How My Business Works

0:00I know there's a lot of new people listening to this podcast and so I wanted to give some context as to who I am and how my business works. I've gotten some emails since I started the newsletter back up at jivinesi.com, G-I-O-V-A-N-I-S-C-I.com. I've gotten some questions about hey you know I've maybe been following you since you had money lab and back when you had money lab and you were doing some university which is my main business. Your business worked this way and now you're in most of your recent videos and in your podcast you're saying it works a different way and you sell different products and different things are happening and so could you explain that? Yes, yes I can explain that and I figured this is just a refresher for myself for you if you've been following for me a long time and you want to know exactly the structure of my business which is swim university. This is how it works. It's very very simple and I've

1:00spent 20 years working on this damn thing building it up breaking it down removing pieces adding pieces streamlining making it harder for myself all the different things but there has been one consistent path there's been one consistent north star that I followed throughout these 20 years and that is that I want to continue playing the game I want to continue working for myself and I never want to work for another man ever again and on top of that I want my life to be easy I don't want to work myself to death I like working I enjoy working but I don't need to do it eight hours a day seven days a week or even more than that I like doing other things in life I like home brewing I like hanging out with friends I like snowboarding I like I like model trains even

2:06though I don't have them like I keep contemplating one day I'm gonna build a model train set that's how nerdy I am I have a house I gotta take care of I have a family to take care of you know I had to spend time with them I like cooking there's I have a me all I'm saying is that I have a lot of other interests besides business business pays for my lifestyle pays for all the other things it doesn't pay to do business but again I do like it and I like spending time on it but as I get older I am now 42 of this recording as I get older I'm appreciating slowing down a bit I appreciate I've done all the work again I said 20 years I've pushed myself I've tried multiple different things and here I am so I'm gonna explain to you exactly how the business works and all the pieces of it so the company is called swim university it's technically called something

3:08different but that's the name of the company swim university you can go to swim university dot com or swim you dot com I run the website swim university dot com on WordPress we write articles every single week and that is I've been doing that since the very beginning that was the first thing I started with and it's been the thing that's kind of driven the whole the whole brand now before I go into the details I realized I should probably give you the overall structure so and I've talked about this on the podcast before so you may hear this multiple times as I as you continue to listen to this podcast but I look at my business in three main parts we have marketing sales and products or distribution those are the three parts marketing gets people to gets leads

4:09sales turns those leads and the customers and the product buy and the products are what the customers buy and then we deliver it to them and supply customer service to them over time all right I used to sell a bunch of different stuff not sell stuff but I'll start I'll start with the back end first and I'll move forward so I'll start with products move up to sales and then end with marketing so here's our product line we we have multiple income streams not a ton but currently we have five products that we sell that we create ourselves and that we sell we have two physical books a pool care book and a hot tub book and then we have two digital products a course for pools and a course for hot tubs the

5:13fifth product so that's so those four products are what my company sells to customers that's one way we make money is through those sales and it's our biggest driver of revenue those those four products we also have an app now the app is slightly different the app is a swim university branded app it is it it works for both pools and hot tubs although it's called the pool care app right now and I have a partnership with a developer on that specific product so we don't make so we we share revenue of that one product and we continue to build it over time and I promote it through my marketing channels those are our five products but that is not the only way we make money we also make money through

6:17affiliates so we use Amazon for our affiliate marketing program we don't use any other affiliate program there are others we could use Amazon just seems to be the easiest one for us we've been on it the longest we've made the most money from it and it's just it's just simple we've been approached by other affiliate companies they kind of come and go so much that it's hard to keep up with whereas Amazon has been pretty consistent although it has changed its commission structure over the years but we don't consider this a something that we can bank on but it is an income stream and so we do make some money from Amazon affiliates or the Amazon the Amazon Associates program the third way we make money is through advertising and we currently only do that through YouTube so we have you so we have ads on our YouTube channel and we get paid

7:21from AdSense to that in the past and we're not we're open to it although it is not a primary driver of revenue we are open to sponsorships but we don't have any packages and right now we've we did one partnership last year and you know it went fine everything went well but we don't go actively seeking that out so I will also consider that advertising so if you're counting that's technically three revenue streams one from products that we sell direct one from advertising that we get a you know a percentage on the content that we make which is part of our marketing and affiliate commissions which is basically us recommending pool and hot tub products to our customers and we get a small portion of that 3% okay that's all the revenue streams that's the products on top of that we have a customer service department we use a program

8:26called Intercom and that's how we you know make sure that people get their books delivered and you know if they have any questions about the course or the book or even just general questions about pool care we do our best to answer them via email and through our app and so that's all done in Intercom as we call that customer service and it's really basic it's part of distribution and and on top of that we use a third-party company that ships our physical books so there's we have inventory in a place in Indiana that stores our books and ships them when they come through our Shopify system which is how we sell our physical products and our digital products so that is our product side of the business that's where all the money is made now the question is is I'll take this I'll jump to the front how do we get customers how do we get them well we

9:32have to one create pages on our website that convert people from leads to customers so sales pages but there's really not much to talk about there so I'm gonna jump to the front and talk about how do we get attention how do we get attention on our products and get people to click our affiliate links and get people to watch our YouTube videos so we'll start with YouTube we publish a YouTube video every single week during the spring summer and fall we take off in the winter time because you know there's not you know things are much lower you know people not that many pools are open in the United States not a lot of people are swimming our main businesses in the United States I understand that there are pools open in you know other parts of the world but we don't we just don't publish in the winter time on YouTube so we do that and that's one way we

10:36get customers and eyeballs on our content and products and it's probably our third I know it's our third largest channel I should say it's our second largest marketing channel is YouTube our first is Google still to this day we publish articles on our website and we do that now every week whereas before we would for between September of 2023 and let's just say September of 2025 we didn't publish any articles because that was when AI was born and we didn't know where SEO was going and we just lost a bunch of traffic and now we're getting back into the game now that things have sort of settled and things are starting to become clear on how the game is going to work now at least I think and so we're

11:38starting to play that game again and even during the times where we weren't you know getting as much traffic you know we were focused on other parts we were focused on YouTube we were focused on building up our email marketing strategy and we were getting into social media and things like that so those are our two biggest channels we publish articles on our website which is hosted on word press and we publish YouTube videos on our YouTube channel which has been growing since 2020 aggressively since 2020 then we also in 2022 started posting consistently on all social media platforms because once TikTok came out and the rise of short-form vertical video we are technically a video first company we focus on videos we started I hired my brother and we started

12:39doing short-form videos on all these platforms and we've been doing that consistently for the last what three four years with very minimal growth but I think it is built trust with our audience over time it is definitely a marketing arm it's hard to create attribution directly to those platforms because the way that short-form content is consumed versus long-form content in YouTube it's just very different and so we are working to kind of improve that over time and the goal is just to publish on a consistent basis and I can say that for the last three or four years we've published three short-form videos a week across TikTok Instagram Facebook Pinterest Twitter LinkedIn and I believe that's it the same video but across all the platforms and we're starting to dabble into

13:43other things like posting stories on a daily basis we're trying to scale up posting more videos we're trying different formats and seeing if we can have better growth in other departments but for now that's what we've been doing we're gonna continue to do that and so that's that's really all that marketing is it's long-form YouTube videos weekly in the summer weekly articles published on our website weekly videos published on social media platforms that's our marketing arm everything is organic we have we have dabbled in paid advertising in the past but right now 100% organic so all of our traffic all of our attention is through content that we create and publish for free now there's the sales part of it so how do we take that marketing how do we take that attention and convert it into both leads and customers so we do this a few ways

14:44but to to be very basic we have five sales pages so we have a we have one page on our website for every product all five products now of course if we're talking about you know earning money through affiliates and through advertising that happens simply by creating content so by publishing articles we're getting people to click our affiliate links by publishing YouTube videos we're getting people to you know see ads on those so simply the act of marketing makes us money in those two departments but we have five different sales pages for each of our products and we are trying to drive traffic to those pages we drive traffic to those pages by getting people from our website to go there getting people from our YouTube channel to go there and social media to go there all right but one of the ways we do that is we also try to get people to

15:49sign up for our email list now our email list right now we have a few different ways that we do that one we say hey join our newsletter you want to get you know weekly emails teaching you about pool and hot tub care sign up for our newsletter that's one way that's at the top of every single one of our websites another way we do it is we offer a lead magnet which is we have a cheat sheet for pools hot tubs and and saltwater pools we get people to say hey sign up give us your email address we will send you this cheat sheet cheat sheet and that gets people on our email list now I don't consider email a form of marketing even though it's called email marketing I consider it a form of sales because once people we get attention outside of our ecosystem right we get it through Google YouTube search tick tockers whatever we get it from outside

16:49things that we can control and then once they're on our email list they're in our ecosystem they're considered a lead so we got them and that's what we're trying to do and our email list just grows every single day by I mean it varies because we're a seasonal business so we obviously get way more subscribers in the summertime than we do in the winter time but I'd say we're probably adding somewhere around 50 thousand subscribers a year which is like not a lot but it's I mean I say it's not a lot for some people that maybe a lot and I could be wrong about that number but that's kind of where we are so now or at least that's where I think we are trying to think like no maybe it's maybe it's less than that maybe it's like 25,000 yeah maybe it's 25,000 so from there we send emails pretty much at this point every day now it depends on what type of lead you are

17:54because you can be in our ecosystem you can either be a hot tub owner or a pool owner and so if you're both you're getting an email every day if you're one or the other you're getting an email every other day does that make sense so in those emails we have a couple different types but basically we are providing value by sending people to our articles sending people to our videos creating actual newsletters where the content is in the email itself and then occasionally ascending promo emails promoting our products directly and you could stay on the email as long as you like but we would love if you supported us by buying one of our products now that is the entire ecosystem that's everything that's how the business works now when it comes to monetization we have our books which

18:58we make the least them well our books are you know one-time purchase and they're they're higher price they have a decent margin and that's how we pretty much fund everything we are our courses are a much better margin but not everyone buys the course they're more expensive than the books we don't have any sort of membership when it comes to you know there's no community there's no ongoing subscription for our courses and our books because we operate it a in a niche that is sort of a one-and-done niche once you learn pool care you don't need to learn anymore it is not a hobby it doesn't have continued education you are trying to basically just solve one problem which is taking care of your pool and once that problem is solved it's pretty easy for the

19:58rest of the time that you own a pool honestly you may have a problem here and there where you might come to us or check out our YouTube video or an article here and there but for the most part you do not need to pay us a subscription for continued education so our education products which again our name is Swim University we deal in education we are an education media company we only charge one-time purchases however we do have an app which is a tool and that is on a subscription basis and so that's where all the money is coming from as far as the team is concerned we have four people currently on the team five if you count my developer my partner so me I'm CEO we have staff who's my wife she does she's the

21:02contents are she writes all of the content video scripts articles emails you name it she wrote both books my brother is our video editor he edits all of our videos he's also been helping me with posting on social media he's also been helping me with putting together our emails our email templates so he's really just an editor at that point and then we have Kayla who runs all of customer service she is in charge of currently answering all emails and app chat support hopefully we're going to start and being able to answer comments on our social media platforms and she will handle that too so she would be in charge of all things community and customer relations and just general relations with like the humans who interact with us and then I kind of fill

22:03in everywhere else I I am the CTO of the education company meaning I am the one who's in charge of fixing up the Shopify store if there's any problems I'm in charge of the I've built the website I designed the website I if there's anything to be updated on the website that's me I developed all of the SOPs that run all of these processes like the article SOP for creating articles every week creating emails every week creating videos every week I I developed all of those and manage the SOPs themselves and communicate with all of the different people on the team to keep the engine moving I'm you can kind of consider me the conductor of the orchestra and the on-screen talent so all of the videos that you watch both in the course in our in our app on our YouTube

23:08channel social media anywhere I am the face I am the guy I have a studio a permanent studio in my basement that is built for just this purpose and actually as of today it's getting later in the day I wanted to record this podcast and get some steps in today I have to film 12 videos 12 videos I have to film for app videos six short form videos and three course videos so I got my work cut out for me today now that will probably take me about two hours of filming if not less depending on how much coffee I've had we'll see and and hopefully I don't make too many mistakes so my main jobs are basically on on-screen talent and you

24:14know operations manager I guess that's it that's the whole company I mentioned in previous episodes and part of this new rebranding of the money lab podcast which is now called business casual which is what you're listening to my goal right now we currently earn about six hundred thousand dollars in revenue per year my goal is to get to a million by the end of the year using all of the systems that I just mentioned no paid advertising no team expansion just just sheer continuing the way we do business and optimizing on the way and I believe we can do it and my wife believes we can do it so that's what we're planning on doing and I'm going to be recording this podcast with that thread the whole time every single episode is going to go toward that goal and I will keep you update

25:19on on that but here's a caveat there's a lot of things that a business can do to just earn more revenue it doesn't necessarily make it more profitable I mean I could work my freaking ass off and just make more money by just doing cold calls but there is a caveat to this mission and that is I am not going to increase the size of the team I am not going to create any new products and I am not going to add any more hours to my schedule truth be told at this point in time I'm recording this on January 9th of 2026 I probably this is a big guess work about 20 hours a week it's about four hours a day now for this first week of the year I've been working a little bit more but as things start because that's just the beginning of the year and everyone's playing catch up like you're

26:22like well Matt you're doing 12 videos today that's insane I'm like yeah but that's the only thing I have to do today I don't count this podcast as part of my work schedule because it's completely different but and I'm getting my steps since this is like exercise for me technically but you know it's probably going to take me yeah two hours I may work an extra hour so I'm basically working four hours a day and I take off the weekends sometimes I work the weekends if I'm just bored and I have something I can you know get a head on I'll go I'll go into the basement and do that but you know I'm trying to reduce those hours I'm at 20 right now I bet you I can get it down to 10 but I need to set up systems and that's also the part of this mission is to make this extra money but reduce the by optimizing essentially and therefore reducing my hours

27:27and just having more output and there's a bunch of ways to do that and I'm going to explain all of those as we go forth on this podcast so that's how my business works if you have any questions that I did not cover in this episode that you're curious about please do me a favor just go to jivinesi.com g-i-o-v-a-n-i-s-c-i.com and enter your email address to subscribe to my free newsletter you'll get an email from me you can respond to that and I'm there I'm the one answering these emails right now the audience at business casual and jivinesi.com is small enough for me to to manage and I don't see it growing that much more I don't know if everyone wants to follow along with a guy who's making a good living but doesn't want to work that hard I don't know maybe I maybe I think of it maybe there is more people like that I don't know but if you know

28:31anybody who also might dig this let them know about it too that's it talk to you next time thanks for listening thanks for listening thanks for listening thanks for listening