← Podcast Answer Man
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- [00:00]
A
When I started podcasting, I didn't set out to monetize anything that I was doing. I was simply following something that has always captured my heart and my mind, and that is having an impact in other people's lives. Using my voice to encourage, equip, and educate and inspire and motivate other people into action to pursue the life for which they were created. I mean, that has always been at the heart of my mission. Ever since I was 18 years old. I wanted to devote myself to service to others, to be of support and encouragement. I started in the online content creating world well before there was an Internet publicly available to me anyway. And that was using BBS services, bulletin board services, and that was not using my voice like my vocal box, my vocal cords, but I was taking my voice, what's in my head, and typing on a keyboard and sharing messages and posting them on a BBS system that I had to dial up originally with a 300 baud modem. And eventually we had the Internet. And for 10 years, I blogged and I thought I would be a writer. I just loved the idea that a guy in Northern Kentucky has 300 people around the world who are consuming every word that I write in my blog. I was just blown away. But when I discovered podcasting, everything in my life changed. It's why I am still, 20 years later, as passionate about podcast content creation as I was the day I recorded my first episode. And you know what? When I started, it wasn't at all about how could I turn this into a business? How can I make money from this? And I have no problems with anybody who starts with those questions in mind. It's just, it wasn't what occurred to me when I first started. Now I have shared my origin story of how I got started in podcasting hundreds of times in interviews on other people's shows. I've even told them in a monologue here in several of my own poems. Podcast shows. Stephanie and I, we actually started podcasting together. She joined me one week after my first episode when it became clear that podcasting was going to play a little bit more of a role in my life than I had anticipated when I published my very first episode. Now, I've told this story so many times, but there have been very few times where Stephanie has been invited to be a guest on a podcast to be interviewed with me at the same time. And recently, Mike and Carolyn Neubauer invited Stephanie and I to be a guest on their show. Their podcast is called Our Family Invests. Unfortunately, Caroline wasn't able to be there the day that this interview took place. But Stephanie and I got to meet Mike and we, we both agreed afterwards. This is by far our favorite podcast interview that we have ever done together. And there's only been a handful where Stephanie and I together were guests on a podcast to tell our story. And this what you are about ready to hear. I've reached out to Mike and I said, mike, you know, I listened back to our interview on your show and I'm thinking, I would love to share this in my own content. I just loved the way that you interviewed us, the questions you asked, especially the very first question that you started everything off with. And it was just wonderful from that point forward. And I said, so do you mind if I share this in my own podcast content? And he said, absolutely, I would be delighted. Thank you. Go for it. So what you're about ready to hear is a little bit of a different perspective on not just my journey, but how this journey of podcasting has a relationship component that maybe I've not focused on in the past. You can hear not only the long term impact of podcasting on my own business career, but how has podcasting impacted me as a husband? How has it impacted Stephanie and I in our marriage? How has it impacted my parenting over the years? In this version of the story, there's a little bit more focus on some of the unseen costs and a lot of the transformation that took place. How I've experienced so much growth personally as a result of this journey. And more than anything, I just love that Stephanie's perspective is in here in a way that I could never represent on my own telling the story. And so I hope you find tremendous value, encouragement and insight from this conversation that Stephanie and I had with Mike Neubauer on his podcast called Our Family invests. I did 24 one hour podcast episodes and published all of those in 24 hours. And immediately after publishing the 24th episode, Stephanie took me straight to the hospital where I spent the next two weeks and almost died.
- [06:27]
B
Guys, you're in for a treat today. As you listen, pay attention to a couple things. The power of a spouse who believes in you before. Before you believe in yourself. And how boundaries, margin and mindset eventually become the difference between survival and freedom. All right, let's dive in. Welcome to the Our Family Invest podcast where we explore what happens when family purpose and entrepreneurship align. I'm Mike, a former Maui firefighter who reached financial freedom in just five years through real estate investing. And I'm Caroline, a Maui based realtor
- [06:58]
C
here to educate, empower, and elevate my clients through make smart real estate moves, Whether right here at home or through my nationwide network.
- [07:05]
B
Together, we're chasing our full potential as individuals, as a couple, and as a family. We're here to build a life that matters. And each week, we share the stories of couples who inspire us to love harder, dream bigger, and grow bolder. So join us, and let's learn, share, and grow together. All right, today I'm sitting down with Cliff and Stephanie Ravenscraft, a couple who started podcasting over 20 years ago before most people even knew what a podcast was. They walked away from stability. They fought their way out of significant debt. They stepped into entrepreneurship with no guarantees, and they built it all side by side. Now, since then, they've helped tens of thousands launch podcasts and created a business around work that they genuinely love. Now, this story isn't about the success as much as it is navigating the unknowns together, working through difficult situations, and staying aligned through all the challenges. Cliff, Stephanie, I'm excited to have you both here, but before we jump into the show, I want you to kind of brag on each other a little bit. So, Stephanie, what would you say if you had to introduce Cliff and then Cliff, maybe you could follow that up by introducing the Stephanie that only, you know.
- [08:14]
C
So, my. My husband Cliff can conquer anything that he sets his mind to and usually does. Um, he asked me in 2005 if I would do a podcast with him, and at first I said no. Second, I said, okay, because I had done a Bible study that. That said, you know, engage in a hobby that your husband is doing as a way of connection. And so I said yes, and we started podcasting together. But at that time, in the course of our marriage, I have seen so many hobbies come and go and come and go and come and go. So I'm like, okay, I've got, like, two months tops, and we're in and out. We're got this. And. And he took a hobby and created a life for us, and we created a life for us. And his drive and dedication and commitment to making that happen and to making that work is all you need to know about who he is as a man.
- [09:12]
B
Nice, Cliff. How would you follow that up?
- [09:15]
A
Wow. Thank you. So, Stephanie Ravenscraft. I am able to walk this planet with a bold confidence that I did not have in the early days, and it stems from the foundation of the confidence that Stephanie had in me when I didn't have it all in myself. So, as she said, we started podcasting as a hobby in 2005. We were creating lots of shows, reaching lots of people around the world, and there were all sorts of signs that were pointing to the possibility that we could potentially make a living from doing what we felt most called to do in the world. Instead of me taking over the family business that my grandfather started in 1937, where I was next in line to take it over, I had all of these conversations with individuals who were like, cliff, I've been an entrepreneur my entire life. I've never had a day job. Let me tell you, all the ways you can make money. And I'd come home and tell my wife all of those things. And it was her that, in September 2007, said, that's it. You are leaving your day job. You and I both know that this is what we are called to do. If we have to sell the house, we will sell the house. We'll do whatever it takes. You've got this. We've got this. I've got your back. Let's go make this thing happen. And I will tell you, I did not have the courage to make that decision on my own. I didn't even have the courage to even suggest that we go that route. But she had that confidence, and it gave me all the confidence I needed. Or that gave me all the courage I needed. My confidence came much later, after all of my worst fears didn't come true. And some of them did come true, but we made it through it, and confidence came later. But her confidence has been strong in me, and I owe so much of my success to her.
- [11:20]
B
Oh, I love that. And I love that you. You're talking about, like, you know, her confidence in you is kind of what helped you step into the person that she knew that you were before you actually believed that, right?
- [11:33]
A
Yeah.
- [11:33]
B
That's so good. That's so good. So I want to get into all that, and I wish that my wife was here, and she's supposed to be here, but sadly, she had something else on her calendar that came up. But I know that I would be, or I will be disciplined if I do not ask you how you two met and what your first date was like.
- [11:57]
A
I'll let Stephanie answer that one.
- [11:58]
C
No, hold on. I love that he would be disciplined. Our first date was a blind date. We were. We were set up by friends of ours. A girl that I worked with was dating his best friend at the time, and they thought that we should get together, and we went on a date. And Cliff is a little bit Older than I am. And so I had to, you know, talk to my dad and get permission and all this stuff. And my dad says it's not going to be an every weekend kind of thing, but you can go on a date. And we've been married for 30 years in August, so.
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B
Wow.
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A
The fun thing is, is that before we went on that date, because we had talked on the phone and we talked for hours upon hours every single night leading up to our first date. And her dad very specifically said, listen, you know, this is not an every weekend thing. And he was right. It was an everyday thing. And I'd say for the first 15, 20 years of our marriage, I don't think we were ever apart for more than 10 to 14 days. It has been an incredible 30 years together.
- [13:15]
B
That's amazing. I love hearing that. All right, so let's go back to before podcasting. What were you guys doing at that point?
- [13:23]
C
At that point, I was a stay at home mom when before podcasting, we had just had our third child, so she was an infant when we started podcasting and I was staying home and I was very much doing the mom thing, completely supporting him in what was looking like taking over the family insurance business. And like, we were just, in my mind, we were the typical American family.
- [13:54]
B
Yeah.
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C
And he still, he worked long, long hours, long days. He, he put in a lot of work to make sure that, that our bills were covered. We did have a lot of debt in our early marriage and that took up a lot of, a lot of time and resources to bring that down. And that's where we are now.
- [14:15]
A
We were introduced to Dave Ramsey, so we became debt free in February 2007, and I think it was about a five year journey, if I'm not mistaken. Yeah, so it was a five year journey to become debt free. Once we started Dave Ramsey's Baby Steps for Financial Freedom, whatever that thing is, total money makeover, whatever. So, yeah, I worked around the clock. So I briefly alluded to the fact that my grandfather started a business, a family business. It was an independent insurance agency selling auto, home, life, health business, every kind of insurance you could sell for multiple different companies. My dad took that over and my mom became his partner and I was working for my mom and dad. I did that for 12 years and for 10 years before I became full time self employed in the field of podcasting. I was also an associate pastor of a church. So that was an unpaid position, but it's something that I did for 10 years, preaching and teaching and leading small groups and then leading leaders with small groups and all this other stuff. But that was in my free time. So I've always been the type of person. I got a very deep work ethic from my dad. And so I probably worked in insurance at the time. Before podcasting, maybe about 60 hours a week, and ministry was taking up somewhere between 10 to 15 hours a week.
- [15:51]
B
Holy smokes.
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A
Yeah. And that was my life. I had had the role model of your work and the things you do is your identity. And so it, it just seemed natural to me. It didn't seem odd or out there or anything like that. It's like that this is just what has been modeled for me and seems to work well for my dad. And I was just following in his footsteps.
- [16:18]
B
Okay, that's a lot. So you are already working a ton. You've got young kids. And then, you know, 2004, 2005, I think the term pod and wasn't even coined until 2005. So, like, what was that first conversation like when you're like, hey, let's start a podcast?
- [16:37]
C
I laughed. Yeah, I'm. I'm not kidding. I. I laughed. Cliff has a great ability to go all in and hyper focused on any one interest at any one time, but the span of that focus can last anywhere from hours to months. So I was in the pattern of expecting habits to come and go and come and go and come and go. It was, it was the pattern. And so when he said, do you want a podcast with me? I laughed. I'm like, who's going to listen? Like this? Ridiculous. No one's going to listen to two people from Kentucky talk about anything. I was wrong. I was humbled quickly. But. But I did, I did laugh. And then it was a Bible study that I was part of at the time that suggested to invest in a hobby that your husband is interested as a form of connection. And so I came back and I was like, okay, I, I will do it. I'll. I'll podcast with you. Like, I think. Didn't I say I do it like twice or so? I don't remember. I think I put like a. I
- [17:43]
A
don't think you put a caveat on it. No, I think you, you said, I'll do it. And I think I didn't. I think your expectation is that it'll probably last two or three times and we'd be done with it,
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C
but then we go ahead.
- [17:57]
B
No, I was just going to ask Cliff, like a follow up. Like, what were you trying to do then with podcasting? What was Your thought.
- [18:04]
A
So here's what happened from my perspective. I had already been blogging for 10 years at that point. I started my first blog in 1996 is Hand Coded HTML files. And throughout you figure a whole decade, this guy in Northern Kentucky is reaching about 3, 300 people around the world. And I thought that was pretty significant. Another thing to know about me, that before I ever decided to go work for my mom and dad in the insurance agency, I told them that if I ever get an offer to do full time ministry to be a pastor of a church one day, you'd have to give me your blessing to leave the family business and go do that instead, no matter how much less money I would make. And that's an important part of this story because I've always had a heart for being of service and encouragement to others and that plays such a vital role in understanding this entire journey. And it goes to answering your question. What was I thinking? What happened was I had been blogging all these years. My wife introduces me to this TV show, Lost. I didn't watch until the very final episode of the first season. And then I got hooked and I'm like, okay, let's go back and watch this entire thing. She goes, okay, I'll watch the whole thing over again. Let's start from the beginning. And I began subscribing to podcasts devoted to the TV show Lost. There were already five of them out there, and they even had something called the Lost Podcast Network where they all shared a blogger account and syndicated each of their content into an RSS feed that came out of a Google Blogger account. So I was listening to five hours of content related to the TV show of Lost as a podcast and I was taking everything that I learned and I was blogging about it. And one day I came up with a theory that was massive. I called it the Thomas Theory. I won't go into all the boring details about it, but I know I was right and I have proof. But anyway, I went and took screen captures from different episodes, high definition, like I've got this entire theory. And I'm like, oh my gosh, I need to call Ryan and Jen Aizawa and send them a 3 1/2 minute audio file telling them about my theory. And maybe they'll play my voice in their podcast in their feedback section and maybe some people will come and see that. I actually did figure this out. So I recorded this MP3 audio file of me just sharing what my blog was about. Here's the evidence that I have come see the blog. Well, they actually played it. Their podcast had tens of thousands of subscribers, by the way. And I wake up the next morning, and I turn my computer on, I pull up my blog. I wanted to see if there were any comments. And in big, bold print, it said, account suspended. Bandwidth exceeded. Contact billing department. And so I called the billing department, and they say, you owe us thousands of dollars for overages on bandwidth. And I'm like, what are you talking about? I've never had more than three views on my thing in a month. They said you served millions of views. And your photos, you had like, 30 photos, and your photos are like 30 megabytes a piece. I'm like, well, they have to be high definition. You have to zoom in. And it's like they said, okay, first and foremost, we're going to. We'll clear out your bill. We need to teach you how to compress your images and all this other stuff. And you need to move off of shared hosting, and you need to have a virtual private service. I'm like, okay, let's. So we work all this out. Turns out that one of the people who heard my voice from Ryan and Jen's podcast, the Transmission, was somebody who was a writer on staff at Entertainment Weekly. And ew.com heard my pod or my voice in the show, went to my blog, was convinced I was right, and said, this guy has solved the entire mystery of Lost, and he's got the receipts. They didn't. I don't think that was a term back then, but essentially it was that he's got the. He's got the proof. And they. EW.com linked to me. And I will tell you, millions of people around the world were into this show as much as I was or we were. And so that's how this all got started. And as a result of that, Ryan and Jenizawa says, cliff, we don't want to tell too many people this, but we're going to slowly wind down our show. But why don't you launch a podcast? We're getting so many people with such positive feedback to your three and a half, they're begging us to tell you to launch your own podcast. And so I went and created my very first podcast episode. I didn't think at the time, Remember I told you I didn't have a lot of confidence that, you know, this was anything for me, but my very first podcast episode was December of 2005, and I said, hey, my name is Cliff Ravenscraft. I'm in Northern Kentucky. I'm interested in Three things in these days. Technology, faith, and the television show Lost. And there's already five podcasts devoted to the TV show Lost. So who am I? I get most of my information from them anyway. So as far as technology is concerned, the only people who are actually listening to podcasts right now are people who are early adopters of technology. You probably, as a listener, know more than I do. And everybody else who has a podcast is a technology podcast. I learned everything from them. So who am I to do that? And by the way, I also very interested in faith. But pretty much all of the faith category is brought on by all of these Christian broadcasters who have been broadcasting on the radio for the last 30 to 40 years.
- [24:06]
C
They.
- [24:07]
A
So my podcast is called Generally Speaking. Welcome to the Generally Speaking Podcast, where each episode I will choose one topic. Cause I understand you may not be interested in all three of them. So look in the title of the episode, it'll say Lost. And then hyphen in the title of the episode. And if you only want Lost episodes, just delete the Faith and Technology episodes. And I said all of this, introduced it, and then I said, okay, now that I've got the introduction, now you know how this show works. I'm going to talk about Lost. And I talked about Lost for the rest of the episode. To my surprise and shock, over 500 people downloaded it within 24 hours. Wow. And the overwhelming response was, cliff, I don't care about what you have to say about faith. I could care less about technology. But if you did a podcast about Lost, I would subscribe right now. So I went to Stephanie, I said, hey, would you like to do a podcast about Lost? And she said, yes. And we sat down the very next week, and I said, hello, everyone, and welcome to the weekly Lost edition of the Generally Speaking Podcast Network. Because I knew in that very moment, this was not going to be one podcast. This was going to be a network of shows. I was going to have my Faith podcast. I was going to have my technology podcasts. And this is just the weekly Lost edition of this podcast network. And that's how it got started.
- [25:40]
B
Wow, interesting. So you knew, like, you were trying to create a channel for everything that you wanted to do, right? The faith, the technology, the Lost. Like, they were all going to be separate podcasts. You knew that from the beginning. Like, you saw that.
- [25:54]
A
I knew it from. I knew it from the feedback that. So for 10 years, I'd been blogging about those three topics. Or. Well, 10 years I'd been blogging about anything I'M interested in. For the past year, I had been blogging about loss as well. And so I'm just like, okay, my blog is generally speaking about the things I'm interested in. My podcast will be. And it was very clear. People want niche content. I'm like, ah, okay, so there will be a podcast for Lost, there'll be a podcast for technology, There'll be a podcast for Faith. And I did launch, by the way, all those shows. A couple of details. By our third episode, we had already been reaching 27,000 subscribers around the world. And the reason why is because we were invited to be the sixth podcast, Lost Podcast, added to the Lost Podcast Network. So they had already established tens of thousands of subscribers there, and that gave us a voice. And then Stephanie and I launched the Desperate Housewives fan podcast, the Grey's Anatomy fan podcast, the Heroes TV show fan podcast, the Doctor who fan podcast, the Twilight Saga podcast, the Hunger Games podcast. We were reaching hundreds of thousands of people around the world as a married couple, and people were asking us all sorts of questions about our marriage and money. And so we started a podcast called Family from the Heart. People were asking me about technology. So I created a podcast called Business Tech Weekly and help. I got a Mac, and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people were begging to send us things. And so we got a P.O. box. And this right here contains hundreds of thank you cards, postcards, and handwritten notes from people who says, what you have shared in one episode has radically altered or changed my life. Three of these handwritten letters are people who said, I chose not to commit suicide. One of them says, because of something you and your wife talked about in your podcast, my kids have a dad in their life again. It's this that made me ask myself the question, what would life be like if I could actually not pastor a church, not take over a family insurance agency, but do podcasting for a living, Speak into a microphone, entertain, encourage, motivate, inspire and equip others around the world. Wow.
- [28:32]
B
Okay. I need to take a breath for a minute because that is wild and that is not a traditional trajectory. And I've never. I've never heard anyone getting that kind of success overnight like that, where you're dropping, you know, you're too much. Too much bandwidth for your server, and then 27, 000 subscribers that quickly. Like, that's absurd. That's absurd. Those are absurd numbers. Diary of a CEO never started like that, right? Like, wow, wow. That's a lot. So, okay, so. So you kind of like, I didn't know what to expect coming into this episode. And so I'm kind of going through your story based on the information that I was provided, and I'm thinking, man, how did this guy grow this thing? So. And I had all kinds of questions lined up to ask you, but now it's like, wow. So I know you teach a lot of other people how to podcast and do that, but you can't repeat that formula. Right? And I imagine you're not doing a lot of the. The Heroes podcast and the Desperate Housewives, are you? Are you guys doing all of those yourselves or are there other people that are running them on your network?
- [29:50]
C
Well, we were. We were doing those ourselves. And then there were some that we had other co hosts come in.
- [29:58]
B
Okay.
- [29:58]
C
When Grey's Anatomy first started, I was podcasting with a friend who had started as a listener to the Lost podcast. We had made a connection and become friends. And so she and I did the Grey's Anatomy podcast together. And I think a lot of that overnight, that 27,000, like right away, the breaking the blog, you know, that was the Lost phenomenon. None of that could have happened without that show. And to this day, like, when we built that, we've been in this house for 11 years. And when we built this house, this is the house that podcasting built. But podcasting built this because of Lost. It would have never been possible without that television show. So. So there were a few, therefore, and early, early days of the Lost podcast. Our neighbor sat in with us for, I don't even know how long she was on there with us.
- [30:52]
A
Four or five months.
- [30:53]
C
Four or five. Yeah. So our neighbor was on, and it was the three of us who did the podcast together. When did it go from once a week to twice a week? Because we would do an initial reaction right after show aired, and then we would do a more in depth live episode. Well, I think they were both live, but then we would do a more in depth episode on a Saturday night. And we had small kids at the time, so, like, bedtime had to be strict and. And everybody had to be down because we have to watch television and take notes and. And then go and record a podcast. And with all of these, we were recording almost every night of the week.
- [31:32]
A
Yeah, we were recording. So to answer your question, Mike, either Stephanie or myself or us together were in every podcast that we were producing. So Stephanie had shows where she had a co host with someone else. I had three or four other shows where I had someone else other than Stephanie as a co host. But Every show on our network, one or both of us were on the show. And so just myself, I know that in the past 20 years, I have personally 55 shows and over 5,000 episodes. Stephanie's probably. I haven't looked. She's probably over 15 different shows that she's had with us together or her own with somebody else or her own solo shows. And she's probably close to maybe 2,000, 3,000 episodes.
- [32:29]
C
I have that paper somewhere. You wrote it down for me. I had a paper on my desk where you have written every show that I've been on and how many episodes of those shows. But it's missing now, so.
- [32:39]
A
But here's the thing. This is a. This is a labor of love. I mean, if you. I just held up the box of the handwritten stuff. This does not even address the hundreds of emails every week pouring in from
- [32:58]
C
people voicemails when we had a voicemail
- [33:00]
A
line or voicemail feedback hotline. Just constantly, you guys, what you just shared, this is changing my life. This is making my life better. It just over and over again. And as a result of that, it just. From a ministry standpoint, I was like, I'm drawn to this. Sure. So within the first 18 months of podcasting, just myself alone, I'm putting in about 20 to 30 hours a week. I had gone down to no more than 40 hours a week at the insurance office so that I could free. And also I was still doing ministry stuff until. There's a unique story. I don't know if you want to go into that. It'll be a fun story if you want to hear it, but there was a story about how I left the ministry side behind the official institutional stuff. But, yeah, these were our shows. At one point I was publishing before I went full time, self employed. I was publishing seven to 15 podcast episodes a week every single week. And some of those were daily podcasts. I had a podcast called. It was at the time called My Crazy Life. It later became Pursuing a Balanced Life, and then it became the Cliff Ravenscraft show. But that show was daily for a very long time. And then I had the almost daily devotional, and then I had a bunch of weekly shows.
- [34:25]
B
Wow, that is incredible. Because you've got the W2, you got three small kids, you're putting out. I don't even know how many shows at once, right? And then half of these shows, or probably 90% of them, are based off of TV shows. So you got to watch the TV shows too. Like, where did. Did you sleep?
- [34:45]
A
No. Okay. There's no time for that. And Stephanie will tell you that she operated probably from about six months into our podcasting journey, and probably for about 18 months of the start of our business. She was like a widow.
- [35:08]
C
I was definitely. I was operating as a single parent for. For a good two years.
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A
Wow.
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C
We were just going round the clock.
- [35:17]
A
I say that, Mike, and before you do a follow on, I do want to say this. That's the way I view it. I feel like, oh, my gosh. However, the most important thing is our marriage. As a father, I'm not contributing much. Single parent is very adequate to describe how Stephanie was caring for things. Right. But at the same time, we had always been doing ministry together. We saw this as the evolution of our ministry together. And most importantly, Stephanie and I, during this entire season of life that I just told you, we're having more in depth, meaningful conversation and connection behind a microphone. And even at the time, believe it or not, live on a camera, streaming to an audience around the world, we are more connected during that season of life than we ever were before this got started.
- [36:20]
B
Interesting. Wow, there's so much there, Cliff. Like, I mean, one part of me is like, oh, that's so sad. Like, you're not being the father that you. You can't get back those years. Right. But at the same time, you're strengthening your relationship with Stephanie.
- [36:39]
A
I want to say something to that because it will buck the normal standard thing. I wasn't that involved as a father in that way that seems to be like, this is the way it should be done, blah, blah, blah. I wasn't that involved in a father. Before we started the podcasting thing, before we had started the podcasting thing, instead of working around the clock doing podcast related stuff outside of the day job and outside of ministry. Before that, it was around the clock, insurance related stuff and ministry. So really the kids never saw any change. And again, not that this is right, it's just modeled. I'll let Stephanie talk about her side in a minute, but I'll just say that from my side. When I was growing up, my mom and dad worked around the clock, and they weren't. I mean, I had so much alone time, free time, all the stuff, you know, and you know, I'm at daycare, I'm over here with friends and all this other stuff. They're working around the clock. So my dad wasn't consistently like, let me tuck you in, let me read you a story, or none of that. He worked his butt off 60, 70, 80 hours a week. So to Me, I am doing what a father does in my conditioning. A father works hard and provides for the financial needs of the family. Why while you know. Anyway, you get the idea, Stephanie, share your experience. Why? Why this wasn't such a problem for you because of your experience growing up?
- [38:16]
C
Because my experience growing up was. That's how it was. My dad left when it was dark and he didn't come home until it was dark. I grew up on a farm, so there was farm work to be done. My grandparents worked the farm, my, my uncles and worked on the farm and cousins and you know, everybody. I did housework because, you know, I was a kid and so I did stuff inside the house. But my dad had a blue collar job. He left at dark, he came home at dark. He had a side hustle that he could have, could have taken entrepreneur and been amazing at it. But he grew up thinking you have, you get paid, you have a job. And, and he had a loyalty to the company that he worked for. It was a family company, it was owned by his brother. And so he had a loyalty to that. And so he did, he did the grind. He had his side hustle and we had farm work that had to be done in any spare time that, I mean there was no. That's all you did. You work from the time you wake up until the time you crash.
- [39:17]
B
Yeah.
- [39:17]
A
And that's the point. So when we got married and I'm working around the clock, this Stephanie, to her this, this was never a point of between us. This is, this is her. It meets her supposed to be. It met her expectation of how our relationship would be and how our parenting would be. It met my expectation. It certainly bucked up against the expectations of how a lot of other people view a father should be involved. But it just didn't seem odd to us at the time.
- [39:46]
B
Interesting. Wow.
- [39:48]
C
And when we first got married and when we had Megan, our oldest daughter, I worked as well. I never imagined that I would stay at home with our K kids and through, through circumstances. That is an. Is a long story. I end up losing my job and I'm like, well now what? Because now I have an 18 month. Well, she, she was probably just like a year old. And I'm, I'm pregnant with my second child. Do I go get another job or do we learn how to be a one income house? And so we chose to learn how to be a one income house. But I never intended to, to stay at home, although I could, now that they're all grown, tell you that was I That's what I was built to do. That. That's what I was made to do.
- [40:35]
B
I love that. So, okay, so you, you, early on, you got a taste of like wild success with podcasting. You know, like we mentioned before, most people don't see that. And you've got all these things going on. You're, you're up all the time. How did you decide to monetize this and what was that path like?
- [40:58]
A
Yeah, so ironically, there was never any thought in my mind to ever monetize any of this. The thought of monetizing never once crossed my mind. As far as I was concerned, this is a hobby and this is a ministry, and it's nothing more than that. However, we began doing things, and of course I was doing things on the cheap. We were still working at that time. We didn't become debt free until February 2007. So we're working aggressively towards paying down debt. So. Which means that when I started our podcasting efforts, we started on a budget. In fact, my very first podcast episode was recorded with a $35 headset with a plastic boom mic off to the side. And it wasn't even USB, that wasn't even a thing yet. It was 218 inch jacks that go into the speaker and mics jack on your laptop. And then I went and found some $50 condenser microphones, and they sounded awful, but it was, it got our voice, it got everything out there. And people were commenting about the audio quality and I'm like, you know what, we understand we're saving up to do this. And somebody said, hey, you know what, how much are you thinking about spending on upgrading your equipment? And I said, well, I'm looking at this package over here, it's going to be a couple hundred dollars. And she says, what's your address? And that's when I went and got my PO Box and she wrote us a check for the exact amount to go buy all of that equipment. And then that was the very first time money came in from this. Well, by the time some of our shows are hitting 60,000, 80,000 subscribers, all of a sudden we're getting Time Warner Cable, DirecTV, Expedia.com and a bunch of other huge brands are saying, hey, we would like to insert ads into your podcast. We were doing live streaming before live streaming was a thing. We were doing it via Skype, casting at first, and then Ustream tv. And then we were using something called talk show. And Talk Shoe was one of those venture capital funded or whatever you call it. They got their money rounds and they're like, hey, we're going to build an entire thing around this. Cliff and Stephanie, we have, eventually we're going to have advertisers and we're going to split revenue and all this other stuff. But for right now, we'll pay you like $3,000 a month if you will host all of your shows on our servers and bring your live shows here. And I'm like, 3,000amonth? Yeah, please sign me up. And so then there was that. And then we had other people say, you know what, we would make donations if you created extra bonus content. So that was always out there. We had other companies wanting to sponsor our shows. Not advertising, dropping ads. They wanted to be a long term relationship sponsor. And the most exciting thing that happened for me was I would go to church and I would like, talk about Lost and then I'd talk about podcasting. Obviously, you seem really excited. When I told you the response response that I got initially from podcasting, nobody in our hometown could care. They could care less about any of that. When they heard me talking, they heard Charlie Brown's teacher going. And they're like, cliff, we're going to talk about sports again now, if you don't mind. And so what happened was, believe it or not, there were people back in, let's just say 2006, early 2007, and they're like, like, I want to create a podcast to help promote my personal brand or whatever. And they're spending about six hours a week trying to produce one 45 minute episode each week and struggling through the process. And here I am recording seven to 15 episodes that are approximately an hour or more in length each and publishing them all. And. And it's no sweat. And they're like, how are you doing that? So I'd get on a call with them and sometimes we talk for 45 minutes to an hour, sometimes we talk for two and a half hours. And at the end of their like, you've got to let me pay you for this. I'm like, dude, I can't believe I just got to talk to somebody for two and a half hours about podcasting. I feel like I should pay you for this. That's how I felt about it, except for the fact that eventually there started to be this little thought that crossed my mind. I felt really guilty and ashamed about this thought when it first crossed my mind. And that thought was this. What would life be like if I were able to do podcasting full time instead of taking over the family Business. And instead of ever becoming a pastor of a church one day, what would life be like if this was my ministry and this was how I made a living? And by this time that I'm asking this question, I'm already making three to five thousand dollars a month. And people are begging me to let them pay me to teach them what I know about podcasting. Because at this point, I've got over. I've got thousands of hours invested. And so I decided to test it. Would people pay me? I started hosting workshops like, hey, I've got this software. I can do 15 people live. I'll teach and I'll answer questions. It's $150 per person. Sold out instantly. I'm like, oh, wow, okay. And then I did that over and over again. I'm like, wow. And I started offering in December 2006, after one year of podcasting, I started Podcast Answerman over@podcastanswerman.com and then the very first episode, I said, listen, my name is Cliff Ravenscraft. I've been podcasting about a year. Pretty much everything I've told you so far was in this episode. Listen, the name of the show is Podcast Answer, and it's not because I have all of the answers, although I have a lot. I have a lot of experience. But here's what I can tell you. If I don't have the answer, you'll be hard pressed to find somebody who's more passionate about podcasting than I am at this point. And I know how to get the answer to any question related to podcasting. So if you have those questions, here's a voicemail feedback hotline. You leave your voice in. I'll play your question of the show and I will answer it. That's what I'm here for every week. And in that first episode, I said this phrase. Wouldn't it be cool if one day, maybe five, ten years down the road, I would be able to make a living as a podcast coach and consultant instead of taking over my family's business? Well, little did I know that one year after saying that statement in that first episode, that would become my reality.
- [47:46]
B
Wow. Why did it make you feel guilty?
- [47:50]
A
Because of a lot of things. I was taught growing up that for you to earn money, you had to work hard. And while it may sound like I worked hard creating so much content, I never worked a day related to creating podcast content. There was no work. There was no hardness to any of was effortless. It was lots of energy, lots of time, zero effort, zero hardness, zero Difficult. Zero challenge, zero overwhelm, zero stress. It was just pure passion, love, joy. And I felt guilty charging people money and earning a lot of income doing something that I love when so many people I know are struggling to get by financially and they're stuck doing jobs that are so unfulfilling and are soul sucking and energy draining. And I felt guilty because it was right. At the time this was happening, I was in the insurance industry. So I saw a lot of what was coming with the financial collapse of 2008. I saw it before it actually happened. So people in my industry who didn't have the same job security I had, my mom and dad were never gonna fire me. I had job security. Meanwhile, I've got people who are my friends and my peers who had $200,000 a year jobs and they were sole income earners for their family. And they're getting laid off left and right, left and right, left and right. And they can't find a job and they're struggling. And here I am. Who am I to think about leaving my job security and going doing this thing that I is. It's like getting paid to do karaoke for people who love to do karaoke. It's like being paid to go golf or something like that. Who am I to live a life where I get to to earn my income doing what I love? And I felt a lot of guilt and a lot of shame early and it took a while for me to understand that. In fact, it was after. It was way. It was a year and a half, two years after I was full time self employed, before I really took care of some of those limiting beliefs.
- [50:14]
B
Yeah. When you had that conversation with your parents about leaving that W2, how did that go? Like, did they understand what you were doing?
- [50:25]
A
Stephanie, do you. How. How many times have you heard the story? Do you want to try give a shot at it? Because I want to give you some airtime as well.
- [50:31]
C
Yeah, I don't know that I know the entire story. I just know that after you gave. I just remember that after you gave your 90 day notice, you start getting like really freaked out. Like, I don't know, like, what if this doesn't work? I don't actually have a plan to make money. I just know I'm starting this business and he goes back to his dad and he's like, what if I did like part time or. And your dad's like, no, you're either all in or you're all out. You gotta choose one. And I will say I don't think Cliff aside from me, because this was my decision. I said, this is. It's time. You know, we're gonna like he. Whenever he said that on Podcast Answer man in early 2007, I then had to live with the miserable Cliff that he became, struggling with the guilt and. And all of his feelings about how much time he was giving to podcasting and only 48 hours to insurance, and that's where our money was coming from. So I was the one in September who said, no, that's enough. I'm cutting it. Like, it's time. It's time.
- [51:43]
A
She actually said, my kids need their dad back and I want my husband back.
- [51:50]
C
Yeah, that is what I said. He became miserable, but directly in line behind of me. Behind me, Cliff's biggest cheerleader is his dad.
- [51:58]
A
Yeah.
- [51:59]
C
There is no other person on the planet who has been more supportive and I think tried to be understanding of what podcasting was before he knew what podcasting was than his dad. It's hands down.
- [52:14]
A
So I want to tell this story. So I come home from a string of bad days at the office, and the bad days are because at this point. So it was December 2006, where I started Podcast Answerman, and I started to have this dream. Now we're talking September 2007. This is nine months of me dreaming. Right. With really little belief that it's possible. But I can tell you right now, at this point, for nine months of the first nine months of 2007, every single minute, no, every single second I was physically in the insurance office, it was a waste of my time. And what I mean by that, it was a distraction from what I most knew I wanted to do. And so for nine months, that career, that was the lifeblood financial, you know, everything, it was soul sucking. Now, today, I know a lot about mindset that I didn't know then. I had very little, actually. No, I had no emotional intelligence back then. But because of that, I told myself some really negative stories about this insurance job, and I just hated it. And so after nine months of that, I come home one day and she goes, that's it. I draw the line. You're gonna. We're already making three to five thousand dollars a month. This is in your free time. Imagine what you could make with this. You've had all these conversations with these people who told you, you believe you can do it. This is what you know. You and I both know. This is what we're called to do. We'll do whatever it takes to make it happen tomorrow. You're going to tell your dad you're going to quit. You're giving him a notice. And I'm like, okay. Ironically, we actually started up our podcast and made an announcement to our podcast audience, and I published it immediately, letting them know that tomorrow I'm putting in my notice. And of course, I knew my dad and my mom weren't going to hear it because they weren't listening to my podcast back then. And so I wake up the next morning and I'm like, oh, my gosh, I'm freaking out. What's my dad going to say? And I go in and I say, dad, I need to let you know that I'm putting in my notice. I want to do podcasting full time. I'm giving you 90 days. December 31st will be my final day. And I'm thinking, okay, I'm about ready to hear all the reasons this is the biggest mistake in the world. Do you know what's coming up financially? Do you see all these things and all this other. I'm prepared for him to talk sense into me, right? This is my mind. He goes, I have been waiting for months for you to tell me you were ready to leave. He said to me, he says, you know, Cliff, you know how much money you could earn owning this agency when I retire? And I'm like, yeah. He goes, I want to tell you right now, you will never earn as much here as you will doing what you love. And you've got to go make that happen. Here's the thing. If you go and you put everything into it and it fails, you can always come back here. But I'm going to tell you right now, you will not come back here.
- [55:31]
B
Wow. So, okay. I love that, man. To have that kind of support from your dad, that. That means a lot. When you went home after that, how did you show up for your kids?
- [55:45]
A
I. I just. Probably just light and. And airy for the first, probably week to 10 days. And then all of a sudden, I'm sitting there watching television show with my wife because we've got podcasts to record on it. And just out of nowhere, I. I'm like, I, I, for the first time in my life, I feel what would be called depression, like, despair. What have I done? And so for me, it didn't change how much I showed up for my kids during this season of life, because, quite frankly, I was in my own head the entire time, and I felt like there's so much that needs to be done to, to figure out all the. How do I set Up a business. How do I do these things? And so how I showed up for my kids, that didn't change until probably late 2009 and early 2010. That's when things really took off there in an incredibly powerful way. But what I will share with you is that I was an up and down roller coaster until finally the final week of December. A friend of mine says, why don't you just go ask your dad to let you work there a couple days a week, like Stephanie was just saying. And I said, dad, I'll work here Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and I'll do my business Tuesday, Thursday and on the weekends. And he says, nope, you can't serve two masters. You're either going all in over there or you're going all in here. There is no halfway. He says, you make the decision, let me know by the end of the day. I said, I don't need. By the end of the day, I'm going to go do it. And I think you probably read my bio. But the first. So what happened is we knew things were coming financially with the crisis of 2008. Well, a couple of the venture capital companies that were paying us a lot of money, so $3,000 a month instantly went away. Like he said, listen, we didn't get our next round of funding. We can no longer, we've ran out of money. We can't pay this. We do. We never did get the advertisers. And now with all this stuff, we're having a hard time getting those. So I'm really sorry, Cliff. They gave me all these options to buy stock in the company if it ever sells and goes public one day. But he says, I'm sorry, man. So $3,000 a month went away. All of this other advertising went away, all this other stuff. And so while I was making three to five thousand dollars a month every single month, now I'm full time self employed and I'm down to two to $400 a month. And I don't know anything about owning a business, I don't know anything about all this other stuff. And, and I worked around the clock for that first year. For nine months I never took a single day off. And after nine months I took Sunday off, but only by convincing myself that I'd work more hours the other six days of the week. By the end of the first year, my total net income, the business was profitable. The business on paper, the business paid for all of its expenses. It paid for health insurance for our family, but it did not pay me a paycheck for the first nine months and the last three months I finally got a paycheck and my net income for the first year of full time self employed was $11,000 income. Wow. And to top it off, I did a 24 hour nonstop marathon to celebrate the final day of our first year in business. I did 24 one hour podcast episodes and published all of those in 24 hours. And immediately after publishing the 24th episode, Stephanie took me straight to the hospital where I spent the next two weeks and almost died. Wow.
- [59:42]
B
And what was the reason for the hospital?
- [59:46]
A
So the reason for the hospital was I weighed almost 300 pounds at the time. I basically woke up about 4 o' clock in the morning, went to the kitchen, got myself some breakfast, took it down to my office, worked until it was lunchtime, went upstairs, got myself a huge lunch, took it down to my office, ate there, went up, had dinner for about 30 to 45 minutes, and went back down to my office and worked until 2 o' clock in the morning, went to bed, got two hours of sleep and got up at 4 o' clock the next morning and did it over and over and over again for the first nine months without a single day off. Wow. I, I, after I got out of the hospital, I started doing the 10,000 steps a day. And when I started doing, counting my steps, 1,000 steps like nearly killed me. It's like, it was, it was incredible. And because I was wearing my pedometer every day, I was able to actually see the average number of steps that I got every day during that routine. I routinely got about 300 steps a day every day. That's the physical activity that I had.
- [61:04]
C
Wow.
- [61:04]
B
What did you see during this time, Stephanie? Like what, what kind of changes did you see in Cliff?
- [61:11]
C
Okay, I don't know that I remember. I, I don't know that I remember because while he was doing, you know, his 4:00am to 2:00am, you know, I'm taking kids to preschool and you know, 2008. So yeah, I have a three year old that I'm, I'm chasing around. And so they would have been 8, 6 and 3 at the time. And so, you know, we've got school and packing lunch and picking up and play dates and all of the, and I'm making dinner and doing groceries and doing the laundry and you know, he pops up like a groundhog every now and again and I didn't really notice anything.
- [61:53]
A
And also keep in mind that while all of this is going on, keep in mind that Stephanie and I are in Deep conversation and watching television shows and having conversations in a podcast for about five hours a week every week. Also a couple of other things. My daughter Megan and I watched Hannah Montana at the time and we had the Hannah Montana Fan podcast. And my daughter was 8 years old and it was her podcast, but I co hosted it with her and we talked about life lessons that we could learn from each episode. My daughter had a podcast with 38,000 subscribers.
- [62:33]
B
Wow.
- [62:34]
C
Yeah, we were just busy. We were just busy. And I don't think, like at the time, health wasn't even.
- [62:45]
A
It just wasn't on our radar.
- [62:46]
C
It just wasn't on the radar. I weighed 220 pounds at the time. And that was when. I don't know if it was after you came out of the hospital or before, but I had started my own weight loss journey because I couldn't keep up with a three year old. I couldn't breathe chasing after a three year old. So I'm like, I have to do something. And I think that might have been before. It was before mine went into the hospital, but we were busy. And yes, we were connecting in conversations and we were having so much connection and so much dialogue and, you know, all of this time, but everything else was spinning like there were too many plates to keep in the air.
- [63:31]
B
Yeah.
- [63:32]
C
To really catch what was going on.
- [63:34]
B
Yeah, that's what it sounds like. You, you guys are both aligned pretty well through this whole thing, which is shocking to me looking at it from a 30, 000 foot view. What has changed for you guys till today? Like, you're not still living that kind of lifestyle, I assume, right?
- [63:52]
C
No, we learned boundaries and we learned margin and balance. I think those are. Those are the three greatest lessons that came out of my 30s and which is a lot of that early building. The business was in my 30s. Boundaries, balance, and margin taught us so much. And now we make our own schedule. We. We. We work because we want to and create our own hours and. And we're able to do that because we worked through the grind and we know. Well, we know not to go back there, number one.
- [64:33]
A
But there are a couple things I want to say.
- [64:36]
C
Go ahead.
- [64:37]
A
So first off, when things shifted for me once I got out of the hospital, I began a fitness journey. And that was up and down for several years until November 2014. And then I made a commitment at the time, I was going to work out six days a week, every week for the rest of my life, which I did for six years until they shut down the gyms during COVID But I lost over 150 pounds, put on about 40 pounds of muscle mass, and radically altered my life there. But during that process, I began a personal and professional development journey. So I was reading all of these books like Think and Grow Rich and just every personal and professional development book under the sun. At this point, I had clients, people who mentors and peers, people who are writing books that I'm like, oh, my gosh, now they're my client, Dan Miller, author of the book 48 Days to the Work youk Love. And then all of a sudden, Dan Miller invites me to come speak on his cruise. And there's a whole story about that. I go there. All of these clients come as a result of that. And he connects me to Michael Hyatt. Michael Hyatt becomes a client. Now I'm speaking on Michael Hyatt's stages for his platform conferences. The first 100 podcast episodes that Michael Hyatt did for his this Is yous Life podcast, he mentions my name specifically and told his audience to go hire me to help them launch their platform as a podcaster. 67 out of 100 episodes, I got that. I didn't pay anything for that advertising. And Michael Hyatt was one of the top ranked blogs globally for entrepreneurs at the time. So I had all of this blessing. And then in October 2010, I helped, or actually September of 2009, I helped pat Flynn launch a podcast. And so he starts Smart Passive Income as a result of my coaching. And then I ask him, do you want to do a mastermind group with me? And so Pat Flynn and I started a Mastermind group in October 2010, and we just met a couple of hours ago. We still meet today every single week for an hour. And we have other entrepreneurs who are at our level. And I will tell you right now, nothing has radically changed my life more than unceasing personal and professional growth, reading books that transform how I perceive myself and the world, and being in relationship in a powerful mastermind group relationship with other high service oriented, high level thinking, super positive mindset. And we're here to support each other every single week for an hour. It's the number one most important meeting on our calendar. And that right there, it's those things that have transformed everything. And to answer your question, there have been some ebbs and flows in our business, but at one point, it's always been myself and Stephanie. It's the two of us. This is our business. And eventually we got to the place where we're making so much from Me teaching, podcasting that we shut down pretty much all of our entertainment shows. And Stephanie and I still always carried on a couple's podcast together throughout this entire journal journey. We still have one today. It's called Building a life and Business Together. However, most of the income earning stuff that's been going on has been my podcast coaching and consulting. And we co facilitate a paid mastermind group for entrepreneurs called the Next Level Mastermind. And so we got to the place where the year that we built this house, I got podcasting A to Z to where it was bringing in 40 to 60 thousand dollars a month every other month. And it took about 20 to 30 hours a week to do that. In November 2017, we shut that down. We started a personal and professional development conference called Free the Dream. We did that annually for a few years until Covid we did in person workshops and we were leading paid high level paid mastermind groups for those who are advanced entrepreneurs, established entrepreneurs. And I got to the place where I could easily make 250,000 to $750,000 a year, just my wife and myself. Almost no overhead in our business and it required no more than 15 to 20 hours a week.
- [69:14]
B
Incredible. Incredible. You know, that's a funny thing because, you know, we had a guest on here before that was like, you know, I had to get to the point where I had to choose, do I want one Costco or do I want 20,000 seven elevens, right. And the purpose of that conversation or that, that mindful thinking there is like, do I want something lean that I can grow and be in charge of, or do I want something that's so expansive that I need a whole bunch of overhead and, and workers and, and everything else for. And the fact that you could build something that can produce that much revenue with so little oversight. To me, that's the dream, right? So it's not, it's being lean enough that you can steer the ship anytime you want.
- [70:00]
A
So my peers, Pat Flynn's only one, and there's some other names you would recognize in my mastermind group. My peers are all people who subscribe to the scale and grow. And I love them. They're super successful, they've done some amazing things. And you know, we have some, some of the most fascinating conversations because we'll talk about 10, you know, 10x is easier or the 100x or I don't whatever, or 10x is easier than 2x. All these massive growth, this growth, this, all this other stuff. And I've been tempted at times to pursue Some of those things. And then just recently, I read the book what Is yous Dream? By Simon Squibb. He's a great guy on TikTok and other platforms in his social media. Great book. It's called what Is yous Dream? And I resonated with, like, 65% of that book until he got to the place where it's all about scaling, hiring the right people, delegating everything out, and then you sell the business and blah, blah, blah, and you have freedom. I'm like, nope, that's not me. I don't like the E. Myth. I don't like all this. I love it for the people who it's for. But I finally am getting around. Right now, I'm in the middle of reading Company of One by Paul Jarvis. And I love people who have stories who built significant, massive things where they never had any employees outside of themselves and. Or their business partner. And my wife is my business partner.
- [71:27]
B
I love that. That's so good. Wow. Okay. I want to start wrapping this up because I do want to be respectful of your time. I mean, I can ask you a million more questions, but looking at where you're at right now and everything that you've gone through, what. What do you think that your kids gleaned from your experience, and where do you. Where do you foresee them going with all that they've learned from watching your journey?
- [71:59]
C
Our kids have learned that anything is possible. They can do literally whatever they want to do. And they learned that, I mean, by watching our entrepreneur journey. Yeah, you got it. I can't say that word. I can hit it once out of every five times I try. But they've. They've. They've learned that out of our journey, but they've also learned that out of. We gave them the space to learn who they were and what their dreams were and what they wanted to do. We didn't push like, you don't have to work in our business. You don't have to take over. You don't have to. You know, Megan's podcast, when she was 8, that was because that's something that she wanted to do. And so our youngest daughter will graduate college in May, and she's headed to law school. That's her dream. She wants to work on changing policy for the aging community, and that's her passion. That is. She's. She's getting her. Her bachelor's in social work, and she's going to go to law school, and she's going to do that. Our middle. Our son, he didn't know what he wanted to do. So he came out of high school, he got a job. He worked for two years. He said, you know what? I think I want to go to college. Can I still do that? Yes. He went to college for a year. He's like, there's nothing here that I want to do for the rest of my life. Came home, got a job, worked for a couple years and said, you know what? I found what I want to do. I want to be a teacher. He's back in college now, studying to do that. And he has a love of anime, so he's found a passion for Japanese, the language and culture. And he'll be going to Japan this summer to study.
- [73:49]
B
Nice.
- [73:50]
C
And. And he. I don't. I don't know that teaching is what he'll actually end up doing just because of a lot of the. The education system. But he does want to teach people, and right now he thinks he has to have that degree to do that, and that's fine. And our oldest daughter is an event planner. And when she went into college, which was now, again, our kids went to public school. College is pushed heavily. So while we didn't put the expectation of college on our children, the school system did. And so Megan had this desire to go to college from a very young age. That's what she was going to do. And so she's getting ready to go off to college. She's 18, and she's like, I don't know, like I'm. What do I declare? Like, I don't know what I want to do. How am I supposed to decide what I want to do at 18? To which we the nester. If you don't know what you want to do at 18, why are you going to college? It was. It was around about. It was a. Just a wheel of questions asking back and forth. And then Cliff told her one day, I think it was coming up on her sophomore year, Megan, stop thinking about what you want to do for the rest of your life and pick a major that you could do a lot with. That made sense to her. She ended up getting a major in communications. She has a minor in American Sign Language. And she is an event planner because somewhere along the way, she fell in love with event planning. But her communications degree helps her a great deal in that. But now she started a side hustle. She's doing weddings and. And planning day of coordinating for. For weddings. And so she has a W2. But she is also starting a side
- [75:41]
A
hustle and also a couple of things there for. For Megan, because I think you hit the. The big spot spots for the other two. But a couple other things. Immediately upon graduating, she got a PR position, public relations museum in Bowling Green, Kentucky, and did all of their pr, was on television stations all of the time, hosted big events, fundraisers for the organization. Then she came up here and she got. She became. She did all the wedding facilitation for all of Cincinnati parks. So it was a pretty big prominent thing. But then she met some other people who were in the business. And today she works at a nonprofit in, let's just say the ritziest ritz part of town. And she has. One of you could not dream of how she rose into the position that she currently has. And it's actually put her in such a position that she has the ability to do this side hustle. And the other things that I will say is that one of my favorite things was Stephanie and I both went to Unleash the Power within together. And I can't begin to tell you the amazing amount of power that experience had for the two of us, especially Walking on Fire. That is awesome. I think every married couple should consider walking on hot coals together. It'll change your life forever. But we came away from that event with what we call shared language about personal and professional development. We came home and began using that with our kids. It transformed how we showed up for them. That's when things really took off. And me personally, I ended up taking. I don't think McKenna ever went to Unleash the Power within, did she? But my other two, my oldest, I've taken them to Unleash the Power Within. And so they've been through this. And I created Free the Dream, or I say I, Stephanie and I created Free the Dream Conference, which is our own version of Unleash the Power within, just without the firewalking, because I didn't have the insurance for that. Tony's got more money for insurance than I do. But anyway, we created our own Rah Rah annual conference, and my kids spoke on stage at this event. And I also want to give a shout out to Matthew. When he was, gosh, probably 4 years old, he had a podcast that I did with him called Gaming with Matt. And even though McKenna was just a toddler, all three of them together did a podcast called the Kids Show. So they've had so much experience. And the biggest thing is they've seen all of the things that we've been able to do, and our lives have been very blessed and very Privileged as a result of sowing the seeds into relationships and serving people throughout the years and. And all of this other stuff. So much harvest came later, and they recognize that, and they understand that things don't just come easy, that you may have to go through some challenging, hard seasons of leanness. And they experienced a lot of the leanness, but they're very much aware of how privileged their lives were in their young adult years before they left the house.
- [79:12]
C
Well, if you ask them, they don't. They don't. They don't remember.
- [79:17]
A
Yeah.
- [79:17]
C
They don't remember the linears the way that we do. Yeah, they. They don't feel like they were Ever. Couldn't have something or didn't have enough or they. They weren't aware that sometimes financial was. That financially we were struggling, and that
- [79:36]
A
wasn't shocking to me. I did not realize this, but as far as my kids are concerned, they never felt like I wasn't there.
- [79:45]
C
You were always in the basement. In their mind, you were always in the basement.
- [79:48]
A
I was here all the time. And by the way, they did come in a lot. Right. So in many ways, while looking back, I see how distracted I was and how much more I could have been involved, although I did the best I could with what I had to work with at the time. But still, in their minds, they're like, man, dad was always there. It's only in hindsight that I realize it's like I never missed a school activity, an awards banquet, or a career day. My kids loved it when dad came and said, my dad's a podcaster. And they're like, what's a podcast?
- [80:29]
C
The first time Cliff was in the newspaper, Megan went into school the next day, and her teacher had put the newspaper on her desk, and she switched. I just. This is just. It's just at the time, what was she, maybe nine or ten? And she's like, it's just a hobby. Like, I don't understand why he's in the paper. Even though at that point, it wasn't just a hobby anymore.
- [80:50]
A
There were two things. There are two things our kids experienced. One time we were on a road trip to Florida for either Disney cruise or a Disney World experience, or a combination of both with our podcast. But anyway, we're driving, and we pull off on a rest area in southern Tennessee, and we decided to have lunch. We packed our lunch, and another family came over and says, are you Cliff and Stephanie Ravenscraft? And my kids are like, oh, my gosh. And I was like, we were just listening to your Lost podcast in the car. And I'm like, well, I still hear Cliff and Stephanie talking. And here you guys are here. So my kids are like. They're like, oh, Dad's never gonna let this one go. And they're like, dad, don't let your head get big. Anyway, we're on a family trip in Europe. We had just taken the train under the tunnel under the English Channel from England to the Paris station.
- [81:51]
C
Paris station.
- [81:52]
A
And we're walking as a family of five through this Paris train. Train station. And all of a sudden, this woman named Wendy comes up. Cliff Ravenscraft. Oh, my gosh. Cliff Ravenscraft. It's like, my kids. This is ridiculous.
- [82:07]
C
The kids are like, we're in France. Like, how does this happen in fr.
- [82:12]
A
But. But the thing. What I'm getting at is my kids have been exposed to just how endless poss. How endless the possibilities are of what can happen. They've also seen how, you know, how you have to. The ways that we have grown, and very much how I have grown to. To be able to relate to all of that. And, yeah, they picked up so many valuable life lessons that I was never exposed to. And so, to answer your question, it's had a really powerful, positive, profound impact on their lives. And my kids are doing some amazing things in this world as a result of our journey as a family through podcasting.
- [82:55]
B
I love that. I love that. All right, four more questions. I'll get you out of here. These are pretty quick, but I'll start with the first one. Who or what has inspired you most along your journey? Could be a person, a place, a book.
- [83:09]
A
Dan Miller, author of the book 48 Days to the Work youk Love. You asked me, cliff, you know, how long did you deal with that guilt or why did you have that guilt or shame? It was all about feeling guilty about doing something I love. I was listening to Dave Ramsey all the time back in the days, and I always heard him talk about his best friend, Dan Miller. I'm going to send you a free copy of his book 48 Days to the Work youk Love. Well, I went and got the book, and that book changed my life. I did a 10 podcast episode series on that book and shared all of my thoughts about how this is transforming my understanding of who I am, why I'm on this earth, why this is actually the right decision, and it just helped me unload so much baggage. I was so excited about it, and I just want to share this. So I came across a blog post that said, four steps to how to achieve any goal. And I'm like, this sounds way too good to be true. And the steps were, believe it's possible, write it down, tell other people about it, and work the plan as you become available. Well, I had a daily podcast, and so I was like, well, this is what I'm talking about today, guys. I found this four step formula for how to achieve any plan. It says if I do these four things, I'll get whatever I want want. So let's just test it out. I want to tell you my goal right now is to meet Dan Miller, author of the book 48 Days to the Work youk Love. But here's what I want to tell you. I do not want to meet him at a conference where he's up there speaking. I'm in a group of 10 or 15 people. I shake his hand, tell him how much he's had an impact in my life, and then he goes to lunch, and he doesn't remember having the conversation with me. I want to literally tell him that I've personally been responsible for selling thousands of copies of his book and that not only has this transformed my life, but I've got over a hundred letters from people that talk about how his book. I want to have that level of conversation to where he'll never forget me. So that's my dream. All right. I have no idea how this will ever be possible, but do I believe it's possible? The answer is yes. Have I written it down? Yes, I did. Before I started this podcast episode, I went in my journal, I wrote it down. Step number three is tell others, guess what I'm doing right now here in this podcast episode. And then step number four, it just says, work the plan as it becomes available. And if you don't know what that is right now, just wait. It'll reveal itself. I'm like, okay. So I hit publish. 47 minutes later, I get an email from a guy named Andy Traub. Hey, Cliff Ravenscraft. I listen to your podcast. I happen to be working with Dan Miller on a project right now, and I want to let you know he already knows who you are. He would love to meet you. Would you like me to connect you? I'm like, yes. Within seven days of me doing that, Dan Miller is a guest on my podcast. We have a conversation. I'm, like, beside myself. After that conversation was over, we stay on the line. He says, cliff, can I hire you to consult with me about my podcast? We schedule a consulting call three days later. He says, cliff, what do you think about my show. I said, dan, I love you. I love your book. I love what you share in your podcast, but your podcast audio quality is terrible. I've sent thousands of people to your book, and everyone loves it. I've sent thousands of people to your podcast, and nobody likes it. And they said the content is great, but it hurts the ears. He goes, cliff, wow. Thank you for having the courage to tell me that straight. It is in alignment with all of the feedback I get, and that's why I'm here. What do you have in your studio? Tell me about what you have learned and what you've chur. And I said, I bought all this stuff. And he says, how much would all that be? And he's like, I told him. And he says, can you order all of that? Put it in a box and come to my home in Franklin, Tennessee, this weekend? And I'm like, yeah. He goes, you can stay in my guest bedroom.
- [87:11]
B
You.
- [87:11]
A
I'll take you to a show here in Nashville. And then all day on Saturday, you can set up my podcast studio just like yours. That happened within two weeks of me saying that on the podcast. And Dan Miller, I can tell you right now, Dan Miller is the one who eventually introduced me to Michael Hyatt. Between those two people, I can personally trace more than $4 million in revenue to those two individuals. Individuals, wow.
- [87:42]
B
If anyone is just listening to this podcast and not watching it, I. I literally had to pick my jaw up off the floor right there. That is such great testimony to the four steps, and I think everyone needs to rewind that and listen to it over and over and implement it into their daily lives. Wow, Stephanie, you want to follow that up?
- [88:07]
C
I will. I. I will. I'm actually going to say Joanne Miller and also Paula Foster. I did not meet these two women. I mean, Cliff had already had a relationship with their husbands. Working relationship grew into friendships. I did not meet these two women until 2010 when we went on that cruise with where Dan had asked Cliff to speak. And we took our whole family on that cruise. We took our kids out of school and made it a learning experience, and we all went. And so we had been in business for two years at the time, maybe two and a half, because I think it was like spring when we went, and we had been podcasting for five years, and no one in our circle understood what we were doing. And so I had no one who I could lean on, who I could talk to. These women gave me acceptance and understanding and love and the best hugs ever. And while I Don't have a daily relationship with them. Now they are in my daily life because they gave me that when it was so needed. And now I can give it to others because I'm on the other side.
- [89:25]
B
Wow, that's great. Well, I have two amazing answers. Okay, next question. How do you find peace?
- [89:33]
A
Hmm. I'll go first. Peace is my natural state of being. So who I am, as created by the creator of all things, is one that is at peace. And so if I ever want to experience who I am at my core, all I have to do is drop everything that I hold in my mind that is not that, and then I experience it.
- [90:04]
B
Wow, that's pretty deep, Stephanie.
- [90:08]
C
I mean, I agree. I don't have to go looking for it. Peace lives within me always. And when other things try to come in and infringe on that, I just have to drop them away and I am at peace again.
- [90:21]
B
Yeah.
- [90:21]
A
Jesus said, the kingdom of God is within you.
- [90:26]
B
I love that. If you could sit with your younger self for just a moment, what is one thing that you would whisper to them?
- [90:33]
A
I would say, you know what? That's a different way of asking a question. I've been asked a lot. You know, what would you go back and say to yourself? I will say I'm going to answer this question even though it's worded slightly different, and I was tempted to go down a different path. But what I will say is this. I hope I would never be able to have the opportunity, opportunity to have such the option to do that, because I am who I am and I'm where I am today because of all of the fear, all of the anxiety, all of the decisions, all of the trial, all of the error, all of the mistakes, all of the not knowing if I would have gone back and said, it's all going to work out, and I can just tell you, blah, blah, blah, that it would change things and I would not want to change. And I've experienced a lot of negatives. We've talked about some highs here, but we've had some really low lows. But they were all necessary for me to be who I am today and how I show up in the world. So I hope I'm never given the opportunity to go back and whisper to that younger version of myself. He did just fine on his own.
- [91:47]
B
That's good. I like that answer. Very different, very out of the box and very insightful. Stephanie, how about you?
- [91:56]
C
I mean, I. I again, I just second that because. And I think he got it from me first because I. I have said many times, like, I can't change anything in my past because everything in my past has made me who I am today. And I like who I am to. I love who I am today. And she has the ability to help people where I was 20 years ago become who they want to be, be today. Like, I can't do any of that without all of the. The judgment and the uncertainty and. And the. The fear and, you know, all of the things that Cliff just names. I can't. I can't be who I am today without having experienced all of that.
- [92:37]
A
Yeah.
- [92:38]
C
So.
- [92:39]
A
Wow.
- [92:39]
B
I. I really. I'm gonna have to think about this one for a while, because I. I haven't heard anyone else have an answer like that before, and it's really profound. I really like that a lot. Guys, what is something that you've learned recently that made you stop and breathe and see life a little differently?
- [92:56]
A
Go ahead, Stephanie.
- [92:57]
C
Okay. I have. It's last spring. Last spring. So there's a window right here. You can see the sun has moved through the whole time we've been talking. So there's a window right here on the side of my desk, and it stays. The blinds on this window stay up so my dog can see outside. And I'm sitting here working one day last spring, and I look out, and at the corner of our house, there is a deer and her baby. And the baby is nursing, and it was the most beautiful thing. And they visit me every once in a while now. I watched them all last summer and into the fall, watch those babies grow up, and they're coming, and still they were here in the snow a couple of weeks ago. And it is the moment. It is a reminder that important moments can happen all the time. You just have to be moving slow enough to catch them. And because so much of our early. I mean, I. I said. I told you that, like, we were moving so fast. There were things that we didn't see, things that we didn't catch. And trying to keep all of our plates in the air, we couldn't add anymore, we couldn't see anymore. But taking the time to slow down and to notice the things around you, you can catch. True beauty.
- [94:22]
A
Yeah.
- [94:23]
C
And that was a. That was a true beauty moment for me. It was just a reminder to slow down, pay attention, and look at what's around me. Because it's. It's majestic and magnificent everywhere you turn.
- [94:38]
B
So good.
- [94:40]
A
So something recently that has come up that's been very profound. I use it all the time with my Clients, today, the most important story you will ever hear is the story you tell yourself about yourself and how that has shifted things for me just recently, eight years ago, I shut 100% of everything that was related to teaching people the technical aspects of podcasting down. And I divorced myself from my podcast Answer man brand. And I wanted to be known instead when people talk about me, I want people to know me as a business strategy and mindset coach instead. And so I, I even created a different jingle. I have this jingle that it's Podcast Answerman. And so I even created the alternate version which is Mindset Answer Man. And so for the last eight and a half years, I've been known as the Mindset Answer man instead of the Podcast Answer Man. And I've been adamant about not going to podcast industry conferences. I rose to the top of that industry. I helped lead conferences, I helped bring this industry many ways to what it is today. Trained more than 40,000 people around the world how to podcast. But I was just, I told myself this story that I'm spending way too much time answering people's technical questions related to what cable do I need? How do I solve this buzzing sound in the audio of my podcast? And I want to speak to people on a much deeper level. I want to get to that heart and soul level conversation, those limiting beliefs that are keeping them from pursuing what they feel most called to in the world. And I had this opportunity to work with these people who are being called to the entrepreneurial path. Aspiring entrepreneurs, early stage entrepreneurs, and established entrepreneurs. I want to go create this free the dream conference, these mastermind groups, these workshops to enable and equip these people to fully embrace this path and this journey, but not be alone through the process. So, and it was a very successful transition. I had built such a large thing. Everything in my world shifted when Covid hit, as did everyone's now. For me, it was great for a while because we were having our highest months ever because everybody is trying to figure out, oh my gosh, what do I do? And a lot of people like Cliff, I want in your mastermind group, I want your coaching. And that was great for the two and a half years after the COVID happened. But the thing is, is right before COVID the two and two or three years before COVID I was speaking 15 times a year on stages. And I use something called the prosperous coach method for creating clients. And I was meeting people all the time and it just had this pipeline full and I still benefited from all of the years from podcast Answerman. But slowly all of that came, you know, pretty much it got to the place where everybody who was in the pipeline who was going to become a client had pretty much already become a client. A couple which still trickle in here and there. And I, it just occurred to me, I came, I was watching a Facebook ad and I came across the PodTrack P4 next $179 device and I'm like, there's no way this could be good. I got it. Without even thinking, I turned on a camera, did a live stream. All of a sudden people are asking me technical questions. One of them was a guy from New Zealand who paid for an all expensive paid trip for me to come keynote his address, his conference back in 2015. And he's like, cliff, how is that different than the original? And do you recommend those of us who have the original upgrade? I'm like, well, I don't have the original, but this is Paul Spain. He paid me lots of money to come spin, to spend, to speak it as if he gave me 10 days, all expenses paid. I mean, I'm going to answer this question for Paul now in my mind, if I go back to 2017 when I shut things down, I'm prepared to spend the next four to six hours getting the original PDF manual, this PDF manual, and going through every line and finding out what's different and giving him a weighted graph in my opinion, on whether or not I think I recommend he upgrade. Well, without even thinking, I do what anybody does. Today I went into ChatGPT and said, hey, hey, I just did a review of this device. Here's the video, here's the transcript, here's Paul, here's who he is. This is why I want to give him the most thorough answer possible. This is the level I want to do it. I want you to do deep research, get the original manual, go over and compare it to this manual and I want you to show me your work so I can check everything. Two and a half minutes later I have what would be printed out on paper, a seven page response to that question. I then went over to Notion and pasted it in there and edited it to make sure it was all right. Copied it all and this, and I hit reply and I hit Paul comma and hit paste. The longest Facebook comment response I'd ever given anyone in my Life. And then 40 other people asked the same question on Facebook and on Twitter and on YouTube. And I'm just copy, paste, copy paste, copy paste, copy paste. And people are like, who spends that much Time answering this. How's this any different than the original boom, eight page document or whatever? And. And all of a sudden, I'm telling this in the green room, Mastermind, my mastermind group with Pat Flynn and some other guys. And I'm like, as I'm telling you guys this, I just realized something. If I would have had ChatGPT, or Large Language Model, AI tools and Notion as a knowledge database back in 2007, I would have never shut down Podcast Answer Man. I can answer questions in a breeze because I have the experience to know whether or not it's right or wrong that gives me that unique thing. Sure, anybody could go ask ChatGPT, but they don't know when it's making stuff up. I do this, put, oh, my gosh. And they said, cliff, when's Podcast Answer man coming back? I said, well, I'm getting ready to celebrate my 20th anniversary of podcasting in December. I'll announce the return. And so I brought back Podcast Answer man. And since then, I'm like, I think I'm going to have to bring back my Podcasting a to Z course where I'm going to teach people. But I have to update all of these tutorials and all this other stuff. And I never got really around to doing that. But it occurred to me, it's like, wait a second. Most all these people who know me and are referring Pete to me, they already have a podcast. And those who want a podcast, I don't have to teach them how to podcast. I already taught all the people who are teaching people how to podcast. I'll just refer them to them, but I'll jump on a call, have a conversation. Let's talk business strategy around it. Let's talk about what your message is. Let's give you a real picture of success, and I'll serve you. And maybe some of those people will become members of my mastermind group or the other things that I do. And I'm like, oh, my gosh. And so all of that to say I have turned on the top of Funnel. All of these people have said, cliff, I'm so glad you brought back Podcast Answer Man. For the last eight and a half years, I've not been no, I have not known how I could send people to you like I used to, but now it's very clear. Cliff Ravenscraft, he's the podcast guy. And it doesn't mean that I have to help them launch their podcast. It just means that I'm the person who, if anything comes up related podcast, have a conversation with Cliff and it's just turned on a flow of top of funnel that has just been waiting to come and I've avoided it for eight and a half years because of the story I told myself about that brand. So there you go. The most important story you overhear is the story you tell yourself about yourself.
- [102:46]
B
I like it. Cliff, Stephanie, thank you guys so much for coming on today. If the audience wants to find you, what's the best place for them to do that?
- [102:55]
A
Free the Dream Conference is what we did together. It is the biggest thing. I would encourage you to go to mindsetanswerman.com free mindsetanswerman.com free. You will get my one hour opening keynote address to the free the Dream Conference called All beliefs have consequences guaranteed to transform your life. I promise you you'll never be the same. All of your excuses will disappear after watching this one hour talk. It's a guarantee. In fact, if no matter what, if at any point after getting access to it, you unsubscribe to the email, it'll be perfectly fine. But I look forward to hearing from you because I get some amazing testimonials and here's what I want you to know. You're going to get an email follow up that'll suggest that you can buy the full course for $197. Do not buy that course. Instead, say that you heard about me on the Our Family Invests podcast. Send me an email. In fact, you're going to get an email that says did you get what you were promised? Just hit reply on that email. Say cliff, I heard about you on our family podcast. I'd like the free course and I will send it to you for free.
- [104:10]
B
Amazing. That's so good guys. Thank you so much. This has really been one of my favorite episodes. Amazing. I wish my wife was here. She will definitely be listening to it again and again and again. You guys are fantastic. Have an amazing day. Day.
- [104:26]
C
Thank you. You too.
- [104:27]
A
Many blessings.
- [104:29]
B
Whoa. I am still on a high from this one. I think what stuck with me from Cliff and Stephanie is how aligned they were as a couple even as they were grinding through 22 hour days and their health was deteriorating. Now for me, some of the biggest takeaways was that sometimes confidence might need to be borrowed.
- [104:47]
A
Right.
- [104:48]
B
I love that Stephanie had the confidence in Cliff before he, he had it in himself and that it wasn't until he was able to grow in that confidence that he began to thrive. Second was that grinding has a cost and they paid it right physically, emotionally, before they learned those boundaries and margin. Third is that your kids are watching the whole time, and sometimes they remember the presence more than the pressure you felt. And then one more thing that Cliff said that I really like is the most important story you'll ever hear is the story you tell yourself about yourself. Guys, if you got something from this, share it with your spouse or a friend who you think might resonate with it. Thank you so much. Really appreciate you. We'll see you on the next one.
- [105:34]
A
Well, there you go. I gotta tell you, this conversation that Stephanie and I had with Mike is very important. Important to me. I just heard so many things come out of Stephanie's mouth that I've not heard before. And I also had many realizations as I was going through this. And I. If there was nothing else you took away from listening to that conversation except for one thing, I would say that podcasting or. Or really any creative work that you get involved in, it's about who you become in the process. And podcasting has given me so many opportunities to show up in the world, sometimes revealing many of my character flaws along the way, but it's given me so much opportunity for growth. And who I am today would not be possible if it were not for all of the content that I've consistently created for more than 20 years. If there was anything in this conversation that resonated with you, I'd love to hear from you. Email me today. My email address is cliffliffravenscraft.com I can't wait to hear from you.