Summary
Toby and Shelley discuss how they made the changes necessary to move from treasure hunting, to treasure hunt authors to encore entrepreneurs. The world changed and so did we.
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Transcription
The Big Shift of the Last Year
[00:00:17] Shelley: hello and welcome to messages and methods. I’m your host, Shelley Carney tonight. We’ll be talking about Encore entrepreneurs and making the big shift into the Encore entrepreneur lifestyle.
[00:00:34] Toby: That’s a lifestyle now. I think I actually like it being a lifestyle because that means I have a new lifestyle. I’m an encore entrepreneur.
[00:00:53] Shelley: How many encores is this?
[00:00:58] Toby: Hey, it’s Shelley and Toby and we’re talking about Encore. Entrepreneurs. Come and join us.
[00:03:26] Shelley: We’re going to talk about our entrepreneurial journey and it is a journey because if you’ve never been an entrepreneur and then you decide to become one, there’s a lot of challenges to overcome. So let’s get into that. Here’s my first question for Toby. How did you change from being an employee to an entrepreneur?
[00:03:54] Toby: I’m going to give you the short version. I left college to join the military. I was in the military and was effectively an employee for five years. I got a regular paycheck.
[00:04:06] Shelley: Waiting for somebody else to tell you what to do.
[00:04:07] Toby: Exactly and worse. You volunteered for being told what to do, right? I guess when you signed up for it.
[00:04:16] Shelley: Then when you get a job, you sign up for listening to your boss.
[00:04:19] Toby: Because I had worked with the Army Security Agency and I’d had top-secret crypto clearance before my service time was ended, I was invited to join the National Security Agency in and outside of Washington and Maryland at Fort George G. Meade.
I became not only an employee of an institution, a government agency, a bureaucracy but it had the safety and predictability of being a government entity. It’s very predictable. You know what your wages are, you know what your next year’s wages are going to be, what your potential for going up the ladder is, how much sick leave you get, how much vacation time, et cetera.
It was very predictable. That was a good time because I was raising a young family and I wanted that kind of predictability. I was with them for five years. You guys may have heard this story before. What happened was I was trying to finish off my degree. I studied journalism at UNM, but I was working towards a degree in photography and photojournalism. I was finishing that up at the Corcoran School of Art. It’s now the Corcoran School of Art Design at George Washington University. I used to go out with the family and I would take pictures and I put them up on my cubicle wall. One day, one of the director-level people from upstairs came down and he said, “Are you a photographer?”
I said I will be soon. I don’t have a degree in it. He said, “You want to take some pictures for the agency?” I thought they probably want me to shoot some portraits of some executive or something like that. Then the gentlemen said, go downstairs and get your orders. He told me the room number. I’m thinking to myself, why do I need orders to shoot portraits?
[00:05:55] Shelley: Why do you need orders to shoot a camera?
[00:05:58] Toby: It was actually orders for Nairobi Kenya and they called it a mission. The project was for me to track the building of the Russian embassy in Nairobi photographically. I did that for three months. I went home and tried to explain to my wife what was happening, I wasn’t losing my job. I was still working for the Agency, but they’d asked me to do this. They called it TDY temporary duty and I was there for three months, came back and turned over my work.
Actually, the work was going out weekly in the diplomatic pouch from the US Embassy. I went back to my desk as an intelligence analyst to work with a group of people, and told stories about my excursion, if you will, to Nairobi. But that wasn’t a National Security Agency job, that wasn’t what you did for the NSA.
Most of what you did was intercept desk work, right? Although they do now, they didn’t then have active field agents. They let other agencies do that. I forgot all about that. Then about three months later the same gentleman came down and said, “We’ve had a request from one of the other agencies in our community,” and that community is the intelligence community.
“They would like to use you for one of their projects.” I said, “What about my work here?” He said, “They liked your work. We liked the idea that they liked your work. We would like to send you TDY for three months over to their project and I can’t tell you anything about that project, unfortunately.”
I went off and did as good a job as I was capable of doing. I came back and they liked the work. About three months after that, the same gentleman came down and we had a long conversation about my career and where it was going. He thought there was this great opportunity for me to serve all the agencies because I had a clearance. I could serve all the agencies in our community in the same way that I had served this one, the NSA and the one that I was asked to do after that.
He said, “I’m going to suggest you become an independent contractor.” At that time, I never even had any thought about becoming an independent contractor, never thought about starting my own business. I had five years with the military and five years with the NSA, everything’s going good. I had my career plan.
Then he said, “and we’ll help.” I didn’t know what that meant exactly. Would that help mean throwing you out and you’re on your own? About three days later, I was invited to go to a conference room and there were five or six other people in that conference room. They all represented different parts of different agencies, including the Small Business Administration.
My agency wanted this to happen so much that they brought in the Small Business Administration to train me in running a small business. They brought in George Washington University to give me my degree as quickly as possible. They brought in contracting officers from three different agencies to explain to me how the whole process worked and to go through that training.
Anyway, they did everything they could, and they were going to give me six months to get all of that done, going through the Small Business Administration training, and finishing up my degree at a rapid pace. Then going through these contracting schools that were being held and they were willing to pay me through that whole process.
So I had six months of intensive training on how to become, a small business owner. I learned how to become an independent contractor to agencies inside the intelligence community in the federal government. By the time I got there, after I said goodbye, there was a point at which I left the NSA. When you leave the NSA, there’s no gold watch. There are no benefits check to walk away with. I think I got a couple of thousand bucks worth of unused leave time. The next day I was an independent contractor and within a week, I won my first competitive contract.
It wasn’t a sole-source contract. I wanted it to be a sole-source contract, but I had to compete for it. I had some benefits. I got points because I was a veteran. I got points because I was a disabled veteran. I got points because I was Hispanic. I got the contract and it required travel. By that time, my wife had gotten used to the idea that this was going to involve travel. At that point, I was on my own and that was 1979 or 1980 by the time it got started. I did that from 1980 to 2010, so for 30 years.
[00:11:07] Shelley: Here’s what I took from that story that I think can be of help to other people is get some training and some help, some mentoring. That is available to you from the Small Business Administration, but also from a volunteer agency called SCORE.
[00:11:28] Toby: SCORE stands for Senior Corps of Retired Executives. It’s a non-profit organization that provides free information and training.
[00:11:54] Shelley: They have online trainings all the time. They have a library full of training videos available to anybody who wants it. Just Google SCORE.
[00:12:05] Toby: Senior Corps, C O R P S. Senior Corps of Retired Executives.
[00:12:11] Shelley: Capital S C O R E. Look it up, go there. They’ve got all kinds of free training. They have mentors who volunteer to work with people who are transitioning to owning their own business. It doesn’t matter if you’re 20 years old or 80 years old, they will help you to do that.
[00:12:33] Toby: Transitioning. The Small Business Administration is the same. They have courses, some of the courses you have to pay for, but they’re college-level in rigor and they teach you the fundamental things of being able to operate a business. That’s where I learned you have to hire an attorney and accountant and insurance agent.
I remember having that class where they told you the people that you want to engage as soon as possible to ensure that you didn’t screw up your business. To this day, when people say, what would you do? I would say, hire an attorney, an accountant, and an insurance agent because that protects you and your business.
[00:13:16] Shelley: So then you’re making this much money. You’re not going to have to pay taxes quarterly yet, but come back next year and let’s discuss it again. You don’t have to see that accountant all the time, but they get you set up and started.
[00:13:29] Toby: I did that under the auspices of Videotero, LLC and I did that until around 1995. Then I formed a B to G consulting LLC. That was based on the fact that I was getting requests from government contractors to help them do business with the intelligence community. I started a consulting business that did training and consulting. Mostly it was training and consulting, but it was all about what you had to know and what you had to do to be able to do business with the intelligence community.
The reason everybody wanted to do that was not that the contracts were bigger. I worked on contracts that were anywhere from $50 million to $1 billion contracts for companies like Oracle and Microsoft and Sybase. But the nice thing about the Intelligence community is, there was a lot of sole-source, meaning you didn’t have to compete, they would put it out and they would say, this is going to be sole-source. We want this person to do it or this company to do it. But the big problem with the Intel and the Intel community is it means the first thing you have to do is find people on your staff that have clearances. The easiest way to do that is to hire away from those agencies.
It’s okay to do that. You can hire them away to be on your project teams if you want. What happens is you find some guy that’s been working for the government for five or six years at a certain salary, and you offer him a job that basically triples his salary immediately.
[00:15:08] Shelley: That’s another great thing is if you’re going to go into business for yourself there are so many people out there who can help you and are willing to help you. But first, try those volunteer organizations like SCORE and SBA because they are set up for that.
You could always go to your brother-in-law or your friend and say, what should I do? Who do you recommend? They can help you as well to connect with the right people. For instance, I know in the film industry, there were one or two agencies in the state that handled insurance for film projects. Outside people didn’t know who that was unless they asked around. So that’s always helpful.
[00:16:02] Toby: That’s my story and I’ve never stopped. I’ve never been employed. I’ve had long-term contracts with organizations, both government and public and private.
[00:16:19] Shelley: We heard about the people who helped you. We heard that you got a contract the first week you were on your own. But what were some of the challenges that you had to overcome in that transition?
[00:16:30] Toby: The challenges were funny because I should have been prepared for that. My father was a business owner. His brothers were business owners. My grandfather on my mother’s side was a business owner. My mother was a business owner, except for the period after my father died. She just didn’t want to be in the business and went to work as a teacher, went back to her teaching roots.
It was funny that my expectation was that I was always going to be employed. I really thought I was going to be a long-term employee of the federal government. I was going to rise from a GS 15 level intelligence analyst to a director or whatever that was. That was the plan.
So when this opportunity popped up, the first reaction was I have to explain this, not only to myself, I could justify it to myself, but by this time I had a family. They had certain expectations that what they got. Here was a guy who was consistent. He was going to leave home in the morning. He was going to come back in the afternoon. He was going to coach soccer. He was going to be around for soccer tournaments on weekends and soccer games on weekends. He was going to bring home a check on the first and the 15th of every month. So when you go back and you say, first of all, there is no schedule. I don’t know when I’m going to be gone. It’s dependent on the next contract or where I’m going. That’s the first thing. The second thing is the money is not regular. You’ll have a contract that may pay you based on getting to certain milestones. But for the most part, it’s not going to be the first and 15th of every month.
Then there’s the government contracting process, which is rigorous. It’s a rigorous process. There’s a lot of paperwork involved. Back then it was paperwork. It wasn’t anything you could do online. It’s changed ever since then. For example, there were some cases where you had to write a proposal in response to an RFP, a request for proposal.
Those were the competitive instances where you didn’t know if you were going to win. There were a lot of risks that you wouldn’t otherwise have if you had been employed. Then you’re employed by the federal government, for the most part, if you can deal with the bureaucracy and you can accept the fact that they do have a purpose in life, right? A lot of people think there’s no purpose for the government except to be irritating. They do the bureaucracy. The people that I worked with were great people and I loved working with them. But there is that consistency if you stay. If you stay there, and you’re good, your income will grow at a regular pace and it’s a fair income. You will be promoted into management, the GSS level.
Eventually you’ll retire as a director with a very good retirement income and you don’t have to spend 30 years. You could do it in 20 years for a partial retirement, but if you spend 30 years, it’s basically 100% of your salary. It has all these consistently defined benefits. When you’re married to someone and you’re raising children who have expectations of going to college, that sounds pretty good.
I thought I’m always going to be employed. I’m always going to have healthcare. I’m always going to have 15 days leave, sick days, and 15 vacation days a year. It was all very predictable. I think families for the most part prefer the predictable.
That makes their lives a lot easier and they prefer the idea that he’s going to leave by the time we’re getting up and he’s going to be back by the time we’re finishing our homework and then we can have dinner and do whatever. He’ll make it back in time for soccer practice.
Once you make a decision to go out on your own, especially when you have a family, the predictability quotient goes up and because the predictability quotient goes up, the stress quotient goes up. Stresses that you didn’t imagine in terms of your family life, you didn’t expect and would not have experienced or encountered if you had stayed with the government. Those thoughts all pop up.
It makes everything a little bit more difficult. It’s hard enough raising a family. It’s hard, enough being married. It’s hard enough raising a family when situations are predictable. Then the situation on your side changes. Since you’re the primary breadwinner, when you start inserting unpredictability into the familial set of relationships, that makes it difficult. It creates stress on them that they didn’t expect. I was fortunate enough not to have too much inconsistency. There were good times and then it would slow down, but there was enough money in the bank that they wouldn’t notice.
One of the things I learned was to put it all in the bank. Don’t go out and buy a car the minute you get paid. Just put it in the bank because you’re going to need it for a month or two before the next engagement comes. That was the first 15 years from 1980 to 1995, then when I came back from Bosnia, I felt like I’ve got to do something else. I can’t keep going to these places where people are shooting at you.
That’s when I formed the consulting company. I was asked by a friend who worked for a large government contractor, he called me and said, “Could you just come in and teach our salespeople how to do this?” They paid me what I asked for. I made up a number to see if I could make a number so high they would say no. Because that was my business.
[00:21:56] Shelley: Start with a high number, then they can always negotiate with you.
[00:22:03] Toby: That’s basically what happened. I haven’t seen him in years, but when we’d see each other the first thing he’d say was, “You really got us on that first contract.” He remembers that.
It was three really pleasurable days for me. I really enjoyed the teaching. I really enjoyed being the person in the room who knew all this stuff, and who could answer all their questions, and who set expectations. It’s not like other government contracting, not at all. Because if you don’t have the people with clearances, they’re not going to hire you anyway. They’ll make it a requirement. You have to have X number of people with this level of clearance. Otherwise, we’re not going to hire you. So it was just fun being in that room for three days. I thought, why don’t I try this a couple more times?
So at networking events, I had a little three over brochure. If there was somebody that indicated an interest saying, “You’re a government contractor for the Intel guys? How do you do that?” Here’s my brochure. That led to not only two teaching gigs, but consulting gigs. They’d bring you in after they’d won a contract, or you’d be part of the proposal team where you just helped them write the proposal in response to this RFP.
That moved me away from the traveling and I was home more. I think sometimes the kids didn’t actually enjoy it. They were glad that I’d be gone for two months. But that stabilized not only the income but the travel. I still did a couple of projects. I went back to Iraq in 2003-2004, and then Afghanistan in 2008-2009. But it enabled me to stabilize a little bit.
The other thing that you have to learn if you work for someone in the private or public sector is you’re working on growing things like social security, 401ks, those kinds of things. So you’re working towards your retirement when you’re an independent contractor. When you’re self-employed, you have to figure out how your retirement is going to work out. You have to start saving and preparing for that independent of the fact that social security is not an option for you.
[00:24:24] Shelley: It’s good to point out that you were letting go of that security, but at the same time, we should also point out that security is an illusion. Yes, a government job is pretty secure, but when the government shuts down, which it has, you’re off with no money coming in and then you realize it wasn’t as secure as you thought it was.
No job is. You could go in to work one day in any industry whether that’s making landline telephones, “Hey, we don’t make those anymore,” or telephone books, “Hey, we don’t make those anymore.” Newspapers are becoming very scarce as well.
These things phase out and the security that you thought you had was just an illusion. So although it’s right in your face, becoming an entrepreneur, a business owner means youI don’t have security. At the same time, you do know you’re in charge of everything, right? You’re the one who’s responsible for money coming in or not.
[00:25:42] Toby: There’s that plus you’re also responsible for where you invest your intellectual energy, right? One of the things about being employed in a company or a government entity, private or public practice where you are an employee is you’re pretty much limited in terms of your intellectual mobility.
The only example I have is an intelligence analyst. If you’re an intelligence analyst, there’s a way to climb up, but you’re going to be in that field. If you want to learn how to write C plus code, you have to do that on your own. But because you’re so busy between work and family, you don’t get that opportunity.
One nice thing about being employed you have time to invest your intellectual energy in other pursuits, learning other things. You almost have to, you have to learn other things so you can add to your skillset to make different offerings available to your prospective clients. You should never spend more time in intellectual research than you do in marketing.
[00:26:56] Shelley: So your production has to equal your consumption.
[00:26:58] Toby: Exactly. You want to be at a point where you’re making enough in marketing and selling and then producing income that you could spend some of that time in other research, in other areas, investigating, and learning.
Although the intelligence community required a good foundation in computer technology, it didn’t require as much as I know about computers. But because I was so interested in them and I really felt like it was going to drive everything, I thought I better know how these things work and what they can do and where they’re going. The same is true for audio and video. Audio and video knowledge was required on a lot of my early projects, and a lot of later projects for that matter. So I had to keep up with that and it had nothing to do with intelligence collection, either open source or otherwise.
You had to know about these things and you become not only a Jack of all trades, but then eventually also a master of all those trades. That provides all these different opportunities as the world is changing. You will have big world-changing events like 9/11 and the pandemic, which changed the way we do business. You have all these tools available to you. Like stepping into a studio as a result of the effect of the pandemic on interpersonal communications. That wasn’t a big deal for us.
[00:28:30] Shelley: We just did it. That big technology existed. More people joined us.
[00:28:34] Toby: It was an easy transition for us. We said, let’s just do this. I don’t remember us asking should we go this way? Should we start doing it? We just said, we’re going to do this, and it was an easy transition.
[00:28:49] Shelley: Thinking about the past year, how has being an entrepreneur helped you to shift into a new business?
[00:29:01] Toby: There is a characteristic of people who think of themselves as entrepreneurs and that is the seriality of the entrepreneur. Serial entrepreneurs. They just can’t stop it.
[00:29:18] Shelley: Once they learn how to do successful business, they keep on doing it again and again.
[00:29:24] Toby: You’re right. But the characteristic that is most valuable to them is the foresight necessary to make an immediate determination of whether that’s the direction they want to go or not. The fact that it becomes a business and they have that kind of experience is less relevant to them than the risk analysis necessary to say, I can do this.
I can become an ‘encore entrepreneur.” It’s not anything that I’m uncomfortable with. While other people might look at that and say, “That’s too risky.” “I can’t imagine doing that.” “I’m afraid of being in front of a camera,” or “I don’t know how to build the technology,” or “I don’t know what YouTube live is,” or “I might lose it.”
Think about how we did Streaming New Mexico. That was based on somebody saying, could you stream this one event for us? We bought a little $500 box and the next thing we know, we’re in a business that’s generating money for everybody. We’re meeting lots of people and getting lots of requests for business. I made a $10,000 investment in that big black box that we used. Today it wouldn’t be a $10,000 investment. It would probably be about half that if not less.
[00:30:51] Shelley: We still had all the same issues with getting connected.
[00:30:52] Toby: That was the most unpredictable part of that. That was the fact that these events are held at locations that were not designed for streaming. Although you could, if you went to San Francisco or Austin or Washington, where the hotels understood that this technology is necessary. Like distance learning, it may have changed as a result of the pandemic, but back then, it was a challenge.
[00:31:21] Shelley: They still need to shore up the infrastructure of the internet.
[00:31:25] Toby: But it was good and it was easy and we made money and we had fun. Then I decided to retire again.
[00:31:32] Shelley: What are some of the skills that you have used over the years as an entrepreneur that make it easy for you to make quick, easy decisions? You easily can decide you need to pivot or here’s a business idea. I like this, that’s great and I’m going to go for it. Then you go off in another direction.
[00:31:54] Toby: I don’t know if it’s skills as much as it is the… maybe it is a skill. So one skill is the ability to see the potential. Like where is this going to go? Based on what I know about where the world is right now and where it’s going to be in 3-5 years, is this worth making the investment?
That’s the first thing, the ability to discern direction, and it has nothing to do with risk, right? If you start doing risk analysis you’re not going to make a great entrepreneur because the risk is always there. It’s true for any business. But you say based on what I know, what I’ve done, what I’ve accomplished, and where I see us going, this is a wondrous wonderful opportunity.
This is really interesting, you’ve heard me use the word because if I use the word interesting, then we’re moving off in a funny little direction here. So an interesting opportunity. That’s the first thing. The second thing is the willingness to make the investment, and there are two kinds of investments you have to make.
One is time and the other is money. If you have any sense that you can’t afford either one of them, then don’t do it. You have to be willing to make that investment anytime you make the decision. The first part is making a decision. I know there’s some ridiculous statistic about only 10% of all entrepreneurial opportunities having any chance of success. It’s a very little number, but they don’t stop. A hundred percent of these guys, even at a 10% success rate, will go on to the next one. Part of it is the confidence and maybe it goes back to vision. You need the willingness to invest time and money and the confidence just to keep doing it until you get it.
Every time you launch one of these entrepreneurial race cars whether it wins or loses, you learn something about it that refines it. The reason they call them serial entrepreneurs is because they can come up with a business idea a day based on whatever they screwed up yesterday. They’ll look at it and say, “I sure made a mistake there. Let’s do it this way this time.” Those three things, time, money and confidence, plus the personality that doesn’t quit. I’m sure as a life coach you’d know the name for this, they don’t get beat up over mistakes.
[00:34:22] Shelley: They don’t beat themselves up. They’re not attached to the outcome emotionally.
[00:34:28] Toby: I guess that’s the connection, right? If it is a failure, it’s a failure. Look, if I screwed that up. What else can I do? They’re not going to sit and mope around for a week while they think about, I spent the money and spent the time it didn’t work out the way I planned. What’s next? is their attitude. That attitude of what’s next? What do I do next? Where do I want to go? Don’t give up. I don’t. I’ve heard the term sticktuitiveness. I don’t think it’s that. It’s the agility and resilience necessary to go again.
I’m just not going to let that affect me. I’m going to move on to the next thing. Their mind is in constant motion and there’s a certain amount of youthfulness associated with that. I get a sense that one of the characteristics of entrepreneurs is that you go to sleep late at night eventually because you’re afraid you’re going to miss some idea or thought that’s going to come as a result of watching a TV commercial, you’re constantly consuming ideas. There’s a bunch of little tiny ideas rolling around your head then one day they all clump up and they become a big idea with lots of potential.
That’s synchronicity and that happens to me. You’re just absorbing all these different inputs from a variety of sources. They go in the back of your head, you don’t think about it for a month. Then one day somebody says something and it all comes together.
Oh, I get that! Boom! Let’s make an investment. Let’s put the time and money into this and see where it goes.
[00:36:22] Shelley: Speaking of vision, what is your vision for the coming year and how do you think we will make that happen?
[00:36:31] Toby: Before I do that, I want to talk about the last year. We had a very successful YouTube channel focused on the Forrest Fenn treasure moving along very happily and earning regular income. We were splitting a check on the 20th of every month that we got from YouTube. We were doing well, we had a good and growing audience. We had some moments there where we tried different things and we realized that’s just not what our audience wants to do. But then on June 6 last year it was announced that the treasure was found.
We had a couple of options at that point. One was to continue milking it for as much as we could. We could have done that but you were bored. That was the other problem. I think it takes two to tango and you and I have been partners for as long as we have. Part of the partnership requires that we at least have the conversation.
We did have the conversation the night that it was announced. By the next day between the two of us, we made the decision to move on. I thought what we did to move on was spectacular in the sense that we wrote a book and published a book in less than 90 days, that’s still selling well, hid a treasure worth $15,000, and did our own thing.
I think part of the reason that period was so successful between June and whenever the treasure was found in October, was we were still attached to the Forrest Fenn treasure topic. I think it was okay. It certainly drove what we wanted to do in terms of the sales of the book. But there was a point at which we both realized we’ve got to get away from this whole treasure hunt thing. It’s not going to last forever. It can’t last forever. It won’t last forever. We’ve got to start doing something else.
So we did a lot of tests. We started looking at the potential of things that we were having fun with and the things that we liked doing and the things that we were learning about doing. That’s when we had our conversations and we realized we want to make money teaching other people how to make money.
I remember having a conversation with you and we were on a phone call and you were going on about how underserved senior citizens were. I just shut up and I put you on speaker and I think you went on for 15 minutes about how terribly underserved they are. You were pretty adamant about this and you had some sense about what you wanted to do. I could tell the reason you were throwing this my direction was you wanted to take advantage of the things that we just talked about. If I can get Toby in on this train ride then he can apply his skills, knowledge, and expertise.
We can take advantage of the things that you’ve learned, because you probably know more about digital marketing than I do at this point. It was the combination of passion and an idea that was moving me forward into the next thing. The advantage that we have in that case is that I’m okay with that. I’m not saying, I don’t want to, or I don’t know how to do that. I’ll just say, yeah, let’s do it. So here we are, and we’re putting things in place to start producing income again.
[00:40:20] Shelley: When you take this training on what kind of business to start, they always say to you what do people come to you for advice about? This. Starting a YouTube channel or a podcast, or live streaming, that was what people had been coming to us for years for.
[00:40:43] Toby: It’s a no-brainer. How many YouTube channels have we done? Like 20 channels. But they’re fun and in each case, we learned. We’re getting to the point where we know exactly what to do.
We can teach anybody, especially an encore entrepreneur, someone who’s already made one career and would like to make a second career in just effectively selling their expertise, their product is them. Honestly, in this day and age, post-pandemic, the evolution of online communications in the past year has expanded immensely.
The reason I mentioned that is because in the past year and a half, as a result of the pandemic, there was this tremendous advancement. A big jump in the technologies that enabled distance communications, right? It’s not just the cell phone. It’s going to change again. Google and Facebook and Amazon are all now promoting the connection to your television that enables you to talk to people. I’m going to bet that if you go to buy a TV in the next three months, one of the options on those TVs will be an embedded camera.
[00:41:59] Shelley: So it’s basically like a large laptop.
[00:42:02] Toby: It’s a large laptop, a large cell phone, and it will communicate via IP to members of your family who have a similar smart TV.
[00:42:13] Shelley: They’ve had those smart TVs for years.
[00:42:15] Toby: So they’re one step away. They’re one camera chip away from making that possible. Everything else is in place. Pretty soon we will get our TVs and they’ll have the equivalent of phone numbers. So if you’re at home and I want to talk to you and Kevin, I will dial your TV and we will have a little conversation.
[00:42:43] Shelley: You can use your tablet to do Google duo online with Samsung, or if you have an iPad, you can do FaceTime. It’s just on a little bit larger scale, right?
[00:42:58] Toby: That’s basically all it is. It’s the ease of communicating because now with my TV, the one that’s in here has an IP address. The reason I know it has an IP address is that I can Chromecast to it. The only way I could Chromecast to it is if it had an IP address. Once I have an IP address, I can get that IP address using any internet service that identifies an IP address.
If I translate that IP address to a 10 digit phone number that represents that IP address, which is effectively what you see when you’re using wireless communication, that means we can communicate as if it’s a cell phone.
I’ll say by the end of the year, we’ll see that technology available.
[00:43:56] Shelley: My Google hub has got the screen on it. You can just say, show me a video on how to cook eggplant. Okay. Here’s a video. Cool. But also my daughter called me on Google duo last week and it came across the Google hub. I haven’t even thought of that before. That’s cool. That’s where we’re at. It’s just going to be easier and easier for people to access that.
[00:44:36] Shelley: I’ll ask that last question again, what is your vision for the coming year and how will you make it happen? I’ll change that to how will we make it happen? I’m here too.
[00:44:44] Toby: I think my vision for the coming year is that more and more people in our age group who have already had one career will start another because they don’t want to stop. It’s hard for any of us Boomers and Gen X-ers, they just can’t stop and shouldn’t, if you can still do it.
I think one of the benefits of the past 50 years is that we each acquired expertise in something, whether it is blacksmithing or in my case, audiovisual communications tech. You can use that in three ways, as far as I can tell. One way is you can sell the equivalent of your expertise. The best example is Peter Leifer who spent his entire life as a financial advisor. Now he’s retiring and he wants to keep making a little money. Although if he’s a good financial advisor, his retirement is planned.
[00:46:00] Shelley: Yeah. It’s not about making money. It’s more for him about keeping a finger in the pie and looking at areas that he wasn’t able to work in before.
[00:46:09] Toby: The only thing that he’s working with is his expertise and the technology. As a result again of the pandemic and how we expanded that technology so quickly, he’s able to use that to a certain extent. But because he isn’t completely familiar with it, he would like some help in making it look good and sound good and all those things. We can help him with that. Another example is Dr. Brown. He had a great time making those 38 episodes of COVID conversations with us and walked away from that because people are getting their shots and everything’s winding down. We don’t have to have this conversation anymore. I think it was like a week later he called us and said, I have an idea for a new show. He’s retired. He has a retirement income. He’s fine. But he keeps his finger in the pie and he likes having those conversations with those people,
[00:47:03] Toby: He’s all about the education and he wants to share that with the rest of the world. He wants people to know that there is a– did we know anything about the microbiome?
[00:47:12] Shelley: I just learned so much because he interviewed one person about the microbiome. I wanted to understand what that was before, during, and after the whole event. I ended up reading a couple of books on it and then sharing all that information with you.
[00:47:31] Toby: You’re the perfect example of what Coffee wants. He has a conversation with a guy that has expertise in something life changing. I’m not saying life-changing in the sense that you’re doing a complete 180, but life-changing in the sense that you learned more about how your body works and you’re making some changes that are going to help you live long and prosper. That’s exactly what Coffee wanted in those situations.
Another example is DJ. Our friend DJ is who had a completely physically-based business with products in the storefront, and live events that people came to. All of that went away. She’s made the transition into going completely digital and distanced. Her business deals with distance now, right? She changed her business and found a smaller location because she doesn’t have to keep all those products in one place.
We see a lot of people in our age group making the decisions necessary to move on and then implementing those decisions so they can do other things. I think we have a very specialized area of expertise. We know how to do that. More importantly, we know how to leverage what you’re creating because for us doing a livestream is the act of creating.
The question is how can I take this content, we’re going to be talking for about an hour, how can I take this content and leverage it into other things? That’s the other thing that we’re expert at is how you can take one piece of content and leverage it into a social media storm of content.
[00:49:32] Toby: We have an opportunity right now to take all the things that we’ve learned over the past eight years and turn it into a service that helps people like us reach their dreams.
Because Coffee’s dream is leaving this legacy of medical information behind. Peter’s dream is continuing to grow and change the financial services or financial advisory business.
[00:50:13] Shelley: Also to teach people how to retire or show those who have a lot of money about being a philanthropist and what that means and why they should do it.
[00:50:23] Toby: Everybody has this dream. I don’t think we’ve spoken to anyone who doesn’t have a dream. They have a dream that we know is possible because of what we know. We haven’t heard anybody tell us their dream, their vision and we’ve had to say, I don’t think that’s possible. We haven’t had to do that because everything that they need for them to accomplish that is available. They’re not quite certain how or they may be uncomfortable with it. But we haven’t had to say to anyone I’m sorry, that’s out of the range of possibilities. We always have the ability to say, “Okay. We can do that.” It’s cool to be able to say that.
[00:51:32] Shelley: There are so many things coming so fast and it’s sometimes really hard to keep up with all of it, especially for those of us who didn’t grow up with certain things. We didn’t grow up with cell phones. We didn’t grow up with computers. We didn’t grow up using tech everyday. We had to learn it as it came out and we’re still having to do that. We still have to constantly keep up.
We had to join Clubhouse and learn what that was. Spotify is going to be doing it. Twitter is going to offer live streaming. Have you heard this? Every day another email comes that tells you something else that’s happening or coming your way, or what changes YouTube or Facebook is making. LinkedIn is doing this now. It is constant change. So how do you get into the flow of that constant change and take advantage?
[00:52:25] Toby: That’s where resilience and agility come in. The willingness to accept that these changes are going to take place and how you incorporate them into your plans. Social audio may have started with Clubhouse, but we’ve had some of the big boys, including Spotify and Facebook say yes, and Mark Cuban has Fireside.
[00:52:55] Shelley: That’s at least four entrepreneurial style ventures, social audio and podcasting together.
[00:52:58] Toby: That’s what Spotify is doing. Podbean was doing it too. They’re all aware that this social audio thing has potential, right? Until you can figure out a way to monetize, they’re not going to make money. I don’t think anybody’s figured out how to monetize it yet, unless you have clients on there. Even then, if you’re not paying for it, you’re the product.
But if you look at them now, Spotify, Clubhouse, Facebook, and Fireside, they’re not making money at it, right? There’s no immediate return on this investment. But what are people are telling them? Each of those companies that have that kind of vision is saying, “There’s this thing, we’ve got to do this boss.”
If the reason is because everybody else is, that’s not enough of a reason. The reason has to be because in three years there’s going to be this huge online activity and people are going to be doing it and suddenly we can start marketing or advertising to them.
[00:54:13] Shelley: People and businesses are asking why aren’t we on TikTok?
[00:54:15] Toby: I’ve watched Spotify’s growth and the decisions they make. The acquisition of Anchor, for example, that was financial, that wasn’t a social media growth decision. That was a financial decision because Anchor had the model where they said, you can put your podcast on here for free.
[00:54:36] Shelley: PetSmart bought Chewy because Chewy was already doing a mail delivery service of pet items. So instead of creating their own, why not just buy their competition?
[00:54:49] Toby: Yeah. One of the nice things about waking up every morning is I’ll have at least one and sometimes as many as four emails from Shelley. Did you see what happened last night? The things that are changing for us. Every once in a while, I get to do one. But it’s because things are changing and we’re watching these things and thinking about where we’re going. How do we incorporate the “social audio” into what we’re doing?
Well for us, if you have content, you incorporate it. When we found out about Clubhouse, not only did we join, but within two weeks, we were livestreaming to Clubhouse. Nobody else was doing it at the time, but we were livestreaming to Clubhouse. We figured out how to do that and do it credibly. One day other people are going to be using that technology to do the same thing.
[00:55:47] Shelley: Life has changed. This was an awesome little talk we had. We also like to talk to people other than ourselves. So if you are interested in being on Messages and Methods and talking about your business, your entrepreneurial journey, your legacy livestream ideas, whatever it is that you have to present, please go to our guests’ journey and go through this simple, quick process at journey.messagesandmethods.com and join us on a livestream conversation on a Wednesday. We’d love to learn more about you and your journey.
[00:56:32] Toby: Tell us about what you’re doing.
[00:56:35] Shelley: It will be the same kind of conversation we had tonight. You get to answer all those good questions.
[00:56:41] Toby: We want to hear what you’re doing. All you have to do is listen to Shelley for about 10 minutes total, and she explains everything.
[00:56:49] Shelley: What else do we have for the fine people tonight? My free book. If you are interested in being a podcast star, if you want to have your own podcast or you want to be a guest on podcasts so that you can promote your business, your book, your speaking, or whatever it is that you want to showcase, here’s a great ebook for you. How to get booked on podcasts and be a great guest, which is a great starting place. If you want to have your own podcast, first be a guest. See if you like it, and you can get this at agkmedia.studio, a pretty good book written by experts.
We also have an amazing Facebook group that we would love for you to join. If you are 50 and over, and you are interested in having your own livestream or livestreaming to your Facebook group, or maybe you want to do webinars, or maybe you want to create video content for whatever reason. We can show you how to do that. If you want to be an encore entrepreneur, we can work with you on that as well. This group is for you and we have great resources in the group. We also do our livestream straight into the group. As you can see, there’s last night’s live stream, where I’m wearing my new AGK media studio crew shirt.
[00:58:25] Toby: Nice shirt.
[00:58:29] Shelley: Please do join if that is of interest, facebook.com/groups/leveraging your content. We have a lot of fun there. Oh, and look, this is our store. If you want to set up your own home studio to run your own livestreams in the most professional way possible, we have a great kit in here. We have several great kits, in fact, but I’m focused this week on the home studio kit. These are things that we’ve used. We have used everything except for the pop-up green screen. I just put that in there because it was on sale yesterday. It’s not on sale today. After Prime Day it’s gone back up in price, but everything else is really good quality merchandise that we’ve used.
[00:59:14] Toby: We recommend, tested and approved it all.[00:59:15] Shelley: Go to our Amazon store at amazon.com/shop/agypsyskiss. We do make a very small commission if you purchase our recommended items. It doesn’t cost you any extra and we do our best to find the best priced, highest quality merchandise.
AGK Media Studio 