Transcription
28 years old, I thought I cracked the code to financial freedom after two high-value exits. I retired early, invested in rental properties, and I thought the money would just roll in without lifting a finger, but I couldn't have been more off.
Instead of living the dream, I found myself drowning in debt, legal battles, tenant issues, endless management headaches, and when I tried to scale, I lost big, more money than I'd like to admit, and I lost years of my time.
But here's the thing, those mistakes taught me one truth about passive income that nobody wants to admit. It's not about no work, it's about the right work. And once I figured that out, everything changed.
Today, I manage three-figure businesses. I have multiple equity deals, and I still find time to travel about once a month with my family. I work out every day. I surf a few times a week. And so, in this video, I'm going to show you the exact blueprint I use to create massive streams of passive income with less stress, less risk, and way more freedom.
My dream was not really passive at all. As a matter of fact, life isn't meant to be lived passively, right? We should be in control. We should be driving. We should always be going to where we want to go, not living passively.
But listen, whether you think that the passive dream is like dividend stocks, so I own a lot of dividend stocks, they just pay me every month to pull distributions. Or maybe again, like my dream was real estate. I have all these rental properties and they give me money, or whatever other area you think of passive income. They're not. They're not passive. And here's why.
Really, all income requires some work. So, really, what we have is the income to work spectrum. That's really what we have. We have more income and more work over here. And we have less income and less work over here. It's a spectrum. So, once I understood that, then everything started to shift for me. So, let me show you what I mean. And I'll show you exactly how to really take advantage of this because it's not what you're thinking right now.
Okay. So, the spectrum of income becomes a work ratio. So, on one side, we have more work. And so, on more work over here, I have businesses like businesses I sold that were making me 50 to 100% returns. But I had work, right? I had employees. I had to manage things like that.
Over on the other end, I have less work. And I might say, probably the lowest amount of work over here would be I own like U.S. Treasuries or own like dividend-paying stock. And I'm making 3%, 4% on that. Right? So, that's the least of my work. And then everywhere in between, I have rental properties, 5 to 25%, you know, um, interest on notes on loans that I make, uh, you know, private money, 5% royalties on things like 5%.
So, this is a spectrum, but here's the thing again, all of this requires work. So, for example, you're going to have dividend-paying stock, probably the least amount of work, but not really. That's the ongoing work, but think about the amount of work that it takes to get into it. Now, if you've never owned dividend-paying stock, you have an entire education gap that you have to go figure out. What are dividend payers? How do they pay? How do I reinvest? How do I compound? Which one should I buy? You buy the wrong dividend-paying stock, it goes down in value more than the payment it's making you. So, now you have all this risk. And then so I have all this work upfront to learn what to do, how to do it, study all different stocks, learn what they are. Then have to buy them, get money, I have to do all that, and then I have to watch them like a hawk and make sure they're not dropping. I have to look at the news headlines. I have all this management to make sure they don't lose money more than they're making me. That is not no work. That is work. That's a lot of work upfront and still a decent amount of work to manage that rental property the same way. I had to buy a whole bunch of rental properties, but I had all these tenants and moving out and moving in. I had maintenance issues. I had landlord issues, and then all is hired property managers and hired property managers. Yeah, it's all still work. Just like having a business, I had employees and I had to manage all that. So, it's all work. It all comes down to how much work you want to do and, more importantly, what type of work you want.
But really, there's a bigger piece to this. All right, that blows this all wide open. It's not just that simple. Let me explain in my story so you can understand what I'm talking about.
Now, real quick, before I tell you how to solve all this, let me tell you where I went wrong and see if this makes sense to you. So, this was my costly mistake. So, I had my businesses and I built them up, and I was able to, you know, still have a fun life. I was able to run multiple businesses at the same time, still do my real estate, but again, I had this thought that I was supposed to sell the businesses to buy real estate. And so, what I wanted to do is I wanted to escape my business. Okay? Why? Well, because, you know, I had to show up there a couple times a week to make sure people were there working. And that wasn't passive, right? I wanted to be doing nothing and have money coming in. So, that was the, that was the scam. That was the lie. And sold.
So, what happened is I decided to sell my business. So, one of them went to a Fortune 500 company. And what was very interesting about that is I had to work for them for a little bit of the transition. And they put somebody on top of me to start over my business. And I told them, "Hey, I didn't want to be, I want to manage a couple things." They said, "No, sir, we're going to make sure within the next 30 days you don't have to do any of that anymore." And I'm like, "So these things that I don't really like with the business, the reason why I sold the business in the first place, even makes me a really crazy amount of money, but I didn't want to do these couple things. You're saying that was in the next 30 days I won't have to do this anymore." Like, "Yeah." I'm like, well, how though? Cuz I know that out. Oh, well, we're going to put this system here, this system here, this system here, this supports, this comes to this support. And you don't have to do any of that. So, I sold a business that made me a crazy amount of money because the few things I did I didn't want to do anymore. I thought I could have this passive life. But then they showed me how to automate and get rid of all those tasks in like the first couple months. So, I sold this high-grossing business, high-profit business when all I had to do was the things they taught me to do. But I didn't know that.
But it gets even worse. So, I was in a very low-risk and high-income business. My business had, for this one particular, I think I had for six or seven years. I've been in that industry for even longer. I knew everything about this high-tech medical equipment space. It was a high-technical equipment company. I really had a business for a really long time. I made a lot of money. There was almost no risk because I knew so much. I had so much expertise there, and I made a really amount of high income. It was great. But then I sold all of that. I sold the business. I took all the money and then I went and jumped into investments that I knew nothing about. So, now I went to large multi-family real estate, which put me in high risk. So, with all the money that I got, I couldn't just go buy a bunch of family. I would have been waiting for. So, I'm going to go to large multi-family. I bought a building like this right here. It was 200 units. It was in Atlanta, Georgia. I'm in California. What do I know about real estate in Atlanta, Georgia, in the projects? Not much. Then I got to go to Georgia all the time. I had work with partners on the ground. I don't even know. I don't have experience with. It was a nightmare. So, I went from low risk, high income to now high risk and low income. But the problem was the amount of risk that I went into. I didn't know about all the interesting risk that caused me a nightmare, a headache. And I went from having like almost passive income in my business to now having another job where I'm on the plane flying back and forth trying to sell all these things up. A whole new set of risk that cost me a lot of money. I'm talking like a crazy amount of money. This deal worked out terrible for me.
And here's the thing. All I had to do was use the blueprint that the company bought me used, and I could have had the business and done very little. Remember, all work, all income requires some work. There's no truly passive. As much as I have to manage my dividend-paying stocks or manage my real estate, I could have had the business with no risk and high income. All I had to do is use the systems, right? That was the key. I had to use the systems.
So, for example, if I want to have a bunch of rental properties, that's fine. But I don't want to have all these property managers call me all the time, all these different issues. So, I need to set up systems for that, systems just like they showed me when I sold my business, the business system. So, what I do is I map everything out like this. So, for example, I want to know how do I acquire customers? So, they see an Instagram post, they click on it, then where do they go? Uh, they go to a website, then what do they do? They put their email in, and then what? They get this email back. And then what? Um, they're asked to book a call. Then what happens? Then somebody gets on the phone with them. So, I map out the flow of how do customers get into my business. And once I can map this out, then I can come up with each individual task that has to be done with each one. And then I can just have somebody else do it. I create a perfect system and have someone else. So, I do this for every way I acquire people. Then I think about how do I fulfill? So, say they do sign up. Well, so they signed up. Then what happens? Well, they receive an email with their login information. Then what? Then they log in, and then what? Then they watch a welcome video. And then what? And then someone contacts them to book an onboarding call. And then what? So, I map out every piece of the business. And it's pretty simple. Now, maybe it's simple for me because I've been doing this for a long time. Maybe not easy for you, but I'm having a three-day live event where I'm going to go live from the stage for three days to show you exactly how to set these up for every single part of your business so you can get time back right away. All right, this is going to be amazing. Reclaim time. Then I'm going to show you how to use that time to keep more of your income. And once you got time back and you got income back, then I'm going to show you how to multiply that wealth very fast. I'm calling it the Wealth Accelerator. This is going to be the first part of January to make sure you crush it for you. If you'd like to like come check out the event, there's a link down below. I'll put something up on the screen right here. Coming out. We're going to be live for three days. I'm going to walk you through. This is not a bunch of fluff. This is in the ground. Do the work.
Now, look, and even if, uh, you want to start a business, you want to start pressure washing driveways or painting houses, you can use these systems to scale that right away. Okay. Now, let's keep going.
Now, the thing is, you can have this passive income today because remember, it's not passive. All income requires some work. The key is, what, how can I take what I'm doing now and reduce the workload so I don't have to work as much so I get more work done? Well, what we want ultimately is leverage over your work, right? That's really what we want. And what we can do is, like I said, even if you start a business today, a pressure washing business, a painting business, you could literally go knock doors on the weekend, find pressure washing customers. You could create a system of, I knocked the door, here was the script I used, here's how I went pressure washing, here's the checklist I did, here's like the money. And you can go hire people to run the pressure washing business for you. You could do this right away, no matter where you're at.
Now, some of you might say, "Well, that doesn't work for me because in my business, I can't hire people to do these things because I don't make enough money." Here's what I'd say about that. Number one, if you can't hire someone to do the work, you don't have a business. You just have like a job that doesn't sound like it's very high-paying. But number two, what I would say is even if I went and knocked the door, found the customers, um, had to buy the equipment, and then I hired them to run that process for me. Sure, maybe they take the majority of that income. I only get a little bit for sort of managing it, never seeing it. But here's the thing. Compared to the what, 3% that you're going to make in dividend-paying stocks or the, you know, 5 to 8% that you're going to make in rental real estate, you're going to make way more. And so, here's the thing, right? We think about if we think about passive income as a spectrum, I could take a business like pressure washing or painting houses or whatever and hire people and still probably make 10, 12%. Which is double, quadruple what I can make in these businesses. And if I set the systems right, it can be just as, honestly, it can probably be even more passive than managing dividend-paying stocks.
Now, which one should you do first is a question I get all the time. I have this map called the ET map, and basically, it's a map that walks you through looking at all the tasks that you have and figuring out how much you could pay for each one and which ones you should outsource first. If you'd like to get this document, you can get you up and going really quick. Check out the link down below for the event. We'll make sure that you get that for the Wealth Accelerator event.
Now, once you start going with this, here's where the real magic happens. You see, once I can get someone else doing a lot of the work, once I can get the system optimized, then I can start to scale up. So, in the beginning, you know, you're only making your 10% because you hire people, things like that. But once you have this going, it allows you to scale the business up, right? This is how I do it. So, this right here, as a matter of fact, is a snapshot of some of the content engines that we have in my business. Um, each one of these is the different engine. These are some of the acquisition engines that we have in the business. Right here, here are some of the fulfillment engines that we have. Is we start mapping these out for each part of the business. So, then we can start assigning this to different people. We map the engines and then we can scale the team. This is how I'm able to manage three different businesses at the same time. It's how I have other companies I advise for, and we're able to scale those as well. You have to learn how to create the engines of wealth, create the systems, and this is what I learned from selling my business. I already had the business that was mostly passive. All I was lacking was a couple core systems that the Fortune 500 company bought me helped me install in the first couple of months. I was free. If I had only known that before I sold the business, but I didn't. But you know it now.
Okay. Now, the thing is though, as I said earlier, really life is not about being passive. Life is about driving to what we want. So, what is it you really want? What do you want your life to look like? Do those things. It's not about sitting to do nothing. It's about doing meaningful work. And really, it's not freedom from having to do work that you want. What you really want is freedom to work on meaningful things, productive things, things that light us up, things that bring us energy. So, that is the goal.
Now, today I'm able to run the different businesses, buy different businesses. I travel about once a month with my family to build destinations. I go around the world and speak on some of the biggest stages because I like that because it builds my skill set. It allows me to grow into a greater sense of purpose for myself. But you can choose whatever it is for you.
Now, as I said, I'm doing this live event. I'm calling it the Wealth Accelerator to kick off 2025. If you want to start a business, you own a business, you want to grow your business at an exponential rate, come check out the live event. If you don't want to check out the live event, well, I'm going to give you a couple books I recommend. There's five books on business systems that I've read that really changed the way that I look at this. I wish I would have read them before I sold my businesses. I'm going to put them down below. You can get access to those five books if you want to do that. But like I said, if you want my personal systems as well as my coaching system where we coach you through that, check out the Wealth Accelerator.
But either way, passive income is sort of a scam. All income requires work. It just depends on how much work you want to do for how much income. And what I learned is choose the ones that bring you the most income, but put the systems in place so you can do the least amount of work. All right, that's what we got. Leave a comment what you think about this video. Uh, if you want more videos like this on business systems that help that help for you, let me know. So I'll make them. Otherwise, that's what we got. To your success, I'm out.