Cashflow Diary™

How to Launch Your Side Hustle with Troy Underwood

Troy R. Underwood is an industry disruptor. Part technologist, part economist, and all innovator, he revolutionized the motor vehicle industry with the nation’s first electronic title system for financial institutions, which was later sold for $106 million. His healthcare venture, benefitsCONNECT, innovated healthcare benefits administration and resulted in a highly successful acquisition. His new book is How to Launch Your Side Hustle: Start and Scale a Business with Minimal Capital. Learn more at troyrunderwood.com.  Podcast Highlights Who is Troy Underwood?  Troy considers himself a necessity entrepreneur and has been doing the entrepreneurial thing since elementary school. Troy has sold all sorts of products including greeting cards, seeds, and computers. Whatever the opportunity was, Troy was willing to take advantage of it. For the average entrepreneurial minded person, the problem is having too many ideas. They need to take these ideas and pick one, then execute, and then when they get bored they have to keep pushing instead of flipping to the next one. Ideas are everywhere, execution, perseverance, and discipline is what’s rare. Even a mediocre idea, when executed well, can work out. Troy’s original plan was to become a doctor, not an entrepreneur. It wasn’t until Troy took an economics course on a dare that he realized that he loved the study of economics and completely switched tracks. He kept up his involvement in computers and software development, and found himself in the right place and the right time to offer a solution that jump-started a business.  Is now the right time to start something? Now may actually be a great time to start a new business, especially for those who have been laid off with nothing to go back to. If you’ve been thinking about it for a while and you have an idea, if everything else is relatively stable, now could be the right time to give it a shot. Being an entrepreneur isn’t an exact science, you just have to take the cards you're dealt and play them the best you can. If you’re someone who craves certainty and security, don’t be an entrepreneur. You are able to mitigate some of that risk by being a business owner instead of an entrepreneur, for example opening a franchise which has a higher rate of success. If you’re looking for certainty, you’re not going to find it in your own business.  Who should be an entrepreneur? Creative thinkers and risk takers are the people who should be entrepreneurs. There is a lot of risk and opportunity cost in building a business and you need to be okay with taking that on.  If you’re driven by necessity you are going to have much more motivation to push through the difficult times and figure out solutions to complicated problems that can keep a business running. Why a side hustle instead doing something BIG? Troy compares a side hustle to a rocket ship launch. It’s not just about keeping a side hustle, it’s about building something that you know will be big eventually, something that replaces your full time job in time and is worth investing in. For Troy, it’s not about having a second part time job to make some extra money. It’s about building something that can make a big impact over time. What is the self assessment? Being an entrepreneur is like climbing Mount Everest, it’s not something you do on a casual whim. You need to be mentally and physically prepared for both endeavors and take stock of your temperament and if being an entrepreneur is really for you. Troy spends just as much time talking people out of being an entrepreneur as he does strategizing how to launch their side hustle.  Even if you think you’re unprepared, there is a point where you need to stop reading and start doing. Reference: How to Launch Your Side Hustle: Start and Scale a Business with Minimal Capital, Troy Underwood Troy’s Takeaway You have to be all in and make sure you also have your partner’s buy in as well. There will be bad days and having a support system is very important. Remember that the downsides are more likely than the upsides and if your family isn’t on board with your idea, it’s going to be a struggle. Your mindset and the mindset of the people around you is going to be more responsible for your success or failure than how smart you are. Links: www.troyrunderwood.com How To Launch Your Side Hustle Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe to the show on iTunes and Stitcher Radio!

Be Your Own Banker and Grow More Wealth with Mark Willis

Mark Willis, is a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™, a #1 Best Selling Author and the owner of Lake Growth Financial Services, a financial firm in Chicago, Illinois.  Over the years, he has helped hundreds of his clients take back control of their financial future and build their businesses with sophisticated, tax-efficient financial solutions.  Mark Willis specializes in building custom-tailored financial strategies that are unknown to typical stock-jockeys, attorneys, or other financial gurus.  As co-host of the Not Your Average Financial Podcast, he shares some of his strategies for investing in real estate, saving and paying for college without going broke, and creating an income in retirement you can’t outlive. Mark Willis works with people who want to grow their wealth in ways that are safe and predictable, become their own source of financing, and create tax-free income in retirement. Podcast Highlights Who is Mark Willis?  Mark’s college years are where the story begins. It was then that Mark met his future wife as well as the first woman they rented a room to. The year that they graduated school was 2008 and they left with $120,000 in student loan debt. With no jobs in the middle of a recession that was a big problem. Over the next few years the goal of Mark and his wife was to figure out a way to build true wealth and be better than debt free.  Since then Mark has learned how to become the banker in his own life and become financially immune to recession.   What was the plan you were thinking about going into school pre-2008? Like many students, Mark assumed that the money would keep on coming and didn’t think too much about the future. Studies have shown that the area of the brain associated with our future selves is the same part of the brain that’s associated with thinking about strangers, and how much are you going to save for a stranger’s retirement? The problem is not just the 18 year olds being handed thousands of dollars of student debt, the entire country has been on a trajectory to become a nation of debtors for generations. We have become a nation enslaved to bankers, credit cards, and debt and it’s not the interest that’s the problem, it’s the volume of debt that we are carrying around. Unfortunately the current crisis has hit us at a moment in history where we are completely unprepared for it at a financial level. Mark didn’t graduate with a finance degree and their journey began by taking baby steps towards becoming debt free. They went lean and put as much towards their debt as possible while also doing whatever they could do generate additional passive income. Figuring out the money situation became such a passion that Mark wanted to dive into on a professional level and started working for a CPA in the midst of the Great Recession. That was when he realized that the whole financial industry was a house of cards. Where is it written that we have to put all of our money into things we can’t access, have no control over, and multiple people with our hands in our pockets? The moment where things completely changed was when a mentor of Mark’s suggested that the path most people follow could be wrong.  What needed to be different from what you were previously doing? There were two things. The first was taking action immediately instead of waiting for the perfect conditions. You might make a few mistakes but it’s better than no plan at all. The second was the realization that you finance everything you buy. You are already in the banking business. Either you buy something by getting a loan and paying interest on the money or you buy something with money that you could have been earning interest with. Another big wake up call for Mark was that our relationship with the Wall Street machine is very similar to an abusive relationship. He realized that he needed another way to become financially free and the truth is anytime you lose money is unacceptable. Mark needed to find a place where he could get uninterrupted compound growth on his cash. There are two things that can interrupt growth. Outside influences like the regular decline of the stock market and personal emergencies. Mark’s tool of choice became dividend paying whole life insurance after looking at over 450 different financial products on the market. Whole life insurance allows you to access your money before you retire, grow your money on a guaranteed basis every single year, and use the cash value of the policy as a source of money to buy back your debt.  Mark’s Takeaway It starts with the understanding that you have the same 24 hours that everyone else does. The question is what can you do today to leverage those 24 hours to put you in the best position to maximize your potential. Lift off and activate your potential, now might be just the moment to do that. Links: www.nyafinancialpodcast.com www.growmorewealth.com Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe to the show on iTunes and Stitcher Radio!

Contact Marketing Secrets: How to Get a Meeting With Anyone

Stu Heinecke is the Hall of Fame “Father of Contact Marketing" and Founder/President of the Contact Marketing Agency and Cartoonlink, which helps sales teams break through using contact marketing solutions to produce critical contact with accounts and prospects. He is a longstanding senior cartoonist for the Wall Street Journal and the bestselling author of How to Get a Meeting with Anyone: The Untapped Selling Power of Contact Marketing and the new book Get the Meeting!: An Illustrative Contact Marketing Playbook.  He hosts Contact Marketing Radio and the How to Get a Meeting With Anyone podcast, and is Co-founder of Cartoonists.org, a coalition of famed cartoonists dedicated to raising funds for charity, while raising the profile of the cartooning art form.   Podcast Highlights Who is Stu Heinecke?  The ability to get meetings with anyone is a kind of superpower. Every great thing that happens in our lives is due to having the right connections at the right time. Stu studied marketing at USC but cartooning had been something that he always loved, so much so that by the time he was in college he was getting some of his work published in the newspapers in Los Angeles. Cartoons have an incredible power to captivate people’s attention so they became a fundamental element to Stu’s marketing strategies.  Back in the early days of marketing, David Ogilvy used to say “humor doesn’t work in advertising, and people don’t buy from clowns.” Stu was one of the people proving him wrong. Initially there was a lot of resistance against the idea, but Stu was able to convince a couple of his first clients, including Rolling Stone, to give it a try and they ended up getting extraordinary results. Contact Marketing In marketing you are always testing a new campaign against a control group, usually the most effective thing the company has ever put out. Stu’s first test campaigns beat out the controls of both Rolling Stone and Bon Appetit and became their new records. He realized that he needed to reach out to some of the key players in the magazine industry and sent each of them a customized cartoon. Most marketers use the 1% rule to measure a response rate against the performance of a campaign, for Stu’s campaign he got a 100% response rate, and they also all became clients of his, so his conversion rate was 100% as well. That initial contact marketing campaign launched Stu’s business and career. How can we cut through the noise with contact marketing? Contact marketing is not just about cartooning, that’s only one way of breaking through.  One of Stu’s favorite contact marketing examples involves a guy named Dan Walshman. Dan is a turnaround specialist and works with CEOs of companies that are in trouble. After combing the business news each day looking for earnings reports, when he finds one that looks to be suffering he gets a beautiful sword created that’s engraved with the CEO’s name on it. He sends that to them with a handwritten note and has been getting a 100% response from that campaign as well. You don’t have to spend a large amount of money per person to create a visual metaphor for your business, it just has to be an item of fascination that conveys a message. Examples include ultra realistic fake food and other similar items. Generally speaking, contact marketing is not about scale, it’s about effectiveness. Creating a top ten list of people that you want to get through to that would be your dream clients is the best target for contact marketing.  Is there a type of business where Contact Marketing doesn’t work? Direct to consumer businesses are probably not the best place for contact marketing. If you’re doing business to business selling there probably isn’t anyone that couldn’t benefit from this kind of personalization. The thing you want is for people to receive your marketing campaign and think “Wow! I love the way this person thinks.” Right now is the opportunity of a lifetime to make connections with people.  Is there a wrong way to do Contact Marketing? If you’re trying to go for humor you do have to be careful. The intent along with the depth and quality of thinking with what you come up with is crucial. One way you could make people mad right now is sending them something without their permission. Giving half a gift may also not be a great approach.  If you send the right thing to the right person, it will end up in their office for the rest of their career. You’re trying to create flip moments, where the person goes from not knowing who you are to not being able to wait to meet you, which is a high bar so you need to do more than just send them a box of candy. How does the person respond? You are the follow up path so the strategy is dependent on you making contact. This can be automated somewhat with advertising but it really needs a personal touch. With the right approach you can actually turn a CEO’s assistant into a valuable ally. Reference: How to Get a Meeting with Anyone: The Untapped Selling Power of Contact Marketing, Stu Heinecke Stu’s Takeaway The easiest and quickest thing you can do is something called deep personalization. Social media has made it easy to gather a lot of information about nearly anybody. Discover what they are interested in and use that as a starting off point. This isn’t scalable, but you don’t need scale right now. You just need something effective that you can start right now. Links: stuheinecke.com Stu Heinecke on LinkedIn Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe to the show on iTunes and Stitcher Radio!

Creating Passive Income with Chris Miles

As founder of Money Ripples, host of The Chris Miles Money Show, and co-author of the book Entrepreneur on Fire, Chris Miles is a leading authority on quickly creating wealth by increasing monthly cash flow and creating passive income. He has shown hundreds of thousands internationally how to free up or generate tens of thousands of dollars each year! Chris has been featured in US News, CNNMoney, and Bankrate.com and has a reputation for getting his clients fast, proven results.  Many of his clients have the option to retire in less than 5-10 years, and Chris himself was able to retire twice by age 39! Chris’s passion is helping entrepreneurs, and high-income employees become financially prosperous by finding and fixing their money leaks and creating passive income. Chris and his family live in Utah, but enjoy escaping to warmer weather during the winter months. In addition to helping his clients increase their cash flow, Chris is a talented ballroom dancer, choreographed ballroom dance routines for Utah Valley University, and got 5th place in his third grade spelling bee.  Podcast Highlights What’s going on in your world today?  Since the last time Chris was on the show nearly five years ago Chris was able to retire for the second time in his life. The first time he retired was at the age of 28, this time around at the age of 39 Chris was looking for something new. He never wanted to be full time again and as an educator at heart Chris continued working on his podcast and teaching people the same strategies that he used. Chris is looking at the current situation in the world and seeing all the opportunities available to those that have been prepared. Preparation The previous recession caused Chris a lot of problems and that’s when he learned the key lesson of never relying on only a few streams of income, because when those get shut off you’re out of luck. Chris has a number of clients that are currently unable to work but because they have set up multiple streams of income beforehand they are able to ride out the problem.  If you weren’t prepared for the coronavirus, you need to do whatever you can. So many people have no idea what to do right now it’s like they’ve been stunned. There are several areas that people are not taking advantage of their money right now. One is the money in mutual funds and retirement plans, people pouring more money into the stock market right now are making a big mistake. What should people do right now? Get lean, get liquid, and get out. Even during the great depression there were people that prospered and those that did were the ones who got lean and were looking for opportunities. Liquid cash is where you want to be right now, having enough cash on hand to weather the storm is crucial. Money never comes from the government in the time you expect so don’t rely on them for help right now.  If you have time, start looking for ways to create value and make money. That could be short term rentals or other forms of real estate. Creating Passive Income The one big mistake that Chris made in the prior recession was in aiming for growth instead of plain old cash flow. The result was he went way too big on his deals and ended up losing the properties. This time, instead of going for sexy Chris went for certain. The trouble is flashy $80,000 checks are interesting and people like seeing that. No one is particularly impressed when someone makes another $400 this month because their renter paid again. Nobody is showing off the time they lost $20,000 on a deal. When the market is good, it’s easy to show up as a winner but now is the time when we’ll see who the real players are. If you’re concerned about getting into real estate or short term rentals right now because of the state of the market, you have to realize that it was actually harder before. Before people just had to show up, but if you’re actually providing a good service you have a tremendous opportunity. The key principle is always looking where you can create value for people. What problem can you solve. Listen to what people are complaining about or desperate about, those are the best areas to tackle. What’s never coming back? Commercial real estate like office space is going to completely fall apart. The area that Chris is paying the most attention to is multifamily as he thinks there will be a push from people trying to get out of the urban sprawl in favor of moving to more rural areas. Many multifamily operators were overleveraged so there could be some opportunities there when those people look to sell at a discount. What’s going to become bigger than it was before? Telecommuting is going to become more prevalent with more companies realizing they can shrink their office size and make more profit. The companies that are willing to adapt are the ones that are going to win. Transportation is going to change. Even Tesla is struggling right now because of falling gas prices and changing driving habits. What would you say to someone who’s feeling like they are in a bad place right now? You are exactly where you’re supposed to be right now. In the last recession Chris was over a million dollars in debt and wouldn’t have learned the things he knows now if he didn’t go through that time. He lost his house, his car, and most everything else but he learned that there are always opportunities and ways to create wealth if you understand the right principles. It always comes down to how you can create value for other people and solve problems. Who do you know and what can you provide? If you’re not the one with the solution for someone’s problem, who can you refer them to that can help? Chris’ Takeaway Remember that there is a reason behind your pain that will lead to a better gain. You can be a positive change in people’s lives by understanding and sharing the core principles of prosperity and wealth and creating passive income. Links: moneyripples.com The Chris Miles Money Show Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe to the show on iTunes and Stitcher Radio!

Conquering Corona With Kyle Stanley

Kyle Stanley is the host of the Fearless Flipping podcast where he educates new hungry real estate investors about best practices for getting started. We flip the roles into today’s episode with J being interviewed for Kyle’s podcast. Find out how J is conquering the coronavirus and adjusting his short term rental business to be even more successful than before.  Podcast Highlights How did you get to this point and what brought you into the short term rental business?  The keyword for J is cash flow, everything he’s done in terms of business is around generating an income without physically going to work. Due to some very challenging physical ailments where both J and his wife were unable to work and earn money, they needed to figure out a solution which is what led him to real estate. Everything he should have been doing should have been geared towards creating cash flow. The next two years were transformational for J’s business. He had no money, terrible credit, no way to earn an income, and was selling his possessions on eBay when a friend recommended he start investing in real estate. His friend didn’t let those obstacles stop him and in a relatively short amount of time J closed his first subject-to deal. How did you find your first deal? You need to move at the speed of instruction. We need to be more like Walmart. Walmart perfected just in time inventory, we need to perfect just in time learning. There are certain parts of a real estate transaction that you don’t need to know yet, you need to learn the first step and then go out and take that step. There is no real benefit to understanding everything before you take any action.  Trust yourself to learn what you need to know when you need to know it and go out there and take action. That’s exactly how J found and put together his first deal, one piece at a time. Real estate is a skill the marketplace rewards. We can all learn to play the real estate game once we’ve been told the rules and practiced a bit. Within 3 weeks of closing his first deal J closed an additional 10 deals in the span of a week, which was a complete mindset shift for him. Fear is what holds all of us back, but we like to tell ourselves that we’re just being prudent. When you’re afraid any excuse will do. You have to ask yourself has anyone overcome the thing you’re afraid of because if that’s the case, the fear is not an excuse.  How are you operating right now? Most short term rental operators think about the business incorrectly and they need to understand what the problem actually is. Changing your thinking from “I have an Airbnb business” to “I have a short term rental business” will unlock your mindset and allow you to see new opportunities. The short term rental business has existed since the American Civil War. When the coronavirus hit, J’s business took a significant hit but that hasn’t removed the need for what his business provides.  J’s business is still on all the marketplaces like Airbnb and Booking.com and he’s now adding additional channels that he planned on including later in the year. He’s also increasing the amount of online advertising he’s doing and offering coupons and discounts to previous customers. At the end of the day it comes down to whether you understand the problem. It’s not like the business is bad, it’s just that the person with the need doesn’t have your number and that’s fundamentally a marketing problem. The only reason you feel what you’re feeling right now is because you don’t have a plan of attack to be able to replace what’s missing. J is changing his approach to finding customers and that includes talking to local city governments to house police, firefighters, and other first responders that need to be quarantined. This period of time is when we are seeing the weak being weeded out and the one’s with an “Airbnb business” fall away. The economy is going to be hit when the virus finally goes away and we’re going to see areas with active rentals disappear, but that means that the ones that survive will have a major opportunity.  J is not offloading any of his inventory, he’s actually looking at expanding his business over the next few months. What do you say to the person that is thinking about pausing their short term rental plans right now? It was your plan before so that hasn’t changed, you just have to change your perspective. Maybe you thought it was going to be easy before and you need to adjust your expectations but you were going to jump in before when the market was 40% more saturated and expensive. There are many aspects of the business that may be more challenging or scary, but the numbers have been made much better.  Every entrepreneur on the planet is undergoing the same changes and looking at making adjustments to how they work. This is an opportunity that’s going to take more mental and emotional work than it would have two months ago, but if you can protect your mindset you can be successful. Links: www.cashflowdiary.com/howmanyunits Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe to the show on iTunes and Stitcher Radio!