Jen Perdew Interview

Editor:

This time we're chatting with someone who has a truly fascinating story. Jen Perdew is the president and CEO of MyNAMS, the novice to advanced marketing system. So if you've ever wanted to have your own online marketing moneymaking business, then you're going to love this conversation. Whether it's affiliate marketing or writing winning sales copy, Jen has you covered. She's got so much knowledge and I'm sure we're going to touch on that. So Jen, welcome.

Jen Perdew:

Thank you so much for having me here. I appreciate it.

Editor:

It's great to have you. Now, as always, I think we should start with a quick overview of MyNAMS and also how you got started online.

Jen Perdew:

It's a very crazy story how I got started online, actually. But quickly, on our business, we really started as a live workshop company, where we were bringing together instructors and bringing people live to events twice a year. And we did about 15 of those live events in Atlanta. And the groups and the people that were coming kept saying, "We want more than just two times a year. What can you do for us?" And so we developed a membership programme that we still have, our MyNAMS Insiders Club. And this is really where our super-serious business owners and startups tend to gravitate towards. And so our biggest focus is really helping either small businesses who have brick and mortar, try to get them into more online channels, or for business startup and really teaching people the foundation and the fundamentals of online business. There's so many bright, shiny objects out there, and a lot of people get discouraged easily. And we really wanted to focus on the foundational stuff, which isn't sexy but we feel like it's really important. And one of my clients told me the other day that we were the last house on the block for him. But it was worth the drive.

Editor:

I love that.

Jen Perdew:

I'm like, "That's my new tagline." So that's really what we focus on. And my background, actually, was I was 20 years in logistics and operations for the outdoor rec industry: whitewater rafting, kayaking, mountain biking, hiking, things like that. And my parents were so excited after they paid for me to go to college to do that.

Editor:

Of course.

Jen Perdew:

In 2015, my dad actually knew that the company was growing and needed somebody in the back end of the business to handle the logistics and the support and training for staff. And he also knew that the company was turning into something. We weren't really sure at that point where it was going. But he also knew that he was going to want to retire someday, and he didn't want to put all this effort into something that was just going to go away. And so he brought me in with the idea of, let's see how this goes. Let's see what you think. And as I really started digging into the business more and more, we came up with a plan for me to actually buy the company when he decided he wanted to retire. And so I did that January 1st of this year.

Editor:

So this is a true family business.

Jen Perdew:

It is. And that's what's been interesting. And I think that's kind of why I'm getting a little bit more attention right now, because with internet marketing being still -- it's not in its infancy, but it's still new enough that there's been no real family or legacy style businesses that have been able to happen yet, with families. And so this truly was, we planned this out, we knew we wanted to keep it in the family. I haven't planned what happens next. I still plan on being in this business for another thirty years to support me. But from that perspective, he and I really had some good strategies in place for systems and processes so that it would be a really super easy transition. And last year, about the last half of last year, I really started making the decisions and writing the emails, writing the content so that it would be not just this very abrupt, "Oh my gosh, she bought the business January 1st and it's completely different now."

Editor:

Yeah. It is always about that transition in situations like this, isn't it? And for anybody who's either listening or reading to this, your dad is David Perdew?

Jen Perdew:

Correct. Correct.

Editor:

Who of course is a legend in his own right in internet marketing. How was that for you, though, Jen? Obviously, big shoes to fill in many ways.

Jen Perdew:

Yeah. So it's been interesting, and I've actually been on quite a journey over the past few months. And I've been really honest with people about this, that it'll mess with your head a little. And I came into this, January 1st. The business has done fantastic. I already had a lot of plans in place for things I wanted to do. My dad had his vision for how he wanted the business to be run, and I have a different vision for that. And so I've been trying to put that in place. But at the same time, I feel like we all go through this kind of imposter syndrome. Whether you've been in the business for 20 years or not, you hit those milestones and you think, "Oh wait, wait, wait, what am I doing? What's happening? Why is this happening?" And it's been something I've been working through with my own business coach of trying to make sure that I'm not trying to fill his shoes. That's the big thing, I think, for myself mentally is not going there mindset-wise. It's really understanding that I worked hard to be able to buy the business. I bought this business, he didn't give it to me, I bought it. And he's very happy to get a check from me every month. And so really just getting confident in my abilities.

Editor:

It's great to hear that. It's great to hear that actually you're not just stepping into your father's shoes and continuing what he's done. You've got your own direction to lead and your own management style and your own, as you say, you are the owner of this business now. You're not just running it to continue it in the legacy of your father. So that's great to hear, Jen. And how has the reaction been, because you have a team, how has the reaction from the team been to that as well?

Jen Perdew:

It's been fantastic. I should not even sit here and say that I doubt things or I question things. I think we all do that as business owners. But the reception that I've gotten from our members, from other people in the internet marketing community, my team, my family, it's been fantastic. Everything that I have challenged myself with since I bought the company is all been self-imposed. And I think that that's something that a lot of business owners, especially startup business owners, really, really struggle with is the self-imposed, "I've got to meet this mark," or, "I've got to be like this person or that person," or whatever. And they're not really comfortable in figuring out their own style. And so for me, it's been quickly shifting over copy, content, trainings, into a style that I'm more comfortable with. My dad was always very high level, and he'll tell you this. If he was on this call right now, he would tell you this. He is not the detail man. He is the visionary. And for me, I'm the detail oriented. I'm the one that wants to get in there and dig around and really dig in and show people the tech side of things in these little steps that get missed, or that a lot of trainings or webinars or whatever, courses out there, assume that people know. And so that's really what I've been focusing on. And what's interesting, because back in 2019, we were kind of getting ready to do the transition then, where I went ahead and picked up the business. And all of a sudden my husband went to have shoulder surgery and we found out that he had stage four cancer. It was an incredibly rare cancer, only about 300 people in the world are diagnosed each year with it. And our world just immediately stopped. And at that point, he was given about eight months to live, and he lived for almost two years. But the point being is that all the work that we had done, the foundation and the fundamental work that we had done in the back end of the business allowed me to step away. And I actually stepped away for six full months towards the end so that I could be with him. And what it did was, A, it let the business continue to run, and it proved that we had created some really strong processes and foundational backends for the business so that it would continue to make money, and it would continue to support me even though I wasn't working. But it also showed me some holes in the business, and the team saw them too. And so that's been really interesting as I have moved into the ownership role now of the team. And I'm really making sure that those processes and those systems are all in place so that if I need to step away, I can, and this company can run. And that's really, for me, what is so important about the trainings that we do and the relationships that we have with our own customers and our own community is understanding how you can have a viable business when you practise and implement the foundations and the processes so that you can continue to make money and do the things that you need to do with your own family when the need arises.

Editor:

Do you know, Jen, I mean, that's an incredible story in itself. And I'm sorry to hear what happened, but it sounds to me like you've been able to get a real positive out of a really, really bad situation, and the business has allowed you to do that. It sounds like you're more empowered than ever to make sure that this business not only continues, but also thrives into the future as well. So that's an amazing thing, and I think a lot of people can relate to that as well. Being in business isn't always about the upsides and the happy days and the hockey stick sales graph. Sometimes it can be, this business is here now to support me for a while, and that's exactly what happened for you. And I really-

Jen Perdew:

It absolutely is. And I'm not sure that I would have been able to buy this business, not financially buy it, but mentally, that I would've been in the place mentally to have done that, if we hadn't really had the business structure set up.

Editor:

And how are you now?

Jen Perdew:

I'm good. I'm good. I am working hard and really trying, like I said, to step out from behind the screen. I was always the behind the screen person and I'm really trying to step out, be a little bit more visible and be more comfortable being live on webinars or trainings, on stage. I've done a couple of those events. Personally, I am doing great. I bought a little mini-farm about eight months ago. After my husband passed away, I thought I was going to be living the life of this little lonely old maid, working behind her computer with her cats and her dogs. I've actually met someone. I'm getting married next year.

Editor:

Congratulations.

Jen Perdew:

Thank you. And so we've really been able to work around this business to allow us to develop the life that we want here with our little farm. We're going to St. Croix next week for the second time in three months, just really trying to build a different kind of life as a business owner. And doing as much as I can just to be happy and keep my staff happy and keep my members happy and offer great value to people.

Editor:

Well, Jen, the interesting thing is that most internet marketing-style businesses, if you like, always talk about the laptop lifestyle. You can be on the beach, sipping a margarita, and the money's coming into your bank account. It's interesting to hear you say that for you it's a farm, and a real working farm as well, I'm guessing.

Jen Perdew:

Yeah. Well, we're getting there. We're trying to get there.

Editor:

But it's great. I mean, that's amazing to know that that's the direction of travel. And it just goes to show that this can be a lifestyle business. As opposed to sitting on a beach if you want to be on a farm or if you want to be halfway up a mountain, you could still run your business from wherever you are.

Jen Perdew:

Well, and I'll tell you, it's interesting. I went last year, last September, I did a whitewater rafting trip on the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon. And I was completely unplugged for 11 days. And it was the first time in 15 years that I had gone on a trip and I did not have my laptop with me. Some places we would have cell service, if we were hiking or something. And it really changed my entire mindset about the business and about setting things up and structuring things in a way that I can actually walk away and I don't have to take my computer. That if I have those systems in place, if I have the processes in place, that I truly can not even live a laptop lifestyle. I mean, of course I can work wherever I want to with my laptop, but for me, it's not always even about that. It's about just disconnecting from the internet and really being with the people that I want to be with, fully being present and with them. And after taking that trip and having that experience, not only was it incredible, of course, to be in the Grand Canyon, but having that experience of not thinking about my bank account, not thinking about work or anything, I'm addicted to that. And that's my big goal for myself is how do I create this so that my family and my friends and my community can all be rewarded by that?

Editor:

Absolutely. I mean, MyNAMS as well is obviously your primary business, but I know you also have products within the business as well. Things like Simple Affiliate Tools and How to Create Winning Sales Copy. Maybe you could just touch on those for a second as well to let us know about some of the products that you work on.

Jen Perdew:

So, it's funny, my dad was a prolific product creator, and he will not disagree with me on this. At one point, we were making products faster than we could sell them. We had over 500 products at one point. And we had decided, we went ahead and started really paring things down. And how things shook out was we have something called our LEAD system, and if it didn't fit within that system, we were dumping it. And so the LEAD system stands for list building, email marketing, affiliate marketing and doing, and doing being productivity and implementation. And so as we went through that, we realised that we also had a software side of our business. And so I actually own both MyNAMS and I own NAMS Toolkit. And our NAMS Toolkit is where we run most of our software through WordPress plugins. We're working on some SaaS stuff right now. And then the training side of the business is all run through MyNAMS. So really what we focus on, our products have to focus on teaching people the fundamentals about list building, affiliate marketing, email marketing, and the productivity and the implementation and doing. One of the things I hate to see is... Of course, we need people out there buying products, but we need people -- and I mean, we collectively, we -- we need people implementing our products so that they're learning and moving forward, so that there are more and more people feeling empowered and growing their business that want to continue to work with the collective we of content creators and digital marketers. And so that's really my big goal. And as I've been changing over the direction a little bit of the company, I've been running a bootcamp for about three years now where I work one-on-one with clients, and I really love that. It's one of my favourite places in the business. And along with my business coach, we're working through how to change the direction a little bit in the company so that I'm not offering quite as many main products individually, we're putting them into our membership, so that I can move more towards coaching. And that's really where my passion is. And so right now, I just actually opened my new coaching programme last week. We filled it within, it was like 18 hours we filled it. It was super exciting, and we closed it back down. And that's the area where I really thrive, is jumping in and digging through the minutiae, I guess, with my clients. And so our products, we'll still continue to do products that are timely and that solve a problem for people. But I won't go the direction in the business where we're producing a new product every month. That's just not me, and that's not the direction really that I want to go in. But we have a tonne of content and products that are available for people that really fit within that LEAD system acronym of helping them with marketing. And about 40% of my revenue comes from affiliate marketing. So I do a lot of training on how to list-build so people can create a viable business with affiliate marketing before they even are ready to create their own products or even understand yet what the market needs in their niche. So that's the basis of what I'm working on right now.

Editor:

And I think for anybody who's interested in dipping their toe in the water of having their own online business, this is a great place to start.

Jen Perdew:

Absolutely. We try to make things as simple as possible. And really, I'm not a whiz-bang. I'm not. And sometimes that makes things a hard sell. Owning a business is work. And it's simple, there are simple steps for you to do that to create your business, but it's not easy. You have to put the work and the time in. You have to learn the tools. You have to learn certain skills to be able to have a viable business. And it doesn't have to be complicated. And I think people make it so complicated and it doesn't have to be. So our goal is really to make sure that we're helping people set up those foundations, understand how to use their tools, understand how to talk to their own community, how to build a community, and how to really be authentic and how to, I guess, for lack of a better word, fake it till you make it. And I think one of the biggest issues that people have trying to start a business is they get so afraid to pull the trigger. They've done all this work, but then there's all that mindset stuff that's happening of, "Who am I to be doing this? Everybody knows this. I shouldn't put a course out about this." And really getting people to move forward to pull the trigger so that they can see their results. And I always tell people who say, "I don't want to send an email. I'm afraid to send an email," "Well, I'm going to tell you, the second you send that email and you see a sale come through, your mind is going to be changed forever."

Editor:

Yeah, it's absolutely true. And it really is about that mindset. I think people do have a bit of a mental block about pulling the trigger and making a product go live. And there's a lot to be said for support around that and the encouragement that's needed. And it's great to hear that you have that covered as part of the MyNAMS course.

Jen Perdew:

Yeah, we try. We try for sure.

Editor:

Yeah. And you can see that it's obviously working because obviously the company is incredibly well-established. Jen, for anybody who's listening, have you got any tips for them if they are thinking of starting or growing an online business, and what would those tips be?

Jen Perdew:

So, for starting an online business, I think the biggest question that you have to ask yourself is, do you have more time or do you have more money? And that's a hard question to ask yourself. If you have more time than you do money, then you are going to have to take some courses. You are going to really have to dig in and learn some processes and some systems, like setting up a WordPress site, for example. If you have more money than time right now, don't trap yourself into thinking you have to learn every single thing. Listen, if somebody asked me right now how to do a WordPress instal, I could probably do it. It would probably take me two days. There is no reason why I need to know how to do that at this point. And I tell my clients that too. You either can get your WordPress site set up quickly by a professional and know it's done right, or you can learn. And that's where I think a lot of business startup people have to make that decision. Do I want to learn it or do I want it done so that I can work towards the things that are going to generate and drive income for me? And if you are going to learn it, you can't spend all your time learning. You have to learn and implement, learn and implement, learn and implement, or else you're just going to forever be learning and never pulling the trigger. For established businesses, I'm going to tell you, every time that something's not working for me or a promotion's not working or just sales aren't doing what I want them to do, when I go back to the basics, I make money. And when I try to get too complex in the business and in the marketing side of things, it just sometimes doesn't work. And when I take that step back and I go back and say, "What works, and what works all the time?" I do more of that. And that is what drives revenue and helps me in those highs and those lows that every single company has. The other thing that I tell people is that your autoresponder system or your CRM is the most powerful tool that you can have in your business, whether you're a startup or whether you are established. And you have to know that tool like the back of your hand. Email is what generates money. And if you don't know how to use your system, you run the risk of leaving money on the table every day. And so of all the tools that are out there, my number one recommendation is to make sure that you know how to use it backwards and forwards, even if you're not the one that's in it every day. But if something were to happen, like in my case, my dad had to call me sometimes and say, "How do I send an email?" Because he didn't know, because I had been doing it for so long. And so you want to make sure that you know that system because that's the system for, I would say, nine out of 10 digital and online businesses, that is the primary source of revenue for them. And so making sure that that system is a good one and that you know how to use it is incredibly important.

Editor:

Any recommendations in terms of which ones that people should look at?

Jen Perdew:

Well, this is the worst question ever. I hate this question.

Editor:

Good.

Jen Perdew:

I use Infusionsoft, which is now Keap, but I know a lot of businesses aren't really in a position to either go that route from a startup perspective. So I start my clients on AWeber because I think it's fairly simple to use, although ActiveCampaign -- I've got a couple clients in ActiveCampaign right now, and I'm actually learning ActiveCampaign a little more just because of them, and I like it. And so I'm not going to change. I mean, Infusionsoft kind of has me locked in. But if I were starting over, I would probably choose ActiveCampaign or AWeber to get started. We actually were with AWeber for a really long time before we realised that there was so much potential and possibility with automation. That's my kind of superpower is automation. And so I wanted to absolutely know everything. And I don't know everything, but I am a partner with Infusionsoft/Keap and really, really like the platform because of the automation capabilities and the way it allows me to live my life the way I want to live, and know that I can schedule things and automations happen, emails go out, and it keeps people informed so that I can be working on things that are really important.

Editor:

Yeah, absolutely. I think that's a great recommendation as well. And we've had Clate Mask from Keap or Infusionsoft on this very programme in the past. Jen, back to you, and what are you most proud of, what's the thing that stands out in your mind that makes you the most proud?

Jen Perdew:

In the business?

Editor:

Yeah. Not putting you on the spot at all here, am I?

Jen Perdew:

Really. I think that it is the fact that I walked into this business in 2015 and I didn't know anything about internet marketing. I knew the operations side of things, I knew how to run a company, but I didn't know about internet marketing. And I was working in our help desk. And as questions were coming in, I was having to go to the courses and the products that we offered to answer their questions. And as I started going through our own courses that my dad was producing, I was like, "Oh, now I get it. Now I get it." And I think that the thing I'm proud of is that I came into this business not knowing anything, just like all new startups do. And I tell my private coaching clients this all the time. "Look, I walked into here knowing nothing too. Take the courses, implement, do the work, and you're going to learn it and you're going to be able to move forward." And so I think that that for me is probably what I'm most proud of, is that I was able to, my dad and I say this all the time, "eat our own dog food." I go through it. I actually do our own courses and learn. When I don't know the answer, I'd go back to the stuff that he had done and go learn it so that I could implement it and do better in the business, plus also be more valuable to my Insiders Club members and also to my coaching clients.

Editor:

So you walk the walk as well as talk the talk in many ways.

Jen Perdew:

Yeah.

Editor:

For anybody that's interested in finding out more about you, Jen, or about MyNAMS, where do we need to go?

Jen Perdew:

They can go to mynams.com, and that's M-Y-N-A-M-S dot com. And we actually have a great little LEAD system opportunity for people at the very top of our page, which actually is a little 10 day e-course that I put together about list-building, email marketing, affiliate marketing and doing. And then, of course, there's a little orange button on every page at the very bottom, and that goes right into our support desk. And if anybody wants to hit me up there, they can do that. Just click the button and it'll come right in and my support staff will get me the message.

Editor:

Fantastic. Jen, it's been an absolute pleasure chatting with you. Thank you for giving us the background. Good luck with getting married as well, when that happens. Is that later this year, did you say, or next year?

Jen Perdew:

January of next year, actually. We're getting married in St. Croix.

Editor:

Nice. Nice. Well, I hope that all goes according to plan. I know that there's a lot of planning that goes into that kind of thing.

Jen Perdew:

[inaudible 00:29:42] keep it small and simple and real just easy-peasy. Everybody wear your Hawaiian shirt and your shorts and let's go snorkelling afterwards.

Editor:

Sounds ideal. Thank you so much again, Jen. Good luck with that. And again, thank you for the chat. I've really enjoyed it.

Jen Perdew:

I appreciate talking to you. Thank you so much.