620 | How to Build Predictable Revenue with Memberships with Stu McLaren

Business owners. If you are tired of feast or famine sales cycles, constantly chasing new customers, or feeling stuck in a business that doesn't give you freedom, this episode is for you.

We're Talking to Stu McLaren, the expert on recurring revenue and memberships to break down how you can turn unpredictable sales into stable income. That is coming up next.

Welcome to the Chris LoCurto Show, where we discuss leadership and life and discover that business is what you do, not who you are.

Welcome to the show, folks. I hope you're having a fabulous day wherever you are today.

I am incredibly excited to have a fantastic guest on the show today. We're going to be tackling a game-changing concept that can solve one of the biggest struggles small business owners face, and that is unpredictable cash flow.

So my guest today is Stu McLaren, the membership guy. I know you've heard of him.

He's helped thousands of business owners create stable recurring revenue with memberships. So we're gonna debunk some myths. Some of you out there might be thinking, hey, this can't possibly be for me.

Stick around, listen to this show. We're gonna talk about how this works for non online businesses and help you to see how you can get started, even if you think this isn't free. So please help me and welcome to the show, Stu McLaren.

Stu, so good to have you on. Thanks, Chris. Great to be here, man. I have been looking forward to this. You've been knocking things around for what, two decades now in this membership space?

Yeah, it's been a long time for sure. You know, obsessed and focused on helping business owners do one thing and that is add more recurring revenue to their business. And yeah, it's been a fun journey for sure.

And a lot of things have changed and a lot of things haven't changed. And that's good too. Well, we're gonna get into a bunch of fantastic questions, but we are talking about your book today, Predictable.

Transform your business from one off sales to recurring revenue. And I gotta say, this is a must have. This is a must have book. And we'll talk about how to get that at the end of the show.

You have so much information. I'm assuming, you know, as we get into this, I'm assuming that a lot of folks hear this and go, oh, gosh, yeah, that can't possibly be for me.

That's got to be for the folks that are, you know, selling their specialty soaps or whatever, or coaching or counseling and all that kind of fun stuff. I bet you get that a ton. Yeah, you know, it's interesting 100%.

There's, you know, myths about, you know, who a membership is for and who it isn't.

But I think if we just take pause and everybody watching and listening just take pause and just think about all of the different types of memberships and subscriptions that you currently belong to or have personally and in your business.

So, Chris, if I were to throw it back to you, like, what would be some of those, you know, subscriptions and memberships that you're paying for on a monthly basis?

Yeah, you're bringing up a sore subject because we have like 14,000. It's so funny. Every year we go through it, I'm like, do we need that? Yes, we do. Okay. All right. Yeah.

I mean, it is Adobe, your site. Gosh, Zoom. What's the-- Dashlane! I mean, it is.

We have so many subscriptions and it is a part of what we just. It's the way we operate business now. Totally. Yeah.

And even if we think on a personal level, like things like Netflix and Spotify, our Costco membership, or like, there's so many different types, even our gym membership.

I used to belong to a membership where we had local fruits and vegetables delivered to our door every week. Right.

Like, there's so many different types of subscriptions. And I think that when we just take pause, we begin to realize like, oh my gosh, like, memberships and subscriptions are all around us.

And so then once we realize that, it's like, well, why have we not incorporated this into our business? And what I think more often than not is just a lack of understanding of how it could be incorporated.

And if you want, I'm happy to go through like the four different types of most popular memberships because I think that'll start getting the wheels turning for people. Yeah.

So we have a ton of small businesses that are following us and a lot of them are doing, you know, the heavy lifting.

The Reality of Unpredictable Revenue in Small Business (00:04:43)

And the biggest stressor, you know, for any small business owner doesn't matter. I mean, you. Even medium sized businesses on and up, but mainly for the small business owner is that cash flow.

You know, one month you're feeling like you're at the top of the world because you've had incredible sales, you've got good profit coming in, and then, you know, some other month you're wondering if you're going to be able to pay the bills.

Why is this such a common issue? And with so many folks that are listening, they're probably feeling, you know, trapped in that cycle.

From your experience, what's that emotional Toil of that, that feels feast of famine type of cycle for business owners.

Well, what's interesting is I read some data recently and they, in this survey, they surveyed business owners and they were trying to get a sense of, like, what are the number, the top stressors for business owners?

Like, what keeps them up at night? And survey after survey, it's like the exact same result. The number one stressor for business owners is finances.

Like, where is the sale going to come from? And unfortunately, we've grown up in a broken business model, meaning that, like, the only way that we think to be able to grow a business is that we've got to go and get more new sales.

New sales, new sales, new sales. And so that means that at the beginning of every month, we're hitting the reset button. It's just like, okay, what are we gonna do this month?

Like, okay, well, let's do this promotion, let's do this campaign, or, you know, let's reach out to this client. And it creates a lot of stress because you just never know how those campaigns or those promotions are gonna go.

Like, if we just take a step back right now, let's just think about when COVID hit.

Like, none of the business owners would have ever expected that the government would step in worldwide and say, you know what? Nobody can come into your shop. Nobody can come into your store.

Like, you got to figure this out. That is an uncertainty that nobody could have ever predicted. You know, it reminds me of a woman in our community.

Her name's Casey Hope. So she has a brick and mortar art studio. So, you know, kids come after school, they learn art. Community groups come, you know, adults come.

She teaches art lessons in her studio. She sent me an email in April of that year, right at the beginning of April 2020, when the world was shutting down.

And she said, Stu, I'm, you know, normally I would be terrified in this moment.

Like, I'd be, you know, fearful of how am I gonna, you know, pay my rent? Like, nobody's coming into the art studio anymore. Like, how am I gonna pay my employees? How am I gonna pay myself?

Like, I don't have income coming in. People aren't coming to the studio. She said, but I'm not fearful because she had launched a membership and that digital membership was covering all of her overhead.

And so does it mean that she had a little bit of a setback for sure, because she couldn't do the in person business. But it also, because of the membership, kept her afloat and kept her bills paid and kept her going.

And interestingly enough, she sent me an email about a month later and she recognized another opportunity in that moment. You know, once an entrepreneur, always an entrepreneur.

She was just like, wait a minute, if COVID means that everybody's got to stay home, that means that there's a whole lot of parents at home with kids and they gotta, they don't know what to do with them.

So she set up a whole other membership. She launched a whole other membership, welcomed thousand plus members in this membership teaching art lessons to kids.

And so there's. Where there's a door shut, another one opens. Right.

But my point is, is that the reason that we need to begin thinking about this and why I'm so passionate and why I wrote this book, like I want this book in the hands of every business owner because we don't need to experience that stress and that uncertainty.

When you have memberships and you have subscriptions, you have the predictability of knowing that at the beginning of the month, you're not starting from zero, you're actually starting with the momentum that you finished the previous month with.

You're automatically going to get paid by all of those members. And that is a huge relief. It allows us to plan with certainty. Like, we can invest in our marketing budget knowing that we've got that revenue coming in.

We can invest in hiring our team knowing that that money is going to be there. And it eliminates that hesitation that we often experience as business owners because we--,

I don't know if we can move forward on this project or if we can go in that direction because I don't know if the sales are going to be there.

Like that is always reactive with a membership. We're always proactive and it just eliminates that stress. Yeah, you hit something that I think a lot of people--

I'm assuming, because I know with, you know, our clients that run into this, this, this lie that lives in their head, you know, for people who trade time for money.

So obviously running an art studio, you're, you're trading time for money.

It's. You're limited to the number of people you can get in. You know, for us, we're consistently trading time for money and we're always looking to get more folks, you know, online in other ways.

But for those folks that are trading time for money, there's this belief that that's it, it's the one time sale, that's all they've got. So kind of break down how the membership model changes the game.

Like, how does it create that predictable revenue that recurring income. Well, this is actually why I got into memberships, because in 2008, I had just recently married my amazing wife, Amy. So we had--

We were a year into our marriage and we were, you know, talking about starting our family. And I had a really successful consulting business at the time. And so things were cooking.

Like, everything was going great, except every time we had that conversation about having kids, I could feel this, like, knot in my stomach, and I couldn't figure out why, like, I wanted kids.

I love kids. Like, this was something I was really looking forward to was being a dad. But why was I, like, so, you know, anxious about it?

And what I realized was I was anxious because I had a great business, but not a great business model. And so even though I had, like, all these amazing clients, my schedule was at the beck and call of my client's schedule.

The only way I could grow that business was to give more of my time. And I didn't have any more time to give.

So, like, something was either going to have to be compromised, like, either my time with my family or the business.

And I just did not like that situation. So I remember having a conversation with a friend of mine. His name was Armand.

And he said, well, why don't you just teach what it is that you're doing for your clients, but teach it inside of a membership?

And I said, well, what does that look like? What do you mean? He said, well, instead of you helping your clients one on one, you're going to teach the same concepts once, but now many people can access it.

So hundreds of people can access it, thousands of people can access it. So you're doing the work once, but now you're serving many. And it was just like this light bulb moment.

And I realized that, oh, my gosh, like, I can help a lot more people and I can create scale in my business. And so I did. I started shifting from working with clients one on one to now teaching the same concepts inside of a membership.

And that was the thing that, like, finally gave me the ability to be able to scale my time and so I could spend more time with the people that I love most, which was Amy and our kids.

And at the same time, I could grow the business and I wasn't having to choose one or the other. I could have the best of both worlds.

So, you know, we see it time and time again, and, you know, memberships create the ability for us to be able to serve more people, but in a scalable way. And.

Yeah, and that's why I'm. I'm really passionate about it. Yeah, we're, we are anti hustle for the rest of your life.

Right? We are the kind of folks that we are like, hey, there's a time period, fantastic, hustle it for a while.

But this message that's been out there for probably about, I don't know, 15 plus years of, you know, you got to wake up at 4 o'clock in the morning and go to bed at, you know, midnight and you don't know your kids names and everything.

That, that's something that we're, you know, if the ox is in the ditch, get it out.

If you got to build something up, start it up that way. But the hustle for the rest of your life will get old and you won't get that time with your family.

So that's, that is something for us. That's why I love this so much is because it's does help people get predictable. It does help them get to a place where they can say, I can spend this time with my family.

And one of the biggest things I know you've run into this probably a thousand times is those folks that aren't even taking vacations.

I mean, they're not taking regular time off because that struggle of, well, if I do that now, I'm going to miss a whole week of potential revenue.

So how can something like this. And again, I talked about this at the top of the show, but how can something like this be for people who aren't coaches or somebody who's teaching art?

Like we have a lot of clients that I'm sure as they're listening there's like, how in the world am I going to be able to get my business to have something like this? What do you say to them? Help them unpack that.

Different Types of Memberships (00:14:18)

Well, why don't we talk about like the four different types of memberships because I think that that'll help give clarity.

So the first one is a product based membership.

So anybody watching and listening, if you're selling a physical product, the question that I would want you to just seep in and just sit there and let it marinate is how could I take this one time sale and turn it into a recurring sale?

So I'll give you some examples of product based memberships. The Dollar Shave Club is probably the best example of this. Here are some dudes who were like, man, you know, buying razors is a really painful process because you got to go into the store.

Normally the razors are behind like a lock and key. You got to go ask somebody to get the key, to unlock the thing, to get the razors. It's like this whole process, right? And it's just a pain in the butt.

And it's one of those things that you got to do all the time because your razors, they get dull and you got to get new razors. So these guys were so genius.

They're like, well, why don't we just make it easy for people? Why don't we just like create a membership where they pay a monthly fee and we just send them the razors. Like easy peasy, right?

That's a great example of a product based membership, by the way. That company went from zero to being sold for a billion dollars, like $1 billion in a four year period.

But bottom line is they took a product that was being purchased one time where the companies were hoping that the customers would come back and buy from them and they created predictability where now they knew with certainty that those customers would be paying them next month.

And so whether it's racers, whether it's socks of the month, whether it's coffee of the month, there's so many different types of product based businesses that have been turned into a membership and subscription.

So that's number one, product based memberships. Number two would be service based memberships. So we have a client of ours, her name is Mary Claire Fredette.

She's a massage therapist. And so the typical model is that people come in and they book a massage and then she, fingers crossed, hopes that they're going to come back sometime in the future.

Well, what she did was she turned it into a membership. So she gave her clients a slightly discounted rate than it would be if they were to come in one time.

But now she knows that at the beginning of every month those clients are going to be paying her again and again and again. And it also created a more predictable service for those customers and clients. An incentive.

Exactly. It's just like, okay, well I want to go use my massage. Like I, you know. And so it created a better service for them. Now the interesting part with Mary Claire was I caught up with her a few years after, three years after actually she launched it.

And I said to her, I said, so did you relaunch the membership? And she's like, no. And that Chris, honestly, I just thought oh gosh, like what happened?

And she's like, no, Stu, I didn't need to. Like 80% of the people that joined me three years ago are still paying me now.

And so we've got all kinds of examples of Service based memberships, whether it's a massage therapist, there's a barber shop here in Toronto, same deal, right?

Whether it's like the women's blow dry bars, like you know, there's all kinds of different services. Or like we have Kim Bennett in our community, she's a lawyer.

So again, instead of people hoping that they hire her or she hoping that they hire her for like you know, a client project or whatever, she has a monthly legal service where they get so many hours on a monthly basis, it's just transformed the model for her.

And so there's many different ways to do that with a service based business as well. And I'll just even give you another simple one that's kind of a service and kind of a product.

But years ago I was in San Francisco and I was in the mall and I was thirsty so I went up to this like juice bar and I'm looking at the menu trying to decide what to get and I noticed that there's two different prices.

There's like the regular price and then there's the member price. And of course being the membership guy, I'm like huh? I said what's this member price?

How do I get the member price? And they said, oh, it's simple. If you pay 10 bucks a month, you get two green juices a month and then you get the member price on anything above that.

And I'm like again, what a genius way to take a one time customer, turn them into a recurring member and the member gets these incredible benefits too. So it's like a win win across the board.

So again, always ask yourself that question. How can I take this one time sale and turn it into a recurring sale? So that's product based and service based.

So the third one is where we're creating convenience for people and we got lots of examples of this in our community. But essentially you think of my wife as a teacher for 10 years.

What I know to be true about teachers is that their evenings and their weekends are gobbled up.

Lesson planning that is a arduous process of being a teacher. And so we have many examples of memberships that cater to teachers.

Like I think of Anna Digilio, she has a membership. It's a seven and a half million dollar a year business by the way. Seven and a half million dollars a year.

And she provides lesson plans for grade two teachers. So those teachers, they don't have to worry about lesson planning, they just sign up to her membership and then the lesson plans are provided for them.

They can focus on just serving the kids in the class. Whether it's lesson plans or I think of Andrew Kraus over in Australia.

He's got a membership that serves real estate agents and what he provides are Facebook ad templates. So they don't have to become a Facebook ad expert.

Instead they can just use Andrew's templates and they can plug in the house that they're looking to sell information and bada bing, bada boom, they're off to the races.

Or think of Nicole Melton. She provides social media templates for beauty businesses. And so they don't have to worry about what they're going to post on social media. She's providing it for them.

So whether it's providing lesson plans or templates or scripts, you're making someone's life easier. They would all fall under that knowledge or information based umbrella.

So number one, we got product based memberships, number two, service based, number three, knowledge base.

And number four is real simple. It's a community based membership.

It's just where people are paying to be part of a community that might be like masterminds, it might be like your local commerce, like organizations.

It might be different golf clubs as an example. Many times people are paying just to be around the people that are there.

But what the Internet has made possible is that no matter what your interests are, if there is a way to be able to connect people around the world who have the same interest.

And so what I love about the Internet is it gives us the ability to connect all of us weirdos.

So like when we're, we got all these peculiar interests or whatever, it's like, great, there's somebody else that actually has those interests too, like amazing.

And if you can bring those people together and create a safe place, everybody wins. So lots of great options for people in terms of how to create a membership and recurring revenue.

No matter what type of business you have, I love it. Things that just so stuck out to me for folks listening to this. And again, this is why you have to get this book one like the massage therapist.

Okay, so now you have somebody. I know that I need more massages.

I know the stress that I carry. It is so helpful. So not only do you get that predictable revenue again because now I'm going to come in because now I'm paying you.

But it changed my life, right? I'm getting stress removed. I'm, you know, getting to, you know, relax.

Another great piece that you're sharing in there is, I think so many people don't realize that they have a skill to teach. Right. They're doing it.

You know, I think of, I, I surround myself with experts. I love turning, you know, I'm somebody who teaches and gives advice and guides and directs and I'm always reaching out to other.

They're my coaches. You know, we've. We've got this big farm that we've been working on the last couple of years and so I'm reaching out to guys on how to run this heavy equipment this way.

Here's this thing I'm doing and it's this consistent thing where I'm pulling their expertise. Right. And yet they haven't realized. And I'm going to be pushing them to do this now that they could sell that.

Yeah, that's an expertise that they could, they could teach and train. And then, you know, my favorite part on the. Well, it's all my favorite, I should say.

But like the teachers of buying back their time, you know, if I'm having to lose my nights and weekends working on something, and this is something I learned in my mid-20s.

You know, the first time I started paying somebody to mow my lawn or paying somebody to change the oil in my car or paying somebody to clean my house was--

It was this realization of, hey, I'm working so much right now in the business that I'm in and I don't have time to do these things.

I can get my life back if I can pay for that service. And so just phenomenal all around. Just great examples. Go ahead. I got one other quick one just to kind of plant the seed of how easy this can be.

But when we think of service based memberships, Another good example of this, my wife and I, we moved our family to a new home and it's in a wooded area.

And we were in the home probably two or three months and my wife and I are lying in bed and all of a sudden we hear. And she's like, what is that? And I'm like, babes, I'm not sure. And then it was again.

She's like, oh my God. She's like, we got mice in the house. She's like, we gotta sell this place. I'm like, babes, come on, listen, let's just, we'll just get an exterminator to come in, we'll fix the problem.

So the exterminator comes in and he's like, oh yeah, you got mice for sure. He's like, you live in a wooded area, like it's bound to happen. He's like, I can definitely take care of that for you.

But then listen to this. He's like, but would you like me to come back and ensure that the problem never exists ever again? And I'm like, no, we're good one time.

Yeah, exactly. I'm like, of course, 100%. So then he set us up on a recurring membership. Like, it was that easy.

Because to your point, like, it is not only a huge win for us as business owners, but it's extremely convenient for customers as well, because the customers.

I don't want to have to worry about calling this guy every time we hear the mice crawling around. Like, I don't ever want that problem.

So just come and eliminate that problem for me ongoing. And I'm more than happy to pay for it. And I think it's just a shift in mindset for people just to realize that your customers want the convenience of not having to worry about that stuff as well.

They want the convenience of not having to worry about the mice every month. They want the convenience of being able to just go and get a massage every month.

Like, they want that as well. So it's just a shift in mindset for us as business owners. And you're still doing what you've set out to do, which is to solve somebody else's problem.

That's right. You have mice. They will come back at some point. You definitely don't want to spend time wondering if, you know, a branch touches the house, if that was mice.

So, yeah, all right, I'm going to assume what people are thinking right now, and my assumption is people are going, this sounds fabulous, but I need to have, you know, 100,000 people on Instagram, and I need to have a marketing person, and I need to have this staff to handle all this stuff.

Is any of that even remotely close to being true? Not at all.

Like, I 100% get that that could be a thought that people have. But I've been doing this for a long time, like, nearly two decades. We've helped tens of thousands of people launch their memberships.

And the reality of it is, is that you don't need a big audience. You don't need tens of thousands or even thousands.

You Don’t Need a Big Audience to Start (00:26:35)

You just need a couple hundred people in an audience to be able to successfully do what we call a founding member launch. And I actually talk about that in chapter five of the book, Predictable Profits.

And so it's definitely, you know, I'd encourage people to check it out, but bottom line is that, you know, when you are launching a membership, you don't need the big audience.

And that couple hundred people can be, you know, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube subscribers, podcast listeners. It could be past clients, it could be customers that you have served over the years, could be an email list.

Like a couple hundred people is not a lot of people to be able to begin working with. Most watching and listening already have that available to them.

So then the next step is like, okay, well how do I do a founding member launch? And I certainly, as I mentioned, I outline that in the book, but it's really about sending a message before you've even created anything.

You're putting a message out there and you're floating the idea out to your customers to see if there is interest. And if there's interest, then green light, thumbs up, move forward.

If there's not interest, then something is out of alignment. Like you're either saying one thing and they're wanting something else. And so we want to fix that before you go, spend a whole bunch of time, energy and effort in creating something that the market doesn't want.

And so to me, it's my favorite way to launch. And you do not need a big audience. You just need a couple hundred people to be able to get going.

And pretty much everybody watching and listening already has that available to them. But here's the thing that's interesting, Chris, is that time and time again we have seen how small beginnings lead to big results.

It's just getting out of our own way and just getting started.

Like I think of Jennifer Chamberlain, she didn't have a big audience and she started, did her founding member launch and welcomed 20 members.

After that first year, it grew to 100 members. After year two, it grew to to 200 members. But then year three, she hit her inflection point. It's like everything got dialed in.

And then she scaled up with advertising. She went from 200 to more than 2,000 members in a single year.

That turned it over into a million dollar plus membership. And so again, that started with 20 founding members. So my encouragement to everybody comes back to a quote I heard in 2004 from Mike Lippman.

And that is, you don't have to get it right, you just have to get it going. That's the most important piece of this puzzle. And so you don't need a big audience by any means.

So what if somebody out there is going, okay, I love this concept. I hate selling. Yeah, we have a lot of business owners that aren't, you know, their personality styles are, you know, more amiable, more, more compliant.

What do we tell them is the secret to getting people into the membership without sounding pushy. Well, Chris, I don't know if you meant to do this or not, but chapter 27 of the book is actually called How To Sell, Even if you Don't Like Selling. So it's pretty spot on.

Selling Without Feeling Salesy (00:29:48)

But the bottom line, my favorite way to sell, there's two ways.

Number one is I love selling through stories. So I love talking about customers just like those that you wish to serve, describing where they were and what happened and where they are now.

And it is. You never feel like you're actually selling in that moment. You're just, you're gushing about your people and you're gushing about your customers.

But in the telling of the story, our audience hear themselves and can see the journey that that person has gone on and can see themselves going on the same journey.

And then similarly, one of the second way that I love to sell is by creating contrast between two worlds.

So in the book, there's an exercise that I encourage people to go through. It's in the foundational section. It's all about creating a messaging map.

And the messaging map is real simple. Take out a sheet of paper, draw a line straight down the middle. At the top of the left column, you put now.

On the top of the right column you put future. And what we want to do is we want to start listing single words or short phrases that describe what our market is thinking, feeling, doing, or not doing. And we use single words or short phrases to describe their now world.

Like what are they thinking, feeling, and doing right now? Maybe they're feeling overwhelmed, maybe they're frustrated, maybe they're scared, maybe they're anxious, maybe their loved ones are doubting them right now, or whatever it might be.

But we're describing their now world. And then we contrast that and we do the same thing on the right hand side where we list single words or short phrases that describe someone's future world.

What are they thinking, what are they feeling, what are they doing or not doing?

And pretty soon you have this incredibly powerful way to describe the impact that your business and or your membership can have on someone's life.

Because now it's like, this is what your world looks like right now. This is what it could look like in the future. The membership is the bridge between those two worlds.

And so it never feels like you're selling because you're actually describing a world that that audience can relate to so vividly that they feel seen, heard, and understood on a level that nobody has ever described.

And that creates incredible trust. Like when somebody feels seen and heard like that, it creates instant trust. And now that then opens them up to being guided toward the direction that they want to head to.

So I love selling through stories and I love creating contrast. And never in those moments do I ever feel like that used car salesman that just high pressure on people.

It's really just meeting people where they're at and describing their world. I love it. And the big key, like you're saying is you do not have to start.

100 people is fine, but if you had 10 people at 50 bucks, you've just increased, you know, 500 bucks a month that you have coming in.

The key is, like you said, get going, get started.

Dude, this time has gone way too fast. I could camp out here with you for another hour, easy.

More About Stu! (00:33:05)

But how do people get more of you? How do they get this book? I've got mine and I know everybody needs to get. This is such a powerful, powerful piece of information.

How do people get the book, get more of you?

Well, I appreciate that, Chris. Yeah, definitely get the book at, you know, any of your local bookstores, jump on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, it's all available there.

And then you can also find me at stu.me. It's like the most simple short domain ever. But stu.me, I love it. And then obviously we got information about the book there too.

But bottom line is that I want to get this book in the hands of as many business owners as possible because at the end of the day, we don't need to be experiencing the kind of stress that so many are because they just don't know where the sales are coming from.

There's a new model, a new way, and it can be incorporated into any type of business.

Whether it's that product based business, the service base, the knowledge base, or if you want to create a community, you can get paid on a recurring basis by just making a couple slight shifts.

And that's what we talk about in the book. We detail everything from soup to nuts about how to do it.

It's nearly two decades of experience distilled into 250 pages. So go get a copy. You can get a copy wherever you get books.

But bottom line is, I just want to encourage everybody to start shifting your thinking about that one time sale and more towards how do I move to a recurring business model. And it'll forever eliminate that stress that you're experiencing. I love it. I love it.

I love it. All right. For about 16 years, I've been asking my interviews One question. What would you tell your younger self if you could? Hmm. If I could tell my younger self?

That's a really good question. I mean, it could be anything. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think, you know, if I were to. I'm just thinking about my son and you know what? Both my son and daughter, actually.

And I think the biggest thing that I would say to them is that we live in this, the most amazing world right now.

There's a lot of stuff going on in the world that, you know, certainly we could get focused on and feel like it's crouching in on us.

But when we take a step back and just look at, like, what we have available to us, it's the most incredible world.

And I think of, like, one generation ago with my parents, they didn't have the opportunities that we have today. Like, my dad had to go in a certain career because that's what boys and young men did.

My mom had to go in a certain career direction because that's what girls and young women did. And now we've got choice.

And so what I would say is that because we have so much choice, take pride in the things that you have passions and interests around, because now we have the ability to be able to create a living doing the things that we love.

We don't have to do anything that we have been forced to in the past. We don't have to go down a certain career because that's just the way it's always been done.

Today, we've got choice. And so I would just encourage my younger self to take pride in the things that you have interest in.

Don't put pressure on yourself that you have to do it a certain way because there's so many options now that are available to us that were never available before.

Conclusion (00:36:34)

Yeah. I love it. I love it, folks. The book is predictable profits. Stu McLaren, thank you so much for being on the show. This is a must, must read, must read, no matter what.

You have the opportunity to take what you're doing in some way, shape or form and look into your family. Maybe your kids want to start some sort of membership, something that they're doing. Look at your spouse.

Maybe there's something. There's a skill, but this is an absolute must read. Thanks again, Stu. I really appreciate you being on the show. Yeah, thanks, Chris. Appreciate it.

All right, folks, there you have it. That's all the time that we have for today. As always, take this information. Change your leadership, change your business, change your life. And join us on the next episode.