Owen Video: How to Succeed as a YouTube Entrepreneur in 2021 (#281)

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All right, so hi, guys, I’m here with Owen Video, Owen Video is not his last name, but he is known for that and I really love his content. And then bringing a lot of the latest videos on his channel for sponsorships, brand deals really get into the details. Absolutely love it. But without further ado, Owen, I’m so glad you’re here. Let’s talk about our creator journey.

Yeah. Hey, thanks for having me. Like, I’m I’m so excited to be talking to other entrepreneurs, especially creative entrepreneurs. Right. You have a business and you want to share that that message on video or in a podcast like that. That is the kind of thing that gets me out of bed in the morning. Quick books, not so much. You know, Excel spreadsheets don’t so much get me out of bed, but I.

You’re good at them.

No, no. I know how to hire people that are good at them. Oh, my gosh. Like, I want to I want to get my reports on an Excel spreadsheet. I don’t ever want to have to, like, create new Excel spreadsheet like I have. It’s so not the way my brain works. And I often talk to my clients about, you know, when you build a system around your content. Right. So you’re not you’re no longer trying to squeeze content into your week.

But it’s like, no, my content generates leads. And so we want to systemize that. We want to outsource the production of it. You know, you you have to be in a place where you’re excited about it. And and it it is a natural extension of what you do every single day. And I think that those are like the big things that we miss in content creation.

No, you get right in there. I absolutely love it. You know, we’re not trying to bury the lead here. Yeah, not good. That’s journalism here. We are here to talk about how to you know, how I think mature and professional, whether your podcast or YouTube versus but content creators in general as opposed to really face or business. What I also noticed there’s a trend, as you described, kind of for me to put in plain English, you’re trying to help content creators understand that they are their own platforms as opposed to relying only on social media or something so specific, like Instagram, Facebook, YouTube.

I can see that you are someone who believes in and really generates lots of, you know, multiple revenue streams. And, you know, before I kind of make some assumptions here, I assume you’re doing YouTube where consecration full time right now. You have your own business. And this is kind of what you do, right, own?

Yeah. You know, we have a coaching company called the Video Marketing School. And in the video marketing school, we help seven figure entrepreneurs leverage the power of video on YouTube to grow the brand and to generate a steady flow of leads. And this is something that YouTube was the best at this ten years ago. YouTube is still the best at this. You know, I have videos from eight years ago that continue to get drive traffic to my work with us form.

And so we we have always believed in YouTube. But we also, for example, I spoke at a conference last week about taking your marketing off YouTube. And the only audience at that conference was, you know, big YouTube or millions and ten million subscribers, eight million subscribers. So their whole thing is like, how do I take this off of YouTube? And that’s that’s comes down into hiring the right people to do the right part of your job.

So as the CEO of that coaching company, we do create our own products. So I have an Amazon Alexa channel called Life Automated. I do comedy videos with my family on Ticktock on a channel called them Satz. And and my wife has a talk show called The Brave Talk Show. And so we, like the business, teaches entrepreneurs, but we’ve we’ve outsourced a good chunk of the business. Right. It’s a business. Ah. So what we do then is our company produces these other shows that that we content create.

Right. So like we launched a show with our friend who’s a doctor, he’s actually my doctor, he’s a naturopath. And we launched a show with him in partnership with him. Wow. So that’s how our model works, is is that two part model of the business runs and that frees us up to do the content that we love to do.

Amazing. I mean, you know, my neighbor just decided to since this is a live show, I’m going to shut the window.

It’s the law. It’s the law of the lawnmower. The lawn mower will begin the moment you press.

Golove It’s so true, as has happened five times. And I didn’t sell something called crisp, you know, as you know, removes background sound if there are severe sounds happening in the background, including like barking music. But anyway, you were getting into some really juicy details. In fact, you don’t just talk the talk. You walk the walk with your family. I can see your you know, I can see your your two boys are babies in some of the earlier videos.

They must be. Like young teenage, are they?

I have a teenager now, I have a 14 year old who’s a teenager and then I have a 10 year old and eight year old and a six year old. And they they love it. They love being a part of the videos. They love contributing to the jokes like are our best performing video on Tic-Tac is 10 million views. Wow. And I filmed it. It was my concept for sure. But then my son, he he changed the joke at the end.

He just said it under his breath, you know, and I go, oh my gosh, that’s so funny. So we filmed his version and it became our top producing video on the channel. And, you know, I love the comments because the comments on Ticktock, like they address him by name. They say, oh, hey, James, you know, hey, great. James was so funny in this one or I got to comment.

I was like, Benjamin cut his hair like, oh, I know. It’s Benjamin cut his hair. And it’s like, you guys I know my family, you know. And then that to me is a really special place to be.

Wow. I got to explore Tick-Tock. You know, I didn’t even realize that you had a channel. And it is something that it’s quite happening for. You know, not every content creator would choose to partner with their family members in this case, you know, your young kids. But I think it’s so creative and you are paying attention to their, you know, individual, their individual contributors. And they are, you know, respecting their opinions and their content.

Yeah, that sounds super fun. I would you encourage other people? You know, great question.

That’s what we would call our retirement channel. And we look at YouTube like we look at real estate and we we do invest in real estate as a retirement plan, just as we’re investing in YouTube as a retirement plan. So, you know, we’ve got the video marketing school dot com where we coach entrepreneurs on how to grow their YouTube channels. But then we also have our own YouTube channels that that bring us life and bring us joy. And and these are things that we we schedule them, but we schedule them as sort of like where where other people might schedule racketball or where other people might schedule like a hike.

Now we do some of those things as well. In fact, some of our videos are let’s go on a hike and film a video. But my point is, is that it’s a dedicated or I say it’s a commitment, but not a full dedication to the channel. Like we haven’t uploaded a tick tock in a month, and that’s OK. It bums me out. It’s been a busy month. And so because it’s a retirement channel, because it’s like our nest egg, we can slow down their build back the business, get get back where we need to go and then we’ll we’ll we’ll start uploading to tick tock again.

So I think that everybody out there, like if you’ve got a coaching company or maybe you’re a gaming creator, think about like your retirement channel and maybe you’re a gaming creator, but you work at Starbucks. Maybe maybe the gaming creator channel is your retirement channel. But but think about like like what do you want to be doing in ten years? You know, what are you really passionate about? Sewing, quilting, like dog breeding. Like we all have these weirdo, like, niche things that we’re into.

For me, it’s like Amazon. Alexa on smart tech. I love that stuff, but I also love stand up comedy and like, I want to be a comedian someday. And I so again, you’re making tiny investments into your future on a secondary YouTube channel, but you still have your business that you need to run during the day.

Incredible. The the long haul of being a content creator is something I feel like so few people have thought about or worry to go there. You know, it just feels like there’s time, there’s money investment. Yesterday I spoke for a basically at this virtual learning session for New York Public Library. And it was so cool because every time they’re two hundred people sign up, half of them show up for the live session. And you learn so much from these Q&A days.

And I notice a lot of people today are still stuck on at the beginning and then they really want to know how quickly they can make money back. So I’m so glad that we are addressing that. But also think about like secondary channels, which is something that I’m currently working on. So I’ll break it down a little bit. What do you think for people who are starting out? I’m sure there are people watching this and thinking about starting their own channel.

In retrospect, you know, you started seven years ago even, you know, what have you learned? What are some of the things that that you wish you knew then?

Well, YouTube changed a lot. You know, seven years ago when when I first started there, there wasn’t like an algorithm per say. It certainly wasn’t knowable. And no, there was no mentors that existed there. There wasn’t like Nick, Dairyland, Tim, and some of these people that know those names, you know, like they were just starting out, you know, and and so, like finding coaching and finding training manuals. There was no YouTube creator playbook at that time.

And so we were sort of scrambling around, trying to figure out how this platform worked, and today what I’m seeing is a lot of new creators using the tactics and strategies that we discovered way back then. And that’s all that’s always like really energizing for me to see is some new creator, you know, start making money on the platform quickly following the format that that I taught in webinars three years ago. So, you know, what have I learned then through all that?

Is that the algorithm now is knowable. And if you know how the algorithm works, you can make videos that cater to that algorithm. You present your content in a way that appeals to the human right. So the algorithm is going to read the metadata. It’s going to read sort of in fact, your thumbnail. Right. Your thumbnail is an image of the video and it’s what people click to watch because on Facebook, it’s auto playwrite, like the video just starts playing, whereas on YouTube you have to click a thumbnail.

And that’s that’s part of why it’s a it’s a it’s a better platform for video. The people choose you so they stick around longer. And and you’re like YouTube’s bots read your thumbnail and they can tell if you have a fishing pole in it. They can tell if you have a salad in it. They can tell if you’re smiling in it and they can tell if you’re, like, overdoing it on the cleavage, you know what I mean? And they will knock your video down for stuff like that.

You know, not in all cases. There’s there’s you know, it’s kind of like in these stupid ads type cases, but you get it right. So. One thing I’ve learned is that the algorithm is knowable. The second thing is, is that you can make videos that that trigger the algorithm and then you present in your videos for the humans, which means that you title your video for a human. But you’ve got to add words that the search engine will recognize there in your video content itself.

Like if you’re doing the whole like today’s math class is based on three things. And I see people do this like, well, come to your market report for Cincinnati, Ohio, real estate. And it’s like then they’ll do boring ass videos like that for a year and then be like, YouTube didn’t work for me. And it was like, no, you didn’t work YouTube. Like you thought a market update was what people wanted to hear when in fact they wanted to hear a video that was like sort of like the the worst homes in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Dasch do not buy these. Right. It’s something that has a little bit more human appeal. Let me tell you, I bought multiple houses and never once did I check a market update first, you know what I mean? So, you know, the other thing is they’ll say this is that your video needs to be at your channel, needs to be about a thing. And this is something that I wish somebody had taught me earlier on because I struggled with this.

My channel started as a Web design channel and then became sort of like like an echo channel and then sort of became like a how to grow on YouTube channel or really like how to use video in general channel. And that’s what we would call a variety channel. And that’s why, you know, it’s I’ve struggled to get past this this point that I’m at right now, like sixty two thousand subs. Where what I think the best creators are doing right now is like you pick a topic and you just go deep on that topic and this is proven out time and time and time again.

You know, as I said, I have a comedy channel with my kids, but then I also have a life automated channel. It’s about smart home tech. Those are two separate channels because it’s a different audience that will watch one than watch another. But I like mountain biking and I’m a real estate agent, so I’m going to do mountain biking in my real estate channel and that won’t work. Now, could you make references to mountain biking? Sure, absolutely.

Like it’s the seasoning on the steak. Right. But but your channel can’t be about like how to which e bike is the best and how to buy a home in Cincinnati. You’ve got to have a singular focus.

I’m so glad you you touched upon that because I think you share your struggle and I have experience on myself, you know, in a way that you two chooses you and and you to basically surface my content as I was creating not just Zoom one on one, because a lot of people are creating that type of content in early. Twenty, twenty. But I dove into a topic which is focused around Zoom for musicians, for artists, for fitness people.

All of a sudden YouTube is like, wow, you’re known for that. Let’s just keep keep feh. Making content like that in the of course I start making about lighting equipment, audio, OBES and all that’s kind of related to that topic. But at some point I kind of like, oh, maybe use me as a guinea pig as well as some point I realized, you know, I branch out to live stream because I’m a content creator.

And that was interesting, like creating net new content, whether it’s for transcription services. I saw you have some content around that where streaming exactly how to use restraint without me mentioning Zoom was hard. All of a sudden I can see a significant drop of oh, what is this? And granting Zoom is like the hot topic for the past couple of years.

What would you do with an older audience to write? Like because like we know how to use Zoom, right? But it was like it was like our older colleagues that didn’t know how to use them. So when you start talking about OBS, that’s now a younger audience, which doesn’t isn’t really like watching your content up to this point. And that’s fine. You’re building another leg of your table and this is part of the YouTube journey. I have a friend right now going through this her she built a huge channel and a huge business on the insta pot and had a different insta pot recipes.

She’s camped out right. Like it’s there’s no growth. So so she’s created a new leg on, like, grilling, summertime grilling. And that’s because we’re coming into summertime now. So, you know, we were just hanging out at this conference last week and she goes, you know, like it’s just not it’s hard to get the views because these people came into my chat largely. Women on insta pot grilling is more male. And so I’m building this whole election is very frustrating.

But we also know it’s part of the process. Now, one thing that you could do in your case is make transitional videos. And I think this is key. So, like, if you’re going to do for example, we both use re stream for our broadcasting platforms. If you’re going to branch into re stream tutorials. But you’ve been in the Zoom space. What I would do is I would make one or two. Like videos that use the word Zoom and streaming them together, right?

And so what happens is you’re starting to bring your older viewers into the stream community through the bait of Zoom. But you’re also telling the YouTube algorithm that these videos are connected, right? You’re building a bridge between your two legs and that that is what triggers the suggested algorithm. So for anybody out there, if you’ve built a whole channel that’s like listing videos, right? Like you’re trying to sell houses, you know, you’re only going to appeal to people that are actively looking for that house.

Right, because nobody’s going to Google five seven one five all of avenue in Cincinnati, Ohio. No one’s going to Google that. And that’s the title of your video, right? Or Houses for sale. Florida could be a good one. But my point is you want to branch out and create a new series that’s like, I don’t know, all the details of gaited, the gated gated communities, my favorite gated communities, best gated communities with schools in them, the best parks in the gated communities.

And you become this gated community expert or a condo expert or something, something like that. But branching out at strategic times is key.

Yeah, it’s a great, really great point and something very specific. So, for instance, I did end up creating videos for how to connect with Stream from within Zoom. So not just theoretically, I mean, realistically, you can simply go live from right from Zoom. That was a huge deal for people who don’t want to leave Zoom Zoom has all these filtering things that it has a lot of limitations as well. But there it is hard for people to switch platforms.

So that worked out well. Do you think, like, for instance, in my eyes or like I see myself as a great entrepreneur and that can mean a lot of things. Like, A, you think of yourself as a creative entrepreneur, you could be author, speaker, coach, podcasts, you name it to an artist. So you could basically approach a lot of content, which can be very maybe too broad in some cases. But for me, you know, sometimes for me it’s there’s a bit of a struggle to say I see myself as a great entrepreneur.

I want to share share all the software and tips and tools that I’m using, including things like, I don’t know, Squarespace, a lot of transcription services for my YouTube and everywhere else. And I also share my YouTube growth journey. Do you think there’s ever an opportunity for people to thrive on a collective knowledge or knowledge base related to creative entrepreneurship? Or do you think people are watching this? Let’s say they’re kind of midway through. They’re not just getting started.

I think a lot of content creators who are maturing right now are really struggling with pivoting or kind of finding that bigger bubble to kind of host hoster content. Yeah, yeah.

That’s that’s the decision that you have to kind of decide on who your audience is. Right. Like, is your audience beginning creators, OK, and and if it is, remember that that that audience is constantly growing with all sorts of people, people that are in high school now that will will graduate and realize, hey, I’m a creative entrepreneur, people that will get fired tomorrow at twenty two from Starbucks and realize, oh, I’m more of a creative entrepreneur, you know, or like me, I got fired at thirty and that’s when I realized that was more of of a creative entrepreneur.

And so this is always growing. But they all have this one thing in common. They’re just getting started right now to move into topics that are for more like intermediate. I mean, that’s a whole different audience you might be dabbling in. You might be dabbling in a variety channel. And that could hurt you, you know, like, yeah, I mean, you’ve got fifteen thousand subs. So I think it’s a good time for you to kind of like start reaching into this.

You’ve been an entrepreneur for a while and now you’re sort of moving in. But I wouldn’t ignore the the the other audience either. Like you don’t get a move on, you just include in addition you don’t miss Beast is a good example. Mr. B’s has about like ten different content categories that he works and he does like giveaways. And then he does, you know, sort of like challenges. But if you look at his page like he has them all divided into ten different playlists and every video he doesn’t, that channel falls into those ten different categories.

And that’s that’s the direction that I would go. You know, the the trouble that that I see with creative entrepreneur is I see a lot of people using that term, but really they’re affiliate marketers. And what I mean by that is, is, is you’re making videos about software, posting links to the software and making money from the affiliates on that software. I do that, too. There’s nothing wrong with that. Is that a creative entrepreneur?

Yeah, like, I’m not sure my friend Roberto Blake, you know, I think really has has cornered the market on creative entrepreneur. And it goes back to kind of that statement earlier on Excel spreadsheets versus Adobe Photoshop. Right. Like an entrepreneur is an Excel. Fred Statesperson, a creative, is an Adobe person, and so for me, like Adobe goes in front of the Excel spreadsheet, I’m Adobe first and then I’m an Excel spreadsheet guy, right.

Where am I making my money? Right. Like I make my money through the coaching program. I make my money through affiliate sales. I make my money through brand deals. I make my money through private coaching. And we also have assets and we have these other side channels that we’re building. And I would call that an entrepreneur. Right, because it’s like a multiple it’s like a business that we could walk away from. What I see a lot of it is people that are unemployed, making YouTube videos, making a dollar a day, talking about I’m a creative entrepreneur.

I’m not saying that’s you, so please don’t take that that way. What I’m saying is, if you’re a creative entrepreneur, for those of you listening, you have to be making money, you know what I mean? You don’t just get to be an artist and say I’m a creative entrepreneur. Right. And I personally believe has to be a certain amount of money. Like if you’re not paying your bills with it, is that what you’re really doing?

You know what I mean? So I’m passionate about this because. I feel like a lot of pseudo experts go out there and they they live at their parents house, which is fine, they they but they don’t have bills, they don’t have kids, they don’t have rent. And they call themselves creative entrepreneur. And it’s like, no, you’re you’re living at home making YouTube videos, which is cool. But, yeah, let’s let’s call it what it is, you know, because what’s going to happen is a 40 year old guy who wants to leave corporate America because he just got diagnosed with an autoimmune disease and he’s tired of living his life this way, he’s going to go follow that 17 year olds lead and fall into a dungeon of dark despair because that that strategy will not build an income for him, you know what I mean?

And so I want to make like I’m passionate about, if you want to become better at Adobe Photoshop, you find the right people to teach you that. But when you want to start making money and become an entrepreneur. Right. That’s why we call it the video marketing school, because our focus is not necessarily cameras and lenses. In fact, I probably have no videos on what camera and lens to buy. I probably have one and I say buy one of these three cameras.

You know, why does it matter if you don’t know how to market that video? You know, so I think it’s very important to recognize what your objectives are as your objectives to make side income while your life is good. I support that. I love that. Let’s call that what it is. But if you’re trying to, like, actually make video that turns into seven figures, let’s call that what that is.

Mm hmm. I love it. I know I was smiling, even though situations are probably not funny for people who are in those situations and unavoidably finding themselves believing in a dream, comparing their beginning to someone else’s middle, it is a market that it’s sometimes just hard to tell, you know, what’s up, what’s down, who to believe in. And it is it’s something that I tell people the moment I say, you know what, YouTube is a long game.

You know, like you want to check in with yourself three, six months, but do plan for a year. Right? When they say a year, oh, a year is too long. You know, when when am I going to start making money? When will my channel be monetized? So I have a question for you, which is at what point seven years ago you started your channel. I haven’t known you for seven years now. At what point did you realize, OK, this is part time living, OK, this is full time living?

Could you give us like some just mental shifts checkpoint’s?

Here’s a mental shift. Right. Like if you start a channel today about electric bicycles, that channel could be monetized to day, right? When when when you’re asking about when is YouTube going to pay me? You have left the realm of entrepreneurial ism and you have entered the world of job ism. You now work for YouTube. OK, YouTube ad sense is one of many monetization pathways that exist on YouTube today. And where we excel and where we’ve always excelled is what I would call brand deals or sponsorships.

And so what that might look like and by the way, I’m coaching a real estate client and how to do this right now because his passion is mountain bikes and and he doesn’t want to do real estate forever. And so we’re I’m helping him build his retirement channel. And it’s about mountain bikes, so. What we’ve done is we’ve put together a list of 10 videos, he’s actively now reaching out to the manufacturers of those Ebix and asking them to sponsor these videos.

Perfect, right. And he has zero subscribers. I don’t even think the channel even exists on YouTube yet. Like, it’s just an idea. Yet he’s still got it, like click start, new account. So why would a mountain bike company? Pay this guy for a video that has like no built in audience. OK, first of all, because what it would cost them to get their Owen Video made and distributed and produced would be like ten thousand dollars.

Where we we’re going to offer them more like five videos for five thousand dollars, and then they have these videos that they can send to their email as they have all these assets they can use and reuse, and then we’ll repurpose them for them and like and then give those to them, like they’re going to get like seven to 10 videos for five grand. So a company is going to go charging. That makes a lot of sense for us. Right.

The YouTube artist is always looking at views. Right. But you’ve got to understand Brian White, right. Brian White’s another client of mine. Brian White has a video with one hundred and forty seven views. And that one video sold three houses in December, ironically, was a market update video, which I hate. I hate market update videos, but he’s like, I need to do it own. And he did it and he built three houses from it.

So, like, that’s that’s the symbiosis I love having with my clients. Or it’s like, hey, you got to go with your gut. But here’s my coaching and I’m going my gut. And he and he crushed on it. And so, you know, there is so much money to be made on YouTube before AdCenter kicks in. But I feel like a lot of like new creators get stuck on an ad sense and then they don’t want to contact a brand.

I get it. It’s scary to contact. It is they’re going to tell you know, so many people are gonna laugh at you, but like the one that says, yes, just paid you five grand. So that’s training that I have that I bring because I was a salesperson for years. I’ve been fired twenty two times, mostly from sales jobs. And and it’s because I’m not a good corporate guy. Like, I just don’t I’m not going to be like I’m things I’m just not going to do for your company, you know, like I’m not going to lose myself in here.

I’m not a company man, you know what I mean? And and my point is I learned how to sell. And so, like, calling a brand, not even calling me. I did a video about an email marketing company, just a quick tutorial. And then I tweeted it to them and I said, hey, let’s do a brand deal. This was like six years ago. I had one thousand subscribers. I had nothing. And they paid me four figures to do a series of webinars for them.

It wasn’t even YouTube videos, but they liked my presentation style. And they’re like, what if we did these? You know, you did webinars for us, you know, great webinars or live. I don’t have to make a video for you. And I pay like four grand to do that, to do like four different webinars for them. Then they referred me to another company. Yeah. That gave me twenty five hundred dollars to make videos for their channel.

You know, and then in exchange, they gave me this great affiliate rate and then I made five videos in my course for them, like there’s a lot of money to be made if you can just get your mind, like away from accents, like accents will be there. It will show up. Now, one creator I know, you know, is raving about and I know creators with eight million subscribers, the biggest channels in the world. Right.

Are some close friends of mine. And there their whole thing is brand deals, it’s the ad sense pays for the editing. Mm hmm. You know what I mean? Now that editing might be 15 grand a month. Don’t get me wrong. Like it’s when you’re a brand new grader, 15 grand a month. Sounds like a lot. And it is. But when your bills are 20 grand a month, it doesn’t cut it.

Yeah, well, how beautiful is that? Because what I notice right away from creating content on YouTube is people are reaching out even before I became monetized. And that was very eye opening. And because I had the training as a podcast since twenty fourteen, I started at a time where there were just not a lot of podcasters. I looked around at work, people like, you know, like making some people making fun of me. Yeah. Like good for you.

But I can’t train my muscle to reach out to people cold calling people or, you know, writing emails that didn’t work then work later on. So what I love about your video of breaking it down so only has this template and actually a product, you don’t have to pay a lot of money to get the template. And he walks you through the beginning, middle and end. And one of the I think some really juicy is the fact that you can offer these brands so much more than just I’ll create a video.

I’ll give you a shout outs. All right. Yeah. Tell us about more than that. Like like have them send you free product. Like, a great way to do this is to send you free product. Like we had a senso pods reached out to us that I’m a little bit too big to do free product deals. OK, so like, you know, you guys can hate on me, but like, you know, it’s like, come on man, I got kids to feed, but I wanted to show my my clients what it looked like to do a free product deal.

So they said, hey, we’ll send you these free earphones to make us any post on Instagram. Am I. I’m not active on Instagram in any major way. So it’s like, fine, who cares? You know, they sent me free pods earbuds. I love them. I love them. In fact, if you want to get them, you can go to my Instagram, click on my link in bio. You get like twenty five percent off and and I made this real of me dancing.

Now none of my audience ever seen me dance and I don’t dance. In fact, I remember dancing with a girl at a club when I was like dating and like I dropped her and you know, it was like I’m never and I told I don’t want to go to clubs. Like, I’m not a dancing guy. Right. Like I used to break dance. Believe it or not, back in the nineties, a cardboard I actually broke my hand break dancing cardboard in the driveway with me in the neighborhood.

Kids like that. That was my upbringing. So that like when it came to club life. And everyone’s like in these groups like Vivint, like I was like, where’s the circle? Like, I want to dance in the middle of a circle and do like back flips and stuff, you know, like it was. Anyway, I digress. But we were talking about something more important than that and I got like sidetracked on my own story.

Oh, no, no, no, no worries. We were talking about that. You know, you should offer more than one or two options. I love you forever more so.

Yeah. So I did this dancing video on Instagram. It is our best performing real of all time. Yeah. You know, and now I have this great success story to take to other brands. So if you’re just starting out, like go be go be like assertive and and talk to like here’s what you do. You go to Instagram or YouTube, type in hashtag, ad in the search bar and you’ll see all the different ad videos that that creators are posting.

I really love this for Instagram and you learn who’s doing brand deals. So you find products like if you have a dog channel, like find the dog channel that are and what and say, hey, like can you give me a month’s supply, I’ll do five videos for you or whatever the case might be, you know. But even even to do if you’re like me and you’ve got sales skills and like you like webinars like. I believe that people like me have a big opportunity to be spokespersons, in fact, when I was a kid, Billy Mays was like my favorite guy.

I don’t remember Billy Mays. He was Attila excuse me, an infomercial guy. So I’m Billy Mays. And today we’re looking at the wow. Like he was in the sham wow guy. But like, he he had that big in fact, he bumped his head on an airplane and died, like I remember thinking, oh, my gosh, Billy Mays. And then I remember thinking maybe I could take his place. Wow. That was like I was like 10, 11 years ago.

Anyway, if you have a skill set like that, go to these companies and be like, I’ll be your spokesperson. I’ll make videos on your channel. What if a company paid you a thousand bucks a month to make videos on their channel? And that fuels you that thousand dollars is enough for you to start working part time at Starbucks instead of full time and focus more on your own channel. And now you’re shifting things around, so brand deals are huge, they’re limitless and like it spans it spans a range of products.

It’s just you just got to get out of your own way. Yeah. I mean, I’m to think this is the way to do it.

I know people ask me this question all the time. How do you reach out to people? I mean, first of all, if you have a cell phone, you have a computer. I don’t care if it’s 10 years old. People are everywhere. Brands are everywhere. You can find brands on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, they’re very responsive. Sometimes you don’t get to the right person. That’s true because you might reach out to the support team.

You know, your email might just float into the ether like nobody’s going to read it. But as you get better at it, and especially when you target the right person in a kid that I’m developing for you to, as well as especially people who are starting out, I tell them to kind of pay attention to certain job titles. Frankly, not every company these days has an influencer department where they may be called something different, but there are no marketers or LNT either.

Community management. They’re actually. Yeah. What else owns that PR publicly. Yep. But also the people. Yeah.

And you reach out to them and you write them emails and it’s like that’s all I’ve been, all I’ve ever done is tweeted and write emails, except I went like I go to a lot of conferences and I always work the sponsor areas. I always where I went to social media marketing world two years ago and I close like three brand deals that day walking through. And when I say closed, like there’s two levels. There’s they said yes and then they paid.

So. So Assael is really a two part thing. But I got three people to say, yes, definitely. Let’s just figure out how much that ended up being like fifteen thousand dollars and what did it take for me? It took me just walking around and, you know, one of those deals actually went sour. It was kind of like the girl who hired me was fired like two weeks after we got started. And so it went sour in that there was no up.

Like I couldn’t Upsala like, we couldn’t keep them on board because the guy who took over, like, didn’t care about me. He was like, I don’t know what she hired you for. Just finish it and give it to us. So I finished their videos and moved on. It was super easy, like it was easy. Now, none of those videos ever saw the light of day and that frustrated me. But I got paid, you know, either way and this is the thing was when you work with brands there on a whole different like mindset, like you’re thinking five grand, like, wow, it’s a lot of money for a brand.

Like they have to spend five grand in order to get their budget for next year. Like it’s a whole different way of thinking. And a great time to approach brands is like November, December, when when their budgets are being renewed and they have money they have to spend. Like if they don’t spend this money, they’re going to have a lower budget next year. If you don’t understand that, go watch the office. They did a whole episode on it, you know what I mean?

Like, exactly. Yep. Nonprofits, too, especially nonprofits, even regular companies as well for your marketing dollars. So would you say that it may be wise to not only approach companies in November, December, but also pitch like cereal content, like let’s let’s play something for the next year? Was a too aggressive for no, never say like it’s always yes and right. It’s always like, sure, that’s great. And we can also talk about this and we can, you know, give you like like no it is can be a no, but it’s usually like not right now, you know.

And so it’s all about getting small commitments along the way. Like when we email somebody, it’s never like, will you do a brand deal? You know, and I have my appliance in my program that are like I sent an email out to one hundred brands and none of them responded. I was like, show me what you wrote them. And it’s like, Hi, I’m me and I love me and I want to talk about me and I want you to give me money.

And it’s like, that’s not my template. That is not what I told you to do. Your your scarcity mindset took over and you got afraid. And so you started telling them all the reasons why they don’t care about you, like they care about them and their bottom line, like that woman, that man that you’re writing to has like job responsibilities and has a busy life and a busy schedule to fit your communications into that. Right. So our first email is like, hey, you.

You do a lot of great content on cat food. We are launching a brand new cat channel and I’d love to explore some collaboration opportunities. Have you ever worked with influencers before? Questionmark might not. Thanks, Kharma. Jim Jones, ACP, BKS Lanctot. Have you ever worked with influencers before? Questionmark. Done. You know, and then hopefully they respond. If they don’t, they don’t. But you’re going to send 10 of those out and so you’re going to get a lot of people.

Here’s one. If you’re reaching out to GoPro, come on. Reach out to the Facebook ads that you see in your news feed. Reach out to the Instagram ads that you see in your news feed, like those people are actively on social right. And then there’s, you know. Yeah, or I got this from an app the other day. We’ve never worked with influencers before, but we’re open to it. You know, I’ll talk to.

Can you tell me a little bit more? That’s perfect. You know, because then your your whole objective is to get on a Zoom call, you know? So can you tell me more? Yeah, absolutely. Like, my goal is like I’m an expert content creator. I can crank out content for you guys. You have an excellent social media marketing team. You guys can boost out the content. Like I’d love to do something where I’m making a ton of great content for you using all of my great stuff.

And then you guys can use it to grow your business, you know.

Do you? Yeah. And when do you feel like I have about three to four follow up questions? Hopefully I’ll get into a little more rapid fire.

I’ll answer for all answer shorter. Yeah, I know that I ramble. I’ll answer. Oh no, no, no, no. This is like really juicy stuff. I mean, we have to break it down for people. So one is when do people choose to or pitch creating content on their own channels versus hey, brand X, Y, Z? I do this for you. Like, you know, what’s a balance?

Like I would do I would kind of like feel them out. Like you notice how in that last conversation I didn’t say on your account, I just said I would create content for you and that you guys would distribute it out like I didn’t say whose channel it would be on. So that’s why you keep it really top level where it’s like I’m going to do what I’m good at and then you guys do what you’re good at that like let’s jump on a Zoom call and chat more.

Yeah, to learn more. So before you come to a conclusion, you bite your nails, like just relax. And sometimes the best way to pitch to people is, like you said, you’re not desperate. You don’t you don’t need this even though you know you need this. But you have to give yourself a chance. Watch.

Any thing else is like to have the conversation and go through the ropes, you know, like like go through the steps, because after a while it’ll be kind of like on Tuesdays and Thursdays I reach out to brands. And that’s just kind of what you do. Like that’s and we have people that do that for us now at this point, you know, so. It’s in the like the call where you’re like you’re like, so do you guys want this on your channel or is it better if it’s on my channel that you embedded in your blog?

Like, just find out. You know, and again, we have I think if you go to Owen Video dotcom brand deals, I think that we have all of like a kit that you could buy on our email templates and all these things. And there’s it’s a great it’s a great progress. It’s really. It’s a conversation.

Exactly. Yeah. I know this is a really, really good advice here. I definitely want to get into I want to get into pricing just for a bit. People get really tripped up by that. And frankly, at the beginning I had no idea. I was like, what is it, 50 bucks? Three hundred. Like, how am I supposed to charge for this? One thing I’ll say is neither one of us can reveal how much we get paid for certain branches in the contract.

That’s not what we’re trying to do here. But is there a way to coach people, teach people based on either their channel size, what they’re about to begin to assess? I have a formula in mind, but I want to hear what you have to say first.

Yeah, one million dollars, like, that’s OK, because that’s that’s the thing is like, you know, you’re worth one million dollars. But today they’re going to get it for the low, low price of. And what I mean by that is that you are worth more than you are giving yourself credit for. When you know your worth in the marketplace, then you’re able to construct a more realistic price. For example, the average cost of a marketing video in a local business scenario is eight hundred to twelve hundred dollars.

OK, so that means you could go to local businesses. Restaurants are a big one. Real estate agents or another one. You could go to a local business and charge, you know, five hundred dollars per video and I would never do that. I would say three videos for fifteen hundred. And and what they’re getting is they’re getting three videos. Instead of the one video that would have cost him twelve hundred if they hired a videographer to do it themselves, plus they don’t have to make it, plus the the the value of someone else, the edification of someone else saying you should hire this agent, you should go to this restaurant is more valuable than the restaurant saying, hey, you should come to us, you should come to us.

Of course, the restaurant’s going to say that. But when you as a spokesperson or as an ambassador, as an influencer for that company. You are telling people to go to that restaurant and that’s more powerful, so three videos for fifteen hundred, I could close that all day long. But the formula is what would this client have to pay for their Owen Video, you know, that promotes themselves. And then you you you charge that or lower you know, like I’m the guy that kind of like lowers the price to get the deal.

And that’s why my wife does our sales now, because, like, I was closing all of these deals that just I closed so many deals, but they weren’t all profitable at the end of the day, you know what I mean?

And women are good at making choosing prices. Yeah, she an investment.

You know, she crushes it for us. So but, you know, like, you got to know your value, though, too, like, at the end of the day you’re thinking, oh, views. In essence, the the brand is not like their their budgets of hundreds of thousands of dollars. The local company has budgets of hundreds or thousands of dollars, you know what I mean? And they don’t necessarily want views. They want the product.

They want the video, you know what I mean? So I think five hundred dollars for any creator to create a video is a good starting point. And I think that if you go lower than that, you have to say five hundred. But I’m going to give it to you for two fifty today. Right, right. If you start in two fifty, then you’re just kind of like, well, you know.

Yeah. And it’s true, you know, when you create, let’s say, continuing to use a different scenario. I love the idea of restaurants because they’re they’re they don’t have many of them don’t have video content. They don’t even know how to do a period. So you are creating an offer as opposed to competing with an ad agency, you know, who has internal teams. And you really got to pitch yourself as to why you’re doing this for cheaper, for better or whatever the reason may be.

But I’ve lately or for the past year, year and a half, I’ve almost exclusively worked with software companies and they care about two things, basically awareness, getting their software out there. Right, especially if they’re new and the others, they want conversion. They want these days with a lot of free sign ups. But they do want people to convert to paid members, as you can probably imagine, which is hard for us to control. Right.

So there especially software that are really good that comes with a forever free version these days. So many of them, including re stream converted MailChimp, a lot of theirs forever free. And I hear this from people to say, oh, my God, that was so cool. I can use it for free forever. And it’s hard to control. But ultimately, what they want to do, they will give you a formula of basically how you know, how much it’s fifty bucks a month.

And we want your video to generate this number of sign ups is ultimately kind of what they’re thinking about. So what’s your take on that? I’m curious.

You know, I would have to get paid a lot more than that because it’s kind of like I can’t control your messaging. You know, a lot of times a brand suffers from too many chefs, right. Like where you got way too many people who are unaccountable for your results making decisions. For example, graphic designers. Right. A graphic artist like you have no control over the designs the graphic designer at that company makes. But yet your payment relies on the conversion of that thing, you know, on the conversion of those graphics.

So for me, I’d have to get paid a lot more. And I think that you have to be careful not to be responsible for the company’s sales unless you’re a salesperson. Right. So, like. Dream notwithstanding, because we’re both dream ambassadors and we’ve like let me move to another example, I worked with a company that hired me to do a show for them, but about, you know, a year in there, like they started, like talking to me about conversions.

And I’m like, woah, woah, woah, woah. You hired me to do a show. That’s what I’m good at. Now, you’re saying you’re judging my show. My production value is based on these people that hit your crappy landing page. Absolutely not. Like if you want me to state that to keep doing this, I was like, then I keep doing the show. If you guys want more sales tactics and stuff like that in the show, tell me what to do and I’ll do it.

We’ll add them into the show. But my job was not to be I don’t need a salesperson job, you know. And so I think that it’s a good idea to do affiliate marketing, don’t get me wrong, but. Go into that like with stream, I entered into that deal going like, dude, I’ll get conversions all day long on this and we’ve done very well because we’re a live streaming company. I like we we teach. I couldn’t do that with like like this pillow company that makes the subscribe pillows.

Yeah, I couldn’t do that with them because like I don’t know that everybody needs that or wants that or it’s like if you want me to do a show for you, I’ll do a show for you when we do some videos. But what I don’t do is I don’t sell pillows, you guys little pillows. So I will bring awareness to your pillow sales funnel for which you will pay me. But, you know, like the conversions on that page, it’s not really my thing.

True. And for clarification sake, even if they tell you information from brands are good to have, it’s better for them to tell you what they need with their needs and wants are as opposed to you guessing what they are. So it’s the transparency helps. However, just make sure that your payment, your work is not contingent based on their behaviors, their responsibilities. What I’m saying. So, you know, and in a way, I think for content creators to be able to see behind the scenes, OK, here is a single video.

How many people clicked, how many people converted? It is a really good exercise. Sometimes for some people it’s stressful for me. I love analytics. I would like to see what works. And and that’s that’s interesting. So to respect your time and I know that at the beginning we had just a little bit of a technical issue. So I want to I only booked an hour of your time. So my last bids. Could you stay on for like five more minutes?

Sure.

Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, like I’m not saying you shouldn’t be able to convert. You shouldn’t be taking on products that you don’t think your audience will buy. You know, I think and you might take on a product that you thought would do well and didn’t do well. And those are all great learning expenditures. But like, I don’t want to see creators going after, you know, like a food like if you’re a vegan, like, you shouldn’t be partnering with the steakhouse, you know what I mean?

Because even though you could probably, like, drive traffic there, it’s not like what you stand for. He’s like outside of your thing, you know what I mean? So it’s all about finding relevant middle of the road or beginning brands like you. Stay away from GoPro, stay away from Johnson and Johnson, stay away from Mattel. I say this all the time and creators, the first thing they do is they go for Mattel. Yeah, because they will.

Oh, when you told me to shoot for the moon, it’s like that’s not what I said, man. Like, you got to go go get the coupon book that comes in your mail. You know, everybody gets these things in your mail and start looking at who you like. It could be the carpet cleaning guy that’s like a great fit for you. Maybe you have a cleaning channel. I don’t know, like there’s a lot of things that you could do.

Really great advice. So I’m super curious for people who have matured in their content creation journey. And I see myself doing that. And I’m definitely continuing with my YouTube journey. What are some of I mean, what is your current routine set up schedule this thing to make sure that you can consistently deliver your content and who’s doing the editing marketing, if you could? Yeah, that’s super juicy to me.

That’s great. So we believe in systems and workflows, you know, and I’ve been really good at this ever since I was diagnosed with cancer five years ago. And and I had chemotherapy really aggressively for a year. And so, you know, I couldn’t do all the things I was running my business by myself at that point. And that’s when I started to, like, learn the power of outsourcing and stepping away. But I also learned the power of time management.

Like any time someone says they’re too busy, what they’re really saying is I’m horrible at managing my own time, but I want you to like me. Yeah, right. It’s like but please respect me. Right? It’s like I’m too busy is I don’t manage my time. Well, it means I commit to things that I don’t know that I can do. I put everything on my calendar and I see what happens in this to me is like the folly of like American entrepreneurialism is like I’m very passionate about time management because you only have one life.

And and so you’ve got to look at your time systematically. Creative’s, I think, struggle. And I struggled with this until I got cancer. Creative’s want to have all of this unstructured time like I want to create when I feel it. OK, that’s not that’s that’s not how it works. You know what I mean? Like Michelangelo, first of all, was paid well for the Sistine Chapel. OK, Michelangelo was a frickin millionaire. So was Leonardo da Vinci.

They weren’t starving artists. OK, there’s nothing cool about that. You know, the second thing is, is that he had to show up for work every day like he was responsible to like the pope or the bishop, you know what I mean? Like, he had to show up to work every day. The trick is the creative is to take to know your rhythms and go read atomic habits is a good one. Like to try to like, make.

Master your own rhythm, so like for me, I’m more creative in the morning, so I try to do all of my creative work in the mornings. I can’t always do that because of my work demands. Right. Tuesday, Wednesday morning, I have calls I have to do and that’s business. That’s a different mindset, different branch, my Microsoft Excel brain versus my Adobe brain. So look at your month in four weeks, if there’s a fifth week that’s unstructured time.

Go celebrate. Go do whatever you want. Right. But all those four weeks, you’re going to be disciplined. You have the first and third week, the second and fourth week. OK, so now you’ve got Monday, Wednesday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. And I think that you should look at your time in those time buckets. So, for example, we run our program based on the first and third week of the month, the first and third Tuesdays of the month.

Right. We do X every Wednesday afternoon. I film videos every Friday afternoon. I film videos. Right. And I have a flow that works this way. So you’ve got to find is a creative life when you’re most creative and schedule that time. OK, the other part of that is know what you can outsource. Like every creative listening to this right now needs to be. Think about what what am I going to outsource first and what am I going to outsource next?

You want to truly be an entrepreneur, hire someone truly. Right, because I’m a creative entrepreneur, I make no money and I have no team and I’ve no staff. And you’re not an entrepreneur, right? I get it. You want to be you’re an entrepreneur. I get that. I respect that. But I want to get you to here’s where we will only I can edit my way. And that might be true. Maybe editing is not what you outsource.

Only I can design graphics my way, you know, only I can can write blogs my way. Like this is the trap of the artist.

Yeah. You know, what about you guys? What is the team like right now like.

So we have one person in charge of one task and we have a three person administrative team. So it’s me. Carmen and Teresa are the management team. Me and Teresa, my wife are owners of the company and she’s like the business development specialist. And I’m sort of like the visionary. Carmen is like our VP of everything. She’s our integrator. She’s the one that deals with all of our sort of like staff members. We have Carlos, who produces two shows for us.

He produces the stream show and he produces the Cast Iron Babe show. We have Angel who produces the the Dr. Jake podcast. We have Lendell, who is our website manager and our blog uploader. We have SEO Express writers who writes and turns all of our blogs and DSTO things. We have Video Huskie who does our editing for us, and we have designed Pikul that does all of our graphic design. So we have like these six people that Carmen manages them.

You don’t have to manage them.

Yeah, yeah, and I do, because I’m teaching calm, I’m mentoring Carmen. Yeah, but that’s where my role is. I spend very little time with the actual staff member. Like, I don’t if I’m the most important person in their world, then then I’m not doing entrepreneur. Right. You know what I mean. Like and it took me years to learn this lesson, by the way, because for years I was like, no one can edit like me.

No one can graphic design like me. No one can do webinars like me. And this is the first year of being in business like eight years that I’m finally stepping back from these things.

Yeah, sorry. Repeat that one word. This is the first time in three, three years and I’ve had your business for like eight years and I’ve hired people, but I fire them because like, you don’t do it like me. You’re not as good as me. And I put no effort into training them or mentoring them or nurturing them. What I did was truly I didn’t want to hire anybody. I wanted to be the best at everything so I could walk around with my chest puffed out.

But then I got cancer, you know, and then I got blood clots from the chemotherapy. Like my health has been this ongoing journey for me. And it’s like I cannot be working 80 hours a week at these massive stress levels. It’s time for me to start hiring. And truly, the designers that we have now in the video, editors now do a better job at the type of work that we do then than I did myself.

Are they individuals or are they companies? I know you need video Haski design Pikul and CEOs. Writers are companies, but then the others are individuals. And we have a good we have a good mixture of those things. At the end of the day, even though it’s a company, I have one editor at Video Huskey and that design Pikul, I have one graphic designer, you know, ANSTO Express Riders. It could be I have one contact, but she’s going to assign it to any writer.

Right. That she thinks is going to be best at it. But you got to find the best tool for the job, right. For some of you like, I think that the best thing that you could do is you find the thing that you hate the most. Like for my wife, who also manages our home, you know, in partnership with me, she needs to get out of, like, prepping vegetables and doing laundry right now.

Don’t get me wrong for this reason, like, I do laundry, too, but there’s eight baskets of laundry upstairs that need to be folded. And we’re kids. Yeah. Yeah. Truly, neither one of us should be folding it. So we’re going to hire someone to help us with that so that we can win our time with the kids is not spent doing laundry. It’s playing in the park while some other young person who’s trying to be an entrepreneur earns money folding my laundry.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, how long have you had this system? You know, where does from a few years.

Yeah, I mean, two years, I think. But like, here’s the problem is, is that I’ve been not willing to give up. I have been a control freak. And this is what I mean is twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty one is the first year that I’ve ever like really decided in my head and in my heart that I need to step back, you know, because I want to make comedy. I want to do stand up comedy.

I want to I want to make family friendly comedy. Your whole family can watch together. You know, I want to write sitcoms. I want to write movies. And I’m never going to be able to do that passion, that retirement project, if I’m in the muck of the coaching business.

Mm hmm. Interesting. So you’re constantly that’s something another note is that you’re constantly going through transition. So we don’t just stay the same as content creators at the beginning. It can be hard, but there’s also a lot of freedom to the videos that you’re creating. Right. You don’t have to cater to so many people. You just kind of experiment. But I, I was also curious, OK, would it be fair to say that right now your energy’s focus on content creation, perhaps that means you script your video, you record on Wednesday and Friday afternoon.

From that point on, I don’t know. You drop your videos and you upload them to a Dropbox and you’re done like everybody else knows what you do after that. Yes.

And then I critique their work. You you you inspect what you expect, you know. And so on Fridays, in fact, we were meeting before I jumped on this call on Fridays we review the work and that’s when I give coaching and consulting and feedback. But I have to be willing. So for example, my my producer uploaded a video to YouTube and it it didn’t perform very well. I went in there, changed the title, and it’s now top performing video on the channel and and like, I dunno, I, I get mad sometimes and it’s like.

Why didn’t you pick the better title, but again, that comes back to me and it’s like, well, OK, why didn’t you teach them how to do this more effectively? And this is where I you know, I try to train our client. We help our clients hire, too. And so, like with my clients, what I find is they’re very they could be very impatient. And it’s like if you’re outsource your messes up once, it’s like you fire them to fire them, find somebody new.

Truth is, you hire very slowly and you fire very quickly. But but the idea is, is that you you nurture, you know, and you show them how to do it. What what a lot. You hire someone, you leave them alone. And it’s like you can’t do that. Like in the beginning, you got to be with them two times a week bugging them. Where you at? You know, and I’ve had outsourcers say like, hey, you know, you seem to be touching base a lot.

And it’s like the moment you start touching base, I won’t need to touch base with you anymore. Mm hmm. I’m trying to train them that you check in every day or every day. You do work for me. You just check in, you know.

Yeah. I mean, you’ve been such an open book on transparency, something I always appreciate. So the next part of the question don’t feel like you have to answer, but just for your at a different stage now as a content nobody. Right. Should if tomorrow you’re starting your YouTube channel. Yeah. It might take a little while for you to understand who you are, who you should hire. But it sounds like there are a lot of people, multiple people, responsibilities.

And how I mean, how much are you budgeting in? You know, if there’s a range for getting help to achieve this level.

Yeah. Like the Microsoft Excel part of the business, you know, and and we sort of work backwards and I don’t know if that’s the right thing to do or not. Like I’m still hiring out of financial team. You know, your financial team should consist of someone who, like, does your bookkeeping, someone who does like your taxes, and not just like at our block, like you need someone who’s like specific and entrepreneurial, creative, artistic type of taxes, you your business to like.

Yeah.

Yeah. And then you need then you need someone who is actually like driving your investments. And like we don’t we don’t have all those things right now. So, you know, like we’re we’re not great at budgeting. And you don’t have to be like at the end of the day, it’s like we need to hire an editor. It’s going to cost five hundred and sixty bucks, Owen Video, Huskie. So do we have five hundred and sixty bucks, nine times twelve in the bank account.

Yes. Hire them, you know, and then say it was the same thing with the with the podcast. Ed, it’s like how, like how much it’s going to cost. It’s like forty dollars a week to hire her like all to sign her up, you know what I mean. That’s nothing you know, because we’re making so much more on that for the client investment. So, you know, it’s like every sort of dollar you make.

Should should be working towards hiring someone to do the work that you don’t want to do.

I love it. All I need to hear those right now. That’s all I is this your whole business should be like like here’s what I think. The mistake that I made is I started making six figures my first year. And so immediately it’s like we bought a house, we bought new cars, things that I feel like we’re maybe we over like I think it’s really good to reward yourself. Maybe we over rewarded ourselves. What I would do now, what I would what I would coach someone to doing is before you buy the house, buy a VA.

Mm. Right. And get out of some of the muck like all of them you should be making should be hiring somebody. So you should be in a place where you’re broke is a joke. But the company is making sales automatically with hired hands who are getting paid and you’re not involved. That’s a business. Now not everyone’s going to achieve that, but you achieve varying levels of it. This is what investment companies do, right? Like when Elon Musk starts a company like he, he gets investment from investors.

Right. And then they hire the people, they get the building, they train the people so that the business can now run without them. This is what we need to do.

Hmm. Yeah, this is exactly what we need to do. Oh, my God. I can I can talk to you forever. I got to ask a couple of more questions, if that’s OK. Just maybe just a couple of more minutes. One thing is there is like you said, it is not a perfect balance sheet and it’s not always so black and white. Making decisions should be easy. In some cases, you might have to sit down and looking at your financials.

So for me, for instance, I have my some of my passion projects, which I get paid for. But I you know, I don’t request a lot of money for just a few things that are really, really important to me. And some of that is related to palliative care and childhood cancer, frankly. Wow. Really? Yeah, absolutely. And maybe we can you know, I can definitely send you some some links and some information, and I’m really passionate about it.

And then there are there are, you know, the other circle of my regular consulting clients who can afford a lot more retainers and all that. And then, of course, there is a third. There’s more like a triangle, but there is a third bubble of the Face World content podcast, YouTube, you know, a little more passive income. So, you know, I think it’s interesting, like when I look at my VA, I have my VA passionately working on my passion project so we can talk about for hours.

But the that bubble doesn’t generate as much revenue. So as you’re saying, part of me is like, OK, I know I need to offload a lot of work, but which which doesn’t even matter for me to figure that out right now or should I just cold turkey and just really trying to offload as much as possible because on one hand. Oh, and like, I’m not super busy. I don’t have I love kids, I don’t have kids, so I have time.

But the other thing is, like maybe I don’t even know what I’m made of. I don’t know what my potential is because my time is currently sucked up with these things. I should be offloading. I’m not sure if that makes sense. It just does. I think that you need to like know what work brings you life and what work brings you death. And that’s and it does bring death, like as someone experience with cancer, like high stress as a toxin that can change your mitochondrial function, which could express itself as cancer and most likely will if you have other metabolic disorders like high cholesterol or low CBC count like like we could talk about this for hours, but like so so you need to know what work is bringing you life, what work is bringing you death and set yourself up is the work that brings you death is being outsourced because the work that brings you death will bring someone else life.

Yeah. And you need to find that person. Right. Find that person and train that person. And they’re probably in the Philippines or in Pakistan or in South America. And that’s OK. Like, I am so proud to be feeding families all over the world. Yeah, there’s there’s nothing like there’s nothing to be ashamed and that I know that somebody is a higher American, higher American. And that’s a great bumper sticker. But is it a reality for every entrepreneur?

I don’t think so. Not when every American wants eighty thousand dollars an hour and health care, you know what I mean? Like, that’s, you know, like a good bumper sticker. Sorry.

It’s true. It’s like it’s not a real way of living. What that is, is like these excuses that we tell ourselves that we can live small. And and what I would do, like you want to spend more time in the things that give you life. So make a list of the things that that bring you death and hire for one of those things. Yeah. And get them good. Like we’re hiring a social media manager right now. And that social media manager is going to do a bunch of things for us.

They’re going to grow LinkedIn, they’re going to grow Instagram, they’re going to post on my profile. But we’re not hiring them for that right now. We’re hiring them to post in our faith to all three of our Facebook groups for thirty days and see if we even like them. Right. You know, I mean, so it’s not just it’s one job per hire. You hire one like our podcast editor. We’re going to have her edit one, maybe three podcasts, but after three, it’s time to hire a new podcast editor and get three more podcasting clients.

Mm hmm. You see where that’s that’s where business growth comes in. Right. So. So we’re not going to hire her to be our podcast editor, my Vuh, my blog writer. And this is the super HVA myth that everybody seems to believe in. Right. Like I’m going to hire one HVA that can do everything when really that’s not what the VA is. It’s unfair to that person, unfair to you. So if you if you’re like, OK, I need somebody to write blogs for me, hire a blog writer.

That’s right. And are they going to be the right person to upload your YouTube videos? I don’t know. Like get them on the blog writing thing, see how that goes, see if you even like them and then say happening in about having you uploaded to YouTube, what do you think about that? Right. You know, and build off of that one person when you found that limit, go to the next person. Right. But just because you have time made doesn’t mean that you should be wasting your time.

You know, you should be putting your time into building the company. I wish that I would have built. Right, which is outsourced the mock from the beginning. If I had outsourced early on. Yeah. I may not have gotten cancer.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Thank you so much. Oh, and there’s a lot more to talk about, but this is so fantastic. I seriously didn’t quite expect this level of details and transparency and, and wisdom. So I know you probably know what I’ll be doing for the rest of the afternoon. I’m going to revisit, you know, my my off load list and really focus on the things I because it will be a dream come true for me to focus on scripting, recording videos, do this and just let everybody else handle.

And that might be a dream for a year you might like. That was me. I loved it. And now I’m in a place like I don’t want to make videos on my channel anymore, like I want to make comedy now. And so like, yeah, it’s OK, it’s OK. Like do what you want now and be open to change because we are going to grow, we are going to mature and like in a year you may be like, I don’t want to do that anymore, so I’m going to, I’m going to sell my channel or I’m going to partner with someone on this channel like it opens up so many new doors.

And that is entrepreneurial ism.

Yeah. Oh, I love it. OK, is is giving me like goosebumps of. Yes, I love to hear that.

Yeah. Next level of thinking, but thank you so much Owen Video for your time. And again, all the links in the description below. I’ll also be repurposing this for my regular podcast platforms on everything Spotify, Google podcast and Apple. I’m I’m very intrigued and I will be repurposing those into a lot of clips, you know, shorts, that sort of thing. So I look forward to continue our conversation in the near future.

I can’t wait. I can’t wait to have you on my show and we’ll just keep this conversation going.

Oh, yes, please. Absolutely. So thank you again.