Live Interview and Lessons Learned from FlynnCon 1 with Dr. Dave Eng

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In this episode of GradBlogger, we have a live interview with Dr. Dave Eng at FlynnCon 1. We talk about the conference and what we as academics can take away from it as we continue to build our own businesses.

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Introduction

Chris Cloney: 00:08
Welcome to Episode #24 of GradBlogger, where we’re helping academics build online businesses and change the world. I’m your host, Dr. Chris Cloney. In today’s episode, we’re doing a live interview with Dr. David Eng in a Buzzsprout recording booth at FlynnCon 1.

This is Pat Flynn’s first conference, and there are some great people attending, particularly Dr. Dave Eng from jobhakr.com. He has a couple of other websites: universityxp.com and davengdesign.com.

Chris Cloney: 01:04
He knows I run the GradBlogger podcast, and he’s thinking about maybe starting a podcast himself in the future. So we got into the Buzzsprout booth at the FlynnCon event and just went back and forth on what lessons we are learning here as academics building online businesses.

The conference was mostly geared towards online entrepreneurs, digital marketers, and bloggers. The question is: what can we take away as academics and put into our own business? So with that, sit back and relax and listen to this live recording from the FlynnCon1 in San Diego.

Chris Cloney: 01:45
I’m here live with Dave Eng at FlynnCon. We are at the Buzzsprout podcasting booth. They have a great booth set up, so we booked a time to sit down and have a chat about what we’ve learned from this event as academics creating businesses.

Dave Eng: 02:13
Hey, everyone. I’m Dave Eng. I’m here with Chris. We’re at FlynnCon. It’s a live event, so you can hear a lot of background noise. Hopefully, you can hear us well over that. Chris and I got together a few moments ago and we just wanted to discuss a couple of our takeaways, specifically as academics who are attending a conference for entrepreneurs. We both have some points to make. So, Chris, I’ll let you go first with your first big takeaway from FlynnCon so far.

Chris Cloney: 02:41
I’m Dr. Chris Cloney. I run a podcast called GradBlogger. Dave maybe, give me a little short intro about you and your work so that when it goes up on GradBlogger it makes sense too.

Dave Eng: 02:58
Oh, yeah. Okay, I run two blogs right now. First one is called University XP. That is the place where I blog about my dissertation research and interest in games, gamification, and game space learning, specifically how we can use games in an online teaching and learning environment.

Dave Eng: 03:19
My second blog is the JobHakr. That’s J-O-B-H-A-K-R. That’s where I help other entry-level student affairs professionals in their very first student affairs job search. So that is a blog that I had started a while ago when I was helping some of my mentees in their first student affairs job search working in higher education.

Chris Cloney: 03:39
Love it. We met through the Academics Mean Business Facebook community that Lindsay Padilla runs. I think we were both featured on her podcast, which you can go check out. We got to meet up with Lindsay last night and chat shop with her, and see where Academics Mean Business is at. So that’s the small environment that we have going on here with the lessons learned. They’re pulling it from online marketing and people like Pat Flynn, who are experts in the field. We just want to go and give you guys an idea of what lessons we’re learning here live.

Chris Cloney: 04:15
So let’s get right into it. Maybe we’ll start with Dave. What things are on your mind or rattling around in there as lessons learned?

Dave Eng: 04:29
I’d say the number one lesson that I’ve learned so far, and the main reason why I decided to come to FlynnCon 1 this year, is for the connections for networking. So if I had to take away my one lesson, first lesson would be connections count. I came here to meet you, Chris, and Shawn and a bunch of other entrepreneurs in this space who are doing the same thing that I want to do.

Dave Eng: 04:52
Granted, some people are at different levels, but I think it’s great to be able to share our different business ideas, share some of our strengths, share some of our weaknesses, and really collaborate on where we are on our specific journeys, and how we can best support and help each other to number one, meet more people; number two, grow our audience; and number three, hopefully, make some more money in the end. So I’d say connections count. That’s been a big takeaway for me.

Chris Cloney: 05:19
Yeah, and I’ll add to that, because one of the big things I learned from chatting with 200 people over the last 48-hours is that there’s no one size that fits all. There’s not one magic business model. There’s not one, dare I say, beta launch of a course that’s going to make this work. It’s really about getting feedback and a cross-section of all the available options out there through those connections and trying to figure out which ones are going to work for you. So I love that point.

Chris Cloney: 05:48
I’m going to mention something that Pat opened up with in his first session, when he brought three ladders to the stage. My other business is dustsafetyscience.com, where we look at industry safety. I’m not going to comment on the safety aspects of putting three ladders on the stage, but he did a really theatrical performance that showed his original career as an architect, and how he lost his job there. He explained that he had to let go of the ladder to move into this online business world. He also had a really poignant demo where he had two hands and a foot on one ladder – online business – and he still had one foot on the other ladder, which was the architecture business.

Chris Cloney: 06:35
He realized that you can’t climb if you have two hands and one foot on one ladder and the other foot on another ladder. I thought that was a great demo. What did you think about that, Dave?

Dave Eng: 06:54
Coming from higher education and teaching and learning in general, I think it’s great to be able to demonstrate and use visuals and metaphors. I think Pat did a really good job of that in that we only have so many hours each day.

We only have so much energy to dedicate to ourselves, to our families, to our professions and to our lives. I thought that was a great analogy for demonstrating that yes, you can put a lot of energy into climbing one ladder, but sometimes you may not get to the top, or you may reach a point where you can’t progress any further. You may want to try to climb another ladder, but to make significant progress on one ladder, you’re going to have to take your foot off the rungs of another one. Again, we are limited on time and resources, and sometimes in order to make big leaps, we have to make a big investment.

Chris Cloney: 07:43
I love it. So I’m going to bounce it back to you. What’s another big takeaway from last couple of days?

Dave Eng: 07:48
My other big takeaway was whenever I go to conferences in general, one, I go there to network. But two, I also go there to learn as much as I possibly can. So my number two lesson is going to be levelled up learning. Here, I didn’t really know what I was going to get out of the conference, because this was the very first time I had attended a business-focused conference before and specifically for entrepreneurs. So all I knew was that I wanted to soak up as much information as possible, and for me, a lot of that had to deal with getting over growth mindset, getting over scarcity mindset.

I know that for academics it’s difficult to want to do something for money, because I know that working in higher education we’re ingrained with the thought that we’re doing this for the learning, and we’re doing this for the community, and not necessarily for the money. But that was a lot of my background. Chris, what do you have to gain from anything that you’ve learned so far from the conference?

Chris Cloney: 08:41
The continuous learning part for sure, and the level up learning. We listened to… I believe his name is Walid, but I don’t know his last name. But it’s Ask Pat. If you Google Ask Pat and Walid, I’m sure it will come up, because the two episodes are pretty popular.

He told us a story about how as a photographer, he knew nothing. He bought a $2,000 camera. He somehow -serendipitously we’ll say- ended up on a photo shoot photographing Usher as his first time ever using the camera. It was a hilarious story that ended in him having really grainy black and white photos that were terrible, and he didn’t even know Photoshop existed. For some reason, Usher seemed to like the photos, and he ended up going on tour with him, which is a ridiculous story. I’m not sure if it’s even available to the public.

Chris Cloney: 09:27
The point I want to make is that while he was the road with Usher, he would learn just one tip every day. He would go on on YouTube and say, what is the next tip I need to know? The team there would say, “Oh, you need to photograph this way.” He said, “Oh, today I learned about how to shoot in front of a window. So you guys are going to have to go over in front of the window, because that was the one thing I learned today.”After being on tour for several months and learning one thing a day, he went on to be pretty prolific photographer I guess.

Dave Eng: 09:59
I think Walid is like the case study and a perfect example of being flexible, because he came into that situation knowing what he wanted. He knew what he wanted the outcome to be, but he didn’t know the steps needed to get from here to there.

I mean, he did embrace that one idea that he wanted to learn one new thing every day. That story about needing to shoot in front of a window was incredibly powerful, because that’s all he knew. Now he is where he is because he was able to learn from that experience, and then just grow from it. I think that out of everyone we’ve heard, he has the most endearing story so far. Just because he was able to not only beat the odds, but also become a better person because of it.

Chris Cloney: 10:53
Yeah, the second episode is Ask Pat 1044. There are over a thousand episodes of Ask Pat, Where Are They Now? Walid Azami. The original episode was Ask Pat 1022. He shared the story of how he got started, which isn’t in those two episodes, but they are well worth listening to. So where are we at? Whose turn is it?

Dave Eng: 11:21
I did level up learning. So it’s your turn.

Chris Cloney: 11:23
Okay. I’m going to dial it back to a planning phase: maybe planning for your online blog. If you’re looking to create an online business, you need to find what’s unique about you, and what only you can put into the world.

The reason I bring this up is because, like Dave, I haven’t been to a ton of online marketing conferences, so I didn’t know what to expect. But I’m pretty sure that there won’t be another one that looks like this. I’ll give some examples. People who are just getting started in an online business are a big portion of Pat’s audience, so I didn’t expect him to have his son and his daughter on stage today. I’m not going to pronounce their names. They’re Hawaiian, and I’m going to–

Dave Eng: 12:18
It’s Keoni and Kailani.

Chris Cloney: 12:20
Yeah, you got it. But he had them on stage. He had his wife on stage. I have my 11-month old son here, and my wife’s taking care of him while I’m attending the event. Not a lot of online marketers would be able to integrate the lessons learned while having a family. I know that impacts a lot of people in academia too. How do you go about doing a side hustle and full-time job and making sure that you are still there for your spouse and children?

I’m going to bring it all the way around. That’s something that only Pat Flynn could put in the online market space. That’s a unique selling proposition that he could really put on at his conferences: softer topics like how you get over things like imposter syndrome, how you communicate with your family about your desire to build an online business.

Chris Cloney: 13:10
Those are things I don’t think you find elsewhere. That’s why I want to bring it back to this. If you’re thinking about starting an online business or creating a blog as an academic, try to find somebody who can be your virtual mentor. Learn about them, but they’re only a guidepost. Don’t try to be them.

You need to figure out what unique value you can put in the world, and then start doing that. You’ll learn and change as you go too. After three years of doing this, I’m a different person than I was when I started, and I’ll be a different person three years from now too. But I still try to focus on the uniqueness of what I bring. So what does that bring up in your mind, Dave?

Dave Eng: 13:46
For me, I think part of the reason why I like listening to Pat and the reason why I’m here is that Pat and I share a lot of the same characteristics. We’re both Brown guys. We’re both 36, we were both laid off in our lives. We both have full names that are only two syllables.

Chris Cloney: 14:08
It’s getting spooky now.

Dave Eng: 14:09
It’s getting real spooky. I identify with so many of those different things. We still diverge in some areas. Pat has a family, I don’t have a family. Pat’s married, I’m not married. Pat was becoming an architect. I decided to continue schooling all the way through my doctoral program. But for me, it is addressing those soft topics like you’ve talked about before.

If we were to go the traditional higher education route, like an MBA program, we’d find that they don’t teach you any of that. They teach you about management, they teach you about accounting, maybe some tax law, or something else. But these soft topics also matter: like how do you balance a family, how do you develop an audience, how do you serve while selling at the same time? I think these are all very important topics, but they don’t get addressed in formal education.

I think this is part of a revolution for higher education in general. Pat’s at the forefront here and addressing those topics from not only the industry perspective, but also from his worldview, has been very, very valuable.

Chris Cloney: 15:13
Yeah, I love it. So I think it’s over to you, Dave. What’s number four? Maybe we’ll do a summary. So you–

Dave Eng: 15:18
I talked about connections count and levelled up learning. The last one that I wrote down was ‘always be advancing.’

This is something that has been part of my philosophy for awhile, but it got reinforced during this conference. I have a daily to-do list that involves certain things that I do on a regular basis. One of them is expanding my knowledge base. I’ve committed myself to reading at least one blog post every day. That could be a blog post on business, online marketing, higher education, games, gamification, anything else. So long as I read at least one blog post, I’m good there.

The other thing I’m doing every day is reaching out to people in my area and trying to add more people onto my email list or Facebook group or anything else. The last thing is that I’m trying to find ways to monetize my own business or better make use of my time.

Dave Eng: 16:17
So every day I am expanding my knowledge, I’m expanding my capacity, or I’m finding a way to monetize something in my business. So long as I do one of those three things every day, I feel like I’m advancing. That’s something that Pat talked a little bit about, and it really resonated with me, because it’s something I’m doing on a regular basis. Chris, is there anything that you do on a regular basis for either your personal life, professional life, or the business in general?

Chris Cloney: 16:51
The GradBlogger podcast is ripe with examples of the things I try to get in every day. Last night I talked with an individual who was really struggling to build a business in addition to working at their existing job. The struggle was finding the amount of hours required to do that.

This comes back to making sure you do that one thing a day. As I reiterated to her, in a past life I had a full-time job. Actually, while I was doing my PhD, I was working 50 – 60 hours a week and trying to do PhD research on the side, which I wouldn’t recommend. I’d hit the gym at 5:00 a.m. and then go to the office for 6:00 a.m and work from 6:00 a.m. – 9:00 a.m., which was when everybody else would come to the office. This wasn’t my academic work. This was just trying to get ahead in the corporate ladder.

Chris Cloney: 17:53
The point I want to make is that I used to get there early in the morning in the office and plan to do more in the next three hours than most people get done all day. With that mindset, I would often get more done in only two hours. If you have the mindset that you can do more in two hours than most people are doing to change their life their entire day, you can make some big, big changes in your life in a relatively short amount of time.

This comes back to the ladder thing. I was doing that, but I was on the wrong ladder when I was doing that. I was climbing right up the rung, but when oil and gas tanked and my company was struggling, all that hard work I put in was difficult.

Chris Cloney: 18:37
So that’s the point I want to make. Can you honestly say that you’re probably doing more in one or two hours to change your life than someone else is doing in their entire day? And the pro tip is that you probably are.

Dave Eng: 18:59
Yeah, I echo a lot of that, Chris. I’m in the middle of several projects right now. I’m authoring two courses and I’m writing one book. The goal is to finish all three of them by the end of the year. I’ve been working on them since October last year.

Dave Eng: 19:15
The way I approach my workflow is that I don’t have time. I can’t devote an entire day to working on a course or a book. But what I will do on a regular basis is spend 15-20 minutes every day doing just a little bit of it. It doesn’t have to be a whole chapter for a book. It doesn’t have to be a whole module for a course. But I’m writing some copy, I’m editing some copy, I’m putting together a worksheet, and just as long as I can do that work for that 15 minutes, I have moved that much closer to the end goal. Where I think I see a lot of people fail, and this happened particularly in my doctoral program, was that people try to do way too much for way too long, when really you should focus on incremental advancement and achievement.

Dave Eng: 19:59
There are some people who can sit down for eight hours and just crank out work for that entire time. But unless you’re a Marvel superhero, that’s probably not you. As humans, we got to do a little bit every day in order to reach that goal. So that’s one of my big takeaways too.

Chris Cloney: 20:14
I love it. So I’m going to close off on the third thing, which is finding the right next step. Chalene Johnson did a keynote yesterday about finding that right next step. Maybe you have a big vision. You want to put a course into the world, or you want to, like myself, with DustSafetyScience, you want to have a year with zero fatalities over the next 20 years. You have some big vision. You want to change your life. You want to not be committed to staying in your university position, or you want to go take your family for a trip. Maybe some big vision.

Chris Cloney: 20:49
That’s not the next step. That’s the vision. That’s the signpost in the future. The question is: what is the right next step?

What Chalene went into was a bit of a dichotomy in that the right next step is usually authority building or revenue-generating. I’m going to say that for the beginner, the next step should probably be authority building. That’s just on the top of the line.

At GradBlogger, if you take six months or months and you’re able to become seen as the provider of the best information in the world about your topic, that’s authority. From there monetization obviously will come, and you can ask your community, “Well, what do you need?”

That’s how I found out that an industry directory to connect equipment service providers in the combustible dust world was the thing that was missing. People would say to me, “I’m in Argentina, I have a facility, and I need some safety measures put in place, but I don’t even know who to connect with.” If I had to create a course doing that, I might’ve missed the mark on what those people needed.

Chris Cloney: 21:41
That’s the point I want to make. So what’s the right next thing? For a lot of us, it is building authority. That’s what I’m doing with GradBlogger. I haven’t created a course to date, but I’m putting out these podcast episodes and recording. That’s really me trying to build authority in the space of academic entrepreneurship.

For you, what is that next step to help you build authority in your space? Is it starting to create blog post content? Is it starting to create YouTube videos? Is it sharing on social media with the goal of educating someone? What is the right next step for you? And then tie that right back into Dave. Can you do that in 15 minutes today? If you can, you probably went pretty far.

Dave Eng: 22:23
Yeah. Yeah. For me, everything that I’ve done at the conference so far has been very, very helpful and useful. Although figuring out the next step was one of those tasks. So one of the things I’m doing right now is what you said before: building authority. So for University XP, I have a blog I write on a weekly basis, and I’ve been doing so for at least the past four months, and some posts do really great, some posts, not so much.

Dave Eng: 22:48
What I’m really struggling with is growing my audience, because there isn’t really a specific target market for that right now. I write about games because I enjoy writing about games, but I don’t know who I’m specifically catering to. I did put together an ideal customer avatar, but it’s difficult, because that ideal customer avatar may not necessarily be looking for something that I’m selling. But for right now what I’m doing is I’m following your advice, which is building authority by writing and publishing on a regular basis.

Chris Cloney: 23:23
Yeah, the ship muscle’s the hardest one to exercise, and that was like Episode #2 of GradBlogger. You need to go out there and practice it every day like Seth Godin says in Tribes and Leap First.

Yeah. Getting content into the world is really necessary. If you’re thinking about creating a course right now and you haven’t published a blog post in the last two months, then you might need to reverse, unless you’re already the worldwide scene guru. But if you’re not, then you need to be thinking about how you can be putting that into the world to create authority.

Anything you would close up on, Dave? Any big, super takeaways, or meta takeaways, or something that’s …

Dave Eng: 24:10
My biggest takeaway as an academic is that we are ready purveyors of information and knowledge in our space, but the thing that we need to do is pivot in order to use that information to serve our communities. That’s something I’m working through right now. It’s part of my identity, and it’s something that’s been a challenge. But I’m committing myself to working through it through the next six months at the end of the year.

Chris Cloney: 24:31
Lack of confidence is another one. These are things that people struggle with. These aren’t things that academics alone struggle with. But sometimes when I talk to academics, they say because they’re an academic they’re scared to sell it, because graduate students don’t have money.

That’s not true. That’s just the human thing. Humans are nervous about selling. Humans think other humans don’t want to spend money on them. And they’re all trying to get over it too. They may say “I have imposter syndrome because I’m an academic,” but it’s not really true. It’s part of the human condition. That’s what we’re trying to fight against every day.

Dave Eng: 25:53
Yeah, and it’s just part of our challenge to want to become more than we are right now, but we have to do that by shedding the person that we were.

Chris Cloney: 26:02
Yeah, I love it. So we’ll close up. If you’re listening to this on GradBlogger, definitely check out the show notes. We’ll have transcripts and all that sort of stuff. I’ve never done a recording at a booth live like this, so I’ll probably throw an outro or an intro or something on this. Dave, I hope this makes it up on your podcast someday as well.

Dave Eng: 26:20
Yeah, hopefully.

Chris Cloney: 26:22
All right, Dave. Look forward to talking soon.