Chandler Bolt has a good size business and has written many books. Additionally, he has helped many people write and publish books through his business, Self-Publishing School.
If you have ever wanted to write and publish a book, his course is for you.
There is no better time than now to let that book idea come to fruition.
Chandler shares about the ins and outs of his business of helping people write the book that is wanting to be written.
What Chandler Bolt Did Before Self-Publishing School
Chandler was in college when he realized he was taking classes about how to run a business from people who had never run a business.
He dropped out shortly after this realization and pursued his passion of being an entrepreneur. He began teaching people how to self publish books through Self-Publishing School and the success of the business snowballed from there.
Chandler had some jobs but not many. He feels it was a blessing and a curse that he never had a traditional job.
He worked for his dad in construction, at a fitness center doing tennis court maintenance, landscaping and pressure washing business, and exterior house painting.
The exterior painting job, which was more of a franchise, would be the closest he was to having a career. After those jobs, he went to school, dropped out and started Self-Publishing School.
Dustin’s dad was also a construction worker and he remembers being outside in the heat working on roofs. He remembers starting many businesses but real estate is what stuck.
What Prompted Chandler to Write His Own Book and Starting Self-Publishing School
Chandler wanted to write a book for people about things he felt like other people wanted to know. He feels a lot of writers write a book because they have an idea they want or need to share, the mechanism being the book.
Chandler believed in the message but was afraid of the mechanism. He got the book done while another business he was involved in was failing.
Everyone kept asking him how he writes and publishes books and he finally got it.
He realized there were a lot of people willing to pay him for the knowledge he had about writing books. He suggests that this is a good lesson for people starting out.
Figure out what the people are already asking you about and what they want to pay you for.
At first, Chandler would get on phone calls and coach people for free just because he is a nice guy. After doing plenty of those calls, he realized that he should start charging for it.
They started the first cohort of 44 students, and then it just snowballed into now having helped thousands write and publish books.
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Dustin was buying property after property and realized his passion was real estate. He was about to literally quit his job and began telling people about what he was doing.
They asked how he was able to quit his job and if he would be willing to show them how to do it as well. If you have something that people keep asking you about and how to do it, you can potentially have an idea for a business.
Dustin was teaching people one-on-one and realized it was taking so much time, even though he loved doing it. So he started a coaching business called Master Passive Income.
It is all about rental properties, teaching people, coaching and courses about how to invest in rental properties. Dustin loves Self-Publishing School because it helps so many people get to where they want to be, which is writing a book.
With Master Passive Income, Dustin helps people get to where he is so they are buying properties and making upwards of $250 on them, perpetually. Dustin is always wanting to reach more and help more people.
Where to Get Started With a Business Like Chandler’s That Teaches Someone How to Do Something
Something that Chandler and his team are really passionate about a business like this where you are teaching how you accomplished something.
For them, books are the starting point but it’s what you do with it that matters. They have a PR and Speaking for Authors program, Course Building for Authors program and how to turn a book into a course.
One thing Chandler thinks is really important is to sell and then build. Until you have your first sales, you don’t have a business, you have a business idea. One of the biggest mistakes Chandler sees people make is they spend months or years creating this whole thing that people don’t want.
They then try to sell it without talking to potential customers. This is something that Chandler said happened to him. He wrote The Productive Person. It was successful and he wanted to create a productivity course.
They did all the work and put in the time to realize no one wanted it. He felt the messaging was totally off. They had spent $10,000-$15,000 developing this course and it probably has not sold to one person.
That was the basis for starting, Self-Publishing School, or Best Selling Book System at the time, and what not to do. They pre-sold to 44 people and it was a live delivery over 12 weeks.
Chandler and his team asked the students what they wanted or needed and then created that exact thing. His recommendation is to first get sales which bring revenue.
He says sales and happy customers are pretty much the two things that matter for your business. However, you can’t have happy customers without first having sales.
Dustin agrees and thinks people believe they just have to pump out a physical product. If you don’t even know if someone wants it or will buy it you are wasting so much time and effort.
Preselling Your Product Proves Your Concept and What You Are Selling
This happens in the online space as well, you presell what you will eventually sell. So by then you are validated because everything you are talking about and trying to sell, is already pre-sold.
Dustin appreciates that when he pre-sells something, it lights a fire under him to get the product done. Chandler agrees and says it is a force function and deadline but also can be a feedback mechanism.
Chandler says that each new product they create has a beta program. Currently, they are near the end of PR and Speaking for Authors beta, the new product they are developing and next week it rolls out.
They believe that every new product should have a beta, sell it then build it. In addition, it is a force function to get the content done and get the product built.
Now after the beta, you have feedback, testimonials and have raving fans in the community that have an amazing experience. Now people know that they should get in on the beta for the best product, the best price, and the most one-on-one attention they will ever get.
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The beta group gets a steal of a deal and his team gets the feedback and testimonials. It makes it beneficial for everyone involved. They are upfront about their goal and that is to make the student successful in exchange for their testimonial.
Chandler says not to join the beta unless you are going to do the work.
How to Pre-Sell Without a Following or Audience Base
Whether you do the course or the book first, it’s not a one-size fits all method, Chandler says. Depending where people are at, Chandler makes different recommendations for them to follow.
What worked for him was he did his book first as well as some other people.
For example Ruth Soukup, who was recently interviewed on the Self-Publishing podcast, sold 500,000 copies of her book How to Blog for Profit which ultimately became known as Elite Blogging Academy. 
On the other hand, Chandler doesn’t believe in teaching theory, but teaching by actually doing. They started doing training webinars for three weeks leading up to a product launch.
At the end of the webinar was an opportunity to apply for the beta program. They only accepted a percentage of the applicants who would then sign up. Some accepted and some didn’t.
So following this, they made “why didn’t you buy” calls and got a lot of feedback. In addition to the feedback, some at that point ended up signing up for the beta program anyway.
The Challenge to Get People to Sign Up for Your Sales Webinar
The first challenge for Chandler was how to get people to show up to the webinar. What he found was a lot of it was just guerilla marketing.
He began messaging every single Facebook friend telling them he was doing a webinar and asking for them to share to anyone they think might want to write a book.
With these messages, he was not asking the friend to come, just to share based on the idea if they wanted to participate, they would.
In addition to that, they had a couple strategic partners that they offered affiliation commission to. He was fully transparent with the partners by reminding them that he wasn’t guaranteeing that it would work.
Worst case scenario for the partner was they won’t make a lot of money off of it. However, the audience is going to get an amazing training on how to write their book and the partner will look good for having sent them there.
Because he built the personal relationships, they took a chance on him, and they got a few people to the webinar.
You Must Become A Self Promoter to Help Others
Dustin mentions he is not a huge self promoter and does not like to be. To help himself get out of that process of being “me-centered,” he switched his mindset from himself to how much he could help other people.
Dustin realized if he didn’t share this with people, they might miss out on important information. Maybe they buy the wrong property or potentially lose money and never want to buy property again.
He wants to help them and save them from that possibility. He makes it more about helping and serving people.
Dustin brought Chandler on the show because people have said he wants to be there for people and help and serve for people to get what they want. As he was doing the gorilla marketing and getting people to the webinar, he proved people want it.
What To Do Once You Have A Course
With every process whether it is with a book, a course, PR or speaking, Chandler tells his clients to begin with the end in mind and figure out what success looks like for them.
Chandler encourages them to identify the goal and once they have that, they can focus on the end result which could be more clients, more sales, etc. With Self-Publishing School, they almost always use courses and coaching together.
When Chandler does a webinar about how to start and launch a course, he shows the example of Udemy describing an online course and says, “No.” It’s an online education program and it is done together.
Chandler describes his friend Marci as an incredible coach. She works with a lot of children’s book authors, memoir authors, and faith based authors.
Chandler and his team believe that the course is the lion-share of the curriculum, and the coaches are there to support and hold accountable.
They try to provide different types of coaching calls like one-on-one, group calls, and then also have the community aspect of the program.
They provide a list of outsourcers like cover designers, formatters, editors and they have negotiated exclusive rights for these services. The goal is to save about what they pay to them, for those services.
Solve Your Customers Problems to Make More Money
No matter if you are doing a course, coaching or whatever, Chandler says it exists to help people solve a problem and it doesn’t really matter how they get there.
Although, most people want the least amount of work and time in order to complete the goal. Not a lot of people want the features, they just want the benefits and the results.
Self-Publishing School decided to design it in the way to maximize student results. Chandler points out that oftentimes, courses by themselves rarely work, not as high of a result rate as everything else.
They have found that the coaching and the personal help has made a huge difference in the success rate of their students.
Chandler confessed that he didn’t like sales or marketing at first. He woke up one day and all his accounts were negative, and he was going to drop out of school.
He found humor in that he almost failed at dropping out of school. He remembers talking to some people who told him he needed the skill set of sales and marketing regardless of him enjoying it or not.
They told him that his business was struggling because he didn’t have paying customers. In order to get paying customers, he needed sales and marketing experience or training.
You can’t outsource the sales and marketing for your business because no one else is as passionate about your business as you are. He says it is possible on a level but it is very hard to hire people for a job that you do not know how to do.
Hiring People Is the First Thing To Do To Scale
It is also hard to hire people when you do not have any money! Instead of doing what a lot of people do, follow the advice right away to learn sales and marketing at the beginning.
Do not wait until you have burned up most of your resources 6-18 months later. One of the early things for Chandler that flipped a switch was thinking when you believe the thing that you have or the person’s life will be better because of it, you are morally obligated to sell it to them.
He says that sales isn’t sales, it is problem solving and it’s helping people. When you shift to that mentality, sales and marketing becomes so much easier.
To wrap it all up together, Dustin says the course, the coaching and helping others, is not about what you can get out of it but how many more people can you help. The last thing that Dustin wants to do is create a course to just make money.
He makes his money from real estate so the course would be mostly for helping people. Statistically only about 15-20% of people who buy a course actually finish it.
Dustin wants people to finish his course and if he tacks on coaching in some form, it helps them stay engaged. It can be overwhelming to people to see all the course stuff.
In 2016, Dustin joined Chandler’s Self-Publishing School course. He wrote his very first book because of it. He was referred by his and Chandler’s mutual friend because of all of the benefits she had seen from promoting books and the course showing people how to promote books.
Dustin’s book was a best seller after he followed the steps from the course. He currently has four books and likes how people respond to that information. People see him as more of an authority figure now that he has published four books.
How to Scale The Business After Creating The Course and Coaching
Chandler says there are only two things you should be doing in your business which is getting new customers and making customers happy.
Optimizing these two things first is important. At some point you will get to the point you can afford to hire and grow. Chandler says that if it doesn’t drive revenue or results, it is not that important.
As you start to scale, that’s when the systems and operations stuff comes into play. Chandler has a podcast called the 7 Figure Principles podcast and YouTube channel called the 7 Figure Principles Show.
One episode he has recorded is the A-Player Hiring Process, how to hire your first employee. Hiring your first employee, Chandler recommends someone in customer service, or an assistant.
Someone to take some things off your plate, or things you don’t like doing or takes up too much of your time.
Focus on creating systems and bring in a person to do that for you. Chandler and his team had hired a student of theirs. At the time, they had scaled the business and offered each student a 30 minute call with Chandler, and then were sent to their coach.
This particular student used his call to talk about what the struggles Chandler and the team were having with the business and asked how he could help.
They hired him about a month later. Chandler believes they got really lucky. Right away they got their new employee busy on Zendesk, which the team had never used.
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There were a ton of customer support tickets on the platform while they were having a summit online. They had him get to work on the near thousand support tickets on the platform.
That may be a crash course on how not to set someone up for success but the guy figured it out. He still works for them today and is one of Chandler’s right hand guys.
The First Person You Should Hire In Your Business
For them, they hired a customer support team member first, and Chandler recalls that he waited too long to hire an assistant. He thinks that it may be possible for some places to hire a person who can be both.
There are a lot of lower level tasks that they can be taking off of your plate for you to be able to spend your time on other things.
Dustin has started hiring people for various tasks and it’s been a little hard because he is so frugal. He finds it humorous that with his 30+ properties, he has other people do all the work for him.
He spends about 30 minutes a month just checking the statements and making sure money is coming in, then moves on because he has other people take care of the work.
He knows that his business gets better when he hires other people to do the management of the properties. Dustin has both an assistant and a customer support person for his businesses.
He has also brought on a student to work for him who has quit their job by investing in real estate. He wonders how to release the control of some tasks to an assistant.
Chandler says there are two things to evaluate. People may baulk at the cost to have an assistant or employee but don’t consider the cost of NOT having them which is mostly the cost of your time.
He encourages taking what you earned last year and dividing it by 2,800 hours, the estimated time you worked, to see what your time per hour is worth. Then your challenge is to raise the average in your business.
Empower Your Team To Do The Work and Make Decisions
In order to raise that average, he says you have to say no to things and empower someone else to do them.
That exercise clicked for Chandler because the number was really big. With his blue collar upbringing, it is sometimes hard to spend money.
However, he looked and saw a large amount he had to pay per hour. It all goes back to you creating systems and your assistant creating systems.
Additionally it is about being fine with their four hours may be worth one of your hours from just a time and value of time perspective.
He says it can be tough to wrap your head around and a lot of mental stuff may need to be worked through. For Chandler, humility was a big thing growing up.
His mom would always say not to ever make people feel they like you are better than them. While he was growing up, he watched his parents move from lower class to upper-middle class where they made sure not to act like they were better than anyone because of where they were.
It was a blessing and then a curse Chandler says. You don’t want to get In your head thinking you don’t want to make someone feel bad or make someone think that you are above them.
So now, it is perfectly fine if something takes you 10 hours instead of one like me, that’s fine because the pay off is significantly better. It will be different for everyone and you might have to work through a lot of belief structures.
Dustin says not to overlook that you are providing someone else with a job, for them to be able to provide for their family.
Dustin believes that if he could help more people, it is that much better.
Regarding some of the things we don’t like to do, there is always a line of people who love to do those things. Some people may believe that is their dream job and if you don’t like doing it, then allow them the opportunity to.
You don’t want to project your belief system on other people just because you don’t like doing something. For example, Dustin hates editing articles, or editing anything. He now has someone who edits all the articles now. It is a win-win.
How To Scale The Business Even Further
Chandler believe is comes down to three things:
- Rhythms- meetings
- Systems- the playbook
- Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Above all of these things, he believes that really great people are so important and all of the listed things make it easy to attract and develop the really great people.
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The Non-Fiction Book Chandler Bolt Recommends
Chandler likes to contextualize book recommendations. So he asked Dustin what the one area he would like to grow in. Dustin would like to help more people. So in that case, Chandler recommends The Go Giver. 
He says it’s a really great book for helping people and is also the next on the list for his company book club.
Chandler’s Advice To Get You Started
Chandler says to sell then build. Some other important things are not to work on your logo or corporation at first. He says until you have sales, you don’t have a business, you have a business idea.
What Chandler Would Tell His Younger Self
He says he would tell his younger self to trust yourself and to be confident in your decisions. Additionally, he feels you shouldn’t let anybody tell you what you should be doing.
Too often for him, there was self doubt. If you feel like you can do something or in some way, trust your personal convictions and then act on them.
Where You Can Find Chandler
Self-publishingschool.com. There are free training sessions and resources such as a book outline generator. Also on the site at self-publishingschool.com/free you can get a free copy of his book Published.