PJ Jonas is married and homeschools her eight kids. In 2008 she began a goat milk soap business with her family. That business, Goat Milk Stuff, now distributes soap world wide and has been featured on the TODAY show and in the Oprah Magazine. PJ has a passion for helping busy moms and reaches out with her podcast, facebook page, blog, and tweets. Running her business and taking care of her family keeps her very, very busy. And she loves it.
Subscribe to EOFire
Resource Mentioned:
- Your Big Idea: Successful Entrepreneurs have One Big Idea. Follow JLD’s FREE training & you’ll discover Your Big Idea in less than an hour!
Success Quote
- “I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.” – Thomas Jefferson
Business Failure
- PJ Jonas was producing as much goat milk soap herself as her eight kids and husband could, and it still wasn’t enough. She brought in help, but listen to the disapointement that followed.
Entrepreneurial AHA Moment
- You can’t do it all, but when you hear a current theme being echoed by your customers and near-customers, listen. PJ did just that, and the dividends it paid were incredible.
Current Business
- PJ just moved Goat Milk Stuff into a brand new state-of-the-art 7,000 square foot facility and is loving life. Hear what she can finally do now that she has the capabilities… exciting!
Small Business Resource
- Workflowy.com: Organize your brain
Best Business Book
- The E-Myth Revisited by Michael E. Gerber
- The Success Principles by Jack Canfield
Interview Links
Killer Resources!
1) The Common Path to Uncommon Success: JLD’s 1st traditionally published book! Over 3000 interviews with the world’s most successful Entrepreneurs compiled into a 17-step roadmap to financial freedom and fulfillment!
2) Free Podcast Course: Learn from JLD how to create and launch your podcast!
3) Podcasters’ Paradise: The #1 podcasting community in the world!
Subscribe to EOFire!
Full Transcript
John Dumas: Hire Fire Nation and thank you for joining me for another episode of EntrepreneurOnFire.com, your daily dose of inspiration. If you enjoy this free podcast, please show your support by leaving a rating and review here at iTunes. I will make sure to give you a shout out on an upcoming showing to thank you!
John Lee Dumas: Okay. Let’s get started. I am simply thrilled to introduce my guest today, PJ Jonas. PJ, are you prepared to ignite?
PJ Jonas: Absolutely!
John Lee Dumas: Awesome! PJ is married and homeschools her 8 kids. In 2008, she began a goat milk soap business with her family. That business now distributes soap worldwide. It has been featured on The Today Show and in the Oprah magazine. PJ has a passion for helping busy moms and reaches out with her podcast, Facebook page, blog and tweets. Running her business and taking care of her family keeps her very, very busy and she loves it.
I’ve given Fire Nation a little overview, PJ, but why don’t you take a minute? Tell us about you personally. How old, where you’re from, etcetera, and then take another minute and give us a little overview of your business.
PJ Jonas: Absolutely! That’d be great. I am a 40 year old mom and wife. Those are my two things that take up a lot of my time. But back about 6, 7 years ago, I was bathing one of my children one day and noticed that the ingredients that I was using in the baby wash were not up to my standards, so I decided to make soap for the family. That seemingly innocent little decision turned into something that I can’t even begin to describe what an amazing journey it has been because it has taken our whole family on this journey for developing this business and brought us to places that we never could have even imagined.
So that’s about the business we’ve got. I’ve got 8 children. We homeschool them. They’re ages 5 to 15 right now. My husband and I met at the University of Virginia where we both attended. I was a stay-at-home mom until I started the business and the business really takes up most of my time now.
John Lee Dumas: Alright! The Cavaliers. I love that university.
PJ Jonas: Absolutely!
John Lee Dumas: I really look forward to delving more into your current business later in the interview because it just sounds so fascinating and being in the Oprah magazine and on The Today Show are just two incredible pieces of the journey that you’ve so far been on. But let’s start with your favorite success quote because at EntrepreneurOnFire, we like to get the show rolling with a little motivational quote from our spotlighted entrepreneur, and that’s you, PJ. What is your favorite success quote that you would like to share with Fire Nation today?
PJ Jonas: Well, since you’re familiar with the University of Virginia, you know that that was founded by Thomas Jefferson so my favorite quote is from him. I’ve heard other people say this similarly, but he put it, he said, “I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.” That has really been kind of foundational to our lives and the way we’ve structured our business. In fact, our tagline for the business is “Work Hard, Get Dirty. Use Good Soap” because we’ve been able to take that hard work and just make a tremendous success of our business.
John Lee Dumas: I love that quote. It is such a meaningful quote and we’ve definitely had some quotes on this show up to this point that encompass luck because most people really don’t realize how much of an aspect luck plays into it, but you need to be in the right place to actually get lucky, and that’s what these quotes really keep speaking to and I just love the fact that it takes the hard work, the effort, the dedication and determination to be in the right place at the right time. Otherwise, you’re just not going to be “lucky.”
PJ Jonas: Exactly. You can’t just let life happen to you. You have to put in your share, and at the same time, you have to be willing to accept that you can’t control everything, but you have to be able to work hard to control what you can control.
John Lee Dumas: There will always be the X factor out there that nobody can explain.
PJ Jonas: Yes [Laughs]. And sometimes that X factor can really work in your favor and sometimes it can make life challenging, but it is always there.
John Lee Dumas: [Laughs] Absolutely. So PJ, can you just take us down to the ground level real quick? This is about your journey as an entrepreneur. So how has this quote resonated in your life, in your mentality, in your business?
PJ Jonas: Well, being a mom with so many children, I was very familiar with hard work. But when it came time to start the business and add the business into my already busy schedule, it was something that I had to make that decision that the business and growing the business so it could support the family was a priority and that I had to put the work into it. I couldn’t just let it happen and hope that things were successful and kind of have this little hobby going on on the side, but I had to structure the life where the business really could get everything that it needed to survive and grow.
John Lee Dumas: Absolutely. Take 30 seconds and just share with us real quick maybe a small story of where you’ve just been lucky.
PJ Jonas: [Laughs] Well, you could say that getting on The Today Show, we were very lucky in getting on. In the Oprah magazine, we were very lucky. Again, we’ve done a lot of the right things to be able to put ourselves there, but there’s no guarantee that you’re going to get that kind of publicity. When we received that, I mean that was a huge bonus to our business and it just keeps rushing it up to the next level.
John Lee Dumas: I love that. Let’s use that to transition to our next topic, which is failure. As an entrepreneur, we face failure every day, every month, every year, and if we’re not facing failure then we’re really not growing and learning as individuals, as entrepreneurs, as businessmen and women. So PJ, take us back to a point in your journey when you’ve either failed or just really came up against an obstacle that you just had a very difficult time overcoming. Share that with us.
PJ Jonas: Well, the business really grew a lot more rapidly than we had intended or expected, and as wonderful as that was, it brought on a lot of challenges. It got to the point where my husband and I were working 80 to 100 hours a week and the business kept growing and we were just kind of overwhelmed. We decided to bring on some help, and that was a really big challenge for us because we’re not the typical work environment. My children, we have 8 young children. They all work in the business. They all know the business more than any of the people that we brought in, and there are not a lot of people who are willing to take directions from a 12 year old. So bringing on people was really difficult and really challenging, and we learned that no matter how great the people were, none of them had the passion for the business that we did. None of them took care of the customers the way we did. That was really hard because some of the things that we thought they would be able to handle just really didn’t work out very well, so we kind of had to regroup and rethink the things that we were going to touch and the things that help was going to be able to touch.
John Lee Dumas: Man, I have a hard enough time taking care of myself during the 50 hours or so a week that I try to keep myself limited to, although often it does loop above that. How in the world did you manage to work 80 to 100 hours a week with 8 kids? That is just beyond my reasoning.
PJ Jonas: Well, you have to remember that the children, because we homeschool, everything kind of involves or revolves around what we’re doing. So if I’m on the website, the children are learning how to manage websites. If I’m dealing with customers, the children are learning about customer service. If we’re dealing with the financials, they’re getting the financials. So everything is just involved, and my children are all very hard workers. They know how to cook and clean stuff. So if I was getting really busy, I could put one of them and say, “Okay, go make spaghetti for dinner.” So everything was just – and we had the dairy goats. We have to milk those. So it was just it goes from one step to another and it’s just all that we do.
John Lee Dumas: I don’t know if you’ve seen the show “Revolution.” You probably haven’t because you seem too busy to really maybe sit down and watch TV, but there’s a new show that just came out this fall. It’s called Revolution and it’s about a time when something happens. I haven’t actually even watched that many episodes, but there’s some kind of nuclear war or something and there’s nothing left in the world. It’s desolate except for a handful of people. I think the Jonas family would have been pretty awesome in this situation. What do you think?
PJ Jonas: Yes. We’ve definitely got a whole lot of survival skills down. There’s not a lot that we can’t accomplish and conquer with the ten of us putting our minds to it.
John Lee Dumas: I love that. That’s so funny. So pull a major lesson that you learned out of this challenge, this obstacle that you had of growing your team, bringing other people on that just didn’t have the passion and to get up and go that you needed to have them to have on a daily basis.
PJ Jonas: What I learned was that our customers feel very attached to our family and what we do. So it was most important for our family to do the things that personally touched the customers. So I would recommend to people that when it’s time to bring people on, figure out what it is in your business – because the common recommendation is to figure out what you’re good at, and do that and then hire out the rest. While I agree with that, if your customers have a certain expectation, you may be the one to have to meet that expectation.
John Lee Dumas: Absolutely. We’re going to use that to transition to our next topic, which is the other side of the spectrum, PJ, because as entrepreneurs, we always are experiencing these failures which we’ve spoken of, but we’re also experiencing this aha moment. These aha moments are coming to us in small doses and big doses. We have them every day, every week, but every now and then we really have that one big light bulb moment that just overshadows everything else. Have you had an aha moment like that? And if so, share it with Fire Nation.
PJ Jonas: I did. When I started the business, it all came because I wanted a natural healthy soap for my family, and that was really the beginning of the business. So when we started, that was how we were marketing. We were marketing towards the mom who wanted a healthy product for her family’s skin. Well, when we were getting out more and more of our soap, we started to hear feedback that people were having relief from their skin problems. Things like eczema and psoriasis and dry skin. Things like that. And it was just this kind of light bulb that, okay, there are more people who are interested in my product than just those who are looking for natural products. So it really opened up our marketing completely.
Now, we pretty much have three target customers instead of the one that we started with. We have the mom who wants a natural product, we have people who have skin problems and skin conditions, and then we have the people who just want to pamper themselves with a good bar of soap. So we have kind of three different thrusts to our marketing and we go after all of those customers. But knowing that there was more out there, it really opened up our whole product line because what started out with just the goat milk soap expanded to lip balms and solid lotions and laundry soaps. So it made the whole business bigger, that moment.
John Lee Dumas: Absolutely. It kind of reminds me since I’m from Maine and Burt’s Bees was a big story around here for quite a long time because it was a local company that just grew and they really just transformed themselves from a one product to a multifaceted product company, and now they just do a lot of great things. So my question to you is this – after having this aha moment, what specific actions did you take marketing-wise to your three target audiences?
PJ Jonas: Well, we went after on the website, we started to create pages geared more towards those different people. So instead of just saying, “Oh, this is a natural soap,” we would bring in the benefits to your skins conditions, and “Oh, this is also just a luxurious way to pamper yourself.” So we started using those keywords throughout the website and having specific landing pages targeted towards that that we could refer people to. So those were some things that just directly changed on the website, but I do a lot of radio interviews and such, and so I started bringing those things in more as I would talk about the products and talk about what we had available. So it was just kind of opened up, the knowledge, and made it something that we really paid more attention to these other target customers.
John Lee Dumas: So people that are listening to this program right now, PJ, who have products not necessarily even similar to yours, but just products that they have, that they produce, that they want to get out there and market, can you give us some strategies that you found have been very successful, specifically in marketing your soap?
PJ Jonas: Well, for us, we started out – we always had the website from the beginning, but we did a lot of craft fairs and festivals. I can’t even say how important that was because we were face to face with hundreds and hundreds of people and hundreds and hundreds of customers, hearing the questions they were asking us and being able to give immediate feedback and have a dialogue. So you’ve got to find a way to know what it is that people are wanting. What was really helpful with that as well is not just the people who had bought, who would buy, but the people who said no and walked away and you could find out why it was that they were not purchasing. So that kind of face-to-face is really wonderful. I get some of that at Facebook. We have a pretty active Facebook page with just over 18,000 fans. So I can ask questions and get that back, but inherently, that’s kind of biased towards the people who like us and are positively inclined to us. So if we can get some of those negative or people who are just not interested, it’s just so valuable.
John Lee Dumas: Absolutely. It’s so valuable for entrepreneurs to know, and we’ve talked about this before on Fire Nation, with pretty much every successful business, you’re going to have different segments of people who look at your product. You’re going to have approximately 20% of people who are just going to be these diehard fans. No matter what you do, you can’t do wrong and they’re going to love you and praise you no matter what. And then you’re going to have 20% of people who are just going to be negative because that’s the kind of people that they are and they get a kick out of being negative. Those two segments, while they’re both always going to be there, they’re not as valuable as that middle 60% of people that is your target audience who are people that you could definitely potentially sell to, but you’re not for some reason, and if you could reach that 60% and find out their pain, what they want, then you can really increase your market share. Be specific, PJ. What was one or two things that you really learned from this 60%?
PJ Jonas: We learned that people have something in their mind that they want. Like for example, people would come up to our booth and pick up our soap and they would ask for do you have Lily of the Valley, and we would say no, and they would turn around and walk away. So what we did was we learned that we needed to be able to deal with these people, and while we weren’t going to make everything for everybody because that was impossible, we instituted a custom batch product where people can request a custom batch. They could say, “I would like Lily of the Valley,” and we get that in for them. We make it and we get it back to them. So that was something that we specifically did. We also found, especially with the economy, that there were a lot of people who loved the soap and wanted to use the soap, but just really couldn’t afford and couldn’t justify spending that much money for the soap. So what we did was we created, instead of selling it, just these individual bars. We started selling it as a soap log so that we would make the soap log, which is a lot less labor for us. Whereas we would normally at our place cut it up and let it sit for 6 weeks to cure, people can buy the log right after it’s made, cut it at their house and cure it at their house and that can save them a lot of money. So those were two specific things that we did directly from the feedback that we got from that middle group that was interested but had some issues.
John Lee Dumas: So valuable. That was great insight, PJ. Thank you for being so specific. I mean that is the kind of nuggets of wisdom that Fire Nation is just so taken with when they hear it because it’s all about the learning curve, and listening to these interviews from people like yourself who have been there, done that and been successful just shortens their learning curve to the point where they can really get to what works and not have to learn necessarily the hard way.
PJ Jonas: Yes. When you’re starting out and every single sale counts, I mean you can’t afford to let anybody go away if there’s something that you can do to obtain them as a customer. The trick then is as you grow and don’t necessarily need every single sale to survive, to still be able to meet those customers and have that wow experience for them and say, “Wow! They really went out of their way to help me.”
John Lee Dumas: So speaking of a wow experience, PJ, have you had an I’ve made it moment?
PJ Jonas: We had a couple of times when we were like, “Wow! We really made it!” The first one was when we brought my husband home and he started working in the business fulltime and when we let go with that paycheck and we were providing for the family of ten. That was like, “Oh my gosh! We’ve made it! We have a successful business. We’re actually doing this.” The second one was when we were on The Today Show. That was something you don’t ever really – I never grew up thinking that I would ever be on The Today Show. I’ve always watched that show. To actually see yourselves on there and be there was just wow, we have really made it!
John Lee Dumas: I love having those little feelings, and I’ve been fortunate to have a couple of those myself. Not quite on that same level, but as a kid we all grow up watching game shows. The Price is Right was one of my favorite ones, and a very random story, the first time I’ve told it on Fire Nation, I was on The Price is Right and I won a car, and it was pretty surreal. I still have the video and I look back at it, and I just have to laugh because it is so weird just growing up watching Bob Barker and everything that has to do with The Price is Right, and then all of a sudden being there. You just like have to do a double take.
PJ Jonas: [Laughs] That’s awesome. I love that!
John Lee Dumas: So PJ, we’re rolling along right now, and we’re going to move to the next topic, which is your current business because you’re rolling along. You have a lot of great things that are happening in so many different directions. Can you just nail it down to one thing that is really exciting you about your business right now?
PJ Jonas: Well that one’s really easy because when we started the business, we had no idea that it was going to become what it’s become. We had three acres, we had the dairy goats that we’d had for our own family use. We built on an addition to the barn and we outgrew the house, but nothing was really planned and we didn’t have the foresight to know what we were going to become, so it didn’t work really well.
Two years ago, we purchased a 36 acre piece of property right in the middle of town and we’ve been trying for two years to build. It just had a lot of different issues. I am sitting and doing this interview in my new soap room. It is built. We’ve been in it for about two weeks, and it is just amazing to see where we came from and what we have now. This new building is 7,000 square feet. It’s got just about everything we need to do what we do. We’re already saying that we probably built it too small and we’ll have to be adding on sooner than we thought, which is a really good problem to have, but that is the most exciting thing. Just that all these things that we’ve been saying, “No, we can’t do that yet, we don’t have the space. We can’t do that yet, we don’t have the room.” Things like we’re going to start being able to focus on our wholesale business because right now we’re pretty much almost exclusively retail. We do wholesale accounts, but they’ve all come to us. Now we have the room to produce the volume to really go after wholesale. Then some of that other products that we’ve been wanting to add, we have the space and the room to be able to do those and store those and inventory those, so we’re just so excited about all the opportunities that we now can take advantage of.
John Lee Dumas: That’s so exciting. Congratulations for that. We had a little chuckle in the pre-interview because you now have high speed Internet for the first time in quite some time, and that’s a pretty awesome thing, right?
PJ Jonas: Yes! I mean because we always lived in the country and we had satellite and it would rain and we couldn’t process orders. We would literally take all our computers, all our printers, the postage printers, and go to McDonalds to print the postage so we could send out the orders. That was one of our major things in finding a new location. And then this when we actually have T1 cable right to the building. So it’s just like it’s so fast. It’s awesome!
John Lee Dumas: Oh, I love that so much! [Laughs] So PJ, on the show we often have online entrepreneurs, and when I ask this question, I get very similar responses as far as I wake up, I check my emails and I write content. You’re a little bit different. You create a product, and I know that if I ask you this question and I didn’t limit it, you would be able to sit there and just list off 50 to 60 things that you do every single day because you have such a hectic and crazy and scheduled day and what have you. I have no idea. But can you just tell Fire Nation, pull back the curtain a little bit. What are two tasks that seem to occupy a good portion of your day every day?
PJ Jonas: I am really the one who keeps the business going in the right direction. I’m the visionary. I’m the one who plans new products. I’m the one who sets what specials we’re going to have and what we’re going to do for the holidays. So that takes a lot of my time, but most of my time, because I do that and I have all these ideas, I have to manage everybody else to actually implement and get the day-to-day work done. So I spend a lot of my time switching back and forth to planning and reaching out and marketing and managing the children and saying, “Okay. You go cut those soap bars. You go bag those soap bars. You take that postage out to there,” and just keeping everything flowing so everything doesn’t come to a halt, and just everybody’s always doing stuff so they can get the work done so they can finish that and get to their schoolwork.
John Lee Dumas: I think another aspect to your business you should create too now that you have this great, new, beautiful location, you should start having tours because I know people would love to see this whole business in process. I know I would. I’m just trying to picture it right now, and it just seems fascinating to me. I just know that other people definitely feel the same. So can you just take maybe 60 seconds and explain to Fire Nation exactly what goat soap is because I personally still don’t even have a grasp on it.
PJ Jonas: Okay. When you make soap, any bar of soap that you buy in the store or wherever, you need to use a liquid, and almost all soaps are made with just water. But instead, we make ours with the goat milk, and the reason we do this is for a lot of reasons. But first, it adds all the cream and the protein. So it’s really moisturizing on your skin and it helps a lot of people with dry skin. When I first started making it, my husband’s fingertips always were just cracking and split and bleed down by the fingertips. That stopped when I started making this soap. So that’s the first benefit. The goat milk is also really high in a lot of vitamins and minerals. In fact, things like Vitamin A and selenium, a lot of things they add to high-end beauty products, that all occurs naturally in the goat milk, so that’s really good. And then goat milk also has the alpha hydroxy acids which help remove the dead skin cells. So all of those things that you can pay a whole lot of money for just naturally occurs in goat milk, and like I said earlier, it helps people with eczema, it helps people with psoriasis. It does a lot of those things without all the steroid, creams and stuff that a lot of people have to deal with. And then we make it smell really good. We have a lot of really good scents that we add in, and I make it so that it lasts a really long time and it lathers really well. So it’s just a really nice bar of soap that people fall in love with.
John Lee Dumas: Well, I just fell in love and I just ordered a bar online.
PJ Jonas: [Laughs] That’s awesome!
John Lee Dumas: So PJ, we’ve now reached my favorite part of the show. We’re about to enter the Lightning Round. This is where I provide you with a series of questions, and you come back with amazing and mind-blowing answers. Does that sound like a plan?
PJ Jonas: Oh, I can handle that.
John Lee Dumas: [Laughs] What was the one thing holding you back from becoming an entrepreneur?
PJ Jonas: For me, it was the idea. I had always wanted to be in business. In high school, I always said I wanted to be the CEO of a company, but I didn’t have the right idea and I wasn’t ready to force it yet. So once we had the idea, then it was just full steam ahead.
John Lee Dumas: What is the best business advice that you ever received?
PJ Jonas: This one we got at the beginning when we first started, and a friend of mine who was a big executive, he told me, he said, “A lot of companies fail because they grow too quickly, but very few ever fail because they grow too slowly.”
John Lee Dumas: I love that. That’s so true in so many ways.
PJ Jonas: Yes. It really helped me a lot to recognize that it was okay to let go of some opportunities because we were already too busy and the business wasn’t going to fail because I missed those opportunities, but if I went above and beyond what we could handle, then I would be causing problems.
John Lee Dumas: Yes, and a great quote from our mutual friend, I’m sure, Bill Cosby, is “I’m not sure what the secret to success is, but I know the secret to failure is not saying no.”
PJ Jonas: Yes. I hadn’t heard that one. That’s a good one.
John Lee Dumas: Yes. It’s a great quote. It’s one that’s been used on the show actually a couple of times because it resonates so well with entrepreneurs because that’s exactly what happens. You get lucky because you’re working hard and you suddenly get some press you didn’t expect, and all of a sudden, everything starts coming at you at once. Those entrepreneurs that just chase all those bright shiny objects and don’t keep focusing on the core of their business see it disintegrate while those that are really able to maintain the core focus and grow slowly from that core are the ones that really build the strongest backbone to their business as possible.
PJ Jonas: Yes, and it takes time. You can’t rush it. It just takes time to build.
John Lee Dumas: What is something that’s working for you or your business right now?
PJ Jonas: I’m really pleased with our customer service right now. We get a lot of positive, positive comments. People really like the speed of our shipping and they like the personal touch that we give. That’s something that I think we had lost sight of for a little bit there while we were growing and trying to bring in some help, and we’ve really come back to that core issue and it’s been working really well.
John Lee Dumas: One thing that I’ve just heard over and over again is the overdelivering aspect of being an entrepreneur and being a business that really is working on growing. Do you add any kind of personal touch to your deliveries that really kind of make people smile?
PJ Jonas: Yes. Every invoice that we have, we write on there. It’s usually just “Enjoy!” and then whoever signed it. But then whoever pulls it, whichever child pulls it writes their name in the left hand bottom side of the invoice and whoever checks it writes their name on the bottom right hand side. Well, it’s kind of become this competition of who can write their name bigger. So the kids have these big colorful pens and they write their names on the bottom and they’ve taken to putting smiley faces in their letters and I get comments all the time from that. People just think that’s the greatest thing ever.
John Lee Dumas: That is awesome. So PJ, now you have high speed Internet. You’re obviously online a good part of the day, doing what you need to do with marketing, emails, etcetera. Do you have an Internet resource that you’re just in love with like an Evernote or something along those lines that you can share with Fire Nation?
PJ Jonas: I’ve started using Workflowy.com, and I’ve been really pleased with that. It’s really allowed me to kind of keep my to do list and my thoughts and my ideas. I can jot things down there. I love it because if I’m on the road, I can pull it up on my iPad and I can jot a note down there, and I don’t have to be in my office, I don’t have to have a specific computer with me. So that’s been really great.
John Lee Dumas: I love it. I use it daily. It’s my daily task keeper, and the search function on it is just incredible.
PJ Jonas: Yes. It’s really, really good when you start using it properly.
John Lee Dumas: What is your favorite business book?
PJ Jonas: I am a huge reader and I read all the time. I’m currently in the middle of “The Success Principles” by Jack Canfield and I’m really enjoying that, but whenever I’m talking to people and they’re asking me about business and starting a business, I always have to point out to them “The E-Myth Revisited” because that’s just – especially like a business like mine where it’s B to C – business to consumer – it’s just such a great book for giving you the proper mindset.
John Lee Dumas: Absolutely. You’ve alluded to it a couple of times in kind of vague terms, but basically, The E-Myth is so much about you don’t want to be working in your business so much as on your business, and you obviously have learned that as a reality and you apply those principles to your company today.
PJ Jonas: Yes. I mean if you want your business to grow, there’s only so much that you can do on the nitty gritty, but it could help with that at some point. But at the same time, I would caution you to be careful. Like I said earlier, you’ve got to know what’s important to your customers and not necessarily let go of that in everything. So for example, I hired a virtual assistant. Well I had her answering almost all the emails. And about a month ago, I took the emails back because I kind of felt like I was just losing sight of what the questions people were having and were kind of the things that were still confusing them on the website and I’ve made so many changes since I took those emails back. Just things that are really quick and easy fixes that I didn’t know about because I had given that out to somebody else. So just do both. Keep the touch and give it out to somebody else.
John Lee Dumas: There’s definitely a balancing act in everything in life.
PJ Jonas: I agree.
John Lee Dumas: So PJ, this next question, this is my favorite question, but it’s a tough one because I have changed it up a little bit and you have such a big and loving family. This might initially be scary for you, but just try to have fun with it and take it for what it is – just a random question.
PJ Jonas: Okay.
John Lee Dumas: If you woke up tomorrow morning and you were in a new world. It was identical to earth, but you knew nobody. You still have all the experience and knowledge that you currently have, but only $500 in your pocket with Internet access and a computer. All your food and shelter is taken care of, but what would you do in the next seven days in this new world?
PJ Jonas: Well, if I didn’t have any children to take care of, I’d probably, after I got done sleeping for a while, I would probably just do a lot of what I’m doing now. I would start a podcast, I would start a blog, and then I would start visiting all the other sites that had anything to do with my personal knowledge base and start making connections. Start leaving comments, start talking to people, and just finding out in this new world what the needs were and how I could help people.
John Lee Dumas: Great specific answer. I love the actionable advice. You’ve just given us actionable advice this entire interview, PJ, and we are all better for it. Give Fire Nation one parting piece of guidance, and then give yourself a plug, and then we’ll say goodbye.
PJ Jonas: I just want to encourage everybody that if you have a dream and you have something that you want to do, you can do it. I mean if I can do it with 8 kids in a down economy, you’ve just got to have the passion and the hard work and you can get there. Just make a plan and go for it. That’s what I would just recommend to everybody.
As for my plug, our business is Goat Milk Stuff. We make goat milk soap that’s really, really good for your skin. It makes really, really good Christmas presents. You can find this online at www.goatmilkstuff.com, and we’re always here to answer any questions that you have.
John Lee Dumas: Awesome, PJ. I will link all those up in the show notes. Thank you so much for your time. Fire Nation, we salute you, and we’ll catch you on the flipside.
