The Future of My Business

0:00Welcome to season seven of MoneyLab. In this episode, we're going to talk about the future of my business. My business is Swim University, which is a brand where we talk about pools and hot tubs, specifically teaching people how to take care of their pools and hot tubs. We're an education company. And I just want to talk about what 2026 is going to look like for us. I have been thinking about this four months and I am ready to tackle the new year. I am ready to do more. That is the word of 2026 more. What does that actually mean? What does more look like from a actual, like, what does it mean?

1:03I think when I look back at 2025 and I kept saying that my word was simplify, when I look at that, I just think simplification meant editing. It meant removing things that we were doing, things that we were selling, and just simplifying how the business worked, what our product line was, how we promoted those products, how we sold those products. And over the course of 2025, I have a very simple three-part business system, which is marketing, sales, and product. That's it. Now that we have that in place, now that that's all set up, I want to do more. And another word for more, a more businessy word would be scale.

2:03So what does that actually look like? First things first, I want to talk about where my business is now, and what I think it'll look like at the end of the year. The one sentence that I'm gearing towards, or leaning towards, is going all in on organic content and better products. That's it. Not new products, same products, just better. Same content, just more. That's it. So here's what the business looks like currently. Here's how the entire system operates. And I'll go through each part. We have marketing, sales, and products. So for marketing, here's what we currently do.

3:05We currently produce three short-form videos a week that get published across all social media platforms, including YouTube. During the winter, or sorry, during the summer, we send out or we create one long-form video per week just for YouTube, and we also upload it to Facebook. That was, that is currently what we are doing for marketing. That's it. I'm saying that I know we do some other stuff, but that's really it. Now for sales, what do we do for that? For sales, we have our sales pages that are all hosted on Shopify. That's where all of our sales pages live. We sell mostly, like on our website, and through email.

4:06So the marketing that we do, the three shorts and the weekly videos, all drive, and our website which exists and has articles on it, evergreen articles, all those marketing channels drive traffic to our sales pages. Some of those pages convert people from visitors to customers or visitors to leads slash email subscribers. Now from there, we send out about two to three weekly emails, promoting our products. There's some content there, and there's some products. I consider all of that our website and our email emails. That's sales for us. Part three is our products.

5:07We now have two books, two physical books that we sell and ship to customers. We have two courses, digital courses that we sell, and people can log into them. And we have an app, which is a tool to test your pool and hot tub. That's our product line, five products. That is currently what our business looks like. When I say that out loud, it's like, wow, that's really not that much. That's not a lot of content. That's not a lot of sales. That's not a lot of products. Right, it's simple. That was the goal of 2025, and we did it. So, let's talk about 2026.

6:07What are we going to do? What are we going to start with? Well, we're going to continue doing what we're doing, which is all of the things I just mentioned, we are continuing that. The only difference is that we're adding some new pieces to it, and we're doing more of it in general, which if you look at each piece, let's just start with just marketing, okay? In marketing, what we are doing is organic content. That's what we're doing when we publish short form videos or reels or TikToks or whatever, that is what we were doing. We do three videos, three MP4s a week, Monday, Wednesday and Friday. In the off season, which is the winter time, which is where we are now, we are not producing long form videos for YouTube. We start that in April, and that goes into September. So, we only do that half of the year.

7:12With those things, we want to do more of them. So, what that looks like, we are not doing it yet, but this is what we think, or this is what I'm hoping to have happen by the end of the year. Oh, I forgot to mention one thing, sorry. In the product space, we also have customer service, which plays a role in deliverability and how customers see us and trust us. So, I believe that that customer service is really part of the product end of our business. So, back to marketing. We do three videos a week in the off season. What I would like to do by the end of the year is get that to seven videos a week. So, doing the exact same style of videos that we're doing, just doing four more a week. That's more.

8:12I think we'll probably start increasing that in April. And then, we'll probably get to seven days a week in May, June, July, August. I think we may not sustain seven days a week all year round, just because we're a seasonal business. We absolutely could do that, but I don't think we actually need to. So, we might just ramp it up in the summertime, which overall, for the whole year, will do more short form content. That's one piece. On our long form video, we do one a week right now, April through September. I would like to do two a week. So, doubling our long form video output. How we plan to do that is literally just doing more.

9:15We could just repeat the process and just do two long form videos a week. Or, we could try, and this is where I don't know what this is going to look like or how we're going to execute this, but we're going to make some experiments. When I add four new videos to our short form schedule, and one to our long form schedule, are those videos different? Are they doing them differently? Or are we just doing the same system just more of it? Now, unleaning towards the latter, which is we are just doing more of what we're already doing and not trying to reinvent some new strategy or some new way of creating videos, just to do more. So, that's just what we have in place now. We are trying to get to seven days a week on short form video in the summer and two videos a week long form in the summer, spring summer.

10:18Now, that's just more of what we're already doing. But I think we can expand that. So, the first obvious thing is a place that currently gets us traffic but doesn't actually, but has been going down year over year, which is our articles. When it comes to SEO, we are living in a black box era. We really don't know what SEO strategies and tools work. We have some insight, I've been talking to some people, most of it's anecdotal, of certain sites in certain industries with certain angles doing fairly well with SEO. We may not exist in that, but an interesting piece of news came across my desk,

11:24which is I use Semrush as my keyword research tool, my preferred keyword research tool. And I used to use A-Traffs. I don't really think there's a big difference between the two. I just wanted to try something new. I like Semrush. It has a lot more features. I'm sticking with them. They, interestingly, are getting bought by Adobe for like a 1.9 billion or something like that. Very interesting. Adobe seems to believe in this idea of brand awareness in this new AI world. And I tend to agree with that. And that's kind of what my bet is. My bet that I'm making is if we start producing articles, we will show up more consistently

12:30in not just regular search engines, but AI search engines. And who knows? I don't know if Google is going to switch from, like, to make AI mode the default, which would be crazy, but it could happen. I still would like to be sighted. And I also think having more content with our name attached to it that we create is simply good because it's really just about brand visibility in the end. So it's kind of like the way I see it, the bet that I'm making is that by simply doing more and just talking about our subject more often and becoming more of an authority and building more trust just by putting out all of this content, I think we will be recommended more often.

13:32So if somebody asks chat GPT, for example, hey, I'm looking for the best book on pool care. Guess who it's going to recommend because it just, because we just seem to be the authority because we put so much out there. And we always are talking about our book. And the same thing with our app, if people start asking like, what's the best app for pool care or what's the best app for testing my water? Do you recommend, you know, we want that to be us. So it's really about those kind of searches. And I think that simply putting out that content, not trying to game it because I know I see people trying to game that system where they're like, well, then we'll just write content that literally tells people or kind of acts like an AI that recommends it. And I'm like, I think the AI is smarter than that. It's not, it's just, it's going to be like, who's been around a long time?

14:32Who's been doing this? Who's putting out consistent content? Does everyone seem to be mentioning some university, talking about some university? It's really that. That's the big play. It's brand visibility, brand awareness, trust building. That's the name of the game. And I think trust comes from putting out as much information as possible consistently. That's it. And staying in your lane, being like, hey, you know what we teach? Pool care, hot tub care. That's what we teach. That's what we are. So that's my big bet. And it means that we're going to start producing articles, we've actually already started. We're going to do it for an entire year. And there's just really one key measurement here as to whether or not this will work. Are we getting more traffic to our website? I don't care where it comes from.

15:34I really don't care if it comes from AI or Google or Bing, I don't give a fuck. Are we getting more traffic or not? Now, if we put out more videos, more social stuff, we might be getting traffic from there. I understand we can separate those out. But for the rest of it, we just need more traffic to our website. When more traffic goes to our website, we make more money. Our website is built for sales. The sales aspect of our business locks solid. We send out good emails. We are sending out slightly more emails, but I believe in the email department, we are capped. There's only so many emails we can send out. I also believe we're capped in the amount of content that we can put out on social. I think if we did daily, that's about as high as you're going to go and the same is true for email.

16:34Long form videos on YouTube, I think you can definitely increase that. But I do think that one to two a week is a lot. But the one area where I feel like there really is no cap is articles. So the way I see it, or at least the bet that I'm making is, how about we start with articles? So every article that we put out becomes a long form video, becomes a series of short form videos, becomes an email, becomes a pin, becomes, gets repurposed, basically. And it allows us to create more. And it's simply that it's simply that easy. So more videos, more articles. That's the more.

17:39More emails, we already do quite a bit. So that doesn't feel like more, but we are doing more. Almost daily emails split between two audiences. Okay. What else are we doing? Another thing we started doing is producing daily stories on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and those stories become pins on Pinterest. Stories disappear, except from Pinterest. And we are using them to collect leads and getting sales. Because we are putting so much effort towards social media. And social media has paid off in ways that I can't directly attribute. But if you look at our search results, even in AI mode on Google, a lot of our shorts from YouTube come up as the sighted sources for AI.

18:46And I don't know, to me, that's like, guess what? To the customer who's searching it or using AI mode? If they just keep seeing swim university, if they just keep seeing that name and my stupid face, that's the bet I'm making. It's just more of me and more of me tied to swim university and more of swim university tied to the best place to go to for pool and hot tub maintenance information and help. That's because that's the products we sell. I think there's a lot of value to that. And it's the thing that we happen to be good at. Now, on the other side of it, instead of just more, we are doing one other thing, which is product improvement.

19:49I will say that right now, starting in 2026, we have one perfect product. And that is our hot tub handbook. It's the most recent product we came out with. It's our second book. We learned an absolute ton from doing the first book, which is our pool care handbook. The pool care handbook will be updated in 2026. It'll be a new cover. It'll have new graphics. It will be the text will be slightly different. There'll be new sections added. But it's not going to be like, if you already own the book, I wouldn't say you need the new edition. I don't really want to call it a new edition, but it technically is. We are going to do that in 2026, but that's not all. If we do that, by the way, I will believe that our books will be pitch perfect.

20:53We will have no more improvements to make, at least for the next five years. Maybe in five years, we may need to change some stuff because technology is improved or something has changed, but it's been a long time since that's happened, especially in our space. So, we have three other products, and those are the things we're working on. We are going to update our courses this year. Now, the reason we're doing that is because I still think there's value in courses. I still think there's a market for people who want a deeper education, who want something, it's a different way of learning. And the question we get asked a lot is, well, how is the course different than what you put on YouTube?

21:54And my answer to that has always been like, if you have to ask that question, then you're not interested in the course. You just want to know, am I going to learn the same stuff? And the answer is you're going to learn the same stuff. You could watch every single Zoom University video on YouTube as a course. It's going to be completely out of order. It's going to give you way more information than you probably need to know, but it's possible to have that free education. And go for it, right? But if you want a shortcut that process, buy the course. The course walks you through what you need to know in what order, and it doesn't waste your time. That's what you're buying the course for. And I believe that there is a group of people, it's not going to be everybody.

22:56But there's people who want to buy the book, there's people who want to buy the course, and there's people who want to buy both. And there's also people who want those things, and will still watch us on YouTube. And will still come back to reference both. There is value to it. But yes, if you have to ask, what am I going to learn in the course of I'm not going to learn on YouTube? The answer is nothing. It's just present it differently. It's the same information. It's always every information. You could go to any other YouTube channel, watch every single video, and learn the same stuff. If you want it to learn cooking, you could pick any food creator, and just watch every single recipe video they have and learn how to cook. It's like, it just depends on, you know, do you want the shortcut of that? Because that's a lot of time. And you're going to be wasting a lot of time.

23:56So that's what the course is for. We are redoing every single video. We are increasing the videos. We're adding more videos. We're adding more downloadables, things that you wouldn't get from a YouTube video. Like, extra downloads, and special cases, and really just us talking to you. And we're constantly uploading new videos that are very hyper-specific. That would never work on YouTube. That all said, okay. The fifth product. We are also working on the fifth product. So the way I see it is the entry product for us is either or both our book and our app. The courses are our high ticket value. That's what we're, that's how I look at them.

24:58Then you have the app. The app is really a tool. It's a tool that has education built into it. But it's not going to teach you pull care. You kind of either have to read the book, watch all of our stuff, or invest in our course, or you have to be somebody who's been doing pull care for a long time. The app is a tool that you pay annually for. There's no community. There's a help section in there. There's chat support. And there's help. There's like on-demand help. So like micro videos that teach you little things. But again, if you buy the book, you would also benefit by using the app. So you can buy all three. Or if you're somebody who's, who already knows about pull care, you don't, you're never going to buy our book, you're never going to buy our course.

26:00Then the app will work for you. So we've covered now every single type of pull owner who does, who does pull care themselves with our product line. Of course, we can expand that into the pros side of things if we wanted to. But right now, I am 100% especially in 2026. I am still very much focused on the single pull owner, the person, the DIYer. That's who our audience is. That's who watches our videos. Yes, there's some pros that watch our videos as well. But the majority is DIY homeowners that take care of a pull. So all of 2026 is producing more content to promote those products and improving those products at the same time.

27:00Once 2026 is over, this is the what I think will happen. We will have seven videos a week on social, a story, sorry, also say daily reels that we're publishing on social media, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, LinkedIn. We put Pinterest, we post them everywhere. Okay, every single day. Same is true for stories. We're posting a story every single day. So that's technically two pieces of content across all social media platforms. One piece of content is to build the audience and the trust, second piece of content, which is the stories to build customers and leads. Simple as that. So every story you see is basically an ad. We have testimonial ads. We have actual ads. We have article ads. We have freebie ads. We have video ads.

28:00Those are our stories. On our website, we are publishing two to three to four articles per week. All right. We're probably more like two a week. I'm going to just safely say two a week. So next year we'll publish like a hundred new articles. And some of those articles will be updated, but whatever. A hundred new pieces of content. I would like to do more than that. I would like to start with what's manageable. Then we are doing at least one video a week, which is the same as what we're doing before. But ideally I'd like to either go longer, meaning that we get more content per video. Or we do two a week or we go longer in a year. Either way, more video, more long form video minutes will happen.

29:01In 2026. Whether it's literally longer individual videos. Or more videos. Or we're publishing videos for longer in the year. So whichever, whichever one we end up going with, which we haven't decided yet, it will be more total minutes of produced content. That's what all of our marketing will look like. Then we will be producing videos every week in the course, updating that, producing short videos every week for our app, which is improving our app. We are making improvements to the app. We have hired some new developers to help us push that along further. And by the end of the year, I have a feeling that we will hit a million in revenue.

30:03Without spending any more money on advertising or really having any sort of big ad-a-pocket costs that we were unexpected. If there's any ad-a-pocket costs that will come from hiring, but that's my goal. This year we did 600, or sorry, I should say like 2025, we did about 600, which was good. But I think just from the sheer act of getting more people, obviously, economy with standing, that's at least my goal, is an extra $400,000 a year, just simply by producing more content. And promoting our products more often, and letting more people know that we exist. That is the plan. And my hope is that by the end of the year, we will have really seen an increase in traffic on our website again.

31:11That will determine this SEO, if it's SEO stuff, this article writing stuff was worth it. So we'll find out. That's the whole year. So if you have any questions, concerns, facts, things you want to share, whatever it is, shoot me an email, mad at moneylab.co, and well, I'll see you next time.