TES 071 - 4 Ways to Make Money with What You Know

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. Hey there, Mel Abraham here, the author of the number one best selling book the Entrepreneur's Solution and the founder of Thoughtpreneur Academy, where we teach you how to capture, package and monetize what you know, the ideas in your head to create something that moves people from belief change to behavior change and to help you out with that. And welcome back to this episode of the Entrepreneur Solutions Show. This one. You know, I'm answering a question again that I answer a lot and I get it because it's an challenging question in this space when you're talking about entrepreneurs that deal in the wisdom area and what they know, infopreneurs and coaches and speakers and authors and trainers and those types of folks that will ask you, how do you scale, how do you scale your business? And for those of you that are unclear on that scaling, meaning growing your business, how do I grow my coaching practice? How do I grow my, my consulting practice? How do I grow my infopreneur practice? How do I grow that? And the interesting thing is that the traditional methodologies, the traditional strategies and tactics and elements to growth of an entrepreneurial endeavor, an entrepreneurial business, are not the same as what you would use in this type of business or what we call a practice, what I call a thoughtpreneur practice. I coined the term thoughtpreneur because I really believe that what we're doing is we're combining that creative nature of the entrepreneur, that ability to think differently, that ability to see things from a different perspective and to give that those thoughts to someone else that gives them insights that are different than what their current insights are, that shifts them to behavior change, that allows them to change their lives for the better. And so in this episode, I'm going to talk a bit and I'm going to break this up a bit because in this episode I first talk about kind of the lay of the land, the spectrum of types of business models. And I'm going to give you the four primary business models the ways you can make money in this, and then we'll come back in another episode and we'll say, alright, let's talk about how do you scale it and how do you leverage it? Because they're not the same thing. So let's jump in, let's jump into, you know, scaling your wisdom, the four ways to have more impact and more income in this episode. So, so here we go. One of the things that I look at is that why is this, why is this so important in the context of what it is you do? And one of the challenges is this, is that if we don't get this right, you freaking get tired. I mean, it really gets tiring. You can't sustain it for any length of time because of that. Realizing that and this, this is the game that I played as a cpa, is that if you're swapping your hours for dollars, in other words, your time for money.

There'S only so much you can do. There's a limit to that. And it becomes unsustainable if we don't get that done correctly, if we can't figure it out. So you cap yourself out on your revenue or you cap yourself out on your productivity and you cap yourself out on the lifestyle that you can create. Because there is only so many hours in the day. I haven't figured out how to do it. If you have figured out how to do it, let me know. But you can only get 24 hours in a day. And we need to do other things with those hours other than just work. The second thing is this. If we don't get it right, we have no impact. And I believe that all of us have a message in us. All of us have a voice, all of us have insights that can shift and change people's lives. And I believe that in today's society, especially given all of the turmoil and the things that are going on out there, people are starved to hear a better way. People are starved to think differently. People are starved and hungry to find a journey, a path that might serve them better than the old industrial age concepts or the old way of doing things, or doing things just because that's the way they've always been done. And I think that it's time for us to challenge convention. It's time for us to look at things differently so we can have a greater impact and have an impactful life while we're here and to impact those around us. And I'm not talking about impacting millions. Certainly I want the entrepreneur solution in the hands of Millions if I possibly can have it happen. But even at a smaller scale, if you just impact your family, if you just impact generations, if you just impact those that are near and dear to you, you've done alright while you're here in doing that. The third thing is that if we don't get this right, there just is no future. It just becomes challenging and there is no future with what it is you've got to work with. Because like I said, you're gonna get tired, you're gonna get burned out and then you're not gonna be able to continue to operate your coaching practice, to operate your consulting practice, to operate your service based business in a way that really has a greater impact. But when we get this right, wow, you know, all of a sudden you feel greater flow. In other words, you're coming around in this and saying, man, it's like me today coming in the studio to do this for you. It doesn't feel like work. It's like, alright, let's get the camera on, let's get the lights on, let's get some things ready to go. Rock and roll and let's have some fun with it. Let's bring some things to life in a way that will serve you. Serve. The questions that come about, the things that I know that I was challenged with, I still get challenged with. And the things that I hear from all the community and all my students and the people that I mentor and the people that work with me in the context of, you know, Think Tank and Thoughtpreneur Academy and Business Breakthrough Academy and Entrepreneur Solution, all of that in doing that. But it's coming from a place of flow. This, it's not drudgery. It doesn't even really feel like work. It's about really getting out there and saying, I know that I'm impacting and changing people's existence with the things that we do. The other thing that happens when we get this right is that we're valued higher. I mean, we come at it, we are providing a much higher, higher value of the things that we do because we're deep thinkers. If we do this correctly, we're going to think deeply, we're going to come up with new perspectives, new things, ways of doing things that's going to allow them to look at things differently. And lastly, what that leads to is better income. But the real key behind this is the greater impact gives you greater impact income. You know, some of you have heard me talk about this, maybe live on stage or in some of my podcasts or YouTube shows my episodes of the Entrepreneur Solution. I truly believe wholeheartedly that we live in an exchange economy, a value exchange economy. We get caught up in things like cost and price and all of that. It's never about cost and it's never about price. It's about value. And the greater value you can create in people's lives, either with products or services, it doesn't matter what it is you're doing. The greater perceived value and actual value you create in people's lives.

The greater they're willing to pay for it. Because in their mind, they're not worried about price and cost. Believe it or not, they may talk about price and cost, but what they're looking at and analyzing is what's the value I'm getting in return? And as long as the value they get in return is greater than the value they feel like they have to give up in time, in money, in effort, in all of those things, their game, and they're buying. And so if we focus on higher impact, higher value, you'll end up with better income. That becomes the byproduct. It shouldn't be your primary focus. It shouldn't be the folks at all. Because when we find the right market with the right message in the right way, we can increase the level of impact that we have, the level of value that is created and the level of income that is ultimately experienced. So if that's the case, if we know what happens if we don't get it right, and we know what happens if we do get it right, what do you need to know? What are the key things that you need to understand.

When moving forward, when really starting to understand and build this out? So if you know what happens if you get this wrong, and you know what happens if you get this right, what. What exactly do you need to know? What does it take for you to really kind of get this dialed in? And I think the first thing is to know what fits with you. In other words, how do you want your life to be? This is a lifestyle business. Coaching, speaking, consulting.

It's all a lifestyle business, I truly believe, because I get a chance to do the things that I want to do. I get a chance to do them when I want to do them, as much as I want to do them, as little as I want to do them, and wherever I want to do them. And I can choose to not work with people or work with people and work in different ways. So what is it that you want to do? Do you want to spend a lot of time one on one with people, maybe that's meaningful to you. Maybe you enjoy speaking and you want to get up on stage. And it's not for everyone, because listen, a speaker's life. A lot of times these speakers are on the road 100, 150 days a year. And I know I did it initially when I was building my consulting practice, I was traveling a lot. I was speaking around the country and around the world on a regular basis almost weekly. And so, I mean, you don't get two and a half million miles on an airline without doing that. And so one of the things that need to realize is that there isn't one specific way to do it, but there is the right way for you. Now, you may have some strengths, and we can talk further about that. We dig deeper in that in Thoughtpreneur Academy and some of my mentoring programs. But you may have certain strengths where strategically, it's best for you to start at a certain place in a certain way. But by and large, let's get the vision and figure out where it is and you want to go. So first, what fits for you? And I would write that down. I would take the moment now and to sit down and say, how would this look for you a year from now, two years from now, three years from now? What do you want it to look like as you move forward? The second thing is to create curriculum and process. I'm a firm believer that your curriculum, your process, your knowledge needs to be packaged. Until you package it properly, you cannot transcend and use the different models as effectively as others might. And here's what I mean by that. The challenge with a lot of folks in this space, whether it's coaching or it's speaking or it's authoring, is that they get caught up in marketing. What I want you to get caught up in and fall in love with is in the creation and the packaging of your knowledge and your wisdom. The creation of taking your insights, the ideas you have, and putting them together in a way that we can then communicate them on multiple levels in a way that really starts to drive people's lives, that drives people's decisions, that drives the difference that's going to make in there. So think about how do I take what I know and create curriculum and process out of it? And there are procedures and processes and tools that we use to make that happen. And then third, number three is this. Am I going to scale or leverage? And then we'll come back in another episode, talk about this more deeply, and give you some of the avenues in which to do that. But a lot of times we think that we want to scale a business when we really don't. We want to leverage a business. And I'm not talking about leverage in the context of debt. I'm talking about leverage in the context of you, your ideas. How do you leverage what you know versus scaling and growing everything together? We'll talk deeper about that in the next episode as we go through it. So what I want to introduce you to in order to understand this deeper is a framework that I use. I know, I know. See, remember curriculum and process. Let me give you a framework on this. It's what I call the practice spectrum that we, we, that we walk from, that we can turn around and say what is going on? What kind of practice can I have so I can figure out which one I want? And it's not an either or. And there isn't one that is better necessarily than the other. There is just a difference between them. In order to do that, I'm actually going to take you to my iPad. So we'll kind of walk through what, what that looks like for you. So let me just pop that onto the screen. All right, so I'm going to talk about the practice spectrum. And when I look at this, it's really about a couple of different things that I want you to consider. And that is this, is that on one axis I want you to think about what's the process.

That you have in place now the greater the process that you have in place, the ability to duplicate and replicate the results that you have the ability for someone else to do it, the easier it is to leverage or scale and allow someone else to do it other than other than you. So on one side the process, do you have a high level of processes or do you have a low level processes? Then the other side of this I want you to consider is this element of what I call access.

Now that's access to your knowledge, that's access to you. That's access to what people would call intellectual property. Your insights, your wisdom in there. So as access goes up, that changes things. So we're going to think about things on those two planes, process and access. And so one of the things that I think many of us are really used to is this concept of.

What we see in most coaching programs is this concept of.

One to one to one. And when you think about one to one, it's really that, that hours.

For dollars model. If you're not careful, it's easy to fall into it. I'm Doing coaching and I coach for, I don't do this this way, but I coach for $150 a session. That kind of economic. I came from that world as a cpa. They're constantly saying, what's your hourly rate? What's your hourly rate? Here's the problem for that is that we need to think about how do I get out of that hourly rate situation? Because if you don't, you're going to run into a ceiling. The only way you're going to increase your value, the only way you're going to increase your income, the only way you're going to increase your revenues at that point is either work more hours or increase your hourly rate. Now for me, I worked a lot of hours and then I started increasing my hourly rate. My hourly rate when I was doing hourly rate work got to be really, really high, well into the four and five figures, depending on what it was I was doing. The challenge is you still have a limit. And I want you to start thinking in the context of again, value exchange. But the one to one model is something that is possible for you. But here's how I'd like you to think about it is a lot of times what happens is that we look at a one to one model.

Down at the bottom.

Of an escalation.

Where we're really doing hours for dollars here.

And that's limited. What I'd like you to actually think about is how do I take that and move it up here? So my one to one.

Is now at the top. And the actually the most expensive work you're doing, the high level mentorship, the high level instruction, the high level consulting that you do at a high level. So instead of doing it for 100 or 150, $200 an hour, you're doing it for 10, $20,000. But that takes time to get there. So the one to one model is a model that exists and I want you to think about it. And that's probably the place where a lot of people start. And it's a great place to start because it's a great place to refine your content, your curriculum, your processes and all that to really dial it in, to understand how to have the greatest impact in the shortest amount of time, to have the greatest value in the process. Now the second way to do this is what we call we start to create more processes in place to allow them to be replicated and duplicated. And that would be to go to a one to many model.

This is typically something like a going out and speaking, I do a lot of training programs now. I do small masterminds like my Think Tank and I do larger trainings like Business Breakthrough Academy, Thoughtpreneur Academy, where I've got hundreds of people in the room that allow me to then get myself out there and speak one to many. And a lot of times it's, it's in a speaking type of situation, just like even this, the video is one to many. Now maybe you're not all sitting in the same room, maybe some of you are sitting and watching this, that would be kind of cool. But it's a one to many concept in there. So is there a one to many in your future or in your present right now? Is there a way for you take this and put it out out there, Something that you ought to think about.

The third possibility is that you may have a situation where they want more access to you, more access to you. But there isn't as much process. And that's what I call a one, two, few situation. Those are your masterminds, those are the small groups. You know, five to maybe 10, 20, 30, maybe as much as 40 people. But it starts to not feel few at that point. Higher priced because they have greater access to you. Higher price because they have greater access to you. The intellectual property, the wisdom, the knowledge, the insights in that process. So that's another model you might consider. And then.

The last model in the spectrum is what I call many.

Too many.

This is, this is a higher level situation. This is something that you're not going to start off with. And in fact, if you try to do this too soon in your business, it's going to hurt, it's going to be painful and it's not going to be successful. And this is where typically the, the best way to understand this is when you license your process. You've now got a process because it's high process here and you've got access, but now they've got access to the intellectual property because you've got other people out there. So what it is is really training other people in your processes, in your procedures, in your results, in your frameworks, in that knowledge you're licensing them. The ability to take what you know and put it out there instead of it all being you. It's a great way to put things out there. Now you can see it in the, in the licensing model. You can see it in a franchise model. Now be careful when you start thinking about franchises. There's a lot of rules with respect to that. Well beyond this here and Even the licensing you got to be careful about to make sure that you do it right. So that's a model that is available to you if you choose to do that. But I would urge you and invite you to not do it right away. If you try to do it too soon, you will get hurt, it will cost you a lot, it will fail. And so what we need to do is focus on the other models that you have in here.

Focus on these other models to really bring it home, to allow you to start to grow it, refine the content, refine the process, refine the work that you're doing in a way that then you can templatize it, license it and extend it. But really when you start talking about your practice, you're looking at these models and saying, look, I got one to one, I got one to few, I got one to many or I got many to many. That's it, that's your choices. Now remember I said earlier, it's not a one, an either or. For instance, I actually run in ollies and actually all of the, the circled ones, one to many. I speak to a lot of large audiences, thousands to hundreds on a regular basis, on other people's stages and on my own stages I do one to one consulting. It's not cheap, but I do one on one mentoring and consulting with folks on an ongoing basis. And then I do one to few. I have a mastermind program that you know, called Think tank that I use, that I do with small groups to allow me to take them through, to be more intimate, to be more hands on, to give them access to that. I don't have a many to many model yet because remember, I don't want to do it too soon, but it is in the works and it will be rolling out in the not too distant future at some point in time. So there is a many to many model on the horizon. It's just not the right time strategically for us to do that. So the point is that think about the model that you want to run or that you are running and say, how do I build that? Now what I am going to urge you to do is let's get one of the models running, right? Let's get them where they are making money for you and doing it on a regular basis before you start trying to put too many things out there in the world. So given that, let's just think about what does it take, what are the other things can come into play. This is the practice spectrum. What are the different ways you can make money in this and we'll work from there and then we'll come back in another episode to talk about how do you scale that and how do you monetize that? So let's go to another worksheet here. And that is what I call the scaling leveraging practice worksheet. Bottom line is that there's four primary ways or business models that you can use to make money. And the first we talked about, which is the one on one, everything is literally time based.

Time based.

So this is the model.

And we'll talk about in another episode, how do you scale it and how do you leverage it?

So one is time based again, swapping hours for dollars. And again, it's not a model that I recommend on a long term basis. It's probably a model that many of us have started out with and we realize this is hard work and I'm creating more value than just the commodity swap of an hour for a dollar. The second possible model is product based.

This is when you package up your knowledge, your information, your systems, your processes in a box and you ship it out to someone or they access it online or they download it and they get it on their, you know, their ipods or their iPhones and their iPads and they work it from there. So it's product based per se, so you're pretty much removed from it. You create it once and it's product based in that process. The third model, which is the one that I actually like a lot is this thing called hybrid. A hybrid model uses both this and this together. So for instance, those people that join me on it, and typically most of my programs, there's an online version portion of it and that, that gives them the product portion of it. And then there's there's a, on the higher level programs, there's a live element to it, there's a, an interactive element to it because I like, I like the hybrid work. So, so it allows me to leverage my time, leverage what it is I'm doing to give access to people, but then give access on an ongoing basis by using a hybrid type of model. And then the last model to consider is this, and I kind of talked about this already, is the license model. And again this is where you start to certify people in your process, your procedures. Not something that I'm going to recommend you do right away, but those are the four ways that there's only four ways to make money in this. You know, I'm either going to sell my time, I'm going to sell a product, I'm going to sell both or I'm going to license it. Now, there's nuances to each of those. So the real question then becomes one of, alright, so what's next? How do I scale it? What do I need to do to scale it or leverage it? And that, my friends, we're going to get to in the next episode, we're going to turn around and we're going to look at what does it take to really scale or leverage any one of these models, to really start to bring them to life in a way that you now can make more money, make more income, reach, reach greater people, a greater number of people to have that happen. So I hope that you found this of value at least laying the foundation for the things that are going to come ahead. And if you have, you know, subscribe, stay with me, leave a comment, ask me a question, let's have a dialogue. I'd love, I'd love to be kind of support you in this journey, to coach you, to mentor you along, along the way. And if you would do me a favor, share this with a friend. Share this with someone else that might, might be served with this. Share it with a friend. And if you have a question, if you have a question that you need me to answer just like this question, go to askmelnow.com that's a s k m dash e l now dot com. Leave me your question there and I'll be sure.

To connect with you on a later episode and make sure that I answer that question for you. And that question could be on wealth, it could be on thought leadership, it could be on thoughtpreneurship, it could be on entrepreneurship, it could be on money, success. Whatever it is, I'm okay with it. I'm here for you. Thank you and I look forward to seeing you in the next episode. And until then, may your vision be grand, your journey epic, and your legacy significant. See you soon. Cheers. Bye.

We hope you enjoyed this episode. Make sure you subscribe so you get access to all of Mel's business and success tips. And if you like this episode, share it with a friend. If you have a specific business or success question, you can ask it at www.askmelnow.com. remember, it's all about being bold, dreaming big, and living life your way because the world needs you. Until the next episode, may your vision be grand, your journey epic, and your legacy significant.

And that's it for this episode of Building your 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.