Making Money In The Stock Market, and When To Quit | #FFLTV Ep 3

Welcome to Freedom Fastlane tv. I'm Ryan Daniel Moran. Today we're talking about when you're done as an entrepreneur. We talk about income from the stock market. We talk about when to double down on your business versus when to quit. And we'll look at a vegan beauty line. Let's go.

So there's a little bit of a common trait that I've seen among a lot of entrepreneurs where we are really good at delaying gratification. But we have this elusive idea of someday we're gonna be done, everything's gonna be rosy. And in a lot of cases, that is from selling a business, or it's when you've got a million dollars in the bank or when you've invested it wisely enough to where you can live off the profits. And I've noticed this trend among entrepreneurs, and I can only speak to it because I've been guilty of this myself. Look, one of the greatest predictors of success is the ability to delay gratification. And the only way we're able to justify this is if we have some sort of shiny day in the future where we think we're gonna get a payoff. I mean, I go to the gym because one day I'm gonna look like a Greek God, right? I mean, I already got it going on, but one day it's gonna be even better. Or one day I'm gonna have so much money in the bank that I'll be able to. Then I'll get to enjoy my life way better. It's gonna be even. It's gonna be. Just keep working hard. One day it's gonna be worth it. We need some essence of that, like, that drives us. That desire for tomorrow to be better than today is why we run for office, supposedly. It's why we build businesses. It's why we invest. It's why we cultivate relationships. So there's an element of growth there that is necessary, but there's also this element that is really, really unhealthy. And I think the missing thing that a lot of us in our community miss is active appreciation. Look, it's. We're sprinting towards the end of the year. We tend to take one day a year called Thanksgiving and actively talk about what we're thankful for. In between belches and pie. And in reality, I think that an idea of being thankful, what I just call active appreciation, that's when you're done. Like, that's when you get to enjoy it. This idea of we put things off until we. One day, when you're done assumes that that's the point at which you get to enjoy what's in your life. Whereas we can practice that all the time. My buddy Mark Jenny, he's The founder of RVshare.com, he said something to me really interesting and he said, appreciation to me is like the process of enjoying life. If you don't actively practice gratitude or appreciation, when do you get to enjoy what's in your life? When do you actually get to enjoy the relationship you're in? When do you actually get to enjoy the process of serving the customers that you serve? When you actually get to enjoy the life you have if you don't pause and appreciate what's already going on. Because otherwise we're just gonna always be pushing it off till later, till later, till later. And then you're dead. And that's like the ultimate failure. The weird combination that I have seen among the very few people who are both growth minded and happy is that active appreciation. So rather than practice it once a year, let's practice it every day. That's when you're done as an entrepreneur, when you actually enjoy your life.

A lot of people have different strategies on creating wealth and getting rich. For some people it's lobbying for a higher minimum wage. For other people it is working somewhere for 30 years and planning for retirement. But I believe the fastest way to wealth is to build a business and to invest the profits. So let's take some questions on how you can do just that. Brian Peyton asks, how do you know.

When to pivot out of a slow business versus doubling down on your effort?

All right, so the first answer to this question is, I never go into anything unless I know that I'm willing to give at least one year to seeing something through at at least a year. And usually I know that about a year in I'm just gonna start seeing things move. If it's less than a year, I'm doing really friggin good. But chances are at about the year point is when things are gonna start upticking. Be prepared for the first year to be just getting things dialed in so that you are actually able to maybe take money off the table at that point. But ideally you're looking at a two to three year horizon. If you can project that long until you're frigging rich, that's the time horizon that you want to have. But at least a year. Commit something before you ever decide if it's a success or a failure. When I started the Freedom Fast Lane podcast, I said, I'M going to commit to this for a year before I even analyze the result. If I do this for a year and I don't like it, that's when I can say, I'm not going to do this anymore or I'm going to do this differently. But until you've done something for a year, it's really hard to be able to determine if something is a success or if it's a failure. On a more practical side of things, if you are not getting feedback from the marketplace that is taking you in a specific direction to that is usually for one of two reasons. It's A, your product isn't what they want, or B, you're not putting it in front of the audience. You're not putting it in front of the market. So when I'm looking at a business, the area where they usually need to double down is on the awareness or the influence side. Are they aggressively putting their product or their service in front of the people that want it? Are they advertising to the audiences that are already there? Are they going out and running ads on YouTube or on Facebook? Or are they really, really pressing the gas on Amazon or wherever they're taking orders? Are they willing to lose money? Are they being that aggressive? Cause if not, we don't have enough feedback to be able to make a decision. The only point at which I would say, let's pull the plug, like this is a slow business. Let's pull it is if we're doing all of that, but we're not getting leads or sales, if it's very clear that the product line that we have is not solving a PA point, or we've had a competitor come out and they've just crushed us. For example, in my younger years, I actually had a little tech company. It was called mytimeline.com I think the page actually might be up still. I haven't thought about it in a long time, but it was this idea that you could archive your life on a daily basis. You'd get a text message or you'd get an email at the end of every day saying, what did you do today? You'd upload your pictures with a short journal entry and. And every day you would archive your life you wanted to search for. When did I go to California? I'll search California. It'll pull it up in your Timeline. We launched, and I kid you not, seven days later, Facebook announced Timeline. And all of the language was someone posted to your Timeline? View this on my Timeline, it was like they had looked into the future and seen my timeline. So this was years ago. We looked at ourselves and said, do we really want to compete against Facebook? No. This competitor has all of the users, they're going to kill us. And we pulled the plug. So if you're getting crushed with no end in sight or the product just is not matching with the audience, that's when it would be time to pull the plug. But most of the time I find businesses just aren't being aggressive enough and they need to double down. Tom Zabro asks, what criteria do you.

Follow for choosing income producing stocks?

So there are basically two approaches to investing. There is speculating, as I call it, which is hoping that things go up in value. That's flipping houses, that's trading options, that's investing in tech companies that make no money. And then there's the income investor, the person who buys real estate. Having the renter pay for the mortgage and having some leftover. It's buying dividend producing stocks, it's buying or building businesses that make a profit. I am an income investor. It's my opinion that if you're trying to make money in the stock market, the only time you should be speculating, buying and selling, buy low, sell high, are the people who are doing that full time. You can have if you're a house flipper, that's a business. If you are trading options or trading stocks, that's an income stream. Or it can be if you're a professional trader. Where I spend my efforts is making my money in business and putting the profits into other income streams, not other speculations. So the best place, in my opinion, where I spend the most amount of my energy in terms of buying income producing stocks is dividend paying stocks. And my criteria there is very simple. I'm looking for companies that have increased their dividend for at least 10 years or more. Why? Because 10 years means the company has had highs, it's had lows, it's had sideways, probably it's had all of those in 10 years. And if they've raised their dividend every year, even through the hard times, good, bad, sideways, that's a good indicator that they're going to keep raising their dividend throughout the rest of the time that you hold the stock as well. So I'm looking for a stock that I can buy that's gonna give me at least a 3 1/2 to 4% return on my money starting right now. And that's gonna go up every year for the next 10 years plus. So no matter what happens to the stock, if the Dividend keeps going up, then my returns are gonna keep compounding. So I make my money in business. I put it over into income producing assets. Some of that is dividends and that's a great foundation for an income producing portfolio. But we're looking for something that's going to be 4% starting now and then next year is going to be four and a quarter, then 4.5%, then five, then five 25, five and a half and on and on and on. So what we're looking at is for.

The amount of the dividend to have gone up every year for at least 10 years. And that's a quick Google search. You can type in stocks that have increased their dividend for at least 10 years. Dividend.com does a great job of organizing them and allowing you to search for different stocks. A lot of people call them dividend aristocrats. It's just blue chip companies that have increased their dividend for a long time. And I'm yet to find an investing strategy that beats that formula. I'm just, I'm yet to find it. Unless you are Nostradamus of the stock market and you can pick the Netflixes of the world that go from $10 to $100 in a three year period for the average person. I'm yet to find a formula that outperforms the dividend aristocrat approach of just long term dividends that are gonna go up over time. That's how I pick my income producing stocks.

This is the part of the show where we analyze one of our students businesses. Today's submission comes from Faras Al Moussa. He's one of our tribe members and his business is mintpear.com. so we're gonna go into hell. Are you doing here?

I'm right here.

Oh, hey Faras.

Hey man, how are you?

Good to see you.

Thank you for having me.

Oh, this is awkward a little bit. You were not in the last frame and now you're in this frame.

I'm not and now I'm here.

So Faraz is one of our team members. He's also one of our students inside of the tribe. The tribe is where we partner up brand builders and audience leaders as well as investors. Because magic happens when those people come together. So Frost, Your business is MintPear.com. you sell beauty products, you sell health supplements. Who's your audience and what are you trying to do with them?

So first of all, I'm the co founder and co owner of Mint Pear. My wife is partner and she's she's.

The face of the brand, too, right?

She's the face of the brand. She's a professional, master esthetician.

Hey, not many people can say they're married to the face of a beauty company. Nice work, man. Good work for us.

I nailed it.

Go on.

So.

And this is where I freeze.

It's okay for us. All right, so as we're analyzing, as I'm looking at your business on MintPear.com and I'm looking at your presence on Amazon, there's a couple things that I think you're doing really, really well and a couple places where I think you're sitting on some opportunities. But first, one thing we didn't talk about is the primary way that you make sales. I know you do, like, holiday gift boxes or something like that. That's your primary sales channel. I know you did, like, 600 grand in the last 12 months with that strategy. So would you comment a little bit on your primary acquisition model? Yeah.

I mean, when we started, when we launched Mint Bear, we launched as everyone else on Amazon.com and we created Shopify.

And you're at like, 10,000amonth right now there, right?

We are at $10,000 a month on Amazon, but you're.

You did like, 600,000 in a way that I've never seen anybody else do. So talk a little bit about that.

So our approach was a little bit different. We saw that the competition is very high on Amazon.com and the way we wanted to launch our products and the originality of our products, we wanted to make sure we reach to a bigger audience. I know that the beauty industry is very saturated and it's very highly competitive. So Rita, you know, reached out to a lot of beauty boxes, a lot of companies that have a huge audience. So we leveraged the audiences, reached out to them. She sold them. What we.

What.

What is our mission statement? What. What we stand for and what we believe, you know, people and individuals should have, what type of products?

And they bought in bulk, like, hundreds of thousands of units. Right.

Our first purchase order was 500,000 units.

Holy cow, man. And so what you said it was because of your mission statement. Your mission statement is.

So our mission statement is to actually create.

The best experience for.

You can't even say your mission statement. That's a problem, man. That is a problem when you can't say a mission statement. So I got you in the door, but you. Yeah. Like, you forgot what it is. So here's what I think when I'm looking at your brand. I think you're sitting on a really, really cool opportunity if you're willing to do the content generation side and the advertising side. So you are 100% correct that the industry that you're in, where you're doing your brushes and your combs and your eyebrow duo brush, whatever, that is going to be really aggressive on a site like Amazon. But if you've got the audience, you can cash that check every single day. And building up a beauty audience, especially with your wife being the face of the brand and her being as transparent as she is on her Instagram. She shows pictures of her without makeup and with makeup on her YouTube, on the YouTube channel, which is.

Pretty underdeveloped. You've got four videos right now, 89 subscribers. There are beauty channels with hundreds of thousands of subscribers, Hundreds of thousands of them. And if you've got a mission statement that you might not know, but Rita knows, and it got your foot in the door with these beauty box companies, it's also going to open up conversations with other YouTube channels that you could potentially partner with. If you're actively making this content, it will open you up to relationships that you can start to partner with. And what's her name? Michelle Phan. Is that the girl that has like a billion subscribers in the, in the makeup world? Is that her name?

Khan?

I don't know. That's a different one. That's not who I was thinking of. But there's all these channels with, with, with. It is Michelle Phan. Okay, all right, so there's, there's all, there's all these channels with, with millions of subscribers. If you start to open up conversations with other mid tier people, that explodes your, explodes your reach. What I'm seeing right now is like, I'm on your YouTube channel right now. I'm looking at your Instagram. And first of all, from your website, I can't easily find your social media. And I would change that. Cause I think your social media is really gonna drive this. I'm seeing like tutorials where Rita's putting on makeup. You're sitting on some sort of like inner beauty campaign. That Dove does really, really well. If your mission is something along the lines of highlighting the inner beauty of every woman or reflecting the beauty that's inside, on the outside, using your products and your tutorials, and your content reflects that. Now you've got a mission that everybody can line up behind. And you're in an industry, you're in a sphere that is going to attract millions and millions of people. Especially if Rita is willing to put herself out there as much as she's already shown that she is willing to do so I'd be doing the exact same thing on Instagram. I think you just need more frequency and being willing to advertise the brand just to get followers. That exposure will pay for itself for years to come. It won't have an immediate roi, but spend the time now to build up that audience so you can cash that check later. And finally, just looking at the product line that you've got right now, I see the three products on Amazon. The makeup brush, the detangling hair brush, the eyebrow duo brush. I don't think that is enough profit margin to be able to build a real business around. Unless you've got a hundred beauty boxes that you can sell hundreds of thousands of units to. I think you need some higher margin products, whether it is creams and foundations. You're nodding like you have thought of that.

We actually have. We're launching five new skincare products that are in the cream and lotions and serums and they will be live in.

Good because that's what's actually going to create profit. You are never going to make money off a foundation makeup brush. It's just never going to be a driver selling $11 product unless you're in every Walmart in the country and you can have enough volume to make 50 cents a unit. It's just, it's not never going to ROI for you. So those higher margin products are going to be the thing that really drive you. Good work, man.

Thank you so much.

On today's show, we mentioned that you should be willing to spend at least a year before evaluating the result in your business. Having that type of a mindset is one of the reasons why so many of our students have been so incredibly successful. We do training, we like to call it 12 months to 1 million, which is really just a framework for how we have built successful businesses. In 12 months or less, you can head over to freedomfastlane.com million to see the exact process of what that looks like, of how we help our students orchestrate a plan that they'll work for a year and on the other end of that have a successful, sellable, scalable, physical products business at the end of that process. If you're not willing to go through a year of work, you probably don't deserve to be an entrepreneur. If you are an entrepreneur or you wanna be an entrepreneur, one of the things that you can do right now is subscribe to the Freedom Fastlane podcast. It's where I bring in the smartest people we know. And I sometimes have something insightful to say about building businesses and investing the profits. If you wanna see one of your questions answered here on the show, head over to facebook.com freedomfastlane you can ask your question there and we might just answer it on the next show. Thanks so much for watching Freedom Fast Lane tv and we'll see you on the next show.