Disclaimer: This transcript was generated using AI.

Bjork Ostrom: So here’s a funny thing on the Food Blogger Pro podcast, I don’t often talk about Food Blogger Pro membership. It’s a huge part of what we do and the reality is the majority of our time as a team is spent thinking about and working with the Food Blogger Pro members. So we wanted to take some time to remind people that if you want to take the next step, like go beyond just this podcast, you can join Food Blogger Pro. If you’re interested, all you need to do is go to food blogger pro.com. We’re going to tell you more about what a membership entails, and if you’re interested in signing up, you can just hit the Join Now button. What does that mean? Well, we have a community forum where there’s the food blogger pro industry experts, many names from which you probably recognize from this podcast. We also have deals and discounts on some of the most popular and important tools for food creators and food bloggers. We have courses that dive deep on photography and video and social media applications. We do Live Q&As with industry experts. Like recently, we had a conversation with an SEO expert named Eddie from Raptive where he talked about republishing and how to be strategic with your approach to republishing and why that’s important. We do these Coaching Callswhere I jump on with a creator and we talk about how we can look at their business and grow their business. And the cool thing is for those of you who listen to this podcast, we actually have a members-only podcast called FBP on the Go where we take some of these video lessons that we’re doing, like these coaching calls or these Live Q&As with experts and we roll those up into a podcast. So if you don’t have time to sit down and watch those, you can actually just listen to them like you do this podcast, but it’s a members-only podcast. So if you’re interested, again, you can go to foodbloggerpro.com and check it out. It’s a great next step for anybody who’s been listening to the podcast for a long time and wants to dive deeper into growing and building and scaling their business.

Ann Morrissey: Hello. Hello, Ann from the Food Blogger Pro team here you’re listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. In today’s episode, Bjork is chatting with Jaimee Campanella about time management outsourcing and how to create a structure for your business. You’ll hear all about Jaimee’s journey of finding the balance between work and family and how being intentional with your time is a game changer. From conducting a time audit to figuring out how to prioritize tasks, she explains how you can stay on track without burning out and make time for what really matters. Jaimee also talks about how you can create a joyful structure for your business, knowing when to outsource and why documenting processes is key for sustainability. If you’re ready to break free from the time scarcity trap and create a work-life balance that actually works, this episode will be right up your alley. If you enjoy this episode, we’d really appreciate it if you would leave a review anywhere you listen to podcasts or share the episode with your community. And now without further ado, I’ll let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Jaimee, welcome to the podcast.

Jaimee Campanella: Thank you so much. I’m so happy to be here. Thank you for having me.

Bjork Ostrom: We’re going to be talking about something that we often hear people I wouldn’t say complain about, but as an example for Food Blogger Pro, for people who are members of Food Blogger Pro, we’ve had thousands of people go through the Food Blogger Pro program, have learned a lot. One of the things that we do is we do an exit interview. It’s a questionnaire and we say, Hey, what was one of the reasons why you canceled your account with Food Blogger Pro? Because we want to know better. What could we improve on? What could we change? One of the most common things is people say, I just don’t have time. There’s so much I have that I’m managing. A lot of times it’s people who have kids or you have a full-time job or family and a full-time job or just responsibilities and you’re trying to build this thing, you’re excited about it, but you can’t find the time. And we’re going to be talking about that today because you have an expertise and a lot of experience helping people find time to do the things that they want to do. But how did you get into this? What did it look like for you to find your own time to build a business around helping other people find time?

Jaimee Campanella: Yeah, thank you for asking and I think it’s so relatable to most bloggers out there. I wanted to start a business where I could be present with my family. I could define this experience of work-life balance that everyone was achieving. This was going to be my side gig. And while I was raising young children, and I knew that the systems and tools I had learned as an organizational expert consultant and time management strategist would help me in this field. But it was very different once I started my own business because I was experiencing all the time that I was disappointed with how much time I actually had to work on it. I still had the family, I still had the day-to-day responsibilities, and I was experiencing a lot of success at the beginning as people were referrals and different people were coming to me to work on different things. But I slowly started to lose my purpose of why I was doing it. And I started to get intoxicating. And I think this is something that a lot of bloggers talk to me about is the more I post, the more I do, the more I write, the more opportunity there is, the more money I could make. And I caught in that same cycle. I was doing more, taking on more clients, and then I was just feeling like I didn’t have enough time for all the things I wanted to do, stop my daily walks, my personal creative time, the future health of my business, and I was tired and overwhelmed and just felt burnt out by this thing I had created, which was supposed to be in support of my vision, of my life vision. So it was in this kind of stuckness, this place of burnout that I realized there had to be another way to approach this because all these amazing, I was working with people as a time strategist and consultant, and people were just suffering. And there has to be another way. There has to be another way that we’re not looking at this because we’re all successful, we’re all ambitious, smart, and yet we’re all struggling with time. And so once I kind of hit my own pitfall with it, I realized I needed to change. And once I finally did discover some of the tools and strategies which I teach people, that’s where I wanted to help people experience — that they could create the best of both worlds for themselves. You can have a successful blog, you can have a successful business and be a present parent or have that other job or whatever. The other thing is is these things that we create that we tend to let them control us. And that’s the first place I love to support people is shifting that perspective of feeling like everything’s out of my control to actually I am in control here and I can change the way I’m living.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. It feels like there’s, broadly speaking, when you think of the time piece, there’s kind of those two buckets that you could put people into, one that you alluded to. I think a lot of people can relate with this idea of you’ve kind of figured some things out and you have some traction, and you start to get this feedback loop that feels really good, and it probably has some echoes of addiction, which is you do a thing and that you get this dopamine hit, and if you continue in that pattern, you will be rewarded for that. And to your point, it could be posting to social and seeing people respond. It could be landing a deal and getting money. It could be increasing page views on your site and earning more from ads. And that a lot of times can result in you doing more of that thing that is feeding the dopamine. But what it does is it creates a situation where you’ve blocked out all of these other things that oftentimes aren’t as dopamine producing, right? It’s really great for me to sit down. Last night I did, it was probably an hour and a half of stop motion with my 6-year-old daughter. She’s been really into stop motion, and it’s literally me. I have a little thing that sinks over to my watch. She moves a tiny character like half an inch, and then I take a picture and that is not dopamine producing, But it’s really valuable. And 10 years from now, I’m going to be really glad that I did that from five to six 30 as opposed to tried to land another deal for pinch of Yum, but it doesn’t feed me in the same way. So there’s that category of time and considerations. There’s also the category of people who are in the startup mode and you’re grinding and maybe you don’t have the dopamine or you don’t have that positive reinforcement yet because you’re trying to build the engine up so it’s going fast enough. So you do start to build some of those flywheels and in those patterns, and it feels like time is of equal consideration for both of those. Do you feel like your focus is more on the former or the latter or maybe both?

Jaimee Campanella: Yeah, I was going to say both because in that first scenario today you’re talking about hustle culture. The more we do, the more rewarding it’s going to be. The more successful I’m going to be if I keep churning, churning, churning and producing more. But at the end of the day, the experience really isn’t real success. Like you just said, if you’re not spending that hour and a half with your child, then you have resentment and then you have guilt. So yes, you might be making a lot of money, but the feeling of accomplishment, the feeling of success is just being diminished day in and day out. So it’s like

Bjork Ostrom: A false hit. And that being success and accomplishment more broader because you do have it compartmentalized within work, but you’re speaking to, I am viewing my life as successful because, and you alluded to this for yourself because you have a purpose that is defined as being a good dad, in my case, being a good mom in your case, or could be different for everybody. But is that what you’re talking about within the context of success?

Jaimee Campanella: Yeah, there’s this intentionality that you have to put forth, if I design my dream life, what does it actually look like? Is it about the numbers? Is it about the feelings, the experiences of having? Is it the memories I’m creating with my children or is it literally the bank account numbers? Is it hitting this amount of followers on my blog? And people often just have a really big imbalance or disconnection with that. They say, I want my business to look this certain way. I want my blog to look this certain way, but I feel like crap even though I hit those goals because I’m not really living my dream life vision. I’m not really in touch with why I created this business or why I am doing what I’m doing and they don’t feel fulfilled. So that’s the imbalance. And most people are feeling when they’re fighting with time. And the other scenario, you’re creating a startup, you might need to dedicate more time at the beginning of something, but that’s an intentional choice. And that’s the kind of shift is people speak in these scenarios, like time is happening to them, time is against them. And so in both, regardless of which bucket you fall in, you have to decide what is the intention? Yes, I understand I’m going to put an extra 40 hours upfront this week for this startup and I’m going to make sure that next week I spent extra time with my children, my spouse, or doing my hobbies. That’s a proactive approach to time. You’re not resenting your startup, you’re making a conscious choice. I am going to give more to this right now, but it’s not that I’ve just given away so much or I’m exhausted and it took over. No, it’s it’s choice. And I think that’s the distinction in all these scenarios that we’re out of touch with what choices we’re making, which are actually creating the experience that we’re having.

Bjork Ostrom: And why do you think people end up there? Because if you look inward, you probably have this feeling of, this doesn’t feel great, but a lot of times we stay in that position longer than we should, knowing that it doesn’t feel good. So in your experience in working with people, is it that they lose focus or they shift their focus, suddenly they’re looking at what other people are doing and then they think they should do that? Why do you think people end up in a position where they are maybe their own boss and we all technically are when it comes down to it, but you end up in a position where you don’t like what it is that you’re doing, even if you’re kind of deciding what it is that you get do.

Jaimee Campanella: Right? Well, there’s a couple scenarios people fall into. One is just there’s a lot of clients I work with. They’re holding onto the rain so tight, they are afraid to loosen up, they’re afraid to let go, they’re afraid to outsource. It’s like their other baby. Their business is their baby and they’re so dedicated to it. And so many people are like, I work, I’m exhausted. I’m working around the clock, but it takes me longer to train somebody to do it. If I’ll just do it myself, it’s going to be quicker. Or that mentality of no one else can help me because only I know how to do this. This is my brand, this is my look. So just really holding on so tight that they’re actually preventing themselves from moving forward. So I do see that a lot, that this perfectionist mentality where they just are not willing to see where they can take help to actually achieve the experience they want. And then this other cycle is people see that they’re in that spot and then they’re looking for all these different tools or tricks or ways to get out of it, band-aid solutions or the other side, I’m just going to outsource, but they don’t really know how to outsource and then they end up losing a lot of time and money or they’re like, okay, I’m just going to revisit my goals. Or I know this one woman was like, if I could just revise my morning routine, I know everything would change.

Bjork Ostrom: I’m like, if I could put that 10 minutes of meditation in,

Jaimee Campanella: And she’s like, okay, I want to journal a weight loss journey, cold plunge gratitude. I’m like, you’ve just added 16 things to your already impossibly full day and you wonder why you feel disappointed. So they just have these expectations. It’s not a realistic perspective of where their time is going. I think that’s another big piece of it. No one is able to look in and do it really audit where their time is going. So they just feel like those days at the end you’re like, I know I did so much today, but I got nothing done. It’s this loss of perspective of how much time things take where all the time leaks throughout your day. So you’re kind of cycling through this disappointment with yourself and time. And that’s the expectation you create with time. There’s just never enough. It’s never going to change. I just have to keep hustling. I have to work late at night. There’s no other time. So this looking for band-aid solutions or multitasking, but not really seeing the results at the end.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, I just had this out the other day. So we use two project management solutions, tools, software. One is a tool called Things by a company called Culture Code. That’s the one that I use personally. So it’s like anything that I’m just doing on my own, I tracking in that. And then we use Asana, but with things specifically, one of what I try and do is I build out the things that I’m doing each day and kind of create a list of what it is. And I was having this conversation, so my wife, Lindsay, we’re business partners, we work on stuff together and we’re just talking about some work stuff. And I was like, I don’t think there’s ever been a day in the past year where I’ve actually done everything that I’ve put on my list and I’m just in this perpetual state of feeling like I’m underperforming. And I had this realization of that’s not a great thing psychologically to feel like I’m never doing as much as I want to be doing. And what would feel really good is to get to the end of the day and to feel like I did what I set out to accomplish. And the realization that I had, and it sounds so obvious, is I just need to reset my expectations around what I can actually do personally. And if I can’t do all the things that need to get done, then somebody else has to help me with those things. Or maybe there are some things that I’m trying to do that actually don’t need to get done and I’m just not doing them. So I can relate to what you’re talking about, and I’m sure a lot of other people can as well, where we set out to have these expectations of we need to do this, we need to get this stuff done. And what I came out of it realizing is, okay, I only have so many hours in a day, but if we can be smart about resource allocation, resources being time and money, if we can be smart about resource allocation, there’s probably a situation and it’s actually happening right now today where we can bring somebody in to help with some things that need to get done that I don’t have bandwidth for. And so today my brother-in-law’s over, he had the day off and we hired him to do just a bunch of house projects, and we’re lucky enough to be able to have the resources to hire him to do that. It’s another thing if you don’t have those resources and you have to think strategically around it. But that’s just an example of me real time trying to figure this out. We have all this stuff that needs to get done, how do we get it done with the resources we have both time and money and being strategic about that. So can you talk about a situation, a scenario, maybe it’s a creator, blogger, social media publisher that you’ve worked with maybe a before and after comparison. I think it’s helpful for people to hear a story of what it looked like before for somebody, some of the things that they did that changed and then what the result was after that. And then we can talk about some of the specifics of how people can work through that if they’re interested in having that transformation.

Jaimee Campanella: Yeah, definitely. And the person I’m thinking of that comes to mind, her name was Lisa, and she runs a very successful blog. And when I started working with her, similar to you, she had this long, long list of things that she wanted to accomplish. She had lots of goals. She had no structure in her life. So the same experience you had is that you have this long, long list, but you never get it done. It’s dragging behind you. You’re resentful because you never feel accomplished. She was working like 60 hour weeks. She never took vacations. She was so addicted to her business and she was sad that she was missing out on her children’s life. She had three children and she was on vacation the one time. I remember the one time we finally got her to go somewhere. She was checking her phone the whole time, answering comments on the blog, just totally addicted to work and not able to see another way of running it. No systems and no structure, and just doing it all herself. She held everything in her head. The whole business she felt was reliant on her being online 24 hours a day. And it was costing her wellbeing, Her marriage, her relationships. And so while she said, I am so happy with the growth that I have in my business. I’m miserable. I’m miserable. And so that’s the starting point of a lot of the bloggers I work with, they are not ready to take help because they don’t see how much more they can accomplish or how they can really be satisfying the balance of why they started the blog to begin with because she wanted to be present with her kids similar to my own journey. And so that was her crashing point, okay, I need help. This is not working and I’m hitting rock bottom. And so the other side of it was creating structure. It’s like when you want to build your dream life, you have to start with the destination first. You have to know what the dream house looks like. What does it look like? What’s the blueprint? What’s the vision? You can’t hire those contractors and people to outsource the different tasks until you know what you want,

Bjork Ostrom: What you’re building,

Jaimee Campanella: What you’re building, what is it that you’re looking for. Otherwise, it’s like the bloggers are building brick by brick, by brick by brick, and they’re just building walls everywhere.

Bjork Ostrom: And

Jaimee Campanella: They’re like, this is not at all what I wanted. Well, you never laid out a blueprint. What do you want?

Bjork Ostrom: And so is that with Lisa? That’s what you started with is you said, okay, essentially you’re saying a year from now, what’s a life that you’re living that is

Jaimee Campanella: Ideal? And she was so clear once we finally got it out, she’s like, I want to work four days a week. I want to work four half days. I want to be producing this many posts per day. I want this much. This is what I want my business to look like, but I want to run every morning. I want to go to my son’s track meets. I want to be there for afterschool pickup. I want to have a date night with my husband. I haven’t gone out with him. I’m too tired, I’m exhausted. So once she started to create the vision for her life, then I was like, okay, we can make a blueprint from here. So then we did the audit. So first is what is the vision? What is the vision you want? And we can’t create structure for the vision until we know what’s all on the table. We have to empty the closet. We have to do that audit that I talked about earlier. So we did a comprehensive audit.

Bjork Ostrom: When you say audit, what does that look like?

Jaimee Campanella: Let’s put everything on the table, Lisa, what are all the tasks in your business that you’re doing? Writing posts, photographing posts, editing literally every single task. Let’s put them all in the table. Let’s organize them. We don’t even know where your time is going because you’re context switching all day. That’s what we discovered. One thing. She wasn’t batching her tasks alike tasks together. So of course she was distracted in between things. There was no focus time. She was just ping ponging from one thing to the next all day, holding tons of information in her head. She did not have asana before we started working together. So we did the audit personally and professionally, putting everything on the table. Let’s organize. How

Bjork Ostrom: Do you do that in a scenario where somebody is ping ponging and all over the place? How do you actually extract what they’re working on and when they’re working on it?

Jaimee Campanella: Sure. Well, I lead people through a lot of specialized exercises to get to that. So from all starting big picture, what are all the categories of your life? Let’s put, then we have to double click. We have to unpack what each and every, and that’s a hard process to do.

Bjork Ostrom: Kids, home, work, what would those categories be?

Jaimee Campanella: In-laws, vacation, house taxes, finances will think of all the big buckets of your life that you’re like, damn, I really wish I had a plan for any of these things. But we’re so insular. We’re just thinking business family, oh, got to get the dryer fixed business, this or whatever.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s this morning, it was like our windows are up, and so I’m having to reach out to the window company and it’s like I have a to-do for our water softener.

Jaimee Campanella: Right? Exactly. So all the things you probably are not categorically looking at, but they’re important. They weigh on you and then it becomes little fires that you’re constantly putting out. So it is very holistic and specialized. We go through every single category of your life. I give you examples because some people are like, oh, I can’t think of anything when it comes to that. And they’re like, oh, A will taxes, business taxes. Oh wait, all the doctor’s appointments for the kids. Of course those are all important. I do those in my sleep or all the invisible to-do lists that people hold. Oh, like the lawn care, all those annual things. So got to get them out of your mind. What’s fueling the feeling of overwhelm?

Bjork Ostrom: David Allen, who we interviewed on the podcast, I’m sure from getting things done, he talks about how terrible the brain is as a storage facility. He doesn’t use that word, but it’s really bad at holding tasks, but it’s really great at being creative. But in a situation like this where you’re talking about for Lisa, if she’s holding all of those tasks, that squeezes out all of the room for creativity. So you go through the process, all of these categories, it’s putting it down on paper, digital paper, making sure that you name it and you look at it, my goodness, there’s a lot of things that I do in a given day, week, month, year, everything from the three times, once every three year air duct cleaning to the once a week updating of plugins on my site. Everything gets documented. And are you just doing that on a Google Doc or where do you put that?

Jaimee Campanella: So when I get started with someone, it’s in a Google sheet, which they have shared access to. So this is a brain dump, it’s a glorified brain dump, getting everything out. So first is get everything out, how much time it takes you, and then we have to prioritize it, categorize it, and prioritize it. So we can look at one area of your life really holistically, and then we create structure. Okay, we have this big, big list. What is the time you actually have available? What do you want your time to look like? So for Lisa, she says, oh, I want to work four days a week from 10 to four. I have a really clear structure that we’re starting to set into place because in the ideal, she has the time before and after for other things. So we have to create the structure, create the blueprint, and then we have to prioritize all those things that we unearthed and that’s where we can make conscious decisions. These are things like, I remember she said, I hate video editing, but it takes me three hours a week. Okay, good. We’re taking that off your plate.

Bjork Ostrom: Let’s not do that. Yeah, let’s get that off your plate.

Jaimee Campanella: It’s all take it off. It’s like the first thing. What are the tasks that you enjoy doing that bring you joy, that light up your spark for why you started the, and most of the time, a hundred percent with all the bloggers, they love the creative work. She’s like, I love taking the photos. I love cooking. I just hate all the admin that goes along with it. Okay, so let’s take some of that admin off of your plate. So we go through this whole process of prioritization, then looking at the structure, the ideal structure, what fits, what doesn’t, and then we make conscious choices. What are you going to outsource? What are you going to consciously just put on hold? No more resentment. It’s just a conscious decision. This project is on hold. We’re going to re-look at it.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s not never. It’s just not now.

Jaimee Campanella: Exactly. And then we come to the time, time structure specific. You had mentioned that long list that you had, and Lisa had this similar one, and you wonder why you’re not getting everything done in the days because you don’t realize how much time these things take. So we have to put in a realistic time block for the things you are going to do. We have to create the structure that’s going to support you to feeling accomplished at the end of every day. I actually did what I set out to do. And

Bjork Ostrom: You can’t do that if you don’t have a realistic understanding of how long something is going to take. And if you’re like, I want to work four days a week, half day each day, and what your list requires of you is actually 50 hours a week, you’re just going to be in this perpetual state of time debt or project debt. So within that spreadsheet, you start to categorize and you look at it and say, okay, this is something that we know is high priority and high interest. You continue to own that. Then how long does that take? Is that the next step is trying to get accurate wtih time?

Jaimee Campanella: How long does this actually take you to fulfill to complete this? You love doing the cooking. It’s your favorite part of the business. You want to keep cooking. You don’t want to outsource that to anyone else. You’re clear, this is your passion. You need four hours a week. Great. So let’s put that as a priority time block every Wednesday in the morning for four hours, this is your cooking, you’re batch cooking. You’re not cooking a thing here, there throughout the week where you have to clean up and restart. Every week we’re going to do one big time block of cooking on Wednesdays.So then we start to create metrics, a puzzle, what are all the pieces of high priority of high interest, and create your ideal schedule. And then we see what’s left. And then we can always make different decisions, but we want to always lead with what brings you joy first. What is the priority and what is fulfilling? So we create the structure and just fast forward to the results of all of that. When I look at Lisa now, she is working those four days. She does have an amazing team. She does use Asana. We did a whole Asana build out. So she didn’t have any systems and she at first was like, I don’t know, learning something new. She was very resistant. But then now she’s like, how was I ever doing task management any other way with the team? Her income has more than tripled, literally because she was able to produce so much more for her business with people helping her that wasn’t attached to her time. So her results just, I remember the first year she’s called me, she’s like, you’re not going to believe it. I have a team. I’m working less and my business has doubled. The next year tripled. So it was just a upward growth and she’s taken so many vacations. She’s a present parent. Her whole life is completely different because she put in structure, she put in systems, she learned how to outsource at the right time in the process. Some people try to do it. What

Bjork Ostrom: Do you mean by that when you say outsource at the right time?

Jaimee Campanella: Well, some people try to outsource at the beginning, but they don’t know what to outsource. They don’t know how to outsource. So you’re looking at everything on the table and you’re like, oh, you do this, you do that. But it’s all piecemeal. There’s no system in place to even monitor that. So now you’re like, okay, now I’m managing what tasks I’m giving away, how they’re doing it, bringing it back. So if you do it too soon in the process, it’s like hiring the builder to build your house without having the blueprint laid out.

Jaimee Campanella: Just, you’re having people work and work and work, but you’re not getting the results you want.

Bjork Ostrom: So can you describe what it would be like to do it at the right time? What does it look like to do that? Well, when does it happen and what does it look like?

Jaimee Campanella: Yeah. If you think about it in this whole house analogy or in Lisa’s analogy, first you need to know what you want. What experience do you want to have? What is the vision for your time? Why are you hiring a team so that I can go running so that I can work on my pottery or write a book or whatever it is. I want to free up more time in my own life. So be clear about your why. That’s first and foremost. And then you have to be clear on the blueprint. What is your business working towards? If you’re not clear about why you want people and what they’re meant to do, it’s a waste of time and money. I had this one person come to me and say, I’m just ready to outsource. I just need a VA to give some tasks away. They paid $5,000 a month for a year, and they’re like, I didn’t even know what to give the va. I was so disorganized. I don’t all over the place. I wasted so much money because they never did an audit. Everything was piecemeal. The person was just waiting around for tasks, but they hadn’t done the audit. They hadn’t created the structure. They weren’t clear about what they wanted to do, what they didn’t want to do. So once you have, I always feel like it’s very linear vision structure, and then you can give things out very systematically. Then you can hire the builder. This is the look I want. This is the design I want. This is the goal. Now build it.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. Before we continue, let’s take a moment to hear from our sponsors. This episode is sponsored by Clariti. Here’s the thing, we know that food blogging is a competitive industry, so anything you can do to level up your content can really give you an edge. By fixing content issues and filling content gaps, you can make your good content even better. And wouldn’t it be awesome if you could figure out how to optimize your existing blog posts without needing to comb through each and every post one by one, or I know some of you have done this, create a mega Excel sheet with manually added details for each post that’s soon to be outdated Anyway, that’s why we created Clariti to save you time, simplify the process and make it easy. So with a subscription to Clariti, you can clearly see where your content needs to be optimized, like which of your posts have broken links or missing alt text, maybe there’s no internal links or what needs to be updated seasonally. Plus you can easily see the impact of your edits in the keyword dashboard for each post. Here’s a quick little testimonial from Laura and Sarah from Wander Cooks. They said, with GA 4 becoming increasingly difficult to use, clarity has been a game changer for streamlining our data analytics and blog post performance process. That’s awesome. That’s why we built it, and it’s so fun to hear from users like Laura and Sarah. So as a listener of the Food Blogger Pro podcast, you can sign up and get 50% off your first month of Clarity to set up your account. Simply go to Clarity, that’s C-L-A-R-I-T-I.com/food. That’s clariti.com/food. Thanks again to Clariti for sponsoring this episode. I think that idea of having a really well-defined outcome task project, whatever it might be that you give to somebody so they know here’s specifically what I’m doing, as opposed to bringing somebody in because you’re burnt out or you’re just tired and kind of hoping that they fix it for you. You have to create the structure that is going to fix the thing to then give to somebody to execute on. There are probably some scenarios where you’re just have somebody come in and be like, I just need you to do this. But that is almost a different hire. It’s almost like what people do when they hire you. Somebody who works with you isn’t having to come up with the process for figuring out how to shift and adjust their time. They’re hiring you as a consultant to come in, work with them to do that. There’s a premium for that versus somebody who’s going to execute on more of a playbook that you’ve created to take care of something that you’re doing on a recurring basis. My friend Barrett Brooks, he was previously the CEO or COO of ConvertKit now. Kit helped them grow from, I don’t know what it was, 3 million to 30 million or something like that. And so he went through this really interesting transition from a business, and I was having a conversation with him and he talked about this idea that businesses, startups, what we’re doing is essentially experiments and processes. And what we are doing as business owners is we’re experimenting, Hey, we think this might work with Pinch of Yum. Recently it was a new video format. Hey, there might be something here. Let’s change this up a little bit and do this experiment. Okay, now that we’ve done this experiment, do we think that it worked? Yes, we think that it did work. Now we create structure around it. We create a process around it so it becomes a repeatable thing. Here’s what the videographer does. Here’s when we shoot, okay, everybody comes in on this day. Here’s what it looks like for groceries to come in that day. And you build a system around it after you do that experiment. And I really love that idea of thinking about business as experiments and processes, or you could say experiments and systems, but the hard part is I think some of us are doing experiments, we’re learning, and then we just start grinding on them on our own without creating that process. So what does it look like on the process side of things? Even if you don’t have a team, it’s probably something you should be doing. How do you do that? Well, you mentioned Asana. I think people like to hear tools, but there’s also more probably philosophy that you could speak to as well.

Jaimee Campanella: Yeah, no, definitely. You need a system to hold the processes from your experiment for this to be sustainable and repeatable, especially if it was a success. And I think that’s the thing with the bloggers half the time they started it not necessarily thinking this was going to be their full-time business or turn into a big thing. It’s like, I just love creative writing or cooking or some people are intentionally starting it. And some people started it as a hobby and saw growth and possibility. And those are a lot of the people that I have been working with recently. And even if they don’t have the team yet, they’re holding all those processes still in their head. They’re just repeating and, oh, what did I do last time? What did I do that worked? So Asana is something I encourage people as a great project management tool to start to document it, make it repeatable, give you automatic reminders, create templates so you’re not constantly recreating the wheel every single time. You need that structure, that system to keep your experiment going. Otherwise, it’s just you feel frazzled and all over the place. And even if again, when you’re in success, you’re like, I don’t know what I did last time. Or constantly wasting so much time in your energy trying to create the same circumstances or other people were just doing everything on autopilot and they’re like, I don’t know how I’m doing it, so I can’t train another team member because I don’t know what I’m doing. So getting those systems down and making them repeatable is a huge, huge part of sustainability and growth in this area.

Bjork Ostrom: Do you feel like there’s a little bit of a decision around what type of business you want to have? Because I think of the spectrum from artist, pure artist to pure scalable systems business. And one of the things that’s interesting in the world that we operate in is it’s not people who are just operational. I want to build and scale a business, but it’s also not just pure artists. It’s not people who are just painting because they love to paint or photography because they love to do photography. Oftentimes though it’s somewhere in the middle where there is art. And so I think sometimes some people might have reservations around saying, I’m going to build a system around this thing that I feel like I’m an artist and artists don’t have systems. And I feel like that would be a hard even I think of for Lindsay, I think she’s relatively organically process oriented. Hey, we’re going to batch video shoot on this day. She’s not going to load that into Asana and use that as a project management tool that she works through. I think she’s just naturally that’s who she is. But I think there’s even people on the other side of Lindsay who the idea of creating a system around their art feels almost like it’s discrediting the art that they are creating. Does that make sense? Sure.

Jaimee Campanella: It does. And I think so when you go into business, you need to know your wheelhouse or whatever you’re doing. If you’re a creative, you’re a creative. And that’s I think a lot of the reasons why people have resistance are pushback to creating the structures. You’re like, well, that’s not my thing. Or when I talk to the bloggers, they’re like, Asana project. That’s not my thing. I just want to cook and take the photo and be creative. So I think that that’s something that’s going to hold people back from growing, from repeating, from continuing that success artists are amazing and they’re creative, and I don’t necessarily have those skills. I’m on the other side of systematization and organization, but I know where I come into the picture. I’m not going to try to say that I’m going to do the most creative piece. I’m going to stay in my wheelhouse. And I think people who want to succeed and stay in their creativity, that’s where they need to know up. My vision is not to be doing business operations. My vision is not. That’s why you have a partner who does it, or upfront, if I want to grow, I’m going to outsource the team. I want to stay in my lane of creativity and I don’t want to give focus or time to any other aspect of what it would take to run a business.

Bjork Ostrom: And I think that one of the traps potentially is there can be this transition from Maker. We could also say artist from maker to manager. And I think in that transition, you could potentially become miserable. You could free up your time and you could create systems, but now you’ve moved away from making to managing. So it seems like one of the keys for somebody who’s looking to scale an artistic or maker or personality driven business is to have somebody who is more manager than maker. You kind of alluded to it, you being an example of that, you’re somebody who’s systems oriented and operational. And my guess is there would be a thousand people who would dream of you being their partner because you would be able to create that structure and manage it without them needing to do it. And I think sometimes people fall into these partnerships by luck to some degree. An example would be Lindsay and I, I’m not purely operational, but I do more of the boring behind the scenes stuff, like a monthly meeting with our CPA and fractional CFO as an example, HR stuff, things like that, which allows her to stay more in the creative world. But for somebody who doesn’t have a partner from the get go, how do you advise them to transition into a business that has strong structure, that has strong processes, but doesn’t put them in the seat of operations and manager? Do you look to hire that person right away? How do you find those people? What does that look like?

Jaimee Campanella: Yeah, I mean, online business manager, when you get to a certain point, I mean I think at the beginning a lot of people hire virtual assistants because just someone to get the tasks done, to get things off of your plate. But then slowly that creative realizes now they are managing a team and a lot of their time is managing the VA and those tasks. And then that’s where that resentment builds. No, I just want to be in the creative. I don’t want to be people management and HR and paychecks and all those things that come with having a team. So there’s that creative who finds themselves already there and they’re like, I got to get out of here. I’m not painting anymore. I’m just leading. And so that’s where it’s very clear at that point, if you have the resources and you’re ready to expand your business, that’s when you would bring in an online business manager so that you can stay creative and you can have the right person to supervise the VAs and get all the backend processes done, create the structures, create the systems, bring in a consultant if you need to. But usually a creative is like, I want to be creative and I want someone else who’s going to oversee all the operations, who understands my vision and why I am doing this work. And then can execute on all the backend, the systems, the people management, the infrastructure, the tech, everyone’s website needs this and that. And they’re like, I don’t want to deal with another plugin. I just want to take the picture. I just want to cook the food or I want to, whatever it is. So it is important to have the right people in your team so that you can continue to stay focused on what really does make you passionate about your

Bjork Ostrom: Work. And it seems like there’s probably seasons that you need to go through if you’re interested in growing your business or evolving your business where you might need to endure a non desirable thing for a season. For example, you might be early stage and you say, I want to be at a point where I have an online business manager who’s overseeing a team. I connect with them and then they manage directly from there. But you’re not going to get there in six months. It might be two years, but you know that you’re going to work towards it. And in a season you might be the one managing, keeping track of the tasks, keeping track of the systems, even though it’s not your optimal zone of genius with the idea that when the resources become available, you can bring somebody in to help with that. But that’s where it feels like it’s important to come back to that mission, vision, purpose

Jaimee Campanella: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: To say, this is what I’m working towards.

Jaimee Campanella: And there is value in that too. When you’re growing, what goes into it, you’ve rolled up your sleeves, you’ve gotten it done, you’re doing it. What goes into being successful and running this business successfully. And now you’re at a point where you’re like, okay, I’m ready to give this all to someone else, but you’ve done it. You know what to expect. So there is beauty in in starting from the bottom of what you’re creating and making sure you’re clear about your standards and your expectations. So then when you do give it to someone else, you’re really clear what you want of them too.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. One of the things that you talk about is this idea of a time scarcity trap. Can you define what that is and how do people know if they’re in that trap?

Jaimee Campanella: Sure. So this scarcity trap is this limiting belief we have about time. And I see this day in and day out that we talked about this at the beginning of our conversation, people expressing, I wish I had more time. They don’t have enough time in the day. They ran out of time. I’m constantly late because I ran out of time or I forgot to do that. I just didn’t have time. So these common beliefs that they’re holding about time is doing something to me. Time is against me, time’s out to get me. This is constantly living in a time scarcity trap. There’s not enough scarcity, there’s just not enough time. So when I see if people will probably resonate with half those statements I just made, you wish you had more time, you ran out of it, you don’t have enough. That is you expressing that you’re blaming time. If you think about those statements, time is doing something to me time’s out to get me. I’m always running out of it. You’re acting like a victim of time. And that is what I see of people in this trap is I’m trapped in it. I don’t have enough of it, but this is just the way it is. And that was part of my impetus is getting people out of that trap, How to get back more into control of your time. I think when you hear it now, you’ll notice it more in conversations. People blame time all the time as if it’s something this cloud of time that’s just happening to you that you have no responsibility with. And so I feel that even before we talk and when I do work with clients one-on-one before I talk about structure and vision and systems, I talk about time mindset first because if you are in this time scarcity trap, it really doesn’t matter what I teach you about systems or how you’re the most amazing team in the world. If you’re in this trap, nothing will work in the long run. It’s just a band-aid mentality. So I think time mindset is the foundation. If you don’t change the way you think about time, your experience of time will actually not change.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s interesting. Yeah. One of the thoughts I’ve had recently is this idea of time is infinite. And what I mean by that isn’t for me, but there’s, well, I don’t know however many billion people in the world and they all have 24 hours. And if I have a goal to do a thing, one of the considerations is how much time does it take to do it? Not my own time, but just how much time in general. And we have friends who are building a wedding venue as an example. They’re not doing the building. There’s a huge crew of people who are taking their time to build this wedding venue. And that’s an approach to business building where they say, we think this is an appropriate risk given the potential reward. We’re going to use the collective time of these people to build a thing which we think then will be an asset in the world. And so much of what I feel like I do, and really what we do is we need to become expert traders of those two resources of time and money. And are we willing to trade our money for this time? For me today, having my brother-in-law come and help turn over the garage for the winter in Minnesota, get the winter tires out. That was an appropriate trade for me given the restrictions that I have right now. Similarly, we need to figure out if it’s worth it to trade the time that we have for money. Are we going to do this job? Are we going to dedicate our time for it? And if we can start to think strategically about where we are trading and how we are trading, it feels like that’s where there starts to be these opportunities where time doesn’t become this limited thing. I only have four hours in a day. Time is actually unlimited. If you think of it as trading, even in so far as maybe you have a recurring Netflix subscription and you’re paying $20 for it, is there a trade in your life where by canceling that you are trading up by hiring somebody for $20 a month to come and do a thing maybe. Or maybe you work an extra three hours and you’re able to have somebody come and help and do five hours of work that you otherwise would’ve been doing. It seems like there’s a lot of opportunities for us if we start to think about time differently and change our mindset around it.

Jaimee Campanella: And I would take it even a step further because when you’re talking about trading it, you already know you have a choice about it. It’s tradable. So when I think about time mindset, I even go a step further in terms of the way you approach it, because I think one of the most immediate changes somebody can make listening to this podcast today, if they really want to change their relationship with time before you even start trading, is thinking about your language around it. Like you said, thinking it’s infinite. I have a lot of it. I have enough time to do anything I want to do. You can trade it or whatever you decide to do. But if you can stop yourself from saying, I don’t have time, it really changes your whole perspective of your day and of your life. Because when you tell people you don’t have time to do something, you’re usually failing to take responsibility for how you are using your time in your day. You said we only have all have the same amount of time, but the language we use to describe our time really does shape the way we think and feel and interact with the world. So if you could simply just stop saying, I don’t have time, it’s a very powerful action in the experience you have, the more power you have to make a trade, because I know what I have, I know the value of it, and people aren’t really in touch with that. And that’s why we’re stuck in that time. Scarcity. We just keep telling people we don’t have enough of it. We believe that to be the state of affairs. So I could offer a quick tip of just how to reverse that so that you feel like you’re in more control. And it’s really simple and a simple way to replace this vocabulary by not saying, I don’t have enough time. It’s by simply saying it’s not a priority for me, or no, both of these so simple. But these statements bring responsibility back to you. It puts in your seat again how you own and control your time. It’s not happening to me. I’m making a choice about it. So if you think about the most common thing somebody might say in a week, oh, I don’t have time to exercise. If you couldn’t say that and you had to say, exercise is not a priority for me, you have a gut reaction, no pun intended, a gut reaction right away that that’s not true. Exercise is a priority for me. So if I keep telling the world it’s not, I’m never going to make time for it. I’m never going to trade someone doing this admin so I can go exercise the whole trading analogy you made. So before we trade, before structure, before systems value it, stop saying you don’t have it. It’s like the whole law of manifestation. We talk about that when it comes to money. If you speak positively about money, the more you’ll be able to manifest in your life. It’s the same of time. If you make it wrong, if you constantly think you don’t have enough, that will be the experience.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. And I like that idea of wrestling with if it actually is a priority or not, because I think if you say you don’t have time for a thing, it allows you to not have to sit with your priorities.

Jaimee Campanella: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: And if you start to say, this isn’t a priority for me, and that feels incongruent, then you have to sit with it and say, if it is a priority, then why have I not gotten it done? Maybe I need to change how I’m prioritizing things. And that’s the issue as opposed to how much time that I have, which I think that mental shift is an important one for anybody, but especially for entrepreneurs who have all of these demands on time. We can’t do everything we want to do, and so we need to figure out what are the priorities, what’s most important, and how we going to get those done. Yes. You work with folks that listen to this podcast, people like this on your website. The H one says, revolutionize your relationship with time. I help moms and entrepreneurs take control of their time so they can balance motherhood and their professional life and be great at both without feeling guilt or compromising on their wellbeing. You do it in a few different ways. If anybody’s interested in working with you, can you talk about how that could happen in ways that they could reach out?

Jaimee Campanella: Yes, absolutely. So I have a lot of different programs available depending on where you’re starting, and I’d love to have a consultation call with you if you’re interested in changing your relationship with time, whether it’s through time, mindset, I have online courses available or through doing the work that I described today with Lisa. That’s my signature Time power program where we do that together, we create that life vision together, we prioritize, we create the structure so that you can actualize the blog of your dreams to have the balance of both, and it’s a really hard process to do on your own, and that’s why I love doing this, because you do see results. You do have a new sense of feeling and control. If you’re ready to outsource, if you’re ready to change the way you’re running your business right now to feel like you have more time freedom, then I suggest to you check out my website, Jaimee campanella.com, set up a free consultation, or take one of my free master classes to learn a little bit more about practical ways that you can go from feeling like you never have enough time to feeling like that, CEO who has time for everything that matters.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome. Jaimee, thanks so much for coming on, sharing your story. Like I said in the beginning, myself included, and a lot of people listening to this podcast are going to benefit from it because it’s such a common thing that we’re all dealing with. So appreciate your expertise and thanks for coming on.

Jaimee Campanella: Thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure.

Emily Walker: Hi. Hello. This is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team. Thank you so much for listening to that episode of the podcast. Since we are kicking off a brand new year and a brand new month, I wanted to pop on and fill you in on what you can expect in the Food Blogger Pro membership this month. We like to kick off every month with just a little summary of what you can look forward to in the membership. If you are not yet a Food Blogger Pro member, you can head to foodbloggerpro.com/membership. To learn more about joining. We would love to have you there. We have already pressed publish on a brand new coaching call with Penny from the Generations Cook. That coaching call went live on January 2nd, and members can find it in the Food Blogger Pro membership on the Live page or on our members only podcast, Food Blogger Pro On the Go. Next up, we are really excited to be hosting a public Live Q&A with Kate Ahl from Simple Pin Media. This Q&A is open to the general public and anyone can attend. You can head to the link in our show notes to register to attend. It will be on Thursday, January 9th at 1:00 PM Eastern and 10:00 AM Pacific, and that will be with Bjork and Kate, and they’ll be chatting all about how to unlock success on Pinterest in 2025. Last up, we’ll have a brand new course on January 23rd, all about Substack. We know that a lot of food creators who aren’t as interested in SEO are exploring Substack as an alternative to share recipes with their community. So this will be a really great course to learn more about substack, how it works, how to grow your following, everything you need to know. We are really looking forward to this month. Lots of great content coming up, and we will see you back here next week for another episode of the podcast. Make it a great week.

Disclaimer: This transcript was generated using AI.

Bjork Ostrom: I want to tell you about a tool that can make a massive difference in your SEO game. It’s called Yoast. We’ve actually interviewed the founder on the podcast and we use this plugin on every WordPress site that we have. It’s really the ultimate plugin to help you get more out of your content and Yos. SEO Premium offers a powerful set of features, including the ability to optimize for up to five keywords per page, which is huge for anybody who has content that isn’t just about one keyword but is inclusive of multiple keywords. Plus, with their new AI-based suggestions, Yoast doesn’t just tell you what needs improvement, it actually suggests how to improve it, making it faster than ever to optimize your content and importantly, save time. Also really awesome is that if you’re using WP Recipe Maker the plugin, you’ll love how seamlessly Yoast integrates with it so you can make sure your recipes are not only delicious, but also SEO friendly, so they’re more likely to get found by search engines and shared by readers. And here’s the kicker. From November 28th at 11:00 AM CET, Central European Time Zone to December 3rd at 11 CET, Yoast is offering their highest discount of the year, 30% off all products. It’s a perfect time to pick up Yoast SEO Premium and level up with any of their powerful tools. You can check that out by going to Yoast, that’s YOAST.com. Level up your SEO game and head into the new year with a lot of momentum. Again, that’s Yoast.com.

Ann Morrissey: Hey there. Thanks for tuning into the Food Blogger Pro podcast. My name is Ann. In today’s episode, Bjork is sitting down with Mo Bunnell who just released a new book called Give to Grow. They’ll kick things off by discussing how Mo went from crunching numbers as an actuary to diving headfirst into entrepreneurship. Along the way, he discovered the magic of reciprocity in fostering meaningful relationships and how relationships can be key ingredients for success. He also shares practical tips for making clear trustworthy offers that can open doors to high value connections, even if you’re just starting from scratch, whether you have a long list of contacts or you’re just starting out, most advice on tracking opportunities and nurturing relationships will inspire you to take proactive steps toward collaboration and growth. If you enjoy this episode, we really appreciate it if you would leave a review anywhere you listen to podcasts or share episode with your community. And now without further ado, I’ll let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Mo, welcome to the podcast.

Mo Bunnell: Hey, Bjork. I’m excited. We’ve known each other for a long time and we’ve got this cool collaboration. We’re going to add a lot of value. I can’t wait.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, long time coming. So you, we know each other through. It’s one of those rare connections where we’ve had multiple conversations that haven’t been recorded or digital. It’s like you’re one of the weird real life in-person friendships that I have in the business world. But now we’re actually going to record it. We’re going to document some of these conversations. What I love about you, and just to build you up a little bit, you and your story is you have followed this path of entrepreneurship where in the positions you’ve been in, you’ve approached them creatively and looked for opportunities. And if I remember right from your story of entrepreneurship, the door opened because of when you were at a W2 job, you started to think creatively around how can I add value here? How can I make the work that I’m doing more impactful? You created a little bit of a system or a playbook, and that grew into a consultancy where now you’re consulting the smartest consultants in the world. It’s really this incredible thing, but it all started with your work within a company, and I think that sometimes what we think about is, I want to get out of my job, I want to become an entrepreneur. But so often it starts with, and I think of conversation I had with John Acuff, another author, and he talked about how it starts with doing that within where you are within your job and thinking like an entrepreneur within your current position. Can you give us a little elevator pitch of what your journey has been like into entrepreneurship? And then we’re going to be talking about this idea of relationships and why those are so important in business.

Mo Bunnell: Well, any shout out to John. He’s a good friend too, and good vibes happen when you just mention, if you just say the words, John Acuff, you have a better life, I think.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, totally.

Mo Bunnell: It’s so true. Yeah. So I was sort of an accidental entrepreneur in the sense that I build a thing for me that would be helpful to me. Turned out other people just around me wanted the thing and I realized, oh, this could be something I could charge for and create a business out of. But I had no idea that was the beginning. The metamorphosis or the change in me was I had been an actuary. I think you remember that we bond on the, you and I bond on numbers and logic and all that, and I took all the exams to be an actuary. It took 24 exams back in the eighties and nineties, like a 35% pass rate on these things. So two thirds of the people are failing, and it took 6, 8, 10 years to get through all of it. It was so hard. Well, you almost can’t do anything else but study and try to keep your marriage together, which I was able to pass the exams and keep my marriage together. So

Mo Bunnell: So, when that system spit me out on the other side, the very month I passed the last exam to be a fellow society of actuaries, my firm moved me to a relationship development role. Well, I’m like 29 or 30 years old. I’m calling on people that are 50, 60, 65. They’ve got 20, 30 years experience on me. I can’t now lead with expertise in content because my little one inch wide mile deep actuarial expertise doesn’t work when I’m calling on chief human resource officers at Fortune 50 companies, which is who I was calling. So my only real move was generosity, which is how can I learn their priorities? How can I connect them with people internally at my big multinational consultancy? How can I work with the internal folks to figure out what they could give to these high level people so that they win as well and can start relationships and new topics off? And basically through that developed a science-based system based on peer-reviewed science that I just hammered out in Word documents that I would find out, experimenting on myself. That’s what turned into a playbook that at one point had a big huge percentage of the global revenue of the firm running through the teams that I was able to lead with hundreds of consultants and people underneath. And that people started asking like, gosh, how are you doing it? And it was through that I sort of fell in love with not just relationship development, but teaching other people relationship development. And that’s when I got the guts to leave and start my own thing, and that was, gosh, it’ll be almost 20 years ago.

Bjork Ostrom: So you went through this process of getting these really specific skills. You acquired those skills, you verified that through these tests, and then you were put in a position where maybe it was valuable to have some of those skills, but really it was like you almost had to develop a new skillset. Is that right? In that new relationship development position, was that hard to let go of what felt like, Hey, I’ve done all this work to get here and now I’m kind of having to reinvent myself?

Mo Bunnell: It all came down to one moment, Bjork. So I had been leading these big healthcare consulting projects with a actuarial bent to them. Imagine the largest companies on the planet could spend at that time easily a billion dollars on their health and welfare benefits. Well, they’re hiring consultants and actuaries to figure out how should they optimize that, and it’s ridiculously complex. And I had been doing things like that. So to get ready for this new role, I wanted to be ahead of the game. So I handed off all my projects to my peers in the healthcare consulting practice. They were awesome, and curing me on to take on this new challenge. Moved offices over the weekend and got in early that Monday morning, and it was like the only time I remember in my life, I don’t have emails, I don’t have things to do. I don’t even know what I’m doing. And my boss walked in. I got there early and I did not do my due diligence even though we worked on this for a year. I made the transition thinking he would hand me sort of a playbook to learn this. If you can imagine an actuary trying to pass these 24 exams, you’re taking a couple exams every six months. Well, you click the button on which one you’re going to take, you get all these materials delivered. It’s like a foot study, you memorize it, and every six months you take a test. I thought he would give me the playbook and there was no playbook. He just sort of chuckled what I asked for and said, well, treat the client right. You’ll do great. You’ve got a good mentor, which thank God I did. But it was then through my brain was used to these six month learning cycles to pass the exams. So for some reason I put the pressure on myself. I don’t think my firm did this, but I put pressure on myself to become great at relationship development in six months. Those are the cycles of learning I was in. And instead of taking 30 years, it usually takes, so it was through that pain and pressure that pushed me to nights and weekends, build the system out or start it and then get better, better, better and better. So that paid off really well for me long term. I don’t know quite how I made it through that time period, but it worked.

Bjork Ostrom: So you had this position, the position didn’t have any documentation around like, Hey, here’s the process you should follow when you’re doing relationship development. So you took that on, you start to document it. This is a really specific question. Were you able to take that with you and did you have to negotiate that you had built this thing within the context of the company? Did you have to negotiate being able to own the IP of that? What did that look like?

Mo Bunnell: No, because I didn’t. I was anecdotally teaching it to people, but it wasn’t like there were material.

Bjork Ostrom: It wasn’t like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right.

Mo Bunnell: So if you can imagine me starting out at a Starbucks that I was worried about a meeting the next week, I remember this specifically, the first time I started writing stuff down is I had the super high stakes meeting. I had to make it go, well, I’ll skip over the story, but I had one shot and it was very clear I had one shot. And so I wrote down, I started digging into the science of reciprocity and how do you give things away? How do you size it, how do you communicate it, how do you offer it? And it was some of that really early on research that ended up being like a three page word document that I hammered out at a Starbucks that turned a meeting that when it actually happened, started with literally the CHR at this huge company, said, I don’t know how you got this meeting, long story behind that, but I don’t need you. I forgot. I’ve been at this for 30 year. I’ve got every advisor I need. And by having a list of gifts to give her, she basically said, get out. I said, don’t you want to see? I worked for 20 hours coming up with things that we can offer you to invest in your success. Don’t you at least want to see the first one? And she said, well, what is it? And Bjork, she loved it. And then she loved the second one. She loved the third one. I had 11 offers that each were, and remember this is 25 years ago. In total it was probably $300,000 of free work or something. It’d be worth a lot more. But I had gone to all of our practice leaders and found ways that they would be willing to offer her success. And ended up, she liked 10 out of 11 ideas or whatever. I left that meeting with 10 follow-ups and it started with get out, and that’s why I drove home that day and I thought, aha, generosity is the way to go. And then of course 20 years later, we’ve trained 50,000 people. And that was sort of the beginning of when I realized giving is the way and thus the title of the new book, Give to Grow and all the things we’ll talk about today.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome. And one of the things that I love about it, and we talked about this a little bit before, is this idea of it’s grounded in relationships. And I think the connection here into our world is we’ve talked a lot about how as creators, publishers, one of the focuses that a lot of people have is, Hey, I want to figure out how to get more traffic to my website and by get more traffic to my website, that means that I’ll be able to earn more from ads. And that is a system that works until it doesn’t. And a lot of people have felt that recently where there’s a Google algorithm update or a Pinterest update and suddenly you have this traffic and it goes away. So does that mean that you can’t create online, that you can’t publish online, that you can’t be a content creator? No. It just means that you have to approach things differently. And one of the things that we’re thinking a lot about and we’re talking a lot about is the importance of connecting with brands with companies and also the importance of figuring out the process of sales. But oftentimes, I think when people think about sales, what they think about is it’s all of the things that people don’t like about sales, which is pitching. It’s trying to convince somebody to buy a thing. It’s the extreme of you need to buy a used car. And what does that process feel like? You feel pressured. You feel like it’s maybe manipulative, but what I love about what you teach as it relates to relationships, sales, the kind of core business considerations is what business at its best sales at its best relationship development at its best is you giving, and it’s in the title of your book, give to Grow. It’s you thinking about and trying to find ways to help somebody else. And I love that. It is one of the things that I’ve tried to think about as I’ve started to have some of these calls with brands as I’ve taken those on more is approaching those from the perspective of how can I help? What is it that you’re after? What is it that we can do? But there is a system that you have and that you can follow within that, and I think that’s what I’m trying to figure out now and refining is like, okay, I know the spirit of what I’m trying to do, which is like help brands be successful. I think we can do that, but how do I as a salesperson now for Pinch of Yum, how do I create a system around that? And you talk about the difference between winning the work and doing the work. Can you talk about what are those two things and how are those different? Because they maybe sound a little similar, but they’re actually very different.

Mo Bunnell: Yeah, massively different. You just nailed it. And just to put a headline on this topic, we’re going to give your audience exactly how to do this stuff and do it well and do in a way that they don’t feel weird like a weirdo and they have to take a shower afterwards. If you do this the right way, it feels great. You can literally talk about what you’re doing to the other side and say, I’m giving in for these reasons and it feels awesome. And I think that hints at the idea that almost everything that’s taught about sales is wrong. It’s that used car sale thing that you were talking about. It feels awful. It feels like it’s just not how it has to be. So to your answer, your question, doing the work versus winning the work, there’s a facing set of pages in the workbook give to Grow whether, and I know you saw it, it’s the little table and it says, these are the things that are true for doing the work. The definition of that is after you’ve got the yes, so after you’ve got the mandate, the brand has come to you, they’ve signed the contracts, you’re going to do X, Y, and Z, the mindset and moves that you need to deliver on that contract or even get the website humming in the way you want to. Anyway, that’s doing of the work stuff. And that is not just different than the winning of the work stuff. It’s the exact opposites. The mindsets you need are opposites and the moves you need to make are opposites. A couple examples, do you want me to go a little deeper?

Bjork Ostrom: Great. Yep.

Mo Bunnell: Yeah, so a couple examples. One is when we’re doing the work, we should expect that branded ambassador or that agency or whoever we’re working on, they’re going to respond a hundred percent of the time. They got to get the files right. You got to get the copyright, whatever you’re doing, winning of the work, we should expect people to answer one out of 10 times. We should think 10 x not one X. We should say, I’m going to try to add value to this person. I’m deep in the relationship 10 times over the next X many months, and I’m just hoping one of these offers of healthiness will stick. So just our expectations have to be totally different. Another example is the length of emails. I know this is ridiculously simple, but emails should be long and have everything in one place when you’re doing the work. These are the seven things I need before we can get the ad up. When winning the work, our rule of thumb is 50 words or less. Why is that? That’s because that’s one screen on an email platform or client on your iPhone.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great.

Mo Bunnell: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Well, even as you’re talking about it, I think of my interactions with some brands and I see myself doing the work communication in winning the work. And what happens a lot of times, and I’d be interested if this is the reason why is we might not get a response because it feels like I probably put too much in there and it needs to be quick and fluid. Whereas opposed to that or doing the work, suddenly it’s like you need to get, in our case, it’s like you need to figure out what the deliverables are going to be. You need to communicate to Instagram reels and here’s how long they’re going to be, and here’s the basic premise for it. Suddenly your expertise has to be in communicating information, clearly, concisely, still, but kind of all in one package. Whereas opposed to winning the work would be like, Hey, let’s just keep this conversation going. The purpose is to get a response as opposed to communicate all the things I need to communicate. Does that feel accurate?

Mo Bunnell: You nailed it. You nailed it. If we had to get it down to one word for each of the columns, doing the work drives certainty. Certainty being the keyword, winning the work.

Bjork Ostrom: Trust is the importance of certainty. Certainty equals trust. And you were saying winning the work is

Mo Bunnell: Possibility. And what’s underneath that is if we go step farther down the road is when we’re driving possibility, what we need is momentum. We have no momentum. This particular because literally our definition is winning the work. We haven’t won it yet. We have no momentum. So we want to choose our very best offer, make it very concisely and have our call to action be the last sentence. Hey, I’m headed up to Minneapolis to work with another brand sometimes in October, little flexible on dates. Can we get together and talk about some of your priorities and see if I can find a way to be helpful? What do you think? Question done? But what we don’t want to do is like, Hey, I got this idea and that idea and do you want to join this webinar we’re having and we could come up to Minneapolis and hey, here’s a thought piece on advertising in the new world order after Google rejiggered their algorithm. And as soon as we have even more than one decision that drives pausing, not responding, I’ll handle this next week. Next week never comes. You’re just not the point of winning the work emails. I know we’re being really specific here, but it’s just to drive momentum. And so we want one thing, we want to choose our best thing and we might want to make it really easy to respond.

Bjork Ostrom: What else helps drive momentum? What are the other things along with, we talked about email as a specific thing, but how else can you keep momentum going?

Mo Bunnell: Yeah, so generally if somebody is not responding, then either our value that we’re proposing isn’t high enough or they don’t trust the value. Somebody might be offering you 500 hours of free prototyping and coding, but if it comes in a cold email from another country, you’re like, oh, this is spam. So you need value and they need to trust the value. Real simple. So around momentum, we want to do a couple things. There’s a bunch of this in the four gifts section of the book that the gifts we can give our clients. We want to prioritize the organizations that we can do the most business with and help the most. In other words, we want to think of very high value things that we can offer them so that they want to get in the room with us. In general, live sessions are going to have a lot more and in person even is going to have a lot more momentum building than on Zoom, which is going to be a lot more than say on email To have a half day workshop on what other brands are doing on our website and beyond to really drive traction, whatever. And then we want to make those offers in as trustworthy way as possible. So finding a referral in from somebody they trust that also knows us might be worth waiting a month in a cold email if we can find that way in. So that little three-step process is getting really clear on who are we for? What can we offer and how can we make that offer in a real trustworthy way? And just treating that a project you manage, that’s a winning of the work project. If you had 10 organizations and you’re trying to find out those three things, you can manage that like a project and then it becomes something that’s like random ideas popping in your head while you’re on a run versus, no, I’m going to drive growth and it’s going to be reliable and here’s how I’m going to do it.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, let’s go one step before that. We talked a little bit about what it looks like to communicate with a client. In our case, a brand might reach out. I can imagine really clearly what winning the work might look like in that situation. It’s us following up. It’s probably timely. We follow up quickly. For me, it’s as often as possible. I’m trying to get on a call if it’s local. We just did this yesterday, we did a tour of a factory and met with somebody on site, which was great. To your point, so much better than getting on a Zoom call. But if they’re not local, trying to get on a call as quickly as possible, asking those questions, how can we help? What does success look like for you? But let’s go to the step before that. What if you don’t have a connection? What if it’s not somebody reaching out? Is that still in the bucket of winning the work where you’re kind of doing what I would consider to be the hard part of sales, which is trying to get that initial connection, that initial, yes, that initial response you talked about one out of 10 of those emails are going to get a response, but how do you even cultivate that pool of really early connections, contacts, leads? It’s probably industry dependent, but do you have any advice?

Mo Bunnell: Oh, I do. This is fun because Bjork, you and I are four wheeling off the main path. We’re going into the deep stuff. Great. So one of the things that we actually didn’t have room for in Gift to Grow, at one point the manuscript was 96,000 words and we had to give it to 40. So only the best stuff could be in there. And also the best stuff that’s broadly applicable. So the idea of generating leads, it was on the cutting room floor. So what we did though is we knew a lot of people would want that. So we created a train, 50,000 high end experts all over the world. Over 20 years we’ve developed the top 16 ways that people generate leads with value. How do you get the first meeting the very first time and we created an extra download. People can get for free to get that, but I can give you a quick overview now and it augments the book, it aligns with it, all that stuff. It’s just sort of alongside the book. It’s not in the book, but you can download it right away. Anyway, the top 16 ways, some of the ways that we probably don’t have time to go through all 16, but a couple, one way you can get in is to create a group of people trying to accomplish the same goals. That’s called a value group. It’s a method I think we invented. It was probably out there before, but I’ve never seen it in anywhere, didn’t have a name for it, so we had to invent it. But that is imagine if you had a group of 12 people that were non-competitive brands, but that were in charge of expanding brand marketing, whatever we would call it. And if you had 12 people, you might invite seven of your best advertisers and clients and invite five people that you’ve never met before but would love to work together. And three times a year you get on a 90 minute zoom call and you share what’s working. What’s everybody going to ask? The first time they get to the call they’re like, Hey, how do you know Bjork? Oh man, we’re having tons of success with Pinch of Yum. Here’s So you’ve literally are building included reference checks and you can pick who you include in the group. So that’s the idea.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. No, that’s great. One of the things I’ve thought about is what if we had, we talked to publishers, we to creators, how do you grow your business? What if we had an adjacent podcast or community or group all around brands and companies? How do you work with creators? How do you work with publishers? Because a lot of times I’m getting on these calls, we’re meeting up in person and these really successful companies are just starting to get into partnering with creators or influencers and they’re like, how does it work? And we’re not super confident around it and there’s an opportunity there. But also selfishly it feels like then you are the connection point. You are the center point for so many of those people. Naturally what happens, you talk about this in the book, you have these relationships and you say relationships are the biggest predictor of success, but it takes effort and you have to be intentional about it. And I think some people would look at it and be like, oh, that feels like a lot of work. And it’s like, well, it is. But the outcome of that could be pretty significant. You could get a brand deal, you could have these recurring relationships over time. Yeah. Can you share maybe one or two more that you think are kind of top of the list when you think through that list of 16,

Mo Bunnell: And I actually want to circle after that. Let’s circle back. I have a thing that I’m going to do some YouTube videos on, but I haven’t shared yet. I want to share with you. I think you’ll love it and it pinpoints the value of relationships, but let’s circle back to that later. So a couple other examples. You gave one, another one of the 16 is interviewing others. Incredibly powerful. So whether it’s a podcast or for a quote or for a thought piece, people love being interviewed, so you got to have the goods behind it. You can’t fake this or else it’ll backfire. But let’s say starting up a podcast, just like you mentioned, gosh, you might be able to just do one episode a month. You, it’s not have lift, but that’s 12 new people you get to meet per year and like us, you bond. When you’re on a podcast with somebody, you’re creating content. You have a prep call before you record it, you get a follow up later. You’re fast friends when you invite people to podcasts, even if you’d never met them before. That’s another one. A third is the multi millennia old method referrals, which we’ve hidden on before. That’s maybe going into LinkedIn, Facebook, other things and finding what are my points of connection between the people I know and the people I’d like to meet. Here’s the way to do a referral. Most people think of them as the cheesy life insurance agent version where the person leans on you and says, Hey, I put,

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it just happened to me.

Mo Bunnell: Yeah, it’s the worst. I actually fired an agent and

Bjork Ostrom: I was like, no. I was like, sorry. I was like, I’ll introduce you if I feel like there’s an opportunity, but I’m not going to cold introduce you to somebody.

Mo Bunnell: Yeah, we’re not going to disclose who the company is, but I guarantee I know who it is. It happened to me and I think they train people. They literally slide a three by five card across a table. I put my food on the table for my kids. It’s so ridiculous. The better way to do a referral though is to flush that. We’re not going to do that. It’s to offer what we call a gift to get through the referring party, to the person they’re introducing to. Maybe it’s a half day workshop, an analysis of what you see around their brand, running some numbers, a project plan for how you do a certain thing really well. The idea is you go to the person that knows both parties and say, Hey, Joe, I see Janine CMO over at X, Y, Z corp. Gosh, I think I could help her a lot because we’ve really specialized in her industry, but I want to make this a win for everybody. I was thinking we’d be willing to do X, Y, and Z for Janine. What do you think about that? I mean her, do you think that would land really well? If not that, what would work? I’d like to come up with something with you that would be really valuable that you’d feel really excited to offer her, and then you get credit for the offer. Anyway, engaging in that conversation where everybody’s going to win at every turn is really valuable. It engages a mental heuristic called the IKEA effect. People buy into what they help create. So as it’s sort of a slow down to speed up referral move, instead of leaning on the relationship like the bad version we talked about, you actually gauge in the importance of making this introduction. You get the referring partners advice and you start the whole thing off with a gift they can offer to their friend. And then I mean those have a hit rate or success rate of like 90, 95% when you slow down a little bit. Do it the right way.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. Before we continue, let’s take a moment to hear from our sponsors. So here’s a funny thing on the Food Blogger Pro podcast, I don’t often talk about Food Blogger Pro membership. It’s a huge part of what we do and the reality is the majority of our time as a team is spent thinking about and working with the Food Blogger Pro members. So we wanted to take some time to remind people that if you want to take the next step, like go beyond just this podcast, you can join Food Blogger Pro if you’re interested, all you need to do is go to foodbloggerpro.com. We’re going to tell you more about what a membership entails, and if you’re interested in signing up, you can just hit the join now button. What does that mean? Well, we have a community forum where there’s the Food Blogger Pro industry experts, many names from which you probably recognize from this podcast. We also have deals and discounts on some of the most popular and important tools for food creators and food bloggers. We have courses that dive deep on photography and video and social media applications. We do live Q&As with industry experts. Like recently, we had a conversation with an SEO expert named Eddie from Raptive where he talked about republishing and how to be strategic with your approach to republishing and why that’s important. We do these coaching calls where I jump on with a creator and we talk about how we can look at their business and grow their business. And the cool thing is for those of you who listen to this podcast, we actually have a members only podcast called FBP on the Go where we take some of these video lessons that we’re doing, like these coaching calls or these Live Q&A with experts and we roll those up into a podcast. So if you don’t have time to sit down and watch those, you can actually just listen to them like you do this podcast, but it’s a members only podcast. So if you’re interested, again, you can go to foodbloggerpro.com and check it out. It’s a great next step for anybody who’s been listening to the podcast for a long time and wants to dive deeper into growing and building and scaling their business. So how about when it comes to, let’s say you are starting to be intentional about this. You’re thinking about, okay, we want to think about relationships strategically. We want to think about helping people strategically, but how do you start to build a system around that? Even for myself, I think about for pinch yum, we have these brands. Some of ’em are cold outreach or some of ’em are inbound. A lot of most of them are inbound now, but we also have some brands that we’d want to work with that we’d want to reach out to. We start to want to be strategic about that. But right now it’s kind of like in my head, it’s in Lindsay’s head, it’s in my inbox. I’ll think probably daily, Hey, this would be a cool thing to connect with somebody on, but I don’t have a system or a process or a tool that I’m really using to manage all of that. Do you have recommendations for people who are wanting to do this well and wanting to do it strategically around building something that keeps them accountable but also is almost like a second brain for all of their relationships?

Mo Bunnell: Yeah, I love Tia’s second brain stuff, by the way. I’m such a fan. Yes, there is. And to put a bow on something I mentioned before because it feeds right into this is what most people don’t understand, is how fast relationships grow. So if we start investing in the right people, and it’s not random, we’re not being reactive, we’re proactively investing in the right people and we’re doing that consistently over time, that’s like dollar cost averaging in the stock market. It grows exponentially. So our relationship, equity and power and trust being sort of the element of that, it can grow exponentially, not linearly. What’s interesting about relationships though, unlike the stock market, is people talk to each other. So there’s a second compounding exponential growth curve of the network effect that sits on top of all the people we’re investing in. So the reason people would want to do what I’m about to share the system part is that, but most people don’t understand is that relationship capital trust grows exponentially, not linearly with each person we invest in, but the more people we help, the more people are talking to others that could need our help or that are reinforcing it. So the benefits of this are like a double exponential curve stacked on top of each other. Here’s how you do it. So it’s ridiculously simple and there’s some worksheets that accompany the book that we can give people a link to, but all you have to do is pen and paper. You can use a CRM if you want, but pen and paper works fine and you write down two lists. One list is your list of opportunities. What are the brands I would like to work for? We think of opportunities broadly. So it can be, it’s basically any place another person or group of people needs to say yes. So if you want to speak at ConvertKit’s conference, that is an opportunity and you want other people have to say yes to that. So no matter what an opportunity is, whether somebody can pay you money or if they just have to approve a thing that you think would be helpful, you write those down really proactively. These are dreams, these there may be no momentum at all. The second thing you write down is who are the 10 or so relationships that are the most important to your future success? Notice that lens is really interesting. It’s not in really any sales book ever. All sales books are like, here are the things you want to sell, get them, do a demo, get in front of them. It’s more of a case approach, but we don’t want to have that. We want to have our list of opportunities. Then we want to have a different lens where we look at relationships and usually the number that’s perfect is 10 to 20, no more than that. If people just take, it usually takes 90 seconds or so. Just take out that pen and paper and say, who are the 10 relationships most important to my success over the next couple of years? It doesn’t take long. Those are the first two steps. You just write those down. The third step rock simple. You manage the advancement of the opportunities, relationships like a project 15 minutes, recurring calendar entry on Friday at three o’clock. People can choose Saturday morning, Thursday morning, Monday afternoon, whatever works. And in 15 minutes you just take a look at your list of opportunities. You take a look at your list at most important relationships, and for the next week you pick the three moves you’re going to make. It’s always your move. It’s always a chance to be helpful. You pick the three moves you’re going to make the next week that are going to either advance an opportunity or advance a relationship, and you do those three and that’s it. And you don’t actually do the things Friday at three o’clock.

Bjork Ostrom: You just think about ’em

Mo Bunnell: And then the next week you find time to do it. You block it off and time block and all that crazy stuff. But you want to separate the choosing from the doing because if you try to say, Hey, I’ve got two hours to do relationship develop, your mind gets all in muddy and you have to, so you want to have one block is the choosing takes 15 minutes and then your other blocks are the doing.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome. So you have this time, it’s blocked off for you. Let’s say it’s Friday morning, 15 minutes, you’re looking at that list. Here’s opportunities, here are the people that are most important for me. And you are coming up with the three things from that entire list of, Hey, what can I do to be of value to this person? Is that more or less what you’re trying to think about?

Mo Bunnell: Yeah, if it was an opportunity advancement, it might be calling up the person and say, Hey, I was thinking about you. I know you’ve been thinking about doing some work with us on our website. I just was thinking, I’d like to run a pilot and I’d like to do it at no charge, like to do it over six weeks. Give me a call if you want to learn more. That might be the move. A relationship move might mean just letting ’em know you’re thinking about them. Hey, it’s been six months since we talked. I remember you had X, Y, and Z as priorities. Gosh, I’d love to get together sometime on Zoom and talk and just refresh those, see if there’s some ways I can be helpful. That might be there.

Bjork Ostrom: Do you have, oh, go ahead.

Mo Bunnell: That’s it.

Bjork Ostrom: Do you have personal non-work relationships on there as well? I know this is within the context of work sales business, but do you also have personal connections on there? Yeah,

Mo Bunnell: Yeah. We recommend four types of people. One are folks who can buy directly from you. So these would, they can actually pay you money. The next group are people inside client, potential client organizations that influence, you might call those influencers. The third group we call strategic partners. Now that’s really interesting. These are people who generally can’t usually pay you money, but they know who should. It might be somebody in an agency, it might be another person with an adjacent, but different type of website. The kind of people who know the kind of people who need you. So sometimes those relationships are more important than clients. They might be able to send you five clients a year or something. So we call those strategic partners. Definitely want to double down on those. And then the fourth group, we just have a bucket we call interesting people. Well, my nephew Spencer is on my list. I just love the kid. I say kid, he’s in his late twenties, but he’s sort of like the son I never had. I have two great daughters, but I just love Spencer and all he does. And this morning he’s on my pro to my list. A Greek word that means first among equals my closest relationships and they’re about having their first baby. And I just want to remember Spencer’s key to me. I want to text like, Hey, I did my workout today. Did you yours, by the way, any news on dilation? How’s it going? How’s Haley feeling? And he’s a priority for me more so than others, first among equals. So I think having a nice mix of all four of those types is really nice and it honestly makes it fun to have some like that.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome. It reminds me a little bit, so when I was younger, I was really into cards, sports cards, I’d go and buy all these random cards at the card shop. But then I got really into sending the cards to the players at the local library. And this, it wasn’t technically pre-internet, but it’s before we had internet. I went and I photocopied all of the addresses of the different stadiums. And so I would do a self-addressed stamped envelope, take another envelope and ship these cards out to get autographs. And what was really fun was I would do it every day, 2, 3, 4 letters. I’d ask for stamps for my birthday and for Christmas. But then what started to happen was three, six months in you’d start to get back two or three of these autographs in the mail every day. And that was really fun to have a little bit of this system going where, and it kind of created this loop where it motivated me to continue doing this where you’d get home, you’d have some of this inbound mail coming in, you’d send mail out, but I imagine it to be a similar thing where you have these people that you really care about, that you’re excited to connect with, that you want to be in your inner circle and you create the system to make sure that you are connecting with them and sending an email, sending a text, whatever it might be. And then what happens is you start to open up those channels of communication and that’s just a really fun thing, but you have to have the system in place in order to keep you accountable. Do you do that? And it sounds like for you what that is is that calendar item where you brainstorm who it’s going to be, you block that out moving forward if it needs to be blocked out, if it’s more than just a simple text message and then you repeat that each week. Do you keep track of conversations or this is again maybe kind of in the weeds conversation or topic, but do you keep track within for work stuff like a CRM of where things are at and technically what does that look like?

Mo Bunnell: Yeah, there’s sort of two levels of tracking. Well, first I just have to say that story was awesome.

Bjork Ostrom: I still have the huge book of all the autographs that I had bust out.

Mo Bunnell: I’ll bet you do all that work that went into it. Look, you were a relationship developer. How old were you?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, totally. I don’t know, 10 probably.

Mo Bunnell: You were like a world-class relationship developer at the age of 10.

Bjork Ostrom: There we go.

Mo Bunnell: No wonder you’re so successful. And as somebody who has boxes of baseball cards, I’m right there with you. So yeah, there’s two types of systems really for people to lean into. One isn’t a system of accountability that’s a little different. Then the other system is a system of information, sort of second brain if you will, accountability and then we’ll talk about information. Accountability is so darn important because your story is so good At the age of 10, somehow you had what scientists call trade self-control to such a lats, C to such a level. You were able to plow through those first 2, 3, 4 months where you’re getting no feedback and you kept going. Very few people can do that. So that happens in this world too, where fear of rejection comes in. I didn’t get a response to my email. It can be really the five, well, you saw in the book we have five lies. People have to get over in this the system.

Bjork Ostrom: And we talk about that in the context of reps. That’s the word that we use is like it’s guitar, it’s weightlifting, it’s basketball. You need to get the reps in before you get the value of whatever it is you’re trying to do.

Mo Bunnell: That’s exactly it. So we need a system of accountability. So different ways to do it. I have a spreadsheet that I track my hours that I work on the business and five buckets if how many MITs I got done from the week of before, tip on MITs most important things, the three things you choose each week, write them so they’re a hundred percent in your control. I share that to the audience, not you obviously, but that by saying, offer dinner to Jane instead of have dinner with Jane.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, yeah, right.

Mo Bunnell: That lets us get three out of three every week. It disconnects us from worrying about the outcome we move to action faster, all that. So anyway, whether it’s a spreadsheet like I use or James clears paperclip method where you have a jar of the thing, how many of the reps you want to do of the thing, and you have an empty jar and you literally just move the paperclips over. That is that tactile nature can be good. Dry erase boards with tally marks, accountability partner, whatever it takes. But having something that will push people through those first 2, 3, 4 months where you’re not getting the intrinsic motivation yet. You’re not getting the baseball cards back, the business isn’t growing. You need that. And then the other system is a system of information, and that’s just second brain stuff. Watch tia’s videos. I had Tiago and my podcast where we talked about second brain for BD that we could put in the show notes if you want. But the idea there is whether you use a notion database, an Apple note, pen and paper, somehow marking down what in writing down, what people’s priorities are, the details about how old their kids are, what they’re focused on at work. I feel like my guess is for every half hour interval where we’re with somebody, I think there’s six or eight really good things to document. They’re a 49 ERs fan. They’re headed to Africa to take their family on Safari. Their boss just asked ’em for X, Y, and Z in the marketing department. Writing those things down, even if we never look at ’em again, there’s a higher likelihood we’ll remember them and we have the ability to look at them again before our next call. Quick refresh. It’s just really powerful unlock, I think.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s awesome. So Give to Grow – the book, talk to a creator, a publisher, somebody who’s listening to this podcast. They want to understand how to do you say bd business development. In our world, it would be like partnering with brands, partnering with companies, they want to get better at it. What is the transformation that happens as you read through Give to Grow? Because I think it’s an important book for people to pick up. It’s available now. I have, this is the original copy. I was also lucky enough to get the advanced copy. We’ll save it for years, but talk to somebody who’s listening and what is the transformation they’ll go through that they can then apply to their business. And we’ll use that as kind of a last thought to share.

Mo Bunnell: Yeah, that sounds great. And we can tie back to that doing of the work, winning of the work table and mindset. So in the doing of the work we’re already hired to do, there’s almost always systems to get better and better. We’re probably in peer groups, there’s articles we’re reading. I mean, heck, just doing the work and getting feedback makes us better at doing the work. But when it comes to winning the work relationship, business development, there are not systems to get better. In fact, most people, we’ve trained 50,000 plus experts, some of the top management consulting firms, law firms, people in the world, marketing experts, agencies. There’s almost never a system for teaching how to win work at a company. You’re left to your own devices, sink or swim. Good luck. And that is crazy to me because it’s the most important thing for most people in their career is growth. So what the transformation people go through is if you read Give to Grow, you learn the best in class methods for how to think about it, how to move past the lies and the traps that will get in your way. That’s a big chunk of the book. What are the gifts and the methods you give those to the various relationships that are most important. And then the last section of the book is how do you succeed in the moment, the short term and the long term? How do you think about this over the arc of your career so that you’d be successful? So if we get all the way to the transformation, if somebody has great expertise, but they’re not good at winning work or relationship development, they’re sort of a jerk and nobody knows about ’em. Somebody’s great at relationship development, but they don’t have any core expertise fun to go to the ball game with. But that’s getting harder and harder to find time to do that these days. It’s when somebody can do both that, who are wickedly good at what they do and they’re incredibly good at making it easy for people to find them and purchase from them. Those are the people that change the world.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome. And so often we hear as we have conversations with people, the questions they have isn’t, the questions aren’t around doing the work, it’s almost always around winning the work. And it’s so hard to know how to coach people through that because there isn’t really a good system for it. And I think you cover so much of that here, even in our own story. It was interesting as I was reflecting on, I talked about, hey, a lot of the stuff is inbound. When I actually paused and thought about it, it’s actually people who have noticed Lindsay talking about their brand, including the brand, saying something about the brand, it’s give to grow. It is. That’s what’s happening there without us quantifying it. Lindsay’s naturally talking about products she loves and that’s the thing that opens the door to these conversations. It’s not like, and this occasionally happens, brands will just kind of reach out randomly. But almost all the conversations I’m having now have to do with somebody being like, oh my gosh, you shared this thing on a Costco run. You did. It’s so awesome. Thank you. My response, Hey, thanks so much for reaching out. Can we jump on a call? Would love to hear about what you’re doing, the initiatives that you have, how we might be able to help. And it’s so interesting to see you talking about that and me starting to realize like, oh, maybe there’s something there and you know that because you’ve been in this world for so long. So I think for anybody who’s interested in starting to do that more intentionally, be sure to pick that up. One of the things that you had mentioned was a couple of resources. Can you talk about where people can pick those up and then also talk about where people can find the book?

Mo Bunnell: Yeah, that sounds good. Well, I can make a joke out of the resources in a way, because Bjork, if you could imagine the pressure an author feels to give things away when they write a book called, yeah, totally. It’s over the top. We gave a ton of stuff out for free with our first book and this is like 10 x that. So all the resources, we talked about the 16 lead gen methods, we’ve got the top 50 discovery questions we’ve ever heard of that are the best. We have a team launch guide to scale the resource across the team. There’s training videos, there’s just the doing of the winning is a download chart. People are printing out and sticking on their wall. Anyway, all that stuff is at Give to Grow info. I nfo and it’s all free. We made it so valuable. Unlike most book resources, we made it so valuable it could actually live on their own. So if somebody doesn’t have 20 bucks to buy give to grow the book, they could actually learn a lot at Give to Grow info and it’ll all stand on its own. That said, it’s better if you buy the book.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, totally. That said, buy the book.

Mo Bunnell: People can get it everywhere. So Amazon’s where most people buy business books, but it’s at every single major bookstore. We landed deals in all four major airport bookstores. So if you can go through an grab a copy, indigo up in Canada is doing a huge thing at the front of their doors. They liked the book so much, and if people like audiobooks, it took me a week and 44 green teas to read the audiobook if you’re interested in that data. So it was fun as an author to read the book too. So audiobook, kindle, everything.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome. Thanks for coming on. Really appreciate your insights and just appreciate you as a person. So thanks for coming on.

Mo Bunnell: Yeah, you too. I was really looking forward to this and we’ll see each other in a couple weeks, which I can’t.

Bjork Ostrom: It’ll be awesome. Yep. Thanks Mo.

Emily Walker: Hey there, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team. Thank you so much for listening to that episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. I wanted to take a minute and just ask that if you enjoyed this episode or any of our other many episodes of the Food Blogger Pro podcast that you share it. It means so much to us as a podcast if you share episodes with your friends and family, or if you are a food blogger or entrepreneur, if you could share ’em on social media or even in your email newsletters. It really helps us get the word out about our podcast and reach more listeners. Thanks again for listening. We really hope you enjoyed this episode, and we’ll see you back here next week.

Disclaimer: This transcript was generated using AI.

Bjork Ostrom: So here’s a funny thing on the Food Blogger Pro podcast, I don’t often talk about Food Blogger Pro membership. It’s a huge part of what we do and the reality is the majority of our time as a team is spent thinking about and working with the Food Blogger Pro members. So we wanted to take some time to remind people that if you want to take the next step, like go beyond just this podcast, you can join Food Blogger Pro. If you’re interested, all you need to do is go to foodbloggerpro.com. We’re going to tell you more about what a membership entails, and if you’re interested in signing up, you can just hit the Join Now button. What does that mean? Well, we have a community forum where there’s the food blogger pro industry experts, many names from which you probably recognize from this podcast.

We also have deals and discounts on some of the most popular and important tools for food creators and food bloggers. We have courses that dive deep on photography and video and social media applications. We do live q and as with industry experts. Like recently, we had a conversation with an SEO expert named Eddie from RIV where he talked about republishing and how to be strategic with your approach to republishing and why that’s important. We do these coaching calls where I jump on with a creator and we talk about how we can look at their business and grow their business. And the cool thing is for those of you who listen to this podcast, we actually have a members-only podcast called FBP On the Go where we take some of these video lessons that we’re doing, like these coaching calls or these Live Q&As with experts and we roll those up into a podcast. So if you don’t have time to sit down and watch those, you can actually just listen to them like you do this podcast, but it’s a members-only podcast. So if you’re interested, again, you can go to food blogger pro.com and check it out. It’s a great next step for anybody who’s been listening to the podcast for a long time and wants to dive deeper into growing and building and scaling their business.

Emily Walker: Hey, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team and you are listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. This week on the podcast, Bjork is interviewing Katie Trant from Foodie Brand Lab and the Food Blog, Hey Nutrition Lady. Katie has a master’s in nutrition and started her own food site Hey Nutrition Lady, way back in 2010. She also works full-time at brand and business consultancies, helping big companies define their brand. So it seems only natural that she decided to start Foodie Brand Lab to help food bloggers like you refine their brand strategy. In this interview, Bjork and Katie discuss everything you need to know about brand, what it is, why it matters, how to define brand, how it can influence your business strategy, and why brand is so important in this day and age. Katie also provides actionable steps that you can use to start building a stronger brand and to help you stand out in the crowded space of food blogging. Katie makes the argument that a strong brand can help withstand algorithm changes, ensures so many interesting thought exercises and ways to think about your business and your goals in a fresh way. This is a really fascinating interview that will give you a brand new perspective, pun intended, on branding and your business. We know you’ll learn a lot, and if you enjoy this episode, please take a moment to share it with your followers on email or social media. We always appreciate it. Without further ado, all at Bjork, take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Katie, welcome to the podcast.

Katie Trant: Thank you so much for having me. Bjork.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, you are tuning in late. You’re tuning in from Sweden. I don’t know if you’ve ever done a Swedish interview before, which is fun for me. If you draw the 23 and me, if I do a genetic test, it’s like that’s where my distant relatives would be. What’s the reason for you being in Sweden?

Katie Trant: So my husband got recruited for a job here back in 2010 and we thought we’d give it two years. We had a two year work visa and now we’re trapped and here you’re here we are.

Bjork Ostrom: You’ll never be able to leave.

Katie Trant: I don’t think so. I mean it’s really, especially when you have small kids, what’s provided by the government and the lifestyle here, the work-life balance, it’s just the winters are tough, but you can’t beat the lifestyle.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s what they say about Minnesota. It’s kind of similar, which are tough, but the people are great. Lifestyle is great. We’re going to be talking about all things branding today. Speaking of work, work-life balance, the work that you are doing, it sounds like for a long time has been in the world of branding and working with generally bigger companies, helping them go through the process of really tightening up their brand or going through a rebrand. Talk a little bit about what that’s looked like for you as you’ve worked in the world of the agency world, helping companies with their brands.

Katie Trant: Yeah, I want to back up a little bit before I got into the agency world, if I may, because I actually started my career path going into nutrition and I write a food blog. I’ve been writing it since 2010 called Hey Nutrition Lady. But as I mentioned, we moved to Sweden in 2010 and when we arrived here I was like, what am I going to do? Am I going to try and work as a dietitian in Swedish or navigate my way through the nutrition world in Swedish? And that just felt like an insurmountable

Bjork Ostrom: Task

Katie Trant: To do.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s complex enough if you’re doing it in your native language and then to do it when you’re trying to do it in another

Katie Trant: Culture,

Bjork Ostrom: But then also another language. Yeah,

Katie Trant: I mean organic chemistry, yes, in Swedish would’ve absolutely been of me. But prior to nutrition, I actually did a degree in creative writing back in the day, and so I decided I did a master’s degree in nutrition here in Stockholm and then I decided partway through that I wasn’t really interested in pursuing a PhD and I really needed a job and I kind of fell into the agency world. I knew a bunch of people that worked in agencies, it was pretty easy to market myself as a native English-speaking copywriter. And so I started at the first agency here in 2012 and there I worked a lot with food and nutrition brands that happened to also be working with branding. But also Electrolux is a Swedish company, so I worked on a lot of their kitchen lines and things like that. And it turned out that my background in science was a really big asset in the agency world because I had a creative role as a copywriter, but

I could go toe to toe with a strategist, I could interpret data and so on. And I just kind of fell in love with the pace of the agency world and the constantly changing clients and that. So I have for the last 12 years been in various positions from copywriter to creative director, now I’m agency director here and working with all manner of clients, big Swedish brands that have a global presence and smaller brands that are more niche in the Nordics and kind of everything in between. So it’s been a great journey and been exposed to a ton of different industries and niches as well along the way.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, and one of the exciting things is you’ve taken, it kind of feels like a Venn diagram where you have that experience with branding in the agency world, your experience with nutrition and food and then also the site that you’ve been working on

Katie Trant: And

Bjork Ostrom: You’ve kind of found the overlap of all of those and you’re now starting to work with people who have a food creator business blog or they publish content online, maybe on social platforms to help them go through the branding process to make sure it’s not always necessarily even rebranding, it’s just like establishing your brand. Is that similar to what you would do with some of these like a multinational Swedish corporation that’s going through the process? It’s just smaller company but similar

Katie Trant: Process? Definitely. I think that a lot of the work, you very rarely get a huge, working with big corporate companies, you very rarely get a huge branding or rebranding project. It’s typically refining the brand strategy, working on various components of the brand platform, sharpening up bits and pieces here and there. So a lot of it is looking at what’s already there, what needs to change, what needs to evolve, how you’re trying to expand your offering, find new markets, find a new audience, that kind of thing. So

Bjork Ostrom: There’s

Katie Trant: A lot of fine tuning.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, and it’s interesting, I have friends who do video work and they’re working with Saab, but actually there’s a subsidiary of Saab called scpa, which is they do these AI-powered boats and it’s just really incredible. But within a big company there’s companies and then and all of these different kind of considerations. So what have you, in working with companies like that and working with brands like that, what’s the realization you’ve come to around what they’re trying to do when somebody comes to you and they’re like, we need to focus on our brand, that feels almost like the what’s at the top, it’s brand, we need to figure out brand, but what’s below that? What’s actually happening or what does somebody actually want when they say, I want to have a strong brand? What does that mean?

Katie Trant: I mean, I think we need to go back even further and define what is a brand. Because I hear in food blogging in the last year, definitely the conversation has shifted dramatically to it’s time to build a brand. Everybody has to build a brand, you need a brand. And I totally agree with that statement. I think more than ever the time is now, but nobody’s talking about what that means or what a brand even is. And when I hear food bloggers particularly talk about brand, these big companies, they’ve got a brand team, they’ve got a head of brand, they’ve got all kinds of people who work under them so they understand the architecture of a brand. It’s just that part of that architecture probably needs to shift when it comes to food bloggers, I hear people talking about brand and most of the time they might be talking about one part of a brand. They might be talking about brand identity or brand personality or some aspect of this very complex ecosystem that is a brand. And I always start by telling people what a brand is not, which is kind of easier than defining what a brand actually is. And I think it’s important for people to know that a brand is not a logo, it’s not a color scheme, it’s not a name, it’s not a tagline, it’s not a visual style and it’s not even you, the business owner in most cases. And in fact a brand is, it’s about perception and it doesn’t belong to us. A brand is, it lives in the hearts and minds of the people who interact with the brand and they decide what, which is kind of scary because it’s out of your hands. But

What’s empowering about working with your brand is all of the brand building and brand strategy that you do is directed at shaping that perception. And that’s something that’s true regardless of whether you’re a Fortune 500 company or someone running your business from your kitchen in Minnesota. Those are equally true.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it feels like it’s not those you talk about, I think initially people would be like brand is the colors of your site and the font size, but it also feels like it’s not those, right, that’s included within it, but that’s not exclusively what it is. Is that what you’re looking at? Exactly.

Katie Trant: Yeah. I mean all of those are components of a brand. I mean the colors, the logo, the color scheme, the typography you choose, those are all components of your brand identity. But brand identity itself is not the brand.

Bjork Ostrom: Brand identity in that case is a sub component of broader brand. So could you break brand up into different buckets like that? So brand identity being one of them that would be like fonts, colors, what is the spacing? Lindsay’s been working with the Katie on her team to figure out how are we going to get good spacing on the print page. It’s like that’s not exclusively brand, but maybe it’s part of it. So that’s a brand identity.

Katie Trant: It’s

Bjork Ostrom: Almost like design which goes in,

Katie Trant: Yeah, that’s identity. And also, I mean the spacing on a print page is also part of brand experience because it’s how the person who’s interacting with your brand experiences it. But there’s absolutely buckets when it comes to building a brand we work with. There’s lots of different terminology depending on what agency you’re working with or who you’re working with, but call it a brand platform or a brand house or something like that. And those can be as complex or as simple as you want them to be, but it breaks it into manageable content buckets. And so brand identity is certainly one of those along with brand personality. And then you have sort of the more strategic parts of your brand, which would be your brand position, your brand purpose, your brand values, a value proposition sometimes. And then you can get into as part of the brand personality, you can get into tone of voice, how your brand sounds, how you act in different channels and so on. So those are all different modules I would say of the

Bjork Ostrom: Brand and to drive the point home further, if you worked with a designer

On redesigning, that would be some of the identity stuff, but you wouldn’t necessarily work with them on warming what your personality is with the brand, what the voice is, is it irreverent, is it serious? Is it really detail-oriented or the value proposition that is, we talk about that almost like adjacent, would you say to niche in a way where it’s like, hey, here’s special about me, here’s why it’s or the brand, here’s why you’d want to come to me versus another random site that’s posting recipes in our case. Can you talk a little bit about brand value proposition because that one is interesting.

Katie Trant: Well, I think you mentioned niche and I think that I’ve been having a lot of conversations with people about niche because you get told in the blog world you got to find a niche, you got to a niche down. And I actually think some of the most powerful brands in food blogging do not have a niche, which is a really interesting thing. But I think brand is more powerful than niche. Your niche is definitely a part of your brand and it’s a part of your brand position specifically because you’ve narrowed in on a position and your position is relevant in the market in which you act. So I do this brand mapping exercise, I’m using my hands for the people that are listening, but we have a matrix and you kind of find your quadrant of the internet. And so I write a vegetarian food blog, so I’m not competing with someone who’s writing a barbecue food blog.

So the position is amongst other vegetarian food blogs and what makes me special in that position, how can I compete and stand out amongst other players in that space? And you get kind of more and more and more granular until you find your position and then your value proposition exists. It’s one of the few parts of a brand platform that’s actually designed to be external facing. So it’s actually your messaging to your audience that you’re serving, but it’s saying, Hey, this is how I can serve you the user in my specific position or niche that I’m here to work with.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it seems like some of these things that we’re generally kind of aware of, okay, we need to make sure that from brand identity that is consistent and it looks the same and emails match with what the web experience would be and what is your voice. People talk about voice when you’re writing. I think we generally understand that and especially when it is a personal brand, and I think it’s almost, tell me if this feels off, but it almost feels easier when it’s a personal brand because it’s like who am I trying to be? And then using the medium of social platform or email or blog to express that, but it still feels helpful to solidify what specifically that is. So you are almost aware of your own tendencies. I think about it within the context of this podcast, like this podcast, everything that you do online has a brand. It is a brand, and it’s just like how intentional are you with crafting that? We could probably be more intentional with thinking about what that is with all of these different variables, but talk to me a little bit about that idea of personal brand versus kind of a traditional brand. Because we’re here in Minnesota, Target Corporate is going to have a much different opinion than Pinch of Yum, which is a personal brand as it relates to decisions around all of these different buckets and how we want to kind of project our brand within the world.

Katie Trant: Yeah, well it’s interesting that you say that Pinch of Yum is a personal brand because I used Pinch of Yum and actually Food Blogger Pro as an example when I was talking about personal versus traditional brands and brand ambassadors in the Foodie brand lab course. And at the time that I put the course content together, I actually defined Pinch of Yum as a traditional brand and Lindsay as the ambassador of that brand.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, I can see that. That’s an interesting distinction. I’ve never thought about that,

Katie Trant: But I’ve actually seen in the last several months, what I have perceived as a very intentional shift towards becoming much more personal.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s accurate.

Katie Trant: And I think that that’s, as a branding expert, I’m like, I see this, see it happening and I love it. I’m here for it. And I think it’s very relevant today with the rise of AI generated recipes and everything that’s changed about the internet, making that conscious decision to shift turn the ship a little bit more intentionally into the personal brand space, I think is really intelligent.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s really interesting to hear it’s just been these shifts and nudges that have happened that result in if you nudge one or two or three degrees for three to six months or a year then and every day you’re moving forward, then after a while it’s like you’re in a much different place than you were a year ago. And so it’s interesting to hear you reflect that back because if you were to look into the conversations for Lindsay and I over breakfast or dinner or on a walk, it’s like some of those conversations around, oh, what would it look like if I was more appearing more in videos or is it the emails or from Lindsay versus just from a generic Pinch of Yum or whatever. So all that to say very interesting. Talk a little bit about that distinction, brand ambassador, like an ambassador of a brand versus personal brand versus traditional brand. So there’s almost like three kind of at play.

Katie Trant: So this was something that when I started to put Foodie brand Lab together after more than a decade deep work with traditional brands, I had to do quite a lot of research and work to get into the distinction between what is a traditional brand and what is a personal brand and what makes it special. And I mean there’s as many opinions as there are experts, but what I have come to believe is that a traditional brand can be born from any kind of inspiration, whereas a personal brand is centered around an individual. So the brand tends to encapsulate their strengths, their personalities, what makes them unique as an individual. And these businesses are not always small scale operations. I mean Oprah Winfrey has a personal brand and she’s

Bjork Ostrom: Martha Stewart.

Katie Trant: Exactly. But I think that a lot of the times when we have businesses like food bloggers where we have solopreneurs and we have small teams and so on that they tend to be personal brands because we build them. Anyone especially who’s been food blogging for a long time, we started back in the day with like blah, blah, blah, here’s a story about my life and a recipe. And I don’t think it’s going to shift quite back to where it was, but I think the personalization of content now and developing richer and more relatable personal brands I think is having a really powerful effect in this time that we’re living now with AI and search changing and a brand ambassador. On the other hand, if you have a traditional brand like Target for example, they may work with people who are the face of the brand while they are not themselves the brand. I mean, I see you very much as the brand ambassador for Food Blogger Pro, which is much more of a traditional business and brand than Pinch of Yum is in this context.

Bjork Ostrom: Can you talk more about that? Meaning there’s the business, the business is Food Blogger Pro and then there’s the ambassador, which would be

Katie Trant: Me

Bjork Ostrom: Doing the podcast maybe showing up on social with the podcast clipped, but I’m not doing blog posts for instance or sending emails. Is that kind of what you’re getting at?

Katie Trant: Exactly. I mean you’re very much the face of the brand and I don’t think that anyone thinks about Food Blogger Pro without also thinking about Bjork. So your role is to be the face of the brand and you represent the brand at conferences and in social media and maybe in a newsletter. Although I think your newsletters are written by someone else typically. And you’ve got a team behind you and Food Blogger Pro who is doing a lot of the work on the brand and they are all representatives of the brand. You want anyone who is working with you and your team to be a good fit for your business. They need to be a good representative of your brand. But I think it’s you yourself who is the face of the brand.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s interesting. And so to draw the comparison Food Blogger Pro versus Pinch of Yum, if there’s a spectrum that Spectrum is, in our case, is it a brand with a brand ambassador versus a personal brand? We would be closer to a brand with an ambassador, we being Food Blogger Pro. Lindsay would be closer to personal brand. Obviously it’s a spectrum. You’re not just either one or the other. I think of Magnolia, Joanna Gaines as an example. It’s like is it a personal brand? No, it’s like Magnolia. What do people think of when they think of Magnolia? They think of Chip and Joanna Gaines. So they’re the ambassadors of that brand, but it’s not a personal brand being like, Hey, I’m out there creating this. It’s me. It all kind of comes back to me. Whereas it would almost be, and tell me if you feel like this is true, almost celebrity would be the ultimate example of personal brand, it’s like somebody who is, they are the product to some degree celebrity is kind of all-encompassing. Yeah,

Katie Trant: I think so. But I think there’s also celebrities who, I think of the designer, Kate Spade and her name is the brand, but she died and the brand carried on without her. So it’s very much a traditional brand in that case, even though it has her name.

And I don’t think you’re absolutely right that especially in our field, there is a spectrum of are you more of a traditional brand or are you more of a personal brand? And I don’t think there’s a right or wrong answer. It’s not better to be one or the other, but I think it’s interesting to understand. I get students who come into the course and one of the first units is what is a brand and traditional and personal brands? And I ask people to pop into our Slack workspace and say, are you a personal brand or are you a traditional brand? And I would say that 95% of the time people say I’m a personal brand. And then I’ll go and I’ll look at their website and I’ll say, actually, I don’t think that you are, and here are the reasons you’re not telling personal stories. You are showing very little of your own personality. You are very much operating this business like a traditional brand. And once people understand that it doesn’t change the way they operate their business, but it changes the way they think about it a little bit and helps them put together their brand strategy and their business strategy in a way that serves them a bit better.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s even interesting for me to think about it as we kind of did the real life comparison, a food blogger prop Pinch of Yum. So much of it is personal. Lindsay said, I’m not interested in working with a bunch of writers. I’m not interested in creating a team, scaling a team.

It’s her canvas. The medium that she’s producing as an artist is a blog. It’s social media and that’s what she wants to create on. For me, that’s not the same. I love doing the podcast, love being a part of that, but a huge part of my interest is business and what does that look like to have a business and a team And we’re lucky enough to have a great team for Food Blogger Pro and they they’ll put a blog post out and it’s not like I need to touch it or have every be involved in every corner of it. And so even just Lindsay and I who work on these businesses kind of together kind of separate, but our own preferences for how we approach them is reflected in the brand. And it’s interesting to hear you reflect those back and I think it’s helpful for people to go through that exercise to kind of understand

Katie Trant: What

Bjork Ostrom: That looks like for them as well. So taking a step back, why is it important? We’ve heard a lot about brand in the last year. I remember interviewing Paul Banister from Raptive and he was talking about this idea of who’s not worried about helpful content update like Disney.

Katie Trant: Or yeah, exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: These companies that have such a strong brand. And so you hear even in the world of search people talking about brand, brand, brand, but why is that important and why have people been talking about it more within the last year?

Katie Trant: Well, I think the last year has been really bumpy for food bloggers. We had this helpful content update last year that just devastated a ton of sites and pretty much simultaneously we have chat GBT coming along and we’ve got AI-generated recipes and other tools for people creating even fake images and so on. And so I think that the days of just working super hard on keyword research and trying to rank for optimizing your posts are kind of behind us and I don’t want to discount the value of SEO and doing that because I think they work hand in hand having a strong brand and being able to identify your niche and find those keywords and understanding semantic SEO and how to rank for them at the same time, I think there’s so much noise out there and the power of brand has to do a lot with eliminating decision fatigue. So I don’t know how many chocolate chip cookie recipes there are on the internet, a million maybe. And if I am searching for chocolate chip cookies and I see 10 recipes on page one, how do I know which one to click? And if I see a brand name that I remember and I remember having a good experience with that brand, I’m much more likely to click on that recipe. I think that this is true in so much of our life.

I live in a cold country, I use a lot of chapstick and I have to have chapstick brand chapstick, I will not buy anything else. I don’t think it works, but it’s also about decision fatigue. If I stand in the pharmacy and I look at 20 brands of chapstick, I don’t have time or the desire to try them all. So I keep going back to this one trusted brand. I think that that’s really a brand is very much about establishing trust and a powerful brand is always going to outperform the market. There’s some really interesting statistics and I think one of them that I reference a lot is with the power of brand Spotify versus Apple Music and Spotify, it’s a Swedish company, it’s global, huge now and in the US Spotify has an estimated 90 million monthly users, whereas Apple Music has about 38 million. And what’s interesting about that is there are 113 million iPhone users in the U.S., yet they’re not using the native software. And I have an iPhone, I get offers all the time from Apple, three months of free Apple music, this and that. And I have a good friend who is an engineer at Spotify and I was like, maybe I should switch. I keep getting these offers, I could bundle everything together. And he said, honestly, the catalog is the same. You’re going to get the same experience,

Bjork Ostrom: Same music.

Katie Trant: Yeah, the same music. The recommendations are maybe a little bit stronger in Spotify, but that’s not really how I listen to music. I’m like a repeat listener album. Yeah, exactly. Yet I stay loyal to Spotify and I just think that those numbers are mind-blowing when you think about the number of iPhone users there are, but that is the power of brand

Bjork Ostrom: That literally happened for us where I was like, if we’re paying, we do the Apple one where it’s like you can’t get everything news blogs, you get the music and you get extra storage. And so I messaged Lindsay, I was like, would you be okay? Just what if we just tried doing Apple Music and not doing Spotify and she’s like, I really don’t want to. I was like, let’s just try it. We did it. And she’s like, please, let’s please go back. This is so terrible. And it’s interesting because like you said, it’s the same music, but for whatever reason, I do think part of it was you have this decade of built up recommendations and

Katie Trant: The algorithm

Bjork Ostrom: Knows

Katie Trant: You.

Bjork Ostrom: So that’s I think part of the staying power of it as well is it knows us really well. But yeah, it’s something that I think we all want as creators is to be somebody people come back to a brand that they recognize. I think of Kate all when we interviewed and talked about Pinterest, she was like, it’s really important to start putting your logo on your Pinterest images because you want to have not only a click to your site, but you want to have brand impressions and brand is important. And it was interesting to hear her talk about that showing up within the world of Pinterest.

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But how do you do that? So I think people get the Spotify example, but if people want to be that as a person who’s creating food content online, obviously that’s a big question and it’s like you dive deep in your course talking about how to do it, but

Katie Trant: What

Bjork Ostrom: Are some of the things that we can start to think about now that help set us up for being a brand that people trust that they come back to, that they view as reliable and therefore are more likely to click on it in a search result or in Pinterest or just type it in when they’re looking for a recipe and go to that site to see if they have something? How do you become that type of brand?

Katie Trant: Yeah, I mean, let me be perfectly honest with you. Brand is not a quick fix. Brand is definitely playing the long game and Google does not care about your brand one bit. So having really nice branding or a really solid brand strategy, Google’s not going to go, oh, okay, you get to go on page one. That comes over time with establishing trust with your audience and having them come back to you over and over again and establishing authority in your niche. But I think that the most important parts of a brand strategy or a brand platform to me are purpose, position and personality. And so your purpose is all of us or most of us are running businesses with our food blogs. So of course you exist to generate an income and put food on your table, but fundamentally why are you doing this? What is your reason for adding to the internet?

The internet surely does not need another chocolate chip cookie recipe, but what is going to be so powerful about you and your brand that you should show up and be there because you’re going to provide something that nobody else is going to provide your purpose, your reason for being what gets you out of bed every morning, and then your position, which we touched on a bit earlier, which is really defining what differentiates you from other players in the same niche, in the same area of the internet. So of all, if you’re a barbecue blogger standing out amongst all the other barbecue bloggers, what is your unique position that you can take and then your personality and that’s how does your brand look sound act, how do you behave in different channels? And you may behave differently in Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, your newsletter, your actual content on your website, they may all be different iterations of your brand personality and your brand strategy. So you may develop a channel strategy that has different elements in there, but all of it should relate back to who you are as a brand and why you’re doing this.

Bjork Ostrom: I think of Dave Ramsey, the finance. So the advice he gives is pretty generic financial advice. You could look back 20 years, 30 years and people are going to have similar opinions on maybe not as aggressive with don’t have any debt. But what feels so clear to me is specific, well purpose, position I guess all of ’em specifically, I was going to say position, but the position of really strong position of all debt is bad.

Maybe not mortgage, but all debt is bad and you need to get rid of debt, you need to get rid of it as quickly as possible. Having a personality that’s kind of blunt and brah a little bit and having a purpose of helping people become debt free, I think of that it’s much different than if you had a blog and the blog was like investment terms and how to understand investing and what is compound interest. And it’s like you’re kind of having similar conversations, you’re helping people become financially educated. In his case, it’s wrapped with this really strong, really amplified purpose, position and personality agree with it or not, it’s there. And that’s almost feels like part of what it is is that there are going to be some people who don’t agree with it,

Whether his personality or position the purpose, probably everybody could gather around that, but there’s a really clear understanding of what that brand is and what it’s about. And in the food world, I think one of the things that could potentially be a vulnerability is you’ve stood up this company, which is really good at doing keyword research and seeing opportunities, but it’s the way that people find you. It’s like a search result. They come to your site, they look at it, they may or may not make that recipe, but the unique differentiator within it didn’t really exist other than you were good at search, which worked and still does to some degree. But the defensibility of that is it can only go so far because you’re reliant on an algorithm update and it didn’t really feel like a vulnerability until a year ago

Katie Trant: When

Bjork Ostrom: Suddenly a lot of that shifting sand in the algorithms happened. What happens if people no longer come via search? Are they still going to come to your site because the brand itself is bringing them in? And I think about that with a Dave Ramsey. It’s like if they had a search algorithm, they’ll probably lose traffic, but they’ll also probably have people continuing to come to the site. Is that a little bit of what you’re getting at with the reason why brand is important because it can persevere through algorithms or

Katie Trant: Definitely

Bjork Ostrom: Search changes?

Katie Trant: Definitely. I think that the concept of having a thousand true fans and that is really intertwined very carefully or very closely with having a strong brand. I think if you have a strong brand, even if my search function goes down or something and I know I can rely on Pinch of Yum for a great recipe for, I don’t know, quick and easy air fryer, tofu, I’m going to go there because I know I can trust it. And I do think that Dave Ramsey is a good example. He has a very strong brand, he serves a particular type of person. I think, and I follow a lot of financial influencers, it’s kind of like a rabbit hole have gone down in the last year

And I follow, so a lot of women in personal finance and the community that they’re serving and the stories that they’re telling are so different than Dave Ramsey to me, much more appealing and human and approachable forgiving. And they are doling out very similar advice. Not everything is the same. I mean Dave Ramsey says, if you have debt, the only way you should see the inside of a restaurant is if you’re working at it. And this is they’re telling a different story. So when I want to go back for financial advice, I’m going to the ones who I trust. And I think with all the algorithmic activity we’ve seen, if I had a, people are inherently lazy so they’re not printing out cookbooks of their favorite recipes and so on, and they’ll typically search the same thing over and over again. And if I search chocolate chip cookie and the recipe that I loved that was on page one is no longer there, I’m going to find it.

I actually had this experience with a recipe for apple waffles, apple cinnamon waffles that I’ve been making for years. And it used to be on page one and it disappeared and I had to comb through the way back time machine. It took me a significant amount of effort to locate this recipe because it had been so decimated by the algorithm. But I remembered it and it wasn’t a brand I was super loyal to. I was loyal to this specific recipe, but I had needed enough times that I wanted to go back to it. And I think that having a powerful brand that people remember, first of all, it’s not necessarily that they have to relate to it. I don’t like Dave Ramsey, but I still understand and relate to his content and you bring him up, I know what we’re talking about, but brand recognition and brand memorability are so important for us as food bloggers. If my recipe drops off, I have a recipe that’s been number one, the number one income generator on my website for six years and I’m terrified that it’s going to drop one day. But I just hope that if and when it does, because all good things come to an end that someone would say, oh, I remember that recipe on hay nutrition lady, I’m going to go back there and find it. So it is that memorability that we’re hoping to achieve.

Bjork Ostrom: And in a world where to use the finance example, Dave Ramsey would’ve 15 years ago, 20 years whenever he started what he was starting, just created a content business where they’re just pumping out content and figuring out how to get people there versus a brand that people understand and they gather around. It’s almost like you create a community of people with shared belief. And if you draw that out over 20 years and you’re like, what’s the bet on what business becomes more successful? My bet would be like, oh, it’s the company that has invested in clarity around these things. Like you talked about the idea of purpose or really understanding your position, your personality and making that also clear for sure. And so for us as creators, it feels like the call to action is, Hey, as you think about creating for the next five or 10 years, it’s important to understand keyword research. It’s important to understand how the algorithm works. It’s important to understand how to optimize for search and Pinterest and Instagram. But within

Katie Trant: That,

Bjork Ostrom: It almost seems like what’s more important it that you are creating a business that stands apart by considering these things that we are talking about. And the hard part is it’s what your course covers, but there’s so many different things that we could get into. It’s not like there’s these little quick actionable takeaways, but if there were, what would those things be that people could start to work on today that they could even from this interview start to fit into their process If they’re currently doing keyword research and figuring out how to get something viral on Instagram, if they also want to think about their brand and how to create a compelling brand that draws people in

Katie Trant: So

Bjork Ostrom: Over the next 10 years people can start to become search traffic changes to direct traffic. And the last piece with that is just yesterday I was looking at for Pinch of Yum kind of doing some analysis and saying, what if all of our search traffic went away? And what was reassuring when I did that is I looked at the last year, I was like, oh, we’d be fine with just direct traffic. And obviously that would tail off over time and there’d be a huge downside to not have search traffic, but to get to that point was a huge sense of relief because we know that people are just coming back now.

Katie Trant: And I think that is because Pinch of Yum is an incredibly strong brand. I mean, Lindsay posted a recipe last spring or last year in February I think, which was basically a package of instant noodles with butter and honey added to it. That’s not even, you know what it was? I went, when I was in the us I went and I bought those specific noodles so I could make the recipe. I saw it and I was like, yes, I want that. I want recipe. That’s not even a recipe. And Deb from Smitten Kitchen, she posted a recipe for butter pasta, literally butter tossed with hot pasta. And I think that Lindsay and Deb can get away with those things because they’re incredibly powerful brands and beloved brand ambassadors. And so it takes a ton of work to get to the point that you can post a recipe for butter pasta and you’re going to get return visitors. Nobody needs a recipe for butter pasta, but they do it. And I think that that’s incredible. It’s a testament to the brand.

Bjork Ostrom: Well, and I think the other piece, and this goes, it’s almost goes against that a little bit is Lindsay will say, I really don’t want to put something into the internet that doesn’t need to be on the internet.

Bjork Ostrom: So you’ll look at when we’re recording this at the time of the recording, it’s like October 15th, she posted something, last time was the eighth, last time was the first. So she’s posting once a week and the process that she’ll go through is like, Hey, is this something that I feel like for the next week for the two weeks that I can, or the next 10 years that I can come back to and promote as this is the feature of right now. And so I think if you were to do all quick and easy, it might’ve been part of the SOS series, I don’t know if it was, but that specific recipe like, Hey, if you’re limited on time, here’s some things that you can do. But part of it is antithetical to this idea of how do you figure out a search keyword that’s going to rank and then produce a lot of content at scale. And instead it’s like, I’m going to publish when I feel like something should be published so people know that I’m not just publishing this to try and get a keyword. I’m just publishing this because I think it’s going to be something that’s helpful for people.

And the other piece with it is to start to view content and recipes as similar like we talked about within the context of Starbucks. And it’s like pumpkin spice latte. They’re not coming up with a new drink every year.

Bjork Ostrom: They’re saying, Hey, this is our catalog. We might shift and change and adjust things. But as the internet starts to become saturated with all sorts of content, especially as content becomes AI-generated, how do you become the source for people to come back and say like, Hey, pumpkin Spice Latte Starbucks, great. What is the equivalent for us as food creators to look at that and say, every year we are creating a piece of content that we can maybe refresh a little bit, but it’s kind of part of a catalog that we can shine a light on. That’s one of the changing rhythms of content now as well, which is you become a catalog and you have your greatest hits and you reference those greatest hits every year as opposed to being a content warehouse where you are just pumping out a manufacturing line of content. Do you feel like that ties into the conversation of brand and even Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Latte as an example?

Katie Trant: Yeah, I think it definitely does. I mean, I think that inherently people trust people more than they trust big corporations. So when you have someone like Lindsay making a recipe that’s so easy, but it’s so good and that’s relatable. It’s like, I’ve got kids, I’m tired, I don’t have a lot of time to cook dinner and I just want to eat something that tastes good. And it’s that established trust, the Starbucks pumpkin Spice latte, it’s like every year they come out, they taste reliably the same. It’s going to come, you understand the experience you’re going to have and that’s that repeatability. And food blogs may not serve up repeatable experiences in that the recipes are constantly changing, but the experience of interacting with the brand is what should be repeatable and understanding that I’m going to spend my time and my money making this recipe.

I want to know that it’s going to work and I want to know that it’s going to work for me because I think they say there’s someone out there for every weirdo in the world, but there’s also a food blog out there for every person. I’m not going to love recipes from every site. So I need to know as a user that this is a site and this is a brand that’s going to work for me specifically as well. And I think that the way search is changing. I’ve seen some snippets of Google the way they’re changing and pulling up recipes specifically based on not just the top 10, but serving up based on, you can search based on the ingredients that you have at home and based on the type of event that you’re serving and so on. And I think it’s really going to change.

Search is going to continue to change in the next few years. And if we as food bloggers are going to stand still and just do the same keyword research in the same optimization that we’ve always done, you’re going to get left behind. I think those things are shifting as well, and as they should. And as I said before, they’re as very much as important as brand, but it is the powerful brands. Like you said, Disney isn’t concerned. Not many of us are as big as Disney, but I think if the fact that you see that you have enough return traffic that you could lose all your search and still be okay, that’s a testament to the power of the brand.

Bjork Ostrom: And it’s also an unfair advantage of producing content for 14 years

Katie Trant: Certainly. But I’ve been producing content for just as long and I’m nowhere near in the same position. So I think it is a testament to the brand.

Bjork Ostrom: So to me it feels like there is no downside. It’s not like a opinion, do I want to build a brand or not everybody’s building a brand. It’s just a matter of clarifying the elements that are within your brand. And it sounds like that’s a lot of what your course does. So can you talk a little bit about Foodie Brand Lab, the premise of it? You can talk about where people can sign up because my guess is some folks will hear about it and be interested

Katie Trant: In

Bjork Ostrom: Checking

Katie Trant: It out. So Foodie Brand Lab was actually born from, I’m part of a mastermind group of bloggers that meets, we meet once a month and we have been doing so for almost two years, and we have different topics we go over. And last year I said, I don’t know if anyone is interested in hearing about brand, but this is what I work with in my day jobs, so I’d be happy to talk about it. And when you’re presenting on Zoom and you’ve got those tiny squares, you can’t really tell whether people are actually, I didn’t know if they were working in the background or doing something else or totally tuned out. And I did this 20 minutes super high level presentation. What is a brand? What is a brand, not these are the elements of a brand platform. Here’s how you do a brand mapping exercise. And I finished and they were like, oh my God, why are you not doing this? Why are you not doing this for food bloggers? And I

Don’t think I slept for a week. I was like, why am I not doing this and put my head down and built Foodie Brand Lab? And I built it because this conversation of the time to build a brand is now keeps happening, but I’m not seeing a lot of conversation about what that means. And so I thought that there was a gap in the market that needed to be filled. And I think that brand support, after many years of working with a brand agency, you work on these big projects with these big global corporations and they are so long and so slow and so expensive. You sit in a room with 15 different stakeholders arguing about the wording of a brand purpose statement or something like that. And it’s frustratingly slow at times. And I thought if there’s a need to serve food bloggers with brand and to make brand strategy and brand support accessible, because I talked to Dwayne from Cultivate, and I’m not going to name any names, but he told me about a big, big food blogger who they had built a custom site for. And he said that that business behind that blogger had spent six figures working with a brand strategy agency before they came to them to do the redesign, which is absolutely the correct order. You should do it, you need

Get the brand house in order and then you do the redesign. And I don’t think that brand strategy or brand support needs to cost six figures for the average food blogger. So I took everything that I know from more than a decade of working in branding agencies and more than a decade of writing a food blog and going through all the algorithm updates and doing the keyword research, it’s sort of bringing these worlds together. And I packaged it into a digital course for food bloggers called Foodie Brand Lab, and that’s our entry-level. It’s a self-paced digital course, and they get access to a Slack workspace to ask questions and monthly office hours. And then we have some premium levels of services. Well for people who either don’t have the time or the bandwidth to go through the course on their own, if they have a bigger site with a bigger team and they just want someone to do it for them, then we also have offerings to do that as well.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome. And what it feels like it does is build a really incredible foundation that then you can build off of. And my guess is some of it is new information that you’re having to make decisions on and think about, but my assumption is probably a lot of it is just pulling the information out that’s already there and defining it and saying, here’s what it is. It’s helping you clarify some of the things you already know but have never clarified.

Katie Trant: Yes. And I’ll give you a really good example of that. My friend Jess, she writes a wonderful food blog called Inquiring Chef, and she’s in my mastermind group. So she was a beta tester for the chorus as well. And she is been working really hard on expanding both her brand and her business strategy. So she’s got the site Inquiring Chef, and then she started teaching cooking camps for kids called Inquiring Chef Academy. She’s got a cookbook coming out. And she was like, I just don’t understand how to work with my brand across all these different touchpoints. And I said to her, and I think this also circles back to the question you asked earlier that we never answered about that one thing that people can do.

So the one thing that we did in her case was answer the question, who is the inquiring chef? And I said, is the inquiring chef you Jess Smith? Or is your purpose serving a community of inquiring chefs? Is your user the inquiring chef? Because if it’s the latter, that opens up your brand world and your business strategy. You have inquiring Chef Academy, you can create a line of spices or baking mixes or whatever for inquiring chefs. She was like, oh my God, that’s it. That’s the one thing. So figuring out that she herself was not the inquiring chef changed everything.

Bjork Ostrom: Oh, interesting. Yeah. And then it becomes like you have content for kids who are inquiring chefs.

Katie Trant: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, I love that. So we’ll link to it in the show notes, but people can also find it by going to foodie brand lab.com. I know that you do courses a group that will go through at the same time. Is that right? Or can people sign up at any time?

Katie Trant: So we had the first cohort go through or sign up, and then we close the cart to make sure that that group could get through in a good way. But we’re actually going to open the cart in the next couple of weeks and then leave it open because part of our brand position as Foodie brand lab is making branding accessible to food bloggers, to all levels of food bloggers. And so it actually didn’t sit right with me to have it closed and inaccessible at times. So that’s a change we decided to make. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. And then is there a specific URL that listeners should use or just go to the homepage?

Katie Trant: What you guys, they can just go to foodie brand lab.com, but we will put in a discount code for podcast listeners so they could just put in the discount code food blogger pro and that’ll knock $50 off of the course.

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome. Cool. Katie, really fun to talk to you about this. I think it’s super important conversation to be happening always, but especially now as the landscape shifts and people approach content creation differently where they’re thinking not just about how can I rank for this keyword, but how can I be a company or a brand that people think about and come to. So super helpful, excited for people who are able to go through the course and love to have another conversation here in the future. Thanks for coming

Katie Trant: Down. Yes, definitely. Thank you so much for having me.

Emily Walker: Hey there. This is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team and thank you so much for listening to that episode. We really appreciate it. If you liked this episode or enjoy the show, we would really appreciate you leaving a review or rating wherever you listen to your podcast. Episodes, ratings and reviews, help get the show in front of new listeners and help us grow our little show into something even bigger. Reread each and every review and it makes us so happy to hear when you’re enjoying the podcast or what you would like us to improve or change in upcoming episodes. All you have to do is find the Food Blogger Pope Podcast, wherever you listen to podcasts, whether it’s on Apple or Spotify or another player, and enter a rating and review. While you’re there, make sure to subscribe to the podcast so that you never miss a new episode. We really appreciate it so much and it makes such a huge difference for our show. So thanks in advance and that’s all we have for you today. So have a great week.

Disclaimer: This transcript was generated using AI.

Bjork Ostrom: This episode is sponsored by Clariti. Here’s the thing, we know that food blogging is a competitive industry, so anything you can do to level up your content can really give you an edge. By fixing content issues and filling content gaps, you can make your good content even better, and wouldn’t it be awesome if you could figure out how to optimize your existing blog posts without needing to comb through each and every post one by one, or I know some of you have done this, create a mega Excel sheet with manually added details for each post that’s soon to be outdated Anyway, that’s why we created Clarity to save you time, simplify the process and make it easy. So with a subscription to Clarity, you can clearly see where your content needs to be optimized, like which of your posts have broken links or missing alt text. Maybe there’s no internal links or what needs to be updated seasonally. Plus you can easily see the impact of your edits in the keyword dashboard for each post. Here’s a quick little testimonial from Laura and Sarah from Wander Cooks. They said, with GA4 becoming increasingly difficult to use, clarity has been a game changer for streamlining our data analytics and blog post performance process. That’s awesome. That’s why we built it, and it’s so fun to hear from users like Laura and Sarah. So as a listener of the Food Blogger Pro Podcast, you can sign up and get 50% off your first month of Clariti to set up your account. Simply go to Clariti, that’s C-L-A-R-I-T-I.com/food. That’s clariti.com/food. Thanks again to Clariti for sponsoring this episode.

Ann Morrissey: Hey there. Thanks for tuning into the Food Blogger Pro podcast. My name is Ann, and in today’s episode, Bjork is joined by Chris Pieta from Creative Biz Launch. Chris starts off the episode by highlighting the need to define what you’re selling, who your ideal client is, and how you can help them achieve their goals. By honing in on these aspects, you can tailor your outreach and messaging to resonate more effectively with your target audience, ultimately leading to stronger connections and greater success. You’ll also hear Bjork and Chris talk about the power of personal connections and how using A CRM can be a game changer for managing leads, tracking interactions and automating tasks. This episode is full of insights on how to supercharge your business, and we think you’ll really enjoy it. If you do, we would really appreciate it if you would leave a review anywhere you listen to podcasts or share the episode with your community. And now without further ado, I’ll let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Chris, welcome to the podcast. Great to be here. Thanks for having me. Bjork, last time, so you did a live Q&A with the Food Blogger Pro audience, which was great. We’re talking about brand deals, talking about building your company, working as an entrepreneur. We’re going to cover some of those things in the podcast today. But one of the things that was, I took a screenshot and I shared it with our team and I was like, it was as if you and I had planned to wear the exact same thing that day. I don’t remember what it was. But then also we have the same mic. It’s like we have a very similar camera. Even depth of field is very similar, so I’m glad today most people won’t see this because it’s a podcast. Glad today we’re not matching. It looked like we could have been brothers last time, missed the model this time. Yeah, we’ll have to make sure to plan that out next time. We’re going to talk about your story as an entrepreneur, but we’re also going to be talking about how bloggers, publishers, creators can be really strategic about brand deals. And one of the things that’s really important in this world is thinking about not only how do you make income from ads with traffic, but let’s say you have a good following on social media. How do you leverage that not just to send traffic, but potentially to do brand deals? Like today, we just got back from a factory tour with a cookware company that we might be partnering with for Pinch of Yum. It’s very much an important part of our business, but even for ourselves, we don’t have a good strategy around it. So I’m excited to talk to you about that. But before we do, I want to hear your story, your entrepreneurial story, kind of the quick version of it because it sounds like you were in a nine to five, you didn’t love it and you knew you wanted to get out. Some of the people listening to this might relate to that. They might have their W2, their nine-to-five, they might want to get out, or maybe they like their W2, and they just want to figure out how to get some additional disposable income doing a side hustle. So what did that journey look like for you and when did you transition into working on your business full time?

Chris Pieta: Yeah, I’d love to dive into that. I was in the boat of, didn’t really like my nine to five, wanted to work for myself. So that was, let’s start with 2016. That’s when I graduated college, went right into corporate America. I graduated in chemistry, started working at a food company, doing kind of quality assurance, stuff like that. Basically desk job. And from 2016, up until 2019 or 2020, that was my main line of work. And through those years, every year that went by kind of disliked my job more and more. The first time I got a promotion or a raise at my job, it was like 2% or something ridiculously tiny, and I was thinking like, wow, I put in so much effort this year and that’s all I get in return. And then hearing entrepreneurship online, putting in all this effort and getting massive returns from it, I thought that would be way cooler. Being able to build something for yourself and see a direct kind of correlation between how much effort you put into something versus what you get out. And obviously with that there’s a lot more risks involved. There’s no security or anything like that, but the reward is so much higher and the fulfillment side of it seemed like so much higher as well. So during that 2016 to 2020 era, didn’t really think much of it. I kind of would read business books on the backend. I like Tim Ferriss’s four hour work week. I was consuming a lot of Gary Vaynerchuk. He was huge back then. So that was the first time I really got exposed to entrepreneurship as a concept because growing up, I didn’t have any family members that were entrepreneurs or any friends that were in that space. Everyone just went to college, got a secure job. That was the path everyone took. So until I got exposed to this stuff, I didn’t know there was any other option. Let’s fast forward to 2019. Now at this point, I’ve been doing some photography on the side. I picked up a camera on a trip to go to Japan, kind of fell in love with the creative side. I was in the STEM side, the science and all that, all my life. So now going into the artistic side of it was this kind of escape from my nine to five would go out, take photos of Chicago sunrises every single weekend, got pretty good at it and figured, okay, I’m not really happy at my nine to five this camera, that’s something I’m decent at. Let’s try and make this into a living. So my goal wasn’t really to be become a pro photographer. My goal was to work for myself. So I think that’s kind of different where a lot of creatives start off as a lot of people want to be professional photographers or professional videographers. My only goal was really to work for myself and the camera was kind of a tool to get to that point. So I started researching how people make money or people make money from a camera, different types of photography, wedding photography events, landscape product. And I kind of landed on product photography and videography because to me that made a lot of sense in my head, okay, I’m going to be taking these photos for brands. They’re going to be using these photos to make money with the photos, so I should be able to get paid for this versus doing landscape photography. I love doing that stuff and I could create really beautiful photos, but the value of hanging a print on a wall wasn’t the same as a brand running ads with this print. So I feel with a photo. So I went down the product photography route, struggled hard for a while.

Bjork Ostrom: What did that look like? What do you mean when you say you struggled?

Chris Pieta: Just didn’t know how to actually get brands to pay me. That was the thing. Okay, I know people make money from this, how the first step is like, okay, do I create a portfolio and post it online? I mean, yeah, that makes sense. People have websites with their photos and videos. So I thought I would do the same thing. So I just went to, I think Whole Foods, bought some hip snacks and started taking photos of that. I mean, I was working in the food and beverage space in my nine to five and I had a camera, so I figured I could niche down to that. I knew a bit about that. So, I created a portfolio around that, put it up on my website, and figured the clients would come. No one did and then they didn’t. Yeah, I don’t know what I was thinking. Obviously if I’m not driving to that, no one’s going to come. And I didn’t really understand that myself until I started working in January. I bought this course from this guy in Chicago who was trying to teach cold email, and that kind of opened my eyes up to having a sales process in your photo or video business. I didn’t even think about trying to sell stuff. I thought I just put it on my website and the clients are going to come, but that just doesn’t happen. So I built out a sales process, built out systems around that. I followed his advice and built out my own stuff. And then after about seven months of testing this tweaking, it landed my first client using that system. It was like a cold email system, landed my first client with it, and I quit my job right then and there with that first client. It wasn’t like a 10 grand deal or anything. It was a $500 client,

Bjork Ostrom: Which you knew if I can do this once, I can probably do it

Chris Pieta: Again. And that was the first thought that came to my head. There was a lot of things that led to that decision. I think of myself as a pretty reasonable guy and not super, I’m pretty risk averse, so someone hearing me quitting my job after a $500 client may think that’s really risky, but I had six months of runway saved up, so I figured I got this system, it got me one client, there’s no way it makes sense. Then my head, it could get me a hundred more. So I gave myself those six months to try it out full time. I’m still here five years later. So something seemed to work, and that’s kind of where I got my start.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s awesome. I’m curious about that system. When you say it was a system. When I think of cold outreach to brands, we’ve been personally, when I think of Pinch of Yum, it’s mostly inbound. We’ll occasionally do outbound. We’re not great at it. We don’t really have a system. But one of the things that I found so interesting, I was having a conversation with a friend who does mergers and acquisitions, and he helps brands and companies acquire companies into their ecosystem. And I was saying, what do those companies do when they buy a company and it’s SaaS, software as a service, it’s media companies, it’s content companies. It’s like, what do they do? They get this company and then what? And he’s like, oh, almost always it’s sales. Their secret sauce is that they are selling well. And I have another friend who has built this incredible site and kind of built this conglomerate within the gear space. And similarly, they talk about how important sales are within their company selling to brands. And I think that there’s a huge opportunity for creators or publishers who are ambitious and interested in pitching, selling, partnering with brands to create a really good income that’s not ad based, but it is advertising based, like ad based meaning display ads and partnering with brands. But it’s like the system feels a little bit more abstract or harder to understand versus, well, you publish content, you get traffic and you monetize via ads. Well, those ads are being sold in the backend, either through custom deals or through the ad marketplace. So sales is happening at some point. It’s just a matter of how much of the cut are you getting from it, but we need that system. So what did that look like for you? And it’s getting into it right away, but what are the early steps that people can start to think about if they wanted to develop a system for reaching out to brands?

Chris Pieta: Yeah, definitely. And this is what I spend most of my time on these days, teaching other creatives how to do the brand work, how to pitch these companies. But I think it has, it’s the four steps really, and it starts with what are you actually selling? So being clear about what it is that you offer. If you’re running a blog, there’s lots of different services that you can sell to brands, whether that’s like a sponsored post on your blog, maybe you’re going to do photos for an upcoming launch for them, or product photos that photos are going to be on your blog, maybe it’s going to be videos. So getting clear on what the actual offer is, I think is important. You have to be able to, if you’re doing outreach, you have to be able to super softly hint at that in the first outreach attempt. So get clear on what you’re actually selling. Once you know what you’re selling, it’s time to get that in front of potential clients or leads. So that can be through outreach, that could be through inbound. You have to pick a method to do this. I think if you’re starting from zero, the fastest way to do this is to do outreach because it doesn’t require a backlog of content. It doesn’t require really paying for ads or anything like that. You’re paying with your time. So the amount of outreach you can do is directly correlates to how much time you have here. Cold outreach is great for that. Now, if you’re more established, well, you’ve got content already out there. You can maybe run paid ads, you’re going to get inbound leads that way. But if you’re just starting out from zero or you’re under 10K a month, then doing outreach is how you’re going to get these engaged leads. Step three of this process is once someone responds to your outreach, it’s like you have to figure out how to get them to be a paying customer in your business. So they responded to your outreach, they’re like, Hey, I’m interested. That’s when the sales process really starts. So you kind of dig into like, Hey, what’s your business look like? Who’s your ideal customer? How does my offer fit into your business goals? And then you have a sales conversation with your lead pretty much being like, Hey, I want to learn more about what your goals are. I want to see if I can fit in there with my service and if so, we can work out ideal. So from there, you kind hop on a sales call with the intention of learning more about them. There’s a whole structure to this that I recommend, but then after that, you send usually a proposal over, you follow up until you get a yes or a no, and then step four is actually fulfilling on what you sold. So you want to at the very least, keep your word to what you promised in every single step of the way, and then have a killer fulfillment process so that they eventually become a retainer client or they refer you to their friends. So that’s the sale system as a high level overview there. But each of these steps, I could talk about hours on.

Bjork Ostrom: And that’s your business. So you have your production company, and it sounds like the stages for you were, you had your W2 job and then you had this ambition around creating your own business. You used photography as kind of the tool to facilitate that transition. You were doing product photography and you were doing direct sales product photography. So you’d reach out to brands, you’d say, Hey, here are the services I offer. You kind of perfected that, and then you saw an opportunity to say, Hey, there are people who might be interested in video, they might be interested in photography, product photography. I’m going to teach them this system that allowed you to get your production company off the ground. I think within the context of what we’re talking about, can easily also then be applied to publishers, creators who are looking to work with brands. Very similar idea. One of the things, so let me know if this recaps what you’re saying. Those four steps, it’s almost like what are you selling, defining that, how are you selling it? Are you doing cold outreach? What is the funnel that’s happening? It’s almost like the third step is packaging the sale. So once you know what you’re selling and how you’re selling it, kind of the package that then you present, would you, does that feel accurate?

Chris Pieta: Yeah, so I would say, so the offer, what are you selling? And then getting in front of eyeballs, getting attention to it, and then once someone expresses interest, that’s when you can present them with a sort of package. But I think what a lot of creators do is they kind of skip the step of actually learning about what your lead wants or what your client wants. So they’ll get someone expressing interest and then they’ll be like, okay, cool. This is what I sell, versus, okay, I’m interested in your thing. What you should do is hop on a call and be like, okay, I’m not sure if I can help you right now. So I want to learn on the call to make sure that I’m the best fit for your company, and you make it all about them, and that’s how you portray your value, and actually you get paid what you’re worth, not just by sending an email back and forth.

Bjork Ostrom: I love that. It’s one of the things we try and do as quickly as possible, and it’s now me for pinch of Yum doing this. We had an agent and that was good for some reasons, but bad for other reasons. And what we found was there’s a lot of value in owning that relationship, and it’s one of my favorite calls is the call with a brand or an agency to say, Hey, let me just ask you a bunch of questions about what success looks like, and then let’s see if there’s an opportunity for us to work together. And I think what feels good about it is I think it probably feels good to the people on the other side to just have somebody who’s like, tell me about how we can partner in a way that is good for you. And people just talking about that. And I’ve had two of those versions of that just this week, and I’ve also had once in the past where we get through it and the answer is like, oh, we’re probably not a good fit for you. It’s not going to be a good working relationship. And in this case, it was an example of, Hey, we’re really just looking for links back to our website. It was like, Okay. And it’s like, well, we’re going to make those no follow. And they’re like, well, it’s, you just got to get a semi-reputable brand, which is kind of interesting. And so in that case it’s like, oh, I know what success looks like. We’ve saved a bunch of time by not going back and forth on defining what a deal would look like by just having a call, but as quickly as possible, trying to jump on that call has been super helpful for us. One of the questions that I have for you that we’re trying to figure out is how do you track these right now? It’s like me in my inbox and my head, and we also use a system called Folk, which is like a CRM for keeping track of contacts, but we’re not really doing deal flow management. It’s pretty loose. What would you recommend for maybe formalizing that a little bit as a system?

Chris Pieta: Yeah, so I think that’s a really important part of it, keeping track of things, because the reality is you’ll reach out to brands and you’ll get a lot of maybes that may turn into deals in three to 12 months. And what most people do is they get that maybe, and then they never follow up on this deal that the person said like, Hey, reach out in a while. So getting organized around that stuff I think is important. So having a CRM is going to be key here, and you can have a paid one, you can have a create one in notion, but keeping track of the stages a potential client goes through is going to be important. So for me, when I reach out to someone, they’re just like a lead. They’re a cold lead, they haven’t responded, they haven’t expressed interest in any of my stuff. This doesn’t matter if they’re like, this is me reaching out through cold outreach or someone filling out form on my website before they come into my world. They’re just a lead. Now, once someone expresses interest in your service, they become an engaged lead, and that’s someone who’s been like, Hey, I’m interested. Whether that’s messaging you on Instagram, a contact form, whether it’s a reply to your cold outreach, they become an engaged lead and they get added to your CRM, and from there, your primary goal is to book a call with this person to see if you can work with them. And this is kind of like you’re not trying to hard sell them here. You’re just trying to figure if you can fit inside of a company. So your goal is to book that call. Once you book the call, you prepare for the call, and after the call, your next primary action is to kind of send a proposal over to this company. I’m just kind going through the stages that to my clients here. You send the proposal and once you’ve sent that proposal, your primary goal is to get that signed. So your CRM, what you would do in there is you would add tasks that are assigned to you to be follow up with this lead. Or if they said like, Hey, we’re not interested now, but in three months we’re launching this new product, you’re going to put a task in there to reach out in three months asking ’em about this product launch. And you just have these stages throughout the CRM that align with what your sales process is like. So proposal, sign, proposal, onboarding, form sent, prep call, book, whatever your sales process is, you have stages set in your pipeline with actions associated with each stage so you know exactly what to do. It’s all systemized. Everyone follows the same flow, and obviously there’s room for customization here, but it’s very deliberate about what actions you’re taking depending on what stage someone’s at in your pipeline.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. What do you use for your CRM? Do you use Notion or have another one that you use?

Chris Pieta: So I have a free notion, one that I provide to my coaching clients and my Creative Biz Launch students I’ve used in the past. Right now I’m using Go High Level for my CRM, which I don’t really recommend if you’re starting out because it’s super complex. I’ve used Close in the past, which is probably my favorite of all of them. It’s pretty simple to use. It’s very straightforward, but really, it doesn’t really matter what CRM you use as long as you use it. That’s the hard part actually sticking to it. There’s lots of great ones out there.

Bjork Ostrom: It was called Clove. Close. Oh, clo, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I did forget the guy’s name who started that, but I think he had a podcast for a while that I listened to. Close.com. I think that’s it now. Yeah, it used to be io, I think.

Chris Pieta: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s the one. Integrates with lots of software too.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. So how often, some really specific questions. How often are you reviewing that? You have your CRM, you have the deals at different points, talking about systems and processes. Do you have a daily thing that you’re like or recommend that people, hey, once a day, check in on your CRM, see where things are at? Is it kind of email where you’re always in there to some degree throughout the day? What does that look like?

Chris Pieta: Yeah, I recommend daily basis go in there and just check in on what tasks you have to do. If you’re using a CRM, there should be a tab that shows you what tasks are due today. So at the very least, all you do is go in, see what tasks are due, and then you do them and then you’re good for the day. Now at the start, you might have no tasks due and you’re not going to have many leads, but as this builds over time and you get more leads in there, you’re going to have more and more tasks to do. You’re going to have lots of things to do on a daily basis. Now, the way I recommend actually going through this, which I learned from my business coach starting from the end of the CRM, so the end of the pipeline where people are most likely to buy from you. So someone who’s gotten a proposal, you’re going to prioritize those tasks before the basic ones like reaching out to new people. So you want to be working backwards what that most likely people are going to buy from you to the least likely.

Bjork Ostrom: Can you talk about your business coach? What has that relationship look like and what have you learned from, is it specifically around deals and sales?

Chris Pieta: Yeah, so I work with Dan Martell. It’s like a group coaching program that I’m in, and I’ve learned a ton from him. He wrote the book up, Buy Back Your Time, which is all about systemizing things, thinking in systems, but I’ve learned everything from sales to marketing to spending money to make money. We cover. It’s a really good program. I’ve learned a ton from it.

Bjork Ostrom: What program is it? I know Dan Martell and we’ve referenced Buy Back Your Time before.

Chris Pieta: He doesn’t advertise this very often publicly. It’s really just through Instagram on stories. He’ll occasionally pitch it to, I mean, if you want, and you just message him like coach or something, and he’ll start a conversation with you.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. And that’s been a good thing for you?

Chris Pieta: Yeah, I really loved it. Yeah, it’s been really helpful.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome. So a couple recommendations there for people who are interested. Dan Martell, the book Buy Back Your Time is really great. Close.com, Go High Level, otherwise you have a free Notion system that people could use. I like that idea of being in there consistently checking on that, and also the idea of working on the most valuable tasks, those being maybe the clients that are closest to signing a proposal or who have expressed interest as opposed to sending out a cold email. Do you have thoughts on the frequency? Let’s say you do have somebody who’s a engaged lead or a lead and you haven’t heard from them. I think none of us want to be somebody who pesters, but also you don’t want to never follow up. What’s the frequency of something that feels intentional, but non-intrusive maybe?

Chris Pieta: Yeah. So what I like to do is there’s really two categories here of leads. There’s people who you’ve had a call with and you probably have a good idea of if you’re going to work with them or not. So those people, they’ve received a proposal from you. I like to figure out when I should expect to hear from them. So on a call, I’ll ask them like, Hey, I’m going to send this proposal over to you today. Do you know when you’ll get back to me on this? And they’ll tell me a day. So they’ll be like, okay, yeah, we’ll review this. We have a team meeting Friday, we’re going to review it Then. So if I don’t hear from them on Monday, I’m going to email them asking about what they told me about that team meeting they had. Did they go over the proposal then, because I’m waiting for a response from them. So at this stage it’s on them to get back to me, but I need to keep following up to actually get that response from them. So in those situations, I will follow up based on what day they tell me, and we’ve sent the president that, Hey, they told me I should hear back by then. If I haven’t heard back, I’m going to keep following up until I do hear back. So if they, on Monday, I email ’em, they don’t respond, then I’ll probably email ’em on a weekly basis until I get a yes or a no. If it’s a lead who I haven’t had a call with and I’m trying to set that up, that’s a bit trickier because we don’t know if they’re super interested in us yet. So that I’ll follow up two or three times and then usually drop it from there and maybe they’ll express interest on the road. But yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Do you remove them then from your database, or do you just put them into a category that’s like not now or check back later or not converted?

Chris Pieta: Yeah, so there’s a column at the very end of my pipeline that’s not interested. I also have one that’s called evergreen marketing. So sometimes I’ll put them in there for my photography and videography company. I don’t do this. I don’t have many consistent marketing assets, but for my education business, create Biz launch. If someone is on the fence of signing up for the program and they’re like, oh, not right now, I’ll put them in my Evergreen marketing column where they’re going to get my weekly newsletter. If I have YouTube videos coming out, they’re going to get those. So I’m still nurturing those leads. They’re interested in my thing, but just not right now. So nurturing your leads is also an important thing you could be doing.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Chris Pieta: That’s great.

Bjork Ostrom: Before we continue, let’s take a moment to hear from our sponsors. This episode is sponsored by Raptive. You may be like the many other Food Blogger Pro members and podcast listeners who are working towards increasing their traffic to be able to apply to an ad network. Raptive, which is formerly AdThrive for instance, requires a minimum of 100,000 page views and brand safe content to join the community. These qualifiers attract premium advertisers and ensure creators like you benefit from Raptive’s expansive solutions and services. But if you’re not quite there yet and you want to be, Raptive can still help put together a comprehensive email series. It’s 11 emails in total that will help you optimize your content, understand your audience, grow your email list, and grow your traffic to help you reach your ad network goals. Pinch of Yum works with Raptive to bring in passive income each month. The ads show up on each Pinch of Yum post, and when that ad loads on someone’s screen or somebody interacts with that ad, pinch of Yum earns money. So more page views equals more money, and it can really add up over time. That’s why so many Food Blogger Pro community members are interested in getting their page view numbers up so that they’ll be able to apply to an ad network and make money on display ads. So if you’re in the same boat and are interested in getting some traffic tips delivered to you for free, head to foodbloggerpro.com/raptive. The 11 weekly emails you’ll receive are designed for creators who have a working knowledge of SEO keyword research and email list, but haven’t yet been able to crack that a hundred thousand page view mark. Go to foodbloggerpro.com/raptive to opt into this free newsletter series. Thanks again to Raptive for sponsoring this episode.

Bjork Ostrom: Are you, last question on the CRM thing, are you making notes along the way so you have an interaction? Do you go in and make a note? Do you tie that into Gmail or whatever email you’re using so you can see the historical interaction? So I think it’s one of the things that’s helpful. You look back, you come across it in a year from now and you’re like, even for Lindsay and I, it’s like two weeks ago we’d messaged with a brand and we’re like, what do we decide? What was the process for that? Oh, yeah, you have to go back, look at the email chain, but how do you sync that up with the CRM? The conversations?

Chris Pieta: Yeah. If you’re debating investing in any CRM, Notion is free, whatever, any paid one, it should have email integration in it. So every contact, when you go in there, you’re going to see the email chain you’ve had with them, plus you’re going to have a space for notes. So if I had a discovery call with someone and they tell me that they’re launching a new product in six months, I’ll have a note in there talking about that so I can reference that when I reach out to them again. So, a CRM is not only great for adding tasks in there, but also all the information you have on a lead, so you can bring it up on future conversations. So that’s both syncing the emails in there as well as just side notes that you’ll make in there.

Bjork Ostrom: And that hooks into Gmail. Are you sending the emails from the application then?

Chris Pieta: It depends on the CRM, but yeah, I usually send them from the application. So for go high level, which I use for my education company, I send all my emails through there. It’s super easy. It also integrates with Instagram, so if I have a contact that has an email address plus an Instagram account, they sync together. So I see all the Instagram messages we’ve had, all the email chains we’ve had, so everything about this lead is just in one spot, which makes it super easy.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep, that’s awesome. So I think people conceptually probably understand that idea of, okay, you’re either reaching out to brands, brands are reaching out to you. One of the things that you want to do as quickly as possible is get on a call, have a conversation with them. I think in the category of you reaching out to a brand, one of the things that might a little bit of a speed bump, a hurdle or a brick wall depending on where you’re at, is how do you know who you’re reaching out to? How do you get that information for somebody at companies and then feel comfortable emailing?

Chris Pieta: Yeah, that’s a big part of it. Reaching out to the right people is important. You don’t want to be reaching out to a support email address or a hello at, because that’s going to go to whatever the gatekeeper, and they’re probably not going to get to the main person who you’re trying to reach. So you want to use some sort of lead database tool, and if you go to Google and just search lead database, you’ll find a dozen different options there and there you can actually filter by company size, company name, region, job title, and I think most of these, they take LinkedIn’s data source business model is just selling data pretty much. They have their own thing called sales navigator, but there they just have everyone’s data that you can essentially just buy and then find the decision makers, email them. That’s kind of how you get in the right people’s inbox. Part of that also is not to dive too into this, but most people don’t get responses. They end up in the spam folder. You have to set up your emails properly so you don’t get in the spam folder, but we can also dive into that.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, can you talk about that at a high level, what that means to properly set up your email?

Chris Pieta: Yeah, so first off, get a Google Workspace account, so your email isn’t at gmail.com, it’s at pietaproductions.com or whatever, so that you seem more professional. But secondly, you want to set up a few DNS records on the backend. So you want a DKIM record, DNS record, DMARC record, and get those set up. If you don’t know how to do that, Google DNS record set up or just send me a DM on the stuff I do in my program.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome. So Google Workspace, it’s this. You can get your custom domain, so a difference between pinchofyum@gmail.com and bjork@pinchofyum.com. We are using Google Workspace to kind of facilitate that. There’s other ways you can do it, but Google Workspace is the best platform for that. Any Food Blogger Pro members, we have a course walking people through that. But then additionally, what’s really important is to have the verification that you actually own the domain. So when you talked about those different acronyms, all of those are different ways to verify like, Hey, I’m sending from this email bjork@pinchofyum.com and just to verify I own this and I’m putting this information in the record of the DNS and associating it with the domain. So there’s an additional level of verification that that’s owned by you. So not only are you using this platform, you’re getting information, you’re starting to learn about who you can actually reach out to with these different companies through a lead database. But then when if you’re doing cold outreach, you have an email that is not only branded to your brand, but also has that additional verification that you’ve done, and it’s a little bit technical, but not too bad. If you work with a developer or if you read through an article or go through a course you talked about, you cover that, you should be able to figure it out,

Chris Pieta: Cold email. It’s a bit of a beast. So that’s at the start. I decided it took me seven months to get my first client, and I just have to figure so much out along the way. So what I love about that,

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, what I love about that is that one of the things we’ve been talking about on the podcast a lot is this idea of reps. And I think sometimes people do something for a week, they do it for two weeks, and then they’re like, it’s just not working, but you just haven’t gotten enough reps in and it’s like playing a sport. And it’s like if I were to go to the golf driving range now, I’d be like, oh man, I’m terrible at golf. It’s like, well, it’s true, but if I showed up and golfed every day for two hours in six months, I’d definitely be better. I might be decent. I dunno if I’d consider myself good, but if I did it for six years, I’d probably be pretty good. And I think the same thing applies for business. You think of something really specific like cold outreach. In your case it was seven months of perfecting that as a craft, and eventually the door opened and then you’re like, oh, I see. You get some pattern recognition, you’re learning, you’re applying what you’re learning, and you continually level up. And it’s a great example of the number of reps that it takes to get that initial breakthrough. And then once you have that, you can double down on the thing that’s working. Let’s talk about that call that you have. So let’s say you do have somebody who reaches out. You do have that first cold outreach that comes back and they’re like, Hey, we would be interested in it. There are two things you talked about. One was doing research and then the other was getting on the call. So let’s talk about the research side of things. What does that mean to research before getting on one of these calls?

Chris Pieta: So this is assuming you’re working with businesses. So I mean just basic level of knowledge around the company that you’re going to be pitching to. What’s this business? Where’s it based? Do they have anything that they’re differentiates them? Are they really into sustainability? What makes ’em stand out? So just doing some research on their website, their about page, their Instagram, but also whoever you’re going to be talking to, look them up on LinkedIn. Just some really basic level of research. Spend five, 10 minutes on this and you’re going to be way ahead of anyone else who hasn’t done that base level of research. So just going to the call prepared, it’s going to be helpful as well as going into the call with certain ideas that you can pitch to this company. What is your core offer? For me, it’s photos and stop motions and piano productions. We did do videography, but we’ve kind of gotten away from that now. But knowing what your core offer is now on the actual call, there’s really going to be three parts to it. Part one is going to be to kind of qualify them. So that’s the first part of a call. Then there’s going to be kind of a, I call this the gap. So figuring out where they are today, what their goals are and what’s kind of missing there. And then step three is kind of the solution. So where do you come in, how does your offer fit into their thing? And then you ask for the sale at the end, but how this looks like is at the start, you’re learning more about them. So you’re asking them questions about, Hey, who’s your ideal customer? Who do you serve? What does your company do? What’s important in working with a photographer or videographer or a blogger like myself? And then you also want to build, not so much build urgency, but make it apparent that, Hey, this is something that we want to do now. So you ask them like, Hey, why is this a priority now and why would I be the best person to, why are you on the call with me today versus someone else? So they’re going to kind of reveal like, oh, well, right now we’ve got this marketing campaign that’s going out in a couple of weeks and we’re looking for people, so I’m kind of preemptively setting it up so that there’s some sort of urgency in working with you. So it’s the qualification part. I mean, feel free to cut me off at any point here.

Bjork Ostrom: No, it’s super helpful.

Chris Pieta: Yeah. But then what you want to do is stretch the gap. So here you’re going to be asking them like, Hey, if we work together, what’s the ideal outcome for you? What are the goals of your business? How do I tie into those? Maybe they’re going to talk about their KPIs or their marketing goals for the year, or maybe they have revenue goals, whatever it is, they’re going to open up about something here. And then you’re going to ask them like, okay, well this is the dream. Where are we at currently with this? What’s missing? And that might be like, oh, well, the photos we have on our website don’t really convert that well, or the ad campaigns, we just, no one clicks on them. So that’s going to unlock a few different things that you can then mention in the third part of call, which is the solution part. So you’re going to be like, Hey, you mentioned this, this, and this. Well, our process solves for all these problems. So you’re kind of bringing in your offer now, tying it into whatever they told you was their problem, and you’re just the perfect solution for this, their problem. So you’re going to paint yourself as the perfect solution for whatever it is that they need help with. And then you’re going to ask them if this is a fit now and if they want to move forward with this, and at that point you’re going to talk about pricing, you’re going to handle objections, and that’s a whole other thing. But yeah, that’s largely what a sales call or discovery call should look like.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, I think what I love about this version of sales is it’s helping people. They have objectives. They’re trying to do certain things, they being individuals that you’re talking to, they have something that they’re trying to do within their job, which their job is within the company and the company’s trying to do a thing. And what you’re doing is you’re coming in and saying, tell me about what you’re trying to do, and then trying to figure out ways that you can help them do the thing that they’re trying to do. And the goal then is to figure out how can you do that as effectively as possible. But sometimes I think we get lost in it where at its worst, it can become like us versus them. Oh, brands are always trying to take advantage of us or underpay or whatever it might be, which in a lot of circumstances might be true, But at its best what it is is you have a company and the company’s looking to do a certain thing, and you have the ability to potentially help them. And if you can agree that you are able to help them and they can agree to the price that you are asking for, that could be a really great partnership that feels like sales at its best, which is what I love about the process. How about for putting together a package? I know that a lot of times you are working with companies and the focus or photographers or videographers, and the focus is like you have a service and they’re selling that service to a brand. We’re going to kind of take a similar angle, but a little bit different where we think about it as the service is a blogger or a publisher maybe doing some of the same things. It’s photography, it’s recipe development, but then they’re publishing it almost as a brand partnership. So kind of similar, how do you recommend people think about pricing and positioning and framing up the offer? Because that’s so many people get stuck with that.

Chris Pieta: Yeah, this is, I think a really challenging part of the process, and people get stuck with this, and they can’t really do the other parts of even starting to sell because they don’t have the offer. What I recommend doing is I don’t recommend starting from a point of like, okay, we can do these photos for you and this is how much it costs. We’re going to have some really beautiful photography. And that’s the offer that’s I think a very generic offer and doesn’t really address what the clients want. I think thinking of what the client’s ideal outcome of working with you, and Hermo talks about this as the dream outcome.

Bjork Ostrom: When you say Hormozi, who is that?

Chris Pieta: Alex Hermozi, he’s a business educator investor on YouTube. Weightlifter, yeah, jacked dude. But thinking of what the client’s dream outcome is. So if you remember, it’s the sales call when we’re asking them questions of like, Hey, what would this partnership look like if it was a grand slam? They’re going to tell you what they want. You have to, before the sales call, think of what their dream outcome would be in working with you as a product photographer. A lot of the time, companies want increased sales because of the product photos I take for ’em. Or they want their brand to be built up more on social media, or they want their conversions to go up on their sales page, or maybe they’re launching a new product, and they want it to be a really great launch. So, thinking of that as the thing that you’re providing rather than you’re providing photos and videos or blog posts, you’re providing this outcome for them. And that way you can talk in terms of what the client actually wants and what their ideal result is. And then you can work backward and build that out. So their outcome is increased sales. Okay, well, you’re going to add in 10 photos into this package, maybe a video into this package, but then you’re also going to add in bonuses. So maybe your turnaround times are going to be really fast to kind of compete on that and make it easier for the client. Maybe you’re going to the entire creative direction and you won’t really need them to hold your hand through this process. You’re going to make it super easy on them to actually get this package done. So, how can you reduce their effort in this process? There are all these little things that you can add that are going to enhance your offer that a lot of people don’t really think about. And this is a core of what I teach inside my stuff by just really thinking of what’s the client’s dream outcome? Let’s work backwards from that with our service and kind of tie these two together rather than it being me against them. It’s like, okay, we’re working together to get your ideal result here.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, I have a friend who does video, and he was working with another friend, family friend who is a general contractor, and they built these really incredible buildings for the headquarters of a bank or Duluth Trading Company stores and things like that. And they did this interview with the people that they’ve worked with and all of these different people have talked about just rave reviews for this company, this contractor, this builder. And what was interesting for me in watching that was the things that people said, and what people said repeatedly was he always follows up, or the team always follows up. I always can get ahold of somebody, I can always talk to somebody. Somebody always responds. It happens on time. So there’s deliverables that the team outlined and they delivered on time for those things. And then the budget was the other piece. It came in at budget or even under budget. And I thought about that within the context of what we do. And it’s so simple, but it’s not easy. And I think if you can nail clear communication, if you can deliver the things that you say you’re going to do on time, and not only that, but to your point, go above and beyond to make them look better or to make their job easier, to reduce some of the burden that they have. That feels like it sets you up really well. For the last piece that it sounds like you talk about is a really important step, which is fulfilling what you’ve been doing, but then using that almost as a conversation to say, Hey, maybe there’s a relationship here that could be ongoing. Do you view that as kind of the last step in the process and how do you do that? Well,

Chris Pieta: Yeah. So that is a hundred percent correct there. You’ve sold them, you’ve delivered on your thing. Or let’s just say they signed the proposal. You pitch them like this, whatever, $5,000 package. They’re like, okay, cool. This aligns with what we want. Let’s do it. So that’s kind of where the fulfillment part starts. And I think at the bare minimum, just keep your promise. Everything you say that you’re going to do, you do it. And if you do that, you’re going to be ahead of almost everyone because people will slip up somewhere. Totally, just even your email communication or whatever. Just always say what you’re going to do. And then if for some reason you can’t fulfill on something, proactively communicate that being like, Hey, okay, we need extra two days for this hope you understand. And they’re going to be like, oh yeah, whatever. As long as you proactively do that. But let’s go back to they signed the proposal, it’s like five grand or something. Your next step is to onboard them into your company. So you want to welcome them immediately, as soon as possible. Send a welcome email, say you’re really excited to work with them, and then give them a clear outline of what the next steps are. So usually that’s going to be some sort of intake form. So a quick onboarding form to figure out some project details to make sure that you’re on the same page with things. Maybe ask them what other, it’s going to be dependent on what your service is, but I ask companies like, Hey, what other brands content do you resonated with? What do you love? What mistakes have other service providers made in the past? And these questions are going to help you along the way with the project. After that onboarding form comes in, you want to book some sort of prep call to make sure that you’re on the same page and you just, on that prep call, what I do is I send over a mood board ahead of time with what the shoot’s going to look like, so they can revisit that. I’ll ask them any questions I need clarification on. They’ll ask me questions. And then from there, we just go into production. So we’ll shoot the project photos, videos, wherever they need, produce the project, and then send them the final assets. And at this stage, I think this is where most people just stop. They send ’em the final assets, invoice paid, cool project done. What I recommend is like, this is the post delivery pipeline. So once you get the final assets to them, they’re going to be like, wow, this is amazing. Well, from there, you want to get them to leave you a testimonial. They just told you via email how great your photos and videos are. They’re feeling good. So ask them to leave a Google Review on your Google page, and there you’ll have a public facing testimonial from this client, and that’s the first thing you want to do. Get that social proof right From there. You want to kind of check in on this client after a few weeks. So this goes back to this, I mean, this is all a big, big system. This is why I teach. But you go back to what you talked on the sales call, what your objectives were of the project, and then you ask them like, Hey, did we meet these objectives a month later? And they’re going to be like, yeah, we did. And from there, you can actually write a case study because you promised ’em something that happened and now you have a case study that you can write about this client. You can take this case study, put it on your website, create a LinkedIn post about it, create an Instagram post about it, and that just further is yourself as a company. From there, you’ve got this case study. You can even ask them for a referral, ask them to go into your referral system. And then lastly, what you could do is ask them for a retainer. So they had a great process with you. They left a testimonial that was like, this is great. You got a case study that they got some positive ROI from you. Well, a retainer now makes sense because the more money they spend with you, the more they get out of it. So you kind of pitch it that way, and then this $5,000 client can turn into 10 x that over the next few years, like the lifetime value of this client by following this type of post-delivery pipeline. That’s

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome. I feel like we could, any one of these steps could be multiple hour conversation, but the good news is you have a course that covers this. You’ve alluded to that a couple times. Obviously, you also work with brands. If there’s any brands listening that are interested in having photography and working with a photographer, you have both businesses. So as we wrap up, talk about where people can follow along with you, Chris, what ways that you are speaking to your audience. Also, one of the questions that I wanted to ask you, so you produce content online and we talked on the live q and a for Food Blogger Pro members, and then you created a reel after that and I was like, oh, this is 20 times better than any of the content we’re producing. Are you doing that yourself? You’re a video guy, so you’re creating those, is that right?

Chris Pieta: So I have an editor that does all the editing, that kind of stuff. So I’m recording this call, so it’s like an hour call. I just sent him the footage and he kind of chops it up and we go back and forth if we need to, but he edits, captions, all that good stuff, which is That’s awesome. Super easy on my end and gets a really great content out of it.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. So where can people find you? Yeah, if people want to go through the course, it sounds like it would apply to publishers and creators who maybe want to do brand deals. It sounds like maybe the conversations that will be happening will be within the context of like, Hey, you’re a photographer or videographer looking for clients, but I think it would also apply to anybody who’s looking to do brand deals, and you also have your production company as well, so you can do some shout outs to those who will include ’em in the show notes.

Chris Pieta: Yeah, definitely. So the Creative Biz Launch System, that’s kind of my course. CreativeBizLaunch.com is where you can find more info about that, or you can just message me on Instagram at Chris Pieta, P-I-E-T-A. That’s where I’m most active, and I respond to everyone’s DM. So if you want more info, that’s probably the best place to message me and just use the word Food Blogger Pro and I’ll know that you came from here. I’m also active on every platform, so YouTube, if you want long-form stuff, Instagram, TikTok, short form, so that’s where the business education part of it is. And then, for photo and video work, that’s Pieta Productions. We have a form on there you can submit and we can get in contact there. But yeah, my mission here is just to provide as much accessible creative business education, so tons of stuff for free online, and then also our courses and coaching for those that want to move faster.

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome. Chris, thanks for coming on and we’ll have to have you on again. We can dive deep into some of these individual steps.

Chris Pieta: This was great. Thanks so much for having me.

Emily Walker:: Hello, Emily here from the Food Blogger Pro team. I wanted to pop in today and thank you for tuning into this episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. We are so grateful to you for listening. Before we sign off, I wanted to talk a little bit about the Food Blogger Pro Forum. In case you didn’t know how it works, if you are a Food Blogger Pro member, you get access to our amazing forum. It’s one of my favorite places on Food Blogger Pro. I spend a lot of time there myself, and on the forum, we have tons of different topics for you to explore. We have a building traffic section, a photography section. We have an essential tools section. We chat about generating income and essential plugins, all sorts of areas for you to ask questions and chat with your fellow Food Blogger Pro members. It’s a great place to connect with fellow members, troubleshoot any issues you’re having, and brainstorm together. Our industry experts are always popping into the forum to help members with their questions. Casey Markee and Andrew Wilder are always popping in, and so is Danielle Liss our legal expert. It’s a really great place to get access to these experts and have them help you with your concerns. The forum is also just a fantastic place to find a community in this food blogging space as you’re working to grow your site and your business. If you’re ready to join Food Blogger Pro and get access to our wonderful forum, head to foodbloggerpro.com/join to learn more about our membership. We really hope you enjoy this episode and can’t wait to see you next week for another great episode. Have an amazing week.

Bjork Ostrom:: This episode is sponsored by Clariti. You spend a lot of time on your blog content, from planning, to recipe testing, to writing, to promoting, but do you know if each of your posts are bringing you the most traffic they possibly can? With Clariti, you can see information about each and every post, which is automatically synced from WordPress, Google Analytics, and Google Search Console, so that you can make well-educated decisions about where your existing content may need a little attention. Think broken links or broken images, no internal links or missing alt text.

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Ann Morrissey:: Hey, there. This is Ann from the Food Blogger Pro team, and you are listening to the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. This week on the podcast, Bjork is interviewing Matthew Garland, the CEO of SPI Media, the SPI, AKA Smart Passive Income Media community is full of online entrepreneurs who have come together to build their online businesses through SPI’s wealth of educational content, community building opportunities, and training experiences. In this interview, Matthew shares a story behind his own entrepreneurial journey, which led him to start SPI Media along with Pat Flynn.

They also talk about the benefits of offering services and leaning into the skills that you already have, and how you can solve real-life problems by doing so. They round out the interview by discussing the importance of strategic goal planning, the power of community, and how building partnerships earlier in your career can help to not only build an audience, but to sell to them. Whether you’re just starting out or years into your business venture, we think this will be a really insightful episode and hope you enjoy it. If you do, please share the episode with your community. It helps our podcast so much and it means a lot to us. And now, without further ado, I’ll let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom:: Matthew, welcome to the podcast.

Matthew Gartland:: Bjork, thrilled to be here. Thanks, buddy, for having me.

Bjork Ostrom:: Yeah, this is one of those conversations where we get on, we have an hour to record this podcast, we have to be accountable to ourselves to not spend the entire hour catching up, talking about what’s going on within our businesses, personal lives, whatever it might be. We have a lot of different connections, one of which is we’re in a fantasy football league with some other really great entrepreneurs and creators, so there’s so much for us to talk about. But today, we’re going to stay focused.

Matthew Gartland:: Stay focused.

Bjork Ostrom:: We’re going to be talking about online business, business building, we’re going to be talking about some systems and processes related to that. But what I want to do, like I do with every interview, is just to hear a little bit about your backstory. I know that you started growing an agency, that agency eventually got acquired or kind of merged into Smart Passive Income. We’ve had Pat Flynn on the podcast before, but fill that story out a little bit. What was the agency and when did you start it?

Matthew Gartland:: I started it as my very first startup right after I left my corporate career, I’m pleased to say and grateful for a career in corporate America. I was in a leadership development program right out of school, sort of like an in-house executive, MBA sort of a thing, and it’s where I started to really kind of give sharper definition to what I’ve been able to play forward into any variety of the startups I’ve been a part of now for over 13 years.

So I had a six-year corporate career, and got out, and that was the very first one, and it was timely and sort of serendipitously, I got lucky in that my background is IT, data science, building of information systems, strategically working with sales and marketing business partners to solve really complex questions and challenges, to grow enterprise companies. That was my corporate career. So I loved emerging technologies. I also just personally loved storytelling. So even in college, I was electively studying the Arthurian legend, Greek and Roman history, the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, Joseph Campbell and the Monomyth, which we know now today as the Hero’s Journey.

Bjork Ostrom:: So the question for you is how often do you think of the Roman Empire?

Matthew Gartland:: Less these days.

Bjork Ostrom:: Do you remember that? Do you that, where it was, there’s that trend where people would ask their… I think it was like… I’m not on social as much. Maybe you are –

Matthew Gartland:: I’m not on socials that much, either, but-

Bjork Ostrom:: Okay, so there’s this trend where people would… I think it was like a spouse, a wife would ask their husband, “How often do you think of the Roman Empire?” And they were like, “Oh, maybe once a day.” And it was like this idea of suddenly all these people realizing their significant other thinks about the Roman Empire all the time. Anyways, but you literally thought about the Roman Empire-

Matthew Gartland:: I literally thought about it, yeah-

Bjork Ostrom:: Every day, yeah.

Matthew Gartland:: I should have, in retrospect, I got within an inch and then I didn’t do it, choose to take an entire semester and study abroad in Greece, so not Romans, but I wanted to actually go there, and I almost did, and I should have. But the interesting, and again, unplanned synergy that happened was my enjoyment and professional career with technology, and especially emerging technologies, different forms of SaaS and different solution building with my personal enjoyment of stories and storytelling, essentially content converged right at the moment with the blogosphere popped off.

So I saw opportunities that were already starting to percolate online with blogs, in particular, of essentially something I could do with my entrepreneurial spirit that I hadn’t yet done. So I wanted to build something, wasn’t entirely sure. So I just started what I think a lot of us sometimes do that are kind of first-time entrepreneurs, which I started a service business, right, before I had a product. And I was already really decently invested in what it takes to write well, because I was doing a lot of writing and even then editing my friends’ papers in school.

I was an honors kid, so that was another layer to all of this, in terms of reading, and writing, and helping people with their honors theses. I wrote an undergraduate honors thesis, so I kind had this weird notion of I can help with manuscripts, I can help edit people’s written stuff into a better shape. So that was the genesis of the very first agency. I would think of it today as like a creator studio, because it evolved rather rapidly into not just working on books, but also doing podcasts and newsletters. And again, what we would think of today is all of the content types for a creator business. The only thing that we didn’t end up doing was video, we never got into video.

Bjork Ostrom:: Sure, which at the time would’ve been people who are doing video, but it would’ve been early. It’s not like video today-

Matthew Gartland:: Super early.

Bjork Ostrom:: … where it’s almost like table stakes for creators.

Matthew Gartland:: Right, even podcasting was relatively early.

Bjork Ostrom:: Early, yeah.

Matthew Gartland:: So this got started in 2012, 2013. I did quickly meet Pat within the first year, but our core focus was working with nonfiction authors, folks that had traditionally published books or were working on their first one. This was also, sort of again, just sort of magical timing of the internet, Amazon KDP arrived on the scene and became a major-

Bjork Ostrom:: Can you explain what that is for people who don’t know, KDP?

Matthew Gartland:: Oh, absolutely, Kindle Direct Publishing, which is now ubiquitous in terms of our understanding of like, “Hey, if you want to write and publish, self-publishing is an option.” It wasn’t always an option, or at least it was really, really hard. And then, Amazon developed an entire ecosystem of tools for-

Bjork Ostrom:: You could have a tool that you’d write a book, and it would be formatted in a way where you could just have it show up in the Kindle Store.

Matthew Gartland:: Yep.

Bjork Ostrom:: So suddenly, it’s like you’re able to get a book in front of millions of people in a digital format, with the ability for them to purchase it with one click, versus 20 years ago, you’d have to get a book published, and you’d print it, and you don’t know how many you have to print. And so a massive change in the world of publishing for authors.

Matthew Gartland:: Oh, yeah. I mean, it brought down the walls, in terms of barriers to entry for people that wanted to be authors that had some version of a manuscript. They could now, yeah, format in different types, EPUB, MOBI files, get really kind of nerdy about it. And then, I forget the exact chronology, I’m pretty certain that the digital KDP side came first, but then eventually, print on demand came as a fast follow through Amazon. So then, you could even have a physical version of your self-published book, so that created so much demand. So for the bloggers, the writers that were really emulating and inspired by Seth Godin, who is still hyper relevant, but he was going through a mega moment. This was in the immediate wake of Tim Ferriss’s first book that really cracked open a lot of people getting interested in entrepreneurship and working for themselves in different ways.

Bjork Ostrom:: 4-Hour Workweek, is that-

Matthew Gartland:: That, the 4-Hour Workweek book. Yep. Check me on this stuff, thank you.

Bjork Ostrom:: Fine, that’s great. Yeah.

Matthew Gartland:: Last pass, important details. But yeah, it was, again, I had a good idea and I got really lucky, and I think that’s sort of-

Bjork Ostrom:: Which is often how it goes. It’s the luck of timing, it’s a good idea, and it’s hard work, and it can’t just be any one of those. It kind of has to be all three of those. And sometimes, what it seems like happens is you work hard, but it’s not the right time, and it eventually is the right time, and then you catch it, or maybe you’re not working very hard and it is the right time of which you’re lucky. And then, eventually you’re like, “Wait, I’m going to start trying at this. I’m going to start working hard,” and then it unlocks. But I think that’s the hard part, is sometimes people feel like, “I’m working really hard on this thing and it’s not happening.” It’s maybe because it’s not the right time or the timing isn’t exactly as it should be. Not that it’s always exactly as it should be, but there is definitely market pull conditions for a thing.

And sometimes, there’s also luck involved, but we talk about this idea of luck wears overalls, like hard work and luck often go hand in hand, so-

Matthew Gartland:: I like this.

Bjork Ostrom:: Yeah, totally get what you’re saying with it. So you’ve built this agency, it kind of coincides with the rise of early creator economy. You’re helping creators in lots of different kind of mediums. Maybe not video, but writing, publishing, blogging, maybe creating content on social. You build that up, and then eventually you cross paths, let me know if I’m fast forwarding too much, with Pat Flynn, Smart Passive Income. Some people are familiar with that. We interviewed Pat many years ago, but he kind of was somebody who did and still does speak to creators who are interested in building an online business. What was that moment like? How did that come about?

Matthew Gartland:: Another sort of serendipitous thing. You mentioned our fantasy football league on the front end of this, Pat is included in that league, and that is the very first interaction I had with Pat, through a mutual friend. As I was building that league for the first time, someone who recommended Pat to be in the league, he said yes, that’s sort of just a weird sort of brand new reference. But then the first project together was in 2012, I want to say… No, I’m sorry, 2015, which was his first manuscript, self-publishing, that we worked on together, but we just kind of hit it off. So I continued to be invited by Pat into the next project idea he had that was in some way creative.

Me and my team, as my team continued to grow, we sort of shared something of a symbiotic storyline in terms of Pat’s building of the first generation of SPI, then as I was building my creative team at that time. So yeah, we became fast friends, we were invited very deeply into the strategic process of what Pat was trying to do, or at least me personally. And rather quickly, I kind of became sort of just a business partner on the side, not formally, but was just really privileged and grateful that Pat trusted me with bringing really big questions and ideas, and we’d kind of just talk about it. And then, we had an opportunity, not all the time, but most of that work lent itself to what we could do. So we did, and that included online courses.

So fast forwarding to around 2016 era, when online courses then became sort of one of the next big things for what of course we’d now call creators, to codify their expertise and create now a new asset to sell. We cut our teeth on that real fast, learning of all of the technology systems to be able to do that, hook them up to different payment gateways, and just the whole kind of marketing apparatus to get people in. So we cut our teeth on that, did a lot of course development for other clients as well, not just Pat. So yeah, that was a whole other kind of moment, sort of like the broader ecosystem, and the economy of online entrepreneurship was the advent and the introduction of online courses.

So yeah, it wasn’t planned in terms of what we ultimately did, but I think in many respects, that’s a good thing. It was never forced. We grew organically. The friendship intensified, the trust was immense. So by 2018, by that point, I’d actually sold another agency, which is a bit of a side quest on the story. So during this whole time, another good friend of mine started an e-commerce agency, and there was also a great moment in time with what was occurring with specifically Shopify and a lot of DTC merchants getting there, and starting their own small businesses on Shopify. He was starting to grow that. He needed a business partner that was really on the ops, and finance, and systematization, and data, and contracts, and all of these things. He was very much the big idea, big energy sales guy.

So there was even a point in time where I had two agencies operating at once. My other partner, John and I, got within an inch of even merging those two agencies together, to create a content and commerce, like mega agency. We ended up not doing that. In retrospect, a good thing. And then, we sold eventually the e-commerce agency to a much larger direct to consumer e-comm agency, but we grew that rather significantly and had a really close strategic partnership with specifically Shopify Plus, which is their real kind of upmarket version of their tech stack, servicing 20, 30, $40 million a year direct to consumer brands like Chubbies Shorts, Bombas socks, some of those kind of darling companies-

Bjork Ostrom:: Of which I’m wearing right now.

Matthew Gartland:: Are you really? Yeah, I mean they’re amazing.

Bjork Ostrom:: Bombas socks. Yeah, yeah, totally.

Matthew Gartland:: It was a wonderful experience, it was a really hard experience. We kind of grew too quickly at different phases, and that’s another kind of teachable thing, which is for folks listening, the business that you’re building, and what is success, how do you define that in numbers? Is it always about revenue? Are you always just trying to scale and grow that? And to the extent that you’re building a team, how fast do you build a team in concert with just revenue, and demand, and all of these other factors that at least someone like me, and I think, Bjork, someone like you, you’re always just trying to balance these things in your head, and then ultimately also spreadsheets and data, and plot these things out, so you have stable, profit-flowing businesses, right?

Bjork Ostrom:: Yeah.

Matthew Gartland:: And that’s been a commonality in my career across my creative agency, which was just me. I didn’t have partners on that one. The e-comm agency, that was chiefly my job. I was the COO of that company. And then, I guess, bringing it back to Pat’s story, after I sold or we sold the direct to consumer e-conn company, that was in late 2017. Then in 2018, maybe like also a lot of us, I kind of felt like that chapter of my entrepreneurial career was complete or nearing complete. Writing an agency, a service business is hard. It’s really enjoyable, I still wildly promote service work. I think too many people these days maybe pooh-pooh service work, and they just want to be creators, and then just have online courses that sell themselves. And I don’t actually think that that’s terribly good advice, we could maybe come back around to that. Yeah

Bjork Ostrom:: Yeah, but basically, I think as long as we’re talking about it, interesting to double click on that-

Matthew Gartland:: Yeah, go for it.

Bjork Ostrom:: We talk about, a lot, what are you after? And if people are after creating their own job, to replace their current job where they work somewhere else, maybe they don’t enjoy it, or it’s not a good fit, or they just have a vision of a future that they want to build, one of the best ways to do that is to figure out how to trade time for money, and to create some type of service that you do for others. That’s going to, most often, you’re going to be able to compress that into a shorter period of time, to a certain revenue number or profit number than you would to scale some type of creator business.

And then, I think often, would be interested in your thoughts about this, you can work backwards from that and start to backfill some of your time, whether it’s you have a gap where maybe you’re not as busy, or you just intentionally start to pare down the clients you’re working with, in order to build on the side. I mean, so many businesses have done this. I think a Basecamp is the ultimate example, where they originally were a services business, doing web design, web development, and then built these products kind of on the side. And then, obviously now one of the most, well-known bootstrapped software businesses.

I think the same thing can be true for the creator world. We’ve had many different interviews with people who they start a video business, and they shoot video for other creators, and that helps them transition into being an entrepreneur. And then, 10% of the time, they’re working on their own site or their own social, and then it’s 20% and 30%, and over time, they start to scale it up. Is that kind of what you’re getting at, is like-

Matthew Gartland:: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom:: … the value of a service business is pretty immense, in that it allows you to relatively quickly, if you’re focusing on an area you’re interested in and you have unique skills and abilities in, scale up?

Matthew Gartland:: Yeah, exactly, especially for folks that aren’t raising money, like they’re bootstrapping. So why not be revenue generating from the jump, if you can?

Bjork Ostrom:: Yeah.

Matthew Gartland:: Right, and I’m not saying that that is for everyone, snap easy to do. I don’t want to create maybe the wrong impression there. But I find that if you’re trying to work for yourself, if you’re trying to replace a traditional source of income with just your own sort of income, that at least as a first, perhaps, not always, but perhaps definition of success is just to match that, right? It’s a very common story, and I think it’s a good one as a starting point, not that… And they’re always. It’s like, yeah, then do services, lean into the skills that you already have.

You can go to market faster. Velocity is always a really key thing in any kind of small business or entrepreneurial venture. And I think something else that is really under celebrated, under discussed is that it keeps you sharp, because things change, like so much has changed in the creator economy by itself over the last 5, 10 years. So if you are doing services, I find, through my lived experience, anyway, that you’re closer to the flame of what the market wants, what your customers ultimately want, and there are pains, the language that they’re using to talk about those pains, the needs that they have, things change and evolve. So when you do services, you’re that much closer-

Bjork Ostrom:: Which is kind of customer development, product development, like-

Matthew Gartland:: Yes, it’s like R&D, it’s like paid R&D.

Bjork Ostrom:: Yeah, if you were creating a product, one of the first things you should do is have those same conversations, but you just wouldn’t be getting paid to do them. You would be trying to convince people, “Please get on a call with me so I can ask you questions about your pain points,” as opposed to if you’re doing a services-based business, you’re helping people solve those problems, getting paid to do it, and also then getting informed as to a potential product, whether information, or software, or physical product that you could be creating to solve that problem, that people are coming to you to kind of get help with?

Matthew Gartland:: Yeah, and at least per the thesis, you’re de-risking your chance of being wrong. If you didn’t do that, if you just sat in your office or anywhere, and you just created a product because you thought it was a good idea, without talking to a lot of people or talking to very few people, and without trying to get some feedback loops going, then you could be building the wrong product or you could be positioning it the wrong way. You could be using the wrong language. So if you can test some of those methods and the services through a services offer first, you can at least, again, and I’ve seen this prove true, it’s not like a totally unproven thesis, then your margin for error reduces, which I think is a very valuable thing to consider, again, from almost like an operational mindset, about how I think about product development for small business.

Bjork Ostrom:: Yeah, I had an email conversation with somebody who’s a food creator, and she was talking about just the painstaking process of trying to build traffic to her site, and she wanted to eventually monetize it. And the back and forth that we had was around she was doing these in-person meal planning classes, and people found them to be immensely valuable. And my feedback to her was like, “Oh, continue to explore that. There’s something there, and it could potentially be made digital, but just because it’s in person doesn’t mean it’s bad.”

You could have something that is a in-person class that you do once a week, and maybe there’s a digital version of it, and then the online component of it is lead generation for that class, versus I think a lot of people start with the idea of like, “Hey, I’m going to try and just grind away at creating content for two to three years, in order to get enough traffic to work with an advertising company or do sponsored content,” which works, you can do it, but to your point, sometimes you might think, “I’m creating a type of content that people really want,” and you don’t actually know if they do want it or not. And doing some of that service-based work allows you to see, “Is this something that people actually want?” In the purest form, are people willing to pay to get this problem solved? And if they are, that’s probably an indicator that there’s something more there.

Matthew Gartland:: Right, you’re onto something. Exactly. And then, just keep listening. It’s what we did through both services companies, so my creative company, Creative Studio, and then the direct to consumer e-comm business, which a quick maybe story back there that perhaps kind of illustrates the point is we solved, through software, through… This is almost a Basecamp-esque story. So through our services business, the e-comm one, we collaborated and co-created software with one of our biggest clients, which was Chubbies Shorts’, crazy brand, if you go check that out, returns and exchanges software, because in direct to consumer e-comm, and some of us are consumers of that, we buy socks online, or shoes, or whatever.

The traditional experience, a lot of it’s been solved these days is returning that stuff is a pain in the butt, right? The traditional process was very manual. You had to download a PDF return slip, you had to print it, fill it out-

Bjork Ostrom:: Tape it on, yeah.

Matthew Gartland:: … go get your own box, take it to UPS or somewhere. It was just, it’s a bad process. So we invented software that moved a lot of that experience into the browser, as people were interacting through a particular brands consumer website, you know, on Shopify. It was a separate piece of software that integrated with Shopify, and it was like, “Crap, this is a product,” but we solved our own problem. We kind of did that and incubated it, and then we eventually spun that out into a new company that went on to raise gobs of money, and it’s on a rocket. But we would never have been able to figure that out on our own. We did it because of services, and we were solving real problems through a service lens.

Bjork Ostrom:: That’s great. Before we continue, let’s take a moment to hear from our sponsors. As you know, you’re listening to the Food Blogger Pro Podcast, but maybe you didn’t know that we actually have a membership for food creators and food publishers like yourself. We’ve actually had this option for 10 years. We talk about it occasionally on the podcast, but recently we had this realization of like, we need to let people know that we have a membership, because sometimes people don’t know that exists.

And there’s a lot of really incredible resources within a Food Blogger Pro membership. We have a community forum where we have FBP, Food Blogger Pro industry experts, a lot of people who you probably recognize from this podcast. We have a deals and discounts exclusive to members page, where you can get access to discounts on some of the most popular tools for creators, a bunch of different courses on photography, and video, and SEO. And then, we do these live Q&As with experts. Like, recently we did one on SEO and republishing. We talked to Eddie from Raptive, and he has years of experience in the world of publishing, and he talks about why the process of republishing is so important.

I also do these coaching calls with Food Blogger Pro members that we record, and then we make available to everybody to watch, and to learn, and to listen. And these are one-on-one calls with other publishers or business owners, to talk through the strategy for growing their business. And the cool thing about these live Q&As and these coaching calls is we actually wrap those up into a podcast that’s exclusive for members. So maybe you listen to the Food Blogger Pro Podcast and you’re like, “I wish there was more episodes that you could listen to and learn from.”

Well, you get access to additional content, additional podcasts if you join Food Blogger Pro. So if you want to check it out, you can go to foodbloggerpro.com and click the Join Now button, and you get access to everything when you sign up, the back catalog of all the live Q&As, all the coaching calls, all the courses, all the deals and discounts, and immediate access to the community forum. So again, if you want to check that out, go to foodbloggerpro.com, and we would love for you to not just be a podcast listener, but also to be a member.

So coming back out, we double clicked, now we press the back button, to hear the completion of that story around you and Pat are working close together. You eventually decide to merge, or the agency that you’re working on, that becomes SPI Media, Smart Passive Income Media, where you work directly with, essentially, the type of people that are listening to this podcast, online business builders, creators, content creators. When did that happen? And then, talk a little bit about the SPI community, what that looks like.

Matthew Gartland:: Yeah, I’d love to, and there’s a really strong tether between the two. So after the e-comm agency was sold at the end or towards the end of 2017, it kind of galvanized within me, okay, what is my longer-term future and vision for then the Creative Studio that I had. And what just kept coming up is we were solving of new problems for folks like Pat, though not exclusively Pat, our other clients. It was that the forms of content in 2017, online courses were still doing quite well, but the zone was getting flooded, if you will, with then online courses. Barriers of entry come down, zones get flooded.

Same happened with books even, and we saw this happen up close, all this self-publishing capability, as we’ve already hit on, from Amazon, it democratized, then the whole notion of anyone can be an author. And there’s a famous Seth Godin quote that says, “When anyone can be an author, anyone can,” or, “When anyone can publish a book, anyone can, and most are going to be crap.” So there’s a quality factor there. So to keep, at least in my mind, and also Pat’s, to keep quality high, to stay differentiated, with courses we were starting to see… And by that point, even though I wasn’t a formal partner, again, he was trusting me enough. So I knew financial numbers, I knew what was happening in the business.

And it was like, “I don’t know if this is the model for the next five years. How do we think about where the industry is going to be? What are we seeing and hearing from the students that we are serving by way of selling online courses? What are they really craving?” And not just more topical feedback, but interaction feedback with our curriculums. Also, what are our friends seeing and feeling, the close relationships we had in the market? And that kind of tied it all together. It was like, “Okay, I think for me…” because I’d had, at that point, close to seven years, or six years doing agency work, it’s like, “Okay, I kind of want to be focused on one brand and be a real vested partner in that brand.” Pat and I were the closest, and he was looking to do things differently, and wanted more help. So again, it was a very natural thing.

We’d almost been dating for years, to use a dating reference, and then I was like, “Hey, here’s something we could go do in different… I don’t have all the answers, but here’s the beginning of a pretty different vision for what could be possible.” Pat enriched that as well. I kind of bent the knee proverbially, but like, “Hey, what if we just made a baby, made a company together?” So I merge in my creative team, and certain assets, and SOPs, and kind of the business apparatus, if you will. You take your SPI assets, the brand and other things, which he had in just sort of a big global, sort of single LLC company, and he had other personal projects that would then be carved out.

Then we put those together, draw a circle around that, and then bam, we co-founded a new company, and that’s SPI Media. And a big part of that thesis, that through-line was that learning and development was already beginning to change. One of the most important things or the most valuable things that we were seeing and hearing was not so much just the curriculum that we were selling on Teachable, our courses, but the interactions that we were fostering through, at that time, Facebook Groups. So we were using Facebook Groups with… And we had a lot of them, and there was one specific per course, and we were trying to cultivate, effectively, community, but Facebook Groups, not the best, it was never designed to necessarily be community, at least not the way that we think about it and talk about it today. And we have very strong opinions, or at least I do, about what is and is not good community.

So it was, again, sort of another accidental, good, lucky timing, because we had a really close, and still do, close personal relationships with the founder of Teachable, who went on to sell Teachable, and that was in the industry. So when I was talking to Ankur, who was the founder around like, “Hey, this is I think the direction that I want to go. We want to build MRR into our business, monthly recurring revenue.” We didn’t have any of that, at least not what I called native. We had some affiliate revenue that is inherently recurring, but we didn’t have our own. So started to even test the waters with Ankur around, “Hey, are you at all thinking about building this sort of capability to the future of the Teachable product?”

And he was unsure, and there were some things you could kind of stitch together, but he was like, “Hey, but three of my top guys are leaving the company to basically go a new startup that I think is going to solve what you’re talking about,” and that is now Circle. So it was just again, happy accident timing. You invest in people, invest in relationships, sometimes you get lucky, and I think that’s always something you should do. So that’s again, fortuitous timing. So this was 2019. At this point, we’d already tied the knot, we had co-founded the company in 2018, or at the end of 2018, we decided to do that.

So 2019 was kind of the start, and then I guess the rest is history, to kind of fast-forward a little bit, but having to come back and double click on anything, which is we started to pivot the business model. That’s a really hard thing to do, is to transform one’s business model, especially when you have a full-time team, which we did. Our high watermark with online course revenue, we were doing somewhere between 2 to $3 million a year in one-time purchase online courses, and then very intentionally, it was already starting, we were seeing attrition for, again, market reasons and others. So we intentionally cannibalized that to zero. Today, we make $0 from our primary revenue source in 2018-

Bjork Ostrom:: At one point, yeah.

Matthew Gartland:: … and now, so do that while you’re building a whole new, essentially, business model, which is recurring revenue.

Bjork Ostrom:: Yep, yep, and the benefit of that is the selling looks different. It’s like you’re building a community, you’re selling into the community. People stick around. That same idea we have with Food Blogger Pro, which is this recurring business model. It’s not like software, but it’s membership. And membership can be a really wonderful thing, but incredibly hard to rebuild that. But now, you’re at this point where you have members who are part of this community, and the focus of it is really the name, Smart Passive Income. We all know, and you talk openly about passive, in the sense that you could not work a day and still earn the money, not passive in the sense of you’re not going to work an entire year, but the allure is what a lot of us feel, which is autonomy.

You’re able to work where you want, it’s digital, so you’re not having to necessarily go into an office, all of these people who are building these types of businesses, and you get to see, in a really interesting cross-section of global digital creators who are building businesses. One of the things that I’d be interested to hear you reflect on a little bit is what’s working right now? Like, with the people you see within your community or that you come across on the podcast, as you guys are doing interviews with people, what are some of the things that feel like are working right now and are effective? We talked about these different stages throughout the last decade, things that did work, maybe didn’t work, but what’s working right now, at least when you look at the entrepreneurs you’re working with, or even within your own businesses?

Matthew Gartland:: A few things, it’s a great question. Might be a slightly counterintuitive answer, is at least in our community, we have the great pleasure to serve over 1,200 members, so a decent data set, is that many of them don’t identify as creators. Yes, this is an important industry term. My opinion on the record, 100 times over, I’m sure on podcasts and whatnot, is that I’m not actually the biggest fan of the term, at least at this point, in its definition, because it’s kind of been hijacked to be now a meta term that is now kind of everything. And when something means everything, it kind of means nothing, in my book.

So anyway, what I’m seeing and hearing, that I think is actually quite fantastic, that is beginning to work for people, one are partnerships, like being more deliberate with the relationship building activity that early-stage entrepreneurs, online entrepreneurs are doing, to help them not just build audience, though that as well, but honestly just sell, and sell relatively quickly, or sell faster than maybe traditional advice might suggest. If, like, “Oh, just go build an audience and eventually sell to that audience.” That could take a while, especially because audience building is increasingly, quite frankly, a hard thing to do. The more that the internet gets fragmented, the more that AI is coming and affecting SEO, which I know a lot of friends, including ourselves, have struggled with, in terms of retaining certain keyword positions, and the whole social media sort of dumpster fire. At least I’m not the biggest fan of all things social media.

Just, it’s much, much harder these days, as compared to 2010, 2012 era of social media. So the more that you can, just to go back to it, number one, partnership building, can we do co-promotion? Can we think about economic relationships? I think that’s a wonderful thing for entrepreneurs to be thinking earlier than maybe they used to around finances, essentially, like pricing, rev share models. Not that these are complicated things, they don’t have to be. And then, relationship building as a pathway to getting a business to really work, to actually getting the inputs into a business that are going to be necessary as the basic needs of a business, a little bit of revenue to get it going, a little bit of access to an addressable market vis-à-vis someone else’s audience. So partnerships is, I think, a great thing that people are thinking about more critically earlier in the process.

Bjork Ostrom:: I think that’s great. So Lindsay and our friend Nate have started a kind of side channel, and they have 6,000 followers. It’s called Snackdive, and it’s like a snack review show, but one of the things that we’ve started to do on it is try and sell. I hear what you’re saying in partnerships, in that sometimes it’s you and another business, and you’re thinking creatively around how do you create a net win situation? And it’s a little bit like that, because we’re reaching out to these companies and being like, “Here’s where we’re at, we would love to figure out how to partner.” And it’s a little bit of that early stage filtering around, like, “Is this a viable business?” And we’re in the early stages of potentially getting the first deal that we’ve gotten.

It’s like, the business is operating at a loss, but as soon as possible, we’re trying to get it to be revenue positive. Even though we have these other businesses that could support it, we wouldn’t really need to necessarily get it to a point where it’s profitable, but if it’s not that, then it’s a hobby, and we don’t want it to be a hobby. We want it to pay for itself. And so to prioritize early on selling, trying to land deals, trying to figure out partnerships, thinking of it as a business early on, and thinking about it from the perspective of building revenue and being strategic about that.

It reminds me of the conversations we’ve had around your… It’s kind of a framework that you’ve created to track business metrics, revenue, expenses. Can you talk a little bit about what profit flow is, and how entrepreneurs are using that within their businesses? And we have our friend Daryl Westerfeld, who talked about it being life-changing for him, and that’s just for somebody like yourself who loves spreadsheets, I’m sure for somebody to say, “A spreadsheet is life changing,” is really great to hear?

Matthew Gartland:: Yeah, tickles my heart. Yeah, thanks for teeing it up. Let me back into that super quick. So you were prophetic in that I was going to say, to my number one, my number two was going to be direct sellings, and they are overlapping circles with partnerships. But yeah, folks moving more into, first and foremost, a mindset, a head space again, of being more comfortable and more willing to try to make an offer on the front end of something, and sometimes, to go back to already another conversation point, and offer that as a service-based offer, in some capacity.

It doesn’t always have to be consulting, per se. There’s a lot of different ways you can design out, like a service offer would be number two. And then, number three is the tie back to profit flow, which is, and I hope I’m not wrong with my read on this, from my friends, my community, et cetera, is that this day and age, definitely post-pandemic, when that has affected a lot of different small businesses in a lot of different ways, there’s been a lot of adversity there, people do seem genuinely, I’d say this is like a Grinchy but healthy byproduct of some of that adversity in the markets over the last couple of years, is a greater literacy with business finance.

They care about business finance more, or at least that’s what I’ve seen, or they care in such that they want to learn it sooner than maybe they used to. Whereas, before, talking about budgets was like, “Oh, that seems boring. I don’t want to put my time into thinking about or designing a budget. What is cashflow? Like, I kind of think I maybe understand the notion of cashflow, but I’d rather just record podcasts versus try to think about cashflow.” So yeah, I think it’s a good thing, ultimately, in terms of what I see, especially as businesses begin to get traction and grow, is that a certain interest level is increased, is my radar, on business financial literacy, if that kind of makes sense?

And it ties back to, again, sort of as a through-line to some of these conversation points, me solving my own problem, over a decade. So going all, all the way back, not to retell the whole story, but from the very beginning of my first startup, that Creative Studio, as we were starting to gain traction, my costs were increasing, because I had to keep bringing in initially contractors, and then eventually I had made the choice to go with a full-time workforce, as our revenues were growing.

It’s like, “I need to keep these things in balance,” because at least I had chosen, this is not everyone’s choice, but I always wanted just to at least be cashflow neutral, which is to simply say, “I want to be bringing in as much revenue as I’m spending out the back, and try to be as least cash flow neutral as I’m trying to systematically grow this business. I don’t want to take on debt.” Some of my companies I’ve been a part of have taken on working debt, lines of credit, things like that, to try to grow. The Creative Studio never did. At least my personal preference is to try to avoid those dates as much as possible. Just, that’s a me decision.

So I started to slowly but surely build out, yes, in the spreadsheet at the start, a very simple just kind of cashflow calculator, and it was designed very literally in almost a calendar format. So day by day, Monday through Friday, where business activity was happening, transactions, to map out, “Okay, here are the inflows that I’m expecting from certain client receivables, et cetera, then here’s when I need to make payments on credit cards and invoices to contractors, and then eventually payroll.” And then, I started to stitch together what this looked like with data.

This is certainly drawing on my data science and information system background. I know how to build systems. It was very basic in the beginning, and then is not basic anymore. So over 10 plus years, kept adding different dimensionality to essentially the database, the data structure to it. Started to build more dynamic elements into it, so I could categorize the inflows in different ways. I could also categorize the outflows, so the expenses in different ways. I eventually built an entire visualization layer through charting, just charts, that still all lives within a Google spreadsheet ultimately. So that’s why it gets a little bit like a joke. It’s like, “Oh, this is just a spreadsheet?” And it’s like, “Yes, and it’s a-”

Bjork Ostrom:: And software.

Matthew Gartland:: “It’s kind of software with a database layer, a logic layer that’s doing all the computations automatically, and then a visualization, UI layer.” And at this point in time, to kind of, I guess, wrap up the story, it’s basically a cash accounting based business system, where you can run almost any small business, whether you have a creator business, a services business, whether you’re working just for yourself, or if you have a team, those things don’t really matter, because it’s designed to work with basically any form of cash accounting, input, output, sort of a system.

Bjork Ostrom:: Yeah, cash accounting mean-

Matthew Gartland:: Cash accounting.

Bjork Ostrom:: … meaning the cash that comes in and the cash that comes out and into your bank account, on any given day or any given month. And one of the things that I think is so great about that and that we, as business owners, when anybody who listens to this podcast will hear me talk about creators, publishers, but the term I often use is business owners, because we are building businesses, is understanding, it’s kind of like the heartbeat of a business is the product. So it’s like what is the content you’re creating in many cases? What is the actual product you’re creating, in other cases? What is the service? That, it’s almost like there’s two hearts, that plus it’s almost like maybe it’s like the heart is the product and then the oxygen is the revenue. It’s the ability for the business to stay alive, it needs to have money coming in and money coming out.

And the understanding of those numbers I feel like is what’s really critical. And a tool like what you’ve built helps people get a good understanding of how much each day is coming in and coming out, and keeping an eye on those things. It’s one of the most… I know that Pat had a season where you do the income reports on Smart Passive Income on Pinch of Yum. We did a similar thing for a season, and one of the most beneficial things for us in doing that was me taking a day, and going in, and understanding like, “Here’s what it looks like from an inflow and outflow perspective.” And even better to do that on a day-by-day basis.

So if somebody’s interested in… I know that you do licensing for that system, if somebody would be interested in connecting with you with that, there’s not a landing page or an official tool, but I know that there’s a handful of established entrepreneurs who are building businesses and using it. If somebody wanted to hear more about it, could they just shoot you an email or something like that?

Matthew Gartland:: Oh, yeah, that’s very kind. Thank you. Yeah, no fancy landing page or anything. I’ll just say, I don’t know, as most entrepreneurs do, they have crazy dreams. I have a dream of someday… I’m a good data scientist sort of a guy, but I’m not a software engineer. So maybe one day, partnering up with a CTO sort of a person, actually building software, like the Basecamp guys actually did. But yeah, for right now, it’s just a little licensing thing. Anyway, my email, yeah, that’d be great, if people are interested, it’s just matthew@gartland.co. So my first name in full @ my last name .co.

Bjork Ostrom:: Cool. That’s great, thanks.

Matthew Gartland:: Yeah, thank you.

Bjork Ostrom:: To close out, would be interested to hear, we talk about those numbers, and we talk about this idea of tracking those numbers, and getting an idea of what those look like. We talked about this idea of autonomy, the ideal schedule, business building, but if you don’t actually know what game you’re playing, then it’s hard to know what success looks like as you’re tracking those.

And one of the things that we’ve talked about before, and I think is really important to shine a light on as we close out, is this idea of using all of those tools, using all of that information, using all of that data, to inform whether you are playing the game that you want to be playing or not. And I think sometimes we can get caught up in other people’s gameplay, we can see what somebody else is doing, and then we start to do it without really defining what we’re trying to do. Can you talk a little bit about maybe how you do that, how you approach it, and how you guide the entrepreneurs and business builders that you work with on doing that well?

Matthew Gartland:: Yeah, I don’t think this could be probably an understated question. It’s so important. Three minutes probably isn’t enough, but it’s definitely a good thing to land on.

Bjork Ostrom:: Yeah.

Matthew Gartland:: Yeah, I again, have spicy opinions. I think there’s obviously a lot of hubris online. I think there’s a lot of grandstanding, and in such a fashion where I think there’s an inceptingness, right, of other people’s success and trying to then mimic, or mirror, or say like, “Oh, I’m not successful until I hit that level,” of either revenue, in terms of people sharing all of their revenue, or all the vanity metrics that usually come associated with social media followings, stuff like that.

Yeah, I think that is a really dangerous game to play, because to your point, it’s not probably the game you want to play or that you should be playing. How do you solve for that? I think one of the classic ideas that stuck with me through my entire career, and it even dates back to my corporate career, I forget where I first heard it, but it’s that classic notion of you are the average of the five people you surround yourself with the most.

So I guess you could call that community, but in a very intimate way. So just look around you, and not necessarily physically next to you, but who are the five people you trust the most that you’re trying to get feedback from? Who are you following in a social media following sense? And maybe that’s a first kind of tactical lens of some form of honest self-assessment. Like, are you following people that are honestly healthy in your own sort of understanding and mental journey of what success means? Who, if you actually are a part of a community that is trying to promote accountability, and foster collaboration, and nurturing of forward progress on your small business, are you in a good community? Is there a better community that you can maybe consider differently, if you’re not really finding that the community that you’re in is really helping you in this way?

So I’d sort of assess, I guess that’s a long way to say, number one, kind of like, yeah, who are you following? Who are you really mimicking and looking to? And maybe doing an honest assessment on that. Number two, with no time to be able to unpack it, is just goal planning. Getting into actual business methodologies that are maybe unnatural at first, because usually they are for entrepreneurs, but strategic planning, goal planning. Over the next six months, how are you defining goals? How do you assess those goals to be the right goals for you? And then, how are you aligning the work that you’re doing day in and day out, week in and week out, to the pursuit and hopefully the attainment of those goals, right? And then, how are you socializing your definition of those goals, maybe flipping back to number one, with the people that hopefully you’re choosing to be your most trusted sort of advisory board, right? Like the people that… Right? So there’s a lot there and I’m sorry we can’t unpack it today.

Bjork Ostrom:: No, that’s great. Well, we’ll have to have to have you on for another podcast.

Matthew Gartland:: Yeah, yeah.

Bjork Ostrom:: That’ll be it.

Matthew Gartland:: Yeah, yeah, just around goal planning. I could talk for hours on strategic planning frameworks, methodologies, tactics, and all of that.

Bjork Ostrom:: That’s great. Well, we’ll have to do another-

Matthew Gartland:: But goal keeping is critical.

Bjork Ostrom:: … on another podcast. People have your email address, Smart Passive Income if they want to join the community and be a part of that. There’s also the Smart Passive Income Podcast. Matthew, super great to connect. Thanks for time today.

Matthew Gartland:: Bjork, thank you, buddy.

Bjork Ostrom:: Really appreciate it, and we’ll have to have you on again.

Matthew Gartland:: Thank you. Yeah, this was a blast.

Emily Walker: Hello, there. Emily here from the Food Blogger Pro team. We hope you enjoyed listening to this week’s episode of the podcast. Before we sign off today, I wanted to mention one of the most valuable parts of the Food Blogger Pro membership, and that’s our courses. In case you don’t already know, as soon as you become a Food Blogger Pro member, you immediately get access to all of our courses here on Food Blogger Pro.

We have hours and hours of courses available, including SEO for food blogs, food photography, Google Analytics, social media, and sponsored content. All of these courses have been recorded by the Food Blogger Pro team or some of our industry experts, and they’re truly a wealth of knowledge. We are always updating our courses, so you can rest assured that you’re getting the most up-to-date information as you’re working to grow your blog and your business. You can get access to all of our courses by joining Food Blogger Pro. Just head to foodbloggerpro.com/join to learn more about the membership and join our community. Thanks again for tuning in and listening to the podcast. Make it a great week.

Bjork Ostrom: This episode is sponsored by Memberful. Looking to find sustainable sources of income from your blog this year that don’t include fighting against changing search engines and social media algorithms? With exclusive membership content, you can create a new source of income by turning your food blog into a membership business while creating the content you’re passionate about.

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Emily Walker: Hey there. This is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team and you are listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. This week on the podcast, Bjork interviews Parker Thornburg from the food blog, Foodness Gracious, they are chatting about a topic that we actually haven’t covered a ton on the podcast but is super interesting. We are chatting all about acquiring an existing food blog, which is exactly what Parker and his business partner did when they acquired Foodness Gracious last year.

In this interview, Bjork and Parker chat about what the process of acquiring a food blog looks like, what factors to consider when acquiring a site, including budget and potential profit, the previous owner, just all the nitty-gritty details that you might need to know, and then Parker shares a lot more about what it’s been like since they acquired the site. He did not have a background in food blogging, and so there’s been a really steep learning curve and he shares more about what they’ve learned, how they’ve navigated traffic changes at the site, and how they’ve re-imagine the site to make it their own.

Parker shares about how he is balancing this food blog with his current full-time job and what he wants the legacy of Foodness Gracious to be. Whether or not you’re thinking about acquiring a site or selling your own site, it’s a super interesting interview with just a new perspective on food blogging and running your own site. Without further ado, I’ll let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Parker, welcome to the podcast.

Parker Thornburg: Thank you so much for having me.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, this is going to be a fun conversation because it’s an area that I’m really interested in and love reading about, love exploring, love talking to people who have gone through this process of acquisitions. A lot of times on the podcast we talk about, and remind people who are listening that one of the things that we’re doing is we’re building a business, businesses inherently have value, and that’s… For a lot of people, you build up this business and it’s one of the most valuable things that you own maybe along with your house, and you can sell it.

You sell it to somebody on the other end as a buyer, and you are a buyer of a food media business, of a website, and it’s going to be a great conversation because a lot of us don’t think about that as a way to step into our entrepreneurial pursuits. For you, it wasn’t something that you had always been doing or thinking about, it was really strategically looking at it as a business opportunity it sounds like.

Before we get there, I’m going to do a little bit of a trailer so people know it’s coming, but we’re going to rewind the tape. You had been working in the world of technology at Yahoo. I’m a Yahoo News guy, so I go to Yahoo Daily. Supporter of Yahoo in your previous career, so take us back to that and talk us through the origin of starting to think about being a business owner.

Parker Thornburg: I’ve worked at a variety of different companies of varying sizes, from small insurance companies to publicly traded companies like Yahoo while I was there at the time. My background is pretty diverse, I consider myself more of a generalist from an operational perspective with project management, business analysis, and things like that.

While I was at Yahoo between 2011 and 2019, I met Scott, who at the time, was my manager for seven of my eight years there. In 2019, just before COVID, I had this entrepreneurial itch that needed to be scratched. I said you know what? I’m going to try my hand and join a startup. When I say startup, I mean four employees and no customers, no revenue actually at the time.

Bjork Ostrom: So this is a startup that had raised a round of money, had a burn rate?

Parker Thornburg: They had a burn rate, but not a lot of seed money or anything like that. We were really scraping for customers, just very down and dirty in terms of from a startup perspective. When I went to Scott and put in my notice and he said, “Where are you going to go?” I told him I was going to this startup that was in Omaha, where I’m located, and Scott said, “I think you should totally go because I’m just getting ready to invest in that company.”

Bjork Ostrom: Oh, really? Oh, my goodness.

Parker Thornburg: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Is he from Omaha as well?

Parker Thornburg: He’s from California originally, but he actually moved to Omaha to help build up the Yahoo presence in Omaha, which included all the whole finance area of the United States for Yahoo. That’s how I met him. I thought he was going to beg me to stay, something like that.

Bjork Ostrom: He’s like do it!

Parker Thornburg: He kicked me right on out the door. Through COVID, we kept talking and we laughed to each other and said, maybe our paths will continue to cross, maybe we’ll even run a business together someday. We laughed about that and then after COVID, I was getting into more cooking and things like that, and we started looking at content websites and digital websites and digital companies that we could possibly purchase together. We knew that we didn’t want brick and mortar, we knew that we didn’t want to have a huge number of employees, we wanted some flexibility in terms of contractors or VAs to help us to run the business.

We looked at about 200 companies over about a two-year period. Some we looked at really deeply, that were a couple of offers made that ended up being declined or chosen other offers, but this one was one that we were really excited about for this food website called Foodness Gracious.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. Number one, are you still with the startup? Is that something that you’re still working on?

Parker Thornburg: I actually worked for that startup for a couple of years and COVID was a very difficult time for a lot of startup companies, including that one. I actually was in Vietnam for a sales pitch the second week of March 2020. My wife was calling me saying, “They’re closing schools. You might want to come home.” And so I did.

I currently work a full-time job at a medical staffing company here in Omaha, Nebraska. Scott also works a full-time job. He’s more on the financial side, he’s a controller, and we just put our passion and all the time we have on the side into Foodness Gracious.

Bjork Ostrom: I love that. One of the things that I love about that is you’re in a stage of life, similar to us and a lot of other people, where you have this passion, you have maybe a little bit of the entrepreneurial spirit, and you also have a family. What does it look like to serve all of those things well, your family, your wife, your kids, and your own desire to be creative and build a thing.

It sounds like you’ve found a pretty cool outlet for that in not having to build something from scratch because it takes a lot of time, and to be at a place in life where there’s always the time, money equation. For us, when we look back to our early 20s, we had a lot of time, but we didn’t have a lot of money and so it made sense for us to say we’re going to spend a lot of time getting started with these things.

Over time, sometimes that changes, sometimes it doesn’t, but if you’re in a season of life where maybe you have a little bit more disposable income, you can start to trade some of that and fast track and say okay, there might be a scenario where in this season of life, it doesn’t make sense for me to build something from scratch, the risk involved, the time involved, but instead to take some of this money that you and your partner in this case have and to go out and look to acquire a business.

You talked about this search phase where you’ve said we want to do this, we want to figure out a business to buy. Tell me about that stage. Did you have parameter, like a buy box? Sometimes people would say that where you have a certain size of business, a certain type of business, a certain category of business, and then if something is outside of that buy box, you can discard it. Did you have that when you were in that two year search phase, looking at those 200 businesses?

Parker Thornburg: We did. I would say more so we knew what we didn’t want versus what we did want, which sometimes is almost even more valuable in the search process. We knew we didn’t want brick and mortar, so that cut out quite a few businesses even though with the baby boomer generation, there’s a lot of small businesses that will be coming up for sale. We knew that was not something that we wanted.

Bjork Ostrom: And they’ll eventually just go away if nobody buys them, they’re these in between-

Parker Thornburg: Correct.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s such an interesting time.

Parker Thornburg: Yeah, so we knew we didn’t want that because I’m in Omaha and Scott at that time had moved back and he was in California again. We knew that it was going to be a lot of pressure on one or the other, and it just wasn’t fair to our partnership.

We knew we wanted to go online, we wanted to stay in the digital space because there’s a lot of flexibility and a lot of learnings out there already, whether it be if we went content, we had a lot of learnings to do and a lot of experts that we could tap into from an SEO perspective or something like that.

We looked at some companies out there that were maybe a little bit more on… As you would see, if you go to foodnessgracious.com, you’ll see that we’ve added a pillar around reviews, different cooking product reviews. We looked at businesses that were based solely on that. There was one that we looked at that was around products for cats, that was the entire business.

We knew that we wanted to stay with a very small number of employees or even potentially zero employees, we wanted something that had lasted and had some social media following, and of course then we had a budget as well that we wanted to make sure that we stuck within our budget and we didn’t overextend ourselves because we both have families as well.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, so you have these general parameters around what you don’t want. You don’t want brick and mortar, you don’t want something that’s going to overextend yourself. How did you find these businesses? Where were you getting these 200 different businesses to look at? For anybody else who’s like maybe this would be something I’d be interested in doing, how do you go about sourcing the deal flow for looking at these potential acquisitions?

Parker Thornburg: It’s a great question. Scott actually saw someone speak at a conference and his name is Walker Deibel. Walker Deibel has a book called Buy Then Build.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep, I was going to mention it. Yeah.

Parker Thornburg: Yep. That was one of the foundational aspects. Scott actually told me, “You’ve got to get this book. Read this, and this could be kind of where we go with our business search.” We started with Walker’s book, it talks a lot about the success rates of starting from scratch versus buying and then building from there, something that already has some value to it already, as you mentioned.

We started from there and then Scott actually was able to reach out to Walker and we got involved in… He has a little class that he puts on where he teaches people about deal flow and what to look for. He calls it creating your buyer profile. It’s almost like a resume for your self and what kind of a buyer you are. That helped us to really get down to what exactly it was that we wanted and what we were looking for.

There were a couple of really large online brokerages for businesses as well. If you are looking, the one that we purchased through is called QuietLight. There is another one called Empire Flippers, and there are probably a handful of others that are online brokerages, but QuietLight was the one that we found Foodness Gracious on, and you reach out through the brokerage website and the discussions begin and you start to… It’s really vetting each other. We’re vetting them just as much as they’re vetting us to see if we have a good match here.

Bjork Ostrom: Did you work with Chris on that, by chance? Was he the broker?

Parker Thornburg: I would have to go back and look and see the name. Everything is a blur over the last year now.

Bjork Ostrom: Totally. Chris has been… I’m trying to think, I don’t know if he’s been on the podcast before. We’ve had Mark who’s the founder of QuietLight on a couple of times because Mark is actually based in Minnesota so pre-COVID, I saw him quite a bit. Chris is on their team. I think Walker is as well as a broker, just as I think Chris has gotten plugged in as somebody as a go-to for the world of food and food sites.

Talk about the idea of a multiple. I think it’s helpful for people who are buying or building a business to understand the inherent value that they have, but also for anybody buying a business to understand what it is that you’re buying and how you think about that as it relates to profit within the company or cash flow or whatever you want to call it.

Parker Thornburg: I think a lot of people, and there are a lot of websites that have different philosophies around how you assess a business’s value. Obviously Scott and I talked a lot about what was the amount that we were willing to pay, and if you’re looking at a business to consumer, a physical product company where you’re selling a product, whether it be through an Amazon affiliate, there’s a lot of those types of businesses for sale where someone has built up an Amazon affiliate product that they’re selling to the consumer that will have a different multiple and the calculation could even be different.

When we’re talking multiple, in this case with content, there are very few expenses really to a content website. The multiples might be different just based on… It could be gross revenue times a certain multiple, if they call it a 3X multiple, and your revenue… Make it nice and easy, let’s say that your revenue is $50,000 a year and you do a 3X multiple, then you would be paying $150,000.

The beauty of having these online brokerages is you can see the type of business, how they’re doing in terms of revenue, and you can see the multiple that they’re asking. So you have a lot of knowledge at your fingertips without even really having to talk to anyone to really understand as you’re looking at a business before you dive into the financials and the operation, you can really get a good understanding of does this even make sense, the multiple that they’re asking?

If you see a content website with a 3X multiple over here and these other 10 content websites have a 2.2X multiple, that’s a very big difference. You would really be able to be equipped to ask the question to this one, why such a high multiple over here compared to all of these other ones that I’m seeing that are in a similar space, same type of business, but a much lower multiple. It really does equip you to ask some really tough questions.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. The idea, as you were saying is with the content site, there’s not a ton of expenses. Maybe you have email, you have hosting, these services. People might be taking a salary out of that as the owner, but that’s something that you would add back in. Let’s say you have a site, for easy math, that’s making $60,000 total in revenue from affiliate and advertising, maybe there’s $10,000 of expenses, you could say that might be worth $150,000 as a business.

Parker Thornburg: Yes, correct.

Bjork Ostrom: Did you guys have an idea of how much you wanted to spend on acquiring a company and what did it look like? Did you have that from savings or sometimes people will get a loan, a business loan to do that? What was the thought process with that?

Parker Thornburg: Scott and I both had savings and part of our buyer profile was we knew we did not want to do a loan. Part of the beauty of buying a small business in the United States is there’s… In Walker’s book, he talks a lot about the small business administration, the SBA, where for as little as 10% down, if it’s SBA approved, you can buy a business for as little as 10% down.

Scott and I knew we didn’t want to mess around with that. We didn’t want to go through the loan process, so we took our savings and we both said, “Okay, how much are you willing to put in?” We had a max amount, and then of course we wanted to get the best deal possible. Everything was from our personal savings.

Bjork Ostrom: Talk about why you didn’t want to go through the process of getting a loan or specifically with SBA, why you avoided that?

Parker Thornburg: Number one, we knew the size of business that we were looking for and it was within the realm of our savings. That really made things easier. If we were looking to buy a million-dollar business, we would really have to figure out how are we going to do this loan process or the SBA process, depending on the business.

I will probably say the number one reason we didn’t want to do the loan process is we had such a fear of the unknown. We had never owned a business before, and there’s just an inherent fear of failure that okay, if this thing goes very poorly, then we wanted to make sure that we weren’t overextending ourselves, that-

Bjork Ostrom: You didn’t have to give your house up.

Parker Thornburg: We wouldn’t have to give our house up, my wife and children wouldn’t give up on me if I spent too much. A lot of those things go through your brain. We really wanted to make sure that everything was within what we were comfortable with. Almost like walking into the casino with $20 and you know you could lose that entire thing, we had to both be very comfortable with the amount that we were willing to lose.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s interesting when you think about the numbers with that in a scenario where let’s say you want to buy a site and you’re going to buy a site that’s worth a $1 million. In a scenario like that, you could look at it and you could say okay, that site is maybe cash flowing, just to make it easy, $330,000 a year. You could potentially take an SBA loan and only put 10% down, so maybe you put $100,000 down to buy a million-dollar company that’s making $330,000 a year, and you’d be able to cash flow while still paying for the loan as long as the revenue doesn’t go down, and that’s the inherent risk with a business, especially businesses in our world where people listening know there’s just a recent Google algorithm update, and for some people the traffic goes in half.

In a scenario like that, you have a loan, you are able to make cash flow, but then if revenue goes in half because of a Google algorithm update, suddenly you’re underwater and then you’re having to cover those or you’re accountable to the loan. That’s where it gets messy and that’s where the risk is with any business acquisition. It’s interesting to think about, there’s a really opportunity there, and if you are able to execute and grow revenue or keep revenue the same, that could be really incredible. You could maybe pay it back sooner and then you have this incredible cash flow, but there’s also a lot of risk involved with it.

Talk to me about when you saw, Foodness Gracious, you saw this site, you knew that it was a good fit, what was the range of that? If you can share numbers on what the acquisition price actually was and then just what that process was like to actually get to the point where you signed the deal and closed.

Parker Thornburg: It didn’t take long for us to look at… Quietlight does a really great job of putting together a full packet of information. There’s a question and answer section on this 30 to 40 page PDF that you can receive, and you don’t have to pay anything to receive this information, you just send them your name and email address that you’re interested, and the PDF will come back to you almost immediately is the way it works.

If you want to go deeper, than you start setting up meetings through the broker and things like that. As we started to see the numbers and see what we thought we could do, and the asking price was within the realm of what we had budgeted for. What we did from there was we started meeting with the broker and setting up meetings with the founder. The founder’s name is Jerry Spears, he’s a wonderful human being. I really think that was a key part of our comfort level was that Jerry was going to work with us to make sure that the transition worked smoothly.

He cared enough about the business. He started it back, I believe 2011 or 2012, so this had been a longstanding passion for him. There are close to nearly 1,000 recipes on the website. He really wanted to make sure that it was going to a good home, so to speak, and making sure that someone was going to take care of it the way that he took care of it. Working with Jerry I think was a key thing. I think if we had met with Jerry and had a poor experience, even if the numbers were great, I think that we probably would’ve really hesitated on moving forward but not only did the numbers look good from our perspective, but working with Jerry and speaking with him and how we wanted to see the transition go also worked out well. I think it had both sides working positively.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, interesting. You go through this process, it’s within your buy box, you’re ready to close, you sign the documents. What is that first day like when the business is yours?

Parker Thornburg: The only thing I can say it’s similar to is when you buy the house and you step into your house and you go what did we just do?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, this is ours now.

Parker Thornburg: This is ours, so I guess we have to do something with it. We worked it out with Jerry where we wanted to do right by the followers of Foodness Gracious. Between Pinterest, Facebook and Instagram, there’s around 150,000 followers on social media and they’re used to seeing Jerry, they’re used to seeing Jerry’s hands. Jerry’s got this awesome tattoo on his forearm and they’re used to seeing that in the photos, so we wanted to do kind of a handoff.

Scott living in California, I actually flew to California. Jerry is in California as well, and so we did a cooking handoff, so to speak, from Jerry to us where we actually cooked a couple recipes that are from my family and Jerry was in those photos and we did the handoff, and then it really got down to really the operational side of things and how are we going to do this?

How are we going to make new recipes? How are we going to get them onto the website? We don’t know anything about WordPress, we don’t know anything about SEO. It was really about identifying the strengths that we felt that I had and Scott had, which is more operational and financial, and then finding team members who we felt could complement those in the areas where we were weak.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. How did you do that? We’ve been doing it for 14 years, and it was interesting, I have some email exchanges with Jerry, which is fun.

Parker Thornburg: Oh my gosh, really? That’s amazing.

Bjork Ostrom: I didn’t know, but one specifically where we were talking about Pinterest and he had some awesome questions in the small world of food creators, but we know okay, we have this contact over here, we have this person over here, this person is really good at Pinterest, this person is really good at YouTube. When you’re just getting started with it, you’re just figuring all that out, so what was that like for you to try and source all of those experts in those different areas to come around you and to help?

Parker Thornburg: It was tough. I’ll be honest, we made some mistakes along the way in terms of our expenses, we made some mistakes along the way in terms of… The first thing we did was we hired a VA who was located in the Philippines, and that person came to us with SEO, social media and website maintenance experience. The amount that we were paying versus the amount of revenue that we were bringing in, we realized very quickly we’re either paying too much or we maybe need to spread ourselves to some different experts and have someone who’s really good in SEO, keyword research, SEO, and then maybe we find someone who’s good on the website maintenance side and we have some smaller expenses across multiple people versus one person who we’re relying on everything. That was a change that we did make very quickly.

I would say my biggest learning was I had this vision, this dream that I had of owning this business was I’m going to have my wife involved, I’m going to have my kids involved, and we’re going to make these recipes off the keywords that our VA is finding for us and I’m going to make these at home, I’m going to take great pictures the way Jerry did, and we’re just going to add on and we’re just going to keep adding on. Each week, we’re going to have all these recipes. I will say I learned very, very quickly that making the recipes and planning for that is extremely difficult, but nothing harder than taking great food photography. Jerry is a food photographer… The way I would explain Jerry, I hope this is no disrespect to Jerry, he’s a food photographer who also had a food blog.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Was an incredible photographer.

Parker Thornburg: That’s his passion. That is what he did, and he did it so well, and people love the photography on the website. No matter what I did, and I’m fairly tech-savvy, I could not get the food photography I took at home to look like his. That was very frustrating. No matter what I did, I’d say… My wife is so supportive, and she would say, “That looks really good.”

Bjork Ostrom: That looks better than your last photo.

Parker Thornburg: It looks better than the last photo. But then my children would go, “That doesn’t look like Jerry’s.” I would go, “Thank you. I’m well aware of that.”

Bjork Ostrom: Tough love from the kids.

Parker Thornburg: Yeah, my kids are always going to be honest with me. It was a real struggle for me because this vision that I had for the business of me making more food and working with Scott from a distance, it didn’t happen and so we had to pivot. It was not working.

Bjork Ostrom: Before we continue, let’s take a moment to hear from our sponsors.

This episode is sponsored by CultivateWP, specifically a new offering they have called CultivateGo. As business owners, I’m talking to you, one of the things we need to get good at is thinking about how we invest in our business. As someone who publishes content online, one of your most important business assets is your website.

But there’s a problem that a lot of us run into when we think about investing into our website and it’s that it seems like there’s really two options. You have the DIY, figure it out on your own, get really frustrated, spend a bunch of time, or pay tens of thousands of dollars to have a fully customized design and theme developed. What if you find yourself in between those two options? You’re a successful and established blogger, or even a new blogger who wants to invest in the best options, but you don’t have a budget of tens of thousands of dollars.

That’s where CultivateGo comes in. CultivateGo is an offering from a company called CultivateWP, co-founded by Bill Erickson, an incredible developer that we’ve worked with in the past before we had our own internal team, and Dwayne Smith, an incredible designer. For years, they’ve had their calendar field doing these fully customized sites, but they realize that there’s hundreds of bloggers who want that same level of technology but didn’t have that budget.

That’s where CultivateGo comes in. It’s a semi-custom theme design in white glove site setup. That means that your CultivateGo site can compete on an even technological playing field with the biggest food blogs in the world. You choose one of the core themes, you customize it with your logo, your brand colors, your typography, and then the CultivateWP team sets it up on a staging environment and it can launch your site within one week, and the cost is $5,000.

It’s that perfect sweet spot for anybody who finds themselves in that in-between stage where you want the best of the best, but you don’t want to have to pay tens of thousands of dollars to get it. If you’re interested in checking that out, go to FoodBloggerPro.com/go or just search CultivateGo in Google.

When you say pivot, you had this dream of what it was going to be, you also have this business and now are responsible to keep this business thriving and successful to yourself in a lot of ways, but what did the pivot look like? What did you pivot into then?

Parker Thornburg: That was when we decided okay, we probably need to redesign the website and we need to expand the content that we’re providing to our followers. We were only recipes with the primary driver of revenue coming from Mediavine and we said we want to expand the content and expand our potential revenue opportunity as well.

That’s when I sat down with a very good friend of mine who also happens to be my brother-in-law, and we tried to strategize on what does the mission of the company become? We knew recipes were going to be a key foundation point, and then I talked about how we looked at some businesses that were all about product reviews, and we knew that it was very easy to get an Amazon affiliate account and get that up. We said recipes and reviews, but then there’s always this tug of being more sustainable, being food responsible.

We said okay, recipes, reviews, responsibility. We liked how the alliteration of that and how that all worked together, and that’s what led us to the mission that’s on the front of the homepage right now, which is we empower, equip, and inspire home chefs. The empower is the recipes, equipping them is with the product reviews, and inspiring them is the responsibility side. That’s what led us to that, and we opened this up and we pivoted our newsletter as well with the redesign of the website in December 2023 and started finding that we have some new revenue drivers as well.

Bjork Ostrom: What are those new revenue drivers? The affiliate obviously, so you introduce product reviews, anybody who’s the buyer intent of somebody who’s looking at product reviews is like I want to look at this review because I might be buying it, so the hope is that they look at it, they click on an affiliate link, they convert, so there’s that. Is that the primary one or is there additional revenue opportunities?

Parker Thornburg: We have that one, we are very thoughtfully considering guest posts onto the website, but that’s a very tricky area that I’m trying to learn a little bit more about, trying to make sure we’re choosing the right ones. I get a lot of emails because my email is the one right off the website, so we get a lot of emails for guest posts. We’re very particular about doing that. We’ve only done one at this point. Our newsletter was on a pretty legacy software application previously, and so we moved over to-

Bjork Ostrom: What was it, out of curiosity?

Parker Thornburg: It was called Mad Mimi.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, yeah.

Parker Thornburg: We moved off of that and we are now with beehiiv and we have found that to be a really wonderful change and I’m very pleased with how that is operating. They have their own ad network built in, they have an ability to do what they call boosts as well, where you can recommend other newsletters to your following. I haven’t tried that yet because I’m trying to not be so spammy with our newsletter. We want it to continue to be really good content.

Between the Mediavine, the product reviews, the newsletter now, potentially some guest posts, and then of course we have some other ideas for the future that are going to take some more diligent research before we jump into anything in the future, but trying to expand our potential revenue while providing more value to our followers.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. Looking at all the options, beehiiv, we haven’t used it before, but know a lot of people who do it, guest posting, kind of like Gray Zone, maybe a good way to make money, but potentially some long term risk.

Parker Thornburg: Correct. That’s exactly how we’re looking at it.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Reviews of product, which is great. Also, I don’t know if you’ve seen this because you’re into it recently, but a lot of waviness in that industry with recent algorithm updates and a lot of review sites we’ve seen have been surpassed by Reddit threads and people are like wait a minute, I spent a bunch of time compiling this review and now there’s some random Reddit thread that’s showing up higher, but all in service of diversification, which I think is awesome.

We’ve been thinking about that even for Food Blogger Pro, people who have listened to podcasts for a long time know that we’ve started to do ads and you’ve heard those ads in a way that we haven’t done two years ago for the first seven years of the podcast, but it’s like oh my gosh, why didn’t we pursue that seven years ago as a revenue service? I think for all of us as business owners, it’s important for us to think about. We have this valuable thing, which is attention, and we have it across multiple different platforms. Email.

You talked about, website, obviously social, and there’s different ways that we can think strategically about how we capture the value of that attention, but like you said, doing so in a way where you want to be strategic, where you don’t stray too far from your brand, you don’t want it to be all the time, so thinking really strategically around absolutely how that works. Tell us about the redesign because that sounds like a fun dramatic story and things that you learned in that process.

Parker Thornburg: Sure. I went back and looked and I wanted to see the first time that we actually talked to the web designer. Scott has a daughter who is in grad school and she said, “If you’re going to redesign the website, you have to use this person. He designs my favorite websites.” He actually is in Europe, and she knows him and was able to connect us to him. We didn’t have a clue how much it was going to cost, what he might have in terms of vision. His name is Ayk, and we do have him linked at the bottom of our website in our footer at his request, so you can check him out.

Bjork Ostrom: Maray, is that… M-A-R-A-Y?

Parker Thornburg: Yep.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay.

Parker Thornburg: Yeah, and his first name is Ayk, A-Y-K. He was fantastic to work with. Now, he doesn’t do WordPress, he built it in Webflow, and the volume of questions that he had to start was completely extensive. Everything about our brand, everything about what we were trying to accomplish, and then he came back with a design that we were really pleased with.

The first time that we talked with him was August 21st, 2023, and we launched the website December 1st, so if that gives everyone a little bit of an idea of timing. He continued to send us samples on a staging website for us to check out and come back with feedback. He was just wonderful to work with. I have no problem telling everyone what that cost. The cost for the website was about $7,000 going from our old version to our new one. We were pretty pleased with that amount.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. I was going to say it’s an affordable amount. It’s interesting with some of the newer products like a Webflow where it just makes… I think it’ll just become more and more of this, but it makes design more accessible, I think. You can be somebody who’s designed forward but maybe not necessarily a super deep developer and you’re able to create something that’s pretty beautiful.

What did that look like just in terms of in the world of WordPress, there’s all of these considerations and I don’t know how deep you got into it, but around recipe cards and structured data and markup, is that all stuff that you were able to integrate into WebFlow in a similar way?

Parker Thornburg: I would say it is not like WordPress where there’s themes that you can use in WordPress and it does it… I don’t want to say does it for you, that is probably not the right word, but a lot of this was all built out of a template that Ayk created for us. We knew exactly how we wanted it to flow, we knew the color scheme that we wanted. We wanted to go away from the bright white that many of the other food websites have, we wanted to have that deeper green, we have a very strong female audience, and so we wanted colors that we thought might relate a little bit more with that female audience. We were pretty pleased with the attractiveness of the website. I will say the best part of the story outside of our traffic diving, which I can talk about too-

Bjork Ostrom: Best part in that it’s the best, most compelling, not necessarily-

Parker Thornburg: Yes, it’s probably best for everyone else, not for me. We said at the beginning when we designed it, we said we’re going to do what no one else does. Everyone hates they have to go down to the bottom to find the recipe card. We said we’re going to put it on social media and everything that our recipes are at the top. We were so proud of ourselves that we were the only one putting the recipe card at the top. We thought we were really smart.

Bjork Ostrom: And then you realized that no one was looking at the ads.

Parker Thornburg: We were not. No one’s looking at the ads and your revenue will take a massive dive when you put the recipe card at the top. It took us about one month to say we need to put the recipes at the bottom. That was very naive and very ignorant on our part, and I’m more than happy to say the lesson learned there was that there’s a reason that all of these websites put the key item, which is the recipe, at the bottom. Looking back in hindsight, it’s just so clearly obvious, but at the time it wasn’t.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s not because you’re not in the world. One of the interesting things that we deal with as food creators is people being like why is there so much content on a site? Why do you have to go down to the bottom? It’s not obvious. If it was, people wouldn’t be asking why it’s happening, but the reason there is so much content is because that helps you perform better in search, so that’s why there’s more content. The reason that the recipe card is… As you learned, is because there’s strategy around it. I would say it’s actually not obvious until you’re in the world and you see the data, which you did, and then you’re smart enough to know I’m going to course correct based on this new information that I’m going to see.

That’s what so much of business ownership is you have an idea, you move forward with the idea, and if it doesn’t work, then you are like what’s my next idea? What have I learned from this? What do I change? Talk to me about that. When you are going through these different iterations of the site, learning about these new things, seeing data or metrics change, but instead of just being like whatever, sticking with it and being like okay, we need to make a change, we need to keep going because there are a lot of people listening who maybe have been impacted by an algorithm update and it’s super discouraging, or maybe they’ve made a change and it’s impacted their revenue and it’s super discouraging.

What was that like for you and how did you continue to persevere through that? I know that a lot of those initial metrics that shifted downward are now starting to come back up. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Parker Thornburg: Yeah. After we launched December 1st, December, January and February, I would say that our traffic and revenue dipped by about 50%. We are seeing some positive movement now in the month of March. Now that Google has re-indexed everything, the website seems to be back on track a little bit. We’re cautiously optimistic, I’ll just say that, but we’re seeing some good numbers coming in now for March, cutting into that 50% decline quite a bit here in March.

I read the book Atomic Habits, and I’m a big fan of that. A lot of what I think it’s James Clear talks about in that book is systems. It’s not about the end result, it’s about the systems. It’s not about the goal, it’s the systems. What Scott and I have talked about is what are the things that we need to do consistently on a week-by-week basis in order to see the end result? We may not see the end result today or a month from now or three months from now, but we’re going to post every day to social media. We’re going to put either a recipe, a product review or a responsibility article that we’ve newly released on social media. We’re going to look at our numbers religiously once a month.

I could sit here every day and run those numbers and run those numbers and obsess over them, that’s my personality. But we’re going to look at them together once a month and we’re going to see how we’re doing. I think our plan is more around staying the course of how many recipes are we updating every single week? How many product reviews are we putting out each week? How many responsibility articles we’ll do in a newsletter every Wednesday at 10:30 AM Central, that’s what’s going out. We’re going to just keep doing that, keep focusing on providing high value content to our followers and see what’s working.

We are making decisions, obviously some were pivots that we had to make, but in terms of more strategic type pivots, we are trying to stay the course, stick with our systems that we believe are what’s going to work, and if Google takes a hit on us or the newsletter doesn’t have the open rate this week that we wanted, we try to learn from it but guess what? We’re going to do another newsletter next week on Wednesday anyway, and we’re going to keep doing that, believing that these are the items, when you pile all those habits on top of each other, the end goal will happen.

Now, our goals aren’t crazy. Our goals aren’t to sell Foodness Gracious for $1 million someday. If that happened, sure. But there’s so much that we can’t control with that. We’re focused on each of these systems, each of these habits to achieve a goal.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s awesome. I don’t know how familiar you are with our parent company, but it’s called Tiny Bit. Tiny Bit is based on this concept we talk about, which is 1% infinity. Tiny bit better every day, forever. You just encapsulate exactly what we want to communicate to people and want to reflect in our own work is what does it look like to show up every day and say what is the one thing I can do today to move things forward?

Maybe it’s a tiny improvement that you’re making with the idea that you’re going to just continue to do that every day over a long period of time. Like you said, those compounding habits, they talk about it in Atomic Habits, stack and eventually get to the point where, I think it was Warren Buffett who talks about compounding as the eighth wonder of the world. It works in investing, but it also works in business, and it works in publishing, and social media. Lindsey’s in that right now, she has a friend of ours, Nate, and Nate and Lindsey are launching this show on Instagram and other social platforms and they have 5,000 followers and they’re in the beginning stages, but we know if you stick with it and if you continue to show up and you find ways to improve, eventually you get to the point where 5,000 is 10,000, 10,000 is 50,000. That compounds, those habits stack, those improvements stack, and the outcome is over a long period of time, 10 years, not 10 months, really significant.

I love that as a theme for how you’re working and I think it’s super inspiring. Last question is what does that look like just in terms of fitting that in? Because you have a full-time job, you have family, three kids I think. They’re active, they’re busy, so how do you think about this within the structure of a day or a week and when do you fit the time into work on it?

Parker Thornburg: I’m a very early riser and I think I’m the only one in my house that is that. I have-

Bjork Ostrom: Sure, which is maybe nice if you’re trying to get work done.

Parker Thornburg: It’s really nice. My kids laugh when they come upstairs in the morning for breakfast, they’re like, “Are you eating lunch?” I’m old and they like to joke about me being old. I have an 18-year-old, a 16-year-old, and an 11-year-old. The best thing for me is to be able to now, do they want to read food responsibility articles? Not really, but I’m having them read them.

I want them to read them, I want them to be a part of this because my vision isn’t to sell, my vision is that I can have this be something that maybe they get an interested in want take over someday or maybe we get it to a point where it’s earning enough revenue on a monthly basis where my 18-year-old who has a dream of going into elementary education, maybe this could be a nice little side gig. I know a lot of my teachers when I was in high school were painting all summer, painting houses and stuff. Maybe this would be something.

Bjork Ostrom: My parents were teachers, had those same side hustles.

Parker Thornburg: Yeah, so maybe this could be. I’m trying to show them that you don’t have to just do one job, you can do more than one job. This could be something that if one of them takes a real interest in it, I have them look at the newsletter, we’ve tried to do some fun things with beehiiv that our old newsletter platform didn’t have like with polls. Just a little bit more engagement from our newsletter with our followers.

I ask them every week to read the newsletter and to take the poll and tell me what kind of food debates should we be putting in our future polls. They don’t realize the psychology of what I’m trying to do is help them to see that this isn’t work necessarily, this can be fun. We can turn into something fun that we can all do together. I know Scott’s wife, Scott’s daughter was a key part of us changing our website, and that’s something that’s super important to us. Scott and I have an LLC that we used to buy the business, and the name of the LLC is Family First, Family First Capital. We’re both very family oriented and would love for our families to be a part of this as well.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s so cool. I love that. It’s almost less of… Unless it’s early in the morning when nobody else is up, it’s less of thinking of it as where’s my time where I go into a cave and work on it and more of thinking of it as collectively, what does it look like for us to experience this thing together? I used that example of my dad who’s an art teacher and then he had a greenhouse in the summers, and I would go and work at the greenhouse alongside of him and never did I feel like ah, my dad’s working all the time, he’s not available, because we were doing it together. When I look back on it, it’s some of my fondest memories and I’m really proud as now an adult to share these stories of working with my dad at the greenhouse.

If it was him going off and me being at home and being like I wish my dad would play catch with me, it’d be a different story, but what it was is we’re going out and he’s teaching me how to transplant and how to sterilize dirt. I just have such fond memories of that, and so it’s really cool to hear you talk about that being something that is giving in a way beyond just financial to your family. We often talk about what are the different types of income from the work that we’re doing? There’s relational income. There’s educational income, there’s family connection income, there’s financial income, all of those things. It’s really fun to hear you talk about that and to think about that because I think it’s something that we often forget about in a good reminder.

Parker Thornburg: Hearing you talk about your dad makes me think about my dad works at a food processing plant for 38 years, and I think there’s probably something deep down inside of me that likes to see a little piece of him consider having a heart attack when I talk about I just bought a business, or I’m leaving this good job to go work at a startup where I don’t know what’s going to happen. It’s just something that he never did, and so it’s just showing me the differences between me and him, but the look of shock on his face is really fun for me when I say, “We just bought this business.” He can’t comprehend-

Bjork Ostrom: And this business is a website.

Parker Thornburg: Yeah, he can’t comprehend that you go to the job and you stay at the job and that’s how you do it and that’s just not how I do it and that’s okay.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, totally. It’s a complete different path, especially from people who have had that corporate, or not even corporate, but just predictable, same company long period of time. If nothing else, it’s fun to have those conversations with friends and neighbors and family, like no, this is a business. This is something you’re building. That’s great.

Parker, I know that people will be interested in following along with what you’re up to, with connecting with you personally. Just really appreciate you telling your story. What’s the best way for people to maybe sign up for the newsletter to see how you’re using beehiiv or to connect with you personally?

Parker Thornburg: You can go to FoodnessGracious.com and we have a variety of ways… We do have a pop-up that we just added that you can sign up for the newsletter, you can also find the newsletter in the footer as well. You can find us on Facebook or Instagram @FoodnessGracious, and then we do have Pinterest, which is… They don’t like the long name, so it’s @FoodnessG. You’re welcome to email me as well. My email, if you go to the Contact us and email me through the website, it’ll come right to me.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. Parker, thanks so much for coming on. Really appreciate it.

Parker Thornburg: You bet. Thank you so much.

Emily Walker: Hey, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team, and thank you so much for listening to that episode. We really appreciate it. If you liked this episode or enjoy the show, we would really appreciate you leaving a review or rating wherever you listen to your podcast episodes. Ratings and reviews help get the show in front of new listeners and help us grow our little show into something even bigger.

We read each and every review, and it makes us so happy to hear when you’re enjoying the podcast or what you would like us to improve or change in upcoming episodes. All you have to do is find the Food Blogger Pro Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, whether it’s on Apple or Spotify or another player, and enter a rating and review. While you’re there, make sure to subscribe to the podcast so that you never miss a new episode. We really appreciate it so much, and it makes such a huge difference for our show, so thanks in advance. That’s all we have for you today. Have a great week.

Bjork Ostrom: This episode is sponsored by Clariti. Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could figure out how you can optimize the existing posts on your blog without needing to comb through each and every post one by one? With Clariti, you can discover optimization opportunities with just a few clicks. Thanks to Clariti’s robust filtering options, you can figure out which posts have broken links, missing alt text, broken images, no internal links, and other insights so you can confidently take action to make your blog posts even better.

We know that food blogging is a competitive industry, so anything you can do to level up your content can really give you an edge. By fixing content issues and filling content gaps, you’re making your good content even better. And that’s why we created Clariti. It’s a way for bloggers and website owners to feel confident in the quality of their content. Listeners to The Food Blogger Pro podcast get 50% off of their first month of Clariti after signing up. To sign up, simply go to clariti.com/food. That’s clariti.com/food. Thanks again to Clariti for sponsoring this episode.

Emily Walker: Hey there, this is Emily from The Food Blogger Pro team, and you are listening to The Food Blogger Pro podcast. This week on the podcast, Bjork is interviewing Jessica Hylton Leckie from the food blog, Jessica in the Kitchen.

Jessica first started her blog 10 years ago when she was in school pursuing a law degree, and since that time, she’s continued to grow her business and now receives between one and two million page views each month, which is just incredible. In this interview, Jessica shares a lot more about how she grew her blog and what the early days of her site and brand were like, and she also chats about some recent life changes that have led to some business changes. She recently became a mom for the first time, and she did an incredible job of planning ahead on her blog and social media accounts for a year-long maternity leave.

In this process, she learned how valuable it is to outsource certain tasks and how to plan ahead for such a long period. Whether or not you are about to become a parent, this is a super valuable interview if you’ve ever just needed a break from your business, if you needed to step away for a little bit to support a family member or for an illness. This is just such a valuable skill to have in your back pocket, and Jessica really walks you through step-by-step how she did it. It’s an awesome interview and I know you’ll get a ton out of it, so I’m just going to let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Jessica, welcome to the podcast.

Jessica Hylton Leckie: Hi, Bjork. Thank you so much for having me on.

Bjork Ostrom: We’re going to talk about your story, growing your site, your social accounts. You’ve had some great success with that over the past 10 years now, which is crazy. But like we do, want to hear a little bit about your origin story, where you got started, and then what we’re going to do is we’re going to talk about this recent big transition in your life with having a little one and maternity leave and how you strategically went about that. But you actually had a baking business before you had your blog, is that right?

Jessica Hylton Leckie: Yeah, I did. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: And that was in college when you were doing that, is that right?

Jessica Hylton Leckie: Yeah. So I had started doing my undergrad law degree, and then I guess I somehow came up on this love of baking that started one night. I was like, “I just feel like baking from scratch one night and tried it for the first time.” I was like, “Oh, kind of in love with this.” That then, I actually got better at it after that, and then it got to the point where I was like, “I could actually start doing this at home, selling this.” And it was the very first site I ever had as well, because I shared just the process online as well.

Bjork Ostrom: Shared the process like, “Hey, I’m making this, here’s what it looks like,” or the process of creating the cakes or the process of starting the business or both maybe a little bit?

Jessica Hylton Leckie: I think both. So there were a couple posts about this is how I did it, but mainly it was old school blogging of here’s this beautiful cake, no actual recipe, but this is also what I’m doing in life today. So that’s kind of how it went.

Bjork Ostrom: Almost like a journal.

Jessica Hylton Leckie: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: So what did you learn in that process, because I feel like anytime that we have these conversations, what’s interesting to see is how people stack their experiences to get them to the point where they are. And for you, that’s a really obvious experience where you had a business, you were running the day-to-day. It was in the world of food as well, obviously selling physical products. But what was it in that experience? What were the things that you took with you into the process of building a media business or a publishing business, which we’ll talk about in a little bit?

Jessica Hylton Leckie: That’s a great question. I feel like a couple of things. Customer service for sure. You’re actually interacting with people in person, so I feel like I really got into the deep side of how to help people, how to answer questions, how to really cater to. My audience at the time, of course, were in-person customers, but shifting that into online as well. And I think just in general just building a business, what are the things needed, a business plan. It doesn’t matter if it’s physical, if it’s online, if it’s both, there’s a way that they all overlap. So I think those skills really played, and of course it’s a food blog, so actually baking and cooking as well transitioned very smoothly.

Bjork Ostrom: Skill of what you’re doing.

Jessica Hylton Leckie: Exactly, yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: In some ways the product is the same, even though it’s so different, which is food, and you’re almost like the medium that you’re selling is different, which is like you’re selling the outcome in one regard, whereas when you’re publishing to a blog, you’re selling the process and here’s how to do it.

Jessica Hylton Leckie: Right. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: What was the decision to wind that down? What was that process like? And it’s always interesting for me to hear about the start of a business, but it’s also interesting to hear about the end of a business. What was that like?

Jessica Hylton Leckie: To be honest with you, in Jamaica you do undergrad law for a few years, and then you do law school, I think everywhere in the world it’s like that as well. And I started law school and I was just like, this is great, but I can’t do both time-wise because I would literally leave undergrad and that was a couple of hours, and then I would just, for the rest of the day go into baking. And then when I started law school, it took up a lot more time throughout the day. You’re studying now and everything like that, and just time wise, it just wasn’t making sense basically. That was really the only reason because I love doing it. But just time.

Bjork Ostrom: And so the general steps along the way, you had undergrad and your side hustle, the baking business, and then you went into law school and at that point that’s where you said, “Hey, this doesn’t make sense to do this side hustle. I just need to focus on law school as my primary thing.” And then where did your site fit into that mix? At what point did you start to do your site and think of that as a potential business?

Jessica Hylton Leckie: I think the site was always there in the background, even when it wasn’t a food blog yet. So I started the site as, and this was when Blogspot was the thing, so I started it as jessicabakes.blogspot.com and just sharing, and then from then, it was kind of like, “Oh, I’m getting an interest into cooking as well.” So I’d share a recipe here and there every now and then. And so it was just in the background weaving in. And so when I stopped doing the actual selling of the cakes, the cookies, et cetera, the blog was already there. And then from there, I was like, “Well, while I can’t necessarily do this physical aspect, I can always do this online. This is something I can actually do on the weekends and share here and there.” And then I’ve really started to really fall in love with that aspect of it. So maybe I was in the background of the classroom on Pinterest, there’s a potential that was happening.

Bjork Ostrom: You were taking these law classes and then maybe listening in a little bit, but also figuring out how to build this business, build traffic.

Jessica Hylton Leckie: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: And so you did law for a couple of years after that and then decided to go full-time into your site.

Jessica Hylton Leckie: So I did law for about a year afterwards, and around that time it was kind of the realization of, “Okay, I’m really enjoying this and I’m starting to make some sort of an income from it as well.” So made a plan at that point in time where I was like, all right, what does it look like if I wanted to transition into this. So it wasn’t an immediate thing, and I would never encourage anyone to just quit just like that. It was more like a plan of whether it’s six months or a year or whatever that looks like to say, this is what it would look like. Do I have X amount of savings? Can I make this plan and move forward into this? Do I feel like there’s a confidence in the trajectory? Is this a scalable business? And I felt like the answer was yes to all of those things. So at that point in time, I was like, “Okay, this is a leap I can take basically.”

Bjork Ostrom: And it’s played out well. You have one to 2 million pages on your site, over a million followers across social, and so you have this successful business, but in the moment-

Jessica Hylton Leckie: Thank you.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s hard to make that decision because you’ve invested a lot of time into this career going in a certain direction, and I think that’s a hard thing for a lot of people to go through four or five, six years of education-

Jessica Hylton Leckie: Of course.

Bjork Ostrom: And then a couple of years outside of that say, actually, I’m going to do a little bit, or not a little bit, like a significant career change.

Jessica Hylton Leckie: Definitely.

Bjork Ostrom: What was it like for you to let go of the work that you had done to understand and get educated in the world of law and get some momentum going there and then say, “Actually, I’m okay with letting that go, in service of trying to build this new pursuit.”

Jessica Hylton Leckie: I love that you brought it up because it’s a big commitment. For example, you’ve decided to do law, that’s even years before university that you’ve made that decision that it’s coming in. So it’s a huge change, which is funny because I know a lot of food bloggers that were lawyers, there’s a big group of us. But it looked a lot like, to be honest with you, getting a lot of support, whether it’s from my partner, my parents, people also encouraging me and saying, “Hey, I see this.” Because there’s a worry aspect. There’s also, you want to make everyone proud of you as well, so you’re like, I’m not sure what this looks like. There’s also, I feel like, trying not to think too much about other people’s opinions because especially 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 years ago, there’s a mindset of, “You’re doing what? You’re leaving all to do this online thing, I don’t understand.”

So unfortunately that I didn’t get that reaction from my family or my partner or anything like that. So I think that really helped me confidence wise as well. But it also just looked like trying to take a similar mindset. I think I’ve always been business minded, and I think law also helped as a background to confidence as well of, “Okay, I know I can do this. How can I utilize this degree towards this?” So even for me, that looked a lot like being used to reading, being used to research, being used to thinking outside of the box because you have to do a lot of that in law as well. So trying to say, “Okay, I already have this degree. What can I do with it to use it in this way basically?”

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, I love that. And it’s not necessarily all of the work that you had done, the education and effort you’d had in the world of law, suddenly isn’t valuable. It’s just like-

Jessica Hylton Leckie: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: “Okay, some of it is maybe not valuable.” But a lot of it could be, and how do you bring that over into this new pursuit? And I feel like we all have those things. For Lindsay, it was being a teacher.

Jessica Hylton Leckie: Exactly. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: How can she teach well in what she’s doing and in creating content. For other people it might be, they are a project manager and how does that transfer over?

Jessica Hylton Leckie: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: And so we all have these skills that we can bring into our new areas of interest or our new pursuits.

The other thing that you talked about is that transition period where you talked about, “Hey, I know I want to do this. I want to figure out how to make it work.” It sounds like you almost talked about having some runway, so you knew, I’m going to try this for a year, I have some momentum, and I can see if I continue plotting this line out, I’ll get to a point where it makes sense. But maybe you weren’t at the point where it made a 100 percent sense in that moment-

Jessica Hylton Leckie: Right.

Bjork Ostrom: But you knew you could potentially get there. Is that what that season looked like? You were like, “Hey, I’m going to dedicate all my time and energy. I’m going to try and get to this point. If I get to that point, that means that I can continue to do this as a full-time gig.” Is that how you processed it or what did that look like?

Jessica Hylton Leckie: Definitely. Yeah, definitely.

Actually, I guess it’s a full circle moment. So even in my office at the time, I would have applied these quotes. I had a quote from you on the wall-

Bjork Ostrom: All right?

Jessica Hylton Leckie: That you had said. Yeah. One percent every day and that actually was very helpful because you can’t see it all in that moment, and it’s trying to just say, “Okay, this is what I can see right now. I know what I want it to be. I have my goals.” And just building on it from there. So there was definitely a lot of trusting oneself, trusting the industry as well and saying, “Okay, I know the potential that this has and this is how I can grow from here basically.”

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome. And for those who aren’t familiar, we talk a lot about on the podcast, this idea of one percent infinity. So we have a parent company. The parent company is actually called Tiny Bit, and it’s based on this premise of getting a tiny bit better every day forever. And one of the things that we can do as creators to not get crushed by the overwhelming amount of tasks and to dos, is to show up and say, “Okay, my job today is to think about what is the small thing that I can improve? How do I get a tiny bit better today?” And you don’t have to do everything. You don’t have to be an expert, but if you stick with it for 10 years, as is the case for you, you can really make some incredible progress and build a really cool thing, which you’ve done, and it’s cool to see that played out.

So what did that look like for you when you thought about making those small improvements, that 1% infinity mindset. How did that actually play out in your day-to-day as you were in the early stages of building this thing?

Jessica Hylton Leckie: So I would definitely say in the beginning it started off like, okay, quite literally a book, a pen. These are my goals for this year. So when I first went full time, it was March, beginning of March. And I would literally say, “Okay, this is what I want this year to look like goals wise, this is what I want this month to look like.” I kind of breaking it down from there to this week or to the date. So really just trying to have goals, but smart goals, actually achievable things. So not just saying, “Oh, I want to make X.” It was like, okay, scalable. This is how much I’m making now. What do I feel like is a realistic, but also shooting for the stars amount? And then just day to day, learning about this business, learning about this industry, editorial calendar for blog posts. This is what I want to do, this is how I’m going to break down my photography, my videography, my blog post writing.

Every day I try to learn something new because at the end of the day, I was still, even though I wasn’t brand new, I was brand new to doing it full time. So for example, Moz.com was a huge resource for me at the time. Every day I’m going to try and read four pages of this or something like that, so that I was always in that mindset. Or joining Facebook groups, which I still find, is helpful to this day, of this is new in the industry or that kind of stuff. Subscribing to certain websites, that was helpful as well. But I think most importantly, was just a consistency of it, trying not to get overwhelmed and just having a realistic schedule. I feel like at the time, I did do like, it was Jessica Big so Jessica in the Kitchen. That’s kind of what I did mainly.

So I dedicated a lot of my life, a lot of my time to it. I don’t regret doing that, but I did say, “Okay, this is what it’s going to look like all day in order to achieve these tasks, in order to achieve these goals, etc.” And it just eventually got, I wouldn’t even say the word easier, but just easier to grasp, easier to continue, basically.

Bjork Ostrom: You start to master the skills that you learn about. And it doesn’t come from one day of cramming, it comes from a thousand days of reading four articles on Moz. And-

Jessica Hylton Leckie: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: That cumulative effort, after a while, there’s that Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book called The Tipping Point. I think it was in Tipping Point-

Jessica Hylton Leckie: Tipping Point.

Bjork Ostrom: Where he talks about, are you familiar, like the 10,000 hours?

Jessica Hylton Leckie: Exactly. Yeah, to master.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. And then there’s a-

Jessica Hylton Leckie: That’s so accurate.

Bjork Ostrom: And the basic idea with it, and I think Macklemore wrote a song about it as well, which is just this great song about dedication to a craft. And a thousand hours, if you think about that, it’s like five years of a full-time job of learning a thing and-

Jessica Hylton Leckie: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: I think sometimes, as creators, a lot of times we think like, “Oh, this is all stuff that should be easy. Instagram, that should be easy. I know how to use Instagram.” I know how everybody takes pictures-

Jessica Hylton Leckie: As a reader, yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: But actually all of these things take a really long time to get mastery of. And I love how you approached it, which is like, “I’m going to stick with this for a long period of time and I’m going to break it down day by day, so over time I can make progress.” And then like you said, eventually you start to look at it and you’re like, “Oh, actually I kind of understand this.” And probably better than most people in the world. You become an expert because of the culmination of thousands of hours of not only educating yourself, but also putting it into practice, like those two things together.

Jessica Hylton Leckie: Definitely. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Before we continue, let’s take a moment to hear from our sponsors.

Speaker 1: This episode is sponsored by Raptive. You may have heard of Raptive, formerly AdThrive as an ad provider for over 4,000 of the world’s top digital content creators. Pinch of Yum included, but they’re not just an ad provider. They’re a strategic partner that helps creators build their businesses with the resources they need to grow and monetize their audiences. They offer customized industry leading solutions like an engagement suite called Slickstream, resources on email strategy assistance, HR guidance, and more. So creators can focus on what they want to be focusing on, creating great content.

If your blog has at least a hundred thousand monthly page views, a hundred percent original content, and the majority of traffic from the US, Canada, the UK, Australia or New Zealand, you can apply to become a Raptive creator by going to raptive.com and clicking the Apply Now button. And even if you’re not quite at the point of being able to apply to Raptive, they can support you in your traffic growing goals through an 11-week email series. Head to FoodBloggerPro.com/raptive to get access to this free series. Everything Raptive does is in support of creators like you, whether you’re just starting out or bringing hundreds of thousands of visitors to your site each week. Thanks again to Raptive for sponsoring this episode.

Bjork Ostrom: So I’m interested to hear about recently in your life, you talked about the amount of work that goes into it, the effort, creating goals, building up momentum, all of the ambition that you have around what you’re building. And I don’t know if you felt like this, but when we had kids, that’s like suddenly you have a very different variable in your life.

Jessica Hylton Leckie: Very, yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: And it impacts everything. And some of it’s really hard, some of it’s really great, but one of the things that is wonderful is that you have built this thing, and like you said, there is some flexibility with it, and you can craft and control to some degree what that looks like. And for some people, they’ll go into a maternity leave and maybe they won’t really take one because they feel like how the monster needs to be fed. I got to keep showing up and creating content. But it sounds like you took the approach of saying, I want to really go into my maternity leave and do a actual maternity leave. And you probably can’t step away a hundred percent, but like, really step away compared to what a normal day would’ve looked like for you. So talk about what that was like and how you made that decision going into it. How did you know that’s what you wanted going into your maternity leave?

Jessica Hylton Leckie: So it’s funny that you brought up, it changes your life. Because I’m like here, and I’m also hearing my daughter in the background-

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Totally.

Jessica Hylton Leckie: I’m not calling over the recording too much.

Bjork Ostrom: No, no, no, it’s not.

Jessica Hylton Leckie: This is life now, right? I think it’s one of those things where it’s such an individual experience. So I have a friend right now, she just gave birth and she knew from the get-go, I want to start back work as soon as possible. There’s nothing wrong with that. Everyone is going to have their own experience, their own wants. And I don’t know, I just had this feeling of, man, I really want, I remember years ago, I’d first seen someone take, they just took six months. I was just like, “Oh, I didn’t even…” She was also an entrepreneur. I didn’t even realize that that was possible. And everyone’s experience is different. And I said, I wonder what it would look like, if for as much as possible, for Sammy’s first year of life if I could just be there very, very present because I know the time is going to pass, and now she’s almost 13 months, I have no idea how that happened.

Definitely just I think, after finding out I was pregnant and everything, and as I got closer to her due date, I just had this overwhelming feeling of, I love my site, I love my blog, but man, I really want to be able to just really just focus on her, that first year as much as possible. And like you said, I don’t think there’s a hundred percent stepping away. I don’t think I would want to step away a hundred percent either, but I do feel like I really got to step away a lot, and I’m really grateful for that as well. And I think from there, I started off trying to, I couldn’t find a resource of how to take the first year for baby’s life off, as a food blogger. That didn’t exist.

So I was just like, “Okay, maybe I can ask other friends who maybe just did this.” Or checking some of the Facebook groups to see, and there were answers here or there, but I think I realized, “Okay, I have to just build this for myself.” I think that looked just a lot like the same kind of approach to starting a business. And it doesn’t even have to be maternity leave. It could be, I had a long year, I want to take the first month off or want to take the first two months off. What does that big planning look like basically?

Bjork Ostrom: I love that. Part of it is, it can just be what does it look like to step back within the context of maternity leave or mental health or a parent who’s struggling with their health and you wanting to be there. And so all of those, it’s a skill to be able to build a thing that you can, in some ways have levers and control the amount that it requires of you.

Jessica Hylton Leckie: Definitely.

Bjork Ostrom: When you went about building it, what did you look at in terms of the different pieces that you needed to pay attention to? Or if there were those levers, what were those levers that you pulled? Did you scale way back on content and just viewed it as maintenance, or did you do a bunch of content ahead of time and work really hard leading up to it? What did it actually look like and what did you learn from it?

Jessica Hylton Leckie: So I think the first thing I did was, what do I want the site to look like when I’m away? And I really wanted it to almost seem as if I hadn’t left, this was content was still going out, videos are still going out, stories were still going out, et cetera. And then kind of working backwards. And it started with a plan again, paper, pen. I have a lot of notes on my computer, but I feel like I’m just a paper and pen person. And so it started from, “Okay, what can I do right now, to adjust myself mentally so I’m not overwhelming myself?” Because pregnancy is such a big thing in your life. You’re changing so much at the same time. And that looked, for example, we were doing three reels a week, and so that looked like scaling it back to one a week.

That was really scary, but it worked. And I was like, “Okay, this is already going to be easier going in.” And full disclaim, I do have an assistant. And that was the biggest help that I could have gotten going in because here was someone who I had been working with for a while who I could say, “Hey, this is the plan. This is what I want to do.” And so it looked like making a plan, especially for the first, I knew I at least wanted the first three months as hands-off as possible. And so drafting out that plan, doing content ahead of time, especially videos, I did a lot of batching for videos. For recipes, it looked a lot like, “Okay, I think we all have recipes randomly that’s not actually on the site, so how do I actually make that something that can go on the site?” Or even saying-

Bjork Ostrom: Like you had something in your back pocket that was a go-to, so you didn’t have to develop it in the same way that you would. It’s just like, “Hey, let’s document this thing. That’s a go-to for me.”

Jessica Hylton Leckie: Exactly. And I had so much more than I realized. That’s the interesting part. I was like, whoa. Or maybe if I did a sponsored video on social media years ago and that recipe just never made it to the site. So I had a lot of those. Or if it was a video I’d done before, it was like, how can I rework this? One of the things I did were these roundup videos, these roundup reels of everything I cook this month or what I eat in a day. Those did really well because I found I could put together all pieces of content to make them anew as well. And we just did reposts as well, for a lot of stuff. Maybe I changed the voiceover or changed the font to feed the algorithm and give it what it needed in terms of new content.

And then a lot of outsourcing happened, a lot of delegating as much as I could. So seeing, okay, how can I work with a team to help me manage, even organize, another blog post, making sure those went out on time or had this in there, etc. And then my assistant did a lot of the actual posting. So we scheduled and we drafted this big schedule for months basically. And then while the first few months of Sammy’s life, my husband was the main point person as well. So if anything happened, if there are any explosions, any crashes, show to him.

Bjork Ostrom: He’s the first line of defense.

Jessica Hylton Leckie: And he did some recipe testing in the beginning as well. So it was just a nice big plan that I’m so grateful actually worked, basically. But like you said, it was just a playbook of how to spend time away, basically.

Bjork Ostrom: Totally. And it sounds like the important pieces of that, if we look at those different levers, one of them was adjusting the amount of content, and that can always go up and down. You can-

Jessica Hylton Leckie: Definitely.

Bjork Ostrom: Just because you’ve always published three blog posts to your blog doesn’t mean that you need to do that forever. So what does it look like potentially to scale that back or on social media or wherever it is? So that’s one of the levers that you adjusted. Another lever was how much of the work are you doing? And you can adjust that one up or down as well. We could do all the work or we could have people come in and help with that work. Do you have a decision framework that you used for what you would hold onto or you didn’t have somebody else do? For instance, my guess is you didn’t have somebody else showing up on social media. It was always you, but somebody else was scheduling it. So anything that you used as a line in the sand around, like, I’m not going to delegate this.

Jessica Hylton Leckie: I think there were easy questions of, what do I actually want to do? I always knew, I love doing blog comments, so even though maybe that would’ve been easier for someone else to take on, that was something I always knew. I feel like it just gives me a pulse on how readers are feeling about recipes and everything. But like you said, also, what would really help me time wise if someone else was able to do this? And is it possible for someone to do this? You’re right. It will still mean the videos.

So that was a lot of… I remember just batching videos and then just changing shirts to do the actual me parts, but what does it look like if I can, with my assistant, we did a lot more video calls, “Hey, so this is how we’re going to… If this goes wrong, this is how you can fix this. Or this is how you upload this video to X.” So it was a lot of looking at that. But just like you said, that basic thought process of what would help me the most in this time period that I know someone can do this just as well as I would do this basically.

Bjork Ostrom: And I think the other piece with it that I think about is, what are the things that wouldn’t make a difference if I did them or not? Or in your case, if you did them or not? And it would probably make a difference if somebody else suddenly started showing up on Instagram on a…

Jessica Hylton Leckie: Right.

Bjork Ostrom: But it wouldn’t make a difference if you were the person who was in the real and somebody else uploaded it, as an example. And so my guess is-

Jessica Hylton Leckie: It’s like what would keep the status quo, basically.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, for sure. And I think that for a lot of us, we’re doing a lot of things that it doesn’t matter if we’re doing them or not. And then once you really get into it, you’re like, “Wow, there’s a lot of things that other people could help with.” Now the big question then is, has the business grown to a point where you can justify hiring somebody? Or if it hasn’t, are you willing to invest in a way to maybe potentially grow out faster?

Before we continue, let’s take a moment to hear from our sponsors.

Speaker 1: This episode is sponsored by Memberful. Looking to find sustainable sources of income from your blog this year that don’t include fighting against changing search engines and social media algorithms. With exclusive membership content, you can create a new source of income by turning your food blog into a membership business while creating the content you’re passionate about.

Memberful has everything you need to quickly get your membership program up and running with content gating, paid newsletters, private podcasts, and much more. Plus, Memberful seamlessly integrates with your existing WordPress website, or you can use Memberful to create your own member home within minutes using their in-house tools. And with Memberful, you can create multiple membership tiers, limiting access to certain recipes, meal plans, and cooking tutorials to better connect with your most devoted followers and monetize the content you’re already producing.

By using Memberful, you’ll have access to a world-class support team ready to help you set up your membership and grow your revenue. They’re passionate about your success, and you’ll always have access to a real human when you need help. Food creators are already using Memberful to foster community within their audiences and monetize their content.

And listeners to the Food Blogger Pro podcast can go to memberful.com/food to learn more about Memberful solutions for food creators and create an account for free. That’s memberful.com/food. Thanks again to Memberful for sponsoring this episode.

Bjork Ostrom: Having gone through it, being a year out now, looking back, what are the things that you’d say, “Hey, if I had another maternity leave, I would for sure do this in the same way.” And what are some of the things that you would do different?

Jessica Hylton Leckie: That’s a great question. I do think, as much as I love comments, I would give that over as well. I feel like, just like FAQ sharing, “Hey, someone asked this, maybe there’s an emergency, then reach out.” But I feel like that was the only thing that I felt like I held onto that I didn’t need to. I would definitely continue or repeat the planning beforehand. That helps so much. So I didn’t ever feel like I’m there, Sammy’s just born, and I’m now trying to rush, put on makeup or anything. And definitely there was a lot of time during pregnancy, like third trimester where I was just like, I’m tired. And I tried to just balance that out. But I feel like also just the realization of your audience is here for you. They understand you. They’re not going to be like, “How dare you?”

They know I’m pregnant. They’re not going to be like, “How dare you cut back on content?” So I think just maybe giving myself a little bit more peace and grace that if it doesn’t go perfectly, that’s also okay. But I think everything I did, I’m really happy I did. And I would repeat again. With regard to the delegating, I’d probably even do that even earlier, even from my second trimester, because I found that that was not only the most helpful thing. I’m still doing it now. Because you’re right, it’s like, you realize, “Oh, maybe this is being done slightly differently from how I would do, but that doesn’t actually mean that it’s a bad thing.” A lot of cases, it is a good thing because this person has a specific skillset that they can really focus on this, whereas you were maybe trying to do everything at once. Or even if it is not exactly the way you want it, it’s still being done properly. So that realizing that kind of letting go.

Bjork Ostrom: That was going to be the next question I was going to ask was I think a lot of times we have a forcing function like this. We have kids and we do maternity leave or paternity leave, and we step away and then we realize, “Oh, the thing that I was doing that I thought was really important for me to do is still happening just the same or maybe even sometimes better. Let’s just keep this going.” So it sounds like some of the systems you implemented you continue to have as part of your business today. Is that true?

Jessica Hylton Leckie: Yeah, definitely. In fact, I feel like now 2024, a year after she’s been born and everything, now I feel like it’s when I’m actually coming back into the everyday. So I started very slowly coming back in, and at first it was just like maybe during nap times on my phone or something like that. And then, as she was getting a little older, it was like, “Okay, I can get that over here and over there.” And now it’s like, “On these days I can get stuff done, on these days, I’d rather spend time with her. Let’s go to the park or go on the road or something.” But it’s realizing that, wow, this really worked. And there’s a feeling of confusion because I feel like before I told myself I had to do all of this, and so you step back slightly scratching your head and you’re like, “Oh, this is working. Okay, I guess I can just keep doing this.” Monitor it, make sure it’s continuing to scale with the business, and just go from there basically.

Bjork Ostrom: There’s this great book. Have you ever read The E Myth or heard of E Myth?

Jessica Hylton Leckie: I haven’t, no.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s an older book, but in it they talk about this idea of working on your business versus working in your business. And I don’t think-

Jessica Hylton Leckie: I’ve heard that quote before though.

Bjork Ostrom: I don’t think there’s necessarily a right or a wrong, it’s just an interesting way to think about it. And I think for a lot of creators, being the main creator, we are working in the business. We are creating content, we’re publishing that content, but there is this kind of sliding scale where you can adjust it and you can say, and it sounds like this is a lot of what you did, now I’m going to work on the business. And for you, it’s looking at the processes, the systems, the tasks that need to get done and saying who can help out with that? Where you’re not in the weeds actually doing it, but you’re stepping outside of it and looking on it. And then, it’s almost like a lot of what we’re doing is, we have the products we’re creating, the content that we’re creating, we know that really well, but if you step outside of it, your business can also be that. It can be this living thing that you treat as there can be strategy around it, and there can be-

Jessica Hylton Leckie: Kind of like the CEO perspective-

Bjork Ostrom: Systems.

Yeah. And so having gone through that and having experienced it, do you feel like your relationship with your business has changed at all? And what does that look like now?

Jessica Hylton Leckie: That’s a great question. I feel like before Jessica in the Kitchen was my baby and understandably, literally late nights and everything, and now I do feel like I still love my business. But I am able to, like you said, step back a bit and say, “Okay, this thing that maybe I needed to work on for a while now.” But like you said, I was so busy working in the business before I wasn’t able to get to it. Now I feel like I can. Or like I said, kind of making those CEO decisions basically and saying, “Okay, I wonder if we need to do this?”

Or even just all the changes happening to our industry. Being able to actually focus on those a whole lot better now and to strategize for them, looking at the scalability of the business in general. So I do feel like I view it a lot more business-wise now, still love it, still especially love Instagram DMs talking to readers. That’s my favorite thing and comments. But being able to step back and say, “Okay, how can I look at this business year over year now?” I don’t think I got to do that as much as I wanted to in the past to look at those 2024 goals kind of thing.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. It reminds me, one of the exercises, Lindsay and I did years ago, we each created a list and it’s like what I do and what I don’t do. And it’s so simple. It’s so simple, but it was such an interesting exercise to go through to say, in our job, here’s what we do and here’s what we don’t do. And it was a little bit of a light job description, but we’re creating it for ourselves. And the great thing is, when you talk about Instagram DMs, that’s a helpful thing. You’re connecting with readers, but it also gives something to you. And so for us, I feel like as entrepreneurs, one of the great opportunities is we can look at that and say, “What are the things that we love doing that are valuable? What are the things that we don’t love doing that aren’t valuable and just not do those? And then what are the things we don’t love doing that are valuable? And then bring somebody in to help and to delegate that.”

So for somebody who’s interested in starting the process of working with somebody, whether it be having an assistant or delegating to other people, what advice would you give to them if they’re stepping into that for the first time?

Jessica Hylton Leckie: That list idea, I did do a version of that years ago, and I’m so happy you brought that up because it is, I’d say a perfect starting point. And like you said, I think the biggest question if you can start looking for help is, what do I actually enjoy doing? And even so there’s stuff we can enjoy doing, that we’re still taking too much time on it. Especially if it’s taking away from other stuff. So I think being very realistic about your business goals, being realistic about, like you said, what are the things I have to do? Just business wise what are the things I don’t have to do? I love that list idea completely. And starting from, where can I find this help? I’m really grateful. My assistant connected us through another blogger friend, but there’s so many groups, there’s so many resources, websites, I feel like the Facebook blog groups are a great place to start.

And just building out a plan from there and adjusting it. Because I think one of the things when I first started getting assistance was realizing it is actually okay if someone doesn’t do things the exact way you do, because everyone has a different skill set. Everyone has a different way of approaching things, and you may learn something new in the process. As long as it’s being done the way that it should be being done, then that’s more important versus the very micromanaging, because then I feel like you’re not actually benefiting from the help if you’re doing too much micromanaging. So finding a way to say, “This is working and let me allow everyone to be human in the process, basically.”

Bjork Ostrom: Totally. Which is a hard thing to learn. And part of it too, I think, is like, “Okay, what is the actual task that needs to get done or job that needs to get done?” And then-

Jessica Hylton Leckie: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: There might be a really specific way how you have to do it, but maybe not. And as long as you are able to figure out, here’s how this thing has to get done, allowing people autonomy and flexibility in doing that. It’s one of the great joys of work, whether you’re an entrepreneur or somebody on a team, is having that autonomy to figure out and to-

Jessica Hylton Leckie: Exactly, yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Have a general idea of where to go.

Jessica Hylton Leckie: I feel like even just parenting in general has taught me to be more flexible. So I think that helped a lot, especially looking over last year and just seeing, okay, maybe there’s something that in any aspect, realizing that there’s a reason why you’re delegating it, let’s start there. And like you said, as long as the task is being done, another person’s personality doing it in a slightly different way, it’s actually probably a good thing. I’ve learned so much, from even just seeing the way my sister did something or someone else that I delegated to doing something that I think was actually really good for me to say, “Oh, never thought about it that way, but that’s great.”

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. Jessica, it’s great to hear your story. One of the things I love about it is it applies to so many different people in so many situations. It’s not just somebody who’s going into maternity leave or paternity leave. It’s like, all of us have these seasons of life where we can’t be on in the same way that maybe we have historically. And at the same time, we don’t want things to fall to the wayside and not be kept up. And so these skills and abilities and the ability for us to say, “Hey, we want to keep this going, but we don’t necessarily want to be the only person shoveling coal into the engine of the train.” When you have somebody else come in and help, it’s like, “Oh, it’s really great.”

Jessica Hylton Leckie: It makes a big difference.

Bjork Ostrom: To have some support to keep the train going, and so you’re not the sole person keeping the fire hot. So if people want to connect with you, it sounds like one of the ways they can do that is Instagram, sending you a DM, but if people want to follow along in other places, I know you’ve just been doing such great work. You have a cookbook, you have your site, you have social media, but you can do a overview of where people can connect with you and follow along.

Jessica Hylton Leckie: Of course. So the website, jessicainthekitchen.com, I’m actually in there answering comments, so that’s a great place to connect. Instagram as well. Jessicainthekitchen, TikTok, Jessicainthekitchen. Facebook is facebook.com/Jessicainthekitchenblog and by email as well. Jessica@Jessicainthekitchen is my personal email, and I love answering emails from readers as well. So shoot me an email, shoot me a DM, and I’m there.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome. Jessica, thanks so much for coming on.

Jessica Hylton Leckie: Thank you so much for having me. This was great.

Emily Walker: Hello there. Emily here, from the Food Blogger Pro team. We hope you enjoyed listening to this week’s episode of the podcast. Before we sign off today, I wanted to mention one of the most valuable parts of the Food Blogger Pro membership, and that’s our courses. In case you don’t already know, as soon as you become a Food Blogger Pro member, you immediately get access to all of our courses here on Food Blogger Pro. We have hours and hours of courses available, including SEO for food blogs, food photography, Google Analytics, social media, and sponsored content. All of these courses have been recorded by the Food Blogger Pro team or some of our industry experts, and they’re truly a wealth of knowledge. We are always updating our courses so you can rest assured that you’re getting the most up-to-date information as you’re working to grow your blog and your business. You can get access to all of our courses by joining Food Blogger Pro. Just head to FoodBloggerPro.com/join to learn more about the membership and join our community.

Thanks again for tuning in and listening to the podcast. Make it a great week.

Bjork Ostrom: This episode is sponsored by Memberful. Looking to find sustainable sources of income from your blog this year that don’t include fighting against changing search engines and social media algorithms? With exclusive membership content, you can create a new source of income by turning your food blog into a membership business while creating the content you’re passionate about.

Memberful has everything you need to quickly get your membership program up and running with content gating, paid newsletters, private podcasts, and much more. Plus, Memberful seamlessly integrates with your existing WordPress website, or you can use Memberful to create your own member home within minutes using their in-house tools.

And with Memberful, you can create multiple membership tiers, limiting access to certain recipes, meal plans, and cooking tutorials to better connect with your most devoted followers and monetize the content you’re already producing.

By using Memberful, you’ll have access to a world-class support team ready to help you set up your membership and grow your revenue. They’re passionate about your success and you’ll always have access to a real human when you need help.

Food creators are already using Memberful to foster community within their audiences and monetize their content. And listeners to the Food Blogger Pro Podcast can go to memberful.com/food to learn more about Memberful solutions for food creators and create an account for free. That’s M-E-M-B-E-R-F-U-L.com/food. Thanks again to Memberful for sponsoring this episode.

Emily Walker: Hey, there. This is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team and you are listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. This week on the podcast, Bjork is interviewing Ewen Finser. He is back on the podcast again this week to chat about the importance of diversifying your traffic sources as well as your income.

Given all of the changes in the online content creation space in the last few years, I’m thinking about AI, Google algorithms, all that good stuff, it makes sense that you might be feeling a little risk-averse or just kind of overwhelmed by all of these changes. So what can you do about it?

That’s why we asked Ewen back onto the podcast. He knows a lot about the importance of diversifying your business and shares more of his tips and strategies for diversifying his traffic sources for his various websites, as well as why you might want to consider diversifying your income from those businesses.

He shares more about how you can go about diversifying your income and some of the tools and sites he uses to help him do that. It’s a really great interview for any entrepreneur. I know you’ll get a lot out of it, so I’m just going to let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Ewen, welcome back to the podcast.

Ewen Finser: Great to be here, Bjork. Thanks for having me back.

Bjork Ostrom: We’re going to be talking about two things that people love to talk about who listen to this podcast, Search Engine Optimization and money. Those are the two things we hear people coming back to quite a bit, and it’s two things that you have experience with. As a operator of online businesses, we’re going to talk about that a little bit, a bit of your background. And also as somebody who’s just strategic in thinking about finances and being a business owner and investments and things like that.

So you’ve been on a couple podcasts for people who maybe have missed those. Can you give a little bit of background of who you are and what you’ve been up to over the last few years as you’ve been in this world of full-time entrepreneurship?

Ewen Finser: Yeah. So I’ll keep it short because some people might be tired of hearing it, but I started this as a lifestyle business back in 2013, 2014 when I was in my early 20s after just being exposed to the corporate cubicle life and realizing it wasn’t for me and working nights and weekends to get the business off the ground. And this is pre kids and everything, but it was like a side hustle, and I picked up how to throw together websites in college, I’ll say for beer money, but I don’t drink beer anymore.

Bjork Ostrom: You and I both, yeah. For tea money for my evening.

Ewen Finser: For tea money, yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Goodnight tea money.

Ewen Finser: Yes. So we did that and then got us to a point where it could replace the day job. This was probably in 2015 and was able to quit the day job and go full-time online. And the types of businesses we were operating were media businesses. They were called niche sites really back in the day, affiliate sites. And fairly simple. We had one of our first sites was in the home robotics and automation space, which is partly just good timing, but over some consistent effort, writing all the content myself and then slowly adding some freelance writers and adding some managers and things like that.

We were able to scale that. We were able to have in 2017, we sold that for a nice little exit. That was my first taste. But I realized at the time, probably around 2017 that there’s some legs here. If we could build more of an infrastructure around incubating, launching, managing, even acquiring media properties or websites, we might be hitting on something. At the time, I just remember this is back five, six years ago, but e-commerce penetration was maybe like 8, 9% of all total retail commerce. So this was very early innings for that. And so we started scaling the team. Amy, who’s also a great producer. You should probably have her on as well.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, we should.

Ewen Finser: Our COO, she, at the time brought her on, she was just doing consulting, helping us with all various projects. And we kind of built the team from there, location dependent, no office anywhere, people all over the world and really started scaling the writing teams.

I would kind of come to market with a thesis around I see a gap with a search landscape or just something I see that’s interesting, affiliate opportunity in a certain vertical and kind put together a scope. And then we’d have kind of in effect, it was like a go to market strategy at the time, which is us doing our own little version of that and then hiring experts, hiring writers to fulfill against the requirement for articles and content.

We did a bunch of that. So we grew the core portfolio of Venture 4th Media. Today probably has like 40, 50 websites in that, kind of the mothership, and that’s like the operations entity. And then we have a couple portfolio companies where we either work with investors or work with strategic small family offices, private equity to acquire and manage primarily websites. We have some digital products, e-commerce elements, some courses here and there, but it all kind of funnels from the media side of things.

And then, fast-forward to today, and we do have some services, we have a content recruiting service for writers, content teams in a box where if there’s brands that want to do content marketing but don’t really want to do all the legwork to find the experts, maybe know what they’re looking for, and manage those writers and manage the production, we can do the headhunting for them, present them with a team and get them onboarded and then move on to the next client.

And we have more recently, my evolution is like we’ve acquired a couple newsletters and we’re building out email lists. So we’re kind of still in that media. I think the media ecosphere is where we are, but definitely evolving a little bit in terms of our thinking around list building and things like that. I guess the one place where I’m personally publishing that I spend a lot of time in is nichemediapublishing.com, which is our little industry trade mag for our people who operate smaller media businesses, whether it’s email, newsletter, social media, video, whatever it is.

Bjork Ostrom: I don’t subscribe to a lot of newsletters. That’s one that I do subscribe to. And one of the things I appreciate about it is it’s squarely in the category of what we are, which is thinking strategically about things that are happening within search, how that’s changing.

But beyond just SEO, it’s also talking about what are the strategies for content creators in general. So you’re creating content and the content you’re creating is going online. How do you think about that strategically? What is the value of a newsletter? How does that look like? What does it look like for these trends and shifts that are changing within the industry?

So for those who haven’t yet signed up, I would really encourage people to check it out, nichemediapublishing.com, is that right?

Ewen Finser: Correct.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. And it’s one of the things that’s so great about talking to anybody like you who has multiple touchpoints across a broad market. So an example is we’ll have a conversation with a CPA who works with creators. They see a hundred different tax returns, a hundred different best practices. And for you, having 40, 50, 60 plus sites that you’re managing, you also have this kind of holistic, or is a different understanding of the landscape than we would where we have three or four sites, two of which are really SEO focused.

And really focusing on the food space, you kind of have this across the board. You’re seeing all of these different sites. So with your portfolio and also with your broader knowledge of the market, what are some of the changes or shifts that you’re seeing happen specifically in the world of search? And maybe you can talk about your own portfolio.

Ewen Finser: Yeah, for sure. I think the last 10 years has been a generally very favorable context for doing anything online with media. I think certainly during Covid, we saw the Covid bump, and then we have this confluence of things happening right now, which is the post-pandemic return to normal slack I guess from everything digital. So even e-commerce companies are feeling this. Not everyone’s using Zoom as much as they used to, so people are coming back to work, that whole like or getting out the house, whatever. And so there’s that trend, which is kind of a little bit of a headwind for anything digital to be honest.

And then there’s the macroeconomic, which is another kind of contributor where there was a period maybe a year or two ago, are we in a recession? We’re technically in a recession, but maybe a soft landing. Either way, we’re certainly not in the environment of 2% interest rates and free money for anything you want to do.

The trio then effects of that, speaking personally, it’s like in that environment, there’s a lot of companies that just are willing to spend a lot of money on things. So we were doing consulting. People were knocking down our door to get services. Just that environment certainly shifted. A lot of the people we work with now, they’re a little bit more conscious of that. They have limitations on-

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, kind of austerity measures around spending and budget.

Ewen Finser: For sure.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Ewen Finser: And then you layer on the third thing, which is probably the … Well, it’s kind of two things in the search landscape specifically, but within search you have two trends. One is the AI kind of apocalypse, which is obviously people creating content using AI or just using AI to do things in an automated fashion, which is both creating opportunities and risk at the same time.

And actually, to be honest, that was what I was preparing for this last year. I was like, okay, sometime around 2023, 2024 end of the year, there’s going to be a switch where Google may turn on search generative experience and search as we know it may be different.

Bjork Ostrom: Can you explain what that means for people who don’t understand what is turning on SGE or search generative experience mean in the Google interface when you’re googling something?

Ewen Finser: Yeah, so you may have opted in, some people may have already been seeing it pop up in search where you get this generated chatbot type response at the top of Google. Basically that’s just using AI to answer the question, pulling from what’s already out there in the universe. So at a very simple level, it’s like putting a chatbot into search as one of the first touch points as opposed to just the search bar and the organic results.

I mean that’s been tested. It turns out though, that it seems like Google’s kind of walking that back. It’s not quite ready for prime time. There’s all sorts of issues with it. But really what the biggest impact has been Google’s helpful content update in September, end of September and some subsequent updates from that. But that actually ended up shaking up the search landscape more than AI has so far, at least in my estimation and experience.

And so that kind of rolled out in September and you might see it in search looking like, oh, there’s tons of Reddit forum posts showing up where there used to be a lot of content brands and editorial sites. Search might not be the same experience you’ve had in the past. Just a lot of flux, a lot of turmoil. We can get into those details, but I think the overall picture right now is headwinds. Headwinds for media brands. A lot of the big companies that I look to, and I do this in my newsletter, kind of breaking down their earnings reports, Future PLC, Dotdash, which is part of IAC, you probably recognize some of the brands like Healthline, some of those. Red Ventures is another one.

All of those big media conglomerates are going through changes and have some negative stories now about it’s the growth isn’t holding up and I think they’re kind of projecting, if I were to summarize it, 10% month-over-month decline into the future for search because they don’t really know. Even in Future PLC’s earning statement, they said something like, “We’re going to try to call the turn in 2024,” which to me is the least optimistic way of putting lipstick on it.

Bjork Ostrom: Call the turn meaning?

Ewen Finser: Yeah, like we’re trying. We want to call a turn in the market back in our favor, but. We’re trying. We don’t even know.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, yeah. Essentially saying things have taken a turn in not a good way. And in 2024, we’re going to try to turn them back towards a good way.

Ewen Finser: Yeah. And call it, like we’re going to be call it. I don’t know. I don’t know what that means even.

Bjork Ostrom: And so just to kind of recap so people can follow along, these companies are kind of big versions of … really big versions of the companies you or I might have where there’s multiple owned brands within the larger company. One of them you referenced was Future PLC, which you can just go to futureplc.com and they have Tom’s Guide where I guess Tom probably started that 15 years ago, built it up into this massive site. It was acquired by a company or Marie Claire or PC Gamer or Homes and Gardens, Cycling News, space.com. So they have all these content sites and what you’re saying is these sites are these conglomerates, these big companies are saying publicly we notice a decline in search. We’re experiencing that and just calling that out.

And what you’re saying is there are these headwinds, headwinds meaning if you’re in a ship and kind of like you said, for the past 10 years maybe we had this kind of the wind at our back and it was suddenly like, “Oh, this is really great. It feels good to create content.” And now it’s headwinds, meaning, okay, it’s kind of coming at us when we’re trying to go forward. The wind’s not going the right way.

And so as, for these companies, part of it is we kind of need to figure out what to do. And that’s part of what you’re exploring within your newsletter is like, “Hey, what are the other ways to do this?” Maybe it’s for you, you talk about a newsletter, which is interesting. We’ve had a podcast with another creator, David Lebovitz, and he talks about a shift from thinking of himself as a blog centric person to a newsletter centric person on Substack. And just the shift that that was in his mindset around content creating didn’t have to be as search optimization oriented, which I think feels good for a lot of creators to not have to be robotic in their content creation, which maybe sometimes feels like that.

So what does that mean then? We’re kind of in this in-between where we’re figuring out what’s next or what is your take on it? It’s kind of the experimental chapter that you’re in to find out what we do? Or do you just keep grinding on content and say we’re maybe going to still be able to make progress, but not as much as we could previously?

Ewen Finser: Yeah, no, it’s a tricky one. And I try to balance. It’s like F Scott Fitzgerald hold two things to be true at the same time, two opposing ideas and still retain the ability to function. And I kind of just keep that front of mind.

It’s tempting. I see a lot of creators kind of jumping from thing to thing. “Oh, it’s over. Google’s over. Don’t do SEO.” It’s like, “No. Google is still an amazing traffic source.” And even the sites that we’ve had that have been hit are still getting traffic from Google. And that’s super valuable.

And in some ways you can even think of it in the sense of if all the media brands are playing with the arm behind their back, there’s more demand than ever for eyeballs because it’s not just the media players that are being disrupted, it’s the whole food chain from the advertisers, the media buyers, the brands trying to look where to put ad dollars. And so there’s this flux.

And I think change always feels kind of negative when it first hits you and then it takes a little bit, but then at least for me, I start to see the opportunities then on the other side. And it’s really what it becomes as an exercise in navigation as opposed to this good, that bad, let’s shift everything over here or everything over there. It’s like, no, we got to navigate this ship in a slightly different tack to get the right, to get the wind where we want it. We do have that ability to control it. Sometimes it’s like turning the Titanic. If your business is entirely wired a certain way, it can be effort even to pivot it a little bit. So I’ll just say that as a general caveat.

But then some of the things that I’m interested in, one, I’ve looked at all the other platforms very deeply, Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, you name it, TikTok. And what I see with all of these platforms is diversification and a similar risk profile. TikTok could be banned tomorrow. The government might be like, “Nope, we’re done with you.” And it’s an algorithm and it changes.

Pinterest is an interesting one because it’s probably the closest corollary to Google Search in that people go into the search bar and enter things and follow. It’s kind of a hybrid between pure social media and search. And it’s very interesting and it’s still an algorithm. And if you’ve been around as long as I have with Pinterest, there’s been times where they’ve turned off the switch.

And I think all of these platforms kind of have this incentive to keep you in their walled garden but give you enough kind of breadcrumbs to keep you creating. And so there’s this tension here where building your house of rented land, it’s like I’ve heard that a lot from people and of course you don’t want to build it, but it’s a place to start build your house. You start there because you can’t buy your own land. And then how do you develop a stable foundation that has some durability?

The thing that I’ve settled on is list, the list, the email list as the kind of the DNA. And I think we have a mutual friend, Matt Paulson at MarketBeat. And if you look at his business, how incredible it is, he’s really built it off at the back of an email list. I think he started with SEO as the play, Google News, a lot of different, what I’d call tactics. I’m kind of looking at all these other platforms as there’s a Facebook tactic, there’s a Google tactic, there’s a growth hack here and there.

But we want something solid that we can hang on. And I think the email list like we talked about MarketBeat, I think they’re probably hit a little bit with this recent Google update as well. But with x number million subscribers-

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, literally-

Ewen Finser: … it’s so immaterial to his business.

That’s I think the North Star for us. It’s like how do we align having the email as being our insurance policy or our very long-term growth, incremental growth strategy. So I’m kind of thinking about all of our businesses like that now. If it’s something that cannot be readily operationalized or synchronized with an email list, it’s probably not a market we want to enter right now.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, interesting.

Ewen Finser: So that’s one framework I’m using.

Bjork Ostrom: And point being, like you said, all of these platforms are necessary to some degree or useful maybe is a better way to say it, like Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, your own site, your own blog. But all of those come with some risk, the inherent risk being an algorithm can change, they can flip a switch. Suddenly Pinterest goes public and they need to prioritize ad revenue, so they want to keep people on more. All of these little nuanced shifts and changes or not nuanced, significant in a lot of ways, which resulted in the thing that you had being taken away in that idea of rented land being a platform that you don’t actually own, whereas your site is something that you own, but the traffic source to it for a lot of us isn’t, which is search. And for some of us, we felt that in a really significant way where that drops off.

Your point being email is helpful because for the most part, the deliverability and consistency around email is controlled by you. Now, there’s always the … I remember one of the things being Gmail releasing their tabs. And the tabs come out and it’s like suddenly stuff goes into promotional tab and how you … So there still is some element of that, but for the most part, email being something that you control wholly and that being an important piece of the puzzle.

Ewen Finser: And also with the privacy concerns coming up, all those things. And even with the programmatic advertising, if you have their email list, they’re opted in. It’s like I think a more valuable visitor. I don’t know exactly how it works with Raptive and Mediavine, but there’s something around that.

And it makes sense. I think that’s another kind of concern that we’re looking at. And yeah, it’s not a perfect solution. You point out there’s some great points there, but I think DMARC, there’s a couple of things coming out right now where you have to add certain things, trusted sender if you’re sending more than 5,000 emails, there’s a whole list of things they’re requiring now. So it’s not without some risk. But it is like this almost like a permission structure. So if someone’s opted in, and I always look at it as a trust proxy too, it’s a great KPI for our content quality. If someone is willing to consume our content, come from Google or Pinterest or Facebook consume an article from us and then enter their email, they probably had a good experience.

And so if we can orient around that, it’s also, there’s other benefits than just getting someone’s email. It’s like we’re on the right track if we’re seeing a high opt-in rate, particularly if we don’t have any special offer. It’s just, “Hey, get the latest from our newsletter,” or something like that.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. And I love that idea of you saying it’s kind of this insurance policy where we want to think as creators, how do we diversify our sources of revenue for our business?

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I am going to go up a layer because the second thing that I wanted to talk to you about related to some of this stuff is how do we as investors almost think about the income that we’re creating from our businesses?

So on one level we’re diversifying with platforms, traffic sources, maybe sources of revenue within the business. But let’s say there’s a scenario where somebody is building their site and they’re taking all of the income they’re creating from their site, putting it back into their site to continue to grow. They’re hiring people, operating break even, revenue is equal to expenses, and they have this thing that’s really valuable. But let’s say one of these shifts does come, Google algorithm changes, and suddenly this asset that you’ve built that’s really valuable is maybe half as valuable as it was, which is still really valuable. But you’ve just had this, if we think of it like a net worth statement for us as individuals, you’ve had a cut in your net worth, it goes to half. All of your investment was in a very small micro cap stock, which is your own business.

So one of the things that I think is important to talk about and shine a light on as we’re talking about diversification within our businesses is also diversification on a higher level just within our own finances as well. And I’m curious if you have thoughts on how to approach that and how much do we build our own thing knowing that we can control it and maybe there’s some really great upside with it versus thinking about other areas that aren’t our own business to put some of that money into when we are at the point where our sites or business is creating profit?

Ewen Finser: Yeah, no, I spent a lot of time thinking about this. And it’s kind of funny because I feel like there’s conflicting wisdom out there, conventional wisdom on Main Street where it’s put it into your socket, into your 401k and contribute x hundred dollars a month. And it’s kind of like this conservative, for most people, here’s your conservative plan to retirement and you can retire. You’ll have just enough money to live a nice life and go golfing once a week or something.

And then for entrepreneurs, it’s like all this stuff here is invest in yourself. That’s the smartest investment you’re ever going to make. And so it’s double down on yourself, conviction, just go do it, take a risk. And so there’s these conflicting kind of narratives. And I think honestly for entrepreneurs, we probably need a little bit more of that conservative. What makes us great entrepreneurs sometimes is our Achilles heel in that we don’t know when to stop and when to diversify.

One thing I think personally about how I’ve thought about this, I used to never want to sell any of my websites are like my babies and I believed in them, and that’s partly why they worked because without some of that belief, I don’t think they can get off the ground to be honest. There’s times where that’s all you’re running on, is belief.

Bjork Ostrom: Your own belief, yeah.

Ewen Finser: And are they going to figure it out and make it work? And it’s not rational at that point. But I think if we kind of zoom out, there have been some situations where I’ve been, someone offered me a certain number I couldn’t say no to, or I just, for whatever reason, I was like, let me have a forcing function to take some money off.

So I kind of have this internal rule of thumb where every, I call it every two to two and a half years I’m looking to sell a certain percentage of our earnings almost regardless of the climate. Because I think calling timing of things is just very difficult. So I just have my own internal rule where I’m going to take some chips off and then put them into very non-correlated things that are not anything to do with websites. Maybe it’s real estate or just an index fund, something very simple that I don’t have to think about, that’s working in the background and I even set it up so it’s automated even on a monthly basis, certain x percent. And one of the books I read a while ago, it’s like Profit First, I think I forget the name.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s a great book.

Ewen Finser: Yeah. And that was also a turning point for me because the point of why we’re doing this is not to just be a venture growth story. We’re doing it most of us for a lifestyle reason. We want a different life. We want a better life. And just being able to say, “You know what? I’m going to pay myself first,” or, “I’m going to think about that at least this year. How is that going to work?”

So yeah, I definitely spent a lot of time thinking about it, but I think we could do more as entrepreneurs to have some sort of framework at least for how we’re investing and taking chips off the table.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. Profit First, great book. The basic idea, there’s a lot of really great elements with it, but it was a while ago that I read it is like, okay, if you have a business that isn’t profitable, you need to make sure that you are building in profit almost as a line item. So if you’re making $100,000 a year in revenue, but you’re spending $100,000 dollars, then you write in that year in the budget, like $50,000 of profit and then build backwards from there. Is that kind of how you remember the bit basic concept?

Ewen Finser: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: And so you did a similar thing conceptually with your businesses to say, I’m going to, as a forcing function, have this percentage that I’m going to take as would it be a distribution out of the business?

Ewen Finser: Yeah, exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: And is that an actual percentage that you’ve set that automatically transfers out?

Ewen Finser: So it’s not always an automatic, it is a target, and I think it’s especially in times like this where things change quickly, all of a sudden you’re on a growth trajectory and then you’re like, “Hold on. We got to stabilize everything.” Of course that factors in. But yeah, one thing is technically speaking, we’re structured as an S corp, which the reason you do that is so you can pay yourself a salary. So that’s part of that percentage.

Bjork Ostrom: And that’s beneficial because then you’re not paying additional taxes on distributions that you might take.

Ewen Finser: Yeah. You’re basically an employee of your own business and there’s tax benefits to that.

Bjork Ostrom: And so from that you’re saying you have this salary that’s kind of in some ways a profit first mindset of taking that out. And then also thinking about, okay, in seasons where it makes sense, having a target percentage of saying, I want to de-risk some of my anchoring around most of my net worth as an individual being in this business by taking that out and looking for other places to invest in, whether that be an index fund. So for those who aren’t familiar index fund being like a bunch of stocks that are rolled up into one. S&P 500 index fund is one of the most popular. The great thing about index funds is there’s not a lot of fees with them. So kind of a strategy from an investment standpoint.

But essentially taking some of that out and doing so in a way where it’s not like when you feel inspired or when you think of it, but thinking of it as that profit first kind of mindset to say, “I’m going to have this goal of getting this amount out of the businesses and from there investing it in other places.”

And that’s for other people where it’s like, okay, it’s probably up to them or financial advisor that you work with to make a decision on that. But building in and what I like about it is some type of process around how to go about doing that. And you said that that wouldn’t always exist in seasons where maybe you do need to focus on your business a little bit more.

How do you figure out when those seasons are? Obviously in the startup phase you’re probably putting more money in than you’re making, but when do you think the point is when it makes sense to start thinking strategically about diversifying by investing in other areas?

Ewen Finser: Yeah, I think that’s a tricky one depending on the type of business I think you’re running. I think initially for me, the type of business I was running was a lifestyle business where the point was it almost started with profit first by accident. It was like, how much money can I make so I don’t have to work my day job? Which was kind of a similar level of analysis and it was a solo operation. I think there’s probably a lot of people in the audience who maybe they have some VAs, but for the most part they’re doing a lot of the content production. They’re still, it’s their thing.

So from that standpoint, I think it’s actually, it’s pretty easy in that mindset because all you have to think about is kind of yourself and some of your line items. Once we made the pivot from solo business with a couple freelancers to we’re now a media company with processes and systems and scale, that I think for me was the hardest one because then it’s very tempting then to be like, “Well, let’s invest in people. Let’s invest in process. Let’s do more now. We’ve got to scale. Now we have this team. We got to keep them busy. We got to keep moving, keep hiring.” And that I think is a very tricky switch.

In some ways when I was solo, there were a couple of years where I was more profitable than years where I had a company with 15, 20 people, which is kind of odd to think about.

Bjork Ostrom: Right. But point being, you’re scaling, you’re growing, revenues may be growing, but along with that expenses are. And it almost feels like I would be interested in your thoughts on this, that there’s a chasm that you have to cross where you go from this solopreneur kind of on your own, maybe a couple people supporting you, and then you say, “I’m going to attempt to build, scale and grow a thing.” And it’s not like revenue immediately ticks up with expenses ticking up.

So you kind of eat into that profit with the bet that eventually the investments that you’re going to be making are going to pay off. The revenue grows, hopefully then the expenses maybe stay the same, and then it gets to the point where then you maybe have that profit again. But it probably is a consideration that people need to make. Is that something that you want to do is try and cross that chasm?

Ewen Finser: 100%. I think it’s actually one of the most important decisions we can make because depending on what your context is, one might be much more attractive than the other if you really think about it. And sometimes there’s pressure too to, well, got to reinvest. There’s also reinvest in the business. And so you kind of, “Okay, how do we just keep growing?”

You have to really know what you want and you take it from a solo business, it’s like lifestyle freedom and you don’t have to answer to anyone, and you build a team. And the funny thing that happens is then you feel responsible to the team, which is natural, it’s human, it’s the right thing to do once you bring people in. But it’s a whole different shift. You’re not just follow your own kind of selfish desires anymore. You’re having to think about a lot of people and-

Bjork Ostrom: So more responsibility. Yeah.

Ewen Finser: Yeah, more responsibility. And I think, yeah, to your point, in terms of profitability, you probably take a couple steps back to take 10 steps forward, but it doesn’t always work out. That’s the tricky part. I see a lot of companies, particularly now going to market where they’re in between, they’re stuck in the chasm, right? They’re like trying to scale. They’ve tried halfway to scale, they’re like, but now they’re in between and there’s a Google update, and so they have to do a fire sale to get liquidity because … So that’s-

Bjork Ostrom: Can you explain what you mean by that?

Ewen Finser: Yeah. When you’re in a situation where you’re planning, look, if we could predict Google, it would be a lot easier, or Google was consistent, we could build a really good model. But coming into 2021, 2022, you’re kind of going along with, oh, well, I expect this is going to be a little bit better than last year, kind of making your projections. And then Google update hits and you may have allocated-

Bjork Ostrom: Which is the fire. It’s like you have a store. It’s really successful. And then a fire comes through, which is the Google update.

Ewen Finser: A fire comes up. It’s active nature almost. And then you’re kind of in this in-between stage where you’re like, “Okay.” For example, we did invest a lot of money earlier in the year into certain things that we were betting on, and all of a sudden traffic is reduced by 50%. And then we’re like, “Oh, now what do we do? We’ve already allocated. Do we continue to following through and just trust that’s going to get better? Or do we have enough flexibility in how we plan to scale where we can unwind some of these things?”

What that kind of looks like for some companies is letting people go or cutting hours or reducing operations, expenses in other ways. Maybe it’s marketing or paid out or whatever it was pulling back and is there enough left for you to pay yourself?

So I think that’s the key to crossing the chasm so to speak, is making sure you have enough, your home front is taken care of. Ideally, I mean the way it worked for me was I had an exit before I started to really scale this whole thing. So that was helpful to set some sort of benchmark where at least I know I had one successful exit. I wasn’t reinvesting everything. I took some off, bought a house, did some of those life things that I need to do and had some security in that before taking that leap.

I guess that’s how I would approach it. But that’s what I mean by getting caught in the middle, is you’re kind of in no man’s land.

Bjork Ostrom: One of the things that I’ve been trying to do is get an understanding of, okay, let’s say we have in the next month we have $1,000 and we’re kind of trying to figure out what we do with it. We could invest it into one of the businesses. Maybe you hire somebody or you have a project. $10,000 is probably a little bit easier to play with bigger, more realistic numbers. You could invest it into the businesses. You could invest it into real estate. Maybe you buy a house and it’s a rental house and you have this other thing. You could invest it into the stock market. So index fund.

One of the things that’s hard, if you buy a house, you go to Zillow and you can see what the value is and you can see month to month how much it goes up. Okay, in this area we owned it for a year and it went up 5%. And previously we had a house that was $200,000 and now it’s $210,000. With the stock market, you have really good day-to-day, second-to-second indicators of how much something is worth. It’s a little bit harder with an obscure asset like a website or a blog or a site.

How do you think of the value of the thing that you’re creating, and do you track that in any way to help inform decisions on?

Ewen Finser: Yeah, I mean I’m always curious about what industry multiples are, and only so far as this kind of a band of valuations are low, valuations are high. And kind of what I try to do is when valuations are high, be kind of selling in, selling into that.

Bjork Ostrom: Meaning that would be a season where you’d potentially be open to selling?

Ewen Finser: Yes. And just like and now, and so this is probably another I guess bit of financial wisdom as it relates to business or life in general, but for business expenses, having a reserve so that when things like this happen, what they call the blood on the streets, when there’s people are selling, people need … I’ve seen it all the time this past month. A lot of people selling things at a discount one and a half times earnings, two times earnings, which is historically low for the asset class. The average is probably like 3, 3.5. That’s the norm maybe for a really good asset or business, maybe 4, 4.5x. During the pandemic for if you’re running an Amazon business, there was all these big aggregators raising money, these big conglomerates that were acquiring Amazon brands from mom and pop operators like me and you and multiples got as high as six or seven times.

Bjork Ostrom: When you say six or seven, it’s earnings. So essentially there’s lots of ways you can calculate earnings, SDE, EBITDA. But essentially it’s like profit more or less profit, profit and you add your salary back in if you’re taking a salary.

So right now you’re saying one and a half to two times that you might see that pop up, but normal would be three to three and a half. So if you have a site and it makes profit of 100,000, the value of that could potentially be 300 to 350,000 if it was something you’re … It’s kind of like that’s a stock and you have 100%, usually not always, you have 100% ownership in that stock. And the value of it is that. It is the multiple on earnings, which shifts and changes depending on the market.

Ewen Finser: What I don’t do, I guess is I don’t track my net worth relative to the industry multiples. I think the only thing that’s real to me is the earnings and the revenue really because you can cut expenses, but the revenue, the profit and money in the bank.

I think sometimes there’s games that get played with valuations, and I think famously venture culture celebrates this. You might hear things like, oh, what’s the word when they look at the book value or something, they did a markdown? It’s like, what does it even mean? It’s a theoretical valuation based on what their last raise was, but it’s all kind of made up numbers really.

And then, because really when you find out what the business is worth when you go to sell it, which sounds like duh. But that’s been my experience, because I’ve sold sites at 4x, I’ve sold sites at 2.5x, I’ve sold sites at 3.5x, and they weren’t necessarily better than each other. They were just usually it’s kind of where we were in the market.

Bjork Ostrom: And it’s always what the seller can agree to and what the buyer can agree to.

Ewen Finser: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. And where you don’t have a ton of that data, it’s hard to know what the norm is. Whereas Zillow, it’s like there’s thousands of houses that are sold every year, and so you can kind of aggregate that and …

Ewen Finser: Yeah. And is the value of the land, which I think in the website space would be the domain if you have really brandable domain like, I don’t know, superhero.com-

Bjork Ostrom: … Yeah.

Ewen Finser: That would be worth something intrinsically versus besttennisshoes.com.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, right. That’s great. Last question in that category. Do you have any favorite apps or tools or on the money management side of things, anything that you use that you especially like?

Ewen Finser: Yeah, let me think. So for business banking, I really like the Mercury.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. We just switched accounts over to Mercury with last year, yeah.

Ewen Finser: So I love them. It’s easy to use, simple. The problem is for treasury management, they’re not great unless you have a huge number, unless you’re a venture company with multimillions sitting in the bank. My stack is Mercury for the business checking and multiple business accounts. You could even set up custom workflows. So things are going to different bank accounts. You can set up 10 different bank accounts under one entity. You can add users. It’s really, really easy to use.

For the saving side I like LiveOakBank. They’re business friendly and they were offering the best interest rates and they still do and good CDs, and basically allowing you to park your business money before you take it out the business somewhere safe. And of course, that’s not investment advice, but that’s just what I’m doing. And it has good interest rates. Because that’s another thing we didn’t touch on, but interest rates at 5%, putting money into treasuries.

So on the personal side treasuries, and I think that treasury is direct, whether you can use your business to register, you personally can register, you can invest in US treasuries that yield over a certain period of times, six months, nine months, three months, you can set a term and you get whatever the current interest rate is. You may kind of spread on that if you blend the government your money for a little bit. So that’s one thing I’ve used, I’ve been using, which is helpful on the business side.

On the personal side, I also like to do treasuries right now because it’s just an easy way to park money. I think there’s a couple. I’m trying to think. There’s a couple different places to go. Any bank worth their salt probably has some sort of treasury management system, but you can also do treasuries direct with the government.

And then Wealthfront, I’ve enjoyed my experience there for they’ve automated, they’ve automated bond portfolios and index funds and their checking account I think is close to 5% or a little over 5%. So it’s been consistently one of the higher. Well, certainly that’s not checking. I think it’s a savings vehicle, but you withdraw it when you need to. So yeah, those are the things. I mean something revolutionary.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s super, super helpful. Yeah, similarly, I’ll just share these if it’s helpful for anybody. We use a site called American Deposits for business savings, one called Max My Interest for personal savings, and I just started using for daily budget management. I have one that brings in all of our transactions, business and personal, and then one that’s just personal, Monarch Money, which is really cool.

Last question that I have, and then we can jump, do you shoot for a month percentage or three month savings for the business or do you have anything like that for your businesses that you kind of try and track?

Ewen Finser: Yeah, I have a target. It’s not always perfect. Yeah, I would like to have three to six months. I look at almost like payroll because a lot of the other thing and like hard OpEx, I look at our expenses as investing in new content. That’s more speculative and that’s like you can just not do it this month. But the hard expense of the core team that we need, that we want to keep, because if we let them go, it would cause us more harm in the long run.

And then the hard expense hosting and things like you need to pay for, yeah, having six months of runway is really helpful. Honestly, particularly in times like this where all of a sudden your projection changes based on the reality on the ground and you have to make some hard decisions and it helps to have a little bit of flexibility so the changes aren’t super abrupt. Because the human mind, in my experience, it’s difficult sometimes to … When things are on the decline, your expectations are almost trailing.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, right. They’re probably a little bit behind, yeah.

Ewen Finser: Until you catch the floor. And you want to get to that floor either from expectations or, okay, we hit the bottom, this is the trough, and then this is the reality. Confront the brutal facts as Jim Collins says. That’s going to be so much easier to say it out loud, say the ugly part out loud and the hard part out loud, and then from that point, you come up with a really good plan. So yeah, three to six months. And then of course you want more.

Now I think of it from an investment perspective, the more, the better, to be honest, because there’s time like this where people are getting a lot of inbound from people being like, “Hey. I’m no longer.” It’s always like, “I’m no longer interested in running the business. I want to do something different.” It’s like, “Well, yeah, because the business declined.”

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, right. Yeah.

Ewen Finser: 60%. That’s not fun for anyone. But there are opportunities. Those will come up when you least expect it, and so having that availability to move on something is really helpful.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. That’s great. Ewen, this is all awesome. Anytime we have you on, we could talk for hours.

Ewen Finser: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: People are interested in this space, I know, especially interested in some of the things that you’re talking about when it comes to content and building content businesses. Best place to follow along is the newsletter?

Ewen Finser: Yeah, nichemediapublishing.com. Of course, you can connect with me on Twitter, fairly unique name, Twitter and LinkedIn, wherever’s easier, and yeah, that’s probably the best for now. And then, yeah, the newsletter is the latest on my thinking. And there’s other things in the newsletter, there’s kind of things we do and businesses we own and services. So it’s like the central eating my own dog food. It’s the DNA for me. It’s the relationship I have with my audience, the people that are in this industry. So that’s a great place to start.

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome. Thanks so much for coming on, Ewen. Really appreciate it.

Ewen Finser: Awesome. Thanks, Bjork.

Emily Walker: Hey there. This is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team, and I am coming at you with your February member news update. So every month at the beginning of the month, we love to fill you in on what is going on within the Food Blogger Pro membership. We like to say your membership is always changing because we are always adding new content, having new events, and just new exciting things going on in the forum. So wanted to give you a little sneak peek as to what you can expect this month.

We kicked off the month with a new coaching call with Matthew Duffy, all about being action oriented, allocating resources and branding. Matthew has seen really significant increases in traffic just in the last few months and shares some tips and strategies as to how he kicked that off in this coaching call, which is almost two hours and filled with lots of good tidbits.

Next up on February 8th, we have a live Q&A with Casey Marquez, all about advanced SEO. So this is for members who are looking to dive deeper into advanced SEO strategies and tips, and just take their SEO strategy to the next level. It’ll be a really great and informative Q&A, and we’re excited to have you join us.

Lastly, at the end of the month, we’ll be publishing a brand new course all about Google Web Stories. We’ll be covering how to get started with Google Web Stories, designing and customizing your own Google Web Stories, optimizing them for SEO and just best practices for maintaining them and hoping to see success with them.

So it’s going to be a really great month. It’s a short month, although not as short as usual because it is a leap year. So we have 29 days to make the most of February, and we hope you’ll join us.

Thanks so much for tuning into this episode, and we will see you next week.

Bjork Ostrom: This episode is sponsored by Clariti. Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could figure out how you can optimize the existing posts on your blog without needing to comb through each and every post one by one? With Clariti, you can discover optimization opportunities with just a few clicks. Thanks to Clariti’s robust filtering options, you can figure out which posts have broken links, missing alt text, broken images, no internal links, and other insights so you can confidently take action to make your blog posts even better.

We know that food blogging is a competitive industry, so anything you can do to level up your content can really give you an edge. By fixing content issues and filling content gaps, you’re making your good content even better, and that’s why we created Clariti. It’s a way for bloggers and website owners to feel confident in the quality of their content. Listeners to the Food Blogger Pro podcast get 50% off of their first month of Clariti after signing up. To sign up, simply go to Clariti.com/food. That’s Clariti, C-L-A-R-I-T-I.com/food. Thanks again to Clariti for sponsoring this episode.

Emily Walker: Hey there, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team, and you are listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. This week on the podcast, we have a special treat. It’s a Bjork solo episode. I always love these episodes where Bjork can dive into some strategies and tips and tricks for owning and developing a business as a content creator, and this is a really good one. Bjork is talking through his strategy of zero-based dream building and why you might want to try zero-based dream building when you’re thinking about growing as a content creator and reaching your dreams as a business owner. He chats through how to approach zero-based dream building, and the different components of it, like focusing on yourself and how you like to communicate, focusing on the needs of your audience, and then how to pursue getting better at both a medium and a topic.

Lastly, he talks about how to be intentional about educating yourself and why you need to consider what phase of life you’re in as you think about educating yourself and improving your business in order to reach your dreams. It’s a really great thought-provoking episode, and I’m just going to let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Hey folks, Bjork here. This is what we call a solo episode. It’s me just sitting in a room here on this chilly Minnesota day. It’s currently 16 degrees, so if you are somewhere warmer, feel grateful. Unless you like cold weather, and then you can feel jealous. Kind of right in the middle. Went for a walk this morning with our dog, Sage, and it was wonderful. The sun was shining. It was really cold, but it was wonderful.

But here I am sitting in a warm room recording a podcast episode by myself, but occasionally we do these solo episodes to share a concept or an idea, and so that’s what I’m going to do today. Usually they’re a little bit shorter, but my hope in sharing this is it gives you something to think about that will be a helpful kind of mindset framework as you think about how you are going to do what you do.

And for most of us, what we are doing is we are creating. We are building a business or building a following in order to have influence for some reason. For some of us it’s for creating revenue. For some of us, it’s a creative outlet. For some of us, it’s to let people know about something that we feel like should be known within the world. Maybe you’re passionate about eating vegan and you want people to know about that. That’s why you’re doing what you’re doing.

But almost everybody who listens to this, apart from my parents, are trying to build a following or to get a message out for some purpose, and I wanted to talk about a framework or a mindset that you can have as you think about how you’re going to do it. The phrase that I came up with for this is zero-based dream building. Let me explain a little bit about that.

A lot of us who are doing this, whether we’ve been doing it for 10 years or 10 days, we have a dream of the thing that we want to build. We’re pursuing a thing, and we need to build that dream. What does that dream actually look like? We need to construct it in our minds. And sometimes what happens is we see what somebody else is doing and we say, “I want to go do that thing.”

But a lot of times we are replicating a thing that isn’t the best fit for us because it’s kind of adjacent to what we want to be doing or it’s close to what we want to be doing, but it’s not actually the best version of what we should be doing, because it’s easiest to replicate a thing we see as opposed to create something that’s a really good fit for us. Similar to making a shirt that’s a perfect fit or a custom suit that’s going to fit you better than just a suit off the rack.

And so what I’m going to be talking about today is that custom dream. So that’s the dream building part. What about the zero-based? Well, there’s been a lot of talk lately about all things political, and one of the things they talk about sometimes is budgeting, and one of the phrases you occasionally hear is zero-based budgeting. And I’ve really loved this conceptually and I’ve thought about using it in other places of my life. And the basic idea is, instead of looking at what you have and subtracting from it, like in our case, if we were to look at our budget, we’d look at it and we’d say, “Okay, we spend this amount on restaurants every month. We need to get that in half.”

That’s one way you could do it. Subtractive. Zero-based budgeting is where you start with a blank canvas. You don’t start with anything, and you say, “How much do we feel like we should be spending at restaurants every month?” Okay, and then you add that in. And you say, “How much is our mortgage or rent?” You add that in.

And so you start with zero and then you build on top of that, and that’s what I want to talk about today as it relates to dream building. So it’s zero-based dream building. How do we go about doing that? The first thing is you start with zero. So imagine yourself, you have a blank slate, you’re not looking at anything. We’re starting at zero and we’re going to build your dream.

Where’s the first place that you should start? There’s really two areas that we should think about in the world of creating a content business. The first is to focus on yourself. Here’s what I mean by that. Oftentimes we see other people doing a thing, we see their successes and we think, okay, I’m going to try and do that. But instead of focusing on somebody else and what they’re doing, focus on yourself. For example, where do you find yourself naturally drawn? If you’re communicating with somebody, do you find that you want to call them? Do you find that you actually like texting more? Do you really prefer to meet up with somebody in person? And if you think of a dream scenario for you, like a work scenario, how would you be communicating with that person or communicating with other people? Would it be a job where you never have to get on the phone and you’re only emailing and using Slack to communicate? Or would it be a job where you never have to be at the computer and you can always be interacting with somebody?

Reflect on where you find yourself naturally drawn. This is kind of the medium of communication that we are most comfortable with, and that should be an indicator to you around where you should be creating content online or how you should be creating content. Or maybe it’s not even creating content. Maybe it’s the type of business that you’re building. It can be outside of the world of content creation. Now, most people who listen to this are creating content, but not everybody. So reflect on how you communicate and where you’re most naturally drawn towards. And we’re going to talk about more of that a little bit later.

The second piece of focusing on yourself is reflecting on what you want to be best in class in. What do you want to be an expert in? And this doesn’t mean that you are an expert, and this doesn’t mean that in six months you’re going to be an expert, but what would you feel good about pursuing, for the rest of your life, maybe, expertise in? You just want to continually learn about it and get better about it. You want to become best in class by reading, by consuming content, by meeting with other people and learning from them. And again, we’re going to talk more about that a little bit later, but those are the two pieces of focusing on yourself.

As you’re doing your zero-based dream building, you start with your blank canvas and you say, number one, where do I find myself naturally drawn in terms of how I’m communicating and what feels most natural with communication? And then number two, what is my area of expertise? What are the things that people come to me and ask questions about? What do I want to be best in class in? So that’s the focus on yourself piece. Do some reflection on that and see if you can surface some of those answers.

The second part is focus on others. So you’ve focused on yourself and you have some kind of self-awareness. And now we’re going to focus on others, because in this world, we’re not creating content in a vacuum, we’re not creating content for ourselves, we’re creating content for others. So do some reflection on who you will be serving. What are their specific feelings? What are the things that you hope that somebody would be feeling in order for you to come to them and say, “Here’s some solutions. Here’s some answers.” For us in this space, we are hoping that people have this desire to create something online, but they’re kind of trying to figure out how to do it. They want to know best practices. They want to know the skills they need. They want to know tips. They want to know tricks. They’re hungry for information, but they also want some direction.

They want kind of a Sherpa to come alongside them and say, “We’re going to walk you along the way to help you get to this point where you can be creating content.” And from that process, that you can either be creating income, you can be having impact, you can be building a following, whatever the purpose is that they want to create it. For you in this stage as you focus on others, now that you know what you are after, how you create content and what you want to be creating content about, it’s focusing on others and saying, “What are the needs that people have for the audience that I will be serving?”

And the hope is that as you reflect on those two things, focusing on yourself and focusing on others, that you’ll come to a place where you realize there’s a group of people who have this problem or feeling or issue or desire, and you, through the medium that you are most excited about, are going to be talking about that expertise and helping them along the way.

An example in my life is I am working with a coach on nutrition and health and fitness, and his name is Brett and he’s incredible. He has this deep expertise. He knows all of this information about nutrition and health. I’ve learned so much from him, and I can tell that it’s his expertise. And we’re doing that all through writing. We use an app, we communicate back and forth, and he’s also a really good communicator in text, in a written format. And he’s serving me, and my needs are I need to learn about nutrition. I need to learn about accountability for fitness and exercise, and that works really well. And I would say, I don’t know if Brett would ever listen to this, but he’s in this area of perfect fit, because he has the expertise. I can tell he’s somebody who constantly pursues that expertise. He’s using a medium that he’s good at, writing, and he’s found somebody, me, who has a need for the thing that he has an expertise in in the medium that he’s interested in communicating.

Before we continue, let’s take a moment to hear from our sponsors. This episode is sponsored by CultivateWP, specifically a new offering they have called Cultivate Go. And as business owners, I’m talking to you, one of the things we need to get good at is thinking about how we invest in our business. And as someone who publishes content online, one of your most important business assets is your website. But there’s a problem that a lot of us run into when we think about investing into our website, and it’s that it seems like there’s really two options. You have the DIY, figure it out on your own, get really frustrated, spend a bunch of time or pay tens of thousands of dollars to have a fully customized design and theme developed. But what if you find yourself in between those two options? You’re a successful and established blogger or even a new blogger who wants to invest in the best options, but you don’t have a budget of tens of thousands of dollars.

That’s where Cultivate Go comes in. Cultivate Go is an offering from a company called CultivateWP, co-founded by Bill Erickson, an incredible developer that we’ve worked with in the past before we had our own internal team and Dwayne Smith, an incredible designer. And for years they’ve had their calendar filled doing these fully customized sites. But they realized that there’s hundreds of bloggers who want that same level of technology but didn’t have that budget. And that’s where Cultivate Go comes in.

It’s a semi-custom theme design and white glove site setup. That means that your Cultivate Go site can compete on an even technological playing field with the biggest food blogs in the world. You choose one of the core themes, you customize it with your logo, your brand colors, your typography, and then the CultivateWP team sets it up on a staging environment and they can launch your site within one week and the cost is $5,000. It’s that perfect sweet spot for anybody who finds themselves in that in-between stage where you want the best of the best, but you don’t want to have to pay tens of thousands of dollars to get it. If you’re interested in checking that out, go to FoodBloggerPro.com/go or just search Cultivate Go in Google.

And to wrap all of those things together, you’re focusing on yourself, you’re focusing on others, and then you implement this idea that we talk often about on this podcast, 1% infinity. You’re getting a tiny bit better every day forever, and you’re getting better, not just on your expertise. You’re not just pursuing education and learning and showing up consuming content, but you’re also getting better at the medium that you’re delivering that content through.

So there’s two parts to this. It’s the medium and the topic, and that’s where you’re getting a tiny bit better every day forever. You’re figuring out how do I become a better communicator? For instance, the medium could be video and the topic could be eating clean. And so what does it look like for you to get really good at understanding? How do you become an expert communicator via video while at the same time figuring out all of the different issues that people have or questions that people have, or ways that you can help people who are looking to eat clean?

It’s the medium and the topic. That’s what you’re pursuing as you are a tiny bit better every day: getting better at the medium, getting better at the topic. Or maybe the medium is writing and the topic is parenting. Obviously not in the food space, but what does it look like for you to get really good at writing? How do you communicate clearly? How do you say less, but communicate just as much? And what does it look like to really understand parenting? Maybe you consume all of the different content you can and podcasts you can in the parenting realm. One last example of this is you want to pursue the medium of podcasting, and the topic is mindful eating. So you want to learn how do you become an expert podcaster, and how do you become an expert in mindful eating? So you understand the medium and you understand the topic and you figure out ways to get better at that every day, forever.

How do you do that? Well, this is the last time that there’s a decision for you to make, and the decision is your primary form of education. So as you want to get better at the medium, which could be writing, podcasting, video, those examples that we gave before and the topic, eating clean, parenting, mindful eating, you have to figure out how you are ingesting information. How’s that information coming in? And it could be coming in through books. It could be coming in through podcasts, audiobooks. Maybe you’re somebody who really likes meeting up with people and interacting with people, so you have local meetups and you attend live events. Maybe you actually use meetup.com to do that, or maybe it’s Masterminds and you are getting together on a weekly or monthly basis with people who are pursuing a similar thing. Maybe it’s just blog articles that you’re doing.

For me, I’ve had this realization, there was a season in my life where I read all the time, I’d read like 50 books a year, and for me that was a lot. And I loved it. And I would start every day with reading. I’d sit down and I’d read for half an hour, hour. I’d have coffee. Zen. It was bliss. We have a three-year-old and a five-year-old now. And now a lot of times when I get up, I’m playing pretend cats and walking around on all fours meowing. And it’s like, okay, this is not the season of life where I’m going to be starting my day by reading for an hour. And so that’s shifted.

What I’ve found, though, is I need to shift my content consumption into areas where I’m multitasking. And so for me, at the end of the day, I probably have an hour where I’m doing the dishes, cleaning up the kitchen, Lindsay’s upstairs putting the girls down, and I’m maybe taking out the trash, whatever it is. All those odds and ends that we all have to do.

And when I’m doing that, what I’ve found is the best way for me to get better at my craft is to fit it into, my content consumption, into those windows. So driving is another time I can listen to podcasts. And I’ve just started… Actually, this is an app that I’ve been using that I really like. It’s called Readwise. And this wasn’t true five years ago, but it is true now, and I’ve tested it out, that Readwise is kind of the compiler, and then they have something called a Reader, which is like a highlighting app, and a read later app, and those kind of go hand in hand. And so what I do is I have the app, and I’ve actually been also listening to articles. So if somebody sends me an article in the middle of the day or I find one that I want to read, I actually just listen to it.

And what I was saying before about five years ago, it wouldn’t have been very enjoyable five years ago to have written text read to you, but it’s actually pretty good now. And these apps are getting good at having life like voices reading the content. And I found that it’s not terrible. It doesn’t sound like a person, but it’s not terrible. And for me, it feels really good in my limited workday where I have limited hours and I have to focus on actually getting stuff done to not spend a half an hour, an hour reading an article, but just to save it for later. And then when I do have that time where I can consume the content, I can just press play and listen to it using the Reader app via Readwise, and it’s been really helpful to do that.

So for me, I had a season of books. That was the primary form, books and podcasts. The season now is books, articles, which I listen to, occasional meetups, but most often it’s from content that I’m consuming while also doing the other things that I need to get done in my life. But that’s been a super helpful way for me to think about how do I level up the medium of what I want to be doing? So for me, it’s like in the general category of business, that’s what I’m really interested in. Less about being a content creator. So I’m not listening to as much content around building a podcast following, but I’m listening to a lot of content around how do you build a successful business? And the best way for me to do that is in those margins.

So for you, as you are building your dream, what does it look like for you to have your dream scenario? You think six months out, you think a year out. The thing that you are pursuing. The best way that I think to do that is to start with zero. And if you are interested in creating something that’s content-based, you need to focus on yourself and say, “Where do I find myself naturally drawn as a content creator? And where do I find myself naturally drawn? Or where is my deepest desire for a topic area expertise? What is the topic I want to be good at? What is the medium that I want to be good at?”

And then who are the people that you want to be creating that for? What are their needs? What are the things that they want? What are their desires? Pair those things together. That’s going to be your focus area. From there, you can start to think about how do I want to get better at this? You bring in the content in order to allow you to get better, and that’s through the content consumption avenues that we talked about, books, podcasts, audiobooks, meetups, Masterminds, articles. It’s probably more that I’m not thinking of.

And from there, you can enter into this journey of getting a tiny bit better every day, continually showing up, publishing content in that form, in the medium that you feel like you’re most interested in, and tomorrow you’ll be a little bit better than today if you continue to have those pieces of information coming in teaching you how to do that better.

So as we think about our pursuits, as we think about the things we want to build in the world, I would encourage you not to look at what somebody else has done, but instead to look at, reflect on your own desires, your own hopes, to start with zero and to build from there.

So this is a wrap for this solo podcast interview. It’s a great joy to be able to do these. Really thankful for an audience who will listen to this, and also occasional emails. If you ever want to drop me a line, it’s Bjork@FoodBloggerPro.com or bjork@tinybit.com. All of those come to me. Love hearing from people. Not super active on social media. That’s not the medium that I’m using. So what I have at my disposal is this podcast and email, and I would love to hear from you if you ever want to connect. So thanks for tuning in. We’ll be back here next week.

Emily Walker: Hello, Emily here from the Food Blogger Pro team. I wanted to pop in today and thank you for tuning into this episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. We are so grateful for you for listening. Before we sign off, I wanted to talk a little bit about the Food Blogger Pro Forum, in case you didn’t know how it works.

If you are a Food Blogger Pro member, you get access to our amazing forum. It’s one of my favorite places on Food Blogger Pro. I spend a lot of time there myself. And on the forum, we have tons of different topics for you to explore. We have a building traffic section, a photography section. We have an essential tools section. We chat about generating income and essential plugins, all sorts of areas for you to ask questions and chat with your fellow Food Blogger Pro members. It’s a great place to connect with fellow members, troubleshoot any issues you’re having, and brainstorm together. Our industry experts are always popping into the forum to help members with their questions. Casey Marquee and Andrew Wilder are always popping in, and so is Danielle Liss, our legal expert. It’s a really great place to get access to these experts and have them help you with your concerns.

The Forum is also just a fantastic place to find a community in this food blogging space as you’re working to grow your site and your business. If you’re ready to join Food Blogger Pro and get access to our wonderful forum, head to FoodBloggerPro.com/join to learn more about our membership. We really hope you enjoy this episode, and can’t wait to see you next week for another great episode. Have an amazing week.

Emily Walker: Hey, there. This is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team, and you’re listening to Tiny Bites from the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. This time on Tiny Bites, Bjork is interviewing Danielle Liss from LISS Legal. She also happens to be the legal expert at Food Blogger Pro. They are chatting about the recent Corporate Transparency Act that went into effect on January 1st, 2024, and what you need to know about it as a small business owner. They go into what this new act is, what you need to do about it, and when you need to complete everything to be compliant. It’s a necessary listen for any small business owner, and we know you’ll get a lot out of it.

Just a reminder that you can head to foodbloggerpro.com to read the show notes for this episode, which has a written description of everything that was discussed, as well as some helpful resource links. Without further ado, Bjork, take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Danielle, welcome to the Tiny Bites podcast episode.

Danielle Liss: Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Bjork Ostrom: You’re a seasoned guest on the podcast. People I’m sure are familiar with you, who follow along. First time on a quick episode like this talking about a specific subject. And the purpose for these Tiny Bites episodes is to talk about something that’s relevant in the moment and that people need to know about. And what we’re going to be talking about today is this thing called the Corporate Transparency Act, which sounds kind of intimidating, it sounds very legal, and that’s why we’re having you on, because that’s what you specialize in, specifically understanding the world of legal considerations for creators, for bloggers, for people who have social media followings. Working in that world, you understand that world well.

So for those of us who are in that world, what do we need to know about the Corporate Transparency Act?

Danielle Liss: So the first thing that I want people to know is it does not need to scare you, especially if you are a small business owner. This is not going to be as terrifying and cumbersome as it sounds. So the Corporate Transparency Act is part of an anti money laundering law that went into effect, and the goal is to create information reporting requirements on companies and their beneficial owners, so that way it will help law enforcement agencies better track who is affiliated with certain companies for purposes of money laundering.

Bjork Ostrom: Can you explain money laundering for people who don’t know? I’m trying to remember, Lindsay and I didn’t watch all of this, but there’s that show on maybe Netflix, do you know this one, and the guy’s like a family man?

Danielle Liss: Ozark.

Bjork Ostrom: Ozark, yeah.

Danielle Liss: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: The whole theme of that is money laundering, and he’s trying to figure out how to launder money.

Danielle Liss: If you have watched Ozark, Breaking Bad, probably a little Better Call Saul, you’ve probably got some of the themes. But it’s essentially to take money that you’ve gotten maybe a not legal way, definitely not legal way, and trying to put it through a business to wash the money, hence the laundering term, to make it look clean.

Bjork Ostrom: So like example being you’re selling drugs, but then you also have a coffee shop and then you inflate the earnings from that coffee shop and include some of the money from the drugs that you’ve sold. So you can still report it as income and then deposit it and not feel as worried about it.

Danielle Liss: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: But in reality, maybe the coffee shop isn’t profitable, but the reason that you’re making money is because you have a drug selling business on the side.

Danielle Liss: Exactly. So if you’ve seen Breaking Bad, it’s the carwash. Because they really took the metaphor with that, right?

Bjork Ostrom: Sure, yeah. Literally.

Danielle Liss: They’re cleaning that money. So it really can come up in the more illegal types of businesses, which I don’t, I’m guessing hopefully maybe most of your listeners are probably not.

Bjork Ostrom: On the straight and narrow. Yeah.

Danielle Liss: Yeah. I’m guessing they’re probably okay. But that’s the goal of the law, is to help prevent people from forming companies in a way that is attempting to protect them, and the government from finding out who owns the companies when they need to investigate money laundering. It unfortunately does trickle down to small businesses, which is why we are talking today because it definitely will impact small businesses.

What I think for most people, there’s definitely, you hear about it and there’s just this level of what now? Then there’s the idea of it’s one more thing you’ve got to deal with, right?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Danielle Liss: So I am here to say for typical small businesses who are operating a legal business, I don’t think it is going to be that bad. I think it’s going to be one thing to remember and one thing to remember to update if it’s needed. But for the most part, it has not shown itself to be something that’s going to be overly cumbersome.

Bjork Ostrom: And the basic idea is there’s this understanding in government that there are businesses that are laundering money, and as a way to combat that, what they’re trying to do is get a better understanding of who is behind the businesses. And so corporate being business, transparency being visibility into those businesses, act being this new thing that they’re pushing out. So the Corporate Transparency Act, meaning we want to know who’s connected to these businesses so they’re not quite as anonymous, and then setting up an official process around that.

But also, not to inject fear into the considerations here, but there’s some pretty hefty fines that go along with it if you don’t do this. Do you know what those are off the top of your head? I’ve heard them, but I don’t remember. It’s like if you missed a deadline and you don’t do it, it’s like $500 a day or something like that.

Danielle Liss: Something like that. And there can also be criminal fines too. I think that it’s unlikely, and I think that whenever something is first starting, I think there is a lot of leniency and there are a lot of reminders provided. But yeah, if it’s something that you’re very actively avoiding, then there could be potentially some ramifications that come with that.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s almost like in the same category as taxes. You can’t just not do your taxes because there’s going to be negative ramifications that come with it. You can’t just not do this new Corporate Transparency Act because there are negative ramifications that come with it.

So who would this apply to first? So if you don’t have any type of legal structure, you have a blog, maybe you’re making a little bit of money from it, you’re submitting it on your personal taxes, does that include you in the category of sole proprietor? You don’t have an official LLC, do you need to be doing this?

Danielle Liss: No. So the folks who do need to do it, there are what’s considered reporting companies. Sole proprietors are not considered a reporting company because you and your business are one and the same. So LLCs are required, as well as corporations. And at that point, I think it’s, if you’ve got a different type of structure, that’s when I would say please talk to your lawyer to see if there’s anything that you need to do.

But for the most part, I think that most of the folks that are in your audience are likely probably LLCs, possibly corporations as well. So if you have established a business entity, so that is separate, that is when you want to start to consider whether or not you’re going to need to do your reporting.

Bjork Ostrom: Got it. So it makes sense. Corporate Transparency Act, it applies to corporations. Within those corporations you think of there’s limited liability company, so LLC, S corporation, C corporation, all these different iterations, you could have a partnership. And the intent with those is government wants to know who’s operating those and what else? When you are submitting, what actually is it, what are you submitting and how do you do it? What does it look like to actually submit it? And I know it’s still early, we’re figuring that out.

Danielle Liss: It is. So they just opened this, the law went into effect I think the second, so this is very new. I have yet to submit one, and I will for my own businesses just so I can get a sense of what is there. But primarily they’re asking you for information on beneficial owners, and they want to know generally who the people are. And you will need to provide contact information.

And that’s I think the most important piece of it, is it’s going to be determining who are the beneficial owners besides just the people who are listed as whether it is likely for many people managers on the LLC. So it would definitely be your managers, as those who are owners of the business, and then potentially other owners. And they’ve created these specific definitions of who is considered a beneficial owner. So if you own or control, because control is also important, 25% or more of the ownership interests of the company, then you definitely need to report.

Then they also have this more vague category, which shocking, because it’s a government statute. So the way they define it, and I’m going to read this off my cheat sheet, is individual beneficial owners are defined as any individual who directly or indirectly exercises substantial control over the reporting company. And that’s kind of vague. So then they break that out into categories.

So you’ve got someone who serves as a senior officer of the reporting company, so that’s president, CFO, general counsel, CEO, COO, or any other officer, regardless of the particular title that you have given them. Or they have the authority to appoint or remove any senior officer or a majority of the reporting company’s board, if they have a board, if they direct, determine, or have substantial influence over important decisions made by the reporting company, or if they have any other form of substantial control over the reporting company.

So they’re pretty broad statements. So I think what’s going to be really important to consider is if you have people who are working with you in your company beyond just those who are listed on the corporate paperwork and those who may not have an officer title, are they someone who is reporting to you as an owner or do they have these responsibilities? And if they do, you are going to need to check in and say, okay, do they have enough responsibility that we should consider them a beneficial owner? If they do, then that’s when you want to make sure that they are being included on the reporting forms.

Bjork Ostrom: Got it. So you have the ownership piece is easy. So in our case, I own 50%, Lindsay owns 50%. Okay, so we’re going to be included on that. And that I would assume is one of the most important things for the Corporate Transparency Act, is knowing who owns the companies, not just who operates them, but even if you have partial ownership of them.

The second variable or the second field that people would be filling out is who has some level of operating control within it. So maybe in some companies you might have two people or one person who owns it completely, but then you have one, two, three people who are kind of the executives that run it. And it sounds like those people would also need to be included in this, even if they’re not owners. Government wants to know who are the people that are operating the day-to-day within these businesses. And then that’s where it’s a little bit gray as to who those people actually might be. Is that right?

Danielle Liss: I think that they are trying to make a somewhat more vague definition with the idea that it will be more broadly reported because I think they’d rather have more information than less information. And I think that if you’ve got questions on whether or not, if you’re looking at this, saying maybe this person has some control, but do they have enough to warrant this, that’s definitely have a conversation with your lawyer and say, “Here’s what this person’s role is, here’s what they’re doing, I’m on the fence as to whether or not they have enough control.” And remember, it’s direct or indirect. So it’s a broad definition. So do you need to include them? I think that this will be interesting also for fractional services, if you-

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s what I thought of. We have a fractional CFO, and that was the exact thought. I was like, do we include Pat on that?

Danielle Liss: And it may depend on do they truly have that title within your organization and what level of control do they have? Because I have folks who hire me as a fractional general counsel, but on a day-to-day basis, I’m there so that I’m kind of the lawyer on call. It’s not necessarily because I am truly controlling or have any of the things that were listed. So I think in that regard, it will likely depend on what people are doing in addition to what is listed, especially if it’s not an employee. I think that that’s potentially an additional-

Bjork Ostrom: Filter.

Danielle Liss: Point of consideration.

Bjork Ostrom: So my guess is 70% of the people who are listening who have an LLC will just be putting themselves or maybe themselves and their spouse, they’ll have maybe some employees who help with the day-to-day. Maybe they have some contractors, but generally speaking it’s just going to be them. That’ll cover most of the people. A decent amount of people will then maybe also have some key team members who maybe would be included, maybe wouldn’t be. Would there be any downside to just including them, other than the fact that their information would then be in this database?

Danielle Liss: I think that the downside would potentially be if there’s changes, that’s when you need to make updates to it. But at that stage it may just be a simple, and I haven’t seen the form yet, it may be a very basic not here anymore type of check box, has someone replaced them and then you add that person. And if that’s the case, that’s not a super hard update to make. So I think that the likelihood is that we will start to see more questions come through, we’ll probably start to see more clarification.

This is always the way with every new law that goes out there. Every time we have a privacy update, it’s like we know generally what the rules are going to be, but we also need to see kind of how it plays out. So I think that’s going to be part of it. But if you aren’t sure, really you can consult the statute, and there are lots of resources on online as to who gets considered.

Now, where it gets trickiest is for any beneficial owner, you have to give name, date of birth, complete address, like where they are actually living. I don’t think we’re going to be able to do any post office boxes, things like that. But then you need to have some type of identifying number, which is typically going to be passport, driver’s license, some type of state ID. Now, you can also register, if they don’t want to provide the owner of the company with a copy of their driver’s license, which I’m thinking they probably would already have on file in a lot of cases for payroll and things like that, individuals can register with FinCEN, which they’ll allow you to create your profile and then you can say, this is my FinCEN ID, and they’ll accept that as well, which I think is-

Bjork Ostrom: As opposed to a passport or license.

Danielle Liss: Exactly. And that might be another way that it’s easy, where you can say to whoever the person is, “Okay, you go register here. Once you have done that, give me the ID that’s generated and then we can enter it in.”

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, use that. And when do people need to do this? Is there a due date with it? And my guess is it’s different or it might be different with companies that have already been established versus new companies.

Danielle Liss: Of course it is. So for companies that were established last year, you have until January 1st, 2025 to get your reporting in. So they’re giving people a full year to get caught up. If you establish a new entity from January 1st, 2024, you have 90 days from the date of creation. So my thought on that is, again, view this as your checklist where you are going to say, okay, I’ve gotten my, let’s say you’re creating an LLC, I’ve gotten my articles of organization back from the state. I’m going to create my bank account and my EIN, and I’m also going to file my BOI reporting for Corporate Transparency Act.

So I think that just keep in mind that there’s going to be one additional thing that you’ve got to do along those steps. And then if you are after January 1st, 2025, which doesn’t that just sound like the future, like far, far away-

Bjork Ostrom: Flying cars.

Danielle Liss: That is within 30 days. So it is going to become a shorter time period for the reporting. But for now, new entities, 90 days, existing entities, you have until the end of the year.

Bjork Ostrom: Got it. And how do you actually do it? Can you do it all online? And then in our case, we’re just like, how do we get somebody else to do it? So is that something that you do and people could work with you to handle it, just so they know that a professional’s doing it?

Danielle Liss: Yes, I am working with people, and again, I work with primarily smaller businesses where it’s usually a very tight team, and that way it’s easy for us to determine everything. I think the key is going to be making sure that we’re able to track down all of the information and that we’re storing it securely. But you can absolutely, there are people that you can hire to do it or it may be something that you just look at and say, you know what, this doesn’t look too bad, I’m the only owner, so once I log in and do this thing, you’re good to go.

Bjork Ostrom: Pretty easy. And it sounds like at this point, we’re recording this on January 3rd, that it hasn’t opened up yet for people to do it, or-

Danielle Liss: I think it has. I think it opened yesterday. I just haven’t done any yet, so I can’t really give an impression. And I have a feeling that let’s just say, aren’t the first few days a little bit glitchy? So I would-

Bjork Ostrom: Like to let the dust settle on it.

Danielle Liss: Yeah. Let’s see what happens with it because government sites are always a little bit like never know what you’re going to get thing, but hopefully since this is new, it won’t feel like it was built in the nineties.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Danielle Liss: Or the 1900s, as my son would say.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s so awesome. So the basic idea is let’s say you’ve had an LLC or another type of corporation set up before January 1st, 2024, you’re in the US, you have until the end of the year to do this. So you have plenty of time. Let’s say you haven’t set anything up and you’re going to set that up this year, you have 90 days to do that. And then starting next year, if you set up any new entities, you’ll have 30 days. So you just kind of have to roll that in.

My guess is in situations where you’re working with a professional to set up your entity, they’ll just roll that in as a part of the process and that will just be now part of the ongoing updates that you get or documents that you get when you’re creating a new company.

Danielle Liss: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: Do you know if it’s something you need to re-up or renew every year or once you’ve done it, are you done unless there are changes?

Danielle Liss: So that’s primarily it. You have the ability to correct any inaccuracies, which if you find out there’s an inaccuracy, I strongly recommend you do because of the fact that we talked about those potential penalties that can come up for false information, or if something changes. So if there are changes to the BOI reporting, you’ve got 30 days to update those. And that can be things like a change of address, a change of a person, new person comes in and let’s say you’ve added a partner in your business, something like that, and they’re going to have an ownership piece, then that would come up. But if you have minority owners who are just, they made an investment, they’re not involved in the day-to-day-

Bjork Ostrom: Three percent, five percent.

Danielle Liss: Exactly, smaller, under 25%, they may not need to be included. So I think that’s important to remember, too, depending upon how much people are investing and what percentages they’re getting to keep in mind.

Bjork Ostrom: And how about for people who are privacy minded? You’re putting a lot of really not private information out there, like your driver’s license, your address, maybe a cell phone number. Where does that information go, and how public is it?

Danielle Liss: It’s a government database, which is primarily for law enforcement. So the FBI, other types of groups, I think it’s going to require very strict regulation as to who’s going to be able to access it. But this is not going to be like when you file something with a Secretary of State and it’s listed and there are records somewhere. So it is meant to be private. And I think that that’s a really good point, when you’ve got that level of detailed documentation, particularly because you have to do not just the number, you’ve got to have images as well. So I think that there is just a lot of personal information there.

Totally understand concerns, but it is not meant to be something that is going to be accessed by whomever. This isn’t going to be like we’re trying to track down everything that Mark Zuckerberg owns and has interest in. It is not meant to be something that is going to be easily accessed. Indeed, it’s going to be very limited access.

Bjork Ostrom: You had mentioned Secretary of State, but where you can go and look up information about an LLC and see who the manager is or address that they have listed or whatever. And I think for some people when they’re filling this out, they’re like, oh, shoot, is all this information public? But to your point, it’s not public. It’s actually just meant for I would assume different government divisions. Maybe it’s restricted to certain, like you said, FBI or some things like that in order to, it sounds like, help combat specifically money laundering type behavior. Is that the primary thing that they’re trying to address?

Danielle Liss: I think that what they are most looking at is a lot of times, my understanding is that when you are in the money laundering game, you create a lot of shell entities and make it extremely difficult to trace ownership so that people can determine who actually owns what in these companies. And that’s the goal, is to really look at those because they are not typically big companies. It might be something that there’s one manager, very hard to track down. Because there are states like Delaware, which is an extremely popular state for when people are forming businesses, they don’t require you to list who the managers are.

And in contrast, California has what’s required as a statement of information and that does become public on their website with particular owner information. So I think that because it varies from state to state as to at least who the owners are, that’s the goal. And particularly because a company can own another company, how many rows do you have to go down to see who actually does own the company at the end of whatever that trail is?

Bjork Ostrom: And this shortens the amount of the chain between companies and it makes it all more transparent, which is the name of the act, which is why they’re doing it. So that’s super helpful. Fills the picture out. Obviously going to be one of those things that’s a little bit ambiguous as you get into it, but will become more clear.

For anybody who wants to work with you, Danielle, and to say, I don’t want to figure this out, can you figure it out for me, whether it’s studying up a company, is that something that you will help bloggers, creators, publishers do? Or just to do this specifically, what’s the best way to get in contact with you and follow up with you to work together?

Danielle Liss: Sure. Usually it’s going to be just find my website, lisslegal.com, and then submit the contact form and we’ll reach out to schedule a time to talk.

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome. That’s great. Danielle, thanks so much. You’re a wealth of knowledge and information and have been through the years, so thanks for helping to fill out the picture on all things legal. Really appreciate it.

Danielle Liss: Thank you.

Emily Walker: Hey there, this is Emily. Thanks so much for listening to this episode of Tiny Bites. Just popping in to remind you to head to foodbloggerpro.com to read the show notes and get any more information and resource links that you might need. I hope you have a great week.