February 2016 Income Report: $1.3M

Oh, hey, fastlaners, I didn't see you there. This is Ryan Daniel Moran with Freedom Fastlane. Hey. It's been like a year since we've done an income report. There's a reason for that. I used to do income reports regularly to track progress and just found the whole process kind of weird. It felt like a bragging contest with all the other people who were doing income reports. So I decided to stop doing them because I kind of stopped enjoying them. But I have been thinking about bringing them back. You can let me know in the comments@freedomfastlane.com if you'd like to see me bring them back. But I felt like I wanted to do one right now because I crossed a major threshold in the month of February 2016, and that was that we for the first time that I can track, the first time that I know for sure. I know we've gotten close before, but collectively, my businesses totaled over a million dollars a month or for the month of February 2016. Now, that factors in some, I guess we could call unsustainable spikes. But I'll tell you what I'm gonna do about making them regular in today's podcast. So we're gonna go through what the spike was from. We're gonna go through kind of how we've grown to that level, because I think the last time I did an income report, we were doing less than half of that. I think I was at about half a million dollars a month. And now last month I did. I did over a million. And the predictable amount moving forward is about a million dollars a month. And this February was about 1.3. So there was a considerable spike of an extra few hundred thousand dollars in there. Then I'll talk about what it's from, and then I'll talk about what the plan looks like moving forward. I want to give you a couple general business updates on where my career is kind of headed. That's not the right term, but where we're at and how we're growing. My team in the last year, I think a year ago, it was just me and maybe two other people. I'm now on the Freedom fast lane side, a team of eight people, and I've hired fairly aggressively and attempted to stay way ahead of things because I've been planning for some really big things. And if you tracked the launch of the Tribe, if you tracked what we're doing moving forward, if you knew kind of the two to five year vision on what Freedom Fastlane and the soon to be released new sites that Freedom fastlane will be morphing along with. You'll see that there's a lot going behind the scenes and you'll kind of get the long term vision as you watch Freedom Fast Lane develop over the next six months to a year. The event that we did at the end of 2015, Freedom Fast Lane Live, was a huge success and was kind of a coming out party, if you will, for a lot of cool things that are happening. In Q1 we did the tribe, which is one of the reasons why we had a big spike in revenue. And I'll be sharing a little bit about where it's going over the next six months or so. I also brought in an acting, we call, we call him the acting coo. His job was to come in and help clean up a lot of systems. And I believe in systems and that systems are the way to freedom. And you know, it made so much sense that we decided to just never have systems. I am an idea person, I am a quick starter and a lot of my team are idea people too. So we decided to go out and get somebody who was not in our industry, somebody who, whose who's really their passion was to build systems and they, they have come in on a short term Sprint and are helping us clean up our systems. And at the end of that term I'll probably be hiring a project manager or a COO who's within our industry, within the marketing community, who can take our vision and is just a vision builder and build it within the context of the rest of the team that we have in place. So the whole point of that was to really free us up to do what we do best because it felt like we were putting out a whole lot of fires. And I've found that as a result of even just having that person in place who is the acting COO who is developing those systems, I find that everybody shows up a little bit better. Everybody feels a little bit freer to operate in their genius, in their unique ability. And that's really what I wanted to see happen. It's been a really great situation. We started that about five weeks ago and it's been a really good transition point for us. It's really helped us put on our big boy and big girl pants and grow up as a company. So we've got eight people in there now and the team will continue to grow, especially as we launch some additional projects that are going to be coming out of Freedom Fast Lane. I like to think of Freedom Fast Lane almost as an incubator. The incubator if you will, of other businesses, of other projects. And we're investing in other businesses, our students businesses, some businesses that are within our, you know, within our zone of influence. So Freedom Fast Lane is kind of that catalyst for our, our arm and our fingers in other fields and other businesses and industries. And building that out has been really fun. And stepping into that vision has been kind of a dream come true. And I'm excited to continue to develop that. One of the things that I have had, it's been a difficult transition for me, but what I've kind of had to look myself in the mirror and get clear about is what I do that really drives the company and what really grows my businesses. Because I feel as though I spent spend a whole lot of time in things that don't actually grow the business. You know, when you're a new entrepreneur, you have to do everything and anything you do is progress. And then you get to this point where unless you make a change, you're gonna say, stay stuck. And that's partly why our businesses have grown in number of people. But both my major companies, both Freedom Fast Lane and my physical products brands have teams between between six and eight. So a total of 15 people or so between the two major companies. But even with a team that that size, it doesn't always feel like you freed up much of your time, which is kind of a mind warp. And it's been a muscle that I've never had to stretch before until the last year. So I have built this great team, couple of teams actually, alongside my, you know, my team has made some of the hires and my business partners have made some of the hires, a good number of them actually. But I don't feel like I'm all that more, much more free sometimes. And really that has been a process of unlearning to be in control of everything and giving myself permission to really operate on the things that truly drive the company. And I have had a hard time identifying that because I'm so used to running everything. So it's recently come to my attention what really makes a difference and getting that clear has at least given me a place to grow into. I'm certainly not perfect at this yet. I'm still kind of struggling to make those things priorities. But as they become clearer and clearer and it's easier to see where they provide value for the growth of the company, it's easier for me to move more and more in that direction. So just today I did an exercise. I'm recording this from Toronto, Canada. I was With Dan Sullivan at strategic coach for the last day and a half. And one of the exercises was identifying the things that really energize you and the things that are really motivating and identifying how much time you spend in that. And my score was pretty scary. I spent a lot of times in doing things that didn't necessarily motivate me and energize me. But the things that did motivate and energize me are the things that really grow the company. And that's where I really need to be focused. So that is kind of my big growth. Internal growth that's happening right now is building that team and focusing on those things that really drive progress. So let's go into the actual income report. The breakdown of my major holdings, my major businesses. I have some other holdings. For example, I have equity in a fulfillment company that fulfills both private label products and does inventory management and holds stock for e commerce businesses. I don't factor that in here. I don't factor my real estate holdings in here. Although I will talk about them. I don't factor in consulting payments in this. We're just going to go through the revenues of the business. So my men's fitness company did somewhere between 700 and $800,000 in the month of February. And I think a year ago it was, it was doing about 300,000. So we've more than doubled, almost tripled. We should triple, be triple that. We should be near a million dollars a month here in the next few months. That growth has been, it's been, it's been twofold. It's been an increase in the amount of the market that we control. So we, we are bigger players in the market now. We have seen the market that we're in grow and we've released new products. So all of those combined have factored into the growth of the company. And at the same time, big celebration, everybody. Asshat and asshat number two have both been removed. Finally, Amazon has started to get serious. At least they say they are about cracking down on fraud. There are still plenty of fraudulent players in the market, but Amazon is at least starting to take action and track people that are on their radar. So by the way, if you're doing any of that stuff, Amazon is starting to pay attention. So I think this is way, way overdue. But it is good to see that Amazon is finally doing some things. So all those together have created our growth. The really exciting thing is that we have all kinds of retail deals on the table. We're in Some retail stores. Now I have a meeting with the president of a very major retail chain here in a couple of weeks and it's starting to spread into other channels naturally, which is really exciting. So we have some deals on the table with some major retailers. We're in some smaller retail places and that's really exciting to be in a completely different market. I think a year ago we were also working on building up our own funnel and distribution channel and and we just never were really able to dial in that piece except for really dialing in our audience. What I have come to find is that most people are trying to build funnels and e commerce platforms and I think they're doing it completely wrong. I think the right way to do it is by building audiences and getting the audiences to really rally behind you and to then send your followers over to either your e commerce store, your checkout or whatever it is. I think that's the way that you really win in E commerce. We talk about that a lot at the next. We did a next level event this past week and talked about that pretty heavily. And it was a big shift for some people to see that E commerce isn't just about turning on ads and sending them to sales pages. In my opinion, it's more about building audiences. And that's where our focus has decided to be, is to build those audiences rather than sending ads to sleazy looking sales pages. Which for better or worse is really what it came down to is what we were trying to do a year, a year and a half ago. So our focus is more on the audience rather than a hypey sales process. So this company has grown, it's been great and it continues to grow. My supplement company is right at the million dollar a year mark, so between 80 and $100,000 a month in sales. And I'm pleased with that. A year ago it was right around 40,000 and that I'm very happy with that growth. This is a cash flow business. This is never going to be a business that does more than about $5 million a year. But it's a nice little cash flow business that puts money in my partner, in my bank account every month and is a nice little, you know, extra income. So this was. This one took a while to kind of crack the code and it took an extra amount of aggressiveness to break into the market because supplements are really, really competitive. And we decided to go into those competitive markets. But we're finally at that million dollar plus mark and it feels really good to be there. It's actually kind of a relief to work as hard as we have and to be over that hump. The thing that has caused that growth was just putting in the work to be really aggressive over the last. The last year or so, doing what it took in order to get the reviews and sales to push us onto ranking for strong keywords and having the conversions in place to live on that gravy train. And that has been the difference maker. My third business, obviously is Freedom Fast Lane and working with and coaching entrepreneurs. My revenues here come from selling the Tribe, which is our training program for entrepreneurs. We teach people how to develop products, invent new products, sell them on Amazon, get funding, how to create your brand story, how to build audiences. We're also going to be launching some programs about investing and building audiences in social media, selling your own products there. And that's going to be coming down the pipeline in the next six to 12 months. We did a short internal launch of the Tribe because it was our first time kind of publicly releasing it. And we just released it internally. We didn't advertise it externally, but it did well. We did about $450,000 in sales. And I was, I was pleased with that. My goal was to do between 4 and 500,000 because that will pay for my team for the next almost a year. And it will allow us to creatively be freed up from having to sell something in order to build out what we want. And what we want to build out is a big audience and.

Some inspirational content that encourages people to be entrepreneurs, to take responsibility for their lives, to show them that capitalism and freedom are still the way forward, it is the best way forward, and that we change the world the fastest. When people are freer, when we have more capitalists, when we have more successful entrepreneurs and the world needs more people in the 1%, that is what the world needs. We don't need to demonize the 1%. We need more people in the 1%. And that's how we create the greatest change. Side rant. I've been thinking about doing a podcast for a while on is there a fixed pie? You know, when we think about. When we think about the political arena today, we have so many people arguing that it's a bad thing for people to have. Have means to be wealthy. And some people say, why do you need all that money? And that assumes that there's a fixed amount. There is not a fixed amount. There is abundance. If I create something and you want it and we trade, we are both better off or at Least we should be. The problem comes in if there is fraud, and that would be the role of government to police that fraud or to enforce the contracts that were agreed upon, or if there is cronyism, which is when business gets in bed with government and thus distorts markets or interferes with markets. Other than that, if people make a voluntary trade, both of them consider themselves better off. We have created wealth. Wealth is infinite. We are infinitely better than the world was 200 years ago. And people forget that. They believe like 50 years ago was some magical time. But let's look at what actually has happened in history. We are healthier than ever. We are richer than ever. We are freer than ever. We are living longer than ever, much longer than ever. And that is because of freedom and capitalism and entrepreneurship. And the more we get, the better we are. So the tribe is my playground for entrepreneurs where we teach them the skills of entrepreneurship, help them start businesses, help them grow the businesses they have, help them partner with funding, partner them with investors, partner them with audiences, people who have audiences. We're training people to have audiences. We're going to be bringing in some investments, investment courses as well. Also within freedom fast lane, one of the ways we monetize, we do workshops. I do the next level for people who are e commerce entrepreneurs. I help them increase their customer values, get independent of their sales channels, and be in a position to sell their company for a lot more money. So last month was a great month. Between 400 and $500,000 in revenue due to the launch of the Tribe. Now, one of the things I want to talk about is it's hard to duplicate a launch, right? We're not going to do that same amount of money this next month because we closed the tribe at the end of the launch so that we could clean up those systems and make sure that everybody who signed up is served, make sure that everybody has what they need, everybody is taken care of before we open it up to new members. But that makes it hard to have a predictable business. Not going to have a $400,000 a month business just because we had one month with 400,000. You know, there's a lot of entrepreneurs who brag about how much money they make, but they really just did a launch and that's impossible to duplicate. So I don't like the launch and burn model. I think it's exhausting. I think it's silly. Why would you want to build a business that required you to open and close and open and close? It's not the business I want to be in. So our next step there is to automate the processes for the products that we sell. Be it our workshops, be it the tribe, be it some other trainings that we're working on that will bring in customers regularly without taking up my time. That's the big mystery that we're working on solving right now. When we have that dialed in, I will sleep much better at night and I will feel like I can actually build on a company rather than have to hustle for sales. So that will be a good day. It's something that my team is doing a really good job of outlining right now. And when we get to the point where that's automated, I'll be really happy. We're taking our inspiration from Mike Dillard, who was on the podcast a couple of weeks ago. That episode is about how he has a cash flow business that funds his disruptor. And that's pretty much the exact model that I have followed. And I'll talk about my disruptor in a second here. I have also added to my investment portfolio. My single family portfolio is now a little bit, a little bit larger. It's still under a million dollars or so, but I paid for those houses in cash. My plan right now is I'm looking for some apartment buildings to pull my cash out of the single families and buy some multi families. And my goal is to kind of build that up as a snowball to use the wealth that is in those real estate holdings, pull the cash out, put it into apartment buildings and build again and again. The problem I've run into personally is just the deal flow of apartments. It's not my full time thing to buy apartments. I don't know apartments that well. And single family houses are kind of slow to accumulate. So I don't have a good place for deal flow. Feel free to contact me or to put a note in the comments if this is a skill set of yours. But finding apartment buildings has been a little bit of a challenge to fall within the numbers that I want to be, especially when interest rates are still stupidly low. Come on Janet Yellen, get it together. Raise interest rates please. So that has been a bit of a, I guess a challenge for me to scale those investments the way that I want to. So let's talk about what's next. My next plan overall is a few fold. One is automation. I want to continue to automate all of my businesses so that they're growing without me, without the officers, without the owners, that there's a plan to grow without direct involvement. And that's a process, but it's one that is worth going through. It is building out the funnels and the sequences to take regular sales that don't necessarily require my time. And that again is a major undertaking, but it's one that is worth doing. It is getting into retail stores, as we've talked about, and building that into a really a major, a major channel. And it is being aggressive with the growth of my audiences both on Freedom Fast Lane and in my other businesses. That is basically my, my one thing right now. My primary focus.

I'm lying. Automation is number one. And when they're automated, then I feel really freed up to put all of my energy into focusing on audience growth. So those are my primary objectives moving forward. I wanted to give you a quick update on a project, a couple of projects that I've kind of teased in the past. One of them was a docu series that I was putting together. I put together a sizzle reel and a pitch for it. It was called Losing My Religion and some of you have heard my story. I went to school to be a pastor. I'm no longer religious, but I have always wanted to go on a path to discover if there really is anything that we can know for sure. As far as faith based matters go, can we find truth? Does truth even exist? I honestly don't know the answer. I have my opinions. I hope those opinions are wrong. I leaned towards the more science based approach and I'd love to be proven wrong. I just haven't been compelled to believe anything other than what I currently believe now, which is why I tend to believe what I believe. So I've always wanted to do a docu series about a quest to find truth. And I had some deals in the works and unfortunately all of them fell through. So that has kind of been on hold for the last year. So I've gotten close on a couple of networks that were interested and ultimately they all fell through. So this is one of those projects that I don't feel like I'll have lived a full life if I don't complete it. But having a nine month old and a couple of businesses has put this on the back burner. But I don't want it to be on the back burner for long. I'm kind of waiting to meet some strategic contacts which means that nothing is really happening there. So if you or someone you know is in that world, please contact me or put it in the comments of the show notes and let me know about that idea. And if you know, somebody who might want to pick up that idea. And finally, Shawn Coyne and I are working on a project. It's our first disruptor company. And when I say a disruptor, I mean a business that has exponential potential, 100 million dollar potential and more. And this is, we're working on a tech company. It's starting as an app and it's something that we're still outlining. And we actually have been working on it for almost a year now, ever since we sold Zenactive, which was our yoga company that we built and sold. We decided to do this business because we wanted to have a swing and a miss or a home run project, which means we're okay striking out, losing a bunch of money or we're okay hitting a home run. But it's probably not going to be in the middle. It's either going to be a big failure or a big success. And that kind of excites us. It's something that we've been working on for a while. We had a development team working on it, but we fired them and kind of went back to the drawing board. But now we have a team that we trust and are moving forward on. That's something that I'll be keeping you, I'll keeping you keeping tabs on as it gets closer to launch day and I'll be happy to share more about the details and the plan there as we get closer to kind of reveal that for now we're keeping it a little bit under wraps until we're a little bit further along. There's a lot of good stuff coming, coming around the the corner with Freedom Fast Lane with the audience. We're going to be attempting to grow it very aggressively. We're doing more events and we're really upping our game here. And also I've leaked what we're doing on the new site soon. I'm gonna try and keep it a secret moving forward, but I've already said it, of course, couple of times on the podcast. But we're releasing a new site where Freedom Fast Lane is going to be kind of merging into here in July and we're very, very excited about it. As always, thank you for your support of the show. If you are not a subscriber of the show, quit kidding around. Let's make this official. Please hit the subscribe button in itunes so that you don't miss any of the episodes. It is always a joy and an honor to serve you and to hear your feedback at the show notes@freedomfastlane.com let me know your thoughts there and I will see you on the next episode. Keep on changing the world. You are the change. You are the facilitator of the change you want to see. The world needs you to be an entrepreneur and the world needs you at your fullest and producing the maximum you can in the marketplace. It is your duty to maximize your potential, both personally and economically. It is your duty and your service to the world. So keep growing, keep building businesses. Keep on changing the world. And keep on listening to Freedom Fast Lane. Talk to you soon.