Seanwes Podcast

Ben and I have a conversational show around transitioning to something new when you have an existing audience for something else. It can be hard, feeling like you still have some of your identity wrapped up in that previous pursuit. We talk about making this switch wisely, the right time to do so, and how to go about it in a way that still provides value to your audience.

In wrapping up our series on growing your business, we use Part 3 to discuss the benefits of removing yourself from the busywork of your business to focus on future growth. We take a step back and ask some great questions that apply to wherever you're at in business. Many of the rhetorical questions will apply to various stages of your business, so while they won’t all apply to you now, the episode is sure to be worth a re-listen at future points in your business growth as you'll get something new out of it every time.

Continuing with Part 2 of our Growth Scaling series, we dive deeper into the hiring aspect of growing you business. Finding the right people, the concept of scaling back to scale up, preserving the sacredness of things tied to your unique voice, bringing people on board with your values, tackling the struggle of maintaining craftsmanship and authenticity—we talk about it all. Ultimately you have to ascertain whether or not you're truly solving a problem for your client or customer and whether delegating can help you provide greater value. You've been hustling and working super hard to grow your business—in this episode we'll help you make sure that effort is not in vain and show you how to actually get a return on your initial investment.

We introduce a new 3-part series on growing your business. In part 1 of this series, you'll learn how to recognize superhero syndrome. We talk about determining the value of your time, embracing 90% perfection, finding tasks the tasks you should NOT be doing, and how to replace them with systems or people while still maintaining quality.

As an ex-nocturnalist, I attempt to call the Night Owls over from the dark side to see the benefits of waking up early. I talk about how I didn't believe the hype on how successful people wake up early—I got plenty done at night. But I changed my mind when I compared daily logs of my output: the results showed a 2x increase in productivity and output. We talk about how you can get more from the same amount of hours by structuring your day right. Get challenged to run your own tests and prove it to yourself.

For those of us with multiple passions and numerous skills, the single biggest challenge is curating what we share. The reality is that people put other people in boxes. We have a compulsive need to categorize. People put other people in boxes because it's too difficult to try to comprehend the true complexity of each and every individual. We talk about how to use this to your advantage, and the one exception that will allow you to be known for multiple things. In the spirit of multiple passions, you get to hear a brand new electronic music track inside this episode and we close out the second half of the show discussing the way to close the gap between reality and what's in your mind's eye.

There's been a lot of #harshsean in the last few episodes, so we thought it was time to take a step back and have one of our conversational episodes without a hard outline or bullet points. We took a conversation happening in the Community live chat on introversion and extroversion and dug deeper, looking into the challenges of each type and how it affects networking, co-working, and making real connections. We talk about Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and discuss the different ways various personality types think and how they communicate differently. We challenge both introverts and extroverts to practice their areas of weakness.

Ben and I were discussing workaholism at our meeting the other morning. We got to talking about whether or not there is such a thing if you're doing what you love. This segued into wondering when is the appropriate time to take breaks or to take a step back from what you're doing. I've heard of people taking a year off every 7th year, which I think is a fascinating idea, but I haven't heard of smaller scale sabbaticals. Among other things, we explore the idea of taking a step back once a day, one day every week, and one week every 7 weeks. We talk about why this is beneficial, and how in the world you can enable such sabbaticals.

If you want to be successful, you need to position yourself around success. I'm going to give you insights from the perspective of a mentor that will help you connect with the kinds of people you want to be around. I'll also give you several ways to position yourself around success ONLINE.

You're creative. You're good at multiple things. Your biggest struggle is figuring out which of the numerous things you enjoy to pursue right now. When it comes to the work you project, I've said many times before that you need to curate what you share. This is how you build an audience. But I'm going to throw a curve ball at this idea. What if you really are doing multiple things and doing them well? At what point do you break one of the pursuits off into another brand or separate feed? Is there ever a time where you'd want to project multiple kinds of content from the same brand? We tear this topic apart and dig into whether you truly need separate feeds or if you simply need to overhaul your existing brand and redefine or evolve it.

In this episode, I share the story of what happened when I relied on someone else's platform and the consequences of selling my material there. I got locked into a price, couldn't remove my content, and had no control over the devaluing of what I had to offer. I won't be divulging specifics in the notes here, so you'll have listen for the details. We talk about the benefits of having things on your own website and being able to control the experience.

This is a big show. I'm going to challenge you. I get real and I talk real numbers. I step out of my comfort zone to motivate and inspire you to set bigger goals—goals that make your biggest dreams look small. Ben asks if it will be a potentially life-changing episode—I say yes, but not "potentially". It will be a life-changing episode. You'll laugh, you might cry, but you'll certainly come away with a renewed vigor and a very specifically-defined goal that you will undoubtedly accomplish.

Those who can, do; those who can't, teach—right? WRONG. You should be teaching right now, exactly where you are. It doesn't matter if other people are teaching the same thing or if other people have more experience than you. Teaching what you know is invaluable, and it's not only good for establishing yourself as an expert but it helps you understand what you know even better. Taking time to teach doesn't slow down your learning—it actually accelerates it. You'll hear why it doesn't matter if you teach something wrong and the reason you don't have to have an audience before you teach.

The key to success is actually quality AND quantity. Yes, the former is more important but it takes both—which requires hard work over time. In this goodness-packed episode, we cover building your audience from zero, getting traction, the benefits of scheduled output, the kind of promise to make, what do you if you break that promise, why going viral is not the goal, how to grow your email list, where to place your opt-in box, what kind of content to put in your newsletters, and why word of mouth is the best kind of referral. Whew!

Everywhere you look online, you see little counters. Everything is "likable" and every "like" inflates a counter. But what does the counter mean? What does it represent? Does it convey value? Is it an indication of worth? I had a very real conversation with a few close friends. What I've found is that we have common struggles. Notoriety on the internet is such a strange thing and if we're not careful, we can easily get caught up in the whirlwind of acclamation.

I talk a lot about my two prices, full price and free, but we haven't discussed it fully at length all in one place. Here we have the canonical two-prices episode where we compare full price and free, discuss the problem with discounts, the one exception for using discounts, why good friends pay full price, the only reason your price should ever go down, the benefits of pro-bono, how to get pro-bono clients, the reason long-term thinking and setting the bar high is the best way to make the most money, how to run effective giveaways, and why you should never, ever, cold-call clients.

In another one of our conversational-style episodes, Ben and I talk about the 3 kinds of unfinished projects, identifying resistance points, when to push through and when to just abandon dead projects. While being able to switch between micro and macro modes can be helpful, it can also result in sensory overload. We discuss ways to focus on one thing at a time—both with individual tasks, and projects as a whole.

This episode is dedicated to a bit of feedback we got on the topic of feeling "not good enough." What do you do when you've tried but fallen short? What if things just don't seem to be working out? Do things just come easier for some people? Where does natural talent and acquired skill separate from hard work and deliberate practice? Can anyone with enough time, passion, patience, and practice develop the skills needed to truly follow their passion full-time? We dive into these questions and talk about evaluating whether something is the wrong thing, or maybe just the right thing in a time of resistance. We touch on the internal rewards of hard work, why finding you don't enjoy something isn't a dead end, and finally the value of iterating in public.

I recently shared very specific launch revenue numbers from Learn Lettering because I wanted to show people that it’s possible to make a living pursuing your passion. However, I didn’t want the fact that I was sharing such detailed information to detract from the fact that I’m just a normal guy doing working hard, doing what I love. It was that last sentence that stood out to a friend when I explained this. “But you’re not normal,” he said. This bit intrigued me. In this show, Ben and I talk about normalcy and how everyone has the opportunity to sacrifice—we just often don’t want to.

This is the in-depth case study of the original launch of my first course, Learn Lettering, in 2014. I shared what went into the marketing, design, and production of the course—as well as the emails sent and advice I got from Nathan Barry on pricing and packaging. This was the first course I ever launched. I shared this case study to show you the detailed process of launching an online course. This case study is not specifically for designers or lettering artists. It's not intended to help you launch your own lettering course. It's not intended to sell my course. It's purely to pull back the curtain and show you what goes into the production and marketing of a six-figure online course, and it is applicable to anyone teaching an online course on any topic. Since this case study was written in 2014, I've learned a lot about marketing. I am no longer a designer—I have since shifted to teaching business. I've since launched numerous other courses on topics including copywriting and pricing client work. While m