The idea of working for yourself is what attracts a lot of people to become online entrepreneurs. But a common problem we’ve found is that although people want to take control of their own income by owning their own online business, their PAYG mindset can get in the way of being able to quit their day job. In other words, people can become so used to trading time for money, it can be hard to accept you don’t have to put in the same amount of time to potentially make a relatively passive income.
Do you feel you need to work hard for your money?
Liz Raad: Today we’ve been talking about leveraging time for money, and whether people work too hard. This is something we see over and over again, and something that we had to do in our lives as well. Ideally you want to break that cycle of thinking: if you’re going to earn a lot of money you’ve got to work really hard, or really long hours.
Matt Raad: This is something we get a unique view of. We retrain a lot of people who are transitioning from PAYG to being able to quit their jobs. They’re swapping what we call time-for-money (PAYG units), to being entrepreneurs, or owning their own businesses and getting leverage on their time.
How to Quit Your Job and Leveraging Time
And what’s really fun and brought it home to me, is we just did a coaching call with one of our star students (a married couple) who are doing really well. They’ve got it nailed – they’re building and buying websites, and also building their passive websites. They’ve got all the online skills but they’re in that transition phase from PAYG to doing this full-time.
They’re still thinking “I’ve got to put in X number of hours to deserve Y $”. It’s all about deservability of “the money that I’m earning”. They have an opportunity of building one particular website that earns around $2,000 a month. They were saying to me “Matt, we can’t just work on this website for a half an hour a month and get paid $2,000 for doing that!”. I was laughing and saying, “Well, the good news is you’re there. You’ve got the skills to do it. Now it’s just mindset”.
Can you really work less hours for more money?
Let’s just change it around because in our journey we’ve had instances (and lots of our business friends are like this), where you get massive leverage as an entrepreneur on your time. We’ll do two-hour jobs on websites and make $50,000 or $100,000 off that one two-hour block in recurring income. And we’ve got lots of graduates who’ve found this as well. Once they’ve got a passive website, they only have to work on it for a week or two every year to generate their ongoing income.
So, this is an important thing. If you’re starting out on that journey to quit your job, going from PAYG, to stop yourself thinking you have to a certain amount of hours each day to earn money. Often, it’s tied up with the mindset of working hard to deserve the money. This is one of the things we notice with our students, and this happens at all levels. You need to change that thinking.
Breaking that old linear mindset around how you earn money
Liz: Yes, because otherwise you’re trapping yourself. You’re going to stay in that cycle of thinking, and I guess we’ve had the luxury of being business brokers and being in this online world for so long, we’ve seen over and over again these people who work very minimal hours and earn a lot of money.
Matt: Yes, I was going to say, we’ve been particularly lucky and fortunate in life when you think about it.
Liz: But that’s why we went out to find those examples, that was important to us, because that’s one of the things that you need to do is find examples of people who are doing it, so your brain believes that it’s possible.
Learning from other’s who have quit their jobs and now leverage their time
Matt: And this is what I was going to say – we’ve been incredibly lucky that we’ve deliberately been involved in many multi-million-dollar deals. I remember the first time I got handed a cheque for $400,000 off this guy (a high net worth entrepreneur) as a deposit on a business and he hadn’t done much time-wise to make that money.
He had just sold a business for a very large sum of money (tens of millions) and so it was like winning the lotto from where I was coming from. This is when I first started out buying and selling these businesses. But to him, that’s just what you do in business. So as a PAYG, you’ve got to realize $400,000 can turn up in your bank account real quick, and it’s not about working 40 hours or 70 hours a week to deserve $400,000.
Reflection – where are you working too hard for your money?
Liz: So maybe think about that. Are you working too hard for your money? Are there some things that you are taking on that you don’t need to? Is there stuff that you’re doing, that you’re doing just to be busy, and to feel like you deserve the money?
Matt: Especially with websites because it’s fun to do the busy stuff.
Liz: Or are you focusing on the most important things and just being able to get paid for the important stuff that makes the difference?