Choosing Your Lifestyle Business

Recently I was talking to a friend of mine who’s looking at starting a lifestyle business. We were at lunch and I was asking him about his background.

Obviously, I was looking for some skills or experience that he had that would line up with a particular business. The more he talked, the more I realized this guy has an entire treasure chest of really practical business experience!

For him, it will simply be a matter of deciding what he wants to do most. I have no doubt he’ll be successful in whatever specific business he chooses to do.

Now let’s talk about you.

It’s Not About Your Passion

Before we start brainstorming your business, I need to make one key distinction here – I’m not trying to help you discover your life purpose here.

My goal isn’t to help you find out what you were put on this planet to do or even to find your dream career.

My goal is to help you create a business that you can scale and free up your time.

Once you’re making $50K a month while only working an hour or two a week, then you can search for your passion and go on as many spirit quests as you want!

This is a business model that’s designed to make you, the business owner, an additional $100k to $500k  a year in net income. It could even be more! There’s no limit. Heck, even an extra $50K a year is life changing for most people.

Your job as a lifestyle business owner is to assess what’s happening in the market, spot an opportunity, and then go for it.

Take an Inventory of Your Skills

The next step is to take an inventory. This is an inventory of your strengths, skills, experience, assets, interests, etc

You could think of it as if you were dropped in a new city and weren’t allowed to get a job, what would you do to make money? You might have to get creative.

Once you have an idea in mind think:

• Is what you’re doing scalable?
• Could you create a system for doing it?
• Could you plug other people into that system?

If you come up with a solution to those questions, you just might have yourself a fantastic lifestyle business idea!

In my case, I had already spent the previous 2+ years learning online marketing. I knew there was a huge need for it. I knew I could scale it. And it was online so my family and I could be mobile (which was a big deal for us).

So that’s what I did. I started an online marketing agency and it worked out really well.

To help you brainstorm your skills, think about the following questions:

• What did you study in school?
• What subject were you the most interested in?
• Do you have any certifications?
• What are your main responsibilities are your job?
• What other experience do you have from past jobs? (name the specific skills)
• What do you like to do in your spare time?
• If you had all the time in the world, what would you spend your day doing?
• What are your talents?
• What do other people ask you for help with?
• What is the one thing your spouse encourages you to do?

Come Up with an Idea

Now look at your skills and experience and think if there’s a way to build a business around any of them.

For example, let’s say one of your main duties at your current job includes a lot of time spent in Excel. In fact, you know spreadsheets inside and out including all of the formulas, macros, etc.

One possibility is to start an online training course around those skills. It’s not the most sexy business for sure! But we’re not going for sexy, we’re going for profitable and scalable. I know of a few people making a killing teaching software.

If you need, get your spouse or a good friend involved. Look at all of your skills, talents, experience, etc and come up with at least 10 ideas.

Find a Model

With an inventory and your ideas listed, you should start to look for a model. This is someone who’s already doing what you’re doing.

The reason is because it saves a lot of time. You don’t need to be original or do any product testing or market research. Your model has already proven there’s a paying market because they’ve got a thriving business!

Remember, this isn’t about you. It’s about what the market wants. This is where you find real people that will really pay you real money for your product or service.

In my case, I took got started by taking a course from a girl who called herself a social media guru and her course was all based on her own successful business. I just modeled her business. The success I’ve had isn’t because I’m some super smart original guy. I just copied someone else’s model and got busy making sales in my own business!

This is why some competition is a good thing. They’ve already done the legwork of proving there’s a paying market. You can then model their business. It will save you a ton of time & money & you can grow the business that much faster.

I can’t stress this enough. This is a crazy hack that most people skip and it often leads to failure.

Just copy a business that’s already successful!

Remember, the key is to get you to making a scalable income quickly. Don’t try to reinvent the wheel. Just do what someone else is doing!

Don’t worry – we’ll make your business different enough to not be a straight copycat.

Obviously you don’t want to plagiarize or directly steal somebody else’s business. That’s not what I’m saying. I am saying that you can use a model to fastrack your own business.

This is how you have success. In fact, when you do this (coupled with making sales) is how you have 100% success in your business!

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We’re going talk about how to make sales coming up but in the next lesson, we’ll discuss some key “mental hacks” that you’ll need to grow your business quickly. Stay tuned!