Connection is a key ingredient In an entrepreneur’s journey.  It is very hard to venture out on your own.  When my friend Sharon McLaughlin let me know of an upcoming free virtual entrepreneur summit that promotes networking with other doctors, I said it’s vital that I spread the word!

Sharon is a plastic surgeon turned successful entrepreneur I interviewed back on Episode 90, and has one of the largest physician entrepreneur Facebook groups.  We also discuss her upcoming project in helping more entrepreneurs add more journaling and mindfulness in their career.

Female Physician Entrepreneur Summit
April 23-25, 2022

REGISTER HERE:
https://bootstrapmd.com/go/fpe/

Mindlull – Bring more entrepreneurial fulfillment through journaling
https://www.mindlull.com

Previous podcast episode with Dr. Sharon McLaughlin:

https://bootstrapmd.libsyn.com/90-empowering-women-physician-entrepreneurs-through-community-with-sharon-mclaughlin-md

Transcript:

Mike Woo-Ming: Hey guys, this is Dr. Mike. welcome to another edition of BootstrapMD today on the program, a special treat. One of my favorite people in this weird physician entrepreneur space that we’re in. I’ve had her as a previous guest. She’s a board certified plastic surgeon and she had. A summit coming up.

That’s really exciting. We’re gonna talk more about it. It’s called the female physician entrepreneurs summit. That’s coming on April 23rd through 25th. She let me know about it. I said, I need to get you on the podcast. Most of be asking her some projects that’s coming up that I think it’d be really exciting, especially if you’re someone who wants to be able to refocus on your business and your life.

She got something that it’s really cool. That’s coming up that I like to share with you today to welcome to the program Dr. Sharon McLaughlin!

Sharon McLaughlin MD: Thank you so much for having me today as always. I’m doing well. Mike, I’m excited about the summit. I’m excited about the upcoming book. I’m excited to share with other people and just help that’s the bottom line, but I never, when it comes to helping other physicians, that’s what gets me most excited because I think with this day and age with burnout being so high and career dissatisfaction, being so high, it gives me purpose.

I’ve had so many failures throughout my life, what I consider failures, and if I can save someone else time, then I want to be able to do that. And I’ve been able to grow a network and there’s a lot of people that I know that can help with others. So I just want to give them a platform to be able to share what they’re doing, just like you’re doing with your group and with your podcast.

Physicians know that there’s other opportunities out there rather than corporate medicine, or rather than being a cog on the wheel. Just to know that there’s other opportunities you may not want to make the move today, perhaps you’re, 100% happy. But if tomorrow comes and you find yourself unhappy, just know that there’s all the options and that there’s people out there willing to help you.

Mike Woo-Ming: I always thought if we didn’t have failures, that means we weren’t trying. So I’ve had a lot of failures in my life and most entrepreneurs, actually, all entrepreneurs probably did. Now, for those who are listening to you for the first time, or maybe watching this video on our YouTube channel just tell us about yourself. How did you become a physician entrepreneur?

Sharon McLaughlin MD: I think it started with my dad. Really. He was excellent. I think it all has to do with our upbringing. He was, is a man of integrity. He loved helping other people. He had a business is to deliver oil, but he was, just going around as a little girl with him on the oil truck, making deliveries, and we’ll see how he interacted with people, seeing how.

He actually… the first word that comes to mind is he brought joy to people and you would think his delivery man, but though his, he was so very personable, very hospitable. And he loved talking to people. He really loved getting to know them. So yes, he was delivering oil. Yes. He was fixing the oil burner, but he truly got to know his customers.

And that’s what I remember growing. Wanted to go into medicine, but I always knew that I wanted to do things outside of medicine as well. So for me, I started with some skincare and I did some scar gels. I did a lingerie line. I’ve tried different things, but it always comes back down to, really what you’re passionate about.

And what’s going to make you happy. I believe that if you’re not thoroughly passionate about it, You’re not going to be able to pursue it because even though it may sound like a good idea, maybe it’s a way to make money. If you’re not passionate about it, there’s always bumps in the road, no matter what you do. So unless you’re passionate about it, truly easy just to give it up or, get off that path.

Mike Woo-Ming: So you started the Female Physician Entrepreneur Facebook group. And if you don’t join it, go check it out. And we’ll put a link on here. When was that? When did we, when did you start that again?

Sharon McLaughlin MD: About four years after I started it, I wanted to be surrounded by like-minded people. One of the things that I believe that if you’re struggling or you feel stuck is to be around people that are similar to you in the sense that they have the light, the same likes desires passions as you and I really didn’t have that in my life. I have a wonderful husband. I had friends that are in medicine. They really didn’t have an interest in entrepreneurship. And I did, and I found that was a boy that my life. And I figured if I was interested, perhaps there were other physicians interested. So I started this group and it really took off rather quickly. Oh, eventually I have to be honest with you in the beginning, people were joining.

It was very, it was crickets and it all, I think, in this time that we’re going to talk about community building, but I believe one of the things you have to do is make it about the other person. And I just kept on adding value as much as I could, but honestly, it was crickets for awhile. And I was like, you feel that people were joining.

I really did question it. I’m like, am I doing the right thing? Because the numbers are going up, but people really weren’t engaging at all. And I just kept pursuing it. And then, it did take off rather quickly after that. And I w I’m happy that I’ve done it. I’m happy. So many people have reached out over the years and said, this group has really given me ideas.

It’s really why I’m where I am. Even if I didn’t get the feedback, it’s just nice to know that you can, again, it comes down to helping other physicians, I feel very. I think a lot of people are very concerned about where medicine is right now. And what do we do about it at so many levels?

So I really would like to bring people together that are working on legislation that are doing things, working with the hospitals that are doing things, working with health plans and really network. And that’s what this summit is about is. But it has to do with my Facebook group. When I see that someone’s really trying to hard to make a change.

I am so happy to promote them as, the way that Facebook is going. It’s hard as far as doing links, as much as we used to in the past Facebook doesn’t like it you’re off their platform. You’re or you’re off the group and they penalize you for it. So I that’s another reason why I wanted to do the summit on a separate Facebook group.

And I figured as long as I was opening it up, might as well open it up to everybody. I really would like to make connections. I think that we move faster when we network with other people. So to answer your question, I started the Facebook group because I needed it. I had avoided my life and I wanted it filled.

I wanted to see if others were interested and I believe that we learned and grow faster together than we do by ourselves.

Mike Woo-Ming: Yeah. And I’ve had many guests on the program and, a number of them, point to your group, as, really the starting point for where they got started and say, “Hey, there are other people, that’ll like me, I’m not just crazy trying to think of this. I’m trying to invent this.” And really that’s really what you need as an entrepreneur. And you went from myself. I remember you asked me to come onto your program. I’d been teaching other entrepreneurs, not too much on the physicians, because I wasn’t sure, if they would be interested in that kind of the crazy stuff that I’d be doing and you invited me and you’re so generous and we’ve had a great relationship talking about all the different projects.

So when you told me that you have the summit to say, Hey, let me know more about it. That might let my folks know more about it. So let’s talk about the summit. Why did you create the summit and tell us what we can learn when joining the summit?

Sharon McLaughlin MD: There’s so many. Great people in the group and it always comes down to “geez, who do I ask? Who do I not ask?” I wanted, it’s very diverse, truthfully. It’s you could say a hodgepodge, but for me, in my head, I’m like, we need the speakers. I wanted it where, okay. You start where you’re at. You’re a physician you’re unhappy. It’s really targeted for the physicians that are unhappy.

So you’re a physician. What do you do? Speaking as a really great, we have a couple of speakers at Ted speaker. We have from me coming on, who was. Really built a career on keynote speaking. So she’s going to be talking about that. You could start a book, right? You could start a book, you could publish a book.

So we have Jasmine talking about that, just really where you are on that…,

Mike Woo-Ming: If you could get the names of some of the people who like, you don’t have unfortunately basis, but if you didn’t have the full name so they can check it out.

Sharon McLaughlin MD: Absolutely please. We have Dr. Lulu, she’s a Ted speaker. She’s going to be talking about that. We have Dr. Romie talking about keynote speaking. And Nivedita, she is a poet. So she’s like a published poet. We’re going to be having a reading from her, one of her poems about people struggling. And then she’s going to be talking about becoming a pilot, which I think is really important. We have real estate investing, both syndication as well as direct buy direct ownership, such as like short-term or long-term rental.

And that’s by parent and it’s by all summer with Miranda Phillips, back to now. Okay. So you have an idea of what you want to do. How do you get out there? How do you market it? So there’s a couple things we have Manasseh who has started a whole line on children’s. How do I say this? Dinnerware, plateware, it’s unfortunate that children are exposed to plastics.

It’s an endocrine disruptor. So she’s designed a line that are really, safe for children. So she’s going to be talking about how she got her product to market. And how do you get, PR for a product, the same thing, even if you’re want to be a spokesperson, how do you get out there?

You have an idea. You have a book. Product service, how to get out there and market it. So she’s going to help with that. We have Amy Shaw also speaking about, getting out there doing social media, cause she’s made some great connections with large companies makeup companies health companies, doing shakes.

Getting my name on products. I can go on and on. We have some coaching talking about coaching, building communities, and you should meet us talking about that, how to negotiate. Cause that’s such a I hate to say this, but I think women are as good with negotiation. It’s not something we learn as we’re growing up.

So we have Karen coming on, talking about that. She’s a physician coach. And Latifah is going to be talking about financial freedom because it’s so important. I believe as physicians, we make these salaries, we should be putting money away for investing. And just so that we have options in the past. I want me to keep going,

Mike Woo-Ming: This is amazing! We could check it out on your website.

It’s again, it is the Female Physician Entrepreneurs Summit people 23rd through 25th. The price, I think you said it was at 1500 or $2,000 for

Sharon McLaughlin MD: the summit?

The summit. Is that. No, it’s a free online summit. It’s a free, here’s some great mic. It’s a free online summit.

Mike Woo-Ming: Yes. I know some of these speakers pay a lot of money.

If you want to do consulting and coaching, it’s well worth it, but it’s not, cheap if you would like to stop with these. So getting the opportunity to hear from them on promoting the speakers is, some people say with the summits it’s free. It really comes down to, what you want to put in and on what you get out of it, there.

And I really feel more people need to be taking advantage of these opportunities. What’s a you,

Sharon McLaughlin MD: so I’ll be honest with you when I started this, Summit’s all about networking. I want links. I want to hear about your businesses. I want people to work together and collaborate. So that, that my goal is that yes, you’re going to listen to the speakers.

You’re going to get some ideas. But you better network with some of the other members there. And I’d like everyone to come out with relationships that they had after the summit that they didn’t have before the summit. And when,

Mike Woo-Ming: what did, just so the listeners know, how will they have an opportunity because it is a virtual summit.

How will they have the opportunity

Sharon McLaughlin MD: to net. All in Facebook as far as putting posts there and comments, and I don’t care if you take this offline, I prefer that you don’t message people if they’re not asking to be messaged, but listen, Mike, this is how we add, right? Like we met through Facebook and so many wonderful things can happen.

I can tell you, I do fundraising, right? For mitochondrial diseases. I’ve raised thousands of dollars doing the things that I’m doing strictly from Facebook, and it’s really. You can do anything. The sky is the limit. What’s not what is a problem. And it always will be an obstacle is how do you get it out there?

And there’s people willing to help you with it. So take advantage of it, make those connections. It’s the fastest way to grow.

Mike Woo-Ming: Now. It is called the female physician entrepreneur summit, but is it open for men to write? It

Sharon McLaughlin MD: is it’s open for everybody. Once I started putting lists together and I was looking at the speakers, I was like, we should all benefit from this.

And I believe again, being that I wanted this summit to network. Otherwise I would have just kept it in my own group, but being that I want networking for a lot of sharing links. I don’t care. It’s important to have other people involved, too, men and women, we’re going to grow faster together. So

Mike Woo-Ming: th this is great.

Now I do want to focus on your own businesses. You got, you’ve got some projects you’ve been working on it. Tell us about my LOL. Tell us what is that? Yeah, you’ve

Sharon McLaughlin MD: got either. I can say, remember slow, cause I’m not, but I’m always going at a fast pace. Like even the summit. Do you know how long it took me to do this?

I’m giving myself two weeks. Like I had this idea last week. I’m like, okay, put out some messages, people, I count me interested and then we’ll put it together. I did a weight loss summit about three years of count. Same thing, third, like we had no joke, 32 speakers. I did a lot more for that summit. Cause everyone, I can build on websites and all everyone have their speaker page and all that.

And this time around, I was like, no, I’m not doing that. That took up too much time. I need to promote this. I need my own sanity. So that’s just how I am. I think a lot of entrepreneurs are now focused. They have all these great ideas, but where do you really focus? So I’m in the process of creating a planner as well as a workbook to really answer some has journaling and miserable.

Those questions that are going to make you think, really plan out your day, plan out your week and plan out your month. And it’s going to be over 28 days. And you can say 20 days, isn’t that much for those people who feel like they’re all over the place. It’s a start. And I don’t believe in.

Overwhelming. I believe in small, if you truly feel that way, like you’re overwhelmed and you don’t know where to focus, start small. So I had said, four weeks is the max. Cause I’ve had people telling me you gotta do a quarter, one, I’ll do a quarter, one. I, my plan is to do a series, but I really want to touch on the people that just can’t move forward.

They don’t know where to go. Ask those questions give you some ideas of what you could start doing and then take it from there, plan it out, do journaling, at least once a day, how do you what’s that morning routine looked like, mapping out your morning routine for you. And then it’s a tracker to, where are you at the end of the week?

Where are you? Did you reach goals and if not, why not? You really need to focusing on

Mike Woo-Ming: that. Yeah. I’m such a fan of journaling and planning out my morning. And sometimes, we try to do this and then we, some few days I fall off and. That’s usually when I’m the least productive is when I let it go and giving an opportunity to be able to have, a site that allows you to do this is very point, especially if you’ve never done this before now, it’s coming out.

We don’t, it’s not ready yet. Where can they go to get more information or is it a you’re going to let us know when it’s coming out and I can let my group. The

Sharon McLaughlin MD: Y the website is mind lull. L U L O is mines. It’s that giving our brain a lot of time, quiet time to really just focus because I believe that’s how we focus.

Just giving it’s not, they can’t do it. I’m doing like quiet time. And I’ve learned to actually factor that in. I need those quiet times because it’s when I’m most creative. And when I feel like I’m saying. It’s usually because I’ve been go, and over all over the place. Really want to like center myself, bring it back to me and what needs to be done to, to move forward.

So you can find it on the website at mine, little.com. I have an opt-in there’s some tips. As far as focusing, there’s an ebook there that you can sign up for. And then if you’re on that email list, I will send out when the book actually launches on May 3rd.

Mike Woo-Ming: And I love what you’re building an email list.

We’ve been talking, I believe

Sharon McLaughlin MD: like it is so important for those people out there. I always even don’t have to do what you pre-train. And I always preached about building an email list, but because Facebook I’m so on it and But I never did build that email list. I built a Facebook group over 8,000 people and I never had an email list for it or one that I didn’t push.

And now with Facebook, logarithm changing so much, I’m like, oh no, I really need to change this up rather quickly. So I’m yeah. To enter the groups. Now you need to give an email it’s really important. If there’s changes at all, you won’t even see it. If I publish it in any of the groups. So I want an email to be able to connect and I don’t spam.

I don’t send around crappy stuff. So it’ll all be valuable information. That’s pretty much how I run.

Mike Woo-Ming: Okay, perfect. Yeah. I know, w when marketing, sometimes we forget all the things that we should be doing. You mean when I started out my practice, W practice advisor to say do you have an email list?

Oh yeah. I should probably email them. Oh, you got you probably, it is one of those things that it is so important. So we’ve got this, we got mine low. We got the summit coming up. Anything else that you want to share or listeners

Sharon McLaughlin MD: to know? I really don’t like just for them personally, if you’re not happy, reach out to others, there’s no reason to stay unhappy.

I’m telling you, years ago, maybe it was, I think it was different. People were still doing things outside of medicine, but there’s ways that you can actually stay in medicine. One of the talks that I have for the summit is actually. Being really smart about running your business because I know when I was practicing, I didn’t know the back office.

So Sandy Weitz is actually going to be talking about building up your practice. Remember, it’s all about staying where you are right now. What can you do? So as far as me, no, because I’m really concentrating on the summit first, then the book and really taking those breaks and really focusing, it’s going to be about helping others with their quiet time.

And if that’s the case, that’s why your time as well. That’s what I’m focusing on. Thank you.

Mike Woo-Ming: You always come from a source of giving and it definitely shows go out and check out or summit. It’s a female physician, entrepreneur summit. It is open to everyone’s coming up. April 23rd through 25th. We’ll have.

We can go to find out more information. Thank you again, Sharon. Thanks for spending time with us today.

Sharon McLaughlin MD: It’s always a pleasure. Thank you for doing what you’re doing!

Mike Woo-Ming: And thanks guys. If you would need to get motivated, don’t just try to do this on your own. Sharon said, it’s all about networking, finding other like-minded individuals and keep moving forward.

This week we look at how creating Amazon Kindle eBooks can lead to a sustainable recurring income. My long-time friend and wildly successful online entrepreneur shows how he built a publishing empire with Amazon Kindle Books, writing everything from romance novels to how-to books. You will learn how his students have made $10,000 a month or more selling everything from romance novels to cookbooks using the Amazon Kindle Publishing platform.   Even his family have been involved in the business, getting his son to publish his first Kindle book at 15 years old!

We discuss what are the best selling niches and what are areas to avoid.  If you are looking to build a revenue generating asset (RGA), Ty says this is one of the easiest ways to start. Get his Newest Book “Kindle Publishing Secrets” for Free: TyCohen.com

Transcript:

Mike Woo-Ming: Hey guys, this is Dr. Mike Woo-Ming. Welcome to another edition of BootstrapMD. I am super excited for this call because I’ve got one of my oldest friends on the internet marketing space. Joining me today. He’s an accomplished internet marketer, entrepreneur. Who over a decade ago, took a major gamble with his life by financially quitting his corporate job and starting a business of his own.

That story kind of resonates with me. He became an offline and online success. He now generates millions of dollars in sales, transforming people’s lives. And he does it through something which is known as Kendall. He’s the founder of the Kindle Cashflow system. He’s going to talk all about it today. One, welcome to the show, Mr. Ty Cohen. Ty, how you doing today?

Ty Cohen: Mike, I’m doing fantastic. Even better to be here. I’m excited to hear what we’re going to talk about. So

Mike Woo-Ming: I was trying to think before we did the interview, I’ve known you at least what? 10, 15 years. Something like that.

Ty Cohen: No, dude. It’s gotta be… So my son, Tyler is going to be 18 in March.

And I think I met you just before we moved from Connecticut to North Carolina. Wow. So we, that was he was a year old when we were in Connecticut. So we have known each other at least 16 years, at least 16. That’s how I remember. I use my kids’ birth dates as a timeline.

Mike Woo-Ming: Yeah. Yeah. I think also cause a COVID that like adds like five years I dunno anything like prior to COVID.

But we were in I got to know you really well. We were on a cruise ship because we were both part of a mastermind group with Russell Brunson. And that was really cool and got to meet the families and just get to know and over the last few years it’s really been a pleasure. rEally appreciate you taking the time and joining me here, because I know you’re really busy. You teach these courses and you do a live events, so thank you again for coming onto the show.

Ty Cohen: Yeah, absolutely. There’s nothing like being stuck on a cruise of someone for five or seven days, where you get to know them a little bit more.

Mike Woo-Ming: Have you been on a cruise since,

Ty Cohen: You know what, coincidentally, so we’re going on a cruise next week. So we actually sell out on Sunday. So that was our last cruise. Which was that had to be what, two years ago? Two years ago. So it was right before COVID really hit. And then now we’re going on a cruise where we’re selling out Sunday. And this has been my first time since,

Mike Woo-Ming: Okay let me know, as it goes, I still can’t give it to my wife to get her on a cruise. So…

Ty Cohen: That was me. That was me. So we had a couple of books then we said, do you know, we’re going to hold off? So that’s it.

Mike Woo-Ming: So let’s talk about it. Now I talked a little bit about your background, but I know you’ve been involved in this for quite a while, helping authors now I told them a lot of my clients and students If you’re going to make money, probably the one thing you can’t really make money in is having a book, is being an author. Most authors are starving authors, but you’ve changed that, thinking a bit about, maybe talk about first for those who don’t know what is Kindle and really. How did it kind of change for you? Because I’m sure you’ve heard that same a message too that there’s a lot of starving authors out there. Yeah.

Ty Cohen: Yeah. 100%. And we hear it every day, from traditional authors and writers that are trying to still follow that traditional route. So for me, so I got involved with Kindle Publishing almost, I want to say 16 years ago. I got invited by Amazon to become a beta tester and they were releasing the Kindle the KDF platform, Kindle direct publishing platform.

And that was their way of competing with the Barnes and Nobles, the Borders bookstores, and all of the other bookstores that were out at that time. And honestly, Mike, I thought it was the silliest thing. I thought digital books? Who are going to want to go in and buy like digital books? We’re used to physical books that we can dog air and mark up.

So I said, you know what? This is Amazon. I’m going to humor them. And at that time, 16 years ago, can you believe it’s been over 20 years that Amazon has been around, but at that time, right? So Amazon wasn’t the huge giant that it is now. It was a major player, but not where it is now. And I said you know what, I’m going to humor him because I was selling a lot of physical books through what was known as the Amazon advantage program at that time.

So with the Amazon advantage program, it allowed people who were authors and publishers who had physically printed their books up independently to ship out 20, 30, 40, 50, a hundred books to Amazon and Amazon would store them. They would ship them. They would take the orders, fulfillment, handle, customer support and everything.

So that’s how they kinda got in contact with me and said, Hey, you’re selling a lot of physical books. We’d love to have you beta test. I reluctantly jumped in. I took the digital format of one of my physical books, which was a book for a musician, it was a book that taught musicians how to start their own independent record label.

I took the word format of that, uploaded it to Amazon and walked away, forgot about it because honestly I didn’t think that there was going to be much to it. About two months later I checked myself and I had just under a thousand dollars worth of sales that came in. Through the digital sales of my, a Kindle book.

And I said to myself, I said, you know what? I was wrong, but this is one of a few times when I don’t mind being wrong. And you and I have a mutual friend, Greg Cesar. And Greg was like, dude, there is something to this. Like you need to really just hit this thing hard and teach it to other people. And I reluctantly decided to teach it after about a year or so of Greg and one of our other friends hammering me really wanting me to go in and teach this to other people.

And I said, you know what? I’ll do it. So that was my beginning of Kindle.

Mike Woo-Ming: You talked about the traditional route and maybe you could talk about that. Most people when they get a book, they go to a publisher. So how is Kindle different than the traditional publishing?

Ty Cohen: Yeah, absolutely. Good question. So the beautiful thing that Amazon did was they said, okay, so how can we remove. And the middleman was basically a bet publisher. So the traditional route, typically someone will get an idea for a book. Someone tells them, Hey, you’ve got this amazing experience or you know how to do this extremely well.

You know how to decorate homes, sell houses, buy houses, whatever it may be. And they say, okay I’m going to go in, I’m going to write this book. I’m going to submit my manuscript to a publishing house. And hopefully the publishing house thinks that my idea for a book is viable enough and I’ll pick me up and I’ll call.

So that’s that traditional route. Now I have a problem with that is there’s a few things. Number one, publishing houses, they get a ton of submissions, right? They get tons of submissions. The second thing is publishing houses. Don’t pay good royalties. So you’ll see royalties in a single digit percentages.

So 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6%. So Amazon said, here’s what we’re going to do. We have this platform, it’s a global platform. We’re going to open it up for anyone that has content. So content being a book. And the beautiful thing about that is they said it doesn’t even have to be in a traditional lamp.

So it doesn’t have to be a a hundred page book, a 200 page book. You can come in and upload a 25 page report and sell that on our site and we’ll make it available to our audience. And at this point, Amazon has just over 600 billion customers. We’re not talking about just people that go in and just serve, but actual customers and credit card numbers.

So we did that. That was the first beautiful thing that they did. They made it available to just anyone, any country, any experience, as long as you have content, the second thing is they made this available for free. So you can go in and you can upload your content for free. The third thing is the percentages.

So they changed the playing field with the percentages. And instead of it being signaled digit percentages that a traditional publishing house would get would give out, they give you 70%, which is insane and they keep 30%. And they handle everything. The aim in doing that was basically saying, how can we get as much content as possible and beaver planet’s largest books.

Do you remember that was Amazon’s really bill of rights, right? His backstory before he started selling things like B12, vitamins and hand sanitizer and tires and everything else. So he said, how can we do this? Like, how can we really shortcut our way. There. And they basically said more, let anyone come in and publish content and we’ll give them a lion’s share of the royalties that come in. And I think it was a beautiful idea.

Mike Woo-Ming: Yeah! And I think too, it made eBooks legit. Yeah. Cause I remember back in the day before Kindle, I was selling eBooks. But I was doing like pay-per-click advertising when it was cheap to do, but still there was this stigma of I don’t want to get a file.

And I’m sure that’s true for a lot now it’s made it so much easier. Now we don’t even think about it with Kindle or I love reading it on my iPad because I don’t want to wait for the book. I want to instantaneously want that information.

Ty Cohen: Yeah. We’ve normalized it. Because, and that’s the exact mindset that I was in. Because like you I was used to ebook. Being a marketer and selling eBooks online, but no, it didn’t seem as authentic as a traditional book would be. So that’s what Amazon did. They came in and they made it to a point where my mother-in-law who’s 70 something years old legitimately can go in and purchase an ebook… and instantaneously do that and for a very attractive price point. I think that one of the advantages was that if you suggested a book to me, Mike, I was just reading… Dan Sullivan’s book who not, how who not? How, and then I just, he just sent me this one, right? So this is the newest one gap in the game.

So let’s say if you had just read Dan Sullivan’s book, and you said, Hey, Ty, just read this amazing book for me. I would want it because I appreciate you. And. I know that you’re a man of authority, I would’ve instantly want to go in and buy that book. Amazon has given us that opportunity to be able to go in and pick up our phone and just literally in 30 seconds type in the book and hit click. And we now have access to it. So we no longer have to jump in our car, go to the mall or go to Barnes and Nobles if we can even find one now, because of Amazon and make that decision. So they’ve shortened the that gap between the customer wanting it and the customer getting access to it, which is a beautiful thing on all sides.

Mike Woo-Ming: Now, I know people are, who are listening here. They may be, have written in a book, but most of the people haven’t, or they may have had that book in their head. I had like my first book that I wrote and it took me like six months to write it. And then I didn’t come with my second book until 10 years later.

And… You tell me you’re making money with writing, but how long does it take to get a book written? And I think there are people that still don’t understand that I can get my book, but it’s gonna take me too long to write a book. What would you say to those folks?

Ty Cohen: So just to make you feel a little bit better, right? So I was talking to a customer who dude, it’s been 30 years, it took her 30 years to finish her. It was a memoir, so 30 years. So you’re actually in good shape there at 10 years. But so one of the things that we’ve been able to master it and help our students, and these are people that are traditional right.

That may have a little bit of publishing experience, but for the most part, most of them are folks who have never written anything before haven’t ever even thought about the possibilities of writing a book. So we’ve been able to show them how to take an idea if they have an idea or find an idea, if they don’t have an idea, it really go from idea to finish book in less than two weeks.

So for my idea or no idea, to finish a book in less than two weeks. And having that book totally created having it edited, having it formatted and published on Amazon and available to the marketplace. So that’s the thing it’s like speed of implementation. So that’s why we’ve been able to master that coupled with what Amazon offers allows anyone to just be able to go in and every book available to.

Mike Woo-Ming: Now I was actually having a pleasure of attending one of your workshops. And we’ll talk about that because I believe you still have these workshops. And really, I found there was two sets of people. There was one who wants their story out there, get their book marketed. And then there were people who were more like the publisher side, because here’s a little bit of the secret sauce we’re going to reveal here is:

You don’t write all of your books.

Ty Cohen: I don’t write any of my books.

Mike Woo-Ming: So tell me how that works.

Ty Cohen: So besides the first two, but I uploaded it to Amazon 16 years ago. I haven’t written anything after that. There’s so many people that are out there that just love writing. And there’s ways to go in and hire those people for very little. We call them ghostwriters. We call them freelancers. Outsourcers, there’s a ton of different names on there’s sites where you can go in and you can find these people in droves, like in droves. So there’s sites like upwork.com or the, do you have one is google.com. So you can literally go in and say, “Hey, I’m looking to have an idea or a book created.”

You know how to herd cats. We’ll give you an example, right? We’ll give you a funny example here. And you can go in and say, my budget for having this 50 page book created is $150, $200. You set the budget and we sh we show you how to set a structured budget so that you get attractive bids. And then you’ll get people literally from across the planet that will come in and bid.

Mike Woo-Ming: I just want to clarify that too. That’s not $150 a page.

Ty Cohen: No, it’s not $150 a page.

For 50 pages, 100%. So 50 pages. And it’s good quality. So one of the things that we stress is you want good quality. So whether you’re writing it yourself or you’re having an outsourcer, you go in and you vet these folks, you can vet them just by looking at their ratings because other people have hired them and using.

Dozens of other people that have hired them. And it’s very similar to you go on Amazon and I want to buy some hand sanitizer. Normally what’s the first thing that we do. We go in and we look at the reviews, right? Because we want to feel comfortable in the fact that we’re buying something. That other people have rated highly, right?

You typically will never go in and buy something. That’s got a half a star or two stars, three stars. It’s gotta be four or five stars. And usually multiple stars. So when you use these freelancing sites like Upwork, the same thing applies here. You’ll find people that will come in and bid on your projects that have amazing feedback.

They’ve written tens of thousands of pages! They have degrees, very journalist majors, and they just have the experience and more importantly, a very great at researching and they love writing. So for them, it’s a win-win because one of the questions that I often get as well, listen type, why would these people come in and write content for me for a couple of hundred bucks and allow me to sell it?

Why don’t they just do it themselves? And that’s something that I’ve thought about when I first got started with it. And the answer is simply that they’re not entrepreneurs and not that you have to be an entrepreneur to do this. The answer is simply that they just don’t have the desire. The answer is simply that they over-complicate it.

And we see that a lot people overcomplicate the simplicity and things. And then the answer is simply that they just don’t know how to. They don’t know how to do it, or if the answer is simply that they are doing it for themselves. And then the other answer could be, and you could choose any of these, that bay are doing it, but they’re on year two of that 10 year journey of writing that book because they want to make it so perfect for themselves.

And they’re looking to publish it. So there’s a variety of reasons as to why people who have the skill and whoever the ability to do it, won’t do it. We see it all the time. Listen, my son is an amazing basketball player. Incredible! He could possibly be in the NBA. And I’m not saying that just because he’s my son.

But he has no desire to do. As much as I want him to go in and get the multimillion dollar contract, he has no desire to do it. And we see that you probably see that in your field, your industry with people who are just, they have the ability, if you have the scale, they just don’t have the desire. So that’s it. And also to a very similar question that you get to is.

They don’t own the content. You don’t have to put their name. So people ask about that. Do I have to put their name on the book, but it’s you own the content, correct? 100%. So you own the copyright, right? Which gives you the legal authority to say, this is my book, I own the copyright to it. You own the byline, and a byline, is simply the name that you’ll put here to author’s name, right? Or you could put a pen name if you want to. We’ll talk about that in a minute. So you own the resell rights, which gives you a right to take back content and resell it and make a profit from it. So byline, byline rights, copyright resell. So now when you come in and you hire a ghost writer or a freelancer to write your content for you, all of that is discussed. So once you pay them, you own the content. You own those three rights right there, but you can pretty much use to do anything with, so you can go in, you can give it away if you want it to.

Not that you would do that, but you can go and you can sell it for whatever price point you want. Now, the thing with Amazon. And in order to qualify for about 70% commission at royalty commission, you have to price your books between $2 and 99 cents and $9 and 99 cents, which coincidentally are the best price points, right?

So you want to price it in between those two price points, $2 and 99 and the 9.99, because those are price points that sell rapidly right there. Then what I like to call no thought price. Someone sees a book priced at 7.99. You’re not going to put thought into it, it’s not do I pay my mortgage?

Do I buy groceries? Or can I afford this 7.99 book? So you can go in and you can buy it, but he had, so that’s a great question. So what do you do as far as depending if you want to go in and put your name? I personally, don’t put my name on any of my books and I’ll tell you the reason why I don’t do that because I published books and under different niches, I published both fiction and nonfiction, and I don’t want to be seen as the Jack of all trades.

So if I’m publishing a book, a romance novel event, I’m publishing a book on how to buy houses or book on how to homeschool my children or how to grow Japanese tomato garden, Japanese tomato. You look at that offer and you’re like, wow, this guy is doing everything. Which one is he truly good at?

So you can use a pen name, which about 50% of my students actually choose to go in and use a pen name because they do publish multiple pieces of content. And then there’s the students who come in and they’re writing their own. Or if you’re hiring a ghost writer to write their content and they just want to have their name on it, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

So they can go in and they can put their name on it. And both ways are totally legal. Both ways are totally allowed by Amazon. And as a matter of fact of Amazon, you can have multiple pen names if you want to. So you can have maybe Jane who wrote this book, if you want it to, and then you can have Betty Sue who wrote this book, if you want it to.

And they both are under your publishing.

Mike Woo-Ming: Now I want to get back to something that you mentioned, because again, I know I know what some of the questions that you’re going to get. You said Amazon, that seems like a lot of money that they’re taking 30%. Yeah. But when you think about it though, Amazon is the largest website.

In the planet and that’s what we don’t have, we know maybe you’re going to have it in the next few years talking about right now, in terms of shopping online, that’s the place to go, right? They’ve got the credibility, they’ve got the name and there was no cost to joining Kindle publishing, right?

Ty Cohen: It is not. And think about it. One of the examples that I like to use is if you’re going to open up a hamburger, and you have a choice between opening it up just anywhere and your neighborhood and opening it up in a neighborhood where you have folks who traditionally have been known to love to buy hamburgers.

Every hamburger stand that’s in that area is totally booked out, right? Like meaning if there’s lines, right? The prices are just amazing. They get great reviews. They have that customer base in that area. You prefer that area where there’s traditionally been people who love to buy hamburgers, right? You want to go with marketplaces and that’s what Amazon gives us versus trying to look.

We both sold eBooks at a pass on our own websites and what you have to have. In order to do that is you have to have a customers. And I think you talked about running ads, right? So you would have your website and then you have to go on Facebook or Google or whoever it is. And you’ve got to send customers to vet product.

One of the advantages with Amazon is you can go into you publish that book to Amazon. And Amazon has this built in loyal customer base already. That’s purchasing. My wife just bought something earlier off of Amazon, a couple of hours ago. I just got reminded, but I have to go in and buy something. I’m going into buying some supplements earlier.

So over later when we finish this interview, so it’s like do I go to the grocery store? Do I go to CVS? Do I go to Walgreens? Or do I just pick up my phone or just go on Amazon? And right. So they give us this unfair advantage here by being able to publish content to various. And then having this built-in customer base of people that have a ton of credit cards.

I want to ask you a question, Mike, I wanna flip it real quick for you. How many of these do you have listed on your Amazon account? This is a credit card right here. How many credit cards do you have listed? On it? Let me ask you a question before I even get there. Do you have an Amazon?

Mike Woo-Ming: Yes.

Ty Cohen: Have you ever purchased off of Amazon?

Mike Woo-Ming: I haven’t today? But generally every other day, this month?

Ty Cohen: Have you ordered anything off of Amazon?

Mike Woo-Ming: Yes. I have an account, my wife has, actually we got two accounts. My wife has an account. Yeah. I like Amazon delivery. Delivery person. They probably hate us because we have this long driveway and it’s gated and it didn’t really turn it around, but they have to drop off our package at this one spot. They don’t get credit for it, but yeah, they’re there they’re almost every other day.

Ty Cohen: Yeah. Yeah. And just like here. If I look out I’m on a col-de-sac I live in, so I can easily see three or four houses here and Amazon, they stay in this circle. They stay in this circle here. And typically what happens is if you’re like my household, we don’t have just one credit card listed with Amazon.

So I got my personal card and then I have my business card. And sometimes people will have a spouse will have their card, right? The other spouse has a card. Maybe the kids might have a card. So Amazon has done a masterful job in being able to really build up this loyal customer base that orders multiple times.

And it’s not just books or things that are not books, the same thing. I’ve got so many Kindle books that are on my phone. So I have a Kindle app on my phone. I’ve got so many books that I have not even read because Amazon has made that process of buying books. Easy. Mike tells me about a book I go in and I type it in, even if I don’t even have it in my schedule to be able to read this book for three or four months dowb. So it’s craziness if you think about it.

Mike Woo-Ming: And to answer your first question. I there’s probably about five or so cards, but 20 expired cards, but I even have an Amazon credit cards. Yeah. I’m in their eco. But let’s talk about it. Cause could, cause you mentioned the books 9.99, but yeah. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but I know you and your students are making a lot of money with this. You want to show some of the numbers?

Ty Cohen: Yeah, actually. So I do, and I’ll give you some of my students numbers, right? Because sometimes. When you give numbers that are out there, it becomes a little bit unbelievable.

And I don’t want people to think that this is something that’s beyond the believable. So I’ve got a student Michael Joshua, this guy publishes children’s books. And I’ve got an interview with him on YouTube and in our community. He generates $10,000 a month just publishing children’s books. I’ve got another student. Her name is Caroline Trainer. She’s over in the UK. She purposes romance novels. I’ve got a student name Andrew Young. This guy’s 20 years old, he just turned 20. So he makes about $10,000 a month publishing books around public speaking. So here’s the beauty of this. So he took, he reluctantly took public speaking classes in high school because he was really introverted and he wonder why his dad says, Hey, listen, take debate class. Take the bait class. That’ll get you out of your introversion. It’ll get you used to talking to people and debating. He ended up taking that class and his sophomore year. And loved it so much, he took it again. And Ben also started publishing Amazon Kindle books around the art of debating and public speaking.

And now he’s doing over $10,000 a month selling. So you can do this with both fiction nonfiction. It doesn’t matter what the topic is, as long as you follow our market research process. So that’s the one thing that’s mandatory. So the first thing that we teach people is to conduct market research and that.

So that you’re not guessing about what actually will sell. With a scientific sense of degree there, that the topic that you’re going to publish has more certainty and selling van had you not done your market research. So it goes back to anyone that started a business before you go in and you started traditional brick and mortar business or any type of business.

Hopefully, hopefully you’re going to find out if there’s people that actually want the product or service that you’re buying, you don’t start manufacturing, these B12 vitamins and everyone on a planet. Has like this allergy to be 12, because that wouldn’t be a great business to start there. So hopefully you go in and do some market research, and that’s why we have students that are so successful because we teach that aspect of doing the market research first and making sure that you stick to exactly what we show you how to go in and and do,

Mike Woo-Ming: And in your training, you really go down in this, but just to give a to better understand is what you’re talking about is like niches that people will want people will want, but people will want continuously, because I think the thing that, what I really love and I mentioned we’ve been talking about what I call RGA or Revenue Generating Assets in that you’re creating this thing one.

And it’s continuing to generate revenue for you over and over again. And it reminds me of with the mad and John Madden recently passed away. Time, the game comes out you had to purchase it 20, 19, 20, 20, 20, 21. And because they know their market and they know that it can be sustainable.

So when you’re looking at niches, you want to look at things that are going to be sustainable. If you came out with a book, I don’t know, you’re probably may or may not remember Y2K?

Ty Cohen: Yeah, 100% had everyone on a tip of seats. Wondering what’s going to happen at new years.

Mike Woo-Ming: How many books do you think they sell on? Like how to beat Y2K? I’m like, okay. In 2022, probably it doesn’t sell anymore.

Ty Cohen: Yeah. Not at all. Yeah. And that’s the other thing. So we teach people… how to avoid the fads, right? So you don’t want to go and publish a book around fidget spinners.

I don’t know how old your kids are, but yeah. So fidget spinners, right? It was all a rave for maybe about a year, maybe 18 months. And almost any… dude. We could go into grocery stores and you would see shelves of fidget spinners. Yeah. You could go into target and you would see fidget spinners. You can go into the Dallas store and you would see fidget spinners.

Now you would have to hunt. You would have to literally probably go into 50 stores before you able to find a fidget spinner because it was this fat, it was this thing that, you know, yes. It sold really well, but it was short-lived. So we teach people how to avoid. The fats, but short-lived ideas, and instead going and publish content that’s evergreen. And the beautiful thing about it is there’s so many different topics that could be considered evergreen. If you look at something like there’s so many health topics that could be considered evergreen, right? A relationship and dating. Material can be considered evergreen.

If I want to learn how to become a better husband, there’s probably a book that was written 20 years ago. That’s still relevant. And I can go in and read bad. Instantly become not instantly budgeted. You get the idea, become a better husband. If I wanted to go in and be a better dad or we were having our first kid, I can go in and read a book on how do you raise your first child?

So those are the types of topics that we teach people to publish. Evergreen content thast is going to be around for the next 10, 15, 20 years. And again, fact or fiction, so we can go in to publish a romance novel. My son, Tyler. His first books when he was 15. And I think you actually got to meet him at arts media.

So you got to meet him now. Tyler, he’s gotten a lot bigger since you attended a event, because I think that event was right before COVID. I think it was in February. That was in February, but just before COVID. So now he’s on a football team, the big guy, right? A manly man. But guess what he publishes and you may already know the answer to this because you were at the event, but I won’t spoil it, but he publishes romance novels.

So he publishes romance novels. And it’s because not because he just loves sitting around and reading romance novels. That’s the first stable too, but it’s wherever money is. They asked at one point they asked one of the world’s greatest bank robbers at one time. This was back like in the sixties or seventies. Why do you rob banks? And his answer was because that’s where the money is. So luckily now we have to help around design. You don’t have to go robbing a bank. You can go in and you can publish content, right? That is already in demand. That’s evergreen. That’s going to continuously sell you, upload it once as you alluded to, and it continuously sells and you follow this process and you can publish. That leads you to the money.

Mike Woo-Ming: And the thing is too is like there’s always money. You can leave on the table. Yeah. Because when I went to your event, it was like realizing Amazon is a global company. And with that there’s Amazon cause. I know you not only get paid for English, but you have Spanish and French chairman and all these different language. So you get your books and you tell your students to get them translated, correct?

Ty Cohen: Yeah. Yep. So we get them translated. So now the process is once you get a book that’s selling well, so the first step what we like to teach our students is, and this is how you go in and you can create multiple streams.

Yeah. All right. There’s a few ways. So you can create multiple streams of income by simply just publishing additional books because each book becomes another stream of income. But the other way is once you get a book, if I publish two books, I’ve got both of these books and coincidentally, this is my newest book, Kindle Publishing Secrets.

And we can give your your listeners, your viewers, a free copy of this, if you want at the end of this thing. But if I publish both of these books and one of them tends to like really sell. Really so well, what we teach our students says, the next thing you want to do is you want to go in and have it translated into Spanish.

So using Upwork, using Google the same freelancing sites that I shared with you earlier, you can go in, you can find someone that is highly proficient in Spanish that does translations for a living and they can translate your book for a couple of hundred bucks. And now you’ve reached an additional market that traditionally would have been outside of your reach because they don’t read English or they’re not comfortable in reading English. So that’s, once you get a book that’s selling well, using our processes, we doing tell you, say, we say, Hey, go translate this thing into Spanish. And then the next thing that we do is we’ll say, Hey, go in and have it converted over into an audio.

And now you can sell it on Audible. So now if you go over to Amazon and you pick up this book, you’ll see in the same books listing on that same page, you’ll see the English version. You can see the translated Spanish version and you can see the audible version. So the audio book version of it and that doesn’t cost a lot to have done either.

So once you have your book translated like I said, that’s a couple of hundred. To get it converted over into an audio format. That’s a couple of hundred bucks and now you’ve created two additional streams of revenue out of one. So out of that, Kindle.

Mike Woo-Ming: Yeah. And it’s true because my, my wife she, sometimes she she makes fun of me. Cause I said, Hey, I just read this book. She said you don’t really read it. You listened to it. But. I don’t have time to, to read, or I when I read I’ll fall asleep easy, but if I’m going to one of my clinics, or like I said, I’m driving to Las Vegas in a few days, I’m going to load up a few Amazon Audible books. And now you’re getting an audience that you may not have been able to reach before.

Ty Cohen: 100%. I’m like you. So I’m always super busy. I like reading, but I just don’t have the time. So another thing that I’ve found is that my retention. Has changed. So I’ll read and then I’ll start to wander. Now think about the podcast interview.

I’ve got to do whatever it may be pick up the kids from school. So now my focus is wandering, but I can go in and I can download. The app from Amazon and Amazon owns Audible. Coincidentally if you’re watching or listening to this and you’re wondering, are these two different companies, if then I can go listen to my audio book.

So my wife and I would drive him down to the beach later on this afternoon. So we’ve got a three hour drive. We’re driving down Animoto beach. Guess what I’m gonna do? So like you on your drive to Vegas, I’m going to go in, I’ve got a couple of books already that are already in my account that I’ve been meaning to get to.

So this gives me three hours now to go in and listen to an audio book and I can knock that out. So the way Amazon has put everything together, I think it’s been brilliant because they didn’t own audible. Audible was a separate. When years ago they went in, they purchased audible and they said, this is the perfect add on.

So now we can give people another outlet to go in and publish to just like publishing to KDP, Kindle Direct Publishing. You can also publish to Audible.

Mike Woo-Ming: Yeah. And everything kind of cross promotes. Cause now I have it like where, if I’m on the audible, I’ll get this message to say, Hey, do you want to get the digital book as well to accompany it? I recently listened to a guy, really bright guy. And when he wants to retain things he has the audio book and the Kindle version together, listening to it and reading it. Yeah. And he’ll retain more information.

Yeah.

Ty Cohen: Happy coincidence. I’ve actually tried that a couple of times and it definitely works a hundred percent.

Mike Woo-Ming: So this is amazing. And again, I know you’ve got a few things coming up. You not only you have the book, but you’ve got a training program. Would you like to talk about it please?

Ty Cohen: Absolutely. So we’ve got the book and anyone who wants a copy of his, you can go in, this is my new book called Kindle Publishing Secrets.

Les Brown has actually wrote the forward to this book. So many of you guys may have heard of Les Brown before. Great motivational speaker. And I gave him a early copy of preview copy of his book and he loved it so much. He said, you know what, let me write the forward to it. So he did that and you guys can go in and get a free copy before it even hits the stands.

So this is not available on Amazon yet, but you can get a copy by going here.

Mike Woo-Ming: This is one you wrote? You didn’t hire somebody.

Ty Cohen: This is what I actually wrote. This is the one I actually wrote in here. I talk about the entire Kindle publishing process, and how myself and my students do so well with Kindle publishing. And a lot of the things that we talked about here on this podcast, but I go into much more detail in the book.

So you can go to Tycohen.com. And get a free copy of his book. You can also go to Kindlecashflow.com and get a free copy. So even one of those websites, Ty Cohen, T Y C O H N a.com or Kindlecashflow.com and get a free copy. Coming to our live event, our three-day event.

So with COVID, what we’ve done is we’ve gone virtual, right? So we’ve done these virtual digital events and people love them. So we get people from across the country, across the planet that come to these events. We actually had a couple of people at our live event that came in from like London. I think it was like Bangladesh and Canada.

So we had a very wide audience that came to the live event that you were at, but you can attend our virtual event for free. If you guys want to go in and grab a ticket by going to KCFlive.com/mike. And that’ll get you a free ticket to our virtual event or three-day event. That’s coming up here.

Mike Woo-Ming: Wow. Wow. So that, that’s gonna be great. And let you guys know it is intense content. You’re going to get so much out of it. Thank you, Ty just for sharing with this and just opening our eyes and ears to what’s possible or what you can do with it.

We didn’t go into your backstory, but I I know your history came from a kind of a rough area and just made you became a self-made multimillionaire and it just so honored to know you and calling my friends. So thank you so much for joining us today.

Ty Cohen: Likewise, Mike, this is beautiful. And I think for anyone who’s looking to supplement their income or create these additional streams of revenue. This is one of the quickest and easiest ways to do it. Come into our community and you’ll see that there’s someone. Has a similar background as you who has a similar profession, or that looks like you talks like you, regardless of where you come from.

We’ve got over 20,000 people that are in our community that come from over 126 countries, Mike. So it’s a very eclectic community. We help one another. It’s a family environment and you guys are welcome to come in and join us. So this has been beautiful. Thank you, Mike.

Mike Woo-Ming: Thank you, Ty. Thanks for everything. And again, if you’re who. Is looking to generate revenue. You’re busy working in your practice, but you’re you want to do something on the side or a side hustle. And that’s one thing tied to before we go, this doesn’t take a lot of time or does it?

Ty Cohen: No, it doesn’t it. So it’s what I like to call it. It’s like at your pace. Because we teach this online. You get access to a, an online community, you get access to the online membership area. So you go in at your own pace. We’ve got our videos broken down and very short bites. So some of the videos are five minutes. Some might be seven minutes. It might be 13 minutes.

So you’re able to go in, consume the information, apply it and get results. Continue to move forward. And in terms of monitoring your books you can do it or you can hire somebody to do it, but it’s not a 40 hour a week job, not at all. You know what, Mike’s I published books 12 years ago that I don’t ever go back and look at.

It’s awesome. Honestly, it sounds weird saying that now this books, I have a, we’ve got a. I’ve got a plaque that we’re sending out to one of our students actually, let me grab this. I want to show you something really quickly. I think you’ll be very cool.

So this is Linda Allen. So we send these milestone plaques. We like to call them milestone, plaques out to our students. I don’t know if you could see that. Can you? Yeah. So Linda. Got started with Kindle publishing. Very same training, but I’m sharing with you guys here and she’s generated over a hundred thousand in royalties so far.

She got started over 10 years ago. She got started over 10 years ago. She published books that are celebrity based and what I mean by bad is the books that talk about the lifestyles of celebrities and you can actually do that. So one of the celebrities that she published a book around was the singer Jennifer Hudson.

So Jennifer Hudson, she fixed, she was a winner on America’s got talent, or one of those shows. American idol where you got, it shows you how much. So she ended up publishing those books and generating over a hundred thousand dollars over a 10 year span, right? 10 year, time period. And the beautiful thing about this is she works in a medical field.

She’s a nurse. So she hasn’t looked at her books and yeah. But she continues to get these checks every single month. She gets these deposits into our bank account every single month. And we’re honoring her. She’s over, she’s actually at about 111,000 and that’s one of the plaques that we’re sending out to her.

There’s so much that you can do with this and you don’t need a ton of time to.

Mike Woo-Ming: This is awesome. Good. Again, thank you so much. Thank you for sharing it again. Just another revenue generating asset that you can start, and it’s not just about thinking about it, but it’s about implementing it and following a mentor, like you’re somebody who’s actually been there and done it is the quickest shortcut to success, and it’s all about keep moving forward.

Have you heard of the phrase “House Hacking”?  It’s essentially where you purchase a property and live in it while renting out the other rooms. This can be done with a single family home, or an apartment complex. It’s also a great way to get started investing into real estate without spending (and saving) a lot of money!

Today’s guest is Dr. Ayush Gupta, a pediatric ER physician and is the founder and CEO of MD House Hacking, who helps medical professionals reach financial freedom through house hacking and real estate investing., Fresh out of his medical fellowship, Ayush wanted to get into real estate but didn’t have a lot of money.  You’ll learn how house hacking was a perfect solution for him, and why he believes most doctors should consider it.  He has now taken that money and invested more properties, and now teaches others how to do the same.

If you think you need a lot of money to get into real estate, you’ll think again after this very lively interview!

MD House Hacking – Financial Freedom for Medical Professionals

Financial Freedom for Medical Professionals

Mike Woo-Ming: Hey guys, this is Dr. Mike Woo-Ming. Welcome to another edition of BootstrapMD. Now, anytime we talk about real estate, it seems to be one of the most downloaded episodes that we have at BootstrapMD. So I’m really excited that I have my next guest on he’s a pediatric emergency medicine physician in New Orleans, born and raised in India.

You moved to the US in 2012, completed his residency and fellowship and residency and fellowship. And then he moved to New Orleans where he realized the importance of creating other income. And what started it was of COVID a lot, which really caused a lot of people to reevaluate where they are in terms of building in their net income building in their revenue.

One year later, he created MDHousehacking, which is to help other perfect medical professionals achieve financial freedom through house hacking. Now, if you don’t know what that’s about, we’re going to cover all of that. So excited to have him on the program. Please welcome Dr. Ayush Gupta. How are you doing my friend?

Ayush Gupta: Good, Dr. Mike, thanks for having me on your show. I’m super excited about it. I’ve listened to a lot of your podcasts and I’m thrilled to be a part of yours.

Mike Woo-Ming: Wonderful. Like I mentioned at the top, real estate is really a topic. A lot of medical professionals want to know more about. And I always like to first start off by learning about your financial journey, for physicians, we historically have been known as bad investors.

We don’t get any type of financial education in medical school or perhaps, very… very topically. I’ll hear something from, ER, doctor told me to invest in some type of stock or something like that. But other than that, we really don’t get any education. So where did it start for you?

Ayush Gupta: This is so true when I talk about it on my portal, on my podcast as well. It’s the same thing. As physicians, we get zero financial literacy and I probably came from the similar background. My father was a doctor in India is a doctor, but then really learn a lot about finances from there started from zero actually. Once I moved to New York for residency and then fellowship, nobody really spoke about finances over that.

I was heading towards of a similar life, which most of physicians and non-physicians high-income owners do bait. They finish their studies, they go buy a house and then they settled down. They have kids. And they have to pay the mortgage and car rent and everything. So it’s not a bit with COVID. It’s just started when everything was shut down.

You can’t really go and do a lot of stuff. Either, you could take your mind and brain to watch Netflix and Tiktok, or you could take it to learn about other streams of income. And that’s how I think I got into it. Started with a couple of courses, find out mandate mission. That was a real estate at that point.

And and as I said, I was just fresh out of fellowship. Didn’t have a lot of savings and have a lot of money to go into real estate. And I think that was one of my limiting beliefs that you need a lot of money. Now. I know we can do deals without any money. So that’s when house hacking started. I listened to some podcasts at that point who mentioned house hacking and read a lot about it.

Thought it’d be perfect for me to do that in New Orleans. And I think now I’m almost two years into it and I love it. And it has grown a lot from where it started.

Mike Woo-Ming: So you said you started it during COVID or at the beginning of COVID. At the time were you renting? Did you have a house with a mortgage? Where were you at?

Ayush Gupta: At the time I was renting a nice two bedroom, two bathroom place for $2,300 a month. And I was right before COVID I was looking at houses as well, like a single family house. Like I was telling you to go live in a, but yes, I was renting.

Mike Woo-Ming: And that was in New Orleans?

Ayush Gupta: Yes, sir.

Mike Woo-Ming: Okay. So you took a couple of courses and I looked, and I think I was listening to a podcast. You did first probably through Peter Kim is probably where is Leverage and Growth Summit people. You’re just a good guy. And then you took Kenji and Leti’s course. I believe correct. Yeah. And and if you’re not familiar, they talk a lot about single family homes and I don’t think they talk a lot about house hacking. So first off, what is house hacking? How would you define it?

Ayush Gupta: Yeah, great question. You’re right. They don’t talk a lot about that. Househacking is basically living in a portion of a house and renting out other portions.

There are various ways to do it. You can live in a four bedroom house, live in one room and rent out the other rooms, like example in a residency, I was living in a three bedroom house, but we were renting out all three rooms. If you own that house, You can have, you can live in that room and rent out the other rooms to other medical students, residents, and fellows, or even guests, and that can pay for your mortgage.

Currently, my house hacking situation is I live in a four unit apartment. And I live in one of the apartments and the other three are rented out. What how’s hacking does it it provides you a great strategy to get in because it’s your primary residence. So you really don’t have to put that much money down as compared to investment property, where you have to put 20 to 25% down.

So you can get in for a physician loan for 0% or a conventional for 5% or FSA for 3.5%. They’re very easy to get started. And then then if you, and if you do it right, and if you have all your numbers, correct, you basically, you can either live for free or even get some extra for living which is a great Saturday

Mike Woo-Ming: Now I don’t want to get too much into your personal life, but were you by yourself at the time when you’re renting? Married? Girlfriend? Significant other at the time.

Ayush Gupta: Yeah, it was I was by myself stood by myself. I live with my girlfriend right now and I think one, I think how… I love this question because I get this alot from people who are a little far ahead with the families and they’re like, oh, I have kids. I have I have two kids. I have a wife, we have this patient, we want a backyard. And I think those things can also be done with in hockey, but a lot of people that I know they, they do. You can Airbnb a part of your property.

You can do a midterm rental. You can also have a big space for yourself and a smaller unit for somebody else to offset some of your extra expenses for the month. It has been done for forever. People have been doing it forever, so there are different options.

Mike Woo-Ming: And again, I’m going to take you into your initial thinking of doing this, because I think it’ll inspire a lot of people who are listening this cause they can see how you were in your shoes. So imagining at the time you were renting where you month to month at a time, or did you have a long-term lease you’d had for break the lease?

Ayush Gupta: I didn’t want to believe actually. I started looking at it and in January of of 2020, but my least in until July, so I don’t know.

Mike Woo-Ming: And so why did you decide to do that versus going in and doing like what the majority of do is get a single family home.

Ayush Gupta: Oh, so many reasons. First. I said, I’m starting out. I was out of fellowship. Didn’t have a lot of savings. Didn’t have a lot of down payment when you do what majority of the people do. Just imagine I’ll give you a quick number example. If you buy a $500,000. You have to put 20% down if you’re buying as an investment property.

So that’s a hundred thousand dollars to come out of pocket. Excluding the closing costs, any kind of rehab renovations, you have to do the same thing for house hacking. If you buying a $500,000 house, you can put in 5% down, you can put in 0% down to 5%. Don is twenty-five thousand. That is $75,000 of leverage you can use from the bank.

That’s number one. Number two was done my first real estate venture. I want it to be a safer house. Hacking is easy, easily by far the safest way to get in to a real estate investing. You can get in, you have to live somewhere, I was paying 2200 or 2300 for rent. The worst case scenario for me was even.

Out of the three units, two units rented out. I would still be paying less than that. I would still be creating equity in the property. So that was, I think it’s extremely safe. That’s number two. Number three is like how you can leverage the other things by living in the house. So for example, you can use a heat.

Like I love using my heater for the house. Once you increase the value, you use your heat lock, you pull it out, you can’t do that. You can, but it’s very tough to do that investment property. Your lenders are very tough in getting a healer and that kind of jumpstarts you to other investment. Now, after my first house hacking, I was able to do a lot of other things and that’s because of the leverage that house hacking created for me.

Mike Woo-Ming: Yeah, that’s what I love about real estate and what a lot of people don’t know. It’s really the leverage. We get scared about debt, but it’s when you have things like a heat lock, you already have that equity in your home. And that just opens up, really. To other different types of investments.

So you’re renting at the time. You’re looking, you decided you wanted to go the house hacking route, which way did you go? Did you go through a duplex fourplex? W what would you thinking? Did you, was this in you’re in New Orleans?

Ayush Gupta: Correct? Yeah. I live in a nice neighborhood, very close to where I used to live. Very safe. It’s a four unit apartment buildings, so it’s a fourplex. And I probably live in the nicest of the four, but all four are beautiful. I think my, my tenants know me, one of the things that I get a lot is like, what if I want to be like not known to my tenants, but I can tell you as physicians, your tenants respect you a lot. They know you, they respect you. They don’t call you out for anything. There are systems in place that I have, even though I live over here in which I don’t have to do anything. I’m an ER physician. I cannot come and change toilets in the middle of the night and I would not never want to get into real estate for that reason.

So there are all these systems in place. I think there was a long answer to your small question, but yeah, it’s a fourplex in New Orleans, in a very good neighborhood.

Mike Woo-Ming: How long did it take you to find that perfect place?

Ayush Gupta: I would say around, around three months I looked at some of the properties and but that’s the advantage of house hacking as compared to buying a real estate investment out of state.

You know the area really well. Like I knew my area after doing maths and looking around calculations and looking around the neighborhood. I knew if a property opens up in this neighborhood, it’s going to do well as compared to if I’m buying something in Texas, but I don’t know the neighborhood that well. And it’s a lot of, and I have to put in 20% now. So that’s why I think this is another advantage of.

Mike Woo-Ming: So let’s talk about funding. You said you didn’t have a lot of money to, to invest in. And you mentioned things like a physician loans, just so for the people in the audience, because physician loan gets thrown around. But in actual fact, there really is no such thing as a physician loan, but maybe.

Ayush Gupta: Yeah, it’s a special kind of, it’s like a portfolio loan, like a lot of banks you go to, they will have multiple types of portfolio loans, like a VA loan, a physician loan. They might have a building like you have to build something, you have a builder’s loan.

So a lot of portfolios, but physician’s loan is one of them. What it does. As a physician, a lot of us have debt when we finish our residency or fellowship because of med school. Once you start using the debt to calculation, calculate a DTI or debt to income ratio, a lot of banks are like I don’t think you’re going to qualify to buy a $500,000 house because you have such big debt for med school going on.

What physician loan does is they don’t calculate your med school debt. That’s the number one thing. Number two thing is if you are paying less than 20% down on a house, you have to pay something called PMI. It’s like a mortgage insurance physician loans always excludes that for you. And a lot of times you can buy a big investment property with traditional, but they do allow you to buy two to four unit apartment building using a solution.

Obviously you have to shop around, but I think that’s a very good way to start. Like it was asking me how I did not have any funds. Yeah. That was perfect way for me to get into a very expensive property by putting no money down.

Mike Woo-Ming: You said you put it around 5%. Was there other expenses you had to do in terms of rehab for your place?

Ayush Gupta: Yeah, absolutely. So I did put in 5% down. My vision for this property was to make it a million-dollar property and cash out, refi it. So I did do another hundred thousand of renovations after putting in the 5% I staged it. But I use a lot of private money. Okay. I, yeah, that was that was again, leverage that I used because I knew that this property had value in it too. So if I use that, I can pay them off back. No private money, actually, I connected with some friends. The difference between private and hard money is like private money is doesn’t check on your credit at all. It is based on one legal document of promotionally note, hard money is more like longer term has more points up front than private money.

Mike Woo-Ming: And again we can always edit this later. What type of load were you getting in terms of, was it a 30 year fixed? What did the physician let off?

Ayush Gupta: For my the prop. So I ended up getting, going for an FHA loan, which was very similar to a physician loan. But it was because there’s limits to an FHA loan.

So for example, for 4 units in New York, you can get an FHA loan for probably 800, 900,000. But in New Orleans, you can’t. I think the limit was six 50. My property was over that price. So I had to put in I got a 30 year fixed mortgage using an FHA loan instead of 3.5, I had to put 5% down.

Mike Woo-Ming: Okay. Gotcha. Another thing too is because there’s just so for clarification with anytime somebody thinks of multifamily, they think more. Often it’s a commercial loan but in this case it’s not right because you have as many doors, is that correct?

Ayush Gupta: Correct. There’s like big multifamily and the like smaller, multi-family smaller. It’s two to four up to four units. More than four units is when starts getting a little more on the commercial side. And then you have to go through. The value of the prop value of the income, your net operating income, the cap rate, rather than over here, when you look at the comps around the neighborhood.

Mike Woo-Ming: Okay. So you got qualified, you got the house now it’s time to look for roommates. So tell me that process. When I hear house hacking, the first thing is. I hear them saying I want to live rent-free so that’s what I’m going to charge is what was your thinking in terms of pricing and then how did you find your, how did you find the tenant?

Ayush Gupta: Yeah, good question. So I had to change all the tenants in the house to get the rents up because when I caught the property, the rents were way lower than what the market trends was. The way the, my formula for finding the rents was looking at the comps around the neighborhood. So they’re like places around for two bedroom, two bath, two bedroom, one bath, they close where I live, which was available for rent.

I would just go and check them. And while I was doing rehab, I was like, oh, my property is going to be way more. Well done then their property. So that would help. The second thing obviously was Rentometer. I use Rentometer a lot for calculating brands. And then I have a pro version of it, which you can actually narrow down the miles, the amount of months out and look at all those things and actually click on those photos.

That was very helpful to those two things I use for rent calculation in terms of tenants. I use Hemlane right now for property management. No blood, anybody, but I, this is the things that I use. So what you can do I think as a lot of physicians, they think “I don’t know how I’m going to be to the tenants. I don’t want them to know that I’m there. I don’t have time to show.” I had the same belief. Honestly I was very skeptical about walking in and showing units. And the first time I showed a unit to somebody, I was like I don’t know about this, but I can tell you as physicians first fall, once you tell somebody who’s coming to see your property that you are the owner. The perspective change is complete. They are like, “Oh, wow.” I don’t have just any random folks, this is an owner who’s actually believes in his property. Second thing is once you tell them you live next door, they know that they can’t like do a lot of things that they would do in the there’s an absentee owner.

So that was very helpful. I put it on a lot of portals online and for each unit I had 50 to 70 applicants. To apply for the housing and to live over there at one time I had to like, just be like no, I cannot. I just, the first person gets it. That’s it. And all my tenants are great. I love them.

They know me personally. They can, they, if they want, they can text me, but the agenda go through the property management if they need anything. Yeah, I think it was a great process as physicians. We have this leverage this persona outside that these guys are going to be honest, they’re not going to be just like any other landlord. So I think that is where house hacking is so powerful for any physician who wants to try to do it.

Mike Woo-Ming: And so your property management is taking care of all the, the toilets and all that.

Ayush Gupta: Yes, sir. Yeah, so they they do all the documents over there. Any tenant communication is through any management stuff is through that. I do have two VAs virtual assistants who helped me through a lot of like social media helped me through real estate. So I think the system, once you create systems, I think it becomes very powerful and you can leverage it.

Mike Woo-Ming: Yeah. Just as in any business, that the key to success is having the system. So in that, just as we do in medicine, you’re an ER medicine, we have a checklist to follow. As long as we follow that checklist, for most of the parts that most of the time we’re going to be successful. Can we say you’re living rent-free?

Ayush Gupta: I do live rent free. I actually make a good amount. I make around 1500 bucks on top of it a month apart from living. Used for other purposes and actually saving for buying the next puppy. So it was always like these coming in and having to do the next one with that. Yeah.

I can tell you, there are some people who have a single family home that would love to get 5,000 a month on their returner.

What two years ago I was paying 2300 for rent. And even before that I did residency, I was paying 1300 and rent fellowship, the same amount of money. I think going back to one of your first questions about teaching and we don’t get education about it, I wish. Real badly that somebody taught me this when I was in residency or fellowship, or even in med school that, Hey, this is a strategy.

This is something that works very easily. It’s easy to get into. You really don’t have to imagine. As a resident, you save a thousand books. That would be, that would mean the world to you. So that’s what I think I’m like way passionate about I bet nobody taught me this and I can help people.

Mike Woo-Ming: So it sounds like that’s why you started MDHousehacking. So tell me about the site you created and what’s the mission.

Ayush Gupta: The mission actually is to help medical professionals, whether it’s students, residents, fellows, physicians, nurses, techs, anybody who want to get into real estate in a safe way, do not have a lot of money and do not have a lot of time and want to get into real estate. There is a lot of competitive markets out there. There’s a lot of people who are trying to buy this properties using 20% down. But! There are people who don’t have that much money, the people who are very scared of getting to real estate.

So I help people walk through all those limiting beliefs, help look at their properties, have them go through the numbers for house hacking as compared to just buying a short-term rental or a long-term rental. And and show them the power of it. A lot of people don’t take into account that while I was one, I’m not paying $2,000 a month, that adds up that is like $24,000 a year saved into doing other activities that you actually can enjoy or the other investments.

So that’s my mission. That’s my goal to help people create awareness about this. Have younger professionals start on it earlier than.

Mike Woo-Ming: Perfect. Perfect. So you mentioned you, you’ve got this additional income doesn’t sound like you’re going to rest on your laurels. You said you’re investing in other projects. Is that more real estate? What’s next for you? Yeah,

Ayush Gupta: So I have now I have what of another four unit that I have, and then I have a short-term rental. So I do have these two properties. I’m part of this the group and I think I’ll plug a GoBundance and I think that has changed my mindset a lot.

Yeah, it’s it’s a good, it’s a group. We have some physicians over there from around the country. But it basically talks about like overall 16, it’s like health, authentic relationship, horizontal income, accountability, and it talks about contribution and adventure. So basically when I make my goals for the year, I think about all of these things, six things that I want to get better at.

So when I talk about investment these days, I might not have that much property that I think I’ve good right now. But I also put investment in this other aspect of my life, which I didn’t do before. That has helped a lot. Like fitness is great. I love fitness health, I think. I think that’s where I wish I can talk to more people about it that creating passive income is great and everybody should do more and have more than one source of income. But you need to do a lot of other things as well to get into,

Mike Woo-Ming: And I know you’re an attending physician, so is that some things that you tell to the. Oh all

Ayush Gupta: the time. It’s even to a fellow attendings too. Like I think what has happened now, like two years into it I just had a dinner with two of them yesterday and a lot of them are.

They’ve seen what’s going on. They’re seeing that, how I’m creating other sources of income and they want to come partner. Now they want to come talk to me. They want to just hear a lot about it. And I think that’s the event is when I was starting out, nobody over here was investing in the real estate.

Nobody was doing apart from like the usual, having a financial advisor come in. Having a portfolio, which is everybody does it. Now. People are seeing the advantage or the benefits of doing other kinds of investments. So yeah, educating as many people as I can.

Mike Woo-Ming: I love it. The website is MDhousehacking.com. We’ll also have a link in the show notes. Ayush thank, you for sharing more about your journey. It was really great to having you and best of luck in the future.

Ayush Gupta: Thank you, Dr. Mike, you’re doing a great job interviewing everybody. I love your podcast and I’m so glad that you invited me. I’m looking forward to hearing more episodes of the podcast!

Mike Woo-Ming: And thank you for joining us on this journey about educating our fellow colleagues and not only talking about passive income, but although those six areas that really can really make a big difference in your life.

So thank you everybody for listening and as always keep moving forward.

How has your goal of creating more revenue generating assets (RGA) this year going?  If it’s a little slower than what you would want, you may get inspiration from my interview with this emergency physician.

Chester Zoda, MD was a former New York doctor who was able to replace his clinical income by developing online courses.  He now makes his mission to help other healthcare professionals replace their income within 12 months to get into the $350 billion online course industry. 

This was a fascinating interview that I know you will enjoy, and hopefully take action to build your own passive income wealth!

Dr. Chester Zoda’s Free Training – How Doctors Build Passive Income With Online Courses 

https://bootstrapmd.com/go/passiveincometraining/

Dr. Mike: Hey guys, this is Dr. Mike Woo-Ming. Welcome to another edition of Bootstrap MD. We have been talking about passive income if you’ve been listening to the podcast lately, I tried to teach you guys about building avenue assets, try to build more assets, revenue-generating assets, RGA.

And one of the passive income streams that you can do is having online courses. I actually talked about this a few episodes ago, and today we’re lucky we have an online course expert and he’s an emergency room physician. And actually guys he left medicine. We’re good. We’ll talk about his story because it’s pretty interesting and exciting and how he did this and how we did it through creating online courses.

You may have heard of them. You may have seen them on social media. Like he’s been helping other doctors and actually all healthcare professionals start up their own courses and making it for. Making really good money been building this passive income streams. I don’t want to, I don’t want to take the give, take the cat out of the bag, so to speak.

So I’m going to have you listen to him today. We’ve got on the show, Dr. Chester Zoda, Dr. Chester, how are you doing today? Hey doing

Chester Zoda MD: Hey doing good.

Dr. Mike: Awesome. You actually have been, your name has been coming about lately. I’ve had some people who’ve asked me to have you on my program. They say, “Hey, do you know anything about this Chester Zoda?”

I guess you also go by Dr. Digital. So who is this guy I’ve been seeing on social media? So I said, I gotta have this guy on, wanna find out about his story and just, you don’t see too many people, too many doctors now. Out of medicine and now teaching digital courses. So this is pretty awesome.

I thank you for coming on. I know you’re pretty busy. So tell us about your story. You started as a emergency room doctor and how did that become now becoming a educator on online courses?

Chester Zoda MD: Yeah, it’s a pleasure to be here. And to be quite honest, over the last few years, I’ve just been keeping it on the downhill in terms of social media, mostly just because I tend to be a much more private individual and a bit more reserved.

And most of my time is actually focused on my team now is we’re starting to grow and serve in to ensure student success. So I actually spend most of my time working with full-time full-time clients, but yeah, I’m happy to be on the show. In terms of my story I essentially started, I’ve always had am entrepreneurial spirit and I’ve always wanted to, I’ve always had a passion for teaching and serving others with the expertise that I had.

But I remember like back in medical school, I just saw especially like how inefficient the entire system was. We would have lecturers. I have to rent out a lecture room just to deliver a talk. They would have to commute just to go to work or even go to a academic conference. And at the same time these are a lot of doctors simply just undervalue their own expertise.

We go two years of school in the October, not get enough. And sometimes we even feel like imposters, but the truth is there’s a giant market out there that starving for our expertise and can really it’s a really underserved market. And if we can simply package the expertise that we already have into the online world, we can make massive impact, but also a lot of highly profitable income.

And so in terms of my own story… people say that you only change out of inspiration or desperation. And for me, it was definitely out of desperation because back during the pandemic, I was working 80 a hundred hour work weeks, like three night shifts, every single week. I’m an emergency physician.

So you can, a lot of all your audience probably can relate, but I was just so burned out and I’d see a lot of my seniors, a lot of my colleagues they would just retire some of them even. They didn’t make it when they were serving on the front lines of medicine. And so I realized just how short-term life really can be.

And I started thinking ahead and looking for ways where I can generate side income and eventually either cut back on my clinical hours or even replace my clinical income and At first, it took some time to get started because I didn’t know what I was doing, but the more I ventured off into the online education space, the better the results I got.

And as my colleagues started noticing how fast I was growing, they asked me if I can help them do the same. And that’s really how this entire thing just transpired. And the more I started teaching them, my methods, the better results they started getting. And now. We have the digital doctor program serving over 350 students all around the world that are packaging, the expertise that they already have into online courses so that they can have the freedom that they deserve. These health care providers.

Dr. Mike: Now we talk about in medicine, see one, do one, teach one. So with your first course, and you don’t have to give away your niche or anything like that maybe you can talk about some of the struggles or maybe just hit it right out of the park as soon as you launch your course.

Chester Zoda MD: Yeah. So when it comes to struggles, a lot of doctors, they think that you need like the perfect idea. That’s that’s never been done before, or maybe they have a lot of, they just have a lot of delusions when it comes to what really makes a good business and what really makes the great business person and an online course or a side income, it’s like a side business that you essentially start.

A lot of doctors would think, Hey, just because someone else in the market has done it, that means I can’t do it. Oh, the market is too saturated. Oh, all the information is out there for free. Oh. Why don’t I just search on PubMed? Why don’t I just search, go to the library, rent out a book and why would anyone buy my course?

And those are a lot of limiting beliefs that I also struggled through in the early stages. In fact I always shared this with my own students, but one of my biggest limiting beliefs was actually my accent. And I was just super insecure with. Just speaking in general. I’m sure like a lot of us can relate when we hear our voices again in a recording or something.

It just sounds a bit off. And this thing held me back for years. I just would never publish anything that I created, even though like my students would tell me they’re good, I would just never publish it online. And it really held me back a lot of the, a lot of the years, but those, I would say those are my early struggles. Until I actually, cracked the code. was able to create online courses on repeat.

Dr. Mike: Now let’s talk about online courses because there are places out there where you can create courses like udemy.com. I’m sure you’re familiar with and all these, but then you look at the prices… they’re like $10, $15. And so how do you, what do you tell your students when they see this, are you charging 10 or $15? Are you charging a lot more for your courses?

Chester Zoda MD: Yeah, that’s a good point. So a lot of ’em, so that’s on the market that you want to play in, right? It’s kinda like when you mentioned in the book, it’s about being The Positioned Physician.

If you want to, you need to be able to charge your worth. And the first thing that the first hurdle that a lot of doctors need to go through is that they need to realize. That just by the fact that they went through medical school, just based on the fact that they have years of medical expertise under their belt, that they, that what they have in their head is actually valuable in the market.

And this is a completely, it’s a completely different shift because a lot of us, when we’re working like 80 hour work weeks or in the hospital or the clinic, we’re just around. By other doctors, other nurses, other healthcare providers that we almost feel like a fish in this, in the ocean. We just don’t value water at all.

The fish in the ocean does not value water. And in the same way, we just don’t value our expertise. But yet, on the other hand, on the other hand there’s a giant market out there that’s starting for our treaties. And the analogy that I like to use is imagine if you were starting a course on English, right? If you were trying to teach English in the middle of America and not a lot of people would actually want a course on English. Like most of us can speak it relatively well. What they don’t realize is that if we simply plop this person out, like even if they filter SATs it’s, as long as they can speak colloquial English, and we just pop them in the middle of China, suddenly there’s a starving market out there that starving for their expertise, but they can really help.

It’s completely underserved and they can make a giant impact. They can change lives in the middle of China. And it’s all about positioning, which is something that you mentioned it’s it’s positioning. That you already have into an underserved market. And that’s exactly what we have our students do.

So based on that position, We can then determine a pricing offer that stat helps you stand apart from the rest of the herd. We’re not trying to, we’re not trying to play the low game where we’re charging 10 to $20. If that’s all we’re, if if that’s all we’re doing, then it would take us like a thousand courses each month just to make a 10 case hour.

That’s not what we’re doing. That’s a lot of, that’s a lot of hurdles. That’s a lot of mistakes, a mess. And at the same time, You attract who you are, you attract lower quality customers. And so we teach our students to package their courses at anywhere from a thousand dollars, us up to 5,000, maybe even 10,000 us.

And these are courses combined with different consulting offers that they want to include. And so on and so forth. And all of this is like inside our program. So I don’t want to bore you guys with the details.

Dr. Mike: That’s awesome. And I have been saying that for years, the doctors do devalue their price.

And if your course is $10, and you think you want to retire, you want to make $10,000 a month. That’s a thousand students and plus you’ll probably do a crappy job in serving them. So I’ve always felt that it’s important to charge what you’re worth. Because really it is a win-win because the more you charge, the more you can serve them.

We we want to help everybody, but we know that, we’re all limited by 24 hours, 365 days out of the year. And like you said, if you’re charging $10, then that means that you think that. Information you have is worth about $10. And so why would I do that? It’s like free advice, right?

How many how much is free advice worth? It’s free. You might give them the keys to success, but they’re not going to listen to you if you’re going to be charging so cheap. So I’m glad you brought that up. Another thing that people will have some limiting beliefs is you mentioned your accent is…

I don’t want my show, my face on camera. I don’t want to be out there. I’m a professional professional and I don’t want my face out there. What do you say to those people? Cause I know you deal with a lot of health, peer professionals, mostly doctors. How do you instruct them?

Chester Zoda MD: Yeah. That is a really good point.

Before I started even working or that putting my face on camera, it definitely feels a bit awkward. I totally understand that. I was a shy kid growing up and it’s very easy to tell yourself these kinds of stories that I’m this person, I’m a shy kid and therefore. I don’t put myself on camera.

I’m a shy kid and therefore I don’t do any public speaking. I’m a shy kid. And therefore, I’m going to sit at the corner, not present in the ward rounds, not present at this academic conference, even though it’s a fantastic opportunity. It’s very easy to tell ourselves these limiting stories from the past that I am this, therefore, I am not that, but change comes from stepping outside your comfort zone, because if you don’t.

If you change nothing, then nothing changes. And if you want different results, then you’re going to have to do something different, right? Because the choice of that led to where you are today. The life that you’re living today are based on the consequences of the choices that you made in the past.

And so this is something that I always try to keep in mind because if I want to have achieved, achieve something new or something different, it doesn’t have to be something big. It could just be something different. I would have to do something new. I realized at that point that, Hey, I’m not going to let this hold me back.

I love teaching. I’ve really liked serving other people. I like helping other people with the knowledge that I have. It makes me feel, it makes me feel like I’m empowering them with something that they didn’t know. And it makes me feel like I’m helping them solve puzzles. So problems that brings so much fulfillment to me.

And so I’m not going to let my own deficiencies or my own character traits hold me back from adding into the marketplace and into my students’ hands. And so when I just made that clear to myself, then it was very simple. It’s not a character defect. It’s more like a skill that I need to acquire, whether it’s public speaking in front of camera, and I’m not saying I’m the, on the best.

I’m not like like some Kardashians on the internet or their social media. I’m just a guy that. I was able to make a decent size of living we’re pacing, my clinical income and leave medicine completely. And I have a story to share. And for those that want to listen. Then I’d love to share that story.

And that’s one thing to keep in mind, like, whenever you want to do something new, you gotta step outside your comfort zone. You just gotta, you just gotta do those skillsets. And that’s also part of the reason I love working with doctors because they, a lot of them have that mindset, right? None of us came out of our mother’s womb, knowing how to do brain surgery or knowing how to, patch up a hernia.

None of us, all of us acquire those skillsets throughout medical school. Our use of training, even things like public speaking, even things like organization, time management, soft skills like that, public speaking, speaking in camera is just one of them. And and yeah and in today’s day and age, it’s like without those skills that you’ll just be left behind.

Dr. Mike: We’re going to go over some self-limiting beliefs, just with, people who are listening to this, you say, Hey, I want to start an online course. And another self limiting belief is it can be really expensive. So how much does it cost to create an online course? Do you have to, do you feel like you need the best camera, the best equipment, and also how much time do you, should you devote to creating an online course? What do you tell your students?

Chester Zoda MD: That is a really good question. In terms of capital, it really doesn’t take that much. Let’s check it out. Like right now, me and Dr. Mike are just hanging out over a Zoom call. We were using webcam probably from our computer $0. We’re using an internet connect.

Probably $0, if not, just go to your local Starbucks. There’s really no excuse. I’m using a more professional microphone, but you can just use the one on your phone or your computer, and you’re good to go. And the true beauty about the internet and the true beauty about online software is that you can really start a wildly profitable seven, eight figure business.

With everything just from your laptop, you get time, freedom, location, freedom, financial freedom, straight out the gate from the laptop. And you don’t need any expensive equipment. We’re not trying to be like Steven Spielberg or James Cameron and direct the next avatar. We’re not trying to do something crazy better.

We’re just trying to share expertise, package of what’s inside our head into the online world. And so in terms of capital it’s really, you can start with $0. It’s just about the desire to help more people and translate what you already know into into an online format that does not require a time, which leads me to the second question, which is how much time does it require.

A lot of programs out there that teach you, how to do online courses or Amazon FBA or let’s face it. If a doctor wants to build site income there’s a few typical options that people tend to talk about. There’s real estate. You’re going to need a huge car starting capital just to invest in real estate.

They have some skills, to sculpt the properties, to determine what’s a good fit. And what’s not because that’s actually where that’s actually where most of the value is in determining what is a good investment and what’s not. And most of us, aren’t going to develop that overnight. We’re going to have to commute.

We’re going to have to file in paperwork. It’s a lot of maintenance, right? You might even need a manager of your. During a war chest of real estate investments. On the other hand, there’s like things like stocks investing in the S&P 500, but that would only returns 8% return on investment each year, 8%, eight to 11%.

And so then there’s things like crypto, which is high risk, high reward is basically it’s some people might even say it’s gambling, and there’s a lot of research. It’s a lot of energy required. It’s a lot of time, but there’s not a lot. Side incomes that you can start that does not require any of your time.

Even if you wanted to start a official business, like a brick and mortar private practice, you’re going to need staffing costs. You’re going to need to hire, manage people, fire people, then there’s payroll. Then there’s also the rent. It’s a lot of starting capital, but in the digital. There’s not a lot of starving capital that’s necessary to start an online business software.

Like the one we’re using right now, Zoom is inexpensive. In fact, it’s completely free. And so things like PowerPoint slides. It’s completely free recording software, completely free. And so they could answer for you is that it really takes you $0 to start an online business. There’s really an compared to a lot of other online businesses out there.

Things like Amazon FBA drop shipping, those require a lot of starting capital. It requires you to have stock and requires you to have inventory, whereas with a digital product such as an online. Zero. It’s just, you can patch it up with Google slides and then launch that online course within the first one or two weeks.

Dr. Mike: Yeah. You don’t even need PowerPoint. Like you said, you could just do Google slides. Like you didn’t have enough money. I hopefully if you have enough money to buy a PowerPoint, you don’t have to be. But by a lot of stuff, especially when it comes to, information using your existing knowledge.

And that gets me to talking about like niches. So a lot of people say, I want to do this niche and I’m a doctor, so naturally we’re going to gravitate towards health niches, but your students have done a lot of different niches right outside of health. Is that correct? Yeah. Yeah. You want to expand on that?

For example, I don’t, you don’t have to give away niches, but maybe overall, what type of niches are they?

Yeah, that’s a good example. We have doctors helping doctors. We have doctors helping patients. We have doctors helping medical students. It’s really all about the, at the end of the day, it’s all about the expertise that you’re bringing onto the table.

And so a lot of doctors, they would just teach what they’re doing. We have a student that’s teaching things like hormone replacement therapy. The four working with me. She had no she had all these different ideas. Like she was about to start a book. She was about to start consulting and she was charging exactly what you were mentioning, like $10, maybe a few hundred dollars for a consultation.

But with the consultation, it requires your trading of time for money. It’s a one-to-one kind of input. And so as long as you’re trading your time for money, you’re gonna break free from that system. And so what we helped her do is essentially package your course so that she’s helping I believe it’s young females or middle aged females with hormone replacement therapy, simply packaging, the expertise that she already had through decades of practice into an online course.

And now it’s generating it’s. Now it’s an asset, a cashflow asset that produces income for even while she’s at the clinic. Even while she’s traveling the world, spending time with her family and doing the things that she loves, even when she sleeps. And so that’s an example of a doctor helping most of the patients or like the general public, but we’ve also had doctors, helping doctors somewhat a few of our th there was one of my very successful students.

He basically teaches other doctors how to start their own private practice, their own dream practice. And like just. And yeah, like within the first 30 days he was already doing 30,000 us and back then he was still charging. 1500, right? So $1,500 for 20 students in one month. That’s 30,000. And so ever since then, it’s just been growing and growing.

He’s recently increased this price to 3,500. So you can imagine the numbers he’s generating there as well. And I remember it was very exciting watching him grow because just within the first 30 days he was already generating a 2000% return on the best spent, which means one daughter. $20 out in a month.

You’re not going to get that in the stock market. You barely get 8% in the stock market. You barely get 10, 20% into real estate. If you know what you’re doing. And that’s a lot of what too. And so if you’re getting like a 20 X, a 2006, Not just each year, but each every 30 days that compounds month over month, because you can simply reinvest those profits.

$1 and $20 in $400 out, $400 in you get the point. And so it just creates a snowball that really, it takes a little momentum to get started, to push the snowball up the hill. But once it works, everything clicks, then the snowball. At the moment, it just carries itself and just generate income while you’re sleeping, traveling the world, spending time with your children, doing the things you love.

As I founded a site called physiciancoaches.com. There’s a lots of different coaches out there, but interestingly, very, a very small percentage have. Online courses they’re coaching, they love coaching. I’m sure you’ve seen that too. What do you have to say to them about using online course as a source of extra passive income?

Chester Zoda MD: Yeah. So it really depends, like at the end of the day, we don’t work with everybody and this program, or like online courses in general, isn’t for everybody. And so it really depends on their course or their consulting offer. I believe that, especially in the today’s day and age, if you’re offering any.

Like advice, expertise, knowledge, information that can easily be packaged into online course format. Especially in today’s age, like a lot of us that we listen to podcasts. We listen to audio books. We watch YouTube videos, we watch educational courses. And because of that, a digital course is a very easy to consume format for the average listener or for your students.

And I know for myself, I personally invested or. 120… $150,000 us just in 20, 21 alone on my own education. And that’s the way I learned the best, because if you really want to learn from the best of the best and the specialized knowledge you just gotta invest in yourself. And most courses I, sorry, most coach.

Most physician coaches know that because that’s where their clients come from right there. They’re wanting to invest in themselves as well. And so if you were able to just simply but the problem with that model, the coaching model is that it requires a time. So no matter what you do, you only have 24 hours in a day, just like you said, and.

It’s not really positioning yourself in a chance to succeed because just like the billionaire investor, Warren Buffett says unless you find a way to make money while you sleep, you will always work until the day you die. And so even as a physician coach, you might be a bit more leveraged because you’re using the online world, but you’re still trading hours for dollars.

You’re still trading your flesh for money essentially. And so with the online course, though, you are able to package information. So that it is independent from your human, from your human flesh. And so it just exists on the online world. It’s able to remove yourself from the delivery of the information and the knowledge that you already have while still getting your clients the results that they want.

And we see this happen a lot outside the medical space. I know because I’ve been I’ve been a speaker or like a member in multiple seven, eight figure masterminds. And I know that a lot of coaches, especially in things like the fitness space or like the investing space or things like that. Like at the health and wellness, the relationships kind of space.

All of them started off as coaches when they work with clients one-on-one but transitioned into an online course model and they were able to they were able to remove themselves, save up all their time. So that is no longer, depending on the time and generate income. That is no longer that is actually scalable.

That’s actually another benefit about digital products because you just need to set it and forget it, create it once, and then you can sell infinite copies. And so there’s a lot of benefits with online courses. I can keep going on and on and talk your ear off. But a

Dr. Mike: That’s the name of the game, the is the business scalable, can you go and, if you are having your own clients and you’re helping with that’s great.

Unless you increase your price. You’re not going to be able to increase your hours. So there is a fight. Amount that you’re going to make until you realize that things like courses, things like, producing live events or a live group, coaching is really going to help you scale. So let’s talk about it cause you really light up.

When you talk about your students, you want to share you mentioned that the one doctor who sells how to start your private practice and making a nice living, doing that. Can you share any other success stories from your students?

Chester Zoda MD: Yeah. So it really depends on what niches you’re talking about. Cause we’ve worked with people like medical students. Like I remember one girl worked with me back when she was a medical intern. Now she’s obviously entering residency and she started a program helping female physicians. We have doctors that are helping students enter medical school, like pastor pre-med admissions.

We have… I guess the best way to categorize it, just the best way to categorize it is really doctors, helping doctors, helping patients up to Southern medical students. So with doctors, helping doctors, typically it’s like private practice, helping doctors invest in real estate, helping doctors start a certain business opportunity, helping doctors pay off their student loans.

That is a very stirring niche, right? Helping doctors with certain things like Financial freedom other income opportunities. Then we have doctors helping doctors, helping medical students with anxiety, stress, exam prep pre-med admissions. And those are the big ones.

Those are the big ones. And then we have doctors helping patients, things like weight loss. So we have we have we have a gentlemen, he started a course called. “Middle aged women, lose weight without exercise in under 30 days.” And so a lot like this is a diet that he essentially pioneered without giving his entire course away, but he essentially pioneered some sort of diet that can help middle-aged women lose that weight in 30 days.

And then there’s also things like helping patients like the hormone replacement therapy example that I shared just now there’s dementia patients. There’s it just goes on and on really. It depends on whatever whatever you’re passionate about, whatever niche you’re passionate about serving.

That’s where I typically tend to go first. And I work really closely with my students because it’s not really about bar which market is the most profitable or which market is, has the most demand you can make any course idea. Any there’s a huge market out there, but it all comes down to what you’re personally passionate about and what you want to teach.

And a lot of doctors don’t even have the self-awareness to realize that, which is why step one of our entire program is to get crystal clear on who you want to serve and what you want to teach, because all of us have something that. All of us is just one course idea away from say a million-dollar passive income each year. And so it’s really just a period of self-reflection and introspection thinking back on who I want to serve, what I want to teach. And that’s where we, that’s where all the magic really happens.

Dr. Mike: I love it. I love it. It goes back to when you were saying, in terms of a niche is, I like to think of it as who do you want to hang around with?

Who do you want to help? Who have you historically helped? Many of us give… free advice? They ask us the questions. We don’t think of ourselves as an educator, but we have this knowledge and I actually feel that if you have knowledge that can help somebody that can make an impact in someone’s life, all those examples will make tremendous impact in some of these lives.

Then you actually, it is your duty to get the word out, and not just keep it to yourself. If it can help someone, then I feel you really owe it to the world. To let them know and then getting paid more for it, that’s even better. So this has been great gesture. I know you had a lot of success with your students, so how can someone listening to this?

Chester Zoda MD: Sure. So I would say just join my free training. It’s completely free. It talks more about the opportunity, like what this actually is, how our students are making like 10 to 20 K per month, passive income in 90 days or less just by selling the expertise that they already have. It talks more about what the current landscape of the medical field is as well.

This is essentially a $350 billion industry that a lot of doctors just don’t know, where a lot of doctors I can only speak for myself, but when I was working in the emergency room with my colleagues, all of us are just so focused on the day and day. It’s almost like surviving the paperwork, surviving the insurance, surviving the surviving, the patients, and We just forget that there’s a giant world out there.

We have Amazon replacing Walmart in the commerce side of things, and then we have Netflix, repacing, Blockbuster in the entertainment side of things. And then we have Harvard Medical School slowly disintegrating moving online. And so we’re seeing the same transition happening in education in 2022 alone this year.

E-learning the e-learning economy is estimated to explode up to a 350 billion valuation. And so this is a giant opportunity that if you simply just, especially as doctors, we’ve already put in the groundwork with. Went through medical school. We already went through years of training. There’s so much that our patients are already paying us for that.

Our hospitals are already paying us for, because of what’s inside here. And so if we simply just package it onto the online world, we can really position ourselves to success. Just like you mentioned, a revenue generating asset that creates. Cashflow even while you’re sleeping, even while you’re at the hospital, even while you’re spending time with your family, doing the things you love.

And so if you’re even just remotely interested about learning more about this opportunity, I just check on my website Chester, zillow.com and I’m sure Dr. Mike is also going to include some links as well. I created a lot of my resources for free and on my blog as well. So you can learn more about this, see if it ticket fit and.

I would highly encourage you to speak with a member of our specialist team because our applications are invite only, and you can, you can’t buy this pro you can’t join us or join a digital doctor community just from a checkout page. You can’t do that. It’s invite only because we want to make sure that every student that we bring on board, we can actually help and are actually qualified for and actually qualified for our community.

And yeah, I hope this was helpful in that.

Dr. Mike: Yeah, this has been an awesome gesture. I think, if you have been considering getting an online course, you have it in your head in, and you’re never done. This is a perfect opportunity. We’ll leave a link here for you. You can go out and check out, see if it’s right for you.

This has been great. You were able to retire from medicine doing this, and now you help others to do any last minute words before we end the call today?

Chester Zoda MD: No, it’s been it’s been a pleasure being on this podcast. I’ve been following Dr. Mike’s content as well. Like back when I was just starting out it seems like a long time ago, but I think I really like what Dr.

Mark is doing because a lot of physicians, they just don’t have this awareness that there’s a huge world outside of just the hospital or the clinic or the day-to-day grind. That is a way to really generate passive income. There’s a way to not even just generate passive income, but like financial. freedom like a replacement plan to go into enter nonclinical careers.

And it really just starts with believing in yourself, believing that you have, what’s what it’s worth. If you’re as a doctor, you are a hard worker. You have to be pretty intelligent. Why not? Why don’t we just give ourselves some of that credit and. And really put our expertise to work, to help more people, but on our own terms.

And if you’re watching this, I would highly encourage you, whether it’s an online course, whether you’re just interested in generating a financial wealth, whatever it is, just take that first step just to learn a bit more, more about it. And it really can change your life because it’s been true for myself and it’s been true for my students. I’ve seen it first. And it really just starts with the leap.

Dr. Mike: That was awesome. Again really appreciate you coming on the show. It’s really. To get to know you a bit more. And also just, I can tell by, you’re you’re an educator and you want to help other people.

They want to do this and invite them to this really exciting world about just sharing their knowledge and getting paid for it with others. But it really comes down to, if you’re listening to this, it really comes down to. Motivating yourself. You can, we could talk about it. We can research about it, but until we actually do it is when the, really, the learning starts.

And to having a mentor behind you, showing you the rubs, giving you the shortcut to success, that really is the way to keep moving forward.