Are We In An Economic Bubble?

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Today we'll be listening to an audio version of our brand new Freedom Fast Lane TV series. If you haven't seen a Freedom Fastlane TV episode yet, you can find them on the Freedom Fastlane YouTube account or by going on itunes and searching under podcasts Freedom Fast Lane tv. But for now, enjoy this episode on Freedom Fast Lane podcast.

What's up fast Laners? I'm Ryan Daniel Moran. Welcome to Freedom Fast Lane tv. Today we're going to ask the question, are we in a bubble? We'll talk about selling an E commerce business and we'll look at a multi million dollar fitness brand. Let's.

Hey, the market is way up. We're at record highs. Everything looks great. We're flush with cash, it's easy to get capital. We're in a big economic boom. But are we in a bubble? This is a question that has come up a lot both in the media and also in conversations that I've had with my entrepreneurial and investor friends. So are we at the top of the market? Are we about to have a new great boom? What's going on in the economy? Look, everybody has an opinion on this. No one really knows. So everyone that you hear talking about it usually has an agenda. They have a book to sell, they have an investment firm where they are taking your money and investing it according to their philosophy. And most people talking about this have an incentive to tell you that it's going way up or it's going way down. This is my opinion. My opinion is that it doesn't really matter if we're in a bubble or not. The question is not are we in a bubble? The question is where is the greatest opportunity right now? And there is always opportunity. So a traditional investment strategy for me is looking at dividend paying stock, is looking at buying single family housing, it's looking at small apartment complexes. Right now I'm not doing any of that. I'm not doing any of that because we're totally in a market where cash flows are less than the value of the asset. So I'm not buying a lot of stocks right now because the dividends that I would get on those stocks are this big. So I'm not putting any more money into the stock market because we're at all time highs. Meanwhile, it's super easy to get capital right now and there's all kinds of opportunities in Business because consumer confidence is high, so people are buying. So the greatest opportunity is in doubling down on your business or it might be in whatever area of interest you're in. There's opportunities that are coming up. Since you're not putting the money in the stock market or in real estate, you have more capital to put into the places that you can impact. So the question isn't are we at a bubble or not? The question is where's the greatest opportunity that's going to vary from person to person. I'm not buying stocks in real estate until or unless we are in a bubble and it pops, then the greatest opportunity is going to be buying Apple at a discount or buying Visa at a discount, or buying up apartment buildings in Austin, Texas if that bubble pops. But if it is overbought, if they're at all time highs. As a traditional investor, as somebody who is not a full time real estate investor, do you think that I can compete with with the people who are full time taking advantage of buying and flipping and speculating and taking advantage of a hot real estate market? No, I can't get into that market at values that are as high as right now. But I can absolutely kick the pants off of people who are in my business or speculating in my business when it's in my full time thing. So the question again is not what's going to happen and how do you shield against it, it's what's the greatest opportunity for you right, right now and doubling down on that. Of course, in order to be investing at all, you should have a business and a really profitable business. If you're not there yet, then the number one investment you need to be making is in yourself and in your business and then investing the profits of that into other areas of passive cash flow. Of course, I believe that is the greatest and the fastest way to financial freedom. So let's answer some questions about how you do just that.

Joshua Singer asks, where's the first place you would look to sell an E commerce business? If you're looking to sell an E commerce business, sell it to me. Actually this is where I double down. This is my strength. So yes, I buy Amazon businesses, E commerce businesses, physical products businesses. If you have a business that you want to sell, by the way, go to freedomfastlane.com/sell and you can fill out a form that'll actually put it on my radar to see if it's a business that my team and I want to purchase. My recommendation though, apart from that quick little pitch, is that you should sell your business to a strategic buyer, meaning someone is buying you because they think they can grow it, because they either know the market or they know the business. I've made this mistake in the past of selling a business and it was to a group that was just looking at as an investment. They weren't involved in the industry, they weren't involved in the market, and I retained a piece of that business, but they didn't grow that business. So the upside I thought I was going to get, I did not get. I only got the cash up front, which was fine. It was still a deal I wanted to take. But my hope was that it was going to grow and that my piece in the business was going to grow. And that didn't happen. So if you're not going to get all cash for the business and then just walk away and be done, which you could do through a broker, you could do it on any number of sites that list businesses for sale. The ideal scenario is if you're selling to a strategic person who is a competitor or somebody who's in the business that has done it before, that is going to grow it and has the capital and the experience to be able to take that and put it alongside their track record of growing businesses like yours. But if you're not going to a competitor, if you don't have a strategic buyer, then you can put it listed publicly just about anywhere you want. There's a bunch of websites and brokers that will do that, or you can just sell it to me. Ruben Castellanos asks, what is an effective way to generate traffic to a new business? Ruben I once heard a quote that said, you don't need more traffic, you just need to step out in front of it. There's already plenty of traffic flowing around the Internet. You just gotta get in front of it. You can do that by any number of things, through video, through posts, through whatever gets the attention of people that are out there. But in my opinion, the best way to do this is by focusing on audience building. Of course, audience building is a vague way of saying either building a list, building, a YouTube subscriber list, building Facebook fans, any of those things will work. And it is work. A lot of people want a magic button of how do I show up and get the attention of people who want to buy my stuff? But the answer is, looks a lot like work. It looks a lot like providing value for people who are in the market for what it is that you provide. Putting stuff in front of them, advertising it, seeing what works and Scrapping what doesn't. There's no magic button, unfortunately for doing this. But in terms of strategy still, number one place to get traffic right now is Facebook. So if you can provide value in a medium where there's already a ton of traffic, that's the place where you should start putting up posts, putting up videos that provide value for your audience, and then link back to someplace for them to get deeper into the relationship. Whether that is collecting an email list, subscribing to whatever channel it is, where you're putting content, or buying your products. I recommend the email list because that's where I've made pretty good chunk of my money is in building up email lists and marketing to those email lists. It's a customer record that you get to keep forever until they unsubscribe. So I think that's how you build up long term equity when driving traffic, getting the email list because you can promote to them forever. I guess the second place that you might want to focus would be YouTube. If you're doing videos, really I should just say whatever medium you or your team is comfortable creating content, that is where you should double down. Whether that is blogging, whether that is video, whether it is audio in the form of a podcast. However you are comfortable providing value, double down there, advertise it on Facebook and through YouTube ads. That's the strategy for generating a lot of traffic. But it is worthless if you are not providing value and you don't have a strategy to turn those eyeballs into customers. And in my opinion, that comes down to collecting the email list and then following up with those leads to turn them into customers.

This is the part of the show where we look at one of our students. Businesses analyze how they could make more money and what they're doing really well. Today's submission is from TNT Pro series. This is a submission from Tim Tierney. If that name sounds familiar, it's because he was an early submission in episode number two of Freedom Fastlane tv wanted to give you a quick update on Tim's progress. His brand, Mommy Knows Best, was doing about $50,000 a month and then taking some of the advice that we talked about in episode two. He grew that and his last 30 days had been $120,000 in sales. So he has more than doubled as a result of implementing the strategies that we talked about here on Freedom Fast Lane tv. Guess what? This stuff works. So if you want to see the old business, you can head over back to the second episode of FFL TV and just know that they implemented what we talked about and they've more than doubled. Tim also has a second brand called TNT Pro Series which sells lifting belts and fitness equipment. They're currently doing about $200,000 a month. Awesome job, Tim. By the way, Tim is inside of the tribe which you can join@freedomfastlane.com tribe. That's where we put our seven figure brand owners, retail partners, investors, and we do all kinds of cool things and create opportunities and relationships for them to grow. So this is my recommendation today, Tim. Tim, you've done some things really, really well in the TNT brand, but everything that you're selling from the outside, from my experience, looks like really, really low margin products. I made this recommendation to the Zigglers on the episode where we analyzed the business. I love where I said the next step for you is rolling out really high margin products. That's the advice that I'm going to give to TNT Pro Series as well. Right now they're selling a lot of entry level products. So the place where the profit is really going to grow the fastest is if we can roll out either a different line of products or a line of products on top of like a premium version of what we're already selling. In order to do that, I would put all of your attention for the next 90 days on getting as many of your existing buyers to be repeat buyers in the form of leads. So one of the things that we talk about inside of the tribe, one of the trainings we put together is about turning sales into customers. When someone buys on Amazon, they're a customer of Amazon. They're not really buying from you unless they typed in your brand name and they're buying from you specifically. So since Tim's products are ranking really well, but they're also very low priced, my assumption is that most customers are just shopping for the products themselves, buying and saying, I got this on Amazon. So it's my recommendation that you put the next 90 days of effort into putting inserts in your packaging, to retargeting them on Facebook, to getting in front of them so that they know about your brand and they become fans and subscribers of the brand. If you do that, you'll start to collect an email list that you can launch higher margin products to. If you do that and you have both the low end of the market and the high end of the market covered, you'll get more customers and you'll also get better customers buying the top end of the product line. There'll be higher margins. So you'll be able to spend More on marketing and it'll make your profits a lot healthier. The other thing that I might suggest doing at this point is this is where you could spend some money outside traffic since you're already at that $200,000 a month mark. This is the part where you could start bringing in influencers. This is the part where you could start putting some cold traffic into Facebook, onto Instagram. And what I'd recommend is that you give your products to people who either have the look of the customers you're trying to attract, or to celebrities and influencers. Get them to take pictures of them using the product and then use that as the asset and the ad that you're going to run on Instagram and you're going to run on Facebook. What you'll do here is you'll drive that traffic to a landing page talking about your products. I'd suggest making a bundle of your products so that you get the maximum price point of everyone who sees it, and then either collect an email address offering a 10% discount code, or simply asking for the order on that sale and then retargeting them with other images and videos of people talking about why they like your products. This is the part you're at that final stage of growing a business where you've got profit, you have margin, you have a customer base, so you can afford to spend money on that type of advertising. And that's the type of advertising that I've seen be effective for a business of this size. So roll out some new products with higher profit margins and also spend some of that profit on getting people using your product. Specifically influencers. Take their images and videos, run them on Facebook and Instagra, drive them to a landing page, and then retarget them with other images and videos of people talking about why they love your products. That's what's going to grow TNT Pro series to the next level. Hey, if you've been watching the show and you see all of these case studies and you're like, well, dang, there's all these people doing so well with these physical products businesses. We have a training called the Brand Builder Bootcamp. You can check it out@freedomfastlane.com Bootcamp where we take people through a 90 day process from Idea or no idea to having the first product up and selling successfully within about 90 days. It's basically a 90 day bootcamp to take you through the process of what it requires to have one of these products up and launched and building a sustainable, scalable brand. If you've already got your first product up and selling successfully, I'd invite you to apply for the tribe. The tribe is where we put our best people together. They invest in each other's businesses. They start new businesses together. We help people get into retail. We help people get funding if they need it. We even will take our successful students who are making an impact and we'll write about them on capitalism.com or feature them here on the show. So that's@freedomfastlane.com tribe if you're ready for the relationships and the opportunities that will grow the business that you have. As always, I believe that entrepreneurs and capitalism are the best shot that we have to make the difference that we want to see in the world. World. The solutions to healthcare, the solutions to poverty, the solutions to taking opportunities to the third world are not going to come from government. They're going to come from you. So we need as much entrepreneurship as possible. That's why we do this show, because you are the change that we need in this world. Thanks for watching the show. We'll see you on the next episode.

Sam.