Thread: Addicted to Passive Income Deposits

I am en route to the fastlane. I have not arrived yet, but am on a timeline and business model that will get me there. And... somewhere along the way, I have gotten completely addicted to Passive Income Deposits into my bank account.

While I am sleeping, money is coming in. While I am having Thanksgiving dinner with my family, money is coming in. While I am vacationing, money is coming in.

I get email alerts to each deposit. And, it has become my addiction. My company works for me 24-7. No matter what I am doing, money rolls in. And it encourages me to work harder. And the harder I work, the more hits of my addition I get.

The money aspect seems surreal. I am addicted to the process as much as the cash, if that makes sense. It's like the best video game, but with real world tangible results.

I am not ashamed of this addiction. I intend to feed it, fan it in to flame, and feed it more and more fuel.

I check my email too often. I check this growing balance WAY too often, surprised at the growing multiples. The money I make is plunging back into the company to create more fuel.

My hope for you is that you discover my same addiction.

Your addiction is rather an enjoyment. I like the passive income bit as well. However, some people do get stuck with the one hit wonder aspect of their product so they feel tempted to sell more of their current product or service rather than thinking about other ventures or opportunities.

What you can do is instead of getting alerts for every transaction, maybe you can get a monthly alert. This way you are not distracted by this one aspect. Congrats on coming this far. Speed ++.

Thanks for the speed and your thoughts. What I need to do (working on it already) is work on the diversification of my offerings.

I am well on the way to #1 market share in my first category, and now am focused on expansion of my business into similar vertical markets. I also am interested and just starting shipping to Canada (from the United States).

Your advice is spot on.

So how do you this exactly ? Feel free to inbox more info !

Awesome! You inspire me brother! I can't wait to launch my website. Everyday I get a little bit closer. Passive income is where it's at. Good for you!

Princess... there's a great thread on passive income HERE

Is Passive Income Real?

Robre. Can't wait for you to make it happen. Accelerate your timetable.

Originally Posted by Vigilante

-awesomeness-

If you don't mind my asking, what is your product?

Atom... importing consumer electronics products (concentrating primarily in video surveillance and other security products)

Originally Posted by Vigilante

Atom... importing consumer electronics products (concentrating primarily in video surveillance and other security products)

Dealing with bureaucracy's convoluted messes...fascinating. It's not something I'd ever have thought of.

How did you come across the idea?

I am now convinced that it has less to do with product and 90% to do with process. As such, the commodity that I am trading in is dispensable. I now have a business process that can apply in other areas. My daughter (college age) has watched this develop, and now she will launch something similar in a consumer products category. I propose it doesn't matter really which product I am in. I could now (I think) drop my current products, source in a different industry, and produce similar results. In fact, in the diversification of the business which is the next step to create cyclical-proof income I will specifically target something different than my existing products... so if they ever dry up something else is already heated up.

Timothy Ferriss did his in health suppliments. I am finding modest success in video surveillance and security. My daughters will be in a completely unrelated but high margin consumer product line. To me, the BUY SIDE (sourcing the merchandise) is more critical than the SELL SIDE, because if you buy right, and there is some demand for the product, the market will support you.

I've built businesses and sold them, and I have built businesses that have crashed and burned. My current business model is an evolution and a culmination of 20 years of successes, failures, wins and losses, laughs and tears. How did I come across the idea? I had this and 20 other ones... several of which tried and failed, 1 of which tried and succeeded and I sold, and this one (and others) have been simmering and developing.

It's too soon to call it a game changer, but early enough to be excited about the model. I frankly don't care what the PRODUCT is... I want to be able to scale the results regardless of the exact "merchandise."

I take seriously what Sharp said above. I have no intention of being a one hit wonder. I am refining a process, and if anyone ever wants to "buy" my company, what they should be interested in is a scalable process moreso than the product. I didn't develop the product. The only thing I own is the method.

Here's a partial list of my failed previous experiments, and I am sure I am forgetting tons :
1. prepaid taxi cab services / emergency transportation
2. remainder (retail returned) discount books
3. wholesale Christian merchandise
3. physical retail store(s)
5. professional performance audio equipment sales and installation
6. e-commerce refurbished consumer electronics
7. e-commerce bibles

Along with numerous other ones that never made it out of the laboratory. The 7 above are just ventures that I lost time and money on and gained experience in.

I have also had some tremendous wins along the way, but I am not going to list those for 2 reasons : I don't want to seem braggy (as I am not retired yet, so obviously they weren't THAT great), and because my failures positioned me better than my wins for this current and future chapter. I know a lot about what NOT to do. :-)

Please excuse me for remaining focused on the more tangible aspect of your success(es), as I'm still recalibrating my mind to think in terms of "producer" and "process", rather than "consumer" and "luck". I'm still legally a dependent and resisting my upper-middle class parents' unwavering beliefs in the veracity of the soothing "you can make the payments to the bank on this" rhetoric. I guess you could say that I'm thinking "against the grain" for the first time.

I've thought of and discarded many different ways to approach this, but I will ask this most simply: What can I learn?

Vigilante, thank you for the inspiration. I have yet to ever have passive income but when I do (and I will), I imagine I will be addicted to it also. There're certainly worse things to become addicte to. Speed on!

I'm a lousy teacher and even a worse boss. :-) So, someone else will have to chime in with some brilliance or better take away knowledge than I can give you. Meanwhile, I will give you a key learning from each of the aforementioned failures.

1. prepaid taxi cab services / emergency transportation
no amount of money, marketing, or operational expertise can help you make a bad idea successful. In this case, I burned through $50,000 in radio advertising to earn less than $2k in revenue. so, from this one I gained a slower introduction, multiple checks and balances against profitability, and practical real world assessment of market. I thought I could manufacture a market where there was none. I couldn't. People who told me what a great idea I had... never bought the product. Don't ask people who love you about your ideas... they will blow sunshine up your ass. You can convince them of anything.

2. remainder (retail returned) discount books
If the market leaders in your space have had the chance to pursue the same thing as your "idea" produces, and they haven't .... there's likely a reason. In this case, I overanticipated market size, launched a business in a space that I loved, and assumed my charisma and a decent price would have people lining up to buy my wares. I didn't study the competition well enough to know that what I was embarking on was a proven failed concept. I wasn't smarter than my competition, but had blinders on as to what I wanted to do.

3. wholesale Christian merchandise
There are several national distributors in this space, and it's contracting, not expanding. I tried to bring a wholesale price model into a consumer space, and they didn't get it. In short, I thought "if someone can sell 20 bibles for $59 each, I can sell 200 of the same bible for $39 each!". In reality, the market was finite in size, and all I did was erode margin and not increase sales. In hindsight, I was playing in a limited market. No matter what the price, there was a finite amount of people in the market for what I was selling. I was not able to increase the size of the pie, so my price strategy only served to erode margin without increasing sales. My "competitors" didn't even see a need to follow my price erosion... they simply executed in other areas better than I did. Put it this way --- if you are a hot dog vendor selling dogs from your cart in New York, you are only going to sell a certain # of dogs no matter what your price is. I had limited market reach, a finite amount of potential customers, and price was not the predominant determinant of a purchase. I overestimated my market potential (actually, I never really considered it... I just jumped in)

3. physical retail store(s)
I had a chance to test one of my longheld theories. I believed if you paid people more, you would get more productivity. I provided the best working environment I could imagine... with perks and rewards and high salaries. The net result? Treating employees like they had an interest in the financial gain of the business when they didn't resulted in an extremely high SG&A, a sense of entitlement, and absolutely zero quantifiable increase in employee loyalty or productivity. This was a complete failure of an unintentional social experiment, but there's a simple takeaway here. Nobody cares about your idea, your business, and your investment like you do. My takeaway from this one is CRASH expenses, outsource where ever possible, mitigate risk, and create the best balance you can of great employees with low cost. Everyone is replaceable. Keep expenses as low as possible.

5. professional performance audio equipment sales and installation
some businesses REQUIRE capital. This is one of them. I was "playing" businessman in this one, with no real ability to move from great business cards into a real business. There are lots of businesses you can start that are not capital intensive... so don't pretend to be a player if you're not one. Having a good idea is not good enough if you can't back it up with action, and not all businesses are conducive to bootstrapping.

6. e-commerce refurbished consumer electronics
Minimize your backside. I could sell a TON in this low margin, high cost business. I could even run this as a drop shipper. But the returns, the consumer problems, and the liability could drain the slim margins in a heartbeat. If you can start any business you want, why pick one where you KNOW on the front side that the best case scenario is low single digit margins? I absolutely could have built a high flying, money losing company here. What's the point? If your best case scenario is a sub 10% margin (if everything works out well)... than the risk you assume exceeds the potential upside. You can pick any business in the world. Why pick one with a high product cost, low margin, and high backside risk? How many transactions do you need to do to compensate for one transaction that goes badly when the margin is slim and the costs are high?

7. e-commerce bibles
As MJ stated in his book, just being in business for the sake of doing something you love is not enough. I had no angle. I couldn't buy better than the big guys, I couldn't assort more than Amazon, and I couldn't sell anything that was proprietary to me. What was my reason for being in this business? Um.... I don't know. I thought it would be fun. I could make a decent margin. The bible is the best selling book of all time. What I missed was... why me? Answer? No reason. I was one of a thousand wanna bes out there in a business like many with almost no barriers to entry. There simply was absolutely no reason this business should have succeeded. I had nothing unique. Not product, not price, and not strategy. All I had to offer was something that someone could get somewhere else.

So.... this is why you hear people talk about failures being a great teacher. A lot of this, in retrospect, you could read and consider to be common sense. When you are right in the midst of life as a wanna be entrepreneur, and people who know less than you tell you what a brilliant idea you have, it's hard to be objectively introspective. Instead of surrounding yourself with people who will tell you how brilliant you are as you SELL THEM on why you do what you do... find people who will rip your ideas apart, tell you every reason it won't work, and why you can't succeed. Find people who have built businesses before.

A professor teaching a class on entrepreneurs in a University, unless he has built a fastlane business, can't help you. A franchisee, who followed someone else's model and now spends his days making Subway sandwiches, doesn't know how to do what I do. My parents, who wished the best for me by following society to college and into a job, don't have what it takes to tell me what would work or wouldn't. A fortune 500 Senior Vice President of Marketing, with 100 direct reports, has no idea what it's like to create a guerilla marketing campaign for a startup business. And, your best friend telling you your idea rocks ---- doesn't mean shit. Be careful where you seek approval, advice, and insight.

Your description of "thinking against the grain" is a GREAT description. It's a spark. However, understand that most people slide into what they think is a safer path. Go to college, get a job, have a family, save your % in a 401K, and invest when you can. Retire mediocre. That works for a lot of people. Most people. Most people stare into the abyss that you are looking into, and decide to take the safe road. And that is OK... for them.

It wasn't for me, and for others like me that want something bigger. I would make a terrible employee at this point. I'm not interested in spending my life in the system. I want to create my own ending.

Sorry for the long ramble. Maybe there was a sentence or two in there you can use. Good luck!

Wow, what a fantastic post! Thanks!

Thanks for sharing... Rep+++

Here's a follow up post for people building their business while they have another job or primary source of income...

At the point where your passive income exceeds your W2/1099 income, technically you are FREE at that point.

You are free to continue to work in your W2 job, but with a whole new perspective. Knowing you don't need that job and could leave at any time means you have a whole different reason for being there. It gives you a whole new perspective.

You are also free to walk out the door should you choose that path.

My theory here if you get that far is the longer you can maintain ALL revenue streams, the better off you will be. That extra time of socking away as much cash as possible, for as long as possible, simply means you are streaming even more cash.

That assumes, however, you are maximizing everything you can do for your passive income stream. At some point, I guess it makes sense that the more time you spend away from your "cash machine," the less you are probably maximizing it. The jumping off point is the day where you have true freedom.

Early on, I needed my regular income to serve as the seed/sustenance for my entrepreneurial ventures. Now, the scale has flipped. The business has enough momentum to replace my regular streamed income. Working remotely has enabled me uniquely to wear multiple hats and build multiple businesses simultaneously.

I'm on that jumping off fence right now. On past ventures, I went all in too soon. So, I plan to ride the fence as long as it makes sense. For this month, it's enough for me to know that the scale has tipped.

I agree, I have a plan in place that the moment my passive income equally or surpasses my income, I'll only stay at my current job until I am debt free and able to sustain my current lifestyle. My fiance and I are moving into my parents house to get out of debt. We are going to get rid of 1/3 of it while we are there only moving out again 10 days before our wedding. It's a sacrifice that is needed and it does accelerate our timetable.

Originally Posted by Vigilante

Princess... there's a great thread on passive income HERE

Is Passive Income Real?

Robre. Can't wait for you to make it happen. Accelerate your timetable.

Thanks Friend

Originally Posted by Vigilante

Here's a partial list of my failed previous experiments, and I am sure I am forgetting tons :
1. prepaid taxi cab services / emergency transportation
2. remainder (retail returned) discount books
3. wholesale Christian merchandise
3. physical retail store(s)
5. professional performance audio equipment sales and installation
6. e-commerce refurbished consumer electronics
7. e-commerce bibles

This is why you succeed. 7 SWINGS and each gets you closer to HITS.

Thanks for posting a GOLD thread.