On this episode of 'The Art of Selling Online Courses' we chat with Eric Reinholdt who was able to 6x his revenue to 6 figures after working with us.
Eric is a distinguished architect and content creator known for his 30X40 Design Workshop YouTube channel, which is widely used in global architecture education.
As the founder of 30X40 Design Workshop LLC, he champions collaborative, idea-driven modern home design, emphasizing craftsmanship and detail. His unique minimalist approach, inspired by the Shaker style and local context, creates personalized, striking homes.
We talk to Eric about his journey selling his online course and how following the steps we provided him he was able to totally change his life and fall back in love with his work!
On this episode of 'The Art of Selling Online Courses' we chat with Eric Reinholdt who was able to 6x his revenue to 6 figures after working with us.
Eric is a distinguished architect and content creator known for his 30X40 Design Workshop YouTube channel, which is widely used in global architecture education.
As the founder of 30X40 Design Workshop LLC, he champions collaborative, idea-driven modern home design, emphasizing craftsmanship and detail. His unique minimalist approach, inspired by the Shaker style and local context, creates personalized, striking homes.
We talk to Eric about his journey selling his online course and how following the steps we provided him he was able to totally change his life and fall back in love with his work!
I checked my sales dashboard and my jaw dropped. This was the highest revenue day I had had by a factor of six, my first over six figure month. I showed my wife and she's like that can't be right.
Speaker 2:So Hello and welcome to the art of selling online courses. We're here to share winning strategies and secret hacks from top performers in the online course industry. My name is.
Speaker 2:John A Entworth and today's guest is Eric Reinhold. Eric is an architect, author, content creator and founder of 30 by 40 design workshop. He makes videos about architecture, design simple modern homes, teaches about entrepreneurship and shares his process online with a YouTube channel with 1.1 million subscribers. Today, we're going to talk about how Eric started this business, how he grew his YouTube channel, some of his mistakes along the way, why he started working with data driven marketing my company and what he's changed since then, how we managed to forex his revenue in the last couple of months, and why focusing on his email list has made all the difference.
Speaker 2:Now, before we get into the meat and potatoes of today's episode, I've got an announcement for you. If you enjoy the tips, techniques and hacks you hear on this podcast and you want to get them in a straight to the point condensed version, then check out our YouTube channel every week, which highlights from each episode into YouTube shorts, and the shorts feature the most potent and helpful sound bites from each episode, and we're going to be doing more and more of these over time. On YouTube and in other places as well. There are great ways to grab the one big thing from each episode that's going to improve your business and increase your profits. Plus, of course, we've got full video episodes of each podcast on there as well, along with the library of funnel building. How to videos? So check out the YouTube channel. The link to it is in the show notes. Make sure to like and subscribe to the channel so you get notified every time we release a new video. That will help you sell more online courses, eric, welcome to the show man.
Speaker 1:Hey, thanks for having me, john. I'm a big fan of the podcast. I think I've listened to almost every episode you've published and I've learned a lot from you, so I really appreciate you having me.
Speaker 2:Wow, that's a great comment. Thank you very much. I appreciate that. Tell everybody who do you help and what kind of problem are you solving for them.
Speaker 1:So I teach design professionals and that's architects, interior designers, landscape architects, students how to build and operate a creative business, and it's one that isn't necessarily connected or tied directly to serving clients. So I basically teach designers to think more like entrepreneurs. And we're taught in design school all about aesthetics, about how to create presentations, drawings, and techniques and theory and things, but we never really learned how to run a business. And yet most design professionals practice in firms of less than six people and actually the majority of them practice as sole operators, like me, and so we kind of enter this profession completely unprepared to open a business, run a business and much less a profitable business, and for many people that kind of keeps them from starting off on their own, and so they're kind of they end up working for somebody their whole career, and you know it was that way for me. I was really intimidated by the thought of starting a business. I had no sort of history of entrepreneurship in my own family and so when I went out on my own 10 years ago, when I started this business, I just created the business in the model of every other architect that I'd ever worked for in the past, which was serving clients. You know, most architects just work directly with a client, so one client equals one project. When that's over, you find another client and keep doing that over and over again. And you know when you're first getting started, you obviously your experience level is lower and the projects are smaller. So you're doing renovations, additions. So smaller projects, smaller budgets, shorter timelines, which means you need more of those projects to kind of fill your schedule.
Speaker 1:And I found myself at one point like I had five different clients and five clients doesn't mean just like five different people, it's like five couples that I'm designing their home and five contractors and design review boards and everything that goes into designing and building a home. And I just found myself so overwhelmed by that thought and I thought, well, this isn't the business that I wanted. You know, I was working all hours just to kind of keep the business afloat and what I realized was I was just spending time working, you know, in the business rather than on the business, and I was just I didn't have time to do anything that I liked to do which was like design. I mean, that's the thing that designers obviously like to do. So I just set about kind of reinventing my practice and as part of that, I kind of jettisoned all these clients and I thought I'm going to start this from the ground up and I'm going to share everything along the way, and I'm going to. I started publishing that on like a pretty big site called housecom, which connects clients to architects and contractors, and I started a YouTube channel.
Speaker 1:I started writing a couple of books and all of these kind of experiments that I started running were with the goal of divorcing the time that I was working from the fee that I was earning. So my ultimate goal here was to try and create passive income with the business. And all of those experiments that I was running the ones that were successful I started just sharing them out on my YouTube channel and other places and writing those books. I was helping other people who are in my similar position, kind of, you know, create a better life for themselves, and so you know, I think I tried everything. I mean I was like hand cutting cards.
Speaker 1:At one point I was making furniture and you know all of these experiments the successful ones, you know I started doubling down on and you know, today, I think you know, my YouTube channel has something like one point one million subs, and you know that's just becomes this big platform and this engine for an audience to say, hey, I like what you did there, or I like what you did there, and that kind of forms the basis for not only the sort of lead generation for the business, but also people start telling you what they want from you and what to make, and so that kind of grounded and created the courses that I have today. So those are the people that I help.
Speaker 2:OK, so you've got to that sort of stuff that you're covering for free. What exactly do you cover in the courses? Is it all of the same stuff in more detail or the specific parts of that that you cover in more detail in the courses?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So the flagship course is, you know it's called the architect and entrepreneur course, and so it intersects the practice, design practice, with entrepreneurship. And I basically show people what I did to kind of reinvent my practice, which is, take all the byproducts of the design process, so, as we're working with clients, you know we have plans that we're doing, we have information that we're gathering, tile specs, you know all these different things that go into the design process take those byproducts of the design that we'd be doing naturally anyway and turn them into marketing materials, so by making videos about them and then also repurposing all of those things that we're creating and turning them into passive income generating products. And so basically, you know, the basic business model that I teach is to kind of separate the business into two silos. So it's products and services, and it's the goal is not to keep them balanced. The goal is to keep the services small, so like 10% of revenues, and then the product side to be like 90% of revenues, and so those two silos are meant to feed each other and be kind of symbiotic. But that's the basic idea that I teach.
Speaker 1:Now my audience is. So with one million subs, you know it's pretty diverse, it's not everyone's ready to start a business. So I kind of tried to create this ladder of products for everybody. I try to meet my audience kind of where they are, wherever they're at, and so a lot of times students will discover me because a lot of my videos are served up to them in architecture school and design school and so they get the sort of free end of the products or the lower priced kind of sketching and drawing products. And then as they graduate and they sort of move into the profession during their internship and they discover this practice isn't quite what I thought it was going to be, or I didn't learn about business. I have a set of products for them, so I have a toolkit for them and then that kind of ladders up into the flagship course, which is a higher ticket item, and when they graduate from you know, wanting to start there working for somebody else, to wanting to start their own thing, then they have that as the option.
Speaker 2:Nice. So you've got your one point one million subs. You've got your products that you've been creating. What made you decide? Now is the time to ask for help with operating in funnel.
Speaker 1:I mean, prior to working with DTM, I all of my sales came from just organically sending people to sales pages, and so I would go ahead and make a video and if there was some product that was in the video that was related to something that I was talking about, I would just put a link in the description and I might not even mention it in the video and I would put like a pinned comment that had a link to the product. And so you know, I was, I was basically tracking kind of one metric and it was like a daily sales revenue figure so like, let's just say, a thousand dollars a day. And if I was meeting that in passive income revenue, I knew things were good. But I also had friends who were making content with much smaller channels and they had digital courses and products and things like that and they were doing their revenue figures were blowing mine out of the water. So I knew, I knew I had some things to fix. I didn't quite know exactly what they were, but I knew my marketing funnel and when I say funnel it's like that I use that term loosely because it was really just kind of an onboarding sequence like a couple of emails and the opt-in on the side was just there's no lead magnets or anything.
Speaker 1:So I listened to you on the Tropical MBA podcast so you were talking to Dan, and that's a podcast I've listened to religiously like since day one, and when you made the presentation I was like I have to hire this guy because you spoke directly to me. I mean, I'm a course creator and I know that's who you're pointed at. I'm a course creator, who whose revenues I think could be better. I know I have great products, but the things that you said in that interview really spoke to my immediate needs. You know, I had flat revenues in the business, probably for the past year, and so I was just I was looking at that and thinking, you know, if I need to earn more revenue, I need to make new videos, because every time I post a new video I would, you know, I would see an increase in revenue, and so I felt really tied to that process of making videos and when you do that for 10 years it gets old. You know you're feeding the beast and it's like if the video doesn't perform, maybe your revenues slip and things like that.
Speaker 1:But on the podcast you were speaking about order bumps and upsells, obviously, which I kind of had. I had some of those things in place. But more importantly you were talking about you were working with course creators who were using their email list to run monthly promotions, and sometimes like two promotions a month, and like that scared me. Number one, because I was like you know, I don't do that at all, but number two, it seemed like a huge opportunity to connect with an audience that I had just been really neglecting, you know. But I had this kind of light bulb moment where you said you know, most course creators who send out an email promotion in a month, they make more money. And I was like, well, it's not the YouTube, you know.
Speaker 1:I realized every time I published a YouTube video, I sent an email out to my list and I was thinking it's the fact that I created a new YouTube video that was creating the revenue bump. It was actually the fact that I was emailing my list and I was like, oh my God, like this is such a missed opportunity. And I mean it sounds silly saying it now because I've ran a couple of promotions with you guys now and I can see what a massive difference that makes. But I never made that connection before.
Speaker 1:So you know, I basically looked around at my website and I thought I have no lead magnets, I have no way of getting people into the top of funnel here and I'm doing kind of the wrong things. I'm paying attention to views on YouTube and subscribers on YouTube as being like a tracking metric or you know, daily revenue figures, and I should really be paying attention to email list subscribers and thinking about how to kind of onboard people there. So that's really what made me reach out and get in touch with you guys because I had no lead magnets. I had nothing, you know, to pull people onto the list and I thought I'm not equipped and prepared to solve this problem. It feels just way too big.
Speaker 2:So you mentioned a few kind of issues in there in terms of what the problems were. Could you summarize just summarize that for everybody, like what you think that the main issues were that needed solving.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So, number one no lead magnets to get people on my email list. If I was going to prioritize this idea that getting people into the top of funnel was really important and I knew that it was I needed to give them something of value in exchange. So I had zero other than hey, sign up for my newsletter, which is who cares? I mean, everyone's got a newsletter, right. So I knew I needed lead magnets.
Speaker 1:The second thing I wasn't emailing my list unless I made a new video, and my list was fractured. So I had a list on Gumroad and I used to sell products on Gumroad. I had one on Teachable, which is where I was selling my courses and products, and I had one on MailChimp and I just started one on ConvertKit. So it was like it was people everywhere and some of these people I had never emailed, like people who bought things from me never, never emailed them ever, and so that felt like a this monumental task that I didn't actually even know how to put them together, what the best practices were, and when I had the initial meeting with you guys, you're like this is very important, this is like you don't screw this up, and so that was intimidating.
Speaker 1:And then the third thing, the real important thing was, you know, I had no, I wasn't tracking any data. I was making decisions based on, you know, emotional, my emotional feel like, okay, if I didn't make a thousand dollars in passive revenue in a day, I was like bummed and I was like, oh, I have to make a new video. And you know, I just feel all this pressure for no reason other than just like that, that random figure, when in reality, you know, making decisions based on actual data and conversions and things that actually matter to the bottom line of the business. I knew I needed that in place and I was familiar with these terms, but I just that felt again like something how am I even going to I don't even know where to find that information, you know, and turns out I wasn't really even tracking it correctly. So those are kind of the three, three biggest things that I sought to solve.
Speaker 2:And so if stuff just kept going as it was? You know, you've got this very successful YouTube channel. You've got products that you're selling. If stuff just kept going as it was, what kind of impact would have had for you on your business and your personal life?
Speaker 1:I mean, you know, flat business revenues basically means, you know, I have to work harder for what I want. And you know I was desperately trying to scale up revenues. But because it's just me working in the business, you know, I mean, like I said, I don't have any kind of history of entrepreneurship in my family, so I didn't have any kind of scripts to go off of and I had this kind of scarcity mindset was like, you know, everything that I earn I have to kind of keep it here because that's the way to safety. I don't want to go back to working for somebody else. And so, you know, those things compound to just a lot of stress, me feeling like a lot, if I want to do this, I have to, I have to solve it all myself and a lot of it, you know, it just feels really overwhelming. You know, creating a marketing funnel from scratch, like, even if I know I needed it, it's like, well, am I going to do it correctly? Am I going to spend hundreds of hours researching how to do it and then still screw it up? You know, it just felt. So you know that that was a terrible feeling. I was at the point of like quitting YouTube because I was so sick of being beholden to the algorithm and I was sitting there saying to myself, like you know, nobody ever builds a business on like a one-legged stool Like if I'm counting on YouTube to do everything for my business, it's just a bad plan, because as they change the algorithm, you know I'm screwed, and so that didn't feel great.
Speaker 1:My wife and I were working toward becoming financially independent and being able to take this business and be location independent. You know, like I mean, I've followed the TNBA for years and like that that's the dream for me. I would love to be able to go travel and still be able to operate this, and without systems in place and automations and things running in the background and a regular stream of income, like that's just not possible. And so you know, it's just generally stressful knowing you have all these great products and people like them when they buy them, but you're not really making the connection to the audience.
Speaker 1:You know, I mean when I first started running I'm skipping ahead a little here but when I first started running promos with you guys, I had some people email me back and say, oh wow, that's so cool, you just made this product, and I'm like I've had this product for like eight years and every time I've sent you an email I linked it and people just they don't make the connection because we're bombarded with stuff every every day and so the the means of me doing that? I was just doing it. I was going about it completely the wrong way. You know, broadly to answer the question, like I mean, it's just a stressful situation. So I was. I was pretty unhappy with the business, that I had kind of painted myself into the corner.
Speaker 2:So what happened? You heard the truck. Let me podcast what happened next. What did you do?
Speaker 1:So, um, I can't remember if it was the one of the pit my funnel exercises, that that you guys have, but it was an offer. Basically. You said you know we'll do an audit, and so I signed up for an audit. I did kind of a little onboarding call to see if I was going to be a good fit and as part of the audit, uh, I worked with Yoseph and Martina and they developed this KPI tracking sheet and, like, I think of myself as a creative person and so I don't live in spreadsheets, even though I know their importance. And it's mostly because, like, when they created this KPI tracking sheet, I was like, oh my God, this is, this is more numbers than I would ever know what to do with what they did. Was they? They really started showing me where I was at with the business in real numbers, and that really hit home for me because I could see the traffic that was arriving on my website. I could see, you know what I was converting, I could see the average order value of people who actually bought for me. And then they showed me the benchmarks. They're like, well, this is what you have. And then this is the benchmark and the benchmarks that, for me they were just way underperforming. You know, like, even with all the traffic that I was getting, I was converting at like some ridiculously low percentage. So people would come to my website and they would they have no way of getting on my email list and then they would just leave and I, you know, may never see them again. So I wasn't taking the traffic that I was getting from YouTube and other sources and my other social media and converting that into a growing list of email subs. And so they pointed out like hey, if you fix this and your average order value is this, this is what every new lead in the top of your funnel is worth. And that really spoke to me and it really changed my focus from thinking about YouTube views on a new video and YouTube subscribers to getting people on the email list. Like it completely changed my focus and it just felt like it felt like such a relief to get that information, you know. So it's really invaluable.
Speaker 1:And you know, to be honest, I still have a hard time kind of divorcing myself from that idea that I need to send people from a video to a sales page, because, as part of this ICS program that I'm in at DTM we have this kind of weekly coaching calls and a couple of weeks ago I brought to the group. I was like hey, is anybody experimented with the merch shelf on YouTube? You know, sending people to your courses from the merch shelf, and everyone's like you don't want to do that, man, like that's the wrong strategy. You got to get them on your email list and I'm like, yeah, like it's just, honestly, it's just, it's a big shift. It's a hard habit for me to break, but I see the importance of it now. So we ended up, you know, as part of working with your team, yosip and Martina and everyone else, we ended up creating a bunch of lead magnets. So I have five or six lead magnets and now every time I make a new video I have a special lead magnet that gets linked in the description and on the comment. And I learned that from someone in the ICS course, lucy and Will, who are doing that with their videos. And you know it's all. It's all now, well thought out and planned.
Speaker 1:We took the all the disparate email lists, kind of consolidated them into one list and your team ran this whole reengagement campaign to the list so that we, you know, like I said there's a proper way of consolidating people and bringing them over to make sure that you're maintaining good list health. And I mean, I was shocked that that first email reengagement campaign that we ran, which is, you know, just basically to see who wants to still hear from me and interact and engage. And you know we sent out that first email and I got like almost a thousand replies to that, to that email. Like I was overwhelmed. I had never sent an email to my list and gotten that kind of response.
Speaker 1:You know, monica had done a whole copywriting exercise to try and reengage and speak to these people and it's like there's just a different. I just it was like this complete unlock because I had not been speaking to my audience, as if they were like other humans. I was just like pushing out, like, oh, this is what I made, this is what I made, this is what made you check it out. You know, instead it was like this dialogue and I was I mean, I was blown away by the. What I saw is just the success of just even starting a conversation with the email list. So it's like it's a completely different mind shift for me.
Speaker 2:And so that was almost a thousand replies. How many people were on your email list?
Speaker 1:I think that went out to something like 20 to 27 or 29,000 people or something like that.
Speaker 2:Wow, that's a lot. That's a very high percentage of people responding there. That's interesting.
Speaker 1:It was. It was actually one thing that was. I think it was a mistake, but you'll see, won't fess up to this. But inside, inside of this first email, you know, we're basically trying to get people to click on things and engage right. And so one of the so we started off. We're talking about time management, since that's a kind of a major thing in my profession and probably any profession, and so we said you know, we're going to have this series of emails. I'm going to talk about how I manage my time and give you some tools and resources. I just want you to let me know if you want to opt into this series, and you can do that by hitting this button.
Speaker 1:And so the button itself. You know it looks like when you click a button, you expect an action to take place, you expect it to go somewhere. Well, the button had no action other than to tell convert kit, put them on, put a tag here and then email them tomorrow. You know, and as part of this, like people are clicking on the button like multiple times, which is, I guess, good for engagement, right, but then they're also emailing me saying, hey, I want in. You know, it's kind of this secret hack. You know, you'll just like oh yeah, we totally meant to do that, which I don't believe, but I said, yeah. I mean, then I had an inbox full of like a thousand people that I had to reply to and it was just, I mean, a massive task but very cool, cause I talking to people I'd never connected with before. There's a lot of work.
Speaker 2:I'm going to check with him tomorrow about that I find out.
Speaker 1:That wasn't intentional.
Speaker 2:All right, okay, so you've reengaged the list, got this 30,000 people. The list is the emails going out to you. Then run a promotion. Talk to me about that. How did that go?
Speaker 1:So the the first promotion we ran was in August. So we've been working a couple of months together to just kind of consolidate everything, get everything in order and get the lead magnets in and get more people on the list. So the first promo went uh was for a hundred and forty seven dollar product, so it's not the high ticket product that I have. Um, kind of middle of the road and, um, I think we sent that to 27,000 people who were engaged on the list and we had an average open rate of 65%. Wow, yeah, that seemed that seemed high to me. And then a click rate of two and a half percent and the order bump take rate. I think that underperformed a little bit Maybe. Maybe you know this more than I do, john, but 13% was the order bump and then the upsell converted at 9% and the upsell was for for a really big high ticket product. So it was a good fit between the, the toolkit product, the 147 product and the full course product, which is kind of my flagship course that I talked about earlier, and with that in place the upsell accounted for like pretty big proportion of the revenue. So like that fit is really important and I know you are always talking about the importance of upsells and order bumps, so that combo in itself, like was very successful.
Speaker 1:So you know a little story, the last day that promo it was a Sunday, we ran it from a Friday through a Sunday and you know your team had told me to expect, like the last day of the promo we have this little kind of countdown timer, which I had never done. They said just expect sales to go like crazy. And I was like yeah, we'll see, I didn't really expect it to happen. So last day of promo I had family visiting in town we live like in a near national park and we went out for a boat tour. So we were totally off the grid. You know it was the afternoon, so we get back late afternoon and I checked my sales dashboard when I get back on shore and and my jaw dropped because this was the highest revenue day I had had by a factor of six, like even height of COVID everyone's locked in their house, like buying online courses, like this was a factor of six times more than my highest sales day ever.
Speaker 1:And I mean I showed my wife and she's like that can't be right. I was blown away, john, I was, and of course, nobody on your team was like that surprised by it. But I, you know, we ended up having August finished my first over six figure month ever, you know, highest overall revenue month by a factor of my average revenue month by a factor of four. So four X normal revenue.
Speaker 1:I was just I mean, I was just blown away and we just finished running a second promo and that one was for the higher ticket item that I mentioned, the one we used as the upsell before, that's a $597 product, and that one we ended up 2Xing revenue, standard revenue for the month.
Speaker 1:So, like both of these like huge success and I think you know, even in the second one we ended up learning, okay, how my audience buys and whether an email promotion is the right thing for that kind of product or maybe we need to sell it a different way, like the previous way that we'd used. But it's all. I think the important thing is it's all data that we can make decisions based on. Like now we have the data so we can see, okay, this converted or that didn't. And I mean your team even goes through and like every promotion email that we send, we get to see what the conversions were for each email and I was like I was kind of blown away by all the tracking that was happening, because we can see like, okay, what subject lines are performing, what are people clicking on, you know how do we speak to them and it's all. So now we can just make decisions based on data rather than emotion.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you said how you're a creator and you aren't really comfortable necessarily in spreadsheets. Yo, Sib is only comfortable really in spreadsheets. I feel that it's like part human, part spreadsheet is like.
Speaker 1:Ridiculous, I know it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm going to try my best to explain how that KPIs spreadsheet works. Everybody listening. What we're doing is we're tracking, for every single email promotion on every single day, how many emails were sent, how many were opened, how many were clicked. How many people then got through to the sales page because just because someone clicks doesn't mean they actually get the sales page, in case it loads slowly how many then clicked to go through to the checkout page. How many people bought? How many bought the order bump? How many bought the episodes?
Speaker 2:We do that every day and then that adds up over the course of the week till the end of the promotion, and so you have the portal and you see what that was. Now, why we bother to do that every single day is that some of those emails convert much better than others. So what we've actually had before was clients where we've gone through and run the same promotion, like a promotion for the same offer, multiple times, and then we're able to go back and take the best performing emails out of each of those and make a version of the promotion where they all work together, and that will then do way better than the previous promotions, because you can see ah, this audience responds to this message about this particular kind of issue that they're facing, and that's a really big deal for them. So that's why we have that like that.
Speaker 2:If you want to get hold of that KPI tracking spreadsheet, then I can give you a copy of that. Just email me, john J-O-H-N at datadrivenmarketingco and I'll send it through to you and you'll be able to use that to track your promotions in the future as well.
Speaker 1:Also even tracking, and I don't know if this is specific to this campaign, but like images in the emails, because I always have an image in my email and button links and text links and because I was convinced for this last program, like people click on my images and they convert, and YoSip is like, yeah, we'll see. And so we put UTM tracking for each one of those objects in there. And he's like, well, they don't actually convert like text links do, and he's able to show me the data. So you know, it's like I love that information because making those images is time consuming for me, so if we don't have to include them, it's like a real, it's a real data point that can save me time and effort. And I think he loves being able to present that kind of data because I'm always like, oh no, the design's got to be there first. Design is most important. He's like, well, we'll see, that sounds fantastic. First of all, congratulations.
Speaker 2:That must feel great to have you know four times your revenue, have the six-fig a month when you didn't necessarily think that was going to be possible. What's kind of next for you? Do you think, based on what's worked so far, have you talked through the YoSip and made a plan of what's going to happen next?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean we're you know, you guys, I think in the initial conversations that I heard with you on the podcast, you're like, yeah, some people are running two promos a month and I was like, ooh, that's not going to be me, because that means you're like prepping for a promo every single week, and so we're doing one promo a month. And so right now we're planning, you know, october's promo and we're reviewing and rewriting sales pages, we're doing all the copy, and so it's just it's a matter of mapping out like your team created this whole roadmap for me, like through the end of the year, starting into next year. So we know, october's promo is this, november's Black Friday promo is this these are the warm-up emails that we're going to do. You know, december's something else, and January's New Year, new Me, and like. So it's like there's a way forward that I I mean I was as a solo business operator I'm operating like month to month and I'm just like I can't look any further ahead than that. And so having this roadmap and having you know this group of people that are working, you know, alongside me to push things forward is just helpful, because now I know if I have a day that's below, you know, the revenue KPI that I used to.
Speaker 1:That's like anchored in my skull and like it doesn't matter because at the when we run the promo, that's when it changes Like it's this lumpy. You know, it's kind of a lumpy earning schedule as opposed to the thing that I'm programmed to, which is like, okay, you know, flat baseline, like that's not the thing that moves it forward. So, yeah, I'm looking forward to all these next promos we're doing. Obviously, my job now is to start thinking, zooming out and being more of the CEO and acting to create new content and add things to the top of the funnel, and that that's a job that you know. I welcome that because before I was just doing all the in the weeds, like head down, like oh, I've got to handle all of these things, and now, with DDM kind of riding shotgun like you guys are handling all those things for me. So yeah, does that answer your question?
Speaker 2:Yeah, totally. What's your message to people who feel stuck in their business growth process? Because it sounds like you were quite stuck, so I wonder what your point of view is on that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, I think we all implicitly know this, but I think it's worth stating. You know, when we get better at something, it's immediately preceded by, like this, moment of extreme incompetence. And you know, for me, you know, when I look back at the periods that I grew most as an entrepreneur, as a business owner, it's always been the result of hiring other people who have expertise. You know, in something that I lack, and you know, rejecting that scarcity mindset has been big for me. I'll give you an example the studio that I'm, that's behind me here, that you see me standing in.
Speaker 1:When I built this, I built this all on passive revenue as kind of proof of concept for my business model. While I was making the course, and, you know, as a capstone to finishing the build, I asked my architectural photographer and videographer to. You know, I wanted to make a short film about this and we're going to submit it to this architecture and design film festival and so as part of that, you know I was in charge of writing the script for it, because I knew how to do that, I know how to make YouTube videos and he was going to do all the videography and the editing and everything like that and I treated it as kind of this learning experience, because I liked his editing style and I liked the look and feel of things. And so a couple of days before we're getting ready to shoot the film, I send him over the script for the for the thing and he calls me back. He's like, dude, this is not a script. It's like we cannot. We cannot use this. This is horrible. And he's like I know you're probably not going to feel like doing this, but we need to hire a story editor. And it was a couple of thousand dollars that I wasn't like totally ready to commit, on top of hiring the videographer and to make the short film. But he's like we need this, otherwise I'm not doing it. And so I ended up hiring her and we had a couple of meetings and she completely retooled the script and helped me write a story where there's stakes, you know, there's a main character, there's, you know, a climax and there's resolution. And all of those things were learnings that I took with me into the YouTube channel and all the editing style and like how my photographer got the shots and how we put the whole film together. It was like this is one big learning experience and we ended up getting the film accepted to this architecture and design film festival and my family and I went down to New York to screen it and it went around the country and it was like this huge success.
Speaker 1:But I never could have done that by myself and I feel like you know, the transformation with DTM is the same way. You know you guys work with course creators in exactly my position, like you've. You've consolidated email list before. I've never done that you're working with. You know there's a whole group of people that I can get on a group coaching call with and say, hey, have you ever done this? And like, oh yeah, we did that and this doesn't work for this reason, you know this tax things and like this whole like body of knowledge that that comes along with working with you guys is just, it's like it's an incredible resource.
Speaker 1:And I tell my wife it's like you know, before we started working together I was concerned about the investment, you know, and now I look back and it's like you know those sort of people movers in the airport you get on the track and it takes you to your gate a lot faster.
Speaker 1:It's like that's how it feels working with you guys on this because I'm just like velocity matters and and I'm just able to do so much more. You know, with you guys kind of by my side and not not to mention like the ICS course that comes comes with this service is like it's gold. I mean it's not just like high level, like build an email list, it's like no, here's how and here's why and here's the copy, and like you have all these calls with me and I mean it's. I mean I'm a fanboy if you can't tell. And it's made a huge difference in now in my business. But just, you know my life and my happiness with the business. I'm happy to work on the business again. Like it feels like I'm moving it forward. It doesn't feel like I'm just treading water. So, yeah, I mean I can't thank you enough.
Speaker 2:Wow, I'm honored. Thank you very much. I really appreciate it. Kind of words. Yeah, you guys deserve it Is there any way you want to point people to. They want to go check out your YouTube channel to know that.
Speaker 1:My YouTube channel is linked on my website, so it's 30 by 40.com slash YouTube and it's spelled out so THIRTYBYFORTYCOM. It's a mouthful but that's a. That's a branding mistake of mine that I made early on, but I own it.
Speaker 2:And thanks so much for coming on today. Really really appreciate your time as a fantastic journey. Really enjoyed hearing that today. I've heard it through Yozip before like you were like oh, this is what we're doing with Eric. Eric is excited about this. This thing work really really well. You know that, which has been great, but I think that video has been been fantastic.
Speaker 1:Thanks, john know I appreciate all the inspiration, all the content you make and your team. I don't know how you assembled like such cool people, but there's like they're genuinely awesome people to work, work with. So I appreciate you.
Speaker 2:If you found this interview useful, please subscribe and give us a review wherever you listen to it, and thanks so much for listening. We really appreciate your time.