IAM490- Strategist Helps People Position Their Podcast to Build Relationships

Podcast Host at Entrepreneur Junkie Movement and Founder/Strategist at Jamie Atkinson

• CEO Hack: Focusing on the simple tasks
• CEO Nugget: Put yourself out there sooner
• CEO Defined: Understanding your roles and decisions

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Jamieatkinsonmedia

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Transcription:

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Intro 0:02

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

Gresham Harkless 0:29

Hello, this is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast and I have a very special guest on the show today Jamie Atkinson of the podcast Profit Lab. Jamie, it's awesome to have you on the show.

Jamie Atkinson 0:38

I'm super happy to be here man. I'm super excited to talk to you today.

Gresham Harkless 0:41

Yeah, definitely. I'm excited as well. The pleasure is all mine. I wanted to read a little bit more about Jamie so you can hear about all the awesome things that he's doing. Jamie is a podcast host at the entrepreneur junkie movement. He's the founder and strategist at Jamie Atkinson. Jamie, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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Jamie Atkinson 0:56

I'm ready, I decided to stand up. I don't know about you but I always get more energy when I'm like talking on my feet.

Gresham Harkless 1:02

Exactly. I completely understand I would stand up. But everything's not set up for me standing up and I gotta get one of those stand-up tables or chairs and then we'll be good to go. I introduce you a little bit but I wanted to hear a little bit more about your background, your CEO story, and what led you to get started in the business.

Jamie Atkinson 1:16

Yeah, totally man. I've been an entrepreneur now for about two years. Originally, when we got started, I was kind of unique. We call ourselves professionally homeless because we travel full-time. We have done for about the last few years and we kind of have a home. So we kind of call it that way. It's been interesting, because about two years ago, when I first got started, I didn't really have any idea about podcasting, we had no idea. That was going to be the business that we went through. I actually had about seven failed businesses just in the last kind of year and a half alone. I say failed with kind of a pinch of salt there, some of them just kind of petered out. Sometimes we lost clients and went in a different direction.

If I were being really honest, I'd say that really about six months ago, I was completely lost in the online space, I felt very alienated, and I didn't have a lot of friends around me. I remember being sat in this kind of hostel in Bangkok and we were in this back room, it didn't have any windows, it was like this off shade of green that looked like it was something from an abandoned hospital. I just remember being sat there on the phone trying to call dentists to try and sell them an ad package. I just felt miserable just absolutely, like defeated. We then decided that we were going to go to an event called Funnel Hacking Live. I pretty much figured out, that I listened to a speech by a guy called Nicholas Bailey and he shared that when you share your mess, it becomes your message. Suddenly that really hit me.

What I realized was that I needed to be serving the people that were right for me. I needed to be surrounded by entrepreneurs and work with entrepreneurs. Honestly, I don't know if you've ever tried to call through to a dental office but when you try and sell them marketing, it's not the easiest bag in the world. I realized I had the wrong customers, I was in the wrong market. A couple of months later, we ended up launching the podcast profit lab and it's been great since then, because now we're helping people launch really profitable podcasts, we're helping them focus on actually generating revenue and getting customers. More importantly, though, I'm actually working with entrepreneurs who I love and I can spend a lot of time with. We're definitely in the right lane if that makes sense.

Gresham Harkless 3:07

It makes so much sense and it definitely unfortunately even made sense when you were talking about calling through to dental offices as I've been there, it's definitely not an easy thing. I love what you talked about going through the funnel hacking event and then being able to hear your message or your message is in your best so to speak. It makes so much sense just because I think so many times that we go through difficult periods, we go through, highs and lows, especially running businesses of failures or things that work out things that don't work out. I think a lot of times we can gloss over and not even talk about those messes that we have.

But I think I have a saying, and I heard something along the lines where there's diamonds are made under pressure. A lot of those difficult things that you go through and you had to struggle through a lot of times, that's where really awesome things come out from it.

Jamie Atkinson 3:50

Yeah, and a lot of us, just don't even want to talk about it. I remember I didn't want to talk about any of the failures, because I was scared my friends back home would like to make fun of me or to be like, Yeah, we told you, you shouldn't have done that. That was too risky. So I ended up living this half-true for a long time. Then back in February, I just decided I was like, what, I'm just going to start living the truth telling people exactly where I am. Hey, Jamie, I don't have any customers. I'm broke, right? Just trying to figure it out. Once I started to do that people were just magnetically attracted to me.

I think it was because of the fact that we were just starting to talk about vulnerability and all of the truth that was happening. I think definitely 2020 is going to be the year of marketing transparency. I think people who are, just talking about what's exciting, and what's different. I see people like the Logan Paul podcast, where those guys are just shooting the shit and talking about what actually happens in Hollywood. People love it because it's transparent, people are actually telling the truth. So I think this year is definitely going to be interesting as we move into 2020 to see what marketers are doing with this whole transparency game.

Gresham Harkless 4:47

Yeah, absolutely and I think because we have so much accessibility to everybody, that even if you're not being transparent, if you're not talking about your failures, pretty much you can do a Google search and find just about everything *about some

Jamie Atkinson 4:58

It's not hiding. They're gonna find out about what happened in that place in Bangkok. When I tell people about it, they're gonna find out the truth. It's not always pretty. But yeah, if you own it, then it's all right. Right.

Gresham Harkless 5:09

Exactly. Yeah, you didn't realize it was Facebook Live going on and then when you were there, so that makes sense. I wanted to hear a little bit more about you know, what you're doing with your business? Can you take me through what you're doing to help support the clients you're working with?

Jamie Atkinson 5:20

Yeah. 100%. I'm pretty new to the podcasting game. A lot of people say to me, Jamie, they said, how can you run a podcasting business or podcasting course when you've only been podcasting since February? It was always a really fair question. We launched our program in May, and I've only been podcasting for two months at a time, what I launched our programs was, hey, look, guys, like, I'm not an expert but this is what I figured out on this journey.

Eventhough I'm just a couple of steps ahead of you, I want to teach you how I've gotten to this area and this place, and what's cool with our business we teach people how, even if they don't have many downloads or many subscribers, how they can use a podcast to basically speak to their dream customer when we teach something called podcast closing, which is really just positioning your podcast to speak to your dream customer.

Like Gresley, if you had a coaching program, and I was your perfect customer, you'd invite me on your show, we'd build a relationship and then on the back end, if it made sense, you would offer me that product to come into it. It's just a really small tweak from what people are doing in the podcasting space. But man, is it effective. What's great about it is that people have this opportunity to just speak to their dream customers, and really connect with them and learn more about them especially. I love podcasting as a medium because you get into people's stories, you learn a lot about them, and you find out stuff that you just wouldn't normally find out in everyday conversation. There's a connection that gets made there.

We're teaching people how to leverage that and how to build really great relationships so that on the back end, they can build a bigger network and sell more of their product. What was interesting is just a couple of months ago, I was feeling pretty burnt out. Our business three months ago, we had an agency, we had a coaching team, we had a core product at 997. We had cheaper products, we were selling and a funnel, we had free stuff, I was giving us training, and we had like six or seven different core business parts to what we were running. I was just pulled in every which direction.

What I ended up doing was I hired an operations manager, actually my girlfriend, she's fantastic. She saw me struggling and she was like I've got to come in and help you because you're gonna drown. What was great was that we went to an event again by Russell Brunson called Unlock the Secrets. What he taught us at that event, which stood out to me was that the secret to creating a million-dollar business and scaling is to have a singular focus, one product, one traffic source, and one conversion method.

The quickest people that get to the two comma club in Russell's Clickfunnels face are the ones that have one product they sell, and they sell it via webinar. At the end of that event, I decided I was going to kill 90% of my business. It's killing our babies time was the phrase that got thrown around a lot. That was tough I had agency clients, I had people in my coaching program, and ended up refunding a lot of people canceling breaking it down. What happened was, with that free time, we were able to go and finish our course that we hadn't been able to do, because we didn't have time, to put all of our energy into that program.

Now we've got this amazing offer an amazing program, we've just had a whole bunch of new people come in, and that process is I'm really enjoying it we've got a lot more time back to spend on the stuff that's important. We're doing the webinar on a regular basis, and now the revenue has spiked and started to increase, just like he told us it was gonna, it's it's kind of funny in our inner circle, we have this kind of saying that says, Do what Russell says, right? The guy knows what he's talking about. Just follow that advice and do it right. At least since the last two, or three months, we've been focusing on just the course making it as good as possible, and scaling it to the right people and it's obviously been going great since we started doing that.

Gresham Harkless 8:35

Definitely appreciate that in ideas success leaves clues. If you find successful people like Russell Brunson, definitely follow a lot of what they're saying, because they've been able to be successful, because they've done that. I love what you're talking about because I think there are so many people who may be listening to this or have felt this, I'm sure most people have felt this is that kind of impostor syndrome. I love the fact that you talked about, even though I may not be crazy, far down the line, I might be two or three steps, 10 steps, whatever that is ahead of you.

I think a lot of times, we are experts in certain things but we don't necessarily give ourselves credit for doing that when we are 2, 3, 10, 15, 100,000 steps in front of people. Even with that being said we still don't kind of step in and show our expertise. So for one, definitely appreciate you for bringing that up too, I think that there's there's so much energy around that. When you're a person that actually does understand that and go after it that in and of itself helps attract into your tribe as well. So I appreciate that.

Jamie Atkinson 9:28

No worries, man. It's interesting. What I've always found is that the more you teach a topic, the more you understand it on a deeper level. We always try and teach in as a simple way as possible, kind of like the fifth-grade level is the goal. As I teach more and more people, people who aren't technically savvy, people who aren't marketers, if I can explain it to them, then I don't understand it well enough. So I have to go deeper and figure out that and that's been a really good tool to improve everything that we're doing and improve our understanding.

Gresham Harkless 9:54

Yeah, definitely a true sign of knowledge and expertise is to be able to teach somebody else or teach a fifth grader as you said, exactly what it is that you're doing. So would you consider that to be and I was gonna ask you for what I call your secret sauce or the thing that separates you and makes you unique or your business do you feel like that's exactly what sets you apart and makes you unique?

Jamie Atkinson 10:09

From a self-aware point of view, I think one of the biggest things that's helped me to be successful is that I'm a really good implementer. When somebody teaches me something, I'm usually the person at the front of the pack, who was trying it and, and it wasn't always that way. For the longest time I was, I was really scared to fail, I had this kind of relenting fear to ever try anything new. My whole life, I kind of half-assed everything, I always had a backup plan. When I left the travel, I had a lot of savings when I was doing well, in my job, I always had that second promotion slot that was set back there. Like if this doesn't work, I can go over in that direction. Mid always had that and I don't know where it came from, maybe from the way I was raised.

One thing that I've kind of learned to do as an entrepreneur, is learn to let go of that and be okay with failure and be okay with fear. It's okay to feel fear. Like recently, I just did my very first-ever webinar. When I was doing and planning this webinar, I was freaking out, I was worried about I can't get the secrets, right? My story isn't good. this isn't gonna work. I planned everything out the two days and then ended up scrapping the whole thing and building all these slides, and we'd like 24 hours left to go, I had nothing again. In those moments, what I've learned is that when I feel that fear in my stomach, Steve Liesman said something really powerful. He said that in life and in business, the obstacle is the way.

If you want to become successful, you have to lean into the pain that gets presented in front of you. That's probably the biggest thing that I've embraced in the last couple of months. Since I've been doing that, what I found is that I'm more willing to take action. I think that is probably one of the big things that sets me apart from other people, somebody will read an email, or get a promotion, they'll read it, digest it, and then they'll move on to the next thing. A lot of the time, I'll if I see something that I like, I will go and implement it straightaway and I think that's what's really set me apart from a lot of other people.

Gresham Harkless 11:54

Absolutely, especially in entrepreneurship, action and actually doing things is kind of what sets people apart from being the entrepreneurs versus the like the entrepreneurs. A lot of times we don't realize it, and you kind of spoke to it. I think being entrepreneurial and going out and being okay with failure being an understanding that it's part of a learning lesson as part of the weights of success is something that you're not really taught. Unless there are some houses, of course that are but it's very rare that you're taught to be able to think like that. A lot of times we have these layers we have to get through to to reprogram ourselves and change our mindset so that we are able to look at it in a different way. That is not necessarily like we don't have it, sometimes it's just that culture, school, whatever family sometimes has created that, those kinds of impediments to us being like, more entrepreneurial.

Jamie Atkinson 12:40

Yeah and it's funny, because I fail all the time now, and I don't mind about it, I'm pretty open. Even the best performers in every industry fail. I mean, look at Will Smith, like the dude just released this brand new movie Gemini Man and I just saw the other day that is absolutely tanking at the box office. Great movie, like, I'm sorry, I enjoyed it but unfortunately, the movie isn't doing as well as they hoped, and someone of his prestige in the position he's in is one of the most well-known actors in the world still has failures, but you don't see him quitting because of it. Like he persevered. He pushes through, he's all over TikTok, he's on YouTube, he's in all these different places now. Even people who we would never imagine we'd be in a position to fail, still fail, and it's just getting okay with that. That's something that a lot of people struggle with and that's okay. It's just trying to figure out, like, how can I do it? How can I just take action, and even if it fails, like not beat myself up about it and just keep moving forward?

Gresham Harkless 13:31

Exactly makes so much sense and I think Mark Cuban says a lot that you only have to be right, once you only have to hit that event homerun, once, you only have to hit that Grand Slam once, and then all of a sudden, it changes your life. So nobody remembers all the things you didn't do? Well, they're gonna remember that thing that you did the most, are the best. So I appreciate that. I wanted to switch gears a little bit and I want to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be an apple book, or a habit that you have, or something that makes you more effective and efficient.

Jamie Atkinson 13:54

I think one of the biggest tricks that I've used previously has been just to focus on a single task whenever I do anything. Multitasking is my biggest downfall, I often get distracted and pulled into different situations.

Gresham Harkless 14:07

I think that's a phenomenal hack. Now I want to ask you for what I call a CEO nugget, and this is a word of wisdom or piece of advice, or if you can happen to a time machine, what would you tell your younger business self?

Jamie Atkinson 14:18

I think the biggest thing that I would tell myself is to just put myself out there sooner, and start building an audience sooner. Whatever situation you're in, you can't you can't predict the future. Right now, we're like Facebook ads are crazy, but five or 10 years ago, we wouldn't have known based on the information that was in front of us. What I think is something that I could have learned from whatever time I read it in, if I've built up an audience, and I have those people in front of me that my dream person that I want to work with, I can adapt base on the times to offer them a solution to any problem they're currently experiencing.

Gresham Harkless 14:49

I definitely appreciate that. Jamie, I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is a definition of what it means to be a CEO and we're hoping to have different quote-unquote CEOs on this show. So Jamie, what does being a CEO mean to you?

Jamie Atkinson 14:59

For me, the definition of a CEO is that kind of system and keeping the ship rated, and I do all the time, drift back into the marketer mode and that's where I want to stay most of the time.

Gresham Harkless 15:09

Yeah, that makes so much sense. Being able to kind of understand those different roles, or there are different things that we have to do but be able to like, make sure that when you're in your CEO mode, you're thinking more strategically about those things, and making long-term decisions. But at the same time understanding sometimes where things like marketing are very, very necessary. So it's not like you can ignore that and the same kind of breath, so to speak. So I truly appreciate that definition. Appreciate your time, even more, Jamie. What I want to do is pass you the mic just to see if there's anything additional, you can let our readers and listeners know. Then of course, how best they can get ahold of you to find out about all the awesome things you're going you're working on and, of course, the fans of the podcast

Jamie Atkinson 15:42

100%. Well, I want to just thank you, if you've been listening this far, my big focus is on helping people create profitable podcasts. The best way I can serve your audience is to help them out for free. I would invite everybody to join our Facebook group, you guys can find this. We're podcasting 1014 ways to monetize a podcast or you can just go to facebook.com/groups/podcasting one on one group. If you guys enjoyed this style, and you want to check out our podcast, then you search us for their entrepreneur junkie movement, I'm more than happy to chat with you guys on there. We like to keep it real.

Gresham Harkless 16:08

Keep it 100 as the kids say. I want to make sure I have the links and information in the show notes so that everybody can click through to find a Facebook group subscribe to the podcast and of course, find out your course and everything you're working on. Again, appreciate you so much and I hope you have a phenomenal day.

Extro 16:22

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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