Hey guys, it's your host Blaine here and today we've got some great news. We're launching a brand new private community for uploading and it's all about building your personal brand the right way. The community will feature access to some of the world's best content creators, some of whom you've heard on uploading and more to come. The best news, this community is absolutely free to join, but there will be a vetting process to make sure that you're serious about your content and personal brand and you're ready to support others. So if you want to scale your content, boost focus, stay consistent, grow your personal brand and connect with other top creators, make sure to apply@castmagic IO Uploading community. We'll drop the link in the show notes and hope to see you there. Welcome to uploading. We're joined by Jonathan Goodman, the founder of a $7 million per year personal training development center and author of 11 self published books.

With over 200,000 copies sold, Jonathan has built a thriving business serving over 200,000 customers in 120 countries all around the world, all while bootstrapping, living remotely, kind of like what we're talking about now, and balancing life with his wife and kids. So in today's episode we're going to cover a couple of different things. How to leverage content to grow a multimillion dollar business, the four stages of, of content every creator has has to master, and turning self published books into, into massive revenue streams. So you know, I guess where I'd like to start is you started as a personal trainer when I built a $7 million annual revenue business, all while living remote, like why don't you take me through? Like how did, how did it start? How'd you get started down this path?

I reached a point at a very, very young age. That's a scary point to, to reach where I was kind of capped out in my industry. Like I was working in Toronto, charging out at $97 an hour, which at that point was about as much as you could charge out. And I was 23 years old. So you know, it sounds great and it was wonderful. I mean I'm happy that I got there, but it's like, okay, well what am I going to do for the rest of my life? You know, is this it? I knew that I didn't want to open up a gym. It's just, I just knew energetically I didn't want to do that. And so man, I started reading like one of the cool things about, about personal training as A career.

And what I, the advice that I give to a lot of young people as they're entering careers is, hey, there you go, Cap. Toronto, your hometown. One of, one of the really, really cool things that I, one of the big pieces of advice that I give to young people is find a career where you get surrounded by mentors very, very young. There's nowhere, there's no other career that I can think of where some 22 year old Yahoo can basically have the, the most successful people in his or her town pay to spend time with them for free, like multiple days a week. And so that's what happens. Like, my clients were incredibly successful. And so one day one of them came in, he was the chief of psychiatry at Sunnybrook Hospital, one of the big hospitals in Toronto. And he walked into the gym and we had been speaking for a couple years at this point.

You know, we had trained together for a couple years at this point. And he walked in and he was late and he took a book out of his bag and he walked right up to me on the gym floor. It's like 4:30 on a Tuesday, 4:37 on a Tuesday afternoon. And takes his book out of his bag and he hands it to me. You're not going to be my personal trainer much longer. It's like, what? Yeah, you're not going to be my personal trainer much longer. I don't know what it is about you, but you seem to think differently, Right. And I don't know what you're going to do, but like you're going to do something.

Right. And so, you know, I wish that somebody gave me this book when I was young because it would have started me on my journey earlier. And the book was Rich Dad, Poor dad by Robert Kawasaki. Now, I mean, is that book that good? I don't know. Maybe it was the first one that I read. Like, looking back, I don't think it's that great, but it set me down this path of I went to the library and checked out all the books on business development. And this was like, man, Blaine, this was back in 2011, 2010. This information was out there, but it wasn't thrust in your face the same way.

And so he was right. I wasn't his personal trainer much longer.

So that kind of takes me to my next question. And it's related to what you're saying. So he was in psychiatry and in your new book, the Obvious Choice, you talk about how algorithms change while human nature remains constant.

Yeah.

What do you mean by that? And how does that Kind of apply to what you were just talking about.

I mean, if you try to keep up, you're always going to be behind. Right. I. I talk about what I call the parade problem, which is if you're at a parade and it's super, super busy and everybody's packed in, well, one person stands up on their tiptoes to try to get a better view, and for a few seconds they do, and then everybody else stands up on their tiptoes, and then everybody's legs hurt, and nobody's view is improved. That's kind of what happens if you try to keep up with algorithm changes or advances in technology without actually building that really, really strong base of just understanding humans underneath it. You know, could technology amplify what you're already doing? Sure, but it doesn't replace what you're already doing. And if you're so focused on that stuff, you're probably ignoring what really matters. And so what I've noticed, I mean, I've worked on the Internet since 2011.

Now I liken it to dog years. You know, every year on the Internet is basically seven years in human life. I'm like a dying year old. I've actually taught people who have taught people who have taught people who are now teaching people how to build businesses online. This shit turns over so quickly. And if you're in the game for any length of time, you notice a few things. One of them is a lot of people come and go, most notably the people who seem to be in the spotlight because they're jumping on whatever trend is in vogue. Never stick around for the long term.

Never. The other one is whatever platform or hack or whatever that you have to use right now is going to be irrelevant in two years. Clubhouse, Periscope, Snapchat, to a lesser extent, but it's losing relevance. Facebook lives were huge. Facebook groups were big at one point. I mean, you can just continue to roll this down the horn. And so if you want to stick around for a long time, you actually don't want to chase those trends because it's exhausting. You know, you might hit it one time, but, like, icar is too close to the sun.

You're going to get burned other times and probably flame out.

Yeah. And I think that's one of the biggest things for creators and people who want to turn their content into their business. It's so easy to burn out. It's so easy to chase trends. And I'd love to kind of talk a little bit about how you approached it from the beginning, right in the beginning you're saying you're reading books, you didn't have an audience, you were doing this kind of like one to one. And one of the beautiful parts about building businesses on the Internet is you can achieve scale in a way you can't scale a individual personal training business. Right. So what were kind of, what were some of the first steps you took to start growing an audience online?

Well, the first thing that I did, which is also what I would do now, but at the time I did it because I didn't know any better. Because you weren't told to be a creator. The word did not exist when I was starting. And so, you know, it was like you were either an entertainer, right. Or you were a business person. And I still think that that's how we should view it. You know, you could be an influencer or creator or entertainer. To me those are all synonyms of the same thing.

Or you can be a business person and neither is worse nor better. But they're fundamentally different games that you get to choose to play with different rules of engagement, odds of success, reward mechanisms and, and incentives. And so back then I did not quit my full time job. I fit this around my full time job. No, I could do that because I was young. But actually the same guy, Tom, what he passed down to me, I call it now my freedom equation or my freedom number. But basically I did little bits of work online. I started writing online a little bit.

I self published a book kind of after hours after clients. And as that started to make a little bit of money, I did actually affiliate marketing at first because I mean to try to build your own product and build an audience for a product and work a full time job, I still think is probably too much to do. You kind, there's kind of an order of operations that you need to do. So I did a lot of affiliate marketing in the day, promoted other stuff and then I had this little self published book, right. That ended up being successful. But you know, at the beginning it was of course a slow gain and I figured out how much money I needed each month. You know, that's the freedom number. How much money do you need in each month? Seneca once said, if you wish to stave off all fear, imagine that the worst that can happen most definitely will happen.

We don't fear things because we should fear them. We fear the unknown. It's an irrational response to the unknown. And so the way to eliminate fear is to actually make the unknown known, to imagine the worst case scenario. And so what I Did is I just, I did that. How much money do I need each month? At that point it was $2,600. Right. What's my rent? I was a young single guy, right? So at that point it was rent, it was food.

And then I called it like, you do something special for my girlfriend fund. It's 2,600 bucks. Way more than that now. I've got two kids, a third on the way, a house, like way more than that now. But at the time it was 2,600. And then I looked at the clients that I was working with, I looked at the money that I was making with the online venture, and I did a basic calculation. Now I was only making a couple hundred bucks. Okay, okay.

So 2600 is now 2300 that I need to make for my in person job. Well, I'm making way more than that if I think that this online thing has legs and I want to make a jump at it. Basically what I need to do in order to not fear, in order to be free to move, in order to be creative, I need to eliminate that part, that irrational part where I don't know. And so what I did is I categorized all of my clients into ABC clients. The gold level clients, the A clients were the people who showed up every week, multiple times a week, when it was time to renew 50 sessions. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Right Then the B level clients were the people who I love to train. They showed up most of the time, but I wasn't quite sure if they were going to renew.

The C were just the people who I didn't like and like, wasn't sure if they'd stay around for that one. So I got rid of the C and then I built my calendar based off of how many hours I needed to work to hit that $2,300 a month. Starting by filling in the A level clients into it, filling in any extra gaps with bees, and then giving my bees to other people. So I cut back my hours then from 40 hours to 25, and then I cut back my hours again because that then I had more time to commit online. And then I started to make more money online. So then I cut that back to 15 hours in person. And then I eventually stepped away fully when it was time to do that. And the way that I built up the audience, It's Dale Carnegie 101.

How to win friends and influence people. Imagine, imagine that every single other person that you see on the street is walking around with a sign on their forehead that says Please, please, please make me feel important today. I named my website the Personal Trainer Development Center. No shit blame. We had business cards made where the original logo was a building. The reason for that was we wanted people to think that it was way more important than some Yahoo single personal trainer at night in the one bedroom apartment. And then what I did is I went and I found other people who were already publishing great work for the audience. I did the work, I went out, found at that point it was blog posts.

I went and found those blog posts and I reached out and I said, hey Nick, I really, really love this article. I'd love to syndicate it, publish it on the Personal Trainer Development Center. You're the author, I'm going to pay you 100 bucks. And all that I'm going to do is I'll change the title, change the formatting, I'll add some images and you know, basically putty it up. Is that cool too? You can see it before it goes live to make sure you're fine with it if you want to. Is that cool? It's a pretty easy yes. And then what happens of course is other people like to show off that they're important by being published on the Personal Trainer Development Center. And now I have my market, my network, all sending basically traffic to this one central site from all of these little satellite places.

And, and, and once we had a platform, I got on the phone with 137 of them, asked them what they needed, asked them what they were frustrated with and went and built it. That was the process.

And, and what was that? What were some of those pain points that needed to be solved?

What it looked back to was one sentence, which is personal trainers who have trained for at least a year need to figure out a way to make a bit more money in a bit less time with a bit better schedule. They didn't want to become six figure trainers. They didn't want to move to Bali. They wanted to make somewhere around 500 to $1,500 more a month and be in a bit more control of their schedule. The young ones worried that when they were older they wouldn't be able to spend time with their family. The older ones knew that they weren't able to spend time with their family and they wanted a little bit more security. And so that's how the first ever, I mean I built the first ever course for Online Fitness in 2012 because it was a solution to that problem. That course was called 1K Extra.

It was a course on how to make $1,000 extra a month. Everybody else at that time in that field was like, how to make six figures? I was like, y'all don't know what you're talking about. None of these people, that's not their goal. Whether they think it's unreasonable, I mean, they wouldn't say no. But it's not what they're thinking, right? It's not what they're thinking.

And, and I think that's so interesting just because, you know, in, in startups and entrepreneurship, a lot of people talk about solving a problem that you have yourself. You clearly had this problem yourself because you were like, I need to make more money. And then, you know, to. You had the discipline to actually and smarts actually think about your hours and saying, there's only so many hours in a week. How do I maximize and optimize those hours for the ones where I know I'm going to get paid and what do I need to survive? And from then, I can kind of build out something that scales. And I feel like that's something that's very translatable to content and people who are trying to really grow their businesses through content, because there's stuff that you're doing. A lot of people see content as almost like a distraction. And it's like, oh, I'm going to, you know, do my business and then if I have time, I'll create content.

Whereas what you did is you basically said, where do I batch my hours so that I will have time to create that content, which eventually will scale more effectively than whatever I'm doing in those hours. So I just think that that paradigm is, is really important for any creator to sort of adapt, where it's very easy to say, oh, I'm making money, I'm doing the thing, I don't actually have to make content. But you kind of flip that idea on its head and you said, I'm going to make money when I know I can make money, but I'm going to be disciplined about creating the scalable system for me that will eventually outpace what, what I'm doing. And then, interestingly, it happened. It just so happened to be that same problem that you sought to solve for yourself was that pain point that other people can relate to. Right.

If you, if you're deep in an industry, you start to figure out what frustrates you. Like, I collect baseball cards. I collect kind Griffey Jr baseball cards. I don't know why, I just really like it. And so I'm deep in that industry and I came across somebody who was building a new way to display and protect baseball cards. Well, sports cards, Pokemon cards, whatever. But like I came across it and, and it's exactly the creator story that you're talking about. This guy is so.

His name's Brian Pier. The company's called Mint My NT M1NT. And it's a wonderful story because this guy is just so clearly obsessed with this thing that most people overlook. Think about the coffee cup, the disposable coffee cup. Next time that you get a disposable coffee cup from like a nicer place, not like a Dunkin Donuts or Tim Hortons if you're in Canada or whatever, but like a nicer place. Look at it. It's actually really intricately designed. There's a tiny hole right in the middle.

That hole is there so that the aroma from the coffee specifically angles into your nose as you tip the cup to drink the coffee. The way that the spout in the lid is designed is designed to optimize the flow of the coffee hitting all of the senses of your tongue. Some people obsess over these things. They only obsess over these things if they're obsessive about that market. Right. What you hit on Blaine that I really like though is, and I'll give you another example, cut back the hours. But here's what I also reflect when I reflect back on my story. And a lot of the stuff I didn't know I was doing at the time and I post rationalized and created a post narrative around it so now I could talk about it, but I didn't know I was doing it.

There's a lot of false economies that exist. For example, what I personal trained was one of the most expensive postal codes in Canada. It's called Forest Hill. And so to live there cost a lot. Like to rent an apartment in this area cost a lot of money. Most of the other people that were personal trainers at the gym did the smart thing. They lived 30 or 40 minutes away. They, they rented an apartment for a thousand dollars less a month and then they commuted it, you know, took them an hour, hour and a half.

But they're young, they have that time. I did the stupid thing, which is I rented an apartment an eight minute walk from the gym and I walked into the gym. Well, what did that mean? That meant that I had an extra hour a day to read and develop myself and work on my website. And so yes, it cost me $1,000 extra a month, but that's a false economy because what it was really doing Was I was trading an asset that's renewable at the time for what's not renewable, which is the money, especially when you were young, to develop myself, which compounds, as you get older and older and older, content, self development. It's a savings account. It's a savings account. You invest into it when you have excess time and capital. You hope that it pays off interest in the interim.

But you do not design your life and your business in a way that requires it to kick off dividends to fulfill your short term needs. That's the way I think you have to look at it.

I love that. I think that is absolutely spot on. I'd never actually thought of it that way, but I think that's one of my favorite analogies for content is thinking of it as a savings account. Right. Because when you're thinking of it as the thing that is going to pay and fund your entire lifestyle, in the immediate term, you're going to fall short of it because you're probably going to try to create a content that goes viral, you're going to burn out, you're going to chase trends, you're going to do all the things that you mentioned before. Whereas if you think of it as a savings account, the people who build the most wealth are the ones who can diligently save and invest over time. All of a sudden, you wake up in 50 years and you're like, oh my God, that's a ton of money. Right?

How the, how the hell, how did this get here? Right? How the hell did this get here? Yeah, no, man, that, that is exactly it. I mean, that's how you have to view savings. The, the earlier that you start the compounding, the better. We all know the famous story of Warren Buffett. Now, you know, the, the reason why he's so wealthy is because he started investing when he was 10 and hasn't stopped. And he's whatever he is, 98 or something. I don't know how old he is now, but like that's, that's how compound interest works. And that's, it's so hard to kind of visualize that.

But it's the same with content as well. Most of the time, everything that's working for you will be bubbling underneath the surface, invisible to the eye. You don't know when that inflection point is going to hit. And that can be a really, really difficult point to remedy. When you're sitting there and you're struggling to pay your bills, or when you're sitting there and you're saying so and so is so successful. And I have this business and I was told that I need to get customers on TikTok or whatever. You have to think of content as a savings account and you have to think of content as a way to primarily nurture and convert people and leads that are generated elsewhere. Unless of course you play the game of I'm going to be an entertainer.

Like if that's a game you're playing, that's cool. But you know, this is how that game looks. You go to Hollywood, you work you wake tables on nights and weekends, you know you're going to get taken advantage of. You know you're going to make basically no money. You know, you have low odds of success, but you know that if you do become one of the chosen few, those outsized rewards and if you knowingly sign up for that, hell yeah, man, go for it. Play the out of that game. But most of the time what people are doing is they're playing that game, but they're desiring the rewards and, and, and the lifestyle of the other game. And so they're conflating the two.

And that's when we see a lot of people running into problems these days.

And, and also how that applies to content creators. I see a lot of times content creators kind of don't know where their lane is because they see content that's going viral and then there's say, you know, even if their audience is for example, like in, in the say it's like for personal trainers or in the business space and then they want to go create this like short form, engaging like super viral TikTok content. You may, and I've seen it myself, like I've created reels that do over a million views and then don't do anything for the bottom line because it's like, it's just like an awareness, it's an entertainment place. So like there is a massive difference between the, like the what is actually in the content as well. Just because you get a million views on something doesn't necessarily necessarily mean it's successful. You can have a piece of content, do a thousand views and if it's hyper intentional and you built it the right way, it's, you know, targeted for your audience, it can convert, you know, convert like crazy. So and I think that's something that in the first era of like content creation that people sort of lost track of because the only thing they could gauge off was the number of likes, right? So people are competing just based off likes and engagement where if, if you're Kind of playing the long game is what you're saying. It, it, it, it's a little bit different because you're always mapping towards almost like a, a different, you know, main metric, if you will.

Right. And in your case. Right. It's, it's one of those metrics has got to be your business. So, you know, one thing that you mentioned was this inflection point where you knew that like, things were happening, the content starting to work when in your journey was that. And like, looking back, like, how would you define that? As kind of like the. Okay, now we're, now we're on the way. This is, this is working.

And then what were the next steps from there?

There's something called Good H's law. You ever heard of it?

No.

Good H's law states that when the metric becomes the goal, it ceases to be a good metric. When the measurement becomes the goal, it ceases to become a good measurement. If, if likes and followers and shares becomes the goal, it ceases to become a good goal. It's a spotlight effect. What you pay attention to, what you focus on, what you measure is what gets managed, is what gets optimized. For most of us, again, if your goal is to become an influencer, an entertainer, perhaps the insights that a social media account in terms of likes, follows views, whatever is a good metric is a good measure. For most of us, though, it's not. And I have the exact same experience as you.

I mean, I could write a post on any given day that's going to get 10,000 plus likes on social media. It's easy when you know what you're doing. When you have an even baseline of audience, it's really easy to do, but it doesn't generate more business. And what Ashley just said here in the comments, you know, likes don't pay the bills. Yeah. What it's, it's exactly the case. I mean, it's easy to be rich with likes and poor with dollars because what feeds the ego is what's bad for the wallet. And that's really, really hard to get over sometimes.

And so what I really push for in the obvious choice in this book coming out is, is a much keener attention to what we're measuring. You know, in my business, which is, you know, one of my businesses, it's coaching. I have a software business too, but in my coaching business, we measure the amount of inbound DM inquiries that our content generates. That's what we measure. And I could tell you straight up, if you go to my Instagram Page amidst Coach Goodman, you can see that I have lots of posts that have 10, 20, 30, 40, 100,000 likes. I also have posts that have less than a thousand likes. And I can tell you that the posts with less than a thousand likes drive more business than the posts with 30 or 40,000. Now, does that mean that neither is valuable? I believe that we need three types of content.

I believe that we need viral value and depth based content. And depending on where you are at over the course of your career, you might need more or less. You know, if you're building up from scratch, you might need a little bit more value just to get more eyeballs. If you already have an audience though, you want more value, you always want some underlying depth so people connect with you more as a human being. It's not a study, but the. It's called Good Hart's Law. Good Hart's Law. When a measure becomes the goal, it ceases to be a good measure.

So. So what you're getting at, Blaine, I very much resonate with, man. It's so important, dude, to measure the right things based off of the success of your content.

Absolutely. And you know, Jonathan, the. The next question I have is, why don't you talk to me? You just mentioned you've got a software business now. You've got like the training, the course, you've got the books. So like, as you've, as you sort of graduated through the years, like, and as you said, time on the Internet moves really fast. So why don't you walk me through a little bit about how all of. Just walk me through what your business empire sort of looks like today. Because one thing that you said that really stood out is you said that you have different, like phases in your business.

Phases where you're going really hard and then phases where you're saying, you know what? I want time with my. I actually value the freedom of being able to spend time with my family. Focus on the personal stuff. And maybe I'm not in grind mode right now. Maybe I'm. I'm in a different sort of phase. So just walk us through a little bit of how you've kind of set everything up and you know, how you think about, you know, building in sprints.

I guess I call them seasons. This is year 13 in a row now where I've left Canada for the winter. I've lived abroad a minimum of four months every year for the last 13 years. And like, I have a 72 year old wife, we're pregnant with our third. So, you know, it's not easy to pick up and leave. One of the main. I mean, aside from escaping Canada when it's cold, one of the main reasons that we leave is actually because it builds in a seasonality to my life that I find I bone the hell out when I don't have. I call it the 84 way of living.

And so Toronto was very much a hustle culture. There's. There's a lot of social commitments. There's a lot of pressures to get ahead. The energy is there. It's a very frenetic kind of fervent energy, which I love, I absolutely love, I thrive in, until I don't, you know what I'm saying? And then I got to get the hell out. Mexico is the opposite. It's very chill, you know, work to live, not live to work type thing.

A lot of the people that we meet here are people who are. People who live here are people who have decided to live this kind of lifestyle. And so every year, if you think about it, what I actually do is I go through basically eight months of really building and four months of, I don't know, call it recovering. But I look at my life as effectively a triangle that has three priorities. You've got health and wellness, fitness, you've got money and work, and then you've got family and relationships. And the process of my life is systematically thickening one side of the triangle at a time. I don't actually believe that you can get fundamentally better and improve more than one thing at once. I think the reason why adults stop evolving as they progress through adulthood is not for a lack of work, is not for a lack of smarts, is for a lack of focus.

And so what this seasonality does is before I enter the season, well, I leave one place. You don't have to physically leave, but in my case, I do. So I leave one place and I actually wipe my schedule clean. Nothing. Take everything out, and then I rebuild it from scratch, I reprioritize it, and I build it from scratch based off of whichever line of that triangle I'm really trying to develop at that period of time. And so that's how I build that seasonality. And then that's just basic, like Jim Collins, big rocks, right? You put the most important stuff at your best times, and then you fit in the rest of the stuff kind of around the edges as it. As it fits.

And so when I'm working on something like. Like when I'm working on a book, for example, that's how I'm thinking about It. So you asked about how my business is made up on the COVID of the book that's coming out. The obvious choice, there's a picture of a whale and there's a picture of a whole bunch of pennies like a whale and like dollars. That's, that's because my life philosophy is whales and minnows. Whales and minnows to me represents a number of things for business. It represents free, the minnows or expensive the whales you sell to the whales in order to feed the minnows. In life you show up or you don't.

You're there or you're not. Nothing in between. In between is the dead zone in my business. That's how I've structured it. It's a whales and minnows business. And so everything that I've built is congruent to people who work in the fitness industry. I could serve people in other industries, but it's way simpler to build more products and services to the family that you've become famous to than it is to try to expand out and get this like recognition and ego hit of other people outside of your industry thinking. It's been fascinating Blaine, like promoting this book that is know, typical Collins that's like for people not just in fitness because people outside of fitness have no idea who I am and like I'm having a hard time getting on those podcasts and stuff.

Anybody in Fitness, any podcast, 100% man, anytime you want, right? That's how our world works. And so I have effectively four arms to the business. At the, at the baseline level are the books. They're not free, but they are zero expectation of service. You know, low end membership site does not meet this requirement by the way, because there is an expectation of. Nobody buys a book and expects the author to serve them and support them along the journey of that book. There's no administrative help, you know, even less now that I'm not self publishing like HarperCollins does it all, Amazon does it all, Barnes and Noble does it all, right? My agent does it all. And so, you know, on the bottom of the books and then the books, especially the self published books, are great marketing engines, are great affiliate marketing engines, no joke.

I have, there's two software companies that I promoted over the years in my books together those links have generated me $1.2 million in counting and they still generate me, give or take, 20 to $25,000 a month in commissions. And I haven't promoted either of those companies for four years. And so you can build a Lot of stuff in your books that are passive and perpetual. Right. So that's on the bottom level. Next up, I have basically like I looked at my audience and I looked at how I can bring them through a journey and what they need in the journey. Not stuff that cannibalizes one another, but stuff that becomes aspirational as people move along their careers. And so on the bottom level is the Online Trainer Academy.

It's the first ever textbook for online fitness. It's an education program, it's a do it yourself course and that helps people basically go from 0 to 1. Call it with online fitness you're probably going to do this hybrid, you're probably going to do this in addition to your work in the gym, whatever. The next step above that is a high end mentorship. I love service based people on coaching businesses all the time. I think that the best businesses in the world to own, I don't think they're great businesses to work in. I think they're phenomenal businesses to own if you know how to scale them. You know, we operate them at a 65% profit margin.

They're cash up front, they're phenomenal businesses to own. And so we have a high end coaching business above that that becomes aspirational. We have a minimum to join it. So people join our bottom one hoping that they'll get to the point where they can join Ohio one that's very, very important, that it's kind of like a ladder. And then a couple of years ago we built a software company that like is the Casio watch, the big pen, the Craigslist of software. No integrations, no automations. Build and deliver programs to your clients. Super, super basic.

And we've got 40 to 43,000 users. Some of that.

Wow. I love how you think about it as like a pyramid where everything kind of stacks on top of each other. And yeah, you know, this is one thing I think and also the insight about, you know, knowing when a service is required, what versus when it's not. I feel like, you know, maybe those are some ideas that you've got back from your original personal training days where as a personal trainer you're, you're making money when you're actually rendering a service versus something that like really scales. And you know, I think a lot of people, there's a lot of buzzwords in today's content landscape. You've got courses, you've got community, you've got books, you've got. There's so many different types of assets that people constantly want to create. And I think that insight about knowing what types of thing require your presence and your, your constant peace of mind versus something where there's no service required.

So, yeah, I think that's really important. And then, you know, one question for clarification because I know a lot of people as they start to like scale out, whether it's a course or a community, thinking about building offers and what goes in each bucket. So could you walk us through a little bit of how you separate your sort of like broader community that you had mentioned versus your super high ticket offering? Like what, what is the difference in terms of what, you know, like how what goes in each bucket?

I mean, it depends on the opportunity that you're helping people with. You know, so OZ is, I mean, if you had to really break down O is a make money opportunity. You know, we do it through online fitness, but you call it make money. And so it fits in that bucket. And so it's not perfect, but we just have a pure quantitative measure. You don't qualify for what we call the online trainer mentorship. You don't qualify for the online trainer mentorship unless you are doing at least a minimum of $6,000 a month in person training or $1,000 a month online training. Those are not crazy high numbers.

But like, you've got to have at least something going on in order to qualify for it. And so what somebody needs changes fundamentally if they're starting. You know, like there's, there's levels to business, particularly in service businesses. Zero to about a thousand, maybe zero to 5,000, 5,000 to about 2503-000003-00000 to about 2 million, 2 million to about 10 million. Like what somebody needs and how they operate their business kind of breaks at each one of those points. And so the type of support and type of skills that they need to either hire for or attain themselves changes. And so that's how we kind of define it. Whereas at the bottom, I'm kind of doing two things.

I personally just don't want to own a coaching business unless the person that we are coaching has already shown inability to execute. You know, I just. You got to choose your customers. It's as simple as that. You got to choose customers who have already shown that they're the type of customer who's going to execute and do well with the thing. And then you basically just add rocket fuel to a ship that's already moving and it blows up. And then you get good reviews. And then, you know, you don't get blamed when somebody doesn't do something.

And so number one is, yeah, sure, this is do it yourself material. This is stuff. I mean, I believe that automation is not a way to replace humans. I believe that automation is a way to amplify humans. I believe that it's a way to amplify what makes us great by removing all of the stuff that we suck at. Technology. A good learning management system, a good email drip system does a way better job in teaching somebody the basics of how to operate a service business than a human ever will. What you need a human, therefore, is to talk you off a cliff.

What you need a human, therefore, is for somebody to help you figure out what not to pay attention to. And so at the base we have that, number one, it helps be scalable. Number two, you know, we don't waste. These are not people who are in a position to invest more, which means that we are not able to provide them the support that they really need. And they haven't yet proven to us that they are the type of person who's going to execute and do really well with our services. So that's how I define it. And then, and then the next level is way higher touch. Way, way, way higher touch.

I mean this is, it's a beautifully operationalized systematized coaching program. But everybody has their support person. There's the head of coaching, there's multiple calls a week. There's a content arm that's automated, of course, and then there's individual skills coaches for them as well. But that costs a lot more. Right. And so we are on the hook to deliver value and success much more reliably and were rightfully blamed when somebody does not do well. You know, our customer service has a, has a single line that we base our entire business off of, which is, even if it's not our fault, it's our problem and it's our responsibility.

And, and so that's how I split them.

Yeah. I think what's really neat there is you said something about choosing your customers wisely. Right. And I think one thing you said in follow up to that was that if you choose the right clients, you're adding rocket fuel to what they're doing. And if you choose the wrong clients, no matter how good you are, you're getting blamed essentially for whatever is going on. And I think this is something that you see in your content businesses that you're doing, but it's also something that you, we see in our software businesses. Sometimes there's no matter, no matter what you create, no matter what Fix, you push. If you're not the right buyer for.

And that's why they have the term like, ideal customer profile. Because if you're outside of that, the feedback that you're getting, the, you know, anything, it's, it's just no matter what you do, it's not going to be right if you don't have the right person who actually needs that problem solved and is the right client. So I think that's a lesson that can kind of really apply to, to anyone.

I love telling people no. Like, even for a software, they're like, oh, do you integrate with my fitness pal? No. Why? Because you don't need it and your clients don't need it and they're not going to use it. Oh, but, but, but, but I go to this other one that does it like, it just. I don't want to, you know, I don't want to deal with it. You know, I don't think it's a good idea. I don't think it's important. I don't think it's valuable.

I believe that it is more problems than benefits. If you really believe that that's something that you need. There are other services. Here's what we recommend.

Beautiful. Beautiful. And I think that's a great place for us to sort of wrap things up. Jonathan, for anyone who's tuning in. So this is going to be fun because this is the part of the section where we actually, we can get into some audience qa, if there's any. I know we've probably answered everything that everyone's curious about, but we'll jump into that in a second. But before we do that. So anyone who's listening in live, if you have any questions for Jonathan, now's your time.

Drop those in the, the comments and we'll, we'll kind of open it up. But for everyone else who's listening at home, where can we connect with you? Where can we find you? Tell us about your upcoming book. Just give us, give us all the details.

Yeah, my book that's coming out is called the Obvious choice. Timeless lessons on success, profit, finding your way. Buy the book. You can buy it anywhere you buy books. It's HarperCollins, so it's everywhere. Kindle, Audible, hardcover, whatever you like. Buy the book. And I'm on Instagram and Twitter mostly.

I'm at its coachgoodman on both. And if you don't absolutely love the book, after you buy the book, send me a message on any of those. You can send me a message anyway, but send me a message on any of those and let me know and I will refund you 100% of what you spent. It's it's a book about how to figure out what game you're playing and appreciating that there are different games that you get to choose between. And once you know the game that you're playing, you know the games you're not playing. You can figure out the rules of the game that you've decided to play, and you can best figure out how to utilize those rules to live your best life and operate the best business. And it's 15 individual lessons, lots of stories. I did a podcast just before this.

He called it a great bathroom reader because it's, you know, it's try to make it as easy to read as possible.

Well, I'm definitely looking forward to it. Jonathan, thank you so much for joining us on uploading.

Appreciate you, Blank. Thank you.