Transcription
I've spent years testing popular business advice across multiple different business models. And I've made over a million dollars in the process, all while documenting this journey to financial freedom right here on YouTube to share with you. But if I had known from the start which advice was garbage and which advice to go all in on, I would have reached financial freedom way faster and with far fewer mistakes and turns down dead-end roles. So, if you're looking to start living the life of your dreams while also avoiding some of those mistakes, the discoveries that I'm sharing in this video, I believe will really help you.
Thank you to Relay for sponsoring this video. You can use the link in the top comment to open up your free business banking account. You get free access to my course on how to manage your money as an entrepreneur.
The people who actually break through and build real wealth don't follow most of the things we often hear. Instead, they're able to filter through all of that general business advice; some that's just okay, some that's completely horrible and should be thrown out immediately. And instead, they find and lock in on the golden nuggets that are hidden among it all. I feel like I've been on my hands and knees searching for that gold for the past few years. And in this video, I'll break down exactly what I found and how I've used it to build a life that gives me location freedom, time freedom, and long-term financial freedom that, even though I'm not there yet, will eventually allow me to work only if I choose to.
First, let's talk about location freedom. And the types of business models that give you this are things that you can do from anywhere—mainly online-based service businesses. For me, I have two of these: I have my YouTube agency where we help business owners to grow their online content. And then I have my own content business where I help people like you reach financial freedom through entrepreneurship and real estate investing, and I can run everything for both of those businesses right from my laptop. I can work with clients anywhere in the world, and I can kind of design my schedule and when I film content around other things happening in my life. If that's the kind of freedom that you're after, you can work directly with me to help you do it. I'm hosting a three-part summer workshop series this summer on Zoom where I'll help you build your own freedom-focused business from scratch. You're going to walk away with the legal part of your business 100% set up—so, your LLC, bank accounts, all that good stuff. You'll have a rock-solid offer, which is going to align with all the things we talk about in this video, as well as a growth system for getting new customers consistently so you can keep the momentum going. If you're interested, there's a link in the very top comment to grab a spot. And if you're not sure if it's a good fit for you, I'll also put a link to the free business breakthrough quiz. It's a 5-minute free quiz; answer a few questions. It'll let you know what you need to do to break through to the next level in your business. Both of those things are linked in the top comment.
So, let's get back to talking about location freedom. Now, many of us start thinking about location freedom as the first thing to pursue because we want to get out of the rat race, right? We don't want to commute to a job we hate or spend long hours working that make us miss out on other things that we want to do. But the popular advice that holds us back from this is first that we should never trade time for money and that instead we should focus on building passive income. Forget about both of these things, in my opinion, in my experience. Because in the beginning of any journey where you're trying to get something that you currently don't have, you're going to have to work harder to get it; you're going to still spend time working. And so, it's more useful to focus on being where you want while you work than trying to avoid the work altogether. And the trap with passive income is that it only slows you down at the start of your journey because there's a really long time between when you start taking action to build passive income and when you start to actually see those results. And even then, the passive income usually trickles in in low amounts over time. For me, I thought that starting a YouTube channel would give me so much passive income. But what I didn't realize was how many months it would take me to actually get monetized. And then on my very first day being monetized, I made $99, which I was super excited about and was like a very cool moment and cool feeling. But I had invested way more money in my channel before that when I was making absolutely nothing. And $9 a day isn't anything that's going to change your life.
So instead of that, what should you focus on? Accept that you will briefly work harder while focusing on a problem that people will happily pay for while you use leverage. And let's break this down into its individual parts. Starting off with you working harder: My high school physics teacher was like the coolest teacher in our school; everyone loved him. We did class projects like building hoverboards and trebuchets. And one of the lessons I remember the most was when he taught us about exit velocity. We had to calculate the difference between how much energy it required for a spaceship to get off the ground versus how much energy it took to keep the spaceship flying once it was already up there. A huge majority of the fuel and energy needed was spent just getting off the ground. And that same ratio is true when it comes to trying to capture that first bit of location freedom on this journey; while still doing whatever it is that you're doing now so that you have money to live will require a good amount of extra exit velocity in the beginning just for you to get off the ground. But as the income from that new activity grows, you'll receive the benefits from that freedom and you'll be able to cut down on other work, and things will get easier; it'll be easier to maintain than it is to get started, especially as you go from being a solo business owner to building out a team, which we'll talk about in just a few minutes. So, as long as you can accept and remind yourself that as hard as it will be in the beginning is not as hard as it will always be, you've got the first step down and you can think about focusing on a problem that people happily pay for.
Bad advice here: Do not follow your passion unless your passion happens to align with a problem that people will happily pay for. I played basketball in college at Stanford University and then at the University of Notre Dame where we won a national championship. And I was always amazed at how when new freshmen joined the team at the beginning of the year, it wasn't the fastest player or the best dribblers and passers that got playing time; it was the ones who could pick up the system the fastest, who understood the little nuances of the game, and therefore the coaches could trust them on the court. As I was leaving college and thinking about all the things that were going to be in my future, I got the bright idea to build an online platform called Serious Athletes Only. And I don't know that anyone's ever seen this logo because this business flopped, but I got this logo made; I was really proud of it. And one of my main programs, you can see right here, this was a post back from 2018, one of my main programs was called the Basketball IQ Academy, and it was aimed at high school athletes who wanted to play as soon as they got to college rather than riding the bench for a year or two first. That is a burning problem that a lot of high school athletes have; it brings them a lot of anxiety. So, I was good to go there in choosing a problem that was serious. But guess who doesn't have the disposable income to spend on an online course or even the interest in taking an online course in their free time? High school athletes. And so, even though I had put a ton of time—I don't know why this footage looks so grainy; this was 2018, not 1918—I put so much time into like pulling clips of all of the different concepts and drawing over them and playing them in slow motion and then giving diagrams of all the different screens and actions that people would need to know. The business flopped because I wasn't even selling directly to my ideal customer; I wasn't selling to high school athletes cuz they didn't have the money or even the interest in taking an online course. I was trying to sell to their parents, right? And then parents were like, "Nah, am I really going to buy an online course for my kid and I know my kid's not going to take it?" And this was kind of like a new concept, right? Parents are used to paying for shoes and for gear and things like that, but not really for online courses to help make their kids better at basketball. And so the lesson is it's much easier to go directly to your ideal client and solve a problem that is not only burning for them, but they are already willing to pay for something like I help sick out-of-shape dads improve their health so they can be alive for their kids for years to come—burning problem with someone who's willing to pay for a solution. I help business owners find more clients so they can remain profitable and in business. Or for me, I help people build businesses that give them location freedom, time freedom, and financial freedom.
Once you've identified that person and that problem, you must solve the problem using leverage—both leverage of your time and also leverage of your money. So, let's start here with money. Alexei says that the number one rule of business is to stay in business, aka just don't run out of money. And that means charging enough that you can make a few mistakes and still have enough money in the bank to keep you afloat, but not charging too much that you never even get your very first paying customer. So, what is that sweet spot? I recommend that if you are charging for a month-to-month service that you charge at minimum $1,500 per month. And if you're charging for a service that somebody pays for one time, then that should go up to a minimum of $2,500. And that's just your start. I know that this might sound like a lot, but remember, we're working with people who have big problems that they desperately want solved and are willing to pay for. Think about if you were a health and fitness coach working with new dads who have had a health scare, and the problem they want solved is they want 40 more years of life to spend with their child. That is an amazingly valuable problem to solve for someone. And this is what I want you to remember: You should be paid based on the value of the problem that you're solving and not just because you're going to be solving very valuable problems, but also because most business advice focuses on the topline revenue number, right? Okay? Like, I got $1,500 from that client; that's $1,500 in the bank that I can spend. And that's just not how it works. Instead, I recommend that you use a system called Profit First. And the way that I organize all of this is with the sponsor of today's video, Relay Business Banking Accounts. So, I want to give a huge thank you to Relay Business Banking, one for helping me get this right in my own business, but also for sponsoring this video. In this video, I'll break down exactly how I set up my accounts, how I move money around in order to keep the entire system working. But in the meantime, you can check the link in the top comment to get your free Relay account set up. And once you deposit your first $100, just send me a message inside my school community and I'll help you get everything set up to customize your own accounts for free. Again, thank you to Relay. Links in the top comment to check them out.
Let's keep going. And what happens is every single dollar that comes into your business goes into your main holding account. But again, that doesn't all belong to you personally. We're going to have four accounts that we need to split that money into. First and foremost, we want to pay ourselves a profit; and this is what we get for owning the business. Second, we need to pay for our OPEX, which stands for your operating expenses; and this is just what you need to pay for to run your business. For example, if you end up getting a Gmail account that instead of saying @gmail.com, you want it to say @yourbusiness.com, then that's going to cost you like eight bucks a month, right? So, OPEX are the expenses for operating your business. Then some money needs to go into your owner's pay account and finally into taxes. So, every dollar that comes into your main holding account gets whittled down in four different ways. And so you have to have enough leverage; you have to charge enough that you can actually afford to do business and stay in business without running out of money. But remember, it's not just the price point that needs leverage; we also need to leverage our time. And how you provide the service needs to give you that time freedom. Because after location freedom, the next thing that I focus on is time freedom. And we unlock that by taking some of the tasks in the business off of our own plate and putting them onto the plates of the team that we're slowly going to hire.
Now, not every business model is going to give you every type of freedom. So, before you follow the popular advice and just choose from a list of best business models for 2025 or 2026, it's better to work backwards from what type of freedom you want the most. I personally like working and being creative on tasks that I choose. And I'm at a stage in my life where I can spend large amounts of time working and not feel like I'm missing out on too much other stuff. So, for me, location freedom is actually more important than time freedom, at least right now. I'm happy to work; I just want to be able to do it from wherever I want. But regardless of the balance of time and location freedom that you're looking for, you will want some time freedom; we don't want to spend all of our time working. So, I do have a small team that helps me in this content business, such as my video editors and my assistant, but I know that there's a limit to how much I can pass off because I'm still the one on camera making the content and I'm still the one working directly with people through those Zoom workshops and in-person events. Again, if you want to attend one, you can find out more using the link in the top comment. But eventually, I want an income stream that comes with a lot more time freedom, and that's what I'm after by building my YouTube agency. Right before I started that business, I read the book called Built to Sell, which talks about the exact way that you should build your business, whether you plan to ever sell it or not. Because a business that you could sell and it would still keep running and keep making as much money as it is today is one that you could also keep and take a year to travel around the world and it would keep running and keep making as much money as it is today. It's a true wealth builder because it makes you money without taking so much of your time versus a business that stops if you stop; that is really just a side hustle.
So, here's how I've used this to buy back some of the time that I was spending inside of that agency. There are five different roles inside of the agency: the person who takes the sales calls, the YouTube strategists, video editors, thumbnail designers, and a client experience manager who's there to make sure everything keeps running smoothly and clients are happy. Whatever your business, you may start doing some of the roles or all of the roles. I personally started as the salesperson, the YouTube strategist, and the client experience manager. This is why we talked about financial leverage though and charging enough in our businesses to fund those four different accounts because from the very beginning I needed to be able to pay the video editor and the thumbnail designer out of the OPEX account. So let's say I charge $2,500 a month to clients of my agency. I know that some of that money immediately going into the OPEX account to pay for these roles that I personally can't fulfill. And that's the case from the very first client that I get; I have enough money to pay the people that I need in order to deliver the service. And then as we get more and more clients, we make more money; we want more time freedom. And that is what turns us from being a side hustler or a freelancer to being a business owner. So again, our OPEX account is taking care of our video editor and our thumbnail designer. And maybe instead of making $2,500 a month, we're up to making $15,000 per month in our business. Now, we can start looking at what roles we're still doing that we want to step out of. Remember, I was the salesperson, strategist, and client manager. And I was paying myself for those roles out of the owner's comp account. So, when I wanted to stop doing those jobs, I took the money that I was paying myself to do them, and that was my budget to hire these guys. Because remember, if our business is making $15,000 per month now, more money has been going into each of our accounts. So, I have a lot more money in my OPEX account to pay these guys. I still get paid a small amount for being the salesperson, but I'm now getting the majority of my money from the profit account—not for working in the business, but for owning the business.
Once you start getting your business set up like this and you've got some time freedom and location freedom, it's going to feel awesome; like, you're going to feel pretty dang financially free already. And if you want to take things to the next level and make sure that that financial freedom is long-term and possibly even the start of generational wealth, there's a couple more steps to turn what we're doing into an asset that can live on without you. This is not something that I've accomplished yet, but it's what I'm researching and working on and continuing to document on this channel. And the first thing I know is that we have to focus on owning the platform. This means that we have control over what's being offered, who it's being offered to, and how they're receiving it. Let's imagine that you're a high-ticket closer, or was also called a salesperson. And we can even pretend that I hire you to be the salesperson inside of my business because I want to step completely out of it and let my team run it. You would have quite a bit of location freedom; you could take the sales calls from your laptop wherever you are, and a good amount of time freedom as well; you could just set your daily schedule when you're available for calls when you're not. But you don't own the rest of the business; you don't own the platform that is making the money; I'm still the business owner at the end of the day. And so, it can be dangerous to set your income up in a way that gives you time and location freedom, but no ownership of the underlying business because it's really hard to build long-term wealth like that. Anything can happen; I could make really bad decisions with the video editors that we hire and the strategy that we implement, and then the agency goes out of business and you're out of a job. This can happen with salespeople or content creators who are only making money from the platform AdSense and brand deals; freelancers who focus on just like one specific platform. Like if you're a Notion consultant teaching people how to build out Notion systems, if Notion changes their policy and goes out of business, then that person may lose everything. So at the beginning, while it might be a little easier to build out the entirety of your business based on a platform that already exists, it is not 100% safe. In order to really guarantee that long-term wealth, you have to have ownership of the asset. Something is an asset when it appreciates and becomes more valuable over time. This is the role that my real estate portfolio plays in this entire journey because as time goes on, the properties that I own will continue to become more and more valuable. The next thing is that an asset is systemized and can run without you. This is why we build to sell even if we
Don't want to actually sell. And then it has to be built on clear, repeatable roles that can be fulfilled by any competent person. We want to be able to plug any good salesperson into that role and have them succeed, or any quality video editor or thumbnail designer.
If our business making money depends on just us, or on the best video editor in the world, and anyone short of that would cause the business to fail, then it's not a real asset that can last beyond us.
These are the lessons that I've ignored, as well as locked in on, in order to build this time, location, and financial freedom. And if you want to work with me on your own journey, come to the summer workshop series. It's linked in the top comment. And that's where you'll also find the link to the business break your quiz. And if you want to know more about how I organized the entire profit first system using Relay Business Banking, you can check out this video right.