who is a highly motivated freshmen and he’s just freaking out because he wants to get to an Ivy league school.

And he suffers from dealing with procrastination and was only getting one or two hours of sleep a day. And I’m saying, “Dude, you’re not going to survive. If you’re doing that, you’ve got to figure out how you specify. What’s important to you and work through a process.” And now he’s getting eight hours of sleep. His grades are improving just with a few little tweaks, so we help the students, but typically it’s sophomore or juniors.

Pat Flynn: And what encouraged you to, to start going down this process and helping people online with this?

Greg Langston: Well, it’s interesting by the time my son and his sister were 13, our son was 13, they’d both been to 12 different schools in five different countries because I had an international career, international business guy.

And so they learned all these languages and they learned about cultures. In fact, and when they were in Singapore, they had 76 nationalities in the same school. And so that was all great. But then when we brought them back to the United States, because we wanted to prepare them for middle school, getting into high school, we found that there was no training for self-discovery 20 years ago and there’s still none now.

And so what we did is we said, how can we fix this? And at the same time, I was getting executive training, running big companies, over a billion dollars. And they spent over $600,000 on my training. And so I said, why did I have to wait 20 years to learn this stuff. Why can’t we teach young people to do this, these life lessons on how to determine your values, how to set up goals, how to inspire other people.

And so my wife and I said, why don’t we teach high school kids to do this? And so we started with our kids and son and daughter. We didn’t break them. They’ve gone on to be very successful. And then we started doing workshops. This was over 20 years ago. Then with the advent of COVID we put it all online.

Pat Flynn: So this is pretty recent that this has been coming online? What’s what’s that been like?

Greg Langston: It’s been excellent simply because we have a global audience now. It’s not just a finite group of people in a room over several sessions over several days. We’re able to address people from the United States, people in Colombia. We have people who are in Albania, who actually, interestingly enough, he is the nephew of somebody that we trained 20 years ago.

And this person we trained 20 years ago, Ulti, he’s just been named recently top 20 professionals in Miami under 40. He used a lot of these tools and he thought so much of it that he actually sponsored his nephew, who was an Albania, to go through this process. And now he’s going to school in the United States as well.

Pat Flynn: That’s incredible. When it comes to positioning this program, are you selling to students? Are you selling to the adults or the parents? How are, how are you getting the message out there or are you working organizations or even schools to run the program through?

Greg Langston: Well, as we mentioned during the AskPat session, I was trying to make sure that I properly bifurcated between approaching the students and approaching the parents because once a student realizes that you’re speaking to their parent Their eyes rolling in the back of their head.

So we have to, and with your guidance, we’ve been able to differentiate. I still haven’t done Tik-Tok I’m on it, but I still haven’t done Tik-Tok yet. I’m going to figure that out. I’m still exploring that. But yes, very clearly, you have to present to the students to say, listen, this is important. Pre COVID only 33% of high school students are engaged in school. This is pre COVID. So just imagine what it is now, 33-34%. And in middle school at 75%, you need to be engaged to figure out what it is you want to do and get off your social media feed, because that is a false promise. And you have to figure out what you’re uniquely gifted to do.

That’s from the students’ perspective, we then also present the information to the parents and to institutions to say, this is how we can help your young people figure out what they want to do.

Pat Flynn: That’s great. I mean, it’s so important to be able to know who it is that you’re speaking to. And in many cases, you know, this is going to be the parents who ultimately have, you know, the credit card or the payment to offer you. How do you convince a child or a kid or a high school kid to tell their parents to go through with the program? How does that work normally?

Greg Langston: Well, what we do is it’s typically a conversation that leads with the parent. You know, that’s the way it works because the parent says, Hey, this program’s great. I saw your blog post and my son or daughter needs to see this. And so we get on the Zoom call with.

And it’s rather humorous. The first thing the kids says, uh, we asked them the question, are you here? Because your parents said so, and they go, yeah. I said, you probably think this is really lame and they go, yeah. So then what we do is we say, Listen. How about if you do this process and you’re going to be able to know what your values are, what your goals are, what your secret super powers are, what your majors are going to be, and it’s all about you, then they start getting interested.

And so what we’re doing is through the blog posts and the resources that we’re putting on the site for students that will cause them enough interest to say, Hey, mom and dad, check this out. Or vice versa. And a blog post with a parent will say, if you want to send something about procrastination or something about establishing your core values, which we’re speaking to you and send this link, which is written to your son or daughter, and it’s written to a child to a teen versus a parent. And so that’s the way we’re able to bifurcate.

Pat Flynn: I love that. And when you start working with the family, who are you working with? And what’s like the initial process like?

Greg Langston: Well, the initial process is as the creators of this process and a family going to invest a thousand dollars, depending upon the program, a thousand or $4,000, and admittedly, they can save between 50 and $160,000. That’s still a big spend. And so what we do is we get on a Zoom call and we walk them through the visual course. We show them what is expected, how they work and something that we’ve added because our $4,000 program is a facilitated program that some families can afford and say, listen, my son or daughter will not listen to me as much as they’ll listen to you. So please take them on this mentored processes. If it’s a young woman, Beth takes it. If it’s a man, a young man, then I take the mentoring process and we take them through that process. What we do find though, is that some people they know their son or daughter has the capability, but does not have the follow through.

And so what we’ve created our tools, facilitator guide for the parent for financial advisor in case the family has a financial advisor and everybody listens to Joe, then you give Joe the facilitator guide to work with their son or daughter, or if it’s in a school environment, or for example, as I mentioned to you, I would like to get into Chick-fil-A.

If it’s in a company environment, we have an instructor facilitator guide that can take the student through and be their accountability partner.

Pat Flynn: I love that. And then how do you ensure that follow through does happen? Are there any particular things that you do? Because we have a lot of people listening, myself included who facilitate education and we help people through certain processes.

What are some things that you in your program do to increase the likelihood that there is follow through. I think a part of it would be the investment is, is quite large. So, you know, there’s just a lot of skin in the game, but even then it’s the kid who needs to do the work. How do you encourage that?

Greg Langston: Well, what we’ve done is we’ve observed when our own kids, when they were going to school, we ask how a school and they go, fine. How has that program you went to? Great. What did you learn? Nothing. What we’ve done is we’ve said, listen, this is extremely important. You need to pick an accountability partner.

And typically it’s a parent that you will report out to during the course of the process and you meet during the course of the, of this process. And the reason it’s important is if a student or any of us, for that matter, say that we’re going to do something, the likelihood of completing that is single digit. If you say to your ecosystem, Hey, listen, I’m going to run a 10 K.

Everybody hear that I’m gonna lose 10 pounds. The likelihood is 65%. If you have an accountability partner who’s accountable to you, then that increases to 95%. And so what happens is at the end of our process, instead of just saying, yeah, you’re done with the course, the student has to present to their accountability partner and to their parents to say, mom and dad, these are my strengths and weaknesses as accounted by eight trusted advisors. These are my values and this is why they’re important. This is my secret power, my distinct natural ability that I know how I can contribute in any environment, in any situation. These are my lifetime goals in the areas of health, wealth, wisdom, and relationships. These are my three majors that are going to have here’s my elevator speech that I want to share with you. That they’ve memorized, which is a 150- word, one minute elevator speech. And it’s kind of a drop the mic moment because that drives the accountability because the parents go, how did you do that? And just have one student we’ve we finished with who we’ve been working with. And he was first generation born in the United States, comes from a Vietnamese family and they have done everything to help this young student.

And at the beginning of the process, he had no clue. You know, I just want to go hang out with my friends. So what is it you want to study? I don’t know. You know, what do you want to do in the future? Well, I want to go on nice vacations like I do with my parents. That progressed till the end when he had his accountability review with his parents, where he basically went through and shared that information and they were, like, flabbergasted, like, how did you do this?

So it is a process that we know works. It’s not just from a school perspective. My, my wife is an educator by training. I’m a business person by training. And what we’ve done is we’ve taken these lessons into micro lessons. They’re two and a half minute increments on average, each of the videos, are over 66 videos and it just tells a student do this.

Now do this, now do this. And so we found it to be very effective.

Pat Flynn: That’s incredible. And I do have to plus one the accountability partner. I mean, inside of SPI Pro a huge value that a lot of people are getting are the connections they have with their mastermind group and the accountability partners that they have there.

And so if you are teaching online in any case, you know, having a DIY course is good and it can help a person through a process, especially if they’re motivated. But the likelihood of them completing that is far less than if they had some sort of coach or mentor to sort of hold themselves accountable to.

So, so I definitely wanted to plus one that. Can you describe a little bit about how you positioned values to a high school kid? I think that that word often gets thrown around not just in that part of a person’s life, but especially in this world of entrepreneurship, provide value, know what your values are. What are your company values? How would you describe what value actually means in the way that you use it for your students.

Greg Langston: If you imagine a very big tree with a deep root system, and you look at a cutaway of the root system, the root system that holds that tree up are the values. And so the values are key to any process like this.

The tree trunk is your purpose in terms of something that’s larger than you and the branches are your goals and objectives. And so all students are going to go through the trials of life, where the storm hits the tree. And if you have a shallow root system it’s going to topple over. We teach the student to say with that in mind, which values are important to you? And we take them through an interactive process. Why are these values important to you? They go from a selection process of 63 down to three core values. They have primary and core values. And then we say, why are these important to you? What should you start doing to make this important? What should you stop doing that you’re currently doing that is distracting from this value and what you should continue doing.

And so what that does is it allows a student to walk away when they’re not with their parent when they’re by themselves and they’re making a decision relative to integrity. For example, should I cheat on this test? If my number one value is integrity, no, I shouldn’t do that. And we take them through a gating process where they go through the sequence of all three values to make sure that they’re working in alignment with their values.

I know that each student understands that.

Pat Flynn: Yeah. It acts as sort of a guiding post for behavior, for decisions and what to say yes to what to say no to. And I think that’s really important. I think that this is why companies need values and need to understand what it is that they’re shooting for. And that way decisions are much easier made within a company and within an entrepreneur, especially for a kid at that point.

I mean, I I’m imagining you might have a few students who come in and just go, I don’t, I don’t care about this. So like, you know, they push back a little bit. And how do you work with maybe a student who might be a little bit more difficult or not quite yet understanding the value of, of ultimately what the course can offer them.

Greg Langston: We have gone through hundreds of students and admittedly, some are more difficult than others. Others, you just let them go and, man, they rip through it. Others are more challenging. Like the one individual I mentioned from Vietnam. He just wants to go hang out with his friends. And so you just need to come alongside the student and say, listen, this is all about you.

It’s not what your mom wants, not what your dad wants. This is about you to figure out what you want. And once they start seeing the flywheel effect of, oh, this is what I’m really good at. Oh, this is what I suck at, and I should probably work on that. This is what people are telling me through 200 data points, confidentially.

They gain a sense of confidence that they currently don’t get in school. I mean, there are on average 424 college students for every college counselor in the United States. And in California, where you and I both live, it’s 900 students per counselor. So for parents to think that they’re going to get that individualized attention, they’re not.

Pat Flynn: I love the way that it just so seamlessly comes off your tongue as far as like how to respond to different situations. You’re using proof you’re using numbers and all this stuff. How long did it take you when you started this program to really understand the words to say it, or convince a person on the other end that this is exactly what you need, without feeling salesy or aggressive?

Greg Langston: Well, that’s where being part of the SPI community has helped me because as I told you in AskPat I knew nothing about marketing in the electronic arena, in the internet and so forth.

And what I’ve been able to do is through your guidance, be able to say, okay, this is where my clients and the parents hang out. What is the language that they’re using? What are the pain points that they have? How are we addressing the transformation? Because they don’t care about it’s 12 hour process. They don’t care about kids watching videos. They want to know what is the transformation that my kid’s going to have. And so that’s what I focused on. And again, with being part of SPI, I learned how to be on podcasts and have been on close to 70 podcasts in the last six months. This was going to be one more that I’m very thankful to be on.

That’s allowed me to increase my my message and to more effectively articulate the message.

Pat Flynn: I mean, I know that to be true from my perspective, having gone on many podcasts, having recorded many podcasts. You just get better at communicating what works. You can get an immediate read on the stories that you’re telling and which ones are good, and which ones are bad, or which data sets that you share that actually make an impact.

And when you say things like, you know, for every one, counselor, you know, they have 924 students. I mean, that paints a picture that completely sells without you even having to say it, the program that you’re offering and why it exists, it counters objections, it supports the existence of the solution. And I absolutely love that.

So is podcasting, guest podcasting, a primary method of marketing the program?

Greg Langston: It has been, although what we’re doing now is we have a series of assessments that we have developed in quizzes that will help format clarity in the student’s mind. Hey, this is an area that I should look at. And what we do is we have free assessments on our website.

We’re up to eight different assessments that we encourage them to take them. You can pay for assessments as well, but I’ve curated about seven or eight really good assessments. Then we encourage our students to go to three or four of them. They may get one in school, but they need to pick out going through one survey in school that takes 15 minutes and it says you’re going to be a garbage collector.

Shouldn’t be what determines what you’re gonna do with the rest of your life. You need to really do some more discovery.

Pat Flynn: I took that test. I’m trying to remember exactly what it told me, but it was a bunch of questions, you know, and then they give you this dot matrix look and paper that tells you you’re more qualified to be this versus this.

And I just was like, oh, okay. I guess this is the career I’m going. And I never really thought about the fact that, well, how do they know that? Just based on a few minutes of answering questions and they’re already telling me what I should do. Like they don’t know me. They don’t know what, what I think is important or, or who I am.

Maybe I had it off test day or what have you, right? Yet they’re deciding my whole life. So I love this idea of something that’s a little bit deeper, for sure. So guest podcasting has been a method. How are you, you had mentioned like going into different places where your targeted audience exists. Like what are those places and how are you going in there without seemingly going in there and just spamming?

Greg Langston: Well, first and foremost, I don’t plug my product. What I do is answer questions and answer the specific question that they have and engage in a conversation. And at some point they’re going to say, Greg, can you tell me more? Hey, let’s exchange, let’s connect on LinkedIn or what have you, how can you help me? My son has some particular issues that he or she sent her daughter trying to deal with and let’s connect. It can’t be an overt sale because that doesn’t work. I don’t want to come across as salesy. What I want to do is serve, but earn at the same time. And I’m passionate about this because I see the transformation that takes place in the kids and in the families.

When you have a parent who weeps and says, you’re my son, and I knew this much about you, but I had no idea that these were your other aspirations. I’m so thankful that we went through this program. I mean, drives me to continue to do this work.

Pat Flynn: I love that. And first of all, I just love the visual of what a win looks like.

I think that’s really important for anybody creating anything is like, what is that ultimate form of success look like? And it’s not money in the bank account. It’s the student and the parent having this defined future now together, and a better relationship likely as a result too. And then the earnings are a byproduct of that. Right? And I also love what you said about going into like a forum, for example, or. What kinds of places are you going into to be helpful? Are you going to like Facebook groups and LinkedIn groups and things like that?

Greg Langston: Yes.

Pat Flynn: Okay. Yeah. I love how you’re going in there and you’re like, I’m just going to be there to answer questions and help.

And I found the exact same thing happened when I started my architecture online business back in 2008, I went in different forums and bulletin boards, they they’re called bulleting boards back then. And I just started answering as many questions as I could. And eventually people started reaching out to me directly and say, Hey, do you have any more information? Or you seem to be an expert on this, even though I wasn’t, but I was in their eyes because I was the one who was actively trying to help out as much as possible. And I remember my day consisted of two hours in the morning, just going in and answering every question that was left hanging, that nobody else had answered yet.

And, and of course people see that, even people who aren’t even engaged in the conversation, see. And they start to paint a picture of like how helpful you can be. And then in those forums, you would have like a byline where you can put in your product or your website or something. And that was a great way to get exposure.

Now it’s your profile, or like you said, your LinkedIn page or other things like that. So I love how just it’s similar, but using different tools and mechanisms now. When people start to engage with you, either from a podcast guest spot or on a social media platform, I mean, it’s a big ask to pay a thousand dollars. Like, is it a call that happens first? Are you driving people toward a call or like what initiates the sales process for you?

Greg Langston: Typically we, after a podcast, for example, your audience will get access to a guide that provides a comprehensive guide as to, for parents to help guide their students as to what they should go through.

If they’re considering college or a vocation, because not necessarily everybody is set to go to college and you can save a lot of money and a lot of angst if you determine that ahead of time, instead of wasting hundreds of thousand dollars. We do that. We also have free calls where people can call us up.

I’m also developing a resource page that has 106 different resources that I’m going to use for SEO purposes. It should be out this week. That is to my knowledge, the most comprehensive college application resource page that has everything from. Assessments to books, to courses, to help from the government to scholarships.

So people can find us through that and I’ll be using SEO to do that. The other thing is writing blog posts specifically to students and or to parents on the pain points of going through this process.

Pat Flynn: Are you doing anything on the back-end of the program, meaning after a program is done for somebody to collect a testimonial and use that as far as marketing materials concerned?

And if so, like what’s the process of the ask. I’m curious, a lot of people have a problem asking for testimonials because they feel bad about it sometimes. How do you go about doing that?

Greg Langston: Again, I think that’s been discussed at length within SPI Pro. And what I’ve done is I will have a Zoom call with a customer and or their parents, and say, I’m going to ask you questions, relative to the experience that you or your son or daughter had.

And what we’ll do is I will capture that information. I will send it to you. It’s not a video, although I know Bonjoro has a new application that you can do video testimonials, which I think is pretty cool. But it is written down, I send it to them for their approval and then if they approve it, then I put it on my site.

Pat Flynn: Nice. It’s as easy as that. I like the framework of, you know, Hey, I’m just going to ask you questions about your experience in the program and not having it be a direct ask for a testimonial, but you are letting them know where it’s eventually going to end up. Oftentimes when you ask for a testimonial directly like that, you’ll have just people say, yeah, uh, Greg’s program was great.

I highly recommend it to everybody. And it doesn’t really talk about the experience. I think the experience through a program and then getting into if possible, the transformation, where were you before and what did you think, or what were your expectations or what were your challenges and then where are you now?

Because ultimately that’s where people want. You had mentioned that earlier people want the transformation they want, ultimately what the end result will be. They don’t want the training. They don’t want the course. They don’t want the book or the program. They want the result of what that could offer them.

And hopefully the program is backed enough by others with testimonials to convince a person that yes, this is worthwhile. It’s proven it will actually help out. And that’s where those testimonials come in.

Greg Langston: And the result that we’ve been doing it face-to-face for 20 years has allowed us to determine and have some testimonials that, that are quite valuable.

And I don’t put something up. That’s not true. And so what we’ve done also is use the facts. I mean, I think I shared with you in the last call. 87% of young people between the ages of 16 and 29, 87% say they have no purpose or meaning. Think about that.

Pat Flynn: That’s crazy.

Greg Langston: Isn’t that crazy? That is all the more reason that I’m passionate about getting this out to people because they need direction.

I received a call yesterday from a person. I said, how did you find out about it? And she said research, and she says, I just need direction. Can you please help me? I don’t know what I do. I dropped out of school when I was 13. I’m finishing my high school degree. I’m 23 years old. I have three months more to go and I need direction.

And I want to do a lot of things with my life. I screwed up. I was a runaway and I want to do things that are good for the world. And I mean, that’s some of the experiences that you have.

Pat Flynn: What are some of the challenges that you’ve faced as you’re growing your business, that we can talk about just for a little bit? Because everything sounds rosy right now, but I’m sure there were challenges along the way, as there always are. I’d love to know what maybe some of the bigger challenges were and how you overcame them.

Greg Langston: Some of the bigger challenges we’re having a site on WordPress and it crashing, and your customer wants to pay you $4,000 and it doesn’t work.

Pat Flynn: When did that happen

Greg Langston: A year ago.

Pat Flynn: What would you have done differently? If you could go back?

Greg Langston: I would’ve said, okay. I will invoice you and don’t go through my shopping cart. That’s not working right now. I will invoice you directly and you can pay me. And so then the person got cold feet and decided not to do it.

Pat Flynn: Oh, interesting.

Okay. Was that like a human made error as far as the, the shopping cart or was that just like a, sometimes there’s just glitches in the matrix, you know, and there’s nothing you could have done about it.

Greg Langston: I think it’s probably a mixture of both and I assume responsibility for that. So that’s, that’s a challenge.

Another one is you have people who call you and have you have a conversation and they say they want to do something. They want to go forward and then they turn around and they say, well, I don’t really want to do that, or it’s not for me. And that’s okay. It may not be for everybody, but it is for the people that we’re able to serve.

I think the technological challenges have been some, I’ve learned a lot. Man, I’ve learned a tremendous amount as a result of going through this process. The content works. The content is excellent. I even had a UX developer go through and try and crash the system, try and crash the learning management system to make sure that it’s bulletproof, which was part of the process that we’ve gone through.

And I feel confident with that.

Pat Flynn: I love it. Thank you for sharing that. Final question, Greg, is related to your workload, running a business like this. I’m curious to know what your day-to-day is like, and like how many hours are you putting into this. How passive is it versus how not passive it might be.

And then we can get into a little bit of, you know, plans for the future and where we go from here. So tell me about your workload a little bit and what your week is like.

Greg Langston: I treat this as a business. And it’s five days a week, six days a week at times, I try to separate my time between content creation, optimization of the site, SEO, developing new ideas, tweaking the offering to, for example, before at the very beginning, we did not have the facilitator guides, but then with feedback from the customers, we said, okay, some people are struggling to get through this, even though they’re smart kids, they just get distracted. What if we gave the facilitator guide that teaches them, just like we teach them to go through that’s the learning, the answer, the constant learning.

So we go through that and we do the one-on-one mentoring for some of the students to pay the $4,000. Plus we have the one-hour calls with each, each person that buys a thousand dollar program. So basically you’re doing this full-time.

Pat Flynn: It’s like a full-time business. It sounds like you have your weekends and it doesn’t bleed over as much as possible.

I mean, there are going to be times when there’s projects and things like that. So you’ll have to sort of add in additional time, but it sounds like you’re treating this like, kind of like a nine to five. And how do you feel about that? Cause I know a lot of us who are entrepreneurs, we want to try to break away from the nine to five.

We want to remove as much work from our plate as possible, but in many cases that’s not always possible. And I’d love to know your take on that.

Greg Langston: Number one, I’m passionate about what I’m doing. I can see the direct result. Of what it’s doing for others. It’s not just doing for me with a nine to five job, you’re getting paid a salary. You’re paid to show up. What I’m driving is the transformation of the kids. I’m trying to get that 87% of lack of purpose down. I’m trying to get that engagement of 33% of high school students to go up and reduce the cost for the families and the student to go to college or not to go to college.

And so that in itself is a motivator for me. You know, I’m doing this after I’m over 60, I’m doing this after a very successful corporate career. A passion project that makes me money and drives enhanced lifestyle that I want to do. And it allows me to do something with my spouse who has an IQ of over 145. She’s brilliant. And her expertise is essay editing, which I’d rather have a 13 inch knitting needle pushed into my face. She loves to do that kind of stuff. And so, yes, I’m, we’re treating this as a, as a full-time activity and we’ll do that for the foreseeable future.

Pat Flynn: I love it. And as far as the future, what maybe new things are coming, or people can get excited about it in case they’re curious about what’s coming next?

Greg Langston: We’re starting to, we just outlined a new book that we have on that. We’ll be producing. It’s called The College Flight Plan that really provides, like our name, guidance and guardrails for the student and their family to go through the process. We’re going to have an essay writing course that. Takes what we teach a student to put in their application essays through one-on-one coaching.

We’re putting that online. That will be complemented by the, by the coaching. And right now, what I’m interested in doing is focusing on predominantly private schools. Word of mouth obviously is key. And then also for very vision values based private entities companies, like as, as we said, Chick-fil-A and companies like that, I want to, uh, work with them and we can find some, some licensing arrangement we’re working with the largest YMCA in the world. Because they’re looking to enhance their students, the people that work at the YMCA and provide them some extra value. So we’re talking with them as well.

Pat Flynn: Great. This has been incredibly inspiring. Thank you so much for giving us some insight on how you do what you do and what the business is about, but more importantly, the vision that you have and the values that you’re providing for these incredible students and parents of yours. Just super cool. This is why I wanted to bring you on because I’m inspired. I likely will be reaching out to you in the future about this stuff. With regards to my kids, I’m sure. One more time, where can people go to follow along to get more information and all the good things.

Greg Langston: They can go to CollegeFlightPlan.com. Or if they want to have some more information, they can go to CollegeFlightPlan.com/Guide. And they’ll get a PDF that has quite a bit information to help a student get and be successful in their college years.

Pat Flynn: Greg, thank you. Thank you to your wife as well for the work that she’s doing in this too, and want to wish you all the best.

Greg Langston: Thanks Pat, been a pleasure.

Pat Flynn: All right, I hope you enjoyed that interview with Greg Langston.

If you want more information about what he’s got going on CollegeFlightPlan.com/Guide, which is where I would recommend you go, or just CollegeFlightPlan.com. Greg, thank you so much for coming on and all the inspiration. If you want to get the links and everything we mentioned on this episode, over at the show notes page, just go to SmartPassiveIncome.com/session593, again that’s SmartPassiveIncome.com/session593. And as you heard inside of this episode as well, Greg is a member of SPI Pro. And as you can see a lot of learnings and takeaways for all the members there, and I hope you do get encouraged to apply. All you have to do is go to SPIpro.com and see if it’s the right fit for you there.

That’s where you can apply. And we hope to see in there. Anyway, thank you so much for listening. I appreciate you. And I look forward to serving you in the next episode. Make sure you hit subscribe so you don’t miss that and be sure to check out the other episodes coming your way.

Thanks so much. I appreciate you. Peace out and as always Team Flynn for the win.

Thanks for listening to the Smart Passive Income Podcast at SmartPassiveIncome.com. I’m your host Pat Flynn. Our senior producer is Sarah Jane Hess. Our series producer is David Grabowski. And our executive producer is Matt Gartland. Sound editing by Duncan Brown. The Smart Passive Income Podcast is a production of SPI Media. We’ll catch you in the next session.