Why I Started A Podcast, and Other Entrepreneurs Should Too

Speaker 1: [0:01] Welcome to the collecting keys Friday focus.

Mike DeHaan: [0:05] What is going on, guys? In this episode of the collecting keys Friday focus, you have me, Mike DeHaan, here to talk to you about my thought of the week or, I guess, question of the week. If you're new to these episodes, every Friday, either I, Mike DeHaan, or my cohost, Dan Austin, pick a topic for the week that's either from our Wednesday episode that was something that kind of spurred additional thought or is a question from other people that are in our life and our community that we just wanted to elaborate on a little bit more in a solo show. So, you know, we call it the Friday focus because we focus in on a specific topic, and we create a little seven to twelve minute sort of brain dump on the topic at hand. So for this week, I wanted to veer away from the real estate a little bit and go down a rabbit hole on something that's been asked of me a lot recently. And I think it's come up a lot recently as our podcast has started to have some more significant traction. We've started to get a lot more organic listeners coming into our sphere, and we've started to have you know, it's like a lot of people that have known us from before being like, hey. I see you plugging this podcast that you're doing. Why exactly are you doing that? So I wanted to dive into why exactly I started this podcast, why exactly Dan and I started this podcast, and also why I suggest that everyone that wants to be a serious entrepreneur or business owner should consider doing so or consider doing some other kind of content because I do think it is very important.

Mike DeHaan: [1:35] So we're gonna go through that over the next little bit here. So the main reason that Dan and I decided to start a podcast was, honestly, because we enjoy it, first off. But the whole concept behind it, I guess, can route. So just a little bit of backstory. Dan and I are best friends from college, and we've always been the kind of friends that, you know, we could go to a a brewery together and just sit there and talk for, like, three hours about pretty much nothing or anything all at the same time. And we have carried that, I guess, together in our in our relationship for the last, gosh, I got twelve, thirteen years, however long we've known each other. And it's the point where, like, especially as business and we started to get into business together and those, you know, different sort of business problems and opportunities started to overwhelm our lives. It would be problematic for, I guess, hanging out as couples with our with our wives and our and our families because what would happen is Dan and I would just sit there and just chatter about business, you know, whatever we have going on. We would just be super cute into each other. And, ultimately, what happened is my my wife actually coined the term, the Mike and Dan show, in kind of like a derogatory way.

Mike DeHaan: [2:47] She basically said, you know, a lot of times we were sort of hanging out, my wife's introverted. Dan's wife intro was introverted, and my wife made a snarky remark. I'm like, okay. Well, I guess we gotta get out of here so we don't get stuck listening to the Mike and Dan show all night. And that became kind of a joke. Right? And we realized that, you know, it was a a thing that we did, the sort of just, like, ramble conversation that we would have with each other. And, you know, that sort of we didn't really think much at the time. But fast forward a little bit, Dan and Dan's family has traveled with my family a little bit over the years. So one time, we were all in Hawaii. My parents were there. My wife was there, and Dan and his wife were there, his family were there. And we got to our typical routine. Mike and Dan are having the Mike and Dan show down by the pool. We're completely just oblivious to everything going on around us. And the crazy thing was my parents who were there sort of as bystanders admitted that they actually enjoyed listening to the Mike and Dan show and that our banter was generally entertaining to them. So, you know, to our wives' dismay, they could not just they could just not stand the, you know, back and forth that we would have if they weren't interested. Turns out the third parties actually found it rather entertaining. And not long after that trip, we got back. We started talking about, like, hey.

Mike DeHaan: [4:04] Maybe we should put this on the air for people. And lo and behold, the podcast was born. You know, we knew we knew we needed to have a topic. Like, there's only so many shows that can be out there about just, like, two white guys talking about whatever's on their mind. I don't think the world needs any more of that, so we decided to make it a business focused show around real estate. So our original podcast name was not collecting keys, but it was the no BS real estate investing show. We're gonna talk about real life real estate related things from people that are actually investors and not a lot of the sort of theoretical stuff that's out there. We I think we got, like, two or three episodes in with that name where we decided we didn't like it, and we also discovered that there was another show with a very similar name. And kind of on a whim, Dan coined collecting keys, and it just stuck. I think he actually made it as a kind of a joke in one of our sign offs where he was saying, like, go out and collect those keys, and that just became the new name for the show. Our first episodes are terrible. If you ever go back and you listen to our first 10 episodes, I'm so sorry for the time that we have wasted of yours. Like, honestly, just ignore those. If we could take those down, I would. Because for some reason, I don't know what people do.

Mike DeHaan: [5:15] Like like, they treat podcasts like a TV show where they just go and they decide that they like it and they go start from the beginning. A, I don't know how people have that much time. And b, like, why would you do that to yourself? Because those first couple episodes are terrible, and I feel like they do give a poor representation of what the show is now. But either way, we enjoyed the process, and we were committed to doing it. When we first started, our commitment was to do it for six months on a weekly basis. We made a hard commitment to that. And then after that, if we decided that we didn't like it anymore, we would just be done, and it would be none the wiser. We didn't even really promote it that much for the first six months. We just kinda, like, let it ride. So, you know, we're doing the show. We would just put stuff sort of out into the sphere. Six months later, we started to have a little bit of organic growth for some reason, which was pretty wild to see. And not only that, but we started to have just, like, random people reach out that were fans of the show. They'd, you know, shoot us a message on Instagram. They'd reach out from different groups we're in just like say, hey. They were listening. Thought it was pretty cool. They liked what we were talking about. So that gave us a little bit of motivation to start going past that initial six month period.

Mike DeHaan: [6:23] As, you know, more people started to reach out, more growth started to happen, I started guesting on more on more shows. I started to get asked to come on a various range of shows, and that sort of motivated me even more. As we started to see, like, some legitimate growth and some legitimate traction, we decided to try and turn this into a business. Second business to go in tangent with our real estate wholesaling business. And, you know, the first sort of steps of that were some free group calls that we would do around, you know, just giving a general information on wholesaling. We'd give presentations and webinars on kind of how we would build our our wholesaling process, how we would run marketing. After a few different iterations of that, people, you know, were telling us like, hey. Listen. You guys should charge for this. Like, this is super valuable stuff. I bet you would have a lot of interest if you turn this into, like, a mastermind or something like that. And that is how our instant investor program was born. It wasn't like the original intention of this at all. Kind of came just in a response to people telling us that they thought it was a good idea, and they thought there was Vi that we were giving out. And we chose to make the instant investor program as a mastermind more so than just like a group coaching program because a lot of value had been brought to us from masterminds over the past number of years.

Mike DeHaan: [7:33] So that started the instant investor program. As our business continued to go so I guess I would say the instant investor program came out in March 2022, so almost a full year ago now. And when, you know, we first started, we were just focused on this mastermind. It was, like, sort of a loose priority for us. We had about 10 members that joined early on. And honestly, it didn't grow a huge amount for the first little bit. We didn't push it. We didn't wanna be like super gurery. And also, we were very focused on our wholesaling business at the time. Shortly after, you know, we started that group, the market started to get a little bit weird. So we started to look at different avenues with our wholesaling business, particularly with doing joint partnerships and, you know, providing marketing services and things for other people that weren't trying to do quite as much volume as us. And that led to us starting the partnership program that we now run. So if you guys have heard us talk about the partnership program, surely have a waiting list for the partnership program because it has exploded over the past couple of weeks. But very basically, what it is is people can hire us to run wholesaling operations for them in their market. And that kinda started out shortly after the market started to turn where we were doing joint ventures with people and, you know, was not connected to the podcast at all.

Mike DeHaan: [8:50] But as we were running that business, we're the podcast was growing. We were still doing it. A lot of the potential clients and partners that we had that were interested started coming from the podcast. You know? Surprise. Surprise. We're starting to build a name for ourselves amongst the community. You know, we had a public sphere of people that were hearing about us. They would inquire to hear about what we were working on. We would present to them our mastermind group. They would say that sounds like too much work, and it would just naturally be like, well, we also have this partnership program. It's more expensive, but this is what it offers, and people weren't very interested in that. And lo and behold, the partnership program became part of our instant investor program, kind of like the top tier. And now even to this day, I mean, obviously, you've heard us talk about it a lot more. The podcast is the top of the funnel for our partnership program and our our wholesaling business that we run on that side. So that's sort of how it came to be what it is. Outside of, like, the actual business side, a lot of the benefits that have come from the podcast are honestly pretty immense, particularly with the connections that we've been able to establish with people. I mean, it's pretty crazy. Like, if you reach out to an a player in whatever industry you're in and say, hey. I'd love to hop on a call for thirty minutes.

Mike DeHaan: [10:01] They're probably gonna say no. If you go and you invite someone and say, hey. Would you like to have a conversation with me for thirty minutes in front of my audience? They're more often gonna say yes because they wanna get their names out there too. So it's a great way to provide value to people that you wanna be closer to. And, honestly, what a lot of our interviews and stuff look like, especially with some of the the more successful names is, you know, we get on with them. We talk about, you know, fifteen minutes getting to know them. We record our show, and then we continue to chat with the guests from anywhere from ten minutes to an hour afterwards where we get to ask all sorts of selfish questions about our business, their business, how we can help each other deals, tons of great stuff that doesn't end up on the air, but it's beneficial to both parties. That And would never be possible without a podcast because we probably never would have been able to connect with them anyway, or we just never would have been on each other's radars. And, you know, through this show, we've met, you know, partners which have become very successful clients of ours that we work with in our partnership program.

Mike DeHaan: [10:56] We have met business partners on deals that Dan and I are now investing in. We met our current business coach, Steve Rozenberg, who's going to be coming out on an episode here, I think, in about two weeks, who's just been absolutely game changing for us. We've started to really establish a lot of authority amongst the community. We're starting to be asked to speak at conferences and attend conferences and be involved in these things that are way outside of our normal zone or anything that we anticipated. And all of that has come from this show. Right? And, you know, for us as investors, as entrepreneurs, everything in between has been extremely beneficial. And, you know, all that being said, if you want to be a serious business owner and a serious entrepreneur, building a personal brand, that is, like, honestly, an extremely necessary thing these days. Like, you look at some of the most successful people in every business, they have a strong personal brand behind them. I mean, honestly, even like Elon Musk. Right? Here, he's like, know, got famous because of his multibillion dollar companies. But one of the reasons he continues to be famous and, like, the Tesla stock went crazy is because he has his personal brand that he's established mostly through Twitter, where he's kind of a dick. He does his thing. Like, that's his brand.

Mike DeHaan: [12:04] Right? And people are into that. You know? And then even on, like, a more, like, small scale level, there's people like Joe Rogan, you know, Brandon Turner. A lot of these people, they have so many opportunities with themselves in their business just because they have this personal brand, and they're a recognizable name. And the crazy thing is you don't even have to be that big. It can be like a smaller personal brand. Right? But it will still give you authority over everybody that doesn't have that. And the core behind establishing that personal brand comes down to content. Right? And, you know, there's bunch of different ways you can do content. You kinda have to figure out what really vibes well with you, what you enjoy doing, and what you would be willing to do on kind of a regular basis, and that wouldn't feel heavy to you. You know, for some people, that's social media. For some people, it's YouTube videos. For me, it's podcasting. Some people are into blogs. I don't know. There's probably some other things that people do out there that I don't even know. But the personal brand is an essential thing right now if you wanna be serious with your business and you wanna grow with any sort of legitimate pace.

Mike DeHaan: [13:07] So, you know, something to definitely consider. All that being said, it is not something to be taken lightly. It is a serious commitment to be jumping into some, like, content like this, especially long form content. There is a lot of work that goes into the back end of it to be have it be done well. You know, our current overhead on our podcast with all the staff and the producers and everything we have is about 6 to $7,000 a month. It may not look that way sometimes with, like, our ragtag nature of of doing things. But, you know, between our producer, all the platforms that we run, like our producer does, like, editing as a service, but still costs us money. All the platforms that we run, the VAs that do all the posting to the various platforms, our video editors, our YouTube videos, our digital product manager that make sure everything gets delivered on time. All of a sudden, that adds up pretty quickly, especially when you're doing three episodes a week. Mean, now you can do all that yourself. But if you're like us and you're trying to balance that with a business, it's just not possible. Right? There are, like, career podcasters that get into doing all those things themselves, but that's a little bit different. Either way, whatever you decide to do, understand that it is a commitment, but the results will be worth it. But if you're gonna do it, make sure you're gonna do it right.

Mike DeHaan: [14:15] And don't be cutting corners or, or, you know, not going into it a 100% because it will just be a waste of your time. Anyways, guys, that was a fast fifteen minutes for me anyway. Might have been super long for you, and you're like, why the hell is this guy still talking? But I hope you got something out of it. My passion for podcasting has grown immensely, and I just love the the fact that it it supports my current business very well, and it enhances my credibility in the wholesaling real estate investing space, which is something that I am extremely passionate about. I do feel that I'm knowledgeable about, and it is somewhere that is crowded with people that I do feel like our posers. And I guess as someone who considers myself a not poser because we do do a lot of deals, it has been a a fun avenue, I guess, to just come out and go head to head with a lot of those people. So, anyways, guys, please go and share this show with anyone who might find interesting, and leave us a five star review or have you listen your podcast. If you do that, you send me a screenshot on my Instagram at Mike underscore Invest. I'll send you a free collecting keys T shirt. I'm gonna be ending that here pretty soon. Probably only, like, three or four more shirts will go out before I have to stop that. So if you wanna be one of the last ones to get a free shirt, please go ahead and do that. Besides that, guys, appreciate y'all listening, and we'll talk to

Speaker 1: [15:24] you all next week. Thanks for listening to this collecting keys Friday focus. Be sure to subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts.