HABITS OF HIGHLY SUCCESSFUL CONTENT CREATORS! | #THINKMEDIAPODCAST #172
Speaker 2 :
So this might be one of the most powerful episodes of the Think Media Podcast that you ever listened to. And we're going to be talking about really next level strategies to take your online business, your income, your wealth building to another level. And I'm talking with Neil Dingra. Who's a financial expert, a content creator, millions of views, building a team, building a business, knows all kinds of tax advantages. And even if you're a beginner, this is the kind of conversation I wish I could sit on the wall and listen to back when I was starting. And to help me go further, faster and maybe even make different chess moves in my journey of starting and growing in the creator economy, but also protecting my wealth and scaling my business overall. So Neil, welcome back to the podcast.
Speaker 1 :
Thanks for having me man. Appreciate it.
Speaker 2 :
So I'm fired up to get into this. We were brainstorming off camera, we jumped on the phone and we came up with like 5 questions creators should be asking that are kind of like next level thinking. And this is sort of inspired by the idea that creators are doing big things right now. I see. You know, mister. Beast, of course mister. Beast got a lot of money, but he's doing like mister. Beast Burger. He's doing all kinds of different merch projects. Our friend Ryan Pineda. Launched a big NFT project, generated millions of dollars, and of course is also diversifying in a real estate, other businesses. He's starting. You look at someone like Shelby Church who opened up an Airbnb business. A lot of creators are doing that. There's tax advantages with these things. There's different creators that are using the money they're generating, and they're. Investing it in future things. And then there's also a lot of things happening where even if you're just at a lower level, even maybe making fifty k a year, there's some big savings you could have if you're more strategic with your income. And so the first question we wrote down, and I'd love for you to brainstorm on this, is how can I strategically reinvest into my business? Some creators start making some money and then they just start buying dumb stuff. So how do you think when you think about generating income and then actually reinvesting it into your business?
Speaker 1 :
I think the first thing you could do, and this is the first hire for everybody, is someone that could help you increase your output. So we talked about on another podcast how to even just hire an editor. You know a lot of i know so many creators, I know highlevel creators that edit every single one of their own videos and it's like that's that could be outsourced. For a certain amount that would allow you to produce even more content and distribute that content across all these platforms. And we have such a unique opportunity right now where you can reach so many people, you know as these as these platforms are growing and new products are growing. So I think that's like the first thing of like hey, you're making this extra money, maybe defer or like you know delay gratification of you got this extra money now instead of spending it on something like the car or the trip or whatever it is that you want put it into the business. With that new hire or with that equipment that would upgrade the look of your content. I mean a lot of people are shooting with not the best equipment and their excuse is that the platform doesn't really care. You can shoot it and that's true for getting started, but at a certain level the quality does matter. And I've noticed you get better quality connections based on the quality of your content. You know, just simple things like mics and lights and all that kind of stuff. So I would invest in the quality of the content first. And also someone to help you distribute, produce more content, increase the output.
Speaker 2 :
Yeah, it's beautiful. And I think on number one, how can I strategically reinvest my business? Another way to put that was how could I buy more time by investing in a team member now you're able to go produce more yeah a couple that I think about in that one would absolutely, especially towards the end of the year in tax time, do we want to hire more people? Do we want to purchase any equipment? And here's a question for you know, depending on what tax bracket you're in, sometimes people say, hey, go buy a car that's six thousand pounds and write it all off in the same year and that might make sense. But if you go buy a hundred thousand dollar car and save twenty five thousand dollars on it because of taxes, that still cost you seventy five thousand dollars and you instead could actually get. And two employees or a parttime person, a couple contractors, you know, somebody at that's just say 45 K helping you distribute your content. What has been your mindset in that? Do you seem that would you, when you were starting out, would you buy the car or would you invest in your business?
Speaker 1 :
Well, it's easy to say now it's the right decision, but I mean, I did all the dumb stuff growing up, you know, buying the cars and spending the money, but. I think now hindsight 2020 definitely the better decision would be to reinvest in the actual thing that made you the money sure so instead of extracting it, let's just do more of the thing, you know, and I think people use their business as a, you know, just a Piggy Bank to rob, you know, and it should be like something that actually grows and you invest in. We had an interesting conversation with Gary Vee at an event recently and he, we asked him like hey Gary, how do you do all these things that are so successful when you're not really, you know, you're not really talking about. How you were able to do all of these unscalable things and all these different companies and all of them are really successful. Like he had the same success with all these companies and NFTS and all that stuff that we talked about and he said it's because I didn't need the money, right. And it's kind of easy for him to say, you might say because he's, you know, already wealthy. But even in the beginning he talked about how he lived with his family on meager, you know, money and just took whatever money he had and invested it in early stage companies. That's what got him to the first level of wealth. So like delaying the gratification seems to be the formula in the beginning for people. How they got to like next level wealth was they took that 50 grand which isn't much or that 10 grand which isn't much and instead of spending it they invested it in an early stage company or in themselves or in their own company.
Speaker 2 :
I love that delayed gratification was a bomb drop for sure, because so many people want it right now, not realizing that even if you maybe didn't buy that car for one two three years. Then you might be able to buy 10 cars because of the scale that could be created because of reinvesting in your business. You know what's funny is personally we were even just thinking about we just had a second baby and we have a 2016 Ford Explorer. Come on sport, turbocharged. But this thing's 6 years old now, right? I can buy whatever car I want at this exact moment. But even talking to my wife, we went around. We were like, we were going to get like a Toyota Sequoia 2022 TRD And then we are looking at prices and we're like, this thing's eighty k and this is just us. We lean way more to that, Gary Vee style. I was like, man, this car's fine. We could drive this thing till the wheel falls, wheels fall off. But on the flip side, we also are looking at making about a half 1000000$ investment over 12 month period in hiring and raises at this moment as well. So that's real money and so trying to play the long game. It's also kind of maybe long game for short game thinking as well like our Ford Explorers cool, our Jeep is cool and so and I don't.
Speaker 1 :
Think there's anything wrong with, like, wanting nicer things to get? Like, I can't say anything. I bought a Lambo, you know, a year ago. So they might be think, oh, you're hypocrite. Well no, I waited 20 years to buy that car, literally 2 decades of doing the thing and trying to figure out success and buying all the real estate first. So I think when you start to invest, it's going to allow you to get. Instead of getting the Toyota, now you can maybe get the Lexus. Or you know you're going to have even better things coming in the future if you could delay that initial gratification.
Speaker 2 :
So powerful. Ok so the second question is what new product or service could I create that would solve my audiences or clients problem. So a next level question you came up with this one expand on if someone listening to this why they should ask? This and maybe how you would apply this question.
Speaker 1 :
So let's say you're having success in your in your journey, maybe it's with content creation for example. That's an easy one, you know, say you're helping, you're doing content creation, you're able to apply it to your business to get more clients and grow that business. You're now, you've gone from step A to B. You are now qualified to teach the people how to go from A to B. There's this interesting phenomenon where people no longer want to learn from a guy who's 1020 steps ahead. They like to learn from a guy who's 2 steps ahead or a gal that's one step ahead. Reason being is now I feel I can do this so you can monetize that by creating courses, coaching, mentorship. And I think a lot of people feel like they're not qualified because this space is kind of littered with scams and all that. But if you are a genuine person, you have knowledge to share. And you really want to help people go from A to B and you've done that. There's nothing more powerful than saying I'm going to teach you what I just did. That is a monetizable thing. So I think there's a lot of products, informational products that we're sitting on that are sitting, you know, in our mind that you could throw into a course on any one of these learning platforms. And it's just putting, taking the time aside to shoot that content. And then I've noticed this does the best in today's market. Is a course plus some sort of updating mechanism, such as I'll do a call with you a group call every month or every biweekly, or it could be a course that updates. I add modules to this every 60 days or whatever that is, so it's not just a static thing. And there's a lot of money to be made in the information space if it's, you know, if it's actually helping people.
Speaker 2 :
So there's maybe a lot of things that can apply to this, but to be even more clear, you're suggesting that people really join the elearning info space.
Speaker 1 :
Yeah, it is a multi, multi, billion dollar space and we need more people who are actually subject matter experts. So let's just say you're subject matter expert at real estate, at anything, at equipment, whatever you know, you should teach. You know, and I think people feel like they're not qualified to, but if you are a true expert at that, you should put that into a product and monetize that and not feel bad about that at all.
Speaker 2 :
Yeah, it's powerful and I believe the same thing. I think you know the stat from Forbes was that by 2025 it was going to be a trillion dollar a day industry or something like that. And not only that, just the idea that it's also one of the best business models or products to sell because of fulfillment, because of cost, because of margins. If it's a digital course, or if it's elearning or a membership of some time, some kind, it's not drop shipping, it's not shipping containers, it's not fulfilled by Amazon's cut on the price.
Speaker 1 :
Think about it like a super basic level. Like if you don't even want to do that, create a document. You know, an ebook. And if you're not going to design, just write it down on a Google Doc. Give it to a graphics Steiner, make it look like a nice book. Sell that thing for five to 10 bucks passively and create it once. It's it just continues.
Speaker 2 :
To leverage, yeah, because you create it once, but you can sell it multiple times. So you're creating leverage and so this is these are some good questions that you could be asked at any time, but this also might be annual. It's good to go through this. You know I would definitely ask these questions if it was like December and this particular question might apply to slowing down in your business and thinking about. Where am I? Where am I now? Like, what did I just do? What did I do over the last 6 to 12 months that I can maybe now teach on you and I both have an event. And so we've been doing our event for five years. You've been doing yours for a few years. Probably wouldn't want to teach on events before we've done it or after one time, but actually. My goodness, we could save people tens of thousands of dollars, if not hundreds of thousands.
Speaker 1 :
And you can show them opportunities to make money from the events, right? Because all the lessons you learned.
Speaker 2 :
All the lessons we learned so we can look back. What have we done now? And so if you're listening that.
Speaker 1 :
Course doesn't even exist.
Speaker 2 :
Yeah, it's come to think of it, we're brainstorming right now like and it's a course I would love to pay for because you know we spent nearly 1000000$ actually on growth video live 2022 and it was profitable. We, it turned out incredibly well, but all that to say. Oh my God, the level of lessons I've learned you as well. So where are you? You're listening to this. Where are you right now to look back and say, what have I just learned? And I love what you said. You've gone to A to B, you left a, you arrived at B. You got that result. Doesn't mean you've been at F for D you know, i definitely don't want to create the course. How to become a billionaire. Certainly haven't done it. So where are you now? Okay, let's go to the third question. How can I strengthen my brand and my market positioning? Why is this a powerful thought exercise?
Speaker 1 :
Well, I think people aren't thinking big enough, you know, and we were just talking about this today at an event in a client service business. You get fired and nobody tells you, right? So for example, like if I'm searching for people and maybe I work with this guy and I don't find any content on him online and somebody else. You know, wooze me with their content and I end up reaching out to them because I feel more comfortable reaching out to that person because they have a stronger brand than you. I don't call the person I left and say, hey, you know what, you really didn't have a good digital footprint, so I'm going to go with somebody else. You just don't get the call. You don't know, but your business just starts to slowly erode. And that's what happens is, you know, people are taking, there's abundance, there's a business, there's enough business out there for everybody. But at a certain point, you know, when I get a client in my industry that. Could have gone somewhere else. So you know that's the, it's just, that's just the way the business works. So you have to think about like what can you do to strengthen your brand so you get more of those conversions, more people reaching out to you or when somebody's considering working with you, how could you strengthen that conversion process. So that's somebody reaching out and then to the time when you actually get paid, how can we make that ratio higher and that's through having a strong personal brand and content so. You know, this is probably underrated part because people are looking to monetize right away, but that's probably been the biggest way of monetize. My personal brand is people just want to work with you and they don't consider the competition. Once they've seen your content. I'm surprised that somebody watching 5 minutes of videos crushes my competition in 5 minutes. I haven't even spoken to them yet. Now I get on the phone with them, conversion rates sky high because they already trust you based on the content they saw online. And it's amazing how many people in a client service business do not exist properly online. So that's a great place to start as somebody listening to this is just like make sure your digital presence is dialed in on all these platforms and invest the time to do that.
Speaker 2 :
That's really good. And this one actually kind of gets me fired up because I have been very personally intentional about this, probably more than most and. We didn't get where we're at and think media by accident or I didn't get even where I am with my personal brand by accident. So when I think about this, things that I wanted to do one write a book and of course you never know how good the book's going to do, but the brand, authority and positioning of over 80.000 thousand copies sold of YouTube secrets of it ranking on Amazon. I've also like my friend Chandler Bolt, he has self-publishing school. A book is like a business card. And so that's a powerful one. You and I both throw an event and throw an event with we pay big money for keynote speakers that maybe are an anchor like a Gary Vee Grove Video Live 2022 for us was actually a brand play. If I said it more than anything else, it was a brand positioning. And so thank God it was profitable and. It was impactful and of course it's about the you don't even want to be in business if you're not about serving the end user and making a great experience. It's not just an event for pictures and it sucks like obviously you got to follow through, but nevertheless it repositioned think media, you mentioned content. So even if you were at the end of the year or at any time, how can I do more content this next year or staff or team around it or contractors. Another thing we're doing, we're doing it a study, it's very expensive. But it's kind of like Dave Ramsey where he goes, we've done the largest study of everyday millionaires like in history. So he becomes a market research leader with a real weighted national study and so contributing our voice will give the study away for free, but now in the crater economy. So these are all different investments and we're going these are next level questions and those would increase your brand positioning.
Speaker 1 :
Are you ready to start or grow your YouTube channel? Do you feel stuck and need help connecting the dots? Join this free web class where you'll learn the step by step playbook for YouTube success. We've helped thousands of purpose driven entrepreneurs just like you grow their influence with video. Register today for this exclusive training at thinkmasterclass.com i know in some cases some people invest in. Services to help them get in Forbes or success or these different articles because maybe those logos, but by growing your brand, you mentioned the ROI of that of course is your perception. It might help conversions, it might help conversations or sales conversations go faster. It might almost help them become unnecessary because you've already built trust and people want to do business with you. And so how can I strengthen my brand and market positioning? Think about that as you are. On your journey, all right. This one of my favorites number four. How can I reduce my taxes? Now, we've already kind of mentioned some of these because early on, if I invest into my business, that's a write off. If I invest in something that's not a write off, then I'm not reducing my taxes. Maybe the car used for business, great, I actually am going to be able to get a tax advantage there. But in some cases, there's a lot of things I could spend money on. It may not be a write off and I'm going to get so much more leverage if I my money's going to go farther. My business money is pretax, the money I've made as a 1099 creator. When YouTube pays me ad revenue, when Amazon pays me affiliate money, when I collect money for my online course. I have not paid taxes yet and I do not pay taxes. Until I have to pay quarterly at least estimated and then eventually when my taxes are due, therefore I am not getting a tax return. Huge myth. People are like, I'm getting a tax return now the government actually just took your money and now they're giving it back to you. They held it all year long. You could have held it all year long, had more leverage with it, done things with it. And so how do you think about taxes I.
Speaker 1 :
Think it's like it's some of it's unavoidable, but you have to think like what are the? Things that I could do to be more tax efficient. And you know, i hate when people are like, you know, I don't want to make this much or get into this because I'm going to pay more taxes. Well, one of the common misconceptions is like the tax brackets are not retroactive. The next tax bracket is on the income above the previous one, you know, so it's just that section. So I would strive to be in the top tax bracket, you know, like. So that means you're crushing it, right? But there's things you can do. To bring down the tax liability, make strategic investments before the end of the year. 1 simple thing that I noticed a lot of people don't even have set up is a separate entity. So you are a sole proprietor as a creator or whatever business you're running, and you're filing down on schedule C You should set up a separate company, you know, because there's tax benefits associated with that. You could talk to your CPA But LLC or an S Corp or something to that effect. And then now you can make those deductions there. You can reduce payroll taxes. There's all kinds of little things you can do. And then you know you start to get into like these little things that have small impact, but combined in the aggregate like they make a make a decent size difference, you know, so all the little tax efficiencies you can do. One thing I noticed with investing is you know what we talked about real estate, you know real estate for your business is one thing but just in general investing your extra money into real estate. Income coming from real estate is probably is the most favorably treated by the IRS You know, that's why all these guys are getting into real estate a lot of times with the income because passive income from real estate, you get depreciation write offs, you know, there's all kinds of benefits to that. And now you're paying like sometimes 0 tax on the income that you're getting from real estate and that's a huge benefit. There's things like people will buy a property and do a. Cost segregation analysis, which sounds complex, but basically you get a huge write off in the first year of owning that property which can offset your taxes across the board. So you know, I've seen people super wealthy buying ridiculous, you know, a building or in grant Cardone's case a plane and then that wiping out his tax liability for years. I mean that's crazy, but that's an extreme example. But you can do this on a oneoff basis with just one rental property.
Speaker 2 :
So what's on your mind as you approach maybe the end of the year or anytime? Personally you're at A at a high level but just your checklist what would you go through in terms of like I want to invest in my business and i understand this will also be a tax benefit and I want to like get this done by the end of the year.
Speaker 1 :
So one thing I did which I didn't really spend much time with before was getting a CPA or a tax advisor, because, you know, I don't know all these things. I don't know the strategy and I don't want to do anything that would put me at risk. So getting that person and then having a tax planning session before the end of the year. So what I'll do is like in November, hey, let's review how much money be made, like where you at? Where's the numbers at? Is there anything we can do between now and the end of the year to decrease your tax liability? Is there anything we could do between now and the end of the year to make your return better next year? You know, things like that you could just put in. These guys are experts, you can pay them, you know, for that session and I, it's always a huge ROI Especially when you get into the higher numbers.
Speaker 2 :
Yeah, that's really powerful. And we actually have a series that we did with Matt Bontrager from true Book Books on the Think Media Podcast. We'll link that up in the show notes, really.
Speaker 1 :
His content's amazing.
Speaker 2 :
His content's really great and I would also I want to encourage you. It's this is kind of overwhelming and it can, it's could be a lot to learn but one of the best investments education wise you can make is in your financial education. And a lot of people just lose a ton of money because they're not thoughtful about this. They don't get incorporated. They don't get organized, they don't. They don't learn the tax code. And so they don't actually end up using it to their advantage. Personally, and this is the one you and I talk about a lot. I'm inspired by space Station gaming is in Utah. They've bought, they bought like ten thousand fifteen thousand square feet. Giant warehouse. They put shipping containers in it. They've got an esports team, there's some studios in there. They have a brand deals business where they help people get brand deals and they have compounded their success. So you and I are talking about, you know, in Vegas here we want to, we've been looking at like a larger house that maybe has no HOA what we could do on the property just because we'd use it for like shooting or events or masterminds. We're looking at commercial real estate that we would maybe build out a friend of mine, David Shands. I'm about to speak for him. He's got I think it's called like the Creator Clubhouse in Atlanta and he got 3000 square feet. He built two podcast studios. He built an 80 person virtual events studio that he can himself can use, but he can also rent it out. So you could get some money and just let it get taxed and put it in the bank account. Not bad because sometimes tax are unavoidable. Just pay the bill. You also could buy a car or you could think about like I'm buying a building. Not only is that a write off, but I also just started a whole new business. Now I can rent out these podcast studios. I maybe want to use these for myself and that's what we hope is inspiring, just a next level way of thinking bigger and back to that. Again I think okay I'm putting off the Toyota which is so chill but I'm like instead of and I've heard some people say yeah instead of the car get put it into real estate. I know some people's principle is until I get real estate cash flowing me the money to pay for my liabilities I'm going to invest in assets and so how can I reduce my taxes will the final one. And let me recap these. So number one, you're asking how can I strategically reinvest in my business number two. What product or service could I create that would solve my audiences or clients problems, specifically packaging what you know into an online course, even if that's not your main business, even if that's not what you thought you were going to do? The elearning industry is massive. It's coming up to be a trillion dollar a day industry and so tapping into that once you've gotten it from A to B. Package your knowledge and start to sell it number three. How can I strengthen my brand and my market positioning? You know, one of the things we also sometimes think about is like prepaying marketing and prepaying for maybe something that's a service for our brand. And so if we do that before the end of the year, we know we want to work with someone who is going to do some PR or branding. For example, we paid for this study that we are doing that was nearly a hundred thousand dollars. We paid for it last December. It's not even done yet. We just wanted to get it off our books. They said you can make payments. We said we don't want it, we want to pay the whole because we knew we wanted to do the whole thing. And what you hear when it comes to taxes is this idea of kicking the can right and just continuously kicking the can down the road forever if possible. And so how can I strengthen my brand and my market positioning? How can I reduce my taxes? And then finally, how can I protect my business during a recession? You've created some great content on this. Uncertain economies are a whole different landscape. And so maybe you have some money, but you don't want to go stretch yourself into a loan, a construction loan, a commercial. Maybe you want to be conservative. I don't know. What's your take in the midst of being in a recession, uncertain economy, or looming economic uncertainty.
Speaker 1 :
I think you want to invest in a lot of the things we talked about like brand positioning, things like that are going to be more elevated during the recession. So in a recession, you know, the money, the flow of money from people to companies and vice versa just slows down. So that money's still there. In this case, it's a unique recession because money's being eroded by inflation, right. So you need to make more money than ever before and you need to invest in things that can produce money. So I think like what are the investments you could make that could increase your cash flow? That could protect your business. When you talk about Brand brands, the ultimate protection for your business, that's a Moat, you know, around your company that took you years to build, to build. And same thing with the content stuff like we're talking about putting out more content. That really helps to protect you, get you more business. And the one thing you can do in a recession is make more money and then invest that into things that will protect you. My favorite is residential real estate, you know, rental properties because of the tax advantages of that. And then also because of the fact that it's always going to be needed, like I don't have to follow the price daytoday. Sometimes, you know, you watch the stock market gives you a little bit of illness because it's up and down and you worried about your money all the time with hard assets. It's like, I know this property's there, it could be residential, commercial, and it's always going to produce income and the value can fluctuate in the short run, but in the long run, it's always going to be there producing income and that income is treated more favorably, sometimes has zero tax liability. So that's amazing. And that's unique to real estate. So that's why I put a lot of money there. But I just think of whatever you're thinking of doing in a recession, you need to focus on a making sure that your cash flow doesn't go down because that's what happens to most people. And then that's how you get into debt and all these things go out the window because now you're not making enough money to keep things going. So focus on that cash flow first.
Speaker 2 :
Yeah, you know, one of the things I love you said too is actually crank up your content and I think for us and recess, double down, double down on your content. In recessionary periods, and it wasn't really a recession, but it was one of the craziest seasons you and I both lived through. I remember back March 2020 the economy will people get stay at home orders that month. The month previous we had just hired people and we just paid a tax bill. And so we were negative thirty thousand dollars on our p and l in. February then in march, the economy and the lockdown orders stay in place happen. And we are like what is going to happen, we're like already the p and l is not looking good. In hindsight, it was just a month where everything was really concentrated. But nevertheless, we had actually just kind of scaled up. We hired a couple people onto the team. I think it was like Nolan and Tony and we make some big moves at the time. And then March happened and I remember I had a choice as a leader. Do I go into the recession mindset and constrict and go on defense or do I go on offense? And it kind of built a cultural principle for us to think media. Yet defense is important, protection, insurance, caution. But you're never going to win if you never score it would be impossible. At least it'd be a tie if all you ever did is play. You play defense, you just it was a 00 zero because there's nobody scored. But ultimately the only way you're ever going to win is you got to actually put points on the board. And so we like to ask, when we think about recession, man, how can we just keep playing offense? And what's interesting is sometimes the psychology of the masses are to really constrict. So actually by being on offense, I think my favorite analogy is when I think about March 2020 and then the preceding months, the world kind of froze and everyone just didn't know what to do. And it reminds me of this scene in Forrest Gump. I don't know if you remember, if you've seen the movie, they're on this boat. Lieutenant Dan is. And there's a storm that comes. And Lieutenant Dan's on the top of the he's like, God, if you get us through this storm and Forrest is down below, like tying the ropes and he's, you know, and this, it's this crazy scene. Boom it. Fast forward, flash forward to the next day. And they've been catching zero shrimp in their shrimp business next day. All the boats are sidelined. And they're up on, they're in the water, they're on the shore, and they're just trolling there through the Bay and there is nobody else but them. And now the shrimp are in abundance. And so that makes me think is that if you can kind of ride out the storm and still be out there fishing, and you can ride out the storm and stay on offense and not get sidelined, not get frozen, a lot of people either run, they freeze, they constrict. You stay on offense during a recession. You actually may the money to like not all the money disappear to just change hands, right? And even if certain people are experiencing economic hardship, there's empathy for that. But there's still money being spent. You just want to make sure you're the one that's at least still out there fishing you just.
Speaker 1 :
Want to be on the right side of the register?
Speaker 2 :
Yeah And I love that you specifically mentioned content double down on content and one of our responses to that time and at this very moment. We very well could be in a progressively worse recession and who knows, you know, we also made a decision to double down on content. We started two shows, the coffee with candle show. We started Heather show, the YouTube made simple show, which were weekly live shows. And we actually said we want to be more there for our Community, especially with encouragement with content. We want to stay top of mind. And it was like we're not, we're not sure get back. We are pressing ahead and doubling down yeah and it's a huge time to take market share from competitors who you say like are pulling back. Companies pull back because of budget things and their stocks are down and they do it like I we had this thing where we're seeing big companies laying off people. Reducing spending because that's what they have to do to appease the shareholders. They have to cut expenses and they're kind of like stuck, you know in those kinds of things. You as an individual or small company or you know a team of three or team of 1, you can be very nimble you know, and you can be like hey I want to double down, okay, I'm going to do that and a lot of things are just going to take more time. So that's not even like you know, money invested, that's just your time. And so I think that's it's like I don't know what it is, but people just get super reluctant to. Invest because of the fear. And if you're doing it in the right way in a thoughtful way, it's probably the best investment you can make is during a slowdown like and that's probably what we're going to see in the. If you're being, you know, looking at all the data, we don't know exactly how it's going to play out, but over the next 6 or 12 months, markets going to be slow, economy slowing down for sure.
Speaker 2 :
Yeah, well, I hope this episode's been encouraging and highly recommended to follow Neil, because you're going to get more tactical stuff not just from this episode, but. As we proceed through the UPS and the downs of the economy, he's packed full of all kinds of wisdom. And so people want to connect with you where they, where can they follow you online.
Speaker 2 :
You can find me on YouTube, but the best place to message me or connect with me is on Instagram at Neil home.
