SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
This Teacher is Right About Education and You're Crazy if You Disagree with Joe Sual Sehy of Stacking Benjamins Podcast EP 245
20 Apr 2016
Chapter 1: What insights does Joe Salsih share about his entrepreneurial journey?
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base. You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have. I'm now at $20,000 per top. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark.
And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Okay, Top Tribe, this episode is brought to you by FreshBooks, the invoicing tool that I use to make sure I collect all my money in an efficient manner. To claim your free month, go to nathanlatka.com forward slash FreshBooks and enter the top in the How Did You Hear About Us section. Okay, Top Tribe, this week's winner of the 100 bucks is Jose Avila.
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Look, I think she's probably the new Shark Tank star. She'll replace Lori Greiner because her designs brought in over a billion dollars in revenue. A billion. Good morning, Top Tribe. I got to tell you, I hope you're not stuck in traffic. I hope you're getting a great jog in. Maybe you're feeling unmotivated on the jog, but I got to tell you, this guy is going to pump you up.
We've got a great guest this morning. His name is Joe Salsehi, and if I mispronounce it, he will correct me, but he is the host. of the award-winning Stacking Benjamins podcast. He spent nine years as Detroit Television's WXYZ money man and owned a top financial planning firm before selling it at age 40. Joe, are you ready to take us to the top?
I am ready, man.
Thanks for having me. Dude, of course. I'm stoked that you're on. I really am. Did I get your last name right?
No, but damn it. You know it to me. That's why everybody calls me Joe. It's all C high, but that's all C high. Okay. Very good. My nickname in high school was say he, cause they nailed it the way you did.
I love it. Okay. So, so you said you sold the finance, a financial planning firm at 40. How old are you now? I'm 40, 48. Okay. Just turned 48. That's 48 years young, 48 years young. So you started off in Detroit. Why did you leave the television network?
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Chapter 2: How did Joe transition from financial planning to teaching?
You own that Ameripro. You own that business. Right. Ameriprise is a bunch of franchises.
And so my franchise was... Exactly.
Got it. Okay. What'd you sell it for? How'd you sell it?
Yeah. I sell it for about three quarters of a million dollars. Okay. And I managed about $60 million, which people out there know wasn't a huge firm, but wasn't a tiny firm either.
Okay. So how does a $60 million kind of managed funds... How is a company like that valued? How do you get to $750 million?
Good. What you do is you take revenue and you multiply it. And the whole game is the multiplier, right? Whether it's two years, three years, whatever it's going to be. And then you take it generally because a lot of people that are going to buy that type of a firm can't afford to pay you all at once. It's a paid out. So I'll get paid once a quarter for X number of years. So there's two things.
Oh, so it's like an earn out. Exactly. How long are they going to pay me over so they may pay me more money if it takes longer? In my case, it was five years. And then the second piece is exactly how many years revenue are we going to take?
So of the $750,000, how much was cash up front? Uh, man, not a lot. Okay. Less than a hundred. Yeah. 75. Okay. Got it. 75 grand. And the rest is really like, Hey, uh, Joe, you're doing, I'm making this up 5 million in revenue per year. We're going to get pay you 10% of that until we get up to 750 K. Exactly.
They took the, well, they took the rest of it times five years, gave me a, an interest rate, a 6%. So I was earning 6% on the money. They still owed me over that time and then paid me out over the rest of that time. Very cool. Okay. So you sell that then what? Uh, then, so, so then I'm free to work anywhere, right? Yep. Uh, and so I decided to go back to school. I got my teaching license here.
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Chapter 3: What are the challenges Joe faced in the education system?
Right.
So I decided to create a website called the Free Financial Advisor. Once again, not worried about the money, just wanted to write and have fun, but I wanted to see my name out there. So we called it the Free Financial Advisor. That website, you know, it languished. There's a ton of blogs out there. My blog wasn't, I thought I was going to be the first guy on earth who wrote online.
How silly is that? Hey. Yeah. Yeah. financial advice online. And then I found out that everybody and their sister writes online. And so that's when then the podcast was born and podcasting was something Malcolm Gladwell talks about 10,000 hours. I have been a disc jockey in high school, a disc jockey in college. I also did a radio show in Detroit. I had the TV experience.
So doing online stuff where I was talking and where I was a spokesperson was something where I already had 10,000 hours. And that was I guess if I had a hard lesson from that time in my life, it was use your competitive advantage, right?
So what year did you launch the podcast? We launched it four years ago. Okay. So that would have been what, like early 2012?
Early 2012. Yeah. March of 2012.
Okay. March of 2012. And break down some of these numbers. So how are you doing in terms of, let's just do, what's frequency? Is it daily? Three times a week. Okay. And is it kind of interview focused? No.
And that's funny too, because I think that when you look at podcasts, like anything, you want to find your niche. I've been listening to podcasts since about 2004. So I go way back with podcasts because I'm a runner and I get bored. So what I did was I looked at financial podcasts and said, how come I'm not hearing the ones that the one I want to hear?
I really have this thing that I want to hear that I'm not hearing. And that was fun. I don't listen to podcasts for productivity. I know a lot of your listeners do.
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Chapter 4: How does Joe monetize his podcast effectively?
So you do it real time. You don't batch 20 episodes ahead of time.
No, no, we'll do two or three max. Two at a time. Yeah.
Okay, cool. And so help me understand where you're at now. Monthly downloads. 10,000. That's great. Okay. So you're doing 10,000 monthly. No, no, no, no, no. I'm sorry. 10,000 per episode. Okay. So what does that mean per show? I mean, per month. Yeah. You asked me a different question.
We're at about, well, per month downloads.
Let me just pull it up right now. We're at 152,000. And how how does that come? I mean, sorry, you said one hundred fifty two thousand. Yeah. So what is the I mean, are you guys focused on driving kind of that up or are you just like, hey, you know, it's been like that for the past few months. We're cool with that.
Now, initially, the goal initially. No, the goal is always to grow it. And it's not that I'm interested anymore in in cash. I'm really interested in being the best that I can be. And it's funny because, you know, on your last episode that I just listened to. Which one? It was the one with the CAC, Michael Perry.
Oh, Michael Perry. Yep. A SaaS entrepreneur. Yep.
Yes. Yeah. Michael Perry was talking about when you do something, you do it to be the best, right? Yep. So my goal every episode is to grow it just as a marker of us being everything.
Totally. I love that. Doing what we can do. What's it cost you to produce each month?
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Chapter 5: What strategies does Joe use to grow his podcast audience?
These marketplaces, man, are growing like crazy. I had a guy named Jason Vandenbrand on an episode 220, nathanmichael.com forward slash the top 220. And he's doing, I mean, he's like, they're growing so fast. He's loaned over $70 million in kind of the mortgage lending space. And it's all online. It's called lenda.com. Not a sponsor, but this marketplace, I have to research SoFi.
The space is growing fast.
Yeah, you know what you're seeing is that the reason it's growing fast is because Wall Street knows this is hot. And they also know that a lot of these companies are doing better work than they can do. I mean, Silicon Valley really has it when it comes to a lot of these fintech products.
We interview a lot of companies and the work they're doing in Silicon Valley is just brilliant and fintech in New York City and other places. I mean, in Texarkana, Texas, right? Yeah, totally, totally. So I absolutely love, love that. But, but the problem is, is that SoFi, SoFi lenders are getting squeezed out by, by Wall Street.
You know, if you or I want to take our money and we want to give it to SoFi to lend to somebody, we're competing against Wall Street who's doing the same thing now, which is why they're growing so quickly.
That's fascinating. And so what are you doing in terms of add up the sponsors monthly revenue for the podcast?
Yeah. Monthly monthly revenue is is right now because we're right in the middle of our contract renegotiation. So so we're at about fifty five hundred a month.
And what do you when you say contract renegotiation, you mean like a sponsor signing another six month agreement kind of thing?
We do every three months because we're growing so quickly.
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Chapter 6: How does Joe balance creativity and productivity in his work?
What are some things you're doing to grow it?
The pro man. Well, number one, we put out a quality product that people tell their friends about.
I totally agree, by the way. I've listened.
Yeah. Yeah. That is that is clearly number one. But then number two, I got to be on other people's shows. Right. I got to be on your show right now. Yep. You're on my show. So I got to be a great guest for other people. I got to be I have to be a guy with a point of view that people want to interview. And I found that that's the number one way, by the way.
I also still do a little bit of writing on other people's shows.
Yeah, I still do some guest blogging. That's not as much. But being on other people's shows is a great way to do it.
I love it. Well, guys, hey, we'll link to all of Joe's stuff in the show notes at Nathan Latka dot com forward slash the top two four five. If you're running or jogging or driving, just remember the number two four five. Plug it into your computer when you get home. Nathan Latka dot com forward slash the top two four five.
Joe, before we get into my favorite part of the show, if people want to connect with you personally online, where can they do that?
Yeah. You can hit us up at stackybenjamins.com. You can also listen to the show there or you can follow me on Twitter and it's Average Joe Money.
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Chapter 7: What lessons does Joe share about financial literacy and education?
Yeah, because between our editors, we're hiring a producer now, my partner who does the classes, just getting all and my co-host on the show, our contributors. Slack is a great way to take all these different conversations and put them in one spot.
And next question, yes or no, as you're building this empire, Joe, are you getting eight hours of sleep every night?
You know, I'm up and down on that. It's funny because I didn't really think about that until I knew you were going to ask this question. And so here's what I do. I have to be creative to have a good show. So I have to be healthy and I have to work out, but I also have to feed that creativity. So One night a week, I will stay up monster late, maybe 3 a.m.
And I'm watching past episodes of TV shows. I'm watching late night TV shows. I'm watching movies. I'm watching as much stuff to just feed my creative engine as I possibly can. I also saw 40 movies last year. Well, I saw 39, 62 the year before that. So I got to feed that. But then the rest of the time I'm up early because I do marathons. So it's funny.
So I go between being in bed by 9.30 and getting eight and a half hours of sleep or nine hours of sleep. And one night a week, I sleep maybe four hours.
Okay. Last question, Joe. How old are you right now? 48. Take us back 28 years. What do you wish 20-year-old Joe knew? Start earlier.
Take the Seneca advice. Don't spend your life preparing. Spend your life living.
folks you heard it from joe move and fire take action from selling his business back in tooth when he was 40 years old for 750 000 to moving into teaching a podcast that's doing extremely extremely well with a goal of 4xing the podcast over the next 18 months joe thank you for taking us to the top and thanks for having me nathan If you guys enjoyed Joe today, you will love Jaina from yesterday.
She's a mom of three and does a very clever thing each morning. You'll never guess it, but this clever thing has made her over $76 million. Top Tribe, I love giving away free money. I feel like Oprah giving away cars, and I have something special for you today. How many of you have heard our super sharp guests talk about success they've had with Facebook and Google Ads?
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