Could you move from working 70 hours per week to just 2 days per week? Not everything in business as about increasing profits, it can be about improving lifestyle too.
Hey guys! Ryan here from Instructions Not Included and I am just doing some cleaning as I record this so if you hear some background noise or things like that, that is because I am actually doing stuff in the background. So hopefully it is not too annoying for you but I am not actually working. I am down in Sydney on holidays.
I actually live in the Gold Coast, in Queensland in Australia. So I am down in Sydney, my grandfather passed away as I think I mentioned in a previous episode. So we are down here for the funeral and we are just leaving one apartment to go to the next apartment and so I am just fixing up the beds, doing what I call the final sweep of the house which I just check under everything. I check every drawer, I check under all the beds just to make sure we have not forgotten some sort of toy or anything like that.
I have been actually listening to Instructions Not Included myself and I really loved it because it is 6 weeks behind where I am at now so the stuff that comes out today is actually stuff that happened 6 weeks ago. And so it is really interesting for me to see where I am at in my journey but then to look back and say, Okay, where was I 6 weeks ago? what was I thinking? How have I got to his place? It is a lot of fun for me to go back and look at that and I think the one that I was listening to today, I was talking about how I was just creating an eBook and I was creating the 30-day Property Journey eBook and I was going down that whole eBook path which has really been a bit of a dead end for me. I have actually removed the eBook link from my site.
I am selling like an eBook a day or something like that but selling an eBook for $2, making $2 a day, 365 days a year, what is that – $600, $700 in a year. That is not just going to quite cut it to feed the family of 5 that I have.
So I am now down the course path, looking at creating courses. I pre-sold my course for $50. I sold 18 tickets to that course. I have now closed it off. I have finished half of that course and so I still have half to go. And then I am going to be relaunching it at the full price. And so that will be interesting to go through and to say, Okay, this is something that I pre-launched.
People could have gotten this at $50 less but now it is actually available. What is the response going to be from people, are they going to be willing to pay $50 more. How much of this course am I willing to sell? I have actually the feeling that people will be more into it because it is not pre-launch, it actually exists. It is a course that I can download, that they could buy it and watch it straight away. That will be pretty cool to see.
But while we are down in Sydney, my best friend Ross is in Sydney. And so it was great. I caught up with him last night, it was after the funeral yesterday so I was absolutely shattered but it is good to see him. We text every single day but we hardly ever get to see each other. So it was great to see him. And then I was texting him today because I have really gone down the path of – probably the last 6 weeks to 2 months where I was saying, Yeah, I really want to grow my income. I want to make $150,000. I want to get rich.
We are not rich but I want to earn a decent income. Here is what I want to earn: $100,000 profit for the year which means I need $150,000 in revenue. And then I just kind of turned everything around and said, Well actually I do not want that. I just want a 20% increase in revenue from $60,000 revenue to $75,000 – $78,000 in revenue. That is my goal now. And I actually want to cut my work hours from 48 hours a week or so to 25 hours a week and I want more freedom to be able to go surfing and freedom to spend more time with my kids and family and stuff like that.
One of the things that really inspired me along with Jams Schramko, as you guys know, from SuperFastBusiness.com. He has a podcast as well. And he talks about effective hourly rate which means if you work out how much did you earn for the month and how many hours did you work in a month, well how much did you earn per hour? And I was talking to Ross and he was talking about his business. They do these market stalls at the big shopping center near here.
He was talking about how much they make at those stalls and how he could basically make the same profit that he makes in his little shop with these stalls being open in this big shopping center just 2 days a week. He was all inspired about all the profit he could make of these and I am making him aware of the fact that this could actually replace the income from your existing shop where you are working 70 hours a week. You could move from working 6 days, 70 hours a week to working 2 days or maybe 3 days, 30 hours a week or 40 hours a week, less 25 hours a week.
So I think I really inspired him. Not necessarily that they are going to do that and they close the shop, like I would not recommend that but just the fact that not everything in life is about growing your profits. Not everything in business is about growing your profits.
It is actually creating the lifestyle and the life that you want. And it depends like some people just want to run big business and that is the goal. I want tot grow the business into as big as I can be and that is completely fine. Some people have that motivation and I do not that that is a bad motivation. I do not think it is bad to not want to grow your business but definitely when you are in business, all the podcasts, all the business books, all the conferences, it is all about more, more, more, more, more, more profit. More business. Bigger business. More profit. Let us do more, more, more!
Let us actually sit back and say, Well, what is the purpose of more? How is that going to impact my life? If I earn an extra $20,000, is that actually going to change my living circumstances if I have to work more? Or can I actually improve my life better by earning less but working less at the same time? So I think I inspired him a little bit and as well talking about that kind of inspired myself.
See, this is why I do final sweeps. I just found this whole – full of food. So if you hear rustling, I am just packing some food. So I am at a point right now in my business where I need to work out really strategically how am I going to achieve this. How am I going to continue to increase my income but actually work less. And as I said, I think it was the last episode, I got through this week. I worked 2 days and I got everything done that I need to get done for the week.
There was more that I would have liked to do to grow my business but in terms of maintaining my business, 2 days a week — easy peasy. Just keep things going but yeah, I am getting there guys.
This course, we are good. I will talk you through the actual launch of this course and how that goes. But if the actual launch of this course goes good well then that will really inspire me for future courses. Because if I do the launch of this course and it sells well, then I can do a pre-launch for another course or I could potentially even skip the pre-launch all together and just go straight into the course and just create it and then sell it as a launch. I just need to work out what is most profitable for me. Pre-launch is great because you can test the market and you can say, Well, how many people are going to buy this? Is it worth creating it? But the problem is if you do a pre-launch and it is a minor success, is it worth the time putting in the time creating it? And I guess you need to have goals around that. But if I can do a good launch of this course selling for $100 each and if I can get residual revenue from this course, $100 every now and then, then this could potentially be the business model that I have been looking for that is going to move my business forward, provide lots of value to my customers. But also be residual for me and allow me to work less.
So, that is kind of where I am at in terms the business. That is kind of where I am standing at the moment. And it will be interesting to see like I still have those goals of growing my business bigger. I still have those goals of creating a big media company, education company, all of that sort of stuff but I also have this family goals and lifestyle goals. How do you balance that?
Anyway, I do not know why I created this episode. I am just cleaning. I am just inspired by listening to myself but I do not think I have anything super awesome to share with you guys or super awesome tips or anything like that. But I just want to share my thought process inspiring my mate in terms of setting goals, not just about earning more, more, more, more.
That is setting goals about living more, more, more, more rather than earning more, more, more because money does not always equal happiness. And he was working crazy and I was like, I saw him last night, met him at his shop because he was putting up shelving. And so I left at 10 and then he was going upstairs to do more work and then he was getting up at 4 to go to the shopping center. So he would be getting what, 5 hours of sleep at night, working like a dog.
Is it worth it to earn $50,000 more and to add more hours or to keep working more when you could just earn a little bit less, $10,000 less, $20,000 less but work a whole lot less. That makes a whole lot of sense to me and something that really inspires me and something that I want for my life. And I hope that inspires some of you as well.
Alright guys, I am out. Final sweep is almost done. Just have to take these stuff down to the car and then I will do the final final sweep just to make sure I have not forgotten anything while I am talking to you guys. Thanks for hanging out with me while I am cleaning up this holiday house.
Until next time, if you want instructions go and buy some furniture.
And also guys, you can check out all the episodes from Instructions Not Included by going to ryanmclean.net or you can head over to soundcloud.com/InstructionsNotIncluded and you can check out all the episodes over there. Peace out!
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