143 - What it REALLY takes to pivot your business

Jason: Welcome to the ad read part of the podcast.

 

Caroline: (laughing)

 

Jason: We just like to be really honest about...

 

Caroline: The most transparent.

 

Jason: Yeah, these things.

 

Caroline: This is the short part where we tell you before we get to the real episode that this is the last podcast episode before our Fall enrollment opens for our unboring coaching program called...?

 

Jason: WAIM Unlimited.

 

Caroline: Wow, Jason, good job. You remember what it's called.

 

Jason: I did a good job. I've been doing this for a couple of years now. I finally have the gist of it. I know that this program helps people grow their revenue.

 

Caroline: Absolutely.

 

Jason: I know that it helps them build better processes and save time.

 

Caroline: Definitely does that.

 

Jason: And I know that it really helps them focus on having a calm business.

 

Caroline: Yes, that's what we're all about here at WAIM. We know that there's plenty of places you can go to get online business content about how you can make like a bajillion dollars in two seconds flat. That's not our jam.

 

Jason: Wow. Nice.

 

Caroline: I just used hyperbole.

 

Jason: No, no. I got it. Yeah. I think everyone got it.

 

Caroline: Instead, we are all about slow and steady growth. We are about designing a life that feels satisfying and fulfilling and then trying to reverse engineer a business that helps you get there, not following the trends, not getting caught up in it all. Just good old-fashioned business intention and fun.

 

Jason: Nice, and there's a five-step roadmap that you can go through, which takes you through all of our coaching sessions, all of our resources, our courses, everything we've learned in building businesses over the years because we're actually business coaches who have built businesses.

 

Caroline: Fun fact.

 

Jason: We haven't just built that business coaching program and then we pretend that we know business. We've built a bunch of businesses and so we share with you everything we've learned that we've repeated over and over again in every single business that you can then take to your business, you can go at your pace, and you can join a whole bunch of other awesome people that we call WAIMers in WAIM Unlimited. It kicks off October 3rd. It will go for two weeks, is our open enrollment period And then after that, you can never join again. Just kidding, it'll be up in like six months but...

 

Caroline: Wow.

 

Jason: We know that everyone's schedule is different so this might be the right time for you. You've been waiting. You've been standing outside the WAIM doors for a year.

 

Caroline: You're like, I'm gonna get a head start on 2023. That's gonna be my year.

 

Jason: Yeah, let's do it. Let's have you join. So go to wanderingaimfully.com/join and, just by basically the time you're listening to this, it's going to be open. So get yourself ready. Let's have you and let's be "you and us" together. Okay?

 

Caroline: Would you believe we don't script these?

 

Jason: Ad read completed.

 

Caroline: (laughing)

 

Caroline: Welcome to What Is It All for? A podcast designed to help you grow your online business and pursue a spacious, satisfying life at the same time. We are your hosts, Jason and Caroline Zook, and we run Wandering Aimfully, an unboring business coaching program. Every week, we bring you advice and conversations to return you to your most intentional self and to help you examine every aspect of your life and business by asking, What is it all for? Thanks for listening. And now let's get into the show.

 

Jason: And I'm here too.

 

Jason: Hi. Hello. Welcome to the show. Uh, I do remember this recording setup. We're in a recording setup that we did once before.

 

Caroline: Really? I don't remember this. I thought we both tried to shimmy our way onto this small love seat, but we didn't?

 

Jason: Uh, no. No, we did not because I think we looked the other way.

 

Caroline: I do remember that table.

 

Jason: Yeah. For those of you who are listening to this, we are in a destination that we'll talk about in a couple weeks during the pramvel but we're it's a... We've already been.

 

Caroline: It's a repeater.

 

Jason: Uh, but the fun part about this is normally as you all know, if you listen to our show every week, we record on the same couch, legs crossing each other, and we're just real close talking, you know. We're just right next to each other. Basically could share one microphone, really. Especially...

 

Caroline: Why don't we?

 

Jason: In the windmill, we could have.

 

Caroline: We absolutely.

 

Jason: There's two microphones. But this one, we're on separate seating devices.

 

Caroline: Do you feel so far away from me?

 

Jason: It feels weird but I kind of like it. My legs aren't sweaty because I'm not touching your hot body.

 

Caroline: Yeah, and your feet aren't like in my face.

 

Jason: I  just called your body "hot."

 

Caroline: Oh, okay.

 

Jason: But it's temp... Just to be real, honestly, it's...

 

Both: Temperature.

 

Jason: Yeah, just really, truthfully honest, yeah. It's temperature stuff.

 

Caroline: Bodies are hot. Bodies are cold.

 

Jason: Pramvel this week. We wanted to give an update here on what we just finished up basically because we're kind of getting like really close to the updates.

 

Caroline: We're almost like real-time.

 

Jason: But then we're gonna take like a two-week break from pramvel updates for our upcoming enrollment, which you heard in that amazing ad read.

 

Caroline: Amazing ad read.

 

Jason: Totally well-scripted by someone who writes those things for a living.

 

Caroline: Not off-the-cuff at all.

 

Jason: And so this is gonna be our last pramvel for two weeks or so.

 

Caroline: Right.

 

Jason: But this one was an interesting one because we spent time with my family.

 

Caroline: Yes.

 

Jason: In the town of Claire Castle, Ireland.

 

Caroline: Yes.

 

Jason: And we had a couple of days in Dublin. So let's first talk about that because we didn't talk about that yet on the show on the...

 

Caroline: Oh.

 

Jason: Yeah.

 

Caroline: Let's do talk about that. First thing I want to say though is we were so excited to come back to Ireland because, those of you who've been listening for many months now, Ireland was our second country of our trip this year we were here late February/ early March.

 

Jason: Yeah, St Patty's Day. We ended up in Ireland for St Patty's Day.

 

Caroline: Please go back and listen to that pramvel, but it just turned out that your family wanted to meet us somewhere.

 

Jason: Yeah, and I I've been doing this... I'll give a little context very quickly. I've been doing this daily blog for my family and our close friends and your family and it's only for them, they're the only people who have the links to it and I think like three or four months into it, my family basically said like, Hey, we want to come meet you in Europe. And we were just surprised.

 

Caroline: Floored.

 

Jason: Because we just didn't think...

 

Caroline: That wasn't really on the map, yeah.

 

Jason: Yeah, and so they start... I let them kind of just decide where they wanted to go and so they basically brought up Ireland because my grandparents had never been, my mom and her husband have never been.

 

Caroline: Which your grandparents have been all over Europe. I know your mom has been all over Europe as well.

 

Jason: My grandfather was stationed in Ramstein, Germany in the Air Force and so they went everywhere during his days.

 

Caroline: Yeah, and your mom's been a bunch of places and so it was just this perfect thing where it worked out where they... Nobody had been to Ireland and then, as you know, we've talked about it many times but the Schen...

 

Jason: Gen?

 

Caroline: [Schen]Gen time limit means that you have to be out of the Schengen region. Ireland is out of that region. It just was very convenient for us and we were happy to come back because we loved it so much.

 

Jason: Yeah. So we'll get to that in one second but let's start with the beginning of the Ireland trip. So we flew back into Dublin. We also had the latest flight.

 

Caroline: From? Because where are we coming from?

 

Jason: We were coming from Puglia, Italy from the Bari airport. We had the latest flight of our year.

 

Caroline: That flight almost took me out.

 

Jason: Yeah. Well, it was an hour delayed, first of all, which just everyone I think knew was going to happen in the airport like I saw no one worried whatsoever.

 

Caroline: Oh, no.

 

Jason: It just was like, Oh, we're flying on Ryan's Air? Yeah, it's gonna be late.

 

Caroline: Yeah, the Air of Ryan has some delays.

 

Jason: The Air of Ryan. Ryan is the flight attendant. Ryan is the pilot. Ryan is the person who gets our bags. Everyone that works there are named Ryan, even the ladies and even the people who have no gender identification, one way or the other. They're just like, I'm Ryan, that's who I am. Anyway, we took this flight. It was super late. We got in at 1:30 in the morning.

 

Caroline: Yes.

 

Jason: The flight itself, it felt like a long flight, like it was just like, Oh, this flight is never going to end. We landed. We get our bags. It just doesn't take too long, which is fine. We get a lovely Uber drive into the city.

 

Caroline: Our Uber driver really made that go by quickly.

 

Jason: It's 2 A.M, so there's not a soul on the road.

 

Caroline: Yeah, and also just our driver was lovely.

 

Jason: He was very, very kind, yes. We arrive at our Airbnb and six hours from the time that we arrived, I had an appointment that I had to go to.

 

Caroline: Not just an appointment, like an actual small surgical...

 

Both: Procedure.

 

Jason: Yeah, so just to catch everybody up. We haven't been posting photos...

 

Caroline: Are you just gonna totally brush past and try not to throw me under the bus?

 

Jason: I'm not gonna throw you under the bus. This is marriage.

 

Caroline: Because listen.

 

Jason: I've learned in 12 years. Some stories you don't tell.

 

Caroline: Here's where I was at.

 

Jason: Yeah.

 

Caroline: I hope somebody can relate to this but the moment, first of all, I was really hungry I was just so...

 

Jason: This is 2:30 in the morning in Dublin at our hotel.

 

Caroline: Right, I was already, when we were about to land, so hungry.

 

Jason: Well, that's because there were no Pringles left on the plane.

 

Caroline: There were no Pringles.

 

Jason: We were row two and they ran out of Pringles after row one.

 

Caroline: They ran out of Pringles by row one.

 

Jason: It's Ryan's Air. Listen, everybody who works there eats Pringles.

 

Caroline: So anyway, we never really had dinner. We had like a late lunch before the flight but we never really had dinner so, at this point, I haven't had dinner. I'm just really hungry and, when I get hungry, I get mean.

 

Jason: I wouldn't say that. No one would describe that, no.

 

Caroline: It just, the hunger takes over my entire personality. Some might call it "hanger." And so I just, from the second we touched down, I was like, Jason, I'm gonna need food and I don't know what it is and you kept...

 

Jason: Listen, we walked through an airport with a bunch of food places open. It would have been so easy just to literally grab a thing.

 

Caroline: Okay, but what you didn't know at that point was that I had already decided what that food was going to be in my head.

 

Jason: Which was?

 

Caroline: And it was fried chicken fingers, okay? I already was like, you know this is miserable. You know what would make it better? Chicken fingers.

 

Jason: Yeah.

 

Caroline: And so, those of you out there, once you get chicken fingers into your head like I don't know that you can get them out like it's just what you want. And so Jason, poor sweep of being, Jason is just being like a lovely husband and is like, all he's hearing from me is I'm hungry and he's like, let's stop at this cafe on the way out of the airport.

 

Jason: There's literally seven restaurants.

 

Caroline: Oh. so I can get a frickin' parfait? I'm not gonna get a parfait, okay? I'm gonna get a fruit cup of cantaloupe and honeydew, okay? I'm not gonna get a bag of chips. I want chicken fingers.

 

Both: (laughing)

 

Jason: Yeah, and that's... That's basically...

 

Caroline: That's what I wanted. And so we get in the Uber and I'm like, I gotta get these chicken fingers. We go, we check in to the hotel at two o'clock in the morning.

 

Jason: 2:30.

 

Caroline: 2:30 in the morning. Jason's like, oh, we get into the hotel. Jason's like, okay, I have to go to sleep because I have an actual surgical procedure in the morning. I'm sitting on the floor. There's like a little, we have like a suite, so there's like a little dinette area. I'm sitting on the floor like hovered over my phone, trying to bring up Uber eats, looking for anywhere that can deliver chicken fingers to me at two o'clock in the morning. My Uber, I do find a place, but then my Uber app freezes.

 

Jason: The Uber Eats app, yeah.

 

Caroline: Okay, it never says like, oh, it's on the way, or whatever. And then so then my guy's outside and he calls me.

 

Jason: Yeah.

 

Caroline: I'm like, please wait!

 

Jason: I mean, luckily, he spoke English. So that made it easy.

 

Caroline: I was like, Please.

 

Jason: Because we could have been in Croatia. We could have in France. We could have been in Italy and it would just be like, oh yeah, hold on. I just want to come and get these chicken tenders.

 

Caroline: And guess what? Long story short, I did get chicken tenders.

 

Jason: Yeah. I went to, I forced myself to go to sleep because I had to get up in the morning. So to get everybody caught up on why I had to get a face procedure done and get a whole new face.

 

Caroline: Yes.

 

Jason: "I want to take his face off." Name that movie. It's gonna be hard to name the movie.

 

Caroline: Mm-hmm. No clues.

 

Jason: I had this growth pop up on my face basically two and a half years ago but it was very, very small for like the first year and a half.

 

Caroline: We thought it was a mole.

 

Jason: And I do have a couple of moles on my face. So it's fine.

 

Caroline: You're a mole-y guy.

 

Jason: We were supposed to go to the dermatologist in December before going on this year of adventure.

 

Caroline: Correct.

 

Jason: But Omicron had other plans. We're like, we're not about to like get COVID, not be able to start this trip with like a whole bunch of things.

 

Caroline: It felt too risky.

 

Jason: And listen the growth was still, it wasn't, it's not big. It's not really that noticeable and we're just like, you know, we'll wait it out. It'll be fine. It'll be all right, whatever. So you saw some... thing on a show.

 

Caroline: I just happened to stumble across an article from--this is embarrassing--Today, like the Today Show, like Today.com article.

 

Jason: And do you spend a lot of time on Today.com?

 

Caroline: I don't. On my Google page, I have some articles that pop up.

 

Jason: Right, right.

 

Caroline: And since I'm not on social media, sometimes I like that because I'm like, what's going on in the world? You know? But this one just so happened to pop up and it was this guy who discovered that he had skin cancer on his face in the exact place that you have yours.

 

Jason: And looked like mine.

 

Caroline: And looked exactly like yours. It was very small. And he just went to the dermatologist and the dermatologist didn't even recognize it. It just so happened that the doctor was leaving the room and he goes, "Oh, hey Doc, one more thing, can you look at this before you leave?"

 

Jason: Of course, it's the "one more thing."

 

Caroline: And of course, Today.com was like, "It's the 'one more thing...'" Blah, blah, and it turned out that it was skin cancer and so I see this and I'm like, Hey babe, I'm under the impression at this point it's a mole. I don't know much about skin cancer. I go and show you and you're like, oh yeah, I know I thought it might be skin cancer. I'm like, okay.

 

Jason: Yeah.

 

Caroline: Yeah, you should have mentioned that to someone.

 

Jason: Well, no, because you're a worrier and there's no way to mention to you... Anyway, let's not harp on this for too long because I want to talk about some of the family adventure. So we tried to find a place, a dermatologist in the UK. We tried to find one in Scotland. We tried to find one in Portugal.

 

Caroline: It is hard to make these appointments when you're constantly moving.

 

Jason: Yeah, it's also hard to make an appointment with a dermatologist in general. They usually book out quite a ways. So I booked this appointment, which happened in September, in July.

 

Caroline: Exactly.

 

Jason: So it was months in advance that this was booked. I found a place I literally called them. I emailed back and forth and I have to give this clinic a lot of credit because I'm not a patient of theirs. I'm not referred by a doctor I'm a person who's not going to be in town for very long and they were willing to AC me and do a consult because everyone had to do a consult first. And then also do the procedure the same day if it needed. It definitely needed to happen. So anyway, you have your chicken tender fingers. I go to sleep. I get up like five hours later. I have a little bit of coffee and then I make my way over to this clinic. I have the procedure done. She says it's absolutely basal cell carcinoma, has seen this many times, knows exactly how to get rid of it. She does the procedure. I get two layers of stitches and then I'm... That's our time in Dublin, basically, but the good news is fairly painless... I mean, it's very painful but fairly painless overall procedure. By the next day, I had no pain in my face whatsoever.

 

Caroline: I am really proud of you though because, if you recall, our coaching session was two days later.

 

Jason: Yeah.

 

Caroline: And...

 

Jason: No, it was the next day.

 

Caroline: It was the next day, that's right. And you...

 

Jason: The one thing she said not to do.

 

Caroline: Yeah.

 

Jason: Don't talk a lot.

 

Caroline: She was like, don't probably talk to like large crowds of people or like anything that requires moving your face a lot, talking for long periods of time. Meanwhile, we have like a three-hour coaching session two days later, these are our monthly coaching sessions. But not always...

 

Jason: You can get these within Wandering Aimfully.

 

Caroline: You can get these within...

 

Jason: At wanderingaimfully.com/join. We do them every single month where we give just one topic to focus on your business. There's also a roadmap that is all 36 of them you can go through. Okay. Go ahead.

 

Caroline: They're not always three hours but we tend to... We just like to make those really high value so... I mean you're talking for at least two hours, if not three.

 

Jason: Yeah.

 

Caroline: And we were, only in the history of almost 36 coaching sessions now have we postponed I think one other time.

 

Jason: One other time.

 

Caroline: But I was proud of you because you said, "This is probably a time we need to postpone."

 

Jason: I had this new face. I didn't wanna mess it up.

 

Caroline: Yeah.

 

Jason: We did all this work to get this new face of mine.

 

Caroline: Exactly.

 

Jason: I didn't want to mess it up. So anyway, we postponed the coaching session and then just kind of like go about life. We spend time in Dublin. We have a couple of days. We get some work done. We're at the Zanzibar Locke Hotel, which we talked about before. It's our favorite little hotel in Dublin, not that we've stayed in a bunch of other ones but we just love it. We keep going back to it.

 

Caroline: That one's ours.

 

Jason: I found a couple of new little coffee shops. Then we meet up with my family.

 

Caroline: Yes.

 

Jason: At the Holiday Inn Dublin Airport Hotel.

 

Caroline: You know it.

 

Jason: Because it's actually where our rental car company drops off the rental cars. But it was really fun. We got to see my mom. We got to see her husband. We did not get to see my grandparents. Unfortunately, my grandmother got sick two days before and had to go to the ER.

 

Caroline: Not COVID-related.

 

Jason: Not COVID-related, thankfully. She is not in the ER, didn't have to spend a lot of time in the ER, but just couldn't make it. So that was kind of a bummer and really they went back and forth on if my mom was going to come and if we were even going to go to the place but my mom and her husband ended up coming over. We spend a week in Claire Castle. We had this amazing house that was a renovated army barracks for the castle.

 

Caroline: It was unbelievable. It's this renovated castle that was completely derelict and they totally took it from just ruins basically to this rental. I think there's like five or six rentals in there?

 

Jason: Yeah.

 

Caroline: And it was just incredible and so I definitely felt very grateful to have that place. It was just such a unique place.

 

Jason: I'll drop a link to the place. It's actually, I mean, really if you're doing like a big family gathering...

 

Caroline: It's made for a bigger family than four people.

 

Jason: Four people is way too big. We all had our own floor. It just felt so extravagant. With six people, it would have been much more appropriate.

 

Caroline: Yeah.

 

Jason: But I'll leave a link to it in the show notes because, a, it's a beautiful place, b, the people that run it are amazingly kind and wonderful, Marion and Jer, her husband. We had so many little interactions with them and run-ins with them and that was truly one of the highlights of the trip.

 

Caroline: Definitely, and it's really centrally located. So it's this tiny town but you are basically within an hour from two of the big things that we did, which were, we went to the Cliffs of Moher one day, which was beautiful. And just kind of like a bucket list Ireland item, I feel like. And the other one was we just took a day trip to Galway.

 

Jason: Yeah.

 

Caroline: And so it was within an hour drive of each of those places. So for me, personally, who doesn't like to be in the car, it was perfect.

 

Jason: Yeah.

 

Caroline: And not a long drive.

 

Jason: Yeah. I do want to mention the Cliffs of Moher, if those of you who are listening. If you ever heard people talk about this, they visit Ireland. It attracts 2 million people a year. This is a thing to do in Ireland. If you were coming to Ireland, this is just my personal opinion...

 

Caroline: Totally.

 

Jason: We have now seen three sets of cliffs. We are currently actually sitting very close to a set, one of those three sets. I would skip the Cliffs of Moher and I would just find other cliffs that you can go to.

 

Caroline: I hear that.

 

Jason: My personal opinion is that these are too like manufactured now. It feels too much like a Disneyland attraction. It doesn't feel like you're in like raw Ireland nature.

 

Caroline: I get that.

 

Jason: On the wild Atlantic way, which runs basically the whole like left and bottom coast of Ireland, you can find so many cliffs and they're just all unbelievably gorgeous. The Cliffs of Moher, they're fine. They're great for what they are. I'm glad they attract a lot of people to Ireland so other people because people can see all the different beautiful things that you can see. But just, I just want to share that because...

 

Caroline: I hear that.

 

Jason: I would give the honest reviews here.

 

Caroline: I totally hear that it is still...

 

Jason: On this travel podcast.

 

Caroline: Extremely beautiful.

 

Jason: Oh, for sure. No doubt.

 

Caroline: And very... But I think you're right because it attracts so many people and, by the way, so they have paths and they have walls so you can't really fall off. I mean, there are places where it's less walled.

 

Jason: Yeah.

 

Caroline: But yeah, you're not enveloped in nature the same way that you might be if you went to like, say, Old Head, which we went to down by Kinsale, or even here in...

 

Jason: You gave it away. We're back in Ballybunion.

 

Caroline: (laughing)

 

Jason: Great job. In Ballybunion, the tiny beach town that we've now returned to.

 

Caroline: Sorry, I've ruined it. We're back in Ballybunion. But even...

 

Jason: You ruined it. I'm usually the one who ruins things.

 

Caroline: I know but it was "we."

 

Jason: (laughing)

 

Caroline: And even in Ballybunion.

 

Jason: Yeah, we wanted those chicken tenders.

 

Caroline: We wanted the chicken tenders, even in Ballybunion here, where we are right this very moment. There's a cliff walk right here and the way that you feel enveloped by nature and completely wild, you're right, it's not the same as going to a cliff attraction, I would say. So yeah. I mean, that's a fair thing to say.

 

Jason: So my mom and her husband went to various pubs. They saw a couple castles themselves. They did a little bit of shopping and overall it was just a good trip. A lot of laughs were had. A lot of good quality time. We plugged in my laptop. We watched NFL Red Zone on Sunday night starting at 6:00 pm and got a good like two hours of football before they went to sleep.

 

Caroline: They love football.

 

Jason: But my mom loved that, American football, and yeah, it was just a good trip and I think the last thing to share about the family trip is just that it's so this year itself of travel, we're very fortunate. We're so grateful. It's an amazing year to do, but it's exhausting. It's so difficult. It takes so much energy every single week in a new place, in a new environment. Add on top of it then like the family dynamics, boy, we were exhausted afterwards.

 

Caroline: Yeah, and we're still honestly tired but in like that type of tired where you're so happy that you did it and you're grateful but it's just, it really takes it out of you. And as you all know, listening to this, we would never dare to complain about anything this year. It's just more of like, in the same breath, we know how lucky we are and we know how grateful we are, but also it does nobody a service by not being honest about how tiring it is at times.

 

Jason: Yeah. I was just texting with a friend before we started recording this and they're currently traveling a little bit for like a month and like, "I cannot wait to get back to my routines." I'm like, You can't wait to get back to your...? We haven't had routines in forever.

 

Caroline: What's a routine?

 

Jason: Yeah, it's a thing that people do. It's apparently really awesome. Parents out there are like, yeah, I know. I get it, okay? I get it. All right, so that's our pramvel, that was the time we spent with family. It was a great trip. I wish my grandparents could have been there but luckily I did have that daily blog where I got to keep them up-to-date with lots of photos. I basically like described where they were in the back of all the photos that we took, grandma and grandpa were swimming in a river. They were climbing around on the cliffs behind us. It was a fun way to kind of keep them into it and they really appreciated it. And we'll see them soon enough, as you'll hear. We'll get into some travels upcoming here pretty soon. Oh, also...

 

Caroline: What? Also?

 

Jason: When we come back to the pramvel, we're not going to necessarily talk about this. We have one new country that we're going to.

 

Caroline: Yeah.

 

Jason: That's it.

 

Caroline: From now to the end of the year.

 

Both: One new country.

 

Jason: That's wild.

 

Caroline: I know.

 

Jason: That's wild. Okay, let's talk about this episode, talking about pivoting. We can all do our Ross, "Pivot!"

 

Caroline: "Pivot!"

 

Jason: Yeah, we can do that for those F.R.I.E.N.D.S. fans out there. So we want to talk about this because it's come up. We, currently this week, we're doing a Q&A session with our WAIMers and this was a very common question. This is something that I do a lot of one-on-one chats with our Wandering Aimfully members within our Slack channel. This comes up all the time and I think this is something where we actually saw a big opportunity for Wandering Aimfully when we were trying to figure out what our positioning was. This is a big thing for us that we did, too. Which was...

 

Caroline: Exactly.

 

Jason: We had to pivot out of working with clients into working on digital products or, for me, working into software stuff, building into a membership, like there are always times when you're going to need to pivot in your business as you change and as your business changes.

 

Caroline: Yeah and just...

 

Jason: And there's a lot that goes into it.

 

Caroline: Totally and just to define it a little bit. I think this is a really natural thing that occurs especially with people who are solopreneurs, are building businesses that are supporting their lives because you're always evolving and changing as a person and so your desires change, your life circumstances change, and so sometimes you need to make kind of a more drastic shift. Whether it's leaving client work to do just more digital product stuff because it's more scalable or maybe it's pivoting your audience so we had a WAIMer who, you know, had more of an info product business and is now trying to do more handmade like tangible goods...

 

Jason: Yeah.

 

Caroline: That feels like you know the audience doesn't exactly apply anymore so you're pivoting your audience or you know maybe you were doing coaching for small business owners but now you want to do more corporate coaching. Whatever that big shift is in your business that's going to maybe require a tweak to your audience, a tweak to your content, a tweak to how you spend your time, that's what we're referring to here when we say pivot. So a big change in your business.

 

Jason: Absolutely. One of the things that I love that you wrote down in our notes is that pivoting is like JCVD, that's Jean-Claude Van Damme, for all of you who are not initiated into the wonder that is JCVD, doing the splits between two moving buses.

 

Caroline: Because that's what I picture.

 

Jason: Now, first of all, we just need to acknowledge the fact that you brought up one of the greatest references of all time. This is a commercial that I believe he did for Volvo semi-trucks, not buses.

 

Caroline: Wait, that was... it was just the commercial?

 

Jason: It was a commercial. It was not in a movie.

 

Caroline: But then he did it in movies?

 

Jason: He's never done the splits between two moving vehicles in a movie. It's only in the commercial.

 

Caroline: Oh, I don't believe that.

 

Jason: As the watcher of all the JCVD movies...?

 

Caroline: You think so?

 

Jason: I'm pretty sure, yeah. Also I think there is a website that catalogs how many times he does the splits in movies and then also like has screen grabs of him doing them, which is amazing to me.

 

Caroline: You just said, if there's a website that catalogs every time he does the splits in movies...

 

Jason: Yeah, but I'm saying between two buses.

 

Caroline: Oh, okay.

 

Jason: That's getting specific. Are you saying that I was saying he has not done the splits in movies?

 

Caroline: I just was confused about what splits we were talking about.

 

Jason: Okay, yeah. We just need to get clarity on the JCVD splits drama. Anyway, pivoting is that because you can be a client service business but you want to move to products so you've got one leg on one bus or truck, that's your clients. You've got one leg or bu--... Or on a bus or a truck, that's your products that you're getting into.

 

Caroline: Oh my God, it was a commercial.

 

Jason: That's what I told you.

 

Caroline: No, I know. I should have trusted you. Wow.

 

Jason: You should 100% trust me in JCVD knowledge. Okay, let's keep going.

 

Caroline: Congratulations, Volvo, what a memorable... Well, I mean, I guess not because I couldn't remember that it was for a commercial.

 

Jason: That's true.

 

Caroline: But anyway, that's what I wasn't listening to because I was looking this up.

 

Jason: I knew you weren't. Yeah, I was trying to carry this train forward because, in a podcast, you can't just both stop talking and then you just get to think for like 12 seconds.

 

Caroline: You could.

 

Jason: Oh, really?

 

Caroline: Yeah. Hey, guess what? Normalize thinking in podcasts.

 

Jason: Okay, go ahead.

 

Caroline: (laughing)

 

Jason: Yeah, it's real dumb. It's not fun.

 

Caroline: Okay, listen, the reason I wrote this down, a, because I'm your wife and I knew that you would love that I, of my own volition, said a JCVD reference, but also because that's what I picture in my brain and I don't know what other kind of analogy. This to me is what not just a pivot feels like, this is what the dilemma of a pivot feels like because you kind of feel like you have one foot in both worlds.

 

Jason: Yeah.

 

Caroline: And I think this is what people really struggle with. They don't know how to finally take that other leg off and get to the other truck, right? So they're on, you know, maybe you're, whatever you're doing now, let's call it point A.

 

Jason: Let's just call it clients and digital products.

 

Caroline: Sure.

 

Jason: Because I think that's just the most relatable.

 

Caroline: You're in clients/ services. You want to be doing 100% digital products because, like we said, it's more scalable for your time, you're not constantly answering emails from clients wanting things, and you're not limited by your own time resources, right? That's a very natural pivot to want to make but you are going to feel torn between two worlds and how... You're probably wondering how and at what point do I finally get that leg off the other truck and finally I can be on just the one Volvo forging ahead with my business. And so that's what we want to talk about in this episode. You know, it's something we've done personally and it's something that WAIMers are doing all the time and so we want to give you a little bit of advice just to kind of encourage you to make that pivot and the way that we like to think about it.

 

Jason: Yeah. I think the big thing we want to hit on here just multiple times is the fact that you're not going to pivot right away. And I think that's the bill of goods that gets sold through the online business space. It's like, you can change your business in 30 days or overnight or whatever. And it's like, I mean, you could for sure. You could get a sales page up. You could build the product. You could have all your marketing. You could do all this stuff, but it doesn't mean that you're going to have an audience that's going to want to buy that thing from you. And I think that's where people get really disillusioned and they go, okay. I'm doing client services now. I've spent a month building up a digital product business, which means I have a course and I have a sales page and I have some marketing stuff. And I open it up for sale and no one buys. And they're like, oh, well I can't sell digital products. I'm going to have to stay with clients forever. And the reason that that doesn't work is because you have to build up the audience. You have to build up the marketing engine. You have to build up the content to build that business to be able to sustain itself moving forward. And I think one of the huge things we want to leave you with throughout this episode is that a pivot takes a long time.

 

Caroline: Yeah. I was going to say not to put a hard and fast timeframe on it but I think a realistic timeframe is anywhere from maybe six months at the absolute least to a year.

 

Jason: And I think it really depends on your runway. If you're someone who, every month, you're waiting for your clients to pay you and that's how you pay your bills, which no shame whatsoever in that game. We have all been there. It's going to take you longer to build up your digital product business.

 

Caroline: Right. This is the thing I really want to talk about I didn't write in the notes that we should talk about more is this element of risk.

 

Jason: Yeah.

 

Caroline: And that's what you're really describing when you're saying you don't want to jump from one truck to the other truck because there's inherent risk involved there. The thing about a pivot is you probably, wherever you are right now, if you're in the client world or whatever, you have something going. You have something that's bringing you money but you know that it's unsustainable for the long haul and so you want to pivot to the next thing. But it's risky to just dive head first into that other thing when the thing that brings you money is point A right now.

 

Jason: Absolutely.

 

Caroline: And so you have to be smart and strategic, as a business owner, to go, How can I use the leverage of point A to mitigate my risk of moving to point B? And the way that you do that is through a more gradual approach, where you're still getting revenue from your clients but maybe you take on one less client at a time and you allow that time to now seed into building an audience. So that, when you shift to digital products, you have someone to sell to.

 

Jason: Yeah. This is a very shameless plug. We built a six-month program called Build Without Burnout. It's within Wandering Aimfully. It was our cornerstone product for WAIM before we built our unboring business roadmap, which is a little bit more in-depth on all this, but Build Without Burnout essentially takes this exact problem, pivoting from client services to digital products. It stretches it out over a 26-lesson, 26-week period, and it makes you slow down and go, okay, I'm going to work on this step-by-step each week and I only have three to five hours a week to work on it.  I cannot work 40 hours on this per week because I just don't have that time and, by the end of that, and this is the thing where I think we're just so honest and different than most people in this space, you're not going to have a ten thousand dollar a month digital product business. You might have a $500/ month digital product business.

 

Caroline: Exactly.

 

Jason: You might only make your first $1,500 and then you have nothing in sight that tells you that you're going to make that again the next month and I don't mean that to discourage you. I mean that to be the reality.

 

Caroline: And, in a weird way, to encourage you by saying at the end of that, if you have any money coming in from point B at all, now that is, you know, money that you no longer rely on point A to give you that in your revenue. That's how you make the shift.  I want you to think about it like siphoning off money. It's like, okay, we're in the trucks. We've got one foot here and one foot there. Not until that second truck is sort of supplementing your Revenue enough that you can no longer rely on the first truck, the revenue coming from that. That's when you can kind of shift your weight to that other leg and finally step off. I don't need clients anymore because now I trust that I've ceded the momentum of that second point B where I'm trying to go and now I trust that I'll have the revenue coming in.

 

Jason: Yeah.

 

Caroline: It's this subtle shift. It's this subtle and gradual and very methodical, from like a financial perspective, way of going about it that, going back to what I said before, mitigates your risk.

 

Jason: I just think so many people get this idea in their head from a bunch of other people who are promoting this idea that you can pivot quickly. And I think about, like when I left the nine to five world to start my own business, it took two and a half years to make that pivot. Two and a half years. And you could argue I had the most financial freedom at that time. I had the most flexibility, but I didn't have the trust in myself. I didn't have the business actually built to do it, and I didn't feel confident that it would actually work out. And I think that instead of looking at that as like, oh, that's a bummer. It's going to take two and a half years. Look at it as like, well, at least in two and a half years, I'm gonna be there. I'm gonna be where I want to be. And I think, for a lot of people listening to this, my guess is many of you who have wanted to make a pivot or who have tried to make a pivot, you've actually already spent a year or at least six months trying to do this but you haven't gotten anywhere and that's really for one big reason, which is time prioritization.

 

Caroline: Exactly. So that's what I wanted to shift over to as well because we're talking about time from the perspective of giving yourself six months to a year to make the pivot but what we're not also saying is that, in that timeframe, six months to a year, you have to really be committed to carving out the time to work towards this pivot. It's not just going to magically appear and I think it's like twofold. I think it's accepting that it's going to take longer and it's also accepting that it's gonna be harder.

 

Jason: Yeah.

 

Caroline: Like that's what I think people don't realize because...

 

Jason: It's easy to keep getting client... I mean, easy, but it's like it's easier to keep getting clients. You've done that. You know what that takes.

 

Caroline: Totally, but I think, psychologically, this is why a lot of people don't make the pivot is because, psychologically, one of the reasons that they're trying to get off whatever point A they're on with clients is because they're stretched thin, the hours are not working out for them, they want more time freedom, all those things, right? So if you're already stretched thin, having to then swallow this pill that you're gonna go into this phase of your business to make a pivot that's actually gonna a little bit be harder for a while.

 

Jason: Yeah.

 

Caroline: That's a hard pill to swallow. But if you're willing to just accept that, that's when you can actually get to the other side. You kind of have to have a little bit of this mentality of like, it's gonna be a little bit harder before it gets easier.

 

Jason: Yeah.

 

Caroline: And I think that's what a lot of people need to hear because the reason that they're not making the time prioritization, the reason that they're not carving out that time every week from their clients to protect that time and to really say "I'm gonna work on this pivot" is because they want it to be easier already.

 

Jason: Yep.

 

Caroline: And I don't blame them for that at all, but it's just like, it's a shift of mindset going, okay, you know what, it's actually gonna feel a little bit more fraught for just a little bit and why am I doing that? I'm doing it so that I can have that time freedom on the other side. I'm not gonna wait for it to show up. I'm gonna create it.

 

Jason: Because it's not gonna show up. That's the thing.

 

Caroline: Because it won't show up.

 

Jason: No matter how long you wait and you're trying to make a pivot, the opportunity is not just going to present itself on your lap and go, here it is, ready for you to like switch over and you're done. And I think one of the things that I hear the most from especially our Wandering Aimfully members that I chat with every single week is they don't know how to carve out the time between all their client work. So they're looking at their schedule they're like, well, my clients take up you know 30 to 40 hours a week of work. When am I going to slot this in? I don't want to work on the weekends. I'm not trying to sacrifice my mental health. And the truth is you have to carve out the time. And one of the things that I talk about the most often are two kind of practical-tactical ways that you can do it. One is you have a pivot workday. So it's like, I'm going to pivot to digital products. Friday is my day. I'm only going to do that. And what that means is you let your clients know, "I'm not available on Fridays," and then, in your schedule, you may have to work one or two more hours every day throughout the week besides Friday to get ahead on your client work. So that's one. The second is...

 

Caroline: Or you may have to... I don't know, raise your prices for one of your projects so that you can take on one less client, so now you're only doing client work four days out of... Like that's a math problem that you have to figure out for your own business but there are options, right? There are levers that you can pull in order to carve out that time. So I just want to throw that out there.

 

Jason: The other practical-tactical way that I tend to tell folks to do this and it really depends on how you work. If you're the type of person that "I am not good at switching tasks," which I think this is where you would fall into it, would be like you need the Friday because switching between client and product work in a day-to-day basis is not for you. For folks like me who have a brain that allows them to switch between tasks, which is very nice, is I would I would set this up where I work one hour every single day or one and a half hours every single day on my pivot work and that's like the first thing I do every day because it needs the most energy. And I know I can do the client work. I've been doing that for a long time. Even if I just got started, I know what I need to do with the clients and, truthfully, if we're going to be honest, I'm not going to give the clients my A+ work all the time anyway so they can get my B work but my pivot work for my future business and my future self gets my first hour and a half of the day, A+ effort and then, at the end of that, hopefully by the end of that hour and a half every day or by the end of your Friday every week, you're going, oh, I'm so excited for this. I see the potential of what this business can be and I can't wait to work on it again tomorrow or next week or whatever that looks like. If that's the mindset that you have, then you're on the right path. That pivot is right for you, but if you're just kind of like slogging through it every day or every week, then it might not be the right pivot for you either. And I think that's also why time doesn't get prioritized is because people think the grass is greener in the digital product world but they don't realize that  it's still work. It's still a lot of writing. It's still a lot of marketing. It's still a lot of selling. It's still a lot of talking to customers.

 

Caroline: You're thinking that the revenue stream or the new pivot is going to solve the problems of your existing thing, which may or may not be true, and instead, you may may just need to go, These are a couple of things that aren't working in the way that I'm doing my client service. Could I try to, within the realm of client service, tweak some of that and the way that I do business so that I don't have to shift my whole thing? That's just a kind of self-awareness thing you have to ask yourself. The other thing I wanted to say to your point about whether it's a full Friday that you're carving out that time, whether it's one hour a day that you're carving out that time. Again, going back to the main point being that time will not show up. You have to prioritize it. You have to commit to carving it out. And you have to draw that boundary so that, if you do get a client email on Friday and you've already set that aside and you've let them know that you don't do emails, that takes some self-discipline to go, "I'm not going to reply to the email even though I want to" because your brain is going to tell you that you've got to reply to the client because that's where your money's coming from right now.

 

Jason: Yeah.

 

Caroline: But I implore you to try to reframe that in your mind that protecting that boundary is also an investment in a future revenue stream, do you know what I mean? Kind of catch your brain when it wants you to immediately prioritize the thing that's bringing you money right now because it's always going to steal time from the thing that could be bringing you money and an easier life later.

 

Jason: Yeah.

 

Caroline: But the point I was making, which I took many tangents to get there, is I also would highly recommend making sure that, in that one hour or that one Friday, you know exactly what you're going to be doing during that time. So this means really making a commitment to, whether it's sitting down for 30 minutes every Monday morning or whatever it is and setting like a little theme for yourself or setting, you know, what exact task, just give yourself one task for each of those days or one big task for the week so that every time you sit down to work on this pivot, you're not going, oh, I'm so overwhelmed. Am I doing content? Am I doing audience building? Am I working on the product itself? Do yourself the hard favor of spending that 30 minutes to make those hard decisions for yourself and so that you can just execute in the time that is so scarce, you know.

 

Jason: And again, shameless plug, this is what Build Without Burnout was meant to do. So, every single week, you got a task you get that task done and, by the end of it, you have a digital product business. Again, there's no guarantee of the amount of money that you can make or that it's the actual product you want to keep going with.

 

Caroline: Right.

 

Jason: But it does help you create this. It removes this idea of "I don't know what to work on." It's like, no, it tells you exactly what to work on.

 

Caroline: Yeah. Another shameless plug.

 

Jason: Yeah.

 

Caroline: Inside WAIM Unlimited.

 

Jason: Tell me about it.

 

Caroline: We also have the Notion Starter Pack, which has been a game changer for me because Notion is the app that I use to basically organize everything with the business and everything is separated into project areas. So you can have a project for your clients, but then you can have a project for this pivot. And, by defining the tasks associated with the project, you're assigning dates for those things to be completed. You're assigning goals for that project. So now it's just popping up in your database and so, when you sit down on a Tuesday and you only have one hour to work on you know whatever this pivot-related project is, your Notion kind task list is telling you exactly what to work on.

 

Jason: Nice. I'm so glad you bought WAIM and then you got that Notion Starter Pack.

 

Caroline: I did.

 

Jason: When you were talking earlier, I had a thought that I wanted to share and just kind of chat about and maybe that's where we wrap things up. But the idea of a business pivot is just choosing a different set of problems to solve.

 

Caroline: Exactly.

 

Jason: And I think the thing that people think a lot about a pivot is "this is going to be easier." And it's actually not going to be easier. It's just a different set of problems to solve. Here's a perfect example for us. When you ran Made Vibrant and I ran Jason Does Stuff, we had our own set of problems to solve. We had customers to deal with. We had an email audience to take care of. We were creating content for social. We were building products and we were selling them. And those were our problems we were solving. When we combined the Wandering Aimfully, we'll skip over the entire building of Wandering Aimfully, but the business problems to solve were, okay, now we have to make a monthly coaching session. Now we have to take care of a bunch of recurring payments and the failed payments come with that.

 

Caroline: Now we have to collaborate.

 

Jason: Yeah, now we have to collaborate. But the business problems that we solve with Wandering Aimfully are extremely different than when we had our own individual businesses.

 

Caroline: Right.

 

Jason: And they are problems that have to be solved. Running Wandering Aimfully is not any easier than our previous two businesses.

 

Caroline: Right. The only difference is that now we prefer the problems that we have to solve.

 

Jason: Exactly, and we talked about this in the Grass is Greener episode, which I don't remember what number it is but you can go back and quickly find it through our things of pivoting to what we've done in a membership model but thinking that, if you're running a digital product business that like, oh, well, if I'm in a product business, a membership is going to be easier because [of] recurring revenue. And the people who have recurring revenue are like, oh, it's a lot of work. I'm gonna go back to digital products and just do bigger launches. Neither is easier. It's just a different set of problems to solve.

 

Caroline: Yep.

 

Jason: And so I think, when you can realize that if you're working with clients right now, you know your problems. "Oh, my clients text me or email me late at night on a Friday and it bums me out." "Oh, my clients don't get back to me." "Oh, I have to do more revisions than I want." "Oh, I have to go and find new clients and I find that process really awful and I really hate it." Those are all problems. When you start a digital product business, it's a whole new set of problems and there are still problems.

 

Caroline: Yep.

 

Jason: It's just about understanding, Do I like this set of problems less?

 

Caroline: Yeah.

 

Jason: Than I like the other set? And I think that's really all business boils down to.

 

Caroline: Yes.

 

Jason: Is trying to find the least amount of stress-inducing problems to solve and then being okay with the fact that those are the problems you're going to solve for the next X amount of years of your life until you want to pivot again, until you want to try something else, and and that's just a part of this whole game that we all play in online business.

 

Caroline: I love that, babe. That's a good place to end.

 

Jason: Wow.

 

Caroline: I thought it was a really good point.

 

Jason: That's nice.

 

Caroline: You have stuff on your feet and it's bumming me out.

 

Jason: (laughing) Well, I've been walking around this house in Ballybunion, where you told everybody where we were. Geez, now everyone knows our secrets by the time because it comes out we're leaving so it doesn't matter.

 

Caroline: It's true.

 

Jason: No one can find us. Yeah. That's our episode on pivoting. We hope it was helpful. We hope that it may have given you some food for thought. If you're a current pivoter, I would actually love to hear from you. I check our email hello@wanderingaimfully.com. I know many of you are cooking, walking, biking, running, laundry-ing, sleeping, doing whatever you're doing, and you might not want to send someone an email, but I'd love to hear from you if you're on the cusp of a pivot.

 

Caroline: And where are you pivoting from and where are you trying to pivot to?

 

Jason: And did this episode give you any...

 

Caroline: "Aha" moments.

 

Jason: Or just any thought of like, yeah, you know what, I have been thinking this pivot had to go faster and I was putting all this pressure on myself but now I maybe feel like a little sense of ease that it can just take a little bit longer and I'm actually kind of excited about the new problems to solve with that.

 

Caroline: And like feeling motivated that, okay, I might have to buckle down for the next six months, but man, is it going to be worth it on the other side.

 

Jason: Could be six months. Could be a year. Could be two years. Could be five years. But...

 

Caroline: You'll get there.

 

Jason: Like we said, it'll be worth it on the other side. Do you want to do an ad read here on the way out for Wandering Aimfully, our membership?

 

Caroline: I think it's a little bit of a misnomer, the word "read," because that insinuates that we wrote something down, which we did not.

 

Jason: Right. Is there anything you want to talk about or plug like with the unboring coaching program that we have?

 

Caroline: More than the plugs we already just did in the episode?

 

Jason: Yeah. Like, is there...?

 

Caroline: Like, you get Notion Starter Pack, like you get Build Without Burnout.

 

Jason: Page Layout Library that you put together if you want to build a home page or a sales page or an about page. We give you templates that you can go off of?

 

Caroline: You get the WAIM AI robot, as we call it, which is just...

 

Jason: We could, if we want...

 

Caroline: 200+ audio messages of encouragement.

 

Jason: If we wanted to do an ad read at the end of this episode, that's something we can discuss if we want to do that. We could talk about the fact that they also get Teachery, which is an online course platform.

 

Caroline: We could talk about that. More like a rad read, am I right?

 

Jason: I don't think so but I'm actually, now that I'm saying it out loud, I don't think I want to do the ad read at the end. So I think let's just end the episode instead of talking about Wandering Aimfully.

 

Caroline: And all the stuff that's included.

 

Jason: And like going to wanderingaimfully.com/join. We're not gonna talk about that.

 

Caroline: I think you're right. That'd be a little too much of like a hard sell.

 

Jason: October 3rd through the 17th, they would be the dates.

 

Caroline: But we won't mention it.

 

Jason: But we're not going to, we're not gonna do a formulaic ad read.

 

Caroline: I see what you're doing.

 

Jason: To go over and them joining...

 

Caroline: I got it.

 

Jason: A community of people that are just like them who are pivoting, who are trying to like sort through this thing called business and life together as a group. So yeah. I think, you know...

 

Caroline: We'll skip the ad read this time.

 

Jason: Not a lot of times do I decide things for our podcast but I think I've decided that I don't want to do that ad read.

 

Caroline: Okay. We're not going to do it.

 

Jason: So I think we're just going to end the episode.

 

Caroline: Just gonna end it here.

 

Jason: I'm very excited we got to talk about JCVD and his splits over the Volvos and then, if people want to check out Wandering Aimfully, they can go to wanderingaimfully.com/join. Oh! I did it! Okay, bye.