The biggest issue when it comes to starting an online business that you're going to see with
a lot of the information out there is that these businesses are based on four incredibly limiting
factors. Number one, trends that won't be popular or in demand forever, tactics that people can
learn for free on the internet, time output, money output on physical products, overhead,
and employees, and this ultimately creates a business that might have success in the beginning,
but it's ultimately going to hit what's called a time and income ceiling. This kind of business
tends to have some success in the beginning, but inevitably, you're going to hit the time
and money ceiling, as I like to call it, meaning that you just don't have enough hours in the day
to be able to scale and grow the business, and you just don't have enough resources either. So
ultimately, you can only grow to a certain point. To paint a picture of a business like this, let's
think about the ultimate business example. We all thought about starting lemonade stands when we
were little, but if you're sitting there all day long, passing out one cup of lemonade at the time,
physically squeezing the lemons yourself, you are trading time for money, so you can only make money
when you are physically there working, and it requires your effort to create the product. Now,
I know that's a very offline model, but when you think about starting an online business,
and this is crucially important to having longevity with an online business, there
are a lot of things that are very similar to a lemonade stand in the online world,
and a lot of those look like freelancer businesses or content creation businesses, things like video
editing services, or photography, or writing, or running paid media, or social media management.
And I know this so well because my business model used to, a long, long time ago, look like that,
and it actually led me to burnout, because I physically couldn't take on any more clients,
and I just didn't have enough time in the day to get all the work done that I needed to get done
for my clients, and it landed me in the hospital at 29 with all of the symptoms of a stroke, which
turned out to be, after they ran all the tests, a severe, severe panic attack. And it woke me up,
and since then, I've worked really hard to completely shift my business model to detach
my time from my income, and that means that my energy, effort, and resources going into
the business stay at the same level, but my profit, and output, and results tend to just
keep growing and growing and growing, and this is what's called a scalable business model online.
And I've made it my mission to help other people do the same with their businesses. So we've
helped everyone from freelancers, to doctors, to DJs, to dancers, to lawyers, to accountants,
you name it, we've helped so many people to date take their expertise and their knowledge and turn
them into these highly scalable online business models. And this kind of business model can grow,
despite time, capacity, or hours in the day, social media trends, or algorithm changes.
So how can you start the best business model online in 2024? Well, if you check one of these
boxes, you have what it takes to create a highly scalable online business model. And the cool thing
is, even if you can't check these boxes right now, you can work your way towards creating this kind
of business model by working towards checking one of these boxes. So they are expertise in a certain
area, a skill set that can be used to help others, career expertise or experience, a transformation
you have gone through yourself or helped others go through. Now, I take this really seriously,
and I've actually created an entire guide on detaching your time from your income in 2024.
If you want that free guide, comment below this video with, stop trading time for money, and we'll
send you the link directly to get that for free. So how do you create this kind of business model?
Well, it tends to go in phases, and I am not talking, like I said, about a flash-in-the-pan
business that's only going to be around for a year or less, I'm talking about a business that can
grow in the long-term. It's what we like to call a legacy business, which means that even if you're
not around, the business can continue to make an impact and an income without you. So the three
phases of getting to creating a business like this come down to mastery, method, and mentorship.
Now, mastery is where most people get stuck, and I want to show you this because I think it helps
illustrate why so many people get stuck here, and it's really revolving around what's called the law
of diminishing returns, which means that, in the beginning, you are mastering your craft, you're
mastering your skill set, you are starting to gain clients from it, you're starting to make a little
money from your expertise, which is always very exciting. But as the demand for your work grows,
your time diminishes, so the ability to do more work for more people becomes impossible. And so,
just because you're putting in more effort and more time, and working with more clients, doesn't
mean that you're actually any benefit from it, and you're starting to see diminishing returns,
meaning that you are burnt out, you are tired, and the quality of your work is suffering, because you
just don't have enough brain power or hours in the day to do it to the level that you are proud of.
And this leads to what I like to call the fully booked calendar of unfulfillment. So this is
actually what my calendar looked like when I was doing work for other people, when I was doing
social media management, creation, consulting, all of those things. And it was really tough on me,
and tough on every aspect of my life, because I was constantly working. And in that whole process,
I got so busy doing the work, I started resenting the work. And I realized really quickly,
there's really only two ways that people can think of to get out of that cycle.
Number one, you are going to hire other people to do the work for you, but the issue with that is
that you're paying money to these people to do the work, and that cuts into your cashflow and profit
margins in the business, and especially if you're in the beginning stages, you don't have a lot of
extra cashflow or margin to be investing into people to do the work for you. The other option
is increase your rate, increase your prices. So you increase your rate, you have a little
bit more cashflow in the bank, and therefore you don't have to take on as many clients. But still,
that doesn't solve the time-money trade-off problem, because you still only have X amount
of hours in the week, and even though you're getting paid more for the work that you're doing,
you can't create more time. Or can you? This is how I went from mastery, ultimately,
to mentorship, which is the way that my business model is built now, and it's how I've helped
thousands of people build their own business models. The amazing thing that happens when
you're in the mastery phase is that you are fine-tuning your skillset and your expertise,
and you ultimately make it your own, and therefore you start to create your own methods and your own
way of doing things that's totally unique to you, and that is incredibly valuable. So I started to
notice I was repeating myself and my strategy with every single client, because I knew that
it worked, and it's what I needed to implement for them to see the results that they were seeking.
But I realized, well, if I'm duplicating this for every single client, what if I was able to
package this up, productize my method, and have them integrate and learn how to do it in their
own business? And that ultimately is when you go from mastery to method to mentorship. So now,
instead of me trading my time for money, working with all of these different people,
ultimately hitting that ceiling, I had this asset which was an online course, an online program,
that people all over the world could study at their own pace and their own time, and get results
without relying on my time, therefore allowing me to smash that income and impact ceiling.
Now, I know you might be thinking to yourself, but people want me to do the work for them,
there's no way that they're going to be able to do this on their own, and I have to correct you
there because I had the very same thought. But the key to this is identifying exactly who is
at a place where they are ready to take this on and integrate it for themselves,
as opposed to having you do the work for them, because those are very different clients at very
different stages. So that's a really important thing to identify in order to go from the mastery
level to the mentorship level, where you are no longer doing the work for people, and
they're doing the work for themselves with your curriculum, your blueprint, your methodology.
So how do you go from mastery to mentor? Let's talk about the steps. Number one is identify
the method with what I call the zero-to-hero journey. So essentially, when you become a mentor,
you are serving somebody who is at a place which we call the zero state. They're challenged,
they're frustrated, and they're in need of help, they're in pain,
and they have urgency for that help. And you are going to take them to the hero state, so this is
based on something that you know can help people achieve. So what is a transformation, a journey,
that you can take your ideal client on to get them from the zero state to the hero state? And it has
to start with one clear outcome. What is one clear outcome that you can provide? And then, you work
backwards from there to create the step-by-step method and curriculum to get your client from
zero-to-hero. I want you to share your ideas with me in the comments of what you think that could
be. How can you take someone from zero-to-hero using your skillset and your expertise?
Number two is identify your ideal client. So that really means, okay, if you've identified
the outcome of where you're going to take people on the zero-to-hero journey, who is the person at
the zero state exactly? And the big key here is really honing in on who this person is,
and, most importantly, where they're at on their journey, because if you try to serve everybody,
you're ultimately going to serve nobody. Let's take fitness as an example, which is often a
popular category to create an online program. The issue is, if you generally create a fitness
program, you're trying to serve everyone, and it's not specific in terms of who you actually can
create the result for, and it also makes it very hard to create a curriculum for everybody on the
planet who wants to get more fit. For example, if you're trying to serve a 50-year-old man who needs
to lose 30 pounds because his life depends on it, versus a 20-year-old female who just wants to tone
up her arms, those are very different clients. So you need to identify the specifics of who
your ideal client is, why they need your support, and where they are on their journey,
where they're most likely to actually make the decision to do the work. That allows you to create
a clear curriculum to get them from that zero state to that hero state. Because imagine if you
were serving those two people in the same course, their paths are going to be incredibly different,
which means that their curriculum is going to be incredibly different, and that means that you're
constantly customizing the work for each person, and that creates the same problem we had before,
which is trading time for money. Step number three is sourcing where
these people live online, and there are so many opportunities to find them. Once you know exactly
who you're looking for, then you can actually find your ideal clients and start building a list of
those people. You can find them in places like Facebook groups, social media comments sections,
you can find them in Reddit forums, you can find them simply by doing Google searches for
blogs and influencers in the space and see where their audiences live and what kind of
content they're interacting with. Your audience is out there. You have to go find where they
are hanging out in order to start building a list of potential clients for your program.
Step four is to actually listen to those people. We call this the research and development phase.
So this means you're actually taking the time to speak to these people, understand what their
pain points are, understand what their needs are, and understand what they would actually want in a
program like this. Then they're hand delivering you the curriculum that you need to create.
Step number five is create your prototype, or your POP, as we like to call it, so a profitable
offered prototype. What that means is you're creating a bare-bones version of your program,
and you're basically building out the steps that will take your client from zero-to-hero,
because people are paying for the transformation. They don't care how much information is in your
program or how long it takes them, people want the most efficient path from you as the mentor to
go from zero-to-hero, so that is your next step. From there, the step after that is you're actually
going to pre-sell this program to the people that you did your research and development with,
because those are the folks that actually told you what they want in the curriculum,
they told you what their pain points are. Now, you generously actually have something to offer
them to solve their problem, and oftentimes, our clients sell out their programs just by
selling to the list of folks that they spoke to to do their research and development.
Step number seven is you collect social proof, so this proves that your offer is actually working,
and it also allows you to sell more easily, because proof and results sell better than
any fancy marketing ever will. A good program, a good product, is all you need, because it creates
word of mouth and referrals, which allows you to market less and still generate a ton of clients.
Once you have that real-world feedback and you have the social proof, then you actually can
build your offer. So you can take the prototype version, optimize it, put it onto a platform,
and then you have your evergreen program and your asset that anyone in the world can study without
you having to trade your time for money. Step number nine is to provide free valuable
content on an evergreen platform. This allows you to create content that will work for you even when
you're not working. And my favorite platform, you guessed it, is YouTube. This is how we've really
built our business over the years, and we have an evergreen stream of leads and clients coming
in all the time, because when people are looking up how to build an online course, how to build
an online program, we, our videos, tend to pop up, and we are solving the problem that they're
seeking to solve. And the same thing can happen in any field, in any industry. If somebody wants to
learn how to do their own bookkeeping in their business, if you create videos on that topic,
you're going to pop up, and that's going to generate a new list of leads and clients all day,
every day, without doing any more work. And from that valuable content you're creating
online, don't allow your clients to forget about you. So the last step, step number ten,
is build an email list. An email list is your greatest asset in any online business,
and it is crucial to your long-term success and growth, because, why? Algorithms change,
platforms change, trends change, so you may be making content right now that's working really
well, but six months from now, nobody sees it. So you need to make sure that you own your audience
and you own your list, so that regardless of what happens on any platform, you always have a list of
potential clients that is engaged with you, that is nurtured, and that is ready to invest into the
solution that you offer with your online program. Those are the steps to really create this business
model and start the best business model you can online this year,
which means that you have low expenses, lower output than doing the work for people,
you're actually able to have them do the work for themselves with your strategy and your method,
and that is so crucial to breaking that cycle of constantly trading time for money. Now, you're
probably asking yourself, well, yeah, but how do I actually price this thing? Well, the reality is,
when you base a program around a transformation, and not just giving people tactics and skills and
things they can learn online for free, you can charge a premium. So our clients are charging
no less than $500, and I just want to show you how impactful this is in terms of how much effort and
work you have to do to get clients in the door to make the amount of money that you want to make.
So let's say that you want to make a million dollars in the next year, let's just set that
as the target. Well, if you are charging $500 for your program, that means you need 2,000 clients.
If you're charging $1,000 for your program, you need 1,000 clients. If you're charging $5,000 for
your online program, which is totally reasonable, depending on the outcome you're providing,
you only need 200 clients. So what does that mean? You don't have to market very hard to get
200 clients in the door. That is a very reasonable number, and if you created a program that creates
real results and transformation, it's completely doable to generate 200 clients and to scale to
that million dollar mark. Maybe not this year, but you can have stepping stones. You could do
a half a million this year, you could do a million the following year. The growth trajectory is truly
limitless with this kind of a business model. Now, if you're wondering what kind of online
program is the best to make this year, well, most importantly, it needs to be based on your
expertise and skill set, that has to come first and foremost. But there are five key categories
that I've noticed tend to be the most popular, so self-improvement, relationships, career,
health, and finance. But there are thousands of micro-niches, as we like to call them,
in each of those categories, and I'm going to talk about that in next week's video.
Now, if you're really ready to take this seriously this year, and you are ready to take
your expertise and scale it for more income and impact on a global level this year, then I highly,
highly encourage you to grab that free guide, the link is going to be in the comments below, and if
you comment with, stop trading time for money, we'll be sure to send you the direct link below.
So be sure to do that, and be sure to share your light bulb moments. I can't wait to hear them,
they are my love language. Thank you so much for watching, I hope this was helpful for you. Be sure
to like and subscribe for new videos on Tuesdays, and I will see you in the next one. Bye.