The Power of Virtual Assistants and Online Mentoring, with Ravi Abuvala

It's August 2017 in Nashville, Tennessee. In just a few days, a rare natural phenomenon will occur for the first time in decades. There will be a total solar eclipse, meaning that in the middle of the day, for two whole minutes, the moon will completely block out the sun, and the sky will be totally dark in the middle of the day. Naturally, people are planning to celebrate. Many Nashville residents are taking off work, and many more people are coming into town to see the event. One of those people was me. This was nearly four years ago. At that time, I was a low-level software developer in an early career development program at a big health insurance company. I and my college best friend, named Rend, drove 15 hours from Philly to Nashville to spend the weekend hanging out with my coworker, Cruz, who was based there. Cruz invited two other friends to come have fun for the weekend as well. So there were five of us in total. We got to Nashville on Thursday, had a blast partying all weekend, saw the eclipse on Monday, and then we all went our separate ways home. Now I had no idea at the time, but that trip would eventually change my life. On the drive home, stuck in Virginia traffic, my best friend, Rend, and I listened to an audiobook that would set us both on the path out of the 95 life and into entrepreneurship. That book is called The Four Hour Work Week. Just one year after listening to that audiobook together, I was out on my own as a podcast entrepreneur, and Rend was getting ready to move to France to study wine and cooking. At that moment, the moment that Rend and I had listening to that audiobook together wasn't the only moment that weekend that secretly set me on a life-changing path. The other moment was the moment that I met one of the dudes that I would go on to hang out with that weekend. That dude is named Ravi Abuvala. Now like I mentioned, Ravi had come to Nashville that weekend to visit his childhood friend, Cruz, who I was co-workers with. And while Rend and I at the time were software developers, Ravi was about to go to law school. We all converged upon Nashville that weekend to visit Cruz and have a good time, and that's exactly what we did. We partied, we had a blast, and then we went our separate ways. Coincidentally though, Ravi also discovered entrepreneurship shortly after that trip to Nashville. And while Rend moved to France to study cooking, and while I launched a podcast that would eventually grow past 100,000 downloads and $100,000 in revenue, Ravi started two businesses. One of them he took past a million dollars in one year. And the second one is about to reach $10 million in two and a half years, insane. And after meeting Ravi back in 2017, hanging out for a weekend, following him on Instagram, and then watching him completely transform his life in a matter of months, I needed to know how he did it. Because for me, after one year of entrepreneurship, I was still miserable. I had launched a cool podcast, yes, but I didn't know how to grow my audience or how to meaningfully monetize. In business terms, I didn't know how to scale. And after just one year of trying to figure all that stuff out on my own, I was totally burnt out and ready to give up. And it was in that moment of desperation that I reached out to Ravi to learn how the heck he went from law school dropout to a million dollar entrepreneur in virtually no time. And how I could do the same thing with my online business, after all, a podcast is an online business. He would teach me his ways and I would go on to take what he taught me and to apply it to podcasting and then take two podcasts past six figures in revenue. And today, he's going to share those exact same things with you. This is Grow the Show, the podcast to help you grow your podcast. My name is Kevin Schmidland and my mission is to help you, the independent podcaster, to grow your audience and monetize now so you can have a thriving podcast business. Today, we're actually reaching outside of the world of podcasting to chat with my business coach Ravi Abuvala. Ravi has launched and scaled two online businesses past a million dollars. And he's largely done so by utilizing virtual assistants and highly efficient systems. Today he's here to teach you how to apply both of those things to your podcast business. So if you're looking to scale your podcast, to grow the show, then you are in the right place. Stick around. My name is Ravi Abuvala, the founder of scaling with systems. Scaling with systems is an online company that helps entrepreneurs to scale their businesses. Their intensive course, coaching and community program teaches the fundamentals of sales, marketing and delegation. And they even find and place their clients with a fully trained virtual assistant who already knows how to handle a lot of the grunt work. Ravi has taken this business past $7 million in only 26 months and he's only 27 years old. On top of that, as recently as three years ago, Ravi wasn't even planning on becoming an entrepreneur. The goal since I was very little was to be a lawyer and then pretty much after I graduated from Florida State, my dad was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer about three days after that. And that pretty much caused me to shift everything I was doing and instead did what every college graduate loves to do, moved into my dad's house, right back in the parents house. And spent the next year doing law school admission test prep and taking my dad to the hospital five days a week for like six, seven hours a day. And then I took the test. I got in the top 10% of test takers in the nation, but like you I was kind of introduced, I know you'd reference Tim Ferriss for our work week. I was introduced to some of that world a little bit and kind of I pumped the brakes on the whole law school thing because I started talking to lawyers and they were telling me not to go to law school and that was kind of a red flag for me a little bit. And so I pretty much bought my first online course and that was my entrance into the online advertising world and that kind of snowballed into where I am now. Thankfully, Ravi's dad is now a cancer survivor. And while that major life event did positively shift Ravi's career path from something he didn't want to do into something he was excited to do, he still had a major problem. Ravi had no idea how to run or grow a successful online business. Here's how he describes that first year of entrepreneurship. Pretty brutal to be honest with you, not sexy at all, not what you see on Instagram. As soon as I decided to drop out of law school, I told my dad, he told me I was throwing my life away. So I didn't have any money. I just spent a year before that taking care of my dad and studying. I had college debt. So I got a job in an Italian restaurant making $2,000 a month serving breadsticks essentially, right? I started going from like a top law school in the nation to work in an Italian restaurant. My parents thought I lost my mind and I just started learning and doing coursework and then reaching out to people and like cold messaging people and the first eight months we did $3,000 total revenue. $3,000 in eight months. That is pretty brutal. I actually thought I made a major mistake. My dad, he didn't kick me out of his house but it was like if you're not going to law school and you're not making money, you can't live here. I ended up living my brother's couch. I was working as a dishwasher in his restaurant and I still waking up at 5 a.m. shooting these like personalized cold message videos trying to get this off the ground but it was not a pretty time. And so if anybody here is going through that, this listens right now. I'm just telling you like it might even be longer than you think but the only difference between that the success on the unsuccessful is you just you keep on doing it. You just push through it to the other end. So how did he keep going through all of those early mornings on the couch? What was his motivation? He's out. It was the time he spent bringing his dad to chemotherapy. You see the same people. You go three times a week. You see the same people every single time or one of the same schedule. So I started becoming friends with them and talking to them. And some of them were like 30 years old, 35 years old with stage three, stage four lung cancer. And so I really hate to sound super cheesy here but it was like I was staring death in the face. I literally was with some of these people. Life is very, very fleeting. So he kept pushing towards his dream with little results. As Ravi said in those first eight months while trying to figure it out all by himself, he made a grand total of $3,000. And then I went to my first ever mastermind and that's when everything changed. A mastermind is when a bunch of entrepreneurs who are trying to grow their businesses come together in a community to trade notes, learn from each other and grow together. We talked about masterminds in last month's episode with Jay Klaus. The Grow the Show podcast accelerator is a mastermind. And really the whole concept of a mastermind is becoming really, really popular on the internet. And why not? It's an extremely effective way to better yourself because you join a set of peers who are smart, talented and all at around the same level, which is key. Everyone I had learned from before was in through courses and really get a talk to them forever. And they were so far ahead of me. And I met people that were like maybe two to three steps ahead of me. And that was when I was like, oh my, like through my age, I could like touch them and like taste them. And I was like, okay, these are real life people. And so then I started listening to them. And that was when about 90 days after that, we had our first $30,000 month, right? So it did more like 10 times way to the past eight months in 30 days. And it was from going to that first mastermind. Shortly after that, Ravi took that first business called prospect social past a million dollars. Then he launched his second business scaling with systems, which will hit 10 million dollars within the next six months in sane. Now I will admit this to the moon scaling and growth is really impressive to anyone who hears about it. But for me personally, it was absolutely mind blowing because I actually watched Ravi transform his life in real time by following him on Instagram. He was just a regular guy that I met in Nashville. And then I had a front row seat to this transformation. What do you remember from the weekend that you and I met? Yeah, it's funny. I knew we were going to bring this up on the podcast here to be quite frank with you not much. Those were actually back when I was drinking. But this is when I was still going to law school or planning on going to law school. And I remember driving to Nashville to go watch a solar eclipse at my friend, our mutual friend, Cruz's house. And I remember pretty much like meeting this tall guy named Kevin there and I was like, Hey, what's going on Kevin? He's like, what do you do? Oh, cool. I'm going to law school. And the rest of the weekend was a blur. I guess the eclipse was an excuse to drink for me back then, but not anymore. Remember at that point, I was a low level software developer at a big health insurance company and Ravi was getting ready to go to law school. We were both living a life that society had prescribed to us and we were both kind of crushing it. We had a great job with a great salary. Ravi had gotten into the best law schools in the country, but we were both kind of miserable. Yet it was really hard to reject that life and take the leap into entrepreneurship. Coincidentally, just months after Ravi and I met each other, partied for a weekend and then won our separate ways, we both also separately took that leap into entrepreneurship at the same time in the summer of 2018. And we've both been successful, but Ravi has indeed grown his business much, much faster than I have. Today, he's going to share some of the exact tactics that he used to do that and that you can use to grow your podcast business. But first, it's important to understand the three key realizations Ravi had early on about entrepreneurship. These three realizations empowered his explosive growth as a business owner and as a person. We've driven my own growth as an entrepreneur ever since Ravi shared them with me last year. And today, I'm hoping that these three lessons will help you unlock the next level of growth in your podcast business. So the first thing was, I actually got to speak to someone that was really close to me that was doing it. So then it was just solidified, okay, if I keep on doing this, I can get that. The cool thing, Steve Jobs once said it, but the world changes when you realize that everything around you was created by somebody not so much smarter than yourself. And so that was like, I was seeing people that I was like, oh, they're not like this, you know, astrophysicist. Like I definitely could figure this out. And so that was number one. Number two was that I was so embarrassed of me switching over to entrepreneurship and not being successful in entrepreneurship. I didn't want anybody in my close family or friends to know that I was entrepreneur until I was already a successful entrepreneur. Like I didn't want anybody to see me hustling and grinding. I just wanted to be like, oh, you know, pull up one day, I had in my mind, I would pull up one day to the local bar in a Ferrari. Like what are you doing, Ravi? Oh, you know, this whole thing, that was what I used to think would go in my mind. And the issue is, and I've learned this now, and you know, I've talked about this inside of my program, but you know, people buy from you because they trust you, they trust your company, and they believe and trust your product or service will deliver the results. Well, in the very beginning, when you're starting out, that product or service that have delivered results, that you don't even know if you can trust that. You actually don't know if you can deliver that yet. And so you have to rely on the trust of you and trust of your company. And the issue with starting out and not talking to anybody that knows you is that you're only talking to people that don't know you, so they don't trust you, and they don't trust your product or service because you've never had any results. So I was doing cold outbound messages all the time, and nobody responded to be no one to work with me. And I'm like, this is so hard. And so what I did was I was on the biggest things I did. I posted on my Facebook group, the only client, her name is Jennifer Wolf. She runs Trufit Pilates in Bluffton, South Carolina, I'll give you a shout out. So a city of 14,000 people, but we were smashing it for her campaign. She was my only free trial client I had. So I just remember I posted it on my Facebook page one day, and I said, hey, check out my client. I've made her this amount of money and this amount of days. If anybody's looking for help, let me know. I remember I went on a run, and the whole run, I'm like, oh, my God, I shouldn't have done this. Everyone's going to make fun of me. And I go back to my computer. I open it up, and we had like 80 comments at the time, like five or six shares. I had so many DMs, and people were like, Ravi, I didn't know you'd do this stuff. I remember you were so smart and college, like, could you help me? Could you help my friend, like, you know, and all of a sudden, it was just like calls, calls, calls, calls. And so yeah, the big major thing for me was like selling to leveraging that personal network first to prove a concept and prove like that you can actually deliver results. And then you take those case studies and sell to the colder wider audience, go after one niche, one industry, and become the absolute very best at that. One industry, one offer, make it duplicatable, and then scale that one up. Okay, okay, okay. We'll hold them. How does all of this relate to you as a podcaster? It's a cool story, but what does it mean for you? Okay, let's break those three realizations down. Realization number one, you need to put yourself around people who have already achieved what you want to achieve. Once you do that, you get to know these people as people, and you see their results. It starts to become a little more real for you. It feels easier. In the case of podcasting, that means that you need to somehow surround yourself with other good podcasters, preferably those who are just two to three steps ahead of you. Now the Grow the Show free Facebook group does have over 500 like-minded podcasters, and the Grow the Show accelerator program has over 70 podcasters who have all committed themselves to growing together, but you do not have to get it from us. There are other groups around as well, but you really should join one. Realization number two, Ravi learned, is the power of your own network. What does this mean for you as a podcaster? Well, it relates directly to podcast sponsorship. Ravi was having an awful time finding customers for his business, and he was cold emailing people every single morning at 5 a.m. to see if they would work with him. Those people didn't even respond because they didn't know him. They didn't trust him. Then he put just one post on his personal Facebook page about his business. He went for a run, and he came home to 80 messages of people wanting to work with him. This lesson can be applied directly to finding podcast sponsorship. Pitch to people who already know you or your show first, instead of cold pitching Squarespace and Casper mattresses like other podcasters do right out of the gate. Now yes, you do need to make sure that that sponsor actually wants to reach your target audience. If your audience definition is vague, no matter where the sponsorship comes from, it's not going to work. That is lesson number three. You need to niche all the way down. The third lesson is one we've shared many times on this program. You need to be more specific about your audience. If you need help with that, listen to episode two of Grow the Show with Eric Newsom. He'll explain exactly how you can do that and why it's so important. So niche down, that's Ravi's third lesson, and he actually also snuck in a fourth one. That's just as important. Create a duplicatable backend system duplicatable. We keep using that word in this episode, but what exactly does it mean to make your business and your podcast duplicatable? Something that's duplicatable, you can almost remove yourself from as much as possible. And that is the basis of Ravi's teachings scaling with systems. As a podcaster, that allows you to remove yourself from the production process, and that will help you effectively scale and grow your podcast business. But wait a second, it's your podcast, you're the host, it's your show. Why should you try to remove yourself from it? So like an example of my coaching program or in a podcast, like sure, I need to be there on the coaching calls or you need to be there on the podcast, but 98% of the other stuff you don't need to be there for. Or finding your guests, researching your guests, creating the questions, you know, pre-guest interviews, post-editing, publishing distribution, all that other stuff, you don't have to be a part of any of that process, yet we all decide that we need to be. And there's no way anybody else could do it as good as us, which could be true. But if someone did it 80% as well as you did, would that be okay, right? Like is that fine, most likely that will be? And so all it takes is actually figuring it out and putting it on paper. So that sounds a lot like the lesson that time management expert and a German cornic shared with us in last week's episode about time management. You just sit down, do a part of your process and write it down. It sets you up for outsourcing to someone else. So we've heard how this is important now, two episodes in a row. But I can still hear that voice in your head saying, how is it that I can remove myself from this? It's my show. I can't hear you. Think about it like this. It's like you're a successful painter. You can't hire somebody to do the actual painting and create the art of your business. You can, however, hire an assistant to keep track of supplies and financials. You can hire a marketer to run your social media ads. You can hire a web developer to write the code for your web store. In our case, if you're a successful podcaster, yes, of course you have to host the show. But you too could and should outsource production. You can outsource researching and countless other tasks that need to get done. Are you with me? Well, there's one thing that we actually have to watch out for. You can't just go from zero to 60 and outsource everything right off the bat. While many entrepreneurs make the mistake of never outsourcing, many other entrepreneurs make the opposite mistake of outsourcing too early. So as business owners who want to grow a podcast business and who understand the need to outsource the grant work, what is the first thing we need to understand about when to outsource? Confirm product market fit. So if you're getting one to two clients a month, is it because you're not doing enough outreach and no one hears about you or is it because nobody wants what you're selling? To translate that into podcasting, we need to confirm that the show is good and that it's a show that strangers will want to listen to. I can't tell you how many podcasters I chat with who say, oh, I get like 50 downloads an episode and their show is super vague. Really doesn't have a topic and it turns out that those 50 people who are tuning into the show are just their friends and family who are being supportive. They don't actually have podcast market fit. The show isn't interesting to strangers again, to learn how to do that. Simply listen to episode two of this podcast, grow the show with Eric Newsom. So once you have the right podcast market fit and you know that there is a really specific niche of strangers who are going to love your show, then it's time to start establishing systems and outsourcing. Even so, as you start to think about establishing systems, beware of one more common mistake. The first thing I'd see is people worrying about building the wrong systems, right? They worry about systems they need like 10 steps down the road instead of the system they need right now. So an example of that could be either the people that are podcasts on here or coaches on here is like, they're worried about how do I do the back end fulfillment? How do I make sure I have this perfect or the distribution of my podcasts? And you've even figured out, how am I going to get guests on the show in the first place? How do I systemize that? How do I get really great talented qualified people on the show or how do I get really great clients? And so the issue is that I know the systems, but I'm doing it out of order. And the reason most people do things out of order like that is because the things you know to be need to do step one and step two are the most difficult, they're the scariest. The one's most likely to end in rejection. So instead of worried about let me asking if this very famous version will be on my show, let me instead tinker on the back end about what my website should look like and what my color should be and I'll build that system back there because that's not scary. No one's going to hurt me. I see this all the time in podcasters as well. For us, for podcasters, the scary work is the foundational work. Sharing out your 10-word description, your super specific audience definition and whether you have podcast market fit is your show good enough to get complete strangers to give you 45 minutes of their attention. It's doing the boring and difficult work of defining your audience, niching down, experimenting with targeted daily engagement. Most podcasters skip these things and they jump right to making 30 episodes and then they wonder why they can't get any more listeners or sponsors. It is scary, but you have to do the foundational work first. If you don't, then I will tell you right now your show is not going to grow. It's not going to blow up with some fancy celebrity guest and you're not going to get any return from grinding it out and making all these episodes. You have to do the boring and scary work. Okay, so let's say you've done the boring and scary work. You've established your audience. You know that you have a show that's working for strangers. Now the name of the game is to grow and you're ready to outsource. Remember that mastermind conference that totally changed Ravi's business and his life? One of the biggest things they talked about there was delegation. Even still, Ravi then faced the problem that most new podcasters have. He was ready to outsource, but he didn't have a budget. I didn't have 30, 50, 80,000 dollars to hire someone in the United States. Yet he still needed to outsource in order to hit the next step. And so I was introduced to a virtual assistant. A virtual assistant is a contractor you hire usually on an hourly basis to help you with your day-to-day tasks. And because they work totally and completely remotely, you can hire people from all over the world, including countries with a lower cost of living where the dollar goes much, much further. Ravi found a couple of really great employees based in the Philippines. What I figured out was like, okay, these people are $3, $5 an hour, which is above minimum wage, three to five times above minimum wage in the Philippines. And yet they're really effective workers because they're highly educated and many of them speak fantastic English. And even if you hire one who isn't a great fit, you're not going to lose out on thousands of dollars from just making one mistake. The risk is so low because the cost is so low, right? What is the worst going to happen? They send the wrong email or they cost you a week's worth of work. It doesn't work out, so $40, $80, $120. Still, even though the risk is low, you might get nervous when hiring a virtual assistant. And you might start having thoughts like this. They're going to run away, they're going to steal my information, they're going to build their own business. But if you just think like the biggest question, and we always talk about this inside my circles, is like, what's the risk and reward here? So risk is I work with them. Maybe they, let's say they take my messaging and they go start their own business. Or I work with them and they decide they're not doing a good job. I paid them for two weeks and they leave. OK, but what's the reward if it works out? OK, I have something that's making me money. I can two times it, three times it, five times it, ten times it, and pay somebody else $400, $500 to do it. So you just have to view it through that lens. And I think a lot of people are just afraid. Even I think the hiring the first employee is really scary. And now that you've done yours, like, I'm sure you're going to hire a few more pretty soon on here. Because like now you see it, yeah, now you, once you see the value of it, you're like, I don't need to be doing anything, but like this podcast right here, right? But I think the biggest limiting belief is just getting past that first. And that's why I love VA's because it's like, the worst that happens is like you lose $50 and then you're like, OK, great, let me just go find somebody else. The other piece that you might be surprised about is how many different things these VA's can do and can do really well. They'll do a lot of things. I mean, we have ours to lead generation, bookkeeping, lead qualification, ads creation, media buying, funnel creation, customer success management, podcast research. You know, you name it. Oh, we've done a book flight for me, international travel, negotiate down deals. Like, but yeah, they're human beings just like you and I. And like you said, they speak multiple languages. Sometimes I have my VA's that I think are smarter than me in a lot of different ways. And I think they can definitely, definitely help out your business. And that's another limiting belief is like, oh, they wouldn't be able to do this thing. I say this sometimes in podcasts, but you give me your best employee. I'm going to put up again one of my virtual assistants and we're going to see who comes out on top here. And so if you're like me, after learning about all of these benefits, you might be thinking, hey, hiring a virtual assistant sounds great, but how the heck do I actually find one that I can trust? So number one is just like I call it the close network, right? Friends, family, you hit up somebody, hey, you know, do you have a VA? You post it on Facebook group, and I have a VA, whatever it is. That's like the beginning of your business when you have a lot of time, you don't have a lot of money because there's a little risk involved in there, right? You don't know how qualified these people are. They're usually not coming fully trained in. You know, you don't know if these people are good referrals. Are they going to steal your information to your business and you kind of like that? But they're usually free. Just like, hey, here's this person you can start working with them. So that's the easiest if you're just starting out. That's probably the simplest way that you can do it. Option number two is usually like freelance websites, you know, like five or upwork stuff like that. Only issues with those is, you know, and you can attest to this yourself. But there's a big difference with having a contractor who's working, you know, for your business and having a team member dedicated to the growth of your business, right? And the third and final option is as a virtual assistant placement agency, right? That's what we are at scaling with systems. I use a different one when I first started as well. It was definitely pretty expensive for me back then when I first started out. But Mel Jane, who I've now had for two and a half years, the first day she came in, she was fully trained on what she needed to do. And that was massively beneficial for me. And I was starting in my business where I was like, okay, I started understanding the difference between time and money. And I was like, okay, I'd rather get someone fully trained that understands that I do everything I can come in, hit the ground running than me having to teach them myself. And so that's like, those are pretty much your three major options. If you have no money, I recommend doing the referral route. If you have a little bit of money and you just want someone fully trained, I recommend doing kind of the VA agency route. And then if you just are like, I need a one off, you can do something like upwork or fiber. You can totally start small and get some tasks off of your plate now. So you can focus on growth and monetization. But it is important to start to decide that your podcast is a business and even to start generating revenue right now, even if you still have a full time job. Now, I will say this stuff is not easy. It's going to be a lot worse before it gets better. You are going to be your own cheerleading squad. But then if you can weather those really bad storms, I'll tell you what, they have the ability to change clients lives, people's lives, you know, to live a really true life of the film and freedom. For me, it was worth every single second. The same is true for me too. It gets harder before it gets easier, but it is possible to accomplish what you want to accomplish. The key, as Ravi has mapped out, is to surround yourself with other people who have already achieved what you want to achieve, even if it involves paying to attain that knowledge and join that community. I am proud to say that Ravi is my business coach. I've paid him and scaling with systems thousands to learn how to work with VAs, how to make Facebook ads, how to scale a coaching business. And the reason I've done that is so that I can learn how to reach and serve you. You would not be hearing my voice today if I hadn't made that investment in myself. So my message to you today is to please invest in yourself, hire a coach, select a mentor, join a community of people who are two to three steps ahead of you, and learn from them instead of trying to figure it all out on your own and by googling things. Very, very, very, very few people have ever amassed massive success that way. Now, if you want me to be your coach, if you want to join the Grow the Show community, the links are in the show notes. You can get instant access to all of that. Either way, even if you don't join my community or Ravi's community, even if you never join our paid programs, that's fine. Just please promise me that you will go out and get the mentorship and the community from somewhere. So you can follow in the footsteps of others and model them and learn from them. That way, you can fast track your show into being a thriving podcast business instead of just waiting and waiting and waiting for the show to blow up. It never does and you pod fade away. Don't do it that way. Please hire a coach. Okay, I'm done. Grow the Show is a Q9 production. This episode was hosted and produced by me with Associate Production by Catherine Nails and Theme Music by myself and Tom Magoverne. For Grow the Show, my name is Kevin Schmidland. See you next week.