Podcasting for Entrepreneurs - Joe Sanok

Hey everybody, welcome to the Future of Fitness, where we talk with entrepreneurs, researchers, and practitioners in fitness, wellness, and the health sciences. I'd like to give a big thanks to our sponsors, Level Five Mentors, helping entrepreneurs achieve the highest levels of freedom in time, money, relationships, health, and purpose. Also, Certified Course Creation, helping entrepreneurs create accredited online certifications that are not only lucrative but highly scalable. Go to levelfivementors.com or certifiedcoursecreation.com and learn more. I am your host, Eric Malzone. And once again, welcome to the future of fitness. All right, we are live. Joe, welcome to the show. Oh, I'm so glad to be here. Yeah, I'm happy to have you, man. I uh so the listeners can gauge kind of what's going on as we actually just recorded another podcast for Joe's show. And now we're doing my show. And this is what podcasters do, right? We we love to talk to each other, we love to support each other. It's an amazing community, and we're gonna talk about that quite a bit within this episode and why it's so critical to branding. And honestly, man, I don't know why more people don't have podcasts, but I thoroughly enjoy it. I love talking to people like you, and uh, it's just a lot of fun. So, Joe, welcome, man. If if you can, let's start by giving people a little bit of backstory of how you got to where you are now.

Yeah, you know, I was trained as a uh traditional therapist. So I went through school, got my master's degrees in counseling and psychology, kind of followed the very typical route of working at nonprofits and then at community mental health, and kind of dipped my toes into counseling, private practice uh as a just contractor to pay off student loan debt. And as I did that and I saw how much I made per hour doing individual counseling instead of working at community mental health, I thought, well, you know, that I like this, you know, it can pay off student loan debt. And really that's all I thought it was gonna be. And so I kept this kind of side gig um thing going. I ended up opening my own practice when I moved back home to northern Michigan and really continued to see it as a side gig until one of my uh interns said, Hey, I'd love to work at your practice. And so I quickly found out how to add a 1099, how to have contracts, worked with an attorney, already had an LLC and all of that kind of set up. I was then hired at the community college locally in Traverse City, and uh it was one of those perfect jobs where it was like the highest paying counseling job. I had a state pension, total golden handcuffs, um, and still had this side counseling gig. And as that was growing, I was starting to listen to more podcasts, uh, people like Pat Flynn and John Lee Doumas and these business people that I really respected, really just to optimize this little side gig practice that I thought, you know, we'll see if anything happens with this. And I started a podcast in 2012 called Practice of the Practice to talk about the business side of running a private practice, thinking it could open some doors, but but we'll see. Well, I remember in 2014, right after uh our second daughter was born, I went over to my new office and it was still a side gig at that time to go do a lunch session. So I had a corner office view of the water and quickly ran over, did this, you know, quick session, got back to the office at the counseling office in the basement of the college where I had no windows. And I remember walking down the stairs and kind of doing the math in my head of how much I had just made per hour and how little it would take to match my salary. And so I ended up uh eventually leaving that that uh counseling gig at the community college and doing practice the practice, the consulting side of what I do and my counseling practice uh full time. I say full time, but it was only probably 25 hours a week that it took to match my other salary. So then just continue to grow that podcast. And now um I've sold my counseling practice. We're totally location independent. We're actually living out of a camper, uh, just kind of traveling the nation and just enjoying ourselves while also podcasting on the road. And we do all sorts of good work to help counselors start growing and scale their private practices now. Amazing.

So you started a podcast in 2012.

That's early. Yeah, and I thought it was super late because the people I followed were ahead of me. And and I mean, I think that's a lesson to learn is that of course you always start at zero, but there's always gonna be people behind you as well. And so uh to me, podcasting still is is the best use of your time for the largest audience with the fewest competitors.

Yeah, really good insights. I mean, we're gonna talk a lot about podcasting today, I think. And I'm curious, walk me through maybe the first year of podcasting. You know, what was there any points when you're like, you know, I'm not really getting any audience growth here? Or, you know, those ones you're like, I got 10 downloads and two of them are my parents. Like, what walk me through that first year?

What was that like? Oh, it was brutal. Uh I mean, I built my own WordPress website. I built my own logo that looked like crap. Um, you know, I would podcast when I could. I I joke that I was a nap preneur where whenever my wife and new baby daughter would sleep, I'd go do podcasts. Um usually it was like, you know, on the weekend in our, you know, upstairs of our house, and I'd have a blanket like over my head because I couldn't afford or thought I couldn't afford decent sound equipment. I still have the same mic I had. I had a good quality mic, but to reduce the echo, I just put a blanket over my head. So I'd be sweating and like drinking water and doing these interviews with people with a blanket over my head, and then you know, have 50 or maybe a hundred listens per episode. And just like I would try to launch things to my email list. People were opting in a little bit, uh, but people wouldn't buy anything. Um, and I I just didn't know kind of how to crack the code. And it took a while, and I think that it was good that I had my full-time job because I could test some things, but man, those first, it was probably two years before before I really saw a major jump in the numbers.

And what was when you started, was it just you talking to a microphone? Were you doing interviews? What was the format?

You know, I didn't have a real clear plan, which I think is when I talk to new podcasters that want advice, having a clear plan, kind of an arc to your podcast, I think is important. But it was really, I would read a book and say, hey, I just read Gorilla Marketing, and here's what I got out of it. Here's some thoughts of how to apply it to private practice. And sometimes I would reach out to someone and interview them. Um, it was it was just kind of shooting and throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what would stick and having zero plan. And and it when I listen to those episodes, they're pretty terrible.

Yeah.

Yeah, I hear you. I don't want to go back ever and listen to my first 10. That's for sure.

Oh, I was I was on the beach. Um, I put on this event in the summer called Slowdown School. Uh, we're outside of COVID. We we get together, we go hiking and hang out on the beach for a couple days and then work on their businesses. And someone was like, Do you have you ever listened to your first episode? And I'm like, No, I haven't. And so we we loaded it up and the amount of imposter syndrome and feeling like I had to say all my achievements to feel like I was accepted and that I was worthy of speaking into a microphone, it was such a narcissistic, not good version of myself. It was just terrible.

Oh, so we'll we'll circle back on this podcasting thing because I have a lot of questions, especially for people who um, you know, may ask themselves, well, why should I start a podcast? But I want to I want to talk about camper life, man. So how long you've been doing this?

Yeah, so we started in early September, right after Labor Day. And we'd been planning it before COVID, though. So part of it was me selling my practice in 2019 so that I could be location independent. That worked out great. And then my wife had really been dreaming of doing this camper thing and wanting a camper. And I was, I'm always the brakes on the finances, and it takes me a while to make some of those financial decisions for our family. In my business, for some reason, I can see the ROI really quickly. But yeah, we we got a truck and then we we started podcasting during the pandemic about the idea as a family, and so we have a family podcast called Leave to Find that's all about our camper adventures. Awesome. And really, so we we started and just headed towards the Badlands and then into the Tetons and Yellowstone. Uh, at the time of this recording, we're in Fort Collins, Colorado. But our idea, even before COVID, was that our girls they were at an outdoor kind of education type of school where they spent a ton of time outside, but it just felt like the creativity was being lost. And when we think about our family, I want my kids to be curious. I want them to really just like love learning. And it felt like if we don't do this in late elementary school, they're nine and six. You know, you get into middle school, they start getting into sports and having their friends, and then it's high school and thinking about college. It just felt like, sure, we could do that at that time, but now felt like one of the easiest times to do it as a family. While I'm saying that, my wife has been texting me all day saying how it's a big S storm back at the camper and how like the girls aren't listening, and they're being little S heads. So, but you know, some days are better than others. Yeah, right.

It's uh it's it, you know, we did we didn't do the camper life, but we were nomadic for, you know, really up until now when we finally got a lot of land here in Montana. But, you know, there was it's it's a very romantic vision too, right? I mean, you're like, well, we're gonna go travel, we're gonna see all these things, but there's there's some downsides to it. I'm curious if you're starting to see any of the downsides to the nomadic living or if it's still Yeah.

I mean, the reality is that you've got a six and nine-year-old or we do, and we don't want them to fall farther behind in school. We want them to be better because of this. And so even just saying, well, we want to keep up with like reading and grammar and math to just have a basic curriculum that they do, that takes a lot of time. And then there's all these things that you never think of when you're not living in a camper, like water, electricity, sewer, those are really important in a camper. And they're they're important at at home too, but you just take it totally for granted. But so, like the other day, it was a colder day here in Fort Collins. I I was in our truck where I had really good Wi-Fi through our truck, um, had a bunch of consulting calls. It was a nine to three day, so I'm not gonna engage with the family. My wife knew that it was mommy time to like pay attention to the kids, and I'm I'm off duty doing my work. And our my father-in-law and mother-in-law had the site next to us for a couple weeks, and I just start seeing these very concerned looks on my wife and my father-in-law's face. And they're opening up kind of this storage area underneath, and it had been a super cold night, like six degrees, and we had a heated hose and all this stuff, and then I see them start taking things out from underneath it, and then I start seeing towels that are just dripping wet coming out from underneath, and I'm thinking, oh no. And I'm on a consulting call, so I can't just be like, let me call you back. Yeah. Um, and so what had happened is there was this outdoor um where it was like a spigot where you could plug in a hose and like spray down a dog or your kids or the camper, whatever. But there was a plastic nozzle on that that was not weatherproof, whereas everything else was these rubber hoses and had cracked. And so when it started to melt, it was just squirting on the inside. And there's like half an inch of water. And so there are always these things that happen that I had no idea to even like think through and to just realize this is this is part of it. You have getting your kids through education, then trying to have them be outside, and then trying to have them engage with nature, and then even just figuring out where that smell is coming from in your camp. It's just there's just a lot of things that are everyday life that is extra. But then on the other side, it's such a small space. You know, we have like six plates and like six bowls. And so when we use it, we have to wash it and put it away. And so the house stays relatively clean compared to what our house was back home because you got to stay on top of it all the time. You can't just leave dishes in the sink or you know, your space feels so much smaller because it's a small space. And when you have junk all over the place, it just it feels super cluttered very quickly.

Yeah. You know, that is that is interesting. Well, first of all, I feel you we have a converted van now, like a sprinter style van that last year I didn't winterize it, which I didn't really know was a thing coming from Northern California. And uh, same thing, water was still in the water pump, that thing broke loose, and then in the spring we turned it on. It was just it was everywhere. So I learned that lesson hard. Also, uh some lessons in how to wire up electricity to it uh the hard way. Oh my gosh. So it was yeah, it was interesting.

Things that I've had to learn are just shocking. It's just I never thought I would learn. I'm not really like a handy guy. So I'm not sure. Um, but but when you're out out in the woods, you you gotta become a handy guy pretty quickly.

Yeah. And I agree with you. You know, one of the things that I picked up quite a bit was, you know, we probably moved for you know better part of three years. Every two to three months on average, we go check out somewhere new and get a new Airbnb or something like that and just keep moving. I eventually got all of my clothes down in one big green duffel bag, and all of our belongings could fit into a small trailer and and our car. And it was so liberating. Like you just start to like every time you move, it was an opportunity to cleanse, I guess. And you know, now y'all it's like, you know, I used to, I'm I'm a fitness industry guy. So, you know, I had like 70, 80 t-shirts before we left Santa Barbara. Now I have 12. And that was an emotional experience for me. I get very emotionally attached to my t-shirts. But it was, it's it's one of those things you didn't see coming, but you're glad you did. It just really simplifies things. It's a beautiful, beautiful thing.

Yeah, I I went through that whole Kanmari Does It Bring Me Joy thing with my t-shirts and clothes a couple years ago. And yeah, I ended up taking pictures of, you know, I was in a band in college and it they were itchy, gross, like not good feeling t-shirts that I never wore, but I didn't want to get rid of them because of the memories. And so I just took pictures of them. And now I have probably about the same 12 t-shirts that I absolutely love. And I just rotate through them, and I know every single one of them I really enjoy wearing.

Yeah. It's funny. A podcast about t-shirts. Uh so give us some insights on to like everything you do now. I mean, you're on the road, you're living this lifestyle that a lot of people kind of dream about, right? Well, some people do. A lot of people are like, that's crazy. I don't want to be in a camper van. But you're making it work. You're you're not only surviving it really, but you're thriving through it. How are you doing that?

Yeah, I mean, it's been a lot of planning and probably for the last, well, for a really long time, I have been asking myself, what's the best use of my time? Um, I read the book, The One Thing, probably four or five years ago, like right when it came out. And that idea of focusing on what's the one thing that's going to make everything else easier has been something I've really tried to live out. And so, even down to my email, I have Jess, my director of details. She reads through my email, she stars the ones that are most essential for me. She texts me if one of my consulting clients emails me. So I can focus on top level things. So my actual schedule right now is that I typically will work on a Tuesday from nine to three, and then I may have a couple meetings on a Wednesday morning if they couldn't fit in on Tuesday, and I might check email throughout the rest of the week, maybe 15 minutes on Monday and 15 minutes on maybe Thursday. And for the most part, it's really like a day and a half of work per week. But the way that we do that is you know, I've really looked at, you know, how do I view my particular audience, which are counselors and private practice, on a spectrum. A lot of you know, consultant types will say, you need to have your one product you sell. And I think that's true for a lot of solopreneurs, or if you want to be an Amy Porter field that just kind of, you know, gets things going, you sell that one big product and that's your thing. But for my folks, there's people that are starting a practice. So we have a membership community where people pay $99 a month for that. We have people that are growing practices, so they're in mastermind groups of six to 12 people, and that's run by consultants outside of myself that I've trained that um I get a percentage of what they bring in. There's one-on-one consulting that those consultants run. I take on a very limited amount of consulting clients just from a time perspective, but also I want to put it into the people that I most enjoy working with, which is usually podcasters or people that are wanting to launch really big podcasts. And then uh we have a bunch of podcasting services that we we've been able to do. But each one of those things that we've launched, the reason we've been able to sell it out, the reason that we've been able to monetize it so quickly is that we really believe in this mantra that we've figured out. And that's that we fall in love with the pain in the people before we ever pitch a product. Uh, we fall in love with the pain in the people before we pitch a product. Rather than create an e-course and then try to squeeze people into that e-course, we do a lot of co-creation with our audience where we really survey them, find out what they want. We have a kind of process we go through. So then it's we launch one new product, uh, it does well. Then we automate that product as much as I can outside of my own time, and then we move on to the next product. And so it really allows me to focus on the biggest picture. Um, and honestly, the the ones that monetize the most, the biggest picture items.

Let's talk about that. Fall in love with the pain and the people. I love that. Dive into that. How do you maybe anecdotally, how do you fall in love with the pain and the yeah?

Well, let me start with how I didn't do it well and why I had the realization to do it. So I used to read a book, listen to a podcast, get inspired in some way, to have an idea. I would then build out this whole product so it could be an e-course, it could be a conference, whatever. And then I would email my list, hey, I'm doing this conference on this date. And then three people buy tickets, and I then had to refund their money because there wasn't enough people to put it on. So, like this model of creating something that you're really excited about and then not having it sell was the problem that I ran into over and over. So then what I started doing, and it first happened when we launched next level practice. So, next level practice is our membership community aimed at counselors starting business or coaches starting businesses under 100K. And so I thought, well, I'm gonna just survey people a little bit differently this time. And so I emailed my list and said, you know, I'm gonna do 15-minute phone calls with 20 or so people just about what it's been like to start a private practice. Um, would love to just hear from you. So then so the process that we go through, and we still use this exact same thing today, is first we ask about the pain, then we ask about the product, then we ask about the price. So the pain, we say, what's it been like to start a private practice? Uh so then they're giving the information of how they describe that pain. We're getting great copy out of that. So I'm taking notes the whole time, looking for trends as I interview people. Uh, the second question is if there was a magical product that would solve all those pains and problems that you just articulated, what would that look like? Would it be a membership community? Would it be an e-course? Would it be small groups? So then they sketch out their ideal product. And then the third question is, how much would you pay for that? So by doing that with next level practice, I in my head, we had a tripwire. So we had this small product that was $17. In my head, the next step up from there would be like a $29 a month membership community, just a small jump going from $17 to $29 a month. Okay, that's a small jump. So that's what I had in my head. So I'm talking to these people and say, what's it been like to start a practice? And they're talking about, oh man, the finances, the marketing, there's just so much to keep track of. And I don't even know how to do this, but I know that there's people that have done this before. So then they give me great copy that we're able to use later. And I said to them, secondly, so if there was a membership community, an e-course, something that helped you solve that, like what would be included in that? And they started listing out the most robust program I had ever heard people say. So they wanted logos, they wanted paperwork packets, they wanted access to experts, they wanted new e-courses every month that they could access. They wanted a community of on Facebook, but they also wanted small groups and accountability partners. And I'm thinking in my head, there's no way for $29 a month that we can do this. But then when we got to step three, how much would you pay if we, and I reflected back everything they just said, you know, if we gave you all of these things, it was a membership community, how much would you pay for that? They routinely said between $50 and $100 a month. So then I would have left tons of money on the table at $29 a month. And now I have a program or an idea that these 20 people have sketched out. They've said we'd spend $50 to $100 a month for that. And now I have my first buyers. So then I sketched out, hey, I just learned this. Email my whole list. I just talked to all these people. Here's what they said they'd like. If this is something that you would want for that $50 to $100 a month, uh click here and you'll get added to a different email list so that when we launch, you get the very first access. So then we launch to that group. And again, at every step we're validating. So if nobody had jumped on the phone with me, I'd know, okay, there's not really interest here. If nobody had opted into that email list, okay, there's not much interest there. If then on the early access, I'm giving you guys all early access. So even if I have 200 people that opt in, if they don't actually give me their credit card number in order to be part of this membership community, now I haven't built out this entire thing only to have crickets.

That what you just did illustrates so many things in the fitness industry that take place. It's there's I saw this meme once, I think you'll appreciate it. It's like, you know, I have landing pages, I have funnels, I have tripwires, but I have an empty bank account, right? People go and they start creating all these things: courses, uh, ebooks or masterminds, or you name it, you know, all these kind of uh contemporary things that we deliver services in, but it just crickets because maybe they didn't take the time to build the audience or they didn't get to know who they were speaking to, and all these points that you know people just like to skip over. We like to get to creation, but we don't like to do the research. And so you primarily work within what, the world of therapists and health practitioners, or who are you mostly working with?

Yeah, I would say a good 80% of our audience are counselors, therapists, psychologists. We're getting a lot more coaches, people that really want to do better digital marketing, better um membership communities, e courses, if they want to launch those sorts of things. Um, we have some fitness people that are some of our podcasters we've helped launch as well. Um, one of them is I gotta give a shout out to Melissa from the Bomb Mom podcast. It's great because she's a fitness instructor out in California. But she tackles kind of all those mom mindsets that just get in the way of putting yourself first. And I mean, I see it in my own wife. I see it in so many women where everyone else comes first before them, uh, and then their health and all these other things go in the backseat. When in reality, if you did put your health and your own fitness and your own mindsets of how you want to grow first, you're gonna be a better mom. You're gonna be a better person. And so, yeah, we do attract quite a few kind of health people as well that want to launch podcasts or launch e-courses.

Right on. So, one of the questions that I love to ask is, you know, as this journey in entrepreneurship for you and taking risks, calculating things, now you're in a camper van, what what's been one of the biggest personal challenges for you as a business owner and an entrepreneur?

Yeah. So if I go back to 2012, that's the year we started practice of the practice. That was a tough year personally, that definitely informed how I live my life and how I choose to spend my time. So my daughter, who was born in 2011, we found out quickly after that, after she was born, that she had some serious heart conditions. And so all of 2011 we spent trying to just get her up to weight because what was happening is she was on this medication that made it so that fluid didn't build up around her heart. And so she was going to the bathroom every hour and a half or so. So we never slept more than an hour and a half for that first year of her life. And so she we would have these breast milk milkshakes where it was breast milk with formula to just help her get enough calories because she she wasn't really growing like she was supposed to. So she finally got up to weight. We went in to have this procedure done and it takes longer than it should. And the doctor calls us into this room and explains to us how he couldn't finish the surgery because she had a left pulmonary stenosis. So if he had done it, it would have cut off all the all the blood to her left lung. So then what we thought was going to be the last kind of day in the hospital for us ended up being another four months until, you know, right before her first birthday. And she then had open heart surgery, got through that, was safe and fine. But then about two weeks after that, I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. And so we thought we were again we were done with the hospitals. We thought we were done with everything kind of hitting the fan. And instead, you know, we're flying down to Texas to, you know, all sorts of medical things done. I ended up having my thyroid removed, have radioactive iodine treatment, all this stuff to take care of it. In the midst of that, my wife has a miscarriage. Um, my grandma died in the middle of all that. My best friend's wife got breast cancer. Um, it was just one of those years where you say to yourself, like, what more can a family handle? It but it's almost, it was such a clarifier in some ways. You know, I'm definitely not one of those cancer patients where it's like, now life is perfect after this, and I have such an appreciation for life. Like, sure, I do, but life's still hard. Like raising little kids is hard, and there's times that things are just difficult. But what it did help me clarify was do I want to sit in a community college doing counseling for the rest of my life? Very similar to your story of um, do I want to be doing this for the next 20 years? It's interesting. As you and I talked on my podcast, you you said kind of one of your clarifiers for yourself is um, would I regret doing this? And while I was going through that phase of thinking about, do I want to leave the community college, I kept asking myself, would I regret staying here and not knowing if I have it in me more, or would I would I regret trying and failing miserably more? And over and over, I just knew in my head that if I didn't try and fail, I mean, I wasn't gonna try to fail, but to try and maybe fail, I knew that it would just eat me up on the inside. And so the idea of just saying, you know what, life is short. There's so many things that can go wrong. And um, and I want to be able to enjoy life as much as I can. To me, that was such a clarifier coming out of such a tough year.

Man, I'm I I feel you. I mean, that's as we talked about on this on your podcast, and we'll just mention again here, it sounds like 2012 was what I would refer to as a cage rattling event where everything changes. You know, it's just it's like your your chemistry shifts and you see things differently. And uh sometimes, unfortunately, or a lot of times, almost inevitably, it takes pain, you know. And I'm I'm glad you made it through it. That's it's powerful, man. It really is.

I mean, I saw a quote recently, I don't know who originally said it because it was just posted on Instagram or something, but it was you can't see the rainbows if you're not looking through tears. And I just thought that, you know, the idea that the biggest joys in our life would be really hard to understand if we didn't have really tough things or at least the chance of tough things. And no one wants to wish that on other people and say, oh, I want to be happy because of pain. But I mean, it really I think we try to avoid pain and suffering so much like in our society that we miss out on the risk that can come on the other side of it, where sure it might cause pain, but it also might cause some crazy joy you'd never experience.

Yeah. Yeah, you know, I'm I'm grateful for 2016 and all the things that happened in my wife and I's life because it launched us into a whole nother thing. And it's given me a lot of perspective that I didn't have before. You know, I was just kind of honestly like life went really well uh up until that point. You know, I was just kind of cruising, everything was going according to plan. And then, you know, as Mike Tyson says, everyone has a plan until you get punched in the face. And we got punched in the face. And uh, you know, it just made us uh shift the game plan and adapt and and go through some things that, you know, I'm sure like the pain that you felt in 2012 will never fully go away. It'll just kind of fade into like a background noise in your life, but it's part of you now, and that's that's what makes you unique. You know, humans are scarred. Uh that's that's just the way it is.

And I think also even just going through that process to then say, well, what's my own therapeutic process of working with the counselor and doing some internal work to overcome some of the trauma and and other things that happened? Um, I mean, that's important, not just from empathizing with my own clients, but even just being able to get through something that to me would have been, I mean, it was so scary to go through, especially seeing my kid, you know, have to have such immense surgery. I mean, but to be able to get through that and say, yeah, of course I don't want to ever go through that again. It was terrible. I don't want to experience that. But they're in the same way that anything that's new is just so hard the first time. I do feel like it's it's almost liberated me to just experience less fear. I forgot whose book it was, but they were talking about the people that were in London during the London bombing and World War II, and how they thought that the people that were really close to where the bombs went off but weren't killed were going to be super traumatized, and how they actually ended up having a more positive outlook on life because they were like, we got through this. We we were bombed and we survived almost like a we're chosen kind of thing. Um, and not that I say I'm chosen, but the idea of wow, as a family, we went through some really tough stuff. And not that I want to say to the universe, bring it, but I'm just not as fearful of going through tough stuff as maybe I used to be.

Yeah, yeah, there's there's a lot of power to that. Thank you for sharing that, Joe. I know those those times are kind of not always easy to recap. Let's let's go back to podcasting for a second. So let's put hobbyists aside. And people who just, you know, want to do it for the fun. We're talking about people who want to use their podcast as a way to learn and grow their business. What do you think if you could give us maybe two or three common mistakes that you see that people do when they're launching their podcast or even when they're maybe in, you know, year two, three?

I mean, I think the very first one is to not have a very clear call to action of how you're going to keep in touch with the people that love you. I mean, the people that listen to you from the very beginning are probably going to be some of your biggest fans. And so to have an email sequence, I prefer to call it an email course because we have kind of a nine-part email series that gets typically like a 60% open. Having a course to point people through to me is really, really important because then you're able to keep in touch with these people. And most people, you know, they they're like, I should start an email. I don't know if I want to spend the time to do it. But when you really think through how long it would take you to write the first, say, nine or so emails, we're we're talking like a page each. Like, so write nine pages of emails that help people go through that pain to transformation process. Um, number two, I would say they don't typically connect with people that already have audiences that are similar to their own. And so, even just what you and I are doing here to do a podcast swap. And you know, in some ways you've said, I want to be where you're at, you know, in a year, Joe. And I'm thinking, well, you've done some really amazing things too. And so you never know where those relationships will open doors that open doors, that open doors. You just can't predict it. And so I would highly suggest that early podcasters connect with other podcasters, and especially when when we have conferences again, go to in-person podcasting conferences. Um, the the relationships I've made drinking tequila at the end of the evening with people and just like talking all sorts of things outside of podcasting, those have opened almost more doors than doing hundreds of interviews with people. Yeah. So I'm really excited about going to conferences again.

Yeah, me too. There's uh have you heard of the Baby Bathwater Institute? I haven't. Uh, these guys are great. I haven't done one of their events, but I've I've been here locally to talk to two people who have. And they just they they create these networking events for for entrepreneurs and business owners where there's you don't talk about business. It's all about, you know, uh, they're quite frank, you know, it's it's you know, there's a decent amount of alcohol and it's you know, it's all about recreation and but it's just about connection. And there's no pitching, there's no business development conversation. It's all about just connecting with people over a campfire or over an activity. And I think that is something that we always want to dress things up and make them professional, but that's not where the true relationships are made. And I can tell you after collectively, six, I don't even know, over 600 interviews I've done in the last three years, that I have made some of the greatest relationships through starting conversations on podcasts that I never thought I would have had. And uh that alone is worth every bit of time and effort and energy that goes into it because your network, and this sounds cliche, is really your net worth. And you know, whether it's great times, right, where business is booming, you can call on people in your network, or times when you frankly, your network is your lifeline. It's always there for you because you've taken the time to actually start relationships with offering value, a podcast interview versus just like, hey, can I pick your brain or um can I get some of your time? You know, it's it's just a very different way to engage. And it's it's it's been huge for me.

Yeah. I and I feel like you just never know where those relationships will go. And so, I mean, some of my best friends started out as business colleagues, and that's not, and usually I have a pretty strong like business life, work life kind of barrier. But in the podcasting world, it we're all cut from the same cloth in a lot of ways. And so to find that community of people that are entrepreneurs, but they also want to live a certain kind of lifestyle. And they, the kind of people I usually hang out with are like yourself, people that have a sense of adventure or you know, building out that ideal life. Once you find those people, it's really hard to not want to hang out with them.

Yeah, yeah, I agree. Oh man, Joe, I could talk to you for hours. Maybe I can urge you now to come back on the show again in a few months and check in on camper life. I think it'd be a lot of fun. Oh, I would love it. Yeah, it would be so much fun. So give us the goods, man. Where do people find you? Is there anything you're offering right now uh for our audience? Yeah, give us the goods, man.

Yeah, I think if if people want to grow their business, uh, specifically through a podcast or even to understand how to use kind of an email funnel with a podcast, with going on people's podcasts, the best place for them to come is over to podcastlaunchschool.com. It's a single landing page where you can opt into our nine-part email series where you can explore whether podcasting is for you. It's really aimed at, like you said, it's not aimed at the hobbyists, it's not aimed at the people that just want to talk into a microphone or the people that you know maybe are gonna try to invent something and squeeze people into it. It's the it's the professionals that are out there that are saying, I am good at something and I want to play much bigger. So uh that that email sequence uh and email course over at Podcast Launch School, I think would be the best one for them to check out. Also, we have Practice of the Practice, uh, that's our podcast. Uh, we have tons of resources there. And if you want to follow our camper life, we're leave to find, that's the podcast. Uh, we're also on Instagram, so you can see all of our recent pictures. Awesome.

Joe, thank you so much for coming on. It's been uh it's been an absolute pleasure. I I love the way you're living your life. And uh hopefully we'll get you up to Montana sometime soon with that trailer. What do you think? Eric, that would be awesome. This has been fun. Ladies and gentlemen, Joe stand up. Hey, it's your host, Eric Malzone. Thank you so much for listening to another episode of Future of Fitness. If you enjoyed it, please do me a huge favor by going to the website and signing up for our newsletter. The website is futureoffitness.do. Again, that's future of fitness. Thank you again. Signing off