It’s every new graduate’s worst nightmare -- you spend four years of your life toiling away to earn the college degree that you believe is the perfect intersection of passion and financial security only to find out that come senior spring, you still are unemployable. Or even worse, you actually land your dream job at the perfect company, start your career off at a blistering pace and then the next thing you know, the economy turns and you are handed the dreaded pink slip. That’s exactly what happened to architect turned entrepreneur Pat Flynn in 2008 when he was told by his firm that he would be let go due to the recession.
Flynn contemplated going back to school but in a chance encounter with a podcast called Internet Business Mastery he discovered an episode profiling an entrepreneur who was making six figures a year by teaching people how to pass a project management exam. Flynn knew how difficult the qualifying architecture exams he had taken in school were and a light bulb went off in his head on how he could support himself on his own.
With fire in his belly, Flynn decided to set up a blog and start serving a niche in the best way he could which was by helping his readers prepare for the formidable LEED Professional Exams which certifies that an architect has an advanced depth of knowledge in green building practices.
“When I was working in architecture, I worked so hard and I still got let go. I never really got recognition for any of the work that I did. The building that you’re in right now...or your home or your office that you’re in every day, if I were to ask you who’s the architect that built that, most people – I would say 99.99% of people – will have no clue or wouldn’t even know how to find that information. But then here I am helping people pass an exam and people are sending me these messages calling me by name and offering me gifts as a result of helping them. It just was so mind-blowing to me that I was able to have this impact,” says Flynn.
The magic of passive income
Flynn was immediately hooked and realized the power of the internet as a medium to deliver value to people and actually get paid for it. After creating his first product, an e-book study guide for the exam, he was surprised that he was able to sell nearly 300 copies of it from just his small group of readers online. He immediately realized that this was his future and set up his blog called Smart Passive Income to do the same thing he did for his architects, only this time covering the much larger area of online business. Flynn teaches people how to make money online via blogs and products and even goes as far as to detailing his own monthly income reports for free on his site every month.
“It’s not always wins. It’s oftentimes failures and mistakes that I’ve made, the graphs going down, and talking about why. I feel like I’m so lucky because whatever happens, win or fail, if I share what happens it’s always going to be a win for the person on the other end, so they’re learning from my lessons. That’s why I call myself the crash test dummy of online business because I do these experiments, I’ve built new businesses and sometimes things work out, sometimes they don’t, but it’s always a lesson for everybody else out there who’s kind of following along.”
The riches are in the niches
Flynn offers two suggestions when starting out in the online space and the first is to niche down to one particular segment and just “own it” even if you don’t think you deserve to be called the expert.
“I could have started and said, ‘Hey, I’m going to tackle all the different architectural exams out there and provide information about each.’ but my energy would be divided across all these different things. I wouldn’t be seen as an expert in any one of them. Instead, I took the more authoritative approach. Select one exam, which happened to be one that I was just most knowledgeable at the time, and just did what I could to just crush that,” explains Flynn.
Secondly, you must be authentic. It’s easy to romanticize about what other people are doing online and try to emulate that. But that approach is not sustainable unless you are genuinely passionate about the business you are running. Nowadays, for every one genuine blogger out there trying to solve a true pain point there exists two snake handlers trying to take advantage of a poor lost soul surfing the web.
“You can master and be the authority, be the trusted advisor in any of these spaces as long as you stand out of the crowd. You need to be original. That’s the first thing. For me there’s no better way to be 100% original than just being 100% yourself. I think this is where a lot of people will get into trouble. They see somebody doing something successful online and they try to do exactly what they’re doing, and they try to be like them because, ‘That worked for them, so it must work for me too’ which is not the case,” advises Flynn.
