Guest Podcast: Make Money with a Podcast (Travis Makes Money)

Today, you're going to hear me on the Travis Makes Money Podcast with Travis Chappelle. Make sure you subscribe on YouTube or go listen wherever you get your podcasts. What is up, money makers. Welcome back to Travis Makes Money Podcast where it's our mission to help you make more money. Today on the show, we're going to be talking about some social media, sales and marketing stuff with my good buddy Scott Clarey. Scott is a dynamic entrepreneur investor and author. He hosts the success story podcast, a number one entrepreneurship and top 10 business show distributed on cheddar Amazon Prime, direct TV and Hulu amongst others. Throughout his career, Scott's led sales and marketing teams across multiple organizations playing key roles in company growth and acquisition. His weekly business newsletter reaches over 321,000 subscribers, sharing valuable insights from his experiences throughout his career. So Scott and I are going to get into a conversation all about money and how that translates to you those listening on how you can go out and make some more money in your life so you can enjoy life now. But before we get into all that, if you're tuning in, you're wondering how I go about connecting with some of the amazing people I've had on this show or my other show, Travis Makes Friends, it's honestly become the podcast. The podcast is the Trojan horse of connecting with good people. They can also help you create better content for social, build an audience, grow your personal brand, sharpen your expertise. And if you're committed to running it for a while, it could even pay you sponsorship dollars to do all of those other things. So for a limited time, I'm reopening my calendar for a couple coaching clients, one-on-one coaching clients, just me and you running through what it takes to build a successful show. So if you're already running a 7-8 or 9-figure business, and any of what I just said sounds appealing, then head over to Travischappel.com slash coaching. There's an application there where we'll jump on a call, see if it might be a good fit to work together to get your podcast out into the world now. Without further ado, Scott Clary, what's up? Do you welcome the show? Yeah, thank you, Jeremy Mann. I appreciate you. And I love your show too. I love all your shows. I've been listening to your stuff for a while now. So thank you for having me. I know there's very few people who I feel like have been around for a long time like I have. And you're definitely one of those guys that you just keep showing up every day and you keep making good content all the time. So congrats to you and all the success you've had as well. Thank you. Thank you. Let's start off with a softball question here, Scott. How do you make money? Right now I make money with the podcast. So right now it's an ad play. And I mean, that's one way to do it. Right now I'm thinking through different products that I can launch against the podcast. But to your point, if you stick with it long enough, you build a little bit of a community and advertisers want to get access to that community and that's how I make money now, that's how I made money for the past really four years. I mean, first two years I wasn't making money doing it at all. But and when I started it, money wasn't the focus, which is another conversation we can have when you're trying to start something new. Maybe don't put all your eggs in one basket and don't risk the farm on it and don't try and do something if you can't pay rent next month. Maybe find a way to de-risk it a little bit, which is what I did. But my name is never the focus. Yeah. Well, when I started, I was building a company. It was eventually acquired. And I knew that the podcast was a way to future proof. So I didn't know what I was going to use it for in the future. But I knew that, listen, unless you are a huge exit, never work again, a few money, which that was not the case for me. It was good money, but it was never never work again money. You're going to have to start something new. So in my mind podcast, as you believe this too, it's one of the four kinds of leverage. It's media. And then you use it to kick something off in the future because you have that community built. Yeah. The term future proof was something that we use all like back when back when I was like really selling like podcast courses and communities and teaching it a bunch. We use that term all the time because that's exactly how I look at it too, man. It's it's very well said. It's it's future proofing your life and your business. It's future proving your your ability to make more money. It's like you don't the the nice thing about having an audience. We're seeing this at scale right now with people like Mr. Beast and Logan Paul and KSI and some of these massive creators. But they can literally start whatever company they want to. And it's going to be successful to a certain degree. It doesn't mean that they're going to all be successful long term, right? Like Mr. Beast burger ended up failing. But it does mean that you can gain enough traction to figure out if the idea is going to take hold and give you enough time and runway to figure out what the pivot's going to be or if this one's one that you shut down. You know what I mean? So you have an audience of people that's built in actually learning and care about what you have to say. That's that's future proofing your ability to go make more more income because there always be a group of people who care about what you're doing next. Yeah. Amen. Exactly. That's what that's what I've been doing. So that's the that's the main focus. I think that that's listen to podcasts is is is a company, right? It's a product. You're an entrepreneur when you're building a podcast. This this audience listens to this show they're trying to figure out sort of how to take a little bit of stress off of their lives finding ways to make additional income. It's one way to do it. I don't always recommend it to everybody if they're trying to make money next week because I think there's other other easier ways to make money even starting a podcast, but absolutely podcasts is definitely a long game thing. But if you can stick with it long enough, it can have outsized returns and make everything else you do in your life whether or not it's getting another job, starting another company, launching your own product, coaching, consulting, it makes everything easier. So 100% makes everything easier. And I really like that frame to and I love this conversation too, just because obviously I really enjoy podcasting. But to me, it's like if you're if you are not desperate for more money right now, like you're maybe making 120 a year or something like that, your expenses are taken care of, you have a little bit of money left over, but you're looking for something that you could potentially do in the future that's going to allow you to do exactly what you want to do with all of your time and have the upside potential. That's kind of one of the filters that I run. These kind of side hustles are these side opportunities through Scott probably the same way is like, yes, I wanted to make money. No, I don't need it to make a lot of money right now. But if I'm going to put this much time, energy, focus, even financial investment into building something on the side, I want to know that at some point, it could potentially scale to the degree where it can take over everything and completely change my life. And that was one of those things that the podcasting like it checks off that box, you know, like you could make an extra thousand bucks a month on sponsorship revenue. You could turn it into your core business development for your online business or whatever it is. But at the end of the day, if you focus back into podcasting, making your product better, increasing your audience size and, you know, advertising your show to increase downloads, then you can make millions of dollars a year talking into a microphone and building that audience. So it gives you that ability to infinitely scale once you feel like you're at a position where you can actually attack it full time, which is to me one of the coolest things about it. Yeah, no, I agree. And I think that also, if you think about what are we optimizing for? That's a very important question. What's your North Star? And I think that more often than not, when we get into this entrepreneurial game, we start to almost adopt someone else's North Star for what success looks like. It sounds so cliche, but how many entrepreneurs, you know, they want to start a business, they want to scale it, they want to exit it, they don't even know what that means. They just know that that's the blueprint that they've been sort of force fed. So podcast, I don't really have a need to rush to an exit. I'm not trying to speedrun this game. And I could be selling a product could be the same idea. Maybe I want to build a business podcast, software, consumer brand. It doesn't matter. And maybe I just want to find a way to build a business. I want to install an operator. I want it to be a lifestyle business. It makes me a million, two million dollars a year, which is phenomenal money. And I don't have to worry about ever exiting it. I don't have to worry about taking on VC money, investment, angel money. So I think that when we talk about ways to make money, there's a lot. There's a lot of ways to make money and be smart with your money and not be so stressed financially. But I think we have to stop playing these games at other people sort of push and do our head that we have to play because you don't have to, first of all, you don't have to be an entrepreneur, which it seems like if you listen to any podcast out there right now, everyone's telling you you have to be an entrepreneur. There's a lot of ways to be strategic about your career and make a shit ton of money, working a nine to five W to have an incredible life. Go talk to a developer at Fang, Facebook app, lambs on Netflix, Google that's making, you know, seven hundred million dollars a year and go tell them they don't have a great life. They're going to look at you like you have three heads. Like there's a lot of ways to make money in this world. Lifestyle entrepreneurship is a way. I don't know. I just want to open people's minds up so they don't burn out and they don't chase the Stanford dropout version of entrepreneurship, but the 95% failure rate that in my opinion isn't even the good version of entrepreneurship. Absolutely, dude. I couldn't have said it better myself. There's this, there's this just weird thing with it. People, you know, they, my overarching advice on that with these people that are saying that thing is always ask what program are you selling? Because if somebody's pushing entrepreneurship and everybody else, it's probably because they have a program to sell you on how to be an entrepreneur. Anybody who's a real entrepreneur, a business builder, somebody who's built businesses and makes good money doing those businesses would caution anybody else from being an entrepreneur because it sucks most of the time. It's not for everybody and it's frankly like not a great path for the majority of people who are listening to this, especially if you're looking at like building a business that's going to, you know, scale and you have a ton of employees and you have HR and you have legal fees and all these other things like most people aren't built to do that. And the people who are online telling you how much money they make, they're always spitting off their top line revenue numbers. It's never how much money they keep. Like you said, like if you're an employee and you've somehow figured out how to make north of a quarter million dollars a year as an employee, the equivalent of a business that you would have to build in order to profit more than what you are currently making in personal income, that business has to be at least a $1.5 to $2 million business to be cranking out $300, $400,000 a year in profit, you know, and to get to that point, it's like, well, you've got a dozen employees. You have a bunch of clients, if it's service-based or you are manufacturing products, like you had to go in the hole to manufacture the product, you had to prove the concept, and you had to sell the product, you're not a marketer, so you don't know how to market, so you got to hire a marketing agency, like there's so many ways to screw it up along the way. And this is not to scare people out of it. If you feel like you really want to do something, then go do it. But yeah, I totally, I couldn't agree with you more, because I was kind of one of those guys at the beginning, because in my mind it was like, how could you possibly give up your time to go work for somebody else when you could just work for yourself? But it's a limited perspective, because I was in a position where I was coming out of Bible college, like with no degree, like my degree was an unaccredited Bible degree, and I had no other skills other than like preaching or whatever. So it was like, yeah, it was a little bit different for me, because I didn't have the option of making a multiple six figure income from a salary position somewhere. I had to go figure something else out. So like that, that didn't make sense to me, because of my limited perspective. And so if somebody else is giving you this one size fits all diet to making money, it's probably because they have a limited perspective, or because they have something to sell you that specifically relates to the advice that they're giving you. So you've got to be able to interrogate that information and ask yourself, like, does this really matter to me? Or does it matter to me just to take care of my family? Because that seems like kind of a better path, you know? I think you should be aggressive about your career. I want to I want to drop two ideas that hopefully will be helpful to people with being aggressive without their career, because if you make enough money in your career, like you mentioned, if you're making a quarter million dollars of more in your career, if you're smart about investing and you don't have lifestyle creeps, you can do quite well for yourself. So first idea is understand that the company that you work for is not always serving your best interests. I'm going to tell you a story. So at one point in my career, I very, very early on, I was moving into I was basically in sales when I first started my career and I was moving from one market to another. So moving up market. So like, say SMB to mid market. Okay. And like instead of like dealing with a million dollar deals, I'd be dealing with, you know, or even less than actually, and instead of dealing with like a hundred thousand dollar deals, I'd be dealing with like, you know, five, six million dollar deals, larger companies. What the point is it was it was a promotion, but there was a salary attached to that promotion. And the director at the time said, Hey, Scott, because you're internal to the company, I can only give you this much of a pay bump. Now it's frustrating because if I had hired you external, I could actually give you say I can't remember the numbers. Say it was like 5% pay bump if you were hired internal. It'd be 15% if you were hired external. We could poach you from another company. So luckily, director was on my side. That's a lesson in having the right people in support and mentors and you know, champions for your career around you. But he's like handing your resignation and I'll hire you external. And then you're going to get the 15% instead of the 5% pay bump. First of all, how stupid is that? But second of all, this happens every single day. This happens all the time. So if you want to, first of all, you have to understand that the company isn't always set up in your best interest that you're working for. So you do have to be aggressive about your career. I don't mean burn bridges, but I mean listen, if the company isn't giving you the salary that you want, then you have permission to go out and find it somewhere else. And sometimes I would actually argue more often than not. That's the quickest way to advance your career because more often than not. If you've been in a company for a long period of time and they're kind of like, oh, you know, they're already here. They're not demanding too much. You're probably getting underpaid. So be more aggressive about your career. Second idea. And then you can go on whatever direction. Second idea is if you are working for startups, if you want to work in a startup as opposed to start your own company, which I think is a great way to gain experience, treat, treat the due diligence and the vetting and the care that you put towards where you want to work to the same degree as if you were going to be a VC investing in that company. So do not just ad hoc go work for a startup and hope that you're going to have what is it? Navidia, you know, whatever, 70% of their engineers are all millionaires. That doesn't happen. Right. So vast majority, like not even the majority, like we're talking like 90% of these companies fail. Yeah, right. So, so understand that the startup you're working at can also fail. So be careful where you spend your time and energy. Experience is good. But if you also want upside, treat that career decision like an investor. Well, I think it's a great way to segue into upskilling because the answer isn't necessarily to always go look outside or always start a side hustle or always do this other thing to make it some extra money. The answer could just be getting better at what you currently do or adding an additional skill into that stack. Right. So if you're not in a sales role or marketing role, and you don't have kind of the natural ability or the honed skill of learning sales, then you might not have the you might not have the wherewithal to be able to negotiate a salary bump or know exactly how to go, you know, shop around what your worth is to the market at a different position in another company. So maybe it's time to pick up a copy of, you know, never split the difference by Chris Boss and learn some tactics about how to be a better negotiator. You know, that's, you know, one of the reasons people don't get paid enough is that they never come to the table and ask for a race. It's like, well, if you theoretically in this scenario, if you're good at what you do, assuming the company does not want to lose you, then they will be giving, they will be willing to give you a race. It's just that most companies won't do it unless you are about to leave or, you know, something equivalent to that. You're, you're, you're, you gotta, you gotta be willing to come to the table and ask for something. And then you have to do it with a certain level of skill to make sure that the thing that you're asking for you get because you're not just going to get stuff because you asked, you need to ask right, you ask the right person in the right way at the right time. And a lot of times you're probably like, that might be the only thing required for somebody listening to go make an extra of 10, 15, 20% this year is just to figure out a way to go ask the people that you're currently working for how you can make that work because you gotta understand like businesses are just, they're, they're designed to make money, right? So it's not necessarily about like, you can't just go be like, I want to raise because I want to make more money. It's like, okay, well, that doesn't do anything for us as a business. But if you can somehow figure out a way to provide more value, then maybe we can, you know, offer you that race. Like if you can do all the things you're currently doing and you're going to save us money from hiring this $50,000 a year person, we're going to hire because you can do what they're doing and we can just tack on that 25,000 to yours and save 25k and have an employee do it that we actually already trust. I know that's probably a pretty decent scenario. I'll give you an example dude, my wife, right now actually she runs our ever bull franchise. We bought a Aussie bull franchise and opened up out here. Congratulations. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. So she's running point on that and crushing it. But before that, she was ahead of ops for a figure, you know, e-commerce company. And I basically helped get her foot in the door because I knew the the guy that ended up giving her the job. But from there, she was like, she was part-time executive assistant work doing contract to work, you know, so, but she had three or four clients that she would do executive assistant work for an hourly basis. And then one of the ones that one of the bigger companies, they were like, hey, can you put together a job description for a ops manager? This is what it's going to pay. This is what the job description is. Do all this and so she did that and posted it. But right after she posted it, she went back to them and was like, hey, I can do this. Give me a shot of doing this, you know, and eventually they basically said, hey, you've done a great job with the work we've done so far. Sure. Well, we'll give you a shot of doing this. And it like led her to a path of a six figure salary, you know, in her late 20s with no college degree working for a brand because she saw an opportunity and was willing to go in and make the ask for for the additional for the additional income. But the additional income was also for additional responsibility as well as additional value to the company. So if you can prove your value to the market, then you can, you know, at least to a certain degree control how much money you end up making. I think I think that that's a great story. I think you have to be entrepreneurial within the company. What do you call entrepreneurial, right? Like you are you are aggressive with your career. You are showing how you add value. You can even be aggressive about setting plans and targets for your own career with your with your manager, your boss, your director. I think that's very important. And I think that if a company is not willing to sit down and set up personal growth goals with you over a two year period, you should find another company. And I don't always mean like, I don't always mean financial. It can be financial, but it can be title. It can be responsibility. It can be skill set. And it doesn't mean it can do everything for you, but they should at least understand where you want to end up and then help you find a way to get there. And another idea I love is even if the company that you're working at is not big enough to support your two year growth goals as a person, I think that it's fine for you to have a very candid conversation with your director saying, Hey, I'm going to give two years of my life to this company. You're the company is going to give two years of itself to me. I'm going to I'm going to get where I want to go in two years. And I won't be quiet quitting. I won't be taking interviews on lunch. I won't be basically checking it before my time's done. And at the two year mark, if you can't support that, then I'm going to go to somewhere else, but I will give 150 percent of myself while I'm actually here and enter into this almost as contractual two to three year engagement with the company that you're working for. And if they're not willing to do that and they're not willing to support your goals and they're not able to get you to where you want to go, giving you put the work in, then I think you have to find another company to work for. Yeah, they have to they have to show some sort of interest in help. Yes, they have to show interest. Right. Yes. Yeah, totally dude. Just a couple quick hitters here, man, about about money. Obviously, the show is built to help people make more of it. And then, but also to help them decide what to do when they have it. So let's hear, let's hear the dumbest thing you've ever spent money and the on and the smartest thing you've ever spent money on. This could be this could be an investment that went really well or terribly poor or it could be just like a dumb item that you bought that was dumb or something that you bought recently that you're like, this is actually a great purchase. I know it cost me some money, but I love it. So it's so interesting because I actually don't spend a lot of money on myself at all. Okay. I put, I put so much money into my work. So I'm sitting in probably a, I think it cost me about $35,000. It's a studio that I built in a guest house in my backyard for the podcast because I love it so much. I think that's not, it's not end of the world money. That's a lot of money for some people to build that a little studio in their backyard. For me, that was like one of the most worthwhile purchases that I've ever done. I don't, I don't do cars. I mean, I have like one nice watch. It's like 10 grand. I don't spend more than that on watches where I do spend money that it's worth it to me is if I go overseas, it's always business or first because I can't, I can't deal with that. And I don't want to show up tired if I'm speaking or something like that. So I think that anything that sort of helps me perform my best with my work, that's a good use of money. Investments, real estate's worked out for me. Angel investing has not angel investing is an absolute crap shoot. Like I don't have a winner with angel investing at all. I've just lost that repeatedly. So I think that if, if you find out how to make money, it doesn't mean you're a great investor. That's the first, that's the whole thing. Like sometimes the ego gets ahold of you and you're like, oh, I figured out how to make money in my career with my business. I hadn't exit whatever. I'm going to become a great realist. I'm going to be a great investor. Yeah. And it doesn't work out like that. So I put the same level of care into what you invest in as you did with building your company, your building, your career, like you have that same amount of energy and effort and learning. Real estate's done well for me mostly because I find it relatively low risk. Crypto, I like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, everything else. I lose money on. Same, those three have done investment advice, but if you just look at, if you just look at, I mean, where else would you put, I mean, I have money in single stocks, but they're pretty safe blue chip stocks. I've tried to do private equity acquisitions, which have worked out to some degree, which is really just looking at companies that have a little bit more of a history, but as opposed to angel investing, which is like pre-revenue or seed sage, the issue with private equity is that if you don't want to run it yourself, you have to become very good at hiring an operator. I'm just sort of going through the gamut of things that people think about when they have money. I would say that my best investment advice would be find one thing that you're passionate about, or just one thing that you really want to learn about, and then spend all your time learning about that thing. That's where you put your mind. Yes, everyone talks about diversity, you want to have a diversified portfolio. Yes, but I think diversified portfolio across safe assets. I don't think diversified portfolio across high risk because you won't be able to give all these high risk assets the attention they deserve. So for example, if you're trying to figure out section 8 and you're trying to buy single or multifamily and you're trying to do crypto and you're trying to do angel investing and you're doing all these different things, you're not going to be good at any of them. But you can become good at one of them. And if you become good at any of these things, you'll have outsized returns compared to the market, but you do have to, in my opinion, focus on one thing and get good at that. So right now I'm focused on real estate. I'm doing a pretty bill like condo purchases and pre-construction and it's working out and everything else is pretty safe risk adverse sort of investing. I love that advice, man. You can basically invest in what you know. And if you have this feeling that you want to throw some money at moonshots, just make it a very small percentage of your available money to lose. Don't invest in moonshot ideas with your last dollar, it's just not. You may as well just go in a casino and put it all in black, frankly. Honestly, better angel investing. I would say one more piece of advice. If you do want to expose yourself to a new asset class or a new potential investment, start with a reputable fund that invests in that asset. And then that's where you're going to learn. So if you want to start in real estate, maybe start in a real estate fund as opposed to owning property yourself and dealing with property managers and dealing with tenants. You want to start with crypto and you don't really understand it. Maybe put your money into a crypto fund. If you want anything, there's pre-revenue SaaS startup, there's a fund called like go-to-market fund. And they're the ones that are the experts. They're the ones that vet the SaaS startups or the startups. And then you can put your money into that fund and they can manage it for you. And then if you like it and you understand it, then maybe you dabble on your own. But I think that you have to sort of go into new asset classes cautiously so you don't lose everything. Yeah, love it, dude. What is the weirdest strangest way that you've ever earned a dollar in your life? Strangest way I've ever earned a dollar. For me, it probably would be the first way I ever made money as a kid was I sold this little creepy crawly bug maker machine like a boy version of an easy bake oven. And I would make little plastic bugs and bring them to school with me and sell them for a dime and a quarter in the pickup line. That was probably the weirdest way I ever made money. And the first way I ever made money, coincidentally. Yeah, I would say that I haven't. It's so interesting because I was never the kid that was like selling like candy and shit like that when I was in like elementary school. I would say the most fun, because it wasn't weird. I'm trying to think I haven't done like weird arbitrage. I'll take I'll take this fun. Yeah, most fun was I was very young. And I was a tennis coach. And yeah, and I would like so I used to play a lot of tennis. And obviously it's not weird, but it's not something that everybody's done. So when I was like, you know, 16 years old, I was teaching kids how to play tennis and I was doing private lessons and it was a lot of fun and I enjoyed it. And yeah, I made good money that way. So I would say that that that that was a that was an interesting kind of out of the box way to make money. But I'm monetizing other stuff. Yeah, man. But also also feeling very fulfilled with teaching and watching the evolution of a person from where they started to where they go, which I think has actually been something that I've carried through all my work. Sure. I know it probably sounds corny, but I mean, this is what we do the podcast because you know that all the shit that you went through and all the ups and downs. And somebody's already figured it out. Yeah. So they don't have to reinvent the wheel. And it started when I was young coaching. But I mean, that sort of mindset carries through. That's why I create the content that I do. Last thing for you, Scott, where can people go to connect with you more? If you like the podcast, then you can go to success story podcast.com. Do great interviews just like yourself. You feel like this kind of content. This is what I do as well. You can go to all the socials at Scott D. Cleary. I got the Scott D. Cleary. We're going to check out the podcast success story. I don't recommend a ton of other shows. But this would be one that I would say is worth your time, for sure. Scott takes the time to actually put together good content that's valuable. He's not just doing this to check off an item on the list, like a lot of other people. He's doing it because he wants to bring you valuable stuff. So Scott, thanks so much for coming on the show. Man, it's always fun to catch up. Everybody else listening to an interview and remember that money will solve all your money problems and you're left over with all the other ones that you got to solve. But it seems to me that those problems, they just tend to be a little bit easier if the money problems are already taken care of. So let's help you focus on that one this year. On the Travis Makes Money Podcast, thank you so much for tuning in. Catch you next episode. Peace.