248 I Made $188K in 4 Days With This One Email Sequence

Pete Matthew runs one of the UK's most trusted personal finance brands, a podcast with over 8 million downloads, a YouTube channel approaching 150,000 subscribers, and an online academy that did £140,000 in a single Black Friday weekend. And he still considers it a side project.

I sat down with Pete to talk about how Meaningful Money actually works as a business, the honest gaps he knows exist, and the philosophy that's kept him going for 15 years without burning the trust of his audience.

We got into the structure of his three-course academy, how a software reseller deal quietly generates £50–60K a year in near-passive recurring revenue, and why his email list of 18,500 people opens his weekly digest at 60% but almost never gets asked to buy anything. Pete knows he's leaving money on the table. He's remarkably candid about it.

And Pete built all of this without a plan to monetise at all. He picked up a video camera in 2009, started answering basic finance questions in the Cornish countryside, and after 150 videos got his first client completely out of nowhere. That foundation of just genuinely trying to help people is, I think, a big part of why his audience defends him when anyone questions his sales emails.

Pete is thoughtful, funny, and completely honest about the gaps between where his business is and where it could be. I think you'll enjoy this one.

Check out Pete's work:
🌐 meaningfulmoney.tv
🌐 meaningfulacademy.com
🌐 jacksons.life
📸 https://www.instagram.com/meaningfulmoney.tv
▶️ https://youtube.com/@UC39PLqUmy-AKK5HGYYfwFYw

Transcript

Black Friday Revenue Shock

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Once a year, Black Friday weekend, we go all out. We get between 10 and 15 grand a month, but then the four-day Black Friday weekend we did 140,000. Look, we don't ask for anything on this email list all year round. But I'll send 10 emails in four days between Black Friday and Cyber Monday. It's amazing. Like 60% open rate. And nobody really complains. Actually, one guy went into my Facebook group and put a comment about how many emails are we gonna get about the academy? And the rest of the community jumped on it. It's like Pete doesn't ask us for anything all year, he provides all this amazing free content. Just unsubscribe if you don't get the emails.

Meet Pete And Meaningful Money

Serving The UK Public Well

SPEAKER_00 0:36

So that was quite gratifying. Hello and welcome to the Art of Selling Online Courses. We're here to share winning strategies and secret hacks from top performers in the online course industry. My name is John Ainsworth, and today's guest is Pete Matthew. Now, Pete is a chartered and certified financial planner, he's got over 27 years in the industry, and he's the managing director of Jackson's Wealth Management in Penzance Cornwall, one of the longest established private financial advice firms in the UK, serving families and business since 1923. But Pete's story gets really interesting to us in 2009. He read Gary Vaynerchuk's book Crush It and it lit a fire under him. He grabbed a video camera and started recording short videos in the Cornish countryside, answering questions like what's a pension and what's an ICE, trying to make personal finance make more sense for normal people. And he called it Meaningful Money. After recording over 300 of those videos, he switched to podcasting in 2012. In his own words, that's when things went a little bit crazy. The Meaningful Money Podcast is now consistently ranked as the number one financial podcast in the UK. It's got over 8 million total downloads, more than 550 episodes, and it was named UK Podcast of the Year in 2015. On top of that, he's published two books: The Meaningful Money Handbook and The Meaningful Money Retirement Guide. He's won the Professional Advisor CEO's Special Award for Outstanding Consumer Engagement, the Scottish Widows Award for Industry Innovation, and completed the hat-trick of PA Awards in total. He's also built Meaningful Academy, a suite of structured online courses which cover financial foundations, building wealth, and retirement planning, with a membership community of nearly 5,000 people learning together in what he calls the MIMO Hub. He's taken a deep expertise in a highly technical field and turned it into something accessible across YouTube, podcasting, books, and courses. And he says he is still only just getting started. Pete, welcome to the show, man. Hey John, great to be here. Thank you for having me. Looking forward to this. So tell us a little bit, who is your target audience? Who is it you're helping with your courses and your membership and such like? It doesn't sound very niche, does it, to say that the target audience is basically the UK public.

SPEAKER_02 2:39

But honestly, I mean my audience has changed as I've gone on. Because I started like YouTube and the podcast. I was 35 when I started the YouTube channel. I'm 51 now. And so the audience has kind of grown up with me. And I think that's quite reflective now of the sort of content that I put out, particularly on uh YouTube and the podcast. It generally is more retirement focused. Not that I'm planning to retire anytime soon, but that's where I spend a lot of my time at Jackson's as a financial planner. Um, you know, we most of our clients are in that sort of run up to retirement or are retired. But my heart, if anything, is to just look, I mean, we don't teach anybody this stuff. We just expect people to find their way in a pretty complex financial world, a world which is driven by money. Um, and yet, you know, we just don't teach them anything. We sort of kick them out of school or university and say, just get on with it and hope you make some good decisions. So, unless you're lucky enough to have a mentor or parent that teaches you this stuff, then you really are, it's almost the toss of a coin whether you end up in a spiral of bad debt because it's too easy to get into it, or you end up building, you know, material wealthier future. I just kind of wanted to address that a little bit, really, and just do my sort of smallish bit to um improve the sum of knowledge on what is a vital subject.

SPEAKER_00 3:54

And what's your main focus now? Is it the podcast rather than YouTube, or is it are both kind of equal for you? Or is there is a I know that writing a book is quite a big undertaking as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 4:05

So I switched, as you said in the intro, which is very kind by the way, thank you. Um I switched sort of from YouTube to podcast in 2012, really took the uh podcast seriously from April 2013. And that just I had first mover advantage, right? So I win in UK Podcast of the Year in 2014, but there was only about half a dozen total podcasts then, you know, so there's a lot less competition, a lot less competition than there is now. So um I loved podcasting, and I still do now, but in 2021, the kind of call home to YouTube became too strong. So I switched the podcast into a kind of a QA format, which makes it a lot less uh kind of upfront preparation. Yeah because it's just Roger, my co-host, and I riffing off uh you know audience questions, and then went deep on YouTube and really sort of tried to learn the craft of like title crafting and thumbnail and all that sort of stuff, and went from 10,000 to 100,000 in about 18 months. Subscribers on there are currently just shy of 150, about 148,000. So it's um it's both now. Um I have it's it's a different set of skills, but I love both of them equally.

From Content To Course Sales

SPEAKER_00 5:15

And what's the system from that through to the courses and the membership? Do you promote those directly on the videos? Are you trying to get people onto the email list? Like what's the kind of system?

SPEAKER_02 5:25

Yeah, a bit of both. So we will um very often uh if we're answering a question, sometimes you know the answer might be look, you know, the only way to really answer this question for yourself is to model your two choices. We offer um access to the best financial planning modeling software in my academy. So that's an easy segue. Just hey, sign up for the academy, use a coupon code, you get a discount, right? And it's just continual repetition. The videos are generally sort of brought to you by, and depending on the subject of the video, I will highlight one of the three main sort of courses or phases in the academy. So it's but we do uh sort of get people on the email list as well. So you could argue maybe that's a little bit scatter gun, but we do do use scorecards quite a bit. So if you know I did a podcast on sort of readiness for retirement, then I mean it's just crying out for a scorecard. Um, and that works really well. And people take the scorecard and there's a sort of an additional coupon code at the back of that. So if they go through that, invest that little bit of time, they get an additional discount and all that sort of stuff. So the academy is the primary revenue generator. I have a couple of affiliate arrangements as well. I have to be quite careful with that because I'm a regulated financial advisor, so I have to be a little bit careful uh on stuff like that. But mostly the academy is about three-quarters of the revenue.

SPEAKER_00 6:44

Okay. Yeah, we did some work with uh a guy called Micah Shilansky, who's an American financial planner for retirement. It's a while back, so I'm just trying to remember exactly how exactly what it was. And he was like, if you change the marketing copy that you write on the sales page, I need to get it approved by my lawyer. Yeah, that's the only time I've ever had to deal with that. I was like, really?

unknown 7:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 7:07

That wouldn't be the case here. I'm directly regulated by the FCA, so I'm answerable to them. So I uh and there are pretty clear rules. You have to be a bit of an idiot to fall foul of the financial promotions rules, really. I should be careful saying that, because one day pride's gonna come before a fall. But actually, it's quite easy to stay the right side of the regulatory line. So we're not fortunately quite as litigious a society as uh as the Americans, so it's not a case of dealing with lawyers, but I would have to make sure, you know, whatever we put on a sales page and whatever I say, because I'm a current regulated practicing financial advisor, I do have to be careful what I say, no doubt about that. Which winds me up a little bit because like the journalists or unqualified and unregulated people, uh, it matters a little bit less what they say. So it just makes me a little bit cross, but I'm not bitter about that.

SPEAKER_00 7:58

And you said the the membership's the majority of the revenue for the business?

SPEAKER_02 8:03

To the business, yeah. So uh the business will be round about four hundred thousand, I think, this year. Somewhere between three seventy and four hundred, I think. And yeah, I would say three hundred of that is maybe a little bit more now, actually, is the is the academy. So it's um yeah, it's pretty good. I mean it's way beyond anything I thought would be possible. And I can't take credit for the idea, perhaps we'll come into that. But I started working with a great friend, he's become a great friend and a real partner in the business, a guy called Kauyan Silev. So he's uh Bulgarian, two degrees from St Andrews, speaks better English than I do. And um we just clicked immediately because we kind of follow the same people and and we just work brilliantly together. But he is the strategic genius, really should be talking to him. So he's he's it's really uh the academy and quite a lot of other things are down to him, giving me the push to do it. Um and yeah, it's uh it's changed my life in many ways. Beautiful.

SPEAKER_00 9:00

With email, how much are you promoting? Do you promote the academy? Do you do any discounts on it? Do you do like webinars saying this is why you should come join? How how's it kind of working from email?

Email Rhythm And Black Friday Rules

SPEAKER_02 9:11

Yeah, good question. So from email, I mean I send out a weekly-ish uh digest, so that is literally kind of my thinking, what I'm thinking about for the week. Uh, like a photo of the week, what I've been watching on YouTube and what I'm reading. And that's basically it's basically just a bit of a brain dump, right? And it's amazing. Like 60% open rate. So just like why do people why do I know why do people care? And there's 18 and a half thousand people on the waiting list. Like people, why do people care what I'm watching on YouTube? But they really they love it. And actually, if I miss weeks, they email and say you're alright, which is lovely. Um, but at the bottom of that is you know, my most distilled learning is in the academy. Click here. So most of the sort of regular advertising or sort of uh positioning people to to look at the academy is in the content, the main content, rather than by email. However, once a year, Black Friday weekend, we go all out. We start signalling it them a month before, give people a chance to opt out. Um I've got over my sort of the sort of native British I don't want to annoy anybody, you know, um and just said, look, we don't ask for anything on this email list all year round, but I'll send 10 emails in four days between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and nobody really complains. And actually, one guy um went into the Facebook group, my Facebook group, and put a comment about how many emails are we gonna get about the Academy? And the rest of the community jumped on him. It's like Pete doesn't ask us for anything all year, he provides all this amazing free content. Just unfollow if you don't want to, you know, unsubscribe if you don't want to get the emails. So that was quite gratifying.

SPEAKER_00 10:44

But um but you know, that says to me, maybe you could probably you could probably send some more.

unknown 10:48

I we probably could.

SPEAKER_02 10:49

Yeah, I I am continually torn, right? Because for me, meaningful money is still a side job, right? I run a 27-person financial planning practice, which as you said in the intro, is is you know, I mean, our side of the business was founded in uh 1974. The main business, the original business, was founded in 1923. Yeah. You know, I feel like a custodian of something that's a lot longer lived than I am. So uh that takes up a lot of time. And so Meaningful Money is one day a week plus some evenings. My wife would say, no, it bloody isn't. You do a lot more than one day a week. But it's still a passion project, but it still feels like a sideline to me. So I would be able to do a lot more, I think, were I not so uh kind of pulled in different directions, but that's life. Interesting.

Course Phases And Pricing Logic

SPEAKER_00 11:35

Okay. What's the the deal with the courses? Because you said that doesn't make up a huge amount of the revenue, but you've got three courses. I saw one of them at least was free and one was paid. I didn't check about the third one, yeah. I may have misspoke.

SPEAKER_02 11:47

The courses make up the bulk of the revenue. So there's mine isn't a monthly subscription site. It's a it's a one-off course, okay? Right. So there are three phases, three courses. One is financial foundations, which I used to charge a fairly nominal amount for, but that is for those who kind of need the help most, right? So it's those who need to understand about setting and sticking to a budget, how to get out of bad debt, the basics of financial mindset. And I finally realized, because I'm slow on the uptake sometimes, that I just need to, yeah, I just need to um just give that away. Right? Get people into the systems. There's somewhere around about, I want to say, just shy of 3,000 people, I think, on that. So they haven't paid me anything. But of course, quite a few of them have then upsold, they've moved up. The second course is build wealth. So that is about investing, putting together a portfolio, planning, adding a bit more about ensuring your family and your sort of ability to earn an income. So basically the step between getting started and retiring, building the wealth. And then the third course is retirement planning. All right, and that's the most expensive. So our build wealth is I think I want to say uh$4.99 or$549 at full price, but quite often gets discounted. And retirement planning is six nine nine full price, but quite often this discounts 10% or whatever, 30% on Black Friday. You know, that makes up it's the sale of those, but it's one off every time. However, I also offer access to a piece of software called Voyant. It's the world's best financial planning modeling tool. And I obviously there's about 50 odd videos in the Academy on how to use it. Members pay me 100, they get it included for a year, and then they pay me 120 quid a year after that to retain access. That's included VAT. 100 quid plus VAT. Um yeah, I mean, that's probably renewals on that is probably 50,000, 60,000 a year now. So that's a nice sort of before you get out of bed sum, you know. Um and as long as Voyant don't decide to change their business model, in which case I'm knackered, um, then because I'm essentially reselling a license, which they know about and they're they're they've agreed to. So um yeah, so the course is a one-off with just a little bit of recurring if people want to keep it after the first year.

SPEAKER_00 13:50

Okay. And do you when you do a discount, is that for both of those together? Or is it are you selling okay, so people could get either one individually?

SPEAKER_02 13:58

Yes, yes. Well, I mean, the you sort of you wouldn't do two together. It kind of depends on your life stage. Okay, got it. So it wouldn't make any sense for 35-year-old to to buy the retirement planning course, really. Um, because that's mostly about decisions they're gonna make when they're in their 50s or 60s, right? So there's not a lot of kind of audience overlap, if you like, it just is very much life stage dependent. Got it.

SPEAKER_00 14:22

Okay. When do you get do you get like a steady stream of sales of those, or is the bulk of it come in when you're doing a a discount on the sale of Black Friday? Like, how is it kind of split?

SPEAKER_02 14:32

So we get between ten and fifteen grand a month every month. Okay. Uh but then the four-day Black Friday weekend, we did 140,000 last year, 2025. So it's obviously a real blitz. Um, you know, people like we signal it, because I'd the last thing I want is somebody to pay full price, like on Cyber Thursday or whatever it's called, you know. Right, right. The Thursday before Black Friday. Um but and if they do that, and if they they email us, well just paying the difference, I don't care. Yeah, but um, yeah, you know, obviously Black Friday is a big deal, it's an exhausting weekend. I obviously have help, I have Cal, I have a great friend called Nick, who is just a sort of customer service ninja, so he's just in his email inbox for four days straight. Um, you know, I obviously look after those guys and uh they do brilliant work for me. So it's a Black Friday weekend is a big push, but it's still pretty pretty steady throughout the year and it's rising. So we'll now have some months which are 20,000. A fairly sort of ordinary month now is about 12 grand a month for us.

SPEAKER_00 15:35

Okay. And you mentioned you you reasonably regularly have 10% discounts. Are you doing email promotions when you do that, or is that just mentioned at the bottom of the newsletter or how's that work?

SPEAKER_02 15:44

Yes, uh yes, to the latter. It's mostly just mentioned when I sort of put it out on the podcast or on a YouTube. It's like uh, you know, meaningfulacademy.com. If you decide to sign up, just use the coupon code YouTube. It's a little bit of a acts almost like like a UTM. Obviously, it's not, but it's just like I know where those sales are coming from because I can see the mix of coupons being used. So it's podcast for the podcast, it's digest for the email digest. So I do get a bit of a sense and also uh book coupon code for people who've read the book and join up. So it's a very simplistic, but it kind of works. So I have a broad view. Obviously, if they don't use a coupon, I might know less where they come from. But we do have some UTMs as well. So it's mostly just given out, coupons given out over the uh on the podcast or YouTube, really.

Better Onboarding Email Sequences

SPEAKER_00 16:26

Okay. Have you tried doing like bigger email promotions of either of the courses separately?

SPEAKER_02 16:31

Well, again, this is largely down to my lack of time and focus. Um Cal is uh continually on at me to do this. Okay. We we have and he's dead right, and I know there's I'm kind of leaving money on the table really, but um one thing we are uh working towards very clearly now is uh more of a kind of um uh a sequence, much better crafted email sequence when somebody joins a list for the first time. So there's there's a drop-down on the main meaningful money site for people to join the list. Obviously, people share the digest and stuff like that. And we add, I'm adding only probably maybe five or six or seven a day to the emailing list. It could be a lot bigger, better, I know that. But when they do, there is now a bit of a sequence, they kind of self-select and they self-select into a sort of sub-sequence based on where they're at, and those three sub-sequences match the academy courses. So if somebody joins the email list and they self-select to somebody being in foundations, they'll get 10 solid days of great info. And you know, also so hey look, financial foundations is free on Meaningful Academy. Uh, and then same with build wealth and retirement planning, of course, but on those it's not free. So we'll pepper links and uh discounts um in the email sequences to the academy. There's a lot more I could do there, man, but uh it's just time-dependent, really.

SPEAKER_00 17:48

Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, yeah, there's normally a few issues that people talk to me about with this kind of stuff. One is time, another one is kind of knowing what it is that they need to do. Most people I think kind of have a basic idea at least of I know I should do more email promotions, I know I should work on my sales page, but then there's the skill level of like, okay, well, I this isn't my day job writing sales pages or writing email promotions, so it takes me longer, so it takes me a while to do it, and then that's more time, of course. So I hear you on that.

SPEAKER_02 18:19

Yeah, I mean of course, I mean, so much of the heavy lifting can be done with a clever AI prompt. I mean, I'm not shy about using AI where necessary, and we've used it in such a way where it's getting really, really good at speaking in my voice now. Nice. I run uh Meaningful Money, the sort of business on Notion, and I have a complete database of every script I've ever written. So, I mean, there's like 1500 entries in that database, so it it kind of knows how I talk, and for years I wrote my scripts longhand. I mean, not long hand with a quill and pen, right? But I wrote them word for word and I read them because it was audio only, so it was absolutely fine. And once I started videoing them, I got very, very good at having just under the camera having the script sort of thing and just dropping my eyes to it, picking up the sentence and then delivering it to the camera. Now I would have an auto cue and all that sort of stuff. But I've got a brilliant database of I don't know, a million and a half words in my voice. So AI now uh we're using more and more and more, and it one of the things very soon on the list is updating the email sequences, getting them more efficient, and all that sort of stuff. It's I I time is less and less of an excuse, John.

SPEAKER_00 19:31

Shall we say it's just I tell you what goes through my mind, right? When I see something like this, I'm like, oh my god, you've got so much social proof, you've got so much trust with the audience, you've got these amazing courses that people are loving, and that you could probably two to three times the revenue by doing regular email promotions. It would have to be, like you're saying, it'd have to be in your voice, it would have to be in a way that you felt comfortable with, that it's not going to annoy your customers. Like, so for example, one of the things that we always do is every single email promotion, kind of like what you were saying about the Black Friday stuff, every email promotion allows people to opt out of that email promotion. So to say, right, I don't want to hear you you're promoting the Building Wealth course this I'm promoting the Building Wealth course this week. If you don't want to hear about that, just click this link and you won't hear anything else about that, but you'll still get your regular Friday emails from it. Yeah, perfect. And then that kind of makes it feel a bit more comfortable as a creator to know you're not pissing people off who don't want to, you know, who don't want to hear so much about it. Um but if you had all that in place, I I I would be shocked if I think it's two things. I think one having the regular promotions, but the second one is I think you could grow your email list way bigger. Much bigger. Because you've got how many views do you have a month on YouTube? Like 200,000 or something like that?

SPEAKER_02 20:48

Somewhere around that. Ebbs and flows a little bit. I had quite a quiet year last year into I only put up about a dozen videos last year. My mum was poorly. She died in September. Bit of a shit. Sorry to hear that, man. So um, you know, so there's reasons for that, but I'm picking it up again now. Um and that last account I will just check. It's somewhere around 150,000. If memory serves, I'll check. Nip into the studio set. But it's there or thereabouts. Sometimes it's uh I mean uh when I'm doing what it's about 150 thousand analytics, it's not what I need to look at. So on a per month basis, just let the down thing refresh. Taking its sweet time. I want to say it's about 150. Uh I can confirm that. Yeah, just under at the minute. But that but that's kind of an between 150 to 200 is if I'm really cooking on gas and putting uh videos up weekly. Um we're getting back to that now, so it's edging up again. It dropped down to about 80,000.

SPEAKER_00 21:37

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 21:38

And then yeah, podcast listens is 10,000 uh about 10,000 per episode in the first two weeks. So uh total is around about 80 to 90,000 downloads a month of the podcast.

SPEAKER_00 21:50

Yeah, so you've got uh eight point six million total downloads. I'm like, oh my god. I'm I'm I've been doing it a long time.

SPEAKER_02 21:57

It's it's just it's just dogged determination. And refusal to give up. So honestly, I started in 2012. It's a long time ago.

SPEAKER_00 22:05

Yeah. Yeah. Alright. I can't remember when I started this podcast, but it's uh it's definitely I'm definitely not at that many. Um but talk to me about um what what you're doing. You mentioned that you've got the scorecards for getting people onto the email list. Yeah. Um what else? Are you doing anything else that like because I think you could probably I'd need to look into it a bit more detail, right? But you could probably get about 4,000 opt-ins a month with the numbers that you're talking about there. And you're getting like, I think you said about 100 something.

SPEAKER_02 22:37

Not that many.

SPEAKER_00 22:38

Maybe 150, maybe? Yeah, we had someone, I've mentioned this one on before on the podcast, just because it's such such a dramatic one. But we had someone who was getting I don't know, like a million YouTube views a month or something, something big. But they just weren't promoting the lead magnets at all. And we we got them from like a hundred opt-ins a week to five thousand. It's like it's it's not saying everyone can get that. I'm just kind of saying that to make the point of the number of opt-ins you can get if you do everything right is dramatically higher than what most people think. The building the audience part obviously has to come first, right? Well, you've done that, then that next step of like actually getting those people to opt into the email list is like it is doable. Um, and so I I mean if it's alright, I'll have a look afterwards unless I need through some thoughts about it.

Reducing Founder Dependency

SPEAKER_02 23:24

Yes, it's alright. We might need to talk. I think I mean I mean, honestly, uh Cal bless him. I don't know how he stays so patient with me because you know he's crafting saying, Man, you know, we could be doing a million quid a year in the academy and we could be adding a massive bundle. Just like really, and it's it literally comes down to the fact that it's still too dependent on me. One thing I'm thinking a lot about is not only from my main business jacks, but also from meaningful money. How do I kind of make it uh endure past my interest in it? Now I'm not going anywhere in the immediate future, but there may come a time when I want to retire. I'm sure you talk to a lot of people, marketers who are talking about retiring, but there may come a time when I want to do that. I don't know yet. And so I need to try. I'm thinking a lot about how to do that and how to make it less dependent on me, my voice, my face, and all that sort of stuff. So one of my kind of models is Dave Ramsay in the US. Come across him. Yeah, yeah. Fort Spanish for stuff, yeah. That is an insane business. He has something like 1200 people working from him. It's hundreds of millions. Holy shit. It's hundreds of millions a year he's turning over, right? It's an insane business. And of course, it started out as the Dave Ramsay show, but now there are other shows. He's got various members of his family and other kind of voices, different demographics, different sort of racial groups, ethnic groups, and stuff being represented. It's all the same message, but a different audience is being reached by different kinds of faces. So I've just started a new podcast and YouTube show with my youngest daughter, Kate, to try and reach her generation with basically the same information, just at a place and at a level where people they don't need to know about pension withdrawal strategies, right? Because that's 30, 40 years hence. They need to know what the hell does my pay slip mean, right? And are credit cards are credit cards really the enemy, or you know, can I tread carefully around them and stuff like that? So that's a large part of what um I kind of want to do. It could be so much bigger, I just feel continually short of time and energy. So uh one other factor, I don't say this for any other reason, just for sort of factual thing, is that I actually have sort of hormone-related chronic fatigue. So sometimes my energy ebbs and flows quite considerably. So I can only do what I can do, do you know what I mean? But I do have some great people around me, so uh leaning on them increasingly heavily.

SPEAKER_00 25:40

It made a mass difference to me. I had a long period when I was like, I don't know if depressed is right. Yeah, I wasn't like unhappy most of the time, but I was just incredibly low energy. Like I'd had some shit happen in my life and I was just like, I just can't face doing that much on work. And it really forced me to be like, okay, how do I make sure that all of this stuff can run without me? Because when you've got loads of energy, it's great. But the downside is you can fall into the trap of going, right, well, I'll just stay involved in everything because I can manage it. And then when you can't manage it, you go, Oh, fuck, that's a that's a nuisance. Whereas I've had to set I had to set up so much the business to run without me that now that it still runs without me, when I've got more energy, I'm like, oh, this is fucking cool. You know, and I know just has levels way beyond what I'm doing, but like that made a really big difference for me. So I really hear you on the um the the building the team and the getting everybody around you working on stuff as well.

SPEAKER_02 26:33

I'm very slow learner on that shit, man.

SPEAKER_03 26:35

So it's it's like just sort of trying to make up for that now.

SPEAKER_02 26:40

And uh yeah, just more people around me. Uh really the thing I'm mostly the bottleneck for content, really. The podcast pretty much is cooking on gas now, that kind of happens. Yeah, um, but the what the thing that tends to slip is YouTube videos. And then if Cal says, Hey, we need I need you to check these 10 new emails in a sequence, that's the sort of thing. It's like, yeah, I'll get to that. And it takes me too long. So uh yeah, work to be done on that, man. But so yeah, I'm I'm very fortunate that it's uh it's as good as it is, really.

SPEAKER_00 27:09

You were saying about being a slow learner. I've got this uh this notebook, it's on a uh bookshelf somewhere behind me. And it's it's all the lessons that I learnt and then forgot and then learnt again and then forgot again, and then just went through this. This I I'd be like, oh fuck. This is that same lesson again, isn't it? Oh, bollocks. I learnt this 15 times and still made the same mistake. And so what I decided, I don't know who came up with it, if it was me or someone suggested it, but I started writing them down, and I was like, I was writing them down in this one notebook, and the idea is every morning I get up, I make a cup of tea, and I read one of the lessons with the hope that I'm then less likely to fuck that thing up again. And it's so it's so useful. I'm like, I read it and I go, like, oh yeah, I remember all of the life experiences that taught me this thing. But then it's just I don't I wonder sometimes if there's like a like a deeper lesson to learn. Like, like almost like these lessons are the things that are at the surface in terms of the way I act, but maybe there's something in my head that doesn't want to accept them because I have some belief that's opposite to them, or I haven't accepted something about myself, or whatever, whatever it is, right? Because I struggle so bad with learning some of this stuff, and it's it staggers me. I'm like, I thought I was quite bright, but apparently not.

SPEAKER_02 28:32

Yeah, well, I mean, we're imperfect creatures, aren't we? You know, we've just got to try and do our best, not beat ourselves up too much.

Growth Levers On YouTube And Podcast

SPEAKER_00 28:41

That's one of my lessons in there. Don't beat yourself up too much. That's like a as like a you'll never learn a fallback. Yeah, I don't know. I keep trying. So what what is the focus at the moment? You said you're gonna growing up to you're probably gonna hit like about 400k just with the sounds like with the way that you're already going. So what's leading to that growth? Is it that you're growing the YouTube channel and putting stuff into that, or is it like uh how's that happening?

SPEAKER_02 29:05

Um yeah, we're just trying to get a little bit better each time. So I mentioned earlier, we really go deep on understanding titles and thumbnails, for instance. That's just one example. You know, it's a it's like a black art yeah, YouTube, right? But you know, you learn, you put something out, you think you've absolutely crafted it perfectly, and it just doesn't do well for whatever reason. And then the one that you throw together at the last minute sort of just like flies, and you don't really know why. But we do try to be very, very deliberate about stuff like that. Uh the content, the podcast particularly has kind of changed form, this move to a more QA thing. Four four and a bit years ago, I switched to having a co-host. Prior to that, basically for years and hundreds of episodes, it was me lecturing. It was just me talking into a mic, right? But now bringing in Roger, who is my best mate in the world, retired former colleague at Jackson, so he knows his stuff. He's a chart for entrepreneur as well. So, you know, we can back and forth, we tear the piss out of each other, and um, you know, people really like that. And it's because it's QA and we'll answer half a dozen questions in an episode, it's quite varied, and so it's I think broaden the audience a little bit, even though there's still something of a retirement focus, there's there's all sorts. So that's kind of broad the audience a bit. I think we've got better, and we've really in really only in the last year started looking at scorecards. We're still only dipping our toe into the water, but it generally when we do one, it does very good, does very well. So if we have a podcast episode or a a video on a particular subject, we'll just like for instance, um uh like retirement readiness is is one that we've done. And it just lends itself to a scorecard, and it's just like, oh, I wonder how ready for retirement I am, and it's like takes them three minutes, four minutes to do. They get a really nicely you know formatted PDF. And and then there's a link in there, and it does well because we can track so we're getting better at that as well. I think that's a lot of uh the the growth in very recent times. The Black Friday weekend we've got a lot better at, a lot better at um intermixing sort of uh sort of multimedia, so video in a couple of the emails, you know, thumbnail click, just a little hey, you know, it's like it's totally unfinished. It's just me and the iPhone, you know, it's not sort of nice background or anything like that. Just thank you so much for for you know taking an interest in the academy. We'd love to have you in there. Um here's what's waiting for you, I'll see you on the inside. Just so using more kind of media rather than just words, mixing up the words, longer stuff, shorter form stuff. So it's a combination of lots of things, really, John, rather than any one sort of is kind of um you know the the small increment school of improvement, you know, 1% better every day, then you know that that adds up to pretty massive improvements. Um I think we've had various sort of uh like hockey stick moments, the YouTube channel, uh just a couple of videos that just knocked it out of the park, the algorithm got behind, and suddenly we're adding 15 unsubs 1,500 subscribers a day for a week or two two weeks, and it just sort of really stepped up. And the video does well. Uh the videos do well in sending people to the academy. Also, the book, I launched the second book in May last year, particularly retirement focus. We've had a lot of business from that, and a lot of business at Jackson's actually. It's driven a lot of clients to my practice, yeah. So the books are have been very good, very well um received for me and have done very well. So combination of loads of things, man.

Value First Marketing And Trust

SPEAKER_00 32:25

Okay, that makes sense. One of the things that you'd said was if your sole goal is to make money off your audience, they'll know it and not trust you. And they trust you, don't let them down. Talk to me about talk.

SPEAKER_02 32:41

Like, how is that why yeah, just talk to me about it? I tend to think the motivation matters. Now it's easy for me to say that because when I started, I had no idea that this could become a thing. I don't even think in 2009, when I first picked up a video camera, first video went up in early 2010. I don't think in 2009 the words content marketing had even been coined. They might have been. But do you know what I mean? YouTube was five years old. Yeah. You know, and so I had no, I was uh it was a hobby for me blend of kind of tooling around with technology and software and liking the sound of my own voice. So bring those two together, and I'm a born content creator, right? So um I had no idea that it would lead to revenue when the first prospective client got in touch after 18 months and 150 videos, and then I fell off my chair. Just sent me an email and said, We've watched your videos, can we work with you? Yeah, I doesn't compute. Um, so it's easy for me to say motivation matters, you just need to what you know, help as many people. But I think that in the sort of less kind of nauseating way of putting that is um look, it's really all about value. And if you try and extract value before you give tons of it, then I think people are wary of that. Um and obviously, if it's a great product and if it's pitched really well, you will get bias. But I've had countless people over the years say, I bought your book or your course just to say thank you for all the free content. Right. I'm like, that's very cool. I could have just sent you an invoice or you know, send me a case of wine or something. But you know, I that's that's pretty cool. Obviously, that's not the norm, but and there there is value in the courses. I think I I honestly think if you if your primary motivation is to make money, I just think that seeps out somehow. I think all the best creators, the people I really follow, and who are obviously caning it, um Ali Abdal, I'm a huge fan of, right? I mean, obviously, I mean God knows what he's earning. But I the guy just I honestly I think his primary motivation was to originally to help people sit in the MCAT exams to be doctors, and then helping people be more productive and all that sort of stuff, and he's just built this empire off the back of it. I just think if your motivation is primarily to add value and to do so disproportionately for what you get back, I I think that will come across and you're more likely to win more people. I might be totally naive, man, and you may have a different view, but that's my general outlook on life. I'm convinced that the universe gives you back if you give out to it.

SPEAKER_00 35:10

I find that nearly everybody I interview, nearly everybody who's a client of my agency, they um have basically this kind of philosophy. It's one of the things I really like about working with course creators, is like nearly everybody has like they became an expert in something. That was 10 years, 20 years, whatever, become the expert, and then they started making YouTube videos. A lot of times, this is really common, people started making videos because they were teaching something to somebody and they're like, well, let me just record it and then I can share that with all of my students. You know, let me just do this just to kind of save myself some time. And then they found people started watching the videos, and then people started asking for courses, and so it was never a plan. It was never like a oh, I want to become a course creator. It was like, oh no, no, I I'm I want to share my expertise in this, I want to help people to become good at whatever financial planning, playing the piano, whatever it happens to be. And I think that's part of why I like working with with people like yourself. It's like the just the the the the vibe and the energy and the the intention is it was yeah, yeah, we want to make money, but that wasn't that's not why they started it, that's not why they're passionate about it.

SPEAKER_02 36:18

No, I think I I think for for many of us, and particularly for me, because I had no idea what I was doing when I started. If it was about making money, I'd have given up ages before I earned a pound. Do you know what I mean? 150 episodes is a lot to get one client, isn't it? Well, yeah, you wouldn't do it if you had any sense. But because I had no idea that that was the that was gonna be an end result, then it's easy to keep going when hardly anybody's watching and you're just having fun doing it, right? But the second you put a sort of um return of capital metric on it, then it gets a bit more high pressure, doesn't it? And that's very often people I get obviously I get lots of people in my industry in uh financial services, you know, obviously wanting to replicate what I've done to a degree. I'm just like, yeah, you need to be in this for the long haul, right? You might get lucky, but everybody I know who's done it well has has really given just masses amount of value, and it's like uh we need to kind of figure on maybe a year of creating content, if not more, before there's significant return. But of course, then it can go nuts.

Where To Find Pete

SPEAKER_00 37:17

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Man, I love this. If someone's uh wants to go check you out, where should they go? What's the best uh what's the best site or best uh place to go on YouTube?

SPEAKER_02 37:28

Well, if you Google Meaningful Money, you'll find me. So you'll you'll find the YouTube channel, you'll find the podcast anywhere. You get podcasts. The website is meaningfulmoney.tv. That's gonna have a big overhaul this year. Um and the courses are at Meaningful Academy. So yeah, uh check it out and get in touch if I can help.

SPEAKER_00 37:44

Perfect. Pete, thanks so much for coming on, man. I really, really appreciate your time. Thanks for having me, John. That was fun.