How to Make Money From Your Passion

0:07Hello and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Chance. My guest today is Christian Brim. He's a certified public accountant, certified management accountant with over 25 years of working with small businesses to grow their business profitably. Heavily influenced by a family riches to rags experience in his formative years, Christian has dedicated his life to work, helping his life's work to helping entrepreneurs have their business work for them. He is also the author of a book we're going to talk about today, Profit First for Creatives, redefining the creativity slash money paradigm.

0:49So Christian, welcome to the show. Thank you very much for having me, John. So first thing, Mike Michalowicz has been on this show. He's the creator of Profit First, wrote the original book, Profit First. So let's just start with an overview. What does Christian bring to the profit first world. That's interesting. Yeah. So when I decided to write this book last year, my original intent was to use it to gain traction in the space with our target market, which we'd recently defined creative industries, such as videography, marketing agencies, interior design. But a funny thing happened along the way.

1:28I started to realize the challenges that I had faced, even though I wasn't in a creative industry, and my experience working with other creatives, what came to the surface was there are some things about creative entrepreneurs that pose some challenges in implementing Profit First. So the Profit First component of the book is you can read Mike's book, my book, any of the derivatives, they're all very similar. But the big difference in my book is the mindset application in creative spaces. So maybe let's talk a little bit about how are creatives different from a mindset standpoint, particularly when it comes to running a business, making money, selling, all those kinds of things that are part of the entrepreneur world?

2:26Is there a unique subset of folks that have challenges? Yeah, so let me define this first. When I say creative entrepreneur, I don't necessarily mean someone that's in a creative industry. The distinction there is, as Perry Marshall explained it to me, and I go through this in the book, is the difference between entrepreneurs either being builders or artists. And builders are ones that see opportunities in the marketplace, find a way to make money, and that's what drives their entrepreneurial journey. Artists or creatives are driven by passion. So they may see an opportunity in the marketplace, but they have no interest in it, and so they pass on it.

3:16In other words, if the entrepreneurial endeavor does not strike their passion, they have no interest in doing it. Yeah. And so in a lot of ways, Mike was a creative, right? Like he probably had never thought of himself that way, but he was passion driven. And one of the problems when you're driven by passion is that you run into work that you don't want to do. It doesn't interest you. There's this false paradigm among a bunch of people in the creative space where you have to do what you don't love doing to pay the bills, or you can do what drives your passion, but you are precluded from making money at it.

4:04But that is a false paradigm because, as I postulate in the book, profit derives from creativity. in every entrepreneurial endeavor. It's something novel that you bring to the equation that drives the profit. And so the mindset is really about embracing that paradigm rather than running away from it or thinking that there's a false paradigm that I can't have both. Yeah. Let's get really down in the weeds of the mechanics of this. And when I first started my business, I was good at selling. That was about it. And so I hustled work. I came to the end of the year and I was like, oh, you got to pay all these taxes?

4:49I thought I just got to keep the money. And so got a real big wake up, you know, for sure. So I said, I've got an idea. I'm just going to make myself a W-2 employee of the corporation. That'll force me to pay the taxes. It'll basically pay me a wage that hopefully I can make payroll. Right. And so to me, even the thought of profit was kind of odd because I was an S-corp. but I was like, I don't want to make any profit. So talk about, I'm setting myself up as something, probably an example you run into. Well, yeah, now you'd be, well, maybe you wouldn't be surprised. There are, so creative entrepreneurs tend to just ignore it for the most part, right?

5:28But there's a large percentage of entrepreneurs in the broader sense that have that mindset of, I don't want to make a profit because I don't want to pay taxes. And I just, I can't even really get my brain around that because if you're not in business to make a profit, then what are you doing it for? Right. It's a job. Exactly. I think creatives also struggle with this idea that profit is honorable, allowable. like it sounds kind of like a dirty word. Like you sell your soul or you don't make money, right? Right. And the reality is that if the business doesn't make a profit, you're exactly right.

6:14You nailed it. You have a job. And there are a lot of people that I've come across in my experience that they would make more money, have less headaches, have fewer headaches and just be more happy in general if they would go work for someone else. Right, right, right, right. Just go to the mailbox and get that check. Exactly. No kidding. So there is a concept in the book that you call the, where is it? Three prong decision of creatives. I would love it if you could unpack that and give us some really the meat of the work. So every business has to answer two questions. One is, can they fulfill the need in the market with their good or service or product?

6:59And the second is, can they make a profit at it? That's what every entrepreneur has to solve. They have to solve that equation. The creative has, adds this third aspect, which is, do I want to do it? Does it, does it further my passion? And that is something that a lot of people wrestle with because again, I go back to, I think most of it is that they don't, they've set themselves into that false paradigm. They've closed the system, so to speak, so that the alternative of being able to make a profit and do what they love is possible. But in interviewing several clients and going through their stories, it's really about reapplying their creativity.

7:51It's using their creativity in a different way. It's not like, you know, there aren't going to be things that you love to do that don't have a economic or monetary impact or value that, you know, purely artistic or purely creative for creativity sake. Those absolutely are. We call those hobbies, right? It's how can I apply that creativity in my business to make a product? And, you know, that word passion, is one that I think is so confusing to people too, because a lot of people, you know, that advice, like do what you're passionate about. Well, I had no idea what I'm passionate about until I did it until I got good at it.

8:35And then I was really passionate about it, but it's because, you know, blogging, writing, I didn't, I didn't, you know, particularly say that's something I'm passionate about. I just started doing it, started getting good at it. People started paying me for it. I was like, I love this, you know? And I think a lot of people really underestimate that idea is, we get passionate sometimes about the stuff we get good at by practice. Yes. And I'd even go a step further that your passion is deeply rooted in something. And for me, in my case, it was this richest rag story. And although I had an awareness of it from an early age, truly understanding the root causes and feelings about my passion didn't manifest itself for, you know, a couple of decades.

9:26I mean, like really coming to terms with understanding what my passion is. And now that I have an understanding of that passion, it's opened up opportunities that I had pretty much ignored, right? The book being the first one, but I'm already on to my second, that is probably going to be a podcast format. But But the point of that is that until you have a true understanding of your passion, what motivates you, it may manifest itself in ways like blogging or in my case, helping people with their finances. But once I understood the true impact of my passion, it opened so many more doors. And that's really kind of a parallel of the creativity in your business.

10:12Once you start looking at it from that lens, you start to see other opportunities open and up to express it. Duct tape marketing really helped me to shave at least six to eight months off of work that I was dreading. After leaving the corporate world, even before I participated in the agency intensive training, I had already landed my first customer. This in essence, more than paid for my investment in duct tape marketing. What you just heard was a testimonial from a recent graduate of the duct tape marketing certification intensive program for fractional CMOs, marketing agencies, and consultants.

10:48Just like them, you can choose our system to move from vendor to trusted advisor, attract only ideal clients, and confidently present your strategies to build monthly recurring revenue. Visit dtm.world slash scale to book your free advisory call and learn more. It's time to transform your approach. Book your call today. dtm.world slash scale. Wow. Yeah, that's a really great point because I don't, you know, for me, I often kid that, you know, I had nine siblings. And so I think a lot of my, I spent a lot of time trying to get noticed. And I think if you were really to take that idea and go back and say, well, you know, a lot of the things, my business, I like to speak.

11:33I like to write. I like that people liked my writing, you know what I mean? So I think that's what you're talking about there. Had I sort of unlocked that maybe early on, you know, you'd realize why, you know, these things that are kind of hard and maybe not that fruitful you stick with. Yes. And, you know, Todd Henry, when I interviewed him for the book, he told me, he said, well, you know what the Greek word for passion is? And I said, no. And he said, I can't, I don't know how to pronounce it, but it's basically the Greek word means suffering. And he said that, you know, in order to really fulfill your passion, you have to be willing to suffer for it.

12:13You not necessarily will suffer for it, but it has to have that depth of emotion for you. And so if you use the word suffering instead of passion, it kind of changes the conversation. Right. Nobody's so interested in that. Right. So, all right, let's all this touchy feely stuff. Let's leave it behind now. Somebody comes to you and they, I think the first step is they do a profit assessment. I know that's part of the book. And then they say, okay, Kristen, what do I need to do? How does the process work? I mean, obviously I know everybody's different, but from a high level, kind of what's the process of working through the profit first framework?

12:53Sure. So the profit assessment basically takes your historical financial information and boils it down to some percentages of, you know, what's your profitability, what's your compensation is. and you know i use the analogy of you know weight loss it's your way in it's like this is where you are and there's no judgment it's just a number but then i i think that the harder part is to think about where you want to be and that you know we we can bring in information around industry standards to say, well, this is what on average your peers are making. But I think the first step for every business owner is to fund their lifestyle.

13:40And that is, I'm going to take out X amount of dollars to do what I want to do personally, support my family. And that's your first goal. I mean, like you need to be able to fund your lifestyle. And so assuming that you have not done that, you're not there yet. The process is to say, okay, you're at a 10 % profit and you need to be at 20 % profit is laying that out in a quarterly implementation plan where we make incremental changes each quarter to arrive at that goal, maybe a year, maybe 18 months, maybe 24 months in the future, depending upon how big the change is, and then help guide you through to get there.

14:25I think one of the things people realize when they implement profit first is that the initial gains are easy, right? When you're changing 1%, you're adding 1 % to your profit. They're easy because you can go back through and say, okay, well, I don't really need to spend this or I can change this behavior or habit. Where it gets more difficult is after you've cut all the expenses that you can, how do you keep moving towards profit? And I devote a whole chapter into the book on value pricing. And, you know, the real lever to increase your profit is with your top line. And in that instance, I'm not talking about just selling more to sell more, but to increase your prices so that your margins are better.

15:15And that's where you really see your profit go through the roof. Yeah. I mean, theoretically, if you're getting 10 % more for something and not paying any more expenses, that drops to the bottom, doesn't it? I was going to ask you if you kind of answered the question already, but I'll ask it in a different way. Profit is a math problem. How much revenue, how much expense, right? So you can lower expenses, raise profit or raise revenue or both as you talked about. How often do you see pricing, not charging enough is a problem as opposed to spending too much? I'd say 100 % of the time. I think owners of businesses, all of us have this fear of raising prices.

15:59And I have rarely met a business owner that was charging the most that they could. Right. And value pricing really forces you to think about how you price your services or goods in terms of the value perceived as opposed to your time and costs. And when you shift your mindset to looking at it that way, you realize that you're leaving a lot of money on the table because you're delivering a lot of value. You just haven't figured out how to capture it. This is the point in the show where I should mention that Christian is actually a client of duct tape marketing. And we are going to go back to the drawing board and reassess.

16:47Well, no, I will tell you this. I did a speaking engagement last week with a group of marketers and kind of walked through my company as a test case, as an example, on value pricing. and then one of the persons afterwards came up and asked me and said well you mentioned you hired a new marketing agency you know what do they do for you and I told them and and they said well if you don't mind how much do they charge you and I told them and they're like really that's a really good deal and I'm like I know okay you heard it here Christian has agreed to a new so I want to And with one last thing, I said in your sort of comical way on the intro, a riches to rags story.

17:31So how did that experience, I think you were in the oil field business, service business, how did that experience as you were coming up, I suppose, as they would have said in the oil field days in Oklahoma, was it? Yes. Yeah. How did that kind of influence your career, your mindset? Yeah. So the whole richest rag story of going from riding in limousines and private aircraft to living in a rent house and driving shitty cars, as I described it, happened when I was 16 and 17. And it shook me not because of the change in lifestyle, but the impact that it had on the family before we were close and did a lot of things together.

18:21And then afterwards, everybody scattered to find employment and that family unit disintegrated. And that was what really impacted me. And even in my early 20s, when I started out on my career, I knew I wanted to help business owners because I knew that what I had experienced, it didn't have to be that way, you know, and that that was my calling. Yeah. Yeah. I you know, it is interesting, you know, starting a business. A lot of people do it to make more money, to have more freedom. And, you know, if you don't get and ultimately maybe to have impact on the world. But if you don't get it's like the hierarchy thing, right?

19:05But if you're not even paying the bills, you know, then the idea of freedom or certainly the idea of impact is kind of a pipe dream, isn't it? Oh, 100 percent. It's Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right? I mean, you got to cover that lifestyle nut first. And I see so many business owners that struggle with that and live hand to mouth and worry when they don't have work and worry when they do have work to see how they can get it all done. And it's like hearing our clients' stories around, well, now I get a paycheck and I don't have to worry about it. And if we don't sell something this month, I'm not stressed out.

19:47And that allows me to be creative. I'm like, that's a money shot for me. Like that's why we're doing it. Yeah, absolutely. Well, Christian, I appreciate you stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Is there some place that you would invite people to find about your work, connect with you, and then obviously pick up a copy of Profit First for Creatives? We've got a URL just for your listeners to go and be able to buy the book and contact me if you have follow-up questions. I don't know it off the top of my head, so I'm hoping you're going to put it in the program notes. We are going to put it in the program notes, but here it is.

20:29CoreGroupUS.com. Is that right? Sound right? Coregroupus.com slash DTM dash podcast. There it is. But we'll also have it in the show notes as well, but I'm glad your team shared that with me so that I could save us both. Save my day. Thank you. All right. Well, Christian, it was great having you spend a little time with us, and hopefully we'll see you soon one of these days out there on the road.

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