#25: How To Turn Passions Into Monster Profits (with Brenton Ford)

Welcome to episode 25 of The Growth Booth, where today I'm going to be talking with a special guest that we've got.

I'll introduce you to him in just a second about how you can turn your passions into profit and how you can build a really great lifestyle business around something that you might be passionate about or something that you might have expertise in.

Now, the person that I've got on the call today is the founder of Effortless Swimming, which is a website that I sort of stumbled upon but have grown to love because as many of you probably know, I am a swimming enthusiast. The person that's here today has been quite helpful with me improving my stroke. Part of that has led me to see that while he's actually doing some amazing things with Effortless Swimming. He's got YouTube videos that have got millions of views. He's got hundreds of podcast episodes. He's well ahead of me in that regard, and I've been asking him for all kinds of tips around there. He just seems like a really good guy who's found a good balance between lifestyle, family, business, travel, and work.

AIDAN

So, Brenton, thank you so much for coming on here today. This is Brenton Ford from Effortless Swimming. Great to have you with us.

BRENTON

Yeah. Thanks for having me, Aidan. you were on my podcast a little while ago because we were exchanging emails, and you had some great results with the swimming tips. It's nice to return the favor now.

AIDAN

That's right. For those of you that are swimmers, I managed to knock a significant amount of time, probably like 15 seconds off my 100 meters, which is absolutely enormous. A lot of that was thanks to the grueling program that Brenton had me going through throughout COVID. You got swimming in your genes. I think your background is that your family has been [involved] in swimming, and you've done a lot of coaching. You've competed nationally in Australia, which is one of the strongest swimming countries in the world. Lots and lots of coaching. When was it that you started building your own business and eventually building an online business around swimming?

BRENTON

Yeah. As a teenager, when I was going through school rather than getting a job at McDonald's, I started selling things on eBay. And I thought, wow, this is cool. I can actually make money by not having to go and trade my time, like my friends were. I could just sell things on eBay. It sort of started there. I really enjoyed the business side of things.

I hired some friends to come and pack the items that I was selling. And then when I went to university, I started swim coaching, just the club at the University of Melbourne there. I also did a business degree, and I thought, "I love to coach. I love swimming, and I really enjoy the business side of things."

In my final year of university, I thought, "I'm going to try and get this thing started." It started as an online business. I started with one freestyle course and started that way.

AIDAN

Wow. And what were you selling on eBay?

BRENTON

I started with the mini disk players, like the Sony mini disk players. I realized I could buy them from the US for, let's say, $200. I could sell them for $300 here. I managed to sell a couple of those, and then the market caught up. And then as a 15, 16-year-old, I found that I could buy some big-name brands from India that were probably not legit in terms of Polo shirts, and then sell them here in Australia. I stopped that when I was 18. I thought, "Yeah, probably not going to get away with that for long." So, yeah, that's when I sort of stopped it.

AIDAN

But yeah, the reason my ears pricked up when you said that is because my first online gig was on eBay as well, not on eBay, I was buying these camera SD cards from eBay in Hong Kong, and I was sending them to New Zealand. In New Zealand, we've got a site called Trademark, which is essentially the same as eBay, and I was selling them there. I would send these things over that cost me maybe like $20 or $30. I'd add another $20 or $30 to them. I was at university as well, and I'd be pocketing a bit of extra pocket money.

But the thing that got me was that I found myself going to the post office all the time and realizing that this is not as scalable, but it was kind of like a gateway into this online world. And then I realized, "Oh, I can do things as an affiliate." Before that, I didn't even know what an affiliate was. I probably didn't even know what the word meant. And so that sort of led on there.

Anyway, back to your story. You got started, and so did you start the online stuff with Effortless Swimming back when you were still at university there?

BRENTON

Yeah. I did a Bachelor of business. Entrepreneurship was the course. I think you can only teach so much in terms of running a business at Uni. But that was the course that appealed to me, and so I did it. Then [in]  the last year, you could either choose to go and do a placement at one of the big accounting firms, I think it was KPMG.

AIDAN

That doesn't sound very entrepreneurial.

BRENTON

Exactly. It's either that or you can start your own thing. I thought, "Yeah, I'm just going to start my own thing." I mean, I didn't quite launch it at the end of Uni, but then the year after, I finally got everything together and started selling. I think I went through a three-day course. It was about online business and sort of learned most of the stuff there. Most of the things I actually put into place, not from the stuff I actually learned at uni.

AIDAN

This was going back to 2008, 2009 somewhere around there, was it?

BRENTON

Yeah, that's right. 2008 was my last review of uni and then started 2009. And over that time, it didn't turn into a real business I wouldn't say for probably another like five or six years. I was still pretty young. I didn't know what I was really.

AIDAN

What were you actually doing? What were you doing as part of those initial stages of your online business way back then?

BRENTON

Yeah. I had this freestyle online video course, and that was my one product. It was basically just like marketing that [course] for the first couple of years. I think I added some other courses as well and some training plans, but it was pretty small scale and I wasn't doing anything in person for probably five years.

AIDAN

I think hundreds of dog years ago, thousands of dog years ago. I think that was around when Facebook kicked off as well. It was somewhere around then. I mean, this is like a long time ago in internet years, and it was completely different.

I can still remember way back then, I used to make my web pages using software called Dreamweaver, and I sucked at it. I was quite limited by what I could actually do. Whereas nowadays you've got all kinds of page builders and so on and so forth. A lot has changed, fair to say. Social media was non-existent back then. Whereas now I see your stuff on social media and I see your videos that go out and some of your videos have got millions of views on YouTube. It's absolutely phenomenal.

Talking about your business and where it is today, like, fast forward to where it is today, you've got hundreds of customers all around the world. What does your business look like? How are these customers? How do you teach them swimming remotely?

BRENTON

That was one of my main concerns going into it: I've taught people face-to-face for a long time. Are they actually going to be able to improve teaching them remotely? If they send me a video and I analyze the technique, will that actually work if I'm not there? Or if I put together an online course can people actually get better without me being there?

That was probably the first hurdle I had to get over because as a coach, as a teacher, I'm probably a bit of a perfectionist. And it's like I only want them to be able to make sure they get a result and make sure that I can make sure that they're doing the right thing. But I think as a coach, you've kind of got to let that go and just put the information together and just put it out there and people do with it what they want and they'll take it. They might interpret it their own way, but you've got to actually put it out there to be able to let them decide what to do with it. That was a hurdle I had initially, but today my business is we run clinics in Australia, so we've had probably 6000 or 7000...

AIDAN

These are clinics in person, I take it.

BRENTON

Yeah. So, in-person clinics, we keep them to six people at a time, so they're small group clinics. We used to run them up to 24 swimmers with two coaches there, but I found that the quality wasn't as good. We just made them smaller group clinics, higher price, and we do underwater filming and analysis, so it's much more hands-on and the results are a lot better.

So yeah, we've had 6000 people do those clinics over the last since we started running them. Then we've got our online membership as well. So we've got over 1000, maybe just under 2000 inside that. And then we've got some standalone courses as well, which I think you first came in on like a $10...

AIDAN

I came in on what we would probably call a lead magnet or a tripwire sort of a thing. I think it was like $5 and it really blew me away. I think that was a real master class in marketing in what people should strive to do. I paid $5 or $7 for I think it was five videos or something like that, but it was actually a lot more than that and it was just amazing value. And I thought, "Holy crap, if I can get this for $5, imagine what I can get for the next level up."

I did buy the next level up and then I was doing an eight-week freestyle course and I got through it and I sent you an email and I didn't even realize it, but it turns out in that same membership there are all these other things as well. There was like, "Okay, there's this and that and the other." Then I remember saying to you like, "Holy crap, man, I didn't even know all this stuff was here."

I must be like the perfect customer because then I got the individual one-on-one analysis, which is where I filmed myself swimming in the pool, underwater, on top, all around, and you did this amazing analysis of that, which was awesome. I guess I've been through multiple parts of it there, but I thought the way that you set that up was just wonderful, especially because you could tell that you were really getting good value. The first thing that I thought would be if you can achieve this in your marketing where people are saying, "Wow, that was really good value for money," then I think that's a good sign that you're on the right track there. I thought that was awesome.

BRENTON

Yeah. The product you're talking about maybe a year ago, I think I set it up perhaps a little bit longer now, but we called it the Five Day Catch challenge. if you're listening to this, catch, it's kind of the most important part of your freestyle stroke. If you get a really good catch, then often you'll swim faster. I thought I'll do this five-day course, charge $10 for it, really cheap, and I'm going to promise you'll take 5 seconds off your 100 meters time in five days or you get your money back.

It's a big promise and with a money-back guarantee. We've had probably 7000 people do that course now, and that's led to a lot of those people then becoming members because they see that you can actually help them with their swimming. That's been a really big thing for the business.

AIDAN

I think it's brilliant how it's an impulse buy. For someone that’s into that, like shaving 5 seconds off, for someone that might be able to relate easier to running, for shaving a certain amount of time off running a distance or swimming a distance, it's quite huge. It's such an impulse buy that it's just a no-brainer. You're probably able to get a lot of people.

I do have a question about when you actually started the business in the first place. Did you think about ‘is swimming a monetizable and commercially viable niche’? Did you sort of go down that path, or did you just think, "I know a lot about swimming. I could do something with swimming."

BRENTON

I didn't think too much about how big the market was and that sort of thing. When I first started, I was coaching a Masters's swim club, which is basically an adult swim club, and that was initially my target market because that's all I knew. But going further down the track, I realized that's not where the market really is. What ended up happening was master swimmers, a lot of them, they'll do their squad, and yeah, they think about technique, they've swum since they're a kid and they're happy doing what they're doing, for most of them.

The biggest opportunity for me was for triathletes who aren't great at swimming. It's frustrating for them because they're fit. They're not getting faster. That's actually our primary market. And so I sort of had to just look at it and go where's the biggest problem that people are having, and then how can I go about solving it? That made such a difference when I was actually targeting the right people with the right messaging as well.

Like in swimming, I didn't know if I'd be able to make a full-time business from swimming. Initially, when the business was quite small. I thought, okay. My wife put her foot down after five years saying, "I'm about to have a kid. I'm not going to be working for a while. You better make this business work." And I thought, "Okay, I better figure this thing out." And that was the best thing she could have done was put a fire under me.

AIDAN

What have you seen work well for you in terms of generating interest around people that ultimately join your different memberships and buy a different product? Is there one channel in particular that you find? Obviously, you've got social media, you've got a podcast with hundreds of episodes, you've got videos with millions of views and hundreds of thousands of subscribers. Is it a little bit of everything or what have you found that's worked well for you there? Or has it even changed maybe over the years? You found that back in the good old days, it was easy to do one thing and now it's different.

BRENTON

Yeah. When I first started making content, which was a video a couple of minutes long, I originally posted it to YouTube, which was new at the time, so I posted it there and there were a whole bunch of other sites like Vidler and a couple of others. I can't even remember them now. They're dust now, but yeah, so we just sort of posted it everywhere.

That hasn't really changed for me. I think YouTube is probably the main one. We've got our biggest following there. We get the most views there. And for swimming which is very visual, it makes sense. But I post that same content on Facebook and on Instagram, and it gets pretty good reach on those platforms even though the content that I make is more designed for YouTube. I don't really tailor it for Instagram, which I'd probably get more views if I did. But that said, people still see it.

I've found that over the years, if I've been consistent with it, I try to do one video a week plus a podcast. If I just keep doing that, then people will see my content day in, day out. And sometimes I've had a customer or someone become a customer after like five or six years of watching videos. Then they're like, "Okay, I'm ready to join." Just that consistency has made a very big difference.

With the podcast, that's where I think my highest value clients have come from. Because if they're willing to listen to me for 30 minutes or listen to me and a guest, well, then they like you, they trust you. And I've found so many people have come to clinics, come to overseas camps all become members through the podcast because you get that relationship through it.

AIDAN

It's probably also the most passionate people would gravitate to something like a podcast where a YouTube video is something that you might stumble upon, you might consume that, you might come back, but a podcast is almost something that hopefully people subscribe to and want to hear more and get to know you and feel like they know you personally. That's all part of building the relationship until the point where they want to actually spend money with you, which is going a step further.

It sounds like you've been applying sort of an 80/20 rule approach to content syndication and marketing where you are creating a piece of content. It's not designed specifically for each platform, but it's designed, let's say, for YouTube or something like that, and then you are spreading it around the different platforms. I mean, that's something very similar that we do in our business. Is that more or less the case with you?

BRENTON

Yeah, that's right, because I thought "what would be the bare minimum to keep my business running, aside from delivering the products and that sort of thing and doing the clinics?" It's those two pieces of content each week that's that even more. It's that 4% that can get 64% of the results. That's what makes a difference, so I think if I can just keep doing that while the business will at least stay the same, but it's still continuing to grow. But, yeah, just making sure I'm focused on the right things, and that's definitely number one for me.

AIDAN

Then given that you're at the point now where you do have thousands of paying members and you've got people reaching out to you for one on one and you're doing clinics in person, you've got multiple sorts of facets to your business here. What does a day in the life look like for you when you've got all of this going on? What are you doing here?

BRENTON

Yes, a couple of years ago, I had to say I'm no longer doing any one-on-one face-to-face coaching because I'd have the time, but I wouldn't be that happy doing that day in, day out just because of what we have going on. I just said, "All right, the only face-to-face coaching I'm going to do is these small group clinics." That freed up a lot of time because I was spending a few hours here and there each day with the one on ones.

A day for me is like I'll get up and I'll either go swimming or go for a surf in the morning. Then I'll often drop the kids at school. I'll do a couple of hours of work, and that will be some online video analysis with people that I'm working with there or create a piece of content or just basic admin sort of stuff, just keeping on top of things.

And then I'm picking up the kids from school, taking them to their sport, and that's kind of it for the day. I'd usually work between one to 4 hours a day, and then on the weekends, I might have some face-to-face clinics on. Work-wise, it's great. Lifestyle-wise, this is exactly what I wanted when I first started the business was I want to be able to surf when it's good, I want to hang out with the kids, I want to be able to swim, and yeah, just do a couple of hours of work each day doing what I love, which is swimming. I love running the business side of things too.

AIDAN

What about the team? I mean, I assume you've got some people there that help you out with this. What does this look like?

BRENTON

Yes, I've got two full-time staff in the Philippines, so they do customer support. They do backend for the podcast and YouTube videos and stuff. They take away a lot of time which I would otherwise spend replying to customers. That was such a game-changer when I actually got some support staffing because even if initially it was like four or five emails a day, that would build up because I'm looking at it going, "It's just the same thing over and over again." So yeah, I've got that there in place.

I've also got someone on working Saturdays and Sundays doing the support then just so we don't get built up with tickets and we're getting back to people pretty quickly. That's a small team, two people or three, I guess it makes a difference just getting.

AIDAN

I think it's fantastic. You've got a really lean operation. Many people I've seen over the years have gone too hard into hiring people and they end up spending more time managing people and the business gets too complex. Whereas applying the 80/20 rule or the 64-4 rule, you can really drill down to what I actually need. if you had a bigger team, maybe instead of working 4 hours a day, you'd end up working 8 hours a day because you'd be trying to keep up with them. I think it's a really interesting way to do it.

How about a content plan or a content calendar? Do you put something like this together? Because it sounds like you've got content that's coming out quite regularly.

BRENTON

I'll often try to batch some podcast recordings, so I try to be at least a couple of weeks ahead with that. They're all scheduled, and by batch I mean I'll try and schedule if I've got guests, I'll try and schedule it between the hours like twelve and three on a Tuesday, and that way I can record a couple.

With the weekly videos, well, at the moment I'm playing sort of catch up. I'm doing one each week and it's published as soon as I make it. But I'd often try and have a couple in the bank just to use. I've got a drive, like a spreadsheet, and I've just got a whole bunch of ideas and I've just sort of brainstormed and I think it's something. I'll just open it up and pop it in. I've got all these things I can reference.

AIDAN

I do exactly the same thing. I try to have always a list of 100 different topics and guests, and in fact, I actually made a mind map of different areas of my life and hundreds of different topics I could dive into and get that I could have so that I never want to get to the point where I'm feeling, "What am I going to do now?" Because I think that if I got to that, it would potentially be quite demoralizing in a content-driven sort of business there.

What about search engine optimization and paid traffic? Do you worry about much of this? Does it take care of itself? What's your take on it?

BRENTON

I haven't done anything SEO-related for years now, so probably ten years ago I think I had a bit down, but I haven't done anything since. With the main pages, I try to have them named correctly and all that sort of stuff, but I think we just redid our site a couple of months ago. It probably would be good to get someone in just to look at that and see what we can improve because I reckon we're probably losing some opportunities there, come to think of it.

But because people follow us on social media and we've got a good following there and we've got a big email list as well that we've built up over time, they're the most important things for our business. A lot of it is referral-based as well when people come to clinics.

 AIDAN

Social media was just the one I was curious about. If you use it very much and if so, do you use any tools? For example, I use one called Hootsuite where I can post multiple social media profiles at the same time and manage all of that a lot easier.

BRENTON

Yeah, I got you. I used to use that a couple of years ago when we sort of outsourced some of our social media, but now my team will just get the video and post them to the different platforms there. It's pretty simple and there are definitely a lot of opportunities for us to do better in some of these things. What we're doing right now is working really well and in terms of time invested, yeah, it's going really well.

AIDAN

Yeah. It sounds like you had a great gig going there. Do you ever sort of have to pinch yourself and think, "Oh wow, how did this happen?" Because from the outside looking in, it's easy for someone to look at what you've done. And I get this sometimes and think overnight success. But what a lot of people don't realize is there has been a fair bit of dedication and just time in general and compounding results.

You've got hundreds of YouTube videos up there and I always say to people, I think building an online business is much easier if you look at it through a long-term lens and think "Where could I be in five years' time versus five months' time with a membership?" But anyway, what's that been like for you? Do you sometimes have to pinch yourself and just think, "Oh wow, look what I've built."

BRENTON

Yeah. I think back to when I first started, when I was like 18, 19. I thought ‘wouldn't it be awesome if I could live by the beach, surf when it's good, and make good money doing that’? I think when I was probably 23, 24 I wrote down, listed about ten things where I'm like ‘I want to be living by the beach, I want to earn this, that, and I look back at that now and they're pretty much all ticked off’.

But I was thinking "Yeah, in one to two years' time I'm going to have this covered." It took way longer than one to two years. Would I change anything about that? Probably not because I had to grow, I had to learn. I think initially when I started online, the thought was to get rich quick. Everything happens fast because it's online. And yeah, that can certainly happen for a lot of people and I'm sure it does, but yeah, it's slow and steady for me that always wins the race. I think I've got a much more solid and steady business as a result of it rather than just trying really hard for twelve months and hoping to...

AIDAN

What I love about what you've done is you've built a business around content and when you're creating content and putting good content out there, you're claiming a little bit of this digital real estate. You could put a swim video out 5, 10 years ago and you're still getting views on it today. It's putting that one piece of content, a little bit of work into something that pays you over and over and over again. And when I really analyze the businesses that I seem to be the most successful, most of them have an element of this organic traffic coming in.

It's very rare that I see a very successful online business that is 100% built around paid ads because paid advertising can be so volatile you can get shut down quickly. I think that real maturity comes when you're getting that online, that organic traffic, which content is fantastic for and content syndication, and the way you're doing it is just awesome.

Going back to the early wins, I can still remember going on a vacation. It must have been around about 2005, 2006, with my wife here in Argentina and I was looking at my online account and I said to her, "Wow, I've been making $20 a day for the past month sort of a thing." It was just $20 a day, but for me, that was when I had this click, and I realized, "Well, if I could make $20 a day and it's consistent, then I can make $200 a day." I think those early wins really do sort of motivate you. If you're listening to this and you're thinking about getting something going, try to celebrate the small wins and try to think that if you can make $1 online, you can make $100 online. If you make $100 online, you can make $1 million online.

Now, wrapping this up here, I'm conscious of your time there. Brenton, if you were starting out, diving into another passion project, you've mentioned surfing, let's say you wanted to get into the surfing niche, or it could be any niche, Triathlon or something, what would you do differently? What would you recommend for someone to do if they have got a passion? Where do they start? It just seems overwhelming.

BRENTON

Yeah. I think the best place to start would be to probably just initially test what you're offering to start with. That might just be with someone in person, maybe with a friend. Just check what you're doing is actually working. That for me, that gives me a lot of confidence, with some of the stuff that I was teaching, that gives me the confidence to then go out and say, "This will help you."

Then just, for me, like finding an offer that converts, finding something that people will want to buy. For them, it's going to be a win-win. Let's say for the catch challenge, that a $10 course, you got nothing to lose because we'll give you your money back if you don't get better. That would be probably the second one, and the third one would just be to just back yourself.

I think of my podcast, for example. I was so afraid of talking even at the start. I was afraid of actually being the face of my business because I just want to be behind the scenes, like this Internet marketer. But then when I was like, "No, you know what? I'll just be okay with being out there and being the face of it." No one is going to see your stuff in the beginning anyway. No one's going to see your YouTube video or your podcast when you first start making it. It's going to take a while to build that traction. Just publish, publish, publish. You'll get better at it. More people will tune in because I took a long time to be comfortable with being heard.

AIDAN

Yeah. I think if you can, one good way to get that validation, if you're sitting there listening to this or watching this on YouTube is to have a look and see if other people are already doing what you're doing. If you're in the Triathlon space, I mean, you could have a look and find out, are there other people out there that are filming content and selling programs about triathlons? If you're in, it could be anything, the gardening space, the landscaping space, the car repair space, it could be absolutely anything, but if you can see other people are out there doing it and have got a following, then that's probably some form of validation. If you can see other people are paying ads for traffic on the likes of social media and search engines and so forth, that's another form of validation. You really don't need that much traffic or that many subscribers to make a really good business.

I always remember this story about 1000 true fans. If you've got 1000 true fans, 1000 people who are going to be passionate about what you're talking about and really resonate with your message and those 1000 people will just spend $100 with you a year, and if you've got a lean business like what Brenton has got, then you're going to be sitting close to $100,000 in profit and you're going to be able to quit your day job and live a real lifestyle business. I think a lot of people think that you need to have a crap load of traffic, a lot of visitors, and a lot of subscribers, when in reality you just have to have  a message that resonates with some people who are passionate about it.

Any final thoughts or tips that you would give to people that might be thinking about starting a passion business of their own?

BRENTON

Yeah, try lots of different things. I think of a friend of mine, he teaches AFL Rules, so footy here in Australia, and he's finally sort of stumbled on something that people are interested in, which is not an online thing at the moment. It's these in-person clinics for kids. He sort of copied a little bit of what I did in terms of a model, what I was doing with the clinics. He's starting to figure his way around that and seeing what people are resonating with. For him, he had his first five-figure month last month as a result of it, and he's been going at it for a little while and it's finally clicked. I can see him just leveling up in terms of what he believes is possible and then what he does with the business.

Just try different things until you find something that works. Because I tried a lot of things. They went okay, but then finally just figured out how to run a proper business. And I'm so glad I stuck with it, even though my wife said "You better make this work," at the time, that was a couple of years in. I think people can do it a lot faster than I've done, especially with the help of someone like yourself, where you find someone who's done it before, listen to them, and do what they recommend because you'll just save so much time. When I have done that and listened to a coach, my business has sort of gone to that next. It's the same and everything.

AIDAN

Isn't it the same with me with your swimming guidance? I mean, how could I be cruising along at a certain speed for ten years and I come through your course and then all of a sudden, I'm getting a lot faster? It's the same in business, at least it seemed like this. When I was getting started online and when you were getting started online there wasn't the same number of training coaches and sort of blueprints and recipes that you could follow now, or maybe I'm just more aware of them now. It seems like you've got blueprints out there for everything and there are thousands of YouTube videos being uploaded every minute so content-finding information is not a problem anymore. You sort of just have to find the right information and put a plan together.

Look, Brenton, this has been inspirational. I think what you've done is absolutely amazing. I don't have any YouTube videos with millions and millions of views so that's absolutely inspirational to me, and I think you've absolutely nailed it with the lifestyle business balance.

Thank you once again for being here and to everyone listening to this. You can find this at episode number 25 on TheGrowthBooth.com and as always you can also find the video format on YouTube. Just head over to YouTube and go to the search for The Growth Booth or on your favorite podcast show, and if you are a passionate swimmer like me then make sure you head over to effortlessswimming.com and at least do the five-day catch challenge because you're going to absolutely love it and I'm sure you're going to shave some time off your lengths as well.

Brenton, thank you once again for being here and look forward to doing this again soon.

BRENTON

Yeah, thanks for this -  love your podcast and appreciate you having me on. I've really enjoyed it so thank you.

AIDAN

Awesome. Thanks for listening and we will see you in the next episode.