Transcription
Peter Shankman:
Going into debt for things that you love or things that you believe in isn't necessarily a bad thing. And I encourage people to go after what they love, but the question becomes, "Are you going after something you love and still able to do it in such a way? What happens if it doesn't work?"
Bobbie Rebell:
You are Listening to you Financial Grownup with me, certified financial planner, Bobbi Rebell, author of How To Be A Financial Grownup, and you know what? Being a grown-up is really hard, especially when it comes to money, but it's okay. We're going to. Get there together. I'm going to bring you one money story from a financial grownup, one lesson and then my take on how you can make it your own. We got this.
Bobbie Rebell:
Hey, Financial Grownup fans. That was entrepreneur and ADHD Advocate Peter Shankman. He talks fast, but pay close attention. He's worth it. Quick. Welcome to, everyone. Thanks for being here. We keep it simple. Spending about 15 minutes talking with high achievers, sharing there are many stories giving us insight into how they became such high achievers. If you like what you hear, please do all the things, subscribe, rate, review, take a screenshot, share it on social, tag me so I can thank you and tell a friend you care about.
Bobbie Rebell:
Let's talk about Peter Shankman. He does a lot and largely credits his ADHD, which stands for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder with being key to his success, which is why he wrote a book about it called Faster Than Normal, hosts, a podcast by that name, and now has the Shank Minds Community. He also wrote a bunch of other books. He was in PR. You might be familiar with the Geek Factory where he started a little side hustle to help journalists like me called appropriately help a reporter out or HARO. It's become very well-known and it's still a really big deal after he sold it. Also, he's an angel investor and he does marathons, Ironman triathlons, and he does a ton of skydiving like close to 500 jumps. Peter is a big deal. Let's get to him. Here is Peter Shankman.
Bobbie Rebell:
Hey, Peter Shankman, you're a financial grownup. Welcome to the podcast.
Peter Shankman:
Well, that's questionable, but thank you. It's good to be here.
Bobbie Rebell:
And congratulations on all your recent success, including your book Faster Than Normal, which is also a podcast, and a mastermind group, and that follows on the heels of many entrepreneurial successes. The most dear to my heart, of course, is HARO, help a reporter out, which you guys sold, but certainly, you have made such a name with that, so congratulations on all that.
Peter Shankman:
Thank you. I've gotten lucky. Good times.
Bobbie Rebell:
And speaking of your entrepreneurial success, that brings us to your money story, which has to do with going into debt in part for success. Nothing you necessarily regret, but something that ties into your ADHD, which you've talked about, and you talk about so much publicly. That's actually been something that you've leveraged as an entrepreneur, but it also created debt.
Peter Shankman:
When somebody with ADHD comes up with the idea for a company, which is what they do a lot.
Bobbie Rebell:
You've had many companies.
Peter Shankman:
I have. The premise is like, "All right, I wonder if I could do this better," and like three hours later I have some have started a company, and I'm not really sure how. The problem there is that it's not necessarily cheap to do. And for me, I got lucky in the respect that when I started my first one back in the 90s, which was the Geek Factory, a public relations firm, I did it in such a way that I created an idea for this tee-shirt. The movie Titanic was coming out, and I had this idea that I could sell tee-shirts in times square, because there had to be other people that hated the movie, as well. So I went into Time Square with 500 tee-shirts that I spent my rent money on tee-shirts that read, "It sank, get over it." I thought I could sell maybe 150 in Times Square and make my money back.
Peter Shankman:
And I sold like 500 in six hours. I cleared like five grand, and I cleared about 100 grand on the web. But that was a risky thing, because that was my rent money. If I didn't have that, I didn't do well, I was kind of screwed. Right? So it's those things where you come up with this idea, and you see what happens, and you risk it, but going into debt for things that you love or things that you believe in isn't necessarily a bad thing. And I encourage people to go after what they love. But the question becomes, are you going after something you love and still able to do it in such a way, what happens if it doesn't work? And there are a lot of people don't think like that.
Bobbie Rebell:
And to some degree, even though it was your rent money and, in your head, of course, that's a huge amount of money. You later made even bigger bets.
Peter Shankman:
I definitely made bigger bets. Here's the thing, there are two types of risks. There's blind risk and there's calculated risk. And I'm a skydiver, right? I have close to 500 jumps. I own my own gear and the whole thing and if I thought that I was going to die every time I jumped out of a plane, I wouldn't do it. Right. The key is, is that I believe that the training I have, and the gear I have, I keep it clean. I keep it in good shape. I know what I'm doing. I've learned how to do it, and so if I thought I was going to die everything I jumped I wouldn't jump. So I take calculated risks and calculated risks, while they're still risky, inherently called risks. The end of the world is not coming, so I'm not going to be like, "Okay, I'm going to start this. If it doesn't work, I'm homeless and living on the street."
Bobbie Rebell:
So tell us about HARO.
Peter Shankman:
HARO was a company. I built the connected journalists with sources all around the world. For me it was, "Okay, I'm going to start this on my own using a mailing list and paying a kid, who I know, a 100 bucks to build me the cheapest website known to man," because all you really needed to do was capture email addresses, and I did it. What wound up happening was that as it started growing I was able to ... I never planned on making money at it, to begin with. I planned on doing it sort of for the sake of doing it, for fun and it would help journalists. It would help my friends, and it would be good Karma and it wound up blowing up in such a way that it started generating revenue without my really expecting it to. But on the flip side, as it got bigger, I had to spend more money to keep it alive. And so it was that balancing, because look, I'm not an MBA. For me, it was a balancing act of how do I do that? And that was a lesson I learned on the fly.
Bobbie Rebell:
So what exactly happened? You went into debt unexpectedly for that.
Peter Shankman:
I went to debt unexpected. Not a tremendous amount, but certainly enough where I'm sitting there going, "Hmm, this is interesting." I live in New York City, right? I was renting an apartment at the time, in midtown Manhattan, which was not cheap, still isn't. And I've since bought one, which is even less cheaper or more expensive, but it gets to the point where it's like, "Okay, am I still able to do this and what's my runway like?" I think that's what a lot of people don't think about. They think, "Okay, I'm going to go into debt for this." You got to look two, three, four, eight, 10, 12 months in advance, or 12 into the future. How is that going to look in 12 months? How's the runway that I'm on right now? So the plane going down the runway at some point you need to take off or slam on the brakes.
Bobbie Rebell:
What was your runway?
Peter Shankman:
I think for the first four months that I was building HARO, there was absolutely no revenue coming in, because again, it was just me and a mailing list, right? It wasn't costing that much, but HARO got picked up by a newspaper. It got picked up by the New York Times. It got picked up, Seth Godin wrote about it, so all of a sudden we were getting thousands of new members per day, and I was using a mailing list service that based their charges on how many members we had. Right? So the more emails I was sending out every day, that's great at building the site, the more it was costing me.
Peter Shankman:
I think I went from like at one point 100 bucks a month in mailing lists charges to 2000 bucks a month in mailing list charges. Right. And so something has to happen here. At the same time people started calling me, said, "Hey, we use HARO all the time. We open every single email, do you accept advertising on it?" And so all of a sudden I was able to start selling ads against HARO. And my premise was I'll sell ads for whatever the cost of everything I'm having to pay for is. Again, wasn't even trying to turn a profit.
Bobbie Rebell:
Why? Why were you not trying to turn a profit?
Peter Shankman:
Because I still was running a public relations firm and at the time I was still running a PR firm. My premise was just, "Okay, I'll just keep doing this and building it." And then one day, it kind of hit me like, "You know what? This is a lot more profitable than the PR firm. This can make a lot more money than the PR firm. I should put all my effort into this." So I started shutting down my clients, giving them to other companies, things like that. And that's when I realized, "Okay, there's a lot of money to be made here."
Bobbie Rebell:
Talk about the connection between ADHD, and your experience as an entrepreneur.
Peter Shankman:
You need to be very aware. Like I said, when you only have two speeds when you're ADHD, so you need to be very aware that the ideas that come into your head, "Hey, this seems like a great idea. Let's do this," right. Might not necessarily be a great idea, or they might sound like an awesome idea, but you have to make sure that you actually can afford to do said idea, right? It's one thing to go into debt on a brilliant idea. It's another thing to say, "Hey, this is interesting. Let's go to bed." So the question is, is it going to work? If you don't have a plan, you're going to get in trouble,
Bobbie Rebell:
But you didn't have a plan at HARO. Really?
Peter Shankman:
I also didn't know I was at ADHD at the time.
Bobbie Rebell:
Okay, fair enough.
Peter Shankman:
It wasn't until about five years later that I realized all this stuff that I do has an actual name for it, and so for instance, now when I go to Vegas to give a keynote, anywhere in the world that I keynote, my contract basically says, "I'll keynote, you'll pay me, except in Las Vegas," In Las Vegas, it says, "Client does not have to be on the ground from wheels down to wheels up for more than eight hours." And so I'll fly in at 6:00 AM do a 12:30 PM, keynote and be out on a 4:00 PM flight, because if I have to stay the night in Vegas, nothing good's going to come of that.
Bobbie Rebell:
So you didn't have the ADHD diagnosis when you started HARO. Looking back, are there things that you would have done differently had you known or are you grateful and it worked out that you did not know because that way you ... you really plowed into that very quickly. You basically had the idea and just did it.
Peter Shankman:
Yeah, three hours later it was launched. I mean, I'm thrilled by the way things happened because you know, I was able to realize, "Hey, this can actually work for me." But again, that point is you have to understand how your brain works and you have to understand sort of what works for you.
Bobbie Rebell:
You don't think you would've launched HARO had you had that fear that other people have, that fear of debt?
Peter Shankman:
Probably not. And the thing about me is that a lot of my, almost everything I've done, I can trace back to my ADHD, right? The premise of, "Huh, wonder what would happen if? This morning I was doing an open water swim with a friend of mine, 5:30 in the morning outside of Coney Island.
Bobbie Rebell:
Because you get up at four in the morning every day.
Peter Shankman:
Because I get up at four in the morning, right. I actually got up at 3:30 this morning, where I'm sitting at Coney island. We're looking at the water, I say, "Oh, it's really pretty. It's really nice. I wonder where we should go? Should we just do our normal regular swim?" And I look at a light, and there's a buoy, right? I'm like, "I wonder how far that buoy is?" And my friend and I, "Oh, that's probably not that far." And you know, then there's the Morgan Freeman announcer's voice going, "In fact, it was much further," so a mile and a half later we come back from the swim, nearly dead. That's why I'd have a wonderful financial advisor, I have a wonderful accountant whose job it is, is to protect me so that I don't do these stupid things.
Bobbie Rebell:
So what is the lesson for our listeners from this? Those who have ADHD and those who know of somebody who has ADHD because that's pretty much everybody.
Peter Shankman:
It is. I think the lesson is to understand yourself first and foremost, and once you understand yourself, don't put yourself into positions where you can get into that level of trouble. It doesn't mean don't take risks, but make sure, again, they're calculated risks is a big difference between doing something for the hell of doing yeah, whatever and taking a calculated risk.
Bobbie Rebell:
And as pertains to debt?
Peter Shankman:
Most definitely there is good debt, there's great debt. You know, owning a home is a great debt, but if you're making $135,000 a year, maybe buying a 2.7 million dollar home is not necessarily the best idea in the world. I would love those shows. House Hunters. You see these two people, "Yeah, my wife has a business where she combs the knots out of street dogs and I make artisanal pencils. Our budget is four million dollars?" What?
Bobbie Rebell:
So true.
Peter Shankman:
Try to live in your own life there and understand that at the end of the day, especially with finances, at the end of the day, the race is only with yourself and it's a marathon, it's not a sprint.
Bobbie Rebell:
For people with ADHD, any specific lessons to draw regarding taking on debt? Are they? Do they need to be more careful? I know you have a lot of checks and balances in place.
Peter Shankman:
Yeah. I think one of the best lessons I've learned. Anytime I want to buy something, whether I'm online, whether it's in person, I ask myself, I stop and I visualize, "Where's this thing going to go in my apartment? Where's it going? Because I have two bedroom apartment in New York City isn't that much. Where's it going to live? Where's it going to sit? How am I going to use it? Am I going to take it out of where it is or is it going to be too much of a pain to get it back in there? And I ask all these questions. That probably prevents me from, I'd say doing probably 60% of things I want to buy.
Peter Shankman:
The other thing I do is I keep a lot of the purchasing Apps off my phone. The same reason I don't put like food Apps on my phone where you can order food because it's just too easy to order crappy food, so I keep those off and if I want to order something I have to go to my computer, get on the web, and it's actually a process. If you make it a process, it's a little bit easier not to necessarily just blindly do it.
Bobbie Rebell:
All right, Peter, your everyday money tip is all about making sure you connect with people because that's how you're ultimately going to be successful. That goes back to your PR days and all the advice you've given people. What is your everyday money tip?
Peter Shankman:
I love a website called spoonbill.io. It's S-P-O-O-N-B-I-L-L-.I-O, and what it does is it shows you anyone who has updated their Twitter bio, right? So you want to keep an eye on that because if you're looking to talk to reporters, you're looking to talk to me, you find out immediately what they've done, the "Oh look, that person just changed where they work or whatever," and then you can shoot a note. "Hey, noticed that you changed your." It's a great way to keep in touch with people without coming across as too needy or too wanting. Just take a look just say, "Hey, I noticed that you just got a new job. Congratulations."
Bobbie Rebell:
Right. It gives you a reason to keep in touch. And it can be for business, it can be for friendship, all of which helps us live richer lives. So, Peter, tell us what's going on with you for the rest of 2018 into 2019 with Faster Than Normal and all your other projects.
Peter Shankman:
Well, Fast Than Normal is my baby. It's a wonderful website and podcast where we focus on ADHD and the fact that ADHD can be a gift, not a curse as long as you know how to use it, which is what we talked about here. I run a mastermind group with sort of the same premise for some entrepreneurs, smaller to midsize entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurship is lonely and you got to have people to talk to. You have people who understand what it's like to be an entrepreneur that's at shankminds.com. And we're a great group of people that meet virtually and then a couple times a year in person. What else am I doing? A lot of fun stuff. My entire life is at shankman.com, my last name. You can find me there and my email is petershankman.com, I'm @petershankman on all the socials. I'm happy to connect with anyone. I think it's fun.
Bobbie Rebell:
Love it, and you are great at keeping in touch and if people reach out to you it's pretty likely they're going to hear back, so thank you, Peter. You're really wonderful. We appreciate you being here.
Peter Shankman:
My pleasure. Always happy to help.
Bobbie Rebell:
Hey friends, here's my take. Financial Grownup tip number one, Peter has been successful because he took things that were unique to him that might have held them back, but instead he uses them as a superpower. Find your superpower. What other people may see as a challenge may, in fact, be your biggest asset. Take a time out one of these days and just think about it. Hit pause. What traits and themes keep rising? For Peter, it was things like risk-taking and moving forward with ideas before they were fully fleshed out, but that worked in his favor usually, or he recovered or the consequences weren't that bad.
Bobbie Rebell:
Financial Grownup tip Number two, Peter talked about reaching out to people when they had a change in job status and you were notified thanks to this App, so that's a great idea. I would add to that, that it is important to keep in touch with people when something maybe not so good happens like they lose a job or face a setback. People remember that. Even just calling to let them know you're aware of what's going on and you're there for them is going to be really meaningful and remembered.
Bobbie Rebell:
Okay, my friends, we're going to wrap. I thought about advocating, doing something big like Peter going skydiving, but you know what? It's not going to happen. I got to be honest, but if Peter has inspired you to skydive, I need to hear about it, so let me know. DM me my friends on Instagram. I am @bobbibebell1, at Twitter @bobbierebell. And find out more about the show, bobbyrebell.com/financialgrownup podcasts.
Bobbie Rebell:
Show notes same pattern every time, bobbierebell/.com/podcast/the guest's name. In this case, that forward slash has Peter Shankman after it. And thanks to Peter for being a great guest. I am staying on the ground. No skydiving for me, but you did get us all one step closer to being Financial Grownups.
Bobbie Rebell:
Financial Grownup with Bobbi Rebell is edited and produced by Steve Stewart and is a BRK media production.
