It’s weird to realize but I’ve basically been using the same “wealth building” formula since I was real young.
Some of you may know pieces of this story but it’s worth explaining in the context of Exponential Income.
See, right after I graduated college I was teaching tennis. I got paid $70 to $100 an hour depending on what type of teaching I was doing.
That’s pretty good money for a 22 year old kid fresh out of college. I could work ten hours a week and make more than my friends that were working full time jobs.
But I realized something really early that had a huge impact on my life.
In order to make money, I had to be present. In order to make MORE money, I had to work more. (I had a High Income Skill…which is not what you want…I’ll explain why in a minute.)
This is how most jobs, skills, and business work by the way. But it wasn’t something I was willing to accept.
At 22 I was making the same amount of money as the 35 and 45 year old coaches. And guess what? They were miserable.
They were spending 35 to 45 hours a week on a hot tennis court…still making the same amount of money they were when they were my age.
There was a glass ceiling in the tennis teaching world. The problem is most people couldn’t see it. And by the time they did see it…it was too late.
They were making six figures a year and had become accustomed to that lifestyle. That meant they couldn’t just backtrack to learn a skill that was only gonna make them a few grand a month to start.
They were stuck in a prison of their own creation. A nice-ish prison. But a prison nonetheless.
Want to Create Your Own Almost Passive Income?
Get my free 111 minute training on how to learn Almost Passive Income Skills. You’ll learn:
-
- How to stop trading time for money
- The best way to start making almost passive income in 2020
- Where to find people who will want to pay you for results instead of hours
- How to double your income without increasing your workload if you are already making money online
Like I said, I could see myself laying the bricks that would build my cell. (To be honest, I had started trying to make money online in college. I knew I wasn’t going to be a tennis coach for long from the beginning. But I could’ve gotten lured in by the high hourly pay if I wasn’t careful.)
So I focused on developing a skill. That skill was copywriting.
While I was coaching about 15 hours a week, I took a job writing copy for $20 an hour. Thankfully that job was really about copywriting AND email list management. After a little while I said I wanted to get paid monthly instead of hourly. He gave me $3500 a month plus a percentage of profits.
That’s the job that taught me you should almost never do profit sharing. Focus on revenue sharing instead. Profit sharing is out of your control if you’re not the business owner.
I left that job for another job writing copy. They paid a base of $5,000 a month. Not only did I get better at copy…I got to spend time on camera. Most of all, I created a new funnel every 2 weeks or so. We were spending $10,000 to $20,000 a day on traffic which meant we got a ton of data I could learn from.
I also had a little bonus package in my contract that gave me flat fee bonuses depending on how much revenue we generated. That year we did just shy of $18,000,000 which meant I made an extra $50,000.
I made $110,000 from my job that year. And I made $55,000 from a tiny email list of 200 people. (Which only took me about 3 hours of work per week.)
Up to this point I had already learned a few things that most people aren’t lucky enough to learn…
1. Don’t develop a High Income Skill. (High Income Skills require you to be present to make money. They also require you to work more to make more. These are skills like teaching tennis or doing one-on-one coaching.)
You need to develop an Exponential Income Skill instead. Exponential lncome Skills allow you to scale your income without scaling your time. And without having to be present.
2. Focusing on an Exponential Income Skill is important… but the way you set up your contract is even more important. You have to create win-win situations where people are EXCITED to write you big ass checks.
If I didn’t have my bonus structure set up in my job, I only would’ve made $60,000 from them…and I would’ve been much less motivated. I would’ve made less money and the company would have too. I won AND they won.
3. Nothing (in my experience online) is more valuable than an email list. Look, the $110,000 from the job was great. I was 25 years old and that was great money. But it took me 30-40 hours per week to generate that money.
My email list took about 3 hours per week and generated $55,000.
Let’s round down and say the job was 30 hours per week and paid $110,000 over the year. That’s $70 per hour.
Let’s round up and say the email list took 5 hours per week. That’s $211 per hour.
But what’s even better about that…I owned the ASSET of the email list at the end of the year. I didn’t own the business I worked for.
That email list has now transformed into a seven figure per year business that’s over 75% profit.
So that’s why I created a special program teaching people like you how to do the same thing.
I want you to be able to follow the same path I did…except in a lot less time.
Cuz I haven’t even told you what happen AFTER I left the job yet.
About 5 days after I left my job I was playing tennis in Austin, TX with a multi-millionaire. We were at his mansion playing on his private court at his house. He was in his 50’s and we were talking about work, business, money, and such. (You know, typical middle aged white guy stuff.)
He worked for a big financial company and made close to a million dollars per year. Now that’s a lot of money.
But he wasn’t happy. He felt trapped. He wanted to do his own thing. But in his own words he said “the money is like a heroin drip. I don’t know how to quit it.”
He had golden handcuffs and gilded cage. That’s what I was afraid of. That’s what I had turned my back on…and man am I glad I did.
Want to Create Your Own Almost Passive Income?
Get my free 111 minute training on how to learn Almost Passive Income Skills. You’ll learn:
-
- How to stop trading time for money
- The best way to start making almost passive income in 2020
- Where to find people who will want to pay you for results instead of hours
- How to double your income without increasing your workload if you are already making money online
The timing of this is almost poetic…
Just an hour or so after our conversation about the golden handcuffs…I checked my email while I was sitting on his tennis court.
I got an email from the owner of a company I knew. He had heard that I left my job and wanted me to do some work for him.
Then I read the offer…and I couldn’t believe it. I had to tell the millionaire because I was so excited and shocked.
The offer was this:
“Rework two of our sales funnels.
You get $20,000 per sales funnel. PLUS…
If what you tell us to test wins by 5% to 15% you get $15,000.
If what you tell us to test wins by 16% to 25% you get $30,000.
If what you tell us to test wins by 26% to 35% you get $45,000.
If what you tell us to test wins by 36% or more you get $60,000.
That means you can earn a total of $160,000 if you crush both of them.
AND we want you to write us some emails. You get $1500 per email. PLUS $5,000 per email that performs better than our existing emails.
In total I made around to $130,000 from that project. The work took me about 15 to 20 hours total.
I couldn’t believe it. (I still work with that company from time to time and they’ve paid me hundreds of thousands of dollars. The work I’ve done for them has generated tens of millions. Which is why they’re more than happy to pay me those big numbers.)
Most people would’ve kept doing that type of work.
I had learned an Exponential Income Skill. I had learned how to set up contracts to make a bunch of money from not a lot of work…
This is what I want for you…
But I still saw a glass ceiling…(Although it was a much higher glass ceiling.)
I reinvested that money from my Exponential Income Skill into my own Asset. I used the cash from that type of work (I did this for a lot of clients…and still do this from time to time for the “cash injection”) to buy inventory for my new water filter business.
After about 11 months of building that business to doing over $100,000 a month, I sold it to the fastest growing start up in Canada.
Quick Interruption: None of this is meant to brag or seem arrogant. The purpose of this story is to show you what’s possible when you develop an Exponential Income Skill.
I did all of this while only working a few hours a day.
Now I own a few different assets (that all have email lists) and I focus on growing those to grow my income. I still only work a few hours a day…but my income keeps rising.
Hopefully this story shows you what you can do when you focus on Exponential Income Skills, contract structures, and win-win situations.
My goal with the Exponential Income Skills Training is to teach you how to develop a skill that can take you to six figures…
Then when you’re ready to reinvest your profits…you can use the One Hour Workday to build your own Exponential Asset.
The skills you’ll be learning are the same exact skills that have allowed me to double my income year after year without increasing my workload.
If that interests you, I recommend you check out my free training on the program:
Want to Create Your Own Almost Passive Income?
Get my free 111 minute training on how to learn Almost Passive Income Skills. You’ll learn:
-
- How to stop trading time for money
- The best way to start making almost passive income in 2020
- Where to find people who will want to pay you for results instead of hours
- How to double your income without increasing your workload if you are already making money online
Talk soon,
Ian “origin stories are fun” Stanley
