Investing for Cash Flow And Balancing Multiple Businesses | #FFLTV Ep 7

Oh, hey everybody. I'm Ryan Daniel Moran. And today we're gonna talk about what the heck you should invest in. We'll talk about balancing what you're passionate about versus what you need to get done, how I manage my time. And we'll look at a new type of physical products brand. Show some clips of me.

Dadd.

A few weeks ago I brought in some of the best investors that I know and put them on stage all at one time. We called it the investment panel. And we had individuals who ran funds versus people who invested in real estate versus people who had multi million dollar stock portfolios versus someone who had just sold their business and was looking to invest in a lot of different things. And they talked about how they mitigated their tax bill and how they diversified for passive income. And we put all of them on stage at one time. And my only regret from Freedom fastlane Live is that we did not allocate more time to that panel. It was the most fun I probably had during the conference and we'll definitely be going more in that direction for future conferences. But there was one specific topic that came up a lot and it was about if things hit the fan, should you be invested in gold, silver, bitcoin and. And other hedges? Let's look at a clip from that panel.

I'm still doing bitcoin. Precious metals is definitely something that's still close to my heart. And then online companies, so something that's existing, running, probably something similar to what.

They would buy because.

I'm like what I call asset agnostic. I don't, I care that it produces.

Cash flow, but gold doesn't do that.

But gold don't get me started.

Actually, go ahead and get started. And it has lousy tax treatment.

Gold is overrated. Okay. Again, there's the holistic portfolio and then there's the single asset. You are correct. However, in an inflationary economy, would you agree we're at least in that.

Maybe. Hold on, hold on for a moment here for a second. Because what you are going to make an argument for is it as a hedge.

Correct.

And you say what the heck is the point if there's no cash flow? Is that right?

Yeah. I mean, ultimately I buy investments because I want them to pay me money over time. And anything that doesn't pay me money over time, I just don't care because I want that income.

Sure.

But to find money, to find money.

Is somebody handing me a dollar bill.

Yeah, but that dollar has value because.

Because we believe it does.

Correct?

Yes, but I don't think the world is going to hell in a hand basket.

I don't either.

And why are you doing this?

Because I want to be ready in.

Case it does it.

I don't lose.

It's only a percentage.

No, I don't lose though.

But even if the world does go to hell, you're not going to want gold rocks in your house. You're going to want blue jeans, water guns and food.

I said that's true, but also silver. But I didn't say again, it has a purpose in the portfolio because you have to have this offsetting thing. I mean, I'm taking on millions of dollars of debt every time I buy a building, right? The world goes to less than someplace none of us want it to see. But I can use that as a way to get rid of that debt.

Now, of course, this is fun for us to speculate about. Is the economy going to go up or down? Is gold going to go up or down? What's going to happen with bitcoin? I've shared my opinion on bitcoin and it's the same kind of opinion as gold and silver. It might be an okay hedge, but if you've got your, if you're treating that as an investment, you've got the wrong strategy from the get go. Look, the primary question that we need to be answering is how are you producing? That is the next. That was the question that will lead into what should we be investing in? Cause the primary thing that you should be investing in is things that you can control. You can't influence the price of bitcoin, the price of gold, the price of real estate. You can do, you know, change the paint and carpets and if that's the business that you're in, go for it. But if you're a business owner, buy other businesses. If you are an email marketer, buy other email lists. You know, you can affect that. That is where your greatest ROI is going to come from. You are the greatest ROI that any portfolio will spit off. Rather than hitching your wagon to gold, bitcoin, real estate, or any other vehicle, the primary thing that you should be investing in is you and the things that you can control and, and impact. Of course it's fun and it's sexy to talk about the things that might go up in value. Look, I had a penny stock ndev go through the roof in the last couple weeks and it was awesome. I thought I was so cool. Cause I made all this money from one investment. It was a company that I had held for several Years, because I think that industry is gonna go way up. But I'm not changing my strategy now to go buy a whole bunch of penny stocks. The reason is. Cause I can't impact that. I can't affect that. Make your money in business. Invest primarily in things that you can impact and diversify through the rest of your portfolio. So if you want to have a hedge account where you're in gold, silver, Bitcoin, go for it. But by no means should your hedges be where your primary focus is as an investor. Your primary focus as an investor should be in cash flow. And your primary focus as a cash flow investor should be on things that you can control and impact. That's when you're bulletproof. That's when you will continue to be able to maintain a lifestyle no matter what happens to the economy. And then you can diversify into other assets. But let's not call that a primary investing strategy. That's speculating. You're speculating on what's going to happen in the economy. You're speculating on how someone is going to manage a business. You're speculating on what is going to happen to the price of whatever asset it is that you're buying or. But it's not speculating to double down on yourself and to double down on your skillset and to double down on the businesses you advise, the businesses that you're invested in, the businesses that you partner with as an affiliate or in a partnership. That's where your focus should be as an entrepreneur. And then you can diversify through your speculative investments.

Of course, I believe that the fastest way to financial freedom is to build a business and invest the profits. So let's address some questions that'll help you do just that.

How do you disconnect what you are passionate about from what you have to get done to escape the rat race?

Now, this is an interesting question, and there are multiple schools of thought on this. There are people who say, follow your bliss, follow your passion, and the money will follow. There are some people who say, follow the money and the passion will come. Both work. Both are perfectly viable. What works for you? What drives you? I think the important kind of X factor here is you've got to be passionate about something, right? You could be passionate about quitting your crappy job, but something has to be driving you. Let's talk about it like that. It's not what are you passionate about? Because then that brings in the question about how do I find what I'm meant to do in this world? How do I find what I'm passionate about, and. And none of that exists, right? It's just whatever you decide, whatever you create, that's what your life becomes. There is no outside of yourself passion that you have to find. There is no you that you have to discover. There is no life path that has been preset for you. It's just what you decide and what you create along the way. So what's driving you is a much better question. And that can be your reason why. That can be your passion. My suggestion for somebody who is still in the rat race, Follow the money. Do what you need to do to make the money. Let the passion be running away from what it is that you're trying to avoid. And once you have cut that off, you've cut the source of your stress and frustration, then you could say, okay, great, what am I going to do with my life and my business? Now, the important question, I think, is, what do you do once you have freed yourself from the thing that you resent? If you hate your job and you've got to pay bills and you're trying to start a business to try and get away from the job, what's your life gonna look like when that's gone? Most people never answer that question. So what happens is they cut off the job, and then they take their resentment, they bring it into their business, and then they just resent the business. So what is your life gonna look like once that's gone? Is it gonna be in this business? Is it gonna be in a different business? And you'll wind that one down? Does it mean that you just automate that one so you can live a nice, cushy lifestyle? There's no right or wrong here. But answering the question of what fills that gap, what fills that space, will allow you to make a healthy pivot from being able to justify, I'm gonna do this thing that is, I might not even enjoy right now, but I'm gonna put all of my attention into it so that I can get rid of the crappy job that will allow you to do that. Now, some people will argue that this is just easier if you do what you love and what you're passionate about. And if that's what drives you, if you got something, if you got a topic that you're interested in and you want to build a blog and a side hustle about that specifically, you have my blessing to do so. That has driven a lot of my business decisions, but only once I was successful. I had to have the. The stress monkey off my Back before I felt free to be able to pursue what it was that I was passionate about. That's me. Other people don't have that. But if you've got something that's holding you back, I say it's a logical and easy thing for you to do, to follow the money so that you can quit the thing you hate. And then we can answer the question, what am I passionate about? Or what am I doing with my life? Derek Sivers had a great blog post on this, and he basically argued that the happiest people that he knows have a job that they're committed to, meaning it's a career or a skill set. That isn't their passion, it's not their gift to the world, but it's something they're at least invested in enough to where they can constantly be growing in that skillset. And then they have an art form or the thing that they're passionate about that they're not reliant on for income. And what that allows them to do is to balance both worlds, is to be committed to their work and committed to their art. And they've got the thing they do for money and the thing that they do for fun or as a gift to the world. I think the same is true in business. I have cash flow businesses. I have businesses that pay for my life. And then I have my gifts to the world. I make the least amount of money from Freedom Fast Lane. Of all my projects, I make the least. But me taking home Freedom Fast Lane, I talk about this stuff because I can't not like, if you took away all of this, I'll be on the street corner talking about capitalism and free markets. All right, I can't not talk about it. But for those of you who've been following me for several years, you know that I haven't been doing this show and the podcast with full commitment until I had the cash flow piece. But built up from my physical products brands, which I love. I've become passionate about them. Cause they're my babies. And now that they're more automated, I can focus more time on the thing that I think is gonna really change people's lives and give me fulfillment. So I do the same thing. I balance the things I do for money and the things I do for passion. They're just businesses rather than a job and a business. Joe Smolenski asks, how do you manage being involved in several ventures at once while also allocating time for sleep and family? It is very hard to be in multiple things at the same Time without having very clear expectations for what you bring to each project or what you bring to each relationship. My life changed in a great way a few years ago when I started Zen Active Sports, which is a yoga company that I built and sold. And my business partner on that is Sean. He's one of my best friends to this day. We spend every Friday night as guy night, which usually revolves around a really good meal and then being asleep by 10:30. That's what happens when you have a kid. Anyway, so Sean and I started Zen Active Sports a few years ago. And when we were starting that business, I remember being in my bedroom on the phone with Sean and I said, shawn, look, I have other commitments. I have other businesses that I run. So the way this is going to work, the only way I can be involved is if I'm the capital partner and your advisor. But this is your business. You run the operations. I will walk you through the process. I will bring relationships to the table, I will bring money to the table, but those are my only commitments that I can bring. Does that work for you? Yes. Then we outlined what the arrangement was gonna be. I have a summary company called Body Vega Nutrition. Same exact conversation with my business partner, Paul. Paul, I can be an advisor and an investor, but that's all I can bring to this. I can commit a few hours a week to working with you, to bringing in certain relationships, to bringing suppliers that I know to the table. And that's my commitment to those projects. Whereas with some of my other projects where I'm much more involved, that's because either we started it years ago and it's really successful, or I have other skill sets I bring to the table. I have other relationships I bring to the table. So I am not fully time committed into every project. I set the rules up front for what the relationship is going to look like. So that is how I manage having multiple projects on top of that. I just block out certain times for certain projects. So when you hear the podcast, I will record two or three podcasts in a day and that will be spread out over a couple of weeks. Or if you look at some of my projects, like my physical products brands, I have certain days of the week that I have blocked out for those projects and my other members, my other team members know not to bother me on certain issues about those specific on those specific days. Cause I'm gonna be committed to something else. So scheduling and blocking out that time has worked out really well for me. So batching that time, if you will, if I don't batch time. I'm at my computer trying to figure out what am I gonna do today, what am I gonna work on? Whereas if I know Wednesday, I'm showing up for this meeting on this project with these team members that has helped me be fully present in the project that I'm focused on. And then I surround myself with implementers so that I can be the idea guy. I can bring what I know best to the table for a project and then get out of the way. Because I work with people who are better than me at the things that I'm not good at doing.

One of my favorite things is when someone sees what we're doing on the podcast or here on Freedom Fastline TV and says, I think finally felt inspired to start a business after hearing something that you said. So this is the part of the show where we look at one of our students businesses and analyze what we're doing. But today's a special edition because someone near and dear to us at FFL TV said, you know, something you said finally inspired me to start a business. And that was the guy behind the camera, the guy you can't see. Chris, let's talk about your business.

Whoa. That was weird.

Hey, Mr. Moran, thanks for having me on the show.

Oh, hey, Chris. Good to meet you, sir. So you gave me an idea for a business that I thought actually had a lot of merit to it. So why don't you talk a little bit about how you were inspired to this business and kind of what you're looking at?

Sure, yeah. Yeah. Following Ryan is definitely inspired. And also from my own personal journaling with the 5 Minute Journal to create something for couples. This would be like a couple's journal that you hand off back and forth, and it could help you build up your relationship, communication skills, love life, all that good stuff.

So that was a big resolution for me this year, 2017, launch my own physical product that I am passionate about, but I also think could generate some cash flow. Then doing a little bit of research.

I realized that there was already two pretty popular companies doing more or less the exact same thing.

And they were on Amazon, right? Yeah.

And I kind of knew from the beginning, like, well, surely someone else has had this idea. Someone else has done it. I'll just do it better. But then I saw that they had over four stars on Amazon, over 500 reviews, and they're selling for half of the price that I thought this would sell for maybe like 22, $25. They're selling for like 10 bucks and they have like Raving reviews. So at this point I'm just thinking like, can. Well, so I've ordered it and I'm gonna keep doing more research.

You've ordered the competitor?

Yeah. Okay. I've ordered these competitors products to see if I can really improve upon it. But yeah, I'm also just thinking, do I need to stay within the same target demographic and pivot to a different product? Maybe even like an app or something that's a little bit different or just get out of this entirely altogether because it's so crowded. There's already been success with other people doing this that maybe I just need to like back out and do something else.

Okay, so a couple things. This is gonna be a good news, bad news thing. First of all, it's not crowded. Two competitors is not crowded. Two competitors is wide open. So it is not crowded Just because somebody else had the idea first or made the product first. That just means they proved the concept for you to go in and clean up. Now on the other side of things, here's the good news, bad news piece. This is not a product that is gonna kill it on Amazon. When you hear about products that kill it on Amazon, it means people are already searching for that thing. They're going to Amazon just to complete the order and yours shows up. That's why there's been so many successful cash flow businesses because they don't have to do any marketing. They just throw up their product in front of people who are already looking for it. Yours needs some explanation. There's no one going to Amazon going journal to improve my love life. It's just not happening. They're gonna hear about it from someone else. And I don't know anybody else who is talking about it in the way that you described it. So if we look at how a business like this is gonna fly, it's gonna have to come as the result of influencers and audiences talking about it.

Yeah.

And I don't know any influencers who are talking about that. But if you can show them that and show them a result. This is a results based product. Right. Because if somebody does five entries, all that does is just like therapy. It gets you talking again. That's the power here. So if you get somebody using it and talking about it, you become the price setter in that space. And in that case, I don't worry about the fact that they're half the price. I don't worry about their reviews. I worry about who's talking about it. And what I like about this product is it's Essentially a consumable. It's a consumable. Cause once you've written everything out, you need a new one. I have like 105 minute journals in my house because I've gone through it once and I buy a new one and I go through it and I buy a new one and you get the same benefit out of what you're doing. It's just not gonna come as the result. They might reorder on Amazon, but they're not gonna discover you on Amazon. So your focus needs to be on who are the influencers or where's the audience already hanging out that I can get in front of that will talk about my product.

So create a kick ass sales page, find affiliates, get mentioned by podcasts, blogs.

People in space, possibly that would work just fine. But let's look at the Five Minute Journal. How often does Tim Ferriss Talk about the 5 Minute Journal?

All the time. I got a feeling he's getting a kickback on that.

I don't think he does. I know the founders of 5 Minute Journal, and as far as I know, they do not have a business relationship together. And as a result of him talking about it, lots of other. We're talking about it right now as something that I use. I don't even remember how I discovered the five Minute Journal, but it wasn't through Tint, it was through somebody else. Okay. I think I actually was speaking with you, Jay, the creator of it, and I think he gave me a free one and now I'm hooked. And now I buy a bunch of them. So I don't think that you necessarily need to go recruit affiliates and pay them a commission. You just need to show the result. Because people talk about results. I talk about the products that have improved my life. So does everybody. You just need to get it in front of the people who have a platform to talk about it. It might be relationship coaches, it might be authors, it might be. And here's the asset you can use, Kris. When you've got an audience, you can now have book recommendations to the same audience and you can promote each other's stuff. So if you've got an audience of a few thousand couples, you can then promote your book to them. Somebody else's book, that author comes around, talks about it to their audience, and now you've got the same type of distribution network that you would have if you had affiliates. You're just not paying them affiliate commissions. You're paying them in other book sales.

Yeah, all right, I like it.

Good work. I like what you're up to. Scene Whether it is saving marriages, saving lives, or saving the economy, I believe that entrepreneurship and capitalism is the best way to solve all of the world's problems. It's why we need more more success. We need more wealthy people, and we need less government because government gets in the way. Entrepreneurship is the solution. You are the best shot at the change you want to see in the world. That's why this conversation is so important. You can help us spread this message by subscribing to the podcast@freedomfastlane.com iTunes. You can also subscribe on YouTube and like our page on Facebook so you see every episode that we release on Freedom Fast Lane tv. Thanks for watching. We'll see you on the next show.