493 - What Podcasting Actually Did to Our Life and Family

Cliff Ravenscraft (0:00): When I started podcasting, I didn't set out to monetize anything that I was doing. I was simply following something that has always captured my heart and my mind, and that is having an impact in other people's lives. Using my voice to encourage, equip and educate and inspire and motivate other people into action to pursue the life for which they were created. That I mean, that has always been at the heart of my mission ever since I was 18 years old. I wanted to devote myself to service to others, to be of support and encouragement.

Cliff Ravenscraft (0:49): I started in the online content creating world. Well, before there was an internet publicly available to me anyway, and that was using BBS services, bulletin board services, and that was not using my voice like my vocal box, my vocal cords, but I was taking my voice, what's in my head, and typing on a keyboard and sharing messages and posting them on a BBS system that I had to dial up originally with a 300 baud modem. And eventually we had the Internet. And for ten years, I blogged and I thought I would be a writer. I just loved the idea that a guy in Northern Kentucky has 300 people around the world who are consuming every word that I write in my blog.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:50): I was I was just blown away. But when I discovered podcasting, everything in my life changed. It's why I am still twenty years later as passionate about podcast content creation as I was the day I recorded my first episode. And you know what? When I started, it wasn't at all about how could I turn this into a business?

Cliff Ravenscraft (2:17): How can I make money for this? And I have no problems with anybody who starts with those questions in mind. It's just it wasn't what occurred to me when I first started. Now I have shared my origin story of how I got started in podcasting hundreds of times in interviews on other people's shows. I've even told them in a monologue here in several of my own podcast shows.

Cliff Ravenscraft (2:51): Stephanie and I, we actually started podcasting together. She joined me one week after my first episode when it became clear that, podcasting was gonna play a little bit more of a role in my life than I had anticipated when I published my very first episode. Now, I've told this story so many times, but there have been very few times where Stephanie has been invited to be a guest on a podcast to be interviewed with me at the same time. And recently, Mike and Carolyn Neubauer invited Stephanie and I to be a guest on their show. Their podcast is called Our Family Invests.

Cliff Ravenscraft (3:37): Unfortunately, Caroline wasn't able to be there the day that this interview took place, but Stephanie and I got to meet Mike, and we both agreed afterwards. This is by far our favorite podcast interview that we have ever done together. And there's only been a handful where Stephanie and I together were guests on a podcast to tell our story. And this what you were about ready to hear. I've I've reached out to Mike and I said, Mike, I, you know, I listened back to our interview on your show, and I'm thinking I would love to share this in my own content.

Cliff Ravenscraft (4:18): I just loved the way that you interviewed us, the questions you asked, especially the very first question that you started everything off with. And it was just wonderful from that point forward. And he says, and I said, so do you mind if I share this in my own podcast content? And he said, absolutely, I would be delighted. Thank you.

Cliff Ravenscraft (4:39): Go for it. So what you're about ready to hear is a little bit of a different perspective on not just my journey, but how this journey of podcasting has a relationship component that maybe I've not focused on in the past. You can hear not only the long term impact of podcasting on my own business career, but how has podcasting impacted me as a husband? How has it impacted Stephanie and I in our marriage? How has it impacted my parenting over the years?

Cliff Ravenscraft (5:25): In this version of the story, there's a little bit more focus on some of the unseen costs and a lot of the transformation that took place, how I've experienced so much growth personally as a result of this journey. And more than anything, I just love that Stephanie's perspective is in here in a way that I could never represent on my own telling the story. And so I hope you find tremendous value, encouragement, and insight from this conversation that Stephanie and I had with Mike Neubauer on his podcast called Our Family Invests. I did twenty four one hour podcast episodes and published all of those in twenty four hours. And immediately after publishing the twenty fourth episode, Stephanie took me straight to the hospital where I spent the next two weeks and almost died.

Mike Neubauer (6:27): Guys, you're in for a treat today. As you listen, pay attention to a couple things. The power of a spouse who believes in you before you believe in yourself and how boundaries, margin, and mindset eventually become the difference between survival and freedom. Alright. Let's dive in.

Mike Neubauer (6:43): Welcome to the Our Family Invest podcast, where we explore what happens when family, purpose, and entrepreneurship align. I'm Mike, former Maui firefighter who reached financial freedom in just five years through real estate investing.

Caroline Neubauer (6:55): And I'm Caroline, a Maui based realtor here to educate, empower, and elevate my clients to make smart real estate moves, whether right here at home or through my nationwide network.

Mike Neubauer (7:05): Together, we're chasing our full potential as individuals, as a couple, and as a family. We're here to build a life that matters. And each week, we share the stories of couples who inspire us to love harder, dream bigger, and grow bolder. So join us, and let's learn, share, and grow together. Alright.

Mike Neubauer (7:23): Today, I'm sitting down with Cliff and Stephanie Ravenscraft, a couple who started podcasting over twenty years ago before most people even knew what a podcast was. They walked away from stability. They fought their way out of significant debt. They stepped into entrepreneurship with no guarantees, and they built it all side by side. Now since then, they've helped tens of thousands launch podcasts and created a business around work that they genuinely love.

Mike Neubauer (7:47): Now the story isn't about the success as much as it is navigating the unknowns together, working through difficult situations and staying aligned through all

Unknown Speaker (7:55): the

Mike Neubauer (7:55): challenges. Cliff, Stephanie, I'm excited to have you both here. But before we jump into the show, I want you to brag on each other a little bit. So, Stephanie, what would you say if you had to introduce Cliff? And then, Cliff, maybe you could follow that up by introducing this Stephanie that only you know.

Stephanie Ravenscraft (8:13): So my my husband, Cliff, can conquer anything that he sets his mind to and usually does. He asked me in 2005 if I would do a podcast with him, and at first, I said no. Second, I said, okay. Because I had done a bible study that that said, you know, engage in a hobby that your husband is doing as a way of connection. And so I said yes, and we started podcasting together.

Stephanie Ravenscraft (8:40): But at that time, in the course of our marriage, I had seen so many hobbies come and go and come and go and come and go. So I'm like, okay, I've got like two months tops, and we're we're in and out. We got this. And and he took a hobby and created a life for us. And we created a life for us.

Stephanie Ravenscraft (8:58): And his drive and dedication and commitment to making that happen and to making that work is all you need to know about who he is as a man.

Unknown Speaker (9:12): Nice. Cliff, how would you

Cliff Ravenscraft (9:13): follow that up? Wow. Thank you. So Stephanie Ravenscraft, I am able to walk this planet with a bold confidence that I did not have in the early days. And it stems from the foundation of the confidence that Stephanie had in me when I didn't have it all in myself.

Cliff Ravenscraft (9:39): So as she said, we started podcasting as a hobby in 2005. We were creating lots of shows, reaching lots of people around the world, and there were all sorts of signs that were pointing to the possibility that we could potentially make a living from doing what we felt most called to do in the world instead of me taking over the family business that my grandfather started in 1937, where I was next in line to take it over. I had all of these conversations with individuals who were like, Cliff, I've been an entrepreneur my entire life. I've never had a day job. Let me tell you all the ways you can make money.

Cliff Ravenscraft (10:18): And I'd come home and tell my wife all of those things. And it was her that in September 2007 said, that's it. You are leaving your day job. You and I both know that this is what we are called to do. If we have to sell the house, we will sell the house.

Cliff Ravenscraft (10:38): We'll do whatever it takes. We've you've got this. We've got this. I've got your back. Let's go make this thing happen.

Cliff Ravenscraft (10:46): And I I will tell you, I did not have the courage to make that decision on my own. I didn't even have the courage to even suggest that we go that route, but she had that confidence and it gave me all the confidence I needed or that gave me all the courage I needed. My confidence came much later after all of my worst fears didn't come true. And some of them did come true, but we made it through it and and confidence came later. But her confidence has been strong in me and I owe so much of my success to her.

Mike Neubauer (11:19): Oh, I love that. And I love that you're talking about, like, you know, confidence in you is kind of what helped you step into the person that she knew that you were before you actually believed that, right? Yeah. That's so good. That's so good.

Mike Neubauer (11:35): So I wanna get into all that, and I wish that my wife was here, and she's supposed to be here, but sadly, she had something else on her calendar that came up. But I know that I would be, or I will be disciplined if I do not ask you how you two met and what your first date was like.

Unknown Speaker (11:56): I'll let Stephanie No. Answer that

Stephanie Ravenscraft (11:58): Hold on. I love that he would be disciplined. Our first date was a blind date. We were we were set up by friends of ours. A girl that I worked with was dating his best friend at the time, and they thought that we should get together.

Stephanie Ravenscraft (12:19): And we went on a date. And Cliff is a little bit older than I am. And so I had to, you know, talk to my dad and get permission and all this stuff. And my dad says it's not gonna be an every weekend kind of thing, but you can go on a date. And we've been married for thirty years in August.

Cliff Ravenscraft (12:38): So the fun thing is is that before we went on that date, because we had talked on the phone and we talked for hours upon hours every single night leading up to our first date. And her dad very specifically said, listen, you know, this is this is not an every weekend thing. And he was right. It was an everyday thing. And it and I'd say for the first fifteen, twenty years of our our marriage, I don't think we were ever apart for more than ten to fourteen days.

Cliff Ravenscraft (13:11): It has been an incredible thirty years together.

Mike Neubauer (13:14): That's amazing. I love hearing that. Alright. So let's go back to before podcasting. What were you guys doing at that point?

Stephanie Ravenscraft (13:23): At that point, I was a stay at home mom. When before podcasting, our we had just had our third child. So she was an infant when we started podcasting. And I was staying home. And I was I was very much doing the mom thing, completely supporting him in what was looking like taking over the family insurance business.

Stephanie Ravenscraft (13:46): And like we were just, in my mind, we were the typical American family. Yeah. And he still, he worked long, long hours, long days. He he put in a lot of work to make sure that that our bills were covered. We did have a lot of debt in our early marriage, and that took up a lot of a lot of time and resources to to bring that down and get to where we are now.

Cliff Ravenscraft (14:14): We were introduced to Dave Ramsey. So we became debt free in February 2007, and I think it was about a five year journey, if I'm not mistaken. That yeah. We so it was a five year journey to become date debt free once we started Dave Ramsey's baby steps for financial freedom, whatever that thing is. Total money makeover, whatever.

Unknown Speaker (14:36): Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, I worked around the clock.

Unknown Speaker (14:39): So

Cliff Ravenscraft (14:39): I briefly alluded to the fact that my grandfather started a business, a family business. It was an independent insurance agency selling auto, home, life, health, business, every kind of insurance you could sell for multiple different companies. My dad took that over, and my mom became his partner, and I was working for my mom and dad. I did that for twelve years and for ten years before I became full time self employed as in in the field of podcasting, I was also an associate pastor of a church. So that was an unpaid position, but it's something that I did for ten years preaching and teaching and leading small groups and then leading leaders with small groups and all this other stuff.

Cliff Ravenscraft (15:27): So but that was in my free time. So I've always been the type of person I got a very deep work ethic from my dad. And so I probably worked in insurance at the time before podcasting, maybe about sixty hours a week, and ministry was taking up somewhere between ten to fifteen hours a week.

Unknown Speaker (15:51): Holy smokes.

Cliff Ravenscraft (15:52): Yeah. So and that was my life. I I had I had had the role model of your work and the things you do is your identity. And so it just seemed natural to me. It didn't seem odd or out there or anything like that.

Cliff Ravenscraft (16:10): It's like, is just what has been modeled for me and seems to work well for my dad. I was just following in his footsteps.

Mike Neubauer (16:17): Okay. That's a lot. So you're already working a ton. You've got young kids, and then, you know, 2004, 2005, I think the term podcasting wasn't even coined until 2005. So, like, what was that first conversation like when you're like, hey, let's start a podcast?

Stephanie Ravenscraft (16:37): I laughed. Yeah. I'm I'm not kidding. I I laughed. Cliff has a great ability to go all in and hyper focused on any one interest at any one time, but the span of that focus can last anywhere from hours to months.

Stephanie Ravenscraft (16:56): So I was in the pattern of expecting habits to come and go and come and go and come and go. It was it was the pattern. And so when he said, do you want a podcast with me? I laughed. I'm like, who's gonna listen?

Stephanie Ravenscraft (17:08): Like, that's ridiculous. No one's gonna listen to two people from Kentucky talk about anything. I was wrong. I was humbled quickly. But but I did I did laugh.

Stephanie Ravenscraft (17:22): And then it was a Bible study that I was part of at the time that suggested to invest in a hobby that your husband is interested as a form of connection. And so I came back, and I was like, okay. I I will do it. I'll I'll podcast with you. Like, I think didn't I say I do it, like, twice or I don't remember.

Stephanie Ravenscraft (17:41): I think I put, like, a

Unknown Speaker (17:43): I don't think you put a caveat on it.

Unknown Speaker (17:44): You don't think no.

Unknown Speaker (17:45): I I think you you said I'll do it, and I think your Maybe

Unknown Speaker (17:47): I didn't.

Cliff Ravenscraft (17:48): I think your expectation is that it would probably last two or three times, and we'd be done

Unknown Speaker (17:52): with it.

Unknown Speaker (17:54): Well But then

Unknown Speaker (17:54): we go ahead.

Mike Neubauer (17:56): No. I was just gonna ask Cliff, like, a a follow-up. Like, what were you what were you trying to do then with with podcasting? Like, what was your thought?

Cliff Ravenscraft (18:03): So here's what happened from my perspective. I had already been blogging for ten years at that point. I started my first blog in 1996 as hand coded HTML files. And through figure a whole decade, this guy in Northern Kentucky is reaching about 300 people around the world, and I thought that was pretty significant. Another thing to know about me that before I ever decided to go work for my mom and dad in the insurance agency, I I told them that if I ever get an offer to do full time ministry to be a pastor of a church one day, you'd have to give me your blessing to leave the family business and go do that instead no matter how much less money I would make.

Cliff Ravenscraft (18:48): And that's an important part of this story because I've always had a heart for being of service and encouragement to others, and and that plays such a vital role in understanding this entire journey. So and it and it goes to answering your question, what was I thinking? What happened was I had been blogging all these years. My wife introduces me to this TV show Lost. I didn't watch until the very final episode of the first season, and then I got hooked.

Cliff Ravenscraft (19:18): And I'm like, okay. Let's go back and and watch this entire thing. She goes, okay. I'll I'll watch the whole thing over again. Let's let's start from the beginning.

Cliff Ravenscraft (19:26): And I began subscribing to podcasts devoted to the TV show lost. There were already five of them out there, and they even had something called the lost podcast network where they all shared a blogger account and and syndicated each of their content into an RSS feed that came out of a Google blogger account. So I was listening to a five hours of content related to the TV show of Lost as a podcast, and I was taking everything that I learned, and I was blogging about it. And one day, I came up with a theory that was massive. I called it the Thomas theory.

Cliff Ravenscraft (20:04): I won't go into all the boring details about it, but I know I was right, and and I have proof. But, anyway, I went and took screen captures from different episodes, high definition. Like, I've got this entire theory, and I'm like, oh my gosh. I need to call Ryan and Jen Izawa and send them a three and a half minute audio file telling them about my theory, and maybe they'll play my voice in their podcast, in their feedback section, and maybe some people will come and see that I actually did figure this out. So I recorded this m p three audio file of me just sharing what my blog was about.

Cliff Ravenscraft (20:42): Here's the evidence that I have. Come see the blog. Well, they actually played it. Their podcast had tens of thousands of subscribers, by the way. And I wake up the next morning, and I turn my computer on.

Cliff Ravenscraft (20:55): I pull up my blog. I wanted to see if there were any comments. And in big bold print, it said, account suspended, bandwidth exceeded, contact billing department. And so I called the billing department and they say you owe us thousands of dollars for overages on bandwidth. And I'm I'm like, what are you talking about?

Cliff Ravenscraft (21:14): I've never had more than 300 views on my thing in a in a month. They said you you served millions of of views and your photos. You had, like, 30 photos, and your photos are, like, 30 megabytes apiece. I'm like, well, they have to be high definition. You have to zoom in.

Cliff Ravenscraft (21:34): And it's like, you okay. They said, okay, first and foremost, we're going to we'll we'll clear out your bill. We need to teach you how to compress your images. We and all this other stuff. And you need to move off of shared hosting, and you need to have a virtual private service.

Cliff Ravenscraft (21:49): I'm like, okay. Let's so we work all this out. Turns out that one of the people who heard my voice from Ryan and Jen's podcast, The Transmission, was somebody who was a writer on staff at Entertainment Weekly, and ew.com heard my pod or my voice in their in the in the show, went to my blog, was convinced I was right, and said, this guy has solved the entire mystery of Lost, and he's got the receipts. They didn't I don't think that was a term back then, but essentially it was that. He's got the he's got the proof.

Cliff Ravenscraft (22:27): And they ew.com linked to me. And I will tell you, millions of people around the world were into this show as much as I was or we were. And so that's how this all got started. And as a result of that, Ryan and Genizawa says, Cliff, we don't wanna tell too many people this, but we're gonna slowly wind down our show. But why don't you launch a podcast?

Cliff Ravenscraft (22:51): We're getting so many people with such positive feedback to your three and a half. They're begging us to tell you to launch your own podcast. And so I I I went and created my very first podcast episode. I didn't think at the time remember, told you I didn't have a lot of confidence that, you know, this was anything for me. But my very first podcast episode was December 2005.

Cliff Ravenscraft (23:17): And I said, hey, my name is Cliff Ravenscrafter. I'm in Northern Kentucky. I'm interested in three things these days, technology, faith, and the television show Lost. And there's already five podcasts devoted to the TV show Lost, so who am I? I get most of my information from them anyway.

Cliff Ravenscraft (23:36): So as far as technology is concerned, the only people who are actually listening to podcasts right now are people who are early adopters of technology. You probably, as a listener, know more than I do. And everybody else who has a podcast is a technology podcast. I learned everything from them. So who am I to do that?

Cliff Ravenscraft (23:55): And by the way, I'm also very interested in faith, but pretty much all of the faith category is brought on by all these Christian broadcasters who have been broadcasting on the radio for the last thirty to forty years. So my podcast is called Generally Speaking. Welcome to the Generally Speaking podcast where each episode, I will choose one topic because I understand you may not be interested in all three of them. So look in the title of the episode. It'll say lost and then hyphen and then title of the episode.

Cliff Ravenscraft (24:24): And if you only want Lost episodes, just delete the the faith and technology episodes. And I said all of this, introduced it, and then I said, okay. Now that I've got the introduction, now you know how this show works, I'm gonna talk about Lost. And I talked about Lost for the rest of the episode. To my surprise and shock, over 500 people downloaded it within twenty four hours.

Cliff Ravenscraft (24:46): Wow. And the overwhelming response was, Cliff, I don't care about what you have to say about faith. I could care less about technology. But if you did a podcast about Lost, I would subscribe right now. So I went to Stephanie.

Cliff Ravenscraft (25:01): I said, hey, would you like to do a podcast about Lost? And she said, yes. And we sat down the very next week, and I said, hello, everyone, and welcome to the weekly Lost edition of the Generally Speaking Podcast Network. Because I knew in that very moment this was not going to be one podcast. This was going to be a network of shows.

Cliff Ravenscraft (25:27): I was going to have my faith podcasts. I was going to have my technology podcasts. And this is just the weekly lost edition of this podcast network, and that's how it got started.

Mike Neubauer (25:39): Wow. Interesting. So you knew, like, you were trying to create a channel for everything that you wanted to do. Right? The faith, the technology, the lost.

Mike Neubauer (25:49): Like, they were all going to be separate podcasts. You knew that from the beginning. Like, you saw that

Cliff Ravenscraft (25:54): for knew it from I knew it from the feedback that so my for ten years, I'd been blogging about those three topics. Or, well, ten years, I'd been blogging about anything I'm interested in. For the past year, I had been blogging about Lost as well. And so I had I I'm just like, okay. My my blog is generally speaking about the things I'm interested in.

Cliff Ravenscraft (26:15): My podcast will be and it was very clear. People want niche content. Mhmm. I'm like, ah, okay. So there'll be an a podcast for lost.

Cliff Ravenscraft (26:24): There'll be a podcast for technology. There'll be a podcast for faith. And I did launch, by the way, all those shows. A couple of details, our by our third episode, we had already been reaching 27,000 subscribers around the world. And the reason why is because we were invited to be the sixth podcast lost podcast added to the lost podcast network.

Cliff Ravenscraft (26:50): So they had already established tens of thousands of subscribers there, and that gave us a voice. And then Stephanie and I launched the desperate housewives fan podcast, the Grey's Anatomy fan podcast, the Heroes TV show fan podcast, the Doctor Who fan podcast, the Twilight Saga podcast, the, Hunger Games podcast. We were reaching hundreds of thousands of people around the world as a married couple. And people were asking us all sorts of questions about our marriage and money. And so we started a podcast called Family from the Heart.

Cliff Ravenscraft (27:24): People were asking me about technology. So I I created a podcast called Business Tech Weekly and Help I Got a Mac. And hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people were begging to send us things. And so we got a PO Box. And this right here contains hundreds of thank you cards, postcards, and handwritten notes from people who says what you have shared in one episode has radically altered or changed my life.

Cliff Ravenscraft (27:55): Three of these handwritten letters are people who said, I chose not to commit suicide. Of them says because of something you and your wife talked about in your podcast, my kids have a dad in their life again. It's this that made me ask myself the question, what would life be like if I could actually not pastor a church, not take over a family insurance agency, but do podcasting for a living? Speak into a microphone, entertain, encourage, motivate, inspire, and equip others around the world.

Mike Neubauer (28:30): Wow. Okay. I I need to take a breath for a minute because that is wild. And and that is not a traditional trajectory. And I've never heard anyone getting that kind of success overnight like that, where you're dropping, know, too much bandwidth for your server, and then 27,000 subscribers that quickly, like, that's absurd.

Mike Neubauer (28:57): That's absurd. Those are absurd numbers. Diary of a CEO never started like that, right? Like, wow. Wow.

Mike Neubauer (29:05): Yeah. That's a lot. So, okay, so you kind of like, I didn't know what to expect coming into this episode, And so I'm kinda going through your story based on the the information that I was provided, and I'm thinking, man, how did this guy grow this thing? So and I had all kinds of questions lined up to ask you, but now it's like, wow. So I I know you teach a lot of other people how to podcast and do that, but you can't repeat that formula.

Mike Neubauer (29:36): Right? And and I imagine you're not doing a lot of the the heroes podcast and the desperate housewives. Are you are you guys doing all of those yourselves or are there other people that are running them on your network?

Stephanie Ravenscraft (29:49): Well, we were we were doing those ourselves, and then there were some that we had other cohosts come in. Okay. When Grey's Anatomy first started, I was podcasting with a friend who had started as a listener to the Lost Podcast. We had made a connection and become friends, and so she and I did the Grey's Anatomy podcast together. And I think a lot of that overnight, that 27,000, like, right away, the breaking the blog, you know, that was the Lost phenomenon.

Stephanie Ravenscraft (30:21): None of that could have happened without that show. And to this day, like, when we built that we've been in this house for eleven years. And when we built this house, this is the house that podcasting built. But podcasting built this because of Lost. It would have never been possible without that television show.

Stephanie Ravenscraft (30:41): So so there were a few there for in early, early days of the Lost podcast, our neighbor sat in with us for I don't even know how long Four she was on there with

Unknown Speaker (30:52): or months.

Stephanie Ravenscraft (30:53): Four or five. Yeah. So our neighbor was on and it was the three of us who did the podcast together. When did it go from once a week to twice a week? Because we would do reaction right after the show aired, and then we would do a more in-depth live episode.

Stephanie Ravenscraft (31:10): Well, I think they were both live. But then we would do a more in-depth episode on a Saturday night. And we had small kids at the time. So, like, bedtime had to be strict, and and everybody had to be down because we have to watch television and take notes and and then go and record a podcast. And with all of these we were recording almost every night of the week.

Cliff Ravenscraft (31:31): Yeah. We were recording. So to answer your question, Mike, we either Stephanie or myself or us together were in every podcast that we were producing. So Stephanie had shows where she had a cohost with someone else. I had three or four other shows where I had someone else other than Stephanie as a cohost, but there but every show on our network, one or both of us were on the show.

Cliff Ravenscraft (32:00): And so for just myself, I know that in the past twenty years, I have personally 55 shows and over 5,000 episodes. Stephanie's probably I I haven't looked. She's probably over 15 different shows that she's had with us together or her own with somebody else or her own solo shows, and she's probably close to maybe 2,000, 3,000 episodes.

Stephanie Ravenscraft (32:29): I have that paper somewhere. You wrote it down for me? I had a paper on my desk where you have written show that I've been on and how many episodes of those shows, but it's missing now.

Cliff Ravenscraft (32:39): But here's the thing. This is a this is a labor of love. I mean, if you the use I just held up the box of the handwritten stuff. This does not even address the hundreds of emails every week pouring in from people

Stephanie Ravenscraft (32:58): Or saying voicemails when we had a voicemail line.

Cliff Ravenscraft (33:00): Or voicemail feedback hotline. Just constantly, you guys, what you just shared, this is changing my life. This is making my life better. It just over and over again. And as a result of that, it just from a ministry standpoint, I was like, I'm drawn to this.

Cliff Ravenscraft (33:17): Sure. So within the first eighteen months of podcasting, just myself alone, I'm putting in about twenty to thirty hours a week. I had gone down to no to no more than forty hours a week at the insurance office so that I could free and and also, I was still doing ministry stuff until there's a unique story. I don't know if you wanna go into that. It it it'll be a fun story if you wanna hear it.

Cliff Ravenscraft (33:44): But there was a story about how I left the ministry side behind the official institutional stuff. Yeah. But but, yeah, I did these these were our shows. We were at at one point, I was publishing before I went full time self employed. I was publishing seven to 15 podcast episodes a week every single week, and some of those were daily podcasts.

Cliff Ravenscraft (34:07): I had a podcast called it was at the time called My Crazy Life. It later became Pursuing a Balanced Life, and then it became the Cliff Ravenscrap show. But that show was daily for a very long time. And then I had the almost daily devotional. And then I had a bunch of weekly shows.

Mike Neubauer (34:24): Wow. That is incredible because you've got the w two, you got three small kids, you're putting out, I don't even know how many shows at once. Right? And then half of these shows or or probably 90% of them are based off of TV shows, so you got to watch the TV shows too. Did did you sleep?

Cliff Ravenscraft (34:45): No. Okay. There's no time for that. And Stephanie will tell you that she she operated probably from about six months into our podcasting journey and probably for about eighteen months of the start of our business, she was like a widow.

Stephanie Ravenscraft (35:07): I was operating as a single parent for a good two years.

Unknown Speaker (35:14): Wow.

Stephanie Ravenscraft (35:14): We were just going round the clock.

Cliff Ravenscraft (35:16): I say that, Mike, and before you do a follow on, I do wanna say this. That's the way I view it. I feel like, oh my gosh. However, the most important thing is our marriage as a father, I'm not contributing much. Single parent is very adequate to describe how Stephanie was caring for things.

Cliff Ravenscraft (35:39): Right? But at the same time, we had always been doing ministry together. We saw this as the evolution of our ministry together. And most importantly, Stephanie and I, during this entire season of life that I just told you, we're having more in-depth, meaningful conversation and connection behind a microphone. And even at the time, believe it or not, live in on a camera streaming to an audience around the world, we are more connected during that season of life than we ever were before this got started.

Cliff Ravenscraft (36:19): Interesting.

Mike Neubauer (36:22): Wow. There's so much there, Cliff. Like, I mean, one part of me is like, oh, that's so sad. Like, you're not being the father that you you can't get back those years. Right?

Mike Neubauer (36:33): But at the same time, you're strengthening your relationship with Stephanie.

Cliff Ravenscraft (36:38): There I wanna say something to that because because it it will buck the the normal standard thing. I wasn't that involved as a father, you know, in that way that that seems to be like this is the way it should be done, blah blah blah. I I wasn't that involved in a father before we started the podcasting thing. Before we started the podcasting thing, instead of working around the clock doing podcast related stuff outside of the day job and outside of ministry, before that, it was around the clock insurance related stuff and ministry. So really, the kids never saw any change.

Cliff Ravenscraft (37:13): And and and again, not that this is right, it's just modeled. I I'll let Stephanie talk about her side for in a minute, but I'll just say that from my side, when I was growing up, my mom and dad worked around the clock and Sure. They weren't I mean, I had so much alone time, free time, all the stuff, you know. You know, I'm I'm at daycare. I'm over here with friends and all this other stuff.

Cliff Ravenscraft (37:39): They're working around the clock. So my dad wasn't consistently like, let me tuck you in. Let me read you a story or none of that. He worked his butt off sixty, seventy, eighty hours a week. So to me, I am doing what a father does in my conditioning.

Cliff Ravenscraft (37:59): A father works hard and provides for the financial needs of the family while, you know Anyway, you get the idea. Stephanie, share your experience. Why this wasn't such a problem for you because of your experience growing up?

Stephanie Ravenscraft (38:16): Because my experience growing up was that's how it was. My dad left when it was dark, and he didn't come home until it was dark.

Unknown Speaker (38:23): I

Stephanie Ravenscraft (38:24): grew up on a farm, so there was farm work to be done. My grandparents worked the farm. My uncles worked on the farm and cousins and, you know, everybody. I did housework because, you know, I was a kid. And so I did stuff inside the house.

Stephanie Ravenscraft (38:41): But my dad had a blue collar job. He left at dark. He came home at dark. He had a side hustle that he could have could have taken entrepreneur and been amazing at it. But he grew up thinking you have you get paid.

Stephanie Ravenscraft (38:55): You have a job. And and he had a loyalty to the company that he worked for. It was a family company. It was owned by his brother. And so he had a loyalty to that.

Stephanie Ravenscraft (39:03): And so he did he did the grind. He had his side hustle, and we had farm work that had to be done in any spare time. I mean, there was no that's all you did. You work from the time you wake up until the time you crash.

Cliff Ravenscraft (39:16): Yeah. And that's the point. So when we got married and I'm working around the clock, Stephanie, to her, this was never a point of contention between us. Meets supposed her

Unknown Speaker (39:29): to be.

Cliff Ravenscraft (39:29): It it met her expectation of how our relationship would be and how our parenting would be. It met my expectation. It certainly bucked up against the expectations of how a lot of other people view a father should be involved, but it just didn't seem odd to to us at the time. Interesting.

Stephanie Ravenscraft (39:47): Wow. And as it when we when we first got married and when we had Megan, our oldest daughter, I worked as well. I I never imagined that I would stay at home with our kids. And through through circumstances that is an is a long story, I end up losing my job. And I'm like, well, now what?

Stephanie Ravenscraft (40:06): Because now I have an 18. Well, she she was probably just like a year old. And I'm I'm pregnant with my second child. Do I go get another job or do we learn how to be a one income house? And so we chose to learn how to be a one income house.

Stephanie Ravenscraft (40:24): But I never intended to to stay at home. Although I can now, that they're all grown, tell you that was I that's what I was built to do. That's what I was made to do.

Mike Neubauer (40:35): I love that. So, okay. So you you early on, you got a taste of like wild success with podcasting. Like we mentioned before, most people don't see that. And you've got all these things going on.

Mike Neubauer (40:51): You're up all the time. How did you decide to monetize this? And what was that path like?

Cliff Ravenscraft (40:57): Yeah. So ironically, there was never any thought in my mind to ever monetize any of this. The thought of monetizing never once crossed my mind. As far as I was concerned, this is a hobby and this is a ministry and it's nothing more than that. However, we began doing things and of course I was doing things on the cheap.

Cliff Ravenscraft (41:23): We were still working at that time. We didn't become debt free until February 2007. So we're working aggressively towards paying down debt. So which means that when I started our podcasting efforts, we started on a budget. In fact, my very first podcast episode was recorded with a $35 headset with a plastic boom mic off to the side, and it wasn't even USB.

Cliff Ravenscraft (41:49): That wasn't even a thing yet. It was it was two one eight inch jacks that go into the speaker and mic jack on your laptop. And then I went and found some $50 condenser microphones, and they sounded awful, but it was it got our voice. It got everything out there. And people were commenting about the audio quality, and I'm like, you know what?

Cliff Ravenscraft (42:13): We understand. We're we're saving up to do this. And somebody said, hey. You know what? How much are you thinking about spending on upgrading your equipment?

Cliff Ravenscraft (42:21): And I said, well, I'm looking at this package over here. It's gonna be a couple $100. And she says, what's your address? And that's when I went and got my PO box, and she wrote us a check for the exact amount to go buy all of that equipment. And then that was the very first time money came in from this.

Cliff Ravenscraft (42:38): Well, by the time some of our shows are hitting 60,000, 80,000 subscribers, all of a sudden, we're getting Time Warner Cable, Direct TV, expedia.com, and a bunch of other huge brands are saying, hey, we would like to, you know, insert ads into your podcast. There we were doing live streaming before live streaming was a thing. We were doing it via Skype casting at first and then Ustream. TV, and then we were using something called TalkShoe. And TalkShoe was one of those venture capital funded or whatever you call it.

Cliff Ravenscraft (43:14): They got their money rounds, and they're like, hey, we're going to build an entire thing around this. Cliff and Stephanie, we have eventually, we're gonna have advertisers and we're gonna split revenue and all this other stuff. But for right now, we'll pay you like $3,000 a month if you will host all of your shows on our servers and bring your live shows here. And I'm like, 3,000 a month? Yeah.

Cliff Ravenscraft (43:35): Please sign me up. And so that so then there was that. And then we had other people say, you know what? We would make donations if you created extra bonus content. So that was always out there.

Cliff Ravenscraft (43:47): We had other companies wanting to sponsor our shows, not advertising dropping ads. They wanted to be a long term relationship sponsor. And the most exciting thing that happened for me was I would go to church and I would, like, talk about Lost, and then I'd talk about podcasting. Obviously, you you seem really excited when I told you the the response that I got initially from podcasting. Nobody in our hometown could care they they could care less about any of that.

Cliff Ravenscraft (44:22): They when they heard me talking, they they heard Charlie Brown's teacher going wah wah wah wah. And they're like, Cliff, we're gonna talk about sports again now, if you don't mind. And so what happened was, believe it or not, there were people back in, let's just say, 2006, early two thousand seven, and then they're like, I wanna create a podcast to help promote my personal brand or whatever. And they're spending about six hours a week trying to produce one forty five minute episode each week and struggling through the progress process. And here I am recording seven to 15 episodes that are approximately an hour or more in length each and publishing them all, and and it's no sweat.

Cliff Ravenscraft (45:08): And they're like, how are you doing that? So I'd get on a call with them. And it sometimes we talk for forty five minutes to an hour. Sometimes we talk for two and a half hours. And at the end of they're like, you've got to let me pay you for this.

Cliff Ravenscraft (45:20): I'm like, dude, I can't believe I just got to talk to somebody for two and a half hours about podcasting. I feel like I should pay you for this. That's how I felt about it, except for the fact that eventually, there started to be this little thought that crossed my mind. I felt really guilty and ashamed about this thought when it first crossed my mind, and that thought was this. What would life be like if I were able to do podcasting full time instead of taking over the family business and instead of ever becoming a pastor of a church one day?

Cliff Ravenscraft (45:57): What would life be like if this was my ministry and this was how I made a living? And by this time that I'm asking this question, I'm already making 3,000 to $5,000 a month, and people are begging me to let them pay me to teach them what I know about podcasting. Because at this point, I've got thousands of hours invested. And so I decided to test it. Would people pay me?

Cliff Ravenscraft (46:22): I started hosting workshops. Like, hey, I've got this software. I can do 15 people live. I'll teach, and I'll answer questions. It's a $150 per person.

Cliff Ravenscraft (46:33): Sold out instantly. I'm like, wow. Wow. Okay. And then I I I did that over and over again.

Cliff Ravenscraft (46:38): And I'm like, wow. I and I started offering, at in December 2006, after one year of podcasting, I started Podcast Answer Man over at podcastanswerman.com. And then the very first episode, I said, listen. My name is Cliff Ravenscrafter. I've been podcasting about a year.

Cliff Ravenscraft (46:54): Pretty much everything I've told you so far was in this episode. Listen. The name of the show is podcast answer man. It's not because I have all of the answers, although I have a lot. I have a lot of experience.

Cliff Ravenscraft (47:05): But here's what I can tell you. If I don't have the answer, you'll be hard pressed to find somebody who's more passionate about podcasting than I am at this point, and I know how to get the answer to any question related to podcasting. So if you have those questions, here's a voicemail feedback hotline. You leave your voice in. I'll play your question in the show, and I will answer it.

Cliff Ravenscraft (47:22): That's what I'm here for every week. And in that first episode, I said this phrase, wouldn't it be cool if one day, maybe five, ten years down the road, I would be able to make a living as a podcast coach and consultant instead of taking over my family's business? Well, little did I know that one year after saying that statement in that first episode, that would become my reality.

Unknown Speaker (47:45): Wow. Why did it make you feel

Cliff Ravenscraft (47:47): guilty? Because of a lot of things. I was taught growing up that for you to earn money, you had to work hard. And while it may sound like I worked hard creating so much content, I never worked a day related to creating podcast content. There was no work.

Cliff Ravenscraft (48:10): There was no hardness to any of it. It it it was effortless. It it was lots of energy, lots of time, zero effort, zero hardness, zero difficult, zero challenge, zero overwhelm, zero stress. It was just pure passion, love, joy. And I felt guilty charging people money and earning a lot of income, doing something that I love when so many people I know are struggling to get by financially and they're stuck doing jobs that are so unfulfilling and and are soul sucking and energy draining.

Cliff Ravenscraft (48:52): And I felt guilty because it was right at the time this was happening, I I was in the insurance industry, so I saw a lot of what was coming with the financial collapse of two thousand eight. I saw it before it actually happened. And so people in my industry who didn't have the same job security I had, my mom and dad were never gonna fire me. I had job security. Meanwhile, I've got people who are my friends and my peers who had $200,000 a year jobs and they were sole income earners for their family and they're getting laid off left and right, left and right, left and right, and they can't find a job and they're struggling.

Cliff Ravenscraft (49:34): And here I am. Who am I to think about leaving my job security and going doing this thing that I it's like getting paid to do karaoke for people who love to do karaoke. It's like being paid to go golf or something like that. Who am I to live a life where I get to earn my income doing what I love? And I felt a lot of guilt and a lot of shame early.

Cliff Ravenscraft (50:00): And and it took it took a while for me to understand that. In fact, it was after it was way it was a year and a half, two years after I was full time self employed before I really took care of some of those limiting beliefs.

Mike Neubauer (50:14): Yeah. When you had that conversation with your parents about leaving that W two, What how did that go? Like, did they understand what you were doing?

Unknown Speaker (50:24): Stephanie, do you how how many times have you heard the story? Do you wanna try give a shot at it? Because I wanna give you some airtime as well.

Stephanie Ravenscraft (50:31): Yeah. I don't know that I know the entire story. I just know that after you gave I just remember that after you gave your ninety day notice, you start getting, like, really freaked out. Like, I don't know. Like, what if this doesn't work?

Stephanie Ravenscraft (50:47): I don't actually have a plan to make money. I just know I'm starting this business. And he goes back to his dad and he's like, what if I did like part time or and your dad's like, no, you're either all in or you're all out. You got to choose one. And I will say, I don't think Cliff, aside from me, because this was my decision.

Stephanie Ravenscraft (51:08): I said this is it's time. You know, we're gonna like he whenever he said that on podcast Answer Man in early two thousand and seven. I then had to live with the miserable cliff that he became struggling with the guilt and and all of his feelings about how much time he was giving to podcasting and only forty eight hours to insurance, and that's where our money was coming from. So I was the one in September who said, no, that's enough. I'm cutting it.

Stephanie Ravenscraft (51:39): Like, it's time. It's time.

Cliff Ravenscraft (51:43): Actually said, my kids need their dad back, and I want my husband back.

Stephanie Ravenscraft (51:49): Yep. That is what I said. He became miserable. But directly in line behind of me behind me, Cliff's biggest cheerleader is his dad.

Cliff Ravenscraft (51:58): Yeah.

Stephanie Ravenscraft (51:58): There there is no other person on the planet who has been more supportive and I think tried to be understanding of what podcasting was before he knew what podcasting was than his dad. It it's hands down.

Cliff Ravenscraft (52:14): So I wanna tell this story. So I I come home from a a a string of bad days at the office, and and the bad days are because at this point so it was December 2006 where I I started Podcast Answer Man, and I started to have this dream. Now we're talking September 2007. This is nine months of me dreaming, right, with really little belief that it's possible. But I can tell you right now, at this point, for nine months of two the first nine months of 2007, every single minute no.

Cliff Ravenscraft (52:49): Every single second I was physically in the insurance office, it was a waste of my time. And what I mean by that, it was a distraction from what I most knew I wanted to do. And so for nine months, that career that was the lifeblood financial, you know, everything, it was soul sucking. Now today, I I I know a lot about mindset that I didn't know then. I had very little actually, no.

Cliff Ravenscraft (53:21): I had no emotional intelligence back then. But because of that, I told myself some really negative stories about this insurance job, and I just hated it. And so after nine months of that, I come home one day and she goes, that's it. I draw the line. You're gonna we're we're already making 3 to $5,000 a month.

Cliff Ravenscraft (53:39): This is in your free time. Imagine what you could make with this. You've had all these conversations with these people who told you can do it. I believe you can do it. This is what you know you and I both know.

Cliff Ravenscraft (53:48): This is what we're called to do. We'll do whatever it takes to make it happen. Tomorrow, you're gonna tell your dad you're gonna quit you're you're you're giving him a notice. And I'm like, okay. Ironically, we actually started up our podcast and made an announcement to our podcast audience, and I published it immediately letting them know that tomorrow I'm putting in my notice.

Cliff Ravenscraft (54:10): And and, of course, I knew my my dad and my mom weren't gonna hear it because they weren't listening to my podcast back then. And so I wake up the next morning, and I'm like, oh my gosh. I'm freaking out. What's my dad gonna say? And I go in and I I say, dad, I I need to let you know that I'm putting in my notice.

Cliff Ravenscraft (54:29): I wanna do podcasting full time. I'm giving you ninety days. December 31 will be my final day. And I'm thinking, okay. I'm about ready to hear all the reasons this is the biggest mistake in the world.

Cliff Ravenscraft (54:41): Do you knew what's coming up financially? Do you see all these things and all this other I'm I'm prepared for him to talk sense into me. Right? This is this is my mind. He goes, I have been waiting for months for you to tell me you were ready to leave.

Cliff Ravenscraft (54:59): He said to me, he says, you know, Cliff, you know how much money you could earn owning this agency when I retire. And I'm like, yeah. He goes, I wanna tell you right now, you will never earn as much here as you will doing what you love. And you've got to go make that happen. Here's the thing.

Cliff Ravenscraft (55:20): If you go and you put everything into it and it fails, you can always come back here. But I'm going to tell you right now, you will not come back here.

Mike Neubauer (55:30): Wow. So, okay. I love that. Man, to have that kind of support from your dad, that that means a lot. When you went home after that, how did you show up for your kids?

Cliff Ravenscraft (55:44): I I I just probably just light and and airy for the first probably week to ten days. And then all of a sudden, I'm sitting there watching television show with my wife because we've got podcast record on it. And just out of nowhere, I'm like for the first time in my life, I feel what would be called depression, like despair. What have I done? And so for me, it didn't change how much I showed up for my kids during this season of life because quite frankly, I was in my own head the entire time.

Cliff Ravenscraft (56:28): And I felt like there's so much that needs to be done to figure out all the how do I set up a business? How do I do these things? And so how I showed up for my kids, that didn't change until probably late two thousand nine to and early two thousand ten. That's when things really took off there in an incredibly powerful way. But, what I will share with you is that I was an up and down roller coaster until finally the December.

Cliff Ravenscraft (56:58): A friend of mine says, why don't you just go ask your dad to let you work there a couple days a week, like Stephanie was just saying? And I said, dad, I'll I'll work here Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and I'll do my business Tuesday, Thursday, and on the weekends? And he says, nope. You can't serve two masters. You're either going all in over there or you're going all in here.

Cliff Ravenscraft (57:17): There is no halfway. He says, you make the decision. Let me know by the end of the day. I said, I don't need by the end of the day. I'm gonna go do it.

Cliff Ravenscraft (57:24): And I think you probably read my bio, but the first so what happened is we we knew things were coming financially with the crisis of two thousand eight. Well, a couple of the venture capital companies that were paying us a lot of money, so $3,000 a month instantly went away. Like, he said, listen. We we didn't get our next round of funding. We can no longer we've ran out of money.

Cliff Ravenscraft (57:52): We can't pay this. We do we never did get the advertisers, and now with all this stuff, we're having a hard time getting those. So I'm really sorry sorry, Cliff. They gave me all these options to buy stock in the company if it ever sells and goes public one day, but he says, I'm sorry, man. So $3,000 a month went away.

Cliff Ravenscraft (58:09): All of this other advertising went away, all this other stuff. And so while I was making 3 to $5,000 a month every single month, now I'm full time self employed and I'm down to 2 to $400 a month. And I don't know anything about owning a business. I don't know anything about all of this other stuff. And and I worked around the clock for that first year.

Cliff Ravenscraft (58:33): For nine months. I never took a single day off. And after nine months, I took, Sunday off, but only by convincing myself that I'd work more hours the other six days of the week. By the end of the first year, my total net income the business was profitable. The business on paper, the business paid for all of its expenses.

Cliff Ravenscraft (58:55): It paid for health insurance for our family, but it did not pay me a paycheck for the first nine months. And the last three months, I finally got a paycheck, and my net income for the first year of full time self employed was $11,000 income. Wow. And to top it off, I did a twenty four hour nonstop marathon to celebrate the final day of our first year in business. I did 24 one hour podcast episodes and published all of those in twenty four hours.

Cliff Ravenscraft (59:28): And immediately after publishing the twenty fourth episode, Stephanie took me straight to the hospital where I spent the next two weeks and almost died.

Unknown Speaker (59:39): Wow. And what was the reason for the hospital? So, reason for the

Cliff Ravenscraft (59:47): hospital was I weighed almost three hundred pounds at the time. I basically woke up about 04:00 in the morning, went to the kitchen, got myself some breakfast, took it down to my office, worked until it was lunchtime, went upstairs, got myself a huge lunch, took it down to my office, ate there, went up, had dinner for about thirty to forty five minutes, and went back down to my office and worked until 02:00 in the morning. Went to bed, got two hours of sleep and got up at 04:00 the next morning and did it over and over and over again for the first nine months without a single day off.

Unknown Speaker (1:00:27): Wow.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:00:29): After I got out of the hospital, I started doing the 10,000 steps a day. And when I started counting my steps, 1,000 steps like, nearly killed me. Was incredible. And because I was wearing my pedometer every day, I was able to actually see the average number of steps that I got every day during that routine, I routinely got about 300 steps a day every day. That's the physical activity that I had.

Mike Neubauer (1:01:03): Wow. What did you see during this time, Stephanie? Like, what what kind of changes did you see in Cliff?

Stephanie Ravenscraft (1:01:10): Okay. I don't know that I remember. I I don't know that I remember because while he was doing, you know, his 4AM to 2AM, you know, I'm taking kids to preschool and, you know, 2008. So I have a three year old that I'm chasing around, and they would have been eight, six and three at the time. And so, you know, we've got we've got school and packing lunch and picking up and play dates and all of that.

Stephanie Ravenscraft (1:01:42): I'm making dinner and doing groceries and doing the laundry. And, you know, he pops up like a groundhog every now and again. And I didn't I didn't really notice anything.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:01:53): And also keep in mind that while all of this is going on, keep in mind that Stephanie and I are in deep conversation and watching television shows and having conversations in a podcast for about five hours a week every week. Also, a couple of other things, my daughter, Megan, and I watched Hannah Montana at the time, and we had the Hannah Montana fan podcast. And my daughter was eight years old, and it was her podcast, but I cohosted it with her. And we talked about life lessons that we could learn from each episode. My daughter had a podcast with 38,000 subscribers.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:02:33): Wow.

Stephanie Ravenscraft (1:02:34): Yeah. Were just busy. We we were just busy. And I don't think like, at the time, health wasn't even

Unknown Speaker (1:02:44): It just wasn't on our radar.

Stephanie Ravenscraft (1:02:46): It just wasn't on the radar. I I weighed two hundred and twenty pounds at the time. And that was when, like, right when I don't know if it was after you came out of the hospital or before, but I had started my own weight loss journey because I couldn't keep up with a three year old. I couldn't breathe chasing after a three year old. So I'm like, I have to do something.

Stephanie Ravenscraft (1:03:08): And I think that might have been before.

Unknown Speaker (1:03:11): It was before mine.

Stephanie Ravenscraft (1:03:12): Went into the hospital. But we were busy. And yes, we were connecting on on in conversations and, like, we were having so much connection and so much dialogue and, you know, all of this time. But everything else was spinning. Like, there were too many plates to keep in the air

Unknown Speaker (1:03:30): Yeah.

Stephanie Ravenscraft (1:03:31): To really catch what was going on.

Mike Neubauer (1:03:34): Yeah. That's what it sounds like. You you guys are both aligned pretty well through this whole thing, which is shocking to me looking at it from a 30,000 foot view. What has changed for you guys till today? Like, you're not still living that kind of lifestyle, I assume.

Mike Neubauer (1:03:50): Right?

Stephanie Ravenscraft (1:03:51): No. No. We learned boundaries and we learned margin and balance. I think those are those are the three greatest lessons that came out of my thirties and which is a lot of that early building the business was in my thirties. Boundaries, balance, and margin taught us so much.

Stephanie Ravenscraft (1:04:14): And now we make our own schedule. We work because we want to and create our own hours and and we're able to do that because we worked through the grind and we know well, we know not to go back there, number one. But

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:04:34): There are a couple of things I wanna say. Go ahead. So first off, when things shifted for me, once I got out of the hospital, I began a fitness journey, and that was up and down for several years until November 2014. And then I made a commitment at the time. I was going to work out six days a week every week for the rest of my life, which I did for six years until they shut down the gyms during COVID.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:04:58): But I lost over a 150 pounds, put on about 40 pounds of muscle mass, and and radically altered my life there. But during that process, I began a personal and professional development journey. So I was reading all of these books like Think and Grow Rich and and just every personal and professional development book under the sun. At this point, I had clients, people who mentors and peers, people who are writing books that I'm like, I'm I'm a oh my gosh. Now they're my client, Dan Miller, author of, the book forty forty eight days to the work you love.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:05:32): And then all of a sudden, Dan Miller invites me to come speak on his cruise, and there's a whole story about that. I go there. All of these clients come as a result of that, and he connects me to Michael Hyatt. Michael Hyatt becomes a client. Now I'm speaking on Michael Hyatt's, stages for his platform conferences.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:05:51): He's the first 100 podcast episodes that Michael Hyatt did for his This Is Your Life podcast, he mentions my name specifically and told his audience to go hire me to help them launch their platform as a podcaster. 67 out of 100 episodes, I got that. I didn't pay anything for that advertising. And Michael Hyatt was one of the top ranked blogs globally for entrepreneurs at the time. So I had all of this blessing.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:06:24): And then in October 2010, I helped or actually, September 2009, I helped Pat Flynn launch a podcast. And so he starts Smart Passive Income as a result of my coaching. And then I ask him, do you wanna do a mastermind group with me? And so Pat Flynn and I started a mastermind group in October 2010, and we just met a couple of hours ago. We still meet today every single week for an hour.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:06:53): And we have other entrepreneurs who are at our level. And I will tell you right now, nothing radically changed my life more than unceasing personal and professional growth, reading books that transform how I perceive myself and the world, and being in relationship in a powerful mastermind group relationship with other high service oriented, high level thinking, super positive mindset, and we're here to support each other every single week for an hour. It's the number one most important meeting on our calendar. And that right there, it's those things that have transformed everything. And to answer your question, there have been some ebbs and flows in our business, but at one point, it's always been myself and Stephanie.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:07:46): It's the the two of us. This is our business. And eventually, we got to the place where we're making so much from me teaching podcasting that we shut down pretty much all of our entertainment shows. And Stephanie and I still always carried on a couple's podcast together throughout this entire journal journey. We still have one today.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:08:04): It's called building a life and business together. However, most of the income earning stuff that's been going on has been my podcast coaching and consulting, and we co facilitate a paid mastermind group for entrepreneurs called the Next Level Mastermind. And so we got to the place where the year that we built this house, I was I got podcasting a to z to where it was bringing in 40 to $60,000 a month every other month, and it took about twenty to thirty hours a week to do that. In November 2017, we shut that down. We started a personal and professional, development conference called Free the Dream.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:08:44): We did that annually for a few years until COVID. We did in person workshops, and we we were leading paid high level paid mastermind groups for those who are who are advanced entrepreneurs, established entrepreneurs. And I got to the place where I could easily make 250,000 to $750,000 a year, Just my wife and myself, almost no overhead in our business, and it required no more than fifteen to twenty hours a week.

Mike Neubauer (1:09:13): Incredible. Incredible. Yeah. That's a funny thing because, you know, we had a guest on here before that was like, you know, I had to get to the point where I had to choose, do I want one Costco or do I want 20,007 Elevens? Right?

Mike Neubauer (1:09:29): And the purpose of that conversation or that that mindful thinking there is like, do I want something lean that I can grow and be in charge of, or do I want something that's so expansive that I need a whole bunch of overhead and and workers and and everything else for? And the fact that you could build something that can produce that much revenue with so little oversight, to me, that's the dream.

Unknown Speaker (1:09:53): Right? It's

Mike Neubauer (1:09:54): it's not it's being lean enough that you can steer the ship anytime you want.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:10:00): So my peers, Pat Flynn's only one, and there's some other names you would recognize in my mastermind group. My peers are all people who subscribe to the scale and grow, and I love them. They they're super successful. They've done some amazing things. And, you know, we have some some of the most fascinating conversations because we'll talk about 10, you know, 10 x is easier or the 100 x or add on whatever.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:10:24): 10 x is easier than two x. All these massive growth, this growth, this, all this other stuff. And I've been tempted at times to pursue some of those things. And then, just recently, I read the book, What Is Your Dream by Simon Squibb. He's a great guy on TikTok and other, platforms in his social media.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:10:44): Great book. It's called What Is Your Dream. And I resonated with, like, 65% of that book until he got to the place where it's all about scaling, hiring the right people, delegating everything out, and then you sell the business and blah blah blah, you have freedom. I'm like, nope. That's not me.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:10:59): I don't like the e myth. I don't like all this. I I love it for the people who it's for, but, I finally am getting around right now. I'm in the middle middle of reading Company of One by Paul Jarvis. And I love people who have stories, who built significant, massive things where they never had any employees outside of themselves and or their business partner.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:11:25): And my wife is my business partner.

Mike Neubauer (1:11:27): I love that. That's so good. Wow. Okay. I want to start wrapping this up because I do want to be respectful of your time.

Mike Neubauer (1:11:37): I mean, I can ask you a million more questions, but looking at where you're at right now and everything that you've gone through, what do you think that your kids gleaned from your experience? Where do you foresee them going with all that they've learned from watching your journey?

Stephanie Ravenscraft (1:11:58): Our kids have learned that anything is possible. They can do literally whatever they want to do. And they learned that, I mean, by watching our entrepreneur journey. Yeah, you got it. I can't say that word.

Stephanie Ravenscraft (1:12:15): I can hit it once out of every five times I try. But they've they've they've learned that out of our journey, but they've also learned that out of we gave them the space to learn who they were and what their dreams were and what they wanted to do. We didn't push like, you don't have to work in our business. You don't have to take over. You don't have to, you know, Megan's podcast when she was eight, that was because that's something that she wanted to do.

Stephanie Ravenscraft (1:12:41): And so our youngest daughter will graduate college in May, and she's headed to law school. That's her dream. She wants to work on changing policy for the aging community. And that is that's her passion. That is she's she's getting her her bachelor's in social work, and she's going to go to law school and she's going to do that.

Stephanie Ravenscraft (1:13:11): Our middle our son, he didn't know what he wanted to do. So he came out of high school. He got a job. He worked for two years. He said, you know what?

Stephanie Ravenscraft (1:13:19): I think I wanna go to college. Can I still do that? Yes. He went to college for a year. He's like, there's nothing here that I want to do for the rest of my life.

Stephanie Ravenscraft (1:13:28): Came home, got a job, worked for a couple years and said, you know what? I found what I wanna do. I want to be a teacher. He's back in college now studying to do that. And he's he has a love of anime, so he's found a passion for Japanese, the language.

Stephanie Ravenscraft (1:13:44): And he'll be going and culture, and he'll be going to Japan this summer to study.

Unknown Speaker (1:13:49): Nice.

Stephanie Ravenscraft (1:13:50): And and he I don't I don't know that teaching is what he'll actually end up doing just because of a lot of the the education system, but he does want to teach people. And right now, he thinks he has to have that degree to do that, and that that's fine. You know? Yep. Our oldest daughter is is an event planner.

Stephanie Ravenscraft (1:14:11): And when she went into college, which was now, again, our kids went to public school. College is pushed heavily. So while we didn't put the expectation of college on our children, the school system did. And so Megan had this this desire to go to college, you know, from a very young age. That's what she was going to do.

Stephanie Ravenscraft (1:14:32): And so she's getting ready to go off to college. She's 18, and she's like, I don't know. Like, I'm what do I declare? Like, I don't know what I wanna do. How am I supposed to decide what I wanna do at 18?

Stephanie Ravenscraft (1:14:43): To which we then Esther, if you don't know what you wanna do at 18, why are you going to college? It was a roundabout was just a wheel of questions asking back and forth. And then Cliff told her one day, I think it was coming up on her sophomore year. Mhmm. Megan, stop thinking about what you wanna do for the rest of your life and pick a major that you could do a lot with.

Stephanie Ravenscraft (1:15:07): That made sense to her. She ended up getting a major in communications. She has a minor in American sign language, and she is an event planner because somewhere along the way she fell in love with event planning. But her communications degree helps her a great deal in that. But now she started a side hustle.

Stephanie Ravenscraft (1:15:27): She's doing weddings and and planning day of coordinating for for weddings. And so she has a w two, but she is also starting a side hustle.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:15:41): And and also a couple of things there for for Megan because I think you hit the the big spot spots for the other two, but a couple other things. Immediately upon graduating, she got a PR position, public relations position for a major museum in Bowling Green, Kentucky, and did all of their PR, was on television stations all of the time, hosted big events, fundraisers for the organization. Then she came up here and she got she became she did all the wedding facilitation for all of Cincinnati Parks, so it was a pretty big prominent thing. But then she met some other people who were in the business. And today she works at a nonprofit in, let's just say, the ritziest ritz part of town.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:16:32): And she has one of you could not dream of how she rose into the position that she currently has, and it's actually put her in such a position that she has the ability to do this side hustle. And the other things that I will say is that one of my favorite things was Stephanie and I both went to unleash the power within together. And I can't begin to tell you the amazing amount of power that experience had for the two of us, especially walking on fire. That is awesome. Think every married couple should consider walking on hot coals together.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:17:11): It'll change your life forever. But we came away from that event with what we call shared language about personal and professional development. We came home and began using that with our kids. It transformed how we showed up for them. That's that's when things really took off.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:17:28): And me personally, I ended up taking I don't think McKenna ever went to unleash the power within, did she? But my other two, my oldest, I've taken them to unleash the power within. And so they've been through this, and I created free the dream or I I say I. Stephanie and I created free the dream conference, which is our own version of Unleash the Power Within just without the fire walking because I didn't have the insurance for that. Tony's got more money for insurance than I do.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:17:56): But anyway, we we create our own, like, rah rah annual conference, and my kids spoke on stage Yeah. At this And I also wanna give a shout out to Matthew. When he was, gosh, probably four years old, he had a podcast that I did with him called Gaming with Matt. And even though McKenna was just a toddler, all three of them together did a podcast called The Kids Show. Oh, it it.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:18:26): So they've they've had so much experience, and the biggest thing is they've they've seen all of the things that we've been able to do, and and our lives have been very blessed and very privileged as a result of sowing the seeds into relationships and serving people throughout the years and and all of this other stuff. So much harvest came later, and they recognize that, and they understand that things don't just come easy, that, you know, you may have to go through some challenging, hard seasons of leanness, and they experienced a lot of the leanness, but they've also they've they're very much aware of how privileged their lives were in their young adult years before they left the house.

Stephanie Ravenscraft (1:19:12): Well, if you ask them, they don't they don't they don't remember

Unknown Speaker (1:19:16): what we Yeah. They don't call remember the looming

Stephanie Ravenscraft (1:19:18): time the way that we do. Yeah. They they don't feel like they were ever couldn't have something or didn't have enough or they they weren't aware that sometimes financial was that financially we were struggling.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:19:35): And that wasn't shocking to me. I did not realize this, but as far as my kids are concerned, they never felt like I wasn't there.

Unknown Speaker (1:19:44): And and But you were always in the basement. I was In their mind,

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:19:47): you were always in the basement. The time. And and by the way, they did come in a lot. Right? So in many ways, while looking back, I see how distracted I was and how much more I could have been involved.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:20:02): Although I did the best I could with what I had to work with at the time. But still, in their minds, they're like, man, dad was always there. He I you know, it's it's only in hindsight that I realize is, like, I never missed a school activity, an awards banquet, or a career day. My kids loved it when dad came and said, my dad's a podcaster. You know?

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:20:26): And they're like, what's a podcast?

Stephanie Ravenscraft (1:20:28): The first time Cliff was in the newspaper, Megan went into school the next day, and her teacher had put the newspaper on her desk. And she's like I just this is just it's just at the time, what was she? Maybe nine or 10? And she's like, it's just a hobby. Like, I don't understand why it's in the paper.

Stephanie Ravenscraft (1:20:47): Even though at that point, it wasn't just a hobby anymore.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:20:50): There were two thing there are two things our kids experienced. One time we were on a road trip to Florida for either Disney Cruise or Disney World experience or a combination of both with

Unknown Speaker (1:21:02): our podcast. Cruise.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:21:04): But anyway, we're driving and we pull off on a rest area in Southern Tennessee, and we decide to have lunch. We packed our lunch. And another family came over and says, are you Cliff and Stephanie Ravenscraft? And my kids are like, oh my gosh. And I was like, we were just listening to your boss podcast in the car.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:21:29): And I'm like, well, I still hear Cliff and Stephanie talking, and here you guys are here. So my kids are like they're like, oh, dad's never gonna let this one go. And they're like, okay. Dad, don't let your head get big. Anyway, we're on a family trip in Europe.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:21:43): We had just taken the train under the tunnel, under the English Channel from England to the Paris Station.

Unknown Speaker (1:21:51): Paris Station.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:21:52): And we're walking as a family of five through this Paris train train station, and all of a sudden, this woman named Wendy comes up, Cliff Ravenscraft. Oh my gosh. Cliff Ravenscraft. It's like, my kids, this is ridiculous.

Unknown Speaker (1:22:06): And the kids are like, we're in France. Like, how does this happen in France?

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:22:11): But but the thing what I'm getting at is my kids have been exposed to just how endless how endless the possibilities are of what can happen. They've also seen how, you know, how you have to the ways that we have grown and and very much how I've grown to to be able to relate to all of that. And, yeah, they they've picked up so many valuable life lessons that I was never exposed to. And so it it to answer your question, it's had a really powerful, positive, profound impact on their lives, and my kids are doing some amazing things in this world as a result of our journey as a family through podcasting. I love that.

Mike Neubauer (1:22:55): I love that. Alright. Four more questions. I'll get you out of here. These are pretty quick, but I'll start with the first one.

Mike Neubauer (1:23:03): Who or what has inspired you most along your journey? Could be a person, a place, a book.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:23:08): Dan Miller, author of the book forty eight Days to the Work You Love. You asked me, Cliff, you know, how long did you deal with that guilt or why did you have that guilt or shame? It was all about feeling guilty about doing something I love. I was listening to Dave Ramsey all the time back in the days, and I always heard him talk about his best friend, Dan Miller. I'm gonna send you a free copy of his book, forty eight days to the work you love.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:23:33): Well, I went and got the book, and that book changed my life. I did a 10 podcast episode series on that book and shared all of my thoughts about how this is transforming my understanding of who I am, why I'm on this earth, why this is actually the right decision, and it just helped me unload so much baggage. I was so excited about it, and I just wanna share this. So, I came across a blog post that said four steps to how to achieve any goal, and I'm like, this sounds way too good to be true. And the steps were, believe it's possible, write it down, tell other people about it, and work the plan as you become available.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:24:15): Well, I had a daily podcast, and so I was like, well, this is what I'm talking about today. Guys, I found this four step formula for how to achieve any plan. It says if I do these four things, I'll get whatever I want. So let's just test it out. I wanna tell you my goal right now is to meet Dan Miller, author of the book forty eight Days to the Work You Love.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:24:32): But here's what I wanna tell you. I do not wanna meet him at a conference where he's up there speaking. I'm in a group of 10 or 15 people. I shake his hand, tell him how much he's had an impact in my life, and then he goes to lunch and he doesn't remember having the conversation with me. I I want to literally tell him that I've personally been responsible for selling thousands of copies of his book and that not only has has this transformed my life, but I've got over a 100 letters from people that talk about how his book I wanna have that level of conversation to where he'll never forget me.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:25:08): So that's my dream. Alright? I have no idea how this will ever be possible, but do I believe it's possible? The answer is yes. Have I written it down?

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:25:16): Yes. I did. Before I started this podcast episode, I went in my journal. I wrote it down. Step number three is tell others.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:25:23): Guess what I'm doing right now here in this podcast episode? And then, step number four, it just says work the plan as it becomes available. And if you don't know what that is right now, just wait. It'll reveal itself. I'm like, okay.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:25:34): So I hit publish. Forty seven minutes later, I get an email from a guy named Andy Traub. Hey, Cliff Ravenscraft. I listened to your podcast. I happen to be working with Dan Miller on a project right now, and I wanna let you know he already knows who you are.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:25:52): He would love to meet you. Would you like me to connect you? I'm like, yes. Within seven days of me doing that, Dan Miller is a guest on my podcast. We have a conversation.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:26:06): I'm, like, beside myself. After that conversation was over, we stay on the line. He says, Cliff, can I hire you to consult with me about my podcast? We schedule a consulting call. Three days later, he says, Cliff, what do you think about my show?

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:26:21): I said, Dan, I love you. I love your book. I love what you share in your podcast, but your podcast audio quality is terrible. I've I've sent thousands of people to your book, and everyone loves it. I've sent thousands of people to your podcast and nobody likes it.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:26:39): And they said the content is great, but it hurts the ears. He goes, Cliff, wow. Thank you for having the courage to tell me that straight. It is in alignment with all of the feedback I get, and that's why I'm here. What do you have in your studio?

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:26:53): Tell me about what you have learned and what you've and I said, I bought all this stuff. And he says, how much would all that be? And he's like I told him, and this is can you order all of that, put it in a box, and come to my home in Franklin, Tennessee this weekend? And I'm like, yeah. He goes, you can stay in my guest bedroom.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:27:10): You I'll take you to a show here in Nashville, and then all day on Saturday, you can set up my podcast studio just like yours. That happened within two weeks of me saying that on the podcast. And Dan Miller I can tell you right now, Dan Miller is the one who eventually introduced me to Michael Hyatt. Between those two people, I can personally trace more than $4,000,000 in revenue to those two individuals. Wow.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:27:42): If anyone is just listening to this podcast and not watching it, I I literally had to pick my jaw up off the floor right there.

Mike Neubauer (1:27:50): That is such great testimony to the four steps, and I think everyone needs to rewind that and listen to it over and over and implement it into their daily lives. Wow. Stephanie, you wanna follow that up?

Stephanie Ravenscraft (1:28:06): I will. I I will I'm actually going to say Joanne Miller and also Paula Foster. I did not meet these two women. I mean, Cliff had already had a relationship with their husbands. Working relationship grew into friendships.

Stephanie Ravenscraft (1:28:19): I did not meet these two women until 2010 when we went on that cruise with where Dan had asked Cliff to speak. And we took our whole family on that cruise. We took our kids out of school and made it a learning experience, and we all went. And so we had been in business for two years at the time, maybe two and a half, because I think it was like spring when we went and we had been podcasting for five years and no one in our circle understood what we were doing. And so I had no one who I could lean on, who I could talk to.

Stephanie Ravenscraft (1:28:59): These women gave me acceptance and understanding and love and the best hugs ever. And while I don't have a daily relationship with them now, they are in my daily life because they gave me that when it was so needed. And now I can give it to others because I'm on the other side.

Mike Neubauer (1:29:25): Wow. So That's great. Wow. Two amazing answers. Okay.

Mike Neubauer (1:29:30): Next question. How do you find peace?

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:29:32): I'll go first. Peace is my natural state of being. So who I am as created by the creator of all things is one that is at peace. And so if I ever want to experience who I am at my core, all I have to do is drop everything that I hold in my mind that is not that, and then I experience it. Wow.

Unknown Speaker (1:30:04): That's pretty deep. Stephanie?

Stephanie Ravenscraft (1:30:07): I mean, I I agree. I don't have to go looking for it. Peace lives within me always. And when other things try to come in and infringe on that, I just have to drop them away, and I am at peace again.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:30:20): Yeah. Jesus said, The kingdom of God is within you.

Mike Neubauer (1:30:24): Mhmm. I love that. If you could sit with your younger self for just a moment, what is one thing that you would whisper to them?

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:30:33): I would say, you know what? That's a different way of asking a question I've been asked a lot. You know, what would you go back and say to yourself? I will say I'm gonna answer this question even though it's worded slightly different, and I I was tempted to go down a different path. But what I will say is this.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:30:52): I hope I would never be able to have the opportunity to have such the option to do that because I am who I am and I'm where I am today because of all of the fear, all of the anxiety, all of the decisions, all of the trial, all of the error, all of the mistakes, all of the not knowing, if I would have gone back and said, It's all going to work out and I can just tell you blah, blah, blah, it would change things. And I would not want to change. And I've experienced a lot of negatives. We've talked about some highs here, but we've had some really low lows, but they were all necessary for me to be who I am today and how I show up in the world. So I hope I'm never given the opportunity to go back and whisper to that younger version of myself.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:31:44): He he did just fine on his own.

Mike Neubauer (1:31:47): That's good. I like that answer. Very different, very out of the box, and very insightful. Stephanie, how about you?

Stephanie Ravenscraft (1:31:55): I mean, I I again, I just second that because and I think he got it from me first. I I have said many times, like, I can't change anything in my past because everything in my past has made me who I am today. And I like who I am. I love who I am today. And she has the ability to help people where I was twenty years ago become who they want to be today.

Stephanie Ravenscraft (1:32:22): Like, I can't do any of that without all of the judgment and the uncertainty and the fear and all of the things that Cliff just named. I can't be who I am today without having experienced all of that.

Mike Neubauer (1:32:37): Yeah. So Wow. I I really I'm gonna have to think about this one for a while because I I haven't heard anyone else have an answer like that before, and it's really profound. I really like that a lot. Guys, what is something that you've learned recently that made you stop and breathe and see life a little different?

Unknown Speaker (1:32:55): I go ahead, Stephanie.

Stephanie Ravenscraft (1:32:56): Go okay. I have it's the last spring. Last spring. So there's a window right here. You can see the sun has moved through the whole time we've been we've been talking.

Stephanie Ravenscraft (1:33:07): So there's a window right here on the side of my desk, and it stays the blinds on this window stay up so my dog can see outside. And I'm sitting here working one day last spring and I look out and at the corner of our house, there is a deer and her baby and the baby is nursing. And it was the most beautiful thing. And they visit me every once in a while now. I watch them all last summer and into the fall, watch those babies grow up and they're coming and still they were here in the snow a couple of weeks ago.

Stephanie Ravenscraft (1:33:43): And it a reminder that important moments can happen all the time. You just have to be moving slow enough to catch them. And because so much of our early I said I told you that we were moving so fast, there were things that we didn't see, things that we didn't catch and trying to keep all of our plates in the air. We couldn't add anymore. We couldn't see anymore.

Stephanie Ravenscraft (1:34:14): But taking the time to slow down and to notice the things around you, you can catch true beauty. Yeah. And that was a that was a true beauty moment for me. It was just a reminder to slow down, pay attention, and look at what's around me because it's it's majestic and magnificent everywhere you turn.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:34:37): So good. So something recently that has come up that's been very profound, I use it all the time with my clients today. The most important story you will ever hear is the story you tell yourself about yourself and how that has shifted things for me just recently. Eight years ago, I shut 100% of everything that was related to teaching people the technical aspects of podcasting down. And I divorced myself from my Podcast Answer Man brand, and I wanted to be known instead when people talk about me.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:35:19): I want people to know me as a business strategy and mindset coach instead. And so I I even created a different jingle. I I have this jingle that's Podcast

Stephanie Ravenscraft (1:35:29): Answer

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:35:31): And so I even created the alternate version which

Unknown Speaker (1:35:34): is Mindset Man.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:35:39): And so for the last eight and a half years, I've been known as the mindset answer man instead of the podcast answer man. And I've been adamant about not going to podcast industry conferences. I I rose to the top of that industry. I helped lead conferences. I helped bring this industry in many ways to what it is today, trained more than 40,000 people around the world how to podcast.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:36:01): But I was just I told myself this story that I'm spending way too much time answering people's technical questions related to what cable do I need? How do I solve this buzzing sound in the audio of my podcast? And I want to speak to people on a much deeper level. I wanna get to that heart and soul level level conversation, those limiting beliefs that are keeping them from pursuing what they feel most called to do in the world. And I had this opportunity to work with these people who are being called to the entrepreneurial path, aspiring entrepreneurs, early stage entrepreneurs, and established entrepreneurs.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:36:37): I wanna go create this free the dream conference, these mastermind groups, these workshops to enable and equip these people to fully embrace this path and this journey, but not be alone through the process. So, and and it it was a very successful transition. I had built such a large thing. Everything in my world shifted when COVID hit, as did everyone's. Now for me, it was really it it was great for a while because we were having our highest months ever because everybody is trying to figure out, oh my gosh.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:37:09): What do I do? And a lot of people like, Cliff, I want in your mastermind group. I want your coaching. And that was great for the two and a half years after the COVID happened. But the thing is is right before COVID, the the two and two or three years before COVID, I was speaking 15 times a year on stages.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:37:30): And I used something called the prosperous coach method for creating clients. And I was meeting people all the time, and it just had this pipeline full. And I still still benefited from all of the years from podcast answer man. But slowly, all of that came you know, pretty much it got to the place where everybody who was in the pipeline who was gonna become a client had pretty much already become a client, a couple of which still trickle in here and there. And I it just occurred to me, I I came I was watching a Facebook ad, and I came across the PodTrak p four Next, a $179 device.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:38:09): And I'm like, there's no way this could be good. I got it without even thinking. I turned on a camera, did a livestream. All of a sudden, people are asking me technical questions. One of them was a guy from New Zealand who paid for an all expenses paid trip for me to come keynote his address his conference, back in 2015.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:38:28): And he's like, Cliff, how is that different than the original? And do you recommend those of us who have the original upgrade? I'm like, well, I don't have the original. But this is Paul Spain. He paid me lots of money to come spin to spend to speak at his event.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:38:41): He gave me 10 days all expenses paid. I mean, I'm going to answer this question for Paul. Now in my mind, if I go back to 2017 when I shut things down, I'm I'm prepared to spend the next four to six hours getting the original PDF manual, this PDF manual, and going through every line and finding out what's different and giving him a weighted graph in my opinion on whether or not he it's I think I recommend he upgrade. Well, without even thinking, I do what anybody does today. I went into ChatGPT and said, hey.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:39:12): I did I I just did a review of this device. Here's the video. Here's the transcript. Here's Paul. Here's who he is.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:39:19): This is why I wanna give him the most thorough answer possible. This is the level I wanna do it. I want you to do deep research, get the original manual, go over and compare it to this manual, and I want you to show me your work so I can check everything. Two and a half minutes later, I have what would be printed out on paper a seven page response to that question. I then went over to Notion and pasted it in there and edited it to make sure it was all right, copied it all, and this and I hit reply, and I hit Paul, comma, and hit paste.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:39:53): The longest Facebook comment response I'd ever given anyone in my life. And then 40 other people asked the same question on Facebook and on Twitter and on, YouTube. And I'm just copy paste, copy paste, copy paste, copy paste. And people are like, who spends that much time answering this? How's this any different than the original?

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:40:16): Boom. Eight page document or whatever. And and all of a sudden, I'm telling this in the green room mastermind, my mastermind group with Pat Flynn and some other guys. And I'm like, as I'm telling you guys this, I just realized something. If I would have had ChatGPT or large language model AI tools and Notion as a knowledge database back in 2007, I would have never shut down Podcast Answer Man.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:40:41): I can answer questions in a breeze because I have the experience to know whether or not it's right or wrong. Right. That gives me that unique thing. Sure. Anybody could go ask chat GPT, but they don't know when it's making stuff up.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:40:53): I do. This put oh my gosh. And then they said, Cliff, when's podcast answer man coming back? I said, well, I'm getting ready to celebrate my twentieth anniversary of podcasting in December. I'll announce the return.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:41:04): And so I brought back podcast answer man. And since then, I've like, I think I'm gonna have to bring back my podcasting a to z course where I'm gonna teach people, but I have to update all of these tutorials and all this other stuff, and I never got really around to doing that. But I it occurred to me. It's like, wait a second. Most all these people who know me and are referring Pete to me, they already have a podcast.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:41:26): And those who want a podcast, I don't have to teach them how to podcast. I already taught all the people who are teaching people how to podcast. I'll just refer them to them, but I'll jump on a call, have a conversation. Let's talk business strategy around it. Let's talk about what your message is.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:41:42): Let's give a real picture of success, and I'll serve you. And maybe some of those people will become members of my mastermind group or the other things that I do. And I'm like, oh my gosh. And so all of that to say, I have turned on the top of funnel. All of these people have said, Cliff, I'm so glad you brought back podcast answer, man.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:42:03): For the last eight and a half years, I've not been know I have not known how I could send people to you like I used to. But now it's very clear. Cliff Ravenscraft, he's the podcast guy. And it doesn't mean that I have to help them launch their podcast. It just means that I'm the person who, if anything comes up related podcast, have a conversation with Cliff.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:42:24): And and it's just turned on a flow of top of funnel that has just been waiting to come. And I've avoided it for eight and a half years because of the story I told myself about that brand. So there you go. The most important story you overhear is the story you tell yourself about yourself.

Mike Neubauer (1:42:46): I like it. Cliff, Stephanie, thank you guys so much for coming on today. If the audience wants to find you, what's the best place for them to do that?

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:42:55): Free the Dream Conference, is what we did together. It is the biggest thing. I would encourage you to go to mindsetanswerman.com/free. Mindsetanswerman.com/free. You will get my one hour opening keynote address to the free the dream conference called all beliefs have consequences.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:43:17): Guaranteed to transform your life. I promise you, you'll never be the same. All of your excuses will disappear after watching this one hour talk. It's a guarantee. In fact, if no matter what, if at any point after getting access to it, you unsubscribe to the email, it'll be perfectly fine.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:43:35): But I I look forward to hearing from you because I get some amazing testimonials. And here's what I want you to know. You're gonna get an email follow-up that'll suggest that you can buy the full course for a $197. Do not buy that course. Instead, say that you heard about me on the Our Family Invests podcast.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:43:56): Send me an email. In fact, you're gonna get an email that says, did you get what you were promised? Just hit reply on that email. Say, Cliff, I heard about you on Our Family Podcast. I'd like the free course, and I will send it to you for free.

Mike Neubauer (1:44:10): Amazing. That's so good. Guys, thank you so much. This has really been one of my favorite episodes. Amazing.

Mike Neubauer (1:44:17): I wish my wife was here. She will definitely be listening to it again and again and again. You guys are fantastic. Have an amazing day.

Unknown Speaker (1:44:25): Thank you. You too.

Unknown Speaker (1:44:26): Many blessings.

Mike Neubauer (1:44:28): Woah. I am still on a high from this one. I think what stuck with me from Cliff and Stephanie is how aligned they were as a couple, even as they were grinding through twenty two hour days and their health was deteriorating. Now for me, some of the biggest takeaways was that sometimes confidence might need to be borrowed. Right?

Mike Neubauer (1:44:47): I love that Stephanie had the confidence in Cliff before he had it in himself, and that it wasn't until he was able to grow in that confidence that he began to thrive. Second was that grinding has a cost and they paid it, right, physically, emotionally before they learned those boundaries of margin. Third is that your kids are watching the whole time and sometimes they remember the presence more than the pressure you felt. And then one more thing that Cliff said that I really like is the most important story you'll ever hear is the story you tell yourself about yourself. Guys, if you got something from this, share it with your spouse or a friend who you think might resonate with it.

Mike Neubauer (1:45:29): Thank you so much. Really appreciate you. We'll see you on the next one.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:45:34): Well, there you go. I gotta tell you, this conversation that Stephanie and I had with Mike is very important to me. I just heard so many things come out of Stephanie's mouth that I've not heard before. And I also had many realizations as I was going through this. And I if there was nothing else you took away from listening to that conversation, except for one thing, I would say that podcasting or really any creative work that you get involved in, it's about who you become in the process.

Cliff Ravenscraft (1:46:16): And podcasting has given me so many opportunities to show up in the world, sometimes revealing many of my character flaws along the way. But it's given me so much opportunity for growth, and who I am today would not be possible if it were not for all of the content that I've consistently created for more than twenty years. If there was anything in this conversation that resonated with you, I'd love to hear from you. Email me today. My email address is cliff@cliffravenscraft.com.

Unknown Speaker (1:46:55): I can't wait to hear from you.