We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - TIP 055 : Creating Assets and a Following (Marketing Podcast)

Starting point is 00:00:00 This is episode 55 of The Investors Podcast, and instead of studying billionaires in this episode, we're going to be talking about how you can create assets. So enjoy. Broadcasting from Bel Air, Maryland. This is the Investors Podcast. They'll read the books and summarize the lessons. They'll test the waters and tell you when it's cold. They'll give you actionable investing strategies. Your host, Preston Pish, and Sting Broderson. Hey, how's everybody doing out there? This is Preston Pish, and I'm your host for The Investors Podcast, and as usual, I'm a company by Stig Broderson out in Denmark. And I'll tell you what, folks, we've got a really fun guest for you today. Her name is Dory Clark. And I really like this topic because we haven't really covered this topic very much on our show. And the idea is, how do you create assets? How do you create your own business? How do you go about creating your own flow of cash flow outside of whatever it is that you might be doing at the present moment. So a lot of

Starting point is 00:01:04 people, they work in their regular business cycle and they're just, they're working for an employer. But how do you start your own business? And so that's why Dory's on the show with us today, because she's going to help us talk about some of those ideas and creating your own assets instead of buying assets, which is what Stig and I almost always talk about. So let me give you a little bit of a background on Dory. Dory is a former presidential campaign spokeswoman and is an adjunct professor of business administration at Duke's University, Fawkaw School of Business, and she's also a visiting professor at the IE Business School of Madrid, Spain. She gives guest lectures at Harvard University, Stanford, Wharton School of Business, MIT, just to name a few, just to kind of impress you with

Starting point is 00:01:47 some of these schools that she's involved with. What I think's really cool about Dory is I was on LinkedIn and I saw an article pop up. And I said, oh, that looks like an article that I'd be really interested in reading. So I click on it. I'm reading through the whole article. And I'm like, this is some really good writing. And it was out of the Harvard Business Review. So I get down to the bottom of the article when I look at who the author was. Well, sure enough, it was Dory. And I'm like, she's coming on our show. I was so pumped and so excited to thumbled across this article out of the Harvard Business Review. And here it is, Dory, who's coming on our show. So she wrote a book and the name of the It's standout.

Starting point is 00:02:24 It's all about how to find your breakthrough idea and to build a following around it and really kind of do this online business type feel and building an audience behind some ideas that you're really passionate about. And so we're going to be talking to Dory about her book today and just some general ideas of creating your own assets and creating your own following. And I think it's going to be a really fun discussion. Dory, thank you so much for taking time out of your day to be with us. Thank you, gentlemen.

Starting point is 00:02:47 It's great to be talking with you. What is your mission of your book, Dory? to kind of give people an idea so that they understand what stand out is all about. Also, give us a little bit of a background and a story about yourself that motivated you to write this book of passion that you put out there. The reason that I wrote the book and the thing that I wanted to accomplish with it was, I think we all know these days that we're living in a world that is getting increasingly noisy. There's so much coming at us.

Starting point is 00:03:15 The average professional is getting 100 emails a day and that number is increasing 15% a year. So just with the compounding alone, we are very close to an unsustainable level of incoming. We have meetings. We have Twitter feeds to maintain. We have social media. We have all this stuff going on. And with all of that, a problem arises. I mean, the good news is that if you have some kind of idea, if you have something you

Starting point is 00:03:43 want to talk about, guess what? You can talk about it now. You can create a blog. You can create a podcast. You can write a book. You can do whatever you want. but who's going to listen to it because no one has the time or the bandwidth to do it. And that's where the potential tragedy comes in because you could have people who have really

Starting point is 00:04:01 good ideas and nobody ever listens to them or picks up on them because they just don't notice. I don't want to live in that world. I want to live in a world where the best ideas can be heard and can rise to the top. And so I wrote Stand Out. I interviewed about 50 top thought leaders in a variety of different features. And my goal was to try to understand what did they do to become successful? How did they break through and get noticed? And what can a regular professional, someone who has a good idea, do to emulate that so that they are far more likely to succeed and to get the word out? I love this because you bring up one of the core elements that I really have such a strong belief behind, and that is if you are a person who has fantastic ideas and you're a person who really can add value to society, you don't necessarily have to have the good old boy network anymore in order to stand out and to really bring that to light. you can be just an average person off the street, but if you have profound thinking and you have

Starting point is 00:05:08 profound ideas, you have now this capacity to really reach an enormous audience, you can do this on your own. And I think that that's a really exciting concept for people out there that are passionate about whatever the topic might be. Like Stig and I are very passionate about business and accounting and that kind of stuff. So that's our niche and we've kind of run in this direction. But there's listeners out there that are listening to us right now, and they have that same passion for something else, whatever that might be. And your book is really kind of a roadmap, if you will, to how do I extract that passion for whatever it is that I'm interested in and bring it to a larger community and a larger audience?

Starting point is 00:05:49 So that's really exciting. And I love that mission statement. You're exactly right. It's about scale. It's about impact. If you don't have that, it's nice. It's a nice thing to have good ideas. but it doesn't really get you a lot or get the world a lot if people don't hear them.

Starting point is 00:06:05 Our audience usually, I under the assumption that they already have a portfolio so they have some cash they can either invest in or they can sell the stocks and buy all the securities. Now, a question we actually get quite often in my inbox is that saying, you know, Stick, this sounds really awesome that you want to invest in stock X, but how do I start generating the cash flow so I can't go into investing? So how do I find my breakthrough idea and how do I build a business around it? Really, the premise of standout is that you can, and I would argue should, because I think it is good for us and good for the world, to make money from your ideas. Now, the trick with modern society and all the channels that we have now for communicating is that you do have to be really deliberate about how you make money from your ideas because we live in a world.

Starting point is 00:06:58 where you could become the world's most famous blogger. You could be writing 15 hours a day and posting everything on LinkedIn or whatever, and nobody gets paid for that. And so fame and money are not necessarily coupled together in the way that they were in the past. And so you have to be smart about making sure that you can monetize from your ideas.

Starting point is 00:07:21 How do you make it sustainable? Because we all know for any field, there's a time when you're toiling in the wilderness. There's a time when you have to do things for free where you're gaining momentum, but you can't live there forever. That is not sustainable. And you don't want to be in a place where you're just going all out for two years. You burn yourself out.

Starting point is 00:07:41 You make no money doing it. And then you say, okay, I have to give up whatever my idea was because I can't support myself doing it. So broadly speaking, and we can go into detail about the specific ways that people can come up with with breakthrough ideas and things like that. But I would say if you're specifically thinking about making money from your ideas rather than from a product or service that you've created from them, it's a lot of different ways to do it. The key, of course, and it's something that is an important tenant that you guys probably talk about is multiple revenue streams. You don't want to be putting all your egg in one basket. And so for people who are sharing their ideas and thinking, you always want to do one thing and see if you can do 10 things with it.

Starting point is 00:08:26 So in standout, for instance, when it comes to content creation, just as kind of a metaphor, I talk about a guy named Mark Fiddleman. And Mark would actually spend up to 100 hours writing a blog post. It was absolutely insane. I spent maybe an hour or two writing a blog post. He would spend 100 hours. But what he did was with that 100 hours, he was able to create a huge amount of interesting content because he was creating these top lists, you know, the top 25 CMO. or whatever. And he would be interviewing the people. He would be building relationships with them. He would be getting tips from them for a supplementary e-book that would grow his email list. He would be hiring designers and creating Instagram cards. And so when he did one thing, he made it count 10 times. If you know how to do one thing, okay, well, you can do coaching on that thing. All right. Well, how do you take that same content? Well, you could make an online course from that

Starting point is 00:09:24 thing. And, oh, well, people are interested in it clearly. So you're creating maybe an email list. And then you can monetize the email list by selling your course, selling other people's courses. You know, all the things that you're doing, we have to ask ourselves. We have the same 24 hours in the day. You want to really be brainstorming and thinking about all of the different ways that one activity can count multiple times. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. All right. I want you guys to imagine spending three days in Oslo. at the height of the summer. You've got long days of daylight, incredible food, floating saunas on the Oslo Fjord, and every conversation you have is with people who are actually shaping

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Starting point is 00:14:10 Yes. Scale is the key determinative factor because there are fixed rates that you can get. If you want to start a business where you like to help people with the feng shui of their closets, or if you want to start a business where you're creating gourmet ice cream or whatever, you really can't sell an ice cream for $500 a cone. That's just not how it works in the real world. You know, you can have the best thing, but it's not going to happen. You have to find a way to scale. because that's the only way that you can really break through and be successful and get the leverage you need. Robert Scoble, who was someone I interviewed for Standout, he talked about the same thing with your ideas and your sharing of them. Instead of responding one-on-one to questions electronically, he would tell people who had questions for him, post them on Quora, the question and answer website, and I'll answer them there, and that way I can help more people. And that's the question we need to ask. How do you do the same thing once, but help more people with it? That's fantastic. And I think for a lot of people that are coming into or maybe wanting to start an online business specifically, because that's what we were talking a lot about there, is this idea of giving away a lot of your information and doing a lot of things for free up front is pretty much the only model in order to make this stuff start to work in order to get the volume of traffic that needs to start coming through the site for you to actually be able to sell a product or a service later down the road. And I think that that's a huge misnomer that a lot of people don't understand as they're getting started. They just want to create the product or the service, put it on a website and think that all these people are just going to naturally start flowing

Starting point is 00:15:46 through that website because it's listed on Google or something. And that's a huge misnomer. Let me tell you, folks, it really does not work that way. If this is something that you are interested in doing, I think that it's really important to, A, understand what you are passionate about because it is definitely a marathon and not a sprint. And that's the only thing that's to keep you going. And I think the second part is you do have to give away a lot of ideas. You have to give away a lot of information and it has to be useful information. I love that comment about him spending 100 hours on the blog post. He's truly at heart trying to create value. And I think that's the part that a lot of people miss when they're trying to maybe start their own online

Starting point is 00:16:26 business is they lose track of the idea of my sole purpose is to create value for other people. And whenever I do that, it's going to come back to me through reciprocity and whatever other means you want to discuss. So our business, we're always trying to gain a larger share of audience. We're trying to capture more people to listen to our show, to go our websites and things like that. Although there's tons of tips out there on how to do this stuff and it's really the core fundamental thing that you can't afford to mess up, but could you give us some of your favorite advice from that second part of your book, maybe really the key ingredient or the key ingredient. that you think really make things pop in that section of basically growing your audience. Absolutely. So in a broad sense, Preston in Standout, I talk about a three-step process to building a following around your idea. First, building a kind of tight-knit network around you.

Starting point is 00:17:19 Next, building a broader audience. And then third and finally, building a community around your idea. And so I think the way that this would apply to podcasts like yours or somebody who's trying to launch a new product or service that they're doing. The first step is, you know, really making sure that you have the right people around you, a small number of people to provide advice. And so, for instance, you guys are already well up and running. You're in the audience phase. But if you were just starting this podcast, I would say the important thing is to think about kind of who's on your mentor board of advisors. Who do you know that maybe has a podcast of their own or is an avid podcast listener so that you can bounce ideas off them and say, hmm, we're

Starting point is 00:18:01 You're thinking about doing an investor's podcast. How does that sound? Be able to actually have people you trust, come back to you and say, oh, that's a great idea. Or, oh, I don't know. You might want to tweak it here. You want to be getting advice from the right people, first of all. They're going to be the ones that can speak honestly to you and provide critical support. When it comes to the next phase of building your audience, this is kind of where you begin to blow it out. You're talking to people who are not just people that you know one-on-one or personally, you're kind of talking to the wider world. So this is, you know, once your podcast launches, you go into audience building mode. And so this is the place where, again, you want to go back to leverage and thinking through,

Starting point is 00:18:41 how do you build the audience? Well, one great way, of course, is through your guests, because if you are interviewing people who are willing to share the podcast, who themselves have reasonable followings, then you can introduce yourselves to new audiences. And then finally, once you start to get traction audience, you want to think through how do I make it easy for my listeners to communicate with each other? Because it's great if all the time the listeners have a relationship with you guys and oh, I love it when a new episode comes out. It's so great when I hear from Stig and Preston. But their bond becomes stronger with you and with the ideas that you represent if they're able to feel like they're part of a community. And so whether it's maybe launching a

Starting point is 00:19:26 Facebook community around the Investors podcast where people brainstorm and trade ideas. Maybe it's doing meetups. Maybe it's periodically having Google Plus hang out chats with your fans, you know, whatever it is. But it's about thinking through how do you bring people together so that they love you even more and become your ambassadors? Can we just force our audience to love us? Absolutely. I think that'll work. No, that's fantastic advice. It's kind of neat how our organization kind of grew. We really kind of started off more with the forum, which was the community piece.

Starting point is 00:20:04 And the podcast really kind of came much later, years later. So it's kind of neat how we've got each one of those elements that you were discussing in our own personal business. But it's kind of interesting how we kind of arrived at that solution. It took us many years of going down different paths and maneuvering around. It was really interesting that when you first started talking about. about a mastermind group. We did that way late in the process. And I love how you put that up front because the time we could have saved,

Starting point is 00:20:31 if we would have known to contact the right people and which steps to take. I mean, it's just we kind of did everything backwards, which is really kind of funny. And everyone can kind of laugh at us out there. That's life, man. Yeah, we all do. Dory, I often get this question, both from my students, but also from the audience saying they have very limited cabaretel.

Starting point is 00:20:52 And they want to start their own business either because they want to invest in stocks or they just want to grow the business. The problem is always money, right? So we don't have that much money. It's always scarce one way or the other. And many people that might have, say, $100, $200 a month in their budget, you know, for everything in their business. If I was asking you and I had said, I have $100, $200 a month, where should that capital go? So in Standout, one of the people I interviewed was David Allen. the productivity guru. And he had a really interesting quote that I liked. And that was,

Starting point is 00:21:27 you don't need time to have a great idea. You need space, meaning you need the mental space to be able to think creatively. Even if you're at a cabin in the woods for a month, you're not going to have a great idea if you're worried the whole time and thinking about, oh my God, who's emailing me back at my desk and, you know, oh, I really should have done this other thing. It's never going to come to you. You don't need time. You need space. And I will similarly say my appendix to his statement is these days, you don't actually need money to have a great idea and be able to spread it. It is absolutely incredible how much the cost has come down for anything you want to create. You know, I mean, certainly we know in technology, that's the case. But these days, with the ability

Starting point is 00:22:14 to outsource, with the ability to subcontract with back-end innovations like Amazon Web Services, allow you to not have to have a million expensive servers of your own. You can rent them now from Amazon. What does it take, if not money, to have a breakthrough idea? So in Stand Out, I actually, in interviewing these experts, I came up with five key things that the experts did in order to come up with breakthrough ideas. Now, it's crucial. People don't have to do all of these things. This is not like check them off the checklist. Really what it is is you pick the idea that feels most resonant to you and you explore that. You only need one, maybe two if you want, but really it's about finding one approach that is a good muse for you and you can go deep on it.

Starting point is 00:23:01 And so very briefly what they are. Number one is mixing ideas and mixing disciplines. If you can take whatever your field is and think about something else that you care about or are passionate about, this could be something else you studied in the past, maybe there's a hobby that you have that other people don't. Maybe you have a different cultural background. This is going to allow you to have different ideas and see the world differently. If you consciously blend these two things together, that can be very fruitful for ideas. That's number one. Number two is the niche strategy where you go really deep and become an expert in a very tiny piece of something. And that's great because it gives you connections.

Starting point is 00:23:40 It gives you credibility. Everybody's like, oh, hands down, he's the expert at XYZ. And then you can expand from there. So maybe you become a very good. an expert at studying Google's self-driving cars, great, okay. Well, then all of a sudden, people are going to, they see your credibility. They're going to start calling you for news stories and for information and for being an advisor to other companies that know about self-driving cars. And before that, then they're going to be calling you about other things with robotics. Number three is about doing independent research. That's a great way to become an expert. And in fact, this is kind of meta because this is what you're doing. You're podcasting, you know,

Starting point is 00:24:18 you're interviewing people. This is a form of generating new content, new ideas through the journalistic process. You could do it with blogging. You could do it with writing case studies or writing white papers or writing reviews, but it's about creating interesting new knowledge that other people can benefit from. Number four is about tackling a big idea. Are you actually focused on something important enough? that's a really key question. If you are picking a big challenge that other people are motivated by and care about, this is certainly the case with things that, you know, say Elon Musk, most people when they say, oh, who's the entrepreneur you admire? They say, oh, Elon Musk. And a lot of the reason is because he's choosing big targets to go after. And that is very powerful and attracts people to you. And then fifth

Starting point is 00:25:08 and finally, the muse that I will suggest to people as they're coming up with their own breakthrough ideas is the idea of creating a framework. And essentially what that means is that a lot of times, surprisingly often, the very basic principles of a field have not been articulated. And if you can be the person to do that, you get an enormous amount of power and recognition. I like that last point, because a lot of people, what they do is they write more for their ego than their audience. And I think that's when you're talking about being able to communicate something effectively and uniquely in a simplified yet profound way, I think it's really important for people to always think about their audience whenever they're generating content. And what do they want to see? How can I make this simpler? How can I add more value to them in a quicker manner without taking up long sentences with big words in order to confuse and service my own ego, I guess? So I really like that last fifth step.

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Starting point is 00:29:31 All right. Back to the show. I already mentioned capital as one resource that I think is scarce. And then my question should actually be about how to invest your time. I kind of want to elaborate on that a bit and to refresh that because you said it was not really so much about capital and perhaps so much about time, but more about space. And I think you really hit it on the nail on that one because what would you advise be to these people that just can create their job and how to gain momentum for them? Yeah, that's a really important question. And I remember this vividly from my own life. My first job that I had after I finished graduate school was for about a year. I was a political reporter at a newspaper. And I had this colleague named Nina. And we had basically the same job and had to work nine to six-ish kind of job doing this. So one day, you know, Nina and I were not terribly close. But one day I sort of hear like, oh, Nina has a book coming out. And I'm like, what?

Starting point is 00:30:30 How does Nina have a book coming out? Like, I go home and it's all I can do to like figure out how to cook dinner and maybe do something with a friend or whatever and then like, okay, time for bed. And it just blew my mind. I'm like, how did she pull that off? And so I asked her, I'm like, Nina, you're so busy. We're so busy. I couldn't even imagine doing it. How did you make it happen? And she said, well, basically just from the moment that I get home every night, I say, I sit at my computer until 9 p.m. and I work on my book. And then I'll go and I'll have dinner at nine and then go to bed. And I was just like, whoa, that was just to me an incredible level of discipline that I couldn't imagine at the time. I've gotten a little more hardcore since then, so I can imagine it pretty well. I think for me, being an entrepreneur has been helpful in that regard. But yeah, I fathom it because I was just so exhausted and didn't think that there was a place for that. But what I learned in the course of actually writing my first book, which was called Reinventing You, is that it really is possible, it's surprisingly possible, for people to,

Starting point is 00:31:37 if they have their eyes on the prize, and if they are willing to accept maybe a slower timeline than they would like in their ideal world, if you start moving towards it, it really can and will happen. And so in Reinventing You, I profiled this woman named Patricia Fripp. And Patricia originally is from England, and she came over to the United States as a hairdresser, actually. She was working in San Francisco, and she was first employed in a salon, and then she had her own salon, and she was working downtown, so she had a lot of business executives as clients. She said that for her, something that was really important was she would overhear the other stylists at the salon, and they'd be having these sort of stupid conversations with people while they were cutting hair

Starting point is 00:32:17 and, you know, just talking about television shows or whatever. And Patricia had a totally different viewpoint. she would be asking business advice of her clients. She said, why wouldn't I do that? I have the most talented business men and women as my clients. And they are like stuck in the chair for half an hour. They give me free advice. So why wouldn't you do it? And so she got all this advice from her clients.

Starting point is 00:32:41 And eventually they began to realize one of the things Patricia had been asked to do was to start giving these promotional talks about certain hair products. So she would say, oh, I have to, you know, no, I can't meet you next Tuesday. I have to go give a talk for whatever the brand is. And they said, oh, you give talks? And they said, oh, that's amazing. Why don't you come in and give a talk to our employees? You're so good at customer service.

Starting point is 00:33:03 Why don't you talk to our people? That was the way she got started. She did talks for all her clients in the San Francisco area, Wells Fargo and Gap and all these places. And she began slowly building a speaking business. And really, she loved speaking a lot more than having a hair salon. First, you can't make a living. You know, maybe you speak for free. Maybe you make 500 bucks.

Starting point is 00:33:21 That's not going to pay for what you need. And besides, she had a lease on her hair salon. So she had a 10-year lease for the property. What she realized was, okay, I've got a 10-year plan. That's what I've got. And so she would take whatever money she earned with her speaking, and she would reinvest it back in that business. And so she was willing to invest in the very best.

Starting point is 00:33:43 She invested in the best speaker videos. She invested in coaching, so she would become a better speaker. She invested in the creation of promotional materials. And as a result, the end of 10 years when her lease was up, she was able to say, okay, I'm closing the salon. I'm not renewing it. And I have more than enough money to make up for my income as a hairdresser. That's an awesome story. And I think that that empathizes with so many people out there that are in similar situations.

Starting point is 00:34:10 Like, how do I bridge the gap from my current job to creating my own business on the side to fully transitioning into doing that as my own, thing full time. A lot of people out there need to really have an appreciation for the power of an hour a day and how much that can create over time. I mean, one hour every single day, 365 hours a year, if you take that approach, is a lot of time, folks. Like, you can really create a lot in just that amount of time. You can write a book. You can write a book. That's right. And that's the part where on the surface, people see it as an elephant. And everyone, knows of saying, how do you eat an elephant? Well, you eat it one bite at a time. You really got to set up the time constraints. I think is a really important part of this is like, hey,

Starting point is 00:35:00 from 8 o'clock to 9 o'clock, I am doing this every day no matter what. If I have to turn my Wi-Fi off so that I can write, then turn your Wi-Fi off so you can write and not get distracted. Whatever that tool is, you know your own personality. Take advantage of that and really commit to it. But I think the problem a lot of people have is they go full blast all at once. Like the first week, they do five hours a day and they get burnout and then it's just done. I think it's really important for people to take the baby steps and slowly transition into this idea of creating your own assets and creating your own business because I know whenever Stig and I look at what we've created, it's really quite amazing to think that that's really our best investment

Starting point is 00:35:41 because we get investing questions all the time. What's your best investment? Well, our best investment is the business we created and that has the best return, you know? I mean, it's It's so important, I think, for a lot of people out there that maybe aren't satisfied with the job that they have or whatever to really strongly consider all this information that Dory is talking about and to really think about some of this stuff at a much deeper level and realize that you do have something out there that you're really passionate about that you can add value to the world and really take it in the direction. It's really quite an exciting conversation. One thing I want to mention is, and I think this really relates to the story Dory had about being hairdresser. I mean, how do you define yourself? And for me personally, I might define myself as a college professor. Before then, it might be a commodities trader.

Starting point is 00:36:29 Now, if anything, I'm defining myself as an educator. So now I'm talking about investing, but not only to my students, but to a lot of people. And it's the same thing if you are cutting people's hair. Is that really what you do? or is it customer service? Now, customer service, that's completely another area. But again, you have been practicing that five years cutting hair or whatnot. So I guess at least that's my takeaway from this amazing story you have, Dory.

Starting point is 00:36:55 Yeah, thank you. I think that's such an important point. It really does start with how we frame and conceptualize ourselves and our lives. It's a real starting point of what we feel we're capable of doing. So, Dory, this is the question that we ask everybody that comes on the show. and it really comes down to what books have you read that have influenced you in a very profound way in your life? And more specifically, we're kind of looking for maybe a book out there outside of your own, which is just fantastic. Standouts the name of the book for everybody.

Starting point is 00:37:25 Outside of your own book, what book would you recommend for people to really harness this idea of creating their own business, going in that direction, and really becoming more of an entrepreneur? So I'll name a few, if that's all right. So when it comes to just general business and life, I'm a huge fan of the book Never Eat Alone by Keith Farazi. That's, you know, a networking classic. But it's written in just an engaging, humane way is a useful life lesson for anyone. So I think whatever you're doing, that's a really good book. When it comes to understanding the dynamics of organizations and how to deal with other people in business, there's a book called Power by Jeffrey Pfeffer. The subtitle is Why Some People Have It and Others Don't.

Starting point is 00:38:07 which is a topic I think of interest to many people. And there's a really interesting explanation of where power comes from and how, particularly if you're in the context of an organization, you can make sure that people are not taking your power away from you. So I found that particularly insightful. Another one I'll give a shout out to. And I actually think he may have been the one that introduced us, if I'm remembering correctly,

Starting point is 00:38:31 because I know we scheduled this a while ago, but you guys had Guy Speer on the show, right? Yeah. Yeah. So, Guy Speer, Education of a Value Investor, that was a wonderful book. So thoughtful. It's a book about money, but it's even more than that as sort of a book about how to be a better person. Dory, seriously, thank you so much for coming on the show. The name of the book is Standout by Dory Clark. Dory, where can people find you? If folks are interested in learning more, I would send them to my

Starting point is 00:38:58 website, which is doryclerc.com. I actually created a free 42-page workbook that folks can download. It is adapted from standout and it actually walks you step by step through the process of coming up with your own breakthrough idea and building a following. And I'm on Twitter at Dori Clark. All right, Dory. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. And we just really appreciate you taking time out of your day. Thank you, Stig. Thanks, Preston.

Starting point is 00:39:24 Okay, so this is the point in the show where we take a question from our audience. And this question comes from Moss. Hello, Preston and Stig. My name is Mass from Muscat Oman. I hope you're both doing well. My question is, if you have $1 million or $1.2 million, how would you invest this money with the intention to enhance your monthly income? Thank you. Okay, Ma, so this question here is a really good question because I think it gets at the heart of what would you do under the current market conditions?

Starting point is 00:39:57 Because to be honest with you, I'll treat $1,000 almost the same way I would treat a million dollars. But here's the difference. When you're dealing with a million dollars, my impression the way I would treat that would be slightly different just because of the fact that I feel like I have a firm understanding of business and I could start maybe my own brick and mortar type business with the million dollars. In order to create an online business or something like that, I don't necessarily know that that's how I would invest the million dollars. But I would definitely create a business with the money. Probably would not be investing in individual stock picks based on the current market valuations. If the market was in a different position, I might have a completely different opinion. So let's say that the market was at 12,000 on the Dow or 11,000 on the Dow.

Starting point is 00:40:41 I would probably take that money and maybe invested in the stock market at that point. But based on current market valuations, based on fixed income bond yields and things like that, I would be much more likely to take that money and probably invest in a brick and mortar type business. I'm curious to hear what Stig would have to say, though. Yeah, I definitely agree with you, Preston. The overall asset allocation of whether or not you have a thousand dollars or a million dollars, especially if you look into securities, that's pretty much the same thing. Now, the thing that comes to mind is really two different buckets.

Starting point is 00:41:14 The first one, that would be fixed income. And as president has always been saying, the yield on fixed income right now is just close to zero. And there's simply two months downside risk going into bond. So we can definitely just say that's probably not the right thing to do. what other people are doing and I'm not just talking about right now, but in general, if they are looking to increase the monthly income, that would be dividend investing. And I think dividend investing or income investing, if you like, that's a very interesting strategy. So again, it's not so much about the annual return maximizing that, but really maximizing your income, your dividend income.

Starting point is 00:41:52 So the logical question would be, how do I start dividend investing? Because I think this idea This sounds very appealing that on your principal, you can make a two, three, four, five percent interest on that and that can just steadily increase year after year. One way to do that would be to do a dividend ETF. As you can probably hear from some of the later podcasts, I'm looking a lot into ETFs at the moment. If I was in the position where I was close to retire and I had, say, a million dollars or 1.2 which is saying must, that might be the way to go.

Starting point is 00:42:25 But if I had to pick individual stock, I would probably look at. for lots cap companies that's stable, somewhat low debt, low payout ratio. All right, Moss, thank you so much for submitting your question. We're going to send you a free-signed copy of our book, the Warren Buffett accounting book. And for anybody else out there, if you want to get your question played on the show, go to Asktheinvestors.com. You can record your question there and submit it. And if it gets played on the show, we'll send you a free signed copy of our book.

Starting point is 00:42:52 So really great discussion. We'd really like to thank Dori Clark for coming on the show. She really gave some people fantastic advice. if you're wanting to maybe venture off into starting your own online business or even your own brick and mortar type business. So thank you for joining us this week and we'll see you guys next week. Thanks for listening to The Investors Podcast. To listen to more shows or access to the tools discussed on the show, be sure to visit

Starting point is 00:43:15 www.w.w.w.com. Submit your questions or request a guest appearance to The Investors Podcast by going to www. www.com. If your question is answered during the show, you will receive a free autographed copy of the Warren Buffett Accounting Book. This podcast is for entertainment purposes only. This material is copyrighted by the TIP Network and must have written approval before a commercial application.

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