180 | The Art of Staying Niche and Reaching A Big Audience, with Brian Luebben

Have you ever wondered how to build a thriving podcast while also traveling the world and making millions of dollars? I'm sure you have. It's a dream many podcasters have. Well, imagine if you can achieve that level of success and freedom through your podcast. This is Grow the Show, the podcast that grows your podcast. My name is Kevin Spitlin. I am your podcast growth coach and today on the show is our annual visit from former Grow the Show Accelerator students and host of the Action Academy, Brian Lubin. Brian's podcasting journey is a testament to what is possible. He's built a million dollar business around his podcast. He left his six-figure corporate job. He's traveled full-time around the world and today he continues to grow and scale his audience and his business. In this episode, you can look forward to learning three things. Number one, the strategies that Brian used to build and grow his podcast while traveling full-time. Number two, you're going to learn how he monetized his podcast to the tune of over a million dollars a year by creating a robust back end business behind the show. Number three, Brian's going to share the importance of knowing your audience and where they're at in the journey so that you can craft the right content that resonates deeply. By the way, Brian's also going to pull back the curtain on his Instagram strategy that has taken him from zero to 275,000 followers in just a couple years. All of that is here right now with Brian Lubin on Grow the Show. If you guys want to learn how to make $50 million a year from a podcast and learn how I've spent over $100,000 in trying to grow my show, crash and burn, couldn't figure it out, tried other ways. That worked. Made a million dollars on my podcast before a million downloads, quit my job and full time around the world. This is your podcast. Cool. So now everyone's in. They're going to listen for the entire show. Yay. Love that for the team. Let's go. Background. Background of me, you and I met, I think in 2021 when I started my podcast, the Action Academy. So it all started with me having this wacky idea of I want to be a financially free multi-millionaire and quit my job. So what's the best way to do that? Start a freaking podcast and interview financially free multi-millionaire. So that is my podcast. We talk about business acquisition and real estate acquisition to quit your job. Go from corporate to cash flow. So what I did is I started that podcast, bought a bunch of real estate, March of 2022, left a six figure corporate sales job, I was making a quarter million dollars a year. The podcast through a CPA method, which was a method of advertising along with my real estate, replaced $20,000 a month in passive income, air quotes from me to quit, left that job, went to travel full time around the world for eight months. That's cool. What's even cooler is the next year I built my own business from the podcast, my own community. And I went and traveled again for six months. That's even cooler. And what's even cooler than that is now this year I make ten times more money than I made the last two times I traveled and I'm still doing it again. I back out to Europe for another two months, I'm doing the south of France, I'm running with the bulls in Spain, I'm going to skydive and Dubai and I've got an Airbnb where I can see the pyramids and I'm going to podcast the entire time. So let's rock. Yeah, dude. Cool. First question for you is, I'm curious how your travel has changed if at all as your business has grown because my understanding is you have a team now. So first of all, what is the, let's back it up. What does the team look like behind action Academy these days? Cool. So first let's kind of diagnose the business itself. So the business itself behind the podcast, which is my first piece of advice for everybody that's listening to this, you're asking the wrong question. The question that you're currently asking is how can I get the best CPM or best CPA for my advertising revenue, my sponsorships and my podcasts, the best way to make money from a podcast is to build a backend business around your podcast. So what I like to say is if you start a podcast in today's market and today's environment with the intention of taking a certain specific niche avatar that Kevin talks about from a point a to a point B, bonus points, if you help them solve an expensive problem, that is what you build your business around. So I started the podcast with helping like going through my journey of leaving corporate America through real estate and business acquisition and then we ended up creating a community, which we talked about in the last episode, we go step by step in the second episode about how we launch the community, but as a mastermind group where people come and join in their specific niche problem is they make $100 to $600,000 a year, they normally have a little bit of real estate and they're looking to scale because that's a big juicy problem. So that is our community, that's the business. We do $1.4 million a year recurring. So that is like annual memberships. So we built up a cool business. Last time we spoke, I had one or two team members, now we have a team of six and how my travel is changing is last year, I was very much so in the business and now I work on the business. So now my team handles sales, my team handles marketing, my team handles the day to day and now for the first time I'm actually doing what is needed and taking the vacation for two weeks where I put in the email up, put in the computer up and that's when I'm going to South of France. So delegation and elevation. Oh yeah man, that's awesome. Can you talk a little bit about something I've been, I'm really curious about is you've got a really specific avatar of folks that are making over six figures and did I hear you right or am I remembering right that it's folks that already have real estate investments, is that right? For the most part, it's not a hard and fast rule but the reason we have that from a cultural perspective and this is important for people is the riches are in the niches is we want the avatar to be ready willing and able to scale and buy like 40 rental properties or 100 rental properties in a year as opposed to just one at a time and we've found if they already have a few five or so, it's easier to get them in the mindset to scale. Yeah, so something that I think you do really well and I point to you as an example is you've got this really specific avatar for your back end business, right? That's a really specific person but your online content, correct me if I'm wrong, is broader, right? So you're not just making videos and podcast episodes specifically for that person. So can you talk a little bit about that difference because I see a lot of creators kind of get stuck in one or the other either they create for a super broad audience and they try to sell to a broad audience and they struggle or they sell to an incredibly niche audience but then they create content for the niche audience and they don't really don't really get a lot of reach. So what's your take on that and how do you how do you balance that? Sure. So it's just a strategy. It's the same strategy that Alex Formosa uses if any of your listeners listen to a business podcast or something. I'm sure they've seen his probably reels or take talks pop up. I do begin like broad medium and like experience content. So you have like broad approach, which is like tam, total addressable market. That's the content that appeals to everyone and anybody can kind of get behind it and then it goes born to intermediate, which is middle of funnel content and then it goes into the advance, which is the very specific meat and potatoes type of content. So in the beginning, I had two different objectives with my media and the podcast is kind of remain the same, but my media has changed. So the media is the best vehicle and tool for you guys to use to grow your show because virality does not exist within podcasting and I'm sure all of you have found that out by now. The virality exists in the media outside of the podcast, which then directs people to. So what I do is instead of addressing the specific problem in my content, I address the end destination of my content and I save a lot of videos that other people do on this. For example, I quit my job to travel around the world. Instead of making a video necessarily on the ultra niche, ultra specific commercial real estate investing strategy to buy like a self storage facility in Boise, Idaho, instead what I say is I invested in real estate that yielded me passive income so that I could go travel and everyone's, oh, I want to travel. What's this other stuff he's talking about? At the end, my CTA is, you know, we did this through self storage, small businesses, multi family, insert XYZ strategy here. If you guys are interested, I did a 60 minute full length podcast episode on this. If you comment self storage, if you comment this trigger word in the comment section, many chat will send you the link to the podcast episode. And so that has been going very well. So that is for my TAM, total addressable market content, the beginning level, the broad, and then the middle content is going to be more so specific where we do talk about the specific problems that our avatars going into. So for your content strategy for anybody listening, what you do is you take the point A and the point B, bonus points if you've done it yourself, and you identify the 10 roadblocks that are in between. When you have your 10 roadblocks, then you list 10 ways that you can overcome each roadblock which would give you a list of 100. That's your content strategy. So what we do is we're like, what are everyone's issues and we talk to the customer. We're like lack of capital, lack of confidence, lack of community and lack of clarity. So like there's four of them off the bat that we built the entire business off of and I could create freaking 40 pieces of content off of each of those. So those were our videos and then it all comes back down to the podcast itself. This is all the short form. When you get to the podcast itself, it has from the beginning and to today remained extraordinarily niche in the long form. So I think that's an important distinction is do not make your podcast broad, make your content broad to attract the funnel that goes into your podcast. My podcast from the beginning has been the most niche podcast that you could have, which has made it difficult to grow, which is why I hired you. So just to be clear, so you say basically your podcast is the super niche part and when you say your content is more broad, you're talking like you're talking social media content, right? Reels, TikToks, YouTube shorts, short form video, crushes, if written medium is your thing, go and figure out which one you like the most. You can crush podcast advertisement on Twitter and on LinkedIn and on newsletters. For me, I just prefer talking into a mic and I'm good on video. So video is my, where I get millions of views per month. So now we have about a million followers on social. Yeah, yeah. I was just looking through and I, you know, I'm a big raver and you made a post recently about, it was like you in a hot air balloon or something and it was a hilarious joke about Spanish and Diplo comments that I'm like, oh my god. Diplo didn't comment on it. That was hilarious. Yeah. I said, I'm in Mexico living in the present because my Spanish isn't good enough for past or future trends yet, which really, you know, it is, it's out there, but it still falls into my niche of who is this guy in a hot air balloon floating above Mexico right now and like, how is he able to do this on a Tuesday? Let me check out his profile and then let me check this link in his profile that says, if you want to quit your job, be a job free in 2024, click here and you go click this link and the first link that pops up is join 120,000 others that are replacing corporate with cash flow through the Action Academy podcast and they're like, huh, let me click that and now you down the rabbit hole. So top of funnel and it sounds like middle of funnel is on social media, bottom of funnel which is the super, super niche stuff is the long form podcast content to the point of my last podcast episode was here is how an Action Academy member bought a laundromat and a flower shop and received $20,000 back at closing and we talked like interest rates and inner mechanisms of the business. Yeah. Deep and that stuff's not going into short form videos and this applies everywhere guys. So book talk is super popular and tick talk. If you have a book podcast like where you talk about and rate and review books, you need to be on hashtag book talk. So what these women do is they go and they don't say, hey, I've got a podcast on books, they don't film like the talking head style podcast videos, they make a video with the book and they're like, this is like the reasons you need to check out this book. This is the best book you've ever read and then at the end is if you guys want to hear all about all the conspiracy and lore behind this book, I run a podcast and this is what we talk about and the comments are like, send me the podcast, this is the coolest thing ever. It applies across all content. One of the two fantasy fangirls went through, grow the show just for her business and then apply this stuff, launching a new show with her sister and within 90 days, they got a million downloads doing exactly what you just said, just got just book talk, just freaking chains their lives. So freaking quick talk isn't saying dude. That's wild. This is cool man. I've never heard it. I've never heard somebody talk about it and the way you're talking about it now where you talk about the outcome on social media. It's the what? It's where you're going on social media but the podcast brings you the how, the deep like super, super niche dives, really, really cool. Before we move on to just like talking about how you've grown the show, other ways that you might have grown your audience, is there any other piece of the way you think about making content that you feel like we haven't touched? Just growing and evolving, I'm going to increase the middle of funnel content because we have now reached a point where, you know, this is a little insider baseball but I'll keep it broad. Now, what got us a million dollars a year isn't going to get us three million dollars a year. So I just left a workshop in Las Vegas where they were basically saying dude, you can double your business if you just niche down your content now. Wow. Those seasons of content where in the beginning to grow a following, it becomes easier and easier to grow a following, the bigger the following is. So now I have about 300,000 on Instagram because I've gotten really good at making those like punchy videos that tell people why the corporate America sucks and they should quit. And so what I do from that, from that punchy stuff is now that I have the audience there, now it's, I'm going to sacrifice a bit of my reach by making more specific, you know, middle of the funnel content that we were talking about, where it is going to be a bit niche down and that's how we're going to get more customers is by talking to them specifically and pulling them out of that 300,000. Yeah. So in the beginning, it's let's get eyeballs and then the second one is let's convert the eyeballs. Yeah. You think that might be tough for you to see to post stuff that gets less reach like I feel like just I'm hating it might be hard. I hate every single second of it. I posted a freaking video that was insanely niche. A normal video gets 60,000 to a million views and this one got 12,000 but I stopped complaining when I got five leads from it and four of them ended up booking calls and two of them ended up joining and paying a $16,000. So that shut me up pretty quick. Yeah. Right. That'll do it. I've heard the same message here from a few different creators at Grow the Show and even in just what I'm talking about on the show, I've kind of gotten a little bit a little bit niche or actually with it and same exact thing where post something and I'm like, I think this might be like a little too like it's a little more niche or business focused than I am used to and boom, calls, books, sales, me and I'm like, oh, okay. That is the way. But less downloads. Oh, yeah. Few reviews, fewer downloads. Yeah, less attention. Which I'm cool with, but it's just it's crazy. Like St. Cash. Exactly. I can't pay my rent with freaking views. Well, you're in Miami. It could work. Maybe. If there's anywhere in the world that we could do it, I haven't figured it out though. I'll go down the street and talk to some of the Instagram models and see how they're doing it. Okay. Cool. So let's talk about getting more downloads to the show. You mentioned to Maniacat. So I'm guessing is that something that you recently implemented that's working well for you? Maniacat. Maniacat's been working. I'm not a master at it. Some people crush it much, much better than I do. And now I'm getting new to the game I'm taking this very seriously now. So Maniacat, it's like the likes of Amy Porterfield. If you guys go follow her and her podcast, she built her podcast off of email and I know she's been on this show and she's a friend of mine. So it's something that can definitely be taken advantage of. My biggest tried and true unscalable way of growing a podcast like you've said and preached from the beginning is I am a guest on two to three podcasts every single week. And that takes us researching podcasts each and every week to go on. That's the hard part. And it involves us reaching out to podcasts doing the perfect podcast pitch each and every week. But anybody that builds a backend business around their podcast or media needs to know what's called their customer acquisition journey. Like what's your customer journey? And for us, we've done the details, like we've done the diligence and we know without a shadow of a doubt, our best customer for our business comes because they heard me on a podcast, another show, and which brought them to my show where they binge on average three to four hours of episodes within the first two days and then book an intro call with our team and say the same thing every single time. We even track it to the amount of episodes they listen to. It's always heard you on a podcast, three to four hours of podcasts on your show. Take my money. I'm yours. Let's do anything that you guys talk about. I'm in. And so it's the highest ROI activity that I have is being on podcast. No way. So how do you choose which ones are a good fit versus which ones aren't? So we have a very niche again, specific focus. So what I do personally, and this is, this is I do, other people can be different. But for me, I'm not going on a show. We use listen notes is like our tried and true. Like nobody's going to act, you can't tell what an actual podcast download number is outside of anybody else, but the closer you can get is through listen notes and seeing what their percentage ranking is. So of the show is under two percent. So the lower the score, the better, like actually the Academy is like 0.05% top global podcasts now with about 100,000 downloads a month, and then two percent, then it goes down to five to percent, 10%. If it's over 2%, we're not going on the show. If it's not a weekly show, we're not going on the show. If they have less than 100 episodes, we're not going on the show. And if it's not in our niche, and we can look through their last 20 episodes and see something that I can absolutely crush to the audience to talk about, we're not going on the show. So we are very focused on the niche of like small business, real estate, you know, financial freedom, digital nomads. That's what we're talking about digital media and digital business. Like I was on Pathlyn's show and entrepreneurs on fire, John Lee Dumas. So that's what we focus on. And we do about 20 to 30 podcasts reach out per week to yield three, three. Okay. So yeah. 10 to 10%. 10%. 10%. Yes, right. Man. Have you ever looked at Riphonic? It's a listen notes competitor. We pay for both. Okay. Yes. Yeah. So Riphonic is too expensive for it is. I think their business is going to crash and burn because it's not a sustainable business model for the price point that they have it at. It's $90 a month, which just every single month, even me as the business owner, I'm like, do we need Riphonic? But it's a cool service and they have a CRM in there. That is where we host our CRM. But I would venture to say that listen notes will probably come up with some type of feature like that, even though they're too expensive as well. I was going to say it's like the same price though. Yeah. Riphonic is an expensive service, but that's where we host our CRM for podcasts. Yeah. Okay. Cool. So getting growth on social media, converting via many chat and showing up on other shows two to three weeks, that's aggressive. That's awesome. That's it. Yeah. What's your take on YouTube these days for podcasting? I think YouTube is amazing. I'll actually cite other data sources that are better than me because I just left a web like a seminar where they just did this. And so it was Hormuz and I'll give them credit. But they found across, I think 40,000 pieces of content over two years, they did 40,000. They realized that people that like short form, like short form, and people that like long form, like long form. So somebody that watches YouTube shorts isn't necessarily going to convert to a long form YouTube video, but people that watch long YouTube videos will convert to a long YouTube video. I think if I could blow everything up and start from scratch again, I would still do the podcast just because it's what I enjoy the most because I get to meet people. But if I were going to start from scratch on Instagram or TikTok or Twitter, I would start a YouTube because it's the only social media platform that pays you for reach. The rest you pay them, you pay meta, you pay TikTok to get reach, whereas YouTube is the only one where you get a freaking, you can get six figures from getting views. So you not only don't have to pay to advertise, they pay you. So I'm going all in on YouTube and it's the most expensive thing that I've ever seen in my life. Yeah, it's crazy. But what's also crazy about YouTube is that good stuff gets shown for years to this day. We get more leads from a YouTube video that I put out three years ago than any of the YouTube videos I've put out in the last year combined because that particular video has just hit. It keeps getting views, it keeps getting served. So to me, I'm like, man, I'm still getting leads from a video. I mean, why didn't you even live in Miami yet? I made that video. It's just crazy. So that doesn't exist in podcasting. It doesn't. I don't think it's anywhere. Anywhere, like social media, you know, stuff, maybe a TikTok will get shown for a month of it really hits, but other than that, like there's nowhere else where you make something in three, five, sometimes even 10 years, it's still performing, still getting you views and eyeballs and reach, suddenly and everything like that. So yeah, more, we just got to do more YouTube. I'm like, fifth percent issue of my episodes are going on YouTube right now, but it's just got to be, it's just got to be a thing. Can I share the advice that I spent many, many thousands of dollars to get on YouTube? For free to your listeners, if you leave you a five-star rating and a review on Girl the Show podcast right now, right? Right now. Yeah. I run a podcast, ladies and gentlemen. Yeah. So I asked, how the hell do I do this for anybody that's attempted YouTube? I highly recommend you try and you'll have a newfound respect for how much time, energy, effort and capital goes into building these videos. You guys watch a 15-minute infographic, done by Wundery or one of these companies. That thing probably took them like 60 hours to edit at minimum. So YouTube editors, video editors and video creative directors that run like your brand in like the YouTube, which is what I'm looking at right now, are very expensive. And you'll have people that come on the show and maybe you're saying, oh, I hire a VA in the Philippines that clips all my content. Well, your content is shitty. I'm sorry. It just is. Nobody watches it and I can probably look at your stuff. And I'm sure that there's one or two that are the opposite that are like the absolute rock stars, but just from a native perspective, the selection of the content is the difficult part. If you have somebody that's a native English speaker that can go into a podcast and pull out like the meaningful moments and then send it to an editor, maybe they can do that. Sure. But for the most part, 99% of us are like, hey, here's an hour-long podcast I did. Pick out the viral clips and it never works. I've spent over $100,000 on this. It does not work. So now I still like to this day as a business owner, I'm the best person that does that and I give them to my editing team to edit and they do it in like five minutes. So the advice that I got from, because I was looking to hire like a six-figure creative director to literally follow me around the world and film like, wow, I go to these things and do this stuff and it's expensive and the advice that they gave to me is to find somebody that's like in film school or in college or hire what they call like a generalist to where it's going to be somebody that's a jack of all trades kind of master of none. They like the creative side, they like the process side and they're kind of getting their toe into the water of YouTube. But then what you do is you have that person on your team, then you go and you hire a YouTube agency and I was like, well, what YouTube agency is good and they're like 95% of them are the worst thing in the world. But if you can find the 5%, heck yeah. And you go to this agency and what you tell the agency and this applies to YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, anything like whatever the niche thing is. You go to that agency and say, hey, I'm going to hire you for six months with the intention of training my internal team. I want you to do this service. I'll pay you a premium to do the service, but do it in a teaching way so that I can teach my team how to do it. And then at the end, we're going to part ways, Olivia, a bunch of good reviews and good will refer you to my friends and then my team will take it from there. And so that is how they scaled like big old businesses by doing that. So that is probably the process that I'm going to follow myself. Yeah. So let's talk about, let's talk about sales. So you know, a lot of folks listening to the show, their goal is to get more sales from their podcast. Can you walk us through what is the journey after someone listens to the show? How do you get people to go from listener of the podcast to their on a call with your sales team? Yes, my favorite thing ever. This is my favorite thing to talk about. So when it comes to sales, for people that are listening, I'm a classically trained B2B sales rep. I was number eight out of 5,079 of my company and I still have my words that are as well as my mentor on my desk to prove it. So yeah, when somebody listens to the podcast, I have a pretty funny ad where I talk in the beginning of each show. I have said no to six figures of advertisers. The only ad on the show is me because it is millions of revenue for me as opposed to hundreds of thousands for someone else. And so in the beginning of the show, I said, welcome to the Academy of Podcasts. You know, today's topic is going to be this, but listening to another podcast isn't going to get you rich. You know, it's going to get you rich, being in the community and being in the groups and the rooms with the people that you hear on the podcast. So don't you want to be the person that's being interviewed on the podcast? If so, come check out our actual Academy community, help you replace corporate cash flow, place $30,000 a month pass of income within one to two years. If you want to check it out, click the link, book a call, their team, it's 15 minute free consultation. It will either tell you it's a fit or will point in the right direction, worst case scenario, now onto the podcast. That's every single podcast episode. And then in the back end of the episode, we do another ad that is holy shit. You just finished listening to 60 minutes of me talking. That means that you probably like the guest. You should check out the action Academy community. If you like them, so you can hang out with them and you can do deals together in partner. So we have a CTA at the beginning, a CTA at the end. We don't do mid role. And then what they do is they go in the show description, there's a link to my website and there's also a link to the just direct calendar lead to book with my team. And then each call is the same way I've done over 1,000 of them myself, 1,000. So for the entrepreneur that's listening to this, that's got a podcast and they're on their 10th sales call and they want to hire somebody else or a VA to do it. I'm sorry, but you're not a business owner. Suck it up and take the calls in the beginning, learn what your customer is saying and what they need. I did 1,000. So every call is ran the same way. We say, we start with, hey, what's up, you know, like what brought you here? Was it a TikTok? Was it a podcast? Was it like whatever? What happened? That made you book the call. What are you trying to get out of the call? Then it's where are we at today and where are we trying to get to? You know, like what's the cash flow at today? What do you want the cash flow to be? How fast? And 15 minutes of a call, 12 minutes of it is us asking questions and the last three minutes is the pitch. If they get to that point, if it's not a fit and we can tell within that 12 minutes of discovery, then we'll see like, hey, I don't think this is quite the best thing for you. I would instead check out the book, listen to this podcast episode. I'll send it to you for free or check out this other community. But after the 12 minutes, if we feel it's a fit, we're going to make it offer, which is, hey, here's the community, here's what it looks like. And then from that point, they get sent an email, a thing that I do that I wouldn't necessarily recommend. But for us, it works is we have a 72 hour kill switch on our offer. So I just pull it and I can back the talk because I literally just told somebody they were trying to say, hey, I'll join, but in July, I've got a bunch of stuff going on. I'm going to join in July. And I said, thank you, but no. And I explained why, because in our thing, I'm like, it's action, academy. If you get a piece of real estate or if you get a business that comes across your desk, you need to be able to act and jump on it. We don't need people taking months to make decisions, which is why we have a 72 hour kill switch. And I tell people it's a hell yes or it's a no. If you're still on the fence after multiple days, it's not a fit. And that's what the cadence looks like. So we convert at 61% of offers sent and we convert at 37% of gross calls. So if we have 100 calls, we'll convert 37 of them gross, but 61 of them would be for offers that we submit. So the metrics that we're focusing on right now is how to increase the quality of the person that is booking the call and just like really, really qualifying that person to where it's not somebody saying, hey, you know, I want to learn about real estate investing. I want to buy my first house versus somebody that's just like, dude, I've got two air B&Bs. I make $20,000 a month. I need to do something more, show me the way like that is the call we'll take all day, but we'll help both. So you'd say anybody who bucks a call, you guys take a call, is that right? If we look at it's an application, so you fill out the form, so it isn't that. Yeah. So it's an application. So we will look at the call nine times out of 10, we're going to take the call unless it's just very extraordinarily obvious that it's not a fit. Then we'll send them an email and say, hey, little early, you know, don't think this is the best thing. Check out the book first. If you like the book, you know, send us your favorite chapter from the book and rebook a call. And we say that purposely to make sure that they actually read it. And that knocks out 80% of the people. Right. So when you say kill switch, you mean that after 72 hours, you guys rescind the offer. Yeah. Done. Can't do it. Oh, ever. Nope. That's wild. I guess if somebody were like, I've had one or two instances where somebody like six months later was just like, yo, it's time. I'm like, really? And they're like, yeah, it's time. I'm like, okay, we got two hours after I send this. Let's do it. And then they're paying the higher price. But for the most part, people make a pretty hard and fast decision if it's for them or if it isn't, which is that's good. What I think is perfection. That is like better. Symphony of sales. Yeah. We don't follow up with people. I can't tell you how many times I've been, you know, either for my own, for my sales reps or if I'm taking the sales call myself, I'm like, look, I just need you to decide. You know, I don't need you to join this thing. I just need you for your own sake to make a decision. Are you in or you out? Because the worst thing you can do is be on the fence for a whole freaking year because nothing's going to happen. The best thing about being a business owner is you get to control the freaking rules. And what I don't want to be is I don't want to be the guy. Maybe I'm sacrificing revenue. I could give a crap less. I'm not going to be the guy that's groveling and begging with my hands out four months later for the eighth follow up email for somebody to join my mastermind. That would lead to a water down community and experience for our members that were a hell yes. Right. I'm going to get a result because in order for them to get the results, they need to be action takers. Bingo. It's fun. Very, very cool. Yeah, man. It is cool. It's such a position of strength to be able to do that. But it really like on the surface, it could be like, I don't know, I think what I'm trying to say is that type of policy really is, I think, in the best interest of the people that you're working with. Yeah. And look, we're not ghost in them. If you want to talk to another member, like you want to talk to one of our people, like we're happy to set up a call, I'll talk to them. I just talked to a guy that was on the fence and he was like, Hey, I just really need to talk to Brian. I'll take the call. I took the call. He's going to join. And I talked to another guy that I was trying to join in July because he's renovating his house and I was like, All right, don't think it's a fit. Yeah. But yeah, it's a privilege place to come from as a business owner. But then again, like I intentionally set up the business in such a way to where we could operate that way. So we, but that's getting into cash flow and reserves and all that, which is probably maybe a little inside baseball for the show a little bit, yeah, a little bit outside of growing the podcast, but it's still very good. So let's talk about, I mean, you have been publishing the show daily now for a couple of years, I think. Yeah. It's a lot of content, man. How are you keeping things fresh for you as the creator? Oh, I need a vacation. Right. I'm going to take a vacation for the first time in three years. I'm going to take a couple of weeks off of no podcasts. My fear has been if I do that, then I won't go back and I'll convert to the dark side. Well, I'll be like screw the podcast I've done. I don't think that will happen because I've met so many interesting people through the doing the show. It is just like even like five episodes a week is a lot. So we do three solo shows and two like interview style shows. So for us, they're really be operating at capacity. We're doing three guests interviews and three interviews I'm hosting per week. Wow. And it's becoming to get, beginning to become a little much. The reason that we do it just started as, hey, I'm doing one a week. We have too much inflow. Let's do two episodes a week. Okay, let's do a show on Monday where we're talking about what I'm doing and then how much more difficult would it be to do just two more shows and we do like 10 minute episodes, like Monday, Wednesday, Friday or we repost an old episode. I think the answer is me just becoming more strict with my systems because if we're being completely honest, if I just dedicated one hour at a Sunday, I could knock out all the podcasts for the week just being like, all right, I could probably do two weeks worth the podcast in one hour, but I just don't, but yeah, right now it's five episodes a week Monday through Friday, just because I was getting pissed off whenever I saw a dip on like the first day where I didn't have a show. That's why that's why I didn't really know like deep reason. And now it's every single day we get we get downloads and somebody's somebody will say, oh, that's just the auto downloader for Apple BS. It's not. Maybe the downloads grow throughout the entire day, like they crescendo and they go up and down throughout the day. So we have data on it. So it sounds like you're saying that you're are you making an episode every day? For the last three years, I have been a terrible idea if it works, it works, it works. It works. But I can do it much more efficiently now and that's part of I'm addicted to work. So now I'm getting to a point where it's just like, how about on Mondays, we just do all the podcasts on one day and then we don't record for the rest of the week. I'm like, that's a novel idea. We should do that. Like everybody else does besides me. That's a great idea. Yeah. So we're going to probably pivot to that. So and you're also, I mean, last time we chatted last year, I think you're making two videos a day for short form two, is that still the cadence that you're keeping? Yeah. That one's a little bit more easy and to be completely frank, like in my business, I'm the CMO. I'm the chief marketing officer more than the CEO at this point. That is the position that I play in the business. People are so quick and fast to delegate and elevate their way out of their business. But the reality is you can only delegate and elevate when you have things that you are better suited to work on that are higher dollar productive, not just you sitting around eating pringles out of a can on a Tuesday. So for me, it's marketing. So I'm going to be actually much more intentional with our content and with the podcast. And so the reason I keep going is like, what's my excuse for not doing it, you know, I'm like, dude, I've got nothing else to do. Mine's will make wonderful podcast episodes and great content and go all in on YouTube. But I've been dragging my feet on YouTube. Yeah. Two videos a day. Yeah. Every day. Two videos a day, a full podcast episode, two to three guest interviews a week. Yeah, man, you're just cranking out the content. And then it sounds like you've got your team to work on the fulfillment of the product. And the CEO type stuff. God bless them. Yeah, dude. We run a full on business with 300 members now. So it's a full business and I've got people that worked full time for me. That makes six figures that work for me now. And they're very highly paid and highly trained and that the best of what they do. And they run the community itself and they run the business and my job is to make action academy known and to be the, I call myself like the lighthouse out in the harbor, calling the ships the harbor, and then they help with the fulfillment. So in a business context, like the metric that I focus on is called CAC, the cost to acquire a customer. And what they focus on is called the LTV, the lifetime value of the customer. My job is to decrease the amount of money that we have to spend to get a new lead. And their job is to make the lead more valuable. So that's through like renewals, upsells, making, yeah. Yeah. And how have you found these incredible team members? Glad you asked. They're from within the team. They're from within the community. No way. Yeah. So we only hire internal. Yeah. So people who are in action academy first, yeah, they have to start from action academy. So when you build a community for high performers, it gets quite easy to build a massive business and businesses with high performers. So every single applicant that we bring in, I'm like, okay, we'll get you financially free one way. One of them may be you working with action academy. And so my COO, Caitlin, she became financially free herself, stay a home mom before kids. She became financially free through action academy. My head of acquisition success, Mason went from zero doors to now 87 rental properties in one year without any of his own money. So he's a product to action academy. And so now I'm paying him enough money to retire his wife and bring her home to be with their kids. And so my assistant that lives in Peru, I pay her $50,000 a year US. So that she could be financially free in Peru and I've got an assistant in the Philippines that I just funded his entire wedding from a bonus from a one time bonus. And so it's just like when you have people like that, it's very easy to sell and to service the customer because they are the customer. Yeah. And as you can't compete with that, you know, and so I don't have any external hires for that reason. One other thing that's been cool to see over the past year is that you've been rubbing some shoulders with some big name content creators. It's been cool to see you want some big shows. You've been speaking, you know, on panels and at events with huge names and, you know, I also had one on your show. What have you learned over the past year, interacting one-on-one with these high level content creators? Yeah. So I live down the street from the likes of Noah Kagan's and, you know, I've met Ali Abdul at a couple of parties and we've spoken and we text sometimes. And what I would say is for the, for the micro and the macro, for the micro, they all have systems and it's hyper intentional focus. So if you look at your favorite creator, they're spending about 10 times more money, 10 times more effort and 10 times more time, then you believe they are and it's for a reason. It's because they are the biggest believers that brand culture and media is the best thing that you could have is a brand for your business because you can build any business off of your brand. So they're like converted, they are all in. These people that making $20 million a year are taken an entire day from their calendar on the Friday, just the film YouTube videos because they realize don't kill the golden goose. So it's a bit of a cycle that you get caught into but it helps a lot of people at scale. So I would say that they're more organized than you think that they are and they're spending a lot more time, energy and effort on and their teams are bigger than you think they are. Like you see one person that's like an alley of doll that's running this YouTube thing making millions of dollars a year. He's got an entire internal team of 20 and he's got another team of six that runs his YouTube. So they have a lot of teams and they invested in those teams before the revenue. So that's a painful process that I'm having to kind of bite right now. Yeah. What do you have to say to the solar printer who's listening in and wants to create all this content all the time and is just completely by themselves being stuffed out for the first time and they hear that and they get discouraged. What do you say to them? Yeah. Brick by brick. I did the same thing. My business is very fun to talk about today not as much last year when I was starting it and launching it from scratch and I didn't know what payroll was and Caitlin worked for me for free for two months because I didn't know if I could afford an employee. I was like, what do I even pay myself? I didn't know. So yeah, it's fun now. But back in the day, like even when you and I first started, this all started in 2021. It's just do a video a day. It's not that hard. Just talk into your phone. I'd be like, yo, this is what I'm going through and the more vulnerable and kind of uncut none edited that you are, the better the video will ironically perform with today's content trends. And so I tell people like a lot of action academy people, you know, they're trying to buy real estate and they need to raise money from other people from private investors and they have 600 followers on Instagram or something. They don't got big followings. But they'll post this video and say, ah, I just tried to flip this house and the roof caved in and the construction was double what I thought it was going to be and I don't know what I'm going to do, but here's how I'm going to fix it. Here's how you can avoid this mistake and it's just simple. No thought to it. Just this is what I'm doing. And you'll be surprised at how fast they're able to raise a million dollars from other people that watch of the 600 people that follow them. So I would say just know your audience, know who you're speaking to and who you're helping. And then at that point, you just have to go do a thousand videos over time. And at that point, you'll get really good at making videos and you'll know what hits and what doesn't. I can look at a video and I can say 50, 50, 50 if this is going to get a million views or not. Now, after a thousand videos and what works for Brian is different than what works for Kevin is different than what will work for you. So my advice is go into your niche if you are gardening, if you are Amazon, if you are book talk, if you are entrepreneurship. Go follow a hundred creators that are in the niche. Look at what styles of videos that they're doing, copy those to begin, copy the frameworks that they do. All my travel videos, I don't come up with creative frameworks. I look at what other people are doing and I just put my own spin and my own content to it in the same style and format. Like, just go ahead, don't reinvent the wheel. Do that, see what hits and then eventually your own voice will start to come through. Brian, I appreciate you so much, man. If folks want to enter your sphere, learn more about you, what you do, your story, what can they do? I'm Brian Lubin on Instagram. You can go to the Action Academy podcast if you're still hanging with us at this point. That means that you enjoy business and real estate. You should check it out. We interview a millionaires every single week, every single day. It is my baby. We're about to hit our millionth download. Now it's going to come up in July after three years. We're about to hit our millionth download. So I'm pumped for that. So go follow the podcast, check that out for a couple episodes and you'll see if you want to join our community just from the podcast first. Or you can, if you're a reader, you can check out from passive to passionate. How to quit your job, grow your wealth, turn your passions into profits. It's on Amazon. I spent 1,137 hours writing the book last year. It was a bulk of my year and it walks you through step-by-step. Everything that we talked about, including how to build businesses by businesses, all that good stuff. Excellent. I'm living back on Grow the Show. Can't wait to have you back in another year or so. I'm going to go for it. But until then, thank you so much, brother. That is going to do it for this episode of Grow the Show. Now I have a quick favor to ask you. If you've ever gotten any value from this podcast and you haven't already, please leave us a five-star rating and if you're feeling generous, a review in the app that you're using to hear my voice right now. It just takes a couple seconds, but it really goes a long way in helping us to share even more valuable growth and monetization tactics here on the show because it helps us land bigger guests and it helps show the world that what we're doing here is actually valuable. So once again, if you've ever gotten any value from the show and you haven't already, please just take a moment, leave us a five-star rating, maybe a brief review on what type of value you've gotten and I will be eternally grateful. This episode was produced by me with post-production by podcast boutique and if you want your show to be post-produced with quality really freaking fast and if you want to save yourself and your team tons of time working on your podcast, you should chat with podcast boutique. Just head to podcastboutique.com or click the link in the show notes and set up time with them because I spent no time editing this episode and neither should you. All right, that's going to do it for a girl-to-show. My name is Kevin Schviddlin, I'll see you next time.