Why do we need Passive Income?

I was super honoured to be able to talk to Passive Income Strategist Lisa Johnson. Lisa started out as a business coach three years ago, and realised that, actually we're told all the time to become fully booked. And then when you get fully booked, it isn't quite what you had in mind, because we're all busy all the time.

So there must be a better way. 

Lisa went on the search for that better way, and found passive income through things like courses, membership, ebooks, all sorts of things. 

The first six months of her business, she started earning six figures per year, but was shattered. Lisa had no more time and had hit an income ceiling. She learnt all about passive income and implemented it in to her business and went on to make million pounds a year, and working a hell of a lot less hours.

Lisa teaches this and I am super passionate about sharing this model, as Pinterest generates passive organic leads for your business and complement a passive income model brilliantly! So let's get to it. 

Why do we need passive income? As an entrepreneur why is it important? 

I think the biggest reason is because what we've seen with the pandemic, if you put all your eggs in one basket, you can be in trouble if anything ever happened. So you need to diversify your income streams First off.

But secondly, because you will hit an income selling at some point, we only have so much time. If we're only ever trading time for money, at some point, there's going to be no more time and therefore no more money. Whereas if you have passive and semi passive income streams, it doesn't rely on your time. It's not completely passive, it doesn't rely on your time. It's like leveraging your time more. If I think about the people that were my clients during this pandemic year, those that had already started their passive income streams, they were still able to make an income this year. Those that were in industries like the wedding industry, the hospitality industry who didn't have passive income streams, literally went from money to no money. And it was really hard on them, then I think that I've been banging on for about three years about passive income and why it's important. And I think now, only recently with the pandemic people have gone Oh, yeah, I get I see why I need it now. 

When we start businesses, we don't generally go I really want to start a business so I can work all of the hours God sends and be absolutely shattered. We don't want that. We want to start a business because we want this freedom lifestyle. We want to be able to travel, spend time with our family. I've got eight year old twins, I started a business to spend more time with them. And so passive income enables you to do that. 

What was your turning point to enabling passive income? 

I didn’t want to hit an income ceiling, I knew I had all this knowledge, because I've done all these courses and, you know, read loads of books, and I knew my stuff and knew I had this knowledge, I didn't really know how I could make money from it. But mainly, the biggest one was, I kept burning out. So every time I got sick, I wouldn't earn any money. And also, I remember thinking, the kind of life I want is to travel, I wanna go on a holiday. But after my winter holiday, I stopped earning money. It was like, This can't be right. But it all came to a head when I forgot to pick up my kids from school! 

I was so busy and was doing all the things and trying to get things done, because I had so much work to do so many clients. I took them to school. And then I got a phone call saying who was coming to pick up the boys from school. I was so busy. I didn't even look at the time. And I realised at that point, something had to change. If I was forgetting, like the major reasons why I was doing something had to actually change in my life. And so that's when I decided to change everything. 

So in terms of your passive income, knowledge and expertise, what is it that you particularly teach?

I realised that as I was starting to add in these passive income streams into my business, I was doing the same to my client so that my clients were like, how are you doing this? Like, you are now travelling all the time? And yeah, I can see from your stripe account, as I post my stripe account on Facebook that you're making £500,000 £600,000. How are you doing this while travelling? Because I was working on 24 hours a month. I said I can teach you if you want. So I started teaching a few of them how to do it. And they started making a lot of money and working less hours. 

So I thought how am I doing this? Let's work out the system. What am I doing the same every time, not just for people that are already doing well, and they want to start going from one to one to one to many, but for new businesses that wanting to come in. 

I devised this system, which we call the casSh system. And it's this five point process to start adding passive income streams into your business.

C

It starts with C for client. Because even if we're going to have a passive income stream, that is nothing to do with whatever our businesses or our work is, we still need to know who our ideal client is. 

So instead of thinking what do I want to do? Do I want a membership, or course or an ebook or affiliate marketing or whatever we need to think who do I want to help? Who are those people that I really want to help? Once you know everything about them, you've got your ideal client, then you can go on to the next stage.

A

A is for audience, grow an audience of those people that you just decided you want to help and nurture them, show them what you know, help them add value to them. Let them see your personality because it's all about growing an audience who are loyal and who trust you. And you can do that by doing things like using a sales funnel and nurture sequence.

S

The next stage of the casSh system is the s and there's two s's in my cash system. The first is structure and you need to know how you're going to do something, what system you'll be using. So there are front facing systems like teachable, Thinkific, Kartra, Kajabi that really help you be able to pack your course or your membership or whatever you want. There are even plugins like it's become really easy. 

The next is selling. In other words, launching this is the bit that most people get wrong. They have a great course. Or they have a great ebook or group coaching or workshop. And what they do is they build this audience like I've taught them to and then they go on to the audience and they go Hey, guys, we've got this thing, Johnny buy it. Because that's not how he learns. Our clients these days, our audiences are wary, they've bought stuff that hasn't worked. They've been burned before. So you do a proper launch plan, six to 12 weeks and you give value while you're launching. 

H

And the last letter in the casSh system is H, which is keeping your clients happy. Because if you're with a passive income stream, you aren't really doing anything passive. First time you do it, because it's a lot of work upfront, you're creating an asset upfront that you can sell over and over and over again. So only really becomes passive, the second, third, fourth, fifth time you sell it, not the first. So you don't want to do all this work and sell it once. You want to make sure it sells time and time again. And the only way you can do that is to make sure your client had a good experience, because then they'll shout about it for you. And then, you know, if people shout about the results and give you great testimonials, you'll be able to sell it again and again. And again. And that's how you have this sustainable long term passive income system. You don't want to be a flash in the pan, sell something once! 

And that's the five steps. And if you follow the five steps, you will make passive income.

What kind of passive income streams Can I have? 

Most people say what should I do and you know you might already have passive income streams, you might have a small audience and sell already things like ebooks. They are a  really quick way to get going. But if people say all the time to you, I'll just pick your brains about something, that means you've got some knowledge that they want. And if you have knowledge, that means you can sell knowledge. So what is it that people always ask your help for? Can you turn that into an ebook that you can sell on your website, for instance, even things like courses, membership, they are easy things to get going once you've built your audience. 

People say I'm not an expert, you are an expert. If you know something that some other people want to know, even if you're only a couple of steps up the ladder, you are still an expert, because other people want to be where you are. And it doesn't have to be something big, like life coaching, like something huge. It could just be something that is your hobby, like, you know, you could write a book on how to cook certain things. Or you could write an ebook on how to do your first sales funnel, or you could write an E book on how to get around Disneyland without being a military operation. It honestly could be anything, I bought that ebook. That's why I just thought of it. You can think of all these different things that you know about that could be making you money. It's knowledge other people want. The other reason that people who genuinely go I can't do it is someone's already done that. But someone's already done it, there's no point me doing it, someone's already done everything. You'll never do anything because someone's already done it. It's not about if they've already done it, it's already done it, there's a market for it. That's a good thing. 

It's more about how you will do it. How will you do a bit differently to them, your person that likes you for Pinterest, those people come to you because they like the way you teach it. They know your personality, they resonate with your story, all of these different things it's never just about the thing that you do. You are your personal brand. And if you can show that by giving value and by showing up and being consistent, then you'll always be able to sell.

What if you've got a physical product that you sell, how would you turn that into more of a passive income module?

It completely depends on how you want to do it. How I always think of it is whatever you do, some people can't afford to pay you for what you do. So let's say you were a branding person who made websites, some people can't afford my fees to brand their business and build a website. But I can put a course together to show them how to do it themselves.

People want to learn how to be you, especially right now. There are 1000s and 1000s of new entrepreneurs coming into the market because they don't want to go back to work, or they've been made redundant. If you are already in the market how can you teach them how to be you?

If I was a branding designer, I might do a course in how to get business as a branding designer, or how to start up as a branding designer, because a lot of people coming in want to do that. So that's the first sort of way to think about it. 

Now, if you have a physical product, there's different ways of doing it. Let’s talk about an artist, I have an artist who's a client, and she now teaches people online, how to draw. In business she was specifically the wedding industry so teaches other entrepreneurs in the wedding creative side how to draw like the cake, how to sketch the dresses, because it's an add on service that makes them more appealing to their client. 

But if you have a product based business, think about the subscriptions model, that's a nice semi passive income stream, you're sending out subscription box with what you sell every month to lots of people. So that's one way of doing it. But there are so many copy that you decide to do the thing that is your business now. Or you might say, Well, I don't want to do a course in that. I want to do a course about something on membership about something I used to do. Like in your normal job, like let's say you were a teacher, maybe you could do something about you know, fitness for kids, let's say you were in PR before, maybe you could help entrepreneurs try and get visible, there's so many ways you can use your skills for something else in the passive income market. Or do you have a hobby, you know, maybe you're great at teaching a dog, how to do something. So you can do something on that, or potty training twins or like whatever it may be that you know how to do that somebody else wants to know how to do you can genuinely make money from it.

What if you haven’t done 1:1 yet or in my case don’t want a 1:1 model?

Everyone thinks they need to get their one to ones done first. My question is why? Why are we choosing a business model that doesn't suit our lifestyle, because people are telling us we should. Like, that's what happened to me. That's what I did once for so long. But I felt like it was the only way because people said, you have to do one to one for five years, I did it for less than a year before I was like, nah this business model is not for me. 

But for many, many people, they come in to business, like their first business, my clients come in with the passive income model, because they say you do what they should do what I didn't do, which is to go do what I want my life to look like, I want to travel a lot, I want to spend time with my kids, I want to do this, that and the other. Therefore I don’t want to do one to one, I don't want it to be based on my time, I want it to be based on my knowledge. And so they go straight for the passive income model, which is, for me, anyway, a much better way of doing things because straight away, you're giving yourself a business model that can scale. Whereas if you do one to one, you're going to have to introduce something else at some point.

And that's why for me, it fits in with my story, my journey, I have to manage my health.  Now a couple of health issues, not just the one the other as well. So it's really important to me to be able to not get up and go, I've got five clients today, but get up and check my stripe account and be making money anyway, you know, and that's the point, I think for a lot of people. 

I think it's really important, especially if you have health issues. I mean, I had health issues this year, I had a bladder issue, and I kept having to go to hospital, to have operations and to be checked out. And if I didn't have a passive income model that would have meant, you know, I would have had to stop my business that made no, you know, I made a million this year anyway, it made no impact to my business because I don't trade time for money anymore. The best way of thinking about it is and I always use this analogy because people can't get their head around passive income sometimes. But if you think about if you had a spare room, and you bought your house and you bought the room, you've painted the room, you've put a bed in the room, you've made it look nice, you've advertised the room. You've done all the work, that's your asset that you've made up front.   Now you can get a tenant in there who will pay you every month without you having to do anything else. That's your past event. So it's just about building something up front. 

It's not easy. I think there's myths around it, which is that passive means you don't do anything. That's not true, you will have to do some stuff. But once you've done the hard work, it then becomes easy. And it means less time, I kind of think about it if I had a one to one client right now, who wanted 10 hours of my time, that would cost about 20k. So I'd make 20k for those 10 hours. And some of my courses that I put out there, I only have to do 10 hours, the workbooks already written, the presentations already written, I just come on to my hour, per month or per week and go off again. So those 10 hours will make me 300k instead of 20k. It just makes more logical sense. 

So how can people get started with passive income?

We'll be doing a free challenge and Ally will be partnering in this to help you. So this challenge is going to happen in June, it's going to be over four days, and we're going to teach you all we can about passive income in a four day period, I'm gonna make you do some stuff, so that you can start actually making money. Now for people that did this last time, one made 10k a month, just from the challenge that it didn't come into programme with me or anything like that. It just did what I said in the challenge. And they started making money. And now they're coming into money now that made the money so they can learn how to make more of it. But even if you're thinking, you know, I can't afford leases one too many programme or anything like that, that Huawei is come and learn as much as you can during the challenge. And lots of people do that. And it's absolutely fine. But yeah, and it'll be in there too. And we'll help you as much as we can in that.

Thank you to Lisa for her interview. I did the challenge and have completed Lia's OTM programme. The challenge is fab in terms of how it made me think about things differently. I had a rough idea, obviously, with my health anyway, I wanted to go down the passive income route, but it actually kicked my butt to get out there and do the work. It made me really think how can how can this work for me, my life, my business and what I want for the future. So it's really beneficial. The challenge is great.

If you are interested in passive income and what it can do for you and your life then join the challenge here!