April Income Report 2015

Foreign.

This is Ryan Daniel Moran with an income report update for Freedom. Fast Lane had a good month of April 2015. Actually, before we kick things off, I want to give you a heads up. This is going to be the last income report for a while because this is the last income report before I become a father. Unless baby Esther wants to stay in there for a few more months, which would be fine with me. Wouldn't be so fine with Pamela. That would be fine with me. And so I'll be taking a little bit of a few months off. This will be the last income report that we hear for a while. I'll still be working away at some long term projects. They'll tell you a little bit about today, but I will not be doing income reports during the few months off. And I'll update what goes on in that time off when I get back. But we had a good month in April of 2015. Total revenues across all companies were about 420,000. Maybe a little bit more, but right around 420,000. You know, it's interesting. What, what is cool about doing these income reports? I've always been kind of uncomfortable with the process of talking about how much your business is due. That kind of makes me uncomfortable to talk about publicly. But one thing that I do like about this process is the fact that I always want to surpass the previous months. I always want to surpass my records. So I think the most we've ever reported on income report was 500 or 550,000. And so the fact that I did 420,000 in total sales last month is like, dang, it's not over 5. So my brain immediately goes into, alright, what do we got to do to stimulate this thing? Because I publicly have to release how much I'm doing. It's, it's, it's a kind of a nice pub accountability thing. And last month we had a down month of about 350,000. And it made me want to go, son of a dang it, I gotta do something here. So one of the cool things, one of the cool lessons you can take away here is accountability always drives you to something greater. So if you have an accountability group for your fitness, for your relationships, for your business, it always helps when you have to report exactly what you're doing. That's why coaching is such a successful industry, because of just the fact that it gets you to do things. Now the quick breakdown is the men's fitness company did about 300,000. A little bit more, but around 300,000. The supplement company did 50,000, which was a record. And I promised last week that I'd talk about what the major breakthrough was for that company. You may remember that this one struggled for a long time and we have broken through and things are looking great. We're finally into this sprint where we can really, really grow and then my personal brand makes up for about the rest of it. And that came from people who signed up for the tribe. And I mentioned on.

Last month's income report that the biggest thing holding me back from being at a million dollars a month has just been the fact that.

I really just don't feel like I want to release new products of my own right now. I really have no interest in doing information products or anything that requires me to do something on a on a regular basis or I just, I don't have a way right now that I feel like I can consistently provide value in a paid setting for customers is just not on my to do list. And I know that I am leaving behind hundreds of thousands of dollars a month by not doing this and I would actually love to hear your comments on this. If you would head over to the show notes over@freedomfastlane.com for the income report of May 2015 I turn to you the Freedom Fast Lane community. I would I am actually looking for ideas right now of how we can grow something special together. What programs you would like to see, what type of events you would like to see, how you would like to interact with me further so that I don't have to leave all of this untapped value there where we can work together a little bit more closely. And I will. I've been thinking about this for like six months and to be honest with you, I don't have a really good answer. However, there are a few cool developments that I would like to let you know about. One, we have released additional dates for the next level. So if you have million dollar business or around the million dollar business point, I can work on your business to tweak your processes so that you're doing far more than that. I can give you the strategies to take your business to the next level. It's a three day workshop where we get really hands in on your business and take it to the next level. It is application process only and that is over@event.freedomfastlane.com One of the things we'll be working on when I come back from my hiatus is the that we will be launching that publicly. That has been mostly in beta for people who have who are tribe members or people who have worked with me in the past, we are going to be opening that up to the public, a more public setting once I come back from my baby hiatus. And that I think is going to be something really special. I get so much, so much meaning out of doing that event. And people who leave are just their businesses are, are, are blown away as a result of what we're able to, to do to work on their businesses. So that's@event.freedomfastlane.com that process is going to change once I come back from baby hiatus. That will be in full swing here in a couple months. So that's one of the things that we'll be doing here at Freedom Fast Lane. The second is we are almost ready to announce the details of Freedom Fast Lane Live. Freedom Fast Lane Live is going to be a first annual event will be held towards the end of 2015. The lineup of speakers on on this event is unbelievable. It is like nothing this community has ever seen. It will we are shooting to make it the most impactful yearly event that you've ever attended and we will be doing that at the end of this year and I will be ready to announce that somewhere in June. So we'll take a little break from changing diapers to let you know when Freedom Fast Lane Live is announced and and when tickets go on sale it'll be sometime early to mid June. That is super exciting as well. It is definitely something that you will want to attend. It will be a game changing event. When you see the lineup of speakers, you will understand why. So that's what's going on with Freedom Fast Lane. Podcast has been growing really successfully and we're kind of just working on where do we take the message from here. We've been talking about doing some.

Book publishings together and I actually may be reaching out to some of you who have experience there when we get ready to outline some new books. So I've been talking about Freedom Fast Lane up to this point. I've actually set up a survey that I would love your feedback on. It's over at the show notes on freedomfastlane.com if you just head over to the Show Notes, there's a link in there and if you click on that it'll pull up a survey. I just have some questions about book ideas, program ideas. You can also leave your feedback over at the comment in the comment section at the show notes of this episode.

Now my main businesses, my men's fitness company and my supplement company, my men's fitness company was mostly flat. It was up a little bit at about 300,000, a little bit off our highs, which are about 350,000. And the thing holding us back here, you know, I have one main point of frustration and I realize it's my fault. I have no one to blame but myself. But the fact that we just have not put enough dedicated efforts into building up our own fulfillment channels, our own fulfillment channels off of Amazon, off of anyone but our own traffic and conversion strategies, and that is just something that I. It's my. It's my fault. I have not made it a priority. And that has to change in May, June, July. And moving forward, it needs to be my number one priority outside of taking care of the newborn. So that will be my primary focus. And I'll. I have to do it now because I. I announced it here on the. On the podcast that I have to make that a priority. So I will let you know the results of that moving forward here in a couple months of just making it a total priority. We are being very aggressive in rolling out new products in this company because our goal is to get to a million dollars a month in this company alone by the end of the year. We do that by following the exact things that I tell all of you about. It is getting good systems in place and repeating the process over as many products as you can comfortably handle. We are doing that. We are also trying to stimulate the sales of our existing products so that they capture more market share. And by doing that, you build up a larger customer base. We are bringing our customers off of. Off of Amazon's control and bringing more into our own control, which is actually the primary thing that we focus on with businesses at the next level event is how exactly to do that, how to control more of the conversation and turn your customers into raving fans. Now, I want to spend the majority of time actually talking about my supplement company. My supplement company had always been kind of the pain in my rear as far as the thing that just did not get moving, the thing that just.

Would not grow as quickly as we wanted it to. And part of that is profit margins. So profit margins on our products were fairly low. Part of it was competition. Part of it was taking too much money off of the table and not being aggressive enough in our business.

So there were a couple different reasons for, for why it didn't get moving as fast as some other products. So we decided to make some tweaks in the month of March and April that have absolutely exploded the business to the point where we have had to raise prices just to slow down growth because we can't keep up with it. So at some points, we were on pace to do more like 60, 70, $80,000 in a month. But we had to intentionally slow down that growth.

Because we didn't have the inventory for it. Now here's what we did to change this. Because.

One of the big mistakes that entrepreneurs make is that they want to protect their profits rather than just focusing on growth. If you've listened to previous episodes with Joe Gianfola, we, you know that we're. We talk a lot about being willing to go into the red, being Willy, willing to outspend the next guy. Being willing, being Willy.

Let me try again. Being willing to be more aggressive. Last longer outspend the next person who's trying to compete with you. So we did that in a bit of a modified way with the supplement company. And we decided that we would do whatever it took just to get new customers. So we dropped our price for a while. We changed up the copy on our listings, we focused on some outside traffic sources, and some combination of all of those things created a perfect storm where our business just exploded. So it was a. It was a combination of one, dropping our price, two, improving the copy and thus the conversion rate of our existing product and sending outside traffic to that listing because if it converts better, we can afford to buy more outside traffic. So a combination of all those things created a surge of customers. We thought that that surge of customers might drop once we increase the price back to normal, but that wasn't the case. Once the customers and the sales were flowing in, it was like a fire hose that we couldn't stop. So we did not go into the red. We just left some of our profits off the table and instead focused on getting as many new customers as possible. Because new customers turn into repeat customers. They review us. They talk to their friends about us. When you have a really great product, getting customers and flooding the market with really good stuff is great press to spread the word about your product and ultimately get more customers naturally flowing into your to your sales pages. So we did exactly that. We just decided to go after quantity of customers and to give them a really great product at a temporary discount, which increased goodwill of our customers, increased exposure in the marketplace. And we got this just this flood of new customers even after we raised the price back to normal. And for a while, we even raised it beyond what it was to slow down customers. And we were still making tons of sales. So if you have products that are Suffering right now. Is it better to be making a lot of sales with lower profit margins than it is making no sales with big profit margins? Of course it is. And we decided to go that plan and then tweak from there, because it's much easier to tweak things that are progressing quickly than it is to start things. So we wanted to get this, the snowball rolling and building, and it worked better than we would have imagined. That stimulus plan that we followed worked better than we ever could have imagined. To grease the wheels with a lot of momentum, new customers, a new flow of sales, and to tweak and build from there. And it has just worked beautifully. We can barely keep product in stock at this point. And I'm stoked about the growth of this because there's cash in the bank, there's plenty of inventory on the way, there's sales channels that are flourishing. Things look good here for the first time. And I'm telling you all this because if you're starting a business, you can benefit from my mistakes here of. Of taking money off the table, of going.

Failing to be aggressive enough and failing to just stimulate as many sales and customers as possible possible, which is really what determines who is successful in this business. So stoked about that, and I hope that that process is helpful for you as you analyze your own business. Now, this is the case I would predict with just about anything. I had a product with a buddy of mine, Travis Sago. He's been on the podcast before, and we had an information product together at one point. And I've predicted in the past, I think information products are gonna make a huge return in 2015 and 2016. It's already starting to happen. Information products are gonna be hot again. It's a great business. People have kind of counted them out in the last couple of years. Travis and I had this business and had this product together, and I went out and I hired the number one copywriter. I went out and spent a bunch of money on, like, getting the website perfect and the marketing perfect. And I was about 30 or $40,000 in the hole before we ever took a sale. And he was like, the heck are you doing, man? Why don't we get some momentum and some customers and have a really unbelievable product, and we let them be the ambassadors of our products, spread the word, and then we can worry about tweaking our copy and all of this. Now, this was four years ago or so, and he was so right. So this applies to every business. It's not just a physical products business. That takes its customers on Amazon. It's really any business. Never delay the customer getting process. Never stifle customer acquisition if at all possible. Always encourage quantity of buyers and you can tweak the process from there. I wish I had known that earlier in my business. Get customers and then sell more to those customers. But step one, get lots of customers. Those who can get the most customers win. I broke that when I launched that information product. My buddy Travis, I broke that with this supplement company. And both times it did not serve me. I would have done much better had I focused on customer acquisition first and worried about tweaking and changing processes later. I can't stress that enough. So if you're starting a business, customer acquisition first, tweaking your processes later. You know, in Freedom Fast Lane, I've been building up my audience for the last two years and I haven't sold anything. But there's still been an acquisition process of audience members. Audience acquisition. And we tweak our processes by doing things like monetizing the audience much later. I'm not worried about that right now. I'm worried about creating the most unbelievable experience for those who follow Freedom Fast Lane as possible. We worry about tweaking the process, monetizing the process, and everything else later. And I think that focus has been why we've grown so quickly and why my men's fitness company grew so quickly and why a lot of other businesses grow quickly when they focus on customer acquisition first, tweaking the processes later. So let's talk about moving forward on all of these businesses for Freedom Fast Lane, I've made that pretty clear. I've made it clear that it's going to be about how do we create a better connection with our audience, grow our audience, create some programs or some more events that monetize the audience. Although that's not my. That's more of. I'm looking for ideas of what to think about beyond the current events that we have. We will be making the one event that we do regularly a higher priority. We'll be launching that publicly in a couple of months and we will be launching our annual event, Freedom Fast Lane live, taking ticket sales in a month or so and preparing that to be, without question, the number one event of its kind. With the men's fitness company, we're looking at aggressively rolling out new products through the end of the year until we're at about a million dollars a month in sales and focusing on that outside channel, which I have, I have talked about a thousand times. And I just need to make it my priority. We're also working on, we're actually looking into some celebrity sponsorships, which I'll have to keep you posted about as it kind of evolves, but something we're kind of playing with. We've started to dip our toe into that arena and with our supplement company, it is all about customer acquisition, rolling out new products, and now strategically investing the cash that is regularly flowing in. It's a really exciting time for that business. So that's what the next few months look like. My personal life. I am about to be a daddy, so I will be signing off as far as income reports go for the next few months. I may be doing podcasts here and there, but I'll be a little bit unavailable as I learn to change diaper and learn how to operate without sleep. So I appreciate your love and your support. Freedomfastlane.com and also@facebook.com freedomfastlane thank you for sticking with me all this time and I will have all the updates and pictures of the new life joining us here shortly. So signing off for a while. I'll be in touch. Thanks for listening to Freedom Fastlane and I will see you when I sleep again. Take care, everybody.