Shannon Jean: He goes, that's your problem. He goes, yeah, I need to fine tune what I'm doing up here and what's the reason I'm here and why. But it wasn't until I started talking about auctions that my account really blew up, and I did a post in August of 2024 and I picked up 5,000 followers from that one post. And I always thought, wow. There's something here and then like you gotta start a newsletter. I was like, what the heck? Okay, great. I'll start a newsletter.

‍Austin Gray: Hey, welcome back to another episode of the OWNR OPS podcast. I'm your host, Austin Gray, and this episode I'm hosting Shannon Jean, a seasoned entrepreneur. He started and sold over 10 different businesses and he's just gonna share some entrepreneurial chops. But if you are interested in the XSMB network formerly Twitter. You might wanna listen to this episode. He's grown his following from basically nothing to almost 40,000 followers in just nine months. So if you wanna learn his strategy for how he's grown, a following, and then also built a business off the back end because he is creating a media company.

Then you'll wanna stick around for this full episode. Shannon shares a lot of different entrepreneurial insights from multiple businesses, but you will learn his strategy for growing on X if you listen to the full episode. So stick around for the full episode. We'll see you guys in there. We were talking about X media companies defining, so Danny asked you something really important, and this is where I want to go down this rabbit hole, is like you said, you were struggling with, 

‍Shannon Jean: I was cool, I was meeting people and stuff, but of course you wanna measure your success, right? With, okay, and your business. Okay, how much revenue did we have? How many orders did we ship? All this kind of stuff you're talking about. But up there I was like, how do I measure success? And especially back then when I was getting started, it was, oh, I want followers and I want people to be attracted to my content.

And Dan asked one day when I was, we were in our group that we have, and he was just like, Shannon, what's your offer? I couldn't answer him. I was like, I don't know Van. He goes, that's your problem. It really was. It made me think, 'cause yeah, I need to fine tune what I'm doing up here and what's the reason I'm here and why.

And so I, I started just getting more into sharing who I was and why and talking about it, why I was up there. And then I started talking about growth, growing on X and I had some early success and then. It wasn't really until just did my thing. I was talking about entrepreneurship and that was great, and I gained a bunch of followers and met some, just continued to make great people.

But it wasn't until I started talking about auctions that my account really blew up and I just did one post. And I've used, I've did auctions and liquidation stuff in my whole life with various businesses, and I did a post in August of 2024 and I picked up 5,000 followers from that one post. I always thought, wow, there's something here.

It's pretty wild. And I also believe strongly in this concept of. The whistle, the workhorse and the whale, and that your whistle is what attracts people or clients to get in. And some people call it a loss leader. I don't like to do that, but stores use it like that. But just something to get attention and in the workhorse is like your day-to-day great earners, standard stuff you sell and then your whale is where you make your big money. I didn't have that whistle until I did that post in August and it really blew up. 

‍Austin Gray: I've never heard it framed that way, so I want to dive into that. Yeah. Because I believe that right there is applicable to every single business, and I'll tell you why, but where my head goes, I spent some time here in Austin with a really high caliber entrepreneur. I'm doing some work with him down there with the land clearing business, and he challenged me to think. Deeper about our lead tracking metrics and just go back and watch some hor mozy videos. These, these are applicable to any video, any business, right. If you can nail your offer, you can get customers in the door, and then you can sell them your bread and butter, and then your high ticket, what you're referring to is the whale.

Right? So something I'm considering doing in Bear Claw right now, we do fire mitigation and land clearing. That's our bread and butter. Right? Right. I would consider it a high ticket home service offer. Right. We're average ticket size, somewhere between 10 and 20 k. But if I market stump grinding, hey, get these 10 stumps removed for some stupid price like $4.97 or something. 

‍Shannon Jean: Yeah, exactly. 

‍Austin Gray: I recently got back from launching a land clearing business down in Austin, and this last winter I launched a snow shoveling business alongside Bear Claw. I. In both businesses, I've implemented jobber as a way for us to efficiently manage quoting job schedules and invoicing, and even collecting online payment. Why? Because it's worked so well for us in Bearclaw and it's saved us a ton of time and headache. So if you are looking for a software that can help you manage the back end of your business, look no further than Jobber, you can visit Go dot get jobber.com/ownrops O-W-N-R-O-P-S. 

‍Austin Gray:Just to get them in the database. That's the whistle. 

‍Shannon Jean:Yep. 

‍Austin Gray: And so I've been thinking about this concept, and I want to dive deeper into this. What did Danny ask you, or how did you guys define what your whistle was going to be after you found that success With the auction post? 

‍Shannon Jean: Yeah. Yeah. So I started. Posting just more about it. 'cause obviously it was like people went nuts and like followers took off. I went from, I started last year with, I don't know, 500 followers and I think I'm at about 40,000 to close to 40,000 today. And I just started talking more about it. What I did with it, you know how I got into it When I was in college, I owned a landscape construction company and I was renting equipment and I went to a couple auctions up here and I live in Northern California and I figured, man, I could buy that.

Piece of equipment for, I don't, not much it. It was a, I just thought it was a great deal because I was paying thousands of dollars sometimes daily to rent equipment, and I was like, I can go buy that thing for 10 grand. How long does it take for it to pay for itself? And then I. So I did that. I bought some equipment, bought some tractors, skid steer, a backhoe, and I, we used them during the summer as I was working during the summer to pay for the rest of my, I wanted to be in, I was in school the rest of the time, so at the end of the season of stuff to go back, I was going to Cal Poly and I said, what do I do with all this stuff?

I didn't have any place to store it. My dad wasn't about to let me bring it to his house. I wanted to sell it, and so I looked around. And I was like, well, where do I sell it? And it's like, where's the place that it's most needed? And I called some auction companies in Southern California and they were like, yeah, ship it down here, man.

It's construction is booming. You'll do really well. And so I, I used this stuff all summer. I. Shipped it down there, made a profit on it at the end of the season, and it's just like this light bulb moment in my life that I could use this concept of flipping and buying things. And so when Dan asked me what my offer was and I started talking about the auctions, I was like, this is the whistle, because everybody wants to talk about it.

Everybody loves a treasure hunt. Everybody loves a good deal. And so I just started leaned into it and started talking about it more. And that built my followers. And then people were like, you gotta start a newsletter. And I was like, what the heck? Okay, great. I'll start my newsletter. I'll start a newsletter.

But I'd started collecting email addresses first, and I, I didn't even know what a lead mag magnet was. I hate to tell you that. But the first lead magnet and still my best performing lead magnet was a list of auction companies that I have dealt with for the past 25 years, like 150 companies. I threw up in a PDF.

I signed up at ConvertKit and I just started gathering emails. I didn't have a newsletter at that time, but I gathered pro probably about five or 600 email addresses before I even started sending anything out. So I knew that I was getting all this attention. I was like, don't waste it. So I kept leaning into that whistle, and then I kept building that up to where I was like, okay, everybody says I should make a digital product.

All right, I'm, how do I do that? And I wrote a book. I've been in technology my whole life, and in 2017 I sold, and I've owned a bunch of companies, but I sold my last. Company with a bunch of employees. It was called Tech Restore, and I vowed never to sell anything with a plug again or anything that plugs in the walls.

I'm done. I'm just, I've been there. I've milked it so many years. It was tough to, at the end, everything turns into a, a commodity and so I get in lots of product, different stuff. And when I got into a couple deals with these high-end handbags, my wife, my daughter, the women that worked for us just went nuts.

And I was like. That's interesting man. This is a weird product. I don't know anything about it. So after I sold that business, I was like, yeah, I'm gonna, I'm gonna get, I'm gonna try to start a handbag business. And so I did that. Sold about $4 million worth of bags over three years. Made $557,000. It was great.

It was really good business and. I needed software, so I'm like, I'm gonna build some software for this automation software. Of course, I've heard this story before. Everybody needs stuff after about, and I created all this content. 'cause my programmer partner was like, Hey, you create all the content, talk about this business and that'll drive people to the software.

I was like, great. But after about 10, 11 months, this guy went sideways on me to deep. Our partnership fell apart. It's another story, but I had all this content and I said, what do I do with it? I said, I've always wanted to write a book. So I hired a coach to help me publish this book and it. Just went off like crazy.

I had no idea it was all about luxury selling and everything else. Coming back around the long way to your question, I took that book that I had sold thousands of copies of and I created a digital product and I started selling it, and then I created a digital product on how to grow on X and I gave it away. There was like a free version and you could. Upsell and everything. So that became my whistle to get people's attention to lead in, but I really still didn't have the digital products became a workhorse. I sold a lot more books, but I still didn't have a whale at that time. 

‍Austin Gray: Okay. Before we go onto your whale, can we dive in deeper on the mechanics of that?

‍Shannon Jean: Yeah. 

‍Austin Gray: Okay, cool. First question, were you using x. To market all of this? 

‍Shannon Jean: Yeah. It was the only marketing thing I had. Okay. I had a lot of time on my hands. I started that bag business just as a new challenge and I only wanted to work an hour a day, so X came along at the right time. I realized that it was a pretty powerful lever to connect with people and to talk about what my knowledge was and to the credibility funnel first, which I think you have to do that before you build a sales funnel.

Mm-hmm. And even though followers are, everybody says, Hey, it's a vanity metric. The people that usually say that don't have very many followers, it people do look for that for credibility, but also just your content every day when you show up in their feed and you share stuff and, um. X is definitely has built and I built a business up there for sure.

‍Austin Gray: Okay, so let's go back to the beginning. Yep. So for people who have no experience in digital marketing, like Shannon at that point, 

‍Shannon Jean: that would be me. 

‍Austin Gray: Yeah. They didn't know what a lead magnet was, so this is gonna be really valuable because I know there are probably some listeners out there who are building something like Ty for example, StumpguyTy. 

‍Shannon Jean: Yeah.

Austin Gray: He's building a stump grinding business. You'll want it. But now he's selling a digital product as well. He is making some extra cash just to help. Basically. He's able to use that cash. Pay his equipment off. So like the way I see it is. Man, if you can do something and share something on X and make some money from it, why not? Right? Like it helps you accelerate your pay down on equipment, especially in these outdoor service based business. 

‍Shannon Jean: Of course, a big key to it, I think, is authenticity. 

‍Austin Gray: Yeah. 

‍Shannon Jean: You are really doing it. This is what attracted me to your content because I'm like, who's this Austin Gray guy and what's he doing? But I'm like, that's cool man. He just gonna just smash that entire tree with that thing and clear. That's what got me interested in what you were doing. And then you like, oh, then you see your post and you're like, oh, he's building a business. Look, he's got this framework and. That's the mechanism, get attention.

But I think that how you get attention, right, is the crucial part. If you just sit up there and talk about kind of, some of this stuff is boring, right? Uh, what is your whistle? What gets them attractive? It's Tyler's stump grinding time-lapse videos. Nails it. You're blowing up the forest videos, my auction posts where I say, Hey, this is a $1.3 million worth of inventory that just sold for $13,000. That gets, gets people's attention. 

‍Austin Gray: Yeah. Yeah. Now, whenever you define that lead magnet, you said, okay, I put together 25 auctions. That you have used in the past, and then what did you do with that? Where did you post the link to that, and then how did you deliver that? 

‍Shannon Jean: Yeah, so I didn't know what people wanted, but I was like, okay, I have this big list, and it was like, it's 140 companies or whatever from over 25 years. So I said, how do I even do this? So I just asked. People, what do I use? And I asked online, I asked on X, I built in public. I said, I wanna help people. How do I, what's, somebody helped me figure out where should I do this lead? How should I do it? And I don't even remember who told me, but I looked at beehive, I looked at ConvertKit and I said, ConvertKit seems pretty easy to set up quickly.

They have a built-in landing page creator. I didn't really know what a landing page even was, but I knew that. I could learn how to do it. So I watched some tutorials. I built a landing page. I linked A PDF, which was this list of auction companies. I posted it a few times and I got people, but it really took off more when I posted it in the replies.

So I would post about an auction and somebody would comment question, man, where do you find this stuff? And I would just put the link in there. And I said, I have this list if you're interested. And hey, deem it if you have any questions, just. Ask me. I made myself very available. I answered every DM I told people, just send me a message, send me a message, and that one lead magnet.

I think it's brought in over a thousand emails and subscribers, but I didn't have a newsletter when I started collecting. I don't like to put things in the way. I have this thing beware. The wants is, oh, once I learn how to send a newsletter or once I understand what this is, I'll start. I, I don't do that.

I'll just start. Okay. Everybody says I need emails. Okay. Yeah, I guess that's right. Uh, created that, started bringing in followers and then, or bringing in subscribers. And just kept using that. And I used it in the replies as well, like when I didn't have a lot of followers, I would go up and I would see people talking about a topic and I would go in and I'd link back to a post I had made and I said, well, you can buy this stuff here for nothing.

And I would have that link there. So I spent a lot of time in replies for months building my account to, to especially to get over that first thousand, first 5,000, first 10,000 followers. 

‍Austin Gray: So from there you build the newsletter. 

‍Shannon Jean: Yep.

‍Austin Gray: What's your workhorse at that point? Where's your hand go? 

‍Shannon Jean: Yeah, I really didn't have one, so I. Everybody was talking about how fast my account was growing on X. It just was a topic, man, you're blowing up, da, da, da. It's like, okay, maybe I should just tell people how I've grown on X. How do I do that? I didn't know how to do videos. I found, somebody told me about Loom and I went up and I said, oh, I can do this.

So I created some Loom videos. I love Costco, right? I'm a huge Costco fan and I've been buying their. Store returns and excess inventory for decades, and I love buying their product. You can make great money on it and enrich your life. So I made some videos about the Costco thing, but along the way. I'm gonna make some Loom videos about how I grew on X.

So I made some videos. I went up on Gum Road, which I didn't know how to use, but I was like, I'm gonna figure out this. This doesn't look very difficult to me. I took some content, I had wrote in posts like, Hey, know how I've grown on X? 'cause my dms were just full of, Hey, how are you growing so fast? Okay, I just.

Posted that, that I took those posts, I just repurposed that content in over to Gumroad and I created this a free thing. I called it the accelerator. I chatt ptd me a, a logo, a picture of a book for this, my program. And I just told people. So that became the next thing I just gave away. And when they signed up on Gumroad, they.

They gimme their email, so they subscribe and then people are like, I wanna know more. So I says, okay, I'll create another level, but it's gonna take me more time. So there was a free version of this accelerator and then I made a a section that was 50 bucks. I was shocked that people were buying it. I was like, dude, I just made 500 bucks and I love, I've chased a hundred dollars bills my whole life and made you and me. Both people, everybody talks about making millions, but man, if you can roll up hundreds, you can kill it, right? 

‍Austin Gray: Yes. 

‍Shannon Jean: And so. That grew and I created this product and then I took those Costco videos I had done and I created a, another Costco product up on Gumroad. I wrote this luxury handbag book a few years ago. It, it took off and I created a book called eBay Unlocked 'cause I've sold, I. Millions of dollars on eBay, and I'm really well connected with eBay ecosystem. And I wrote that book and that was a bestseller. So I put that, I wrote, I sold the book for 10 bucks, but I put it up on Gumroad as a PDF, and I made a couple of videos and I sold it for 50 bucks and all of a sudden I've making this money.

And that was like this aha moment that people really do want to pay for this stuff. It, and it is courses and all they, it has a bad rap because there's a bunch of garbage out there. But if you really make it useful and people really dig it, and that those became my workhorse. And then I hired an assistant and that changed everything.

‍Austin Gray: Before we jump into that, it's really funny that nobody bashes college. Nobody bashes getting a college degree, but there's so much negative connotation around buying a course and it's just education. That's all it is.

‍Shannon Jean: Yeah. 

‍Austin Gray: And if it's truly valuable and is actually time tested and proven strategies.

‍Shannon Jean: Yeah, from people that have really done it instead of somebody sitting in a classroom telling you how it should work from a book. 

‍Austin Gray: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

‍Shannon Jean: And again, you wanna buy courses and stuff from. From credible people, right? You want to see what they've done and you want to be able to look it up and where's the evidence that they've done it. Not, I don't want to pay for life coaching from a 23-year-old dude because I just don't think they've lived much life. Not that they may have some great stuff to share, but if I want a life coach or whatever, if you're looking for that, you wanna find somebody that's. Lived the same thing. If I wanted to learn how to do land clearing and grow a a multifaceted business, I find a guy like you who's done it and yeah, spot on.

And it works. And I've done it my whole life too. I bought courses to learn how to build a website when I wanted to build it. 'cause I was like, I sure I can hire somebody, but I wanna know how it's done. So I just don't get hosed. And in some ways I'm a real hands-on person. I do a lot myself and I have to force myself sometimes to delegate.

It's a problem that I have. But learning that first part and teasing it out, it's very valuable. Like I don't do my newsletter anymore, but I learned how to do it. I still create the content, but I don't do the mechanics of it. 'cause I have an assistant that does it and I don't create as many of the digital products anymore. I create the content and oversee it, but I have help doing it because it's a better use of time. 

‍Austin Gray: Absolutely. And. I couldn't agree with you more, and I was talking about, I think it was in our first recording here, how you know guys like yourself, you were asking why am I on the owner ops podcast? I'm not like an owner operator of a local service based business.

And I said, but you are a seasoned entrepreneur. And I try to do a fair amount of bringing people like you, like Chris Berg, like Simon Turner, people who have built good businesses and just have entrepreneurial chops to share. Yeah, and I think that's a huge benefit for just coming on and being able to share because every business, it's like you can either decide to stay in that solo owner operated or bootstrap or phase, but you said something really important there.

You hired an assistant. That was something I did at Bearclaw, and then now that I'm building the podcast, I'm addicted to it. Now I'm just like, I just have to go find the next person after I pioneer the process, build the system, and then. Just see what's broken. Yeah. Hey, here's the system I built. Read through it huge and then gimme your feedback. How did you think about that transition? 

‍Shannon Jean: Yeah. I'm a huge systems guy too, right? One of my posts that really is polarizing that takes off every time I use it repurposed on an X, is I always post that goals are for losers, right? And winners you systems, right? Because they don't rise to the level of your goals, right? You fail BA based on your. Systems if they're not very good and systems are repeatable, right? And they allow you to level up in small ways daily instead of this big goal at the end that you try to work towards. And, uh, I just don't like it. Once I, I started getting this workhorse concept, okay, great. I'm making a little bit of money and I was measuring success in hundreds, a hundred dollars bills, right?

But I was like, oh, there's something here. So I had my whistle. I had this beginnings of a workhorse. I didn't have a whale yet and I didn't know what it was. So then I was like, I got, I need help because I can't do all this stuff. It's just too much. I was like posting on next all day LinkedIn. I was spending eight hours a day doing this stuff, learning this. 'cause it was just the be early time and I always give myself a year. It took me a, it took me a year to build. An iPhone business that wound up doing tens of millions of dollars. It took me a year to build my landscape construction business and to understand it took me a year to build, to understand how to publish a book to sell thousands of copies.

It, it took me a year to build a handbag business that, 'cause I don't know anything about that stuff, but I. The systems are what allowed me to do it. So I, and then I was reading all this stuff about global talent. You should hire this person and there's all these global talent people and everything else.

What's this? And guy, one of the guys in my group, Parker Cox, he owns Avago. And I was like, Parker, you gotta hook me up. What's the story I need to help, man? I can't manage this stuff. So they had this great. Method and systems. Okay. And I've hired global talent before, but it's much easier now. And so we did some interviews, had some people, and I found this one person who she was more expensive than the others.

But I, what struck me when I was watching the interview and then when I interviewed her was that she justified her value really well. And I thought, man, this is really important because yeah, I could save a few hundred bucks a month, but. This person, she knows her worth. And I really believe I value that a lot.

So I hired her and the first thing I did is I bought Justin Welsh's content OS course for her. And so I put her through that course and she picked it up and I said, okay, I don't want to go on LinkedIn ever again if I don't have you and me both. Exactly. But there's value on LinkedIn, right? And I have lots of connections on LinkedIn, the people that I've met, and I have a system of.

Finding people on LinkedIn to connect with to help you with your business. And I've used it a lot, but I didn't really ever do anything with content. So she started taking my content on X. It was the first thing I had her do, and she would take it and. Posted on LinkedIn and X content's very different than LinkedIn content, right?

But it stands out when you post it on LinkedIn. And so my followers on LinkedIn started really growing. I started getting dms and connecting with people and made some really good connections. And then I want, I put her in charge. I built a Slack workspace for her and I to communicate. We talk every day or communicate, and then we do a call once a week, a list of weekly tasks. She creates her own KPIs to say, Hey, you can get a bonus this month. What are your KPIs based on what projects we're working on? And I had her K, 

‍Austin Gray: Can I interrupt right there? I'm sorry. Because that's something I have. I'm actually setting those in my media company right now. Yeah. What KPIs do you bonus on?

‍Shannon Jean: So I love KPIs, but I think they're way more powerful when you let your people set them themselves. You then, oh, that's not enough, or that's crazy high. So it could be anything from, it depends on what you're working on. For me, it's all output driven. So it could be a course we're developing and she'll say, okay, I'm gonna finish this.

The first five sections of the course. This month or I'm gonna finish the course and I'm going to it. It has to be things they're in control of. It can't be like, I'm gonna grow our newsletter subscribers by 500 subscribers this month. She doesn't control that. I do. It depends on the content and the lead magnets and all that stuff.

So you can't make the KPI when it's out of their control. And so I always push back on just things they can do and. Not too many. 'cause I want them to focus on maybe three or five things that they can be really good at. And so it could be, okay, I wanted her to learn video, right? And I used Opus Pro or Opus Clip, and I said, okay, I learned it right.

I went up, I figured it out how to do it. Okay, great. Now you go learn it and you take over and you create the videos from this podcast or this or that. And so that was a KPI. She had to learn that in April and she had to finish up certain content. But the KPIs start with them and she presents 'em in Slack. Here's my KPIs. What do you, here's a draft, what do you think? And then I go and give her feedback on it. 

‍Austin Gray: Okay. Thank you for that. I appreciate that. I interrupted you though. I don't remember where we were going though. 

‍Shannon Jean: Uh, we were talking about the next step. So she took over ConvertKit, or it's just called Kit Now platform for the newsletter. I said, okay, you're in charge. I want you to learn how to do lead magnets. I'll give you the content. You're in charge of the newsletter. I want to be in control of the content because that's what I'm the best at. I know how to do it. That's my voice. I don't wanna use chat gpt, I don't wanna use someone else.

I don't want someone a ghost writer. I just wanna talk to people as I, and I really enjoy that. I'll write the content and just write it in Word or whatever, and I give her that content. She creates the newsletter. I had her learn how to do the email sequences and automations and onboarding because it's not enough just to get somebody to subscribe. It's okay what happens when they subscribe and what? Why are they there? And so how do we lead them down a path to taking action with me? So she learned how to create the sequences, and we have some incredible sequence emails now that go out to new subscribers. 

‍Austin Gray: Stryker Digital specializes in SEO services specifically for local service businesses. Bodie and Andy, the two co-founders, have helped me get Bearclaw land services to the number one search result on Google inside my state for my specific search term. If you wanna learn more. Visit Strykerdigital.com. That's S-T-R-Y-K-E-R digital.com, 

‍Shannon Jean: depending upon how they sign up with a particular lead magnet. And as you build subscribers, I have subscribers that want to talk about entrepreneurship. I have a whole nother group of subscribers, probably most that wanna talk about liquidation, Costco auctions, all that kind of stuff. And then I have people that just follow me because I talk about trucks I like and taking my kids and going fishing and buying real estate and vacation rentals.

So you, you segment those audiences and because you can give them general content, that's what I mostly do, but you also niche, there's opportunities to niche that or segment that audience. So she handles all that, all the LinkedIn stuff and then. We built our first big course, spent a ton of time, all these videos, all this stuff.

It was a disaster. It just sucked. I think I sold one, but during that process, we both learned together what the components of a good course were in a bad course, and this was like too much. I was just like, I'm just gonna vomit out everything I know about this topic and it'll be great, but it was too much and people were overwhelmed by the amount of data that I presented.

So I learned a lot and I learned also about the platforms. We researched all these platforms, circle and school and Kajabi, and we wound up going to Kajabi because it had a steeper learning curve, but I felt it was, it had more depth for what I wanted to do. And I also, I wanna build a community. I really wanna learn how to ho host a a community that that was down in the, down the road.

So we learned Kajabi by building that crappy course, but now we build much better product and we've developed a system. This has all happened since like August. So this is, it's pretty rapid. We, I like to move pretty quick, but I still didn't have my whale, but I had a pretty good workhorse and I was making some good money.

Not life shattering money, but as a measuring stick. It was cool. 'cause for me, if I'm making thousands of dollars, there's something here. I can put some energy behind it and I'm a real energy guy. I give a lot of energy to get something going, but at some point it has to give me energy back or I lose focus and I give, I have a DD like man, I'm shiny object syndrome like crazy. 

‍Austin Gray: Absolutely. Yeah. 

‍Shannon Jean: So once it started kicking out and I was like, Hey, this could, I could go buy a new truck with this. That's how I measured stuff. I could go buy, I'm gonna buy a new a TV or side by side for my river property. 

‍Austin Gray: I'm right there with you right now. Like literally that's where I'm at. I'm like, oh man, I could buy a side by side right now, but I'm just trying to be, I'm trying to be disciplined with it. 

‍Shannon Jean: Yeah. Yeah. So that's how I got this kind of this workhorse thing going and it's working and then I didn't know what the whale was and. Close out this conversation. It many people that I talked to on the dms or after I started DMing and just meeting people and taking calls, discovery calls, and I was like, how do you do this man?

So I got a Zoom account, I build a Calendly so people could book my, I was like, what you mean you let people just book on your calendar? So I was like really strange to me. But it okay, great. It was cool. It was all new. I had these, I started doing these 30 minute calls with people, and people often said, Hey man, you should coach people because you're good at talking to people.

And I have a big mouth and I like to talk and tell stories, and I love helping people. I was like, that's, I don't know anything about coaching. One of the ways I learned years ago when I wanted to get into something new was to just volunteer, and so I found three guys that I had interacted with up on X that I felt maybe I could help.

I just went to him, I said, Hey, can I coach you for free? 'cause I need to learn how to coach and to see if I'm any good at it and figure out a system. So I didn't know the system, how to coach. I need the mechanisms of it. How do you set it up? What do you do? One of the guys was Nathan Quinlan. He's a a contractor house guy.

And his, I went to him because he said, I really want to get into buying houses and not just renovating other people's and stuff. So I'm like, oh, I can help you. I think I could. Help you get there. I don't know anything about that, but I know about business and entrepreneurship. So I spent three months coaching Nate for free, just talking with him every week.

Set up a Slack workspace at back and forth, questions and stuff. And I started coaching a few other guys and I started doing some free calls for people, one hour strategy calls. And the only payment I asked of them was a testimonial. And I started gathering testimonials. So I used, I went and I'm like, how do I gather testimonials?

What do you do? So I, of course there's an app for that. So I used Senia j.io I think it is, and I just sent 'em a link and say, Hey, if you thought just said, if you think I added value on our call, I would love some feedback. And I started getting all this great feedback. So again, my credibility funnel was really building.

Um, at each level. That's what I focused on first, my credibility before I asked anybody for money. And man, I learned so much coaching those guys for free. I learned what I could not help with. I had one guy, it was a disaster. He had financial problems and I was like, dude, you need a, like a fractional CFO.

And he said, yeah, that's it. And I said, let me introduce you to someone. But I realized that's value too. My network of people that I could help them. So I was like, okay, that's cool. And so then I finally had somebody that reach out to me. I don't really wanna sell, I want to attract people that, that I can use their services or that they want my services and think I can add value.

So I use this gravity concept. I wanna pull them in with my content and just who I am and if I can help 'em. So I had a guy reach out on X and said, Hey, I'd love for you to coach me. What's gonna, what's it gonna take? It was amazing. It was life changing for him and for me, and it was transformational and that's what I realized.

What coaching really is about is transformation. It seems transactional. I need to make more money. I want you to teach me how to sell luxury products. I want you to teach me how to sell Costco liquidation products. Yes, I can definitely do that. I can also change your mind about how to think about entrepreneurship and how to build systems and how to share your story to attract people and all that stuff. And so I started doing that. It's been, I. That's my whale man, and it's been wild. It's been really cool. 

‍Austin Gray: That's so cool. So your whale is coaching?  

‍Shannon Jean: Right now, It is. I'm hitting some limitations with it because I have so many people that wanna do it and I've doubled my price just to manage it. I don't know what it'll be in the future, but I'm learning a lot. I'm still building digital products. I'm in the middle of building the most comprehensive. Product that I've ever, that I've built to date, and I'm, but I'm doing it in public. I'm doing a 10 week experiment in my newsletter. 

‍Austin Gray: I saw that. I saw that. 

‍Shannon Jean: Yeah. And I'm just trying something different. So I write a lesson every week, and then my assistant and I'm, we're getting ready to hire somebody else. She takes that content, creates a lesson in this, and it's gonna be this 10 step course, and then I'll go back and add video to the content and stuff. But I'm giving it away in my newsletter and, and then. Something weird happened along the way. I got an alert that, Hey, you, you're eligible for subscriptions for people to pay to subscribe to your content.

I was like, why would they wanna do that? I give everything away for free anyway, talk about all this stuff and this systems and lessons I've learned. But I turned it on and at the time it was five bucks was the maximum that you could charge. So I'd just said, sure, I'll turn it on. And all of a sudden people started subscribing to my X was like, I had 10 people, so that's interesting. That's 600 bucks a year. That's interesting. That's, that intrigues me, right? And so I was like, what do I do for these people? I don't want to create a separate group of content. You've seen people that have their content hidden just for their subscribers.

I don't really like that. So I said, I'll just create a, a group of DM group on X and I'll be in there and I'll, I'll answer questions and then I'll do a call once a month. We'll do a Zoom call with everybody who wants to join, and all of a sudden I had a hundred subscribers. And I was like, huh, that's interesting.

And that's around six grand a year chasing a hundred dollars bills, man. Mm-hmm. And so I couldn't control it after a hundred and the dms, it was just a nightmare. So I think, okay, I'm gonna shift all this to Kajabi. And so I built a community in Kajabi and. Again, one of the guys in my group, I think it might have been Dan, I called it my subscriber group or whatever, and he said, Canon, you gotta call that a mastermind.

I'm like, all right, that sounds great. So I called it my $5 Mastermind and I moved it to Kajabi. It was very difficult moving people from X to Kajabi. Mm-hmm. It took me. Weeks back and forth, and I still have people on X that don't come, haven't come over to Kajabi, that it's just a lot of friction. Sure. But now I, every link I use, it's always the Kajabi link. So it's better as of this morning with this community that I started a few months ago, I've got 448 members. 

‍Austin Gray: Oh my goodness. That's a monthly subscription. 

‍Shannon Jean: Yeah. It's only five bucks. It's a cup of coffee, but it's freaking awesome, man. I'm learning, I've learned so much on how to build a community, right. And how to interact and how, what people expect, and how to do a meetup and how to manage that. And that $5 Mastermind has turned into like my funnel, my sales funnel. Because when, 'cause I have a coach, I have a branding coach that I hired to help me. To figure this stuff out because I don't know what I don't know, and I don't know what to do with all these people.

And he was like, dude, those people have already paid you. Those are your leads. They want to talk to you. So he said, you need to talk to every one of those people. Say you outta your mind. Okay. So I created a 15 minute call and when they joined my mastermind, they get a link. I have a loom that walks them through how to use the Mastermind in Kajabi.

It's just a forum. They can post things and I have all kinds of resources up there for them. Some free, some paid, and I, there's a link to book a call with me, 15 minute chat. And you know what? Some of those people want a lot more than to join and pay me five bucks. So I talk about the digital products, I help 'em, I give 'em. And some people it's just, Hey, 15 minutes. Great, I'll see you in the mastermind. I'll answer your questions. Some people I wind up spending more time with and they hire me to coach. And so it's become an incredible funnel. 

‍Austin Gray: Incredible funnel.

Shannon Jean:  And that's been my journey on X-Men over, I guess what, six, eight months, nine months. So cool. And I had no idea when I started, so that this is what I would say to people listening is that. You don't know where it's gonna lead, right? No matter what business you're in. And just pull the string, see where it goes. I'm with you. 

‍Austin Gray: I think it's so cool. And thank you for sharing your journey. I have friends in who are running small businesses and they're like, why are you spending time on X? I'm like. Why would you not like it? Is the entrepreneurial goldmine. Like it really is just the connections. And selfishly, I do this podcast 'cause I, so I can meet and talk with guys like you. I just, oh, it's a hack. Yeah. I truly believe that. I personally get smarter. You do by talking with guys like you. It's a and, yeah. Yeah. And then in turn, the listeners get to learn from someone like you. 

‍Shannon Jean: Yep. 

‍Austin Gray: And so I, I just believe it's just win-win and I spend. Two hours a week on it at this point. Right. Because like my whole team on the back end just produces all the content. We've got improvements to make and whatnot of course. But X is such a powerful business network right now. It's amazing. It really truly is. And so you heard it, listeners from Shannon started nine months ago at zero.

‍Shannon Jean:  I fluttered around the first six months. I didn't know what I was doing in there. Okay. But it really took off in August of last year is when it started going and I hired. I hired my assistant pretty quick after that and I realized it was taken off. But a lot of what you're talking about too is this, I really believe in the law of reciprocity that the, you give first, you give out that value and it'll come back to you. And I've just seen it over and over in my career. The various businesses that I've run is give a lot away. It brings people to you and, uh, you make a lot more money.

‍Austin Gray:  I agree. I guess where I was going with that last comment was just to build off of what you said, it has opened up opportunities I never dreamed were possible and I'm just a, I grew up working in my dad's concrete business in West Texas and, and then jumped back into kind of the outdoor service based stuff and then started sharing on X and then now here we are, we're doing business down in Austin with another really high caliber entrepreneur. I'm learning a ton from him. And so yeah, if I can encourage listeners, it's like you mentioned the vanity metrics thing. I don't think that's what this is about.

What it's about is in today's day and age, whether you like social media or whether you hate it. Yeah, it is a tool to open up more business opportunities and the people like Shannon who are using it, your wildest dreams can be become Al. 

‍Shannon Jean: Oh, yeah, yeah. Spot on. It is the, that's where everybody's at, whether they're scrolling Instagram, TikTok, or on X or Facebook.

Everybody's there. And whether your, your ICP, your customer, ideal customer profile is on. On a meta platform or on X or you know, LinkedIn, whatever, that, that's where you find them. And every platform has different methods to that you can succeed at. But you made a comment earlier, and I have been there, man, where you're, you know, you build a business and you put your, oh, you're just trying to make a living right the beginning, trying to pay the bills, and then you get employees and you've gotta make payroll, man, every two weeks.

I gotta come up with how much, it's so easy for a guy like me to sit and talk about. Oh, broaden and spend time up here. But if you give up and delegate, you will find that time and it will be booked.  I love is the E-Myth where they focus on you gotta work on your business not in it. And if you wanna get away from the daily grind, you have to get to that level where you can step aside.

Even if the people around you aren't gonna do it as good as you. And I'm quotes in the air, if they can do 75%. As good as you can, you gotta step out and start doing other things. It's a hard lesson. It was very hard for me to learn that in my first few businesses. But what gets you out of this and gets you to the next level? If you wanna stay up behind and drive the tractor or sell the product or whatever it is forever, that's fine and you can make a good living at it. But if you really want to take it to another level and experience a different kind of life and an uncommon life. You got 

‍Austin Gray: and create opportunities. Like I'm in a point right now with my business and I'm curious if you ever hit this where I don't really have another choice because I have some high performers around me and if I don't allow us or give up enough to allow us to grow, then I'm capping their opportunity at their current.

‍Shannon Jean: And you're making competitors 'cause they'll leave. 

‍Austin Gray: Exactly. 

‍Shannon Jean: They'll go start their own thing. They're like, hell, I can't do it. But if you're like, Hey. You can own this business someday. Of course, you want to create owners, right, and level them up. Now some folks. Don't want that. And you gotta be careful. 'cause like my wife always used to tell me, Hey, they don't wanna hear your entrepreneurial bs. They want a solid paycheck, they want a good place to work and all that kinda stuff. There's a lot of people like that and that's awesome. But there are people, like you said, high performers that want to grow.

And I would just be like, Hey, I want you to have my job because I'm gonna be bored at some point and I'm gonna want to go do something else. So if you bring those people up with you. It's makes your life way better and it adds value to them. Of course, it's the opposite of that crab pot where the crabs are pulling everybody in.

You lift everybody out and then it in turn, that fuels you and you get to go do things. 'cause maybe like when I did it, I, it's okay. I got, I'm gonna, I'm leaving this business. I need to step out. I'm gonna take way less money out sometimes nothing. But I'm gonna step in. This person's gonna step in and then I would go do something else.

But eventually that business would start kicking off money to me again, or more money again, because somebody else that came in. A lot of times it's about the energy and a different way to look at things. And maybe your ego doesn't wanna hear it, but the sometimes there's gonna be somebody who's better at it than you. You want to get outta their way? Man, 

‍Austin Gray: I can tell you this right now. This is exactly what I've experienced in Bearclaw. I mean our project manager, sales guy, brother of our lead field operator, like they just come from an incredible family. And there was a certain point, the hardest thing for me to give up was sales and estimating.

So the way I built my business is I solo o owner operated. I really love doing the work. And so that was the hardest thing. For me to pull out of the equipment 'cause I just love it or actually enjoy it. But then I realized that our field operator is actually way better at the work than me. And I would make mistakes with the equipment and it'd be $1,500.

And I'm like, dude, this is stupid. Like why don't you just take all of this and then I'll go focus on sales and estimating and then I don't have the $1,500 fixes. Because he never makes a mistake. The dude's perfect in the equipment. So then we like built that. Then we recruited our field crew. I handled sales and estimating.

Then we, he's, Hey, my brother's really good at sales. He does solar sales. So I'm like, shoot, let's offer him a job. So then he comes on and he's very quickly, I just showed him our grading estimating sheet. I showed him our land clearing, ex estimating sheet, and he like understood our, once he understood our pricing model, it's like boom. He starts sending quotes, he starts closing deals. And I'm like, holy crap. This was something that I could not let go of. Yep. But. I realize this guy's actually better than I was at it, so I just need to get out of his way. 

‍Shannon Jean:  That's right. 

‍Austin Gray: And then support him. And so since making that decision, like our growth trajectory right now in the phase that we're in, where I'm like sitting back, managing, helping support our team as opposed to like trying to get in his way. We're growing faster than I was, than we were when I was in the sales. And so that has been a transformational shift here. And I guess long story short, it's like I'm capping those guys if I choose to just do this solo owner operated. 

‍Shannon Jean: Absolutely. 

‍Austin Gray: Even though I love doing the work 

‍Shannon Jean:  And you're capping yourself and you'll be stuck and you won't be, you won't have time. You'll be like, how could I do a podcast? Excuse me. How could I do this two hours a week and how could I post on X? You won't have time and the things that you're freeing up your time to do, you'll, you don't know where they will lead. Who you will meet because you have the opportunity to breathe, man, and you're out of the trenches of that stuff.

And you've got the insight to realize that there are better people at it, at those specific things. And I commend you for that because it's not easy. It took me a long time. I struggle with a lot of it. I still struggle because I should be like, oh, hey, you know, I use like chat GPT like crazy, right? It's like my assistant, and once they threaded all the. Post together so we could search everything I did that there's a prompt that says, Hey, identify my five blind spots based on everything I've posted for the last two years. Yeah, and one of it was like, you don't give up enough. I was like, dang it. I thought I did. 

‍Austin Gray: Yeah. Oh my gosh. Like we, we have to do another episode. I think we could probably record five or 10 episodes ending un unending amount of things to talk about. I do want to go into that. We're also over the top of the hour here, so I wanna be respectful of your time. 

‍Shannon Jean: Appreciate it. 

‍Austin Gray: And so we can wrap up some other things that I did want to touch on real quick. Was that content os course helpful for your assistant? 

‍Shannon Jean: Oh yeah, because I hire for personality and drive and ambition. I don't, that's the most important thing to me. I think people can learn anything. So yeah, it was very important for her. 'cause global talent is great, but sometimes they're not here. They missed the context of it, right? The why, what's really happening? What are these things? So that content os really helped her understand what I was trying to build, even if I didn't totally know it. And so, yeah, it was a big accelerant for her. 

‍Austin Gray: What was the price of that product? 

‍Shannon Jean: It was a hundred bucks, dude. 

‍Austin Gray: Oh my gosh. Alright. I'm going to buy it right now.

‍Shannon Jean: Yeah, it's good. It's a good course and it's, 'cause it's an older course. He sold it, I think for three, 400 bucks when it first came out and, but now it's, I think it's a hundred bucks. 

‍Austin Gray: Okay. And then the last question I had for you before I let you run is you and I are similar in the sense that shiny object syndrome, like there's never a shortage of opportunities, right? And there's never a shortage of things to work on. So you're coaching people right now you have this general business sense, but. You also, uh, have identified that there was like that one offer that sort of got people, uh, at the whistle. 

‍Shannon Jean: Yeah. 

‍Austin Gray: What would you recommend that I do or our listeners talk about general or pick something specialized?

‍Shannon Jean: I think you have to let your followers or your clients or the people around you tell you. I didn't know. I was just posting general stuff, entrepreneurship and all, and I thought, I have a lot. I think I have a lot to add and talk about stuff, and I, it was okay and I kept growing. It wasn't until I posted about that, Hey, you know what, you could, it was so silly too.

It was a exercise equipment. It was like, Hey, you're selling this ex, these exercise equipment loads and this is like $18,000 worth of exercise equipment and it's selling for 800 bucks. And that was what blew up. And I realized that, okay, how my whole frame, how I talked about it was like, this is the treasure chest.

This is, these are the deals that we all want because Peon X, a lot of guys like us that have shiny object syndrome and they're like, I could build a business with this who couldn't make money. I think it's important to niche and not be a generalist. I think you have to be more kind of a generalist until you figure out what that mm-hmm.

What will want to, I have a client that I'm coaching right now and we're still trying to find his whistle and he's had some posts that related to the NBA stuff that have taken off and I was like, dude, you need to talk about basketball more. And he said, I'm a pro a strategy guy. And I'm like, that doesn't matter.

Your whistle could be talking about basketball and then using analogies from that to attract followers and then bringing those followers in and then they say, oh, I could make more profit in my business. So you, you have to find the thing that gets you attention. Like talking about Tyler's stump thing, he's getting attention 'cause he posts his TimeLapse videos of those stump grindings.

That's why not because he posts a text thread about. How to build a stump grinding business. And he is talking about his journey from leaving corporate America, a soul-sucking job to be out in the field and grinding stumps and making, having a $30,000 month or whatever. But he's also, yeah, I made $2,000 the first month, so you, you have to throw a lot of stuff at the wall and really put in the reps. I will tell you. I have posted or replied almost 27,000 times on X. 

‍Austin Gray: This episode is brought to you by dialed in bookkeeping. Ben and his team provide bookkeeping services, job costing reports, and accurate financial information for the home services industry. If you're looking to keep your books up to date, visit dialed in bookkeeping.com/ownrops. When you use this specific landing page, you'll get your first three months 50% off. 

‍Shannon Jean: And that's the only way I would've known. The possibilities of what you could do with it is by really putting in the reps and it's a grind, just like your regular business is a grind. This is a grind. So I always tell people, don't watch Netflix. Your new hobby's making money. You keep your laptop in front of you or your phone and you're either look like, I have lots of people, I'm teaching auction stuff and I say, you need to watch auctions, not some streaming show. This is auction time at night, so you have to be willing to put in the hours for sure.

‍Austin Gray: 27,000 replies. That's what nobody talks about right there. That's right. Let's wrap it up on that one. Shannon, thanks so much for being on the owner ops podcast. I appreciate you, you sharing your time, wisdom with us. 

‍Shannon Jean: Yeah. Come up and, and, and follow me at Shannon Jean, S-H-A-N-N-O-N-J-E-A-N. Ask me questions. You wanna learn about anything, come join my $5 Mastermind and we'll have a great time doing it. I'm having the time of my life up here. 

‍Austin Gray: This is fantastic. Thanks again for being guests on the show listeners. Thanks for listening to another episode of the Owner Ops podcast. Every week we drop episodes on Friday where we talk about building local service-based businesses. Every Saturday we're sending you a newsletter where we summarize the main learning points from the guests on the podcast. So if you haven't signed up for that yet, go to owner ops.com/newsletter. That's OWNROPS.com/newsletter. We'll see you guys next week. Don't forget, work hard, do your best. Never settle for less.

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