Ryan McLean : Slightly Unconventional

#79 What’s The Payoff 3 Years From Now?

iniartworksmallWith my business performing well at the moment my mind is freed up to think about what I should be doing now to set myself up to have the life I want in 3-5 years time.

Hey and welcome to Instructions not Included. This series is about me, Ryan McLean, as I try and make a decent living online.

In this episode, I want to talk about actually planning for where you’re going to be in 3, 4 maybe 5 years’ time because that’s exactly what I’m doing at the moment.

I’m trying to put in the work and trying to put in the plan, the system in place so that in 3 years’ time, I can do what I want to do.

Generally, for me, it’s really hard to plan forward more than 12 months because when you’re running your own business, when you’ve got 3 children under the age of 7, things change pretty quickly.

Me and my wife, our friends call us gypsies because we move so much. We’ve relocated to different cities 3 times. We’ve moved house 14 times in the last 7 years.

So planning ahead can be really difficult for us when it’s more than 12 months into the future. Generally, we only live in a house for 12 months, if we’re lucky.

But what I have been thinking is like, we have started homeschooling our daughter who is 6, she’s in Grade 1. We enjoy it.

We have a lot of reasons for doing that. Thinking of starting a website on homeschooling where I’ll discuss those, but I won’t waste your time here. But basically, in my mind, anyway, I’ll talk about it in a different episode if people are interested. So, we’re homeschooling our daughter. Our son, who is 4 is in what’s called pre-prep.

Here, where he does 3 days a week and then they start prep or like, kindergarten next year. And so, we’re talking about, is he going to go to kindergarten? Is he going to do homeschool? What do we think we’re going to do? He’s happy at school, but then, he wants to do homeschool because his sister does homeschool. I don’t know.

We don’t really know what’s going to happen. But then, fast forward 3 years, and our youngest who is currently 1 to 1.5, he will be 4 to 4.5 and we will be making these decisions again for him.

So fast forward 3 to 4 years, there is the possibility that we could be homeschooling 3 children if that’s the route we decide to take. Now, we haven’t decided to take that route yet so we’re not sure. But we kind of need to prepare for that and I am currently doing the majority of the homeschooling.

The responsibility is on me. So I spending the mornings doing school with my daughter and then come to work. If we were to add one more child to homeschool, I can foresee it being a lot more difficult than it is. I may need to drop my work hours. You know, things may change.

Basically I’m at the point in my business now where the business is quite successful. onproperty.com.au is quite successful. It makes decent revenue in terms of my own products. Then, there’s revenue on top of that in terms of recommending a buyer’s agent. It’s one of the biggest property blogs in the country.

It’s got a big presence in terms of podcasting and in terms of YouTube that is just continually growing, which I think will be the future. Anyway, that’s ticking along and doing well. But given the Australian property market, it may continue to do well for another 10 years or it may not be a stable source of income in the future. We’re just not 100% sure about that.

So I’m trying to think now while I’ve got stability of income, spending a couple of days a week doing On Property. That frees me up, I’ve got a couple of days a week to do some other things. It frees me up to think, “Okay, 3 years or 4 days down the track, let’s just imagine that I am stepping back from work a bit.

I am doing more homeschool. Hopefully, we’re travelling as a family – that’s something I would really love to do. What do I want my life to look like? What do I want my income to be coming from?” all that sort of stuff.

They’re the kind of questions that I’m asking myself now. Because I don’t have to ask, “Where is the next paycheck is coming from? How are we going to survive the next month? What do I need to do to make that happen?” I can begin to ask, “Okay, in 3 years’ time, what sort of revenue streams do I want to have in my business? What sort of flexibility do I want to have?”

The ultimate thing for me is to generate as much semi-passive income as possible. I do make money from a bunch of different sites. On Property makes the lion’s share – 90%+ of my income. But I do get advertising income, I do have affiliate income from other sites like my public speaking site, podcasting site.

I’ve got a site about online marketing. I’ve got a site about Super Smash Brothers Melee. I’ve got this personal podcast as well, which doesn’t really make any money at the moment. And then I’ve got a software tool that is associated with On Property as well.

I’ve got another niche site. I’m thinking starting another one. And so, I’ve got a few sources of income and they all kind of add up a little bit. But the great thing is, like with the public speaking site, I haven’t touched that in probably 3 years now – 2 to 3 years. That’s something I want to start re-investing in. But that still makes money today, which is just absolutely amazing.

I’m just going to go ahead and check my Google AdSense in terms of YouTube as well as in terms of the website – in terms of how much money that website is making. Because that’s something I want to scale up. I want to create a lot more content for that. And so, let’s go ahead and have a look. I have not used this site in quite a long time. There it is. I’m actually going to change the brand name back to Public Speaking Power.

I decided to change it to outspoken.co, but they never did anything with it. So I think I’m going to change it back to Public Speaking Power. Wow! I have 711 subscribers and I’ve got 36 videos on there. So, not too many videos. I just got to login to a whole bunch of different stuff so bear with me for a minute. Let’s go ahead and sign in.

So in terms of revenue from YouTube, we’re looking at $10 a month. Not much, but that pays for 2-3 coffees a months. Actually, I pay about $3 per coffee, so a coffee a week it pays for. And then let’s go ahead and look at the performance reports for the website. Common reports, websites. Okay. Not last 7 days, let’s go last month. We’ll look at that. In terms of that revenue, we’re looking at above $60. So we’re looking all up about $50-$100 a month.

I’d love to take that up to $100-$200 a month. And then, as well, work on other stuff and build them up. Even if I had 10 different things making $100 a month, but that is super passive. That’s just a baseline income that could pay my bills if we needed to travel. Do you know what I mean?

That’s what I’m trying to think about in terms of the next 3 years. How can I build up these things? Change this from $50-$100 a month to $100-$200 and then do that multiple times and do that for a couple of different sites. Last month, let’s do this month. So this month’s tracking very similar, but I do have a niche site that is now generating probably $10 a month. So, yeah, I’m building up that sort of stuff.

So it’s kind of going back to what I was doing years ago in terms of content creation and niche sites and stuff like that and I come back to this. But I guess, I just want to take the things that have been working, build them up. And then opportunities kind of come out of that.

So with On Property, for a long time, it was just advertising. Then, I had my own products. Then, this agreement with Ben came up and I’m making more money now through that agreement than I’ve probably made through advertising in the history of the website. As you grow bigger, as you become more noticeable, as you build up in the community, these opportunities come out of it. And so, I’m hoping that as I build up these other sites, opportunities will come out of those as well.

At the moment, I am focusing on maintaining On Property, keeping that source of income. But as well, building up my passive income and doing work now that’s probably not going to pay off any time soon. But they will hopefully pay off in 3 years. And so we can look back on this in episode 500 in 3 or 5 years’ time of Instructions not Included.

I’ll be travelling and I’ll have these passive income sites on the side and I’ll be doing what I really enjoy, which is creating content.

Hopefully, this will work. I wish you the best in your business. I hope that you’re not just thinking about today, but you’re thinking about 3 to 5 years down the track as well. That is it for me. Until next time, if you want instructions, go and buy some furniture.



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