Selling Smart Passive Income (And What We Can Learn From It) — Pt. 1 featuring Pat Flynn and Matt Gartland

Jay Clouse (0:00)

It sounds so intense.

Matt Gartland (0:02)

I mean, it's not not intense.

SPEAKER_3 (0:04)

Thank you, Matt. Thank you, Matt.

Jay Clouse (0:20)

Hello, my friend. Welcome back to another episode of Creator Science. This is a big one this week. Let's start with the big news. Smart Passive Income, the brand started by Pat Flynn in 2008, has been sold. If you've been anywhere near the creator economy, you know SPI. Pat started it in 2008 after getting laid off from his job as an architect and it became one of the defining brands of the online business era. The blog, the income reports, the courses and the podcasts with more than 80 million downloads.

Matt Gartland was Pat's business partner who came in in 2019 when Pat acquired his agency Winning Edits and the two of them co-created SPI Media together the following year. That is what has been sold.

I played a small role in this story too. SPI acquired my community, Unreal Collective at the end of 2020, and I spent about a year and a half there leading their community experience. So I've seen the inside of this business and I've known Pat and Matt for years now. I can't speak more highly about both of them. Now, here's why I wanted to make this episode. Most creator businesses can't be sold. Not just won't, can't. The brand is the person, the audience relationship is with the person, and there's nothing left to hand a buyer once that person walks out the door. It's the biggest weakness in how most of us build quote unquote personal brands, and it usually only becomes obvious at the time you actually want out.

Pat and Matt built a way out and they started building it years before they needed it. So in this episode, we get into how they separated SPI from Pat, legally and creatively, starting back in 2018

Why they turned down venture capital and private equity offers that were higher than what they ultimately sold the business for, how Liz Wilcox came to be the buyer, which starts with a Pokemon event and a conversation Pat wasn't even a part of, what the deal structure looked like, how you license a person's name, face, and book back to a company they no longer own, and why they closed the deal in April and told absolutely no one until now. Now I know you're thinking, how much do they sell the business for? We don't talk about the purchase price. We agreed to that before we recorded. I'm sorry, it was off limits. But the structure of this deal we get into in detail, and I think that's more useful for you anyway. Next week, I'll be publishing a conversation with Liz Wilcox, the buyer side of the same story. So make sure you're subscribed. We'll get to that full conversation with Matt and Pat right after this.

This episode is brought to you by Circle, the community platform chosen by Tim Ferris, Dr. Becky Kennedy, Johnny Harris, the Obama Foundation, and yours truly. I just finished teaching a live course on building memberships, and one of my students did something that surprised me. Mandy Loomis turned her course notes into a community in just minutes using Circle AI. I'm going to read this directly from the transcript from one of our live calls. She said, quote, If you're building in Circle, I just started my free trial, and as soon as I created my account, an AI prompt opened up. I pasted all of my homework, the persona, the mission statement, and the spaces I had brainstormed during our session, and it literally built the spaces for me that I had listed in there. I am super impressed with their AI, end quote. Now you guys know me. I already love Circle, but it just keeps getting more and more powerful. From community to courses or live events, Circle does it all. And now with Circle AI, it's never been easier to build a digital business of your own. You can go from prompt to full community build out in a matter of minutes, even if you're totally new to the platform. It's never been easier to get started, thanks to Circle AI, just to visit circle.so to start a free trial today. That's circle.so.

SPEAKER_4 (3:48)

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