Being a Generalist and Mastering the #1 Skill For Online Success with Pat Flynn

Transcription

Today we’re talking with another amazing fitness entrepreneur, his name is Pat Flynn. Not to be confused with the podcaster, Pat Flynn of “Smart Paths of Income” …

But this is another Pat Flynn who’s just as awesome, maybe more awesome. Pat has a great podcast himself called “The Chronicles of Strength” but let me quickly tell you about who Pat is.

He is a self described fitness minimalist, expert generalist, business coach and seventh degree black belt in hanging out. That’s right—just chillin like a villain.

Some of his notable accomplishments include building a six figure monthly income as a solo entrepreneur, he also was one of the top 500 health and fitness wellness blogs and he’s become an international bestselling author of three “For Dummies” books—you know those WordPress for Dummies type of things, right? Not that he was writing them for WordPress but it was one of those “For Dummies” books.

You can learn more about Pat over at his website, it’s chroniclesofstrength.com. In this episode we’re going to talk a little bit about some controversial ideas … Whether or not specialization—really doing the one thing that you do better than anyone else—is really the best way to go as it pertains to building your business’s standing out.

Some interesting talk as well as some lessons learned about navigating the complex world of building an online business. Pat will also share what he believes to be one of the most important things you must master in order to be successful with businesses, especially online.

With that said, let’s welcome Pat onto the show and let’s get started.

Mr. Pat Flynn welcome to the Healthpreneur podcast. How’s it going buddy?

Pat:     Yuri, I am so excited to be here. Things are going well, thank you.

Yuri:    Yeah, awesome!

We had a great conversation on your podcast a little while ago and that was a great conversation so I’m like, “You know what? I’ve got to have you on this podcast!” Because you’re doing some great things and I just think we have a lot in common with the way we think.

I have no doubt this conversation will go down a really fun route.

Pat:     Yeah I’m excited. I loved the talk that we had two or three weeks ago and have gotten fantastic feedback from it. You’re incredibly savvy. I’ve just been diving into all of your material since, so I’m excited to talk about whatever comes up.

Yuri:    Yeah so let’s talk about what you’re excited about right now. What is the major focus? What are you excited about bringing to life?

Pat’s background and his new book

Pat:     Well the major focus right now is my next book, which isn’t slated to release until 2018 but what’s kind of exciting about this for me is it’s completely a new venture.

It’s a venture that I’ve kind of taken on as a passion product—because I’ve done very well with my business where it is, which is in the fitness industry.

The benefit of having an online business and it doing well and a lot of it being automated, is it allows you to take on different projects or more creative projects. And they don’t always have to be projects where you’re like, “Alright, how am I going to derive instant revenue from this?”

That’s kind of where I’m at right now. I’m writing a new book that really ventures more into entrepreneurship, I’m sure will be relevant to the conversation we’re about to have. It’s not completely detached from fitness but it’s definitely toward a different audience.

For me it is an entirely new thing that I am excited to explore. You asked me the one thing I’m fired up about, that would be it.

Yuri:    That’s awesome.

Yeah, it’s so cool to be an entrepreneur because you can create stuff out of thin air, right? We create value in physical things, whether they are foods, courses, books, just an idea.

That’s what’s so amazing about doing what we do, as crazy as we are.

Pat:     Well for me, the biggest thing about being an entrepreneur was to get to this point. To get to a point where all the bills are covered, I have extra in the bank and I can just focus on creative projects.

Especially things where I don’t have to worry, even if they don’t return a dime—because I already have that part covered.

Now that said, I have a plan to make this a profitable venture, but even if I didn’t it wouldn’t be the end of the world.

Another thing for me is that I grew up a musician and just being able to have time to record music and have creative projects there is really something I don’t feel I would have been able to achieve if I didn’t start my own business.

Yuri:    Totally. This is a really important topic to get into because a lot of people get into business and then they get so deep in the trenches, they kind of forget about why they even started in the first place.

I think what you’ve been able to do is create a really successful business that’s allowed you the creative space to really pursue other passions without compromising your existing business. That’s awesome.

What advice do you give to someone who is struggling? Who’s constantly like, “How do we make money tomorrow? How do we make these goals? How do we survive?”

What advice would you give to that person so they can kind of get out of the weeds and start to think about what the possibilities might be outside of that?

The benefits of being a generalist

Pat:     Yeah, well it would be the exact advice that I’m writing this book about—which is the idea of generalism.

To give a little bit of background about myself, I got into fitness kind of late in the game. I grew up very unhealthy, out of shape, never worked out, was never on any of the sports teams—at least, never played on any of the sports teams. I sat on the bench, I kept that perfectly warm for other people.

Later in life I kind of stumbled into martial arts and that instilled a certain level of discipline in me. It started to increase my confidence.

I realized that as passionate as I was about fitness and martial arts, I was never going to be the best in the world.

I was very honest with myself about that. I was never going to be the strongest or the fastest or the biggest. I was never going to be the best at fitness, whatever that even means. That would never have been me.

I wanted to make a career out of it, I wanted to build a business out of it because it was my passion, it’s something I cared deeply about and I was really great at fitness. I’m exceptional at coaching, even if I’m not the best in the world.

I’m also really good at writing and I’m really good at marketing and I’m really good at copywriting and a number of different things.

The point of the book that I’m writing and the advice that I would give people, is don’t specialize—don’t try to be the best in the world and hope people discover you. The better way to get ahead is to get good—or really good, maybe great—at a bunch of different things of compatible skill sets and then learn to stack those skill sets and that way you can have a competitive advantage.

Even though I wasn’t the best at fitness and I wasn’t the biggest or the strongest or the leanest—people paid attention to me because I could write about fitness in a way that was humorous, that was relatable, that was sharable, that made it easy to understand.

It was by stacking my skill of what I knew about fitness and my ability to write—both skills that I developed later in life—I was able to stand out in the fitness industry in a way that a lot of other people weren’t, back when I first started getting into blogging.

Then when I started getting good at marketing—and again, I’m not the best marketer in the world, but I can run direct response ad campaigns, I’m a good copywriter, I can curate sales funnels that convert. When I got good at that and combined it with writing and fitness … That was when I was really able to break out.

That was when I really had the skill sets that I needed to create a profitable business.

I ignored being the best. I ignored specialization. I definitely got away from trying to be leaner or stronger or more impressive than all the other people on YouTube, because that was a losing game.

I was never going to do that and I don’t think anybody can really do that. Statistically, as soon as you’re the best, you’ve got what, 10 seconds until somebody beats you?

Rather, you focus on, “Okay, what other skills can I develop or layer on top of my base skill? The thing I’m really passionate about that I want to build a business around, to create that competitive advantage?”

Yuri:    Nice. So this is kind of on the opposite end of the spectrum of what a lot of people talk about—which is, focus on your few activities that are your zone of genius or unique ability, outsource or delegate everything else, specialize and just focus on the one thing you’re amazing at doing.

How do you know if this approach is right for you? Or is it maybe appropriate for certain people more than others?

Pat:     Yeah, I think this is a really important point.

Just because you generalize and get good, or great at many things—that doesn’t mean you have to do all those things and you probably shouldn’t.

The thing that’s beneficial about being good at say advertising or copywriting or marketing is you can easily detect bullshit. Right?

When you go to outsource these things—which you should if you really want to scale and grow—you should still have a base stack of skills. Like, I’ll handle these two or three things—for me that is fitness, writing and copywriting. And then everything else I kind of outsource.

But I’m good at those other things—that way when I do hire somebody else I can easily detect if they’re actually good at what they do. “It takes one to know one” is the old saying and there are so many people out there who get duped by people who say they’re good copywriters or good ad agencies because they don’t know any better.

If nothing else I think the advice is actually mutually compatible. You generalize in order to be a more effective specialist in your business.

Yuri:    Yeah, that makes sense. I think actually it’s a natural progression too, especially if you’re bootstrapping from day one.

If you’ve got 100 million dollars backing, you can hire hundreds of people and get a ping pong table for your office and just do what you want … But if you’re like most of us, you’re kind of doing everything—customer service, copywriting, video, audio, writing.

Eventually you become competent in all those areas to a certain degree.

I think, as you mentioned, it is important. Have you found—in terms of delegating or outsourcing or hiring other people—that it allows you to better set parameters or performance measurements? And getting those people in the right seats in the first place?

Pat:     Oh 100%. Another point—I think it was you who said it in our last talk—is to make sure you’re emulating people not where they are now, but where they were in position relative to you.

Yuri:    Sure.

 Pat:    A lot of people see someone like Gary Dean—Well, he didn’t start out with a 100 million dollar ad agency, right?

 Yuri :   Yeah.

 Pat:     Same thing.

A lot of people will try and emulate where you are, and I’m sure where I am now. It doesn’t always make sense for people but to your other point, metrics. I mean, when I hire somebody it’s very easy.

I say, “Hey, here’s my number from my ad campaign. You gotta beat it or you’re gone.”

Yuri:    Yeah.

 Pat:     It’s kind of hard and it’s kind of harsh, but it’s allowed me to build very effective team members.

It’s like, here’s what I’m getting … It’s not like you have a week to do it. I’ll give you some time to show me what you’ve got, but if you can’t do it at least as good as me, then what value are you adding to my company? Like, fundamentally.

You shouldn’t be able to just do it as good as me, you should be able to do it better than me.

This is where it helps to not really have an ego with these things. I want people to do these things better than me. I want to be beat at these things.

I haven’t been able to do that with everything, because I’m not great at absolutely everything. But I’m good to great at the things that are really important.

A number of those are things I really don’t like to do, so it at least helps me set those benchmarks that you’re talking about. That when I go to hire somebody or outsource I can say “Hey, here’s what I’ve done, here are the hard numbers. Can you beat this?”

That’s what I love about things like advertising and working with people like that—the numbers don’t lie.

You’re going to know very quickly whether somebody actually knows what they’re talking about so long as you have some general base level of skill and have been able to acquire some level of success yourself.

Yuri:    Yeah. That’s great. How do you get people to recognize what their few activities should be?

They’ve done a lot of the general stuff, they’ve done everything kind of growing their business and then they get to the point where they’re like, “You know what? Really what I want to do, what I love doing is walking my dogs. But obviously that’s not going to help grow my business unless I’m doing something in the dog business.” [laughing]

How do you steer people in the direction of really figuring out what those few things are? In your case, for instance, it was blogging and some of that.

The power of communication

Pat:  Yeah, I think you start with communication skills.

I think fundamentally, if we’re talking about essential skill stacks, communication is the name of the game.

Then this is where you can kind of go where you think your strengths may be. Not everybody wants to be a good writer or is a strong writer, but maybe your voice is great and you’d be fantastic with a podcast. Or maybe you like the way that you perform in front of the camera or maybe you suck at all of these things and you just need to work on getting a little bit better at each. And then kind of see which one suits your style the best.

Communication is fundamentally the name of the game. If you do not have clear channels of communication in your business it’s over. You’ve lost.

If you cannot communicate your value, your message, your unique proposition, your brand in some way … And there’s no one way that you have to do it.

First I started out with writing, then I started taking video work a little bit more seriously and now I kind of do a mix of each. I know people who are tremendously successful in just one avenue, whether it’s podcasting or YouTube or any of these.

I think the first skill is communication and then once you develop those lines of communications—or as you develop those—you can simultaneously develop the skills of direct response marketing.

If we’re really talking about bang for your buck, “how are we going to get from A to B as quickly as possible?” …

I’ve built over four businesses since I started my first one, and I don’t want to make it seem like it’s easy— but nothing is as effective for building a profitable business than understanding true direct response marketing.

How to build a sales campaign start to finish, how to get attention, how to acquire leads, how to get those leads into some type of sequence, how to warm those leads up, how to introduce them to your brand.

This is where the skills of communication come in.

Then how to ultimately position and offer and make sales. Then once you do that how, to retain customers. How to please customers, make sure they’re satisfied and then eventually get them to ascend to more or higher levels of good or services.

Yuri:    Yeah. That’s great. That’s really good advice and the funny thing about direct response … For everyone listening, direct response is … I’m so deep in it I can barely explain it anymore, but it’s basically a form of marketing where you can measure the response.

You put out an ad, you can see the ROI. You put out a video or an email you can see the response, as opposed to, say, a billboard ad on the side of a highway that has no way of tracking the results from that.

Pat:     Yeah it’s funny that you bring that up because people will often ask me, what’s direct response? Same thing, I’ve been in it so long I don’t have a great definition for it.

I think you’ve really summed it up. I think that’s perfect. It’s a type of advertising where you can directly measure the response that you get. That’s it.

Yuri:    That’s the beautiful thing about online is that you can measure—you should be able to measure—most of what you do.

For instance, with this podcast we have a free book for all of our listeners called Health Profit Secrets. There’s a specific URL attached to that book so I’ll know exactly where those people came from and I can measure the value of those customers based on their traffic source being of the podcast.

That’s something I can measure but if I were to just say, “Hey, go buy this book on Amazon,” I have no way of knowing—other than looking at the movements in book sales somehow based on it’s popularity on Amazon—how this is affecting that.

I think that’s such an important skill set. The funny thing too is—and you might agree—once you know this stuff you can’t un-know it.

You’re going to start looking at commercials or looking at billboard ads and you’re like why would they waste their money doing this when they can track things appropriately?

Pat:     Yeah it’s funny. And direct response is a series of skills. It’s communication, it’s copywriting, it’s advertising. It’s a lot of different skills that go into being an effective direct response marketer.

I forget who said it, it might have been Gary Halbert or Dan Kennedy, but they made the point of— if you can learn the skill of direct response you will never be poor.

You could be broke if you’re irresponsible with your money, which often happens to people. But you will never be poor because you will always have a skill set that you can use to generate income. And then, you know, learn some financial skills so you don’t wind up broke.

Yuri:    Exactly. One thing at a time.

This is one of the biggest challenges for the health and fitness industry, because a lot of people starting their own businesses are really technicians, right?

They’re really great artists at doing their work but they’re not great at the marketing. Because they’re not great at the marketing they don’t like the marketing. Or they don’t like selling so they feel like sales is douche-y or they want someone else to handle that.

How do you get someone to understand that if they don’t get this dialed in they’re going to have a tough time?

Pat:     Yeah you know it’s very similar to my background of playing guitar and this was exactly me as a guitar player I just wanted to be a technician. I wanted to be the best guitar player.

The problem with being the best guitar player is the only people you interest are other guitar players.

Most people out there are not going to a concert to listen to somebody shred on the guitar for two hours. They want to go hear actual music.

I got stuck in this trap early on of being a specialist and kind of being a purist about it too, like “Oh, I’m not going to dilute my art.”

You see the same thing with a lot of business owners. “Oh marketing, no I’m not going to dilute my art or dilute my integrity.”

You really have to get away from that mindset. It’s a hideous trap and it’s a snare that a lot of us fall into.

Marketing and Pat’s 80% rule

The rule that I tried out in my book is the 80% rule. The idea is that you go to 80% of something. Be 80% as good at something that you can be—and 100% means you’re the best in the world.

Don’t go beyond 80%, because beyond 80% is where you typically pass that point of diminished returns. Where the trade off you have to make to become that hard core specialist is the difference between practicing for a few hours a day and practicing for every hour that you’re awake, and giving up every other possible opportunity.

Rather than trying to go to 100% in fitness or whatever your technical base skill is, go to 80% of it, which is still great.

You’re still a master at 80%. You’re just not the best in the world.

Then all that time you’re saving by not trying to go to 100% you can begin to allocate to the other skills that, like it or not, you need to develop if you want to grow a business.

Marketing for example, it doesn’t matter how great you are at the guitar or doing hanging leg raises or hand stands if nobody knows who you are.

Now the flip side is true, and we have to acknowledge that. If you’re only like 5% good at something and then you start getting good at marketing … Everyone’s going to realize you suck at that other thing. Right?

You do have to get good at something first before you start to add marketing on top. Marketing is just a delivery mechanism. It’s just going to speed up the rate at which people find out what you’re talking about or not.

I can sympathize with it, I’ve been there.

I was that technician who was like “No, I’m not going to dilute my art by learning song-writing, I’m just going to play the most technical guitar solos I can.”

Nobody wanted to listen to that. It wasn’t until I decided, “Okay I can just be an 80% good guitar player.” Then I also learned to be a better songwriter too—to actually attract people to my music—which was far more rewarding and actually allowed me to make music in high school that people wanted to listen to, and would win the battle of the bands competitions.

That lesson always stuck with me when I went to start my business. I avoided specialization and I embraced generalization. Okay I’m just going to be 80% good at fitness. Then all the time I save around not trying to be the best at fitness I can spend on getting the word out about what I do and how I help other people.

Yuri:    Yeah, totally. That’s great.

It’s funny, I was going back and forth with someone on LinkedIn who I thought would be a good fit for the podcast because he was doing some cool stuff. He was really adamant about his response like, “I’m a researcher not a promoter.”

I was like, “Wow. That’s really sad. I’m very sad to hear that.”

I have nothing against people who are doing the PHD thing, researching and all the formulations or whatever it is they do. When I see those kinds of responses I’m like … “Wow, you have a gift that can transform a lot of peoples lives and because of your own mindset you don’t actually want to get out into the hands of more people.

I find that somewhat selfish.

That’s why … Similar to what you’ve said, for me it was a big journey. Figuring out how to be okay at selling and getting to the point where I understood that if I don’t sell something I’m really depriving someone of a solution that can help them.

I think that’s something a lot of our listeners really have to remember. Whether it’s you, Pat, or anyone else—everyone has a gift and a message that can really transform peoples lives, and if we don’t get it into their hands we’re really doing them a disservice.

Pat:     Yeah I forget, I’m terrible with the attributions, but again I remember one of my early mentors saying, “Hey, there is a moral imperative to marketing. If you really believe that you are great and you truly believe that you can help somebody and you can help them better than that other person. Well don’t you have some type of moral imperative to get the word out about what you do or of how you can help them?”

Especially when there are so many hucksters out there, or con artists, because if you don’t get them then the other person will. Right?

If you can do a better than job than that other person then certainly there should be some type of impotence upon you to make sure that you are doing whatever you need to help that person. You can’t just expect that they’re going to be magically attracted to you if you’re just sitting in your research lab doing research all day long.

You might have the best knowledge and the best experience for healing people but if you’re not willing to get out there and promote yourself then you’re not really helping anybody.

It’s a shame because I’ve talked to a number of these people, especially people on the fitness side. I’m friends with many people who are very much in the evidence-based community, which, that’s what I am. I’m an evidence-based guy but a lot of them just lump all marketing into one category where they feel like it’s selling out, or they feel like it has to be done in some very cheap cliché way.

Then they see what I’m doing and they talk to me and they’re like, “Pat, I love what you’re doing. You’re marketing effectively but you don’t come off as that used car salesman.”

I think that’s a really important message, and I think it’s really important to expose people to that—not all marketing is about being that used car salesman, in fact I find that method to be quite ineffective.

I think a lot of effective marketing comes down to authenticity but that doesn’t mean you’re not being aggressive about it, because you should be.

Yuri:    Well you have a great podcast and that is a form of marketing. That’s a marketing channel where you’re basically just getting people used to who you are and other guests.

Hopefully people understand that a podcast—us having this conversation—is a form of marketing, so if you’re worried about what that looks like here’s a simple example.

Having a conversation, adding some value and then over time whenever you’re ready you can go to the next step. It doesn’t have to be really slimy as a lot of people might find.

Pat:     Yeah.

Pat’s advice for starting in a new market

Yuri:    New market today, what’s the first thing you would start doing?

Pat:     If I was starting in a new market today, I would start by identifying a problem.

A lot of people think initiatives and things like that. I don’t think that’s necessarily wrong, but I have always had the most success by identifying problems first—big specific problems.

Problems that have a large market to them already, meaning problems that people are actively paying to have solved.

Then I would go to that problem and I would try to develop a unique solution to that problem.

Rather than trying to find a problem that isn’t being served or isn’t being solved—which means there probably isn’t much of a market for it—I would find a big problem that is a huge market like fat loss for example.

I’d be like okay, how can I craft the unique message, unique brand, unique proposition that would allow my solution to stand out in this big market, in this hot market—that other people are not able to do?

Fundamentally, that’s what I’ve done with my business.

My business is fitness minimalism. That’s my unique proposition because I’m the guy who will help you get from A to B by doing the least amount that you need to do. By being effective and efficient. And then through there I do a lot of my stuff with kettlebell training so I have a very unique solution to a series of common problems, really—I offer solutions to fat loss or gaining strength or muscle.

I would just take that approach and move it to a different problem, whatever that is.

Maybe you have problems making money—okay, well here’s a unique approach. Generalism, like we’ve talked about. That’s kind of what I’m doing with my book right now, and that’s why it’s exciting, is because I’m doing exactly what you asked. I’m moving into an entirely new market, at least for me.

The problem that I’m helping people solve is actually a few problems. It’s not just making money, but it’s also that feeling of wanting to do more with your life, of wanting to create—and creating a business is just one part of that.

A big thing that I’m trying to solve with this book is to help people understand that humans are really meant to be generalists. I mean, that’s why we’re at the top of the food chain, because we can adapt to so many different things.

We are beaten out as specialists—we’re not as strong as the gorilla, we’re not as pretty as the ostrich, right?

But we can do most things better than almost any other animal. We are supposed to be generalists and when we embrace that, we’ll not only be more successful in my opinion—or at least find success easier than trying to be a specialist—but we’re going to be able to be more creative, expressive, and enjoy life more overall.

That was a very long winded answer to a very simple question.

Rapid-five questions

Yuri:    Oh it’s great man. Well going from a long winded answer, which is always welcome on this show, we’re going to the rapid five. Are you ready?

 Pat:     I am thinking I’m ready.

 Yuri:    Alright. You’ve got no prior knowledge of these questions, I’m going to just fire them at you and whatever comes to mind just shout it out.

 Pat:     Right.

 Yuri:    Number one, your biggest weakness?

 Pat:     My biggest weakness is procrastination.

 Yuri:    Your biggest strength?

 Pat:     My biggest strength is creativity.

 Yuri:    One skill you’ve become dangerously good at in order to grow your business?

 Pat:     Copywriting.

 Yuri:    What do you do first thing in the morning?

 Pat:     I write.

 Yuri:    Complete this sentence, I know I’m being successful when …

 Pat:     I know I’m being successful when people tell me that I’m changing their lives.

 Yuri:    Beautiful. Awesome Pat. This has been a lot of fun buddy. Thank you so much for taking the time.

What’s the place for our listeners to stay up to date with what you’re working on and obviously when it’s out, your new book?

 Pat:     Well my email list is definitely the best place and you can join that at my website, chroniclesofstrength.com.

I give away an eBook with 101 kettlebell workouts in it, so if you’re interested in kettlebell workouts then you’ll find that to be very fine and dandy indeed. You can also just grab that right at 101kettlebellworkouts.com.

I make my emails fun, I think people enjoy being on there. I talk a lot about minimalism and generalism but other than that—Facebook and Instagram. Facebook.com/chroniclesofstrength. Instagram.com/chroniclesofstrength. Those are the best places to get me.

Yuri:    Awesome. Guys, we’ll be sure to link up to all that good stuff in the show notes so check out the chroniclesofstrength.com afterwards.

Pat, once again, thank you so much for taking the time. I appreciate you, I appreciate the work that you’re doing and for really kind of challenging the status quo with these new concepts that you’re pushing out into the market. And really getting people to think differently about how they approach life and business.

Keep up the great work man.

Pat:     Yuri, thank you for the engaging conversation.

Yuri:    As always.

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There we go guys. Hope you’ve enjoyed this conversation with Mr. Pat Flynn. It’s always fun connecting with him because he’s just such a well spoken guy, he’s got his head on straight, he’s got a really cool way of looking at the world, as you can tell.

Once his book comes out I’d strongly recommend grabbing a copy. I haven’t read it obviously, because it’s not out yet, but I’m sure based on who Pat is—it’s going to be pretty cool to go through.

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