The 1st Step to Saying, “FU to the Rat Race.”
and the problem with side hustles and freelancing…
I will be the first to stand up and applaud someone taking on a side hustle to make a better life for themselves and their family.
Most folks hope someone or something else (like the guvmint) will bail their butts out.
There’s a problem with a side hustle though I’d like to talk to you about.
This is the same problem that 90%+ of freelancers experience too.
AND…
The same crushing problem overwhelms small business owners.
All 3, the side hustler, freelancer and biz owner largely trade their time and energy for money.
Once an Uber driver finishes for the night, they get $XXX, but that’s it.
Once an email copywriter finishes up a 10-day autoresponder sequence and gets his/her $1,500 Paypal payment…now they’ve got to do it again, again, and again!
Once a small lawn mowing service mows their customer’s lawn, they invoice them, pay their payroll, pay their bills, taxes and fifty-eleven other expenses, they hopefully take a small slice for themselves. EVEN THAT doesn’t always happen in a bad month.
This is the “trade time for money” sitch we’ve all been taught and ALREADY LEARNED!
Taking on a side hustle or another client teaches us nothing new.
It’s still the rat race.
We already know how to run inside the rat race.
Running faster on the hamster wheel may feel like we are getting somewhere, but we’re totally not going anywhere. Maybe with enough stress and exhaustion, we’ll win an ambulance ride to the hospital with a cardiac arrest someday?
So, the trade time for money sitch is a problem, but the bigger problem is WE NEVER LEARN HOW TO GET OUT OF THE RAT RACE!
The personal finance geeks will tell you to keep trading your time for money and save, save, save, to buy assets like stocks, rental real estate or businesses so you can get out of the rat race SOMEDAY.
But trading your time for money and then trying to save it doesn’t work out for very many people BECAUSE THE CONSTRAINT is not your willpower.
The foot on our financial throat is trading our time for money to begin with!
Instead of the rat race model we already know:
Time → Money → Assets
We need NEW to learn and experience a new model:
Time → ASSETS → Money
How does this look?
Let’s start with a hypothetical example; I’ll bring it home in real life.
Let’s go back to our lawn mowing service.
It’s really hard to get customers in just about any business.
Because we are asking them for money, which we will trade them time for.
“Sir, give me $100 and I will mow your lawn.”
Then there are fifty-eleven reasons why they may turn you down or ignore you.
“I mow my own lawn.”
“My daughter mows my lawn.”
“I’m happy with my current service.”
“$100? WTF? That’s highway robbery!”
And on and on…
Now, even when someone says, “Yes.”
Now you’ve got to trade your time for the $100.
And then repeat the process over and over and over…
If you don’t wear out and win that ambulance ride.
But what if?
We set money aside for a minute.
What if we had a fictional company that said, “We desperately need grass clippings. We need them so badly that we will give you a percentage of our company and profits for every pound of clippings you bring to us. You will receive the profit share for the life of the company. The more you bring, the bigger your profit share.”
Now…
The GRASS is the asset.
Let’s look at how this changes things.
Now our “value prop” to our homeowners sounds like this:
“Sir, I’d like to mow your lawn at no expense to you. All I’d ask is that you agree to let me mow it every week and put a small sign at the corner of your yard that says, “Lawns Mowed Free - Call 555-1212 for details.”
(I call this an RFP: Risk-Free Proposal.)
Do you think you’ll get any takers on that?
Even if you’re not gifted in sales?
And every lawn you mow…
You may not get $100 at once…
…but let’s say with the profit share with your fictional partner company you get $20 a month for years or forever…
And it stacks every month…
Let’s say all you did was get one lawn to mow…
$20 in month one
$40 in month two
$60 in month three
$80 in month four
$100 in month five
$120 in month six
$140 in month seven
$160 in month eight
$180 in month nine
$200 in month ten
$220 in month eleven
$240 in month twelve
Trading time for grass clippings and getting equity and profit share you’re at $240 a month in perpetuity even if you stop.
And what if you did 10?
$2400 a month.
And getting those 10 would be easy with your RFP and signs in their yards; your phone would be ringing off the hook.
With $2,400 a month, you could hire someone to mow the lawns for you…
After 2 years, you’re at $4,800 a month.
Here’s the bigger thing…
You’ve learned how to trade your precious, precious time and energy for an ASSET!
And this is really the first step out of the rat race!
The only way out of the rat race is to LEARN how to stop trading time for money. Start learning to trade time for assets and assets for money and you’re on your way out.
You might think, “Sago, you’re in fantasy land.”
Well, you’re partially right.
I don’t know of any companies paying for grass clippings.
But right now…
There are millions of business owners, influencers, and course creators with assets just sitting idle.
Courses, podcasts, articles, blog posts, videos, webinars, and more…
Let’s pick one: Courses.
There are likely billions of dollars of old courses just sitting on a digital shelf somewhere.
They sold well to THEIR audience.
They even have the emails, videos, and other marketing materials they used to sell to their audience.
But after they sold all they could to their audience, they stopped selling it and came up with a new offer.
That old course is sitting there just like uncut grass.
Doing the owner no good, do darn good at all.
Now, do you know there are dozens of course marketplaces you could put a course on?
Marketplaces with their own traffic.
They need courses just like our fictional company need grass clippings.
Now, what if we went to the course owner and said, “I’d like to license your old course and marketing materials you’re not selling anymore, and I’d do everything to put it in new marketplaces and promote the bejeezus out of it. I’d cut you a check for 10% of everything I bring in on the first of every month.”
You’d totally have all the “takers” you could shake a stick at and MILLIONS of influencers and course creators to partner with.
Did you notice YOU get 90% they get 10%?
And YOU take the money…and pay them!
This means you’ve got “equity” in the micro-biz you create from thin air.
The sweetest part…
…Is putting courses on different marketplaces is a lot less sweat and easier work than mowing lawns, by a darn sight!
And you’ll likely make waaay more than $20 a month.
There are 1001 ways to monetize one course and marketing materials besides the course marketplaces.
You can turn emails into videos and put them on Youtube and Tik Tok.
You can snip short videos from the course as teasers and put them on Youtube and Tik Tok.
If enough marketing materials are already created, you can repurpose them into mini-books and put them on several marketplaces with links to your course.
And don’t even get me started on what you can do with A.I. using the course and marketing materials as a base.
It’s sick.
Now what I really want you to hear…
Is the REAL BENEFIT is not the money, Honey!
It’s the KNOWLEDGE AND EXPERIENCE you get in turning your time into assets and then letting the assets write you checks every month.
Once you got this down, you can say F.U. to the rat race.
This is the 1st step to saying “FU to the Rat Race!”
We’ve got our next Sinner Zoom shindig coming up…
We are all in this together.
We get there faster together.
It’s more fun to celebrate our wins together.
Having a shoulder to lean on when we hit a few potholes on the road to financial freedom is comforting.
It’d be great if you could join us in saying, “FU to the Rat Race!”
Details of our next Zoom get-together are below…
I’d love to see ya.