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.
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