9 Rules to Level Up Any Side Hustle Watch Up What's Up Nick Loper here. Welcome to The Side Hustle Show. Helping you take back control of your earning power so your income doesn't have to stop. On your day job does. Today we're talking about scaling up your side hustle. We've got a lot of episodes on the 0-1 part of the equation, which is honestly probably the harder part, really something into existence and getting it off the ground. Not an easy key, but today we're
talking about the next stage. God from 0-1, now it's time to go from 1 to 2 to 10. Well how do you do it? We've got 9 rules to go through. Listen in to see which stage you're at today to see where you need to focus your attention next. To help me with these is a special guest who knows a thing or two about scaling. He's done it with multiple businesses, including flipping over 100 houses a year, sometimes without even seeing the houses, scaling, automating and selling an online education
business. It is the latest venture and online platform and podcast from millionaireuniversity.com. Justin Williams, welcome to The Side Hustle Show. Hey Nick, what's going on? What's up? Side Hustle Nation. Before we dive in real quick, Nick I just want to say I started listening to your podcast just over a year ago. We had taken some time off, we sold our business, and honestly it was hard to get back into the business world after taking some time off. There was a lot of demons
in there, and I found your show and started listening to it. Even though your show was for side hustles, and in a way people getting started and getting going, it gave me a lot of inspiration to keep going, and I just appreciate what you're doing. Being here is pretty exciting. You're one of the rare podcasts out there that both get the guests to really share everything that's going on in their business, but it's also real down to earth. Do you never get that icky feeling when
you're listening to you? I just recommend to you everyone. You're a mentor to my kids. Anyway, huge fan. Thank you for everything that you've done. I'm going to put that on a bumper sticky. You don't get that icky feeling. That's an endorsement. I don't know. No, it's so true. You just don't get that. A lot of times I'm listening to something. I get a lot of value, but there's kind of the back of my mind. I'm like, what's really going on here? You're just so down to earth, and I just
really appreciate what you're doing. On behalf of everyone, I'm sure who's listening feels the same. You're doing a great work. Thank you. Well, very much appreciated that makes my day. So if you're listening, we're doing three rounds with Justin today. We're doing the nine rules of scale or nine rules, two scale. We're doing a donate a business idea. He says he's got a good one for us. Stick around for that. And then we're doing the triple threat, a marketing tactic that's
working now, a favorite new or new to him tool, and the best book of the last 12 months. But let's kick it off with these nine rules. What's rule number one? So the first rule that we have is intent. Now, I almost didn't use this one because it sounds obvious. Of course, you have to have intent. But what I found is the number one reason and the way that we have scaled all the business we scaled is because it was our intention to do so. In our minds, we are always asking, how can we do this
better? How can we do more of this? How can we automate this? How can we get more done with less time? And what I found is most people who haven't scaled their business or aren't scaling their business for side hustle is it's not their intention to do so. Kristen Armstrong, who's one of the best women cyclists that's ever cycled, she said we either live with intention or exist by default. And I just see so many people going throughout their lives and they don't have an intention
to change things. And they just kind of are reactive to things that are going on in their life. And they don't really get the places that they want to go. So number one is intent. Your brain is an insanely powerful tool. If you give it a problem to solve, it'll usually go to work doing it. So first of all, you got to have that big vision. You got to know where you want to go. You got to have the intention to want to grow and scale. And that's role number one.
That's a really powerful one. I'm kind of with you. Like do you even include that? Because it's almost so obvious and almost woo woo. Like that power of positive thinking. If you believe it, it'll start to capture. We've heard from so many entrepreneurs, like if you don't have this vision of where you want to go, how are you ever going to get there? Like trying to do a Brian Scootamore from 1-800-Gott junk. He called it his painted picture vision of like, hey, five years
down the road. This is what the business is going to be doing. This is what it's going to look like from a branding perspective. And then just kind of working backwards to get from the reality that is today. How do we make that happen? I love this line of we live with intention or exist by default.
And I find myself guilty of this as much as anybody. So this is not like preaching from on high. But like you're going through the motions day to day and you feel like kind of just in maintenance mode and like you described it reactive versus driving your own agenda forward, living with intention. It often feels like it was too busy chopping down trees to sharpen the saw. And she kind of gets stuck at that. Like anything that has worked for you exercise wise or other resource wise to
get clear on this intention or where you want to go. I always start with the goal. Often it's a money goal. It's a number goal. For example, when we started flipping 100 houses a year. Remember, we're at a wild buffalo wings with a bunch of other investor friends. And together I started counting up how many houses we had all flipped collectively that past year. And it was just over 100. And I said, I want to flip 100 houses just my business alone. Everyone laughed at me. They thought I was
crazy. Yes. Like a house every three and a half days. Like how does it see? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And up until that point, we definitely hadn't done that many, right? But I just thought, why can't I do this? So I started thinking about how can we do it? How can we do it? It started with a goal. I also wanted to get to a seven figure income. So it was constantly just working those numbers. How can we get there? How can we get there? And then I mean, what kind of growth? I don't want to like
we'll go through the rest of the rules, right? We'll share what how we're going to help them get there essentially. So rule number two. Should we move on to it? Yeah. Let's do it. Okay. Rule number two is eliminate. Essentially the way this works is you want to write down everything that you're currently doing and your business and your life. And you just want to start getting rid
of anything you can. I'm all about having multiple streams of income. But if you're spending a lot of time doing some things that you're not getting great results, you might want to just let those things go. Peter Drucker said there's nothing so useless as doing efficiently. That would shouldn't be done at all. And I don't know about you Nick, but there are a lot of times where I'll find myself working on this project. And it's taking a ton of time and energy and I'm getting frustrated
with it. And I just sit and think about it and I think about my long term goals. And I'm just like driving me to you do this. Like is this even something that matters or is important right now? And sometimes I'll just eliminate it completely. What was an example for you when we started millionaire university. Terran, I were doing everything. We thought we had to have our social media as dialed in. We were doing the podcast. We were trying to collect emails. We were doing
blogging. We were doing Twitter threads, which now you have threads threads. Like we were trying to do it all. And it was fun for about a week. And then it started to get exhausting and overwhelming. And we were like, what are we doing? We don't even have to have a business. But we're doing this business because we got bored and we weren't fulfilled. So we started the business. And now we were just working and working and working and not enjoying anything that we had done. So we just came
to the realization, okay, what is the one thing that we want to focus on? And it was the podcast. We still did some social media stuff, but it was very limited. We didn't worry about any other metrics. We just worried about growing our podcasts. We weren't getting traction in anything. Here we had Bill other successful businesses. We had pretty good cash flow coming in. And we're just working our guts out and not getting any traction because we were spread toothed in. I
weren't really getting anywhere. Is that the deciding factor of if I'm not seeing traction in the combination of I really don't enjoy doing it because the counter argument would be like, well, I'm not seeing traction, but I only gave it a week. I got to put it some breaths. I got to put it some time here to grow an Instagram audience to go a Twitter audience or something like that. So I think it's a combination of both, right? We decided, what are we best at and what do we enjoy
the most? And let's put everything else on the back burner. It doesn't mean we're not going to go back to it at some point, but let's put it all in the back burner and really double down and focus on what we enjoy the most because it gives us the most energy and what we think were the best at. So we can really focus in on it. And that was the podcast and the truth is, even at the beginning, we weren't getting a lot of traction in the podcast. We had done several podcasts in the past.
And we thought, this is like our fourth podcast. We're going to kill it. And we published it and it was crickets. Like we had several episodes ready. We built this website. We're excited for having to reach out and be like, yeah, I'm going to university. You guys are going to change the world and nothing happened. It was so disappointing. And even after we lo and do the other stuff,
who is still crickets. But after focusing on that one thing, just growing the podcast numbers, in any way we could creating the best content we could for the podcast, we did start to see traction to the point today where we now in the past 30 days have over 260,000 downloads. And it's just everything has changed. Now we have traction. We can go back and start to do some of those other things over time. Yeah, I feel like there's a certain pressure to be everywhere and try all
these different channels. But the brands and creators that you see doing that likely have a team in place. So they've been doing this for years where they really honed in the systems for it. 100% and if you're trying to do that as a side hustle, you just like, oh my god. And then that's a reason I've had such a hard time, beginning the time to short form social platforms. It's like, I'd so much rather create long form content that's going to be around for years. 100% then come up
with this thread that may or may not get any traction or eyeballs. It's gone tomorrow, even if it does. I guess it's just kind of a weird and one of the things that I eliminated early on that I felt was very necessary in the business was the email opt in form. I had like first name email, right? And some people would not feel in the first name. It was like an optional field. But I would, I've still remember doing this in a webber copying and paste this email. And sometimes it would be like
John Smith at Yahoo.com. It's like, okay, I'm going to guess that this guy's name was John. So I'm going to put in John and like just so we would show up like more personalized in their broadcast emails. It's like if somebody didn't care to put in their name, like just I don't know the cumulative hours I've probably spent doing this in the name of a more personalized experience. But that was something that has long since been eliminated. So that's rule number two. You eliminate what is
not getting results or driving you towards that intention. But what's number three for us? Rule number three is automate. So you want to take that same list that you had all those things on you eliminate everything you can and also eliminate things in your personal life. They say the average person consumes about eight hours of media per day. So imagine if you can just cut that in half. If you're at four cut it to two, I'm not saying don't watch any TV or like I would be a
hypocrite right or Netflix or anything. But just cut that in half. It'll buy back a lot of your time. So then you're going to take that list of what's left over. And number three and four kind of go together. You're going to write down you're going to figure out what you can automate, which is number three and the number four, which is delegate. So you're going to look at this list and you're not going to think can I automate or delegate these things. You're going to think how can I
automate and delegate everything on this list. Now you want to start with the things that take the most of your time and you feel like would be the easiest to automate or to delegate. So for us, for example, when we were flipping houses, we spent most of our time making offers on houses, fixing up houses, managing contractors, that sort of thing. So some of the things that we did was we hired an assistant. We trained her our exact criteria for making
offers. And then she later trained our agents. And we had all these agents out making offers, which we gave them authorization to make offers on our behalf based on our criteria. And they were making hundreds of offers without us even knowing anything or seeing the house or seeing that number until one got accepted. Then we would briefly go over it and review it, make sure it was good. We had a 14 day inspection clause. It was going to say there's a certain level of trust in there,
but as long as you have like, over 100%. Yeah, get out of jail free here. Yeah. And then we had just a couple of contractors that we worked with and they had the people they worked with. And we would use the exact same materials for every house. The decision making went out the door. We were
buying similar types of houses and we'd use the same color paint, same type of finishes. And then another thing that we did, we realized we were spending a ton of time working with contractors in coming up with the beginning would have like three people go to the property and come up with these different bids and would haggle back and forth. And I was sitting down one day and looking at these bids. And I was like, you know, at the end of the day, they're all ending up about the same
place. So why don't we just start there? And we came up with a list that had every line item that the contractors would do. And we came up with a pre-agreed price and we had our contractors agree to that ahead of time. So we no longer had to do multiple bids. There was no longer any haggling. We knew exactly what we were paying for a house for paint for like the square footage of the house. We knew we were paying for flooring based on how big the flooring was. It was all laid out. It made
it very simple and really stayed a lot of time in that way. Okay. Yeah. So rule two, three and four eliminate, automate, delegate in that order, right? In no sense in automating or delegating stuff that doesn't need to be done in the first place. 100% the figuring out. And even if it's something as simple as sending an email, like I have found certain triggers wouldn't necessitate sending an email to another member of the team. It's like, okay, well, the trigger is that file is delivered back
from the editor. So now I need to send a note to the writer that it's ready to summarize. Like, oh, if they're uploading it to a specific folder in Google Drive, like, okay, make used to be Zapier, but like make.com, like, can automatically send that email trigger, that task notification system, or you can automatically add tasks to Asana. Even if it's just individually, it only took a couple seconds, but like now you just don't have to think about that and then delegating that
to somebody else on your team. The combo platter of automation and delegation can be super powerful. For me, it was bookkeeping tasks years later than I should have, whereas like every PayPal notification would come through. It was kind of like the dopamine hit of like, oh, I made some money. I get paid. I better go log this in my up to the minute accounting spreadsheet. Basically, it's like, oh my god, the tasks, which in costs of all this sort of thing. 100% having a
bookkeeper that can tap into your accounts and just create that summary for you. More with Justin in just a moment, including how he's delegated himself off his own podcast and more rules to scale your side hustle right after this. That's the sound of another sale on your online Shopify store, but did you know Shopify powers in person selling to? It's true. Shopify is the sound of selling everywhere online, in store, on social media, and beyond. Shopify POS is your
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job credit to get your jobs more visibility at indeed.com slash side hustle show. Just go to indeed.com slash side hustle show right now and support our show by saying you heard about indeed on this podcast indeed.com slash side hustle show terms and conditions apply need to hire you need indeed. So in our house helping education business essentially the way it worked out was like what were all the main things that we needed to do? We need to the tech guy need someone who was constantly
making offers and funnels and sending out emails. So we brought on a guy to do that. And then it was essentially coaching. So I initially did the coaching myself, but then brought someone on to help with the coaching. And over time, brought on other coaches eventually our COO was one of our first high level students. We got to the point that business where I was no longer needed in my house, uping business or my education business or my coaching business. And I would show up to events
and just kind of talk a little bit and record stuff and just kind of hang out. And eventually when we were ready to sell the business, it was an easy exit because we weren't needed anymore. It makes it more sellable or makes it sellable in the first place. Yeah, exactly. It's not reliable on you. But it's interesting too with the podcast. In fact, it's rarely you behind the mic from how it started
to where it is today. Yeah. So the same thing with our podcast now. It's like what are the main things that we focus on? What are the main levers? And it's create podcast content. I always use you as an example. I'm like, is our content as good as Nick Lopers content? If it's not, we got to keep working on it, right? So that's kind of the gold standard is we're always trying to improve the content. And then we're trying to grow our numbers, right? And I'll get into that in the upcoming ones. But
yeah, you're right. We're to the point where Tara and I who Tara's sitting over here, but we rarely even show up on the podcast. So we've created this podcast that has over a quarter million downloads per month. If I want to show up, we show up. But my goal is to create businesses where I don't have to be a part of if something happens. That's because the truth is there are some days I don't want to do anything. There's some days where I feel super motivated and want to talk.
And I like to run businesses in a way that I don't have to be involved if I don't want to or I can't. And that to me personally is kind of like the ultimate true freedom. Yeah. Was there any pushback from listeners? It'd be like, who's this new guy asking the questions? No. So the way we did it, and this was pretty similar to how we did our coaches was the first person I brought on was Brian Geeren who side us will show guest. Yeah. Yeah. I heard on your episode. So I reached out to
them. I was like, Hey, you are awesome. Can I interview you? So we kind of built a relationship. And then I asked him, I said, Hey, do you want to help me interview people on the show? And of course, he was excited to do that because it gives him notoriety. We pay him a little something, we give him a little bit of that. We kind of made it this win-win situation. There wasn't pushback because they had already heard from him. And then I think I, I don't know if I interviewed him again,
or the first couple of times that he interviewed someone. I did the intro and outro. So I helped the guests kind of get warmed up to him. You know how you watch a TV show or a series. And if a new person just comes in and you don't know who they are, you're like, Hey, who's that? What's going on? But if you kind of get warmed up to him over time, you're like, Okay, I like this person. I can jive with that. So I did the same thing with the other two hosts that we have. I was people,
you know, Eric Fisher, who he's been on the show a couple times. I've been on his show. Long time podcast to be honest. I know. Long time, man. So I usually like to have the audience hear them a few times before I let them just kind of go on their own and do their own thing. We have not had any pushback. I still listen to every episode. I'm kind of like quality control. There have been some episodes that I've sent back and said, Hey, we got to get more details on this one, right?
But the goal is eventually where I don't have to do that quality control. Okay. So that's rule number four, delegate. How do you delegate the items on your list? How do you make the business? Ultimately, it doesn't have to be today, but someday in the future run without you. What have you got for number five? Number five is come up with your de-riskify plan or your risk mitigation plan. De-riskify is just kind of a fun word came up with. So this was actually pretty huge for us.
And it's something that I don't think a lot of people think about. I think the first few are kind of a little more obvious, but I think the main thing that holds people back from taking action on their dreams and starting their side hustle or their business is fear. It's the fear of what people are going to think of them, the fear of failure, the fear of what if this doesn't work out. And I think the thing that keeps people from growing or scaling their business is fear of risk, fear of
what am I going to lose? So one of the things that happened before we started scaling our business was when we first started in the real estate game, it was in May of 2007. And for those of you who know your real estate history, that was not a good time to get into real estate. But we started out doing a thing called wholesaling, which essentially was we would put houses under contract and then we would sell the rights to that contract. We never actually bought the house. So we weren't
risking any money, we weren't risking any repairs or anything like that. A couple years later, when we went to flip our first house, I was scared to death. The thing is we weren't even using our own money. We're actually using one of our investors money, but I was so afraid to lose his money. And we made it through that deal, but it caused me to not want to buy anymore houses. So we got into rental properties and I learned rental criteria and learned how to understand cash flow.
And we just went to town. And in a four month period, we ended up buying 12 houses, which was more houses than we have bought in that shorter period of time. It was really exciting. But we got to appoint in our life where we were way out of money. Our investors were out of money. We didn't how to pay the bills. So kicking and screaming, we had to sell some of those houses and we ended up selling for those houses. And from selling those four houses within a couple of weeks, we made more
money than we needed to pay our bills and all our expenses for over a year. And that just changed everything for us. I was like, wow, what if we could do this every month? What if we could make more money than we need for an entire year every month? So we ended up selling the rest of the houses. At the same time, we started buying more houses, but that also met that rental criteria. And it
just helped us go to town. I no longer had that thing in my brain, that limbic brain, that lizard brain, the fight or flight that was getting so afraid of taking action because I didn't know what the end result was going to be. I was afraid of losing money. So I was stuck in my tracks. I didn't have that anymore because I was buying houses. I was flipping rentals essentially. I had a plan B. I had a plan A plan B. If something didn't work out, then I would end up with the 100 rental
properties that I initially wanted in the cash flow that I was looking for. So that combined with the systems and all the things that we've been talking about, just a lot is to really take off and scale from there. We got a JV partner who put up this guy had deep pockets. It wasn't like the other guy that I was borrowing money from who this was his retirement. This guy understood the risk. And we will save all the gutter down. Okay. Have a plan B that is still acceptable to you. I think
probably makes sense. First is like the Warren Buffet thing you make money when you buy. I'm going to do the forced appreciation thing and sell this to another investor. Let them be the long term holder of this thing. But I'm going to give my money out quickly as a way to de-risk the whole operation. I think about what's probably on a lot of people's mind for the last nine to 12-ish months in the world of online businesses, the algorithm updates and AI and stuff. Like how do I
de-risk my business from AI? Whether it's diversifying traffic sources, whether it's building an email list, whether it's selling your own product, how you get a pet in the AI first world, the answers may look differently for person. But that's number five here is this de-risk plan or come up with your de-riskify plan. And it's going to be different for everyone. The truth is I don't have about you. But the number one thing people tell us, because we ask our audience like, hey, what's
the number one thing you're stuck with? And it's always money. They're like, I don't have enough money. And you know this, I know this. You don't really need a lot of money to start a business. There's so many different ways you can start a business with little no money. So it really depends on your situation. We could talk about this for hours. You love service businesses. I love service businesses.
There's not a whole lot of risk in going out and trying to get these clients for service business. In most cases, right? It's like the startup costs for almost anything that we talk about would be sub $500 or there's some creative way to make it such that it is that it's within reach for you.
Not having to take out a second mortgage or something to get something off the ground. And when you've kind of minimized your downside exposure and you're taking a swing at something with some upside with some scale, it's only a matter of time before something hits and erases all the losses because the first thing may or may not be the one that actually works. 100% having the wherewithal to be like, well, that doesn't make me an abject failure. It just means that idea didn't
pan out. So okay, on to the next thing. So I'm definitely keep your risk slow, keep your goals high and get after it. So all right, that's number five, the D-risk plan. What have you got for number six? Number six is what I call the $60 an hour rule or the 3x rule. If someone can do something like a service business, whether it's cleaning and all you did painting, whether it's gutters, curbs, trash cans, card detailing yard tree removal, all that stuff, power washing, parking lots. I'm just
naming all kinds of stuff. If you can come up with one of these businesses and you can make at least $60 per hour, you can scale that because then you just hire out the labor at $20, $25 an hour, then you focus more on getting the new clients, you hire out the labor, and that's how you can scale those businesses, also known as Nellett, then scale it, right? Okay, so this would be like an agency model. This is the cost of labor ratio that you would like to see. You want to have
the final price be triple your labor cost. Exactly. So my son, for example, he just turned 18 and he's trying to figure out what he's going to do in life, right? And he's been fixing phones, and he's been doing a few different things, but he's gone to the point where he can make $100
an hour fixing phones. So now he just has to improve his marketing. He has to be able to get more clients, and then he can hire people to do the driving and to do all these different things, like all the different things that we've been talking about that will allow him to focus on his
highest and best use of time and ultimately be able to scale the business. Yeah, this is one where in the context of SEO and online business, like, okay, based on this projected keyword volume or traffic volume, if it ends up hitting, and this projected affiliate ad, it's like really hard
to kind of try to figure out, well, what's this page you're going to make if it gets to the first page of Google, but say it does and say it is going to make $1,000 a year, best case scenario, like, okay, so it wouldn't be unreasonable to pay somebody $300 to write that article for you, and then allow the rate to repeat. Yeah. It's like a timing of cash flow. In this case,
like, you're going to earn that $1,000 over the course of 12 months, hopefully you may not. So that's like where the risk comes into play, but that's where you could kind of pencil me and we'll say, what's my labor cost or what's my potential labor cost for whatever model that I'm in? And then you know, you start to buy back some of your time, and then you're able to do the whole think smarter, not work harder, right? You go from labor to leadership, and that's how you really
go. You become the rainmaker. That's what you focus on. And then you eventually can hire someone to help you with that marketing, but you've increased your customer base pretty significantly. And then hopefully you have repeat customers and so on and so forth. Rule number seven is the marketing flywheel. How can you creatively get customers for free, or even get paid to acquire customers? That's coming up along with Justin's business idea donation
and more right after this. Yeah. So this one, I have lots of titles for it, but the marketing flywheel, self-liquidation offer or break even funnel. Russell Brunson often refers to the break even funnel, and that's kind of how he grew click funnels was he created a webinar and spent X amount of money to get people to register for the webinar, sold the webinar for like a thousand dollars, plus six months of click funnels. And the whole concept is you are you're making money by acquiring
customers you're acquiring customers for free. And he talks about how he would sometimes talk to venture capitalists and they would ask him what's your cost to acquire customers like oh no we we acquire them for free or we make money when we acquire customers and like wait this doesn't
work for my numbers and my algorithm and it totally throws me off. But understanding this concept once again, I think so many people who want to get into business think oh I got to have this big huge tech idea and invest millions of dollars and most businesses fail and all this stuff and it's
like no like you just have to figure out one of these models that work for you and for us right now we're just focused on how much does it cost us to acquire a new listener and it took us a year to build up to this, but we're at that break even point that it cost us about six to eight cents
to acquire a new listener and we're making about six to eight cents for every new listener. So if someone listens to just one more show we're spending a dollar to make two dollars and the goal is to keep growing that I have these different numbers where I know we could make ten cents per listener
and even up to like 15 cents per listener. If and as we continue to do that these numbers get better and better and then over time you could add on programs different things you're selling though we don't have any of our own programs at this point but we're already to that break even
or make money point right there's a thousand different add-ons you can make to that to where it's you got your money making machine essentially right yeah and that's the whole goal of business for every dollar you put in you're making two dollars back three dollars back for how can we
excel or make that number bigger and bigger that every dollar we invest we're making more and more back yeah it's fascinating we've heard from newsletter operators well if every I mean there's a very elaborate equation to start to go into it but like well what's a new subscriber worth to us does it make sense to pay two dollars for a subscriber if they're going to open 50% of the emails and they're going to stay on the list for nine months and they're going to be exposed like okay we're
going to make five dollars from that one subscriber on average so yeah we're happy to pay two bucks for it and so this is on terms of the podcast downloads this is just on average we have two or three four ads per show at this cpm so every download is worth to us six to eight cents or six to ten cents yep yep I'm constantly looking at the numbers and analyzing numbers and just seeing oh if we pull this one lever and we spend this much money what does that do to our bottom line yeah that's
really interesting I like only very recently started doing any paid podcast promotion and it's interesting to look at like the cost per download metrics or cost per subscriber metrics yeah my never never really thought about it that way and then yeah if you have a potential guest could you
share the cost with that because they're getting some promotional benefit out of it but yeah what platforms do you like in terms of going out and buying listeners so at the beginning we had an agency that we hired that was connecting with a lot of other podcasters but it was costing it's
like several dollars to get a download then we started going to like the podcast players and we started to get a lower amount but one of the gotchas something you want to watch out for is what we didn't realize because we just didn't know what we didn't know until we were starting
to work with an agency to get sponsors for us was one of these podcast players a lot of the places they were promoting to were in countries that sponsors just being honest they just weren't paying for those areas so we got to the point we had like 20% in the US and our agency was like that's
not going to work so we had to go back to the drawing it's like Facebook ads like oh yeah it's cheap if you want to advertise to a non-US audience totally gotcha gotcha but then we found the right players and if you invest enough certain players the amount just goes up depending on like how many
people are bidding on it right or buying the ads and then there are other players that you can negotiate with the podcast player we've done such a high volume at this point where we've gotten some of the players to come down like hey we'll keep buying in volume we just want a good deal we
mainly buy like the US but then they'll throw in other places like Canada Australia UK so we've been able to literally like 3x the amount of listeners that we would be getting with them because we've worked out deals we're buying in bulk we know they're good listeners we know we're getting
paid well for them but yeah another one I really like this isn't a podcast player but it's called Podroll Podroll is amazing because you can get a great CPM by allowing other podcasters to do what's called a feed drop I don't want to get too technical to into the weeds here but
doing a feed drop is where another podcaster can put their episode in your feed and Podroll has a platform that facilitates doing this so initially we we got doing podroll because we're like oh you can make 50 to a hundred dollar CPM but what we realized is we wanted to be on the other end of that
where we're paying 50 to a hundred dollar CPM for people to listen to our show because it sounds like a high CPM but they're actually listening to your show it's not just someone hearing a one minute ad on someone else's show on your podcast right they're listening to your show so you get
the downloads and then you get some people that stick with you and that's how you can grow so that's been huge for us it's pretty exciting man you can do that I know we're talking about podcasting but you can do this like you said with an email list you can do it with I know I
would say a blog I know there's been a lot of stuff with the updates and whatnot but it's just all about and I guess that gets us to our last one which is oh no there's two more I haven't talking too much anyway I'll say that but you can do this with anything yeah figuring out what
that marketing flywheel is what that self-liquidating offer maybe if that may be possible in your industry or units like how can you acquire customers for free I think it's a creative thought experiment if nothing else to figure out where are customers at how can I set this up
in such a way that it doesn't cost me anything to get that next lead into the funnel that next person into the pipeline there all right that's number seven the marketing flywheel or the break even funnel what have you got for number eight so number eight is you want to understand the velocity
of money and returns on how they work and this might sound simple but I'm telling you most people do not understand it in fact I read something earlier that said two thirds of American adults cannot pass a very basic financial test we just don't learn this stuff in school but the velocity
of money basically says for example we started flipping houses we were making anywhere from 15 to 20 percent on the money that we invested into a particular house it would take us about four months to flip a house so there's 12 months in a year we could essentially turn that money three times
so essentially if you're making 10 to 15 percent and you're doing that three times a year that's it's probably more than that I think yeah I messed up 45 to 60 yeah 15 to 20 percent or the numbers you make 15 to 20 percent on your money and you do that three times a year you're making 45 to 60 percent annualized yeah nominally I'm sure there's like some other velocity time component or time value element to it too but they're right it's like okay how quickly can I get a return on it and how
often can I leather and repeat is that my understanding exactly we're making 15 to 20 percent per house we're doing that three times a year given money and that was 45 to 60 percent for the year so what we did I mentioned this JV partner I went to this guy this guy had deep pockets millions of
dollars knew the real estate game was just kind of retired and I said hey here's our track record here's all the houses here the numbers we're getting would you be interested in putting up the money and we split the profit and he took a look at it and he's like pick yeah they would take a little
more than that but essentially that's what it came down to and he essentially gave us a blank check so we now knew we have the systems to buy the houses we have the systems to fix up the houses we just needed more money and that was our money and that's the other thing I helped us really grow
because his return all he did is he's like okay so I'm going to make anywhere from 22 and a half to 30 percent annualized that's a heck of a lot better than what I'm making and anything else I'm doing since that time I've talked to a lot of different people and done this with a lot of
different businesses we talked to a guy that had like a grass fed beef business so he raised cows essentially and he was like I want to do more of this I just don't have the money and I'm like okay how much does it cost you to buy a cow how much does it cost to feed the cow like what are all the
expenses that go into that cow how long does it take to the cow it gets slaughtered I hope I knew one less thing isn't you know it gets too offended by this but how long does it take till you're able to essentially sell the cow we broke the numbers down and it was like a hundred percent
annualized returns I'm like dude I'll give you all the money you want and I said a better thing to do though is now that you know that you can make a hundred percent annualized return on the money invested just go bar to 10 percent okay and then you're essentially making 90 it's arbitrage right
you're taking other people's money you have the system in place and you're making a killer return on that money yeah this is an interesting one and I think about it most often in the context of an e-commerce business or a physical product business okay I'm gonna buy 500 bucks of inventory
sell it next month for 600 and now I've got $600 worth of inventory and I can sell it for 750 and then kind of like continue to level up and multiply your money but like how you would think about it in context of inventory turns and coming from the car business like how much inventory is in
our parts department right now that's always like the dealers wanted to know like how many millions of dollars are we sitting on parts like what has it sold lately do we really need this to sit on the shelf like could that money be better deployed elsewhere and it's like okay this could really
apply to any business that has an investment component to a cost of labor or a cost of goods type of aspect to it like cost of houses in a flipping type of business you're right e-commerce is a great example you just essentially run the numbers if the numbers make sense and you can either bring
on a JD partner if you don't want to take on the risk but usually you'll find that the cool thing about business is if and when like you said it's hard to get started it's hard to get that inertia hard to get that thing going put that thing up into orbit but once you do a business
typically will pay you significantly more than you're ever going to make in any other kind of investment which then allows you to get the investors coming to you that's what I believe in I don't think most people should go out and raise a ton of money unless you've experienced in that
kind of thing but if you're not that experienced in raising money and growing a huge business now at first then scale it right go start that e-commerce business go start that SaaS business whatever that thing is and then start to get some proven numbers and if you can
kind of someone like me and you can show hey these are the things I'm selling this is how much I am making these are the returns I'll give you the money no problem no problem all day long all right well you maybe get some calls after this sounds good is this number eight velocity of
money number nine on the nine rules of scale go for it so number nine is the aggregation of marginal gains also referred to as like the compound effect but essentially the aggregation of marginal gains many people know about it from the book atomic addicts or James clear and his
blog it essentially is from the British cycling team back in the day for like a hundred years they were horrible they only won like one gold medal in that time and they brought in this guy to be the new manager of the cycling team so his name was Dave Brailsford the way he did things as most people
came in there like all right we're going to make this huge improvement by doing this one thing it's going to change everything and it just wasn't working out so he was all about this thing that we're talking about the aggregation of marginal gains and he just said if we can take every little
component of what it takes to be good at cycling or to make you faster whether has to do with the bike or the athlete then we're just going to do that we're going to make one percent improvement each day as much as we can and all these different categories and within five years the British
cycling team just started dominating they started winning almost every gold medal they started winning tour de frances which they hadn't done previously in that hundred years and it just changed everything and he was just focused on the one small thing that's what I would invite everyone
who's listening to do we're in the information age you're literally listening to a podcast there's so much information out there I love like swipe and deploy see what people are doing and just be like oh let's try that it's the different industry but I can try it here we try it out we test it
out we keep going with what's working we keep trying to improve the things that aren't working I'm constantly talking to my team about how can we improve the podcast how can we get more numbers how can we improve everything that we're doing just little by little and as you do those things over
time you'll see a huge difference in your business yeah this one percent improvement every day what's like it doesn't make a huge difference it may not even be noticeable but you know over time it really does start to compound and that's like Einstein's eight wonder the world compound
interest and all this stuff where it really does start to lead to some exponential growth over time but the trick is doing it consistently making it a habit some the compound effect for number nine let's move on to round it to the donate a business idea around what have you got for us here so I have business ideas every day as I'm sure you do as well but the idea and it's related to all the things that I've been working on combined with different things that have been happening in my life
so recently we traveled the world for nine months as you know we were in Rome just a couple of months ago and as we were in Europe in these different places we're doing all these tours and somewhere okay
but someone were kind of long and a little boring but it was almost like a necessary evil I felt like I'm glad I'm doing this tour but I'm kind of bored and it's a little long and I thought you know there needs to be something called ten minute tours or something like that and I know they have audio
tours but I was like what if there was like a podcast that had like a tour then my mind got going to like a or a history lesson and maybe it's longer than ten minutes maybe because now that I'm picking about the ads that you can put in I'm maybe it's a little longer so we can put more ads in
but you have 30 minute to 40 minute lessons and there's so many lessons you could do on history just in Italy alone because we're in Italy for like 38 days I'm like you could do a lesson on that on that on that on that on that part of the reason why I have this idea too is I know another guy
who has a history podcast but he does it himself and his returns are bigger than ours just because there's a lot of business podcasts and he invests in his podcast and the amount of people that stick in the amount he has to spend to get more listeners are significantly higher than what hours are
so I was taking all these ideas I was like I don't know a lot about history but I know there's a lot of people out there who do know a lot about history and they're probably not making a ton of money I thought you could reach out to them and then Tara made an ad for our podcast the other day
we got this great guy the great voiceover voice just the number you know just sounded amazing and I was like you get the person who writes these things get the person who's going to record them and then just work with different podcast players and promoting these so this guy once again he spends
all day creating this you could tell he works really hard on him I was like man you could put this thing together bring the people together you could pay them equity so there's no cost or if you have a little bit of money you can just pay them whatever they would get paid to ultimately you
make more money yeah or it may even be like an AI voiceover artist 100% yeah I was thinking of all that too I was like you could probably do some AI stuff you could probably do especially like AI online is kind of tough because you have Google like crawling in and everything but podcasting
no one's crawling podcasting right so you could even create these lessons through AI you could record them yourself or you could have someone else record them but then the same idea like for every dollar you spend you could easily make two back and you could essentially have this thing be
you could be a big part of it or you can just kind of outsource it to different people and anyway I'm just sitting there at the call of CM and the forum and I'm like this guy's kind of boring but people meet these lessons are incredibly valuable and I think it would just take off anyway if I had more time I'd do it but yeah that's the business idea donation audio history lesson or audio walking tours we've been on some that were incredible we had this British guy in Barcelona
who was just like so into the history of the city and here we're going from the 5th century to the 15 that's awesome right across the street from you know and he was really into it and he told us that the FC Barcelona logo is like there's four red stripes he's like that was like the King's
bloody fingers like running down a dude I will never look at that that's also the same way again and then we've had other ones where you're kind of like yeah I'm getting something here but it's he's the bar now that everything else measured against it's interesting but yeah this could be an
interesting one hiring historians to write or repurpose lessons maybe they already have that I licensed these and then hiring a voiceover artist or using some AI voiceover to you know be the voice of your podcast might be interesting to play around with and you can do the same
thing with science or any subject right it goes on and on but just yeah okay in a mind yeah yeah you got to scratch your own itch from these boring tours yeah exactly all right round three is the triple threat this is first off a marketing tactic that's working for you right now
could be this pod roll stuff could be something else you got in mind yeah and I think I've kind of went through that it's just working with the podcast players to promote the show and we have our numbers pretty dialed in like I'm pretty aware of what it costs us for each pod player if that
doesn't work I reach out to him and try to negotiate a better deal or we focus on other ones and then from that like I said we're going to leverage it into working more with podcast swaps and all that so that's kind of our main focus at some point we do want to launch a program
but we're just trying to hang in as long as we can because once we do that it's a whole other thing to take care of we're just trying to generate a bunch of cash because cash will allow us to hire more people and just keep that fly will go right yeah if you get somebody to tune in
for multiple episodes they join the email list maybe they eventually buy the to be determined future product totally yeah there's a lot of good things that can happen and it could be an affiliate marketing at the beginning right there's so many different options a new or new to you
tool that you're living right now for me this might sound kind of boring and not that exciting I just love my Google calendar that is my second brain anytime I have an idea I thought I put it in my calendar if I have to do I put it in there and then I just either delete them like a lemonade
automate or delegate that's my list right so every day I'll have my list of top priorities I'll check it out the day before make sure it's what I want to do for the next day and I'll delete it I'll move it over like sometimes months away sometimes it felt like a great idea and then
it's not anymore but I'm always trying to figure out how can I systematize this how can I do but I use the Google calendar it's not that sexy but I use it all the time it's my calendar of where to go where to be what to do it's what I live by I never wake up and don't know what to do because it's
always there very good not a new tool but a very useful one at that so I like that one as well it's like and I find myself to block off that time and be like it's not important right now I'll I'll put that off until next month but like it's in there it's kind of a reminder yes you thought
this was important at one point exactly is it still all right so that is the tool and a favorite book from the last 12 months so in getting ready for the site relic into the book procrastination on purpose by Rory Vaden he also has a good TED talk on it and he kind of talks about the focus
funnel and he he guys go over I don't know about you but sometimes I'll teach something or talk about something and I almost forget where I learned it from so as I listen to that again I was like oh yeah he talked about the eliminate the automate the delegate and then he goes as far as
to procrastinate on purpose right if it's not a priority now and then concentrate that was a pretty good read I thought he talks about ROTI return on time invested which is a lot about what we've been talking about and how that's like the best investment you can make is working on your
business instead of just in your business and it'll pay you back dividends for time to come yeah return on time you start off doing the 10-dowell and hour things and you graduate to the hundred dollar hour things and then hopefully you graduate to the thousand dollar hour things and
I like this I have not read this book procrastinate on purpose but we'll link that up in the show notes for this episode you just follow the link in the episode description and I'll get right over there millionaire university Justin Williams thank you so much for joining me be sure
to check out the podcast check out the website at millionaireuniversity.com any parting words of guidance before we wrap up here I would just say take action that's what everyone says but take action and then after you've taken action don't just keep taking action start to think about how can
I use leverage how can I grow how can I implement the things that we're talking about today so that you can really get to the point where you're making more money with less time and once again I want that to sound like cheesy or or like woo woo or fake but you really can the same things that helped
us get to the point where we are flipping a hundred houses a year also gave us more time because if we were the bottleneck if we're the one doing it there was no way that would have happened same with our education business so just take action and then start thinking about how can I take
that next level of action that will give me to that next level and just keep living a life on purpose yeah such an interesting distinction between how can I make extra money right I'm going to go solve this problem and then flipping the switch be like how can I be a business owner and trying
to fire yourself from the doing stuff and promoting yourself to the CEO role and it's a different set of questions I think it's really interesting stuff so again millionaire university.com check out the podcast I was an early guest on there Brian was my interviewer for that one I think that's a
good one to start with but big thanks to Justin for sharing his insight big thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone as always you can hit upside hustle nation at.com slash deals for all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place thank you for supporting the
advertisers that support the show that is it for me thank you so much for tuning in if you're finding value in the show the greatest compliment is to share it with a friend so fire off that text message pay I think you like this episode hey I think you should check this out until next time let's go out there and make something happen and I'll catch you in the next edition of the side hustle show hustle on