Income Report January 2015

Foreign.

Hey fastlaners, this is Ryan Daniel Moran with this month's Freedom Fast Lane Income Report. I want to thank all of you who gave me such valuable feedback during the last income report and helped me shift the style in which we do these. I was really considering not doing income reports moving forward into 2015, but decided to keep with this format of, of doing the podcast style and also sharing more about the changes in the businesses rather than any specific numbers. I don't really care for reporting on specific numbers, so I'm going to keep those fairly vague and just share the things that made the biggest difference in our business from month to month. So to keep it vague, I suppose my total income or revenue on all my businesses in June, January of 2015 was just south of half a million dollars, which is slightly less than what it was what it did in December of 2014. So we had a slight regression, which was to be expected. Had a huge bump in income as a result of some affiliate payments coming out towards the end of the year. And so that north of half a million dollars mark that we hit in December of 2014 wasn't quite matched in January, but still a pretty decent month, being just south of half a million dollars. Not bad for a month's revenue across my businesses. And there was, there was some combination of things as of as there is in every month. There were some opportunities, there were some challenges, and they sort of evened out this month, I suppose. So let's start from the top. My largest business is my men's fitness company and it did its best month ever. It did about $325,000 in sales. Now this is my company that is my first Amazon business. So this one is going to have the most traction since Amazon picks up a lot of steam over time. And this company has grown month over month for the last two years and had his best month in January of 2015. Now, the biggest difference in these sales, the biggest difference in the sales of this company was simply that some existing products increased their market share. One of our products, one of our best sellers, lost market share, which I'll talk about in a second. But there were some other products that weren't doing as well that increased in sales by about 30% in one month. Now how the heck does that happen? The way this happens is through a cumulation of reviews, rankings increases and repeat customers. So I've told the story a hundred times. There was a time in which I thought that one of our products would cap out at about 25 sales a day and that's where we thought the market limit was. And then when we rolled out additional products, the sales of product number one kept going and going and going and now it does over 125 sales per day. It's our best selling product. So this happens to be a trend. When one product picks up steam, the others tend to pick up steam as well. And there is a monumental increase in sales from increase in rankings from repeat customers and from increased reviews, which increases your conversion rate. So all of those things play together. Obviously we're not going to lose reviews on a month to month basis. We're just going to keep getting more reviews. So that plays a factor in sales. We had our rankings increase and then just the total number of sales across all of our products continues to go up. And when somebody buys one product, they buy another product and so your total sales goes up. That's why I say you should focus a lot of your attention specifically in an Amazon business in replicating the product release strategy over and over and over again as much as you can comfortably handle in order to have a million dollar plus business. There's people who pay me for consulting and when usually we're getting on the phone, we're talking about launching products and launching more products. That's usually what we end up talking about. So if you have one of these types of businesses, be more aggressive in the products that you roll out. We just outlined four additional products that we are going to be releasing in the next 90 days or so, knowing full well that there's about a six month curve before those products are really significantly profitable. Another thing that we're doing is we are changing the layout or the style, the design of some of our products to look more professional. We kind of look a little bit generic right now. So we are going to be upping our game. And as far as design and product presentation goes, in order to hopefully in the long term attract some retail partners, some physical product stores. That's the long game here. Now we had one of our products actually lose market share and the reason for that was because of some cheating competitors. I feel like a broken record. I talk about this every month, but I have lovingly referred to one competitor as Mr. Asshat who continues to leave negative reviews on our listings, on other people's listings and inflate his own listings. Well, now we have asshat number two who is just buying hundreds and hundreds of fake reviews on his products and making it look like everybody loves his stuff, when in reality it's just freelancers who are Paid a few bucks to leave a review. So we have identified that this person has even admitted to doing so, but Amazon hasn't done anything about it. So this is one of those things that if eventually Amazon has to get their stuff together, Amazon eventually has to figure out a way to mitigate cheaters or another marketplace is going to come and take away market share from Amazon. It happened with MySpace 10 years ago when MySpace was overridden with spam. And then along came a website called Facebook which took a hard line on spam now and as a result it is now the biggest website in the world. So what's next for this company? We are rolling out new design, more professional design. As I mentioned, we are going to be rolling out some additional products. We outlined four or five that will be launching in the next 90 days and we are continuing to work on other sales channels that are not dependent on Amazon. So we're looking at E commerce and we're looking at, at funnels like video sales letters. We just hired a new employee to kind of project manage those tasks. Actually have a meeting with them an hour, in an hour or so to kick off those, those new strategies. So we'll be building those over the next six to 12 months and I expect them to have a significant impact on our bottom line. So the total revenue from that was about $325,000,000 last month. Then I have a supplement company which is on Amazon and we had the lovely fortunate to run out of inventory in January due to finally cracking the code in December. I shared in December how we took that struggling company and turned it around. It was on pace to do about $50,000 a month in sales. And because of that big surge we couldn't keep in stock stock fast enough. This created a snowball of problems. We couldn't order fast enough. So we had Amazon actually smack us on the wrist and say that. Well, basically what happened is, is we set an in stock date. We didn't meet it in time and Amazon didn't like that too much. So we got temporarily removed from Amazon, fought to get back on. We're back on. Everything is fine and well now. But as a result we lost all of our keyword rankings. So we are back at square one, hustling to get these products ranking and scraping and begging for, for every sale all of our reviews were, were maintained. And we're back to the point where, which we're doing about 70 sales a day or so which, which averages to be about 30 to 40 forward. It's about $40,000 a month in sales. So we're getting back on track, but we are having to kick down some doors in order for this company to start being really successful. One of the things that I wish I had known when I started these businesses was that managing inventory was going to be a pain no matter what market I was in. And I wish that I had been more aggressive in my inventory management from the get go. It would have saved us a whole lot of headache and a whole lot of time in scaling these businesses. But we are back on track now and it appears that we're, you know, back on, on the the up climb towards hitting that $50,000 a month mark which has been fairly elusive to us in this business. The third business, and I guess this will probably be the last time I bring this up, Zen Active Sports is sold. I have check in hand and we will still be advising this company for the next year or so, but we are now removed from the operations of Zen Active Sports, our yoga products company. And I have check in hand and we're done. So we have successfully built and sold a company that is mostly Amazon based. And on the next podcast I will be sharing more about the sale of this business will be detailing the sales of how this looked. So make sure you are subscribed to Freedom Fast lane over the iTunes store. You can go to freedomfastlane.com iTunes and subscribe to make sure you are tuned for that episode. We'll be sharing more of the details about how that worked, why they approached us and what it looks like to position a company for sale if that is the route that you want to go. And then of course there is my personal brand. There's Freedom Fastlane. It did about $75,000 in sales in January and this was due to a couple things. This was due to some late affiliate payments trickling in some reserves that were being held by the merchant coming in, but they also came from some news sources. So I have launched a new event for for Amazon entrepreneurs who are at least at the $25,000 a month mark. So if you're between 25,000 and $100,000, I'm holding workshops in Austin, Texas and we started taking spots for that last month and they sold out within a couple of days. So we opened up some new dates which you can find out about over at event freedomfastlane.com so I'll be working workshop style, hands on with 10 people and creating custom plans to 2, 3, 4, 5x their businesses using the strategies that we have built to have Multimillion dollar businesses. So if you're at the 25 to $100,000 a month mark, you'd qualify to attend our workshops, which is called the Next level. And again that URL is event.freedomfastlane.com so we opened that last month. We opened it privately, it was, it was invite only to start and it sold out. And that was a significant portion of last month's sales. I also took on a new consulting partner. Now I mentioned at the end of 2014 that I was no longer taking any consulting clients and I've even shut down my coaching page over@freedomfastlane.com but I approached a deal in which there was a piece of the growth in this business which is really exciting for me because I'm able to create massive results in people's businesses. Here is a little side note. For those of you who are in the service based business or you do consulting, it's really interesting how when you get really good at the services that create massive differences in your clients businesses, how you can really leverage those. All of 2014 I was working with a client who paid me a substantial amount of money to increase their business and I was able to about double their business. But I didn't get any of that upside. But all I was really doing in their business was tweaking their email copy. Now this alone about doubled their business. It was well worth their investment in me for me to tweak their email process and it continues to bring them an additional several hundred thousand, if not a million dollars in revenue.

As we move forward. Even though I retired from working with that business. So it's amazing what you can do when you really dial in what services add to their bottom line. So if you're doing that right now, I would invite you to see if to explore what activities are actually adding to your clients bottom line. And can you either increase your prices or incentivize growth more than you currently are? So I have no interest anymore of getting a flat paycheck. I just have no interest. It's not exciting to me anymore. But getting a paycheck plus a piece of the growth that comes on when I'm brought into a new company that all of a sudden is pretty exciting because I know what I can do. I've seen what I do in other people's businesses. I've lost a lot of money not doing this and I would not advise anyone to do this anymore. Just for a quick example, I ran some email campaigns for some clients that added an additional quarter million dollars A month or so to their bottom line. And they paid me for this and they paid me well, but I got zero of that upside down. If I had just taken 10 to 15% of that upside, I could have put an additional 20 to $30,000 a month into my pocket. But I didn't do that. And part of that was, you know that voice in your head that's like, ah, I don't know if I'm worth that. And part of it was probably just a lack of boldness from asking. But the alternative is that the client makes zero extra dollars or underpays you and still has their tremendous results. I could have either not worked with that client and they would have had zero additional dollars on their books or I would have stayed underpaid. So I wish that I had gone back and done this earlier and I taking way too long to encourage you if you are working with clients to look at the activities that create the biggest addition to their client's bottom line and take a piece of that upside. I have one student, I passed an Amazon client over to them and he alone has added, I want to say it's like $400,000 a month additional revenue to that client. I may be inflating that, forgive me, it's in the hundreds of thousands of dollars he has added directly to their bottom line and he's taking a decent monthly fee from them, but no upside. And this is my fault. I should have encouraged him to do this earlier. But as a result of not doing that, if you had just taken 2.5% of the total sales, just 2.5% and it was $400,000 a month, that's an additional $10,000 a month in your pocket that this individual could have taken. And that's my fault because I didn't advise this person to do that. All of this to say that I'm no longer interested in just monthly checks. I'm interested in being able to be compensated for my results. That's a business. So rather that that's you have stopped training your hours for dollars at that point when you're rewarded for your results. So if you have clients, I would encourage you to consider this. So that client approached me with a results based compensation and that made it easy for me to say yes because I know I can increase this client's results. And because of it, I'll probably add an additional quarter million dollars or so directly into my personal bank account in the next year or so, assuming that everything goes according to plan. Now I actually canceled a project or put it on hold. I had a product that I was developing called Perfectly Passive Income. You heard me announce it on the podcast and I put it on hold. And I put it on hold because I just didn't feel like launching it yet. I. I love talking about investing. I didn't feel like the format in which I was doing it, which was an info product, was the best way to communicate the message that I wanted to communicate. And to be honest with you, I wasn't really enjoying making PowerPoints. I would much rather be doing this in a live event or I would rather be doing this in a different style of product. So I have actually put this project on the back burner and I know that I'm. I'm losing about $25,000 a month or so by not launching this, but I don't yet feel, I don't yet feel in line with the strategy that I had. So I have put it on pause. So I apologize to the several hundred of you who have requested more information about that product over@perfectly passiveincome.com There is a waiting list. I haven't yet decided what to do about that because it is something that I'm very passionate about talking about, but I felt like I was thinking too small with the way that I was doing it. As a result, I put it on the back burner and I'll be kind of reviewing that process and seeing what the best way to move forward will be over the next few months. So I'll have more information on that as it becomes available. And finally, my partner Sean Coyne and I, who I've had on the podcast and shared our step by step process to six figures on Amazon. It's one of the most popular podcast episodes I ever did. He and I obviously sold Xenactive. So there's a question now of what do we do next? What do we do with the money? And what do we do next with our time? Well, with the money it was easy. We'll be investing that into the next project. What the next project is was a lot of back and forth. We thought, do we start another company? Do we advise some Amazon companies and help them 10x their sales? Do we do it for some large Fortune 500 companies and take a piece of their upside? What do we do? And we hadn't decided yet. And then as we were sitting around having dinner on one of our Friday night dates, we were kicking around this idea for a brand new company that has nothing to do with anything we've ever done before. And after about three hours of massaging the idea. We think we came up with the best idea for a company that we've that I've ever come up with. It was just a really, really exciting idea and we are still in the very early stages of planning that. It is a completely new type of business that I've never built before, something Sean has never built before. So it's actually pretty scary. But we are kicking around this idea and looking at what it's going to cost to fund this business and what it is going to take to build this business. And assuming that we go forward, it'll be a really cool case study for us to share here on Freedom Fast Lane because it's an entirely new type of business that I've ever done before and it'll be really cool to track it from the ground floor moving forward as we build this and share the details publicly here on the podcast and over@freedomfastlane.com so we are still putting the initial plan together. So I'm not ready to announce this business yet, but once it's live and once it's ready, it'll be really cool to follow along with us. So it overall was a successful month. One business had its best month ever, another is finally starting to get traction after cracking the code in December. One business got sold and another business is going in a new direction of events and thinking a lot bigger, which is really exciting for me. So just to recap, if you are at the 25 to $100,000 a month mark on an Amazon business, you can apply to come to one of our workshops where I will hands on work on your business to get it to literally the next level. And that Application is at event.freedomfastlane.com I'll also be releasing the full scoop about the sale of Zen Active so sports and talking more about that process and what it looked like. So make sure you are subscribed to us on itunes because that episode will be coming out next week. Thanks so much for listening to Freedom Fast Lane. I would love to hear your thoughts. You can access the show notes over@freedomfastlane.com and would love to hear your feedback on this format for these income reports. Thanks so much for listening and I'll see you on the next show.