February March 2015 Income Report

Foreign.

Hey fastlaners. Ryan Daniel Moran here with another episode of the Income Report version of Freedom Fastlane. Today we're going to be going through the income reports on my various business and entrepreneurship holdings. And today we're going to be going through February and March of 2015. We try to do this periodically on the podcast where we go through an update of my businesses. What's working, what is not working, where we're putting our attention, what we've stopped putting our attention on so that you can see the things that drive the most business and the most attention in all my businesses so that you can copy them and implement them into your own businesses. I always try to kick off with a little bit of a disclaimer that first of all, these are all estimates. I hate details. I hate managing the little nuances of business. I'm big picture guy, so if I'm off a few bucks on these numbers, don't shoot me. I just estimate everything. I used to try and be more specific, but I honestly just did not enjoy that. And these are revenue reports. These are not what I personally take home. I have employees and partners and expenses just like everybody else. But the real purpose of these income reports is to show you the overall impacts that little changes had on and the amount of an impact that they had so that you can take those and learn lessons from them. This isn't supposed to be a bragging contest and that's actually why I stopped at the end of last year reporting more specific numbers because I don't care to brag about how much I take home or compare it to a bunch of the other people who do more specific income reports. Great for them, great for what we're doing here and I hope that the changes that we make on a month to month basis, helpful for you. I also share the highs and the lows during these income reports and these past two months. I have some lows to report to you because we had a significant pullback from the highs at the end of last year or even early in 2015. There was a significant pullback due to some challenges that we've now overcome. But I will share those with you.

In today's income report. So so the average between February and March of 2015, the overall income across all my businesses was about $350,000. That's a significant pullback from earlier this year because we weren't selling some new things that I'll talk about in a few minutes, but they average about $350,000 between the two months. So about 350 in February, 350 in March. Now, there were some challenges on all businesses. They seem to be related for some reason. All seem to happen at once. Being an entrepreneur, I like to compare it kind of to the stock market. You've got highs and lows, but if you're doing things right, your overall projection is up, you should have a trend that's going up. If you're trending down, something's wrong and it's time to change something. So we had a significant pullback in our businesses, mostly due to inventory restrictions on my physical products, brands. It seemed to all happen at once. We had a big spike in sales and in income a few months ago. And that spike, it messed with our projections on how much inventory we had to keep. So because sales increased so much a couple months ago, it ate through our inventory faster than we had projected for which man, to be honest with you, at this point, I thought I'd have that problem solved, but I didn't. And we had some setbacks with our supplier. We had to look into a different supplier. It was more of a problem than we expected. In fact, it was so much of a problem that two or three of our products were out of stock for several weeks, which really hurts. Now, I've kind of been one of the loudest spokespeople for saying the worst thing you can do is run out of inventory. And yet it's a problem for even me. So we came up with what I think is a solution, and I'd like to share this with you because this was a big shift for us in our businesses. We keep an emergency fund just like we keep in an emergency fund. You should keep an emergency fund in your own personal bank account. We keep an emergency fund of cash in our bank account in case something happens, in case we need to make a strategic investment for a variety of different reasons. It's just a good idea to have six to 12 months expenses in your bank account in both your business and your personal bank account. Well, we had an interesting thought. We thought, okay, what if we took our emergency fund and we used some of that money to make a supply emergency fund. So instead of having all of our fund in cash, what if a significant portion of our emergency fund was in inventory? So we had at least a month's worth of emergency inventory that we considered out of stock, even though there was still a month's left of inventory there. So we made a very significant investment and a very large purchase of inventory so that we could keep a month's worth of inventory in stock at all times. And when it hit 30 days of inventory, we would consider that out of stock. So when we're making our projections, we don't include the emergency fund in our inventory projections so that we at least stay four weeks ahead of where we were currently projecting. We're doing this to hopefully never have this problem again. Because my men's fitness company was down, you know, a good 20% or so because of the loss of these two products for a couple weeks. That's not insignificant at all. And I want to ensure that that never happens again. So we made this change in order to mitigate our risks moving forward. It's great that we had a big spike in sales. It really stinks that we ran out of inventory as a result of our projections being thrown off. We had some supplier issues as well that we think we have solved, but that hurts having being out of stock for that long. So we think we have fixed that problem moving forward. You know, I talk a lot about getting around people that are at a higher level than you, and that's one of the reasons why I run masterminds. I participate in masterminds, and one of my mastermind buddies in the tribe is doing a million dollars a month. And it was so good to spend a couple days with him at our last mastermind meeting, because, you know, when I'm doing a few hundred thousand dollars a month on a specific business, it's so good to kind of have that reset of you think you're doing pretty good, and then you get around somebody that's like, you know what? I can do better. And the difference in our businesses is a slight tweak. He reinvests more than I do. He takes less off the table than I do. And it was kind of a nice kick in the pants for our next goal. So we're shooting to hit that mark by the end of the end of this year. And we've started to come up with a plan for what does it look like? What do we have to have in place in order to be doing a million dollars a month? What does that look like? And for us, it comes down to having more products. As always.

We'Ve got the systems in place now. We've created a list of products that we're going to be releasing in one month, two months, three months, so that we can have pop, pop, pop, pop down with with more products to release. But also, we're getting much more aggressive with what we're doing in other channels. So we've had some opportunities in retail. Open up. We've had some opportunities with using some other online channels. I don't really feel that it's necessary to start talking about those until I have results. But basically I was having dinner with one of my best friends who is one of the greatest funnel designers in the world. He, he just creates multi million dollar funnels, meaning you're taking your own orders. You're taking your own orders and you're controlling the customer experience. And I've been friends with this guy for years. And finally I was like, why don't I just pay you to do this for us? And he's certainly not cheap and he's also a friend. I try to avoid doing business with friends. And I was like, can we have a separate relationship, a business relationship and a friendship? And can I just, can you just treat me like a normal client and I'll hire you to do this for me? And he was like, yes, absolutely. So we decided just to go all in and pay for the best in the world to come in and help us develop those sales channels. So, you know, I've realized throughout my years of entrepreneurship experience that it just pays to do things right. We've been trying to manage our own traffic channels. We've been trying to get independent of online retail shops for like a year now. And we've just never made it a priority because what we're doing is growing so quickly. You know, we, we, we make a lot of our sales from Amazon.com it doesn't really make sense for us to move our efforts away from there. And yet, so, so what was happening is I was really invested in Amazon and then I would kind of, you know, half arsenal, the other channels, the other sources of sales. And that was doing a disservice to our company. So we finally decided to hire the best, pay the money, get moving, and do it the right way from here on out. So that's kind of what we're focusing on right now. Now, in my supplement company, we had a really interesting couple of months. Now, I've publicly said that this has been kind of the stubborn stepchild. This has been the company that for whatever reason, we just could not get moving. And supplements are a huge space. There's a lot of competition there. There's also a lot of volume and opportunity there. So.

A lot of times we could blame competition, we could blame a whole bunch of things, but the reality of the situation is whatever we were doing was not working. So this company has kind of been stuck at around the 25 to $30,000 a month mark. And that was frustrating for us because I've had other businesses grow much, much faster than that. So what the heck are we doing differently in those companies? And I really, I could not. Everything we tried just didn't seem to push us to that next level, to that point where it was doing $100,000 a month. And it's forced me to kind of reassess how I think that Amazon's algorithm works, how you stand out among competition. Now, I'm gonna share with you on the next income report how we broke through, because we finally did break through a couple of weeks ago and sales have absolutely exploded. They have exploded. So I will share with you on the next income report what we have changed to finally get over that hump, because sales have more than doubled and we have. And we're charging more money, so our profit margins are much higher. And we have. We have. I mean, the company is far more profitable than it has ever been. Now, I will talk about that because that's happening now. So I'm going to let everything settle before I share all of the details about what we did to change things. But in these past two months, we tried a couple of things that had mixed results. We did see a slight bump as a result of dropping our price. Now, as I shared with you a second ago, we've raised our price since then, but what we wanted to do was we wanted to try and stimulate sales as quickly as possible. And this is something that I recommend to my tribe members and my mastermind members. If you have a product that is stubborn, it's time to grease the wheels with as many sales as possible, even if that means dropping the price. I don't like dropping prices on products. I like creating premium products. I like going to the high end of the market. But do whatever it takes to get sales flowing. This is why I recommend doing things like Zon blasts. This is why I recommend doing launches and giveaways, because we need to grease the wheels and we need to grease Amazon's algorithm with sales in order to get things moving. Once we have things moving, we can adjust, but it's really difficult to. To get something moving without momentum. So we build on that momentum by getting sales moving, even if it means dropping the price. So we dropped the price. We were still making a profit. And that did start to grease the wheels. That did start to get sales moving through. We also started to tweak our product listing a bit, so we get increased conversions and that definitely helped. But we kind of hit a wall at about 50 sales a day. At about 50 sales a day. We just kind of hit this wall that we were not able to break through. And of course, we ran out of inventory, which this was interesting. We were lied to by our supplier for about three weeks, maybe four weeks about this, about our order, and about the amount that that supplier had in reserve for us. I mean, there's no excuse for that. Like, I want to be upset at myself for, like, doing something wrong, but we were lied to. We were just straight up lied to. There's not a lot we can do there except scrap your supplier and find somebody new. It's one of the biggest frustrations that I've experienced in this business. And I'm sorry, fastliners today. I don't feel like I have good news for you on that particular. Particular. On that particular topic. Sometimes suppliers can be jerks and sometimes they can toy with you. What I have found is that there seems to be more reliability in the less known suppliers. Now, why this is, I'm not sure. Maybe it's because they're more eager to please. Maybe it's because they're smaller companies that deal more intimately with their customers. I'm not sure. But I have found that the less known suppliers often provide better service and for whatever reason, seem to do things better than do things better and more honestly than who everybody else is using. So my recommendation to you is that you always keep. You always keep a lookout for new suppliers. Always. I've shared the story before where we found later in our process and the yoga company that I've now sold, we found later on like a year in a different supplier that was cheaper and provided a much better product than what we had been selling for a year. So always be looking for new opportunities to find a better and cheaper product. Now, if you are sourcing from overseas, there's a gal in our tribe who actually is based on China, who goes over and looks at the suppliers that you're using, takes pictures of the products, make sure they're doing what they say they're gonna do, looks at the products to make sure they're of the utmost quality, speaks the native language. So she actually negotiates better rates than most people get. If you're just looking@alibaba.com so that's a resource for you can use if you're in the tribe. If you're looking to get in the tribe, it is open for through the end of the month and you can get access@freedomfastlane.com tribe freedomfastlane.com tribe. So always be looking for additional suppliers, new suppliers, better pricing, better products. It's something that I wish we had made part of, like a regular system for us when we got started. And it's something that if you're starting a new business, I would recommend you do to just keep a regular thing flow, a regular list of backup suppliers, new pricing from the suppliers that you're finding, and just always be ready to move if something like that happens. All right, so next month I will be documenting a little bit more about what we've done on each of these companies. Because April and probably definitely may look to be the most profitable months for either of my companies.

There has been a sharp increase in sales as a result of some tweaks that we've made that came out of the pullback. The downtime that we had in February and March. When you have those down times, it's a good time to ask yourself, okay, how can, first of all, we make sure this never happens again? And second of all, how can we make this into something that's really profitable and really beneficial? And by asking those questions, we've made some tweaks to our businesses that have really made a serious difference. Now, my third business is my personal brand. It's Freedom Fast Lane. It's people who pay me for consulting. And I had a little bit of a mixed bag here because I keep one consulting client at the moment and that consulting client.

Has. In February and March, we had a marvelous time.

This definitely offset a lot of the pullback on my other businesses. And we more than doubled my consulting clients business. And I enjoy that process so much. To be able to go in there for a few hours a month and double a business is extremely rewarding for me. And it's not the first time I've done this. If I can get personal with you, I've done this quite a few times. I have doubled and tripled businesses by going in there for a month or two, changing a few processes. And I have this email system that I've used that has generated millions of dollars, millions of dollars for myself and the people that I consult with. I actually only share this email sequence that has doubled and tripled my businesses and other people's businesses at my next level Event, which is at event Next. That's not right. It's event.freedomfastlane.com there's an application process for it there. If you're doing at least $50,000 a month in a physical products business, I can help you explode that. So if you're at that level and you want me to hands on work on your business event.freedomfastlane.com is where you can apply to attend the next level. But I have this email sequence that I have run many times, works every time. And that plus a couple other tweaks to my consulting client exploded that business. And it was a really interesting lesson for me because I've realized something about my personal brand is that I don't, you know, I shut down a lot of what I do in this business a couple years ago and just decided to only do things that I enjoy. Only do things that I'm. I really, that really excite me. I love doing this podcast. I hate creating information products. So I stopped doing that several years ago and as a result I'm a lot happier. But I have no consistent cash flow on this business and I have a lot of expenses, the expenses of hosting, I have one employee, I pay myself out of this company and I don't have consistent cash flow. So this is an interesting question that if you're an entrepreneur, is an interesting question to ask. And that is what can you do now to have regular, predictable, consistent cash flow in your business that you don't have to work for? Something like Amazon.com is extremely beneficial because once you figure out how to work that channel, which we've talked about extensively here on the podcast, you basically have cash flow forever as long as you maintain that. Whereas other businesses, like what I'm currently doing in my personal brand has none of that. Occasionally I promote an affiliate product and I have the next level event, but I only do that every few months, so there's not a regular flow to pay for those expenses. And I've realized how much better I will sleep at night once I have figured out how to solve that piece. I'm starting to kick around a couple ideas around that. And I came up with those ideas by asking a really interesting question. I asked myself the question, what would I do in my businesses if I didn't care about money? Now I've reached a certain level in my career where I have businesses that are somewhat automated. They require input if I want to grow, but I could maintain them pretty easily. And I figured out how to make more money than most people see in their lives. And that's great. So I don't have to care about money and the only reason I do is because I want to own the Cleveland Indians. But I'm curious how I would think differently if I didn't care about money and I haven't Resolved all this yet? Fast laners. But I'm starting to ask this question, what would I do? What would I keep? What businesses would I change if I didn't care about money? And I'm just playing with this question because I know that if I was honest about that, I would probably change a lot in my businesses and I would probably be a lot happier. But the temptation is to say, yeah, but this makes a lot of money, so I'll hold on to it. So I've started to play with this question as a way to be honest with myself about what isn't serving me and what am I really not excited about. And what I realized was I had been looking for the way to provide consistent cash flow in my personal brand. And I had this plan to do these information products that I know would be extremely impactful. They would change a bunch of people's lives, but then I would hate doing them. And I know I could make millions of dollars doing it. And I know that people would be thrilled with the content, but I know I would hate every minute of it. And if I didn't care about money, I wouldn't do it.

So.

If I ask myself that question, I have to think a little bit differently. And then I have to ask, okay, is there a way that I would provide this value that I wouldn't hate, that I would love, that I would do even if I didn't make money, if I didn't care about money, would I do it? And I don't have a clear answer yet, but I believe that by asking that question, I might come up with a better result in a month or three months.

Because once you have figured out the money piece, like if I ever needed money, I could go back and do things I hated and make money. But if I look at what I really love and what makes me happy, I like doing events and I like working with companies that I have upside in. Like if I make a big change, I get upside.

And I would probably spend more time on my passion projects which are very sorely neglected. I have a passion project called Losing My Religion. It's documentary that I'm, I'm working on. And I neglected it at first because I was being vetted for a TV show on Fox called Utopia. And that was a six month vetting process. I put it on hold, but now it's just like I'm just too busy with work. But if I had a billion dollars in the bank and I own the Cleveland Indians, all I would care about is going to Indians games and working on that passion project.

So I'm just playing with this question and I've talked to a few people at this, and I say I don't. I'm not even, like, I'm free. Giving myself the permission not to feel forced to do the answers I come up with. I'm just playing with the question. And that's a very empowering thing you can do what comes up. If you just play with the question, you don't have to do anything. But what happens when you ask that question or any empowering question? And it's something that I'm starting to play with, just asking myself questions that, like, I don't know the answer to, but just allowing myself to see what comes up. Like, what would I do if I had a billion dollars? Or if I was going to make $100 million next year? What would I be focusing on? Or if I was just gonna be, you know, 10 times as happy in my relationship? What might it look like? Or how would I feel? And then just see what comes up over the next couple of weeks. So I feel like I'm jumping all over the place here. But what I realized in my personal brand was a couple things. One, I realized I need consistent cash flow that I don't have to ask for and that I don't have to do it in the way that I've done it for a long time, which was releasing information products. Cause I don't get enjoyment out of that unless it's on a topic that I just love to talk about. So I don't know what that looks like yet. I just know that that answer is coming and that it will reveal itself when I'm, you know, I'm aligned with that when I. When I'm there. You see, look, I. I want to own the Cleveland Indians. So I have to think about different things. Like, since that is really my goal, things that are going to make $10,000 a month, I'm not interested anymore. Like, I have to think about what is going to minimum get me a million dollars net take home every year. And I can't take on a project unless it has the potential to give me that much. It's a waste of my time because that's energy that I can't dedicate to something else unless it's just gonna make me deliriously happy. Because I know I make a lot more money when I'm happy. I know I think a lot more clearly when I'm really happy. I know that I feel free to go after 10 million and $100 million projects rather than $10,000 a month projects when I'm deliriously happy with everything else going on in my life. So I have to think about the question, what would I keep or what would I do if I didn't care about money? Because I know that is going to put me in the place where I'm thinking about things that will make a lot more money because it's coming from a place of being completely in line with what I'm doing. It's when I know that I will carry it through. It's when I know I'm not doing it for money. So I'm not gonna burn out. I'm gonna do it because I love it and I'm gonna do it because it's changing the world. And by the way, I'm not. This is completely different than following your passion. That's not what I'm advocating here because I don't advocate that. I'm talking about while operating within the sweet spot that I have, which is my platform, my businesses, my experience, my connections. Kind of like the success equation that we've talked about with Greg Reed. It's a fantastic podcast that we recorded early on here on Freedom Fast Lane. But within that equation, within the sweet spot that I have, what would I actually keep if I wasn't concerned about the result, if I wasn't concerned about the money that it would make? These are the questions I'm asking now. And these are the questions that once you're at a level where your bills are paid, I would encourage you just to play with to see what comes up. Let's get a little bit more on track here and I'll recap a bit. We had a slight pullback in business, but it was due to some things that were sort of out of our control. And next month I'm going to outline exactly why April we've exploded and I'll share a little bit about what we've done to just make this the best month we've ever had. Oh, and I meant to mention, I always forget to mention stocks and real estate here on the, on the podcast. So one of the things I've been looking into lately is buying apartment buildings and moving over from buying single family houses, which I own five of, and keep them as rentals and putting that money into 50 unit apartment buildings instead, because I've run the numbers and it's a lot more profitable to buy really big buildings than it is to put that money into single family. So it's something I've been toying with and I dumped a lot of money into.

Stocks and retirement accounts, which is interesting because I'm not very confident in the stock market in 2015. I think we're going to have a downer of a year. But.

I am seeing certain opportunities in the stock market. I continue to buy cash flowing stocks like real estate investment trusts. I also like dividend paying stock. A lot of it's up in dividend yield right now just because the overall value is down. So when the stock market goes up, a lot of dividend stocks go down simply because you'll get a bigger return if you're putting it into growth stocks rather than putting it into dividend stocks. So there are some opportunities there on the dividend side of things. I've documented them in previous blog posts here on Freedom Fast Lane.

And I've had to actually massage my strategy a bit because for the first time this year I opened a 401k out of my company. So I'll have to share in a later podcast about how I'm allocating that because that's still a part that I'm massaging in my overall investment strategy. So I think all of this came up when I started talking about my personal brand and the need for consistent cash flow where I realized right now my personal brand, all that profits is when I work more. If I do a next level workshop, which I love doing because in three days we can produce a million dollars worth of value for somebody who is, who is running a physical products business. And if you're at that level, if you're at that $50,000 a month level, we can do some pretty special things to your business. Again, you can apply@event.freedomfastlane.com but apart from those events, you know, I don't really monetize my personal brand and I don't want to do it in a way where I have to work more often. I would like it to be in a way that had just had consistent cash flow. And I don't know what that looks like yet, but that's what I'm starting to play with. So those are the different areas that we're working on in our business. We're looking at scaling the products we have, releasing new products in the physical products businesses and looking at new channels where we can expand where there aren't thousands of people entering the marketplace. Even though there's still plenty of opportunities on sites like Amazon. I like to be thinking several years ahead and these are the types of things that share within the tribe which I'm sure you have heard is opening for the last time here in a few days. Actually, you can get more info over@freedomfastlane.com tribe and we'll be doing the coaching sessions again for those of you who are going to be going through amazing selling machine and we'll be taking that group again and mentoring them into either start starting a new business or growing the businesses that they have again. That's@freedomfastlane.com tribe. And then on the personal brand of things, it's kind of me figuring out what it is that I want to do without needing to do anything because I don't need to do anything I don't want to do. So where is it that I want to put my efforts that will be profitable? We're looking at events, these small events like the next level. I love doing it. And we're looking at having one big event a year, maybe two, where we bring in speakers and really just put on a phenomenal event. So I'll be sharing that development with those developments with you. I'm kind of learning what it is that I want to be doing in that business. So I'll be sharing the developments here on Freedom Fast Lane. So thank you for listening to this income report. I felt like I was rambling about my life for the last 30 minutes, which I try not to do do. So thanks for sticking with me. I hope you found value out of me. Sharing what is has not worked in our business, what is working in our business and where we're looking at going next. So thank you for listening to your Freedom Fast Lane and I will see you on the next show.