9 Income Streams You Can Build While STILL an Employee

If I wanted to be wealthy, have less risk, and have a higher likelihood of figuring out where I could make the most money. I need multiple income streams and in this video I want to share with you the nine income streams I grew while having a job before I got known on the Internet. I wish somebody would have told me this stuff when I was working. Nobody talked about where they put their money, why, and how much money they actually made. In fact, they hid it totally frowned upon to share any of this. Depending on your situation in life, the best side hustle or income stream for you to pick is going to be different. The most important thing to understand when looking for more income streams is that you want to find leverage, a way of working smarter, not harder, to achieve the same goal with less effort. Consider it like using a lever to open a bottle cap. You can either attempt to manually brute force it, which is time for money, or you can use the right leverage for your situation and the leverage doesn't work for you. So how do you figure out which income streams you have the right lever for? There are four money levers at different points you can use to build up your income streams like I did. Let's jump into what those are and I'll give you all the exact things that I did. First lever is time. Obviously time's all you got in the beginning. Early on, anytime you can trade your time for somebody else's money, that's going to be your superpower. Here is one of the first income streams that I had. A service business. I started a service business that helped people do business in Latin America. It was called Selling south and basically did it on the side with a colleague who worked with me at the time. All we did was we helped companies that wanted to do what we did in Latin America by giving them introductions. So this company got paid by the hour to create market entry to those who also wanted to sell investments in the latam. It wasn't a huge income stream, but our first year we each took home about $40,000 a year. It also led to a big job years later for me, helping this woman, Nelly Galan, do a part of her tour in the US for Latinos in finance. And I never would have gotten that opportunity without a couple of long hours and nights doing the service business. That's how I met Gloria Estefan. That's how I got on people in Espanol's red carpet. I think I made 15k for that side gig with Nellie Galan, but I would have paid to participate in all of that now today I own another online service business. This one's called Viral Cuts. And it's made me realize this is something I wish I had done when I was in my 20s. I didn't have selling south until I was well into my 30s. It's so easy today to start offering a service online. We've paid contractors at contrarian thinking 5k for 10 to 20 hours a month doing research, writing, design, short form editing like this. Finding an outsource expert on sites like Upwork or Fiverr for. Look at this, like 5, 10, 20 bucks an hour and then you charge 100, $200 an hour. You can also start a bare bones sort of boring service business out in the real world. You could do it for 500 bucks like we did with this pressure washing company, window cleaning, landscaping, et cetera. I didn't do that early on. I did it with my consulting hours to make intros. Here's what no one will tell you about this though. Service businesses are a great way to start, but I don't think they're a great way to end. If you have custom services and provide services before you get paid, that means you're chasing invoices. Scope creep is a real thing, which means somebody asks you for this and you instead deliver all of this. But you don't get paid for this in the middle. So there's a reason there are so many of them. And very few of these service businesses get huge. You want to have somebody pay you before you offer a service. You want to have somebody have very specific things you deliver every single time. You want to get paid for every single hour of your time. And with service businesses, that's hard to do in the beginning. The last thing that's hard for me with the service business, I couldn't estimate very well what my total time needed was. And that's something you're going to want to do. So don't start with a ton of these. Start small if you're going to do a service based business. Number two, nine to five. Hard truth. Your first 100k will most likely come from your earned wages, your income. For most people It'll be your first million. It was for me. I made 37k ish when I got out of college. And at the end of my time being employed by someone else in finance, I made seven figures as a private equity partner. It was broken down like this. 20% salary. So I get this no matter what for my day to day, unless I get fired. 30% carry, which is distributions for performance. I'D get paid out a percentage of the profits we made in our investments. So if we have a company pay out, I don't know, $100,000 dividend between U.S. partners, I might get 8% of that because that was the percentage that I owned of the company. Then another 35 to 40% was bonuses. These are milestones hit. So I'd get paid when we hit our milestones, like a number of deals done or or a return profile hit and then maybe another 10 to 15% for commissions in money raised. So you will ideally have a gradually declining line that starts at 9 to 5 at the height and eventually whittles down to the least portion. Why? Because earned income, working versus investment income, or what is deemed by the IRS as non active income is taxed at a startlingly lower rate. So you keep more of what you make. Look at this chart. If you have a taxable income and you make over $622,000 by having a job, you pay 37%. If you use long term capital gains, aka investment income, you pay 20%. You are almost double paying for the right to trade your time for money. Crazy. My income was also highly skewed by my salary and I'd say probably accounted for 80 to 90% of what I made back then. So I had other income streams, but it was mainly salary. Nothing wrong with having a job. Just know it'll be your biggest driver to start and it could be forever. But you still want to have something else in case your income dries up. The second lever is expertise. So after a couple years of trading your time for money and job, you've got something more valuable, expertise. So my third income stream that I had was consulting. I was doing a ton of work in Latin America, investing and building up investment businesses. I noticed people wanted to mimic the work that we were doing. And so it made me think, could I teach other people how to grow a large Latin American investment business like I do? Someone first asked if they could pay for an hour of my time and I really had no idea about that. So I said sure. And I think I threw out a number like 250 bucks they paid. Then I increased it to 500 and would randomly take one off phone calls. I made 2 to 4k a month taking a few phone calls. Then I got on glg. Then it connects a million plus experts to clients. You could also do this one which is Intro code. I like Intro better because GLG makes people interview for the opportunities. While intro you don't have to Apply. You just get paid the second that somebody signs up. I'd rather get paid, do the work and move on than have to do an application. Pro tip. Do some calls for free in the beginning, but don't do that work for free forever. Now I don't even do one off consultations, but in the beginning I did. So take the thing that someone pays you for in your salary or other high area of performance and, and do it one off by the hour. That's what consulting is. And you can do this on the side pending your employer is okay with it. What people won't tell you is that you have to set boundaries. When you consult for an hour and you do a good job, they're going to want more and more. You have to make sure you're really clear on rates and you only do work when you are tracking it. Almost like if you were in a job back in the day where you had to clock in and clock out. You have to be really good at that. With consulting, most people are not. So the other way you can get around it is I now have a consultant that I pay like Jordan and, and I pay him a flat fee. I pay him 10k a month for him to help me scale a few of my businesses. If I use more than the couple hours a week that he has dedicated to me, it's okay because he has a flat amount that allows for overage. In the beginning of you doing consulting, if you're like me, that probably won't work out for you. Fourth, sitting on boards. I use my expertise to add another income stream by sitting on the board of a company in my industry, for instance, now I sit on the board of a hedge fund. Back then I sat on the board of a venture capital fund called Magnum Partners. This meant getting paid somewhere between 30 to to $300,000 to go to four quarterly meetings and give my advice. Obviously when you start out you will be very cheap or maybe even free. But as you continue to become a better board member, you can charge more. Now how do you get this type of position? How did I get somebody to decide that even wanted my vice? I was really valuable to the founder of a fund group in an area that I already knew. And I asked him what his two biggest pain points were, deal flow and fundraising. So I made some introductions and then he asked me to be on the board. One of the biggest hacks is not always you having to do the work, you finding somebody's who to solve their biggest how or what. And so the way that I got a board position is I introduced him to a few high net worth friends that I had accumulated relationships with who wanted to invest in venture capital that led to investment by them into his fund. Because of that, he offered me a 30k payment a year for being at quarterly meetings and continuing to help and advise him. Now again, not everybody can do this, but you need to understand what the really, really rich do to ADD Inc. I hate when people gatekeep how they got here, so I thought I'd share this with you for real. How could you do this as somebody brand new? Well, you probably couldn't. What you could do though is you could do what this guy Jamie did who actually consulted on this YouTube channel. You could watch my YouTube channel, see that we've had some success. Take all of the expertise that he's had by playing around with this industry, being young, experimenting in YouTube and send us a format. And that format, which looks like this, that Jamie sent, it gives us a bunch of free ideas and insights from somebody who's played in this space for quite a while, even though he's very young. He sent this to me, I took a meeting with him and we ended up paying him to be a consultant for us. Now if I went and started a YouTube company, do you know who I'd ask to be on the board? Jamie. And when you're on the board of one, that might mean you get equity and you get income. Who this is really good for though is ex executives for founders and people with real expertise. It does come with some risk though. So for instance, you could be in trouble if you sit on a bad board and they do something really dumb. Or if your executives of the company do something really dumb. Imagine being on OpenAI's board or Enron's or FTX's board. You could have what's called fiduciary charges, which basically means they could do lawsuits against you. That's why you can earn a ton doing this. But it's not my favorite income stream. Speaking events so then I started wanting to get paid to speak. First, no one would even let me speak. Then I did it for free a handful times while I was still an employee. And then about my fifth speech, I started getting paid. They asked what I charged for an event. Originally that was 1000, 2000, then 5, and then after like 15 to 20, and then after 30 and 40 and 50 and 100, now I get paid more like 50 to 100k. That last part's candidly wild to me that we still get paid like that, but I want you to understand the events industry because then it doesn't sound so crazy. I mostly turn down the number of speaking events we get. Let me show you how this works, though. We do an annual event each year at Contrarian, thinking it costs like 200 to 230k to put on and we have a 25k speaking budget. That's because we can make that money back from the group. Look at this graph. The UK spends $20 billion a year on events. Look how big the exhibitions market is. It's huge. $11 billion. And that means they need speakers in order to get sponsors and attendees. And this is where you slot in. You can do some of these speaking agencies like I have. You can see me listed on a few of these. And what happens is, if you can find a specific niche, especially in a niche where other people make money or they bring in attendance, then you too can get paid a lot for speaking in events. Just expect the beginning to kind of suck. Almost like any type of income stream you're gonna make. All right, what kind of events? You start local, then go corporate, then go conference, then go exhibition, then those are the different budget levels that speaking goes to. Now, what people will not tell you about speaking. Have you ever been stuck overnight in Topeka, Kansas? Had to stay in an airport hotel, miss your anniversary, then catch a red eye the next day? And since everything was closed, for dinner, eat Cool Ranch Doritos and a Sprite for dinner. Yeah, I have. It's not fun. You do get paid to speak for an hour, but it takes five hours to prep for that speech. Then you gotta come up with a PowerPoint. The idea. You talk to the hosts, you get there early, you fly in the night before. You always need at least three hours to speak. And because of Q and A and wait time, the average hourly rate, you should never calculate at one hour because I think it's more like 10 to 24 hours. Now, the upsides are you meet a ton of really cool people, you look good, you expand your ability to speak and communicate, which is super, super valuable. And I would totally recommend to most people at some point get paid to speak. It just means you're gonna be able to get more of what you want by being able to communicate more clearly. Now, pro tip, I have a rate that's for local speeches, 15k and one for travel, 50 to 100k, depending on what it is and where it is. It still feel weird saying that out loud. I focus on my businesses. Otherwise. The other thing that I wish I had done earlier is stop giving new speeches. I can't take my own advice on this, but the best speakers give the same speech 400 times until it's incredible. I get ADHD and change mine all the time. If you can just have one speech, you skip all of those hours. Year one of speaking, I made maybe 3K, almost nothing. Year two of speaking, I made more like 25K. Year three of speaking, we're talking close to six figures, more like 90K. And now if I wanted to, I could make millions a year. Instead we take, I don't know, probably somewhere between 300,000, $500,000 worth of speaking events a year. So you certainly can scale. There are people that their entire income is is from public speaking. I don't think it's the best income. Talk about really bumpy, but it's certainly possible. Info product. I was in cannabis private equity, but I kept getting two questions. How do I get a job in cannabis? And how do I invest? So I randomly made two guides and I put them on gumroad. You can see them here and it's wild because they're still up there and we still actually get people buying these things. You can see right here. This made me $4166 in total, so about 3k in the first year, and then dwindled off from there. Not huge, but not nothing. I don't promote it and I still randomly get sales from it, which is awesome. Now where did I learn to do this? Because I'm actually not very tech savvy. I listened to a now friend of mine, Sam Parr, talk about creating a guide for finding an apartment in San Francisco. So I basically followed his process, uploaded mine to gumroad. I said, it's free to create, they just take a percentage of the sales. Great. Who would this work for? If you get asked for your expertise on multiple subjects multiple times, I think start writing it down. Worse comes to worse, you can start sending them a little blog post or a little Twitter thread you do on it. And after you start getting that asked 10, 15, 20 times, I think it's guide time. The worst comes to worst, you learn how to create a guide. Maybe you sell 5, 20, 100 bucks. The best case scenario, you're like me and you get a couple thousand bucks in a product you don't spend any time on, or you develop an entire info product business. Now what do you need to apply this skill intelligently? You need three things. Cash, curiosity, crowd people who are willing to pay for insight on the Subject. So how to pet a cat? Probably not. Curiosity. Something you're naturally interested in and want to create around. If you're already curious because you like to look hot on Instagram and you want to put cool filters on, well, it turns out that other people buy those filters from you. So if you're already creating them, you're already curious. You just sell them. That could work. And then finally you need a crowd. A group of people who are willing to pay. You might be able to get a crowd of people for how to turn your cat into a cool looking panda. Maybe there are a bunch of people that want to do fancy cuts on their cats, but if you go how how to just groom Siamese cats? Not as much. A quick way to tell one way or the other is to go to Facebook. Search the exact term you want in Facebook groups and see if there are groups of at least 100,000 people interested in your subject. Why I like it. You don't have to trade time for money anymore. You create something once and then it continues to sell in multiple different ways. If someone asks me a question on a subject, I can briefly answer, but say, hey, if you want more detail, I actually have these. I think this is the easiest way usually to make your first dollar on the Internet. For me, it wasn't a huge revenue stream. It's hard to be unless you have massive scale. All right, the third lever. Brand or audience? The most powerful leverage is building an audience. Maybe you already have one, or maybe you want to build one. I grew from Nothing to over 5 million in less than three years. It was a lot of work. It was not just luck and having fun on the Internet, but it did start with this next income stream. Newsletter Affiliate sales. My newsletter back in the day was called Cody Sanchez.com, really creative and I would make about 1000 bucks a month from newsletter sponsorships for a year or so. Then I branded it Contrarian, thinking I got serious and I grew up from 0 to 55k subscribers and 50k in revenue in 8 months. I started this all out on Mailchimp. That was my tech stack. Then I went to Substack. If I was starting out right now, I would use Beehive. Here's the reason why they have an auto sponsor button. So they basically bring ads to you. You can click a couple buttons so select yes or no, which means you don't have to chase them. Now we're gonna get into more details on how exactly to do that later, but if I was gonna start this now, I Think there are four questions you need to ask yourself before you start a newsletter and how to do it. This is what I ask myself. Where do people ask for your opinion? What would you do even if you weren't getting paid for it? What are the hobbies you'd like to get into? And what are you really, really uniquely skilled at? When you answer these four questions, you should have a short list of topics you could create a newsletter or a product business. So how did I learn this? I watched these guys who become friends, Alex Lieberman and Austin Rief at the Morning Brew grow theirs and then my other friend Sam. Basically I want to steal other people's homework just like you guys are doing today. All of us create all of this stuff on the Internet and we literally tell you all the secrets. Back when I was just starting I had to go through podcast after weird one off blog post and now I could just double X speed, look at the transcript and also the comments and get all the information I need from YouTube. Amazing. Who is this good for? Well, you need to like writing and you need to also be able to commit to writing at least one newsletter a week for a year. If you won't do that and find joy in it, don't do it now. What people will not tell you about starting a newsletter. Dealing with one off sponsors is literally the worst thing in the entire world. Especially when you're small. I would not go back and do this way again. I would use Beehive or Convertkit where they set up sponsors for you and you just get to insert them. It's too much work for me going and trying to talk people into sponsoring my newsletter. I wouldn't do that. I love the fact that you could plug and play now don't get me wrong, Morning Brew created a nine figure business by going and hand separate selling people on putting ads in their newsletters. It's totally possible. I just didn't love doing it. Another little pro tip, don't do one off prices or custom amounts. Try to standardize. I did a lump sum 250 to $1,000 a newsletter. Then once I got bigger I used what's called cpo which is a newsletter specific metric. It's basically based on every thousand opens and so it ranges between 20 to 100. The numbers can be a little fuzzy with multiple factors at play. But if your newsletter has an average of 5,000 opens and you can charge $50 CPO, your sponsorship price would be 250. Because 5,000 opens divided by 1,000 times 50 that's how you determine what you can charge. Now, the next one's slightly different. This is sponsorships online for being kind of public. And this one takes me way back. I didn't do a lot of these ever. But I remember getting thrilled when I first got on the Internet to get sponsored by these guys, Prana, and I think they basically gave me some leggings and some yoga pants and a very small amount of money. I also remember doing one a billion years ago for Kind Bar. Look at how awful this was. I was influencing hard. I think this led to max 5k a year for me. Now, who is this good for? Lots of people. I mean, this is a Internet friend of mine, Dani Austin, and I assume she makes definitely seven figures, but probably eight figures by doing sponsorships and affiliate posts on her Instagram. You have to have a massive audience for this to work at so scale. And, you know, I never liked the idea of a brand being able to put words in my mouth and control my actual picture. It just felt bad for me. So I think if that doesn't bother you and you want to start at a smaller level, that works. But at a certain point when you get big enough, you can kind of say, no, I don't want that. No, I don't want that. And this is the only way that I'm going to do it. What don't they tell you about sponsorships? One, there's no set amount pay. When you are what's called a micro influencer or somebody below 15,000 subscribers or followers on something like Instagram, typically they're going to give you free product, maybe a couple hundred bucks, and you might have to apply for the sponsorships. Once you get up above 15,000, let's call it more like 50 to 100,000, they're going to have set prices plus some free product. But it's probably not going to be a lot. It's only once you get to hundreds and hundreds of thousands, if not a million, that real money starts to be here and you can start making five, six figures a month, if not more. Obviously, Kim Kardashian does this like crazy. The other thing that I never loved about this is for $5,000 a year, if I was to go and sell my own products instead of selling somebody else's, that means I kept the whole pie. So I know if Prana is going to pay me $5,000 for a post, let's say, then they've done the math that they're going to make on average, I think 5 to 10x what they paid me. So that means they're making $50,000 off of a post that I did. Well, why wouldn't I just want to go try to make $50,000 on something I own myself? That's why now mostly we talk about our own businesses. I input in our portfolio of businesses, and I grow. But in the beginning, this was $5,000 a year. Fourth lever, money. Once you have money, it's your job to make that money, make you more money. And this is where it becomes really, really fun, and it becomes your strongest lever. My next income stream was Airbnb. I very first bought a small townhouse with my brother, and he managed it while we cash flowed off of it. I had more money, he had less. So he earned in by managing it. Then we did that again and again and again. Now we make multiple six figures a year in incomes from Airbnbs that I have in Texas and California. I'll actually show you one of the P&Ls right here. The first year that we did this, we made $73,000 in total revenue. Expenses were $21,000. And then all in pay, we made about $52,000. I think we made a little bit less than that with, you know, extra miscellaneous things, but let's call it 40 to $50,000 or off of one Airbnb. Then the next year, we made more like $129,000, and the expenses were something like $36,000, which means that we made $93,000 in cash flow split between the two of us. You do that a few times, and it starts looking pretty interesting. Also note, this is without us owning the property management companies. So who is this good for? This is good for anybody who can do one of two things. Have some cash to be the backer like I was, have some time and willingness to be an expert or become one, AKA like my brother became one to actually manage the property. You can do either. The other interesting thing that you should know about Airbnb is there's huge volatility. So you can kind of see this in some of our months. You know, we had a couple months in the beginning where we were negative. We made no money. And then we have a couple months where we make 10,000, another month where we make 18,000. There's a lot of variance between those. And so you have to understand that when you're getting into the Airbnb game, every single month isn't going to be the same. So that kind of stressed me out in the beginning. The last thing that nobody ever told me about Airbnb is that I would never want to be the one to manage them. At some point, I had to tell my brother, please stop telling me about all the stuff that's going wrong at our Airbnbs because I actually don't want to know because I don't want to go solve it. Your job to solve it. My job to own it. And so, you know, there is an instance where a pipe burst in the top of the townhouse and it flooded the entire thing. It flooded during the ACL weekend, which is the weekend that we make the most money, aka that $18,000 weekend. It fell on the guitar of a person performing that cost, I don't know how much, thousands and thousands of dollars that we had to replace. We had to go back and forth with Airbnb, plus we had to refund the guy completely. Plus that was our biggest weekend. And so Airbnb does have a lot of issues, just like any business. And that stressed me out. My pro tip would be either spend a lot of time and be the one that manages it and just know what that's gonna feel like or hire somebody else to do it. Which is pretty much how I like to run all of my businesses because I spend the most time managing the portfolio. Overall. Laundromats. You guys have heard about this a lot from me. Video, video, video. You could link to any one of these. I won't belabor the point. I know you've already heard my laundromat story about how I was working and employed at the time. I was running businesses in Latin America. I couldn't actually own a business that I had to operate because I wasn't in the country. And so I partnered with somebody who had already owned and run a laundromat before I was the money behind it. We bought one for a very small six figure amount that didn't make that much a year. And then we added other laundromats on top of it. The reason isn't that I particularly like laundry. I just like the simplicity of it. And let me explain why to you. Laundromats are interesting because the customers do the majority of the work. They're washing and drying their own clothes. That means you don't have a lot of labor. So training and onboarding is pretty minimal. The customers pay you upfront. I like upfront cash, which makes accounting and tracking easier. It's recession resistant. People always need clean clothes and you can ROI on it. The laundry industry has something like, let's call it 15 to 35% return on income, and they have a little bit higher of a success rate because there's not so much variance in this type of business. The other thing that's interesting about laundromats is unlike a restaurant, convenience store, grocery store laundromats have very little physical inventory. We just used to have these soap dispensers and some toy dispensers. The last thing, not a lot of seasonality. So maybe you get more bathing suits in the summer if you're in California and more warm jackets if you're in the winter in Colorado. But people are still washing their clothes. Now. There are a lot of cons to this business. You, or in my case, my gent, an operator who ran the business, have to run a laundromat. So there's that. It's also not the cheapest thing to start. You could go start an online business for zero, but laundromats are going to have a price tag of a couple hundred k. So you got to figure out creative financing to get them. We talk about this a lot. You can see some of the free blog posts we have on it. The other thing is, it's a low barrier to entry. There's a lot of laundromats out there. So competition is high. We're not like Facebook moated. You also have to get your hands a little dirty. You're like a plumber, electrician, businessman, marketer, janitor, A million things rolled into one. Or you do what I do and you give an equity split to an operator who can do all those things and you take care of the cash. Utilities and rent, they don't go away. Those are set costs which can keep rising, and then the customers. This is a unique client set. You know, I have someone else do this coin collection oversight and security because, you know, crackheads, some of these laundromats have tough neighborhoods. Last thing I want to hit on here is not exactly one income stream. It's a way to layer a bunch of them. I call this horizontal income. And it's an idea that you can layer on top of any of these income streams. You can think about it kind of like the Russian nesting dolls of income streams. You know, those dolls that fit inside of one another. For instance, I bought a laundromat. Then I added soap vending, then I added toy machines, then soda vending machines, then wash and fold a new service. Then I might buy the actual strip mall. Then I might add more laundromats. This is called a platform acquisition, where you're buying up different sectors of clientele that you can serve. Vertical acquisition and then horizontal acquisition. You're buying your competitors, then you can layer these all on top of each other. The thing is, I'm a self admitted wuss. I was too scared to leave my job to go take a big huge startup risk. So I needed to stack income streams that made me confident I wasn't going to go completely broke. If you had have a big huge idea and aren't scared at all, go do it. You don't need a million income streams. I just don't think that has to be the only way. And I think people mislead you there. I want you to send this video to someone who's like me, a little scared and needs a ladder thrown down from somebody like you. And two, comment below the income streams you have right now alongside your job. You cannot be it if you cannot see it and you can actually inspire somebody else below. Let's go do the work. Because there are two types of people in this world. Those who talk shit and those who do shit. I know which one you are. Don't talk shit. Subscribe. See it. See that?