How To Grow Your Income - Part 2

All right, let's take another look at best ways to grow your income. Kind of a follow up to that take we did with the Narangs. Listening in and watching in this afternoon, I've got George Constantis from up in Baltimore. Hello.

Very good to be on.

Good to be on. Charlotte, North Carolina, we've got David Kattan.

Hey, guys.

And I'm in West Palm Beach. So let's go do this thing. Let's talk about growing your income, growing your business. There's a concept you need to get about income, and that is you got one line, which is your amount. You start down here, zero. Then the other concept is time. Okay? I want you to get the idea of. Understand range. You can go along and you can make between. Let's just say you're somebody that when you're properly maxing out, if you maxed out, I mean, you were healthy all year. No vacations this, that, and the other, let's say in sales, you could go out there and make $100,000 a year in sales. Whatever you're selling. Doesn't matter what you're selling. Let's just say that's you at your best. Unbelievable. You're maxing out your star. Okay, well, what we have here is a range, all right? That is the range of income. When it's just you have we got that. That is your income range. So, George, does that make sense?

Yes.

And data. That is a cornerstone. Understanding. This is a cornerstone concept to understanding how the rest of it works. Because if you don't understand this. See, so here what most people do is they'll go along doing about 50, 60%. They'll be trucking around in here. If they've got the ability, if everything goes perfect, to make $100,000, they'll probably be bringing home 50, $60,000 a year. Normal activities. Because they take vacations, they get sick, they do things with the kids and they get in. Plus they don't really stay highly energized all the time. So they're, you know, trucking around in here. Sometimes they may go up and down, but, you know, like the stock market, you like. They really get serious in January, really get serious in September to kick off the year, really get serious in the spring. Unbelievable. You know, the good weather's coming out, the flowers are blooming. We're going to go. And so they. But then, you know, they get sidetracked in December and July and they have these kind of months. So you guys understand that concept, the range. All right, so let's Go. We're going to build off that range. And so the deal is this. Well, no, let's just stop while I'm here. The concept is, if you want to grow your income, how can you get your income up over. How can you get your income up in this range? In other words, how can you break through this barrier? Is it possible to break through this barrier and get up to where you're making, not consistently make it a hundred, and maybe have a shot at 150 or 175 or 200? If you had a chance of doing that, you'd be, you know, a lot more gung ho about your business, don't you think, Dave?

Absolutely.

Because, you know, if it's the same old same old, you get bored, don't you, George?

Yeah, absolutely.

So how can you range, you know, how can you raise the ceiling, the possibilities up like that? And then also, wouldn't you like to have a little more security to where, when you have your worst month, you know, that, you know, maybe your worst month was 50,000. So how can we get it up here to where, say, in your worst month you're going to make that 50 or 60, but in your best month you got a chance of 200. How can we do that? All right, what's the best way to do that? That's what we're going to be talking about here. That's what I was talking with Tony and Shelley about. So that's the concept. We're going to start over here. I'll do a different color. So let's go here, see if we have the problem with, man, I'm getting better at drawing my lines. You guys think this comes easy? I'm telling you, the boy sweats over this stuff. Okay, so let's just say that the same thing we were looking at, just so I don't screw you all up, we were talking about the range. This is your range, your starting range. You know, it's a different scale now because we want to go higher. So you're going to be. Let's just say this is your max, you know, right there by yourself. That is your range that we talked about on the other thing. And let's just say you're tracking around in here. And so you say, ted, gum, and I want to break through this level. Well, you have a choice, and you have the unsupported and the supported way of doing it. You have the guaranteed secure and the iffy insecure way of doing it. And it's basically what most people do because they don't know what else to do is they say, I'm going to gut it out. I'm going to get out here. I know what to do. I just need to do more of it. Larry, I know what to do. I don't need to go to that meeting. I don't need to read that book. I don't need to go any training. I know exactly what to do. I need to work harder and be more efficient. And you know, New Year's resolution time. I want to go for it. So they, what most people do is run out of gas before they get there and settle back down. And they say, if I could just break it one time, I'd figure out how to do it. I'd find out with my own eyes what it feels like. I'd experience it. I know I'd develop skills. My eyes would be open and then I could move up and I could raise my, my ceiling up. And to an extent that's true. At some point you just got to push yourself and just to find out where the maximum is for yourself. So you never go over the edge. You never find out where the edge is. So that's why you need to push. And this is always good to have personal pushes, but it's going to be somewhere around in this range you're going to find. So you're going to be going up and down. So. So what some people do is they get to think, I want to break 100,000, I want to get 150 or whatever it is. Some people can make 150. They're just highly skilled, highly organized compared to the average guy. Everybody's got their max because there's 24. The reason you have a max is there's 24 hours in the day. So there's a limit with your skill set and your personality and obligations, how effective you're going to be. And the reason if you're trucking along year after year after year, making the money you're making is because you're doing the bulk of it yourself. That's what it comes down to. So let's say so one way is I'm going to gut it out. You know, the gut it out method. I'm going to do it myself. I'm going to work harder. Well, that don't work so great. See what happens. Let's just say you went in here and you did this. You know, you're going to go on a big growth surge. So you are, you know, working surge and you're trucking along here, and you say, I'm going to go for it, and you gut it out. Unbelievable. I mean, I'm saying, when I make 150, my family's proud of me. I'm breaking records, I'm up here, okay? I'm flying high. Well, sooner or later, you try. You know, you hit your goal, you're proud of yourself, and it's time to enjoy the fruits of your labor. I won the Super Bowl. You know, I pressed myself and I didn't recover. So eventually, you're going to kind of top out. And no matter how hard you try, you're going to revert right back down to where you want to. Now, the trouble is that all of the things you sell, I don't care if you sell TVs or whatever it is you're selling, it doesn't all stay on the books. It's a persistency thing. There's going to be a washout. In some businesses, it's a 10% washout. In some it's 20%. In some it's 30%. But what happens is, if you keep going up like this, see, you build up this accumulation of stuff that's got to be dealt with that you didn't have. Now, if you're down here, let's just say it's 20%. 20% of this is not a problem because that's pretty much the same. You can absorb it because that's what you're always doing. But when you start a surge now you've got 20% of a bigger number, it creates like this negative fireball. You've got to deal with the way it was with me, it's like a service obligation. When we built houses, we went in there and we built 25 houses a year. First year, no problem for Larry. You know, I was in charge of construction and followed through 25 houses, first year, and we had zero from the year before, so there was no service work. The second year, we built 25 houses, but now we had 25 that I had to service. Well, that made my life a little bit harder. Even though there wasn't all that terrible much going on, there's still 25 possibilities there that could go wrong during the course of the year. Now, the third year, we built 25 more. Now I had 54th year, we built 25 more, and now I have 75. So you can see how I was creating a bigger and bigger nightmare for myself. And eventually you have to do something about it, hire more help or something. But as you go up here, you're building up a chargeback thing that's got to be handled even if you're state of the art in terms of your persistency, the quality of the sales of your business. This is fine as long as you stay at this level or keep climbing. See down here it was like this size but up here it's just the natural proportion. It's bigger, it's the biggest you ever have. If what happens after you have the biggest sales month you've ever had, you know, the biggest anything you've ever had. Well, after something goes up, what's the normal thing for? It happened there, David, come down, come down. It's nature. So when this thing starts coming down, what it means is your income is coming back down. But you got this thing to deal with, this fireball is following you. So what happens is you see if the danger of you coming back down to your previous income levels because you're tired, you're worn out, you're recovering, holiday season, kids got sick, got sidetracked. Well now, whereas here you had a net, you know, you had plenty of income because you were used to doing that. Here you, you got this thing to deal with. And so your net is much less. So what you have, if you do a sales surge, number one, what's wrong with it? It is one time you're like a gerbil on a treadmill going crazy. You know, you're just running faster. You're not going to run faster forever. You're going to go at what a normal pretty much walking speed is and you can't always sprint. So that's kind of a one time hit. But then you get the double whammy of the, you know, the charge banks from the bigger, you know, from the bigger income months. And what you find is some people, they don't expect that to happen. They don't think about this because they think here and they spend all the money, don't save it, even take out money for taxes. You know, if they're in business for themselves usually oh, Uncle Sam wants more of that too. And then so now in addition to probably owing more taxes, they've got this normal, you know, percent of business chargeback thing to deal with that usually shows up a month or two or three later. And for some people it takes them months to recover from this, dealing with this, you know, getting that sucker paid off. And some people run some out of the business. And so that's why, see, it's unsupported growth. When you go up here, it's unsupported it's all you working like a dog.

All right, we've established why a big income month can be fragile. Mainly because it's unsupported. In our next tape, we'll show you how you can turn things around and take charge of this situation and keep your income growing and stable.