Ryan McLean : Slightly Unconventional

Of all the customers you have in your business what is the absolutely most a customer can make you. For me it was previously $400-$500, but that just got increased.

What is your best customer worth? Of all the customers that you have in your business, what is the absolute most a customer can make you or has made you? For me, with OnProperty, my best customer – up until a couple of days ago, made me probably somewhere around maybe $400, maybe $500 or something like that.

They might have purchased an annual subscription to OnProperty Plus for $300, maybe some eBooks or courses up to the value of maybe $500. Or, I could have had some that was a subscriber for $300 subscribed to 2 years. Okay, maybe $600 is my best customer ever.

Well, there was actually a customer the other day, on Sunday – a day when I wasn’t even working, that beat that record and spent somewhere around $800-$900. Almost $1,000 and this was absolutely awesome to see. I through phases where I get a bit worried about money.

Last month was really good in terms of I closed down OnProperty Plus, changed it to OnProperty Listings and as a result, increased the prices. So, I got a big influx of income – about $4,000 or something like that from that promotion and people signing up as a result of that promotion.

So, I’m going into this month, into October, thinking, “Okay, a bit more stressed about this month.” I don’t have $4,000 automatically coming in. I’ve got about $1,000 revenue from Property Tools as well as OnProperty Plus/OnProperty Listings monthly subscription. So I’ve got about $1,000 coming in. I’ve also been working closely with Ben Everingham, recommended a few people to him. So, it might be $2,000 coming from him, but it’s never certain with buyer’s agents.

They’re working with a couple of clients and if they can’t find the property, then, Ben is so honorable, he gives the money back. So, that could potentially result in no money coming in. So, I’ve got about $1,000 guaranteed and I’ve got about $2,000-$3,000 a month in expenses now. Things just go up as you become a more profitable company.

So, going into the month, just a little bit more stressed about how much money I’m going to make. What am I going to sell? How am I going to do this, blah, blah, blah, blah… And then, I get this customer on Sunday who spends $900 – almost $1,000 with me. And I go, “What am I stressing about? I’ve got people who want to spend this amount of money with me. I must be doing something right.” And anyway, there was one offer – I had 2 conflicting offers, one for $50, one for $80. So, I emailed this customer, I said, “Thanks for being the best customer ever. I just want to let you know there was an offer on this for $50 for people who bought this other course.

I’m going to honor that and refund you $30.” emailed them, blah, blah, blah… I got an email back from best customer ever yesterday and they said something really interesting to me over the course of this email, which was quite long. But they said, “Ryan, don’t underestimate yourself.” He said, “I wanted to buy everything that you had and it was a lot of work for me to go through and to find all your products and to purchase all of your products individually. So, don’t underestimate yourself and why not have a ‘buy the lot’ option as a way to convert every customer into your best customer ever?”

I was like, “Oh my goodness! You are a genius! Thank you so much. You’ve just gone from best customer ever to absolutely best customer ever because you’ve given me an awesome idea.” This customer has shown me that the buying process that I have isn’t ideal for my customer. I create videos, audios and blog posts so customers can consume my content in whatever way they want. But when it comes to my products, I haven’t exactly made it easy for customers to purchase everything.

I guess part of that was I wanted to break things down for customers and service their needs. So, kind of like a supermarket where you go to the supermarket and they’ve got thousands of items and they never intend you to buy everything in one shop, but what you need is there for when you need it and when you need something else, then you come back.

I guess my product strategy was the supermarket sort of strategy where I’ve got a whole bunch of different things there that service different needs. Come and purchase this product when you have that need. And when you’ve got a different need that I can serve, come back. But I never thought that maybe there’s customers that are passionate enough they just want to purchase everything all at once and I need to make their experience better. So, definitely going to add a “buy the lot” option to my products page.

At first, I was like, “Well, how am I going to do this?” Because OnProperty Listings has monthly, annual and 2-year options. Property Tools only has monthly and yearly. How am I going to do this? But I think the way I’m going to do it is I’ll scrap the monthly because if someone wants to buy everything, then they’re pretty keen on spending money and I’ll just offer a yearly and 2-yearly options. Yearly for OnProperty Listings is $480.

Yearly for Property Tools is $50. So, that’s $530 plus everything else. And then, the 2-year option for OnProperty Listings is $720 and then I’m just going to leave 2 years for Property Tools at $100, so no discount for getting property Tools for $100. So it goes $720 to $820 plus then I’ll have 3 courses at $300 each so that’s $1,120. Plus I’ve got the eBooks that’s $7 so it’ll be like $1,127. So, I could, eventually, once all my products are out, I could have a “buy the lot” where someone could spend $1,127 with me in one go.

All of a sudden, I only need 4 customers a month in total in order to achieve my income goals that I set for the year. Obviously, not everyone’s going to do that, but maybe get 1, 2 or maybe 3 of those customers a year and that’s a nice little kicker. Definitely, big thank you to my best customer ever who has now spent the most money ever with me and has also given me a great idea in order to improve how much my customers are potentially worth. That was a really cool breakthrough for the week.

Bit of an update from last week, when I worked 25 hours a week, took me a little bit to get used to it. The first 2 days I think I finished the day and I was a cranky shit. I was like, went down and I was just cranky for some reason.

I was quite rude to my family. I don’t know why exactly, but I think it was just the stress of it. And the mindset of working less and feeling like my family is taking away from my work time, which is not the intention at all, you know. I value family over work, so I don’t know why I was thinking that. But I kind of felt like that and I was like, “Oh, well, this is crap. I don’t get to work” So, the first couple of days were hard.

Third day, I had about half an of being cranky after I finished work. And then, by the fourth and fifth day, I was quite happy with the work schedule that I had and what I was doing and I was less stressed. So, I had a great day on Friday with the family. I had a great weekend. And then, Monday was a public holiday up here, it was super hot. So, we ended up going to my mother-in-law’s place to swim in her pool.

Even though technically, I’m not doing 25 hours a week anymore, my stress levels – oh my goodness, have they gone down so significantly! Because I was like, “Yup, absolutely. Let’s go for a swim in the morning.” We went for a swim. I started work at 11:00 and then I finished work at 3:30 of 4:00 or something. I actually wasn’t feeling very good that day. I had a super sore back and ended up passing out asleep at 5:00.

My stress levels have gone down significantly. So, Tuesday, I did 8:00-4:00, that was yesterday. Today, I’m doing kind of 7:30 until 3:00-ish because as soon as the kids come home from school, we’re going to go for a swim because it’s hot again. Then, tomorrow, I’m going to see The Martian, which is an absolutely awesome book that I read and apparently, it’s a good movie, too, so I’m going to see that. And then, hopefully, got Smash Brothers tomorrow night. We’ll only work a few hours on Thursday, which I’m fine with. And then Friday I’ll probably do a full day there.

I think the 25 hours a week, definitely something that I want to move towards. It was great to that example and to do that week. As well, to work with my wife and to be able to help her out more with the 3 kids. Because having 3 kids and taking care of 3 kids is really hard. Not just for her, but just in general. And so, being able to help her more reduced her stress levels, leads to a better family balance, better emotional health; which leads to a better relationship that we have together. Definitely something that I want to pursue more is work less and be more focused.

Another thing that I realised about working 25 hours a week is I’ve got more important shit done! Often I’ll spend a day and I’ll just fat ass around. I’ll get some emails done. I’ll do some admin stuff. I’ll get stuff done, but it’s not stuff that’s super important. When I got 5 hours a day, I lean on my virtual assistant more. I’m like, “Okay, I’ve got 5 hours. What am I going to get done? Alright, I’ve got to get some videos done.

Let’s get these videos created, let’s get these videos edited and uploaded.” Bam, they’re done. Off to Dipti in order to manage them and publish them. So a lot of work that I was doing was more valuable work. I can actually potentially achieve more working 25 hours than I could working full time. Because I just do less stupid tasks that I probably shouldn’t be doing anyway. So I’m going to have to think about this.

We’ve got school holidays again in about 8 weeks. The kids have 9 weeks off or something like that. So, I think, over that Christmas break, I’m probably going to do 25 hours a week for maybe 8 weeks or 9 weeks or something like that. In Sydney for a week, so that’ll be a holiday. Probably have another week of holidays, but I was thinking and talking to my wife and we’re saying, “Yeah, well, let’s just do this.” At least we know if I run out of money or we start running out of money or I’m not making enough, I can just increase my work hours again and find out ways to make more money.

So, yeah. That’s where we’re at. That’s where we’re at. Enjoying my Smash Brothers, practicing that pretty heavily and getting into that. So wanting to become good and, eventually, would love to be able win some competitions, win some tournaments in Smash Brothers as my Peach player. But that’s another topic for another day.

That’s it for me today, guys. Until next time, stay positive.

Sometimes you just get lucky first go…and sometimes you don’t. This is an example of me not getting lucky.

Sometimes you just get lucky first go, and other times, you don’t. I remember, it would have been 3 or 4 years ago, I was still working as a pharmaceutical rep and I had a property blog and I had a little over 1,000 email subscribers, over 100 articles, less than 120.

Were getting a decent amount of traffic and I thought, you know, I need to make some money from this – I want to make some money from this. And so, I decided to create and launch a membership site where I would teach people how to find positive cash flow properties. So, what I did was I created a single page.

Literally, a single webpage that was password-protected. That was it. It’s a functionality within every single WordPress page or WordPress post – you can set a password on it.

So, I created that and I put a video on it or a couple of videos or something like that. It wasn’t even complete, the product. I sent out an email to my list saying, “Launching this product.

Here’s a 50% discount.” or something like that and I sold it for $50 and I had $2,000 in sales in the space of 1-2 days. Before then, the most I’d ever seen in terms of a month was maybe $300-$500 in AdSense revenue. So, for me, this membership site was a big kicker for me.

This membership site, eventually, over the course of a couple of years evolved into OnProperty Plus, which is now OnProperty Listings, which makes me a good 4-figures per month and means that I can work from home and I don’t need to have a job.

That was striking it lucky. I was very lucky to launch that and to get so much success off the bat with that. Just really struck a cord with the market and what they wanted. One that’s not so lucky is my public speaking course. Yup, no sales. We are not drinking beer today. We are not celebrating and getting drunk together because there are no sales for my public speaking course.

I sent out an email to my list of about 700-800 email subscribers talking about the course. Had a bit of traffic to the page, but absolutely zero sales, nada.

I was thinking that maybe today I create some free videos for outspoken.co, but at this point, I just don’t see the point because I’m not making any money from the site. I haven’t “nailed the coffin” so to speak. I haven’t given up on outspoken.co or given up on this product.

I will still give it probably a month to see do people go to it? Are people interested in it? Do I get any sales? All I need is one sale to really encourage me to push this site forward. But I know this is my first product that I’ve ever created and it may not be aligned with the market, it may not be what they want. It has a good learning experience for me, but I definitely did not strike it lucky with this course.

It’s not something that I just launched and I sold a whole bunch of copies to this course. So, I don’t know if that means it’s a dud course, I don’t know if that means that public speaking is a harder niche to monetise. I’m not 100% sure what it means, but definitely didn’t strike it lucky. So, I’ll wait a little bit longer and see what happens and then, maybe go again and create another course or try and market it in some other way.

So, yeah, I was hoping to strike it lucky. Hoping to get a little bit of traction with this course so I could then justify working more on oustpoken.co, but unfortunately, that’s not the case. So, I’m back to just focusing on OnProperty, focusing on creating more marketing materials for that. So, more free content and driving people to my products.

I am thinking about the long term and longevity of OnProperty and me and this business and what it’s going to look like moving forward. And something that I’m doing is at the end of each of my videos, I’m doing a call to action to one of my products. So, rather than just trying to get more and more email subscribers now – which I actually think is becoming less and less relevant, less and less valuable over time. But the content is going to hold it’s value and so I really have this sense that the value is in the content. The value is not in the email list, as people say.

Obviously, collecting people’s emails are very important. But when you’ve got people who are so segmented online now, so many people surfing the web through apps. So many people go into a lot of different websites using Facebook and stuff like that. But you still develop a relationship with the person.

So, whether you’re watching someone on Youtube or you’re watching their video on Facebook or you’re interacting with them on their website or they send you an email, it’s all the same person. And I think that as I grow this brand, as I build up this brand, I think email will become less and less important over time.

I can’t remember the last time I actually bought something from an email that was sent to me; which is really interesting. But I do know that I follow people like Gary Veynerchuk, I love all the stuff that he does. I follow his podcast or his Youtube channel. And he’s the same person there. He’s the same person on iTunes as he is on Youtube and when he has a book out or a call to action, I find it through the videos he does and I then go ahead and take action.

So, I’m thinking that emails aren’t as important as they used to be. Still important, but they’re not the be all and end all. And so, what I’m doing, because I believe the content will hold value for longer into the future than collecting email subscribers, I’m actually marketing my products at the end or within each of my videos. So, I’ll do a subject like I just did one about the biggest mistakes that people make when doing suburb research, when investing in property.

So, at the end of that and throughout that video, I was talking about I’m launching a course on suburb, which you can get at onproperty.com.au/suburb. So, I’m integrating it into the videos. I did other videos and marketed other products, like my course on how to find positive cash flow properties or my membership site, OnProperty Listings.I’ve been doing more of this free content with a call to action.

So, we’ll just see how that goes and see whether that’s going to work. But I think in terms of long term strategy, I think that’s going to be the most successful way to do it, is to just have in-content discussions about my own products. I think that’s going to be pretty cool.

I am considering moving back to daily videos. I did this back in 2014, so last year. What I did was I release a new video, podcast, article every single day. So, the video gets transcribed into a blog post. It also gets converted into an MP3, into a podcast. And I saw huge growth over my site in that period of time and I’m still seeing upwards of 1,500 people visit my site every single day from the content that I produced partially during that period. Some of the content was before that.

I have noticed that as I release articles talking about the courses that I’m creating, like I’ve released some of my videos are sales videos, I’ve noticed that I’ve had sales that I feel are related to that – not to the emails that I sent out. And I know this because some of the people who purchased my product weren’t even email subscribers of mine. So the only way they could have found out about it was through the actual episodes themselves or through the menu tab on my website.

I think that it’s powerful. I think that getting people in the routine of listening to me, I think the idea of getting more and more content out there and just smashing my competitors in terms of how much content I have, how much I can be found in Google and have people find me is going to be super valuable. And I think the long term strategy of absolutely owning this space in terms of the market and getting people to come to me really allows me to have a more positive impact on people’s lives than if I was to do affiliate deals to try and sell my products and stuff like that.

I want to be like Apple and basically be fully integrated. Everything from my marketing to my products. I don’t want to make money selling other people’s products. I don’t want other people acting as affiliates for me. I want to do everything myself, which is, I guess, less like Apple, more like James Shramko and what he does over at SuperFast Business where he doesn’t have any affiliates marketing his stuff, but he just does it all himself. And I think that’s going to be the best long term strategy for me and for my business. And if I’m creating all these free content now and I’ve got the backend, like my virtual assistant Dipti, she’s absolutely awesome.

She can get all this stuff up. So I can create 3 videos in the space of a couple of hours. I then upload them, let her know about it and then, bam! She’s away, gets everything scheduled, gets everything ready and published on time. So I don’t have to worry about all that backend stuff anymore. It’s not sucking my time. So, I think it’s more achievable for me to do daily videos now than it used to be.

So I’m excited about that. That’s going to be good. I think we’ll move towards that I was doing 2 videos a day for a while and I’ve just started moving to 3 videos a day. I’m going to get my way up to 5 videos, so Monday to Friday there’s going to be a video every single day. And then, as soon as I have enough content and I feel like I can keep it up, then I’ll go ahead and I’ll do fully a video every single day.

I think that’s going to be exciting because then once I’ve created this course on suburb research and then I’ve created the course on how to evaluate an individual property, then I can just focus on marketing those courses.

The free videos could be all I do. That could just be the only stuff that I have to do on my business. It’s just, I do free videos and I do customer service, like emails and stuff like that. And then I could definitely work 5 hours per day. Working 5 hours a day has been pretty rough.

It’s been getting difficult to get into the habit. But I think now that I’m starting to do it, starting to get used to it. I think there’s massive value in it for me, for my family, for my wife – to help her out. But then, also for me, in terms of socially, I will then have more time. My wife will be less stressed, so she’s okay if I go for a surf or if I go to someone’s house and play Smash Brothers or something like that. I think it’s going to be good, I think it’s going to be long term.

I think I can definitely make enough money – if not more money doing just 5 hours a day than doing 8 or 9 hours a day. So, it’s definitely something that I’m going to be working towards and it’ll probably happen faster than I expected.

Anyway, I have rambled on enough. I’m excited to get on with the day to go ahead and make some videos. I’ve got 4 hours until I finish work. So, let’s see how many videos I can get done. If I get 3 done, I’d be happy. But why not push for 4 and then I’ve done 7 this week, hey? Well, we’ll see how we’d go. Hope you guys are having an awesome day. I hope that you are working on your business. I hope that sometimes you get lucky and you get a quick win like I did when I first launched my membership site for OnProperty.

Sometimes you just don’t get lucky and you need to re-evaluate and think, “What did I do wrong? What can I do better?” And also, I want to encourage you, it’s not about doing the grind and working 12-16 hour days. It’s about achieving what you want to achieve, having the biggest influence that you can – positive influence on people’s lives. And then living the life that you want. Living the life that you want is super hard to work out. So hard to work out what kind of life do I actually want. What I want to do for work? What I want to do with the rest of my time when I’m not working? But it’s totally worth it if you can work it out.

I’ll keep you guys up to date on that. 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.

Today I realised (as I was driving to get some dinner) I need to stop consuming business podcasts. I also need to reset my values if I want to move to 25 hours per week.

Hey guys! Ryan here from Instructions Not Included. Just a quick recording in my car. It is Saturday. I did not actually work today but I have been thinking about my business and I think I talked about it in the last episode but basically I kind of set a goal for myself that by the end of this financial year I want to be working for 25 hours a week or about 5 hours per day, with enough time to go surfing or enough time to spend time with my family and things like that.

And today I realized as I was driving somewhere, I think I was driving to pick up dinner, we got some take away, some pizza, crust pizza, which if you are in Australia, crust pizza is absolutely awesome. Chicken Peri Peri, so good!

Anyway, I am driving to get pizza, I am listening to a business podcast and I realized I really need to stop consuming business podcast. If i want to work 25 hours a week, how many hours a week do I spend listening to podcast. It is probably an excess of 10. So I am thinking I could save 10 hours per week on my business just by stop listening to podcast. I already know what to do.

I already know what to do to be successful so do I need to learn more of all of these stuff which kind of takes me in different directions and spins me around? Well no. Probably not. So something that I could do is to limit my podcast consumption for business podcast.

So okay, that is interesting. And then my mum is up here from Queensland so I dropped her home and I am driving back listening to music, just some quiet and I am letting my mind think. And I am thinking to myself I actually need to reset my values if I want to move to 25 hours a week. Because if all I am doing is listening to business podcast and thinking about business, business, business,business..I am putting so much value on my business that every waking hour that I am not doing something I want to be working on my business and that is because I value it above everything else.

So I need to actually make the decision to value other things, to value surfing, to value time with my family, to value these things and to stop spending time on other things and to actually begin to try and see the value in these other things that I want to do.

And I guess part of that is stepping away from listening to so many business podcast and business audio books and listening to other things or not listening to anything but thinking about my family or thinking about other things that I want to do and actually getting value and getting enjoyment out of other stuff apart from my business.

So that is a big step for me and so I thought on the way home I just quickly stopped to get some ice creams for my wife – she has had a hard day, so I thought get some ice creams, give her a treat. And probably if I was not listening to a business podcast on the way home that thought would not have even entered my mind because I will be thinking about my business, how I can make more money, blah, blah, blah. So by changing what I value and by changing what I  am spending my time thinking about I can actually change the outcomes in my life.

So I am thinking about if I want to achieve that goal of 25 hours per week, I need to change my values. I need to change the things that I focus on. And that is going to be a big process because I love business podcast. I love learning about business. I love the game. But just business is not making me happy. So that is going to be a process but it is going to be fun.

Alright guys. That is it for me for tonight. Thanks so much for listening!

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

I made a big strategic decision to move towards working less. I only working 25 hours per week and I want to spend more time living my life.

Hey guys! Ryan here from Instructions Not Included which you can find over at ryanmclean.net, R-y-a-n-M-c-l-e-a-n dot net. Now I made some big changes today, really strategic changes around my business because I made the decision I want to move towards working less.

You know, Oh Ryan you are not happy working for yourself, working the hours you want… No. I want to shift my lifestyle. I want to spend less time in my office working and I want to spend more time living my life and being with my family, going surfing, and also I want the time that I do spend working to be more productive. So rather than sitting down for 9 or 10 hours and just sometimes getting lost in the haze of my own thoughts, I would rather have a strategy, have a business that I go and I work 5 hours and I just smash things out and I just get things done.

So I really want to have a systemized business that has just more structure to it. I do not know if that is going to work for me because as you guys know I change my mind every single day so having a structure to my business might not work. But we will see how we go. But basically the goal is to work 25 hours a week or around 5 hours per day. And I would like to begin, start surfing again and doing that sort of stuff.

I just find that when I am surfing I am a happier person, I am a better father, I am a better husband and I will probably be better at running my business as well. So I need to free up some time to do that. I want to take the stress away, focus away from the business and start to focus on my life. I actually believe that as I do that then my business will continue to grow and I will probably find even more creative ways to make money.

So something that I have decided to change is On Property Plus, which is my main source of revenue at the moment. The way that I have been selling On Property Plus is through an Evergreen launch funnel. Now if you do not understand what that means, I am just going to quickly explain it now. Basically a launch funnel is when you create a series of videos or a series of blogposts or whatever it maybe, generally it is videos, and you send them out over the course of maybe 1 to 2 weeks and you have 3 videos that just add massive value. Free content, you teaching people about how to do what you do or why, why it is important.

So for me I have the first video on the 3 different ways you can find positive cash flow properties. Second video is on the biggest mistakes probably investors make. And the third video is on some research tools that I use or that you can use to research property. And so I give away these free content and then that leads into the fourth video which is a sales video which says you can sign up for my service, On Property Plus. You get property listings, you get education, you get tools that you can access and all of these sorts of stuff. And so basically they go through this 2 weeks series which leads them to the sales video. And then the sales video opens for them on a Tuesday and closes on a Saturday night.

And the reason it is called Evergreen Launch Funnel is because every single week you have a new group of people going through that funnel but the way it happens is that it is a real limited time offer for that person because the page that they get access to, it is open from Tuesday to Saturday, and then the link that they have disappears or goes to an expired page. And the next group of people that go through the next week get a different link. And so it is only groups of people at a time that have access to the deal. So it is a work around the launch funnel so that you can make it open to a small group of people for a certain amount of time but not to the general public.

And so I have been running with that for the last maybe 4 to 5 months and it has done well but it has definitely slowed down lately, definitely not seeing the results that I have been seeing in the beginning. It is just not working as much as I would like anymore and I am finding that it is just not me. I feel that the sales funnel process… it is a little bit of a sneaky tactic. I find it a little bit sleazy because it is that high pressure: it is closing, now is the last time for you to get in.

And I just find it frustrating that I cannot just create a video and market it on property Plus and sell over the link for sign up. And I know for myself if I am signing up for a tool to go through a sales funnel and to do that is not something that I really take action on anymore. It is not something that I really ever taken action on. All the tools that I signed up for really are tools that just exist out there. So I have Real Estate Investor, I pay $100 a month for that.

I have Hosting which I pay hundreds of dollars for. I have access to lead pages that is available all the time. So all of these stuff that are out there are always available and I could sign up and I could cancel them anytime but I do not.

And so my thinking behind changing On Property Plus from this launch funnel back to being available all the time because I think this will decrease my revenue. I think this will actually decrease how much money I am going to make from On Property Plus but it is going to allow me to automate my business more.

It is one less thing to have to think about. Every single week I have to go in, I have to adjust all the links, I have change all the emails, I have to fix everything up but if it is always available, I do not need to worry about that. And I can go, I can create free content and I can market On Property Plus and I can send people there. If I want to be working 25 hours a week, I do not want to be spending an hour or 2 changing my launch funnel every week which does not actually move me towards my goals. So I just want it to be – Evergreen, I want it to be available all the time and so I have made that move.

Another big move that I have decided to make with On Property Plus is to rename it. So I am renaming it On Property Listings just for clarity purposes. So I want people to know exactly what they are going to get, exactly what they are signing up for. And On Property Plus, the whole idea behind it was that it is on property plus you are getting a whole lot more. And originally when I launched it, it was not so focused on the listings.

It was more focused on the trainings that were in there as well as the tools that were available. Really because I felt like the listings did not have enough value and I could not justify the charge for the listings with what I was charging, which at the time was $20 a month or $200 per year. And so I added all those things in and so that is why it was named On Property Plus.

Now, I am actually going to remove the whole membership site aspect and I am going to charge more. So I am making the product less like they are getting access to less and I am going to actually charge more. And my reasoning behind this was I was listening to James Schramko and he was talking about his membership site and he was talking about people do not want 200 videos that they have to sit and look through. People want results. And so you need to focus on giving people the results that they want and anything that is there, that is fluff.

That is not going to give them the results that they want, you should strip out and you are actually giving people a better experience by doing this. So by changing the name from On Property Plus to On Property Listings and by stripping everything out and by focusing on the listings, well then I am giving people exactly what they want. And I am actually not having a membership site. It is going to be delivered directly to their inbox and so they are going to get emails with all the property listings in there. Now also, they might have access to the membership site if they want but I guess my goal is that very few people would ever log into the membership site. They will just receive it via email.

And so I am changing it. I guess stripping everything away and then what I am also doing is increasing the price. So currently it is $49.95 per month or $297 per year. And as you guys know, which we talked about yesterday, and I was doing the modeling; if I have it at $297 per year, I need – I think, over 400 people to reach $120,000. If I had it at $50 per month, I needed 200 people to hit $120,000. And so for me, I have decided to up my price and change the way that I am positioning it. So now rather than doing $49.95 per month, I am just doing $50 per month if you want a no-contract monthly subscription.

If you want to commit yearly and pay upfront, then that works out to $40 per month but it is a one-off payment. So rather than saying it is $480, I am saying it is $40 per month in a one-off payment built annually or paid annually. And so this is what a lot of different websites are doing; leadpages.net does this. i have seen a few others do this. A lot of them do this, wpcurve.com does this as well. So I am doing that.

And then I am also going to trial and offer a 2-year subscription where you pay upfront for 2 years and that is going to be worked out to $30 per month or will be $720. And so the price that I have at the moment is going to expire on Saturday, at $297 will no longer exist and the cheapest you can get it for will be $30 per month which is $360 per year, $720 for the 2 years. Yeah, so the price that exists now is going up. So that is the change that I am making with On Property Listings.

And another reason to strip it is that there are these people who want to see the listings and there are these people who want to train themselves. There are 2 different types of people. The people who want to see the listings are less likely to be the people who want to go through the training. And so by splitting them up I can then create another division of On Property which I am going to call On Property Courses, and that is just going to be training courses.

So there will be courses on how to find positive cash flow properties, how to research an area, how to save your deposit, how to increase the rent of your property, all these sort of stuff. That will be a lot like Udemy which is you go sequentially through this courses and that would be $100 each, just a set price of $100 unless I create a course that I do not think is worth $100. I might sell it for $50 or if I think there is a course that is worth more or more complex, I might sell it for $200 or something like that.

You can see from my pricing, I am actually changing away from $99, $297 to $50, $100. And the reason that I am doing that is it is just so much easier to talk about. The reason that I did that is originally with Property Tools. I set that at $5 per month or $50 per year. And I thought this might be a tool that people talk about and recommend. And when they recommend it someone says, Well how much does it cost? and they can say, It is just $5 per month. They do not have to say it is $4.95 per month. That just makes it harder for word to spread. And as well when people are buying it, $4.95, it is kind of arbitrary number.

I guess the goal is that you are not really thinking how much it costs but when you say $5, sure that is cheap. It is only $5. Again, I just think it just improves the process. So yeah, I am just moving away in a more straightforward, less sleazy tactics and more of ‘here is my business, here is what I am offering, take it or leave it, buy it as you need it.’ And hopefully with the launch of the courses and having multiple courses and having the listings that people will be able to sign up for multiple things and multiple purchases with me so they do not just have the one option and the one subscription.

And so that is the big move that I have made with On Property and On Property Plus and again I am making that move so that I can transition and by the end of this financial year, I want to be working just 25 hours per week but I still am aiming for that goal of $78,000 in revenue or I might just lower that goal to $74,999 in revenue. And by lowering the goal to that, that means I will not have to pay GST. I will not have to deal with that and I just need to manage my expenses so that I can make the $60,000 that I am aiming for this financial year in terms of net profit.

So yeah, I guess those are the big changes that I made with On Property. With the course that I pre-launched, that has gone really awesome. I have sold 16 out of 20 of those so I have made $800 in pre-launch revenue for that course which really justifies to me that this is a course that will sell, this is a course that people want.

The fact that 16 people are willing to pay for this course upfront without any other course being delivered and I was very clear in my video, You are going to receive this over 4 weeks, blah, blah, blah. That is pretty awesome, so excited to have that, 4 more spots. Hopefully I will fill them before, Friday was the goal. I guess I will send out an email tomorrow or something like that, try and fill those 4 spots but either way I am happy with 16 if that is all I get. $800 in revenue for a course that before I launch it I am getting paid $800 to make the course that I am going to sell. I am getting paid to make an asset that is going to generate me passive income. So that is pretty awesome and I am pretty excited about that.

So that is me for today. That is what I am working on, just working on creating the content for this course now. I am going to create 2 videos to send out on Friday and then also need to work on the sales video for On Property Listings and get all of that in order and fix up my email subscribers and all that sort of stuff. A lot of work to do but I am excited about moving forward, excited to be creating a business that I can begin to step away from and work less but actually deliver more to my customers. So I am excited about that.

So if you guys want to check out all the past episodes, you can go to ryanmclean.net and that is M-c-l-e-a-n for Mclean. I am Scottish so it is a weird spelling. So sorry, really I should be called Ryan Mclean because that makes more sense but it is Ryan Mclean. So go to ryanmclean.net if you want to see all the episodes over there.

And until next time, 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.

I had another mental breakthrough. I realised that I want my business to be more passive so I can do other things with my time.

Hey guys! Ryan here from Instructions Not Included and I had another kind of mental breakthrough which is pretty cool! I think the last episode I talked about setting my goal of improving my reach from where it is at the moment which is around 94,000 people in a month to reaching a million people a month. And something that kind of came out as I was talking to my wife and I was thinking about my business and talking to her about the fact that I am looking 3 years ahead and I do not see us needing to be more wealthy in order to be more happy.

And I was saying to her that what I really want is just to have more freedom of time and to not have the stress that I have right now, that if I stopped working on my business I am not going to earn enough money for us to survive. Because at the moment I feel like I need to work on my business every single day. I need to put in good hours in order to generate that income that I need to generate.

Like the last month in July, sales for On Property Plus were lower than usual, somewhere around the $2,000 to $3,000 mark instead of maybe $4,000 to $5,000 or even $6,000. And so I was a bit stressed about that. I am not stressed this month because I have a buffer but if that happens for another few months, well then I could be in a difficult situation.

So I really wanted to set up my business in such a way that I was never in that situation like I never want to put myself in a situation where money is running dry and I just need to pull something out of my ass in order to move forward and in order to support my family and survive. And so that was something that I really wanted to change in my business and I guess that is part of the motivation that I have had creating eBooks and the courses that I now am looking at creating – was the fact that these are not things that I need to create over and over again.

It is not a service that I need to provide. It is just something that is out there that sells on an ongoing basis and the eBooks have been selling a copy every single day mainly through my website. There hardly is any action on Kindle. But that makes sense because I do not know a lot of people in Australia who use Kindle. Amazon is not as big over here in Australia because we do not have Amazon.

We only have online Amazon so there are less people using Kindle than maybe there are in the US, I am not 100% sure. But I have been finding that people are finding my eBooks through my website. They must be just finding it through the main menu navigation on my website, just a little bit a link there that says eBooks because they are going through there and they are buying my eBooks. People are buying the bundle, $6.99 for that bundle.

They seem to be purchasing that the most and I just get notifications all the time of a new sale here, a new sale there and I worked out that if I just sell one of those bundles a day that is almost $3,000 in a year in revenue.

Yeah. I have the goal of a million people in a month that I want to reach. I also have the income goal of I want to be earning enough income every month where I do not have to stress about it. I really want to free up my time now so I can focus on other things in my life.

I want to start going surfing again. I want to start exercising. I want to have the freedom to spend more times with my kids and with my wife and not stress out about that. I would eventually like to build some sort of structure like a tiny house or a tiny office or something like that. And so now what I am working towards is yes to impact: more people – a million people but also to make my business more passive.

And so something that I am doing this week to make my business more passive is I am completely reworking every single training video that I have for my virtual assistant. And the goal here is to take me out of the process completely.

I want to be like James Schramko who is from SuperFast Business where he has a team. He creates a video, puts the file in Dropbox and then the next time he sees it is it is published on his website. So I want to have that. At the moment I am setting up the processes. Also we are editing the video and things like that. But once it is edited I will out it in Dropbox and the process will go all the way through from there, all the way through to that post being published on my website and going live.

So I am setting up different spreadsheets in order for my VA to manage the ordering of the transcriptions of those podcasts. I am also setting up spreadsheets to order thumbnails and something that I will be moving towards is getting a designer to create my thumbnails because I have been doing them all myself and if I work a full day I can probably create about 40 thumbnails or something like that. But I should really be spending my time on creating more content, creating more courses and things like that.

So I am setting it up so that eventually designer can take over those thumbnails and create images for my blogposts as well but at this point in time I will still be creating those thumbnails until I feel like I know how I can communicate with the designer and how I can hire a designer in a cost-effective way to get the look and the quality that I want.

So I am pretty excited. I have what I think is a 14-set process or a 15-set process that I am setting up at the moment. The very similar process that has been a few little tweaks, a couple integrations with Slack and Dropbox using software or service tools called Zappier which every time I upload an image or a video or whatever to Dropbox it then pushes a notification through to Slack and then my VA can take that and roll with it and do the full process.

So I have a 14-set process or maybe 15 steps. I have done 2 videos today, today is Tuesday. 2 videos today, hopefully I am going to smash out a few tomorrow. I would like to get this done by the end of the week, chances that happening is pretty slim, probably Monday or Tuesday next week that will get finished. But yeah, I am excited to have that process in place to be able to just put the file in Dropbox ad then it all happens after that. And that could potentially open up a new business opportunity where other people have videos and they want to get them published in the same way that I do could hire my service and get me to do it for them.

I am not planning on launching that but hey, I could in the future if I wanted to. So that is pretty exciting. And that process – me not having to do that, will free me up to spend more time on videos, creating courses which will move me  towards the reach that I want to achieve – the million people in a month, and will also move me towards my goal of not having to stress about how much I am making and just be financially secure in that.

So this has been interesting guys! Find me on my journey! I really appreciate everyone who listens and enjoys this.

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

Today I set a goal to improve the reach of my business by 10 times. Incremental growth isn’t inspiring but 10X’ing something is exciting.

Hey guys! Ryan here from Instructions Not Included and today I set a goal to basically 10x my business or to improve the reach of my business by 10 times. I have been really inspired by businesses like Google and other businesses and books and audio books and podcasts. They talk about the benefits of having a goal to see a 10x improvement in what you do because when you are trying to get incremental growth, 10%, 20%, 30%, even double your business, you are just kind of doing the same things over and over again. But if you are trying to improve something and make it 10 times better, you really need to change your thinking and approach the problem in a completely new way.

And so as I was thinking about yesterday, filling a bit disoriented with my business, I was sitting down thinking Okay, what do I want for my life? What do I want my life to look like in maybe about 3 years? That is about as far ahead as I can really conceive at the moment. And I am thinking about how much do I want to earn and I kind of earn enough money at the moment and I am pretty happy with what I earn.

I would be pretty happy to still be earning that in 3 years’ time. And that is kind of somewhere around the $60,000 to $100,000 a year mark. Obviously, pushing beyond that and getting over $100,000 a year would be nice but in terms of me really seeking a goal and saying I want to be rich and I want to have this, I do not want that at all. I love tiny house living. If I could I would live in a tiny house which is like miniature houses they build on trailers that are 2 and a half meters wide by 6 or 7 meters. If I could and I did not have 3 kids, I would be living in a tiny house traveling around Australia or something like that right now.

So for me, looking forward, looking at my goal, money is not really the driving force. I make enough money. I can see that as I grow my business making more products, I am going to make more money. So it is not really a goal I need to stretch for there. But what I do when I do is have a bigger impact in people’s lives.

I want to be able to reach people and help people. And so I have decided that rather than focus on money, which I am already happy with, why do I not focus on the actual impact of my business and what I can do there. And so I was thinking maybe I will aim for like 100,000 visitors a month to my website because at the moment for On Property, I thought I was getting around 30,000 visitors. But then I looked at my 4 main websites which are On Property, Public Speaking Power – which is going to change the brand now to Outspoken.co, then we have Podcast Fast, and we have Instructions Not Included.

And I looked at combined how many people are reaching with that in terms of visitors to the website, views of the videos and downloads of the podcast, and overall it was reaching, I think it was about 94,000 people if we tally all that up in July. So my goal of 100,000 was kind of basically already achieved. So alright, let us set a big goal. Let us go ahead and 10x this and let us aim to impact about a million people a month through those 4 main websites.

So that is the goal that I have set for myself and I have started thinking about how can I achieve this goal? What things do I need to be doing differently? And one of the things that I need to be doing differently is offloading more to my virtual assistant. and I think I have talked a little bit about not having enough work for my virtual assistant and so one of the things that I am setting up at the moment, when I created a video and uploaded that video into Dropbox, I would then have to go into a Google spreadsheet and type the word ready into a whole bunch of different columns so that my VA would know what tasks are ready to be done. And so now I am setting it up so that there is integration with Dropbox and a messaging tool I use called Slack.

So every time I put the file into Dropbox, it automatically creates a message in Slack saying there is this new file that needs to be uploaded. So I am basically taking a step out of it. I am automating that step and then the VA is going to take that file from Slack and import the relevant stuff into the spreadsheet and then go ahead and upload those files. So basically I am trying more and more to take myself out of different things. Eventually I want to not do any design myself, so not design the thumbnails for the videos and stuff myself.

I would like to outsource that to someone who can do a really good job. I would also like to outsource the editing of the audio and the editing of the video as well but that is down the track. So basically I would really love to have my life be like James Schramko and what he does or what he used to do was basically he just created a video a day, put that video in Dropbox – just the raw file, and then someone would edit that for him and his whole team would go through the process. And the next time he would see that was when it was on the website. And so I guess that is the point that I am trying to get to, for me to be able to film a video on my iPhone or whatever device it is, put that raw video file into Dropbox and then in a couple of weeks or whatever it is, it spits out in the other end and is finished and published.

And so that is what I am trying to get to and is part of the way that I am thinking about 10x-ing my reach is by taking myself out of this back end processes and so then I can just focus on creating videos and creating content and I guess getting more creative with the content that I create.

And so that is my day. That is kind of my goal. I guess setting a goal for myself has made things more exciting and has made my work more enjoyable because now I have something challenging that I am going to try and reach for. Going from 100,000 visitors to 200,000 is probably pretty easy in a year just working it out or maybe 1 to 2 years. But going from 100,000 to a million, that is going to be tricky. I do not know how I am going to do it but I am excited to try, at the least.

Alright guys, that is it for me for this week. Small week, only working for 2 days this week because of sick kids but I have a little bit done and I have a bit of mental shift going on there. So hopefully we will have a productive week next week, working 5 days a week getting stuff done.

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

Sickness hit our house hard this week and I’ve had some time off. I was bummed on my business at the start of the week and was a bit bored.
 
Hey guys! Ryan here from Instructions Not Included. Now I have not been updating in a couple of days because I have not actually worked in a couple of days. I have had 3 sick children, all with fevers and it has been absolutely hectic at our house. No one has been going to school or Kindie. Everyone has been home. I have been sick as well so I guess one of the benefits of having an online business is that I can take that time off and I do not have to tell a boss or anything like that.
 
And if you would like to answer, it is you guys because you are like, “Ryan, why was there not an episode? What the f man? I have been hanging out for it!” Actually no, if there is anyone listening or hanging out for the episodes because these have not gotten live yet. But I hope you guys are and I hope you are enjoying that.
 
So anyway, I had a few days off and now back into it. I was actually pretty bummed on my business at the start of the week, as you guys know. If you have been following, I totally go up and down about the business in terms of ideas as well about how I feel about business. And I guess the last little while I have just been again a bit bored with my business because it is not really challenging. I spent so many years.
 
I spent 7 or 8 years just trying to make this online business thing work, trying to make this viable, trying to make it generate a full-time income, trying to make this work for me. And it is just struggle, struggle, struggle, struggle and then finally now I am at the point where I am making decent revenue like last month I did almost 7 grand in revenue and I am paying for my way of life. I am paying for my family.
 
We have a bit of savings as well so if the income stops today, it would take us probably 6 months to completely run out of money and enter an oh-my-effing-whoa we just need to work something out. So it is good to have that buffer there and I guess I just have not been challenged that much and so that has been frustrating me because I know that my system works and all I need to do is put more into the system. So if I put more podcast episodes, if I create more products, if I make more email marketing campaigns and just do what I am doing,  do, do , do, then it is going to equal more money. More money.
 
I do not know but something about that is just a bit boring for me. More money, why am I bored about more money? I do not know. It is a bit stupid.
 
I am very grateful. I am super grateful for what I have but I guess my passion comes out of being challenged, wanting to learn things, wanting to do really difficult tasks, wanting to really grasp something that is difficult to understand and to make it work like the way that my brain works, it is like I do not understand something at all and then I study it, study it and study it and then all of a sudden, finally something clicks and I just see the whole picture and understand the full concept of something.
 
And so sometimes like I would listen to an audio book and I would have to listen to it 3 or 4 times and I get a little bit out of each one but I might listen to it the fourth time and then I am like, Oh my goodness! I get it now! Okay, that makes so much sense. And all the little bits that I learned, they are great by themselves but when I can tie the whole concept together and understand everything that is just when I become like a powerhouse, when I understand something.
 
And I think in the last 18 months or 2 years of working on my own as well as the 6 or 7 years that I did part-time or on the side was me really trying to understand how things work, how my business model works and all of a sudden they clicked and I understood it and then I grow bores.
 
So I guess I am just trying to stir things up a bit, trying to make things a bit more interesting. I am pretty passionate about the property industry and helping people in this industry and making this industry better because there are just so many people wanting to rip people off and one of the things that I am considering doing – I think I have talked about this before, is actually sharing my income, like my revenue and some of my expenses on my website, on onproperty.com.au.
 
I could share with you guys as well but I just feel like being transparent and being someone who is transparent about how much I earn will just open people’s eyes to the industry and will increase people’s expectations when they deal with other parties, like if they know how much I am making and they might want to know how much is that free property advisor who is actually making $40,000 in commission, how much are they actually making from me? And I feel like being transparent, even if I am not earning that much at this point in time -$7,000 revenue is nice but I think people will understand it is a business and a $7,000 revenue is only like $90,000 a year or something like that, that is nice but that is not massive.
 
But if it gets to the point where I am earning $20,000 or $40,000 or $50,000 or $100,000 a month to have that transparency there and to say Look, this is what I earn, and if you are not happy with what I earn, totally do not buy my products and just give people that transparency and if people are like, Hang on, you are earning $100,000 a month. Why are you charging this much? To give that transparency to people would be pretty interesting and there could be backlash from it for people.
 
The only way you make money is not through property, it is through teaching people about property.
 
Oh yeah, that is my situation. So I think I am going to do that. I think a lot of people will say to me Why are you doing that? Because I know a lot of people in the internet marketing space do it and people feel like they do it to show, Okay, they are teaching about internet marketing. How to make money online. It is their proof of how much money they make. But then there are these people, like Justin and Joe from EmpireFlippers.com, they put up their revenue reports but they are not teaching people how to make money online, they are brokering websites.
 
So they definitely do not need to do that but it is just interesting to look at their things, and because of them doing that I engage with them and I am going to do an interview with Justin and we are going to talk about monetization strategies of podcasting. The fact that they do that opens doors for them. The fact that they are so transparent in their business may make some people want to compete with them. But for most people like myself, it makes me trust them. It makes me really grateful to them.
 
It makes me want to work with them and help them in whatever way I can just because they have that transparency and that trust there and I just want to see them to be great people. You know, they did over a half million dollars in revenue last month and I am not sitting there and say, Whoa, why are they charging 15% in brokering fees? Like this is ridiculous, they are making too much money. I am like, Good on you! Go and smash it! Like you are offering so much value, good on you. So yeah, I guess I will give you guys feedback on how that goes.
 
I was speaking to Ben who is a buyer’s agent that I partner with and I was telling him about these plans because he pay me a referral fee and that was going to be in there and he was just like dude, I do not care. You are transparent about getting a referral fee from me. Anyway, so it is no big issue. He was like then you do not need to do it. And he was kind of encouraging me out of it because thinking there is no point. And I totally understand that. There is no point.
 
There is no reason but I feel in me, there is some point. There is some reason. And I just should do it and then after I do it I find the point is, what the reason is. And so that is kind of cool. I did an interview today for podcastfast.com, edited a bunch of things, did another video for On Property, and so I have done a bit today. And I have done pretty well.
 
I did terrible, for those of you who wanted an update of my super smash bros tournament because you who is listening to this is not passionate about Super Smash Bros may…, right? Okay. For those of you who do not care about this, you can tune off now because there is no more start up stuff for this episode. But in my Super Smash Bros tournament, totally annihilated. Lost every game, lost every set, did not win one game at all. I play as Peach, Princess Peach, she is the best. Lost completely. But then I played a bunch of friendlies, I bought a couple of those and I feel like I got so much better.
 
I am really excited to go to my next one which probably will not be for another 2 months or something like that. But that was really fun. I bought new CIT TV, like one of those TVs with a big backs because apparently you have to play on those because otherwise there is lag on the HD TVs between when you actually input your control and what actually happens on screen.
 
So you need a super old TV to go with my super old game cubes. I bought one of those and it will actually arrive in a couple of days so I can practice properly in a tournament-like scenario, and I  have met a few cool people as well, someone in Gold Coast, someone in Brisbane, who hopefully I can meet up with some nights and practice with them and get better. So stay updated for my next tournament in a couple of months because I do plan on winning not just some games bot some sets as well. So there is a lot of practice to go in until then.
 
All right guys! That is it for me today. Until next time, if you want instructions go and buy some furniture.

Today I deleted websites that actually made me money. Why would I do that? Because I want to focus on the websites that make most of my money.

Hey guys. Ryan here from Instructions Not Included. Today, I had a horribly unproductive day. My mind was just not in it; it was all over the place. But I did make a big decision today about really focusing on the websites that I have.

What I did was I looked at – I had a couple of small sites one’s called InspiringAudioBooks.com another was called TiredAndSleepy.com. There was another one called YourEnergyDrinks.com and these were making probably collectively around about $1,000 a year, maybe, if you could count that much.

But I just felt like they were sucking up my energy and distracting me and there was always maintenance issues or they’d get hacked or something like that. It’s just a real pain in the butt to have these websites that I don’t actually want.

I’d always imagined that one day I would go and work on these websites and build them up or one day I would sell them for a few thousand dollars or something like that. But I was looking at it and combined they’re making maybe $100 per month.

Which means that they would sell for – actually, it wasn’t even $100 per month, I don’t think. Anyway, they would sell for like $2,000 all up, if I could be bothered to do that.

So, what I decided to do was just basically delete them. It sounds crazy to delete $100 per month from your life but they were just distracting me and causing me to lose focus and I’m making $5,000 a month from On Property, it varies from month to month.

When you’re making so much money from one site and other sites that are making combined $100 a month are taking away your focus. Then, it makes a lot of sense to really focus on just one website.

Another thing that I’m super excited about today is – tomorrow, I’m actually going to my first Super Smash Brothers Melee Tournament. Super Smash Brothers Melee is a GameCube game that was released in 2001. It’s a fighting game but it’s a very popular game and there’s a big scene behind this game.

People play competitively to win money and stuff like that. I’ve been really into this game for the last 4 months or so, ever since I found out that this was a competitive game.

I used to love Super Smash Brothers as a kid. When I was in High School, I used to play with one of my friends on 64 and bought myself a GameCube after I found out that Melee was actually the competitive version of this game. I’ve been playing that, loving that and then found out that there’s a tournament up in Brisbane, about an hour from my house. So, I’m heading out there, I’m going to be playing GameCube all day tomorrow.

So, I’m pretty excited about that. I play as Princess Peach, is my character. Random fact but, yeah.

So, I spent part of today trying to work out, how can I actually play this on my computer? Because there’s a Netplay version where you can play people from all over the world, like you’d play Call of Duty or any other game online. You can connect and you can play Melee against other players online. But, oh my freaking gosh! It’s just been so hard to try and work this out.

I think I’ve got a solution now but I’ve got to download this program called Xcode that’s 2.6 Gigabytes. So, that’s going to take ages to download, like, all night for me.

I’ve got the program but I can’t connect my controller to the computer even though I’ve got an adapter. It’s not programmed for the computer so you’ve got to hack it. No wonder there’s not a lot of people playing this online.

It’s really hard to work this out. I do actually own Melee.co. So, I’ve been thinking about starting up a channel or something like that to help people with the issues that I’ve been having and to help the scene to get it more competitive and easier to play and stuff like that.

So, that’s something that I’m pondering but, again, I don’t want to spread my focus. I think one of the good things about Instructions Not Included is I’m doing it, it’s a fun thing, I’m not trying to make money from it.

Whereas, with these other sites, I was. If I was to start any more sites like Melee.co or something like that, it would just be for fun with no intention to make money. If it grew an audience and made money, at the end of the day, then happy days. But I just need to consider it in my own mind that it is just for fun.

What else have I done today? I also am moving over PublicSpeakingPower.com. As you guys know, I changed the name to Teach Speaking and I talked about another domain, which I bought which is Outspoken.co. I’m actually going to change the brand name to Outspoken Co or Outspoken.co.

That’s kind of the update there. I’ve just been migrating that across today but I haven’t fully completed that. So, yeah, pretty useless day for me. But you can’t have a win every single day of your life. I do my best. I do my best, I do my best that’s a song that I could sing.

Alright guys. I’m just rambling. It’s Friday afternoon. As you can see, I have freaking lost my mind. I don’t know what is going on or what I’m doing. So, until next time. If you want instructions, go and buy some furniture.