Ryan McLean : Slightly Unconventional

Through demotivation came inspiration and I’ve decided that I will now only work on things that inspire me, otherwise I won’t work.

I’m going to call this one The Inspiration Episode because Out of Demotivation was the last episode. If you haven’t listened to that go back and listen to the demotivation episode. I actually got some inspiration from talking to my wife after recording that episode.

In the Demotivation episode I spoke about how I spent the whole day in the box which is what my office is now called and just couldn’t think of what I should be working on. And so I basically achieved nothing that day because I didn’t know what to work on.

I make enough money; I’ve got multiple businesses; there’s so much opportunity and things to work on, I just wasn’t motivated to work on anything and nothing seems like a big enough challenge for me. So that was where I was at.

And I spoke to my wife about it and the clarity kind of came. It was like, “Well, do you really think you’re going to find your motivation? Do you really think you’re going to find your inspiration sitting inside a box all day which is your office?” And I was like, “Well, no of course not, that’s not who I am.”

And I also spoke to my friend Ross the same day and we were talking about it and he was like, “Well you’ve got the van.

You’re going travelling in the van in a couple of months. Why don’t you just put that front and center and just go through the mundane writing articles for your niche sites, creating content for On Property and just go through the motions knowing that in a few months’ time you’re going to move in the van and hopefully that’ll change things.” And I said to him, “I can’t do that.

I can’t do mundane. I can’t just go through the motions.” And while that can be a negative sometimes because I don’t do the work I know I should do to achieve the results that I know the work would bring it can be a massive negative. It’s also been a huge positive in my life because I won’t  do something that’s boring.

I’ll seek out the new. I’ll seek out the innovative. I’ll learn. And through learning so much I’ve had so many breakthroughs and achievements in business that I feel like I wouldn’t have had otherwise. I kind of like that about myself and that I can’t just do the mundane thing.

I was actually listening to a podcast and it was a swimming coach talking about mastery. He was talking about the same problem about how we can’t just go through the mundane and do it and the fact that things are boring and aren’t challenging that’s more difficult than the actual work. And I’m exactly in the same place. So I said to him, “I can’t do that.” And he was like, “I can, that’s just what I do to get through things sometimes.” And I was like, “Okay, well I can’t do that.” So to get to my point, the realization I came to was: a) I am not going to find my inspiration in the Box; b) I’m not just going to sit down and do mundane things which would be in the box as well. That left me with c and it’s just that I’m not going to work unless I feel inspired to work.

Therefore my business is at a point where it’s basically on autopilot and making me enough money to get by. In fact once we move into the van our expenses will go down so we’ll be in an even better position than we are now. So if my business is making this much and really my focus and motivation has been that I want to generate some more passive income that’s going to protect us from the future.

That would be great but as we know I don’t work well in mundane things. So instead of doing that, how that I take this time to not work unless I feel absolutely motivated to work. That’s what I’m going to do so there’s no pressure on myself to work. I can take the whole week off if I want but what I found is that’s not going to happen because I always find some motivation of little things that I want to do and achieve during the day so generally I’ll work a bit.

I also spoke to my wife about Melee. I play this game, if you’re not familiar with it it’s called Super Smash Brothers Melee. It’s a game that came out on the Nintendo GameCube but it’s actually got a competitive tournaments scene mainly in the US. That’s something that I feel like I want to pursue.

I’d like to be top 100 in the world. That is like my ultimate goal that I don’t tell many people about but I’d love to do that. But that requires a fair amount of practice and so I spoke to my wife about it and she said to me, “Well, why don’t you just spend some time do a bit more practice on that.” She was like, “Because when you do that you’re happy or you’re a better dad around us when you’re pursuing things that you love.”

That made sense to me and or course I would absolutely love to do that. So I’m at the point now where when I feel inspired to work I’m going to work on what inspires me. And I always know that I’m motivated by challenge. And so if we get to the point where we’re not making enough money anymore then I can just challenge myself and I’ll go back to work because that’s the challenge to try and make some money.

Therefore if we find that we’re not making enough then I can just go back to work and that’s going to find because I’ll be challenged. I’ll have a goal to try and make enough money again and it’ll be fine.

That’s where I’m at, at the moment in terms of inspiration – I’m only going to work when I’m inspired to and otherwise I’m not going to work.

That’s it for me today guys. Until next time if you want instructions go and buy some furniture.

I think we’ve worked out partially what we want our lives to look like in 3 years and I might even have a plan to get there.

Hey and welcome to Instructions Not Included, the series about me, Ryan McLean, as I try and make a decent living online. In this episode, I’m going to talk a little bit about where I think we want to be in 3 years’ time because I’ve got some clarity around that. As well as becoming a content business.

If you’ve been following me for any amount of time, you know I’m constantly changing strategies and so, this may be just another one of those changes or it may be a new direction moving forward.

First, let’s talk about where we want to be in 3 years’ time. I talked to you in the previous episode about looking at my business in terms of where I want to be in 3 years’ time and designing my business so that I can achieve those things in 3 years’ time.

I see so many people starting businesses not thinking about the future and basically finding themselves trapped in the future because their business isn’t designed to give them the life that they want.

For example, Ben the buyer’s agent, he makes a great deal of money. He has a really solid income from his business. However, his business is very reliant on him, very reliant on a lot of client interaction. If he wanted to work less or didn’t want to be a buyer’s agent anymore, in order to get himself out of the business, he would need to hire sales people.

He would need to hire people to manage clients. It would just be very difficult because then he’d be managing those people, which is still a job in and of itself. So in terms of his business, it isn’t really a business where it can just be managed and he can go and do what he wants.

He does have a rental agency on the side that I think he partnered with his mom in order to start that. And that, he doesn’t have to do a lot in because his mom runs it. So he started a business, he’s not the only person in it.

Someone else is running it and he basically doesn’t have to play a large day-to-day role in it. So that’s 2 examples of 2 different types of businesses that generate different outcomes for you. Really, you need to think at the start; okay, what business do I want?

Anyway, to get to the point, I talked about thinking about where I want to be in 3 years and trying to design a business around that. Well, something that me and my wife have always been inspired about is kind of this tiny house living, traveling in a caravan or a motorhome – even thinking back to 4 or 5 years ago, when I used to work for Alpha Pharm, a large pharmaceutical company, we always talked about getting a caravan.

Potentially doing some travel around Australia. Even quitting my job to do it or maybe just getting a caravan and doing weeks away in it. So, we’ve been talking about this for 4 or 5 years and it’s gone through a lot of different phases – from caravans to tiny houses.

Now, we’re kind of on the vein of it’d be awesome to get a camper van that could be my second car rather than having the little second car that I have. Sell that, have the camper van as our second family car. But have it so that it could seat 5 people, so we could all fit in it. And also, sleep 5 people and then we could do trips away, just for the weekend or something like that.

We’re not going to live out of a camper van with 5 of us. That would probably just be insane. But that idea of being able to get away whenever you want is something that is really important to us and something that we definitely want to work towards.

I’m thinking with my business in the future, I definitely want to me more hands off. My ideal business, I would be able to take basically a week’s holiday every single month would be my goal so I could work for 3 weeks and then have a week off and do something fun with the family.

We home school my daughter. We may be sending my son to school next year, so that might change things. But we basically have the freedom and the potential, if we decide to home school our kids, to be traveling whenever we want because we can just still do school while we travel. That’s pretty cool. Basically, I’m thinking about that and I was talking – no, I wasn’t talking, I was writing down. I was talking to myself.

I was writing down in my notepad the sort of things that would make a perfect website or perfect business for me.

The perfect website in terms of – this will lead into me talking about my content strategy – is something where I can create content for the website and I can help people through the content that I create. It’ll be a website that would generate no incoming emails for me to deal with, so no customer interaction, basically, there. A third party website or I’d recommend third party products would be the ideal. So things like Amazon affiliate sites, AdSense websites. Sites where you recommend other information products and stuff like that.

Ideally, you would just be an information hub and then you’d go ahead and recommend people to other places. So, in a perfect world, that’s my perfect site because it’s something that I can work on building and I can create content when I want, but it’s something that I don’t need to actively manage so it gives me the freedom to go away when I want.

It’s not really going to affect my website. Whereas, at the moment, in 2 days, we’re heading off to Sydney for a week. I’m going to have to keep monitoring my emails for things related to On Property. Maybe new customers, maybe customer issues, etc., etc.

Basically, in a perfect world, I’d be rid of that and I just have these probably niche websites that I would run on the side and build those up over time. In a perfect world, I’d also have websites where I could pay writers to help me write content for those sites so I wouldn’t be doing it all myself and it wouldn’t be all built on me. Because at the moment, in terms of my content empire, all the websites that I have, it’s all built on me and the content that I create. So in a perfect world, I would have websites where I could hire people to write for me and that would be a viable option.

Thinking 3 years into the future, and this leads me into the content strategy and things like that, is the business that I would like to have is a very hands off business, but it’s something that makes sense in terms of I can continually build this because I continually add in content and the more content I add, the more money I can make, which can pay for more content. So it kind of got this perpetual machine feel to it. However, there wouldn’t be ongoing management, which is a thing that I want to get away from.

Now, looking at my current situation and where I am now, I’m definitely not there yet. I don’t own enough money to be able to take a week off every 3 weeks. Firstly, we couldn’t afford the holidays. Secondly, I need to be working in order to generate enough money because I just need to kind of make things happen. So I’ve still got a bit of a ways to go to get to where I want to be.

At the moment, and I think I talked about it in the previous episode, On Property kind of generates around $40,000 a year through my own products and $40,000 a year through recommending Ben the buyer’s agent. I would really like to see that continue. I have made some changes to my products so On Property is no longer a yearly recurring subscription.

It’s just a one-off payment of $299. Property Tools is now a one-off payment of $99 and you get 12 months access. I’ve moved from a membership model, which I feel like wasn’t necessarily working for me to a one-off sales model, which I’m hoping will have less friction and, therefore, be able to generate more consistent sales for me – things that I can predict. It sounds strange to move away from a membership model where you think will be more predictive to a single sales model.

However, when I look at generating $30,000 a year or $40,000, I look at really, I need to get 2 sales per month for On Property. No, not 2 sales per month, 2 sales per week. So that’d be 100 sales in a year or $300, that’s $30,000. And then I have Property Tools on the side as well as eBooks and courses that will kind of make up the extra $10,000. So, $40,000 would be covered there if I can get 2 sales per week.

So I have changed On Property from a blog that also has products into On Property is now this membership and I also have a blog to help market the membership site. That change has just taken place – haven’t had any sales yet. It will take time to work out; is this having an impact that I want and is it going to generate the income that I want? In terms of recommending people to Ben, we’ve got a lot of great strategies. We worked together on Friday.

We got a lot of great strategies to send people to him. Basically, we’re in this situation at the moment where I can send him more leads than he can deal with. And so, we’re just working on how to communicate better with each other so that I can deliver him the amount of people that he needs and that he can handle and help while maximizing the return on investment for both of us. So, not sending him too many people like we did with the webinar a couple of months ago, where he had 100 strategy session requests.

That’s an hour of his time each, so even if he works full time for 2.5 weeks just to make strategy sessions, 40-hour weeks, we would get through those 100 people.

It will take him 2.5 weeks, that’s doing nothing else. So 100 people is not really viable. And so, we’re working on strategies to basically maximize the quality of people that are coming through so he can work with less people but they have a better chance of converting into a sale. And then also, just managing it so that he’s getting just enough – not too little, not too many. And so, we’re working on the communication there.

Hopefully, in a perfect world, $40,000 from him would be great. And then, I’d also like to build up my content website. This is things like Public Speaking Power. This is things like my niche website. I’ve got an audio book website. I’ve got a website about podcasting. Each of these makes a little bit of money. I think Public Speaking Power makes $50 a month or something like that. The goal for these sites were basically to build them up where they could maybe make $20,000 a year within the next 12 months. And so, we’ve got $80,000 coming from On Property, but then we’ve got $20,000 coming from these niche websites.

The goal towards as we get to the 3-year mark, would basically be to have a sustainable income coming from websites that don’t require email assistance, don’t require ongoing customer support, that sort of stuff. So 3 years’ time down the track, that’s the goal. So I’ll be creating a lot of blogs, a lot of audio, a lot of reviews, all of this sort of stuff so that I can make affiliate commissions, be diversified in the affiliate things that I recommend. So I’ll have lots of different income streams coming through. And so, they’re more protected and also, that it’s more passive.

That’s kind of where I want to be in 3 years’ time as well as the strategy for getting there. At the moment, On Property is still my biggest website, so that needs to play an important role in it. But overtime, I would love to see these new sites do even better. That way, we could even change the strategy for On Property and just recommend Ben or go the advertising route or do whatever we want with it. We’ve got the potential there to do what we want with On Property if we have other income sources.

So that’s where I’m at in my business. That’s my goal for the next 3 years. I hope that you’ll follow me for the next 3 years and see how this happens. And hopefully, in 3 years’ time, I will have the camper van, we’ll be going on weekend trips. I’ll be having a week off every 4 weeks and I’ll be living the life that I want. We’ll see how it goes.

Life never works out as planned, but we’re going to try for it and see what happens. That’s it for me and my business. Go ahead and work on your business and just remember; design a business that’s going to give you the lifestyle that you want, rather than just creating a business and hoping that the lifestyle will come in the future because you might create this perpetual machine because as businesses get bigger, they feed on themselves and they require so much more.

Just be careful when you’re starting out. Design a business that’s going to give you the life that you want. That’s it for me. Until next time, if you want instructions, go and buy some furniture.

Pretend On Property didn’t exist and I was starting from scratch. Would I enter the property space again or sell similar products? The answer is surprising.

Hey guys and welcome to another episode of Instructions Not Included with me, Ryan McLean, as I try and make a decent living online. Now, I am driving at the moment, heading from the Gold Coast to the Sunshine Coast, which is about a 2-hour drive.

I’m going up there to meet with and to spend some time with Ben Everingham who’s my buyer’s agent of choice that I am very closely partnered with. So we’re going to be hanging out, setting up some systems together, doing some videos for the On Property website and stuff like that. So it’s going to be a good day.

I’ve got a drive ahead of me and so I thought I would take the time to record an episode for you guys because it has been a while since I’ve given an update on what’s happening with my business and how I’m moving things forward.

First, let’s talk about On Property. So I’ve been asking myself the question, “If I was starting from scratch, would I start a property website again?” and I’ve also been asking myself the questions, “If I was a brand new start-up and I was deciding to get into the property space, what would I do to be able to generate X amount of income per year?” and I changed the figure based on how I’m feeling or the answer that I want to get.

So I say, if I am starting a brand new start-up today, pretend that On Property doesn’t exist and I want to earn $100,000 a year from this business – that’s the goal of the start-up. What would I do to generate that? Would I go down the path of property tools in which I’m selling low-cost software for property investors? Would I go down the path of selling educational courses? Would I go down the path of being a lead generation tool for people like Ben the buyer’s agent and potentially other people as well? Or would I go down the path of selling my own courses and things like that? I mean, would I go down the path of my membership site where I am showing people properties and things like that?

They’re like the 4 kind of options that I have because it’s what I’ve done. It’s the space that I know. And also, when I look at the property field, I can’t think of anything else that I would want to do because there’s a lot money to be made as a buyer’s agent or there’s a lot of money to be made marketing new build properties because they have huge commissions for them. But in terms of marketing properties, they’re generally overpriced – the new build properties. In terms of being a buyer’s agent, that’s a lot of work that I don’t want to do.

I love creating content. I want to be an education company, not a one-on-one sort of consultancy-type model. So they’re kind of out of the question and so, it just leaves me with kind of the strategies that I’m already using. And so, I just kind of think, “Okay, well, starting from scratch, what would I do?” So, property tools would be out of the question because I looked at the data, it started about a year ago, it’s probably made me about somewhere between $6,000-$10,000 in the space of a year.

Now, that’s not too bad as a little side income, which is what property tools is. But if I was starting a start-up, would I go after that cash flow calculator sort of market? No, I wouldn’t because it’s not going to generate me enough money. I can’t market and scale that at all.

Then, I look at the courses that I created. Okay, I started creating courses about a year ago as well and they’ve made even less money. They sell for about $100 a piece and they’ve made about $3,000 or $3,000-$4,000, something like that. So they’re not really a viable option either because they just don’t sell in enough volume and I have decent volume on my website. We’re talking over 100,000 people a month come to visit my website, which is quite high for an Australian property blog.

You have to remember, Australia only has about a bit over 20 million people, compared to America which has over 300 million people. So you’re talking about a much smaller market. In terms of courses, not something I’d pursue because you really do need to sell the high value courses. You’re talking $2,500 to $6,000 courses in order to make significant money in this industry.

So that leaves me with that lead generation and it leaves me with m membership where I am finding and sharing with people positive cash flow properties. And so, I looked at the revenue for both of those and from Ben, the revenue was roughly around $40,000 in the last 12 months and from my membership site, the revenue was roughly around I think it was $60,000 to maybe $80,000.

I didn’t do hard figures in the last 2 years, so kind of about $40,000 per year each. Though, I know those figures are wrong because I didn’t make $80,000 in the last financial year. So, I don’t know what’s messed up there or what calculations I’m doing wrong, but the takeaway from it is that they’re basically even.

And I was also thinking, well, they kind of serve 2 separate audiences. So my audience in terms of On Property or the product that I sell – the membership site, is really for DIY investors. People who want to go out there, find the properties, research the areas. They want to learn how to do it themselves. And my membership site is great for that. I show them properties, but I don’t help them negotiate, I don’t make decisions for them.

I provide them with the courses that they need to learn how to do different things. I provide them with the cash flow tool as well, so they can go ahead and use that to analyze properties and things like that. So I kind of give them a kit that they need to become a DIY investor in terms of positive cash flow property. But then, Ben’s offering is very different because these are people who don’t want to be DIY. These are people who want someone to hold their hand.

They want someone to lead them, someone to help them. And so, that’s a different market segment, I guess you would say, a different type of customer. And so, it kind of works perfectly that those 2 would be aligned with each other – that I’ve got this audience of general property investors. A portion of them will want to be DIY, which will be my membership site. A portion of them will want the helping hand, which will be recommending people to Ben.

So I guess the answer that I came to when I thought about if I was to start from scratch, what strategy would I take? And it would probably the dual fold strategy in terms of marketing my membership site as well as marketing Ben’s service for people who don’t want to be DIY. So that made me think, “Okay, let’s try and re-vamp On Property.

Let’s try and again bring it back to this membership site concept.” and I was thinking, originally, “Okay, people just want the properties. Maybe I should strip the membership site away and just sell people the properties again.” which is a path that I’ve taken in the past and it kind of works.

I don’t really know, I haven’t tested it enough, but people are happy to sign up just for the properties. But then, I was talking with my wife, Kelly, about it and talking about the different products that I have, talking through all of this. And she made me realize that the properties themselves aren’t just what people need. So people want the properties, yes, that’s probably what most people are paying for. But then, people also want the calculator so that they can calculate those properties or so that they can calculate their own properties.

They also want the courses so that they can learn how to be a better and more confident investor. So, rather than seeing my membership site as all these different things, like you’ve got property listings, you’ve got tools, you’ve got courses, I see my membership site now as one complete package that helps people invest in positive cash flow properties if they want to do it themselves.

Every little bit forms an entire solution to help people find positive cash flow properties and if I only shared the properties with them and I didn’t provide the tools, then I wouldn’t be providing that complete package for people and they wouldn’t be getting everything they need in order to succeed. So it made me realize that, okay, probably not best to break it all up, but probably best to leave it as a membership website.

We also talked about subscription versus on-off payments. We were talking about the comparison between Netflix, you’re paying, in Australia, it’s like $8-$12 a month for Netflix. You’re like, “Yeah, I’m happy to pay that subscription.” Easy to sign up for that because it’s so cheap. You hardly even notice it and you can cancel any time. So when you’re making that decision, it’s not a big decision that you have to make. However, when you’re signing up for something like On Property membership and you’re talking about $300 per year, the thought that goes through people’s minds is very different to that. So they’re thinking, “This is quite a large commitment that I’m making, $300.

I need to think about whether I can afford this now as well as whether I can afford this in 12 months’ time.” So the question is, would it be better to sell it as $300 per year and just get less people, but get them as subscribers or would it be better to sell it as a one-off payment of $300 and then, they just get 12 months access. And at the end of 12 months, they’re not re-charged, but they’ll obviously have an opportunity to sign up again if they want to. And after some discussion, I’ve decided to at least test the fact that it’s just $300, it’s a one-time payment.

And I put myself in the mindset when I’m making business decisions and things like that, if I’m signing up for a subscription that’s a yearly thing, I need to think about that. I need to think about, “Will I be using this product in a year’s time?” I remember there was a product, Countdown Monkey, that was $79 per year. And when I signed up for that, I had to think, “Okay, will I be using this in 1 year’s time or not?” And then, you’ve got to schedule in time to cancel it if you want, so it is a much bigger decision.

Whereas, when there’s software that I purchased, like once I purchased the SEO Yoast Plugin for videos, right, and I think that was the same price. Like $79 or something like that and it came with 12 months of free updates and support. Then, after 12 months, you don’t get any more updates. So it’s in equivalent the same sort of thing that I’m going through and I was like, “Yup, okay. I can purchase that.

I know it’s going to be good for 12 months.” And then, the service didn’t actually end up working for me. It didn’t end up being what I needed. And so, when 12 months came around, I didn’t renew. But the decision to sign up with Yoast versus the decision to sign up with Countdown Monkey was so much easier because you’re just doing a one-off payment, there’s no commitment. And so, I’m hoping that by changing On Property from an annual subscription or a monthly subscription to a one-off payment with 12 months access, that I will gain more members.

I also wanted to change On Property from being a blog that also sell products into a product that also has a blog. So, the membership site is going to be more heavily featured. I’ve created a new sales page which will go on the homepage. And then, the blog will be kind of separate link that people need to click on.

Most people come to the individual pages through the blog, anyway, and return customers are there, but they’re not huge. And so, basically, I wanted people to think On Property – that means positive cash flow properties. So if I want to find positive cash flow properties, I go to On Property. Not, I go to On Property and it’s this property blog/video/podcast and, “Oh, look, they have products as well. Maybe I’ll check them out.”

I want it to be like, okay, this is what On Property is. All the marketing that we do is to support this and that’s to support the membership site. And then, obviously, there’s going to be huge marketing opportunities for recommending Ben through the email list, through the podcast, through the videos, through a whole different variety of sources that we’ve been talking about. It doesn’t distract away from the offering that I’m bringing because there’s so many people who aren’t interested in my offering that may be interested in getting the one-on-one help.

That’s kind of my new strategy for On Property moving forward. If I had the question in mind; Okay, if I wanted to start On Property today or start a property website today with the goal of making $100,000 per year in revenue… Then, it seems feasible now that my membership site could generate half of that. My referrals to Ben could generate the other half of that. And so, combined, they would make $100,000 together. Whereas, individually, I don’t think I could make $100,000 from either of those things. So, that’s cool. I feel like I’ve kind of got clarity on On Property again.

I’ve got some work to do to bring that to the point that I want it, but I’m very excited. And so, a takeaway for you guys with this is to really get rid of the idea of what you have now. So I’ve already built this thing, I’ve already got this traffic. For me, I’ve already got On Property that’s generating. Over 100,000 people a month are coming to that website.

That’s a pretty valuable asset, but if you just strip that all away and say, “Okay, if I was to start today, would I build the same thing or what would I build if I was to start today?” And so, I think doing the same activity for your business could be helpful for you because you can say, okay, get rid of that ‘sunk cost bias’ they call it because I’ve already sunk so much time or so much money into this, I need to keep going with it. Get rid of that and imagine yourself starting from scratch again. Starting brand new from scratch, what would I do?

That’s really helped to get me clarity and hopefully, it helps you give you clarity as well. In terms of other side projects, I was thinking of building on publicspeakingpower.com. I’ve kind of decided against that just because it’s not generating enough revenue and I don’t think it will. My niche website is doing pretty well. I think it made about $100 last month.

It’s probably on-target to make somewhere between $100 and $200 this month. So in terms of that niche website, that’s doing well. And there’s some other niche websites that I want to start as well. So rather than focusing on trying to grow Public Speaking Power into some big website, which is never going to make a lot of money, I’ll just leave it there. It makes like $50 a  month and it pays for itself, so I’ll just leave it there doing its thing and I’ll focus on On Property and I’ll focus on other niche websites that I’m starting as well.

My wife keeps encouraging me to start a review site to review all the things that I love to talk about. Things like microphones and phones and whatever it is I’m buying at the time, you know, tripods, adapters, all these sorts of things. Just a random website where I can talk about different marketing things, different software that’s just product reviews and so, I think I’m going to do that. I kind of did with pelt.co and I kind of do it with pelt.co, but Pelt is, I’ve realized, such a dumb name and it’s taken me so long to realize that.

I always knew Pelt was a dumb name, but I thought if I could make something big enough and exciting enough, then it would take on a life of its own. Just like Google has, but I think, really, at the end of the day, Pelt’s just a dumb name and I probably should’ve never created a website with that name. Oh, well, but anyway, so I’m think of starting a website. Something like Ryan’s reviews or reviewed by Ryan or something like that. There is a Youtube channel called Lachlan Likes A Thing, where this guy does really great reviews on headphones.

I’m not sure if that’s still running, but that sort of concept – that it’s just me, I like this thing. You’re coming because it’s my reviews. It’s not something that I’m going to scale into this big business like The Sweehome or The Wirecutter or something like that. It’s just me reviewing products in my own way. That’s something that’s on the cards, but I haven’t started at the moment.

That’s it for me today, guys. I think I have babbled enough and talked enough. I’ve talked about On Property and what I’m doing with that. I talked about also focusing on niche websites and really just leaving Public Speaking Power there. And I’ve also talked about creating a review site as well. And so, that’s where I’m at in my business. I’m still on the drive. I’ve just got less than 2 hours to go now because I’ve been talking to you guys for about 15 minutes. It’s going to be a good day on the Sunshine Coast.

It’s pretty sunny weather. Nice and warm up here for winter in Australia. It’s going to be a good day that I think we can create some good content with Ben and I think we’re going to strengthen our partnership and hopefully generate a lot of business as a result of this time that we’re spending together.

Hopefully, we’ll get either some coffee or some beer or both because I love coffee and I love beer. So, maybe coffee in the morning when I get there and maybe beer before I go in the arvo. Not too many because I still want to be able to drive. No drink driving, that is a terrible thing. I would never do that. So, yeah. So that’s where I’m at today. I wish you the best of luck in your business and until next time, if you want instructions, go and buy some furniture.

The first episode of 2016 and my new site has already made over $50 in income.

Hey, and welcome back to Instructions Not Included where you follow me as I try and generate a decent income online. And let me tell you, it’s not as easy as I would have hoped. I have been trying to do this for a number of years – basically, since 2006.

I discovered it when I was 18 years old and been trying to do it. I’ve been working full time online for the last 2 years now and still haven’t quite made it, I wouldn’t say. So I’m earning enough that I don’t need to go back to work, which is great, but we would always like to be in a better position. So, welcome back.

It feels like forever since I did my latest post and a lot has been happening.

December was a pretty tight month for me. December tends to be my worst month of the year. The property market in Australia doesn’t dry up, but people lose interest in investing property over the month of December with Christmas and New Years and Holidays and everything happening.

There’s just not a whole lot of action in people researching and thinking about investing in Australia. So, cash flow did get very, very tight in December, early January. We’re talking I basically had a week or less than a week left of income before I was going to run out of money and need to pull from savings.

This is because I pay myself every single week. So the business is always profitable every month, but it doesn’t necessarily pay what I need in order to support my family. So I got to the point where I was basically a couple of days from running out of money, but cash flow has since improved and we’ve sold a lot of memberships to our membership site.

We’ve had some commissions come through so all is good. So we’ve got months of income in the bank now so that should be fine.

One of the things that I tried that failed last year was trying my evergreen launch funnel sequence again, which worked great back in May, June, July of last year. But when I re-did it, I had over 1,000 people go through it. Usually, we’re talking anywhere between $5 and $10 per email subscriber, I was making in this launch funnel. All of a sudden, I had over 1,000 people go through it and I think I did one sale of about $300. So it wasn’t doing very well, wasn’t generating the income that I needed and so, I shifted gears again.

I re-marketed my product, setup a sales page without a sales video and setup 2 tiers – one property only and one a full membership for $300 a year and property only was $99 per year. Sales of that have been going good and going fairly steady and hopefully, they continue into the future. So that is good.

I have also started another site called pelt.co where I’m doing a lot of education videos around how to do certain things in internet marketing, like how to setup an evergreen launch funnel or how to create a membership site. And that’s going to be my big project of 2016. So I look forward to working on that more and sharing more details with you guys on that.

I started working on that the very end of November and a couple of days ago, we got our first income from that – an affiliate sale that was worth about US$40 and then we got another affiliate sale that was worth about US$9. All off, in the first 2 months, it’s made US$50, which isn’t stellar, isn’t going to fund my lifestyle, but hey, progress is progress and any income is better than no income at all, so I’m happy with that.

Also, I’m going back and learning about how to build niche websites. So I’ve been following Spencer over at nichepursuits.com and so I’m following the Niche Site Project 3 and re-looking at that and looking at apply the things that I learn to existing sites that I have or even potentially launch new sites into the future. I’ll give you guys updates on that as they go around and as they happen.

I did spend a day or two creating one article that was almost 3,000 words in length to target a specific keyword that was low competition and I think it just had 70 views a month or 70 searches per month. Within 1 day, I was ranked within the top 120. Within 2 or 3 days, I was ranked in the top 40 in the Google search results, but I kind of hovered in the top 40 for that last 5 days or something like that. And so, this is quite low competition and a lot of the people ranking in the top, they’re good websites, but they’re not targeting that keyword, not answering that question.

I really want to rank for this so I did some stuff today to drive some links back to it. I created a Youtube video, which will also go out as a podcast on Soundcloud. Both of those will link back to the website.

I did some internal linking on my website as well and I am thinking about doing some Pinterest post or social media marketing to link back to the site as well just to give it a little bit of juice, a little bit of love and hopefully push it into the rankings a little bit faster. I also adjusted it so it had less affiliate links in there. I think I had about 20 affiliate links going out, which sounds like a lot, but it was one image and one link per item that I listed.

There was 10 items in total, which equaled 20 links. I basically removed the links from the images except for the top 2 recommendations because I figured they’re the ones that’ll be clicked on the most. So, I’ve got 12 links now instead of 20 links going out. Also did an external link in the post to a reputable source and so I’m trying some on-page SEO as well as some minor, very minor back linking – very minor white hat back linking. Linking from Youtube back to the post, etc. And so, we’ll see if that can boost rankings and if we get into the top 10, I will definitely record an episode and let you guys know about it.

Writing a second article now on the same website also targeting a low search volume. I think it was about 40 searches per month, but low competition as well. So we’ll try and rank for that one and both of these searches are trying to make money through Amazon associates or Amazon affiliates. So linking people over to Amazon and basically getting them to purchase over there. We’ll see how we go.

I would like to make a little bit of extra income from Amazon. I would like to diversify my income away from On Property. I think my goal is really to get On Property earning 50% of my income by the end of the year and earning 50% of my income from other sources – 50% or more. Whereas, at the moment, it’s more like 95%-98% of my income comes from On Property, so we want to change that.

That is my quick update of what I’ve been doing in the last couple of months. I hope that your business has been going well. Go out there, work on it. Even if it takes you 7-10 years like it’s taking me, know that in the end, it’s going to be worth it. So, that’s it, Ryan out. Until next time, if you want instructions, go and buy some furniture.

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This feels like the 1,000th time I have had a new approach to marketing On Property. But here we go for another round.

Hey guys, Ryan here from Instructions Not Included. I just wanted to record an episode to talk about what I’ve been going through in On Property over the last couple of weeks and to flush it out for you guys.

However it’s really for myself to look back on and to say okay here’s where I was at a point in my business where things weren’t going well, here’s the way I was feeling, here are the things that I did. And then hopefully I can look back on this in a year and I can see how I turned it around. It’s actually interesting I started Instructions Not Included about a year ago.

I think I started in December of 2015. So for it to have been a year since I started this podcast is quite amazing. And to think of the things that I’ve tried in those 12 months is quite significant. To think of the success that I’ve had maybe not as significant but I’ve tried a lot of things and I’ve learned a lot and I feel a lot more knowledgeable and I feel like I can take on the world more.

And even though things haven’t necessarily gone my way and I haven’t got everything right I am very grateful for the year that I’ve had in business, the things that I’ve learned and the position that I’m currently in to move forward with my business.

Let’s just talk about where we are with On Property. I talked about in a previous episode how I came to the realization within myself and with my wife. I did the data – I went digging through all of the data – What’s my retention rate for On Property Plus? How long are people staying? I discovered that 90% of people are leaving within a year.

Therefore what I thought was a sticky and a recurring product actually really isn’t because people are gone within a year and I’m not necessarily bringing in a lot of people to replace that. In fact, my customer base has actually decreased in 12 months but my revenue had slightly increased because of the increase in pricing that I had.

So I was kind of going backwards or being very stagnant in my business and so I came to the realization that On Property Plus isn’t going to make money in the way that I thought. It isn’t going to make the amount of money than I thought it was going to make and as a result I really need to rethink this and go back to the drawing board.

What we went back to was the original evergreen launch strategy that I had done with On Property Plus in the past. I was going to redo that and launch it again through an evergreen launch funnel basically using the exact funnel that I used about six months ago. I think it was back in May that I started it and it ran for about four months. Well I’m unhappy to say that it’s been three weeks – now is the fourth week and I’ve had over a thousand people through that evergreen launch funnel and I’ve had one sale of $300.00.

The evergreen launch funnel – I don’t know why it’s not working – I don’t know why the people aren’t as targeted – I don’t know what the go is but definitely it hasn’t been performing as well as it previously performed in the past. What I thought could get me potentially to my goals or get me a decent passive income out of On Property is probably not going to work.

Therefore that means back to the drawing board again. I went through an entire week where I was thinking about this and came to a conclusion and an idea and then actually scrap that idea yesterday. My idea was I could potentially Crowdfund On Property because I do believe that there is an opportunity in this space to provide non conflict of interest advice and education around investing in property.

And I thought some people might be passionate enough to get behind that and to support that because they want someone who is going to give them the information that’s not skewed towards the overpriced properties that are selling or whatever.

So I got on that bandwagon and I was going down that path thinking okay this could be good if I reach maybe $6,000 a month in crowdfunding then I can release all of my products for free. But the problem that I came to in the end was the people that are having success with crowdfunding – and by success we’re talking $10,000 to $20,000 a month and have absolutely massive followings.

We’re talking millions of views on every video that they have on YouTube, millions of subscribers or hundreds of thousands of subscribers. Compared to me you might get 400 views a day on YouTube – 10,000 views a month or that sort of thing.

It probably just wasn’t going to be viable for me to do it because so few people would actually put up money for effectively no reason or for the ability to crowdfund this that I just didn’t have the scale or I didn’t think that I had the scale to actually make this achievable.

I therefore went down the path of crowdfunding thinking about it a lot and ended up coming up with the fact that I’m probably not going to be able to crowdfund this because I really just don’t have the volume of people to make this successful. I was then back to square one again thinking, “Oh my goodness what am I going to do? How am I going to turn this business around?”

Basically I have been focusing a lot on my new business which is teaching people educational videos. That’s over at www.pelt.co so you can go and check that out. That is about teaching people how to set up a membership site, how to set up an evergreen launch funnel, a bunch of WordPress staff.

Mostly I will start with internet stuff because I can market referral programs, affiliate programs and make commissions there but eventually I’ll move into broader education for Pelt. I’ve been spending more time on that and really talking to my wife about it. We are thinking that On Property we want to tick away but we’re not going to heavily invest in it.

So we want it to provide us with enough money to get by until Pelt takes over and starts to make the bulk of our income which is where we want to be eventually as a company.

I have a whole bunch of ideas thinking around about what different things I could do. The idea that I finally settled on that I’m creating a sales page for and launching it this week was that I was going to basically roll everything into one again like I’ve been doing and really simplify things in terms of my website.

What I’m going to do as a marketing strategy is take the properties that I’m listing inside my membership site and I’m going to put them on my free site onproperty.com.au. I’m going to put them on the free site but I’m going to have them censored so the images will be blurred, there’ll be some information about it like price range, rental yield, potential cash flow of the property but it will be very limited.

Therefore people won’t be able to understand where this property is or what is the address of this property unless they remember. So the goal is that each post that I put out because I’m already going out and finding a property every single day and that’s daily content for the website and the goal is that people will then be able to peruse these properties and then it will encourage them to become members of On Property to get access to the properties.

That’s what I’m going to be doing. I’m going to launch the sales page. I’m creating it now so it will probably take me maybe two or three days to finish that.

I then need to set up a new process and some educational training videos for my virtual assistant so she can take things from my membership site and create the free content as well. However, the goal is really that the free property listings are a way to drive people to the members’ area.

I was thinking about it and I was thinking when I had previously looked at properties in the past there was a site that used to do a similar sort of thing called Cash Flow Capital and I used to look at it and they would share property listings but they wouldn’t share the addresses and then you would have to sign up and become a member in order to get access to those addresses.

I saw this and I thought that is actually a much better way to do it. And it just makes a lot more sense because people then see the properties and they create curiosity in them so they get interested and want to know about the property. I don’t even have to explain what On Property is to them necessarily. I just have to go ahead and give them access to the stuff. That’s where I am at the moment.

I just arrived at Melee so I’m going to go in and play a bit. Thanks for listening. I just wanted to get that off my chest to understand where I’ve been, the ideas that I’ve gone through and where I’m at the moment. I will be dropping the price to $99 a year but then I will be having a higher tier pricing so it will $99 a year just for the properties which I think is super affordable and then $249 will be the complete package.

They will get access to properties, they will get access to courses, they will get access to the FaceBook group, they will get access to the calculator and other stuff as well. Hopefully a large portion of people will go for the $249 but even if they would just go for the $99 I’m fine with that as well. That’s my pricing structure at the moment. I was thinking about adding a middle-tier but I’m not sure whether I’m going to do that at the moment so I’ll see how it goes down the track.

If at 99 bucks a year I can get 200 members that’s 20 grand a year and that will at least pay my expenses for my business and give me a little bit of profit as well and allow me to focus on building up Pelt. So hopefully it works. I’ll keep you guys updated obviously.

Until next time, if you want instructions on buy some furniture

I am trying to create financial freedom and security through my online business. But at the moment I am cash strapped. Can I pull myself out of this hole?

I’m about 3 weeks away to running out of money in my business. But don’t freak out, everything is going to be okay. Hey, I’m Ryan from Instructions Not Included. Documenting my journey creating an online business and trying to achieve some level of financial freedom. Really, just financial stability working online.

I was looking at my finances, recently – within the last 2 days, I bought a second hand computer because my current one is dying up the ass. So, I spent $1,700 on that. I’m about to do my tax return and I’ll get a tax bill for that – tax that I need to pay for the year; which I probably don’t have the money to pay it right now.

Looking at how much my lifestyle is taking from my businesses because it’s my primary source of income. It pays the rent, it pays for food, all of that sort of stuff. I’m looking at about 3 weeks until I run out of money. But I’m not completely stressed about it because I know that I’ve got some referral fees coming from Ben that are $4,500 or something like that, which will really see me through an entire month after that.

I’m just not 100% sure if they’re going to come – because he’s going to pay me at the end of each month. So I’m just not sure if they’re coming at the end of this month or at the end of next month. So, it could be a tight time there.

Something that I really love about my business is that when I’m tight on cash and when things look dire, there’s things that I can do to increase my income.

If I was an employee and I started running out of money for one reason or another, then there wouldn’t be much that I could do to increase my income in order to fill that gap. But something that I love about my business is that there’s things that I can do.

Recently, I just did a 4-part series with Ben, the buyer’s agent, and that’s going to help me create more leads with him to generate more income. That’s more a long term play. In the short term, I am just finishing up my suburb research course. So, I’ve done all of the key videos, all I need to do now, I got 2 videos left – a conclusion video, which talks about what to do now and markets my next course as well as a comparison video comparing suburbs, so people really know how to do it.

So I’m almost done. 2 more videos to do, which I can probably get done tomorrow. And then that course will be complete and then I’m going to re-do the sales video for that. So, 3 videos for that.

So what I’m thinking is when I complete this course, when it’s done, let’s do a proper launch to this course. We did the course on how to find positive cash flow properties. We pre-launched it, we made about $1,000 in sales in pre-launch for this course. However, I didn’t then go ahead and launch it as I had planned. So I didn’t say, “This course is now available. Go ahead and get it, learn how to find positive cash flow properties.

This is awesome! Yada, yada, yada.” For some reason, I didn’t do that. I think it’s because I got caught up in creating the suburb research course that I just forgot to do that.

What I’m going to do, next week, I’ll finish the suburb research course tomorrow. I’ll create the sales video tomorrow/Monday, probably. And then, I’m going to do a launch of it. So, how am I going to do that? I don’t actually know. I haven’t actually had any ideas about that. But let’s think about it now, on the spot. Let’s pretend that you and me are brainstorming on this.

I want to move to daily content, anyway, right? And I haven’t been doing content because I’ve been creating this course. So why don’t I create 7 videos – let’s market this over a week. Let’s aim for $1,000 in sales, which will give me an extra week or 2 in terms of living expenses and just push the timeline until Ben’s money comes in and really sets me up. So, we’re aiming for $1,000.

Let’s start with a podcast because that’s easy. Let’s do 7 videos on how to research a suburb. So we’ll pull out different aspects about researching a suburb. We’ll do videos and then at the end of those videos, we’ll talk about our new course. Now, should I run any specials with the new course? I don’t like doing discounts. I don’t mind doing discounts on pre-sales but I hate doing discounts on full products. It’s just something that I don’t really do.

So the other things I have are how to find positive cash flow properties. I don’t want to throw that in free because that’s worth $100 as well. I’ve got property tools, which is $5 a month, so I could give a month free access to property tools? That’s like $5 but it’s something that I could say you’d get this. A year’s free access is $50, I could give away a year’s free access, but that’s pretty extreme.

I don’t know if I want to go ahead and do that. We could do that. See, but I want to reward the people that signed up early and got a discount, so they got either a 50% or a 20% discount. Alright, we’re not going to give something away, we’re just going to market the course and say that it’s available.

Okay. So we’ll do 7 podcast episodes about suburb research and we’ll release them one day after the other. Market the course in those videos. What about emails? I’ve got a list of about 10,000 people. So, let’s send out a couple of emails. Let’s send out an email announcing the course. So we can do that on Monday. We’ll announce the course. Then, on maybe Wednesday or Thursday and then maybe one on Sunday, so we’ll do 3 emails in total. So, one is announcing the course.

Then on Wednesday or Thursday, we’ll do one about one of the videos we created about this cool technique. And then, we’ll also do a video on Sunday and talk about another free video that we did and within those emails, talk about we’ve got the full course here.

I’m thinking one of those emails can be an awesome tool for analysing properties, because I just found that brand new tool so I can share that with people. Because, really, it’s the analysis of the data that people need to learn – that’s what I teach, it’s not necessarily the tools. So I could share that and then talk about my course. That’ll be one of the free videos and I’ll have to think about the other ones some time. Alright, so that sounds pretty good. That sounds pretty cool.

It’s Thursday today I’ll create the other videos tomorrow and try and get that sales video done tomorrow or Monday and we’ll go ahead and market that. Our goal, $1,000, which is just 10 sales from 10,000 people. So, that’s 0.1% conversion, which I think is definitely possible. Given the fact that I’ve already made $600 on this course and I haven’t done much direct marketing for it. I think with the right marketing, we could definitely do this.

I’m just trying to think if there’s any other way that I could really push it. I guess the other way, let’s also – alright, for the week, let’s say do suburb research week. Starting on Monday or maybe Tuesday, whenever I get my sales video up. Let’s put one of those banners across the top of my website. Just like an announcement banner saying, “Brand new course available. Click here.” Let’s try that as well. That way, website visitors can see that and if they’re interested in suburb research, then they can go ahead and check out that course.

We’ll only do that for a week. I’m not super stoked with those header banners, but I’ll find something and we’ll do that.

So, there we go. We’ve got a few different ways to market it. And you’ve literally seen inside the thought process of how I run my business. Running out of money, I need to make some money. I’ve created this course that I think is really valuable for people. How am I going to achieve my income goal for this and get people to sign up for it? And really, the goal for me is to reach those people who are interested in suburb research. So, by doing those lessons, I’ll reach those people and I’ll reach them over the long term as well.

My list is people who are interested in investing people generally by themselves anyway. So, I can definitely market to them and I think there’ll be a bunch of people who will be interested. So I’m very excited about this. I hope you are too.

I’m going out tonight to play some Super Smash Brothers Melee with a couple of mates on the Gold Coast here. I’m a Peach player. The two guys that I’m meeting up with, they both play as Marth, which is this guy with a sword and he’s the hardest character for me to play against. Because his sword is so long, he can just hit me from far away and it’s just really hard for me. So it’d be really good for me to practice my Peach against Marth. I’ve been kind of studying that match up and try and get better at that. That’ll be good fun tonight.

That’s it for me today, guys. Until next time, if you want instructions, go and buy some furniture.

I recorded the entire public speaking course in just 1 day…well I filmed all the videos but I still have some editing to do and a sales page to create.

Hey guys! Ryan here from Instructions Not Included.

Just a really quick recording to talk about how I went with creating my public speaking course and I have good news for you. I finished all 7 videos – actually 8 videos yesterday. So I recorded the entire course in one day but that has taken me more time than I would have liked to get that course up and available.

My goal for today was to get it all edited, all up and actually create a sales page and even send out an email about it to try and sell my first copy. But it did not get that far. I have edited and I have uploaded all of the videos. I have some design work to do to create the thumbnails for each of the videos and so I have to create a sales page in order to sell this product so I am still a couple of days away from that.

I am going to have Monday off. I have a Smash Brothers tournament tomorrow so I will let you guys know how I go with that. And then my weekend is going to be Sunday, Monday and then next week I will only be working 25 hours during the week so this is my trial week and so because I am taking Monday off. And I will probably do like 4 6-hour days or 3 6-hour days or one 7-hour day or something like that. Work less. Spend some time with the family and yes, see how we would go.

I do not know when I am going to get this out. Hopefully early, some time this week. It is not early next week but some time next week and how much do I want to sell it for? That is the question that I am asking myself. Do I go – I think the highest that I would charge would be $50 and the lowest I would charge would be $20 so I am really umm-ing and aah-ing about how much to sell this for. So the course is called How To Become A Great Public Speaker In Private so how can you train to become a better public speaker in the privacy of your own home.

If you want to check out the course, if that is something you are interested in, go to Outspoken.co/private and you can check out the course there. By the time this goes live the course will be up there and be available for sale. I am still working at how much I am going to charge for it and something that I am absolutely stoked about is that I am going to charge US dollars for the course.

I have said in a previous episode that one of my frustrations is that I earn Australian dollars and I spend US dollars. And so what that means at the moment is it is about 1.5 so that every US dollar that I spend, it is almost a dollar and fifty Australian that I need to earn in order to cover that cost.

So I am excited to have this course out, just start selling this course and hopefully I can earn some US dollars for the expenses that I have in US dollars and so yeah, I am pumped to do that so it will be somewhere in between $20 to $50 US dollars. I think if I did a better production of it so because obviously I recorded it in 1 day, recorded it in my bedroom.

It is a pretty cruisy production. If I have done a good production of it I think I will feel more confident charging either $50 or $100 for it. But because the production is not awesome I am not feeling super confident to do that so $20 to $50 will probably be where it lands. But yeah, I was excited to be able to smash out 8 videos in one day, an entire course. And I have them edited and all I have to do is create a sales page then I can put it up on my site to sell it.

So pretty pumped to be in that situation and to finally, finally, finally have a course for Outspoken.co which previously Public Speaking Power which is a site that I have massively struggled to monetize even though I get great traffic to it. So I will keep you guys updated with how it will go, what I decide in terms of the price, and whether or not I can sell any unit. And as I promised yesterday, if we sell just one copy we are going to have a big celebration and crack some champagne or drink a beer or something like that.

If we sell a copy I will call an episode While I’m Drinking Beer and we can celebrate that together. Alright guys, that is it for me for today. It is 4:35 on Friday and I have the weekend coming up. I have the tournament tomorrow. I have to hang out with the kids and the family and have some dinner. I hope you guys have an awesome weekend. So until next time, if you want instructions go and buy some furniture!

If you have nothing and try to make it twice as good you will still end up with nothing. This is the problem I have been having with my public speaking site.

What is a 20% improvement on nothing? It is nothing right? What is 100% improvement on nothing? it is nothing right? So if you have absolutely nothing and you try and make it twice as good you are still going to end up with nothing because you have not done anything.

And I think that is the problem that I have been having with my public speaking site which is now called Outspoken.co. I cannot improve it because it is not really making any money. I do not have any products so I cannot create a product and see what the feedback is and kind of improve upon it. I do not have anything on there.

I think a big part for me about getting On Property to the place where it is at was simply constant improvement. I launched my first membership site, my first product, in April of 2014 so it is about 18 months ago. So I launched it, it was a membership site where I taught people how to find positive cash flow properties and I was going to list some positive cash flow properties in there but it was pretty infrequent that I was listing those properties.

What I found out as I started selling this site I then adjusted the sign-up forms to say which part of the site did you sign up for? Was it the courses? Was it the tools? Was it the properties? And 90 plus percent of people said they signed up for the properties.

And so I started learning as I ran this site, as I created this site that this is what people want. This is what people are willing to pay for. And then also I was getting feedback from people saying “you are only charging $200?” like there is something wrong with this like I am undercharging. And so I began to understand what is this actually worth to people.

I was only charging $20 a month or $300 per year and so people are thinking, “it is worth more than this, what are you doing?” and it was kind of like people were hesitant to buy because it was cheap and so I was learning about that.

I was then learning more about how to teach people about finding positive cash flow properties as I got more customers and different things that I could sell. If you have been listening for any point in time you would have known that I talked about creating and selling eBooks which sold pretty well but they were so cheap that it is not worth it.

And then I kind of graduated onto creating and selling these courses that are going for $100 each and I have sold probably $1,200 worth of courses at the moment which would take me hundreds of eBooks to sell and I only have to sell to 20 or so customers. So, pretty awesome there.

What has happened with On Property is over time I have been invested more into it because it is making me money. And I have also adjusted my courses, adjusted my products, adjusted the things that I sell and slowly improved upon them.

So what started out as pretty crappy, as a membership site that was not super awesome slowly became better and better over time as I made progress to that and as I improved it. And so one of the things that I think is holding me back from expanding into other niches like into public speaking, into podcasting, is I do not have any customers. I do not have any products to improve and I have not actually gone ahead and done it.

So why am I talking about this? Why am I saying all these? Well, I have decided that I am going to create a course for Outspoken.co. It is going to be a course on how to become a great public speaker from the privacy of your own home. So one of the things that has really helped me in my speaking ability over the years was just simply talking and creating videos and doing a lot from the privacy of my own home.

So I have done a lot of videos and if I go back to the first videos I did on public speaking, well the first videos I did here on On Property, I definitely cringe at them. They are very cringe-worthy for me because I see what I used to be like and how I used to present. How stiff I was. How unnatural that was for me and how poor the quality was and I have come a long way. My quality is still, in terms of the video image is not awesome but in terms of my speaking ability, my ability to talk impromptu, my ability to come up with stuff on the spot, be confident enough to do that, has really grown.

It used to be really emotionally straining for me to create videos and the more and more that I do it, the less straining it is; the less emotionally straining because it is kind of like a subconscious thing that I do now like riding a bike. And so I am creating this course on How To Become A Better Public Speaker Without Leaving Your Own Home. So you can actively do it in the privacy of your own home to become a better public speaker.

And so the goal of this course is not to be the most awesome course that I have ever created. I think something that has held me back from creating a course for Outspoken is I see the quality of stuff that is out there and I just think I cannot match that. I cannot be as good as Patricia Fripp who is a famous chick who teaches public speaking, probably makes millions of dollars. I am not as good as her. My quality is definitely not as good as hers.

I am not as well-dressed as her. I do not have makeup that is as nice as hers. Of course I do not wear makeup. But I could wear makeup. I could have cats.

Anyway, something that has held me back a lot is that too scared to sell something, too scared to even create something because I feel like it is not going to be good enough. But if I create something and I try and sell it and I see how it goes and then I can improve upon that. If this course is going well; it is resonating with people, I can improve this course and make it better. I could re-record it down the road so it is more professional if I wanted to. Or I could go ahead and create another course. What I want to do is I want to get out there and I want to get this course created.

So that is what I am doing today, I am recording this course. So I have done 4 videos. It is a 7-part course but it has an introduction video which I have done and I will probably have a conclusion video as well.

So let us say I have 8 videos that I need to create all up. I have done 4. Ideally, I would love to get them finished by the end of today, by the time I finished working. But what is the time now? It is probably like 4:30. It is 3 o’clock and I finish work at 4:30 so can I get another 4 videos done in an hour and a half? Probably not.

But I can get some of them done and what I  am trying to do is just get all these recordings done because I feel like if I do not get them done quickly then I am not going to get them done. It is a scary thought for me so I am motivated now. I want to just go ahead and do them. And then it is easy for me to just have a cruisy day and to edit the course and then to put it up for sale.

So I want to get a course out. I want to get it created. I am halfway through. Give me some encouragement. Hopefully I can do it by the end of today or at least some time tomorrow to get this completed.

That is where I am at, creating a course for Outspoken.co. I am really excited to get my first course out for this. We might sell one copy and I am going to be over the moon and I will definitely, definitely share that with all of you and let you know. We can celebrate together. We can crack some champagne or a bottle of water, whatever it is that you want to drink. So wish me luck and we will see how it goes.

So until next time guys, if you want instructions go and buy some furniture.

I learnt a technique from James Schramko on product modelling. It gave me HUGE insights into my business and is a great way to fast track a business plan.

Hey guys! Ryan here from Instructions Not Included and last week was a pretty hectic week. I do not think I even got around to recording one episode. Did I do one on Monday? I cannot remember. But basically I made a promise to myself that I would never go and backdate episodes and so I will never let a buildup of episodes happen because if that happened then Instructions Not Included becomes a chore.

It becomes an effort. So basically you guys get this, I am trying to do it each day when I am working but sometimes I just do not get around to doing it or sometimes I forget to do it. And so when that happens it just means you guys miss out.

So this one will probably be a bit of a longer episode where I talk about some of the things that happened last week and some of my plans moving forward which as you guys know change absolutely every week. That is part of running a business, a lifestyle business where you just make stuff up every single day like I am creating value basically out of nothing every single day. And so things change and my life changes and I have 3 kids and so things are constantly changing, constantly different and so I guess that is why I change things.

One of the big things that happened last week was, I was listening to a podcast, I think it was on Tuesday, by James Schramko. He is over at SuperFastBusiness.com. I think I spoke about him before because I really do admire his business and his work ethic like he works hard but he works super smart and he does not believe in the whole hustle, hustle, hustle game. You know Gary Vaynerchuck, who I also really like.

He just preaches hustle work in 16 hours a day, 20 hours a day and that is not me. And James Schramko just talks about running a business that has a high impact, that you enjoy but also go surfing every day. Live your life, spend times doing things and create systems so that you do not have to do it all yourself and hustle, hustle, hustle. But yeah, work hard but work smart. And so I really admire him and he was interviewing someone and I cannot even remember what they were talking about but he talked about this idea of what he called modeling.

This was where you basically take a business and you take the products that you are going to sell in that business. You put in the price of how much those products are going to be and then you basically work out how many of these items do I have to sell in order to achieve my goal, in order to achieve my goal income or in order for the business to be viable. And basically this is like a way to fast-track any business plan. It is just to say, Oh well I have a membership site, On Property Plus, or I have a course or whatever it may be. I am going to sell it for this much, how many do I need to sell in order for my business to be viable. And then you can begin to see that Okay, this is going to be really hard in order to achieve this or Yes, this is going to be viable. And so you might find that at the price point you are going at it is not just going to be viable for you.

So what I did was I did some modeling on Tuesday and I set the goal of $150,000 in revenue. The reason I set that goal was I thought I would like to be earning $100,000 a year. That would be nice. But in order for me to take home $100,000 a year, I probably need to be earning about $150,000 in revenue. And that was just base off last year where I earned about $60,000 in income or in revenue and then I had to pay about $20,000 in expenses so about a third of my revenue was expenses so I thought $150,000, a third of that is $50,000 in expenses. That would leave me with $100,000.

And so I started doing some modeling around this and I just did some modeling for all of my products and basically I said, How much of each product would I need to sell in order to reach $150,000? Actually I am going to adjust this spreadsheet that I have here as I talk to you guys. But let me just work out, so goal income we are going to put in $150,000, and then I am going to copy it. So basically I have put in all of my different products in here at $150,000.

So the first one is On Property Plus monthly membership and I have put in a frequency of 12 times per year – 12 months in a year. So basically assuming people stay on for 12 months or consistently replenishing people that have left, in order to reach $150,000 I would need to have 250 members. And currently I have 39 monthly members so massive job in order to do that and that has obviously freaked me out. On Property Plus annual membership which is about half the price of the monthly one, I would actually need 505 members to achieve that goal. And at the moment I have 90 so again a massive jump.

And then I looked at Property Tools and so currently that is selling for $5 per month. So at $5 per month I would need 2,500 members in order to achieve that and what have I got at the moment? Maybe like 60 or something, it is growing pretty quick actually. I am pretty impressed with how Property Tools has been doing. Let us have a look at monthly, annual and 5-year, so I have 55 members at the moment for Property Tools including monthly and annual. So monthly I have 28 and then annual, I have whatever is left. That is too confusing for me to try and work out. But yes, monthly I need 2,500 of yearly which is $50 so they just gain 2 months for free.

Then I need 3,000 members to achieve $150,000 which considering how niche I am, getting 3,000 members for a cash flow calculator, probably not going to be achievable.

EBook bundles, so this is the bundle that I am selling for $6.99. Those are my 3 eBooks. I would need to sell 21,459 eBook bundles which is just completely – yeah, that is never going to happen. And then courses which I plan on selling for $100 each, I would need to sell 1,500. And these numbers just absolutely freaked me out when I did it and I was like, Oh my God! I can never achieve this. This is just unachievable. Maybe On Property Plus over a few years but everything else is just ridiculous. Like 1,500 courses? Like 21,500 eBooks? Like 3,000 Property Tools members? That is not going to happen.

But then I got wise and I was like, Hold on. I am not modeling to make $150,000 per product. I am modeling to make $150,000 for the business. And then I was like, Okay, let us try and break this down and see what I would need to earn in order to achieve this. And so what I want to do is make $60,000 from On Property Plus monthly members, $60,000 from On Property Plus annual members. From Property Tools I want to make $12,000. From Property Tools annual I want to make $5,000. From the eBook bundles I want to make $2,500. And then from the courses I want to make $10,000. So now this is looking a bit more achievable but definitely not this year. B

ut On Property Plus monthly I need 100 members, annual I need 200 members and again I am at 40 and 90 so this is basically more than doubling that business. And that would form the bulk of my income so $120,000. Property Tools I would need a total of 300 members and that would make me $17,000. The eBook bundles I would need to sell basically 1 a day so about 350 to make $2,500. And then the courses, I would want to sell 100 courses at $100 to make $10,000. And that would bring me pretty close to $150,000. I think a little bit short of $150,000.

And so that was more achievable but still freaking me out. I am having a little bit of a mini, mini meltdown where I was just like I am not getting enough time to work and I was stressing out. And things are just hard and as well because I have been diverting my attention because I have had to recreate this training videos for my virtual assistant in order for me to be able to put a video file in Dropbox and then for it to go all the way through I would have to redo everything. So my week has been spent on that.

And then my son, we went to a specialist and then he had to go into surgery the next day on Thursday. So Thursday and Friday were wiped out taking care of him. And so I was doing like a couple hours on Sunday and I did 3 training videos for my virtual assistant. I got to the end of the third one and realized that the whole work flow was actually broken.

And so everything that I did, I took half my Sunday and then basically do nothing. I did have a little bit of a breakdown where I was like, Oh my God! I cannot do this. I do not get to work enough like I need to take care of my family but I do not feel like I can work enough in order to earn enough in order to achieve what I want to achieve. So I almost cried. I did not quite cry but I was pretty frustrated.

And then last night, just hanging out with my missus, with my wife and realized that last year I earned $60,000 or $40,000 profit. If I did that again this year, that would be fine. That would be okay like we would get by, we would have the same lifestyle we have now. We would not be able to buy a house but we have been talking and we do not really want to buy a house yet anyway just because of what our lifestyle goals are and things are and things like that. We do not really want to make that commitment right now. Maybe in the few years when it is really easy financially but to push for that is not something we really want to do.

And so to have that realization that if I earn $60,000 then that would be fine; that would be enough to get by. And then I thought well, let us push it a little bit and let us try and make $1,000 a month, so $52,000. And basically $52,000 divided by 66.66 times by 100, this is how much revenue I will need to make. So I need to make $78,000. So I made $60,000 last year and remember I launch On Property Plus in April of last year. And so I had a couple of months and we were at June until July. And so I am in a much better position now than I was before so even at this current state, with 39 sales of On Property Plus, 90 sales of the annual, and Property Tools, 55. All up, I am kind of on track to make like $53,000 in revenue anyway. So to push that to $78,000, which is what an extra $25,000 is probably not that hard.

That is probably quite achievable for me. And so when I had this realization I was like, Ryan, what are you doing? Why are you freaking out? Why are you melting down? Why are you pushing yourself so hard mentally to try and achieve this when you do not actually need to do it.

Alright, so $78,000 is what I am aiming for. I have not actually done the modeling for this and what we would need to achieve but I am just going to make up some numbers. So let us say 50 monthly On Property members. Let us say 100 of the annual members, that gives me my $60,000. Property Tools, let us say 50 monthly and 50 annual, they get us up to $65,000. I still would like to sell 100 courses at $100 which is an extra $10,000. That gets me the $75,000. And then eBook bundles, I think I am not going to sell 1 a day. Let us put 100 in there, sell 100 over the course of the year. So I need to adjust this, Property Tools, how many people are signing up for monthly versus annual, it is pretty similar.

So we have 55 at the moment, we launched in May. It has been June, July, August, it has been 3 months and we are at 55. So let us say another 3 months will be 50. So we could maybe hit 200 by the end of the year. So let us go into our modeling and let us just say 100 monthly and 100 annual and then we have 100 eBook bundles, 100 courses, that gets me to $81,369. So my goal would be 50 members to On Property Plus monthly, 100 to On Property Plus annual, Property tools would be 100 members for monthly and annual, eBook bundle would be 100 over the course of the year, and then courses would be 100 as well. And so that is probably pretty achievable.

When I was freaking out on Friday, I actually decided On Property Plus is not making as much money as I wanted. We need some more revenue straight on. We need to pull some stuff out of thin air. There are no instructions for this, let us just pull it out. And so what I did was I decided to launch a course and I had started work on How to Save Your Deposit but then I was looking at some other courses that I wanted to create. One was on How to Find Positive Cash Flow Properties, another one was How to Research an Area and I thought, the one on researching an area, I will probably launch that. But then I was looking at it and I was like, Okay, positive cash flow property I know people want this because they paid for it already with On Property Plus.

I have some training in there for On Property Plus that I wanted to redo so let us just redo it as a course. And so I set up the course, the outline, and it was like 8 episodes, 8 lessons. And so then what I did was I used canva.com, which is a cool tool to create graphics.

I created just some slides of what each would be about, of the 8 modules. And then I created like a Keynote with each of those slides. What I then did was I just recorded my screen like recorded the Keynote and just talked about: Hey guys! I am going to be launching this course but I am going to do a pre-launch sale. And what you are going to get is you are going to get 50% off. So it is only going to be $50, not $100. And you will also be going to get access to a private group where we can discuss this and I can get your feedback and we can improve the course based on your feedback.

And so I put this together on Friday because I was having my meltdown or freaking out; sent this out Friday afternoon to people, like I set up a sales page. I used Snappy Checkout to receive sales. I absolutely recommend snappycheckout.com if you need to receive sales. The guy Mike over there who runs it is absolutely awesome. And the fees are started small, it is ridiculous. So use Snappy Checkout to set that up. I am hoping to get him for an interview soon.

Anyway, I sent out an email to my list of On Property members or On Property email subscribers, which is about 10,000 people. I cannot believe I have actually grown to 10,000 people. Sent that out and then by the end of the afternoon or by the end of the night, I have done probably $350 to $400 in sales so 7 to 8 people. And then by this morning I had done 12 sales which is $600 and I think as I am recording this I just saw an email come through with another sale.

Let me just go ahead and double check that: You have received a payment for $50 for How to Find Positive Cash Flow Properties course. So there you have it, $650 at 13 members. And I have said I would accept a maximum of 20 which will give me $1,000 in revenue and would really prove that this is a course worth creating and I am getting paid upfront to create it so it is absolutely awesome. And the goal is to put this on the courses page which will then I guess create passive income and move me towards my goal of selling 100 courses over the year.

So each of these courses is half-priced so selling 12, that is equivalent to 6. So I need to sell like 10 a month in order to achieve my goal of 100. So I am pretty pumped about that, pretty excited to create this course. I think it is going to be really good content.

I am excited to trial this group in Slack, this private membership group because again this private membership group is going to be a way to get feedback but then also if people find this valuable this could be something that I could sell in the future, a private group of property people where you can ask property questions, you can get help on something that I could consider launching.

I am not really planning on doing it because as you guys know I like the stuff that is really passive. I created products, sell that over and over rather than subscription stuff where you have to keep doing stuff. I just do not like that for some reason. I want to create stuff and then be able to have my lifestyle without having to do this over and over and over. So yeah, I think that kind of wraps up last week and wraps up where I am at at the moment. Breakdown over.

We got our modeling so we have our targets set up now for On Property Plus, Property Tools, eBook bundles and the courses. And basically that is going to get us there. And then if these courses work well and are easy to create, well I could create some of these $100 courses for Public Speaking Power which is going to become OutSpoken.co. I could create one for PodcastFast as well.

These easy $100 courses I will just bam out 10 videos and there you have it, Bob ****. So maybe to get to 100 course sales, I want it to be through On Property only but I might also be through OutSpoken.co and also it might be through PodcastFast.

So yeah. Pretty exciting stuff. I have stopped freaking out which is really good and I guess now I just need to get to work on my course. One of the good things about when I created this sales video for the course was like, Here is the course. Here are the first 2 videos, they are going to be delivered on this date which is Friday of this week. The next 2 videos will be delivered the next Friday and I was really clear, 2 videos each Friday for the next 4 weeks.

I actually have 4 weeks to create this course and as you guys know I come from a history of making a video a day so to only have to do 2 videos each week to deliver this course and I am getting paid $650 upfront in order to do it or maybe $600 after you take my costs into account, that is pretty awesome. Pretty, pretty awesome. And then I am going to have a course that I can sell over and over again and that is going to be pretty exciting. So I am pumped. I am excited. I am very excited to do this. And that leaves me with where we are up to.

Just rambling now. I have a text from one of the guys in the Super Smash Brothers community so I am hoping to get out sometime this week and play some Smash Brothers although you guys know how I go with that if you care which you probably do not. But it is my podcast so I guess I could do what I want so bad luck. You just have to listen to me.

Alright. Another thing that I have been thinking about last week, I might just leave this until tomorrow because this is getting pretty long. But we are going to do it. We are going to get it done, smash it out of the way. Something that I was really looking into last week was actually investing in precious metals. Random. Ryan.. what?! Precious metals?! Going on a tangent here, what is going on. But yeah, I was listening to an audio book by Robert Kiyosaki, who was the Rich Dad Poor Dad guy. Let me just find out what the book was called. The book was called Second Chance by Robert Kiyosaki. Basically I love his stuff.

I love the way he thinks about money and he was just talking about currency and how the currencies that we have – the US currency, Australian currency, all these currencies they are actually fiat currencies, are actually backed by silver or gold or anything like that and so using gold and silver, buying these things can be a good way to retain your wealth and avoid inflation because obviously gold and silver have been used for thousands of years as currency. Precious metal is always going to have a level of desirability to it and then if these currencies go to zero then you still have wealth like intrinsic wealth.

Whereas if the US dollar goes to zero how much is a piece of paper with the US dollar printed on it going to be worth? Not much. But still that will be of value so I have been looking into that, looking into investing in silver. I have been doing some research into that which is cool. Apparently silver is pretty low at the moment but it has been going down for a number of years. It may go down some more. But yeah, the people that I was listening to that I resonated with were saying, When you start investing in silver or gold start small. Start small. get a couple of coins, a couple of ounces and then build it up slowly over time. Do not just go gungho into it. Learn a lot about it. Start small and then build up your portfolio or your stack, as they call, it over time.

So I have been looking into a few things here, speaking to my wife about it and she is like, Yeah, I am on board. I understand it. We talked about the currencies and all that sort of stuff. How it is fiat money and how inflation and it is kind of protection against inflation. And she was like, Well, we have a whole bunch of stuff in the garage we need to sell. You have a Nintendo 64 you need to sell. How about we sell that stuff and then we use that to invest in silver.

It is going to be heaps smaller to hold than a couch. Now that we have what we need to sell and then it is kind of like a way to invest that does not affect our money supply. And like we have a backup supply of money as well for lifestyle reasons and this would just be another way to have a backup money supply which you could then sell in the future and liquidate if you needed to.

Yeah so looking at investing in silver as I learn more about it I will let you guys know as I invest in silver I will let you guys know as well. But that could be pretty cool. Thank you guys. That is it. I am out for the day!

Until next time, if you want instructions go and buy some furniture.

Almost 5 years ago exactly I wrote this post proclaiming exactly why I would be financially free in just 5 years time.

Well 5 years have come and 5 years have gone and I am currently not financially free.

So why aren’t I financially free (despite my proclamations and fierce self-belief).

My Reasons That I Would Achieve Financial Freedom

I think to start it’s a good idea to look back on the reasons I gave for why I would be financially free.

1. I Think In Terms of Cashflow Not Net Worth

2. I Am Always Learning

3. I Am Not Just Willing To Take Risks, I Want To Take Risks To Learn

4. Having Financial Intelligence Attracts Money and People With Money

5. I Will Use Leverage

6. I Love The Game

7. I Know My ‘Why’

So Why Aren’t I Financially Free?

Looking back on these reasons I gave I can see that some of these reasons have caused me to advance financially, but other reasons have actually meant that financial freedom was the wrong goal to strive for.

1. Thinking In Terms Of Cash Flow, Not Net Worth

This has served me really well. My net worth is extremely small (under $100,000 if you counted everything in my life) yet my cash flow is good and we can afford to do most things we want.

By focusing on cash flow rather than net worth I focused heavily on growing my income and growing my online income.

Between 2011 and 2012 I TRIPLED my salary. Going from around $33,000 to $104,000. This happened by changing jobs and securing an internal job promotion to the role of “Business Advisor” with a large pharmaceutical company.

I was also able to grow my online semi-passive income to around $1,000/month on average (on the side). This passive income and the fact that I could pay down debt and get some savings allowed me to make the jump to running my business full time in October 2013.

2. I Am Always Learning

This has also served me well. When I was a road rep I used to listen to multiple podcasts or audiobooks per day while I was driving between appointments. Even now that I am self employed I am almost always listening to something educational while I am working.

This learning allowed me to grow my business without going to business school and actually achieve a moderate level of success (still growing).

3. I Am Not Just Willing To Take Risks, I Want To Take Risks To Learn

It is one thing to be willing to take a risk, it is another thing entirely to seek out risk and make it your comrade.

While I don’t base jump (wish I did) or ride a motorbike (I would like a Vesper…I know…not a real motorbike) I do naturally seek risky things to do.

Leaving a 6 figure job for a business that paid me less than $1,000/month. Having a kid at 22 and another one at 23. Moving out of Sydney and then moving interstate.

I love taking risks in life. I think I love it because I know that if the poo hit the fan then I could just move back to Sydney, get a good job and I would be right back where I started…no worse off.

I think taking risks is one of my favourite ways of learning. Because a lot of things I want to do haven’t really been done before so you have to take the risk to find out.

It’s hard to know what it’s like to live interstate…you kind of have to do it. It’s hard to know if a new business venture will work you…you just have to do it.

Risks have definitely helped me advance my life forward…however not always financially. Moving interstate costs money and leaving a high paying job for a low paying business wasn’t the best short term financial decision.

4. Having Financial Intelligence Attracts Money And People With Money

While I don’t think I have become extremely financially savvy I do think I have become savvy at business and marketing. Specifically online marketing.

This has attracted some interesting people into my life and has let me hang out with marketing guys who have $1,000,000+ budgets.

So while it attracts money and people with money (or marketing guys with huge budgets) it hasn’t actually passed that money onto me, and I am ok with that.

5. I Will Use Leverage

This is something I never got to do. See I never quite earned enough (or stayed in a job long enough) to secure a loan and invest in property. So I never got to leverage other people’s money.

However, I have been leveraging other people’s time to build my business. I have people who work on transcriptions for me, design, data entry and other tasks in my business.

As my business continues to grow (and I have more disposable income) I can increase the amount of other people’s time I am leveraging and I can focus on tasks that give me a higher return.

I still can’t get a loan though.

6. I Love The Game

In 2010 I spent $1,000 (basically all the savings we had) on USB sticks that I was going to resell on Ebay. The sticks were dodgy and I lost $1,000.

Between 2008-2013 I had many attempted to quickly grow successful online businesses (none of which grew quickly).

But my LOVE of the game drove me forward.

For me it was never “I hope I will succeed at working for myself” it was always “I will succeed at working for myself, it is just a question of how long it takes.”

Quitting and giving up simply wasn’t an option in my mind. I could settle for the day to day 9-5 life. Even if it took me 40 years (which luckily it didn’t) I would have kept going.

7. I Know My Why

Ahhh this is the one that actually stopped me from becoming financially free. My why was:

So I can have as much free time as I want to spend with my family, and so that I can have a platform from which to speak into people’s lives.

Believe it or not but I feel I have actually achieved this why.

My business gives me the flexibility to spend as much free time as I want with my friends and family. I start work late on Tuesdays because I go to swimming lessons with my kids. I finish early half of the time so I can go to the beach with my kids.

The goal was never to “not work”…the goal was to spend as much time as I want with my family. I have basically achieved that goal…though a few extra hours away from work and with family would probably be the right balance of work and family.

The other “why” was to have a platform from which to speak into people’s lives.

I love communication and I love having a positive impact on other people’s lives. Turns out you don’t have to be rich or a billionaire for people to want to listen to you. But what you do have to be is GENUINE, and that is what I have focused on.

In fact this week someone actually quit their job and went into business for themselves full time because of me.

This is an email I got from a fellow property blogger Ben

I also have some other exciting news. I left full time employment today never to return.

After my eloquent reply saying “wtf are you serious?” He wrote:

Yep, Im done.

Completely shitting myself but done.

Its 90% because of your story man!

So despite not being financially free, I have achieved my why. My life is not perfect and I still have a long way to go both personally and financially. But I am pretty happy with how far I have come in the last 5 years.

The next post I will do will talk about what I want to achieve in the next 5 years (or maybe what I want to achieve before I am 30). Stay tuned for that.