Ryan McLean : Slightly Unconventional

#20 Thinking About 3-5 Year Goals – Mon 13th July 2015

iniartworksmallToday I want to talk about working towards what you want your business to be in 3-5 years time. What do you want your life to be like in 3-5 years time?

So, I just had a week off, which was great! So, if you notice that there was a gap between the last episode and this episode, that’s because I only really record when I’m doing work and I just record one a day. I’m not trying to push it to a daily thing or anything like that.

Today, I want to talk about working towards your business or whatever you want it to be in 3 or 5 years’ time. Something that me and my wife have been doing. We’ve been sitting down, talking about, okay, what do we want our live to look like in 3 years’ time?

Because I feel like I’m at the point in my business at the moment where I can go in a multitude of different directions. My business is self-sufficient, self-sustaining. Really, if I wanted to, I could walk away from my business, work a couple of hours a week, earn enough money to get by, not significant money but enough money to get by and I could do whatever I want with my life. But I love my business, I’m doing this because I enjoy it.

I want to keep working on it. So, me and my wife need to decide, okay, where do we want to be in 3 years? And what sort of business do I need to have in order for us to be there in 3 years’ time?
Because one of the thoughts that I had, my big vision for my business, which is an educational company, is to really start to give educational access to basically everyone.

Affordable education for access to everyone and education in such a way that people can learn as they want to and progress as they feel inclined. And then one of my big passions is, I got this big vision of the future where we can go into third-world countries and we can use the internet in order to deliver education over there and to create an economic sustainable model around education to just improve people’s lives.

So I’ve got this big vision of what I want to achieve but then I’ve also got a family, I’ve got 3 kids. And so I’ve got a vision of what I want to achieve in my family. One of the things that I was aiming and eyeing about is scaling up my business. If you listen to anything about startups, they talk about scaling up, getting venture funding, millions of dollars so that you can hire people and scale up. And so, really, my business, in order for me to scale, the biggest roadblock that I have at the moment and the biggest bottleneck is the fact that I create all the content.

So, I create the videos but then I have a team behind me who then take those videos and upload them and transcribe them and put them into blog post, etcetera. But I create all the videos. So if I wanted to scale, then I would really need to get people to come and work for me who can create content and create videos as well. Which would mean hiring people here in Australia and it would mean having a studio, having an office that people can come to, having a fixed location.

And we’re talking about, okay, what do we want our lives to look like in 3 years? And I think we came into the realisation that that wasn’t really what we wanted. We didn’t want me to be working excessive hours trying to manage a local team here in Australia.

We wanted the flexibility to continue to grow our income, maybe slower than we could if we scaled up but continue to grow it but then still have the flexibility for me to take time off work, for me to spend time with the kids, for me to leave my business almost completely if I wanted to. And so, we didn’t really know where we want to be in 3 years but we kind of know the feelings that we want to have and the lifestyle that we want to have.

We’re very inspired by tiny house living so we don’t want to go big house but we want to earn our own house and be able to do that and there’s some things we want to do.

And so, basically, I guess the decision that we’ve come to at the moment, and if you follow me, you know I change my mind every week so this could change. But, basically, just going to keep working as I’ve been working and I’m going to scale my business through the use of technology.

And because every video I create stays on Youtube and the podcast stays on iTunes and the blog post stays on my website, which gets indexed in Google, I can actually scale up and get more and more traffic and generate more and more income by doing work once and then it creates this passive traffic stream afterwards.

So, that’s really the direction we’re moving towards is just being able to scale up my business in terms of me being able to create more content, more products that I can sell and then I might scale up my backend team so that I can spend more time creating content and then the backend team can just spend more time working on that.

So, there’s still some things that I do on the backend so if I could pull myself out of that, and then my job would just be creating content, well then, I would have a lot of freedom in my business.

I could just create a video a day, spend 10 minutes and then I’d be done or I could spend the whole day and create a whole bunch of videos and a whole bunch of products and stuff like that. So, we’re moving towards scaling the business in such a way that the technology is doing the scaling, not people.

And then I’m not going to have any employees and I’m not going to have a fixed base here in Australia. So, I can work from home, I’ve got this dream of getting a camper van and turning that into an office so I can work from a camper van.

Basically, I want that freedom to work around and so that means no employees here in Australia.

So, that’s kind of where I’m at at the moment and just don’t have enough time in a day, I feel. I earn enough money so I’m okay. But there’s a lot of products I want to build, a lot of content I want to create and I just have to pick and choose which ones I do.

So that’s my biggest struggle at the moment, is picking, do I work on this PodcastFast ebook or do I create videos for OnProperty or do I create videos for TeachSpeaking and try and get a product out there? What do I spend time on? That’s probably my hardest thing at the moment.

So, I think, what I’m going to do today and for the rest of this week is try and finish that PodcastFast ebook, get the first draft done. And then find an editor who can go through that with a fine-toothed comb and just make sure that everything is good there.

So, that’s where I’m at. I hope that you’ve enjoyed this kind of inside look at my thinking towards how I want to grow my business. Because I really do believe that businesses tend to self-perpetuate once they get in a rhythm and once you start to earn money in a certain way. So you really need to be smart in the decisions you make in the early days because that will often define the way your business progresses in the future.

Alright guys, this is me signing off from Instructions Not Included. And as you know, if you want  instructions, go and buy some furniture.



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