PP 250: How to Build Multiple Income Streams with Dorie Clark

Dorie Clark has been named one of the Top 50 business thinkers in the world by Thinkers50 and was recognized as the #1 Communication Coach in the world by Marshall Goldsmith Leading Global Coaches Awards. Clark, a consultant, and keynote speaker, teaches executive education at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and Columbia Business School, and she is the author of Entrepreneurial You, Reinventing You, and Stand Out, which was named the #1 Leadership Book of 2015 by Inc. magazine. A former presidential campaign spokeswoman, Clark has been described by the New York Times as an “expert at self-reinvention and helping others make changes in their lives.” A frequent contributor to the Harvard Business Review, she consults and speaks for clients including Google, Microsoft, and the World Bank. 

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Kim Sutton: Welcome to the Positive Productivity Podcast episode 250. Are you a small business owner using Infusionsoft who’s struggling to figure out how to take your business to the next level? Well, I might have a solution for you. Head on over to thekimsutton.com/infusionsoft to visit my campaign page and see the campaigns that I have seen successfully work time and time again for my clients. Again, that’s thekimsutton.com/infusionsoft. The Positive Productivity Podcast was created to empower entrepreneurs to achieve and appreciate personal and professional success. I’m your host, Kim Sutton, and if you’re ready, let’s jump into today’s episode.

Welcome back to another episode of Positive Productivity. This is your host Kim Sutton and I’m so happy that you are here to join us today. I am thrilled to introduce our guest of the day Dorie Clark. Dorie is the author of Entrepreneurial You and the founder of Clark Strategic Communications. Dorie, welcome.

Dorie Clark: Hey! Thanks so much for having me.

Kim Sutton: Oh! You are welcome. Dorie, you have such a fascinating backstory, even just how young you even entered college, which I’m blown away, because I know it, what? 16. I wouldn’t have seen.

Dorie Clark: 14 actually.

Kim Sutton: Oh, my gosh! 14 for me was focusing on boys and all the trivial stuff. So I would love if you would share some of your backstory with the listeners and then we can jump into further conversation.

Dorie Clark: Yeah. Absolutely. So yes, I did go to college early. I grew up in a little town in North Carolina and was pretty eager to get out and to do, you know, what I consider to be a little more exciting stuff. I wanted culture and, you know, just the big city excitement and to feel like I was really stepping into the kind of life that I wanted. So, went to college, finished up and went straight into Divinity School, actually, I went to Harvard Divinity School. And after I graduated, I became a newspaper reporter for an alternative Newsweekly in Boston, which now is defunct, like a lot of newspapers. But for better or for worse, I was part of the early vanguard of people who got laid off. And so it set me off on this path. Otherwise, I probably would have remained in journalism, but I got laid off, could not find another job in journalism and so I was forced to essentially keep reinventing myself until I found something that stuck. And so I had a lot of career adventures along the way, I ended up working in politics, I had been a political reporter, so that was kind of a natural transition. And so I did press on a couple of campaigns, one for Massachusetts Governor, another was a presidential campaign. Unfortunately, both of my guys lost and ran it on profit for a couple of years. And eventually, 11 years ago, I started my own business. And so since then, I’ve been in the world of entrepreneurship and it sort of led me to where I am today. I have a new book about how to create multiple income streams in your business and so I’ve really been working to try to develop that and expand that in my own life.

Kim Sutton: As we chatted about in our pre-chat, I’ve been hearing you since our introduction, on every day you pop up in my podcast feed, that would be an understatement, probably. And I heard about the income streams, but before I get into that with you, I do have a question. Divinity School to journalism, how does that happen? Like, I wouldn’t have put the two together?

Dorie Clark: Yeah. Well, the main way that it happens is that I originally thought that I wanted to have a career in academia. And so I finished my master’s degree in theology. And I applied to several doctoral programs, and I actually didn’t get into any of them. And so I was like, oh, okay, what other profession allows me to read and write a lot. And I thought, Oh, well, maybe journalism. And so, you know, I think for a lot of us, our 20s are this, you know, time of kind of flailing around a little bit and just, you know, figuring, you know, trying to mix and match your skills and your interests with professions that have some semblance of, you know, similar skills or overlap and so that was the goal for me. I was somebody who is intellectually curious, liked having, you know, the so called life of the mind. And academia was choice number one, but since that didn’t work out, I thought, Okay, well, you know, journalism is kind of the real world application of that so let me give that a go.

Kim Sutton: If any of those doctorate programs came back today and offered to let you into their program free of charge, what would you say?

Dorie Clark: That’s a great question. Actually, I would not be interested now for a couple of reasons. One is just at a basic level the opportunity costs because to get a humanities doctorate, it is at the very, very short end, maybe five years. Tip more typically, it’s like a seven-ish year process. And I’m 39 right now, and these are like my prime working years, my prime earning years. It’s a little bit of a different story. I mean, I was applying to these things when I was 20 years old. And so the idea of spending, you know, 20 to 27, doing it, and then, you know, emerging ready for my career seemed like a good educational investment at the time. Right now, it would not be from a dollars and cents perspective, even if it were free, because there’s other things that I could be doing with my time and having a bigger impact. Because I’ve spent the intervening years building up kind of brand and platform and reach that I’m doing interesting things. I mean, you know, it’s nice to can cocoon yourself for seven years if you don’t have something better to do. But I feel like fortunately, I’m in the position where now I do. The other thing that I came to learn that I didn’t really appreciate at the time, is that being in a doctoral program is actually very different than being an undergrad. I really didn’t grasp that fully being an undergrad is this wonderful time of intellectual exploration and you are encouraged to take a bunch of different classes, explore different disciplines, really just like go nuts with interdisciplinarity. But in grad school, it’s all, you know, and for doctoral programs, it’s all about narrowing down, focusing, ultimately writing your dissertation about a very narrow cast, slice of a subject. And, you know, I mean, just by way of example, I once briefly went out with someone who ended up abandoning a doctoral program. But when I was asking about what she had been working on, it was, it’s like, hysterical. It was how the transition from gold to paper money was handled in 18th century British literature. It’s like, who the F cares about that? You know, I mean, it’s so abstruse. And that’s the kind of thing that you would write a dissertation on. And to become an expert in something like that, I actually think in retrospect, would have been terrible. It would have been mind numbing for me, because I think that what the world needs a little bit more of is people who can make connections with different fields, rather than going so deep on something that is of questionable interest or value.

Kim Sutton: Yeah. That actually makes my stomach turn. To all of you who can write a paper, so specific, bravo to you, but it is something that I never even want to attempt. Let me just put it that way. I have enough trouble staying on topic on a broad range, like a broad range article that I write. So no, that just wouldn’t work for me.

Dorie Clark: Totally.

Kim Sutton: I have overcome a lot of adversity. And I’m, I know that listeners have as well, you lost your job on 9/10/2001. However, I want to go back a little bit further than that. I know that going into college at a young age, it’s such an accomplishment, but what type of adversity did you face through that? Did you have to do a lot of work to prove that you had to be there?

Dorie Clark: You know, I feel actually very lucky about how that turned out and how I was able to do it. Because first of all, it was a program that I was part of. So it certainly would have been a challenge if I was carving the path, like if people had not done that before, it might be an uphill battle to convince people that a younger student could do it. But I entered a program at Mary Baldwin College, now Mary Baldwin University, which was, you know, to the everlasting mortification of everyone who went through the program is called the PEG the Program for the Exceptionally Gifted. And anyway, they had been operating for, you know, over a decade. By the time that I did it, they started in the early ’80s. So they had they had a track record and you had a cohort of other young women who were doing the same thing. So it wasn’t so strange. It wasn’t like me, and then a bunch of traditional age college students, there was about 50-ish people who were in this program. And we lived together in a dorm and it was an established thing.

Kim Sutton: Oh, wow.

Dorie Clark: Yeah. So I didn’t have to convince the world like, Oh, I am so unique. I have to do this thing that’s never been done before. I really just had to convince them like, okay, you have this program, I would be a good fit for this program, which is a much easier hurdle.

Kim Sutton: Maybe I’m just looking back at who I was at that time. You know, I was trying so hard to fit in. And I can’t imagine going into a traditional university system surrounded by students who were four to eight years older than me. And it was just so important to me then, but it’s not. I really don’t care about fitting in now.

Dorie Clark: Yeah. That’s good.

Kim Sutton: Yeah. Which is why I’m just so ridiculously transparent sometimes on this show.

Dorie Clark: Yeah.

Kim Sutton: Dorie, I’m going to be 39 in March. So I’m right there in the same decade, somewhere between whatever generation, I really don’t pay attention to what the names are, and I know that I really should, but again, I don’t care what other people tell me to.

Dorie Clark: According to the demographers we are the youngest exerce.

Kim Sutton: Yeah. But I don’t feel like I really, you know, but I also don’t feel like I relate to what is Gen X, no, the one before.

Dorie Clark: So the boomers would be older and the millennials would be just after us.

Kim Sutton: Yeah. So okay. See, I told you I just don’t follow. I don’t connect to the millennials either. And I do a lot of marketing, and you do marketing, but isn’t it fascinating that looking back to when we were growing up marketing, as we know it today, in terms of social media marketing, it just wasn’t around, as you say, on your website, I mean, we grew up in the pre internet era. And if there was internet, it was a eeeehhhhh, you know, the very bad [inaudible] of dial up.

Dorie Clark: That was good, though. I totally got it.

Kim Sutton: Sometimes I think that if I could go back and do college again, that I would go into marketing. But I realized that, I mean, when I entered college, it was 1997, so there was, I mean, dial up was just starting, but Facebook was still wasn’t around. So I really can’t say that because it wouldn’t have existed. If you could go back and do college any different and do a different major, would you?

Dorie Clark: Actually I went to some liberal arts schools. So Mary Baldwin, where I started, was a liberal arts college. And then I transferred after two years to Smith, in Western Massachusetts, which is also a liberal arts school. So one of the things that gives me a little bit of delight, is that, despite getting turned turned down for these doctoral programs, and things like that, I actually do teach at the university level now. And I’ve taught both undergrads, and graduate students, and professionals who are part of executive MBA programs, or executive education programs. And I not only don’t have an MBA, I’ve also literally never taken a business class, because it was never offered. There wasn’t a thing they had at my schools. So I’ve kind of had to create something new, which has been a lot of fun but I liked my education a lot. Overall, the one thing that I would change, which is possibly a little abstruse, but it was important to me at Mary Baldwin, I got really into philosophy, which ultimately my major, and I carried that through when I went to Smith. But what I didn’t realize because I didn’t really have the kind of overall context and somehow didn’t mention this at Mary Baldwin. Apparently in American academia, there’s really two major strands of tradition. There is continental philosophy, which as the name implies, is what is more commonly practiced in Europe, and that is a little bit more like, let’s call it black beret, what is the meaning of life kind of philosophy. And then what is more commonly done in the US is the Anglo American tradition of philosophy, which is, I would argue, it’s also known as analytic philosophy. And so it’s much more philosophy as a modified form of cognitive psychology, or neuroscience or linguistics or something like that. It’s like philosophy trying to solve analytic puzzles. I find the ladder to be pretty boring, I’ll be honest. It’s a lot more arcane. And I feel like just a little bit more like navel gazing. And I just connected much better to continental philosophy. And so Mary Baldwin is specialized in that and I had no idea that the way that they did philosophy was very different than almost any other university in the US. And so when I got to Smith, and I discovered that they were all into analytic philosophy, I was like, What is this? This isn’t even philosophy. And then I realized, like, oh, what I actually liked was this thing that is very hard to find. And I hadn’t really realize that. And so I ended up with a philosophy major, because it just made a lot more sense in terms of the credits and the distribution and whatever, to just go ahead and finish up the philosophy major, but I was unhappy with that. And so if I had known then what I know now, I would instead have been an English literature major.

Kim Sutton: I didn’t realize there are two different sects.

Dorie Clark: Yes. Sect is a good word.

Kim Sutton: Yeah. But I agree with you. The the second half sort of bores me as well. I want to fast forward a little bit. You lost your job in 2001 and then you started your business in 2006. Can you share what that journey looked like? And what it looks like for you today?

Dorie Clark: Yeah. So what really prompted me to start my business– so in this five year period between losing my job as reporter and starting my business, I did a few things. As I mentioned, I worked on political campaigns and then I ran a nonprofit for a couple of years. And during the course of running the nonprofit, I realized that it took a while before it really hit me. But I realized that running a nonprofit was literally the exact same thing as running a business. I hadn’t ever thought of it that way. And I had honestly never really thought about running a business or wanting to run a business. But when I was in the midst of it, I realized, like, Oh, that’s what I’m doing. And then immediately on the heels of that, I realized, oh, it would be so much less stressful if I actually were running my own business as compared to running this nonprofit where I’m responsible for a staff, and we have to earn so much of our money through donations, and just appealing to people. I mean, that was an extraordinarily high stress job for me. So I just got entranced by the idea of doing it for myself where I could be learning and autonomous and probably also having less stress and making more money. And so I spent the last year of my time running mass bike, my nonprofit, just kind of plotting to go out on my own. And I took classes and I read a bunch of books. And so I prepared myself and then finally in 2006, I launched.

Kim Sutton: I heard on another podcast, you mentioned that you don’t have a logo, you’ve never had a logo in the last 12 years. And I love that you brought that up, because I see so many entrepreneurs getting held up by little things like logos at the beginning. And on a side note, I have a logo, but to me, and listeners, I don’t know if it will still be up on the site so when this episode goes live, it looks like a butt. It’s a gear that’s supposed to look like a light bulb.

 Dorie Clark: That’s great.

 Kim Sutton: And every time I go to my site, and I see it, I just think it looks like a butt. And now it will start looking like a butt to other people too. So I’m hoping that it will be down by the time this episode goes live.

 Dorie Clark: That’s incredible.

Kim Sutton: But I have to say that I held off from launching this podcast because the logo was not down yet. And I wish that I had just pushed ahead. You know, put the podcast name on and just go on ahead. And well, yeah. Just push go. Is there anything during your work that you’ve seen holding entrepreneurs up from just going other than logos?

 Dorie Clark: Yeah. I mean, definitely there’s a lot of things. I think probably the biggest hurdle for people, and they don’t necessarily even recognize that this is a hurdle. Because they feel like they’re doing work, right. This is the tricky part. Everybody knows that if you are saying, I’m starting my business. I’m starting my business. And if you’re like watching cat videos on the internet, okay, that’s procrastinating. That’s not doing your work. We can all agree on that. But what is far more insidious is the things that feel like work, and yet are not really work. And so I actually talked about this in my new book, Entrepreneurial You that social media, for instance, is one of these things. Again, if you’re just like really screwing around on it, you know it, but it’s very easy to convince yourself, oh, well, obviously big stars or whatever, they have a big Facebook presence, or they have a big Instagram presence, so I need that too. And so, you know, you’ll spend like several hours a day building your Facebook presence. And the truth is that, yes, it is true that if you’re a big celebrity of some sort, you probably do have a large social following, but it does not necessarily go the other way that, Oh the most important thing for building your is having a large social media following. In fact, that’s something that often is a huge distraction. What you need to focus on more than anything in the beginning. And I think this is the part where I did plenty of things wrong when I started my business, but this is something I did right was I understood from the beginning that you don’t have a business if you don’t have clients. Job number one is getting a client who will pay you money. And I think that in any of these other things like, Oh, I’m gonna make my website really nice, or I’ve got to, you know, do social media, or Oh, gotta see about getting some speaking engagement. Like, yes, those are all great things to do, by no means am I saying don’t do them, but those are things that will indirectly get you clients and what you need in the beginning is to directly get a client. And the way that you directly get a client is you freakin call people on the phone, or you send them a personal note or something like that. And you say, here is what I do. Do you need this thing? Or do you know someone who needs that thing? And if you do, will you introduce us? Like, that’s the thing. There’s an element of personal risk involved, psychologically for people because they don’t want to be turned down. And so they don’t do that one thing, that is the most critical thing for them to be doing. And so that is, in fact, a form of procrastination. So I think the worst thing you can do is trick yourself into thinking you’re working when you’re not.

Kim Sutton: Thank you so much for bringing that up. I wish that we had had this conversation three years ago. I am past it now. But in 2015, I was literally part of 180 Facebook groups.

Dorie Clark: Whoa.

Kim Sutton: Yes. And I turned on notifications for them all. So I would spend– I’m glad I don’t know the number. But just imagine the number of hours every day trying to keep up with the Joneses, watching what other people were doing, trying to chime in and it was such a waste of time. Looking back I am not surprised now why it was such a huge financial struggle in 2018. Especially because with what I do, my ideal clients are not spending their time in Facebook groups. They’re out there producing their work.

Dorie Clark: Yep. That’s exactly right. I mean, it’s kind of like going to networking events, “which is yet another way that people waste a lot of time.” And when I say a networking event, I mean, something that is kind of like this open call, like, hey, the Chamber’s having a mixer. Like that kind of thing. Because those are the things that other people who are not busy are going to people who are not busy or like, hey, maybe I can meet some people, and it’s like, very diffuse, and they don’t care that it’s very diffused, because they don’t have anything better going on. But the minute you start to get traction in your business, and you’re successful, you’re like, Oh, my God, I absolutely don’t have time to waste two and a half hours mixing with random people. That’s the last place you’d go. And so the more successful folks are only willing to go to very tightly curated events where they feel like there’s a high probability they will meet high performers.

Kim Sutton: Oh, absolutely. I just realized I say, Yeah, absolutely right, a lot. And I’ve been asked several times why I don’t attend a couple networking groups here in my small town in Ohio and that is exactly why, because I realized that it was a waste of time, even though it was only once a month. My ideal client is not the owner of the local car repair shop, or the local salon owner. And I think we need to be a lot more clear on who our ideal client is before we’re picking where we’re spending our time. I’m not saying yeah, I mean, [inaudible] and those type of networking groups are going to work for some people. But I think as we’re really becoming more clear on our message and who were serving, that’s, yeah, we have to be much more. I am not a walking dictionary, cognizant, aware, whatever word is appropriate of where that’s going.

Dorie Clark: Absolutely.

Kim Sutton: Would you mind talking a little bit about Reinventing You?

Dorie Clark: I certainly can do that. Yeah, Reinventing You is my first book that came out in 2013. And it was really something that was sparked by a blog post that I initially wrote for the Harvard Business Review. And it was kind of inspired by my first personal experience with getting laid off and having to reinvent myself, got me interested in the topic. And so I began to look into what that process looked like, how was it for other people? What did they do? How did they reinvent successfully, because I felt like when I was doing reinvention, I didn’t really have a good strategy, or plan, I was just kind of bungling along and it all worked out but it was not the most efficient thing in the world. And so I realized that if there actually were a template, if there actually were what could essentially be a guide book or some guideposts, that would be hopefully valuable to other people. So I set out to create that. And so I interviewed several dozen people who were high level professionals that had reinvented themselves successfully, to try to extrapolate key principles that people could follow if they wanted to change jobs if they wanted to change careers, etc. And so it’s been a great journey, a great process.

Kim Sutton: Dorie, one of the things that I found to be a struggle was not saying yes to everything as I was growing my business. I knew that I needed to bring clients and I knew I had to build my reputation. So I thought that I needed to accept everybody who came my way. Was that ever a struggle for you?

Dorie Clark: Yeah. I mean, I think it’s a struggle for everyone. But it’s definitely a problem, largely, because it’s not a skill that you need to be good at in the beginning of your business. In fact, what’s tricky about it is that in the early stages of your business, you kind of want to say yes to everything, because you don’t really know what your business model is, you don’t really know who your clients are, you have no idea what’s going to pay off for you. And so you kind of have to figure that out by experimenting. And so saying yes to a bunch of things, is a useful learning process. But at a certain point, once you do gain that focus, it becomes important for you to shift your behaviors, you sort of shift into the more developed mode of understanding, Oh, right, I need to not be wasting my time doing all this, because I have some clarity now. And so at that point, you need to develop the no muscle. But you’ve gotten in the habit of being successful by saying yes to everything. And of course, we have our cultural baggage, but not wanting this to disappoint people or something like that. So I think it is something that we all struggle with, understanding when to make that shift, and then learning how to do it graciously.

Kim Sutton: I love how you said no muscle, that no muscle must be with the arm muscle that prohibits me from doing a pull up to this point, because it has been so hard to develop. And I’m finally getting there. I mean, I have a wonderful client who always wants to send referrals my way. And it’s taken when she’s offered these referrals, like it’s taken no joke, two years to finally start saying, no that’s not the work I’m looking for right now. Because I didn’t want to let her down. But I was also in scarcity mindset of, Okay, if I say no to this, is there going to be something better that follows? And I finally realized that yes, but I’m not going to be able to take this something better that follows unless I say no to this now.

Dorie Clark: Yes. Very true.

Kim Sutton: I want to jump back to your multiple income streams. Would you mind sharing a little bit about that with the listeners, please?

Dorie Clark: Yeah. Sure. So when I first started my business, like, probably most people, I had one income stream, which was doing marketing strategy consulting. So essentially I would write marketing plans for companies so that was the basic idea of what I did. And so for a few years, that was really all I did. I mean, sort of variations of it, but same type of thing. But over time, I began to expand out into some other directions. And at first, it wasn’t super strategic, but I knew I wanted to write a book so I started doing that. And then, of course, once you land a contract and get a little bit of money for it, then that’s another income stream, albeit a relatively small one. I also knew I wanted to do some executive Ed teachings. So I began moving into that, so I was adding more. But then at a certain point, I came to realize, Oh, you know, this isn’t just this sort of cool little things I’m doing on the side. This is actually a valuable diversification strategy in my business. It is proactively a good thing to be diversifying my income stream because it’s a way of mitigating risk. And so I began to think more about how I could do that. And so I began building out other areas. And the great news is that as you develop new revenue streams, other things become possible for you. So for instance, when I published my first book, Reinventing You, I started to get offers for paid speaking engagements. Now speaking was something that I had always done in my business, but no one wanted to pay me for it. But once my book came out, it became something that it was like, Oh, you are legitimate enough to get paid for this. So I began getting that as a source of revenue. Some things I handled very strategically, like I knew I wanted to go into online courses. And so I started experimenting first doing some courses with other entities and in me being sort of the hired help as it were doing the course. And then eventually in 2016, I launched my first independently developed online course called Recognized Expert. And so I launched that. And that became a source of revenue and interestingly, the people who were involved in that, they began to say, hey, we’d like to meet in person we’d like to connect. And so that opened up a new line, which was doing live events. So over time, if you’re moving strategically, and you’re looking for opportunities, you really can find ways to develop multiple income streams in your business.

Kim Sutton: In theory, the book I am working on is Chronic Idea Disorder, overcoming idea overwhelm for entrepreneurs.

Dorie Clark: That’s great. Yes.

Kim Sutton: For me, like I would love to have multiple income sources. However, I have struggled myself with chronic idea disorder. I love how you say that you’ve been strategic, but do you have one tip for staying on focus and getting making sure that you’re not doing way too much at a time?

Dorie Clark: For sure. I think the first thing to keep in mind is that I would advise people definitely only focus on adding one new income stream per year. To somebody who has lots of ideas, and you know, I mean, I count myself, among them, that might sound frustrating, like, oh, but I don’t want to do this, this or this. But the truth is, the time is gonna pass anyway, right? And it is almost a certainty that if you’re like, I’m going to add half a dozen new income streams this year, it’s just not going to go well. You’re going to be pulled in too many directions, you’re not going to be able to focus, but meanwhile, if you add one a year, and you just say, okay, you know, like five, six years from now, I’m gonna have all these income streams, that’s pretty badass. But you just have to be systematic about saying, okay, just because I can’t do something now, doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen. It just means not yet. It just means I’m focusing on this thing now and then I can reevaluate it. And so in fact, I’ve actually even developed a methodology to kind of control myself, and hopefully it can help other people as well. So I have this short online course I call a masterclass, called Be More Productive. And Be More Productive masterclass actually shares a methodology that I developed around goal setting, which is that number one, instead of annual goals, I am a believer in six month goals, because they can be reviewed and evaluated more systematically. And number two, you should only have two overarching professional goals at a time. So meaning, let’s say you want to start a podcast and a video series, and you want to focus on your professional speaking and you want to write a book. You know, I mean, these are all good goals, these are not bad choices, but it would be a bad choice to try to do them all at once. So you say okay, I’m going to pick two, and for six months, I’m going to go nuts on them. That is what I’m going to focus on. Of course, above and beyond whatever sort of administrative tasks you have. We all have to do email and stuff. But in terms of a primary focus, you focus on two things. And then it’s six months, you reevaluate, and if it’s going well, if you like it, if you’re making progress, great, you re up for another six months, if you don’t, or if you don’t like it, or if it’s already become amazingly successful. And now you’re done. Well, great, then you can pick something else to add to the plate. But the key have to be more productive methodology is understanding that there is an unlimited number of slots on the plate.

Kim Sutton: You just shifted my whole next 90 days.

Dorie Clark: Boom. Fantastic.

Kim Sutton: Thank you so much. Dorie, this has been an incredible conversation. I feel like we’ve just scratched the surface and I’d love to bring you back– I had a future date whenever it’s convenient for you. But I want to be respectful of your time and also the time and the listeners. Where can listeners get in touch with you to learn more, find out more about what you do.

Dorie Clark: Yeah, thank you so much, Kim. The best place to send folks is my website DorieClark.com. It’s D-O-R-I-E C-L-A-R-K. It is the repository of more than 500 free articles that I’ve written for places like Forbes and Harvard Business Review, and all kinds of things so they can, they can really go deep there. And I also do have a free resource in particular for people who are interested in expanding into multiple revenue streams. That is my free 88 question entrepreneurial use self assessment that actually walks people through how to apply the principles of developing multiple income streams to their own business. And so if anyone would like to get that they can at DorieClark.com/entrepreneur.

Kim Sutton: Fabulous. Listeners, if you are driving and can’t write that down right now. You can go to thekimsutton.com/pp250 where you will find all the show notes and eventually a transcription. Dorie, thank you again so much for coming on. Do you have a last thing? Oh, sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt.

Dorie Clark: Yeah. I’m just failing over here. Thanks, Kim.

Kim Sutton: Do you have a last piece of parting advice or a golden nugget that you can offer to listeners?

Dorie Clark: Yeah. Thank you. It’s been great to have the chance to talk with your folks. And I would just say that developing multiple income streams is something that it’s never urgent, exactly. And it’s a lot easier sometimes for people to just continue doing what they’re doing. But I think that in terms of building the long term stability and resiliency of your business, it’s one of the most important things that you can do, and invest the time in. Because it really is like the proverbial table. When times get tough for whatever reason, you know, technological change, or economic disruption, or just swings in the overall economic cycles, you want more legs on your table. You want to have more options, because if one door gets closed, you become much more able to adapt if you have other things that you can lean on. And so that’s part of why it’s become so valuable for me you can earn more money and it makes you more stable and resilient.