May 28, 2019
Today on the show we have Jill Stanton. Jill and her husband Josh and their brand Screw the Nine to Five is something I came across while living in Chiang Mai Thailand and in a membership called the Dynamic Circle.
They started in 2012 and have grown the brand over seven years and have tried out many different business models that fit who they were at the time or what their goals were, and Jill, on the episode today, is going to share the evolution of Screw the Nine to Five, of her own mindset, of her own philosophy, and of a lot of the products and services she offered that has taken her from running a business with her husband, the big decision around shutting down a giant, very profitable membership site around the time they had their first child, and many more things. Jill is very vulnerable, very down to earth, and very powerful. So I think you're going to get a lot out of this episode. I had a great time interviewing her.
Key Takeaways
- The Evolution of “Screw the Nine to Five”
- The Choice to Shut Down a $300,000 a Year Membership Site
- Choosing to Run a Business Based on Your Core Values Instead of the Hopes of Becoming “Opera Rich”
- Jill’s Failures and Triumphs as an Entrepreneur
- Making the Choice to be Real Instead of Polished
Links and Resources Mentioned in this Episode
Transcription
Kyle Gray:
Hello and welcome to the Story Engine podcast. My name is Kyle Gray and today on the show we have Jill Stanton. Jill and her husband Josh and their brand Screw the Nine to Five is something I came across while living in Chiang Mai Thailand and in a membership called the Dynamic Circle. They started in 2012 and have grown the brand over seven years and have tried out many different business models that fit who they were at the time or what their goals were, and Jill, on the episode today, is going to share the evolution of Screw the Nine to Five, of her own mindset, of her own philosophy, and of a lot of the products and services she offered that has taken her from running a business with her husband, the big decision around shutting down a giant, very profitable membership site around the time they had their first child, and many more things. Jill is very vulnerable, very down to earth, and very powerful. So I think you're going to get a lot out of this episode. I had a great time interviewing her.
Kyle Gray:
So without any further ado, let's turn it over to Jill. Jill, thank you so much for joining us today.
Jill Stanton:
I'm so excited to dive in with you.
Kyle Gray:
I really am excited too. As I mentioned just before we got on the call, I actually, I've known about you for a very long time and watched your brand evolve over what looks like now it's been about seven years.
Jill Stanton:
It's been a minute.
Kyle Gray:
You have such a good message, such an incredible story, and I want to dive into that seven years journey because it parallels a lot with my own. But I want to introduce you properly to the audience with the question I always ask which is, "Tell me about a defining moment in your life that has brought you to who you are today or doing what you're doing today."
Jill Stanton:
Mine's going to sound really cliché, but I swear to God, having my son changed my whole world. So my son's 14 months right now, and like you said, we've been in our business, running our business together, Josh and I, for seven years. So for so long we had a membership site, and it was called Screw You, and it was like this die hard community, and we absolutely loved it. And then we had our son, and he was a catalyst for so much change. And he allowed us to have some space from our business, and ask ourselves like, "What do we really want moving forward in our business and in our life?"
Jill Stanton:
And we slowly came to the conclusion that in order to have the business and live out the vision and live the kind of lifestyle we want, we had to shut down our community. So that was a huge pivotal moment in our journey because this was a community that was known. It was one of the most popular in the online space. I mean our members called themselves scramily-
Kyle Gray:
Wow.
Jill Stanton:
So it was a big move for us to shut down something that was making over $300,000 a year, but that was quite possible the most pivotal moment in my entrepreneurial career, hands on.
Kyle Gray:
That is really impressive, and I'd love to know more about kind of the decision making process because that sounds like a business model that is like the Holy Grail for a lot of people. They're craving membership sites.
Jill Stanton:
Totally. And we loved it. I love it until I had a tiny human who just flipped my whole world upside down.
Kyle Gray:
Yeah. So how did that work? There's some obvious priorities with it, with a new baby, but tell me how you, kind of the problems that it was causing between your business and the decision making process. Because it probably, I doubt this is something that you immediately thought, "Okay. Well, we got to walk away from this core of our business."
Jill Stanton:
Oh, no.
Kyle Gray:
I'm sure this was a very challenging moment for you.
Jill Stanton:
It was. A whole lot of tears truthfully, and then once we made the decision and had the like, "Ahh!" moment of clarity where it finally all clicked, then came in like the anxiety of like, "Oh my God. We have to tell our members now, and will they hate us? And they're like part of our family." But truthfully I think the biggest piece of it was we had time to breathe, and I'm sure anyone else who's a parent knows like, you're just living this blissfully ignorant life not even realizing like how much time you have, and like how quiet it is and how much you sleep. And then you become a parent and all of that kind of gets thrown into flux, and you take a minute to obviously go into like baby mode, and it allows you to ask some big question. Like is this what we really want moving forward? Is this what we want for our business? Is this what we want for our life? Do we want to be time zone dependent? Like what do we want for our life moving forward?
Jill Stanton:
My son was born in February, and we didn't come to this conclusion until end of June, so that's how long we were kind of in the pain of unalignment because we knew something was off, but we just didn't know what it was yet. It was just like, "Everything feels like it's suffocating. What is happening?" And it wasn't until we started digging in like, "Is it maybe our business model that's causing us a bit of strife," and I don't know why it is, but all of our best ideas seem to on a patio when alcohol is involved, so-
Kyle Gray:
Sounds great.
Jill Stanton:
We were having a couple drinks on the patio, and my husband Josh said because he's like, "What business model have we absolutely loved?"
Jill Stanton:
And at that time I was just so burned out I was like, "Nothing! I've hated everything!"
Jill Stanton:
And he was like, "No. That's not true. Like we love affiliate marketing." And that was actually mine and Josh's first business together. So when we were living overseas and traveling heaps, we had a network of affiliate marketing sites or affiliate sites, and we sold those to go all in on the Screw, and we realized that what was kind of tripping us up with the membership site model was Screw the Nine to Five has a bigger message outside of just coaching in a small capacity, right? Like it's a online destination for unsatisfied employees and up and coming entrepreneurs who are looking to get the free knowledge, info, and inspo, that they need to get their businesses off the ground and growing. And I think that has such a big message especially now as the automation crisis is starting to trickle. The economy's being shaken up, jobs are changing, the scope of work is changing, and people are looking for alternative options to, you know, like guarantee their financial security. And for once in our lifetime, that isn't jobs anymore.
Jill Stanton:
And so the Screw is now meant to serve that piece and become like this ultimate destination that helps people, not just people who start courses or membership sites or want to coach which is who we were helping initially, but pretty much anyone who wants to start a business online. So whether that's ecom, affiliate marketing courses, memberships, coaching, whatever, we want to become the go to destination where you come to get the info, and skills, and inspiration you need to get that off the ground.
Kyle Gray:
That is incredible and a very ambitious vision.
Jill Stanton:
It's a big one.
Kyle Gray:
It's been a lot on my mind too in thinking about just how automation is going to change a lot of our lives. It's already happening in a lot of places, and so it's really interesting. And I'm sure that like this wasn't your initial vision going in-
Jill Stanton:
No.
Kyle Gray:
I think to this huge almost like global thing that is unfolding before us, but tell us, and you have a unique situation that I want to explore where you are business partners with your husband which I think is rare to find, and I'm sure though there's been bumps in the road-
Jill Stanton:
Oh, yeah.
Kyle Gray:
You are very successfully.
Jill Stanton:
It's called Divorce Days.
Kyle Gray:
Oh, okay.
Jill Stanton:
That's how we get through.
Kyle Gray:
Yeah, yeah. That's fair. That sounds like a good thing. But can you tell me like, tell me the beginning stages. So you mentioned you started affiliate. You've created memberships. You've created courses. You've probably created every kind of online content under the sun.
Jill Stanton:
It felt that way, yes.
Kyle Gray:
And now you've come back. So maybe give us like an overview of how Screw the Nine to Five started and kind of what is the high picture of how this business has moved and grown?
Jill Stanton:
Yes. Okay, so I'm about to sound like a total drinker, but it just so happened that it happened on a balcony when we were having a couple drinks.
Kyle Gray:
Yeah, yeah. We're sold. It's all good.
Jill Stanton:
So it was actually our wedding week which is probably the week you're not supposed to work, and we were just talking about the fact that we had all these affiliate sites, and as they were starting to make a lot of money, and we were starting to travel more and work less, people in our offline lives were like, "What are you guys doing, like what are you doing? Are you drug dealers? Like how are you making money? What's happening here?" And so we were talking about, we were just about to move to Thailand, like you and I talked about before we started recording. We both lived in Chiang Mai, so we were about to move to Thailand, and we wanted a way to share that journey, share our travels, share what we were up to, and create a space that people can learn how to do what we were doing. And so Josh was like, "Yeah, but what would we call it?"
Jill Stanton:
And I was like, thanks to Costa Rican rum I was like, "Screw the Nine to Five!"
Jill Stanton:
And both of us were like, "Oooh! Oh my God! Could that be it?" And we checked it. It was free.
Kyle Gray:
Get on GoDaddy right now. Hurry.
Jill Stanton:
Totally. That's absolutely what we did. We were like, namecheap.com. Let's get it. We registered it right there, and we didn't really know what to do with it because we had never had a personal brand before. We had only had affiliate sites in like the skin care site or the skin care space and supplements and high heels and like all these random niches. So we really floundered with it for the first year. I was just like, "What the actual F are we doing here?" because it was just like a cluster fuck of just random content and no clear message, but somehow people choose to hire us.
Jill Stanton:
And then we created our first course. It was called Bad Ass Guest Blogging. It was a total flop. No one bought it. Literally not one person. I ugly cried for a day straight. Truth. And it was the best thing that ever happened to us because then we realized, "Well, maybe we should start teaching what we know." Oh, light bulb.
Jill Stanton:
And then we were like, "Well, what do we know?"
Jill Stanton:
"Uh, affiliate marketing." And so we started teaching that through free content. That's what we talked about in our emails. That's what we talked about in all the guest posts we wrote, all the videos we did, all the interviews we did, and then we launched a program called Lifestyle Affiliate, and that was our first successful "launch" and it did a whole $8,000.
Kyle Gray:
Nice.
Jill Stanton:
And we were just like, "Did this just... Did we just become Oprah rich because I think we did? Because we're living in Thailand, $8,000 at the time was like, what just happened?"
Kyle Gray:
That's a half year, I mean God.
Jill Stanton:
Totally. We were Thailonaires at that point.
Kyle Gray:
Yeah, yeah.
Jill Stanton:
And so from there we just kept going, right? And then we had the idea to start this other flagship program called Screw You which eventually became our membership site which then carried us through for the next three and a half years. Over those years we did 1.7 million, and then shut it down, and a lot of people thought we were actually certifiably insane because we shut down something we were so known for, but it just made so much sense to us. And now we've done kind of a full circle moment to come back to affiliate marketing, and that is the revenue model we use inside of Screw the Nine to Five now.
Kyle Gray:
So I like this, and you've tried on a bunch of different business models, and you've succeeded with a bunch, and I would love to explore what does a day in like a quarter million dollar a year membership site look like? I'm guessing there's a lot of time intensive things involved in this. That was probably what was causing the conflict when the baby arrived.
Jill Stanton:
Yes.
Kyle Gray:
Yeah, tell me what that looked like and how you grew it, and how you served that community?
Jill Stanton:
Yeah. Sweet, so I think it become time intensive because we never set boundaries. I think that more so if I'm looking back on it with hindsight and perspective, I think we had self-worth issues. I think we thought, "Oh my God." You know we had 800 and 60 something members. "Why would they want to stay paying just to have access to us?" Like we built a virtual campus, and we did like weekly calls, and courses. It was just like we started piling things on to make up for our insecurities pretty much. And so we kind of did it ourselves, right? Like we were like, "Oh, surely they need more support."
Jill Stanton:
When really if we had taken a good hard look at what our members actually use, they loved some key pieces, but what they really loved, the magic was inside Screw You for so long was the community. Like we had members events and people had meet-ups at their house and game nights and virtual co-working and happy hours, and all of this stuff. And if we had just stuck with that, I feel like it would have continued to stay really easy for us because when it was more so the community piece, we loved it! Like it was awesome! It was so much fun. It was a giant family. We all had a blast. Everyone learned from each other. Everyone supported each other, and I think Josh and I almost didn't believe it could stay that easy, right? We were like, "Surely it can't be this easy to make this much money." And so we mucked it all up.
Jill Stanton:
So if we were to do it again, I would absolutely set boundaries straight out of the gate. Like this is what you can expect. Here's what we will give. Here's what we won't give. Here's how we serve. Here's what happens on a monthly basis. Here's the price. I would probably make it more expensive, and I'd rather work with less people.
Jill Stanton:
So I mean it's been amazing because we've learned so many key lessons. We know to our core how to grow and engage a community which is a such a skill set in our online space, especially now as people crave it more, and it really allowed us to have some insight into how to properly coach people, how to build a membership, how to learn the ropes of things like retention and churn rates and metrics, and you know, how to manage group dynamics which is a whole other beast. Like how do you manage group think and conflict and hurt feelings and stuff like that, you know? So it taught us so much about running a business online.
Jill Stanton:
So now like, affiliate marketing, I'm like, "Bro. That's so easy." Because it's just creating content. That's all we do. So now, a day in the life of our business, is I'm creating, I'm doing this. I'm on other people's shows, spreading the word. That is my main job. I'm the relationship builder, I'm the word spreader, and I'm a content creator. And that's all we do. [bctt tweet="We create content, and we audience build. And then we shine a light on the people, products, programs, and services we use, like, and believe in - Jill Stanton" username="kylethegray"]. And that's how we make money.
Kyle Gray:
That sounds great. And that's, I mean a dream for again a lot of different content creators as well.
Kyle Gray:
Do you and Josh, have you over time, I'm certain you have discovered your different strengths and weaknesses and found ways that they could differently leverage each other advantages to grow this business?
Jill Stanton:
100%. That's how Divorce Days became a thing is by really trying to be right all the time and trying to micromanage the other person, and that's always my biggest piece of advice. When people are trying to start working with their partner, I'm like, "Don't try to micromanage." Just get clear on what each other's strengths are, like you said. Josh is very analytical. He's very systems minded. He's a great manager of people, and he loves like data and doing things. And I love this. I love talking. I love connecting. I love creating content. I love getting on other people's shows. I love the connection piece of it. And so once we really started realizing that, like I don't even touch his side. I don't even think about it. If we need to hire someone, he is finding them. He is hiring them. He's interviewing them. He's onboarding them. He's training them. He's creating procedures. He's the CEO of this business, and I just, I'm the pimp.
Kyle Gray:
Perfect. Good deal.
Jill Stanton:
I'm the one who gets the word out there.
Kyle Gray:
Yeah. And tell me now these days, what is a great affiliate brand look like? I looked at your own site, and you're recommending a lot of website building tools, and you've still got that brand out there. Is this mostly going for good search engine traffic and continuing to grow that way?
Jill Stanton:
So we kind of use a three fold approach. So for the tools and the product reviews and everything that you see, like through our ClickFunnels reviews or anything like that, anything that is targeting tools with recurring commissions, that's an absolute SEO play because we just target people who have high intent to purchase something for the tools we've used in our business, and we create epic reviews around them. They rank, and we make passive income, right? Like when people are like, "Oh, passive income isn't really a thing," I'm like, "Is it because you don't know how to do it though?" Because outside, honest to God, outside of writing that blog post for ClickFunnels review as an example, outside of writing that once last year, we haven't done anything for it, and it makes over $1,000 a month, you know. So you have 20 of those, and all of the sudden you're making over a quarter of a million a year off something you did once, you know?
Kyle Gray:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jill Stanton:
So that's the first tier of what we do. Then we do partner webinars. So anyone who might have like an Evergreen program that is aligned with something that we're talking about that week or that we're focusing on that month or that we think a segment of our audience could really get use out of, then we'll do a partner webby. We'll send it out to our email list. Maybe we'll drive some traffic, and we'll do a one off promotion.
Jill Stanton:
And then we do things like what we're in right now, and I know this will air after it, but we're currently promoting Stu McLaren's TRIBE, and when we started our membership site, we hired Stu one on one before he had TRIBE, and so he helped us create everything that was Screw You and really kind of mentor us around the best practices around that. So we have created a bonus experience for it. There's a live event piece for it. So we go all out for some key promotions each year, and that allows us to do like big profit pushes with a whole lot of hype around the particular program or launch, and that's kind of like how we do what we do in our business. So it's not always just reliant on one income source.
Kyle Gray:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). So you've done a great job, and you've created a lot of content. I think some people probably now would be wondering, how do keep things fresh? How do you keep finding new ideas? How do you keep things going? And I think usually there's pretty good solutions at this point, but I imagine that what you're learning and what you're discussing has evolved a lot with just your own experience.
Jill Stanton:
100%, and I think before we really struck out and changed things up and really went to bat for the life we wanted to create, I think we had a lingering fear of judgment truthfully. So we were like, "Oh. We should probably just like stick with what people want and what they want is like money making strategies." So our podcasts got a bit stagnant because we were always talking about how to make money with Facebook groups, how to make money with Evergreen webinars, how to make money with Facebook ads, how to make money with mer, mer, mer. And it's just like, "Yeah. We get it."
Jill Stanton:
And then we started being like, "What happens if we just open up and start talking about the real shit that matters? Like other stuff that matters to entrepreneurs?" Yes, money. But like what about wealth management or wealth creation or relationships or health or team building or, you know, your marriage, or raising kids or any of that. We're going to start talking about automation and like what happens as that starts coming in? Like what's the future of work look like? There's so many other pieces that goes into a entrepreneur's life other than just marketing strategies.
Jill Stanton:
And once we started opening up the possibilities of sharing the things we're dealing with in our day-to-day life and marriage and business, it opened up all the topics because I actually believe that topics, [bctt tweet="Having the most creative topics, is what gets your content to spread - Jill Stanton" username="kylethegray"]. And also realizing that not everything has to be like epically long pieces of content. Like my favorite podcast interview, excuse me, my favorite podcast episodes for our show are our quickies because they're under 10 minutes. They're super punchy. And we are just like, they're quick and dirty. We get them out of the way. We can batch those for like a quarter at a time in two days. You know, so it just allows us to crank content and talk about things that matter and those quickies are just like one quick thought. That's it. It's not like this three step process to this and that and all the things, templates and all this nonsense. It's like, "Here's a quote that's lighting us up right now." Or "Here's one thing we're doing in our morning right now." Or "This is a question we've been getting a lot." So I think like microcontent is going to become so much of a bigger thing for people as short attention spans come into play and just like the insistent desire for constant content creation. People are going to get burnt out if they don't start tweaking to go more towards microcontent.
Kyle Gray:
Wow. That makes a lot of sense, and it seems like you've got a great process and a great team to help you just focus on your zone of genius.
Jill Stanton:
It helps when you have no customers.
Kyle Gray:
Yeah. Customers, you know, it's fire and ice. You know it's very nice to have customers sometimes
Jill Stanton:
Of course.
Kyle Gray:
But they also do take quite a lot of time and energy.
Jill Stanton:
Well, think about that. Like now I have no customer support, right? I have no fulfillment outside of any bonus experience which is typically capped at four to six weeks. You know, we have our every hour that we work can now be put towards content creation and creating the best stuff we can and spreading the word. And so that's all we do. We build systems around that that allow us to just go into hyper-production mode.
Kyle Gray:
I love that, and I really appreciate your vulnerability and your openness in kind of sharing your mindset and some of the things that were holding you back or impacting some of the decisions you had made.
Jill Stanton:
Thank you.
Kyle Gray:
What do you think, and I think what you're expressing is really common. I think a lot of us show up with these same things or when we want to create products and things. What are some of the most common ones of the many people that you've worked with and you've helped grown, what are these mindsets or philosophies that are holding people back from achieving what you've achieved?
Jill Stanton:
Who am I to do it? That's number one. Always. What happens if it doesn't work? Number two. Right there. Number three is I don't have the money. Like if I were to boil all of my conversations down into three main topics, it's always mindsets and beliefs, like beliefs about yourself and your inability to do something. It always comes down to that, and it's because we've never been talk how to think properly.
Jill Stanton:
And I will just touch on what you said before, like I'm sure a lot of people have dealt with what we dealt with with feeling unaligned in your business, and it was insane how many people reached out and been like, after we announced that we were shutting down our membership to really go to bat for what we wanted in our life, and so many people were like, "Wow. I really feel the same way about my business." But most people don't think they have a choice, right? And so they're just like, "Well, it's making me money so what else would I do? Like I'm not going to sabotage my income." You know, and so they continue doing something that they don't love any more because they don't think they have another choice or because they get in their head around, "Well, who am I to do something different? Who am I to turn down people's money?" Or "Who am I to shut things down and like do something different?" Like how "irresponsible" when really doing something that is so unaligned with your strength and your passion and what you're here to do, is the most irresponsible thing you could do because you're showing up in a shitty way for some many people.
Jill Stanton:
Like towards the end of our membership, I felt like I was doing more of a disservice being out of integrity and continuing to be like, "Oh my God! I love this!" when really I was like, "Guys, I'm dying inside." You know what I mean?
Kyle Gray:
Yeah. Yeah.
Jill Stanton:
I just felt so out of integrity doing that, and when you operate your business from that standpoint, from that energetic place, [bctt tweet="You sabotage so much of your success because unconsciously, subconsciously you know it's not what you want. - Jill Stanton" username="kylethegray"]
Kyle Gray:
It makes a lot of sense. I am feeling and have been feeling some of this recently in my business where I've become, you know, over these last couple of years, much more known but more opportunities come my way. And so I think in a similar there is, I've definitely experienced the mindset issues where it was like, "Take any opportunity!
Jill Stanton:
Who knows how long it will last?
Kyle Gray:
Yeah. And so I've found myself at many times spread really thin and have like a little project, a little one, a little one there, a little one there, and then I can't really put my heart into anything. I'm like kind of working, but I'm also like spread really thin, and I think this is something that a lot of people do. So it's been one of my top priorities this year, and you know, something I try and reflect on every day, but asking these deep questions to find what the business is that's most aligned with you that you can get up and be in alignment and in integrity because I think that more and more it's one of the most important things. Because if you can't show up with that energy that fuels you, you don't want to be showing up and just kind of grinding and draining.
Jill Stanton:
Yeah. And people feel it. People feel that. And I just want to acknowledge you for admitting that, like on your show because I'm sure it's so easy to be like, "Everything's fine, guys."
Kyle Gray:
Yeah, yeah. Everybody.
Kyle Gray:
I'm go just take a dip in my Benjamin Franklin build hot tub after my podcast episode. No.
Jill Stanton:
I'm going to exfoliate with hundred dollar bills.
Kyle Gray:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Mm-hmm (affirmative). No.
Jill Stanton:
But I just want to acknowledge you because a lot of people don't want to admit it because they don't want to come across as like, "Oh my God. I don't have it all figured at any given moment." You know?
Kyle Gray:
Yeah.
Jill Stanton:
And so I just think you do your audience such a service when you humanize yourself because I guarantee a lot of them have felt that way too.
Kyle Gray:
Well, that's definitely one thing I've learned in this reflection process is people have been like, "Well, you're really down to earth and like you have this calmness." I'm not trying to position, you know, as this genius, I know it all, and I think that, yeah, people have been relating and mentioning that. And so yeah, it's good that observe that, and it's a good quality and yeah, it's exciting to see how to explore that more. But I've always felt like, yeah,[bctt tweet="Just be vulnerable, be honest, and you'll attract the right kind of people - Kyle Gray" username="kylethegray"]
Jill Stanton:
Man, [bctt tweet="That's what people want. They don't want perfect. They don't resonate with polished. They resonate with real. - Jill Stanton" username="kylethegray"] Resonance, that's your currency, right? That's what people care about. Who gives a shit about vanity numbers? If you don't have resonance and people aren't listening to what you're saying or clicking or buying or reading or watching what you're doing, you're talking to no one.
Kyle Gray:
Absolutely. And it takes that vulnerability. It takes saying those very things. With me and many other clients I've worked with, when it comes to the content that's always gotten the best results is the one that you're afraid to push publish on.
Jill Stanton:
Oh! Isn't it the truth? I want to throw up when we were going to push our episode live saying that we were canceling our membership. And we also did one around like how much money we've made versus kept which was like so sad to talk about publicly.
Kyle Gray:
That is a tough one. That is a tough one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've definitely shared those kind of stories too where yeah, business money yeah just comes and goes really fast.
Jill Stanton:
Yeah, but then you're like, "Oh, wow. So many of us do that," because... I mean did you learn how to manage your entrepreneurial finances in school? Like I didn't learn that.
Kyle Gray:
No. No, no.
Jill Stanton:
I've been like thrown in the fire and been like, "Oh. You're not supposed to have 70% expenses. Cool. Okay."
Kyle Gray:
Yeah, you've got to cut it down and then one of the scariest things that I've done that's consistently paid off is like, invest in high end master minds and good coaches.
Jill Stanton:
Big time.
Kyle Gray:
Like that and throw down thousands, tens of thousands of dollars, and it just feels like you're getting, you know, punched in the stomach
Jill Stanton:
It's so true.
Kyle Gray:
[bctt tweet="You've got to make these leaps of faith. - Kyle Gray" username="kylethegray"]
Jill Stanton:
Yeah, man.
Kyle Gray:
And yeah, they pay off little by little.
Jill Stanton:
I remember in 2017 we invested $100,000 in events and masterminds and coaches, and like I live in Canada, so the Canadian dollar of that was like eeh! Like let's pretend this isn't happening.
Kyle Gray:
Yeah. Yeah, but that's what it takes, and then you meet, like almost every time I've either met people that become clients that pay for the event or you get these skills. And yeah what you were saying like though, and I think this is probably one of the things that's at the core of all of your successes, this real human connection that you've brought to everything that you've been doing with the community, even with your current content now.
Jill Stanton:
Thank you.
Kyle Gray:
And I think it's what people are looking for.
Jill Stanton:
Thank you.
Kyle Gray:
I think it's probably a great way to kind of tie this whole thing back together is that is this honesty, this vulnerability, this truth, and this human connection because again, like you can find perfect articles. You can Google, you know, and find any answer to any question you want, not just an answer but any answer you want. And so yeah, [bctt tweet="The only thing that stands out in this world, I think, or in the online world is, yeah, your humanity. - Kyle Gray" username="kylethegray"]
Jill Stanton:
Ah. Preach. I couldn't agree more with you, and I just hope that it gives people the permission to know that they can show up that way too, and you know, it's scary for sure to put your stuff out there because like keyboard courage is a big thing in our space.
Kyle Gray:
Oh, yeah.
Jill Stanton:
A lot of people will say some really interesting things, so it can feel intimidating to put that stuff out there, but on the other side of it is just like liberation, pure lightness, you know. You just feel great when you allow yourself to be seen in a way that's really indicative of what's going on in your life. Because that's what people want to know. They want to know you, you know?
Kyle Gray:
Yeah.
Jill Stanton:
Not just like, like online you. They want to know the real you.
Kyle Gray:
Well, Jill, it's been such a pleasure and an inspiration chatting with you and getting to know you and catching up and seeing, you know, how Screw the Nine to Five has evolved over these years. I'm grateful for you sharing your story on the show. I'd love to invite you to leave any kind of closing comments with the audience, and let us know where we can find you and follow you.
Jill Stanton:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). I think my favorite thing that I really try to always remember, and it sounds so quippy and it's definitely an Instagram quotable, if anyone wants to make a quote card out of it, [bctt tweet="Alignment is the new hustle - Jill Stanton" username="kylethegray"]. And I really believe that for so long we've preached that, hustle til your eyes bleed. Hustle til it happens. Hustle til you no longer have to hustle. Reh, reh, reh, reh, reh. And that's great, and I do not negate that hard work is a huge piece of what we do. But if you're working for the wrong thing, if you're working from a place of just unhappiness, unalignment, and just unalignment, just sums it all up, then I really think things are going to feel like a uphill climb versus as ease-y and I say that as ease-y, as ease-y as it could feel. And so if you prioritize alignment over everything else, everything will happen so much faster than you could possibly imagine because once you get into that space and you just allow it to flow, magic happens.
Jill Stanton:
So that would be the biggest thing that I try to leave people with. And if you do want to connect with me, come on over to screwtheninetofive.com, all spelt out. No numbers. Or come hang with me on Instagram because I spend an inappropriate amount of time. I'm just going to own it. I'm just going to own it. I spend an inappropriate amount of time on Instagram.
Kyle Gray:
That's fair enough. And we'll definitely be getting some quotables together for this because this episode is full of them. So thanks again, Jill.
Jill Stanton:
Thank you so much for having me, Kyle. It was so much fun.
Kyle Gray:
Thanks for listening to The Story Engine Podcast. Be sure to check out the show notes and resources mentioned on this episode and every other episode at TheStoryEngine.co. If you're looking to learn more about how to use storytelling to grow your business, then check out my new book Selling With Story: How To Use Storytelling To Become An Authority, Boost Sales, And Win The Hearts And Minds Of Your Audience.
Kyle Gray:
This book will equip you with actionable strategies and templates to help you share your unique value and build trust in presentations, sales, and conversations both online and offline. Learn more at SellingWithStory.co. Thanks for listening and I'll see you next time.
Kyle Gray:
Thanks for listening, and I'll see you next time.