SPI 834: Being Happy with Scrappy (Part One of My Entrepreneurial Journey)

SPI 834: Being Happy with Scrappy (Part One of My Entrepreneurial Journey)

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 chases discomfort, because everything awesome happens outside the comfort zone, Pat Flynn.

Pat Flynn: First of all, I just want to say thank you. I’ve been getting so many comments about these Friday episodes. I mean, I know you love the interviews and the conversations we have, but to get the feedback I’ve been getting about these episodes, where it’s just you and me, and I go deeper into things, and I tell more story, it just makes me so happy.

In fact, we’re going to be leaning into that a little bit more in 2025. And again, I want to thank you. I do listen and I do pay attention and I, I do care. And it makes me feel good that you’re listening to these and to set up 2025. And also, if you didn’t hear already on social or in some other places we’ve been sharing, especially if you are a member inside of our community, you know that something is coming.

There is a new phase of SPI coming. And I’m not quite yet going to share exactly what that phase is. Although it’s all about providing more value to you in a new way and leaning into more of what is working. So I guess I revealed a little bit of it. You’ll, you’re going to hear and see more of me. But more than that, there’s going to be different ways to get involved.

And I’m excited for that. I’m very excited for that. The entire team, especially when we were in Mexico, we were brainstorming and we just couldn’t be more thrilled about the next phase. of the life of SPI so I wanted to take this episode to go back in time as we often do but to the very beginning and then lead into this reveal and what it all means because there’s been a lot of phases to my work here and then bringing the team on a lot later the team came on much later in fact that was a later phase in fact we’ll talk about that in the next Friday episode as we lead into this big announcement I wanted to start today with the phase where it was just kind of all me and from the beginning after getting laid off Through when the team started to come on board and what I learned and the lessons and the mistakes that I made all those kinds of things so I want to take you back to 2008 and if you’re new here, likely you haven’t heard this story as many times as I’ve told it and I think it’s worthwhile to reshare this, especially as many of you may be going through similar moments in life, similar uncertainties, similar, just wondering what’s happening next.

So in 2008, right, this is sort of phase one, and I call it the scrappy start phase, right? From getting laid off to building and starting my first business to then building and starting smart passive income to share how I built my first business. So in 2008, In fact, it was June 17th, 2008. Today we call it a let go day here in my family, at least.

Cause that was the day I was laid off and I was laid off from my dream job as an architect and I was depressed. I didn’t know what I was going to do next. However, it became a huge blessing in disguise because over the next 16 years, I’ve generated over 10 million in online revenue from all different kinds of businesses and investments.

And I guarantee that I would not have had that happen. If I hadn’t gotten let go. So I’m so grateful for that. You wanna hear a fun fact? By the way, I was just telling this to Caleb the other day. A lot of people go, Oh, what was your boss’s name? Like, who was that, that guy? Well, he was the principal at MBH Architects, and his name is Joseph Smart.

His last name is literally Smart. And here we are, Smart Passive Income. I started a business, Smart Passive Income, and it wasn’t because his name was Smart. I just thought that was interesting. And that’s it. Like I never really made that connection until just recently. So it kind of blows my mind because he was the one who kind of started this whole thing after letting me go.

Now he didn’t want to let me go. He held me on as long as possible. This was during the great recession in 2008 and he had let go a number of other of my coworkers before it was my turn, but eventually just, there was no money. There were no new projects and he was budgeting. And I kind of went, I went down with the business that business survived.

He later asked me to come back. I said, no. Anyway, I was happy when I was an architect. I wanted to get back in right away after I was let go. You know, I was searching for other jobs that were similar. I was making decent money. However, I had no idea what the world of online business had to offer me. It was only through being a part of it, by doing things, that I then understood really what the benefits were.

And over time I saw three really major benefits of getting into this world of online business. The first one, more earnings. My revenue potential is You know, it’s, it’s parallel to how much work I put in, right? There were times I remember in the world of architecture where I would work overtime and yeah, I’d get paid overtime, but then I was on salary and then I wouldn’t get paid for that extra work.

In fact, because my job position was much higher, I felt like. I was required to do even more, and I really wasn’t getting what I thought I had deserved. Again, I was making decent money, but I was putting a lot of extra effort in because I wanted to make more, and I was hoping that maybe there’d be a bigger Christmas bonus or something like that, right?

Now, as a business owner, as an entrepreneur, my ceiling is however high I want it to be. My revenue potential is much, much higher. My room for growth is much, much higher and faster, but it also is my responsibility, right? Number two, in addition to more earnings, I have now more creative freedom. And this was really important to me, right?

Because even in the world of architecture, I was doing things perhaps differently than they wanted me to. I was trying to find new ways to better improve the systems that they had. And some of that stuff they did adopt and credit me for some of that stuff was never adopted because it was old school, right?

I was building a business for somebody else. I was building somebody else’s dream. But when I became an entrepreneur, even though I didn’t know exactly what I was doing and I was figuring it out as I was going, I was building a business on my own terms for my own dream. At the time, it still required me to come up with a plan and to take responsibility.

However, even the smaller wins, because they were my own, they were so much more reporting. And then number three, So number one was more earnings. Number two is more creative freedom. Number three was more time freedom. So when I started my family, which was right around the time my business started, I soon realized, especially as the business started to take off that having freedom of time, time to choose what I want to do and when I want to do it right.

Not just to lay around, but to choose when to do the work required to generate more revenue, to run my business, but also choose when I wanted to focus on my family. To choose to, yeah, take a three hour lunch because my wife needed help, or what have you, right? Or take a day off and go to Disneyland because it was just up the road an hour and a half from here in San Diego.

So I was able to not schedule my life around the work I was doing, but rather schedule my work around the life that I wanted. The myth of the four hour work week is real. There’s still work that’s required, and will always be required, to upkeep things at least. Nothing is 100 percent super passive.

However, you can make it more passive, and that’s the whole idea of smart passive income. Those are the three benefits. More earnings, more creative freedom, more time freedom. Notice I didn’t say less stress. Online business, this thing is not easy, but I’m going to, 100 percent of the time, now that I know, you know, both sides of it, right, 100 percent of the time I’ll take the stress of starting something on my own, of building something that is mine and the rewards that come with it over the complacency of just being in a job saying, Yeah, I’m fine.

I’m okay here. And that job was supposed to have my back. I put everything into it. I put more than was required of me. I put in years of schooling. I put in years of work. I did more than Then my coworkers and yet this thing that was supposed to have my back turned its back on me. So that was the first phase, learning what it was like to get laid off, to discover who I was and become an entrepreneur.

And this is where I started, of course, in the lead. com, right? And this comes to my first lesson here, which is be happy with scrappy. Be happy with Scrappy, or as I like to say, you got to be cringed before they binge. Or as John Lee Dumas once told me, you got to be a disaster before you become the master.

All the same lessons, right? Be happy with Scrappy. So after I got laid off, I discovered a podcast called Internet Business Masteries, hosted by two gentlemen. Sterling and Jay. And there was one particular episode that inspired me because it was about a guy. His name is Cornelius who taught people online how to pass the P M exam, the project management exam.

And that was my light bulb moment. That was when I was like, Oh my gosh, I’ve taken several exams to get to where I was at. I was not yet an undergrad. Licensed architect, but I was on my way, but one particular exam called the lead exam was very difficult. And I decided to take that information, that experience, having passed that exam and turn it into a website.

Unfortunately, internet business mastery no longer exists, but I always want to give credit to where credit is due. And I would have not understood how to do any of this if it wasn’t for. The community there at Internet Business Mastery, it’s also a reason why I really value community and why we focus so heavily on community here at SPI because I’ve learned firsthand exactly what being around similar people with similar values doing similar things can do.

So this is when I started inthelead. com L E E D. Keep that in mind because that was a trademark that I probably shouldn’t have used. However, I learned my lesson. And that’s a part of this journey, right? The idea of lean learning, figuring out what your next steps are, and then dealing with the mistakes along the way, learning as you go, I figured it out.

I didn’t know what I was doing, but I figured it out. So I built in the lead. com as a website to help people pass the lead exam. And it was nasty. Like it was HTML. I was using a tool called dream weaver. Do you know what that is? That is an old. tool to build a website with CSS styling and coding and you have to do this on your own and like I scrappily put together a website but it worked and eventually people found it and eventually people shared it and eventually I published a PDF file that was just written in Microsoft Word again because I didn’t know what I was doing.

I was figuring it out along the way. I didn’t know how I was going to sell this thing. All I knew is my next step was to write this thing or else I’d have nothing to sell anyway. So I might as well write it and then figure it out. Which is what I did. So, toward the end of it, 2008, I sold this guide and I had generated 7, 908.

55. Which was two and a half times more than I was making as an architect when I launched that thing. And that was from one month of sales and it just blew me away. And the biggest lesson again was I started scrappy. I couldn’t afford the time to learn how to do everything first and then go do those things.

It would have slowed me down. It would have absolutely overwhelmed the crap out of me. So I was practicing what I now call lean learning, and this is exactly what my upcoming book is about coming out in June of 2025. So I’m excited to talk more in depth about this, but at a high level, this is what it’s about.

Number one, figure out your next step. Number two, learn only about that next step. Number three, implement what you just learned for that next step. And the number four. Repeat steps one through three. Repeat steps one through three. Remember that song? Anyway, I did this when I published the book. Like I said, I didn’t know how I was going to publish it.

I didn’t know how I was going to sell it, but I wrote the book. I figured it out as I went along. And trust me, once I had that book done, I was like, okay, I now have a reason to go and learn about this stuff that just bogged me down or overwhelmed me when I first heard about it. Because I had this book sitting there, and every day that went by I was like, oh my gosh, it’s a day that’s not out there making sales.

When I received my first refund request, I didn’t know how to process a refund. So I just figured that out when I was asked and used that opportunity to make my guide even better. And like I hinted at earlier, I also received a cease and desist letter. Yay. From the United States Green Building Council.

That’s the company that puts on the lead exam. And I thought it was cooked. I thought it was done for. Like my life is over, but they just asked me to change the domain name, which I didn’t know how to do, but I figured it out right in that moment. And that website, the new website, green exam academy. com still exists today.

It still provides passive income through zero hours of work. I have not put an ounce of effort into that site for five years, and it still provides a couple thousand dollars a month. So passive is possible, but it’s not the first step. It’s always the last step in the process, right? Creating systems or putting people in place or tools or software to automate those things that were initially having to be active.

And again, the biggest lesson here, be happy with scrappy. So after that, I started smartpassiveincome. com to share how inthelead. com, later greenexameacademy. com was built, things I was learning. I created a monthly income report to share how that was going. Down to the penny, I was sharing exactly what was working, how many sales I made, how much I was generating, how much I was spending, and smartpassiveincome.

com started to take a life of its own. People started to come to it for help with their own journey from their nine to five or getting laid off or getting fired into the online business space. And it was not a great looking website. In fact, if you go back into the Wayback Machine, you’re going to see it and it’s just a bare bones.

It was actually using the thesis theme. because it was easily able to be used outside of the box. And that’s why I got it and I didn’t know how to customize it. So it was just the bare bones, minimal out of the box, default theme. And it worked, it did its job for a while. And then I eventually found somebody to help me create a new version of the site, which was okay.

And then it just upgraded over time again, because. I was happy with Scrappy. I was happy with Scrappy. So from there, which was the happy with Scrappy phase, I entered the blog or die phase. The blog or die phase. The blog or die phase was interesting because it was all about creating as much content as you could.

And it was about blogging. So from 2008 to 2010, Everything was about blogging. I went to Blog World Expo. I participated in blog carnivals. I learned about how to become a better writer at this time. There were sites like CopyBlogger and ProBlogger that were my number one reads every single morning. And this was back when you would subscribe to blogs with an RSS feed.

And you’d wake up in the morning and you’d see the new articles published in your feed reader and then you’d read them like a magazine article every single day or every single week and it was so fun. The blogger dive phase introduced me for the first time to affiliate marketing. Because as I wrote about these other software and tools, that’s when I discovered that you could generate a commission from doing that.

And so I started to talk about the tools I was using from market research tools like Market Samurai and Longtail Pro. Those names might ring a bell and bring back some memories for some of you. I talked about web hosting tools and providers. And as I started to write more, I started to realize that people loved The income reports because I was talking about in the lead.

com or green exam academy. com a real life case study and I was like, Oh my gosh, what if I, you know, instead of just like came up with stuff or regurgitated content that other people were also publishing, that was good. And, but in my own style, like I wasn’t copying anybody, I was just kind of sharing the same kinds of principles and using my own thoughts behind them.

What if I, in fact, created a new case study? So this was when, in 2010, the niche site duel came about. And the niche site duel was actually a person challenged me to build a website from scratch and said that he could do it himself faster and make more money than me. And I was like, I mean, they scratched that competitor itch in me because I’m a very competitive person.

This person was a friend at the time, they are no longer because of other stuff that happened. But I’ll save that for another day. I wanted to compete, and I said, you know what, let’s make this public. Okay. You share it on your website, make it public. I’ll share it on my website, make it public, and we’ll see who wins.

And either way, it’s going to be a lesson for everybody watching. We’ll hold each other accountable. It’ll force me to actually do the work and I think it’ll be a great case study. So that’s what I did. So I started to blog publicly, the process, even before I knew what the results were. the process of building a brand new website.

And so I used certain tools like Market Samurai to discover which keywords were being searched for and which ones were being underserved. And I found a keyword, security guard training, and decided to create a website for that called securityguardtraininghq. com. And in 73 days after writing articles and sharing the process on how I did that on the Smart Passive Income blog, in 73 days, I wrote a post, and That revealed that we were at number one in Google and everybody flipped out.

They couldn’t believe it. They were like, Oh my gosh, this guy’s not just like talking to talk. He’s actually doing the work and we could see it. Everybody was going to the website just to like see it and search for it themselves and could verify that everything I was saying was actually happening and actually was true.

And that day. I saw like a 500 percent increase in affiliate earnings, like from that point forward, because people saw that what I was talking about was real. So that showed me the power of actually just creating real case studies and actually just doing work and sharing the process, journaling, working in public, as some people say.

And that forever will be a strategy of mine. And I think we’ve walked away from that a little bit. In the recent years, but guess what? It’s going to come back a little bit. We’re going to do more of that. I’m doing that a little bit now with my shorts case study. You’ve been hearing me talk about it here on the podcast, by the way, a little quick update, since I know that a lot of you are following along for my shorts channel, we’re at 420, 000 subscribers at this point, which is amazing.

And we are at episode 98. So 98 straight days, I’ve gotten to 420, 000 subscribers. On YouTube, we’re at about the same number of subscribers on TikTok. When we started, we were at just 20, 000. So we’ve gained 400, 000 subscribers on TikTok in about three months. And then on Instagram, we went from about 10, 000 subscribers to now 340, 000 subscribers, and the views are just rocking.

I mean, we’re getting 50 million views from the last 28 days across on each of those platforms. So nearly. 150 million views per month at this point for the shorts channel and it is generating revenue. It’s still steady at about 12K per month on YouTube and I did see my first check come in or deposit come in from TikTok for the first 30 days after monetization and that was 4.

2K in revenue from videos that are over 60 seconds in length, which is pretty amazing. So that’s, that’s going well. Again, case study, sharing the information. Real case study that people can see. We’re going to be doing more of that. And by the way, the Deep Pocket Monster YouTube channel, which was started in 2021, is 10, 000 subscribers away from 1 million subscribers!

Yay, YouTube! More information on that later. But anyway, let me keep going here to finish this video. Particular podcast episode, and then we’ll pick up where we left off next week, continuing the journey and then leading into our next phase, because after the scrappy start phase and then the blog or die phase, it was.

The podcasting pump phase. Yes. Pumping up the brand with podcasting. And this was a huge opportunity. I started the podcast that you’re listening to right now in July of 2010. I wish I started earlier. I actually bought equipment to start a podcast sooner because I was inspired by the internet business mastery podcast, yet I was so scared podcasting.

And it was especially hard back then because the technology wasn’t as easy as it was to just get one up and running. So you had to do all these things with coding and RSS and stuff to get started back then. So that kind of held me a little bit, but mainly I was just getting in my own way. I was scared of what people were going to say.

I didn’t know how to communicate behind a microphone, especially if it were solo episodes and plus even interviews. They were not great. I remember a test interview I did with a guy named Yarrow Stark and the interview was so bad. I never published it. I asked him what his favorite food was. He said it was spaghetti.

This was like a famous entrepreneur back then. He’s still a great guy. Yarrow Stark. He was in the blogosphere back in the blogger dye days. So I asked him what his favorite food was and he was like spaghetti. And I was like, what’s your favorite color? And he was like, uh, my favorite colors are blue. And if you go to his website, well, at least back then it was blue.

And I was like, have you ever tried blue spaghetti? It was so bad. It was, it was absolutely terrible. So I never published it. So I waited, but in July of 2010, I finally came out with the first episode, even though I recorded it three times, it was not great. It was not perfect at all. But I realized that like before you learn as you go, you got to be cringe before they binge.

And I published my podcast for the first few months, every other week. Cause that’s all I could handle. It took forever for me to come up with episodes. I would like script the whole thing and read it out. And it was just boring because I was too afraid to trust myself. But eventually I found a groove.

But I also eventually, when I attended one of these blogging conferences, I’ll never forget it. I was at Blog World Expo in 2011. This was 6 months after the podcast came out, just about. And I was in the hallways, and I was still podcasting every other week. My blog was still running hot. It was 3 days a week my blog was being published.

And I would meet fans there who were fans of the blog. And when I’d meet them, they could not stop talking about the podcast. Oh, I loved your show. I love this episode when you talked about this and you and your wife talked about this. And it was like, what about the blog? I’m blogging three times a week.

What about the podcast? Like, give me some, like, throw me a bone here. What I was realizing was that there was a shift happening, that people were enjoying hearing a real voice and hearing stories being told with the podcast, not just from my show, but from other people’s. All across the board shows like Mixergy, and of course, Internet Business Mastery was still there, and people were listening to NPR, and this was in the early days of podcasting, and I was getting right into it at the right time.

Now, by the way, podcasting is still in its early days, in my opinion, although there’s the video component of it now, and the video sort of phase comes later for me and us at SPI, but all this to say, I became privy to the fact that, okay, well, maybe I should shift my focus. I’m going to reduce the number of blog posts we’re publishing and increase the number of podcast episodes we’re publishing.

So I increase the podcasts to once per week, and then I hit some milestone episodes like episode 51. Tim Ferriss. Those are Tim Ferriss podcasts. And I remember fanboying for the first like five minutes. Cause I didn’t know how to handle it. It was my first big celebrity on the podcast and he and I have since remained friends.

In fact, I was able to help him start his podcast. There’s even proof because if you go to his YouTube channel, you’ll see a tutorial from me on how to use garage band. And he had asked me to create that tutorial for his audience because I was able to consult with him a little bit when he started his.

And of course he’s just gone gangbusters with it. Definitely subscribe to his podcast if you haven’t already, as well as five bullet Fridays. And then he and I stay in, like we text each other once a year, and we’re not like best friends or anything like that, but I do have text accessibility to him, and I don’t abuse that.

Every time I reach out to them though, he’s super grateful to hear back, and he just always has some great tips for me. I love Tim, he’s great. Shout out to Tim, he was definitely an inspiration to me. Anyway, that was episode 51. Episode 122, with Shane and Jocelyn Sams. This was a big episode. I think this came out in 2012, because it showed me.

That I didn’t need to have the big celebrities in order to get an incredibly impactful episode. Shane and Jocelyn were the two teachers from Kentucky who had quit their jobs after listening to the first episodes of SPI to generate passive income. Shane quit his job as a football coach and started a football coach website.

Jocelyn quit her job as a teacher. To start a librarian resource and they just became so successful. Flip your life with Shane and Jocelyn. Sam’s has been amazing. They have a book now we’re coming out soon. They have a podcast. They’ve just been incredible. And that was episode one 22, another milestone episode.

Anyway, I’m just kind of sharing the history of what I’m learning as I go. And what I love about the podcast is as a byproduct, two things happened, right? In addition to, you know, just being the number one way that people found out about the brand. That’s what we found out in a survey. It was like over 50 percent of people who found out about SPI at this point in the podcasting pump days found me because of the show.

More than the blog, more than word of mouth. Well, sometimes the show they found because of word of mouth, but the show was really the center of everything for such a long time. And here you are still listening to it or having just discovered the podcast, which is amazing. Anyway, two other byproducts.

Number one, I became. A much better communicator. Just by continually getting behind the microphone, I became more confident in my storytelling, in my voice. My ums, although they still exist, have been fewer and far between. I’ve been able to hold a conversation better in person, in public. It eventually became my stepping stone to getting on stage in 2011.

Shout out to P. T. Money over at FinCon. He got me started. with speaking and I only was able to do that because number one, I said yes to it, which put me in a force function. But number two was a result of the podcast being able to get comfortable behind a microphone like I am today. And I can create an entire podcast episode.

Here we are 30 minutes unscripted. I do have bullet points of course and certain things I want to cover, but to trust myself to be able to do this has only come from getting behind the mic and doing the reps, getting better each time. The second by product. We’re the relationships that were built from the guests who are on my show.

I would not be best friends today with Chris Ducker if it wasn’t for the podcast. I would not be colleagues and friends with people like Michael Hyatt and Amy Porterfield and more recently people like Jenna Kutcher and several others if it were not for the podcast as the platform. It’s the only way I was able to get in contact with Gary Vaynerchuk when his book came out, Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook.

I bought a few of his books. I said, Hey, I bought a few of your books. Could you come on the show? He said, You got 15 minutes. Let’s talk. And then we both were on the board of Pencils of Promise together. We got to meet at an event together and become even better friends. And although we don’t chat. That much.

I chat with him as much as perhaps I chat with Tim. They’re both very busy people. There are people in my life who I could potentially reach out to if I need anything, which is pretty amazing. Only because of the podcast, some of the students at SPI only take that course power of podcasting because they want to build better relationships with people in the space that they’re in.

I mean, to get 30 minutes an hour with somebody is just incredible. And to have that platform, to be able to share that conversation, to build an audience through association. Right? John Lee Dumas. I was his first podcast episode. I was his first podcast guest. And he and I just recently caught up. He was in San Diego for a time.

I remember this because that evening the Padres got crushed after beating the Dodgers the day before. And then we lost the playoffs, and now the Dodgers are about to take the World Series away. They’re up 3 0. I am a Shohei Otani fan. But anyway. Where am I going? I’m going back to JLD. John Lee Dumas was in town.

We caught up. We became friends because of the show and he has built this incredible empire as a result of his podcast, The Podcasting Pump. And I do believe that podcasting is still a viable way to build a brand today or else I wouldn’t be teaching that course still today. So anyway, here we are 30 minutes in.

In next Friday’s episode, I want to continue the journey with you and get into the online course boom and then communities that convert. And then the next phase of the SPI journey. And I’m here for you. I’m excited. Let me know what you think of this episode. Hopefully it shows you that we’ve come a long way and that it didn’t just happen overnight because it’s not going to do that for you either, but getting those reps in and understanding that what got you here won’t get you there, right?

Wherever there is for you, we want to help you get there. So hit that subscribe button so you can catch next week’s episode. Next week’s interview. We’ve got a lot more stuff coming your way. That’s all here to serve you. So thank you so much. I appreciate you. Hit that subscribe button. Cheers.

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