Running Your Podcast As a Business with Steve Stewart

Okay, I know you saw the title of the episode and you may be thinking, yeah, I'm not really interested in money when it comes to my podcast. I get that. I'm here to tell you you want to stick around anyway, because I am going to talk a little bit about personal finance.But the reason I wanted to do this episode is because I am familiar with Ray Edwards. He's an excellent copywriter.If you want to learn how to write things on your website, that inspires people to buy stuff, any book from Ray Edwards will help. I've taken his courses, I've driven to Tennessee to attend his seminars, and all of a sudden, on YouTube, this came out.

For the last seven years, I made at least a million bucks a year. Nevertheless, never more than 1.6 million. Year eight rolled around and I finally had the realization that this is unsustainable.So we shut down the business and declared bankruptcy.

And I remember thinking, what? How does that happen? Well, I know how that happens because when I was in my 30s, I filed for bankruptcy.So today we're going to share some stories about how this even happens and how to spot those things, as well as a tale of horrible customer service in me trying to really understand what's the best resource that I can recommend to you.And if you need more reasons to listen, the one and only Steve Stewart from the Podcast Editors Academy is going to help us understand how to put profit first. But I knew everything was going to be okay when I heard Ray say this.

I'm Ray Edwards. Welcome to my masterclass.

So put on your thinking caps. It's time to go to school. Hit it, ladies.

The school of podcasting with Dave Jackson.

Podcasting since 2005, I am your award winning hall of fame podcast coach, Dave Jackson. Thanking you so much for tuning in. If you're new to the show, this is why I help you plan, launch, grow, and sometimes monetize.We're going to kind of hit a little bit on monetization, but really it's about being focused on your show. And that's what we're going to hit on today. My website, schoolofpodcasting.com use the coupon code LISTNR. That's L I S T E N E R.When you sign up for either a monthly quarterly. Yeah, that's new. Or yearly subscription. And of course that comes with a 30 day money back guarantee.And so, yeah, I couldn't believe this video from Ray.

How does that even happen? Ray, what did you do with all that money? Simple.I spent it on the Business at its peak, we had 17 employees, a 3,500 square foot office, and I was jet setting around the world speaking, shaking hands and making deals. Then life threw me a curveball. Parkinson's disease.

Yeah, I'm so sorry to hear that. And Ray has gone through many different surgeries and such. He actually has something implanted in his brain.And when things got bad, he thought, well, I'll just buckle down and, you know, I'll sleep when I'm dead. Well, you know what? Parkinson's had another, you know, idea about that. And so he couldn't kind of work his way out of it.But one of the things that I really respect Ray for is he's not becoming a victim.

Meanwhile, my business still needed $100,000 a month to keep running. I made some questionable operational choices. I look back now and realize I knew something was wrong.And I had coached clients out of making these same dumb mistakes. Overpaying the staff, spending recklessly, ignoring financial red flags.

And we're going to be talking about financial red flag flags in just a bit with Steve Stewart.

Through a haze of irrational exuberance, I pressed on. And yet there I was, being that guy. I could, if I wanted, construct some stories, making it not my fault. But I won't.I've preached for years that I'm 100% responsible for everything in my life. So, yeah, I didn't cause Parkinson's, I didn't cause the pandemic. I wasn't trying to go broke. But I did make less than stellar decisions.And before I knew it, I was a million dollars in debt. And a large chunk of that money was owed to the irs.

And so everything we talk about today you can find out@schoolofpodcasting.com 9 and so I wanted to kind of pause here and go realize what's going on here with Ray. He's got health issues.But he also says in the video, which I'll have a link to in the show notes again, school of podcasting.com983 that part of it was he was doing what everybody else was doing. Well, they have a big team of 14, so I need a big team of 14.And, well, they've got this big thing with the video thing and they're, you know, meanwhile, he's got some serious health issues. And I'm not throwing shade at Ray. I'm just going to talk about myself here.When I went bankrupt, the biggest reason was we made bad decisions because we weren't thinking logically. And that's really Where? Because if you think about it, math, I mean, it's easy. Don't spend more than you make. There you go. Thank you. Good night.You can, you know, I'll see you next week. But when you get emotionally tied into situations like your health, where you're like, I'll just do anything to live, wouldn't you?I was just trying to get my wife to stop crying because we were trying to have a kid. We both knew when we got married, she had one ovary, and unfortunately, she later developed endometriosis, which is like speed bumps for sperm.And we went through our savings. We then started charging fertility treatments, which are very expensive. And I knew that was a bad idea.And I knew it was a bad idea when we got a second credit card and started putting fertility treatments on it. And I said, we gotta really stop this.When I got a third credit card and just ran it up with fertility treatments, and finally a doctor said, yeah, you guys can't conceive. And at that point, we were living so paycheck to paycheck. It was insane. Why?Because again, not that, you know, looking back, you can go, that was a bad decision. Why I kind of knew was a bad decision. But you don't make the best decisions when the emotional side of your brain is taking over the logical side.Because there are things that we get tied into. I'll give you a classic example. You'll hear somebody on their podcast say, well, you know, after four years, I was a six figure podcast.And there's a question that nobody's asking. I'll give you another example. Last year, according to my records, I use a thing called chronometer. I lost 10 pounds. Sounds great.Hey, last year I lost 10 pounds. The question nobody's asking, how much of that did you gain back? Oh, ten pounds. Actually, probably closer to 12.So when somebody says, I'm a six, seven, whatever it is, figure podcast, nobody's asking how much of that is profit. How much of that did you get to keep? Because Ray was bringing in 1.6 million. The problem was he was spending, I don't know, 2 million.And so that's kind of what we're talking about today. And again, we are kind of busy. We buy things on impulse, like, oh, I'll just. It's only, you know, $13 a month. I'll do that. And here's another one.Oh, it's only $24 a month. I'll do that. Here's another one. And all of a sudden you look up and you go, hey, how come I'm not making any money?And so you have to track everything you want to do. If you want to run this as a business, then you need to track everything so that you can see what's working and see what's not.And so that's where my buddy Steve Stewart, head of the Podcast Editors Academy, if you're a person that's doing editing on the side and trying to earn some income, I highly recommend it. It's been around for a while. Him and Mark, the Real Deal deal. And it's a great. All they do is talk about editing.They talk about clients growing your editing business. And I'll have a link out in the show notes for that. That is an affiliate link, but I am in that group and it's got some great stuff.And so I brought Steve in. Steve has a background in finances.He started off, in fact, if you go to anybody in a financial podcast and just say Steve, they know you mean Stuart Steve, when he edited and started his kind of career as an editor because he had a background in finance, he was editing for his friends and it was just referrals that basically helped him grow his business. So it's great to have Steve back on the show.

Thanks for having me. Hey, SOP family.

And there's this really popular book called Profit first by Michael Michalowicz. And again, I'll have links out in the show notes. The first thing we have to start with is what the heck is Profit First?

Profit first is a fantastically simple and somewhat automated, if you use the right tools, way of managing money that can come from a small business. This is not really as good for personal finances as a zero based budget type of thing is.But it's great for small business or even large business because it's taking a focus away from trying to manage every little detail to let's group everything over here and then we can focus on this group when we need to. And it forces you to actually put money aside for profit. Not just payroll, but for profit.

And I understand this is for small businesses, but like, who is this for?

So if your podcast is making like 300 bucks a month, maybe this applies to you. Definitely. If you're making more than 500amonth, this can definitely apply for you.And if this is something you do, like I edit podcasts for a living, this has really been helpful for me to simplify my bookkeeping and to make sure that I've got cash flow, because cash flow is the number one reason businesses fail, especially small businesses, because the Bills seem to come in a lot faster than the invoices get paid. The bills come in more frequently than people with Patreon payments that come into your podcast and those deposits make it to your account.Cash flow is king when it comes to small business.

So where do we start?

Let's first start by separating our finances. So we've got our personal finances over on the left, but to the right is our business finances.And there are business bank accounts out there that are free and I could point people to them, or you could simply, if it's a really small business, just open up another bank account. You want to separate these things.That's really important because it helps with the bookkeeping, helps with all of the transfers that you'll be doing, which isn't that frequent. And that's part of the benefit of profit first.

And a little later, we'll be talking about some of these accounts you can use. And I'm going to tell you how I went rogue and and came up with my own plan to implement profit first.But isn't this just kind of like simple accounting?

In the old days, what we used to do was we think about the income, the sales, the receipts comes in. Then we take out the expenses, and then the rest is what we call profit. With profit first, it switches those last two.You got the income coming in, but then as you mentioned, something like this would happen. You take the profit out first. First, and the rest is left for expenses. Now, that scares a lot of people. That scared me at first.That's why I stayed away from this for a while. It's like, oh, wait a minute.I understand the whole pay yourself first thing, but I need to pay my bills, then I can figure out how much money I made.When you flip those two last things, the expenses and the profit, you flip those where you actually do take the profit and you put it aside first, you're forcing yourself to look at the expenses even more. And the expenses are the things that you can really control, sometimes even more than the income if you're not looking at your expenses.I mean, how many people have subscriptions that they're paying for that they're not using right now?

Oh, man.

And that's in business and personal and especially in these days with appsumo. You know what I'm talking about, right, Dave?

Oh, man.

Yeah, I think the listeners are nodding their head. Yep, yep, they're nodding it, too. So we got to flip those last two.And that's where profit first, the name comes from, and the whole method Kind of is based around that.

And so why I wanted to do this episode is when I went and looked at just domain names. I have 335 domain names. And that's after I sold a few. And you kind of go, ah, it's. What is it, 15 bucks a year at Namecheap, something like that. 335.And when did I discover that? When I started looking at my expenses. Yeah, if you do the math, that's 28 domain names a month. And it's not evenly split up like that.And I was like, wait, what? And so when you go to get started with this profit first, what does it look like?

The way I did it was I had my original bank account that I was using, but then I opened up a new one so I could say, this is going to be my profit first account. And I only put like $1,000 in there. So I started with $1,000 to say, okay, here's my seed money.I still got my money over in the old account to start taking care of those bills the old way, but then I'm going to focus on moving to this new way. And I started having all the new deposits, all of the invoices that get paid put into the new account.So I had money on the back end here to cover the expenses. And on the front end with the new account, I was already separating into these buckets. And we're going to talk about that in a minute.Separating all the money that's coming in into the correct places. So I had money to pay for the bills and very importantly, saving up for taxes, and very importantly, putting a little bit aside for profit.

And I cannot tell you, I used to have my quote, we put up quotation marks here. My business account was from the same bank that my personal account was.And it made it way too easy to a accidentally pay for something for my business with my personal account, which is a accounting nightmare. And just, it was just way too easy to transfer money back and forth. And so I totally agree with Steve on this.And think of this, we're going to talk about accounts now.If you want to just to get the theater of the brain going, just picture opening up a drawer and having like four to seven envelopes that you're putting money into.

There are business bank accounts out there. The one I use is called Novo.

Link in the show notes.

Another one's called Relay. You could just simply get business bank accounts.And if you followed the true original Mike Michalowitz way, he was going to have you open up Seven bank accounts. I think that's a little ridiculous these days. And thank goodness that these new accounts are out there.They actually have kind of like sub accounts within one major account. So it's all in one place. So you're supposed to break this into seven buckets.Well, okay, let's say you have seven sub accounts in this one account, and each one has $1,000 and $7,000 in the account. And if you misspend one of them, you're not overdraft. It's of the $7,000. So these seven buckets are actually six buckets.I should start there because the first bucket's really, I should say your first bank account. This is the way that Mike Michal taught it was the first bank account is the income account of all your money going to the income account.And then the other bank accounts that he was saying originally, he's revised it recently, but originally was open up these other four accounts and then another two after that. So let's go through that process. You got the one income account. Income comes in. Here's the time. Saving tip.Just twice a month, you go into this account, or maybe do it three times if you feel the need to. But just twice a month, 10th and 25th go in, and now you send the money out of that account into four buckets twice a month.You're actually doing your bookkeeping, as it were. The four other accounts, or buckets, I'm going to call them, is profit. Profit first, and that could just be 1%.So if you bring in $4,000, you're taking 40 bucks, and you're sending it to this one bank account called Profit. Then the other account is what I call the payroll account. It's really owner's comp. Owner's compensation you got to pay yourself.So profit and owner's comp are separate.

Right.

You know, at least half of what I generate I need to be bringing home. So maybe that's 50% of that $4,000. That's $2,000. So we've got $2,000 in this bucket, $40 in that bucket. Okay?Now operating expenses is the third bucket. That's all your expenses, the things that you generally pay.Let's say you do a monthly subscription to Descript or your media hosting account with Libsyn. You got your pod page.Those things you can have automatically deducted out of this operating expense account if you set it up, just like Billpay, so you don't have to think about those things. But then the other things that you spend Money on come out of that account as well. Takes away a lot of the.When my credit card comes in now, I got to review everything. It's been a month. I don't remember this one. Now I got to look it up. It's already taken care of. And then the fourth bucket, there would be taxes.Very, very important.

Oh, man, Very important. Don't forget what Ray said about his situation.

And a large chunk of that money was owed to the irs.

Taxes gets the bucket as well. So now we've taken that income bucket, we've spread it out among the other four, and we've got money put aside for profit.We've got money put aside to pay ourselves. We got money put aside for the expenses. And you have a general idea of what your expenses are.Now you can go back the last three months of your bank account, your credit card statements, whatever it is, and figure it out. And then there's taxes, and have a general idea of that would be very helpful.

And so the book talks about how there are some people that are not paying attention at all. And again, credit cards come in and they're just spending money and more money and more money.And when they finally sit down and look at it, they're not making any profit. They're losing money with their business.So by having these buckets, I call them envelopes, you now can see what this money is, and now you can go about really managing it.

So we move this money out to a profit account. But you're not going to use that profit account yet. That profit account, you'd pay yourself out once a quarter. That makes you hungry to earn more.And when you get that reward every three months, it's like, ooh, I get an extra couple hundred bucks. Sweet. And you could do anything you want with that money that could come to you.And you could go out to dinner, you can go to movies, take a trip, whatever. So it makes you hungry to get all the other stuff in line. The other last bucket is for the taxes.And what you're doing is you're taking these buckets and you're putting them aside because you're not spending those every month. You're going to be doing those once a quarter. Like, you could do quarterly estimates and things like that.So he says, lock those away at even another account. Now, I don't do that. I'm going to simplify this. We made it really complicated by explaining that. So we got the income account.If we go with a Novo or relay account, we can do this all within the same Account, we just have to be diligent to not start transferring from stealing from one envelope to pay another.So really, you could have one account and you could have what they call reserves in novo, which is a reserve for profit, a reserve for owner's compensation, your payroll, a reserve for operating expenses, and a reserve for taxes. And what's beautiful about these two, the novo or the relay accounts, is you say, this is the percent.I want to go to that bucket when money comes in.Regardless of when it comes in, when the money comes in, it gets divvied out to these buckets automatically so that when you log in once every two weeks or so, it's all there. It says, oh, you can bring yourself $2,000. Okay, now I can pay myself. I can transfer that money home. I've got the money for taxes. Cool.I'm going to send that one out to a separate bank account. That's high interest checking or a higher interest saving, I should say, and earn some money over here until I have to send it in for quarterly.And that profit bucket's way off here in another bank earning interest, pull that money home once a quarter.

So it's organized, it's automated. And when it comes to your money, I kind of noticed something I don't know about you.I have found that the more you pay attention to your money, the more of it you have.

Well, the motto from my old podcast was pay attention, not interest.

Yeah.

And pay attention right there can apply to anything. Pay attention to your relationships, your relationships get better. Pay attention to your career, your job gets better.Pay attention to things, and it just gets better.

And what's probably one of the top things that couples fight about? Money. At least it was in my situation.So what are some of the common mistakes that people are making when they go to kind of implement this profit first strategy?

They go right for the percentage that they think they need. Instead of focusing on, here's what I've been doing. Okay, let's put that into a profit first model.Let the engine run and warm up, and then I can start tweaking things. Because just by doing that, you're realizing I spend 50% of my income on operating expenses, and that's not including taxes.So there's another 15, 20%. Okay. Now I'm left with 20% of my income goes to the house, to me. No.Unless you're making a lot of money and you're using a lot of operating expenses to grow, it's not sustainable. So that's the first thing. But again, the Profit first model says here, let's realize what we're doing.Let's get our percentages down, tweak it by 1%, decrease operating expenses by 1%. Increase your owner's compensation by 1%.

Yeah. Cause that doesn't change. The easiest way when it comes to making more money, you're either gonna make more or spend less.And I know you mentioned the, you know, look at how many subscriptions you have. There were a few that I looked at and was like, oh, I haven't used that in months.And so that's an easy way to increase your income is just take a look at, you know, and that's business and personal. I. Right now, I'm doing the thing where I have one streaming service. Right now, I'm on Netflix.And when I've watched everything I need to watch, I will shut down Netflix and go to Hulu, and then I'll go to Apple, and then I'll go to whoever. Because I kept spending, I don't know, whatever, 10, 15 bucks a month.And I was watching one show on each one of these platforms, and I'm like, that's really dumb.

Yeah. And I like forced scarcity.I used to have a phone plan where we could only use so much data, and then our daughter joined it and it blew it up all the time. But I was like, now I really have to make sure that I'm not out on my phone and going onto Twitter on my phone while I'm out. Stupid things like that.But it forced me to look at what I was doing, and it made me better at what I was doing. And there's a lot less waste when you spend time looking at things like that.

And I realize we're talking kind of math, we're talking numbers, and anytime you do something like this, you either have it in the show notes, or Steve has done a really great thing and he's actually made us a cheat sheet.

Well, first of all, there is a spreadsheet that I have that I have in the academy, the podcaster Academy for people. And it's part of this PDF that we're talking about before@podcasteditoracademy.com SOP did I say it too fast?

Links in the show notes.

Let's do it again. Podcasteditoracademy.com SOP There's a link in there to the spreadsheet that I share, and that will help you.You take your last tax return from your schedule c and your 1040.If you're doing this as a business, you're plugging in numbers or you can just figure out what you've done in the past quarter, the past three months, and start there. And it's going to tell you, here's what you've been doing, you need to do better at this. And you know, let's cut that, things like that.And then you can then apply percentages that will then set you up for what you want to put into novo, saying, here's what I want to bring home for payroll, here's what I want to put aside for expenses as a percentage. The percentage is where it's all at.

And so when you pay attention, like I said, for me, I have way too many domains and, and I have a lot of services that I pay for that I am not using. So if I haven't logged into a service in a couple months, I'm going to cut it out.And so if you're listening to this going, hey, why'd you cancel your account? It's because I'm not using it. So I asked Steve any big takeaways when he started using this system.

The biggest one was, and it was pretty much the time when I first started doing this was like, oh my gosh, I am spending way too much time at conferences. I could see the big red letters telling me, Steve, you're spending a lot of money going to conferences.Really did cut back on the expenses a lot last year. In fact, I had the most profitable year since I've been. I went full time in 2017. Well, actually went full time 2016. My first full year was 2017.And my most profitable year was this last year, 2024.

There you go. Well, it's funny because I did the opposite my last year.I had more revenue, but because I kept buying equipment because I was like, oh, you know what, I can use this as a tax write off. And in the end it's like, yeah, but I still paid money for that. In the end it was about the same, even though I generated more money.And now I'm surrounded by microphones and equipment that I'm not using. And I was like, yeah, that was a dumb idea.

Can we talk about that tax write off bit? Yeah, because we hear that, we think, oh, it's great, we'll have a tax write off. But you don't get 100% tax write off for what you buy.I guess you kind of do. But it'd be better to bring home that money than to spend it and try to get a tax deduction.Now, that's mostly impersonal obviously if you spend 600 bucks in your business, that's a complete write off. But if it's not going to make you money, then really what's the goal? Mark Deal.My business partner in the academy says all the time if you're going to buy something, you have to get 10x the value out of it. If you're going to charge somebody something, they need to get 10x out of what you're providing them. So you got to think of it that way.Is $600 buying a Rodecast Pro going to give me $6,000 worth of benefit?Whether that's time savings, a better product that's going to sell more, or I don't know, what is it that you could do with a Rodecaster Pro that you couldn't do before with the Poitrak B4?

Well, and we get stuck on bright and shiny stuff. So one of the things I bought was a rode microphone that had a built in recorder. And I was like, oh, this could be great when I go to conferences.Which sounds like a logical kind of decision, but really that was probably more of an emotional decision like ooh, look. And I've gone to multiple conferences since I bought that and haven't used it yet because when I'm there it's loud and you can't hear anybody.And if you really wanted to get any kind of decent recording, you got to pull them either into a room. You know, I didn't think that through but oh, look at it. It's new and it's 32 bit float. Holy cow. I must have this.And was like I need to avoid the it's new and sleep on it a night or maybe even two and think about am I really going to use this? Because in many cases I'm not.

And look at your operating expense percentages. You're putting this money aside with profit first. You haven't spent it yet. It's being put aside for spending. Is the money there?If it's not, don't go to use that credit card because that credit card can't cover the expense because the operating expense money isn't there. This is going to make you look forward to spending, not back at what you spent.

When we come back, you heard there where Steve was kind of tweaking the strategy from seven accounts to four.I'm going to explain how I've tweaked mine and the fact that I reached out to both Nova and Relay and this is nothing against their actual product, but I'm here to say that their Affiliate programs are. Well, yeah, right after this.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I reached out to both Novo and Relay and said, hey, I'm gonna be doing an episode about running your podcast as a business, and I have to sign up as an affiliate. And I'm here to tell you for. Well, let's just start with Novo.For three months, I've been going back and forth, and I reached out to their actual affiliate people. I reached out to their support.I did finally, after about a month and a half, get one reply from the affiliate person who I then gave them all the information I needed, and I never heard from them again. Now, again, not saying they're a bad bank. I'm just saying the people that work in their affiliate program kind of blow. And.And I went through the whole same exact thing through Relay. Now, again here, support team was great. And I said, I'm trying to get in touch with someone with your affiliate program. And they.Relay actually has a phone number. That was the one advantage Novo. You can do invoicing. Relay, no invoicing, but a phone number. And somebody actually picks up the phone. That was cool.And I'm like, hey, I'm trying to get a hold of your affiliate team. And they're like, oh, they'll call you back. And then they never did. So I called them back and said, hey, they never called me back.And they said, they'll call you back. And they finally emailed me and said, we'll let you know. And I'm like, look, if the answer is no, like, I was not.I used to be an affiliate for Canva. And then they changed their criteria.You have to have 8 billion people on your YouTube channel, which was stupid because I would refer lots of people to Canva. And then they're like, nope, sorry, not enough. Big enough YouTube channel. So that's one of the reasons why it took so long.I was like, all right, I guess I'm not gonna be an affiliate for either one of those. Now, if you use the links out there, I'm going to use Steve's affiliate links because he's the one that turned me onto them in the first place.But I'm just letting you know, if you're like, oh, cool, I'm gonna be an affiliate for this company. Cause they both seem. I got demos of both.I went to different webinars and stuff, and they do the thing where you make multiple accounts and all that kind of stuff. But in the end, I just was amazed how low. And again, in terms of their affiliate program.Not so much their main product, but that part, the bar was set very low.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And Steve brought up going to events, and that's a great way to build your network. But I have had people say, if I want to go to an event, which one should I go to? And they usually mean podfest or Podcast Movement.And as always, with every single podcast question, the answer begins with it depends. If you're looking for strategies and maybe looking for people to swap interviews with things like that, then go to Podcast Movement or podfest.I would not. If you're an indie podcaster. Nothing wrong with podcast movement evolutions, but that's just not for you. It's not really designed for you.It's more for industry people. So there's that. Now, if you're looking to grow your audience, then go to an event that your audience is there.So if I like Ray from around the layout, goes to model train shows, because that's where people that do model train stuff are at.He's going to where his audience is, and that's where he can hand out business cards and stickers and everything else to get people to go, hey, there's a podcast about this stuff.So that would be a great example of that, where if you're looking for strategies and interview opportunities and things like that, then go to a podcast event. The fun part is it is hard to go to a podcast event these days without spending $2,000. It's somewhere between $1,000 and $2,000.Of course, it's gonna depend on where you live. But the hotel, if you're lucky, is $150 a night, many times over 200. And so if you're there for three days, there's $500 out the window.Again, probably more. Uber. Remember when Uber was like, oh, so much cheaper than taxis?And I remember when I was in Chicago, I think I went less than two miles and it was still an insane Uber bill. So that is something where you want to, if you're going to go to these, treat it like a business and take pictures of your receipts.I use a tool, it's called Wave Apps. Actually, it's just called Wave, but The address is waveapps.com. this one is pretty handy.They do have a free version, and it does one thing really well, and that is track your income and track your expense.And again, if you want to treat this as a business, get a separate bank account, like completely different from your, you know, your normal bank for your personal stuff. And that's where if you want to again, Novu Relay, I'll talk about what I'm using here as a hack.But that will make a big difference because it's out of sight, it's out of mind. You're in your personal banking every day. Your business stuff. Yeah. And it makes it easier to.Then when you have a business credit card and you put your media host and you put your pod page and you put your, you know, chat, GPT or whatever else you're bang. You can kind of see, am I making or losing money?And when I did this this year or really last year, yes, I was making money, but not a ton, much less. I was surprised because my whole thing was, do I have enough money for taxes? That was my whole thing. Do I have enough.I don't want to get behind on my taxes.

And.

And I had that. And I had money left over, but not a ton. Like, if I was on Shark Tank, they'd be like, oh, what's your profit? You.You almost don't have a profit margin. So that's something to keep in mind.And another thing I fell trapped to was just buying equipment because, you know, again, I thought it's a tax write off, but it's not like you're getting a dollar for a dollar. And then there's always like, you can sell it on ebay.Well, Kenya, I have, you know, I'm gonna have a garage sale for in a bit here, and there's a lot of stuff that I think about now. You know, maybe use it as giveaway, actually might be better. And get people to sign up for your email list.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The other thing that put a pause on this is I am now an S corp. I was gonna be an llc. I worked with my buddy Ralph Estepp over at just go to askralph.com that's all things Ralph.And he's been an accountant for 30 years. I thought about going to Gordon Firemark. Nothing wrong with Gordon. Ralph is a member of the school of podcasting.And he explained how when you're an S corp, you have complete separation. Like, nobody can sue you personally. They can sue the company into the ground. And I'm not really worried about that.I've never had anybody even remotely close. I had one company that threatened to release the hounds on me because I said they were skeeving thieves and nobody should do business with them.And it turns out that's liable. So I don't do that anymore. But I've never really thought about it. But Ralph was Like, hey, if you're worried about getting sued, I'm like, I'm not.He's like, but this offers this and that. And so I went with an S Corp.I did find out later, and again, it's not a big deal, but I have to do payroll when you're an S corp, even though there's only one employee, and that's me. And the app I just mentioned, the Wave app, is an extra 20 bucks. So there's $240 a year to pay myself.So I'm assuming that, again, is tax deductible, but that's the joys of running a business. And if you have any financial stuff like that, Ralph is the guy you want to talk to.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

All right. So I'm a rebel. And again, nothing against Novo or Relay. I had already been using Sofi as my business account.I like them because they're not even physical. Like, it's an online bank. I probably use them because I saw their name on a football stadium somewhere, and I really like them.But I wanted to do this profit first approach. And they have a thing called autopilot. And you basically say, when money comes into this area, put them into what they call vaults.And a vault is just where you kind of like tag money. Like, this is for this. This is for this.So I can log in and see how much is set aside for taxes, how much is for profit, how much is for compensation, et cetera, things like that. And then I can move them, even though it's the same account. Like, it doesn't have separate account numbers.It's one account with this thing called the vault. I can move them from the vaults to the main account and then pay whatever I need to pay.Now, the one thing I do that I can do and you might be able to do, but I do not recommend it. And I'll explain why I just said do as I say, not it.As I do is I pay everything with a business credit card from Sofi, and I get a fair amount of money. Now, I realize if I were to look at the amount of money I spend and the percentage, it's probably low. But I do see it as free money. Why?Because at the end of the month, I have it automatically set to pay off the balance. As in, I never carry a balance into the next month, consequently, no interest or whatever, and I get free money.So I do not recommend this if you do not have the discipline to pay it off religiously every month. In fact, sometimes I pay it off in the middle of the month, and then I'll pay it off at the end of the month.Now, the reason I do that is because I've gone through bankruptcy and I know that credit cards are the devil and you can really easily sync yourself. And so I purposely have a credit card with a somewhat low limit and I don't really want them to increase it. I just do it for the points.And then so it comes in. It goes into my checking account. I use Stripe for my processor at the school of podcasting. It then goes into from the checking account.It automatically puts it into my savings account where I am earning. He said, 3.8%. Now, again, not a huge amount, but better than a poke in the eye. So that's currently what I'm doing.I am very close to considering using Novo, even though their, you know, affiliate team is kind of a, you know, not my favorite people on the planet, but that of Relay and Novo looked the most enticing. The fact that you could do invoicing, I thought that was cool. Not automatic invoicing, which is what I'm using with the Wave tool.And Wave has a free plan. So that's my insights on how I'm doing it.Again, I would only recommend that if you are seriously like, wow, you have to be disciplined to pay that credit card off. When I mentioned this to Steve, here was his response about using the credit.

Card that's going to distract you away from profit first. You could still follow that process, but I'm going to tell you, when you get a new bank account, it's a new business. Checking. We'll call it checking.Even though you may never check. So you're going to get a debit card or a debit card number you can use online.

Right?

It's so much better to tie all of your expenses to that account because you're going to be paying expenses out of it. Now, it gets a little more complicated over the air here talking about it.

And so he's got a great point there.The fact that if it's tied to your checking account and not a credit line, you don't have this kind of temptation to just keep charging and charging and charging. It's like, no, because you're actually using the money in your account. So again, I just, I am kind of obsessive about this now.And I check every night before I go to bed. I spend like five minutes just seeing what came in, making sure it's in my WAVES app. Everything seems good, and then I go to bed.So if you're not quite that disciplined. You could really bite yourself in the butt with this. And I also have a purposely low credit limit.I don't want a big card with, you know, here's $8 million you can charge. No, no, I keep it low.In fact, sometimes during the month, I will pay it off in the middle because I might run out of credit, and that's exactly how I want it. So this is where you really need to know yourself. And I mean, know yourself that, hey, I'm not gonna do this. I am gonna pay it off.Like, I have the pay it off that's automated. So I have to have money in that account. And again, I'm checking my account every night like a brand new podcaster checking his stats.I'm checking the money in my account to make sure everything is okay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Here's another great tip from my buddy, hall of Famer Todd Cochran. When he started his podcast, his wife said, you got three years to generate some revenue.And so by putting a time limit on it, and not six weeks, not six months, it's got to be years. It kind of kept his, you know, feet to the fire, and it kept him focused. And sure enough, in three years, he had secured a sponsor.So maybe give yourself a deadline.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And Steve and I were talking about different things to kind of save money at home. Like, I do the thing where I only have one streaming service because I got tired of paying, you know, whatever, $15 for some streaming service.And I'm watching one show on it, but I wanted to give you some resources for personal finance. And right now, I'm using a thing called Monarch Money that I tied into my banks that helps me make a budget.And I see exactly where I'm spending my money, which, again, when you pay attention to your money, you seem to have more of it because you're like, wait, we spent $4 million at McDonald's last month. Holy cow. And then I switched. I used.I had the same bank for literally 30 some years, because back in the day, it was like, they used to charge you to have a bank account. And then they went no fees. Well, they also went no interest. And so I started using Acorns, which is an online bank.And I know it's like, but what if I need cash? I kept my old bank account, but there's, like, I don't know, a hundred bucks in it in case somebody really.It's a birthday, and I want to put some money in a birthday card or something like that. And so I love acorns because a, I'm earning interest, sometimes close to 4%.And they have this cool thing where if you use your debit card and you pay A$50 for something they'll take, they'll round up to the nearest dollar. They take that 50 cents and they put it in a savings account. And I'm amazed at how much money I'm saving using this cute little roundup feature.And I'm sure maybe your bank does that, but look into it. But I was just surprised. And Look, I know 4%, 3% is nothing when it comes to interest, but after a while, it adds up.I used to work with a nice old grocer, and I remember once he asked me, hey, if. If it's three for a dollar, how much are the bananas? And I go, well, it's 33 cents. He's like, it's 34. And I go, well, it's actually 33 and a third.He goes, in the grocery business, we always round up. And I went, oh, okay. And he said, yeah, never forget this. Pennies make dollars.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I realize you might be again saying, I'm not making a penny. Well, okay, well, get yourself a business account. They're free. And start tracking your income and your expenses.But the thing you want to be kind of aware of is there are so many people that will say, I can show you how to grow your audience. And the only thing I ever say, and you'll notice this is vague.And that is know who your audience is and, you know, make a podcast that has that content in it. Go to where they are, make friends with them, and tell them about your show. It's very vague, but that's really it in a nutshell.But realize that some people are like. They'll see the story where it's like, well, I just figured, I saw. I sold everything I had. I quit my job and got in the car and just started driving.And, you know, and now look at me. Well, okay, but I would not recommend anybody quit their day job unless your day job is really bad.And even then, how much you got in your savings account. But just realize when somebody goes, I made six figures doing A, B and C.Okay, but realize your audience may be completely different than that person. That's why I always say every podcast begins or every podcast question, the answer begins with, it depends.I can't do what, you know, Joe Schmo over there and Jill Schmo over there is doing because their audiences may be completely different than mine. So be careful about breaking out your kids college fund because I'm going to take this course because so and so guaranteed me downloads.I saw that this week. Guaranteed downloads. Well, okay if I give you one. There you go, there's your download.A guaranteed you one straight from the Philippines where a guy's pounding on an iPhone. Thank you for that.So I wanted to throw that in there, but as Steve mentioned, as my buddy Glenn Hebert has mentioned about if you want to make money with your podcast, you have to run it as a business. And we said it over and over and over and that is watch your money. Because people that watch their money have more of it.Now if you need help with your podcast, I would love to help you because they are all like snowflakes and I like to get in there with you, find out what you're doing, who's it for, that whole nine yards. Come visit me at schoolofpodcasting.com use the coupon code LISTNR.And that's on either a monthly, a quarterly, that's new again or yearly subscription. And that comes with a 30 day money back guarantee. So you don't even have to worry about it.Just go to schoolofpodcasting.com, click on the join now button and I can't wait to work with you because that's what I do. I help podcasters. I'm Dave Jackson. Thanks so much for tuning in. Until next week. Take care. God bless. Class is dismissed.If you like what you hear, then go tell somebody. If you like what you hear, then go tell someone.