085 Your Business Is a Bad Wealth Plan

Hey there, real quick, before we jump into the episode, listen, if your earnings treadmill hasn't set you free yet, running faster won't either. Listen, hustle without principles just going to burn you out. So here's what I want for you. I want you to join me for my money machine experience live. It is three free trainings. Deep dive into how to escape the treadmill and build a money machine that actually works for you. All right, grab your spot here by going to moneymachinelive.com and I'll see you in the free training. I get it. You have your business and that's your wealth plan. Well, hate to tell you, it's probably the worst wealth plan you could ever have. I mean, fact is, is this is that it's likely not going to give you the freedom, the control and the wealth that you want when you start to look at the statistics. But in this episode, we're going to talk about what you need to do instead and how to use your business the right way to create the wealth you deserve. I'll see you in the episode. This is the affluent Entrepreneur show for entrepreneurs that want to operate at a high level and achieve financial liberation. I'm your host, Mel Abraham, and I'll be sharing with you what it takes to create success beyond wealth so you can have a richer, more fulfilling lifestyle. In this show, you'll learn how business and money intersect so you can scale your business, scale your money, and scale your life while creating a deeper impact than living with complete freedom. Because that's what it really means to be an affluent entrepreneur.

Believe it or not, your business is actually not going to give you wealth and it's not going to give you freedom. I know that often working with entrepreneurs, they tell me that they got into business because they wanted to have control of their life. They wanted to build wealth and they wanted to have freedom. Here's the thing. The reality is that your business actually was never meant.

To give you control and freedom. Here's what, here's what I mean by this. Because your business was meant to create a solution to have an impact, to improve the human condition. That's what every business is meant to do. And through that process, it generates cash flow. And it's what you do with that cash flow that results in your wealth and your freedom. But this is where most entrepreneurs go wrong. They see the business as the core element. They see the business as not only the business, but also the wealth. And that's not the case. We get so focused on the top line and this might even be you. It was me at first. Is like, you know, that sales number, that revenue number, that launch number, that big number, that's the top line. And listen, without sales, we have no business. So we have to have sales. But sales alone isn't enough to give you the freedom to give you the control and to give you the wealth that you actually desire. See, the real number we need to focus on is the bottom line. The thing down below what is left over when you're done paying all your expenses, when you're done paying all your contractors, when you're done paying your debts off and all of that. And so what we want to look at is definitely the sales, but more importantly is what's left over. Let me maybe bring this home to you. Have a good friend and a client who was doing, was totally focused on, on the top line. And in a year that he did half a million dollars revenue sales, half a million dollars that he got from his customers, that same year, he found himself $40,000 upside down. In other words, $40,000 in debt. So although he had the $500,000 coming in, he overspent.

To a point of $40,000 to the negative. And see, when we get so caught up with being totally focused on the top line and not considering the bottom line, we then have nothing left over. The job of the business is to have that impact. The job of the business is to create cash flow into your pocket. Then this is the piece that is the missing element that most people don't consider is then to take that cash flow, that, that money that's coming out and use it to build a machine. What I call a money machine or a wealth machine is to create a portfolio of assets, to bring a portfolio of other assets that you can then use to live off of. This is where your freedom comes from. So if you think about it from, from this context, it's, it looks like this. I'm going to draw this out for you so you, so you get a chance to, to see it. I have my business. Let me do this. So I have the business right here.

And that business, that business is going to generate cash, it's going to generate sales, it's going to have some expenses. And those expenses are going to be things like, like rent, like ads, like labor, like contractors, things of that nature. You're going to have all those expenses. And after you pay those expenses, including the expenses that that may need to go to you, you have the net. And that net cash flow then is used here to create the Money machine. Because so now we take the cash out of here and bring it into here, and we start to buy assets. We start to create wealth. This is the thing that many, many entrepreneurs miss is that we start to acquire things like stocks, real estate, other investments, okay? All of which will then create.

Value, which we call asset value, which we call wealth. And so you have a portfolio of assets that now can give you cash flow. And here's the key. See over here where the business is, this takes your effort, okay? Especially at the beginning. In other words, if you're not working it, it's not working. If you're not selling your coaching, if you're not selling your speaking, if you're not selling your services, if you're not selling, then all of a sudden the cash doesn't come in. So that side of it takes effort. The idea behind the money machine is to take a portion of what your effort is producing, convert it to assets so it can produce cash flow without your effort. Some people will call it passive. I call it leverage, because it leverages your time. I don't want you ever to be passive about your wealth because that means you're passive about your future, which typically doesn't work out well. So I want you to look at how do you leverage your time. And the way you buy back your time, the way you leverage your time, is to build a machine of assets. This is exactly what allowed me to. To shut down the businesses that I have to focus on healing from the cancer without having to change my lifestyle, without having to reduce my lifestyle because we had this machine on the side, and all I needed to do is flip the switch and say, that cash that the machine is building, that is. Is creating, just give it to me so it'll. It'll pay for it, for my lifestyle. So the idea is to look at it from this perspective is as an entrepreneur, what we need to do is have enough cash coming from the machine to support your lifestyle. Ultimately. Ultimately, we want it to support what we call your affluence vision, the lifestyle that you have for.

That you have a vision for. Maybe it's not the lifestyle you have right now, but it is the lifestyle you desire in the future. We design it that way. This is what my wife and I have done. This is what I've done with my clients. This is what my son and his wife have done, is that we create the machine to fund the lifestyle that we want. Okay. You know, I'll give you a for instance of another client, another good friend of mine who what he was doing was he was running his business, and he was doing launches, and he was making. He was doing really, really well, making millions of dollars doing launches. But he knew that he was on a treadmill. He knew that unless he was running on the treadmill, things wouldn't go, he wouldn't grow, he wouldn't build income. And I said, you know, what happens if something happens to you? What happens if maybe you desire to retire? What happens if you want to go spend time with your children instead or your spouse? What happens if someone gets ill and you want to take time off? Just like I did when my. My dad fell ill and I took 21 days. The last 21 days of his life I spent with him.

It was invaluable. But I had the luxury, the privilege, the ability to do that, because I built the machine outside the business so it could support me when I needed it. And so what he did is he was running. And I said, we need to change this dynamic. Yes, have the business. Let's optimize the business. In fact, the first pillar of the affluence blueprint is the generate pillar, where we're following, focusing on building income streams and scaling our income and scaling our cash flow. That's the generate piece. That's your business piece. But the second pillar is the accumulate pillar. And this is what was lacking in his world. And so we looked at the different incomes that he could create that would leverage his time, things that wouldn't take his daily effort, that, once set up, could generate cash flow. And in his case, what we did is we built a real estate portfolio, an Airbnb portfolio that to this point right now, will generate somewhere in the neighborhood of $40,000 a month for him, okay, that's without his effort. And so he can continue to do his business until he decides he doesn't want to do the business anymore because he has a machine that's going to pay him $40,000 a month. And that machine will continue to grow. At the same time. This is what every entrepreneur should be doing. Now, some entrepreneurs say, well, I'll sell my business. That's great, but what if the business doesn't sell? What if you can't find a buyer? What if it isn't sellable because it's a personal brand of sorts or something? So what we need to do is plan ahead as entrepreneurs. If we truly want financial freedom, if we truly want control, if we truly want a richer life, and that richer life is about experiences and feelings. If we truly want to control every ounce of our time. To have choice then alongside of the business. We need to build the money machine. And it needs to be built on sound principles, clear priorities, and understanding what the possibility is when you do that. And so this is the thing that we do. This is what drives everything I do, because it became so apparent to me the importance of it during my cancer, to allow me to heal, to allow me to focus on what was important. To be with my dad when he was ill, to be with my mom when she was ill, to just simply take off and experience life. That's what I want for every single one of you. That's for what I want for you. If you are in my sphere, if this relates to you, if you can relate to it at all, then this is the game that we should play. Financial freedom, it's your birthright. Let's go claim it. Let's do it the right way. Most entrepreneurs are building a house of cards and they don't even know it. And it's because they're focused solely on their business and not building something outside of it. Let's work them together to make that happen for you. So I want to help and I want to make it easy for you. I'm going to be doing a special exclusive once a year free training starting September 15th. Okay? It's called the Affluent Entrepreneur Live. All right? I want you to join. Go to affluencelive.com, grab a spot, get on the wait list. It's not till September 15th. Let's make it happen. Get in there. We're going to. I'm going to do live sessions with you, a series of live sessions with you. I'm going to talk about the priorities, the processes and the principles that you need to have in place so you can use your business to create a money machine so you have the freedom and that you always dreamt of. Here's the thing. It doesn't matter your age or stage. I don't care whether you're 20, you're 50 or 60. I don't care whether you're making 50,000, 150,000 or a million dollars. We need to get this stuff in place. It doesn't matter your age or stage. We get it running from the great, from the very beginning, and we continue to grow from there. I want to be your guide. I want to help you out because it's what I believe I've been called to do from the cancer. It's. It's what I want to do to, to really build. In this new season, my life. And so if you truly want to find the path to financial freedom as an entrepreneur, then join me on the journey. Let's make it happen together. I'll see you there. Go to affluencelive.com cheers. Thank you for being part of the Affluent Entrepreneur show with me, your host, Mel Abraham. If you want to achieve financial liberation to create an affluent lifestyle, join the Affluent Entrepreneur facebook group@melabraham.com group and I'll see you there. Cheers. Bye.

And that's it for this episode of Building youg Money Machine, where we help you learn how to master your money, eliminate financial stress, and live a life of choice. If you found this valuable or helpful to you, here's what I'd love for you to do. If you do me a favor, go to Apple, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to this podcast and rate and review the show. It helps us tremendously to keep us at the top of the list so we can continue to get this information and this message out to people, because I truly believe that financial freedom is your birthright and I want to help each and every one of you claim it. Thanks so much.