"Justin, I have a confession to make. I am probably at the most scared point in my life right now, but at the same time, I'm also the most excited."

That's how Pat Flynn opened our conversation. Not with a hook. Not with a teaser. Just straight into it.

Eighteen years. That's how long Pat has run Smart Passive Income. It's one of the OG brands in this whole online business space — the kind of business people build their entire careers studying. And he just sold it.

Not to a private equity firm. Not to some faceless media company. To Liz Wilcox, an email marketing coach who's been building her own brand for the better part of a decade and had already been a guest on the SPI podcast.

Here's the thing — when a deal like this happens, everyone wants to talk about the money. The multiple. The earnout. I wanted to talk about something else: what happens to the sponsors, the brand deals, the relationships worth hundreds of thousands of dollars when the face of the business changes overnight?

Turns out, that's exactly the conversation Pat and Liz needed to have too.

Why Pat Said No to Eight Figures (More Than Once)

Pat's turned down offers before. Real offers. Low eight figures, from venture capital groups who wanted a piece of SPI.

"Those were easy nos for me," he told me, "because I always knew that those people would just dismantle everything that I've built."

That's the tell. If you've ever built an audience-driven business — content, coaching, whatever — you already know the fear underneath that sentence. It's not "will I get paid enough." It's "will the thing I built for my people still serve my people once I'm gone."

Pat's been describing his last five years as climbing two ladders at once. SPI on one side. His Pokémon channel — now sitting at multiple millions of subscribers with its own team and its own revenue — on the other.

"It's very hard to climb two ladders at the same time," he said. "At some point, you have to make a decision to grasp onto one so that you can fully immerse yourself in that space."

So he found Liz. Ever since she came on as a guest and then joined the team, membership at SPI doubled. Community activity jumped 400%. That's not a coincidence you sell around — that's proof you build a decision on.

What would you do if the thing you spent two decades building suddenly had a better home than the one you could give it?

The Money Wasn't the Hard Part

Here's what surprised me most in this conversation: the negotiation between Pat and Liz wasn't really about the purchase price.

"It was do our values align? Do our missions align?" Pat said. "Can Liz become somebody who — down the road — somebody comes back and goes, 'It is even better now that Liz is there?'"

That's a different question than the one most acquisitions ask. And it's the question that actually matters when your business runs on trust with an audience and trust with sponsors.

The acquisition happened back in April. They sat on the announcement for months — not because they were hiding anything, but because Pat wanted to give Liz time to prove herself first. No cliff. No "surprise, I'm out" moment for the audience or the brands paying to be in front of them.

"That would have been really bad," Pat said, "if on April 1st I let the audience and the sponsors know, 'Hey guys, I'm out, and Liz is coming in — trust me, bro, she's great.' No. Why don't we prove ourselves first."

If you're ever in a position where you're handing part of your business to someone else — a co-host, a successor, a business partner who's suddenly the face of something — steal that instinct. Prove it before you announce it.

Liz Wilcox Didn't Get Pat Flynn's Following. She Got Something Better.

I want you to sit with this for a second, because it's the part of the story most people gloss over.

"I did not get Pat Flynn's social media," Liz told me. "I did not, you know — that's Pat's YouTube, that's Pat's Instagram. He worked so hard the last basically 20 years to build that up."

She's stepping into a business that sponsors evaluate partly on the strength of a personal brand she doesn't actually have. No massive YouTube following. No Instagram numbers to point to. Just a "modest, but not small" following of her own and a business with 18 years of institutional trust behind it.

I asked her straight up: what's the philosophy now?

"Maybe the numbers aren't what they were March 31st," she said, "but the energy is here. So my philosophy has been: in the next 12 months, how can we juice up this email list — not only with subscribers, but turning the current subscribers into customers?"

This is the pitch she's taking to brands like Kit and ecamm: we're not going to charge you as much for video anymore, but we have an email list that's full of buyers, not just followers.

Here's the thing — most creators think their leverage with sponsors is the size of their audience. It's not. It's the depth of your relationship with that audience. Liz is betting her entire sponsorship strategy on that distinction, and honestly? I think she's right.

The Coupon Book That Turned Into a Six-Figure Question

Then Liz told me about her coupon book, and I felt like I was watching a strategy click into place in real time.

On her personal brand, she doesn't have flashy YouTube numbers. So instead of chasing bigger sponsors, she asked her own audience: do you want in? She built a coupon book — $50 to $100 a slot — and sold it into her live events.

Then Smart Passive Income happened.

"I was actually able to go to them yesterday, at the time of this recording, and say, 'Hey, surprise — we're actually going to put this in front of the Smart Passive Income audience,'" she said. "Your coupon book is now going to be seen by over a 100,000 people."

Her inbox lit up. People asking if they could double down, whether Pat would show it again, how to get more visibility next time.

That's not a sponsorship tactic you'll find in a course. That's a creator realizing her own audience — the people already invested enough to buy into her coupon book — were the exact pool she should be pulling future sponsors from.

But here's what I noticed talking to her: she's not treating this as a one-time stunt. She's already thinking about which of those "small" sponsors are the right match to bring over to the much bigger SPI audience. She's building a pipeline out of people who already said yes once.

From a $2,500 Video to a $5,000 Invoice, Same Afternoon

This next story is the one that made me stop and ask her to repeat it.

Liz recorded her first sponsored YouTube video in one take. Seventeen minutes, no editing, filmed in a friend's cabin because she didn't have her setup with her. The brand loved it. "This is one of the most creative videos we've seen in a while," they told her.

They paid her $2,500.

Then — before the SPI acquisition had even been announced publicly — she emailed that same brand. "I'm in charge of the sponsorships over at Smart Passive Income," she told them. "Would you want a video like this over on their channel? It's got three times as many subscribers as I do."

They said yes. She made almost the same video, tweaked slightly so it wasn't a duplicate. And she invoiced them $5,000 for it.

Same brand. Same day, basically. Double the money, because she pointed the exact same value at a bigger surface.

"That closed mouths don't get fed," I told her, "is one of the biggest lessons in this whole story." If a brand comes to you wanting one thing — a newsletter blast, one video — and you never tell them about the other surfaces you have, they will never know to ask. Not because they don't care. Because they don't know it exists.

If you're only pitching sponsors the one product or platform they originally asked about, you are almost certainly leaving money on the table. Go count your surfaces. Then go tell your sponsors about the ones they don't know about yet.

The 5-Foot Binder Nobody Asked For

Pat's story tops all of it, and it's not even about Smart Passive Income.

On his Pokémon channel, he found a UK binder company called Vault X. Never talked to them before. He just loved their binder, featured it as his top pick in a video, and figured maybe they'd see it.

They did. The video pulled a couple million views. A conversation started. He asked if they had an affiliate program — sure, they said, but what else could they do together?

Here's where it gets ridiculous.

Pat wanted to build a series collecting every Pokémon card ever made — all 1,025 of them — in one binder. Except no binder existed that could hold that many.

"Can you create a custom binder?" he asked. "Okay, how many cards per page? Usually there's nine. It's going to be really thick." "No, no, no. Make it like 5 feet tall. I want it huge." "This is ridiculous." "Trust me. Because guess what? On the thumbnail, people are going to see this. They're going to click. Just go with me on this."

They built it. The series ran across eight videos and pulled over 12 million views. It became Vault X's number one source of customers.

There it is.

That relationship didn't stop at content. Pat's now investing in a building for a film studio, and part of that build is a separate six-figure sponsorship deal with Vault X — a 10-foot binder behind him on set that opens up into a display. The sponsorship money is literally helping fund the studio it lives in.

"It started out small by providing wins for them," Pat said, "just like I learned at SPI. But it's now led to even bigger deals — bigger deals than I've ever done in my entire life."

Screw what's normal. Strive to be abnormal. A normal binder pitch gets you an affiliate link. An abnormal one gets you a six-figure sponsorship and a custom-built prop that funds your studio.

What Happens Next for SPI

I asked Pat what he's carrying forward into this next chapter, now that he's fully handing the reins to Liz and focusing on the Pokémon side.

"Building relationships and finding ways to bring wins to those companies first — even before making a deal with them," he said. Same instinct that built Vault X. Same instinct that's now baked into everything Liz is doing with SPI's sponsors.

And Liz's closing line summed up the whole transition better than I could:

"For 18 years, Smart Passive Income has been Team Flynn. I'm not Pat Flynn. But we can take it from Team Flynn to Team Win. And WIN stands for What's Important Now. I'm on a mission to help you decide what's important now, so you can get going, make more money, and live a better life."

So here's my question for you: if you had to hand your business, your audience, and your sponsor relationships to someone else tomorrow — would they know why those brands say yes? Or would that knowledge walk out the door with you?

If you're building a sponsorship business that's actually built to last — one where the relationships, the pitch, and the pricing don't just live in your head — that's exactly what I break down in Sponsor Magnet. And if you want direct feedback on your own sponsor strategy, that's what we work through inside Wizard's Guild every week.