The Transcript

Sean McCabe’s Tried-and-True Techniques for Getting More Meaningful Work Done

Jerod Morris: Hey, Jerod Morris here. If you know anything about Rainmaker Digital and Copyblogger, you may know that we produce incredible live events. Well, some would say that we produce incredible live events as an excuse to throw great parties, but that’s another story. We’ve got another one coming up this October in Denver. It’s called Digital Commerce Summit, and it is entirely focused on giving you the smartest ways to create and sell digital products and services. You can find out more at Rainmaker.FM/Summit.

We’ll be talking about Digital Commerce Summit in more detail as it gets closer, but for now, I’d like to let a few attendees from our past events speak for us.

Attendee 1: For me, it’s just hearing from the experts. This is my first industry event, so it’s awesome to learn new stuff and also get confirmation that we’re not doing it completely wrong where I work.

Attendee 2: The best part of the conference for me is being able to mingle with people and realize that you have connections with everyone here. It feels like LinkedIn Live. I also love the parties after each day, being able to talk to the speakers, talk to other people who are here for the first time, people who have been here before.

Attendee 3: I think the best part of the conference for me is understanding how I can service my customers a little more easily. Seeing all the different facets and components of various enterprises then helps me pick the best tools.

Jerod Morris: Hey, we agree — one of the biggest reasons we host a conference every year is so that we can learn how to service our customers, people like you, more easily. Here are just a few more words from folks who have come to our past live events.

Attendee 4: It’s really fun. I think it’s a great mix of beginner information and advanced information. I’m really learning a lot and having a lot of fun.

Attendee 5: The conference is great, especially because it’s a single-track conference where you don’t get distracted by, “Which session should I go to?” and, “Am I missing something?”

Attendee 6: The training and everything, the speakers have been awesome, but I think the coolest aspect for me has been connecting with both people who are putting it on and then other attendees.

Jerod Morris: That’s it for now. There’s a lot more to come on Digital Commerce Summit, and I really hope to see you there in October. Again, to get all the details and the very best deal on tickets, head over to Rainmaker.FM/Summit.

Welcome back to The Digital Entrepreneur. I am your host, Jerod Morris, the VP of marketing for Rainmaker Digital, and this is episode No. 26.

On this week’s episode, I am joined by someone who is passionate about helping other people make a living from work that fulfills them. Someone who’s goal is to “demystify the path toward building a sustainable, profitable, audience-driven business.” He recently took the month of July to write his book Overlap. He’s the host of a couple of podcasts: one on creativity in business and another with the goal of helping others build a thriving, sustainable business and achieve huge goals.

He is the founder of the brand called seanwes, where he teaches two courses. One is on how to grow your business with writing, Supercharge Your Writing, and the other is focused on how to stop trading time for money and start pricing your work on value, Value-Based Pricing.

He is Sean McCabe, and he is a digital entrepreneur.

Get the Inside Scoop on RainMail — The Rainmaker Platform’s Integrated Email

Jerod Morris: Real quick, before I bring you my discussion with Sean, I want to let you know about a webinar that I participated in recently with Brian Clark and Chris Garret that you may want to check out. You’ve heard us talk a lot about the Rainmaker Platform here on The Digital Entrepreneur. Rainmaker, of course, is the complete solution for digital marketing and sales, giving you more power, less pain, and higher profit. It was designed by digital entrepreneurs, the team at Rainmaker Digital, for digital entrepreneurs, people like you.

Well, did you know that Rainmaker now includes integrated email marketing as well? It’s true. It’s called RainMail, and it’s built right into the platform, integrating with all the other features of Rainmaker — like landing pages, marketing automation, and memberships. You can really create an adaptable, personalized experience for your audience when email is baked right into your online platform, like it is now for Rainmaker with RainMail. Oh, and your first 999 subscribers? They’re free, as in they’re included in your regular platform payment. You don’t pay a dime extra.

Want to see how RainMail works? Well, one way to do it is to check out the replay of the webinar that Brian, Chris, and I did recently. The live event was only for Rainmaker Platform customers because we wanted to answer customer questions, but we’re happy to share the replay with prospective Rainmaker customers like you so you can see what RainMail is capable of.

To watch the replay, go to RainmakerPlatform.com/Webinar1. It’s about a two-hour replay, but the nice thing is, on that page, we actually have a bulleted list of all the topics and questions. It was based on a lot of FAQs that we often get, plus some use cases and examples, so we could show folks what RainMail can do and how you can use it on your site, too. So again, RainmakerPlatform.com/Webinar1 — the number ‘1,’ not spelled out like one.

And now, here’s my interview with digital entrepreneur Sean McCabe.

Mr. McCabe, welcome to The Digital Entrepreneur.

Sean McCabe: Hey, Jerod. Thanks so much for having me.

Jerod Morris: It’s great to have you on here. Let’s begin here, Sean. I’ve always believed that the number one benefit of digital entrepreneurship is freedom — the freedom to choose your projects, the freedom to chart your course, and ultimately, the freedom to change your life and your family’s life for the better. What benefit of digital entrepreneurship do you appreciate the most?

The Two Biggest Benefits Sean Derives From Being a Digital Entrepreneur

Sean McCabe: Freedom is a big one for me, for sure. I’m also an introvert, so I love working from home. I love the ability to work from anywhere. Usually, that’s home. I wrote a book last month, and I was thinking, “I’m going to travel,” because I like this romantic idea of getting a cabin and looking over the scenery, but my friend said, “Do you get your work done really well at home, or do you get distracted at home?” I was like, “Oh I focus great at home. I have so much focus at home.” He’s like, “Why are you going to go anywhere else?” I’m like, “You’re right, you’re right. This is where I get my work done.”

So I like being able to work from home. It was just me at first. I was a solopreneur. Now we’ve got a team of eight people, including myself. I consider the people I work with to be some of my very best friends, so it’s also fulfilling to give them freedom as well and give them the ability to do work they enjoy. We have a remote team, like you guys do at Rainmaker, and it’s such a joy to give them a sense of fulfillment as well.

Jerod Morris: Yeah. Working from home is so interesting because it can be a blessing and a curse in so many ways. You really have to learn how to manage it for yourself. I’m the same way. I can focus really well at home. And then there’s every now and then where I find my focus is jumbled, and I’ve got to get out somewhere else and spend a day somewhere else. But then usually I can come back and my focus is back.

That really is a big benefit, just to be able to have that freedom. Especially for me now starting a family, it’s been really nice to have that flexibility. That’s definitely a big benefit.

Sean McCabe: Yeah for sure. And then nothing beats waking up in the morning and finding out you made a few thousand dollars, right?

Jerod Morris: Right, exactly. You said something interesting there. You said last month you wrote a book. Did it only take you a month to write the book? This is a pretty big project for you, isn’t it?

How Sean Wrote a Book in a Month

Sean McCabe: Well, it’s been in my head for several years, so I did actually write a book in a month. I actually set a really ambitious goal, really, really ambitious, which was to write three books in a month just because I’m crazy. I set out on this goal to write three books in a month. I figured they would be about 80,000 words apiece, which means I would need to have written 240,000 words. That comes out to about 8,000 words a day, which I have done before. I’ve topped 10,000 words in a day, but this was going to be an intense sprint.

During the process of this, I was actually journaling the whole process. I was doing a live stream every morning, just sharing the writing process. On day four, I decided, “You know what? This three-part series really should be a single book. I really should put it all in one book because it’s for the same person.”

I was at first thinking, “Oh this is for different people,” but it’s really for the same person in different stages. I decided, “I’m going to compile it all into one book. I’m going to make it nice and concise, condensed, nothing that you don’t need.” And because I set that super-big goal of trying to write three books in a month, I actually wrote the one book in 14 days. That’s 75,000 words.

Jerod Morris: That’s the Overlap, right?

Sean McCabe: Yes, the book is called Overlap. It’s on getting from the life you have to the life you want, basically like a really practical, step-by-step guide. Especially people who are in a day job and they want to be able to start their own thing, it’s just a really practical guide for getting where you want to be.

Jerod Morris: Let’s talk a little bit about your story, then, of getting from where you wanted to be to where you are now. Take me back to before you became a digital entrepreneur. What were you doing, and what was missing that led you to want to make a change?

How an Interest in Hand-Lettering Led to the Burgeoning Online Empire Sean Now Oversees

Sean McCabe: Well, honestly, Jerod, I started pretty young. My first business was a computer repair business when I was 17 years old. Before that, I was three stories up, washing windows.

Jerod Morris: Oh my.

Sean McCabe: We had a 32-foot ladder leaning against a three-story residential building, and then on top of the roof, there was another window, yet another window, a little bit higher, maybe a good 12 feet up or so. We had a four-foot ladder on top of this roof, on top of the 32-foot ladder, and my partner was holding this ladder because the roof was slanted. I was standing on the top of the four-foot ladder where it says “Do not stand,” reaching as far as I could to wipe the drops of water from the corner of the window. At that point, I started thinking, “Maybe I should do something else.”

Jerod Morris: My fear of heights is getting activated just listening to the story.

Sean McCabe: It was an exciting time, but not what I wanted to do forever. I ended up starting a computer repair business just in high school, passing around flyers, learned the importance of relationship marketing and referrals, got into this nice … basically, a retirement community where everyone had computers they didn’t know how they worked, and they wanted to pay someone else to fix them. They just kept referring me and referring me, so that’s basically how I got into business.

Jerod Morris: Talk about how hand-lettering fits into this because that was your entryway into working online, correct?

Sean McCabe: Yeah. I’m a musician. I’m a creative person, but also very logical. I enjoy business. I enjoy computers. When I started the computer repair business, I stepped down from a band, and what I didn’t anticipate was losing that creative outlet. I eventually started a web firm with a partner, and I enjoyed creative work.

I started pursuing things in my nights and weekends, just creatively, creating hand-lettering — so drawing letters by hand, kind of like the Coca-Cola logo type. It’s not a font. It’s drawn by hand. I was really enjoying this process, and I started sharing my work. No one really noticed it for a couple years, but after about two years into it, people started to notice my work. They were asking for T-shirts and prints. You know, “Can I hire you to design my logos,” and I ended up going full-time freelance. I sold my other businesses. We hibernated the web firm, and I went full-time freelance.

Jerod Morris: Wow. So tell me about the milestone or the moment in your career as a digital entrepreneur. Maybe take us from where you were doing what you were doing with the hand-lettering and then to what you’re doing now, which is teaching people how to build their own online businesses. Tell me about a milestone or a moment that you are the most proud of.

The Essential Lesson Sean Learned From Launching His First Course

Sean McCabe: I’d have to say the moment that made me realize that it was possible was when I launched my first course. I had a bunch of people … they were buying my products and hiring me, but a lot of people wanted to learn how to do what I did. I took about six months to create a course and launched this course.

During that time, I was learning from a bunch of people, especially people on Rainmaker and Copyblogger, and books, articles, and videos, everything I could learn about marketing online. I applied that knowledge to the first launch of my course, and thanks to people who were willing to share what they learned for free with me, my course actually made six figures in the first three days of launching. That was when it was like, “Wow, this is actually possible. I can actually do this.”

As much as I actually enjoyed doing design and being an artist, people started asking me, “How did you do that? How are you able to launch a course and make so much money in a few days?” I said, “You know, I’m just going to share it.”

I started sharing on my podcast. I started sharing articles and case studies. I’m just trying to help people, and I started seeing, over time, these people were taking this advice and they were going on and starting their own businesses, quitting their day job, moving across the world. Even more than actually doing the work of art, or design, or working with clients, I found a lot more fulfillment in helping others realize their dreams.

Jerod Morris: A good story. When you talk to people who have been successful in digital entrepreneurship, especially a teaching kind of digital entrepreneurship like what you’re doing, that love for helping people and helping people achieve their goals just comes out time and time again. It’s such an important lesson to remember. The more that you help other people get what they want, the more that you’ll get what you want. It’s such a beautiful cycle in that way.

Sean McCabe: Completely agree.

Jerod Morris: On the flip side of that, tell me about the most humbling moment in your career as a digital entrepreneur and what you learned from it.

How Hiring Full-Time Employees Changed Sean’s Perspective

Sean McCabe: I think the most humbling moment for me was when I started to hire. This was my third...