The Hidden Work of Business

WEBVTT - The Hidden Work of Business Ruby. The views, information, and opinions expressed during this podcast are solely those of the individuals involved and do not represent those of Into It QuickBooks or any of its cornerstone brands or employees. This podcast does not constitute financial, legal, or other professional advice or services. No assurance is given that the information is comprehensive, accurate, or free of errors, and the information presented is for information purposes only.

Into It QuickBooks does not have any responsibility for updating or revising any information presented. Listeners should verify statements before relying on them. Hey everyone, and welcome to another episode of Mind the Business Small business success stories of podcasts brought to you by Into It QuickBooks and Ruby Studio from iHeartMedia. I'm Austin Hankwitz, host of The Rich Habits podcast and co founder of Witz Ventures.

I also make TikTok videos about personal finance and investing. And I'm Jennise Torres, author of Financially Lind, the Modern latinas guy to level up your dinetto and become financially Poverosa and host of joccierro Dineto. And We've got a fun one to cap off our season with Today we'll be talking about the behind the scenes of starting your business, all the blood, sweat and tears that go into achieving your dreams. I love it.

Side note, how is it the end of the season already? I feel like we just did episode one yesterday. Janie's time flies when you're having fun and talking shop with fellow entrepreneurs. It really does.

So we'll get to our guests in a minute here, but first let's talk about starting a business that in itself is something that many people find interesting. So if you're taking this entrepreneurial journey and you're not monetizing your journey, then you're leaving money on the table. People love seeing the behind the scenes stuff. Maybe they want to learn how to start their own business, or maybe they just want to meet the person that they're going to be buying from, or both.

You can do a lot by just turning your camera on and showcasing your day to day, or starting a blog or anything that you can do. Denise, I just read a QuickBooks blog that features a list of small business ideas to get started, and there's over sixty different types, from dog sitting to a mechanic to even being a vlogger. Go to QuickBooks dot intoit dot com and type sixty small business ideas for solopreneurs into the search bar and see if there's anything that resonates with you or inspires you to try something in a similar field.

Yeah, so definitely go check that out. And there's plenty more on that blog that can help and educate you too. It's pretty useful stuff because remember QuickBooks is on our side as entrepreneurs. The Intuit platform untangles so much of the day to day paperwork and really allows us to focus on those crazy behind the scenes things, tackling the challenges, keeping the lights on, and even showcasing your work to tell your story and ramp up your marketing.

So you know, Austin, I feel like every time I look at these types of lists, it cracks me up because I definitely didn't come from a oh, I want to start a business, so let me go and look at what kind of business I want to start. It definitely happened accidentally because I was doing exactly what we just mentioned, which is just sharing the behind the scenes journey. So my whole shtick as a personal finance educator started because I was just sharing my real life how I'm using my side hustle income in this case as a blogger, to pay off my student loan debt.

Like that was the goal. Initially, I just wanted to become debt free. You know, I'd been bitten by the personal finance bug, and I said, I'm just going to share what I'm doing and loan and behold sharing turned into people asking me, oh, can I pay you to teach me this? And I started a business.

So it's just crazy, like the power of showing up, sharing behind the scenes and just seeing what it turns into one. Hundred percent, and it was a similar situation for myself. Well, everyone was lip syncing and dancing on TikTok. During March of twenty twenty.

I decided that I was just going to be that weird guy that posted videos about paying off his student loans, trying to grow his credit score, investing to his retirement accounts for the first time, not from a perspective of you know, I'm some expert and you need to see what I'm doing and follow my advice. It wasn't that. It was more of a listen. We all just graduated college.

I was told that I'm supposed to not have student loan debt, have a good credit score, and have decent you know, money in my retirement account. I have no idea how to achieve those things. I'm just going to document the journey of trying to do that in a way that is sustainable and turns out to your point, people care about it, and they're willing to, you know, pay you for that advice and that sort of handholding. And it's really cool.

So today's guest is super interesting. He started out as a firefighter, and when he finally became one, he tried to make himself a plaque to commemorate it. There was a lot of trial and error with the wood burning, but he finally created this chemical substance that allowed him to engrave the wood effectively. And the recipe for that substance stayed in his mind even as he started his career as a firefighter.

He often wondered if people would want to buy that product, but the idea of starting a business around it still seemed far fetched. Until one day he was calculating how much he'd make if he worked over time all year as a firefighter, and he realized his ceiling was too low for what he wanted out of life, and so he created Scorch Marker and built a business around diy word burning materials. It started out as a side project, but eventually grew enough to where he could leave the firehouse and focus on Scorch Marker full time.

And it wasn't just the Scorch Marker brand he created. He also built a brand around himself, launching Vanitor his social media presence with videos and tutorials teaching other entrepreneurs how to launch and sell their own products, from putting out fires to well putting out fires, because that's a lot of what being an entrepreneur is. Anyway, let's welcome Evan van Awkin. I'm going to steal that genise.

That was really good. Thank you, Thank you for thank for having me. I appreciate it. Absolutely, really excited to hear man.

So, something that's really cool about your journey is that you've got the Scorch Marker brand, which is just a great product, great story all around. But then you've also got your own personal brand, which basically puts your behind the scenes in front of the scenes so everyone can see what's going on. Everything you've built, all the lessons, the ups and downs that come with entrepreneurship. When you started figuring out how to take this entrepreneurial leap, Why did you decide to document the journey?

Oh man, that is a good question. And I met you right around that time. By the way, whushas around twenty twenty, when TikTok started to blow up, We're all sitting at home. I remember I was sitting on a fire line.

I was refilling helicopters, still working at the fire department, and I decided to take a video of well what we were doing. And I just spent some time editing it, you know, in between helicopter refills and things like that. And I posted it and it got a bunch of attention, and I was like, whoa, Like, there's attension out here. This is crazy.

But I don't want to keep talking about firefighting stuff. I'm on my way out. I want to build this business. I'm planning on e quitting in a few months.

So I started to talk about what I was learning on the business side, and people actually cared. They cared about LLC formations and you know, how I do my bookkeeping and how I do purchase orders and how I ship orders. And it blew my mind and so I was really excited to just share what I was learning. Plus low key, one of my secrets in paramedic, school, fire academies all that stuff is if I lead the study groups like I will learn the material.

So if I can regurgitate it on social media, it'll force me to learn it and cement these lessons. So I was like, oh, this is a win win, let's do it, and I just jumped all that's incredible. Would you encourage other people to document their own journeys? I would, but with a caveat.

I think that it's very difficult to do two things. I think the more things that you do, the less good you are at those things. It spreads your attention, honestly, it spreads your bandwidthout and stretches you thin. And so if you document the journey within the confines of what your audience is interested in, to give you an example, if I had been documenting like building a crafting company, how I was coming up with new products and you know, making the labels and doing product development and just stayed in that lane, I think it's totally cool, But I wanted to talk about much more than that, and that's when I kind of split things out a little bit.

So if you have a business or like a product or an invention, like, yeah, show us the behind the scenes and make founder led content and you know, spill the tea. But I would stay within the confines of like what your audience is looking for, because doing both it's still hard. It's it's so much work. I've built a second business for myself in a sense, and oh I think about it all the time, and I've had to do this in the past.

Is just say no to all so many different things just so I can focus. Because whatever you focus on increases, and I wanted that to be scorch marker. So yes and no. Amazing.

This is a perfect segue because I'd love to talk more about that balance that you were talking about when it comes to running the business and then also building your personal brand. So can you take us behind the scenes about Vanitor, Like what did that process look like of you building that personal brand while also building your product based business, Like did you reach points of burnout? Did you question your sanity? One hundred percent?

I did. Yeah, there were many nights, many nights that I absolutely was questioning my sanity and amongst all the other things that we have to deal with so and put it this way, I had the e commerce company, my crafting company, where we sell our products on Amazon and into retailers and you know, on our website, and then I'm documenting this process on my personal brand. And so in the beginning, to answer your question, it just started with pure excitement. I literally just wanted to tell people what I was learning.

I was so excited about it. I was taking courses and reading books and novels and just going through the gamut of business education. But it has spread me thin. So to answer the second part of your question, Jenny's shiny objects syndrome is an affliction I suffer from.

And in the beginning, you know, I was going to zero to one. I was like, Oh, I know how to do this, Let me do it again, Let me do it again, let me do it again. And it kept distracting me, and it kept pulling my attention. And it wasn't until I just killed all those other ideas put them on the shelf that I had the time and attention to focus.

And so these are the two that I've chosen to just continue on with. Yeah, I think that speaks to a struggle that a lot of entrepreneurs make because once you strike the iron, you know, and you find something that wins, I think there's a lot of pressure to keep doing that, and then that can dilute the efforts that you've already put around what you've established. So, Evan, were you always someone who had a side hustle, a side business aside something yes. From lemonade stands to you know, little choch keys and fixing go pets, building mining rigs, like all of it.

I always wanted more. And what was the first action step you took to start inching toward, you know, escaping the matrix? Quote unquote hmm. That's a good question.

So that feeling was always in the back of my mind, knowing that I had a hard ceiling on how much money I could make, and I was like, no matter how good of a job I do, no matter what happens, I can only go this far. That didn't so well with me, But you know, that state in the back of my mind. I just kept pushing it off, you know, stomping it down, until I called my wife one day at the fire station and I said, hey, sweetheart, I know I've been at work for the last four days straight.

But the chief called, We've got a bunch of guys out, and I'm forced I have to work again. And then my shift starts in another day, so I'm going to be gone for another six days. And then she said, that's okay, we can survive without you, and I was rough. She didn't know it at the time.

She was just telling the truth. You know, my family had learned to live their life without me be present. So I lit a fire and I was like, Okay, I got to make something happen. What needs to be true in order for me to quit this career and go all in.

And I sat down at the table and I opened up my notebook and I started crunching some numbers. How much am I earning per paycheck, what's going into my pension? How much do I need for health insurance? And that's when I decided to just make the jump.

I was like, I can always come back. Let me just try it. I've got to do it. I love that.

That's so exciting. Tell me more about how QuickBooks helped you learn to navigate this sort of self employment. Oh yeah, I've been using it since the beginning. I really have.

One of the first things I did was connect to all of my bank accounts and credit cards to QuickBooks so I could see where my money was going and how it was coming in. It's not been easy, but it has definitely given me the ability to learn the financial lessons we need to learn as we keep getting to the next level. And you've been through it too, you know. In the beginning, you just know what you know and like you get and then eventually you hit a blocker and you're like, oh, I don't know how to read financial statements.

Oh my gosh. I need to get clear on how this profit and loss actually works and what it means. You need to learn how to go through it and understand it. Then next for me was balance sheet.

Ooh okay, I need to really understand this. Then it got to a point too where I was overspending. You know, I was spending based on my sales, not based on my cash flow and net profit. So I got out over my skis and I'm like, why are the credit card bills higher than the checking account?

Like this doesn't make sense, What's going on? So that I had to learn how to manage my money properly and set budgets and now use the profit first banking system and QuickBooks has enabled me to look at all of that data so that I can figure out what the problem was and learn the next lesson. You actually taught me about the profit first banking system many years ago. Do you want to take a moment to explain that to the audience and how you use quick books to implement that sort of system yourself?

Oh, one hundred percent. I have to protect the business from myself. That's what that system does. Keeps me from being irresponsible with my money.

So of money comes into the account, it gets automatically split up into like five or six different checking accounts within my banking system. Some get set aside for taxes, some get set aside for profit, A big chunk get set aside for operating expenses. Then we have stuff for like inventory, financing, sales, tax et cetera. And by doing it this way, it's kind of like a digital envelope method.

I can only spend what's in the account on that specific thing. And it forced me to make sure the irs was still happy with me, and I had enough money to buy inventory and I didn't overspend, And so all that's broken down in quick Books. It monitors all that data, everything's reconciled, and I can easily see where all the money is out all the time, and it really does it is very helpful. I'm like, oh, I can only spend this much.

It's been great. Our cashule has gone up ever since. That's incredible. I almost went bankrupt Austin, Like, I literally almost had to fold the business until I implemented this system.

It was so valuable. I love that. Evan. You've talked about how being a firefighter was kind of like a boot camp, right.

I gave you life skills that have helped you be able to now tackle the new challenges that come with entrepreneurship. So can you tell me about some key skills that you developed as a firefighter that now you apply as a business owner. I don't know if you know this, Genie, but I tried to start a business multiple times before I had worked at the fire department, and I failed every single time because I didn't have the discipline. I didn't understand it.

I didn't have that skill and getting the job of becoming a firefighter, that process of the applications and the testing and the fitness regimens and all the things shapes you into the person that they ultimately want. And so when you get hired, they put you through this big, long, eighteen week academy and they just grind you into the dirt. And that's where I learned discipline. I learned how to show up.

I learned where my limits were, both physically and mentally. And that has, oh my gosh, been so helpful. Yeah no. And the second thing too is when and we got a nine to one call, like we couldn't go home until the problem was solved, we had to fix it.

We went home when the job was done. And so it realigned my thinking into problem solution mode. Okay, here's the problem, here's some potential solutions. Let's execute as a team, let's get it done.

And so the combination of discipline and problem solving, we're huge. It also give me some perspective too, it can always get worse. Mm hm, fantastic. And I think the cool thing too that I appreciate about entrepreneurs and how they show up online is showing the building in process.

Right, So like you were showcasing your transition out of becoming a firefighter to being this personal brand business owner. Can you talk to me about how you illustrated that behind the scenes as you're like showcasing and building this brand one hundred percent. So I'm like, Okay, I'm going to document this process. My grandkids, their kids, their kids are going to watch this maybe one day, just to see where it all came from and how it began.

You know, how real and raw can I get? Because if I can shine a light on some of this this pain, some of the darkness, some of the challenges and problems, I know it's going to help somebody. And so I really wanted to lead with ruth realness and authenticity, and so that's one of the things that I think has been really really important, but it's also just been huge. Yeah, you know, I think you've tapped into something that builds human connection, which is this idea of being able to relate right when you feel like someone else can understand the pain that you're growing through, in this case, the pain of building a business without having gone to a business school or knowing what the heck you're doing or what's the difference between an LLC and an es corp.

Right, Like, Yeah, it's great to be able to find folks that you can relate to and then for you as the person building the personal brand. I think that inherently breeds trust, right, and so when we think about what makes people buy, what makes people invest in a business, it's because there's some level of trust that's been built. So I think you're following the winning blueprint. It's also a lot more sustainable to tell me about that.

I just have to show people what I'm doing. You know, I don't have to pretend. I don't have to make things look nice. It's just like, it is what it is.

If you don't like it, okay, that's fine. I'm not for everybody, but for the ones that are like, oh my gosh, like that shipping setup that is exactly what I do. You know, there's boxes everywhere like yes, yes, real life. Yeah.

Keeping it real and showing real life is I think more important. We're in like a trust recession right now. I don't trust people on the Internet, and it's just really hard to build that up. So I'm like, I want to I want to contribute to the good side, like Austin my man, let's go.

Well, speaking of contributing to the good side, I mean, you've got millions of followers, A lot of people definitely trust you, they follow you, they're excited about you. So tell me about when vanderder went from a personal brand. Document the journey to an actual business itself. It started pretty quick, you know, with getting monetized from views on social media.

That was the first big step, and then companies started to reach out and ask if they could make sponsored content. But I'm gonna be completely honest with you here, I have recently shut down almost all money making revenue streams from my personal brand. I tried coaching. I had built courses and communities.

I had done group coaching and individual and all this different stuff, and it was taking so much time and energy away from me, and it didn't give me an opportunity to build the business. So over the last couple of years, I've decided I'm just going to keep giving everything away for free and focus on just a couple different ways of earning. So I put out free courses, I've got a free community, I answer all the messages. I just put everything out there, give it all away for free, like anything I have.

Take it it's yours because I want to build that trust and I want to make a difference. And I didn't have someone like me when I was building my business in the beginning. Consequently, what has happened is, instead of monetizing my audience and charging them money, I've just grew even faster. I built up even more of an audience, and now I'm able to work very closely with brands and help them make better content.

And so instead of monetizing my customers, I work with larger companies who need my skill set, the skill stack of understanding the business, understanding the language, content creation, you know, the negotiations, advertising, you know, all the content, all of those things. You know. I've created this unique little niche for myself, and so now I work with these brands and I make them a bunch of videos. They run them as ads, and I'm able to help them get more sales and just keep giving everything away for free.

So the business it's evolved in many different ways. But I like doing what I'm doing now. I think it's fun because it keeps me in the creative side. No, I think that's great and evolving.

I mean that is what it means to own a business. You have to figure out what's working, what's not working, then continue to iterate and figure out how you can now to your point have enough time to actually build Scorch Marker will also you know, building your personal brand and balancing the two of those. So tell me now, I'm curious how much of your time is spent on Scorch Marker and building it to an eight figure business versus Vanitor and like maintaining your existing I mean, you mentioned fifty to one hundred pieces of content per week just kind of putting it out there so people can see it in real time.

So like, what's the time split on that? Is it maybe twenty five percent Vanitor in seventy five percent Scorch Marker or maybe something like how are you sort of approaching it from a time perspective. That's pretty close. I would say twenty percent personal brand eighty percent Scorch.

And the more I build in Scorch, the more problems I solve, the further I go, the more content I have for my personal brand. Evan, when you look back now at Scorch Marker and Vaniter, how are those endeavors similar and how are they different? It's totally different audience for one, but they're similar in that, like they're both businesses and I'm documenting both of them, just doing it in kind of different ways. Like our customers for Scorch Marker are ladies in the Midwest that are typically over sixty years old, and so they don't care about the manufacturing equipment and how I invoice, Like they just don't care, but I care and I'm super excited about it.

And business owners are my people. So by documenting that stuff on the personal brand side, like, it's a completely different set of questions, completely different demographic and it's able to fill my cup in by having my foot in you know, kind of both areas, but they're more similar than you would think in terms of like delivery and management and systems. Sure, it's really interesting. Yeah, I'm curious because you do have such different target audiences with each one.

What are some unique challenges that you have run into running a DIY craft business and a personal brand that's built around entrepreneurship. So I'm really good at operations and execution and product development. I can make content when I'm not. I'm not a crafter.

I don't spend my time doing needlework and coming up with cool projects and going to Dollar Tree and shopping at their stores. I just I just don't do it. It's not me, And so that was the biggest hurdle to overcome. It's like, how am I going to make videos that relate to these ladies?

How can I make a video that they would actually care about? So that's when I was like, oh, I'll just become a student, you know, I'll take the student approach and just wear it on my sleeve that I have no idea what I'm doing and I'm going to figure this out as I go and take their input and learn from them. M hm. So I just had to like knock myself down and just be like, I don't know what I'm doing, but we're going to try it.

Yeah, and it's worked out. And as far as the back end, how much overlap do the two businesses have when it comes to systems, processes, the way you guys are tracking your inventory and accounting and all that stuff. Yeah, as far as the content side, it's very very similar. But the most similar the thing that I use exactly the same for all of it is QuickBooks.

I know, I swear, it's just the accounting is just standard. Yeah, the same thing, the same management, the same processes. It is just almost an exact replica. Yeah, I think being able to understand those revenue streams from those different businesses really helps you focus in on double down on understand you know where your best return on investment is coming from.

So the fact that you've been able to retrofit QuickBooks into two completely different businesses, I think it just speaks to the versatility of the system. I was just in there today, So yeah, it's just very highly used system that we have in place here just because of all the beautiful data I'm able to look at. So, Evan, what is next for Vanitor and Scorch Marker. Let's start with Scorch.

There's a few constraints I'm trying to solve right now. One of them is average order value and the second is retention. Those are our current constraints to get to the next level. I have some ideas on how we're going to do it, and that's my focus this year.

Increasing average order value, conversion rate, and retention. That's what we need to solve in order to get to the next level. To make that jump from two to three million a year all the way up to ten. There'll be a few more in the in between.

It's a tough gap to cross, but I'm really looking forward to who I'm going to become in the process of learning those skills. So that is very exciting. So that's where we're at. On the scorch marker side, also doing more of what works and adding live streaming to the mix.

I think it's going to play a big factor in the future. Now on the personal brand side is my south strange, but I'm doing less and less and less, but we're growing more than we've ever grown in the past. So give you an example, like I'm just because now I'm just giving everything away for free and just putting every thought and idea and lesson and you know, hardship out there. It's simplified things.

And so as I'm going through this process of building this company to an eight figure brand, I'm like, oh cool, that sucked, let's talk about it. And so that's the future. I'm going to keep documenting, I'm going to keep creating, I'm going to keep giving, and in the future we'll have more clarity on what we're going to do with it. But for now, it's just it's a creative outlet for me.

It's self sustaining and it's helping me get in extra reps, which I need. That's amazing. I want to go back to Scorch Marker for a second. You mentioned average order value and retention, and it kind of goes back to what you were talking about before with like the shiny ball syndrome where you're really good at taking things from zero to one.

Right. I'm sure in your brain you're like, Okay, what's the next product I can invent to take me from two or three million a year to ten million plus a year? Right? What new products do I need to create and sell to really make that jump?

When an actuality, forget about that. Let's double down to what's working and make it just that much more profitable, and like compound the existing growth and you know, everything that we've created so far over the last call it half decade plus now, but focus on that retention, focus on that average order value and everything to ensure that it's trending in the right direction versus just now putting new ideas and new products in the mix. I want to talk about that because it's it's a big thing that every single company has to solve at one point or another.

Average order value being the average amount that someone spends when they come to your website how much money is your customer going to spend when they buy from you? And then retention being how often are they going to come back and buy from you? So to unpack that a little bit, for the average order value, add costs are expensive. It costs a lot of money to buy a customer, whether it's for a digital product or a physical product.

And in our industry, we can expect ad costs to go up to about fifty dollars per customer. And so if we're going to have to spend fifty dollars to get a customer, we need at least two times that plus our cost of goods in order to make enough profit to continue to put back into the machine. So that means I need to get my average order value up to like one hundred and twenty dollars. So then you're like, well, how do I do that?

How do I get customers to spend more money? So what we have been experimenting with is bundling and putting things together into do it yourself kits basically like make this project or get all the things you need to make your own project. And so now the juice to start following. Okay, what other ancillary items are going to help make them more successful at what they want to accomplish.

We started with just a marker, and now we have a paint and we have a wood finishing oil, and we have a sandy kit, and we have a heat gun, and we have paint brushes, and we have a pre treatment, and we have all these other things, including stencils and wood itself that help make that whole experience special and just like one stop. And so I'm paying attention to what my customers are asking me on social media, and I'm listening to the emails and the customer service feedback, and I'm like, oh, why they keep asking me where to get good wood?

You can't get it at the craft stores. Okay, I'm going to source it, I'm going to develop it, I'm gonna find it, and we're going to bundle it together. So incrementally, our average order value has continued to increase, and we just need to stay on the path keep it going up. But then if you just buy a customer one time and then never come back, that's a lot of wasted money.

I need them to come back and buy again from me. How do I do that. I've got to make an awesome product that they use up and want to refill. So that's what we spent all of last year doing making our products better.

And I'll be honest with you, Austin, our products weren't good enough for a really long time. We just muscled through it with good marketing, and so I had to completely redesign everything from the ground up. The current variation of our Scorch marker and Scorge paint took two hundred and fifty two attempts, cost me over a half a million dollars five years. There's nine chemists.

I'm like, it was no joke, but we finally cracked it and people are now starting to tell their friends about it and refer us to other people and come back and buy again. And so those are the two focuses this year. That's why I brought them up. We need them to come back and buy again because we don't have to spend the money to acquire that customer if they come back and repeat purchase from us.

And then we also need to increase the value we provide on the front end so the customers feel comfortable spending more money. That is incredible insight. And the funny part is I knew you were going to say bundle, because you already made a whole deep dive YouTube video about this on Vanitor's YouTube channel that I watched, and it's it's just awesome. It goes to show how good of a job you've done of thanks solving business problems while also sharing what you've learned in real time with millions of people on the internet.

And I very much commend you on that. You're doing an incredible job, my friend. I appreciate you saying that, Austin, and it makes me feel so good that you watch that video. That is so cool.

What an honor. Evan. We want to thank you so much for being here, sharing all of this wisdom that you've acquired along the way, and most importantly for sharing that wisdom right because you could easily just be hoarding all this information building your empire, but you've actually decided to take us along the way. And I think that speaks to the kind of entrepreneur that I love to support and that others do as well, which is one who is, you know, not just talking to talk, but walking the walk.

So thank you so much for being here. I appreciate you saying that, Jenise. Thanks for having me. You guys are really good at what you do.

What a team. Thank you, my gosh, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much. There is nothing cooler than getting a little behind the scenes sneak peek into how fellow entrepreneurs are building their businesses.

Janies mm hmm. Yeah. You know, it's funny because obviously Evan and I and you we all run completely different businesses, but there's so much to relate on about the behind the scenes and like how chaotic things can be, but also how gratifying it is when things do work out right, and it's those moments of figuring it out of seeing those successes that really does keep things going well. I think what's so powerful is and this is something the three of us all have in common here.

You know, we're so excited and curious about our respective domains. But what's so cool about it is we are so excited about these things that we took to the internet to tell the world about it, and what we've learned and the mistakes we've made, and just being able to have the opportunity to say, listen, you know exactly what he said. I'm not a crafty person, so I'm going to be the student. I'm just going to start making crafts and wait for these incredible women from the Midwest to correct me on how to do it right, and then go back and forth with them and make a better product for them.

It's just being able to document the journey, document the process, and share what we learn in real time, the ups and downs, you know. I think this podcast is a great example of that as well. Yeah, you know, one of the sens that I loved that Evan shared was around solving a deeper problem for your audience or for your community, and then that being a way to make more money. Right.

So he was talking about how he's looked at bundles and then just adding different things that he can put into these diy kits that now solve multiple problems. And it's funny because I've been going through that same process with my own programming. I have a bunch of digital courses, and I've been looking at how can I charge more for essentially the same product, but adding maybe some done for you help, or adding an additional AI resource that helped totally you know, do something else.

And I've been able to like five x my product price because of just like getting creative about how you package and market something. So I think that's a super important lesson for entrepreneurs. You don't necessarily have to build something new, just make the thing that you're already doing even better. And my big takeaway from this conversation and it's a personal something I'm trying to work on myself here as I you know, I'm twenty nine at the moment, but I turned thirty here in twenty twenty six, and I'm very excited about that.

And so I keep asking myself, what does thirty year old Austin do right? What kind of an entrepreneur is he? And Evan kept talking about how what is the eight figure entrepreneur Evan do right? What are the skills he's learned, What are the ways of leadership and marketing and different things that he's working on and getting better at every single day.

He mentioned he can't wait to meet that version of himself. And I kind of have that same mentality right now, and I'm sure a lot of listeners have this as well, which is like, you know, it's not just what you're building right now, but what are the traits and characteristics and habits that you're implementing on a daily basis that you know you're going to have to do if you want to get to that next level as an entrepreneur. Yeah. I mean, I can't think of a better way to close out the season.

I can't either Denise what a perfect guest for this show. I mean, he's basically doing a behind the business but for his own business. And he's doing it in the right way, amassing a following, sharing his knowledge in a way that helps others and also uplifts himself. He's taking his behind the scene and monetizing it and it's working in a huge way.

I just love it. I can't believe we had them on. I'm so excited about this. And speaking of things we love, let's get this audience to work.

Love. Putting them to. Work sounds great, Austin. Okay, So for this week's homework, try to go online and check out at least three different entrepreneurs showcasing their journeys like evan Is, pay attention to what challenges they've overcome and try to learn from their mistakes and accomplishments, and note how they present their channels, blogs, etc.

What works for you and what doesn't. Emily what you like when telling your own story. Also, evaluate the social media presence of your business. How much of the content is showing behind the scenes, can you add more and what would be an appropriate way to showcase that, maybe creating additional channel, a blog, a newsletter, something of that nature.

Look at your daily schedule. Is there something you can lean on quick books to automate or help with that will free up time to showcase your behind the scenes work for marketing purposes. If there is, you'll find it and execute. Take the craziest day you've had as a small business owner, you know, the one I'm talking about, the one where everything goes wrong, the one that you talk about at parties.

Turn that story into a blog post or a vlog video or even an instant story and see what happens. Janias, it looks like that was season four. I can't believe it, but you know, it's been a pleasure as always. Austin, Absolutely, I'd so much fun talking with countless small business.

Owners, and to all of those who are listening, thank you so much for joining us. Feel free to check out any episodes you may have missed or want to revisit, and good luck on all your entrepreneurial journeys. We'll see what the future holds. We sure will.

Everybody take care, goodbye and good luck to all of you. That's it for today's episode. You can find me on social media at jocierro dinetto podcast. And you can find me at Austin Hankwitz.

You can follow Into It quick Books on all social media at books. To get the tools you need to start, run and grow your business, head to QuickBooks dot com slash mtv today. Don't forget to follow this show wherever you listen to podcasts so you can stay up to date on future episodes. We also want to hear from you, so be sure to leave us a rating and a review.

See you next time. This podcast is a production of iHeartRadio's Ruby Studio and Into It QuickBooks. Our executive producers are James Foster and Ryan Martz.