Guest Podcast: Guide to Thriving in a Risk Averse World (Seek Your Summit)

Hi, I'm Jen Drummond. Welcome to Seeker Summit. As a mom, a business owner, and the first female to climb the seven-second summit, I realize that the mountains we climb are a part of our success. And it is up to us to go beyond that success into a life of significance. All right. I have Scott, Cleary, on the podcast today, and I am so excited. We have mutual friends. Scott Miller. So thank you, Scott Miller, for introducing us. Scott, thank you for having me. Thanks for being here. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. One day, one day, we'll do a little bit of the show. We'll swap. Yeah, perfect. I'm already because I have a podcast too. Yeah, I'm manifesting that prematurely. So there you go. Okay, so introducing you to my audience, you grew up in Canada with non-entrepreneurship type parents, like very risk-adverse people. And I look at who you are, and I'm like, apple tree, it just doesn't make sense. You're right. So I always make a joke how I don't have this origin story where I came from nothing, or I was homeless for some point. I was very comfortable, very privileged growing up. But I think safety is a facade that a lot of people don't understand how to escape. And I think that the lives that our parents had and our grandparents had and the safety and security of a nine to five or a w two, I think a lot of people still chase that. And I did for a moment until you start to realize that safety is a facade. If we look at cost of living, if we look at buying a detached home, our first home, our first condo, if we look at our, the buying power of the dollar that we make, if we look at the fact that we no longer have pensions like our parents, all of a sudden, we look at the fact that especially during COVID, obviously, this didn't impact my upbringing in my decision, but I think it was very, it made very prevalent during COVID, when people who worked for companies for 30 years were laid off overnight, we realized that maybe the things that we thought were safe, that our parents that are grandparents that are not that safe. And I think I had that realization very young because even just looking at the job market, I was trying to do the math. I'm like, listen, if I just work a w two, that's what it's called down here. It wasn't called that in Canada about just working nine to five I make X amount of dollars. I don't even have a pension. Then how much do I have to save up so that I can retire at some point? Like most of our parents would want to retire at 65 or seven years, something like that. And on top of that, we're living longer too. So how am I going to find this nest egg of 10 to 15 or 20 million so I can make X amount of dollars per year until I retire if I live to 100 and whatever. So that's very scary because then you start doing the math and you're like, okay, so I got a good investing because if I'm making what people think is a great salary 100k, which is not that much in a country that taxes you 50 plus percent and you do that for your whole life and then homes are more expensive and cost the living more expensive. You're doing the math and you're like, shit, like I'm not going to be able to retire at any point to draw a picture for what it looked like for my parents and for a lot of people's parents and grandparents. They had these pensions that they would work for 30 years and they get 70 percent of their best years until the day that they died. And this doesn't exist in 99 percent of industry anymore. So that means if you made 100k, your whole career for 30 years, you would make 70 percent of that $70,000 without working without doing anything until the day that you die. That really doesn't exist for the majority of people anymore. Now you have pension contributions and whatnot and you have investment contributions or 401k contributions but it's not the same. Not the same at all. Never the same. Right. So that was the light bulb, Scott, wake up. You got to get your shit together. You got to figure out how to make a ton of money and what does that look like? And I was like, well, let me take more risk early on in my career and that the idea of wanting to take risk pushed me down this not immediately entrepreneurial rabbit hole but working in more of an entrepreneurial environment. So working with startups where I felt like I had even more opportunity to move up the ranks quicker than in Fortune 500, for example. And that was really where sort of the push away from safety and air quotes, security, nine to five government moved into entrepreneurship and working in smaller companies. One small company I worked out was acquired by a private equity firm. That was the light bulb moment for ownership and the opportunity there and multiples. And then that sort of kicked off everything else. And then I consulted with a whole bunch of startups. I joined startups, some works, some didn't. I joined one that was actually acquired where I led sales and marketing. So I bolted myself onto an existing company that was about 10 years old. I really helped them scale out exit. That was about five years ago now. Okay. And I've just been involved in the entrepreneur startup ecosystem ever since. That was what led me to create content around it. The podcast, all of that was all focused on entrepreneurship startups. And I've loved it. I've invested in startups. I've done the whole, the gamut of things, building them, joining them, talking about them, investing in them. So I think it's, I think it's a smart way to look at potential career opportunity. What brought you down to Miami Fort Lauderdale area? I mean, that's a mix of different things. That's not just me wanting to further my career, even though I think that the US is a great place to further any career because there's so much opportunity. It was more just we were done with the weather, we were done with the cold. I think that if you are an ambitious driven person, I think you can build a business anywhere. But for me, in my opinion, I wanted to give myself the best chance of doing anything. And for me, that was, that was the US. There's opportunity in Canada for sure, but there's just less opportunity than the US. There's just less money to flows. Investors are a little bit more risk adverse. If I have a podcast, I have less access to people in Canada than I would in New York LA or Miami. So that was the goal. It was really just to put myself in a position to win a higher likelihood of winning than not. I like that. Yeah. Depends where you swim, right? It's true. Depends where you swim and just being conscious of what that environment looks like and what it can provide. I think that's actually, that's how I've always sort of positioned myself. I mean, there's a lot of things that go into being successful. But I also think that you don't have to make it harder on yourself than it has to be. And if you have the means or the opportunity to make these bold, audacious moves at a particular season of your life where you were able to do it, meaning it's not maybe adversely affecting your relationship or your kids or whatever. If you can do that, then I think that it's good to take those risks early on because then it actually makes all the other risks like building a business, building an audience, getting on more stages, interviewing cool people. It removes a little bit of that risk by taking that one big risk to switch countries, basically. No, I like that. Mm-hmm, helpful. When you came here, did you already have an audience built or did you do that pretty much here? I started the podcast in Toronto. Okay. I started all virtual because I started just before COVID and then obviously during COVID, everything was over, over Zoom. I started building it out, but I think it really took off when I moved down to South Florida to Miami. And I think it was a mix of being around the right people, but also I don't want to equate the success entirely to South Florida and making a move to the U.S. I think it's also because I stuck with it for an unreasonable amount of time too. Right. So keep in mind when I moved down from Toronto to Miami, I was already four years into building, or whatever, three years, three and a half years into building this thing. So you can say, okay, you moved down to the U.S., you had access to great guests or whatever, or you went out for lunch with that one person who introduced you to this one individual that was a degree of separation away from an individual that you wouldn't have had access to if you stayed in Canada. But I think that it's, again, putting yourself in the right place, right opportunity. That almost architects a little bit of luck. And then sticking with it for an unreasonable amount of time also adds to that potential luck that you're creating for yourself. So it's a mixture of everything. It's time, it's the moving yourself to the right spot, it's the connecting with the right people. All of it contributes to the overall outcome. And it could be successful without any one of those individual pieces. But again, like my belief in life is that you just want to stack the odds in your favor. Right. So if I do it for another 10 years, and if I stay in a major U.S. coastal city that has asked the people when that city is growing, if I upskill myself, all these things impact the potential likelihood of a positive outcome or success. So I think that that's really the lesson. It's stacking the odds in your favor again and again and again in any way that you can reasonably do it. Given your resources, your band with your connections, your ability to move, your ability to learn new things, your ability to invest in people or processes or ideas that can help you take it to the next level. Yeah. And I think the through thread here is the persistence, right? Yes, definitely. Like it's just one step, one step, getting in the right room. And like you said, a lot of times it's that one random relationship for that one random person that maybe wasn't so random. If you look at all the steps you took before that allowed you to meet them, it feels random. It feels random. And this is actually so if I had just just just stayed in Toronto and just podcasted and wasn't able to sit down with people in the same room and shake their hand and build rapport with them that way. And I could only email and jump on zooms with people. If I had just done that, it would still be successful at some point. And I believe that. But maybe I shorten the time that it takes to be successful by a factor of 10 or 20. Who knows, right? You can only assume. But I still think that I don't want to take away from this to be I got to move to the US or I got to be in the right rooms of the right people. Like you said, the through line of thing that is the most important out of any advice you'll ever get from anyone is you have to stick with it for an unreasonable amount of time. And that's when you'll become successful at it. It may be in your five, it may be in your 10, it may be in your 15. But there's there's a tipping point because when you start the thing, there's a higher likelihood that you'll fail or you'll give up than you will succeed. But there is a tipping point when after doing it for so long and learning what works and what doesn't, there's a higher likelihood of you succeeding than failing. So the goal is to stay in the game long enough to get to that tipping point where things start to move in your favor where that incremental growth turns into this hockey stick parabolic growth curve. So I think that that's what people have to look for. And that's how they have to set themselves up with their systems, their processes, their financials so that they can stay in the game long enough. And I speak about this a few times, it's like a 10 year rule that I have. You want to stay in the game for 10 years minimum or at least position yourself in your head to think I'm going to, if I'm going to do this thing, I'm going to stick with it for 10 years. Because what that does is it forces you to think long term. It forces you to say, okay, if I'm going to do this for 10 years, what is the systems and processes that I have to put in place that allow me to do for 10 years? I mentioned finances. How much money am I making? Do I have to keep my nine to five while I work on my side hustle from five to nine? Because I only have six months of runway. If I quit my job, six months is not 10 years. So how do I find a way to structure my life? So I continue to do this thing for 10 years, an unreasonable amount of time. That's when I know that at some point in that 10 year journey, there will be that tipping point, the higher likelihood that I will succeed than fail. That's what I'm trying to get to. And that's what I've done in my own life, in my own podcast, in my own career, in my own relationship, everything, right? It's about not giving up too soon. Yeah, no, definitely. And it's like you said, being smart about, okay, if I commit to this commitment, like I talk about it in my book, if I'm going to climb the mountain, and I know that I'm climbing the mountain, then I don't have any energy being wasted on whether I'm going to climb it or not. So if you set up something, it's like, hey, I'm going to do this for 10 years. Now there's no energy being wasted on whether it's going to do go for 10 years or not. That's already decisions been made. Sorry, did you're doing it? Yes. You've got to figure out how now. Now you figure out how and now you get creative. And now like when it's miserable, you're like, okay, well, this is miserable. How do I make it fun? It's not, do I quit? Yeah. That's it. That decision's been taken off the table. So I think it's very important that we take certain decisions off the table so that we have this energy to deploy to make it successful. Because I mean, climbing a mountain, there's like a physical component to a very real physical component. So I think that climbing a mountain forces you to think about this stuff before you take it on. Because if you are not physically prepped for it, you're not even going to get, I don't know, the mountain climbing terms, but to whatever elevation or whatever first base camp or whatever, you're not even going to get there. Right. The beautiful thing about, and also, the potential issue with accomplishing anything in life like not physical, but building a business is that we can trick ourselves into believing that it's going to take way less effort than it actually will be because it doesn't feel painful immediately. It doesn't feel painful in the first week, usually. It feels painful in year three when we still haven't made a lot of money and a customer sues us. That's when it feels painful. You will figure out way quicker than three years, whether or not you can climb a mountain, but and that's when you're going to be tested and you're going to be tested early. When you've been beat down over three years and trying to build this business and you don't have the right mindset or you can barely make rent and you're taking consulting gigs on the side to pay you, you know, put food on the table, pay your mortgage, pay your rent, and then you're still not making money and then you get sued and three years into it, you're beaten again and again and again and again. There's a very high likelihood you're going to give up and go take another job because you have not set yourself up for success and you have not set yourself up to be able to do it for 10 years or even understand that 10 years is the goal that you're aiming for when you first started out because there's so much misinformation about overnight success and the Stanford dropout that builds a business, you know, and it goes to $100 million in three or four years. I think that there's more, as we're talking about this, I think that hopefully nobody confuses the fact that climbing a mountain is hard. So probably scares people away much quicker. I think there's a lot of confusion about how hard it is to build a business. True. Because there are probably not many videos on YouTube telling you climbing a mountain is easy. There are a lot of videos on YouTube and TikTok and Instagram saying, you know, follow my course and you're going to be running at $50,000 a month with your dropshipping business in a month or two months. So when you're inundated with that information, you start to believe it. And like, I think my goal in life, at least at this point is just to tell you like ignore all that because it's not real. Commit 10 years and you will find a way to be successful, but you are being like brainwashed into thinking that building businesses is easy. It's not confusing. It's not complicated, but it's not easy. It's going to be hard work for a long period of time. And the second you figure that out, and the second you figure that there is no such thing as passive income without active effort, and there's no settings overnight success, that's when I think that you will start to understand what you're getting yourself into. And that's when I think you have a higher likelihood of being successful. Yeah, when you keep saying yes, and you have all that information. Yes. Because then when you start out, and you're through that scenario, just describe where you're getting sued and you're barely making any money, but you're making incremental progress. Well, all of a sudden, you realize it's like a blip as opposed to the end of it because you again, going into it, realize that you have to commit to this thing for 10 years. If you benchmark against that, the three year blip is no longer an issue. If you benchmark six months, the three year blip is a big issue because you didn't even expect to be going this long and not having the money coming in that you wanted to have. So I think that setting expectations is probably one of the most important things to do when you're trying to take anything on. I also believe it's the same as working out a relationship. I mean, you have to set expectations with yourself. How long are you going to commit to this thing? Because a lot of people just want overnight success in anything. It's not just business. It could be overnight success and weight loss, overnight success and finding the perfect mate or spouse or partner. And it's not like no relationship that survived past three years has been like what's what's the honeymoon period like six months or a year psychologically or something, right? And then it turns into real and then it turns into we have to figure out how we're going to live together and we're going to grow together and are we going to have kids and are we going to get married and all these things, which is all beautiful and it's good. But there's no relationship to void of those conversations, right? So if you only expect to go into it for six months or a year and you expect that that's always going to be the case and it's always going to be honeymoon and it's always going to be infatuation as opposed to like true love and commitment, then you're always going to fail. Right. Because you don't know how to repair the rupture. Exactly. Because you have the wrong expectations going into it. Yeah, definitely. No, I like it. There's that soapbox. Thank you very much. We're good. So when I look at your path, right? Let's because this has been very successful for you. You have the podcast. You have three, right? Two. Two. Okay. Well, okay. So depending on how hard you research, you'll find a graveyard of broken projects and abandoned stuff that never worked out. But yeah, yes, I do that I'm actively building right now. Okay. One's daily. One's daily and one is a more like this interviewing style twice. And what made you decide to start the second one? So I study what's working and I see if there's a way for me to replicate it. And I I reverse engineer other other people success quite often. And I look at not only the main podcast that I'm growing, but is there something else that seems to grow faster that fits the podcast listener better in terms of the content they like to consume. And after looking at like literally hundreds of podcasts, when you create an interview style podcast, you create what's I guess the best way to describe it is like a me too product. So it's us interviewing and it's great, but ultimately there's like 50 other podcasts where you know, someone's interviewing me and someone's interviewing you. And you have to really be in like the point 0.01% to capture an audience because people aren't going to come for me if this is your show. They're actually going to come for you. So you got to stand out so much as a host that you built a cult like following around you. And that's very difficult to do because there's major hosts that have huge audiences like a Lewis house or a Tim Ferris or Tom Billy or Alex Friedman or any of these guys that are building massive shows or a Mel Robbins like they that there's tons, right? So if you're going to create another me too product based on someone else's thought leadership, I'm bringing on all these great guests. It's really hard to stand out. And I've been building it for six years and it's doing well. But I mean, there's shows that are still bigger than me and there's shows that are massive and it'll probably take me another 10 years to get to where some of these shows are. So I like it. I use it for a very specific purpose. It gives me access to incredible people. It's a great networking tool. It does good numbers. But I also understood that the piece of the podcast that people actually come for is the host. It's not the guest. It's the host. I compounded that concept that I believe to be true with the fact that people also like listening to podcasts in short bursts while they're doing things. So not everyone loves a four hour Joe Rogan episode. A lot of people like 10, 20, 30 minutes while they're taking the dog for a walk or driving to work or working out, right? And people can love consuming daily short content. So the second podcast is really the combination of those two sort of thoughts combined into a show. It's it's me every single day for a really short 10 to 15 minute segment teaching on things that I know. And it's giving people constant exposure to me and who I am. And they're going to learn from my career, my experience and some of my ideas. And it's also just it's it's much easier to scale that out. It's very hard to do a daily interview. I know John Lee Doomass with entrepreneurs on fire does it. But for me, it's easier to just focus on me creating content every single day, removing all the X factors, removing all the booking and really tapping into my audience and building a relationship with them and making sure that I'm in their ears every single day. And I find that that is a much quicker path to grow a podcast than being another me to interview style. And so far, the thesis is working like it's it's growing faster in the two years that I've been building this than what success story, which is my interview style podcast was doing at the two-year mark. And I look at like I look at Erick Sue and Neil Patel who do marketing school at the daily marketing podcast. John Lee Doomass is a daily interview with that grew incredibly quick. So all these daily short focusing, in my opinion, more on the host, I think that's what create a really not fast, but quicker a quicker podcast, a quicker, you know, quicker podcast growth than doing like another me like a copycat me to style interview show. That gives you a lot of content, right? Repurpose content gives you tons of content. So every single every single time I do the podcast, I mean, I'm a content marketing machine. I probably put out 30 to 50 pieces per day. So everything that I do, whether or not it's a podcast or I'm doing a 10 minute because the second podcast is called 10 minute MBA. I'm just talking about daily business things that usually it's something I dealt with that day. And I'll turn it into like, okay, these are my thoughts and like teachings on how to sort of solve for this in your own business. So all that turns into content as well. Every time I go on stage as a videographer, records me sometimes as Gina, sometimes as an actual videographer, recording me, I turn that into a whole bunch of content. Yeah. So find a way to I think the lesson after, you know, just understanding how I think through taking a new product to market in the podcast of the product, the lesson is you got to find what resonates with that particular medium, the best in the audience that is consuming the content on that medium. And maybe it's doing things slightly differently than everyone is doing it or maybe it's maybe it isn't. Maybe it's emulating what everyone is doing, but testing different ways of creating content on a particular meeting them and seeing if it's growing or not or working or not, I think is very important as a content creator. And that's constantly what I'm doing, which is what led to the second show. And do you ever have a problem coming up with content? No. Never. Never. Never. I mean, because your lens is always on. Lens is always on. There's like 50 different topics we'll talk about today. And I'm sure one of them, it'll be a light bulb. I'm going to just put that and turn that into a 10 minute clip. If I have zero ideas, I mean, you can just go to YouTube and type in business, I don't know, entrepreneur ideas or entrepreneurship tips. And then you can literally rank the videos by most watch, to least watch and then look at some of the topics that they discuss and then go record a video on that because you know, it's a high search topic. There's so many ways to get inspiration. And I also write down everything that I've already spoken about. So I never repeat. So I think that it's actually quite easy. When you live in this space and you study it, like all good entrepreneurs do, they live in what they're doing so much that the ideas come, you understand the market, you understand what works, what doesn't, when you're a content creator or a podcaster. But I think that's just a great way to approach building anything worth building as an entrepreneur, like just live in it and focus on it. And don't get distracted by all these other shiny objects. Like focus on the one thing you're building and study people that are doing it just a little bit more advanced than you and people that have been doing it for 20 years and 50 years and just study everything you possibly can and immerse yourself in it. And this is what I do with content and podcasting. So the answer your question, ideas come very easy because I'm living it all the time. Yeah. Yeah. No, I become, I can get geeked out on things, right? Like I'll start watching and studying and then I'll watch it the first time to absorb it. Yeah. I'll watch it a second time to like start like putting timestamps in the how, when do they transition and how do they do this? What's going on? Right? And then I'll watch it a third time at a different moment to see if I pick up different pieces. Yeah. And it's because it's something you love, you don't even realize that it's abnormal, right? It is a super abnormal behavior to do that and watch something three times, but you're right. I will. So I will go so far as to like to your point, like I'll look at how they entered. So for a video podcast, for example, I'll look at in the first 30 seconds, like what's the hook? What's the line that diary of a CEO includes in their YouTube video that hooks people in because I know for a fact that diary of a CEO does, I think something stupid, like 20 million downloads a month. Wow. And he is so analytical and there's a lot of good examples about, you know, with various creators, you can go study, but diary of a CEO, I'll be looking in the first 30 seconds. What's the line that the guest drops in the trailer that he chose to put that there because he knows that that's going to hook people. And then if you look at YouTube stats, if you can hook people for the first 60 seconds, then they're more likely to stay for the first five minutes. And then you know, you see how many people drop off after the first five minutes, they're more likely to stay for the 10 minutes, whatever. And you can optimize your video or your podcast. But I'll study the trailer most importantly. And then I'll also study, for example, his thumbnails, his show notes, I know for a fact that Stephen Bartlett in particular, diary of a CEO, tests about 15 different thumbnails on Facebook. So what he does, and you can use, so Facebook ad library, you can go check out anyone else's pages, Facebook ads that they're running. So what Stephen Bartlett does, if you go to his ad library every time before he drops a show, he will run ads against about 15 different versions of thumbnails, YouTube thumbnails, that he will then pick a winner based on the click through rate. Obviously, he sees the data on the back, on the back end, and he'll pick a winner thumbnail. And then he'll use that for his YouTube video. So just by studying that process and by looking at the 15 different thumbnail options that he puts in front of an audience and runs ads and pays money to and then seeing which one the winner is and then learning from that strategy. So out of all these 15, he picked this particular thumbnail with this particular quote from the guest. And that's the one he used on YouTube. Like, now I can reverse engineer a little bit so I can understand after testing at scale every single time, what a good thumbnail should look like or what a good thumbnail caption or what a good headline is so that that gets a click through rate. So yes, I super definitely nerd out on this because there's the way that I see it. And this is again, I'm speaking from the lens of a creator, but I really want to drive this home. It's as a creator, I'm an entrepreneur. The podcast is my product. Okay, so it's no different if you have a software product or a consumer goods product or you're a consultant. These are your products, you're an entrepreneur. So I'm talking about reverse engineering a competitor, not really a competitor, but yes, quote unquote competitor. You can apply this strategy and this mindset to reverse engineer any type of business because you're basically just studying what's already in the market and you're applying best practices. This is not a novel concept, but I see so many people probably it's a little bit of ego. They think they're smarter than they are when they start something new and they want to reinvent the wheel and want to they want to just they they assume that what they know and the lens that they look at the world through is the correct lens and they'll just push it out there and they're confused when the market doesn't receive it. I'm the opposite. I'm like, I don't want to I don't want to trust my opinion too much. I think I know a couple things, but I don't really care what I know. I want to understand what the market needs. I want to understand what the audience needs. And the more I study the audience and the more I study the people that are doing this at scale, the more I can see what works and what doesn't. And then that's my initial thesis. That's my initial take to market with the podcast. And I just find like that again, it's all about compressing time. That's what we call luck. I think a lot of times. I think we call that luck, but it's not luck. It's our tech did studying your research and you're living in it. And for me again, it's just about increasing the chance of you being lucky. But also it's about reducing the amount of time and the friction so that you can start to see success so that you can start to see the you know the fruits of your labor when you're building the thing that you're trying to build. So I don't see any value and bringing my ego into the equation and assuming that I know what's best. I will look at all the things that are out there and then I'll make a judgment call based on people that have killed it and that I trust that I think to have massive teams behind them supporting them that put a lot of energy and money and time and resources into figuring out problems at a scale that I could never figure them out, especially when I'm just starting out. And that's the first version of whatever I put out because I know what good looks like. And then I'll iterate from there and I'll test and I'll learn, but I know my first version is better than just you know throwing it at a wall and hoping it sticks. So yeah, and there's confidence that comes with that. There is. Yeah, I think that's important. Yeah, very much so. And so you have a super successful newsletter. Yeah, I mean over 300 and 7000 subscribers. How why when did that fit into the puzzle and what is that? How the newsletter fits into the puzzle is I'm a big fan of if you are creating content, you cannot just assume that people want to consume content in the format that you're creating it. So if I'm creating a podcast, I know that there's tons of missed opportunity growing a social audience, a YouTube audience, a newsletter. So my job and I can't be so entitled to think that I'm going to convert people that just read newsletters into podcast listeners because that's not happening. That's I mean, maybe a fraction of a percentage, but ultimately I already have this great content. So instead of me trying to convert newsletter readers into podcast listeners, why don't I do the inverse? Why don't I find a way to repurpose what I already am creating into something that is consumable for that particular cohort of individuals. So for me, it was more a matter of I just want to be able to create one piece of content that can help me post everywhere and have to find a way to turn that content into not just audio but audio and video, short form video, social clips, tweets, newsletter. So the newsletter was a derivative piece of content from the podcast that was basically just building an audience in a different on a different medium tapping into a different group of people and serving them with a type of type of content they like to they like to consume. So it was Marty doing these great interviews with all these thought leaders. How do I turn these interviews and the topics we speak about into newsletter content, which is really not that hard. I mean, we already have a conversation. We already have a couple great talking points. I can just summarize these. I can transcribe it with I mean, there's a lot of tools we can use, but otter.ai does great transcription. There's a lot of Chrome extensions that do YouTube transcriptions and I would turn that into a newsletter into a blog post and I wouldn't take the transcription and turn it into it, but the transcription guides you guides me and lets me write. And then I also am a firm believer that writing is great for organizing your thoughts, for testing your own ideas and assumptions. So for me, I love the practice of writing. So it was it was sort of like a win-win. I sort of take the content I already have. I turn it into another medium. I build an audience over here that normally would not even know about my podcast. If for some reason some of them like podcasts, I'm going to tell them that I have a podcast, but ultimately I want to build a whole other audience that I can eventually in the future if I want to sell ad space on that newsletter. If I want to build another company, I have a whole other set of eyeballs over here that I was missing out on. So I'm not saying it's easy, but I think people also... It's in the same lane, right? Yeah, so the goal of the podcast and the pillar content or the long form audio video content was to create something that I could scale across all my channels because I wanted to show up everywhere. And especially with... Do you have a favorite channel? I think the podcast would be the favorite channel because that lets me show up on YouTube and then YouTube is video and that's a really high-trust building platform. And it also lets me sit down with people and chat with them. So I mean like that's... You're not going to get that by recording a dance on TikTok, right? So there's all these like adjacent benefits to building a podcast. That's the reason why I love it. But outside of that, I mean, I don't think I have a favorite channel. I think channels serve purposes for different reasons. For some reason, you'd have to be big on Instagram because people love verifying and validating your worth as a creator based on your Instagram following, which is stupid, but this is a social signal out into the world. A lot of my audience, I like... They're all super nerdy, they're all on LinkedIn. Those are probably the people talk about the same kinds of things that I talk about. Yeah. I like Twitter because... I mean, I like everything for different reasons. I like Twitter because what Twitter forces you to do is be super clever and witty and a really concise character account, which I think is a whole other skill set in and of itself. And I think that I like Twitter because it's a version of writing and it's a version of creative writing. And I do actually enjoy writing because again, of all the things that I mentioned before. And then newsletter is long form creative writing and it allows me to honestly de-stress and just put my thoughts on paper. And I think that also it's a great... It's a great medium to... Again, if you have ideas that you can put into a newsletter, like why wouldn't you be doing it? So the goal with the podcast originally was to create this pillar content that could be distributed everywhere. But I didn't have the capacity, like the energy to think about new topics for a new newsletter every single day or a new topic for Instagram every single day. So maybe sometimes I want to write a newsletter just based on what's happening in my life. But more often than not, I want a predictable repeatable content strategy that I don't have to rethink, you know, I can't think of another TikTok today or another Instagram short. I'm just going to pull a 30-second clip from the podcast I did two weeks ago. And that to me, it still shows up. It's still great. It still features another thought leader. And I don't have to do a lot of thinking to put that content out. And I think that that's probably the best way to consistently show up. I think that when people try and invent new content for every single platform, every single day, if you don't have a team supporting you, it's it's going to lead to burnout. You're going to quit immediately. So that's why... Yeah, how do you manage burnout? Well, I enjoy what I do. Yeah. Which is very important. I work very hard. I think that the reason why I don't burn out is because what I'm doing is in line with my personal North Star. I think that if I was working this hard for something that I wasn't enjoying, I would have burnt out a long time ago. I truly do believe... I'm sure there's edge cases for sure. But I think that burnout is more often than not correlated with somebody doing things they don't actually enjoy doing. Or whether or not they know it, it's not aligned with where they want to take themselves in the future. They don't see the thing they're doing day in day out, really getting them to where they want to go. And sometimes they don't even know where they want to go, but they just know that the nine to five that they're they're working on right now is not it. So I work way harder with the podcast with doing my own thing that I've ever worked in a corporate environment, like like by a factor of a thousand. I think that's important for everybody to listen to that's following today. Like when it's your passion projects, when it is your brand, when it is your entrepreneurship journey, it is way harder than if you're working for a corporate. I mean, it's just it's just it's all of you. It's a lifestyle. Yeah, it is. But I remember working in corporate and I would I would not burn out, but I'd be over it. Yeah, but I'm never over it now. Right. Right. And there's we there's weeks where it's hard to turn it off. Super hard to turn it off. I bet. Super hard. I struggle with that too. So I think that I think that's actually on the other side of entrepreneurship that not enough people speak about it's very hard to turn off and it can be toxic for the people around you. I mean, you can you can ask G how much I work. It's very toxic. Sometimes how much I put into this not because it's hurting our relationships are both entrepreneurs, but I think that sometimes it's important to know like, okay, so if we're going to have date night, go out, you're not working. Yeah, we're both learning how to turn that off. Learning how to turn it off. So I think that again, a lot of what I spoke about at the beginning was getting the right mindset. So you understand what you're getting yourself into and understanding what you have to commit and what you have to commit to. And I think that part of becoming an entrepreneur is understanding the season of your life that you're going to give to this thing. You're trying to build and then setting a deadline. And if it doesn't work by then then you have to remove yourself from it and find something else. But when you set yourself a deadline to not be working in the business for 24 hours a day, then you are forced to start to hire to delegate to build systems to build processes SOPs that will allow you to remove yourself from the business eventually so that it can continue on and you can be and you can start to craft a lifestyle as opposed to just committing more and more time for the rest of your life really. So I think that that's something that is very important for entrepreneurs to consider. How do I, what do I want? Do I do I want a billion dollar business and do I never want lifestyle? Do I want to make a million dollars a year and do I want lifestyle? Do I want to make 10 million dollars a year and have lifestyle? How do I architect that? Am I going to do this for the next 10 years? Okay, great. When I'm going to have kids, how much time do I have for kids? It's my spouse cool with it. If I can do the next 10 years and that's the most I can commit to this because then I want to have kids and be more present in their life and not just be an absent parent, then I have to figure out, okay, at the 10 year mark, we have to be doing this amount of revenue and I have to have this team supporting me so I can only have to commit 20 hours a week to my business. Like, there's so much nuance and context and factors that can impact, but the point is you got to think about it. Yeah, how often are you doing a check-in with yourself and saying, hey, this is balanced for me or this is working or is this not working? Are you proactive on that or just something normally break down and then you have to fix it? Because I used to be the breakdown. I used to be the person that I would break down and now I'd fix it. I've gotten better at being able to, okay, I'm going to check in quarterly, I'm going to check in more regularly so I don't have as many breaks. I think I'm more proactive. I'm just thinking about my own behavior because I'm proactively creating systems for things that remove things off my plate and I think that because I do that and I do that so much sooner than it has to happen. Can you give an example? Yeah, sure. Very basic example. So I just signed a new deal with a network that's going to help distribute the podcasts and there has to be some back and forth on the assets that are going to be delivered into this drive and the network's going to take the drive and the assets and the drive and the mp4s and the videos and they're going to push them out to their own distribution channels. So I mean, immediately I'm just finding the person on my team that can take care of that task, training them up on it, showing them where the drive is, showing them how to title and how to structure all the videos so that the person on the network side can pull the right videos and understand who the video is about and a couple different pieces about the video in terms of what we spoke about so that they're not confused and they know what to put in the show notes when they blast it out to their network. So I mean, train somebody up on that immediately, let them run with it a few times, make sure they had no questions, document it SOPs around, it did a screen recording and now that person's running with it and that's like a bolt on part of the machine. So I mean, I think some entrepreneurs for better, for worse, probably for worse would probably just do that thing themselves for a couple months if they felt they didn't trust somebody. It's a big deal to big network. That means you're introducing somebody from your team to somebody who's very high up and you don't want to disrupt that relationship. So maybe an entrepreneur would think, well, I want to manage that relationship and I want to make sure they don't screw it up so I don't like an idiot. I don't know, this is not how I think so it's hard for me to understand that but I know people that get stuck with two of these, too many of these processes and they don't trust somebody else to do it on their team for a variety of reasons. It could be they don't feel like they're competent or they don't feel like they have bandwidth or the person could be telling them they don't have bandwidth and they have a hard time hiring somebody new. Fortunately, I do not overburden my team so I'm constantly checking in to see what kind of bandwidth they have. How many hours they're committing in a day and if they if they have free time to do extra things, it's a lot of very candid conversation with them about what they're working on and what they're not. So when a small little project like this comes up, which probably only takes about an hour a day of work, I don't want to throw it on somebody who's going to drop the ball. I'm walking them through it. I'm making sure that there's no hiccups or bugs. I'm making sure that they can do it properly and then I'm trusting them to do it and I'm not checking in. I'll check in with the team meeting later on, you know, once every month or two months, but in this particular process, it's handled. It's done. It's on autopilot now. So yeah, and as new things come up, that's the mindset I have for that new thing and it'll just be find a way to codify the process, screen recording with loom or whatever is a really good way to do it if you have an outsource team, which I do. And then trust them to do it and also give them the agency to put up their hand and ask questions if they're not comfortable, which I think is probably the biggest issue with teams teams are and people are scared for some reason. And it's probably because you feel like you're approachable, but you're probably not to say, Hey, I don't understand something or hey, this isn't working or hey, this is broken or hey, whatever. And I think that the number one thing that has allowed me to effectively communicate is almost every time something doesn't work out the way that I want it to. It's like, let's solve this together and please just talk to me about what's going on in your life, in your work, in the SLP that I created so that we're trying to solve these problems that don't happen again, but it's not your fault. It's not your fault. I don't want you to think it's your fault. I don't want you just because something screwed up to never bring another problem to me. It's really important to make the person feel comfortable to constantly sort of raise their hand. And I think that that's something that's really helped me and allowed for, I mean, Kim Scott calls it radical candor, whatever you want to call it. That is the most important because nobody knows how your business is running like the people that are actually building your business. And you may think you know everything that's happening, but there's always some, there's always a mess that hopefully you create a psychologically safe environment for the people to tell you about it before it gets too big. Yeah. And what do you do for the person listening today, what do you suggest they do to help foster that type of environment and cultivate that type of culture within their business? It's a great question. There's a few things that I think I do personally that have helped outside of explicitly telling the person like, please don't stress if you screw up, please like let's figure it out together. I mean, that already is a step in the right direction. I do know where my team wants to go professionally. So I help them and I have a small team. So obviously with scale, you have to enable like your level of management to act like this for the people that are direct reports to them. But I don't have a level of management. So I have one guy that acts like my CMO, which I guess is a level of management, but it's not it's not a huge team, right? It's only six people for the podcast and the social stuff. So I know where they want to go in their careers. I know where my CMO who manages my editors and my social and my copywriting and all that. I know where he wants to go in his career. And I actively help try and as best I can help them get there. So like my funny enough, I'll talk about my editor Ali. He's an awesome dude. He started off as a solo video editor. He wanted to build a marketing agency. So obviously he did all the work, but I was giving him templates on how to run outbound sequences, how to struggle, how to figure out who your ICP is, your ideal customer profile, how to figure your buyer persona, how to set up a landing page. So we go back and forth on for him and his north star. Obviously he helps out me. He manages my team, but he wants to build his own marketing agency. And he has. So I've just through like a mentorship relationship, peer relationship, helped him get to where he is right now where he has multiple clients. He has not just my team, but he has his own internal staff. So I mean, I know where the team wants to go. And when you help them get there, first of all, they're super appreciative of you. It's a level of trust and loyalty that really I don't think can be replicated outside of you just giving it about what they want to accomplish in life and helping them get it. And I think that that's that along with telling them that they can bring you problems that that whole that whole level of trust that's built. I think I think that that's how you have to build a team. And if it's not, I mean, I helped Ali build a marketing agency. I mean, but say you're managing somebody who doesn't want to build an agency. I mean, where do they want to go in their career? How much money do they want to make? I mean, do they want a promotion? Is it title? Is it what is the thing that that person actually wants? You shouldn't know that. And then over time, help them get there and realize that when people are working with you, the options for where they can work are truly endless. So if they don't feel like they're growing in their own career in their own life, like sooner or later, they're going to leave you. So it's better to invest that energy and time into that person's growth, personal professional if you can, because again, it creates this environment of trust, which in turn will allow them to feel comfortable saying, Hey, Scott is on my team. I trust Scott. It is not going well. We uploaded the wrong version of the video. We forgot to edit this part out. Whatever. I'm going to let him know because he's not an asshole. He's we're on the same team here. We're trying to win together. I'm trying to help him win in his business. He's trying to help me win in my business in my life. And I found that's worked very well. Yeah. And do you feel like the economy is more like that nowadays with the gigs? Like I'm going to help you with your gig. You're going to help me with gig. It's not like this person's dedicated solely to you. Well, I think that with the gig economy with how much people switch jobs, I think that companies, employers, managers, founders, CEOs, they have to give way more shits about their team and their and the people they hire. I think also it's much easier for people to leave. So what does that mean? I think that you have to I think you have to create mutually beneficial contracts with the people that work for you. What I mean by that is people are not going to stay with you for 10 years anymore or 20 years. People are going to jump ship for a variety of reasons. They want more money. They want to they want to change. They want to work for a company that allows them to work from home all the time or maybe three days a week or four days a week. Whatever. They want to work remote. They go live across the world and some companies allow them to do that and yours doesn't. So when you hire people, it has to be a reciprocal agreement and you have to say, listen, I'm hiring you because I need you to do this thing and I need you to commit say two years of your life to my company just two years. And after two years, we can renegotiate. I know you're not going to commit five years, but if you commit two years to my company, then I'm going to commit two years to getting you to where you want to go. Now, what does that thing look like for you? Is it more money? Okay, two years, I will show you how to make from 60,000 to $100,000 in my company or elsewhere. If it's just title, if it's more responsibilities or whatever it is, if it fits within the context of what I can do as a business owner and a leader, then I'm going to find a way to get you there. And that's the agreement. So you're not going to quiet quit and you're not going to f off after one year and six months, you're going to give me two years. And after two years, we can decide if you want to renew this contract. And I think the issue with hiring people in 2024, what's happening is the employee says, I'm not going to, I'm not going to commit five years. I don't know how much time I'm going to commit. I'm just going to take this job. I don't feel they're investing in my growth. And like after a year and a half, two years, I'm kind of working, but I'm interviewing on the side. And the employer is like, I don't want you to do side hustles. I don't really care where you're going. If you want to raise, I mean, we were only allowed to give a 5% raise to internal candidates, even though we can give a 10% raise to recruiting ahead. I think people from the outside bringing them into the company, which are all real things. So now you have this misalignment. You have employers. I think they have the power. You have employees. I think they have the power. And I think it's actually going to hurt employers more because what's going to happen is that employee doesn't feel valued and respected and doesn't have a reason to stay with you for any period of time because you don't feel like the employer is investing in the employee's growth. They're going to quiet quit. They're not going to care. They're going to be flippant, nonchalant about their job. And eventually they will quit. And the employer won't be expecting it. And the performance was already lagging because they already checked out six months ago. And then they quit. And now you have to go find somebody new and hiring somebody who has a massive cost for a business. So I think that being super clear, aligning objectives, understanding commitment and locking that in as even a verbal contract is such a win for employer employee relationships and hiring that really fits a 2024 modern job market. And even thought process of the average employee in 2024, it's they don't want to work the way we did 10, 15, 20, 30 years ago. I think that's a good fix. I think that particular framework is not perfect, but it's a decent fix that sort of allows this commitment from both ends. Yeah. No, I see that. And I like that. I respect that. I think helps everybody succeed when you're working and communicating to each other. Well, I think so. I think that the alternative is just is is is people not setting expectations on either side. Right. And then when you don't do that. And again, if an employer thinks you're going to be with them for 10 years and the employee thinks that the person who just hired me is going to help me in my career and help me get to the next level. And neither neither person is fulfilling that agreement. Then that's when money's waste at times wasted really awkward career circumstances, broken bridge, burned bridges, whatever, all that nasty that comes with lack of clarity, lack of clarity. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Okay. So I'm going to move on us a second. So you have the two podcasts. You have the newsletter and you have a community that you're building. Yes. Right. So talk about the community a little bit and how that came about and where that's going. So communities call the social club. And community is I think the object that should be the objective of every creator. So I am trying to and I am building a community of later stage some exited entrepreneurs. And we meet four times a year and they're we bring in speakers that are some of the X podcast that I've had that I built relationships with. And it's a little bit of almost like masterminding a little bit. You bring in some some great business leaders to teach over some things that are obviously you know you bring in the founder of Reebok or something like that to teach it's it's a wild experience like the level that he's operated at is phenomenal. So that's the goal of the social club. But what I'm trying to do with a social club and what I think other people should do is they build audiences a lot of creators build audiences. But an audience is really just like they just listen to and receive the content. But it's a one way transfer of knowledge. So I put out a podcast audience listens to it. There's a level of trust there but and there's a level of of there's a level of influence created with an audience but it's it's peaked and it's capped. I think that the best way to as a creator monetize build a business leverage whatever word you want to call it is a find a way to turn your audience and turn them into a community. And when you turn an audience into a community you are no longer the only source of truth for that audience. Now that community is activating together. It could be in person. It could be online and they are supporting each other's goals and each other's journeys and they're teaching each other's stuff. So it's not just a one way anymore. You've created this community of people that are helping each other grow in their lives and their business. I mean for our community it could be where to invest after you made a little bit of money or it could be I'm starting my second company like I don't want to screw it up the way that I did the first one by diluting myself too much when I raise investor money. A million and different one you know conversations come up but I think that would be the ultimate goal because I think that too many people just try and monetize their audience by selling a product or a service. I think the most value is created when you find a way to turn an audience into a community. That's what I'm doing with the social club. That's what I've seen some of the best creators in the world do in different ways but it's finding a way to take people from just a follower on Instagram and how am I putting them in a room virtually or physically where they can help and engage with and activate together and help each other and that's what the social club is all about. So it's sort of taking the audience and moving it one step further into an actual community. And also there's more monetization options there too so if I want to sell a product or a service I want people that feel more value than just listening to a podcast guest. I want people that feel like okay if I listen to Scott interview the founder of Reebok for example I'm going to get information based on the founder of Reebok's journey however if I can get into a room with him or other business leaders not everybody's wonderful of that but other business leaders. Now it's I can talk about my specific problems and I can also help someone else with their specific problems and I also am in a room with people that are having similar problems to me so it's no longer just one way communication. Now it's again activating together it's camaraderie it's peers it's I can get advice contextually relevant to what I'm trying to solve for in my life as opposed to just here about Joe Foster the Reebok eyes journey. So I think that that's where that's where you create the most value as a creator if you can find a way to turn the people to follow you into a true community. And how are you building that and expanding that? It's for us we're doing in person because again everything in person is so powerful. In person is so powerful there's a lot of ways to do it but for us we're just inviting people out and then it's a very traditional model four times a year we charge an amount for people to come out to all four events for the year we bring in speakers there's networking there's food we do bespoke like matchmaking so somebody has like an issue with their business we'll find somebody who has solved that problem before at a high level we'll get them into a conversation with each other but it's really just I mean in terms of promoting it it's all the marketing things so throw a story up on Instagram say hey we're having an event come out check it out if you like it this is the cost right that's pretty much it I mean it's all the traditional marketing things you you tap into your existing audience you let them know it exists you invite them out to experience it I run outbound emails outbound on LinkedIn with a call to action to come out to an event so all the all the normal marketing stuff because at the end of the day the community is a product so how do you market a product I mean you talk about it on social and you you know you talk about you build demand for it you can jump on calls and talk to people about it on zoom and invite them out you run campaigns you do all you can run ads you can do all the all the marketing things and that's actually just one quick thought on this whatever you're doing whatever you're building if it's content creator it's newsletter if it's community online offline like it's just a product and it's just a business and want to say just I mean don't be so myopic like don't put blinders on to all the different things you can potentially do to grow it so you ask me how do you grow a community I mean run ads run emails like reach out to people like you can call call you do whatever you want it's just every sales and marketing activity you have a product figure out which one works the best and then triple down on that it's it's the same as if I was building a new software product or a new consumer good or I wanted to be a consultant like how do you how do you raise awareness for that everything everything yeah same formula yeah avenue yeah what are you most excited that you're working on right now I've been excited about the podcast since they want since they went and it's never felt or did all that's awesome because and that's why you don't get burnt out that's actually why you don't get burnt out because I went into it not caring about the financial component to it yeah because there was so many adjacent rewards to building a network and a podcast and sitting down with cool ass people that and and I also drink my own coolate I do believe if I do something for 10 years I'll find a way to be successful like I have to drink my own coolate right so there's so many immediate rewards like like sitting down with some of these people and talking to them my god it's like it's just phenomenal right it's like networking on steroids so those dopamine hits yeah kind of allowed me to forget about the fact that it was like a lot of hard work before I got paid and then I mean those dopamine haven't gone away because somebody who is a highly ambitious person I can't imagine anybody who sits down with some of the people that we do and you know get excited that I've ever done yeah you don't even you have to like paint yourself sometimes so no I'm still super excited about that because all this stuff that got me excited about day one is still happening plus I'm making more money plus it's growing so it's like it's like it's like all the even more cooler stuff and and better and and more good is happening to the podcast and I mean you know I just mentioned I didn't name the name because I don't want to name the name of the distribution partner until it happens and it's all working and yeah yeah you're feeling confident and other pieces but everything is going in the right direction right so now distribution partner adds x million more downloads and then I just had a great conversation with somebody that can get me access to these particular guests that are all like fortune 500 CEOs and like so it always excited about that because you see you see the path of somebody who's even done it before you look at Tim Ferris you look at Lewis House you look at Tom Bill you you look at even people that have not like Tim Ferris gets paid a ton to podcast but also very smart guy he turns a lot of that money he can do some angel investing into businesses so I'm like okay that's something I could do with it right Lewis House built a mastermind courses built a conference around his podcast I'm like okay that's an option to Tom Bill you as like a full movie set for his show right so like I could even do that or there's a ton of shows that have sold to Spotify for seven figures and that's an option to not everyone's a Joe Rogan but I'll take a multiple of 10 million for the show right if you sell if you sell and you grow big enough and you sell the rights to Spotify so and there's also other people that invest in shows too so like there's so many avenues for success and there's so many different ways to monetize it and whether or not it's selling to Spotify or turning it into a conference or just taking the revenue from it and and throwing it into angel investments like Tim Ferris there's so much opportunity on top of the fact that you're still sitting down with exceptional people right yeah I mean how do you not get excited about that oh yeah no it's my favorite thing and then also they look and then you get other opportunities too so now I get access to bigger and bigger stages I get to actually not just like podcast stages but get on stage in front of ex thousand of people that's all because of the podcast there's different ways to create influence and I think that this is a really I think that if you can stick with it for long enough I think it's a great way to do it because you can also build you know a billion dollar company you can also you can also stream on Twitch and TikTok for me as somebody who loves entrepreneurs this was like the best way to create fame and influence I love it so yeah so good okay so our listeners are all excited about all the things you're creating they've got a lot of tactical lessons not just the mindset piece that you have to do today so thank you for both how do we connect with you and follow and become part of some of your stuff so it's pretty straightforward all the socials the same so it's at Scott D. Clary and then you can go to successstorepodcast.com and that's the podcast perfect yeah thank you so much thank you I appreciate it yeah thank you