The Transcript Is Auto-Generated and May Contain Spelling And Grammar Errors
Tyler Jorgenson (00:01.555)
Welcome out to Biz Ninja Entrepreneur Radio. I’m your host Tyler Jorgensen, and I’m excited to be kicking off another year of shows. This is probably gonna be either the second or third one that you’ve listened to for this year. And going into our 12th year of publishing Biz Ninja and broadcasting, always cool to meet more people, get more people on the show. And I’m glad, I’m grateful this time for this episode to have some…
some people that I’ve known and met through the marketing world over the past few years. Makes it a little easier to get back into momentum here, but want to welcome out to the show AJ Rivera and Mike Schmidt of Agency Coach. Welcome guys.
Mike Schmidt (00:40.18)
Hey Tyler, thanks so much man. Super fun to be here.
AJ Rivera (00:43.438)
Yeah, we’re excited, man. Thanks for having us.
Tyler Jorgenson (00:45.375)
Yeah, so my first question is almost always this. And then I want it, but it’s gonna have a little bit of an asterisk for you guys. So I’m gonna preface it with a pre-question. Do you guys consider yourself to be entrepreneurs?
Mike Schmidt (00:59.676)
Yeah. I mean, I think that word is, uh, littered with a lot of different meanings to a lot of different people. And, uh, I think the identity of an entrepreneur is something that is kind of cool because we each get to define what that is. Uh, one of the things I love about business is that it’s a game that we not only play, but we get to design that game in which we play, and I think that the, the title of entrepreneur is, uh, giving us.
gives us permission to do that not only play the game, but design it. So yeah, I think I would definitely put that label on me because that’s what that means to me.
Tyler Jorgenson (01:39.023)
Yeah, how about you AJ?
AJ Rivera (01:40.946)
Yeah, for me, I mean, I think maybe when we were just running the agency, I might not have considered that, but, you know, having now had multiple companies, I think that for me kind of checks off the box in terms of being an entrepreneur. So I can step into that identity more freely now and feel like legit about it.
Tyler Jorgenson (01:57.919)
Yeah, well, and I think it’s fascinating because some people really have born an entrepreneur, right? They always kind of shaking off the normal traditional roles. But what I’ve noticed in the agency space is a lot of those people stumbled into it, into business ownership. And that’s not always the same as entrepreneurship, right? Saying, I own an agency may not have been a very entrepreneurial thing, or maybe a thing of necessity. And so there’s a lot of nuance in that definition. But Mike, when was the moment you first realized, like, you’re not?
like everyone else, but you see the world differently and you’re an entrepreneur.
Mike Schmidt (02:32.784)
Yeah. So, uh, I had just graduated from college and I started my agency probably about six months before I graduated. And, uh, at the time, all of my friends were going off to get these big corporate jobs and, um, you know, really starting their careers. And I just remember thinking like, it’s a trap. I’m like, don’t do it. And I was like, I was worried for them because I had.
AJ Rivera (02:57.262)
Hehehehe
Mike Schmidt (03:00.26)
already by the time I graduated, like this sense of like freedom in like, um, uh, I could do anything that I wanted and this thing could be as big as I wanted. I could earn as much as I wanted. And, um, sure challenges for sure. But, but I, I really was just excited about that. So I saw my friends jumping into these corporate jobs and wearing the suits and cubicles and, you know, uh, you know, the break rooms, like, you know, the, the stereotypical like office space kind of thing and, um,
Tyler Jorgenson (03:26.587)
Yep.
Mike Schmidt (03:29.864)
What I said to them, a lot of times we’d be hanging out and I’d tell people, I’m like, Hey, you should start a business. You should start a business. And like, I was always just trying to convince the people around me that they should be doing this. I felt like it was my job, like my, my role to protect them, my buddies from making this massive mistake as I was seeing it. Um, and one day my, my wife said to me, um, I was telling her the same thing. She was not excluded from this list of people who should start businesses.
Tyler Jorgenson (03:41.903)
Yeah
AJ Rivera (03:42.818)
Hehehehehe
Mm.
Tyler Jorgenson (03:48.235)
Right.
Mike Schmidt (03:59.396)
One day she snapped at me. She’s like, dang it, Mike. She’s like, stop trying to convince everyone that they need to start a business. Not everybody needs to do this. And like, what’s funny is it was the first time in my life, it occurred to me that like, not everybody should start a business and not everybody wants to do this. And like, I thought I was helping them. Turns out I was being like a real ass to everybody. Nobody wanted to be my friend to be around me. And, and it was just like a big aha to me that I was like, I can’t make you want this, right.
AJ Rivera (04:04.35)
Hehe hehehehehe
Tyler Jorgenson (04:16.665)
Right.
AJ Rivera (04:16.803)
Mm-hmm.
Tyler Jorgenson (04:20.526)
Yeah.
AJ Rivera (04:20.831)
Yeah
Mike Schmidt (04:28.876)
But, you know, now it’s like, if you want this, I can help you. And that’s, that’s the key difference. Like, you know, today we get to coach and teach agencies, the platform and the, and the operating system by which we’ve had a lot of successes. Uh, but I can’t make them want that, but if they want it, then I can teach them. And that’s, uh, that’s been all the difference. And I’ll be honest, like sometimes I still find myself in the trap of, uh, trying to help people by putting them into business.
Tyler Jorgenson (04:33.484)
Yeah, it’s a big shift.
Tyler Jorgenson (04:58.915)
Sure. So go backwards a little bit there. You started an agency in college. That’s not something again that’s not a normal situation. What led to that?
Mike Schmidt (05:09.416)
I had, this is 2003. So think about what was going on back then. Google was not the top search engine. Facebook was like, maybe it was around, probably not yet. YouTube was not a thing yet. And so like smartphones, right? Like that was also not a thing. And so a very different world. So think of a young college kid in Tucson, Arizona, right? Trying to…
AJ Rivera (05:21.545)
Mm-mm.
Mike Schmidt (05:38.432)
figure out how to do websites. And like at that point, I had already been building websites and I’d been really deep into the internet at that point, as we called it back then. Uh, I was building, um, well, I was, I was hand coding everything and I was using like a combination of like Dreamweaver, sometimes notepad and, um, yeah, I had just learned PHP and I was, yeah, I got my start. I’ve, that’s been on the list. That’s been on the list. Um,
Tyler Jorgenson (05:47.247)
What were you building your websites in, in 03?
AJ Rivera (05:50.635)
Okay.
Tyler Jorgenson (05:53.696)
Okay.
AJ Rivera (05:57.678)
I’m going to go ahead and turn it off.
Tyler Jorgenson (06:01.495)
Yeah, I was using like Microsoft front page, right? Like, yeah.
AJ Rivera (06:07.212)
Nice, nice.
Mike Schmidt (06:08.16)
But I built, I built a community for magicians. Like I used to be really into magic. So it was a magic library. So I built this site in order to create a place for magicians to tell me all their secrets so that way I didn’t have to pay for them. And it was like a really clever, clever thing. And it was huge. 25,000.
Tyler Jorgenson (06:11.985)
Okay.
AJ Rivera (06:23.48)
Mm-hmm.
Tyler Jorgenson (06:26.635)
So am I right? You started building things based on your own interests. You started to understand how to do it. So then you’re like, oh, I can charge other people and I can do websites and things for them. Is that essentially how you got rolling? Oh, cool.
Mike Schmidt (06:31.529)
Yeah.
Yeah, right. Exactly. But in Tucson, Arizona, at that time, like there wasn’t a, you don’t, there’s no place you went to go to work as a web designer, like, I mean, there wasn’t. So like I either had to, I had to create it or I could have moved back home to Southern California and no doubt there was something there for me, but you know, I was playing in a band, didn’t want to leave Tucson. I was dating a girl. I didn’t want to leave Tucson. So I started a business and then I really couldn’t leave Tucson.
Tyler Jorgenson (06:57.839)
Gotcha. Yeah.
Yeah. All right. Well, AJ, how about you? I mean, you mentioned you were more of in the agency, you know, as an executive before you really took on that role of, or that identity of entrepreneur. How did you end up here?
AJ Rivera (07:02.39)
I’m sorry.
AJ Rivera (07:18.338)
Yeah, so it’s funny. I actually was in that corporate environment Mike was talking about, working at Intuit. Started off doing technical support there for QuickBooks. And it’s funny, because I worked like the swing shift, right? I went in, I think at like two or three o’clock till like 10 at night. And so you can imagine like here in Tucson, two o’clock is already five o’clock on the East Coast. So most businesses are closed, right? I wasn’t getting a ton of calls. And there was a guy that sat next to me that would spend literally hours building websites there. And so I’m like,
Tyler Jorgenson (07:40.292)
Mm-hmm.
AJ Rivera (07:47.638)
that looks pretty cool. And he just started teaching me and pretty soon I started building sites for Intuit just for like internal stuff, like our team page or a page that needs to do this or that and became kind of known as that. And they started like lending me out to other departments to do that. And same type of thing happened. So I started my own agency. It failed. It didn’t work out the way that I thought it would, but I still kind of had that in my mind as something I wanted to do. You know, when you work in a big corporate environment,
Sometimes you feel like a really small cog in this big machine and you’re not quite sure how the work that you’re doing is really doing anything, right? I wanted to work more closely with people. I wanted to be able to provide people with web strategy and help them find technical solutions. You know, I’ve always been good at like translating like complex technical stuff into regular terms. And so Mike put out an ad, in anchor wave for a web strategists. And what he was really doing was hiring somebody to do sales.
but he disguised it as that. And I could tell you 100% I would not have applied if I would have thought it was a sales position because at that time, my perception of what sales was, was like a sleazy guy that’s trying to manipulate people and force them into things they don’t want. And it was just like, that’s not the angle I wanted, right? I wanted to be more consultative. And fortunately, that’s really what sales is in a lot of ways, at least the way that we sell is like, hey, you’ve got some problems or you have some goals.
Tyler Jorgenson (08:58.959)
Sure.
Tyler Jorgenson (09:02.293)
Right.
AJ Rivera (09:13.974)
You know, I’m going to give you some ideas and recommendations based off of how I would tackle those and would you like our help with that? Right. And so really kind of changed my view on all of that and, you know, has led to a lot of success for our agency and being able to have that consultative sales process that we’re now able to teach to other agency owners all over the world. Right. Because I think you hit the nail on the head. There’s a lot of people that get into agency work, right. That
they don’t want to be a salesperson. They don’t want to be the CEO. They want to design websites or they want to do SEO. And they quickly learned that in order for their business to be successful, they probably need to not do those things. They need to be running the business, not operating in it like that. And so that’s a shocking thing for a lot of people. And sometimes there’s a lot of resistance there. And so we help agency owners kind of break through that and implement kind of the things that.
Tyler Jorgenson (09:52.245)
Yep.
Tyler Jorgenson (10:02.299)
Sure.
AJ Rivera (10:07.786)
allowed us to get past that, right? And allowed us to be able to build the business, the agency like a business.
Tyler Jorgenson (10:09.752)
Yeah, it makes sense.
Tyler Jorgenson (10:13.583)
So you mentioned AJ that your first agency, your first effort failed. What is your perspective on failure and your mindset towards failure as part of business in progress?
AJ Rivera (10:18.594)
Mm-hmm.
AJ Rivera (10:22.327)
Mm-hmm.
AJ Rivera (10:28.267)
Yeah. So I mean, I don’t think that I think it’s like you never lose, you learn, right? I definitely believe that. And I know I needed to go through that in order to kind of step into where I did with AnchorWave and the other businesses that we’ve had. And so I certainly, well, I said it failed. I mean, it doesn’t exist anymore. But our attempt at that was just, you know, it was…
Tyler Jorgenson (10:48.268)
Right.
AJ Rivera (10:52.362)
I had a buddy that I thought was a sales guy, right? And I thought he could go out there and drum up a lot of business and that I would just be in the background coding stuff. And we were both kind of just doing it on the side while working other jobs. And it just became clear that neither of us were really as into it and focused as we needed to be and serious about it. And we got a couple gigs, we did them, and then it just kind of fell flat. It was always some excuse about why the sales weren’t coming in. And I just didn’t have the…
Tyler Jorgenson (11:05.605)
Sure.
AJ Rivera (11:22.942)
drive to change anything about that at that time. You know, I was pretty comfortable into it and kind of happy to just do the little things that we did.
Tyler Jorgenson (11:25.871)
That makes sense.
Tyler Jorgenson (11:32.011)
Yeah, but I like how you said that those are the lessons, those are the things that prepared you to be able to handle the future challenges or future responsibilities. So Mike, you mentioned, you know, you started your agency in college, right? That’s still an evolution of what you’re running now and growing now. You also have agency coach where you help other people do the same. Along that path, along that, you know, since 03, I guess, what was one of your biggest failures or setbacks?
And how did you overcome it?
Mike Schmidt (12:02.62)
Yeah. I mean, it’s funny because, uh, there have been so many. Failures along the way. Um, yeah, I think that if you would have told me the number of things that we’d have to go through in order to get where we’re at here today, um, I wouldn’t have had the guts to really go through with it. And so just having some of that, uh, you know,
AJ Rivera (12:07.694)
Yeah
Mike Schmidt (12:23.628)
blind enthusiasm has really served well. And I think that’s what’s kind of cool about this. Every lesson that we’ve had along the way, it was like perfectly timed for what we needed to learn. I’d say that probably the biggest one that probably is still in our common language in our day-to-day running business has to do with
building recurring revenue in our, in our businesses. Um, recurring revenue is like fricking awesome. And it’s like the most magical thing in the face of the planet. And, um, it’s fixes everything. Like it’s just, you know, it’s the best. And the thing is that we were running a business that didn’t have recurring revenue that we had to go out month after month, getting new clients, building new websites, doing new projects. And it made it really hard to,
to have a predictable business. We didn’t, we knew that we shouldn’t be doing all the work, but if we were going to hand it off to someone else, we needed to be able to pay them and, and reliably expect that we could do that month after month. And you figure, you know, 2003 in the early two thousands, like, you know, we didn’t necessarily have things like Upwork and the marketplaces and the gig economy. Um, we were kind of looking around our neighborhood, trying to figure out who knew this stuff. And it was, uh,
Tyler Jorgenson (13:27.342)
Right.
Mike Schmidt (13:43.232)
It was early on in that. So like the, the entrepreneurs of today have access globally to a talent pool, which I just like wish I had back then. Um, but building recurring revenue was what created a lot of stability for, for the business. And, you know, people a lot of times will ask us like, how do you create a financial freedom with your business? And it’s very simple, right? It’s hard to do, but it’s very simple because it’s an equation. It’s monthly recurring revenue greater than expenses. Right.
I mean, that’s it. If you have more monthly recurring revenue, then you have expenses, right? Then you have financial freedom. And
Tyler Jorgenson (14:13.911)
Yep.
AJ Rivera (14:15.038)
Hmm
Tyler Jorgenson (14:19.511)
Yeah, it’s pretty similar to the equation for like any financial freedom, whether it’s at home, income equals more than output, right? But this, yeah, but I, but the big difference of what you’re saying here is recurring.
Mike Schmidt (14:26.405)
Yes. Yeah. I’m not some Brainiac to pop this thing up. It’s just like, it’s
AJ Rivera (14:26.862)
Mm-hmm. Hehehehehehe. Mm-hmm.
Mike Schmidt (14:33.884)
Exactly. And so, because, you know, there’ll be plenty of times, you know, uh, you know, AJ, if you want to share the story about the casino, I think this would be a great spot to drop it in.
AJ Rivera (14:44.574)
Yeah, 100%. So, you know, for a long time, like Mike and I are always trying to best our best, right? So we’d have a great month and then I’m like, cool, I want to go have a better month, right? And, you know, the way that we thought we needed to do this, and I think this is the mistake that Mike’s talking about, that we made over and over and over again, was going after bigger and bigger fish, right? And I remember, like, we were always trying to sell large upfront projects. And I’d been working on one for a while, which was a local casino here in town.
Tyler Jorgenson (14:49.466)
Yeah.
Tyler Jorgenson (15:06.51)
Yep.
AJ Rivera (15:10.978)
And it took me a while to close it, but when we did, it was by far the largest website that we’d ever created. It was a six figure web type deal. And I remember thinking, oh man, finally we did it. Like all our financial worries are over. You know, we’re never going to have to worry about payroll or expenses again. And man, it wasn’t two months, three months after that sale that…
Tyler Jorgenson (15:26.551)
Right.
AJ Rivera (15:33.462)
We were kind of talking about that again, you know, hey, we need some cashflow, we need some money coming in. And I remember going to our bookkeeper, our accountant so frustrated and being like, how the heck did I just bring in all that money and it’s all gone, right? And I feel like we’re no further ahead than we were two months ago. And so she did some analysis and she ran this report, which was like a report that really changed a lot for us. And it was our top 20 clients over the last few years. And I wholeheartedly expected
The casino that I sold to be the number one on there. And guess what? It was barely in the top 20, barely in the top 20. And I’m like, what the heck is going on? And guess who was number one? It was this orthodontist that had been paying us two grand a month that whole time. And it was a dentist and an HVAC company, all these companies that like weren’t paying us a ton, but they were paying us for a long time, right? And, you know, at first I was like just shocked, but then I got really excited. Why? Because when I sold that casino,
Tyler Jorgenson (16:23.735)
Yep.
AJ Rivera (16:31.358)
It was kind of like the, I remember the first of the next month, I’m like, where the heck am I going to go get another site like that? Right? Like I already knew I was going to have a worse month than the prior month because there’s just no way I could find that. But guess what? There’s a ton of dentists in town. There’s a ton of HVAC guys. There’s a ton of roofers, all these other people that are on there. I’m like, this is it. So we completely shift our focus to like, great. How can we should have been celebrating the thousand dollar contract that was monthly or the two thousand, not the hundred thousand dollar contract. Right?
Tyler Jorgenson (16:37.364)
Yep.
Tyler Jorgenson (16:56.364)
Right.
AJ Rivera (17:00.742)
Once we realized that, we put all of our attention on going after those types of clients and not focusing so much on these big web projects that were one time. And that’s what set the stage for us very quickly, building enough recurring revenue so that at the beginning of the month, everything was paid, right? And I’ll tell you what, the feeling of going into a brand new month, knowing that you don’t need another new sale for this thing to still keep going was like, man, we are so like.
Tyler Jorgenson (17:25.325)
Right?
AJ Rivera (17:29.054)
all the stress just melted away and we could then start to work on things that we wanted to work on, right? Or that might not have an immediate like financial result, but we were excited about it or it was just the right thing to do for our clients or it was going to create better results, right? And like those things were things we couldn’t work on when we were constantly in campaign mode and just trying to get more and more deals.
Tyler Jorgenson (17:41.656)
Yeah.
Tyler Jorgenson (17:50.443)
Yeah. You can play a lot longer game with a long-term strategy. Once the, it’s like, I always think of business having similar needs to like our Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, right? Where it’s like, okay, what, once I’ve covered that shelter and is handled, right? Like once I know the bills are paid, now I can start thinking about all those other levels of achievement in the business. And so Mike, cause you guys have evolved with anchor wave and then
Mike Schmidt (18:03.209)
Right.
AJ Rivera (18:03.52)
Yeah.
AJ Rivera (18:07.534)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
AJ Rivera (18:15.214)
100%.
Tyler Jorgenson (18:19.075)
What made you decide you wanted to start agency coach? Like that’s, you know, what made you decide, hey, I’m gonna give away all of our secrets too?
Mike Schmidt (18:27.068)
Yeah. People have asked us that often. They’re like, if this is working so well, why are you teaching everybody else how to do it? And, um, you know, I think it comes back to what you were talking about before is like the desire to help people create a life of freedom of their choosing through business. And that was something that was in me from the beginning and it was evident by me trying to convince all my friends to do this. Um, and it’s what really drives what’s happening now. I, um, you know,
AJ Rivera (18:27.15)
Hahaha.
Tyler Jorgenson (18:33.177)
Hmm
Tyler Jorgenson (18:48.046)
Right.
Mike Schmidt (18:54.152)
We kind of got to the point where we felt like we’d slayed a lot of dragons that in the business. And, uh, we felt like it was time to, to figure out how else we can help and how we can expand ourselves. You know, we ended up putting ourselves in the rooms of a lot of really brilliant marketers. One of those rooms was Russell Brunson’s inner circle. We joined in, uh, 2015. And so this was in a, this was in a time before ClickFunnels was a, you know,
Tyler Jorgenson (19:11.119)
Mm-hmm.
Mike Schmidt (19:20.664)
the behemoth that it’s become. And we were sitting in a room with a bunch of people that people on this podcast listening to probably know the names of these people. Um, but back then they weren’t the people that they are today. And so we kind of got a view of the world from outside of Tucson, got a view of like what was possible. And we’d realized that what we had created in our business was actually something pretty special. Like I always just kind of assumed that every agency out there had like sales process and system and lead generation.
Tyler Jorgenson (19:22.465)
Right.
Tyler Jorgenson (19:37.068)
Yeah.
Mike Schmidt (19:49.004)
team recruitment and retention and like all those things. I just thought that like, well, of course, like I did it. Like you just figure it out and you do it. And I didn’t really think it was special at all. And it wasn’t until that we started to show some people these things and people were just like, wait, how do you do this? And like, that’s what, that’s how you did this. And, um, like even today, I sometimes fall into that trap of like, oh, what we did is nothing special, but like, it turns out that it really is, um,
AJ Rivera (19:53.538)
Mm-hmm.
Tyler Jorgenson (19:57.763)
Yeah. Sure.
AJ Rivera (20:07.029)
Mm.
Mike Schmidt (20:15.452)
something unique that, that our team has put together and we’ve built. And so knowing that I’m helping the agency that might be just like us. Um, but maybe a few steps behind us and like, is really fulfilling because like I have worked with business coaches nearly the entire time I’ve been in business. No, none of them have been agency coaches, but like these, these have been people who have, you know, walked the walk and been on that pathway and the fact that I can not only just coach people.
uh, around business, but then also apply it specifically to their situation. Um, has, has been just, uh, just really cool, really fulfilling and to witness the results in the lives that are changed, um, it scratches that itch back to that same guy who was, you know, nearly out of college, trying to convince everyone else that they could change your life by starting a business.
Tyler Jorgenson (21:05.739)
That makes a ton of sense. And so AJ, earlier on, you mentioned that, that like drop of stress. Once you know, the monthly bills are covered, right? And I think business is, and Mike, you’ve been talking about it this whole time, that business is more than just, uh, having your own job, right? It’s about creating, having a lifestyle that you have some control over and that you get a design. Uh, and so I always like to shift from business into more personal. AJ, what’s one item on your personal bucket list you want to accomplish in the next 12 months?
AJ Rivera (21:06.09)
Mm-hmm.
AJ Rivera (21:14.263)
Mm-hmm.
AJ Rivera (21:35.222)
Well, personal bucket list. I really want to get into some real estate investing. That’s something that I haven’t really done. We’ve kind of just reinvested back into our own businesses. And of course, we hear the idea of passive income and all this other stuff that comes along with it, which I get there’s still probably work there. But I feel like that and acquisitions in general are probably an area where I don’t feel I know a lot about it. And I feel like people that
Tyler Jorgenson (21:42.808)
Nice.
AJ Rivera (22:05.498)
are at the stage in entrepreneurship that we’re at, are definitely exploring that type of thing and able to go faster than maybe what we’ve done in the past. I do believe what got you here won’t get you there. And sometimes I still think we get caught up in the forced hard way to do stuff and grow when maybe now we can go quicker by leveraging some of the momentum that we have in a different way and learning about that.
Tyler Jorgenson (22:17.433)
Yep.
Tyler Jorgenson (22:30.299)
Cool. I like that. Mike, same thing to you, man. What’s one item on your personal bucket list?
Mike Schmidt (22:35.452)
Yeah. So like AJ and I each, uh, you know, we’re, we have our respective wives, right? But we still make the joke all the time that we’re each other’s work wives. And so like everything AJ just said, very much in alignment with that. And I think if I was going to add, um, anything to that, and I know this would is a thing for, for AJ as well, you know, we’ve, we’ve got, you know, growing and young families, right? And so.
Tyler Jorgenson (22:43.973)
Sure.
AJ Rivera (22:44.658)
Hmm. Hehehehe.
Mike Schmidt (22:58.52)
Um, really making investments in our families in the ways that is meaningful to them, like, uh, you know, I’m really involved in the scouts with the kids. And, you know, we were, uh, you know, right before this call, I was just sanding a model rocket that we’ve been applying paint to and like, we haven’t picked out the color yet, uh, the kids want to do this gold color that’s, I think is the wrong choice, but I’m thinking I’m taking them through the paint aisle at the Lowe’s or Home Depot later and let them, we’ll really pick the right color, but it’s like, it’s stuff like that.
Tyler Jorgenson (23:06.192)
Mm-hmm.
AJ Rivera (23:12.445)
Hmm
Tyler Jorgenson (23:13.273)
Yeah.
Tyler Jorgenson (23:22.062)
Yeah.
Mike Schmidt (23:25.6)
You know, our motto in agency coach is own your agency, own your life, right? We’ve talked about financial freedom before, but what about the time freedom? And so, you know, if financial freedom is, you know, monthly recurring revenue greater than expenses, well, then once you have that financial freedom, that’s when you get to buy your time back. You know, that’s what AJ and I have done inside of our agency. Like today, we don’t work day to day in our agency at all, right? Our leadership team handles that. And we work.
Tyler Jorgenson (23:25.717)
Oh heck yeah.
AJ Rivera (23:26.222)
Mm-hmm.
AJ Rivera (23:36.01)
Mm-hmm.
Mike Schmidt (23:54.476)
But we do work day to day, we’ve jumped into agency coach, which is a new business for us, a new, a new thing to figure out. Um, and while we have time and financial freedom in our agency, we’re still figuring that out in the coaching business. So getting to use that time for, for the things that really matter and creating the kind of life that we want, um, which is really true owning our lives is about having businesses that can operate without us, that can provide cash flows for us to buy our time back so that we can do the things that we want if we.
If, if agent and I were like avid golfers, like maybe we would have done golfing now and when we were quote unquote retired, but like we chose to get into this business and figure it out, um, on purpose because we wanted to. Um, and I couldn’t think of a cooler thing to be able to do.
Tyler Jorgenson (24:27.969)
Right.
Tyler Jorgenson (24:38.587)
That sounds awesome. Well guys, both of you, thank you for coming out on the show. Agencycoach.com is where you can learn more about what they’re doing there. And we’ll have a special link for listeners later on when you check. I think it will be agencycoach.com slash bizninja where you can check out some special stuff that they put together for you. But really appreciate you guys coming on the show. Hang tight, I do have another question that won’t be aired live, but I’ll show a special way that people can get access to that. So thanks for coming out.
AJ Rivera (24:39.403)
Uh huh.
Mike Schmidt (24:57.377)
That’s right.
Tyler Jorgenson (25:08.475)
And to all my bizninjas just wherever you’re listening, watching streaming, it’s your turn to go out and do something.
