Aidan

Hey everyone, Aidan Booth here. Welcome to episode number 78 of “The Growth Booth”. And this episode is the second in a new series called “Decoding Success”, where I'll interview people who have built very successful online businesses. Now, a couple of episodes ago, episode number 76, I interviewed Ricardo, a student from Portugal  who overcame a range of different challenges to build a reliable and lucrative online business. 

Now today, tuning in from almost the exact opposite side of the world in Sydney, Australia, is Vaughan. Now, you may remember Vaughan. He's been on the show before, episode number 53, where he and a few other course members shared some results specifically related to a cost per action, CPA affiliate marketing. That, however, isn't the only thing that Vaughan has succeeded with. Prior to diversifying into affiliate marketing, Vaughan built and still runs an ecommerce business that has earned him hundreds of thousands of dollars.

So how did he do it? What kept him motivated? And how did he avoid all of the distractions that are out there for online marketers, all of the too good to be true opportunities that keep popping up? How did he manage to build a business while also holding down a day job and being a hands on dad of three kids? So that's what we're going to try to find out today. 

Vaughan, thanks for taking some time out of your day to join me here. Always great to catch up with you. 

Vaughan

Yeah, happy to be here. It's excellent, and looking forward to chatting further. 

Aidan

Can you share a little bit about you, yourself, your backstory and your journey to seeing success online? 

Vaughan

Yeah, absolutely. So look, a little bit of backstory then. I was originally born in New Zealand and moved to Australia or close to 20 years ago, so made Sydney, Australia, my home. Got a background in IT, so been involved in the IT industry for quite a while. As you mentioned, three boys, two kind of teenagers, and one almost a teenager, or thinks he's a teenager, so very active in that area. They're all into competitive swimming, which basically means early morning starts for me every single morning.

So, yes, very busy in regards to that. Look, I started working on computers way back really when, I don't know. Some people may know the BBS's, this was before the Internet. They called them bulletin board systems where we used to connect up on dial-up modem and showing my age there a little bit, I think, but this is when I got involved in computers and always had that kind of business mindset. From there, I started my own computer business, selling computer hardware to kind of friends at school and through Uni and that kind of moved in and essentially paid for my first car and my university courses and what have you.

It was around about that time when Robert Kiyosaki became a little bit more known and my friend gave me the Rich Dad, Poor dad book and started to read that and soak up the information there and really kind of, I guess, open my eyes a little bit to what was possible. So I started looking at various other ways of generating income and got that whole passive income mindset. So I've been involved in a lot of other areas, stocks and options trading, foreign exchange, network marketing, real estate, pretty much everything, really, other traditional businesses. I guess obviously with the progression of the Internet, online business then made sense, so diversifying into and getting into online businesses was just a natural progression from there. I guess the global reach of everything now, the Internet is making everything smaller. It's a little bit of background. 

Aidan

I remember when the Robert Kiyosaki first book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, burst onto the scene. A friend of mine actually gave it to me as well, and that really opened my eyes to a whole world that I didn't really know existed and this whole concept of passive income. I read that book a few years before starting my online business, and I think I took a lot of the lessons from that to my online business and eventually also built out a portfolio. So, really interesting. That's a few parallels there. 

Now, can you remember a moment in your journey when the penny dropped, so to speak? Maybe it was when you made your first sale or when you just knew that, “Okay, wow, I'm actually going to succeed with this. This is not just an idea,” maybe like ideas you'd had in the past, but “This is real.” For me, for example, it was getting my first sale, not even the first sale, but getting my first check in the mail. It was checks in the mail for affiliate payments way back then. I remember looking at it like, “Holy crap,” taking it into the bank in New Zealand. It was a US dollar check, so the bank teller sort of looked at me, “Wat are you doing with this $35 check?” kind of a thing. But that moment for me is ingrained or engraved in my mind and in my memory because there was a massive before and after. Was there something like that in your journey? 

Vaughan

Yeah, look, I do remember. I can get into the details a little bit later, but essentially but my first sale was a complete disaster. It was hilarious. I'll get into that shortly as well. But it probably wasn't really until probably my third or fourth sale where things really kind of just took off. It was like, I got the confidence and I knew, “Okay, this definitely works. Well, okay, if I just keep doing it and doing it and doing it then and growing it from there, it was just a matter of repeating it.” So it was around about six months or so, probably into it where the penny dropped, and it was like “Right, this is it. This is working. Excellent. Let's go.” 

Aidan

Yeah. What was that first product or those early products that you were selling, if you can share those? 

Vaughan

Yeah, it was just a simple shoe rack that was my very first sale. Look, I listed a few various types of products there, and I just thought it was a common enough product that people wanted so I put it up there. I found it on eBay there. It was cheap enough and I thought let's give it a shot. Like I said before, it was a little bit of a disaster where the sale went through, no problem. The shipping came through. It was on its way, and then the customer reached out to me via email and said, “Oh, I am moving house. I needed to change my address,” and it was already on the way to. It was already set in stone, so I didn't really know what to do. It was my very first sale. I was going, “Oh my God, drop shipping man. Hopefully all these things are not all sales are not going to be like this.”

Anyway, I spent probably way too long trying to get it over the line. I was reaching out to the courier company trying to get it, the customer to go to the old address when it was delivered and all this, and they eventually got it. You know, it worked out in the end, but I spent probably two or 3 hours in total and a lot of stress as well making sure that the first sale was a success. 

Aidan

Right. 

Vaughan

I'll never forget that. 

Aidan

It's funny because if that happened to you now, it would just be like a non issue. It would be water off a duck's back, keep on going, not even make you blink kind of a thing. But I can sort of relate to that. One of the first physical products I sold from an ecommerce store was a futon cover. I had something similar happen where the woman that bought it, she must have had buyer’s remorse or something. It was a $50 futon cover and she said, “Oh, you know what, I don't know if this is going to be right for me,” and inside I was thinking, “Come on, you bought it. You're buying this, you're going to love it.” Anyway, the sale went through okay, but it's kind of Murphy's Law, your first sale and you get these random unexpected things happening. 

I remember you mentioning though that one of your kids was sort of the magic bullet that ended up helping you really sort of start crushing it online. Can you share that story? I remember being sort of quite amazed by it. 

Vaughan

Yeah, well, look, it would have been about six months into learning and kicking things off and I guess I was almost at that point where the fire was almost out. I was basically a week away from quitting. I tried everything. I had all the challenges that people have, no different. I remember talking to my middle kid, actually, he was ten at the time, and he said, “Oh no, dad, how's your ecom business going? You're making much money yet?” I said, “It's going okay.” I was trying to be positive because this is my middle kid, the most positive out of the three of them, so he's got that glass-is-half-full mindset, and he said, “Well, can I help? Can I make money with that too?” And I said, “Well, look, I'll tell you what. I'll show you how to find some products. You go and list some, you know, go and find some. I'll give you the criteria, and if you come up with any good ones, we'll list them for you and we'll go halves.” 

He goes, “Okay, awesome.” So he set off, came back probably two or three hours later, and we put a few up there and would have been maybe three or four hours later, the first one sold. I was like, “Whoa, hold on a minute. I've just spent three months trying to sell a second or third product. In 4 hours, he sells one.” It was like, “Come on, this is not fair.” So he said, Well, come on, let's do some more, let's do some more,” so we kind of sat down together and researched some more and what have you, and we found a product that I still sell today, and I've sold literally thousands of them. It's absolutely transformed my business. So that one little he keeps reminding me, “Hey dad, you meant to go halves of me with all these sales.” It's like, “Yeah, go away, go away.” 

Aidan

That's awesome. Was that a product that you think you never would have tried testing unless your son sort of randomly chose it? Because sometimes I've found that it's the products that I least expect to do well, or I'm testing out multiple products and then you never really know which one's going to take off. What's the story there? 

Vaughan

Yeah, you're right. It's probably something I wouldn't have. Yeah, to be honest, I wouldn't have listed it. I was quite surprised that it did. That just goes to prove that.

Aidan

Thousands of sales later. 

Vaughan

Now that was good, but that caused me to continue on, and I definitely wouldn't be here today if it wasn't for him, that's for sure. 

Aidan

What about some of the biggest challenges that you faced while setting up your business? You said that in the first six months, you got to a point where you were almost ready to give up. Maybe there were some challenges that you can remember there, or even challenges that you've had since then, since you sort of made your breakthrough. 

Vaughan

I think in the early days, I was definitely getting probably too emotional with the customer queries, customer complaints, things like that. I was definitely taking them too far and taking them too personal because obviously it was early days and you wanted to please everybody and you just can't do it. Things are outside your control, delivery issues.

Aidan

You also expect that every customer is rational, whereas it's just not the case. There are so many emotionally charged customers out there that it can be surprising. 

Vaughan

Yeah, it definitely can. You can't do it. Things you got no control over, like delivery couriers, you're trying your best to please them, so that definitely took a little bit of a toll to start with. The ways I got around it is I outsourced it. I outsourced the customer service. I don't even know about most of them. 

Aidan

That's perfect. 

Vaughan

Yeah, I outsourced that stuff, which is good. It takes a big relief off my mind. This was over COVID as well. So this is why I was having so many delivery issues. Not such a problem anymore. Right. I think the world was having delivery issues at the time.

Aidan

Right. What about maybe some of the mistakes that you've made along the way where you can see now that, “Oh, I would have done that differently.” Is there anything like that that you can share with folks? 

Vaughan

Yeah, look, probably the biggest one really is a little bit like what we touched on before is just giving up too early. I was there, I was basically a week away from giving up. Looking back on it, that would have been a huge mistake. That was finding something that just allows you to carry on and get through it and going through, continuing on. It kind of taught me that if you just keep going, success is closer than you actually think it is. That would have been a huge mistake. 

Aidan

I think one way that people can sort of mitigate that is by building a success circle of some kind. These can take different shapes. They can be virtual online, they can be physical in person, having someone to talk to about the business. It could be a partner or a loved one or a friend, someone who can encourage you to keep going through the tough times because we're all going to hit speed bumps, but the speed bumps that you hit when you're getting started can completely derail you to the point of giving up, whereas a speed bump, once you're established, is just that, a speed bump. 

Vaughan actually came in as a member of our Blueprint Academy and is also one of our coaches in the Blueprint Academy. One of the reasons we set up the Blueprint Academy was to work with people and sort of be that shoulder to cry on, that moral support and help people form their own success circle. I mentioned that because I think a success circle or having people who will encourage you to keep going and being surrounded by like-minded individuals, people who know that online marketing is a genuine path to building an online business, that's something that can be a complete game changer.

When I was getting started online, it was one of the things that I did, actually, was I had a coach, and month after month, we would check in, and that would just help me keep pushing forward and give me a little bit of balance over the crazy months when things weren't quite going as I wanted them to go. It would just keep me focused on the bigger prize rather than getting tied up in the little challenges and things that would present themselves. I know that for me a success circle is something that I think can help people bypass some of the challenges and mistakes early on at least.

Vaughan

Yeah, it definitely helps. 100%. 

Aidan

A lot of courses actually have those sort of built into them, to a certain degree anyway. The courses that we've done over the past few years have normally got forums, communities associated with them. I think that requires being proactive though, whereas if you've got a formal coach or a part of a mastermind, then that coach has got a responsibility to reach out to you. It's not relying on you being proactive. So anyway, something for people to consider there. 

Just to change things up a little bit now, your journey started with ecommerce, but you're also doing CPA marketing where you get paid for leads, you get paid for email addresses, and it's a completely different model. What was it that had you thinking about diversifying and going off into a new area if the ecommerce stuff was already going so well? 

Vaughan

Yeah, look, it's always good to diversify. As you mentioned, my ecom business was going well and it was running fairly systemized by itself. It didn't have too much involvement from me anymore so it was essentially a case of right on to the next thing to expand the income. 

I was kind of on the lookout for something else, not so much directly being in that space but a totally different vertical. That's where CPA marketing comes into it. They didn't rely on each other, which is the whole point of it and it just made perfect sense, especially with I guess my knowledge of IT and what have you in the past. I found it fairly simple to grasp the technical side of things which is not huge, but it just made it a little bit easier to move forward with it. It was just the next logical path to go through, which is why I got into it. 

Aidan

How do you manage to sort of run your business? Because I know you work your day job, you enjoy doing that. You mentioned you've got a virtual assistant that helps doing customer support. Do you have other virtual assistants? Do you just have one sort of right hand man, so to speak? How's that work? 

Vaughan

Yeah. I've got a total of three VAs at the moment, which is good. They all work different areas of the business. They all specialize in different things and different times as well. So we're in touch throughout the days, which is good. So that definitely frees me up and really makes it a hands off business, which is great. That allows me to do other things like my day job, which yeah, like I said, I still love doing that. 

Aidan

Being a taxi driver for the kids as well. 

Vaughan

Oh, yes, being a taxi driver and taking them around everywhere to all their activities. Balance is important, I think, as well, and just managing your time effectively. Weekends we usually keep free for family time. I try not to do anything kind of business-related in the weekends. It's very important to get that balance.

Aidan

In terms of scale, one of the questions I had for you was just to ask you if you've got any advice you would give to listeners who might be currently earning, I don't know, $1,000 a month for their online business, maybe even less than that, and obviously want to scale up to $10,000 or tens of thousands of dollars per month. Is there anything that you would say from your experience that helped you scale? 

Vaughan

Look, definitely when I needed to scale, I got a VA, and that's when I scaled. That was my biggest leap forward. So I was at the point where I was doing everything myself. As you can appreciate that there's a lot to do when you're doing everything yourself. Sometimes you don't do things as good as other people can do. I got some really good advice and took the plunge and hired a VA. Look, I was a little bit nervous at the time, obviously, but I did it and it basically helped me scale from $1000 to $10,000 in only a few short months. 

I think it helped me focus on what the next steps were. I wasn't so much involved kind of doing the day-to-day stuff inside the business. I was more like took a step back. I had someone else doing that now. I took a step back and it allowed me to really kind of look at, I guess, the more strategic kind of things on what we can do moving forward. That was the way to do it, because in a way, you're kind of doubling your time if you get a VA or if you get two VAs. 

Aidan

Totally. So you have multiple VAs. You could be tripling or quadrupling your time. I mean, I remember when I was getting started, at one point I had I think it was like five or six different VAs each working 8 hours a day. And I was like, wow. And that continues to scale. Like right now in my business, just to give you an example, we've got somewhere in the range of 140 to 150 people on the team employees. If I sit down and think how many hours that allows me to get done in a day, it's quite phenomenal. There's no real limit to that either, but certainly for a solopreneur starting out, having a single VA who can either be a jack of all trades and just help you with little bits and pieces or take one or two things off your plate is huge. To your point, it allows you to get out of the forest, out of the trees and actually see the 10,000 foot overview. 

I think even if someone hasn't got a VA, it's worth setting time aside to do that because otherwise it's easy for people just to get tied up in the day-to-day operations and it's like you're running on a treadmill. You just keep on running, keep on running, keep on running and if you hop off, you stop. You sort of get overwhelmed. But if you plan into your week, even just an hour a week or a couple of hours each week, where you can sit down and sort of try to have a look at the bigger picture, see where you're at, it helps you identify opportunities for growth and opportunities to design the business in such a way where you're not just a cog in the machine and take a more strategic approach to it. 

Totally agree with that. Getting a VA, my business exploded actually when I got my first virtual assistant. That was when, very similar to what you said, I got my first virtual assistant and next minute I was doing so much more work and the income took off. Totally agree with that. 

What about tools and software? Is there anything that has been crucial or that you use on a daily basis that you would share with people? 

Vaughan

Tools, lots of tools. So obviously with an online business, you definitely need the right tools. I'm a big fan of keeping things simple. What I mean by that is for tracking and what have you, I just use Excel, nice and simple, everyone's got it and I use that. For my e-com store, there's obviously Cartzy, which is useful. Again, it does the job. It's nice and simple, you don't have to overthink things, it just works for a CPA type of business. Then you've got the Float Funnels and Sendpad for emailing which again, they work really well together and just integrate nicely. It makes things so much easier to set up. Funnel Flux is useful for tracking, that's what I use which is really good, saves a lot of time, so definitely recommend that. I use a bit of an in house tool for handling customer queries and through the e-commerce business. But apart from that, just keeping it really simple. 

Aidan

What platform do you use for working with your virtual assistants? Or do you do that all through Skype or something, or how does that work? 

Vaughan

Yeah, everything’s Skype, and I use Notion, which is kind of a free note taking, kind of a document sharing kind of app. I use that for basically putting standard operating procedures and instructions and what have you, and keeping track of everything in there which is useful. It's just nice and simple. So yeah, that's another tool. Notion, good stuff. Want something easy. 

Aidan

We'll include a list of these tools, by the way, in the show notes, which everyone will be able to get access to by going to The Growth Booth, navigating to episode number 78, and we'll include a list of the different tools and bits and pieces that Vaughan has mentioned there. 

Now, just to sort of start wrapping up here. Have you noticed that your mindset has changed throughout the journey of your online business? And if so, how has that sort of unfolded? What are the main sort of changes in Vaughan as a person and how he sees the online business space today versus getting earlier on? 

Vaughan

Yeah, definitely way more opportunities now. It's amazing. Everything's moving so fast. I think from a mindset point of view, just the belief is just way more stronger than it used to be. It's just with new opportunities opening up all the time, it's pretty much put everything, I guess, that I've learned over the last 20 years, everything's falling into place and just coming together. It's just amazing. It's such a good time to do online marketing at the moment. It's just no better time. There's so much happening. It's exciting. 

Aidan

The belief thing is really interesting because when you've basically gone from having thoughts, thinking, “I think I can do this, I think this could work,” to knowing it. It's a fundamental shift. One of the most common questions that I get, and we're actually speaking about this before the call, is people often ask me, and they ask you through the Blueprint Academy coaching, “Does it actually work?”

I think it's a perfectly natural question. I was certainly asking that question myself when I got started, but one of the easiest things that you can do if you want to, I think, accelerate your results is to set that question aside and put 100% faith and trust in that online marketing does work. 

Obviously, there are better courses out there, worse courses out there. I'm sure there are. I know that there are some online business models that probably don't work that well, but if you just look at the core business models that have stood the test of time online, ecommerce, there's only a few ways that you can really do ecommerce. You could have a dropship store. You could be selling physical products on Amazon. You could be selling through the Facebook marketplace. And then you've got the different traffic channels. So you've got Facebook as a traffic channel, you've got Google for paid ads, you've got search engine optimization, you've got affiliate marketing. There's different types of affiliate marketing, but those models work. 

We know they work because we do them. We know they work because lots of other people do them. If you're starting out with an online business, you can set aside the question of does it actually work, because it does actually work. Once you know that, and once you stay focused on a simple plan, that's when you can get the results. 

I think this is also one of the reasons Vaughan why if your ecommerce business, if something were to happen to it and it didn't work anymore, or your CPA affiliate marketing business, I know with 100% certainty that you would be able to start again. It might take you six months to grow, but you'd be able to start again. This is why I think successful entrepreneurs who have different challenges and go bankrupt or the business fails or something, they just get very quickly, they get back to where they were. That is all down to mindset, really. I mean, that's the one differentiator between if you're looking at two different people, one of them is someone who knows it's going to work and one of them is someone who thinks it might work. The one that knows it's going to work and has that 100% belief is going to get results so much faster. It's just a no-brainer, it's just going to happen and the universe and that person's world sort of aligns to make that happen. A couple of thoughts there. 

What's next for your business? 

Vaughan

What's next? Currently expanding. It's been a fun year. Moving into CPA, expanded into that. I still need to do and move forward with my e-com business still. There's still some areas there that can definitely move into and expand with, so that's definitely on the cards to scale that even further and to also scale up the CPA business. That's kind of the goals for this year. There's so many things on the list to do. I guess like we said before, and like you mentioned, there's just so many ways out there in the online space to make money, right? I've got a huge list of all these things that I want to get into. I've learnt just to focus on one thing at a time. 

Aidan

Is there one piece of advice, maybe business advice that you've received or something that you've learned that has maybe influenced your entrepreneurial journey that you would leave with our listeners here today?

Vaughan

Yeah, probably what I just touched on, actually, I was pretty bad at the shiny object syndrome. So avoid it. There's so many things out there, so many distractions. Stick to one thing. I was told this probably just short of a year ago. Stick to one thing, make it really good. Just focus on it. Do really good at it. Once you've got it systemized and pumping through, then you can move on to the next thing to diversify, which is exactly what I did. I'd recommend that. It's one piece of advice that I received that's definitely helped my journey. 

Aidan

Fantastic. Awesome. Well, look, Vaughan, thank you so much for taking time out to be here today. I think we've covered lots of interesting stuff from the mindset that it takes to succeed online to your story, which I think is hugely inspirational and motivational to a lot of our listeners who are going to be able to relate to everything that you're saying, some of the mistakes that you made along the way, some of the different software tools that you've used and how you've been able to explode your business with the help of virtual assistants. Thank you once again for being here, man. This has been awesome. 

Vaughan

Yeah. Excellent. My pleasure. Looking forward to catching up again sometime. 

Aidan

Fantastic. We'll definitely love to have you back. 

That's a wrap for this show, guys. You can see this show, get the show notes at episode number 78 of The Growth Booth. And as always, you can see the video version over at YouTube. Just do a search for The Growth Booth. You'll find us there or wherever it is that you like to listen to your podcast. I will see you on the next episode of The Growth Booth, coming soon.  Bye for now.