Entrepreneurs: How Profit Driven Innovators Are Cleaning Up the Planet with Jim Beach + Others

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The following is a paid podcast. iHeartRadio's hosting of this
podcast constitutes neither an endorsement of the products offered or
the ideas expressed.

Speaker 2 (00:09):
You tell me an environmental problem and I can introduce
you to the entrepreneur that is currently solving that problem.

Speaker 3 (00:17):
Always wanted to come back to media, and at this time,
podcasting was the great escape.

Speaker 4 (00:21):
I took on this label as a widow, which is
a club that nobody wants to join, one with the
highest admission price.

Speaker 5 (00:28):
I'm Richard Gearhart and I'm Elizabeth Gearhart.

Speaker 6 (00:30):
You just heard some snippets from our show. It was
a great one. Stay tuned to hear tips about how
you can start your business.

Speaker 1 (00:39):
Ramping up your business. The time is near. You've given
it heart, now get it in gear. It's Passage to
Profit with Richard and Elizabeth Gearhart.

Speaker 5 (00:50):
I'm Richard Gearhart, founder of Gearheart Law, a full service
intellectual property law firm specializing in patents, trademarks, and copyrights.

Speaker 6 (00:57):
And I'm Elizabeth Gearhart, founder of Gearmy Studios, podcast and
content coach, Passage to Profit co host and CMO like
your heartline.

Speaker 5 (01:05):
That's a big list. Today's guest is someone who's about
to challenge how you think about entrepreneurship today. On the show,
we're joined by five time best selling author, award winning speaker,
and founder of the School for Startups Jim Beach, whose
groundbreaking work is helping entrepreneurs and even capitalists solve some

(01:27):
of the world's biggest challenges.

Speaker 6 (01:29):
And then we have two amazing presenters. Joe Massa is
a podcasting veteran, so nice to have you on the show,
and a media strategist and host of The Measuring Post,
owner of Podtopia Network. And the list goes on, and
I want to hear all about this network because if
you're even thinking of starting a podcast, you want to
know how these work. And then we have Nicki Wake,

(01:50):
the inspiring founder of Chapter two Dating. So she lost
her husband, which really stunk, and she decided instead of
just wallowing itself pity, to do something about it, so
she started a community. Really cool.

Speaker 5 (02:03):
That's great. Well, welcome to Passage to Profit the Road
to Entrepreneurship, where we talk with entrepreneurs and celebrities about
their business journeys. And speaking of business journeys, it's time
for your new business journey. Two and five Americans are
business owners or thinking about starting a business. And we're
going to ask our panel today what's the one mind

(02:25):
shift or habit that separates people who actually start a
business from the people who only talk about starting one. Jim,
welcome to the show. Great to see you. What's the
one mind shift that separates the actual business starters from
those who are just talking about it.

Speaker 2 (02:43):
Well, it's a great question in one of the fundamental
questions of entrepreneurship. I do believe that it's a decision
you have to make. And my wife started a business
and was going to teach her ten friends how to
do it and a seminar, and no one came because
they just didn't take the initiative. You need to give
up something, I believe, And I think TV is a

(03:03):
good place to start. The sports All Weekend, the Real Housewives,
the cooking shows. I think you usually just need to
it's up to you to decide. You know, no one
else can decide for you, and you are the only
one that can make the decision. You have to say,
I'm going to be the one that's going to raise
my hand and be different from the way everyone expected
me to be. I think my high school class would

(03:23):
have guaranteed that I would be the least entrepreneurial or
outgoing person on earth. But I chose to be different.
So it's a personal choice you have to make. I
roise my hand.

Speaker 5 (03:33):
Absolutely true. So Joe Massa, welcome to the program. What
separates the thinkers from the doers?

Speaker 4 (03:41):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (03:41):
I agree definitely with what Jim said, but I think
a bigger part to consider is that people really get
stuck in this planning phase where they're going down analysis
paralysis road and they can't start because they need the
most high end microphone and camera or the most expensive software.
And really the most important mindset shift that you can
create it is just to start with where you're at

(04:02):
and not feel like you have to have the whole
plan mapped out because you'll never have a perfect plan.
And you know, they always say that a good plan
today is better than a perfect plan you know, tomorrow
or never. So just start with what you have, really
dial in and learn as you go, and don't feel
like you have to have all the answers up front,
because if you do it that way, you'll never get started.

Speaker 5 (04:21):
Oh that's a great comment, really appreciated. Nikki Wake, What
are your thoughts and so my.

Speaker 4 (04:27):
Kind of echo Mapovo speaker. I'm not sure this phrase
translates to the US, but j FDI, which basically means
just think, do it, and it's about it's about you know,
not thinking about it. I mean, it's sort of translates
back to Mel Robbins five second rule of just do
it right, don't question it, don't deliberate it, don't procrastinate,

(04:50):
just do it, and the minute you have an idea,
action it. And that's been the one thing that's got me, well,
I'm serial entrepreneur, run a couple of businesses. Is is
not stopping and thinking about it.

Speaker 5 (05:02):
That's great. Decisiveness is important. Elizabeth.

Speaker 6 (05:05):
Yes, well, I think we're kind of on a theme
today because mine thought about before the show is recognize
that you are procrastinating and quit procrastinating, and especially for
those parts of it that you don't want to do,
just you know, recognize that that's what it is.

Speaker 5 (05:21):
Speaking as a fellow procrastinator, you must be speaking from
personal experience. I couldn't agree more. When I think about
what got me from thinking about starting a law practice
to actually starting one. For me, it was kind of
my personal circumstances. So I think that people who start

(05:42):
businesses are either really passionate about the subject or they
have their back against the wall. And in my case,
I had my back against the wall.

Speaker 2 (05:51):
Right.

Speaker 5 (05:52):
I had been in corporate America for a long time
and just felt ground down by the whole environment, all
of the politics and everything else. And I was looking
for new options and Elizabeth said, why don't you start
your own practice? And I thought she was nuts, but
I did it and it turned out to be a
great decision. So for me, the motivator was I didn't

(06:16):
want to go back into the corporate environment and subject
myself to all of the suffering that I experienced there,
and that, for me was the motivator, and that moved
me from thinking about it to actually doing it.

Speaker 6 (06:29):
So Chief Marketing Officer, may I interject something, Oh absolutely,
And this June, in six months, it will have been
twenty years since he made that decision and got incorporated
your heart law.

Speaker 5 (06:40):
Yeah, so we're very excited about that and it's a
milestone for sure, and we're going to have a big
celebration at the law firm. We're going to bring in
a lot of clients. We're going to bring in the
team and we're really looking forward to it. So today's guest,
Jim Beach, is an entrepreneur and author who argues that
the real heroes of climate change aren't celebrities or politicians.

(07:04):
They're risk taking capitalists working eighty hour weeks to actually
fix the world. He's the author of a new book,
Real Environmentalist, and we're really anxious to hear about his
thoughts on how capitalists and entrepreneurs are fixing the environmental issues.
And he's also an amazing entrepreneur in many other ways.

(07:28):
He is the founder of the School for Startups, which
teaches entrepreneurs more about business than they could get anywhere else.
So welcome to the show. Jim. It's a pleasure to
have you. Your new book argues that capitalists and not climate celebrities,
are the ones saving the planet. Why do you believe
entrepreneurs are the true environmentalists today?

Speaker 2 (07:49):
Well, thank you for having me. It is an honor
and I'm going to have some fun. I don't think
that they are the one solving that. I know it
because I have met the people. So I was doing
my radio show and one of my radio guests was
a man named Wayne Elliott, and I consider him an
environmental hero twice. He has for the last sixty five

(08:12):
years recycled ships. He buys aircraft carriers and submarines and
oil tankers and drives them into his yard and under
the highest ISO certifications and the highest environmental standards, dismantles
the ship and recycles them down to their fundamental parts,
and ninety seven percent of the ship can be recycled.

Speaker 7 (08:33):
One of the.

Speaker 2 (08:34):
Hardest parts is the batteries, and so he spent twenty
million dollars of his own money in twenty years researching
how to recycle alkaline batteries. He finally figured it out
and got a patent and got Canada up to ninety
seven percent in recycling and had an amazing accomplishment. Eventually
that business was sold to Black Rocks. You really don't

(08:55):
get any more prestigious or more corporate blessing than that.
But here he is changing two environmental problems and solving them.
Ships that sink are much worse than the island. You
know the sea level rising, you know the sea level
rising is going to take centuries to happen. But that
ship that sank off of your port could leak asbestos,

(09:18):
oil fuel, paint, and thousands of other chemicals that would
ruin your ship or your port or your fisheries for centuries.
And I think that's much more likely when we consider
that there's hundreds of thousands of ships that are at
the end of their life cycle right now, and there's
no international law about what happens to them. They get
sunk in the middle of the night, in the middle

(09:39):
of the ocean. I think it's a much bigger problem.
But here's Wayne solving two of those problems. And I asked, Wayne,
can I write a book about you? Because you deserve
to be more famous? And he's like sure. And then
I started studying the problem and I realized discovered two
hundred and sixteen American companies that are for profit, one
hundred percent operating in our norm capitalist rules. Go find

(10:02):
a customer, have the customer pay you, and deliver a
good or service. They're not out there getting grants, they're not,
you know, appealing to Congress for congressional money and for
you know, government loans. They're out there selling product and
services and they are slowly cleaning the earth and solving
the problems. You tell me an environmental problem and I

(10:22):
can introduce you to the entrepreneur that is currently solving
that problem. So in the book, we have five heroes.
Wayne is of course one. Another one is getting named
Gator Halpern. In one of his college classes, he figured
out that the chemistry that they were teaching could have
other uses, and now he is growing ocean coral like

(10:46):
you know, see coral fifty times faster than God can
grow it. And he can come into your resort overnight
and replant a coral reef that was damaged or give
you a whole new coral reef. Another incredible sign scientists
that I met is figuring out how to suck all
the microplastics out of the ocean and out of our
water and turning those in to sneakers and croc shoes

(11:11):
and things like that.

Speaker 5 (11:12):
That's really amazing. And getting back to the ships. We
live in New Jersey and if you go down to
the shore, you look out across the water. A lot
of places there's these old sunken ships that are sticking
out of the water. They're ugly and they're you know,
hazards for other boats. I guess the scuba divers, like

(11:32):
you know, swimming around in them, but that's about the
only about the only use.

Speaker 6 (11:36):
Well, we were at the patent awards for New Jersey
for the Research and Development Council, and there was an
entrepreneur there who was doing the same thing with the microplastics.
I don't know if it's the same person, but those
are a huge problem and making plastic. Plastic is made
from oil. I don't know if everybody knows that. And
so I mean I worked at Dow Chemical and when
the price of oil went up, Dow Chemicals profits my

(11:58):
way down because they're making all the plastic. So the
more that you can recover, the less oil you're going
to need for those types of consumer products.

Speaker 2 (12:05):
Right. One of the entrepreneurs in the book is actually
addressing that and figuring out how to build plastics without
oil as the backbone chemical that holds all of them together.
So instead of having oil as the basis of your
paint or your cosmetics or anything like that, a natural
element can be used. But he's replacing the bad part

(12:28):
out of our plastics, which is an amazing thing. Now
here's the kicker the story that's going to make you
really upset. He is a professor at UC San Diego,
and the dean of his program came up to him
and said, you need to stop studying all of this
commercial stuff. You're not doing what you're supposed to be doing.
Go write papers for us to read. Quit doing this

(12:50):
commercial application stuff.

Speaker 5 (12:51):
Wow, He'm not in trouble.

Speaker 2 (12:53):
For saving the world, is I think of it.

Speaker 5 (12:56):
It's really true. There's a mindset out there, and I'm
glad you're challenging it. We're with Jim Beach, who's the
author of the Real Environmentalist. Jim doesn't some of this
activity need to be coordinated by the government.

Speaker 2 (13:09):
I'm sorry, I don't think so. No, they're the people
who are slowing down my entrepreneurs and are making it
more difficult and coming in and saying, oh, wow, now
that we've discovered you here solving things, we need to
regulate you.

Speaker 4 (13:21):
No.

Speaker 2 (13:22):
I think the last thing that we need is more
government involvement in this. The government, the academics, they are
the problem. The non government organizations, the NGOs. They're slowing
down and preventing good solutions, and they're spending money in
the wrong places. They just had the big COPA Brazil
event where they all flew down to Brazil and talked

(13:43):
about all the important things that need to be done,
the new regulations they want, and how they're going to
decrease the usage of air conditioning and all of this stuff. Well,
not a single one of my entrepreneurs was invited, Not
a single business person was down there representing common sense
and saying, already solved this, Probably we can do this.
You know, we're already doing it. Then we don't need

(14:04):
you to provide money or more regulation.

Speaker 5 (14:07):
But one of the things that I think you point
out is that there are a lot of celebrities who
are pretty hypocritical on these topics.

Speaker 2 (14:13):
Right, Well, it goes beyond that. The level of hypocrisy
is absolutely disgusting. And so one of the things that
we did do in the book is we compiled a
list of the ten biggest celebrity hypocrites. And one of
the features we're going to talk about later on and
the show is how to use chat GPT. And I'll
talk about this then, but we use chat GPT to
prove who the biggest hypocrites are. It's not our suggestion

(14:37):
or our bias or any influence. This one's prettier than
that one. No, we set it upon chat GPT to
figure out and tell us who the biggest hypocrites are.

Speaker 6 (14:46):
I'm going to say who they are on this show.
You have to buy the book.

Speaker 2 (14:52):
Yes, well, some of them are obvious, you know, some
of them are quite disgusting. I'll tell you some of
the people who didn't make the list, and I can
tell you why. The Kardashians, for example, all of their
houses get fined every month about one hundred thousand dollars
each because they use more water than they are allotted.

(15:13):
They want green grass and calabasas, and that's not going
to happen without daily watering, and they use so much
more than their allotment that they're fined one hundred thousand
dollars a month. And the list of celebrities who get
fined was endless. I have an attire. It's a footnote
and it goes on for a page and a half
of other celebrities that are getting fined for their excessive

(15:36):
water use, and that didn't even make the list. The
Kardashians didn't make the list because they're not stupid enough
to go out there and say, look how great I am.
I'm saving the world. I'm saving the world. Some of
our celebrities are famous for going to the UN and
giving speeches and saying I'm saving the world, and then
saying You're not doing enough, then getting on their private
jet and flying off to their private yacht with some

(15:58):
twenty four year old.

Speaker 5 (16:00):
Well, I mean, no, bush.

Speaker 6 (16:01):
Wait, what's the name of your book? You didn't say.

Speaker 2 (16:03):
It's the Real Environmentalist And it's also real Environmentalist dot com.
And you can go there and see the methodology that
I'll talk about in a minute or two with chat GPT,
see who's on the list, have us defend it. And
then there's also bios on all of our heroes there
as well, So let's not forget the hero Part two.

Speaker 5 (16:22):
Is there a real concern about climate change and the environment?
I mean, I've heard so many contradictory opinions on this.
What's your opinion?

Speaker 2 (16:33):
Well, I got a degree in oceanography and undergraduate, I
have sailed across the Atlantic Ocean, and I have been
on the tallest some of the tallest mountains in the world,
and I've explored the world. And I want my kids
to do the same thing. I love beautiful, clean environment,
and I'm a conservative. In the nineteen o two, Teddy

(16:55):
Roosevelt type conservative. Let's just not change stuff. Let's not
introduce wolves unless there's a reason too, you know, let's
not mess around with things that are working in that
sense of conservation. I used to worry about climate change
all of the time, because of all of the media
stories that we hear, the UN report that we get
every four years. Of course, I was worried. But the

(17:17):
more that I study it, the less I worried. And
I'm sleeping really well at night right now, Guys, got it.
My story is an incredibly good news story. The problems
are being solved.

Speaker 6 (17:30):
I just want to get your take on this. So
you know that when you burn a fossil fuel like gasoline,
when you combust it, everything in it. It's made of
carbons and hydrogens, and you combust it, you add oxygen
to that and you make CO two, which is the
bad greenhouse gas. But you also make a molecule of water.
Right so, I feel like we're taking water that's been

(17:52):
buried with the dinosaurs for however long, and throwing it
into our atmosphere and really saturating our atmosphere with more
water than it expects. And maybe it's adapted to that,
but when you think about these storms and tsunamis and
all this stuff and rising sea levels and everything. People
are like, it's from the icebergs melting. Maybe, but maybe
it's all this extra water with throwing into the atmosphere.

Speaker 2 (18:13):
That's not the main thing that I'm worried about with water,
And I'm also not worried about the atmosphere right now.
There's been a lot of studies on that, and I'm
going to come down on the not worried side. As
a matter of fact, there is and an European company
that I did not cover in the book because they
would not let me interview them, that is primarily owned
by Bill Gates. Interestingly enough, and they are the major

(18:36):
carbon offset company in the world, and they will take
all of your private airplane use and plant trees and
all that stuff. They're not planting trees, they're cleaning the air.
They have built skyscrapers that suck air in one side
and pump air out the other side. That is clean
and better. And I don't know anything about it because
they really won't talk to me about it. I can

(18:57):
give you the name of the company offline and stuff.
But Bill the Eights has sworn, and he just made
his big announcement about a month ago that he's not
worried about the climate anymore, that these companies are doing
what they claim and cleaning the air and the environment.
So water is a huge issue. I think my biggest
concern is the lack of water right now in certain

(19:17):
areas that we're building data mines and all of these
new data centers that are going to need nuclear power
to operate and a whole new source of water to
keep cool. So I'm not worried about the atmosphere.

Speaker 5 (19:31):
Elizabeth, Well, we're with Jim Beach, who's the author of
The Real Environmentalist, and I'm kind of glad to see
the direction things are going now with climate change, because
it seemed for so many years the issue was highly
politicized and the politics of it really interfered with thoughtful,

(19:53):
deliberate solutions that both could be arrived at through commercial,
capitalist means and also through perhaps some regulations, some moderate
regulation and policy, and it just became such an intense
issue that we couldn't make any progress on it. And
regardless of whether you think there's global warming, cleaning up

(20:16):
rusty ships out of the ocean is something that everybody
can agree on right, nobody wants beer. So I think
that the direction you're taking us with these concepts is great.
What do you see as the future of capitalism and environmentalism?

Speaker 2 (20:32):
Well, you know, I am concerned about the future of
capitalism itself. I think that, you know, with the maorial
elections in both Seattle and in New York, and you
know the way politics are now, there is a huge
majority of youngsters that are loving socialism and they haven't
seen it collapse five times during their lifetime like some

(20:53):
of us older people have, and so they still think
it's sexy. I think capitalism needs to be defended, and
one of the coolest ways that we could defend capitalism
is show that it saved the environment. So I think
that the two maybe shouldn't be as connected as much
as they are, but they are one hundred percent connected.
And that's what's so cool about the entrepreneurs. Instead of

(21:14):
asking for money from the government from people who don't
want to give it because they want to buy more
military or more guns, that were you know, the perpetual
fight of guns versus butter What are we going to buy?
We take that problem away and have the entrepreneur go
to people who are throwing money at them and saying,
solve my problem. You solve my problem, I will gladly

(21:34):
give you my money. The way the capitalist system.

Speaker 5 (21:37):
Works, I would say that my early corporate experiences were
in the chemical industry, and when the environmentalists came out
with their program in the eighties and the nineties, the
chemical industry just had this knee jerk reaction that you know,
defended all costs and just ignore it. And you know,
they knew that they were polluting. They knew that they

(21:58):
were polluters. That was a business that runs on very
small margins. They didn't want any extra cost and so
they worked hard to discourage the environmental agenda. So it
does require incentives for some of these companies to put
profits aside and work on things that are going to
fix the environment right, And to me, it seems that

(22:19):
part of that has to be through some level of
government policy.

Speaker 2 (22:23):
I don't know, I lost you somewhere in there. I
don't necessarily agree with that, and I'm not going to
compare a new entrepreneurial startup with a fifty year old
company that makes military weapons and chemical weapons and breast
implants and the incredible teflon that keeps my eggs off
of my plate in the morning. You know, I'm a

(22:43):
believer that they do good and bad. You know, I'm
a realist here. They've made some great things and they've
made some bad things. But that's a situation where a
fifty year old company or maybe even older. I don't
know how old now is, but we know they're around
for World War Two. They were certainly going to have that,
you know, defensive posture versus the people who are always

(23:05):
coming in and trying to catch them on something. Whereas
the new entrepreneurs are just going out there and within
the existing legal structure solving problems. You know, my San
Diego professor has business makes amino acids, and that's what
they're turning into the new backbone of plastics, amino acids
instead of oil. I don't know that that needs to
be regulated. There are already regulations. He's not allowed to

(23:28):
emit toxins, he's not allowed to pollute, and so I
think those regulations are what we need, and we don't
need a new regulation that says, if you're going to
build an amino acid company, you need to go talk
to Frank first, you know, and make sure you make
Frank happy.

Speaker 5 (23:43):
And there's a lot of government waste and a lot
of the programs that were started, and so it is
a thorny problem. I'm with you, though. I think entrepreneurs
can help, and I think the awareness if the politics
can kind of dissipate a little bit. I think that's
probably the best hope for us. In the few we
have to take a commercial break. We're with Jim Beach

(24:04):
amazing discussion. He's the author of Real Environmentalist and I
suggest you pick up a copy and support the entrepreneurs
who are supporting us. We'll be back right after this.

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Speaker 10 (26:14):
Now back to Passage to Profit once again. Richard and
Elizabeth Geerhart and.

Speaker 6 (26:19):
Our special guest Jim Beach, the real environmentalist.

Speaker 5 (26:23):
Yeah, there's there's a lot of people out there working
on this stuff.

Speaker 6 (26:27):
Yes, he's also very much into entrepreneurship and he has
a school for that, and we're going to ask him
some questions about his entrepreneurship school. I did go on
your website and looked at it, and wow, you've done
a lot and you have a lot of credibility.

Speaker 5 (26:41):
He's a five time best selling author. Well, he's done
and he's been on like all the major networks.

Speaker 6 (26:46):
So what does somebody need to do to get into
your school of entrepreneurship? Can anybody join or do you
have a criteria that you follow?

Speaker 2 (26:53):
We want everyone to join. I believe that everyone has
the ability to be a successful entrepreneur and to change
their life life and to change the generations of their family.
So we'll help anyone do it.

Speaker 5 (27:04):
Where did you come up with the idea?

Speaker 2 (27:06):
I was running a business in my twenties. I started
the business when I was twenty three and ran it
until I was thirty one. We grew the largest summer
camp company in the world. I started with one camp
at Stanford and another one at Mit and within seven
years we were at eighty nine locations with six hundred
employees and taking care of some twenty thousand kids a day.

(27:30):
And when I got out of that business, sold that
business to the cheerleading camp. By the way, the cheerleaders
bought out for the summer of my summer camp business,
they are the only ones bigger than us. I started
reflecting on the things that we had done and the
way we had done it. I started writing a book
about that time. And also I was asked by Georgia
State University to come and teach an international entrepreneurship class.

(27:51):
And I went to that class. And I was a
little arrogant, little cocky thirty one years old, just sold
a big business six hundred employees. I was, Oh, this
entrepreneurship stuff is so easy.

Speaker 5 (28:01):
Anyone can do.

Speaker 2 (28:03):
It is so easy. And so my class made a bet.
We bet that I could start a business that semester,
make it cash flow positive that semester. They got to
choose the country and the industry that I would start
the business in. They chose Pakistan and furniture. So I
had three months to build a profitable Pakistani furniture company.
If you go on my LinkedIn profile and go to

(28:23):
the experiences and scroll all the way to the bottom,
you will see the chairs that we built, the product
that we built there, absolutely gorgeous, three four thousand dollars chairs. Well,
I won the bet and made the bet many semesters
in a row, and a reporter from the Atlanta Journal
Constitution heard about that and said, what's the consistency? What
are you the thing that makes this work? And by

(28:44):
that point I had developed my methodology. And the reporter said, well,
you should write a book about this, and I said, well,
I'll write a book if you find a publisher. I
made him a bet. Well, a week later he came
back and said McGraw hill has said yes, so you
hear these stories about a book and sent out one
hundred letters and got ninety nine rejections and finally someone
took it no. And this really proves the you know,

(29:08):
when we talk about entrepreneurs, you need to have your
story really good. You need to know what your value
statement is. Your elevator pitch. Our elevator pitch was so
good that McGraw hill said yes in one week to
our book. We only pitched one person McGraw hill, one
page proposal. We got a yes, and so we sat
down to write School for Startups. I ended up writing
it all and it includes my three prong philosophy. Number one,

(29:33):
creativity is worthless for an entrepreneur. You should just go copy, borrow,
or steal someone's idea. Ninety three percent of businesses are
copies of other existing businesses, so there's no reason to
be in that seven percent and try to come up
with something new. Copy someone else's idea blatantly, just make
it better. Of course, Richard not going to steal any copyrights, trademarks.

Speaker 5 (29:54):
Now you're talking to it intellectual property line.

Speaker 2 (29:56):
I know, I know. My first business was American Computer Experience.
It was a copy of National Computer Camp, National became
American Computer stayed the same camp became Experience. They started
at Sunday at three. Can you guess what time? I
started Sunday at three. But I didn't have their curriculum.

(30:18):
I had to write my own curriculum. You know all
that we just did it better. I was at Stanford.
I don't know where they were, but I was at Stanford.
Where do you want to send your kid for the summer?
And so that was philosophy Number one, copy someone else's
idea and just make it better. Number two risk, I
don't believe in risk. I think you should start a
business for under five thousand dollars. If you can't prove

(30:39):
the model for under five, probably shouldn't do it. On
my radio show, I have interviewed thousands of entrepreneurs who
have bootstrapped every business model, and Richard Branson proved that
you can bootstrap an airline with zero money, one of
his favorite best stories. And so five thousand dollars is
my limit to start a business. The same amount you

(31:00):
would spend on your weekly vacation to San Diego for
the week, or you know, to go to bail something
for the week. So that's the amount of risk. I'm
comfortable with the number three passion. Passion is awesome for
the church, the synagogue, the mosque, in the bedroom, but
nowhere else do you need to have passion. I sold
a lot of stuff that I don't like, a lot
of passion for items, or sold a lot of products

(31:22):
I just don't care for because I'm more passionate about
the money, the lifestyle, the freedom, the opportunity. I'm not
obsessed with the thing. I will sell anything if it
allows me to go on another week of vacation doing
what I want to do. So when you take those
three rules, it changes the entire game. And so now

(31:43):
I have to sit around waiting to discover what my
passion is. I don't need to have a lightning bolt
from God. I just need to read Entrepreneur magazine, see
what someone's doing in Denver, and do it better into
coma right well.

Speaker 6 (31:54):
And I think that's the true definition of an entrepreneur.
They don't have to invent it. They have to take
a business from ground zero, build it and then sell it.
So I know some of them are lifestyle businesses, but
a true entrepreneur just wants to develop a business and
then sell and get an exit and at your heart law.
We have entrepreneurs who've seen be successful time and time again,

(32:16):
and they do protect their intellectual property. And then we
have inventors who are people who really do want a
lifestyle business. So they invented this and they want to
build a business with it and keep it until they retire,
and both ways work.

Speaker 5 (32:28):
Yeah, I think what you say has a lot of
truth in it. One of the things that we're working
on right now are some of the software systems, and
just by the nature of a way it came about,
we have a few systems now that are patched together
and they're not necessarily legal systems or systems meant for

(32:50):
attorneys or law firms. We're now looking at getting systems
that are made especially for attorneys and law firms because
they've been through all the issues that we're trying to solve.
So why buy something different and then try to make
it work for you when somebody's already done that. And
so your approach is really very very pragmatic. I think

(33:11):
the creativity comes in from the decision making that you
make and the directions that you take the company once
it's started, Your attention to trends, your sensitivity to customers.
All of that is you, and that's I think something
that would be very difficult for somebody to duplicate.

Speaker 6 (33:31):
We're talking with Jim Beach on Passage to Profit. Jim,
I had a question for you. Do you have a
success story of somebody who's been through your entrepreneurial program
and had a great exit.

Speaker 2 (33:43):
Yes, we do. You know, we're not really about the
exit as much as just getting a business up and running,
and most people end up loving doing that and keeping
the business up and running. So yeah, we do. We've
had a lot of web designers who have come through.
We have. One of my favorite success stories is Randy
Brown and he provides services for legal firms that have

(34:06):
nothing to do with legal so you know, stenographers and
all of that kind of stuff in the record keeping,
in the online things that you know. He has a
law firm supply company. I would say, so, yeah, we've
had thousands and thousands of people come through. We've been
doing this since two thousand and one.

Speaker 5 (34:24):
That's great, Jim, it's been amazing interview. We've learned so
much and really appreciate your time. Can you tell our
audience where they can find you?

Speaker 2 (34:34):
Of course, they can go to Jimbeach dot com or
School for Startups Radio dot com or Real Environmentalist dot com,
all of those, but Jimbeach dot com is the easiest
and it launches off.

Speaker 5 (34:46):
To everything perfect. Well, thank you very much for joining us.
Now it's time for AI in Business, so Elizabeth take
it away.

Speaker 6 (34:54):
This is AI and Business where I will ask each
of our guests for one way that they're using AI
in their business. We'll start with Jimpeach with Jimbeach dot com. Jim,
what is one way that AI is helping you in
your business?

Speaker 2 (35:07):
I alluded to this earlier when I was making my
list of villains for the Real Environmentalist. We asked chat
gpt to rank the celebrities of the world, and we
defined celebrities as you know, people who might appear in
People magazine and sports stars and stuff like that, and
ask them to say, who are the people out there
talking the most about their environmental effort? Who's out there

(35:31):
claiming to be the best. And it made a list
for us, and you can see that list on Real
Environmentalist dot com. Then I said, now, take a list
of people who are actually getting their hands dirty the most.
Who are the entrepreneurs that there's pictures of out there
cleaning birds and planting trees, and it made a list,
and then I said chat GPT fliped those two lists,

(35:52):
and so the people at the top here should be
at the bottom here, meaning that they're honest people doing
a lot of work that they're talking about. And the
worst is when you're talking about a lot and doing nothing.
And so that created a number of scaling system and
by flipping our two chat GPT lists, we were able
to determine who's the biggest liar and biggest hypocrite amongst
all of the celebrities own and so creative. It's not

(36:17):
my opinion, it's not my bias verifying. If you don't
like it, you have to argue with chat GPT.

Speaker 6 (36:26):
Not everybody's uses. So Joe Masa with podtopianetwork dot com,
what's one way that you're using AI?

Speaker 3 (36:36):
So obviously, using large language models is great for market research,
it's great for asking questions and learning different procedures in
how to sort of build something out. But what a
lot of people are not using is frequently is AI
is meant for automations. So we build a lot of
different systems that eliminate a lot of busy work.

Speaker 7 (36:55):
I'm a smaller company.

Speaker 3 (36:56):
I've got an employee, I've got some interns, some people
that help us out, But essentially a lot of the
day to day work, I have to wear a lot
of hats. I'm the admin, I'm the payroll, I'm the marketer,
I'm the face on the camera. I have to respond
to emails and do a lot of the clerical work.
So a lot of that is very time consuming, and
then I find myself in this sort of hamster wheel
where I'm doing work that doesn't move the needle instead

(37:19):
of doing the work that will move it. So we
implement systems in place that automate responses and firing off emails,
informed submissions that upload into our CRMs, and build out
systems built on different AIS that a lot of people
aren't quite as familiar with that really help streamline and
make my day to day work a lot more efficient.

Speaker 6 (37:39):
Do you have a company helping you do that that
is an AI implementation company, or do you have your
own developers figuring it out or what so?

Speaker 7 (37:46):
I do ninety nine percent of that myself.

Speaker 3 (37:48):
Podtopia originated the name I'll give you quick high level
I started an AI company called Flowtopia dot Ai, and
it was meant to be a system of automations for
any industry, but the Flotopia and the pod Toopia we
wanted to keep the nomenclature similar so we could brand it.
But I've been just focusing more on the podcast side
and really just doing a lot of the flow Topia

(38:10):
automations myself underneath, sort of in the background. It's sort
of the glue that keeps the business running, and we're
really testing out these frameworks and I'm sort of my
own case. Study 'reun proving that it works because it's
really helping my business grow and thrive. And if it
works for me, we can make it work for you
as well.

Speaker 6 (38:29):
That's awesome. Okay, Nikki Wake with chapter two dating dot
app are you using AI?

Speaker 4 (38:36):
We're not actually using II. I mean you have to
think about there's a lot of talk in the dating
industry about AI. I mean, you can even have an
AI boyfriend or girlfriend as an example. But my audience
is predominantly over fifties, slightly technically challenged, shall we say.
In many cases, some of my audience struggle to upload

(38:58):
a photo. So the idea of unleashing AI girlfriends on
that particular audience fills me with dread and fingers. I'm
a real believer that actually our site is all about
human to human connection and that's at the very core
of what we do. So we're not using AI per se.
I'm seeing personally arise in people using AI to generate

(39:20):
their dating profiles, and quite frankly, you can spot some
of them a million miles clearly. You know, Bob in
Texas is seventy five. You didn't write this, you know
it's blindingly obvious. But you know, we generally put out
quite a lot of communication about how to write an
authentic profile personally and guide people where we can. But yeah,

(39:43):
AI and dating the juries out for me.

Speaker 5 (39:46):
I'm afraid that's hilarious. But would you like ever use
it for administrative purposes?

Speaker 4 (39:52):
I mean, yeah, we kind of could. I mean, for instance,
I have to screen profiles every single day. I personally
there every person who joins, because we have lots of
potential scammers who think that widows and widowers can be exploited.
I could do that to AI, but nobody can spot
a scammer like I can. And you know, that is
all about human nature.

Speaker 6 (40:13):
You're right, there are things AI can't do that it
wants to pretend it can, but it can't. So Richard Gearhart,
with your heart law pats trademark's copyrights. What is just one?
I know he's been in an AI crazy lately, but
what's one way you're using it?

Speaker 5 (40:28):
I was initially going to say that we want to
create our own LLM for the law firm, which we do,
but we haven't started on it, so I'm not technically
using that. One way I used it last week was
to create a script for cleaning up file names. So
when we take passage to profit, we tape it on

(40:48):
multiple cameras, and there's hardware that we use creates a
lot of junk files that make it hard to find
the real files. And so what I did, I asked
chat Shept, is there a way to clean up these
files so I don't have to go through it manually?
And it said sure, you could use a program called PowerShell.

(41:10):
And what it does is it goes on the operating
system and you take a piece of code that chat
Shept writes and you paste it into a file, and
then you click on that file and it automatically goes
through and gets rid of all the garbage files and
changes file names to something that is more useful for me.

Speaker 6 (41:34):
I am totally impressed.

Speaker 5 (41:35):
Yeah, it's great, and it probably saves me thirty minutes
per show when I'm just trying to clean up the
footage so that we can get it to our editor.
It just amazed me. And the feeling of satisfaction that
I got from actually fixing this problem and saving that
time was amazing. So it's just like another dopamine hit,

(41:56):
you know. Okay, now I'm back into chap gip even
more now, So I don't know what's going to happen
to me.

Speaker 6 (42:04):
So for me. Elizabeth Gearheart, founder of Gear Media Studios,
et cetera. I'm giving a presentation at podcast Expo, which
is a big podcasting conference in Orlando in January. Really fun,
and my presentation is five tips to influence what chatchept
says about you and your podcast. And I've been using
different llms. I've been using chat Rept and Google Gemini

(42:28):
and perplexity and then the various ones with imperplexity to
help me come up with the content for this. I've
learned a lot and a lot of it's back end stuff,
but I'm comparing from different sources. And then there's also
stuff I know that I've learned, like at different conferences
and presentations, and stuff that it didn't put in there
that I've had to add myself. But then what's really
interesting is the people that are running podfasts said, well,

(42:50):
if you're giving a presentation, take your presentation and put
that through chat rept and tell it to tell you
what questions people will be asking you from your presentation.

Speaker 5 (43:00):
Oh that's so clever. Yeah, so you can kind of
anticipate what you're going to get.

Speaker 6 (43:05):
Yeah, and that was a podfast people. That wasn't me
that came up with that, but I thought that was
really smart for anybody that gives presentations. You know, how
could this be better? Although I don't know. I think
you have to keep it pretty real. I don't think
I would ask it to write it for me or
make it better, but I would ask it to certainly
find questions.

Speaker 5 (43:21):
Well where I find it's been helpful. So I'm working
on a series for the law firm of YouTube videos,
and I'll ask chat GPT to write a script for
YouTube video and then I'll look at it and I'll
rewrite it myself, just borrowing a few ideas here and
there from chat GPT. So it's good at that kind
of thing. But again I want it to be natural

(43:44):
and coming from me and not from chat GPT. And
just using it as a way to sort of add
or verify ideas I think is great.

Speaker 6 (43:53):
So Joe and Jim, what are some other ways you're
using it? We don't have to just keep it to
one way. Any comments about it, like does it lie
to you? Does it tell you the wrong thing?

Speaker 3 (44:02):
It definitely can. They call it hallucinating. And certain lms
are better for certain tasks. For example, one that's more
of a human sounding writer and a little more creative
in writing is going to be clawed by anthropic and
that's just another LM. It's a French one, but it's
very similar to chat GBT. Chat GPT is going to
be more of your jack of all trades. Gemini's sort

(44:24):
of in that field. Gemini's gotten really good with their
AI studio. They've got their image generator. The newest one
is called Nano Banana really powerful. Their video one is
called Veyo Veeo, and I think they're on the third
iteration of that very good for those AI generated videos
that you see.

Speaker 7 (44:42):
But it really.

Speaker 3 (44:43):
Depends on how you use it, and lms have a
lot deeper functionality than people give them credit for. Most
people use them like a Google search bar and they
just go, hey, what's the best way to bake salmon?
And it'll spit out some recipes and that's great. Or
you go, hey, I need to write an email to
my mother in law who i've and talk to in
years and tell me what to say, and it spits
out this great information. But in the settings and in

(45:06):
the back end of those lms, there's a lot of
ways that you can fine tune it to have your
brand voice. There's ways that you can have it give
you answers more like a consultant would, instead of just saying.

Speaker 7 (45:17):
Hey, Richard and Elizabeth, what a great idea. You're the
best and most amazing and this is great.

Speaker 6 (45:22):
There's nothing wrong with that, by the way, at about
doing that before the show. It's like, you're the best
thing since slicespread.

Speaker 5 (45:31):
I know, you go into the settings.

Speaker 3 (45:33):
Instead, you can go into the settings and say, hey,
chat GBT or Clode or Gemini, don't just agree with
me on everything instead treat me like a consultant would
treat a client who's looking for real information, and you
can sort of guide the way that it treats you
and acts for you. So if you're using just the LMS,
those are great, but again, a lot of the automation tools,
like you know for the no code or low code

(45:55):
ones like make dot com, there's Zapier, there's N eight
n these are things is the connected tools you are
to use. For example, if you're using the Microsoft Suite
or the Google Suite and you connect to airtable and
then you connect to Slack for internal communications, you can
have an event trigger off a series of other events
that follow behind it. So it's an automation flow that

(46:15):
really takes away a lot of the busy work that
you do and the work that's not something that only
you can do. For example, Richard, you are the main
person who does the trade copyright laws, you're the lawyer.
Your expertise is really hard to come by. Anyone could
be a data entry person. Anyone could reply to an email.
So use AI or a virtual assistant to do the

(46:37):
work that anyone could do, so you can focus on
the work that only you can do.

Speaker 6 (46:42):
Well, and you brought up a good point. So a
lot of software systems that we're using have their own AI.
So we're using Zoho for our CRM for the law firm,
and it has its own AI. Now, Zoho has always
done automations the whole time we've been using it, and
we've used that piece of it and it's really cool.
It's pretty effective. But we're trying to decide whether to
keep using Zoho. I think we are, at least for

(47:03):
a while. So we're going to dig into Zia and
see how much Ziya could do for us without even
having to bring in a chat or another LLM. So, Jim,
did you have any more AI comments?

Speaker 2 (47:13):
I do have one more thought. We haven't mentioned using
AI to remember what you have forgotten. So one thing
that I'm using it for is to put an a
tire book in and say what characters are not developed
as well as the other characters. Or you could put
in a legal document and say are there any things
that I'm forgetting about? So my friend and I make

(47:34):
a one page legal document on the back of a napkin.
Basically we could put that in and say is there
anything that I'm forgetting what else is there to consider?
And even with a marketing plan, if you input your
marketing plan and say what else do I need to
think of for this? I love it for that helping
me consider my bald blind spots.

Speaker 5 (47:55):
For our audience, Jim is showing us as bald spot some.

Speaker 2 (47:58):
Of us just don't care less work to do. That's
product to buy.

Speaker 6 (48:04):
Yeah, so I think a lot of people are using
it in very interesting ways, and it'll be interesting to
see how it progresses as time goes on. I only
know one person I think maybe two that have not
used chat GPT at this point. Right, so we're in
December twenty twenty five, so it's catching on much as
the personal computer did. Like I think people were pretty

(48:26):
floored by that when it came out. Now everybody has
it on their phone. So thank you very much. This
has been AI in business use cases from the real world,
and now it is time for a break. We'll be
right back.

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Passage to Profit continues with Richard and Elizabeth Gearhart.

Speaker 5 (50:44):
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So subscribe to the Passage Profit Show on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube,
and on the iHeart app. And now it is time
for Intellectual property News. Today's Intellectual Property News takes us
to Capitol Hill where Gene Simmons of the rock band

(51:29):
Kiss walked into a Senate hearing and without a single
drop of face paint, managed to rock the entire room anyway.
So the issue is the American Music Fairness Act. And
we've got a couple of radio folks here on the
show today, so this may be of interest. And the
question is is should the people whose voices we hear
on the radio be paid when their songs are played?

(51:51):
So you kind of think, well, aren't they paid, Well,
it turns out that they're not. Right now, they're making
zero dollars and the American Music Fairness Act seeks to
change that.

Speaker 6 (52:03):
And the hearing also revealed something very wild when it
comes to paying the people that are actually singing the
songs on the radio for the radio play. The US
is in the same category as Iran, North Korea, and Cuba.

Speaker 5 (52:20):
Strange there, so when your IP strategy aligns with North Korea,
you're in pretty bad shape. So anyway, Gene Simmons pointed
out that everybody gets paid when there's a hit song,
the radio station, the advertisers, the DJ, and even, according
to him, the plumber fixing the station bathroom, but Bing

(52:41):
Crosby singing White Christmas and Elvis and Whitney Houston, none
of them get paid. These are all dead well, these
were the names he brought up, and there's more to
it than that.

Speaker 6 (52:52):
But there was a radio broadcaster there, Henry Hinton, and
he said local stations are struggling, and even a small
royalty could hurt their ability to broadcast local football games.

Speaker 5 (53:04):
Small radio stations are always struggling, though.

Speaker 6 (53:06):
Struggling, but really, if you sing a song that' they're
playing over and over again. Jim shaking his head. Now,
he doesn't think they're struggling.

Speaker 2 (53:13):
I know a lot of individual radio station owners that
are making a million dollars a year.

Speaker 5 (53:18):
Well, that's struggling.

Speaker 6 (53:19):
I think.

Speaker 2 (53:20):
Well for me, you know, I spend just that on caviar.
But of course, yeah, a lot of my station owners
are doing very, very very well. I think they are
in the station. You are, like if you're in Topeka
or places like that, that local advertising market has not died.
Those local pizzerias still need new customers.

Speaker 6 (53:44):
And really, if you're singing a song, should you get
paid for it? Yes, okay, Jim.

Speaker 2 (53:49):
The thing that the problem is now is that content
is free. That's changed everything you used to have to pay.
The radio station had to pay. They still do, but
now I'm giving them content for free, and Joe will
give them content for free, and Nicola will give them
content for free. Because there's thousands of US podcasters that
will want any distribution if you called me up and said,

(54:10):
you know, we'll do it for free. So content now
the cost of their product has gone to zero.

Speaker 5 (54:15):
Well, and the other part of it too is that
the radio station bargain was that you got exposure, right,
so you've got your song played, and then people would
go buy records and they go to your concerts. But
that's not so big a deal anymore because people are
getting their music from all sorts of different sources besides
the radio, right, So that argument doesn't hold up.

Speaker 6 (54:36):
This is an issue I think, not just for radio
stations but for AI in general. Taking content that it's
going to be in the courts for a while now,
so we'll see how it all plays out.

Speaker 5 (54:47):
Right, Well, we'll keep you updated. We'll let you know
if Gene Simmons has any more wise remarks on this subject,
and this act will go to Congress and could fall
into the Congressional black holl or it could get past.
So we'll keep you informed.

Speaker 6 (55:03):
Let's keep going with content creation and talk to our
next guest. Joe Massa is a podcasting veteran media strategist
and host of The Measuring Post and owner of Podtopia Network,
a full service podcast network that helps creators launch, grow,
and monetize their shows while connecting them with top tier
guests and sponsors. I don't really know a lot about

(55:25):
podcasting networks, but I am so eager to learn after
reading this so well, Tasha tell us all about it.

Speaker 3 (55:32):
Yeah, so it really I didn't start with the intention
of running an entire network of shows.

Speaker 7 (55:37):
It really was.

Speaker 3 (55:38):
I've spent about twenty plus years in the radio industry,
and I was on air on AM FAM online syndicated
via satellite nationwide, and one hundred and seventy cities nationwide
on a Westwood One and these different platforms, And as
I got a little older, started a family, I realized
that radio, while, like you know, Jim said, the stations
themselves aren't necessarily hurting a lot of these stations because

(56:02):
of the technology advancements, they're syndicating a lot of their formats.
So it used to be everyone was live and local,
and it was you know, your butt had to be
in the chair in the city that you were living
in and that's where you got your local news from.
But now a lot of it's syndicated. So a lot
of the shows you might be listening to, they might
be being broadcasted from LA or Chicago or Dallas. So

(56:23):
it's it's different for the internal employees of radio stations.
They're certainly not making millions of dollars a year. So
what we were forced to do is always have two
or three streams of income. So it got to the
point where I couldn't comfortably take care of my family.
So I started looking for other means of making you know, income,
and eventually I got out of media all together for

(56:45):
a while, did some finance, did some it always wanted
to come back to media, and at this time, podcasting
was the great escape. So I started launching my own show,
and you know, just working through the process and having
twenty years of radio experience. I would get other podcasters
that I would network with and they would need help
or they would want tips on how to produce things

(57:05):
or how to market their show. So eventually I just
started taking on more and more of these people who
are looking for expertise and said, why don't we just
build a whole network out of it. Let's put all
of our shows together. Essentially, I market a lot of them,
I help them grow. We created an online course where
we teach people how to start a podcast. Then we
have a lot of educational pieces where we continue to

(57:28):
teach you how to find new tactics, new techniques, new platforms,
new tools to try, new ways to monetize. And so
we just started growing sort of organically, and eventually, you know,
now we've got like sixty shows that we work with.
We've got about two or three hundred that we work
with on a smaller scale, and we've even opened up
a new community and we invite media businesses to come in.

(57:51):
So maybe you are a video graphic editor or a
graphic designer, website designer, an SEO company, Well, we want
to work with you too, because those of the people
behind the scenes that make shows monetize and get traction
and are seen by the algorithms on YouTube or Instagram
or your platform of choice. So we decided to kind

(58:11):
of put it all together and be a full ecosystem
for podcasters, built by podcasters.

Speaker 6 (58:17):
Well, it's interesting that you say that, because I was
looking for a podcast marketing agency a couple years or
so ago and I couldn't find one, and I realized
that with your media studios, I was going to have
to be an agency. So I do help people with
the marketing, but I feel like podcasting now. I used
to say it was seventy percent marketing. Now I feel
like it's eighty percent marketing. I think having a network

(58:39):
like yours to help is really valuable.

Speaker 5 (58:41):
Yeah, I mean, I'd like to ask the question, Jim.
Maybe you can chime in here too, Joe, and of
course Nikki. What does somebody need to do to get
their voice heard among all of the media that's out
there today? So you have a lot of entrepreneurs who
are using media tools like YouTube, podcasting, blog posts because

(59:02):
they want people to hear about their business. But it's
so competitive, there's so much content out there, So what do.

Speaker 4 (59:10):
You do from a personal perspective. I've had huge amounts
of media coverage. I've been in every single women's magazine
in the UK, in every porteet newspaper, in every tabloid newspaper.
I'm on the TV twice next week. But for me,
it's all about sharing my personal story. So I think
having a very personal and compelling story certainly helps you

(59:31):
cut through the kind of promotion and marketing noise. I
think you know I well there. Obviously my personal story
is very tragic. It has enabled me to get my
voice heard quite clearly. So and that and a very
strong PR person who can get very creative with angles
and stories, Joe.

Speaker 3 (59:49):
So I think Elizabeth, you said something that's very true too.
A lot of it is, you know, a smaller section
is the content. Obviously you need quality content, but it
doesn't matter how good your content is if nobody sees
you or knows where to find you. So your visibility
and discoverability, which is where your marketing comes in your
SEO game, your keywords if you're not familiar seos search

(01:00:09):
engine optimization. And I'll get into more of that in
just a moment, because there's an old way of thinking
about SEO in a new way that should be adopted
as well. But a really big piece of it is
leading with value. Like Nikki said, you have to lead
with a story, lead with something. If I just get
on every podcast and go check out my website and
buy my program, people get tired of that really quick.

Speaker 7 (01:00:31):
Like I'm gonna give you something. You're gonna learn from me.

Speaker 3 (01:00:34):
You're gonna learn why I'm an expert in this field
and why I've been doing this so long. And then
there's a good reason that if you do have a
real question, you can reach out to me because I've
built and gained your trust right in a way to
do that, A simple three way to do that without
reinventing the wheel is find your target audience. Maybe if
you're a health and wellness person, maybe they're mainly on Instagram.

(01:00:55):
If you're an entrepreneur show, maybe a bigger chunk of
your audiences on LinkedIn. So identify where the people that
you want to talk to are living, and then engage
with them. Go into the communities that already exist. Comment
on people's post. Lead with value. Drop in some templates,
say hey, thanks for adding me to the group. Here's
who I am. I would love to share this new

(01:01:16):
thing I found out XYZ put it in there. If
you do that consistently, all of a sudden, people are
going to start saying, man, I see this Joe massa
guy in every threat, who is he? They click on me,
then they see what I do, then they can watch
some of my content. But you have to create a funnel,
a funnel of engagement, and a lot of people think
of this as the old school just sales funnel. You know,

(01:01:37):
they got your flyer in the mail, then they checked
out your website or called your phone number. You sold
them the pitch. Then they're in the bottom and they
buy your product. It's a lot different now the marketplace
is overrun and consumed with new media. You're absolutely right, Richard.
There's so much media out there. It's really easy to
get lost in the shuffle. So you have to find
a good niche. You have to be consistent, and then

(01:02:00):
you have to have a lot of touch points. A
lot of people think, Okay, I'm on a podcast, I'll
take one reel from that, I'll post it today and
then I'll never talk about it again. Well, the algorithm
on Facebook and Instagram and LinkedIn a lot of the
people that are your followers or people that like your page,
they don't see every one of your posts because the
algorithm washes that out and they fill it with ads

(01:02:22):
that are from paying advertisers. So consistency, always repurpose your content,
get lots of touch points. And then also something not
to sleep on is your email marketing strategy. You absolutely
want to be in people's inboxes because that is like
the most intimate form in modern day advertising that I
can think of, Because if I let you stay in

(01:02:44):
my inbox, that's like your DMS but for professionals. Right,
So most people just unsubscribe, But if I let you
stay in my inbox long enough, there's a reason I
either like you your content or I want to buy
something that you're selling. So touch points, consistency, an engagement
is where you're going to be seen and picked up
by other algorithms.

Speaker 5 (01:03:04):
Right.

Speaker 6 (01:03:04):
And I think what I've been finding in my research
too is you really need to have brand authority. And
that's one thing that being on podcasts like this, and
that's going to be my secret at the end of
the show, But being on podcasts like this, somebody else
has invited you onto their media property. Thought you were
good enough to talk on their media property, and that
gives you more authority both with Google and the llms

(01:03:28):
and the whole ecosphere, and that's really important for authority building,
especially for your website.

Speaker 5 (01:03:33):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:03:33):
Absolutely, Yeah, and you said something I really want to
highlight real quick before we move on, because on Google
search engines and lms, they have different search engines.

Speaker 7 (01:03:43):
So yes, what I wanted to say.

Speaker 3 (01:03:45):
Earlier is people are really the old school thinking of
SEO is how can I get Google or Yahoo are
being to find me? But now a lot of people
are using chat, GPTs or Gemini to search. They have
a different set of criteria for how they find in
scrape information. So you want to make sure you're playing
the game to be seen by them as well as

(01:04:06):
the major search engines, because in a couple of years
from now, even Google Search, which is the king of Kings,
when it comes to modern day search engines, they're dwindling.
They're hurting right now because of the lms. So make
sure either you or your team understands SEO on LM
fronts because that's a game changer for modern businesses.

Speaker 6 (01:04:26):
And that's a big part of the presentation that I'm
giving at Podfast, So I've really dug into kind of
the back end of the marketing stuff and it is different.
And I've asked it what's the difference between Google and llms?
And there's a few key differences that I'll be getting
into as well. But whatever marketing agency you use or
for your business, like I'm not even just podcasting, but

(01:04:46):
for your business, really needs to be on top of
this stuff, right.

Speaker 3 (01:04:50):
Yeah, majorly, And and again, brand authority is the best
thing that you mentioned. I even created a program called
the Brand Authority Launch Path. It's just specifically for that.
But you absolutely need to have a team behind you
or even if you're doing it yourself. The other piece
of advice, don't stretch too thin. A lot of times
people start businesses and go I need to be on Facebook, Instagram,

(01:05:11):
x TikTok, LinkedIn, And now you're on five platforms, six platforms.
You're not giving any one of them enough attention. So
instead of having one or two really powerful platforms, you've
got five mediocre or just not flat out good. And
it's more of a bad look. If I got nine
different platforms, they each have five followers, and three of
them are my family members. A lot of people are

(01:05:33):
not going to want to take advice for me. They're like,
this guy can't even build up his own brand, why
should I listen to him? So focus on a few
platforms specifically, and then have good keyword game and learn lllms.
You're gonna get up more bang for your buck.

Speaker 5 (01:05:47):
We're with Joe Massa, who is the founder and owner
of Pontopia Network. Joe, can you tell us any stories
about people who have successfully sort of risen above the
in and you know, kind of broken through.

Speaker 3 (01:06:02):
Yeah, I think you can look at a guy like
Joe Rogan if you want to see the tippy top
of podcast echelon.

Speaker 2 (01:06:08):
Right.

Speaker 3 (01:06:08):
He started doing a monthly podcast on UFC fights. Because
you might not know, I mean a lot of people
know he was a commentator for the UFC for a
long time.

Speaker 7 (01:06:17):
He was actually a professional.

Speaker 3 (01:06:19):
Kickboxer himself, so we always had this background in fighting.
He decided to do a monthly show about what's happening
in the UFC.

Speaker 7 (01:06:27):
It was not doing well at all.

Speaker 3 (01:06:28):
The early shows were terrible, very low quality, and even
though he had enough money could produce it, had the
team behind him, it just wasn't done well, and he
started getting to a rhythm and found out that he
really liked it. So instead of a monthly show on
one specific topic, he said, I got enough money, Let's
do this every single day. Bring on people that want
to be you know, our audience wants to hear, whether

(01:06:51):
it's Elon Musk or some famous celebrity or some famous
athlete or other you know, social influencer. And his consistency,
I mean at this point and he's got three or
four thousand episodes out and now he's got one hundred
million dollar contract from Spotify. So the power of podcasting
is really there. And the reason why, and what separates

(01:07:11):
podcasting from radio, in my opinion, is the engagement factor.
When you turn on the radio, whatever's on is on.

Speaker 7 (01:07:17):
You don't choose that.

Speaker 3 (01:07:19):
But if I go out of my way to find
your podcast and I engage with it, I subscribe to it,
I download your show, I listen to it. I'm hyper
engaged with whatever you're talking about. I'm a very warm lead.
It's much easier to sell to someone like that than
it is to someone on the radio that just flips
on the car and they're talking about a restaurant. That's great.
It might be like a discoverability factor, but the ability

(01:07:42):
to break through to your target audience is significantly higher
in podcasting, at least from my experience. So there's a
lot of brands that don't even want to interview people.
They just want to, like film myself talking for ten
minutes about a topic, because that will build that.

Speaker 7 (01:07:57):
Brand authority that we're talking about. This is a new
way that you see me.

Speaker 3 (01:08:01):
You get to hear my voice, you get to see
how I interact with people or thoughts or procedures, and
then you can say, this guy really knows this stuff.
So next time you have a question in the podcasting space,
there's a good chance you'll reach.

Speaker 5 (01:08:13):
Out to me. So we're with Joe Massa Jim Beach.
Do you have any questions for Joe?

Speaker 2 (01:08:18):
Joe? Have you had any outsourcing success? I have almost
everything that my show does except for me talking, is
outsourced to the Philippines for I'll tell you exactly one
thousand dollars a month. And I have a college graduate
who you know, I send him classes to take and
you know he's awesome. Are you having any experience like

(01:08:39):
that or have you thought about doing that because I
think it's a lot easier. A lot of people would
step into it easier if they had someone in the
Philippines that three or four hundred dollars a month to
do so much logistic work for them.

Speaker 3 (01:08:53):
Yeah, you're one hundred percent right, And we definitely outsourced
a lot of work. And again that's why we built
a lot of these AI system we talked about earlier,
because it eliminates the need for some of that. But
I think part of what we've built into Potopia Network
is the business database.

Speaker 7 (01:09:08):
I get people all the time that say.

Speaker 3 (01:09:10):
Hey, Joe, I'd love to start a podcast, but I
also need a graphic designer, I need somebody to run
my pr I need someone to get me bookings. And
while I can do most of those things a I
don't want to do it consistently.

Speaker 7 (01:09:21):
That's just not what I'm passionate about.

Speaker 3 (01:09:23):
I know passion is not always something that's necessary, but
for me, that's something.

Speaker 7 (01:09:26):
I'm really anti passionate about.

Speaker 5 (01:09:29):
But also I think, I guess right.

Speaker 7 (01:09:35):
Very powerful emotions.

Speaker 3 (01:09:37):
But you know, I would rather give somebody the tools
and the tactics and the blueprints to do this on
their own because that's scalable. There's only so many clients
I can take on. There's only so many hours in
the day. I can only produce so many episodes a day,
whether I'm recording editing. But if I can teach you
how to build a profitable podcasting business and how it

(01:09:59):
will escalate your brand into the right audiences, that is,
you know the old adage, give a man a fish,
feed them for a day, teach him how to fish
feed him for a lifetime. So I'm going to teach
you how to build your own podcasting ecosystem that thrives.
And then some of that might require some outsourcing, depending
on your skill set. But to answer your question a
very long winded way, outsourcing overseas is fantastic for certain things,

(01:10:23):
especially busy work. Booking agencies absolutely use tools at your disposal,
and if you can get them at a lower rate.

Speaker 7 (01:10:29):
You know, I don't see the problem there.

Speaker 3 (01:10:31):
But knowing how to do this on your own is
always going to be more beneficial because then you're not
at the mercy of somebody else.

Speaker 6 (01:10:37):
I agree. Well, unfortunately we've come to the end of
this discussion, but you and I are going to talk
offline for a long time. I think looking forward to it.
But Joe, how do people find you?

Speaker 3 (01:10:47):
So again, you can reach out to podtopianetwork dot com.
We have a newsletter called Podtopia Insider. But much like Jim,
just go to the main site podtopia insider dot com.
You can find my personal information find me on LinkedIn.
Joe Massa would love to be a resource and connect
with you anyway I can.

Speaker 6 (01:11:04):
Great. Thank you.

Speaker 5 (01:11:05):
Passage to profit with Richard Analyisabeth per.

Speaker 6 (01:11:07):
Heart and now it is time for Nicki Wake, the
inspiring founder of Chapter two dating. She transformed her own
heartbreaking lass into a powerful, compassionate community helping widows and
widowers find connection, hope, and their next chapter. So welcome Niki.
Pretty amazing what you were able to do. So tell

(01:11:28):
us your story.

Speaker 4 (01:11:29):
Thank you, thanks for having me. So. I was living
my perfect life, deliriously happy, married to my soulmate in
twenty seventeen and I returned. I was running an event
management business, a business I also still run to this day.
And I returned home from a business trip and my
husband was complaining of chest pains, and it transpired he

(01:11:52):
was actually having a heart attack. That heart attack long
story shore but that heart attack resulted in a catastrophic
brain injury, so he suffered severe brain damage and was
left in a critical condition in one to one nursing
home care for three years until we lost him sadly

(01:12:14):
to COVID in twenty twenty. So a really really awful
period and phase in my life. In twenty twenty, I
took on this new label as a widow, which is
a club that nobody wants to join in one with
the highest admission price. And through that I actually met
this incredible bunch of other widows, my kind of widow warriors,

(01:12:35):
this network through a charity that I was involved with
called Widowed and Young, and the widow community is a
truly wondrous thing. And through the widow community, I started
to heal and find a new way to move forward
and to live with grief and accept what had happened.
In part, you never fully accept and you never ever

(01:12:55):
move on. You move forward, And I decided I was
chatting to one of my widow friends and she was
talking about the idea of a chapter two. So a
chapter two in Widow Circles means your next significant relationship,
So it's about when you think about moving forward and
I thought, you know, actually maybe it is time. And

(01:13:16):
so i'd actually met my husband online in two thousand
and two. We were early adopters of the tech, and
this was back when you didn't tell people you were
dating online, you lied, and so I knew it works.
I thought, you know what, I'll get myself back online.
That'll be fine. Obviously, dating is a forty something your
old woman is very different to dating as a twenty something.
Your old woman didn't get quite the same response. And

(01:13:39):
then the other problem that I had is I downloaded
this thing called Tinder, and for those of you who
are fortunate enough not to know, Tinder is.

Speaker 12 (01:13:47):
Like the wild Wes right.

Speaker 4 (01:13:51):
Questionable photographs of appendages and married me trying not to
say anything I shouldn't on it, you know. So, as
a kind of raw, vulnerable widow, I was utterly horrified
at this wild West environment that I found myself in,
and I was thinking, there's got to be a better
way than me. Surely. What I need is I need

(01:14:13):
a widower, ideally one who looks like George Clooney, who
understands what I'm going through, because it's very complex dating
as a widow, because you've got all this this guilt,
like you know, he's dead, he's not coming back, but
there's all that guilt associated with the idea that you
could love again and or even just you know, have
slights again. And so I thought, well, there must be

(01:14:34):
a website for widows and widowers. And I went online
and I went in the app store and I wasn't.
When I went to the Google Play Store and there wasn't.
And I'm an entrepreneur. I did run a very successful
multimillion pound business delivery events all over the world, and
I could smell a business opportunity and I was like,
and then I'm quite well connected, so I know quite
a few high net worth individuals. And in the UK

(01:14:56):
we have this amazing scheme called SIS, which is if
you're a higher rate taxpayer, if you invest in a
startup company, a startup tech company, then you get fifty
percent of your investment back in tax release, and then
if that tex startup goes bast you get another twenty
five percent. So all I was asking my potential investors

(01:15:20):
to invest risk was twenty five percent of their investment.

Speaker 5 (01:15:24):
Why can't we do that in the US.

Speaker 4 (01:15:27):
You know what if you did it in the US,
it would. I mean, the US is really entrepreneurial, much
more entrepreneurial than the UK. I would argue if you
did it in the UK, it would put rocket fuel
on the fire of your economy. Can't I can't tell
you how big a tax break it is and how
easy it is to go out and raise money as
a result of it. This is a terrible fact. By
the way, only two percent of all funding raised worldwide

(01:15:51):
goes to women. I now, as a female founder, I've
raised three hundred grand really really easily congratulates through SIS
and fas is in place up to the first two
hundred and fifty thousand pounds that you raise. After that
it drops to EIS, which is that the investors get

(01:16:11):
thirty percent tax release. So it's still brilliant, right, And
so I went out and raised cash and I built
Chapter two dating door app.

Speaker 6 (01:16:19):
So I want to ask you, is it worldwide? Then
your app?

Speaker 4 (01:16:22):
So we're live in the UK, the US, Canada, and Australia.
So yeah, we have thousands of widows and widowers in
the US who have joined us. I've created four marriages,
twenty two engagements I think at the last count, and
we even even had a chapter two baby. Now, I
thought we were all.

Speaker 12 (01:16:43):
That.

Speaker 5 (01:16:44):
Are you checking the ages of the people joining?

Speaker 2 (01:16:46):
The baby's shocking?

Speaker 4 (01:16:49):
Sadly, there are some very young widows out there. So
these are two of our younger widows who will in
their mid thirties, and they have gone on to marry
and have a baby. And suddenly they did call it nikki.
I thought they should have actually.

Speaker 5 (01:17:01):
But what is the proportion of men to women?

Speaker 4 (01:17:04):
And that's really interesting because most dating sites, if you
go on Tinder, it's eighty percent men and twenty percent women.
They but they just don't show you, you know, the inequalities.
On chapter two, we are sixty five percent women and
thirty five percent men. And the sad reality of this, gentleman,
is that's because you die earlier than we do.

Speaker 5 (01:17:24):
We know, Yeah, I mean we're not happy about that.

Speaker 4 (01:17:29):
Because you don't go that's because you don't go to
the doctors, or they.

Speaker 6 (01:17:34):
Would somebody move like across the country.

Speaker 4 (01:17:37):
Did you have people that, Yeah, I've had. I've had
people move coast to coast. I've had people moved to Canada,
which may have been political but also may have been
from followed. We've got some beautiful love stories to share.
I met my current well my partner who I so
I met my part I have another so I have
two dating apps for widows and widowers. So chapter two

(01:17:58):
is for people looking for serious relationships. And then I
realized that some of our widows and widows, perhaps like
myself at that point, not quite ready for a serious relationship.
But we're looking to scratch and each shall we say.
So I something called widows Fire because there's a recognized
mononymous when you're grieving that you you ate physical comfort.

(01:18:18):
And I met my boyfriend who is actually now become
my Chapter two on widows Fire. So yeah, I always
said I would never use my own site, but then
I thought it's widows Fire. Doesn't matter, it's just a
wonder five months.

Speaker 5 (01:18:31):
So which website is more popular? Widows Fire Chapter.

Speaker 4 (01:18:34):
Two, Chapter two because two is more popular because I
can advertise it on meta, so we do all of
our advertising on meta. Mark Zuckerberg won't allow widows Fire
on meta. I'm so I'm limited.

Speaker 5 (01:18:49):
This seems more open minded than that. I'm just surprised.

Speaker 4 (01:18:54):
So yeah, because it's classed as an adult site, so
we we acquire traffic through chapter two and then we
cross cell. We do as fire product to them.

Speaker 5 (01:19:01):
Got it? So what was the entrepreneurial piece of this, Like,
I mean, was it overnight success? What did you have
to do to kind of build it up to the
point it's at now?

Speaker 6 (01:19:11):
Yeah?

Speaker 4 (01:19:11):
Pretty much. I mean, as I said earlier in the
early section in the interview, I've been blessed with an
amazing amount of PR you know, I've been on TV radio,
women's magazines, newspapers. Almost every week I have some piece
of PR live. I've been on hundreds of podcasts from
business through to lifestyles through to you know, women's issues, relationships, sex, dating,

(01:19:34):
all of those kind of topics. You know, I'm a
complete media at TART and that's helped enormously in terms
of going the brand. I'm loving being back in tech
startup world. My events company is twenty years old. I
employed twenty two people. I don't even know how to
log into the back end of our website there, do
you remember? That's how far removed I am from the
cold face of the events.

Speaker 8 (01:19:53):
You know.

Speaker 4 (01:19:53):
I turned up a big award show that we were
running last week at like twenty five plus six in
the evening in my frock ready to hand out an award.
That's the only piece of that awards I touched. So
it's lovely to be back in the weeds. And I
think as entrepreneurs, we thrive on the wind, don't we.
We thrive the dope. Have been hit of new, exciting,
shiny things, and I'm loving being back in startup world

(01:20:15):
and traveling the country meeting widows and widowers because we
do a combination of online and also in real life events.
So whenever I'm in the States, I'm there regularly for
business out run events in New York, or in Florida
or Seattle. Was the last time I won an event there,
so so yeah, I like to get out and meet
my community.

Speaker 5 (01:20:32):
So Elizabeth confessed before the show that she went to
your website, which I found a little alarming. You know,
I'm wondering what kind of plans she has for me.

Speaker 4 (01:20:42):
Watch you're back. She's changed. If she just changed the
will you might want to be a bit suspicious.

Speaker 5 (01:20:51):
Well, you were doing show research, right, hon.

Speaker 6 (01:20:56):
Black. Okay, personal story, We last one of our cats
and we were going to go get one cat and
we went just to look and this little kit reached
out and grabbed Richard by the arm through the bars
of his cage, and we ended up coming home with
two kittens, and now we have a lot of cats.
I think we have four cats, but they cannot live

(01:21:17):
without Richard.

Speaker 5 (01:21:18):
So so I get to live, is what you're saying.
But that could be your next project is a dating
site for cats?

Speaker 6 (01:21:25):
Right, cat cat people?

Speaker 4 (01:21:29):
Maybe?

Speaker 5 (01:21:30):
I'm sure somebody has done that. I think there.

Speaker 4 (01:21:33):
Probably is probably dating sites for most niches. But we've
actually I've just recently bought the platform. We were existing
on a white level platform. I've now bought the text
so we will be incubating other dating apps. So anyone
who's got a dating app idea and has a community,
if they come to me, we'll create them a dating
app and host it on our platform on a revenue

(01:21:54):
share basis. So that's a new development for us, which
is which is really quite exciting for both me and
my investors.

Speaker 6 (01:22:00):
So what do you do with the events that you hold?

Speaker 4 (01:22:02):
So we do speed dating. So people read this stuff,
and what always happens is we end up with say
thirty women and ten men, and the men all go
home very happy. So yeah, but the women, actually, the
women love the community. Aspect that you know that. I
always say to them, I might not find you the
money you dre in tonight, but I'll find you some
very good new friends who understand your situation. And widows

(01:22:22):
bond very very quickly through the one terrible, tragic thing
that binds us, which is shared loss. I always say
that the one silver lining to the dark cloud of
widowhood is the friendships of the community that you make
along the way.

Speaker 6 (01:22:35):
I was going to say, because if like Richard and
I travel together, I wouldn't necessarily want to travel alone.
So do you have people that become good enough friends
that maybe they'll go on trips together and things like that.

Speaker 10 (01:22:45):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:22:46):
Yeah, I went on a widow cruise. That's why I
was in Seattle actually up to Alaska in the summer.
So yeah, a bunch of I think fifty of us
went on the cruise and had a whale of a
time quite literally with whales in Alaska. But yeah, it
was great. Yeah, no, and people do so. I also
I set up so much so that I set up
a not for profit company called the Widow Collective dot

(01:23:07):
com so that we could give something back to the
widow community. Obviously, Chapter two is a commercial dating app,
but in an ideal world, people come to Chapter two,
find their Chapter two, and I never see them again.
It's a really rubbish business model because the more successful
you are, the less money you make, so you're always
trying to fill the top of that funnel. And so
we launched the Widowed Collective so that we can talk
to the entire of the widow community. So we're there

(01:23:29):
to support the widow community in a wider sense and
as and when they're ready to start dating, then they
will find out about Chapter two.

Speaker 6 (01:23:37):
Yeah, so, Jim, do you have any comments or questions.

Speaker 2 (01:23:40):
I love it. I've impressed. She's done everything right. You know,
it's going to be an entrepreneurial success, and I love
that it solves a huge problem for people who are
in a bad situation and bad things happened. So to me,
it's an A plus grand slam.

Speaker 4 (01:23:55):
Oh thank you.

Speaker 9 (01:23:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:23:56):
Now, I really have tried to take my pain and
turn it in purpose, and I think if I can
help other people find some joy, then that really helps
me make sense of my loss. It's given me that
reason for being and a newfound passionate life. And I
genuinely think that my husband would be incredibly proud. He'd
be absolutely horrified that I'm discussing our sex life in

(01:24:17):
the Daily Mail and a week I'm sincerely hoping that
he's right about atheism, because if he isn't, I'm in
such trouble I cannot tell you. Yeah, I'll be in
for a rights banking. So I hope that I would
have made him proud. And it's certainly given me meaning
and purpose in life. And hopefully you know, a nice

(01:24:38):
business I can exit from when match dot com by
me will soon.

Speaker 6 (01:24:43):
So how can people find you? What's the best way?

Speaker 4 (01:24:46):
So the best way to buy me? I'm on LinkedIn
nicki Wake. You'll find me there. You could also find me.
Oh this is this sounds terribly egotistical, but nickiwake dot
com is my personal website. I do quite a lot
of conference speaking of danted X talks and things like that.
So you can find my show reels and things on
there and all my press and pr Oh you can
email me Nikki and Icky at chapter two dating dot

(01:25:10):
app and I answer all those personally and I love
to chat. So yeah, please do get in touch.

Speaker 6 (01:25:15):
Okay, thank you very much. You are listening to the
Passage to Profit Show with Richard, Elizabeth Gearhart and our
special guest today, Jim Beach, and we will be back.

Speaker 2 (01:25:23):
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Speaker 5 (01:26:23):
It's Passage to Profit Now. It's time for Noah's retrospective.

Speaker 6 (01:26:28):
Noah Fleischmann is our producer here at Passage to profit,
and he just has a way of putting his best
memories in perspective.

Speaker 12 (01:26:36):
Scott the keys, I've always kept him in my left
pocket ever since I was a kid. That's the one
thing that hasn't changed since then. We still use our
keys to lock up and get into our homes, at
least most of us in the cities do.

Speaker 4 (01:26:48):
Oh.

Speaker 12 (01:26:49):
I know all about those computerized home systems where it's
all face and voice recognition, but if something in that
computer goes the wrong way, Heaven forbid, you could be
sleeping in the car for a couple of nights. That's
of the car. We'll let you back in. These are
probably just as old as doors, and you don't have
to reboot them, and with more traditional structures controlled on
the internet nowadays, we better cherish it. I visited one

(01:27:10):
of those modernized offices recently and I stepped out to
use the restroom, but I was just about done. I
leaned over and looked around and realized there was no
handle or button to finish the job. So I quietly
stepped out and asked the concierge, and she said, oh no,
there's no handle or button or anything. I'll just log
in and flush it later. That was some restroom good thing.

(01:27:32):
I remember to return the key.

Speaker 10 (01:27:34):
Now more with Richard and Elizabeth, Passage to Profit.

Speaker 6 (01:27:38):
And our special guest Jim Beach. And now it is
time for secrets at the Entrepreneurial Mind. We're gonna start
with Joe Masa with podtopic insider, Joe, what is a
secret you can share?

Speaker 7 (01:27:50):
I'm going to.

Speaker 3 (01:27:51):
Relate back to something Jim said earlier about the best
way to start a business is to steal an idea
that exists. And I would just spin it slightly and say,
there are no real original ideas left almost anywhere in
the world right now. So you don't have to have
this magnificent, brilliant new platform that you're building or something
over the top. Start really small with something that you're

(01:28:13):
either passionate about or you can be consistent with. Whether
you like it is sort of irrelevant at some point,
But what's really important is to understand that. That's like saying,
why did Pepsi get created because Coke Cardi existed?

Speaker 7 (01:28:24):
Why do it? Well?

Speaker 3 (01:28:25):
They're both doing quite well. You don't have to be
original to be successful. What you have to do is
innovate and you have to be dead committed to it.
You have to just be really consistent, not throw yourself
over the ledge every time you run into a hiccup.
And with that, I would just finalize this by saying,
you are going to fail along the way, so learn

(01:28:47):
to embrace the downs because they are as temporary as
the ups.

Speaker 7 (01:28:51):
So peaks and valleys.

Speaker 3 (01:28:52):
Will come and go, but your resolve is what's going
to keep you in the game.

Speaker 6 (01:28:56):
Oh I love that? Yes, okay, Nikki wake with if
you wake that cam. What's a secret you can share
with our audience?

Speaker 4 (01:29:04):
I think my secret is not to be afraid to ask.
The one thing that I've been very good at, and
I think mainly because of my personal situation and the
problems that I faced, was actually not being afraid to
ask for help because actually ninety nine point nine percent
of the people in your contact list want to help you.

(01:29:26):
It's about being being brave and being bold and asking
for help and people will invariably help. So if you're
looking for funding, if you're looking for marketing sport, if
you're looking for advice, if you're looking for someone to
intro you to potential contact whatever it is, ask the question.
The very worst thing that somebody can say is no.
And for so many years I was too afraid to

(01:29:47):
go for the ask. And I think as a widow,
you know you live for the moment. So I sort
of inherited this kind of what the hell just do
it attitude, And by stepping up and asking for help,
my second business has excelled in ways that I never
believed possible, at a speed I never believed possible because
I didn't pusifoot around a situation and I just asked

(01:30:10):
the question.

Speaker 6 (01:30:11):
Like that too. So Jim Beach with Jimbeach dot com,
what's the secret?

Speaker 2 (01:30:16):
You can share the corridor principle. So when you start
becoming an entrepreneur, you're starting this pathway. Imagine you're standing
at the entrance of a corridor and you can see
all the way down the hall, and you can see
that they're rooms off to the right and the left,
but you can't see into the rooms until you start
walking down that path, and you'll never discover what's in

(01:30:38):
room one or room nine where your passion may live
if you didn't start down the path. And so we
talk about starting businesses, maybe that you're not passionate about.
Maybe the passion comes in year three in that business
and you don't know that yet, Or maybe the passion
is in the other thing that the first thing leads to.
You've got to get started down the corridor. Take your

(01:31:00):
remote control. This is kind of technical. You might want
to take notes. Take your remote control and put it
underneath the rock and then pound the hell out it
like fifteen times. That's not number one corridor principle. You
might find passion later in life than you think.

Speaker 6 (01:31:16):
Okay, thank you. Richard Garhart with Garhart Law dot com.
What's your secret?

Speaker 5 (01:31:22):
My secret is sort of related to Jim's Mine is
entrepreneurs bet on their future selves. What happens in entrepreneurism
is that as your business grows, you grow as an
entrepreneur and you get better at things. So when you're
starting out, I think it's important to appreciate that you

(01:31:42):
don't need to know it all, and that as you
go down that pathway down that corridor, as Jim said,
you'll learn more and you're developing more. And I think
that's part of the satisfaction of an entrepreneurial career, is
what you learn and how you develop as a professional
as you go through all of those different growth stages.

Speaker 6 (01:32:05):
Excellent, Thank you well and me Elizabeth Gearheart with Gear
Media Studios. Usually I throw out something about AI or
digital marketing, but this time I'm going to go into
appearances and speaking and being on podcasts and all the
places where you can go and show everybody how smart
you are, and not only how smart you are, but
how smart the hosts think you are because they invited

(01:32:26):
you onto their podcast, which doesn't always happen, right, And
the reason that you should be doing that is because
it builds brand authority, which sends more people to your
content and to your website, especially to fill out those
contact forms and ask for a consultation with you. So
there are places that can help you get presentations, like
the National Speakers Association and others. But really, as an entrepreneur,

(01:32:49):
as a business owner, you do have to put yourself
out there. And you heard what Nikki said, I mean
she grew her whole business, she feels by putting herself
out there into all the media and it really helped
a lot. So that's my secret.

Speaker 5 (01:33:03):
Awesome, Well, then that's a great one. Passage to Profit
is a nationally syndicated radio show appearing on forty stations
across the US. In addition, Passage to Profit has also
been recently selected by feed Spot Podcasters database as a
top ten entrepreneur interview podcast. Thank you to the P

(01:33:24):
two P team, our producer Noah Fleischman and our program
coordinator Alisha Morrissey, our studio assistant Rusicat Busari, and our
social media powerhouse Carolina Tabarees. Look for our podcast tomorrow
anywhere you get your podcasts. Our podcast is ranked in
the top three percent globally. You can also find us
on Facebook, Instagram, x and on our YouTube channel. And remember,

(01:33:47):
while the information on this program is believed to be correct,
never take a legal step without checking with your legal
professional first. Gearheart Law is here for your patent, trademark
and copyright needs. You can find us at Gearhart Law
and contact us for free consultation. Take care, everybody, Thanks
for listening, and we'll be back next week.

Speaker 1 (01:34:07):
The proceeding was a paid podcast. iHeartRadio's hosting of this
podcast constitutes neither an endorsement of the products offered or
the ideas expressed