Jeff Goins- Started a Blog and a New Life

Jeff Goins [00:00:00]:
I started my own blog, and I decided to write every single day on that blog for a year. And I did. And by the end of that year, I had 10,000 readers. The most I’d ever had on a blog before was 250 readers.

Dana Robinson [00:00:11]:
Wow.

Jeff Goins [00:00:12]:
I had 10,000 subscribers, and a publisher had contacted me asking me to write a book. I didn’t even have to get an agent to go pitch it. They came to me. I replaced my income through teaching online courses and writing books. And by the end of 2012, I went to my boss and I said, I think it’s time for me to move on.

Dana Robinson [00:00:35]:
Exit Plan is a podcast for business owners and those who want to be business owners. I’m always in search of the lesser known stories of entrepreneurship. In the exit Plan podcast, you’ll hear stories from startup to sale and hear from the professionals who help business owners achieve their exit. Hosted by me, author and private equity manager, Dana Robinson, along with my co hosts and guests, you’ll hear real stories, tips, and tools that will help you plan for the exit you want, whether you are still working at a day job or running a business. Let’s get started with this episode of the Exit Plan podcast.

Dana Robinson [00:01:15]:
Today I bring to you best selling author, writing coach, blogger newsletter, author extraordinaire, Jeff goings.

Jeff Goins [00:01:29]:
Jeff, thanks.

Dana Robinson [00:01:31]:
Hi.

Jeff Goins [00:01:31]:
Good to be here. Thanks for having me.

Dana Robinson [00:01:33]:
I appreciate it. I love talking to you on video calls because I see all kinds of books behind you, and you’re a bookish person. So I see all these beautiful bound and cool things behind you.

Jeff Goins [00:01:45]:
My favorite is all these different. These are all translations of my book. So this is korean, maybe, yeah.

Dana Robinson [00:01:52]:
How cool. All right.

Jeff Goins [00:01:54]:
And they’re just like the coolest looking books. I mean, they’re just know, I don’t know, random purple page here. For some reason, korean books are the coolest. Like, they’re the most beautiful books I’ve ever seen. Super colorful.

Dana Robinson [00:02:12]:
I was in school, there was a number of korean students that were at Westminster seminary when I was there, and I never actually picked up a korean book. Do they read from left to right or turn from back to front? Like picking up a hebrew book?

Jeff Goins [00:02:30]:
I think so.

Dana Robinson [00:02:32]:
You don’t know? You just like it on your shelf?

Jeff Goins [00:02:34]:
Yeah, I can’t remember. I think they are right to left, but I don’t know because this looks kind of like the acknowledgments of the book, but who can say?

Dana Robinson [00:02:51]:
It’s very cool. How does it feel to have a book that’s being translated and distributed around the world?

Jeff Goins [00:02:57]:
I don’t really think about it, but it felt good when it happened, when I would launch a book and it would sell pretty well. Immediately, the publisher would start selling international translations of the book, and it was sort of an autopilot thing. And I would just get books in the mail. Like, this one’s cool. This is. I forget. This is, like, looks Russian. One of my books was translated into Czech, and I don’t think.

Jeff Goins [00:03:39]:
I don’t know, it’s this one or something else, but, like, you just get them and you don’t know, and they get a little letter, and it says, this is the chinese translation of such and such. And you learn a lot about language and translations, and there are different versions of Chinese that are spoken in China. There’s obviously, like, cantonese and Mandarin. But, like, I got a. I got a letter once that said, like, this is. I don’t know, they called it a certain kind of Chinese, and I got, like, two different chinese versions. And I think it was different from just Mandarin and Cantonese, but it could have been that. I don’t remember.

Jeff Goins [00:04:18]:
But you learn some things. I guess I didn’t learn that much because I don’t remember.

Dana Robinson [00:04:22]:
There’s a Seinfeld episode where he has been syndicated into foreign countries, and he’s getting checks for, like, one and $0.02 each. Yeah, it’s like that. His wrist is cramping up from signing, from the signing back of thousands of checks, pennies apiece. Is that the way it feels? Are you, like, your pennies dribble in from 40 different countries, and do you have to sign the back of the check?

Jeff Goins [00:04:51]:
So in 2012, I published two books. I wrote and published two books. And the way that I did that was I had a book called Wrecked, which was picked up by a publisher, and they paid me maybe $6,000 less agent fees to publish my first book. And so I wrote this book in, I don’t know, three or four months, sent it to the publisher. They were editing it. And then I was hearing about self publishing, and I needed money. I was about to have my first kid. I was working for a nonprofit organization, fundraising my salary, working for a ministry.

Jeff Goins [00:05:30]:
And I kept hearing about self publishing. And I had this friend who had self published an ebook, and she was making, like, $40,000 a month off of it. And I was like, oh, I’ll just do that. And so while I was waiting for my first book to be published, I wrote and self published another book. In the meantime.

Dana Robinson [00:05:47]:
What was that book called?

Jeff Goins [00:05:48]:
That was called, you are a writer. And that book sold like 100,000 copies. Wow. Yeah, totally. And it’s just this little book about writing, and my audience was super primed for it. And so I self published this, just an ebook. I self published this book on Amazon, and they started mailing me checks. And you could publish books even at that time.

Jeff Goins [00:06:12]:
This is 2012 internationally. And so I was getting checks from Denmark for $15 or whatever, and it totally changed my life. I mean, we’re sort of segueing into entrepreneurial stories, but becoming an author did not change my life. Becoming a self published indie author totally changed my life. And I remember I’m not very good at opening mail and managing the paperwork. Last night I was on our bed and I was going through, like, I don’t know, three months worth of paperwork that I needed, mostly needed. Like, I’d opened it and there weren’t like bills or anything, but it was just like crap that I needed to deal with. My wife was like, what are you doing? I’m like, I’m doing paperwork.

Jeff Goins [00:06:57]:
It’s my annual tradition, but it’s just super messy. Anyway, so I launched this book in, I don’t know, April or May of 2012. And a month or so after that, I got all these random checks from all over the world, all from Amazon. And the Book sold pretty well on Amazon.com, but it was selling randomly in other countries in the world. And I got all of these physical checks in the mail. Eventually it all went paperless, but I brought probably 30 different checks that ended up being like, I don’t know, $15,000 or something. And I went to this crappy Us bank office on the street, and I’m like, giving them checks, like checks in German and Italian. And it’s like, this one’s for $43, this one’s for $700, this one’s for $2,000.

Jeff Goins [00:07:51]:
And it was just like, you probably know this because you’ve traveled, but some of these checks were beautiful. They were like works of art. It was this beautiful british check with these, I don’t know, glistening seals on it or something from the queen. Anyway, I dropped $15,000 worth of checks from around the world like I was Jason Bourne or something, this bank teller who was like 23 years old and I was like 28. And they were like, what do you do? And they had to call their bank manager. It was very drug dealy, except it wasn’t in cash. If drug dealers got paid in checks from other countries, they were trying to pay their taxes and be a good citizen.

Dana Robinson [00:08:40]:
That’s awesome. So, yeah, I like your Jason Bourne analogy better than Seinfeld, where all of his checks are flying all over the place in the rain. In that final scene, step back. Then you’re working for a ministry where you had to raise money so you could get paid, and fast forward, you became an entrepreneur where you work for yourself. Talk about that journey. Takes back to the employee.

Jeff Goins [00:09:11]:
Jeff, this is a little bit out of order, but I really struggled even with the concept that I was a business owner when I was a business owner. That first year that I went into business, I went from making $30,000 a year to making $150,000 a year. And I didn’t call it a business. It was just like a gig. And I think that stems from a lot of fear around money and this association with entrepreneurs and business people and even rich people. I grew up in this small farming community in northern Illinois. 100 people. Half of the town lived on farms.

Jeff Goins [00:10:03]:
The other half lived in town. We were in town, and the rich people in our town had rental properties. They had an apartment or a house that they rented, and those were the rich yuppies that we didn’t trust because they had money. And I grew up with this idea that you shouldn’t trust people with money because they probably did something wrong to get it.

Dana Robinson [00:10:27]:
Wow.

Jeff Goins [00:10:27]:
So I had this weird association with wealth and business. As a person who’s afraid of money, I went and worked for a ministry, like people sometimes do. And when I graduated college, I graduated with a double major in Spanish and religion. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. Those were just fun topics for me to explore. And I thought in the back of my mind, I might be a missionary or something.

Dana Robinson [00:10:58]:
Yeah.

Jeff Goins [00:10:58]:
And so I traveled with a band for a year after that, and then I settled down in Nashville and started working part time at a call center. That was the only real job I’ve ever had, right, to go into an office and work for a boss. And then I started working for this ministry, for this nonprofit mission organization based in Atlanta, Georgia, called Adventures and Missions. And they hired me to help them start an online magazine. This is 2006 and basically like a multi user blog where I, as a writer, had to build a website, recruit volunteer writers, and then sort of act as editor in chief of these missionary stories, basically, that we were trying to share with the world to promote the mission trips that this nonprofit, they were trying to sell, basically. And that was my first big break as a writer. I had this double major in Spanish and religion, and I had traveled the world as a musician, and then I was trying to get a job, and so my resume was kind of a mess. I didn’t think of myself as a writer.

Jeff Goins [00:12:14]:
It was just something that I had always done. And the guy who hired me for adventures and missions, his name was Seth. He saw on my resume, he’s like, oh, you’re a writer. And I was like, I am. And the longest job that I had had at that point was as a writing tutor in college, where for three or four years, I had helped other students with their term papers, which was like a real job on campus. We had a writing center where you could get help from english majors and stuff. I wasn’t english major. I was just a good writer.

Jeff Goins [00:12:44]:
And one of our writing professors said, hey, do you want to make some money reading people’s papers? And I said, sure. That’s kind of how that started, is I started an online magazine, got really into blogging as a result of that. And then I became the marketing director for this nonprofit. And not because I wanted to, not because I knew anything about marketing, but because my boss was like, yeah, you can be our marketing director now. He’s like, you sort of know how to do it. I was like, what? I’ve just been sort of writing and telling stories. He’s like, yeah, it’s the same thing. And so I learned email, market, branding, social media, all of that was basically becoming a thing at the time.

Jeff Goins [00:13:25]:
And that was just all kind of on the job training. In fact, my boss, whose name was Seth Barnes, told me to read Seth Godin’s blog. And I said, I don’t know anything about marketing. My boss had an MBA. He was a smart, savy business guy and a serial entrepreneur, and I was not. And he was, you know, marketing’s easy. Just read Seth Godin’s blog and you’ll figure it out. And that was true.

Jeff Goins [00:13:49]:
That was my marketing education, was I read Seth Godin’s blog every single day and became a professional nonprofit marketer.

Dana Robinson [00:13:57]:
Amazing. And while at that job was when you started writing the book you got published and the one you self published.

Jeff Goins [00:14:06]:
Yeah, I became the marketing director. We built a small marketing team of maybe a dozen or so people. I did that for about five years, and it was pretty successful. We grew the organization, basically, we trained missionaries how to blog, and then we would leverage their stories to help the organization raise funds and recruit missionaries for future trips. Um, and so while I was telling other people’s stories, I was like, but, but I want to tell my story I want to write. I started blogging pretty religiously, and then I always wanted to be a writer, you know, and I felt this itch to write. And I told my boss, I was like, I want to write. I want to do this.

Jeff Goins [00:15:02]:
And I said it to him sort of expecting to get fired. I remember saying it at his house, going like, hey, I don’t really want to be a marketer. I want to be a writer. And he said, yeah, that’s great. He goes, you can help me write my book. So I did. And that wasn’t what I was getting at. That wasn’t what I wanted to do.

Jeff Goins [00:15:20]:
I didn’t help him write his book. I wanted to write my own books. But it was a wonderful education. It was me, my friend Joe Bunting, who’s still a good friend of mine today. And then we had this editor. So there was, like, these three people that were all working on this book together for someone else. And I’d never written a book before. I’d never been a part of a book writing team before.

Jeff Goins [00:15:43]:
But by the end of that experience, I knew how to write a book because I’d helped somebody write their own book. That was sort of an apprenticeship. And then shortly after that, I stepped down as the marketing director. We hired a replacement, and then I became the communications director of that same organization. And this was never explicitly said, but it was understood that I was trying to work my way out of a job. And he was so kind and generous. He was like, well, let’s get you doing something else. And so I replaced myself as a marketing director.

Jeff Goins [00:16:18]:
And I was working in Nashville the whole time the organization was in Atlanta. And we felt like, well, we probably need to have somebody on site to manage the team. So I’ll start this other thing called the communications department. So I did that for about 18 months. And when I started doing that, I got really serious about my own writing. And so I started a new blog called Goinswriter.com, which I still have today. And I started writing every single day on that blog. And I did that for a year.

Jeff Goins [00:16:44]:
And I’d had other blogs before that had a few hundred readers, but I’d never been super serious about it. I’d get really serious, and then I’d kind of fizzle out. And, I don’t know, one day a switch just flipped in me, and I got pissed. And I got pissed about having dreams of, like, someday I’m going to write a book and not doing it. And I’d done this for years and years. And years every January 1, I’m going to write a book someday and not doing it. And I knew that a lot of the authors that I followed and paid attention to, they started with a blog. And so I understood this is a path to write a book.

Jeff Goins [00:17:16]:
And so I started my own blog, and I decided to write every single day on that blog for a year. And I did. And by the end of that year, I had 10,000 readers. The most I’d ever had on a blog before was 250 readers.

Dana Robinson [00:17:28]:
Wow.

Jeff Goins [00:17:28]:
I had 10,000 subscribers, and a publisher had contacted me asking me to write a book. I didn’t even have to get an agent and go pitch it. They came to me and, yeah, that was 2011. That was the end of 2011. And then in 2012, I wrote those two books. I replaced my income through teaching online courses and writing books. And by the end of 2012, I went to my boss and I said, I think it’s time for me to move on.

Dana Robinson [00:17:58]:
When you left, were you thinking, I’m just going to make money as an author? And this thing that actually turned into the business wasn’t evident to you? Did you know, like, look, I’m talking to people about their writing, and in that sense, I’m a coach, or I’m a paid thought leader in this space. You said it took you a long time to even admit that you were a business person, right? Just sort of like, I’ve replaced my income, and now I’m writer guy.

Jeff Goins [00:18:33]:
Yeah, I would have called myself a writer. I was really enamored of the idea, the ideal of being an author. And my blog was just like writing tips. I was just sharing my own writing journey, what I was learning. And I knew something was happening because people were coming and reading the blog. Hundreds of people were leaving comments every day. It was a big deal. And I’d never experienced anything like this before, and I knew it was rare, but I didn’t know how to make any money off of it.

Jeff Goins [00:19:04]:
Like I said, I got a book deal for $6,000, which was nice. I was making about $3,000 a month at the time, so that was cool. It was two months worth of work, but I wasn’t going to quit my job over it. And I started intentionally putting myself in places where I knew I would learn something from other people. I live in Nashville, which is kind of a small creative hub, and was becoming that way at that time for writers, bloggers, podcasters, kind of digital media people. And I knew a handful of folks in the area who were into that world, and I just wanted to get closer to them. And so there was this one guy who taught public speaking. And so basically I said, hey, I’ll come and be, like a live blogger for your conference if you can give me a free ticket to your public speaking conference, because I wanted to learn how to speak.

Jeff Goins [00:20:03]:
And he was like, well, I’m not going to do that, but I’ll give you like a discounted rate. And I was like, okay, cool, sold. And so I just kind of started being a part of this scene. When I was at that conference, I bumped into this woman that I followed that I knew. She was a very successful businesswoman, online businesswoman. She was basically teaching entrepreneurship to people online. And she was the kind of person where you met her and she’d be like, hey, I made this much off my business last year. I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, money girl, slow down.

Jeff Goins [00:20:38]:
I’m from the midwest. We don’t talk about money. But she had a million dollar business. I couldn’t fathom that. And I said, hey, can you help me figure out how to monetize my blog? Can I have lunch with you and can I just pick your brain? And she said, sure. And she said, how many subscribers do you have? I was like, I have 10,000 subscribers on my blog. I don’t know how to make any money off. I’d done, like, advertising and made a few hundred bucks off of it, but I couldn’t really.

Jeff Goins [00:21:04]:
I knew people were making lots of money off of this and I didn’t know how to do it. And I was like, looking for the switch on my blog that went from no monetized to monetized. Like, how do you make money? I didn’t know. I really didn’t. And she goes, how many subscribers you had? I said, 10,000. She goes, oh, well, that’s a six figure business. And I was like, no, it’s like a two figure business. I made like $50 off of it.

Jeff Goins [00:21:27]:
It’s not a real thing, two figures. And she was like, no, all you need to do is do a survey, email your list, ask them what they want from you, what they’re willing to pay money for, ask them how much money they’re willing to pay you for it and then give it to them. And I was like, that’s crazy. She’s like, no, do it. And I did. And I sent like a survey monkey survey to my email list, and like 1000 people replied. I mean, it was incredible engagement. And hundreds of people said crazy stuff to me, like, oh, I would pay you $500 to teach me how to build a blog like you’ve done, and I’d pay you $20 for an ebook on how to write.

Jeff Goins [00:22:11]:
It was just all kinds of stuff, but I was just astounded by this because I had no idea I was making $37,000 a year. My wife made $29,000 that year. Together we made almost $60,000 in a year. Or maybe a little bit. Yeah, I don’t know, after taxes, whatever. And I remember being embarrassed to tell my parents how much money we made, like, it was too much, truly. So I already felt like, rich, like $50,000 a year. $60,000 a year is too much money.

Jeff Goins [00:22:45]:
We never made more than, I don’t know, $20,000 household income. Growing up, when people started telling me they were going to pay me hundreds of dollars to tell them things, I was like, this is weird. So, long story short, the next month I put together a mini ebook based off of a slideshow that I’d put together that I delivered to my sister’s college journalism class the month before, she’d had me come speak at her journalism class. And I put together this little slideshow and I turned those slides basically into pages on an ebook and then exported it as a PDF. And it was just this little ebook. And I sold it for $2.99, and I sold like 500 of them in a week. And I was like, oh, this is cool. I was like, $1,500.

Jeff Goins [00:23:41]:
I was a paycheck, basically, two weeks worth of work. And then I started doing the online marketing thing. I was like, I’m going to raise the price. You better buy it now. And people did. And I was like, weird. And I was like, I’m going to raise the price again. And people bought it again.

Jeff Goins [00:23:56]:
I was like, whoa. And I remember one night lying in bed looking at my phone, and I was using e junkie, which was an online shopping cart at the time that you use $5 a month, that was the most I was going to invest in my business. And I watched these, my, my ebook was $5 at the time, and I watched these transactions come through. Five, like 20 transactions in an hour. I made $100 in an hour. And I was like, I’ve never made $100 before in my life. It’s crazy. $100 an hour.

Jeff Goins [00:24:31]:
Yeah, it was crazy. That’s probably when I got bit by the entrepreneurial bug. I was lying in bed making money off of the thing that I’d created months before at this point, and every month it was like $3,000.01 month, $4,000 the next month, $5,000 the next month. And it just kind of kept going. And then I put it on Amazon, and then the checks from Romania started coming in, and it all just kind of started compounding. And then people were emailing me about this ebook that I’d written that became what is now called you are a writer, which is still a book that is available. And the book was called you are writers, to start acting like one. And it was really just my story of hemming and hawing and wanting to be a writer and not doing, and then one day just going for it.

Jeff Goins [00:25:23]:
And people started emailing me saying, hey, could you teach this as a course or something? And I was like, well, I put it all in the book. They’re like, no, I want you to pay me. Like, I want to pay you to teach me this. And so then I turned it into an online course. We called that tribe writers. And instead of making thousands of dollars a month off of an ebook, I started making tens of thousands of dollars a month off of an online course that I was teaching. And then that kept going. First I made $20,000, then I made $30,000, then I made $50,000.

Jeff Goins [00:25:56]:
And by the end of the year, I’d made about 180 grand, really, in about six months, because I didn’t start it until the summer of 2012. By the end of the year, I’d made enough money that I didn’t need to work for a year or two or three at that point. And I was sort of astonished. And I remember telling a good friend of mine, what do I do? All my young friends were like, you should quit your job. But I had an older friend who was a bit of a mentor to me, and I just said, I don’t want to quit this ministry job that I really like because I’m chasing money. That’s not interesting to me. I want to do this because this is the right thing to do. And I’m afraid.

Jeff Goins [00:26:39]:
I’m afraid that I’m doing something wrong because I have this weird association with money. And he said, jeff, what’s happened to you is rare. He said, I don’t think anybody saw it coming. I know you. And I didn’t see it coming. He said, you need to consider this a calling. And I did. I was like, oh.

Jeff Goins [00:26:59]:
He goes, you need to go after this and to consider not doing this an act of disobedience. And I was like, oh, okay. And, yeah, it felt like a thing that was happening to me. I went and I told my boss shortly after what had happened, and I said, I think it’s time for me to move on. And he said, I’ve been waiting for this conversation. He said, it is time. It’s time for you to go, and you’ve got. I said, the only thing keeping me from doing that is a feeling like I might disappoint you.

Jeff Goins [00:27:36]:
I said, I don’t want to disappoint you. I said, I recognize that I have what I have as a result of your mentorship, your belief in me. He hired me when I didn’t know anything and gave me all these opportunities, and I was very transparent with him the whole time. Hey, I’m starting a blog. Hey, I’m working on a book. The organization, as many organizations do, I was a full time employee. They owned my intellectual property, so I had to get them to waive that. When I started working on my own book lawyer, I had to make sure everything was legally on the up and up, as best I could tell.

Jeff Goins [00:28:09]:
And I was working with people who were cool about it. It could have been really difficult, and some people were kind of weird about it. But for the most part, everybody, especially my boss, they were really supportive, and I would not be doing what I am doing today were it not for that job. Working as a marketer at a nonprofit organization.

Dana Robinson [00:28:32]:
I love it. It’s funny, through the couple of years that Nate and I did the opt out Life podcasts, what we were looking for were entrepreneur journeys that weren’t that sexy, not the sizzle of shark tank or. I had a brilliant idea of something that no one ever thought of, and I sold it for $100 million. Those stories, they write their own books. That’s a class of entrepreneur that I think everyone loves, and it’s unusual. The usual story, it turns out, after interviewing 100 people, is that someone learns something in an unexpected environment, and it’s usually a job. And in that job, they sort of catch lightning in a bottle and don’t always know it, but they gained some skills and then eventually get bit by the bug and end up taking those skills as the first thing they do. And in your case, even accidentally.

Dana Robinson [00:29:40]:
I mean, you’re leaving, becoming an entrepreneur bit by a bug that says, the feeling of watching $5 transactions click through your merchant account is delightful, and voila, years later. I don’t want to speak to your numbers, but I think you have 80,000 followers now and have the freedom to be a writing coach to consult to have courses or not have courses. You’re at the pinnacle of a career in something that you didn’t know existed, that you didn’t try to create, and your entrepreneurial journey started at a job doing something you didn’t think you had a skill in.

Jeff Goins [00:30:29]:
I had more brag worthy numbers a few years ago, before I started culling some things, and parts of my life started imploding on themselves. But I think what I know, all of that taught me is that I have a lot of control over how much money I make. And I never believed that. Never. The first year that I worked at adventures and missions, I made, like, $12,000 that year. And I worked for seven months part time at this call center, and that was how I was able to pay my bills. And then the next year, I think I made, like, $20,000 because I went full time. And then it was like $22,000 the next year.

Jeff Goins [00:31:15]:
And my boss was always, he gave me a raise without me ever having to ask. He understood that he was training me, and it wasn’t like I was being taken advantage of. This was the only job I could get. And one of the things that he did to his credit was he would buy me books. And he basically said, I would rather spend hundreds of dollars a year on buying you books all year long than spend tens of thousands of dollars sending you to stupid trainings and seminars and stuff that may not be that useful. He goes, I love books. And if you see a book that you want to get, just tell me, and I’ll buy it for you. And so I was like, that book? He’s like, yeah.

Jeff Goins [00:32:00]:
So I just read business books all the time working at this nonprofit. And his understanding was, if you’re good at business, you’re going to be good working for a nonprofit, because that’s what we’re doing. We’re doing business. This is a business. We’re trying to make money here. It was a really good education. And then once I knew how to do that, once I knew how to take control of my own income, it changed everything. Last year, we needed a house.

Jeff Goins [00:32:46]:
In 2020, I went through a divorce, lost a lot of my assets, just lost a lot of confidence. I’m now remarried, as you know, and we’ve got a blended family of six people, four kids, two adults. We needed a house to house all these humans and didn’t have much cash. And I was like, okay, well, I know how to do this thing. I know how to make things and sell them, and I know how to sell stuff to people.

Dana Robinson [00:33:19]:
Dana Robinson here.

Dana Robinson [00:33:20]:
Quick plug for my book, the king’s Fly swatter. You can see it here behind me.

Dana Robinson [00:33:24]:
If you’re watching this, I’ve got it in my hand.

Dana Robinson [00:33:26]:
It’s a beautiful hardcover book, printed to.

Dana Robinson [00:33:30]:
Make giftable something that you can share with a family member buy as a gift.

Dana Robinson [00:33:35]:
So this latest book, it’s a fable about a person who has a really crappy job. Let’s just start there. This is a book that most people can relate to because we’ve all had crappy jobs. This is the story of Ubar, a servant in the court of a babylonian king who masters his boring, monotonous job and then learns to listen to the king, hearing him rule the kingdom while quietly swatting flies behind a king. Eventually, Ubar becomes the wisest and most.

Dana Robinson [00:34:04]:
Successful man in the kingdom.

Dana Robinson [00:34:07]:
The story is fun, and it’s easy to read, but it’s not mythology. It’s my story. And as I shared the idea with colleagues and friends, I learned that it was their story.

Dana Robinson [00:34:19]:
And guess what?

Dana Robinson [00:34:20]:
It’s your story if you’re at a job of any kind, one that you love, one that you hate, one that’s just enough to get by. This little book gives fresh perspective on how to leverage that job to get.

Dana Robinson [00:34:34]:
You something greater than a paycheck.

Dana Robinson [00:34:36]:
The lessons in this parable are entrepreneurial lessons, but not what you might think from the current entrepreneurial zeitgeist. If you or someone you know are looking for a real pathway to entrepreneurship, here’s the secret. Your job is the way out of your job. It’s counterintuitive, but once you see how it works, you can’t unsee it. Learn the way of the fly swatter from the parable of Ubar and from the stories I share from my 30 year business journey. You can get a free copy of the king’s fly swatter by going to danarobinson.com.

Jeff Goins [00:35:13]:
And so I needed about $150,000 for a down payment on a house in 30 days. I took $20,000. That was all, like in crypto. I sold all my crypto that I’d bought in 2013 and put that down as earnest money on this house that we knew we wanted to move into. And then I had to come up with 150k cash to buy this house. And I did it. And it didn’t feel crazy. Like I was like, this will be a stretch, but I know how to do this, and I’ve been in enough situations, and I think, you know what? This is like, I’ve been in enough situations over the past decade or so of working for myself that when I’m in a bind, I know that I have certain tools that will help me produce enough resources to get out of that bind.

Jeff Goins [00:36:06]:
Or if I want something, I can generate the resources that I need to at least move closer to that something instead of doing the thing that most people do, which is, like, someday, maybe. And when I was a missionary, I remember driving a car one time, and I was working for this mission organization. I was working for this nonprofit, but we were an organization of missionaries, and I had these two missionaries in the backseat, and we were driving around, I think it was in Nashville doing some sort of mission project, doing some service work in the city. And there were these two young women in the backseat, and they were talking about shark tank, and they were like, so and so invented such and such, and they made $100 million. And one of the young women said, that’s all we need to do. We just need one great idea, and we’ll be rich. If you work with missionaries or anybody in professional ministry, you’ll soon realize that all they want to talk about is money, because they don’t have any, roughly. What’s that old saying? All priests want to talk about his sex.

Jeff Goins [00:37:07]:
All prostitutes want to talk about his God? It was like that. All broke missionaries want to talk about is money. And it was true. They wanted to talk about money, and they said, we just need one great idea, and we’ll be rich. And I was like, I hadn’t done any of this stuff. I was just reading business books and stuff and going through this apprenticeship, basically, this self made apprenticeship. And I remember turning back and what. That’s what you think it takes, is, like, one great idea, and they’re like, oh, yeah.

Jeff Goins [00:37:34]:
And I knew even then that was wrong, that that’s not typically how that worked. And I eventually became friends with Seth Godin, whose books I was reading. We connected in a variety of ways. And he told me once that he a very successful entrepreneur, author, et cetera. He’s never gone viral. He’s never blown up. Now, he’s incredibly prolific and very successful, but he’s never had, like, a big, big win. And that’s true.

Jeff Goins [00:38:14]:
I take a lot of comfort in that. It’s like, first of all, I know people who had the big, big wins, and I’m sure you do, too. It is not always, but sometimes the worst thing that could have happened to them, like, I don’t know what to do with $100 million. I’m sure I would not spend it well. And I know people that have had too much success too quickly. It’s jarring.

Dana Robinson [00:38:39]:
Yeah.

Jeff Goins [00:38:40]:
And so what I like about the king’s fly swatter, what I like about what you teach, and it’s true in my own journey, is we all have access to these incredible tools to create resources for ourselves that we otherwise wouldn’t have access to. And there is something to be said for taking your time getting there. Maybe not slow and steady, but there are sort of two ways to go about it. One is to hope and dream and wish that someday you’ll have some big idea and you’ll. And $100 million will fall into your lap. And then the other side is like, no, you have enough to get started today. And when I called my own bluff and started the blog and started using the online marketing knowledge that I’d learned over the years of working at the nonprofit and started applying, what I already knew, what I had sort of mistakenly stumbled upon working for a nonprofit, it was like slum dog millionaire minus living in a slum. It’s like, oh, I have all this knowledge that has prepared me for an entrepreneurial endeavor that I didn’t even know it was preparing me for.

Jeff Goins [00:39:57]:
But I can leverage that or not. And that’s pretty cool. And so even on a bad day, I still know that I have options. And really, the only thing we’re trying to teach our kids now in this blended family of ours is you need to understand how entrepreneurship works, because you’re going to work for a living at some point, and you are either going to work for one of these people, an entrepreneur, or you’re going to be one. But that’s it. You’re going to work for somebody who works for somebody who is one of these people, or you’re going to work for yourself. And so we at least want you to understand how it works, how does business work? And then you can decide what you want to do with that. If that sounds like too much work, too much hassle, and you want to just be somebody’s employee and get a job and get a certain percentage bump in your salary every year and get nice bonuses, and that’s it.

Jeff Goins [00:40:54]:
And you want that security, great, go for it. And if you want to work for yourself and take on all that risk and understand what that looks like, go for it. But we at least want you to understand how the sausage is made and that it’s not that hard. And there are plenty of people who are dumber than you who are doing this. And so if you want to do it, here’s how it works. Go do it.

Dana Robinson [00:41:16]:
I love that. I think the thing that a lot of people miss in terms of simple beginnings is if you can make $5, what was your first book? $2.

Jeff Goins [00:41:28]:
299.

Dana Robinson [00:41:30]:
If you can sell something for 299, you can sell lots of 299. Totally, right? So the moment you have a thing someone will pay you $5 for, you can sell more of it. And that is business. Like, if I can mow a lawn, which was my first business, and I can mow bigger lawns and make more and I can more mow lawns. Mow more lawns, and I can hire people to mow more lawns and so on and so forth and have a business that produces more income. And then you hit certain lessons along that journey, and, of course, along those journeys, a lot of people fail. In the private equity world, the worst thing that can happen to somebody is to have an immediate success, because then they think everything that they do or invest in is going to be that successful. So taking this small business basically that you found yourself running was fairly low risk, because the worst that could happen is you’re not making $5 a book or whatever.

Dana Robinson [00:42:46]:
But even so, many people don’t get out of the gate because of that fear you’re talking about someday. Or if only I had a brilliant idea, which is a total myth, and how simple it is to just start with the building blocks of, if I can make $5.

Jeff Goins [00:43:03]:
Yeah, if you can do it once, you can rinse and repeat.

Dana Robinson [00:43:06]:
Yeah. Why can’t you sell 1000 of them? And if you can sell 1000, why can’t you sell 10,000? And so on and so forth? So there’s your business journey. Do we have time to talk more about the growth of the business and where you’ve taken it since? So you had your writers tribe. You grew that for some season and helped a lot of people become published authors and finish their books. I know you from essentially an agency model, and I didn’t find you on writers tribe, and I’m not sure I would have been a customer because I was at a point where I had finished one book and could get something across the finish line. So I came to you and said, I’ve got a book. Already did. It’s okay, but I want a good book, and I’d be willing to pay for someone to help me shape a good book.

Dana Robinson [00:44:01]:
So I encountered you in the quest for more of an agency situation. I think it’s worth talking about where you went from your first couple of good years in the business that you did continue to publish as well.

Jeff Goins [00:44:17]:
Yeah. So from 2012 to 2021, my primary means of making an income was through teaching online courses. I taught something like 20,000 students across nine different courses. And the main flagship program was a program called Tribe Writers, which had several thousand students. It was the first program that I started, but then I did a variety of other ones. And basically I was teaching writers and authors how to write books and how to get attention around their work, how to make money as writers through writing books and building online platforms, because that’s what I had done. That’s what I knew. And in 2020 happened, there’s a pandemic.

Jeff Goins [00:45:10]:
I went through divorce and just a lot of personal upheaval. And I was sort of tired of the whole online course business because it was what Jim Collins calls in, I think, good to was, what does he call it? The genius with a thousand helpers. Except I wasn’t a genius. But you think you have a team and really you have one person with a personality with something to say, and then they get a bunch of people around them to help them carry out that vision. And most businesses, like mine and most people I knew who were doing what I was doing were basically doing that. They’d become thought leaders, and without them, the business didn’t work. And that can be okay, except when you have, like, a dozen employees, as I had, and you’re stressed about making your six figure monthly payroll, and it’s all on you, and you actually haven’t scaled anything. You’ve scaled you sort of, but you haven’t taught anybody to do what you’re doing.

Jeff Goins [00:46:20]:
Nobody can quite do it as well as you can, and it’s stressful. And that’s the situation that I found myself in. In like, I don’t know, 20 18, 20, 19, 20 20. I was just really tired of being the primary force of the business. And I’d seen other people scale businesses, like, actually work themselves completely out of their business. I was like, well, that looks cool, and either I’m going to do that or I’m not going to do that. And if I’m not going to do that, I don’t want to keep pushing this hard. And the online course scene was changing quite a bit.

Jeff Goins [00:46:52]:
And I was tired of selling stuff that people didn’t use. A lot of people that were taking our courses didn’t like, they bought them and then they wouldn’t go through them. That didn’t feel good. I didn’t want to sell loaves of bread that were growing moldy on people’s kitchen counters. That didn’t feel good. So I had become an accidental ghostwriter. A friend of mine needed help working on a book, and he asked me if I would help him, and I said, sure. And I ended up writing the book with him, basically interviewing him and then translating those interviews into a manuscript, and then helping him sell the book to a publisher.

Jeff Goins [00:47:30]:
And we split the money. And I was like, okay, that was cool. And then I kind of went back to doing everything else that I was doing, and then he referred somebody to me, and I worked with him on that, and then that person referred somebody. And then people start finding you, and the publishers find out that you’re writing books for other people. I was working on multiple books. I had actually asked my assistant at the time to help me because it was so much to do by myself, and so I was basically writing books for the people. I was a ghost writer, and I was doing the online course business, and it was too much. It was too much to run at the time.

Jeff Goins [00:48:04]:
It was a lot of context switching, seemingly similar businesses, but in terms of how they were run, very different. One was an online marketing business. We were selling lower priced products to the masses, and another one was a higher priced service agency. And so I shuttered the online course business, did a flash sale, made some money off of that in 2021, and then went all in on building a writing and editing agency where we help authors not write bad books. And it’s really easy to write a bad book, and our commitment is to the book itself. We help authors say something interesting with their words, with their message, with their ideas, and then package it into a book that’s going to help that idea spread. Primarily nonfiction works. We do mostly business books, personal development books.

Jeff Goins [00:48:59]:
We’ve done some memoir, and we’ve done a business fable, which would be your book. And then we did a Christmas book last Christmas as well, which is a children’s book. But for the most part, nonfiction books work on about ten to twelve projects a year. And I am the creative director of that organization. I continue to ghost write. It’s been a good way to grow as a writer, and it’s been fun to kind of figure out how to write in other people’s voices. And I’ve worked with almost all of the big five publishers, I think, and just be a part of that world. It’s kind of cool.

Jeff Goins [00:49:40]:
But now we’re really growing an agency of writers and editors, where authors come to us and they go, hey, I need help? I don’t know what I need. Maybe I need a book proposal. Maybe I need an editor. Maybe I need a ghostwriter. But I have something that I want to say. Can you help me? And you were kind of that way, Dana. You’re like, hey, I’ve got this thing, and I’ve got this other thing. What do we want to do? And we spent months kind of figuring out, oh, you’ve got all the words, but we need a writer to kind of put them together, and we need this editorial team and this design team, and we kind of custom build these teams, and that’s fun.

Jeff Goins [00:50:16]:
It employs a different part of my brain, the organizational part, the leadership part, where I bring people together to create something that I couldn’t create on my own. And I’m still learning how to completely step out of it. But it is probably the most scalable thing I’ve done. It’s not the most profitable thing I’ve done because we have to hire people to do all of this work. But I heard a friend of mine who runs a creative agency and runs a bunch of them, actually, he said all he does as an agency owner is buy other people’s time and sell it to other people. And I was like, oh, yeah, that is kind of how that works. Whether you’ve got employees or subcontractors, you’re paying for people’s time, and then you’re marketing it up and selling it to somebody else, and that’s all it is. And that’s kind of fun.

Jeff Goins [00:51:09]:
And I like that business model. My wife runs an editing agency, and she’s better at the entrepreneurial side of things than I am because I still have that blue collar. I got to get in there and work, got to earn my stripes. And she’s very good at just selling the client, getting the talent, connecting the two, managing the process, and not taking it too personally. But it is fun, and you’ve helped me consider where kind of information products fit in this space. So, yeah, I’m figuring out my entrepreneurial future and how many businesses I will have. A thing that I often think about that I did learn from you. This is a pivot for me, is I thought I needed, like, one business, and I needed to take it to the Moon.

Jeff Goins [00:52:10]:
And you’ve kind of taught me the discipline of the base hit. You’ll gladly have a dozen or so businesses that are profitable. And if this business makes you $50 a month for the rest of your life, that’s what that business does. And you’re cool with that provided it’s just not taking a bunch of time or other resources. And I like that. I think every business sort of has an ideal size, and for a long time, I thought that size was, like, really big. Like, every business should be really big and make the most amount of money possible. And that’s not true.

Jeff Goins [00:52:47]:
When I was running the course business, I was personally making more money when the business was making half a million dollars a year than when it was making over a million dollars a year, because everything just got more expensive when we hit that seven figure mark.

Dana Robinson [00:53:01]:
Right.

Jeff Goins [00:53:02]:
And so figuring out how big the business needs to be in order to reach people that we want to reach the work that we want to do to make the money that we want to make has been a lesson. And I’m enjoying working with teams and helping authors say important things. I don’t know a lot, but I know books, and it’s fun to help other people create really good books that we’re all proud of.

Dana Robinson [00:53:26]:
Yeah. And I think the business of the agency is your and your ghost writing. I think of them as bespoke, the High end clothing, high end furniture, for example. One of the guys I interviewed is a friend of Mine, Kim Dolva, in Denmark. Makes high end cabinets and furniture. And if you’d like your kitchen done by Kim and his High touch team, it’s probably hundreds of thousands of dollars, and they touch all the wood, and it looks amazing. Or you can spend $500 and get a chair that’s been made by their CNC Machine and finished in their factory still. So there’s the off the Shelf product, and there’s the Bespoke product, actually, to plug you.

Dana Robinson [00:54:19]:
We have two of your courses going into an environment where hopefully, you get revenue and attract new gravity around new clients. And LinkedIn learning, we take Jeff goings content, and instead of you having to be a guru, we find a platform where that can reach a lot more people and not require you to actually provide bespoke service and at the same time, generate some income that brings value for the people who have found the off the shelf product. I mean, that’s sort of where I’m at. If anyone cares to learn something from me for almost free, it’s on LinkedIn learning. Then go join the. I think I’ve had, like, a million learners, and it’s made a little money, and I’m proud of it. But I’m also ecstatic that a platform can give access to that many people. The information both that I have and that you have about our expertise that we can.

Dana Robinson [00:55:26]:
To me, we get paid. It’s like an author. We make a little bit of money because the platform makes money, but we don’t have to spin our wheels with every reteaching something that we’ve taught. One time I’m excited about the couple of courses that one of my companies was able to push into the platform. And certainly of all your other content, we hope to do the same because then the world still benefits from that. And from a business standpoint, you get the benefit of your labor, just like your ebook that made you $5 and is hopefully still making you $5 a pop. When people find the book, did they still get on Amazon if they want that?

Jeff Goins [00:56:09]:
Yeah.

Dana Robinson [00:56:11]:
You are a writer.

Jeff Goins [00:56:12]:
You are a writer, so start acting like one. It is my best selling book, actually. And then for a while, I used it as like lead Gen for the course because I would give away a $5 book to make $500 on the course. Sure. But I think the biggest challenge of this journey for me, I grew up lower middle class, very blue collar. My dad worked hard his whole life. Body doesn’t work really well anymore because he worked so hard. And a really valuable lesson that I learned from him was, if you want something, work for it.

Jeff Goins [00:56:48]:
It’s a really standard, midwestern middle class kind of thing to learn, but that’s a hard thing to turn off. And what I learned and then forgot, and I’m relearning again in my entrepreneurial journey, is there’s a point at which you can’t work harder, that harder work doesn’t equal more money or even better work. It just means harder work. And so you’ve got to figure out scale and leverage. And so when I spent probably 20 hours writing this book, right, and then sold it and made $5 off of it, I was like, cool. And then I made $100 off of it, and then $1,500, I was like, wow, this is really great. And then it just kept going. And every once in a while I would touch it and kind of give it a little boost or whatever.

Jeff Goins [00:57:35]:
And that was magic. And then for a while, I sort of forgot about that. And I thought, if I’m going to make money, I’m going to have to work hard to do that. And what’s cool about working on courses with you is show up, record something for 30 to 60 minutes, and then you just kind of take it. And it’s not about maximizing the most amount of value for me out of that experience. It’s about minimizing the amount of work I put into it while still profiting off of it.

Dana Robinson [00:58:11]:
Right?

Jeff Goins [00:58:12]:
And if I could just do that over and over and over again, that’s a way better strategy. When I was working at the nonprofit, I met this guy who was a very wealthy.com kind of guy. He had a bunch of e commerce businesses, and he was really good at SEO search engine optimization. And what he would do is he would build a website and he’d sell Google Adsense on it, where Google just serves up ads on it, and he’d make money off of it. And he would do that for a vertical. He would figure out how to build an algorithm where people could put in their zip code and it would tell them all the land for sale in their zip code if you were looking for real estate properties. And then he would spend whatever, 100 hours, 20 hours something, building something, and he’d make it work in a vertical, and then he’d clone it and he’d apply it to different verticals. So land for sale by zip, houses for sale by zip, dogs, whatever.

Jeff Goins [00:59:17]:
And he told me this, and I didn’t believe, I didn’t actually take it to heart until now, basically, he said, somebody told me a long time ago that this was a wealthy person telling him this. If you have the choice between making a lot of money now and never again, or a little bit of money for the rest of your life, take the little bit of money. And he goes, and that’s what I did, and that’s how I became rich. And there’s lots of caveats to that. If you give me $100 million now, I’ll take $100 million, I’ll invest it, I’ll live off of that. That makes absolutely way more sense than $10 a day or whatever. But what he learned was leverage. He was like, well, I’ll take the $10 a day, and I’ll set that on autopilot, and then I’ll go do something else and I’ll get $10 a day and I’ll set that on autopilot and on and on and on, and I’ll have big wins and whatever.

Jeff Goins [01:00:11]:
But the game is to keep working yourself out of a job while having something work for you. And that’s what the ebooks taught me. In a way, working for a nonprofit taught me that I, a couple of times a year, would have to write support letters and I would send them out to people, basically asking them to donate to my fund as a missionary. And I would do that once or twice a year, and then money would just they would make a pledge and money would come in. And so in that sense, it was a fairly automated way of making money. And I recently, about a year ago, moved all my online writing over to substack and just to kind of play around with it. And then I basically gave people an opportunity to pay me to write, which is part of what substack does. I don’t know.

Jeff Goins [01:01:06]:
I’ve got like 250 paid subscribers on that thing. It makes like $15,000 a year right now, and it’s not a huge deal, but I just write. And I realized recently, I was like, you know, that was about what I made in those early days of being a missionary. And these are like my supporters again. And so I think what’s cool about this journey is, I don’t know, seeing the world as a playground, as a sandbox where you can try different things and if you can find ways to make some money and then put it on autopilot or minimize the amount of inputs you put into it, and then you’ve got more time freed up to do other things, that is a free life. That is a life where you’re creating the kind of freedom that you want to enjoy the things that you want to do the way that you want to enjoy them.

Dana Robinson [01:01:56]:
Absolutely. And for some of us, that’s creative. And then creative sometimes feeds back into the beast, but you at least have the freedom to create. And for others, it means golfing and surfing and taking advantage of the travel and pleasures of life. Whatever it is. The getting there is the same. If you can get $15,000 a year on Substac, you can get $150,000. By the way, just bringing back to the $5.

Dana Robinson [01:02:22]:
If you can sell $5 book, you can sell 1000 of them.

Jeff Goins [01:02:26]:
I met a guy named Jeff Walker, whom you might know, product launch formula. And I was in a mastermind with Jeff for years.

Dana Robinson [01:02:35]:
Met him once and met as a brother at a mastermind as well. Both brilliant, really smart guy. Yeah.

Jeff Goins [01:02:41]:
And I was making about half a million dollars a year at this point off of my online course business, and he was making about $5 million a year. And he was really good at practicing what he preached. Most people in that online marketing space that I was in for a long time would preach independence, but they lived lives that were enslaved to their businesses. They were working 70, 80 hours, 90 hours a week.

Dana Robinson [01:03:10]:
True.

Jeff Goins [01:03:10]:
And they were making millions of dollars, but they were out of shape, stressed, not having fun because they were the genius with 1000 helpers. They weren’t actually free. And Jeff was. I mean, he had really built a smart thing. He did a couple of product launches a year. He was making millions of dollars, and he was skiing every day. He would work, but he would play, and it wasn’t too crazy. And he kind of right sized his business.

Jeff Goins [01:03:38]:
And I went to him and I said, hey, jeff, I’m making half a million dollars a year. I’m making half a million. You’re making 5 million. I want to ten x. I want to get to where you are. How do I get there? He was like, well, tell me how you got there. What did you do? I was like, well, I told him the story. I told you ebook, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Jeff Goins [01:03:56]:
I was doing this at the time because my wife at the time was pregnant with our first child. I wanted her to be able to stay home because she wanted to do that, and we couldn’t afford for her to not make a living. And his story was very similar. He had gotten laid off, and he was just trying to supplement his income. He needed to make like $10,000 a year. And he basically said, the hardest part is over. The hardest part is going from zero to one, and you’ve already done that. And so now it’s just a question of finding more of the people that you’ve already found and selling them more of the things that you want to sell them.

Jeff Goins [01:04:30]:
And he goes, that 5 million will eventually take care of itself. You just need to keep doing more of what you’re doing. And he was right. I didn’t really totally believe it at the time. But once you get going, you can go as far and as long as you want to go, as long as you keep finding leverage points and keep using whatever you’re learning on the job for whatever comes next. That’s the thing that I think is cool about the whole fly swatter thing, is you say this in the book, you don’t ever actually stop fly swatting. Every new opportunity, every new big win is just another arena to learn to acquire new skills that you can leverage for the next thing. And one of the things that’s fun about being a ghost writer and helping people write books is I’m connecting with a lot of influential people who, like you, are running multiple businesses, or they’ve got influence in another area that I don’t have influence in, or they know something about something that I don’t know, and I have to sort of learn from them.

Jeff Goins [01:05:40]:
And I’m getting connected to a whole other world as a result of leveraging the skill of writing and applying it in this new arena. And I’m learning things on the job that I’m sure will be utilized in the next season of life.

Dana Robinson [01:05:51]:
I love it. And you’re going to be doing something with that, that someone who’s just an editor ghostwriter probably isn’t, because you’re bringing to that the humbleness, the desire to learn all of what they’ve got to teach. So you’re extracting all of this amazing wisdom for free. And I wonder how many people in that side of the industry simply do the task and then take a vacation and come back and pick up another book for a publisher.

Jeff Goins [01:06:18]:
Most, I mean, it’s a grind. It’s really easy to fall into that tendency, and I do it too. But it is an incredible opportunity to learn and grow and get connected with smart, influential people.

Dana Robinson [01:06:30]:
In a year or two, we’ll have a podcast and we’ll talk about what you’ve taken from all that knowledge and what you’ve done with it.

Jeff Goins [01:06:35]:
Hope so.

Dana Robinson [01:06:36]:
If someone wants to connect with you, what’s the best forums for people to find you, connect with you, follow you.

Jeff Goins [01:06:43]:
I’m off of most social media, but you can find me at goinswriter.com. Goins writer. That’s where all my writing is. And if you want to work with our team or learn more about what we do as an agency, you can go to freshcomplaint.com.

Dana Robinson [01:06:57]:
Fresh complaint. Like someone is complaining about something, picking a fight with a book, with a, uh, and your substac is the ghost.

Jeff Goins [01:07:10]:
Yeah, and it’s just Jeffgoins substack.com. But if you go to writer, you’ll, you’ll find all that stuff awesome.

Dana Robinson [01:07:15]:
Jeff, thanks for giving me the time today. Good to see you. And go through some of the history, some of which I knew, some of which I didn’t love it. And thanks for all your help with the book. I appreciate that as well.

Jeff Goins [01:07:26]:
It’s my pleasure.

Dana Robinson [01:07:27]:
Thanks for joining me on this episode.

Dana Robinson [01:07:29]:
Of the Exit Plan podcast.

Dana Robinson [01:07:31]:
I’d love to hear from you. Feel free to hit me up with questions or comments by emailing me at hello@danavrobinson.com or leave comments and questions by calling 858-252-7785 call 858-252-7785 and leave a message.