Gold Nuggets
- When you’re running a business, as shallow as it sounds, you need to look at the financials.
- You’ve got to keep trying new things and pick yourself up, brush yourself down and just get on with the next project.
- You’re not ready to go fully and start your own podcast to begin with appearing as a guest or an expert on other podcasts is a great way to kind of dip your toes and see if it’s for you
Every guest you interviewed generally will share it with their audience too. So it’s a good way of spreading the word about your business. - If you’re guesting on other people’s podcasts, you’re pushing, pushing yourself in front of audiences who perhaps wouldn’t have had exposure to you or you, or your product or service.
- When it comes to cash flow knowing is always better than not knowing because not knowing is not going to save your business.
Meet James Mulvany
Our guest is James Mulvany, a UK based entrepreneur responsible for launching more than five internet companies. All doing interesting things with incredible teams in the online media/broadcasting & content spaces.
Smart Man, Smarter Woman References
We talk about a lot in each episode; however, we don’t want you to miss a thing! Here are some key items were mentioned if you want to take a closer look.
Website Recommendations:
https://radio.co/
https://www.matchmaker.fm/
https://www.podcast.co/
Website
https://jamesm.com/
If you want to learn more about James Mulvany, you can following him on social media at:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamesmulvany/
Learn more about our Cloud Accounting Services here
Transcript
Steve Loates: Welcome to the Smart Man, Smarter Woman, a podcast for entrepreneurs by entrepreneurs, and thank you everyone for joining us today. I am Steve Loates.
Juliet Aurora: And I am Juliet Aurora.
Steve Loates: And we are your co-hosts. But before I introduce our very special guest for today’s show, let’s hear from my wonderful co-host, the smarter woman herself, Juliet. How are you doing today? Juliet? How was your swim this morning?
Juliet Aurora: It was excellent. It was a little on the short side. I slept in a little [00:00:30] bit, so it was a little on the short side, but no it’s a great way to start out my morning.
Steve Loates: Awesome.
Juliet Aurora: I’m actually really excited about our conversation today. I always love sitting down with young entrepreneurs and pretty much everybody is young nowadays compared to me. But young entrepreneurs who take one area of business and create several different businesses around this one area. And just the thought process that kind of goes behind that. I’m interested to hear [00:01:00] from our guest today as to how that all evolved.
Steve Loates: Excellent.
Juliet Aurora: So over to you, Steve, so we can get started.
Steve Loates: Okay, well thank you Juliet. Now, as I mentioned at the beginning, our podcast is for and about entrepreneurs. Our goal with each episode is hopefully to provide you with some entertainment, but most importantly, value insights, hopefully some gold nuggets that can help you on your journey wherever you may be on that journey. And today we have a really great show for you. We have a very special guest all [00:01:30] the way across the pond, as they say, from the UK. His name is James Mulvany and he is an entrepreneur that helps brands and other entrepreneurs use audio to grow. And he does it in many ways, including being the founder of Radio.co, Podcast.co, and MatchMaker.fm.
Just a quick background, Radio.co is a radio station management tool. [00:02:00] I’ll let James go into more detail if you would like. Podcast.co is a full service podcasting platform, including hosting and distribution, and then MatchMaker.fm, which is actually where I sort of met James initially indirectly, which I love his description. It’s like Tinder, but for podcasters. I’m sure we’re going to talk about MatchMaker a much more during our show today.
As [00:02:30] I was reading a little bit on his bio, he does sound very much like our kind of guy. His passions are helping people grow their audiences and businesses. That’s awesome. But he loves food, check. He loves wine, check. He loves sunshine and cooking, check, check. And listens to lots of music. It sounds great, so without further ado, let’s bring our guests into the show, James Mulvany. [00:03:00] Welcome James, and thank you for joining us today from the UK.
James Mulvany: Thank you very much, Juliet and Steve, for having me on your show. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Steve Loates: Thank you. You’ve got so many things going on, I didn’t really know where to start. But the perhaps where we will start is could you share a little bit about your own entrepreneurial journey and perhaps how you got where you are right now?
James Mulvany: Yeah, absolutely. [00:03:30] So for me being an entrepreneur, it was kind of something I picked up at a very young age. I, believe it or not, have never, ever worked for anyone else. I’ve never had a job. So the first thing I did when I finished doing my GCSEs at school was I got a PayPal account on my 16th birthday. This was like back in 2003. And I just thought, right, okay, what can I do? What skills have I got? How can I make some money? And that was really it. I was off. So the first business, if you like, I ever had was I used to do [00:04:00] kind of graphic design, logos, websites. And I used to make those annoying little flashy, animated banners that you used to see on websites. So that was really like what I spent my summer holiday just after school doing.
And yeah, I kind of just caught the bug. My friends were going out doing part time jobs, or getting paper rounds, or working in McDonald’s. And I thought, well, I don’t really fancy doing that. I’m going to see if I can use this thing in front of me here, the computer, to make some money. And really, that’s just the kind of the starting point. Obviously I then went on to sort of [00:04:30] run a few different businesses. I’ve had successes. I’ve had failures as well over the last 15 years, learned a lot along the way and I think I’m kind of sort of starting to get there now.
I know what I’m doing to some extent, you know. So yeah, at the moment, obviously running three different services, three different products, Radio.co, Podcast.com, MatchMaker.fm all have got kind of complementary offerings so there is some crossover in our audiences. But also as well, each of them has their own sort of separate audience too, separate customer base as well.
Juliet Aurora: [00:05:00] So you started out in graphic design space site. And yes, some of us will remember those flashing animated. Some of the people in our audience won’t, but the flashing animated banners. But over the years, you’ve said you had multiple businesses, both successes and failures. Have they all been kind of in the same industry? Have you kind of found that you’ve had success in one [00:05:30] area versus not as much success in another area?
James Mulvany: I mean, yeah, certainly they’ve all been online ventures. I did run a project called MCR Live, which is kind of a radio slash content type service here in Manchester for a couple of years, which ran between 2017 and ’19. And we ran that two years and in one way it was a success. It attracted a big audience. We got lots of people involved with project. It was really fun to run. But then [00:06:00] in some ways it was a failure because it didn’t make any money, and it got to a stage where I decided, okay, enough’s enough, we’ve got a call that day.
For me it was all about creating that audience first and creating that buzz. It was a real passion project. We got probably 50 or so DJs, musicians all involved creating output for the radio station. And we had a team of contributors who’d go out to gigs and write reviews on the gigs, and review restaurants, and all this sort of thing. So it was a real kind of community-led focused [00:06:30] project.
But unfortunately we couldn’t find a sponsor that would just cover the bills. And that was my initial target was like, I don’t really care if we don’t make any money from this. It was just meant to be something that would kind of pay for itself. But unfortunately after two years of trying, we didn’t. So that was one of the sort of failures, but you know, on the other hand, at the moment I have Radio.co, which has about 5,000 clients all over the world and are powering thousands of different radio stations. We have podcasts.co which powers around 2000 podcasts [00:07:00] now, I think, which is only around about a year old. And MatchMaker, which is we launched this year and it’s grown very quickly too. I think we’re about to hit 5,000 users on that as well. So that’s grown really quickly in a very short space of time.
So I think when you’re an entrepreneur, you have to go through sometimes negative experiences. I’ve had other businesses as well that haven’t worked out, products that we spent money and time investing in building and they end up just either kind of [00:07:30] just fading away, or you end up selling them on, but sometimes you sell them on a loss effectively.
I think that’s just the nature of what I do, and I think I’ve accepted that now. I think maybe 10 years ago, or maybe it was about eight years ago, I had my first sort of significant failure where I probably spent north of a hundred thousand pounds in investing in the products in terms of when I look at the resource that we devoted to it, and it just wasn’t working. You know, you take that pretty hard to begin with, but I think nowadays [00:08:00] when I have a failure, it’s not the end of the world, so to speak.
Juliet Aurora: And I guess, and I don’t know what the direction is that Steve wanted kind of want to take this podcast, but I want to spend a couple of minutes because we don’t often hear from entrepreneurs and business owners who are willing to talk about that every business was not a success. Most people say, yes, I’ve had this business and I was successful and I sold it. And then I moved on to this business. And so you don’t have a lot of business owners who are willing [00:08:30] to be vulnerable and say, Hey, I tried something, it didn’t work. So if you don’t mind, I would like to just talk a little bit about how did you know that it was time to say, okay, yes, this isn’t working. I need to move on to something else.
James Mulvany: That’s a good question.
Juliet Aurora: Because sometimes that’s [inaudible 00:08:49].
James Mulvany: Yeah. I guess the first question is how do you measure success? Of course, when you’re running a business, as shallow as it sounds, you need to look at the financials. [00:09:00] If your business is not making enough money to support itself, and you feel like you’ve given it a reasonable amount of time, because of course, yes, sometimes you get really lucky and something will take off overnight. And other times you have to work at it sometimes for two, three years before you even start breaking even.
I think you can kind of see if you’re on a trajectory or a path to start getting to that level where you’re breaking even, and you’ve maybe invested X amount of money in building a product. Of course, you’re not going to make all that money back to begin with. [00:09:30] But if you’re not on that trajectory to kind of start breaking even at some point, and you can’t see a clear way of getting out of that sort of trench that you might be in. I think that’s probably when you should call it a day, because, of course, sometimes the problem with businesses is the longer you run them for the more debt you rack up or the more you end up investing in them.
And that was very much the case with MCR Live, which was the sort of radio and content project which we have here in Manchester. It did serve a good purpose in that we used it as a kind of guinea [00:10:00] pig for our Radio.co platform. So it was really good for product development and research. We learned a lot from it, and also it was a great case study for the platform. But after two years we’d had several conversations with sponsors, brands. It was some of the alcohol brands or local businesses. We’d had kind of interest in sponsorship, which is really how we were going to monetize it. We had a decent audience. It was about getting sponsorship.
[00:10:30] But unfortunately we just couldn’t get someone to sign on the dotted line. And I had sort of three, four members of staff who were working full time on that, which obviously cost quite a bit of money to support it. We had a studio space which we rented, which obviously costs more money. And I think it got to a stage where eventually we’d achieved success in that, yes, we had this audience. And yes, we had lots of people engaged with the project, and it was a real fun project to have. We ran events, et cetera. But ultimately you’ve got to look at the bottom line. I think that as [00:11:00] an entrepreneur, if you have like an endless bottomless pit of money, then of course you could just run something like that for years and it would be fine. But I don’t. So it was one of these things that was just like, right okay, enough’s enough.
Juliet Aurora: Okay. Thank you. Thank you for sharing.
James Mulvany: That’s all right. I don’t mind. I think it’s interesting that you say that a lot of people don’t want to talk about failures, because for me, I think it’s always important to learn from failures. Ultimately every entrepreneur will have successes and will have failures. You’ve got to keep trying new things and [00:11:30] pick yourself up, brush yourself down, and just get on with the next project.
Juliet Aurora: Yeah, yeah.
Steve Loates: No, absolutely. I mean, we’re big believers. We never say failures.
James Mulvany: No.
Steve Loates: It’s always successes and learnings. And we have had lots of both, lots of learnings along the way. And one of the great things about being entrepreneur, I mean, it’s such a great ride. I mean, speaking from personal experience, but even [00:12:00] as you reach my age, which is certainly older than yourself. I mean, it’s not that long ago that Juliet and I were involved in a business that we’d been doing for a few years, and we were on the verge of closing it. It wasn’t working as well as we hoped it would. We thought we’d done everything right. And we both brought lots of experience to it, but even [00:12:30] then we could not get it to work the way it was. And it was only through taking one final step that we hadn’t tried before that we were able to finally turn it around, finally get it to where it needed to be.
And many years later the business is still thriving, won awards and been recognized within our industry. But people look at that, right, and they go, oh, look at those people. They’re so successful. But if [00:13:00] they would have had that conversation with us not that many years ago, you know what I mean? We had tears dripping in our own glasses of wine and we were very, very close to shutting it down, probably more close than we care to admit to ourselves sometimes. So it is always a journey. And I believe one of the keys to success for an entrepreneur is knowing when to quit. I mean, we have to be tenacious. We have to be stubborn. [00:13:30] But we also have to be wise enough to know okay, it’s time.
James Mulvany: Yeah. I think one of the other reasons last year when I decided to wrap up MCR Live was due to the fact that we were about to launch Podcast.co. And I do believe as an entrepreneur, you’ve only got so much kind of mental bandwidth to focus on things. I think for me, I like having a few different things on the go, three different businesses, different projects, like for example, MatchMaker, I’m sure we’ll get onto shortly. But MatchMaker currently there’s no [00:14:00] way of monetization on that. It’s just a free platform, but I’ve got no doubt and I’m very confident in that service that we will be able to monetize it. And of course, we do get clients from MatchMakers signing up for podcasts.co. There is a kind of benefit to it. But again, sometimes you have to get momentum with a certain product or service before you can actually sort of start to read to reap the rewards and benefits.
Steve Loates: Absolutely. Well, I mean, speaking of MatchMaker, why don’t you tell us a little bit about where that came [00:14:30] from in your head and, and I guess why podcasting?
James Mulvany: Absolutely. So, yeah, I’ll just kind of start by giving a summary. So MatchMaker is a platform to connect to podcasters with guests. Because about 60% of podcasts are based on interviews and having guests on. You know, I’ve done podcasts in the past, both as a guest and hosted it. And sometimes finding guests is not always that easy, but it’s one of these things that if you want to push out content on a regular basis, you’ve got [00:15:00] to make sure you have this constant supply of guests. And sometimes that can be a lot of work. So it really just came out of looking at the market. We’d built podcasts.co. This was probably about a year ago, sort of last summer. And we were looking at other opportunities. How could we build funnels to drive more traffic onto our website?
And one of the ideas we came up with was let’s put up a couple of landing pages seeing if people are interested in booking guests for their show. And the other landing page was, are you interested in being a guest [00:15:30] on more podcasts, on more shows? And before we’d even start writing any code to build the actual platform, we kind of tested this idea with these landing pages. It’s just a simple Google form we had on each. But what we noticed was that people were actually responding. We had people filling out effectively like a profile. So it wasn’t just like, enter your name and email. It was tell us about yourself. What sort of shows you interested in? Who would you like to connect with?
People were going to great lengths to actually complete this information, but we have no way of connecting these two lists together. [00:16:00] So really that’s how the idea for MatchMaker came about. We thought, wouldn’t it be great if we could actually connect these two audiences. We weren’t just using it as a way of promoting Podcast.co. We actually had a platform to get these two groups of folks engaged with each other, and also start building valuable relationships between them, and also having us as a byproduct because we have the Podcast.co logo. A lot of people that are guesting on podcasts end up starting their own. So it’s [00:16:30] a sort of a three-way relationship really between the guest, the podcaster, and then also we’re there as well. So that’s pretty much how the idea came about. It’s currently unmonetized. It’s totally free to sign up.
I think we will always have a free option. We probably have a premium model moving forward, which we’ll probably introduce like towards the end of this year. But really for the last few months, it’s just about being able to grow that platform and making sure that users are kind of satisfied and engaged with it. One of the ways [00:17:00] we’ve done that is just by kind of focusing on quality really. So, yeah, we’ve got 5,000 users now, which sounds like a lot, but for the first couple of months it was a couple of hundred users. Then we sort of worked so our way up towards a thousand, and then 2000. It’s starting to grow at a more rapid pace, I suppose, because of word of mouth as well. But to begin with it was we’ve just wanted to make sure that it was good quality guests on there and good quality podcasts. And I think that kind of spurred the conversation between the two user groups.
Juliet Aurora: One thing I’d [00:17:30] like to highlight that you talked about. I’m not sure if our audience even paid attention to it, but I think is very important, is you actually said that when you started MatchMaker and you built out these Google forms you were testing the market. You didn’t even have a product.
James Mulvany: Absolutely, yeah.
Juliet Aurora: Whereas most entrepreneurs, and I am a hundred percent guilty of this, will not go out and market anything, sell anything, until I have the entire product built in the background. [00:18:00] So I think it’s so brilliant and I can completely respect it because I’m not capable of doing it, is putting it out there first to see whether or not anybody wants it before you actually invest any time and money. So I just wanted to call that out.
James Mulvany: Yeah. It’s the cheapest possible minimum viable product, isn’t it, just two Google forms, and we probably spent an hour putting them together. [00:18:30] Weirdly, this product is growing far quicker than I ever anticipated. It’s really exciting. There’s so many different avenues we can go down now. We don’t necessarily have to stick to podcasting. We could kind of go down the influencer route. We could be connecting podcasters with brands and advertisers. So there’ lots and lots of opportunities that we’ve kind of identified where we could go with this. But for now, it’s been just focusing on this kind of one core thing of connecting podcasters and guests.
But yeah, it’s one of these things. I’m [00:19:00] guilty of that as well in the past of just assuming that there’s a demand for something or you think you know better, because it’s your idea so it’s going to be great, right? Then you sometimes invest a lot of time or money building something and ultimately it might not work. Then either your options are you try and pivot or try and create something else, or you just have to move on and try something new. But yeah, it’s probably the first time I’ve done that in a true basis where we’ve literally had like a really scaled down MVP [00:19:30] just to test the market. But I must admit it’s worked. I think I will be trying this again in future. And again, it’s one of these things you hear people talking about and you think, ah, I know better. But actually, sometimes it’s good to listen to other people and their experiences as well.
Juliet Aurora: And I think also that by going this route where you haven’t invested a ton of money. You haven’t spent six months or eight months building out a product, or years building out a product before you take it to market. [00:20:00] You also, I guess, have less emotion invested in it that if it isn’t working for you to pivot and shut it down. Whereas if you’ve spent two years of your life just getting ready to launch, you’re going to hang onto it a lot longer, even if it’s not successful.
James Mulvany: Yeah. And, the other benefit, as well, is we had a list of probably 150 people who were our first users, that they were ready and waiting to sign up. We knew [00:20:30] that there was that intention there. They were looking for a product like this, even though we kind of lied a little bit saying that this was a product that wasn’t really in existence at the time. You know, straight away when you do launch, you can say, look, go and check it out, create your profile. And I think actually, maybe what we did was we actually took that information and created their profiles on behalf of them just so we had our kind of first core group of users already. Because again the problem with building a community like MatchMaker, no one wants to sign up to a ghost town, and unless there’s a great [00:21:00] selection of guests on this platform, then podcasters aren’t likely to sign up and vice versa.
So that was kind of one of the challenges as well, which we thought when we bought it to market in February, we wanted to make sure that we were going to be able to grow both sides of the platform, both podcasts and guests. But we had to kind of try to be careful about to begin with that people weren’t signing up and just being like, this is rubbish, there’s no one on this platform. So yeah, it was really useful having that initial sort of group of people that we can market and sort of get on board.
Steve Loates: [00:21:30] Well, that’s great. I should just mention too, that the website is MatchMaker.fm. for anyone who was interested. We joined and have been very, very happy with it. It’s worked very well for us. We’re a relatively new podcast. So for us, we have lots of contacts within our own industry, but we very much wanted to reach out and find people outside of our industry to share their knowledge. [00:22:00] And it’s just been a great platform for that.
One question I’d love to ask. Not to put you on the spot here, but entrepreneurs, when they’re growing their business and marketing their business, they have so many channels and so many avenues open to them that they can follow along or go in that direction. What would you say to them as to why you believe podcasting should be part of their [00:22:30] marketing from your perspective?
James Mulvany: Absolutely. Good question. I think a couple of points to make. Firstly, if you’re not ready to go fully and start your own podcast to begin with, appearing as a guest or an expert on other podcasts is a great way to kind of dip your toes and see if it’s for you. I think the power of podcasting is that you have the user’s attention. Now, if you look at other platforms, so for example if you’re talking about doing video marketing on Facebook or YouTube. Generally speaking, people watch those kinds of videos between like 30 seconds and a minute. [00:23:00] It’s proven that if you get someone listening to a podcast episode, 70% of people will actually listen for the entire episode, which can be 20, 30 minutes. Now as marketers and business people, there’s no other platform really, online I don’t think anyway, where you have people’s attention for that amount of time.
So it’s really, really powerful to build that rapport with your audience. You know, I’ve just come off this podcast tour where I did 30 podcasts in 30 days. And [00:23:30] as an entrepreneur, you have some great conversations too. It’s fantastic interviewing people if you’re sort of like you guys on the other side of the fence and learning from guests you have on. But as well as a guest it’s just really, really liberating being able to meet some really interesting people. And, of course, the other benefit of doing a podcast like this, where you have guests on is that every guest you interviewed generally will share it with their audience too. So it’s a good way of spreading the word about your business. But then again, if you’re guesting on other people’s podcasts, you’re pushing yourself in front of audiences [00:24:00] who perhaps wouldn’t have had exposure to you or your product or service. So I think it’s a win, win situation. It’s just great fun as well.
Steve Loates: Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, I’m a big believer in podcasts. I mean, the other thing that I think is very important for podcasting going forward is that it’s all about consuming content. And podcasting you can consume anywhere, right? I mean if you’re working out at the gym and you’re driving in your car, you can’t watch videos. Well, you shouldn’t be watching videos while you’re driving your [00:24:30] car. And so it just gives people much more flexibility as well as, like you say, that generally they stick with it longer. So there’s an opportunity to perhaps learn more. But they can consume it really anywhere.
I’ve been wanting to have a podcast for a number of years, and I can see Juliet cringing a little there. She was a tough sell on this because in my own head, I very much had an idea of how I wanted to do this. [00:25:00] I thought it needed to be both of us is co-hosts because we come from different perspectives, different backgrounds. And I thought it would bring much more to it than if it was just me as the host of a podcast. But she fought me on it for I’m going to say three years, maybe a little bit longer than that.
Juliet Aurora: Definitely three years.
Steve Loates: But then when I came up with this name, Smart Man, Smarter Woman, for some reason she seemed really excited [00:25:30] about podcasting.
Juliet Aurora: You keep repeating that, but that is not true.
Steve Loates: It does make a good story though, Juliet, you have to admit.
Juliet Aurora: It makes it sound really shallow sometimes.
Steve Loates: Anyway, the important thing is we’re here now. Right? I think we’re enjoying it. It’s been great meeting lots of very interesting people. You mentioned your [00:26:00] tour, which I thought was quite fascinating. Was there a specific reason why you wanted to try and do 30 podcasts in 30 days? Was it just to see if it could be done or what was the rationale behind it?
James Mulvany: Yeah, firstly, I think it just sounds cool. I wanted to really test MatchMaker out. As the founder, I’d obviously architected and built this platform, with my team obviously. We had launched [00:26:30] it. I could see customers were getting involved and giving us good feedback, and oh yeah, I’ve made connections. And I really just wanted to try this for myself. Plus also it was a good bit of marketing content because I can then push this story out and teach others how this is possible and how to be organized about it, how you can approach it, writing a pitch to appeal to two different types of people. And again, how to actually sort of filter down what sort of podcasts you want to appear on. Because of course there are podcasts on every subject imagine. [00:27:00] Obviously we’re quite heavy on business and marketing, and sales, and personal development style podcasts on the platform.
But also there’s ones about sports, science, anything you can possibly imagine. And of course there’s an expert to match. So we’re really trying to sort of broaden horizons there. But yeah, the tour just seemed like a logical next step. We’d spent the kind of first couple of months, sort of February, March, and then April, kind of building out the audience. So I thought, let’s [00:27:30] just try this out. Obviously as a founder, it’s really good to get hands-on experience using the platform. And of course, one of the byproducts of doing this is that I’ve been able to tell lots and lots of people about MatchMaker as well.
Steve Loates: Absolutely. No. I mean personally, I think it was a great idea, quite brilliant, and I’m sure is going to do very well for you.
Juliet Aurora: Okay, Steve, just don’t get any ideas about us doing 30 podcasts in 30 days.
James Mulvany: It’s a lot of work. It was one of these [00:28:00] things. You know, some days you’d have four lined up and you’d have maybe an hour or half an hour gap between each of them. So really that day had to be devoted just to doing podcasts, which is fine and I think actually I would not normally be able to do this if I wasn’t in lockdown. Because if I’m at the office, I just don’t think I’d have the time to devote to it. Too many people coming up to me and ask me questions, et cetera. So it seemed like a good time to do it as well.
But we finished the 30, and I’m still doing like three, four a week anyway, just because I think I’ve caught the bug of it really. [00:28:30] And of course, there are quite a few that were rescheduled, et cetera. So there’s no reason really to sort of slow down. If you can manage to do one or two a week, it’s fantastic.
Steve Loates: Yeah, that’s certainly what we try to do. Although I guess we haven’t been guests yet. We haven’t been asked.
Juliet Aurora: [inaudible 00:28:52].
Steve Loates: We’re working on it. I know when I say that Juliet just cringes and goes, one more thing for us to do, where are we going to find the time? [00:29:00] But you make the time.
You’ve accomplished a lot in a relatively short period of time. Where would you like to see yourself five years from now?
James Mulvany: That’s a good question. I’m not sure the answer to that. One of the things I’ve never done is I’ve never had really much time off. Since I sort of turned 16, 17, I’ve just worked for my entire adult career. I’m just [00:29:30] turned 33 now. So I’ve been working nonstop for 15 years. I never got to do the whole traveling thing. I never went around the world. So I think at some point within the next five years, I’d either like to be at a stage where I can just either maybe sell one of the companies and go and take a backseat and go and do something like that. Or even just get to a point where I can potentially just take a step away for a year or two and have some time out.
But it’s been an interesting journey. I think [00:30:00] I’m still very much focused on growth. I’m still very kind of hungry to try and achieve more. I think part of that won’t ever leave me. I think it’s one of the things that a lot of successful people have is that in a sense you’re kind of never happy and you’re never satisfied. You’re always want more. So, yeah. But where do I see myself in five years? Well hopefully on a beach somewhere.
Steve Loates: Awesome. Awesome. A beach is a great place to be. I can tell you that Juliet and I have probably made some of our best decisions [00:30:30] laying on a beach. So highly recommended for sure.
Juliet Aurora: Definitely.
Steve Loates: Is there any interest in writing a book?
James Mulvany: Yeah, I’ve written. There is a book I have called Read This If You Want To Start A Podcast, which is kind of like a step-by-step guide. I’ll hold my hands up. I didn’t actually write it all myself. It was a sort of team effort. Do I think I’d write a book? Potentially one day. I don’t know if it’s something that I would necessarily do right away. [00:31:00] And again, it depends what the book would be about. The thing is I think there’s lots and lots of business books now. Everyone is an Amazon bestselling author, you know. So yeah, maybe potentially,
Steve Loates: Well, we’ve written a book, but we are not Amazon bestselling authors. Our book, I guess it was about a five or six year time frame, as I mentioned earlier in the podcast. We start the book where we’re [00:31:30] thinking strongly of closing the business and then it’s sort of the journey that took us from there. Anyway, it’s basically an entrepreneurial journey. It’s pretty honest. We share lots of learnings in that book. It’s hard work writing a book, but it can also be very rewarding at the end of it when you have people come to you, who’ve read it and, and say, thank you very much for writing that. That [00:32:00] I think was the great thing about it.
I think that brings us to the part of the show where we ask some questions. And this is where I thank Mr. James Lipton from Actors Studio. Don’t want to ever be accused of borrowing this without giving credit. And this is where for those that are regular listeners of our podcast, you know we have our questions that we ask every guest. And so are [00:32:30] you ready, James?
James Mulvany: I am. I’m always rubbish at these quick fire rounds, but I’ll give it my best shot.
Steve Loates: You will be awesome. I know you will. So the first question is what one word best defines an entrepreneur?
James Mulvany: Oh, that’s a tricky one. I think perseverance.
Steve Loates: Good answer.
James Mulvany: Yeah?
Steve Loates: What profession, other than your own, would you like to attempt?
James Mulvany: When I was sort of [00:33:00] 15, 16, I was training to be a cabinet maker. So I’d go back to that in a heartbeat. I just think it was a reserved for a hobby rather than a career. But yeah, I love making furniture and woodworking. That would be my choice. That’s going to be my retirement plan, I think.
Steve Loates: Awesome. That’s quite different from what you’re doing.
James Mulvany: Yeah.
Steve Loates: What profession would you like never to attempt?
James Mulvany: Something that was really [00:33:30] like an accountant. I know you guys are accountants, aren’t you? But I don’t think I’d ever be a good accountant.
Steve Loates: Okay, perfect. And I think Juliet pleads guilty, but I’m innocent on that particular charge.
Juliet Aurora: It makes the world go round.
James Mulvany: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Steve Loates: For sure. Okay. Next question. What sound or noise do you love?
James Mulvany: I love bird song just when I’m in the countryside just listening to the birds. I [00:34:00] think that’s amazing.
Steve Loates: Awesome. What book would you recommend that every entrepreneur should read?
James Mulvany: It’s quite hard to just narrow it down to one book. I think one book that I read… Well, there’s a couple of books. They’re quite cliche. Everyone talks about them, but I remember reading Rich Dad, Poor Dad about 10 years ago. That kind of, I think, opened my eyes up to not just how to make money, but then once you’ve actually got some money what to do with it. So the idea of investing, property, and stuff like that was really [00:34:30] useful to learn. And also, I remember reading Tim Ferris’ 4-Hour Workweek, probably again about 10 years ago. That was, again, a big eye opener for me. I think it’s maybe a bit of an ideal point of view. Oh, you know, you can sit on the beach and work from your laptop. Doesn’t always work out like that, but it was good to read anyway.
Steve Loates: It’s an entertaining book. And our last question, when your own entrepreneurial journey is completed, what do you hope your legacy is?
James Mulvany: Well, I’d like to think that we’ve created products that [00:35:00] have changed people’s lives for the better, they’ve got some kind of use out of them. Yeah, I think that’s always a good legacy to leave behind, and hopefully products that have longevity as well. You know, you hear about companies that get bought out and then they just sort of squash them out or it just gets absorbed in some big corporation. I really hope that by that time one of our products can stand on its own two feet and it’s not just absorbed into some corporation and just becomes sort of a thing of the past.
Steve Loates: Excellent. Excellent. [00:35:30] And if any of our listeners want to reach out and connect with you, James, what’s best way? I’ll just I’ll spell the name. James, I think most people can get that one. Mulvany, M-U-L-V-A-N-Y. Where can they get in touch?
James Mulvany: So I’m on all the social media channels for this very reason. I have jamesm.com/connect, which is easy. Jamesm.com/connect. That has got a list of all my social [00:36:00] media links on there. And I’m constantly pushing out content on YouTube and LinkedIn about broadcasting, and podcasting, and being an entrepreneur, all that good stuff.
Steve Loates: Awesome. Awesome. And before we conclude this episode, which has been great, really enjoyed it. Do you have any final thoughts for our audience, James?
James Mulvany: I think I might as well give another shameless plug to MatchMaker. If you’re interested in thinking about starting a podcast, head to Podcast.co. If you’re interested in booking [00:36:30] guests for your show or you want to become a guest, you think you’ve got an area of expertise that you want to share or a story to tell, go check out MatchMaker.fm.
Steve Loates: Awesome. Thank you. And what about you Juliet? You’ve got any final thoughts before we close out the show?
Juliet Aurora: I always have final thoughts, but I’ll keep it short. I think that one of the things that I got out of this episode more than anything else was, again, going back to that minimum viable product. Trying something [00:37:00] and seeing if there’s interest and demand for the product before you actually invest a lot of time in it. And again, I appreciate your honesty in sharing with our audience and some of the things that didn’t work and why you moved on to the next thing. So thank you very much, James. It was an enlightening half an hour spent with you. Appreciate it.
James Mulvany: Thank you very much for having me on. I appreciate your time. It’s been a pleasure to talk to you both.
Steve Loates: Well, and it’s been our pleasure. There’s lots and lots of great [00:37:30] stuff there. And I also get the feeling there’s lots and lots of stuff we didn’t even touch on. So who knows, maybe we’ll get together again in the future. So let’s close out now with our quote, as we do for those of you who know me as the quote nerd. We have to have a quote to finish. So here it is: “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did [00:38:00] do. So throw off the bow lines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” Mark Twain. I think that’s appropriate for our conversation today.
James Mulvany: That’s fantastic.
Steve Loates: So thank you again, James. Thank you, Juliet, my awesome co-host. Couldn’t do this without you. But most importantly, thank you to you, our audience, for tuning in and giving [00:38:30] us a listen. We sincerely hope you found some value. If you did, please subscribe. You can find us in all the normal places, iTunes, Spotify, Google, you name it. Or you can visit our website, smartmansmarterwoman.com. So thank you very much. Until next time take good care of yourself and those you love. Bye for now.
Song by Adam Vitovsky / CC BY 3.0
