From employee to side hustle and self employed is a great first step… But the BIG MONEY & time freedom come from building a real business!
This video expands on the idea of the cash flow quadrant. If you’re not familiar with this core concept, read this post here: https://www.milesbeckler.com/cashflow-quadrant/
Or watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YqEt4HsNyk
this video is all about transitioning from being self employed to being a business owner. Now in a previous video I covered the four quadrants of the cashflow quadrant. Number one is being an employee. Then you have being a self employed individual, then there’s a business owner and fourth and finally you have being an investor and really I think the the biggest lifestyle jump and the biggest benefit for you is in getting from that self-employed phase up to the business owner phase. So we’re going to talk about what that is and how they differ in this video. But then you’re going to learn how, what do you need to do to actually make that transition because there’s a lot more freedom and there’s a lot more income potential being a business owner versus being self employed. But I want to make sure you know that being self employed is a great step and it’s kind of a must have step on the path.
You see. When my wife and I were first getting our website going, we both had day jobs, desk jobs, nine to fives with commutes and all that jazz. And then we would work the nights and weekends on our business. Over the course of several months growing that website, growing traffic, getting it picked up by Google, doing SEO, I learned the basics of how to rank a website. And then I decided to let go of my employee position and shift to being self employed. This is when I started offering services for local businesses because I knew that I could help them get onto wordpress websites, I could help them do keyword research and content marketing in a way that would get them to outrank their competitors, their other local businesses. And I knew this would make them more money and I knew that they were willing to invest in that.
So that was my transition down to the self-employed world. And my wife and I stayed in this position in this phase for about four years and I learned a lot of skills and it worked really well to give me extra time. You see when I was an employee, I had about a two hour, sometimes on a bad day, three hours a day commute every single day. So that was 10 sometimes even 15 hours per week. That just disappeared into, you know, the commute and I’d listen to audio books and I’d get audio books from my library to keep filling my brain with positive information and good marketing books. But being able to apply that time to client sites directly in my own website literally helped me increase my income. It was in this phase where we paid off all of the debt, all my $50,000 in student loan debt.
It was in this phase of being self employed that I was able to pay this off. But the challenge with being self employed is that you’re kind of the bottleneck in everything. Oftentimes you start out by doing everything. So in those early days, I was the marketing guy, right? I ran the meetup groups where I was able to meet the local business owners. I would go to the networking events and I would sit down over coffee and learn about their businesses. I was the sales guy. I was presenting offers and really kind of crafting custom offers to meet their specific needs. I was the delivery guy, I was the dual, the work guy. I was the keyword researcher. When I sold keyword research packs, I was the quality assurance guy. Okay, so that’s being self employed and it was a better arrangement than being an employee. But as I sought to remove myself from the the actual day to day work, this is the thought of being a business owner.
This is what you need to get to and really ultimately the, the piece of the puzzle that’s going to help you make that shift from being self employed to becoming a business owner is focusing in on systems and processes and then teammates because a business compared to that self-employed reality that I just shared with you. A business is one that has different individuals, project managers, operations officers, et Cetera, who oversee entire teams and divisions who all move projects forward on their own. It eliminates the situation where every road flows back to miles, right? Every decision eventually landed on Miles’s desk and everything needed miles. His input. Now it’s built in a way. My business is built in a way that all of the different individual people in the game, uh, the people running our backlink campaigns, they all have very standardized processes that they follow.
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Most of us learn this after we burn out, after going to business school i learn this is a must, you need to get people on your team, you need sales people, customer service, depending on your type of industry.
This is the video i was searching for. I am stuck in the self employed level yeah i am doing keyword research, i am seo and writing article and that's why my project is slow. Thanks for sharing this video i will obviously hire few writers
myles have you ever had content or other data stolen by an employee . how do you offer oversight , that an employee wonβt go rogue with your ip or content ? could you share some tools or examples you have had
QUESTION IS IT BETTER TO JUST BUY A HUMAN PROOF DESIGNS WEBSITE AND JUST ADD CONTENT OR IS IT BETTER TO JUST FIND A NICHE YOUR SELF?
Really useful stuff, thanks Miles. The go cart king !
I'm a big fan.
This guy is the best business coach ever.
Thanks Miles! π Have a Wonderful Weekend!
Awesome Miles! As a follow on clip it would be endlessly helpful to us to show on a white board all the "cogs in your machine". This would make clear to the beginners how many systems and team members are needed for a successful online biz.
You're a legend!
For anyone wanting to do this, my company writes procedural documents for businesses so you can duplicate yourself and delegate tasks.
This is so timely – I was just mapping out my systems last night. This added a ton of value thanks!!
Miles, are you following a process like "Work the System" by Sam Carpenter? Or is it more of a self-developed process?
Good stuff. Prior to learning what you teach, I was already self employed with a few contractors occasionally helping out. I started watching your videos to figure out how to digitally scale some educational products. Now, my plans are to do that and more. For my main business (tutoring and test prep) the challenge of scale is very real. I'm all in on scaling it now from the standpoint of an information and affiliate marketing site that can also offer tutoring (or recommend then receive kickbacks). No longer being geographically bound opens up the talent pool as well. Continued success.
Thanks
Thank you so much Miles, sooo happy to see your growth!!! Amazing timesππ½ππ½
Great food for thought Miles. I am currently a one-man show so definitely needed to hear this if I ever want to grow to a business owner. π
Your vids are very helpful thanks Miles!!!
Good ideas here, all easier said then done but something to work towards ππ
Thank you a lot for the video Miles! I started at the same time as you to build my niche site. Since Iβm still full time employee I use all my time to create content. Iβm struggeling with the content promotion for my informational content. Should I focus on email outreach or what is the 80/20 of content promotion?
Always love listening to you Miles, always talks sense! who else agrees?
Good stuff Miles, learning to delegate responsibilities can be a tough transition after doing it all yourself as a small business person.