Greg Hickman on Working Backwards and the Journey to $20,000 Per Month

The Transcript

Greg Hickman on Working Backwards and the Journey to $20,000 per Month

 

Jonny Nastor: Hack the Entrepreneur is brought to you by Showrunner, my brand new podcasting course. Do you want to build a massive, engaged audience from scratch? The Showrunner Podcasting Course is your step-by-step guide for developing, launching, and running a remarkable show to build you an audience in the age of on-demand audio content. Go to Showrunner.fm, and get on the list to be part of the extremely limited pilot launch, receive a huge discount, and get exclusive pilot launch bonuses. Find out more at Showrunner.fm, and get on the list.

Voiceover: Welcome to Hack the Entrepreneur, the show which reveals the fears, habits, and inner battles behind big-name entrepreneurs and those on their way to joining them. Now, here is your host, Jon Nastor.

Jonny Nastor: Welcome back to Hack the Entrepreneur. I am so glad you decided to join me today. I’m your host, Jon Nastor, but you can call me ‘Jonny.’ Today’s guest is an entrepreneur on the path to success. In fact, if you visit his site, you can follow him on his journey from zero to $20,000 per month. He is a mobile marketing consultant, entrepreneur, podcaster, speaker, coach, adviser, and friend.

In September 2013, my guest quit his job and made the move from corporate to entrepreneur. His journey and all of its bumps and struggles is one that many of us can relate to. He’s currently the co-host of Zero to Scale and the host of Mobile Friendly, two podcasts definitely worth checking out. Now, let’s hack Greg Hickman.

Before we get going, I want to take a minute to thank my awesome sponsor, FreshBooks. FreshBooks is absolutely made for people like me and you: entrepreneurs, small business owners, or medium-sized business owners. I don’t know why it took me two years to figure out. When I moved to online business, I was still printing everything out and going completely old-school, as in dealing with a proper bookkeeper and accountant off to the side, but having to deal with the offline aspect of that, and I absolutely hated it.

I didn’t know how to write checks to these people. As my business ran online, I felt like the rest of it should have been done online — the bookkeeping, the accounting side of it. FreshBooks absolutely allows me to do that with the app on my phone, to the fact that they can integrate fully with PayPal and with my MailChimp account. Everything is done there, all the reports, and I can just email it to the accountant to take care of, and I don’t have to worry about being absolutely disorganized anymore.

I want to thank FreshBooks for that and for sponsoring me. Thank you so much. If you are an entrepreneur or a small business person like myself, I strongly urge you to go start your 30-day free trial today. No credit card, no anything necessary. Just go to FreshBooks.com/hack, and don’t forget to enter ‘Hack the Entrepreneur’ in the ‘How did you hear about us?’ section. Trust me, you’ll be absolutely happy that you did.

We are back on Hack the Entrepreneur, and we have an awesome guest today. Greg, thank you so much for joining me.

Greg Hickman: Thanks for having me, man. I appreciate it.

Jonny Nastor: It’s totally my pleasure. All right, Greg. Let’s jump into this. Greg, as an entrepreneur, what is the one thing that you do that you feel has been the biggest contributor to your successes so far?

Breaking Big Goals into Mini-Milestones

Greg Hickman: So far, I would say that backing out goals into mini-milestones has been something that has really helped me make progress, because before I did that, I was wandering aimlessly. Now, I’ve determined my end goal. From there, I back out what would be realistic mini-milestones and when I believe that I can get there. Obviously, this goal is a little bit of a stretch, but again, I’m realistic and work my way towards these mini-milestones, and I track my progress that way.

Working Backwards from Where You Want to Be

Jonny Nastor: Nice, so there’s the end goal, and then work your way backwards. What do you mean exactly by ‘end goal?’ Like obviously, not “Where do you want to be when you’re 70 years old?”

Greg Hickman: Right. For example, I started a business called Mobile Marketing Engine, and my goal was to get it to $20k a month in monthly recurring revenue by the end of this year, which was 2015. At my proposed pricing at the moment, that would put me at 40 customers at least at $500 a month.

I gave myself goals by the quarter — to essentially have 10 customers by the end of Q1, 10 customers by the end of Q2, another 10 by the end of Q3. If I do that again by the end of the year, I’ll be at my 40-customer mark. I’m tracking the number of customers per quarter, which I could also then back out per month if I wanted as well, which is essentially what I’ve been doing.

Jonny Nastor: Excellent. That makes more sense. It’s like where people are like, “I want to make a million dollars a year,” and then you’re like, “Okay. Well, how much do you have to make per month? How much do you have to make per week? How much do you have to make per day?”

Greg Hickman: Exactly.

Jonny Nastor: It makes it understandable, and then obviously, achievable. I like that.

Greg Hickman: Yeah, and it feels believable, too. When you say, “I’m going to make a million dollars a year,” and you’re not making even like $10,000 a month yet, you got to be a little more realistic and back that out to something that you can actually believe in.

To be honest, I think I can get beyond $20k. At the rate I’m at right now, I believe I will, but when I set that goal, in my mind, in my heart, that felt like I’d be super pleased with it. But it also felt like it was obtainable, unlike if I was like, “Oh, I’m going to get $100k a month in recurring revenue by the end of this year.” That, I don’t know — I just wouldn’t have felt as confident in that.

Jonny Nastor: Yeah. No, I agree with that. You got to set your goals lofty, but $20k a month is lofty. You know what I mean? Then from $20k, obviously, next year or in six months, you’re like, “Okay. Well, now, let’s maybe move this up and double it or whatever.” That’s cool. I like that.

Greg Hickman: Totally, but then you’re looking at it from another way. I even say that to myself: “20k? That’s …” I’d be super contented with $20k a month in revenue. Granted, you have margins and stuff like that.

Jonny Nastor: Of course. Yeah.

Greg Hickman: Then, I look at, based on my price points, “That’s 40 customers.” Obviously, there’s turn and some things like that, but with the service, I believe my turn will be low, and it already has. Like, “Forty?” I’m like, “Uh, that’s not high at all.”

Jonny Nastor: Yeah.

Greg Hickman: Even from another viewpoint of that goal, just flipping it around to customer number versus revenue, has also helped mentally.

Jonny Nastor: Yeah, because you’re like, “Well man, I can have a hundred customers? No problem.” That’s like what, 50 grand now?

Greg Hickman: Yeah.

Jonny Nastor: I’m talking a month. That’s awesome. I love it.

All right. There’s this point, Greg, in every entrepreneur’s life where they realize one of two things. Either they have a calling to make something big, way bigger than themselves in the world or a difference in the world, or they simply cannot work for somebody else. Which one of these two are you, and when did you realize this about yourself?

Greg Hickman: I think I’m the latter, just not being able to work for somebody else. That’s the one that resonates most. Of all the positions I’ve ever been in since I’ve gotten into the mobile industry, which was really early compared to when mobile marketing as a thing even became a thing. I’ve been in it from the beginning, and so I have a very strong opinion and vision for what it can do for a business.

If I had to work for someone else and fulfill their vision, and I didn’t necessarily agree with it, it became really hard for me to push forward. It constantly became that. I don’t necessarily believe in the vision that my employer necessarily had. I think I could do it better and do it my own way.

Jonny Nastor: Nice. It’s interesting. You talked about mobile being ‘a thing.’ Mobile is definitely more than a thing at this point, as we can all agree, but you did. You started when you had to convince people that it was going to be a thing.

Greg Hickman: I still have to convince people.

Jonny Nastor: Which is crazy.

Greg Hickman: Yeah.

Jonny Nastor: Like, “Log in to your Google Analytics and tell me it’s not a thing if it’s not over 50 percent already of your traffic.”

Greg Hickman: Yeah.

Jonny Nastor: Can you explain to me the thought process? What made you, Greg, be like, “I’m going to become Greg Hickman, the mobile marketing dude?”

How Greg Accidentally Became an Expert in Mobile Marketing

Greg Hickman: So it happened, I guess, sort of by accident. I started working for a small agency a couple years after I graduated college that was doing mobile promotions, and this is the first company that got me into this whole space. At that time, it was essentially text message marketing and what they called ‘WAP sites,’ which were basically mini mobile websites, but they were mostly text — like tiny, tiny graphics.

This was before the iPhone, so no smartphone, no HTML5, none of that stuff. So it was very, very simplistic. But that’s when I saw where things were going. When the iPhone came out, I saw even more of the opportunity, and the app ecosystem became a thing. What happened was, as I was learning by doing for these clients that we had, doing these mobile promotions, I was looking to learn more, and I always look for someone that was a few steps ahead of me.

What I was coming up against was that there just weren’t a lot of people that were approaching and doing mobile strategically. There weren’t many mobile agencies at this point. There were very few people that were doing it. I couldn’t go find a company where I could go work for someone that had been doing it way longer than I had because they just didn’t exist.

I got to a point where — this is multiple years later — I saw everyone blogging and podcasting, and I saw starting a podcast as a way where I could maybe approach some of these people that I thought were doing cool things in mobile, or at least brands that I thought were doing cool things in mobile, and start talking to them, and create that relationship through the podcast.

That’s where it all came from, and there was no one really talking about it, at least in the podcasting world. The blog space was very much just like mobile marketing news. I went on to be able to become one of the, I guess, authorities in mobile strategy, at least in the online blogging and podcasting world. It’s because I love the concept of mobile and what it can do for a business. It just continues to evolve from there.

Jonny Nastor: Yeah, and grow.

Greg Hickman: Yeah.

Jonny Nastor: Now, looking back. Obviously, it’s nearly genius, Greg. You picked the place where it is all going. It’s seriously going that direction. Even when I met you a year ago, it wasn’t even as far as it is now. And at that time, I knew that it was a big thing, and I was like, “Yeah, of course. That makes sense. I’ve seen the analytics.” A year later, it’s outnumbering people on computers or on any other device besides a mobile device.

Greg Hickman: Yeah. I think it’s still super early.

Jonny Nastor: It is. Yeah.

Greg Hickman: There’s still a whole lot of convincing. There’s still a whole lot of people that don’t get it. The people that are listening to this show probably understand where we’re coming from and our kind of shock that others don’t. But the rest of the world, most business owners still don’t understand the impact that it’s having on their business and is going to continue to have, and it’s well beyond just having a mobile-friendly website. You know?

Jonny Nastor: Mm-hmm.

Greg Hickman: Google is now obviously enforcing this as of April 21st, 2015, but there’s apps. It affects email. It affects search. There’s text messaging. There’s push notifications. There’s all these other aspects of mobile that will allow business owners, content marketers to better engage with their audience, and their prospective customers, and even their existing customers. It’s so early still.

Jonny Nastor: Yeah, it’s cool. You’re in the right spot. Let’s move on to work if we can.

Greg Hickman: Yeah.

Jonny Nastor: You work from home, and you live in Denver, I believe?

Greg Hickman: I do. Yeah.

Jonny Nastor: You get out. You exercise a lot. Yet, you are podcasting. You run a business. You’re starting a new podcast. You’re starting a new business. You speak in many places. You are a fairly busy person.

Today is a workday. You got up to get ready to kick ass throughout the day and get done what you had to get done. Can you walk us through the first 30 minutes of today and how you set yourself up to kick ass?

How The Miracle Morning has Increased Greg’s Focus

Greg Hickman: Yeah. The first probably 30 to 60 are — especially Monday through Friday — are almost the exact same. I follow The Miracle Morning, which is a book by Hal Elrod. I highly recommend it. I wake up — actually, my wife wakes up slightly before me. She works. She’s a doctor in her first year of residency, and she works at the hospital two blocks away. I wake up, I get the dog, and we essentially walk my wife to work two blocks away. It gets me outside, some fresh air. I say goodbye to my wife, walk back home.

Immediately when I get home, after the dog has been fed, I come into my office where I have a reading chair in the corner. I sit down, and I do five minutes of meditation. I use an app called Calm, and they have like a five-minute guided meditation, a couple versions of that that I do every single morning. After that, I will then read a piece of paper that I wrote a bunch of affirmations on. Again, this is part of the whole Miracle Morning process, reading affirmations, and I have my affirmations listed out by category of finance, health, family, things like that. I do that. That takes not even five minutes.

Then, I will write in my five-minute journal, a really cool little journal. It starts off with a quote for the day, and you write down things that you’re grateful for, three things that would make today amazing, and then another affirmation. Then, at the end of the day, you come back to it, and you write three things that did happen that were amazing and what you could have done to make the day better. That’s later in the day, but it’s all in that same book.

After that, I read for 15 minutes. I’m currently reading three or four different books. It depends on what I’m in the mood to read. I’ll read for 15 minutes. Then I foam roll. I had a back problem last year, so I’ve gotten really into foam rolling. I have like a 10- or 15-minute foam-rolling routine. I’ll do some kettlebell swings and handstand pushups, and then I will shower. That’s basically when the real the rest of the day starts, but up until that, everything is the exact same.

Jonny Nastor: Man, you just made us all feel so terrible and unproductive. It sounds like an amazing habit, a whole bunch of them combined to have.

Greg Hickman: Yeah.

Jonny Nastor: That sounds amazing, and it is, but is there one habit, Greg, that you want to be adopting into your life, but you’ve been struggling with it?

Greg Hickman: If we had this conversation three and a half months ago, I would’ve said reading more. I was doing some of the things that I mentioned, just not all in the morning. They were scattered throughout the day, and I just never prioritized reading. After I read this book where I talked about doing these six things all back-to-back for 10 or 12 minutes, again, back to that feeling believable, making it feel possible, I was like, “Oh, yeah. Imagine — I just did all of these things that I wanted to do for 10 minutes. Then, I’ll at least be able to have gotten done, and then maybe if there’s more time later, I can revisit it.”

I put a timer on, and I start reading my book. I’ll usually finish the chapter if the timer goes off and it’s in the middle, but what I’ve found — and this is what’s amazing — is that like 10 or 15 minutes of reading in the morning makes my mind start firing.

Jonny Nastor: Nice.

Greg Hickman: Then, I somehow find more time in the day to come back and keep reading because I got so excited about what I was reading that I feel like now, I’m actually making the time outside of those 10 or 15 minutes to do more of it. I never thought that that would be a result of just doing 10 minutes of it, but it has, and that’s a habit that I’m really trying to stick to. I wouldn’t say I’m perfect with reading outside of those 10 minutes every single day. I’d love to be reading at least an hour a day, so that’s something that I’m still working on.

Jonny Nastor: Nice. Excellent. I love it. I think you have now officially convinced me to read this Miracle Morning.

Greg Hickman: Yeah, it’s pretty awesome. You could do the audiobook, too. Listen to like, one and a half acts. I read the book in probably like a day and a half.

Jonny Nastor: I read quite a few books. Actually, my Kindle just died, and I’ve got to get a new one because it had like 50 books on, and I was in the middle of half of them. I’ve seen on Twitter and on your Instagram, you’ve been going through this process, and Pat Flynn as well. I see it all the time, but now, to hear you actually explain it, it seems like something that everyone should at least try and see.

Greg Hickman: Totally. It’s very customizable too. When you read the book, you’ll see. They do like a six-minute version of the whole thing. The author does everything for 10 minutes, which ends up being an hour. That was too long for me, but the way it was written, it didn’t feel like it was this concrete process where it had to be 10 minutes.

If it’s one minute for one of the activities and three minutes for another one, as long as you’re doing them, I think that’s the important thing. That took a whole lot of stress out of it and the pressure out of doing it, which I think is why I’ve been doing it pretty consistently now since December.

Jonny Nastor: Excellent.

Greg Hickman: Yeah.

Jonny Nastor: Thanks for sharing that. We’re going to move to struggles and failures, which as an entrepreneur, I’m sure you’ve dealt with.

Greg Hickman: Every day. Multiple times.

Jonny Nastor: Yeah, exactly. As an entrepreneur and as a human being, one of our greatest struggles is the fear of being wrong, making a mistake, and failing. Greg, can you walk us through how to be wrong?

Greg Hickman: I think just trying, you’re going to end up being wrong. Just go about your business, and you will be wrong at some point. I think a surefire way to be wrong is to move forward with no goal in mind. There’s like a saying. It’s like, “If you don’t have a destination in mind, you’re never going to get there,” or “you’re already there,” or something like that.

Jonny Nastor: Yeah. Just do it.

Greg Hickman: Something like that. I think that’s a surefire way to waste time, which theoretically could lead to failing, not having any kind of endgame or end goal in mind.

Jonny Nastor: Nice. Yeah. Can you think back to one of the last times you felt like, with your gut and everything, that this was the right thing to do in your business, and it turned out to be completely wrong? How do you deal with that — to not get like sideswiped for a week or two, and just get knocked off your game? How do you get back on and be like, “Okay. That’s fine. Now, let’s do this?”

Greg Hickman: I would say the biggest thing was most of last year. All of 2014 was actually my first full year working for myself. I had started my business on the side. Through following a lot of other podcasters and online marketers, I went the route of creating online info products — training and stuff like that — around my expertise because I thought that was just the way it was supposed to be done. I never gave myself any goal for where I wanted to be at the end of 2014, which is a big mistake and is why I’m very goal-oriented now.

The fail was that I had little moments of success, I would say, in 2014. I’d see spikes of people buying my product and buying training, but it wasn’t anything like I expected. I kept coming back to this service model, which for the whole year basically, I was telling myself, “That’s stupid. You didn’t leave working at agencies and brands to like build an agency. That’s not the way. That’s not going to allow you to live the life that you want to live.”

I fought against that notion probably most of 2014. Because of that, I think I struggled. At the end of the year, I landed on, “Okay. You know what? I can create a service company, and I can create it however the heck I want to create it because it’s in my control now. It’s my vision.” Since I’ve gone in on this service model, I have way more consistent revenue. It’s way more predictable, and it’s something that I’m actually really enjoying doing, and I have experience in.

I feel like I was trying to fit the mold that I thought I had to fit, and I just reverted into this service-oriented business, which I pushed away for a long time because I was like, “That’s not how you build an online business.”So, I think maybe letting other people’s definition of what your business has to look like really slowed me down because I was just trying to build the same model that I saw everybody else doing, when that’s not necessarily going to work for everybody. At least it wasn’t working as well as the service is for me.

Jonny Nastor: Yeah. The one thing I’ve learned from talking to so many brilliant people on this show is that it’s really confidence in what works for you. You’ve now said it — with The Miracle Morning, he says to take an hour. You’re like, “A half-hour works for me,” and it’s working for you really well.

Greg Hickman: Yeah.

Jonny Nastor: Now, with your business, you thought, “It was this way because that’s what other people around you were doing,” and now, you’re like, “No. Actually, this is right for me.” I run a show called Hack the Entrepreneur, but these hacks or anything doesn’t necessarily work for everyone.

Greg Hickman: Yeah, right?

Jonny Nastor: You have to take ones that work for you or adapt them to work for you and not think that everybody else has the answers for how you work. You have the answers for how you work, and you have to look in, take stuff from everywhere you can and from everyone you can, and surround yourself with brilliant people, but you have to be like, “No. Actually, this is what works for me.” Things aren’t going to work, and they’re going to fall, but it’s cool, man. Watching or listening to you now is like, “This dude figured it out.” Here it goes. This is awesome.

Understanding Wealth Dynamics

Greg Hickman: You know what’s interesting is — I don’t know if anyone has ever mentioned this book on the show — but there’s a book called The Millionaire Master Plan, and it covers this concept of wealth dynamics. Have you heard of it?

Jonny Nastor: I haven’t.

Greg Hickman: Wealth dynamics is fascinating, and it brought me to a lot of this realization. What the whole 50,000-foot view of wealth dynamics is, is that each of us have our own archetype of how we can — because of our strengths, our weaknesses — be able to obtain wealth. The way I obtain wealth may not be the same way that you obtain wealth if we’re different, if we have like these different profiles, so to speak.

When you don’t know what your profile or your archetype is and you’re just mimicking that of others or if you are a different archetype mimicking someone that has a different archetype, then like you’re never going to obtain wealth. I think that’s what I was doing in a way by trying to force my experience into this model that was working for other people that may not actually as a person be like me.

I find that fascinating, and I think that’s back to the point of, “The strategies and tactics that you use might not work for me, and my business, and/or my audience,” et cetera. Really, you have to understand what are your strengths, what are your weaknesses, why might this person who you’re trying to mimic be having all these success if you’re not?

Because it might just be the fact that that’s not the way that you’re going to obtain wealth. You might be the Steve Jobs, and they might be the Wozniak or vice versa. I remind myself of that every single day, and I think it helped me stay grounded.

Jonny Nastor: Yeah, that’s great. I’m going to actually pick up that book, too, because I think that totally agrees. You are friends with some people with some brilliant businesses, and they’re all different people, though. They all run similar yet different businesses. I guess they’ve just found out what works or is congruent with them. You have to find that business that really does and is you. You can’t force it. You can’t fake it, and it’s cool.

It’s going to be a great year to watch you take off, and I’m looking forward to it. Greg, we’ve got to talk in passing about your business, and about your businesses, and your podcast, and a new podcast. Can you explicitly tell the listeners where they can go to find out more about you?

Greg Hickman: Yeah. GregHickman.me, which is my personal blog, and this is where I’m sharing more of the entrepreneurial stories of how I’m building my business and things like that. If you are interested in mobile, everything that you want to know about mobile can be found at MobileMarketingEngine.com. From there, either one of those, you’ll link to and hear about the podcasts.

Jonny Nastor: Excellent. Greg, thank you so much for joining me today and sharing everything that you did, and please keep doing what you’re doing because it’s awesome to watch. I think it’s going to be an exciting year for you.

Greg Hickman: Likewise, man. I appreciate it, and it was an honor being on.

Jonny Nastor: Greg, thank you so much. I’ve wanted to have you on the show since I started, and I’m glad to finally have had the chance. For anyone out there listening, please go check out GregHickman.me and follow his journey from zero to $20,000 per month because it’s interesting, and it’s if we want to step into the game of entrepreneurialism, we have to all take this journey at some point. Yeah, just go follow him. He’s a great person to get to know and a great person to learn from.

Greg said a lot of smart things in this conversation. He said a lot of smart things, didn’t he? Did he? Yeah. Yeah, he did. But he said one thing. He said one thing. Did you get it? Did you hear it? Let’s do it. Let’s find the hack.

Greg Hickman: The strategies and tactics that you use might not work for me, and my business, and/or my audience, et cetera. Really, you have to understand what are your strengths, what are your weaknesses, why might this person who you’re trying to mimic be having all these success if you’re not?

Jonny Nastor: That’s the hack. Mr. Greg Hickman, thank you. This is something I guess I’ve been dealing a lot with since, I mean, the past hundred interviews and learning the confidence of my guests, the successful entrepreneurs who are out there and have built businesses over and over. It’s this confidence to know that you can do things differently, and you should do things differently than other people, than other entrepreneurs, but you have to do what works for you.

I don’t pull out these hacks so that you can go and mimic each of them. I’m doing them so that you can find the ones that work for you. Try them out. Try as many out as you need to. When you find something that works for you, confidently go in that direction. Don’t keep looking for more. Confidently go in that direction, and it is what is going to allow you to follow the path of success. It absolutely will, and it doesn’t matter if nobody else around you does what you do or the way you do it. If it’s working for you, it works for you. Just know that, and be confident with it.

Also, know that it’s going to be fluid. Things are going to change. You’re going to change. Life is going to change, and you will have to adapt to that and change as you need to, and that’s okay. That’s what it’s about. That’s why goals should shift. That’s why your dreams should shift. That’s why your businesses and your life should shift over time. It shouldn’t be one straight line because that’s boring.

Greg, thank you very much. I very much appreciate you coming on the show, and that hack was awesome.

All right. Thank you very much again for taking the time. I really do appreciate it. Stop by the site, HacktheEntrepreneur.com. Check it out. Get on the email list. It’s a lot of fun. I’m still giving away Seth Godin books. I have four left. Two ever Sunday. I’m giving them away. I might actually have six left. We’ll see. It’s an awesome book, and people — someone in South America, someone in Europe, and one person in Canada, and the rest of you in the United States — have been winning. They just get randomly picked.

When you open up the email on Sunday, you get your name drawn. That’s just how it works, so get on the list. You’ll see at the very top a place to put in your email address at the top of my website, HacktheEntrepreneur.com. Drop it in there. That’s my best writing. It goes out every Sunday afternoon, and you can win a book. Seriously, truly, thank you. I do appreciate you taking the time. Until next time, please keep hacking the entrepreneur.