Are you ready for an open discussion with the best of the best and the best of what's next? Welcome to the Tony DUrso Show. Join in on a great conversation today with some of the world's great influencers as they showcase great advice and techniques that made them the game changers they are today. Now here's Tony DUrso.

Tony:

Welcome. I'm your host, Tony DUrso. I interview some of the most successful people in the world, and I thank you for joining us. This show is dedicated to helping you turn your vision into reality, and here's a successful entrepreneur who provides insights and guidance you can use to move along your vision path. Listen to my shows at Tony D-U-R-S-O.com or go to your favorite podcast platform, such as Apple podcasts and search for Tony DUrso. Hey, 90% of people read new text messages within 30 minutes. So let's help your business grow. Check out EZ Texting®® by texting T-O-N-Y to 858585 for more details, and here's a way to up-level your writing for your blogs, social media, books, company literature, and so on. It's more than just spotting typos. Grammarly® helps you readjust and define your style. See grammarly.com/Durso and listen just the head for my story. Lastly, I'll tell you a few things about Harry's razors. I've been using them for years, and we're giving you a trial set at harrys.com/D-U-R-S-O. More details just ahead so please stay tuned. Today's show is about getting predictable income with Jason Resnick. Let's see what we can learn today. At the end of this interview, I'm going to do a summary recap of what we went over. So stay tuned for that. Jason helps developers and designers discover their niche and plan out and market themselves to build recurring revenue so that they can live the life they want and ultimately reach the goals of why they started their own business in the first place. Here we go.

Tony:

Hi Jason. Welcome to our show.

Jason:

Hey Tony. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Tony:

Jason, you are a fellow comrade after my own heart. You do a lot of what I used to do in the past and you podcast now. You've got a really great show. I want to make sure we talk about that. There's so much that you do, yet you're off on a little bit of a tangent say in how you help people. You're very, very successful. I can't wait to find out about it. And so let's kind of go along the journey to success here. Let's follow you and perhaps let's start off at the very beginning. What's your back story?

Jason:

Yes, sure. So as you said, my name's Jason and I'm from New York and my backstory really starts when I was actually a teenager. I didn't know then what I know now. The world is very, very different from when I was a teenager. There was no internet or anything, but I knew very early on, I was sitting as a stock boy in a fabric store when I was the age of 14. So you can imagine that that's not the ideal place for a 14 year old boy where he wants to be. A fabric store with bolts of fabric and zippers and things like that. But I was there and I vowed to myself -and I remember vividly where I was - I said I never want to work a day in my life where I get up in the morning and I dread doing the thing I'm about to do. Now, I didn't know what that meant. I just knew to myself that that was something that was inside of me. My family, my parents, my grandparents, they're not entrepreneurial types so that wasn't even in my head at the time. It was just I don't want to do this crappy job that I've got now. That was pretty much where it came from. So fast forward I was in college, and that's when the advent of the internet. So I was in college between '95 and '99, and the internet started to come to how it is today. And what that looked like was, I didn't know what it was at that time. It was something that was cool. I was going to an engineering school. I was a computer science major. I was obviously into computers and what they could do for me. However, I had to take courses that were long distance learning courses and this economics course that I was taking was like a three hour course every Tuesday and Thursday that was long distance learning where I was watching a TV and the professor was at the other campus teaching us, and it was the most boring TV show that you could possibly ever watch. And so I just was like, all right, I'm not going to this class. I'm cutting it, and I went up to the computer lab and I would mess around on the internet, and my friend was at another school and he was building a web page, and so I learned over email how to build web pages based off of him. And so every Tuesday and Thursday I would do this and I fell in love with it. And I was like, this is awesome. This is so much better than me learning C++, all this other junk and maybe this is something that's going to take off. So I went the route. Silicon Valley started happening in the late '90s. I had this huge blow up argument with my mom. I wanted to leave college and go out west and say, Hey, look, I could build a website. I already had a couple of side hustles at that point in time where I would build websites for people. And then all of a sudden, my mom won that argument. She basically said, no, you're going to get your diploma. You going to walk and so on and so forth. And so I did that. I graduated, I got a job, but I got jobs as web developers, worked in Fortune 50 companies. I worked at small boutique agencies and I was a Jack of all trades. I did all sorts of development, all things from Java development to PHP development, to Ruby on rails development, full stack development, front end, the whole breadth, right? And then it was the early 2000s when I was working for a consulting firm at the time that really, we were just a body shop. I was only there for a little over two years, and when I first started there, it was 600 employees. At the biggest point at which the company grew was 2,400 and then by the time I was laid off, there was only about 450 left. So in two and a half years, this thing swelled and then totally went back to its roots. When I was laid off, I figured, Hey, maybe this is my opportunity. Maybe this is when I decided that I could do this thing. I can have my own business and run my own business. And so what happened was 18 months after getting laid off, doing work as a freelancer, I wound up getting a full time job somewhere else. 18 months into that, I found myself going back to work full time. It wasn't because of my skill set because that was fine. It was just all the business stuff. How to market myself, how to do sales calls, how to handle client onboarding and offboarding, all of the business-y things that as a developer, I didn't have to deal with working for somebody else because that stuff was all handled by other people. So I knew this thing for me wasn't going to end with me retiring, getting a gold watch from a company or anything like that. So I went back with the intention of learning all of those other things. Getting in with marketing teams and sales teams and trying to understand how that all works and how to do that sort of thing, what sort of documents and contracts you need for proposals? All of the things. And I basically educated myself in that way. And in 2010, I decided in August of 2010, I decided that I was going to quit my job and run my own business. And it's been that way ever since. It was January of 2010 when I made the decision that by my birthday, which was in September, I was going to do this because what happened was, I was essentially burning the candle at both ends. I would wake up at 6 o'clock, go to work at 7. I had an hour-long commute one way. I would come home around 4, eat dinner, start work again at 6 and basically work until about 3:00 AM, and then do the whole thing over and over again. I was running two businesses essentially. I was just doing my full-time job, but I was also running my business. And that for me, it was like, okay, now it's time. And in August, that was the time at which I did that. And I've been helping clients ever since. Been growing their businesses and helping them in any way to do that.

Tony:

Quite an amazing story there, Jason, and to our audience, which are entrepreneurs, small business owners, as well as corporate level executives, you could actually hear what's going on. Jason is a very successful entrepreneur. He creates his own lifestyle. He works when he wants to work. He works from home. But the cool thing is he's gone through all of this to actually create what he wants. And yes, he works from home. So there are some home sounds here, but this guy controls his own income, which is absolutely the most amazing thing. And I can't wait to learn more about how to get predictable income. I understand so much of your story now, how you were trained very well as a programmer. You went into business development. I'm curious though, how did you get that vision for your current success that you have now? Where and when did that come, that Eureka moment of hey, this is what I'm going to do.

Jason:

I think it was working for a lot of different agencies. I got a good taste of a lot of things that I enjoyed, but I also got a lot of taste of things that I didn't like and just my own personality. I'm very opinionated. I don't hold back for better or worse. Sometimes if I feel like something's a little off and I knew that I wanted to have the time, freedom and flexibility to live my own life. So early on, as I mentioned that when the time and the opportunity was there for me to do this myself, I just took all of these things that say, hey, this is how I want to run a business. These are the types of clients I want to work with. I want to have them appreciate and value and respect the asset that I am to their businesses. But also, I want to work with people that I enjoy as people, and I want them to feel that I care about them, right, because I do. I just felt in the agency life, especially in some of the agencies that I worked at, it was more of just order sheets and revenue and profits. And if that's what the person was as a piece of paper that was coming through your desk, I just didn't feel that. And so for me, having the vision of being able to build a business that allows me the freedom and flexibility to work with types of clients that I want to work with, work on the types of projects that I want to work with, but also to be able to take off on a random Tuesday afternoon, because it's a nice day outside without having to ask another person for permission to do so. So that for me was critical. And again, that's something that I work into my brand, my personal brand is a big thing. It's just me. I bring in contractors and all their trusted vendors on projects, of course, but when you come to me, it's me that's doing the work. I do the sales. I'm with you along the way throughout the whole journey in my business. So that for me is so important and my clients know. I work from home. They know that I only have a few select clients on a regular basis because it's just me doing the work, and so that's how I've built my business and the personal brand that I have that allows me to do all of those things.

Tony:

This is the Tony DUrso Show, where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Just ahead the chat continues about getting predictable income with Jason Resnick, but first it's time for us to take a short break. See you back here in just a moment.

Tony:

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Tony:

Alright, we're back on the Tony DUrso Show where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Let's see what we can learn today. Today's show is about getting predictable income with Jason Resnick. At the end of this interview, I'll give you a summary of what I got out of this, and I'll share some pointers with you. Stay tuned for that. Jason hosts two podcasts Live In The Feast and Ask Rezzz. Both are designed to be actionable and educational to help freelancers take action on their business to build recurring revenue. All right. And now back to the chat with Jason.

Tony:

Isn't that such a great feeling, Jason, to just be able to work whenever you want, take off whenever you want. It's so amazing because it's not like we're bazillionaires, but we still work. We still do whatever, but yeah, if something happens, something important, we can take off whenever we want. It is just absolutely amazing. And that's when you have a steady... let's call it a steady growing business that's stable, you know what you're doing, you're good, and whether it's through word of mouth or whatever, you're getting business. It's just such a good feeling, so hats off to you on that. I absolutely love it. And I got to make a comment on the corporate years. I cringe sometimes when we talk about it, because I've been there, done that for so long, and there really is no such care for people. I mean, you go out from school, fresh into the corporate world and you go, I'm going to help people do this or that. And there's no such thing. It's all about money and profits and whatever. And if you work at a corporate life, folks and you have an actual care for people and you're allowed to push that out, that's more of the minority because it's not normally that way. It's just what money can you get? What can you pull out of people? And it's all that stress. It's just so nice to just have that go away. I just wanted to comment on that, because I love that. It's just such a good feeling to just work for yourself and have it work. Whereas some entrepreneurs, they can't make it or there's not enough revenue and then they have to go back to getting that j-o-b, but to actually be able to sustain yourself and run a family and everything, I just think that's just amazing. And that's great on your vision. So now the purpose, what is that reason? I understand your lifestyle, but was there anything else in terms of how to help people grow their business or anything else in terms of that purpose that you set on fire to make your success?

Jason:

Yeah, my purpose and you sort of heard it in the background. That's always my why. That's my compass, my North star. So anything I do, it reflects back - is this taking time away from them? And likewise for my clients, meaning that I want my clients to have some sort of purpose in why their business exists and it can be anything. A lot of them, the vast majority are like myself, because that's who I attract, where family is very important, and they work at odd hours maybe sometimes, but it's different in that way. They're not looking for the Manhattan corner office sort of job. Whereas there are other folks, other clients that I have where their purpose is a little different. Where it is growth and revenue and they're trying to build a virtual agency, or they're trying to build new programs or new revenue streams in their business to scale. And so my ideal client and how I look at it is I want to be able to help them grow the business so that they can achieve what they're actually looking for from the business.

Tony:

We're learning how to get predictable income with Jason Resnick and you can find him at www.rezzz.com and I need to spell this. It's R-E-Z-Z-Z.com. There's 3 Z's - one, two, three. Rezzz.com. Jason, of course your last name is Resnick, but how did you get R-E-Z-Z-Z.com?

Jason:

This is so awesome that you asked me this Tony, because I rarely get to share why. When I was a kid, I played a lot of video games online and my last name is Resnick. It's R-E-S-N-I-C-K is my last name, but a lot of my friends called me Rez for short. So when you have a video game, you create like a little handle, and so I used to use REZZ with two Zs all the time. I don't know why; it was just what I did. Well, I joined some video game - I can't remember exactly which one - REZZ with two Zs was taken.

Tony:

Oh no!

Jason:

And I was like, wait a second. Who is me? I'm me, right. And I was like, I don't know what else to pick, so I just added a third Z and I was just going to add Zs until it was available. All right, I'll add a third Z and that was available and fine. And so in college when I started building these websites, I was just goofing around. I had no desire really to build the actual business off of it or anything like that. And my college asked me for a sub-domain name and it was building it off of the college domain. And I was just like, rezzz with 3 Zs, because that was what I carried over all the time now. And so, when I registered my very first domain name, I was like, all right, I'll do rezzz.com. It's something I'm going to remember. I never actually thought I would have to spell it out all the time or say, hey, yes, that's with three Z's. But yeah, nonetheless, just to be honest with you, it was my nickname. It was a carryover from video game life way back when and yeah, laziness from not changing it.

Tony:

Well, it's very unique as long as people know how to spell it, so it's very cool and it stands out, so very good on that. You've had that for quite some time, because I think you started your business in around 2010. So you've been around with that domain for quite some time, which gives it a lot of seniority or whatever for SEO and so forth.

Jason:

Yeah. Yeah. I think I actually registered that domain in the early 2000s, to be honest with you. But yeah, the site has had iterations over the years and things like that. And people ask me, how'd you get a five-letter domain name? I registered it way back when.

Tony:

There you go! Jason Resnick, let's get into your vision path. We want to build predictable income so where do we start? Do we start with web development and design? Is that a good place to start?

Jason:

Yeah, I mean, for me it's funny because I never really talked about this predictable income until maybe about two and a half years ago when a lot of developers and designers were asking me how I built my business. Living in New York, it's not exactly cheap. And they were like, Hey, you've been around for a long time, a number of years now, doing what you do in a space that's very crowded, and you have retainer clients that pay you multiple thousands of dollars every single month. How do you do that? And so I started talking about this when a lot of other developers and designers were asking me about it and to build predictable income, there's a bunch of different things that you have to pay attention to. As a generalist developer, that for me burned me out twice. it was like a dog chasing his tail, and I found out on the second time that ... I asked my wife to marry me. A month later, I told her that I was actually going back to get a full-time job. This was around 2012 and she looked at me and she said to me, but that's not what you want. I know that and if I know that, then you definitely know that. We'll just figure it out because I was burnt out and I didn't know what I was doing wrong essentially the second time. And so for me, her saying that proved she's the rock in this relationship. She is the non-gambler. She's not a risk taker. She wants to know where things are coming from. So for her to say that to me, that was like the kick in the butt that I needed to figure out what I was doing wrong. I have skills, I have clients but I still feel like I'm chasing my own tail here. So that was when I realized that in order for me to get predictable income, I had to be a go-to person for something, meaning I couldn't just be a web developer. I analyzed my client base. I looked at what I liked, what I didn't like, from both a client perspective as well as personally, what I like to work on perspective. And what I found was that I wanted to work on WooCommerce websites. That wasn't something that I was doing a lot of, but it was the needs of a lot of my clients and I love the e-commerce game. That was something that I've always loved from the start of the internet. I love the challenge of it so I combined that and I said, okay, with WooCommerce, specifically recurring revenue. Well, that's subscription and memberships and things like that, so I hitched my wagon to building subscription-based WooCommerce websites. And once I planted my flag there, I became known as the WooCommerce guy. I was on podcasts. I had my own podcast at the time and my network widened and I became known for something and leads would come to me from various different angles - word of mouth, past clients, colleagues and peers - and they knew exactly what I was doing already. There was no sussing out a project. Yes, we had to figure out projects, but I didn't have to change up my technology. I didn't have to change up what I was working on all the time.

Tony:

This is the Tony DUrso Show, where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Just ahead the chat continues about getting predictable income with Jason Resnick, but first it's time for us to take a short break. See you back here in just a moment. When I was 19, I wound up getting a job in corporate America as a typesetting proofreader. I didn't know how to type. I went to the library and got a typing book, and I learned how to type very fast. And I was taught many proofreading skills. I got so good at proofreading that I could just glance at something and find the typos. And to this day, I find typos in magazines, on the TV screen, in books, on billboards. You name it, I find typos. And this is why we need Grammarly® today. The typos are so rampant that you probably get immune to them, but they're still out there. For family emails, that's okay but for your blogs, your social media, your books, your company materials and so forth, the typo can mean the difference between closing that deal or having your prospect go to a competitor. It really can make the difference. This is serious if you're serious about your business. This is why I endorse Grammarly®, and there's so much more. Check this out. Whether you're communicating with your team online or working on a project, Grammarly® is the digital writing tool you can always rely on to get your message across clearly and effectively. Grammarly® works across multiple platforms, including Gmail, Google docs, and Slack. There's more to writing well than catching spelling mistakes. Grammarly® can help you write confidently, no matter where you are. Grammarly® is the digital writing assistant that helps more than 20 million people put their best words forward. Signing up for a Grammarly® account is free and gives you real time spelling and grammar checks as you write. It works where you work so you can communicate with clarity and confidence on every platform. Want deeper insights on your writing? Grammarly® premium gives you advanced feedback on tone, word choice, punctuation and more. I use Grammarly® because it's so fast, faster than me. I know that's a typo for you linguists out there. I use Grammarly® premium to go through my next book to assist me, not only in finding any titles after my rewrites, but to help me finetune the very specific and exact style for my book. The customizable feature is super, super brilliant. I can set it up to help make my writing academic or casual or anything in between. You get tailored, writing suggestions based on your goals and audience. You can make it informal, neutral or formal. You can set the tone, establish the intent and so much more. I love it. Grammarly® premium helps you write like a pro with advanced real time feedback. Hey, level up you're writing for work school or impersonal projects. Premium features include advanced suggestions on grammar, punctuation, sentence structure, and style. It's the perfect writing tool for anyone who wants to stand out with every word. And if you believe that you're good with words and that you really know how to spell and you don't make many typos and you're a good typist, this is so great to have Grammarly® premium. It's like this extension of you that just helps you do a better job faster. I absolutely really love it. Okay, guys, here we go. Get 20% off Grammarly® premium when you sign up at grammarly.com/D-U-R-S-O. That's 20% off Grammarly® premium at grammarly.com/Durso. Okay, let's spell that. G-R-A-M-M-A-R-L-Y.com/D-U-R-S-O. Grammarly.com/Durso. All right, guys. Check it out, sign up and tell me how much you love it. You're listening to the Tony DUrso Show with special VIP guests. Now back to Tony and his guest.

Tony:

Alright, we're back on the Tony DUrso Show where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Let's see what we can learn today. Today's show is about getting predictable income with Jason Resnick. At the end of this interview, I'll give you a summary of what I got out of this, and I'll share some pointers with you. Stay tuned for that. All right. And now back to the chat with Jason.

Jason:

And so that was the first step was to figure out what my specialty was. The next step was building out systems to create the pipeline that came in my business. I was never one for cold calling or cold emailing or anything like that. I wasn't going to knock on people's doors. It's just not my personality, but I was a developer. So I looked at myself as, how can I leverage the skills that I have so that I can create opportunities for people to come into my ecosystem? And so there was several ways in which I can do this. I created a referral network inside of my own client base. I created scripts that would pull Twitter and alert me of certain tweets that had certain key words in it that I knew that I could jump into the middle of a conversation and create value in that conversation without me having to be on Twitter. So these scripts would just send a notification to my phone at night when I was downtime on the couch. I would just look through these notifications, jump on Twitter and add to the conversation. I had other scripts too that were more of looking at Craigslist for jobs. This is sort of like a freelancer no-no, like you don't get anything good on Craigslist, but I got jobs from PGA, Canon, Sony, all from Craigslist. Those companies post on Craigslist, but they pull their ads down quick once they get enough candidates in there. I wanted to be first so I created scripts to do that. I created all of these mechanisms in my business and systems or processes in my business so that I could build up the pipeline while I was doing work, while I wasn't being active in the sales process. So in order for the predictable income to come to me, I needed predictable ways to bring leads into my business that were more likely to close rather than just be tire kickers, if you will.

Tony:

This is very interesting and I'm tracking with this. What would you say for the audience? There's so many of specialties out here, but everyone pretty much is good at something or can be good at something or knows about something. What would you recommend for the audience that wants to have a predictable income and build towards that is create something that they can sell and then get with someone like you to create an eCommerce website for it?

Jason:

Well, I would say if you have any sort of audience, ask that audience what they would like you to build. I've gone down the road of building things first and then releasing it to market and then having nothing but crickets. I've gone down the road of having an audience and then saying, hey, what would you like me to talk about? What would you like? What would you see value in? And just basically polling them and seeing if there's a product or a program that I can build from that. That is much more successful. Actually, my Feast community was built off of that. Feast is basically a community and resource hub for developers and designers looking to specialize and build predictable income, but that would've never happened had I not just asked my podcast audience, asked my email list and just say, Hey, I'm thinking of this idea. How does this look? How does this sound? Does this sound valuable to you? If not, what would you like? And just figure out what that is and read those responses. Yes, it’s not sexy, but much less painful than going down the road and building something out weeks at a time, or maybe months at a time and then releasing it to the world and nobody wants this thing.

Tony:

Yeah. I've definitely seen that happening where we think we know what people want. We spend a lot of time putting stuff together to sell it and then it doesn't sell well, so I totally get that. And it's very smart to ask and we forget, but surveys are the key sometimes and we forget we have to do it. Whether we have a big list or not, whether we podcast or not, there has to be some way to get ahold of the people that we want, we would love to be able to buy those items. So, yes. So we have to do that. So if we don't have a podcast, we're not podcasting, we could get on other podcasts, we could get on our social media, would word of mouth help at all? Because when we talk about eCommerce, we're talking about selling something anywhere in the world. So word of mouth to me kind of connotates local people, but not necessarily, perhaps you could comment on that.

Jason:

Yeah. I don't know if you've heard of the Morning Brew, that newsletter. It's a newsletter that's based off of referral, which is word of mouth. A lot of times when I talk about word of mouth, I talk about word of mouth marketing, and what that means is that if you ask anybody that's in the service based industry if they're getting word of mouth referrals, they're going to say, yes, it happens. And then you say, where are you getting them from? And then they say, it just happens like a past client or a friend of mine or whatever. Well, I like to actually make things a little bit more intentional and predictable. So that's why the word marketing is attached to that because there's some strategy. And then from that strategy, you implement tactics to that. The Morning Brew is a newsletter that has grown massively in subscriber base, based solely off of referrals. You don't have to run any ads or anything like that, and what they do is they entice their subscriber-ship with essentially gamification. You mentioned local. Yeah, I talked to my neighbor. I might mention something, but this thing allows you to, within the newsletter, it says, Hey, if you like today's newsletter, feel free to share it and you get points, and those points translates to things like stickers and t-shirts and even trips and things like that. And that's a word of mouth marketing mechanism in order to get predictable growth in the actual thing that you want to grow. In this world today, it's crazy how easy it is to reach somebody on the other side of the planet, a sole person on the other side of the planet. You could run an ad to a single person on Facebook or Instagram that matches up certain criteria. So if you actually want to test something that you have an idea on, and you want to create that word of mouth, create a simple awareness ad that then targets those people, ask them a question, get responses in the comments section there of whatever you're looking to build or share or give value on and see what that engagement is. See if it works. You could validate your idea there so this could be a product, it could be a program. It could be anything that you want. Like you mentioned about e-commerce, I'm actually standing on something called a fluid stance. And for those that don't know what that is, picture a skateboard without wheels, and the bottom of it is actually concave so I can move back and forth on it, and it's supposed to be better for standing and things like that. I never would have seen this thing, had it not been for a friend on Instagram who also had a standing desk and he said his feet hurt at the end of the day. And I said, Oh, my feet hurt at the end of the day too. He said, Oh, I got this thing. And this friend of mine lives in Australia, so I would have never had this thing had I not just had that engagement over social media.

Tony:

That's interesting. Now the standing desk, if a person is standing all day, normally at their job and they have aching feet, standing on this device helps abate that completely.

Jason:

Yeah. It's supposed to keep your legs and feet in motion, and it does. I don't notice it every day, but I've noticed now that I have this thing that my feet don't hurt at the end of the day, and I'm standing at my desk for half the day usually; or half or more. I had a pad underneath there, but it still felt problems. But then I heard about this fluid stance. And for me, this is awesome because I skateboarded when I was a kid. I was like, Hey, this is cool. This is kind of like the same sort of motion, if you will. But I would have never known and it was word of mouth. I didn't go searching for this thing. It was a friend of mine that lives in Australia who told me about it.

Tony:

Alright, Jason, we're going off on a tangent here. You stand at your desk. I sit at my desk. Now I have a carpet. I've got nice thick socks on. I'm good. Why do you stand? What's the standing thing?

Jason:

The standing thing is I have lower back problems. And if you haven't done any sort of research on this, sitting is the worst thing for you. There are some studies that say sitting is like the quintessential "cancer" to people that are white collar workers, the people that sit at desks all day long. And I was also in a car accident where I got major whiplash in my neck. I couldn't even turn my head to the left at all. And so for me, standing alleviates a lot of those pains. It keeps my energy level up during the day. If you notice you have like an energy crash around two or three o'clock, I don't have that anymore because I'm standing. The blood flow is better and as a podcast, you get full breaths by standing up. You enunciate better and your posture is better and things like that, so for, I guess about six years now, for every single day, about half the day, I stand.

Tony:

Very interesting. I'm going to look into that. And by the way, I did a little video called Entrepreneur Warm-Ups. I didn't do any promotion on it or anything, where I show various stretches that I do every day really fast while my coffee is brewing. I do some quick stretches to just stretch every part of the body or most of it. And I find it's just absolutely amazing. You can check it out on my YouTube, Tony S. D-U-R-S-O, Entrepreneur Warm-Ups. You'll see some stretches there. It's a little funny, little cute and you'll see my dog.

Jason:

Awesome. I'm going to get a clip of that.

Tony:

This is the Tony DUrso Show, where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Just ahead the chat continues about getting predictable income with Jason Resnick, but first it's time for us to take a short break. See you back here in just a moment.

Tony:

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Tony:

Alright, we're back on the Tony DUrso Show where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Let's see what we can learn today. Today's show is about getting predictable income with Jason Resnick. At the end of this interview, I'll give you a summary of what I got out of this, and I'll share some pointers with you. Stay tuned for that. Jason says "for my fellow freelancers, I want you to reach your dreams as I have. It's the fuel to my fire. I make it a mission to help share my experiences, how I built my business, help you build recurring revenue so that you can take off that Tuesday afternoon without any worry". And now back to the chat with Jason.

Tony:

All right, we're back to learn how to get predictable income with Jason Resnick. We just talked about word of mouth strategies, word of mouth marketing, which is how we got into the standing desk, which was very interesting. Now some of the people here have tried different things, and as you've mentioned very smartly, you have got to survey people. Say, hey, if I did this, if I talk about this, would it be interesting, cause otherwise you could spend all this time putting something together and all this money and nobody would be too interested? So you have got to survey. Are there any other ways to know, like if I'm going to go down this road, I guess where I'm fishing for is, I like this niche, but perhaps there's a different way that would make it more profitable? In other words, how do you know if you're going to sustain yourself where you're going?

Jason:

Sure. One of the best ways to do that is one, try to sell it. If you could sell it to one person, then more than one person needs this thing. If you sell whatever it is that you're trying for and trying to break into a niche, let's say, give yourself a limit. Can I sell it to 10 people? Can I sell it to 50 people, whatever that number is? Now you have that bucket. Now you have a bucket of people that are in that niche. There's a high likelihood that those people know more people that you can help. Create ways in which you can spark inspiration for them to refer you to them. And you can do this any number of ways. There's a couple of ways in which I do in my business is the p.s. on the bottom of an email. You might've seen this before, and if you haven't, just go in your inbox and see on some of the newsletters that you have to see if there's any of these boxes after the signature. You could just say, hey, I really enjoyed working with you on this project, or if you enjoyed this product, if you got value from this program and you know anyone else who has X and fill X in with the problem, I would love just a simple introduction and I can take it from there. That little p.s. after your signature goes a long way to just spark that inspiration, but for word of mouth, because nobody's thinking of you. You have to actually tell them to actually do the word of mouth for you. There's another way in which I do this. It's because I'm in the client services game is milestone happiness. This is more of like a human thing as well as a business thing. And what I mean by that is that in any project, there are some milestones which we achieve or reach, and at that time instead of just sending off an email or having a phone call and saying, Hey, this is awesome. We did this thing. Instead create a memorable moment in time with that person, with the engagement. If it's a team, awesome, with the team as well. And the memorable moment could be, if they're local, take them out to a steak dinner. If they're not local, figure out what it is that is important to them and share it with them, give it to them, do it for them, whatever it is. Just as a simple example, I had a client - and this was a number of years back - who is in the Midwest. They don't have any Major League Baseball teams in his area, but they have a minor league team there. And his son and him go to the ballpark every weekend. I'm a huge baseball nut, die-hard Mets fan. I love baseball. And I knew this just from engaging with him, and so when we launched his website, I sent him and his son two tickets to the minor league game that weekend. And I sent them with a card saying, hey, go have a night on the ballpark with you and your son, all on me. Congratulations on the launch. This was a number of years back and he still sends me referrals just because of that memorable moment. And I just simply asked him one day, I said, I mean, we haven't worked together in so long, but yet you're still, is there anything I can do to help you? You keep sending me referrals. And he said, no, I'm good. You're always front of mind not because you sent me those tickets, but because you included my son in this. And so that was important to him and that created that moment in time for him. So, these little sparks of inspiration is where you can create those word of mouth marketing tactics that actually turn into results.

Tony:

I really liked that. That's a good way to scale and sustain a business that we talked about earlier, the entrepreneur working from home to be able to enjoy the family. And that kind of brings in a point. We've talked about the marketing, the word of mouth. We've talked about different facets of this, and I want to get into scaling that business because I have of course reality with it. I podcast, I do things. I run a business and it seems to be sometimes that there's a level to it where you're comfortable just enough, that if you did much more, it would take you out of the family or you'd have to hire someone, and I run into that. I have a number of people working on all sorts of things for me, doing things so that I can still enjoy family life and I would love to know your take and how far do you feel that a single person should scale their business?

Jason:

Scale is such a dangerous word. For me personally, I love having a small client base. Yes, there have been times where I thought I'm going to hire an employee and build this thing up. But then my compass, my why of why I started the business in the first place, as you mentioned, that would be counterproductive, because now I'm starting to go in the way of managing people, growing a business and that would take me away from my freedom and flexibility of shifting as well as spending time with my family. So scale has to mean something to that person, that business owner, that entrepreneur in a way that maybe isn't what everybody else may see. So for me, how I scale my business nowadays is I love my clients. They're my bread and butter. It is what I've built my business off of. However over the past two years or so, I've branched out into a scalable portion of the business, meaning I'm coaching and mentoring and helping other developers, designers, agencies grow their businesses, and that is a scalable asset to me only because at the very bottom of that is digital products. So those are just digital assets that I've built and know how to sell those, and I can rinse and repeat that and they can just sell on their own. People come in through the podcast as I said. They come in through my email list. They get nurtured, they get presented these products, and that's a scalable way from a digital perspective to do that. My client services on the other hand, a lot of it is custom work. I have since started a productized service, which is a defined deliverable for a defined scope of work for a defined price. That is something that is very... I don't want to say assembly line-like, but it kind of is. There's little customization in there, but for the most part, I know exactly how long it's going to take to do each step. I can rinse and repeat. I could outsource parts of that that eats up my time and I could pay somebody else to do it and just do a cost analysis there. So I can scale parts of my business to serve me better, to give me more time back. And to me, that's what scaling is. It's how much time can I get back if I do these other things. I'm not looking to grow an agency or have a hundred-million-dollar business, while that would be awesome. It's just to have to sustain that sort of a business would just detract me from my compass.

Tony:

Totally get it and I love it. You're so humble and you're so rooted in enjoying your family and living a good life, which is great because I think a lot of people or too many people - and I'm generalizing a little bit; this is my opinion - it's later in their life where they really circle back to focus more on the family. I think you've started early, which is what you supposed to do, so hats off to you. Absolutely great, Jason. One last question. We're just running out of time. Any great resources that you would like to share with our audience visionaries?

Jason:

Yeah. If any of this resonates with you, I would love to have a conversation with you, and there's so many different ways in which you could do it. As Tony said, you could find me at rezzz.com and I have an opt-in there that actually talks about how to get clients on a predictable basis. A lot of the things that I shared here are in that opt-in right there, and I actually walk you through a lot of the setups and how to do those things. Otherwise go ahead and grab a listen to my podcast. It's called live in the feast. You'll find it right on my website as well, or my DMs and Twitter is always open for me, and I'm always open to a conversation there as well. I'm @Rezzz with three Zs there as well.

Tony:

Once again, we learned how to get predictable income with Jason Resnick and you can find him at rezzz.com. That's three Zs. Thank you so much, Jason. I learned a lot. I thought I knew so much. I get mentored. I speak to entrepreneurs and it's just absolutely amazing how much more I keep learning. Thank you. You filled in some gaps.

Jason:

Absolutely. Tony, thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.

Tony:

Hey, success squad. Thanks for hanging out with me while I featured an elite entrepreneur who took his vision to reality. I hope this was as inspiring for you as it was for me to do this interview. So how did you like it? Getting predictable income with Jason Resnick. What did you learn? You know, I can see that Jason's future began unfolding when he was 14 as a stock boy in a fabric store, when he vowed that he would never work a day in his life, dreading the work that he was doing then. We see that he got to a point where he worked a day job, and then he worked his own business nights and weekends, something I advocate all the time. He didn't get much sleep and I don't miss those days, but sometimes we just have to do what we need to do to get ahead, right? If he didn't make some sacrifices, he wouldn't ever get to a position where he called the shots and ran a big company, his own company. Do you have parallels to something like this? Are you trying to kick it up a notch and hitting this kind of ceiling? I hope you can learn something from this. I like the picture Jason paints when talking about how he got his vision and what was his Eureka moment on what he should do in his life. He talks about being able to take off on a Tuesday because it's a nice day. Now while we all liked this idea and some of us may take time off when we want, the question I ask you is, is your income sufficient enough? Are your needs all met and in good place? And are your clients always taken such good care of that you can take off a whole day or even a few days without a care in the world? Now I know I said a mouthful. So really think about that. Are you at that level? Not to toot my own horn, but to point out the power of having a strong vision in place, I took multiple trips last year totaling three months with family. Yeah, three months and all the while, I kept my shows and my businesses going. Now that makes a strong vision. Of course, I had the rest of the steps in place, as you may know, and which I'll bring up in just a moment. There's so much I got out of this interview. What did you get? I would love to know how you use this information to help you in your business or career. Okay, guys, now grab hold of your vision. Decide you're either going to start something great or take it to the next level. You have to decide first. It always starts with the decision and you can get my Vision Map to help you along the process to free eBook is at www.tonydurso.com. You can pick up the audio version and the training class too -highly recommended. I created my empire in just a few years. That's all it took. I had the Vision Map as my guide. You can do it too. Let's help you move on your journey to success. And if you have any Apple device or access to Apple podcasts, please look up my name, Tony D-U-R-S-O and subscribe to my show. A kind review there will get you tremendous appreciation back in return. Thanks guys, and remember - just take action. Success awaits those who persevere and remain steadfast despite the odds. Sow good seeds. Do good deeds and join me on the next episode of the Tony DUrso Show. We hope you've enjoyed this week's edition of the Tony DUrso Show with his key influencers. Be sure to tune in again next Friday at 5:00 PM Eastern time, 2:00 PM. Pacific time on the Voice America influencers channel.