Self-Made Millionaire Interview: Scott Skinger – Founder of TrainSignal.com, and Internet Marketer

Right Click to Download the MP3

Scott Skinger – Founder of TrainSignal.com, and Internet Marketer

Scott owns two companies that are based on the internet, and has a wealth of knowledge from the past 10 years online. Not only that he has a great story of working for someone else and realizing that he could do it better! Now he has and built an amazing company in the process.

Scott is an amazing guy and I highly recommend hearing his story.

Resources Mentioned in the Podcast:

• Tony Robbins
• The 4-Hour Workweek, Expanded and Updated: Expanded and Updated, With Over 100 New Pages of Cutting-Edge Content.

Check out TrainSignal.com.

Thanks so much for listening! If you like these interviews subscribe via iTunes.

Or check out the huge list of interviews with other self made millionaires.

Any questions or comments on the podcast let me know!

Transcript:

Welcome to Eventual Millionaire. I'm Jaime Tardy and today we have Scott Skinger on the show. Scott is the president and founder of TrainSignal, a company that provides computer software training for a wide array of products and services. Thank you so much for coming on the show today, Scott.

SCOTT SKINGER: Thank you for having me, Jaime. I really appreciate it.

JAIME TARDY: The first thing I want to say is that I am extremely impressed. We scheduled this interview and I started to do a little bit of research on TrainSignal and then whenever I was online I started seeing TrainSignal ads everywhere. I was like wow you guys are absolutely everywhere because I started looking it up. Before we get into how you started the business, what are your marketing tactics and what are you guys doing right now to get your customers?

SCOTT SKINGER: Okay, great. We do a lot of hands-on marketing. At TrainSignal we really don't have a sales person. We just hired our first sales person about a year ago and we have been in business for nine years now. Since the beginning our website has been our number one sales person and a large majority of our traffic comes in through Google organic traffic. We also do pay per click activity, direct traffic, so we get a lot of people who are familiar with our brand.

We spent a lot of money and time building up our brand. With analytics, when we check those, a lot of times we'll see that majority of our traffic is just coming from people searching directly for TrainSignal and that's something I think is super important, as you are building up a small company, is to make sure that you are also paying attention to your brand. We also do a lot of repeat business. About 35 percent of our customers on a monthly basis are coming back to us through email promotion and new courses that we are creating.

I think that's huge for us and huge in the growth of my company is that early on we focused on creating a great product and in doing so we have a lot of happy customers who are coming back and respond real well to our email marketing that we do. Specific to the ads you are talking about, it's kind of funny, about five months ago maybe we opted in for Google's retargeting. I don't know if you are familiar with that at all or not but basically what retargeting is, you can enable this through your Google Ad Words campaign. So when you visit say TrainSignal.com and then go off to another website, if they have Google Ad Words on their site, there's basically a cookie that knows that you were at TrainSignal and by retargeting, you are more likely then to come back to TrainSignal and actually buy a course from us.

We've done real, real well with the retargeting campaign but it's something you definitely have to be careful of as well because we've had some customers call us back and think that we've done something to their computers. It's almost like you're spying on them but it's really a Google thing that's going on there.

JAIME TARDY: Now can anyone do retargeting or do you have to be a certain level of a Google Ad Words person, in order to get that option?

SCOTT SKINGER: I don't directly control the Google Ad Words campaign, but as far as I know, anybody can opt in for that and that's something that I think they were testing out initially and I think that it's open to anybody at this point.

JAIME TARDY: Nice. It is funny; I mean I am a geek. I have a degree in IT so I know computers. I know exactly what's happening but I have heard the exact same thing where people are like they are following me around online. How do they know? Everybody knows everyone apparently.

SCOTT SKINGER: I've got a brother who is married to a Croatian woman and he was just doing a search, they are going to Croatia for a vacation and he was just looking at a Croatian village website, something really, really obscure and TrainSignal ads were popping up. He was like oh my gosh, they got everywhere covered. He couldn't believe the reach we have. It has been really effective too. We also show up on the New York Times, other big sites where it really gives your brand a lot of credence.

JAIME TARDY: That's great and the people that see you or have been to your website first always have sort of an inkling to go back and stuff like that. But you were also saying, in general, that the people love your product and that's one of the things. It's funny because I was in IT so I studied Microsoft certification and stuff like that. This was a long time ago like 2003 or something, and I know exactly what you mean. The products that were sort of on the market then were so I don't know bad, long and boring and stuff like that. What did you do to make your product better than theirs?

SCOTT SKINGER: There's a little of a back story I guess to that. My background is in IT. I went back to school when I was 28. I just kind of wanted to be a network admin. I finally decided what I wanted to do when I grew up. I started going back to school and became a network administrator for a company and I started teaching and my first teaching job I kind of went with the flow but I was at one of those typical computer schools that charge a lot of money, I think tuition was around $20,000 and preyed upon people who could get financial aid and then the computer equipment and the curriculum that was there was really lacking.

It was frustrating because one of the first classes I was in you needed to install Windows server software onto a machine and the hardware they provided didn't even meet the minimum requirements in order to install Windows server software. It was kind of my first taste of wow these schools really don't care about the students and really more worried about the profit that they are making and that was frustrating to me. So after being at a couple schools like that, I found a school that was a little bit better and I realized that they needed better curriculum, better attention paid to the students and TrainSignal actually got its beginnings because I started bringing in my own computer equipment.

I started writing my own labs, just doing things to supplement the curriculum and in doing so I got a lot of positive feedback and a lot of the students who were leaving the classroom then were actually able to land network administrator jobs and do what they wanted to do whereas before I find a lot of the students who left were just going back and working where they had worked before with now $20,000 loans to pay off. That was a great feeling and just exactly how I got started with my business.

JAIME TARDY: Wow, so what do you think the difference was in the people that got jobs and the people that didn't? Was it just more of a confidence thing or they just knew enough and the company wanted to hire them?

SCOTT SKINGER: I think it's a combination. As an instructor, I think it's your job especially in a career education environment to really motivate and inspire the students and to make sure that they know that they can do it. But I also think that just an experience with a lot of different students, a lot of it falls on them as well. Some people come to a school and they are really looking to just kind of go through the motions and they fell that when they complete this program that might be anywhere from six months to two years, that the piece of paper along that they get, the certificate of completion, is going to be enough for them to get a job.

It's so not true and just like with anything in life, you get out of it what you put in it. I went through, it's funny I didn't get into this, but the way I got into the computer school was because I took a low paying sales job working at the computer school. I was pushing the computer programs on people and finally became sold by my own sales message that I signed up to go to the actual school. I found that, you know, this is the school that I first taught at too. So even though there was inferior equipment and some of the students didn't really take it seriously, I put a lot of time and effort into it and I studied a lot on my own. I went through and passed a series of certification tests first on Novell, this old networking operating system that's basically not in use anymore.

JAIME TARDY: I remember that.

SCOTT SKINGER: I got so much out of it and I think a lot of it, you said confidence before, I think confidence is a huge thing and in getting that, getting certified and kind of building up that confidence formed kind of an addition to getting more certifications. Before I started my business, I had actually accumulated I think around 35 different computer certifications and my career almost went totally different. I kind of faced a time in my career where I either had to go into business or go down a different route that would require me to be way more technical and devote a lot of time to study towards Cisco certification. It takes about a year to get.

JAIME TARDY: I remember that. What made you make that leap? I mean that's what I was going to ask you in general. Did you always want to be a business owner or was this just the natural path because you already had 35 certifications and knew how to teach?

SCOTT SKINGER: I think growing up I always kind of had that entrepreneur spirit in me. I don't think that I had it totally set within my head that that was what I was going to do. I did the traditional things that I think kids have done. You know, sold lemonade. One thing that I think was kind of unique; I was an avid baseball card collector and my brother and I would take our baseball cards and we were young at this point obviously but we would take all the common cards we had, repackage them, created our own wrapper and we went door to door and we were selling packs of common baseball cards to people, which was kind of funny.

After that, I think that, my dad also owned a small accounting practice so I think seeing that, that was influential. But basically what happened to kind of trigger it was I was going down, there is this advanced Cisco certification called the CCIE. In order to get this, you basically have to study for about a year and then you have to take a lab exam that takes, it's an all-day exam. It costs around $4,000 or $5,000, I don't know the exact price. It's only offered in two locations; at least it was when I was going to take it, either North Carolina or California and I am in Chicago by the way so it would have been the flight and hotel.

The statistics on it are about 10 percent or less people pass the test the first time. You are basically studying and putting all this time and effort and spending a lot of money and then not passing the test. Then you go back into another six-month study pattern before you take the test again. I had that and I was ready to go down that path or I had the business side of things. I had just started creating products and I had gotten some feedback on them. I wasn't really generating any revenue at this point and I decided I wanted to go down the business route. So I went down the business route and it turned out well.

JAIME TARDY: Tell me about that first product testing. The good thing about online and digital stuff is that you don't need a lot of capital in order to start. Tell me about just creating those products. What made you try and make it a better product and also what made you, as you were going through it, feel like this might be the right road? What did you get as far as feedback from everybody else?

SCOTT SKINGER: Sure. Well one thing I will say right out of the gate is you're totally right about information products. You can put something together relatively quickly and you have to learn from it. One thing that I tend to stress to people is to make sure that you're not launching something too late. Get something out there. Make sure that you're just doing iterations to your product and getting it better. Tony Robbins is a big fan, I'm a big fan of Tony Robbins, I was about to say he's a big of mine; I don't think he knows who I am.

I'm a big fan of Tony Robbins and one thing that he stresses a lot is CANI, constant and never-ending improvement, and I still stress that today to all of my employees. It comes up almost every meeting we ever have because I think it's so critical to success of individuals and also to business owners. You need to be improving yourself every day whether it's your product, your personal life, whatever it might be and I think that's something that was really, really successful for myself.

My first product, almost embarrassing, if you go back and look at it, it was a lab book. Basically I put together a lab book. It was step-by-step instructions of how you'd set your own computers up. Walked you through exactly what cables would plus in where, what the computers would look like. I had screenshots of what you should do, but it served its purpose and the people who used it, in my classroom, really, really enjoyed it because it was step-by-step instructional book.

The first one I did was how to set up DNS which was a complex subject that people were struggling with in my classroom. So I did that. From there just a lot of iterations with the product. I went from initially selling a lab book to then going hey that would be kind of cool if I had a video that was part of this. In the back of this lab book, which was a homemade book that I had created at Kinko's. I put a CD in the back of it and I was selling this for $24.95; was the price of my first product. I realized there was not a lot of profit to be made in this. I've got this physical book. It takes a long time to put together. It costs $10 a pop to have them made at Kinko's. I spent a lot of time on it and not really selling that many.

I went through kind of all these iterations where the next time it was like wow, that would be smart if instead of this being a book, maybe I should sell this video. People really like this video and I kind of realized that people would pay more for a video than they would for a book. Traditionally, if you go to the store you'll pay $30 for a book and it has a disc in the book and the disc often times is kind of considered worthless. At least that's the way I kind of look at them. So I switched things around and started selling the video and then sold the book as an accompaniment to the video itself. We raised the price up. We started selling stuff for $49.95 and sales actually went up. So we were selling more for a higher price.

I went through a lot of iterations like this and over the years our product has evolved from where it was initially a lab book up to now where it's a video product that has PDF supplements inside it and the video product currently right now you can actually get a DVD or you can watch it online. You actually get both when you buy our product. From a pricing standpoint, we've gone from $24.95 initially up to $397.00 is kind of our standard price for our top products. The profit margin is much, much greater than what it was when we first started, but the value that we offer to the customer is also much, much greater as well.

JAIME TARDY: That's a huge span. You started in 2002 was it?

SCOTT SKINGER: Correct. Actually it was incorporated in 2001 but the business really got going in 2002.

JAIME TARDY: Wow, so a lot has changed in general. What were you doing way back when to even get traffic to your site for your $24 or $50 product?

SCOTT SKINGER: Initially it was just put up a site and not worry too much about what it looked like and traffic slowly started coming in. First it was general friends, people that I went to school with and just kind of telling them about it. You start growing and doing small things. I started posting in forums and helping out. At the time, when you're talking about eight years ago, still similar but a lot different. You can't go into the forums and start spanning the forums with links to your product and such and that was still true back then. But you had to really help out and be a community member and make sure that people were seeing that you offered value and then were following your link, you know, potentially in a signature at the bottom.

So just little things like that I think is how I started. Back then, in the early days of Google Ad Words, ad words were much much more affordable. We were able to buy clicks for a nickel. I think the minimum bid at that point was a nickel. Through Google Ad Words and also Overture, which Yahoo! has now bought out Overture, we were getting real cheap clicks that way and even with not knowing much about how ad words worked or writing good sales copy for the ads, was able to do pretty well and have a positive return on investment through Google ads. That really helped out a lot with traffic.

One of the key things though, I think probably the most important thing that I kind of lucked out upon was somebody called me just out of the blue and they wanted to offer up a joint venture. Essentially this guy was a middle man, he was a broker, like an affiliate, and he knew of a couple, I think one of them was CareerBuilder, it wasn't CareerBuilder but it was a large IT list and he knew the guy who kind of ran the email list. He brokered a deal where I was able to send out an email to this list of people and he was going to take a cut of the commission.

If I was going to pay 25 percent of all revenues out, he would take his 5 percent and the list donor would take 20 percent. It kind of opened my eyes to this whole affiliate marketing world and revenue sharing world. From that, I was able to then reach out to some other business owners, people who owned big IT websites and strike deals with them in similar fashions. I never really realized that that was an opportunity before and I think at the time it was perfect for where I was in business and it kind of started opening up more revenue opportunities for me and once you start getting a few opportunities and money rolls in a little bit, you are able to kind of leverage those opportunities into other ones.

JAIME TARDY: When was that, when you started really doing JVs? Was that at the very beginning?

SCOTT SKINGER: It was pretty early on so that was probably 2003/2004. Keep in mind, just to put things in perspective, at that point, my business was probably around a $100,000 to $500,000 business between 2003 and 2005. They weren't large JV deals. They were things that, at the time, when I started my business, I didn't mention this but I started it on my own. Everything was bootstrapped. I started with everything on credit cards; had no employees so my expenses weren't large. At the time, when you are getting in even an extra 20 sales in a day, that's a huge thing.

My price points at that point were a little bit different. They were, I think for the package we were offering for these JV deals, something like $75, but it was enough to kind of keep the business going and at the time it was like wow, this is great. All this money is flowing in and my business goals were much different then than they are now. Then it was I have a wife and two kids at the time and we were just trying to make ends meet and it was more of a cash flow thing than it was long-term business opportunity.

JAIME TARDY: Where are you today?

SCOTT SKINGER: From what perspective just so I am kind of giving you a good answer?

JAIME TARDY: Like employees, I mean if you are okay with sharing revenue and how many employees you have and just sort of the difference between then and now.

SCOTT SKINGER: I think the big thing, a couple different areas, I am a lot less technical on the IT side. When I first started out, I was creating all the courses by self. I was the teacher and I loved that and was really passionate about it. I spent a lot of time studying stuff and researching, putting my courses together, but I was also the marketer who was also the office cleaner, all that stuff. Revenue wise we have grown in revenue every year. We started off I think the first year I did something like $10,000 in revenue. The second year we did about $100,000 in revenue. We've grown every year. We've been in the Inc 5000 for the last four years, which has really been cool for us. I am happy about that.

JAIME TARDY: Congratulations.

SCOTT SKINGER: Thank you. This past year we did $5.5 million in revenue. All this information is online so it's not a big deal sharing it. This year, this isn't public yet, but we're projected out to $6.75 million in revenues this year. We are on target to do that, at this point right now, so we are going to be right around that $6.75 million revenue mark and I have about 30 employees.

JAIME TARDY: That is so impressive to go from $10,000 for your first year to $6.75 million in revenue. That's an amazing growth in 8, 9 years. I am sure you've already patted yourself on the back, but my goodness, that's amazing.

SCOTT SKINGER: I try not to. I try to be really modest about stuff and definitely I'll say lucky. Everybody has to be a little bit lucky. I also think that hard work is really, really important. Fighting through stuff and I think that sometimes luck is made by working really hard. I think that's something to really point out that I think would be valuable to know your audience.

I think business is a struggle sometimes and you have to struggle through some things that don't seem, you know, that aren't that much fun and you got to get through it, if you really want to make it up to the next level. I feel like it's just, for me, because I wasn't really an experienced entrepreneur, I didn't really know what I was doing. I had lack of fundamental business knowledge and planning up front. I think I overcame a lot of that just by brute force and by working harder than other people.

JAIME TARDY: Let's start talking about that because what I'd like to say here is we hear the success story. Wow, $10,000 to $6.75 million, that's amazing. You must be awesome in order to do that, right? What I would love to know is a little bit more about what sort of the obstacles and challenges, like give me some stories of times when it was really hard and maybe you were fearful so that way we know that it didn't just go absolutely perfect for you.

SCOTT SKINGER: There's a lot of those. I think that's definitely important. If you have a lot of battle scars, I think from throughout the years. Early on, when I first started this, I really had very, very minimal business plan and I took a path that I see a lot of people take, when they first go into entrepreneurship, and it's hey I've got this great idea. I'm going to buy a desk. I'm going to buy the computer equipment. I'm going to buy the this and this and that's kind of a secondary thing and I think a lot of people kind of grow into their business with the idea, the dream of owning a business, rather than working on the business plan or working through the hard parts.

I lacked fundamental business skills, no doubt about it and I kind of had this pipe dream of something I thought would work well. I went into this situation, you know, back in 2001, I had just been married for about 3 or 4 years. We have two kids at that point, so my kids were 3 and basically 1, separated by about 18 months. I started this business on credit cards. It starts off innocently enough where I am going to spend $5,000 or so to make this work. One thing led to another and everything that I had planned on was three times more expensive than I thought it was going to be and took probably six times as long for me to get it done.

You put those two things together and before I knew it, and I had also quit my job. I decided that I wanted to quit my job and give this a go and try and go at it full time. At the point, we were more or less debt free and had good credit. After about a year, I ran myself up into about $120,000 of credit card and in doing so, also even though I made payments on time, paid minimum payments, your credit rating tumbles because of the debt to total limit ratio. As this was happening, my interest rates also started going up.

I literally had a history with the company where I made payments on time, I had never made a late payment but my interest rate went up to 29 percent on a credit card. All of a sudden now is tumbling quickly down and very, very panicked and didn't know what to do. Prior to that, just to give you a perspective, I was taking out cash advances to help pay the mortgage or to help pay for groceries, whatever we needed expenses for because I wasn't taking a salary at that point. That was definitely a scary, scary time and I was really close to having to declare bankruptcy.

What I ended up doing, I took a job. I started teaching again. Every day I taught in the city downtown at Chubb Institute right off of Washington and Chicago, I don't know if people are familiar with that, and I would get up at 5:00 in the morning, drive a half an hour to the train, jump on the train, get to class by 8:00, teach until probably about 2:00 or so, stick around for as long as I had to, take the train home, getting home at 4:00 or 5:00 and I'd go into my office and try to get anything done I could, process orders, answer emails, do whatever I could and then get home.

This was really, really tough on me and really tough on my wife. She was home with two young kids and Jaime, I know you have just in reading through your blog, you have one kid or at least you did at least when you were hosting.

JAIME TARDY: I have two, two small children, 4 and 2. I can only fathom what she was going through.

SCOTT SKINGER: It's a lot of stress. It was very hard and we struggled through some stuff. It was a great lesson on business and personal balance as well. That's something I know I definitely took from that and that was one huge early struggle. I think another thing that I've struggles a lot with is going from doing my own thing, running the show and making things happen and just having control of stuff and having a tight, you know even early on when we had three to five employees, everybody was kind of in the same office, everybody got along well, there wasn't issues.

With 30 employees, you start running into HR issues and you are thinking about things like benefits and all these things that you really don't want to be thinking about because you want to be growing your business and you're passionate about the education and the training, but now you have to deal with all these administrative headaches. You start, I get really frustrated because I am a pretty easygoing go but I have people sometimes in the office who are arguing over it's too hot, it's too cold. I don't like dogs, stuff like that and it's really frustrating sometimes and you just want to say come on people can't you just get along?

That has been a huge lesson and that's something that I've taken drastic steps towards making sure that we go through a really rigorous hiring process and we're hiring for culture and fit within the office now. Not that we didn't do that before, but we're much, much more thorough about it and to the point where even if we have somebody who is a perfect technical fit, has great experience, if there's a concern at all of them not fitting into the office, we can't hire that person because everybody has to get along and that's something that I kind of took from a couple years ago. I went on a tour of Zappos out in Las Vegas.

JAIME TARDY: I love Tony Hsieh.

SCOTT SKINGER: It was really, really cool. I got to go out to lunch with him just me and my director of sales and marketing. We went out to lunch with Tony and just one of his colleagues. It was pretty inspiring. It was pretty cool.

JAIME TARDY: That's amazing. Let's go back for just a second. What advice do you have for personal balance, because you said you figured out stuff? What do you do now? I know now of course you are in a much different position but what did you learn? What advice do you have?

SCOTT SKINGER: Just to be honest with you, I still struggle with this today. It's a tough, tough thing. I love my business. I love being an entrepreneur and it's what I am passionate about. So it's not just about making money for me. It's about doing it and it's kind of an addiction to wanting to go back to the computer. There's that drawback to my office, in my home, where I might circle the house looking for something to do and it's easy attractor pulling me back into my office to do stuff.

JAIME TARDY: That's a very good way of putting it. Such a very good way because I know so many other people that feel the exact same way. It's like this draw, even to your smart phone, to be like oh well I can just finish sending this quick email.

SCOTT SKINGER: Exactly and it's tough. Now I need to balance. I've got three kids and my daughter, my youngest daughter is 7, so she is still at the age where she seeks me out and she really is good about nagging in a nice way I'll say it because she wants that attention so it works really well there. My older son, we have more of a bond, he likes sports and he plays football so I am able to spend time with him. But my middle son is more of a challenge because our interests aren't as much in alignment and it's something that I need to, with my middle son and my wife, schedule time out.

Just like you would with a business appointment, I need to carve out time in my schedule. This afternoon, for example, normally during the week I don't schedule time out to go on a date let's say with my wife, but today at 1:00 I scheduled time out and I literally need to put in my schedule, so from 1:00 to 3:00 we're going out to, she wants to get a massage. I've never gone to get a massage. It kind of freaks me out but I am going to get a massage today with my wife because she wants to. It's just something that I have to do personally because if I don't do that, some business need will come out and that stresses me out.

I think that's the biggest advice I can give is just to make sure that you are constantly checking yourself and for me it's on a daily basis. I've got a priority list on a daily basis. I apply that whole constant and never-ending improvement thing to my organization techniques. I struggle with it. I get distracted just like anybody else and so, for me, it's important to review my tasks on a daily basis and make sure that I've got my schedule in alignment.

JAIME TARDY: Beautiful. How do you measure that stuff? I know with constant improvement you're always of course trying to get little bits of improvement but how do you measure whether it be in business or in personal life?

SCOTT SKINGER: That's a good question. I don't know that I necessarily measure. I think that for me the best measurement I guess, well I guess this is a good example. We started at TrainSignal using what's called I guess a scrum technique and I don't want to misquote it or mis-say how it's actually implemented but the way we use it, we found that we would set quarterly goals but when we set our goals, whether they are business or personal, you kind of like write them down, you push them aside and you look at them like once a week or something.

You get kind of distracted by all the other stuff that comes up on a daily and weekly basis and so it's really easy not to focus on those goals that at the beginning of the quarter you said were so important to work on. So now we do this thing called a weekly scrum and basically with myself and I work directly with, I have four managers who work underneath me. We will meet once a week and they will talk about everything that they are going to get done this week and it kind of makes them accountable for do these things match up to what I am supposed to be working on? Do they match up to my quarterly goals? At the end of the week then, the following Monday, so we do this every Monday, they will review their last week's goals and we'll kind of go through what did you get done? What did you accomplish and then we'll also talk about the next week's goals.

The idea is not to have an exhaustive discussion about them. Really it should be done and completed within five minutes. It's more or less to highlight them on a weekly basis and make sure that they are being accountable for what they said they were going to do and then personally they are more accountable for tying those weekly goals into the quarterly goes. I found that to be really effective and just making sure that we are getting those little incremental things done. The same things happen then from the managers down to the employees that they manage. We had a real problem with products not getting done on time and in a year's time, after implementing these technologies, after starting the whole scrum with all the individual employees, we are way more effective.

Before we would have product releases that were two months late. Now we're getting them done early because people are breaking the course production down into small parts and able to get done the parts; they realize they need to record two videos let's say this week and they get those two videos done and when they start doing each piece by piece, by the time they have accomplished their goals, they are a month ahead of schedule sometimes. It has really worked out successful.

JAIME TARDY: That's brilliant.

SCOTT SKINGER: I apply that same thing to myself, on a personal level. I also have a weekly list of the stuff that I feel is most important to get done. On a daily basis, I am kind of asking myself "Is what I'm doing today tying into these weekly goals that I said were so important at the beginning of the week?" I think that discipline is helpful in conditioning your mind to make sure that you are focusing on the most important things. You know how it is, on a daily basis, there is always something that is kind of screaming for your attention that seems to be the most important thing but if you took a step back you'd realize that it's really not that important. It just seems that important because somebody needs instant attention.

JAIME TARDY: It's funny; I do that exact same thing in my business but I haven't pulled it out to my personal life. Usually I just come up with the things I want to do, like during the summer, all these things I want to do but I don't do a week by week. That's a really good idea. It's funny; it works out really well in business but I never really pulled it over to the personal life. I'll have to go do that later. Thank you for that. That's great.

SCOTT SKINGER: No problem.

JAIME TARDY: I would love to get back to a little bit more about talking about JVs because I know now sort of that's the hot topic. I want to talk about JVs for just a minute and then I know you have a second business too so I would love to talk about that a little bit. First the question having to do with JVs is do you have any advice on finding JV deals and really building that relationship with a new JV, especially if you just first met them?

SCOTT SKINGER: Sure. I can actually, I think this will work and segue perfectly into the second business, as well, because that's how I got introduced to the second business opportunity.

JAIME TARDY: Good, see I'm good!

SCOTT SKINGER: Very impressive. One thing that's really important to us; I'm really, really passionate about our products and about our brands. You may hear people say that but I really, really mean it. What I mean by that is a lot of people create IT training products, but we create IT training products and we make sure that they are of the utmost highest quality. We back them up. We help our customers out. We make sure that we are teaching to not only pass the certification, that's honestly a secondary goal. We're teaching to make sure that people understand how to do something and how to better themselves.

We kind of carried that forward into how we approach JV deals as well. We have an affiliate program and anybody could sign up for an affiliate program but they have to be approved and we're pretty thorough, pretty picky I guess, about who we let into the actual affiliate program. We don't want our brand represented by somebody who is looking to make a quick but. When you talk about affiliates and that type of JV, it's not a great mesh for us meaning your traditional affiliate is selling some of the scammier stuff on the internet and they are able to make more money that way. We don't match up well with companies like that.

When we do JV deals, we're really looking for good business relationships with other solid businesses and people who have already established themselves. Some people who we've been real successful with, in general, bloggers who are really passionate about the technologies that they're taking on or actual companies themselves who create certification products or create certifications for products. There's a wireless certification company, for example, and we'll JV with a company like that because we're able to partner with them, be the authorized reseller of their products and then be able to strike a deal with them that works out really well.

JAIME TARDY: How do you find them?

SCOTT SKINGER: One of the most successful JV deals that we've had that actually turned into my second business was when I was doing research for products about five years ago. At this point, I was still an instructor and I was doing a lot of research. The product was Microsoft Exchange Server, which is an email server that Microsoft makes. Every time I did a search for just something technical that I was looking for to add to my course, this website kept popping up over and over and over again in Google. I didn't understand it because I would go there and it was this really shoddy looking website with an Israeli domain petri.co.il and that just didn't make sense. It didn't register.

What I ended up doing, you know I am not a salesperson by nature, so it's kind of out of my general personality traits to just contact somebody and try to sell them but I did. I contacted Daniel Petri and had talked to him and basically asked him would you be willing to sell our product on your website and essentially what I had proposed to him was I think that our product would do really well, if you wrote a recommendation for the product. In line within any of the actual web pages, the proposal was you would put Daniel Petri recommends this blah, blah, blah product and make it sound real genuine, you know, that he really genuinely liked the products.

We went through a courting process as well to make sure that he really did like the product. We sent him a lot of the courses. I sent him the exchange server course and he was real comfortable with the training and liked the training so he felt comfortable kind of attaching his name to it. In doing so, at the time, it doubled our sales and it was a huge, huge win for us because I found this affiliate, this JV deal, just really out of nowhere. Doubled the company sales and then Daniel Petri, he was getting three times as much ad revenue as he ever had before, because he was just kind of doing everything on his own and was working with advertisers but wasn't really doing that well.

What that led to about a year later Daniel wanted to sell the website for whatever reason, I'm not sure exactly why, but because I knew how successful it was for TrainSignal, I felt comfortable buying the website. Had I not known that, honestly I would have never bought the website. If you looked at it, you would have thought man, especially for the price he was asking, I mean we are talking about multiple six-figures that he was asking for the website and it just didn't make sense.

JAIME TARDY: Sometimes you see those websites and you're like wait a minute. This?

SCOTT SKINGER: Exactly. So we were able to put together a deal that allowed, because at the time, TrainSignal was successful but we weren't that successful where we could just go out and pay six figures for a website like that was not a big deal. What we had to deal was put together an agreement where we're paying him out over time and just it worked. I knew that I really, really wanted to make it work because I wanted to have the website and at that point it was really more for TrainSignal's traffic and for TrainSignal's revenue than it was for the third party advertising revenue that came in from the site.

We ended up buying the website and right now we've cut down a lot of the traffic that's sent from the website to TrainSignal and it's an IT knowledge base website by the way. It's articles and information that techies would be looking up. So if you, let's say forgot your password in Windows XP, if you type it into Google, that particular page ranks really well so that page will pop up and it might be the top five search results. The site in itself still ranks really, really well in Google. That's kind of how the traffic gets to the site. It just wasn't working that well for TrainSignal as TrainSignal grew so now the website itself is really all about it's a different business model. It's all about third-party advertising, which is kind of interesting in itself. There's a lot of different venues and different ways that website captures money and that's something I could talk about as well, if you're interested.

JAIME TARDY: Yes, definitely. There's so many different models and usually with the third-party advertising you have to have tons and tons and tons of traffic. You bought this website that had a lot of traffic I'm assuming and did you change anything once you bought it having to do with the third party advertising?

SCOTT SKINGER: We changed a few things. We bought the website and then, you know, initially I didn't know what to do with it. I'm not technical from a website development standpoint and I didn't have anybody on staff who was. So literally for two years we had this website and for people who are at all techie or know Microsoft products, it was built on Microsoft Front Page so it was really, really clunky. The website itself had about 1,500 pages and if you wanted to update a page you literally have to manually update the page and manually update all links and information in the page. Just the process of posting a page, not the content writing or anything, would take 45 minutes just to get a page up. It was really clunky.

JAIME TARDY: That's ridiculous. So not only did it not look great, it wasn't good on the backend either. Great.

SCOTT SKINGER: Exactly. But the magic of it, for whatever reason, it ranked really, really well on Google and advertisers knew this and took advantage of it because, at the time, Daniel didn't really know to the full extent how much to charge and how to monetize that and such and neither did we. For two years, it really kind of sat around and it benefitted TrainSignal, but on its own it didn't really do so much. At the time, I think, when we first purchased it, it probably brought in about $150,000 in advertising revenue so it wasn't like it was terrible by any means. It was still a nice property.

Over the last four or five years, we've partnered with a marketing company and the marketing company, just a small company, and somebody I met at an internet marketing conference that I go to, that's something that might be worth talking about as well a little bit later, but we met then and they were able to transform, part of the JV deal we had with them was they were going to take over all sales and marketing of the website and they had a technical element to what they did and they were able to migrate the entire site from Front Page over to Word Press. So now it's a lot, lot better.

It still has a lot of infrastructure issues just because of the old stuff that was there but everything is automated with the site now. It works a lot better. Advertising, they did a great job over about two years of beefing up the sales and marketing on the site. The site now does about $800,000 in revenue annually.

JAIME TARDY: Did you just pay that marketing company and they just did the work for you or did you have like a deal where if they did all the work they'd get a piece of it or something like that?

SCOTT SKINGER: Exactly. We're not working with them currently. We actually discontinued our deal earlier this year but for about two and a half years the deal was they would take a slice of the revenue, actually a slice of the net income. They were responsible for everything on the front end, taking care of and basically managing the entire site. We were responsible for just adding content and then the way it worked was we created an income statement and then whatever the net income was they took a percentage of that net income. We really overpaid them compared to what would normally be considered fair.

In a situation like that today, I would offer a lot less money, but when they took it on, they took on a major, major infrastructure project to migrate it over to Word Press and they also, I guess one of the big things I left out, the site itself ranked really well in Google and migrating it over to Word Press you could lose all those rankings.

JAIME TARDY: Yes you can.

SCOTT SKINGER: So they were really, really good at migrating all the pages over, making sure there were redirects in place in order to make sure that we kept all that traffic. We really lost no traffic from the activities that they did.

JAIME TARDY: That's impressive and it was really a no risk deal for you if they were taking out of the net profit. The more money they make you the more money they make, which works out well.

SCOTT SKINGER: Yes, it was a little scary. You're entering into a deal and I didn't know the guys all that well. We had talked for awhile and I felt pretty comfortable with them but it was still a little scary not knowing what you are getting into but you are right, it was more or less a no risk deal and I felt that it just needed to be done so we took a step forward and it ended up working out. Just from a scale standpoint to understand, the site gets about 2 million unique visitors a month and then about 4 million page views to give you an idea of kind of the scale of the site and just some perspective as to what we were dealing with and if you lost those rankings, probably 85 percent of those rankings were driven by Google organic traffic.

JAIME TARDY: That would have hurt. We've got a couple more minutes left. I would love to touch on, you said internet marketing conferences, before we start wrapping up. Tell me a little bit about how that's helped you and what you've done.

SCOTT SKINGER: Our business itself is obviously education and it would be easy to kind of avoid the internet marketing stuff, not that we don't need it, but not go to conference and focus more on the education side. But something I think has been really critical to our success was to start networking and going to some of these internet marketing conferences and start to meet some of the people that are really influential in the industry. About three years ago, first I started off going to some of the larger conferences like Pub Con or there's some other search engine strategies. But you have attendees too, you know, 500 to 1,000 people and you kind of blend into the crowd.

Then we started going to, I kind of took a leap of faith and I went to this conference called The Elite Retreat, which is a conference that's offered by Jeremy Shoemaker, shoemoney.com and he's well known in internet marketing circles. The premise of this conference was that basically 30 people go. It's $5,000 to go to the conference so it's super expensive but the people who are there and the speakers who are there are really, really big and so by spending the money and going to this conference, I was able to really meet a lot of influential speakers, people like Jeremy himself. I think the first one I went to Brian Clark from Copy Blogger, is that right?

JAIME TARDY: Yes.

SCOTT SKINGER: Was there. Aaron Wall who is a really big SEO was there as well. It was really cool. At first I went there and I was really more in awe than talking to people because it's just not in my nature to reach out and network like that. I was also in awe of the other attendees where it was like oh my these guys are a lot more technical and there's a lot of affiliates here and domainers, but it was really cool to just be amongst that group and start to meet people. I have gone now, I think, I went this year and it was either the fourth or fifth time I have been now and now I've formed friendships and that's where that marketing partnership, for the Petri website, was formed was at this conference and a lot of other friendships as well where things happen, people do you favors, you're able to get stuff that you weren't able to get before, as far as access to people and I think it has been really, really helpful from that perspective alone.

I think that's something I would stress to anybody is make sure you're taking the time to invest in yourself and make sure you're going to things like this, you know, meeting people in the industry, going to meet ups. You can learn a ton from other people and I think it's good for the psyche. I think being an entrepreneur sometimes can be scary and lonely and I think it's also just good in general for business opportunities.

JAIME TARDY: Nice. I haven't heard that specific information. I hear, I talk to a lot of people and they always say conferences, conferences, conferences but that's a really different take to sort of say yeah conference with 30 people is a big difference compared to a conference with 1,000 people. That's great advice.

SCOTT SKINGER: It makes a big difference. I think if you're kind of with the smaller circles and able to talk to less people and have more of an impact helping people or getting help from people, you're in a much better situation. I've gone to a lot of conferences where there's thousands of people and it's pretty intimidating. I mean you're not going to just go up to somebody and start talking to them and even a speaker, if you want to talk to the large conference, they're being bombarded. There's 20 or 30 other people who are also trying to talk to them so they are kind of, it's not an environment that the speaker probably feels that comfortable with really digging deep with you either.

If you can get to stuff like that and even if it's not a big name, I think even local meet ups, you know, through meetup.com I think can be really helpful and you just have to pick and choose. You may go to one and not really be too fond of the people there, well choose another one and really get out there and talk to people because I think that's the best way to start learning and getting motivation. I think that's one of the biggest challenges as an entrepreneur, you know, finding motivation to kind of go on, on a daily basis.

JAIME TARDY: Great. What are some resources that you turn to throughout your whole time as an entrepreneur? What really helped you as far as resources whether it's books or tools? What's worked for you?

SCOTT SKINGER: I mentioned the conferences. I think that's a big thing. I don't want to throw that to the side. I mentioned Tony Robbins earlier one and I'm kind of thinking back to some early days when I was more, I think when things were more unsure and I was a little bit not feeling so great on a day to day basis of what was going on. I love Tony Robbins and just even listening to some of his old power talks I think they were called can be really motivational and it's not the type of thing, at least for me personally, I don't listen to it once and then I'm great for six months. It's almost like, if you listen to it a couple times a week, it inspires you for that short 24 to 48 hour bursts that you need to kind of get through the day.

Realize, like in my case, when things weren't going so great early on, that things aren't so bad and you start putting stuff in perspective a little bit and instead of sometimes me feeling sorry for yourself or not knowing what direction to go because you have so many different things that need to get done, you focus on action and you focus on the fact that honestly just being in the United States, we have a lottery of having opportunity right here in front of us. I think it kind of opened my eyes a lot to just knowing that you're already pretty lucky to even have this opportunity to even try this versus some of the other people who are out there and are struggling to have shoes or food or some basic necessities.

JAIME TARDY: Yes, putting that perspective on life really helps in general definitely.

SCOTT SKINGER: Another person to put out there, Tim Ferriss. I love reading Tim Ferriss. I think he's a great resource. The 4-Hour Work Week, it's a good book. I wouldn't say, I think that to a budding entrepreneur can maybe lead to more stress and anxiety just because there's not necessarily a lot of actionable things to do out of there, but I think it's great reading material and Tim Ferriss has a lot of great information on his blog that you can kind of pick and choose from and learn a lot about him.

JAIME TARDY: Yes, that's a great resource. Beautiful. What do you say, this is the last question I ask everyone, what's one action that listeners can take this week to move them forward toward their goal of a million?

SCOTT SKINGER: Well I hate to go back to something I mentioned earlier but I think it's so, so important to just get started and focus on constant and never-ending improvement. It's the number one thing that I can tell anybody because I'm a huge proponent of the internet business and it's just kind of in infancy right now. There's so much opportunity in creating information products and such on the web. Just get started. I think that you can make the product better. It doesn't have to be perfect when you first launch it.

Reid Hoffman from LinkedIn had something I loved. He said, "You need to launch early enough that you're embarrassed of your product" and you know he's talking about stuff maybe at a different scale in dealing with LinkedIn but that applies to everything. I mean if you're too worried about what people are going to think of your first product that you launch, I think that you're waiting too long and I think that's something that anybody can take, get that first product out there, listen to your customers, figure out how to make the product better and just get started with it. I think that's the most important thing that anybody can do and don't get bogged down with all the different things there are to run a business. You can only do a few things everyday so focus on the most important things you can do that day.

JAIME TARDY: That's sort of where the whole scrum technique that you use works into. So that never-ending improvement plus doing it every week is really what's going to move you forward. Great.

SCOTT SKINGER: Exactly.

JAIME TARDY: Beautiful. Where can we find more information on TrainSignal, on you online? I know you're on Facebook and Twitter.

SCOTT SKINGER: Correct, yes, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. If you just look up Scott Skinger or TrainSignal, just two words basically TrainSignal, you can find us. TrainSignal's website is at www.trainsignal.com. If you're interested in the Petri website is petri.co.il and I'm more than happy to chat and help anybody out. So of anybody has any questions or needs just any sort of advice, I'm pretty passionate about helping out budding entrepreneurs or people who have been doing it for awhile. I love just talking and sharing information.

JAIME TARDY: Thank you for that, Scott. I'd highly recommend anyone check out TrainSignal too because you can see their guarantee and you can sort of just see how professional and nice the site is with testimonials and all that other stuff. So if you're interested in an internet marketing website, it's a good site to just check out too and see what works for them. Beautiful; well thanks so much for coming on today, Scott. I really appreciate it.

SCOTT SKINGER: Thanks, Jaime. It was actually a lot of fun. I'm thankful for your for doing it and congratulations yourself. You've got a great thing going and I'm honestly inspired by your personal life balance as well. I was kind of reading through that and I think it's pretty awesome that you've kind of taken that up front and said hey I want to be a millionaire but I also want to have great life quality and I think that's just absolutely awesome and the best way of looking at stuff. So congratulations for that.

JAIME TARDY: Thanks so much, Scott. Take care, Scott. Thank you so much.

SCOTT SKINGER: You too, have a good day.

Just to note, you can download the top ten tips from these millionaire interviews on the blog.

Thanks for listening. You can find out more great information like this on EventualMillionaire.com.

Tags: internet business, internet marketing, millionaire interview, online business, Scott Skinger

Categories: All, Business, Business Model, Millionaire Interviews

Hi I’m Jaime. Each and every week I bring you the top business advice from the people who know best.

Learn More