From food stamps to a $1M+ business with zero employees
Jordan Raynor sits down with Graham Cochrane, Founder of The Recording Revolution, to talk about his remarkable path from food stamps to a $1M+ business with zero employees, how you can turn nearly any skill into a content business, and how faith in Christ provides continued ambition for your work, even after you are financially “set.”
Links Mentioned
[0:00:05.3] JR: Hey there, welcome to The Call to Mastery. I’m Jordan Raynor. This is a podcast for Christians who want to do their most exceptional work, for the glory of God and the good of others. Each week, I’m hosting a conversation with somebody who is following Jesus and is also pursuing world class mastery of their vocation and the work they feel called to. We’re talking about each guest's path to mastery, their daily habits and how their faith influences their work.
Today, you’re going to hear from one of the most impressive entrepreneurs I know. A guy by the name of Graham Cochrane. Now, if you live in the world of music, you probably know Graham’s name but if you’re not in that world, you probably don’t so here’s a little bit about Graham, Graham is the founder of The Recording Revolution, a blog about the music industry, the latest recording technologies. Here’s what’s crazy: he built a seven figure business, they’re doing more than a million dollars a year in revenue, serving more than 20,000 paying customers in 200 countries and Graham is the only full time employee.
He’s got a couple of contractors but it’s basically just him. What’s even crazier is that when Graham started the business, he had nothing, his family was on food stamps and what I love about Graham’s story, is his tremendous humility throughout this whole process and certainly in retrospect. Very much embodies that lyric, 'All glory be to Christ the king. All glory be to Christ,' and he certainly lives that out.
Graham and I recently sat down in our both what we share a hometown, here in Tampa. We talk about his remarkable story, we talk about how you can turn nearly any skill or interest into a profitable content business and probably my favorite part of the conversation was Graham and I talking about our faith, how faith in Christ provides this continued ambition for our work, even after you are financially set. We’re not working just to earn a paycheck, we’re working, we have ambition for different things beyond finances themselves.
I promise you’re going to love this episode, this is one of my favorites that we’ve recorded thus far. Without further ado, here’s my conversation with Graham Cochrane.
[INTERVIEW]
[0:02:30.0] JR: Graham Cochrane, how are you doing buddy?
[0:02:31.3] GC: I’m doing great man.
[0:02:32.4] JR: Good, we first meet for coffee like, it was pretty recent, two months ago?
[0:02:35.9] GC: Pretty recent, yeah.
[0:02:33.8] JR: Conversations right across the street and my favorite coffee shop down here in downtown Tampa. I was really blown away by your story, right? I think your story’s really interesting. I don’t want to start there though, right? Let’s not give it all away.
[0:02:50.4] GC: Right at the beginning. Too easy?
[0:02:51.5] JR: Too easy. We'll get your story man, but first, tell us about your business. We’ve already talked about The Recording Revolution in the introduction, what’s your business, what do you do, who do you serve, who are your customers, just give us the basics.
[0:03:04.9] GC: On the recording side?
[0:03:06.2] JR: Yeah, we could do both sides. But let’s start with The Recording Revolution.
[0:03:08.8] GC: Yeah, In that business, I serve musicians who are getting into wanting to record their own stuff so they’ve got maybe a laptop, maybe they’ve got some recording equipment and they’re just trying to make their music sound good and they’re not audio professionals, they don’t care to be professionals.
Some of them want their music career to be professionals, they know their recording this to sound good and they just get on YouTube because they’re really frustrated and why does my stuff sound awful, you know? Then they find me and I show them what equipment they need to use, I simplify it for them, I speak in non-technical terms. I speak to them like musicians and then they’re like, "My gosh, this is really helpful."
That’s where they meet me and I kind of become like a mentor in that craft of helping their music sound good and from there, they go deeper with me, I have online courses and membership sites, where they can dive on deeper and get better at that kind of thing.
[0:03:59.8] JR: That’s great, you’ve had that business for 10 years?
[0:04:02.9] GC: 10 years. Next month it will be 10 years.
[0:04:05.1] JR: That’s awesome. And then recently, let’s call it a year ago or so, you launched this personal brand, Graham Cochrane, give us the real quick hit of what that business is?
[0:04:12.6] GC: Yup, teaching people how to start online passive income style businesses based around what they know, what they’re good at, sharing knowledge and information and how to either scale that if they’re starting out or a lot of people who don't want to bein a full time job and branch out into creating a business. I teach them how to do that.
[0:04:29.9] JR: You have a lot of authority on that topic, right?
[0:04:33.6] GC: Doing for a decade, so yeah.
[0:04:35.3] JR: That’s what you’ve been doing for a decade? Let’s talk about the story. I gave a little bit of hints of this in the introduction. I’ll just say this, we’ve been working together for two months, you remember my collaboratory for founders which we could talk about later on. But you’re just – I’ve been very impressed, you’re a masterful entrepreneur, you really know the craft, yo know how to serve your customers well.
But you didn’t always really see yourself as an entrepreneur, right? You fell into this, how I think a lot of entrepreneurs fall into business. This path to mastery, of mastery in this vocation of entrepreneurship is really interesting to me. Tell us about the story? Just take us back from the beginning, maybe pre-even moving to Florida and tell us how this all happened?
[0:05:14.4] GC: Yeah, I tell people I’m like the unlikely, fearful entrepreneur. Because I feel like people like you, from what I’m gathering, had vision at some point. I know your story has changed to to what it was you wanted to pour yourself into. But I never seem to have much vision other than the music career, I wanted to be the rock star.
[0:05:34.3] JR: Wait, what did you play?
[0:05:35.9] GC: What instrument?
[0:05:36.2] JR: Yeah.
[0:05:37.1] GC: Guitar, I’m a singer-songwriter, guitar and sing –
[0:05:40.0] JR: Interesting. Have we talked about the fact that I was in a rock band in college?
[0:05:44.0] GC: No, but I was reading about that somewhere, I was on the inter-webs and you were like a keyboard player.
[0:05:48.6] JR: Yes.
[0:05:49.5] GC: Dude, it’s just crazy.
[0:05:51.0] JR: I was so out of my element. I was in this band.
[0:05:54.5] GC: I’m trying to picture you right now though.
[0:05:56.5] JR: Picture, your like typical rock musician and go a mile past that in the opposite direction, that’s what I looked like. I saw a picture the other day of me, I was wearing a Tampa Bay Buccaneers T Shirt on stage at the Beta Bar in Tallahassee, playing keyboard. It was absurd.
[0:06:11.1] GC: Did you have long hair or anything like that?
[0:06:13.2] JR: No, at one point, I had pretty curly, like borderline afro hair.
[0:06:17.8] GC: Okay, we have the same hair then. We both secretly hide –
[0:06:20.9] JR: Yeah. Please keep this thing under wraps. But yes, I was in a band, I played piano. Most people almost a vocal major at Florida state for six weeks. I basically just did it just so I could say on a podcast 10 years later that I got into the Florida State School of Music.
[0:06:35.1] GC: It worked.
[0:06:36.2] JR: I could at six weeks because I wanted to make money.
[0:06:38.1] GC: Smart.
[0:06:38.6] JR: It was probably a good decision. Anyway, sorry. You want to be a rock star?
[0:06:41.9] GC: Yeah, we have similar backgrounds. That was the only vision. When I see entrepreneurs that have a vision, it’s very appealing to me in a romantic way like dude, I wish I had a vision for that. The only thing I had a vision for was music and what’s interesting is God used a lot of that in my story to actually help me with my business.
But I got to a point where I let that dream die, the vision die and just try to do the good thing and "get a job", and be a good Christian and take care of my wife and we are part of a church in Virginia that we loved, that’s why I really started to get disciplined and bought into the idea of church planning and after being in a small collage town for a while, my wife and I felt like we were up for an adventure.
She was looking actually into counseling psychology, maybe looking at different schools, we might move around. We already mentally ready to leave but then, my pastor and buddy at the time was saying, "Hey, we’re going to plant a church in the south." Originally it was going to be around University of Georgia in Athens and god just shifted us to Tampa to be near USF.
He said, "Do you want to come, do you want to help out with the worship band?" For me and my wife, it was just an opportunity to say hey, let’s just go and serve God on the volunteer basis, be a part of something new and have an adventure.
[0:07:52.5] JR: Yeah. This was pre-kids, right?
[0:07:54.5] GC: Yeah, we were pregnant at around the time we were in a sort of like year long praying, team building phase but no kids yet that were tagging along.
[0:08:03.0] JR: You moved down to Florida.
[0:08:04.0] GC: Moved down.
[0:08:04.7] JR: What happens next?
[0:08:05.5] GC: Well, you know, we picked the right time to move, middle of a global recession.
[0:08:09.4] JR: Ideal time.
[0:08:10.3] GC: Especially moving to Florida, it was hard. Florida got hit hard so coming from another place, I didn’t realize how tough the job market was specifically in Florida. All I needed was a job to get me down there. I didn’t need it to be my perfect career but it was hard to find. I had 50 interviews. 50 interviews for low level jobs. I just need something. I got a job in the financial services, helping with debt consolidation.
[0:08:33.9] JR: I didn’t know that.
[0:08:35.5] GC: Smile and dial.
[0:08:36.6] JR: Dial for dollars.
[0:08:37.1] GC: Yup. Got that job, it paid just enough base for me to like qualify for mortgage, get down here, we had our first baby. Then they ran out of money, four months into it.
[0:08:48.3] JR: The business?
[0:08:48.7] GC: The business. Now we’re down here planting a church which is like starting a business, we didn’t know what we were doing. I run out of employment and we don’t know anybody really and the people we came down with, they’re not connected either. In that moment, I felt, like okay, I have some savings.
I thought my plan was I have a freelance skill of recording and mixing bands because as a musician, that became my trajectory of I also got into recording and audio engineering, went to college for that. I’ve been doing that on the side so for me that was easy transactional but I didn’t know anybody locally so it was harder to try to call up previous clients, do remote work.
My scramble was try to get as much freelance work as I could and that’s when I thought, if I could get some freelance work, maybe my wife could do some part time photography work and maybe we can patch this all together. That was the soup in which I kind of started the Recording Revolution.
[0:09:40.6] JR: Yeah, it really started, you were doing freelance work for hire?
[0:09:43.5] GC: Yeah.
[0:09:44.3] JR: how did you get to this point where you're like all right, I don’t’ want to be doing this, I want to record YouTube videos and produce this like educational content.
[0:09:50.7] GC: I didn’t, I never made that decision. It was how God led me so I – between a conversation I was having with my wife one time, we had somebody over for dinner who is a musician and he asked the same questions about, "Graham, what audio equipment do you need to buy, how do I use it?" And my wife had this sort of funny moment where she’s like, "Babe, we’ve had so many of these guys over and you're always telling the same thing, giving them the same advice. I could tell them what to buy at this point, I could tell them how to use it because I know the script. You should just write this down for them so we don’t’ have to keep having them over for dinner." And have to listen. Just create a little resource.
[0:10:23.2] JR: I’m sick of having people over for dinner.
[0:10:24.2] GC: That’s basically what she was saying but in a nicer way. That idea was planted of what if I created a little resource for my friends. And then I thought, you know, what if I actually turn that into a blog on my freelance site and put some content out there in the world, maybe people would discover it, see what I’m doing in the studio, see a couple of videos, see that I’m credible and they might hire me to finish their projects or something.
[0:10:48.2] JR: Sure.
[0:10:48.9] GC: That was all as far as I thought of I would create some content to get some freelance work.
[0:10:52.9] JR: Is that how it works? You were creating content, you were getting freelance gigs as a part of that?
[0:10:57.2] GC: That was the goal, yeah.
[0:10:58.0] JR: When did you make the shift, there’s a pretty big shift there from being a service provider and doing freelance contract work, to what the businesses now, which is basically SaaS, right? It’s online education, Software as a service, right? I come to the website, I buy a course and I’m good to go. How did that happen over time?
[0:11:16.9] GC: Well, when I’m putting on content, thinking that it will just prove credibility with my skill and people want to hire me. What ended up happening is like people found the content somehow, they found the early YouTube videos, they liked them and then they would leave comments and say, "Hey, this is really helpful. No one’s explained this like this way to me or I finally understand said concept. Could you do another video on this or could you explain how to do this?"
There was more requesting for more content. If you can picture having no day job, plenty of time on my hands, in between freelance work that I could scrape together from past clients. I felt like I needed to keep myself busy, I need to go to my home office and feel like I was doing, I needed to control something, right? I felt like my whole life was out of control.
I needed to control something so all I could control was helping these people, this smaller group of people. Sure, I’ll shoot some videos, sure, I’ll write some articles but I thought I was filling time for the thing that God was going to do was bring me some freelance work. But he was doing was developing me as a content creator and educator and helping me build an audience and I didn’t realize — it took me a couple of months but really, the scheme of things, it wasn’t very long to realize, maybe this is the thing over here, the content that people are more interested in and so, I decided to – I almost think, you were describing this in your book Master of One, you're talking about in Called to Create and how that book sort of, it kind of took off.
[0:12:42.0] JR: Yeah.
[0:12:42.1] GC: In a way you’re like.
[0:12:43.3] JR: It’s like divine multiplication, you can’t explain it.
[0:12:46.4] GC: When you see god’s hot hand on it, you’re not going to sport and hot him. When you see God’s hand on it, you know, unless the lord builds the house, those who labor, labor in vain. I’m laboring on the freelance side, it’s kind of working. I’m not even trying hard and the audience is seemingly growing on the –
Now, I wasn’t making money on the content but you could see momentum and so I was smart enough to at least try to get behind what was happening here. Let me give that a little bit more of my attention.
[0:13:11.4] JR: Yeah. The reference of to Master of One, this episode is airing before the book’s out So Graham’s talking – this is great, I want it, hey. You’re like throwing softballs to like talk about the book. The episode is there, the book comes out, you’ve read an advanced copy and so the story Graham’s referring to, I think about this a lot actually. You just illustrated it really well, right? I think when you’re thinking about finding your thing, right? Or the thing, whatever that work is that God has called you to I this season of life.
Be on the lookout for where the Lord is multiplying your efforts far beyond what you could take credit for in your own feeble inputs, right? I tell this story in Master of One about how as an entrepreneur, I’ve had a good deal of success in my career but most of that’s been like pretty proportional to the amount of effort I put into the endeavor.
Right? It was a pretty – it always felt like this, like this one for one match. And then, when call to create came out, right? The community listening to this podcast, has just taken of. At such a great scale that I truly – I don’t know how this happened. Other than the Lord has blessed this and has multiplied that. I think that’s a good wisdom for anybody looking for what that thing is. It may not be the thing that you originally had intended but be on the lookout for how the lord is moving around you and where he’s multiplying the impact. Even if it’s something that’s not immediately generating revenue. Because for you, that wasn’t the case.
[0:14:36.8] GC: Right, don’t be stubborn. Don’t do the thing you want to do at the expense of the thing God’s like just putting his hand behind because the only negative about making content was well, how we’ll monetize this, right? That was the only question. My wife, she saw the same momentum I saw. How are these people finding your videos? You just put them out, nobody knows who you are, you don’t have a big following but they’re finding them and they’re connecting with them. There’s something here.
It sounds nicer to say now, 10 years removed but in the moment, right? Painting the picture, there was 18 months where because we were out of money, we burned through our savings and because we weren’t making hardly any money. My wife asked me to apply for food stamps because she had a friend whose husband lost a construction job, right? They were on food stamps and she was like, I didn’t realize how much money you can get for groceries, this will be very helpful.
There was a whole internal battle there where I refused, I told her no, I’m not applying for assistance because I’ve always had a job and I went to college and that’s just – we’re not those kind of people, it’s a lot of disgusting pride. If you think back, If I think back to the way I thought about it, it was a really humbling moment of like, that’s not me.
If I sign that application or apply for it, I’m waving the white flag and saying, I’m a 26 year old, I’ve never really amounted to much and I’m a failure. There was a lot deeply going on there, I finally relented because she asked again. If you picture, I’m in this soup of, I can’t believe I have to go to the store with my EBT card, the big American flag on it, it’s got a little flicker, now I think you can hide it a little bit now but now me and the cashier both know that the government’s paying for my groceries.
That was a lot of shame there for me. Then, when you're in that, I’m trying to build this content brand, I don’t’ even know what it is, I didn’t even know if it was a thing, I didn’t know the model that I know now. I know t here’s momentum but I don’t know how to monetize it. And having to convince myself that I’m not wasting my time and I shouldn’t just go to Home Depot and get a job. And having to see family members who ask you, hey, what are you working on?
[0:16:34.9] JR: Right.
[0:16:35.2] GC: I started a blog, a YouTube channel on audio recording, you know? They get it from a hobby standpoint. Yeah, that’s your skill but how does that make money? It’s just a little hard conversations to –
[0:16:46.9] JR: But is it that, this is part of what I love about your story, right? Part of that is like a leap of faith. Part of that is recognizing that there’s something here and I think that something is – you knew you were loving people really well. These people were talking back and saying you’re solving my problems, right?
It’s like yeah, I don’t know exactly how this is going to make money but I know I’m loving my neighbor as myself and the Lord is multiplying this beyond what I can reasonably expect. I mean, were you thinking in that moment, hey, this is clearly the Lord, I’m going to trust him and go down this path, was I conscious or is it just from retrospect that you see them?
[0:17:22.6] GC: No, it was definitely the Lord because my personality is very much like, try to do the right thing, if you're an enneagram person, I’m number one on the enneagram. I’m going to do the – there’s a one right way and I’m going to do the right thing. I also had been beating to my head, you know, provide for your families.
To me, to try to start a business would be selfish. This is my dream, this is what I want to go build at the expense of dragging my family through some uncertainty. I thought the right thing would be to have certainty in a paycheck. To be working on this business that made no money went against everything I wanted to do in my flesh. I was relenting to seeing some momentum and trying to trust the Lord but every day, beating my head against my desk, is this a good use of my time, creating content or not and so, it was definitely hard at first.
[0:18:08.4] JR: Fast-forward 10, nine, eight years, right? Let’s just talk Recording Revolution, where’s the business at today? Rough revenue, team, audience size?
[0:18:19.3] GC: Yeah, it does about a million dollars a year in revenue, it’s about half a million viewers on YouTube every single month.
[0:18:27.8] JR: You’re the only full time employee?
[0:18:28.9] GC: Yeah. I got two contractors, it’s crazy man.
[0:18:33.9] JR: It’s wild.
[0:18:34.5] GC: It is wild.
[0:18:38.2] JR: People listening to this podcast, I’m all in on like content as a business model, this business model makes sense. I’m just a big fan of content businesses, right? Like moving forward. I think that it’s a really interesting niche, man.
All right, you read master of one or you are reading Master of One. I’m really curious what you think you were one thing is? Because on the one hand, I could easily see it being, I do think it’s super broad by the way. I think it’s either entrepreneurship or like you’re an exceptional teacher. If you go – if you just google Graham Cochrane, watch his YouTube videos. He really is a natural teacher. What is your one thing?
[0:19:16.5] GC: I think it is teaching/encouraging.
[0:19:18.8] JR: /encouraging, interesting. Is that a part of teaching?
[0:19:22.0] GC: To me, it is. But it’s the way I like to teach and be taught, right? There’s different styles. In Master of One, you talk about you know, this examples of guys that are like super zeroed in on what their one thing and it’s very dialed in.
[0:19:35.0] JR: Super specific, yeah.
[0:19:36.1] GC: Then you use CS Lewis as an example, right? Where his super power, his one thing is actually teaching.
[0:19:42.7] JR: Very broad.
[0:19:43.4] GC: Very broad. As a professor, as obviously, on the radio. Mere Christianity was a radio program originally and just sharing and teaching, he has a way with analogies and I don’t’ want to compare myself to CS Lewis but when you made that connection, I was like, that makes more sense for where I feel like I’m at. I thought my one thing was music as a musician.
[0:20:01.4] JR: Like an industry.
[0:20:02.3] GC: Right. Then, the challenge was like I got to be an expert at my craft to be able to teach this and then I’ve realized which helps me now on this other business where I’m helping other people teach what they know, expert status isn’t needed, it’s not just knowing the craft to be a teacher, that’s another skillset.
There’s people that know audio better than I do but cannot teach it to save their life or if they do, they’re so boring, God help them, they’re so boring.
[0:20:27.2] JR: Right.
[0:20:28.7] GC: Being able to –
[0:20:29.0] JR: It’s an academic.
[0:20:29.9] GC: It is, yeah. That’s not what everybody needs, there’s a place for that on the YouTube world, I’m realizing, I have an ability to communicate an idea and simplify it down, so that someone understands it. Understands it, feels like they can do it and is motivated to go do it. Those are really important to me when I’m teaching. I feel like maybe that’s with the gift is, I’m shifting that over to now business. I’m not the best business person or the best audio engineer but I can teach those things that I know.
[0:20:56.9] JR: Yeah, that’s interesting. For those of you who haven’t read the book yet. I do talk a little bit about this. I think it’s like an interesting distinction. I think when people hear the title, Master of One, it can be intimidating, it’s like what is my one thing that I’m going to be great at in this season of life vocationally?
I do think most people’s one thing is really broad. You mentioned CS Lewis, his one thing was not writing. His one thing was not – he did a lot of different things but as I sat down with his step son and was talking about Jack’s story, he was like no, Jack’s one thing was teaching, he was a masterful teacher and he applied that in a few different contexts.
He applied that to fiction, to writing nonfiction, to teaching people on the BBC and all those different things. I think that’s interesting. For you, your one thing’s teaching, encouraging, how have you pursued mastery, how you gotten world class at that thing? How have you developed those skills?
[0:21:48.5] GC: Just a lot of it. What I love about being a content creator is pumping out a ton of videos, pumping out a ton of – doing a lot of webinars, just the more I teach and then get feedback, which I love about the internet because then you can get instant feedback as to which videos are landing or not.
Or where am I not clear? Or, what’s interesting to me is, what are my distinctives in my brand. In the audio space, I was just teaching all things audio recording and then it became very apparent early on — okay, people tune in to me because I focus on these three things. For me, he’s all about championing affordable equipment, so I’ll make fun of the people to say you need a thousand dollar micro – you can do it with a hundred dollar microphone.
There’s a couple of different things that became grandisms that people realize, they either like or don’t’ like. The distinctive, Graham, if you follow his audio videos, he’s going to land in this camp. Now, I’m having to relearn that in the online business space. Now, if I’m teaching business, figuring out what is it that I am distinct about and the way I think about business. And then, the more you share it and teach it, you’re repeating it and as an author, I’m not an author, maybe yet, maybe I will be.
[0:22:58.2] JR: Yeah.
[0:22:58.7] GC: But I’m sure as you and you’re kind of doing all the rounds with Called to Create, a lot of the stuff in the book that you would repeat or your main thing, the main – you start to get really dialed in on what you know are your big things and your big topics and that just comes from doing a lot of it. I think it’s kind of messy at first, you’re throwing out a lot of – here’s what I know but then finding out what connected with people and just like with the hot hand, which business or opportunity. It’s the same thing, which content of mine am I going to get really behind?
[0:23:26.4] JR: Yeah, it’s looking for feedback, so we look for feedback from the Lord and trying to understand like where he’s moving. But every masterful entrepreneur I’ve ever talked to ever has mentioned in some way, shape or form, this idea of humbling themselves and listening to customers obsessively. Listening to the audience obsessively and like really understanding them, right?
That’s a form of loving your neighbor as yourself and that’s how – it’s so simple. But it’s also really hard, it’s hard to get that feedback, especially when it’s critical, especially when something’s not working and admitting that.
In the book, I talk about discipline over time as one of the three keys to mastery. You know, it’s a theme I certainly see in your story, you spent 10 years. people look at Recording Revolution like my goodness, a million dollars, one full time employee, two contractors, this is crazy but you spent 10 years building this thing. Well more than the 10,000 plus hours that Anders Ericsson says we need to do I purposeful practice to get masterful at our one thing.
I guess my question for you is what encouragement would you give to somebody whose earlier in that path to mastery. They just started the blog, they just started that YouTube channel, maybe their content creation, maybe they’re a content creator, maybe they’re trying to write a book or starting a business. What encourage do you have for them? Is the fight worth it? Is the fight for 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 hours of practice worth it?
[0:24:47.0] GC: 100% I tell people, if you can have 30 minutes a day, you can do this because you see the people pumping out a ton of content, well, if you don’t have that kind of time, you don’t have that kind of time. I would rather work on trying to get one article out a week, one video out a week. Just one thing out, you know? Because you need to do a ton of it to get good at it for one. But you need to start because the way the internet works, at least if you’re going to be content focused or be online, is you only have credibility if you have content behind you.
The YouTube channel, if you’re looking at how to fix a car and you go to YouTube channels and one guy’s got two videos and one guy has 200 videos, you just – you trust the guy with 200 videos even if he’s awful. At least, initially. Because he’s been at this for a while, and the algorithms support that but I think there’s just the get started aspect of you don’t know. A, like you said, what a customers want until you put out a ton of content. I was just talking to Darren, one of the guys in our collaboratory, just this morning.
He was interested in creating content, he’s asking me about it and I was talking with him about where he wants to create content and he was thinking about what product – you don’t even know what product to make yet so don’t worry about that. Just become known, in some little corner of the internet, what you’re good at and help these people, create content and then learn which - where they’re getting stuck and where they want help to go deeper.
It’ll clue you in to what to build but we don’t’ know until we get started. It is the ultimate learn as you go thing but it's a really safe place I think. The only hang-up that I was talking about this was someone recently is, people are afraid to make content because you’re developing in the public eye.
[0:26:19.5] JR: Yeah, but when you're starting out, you’re not. I tell a lot of you know, entrepreneurs whether they’re content entrepreneurs or not. You know, when nobody knows you, embrace that, take advantage, it’s the best time, you can make all sorts of things. We’re launching this podcast after we’ve got two books, after we’ve got this big email list and you know, it’s funny, I was thinking about like man, if we didn’t have those things, I could do whatever I want, I didn’t need this fancy microphone or this sound proof room, right?
But we got an audience, we can’t afford to make those types of mistakes. Take advantage of being unknown. That’s such a beautiful place to be, you can experiment and be so much more artistic and creative and just – you really have nothing to fear at that point. I want to go back to something you just said, I talked about this a lot with a good friend of mine who is way smarter than me about content and the trajectory of like content businesses.
I think a lot of people are exhausted on content. I think a lot of people at this point feel like I already have too many podcasts, I already have too many book recommendations. But at agree with you that we’re at the beginning of this wave of content and it’s only going to grow, why do you say that? Beyond the obvious — like the internet’s ubiquitous but what’s – why are we at the beginning of this content wave?
[0:27:32.9] GC: Okay, no one knows the future, I don’t know the future but what we’ve seen in the last 10 years. I think I was really fortunate to start creating content when I did in a lot of ways. But I think like, that wave will look like nothing in the scope of the next 50 years. Anyone starting in the next five to 10 years will be at the beginning of this wave because we’re still – people are still clued into the idea that you can learn something online.
Not just like a helpful little tip but I can learn a whole career’s worth of education. With college expenses getting crazy, and we’re seeing how that’s going to – I mean, the next generation’s going to be really confused is college or even really worth it and for some people, that’s a no-brainer but it’s almost not the no-brainer it once was.
People still need quality education and in the gig economy and there’s some – sometimes you just need to learn enough to do one thing well to make some money over here so that you can do your other thing over here. There’s going to be more need for people to get information online that’s professional, that’s good and I still think people are still so new to this idea so there’s one – it’s not new to me because I’ve been learning online forever and I wasn’t new, people were teaching stuff online in the 90s and making a living off of it.
But, I think there’s a lot more people realizing, even with Masterclass, you ever seen Masterclass?
[0:28:45.3] JR: Yeah, I love Masterclass.
[0:28:45.9] GC: They’re kind of late to the game but all of a sudden, people are – gosh, you could learn how to do whatever from so and so? Yeah, that’s been going on forever but now they just have celebrities. Getting a nice advance to shoot a video and do this thing. I think you’re going to see more people accepting internet as a legitimate way to learn.
Then, here’s the thing, the problem with content because what you said was spot on, people are overwhelmed. Overwhelm is the problem, there is just too much. So we are almost seeing a people rejecting content because it is just too much and there is this built in guilt and shame of like I haven’t listened to all of Jordan’s podcast episodes that are –
[0:29:19.9] JR: You should feel guilty about it.
[0:29:22.3] GC: Yeah that is why I said that where I was sneaking that in. So there is all the good stuff I want to watch or listen to but I am so busy or you get online to learn how to do something and everyone is telling you a different way to do it. Just take like what are you supposed to eat? Is keto all right? Is it plant based or carnivore diet? So overwhelming because there is so much. What people need now is to combat the overwhelm.
We need content creators who will come in and simplify. So I think because there is so much overwhelm there is so much more opportunity out there for a new content creator who will come out not just throw everything at somebody but look at their niche and say, “Where is their confusion? How can I help people just have some clarity of step one do this, step two, do this?”
[0:30:04.9] JR: It is a Dave Ramsey model. He is the ultimate master of this, right? They have made getting out of debt not the process but the communication of the process, super simple to understand. They literally call it baby steps, right?
So I am obsessed with people’s routines and habit. I am interested in yours so let’s talk about a typical day for you from the moment you wake up from the moment you go to bed, what does a day look like for Graham Cochrane?
[0:30:30.5] GC: So it changed in the last year because we put our kids in a different school and it is farther away and they go to school way earlier. So my morning got much earlier in the last 12 months. So in the last year it has been on a good day up at around five because from five to six is the only quiet time in the house that I get before I got to get everyone out the door. So that is like time to pray, drink coffee, so that I can be awake to pray, read my Bible and sometimes I just sit in a quiet house because it’s quiet and I have a lot to do mentally.
So I just try to sit and listen because I don’t listen a lot from the Lord. So I just sit in sometimes not like I am hearing anything but that is the five to six but then six is getting my girls out of bed and we’re packing lunched getting them out of the door quickly in the next 45 to 50 minutes because we are leaving at 6:55 in the morning to take them to school. So that is the morning but my wife and I alternate what days we’re taking the time to school.
We have this place downtown so we can work downtown if we need to but I work Mondays through Thursdays and I basically am about nine to two and I am not really good in the afternoons. I am usually brain dead and I am pretty much gotten super-efficient with the work so that I only need a few hours a day to chip away at both brands. So by 2:00 I am usually done either picking up the kids from school or I just get out of my home office and go for a bike ride or go for a walk or clean up the dishes or something.
And it is just Monday through Thursday and pretty much the afternoon is needing so we are just home with the family. So I just get the big things done in the morning basically.
[0:32:01.7] JR: So those afternoons when you are doing dishes, when you are going for a bike ride, is that when you have your best ideas?
[0:32:07.6] GC: Yes, so if I go for a walk around the neighborhood –
[0:32:11.4] JR: What is an example of one of them recently and where did the idea come from?
[0:32:15.5] GC: Yes, so last month I launched this new membership site on the Graham Cochrane brand to help entrepreneurs who already started their little online business, grow it. So not the basics of having a startup, they are stuck, how to grow it. That was going on a walk a few months ago. I just launched a second product that didn’t do well. It was advanced content, how to grow things but it is really good but I know the positioning was wrong but it just didn’t click with my audience.
A few sales, it didn’t do what it should have done and I was frustrated. I am going for a walk and like, “What do I do with that content? It is so good, where did I miss it? What do my people really want?” And thinking about a lot of the feedback I have been getting and realizing people have so many questions. They want a lot of handholding, they don’t want to be alone. All this stuff I knew came and I was like, “I need a membership community for this brand.”
I actually didn’t want to build one because I didn’t really want to do it personally. But it is what people seem to be asking for. So I flushed out what would it look like, what would the price point going to be, how involved am I going to be, how is it going to help them achieve their goals? It all came together on a walk, like months ago. And then that is when I got back in my calendar, okay, how long will it take to build this out, what would my promotional calendar look like?
And so we just launched that a month ago and it did phenomenally well and I am in there helping people. So that was the result of clarity for me. I get a lot of feedback from listening to customers. For some reason it doesn’t connect until I am out on a walk.
[0:33:36.0] JR: Yeah, totally. There is I think Cal Newport said this in Digital Minimalism.
[0:33:41.4] GC: That is a good book yeah.
[0:33:42.5] JR: It is a great book. I think he was quoting somebody else because there’s never been a good idea that didn’t occur during the walk, right?
[0:34:52.1] GC: Didn’t occur during solitude that might be right when your emotion is the same when I ride a bike because I am not going to end up cycling. Two years ago my neighbor is a cycling coach, he got me to cycling but he always said when I am riding, when I am physically in motion I just get so much clarity of thought.
And I don’t know what it is about moving, obviously visual stimuli being outside and I have heard so many people say they just start to walk around the block in the city or walk around their office or go out. I don’t know what happens in your brain but so much makes so much sense.
[0:34:18.1] JR: Yeah, so you talk about launching new products. You and I have talked about ambition a couple of times. So I want to talk about this for the good of us but also hopefully for the good of listeners.
[0:34:32.2] GC: It is all selfish though.
[0:34:33.5] JR: These are very selfish questions that is all I ask on The Call to Mastery. You don’t have financial incentive to grow your business for you. You are making plenty of money right? You have a very little, very small cost structure and yet I do see you being ambitious for these projects, right? You talk about listening to your audience what they need and wanting to deliver a solution to them. So why are you still going? What’s driving? Obviously I love it and obviously I think I know what the answer is and that is why I am asking but why are you still ambitious for these brands?
[0:35:02.4] GC: Okay, so I am on the fence. There is two sides of the fence the way I view it. I view it as from the selfish standpoint and I don’t mean that word in the negative sense but from what I need out of the business because I started this business out of a need, right? We’re on food stamps, have no money and I just want to provide. That was solved within two years of the business and then grew beyond what I needed it to be and then we had some fun and then I realized this is a whole different thing.
And now I have to learn about stewardship in a way that I never thought I would have to. I always was tithing as a Christian and all of these things. But you don’t know how hard stewardship is until you have given more to steward then you realize there is a lot of interesting emotions that come depending on your personality. So that has been a whole different ball game but on the selfish, what do I need for my family, that is covered.
So on my days where I am tired or on my days where I am just like, “Why do I keep pumping up content? Why do I have two brands now?” Like when I am asking myself these questions is because I’m like, “I just want to take a break.” And I take plenty of breaks but part of me just wants to get on Google, look at all the early retirement blogs, the FIRE movement, Financial Independence Retire Early, I sort of dork out with these guys and I’m like, “Why don’t just retire in my 30’s? I could do that.”
And that is the side of me that’s like I’ve got everything I need. I am tired, don’t I deserve a break? And then it sucks being a Christian because then you’ve got – don’t quote me on that God, but you know the Holy Spirit convicts you of like, “But it is not about you,” right? God gave it to you as a gift but it is just not about you. So if it is not about you what else is God doing? Okay, so it is about also the people that I am serving and so when I look at let’s say the Recording Revolution brand, the first one.
I didn’t start a second business because that one was dying. I stared it because God told me to start something new like you got this other thing you can share. So don’t just keep it to yourself. Unload everything that you have known about online business in the last decade but he’s only blessing the first one still. So he hasn’t closed the door so he is telling there is still people out there that I can serve. So when I read Called to Create and really that sealed the deal with Every Good Endeavor started it and then you seal the deal and that is why those two books were so good together.
[0:37:09.5] JR: Literally the best compliment I have received, yeah.
[0:37:11.2] GC: Well dude those two books together –
[0:37:11.8] JR: Connecting those two in the same conversation.
[0:37:14.2] GC: Because that gave me verbiage to understand one reason why to work, which is love neighbor self and serve and create culture just literally make the world a better place in the cheesiest sense like in my little corner of the weird audio universe like audio engineers and musicians. I can make musicians better and their recordings better and all the people they touch, right? And so if I can still help people I should, as long as God hasn’t told me not to or I just hate it or it is at a detriment to my family.
So there is the — because it still helps reason and then personally and we know this is entrepreneurs too, I love entrepreneurship because not only can you help people but you can create wealth. You said another awesome passage. You know Deuteronomy or I think it was Deuteronomy, right? About it’s really God that gives us the power to create.
[0:38:02.2] JR: Yeah, wealth and honor come from you alone for you rule over everything. Power and might are in your hands and at your digression, people are made great and given strength.
[0:38:09.5] GC: Absolutely. So it is not us that make the wealth but we’re the ones God’s called to do the physical work of creating the wealth and having been an employee and being on that track my whole life and growing up with two employees for parents and not having an entrepreneur in the family. So I never understood, I understood you make money one way, you work and you earn it. Now being on the entrepreneur side, I see it as like entrepreneurs are the future for any kind of ministry.
Because all ministries the only way they make money is to fund race, which is a skillset but it is the skillset of asking entrepreneurs for money basically or someone, someone who’s got money. So the responsibility that we have, the ability to create wealth to fund charities, ministries, anything or to even help your neighbor. That side of it is really important to me too and maybe it is because God had me start my business literally the same month we were starting a church.
And seeing them running in tandem of life. I have been a part of a church plan for 10 years. I have been part of a business for 10 years and seeing, how not only the business helps my life and then helps the millions of people I am reaching through this crazy YouTube channel but being able to fund my church and then other ministries from it, seeing the importance of it, I see the connection that I if I can and I am not dead yet, create as much wealth as possible with the goal of being able to fund as many ministries as possible, why not?
[0:39:35.9] JR: Yeah, I think you have a really holistic view of the purpose of profit, which I talk about in Called to Create, right? So you do have this perspective of I keep going, I continue to be ambitious for my work because it creates wealth and that wealth can be used to be generous. But you also don’t see that as the exclusive purpose of profit, right?
You see the purpose of ambition to keep going and serving those customers well, right? There are people who have problems, I know how to solve those problems. You’d almost be a poor steward of that knowledge and those skills and the opportunities that the Lord is putting in front of you not to capitalize on it and bring solutions to market and solve those people’s problems, right?
[0:40:18.9] GC: You know the crazy thing in my business if you are a content creator, 90 to 95% of the people you serve don’t pay you for anything. So I am not even making profit.
[0:40:26.9] JR: It is the ultimate form of generosity.
[0:40:28.6] GC: Absolutely, so in that way it is even more important. It is like dude, if I stop all of these people who don’t pay me will lose out too. So it is not even just my customers.
[0:40:36.7] JR: I love that. So you’re a member of my newly launched – we actually haven’t talked about that much. We sent one email to my list about this, The Master Collaboratory for Founders, which is basically a fancy way of saying it is a community group for really high caliber of Christian entrepreneurs.
We have been doing this for a few months now meeting once a month for a couple of hours. Why did you want to be a part of that? Why is it important for us as Christians to being community with not just other Christians but other Christians who are ambitious for their careers?
[0:41:09.4] GC: Yeah, I mean I joined primarily to meet new people and be connected because everything I do is so isolated. You know I don’t have a team that I work with, I have a little bit of a contractor team but they are all remote all over the world and so I am literally alone and I have been alone for 10 years. So part of me is that aching for community just to talk to other people that are like me and even in my church there is not many entrepreneurs.
I can only think of one or two, so even the people in my Christian community don’t understand the way I think or what I do for a living or the burdens that I bear that are unique to being an entrepreneur and then the entrepreneurs that I know are not Christians. So to have both together is really important to me but also accountability too. I feel like it is really scary that God has given us the business that’s super successful. It is like, “Do you really trust me God?”
It is a lot of money, it is a lot of responsibility. I could just derail this whole thing and just do it for me. So I even like having the money conversation is very interesting to me. Like I want and we haven’t really dived into this a lot yet in the collaborator but even offline conversations we can have with the guys in the group, I want to know how other entrepreneurs who are Christians think about stewarding their wealth personally like I want to ask questions how much house is too much house?
How much car is too much car? Again maybe that’s the one in me anyway, what is the right Christian car? But also I want to be able to be in the light and have other people who understand I say “problems” you know, air quotes. The struggle of like I want to be held accountable by somebody that understands similar situation. So that is one of the reason why I joined and then also I learned, I think I leaned the most in business by looking at other industries.
I don’t want to just stay in my little pool of mine. I am really good at actually ignoring my industry and better at paying attention to other industries and I don’t know if I consciously decided to do that but it has served me well. So I wanted to join a group of people that don’t do what I do at all.
[0:43:08.5] JR: What industries have you as a content producer, which industries have you learned the most from?
[0:43:14.4] GC: Like everything that is just different. So I will look at airlines like how they structure their pricing of things like I learn a lot about up sells and priorities through the same stuff and premium products from airlines like first class flights are just fascinating to me you know? It is just a fascinating business model. I offer super ultra-premium stuff that doesn’t make sense for most people, looking at technology companies like Apple and Amazon.
I look at them and the way they think about products I don’t look at digital content creators really especially not in the audio space like when I started and there is a bunch of audio blogger people and we found each other, we were friends and I have friends and I like them but I never paid attention to their businesses. In fact maybe it is insecurity but the more I am on everyone’s email list that is doing what I am doing and I see all the awesome stuff they’re doing the more insecure I feel about myself. So I just unsubscribed to all my friends.
[0:44:07.0] JR: You don’t pay attention to competition?
[0:44:08.6] GC: No.
[0:44:09.1] JR: I don’t either and I always felt self-conscious about this but I really –
[0:44:13.0] GC: It’s the best thing ever.
[0:44:14.1] JR: So you’re like all in on it. You don’t think it is a weakness?
[0:44:17.3] GC: No, I think it is a super power to ignore. Now to be aware of best practices can be helpful.
[0:44:25.4] JR: But I actually think that is overrated because I think you could find most of the time better best practices in other industries.
[0:44:32.0] GC: Well yeah but I just don’t care what they’re doing because I don’t serve them, you know? They’re not my customer.
[0:44:37.1] JR: They’re not your customer. They are never going to pay you.
[0:44:39.5] GC: No and I see in other small industries like if you look at somebody wise, a photographer and I have interacted with a lot of photographers, if you interact with a lot of photographers but let us say wedding photographers. I am going to pick on wedding photographers, all their websites are the same because they just copy each other and they’re all awful. There is a very few select people that are crushing it and if you look at their sites they’re different.
So many of these photographers and their whole about me section is really about them and your about page should never really be about you. It should be about your customer, right? It should be qualifying who are we for, we help you do this but they are all flowery about me and I feel like they all look the same and how do you know that that person you are copying is effective? You don’t so I have been really served well by ignorants.
It is good for my soul because I don’t get insecure but it allows me to keep my head down and just think about what am I good at, what are the problems that my customers are facing? How can I serve them?
[0:45:30.5] JR: I love this idea of selective ignorance, like conscious ignorance. So I don’t think I have ever talked about this on the podcast but I don’t read news. Like period full stop. My information consumption is almost zero, right? And that includes competitors. Now when I need information, I think this is like Tim Ferriss 101. When I need information I go out and I find it, right? And I hear about truly important things in conversation. So do you read news?
[0:46:00.8] GC: So I am weird in that. You get an actual newspaper delivered to us every day.
[0:46:05.0] JR: So I actually love that idea. I don’t know why I like that but when Kiera and I go away for a weekend, we will always read the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times and that seems to be very relaxing.
[0:46:14.8] GC: You know why I physically – this is maybe a tangent but why I physically like a newspaper is because again, going back to overwhelm, scrolling through CNN or scrolling through USA Today it never ends.
[0:46:24.0] JR: It’s finite in the newspaper.
[0:46:25.6] GC: Yeah newspaper is finite. This is all the important news for 24 hours and you get a sense of accomplishment where I just feel like I just lose my soul when I am on Twitter or just it never ends. So it never satiates.
[0:46:36.1] JR: Yeah it is all the news that is fit to print but on the internet that is unlimited. So hey, I know you have gotten some advice in the past that I want to talk about. I think anytime somebody has a large audience or a large platform, be it a million YouTube subscribers or professional athlete or Justin Bieber who’s newly found in Christ, praise the Lord, I think there is this expectation that we are going to automatically start talking about Jesus everywhere we go, right?
Okay, am I getting you fired up? All right, so I have to ask the question. You made a very conscious decision not to do that. You have been told, “Hey you have a million YouTube followers, why aren’t you sharing the gospel?” I think that advice is well intentioned but I think it comes from some pretty old thinking and maybe some bad theology. Talk about your perspective about this.
[0:47:24.3] GC: I am so glad you brought this up. So this is interesting to me. So lately I have been having those people in my life that have been giving me this council and say, “Do you see how big your following is?” And what they are saying is exactly what you are saying. "Are you stewarding that audience well? Shouldn’t you be sharing about Jesus?"
And it’s never made sense to me in what their saying where they want me to make a video explaining the gospel, right? Because maybe people will unsubscribe but at least for a moment, half a million people will listen.
[0:47:52.3] JR: The modern day track dropped into YouTube format.
[0:47:56.5] GC: Boom and I never liked tracks anyway. So this is probably one of the things that drew me to you. It makes so much more sense to me at least that okay, here is a personal example. My buddy who is a pastor and he is still a pastor at my church and I love him to death, we have early conversations on when we started the church where even before that, he counseled me to become a pastor and he was like, "Bro," because again he saw a communication skills maybe teaching. He said, "You should go to seminary, you would be a great pastor."
[0:48:27.5] JR: You went there.
[0:48:28.4] GC: Well I appreciate it and I felt both, I admired him so I am going to take what he says and really respect it. I thought wow, finally something I could be good at and it will be for the Lord, you know? Check the boxes, exactly. So I was like, “This sounds great,” and I started to tell people I am going to go to seminary to be a pastor. But it never actually settled in my heart like there was never – God never said yes, however you want to define it.
I never felt God’s hand being like yes. I always felt like a lot of hang ups and closed doors and just like slow movement and not a lot of excitement. So I felt guilt and now I am blogging about audio that’s like how spiritual is that. But I always joke about with my pastor buddy because he has been so focused on ministry for years and has had an impacts on so many people but he jokes on me now. He’s like bro, you have an impact on so many more people than I do because you got half a million people every month that watch your videos in over 200 countries like that’s incredible.
So he sees it now and I see now in retrospect, God snuck me in to have an impact in a different way to more people. So I’ve had a larger impact because I haven’t been A, reaching Christians specifically but B, because I haven’t just been sharing the gospel, people come to me because they want their music to sound good or in the second brand, they come to me because they want to learn how to start an online business.
So I better deliver that and I love that Martin Luther quote. That I don’t know if it was really Martin Luther but you know, "A good Christian cobbler isn’t a good Christian cobbler because he puts crosses on the shoes, it is because he makes good shoes." And so I am trying to make good shoes. That is how people trust me and you talk about being winsome and I think it is the best word. A, I deliver what they are looking for like any business that does a good job can do that. Okay, I like this brand, I trust this brand but it gives me the opportunity to speak into their life –
Because as a content creator, I can share whatever I want to share. So I am very intentional about pushing my world view and I push it in ways that I think might be connecting with them. So I don’t share Jesus all the time, what I share is the value of family, the value of church, talk about going to church like it is a normal thing just like anybody else. But whatever they do is normal, it is normal to them.
I talk about generosity, I talk about not working and overworking.
So I try to combat overwork and workaholism. I talk about serving people. So I am trying to teach about Christian principles to be light in the darkness and what’s crazy is that just by being an open Christian and then doing your work and not hiding that I am a Christian because some people hide that they’re Christian and I actually had marketing people tell me you need to hide that you’re a Christian and I won’t do that. No I will be blatant Christian.
That is the point of being alive as a Christian is to let people know that you are different but that is a lot of times enough to get people — there is people that have email, this is the craziest thing, people that have emailed me through the audio side of things, right? Email me saying, “I was considering suicide but after watching your videos your music, audio-videos." By the way, “And just learning about you like I had decided not to commit suicide. I found a church, I was walking to a church one day and God saved me,” you know?
Or people that were following the Lord and walked away, a lot of those who were like, “Well this guy doesn’t seem like a crazy person and he still goes to church. Maybe I missed something or maybe that I was burned by a pastor but I missed something. Maybe I needed to go to a different church.” So people have gone back. A lot of returning people to the faith or just people who are spiritual.
Who like to dive in with me and talk about, you know they say the universe gave them this and I say God and they think it is the same and it is not but we could have conversations about there is something bigger than just living for self and so it has given me so many doors that are open just by serving people well and not dropping the virtual tract on them.
[0:52:16.5] JR: I love how you think about this, right? I think you know so often we feel like to be the most effective Christians we have to be sharing the gospel every chance we get. Jesus said, love your neighbor as yourself and that was a complete sentence, right? Love your neighbor well, serve them well and by the way, when you do that, when you do masterful work, you are winsome. You are fulfilling Jesus’s command to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world and people just naturally gravitate to that, right?
The people see light even when you are not talking about the explicit capital L, light of the world by just being you, by being a Christian, by having the Holy Spirit and going into these dark places that you couldn’t enter if you were dropping tracks every chance you got. So man, I want to commend you for the work that you are doing. Thank you for serving this 500,000 people well through the ministry of excellence.
Thank you for commitment to Christ, thank you for your commitment to generosity and sharing that you are being generous and sharing what it is to live like Christ through your products. So anyways, I am such a big fan of yours. So hey, three questions I like to ask every guest to wrap up the conversation. Number one, what book do you give to others the most? Or books?
[0:53:34.2] GC: Yeah, it would probably be The Go Giver by Bob Burg.
[0:53:37.4] JR: Yeah, I haven’t read it.
[0:53:39.0] GC: Oh dude you’d love it. It’s like the most Christian, non-Christian that is a book.
[0:53:42.9] JR: It really is. It is Philippians Chapter Two.
[0:53:45.4] GC: Yeah the whole book is don’t do anything out of selfish ambition. He doesn’t realize this but don’t do anything out of selfish ambition or conceit but instead view others as more important than yourself, right? Look out for not only your own needs but for the needs of others. That is like chapter two, three and four and then it goes on to look at how Christ did that for us. But that is a life verse for me in a way of like the way to be winsome, the way to connect to people is to look out for their needs above your own, you become attractive, right?
But that whole book and it is written like a little parable and it is about sales and selling but it is just so beautiful because it is all about stop worrying about that your fist is so tight like getting yours and making sure you have enough and getting the sale and holding on. It is like let go and serve other people even if it costs you something and their belief is that the universe will – like it will just work out for now. We know that that’s just the way God designed things.
That generosity is sewn into the fabric of His universe that he created and it is sewing and reaping and it is all Second Corinthians chapter nine, Paul knows this but that book put practical words and pictures to the way I believe my business model was set up by God and I read it probably four years into my business. I was like, “That is my business.” And so I love it because it is such an easy read and I give it to people because it gets them to think about how can I make other people’s lives better? Which is entrepreneurship.
[0:55:05.3] JR: Yeah, absolutely. All right second question, what one person would you most likely to hear talk about this intersection of faith of work maybe on this podcast.
[0:55:13.9] GC: Ooh to have on the podcast? Can you get Tim Keller on here?
[0:55:18.7] JR: You’re the third vote for Tim. So we got to invite Tim.
[0:55:22.4] GC: Yeah, absolutely invite Tim.
[0:55:23.4] JR: Well I wouldn’t do any talking. I would just sit here and listen to that soothing voice of Tim Keller talk for it would be a three hour interview, yeah. All right, so Tim. What one piece of advice would you give to somebody who’s in the audience right now in pursuing mastery of their vocation really any vocation but particularly for the entrepreneur, what would you say to that person who wants to start a business, wants to start a blog, wants to start a YouTube channel, what is the number one piece of advice from a master content creator and entrepreneur like yourself?
[0:55:54.9] GC: I just view content as sharing. It is the most Christian thing that you can do. Everyone is given different gifts from the Spirit, everyone is made different. So stop worrying about what other people are doing with their content or the way God has blessed them even other Christians. But what has God given you to share and that is all good content is.
You don’t have to be an expert yet or maybe you won’t ever get to expert status in your own definition. But you have something that you could share now and good content in this day and age is just sharing. Because it is authentic and real and the guru kind of thing is dissolving. People want real humans who have something to share and you could start that today.
[0:56:36.8] JR: Absolutely. So hey, if you want to connect with Graham and learn more from him, I can’t recommend that highly enough, you can go to grahamcochrane.com, did I get it?
[0:56:53.9] GC: You got it.
[0:56:54.2] JR: Great and hey, we are having dinner tomorrow night.
[0:56:56.0] GC: Dude, I am pumped now. It is 48 hours of –
[0:56:58.7] JR: 48 hours of Jordan yes, so Graham and his wife Shay live here in Tampa where Karen and I live and Shay is also a member of the collaboratory. Shay is also going to be on this podcast. You will hear her episode soon. So we are all going to dinner tomorrow night, if I still have a voice after recording all of these podcast.
[0:57:15.3] GC: Stop doing a bunch in row, stop doing 17 podcasts in a row, bro.
[0:57:18.1] JR: Exactly, thanks for being here man.
[0:57:19.8] GC: Thanks for having me.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[0:57:22.1] JR: Whether you’re an entrepreneur or not, I hope you enjoyed that conversation with my friend, Graham Cochrane. Hey listen, if you are interested in entrepreneurship, there is going to be a lot more conversations with people like Graham on this show. Now we are interviewing people across a bunch of different disciplines. So we are talking to teachers, we are talking to people in corporate America. We are talking to authors but by nature of the fact that I myself an entrepreneur, we are going to be talking to a lot more people like Graham.
So if you liked this episode, make sure you subscribe to the Call To Mastery so you never miss an episode that we release in the future and if you’re already subscribed to the show, do me favor, take 30 seconds and go review the podcast wherever you listen to podcasts and if you have no idea how to do that, how to do either of those things subscribe or review, go to jordanraynor.com/podcast. We have made it really, really simple for you to do both of things. Again that is jordanraynor.com/podcast.
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Call To Mastery, I’ll see you next time.
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