595. Can You Make Your Product-Based Business a Passive Money-Making Machine?

I was on vacation, but this time I wasn't so on vacation because we had some big launches planned, we had some due dates. So I really, as the CEO of the business, had to step up and step in and I hated it. Not because I don't like working, I hated feeling that pull. Hi, I'm Jacqueline Snyder and this is the Product Boss podcast. I've helped launch and grow stack thousands of product based businesses, even one of my own. And over the last 20 years, I've seen behind the scenes of businesses just like yours. Whether they are makers, manufacturers, artists, or food and beverage businesses. I have spent so many hours studying it all. I've discovered what makes them successful, what are mistakes they could avoid, how did they turn an idea into successful business? And what are strategies they have used to make more sales and be discovered by more customers. This is what this show is all about. Whether you're just starting out or you're looking to become a million dollar product boss, I'm here to give you the permission to chase your dreams no matter how big or small. All you need is the right mindset, a little courage, strategy and support and you too can be the next million dollar product boss. Let's do this. Hey. Hey, friends. And welcome back to another episode of the Product Boss podcast. I'm Jaclyn. I'm so glad that you're here. Wow. Like, this show has been growing and growing month over month and I just want to thank you, I want to thank you for following the show and if you're not following yet, just go ahead and hit that follow button wherever you're listening to this podcast to make sure that, you know, when we, you know, launch a new episode, which we do twice a week, once a week, it's our coaching calls. And another week it's usually a solo sode or an interview with me and a special guest. So I'm just really glad you're here because one for you all. Following the show is just such a big deal and so incredibly amazing. And I show up every week because I want to support you in growing your product based business. And then the other thing that I'm loving seeing and again, thank you are these amazing reviews on the podcast. Like, I'm blown away. I mean, thank you, thank you. A lot of you know that I took over the podcast and the business last year and went solo with it. And so this transition has been a transition and so we've been testing and trying some things and I'm really glad to see, I think you all are loving the coaching episodes. And so it's if you're loving something, leave the review. If you're not loving something, send me a DM on Instagram and I would rather get in a conversation about it with you. Right. But I just love reading these reviews. So I just want to thank you again. If you haven't left a review yet, I would be so, so, so grateful. What I wanted to do today is really get into talking about this idea of can you make your product based business a passive money making machine? And the reason I wanted to talk about it right now, you know, when we're airing this, it' summer months. And for me, I work really hard through the year to leave space and time to spend time with my kids who are school age kids, and with my husband and with my extended family. During the holidays, right? During the winter holidays, during spring breaks. During the summer months. And honestly, this last spring break was not the greatest. We were on vacation. I had a press tour in Nashville, I was hosting in person events and I had like an in person mastermind that I had amazing people come to and then we went back and visited where we were living in New York and New Jersey and all the things and it was like I was on vacation. But this time I wasn't so on vacation because we had some big launches planned, we had some due dates, we had some people who weren't necessarily doing their job. So I really, as the CEO of the business had to step up and step in. And I hated it. Not because I don't like working, I hated feeling that pull. And I don't blend as well. Like I can go all in on business, I can go all in on parenting. And my anxiety really spikes when the two crossover because I feel like I'm not enough to either. And so what I've been thinking about, and this is, you know, for product based businesses, like whether you are in general, you want to have a passive product business, which means you're just not operating in a day to day capacity at a certain rate, right? It's sort of like maybe you have one sales machine stream, right? Like one stream of revenue that tends to need you less than other types of sales channels and revenue streams. Or during the summer months, like for me it's like, can I turn my business into a passive money making machine? Slightly more like can I step off the gas a little and ease into the summer? Because also the summer months, a lot of times the J months are notoriously slower months. January, June, July, they're notoriously slower. Why? Well, January people are spent from the holidays and they've spent their money in June and July. People are getting out of school, they're going on holiday. You know, they might be buying certain products, but they're not consuming as much. Their money is being spent in a different way. So first I want to say that no matter what, no matter where you are, like if you find that these months are slower, that's okay. Your business isn't broken. It's just the nature of things. Which is why, for example, you see a sale like Prime Day in July, right. Christmas in July. Why do you think they did that? They created a sale discount promotion during a month that is notoriously slow. So how do we get people to buy? Well, we make an event around it. Right. We offer discounts. Like this is why there's Memorial Day sales, this is why there's after 4th of July sales, Labor Day sales, all of that. All these sales are meant to re stimulate consumers buying. Okay, but thinking back to. All right, in the summer, I'm going to speak from the summer perspective, but I want you to listen because if you're also like, I don't want to be as active and I say this in the way of I'm never going to tell you. I get that there's like the four hour work week. There's things that are written about like, yeah, you can have a passive business and it just has to happen like this and you just have to click a button. That's not the way that I coach, it's not the way that I teach people to build business. I believe that there are seasons where we are really in it. Like I feel like right now I'm really in it. I'm rebuilding a lot of things at the product boss. A lot. We launched Standout Society, which is our brand new program which people are loving. Like, I'm so excited to see the wins people are having and the way that they feel inside the program, it is bonkers. It like surpassed anything like our goals. It surpassed anything that we could have ever imagined for it. So you know, we've been doing that. We're planning a retreat at later part of the summer. We have our masterminds that we run. We have multi stream machine and the amazing community in there of over 5,000 students. Right. We have all these things that I'm working on actively right now. But during the summer, how do I get a little bit more into the passive phase? Because I'm working my booty off through June. That was like, that was the goal. I Told my husband, like, you will see me on July 1st. So here's what I think. You know that one of the things that we teach here at the Product Boss is to be known for something. We typically, and you've heard over the years, us talk about your bestseller and being known for your bestseller, which is usually the product that most people gravitate towards or the thing that you sell more of. And your best sellers can be general, like a category, or it can be specific products. So general would be something like necklaces or my candles versus my room sprays. And really specific might be my 8 ounce lavender scented soy wax candle or my black and white striped Amanda dress. And I just made that one up. Right. Like we may know, or it might be like a very specific style, this bra and not the others. Right. So we know what our bestsellers are. Now, a lot of people, the kind of feedback that I got was that people would say, well, what if I don't have enough sales to figure out what my best seller is? Right. What if I don't know what that is? Or. Or what if my business is smaller? Like, I've been selling all the things to everybody. So what I've really started to transition to talking about is being known for something and either identifying your hero product or your core collection. So to give you an example, if you followed Rothy's when they originally started, they came out with the pointed toe ballet flat made out of recycled plastic bottles. Okay. So the pointed toe ballet flat, that was the style. Now, it wasn't the pointed toe ballet flat only in black. It was a pointed toe ballet flat in multiple colors. So they manufactured one style but then offered it in a lot of variations. So that would be the same thing. Like if you're like, okay, I do really well at my necklaces or like, people really love necklaces and I'm going to do a whole bunch of necklaces and be known for that. Now I get with jewelry, it might be a little bit of a different sort of situation, but knowing that making more of like 80% of your revenue can come from 20% of your products. So it's like, where do you focus? You focus on the things that people want to buy. So that would be like an individual product or a hero product. A core collection is something where there's this brand I love. It's called Arcana. Actually, I feel like I need to start buying it again. I love a good skin regimen and I also don't like to overcomplicate. So if you think about Cuffs Couture. When I created my product, which is the wearable wrist wallet, the reason I created it is, like, I just want something simple when I go out. I need simplicity. So for me personally, as your ideal customer avatar, let's say, very rarely will you see me with a giant bag. I hate wearing it on my shoulder. I don't like having all the different things in there. I don't want something heavy. Like, it's just not a me thing. Some people like my really good friend Melissa. Melissa, she's got the Mary Poppins bag. Anything you need, she's got in there. Anything. And this was like pre being a mom, you need a band aid, you need Benadryl, you need lip gloss, you need face powder, you need a snack, like, anything. She probably has, like, a flashlight and an umbrella in there as well. So knowing your customer Persona and knowing your core collection, for example, with cuffs, I knew that I wanted something super simple. I just wanted to put an id, a credit card, have my car key on it. That was it. That's all I needed to go out. So going back to Arcana, the core collection, what I love about it is they call it the Basic five. So they're a skincare brand, and they came up with a regimen of five products to use that are their basic but, like, their core products to use on your face. So if you were to do nothing else from them, you would buy the Core 5. And that's actually how I discovered them. I was at a really lovely spa in la. That's the product they used. And when they suggest to you the product at the end, they're like, oh, buy this. And they had a kind of like a small sample bag that I could try the Basic five together. So that was like my gateway drug, right? That was the thing that I was like, okay, I'll test it. I'm not gonna make this huge investment into all these products. Let me go with this five. Let's try it. And if I like it. And then for years, I did it, and then I told my mom about it, and my mom buys it, right? So that's like the growth of it. And then they added products on. So if you go and look up Arcana, and it is a much bigger brand than when they started, but they have their core collection. So when somebody comes and buys from you, they're like, what should I buy? And they're like the Basic five. But again, here's my variation for you. They have one for oily skin, one for dry skin, and one for Combination skin. So they have variations, but that's the base of their collection. So when I talk about one passive money making machine, I want you to first identify and say like, where can I kind of like niche down. Where can I find my core collection, my hero products? This is something that we've been doing inside of standout society. It's one of the, you know, the four core pillars of that program. It's nail your niche and your audience. So what are you selling and why and who are we selling to? It's nailing your brand messaging. So again, what's the messaging behind it? Why would someone buy yours and not somebody else's? Then it's nailing your offer and the pricing psychology behind it. So this is a little bit what I'm talking about now. It's like we're going to define our hero products versus our core collection, right? We do touch on this inside of multi stream machine as well, which is our other program, right? We, we touch on it in both. Because the programs that I've created and the way that the product boss is evolving is that we are going to have these different levels or different needs that are met for every kind of, not every, because again, we can't sell to everyone and we can't be everything to everyone. But the idea here is like, what are the gaps that I'm seeing and how can these all work in tandem and work together? Right? Kind of like the Arcana Basic 5. It's like, what are the five core products that I need to be successful? What are the five core products that I need to keep my skin maintained? Right? Like it's that same idea. So we are honing in. That's the first part to this idea of like how to have this more passive money making machine in the way of what are you going to sell, what are you going to be known for and what is the thing you're going to get onto? Sales channels in front of the right customers. So now let's get into the meat that was the potatoes. Let's get in the meat of this part of this podcast. All right, Product boss, I have a serious question. Does it ever feel like you've tried everything and you still aren't making the sales you want to be? Or maybe you've poured countless hours, days and nights, there's been tears into your product biz and you're starting to think that maybe you're just bad at business. I mean, trust me, I have literally been there. So I'm here to tell you that you aren't bad at business and that selling your products doesn't have to feel this hard. So what I've seen from coaching thousands and thousands of product based business owners like you is that they just don't know how to get their products in front of more customers to make more sales. And listen, I get it because I used to have that exact same issue with my product biz until I figured out the one thing that took my business from one or two sales every two weeks to people I knew to making six figures in my first year of business. That's right. I was able to take a piece of fabric that I folded over three times and turn it into a six figure international success which was worn by countless celebrities all in just one year. And the best part is that I did it without spending a single cent on ads or having an audience or a following or an email list to sell to. Now listen, I want this for you too. Which is why I'm sharing my secrets so you can learn how to turn your product based business into a money making machine that provides the stability and financial security that you're looking for. And it's all happening inside of my free masterclass, the three part framework to building a consistent, profitable, revenue generating product based business in 2024. So if you're ready to get clarity, get profitable and take that next step, all you need to do is head over to theproductboss.com framework to save your spot. Again, that's the productboss.com framework. Or you can just click the link in the show notes and I'll send see you inside. All right, now back to the show. The next thing I want you to think about is where can you sell? What sales channel can you sell on that is more passive? And so out of the sales channels that we teach about inside of our program, so within Multi stream machine we teach about different sales channels because it's that idea of multiple streams of revenue. We usually start on one main sales channel and we get data from it. And then how do we start to make more money While we start to take our best sellers, what we're known for, our hero products or our core products and then we get them onto other sales channels. So I want to talk to you about some passive sales channels that you can use that don't require daily posting, weekly emails necessarily, they don't require a lot of the marketing efforts and they also don't require the daily fulfillment. Okay. And so the two that I want to talk about are Wholesale and Amazon. Okay. So Wholesale and Amazon. So let's start with Amazon because these are the sales channels that we teach. So if you're like, I really want to have a more passive business or this summer I'm like, you know, I want to kind of kick off like a more passive type of situation for my business and I think my product would work well on Amazon. Which by the way, Jeff Bezos has said Amazon, he wants to sell everything to everyone. So it's the exact opposite of me saying like, sell everything to everyone, but the way that they're doing it is different than the way that we have the abilities to do it. Okay, so Amazon, the reason why it's a passive money making machine is all you have to do as a business owner is one figure out how to get onto the platform. So you know, if you're a multi stream machine student, we've walked. We actually just redid this entire module. So inside of MSM we have step by step, like this is how you get onto Amazon, this is how you choose to be fulfilled by Amazon or not. Right. Like we talk all about how to get on that sales channel and if it's right for you. So why is it passive? It's because what you have to do is you do the initial work. I'm going to get up and running. I'm going to figure out like the photos that I need. I'm going to get my listings up, I'm going to create all the things that I need. You may or may not choose to do pay per click, which a lot of times on platforms like Amazon or Etsy, for example, there is some sort of ad element within the platform that is sometimes necessary to drive traffic to be discovered on your product. Right. And so you get it up and then you decide, okay, I'm going to send in. And this is not an exact amount, so don't say like, oh, I heard Jacqueline on the podcast. I'm going to send in 100 units. But let's just say, okay, let's just say I am arcana. I want to sell my basic five and I'm going to sell all three. I'm going to sell my oily skin, my dry skin and my combination skin. And I've decided I'm going to send 50 of each. Okay. I create the listings for all three. I send in 50 of each and then Amazon. And when you are doing this, Amazon will tell you like which fulfillment centers to send to. Once you get going, they start to tell you how much to send in again. So it's pretty awesome. It's a pretty cool partnership with that platform. And so you're saying I'm going to send in 50 of each and I'm a CEO does and we teach this with a multi stream machine and you start to drive traffic to it, right? You start to get that money making machine, the Amazon money making machine performing for you. And so if you were to say, I want to take the summer off, I want it to be more passive, I don't want to do things every day and you were to get on Amazon, then all you have to do is like look at your computer, see how it's doing, optimize your ad spend, you know, make sure that things are performing well and you will, you will have only sent in the product that one time. You don't do anything else. You don't have to fulfill, you don't have to deal with returns, you don't have to deal with customer service. That's why we pay Amazon the fees. They're dealing with all of it for us. We just have to make sure the virtual shelves are stocked, which a lot of my multi stream machine students and I'm like smiling as I say this, like they start to sell and they start to sell well and then they have to restock, right? It's like, oh my God, it's selling and then you send in more and you're only working in the times that you have to send in the more more, right? You're getting the product, either you're making it, manufacturing it, importing it, whatever you're doing and then you're shipping in and then they're handling the rest. So Amazon is one of the number one ways I think you can have a passive money making machine if it's a platform that you want to learn and that you are willing to put in the work initially. Now if we think about people who have been so successful with this platform, I'm just thinking about, and I've talked about her before, but Donna Baum of Static Block. Donna is a Multi Stream machine student and she had a full time job and she had products. Static Block is a hairspray to prevent static on your hair. And she had multiple variations of this product. And so she went through exactly what I'm teaching you here. She decided to jump into Multi Stream Machine. And then she was like, all right, I'm going to get this one product up on Amazon one. And then I start getting updates from her. She's like, oh my God, like the first month she made like $7,000 on one product, second month, it was like, I don't know if it was like 12,000, you know, basically by the time after 90 days she made. And this number sticks out so specifically to me. She made $31,500 in 90 days selling one product on Amazon. So cool, right? One product. And then we get an update from her. She's like, oh my God, I'm keeping up. At this rate, I'm leaving my full time job, right? I've already replaced my salary from my full time job and then cut to the end of the year. She updates us and says I made $200,000 on Amazon alone, which is more passive. Replaced her full time income, which was a great income and blew it out of the water right on this one sales channel. And all she had to do was narrow down. She decided to do a hero product to be known for something. She decided that she was gonna go all in on Amazon. She was trying all the other ways. But right now she's like, okay, I'm gonna really learn Amazon. I'm gonna add that SAL channel onto my versions of it. Because I think, I don't remember if she was on Etsy, but she had her own website for example, and was trying social media. Oh, by the way, so social media, she only has 24 followers. Maybe it's updated now. But I was her 24th when I checked a couple months ago and I was like, she's not doing anything on it. She doesn't need social, right? It's very passive. She's an awesome product on an awesome sales channel that's becoming that passive money making machine. Okay, so let's jump to the other one that I mentioned was wholesale. And why do I love wholesale? Well, wholesale is kind of similar and it's similar in the way that when you create your collection and we do, we teach this a multi stream machine as well, right? We're like, here's your line sheet. Here are the products that you are going to sell for the season. Here are your delivery dates. And then you're basically like, okay, I'm like getting stuck here because I don't fully teach the sales channels like fair.com when I say don't fully teach it, that is not the strategy. That is not the full strategy. That's again another tool in your tool belt to reach and find retailers to sell to. But the way that I like to teach wholesale is more of a traditional way. How can you do it yourself and how can you do it well by yourself? Right? So that is also kind of done in Seasons, the summer months, like in apparel and accessories and stuff. June, July is when they're starting to sell for holiday and resort. So that means it's like the stuff that's going to come out in late October, November. And then resort is like, if you think about it, bathing suit lines, when you would think like, bathing suits don't sell well in the winter. Well, they do during a resort, which is that transitional point, December, January, where people are, you know, snowbirds are going to islands, like they're flying to the Bahamas or Mexico or they're going to Hawaii. Right. So resort is like to go away on vacation during the holiday months, but to warmer weather. So in June and July, like, July is the Miami Swim Show. That's a show that we always did. And Miami Swim show was selling. It's a huge show. And they were selling for actually the following year for spring, summer. So there's these larger lead times. So what's interesting, and I had done this with Brooke of Be Happy designs her the hats. She used to be like, well, you know, the summer's dead for me. So it's just because she sells wool hats. Like, it's not dead for you. In fact, instead, what if you tried selling to your wholesale stores during those months and you got the orders in and then you were ready to ship in the winter months, the fall winter months, the transitional months when they wanted to buy. So you can also do your wholesale work earlier in the summer. Right. Or during the summer months where you're just reaching out to stores, you know, because stores will buy more quantities from you than an individual customer. So they're going to have minimums that they have to order. They're going to have like the line sheets that you share with them. They're going to buy collections. And then you know that you've got these orders and you're going to fulfill against these orders. And the way that I teach wholesale is different than how fares, because fair sometimes operates more like immediates. What immediates means is that I place an order with you today and then you ship it out tomorrow. That's not typically how wholesale works. Immediates means this is what we have in stock and you can buy from it. But typically bigger retailers are buying in advance from you. Okay. So small stores that are trying to fill the gap might be buying on fair and buying things initially. Bigger retailers or more established retailers, they are looking to buy same that we do. Right? Like, they have to think, okay, I have to stock my store for the holidays. What's my budget? What are the categories I'm going to buy how many of each? Like you know, I remember like you're thinking of a clothing store, a big one. And then they're like there's a dress buyer and the dress buyer has a $10,000 budget per month to buy dresses. And then there's the handbag buyer and that buyer has, you know, $5,000 budget a month to buy handbags. So they actually are also working within budgets to then fill the store shelves. So I say this because typically they need a longer lead time. So I think that you could be passive with wholesale in the way of can you spend again kind of the same way we were talking about building Amazon. You spend some dedicated time to going all in on wholesale. You make the connections, you get the orders in and you know that you've done the work in a short amount of time so that then you can ease off and know that you're going to fulfill those orders later down the road or you ship to the stores, right? You're only, you're dealing with less people. Let's say, you know, you have 10 wholesale orders of $500 each, right? So instead of $5,000 versus you needing like a thousand or like a hundred customers to buy from you to make the same amount of money, right? So you're dealing with 10 stores instead of, let's call it a hundred customers and that's easier, don't you think? So then what you're doing is you're dealing with the 10 stores, you're shipping them $500 each worth of product. I'm just throwing a number out there and then they're selling for you and then they just call you when they need a restock. So what this idea of this money making machine is and passives that other people are selling for you and these two sales channels in particular are ones in which you do not have to be constantly on the day to day monitoring them, marketing to them, dealing with it. You get to do like a focused push, right? A focused time of action, a focused way to get you up and going and then you bless and release and you step back and let them do the selling for you. So I hope that this resonated with you. Those are the two ways I think that you could really make your product based business a passive money making machine. These are the two things, these are two of the different sales channels that we teach inside of multi stream machine. I mean it just, it is. And when this was created, I was the wholesale, like wholesale was the way I did it and Mina was the one who did Amazon. And when we talked about this, we were like, these are the two sales channels, right, that we really liked. And we also like them for different reasons. There were two very different reasons that they both resonated with us and that's why I wanted to share with you. Because depending on who you are, you might have a different way of like, you might be like, oh, I really like this and I don't like that. Cool. Do what works best for you and your business. All right my friends, I hope that you enjoyed this podcast. I can't wait to see your reviews on the podcast. I really, really appreciate it. If you have anything, any feedback that you want to give me, head over to Instagram at the productboss. But hopefully you're loving these episodes as much as I'm loving giving them out. Giving them out, speaking them into existence. All right, my friends, until next time. 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