Opportunity Awaits podcast Episode Transcript
Aaron Henriques: Do you want cash coming in without even having to lift a finger? Would you like to go from where you are now to earning income passively instantly? Or how about, would you love to make $10,000, $20,000 passively every single month with little or no money down and not taking up your time? Well, I've got news for you.
[00:00:23] You've probably heard this crap before, right? Maybe you've even paid for some shitty little course that soldier a dream and hasn't worked now. If you're like most, it just will never, ever work. And the truth is the real truth is from my own experience is that there is never truly any thing called passive or 100% passive income, especially when you're just starting out.
[00:00:53] It's a myth, it's a dream, but you can create. a mostly passive income. You do not need the perfect business plan. You don't need business cards. You don't need tops with your logo on or tons of money to get started either. So if you're prepared to come back to reality for a little bit and put in the time and effort it takes, now you can be rewarded with having a passive or mostly passive income stream for years to come.
[00:01:53] So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go for. Seven, mostly passive income streams. And uh, go through seven posts, mostly passive income streams. But first of all, I'm going to talk a little bit about passive income and the realities of having it. So why is passive income not really passive?
[00:02:16] The truth is that you might see these people, particularly on social media. It looks like they're not doing anything to make a load of money, but you forget even the fact that they're posting constantly to make it look like they're not doing anything, they're having to do something. Right. So it is just one of those things.
[00:02:36] You do have to do something it's not just going to suddenly land on you. You've got passive income, just land on you from nowhere. You're going to have to do something to get it in the first place. It doesn't mean you always will have to be there. That's why I use the phrase mostly passive income.
[00:02:54] So. Then you got to think about why'd you actually want it, like, what is it for? Is it because you just want to sit at home, watching Netflix all day? That's fine. If you do, there's no right or wrong here, but I can tell you now that when I'm not working on projects, I've got mostly passive income. It can be really, really boring.
[00:03:13] There's only so many times that you can, go for walks or go to some adventure park or something like that. There's only so many times you can do that stuff. And particularly when most of your friends and family are not that way inclined as well. You'll find that even though you've got the whole 40 hour working week or most of your full chow working week as free time it's, it's maybe not as fun as you think.
[00:03:40] So how much do you want to earn? And what do you need to earn so people can pluck numbers out of skylight. I don't know. I want to add a million dollars a year. What is it for? Have a think about that, how many I'm thinking about how much you it is you actually need and why you want it, is there something you actually want to get, is there a boat you want, there's nothing wrong with that.
[00:04:04] If you want a boat, get a boat do you want to fly to space? So, you need to get a load of money to get on one of Musk's or Richard Branson's or Jeff Bezos's spaceships, whatever you want, but just think about why do you want it? How much do you actually need? And are you prepared to put in the time for it now?
[00:04:23] Is there enough profit in the product or service that you're going to sell? Or are you going to need tons and tons of customers to make any money at all? Now, just to be very, very clear, very clear. I am not a financial advisor. I'm not, I really not. If you watch my last video, I told you then, and I'm telling you again, I'm not a financial advisor.
[00:04:47] If you need professional financial. Yeah. We'll go somewhere else. It is not me. All I can tell you is stuff that I've tried myself or looked into and that's it. You make up your own mind. Don't blame me for your mistakes. So I'll move on. Yeah. So I'm going to leave the last one. Well, the very last one is the one I know the most about, and it's actually the one where I make most of my own money.
[00:05:14] So just stay tuned because it is a proven model and I have made a lot of money for it and it's the sort of money where it will replace a very good salary. Without having to do the 40, 60 hours, whatever is work. And it's definitely not that thing where, you gotta be working 18 hours a day, and sleeping under a desk to to make it.
[00:05:40] So, anyway, I'll start off with the first one. One I've actually tried. And that is selling a product on Amazon. Now this might not be anything new to you. There are seven. This is number one. Some of the products on the Amazon is not as easy as you think. Some people can make a killing on Amazon and then a lot of other people are making nothing or minus money.
[00:06:07] Right? So my suggestion for selling on Amazon is if you're searching for something yourself that you cannot find, then perhaps there are other people like you also searching for. And maybe it would be really great to have a product on Amazon. Now recently I couldn't find a travel charger with a USB-C plug, like a worldwide travel charge, a USB-C plug eventually found one that was suited for what I needed with all the different connections and bits and bobs or whatever.
[00:06:39] And I just felt like it was really expensive and it's something where I could go off. I don't want to, and I'll explain why, but I could go off and go and source that product. Cause I'm pretty sure there's other people with apple products, looking for a travel charger with USB-C connections on it. And there were very few available, certainly in the UK.
[00:07:01] So where you can discover products like that is on alibaba.com. So you can discover products that you can sell on Amazon. And if you use fulfilled by Amazon, so Amazon FBA, it will reduce your time because they will ship it. And they, you can do to sales via prime, but it also reduces your.
[00:07:21] And getting traction on Amazon is pretty hard. I found it pretty hard anyway. You can use ads, but the cost of the ads can sometimes once you've taken out the selling fees on Amazon obviously your costs, your importing costs, your shipping costs, your taxes that you have to pay for importing the goods.
[00:07:39] The fulfilled by Amazon costs, when you include ads in that your profit margins can be really slim, which is why I said the reason why I haven't just gone in straight and fought. Yes. I'm going to sell Amazon charger. Travel charges on Amazon is because when it comes to the cost of the product, the importation and all that stuff, and then thinking about the sort of ad spend your needs, get initial traction.
[00:08:06] It's just not for me, something that I'm prepared to do, because I don't really care about it. It's not a long-term thing for me. I would just be interested in. A fairly easy win if I was doing something like that, that isn't it. And the reason why it isn't, it, there's just not enough profit per product for me to justify doing that.
[00:08:26] So that's one of the things I mentioned earlier about having enough profit. So number two is selling a product on eBay, and that is where I actually started. My very first sort of real online business type thing is selling on eBay back in 2003, maybe 2004. It's similar to Amazon, but you need to fulfill it yourself.
[00:08:47] So you need to pack it. You need to ship it. You need to deal with customer inquiries, et cetera. Amazon will do all of that for you. But if you're selling on eBay, you need to do all that yourself. However, lower selling costs, the ads are available and you only pay when the product sells on eBay at the moment for the ads.
[00:09:05] Whereas Amazon, you pay either way. So you could spend a hundred quid in ads and $100 in ads or whatever, and you get zero south happens. It happened to me. I did actually ended up selling a load of stuff on Amazon, by the way, I'll just go back to number one. I did sell the products that I had on Amazon.
[00:09:23] I didn't continue using it just because there was nearly no profit in it for me. I couldn't charge enough to I couldn't charge enough. So the only way I could really make a profit was to either get a completely different product with a bigger margin. My margin was something like $12 or something like that after everything and that wasn't including the ad spend.
[00:09:43] So it just wasn't really anything in that. You'd have to sell tons and tons and tons to make any money. And I'm not interested in earning $12 per customer. So yeah, you can sell a product on eBay back to numbers. And that is where I started out. Like I said, I was selling Japanese footwear Japanese martial arts footwear.
[00:10:03] I'll just add it. It wasn't just random Japanese footwear. That was because I saw a problem. I used to be a marsh into martial arts back then. And the only sort of like Japanese Tabby, the only ones were available with this cheap crap made by or made in these Chinese factories for the American market, particularly.
[00:10:22] And they were just horrendous. Like they were really thick and horrible and yeah, they were just nasty pieces of crap. So I found a way to contact someone in Japan. He didn't speak English. I didn't speak Japanese. Somehow. We made it work. He would ship in a load of things and I'd sell, 30, 40 pairs a week at his peak.
[00:10:41] And back then considering my age, that was decent money. It was, it was good money for me. So yeah, you can set up products on eBay obviously now. The world is more open and everything's a little more international and there's a lot more competition on that. But one of the benefits that you can get by selling on Amazon and eBay, both of those particularly is you may have heard of drop shipping, right?
[00:11:05] I don't like drop shipping. I kind of don't like drop shipping is because if I order something today, I don't want to wait three weeks to get it. I never your customers. So selling the product on Amazon that is actually in the Amazon warehouse, it gets shipped to them within a day or two, or selling the product on eBay that you've actually got stock of yourself.
[00:11:28] I think that's a much quicker sale for your customers. It might keeps them happy. They don't, they're not going to wait weeks and weeks for the product to arrive and then find it's actually damaged or not complete, or they've sent the wrong product or something. If you were doing something like drop shipping.
[00:11:43] So drop shipping is definitely not one of the things I'm going to say about passive income despite its popularity. I've tried it as well. I'm not just talking from I've heard something. I have tried it and I tried it for a while and I sold stuff on that. Yes, it's sold. The biggest issue was getting emails.
[00:12:04] Where's my product. Where's my product. And I don't know. Cause it's coming from China, they send it by boat or something. I don't know. It takes ages. So yeah, that's the first to Santa products in Amazon Senator products on eBay. Now the third one is a bit random, bit more different. It's like high, monthly income stocks and shares or high, monthly income.
[00:12:30] In stock. So basically you could earn probably like 5%. You need a lot of cash to be able to to be able to get those gains. They're not guaranteed anything in the stock market and shares. They go up and down. So you can lose a lot of money. You can make, you can make some money as well. They're more long-term, but that sort of longer term consistent income.
[00:12:50] So if you're looking at high, monthly income funds in, in the S in the stock market, then that's something where you'll get a monthly income based on whatever you've invested. And if you do have, 50 grand lay in about, that you maybe you're saving for a house deposit, remember I'm not a financial advisor, so don't quote me.
[00:13:10] But if you did have £50,000 pounds laying around for like a house deposit and you knew you weren't going to buy a house in the next, I don't know, two years or something like that, you could easily put that 50 grand into. Hi, monthly income stocks stocks, funds stocks and shares fund. And you could own 5% of that.
[00:13:32] 6% of that, whatever it may go down though. But more often than not, you're probably going to make your money with these they're they're managed funds, but they do have fees involved. Now, if you stick it in the ice in an ISA, if you're in the UK your gains are tax-free, which is great, so you can put up to £20,000 pounds per tax year.
[00:13:52] If you're a UK citizen into a stocks and shares ISA, and any gains you make from it was tax free, which is great. I don't know how that plays out in America. I know they've got 401ks and all sorts of stuff, but one day I actually research it because I'm really interested in this stuff in America. And.
[00:14:10] I just haven't really researched it. So if anyone knows, let me know if you do have any, like anything, like an ISO where you can invest money tax-free and any gains on that is actually tax free. If you can DM me or something, let me know what it is and what it's called then. Yeah, that'd be great. So the next one online courses, eBooks, anything like that, the digital economy, they take a lot of time to create, so they are not passive.
[00:14:36] They're mostly passive. But when you're thinking about online courses, you've got to think, is there a market for it? Is there a market who's actually willing to pay the money for your course? For whatever it is that you have to share. Probably most people have something in them that people are willing to pay for.
[00:14:54] And then you got to think about how you're going to find them, how are you going to market this product? So you're probably going to need some cash unless you've got like a good social media following, or you're great at social media organically and can do that. But again, Particularly at the start.
[00:15:07] It's not going to be passive. However, if you'd get it rolling over time, if you're making consistent sales, you see people have their funnels that they will, they'll use a platform like click funnels, for example, it's a much easier way for you to create your website and, and sort of membership area, whatever than doing it yourself.
[00:15:29] Then, you can eventually make that mostly passive. You have to still do with customer service inquiries, unless perhaps you've got a VA or something like that, which some people do I've got to. So yeah, online courses, eBooks, anything in the sort of digital space that you can sell online like that, then that.
[00:15:50] Is possible, but think about is the market big enough? How are you going to find the people? How are you going to access them? And think about the amount of time is going to take you to create it. Perhaps you might want to, pre-sell a course case. If you're going to make a course, put it out to your community and see, do you actually want this?
[00:16:09] And if they're saying, yeah, yeah, this sounds great. We'll take their money, make them put their money where their mouth is. And when they put their money where their mouth is, then you create your course, but don't spend six months creating some course that no one's going to buy. Right. Next thing, join an affiliate program, partnership program, anything like that.
[00:16:28] So that's particularly if you've got an audience of a particular niche the benefits of it is you don't need to create your own product. You don't need to cut your own product. You don't need to create your own customer service, anything like that. You can just go and sell someone else's product, and then you get a commission from that then.
[00:16:47] I prefer. And that she's one of my own affiliate programs that I run is a recurring income program. So an income where someone pays like a monthly or an annual subscription, and every time that they renewed their subscription, you get paid. That is a mostly passive income. Now you can potentially autopilot that.
[00:17:09] So if you've got ads running or anything like that, so you're going to need to find, to find a way to find the market for it. And you might want to run Google ads or Facebook ads or something you're using your affiliate link. Now just be mindful that lots of affiliate programs do not allow you to use paid advertising like Google or Facebook ads.
[00:17:31] Because it's actually competes with their advertising, which increases their ad costs. That's why. Right. So it makes sense why they wouldn't want you to, but there are overs that do like my one, I don't care. Run Google ads, Facebook ads, if you feel like it. But you don't have to. So that's one way you can get it out there.
[00:17:50] Or if you've got a podcast like this, you can put it out there, put the links in the show notes, you can put it on your YouTube channel. You can put it on social media, your email lists. If you have one, there's, there's so many ways that you can sort of promote it and the affiliate program, and you're not responsible for the end product.
[00:18:08] You just get paid your commission on the sales that you generate. So my program is one way you can sell SEO services and that search engine optimization to any business that has a website. It's simple, it's a simple concept. It's a simple thing to explain to people, get SEO after a time, we'll bring you up to, towards page one of Google, that's it?
[00:18:32] Yeah. So if you find, if you one of my affiliates, for example, you could go out there and find some businesses. I don't have SCA, maybe they've got, maybe they're a new business and they've got a new website and they want to get found by people on Google or whatever you sell that to them every month that they pay me, I pay you.
[00:18:51] That's just how it works. So affiliate programs are really great ways to make a load of money in a, in a decent amount of time, like without it taking too long, without too much effort on your part. Next one invest in businesses or partnerships. So is it a bit of a long one?
[00:19:12] But you can look at there's different ways you can invest in businesses. And there's so many ways I'm not going to cover everything, but I'm just going to cover bits and bobs here. So you can look at stocks, investing in the stock market, like I've already sort of alluded to, but I was more talking specifically about.
[00:19:31] Which bond was it? It was point free point free was specifically around high income funds, which are paid monthly. So they do exist on there. However, the investing in a stock market whether they're big or smaller companies, generally speaking, they're like longer term investments. If I S if I'm talking to someone about investing in the stock market, it's not to try and make short term cash.
[00:19:59] It is to build it up over a longer time. And lots of those companies do pay dividends every year or every six months or whatever. However, there are some, like I found out recently, like Facebook do not a fact, a lot of the tech companies don't pay any dividends. So really you've only got the long-term growth to go by, unless there's something else.
[00:20:18] I don't know. But yeah, I, I bought some Facebook shares because I'm ho I'm really interested in the metaphor. Oh, I'm going off track, but I'm really interested in like the metaverse and all that stuff, right? Yeah. So I just thought, you know what? Facebook is going to explode if they get this right. And so I've bought some shares, what are called Metta now aren't they, but I'm going to call them Facebook because that's how you know them.
[00:20:39] And yeah, but you can also look at partnerships, so all investing, I'm going to say it again. All investing has its own risks. Stocks go up and down and I'm not, I'm not your financial advisor. So don't quote me, go and get your own advice. So some stocks I've mentioned that already don't pay dividends.
[00:20:56] You can invest in in small private businesses though. They're the ones I'm actually more interested in. You can have more impact in those as well. Particularly if you've got business skills that you can, you can help them with as well. You can make more impact with your investments there, whether they're cash investments or time investments, which I talked to you about.
[00:21:15] So you can invest in small businesses that are not on the stock market using platforms like crowdfunding platforms, such as Crowdcube. Now it takes a long time for them to become profitable. If ever they, you could lose all of your cash that you put in. If you are putting in cash, unless you've got any UK we've got something called the seed enterprise investment scheme or the enterprise investment scheme, SIS or EIS investments.
[00:21:43] And you can write it off from your tax. Which mind countless just done my first lot of writing off, writing off the EIS investments from my tax. Because in the long-term, if they do fail. You've not lost as much as you would. You don't lose a hundred percent of that if you're in one of those schemes, but you do need a certificate for it.
[00:22:04] Now that's one way using platforms like crowd cube, like through crowdfunding search, crowd funding, wherever you are locally, there are plenty of sites out there. I just mentioned Crowdcube cause it's one I use. So over time, these, these companies can pay income in the form of dividends as well.
[00:22:25] Now you can invest directly or partner with other people like into their businesses. So if you know of someone or you go on platforms like the angel investment network, you can find small businesses who are looking for money. It could be £5,000 pounds or they want a £1 million pounds, whatever it is.
[00:22:44] And you can pay part of. You know the cash in there, but some of them are also after more than money. A lot of the time solo entrepreneurs are looking for more than just money. They want someone who can actually help them with the nitty gritties of the business or bring something to the business.
[00:23:00] So I'm going to give you an example of one of my own. I've recently entered the silent partnership, but it's, semi-solid at the moment at the moment, but it will eventually be fully silent. And that's a 50% equity that's in a commercial finance brokerage. There was no cash invested at all into that. I've loaned it like 200 credits.
[00:23:20] Something is nothing. It was to support really. It was to support a mentor. The managing director of that company now is to help them accelerate in, sort of general business and marketing areas that they knew. Absolutely nothing about, which has taken me over a decade to learn myself. Right. So I'm bringing in over a decade.
[00:23:40] Experience into them, just so that they can basically give them an instant business so they can get all the, they can get on with the technical part that I don't really understand what the broker side of it. They know that or the business side of it, they didn't know. So helping them out with that, bringing them up to speed without them having to go through all the trial and error that I did.
[00:24:00] And literally hundreds of thousands of dollars or pounds, whatever it is you want currency you're looking at to be able to get there. So my time in this at the very start amounted to a few hours per week, and meetings used over the phone mentoring, looking at some stats every now and then we just a few months in, we've got, well over half a million pound of deals on the board that haven't converted yet into real cash, but they are deals on the board, which are being progressed right now.
[00:24:32] Now. If 1% of those go through, that's still great. If 50% of those go through, that's great. There's, there's tons of deals going through our boards at the moment in advanced stages. So for those of you who might be sitting there thinking, well, you're not doing anything, your business partner is doing everything, but you're getting 50%.
[00:24:55] It doesn't really sound fair. Right? Well, firstly, I actually suggested that I take a lower percentage when the company was being formed. They want either 50, 50 split. With the option to buy back a certain percentage after 18 months at the value on the day. So I actually agreed to that. Eventually I still think 50% was team March, but that's really what they insisted on.
[00:25:21] They wanted it to be equal in that. So that's fine. Now you might not be able to add value to a bit. In that way. I've not really gone into everything about it. Cause it'd just take too long, but you might be able to add value to a business like that. You may not have like the background or experience or skillset that someone else needs to for you to add value, but they always need cash as well.
[00:25:43] So it might be if you've got $5,000, 10,000, 25,000, whatever you've got, you can exchange that for equity. So you own a portion of that business. You're not running it. That's the beauty of it. You don't, if you want passive income, you don't want to be running the business necessarily. Right. So if you invest your money into a business like that, which is someone else's business that you are investing in.
[00:26:08] So now you own a piece of the little pie. Yeah. But before you do something like that, make sure you've carried out your due diligence on them. The business idea, satisfy yourself that it is a viable business, and that is a good investment because you could lose every single penny that you put in every penny and get nothing back.
[00:26:31] Right. So be sure that you are happy with your investments and some, you lose some you win, but if you've only got a finite amount of money, be really careful about where the money's going, what it's being used for. All right. So you can also be creative with these deals. So if you are really cautious about, the potential super new business, not really got much sort of trading history, they maybe have sold, a few thousand dollars of product or whatever, but they haven't, done hundreds of thousands of whatever.
[00:27:10] Basically, if you're putting in $5,000 and they've only done $20,000 or sales, you might be able to get a fairly large chunk of the business. I'm not talking about 25% guys. Not, it doesn't work like that, but you might be able to get a fairly large chunk. Whereas if a company has done a few million and you're only given 5,000, you're going to get tiny, tiny portions.
[00:27:31] So the swings around about three each. So you can be creative with these deals. It's up to you to negotiate. There's no set rule as such. You can negotiate with these deals. Now something I see regularly by Mr. Wonderful is Kevin O'Leary from shark tank. If you don't know him is a deal where you will get a percentage in equity, but you will also get back a certain dollar amount until you've made back your money or two times your money or three times your money for every product sold.
[00:28:02] So product was self, like a $100. Let's say that it's got a margin of $50 like of profit. He might turn around and say, I'm going to take $5 every product that you sell. Until I've made back three times my money and I also want X percent equity in the business. That's something you can put to people.
[00:28:22] And that's something I'm really interested in doing when I'm looking at my next investment in a company like that. Particularly if it's one that I find pretty risky or where I want to make sure I'm getting some of my money back, like from the very beginning that's something that I'd potentially put forward and you can be creative with your solutions.
[00:28:40] So put it out there and negotiate with the business owners and, see what you can come up with now. Last one, finally, cause I've got sore throat start a service-based business online. You don't want to glorify job. This is the one where I've got the most experience in. Service-based businesses online, not really a product person.
[00:29:02] I liked the idea of pre. I just find them a pain in the ass. That should be an honest view. I don't, I, I don't really, I haven't really got, got to grips with selling physical product myself online, properly, and I guess it's probably, cause I'm not really had anything. I dunno if I give a damn about, I guess to, to really put that much effort into it now, again, starting a service-based business practice, like any business, I don't care where it is, what it is.
[00:29:34] It is not going to be purely passive from the start. I don't care. I don't care who you are out there. You can come at, come at me all you want, send me wherever you want. And tell me what you think is a passive based business that you can start up online. And it's immediately passive. I don't know of any, unless you're calling people, even then it probably not passive.
[00:29:55] So it's, it's one of the things you are going to have to put in some time and effort at the start, particularly now, one of the ones that I've made most of my passive income from, or mostly passive income from, because you're still not a hundred percent passive. It's like probably 99% passive for me, but it's not a hundred percent and it hasn't always been that way.
[00:30:16] So it's taken years to get where it is today. But that said I could easily replicate what I've done now within six to 12 months. Now, as I've said that we have nearly a decade of experience in the industry. We have six to 12 months and that's my cleaning company. I've got somebody, something cleaners at the moment and six, seven, I don't know, recruiters and office staff or whatever.
[00:30:43] And basically I could replace what I've got now within six to 12 months because of the lessons I've learned over the years now, you don't have those lessons. You don't have that experience. And so how long did it take you? Who knows? You can shortcut these things. You can look at business coaches, you can get people who've already done it.
[00:31:00] You might find them willing to take equity instead of you paying them cash. Or it might be a mixture of the two, people can help you shortcut. Like my business partner has done. Like I spoke about in the last one, given me, offering me 50% of the company in exchange for more.
[00:31:19] Knowledge and experience to be able to help, help them start up the business. And actually get, get going with things and have a sounding board, have someone to speak to you and shit's going down and shit's going wrong and it has done. And it's, it's helped them to have me on the end of a phone.
[00:31:37] Sometimes it's three or four times a day that I might get a phone call. This has happened. What do I do about it? Emergency? I know, Joe man, it's not so bad. Let's talk for it, work for it. And we get through things. So anyway, somebody reporting things for you to consider, right? If you want to start a passive online income business.
[00:31:59] The first, most important thing I reckon is you cannot repeat. You can not be core to running the business. If you are required for that business to function immediately. Shoot it, put it in the bin, set it, alight, be done with it, find something else. Because if your end goal is about a passive income business, but you are required to do it, then it is never, ever, ever going to be a passive income business ever.
[00:32:36] All right. So that's the first thing you cannot be core to running your business. You need to be able to be that person that can go on on holiday for two weeks and the business will still operate without you. So it needs to be easily replicated needs to be scalable, simple systems for staff to follow.
[00:32:55] So you may have heard of creating systems. People don't often understand what creating systems could mean. You want to be, creating literal documents or videos for every single person's job and the individual tasks that they've got in that. So that if they drop dead, I suppose they don't need to drop dead today.
[00:33:19] They, if they decided to leave, let's be a bit nicer then if they decided to leave your business, okay, you could get someone else in and say, Hey, read this stuff, watch these videos. And they will probably know 85, 90% of what it is they're meant to do and how to do it. Right. So you want to create simple systems for people like so systems and processes for your staff to follow.
[00:33:44] There has to be a clear profit margin. Don't Bolivar, in my opinion, no screwed up wishy washy stuff. Don't bother. With something where there's just rubbish profit margins, or there's like a tiny margin that is just no point or the margin. So small or the product price is so small. So I always think of this one lady that I dealt with through my SEO and Google ads company her product cost, average basket was like $10 or something like that.
[00:34:21] And you immediately had, you don't have a business from that. It's just selling, selling chocolate online. You don't have a business. You'd have to sell to thousands of people bearing in mind, let's say $10, a thousand, a thousand people buy the average basket at $10.
[00:34:40] You made $10,000 in a month. That sounds great. But then when you start taking out your costs, the cost of the product, the cost of shipping free shipping, yes. Free shipping was involved the cost of product cost of shipping. You've got your payment processing fees or your other business expenses.
[00:34:56] You know that you've got to think about insurance, your, your website, your hosting, any ads, you are doing everything like that. You've made no money. You need a healthy margin for you to be able to do it. So if you're looking at a business, you need to be really clear on this. And I actually set up a contact me about it if you want it, a business planning master class.
[00:35:18] And in that one of the videos in there is really going into depth about. These, this profit margin stuff, because people get so hung up on stuff. Like they get confused. They don't really think it through what profit actually means. They think, oh, I bought a product for $10 and I'm selling it for 20.
[00:35:34] Therefore I made $10. Now you didn't make you didn't because you just forgot about all your other costs involved. In fact, you probably made a loss if you're set on buying a product for that, selling it for that. So you really need to think about where's the clear profit margin.
[00:35:50] Otherwise you're never going to have any passive income. You might have money in and it goes straight back out. You making the profit, what's the point. So you must be willing to how do I say this? These are things that you must do, right? You must be willing to do. If you're going to have any business.
[00:36:06] I don't care. It's not even just online. If you're going to have any business, I've put down 10 things. 10 things here and my screen right now of what you must be willing to do. So first thing you must be willing to let go, right? You cannot be the control freak of the business. You need to be able to hire a team of people who are better than you.
[00:36:30] Yes. I said it, there are people out there better than you at whatever it is that you think you're going to do. They're better at the marketing. They're better at the sales. They're better at the admin that better at everything that you do. And if you haven't got someone who's better than you, or you think you've hired someone who isn't better than you shift them around into another job, if they're still not bad in you, in that job, shift them to another one.
[00:36:55] If they're still not better than you in that job, get rid of them and find someone who is better than you for what you need to do. And trust them to do it their way. Give them guidance. This is the overall objective. This is what I actually want to see over. I'll let them work it out. People are pretty smart.
[00:37:11] If you give them the autonomy to be able to go and do it. You want to be able to partner with other people. So giving up equity is not a bad thing. Lots of people are really like, I want to keep a hundred percent of my tiny little pie and really by having that person there, who you might've given away 25% to could have blown up your pie 200 times, and you still got 75% over 200 times bigger pie than keep a hundred percent of your tiny little pie.
[00:37:42] That means nothing to nobody. And by the way, you're looking at passive income. Right. Or was it while you're listening to this, I'm talking about passive income opportunities in 2022. So yes, I would say being able to partner with people, give up equity in your business. You can still maintain control, but listen to them as well, because everyone's got a valid opinion and it may be able to help you.
[00:38:08] You need to be willing to not be a control freak. That'd be a control freak. Let people get on with it. Like I say, they will find their own way. Sometimes you need to bring people back on track cause they go off like that way and you actually, you need them to go over there. So bring them back in, but you need to not be a control freak.
[00:38:25] It can't be your way or the highway. It has to be a bit fluid because your way may actually be wrong. Particularly if you've never even done it in your life. You've got no like experience to fall out. And you're just like, oh, it has to be done this way because I saw it said on YouTube, no, let other people use their brains.
[00:38:40] You need to give it time to grow case you need to be willing to allow enough time to grow. One of the biggest problems I see right now online is people will see like an online business and they expect it to like magically go from zero to a million dollars in a week. And you're like, well, how, like if you've looked at.
[00:39:05] Anyone online, anyone you successful in, you fought that. And then you made that mistake. You've made the mistake of thinking, wow, they've come from nowhere and they've made millions. They haven't come from nowhere. They've been at this for ages. You just didn't know about it. That's the difference. So that's one of the things, give it time to grow.
[00:39:28] If you give it enough time to grow in that consistency, keep doing it, keep plugging away. Eventually you will get to that passive income stream. That you're actually after. You need to be willing to ignore advice from your friends and family, unless they're actually qualified to help you. But most likely than not.
[00:39:47] I prefer not to even tell my friends and family what I'm doing business wise, because you'll start hearing that chitter chatter that gives you some self-doubt. They want to hear it not interested. There'll be, or they'll tell you, you should do it this way based on what experience. They don't know. So ignore advice from your friends and family don't even speak to them about it.
[00:40:07] And certainly don't be like, oh, please follow me on my channel. And, keep liking my posts and then start getting angry when they're not liking your posts. They're not your customers more than likely. So why do we even want them? I don't want them. You hear me say about that before? And plenty of times I've said it, I don't want my friends and family following my stuff.
[00:40:27] In fact, it messes up my logarithms. It messes up any market and I'm doing it anyway because it gets confused. I don't want them liking my staff because the logo is just start thinking, oh, this is the type of person we might want to be speak. We might want to be showing stuff to, no, I don't want that. I don't want it.
[00:40:43] I want it to people who are going to buy from me or who's going to, get something from or value from what I'm actually doing. So forget about your ego. Forget about your friends and family. Crack on and find the people who are actually going to buy your stuff. You must be willing to invest in your business, your team and in your own education.
[00:41:03] Three things invest in your business, your team, and your own education. So investing in your business, the general bit marketing spend, you might need, you might need work on my business. You're going to need a website. If you don't know how to do websites, go and just pay for someone to do it, pay a few hundred dollars to do it.
[00:41:21] It could potentially save you spending six months of your life to create a shit website, just go and pay someone $300 on fiverr.com or something to do it invest in your team. That means hiring people, pay for people and then investing, training them and giving them the resources they need go to do the work, to be able to grow your business and your own education.
[00:41:41] So whether that's, doing things like audio books, online courses, Getting coaching calls or, proper coaching program do it. Because you could, for the sake of $10,000 as an example, you could get a coach. Someone like myself, someone like Jessica Lorimer, it was one of the ones I use first, who you may be able to get access to them depending on what you're doing and what stage you're at.
[00:42:09] And they can help you shortcut your, your journey very, very quickly. They can save you a ton of money. Like if you think that if you think $10,000 sounds like a lot of money to pay for someone to guide you. No, it's not because if you're someone like me, who did it the hard way at start, and I've lost literally hundreds of thousands in trial and error, but more importantly in my time that I will never, ever, ever get back.
[00:42:40] And I'm like, why did I do that? If you're one of them people, that would, Rob has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and lose loads of time to find out your own way, then go ahead or go and get a good coach who can guide you down, down the route you need to be. So invest in your own education and you must be willing to lose money sometimes, take the lessons from it, but forget about the losses.
[00:43:04] You will make it back when I lose money and I still do, I will, I would do. I'm always testing stuff now, but I will put the money there and I'll lose it and I'm fine with it. I don't care. I think about it. I just move on because I always make it back, be made back by the following month usually, or even, even a couple of weeks or whatever.
[00:43:23] So I wouldn't be that bothered about it. I get it. If you're starting out and you've got a finite amount of money and you've got a family and you've got all these crazy bills to pay, it's more important. But don't be worried about, oh, you've lost a hundred dollars. And so I'm going to stop with this idea.
[00:43:40] Remember number four, give it time to grow. And that means you will lose money over time, or you will be investing in things that doesn't look like. It's giving you any benefit. Like SEO people prefer to go to Google ads, which are really expensive, which is stupid as hell by the way, but they won't do SEO.
[00:43:59] And then they find out that they can't sustain Google ads. W really you should actually be doing them both, but it doesn't look like SEO is working for a while six months, 12 months, 18 months until you start seeing that consistent income coming from it. So be prepared to lose money. Sometimes take the lessons, forget the losses.
[00:44:17] You will make them back. The next thing number eight is set. You won't get it right first time or even a 20th time, 100 times, whatever you need to be constantly adapting, trialing things, keep moving forward and do not get put off. Do not. That sort of defeatist attitude of, oh, nothing works.
[00:44:36] Let me shut it down and go back to my job. It's all a dream. Just keep going. Nine, forget your ego and be open to criticism, right? So you need to be willing to forget that ego and be open to criticism, criticism from your staff criticism, from your customers, particularly you need to listen to them because they're the one buying from you.
[00:44:59] All right. So if people come, criticize me on this podcast, but I'm sure they will do without, I mostly had blood positive. In fact, I think nearly all positive if I don't remember any negative, but if there was anything, I had mostly positive feedback from this podcast. I might have a podcast British pilot podcast.
[00:45:18] And, but if someone did say, Hey, Aaron, look, you're doing this thing is really bloody annoying. Can you stop doing it? I'd have a look at it at least. Is it annoying? What is it I'm doing? Can I improve this for them? Like for, not just for them, but overall, will it have an impact on everyone that makes everyone better?
[00:45:37] Or am I just going to be like, no, I'm right. All the time. You're wrong. Fuck off. No, I'm not going to do that. So be open to criticism. Forget your ego. It's not about you. You just want passive income, right? You want passive income? Do what needs to take to get that passive income. Get started. Get perfect later.
[00:45:57] Do you know what that is? The name of a book by Rob Moore. Rob Moore is a British entrepreneur. Done very well. That is a great book. I'll put the link in the show notes. Get started. Get perfect later, basically, as it says on the tin go and get started, people will waste so much time. So much time on trying to make this perfect company, this perfect online course have a perfect social media platform.
[00:46:26] Meanwhile, someone who doesn't give a crap, we'll just go out there. I don't mean don't give a crap, but you know what I mean? They're just more like go get as they will go out there and they will just get started. They will get that business started. They will pick up the phone, they'll start making calls and they haven't got a website.
[00:46:43] They will, they will be making money and they will start making sales up, send invoices out. They got no contracts, even they would just get there. You can get perfect later. You're not going to be perfect from day one. And trust me, trust me, the business that you start day one, the idea will be very different to how it actually ends up.
[00:47:05] It will be. So there's no point in trying to make this perfect business from the very start, because it's going to change. Now just because it's online doesn't mean it's easy. Like I've said before, get someone qualified to help you like a business coach or do online courses. If you can't act, afford or access a business coach or, audio books are fantastic books in general.
[00:47:27] There's so many out there you will learn tons from them. People are putting 10, 20 years of their experience into a book before you use it. Listen to people who are a few steps ahead of you. I have a tendency to say, Hey, I shouldn't really be listening to the lessons of what I do, but I wouldn't necessarily listen to the lessons of someone like Warren buffet as much because he is a X time billionaire.
[00:48:02] Maybe there's a bad excuse bad example. Someone like mark Zuckerberg. For example, I don't know how much I could probably take from him in terms of where I am at the moment in, in starting my business, because it's so long since he's been where I am and things have changed. And he's now got literally tens of thousands of people under him doing all the things that I have to do, or my few members of my team have to do.
[00:48:31] Does he really have the relevant experience right now to be able to get me to my next step? I can't leap from where I am now to in charge of a hundred billion dollar business or something. You know what I mean? So listen to people who are just a few steps ahead of you. Okay? You don't need to be speaking to someone who's earning $50 million a year.
[00:48:51] One, you probably can't afford to access them anyway, but number two, even if you could, the stuff that they might tell you to do that requires a resource resources that they have. Probably ain't going to wet. So yeah, this has to be, we're a few steps ahead of you. That's just my idea. Other people won't agree, but whatever, I don't care.
[00:49:11] Maybe I should care. Anyway, I'm a crappy people person. I'm a crappy people person. I'm a ship manager and I'm too blunt for customer service. All right. I will tell my customers to do one. But I don't actually want to be involved in the day-to-day running of my companies. Anyway. I don't want to be involved in it.
[00:49:34] I don't want to be involved with managing the staff day to day. I don't want to be involved with replying to my customers, emails and all that stuff. So I get great people to manage all of those areas for me to take control of that. So it gives them my frees up my time for the due to stuff that I actually want to do.
[00:49:55] And sometimes that means I'm not doing anything for a long period of time at K a really don't period. I don't, if I'm not working on a project, I could just have weeks and weeks and weeks where really I'm not doing much pot. I'm uploading my bank statements every now and then, so they can go and chase down any customers that only money.
[00:50:14] That's it. That might sound great. It's not always as great as you think it, it can be really boring, which is what I said at the start. And when I'm not working on a project, I'm like a bit down and whatever, and I just want to get like engaged in something, but I don't like doing stuff just for the sake of it.
[00:50:30] Which is something that kind of happened to a lot of people. So think about, again, going back to the very start, think about why you actually want this passive income, because I in the, from my businesses, a decent sum of money, which most people who work 40 hours a week, can't earn or won't earn.
[00:50:51] And yet I've still got my entire 40 hour week, like their equivalent anyway, to do whatever I want that. Sometimes it's great. Sometimes it's not recently, it's been fantastic because I've got around loads of different friends and not so much family, mostly friends who I've not seen for ages. And I've been doing most of this stuff during the week, we've those different people and just going off doing stuff and that's great.
[00:51:15] But you, what's my point, my point is, I'm saying I'm a crappy people person, crappy manager to bumper customer service. My point here is that I just think that you should just, if you, well, if you want a passive income business, you're going to need to get people in any way. But in any case, this is me telling you, I've just told you a few minutes ago that to let go of your ego, don't be a control freak and all that stuff, right.
[00:51:47] That is my way of doing it. I identify the fact that I'm crap with people. Managing them. I'm just too blunt. I come from like a policing background. It doesn't sort of really translate into like normal world. People are not like that direct and militant, I guess, like sort of regimented whatever the phrase is.
[00:52:05] They're not like that. They don't like it. It can upset people. So I like to have a shield between me and the people that I could possibly upset. So that things can actually grow. I don't want my staff upset, which can, make my customers upset and then the customers cancel it and I make no money.
[00:52:25] What's the point. So that's why you get these people with buffers between you and also they free up your time. Now take note, like I said, I've not included NFTs. I've not included crypto. I've not included. Well, if we're not included, drop shipping a few other things, but anyway, on that and crypto, because this is something I hear a lot.
[00:52:44] I'm just going to cover it really quickly. Now, lots of people like idea. But here's two facts. Here's two facts on NFTs and crypto Ray Dalio. If you don't know Ray Dalio go and Google him, he is someone who you listened to. He, in terms of his research, he spends literally hundreds of millions of dollars on research.
[00:53:06] Now he has set the entire crypto and NFT global market is only about the size of Microsoft right now. Now Microsoft is huge. Don't get me wrong. But if, if they are, if the entire NFT and crypto market is only the size of one company in United States, you need to remember that it is actually quite a small niche thing.
[00:53:32] Still people think it's like massive because he gets so much exposure on. Now the second thing is it's extremely volatile. It's extremely volatile. I remember when I was looking at recently, right? The experts, the self-proclaimed experts of crypto in NFT was shouting off the rooftops, badgering on it twice a year.
[00:53:55] And I shooting people down that Bitcoin can never go below $50,000 us dollars ever again. It will never, ever, ever happen. Well, where are you now allowed people? So at the time of I'm recording, this is $31,825, us dollars, $31,825, us dollars. But apparently it could never go below $50,000 ever again. Now, if you will, one of the schmucks I'm going to, honestly, I, what schmuck, I hear it in like New York cop films, whatever.
[00:54:29] If you want them, people that were buying, let's say had a $100,000 dollars and you put in $100,000 dollars when it was over $50,000, you might have got like 1.6 Bitcoin or something like that. And it's now gone down to $51,000. I mean, I don't know, your a $100,000 might now be worth like $60,000.
[00:54:49] And if that was your life savings, you're fucked. You were only relying on it potentially coming back up again. So yeah, I'm not one on NFT and crypto. I would treat that like I have got some, I've got some and it's been like that mostly down. Most people will lose money. That's a fact, most people will not win at crypto.
[00:55:15] An NFT Ray down here said that, not me. So he's the one who's got, you spent millions on research and it's gambling be warned. You could lose all of your money. Somebody like smaller coins, school pop up and then disappear. And you're like, where's the money gone? It disappeared completely. So. Yeah, I would say, be really weary of it.
[00:55:36] You don't get dividends from crypto. You only can rely on it going up. Now here's a tendency that people do. They will buy when it's high, they will sell when it's low and then they cry. So it's dumb. If anything, if you are really going to buy crypto NFTs, something like Bitcoin buy when it's low.
[00:56:00] And so when it's high, that's the smart thing. Right. But people are like crazy animals look at, oh my God, he's doing really well. He's gone up like 200%. Let me buy when it's at the highest it's ever been. And then suddenly it crashes and they lose all their money and then they cry. So don't be one of them.
[00:56:19] Is gambling be warned? You can lose all your money. Yeah. Anyway, that's enough about that. And I've not really gone onto property now, especially important for UK investors right now, property investors, if you're really small property investor, you're looking at buy to lets or anything like that versus money to I'm not talking about if you're looking at investing in property and you've got, a £100,000 pounds, whatever in a UK market, particularly right now, you need to be weary about it.
[00:56:49] Get some tax advice because the UK government have changed all the rules with it. Like you cannot claim back mortgage interest anymore. If it's a private, it's a privately held property that you're letting out. And there's all sorts of other crap that's going on at the moment, which to me doesn't make it really seem like a viable investment.
[00:57:08] So you could tie up £50,000 pounds or $50,000 of your money into a property you might own. Then mortgage arrest, you might walk away with one to $200 per month profit from that. And then all it takes is a boiler to break and you replaced that and suddenly you've got no money. So I'm sure there's a lot of UK property investors right now, shouting at me like, oh no, that's not true because of this, I've got 500 properties and therefore I'm making tons of money.
[00:57:35] Yeah. Great. But for the person who started with one or two homes, the amount of money you're going to make is really low. I think there are other things you can get better returns like with aircraft. That's something I'm looking at myself right now. I K I'm pilot. I wouldn't necessarily say do that.
[00:57:51] I'm a pilot and I'm going to use the aircraft, but I'm looking at potentially buying one myself and I'm renting that out quite simple. And they're really quick to sell. Whereas property is not really quick to sell. You've got to go. There's a lot of legals involved, a lot of costs involved. It can take months.
[00:58:09] An aircraft is like buying a car. They might cost as much as a house, but they're like buying a car. You can sell it very quickly. There's not as much legal red tape around it and you can rent them out. Anyway, so that is really my seven best passive income opportunities in 2022. Then I'll just recap very quickly as selling a product on Amazon Senator products on eBay, high, monthly income funds in the stocks and shares online courses, eBooks join an affiliate program, invest in a business or a partnership and start a service-based business on the line.
[00:58:46] So that's it, that's it from me. I've been Aaron Henriques well I was yesterday and I am today. All you need to do is. Well, if you're not already subscribed, it'd be great, if you would, if you'd leave some comments leave some comments. If there's a review system, however, you're watching, leave a, leave a positive review, leave some comments in with your review to let me know if you've got a question, raise that question.
[00:59:10] If you've got a comment about anything I've said, maybe you don't agree. Maybe you do agree. Maybe you have an example yourself that you want to share with others who could be looking, then please put it in the comments. I, I will read them and if I can reply to them some platforms, let me some don't then I will reply.
[00:59:26] Yeah. So good luck. There are passive income opportunities out there. As I say them, there are ones are mostly passive. They're not going to come overnight. So if you are looking for a really quick win and overnight, when you're probably not going to get, get it you need to probably rethink about how much time you want to allow.
[00:59:46] So some of these ideas of six months year down the line, some of them are a bit quicker. But it all depends on you. And remember, I am not your financial advisor. If you want financial advice going get professional, it's not me. You can visit my website at any point. If you want to visit a website and have a look at any courses I do, you've got a business planning, masterclass, online coaching programs, whatever.
[01:00:09] Get in touch links will be down there somewhere in whatever platform you're listening in. And yeah, until next time. Goodbye. .
