So here's what you told me about
One, is you have a product business, we didn't talk too much about that
But the bulk of your income comes from freelancing but it's consuming all of your time.
Here's what I wrote down in terms of your wants
What you want to do is have more time
That's the most important thing that you want. To have free time is everything
because you can focus on different businesses
you can think about new things that you can create
You can spend time with your family and I see that in your videos too
and you want to, basically, move away from the guy on the box
and be paid to be a consultant, to be paid for thinking.
you want to be paid for the high level stuff and there are some challenges there.
You want to, also, build a passive income business model
through this productised business model you're developing, right? Right.
right now you don't have enough time to do that.
This is the dream of all creatives is to do something once really well
and to make money from it for the rest of your life
and it's a wonderful dream to have and it's not a dream if you know how to do it.
Last week we mentioned a little about the youtube channel
that at some point, the youtube channel, depending on your life ambitions
can exceed all other things, including the product business that you're building..Who knows?!
Or atleast it can support and compliment the other things that you're doing
That's what I heard, right? Yep
Okay...now if you had to.. and play along with me here because I'm going to treat you like a client right now
to teach you, in essence, so there's going to be this whole meta thing, right? Alright
To teach you how I do what I do so that we can go away from hourly rates
now I'm going to ask you..to define what success looks like for free time?
How many hours do you want to be working on or in your business a week?
and when that would feel like "yes, I feel like I have more of my free time back"?
So right now, how I thought about this is
I have divided my week into 10 chunks
So every day there are morning sessions and afternoon sessions so there are 10 chunks at the moment
and right now, my product business is getting 1 chunk.
so like half a day per week but I want it to be atleast 5 chunks, like half of my week. At least.
Okay. Perfect. That's great. So how many hours do those 10 chunks represent a week?
A normal work week in America is like 40 hours so when someone is telling me they're working 80 hours
So let's do 6x5...30 hours
So you're working roughly 30 hours a week
You're making $200,000 a year which is fantastic
You're doing really well for yourself. Aiming for $300,000 this year
Right, right. We're going to get there, we're going to get there
It's actually not as hard as you might think you're going to get there and you'll probably shoot passed that.
Now, I'm looking at this, 30 hours...You only want to work 15 hours a week then?
Like in your ideal scenario you're only going to work 15 hours a week
You're going to make $300,000 so you have all of this free time. Exactly!
I just want to know that.
If you can really focus on your product business
How much money do you think that can generate for you annually?
If you were really building it the way it's supposed to?
My goal is to make a multimillion dollar business out of it
This is a really long term play for me.
I want to build a team around it, I think we can create a great brand, a great product
This is a recurring revenue model so it can generate a lot of money I think.
But it takes a while. Let's put a timeline on it
Say in the next 3 years
If you were doing what you were doing?
At the end of the 3 years...How much money is this pulling in annually for you?
I just thought today about 5 years and in about 5 years about $300,000 monthly
so that's got to be around $4 million maybe. With a team of around 10 people
Something like that.
So typically, at this pont, I want to talk to you about
If I'm able to and I believe I can. I believe I can get you there on all of these fronts
but let's go down one at a time
let's assign a value to each of these if we can. Okay
So if you're able to cut your work time from 30hrs to 15hrs
How much value is that? How much is that worth to you?
It's really hard to quantify it
Obviously, I'm not losing money because I am making the same amount of money
I'm just making a lot more time, but this time is an investment
because I'm not sure it's going to pay itself back this year
but I think it's a long term investment. I don't know.
It's in the tens of thousands of dollars for sure
I think it's worth more than that, let me help you figure it out, watch this.
You're going to hit $300,000 this year
So if you had to work half of the time then you've already saved $150,000
So I'm going to put $150,000 value on that right now.
I'm not saying I'm going to charge you that
How did you come up with this number?
Watch this!
If it takes you 30 hours to earn $300,000 a year
If, for whatever reason, I could wave a magic wand
or a genie comes out and you only have to work half of the time
You've done twice as much work in half of the time.
Right? So that means I have saved you...$150,000. It's worth $150,000
You just take the half..That makes sense, that's reasonable, right?
Amazing. So $150,000, now here's the beautiful part, that's just year 1.
Year 2, year 3, year 4, this is something that just keeps paying itself off. But I want to focus on the first year.
Awesome
Now that you're getting your hands out of doing the making stuff
If we can figure out how to build a team around you, a process, and systematise that stuff
you just go in, you patachute in just to do the critical thinking work.
How much would that be worth to you? On an emotional level, what price tag would you put on that?
Again, I want to understand the question specifically
How much would it be worth if I..in my freelance business or in my product business?
In my freelance business to just come in, do the sale, all the high level thinking
Aw man, that would be amazing!
Wouldn't it!?
Look, if I could just say I'm going to build a team around you
and if I had to fly there and manage your team and coach them for 3 months or 6 months
or whatever it took so I am going to say to them "You guys don't bother Ron about any of this stuff
He's going to run it and we want to make sure he knows where he needs to be
that he's prepped for his meetings and then as soon as he'finishes doing what he wants to do
we collect all that data and we hand hold the client and deliver it
with just impeccable delivery."
Smooth customer service. If I could do that for you. What would that be worth to you?
A lot.
I think so
Let's just put a number on it. We're playing a game so let's just put a number on it.
What do you think?
I think it's either the same amount or more
because it's like, making my business on autopilot and keeping all of the fun parts.
You do all of the best things you want to do and none of the garbage
Alright, so that's how we began and I have a plan, now I'm going to teach you some of these things right now.
So this is the first part
When you're dealing with your client. I want you to try to surface the desired future state.
Don't go too far out because then it gets too dreamy, right?
That's a "pie in the sky".
Somewhere between 2 to 5 years seems to work.
Alright, so you think I need to hit $500 per hour before I do my first hire?
No I don't
I think this is part of the plan, okay?
It's a complex thing, I'm trying to disseminate a ton of information for you really, really fast.
So, I want to go over high level concepts then we can drill down some other point in time
I honestly think you should be moving towards a project base thing
So that we're not measuring time anymore.
We're not selling time as a freelancer
We're gonna sell, what (Peter D.) Blair calls "Inputs" which is selling time
How much time I input into this project is how much it's going to cost.
The 2nd way of bidding and estimating projects is called "Outputs"
So we don't care how many hours or how many people get involved in the thing
We only care that the product at the end is what we've asked for in the time that we've asked for it.
So then you can learn how to run your company the way you want
And now what we want to do is assign a higher dollar value to the output.
Yep. That also means that I will have to change, a little bit, kind of the types of projects that I'm taking
because some of them are to help a team on a process
on an ongoing product development so there isn't a fixed outcome
It's an ongoing process
But yeah, maybe I will have to change some clients. Maybe..
Yeah
Are you selling sprint cycles? So each sprint is completed and there's a dollar amount.
Not really.
Perhaps that's a good thing to do. I'm considering..
It might be, there's different models here, right?
So you can sell a 2 or 3 week sprint, that we define what "done"looks like
A MVP (Minimum Viable Product)
and then you just use your team to run the project.
And here's the most amazing thing
We're not even talking about the feeling a person gets
by teaching another human being and giving something that's going to help them for the rest of their life.
So you might find some young, able bodied woman or man
Who comes in and is like "Ron, I believe in everything that you're doing
and I want to buy all into this and I just want to learn from you".
And so then, as you see them grow and blossom
You're like a proud father to this other person
and you know, if you get hit by a truck tomorrow
that person's life is improved forever
and their gonna be able to find a way to sustain themselves
and to take care of loved ones and a family that may or may not come in the future.
and that's a pretty amazing feeling. That's true.
I don't want to get all economics and accounting on this, but there's a value to that too.
Okay, alright man, take care.
Bye