Leap Academy with Ilana Golan - From Near Financial Ruin to Podcast Mogul: The Incredible Journey of Gary Arndt

Episode Date: September 26, 2023

How do you maintain relevance in your career and stay excited about the work you do when the world changes around you?  Gary Arndt reveals how he successfully adapted his career in a changing economy. He went on to become an award-winning travel photographer and the host of the 'Everything Everywhere Daily' podcast, which boasts one million monthly downloadsMore about Gary:https://everything-everywhere.com/ About Ilana Golan & Leap Academy:Website - https://www.leapacademy.com/Follow Ilana on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/ilanagolan/YouTube Channel - https://www.youtube.com/@ilanagolan-leap-academy

And when the pandemic hit, I didn't want to double down like some people did and start another website. I wanted to do something different. So I launched the show on July 1st of 2020 and just threw myself into it because I really had no plan B. And today it's at about 1.1 million downloads a month. The show keeps growing and it's become far more successful than I ever thought it could be. Welcome to The Leap Show. In The Leap Show, we're here to bring experts from around the globe who share inspiring stories, concrete tips, and insight

on what helped them become the best version of themselves and who they are today and create the incredible life that they wanted. Subscribe and follow us. Share this with friends who are also driven and aiming for more because you'll hear stories and tips that you'll hear nowhere else. Hi, I'm Ilana Golan, CEO of Leap Academy, which helps driven professionals reinvent, leap their careers to the next level. Now let's get started. So today we have a really, really special guest. When I first met Gary, I was actually in a travel blogging conference. I had my own tech startup at the time it was acquired.

And Gary was one of the top bloggers, photographers in the event. I'm sure you were speaking there. And I've been since following Gary really closely as he became a host of Everything Everywhere Daily, a podcast that gets a million monthly download. Oh my God. So Gary, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. It's awesome to have you. It's awesome to see your growth and how this all became possible. I mean, how did you get to blogging and especially in, you know, why this podcast? I had a internet, an early internet company that I started in the 90s. I managed to sell it before the dot-com bubble burst.

I started a few other companies during when the dot-com bubble burst. And I didn't really kind of know what to do for a while. I went back to school, realized I did not want a career in academia. And I came up with the idea of selling my house to travel around the world for a year or two. And that year or two kind of ended up becoming more than a decade.

And in the process, I started a website and that became pretty popular. I think in large part because I was traveling in places when I started that most people don't visit. Most people kind of, they visit a lot of the, you know, the same areas, major cities of the world. And I started, you know, it took me nine months to cross the Pacific Ocean. So I was visiting a lot of, you know, countries that don't get a lot of visitors. And that went well. I taught myself photography, became a pretty accomplished travel photographer, winning a lot of awards. And when the pandemic hit, it really did a number on my business.

Within a span of like two weeks in March of 2020, I lost about 95% of my income. Traffic of the website dried up, affiliate income went to zero. All the contracts I had, which is really the biggest thing, were all canceled because nothing could be done. And even before the pandemic hit, I was starting to have my doubts about blogging because it used to be when I started that people would come to my website and they would read it. And I was writing for those people. And I would use puns or song lyrics in the title. And I just gave my observations about wherever I was in the world at that time. But over time, social media became prevalent and people started reading content based on what Twitter or Facebook showed you. And then they started changing their algorithm and prevented what people saw. And so more and more of it started coming from Google, which meant search engine optimization.

And by the time early 2020 rolled around, everyone was kind of writing the same articles to appease Google to get traffic. So it was like 15 things to do and whatever. They weren't writing for readers. They were writing for an algorithm. Hopefully, somebody would come by and see it. And it just was not what I got into this to do. And when the pandemic hit, I didn't want to double down like some people did and start another website. I wanted to do something different. And a couple of years previously, I'd hashed this idea about starting a podcast. And I've been podcasting since 2009.

Myself and two other co-hosts launched a show called This Week in Travel. That got killed in the pandemic as well because we had nothing to talk about. And so I had this idea for a show that wasn't a travel show, but it was closely related to travel and that it was talking about history. I could talk about a lot of the places I visited, but not necessarily in a travel context. So I began working on that. I got the artwork done. I paid for the rights to the theme music, everything. And eventually I abandoned the idea because the shows were going to wind up being two to three hours long, and that just didn't work. So I put it aside, and I came back to the idea when the pandemic started, except this time,

I thought, well, maybe I do just the opposite. Instead of infrequent long shows, what if I did frequent short shows? Something that hadn't really been done, because most history podcasts do these very deep dives into one subject. And I was thinking of doing, you know, taking a shotgun approach and doing a whole bunch of different topics every single day. That was kind of completely random. And I figured if I was interested in these topics, then there's gotta be other people out there interested as well. So I launched the show on July 1st of 2020 and just threw myself into it because I really had no plan B. And I pitched the show to some other podcast friends I had who had successful podcasts, and they all said the same thing. This is a great idea, and you are insane for doing this because doing a daily show is a

whole lot of work. And so many people with daily shows that have tried it ended up abandoning it because it just required too much time. But I had nothing but time, so I threw myself into it. And over time, the show just kept growing and growing and growing. And by early this year, 2023, the show had reached a million downloads a month. That's somewhere in the neighborhood of 30,000 to 40,000 downloads every day. And today it's at about 1.1 million downloads a month. The show keeps growing and it's become far more successful than I ever thought it could be.

And it took me about a year and a half from deciding to do it to tying up all the loose ends, selling my house, selling things, putting stuff in storage, uh, that I was able to hit the road. And, uh, but I, a lot of people have told this to me like, Oh, you're so brave. I never thought of it that way. Um, I've never really been one to worry about what other people think or, uh, you know, do what other people do. So it never bothered me. I, I wasn't married. I had no kids, so there was nothing stopping me.

And I figured why not? You know, I have the means to do it. I have the, the ability to do it. So I might as well do it. And I did. And you did. And I think you brought exactly the same. Let me lean in to do the podcast, because, again, most people will never try to do a daily show. And even if they try, they would give up and they would definitely not take it to

a million a month. Right. So what what were some of these moments that, you know, maybe catch you and say, oh, my God, like, can I make it happen? Like, I'm sure if you're like every entrepreneur, like it catches you at some point. It's like, am I serious? Like, am I really going to do this? It sounds like you just don't stop. I was I was confident in the idea. And I knew that for a show like mine, there were very few people in the world that could probably do it. And the people that could do it probably wouldn't do it.

So that created a barrier to entry. And just to give you an example, there are a couple of shows that are kind of like mine, but they're all done by like large media companies. And they have a staff of multiple people to put out a show three to five times a week i do seven days a week by myself um so i just i don't know i just i just went and did it now i having done 1100 episodes i'm pretty good at it um and it i've just never been afraid of these sort of things you know especially i, if you think about it, in starting and launching the show, it was just a matter of work. That's all it was.

It wasn't a matter of funding. It wasn't a matter of equipment. It wasn't a matter of anything else. It was just, am I willing to put in the work? That's all it was. And I was. And most people are not. And that's all the difference. And the other thing, a lot of people, when they start a venture, they envision themselves being successful.

There's nothing wrong with that. But if all you do is envision your success and not the hardships you're going to encounter along the way. When you do encounter those hardships, and you will because they always happen, you're more apt, I think, to give up. So one of the things I envisioned, I knew what this was going to require, and I didn't envision myself being successful. I envisioned myself sitting in a room every day for several years producing this show. So when that happened, people were like, oh, don't you get burnout? Don't you get tired? You know, isn't that difficult? It's like, no, because this is what I knew it was going to be from day one. And when you understand what it's going, if you can envision what those hardships

are going to be when you encounter them, they won't surprise you and they won't frustrate you. That's just what I did. Which is incredible. But I'll say two things. One, most people never get started. And like you said, they don't consistently continue, right? And I think that's the piece that makes you unique. But tell me maybe a little bit. So with a few shows before you, with Kobianoch and Chris from CEO Magazine, we talked about what we call the near-death experiences.

That sometimes in entrepreneurship, you suddenly like catch yourself and like, can I do this? Can I continue? Did you have those moments? Oh, absolutely. A podcast is going to grow in fits and starts. So you're going to have a period where your audience growth will plateau, and then you'll have a period when it goes up. When it goes up, it's easy to be excited about what you're doing. But it's when it plateaus or maybe even goes down, it can get very frustrated because you start thinking of the worst case scenarios and whether

or not this is going to be successful. And I certainly had those periods. But if you believe in what you're doing, then you just have to trust in the system. And also, those are just opportunities where it's like, okay, things have leveled off a bit. Now I need to try something else. I need to do some other form of marketing maybe that I haven't tried. So whenever I hit those points, there are always things you can do to plow through it. And I've had, you know, my marketing efforts always haven't been consistent. Sometimes I would, I was getting a lot of organic growth, so I would put my foot off the gas, allow me to build up a bit of a war chest that I knew I could use later on once I knew that the growth was going to level off.

So yeah, those things happen, and I think they happen in everything. You just have to prepare for that fact. And again, if you see it coming, then I think you can deal with it a lot better than if you take it as some sort of shock. It's like, oh, I'm failing. No, it's natural. And you just need to, when those things happen, be able to plow through it and find a way out of it, which usually involves doing something different. You're going to encounter different problems at different stages of growth. The problem I'm encountering with a podcast of a million downloads a month is very different than the problem I was facing when I launched the show.

If I could get 100,000 downloads for a brand new podcast, that's huge. That's an enormous amount of growth. Now, that would grow my show by less than 10%. So I am needing to find larger and larger outlets for me to promote my show in order to continue to see the needle move. And that've just kind of had this epiphany moment not too long ago where I was reaching out to a lot of smaller shows and it hit me as like, this just isn't going to scale. There's too many of them. It's too hard working with this many people. It's going to be easier for me to just do a big ad buy with a larger show. So that's probably what I'm going to be doing for the rest of the year. Which is incredible. So that's the muscle that you need to build as a leader to take yourself and whatever the business is to the next level. What do you think is one thing that maybe people usually don't know about you that built you to who you are today and made this possible?

I don't know if it's stuff that they don't know, because I'm pretty transparent about most things. One of the things that I did was really important kind of in my formative years is that I was very involved in competitive academic debate in high school and college. In fact, I was very successful. I was recruited to college. I placed in the top 10 in the national tournament my juniors and senior year. And that really trained me a lot in terms of doing research, the ability to speak, the ability to think critically about things. And that's been huge for me. And everyone I know that's gone through that experience has said, I was the only person on my debate team who didn't get a Ph.D. or go to law school.

And because they all tend to go in those careers and I went into entrepreneurship, I had a huge advantage, I think, against a lot of other people because of that training and background that I had. That's amazing. I love that. So share with us a little bit, maybe one question. Was there something that somebody could have told you back in the days that would have made a difference for you? It depends how far back in the day you're going. When I first started in business, I was in my early 20s, and I didn't know anything. And it was figuring out all of the things that a lot of people knew. So I began by doing computer programming, and I had a client, and then I had more business.

So I hired a friend who had a friend. And the next thing you know, you have multiple people. And the question is, well, how do you pay them? Because at first I was just like literally writing a personal check and giving it to them. And that only goes so far. And I was like, well, there are payroll services. And then I called them and figured it out. And every step of the way, it was just figuring out these basic problems that most businesses have to deal with when I was younger. And when I started my company, I was 28 years old. I had a company with 50

employees. And for the longest time, I was the lowest paid person in the company because I had bootstrapped the entire thing. I'd never received any financing. I never received any capital. I never took out a loan. Everything was done through the revenue coming in. And I like to tell people I basically funded it through poverty. That when you have cash flow problems and you can't make payroll, well, guess who's not getting paid? It's not your salesperson. It's not your programmer.

It's not your salesperson. It's not your programmer. It's you. And so I wish I had known more about technical things like the importance of cash flow. That was a big help. I ended up doing the business and when I sold it, I then had this enormous windfall that came in all at once. Whereas with the current business I have, it is arguably more successful in that there's far more cash coming in. I have far fewer expenses. I'm literally the only employee still. I'm looking to hire other people, but that's proving challenging. But it's in a much more stable position in terms of finances than it was when I had arguably more revenue and more employees, just because it's such a profitable business. Right. And that's incredible, Gary, because you built it to a little empire

here. So why should people go download, subscribe and follow your daily show? If you're a person that's curious about the world and what I have found is that some people are and some people are not. Some people are, you know, they have a mania about a certain thing. They really do not care about, you know about the world or history or science or how the world works. And the show is just not for those people. But there are some people that are deeply fascinated by it. And I've been surprised at the audience. They come from all walks of life, from every different sort of education level. It's not necessarily people that are highly educated. I get truck drivers. I get parents that listen with their kids. But I also get, you know, people that that that work at large laboratories and our college professors that are listening as well.

So the curiosity aspect is is not something that necessarily correlates with education. And that's both that that's kind of been a welcome surprise. That's incredible. So everything, everywhere. Everything, everywhere, daily and wherever you're listening to this, you can probably find it there, too. Amazing, Gary. So thank you so, so, so much for this incredible interview, for everything you've done. Love following your journey. It was incredible to watch. And thank you for inspiring our listeners. Thanks for having me. And the journey is not done yet. Just begun.

Thank you for listening and hope you enjoyed the show. Don't forget to subscribe, follow, share this with friends. I'll see you in the next Leap Show.