Can we talk about the fact that our whole damn lives, we were told? That there was one way to do things. If you were smart, if you went to university, if you did all the right things, if you did the internships, if you had, the creme de la creme, when it came to good jobs, top tier opportunities, top tier careers, if you did everything right, The most you could hope for is to be in a company that keeps giving you promotions up that career ladder every so often.
Otherwise you might get, like a one to 3 percent pay rise year on year and then around 65 years old, you'll be able to retire when you're 65 years old and finally, get to travel the world on some kind of cruise ship or something like that. That is what has been painted to us as the idea of the ultimate success.
Like that's the privileged echelon of society. That's the most educated, privileged way forward, essentially, right? Of course, you've got the exceptions, but typically in terms of general status quo, that's what we're, that's what we're shooting for. And yeah. It's been coming from probably a few decades now, people realizing and waking up that hey, the average life expectancy is what, like 75 AD?
That's not a lot of life. And who's to say that I'll have my health? And who's to say that I'm going to be You know, hiking up the Mayan ruins at 65, like probably not. And people are starting to realize, Hey, like I actually want to live now. And I actually want to experience life as much as possible as I can in the present.
And.
The Concept of Work Optional
When I ask most people who build businesses, most entrepreneurs, why they're doing this, why they're figuring this out, why they are choosing the unconventional path. It's because they want more freedom almost to a greater extent, or at least the vocalizing it more than a general population. They know, they're acutely aware, that time and travel and money and options, that's wealth.
In fact, it's not that they're not ambitious, they're relentlessly ambitious, but for something different. They're looking up and they're saying, hey, that director's role up there? Yeah, they're earning 350k and they're, only 48 years old. But the working hours, the stress, the politics, the family never sees them, like they can't take any holiday.
Like maybe not right. Maybe not. And so this way, even this attitude has invited a new conversation around. Entrepreneurship and the barrier to entry being so low because, if you've got a phone, you can get started and making money on your terms. And of course the ultimate freedom. Which is becoming work optional, or you could call it retiring early.
I like to call it work optional because a lot of the people I speak to, they don't actually want to retire, but they want to be able to work for pleasure. They want to be able to work for contribution. And. If they work for six months of the year, 25 hours a week, and then not for the next six months of the year, like that's ultimately freedom for them.
So let's call it work optional, becoming work optional. That is just knowing that you're good financially and work is a choice. And because we love what we do, we're building our businesses around our purpose and we'll keep evolving alongside that journey and that purpose. whether it's volunteering, whether it's actually making money off it.
I think that a lot of us are impact driven people and we will keep contributing in some form, but wouldn't it be so nice for that to be optional?
Starting a Business for Financial Freedom
So I started my business at 30 years old. I'm 35 now. And if I wanted to, if things kept going how they're going and or scaled up, if I choose to scale up and I'm in that great position now where I can choose.
To double my business revenue. If I want to, like I know how to do it, but just say things keep going as they are and on track, I could absolutely plan on becoming fully work optional by 40 years old and I've got an expensive life. Like I live in New Zealand. It is one of the worst countries. I think it's only second to Norway.
In terms of the disparity between how expensive housing and the cost of living is versus what people actually earn in the country. It's an incredibly expensive country. We're an island, we're far away from everything, there's not much competition. Like in Europe, you've got what 12, 000 phone providers to choose from like in France, for example.
And so it's cheap. It's so cheap, like phone, internet, things like that. In New Zealand, it's three, like we just don't have the competition. There are a lot of factors going on, which make it a very expensive country and a very expensive life. I also have a doubly expensive life because I spend three months of the year, at least in the South of France.
Traveling and all that kind of stuff. I'm sharing this because. When I first started looking into the concept of early retirement, I saw a lot about this FIRE movement. And FIRE is interesting and I really respect it for opening the conversation around, financial independence, retire early essentially.
But the way that most people are doing FIRE is that they live off nothing. Like they reduce their expenses as much as possible. Like they, they will sell their car and use bikes. They will, and I get it for sure. But they will get incredibly frugal now. So that they can save a proportion of the income so that one day they can finally retire.
But it's on quite like a, usually like a modest amount of money, but the idea is that freedom and I get it and like good for them. And that sounds amazing. But I have an incredibly expensive life. And so I, I've got a main house, I've got a beach home, I've got a child, I've got, and we don't have free education in New Zealand like we do in France and she's French as well, of course, so she could go study in France, but like all of those things, it's I would like to help her if she wanted to study in New Zealand and pay for a student loan.
So it's I have an expensive life and expensive future in mind. Okay. So I. I'm not going to go like tight and frugal for 10 years just to be able to live on 40k per year. Like it's just not going to be possible for me. And so I remember thinking, I love the idea of fire, that how can we make it so I have way more money to live on?
Obviously you want it all. And I'm like, many years later, here I am, I was like listening to these kind of podcasts and just exploring this, the same sort of time I was exploring side hustles. And what if I started a YouTube channel? So I'm talking about like seven, eight years ago now, I haven't really kept up with the fire movement, but I started thinking about it more recently now through my business and through being able to.
Create more wealth, create a disproportionate amount of income compared to my age, compared to my life experience, compared to what I would be earning in the corporate world. And that's because the businesses that we create over here at Badass Empires, essentially they're called lifestyle businesses, which is, it's not a business where You know, are taking on significant debt and risk and not earning anything for many years with hopes of selling it.
We'll speak about that a little bit later. It is a very cashflow heavy business model once it takes off. And so with that, I would rather, instead of save more money, earn more money and use my business to earn more money out, earn what I need, and then invest that into other streams that allow me. To not rely on my business for income.
So let's talk about how I'm using my business to be able to do it. Many other people in coaching course creation businesses are able to do the same thing and are doing the same thing right now and what that can look like. Because I think there's something really exciting about that. When you are in the thick of it, when you are starting it, when it feels like a grind, when it feels like it's not working.
Something that's always helped me is holding the vision. And yes the first layer of that vision could be your first 10 K months, right? And out earning your corporate salary and all of those good things. But there's actually a bigger vision at play, which is that you could create such disproportionate amounts of wealth compared to your time input.
Because of the business model, leveraging the internet and the scope of the internet and being able to help thousands of people with their problems. Because of that, we have this opportunity to have this conversation as well around becoming work optional, about intergenerational wealth and really exciting topics.
So what we'll need to have in place, obviously, is your business that significantly out earns your lifestyle expenses. And we'll need a business that has very high profit margins, like the ones that we create. And we need a business that doesn't come with significant risk, either financially, Like for me, a restaurant or a cafe is a significant financial risk.
Those people are running on 10 percent profit margins. They've got bills to pay, stuff to pay, electricity, heating, rent. So we don't want that. Okay. And we don't want significant risk to you either. And what I mean by that is, An inability to do this without extreme sacrifice and burnout. Okay.
Choosing the Right Business Model
So the first step and using your business to retire early, like I'll be able to do in the pretty short to medium term future is choosing the right business model.
Step one, choose the right business model. And of course I'm biased. But facts are facts. Look at your options, right? A lot of people go into, let's not even talk about brick and mortar businesses because we're just, that's just way too high risk, way too low profit margins. That's a real passion project for me.
I'm like, no, thank you. That's out. But if we look at other business models just say you're creating products, just say you're developing an app. Those kinds of things. Typically, the business model that a lot of people are going for is this kind of like buyout business. And I'm talking about if they want to become work optional.
So a buyout business is where they grow an app or they grow a product, or they grow their business to a point where it's got a community and an audience and it's going really well. And then they can sell it and step away from it. So they might develop a website, they might, whatever. And.
What sort of involved in this is often a huge amount of upfront sacrifice. Just let's take developing an app. For example, you need to basically get loans, get investments higher before you're making any money, drop hundreds of thousands of dollars into development and to teams and to marketing and to, you need to be in the red.
For a long time to even get to market, to even then break even, to then even get profitable and then even go through the process where you're like hoping that this thing can sell. And you can often sacrifice a lot of emotional and mental and heartache and overwhelm and stress. And it's pretty risky.
Like, how do you know that it's going to work? How do you know that it's going to sell? You can have your hypothesis, you can have your market testing, that kind of thing, but things can change. Things can shift. There's a real upfront sacrifice and a lot of risk involved. And I've got someone who I know in a similar, business model to the one I'm in selling digital products.
She has a massive audience, but she hasn't been paying herself much at all. She's been, she doesn't own property. She hasn't been, she's been earning very modest money because Everything has been reinvested into the team and the business and the business because she wants to sell it.
But we're coming up to the 10 year mark And it's still not ready for sale because to be ready for sale It needs to prove that can fully run without her And so again it's like years and years and years of modest living and all of the money going back into the business with the hope of a buyout and yeah, maybe you'll make like Just say you make two million in the buyout, for example You That's amazing money.
But if you're 35 years old, is that enough to live on for the rest of your life in your retirement? Like maybe, but like, just with the specific person in mind, what if things change? And what if, goals change or family dynamics change? It's just a little bit like, okay and who's to say you're even going to get that much?
There's just a lot that I'm it wouldn't suit me. I wouldn't suit my personality. When you have a lifestyle business, which is the meta category of our business, which is a personal brand based business where we are educating, we're sharing knowledge, we're helping people. We are helping them to achieve their goals and we're helping them to up level in a certain area of life and feel better and live better.
Firstly, it's like a really enjoyable business to be in because it's very purposeful. But what's amazing about it is that costs are incredibly low. It's fully online and there are zero overheads. You can start with the Instagram app and a place to have coaching calls, like Zoom, Google Hangouts, like whatever.
You could bootstrap this business for free, or if you only had a budget of 500 for your entire first year in business, I could tell you exactly what to invest in with some tools and software that's going to make your life easier. But like I could run a multimillion dollar business on less than 10, 000 worth of systems tools, technology, like easy.
And so the costs are incredibly low. So the risk is low. And so the profit margins are very high. Typically what eats into your profit is delegating and hiring teams and contractors and things like that, which is a great investment when you're ready for that. And it's so worth it when you make the right hire and the right roles to amplify the right revenue lines.
So it's a great business model in that way, but I guess the main thing is that you're going to need visibility and you're going to need to be able to make the most of the internet by getting eyeballs in traffic. So you need to become a content creator. Okay. And , you've got your time involvement in that, but there aren't many businesses that you can launch and try and start and start earning thousands of dollars for free.
So it's really cool. Being a coach, being a service based entrepreneur. There's a lot of opportunity.
Exploring the Creator Economy
So within the world that we're in, which is the creator economy, there are obviously many ways to make money online, but they're not at all equal when it comes to earning potential or freedom capacity for me.
So let's break it down. So I want to contextualize for a second here, cause it's really important that we understand this. Cause you're going to see, creators online telling you that you can make money doing this, doing that, and this is why you've got to be very careful about your business model.
We are in, we're playing the very, very much booming creator economy. Okay. This is an economy that allows content creators, freelancers, service providers to leverage the internet, to generate income it's permissionless. It's global. It's limitless. It's fueled by the digital revolution. Okay. And it's definitely not slowing down anytime soon.
And within the creator economy, you have four main markets as I say it. And to some extent, they're all like more or less flexible and lifestyle friendly, and they have a low barrier to entry, like all the things that we've been speaking about, but they have completely different vibes. Okay. So within the creator economy, you can be creating content and generating visibility and then be a consultant or a freelancer.
And this is a great place to start, right? Like you could be doing the social media management for someone. You could be doing the copywriting for someone. You could be doing the web build for someone. Okay. You could be consulting freelancing with your skillset and offering services. At some point, you're still trading your time for money.
You can only work so many hours in the week, and you can only take on so many done for your clients per month. And yes, you might be able to charge 15 grand per website build, but realistically, in terms of the intensity of that, you know that you can only take on three clients per month, max, maybe even two, right?
Two clients per month, let's say, because that means that if you take three months to develop their website, that means you could have Six clients on the go, which is a lot, right? So you're doing two clients per month. That's 30 K per month. That's amazing. But at some point you're going to tap out.
And unless you want to go down the agency model of hiring juniors, training them, recruiting them onboarding, Oh, that one quit. Oh, that one's got performance issues. Oh, like that one doesn't have the standards that you have. Unless you want to go down the agency model of. Hiring out people behind you to take on more clients and do all of that kind of stuff.
It's going to be very complicated for you to get to the level that I'm speaking about when you have hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit able to invest. The other main sort of option in the creator economy are influencers. Won't go into this category too much, but Influences essentially sell themselves.
They sell themselves, their lifestyle, they give away a lot around their looks, their body, the way they organize their home, their kids it's not something that interests me at all. And they often sell either, like other people's products, like affiliate marketing or like 10 percent off skinny tummy tea and things like that, or they're relying on brand deals and, those can be very inconsistent, and it's just not something that I think is inherently scalable.
You've also got affiliate marketers or people into user generated content, and these people can be creating videos around Hey, look at this cool cat toy. My cats absolutely love it. Link in bio. And that link is an affiliate link, and they can do this selling other people's products or creating user generated content for brands and things like that.
Again, this is your total victim to others in this situation. Like what if your affiliate provider tanked and disappeared in the market? What if Amazon stopped paying 3 percent commission and went down to 1 percent commission? They can do whatever the hell they want. They're Amazon. And again, it's very unpredictable and very inconsistent.
Building a Personal Brand
The final category is this personal brand education category that we're in, which is wonderful because. You empower others and it's profitable and you are in control of what you're selling, who you're selling it to. And once you master the process of being able to drive traffic to your funnel, nurture that audience, launch to your audience.
Once you master the fundamentals and you get better and better at them. It just scales up like it just does. And this is where you're able to get to a point where you can do, for example, courses or group coaching programs that allow you to serve hundreds of people at once, which can really amplify your income.
So it doesn't mean that it's not a great idea to start out as a consultant or a freelancer to get that money coming in. For sure, go for it, right? I did. I was writing resumes. I was writing resumes for CEOs and things like that when I started Badass Careers. But over time we want to get to the point where we are packaging up knowledge and teaching people how to do something.
Because that's when, instead of doing things for people, We're teaching them how to change their own lives. And it's a really exciting place to be in because consumers are very much seeking this high quality content regarding self actualization. As basic needs are met, people start to seek more out of life.
There will be that proportion where people want to live well, optimize their health, optimize their wellbeing. And we can show them how to whatever extent we can in the niche that we're in. So at the most basic level, our business model empowers us to generate. Significantly more income than our base needs.
And it goes a little bit like this. Number one, you use your gifts to help people, right? So you figure out how you can use your expertise to help a specific type of person, achieve a specific type of result. Step two, you add value to thousands of lives for free. You build an online community where you can be of immense value to those people for free.
You're putting out content, you're helping, you're adding value and you're getting recognized. And then three, you package up that genius and that knowledge into a VIP
experience. Service or product to the most motivated subset of your community who want to go deeper and get results even faster with you. And of course you can also earn money in a lot of other ways that you also get offers to do workshops, speaking gigs work with corporates on projects. You name it.
Once you've got that brand, of course you have a lot of different ways. Like I've been pitched a book deal like three times. Like there are many different ways. In fact, you're going to have to decide what's important to you to say yes or no to, but essentially that's it. The main focus, the main way you make money.
And of course you have brand deals coming to you and stuff like that.
The Power of Personal Branding
But the main way you make money is what you're in control of, which is your product, your service. And because people will always want and need support with their problems, it's a really safe industry. Okay. So it's purposeful, it's profitable at zero risk, aside from your time and your ego, and you have sustainable demand. So for me, looking at the business model, that's going to give you the best chance of something lasting long term and being reliable enough to become work optional. It's absolutely the personal brand based online education space. It's absolutely booming. So you've got to make sure you've got the right business model in place.
Building Brand Equity
Then step two is that once you've got that business model locked in, you want to build your brand equity upfront to enhance revenue longterm. Now I coined this term brand equity. It's something that came to me in that people were complaining to me saying, Hey Rosie, I've been posting consistently. For six months now or a year now, or I've been showing up or I've been doing this and things aren't working or things aren't changing or I'm absolutely stagnant.
I'm not hitting like the revenue I want to be. And where's my ease, where's my freedom. It made me realize that if you put ease and freedom on a graph you've on the X axis around along the bottom, you've got ease and freedom going off in one direction. On the y axis, people think that it should be labeled time.
The more time I put into this thing, the more ease and freedom I'll create. And that's just not true. It's not time. It's brand equity. And this is why some people can have their business working after three months, and for some people it's still not working after three years, because time doesn't owe you anything.
You've got to be doing the right things. Okay.
Establishing Credibility, Trust, and Clarity
So you need to build brand equity up front and to build brand equity what's, what are the three core drivers of brand equity? Actually, let's define it. Brand equity. You've got credibility. So credibility is about your size, your scope, your depth of expertise.
It's giving the impression this person knows their shit and other people can see it too. Validated. This person knows what they're talking about. So it's your content, it's your knowledge sharing, it's showing off that, what you're doing. Okay. And then obviously as your audience size increases, there's that validation there instantly of okay, other people get it.
You've also got trust, the perception that you are a real person who cares, who shows up, who's reliable and committed to people's success. If you are posting for a month and then disappearing for a month. I can't trust you. You're not reliable to me. It doesn't mean you can't take a break for sure. I've taken plenty of breaks, but you come back and you come back consistently for you're consistent 95 percent of the time.
And within trust, there's also this Oh, they're legit and their stuff works. So that's testimonials. That's case studies. That's results. Okay. So you've got trust, which is massive. And then you've got clarity, consistent, focused messaging, consistent. Assistant focused offers easy to understand who you stand for, who your service is for, and how to work with you.
You don't keep chopping and changing. It's not confusing. You're not offering 18 different things. It's extremely clear. What you do and who it's for and a lot of people think they're being clear, but they're very wrong about that. Okay, so it's credibility. It's trust and clarity and the faster you can establish credibility, the faster you can establish trust and the faster you can establish clarity, the more brand equity you're going to have.
Hands-On Work for Long-Term Success
And the reason I'm talking about this in the context of retiring early and becoming work optional is that in order to get to that place of ease and freedom where you're scaled up and you're doing group coaching and you're selling courses to thousands, you actually need to do at least a year of hands on work, right?
If you want. Decades of hands off ease, freedom, revenue generation. You need to be hands on. You need to actually in it because you need to be building the brand equity and the brand equity gets built. How you're creating excellent original content consistently. You're replying to everyone in your community.
You're conversing with them. You're chatting to them. You're sending them DMS. You're introducing yourself. You're offering market research calls or strategy calls. You're jumping on and having conversations with these people for free, right? You're working with people one to one when they start paying you.
It's one to one because you were so in it. You're so in it, making sure that they get those results. Like the first one to one clients I had were not profitable. If I were accounting for my time, I was like writing resumes for people and I was overhauling LinkedIn for them. And I was doing so much with them upfront because I really wanted to help them get results.
Like I was so in it, I was over delivering one to one and the, it was obviously the lowest price point I had ever charged because I was just getting started. But that's brand equity because guess what? The testimonials I got from that, the positive buzz, the word of mouth, the credibility I had when I was showing up in my stories, showing people what I was working on with my clients, what I was up to, what my clients and I were talking about.
It's brand equity. It builds demand. Okay. So you've actually got to do the work, building that brand equity upfront. That's a critical component in your speed. To become work optional because the best videos, the video testimonials, like the best testimonials, the best, like the kindest words from people, like it's going to be coming from that period of working with you.
And so while your ultimate goal might be to become work optional, the first goal is just hitting your freedom number, which is making enough money to pay your bills. Before you can have time freedom and financial freedom and all that kind of thing, you need to hit your freedom number and you just need to work hard and impress people and be there and connect with people and pay your bills.
Hitting your freedom number where your business can pay for your living expenses.
Leveraging Brand Equity for Growth
And then once you've built that brand equity and you have the audience that size that can support it and the testimonials and people who are really happy with you and you've refined your methodology and you know what you're doing, that's when you can move on to step three, where you leverage your brand equity and your audience size to earn a lot more while working less.
Okay. So when I first launched the career glow up, it was a one to one coaching program for 10 weeks. And when I launched it, when I packaged it up and I launched it for the first time, I think I had around a thousand Instagram followers at the time, something like that. I sold 15 spots and it was 1, 500.
So I made 22, 500. If you do that calculation USD, I actually made more than that because some people chose payment plans, which were more money. So it was, it actually ended up being more like 28 K, but anyway, you get my point. So decent money. Now, the downside of earning incredible money, right?
That was my first 28, 000 a month, I'd been making like 3k per month before that, before this launch. And then I never looked back, this was a real turning point for me, but when I launched the career glow up for the very first time and I made that, 20 something thousand dollars in a month, I also had 15 clients.
On the go. So every week for 10 weeks, I had 15 hours of one to one calls. And then on top of that, I was really hands on as I was saying, resumes, LinkedIn, workbooks, custom questions. It was private coaching. So I was working disproportionately hard for the money coming in. I was. When I launched it a few rounds later as a group program, and I was able to sell 30 spots at 2, 000.
And I know you're like, wait, what, how? Because brand equity, because six months, so I launched it at private and then I launched it private again. And then I launched it in a small group sitting. And then I launched it in a large group setting. Okay. Because over time brand equity is building audience sizes, building more content's gone out, right?
When I first launched it as the group program, 30 people signed up at 2000 USD, even though it was group program. Cause I had the brand equity and the reputation and the testimonials that my system worked, that my methodology worked from having done the hard yards. So that's 60, 000 USD in a month. But the big change is that I was doing one call per week, one group coaching call per week.
And I had the materials and the templates and everything for them to write their own resumes and do their own stuff.
Scaling Your Business
And so within a year, my life changed dramatically, but it's because I went hard in the first year that I was able to pull it off. Because in private coaching, you're developing templates, you're developing assets you're able to pick up on the themes and patterns of what needs to be packaged up and the frequently asked questions and all of that kind of stuff.
And once you have all of those tools and templates in place, guess what? You can build out some course materials. You can flick it in a course portal and you can have a weekly Q and a call. And because I would rotate it across different time zones, the goal is that most people would join one or two calls per month, even though I was hosting a call every week.
And so usually there were only like 12 to 15 people on the call because it was split across different time zones. It was very manageable, really enjoyable. People got incredible results. Like we were all very happy with that. And this is when you can start making silly money because. I could have enrolled 60 people if I wanted to, and maybe I'll do two calls per week.
Do you see how like the income is now suddenly disproportionate to the time I'm putting them? And this is when you can start scaling your business, but you have to have a great business and a great reputation to scale. And this is where you hit a turning point.
Calculating Your Financial Freedom
And from here, you can start thinking, what is my work optional number?
What would it take? And you need to reverse engineer that. For me, I like to do three budgets. I have a beer, like beer bones on my leg like just absolutely like tight, frugal, minimum viable product life, which is not a goal. It's just, so I know at the end of the day, what are my needs?
Like what would keep the lights on? Then I like to have, like a simple life kind of budget where it's a bit nicer than that. I can, buy new clothes and work out and eat what I want to eat when I go grocery shopping and not be super frugal about it. Like that kind of thing. I've got like my next level up and then I've got my comfortable life.
And for me, I have a quite a high comfortable life number because I go back to France every year because. I have the things that I love to do. Like I like to have private lessons with my pole dance instructor. And I like to get a massage every few weeks. And I like, so I have like my comfortable life number.
And. For me, I like to aim for that because it's anything more as a bonus and then, and that, and that you have some safe, you're able to save, you're able to like, all that good stuff. And so for me, it's around 125, 000 per year. Again, I'm in a very expensive country. I'm like, it might be less, or it might be more for you.
If you're in Sydney, it might be more if you're in the countryside or in Europe somewhere, like it might be less. Okay. But for me, it was around 125, 000 a year. Now, if you take the average kind of return on investment, when you're looking at, investing in, I don't know, stock shares, pie funds, like all that kind of stuff, like typically averages out around 5%.
So if there's a 5 percent return, what would I need to have invested? You take the number that you need, so 125, and you divide it by 0. 05 to make that 5 percent or whatever the percent you choose. And that spits out to me that I need to have 2. 5 million invested. And again, there are many different.
Ways you can invest, like I'm not an expert in it, but there are term deposit savings accounts, Python, stock market, real estate yields, et cetera. But as everyone says, you want to invest something that gives you compounding interest or, capital gains or compounding results, right? You don't want to just have your money sitting in a basic savings account.
And so that sounds like a lot of money to have invested, right? 2. 5 million. It is a lot of money, but. If I make a million dollars in revenue per year, which is absolutely achievable because it's something that I've done and I do, at 60 percent profit margin, Because we have nice high profit margins. And honestly, like my profit margins, I've made choices to have expensive, talented, local hires, right?
You have some entrepreneurs who are outsourcing their video editor to the Philippines and things like that. I'm not doing that. Okay, so I've got I've got people on my team earning in the hundreds of thousands. So I'm like, cool. 60 percent profit margin. Okay, so if I get to extract 600k per year out of my business, that's 384, 000 after tax to invest.
And if I invest 384, 000 after tax per year, it will take me 6. 5 years to hit my target. And then if my business is making 1. 5 million per year at the same profit margin, It would take me 4. 5 years to hit my target. If you're 30 years old right now and you're sitting there and you're like, I don't need this to happen anytime soon.
Like I don't care if it takes 15 years, then a business making 300k per year might be totally perfect and enough for you. Depending on your profit margins and your setup, right? Like it doesn't need to be my business model. It needs to be the business model in terms of the business that we're in the industry that we're in, because it's like the best, but it doesn't need to be the minute decisions that I've made and the value based decisions that I've made in terms of how I structure my business.
So if you have more time. Or you need less money to live off, then all of these things mean that it could look very different for you, right? If you only want 60k per year to live off, it could look very different for you.
The Benefits of a Personal Brand
Now, the ironic thing is that if you do build up a personal brand based business, it's actually really hard not to make money.
Like as an example, my YouTube channel, not even French, that didn't even have a business model behind it. That was just like me being a YouTuber, right? French language, culture, that kind of thing. I didn't have products. I didn't monetize it in terms of my own services. Like I should have, could have, would have, but I didn't.
Okay. It was just like AdSense brand deals. Of course I'm not making brand deals and things like that anymore, but just off the Google AdSense alone, like just off YouTube alone, I'm still making a couple of hundred dollars a month. Every month from that, I haven't touched that channel in five years.
Sometimes I have a video that picks up again and I get this like check from you from YouTube bucks. And I'm like, what? Like when you establish yourself as a personal brand, like money does come to you. Like I just, without doing any work, like I had someone knocking on my door a few months ago, just saying, Hey, can you develop a workshop on salary negotiation for us?
Which I obviously have all the materials for already. And I will pay you 5, 000. I'm like, yeah, cool. Sure. So it's you become work optional in that for me, it's you don't rely on your business and it takes the pressure out of it and any stress out of it. And it's it's just bonus really.
It's bonus land. And you can use that to obviously add to your savings to spend, to do whatever the hell you want with. Maybe you want to become a goat farmer. Maybe you want to own a cafe and not be stressed by the tight profit margins. You can do whatever you like, right? Because it's about having options.
So it's get another reason to start a business. And by the way, when I see that would take 6. 5 years or 4. 5 years, I wasn't accounting for compound interest. I was just accounting for like brooch needing that amount of money, but the interest is helping me get there and work. So it's actually less time than that.
Yet again, like why not start a business? What an investment in you, what an investment in your earning potential, what an investment in your freedom, what an investment in your future, what an investment in your retirement, like why not really? Why not?
Join the Empire Era Waitlist
And by the way, if you want to learn how to start this exact business model, Be given the step by step roadmap.
Do it with me. Do it with a community of like minded, smart, ambitious people. I am going to be opening doors to Empire Era very soon. And there is going to be a special how do I say this without giving it away, opportunity, and massive advantage to the people who are on my waitlist. So if you want to join the wait list for that and be in the know, I will leave the link in the show notes for this episode, because when Empire era opens up a, it always sells out and be, let's just say the wait list is going to have the last final opportunity ever.
To get something really epic with their investment. So highly recommend being on that wait list. If this is something that is of interest to you, if investing in yourself and understanding how to make this work, honestly, like this program is elite. It is incredible. It is thorough. It is everything that you will need to scale your business to a hundred K to a hundred K and beyond.
Like it is the foundations. It is your online personal brand based business, like MBA. Like it is. Everything you need, everything. And the fact that your investment could get paid off if you just sign it, like your first, like two clients is actually insane. It's actually crazy. Like it's wild to me.
So all that to say, join the wait list. If that's something that is of interest to you, it probably should be if you're still here listening, because what an opportunity, like I don't know many investments you can make into yourself with such a huge ROI.
And otherwise, I'd love to hear what came up for you in this episode.
Have you done your calculation? Have you got your number? What would the number you need to have invested be? If you want to become work optional, tell me all about it. Send me a DM. I'd love to hear from you and otherwise stay badass, reign on and keep building that empire.
