Hi all, I’ll be using this space to host my overall progress as I transition into the fast lane. My hope is to collect feedback on my work and on specific problem areas / questions I have, and to keep myself accountable to hitting progress milestones… also just share generally with the community.
My overall goal is to earn $1m / year within six years (wealth is a process, not an event!), and only from fast lane sources, no slow lane salary, bonuses or equity included.
November 2019 Update:
I have two things in the works at the moment, and a longer term vision for a third.
#1 Music Genre Niche Blog & Apparel Shop
First, the lowest priority. It has its own thread (here), but I’m going to stop updating that one in favor of collecting all updates here. It’s a music niche website that focuses on culture, media, blog posts and artist interviews. The monetization is intended to primarily move through apparel sales, which are shirts my wife and I design (we have art backgrounds) and fulfill through a print on demand & drop shipping company. In all transparency, I’m in love with the genre but it’s tiny compared to most other music types, and I know it’s not going to scale up to anything close to life changing. I wanted to launch it anyways as a way to get some experience with a few things:
Since last May (well before I discovered MJ’s Millionaire Fast lane book which was in Sept '19) I set actions in motion to start a B2B service company with a business partner. The partner is absolutely essential in this and we also work really well together professionally speaking. He’s the backend guy (CTO) whereas I am the frontend (CEO) of our little operation. By the nature of the niche we’ve entered and the service we provide, this endeavor will likely not be an easy candidate for the fast lane. Scaling up would require hiring a staff of account managers, and taking on employees is something I’m not a big fan of doing... But I would still do it if we have the clients coming in. What it will give us is additional income on the side, which I personally plan to re-invest in other truly fast lane style businesses. But more on that in item #3. I won’t go into much specific detail on this biz, but we leverage external talent to fulfill the services for our clients, so happily we’re in an arrangement where we’re not trading 1:1 time for money. We handle quality assurance to make sure client gets a top service level.
Progress so far:
My third initiative is what I’m considering to be my fast lane vehicle. It might change in the future but at the moment I am planning to follow in @richardd 's footsteps and the excellent precedent he has set in his execution thread.
Unlike Richard I don’t have the ability to generate huge sums of cash quickly via consulting in my slow lane job (unless I cash in stocks, which I'm unwilling to do). I’m paid well, but most of it funds living expenses and lifestyle. I am able to save about $1000 / month however. Combined with an existing $20k that I have set aside already, and also with anticipated income from the B2B startup, I should be able to begin purchasing some small businesses in the near term. With at least one business purchased I will be able to increase my savings rate to purchase more businesses that complement the existing ones. From there, gradually step up and up... Sounds easy—I know it won’t be.
Progress so far:
More to come... Open to your feedback. Thanks for reading.
My overall goal is to earn $1m / year within six years (wealth is a process, not an event!), and only from fast lane sources, no slow lane salary, bonuses or equity included.
November 2019 Update:
I have two things in the works at the moment, and a longer term vision for a third.
#1 Music Genre Niche Blog & Apparel Shop
First, the lowest priority. It has its own thread (here), but I’m going to stop updating that one in favor of collecting all updates here. It’s a music niche website that focuses on culture, media, blog posts and artist interviews. The monetization is intended to primarily move through apparel sales, which are shirts my wife and I design (we have art backgrounds) and fulfill through a print on demand & drop shipping company. In all transparency, I’m in love with the genre but it’s tiny compared to most other music types, and I know it’s not going to scale up to anything close to life changing. I wanted to launch it anyways as a way to get some experience with a few things:
- Drop shipping / E-commerce
- Advertising (google ads, facebook, instagram)
- Growing / cultivating an online social following
- ~200 instagram followers (via follow / un-follow). Usually hit a 10% “like” ratio on my posts.
- One T-Shirt sale to date. Yipee!
- One instagram campaign started for my latest shirt design, set to a modest $35 budget (just to take advantage of a free $20 marketing offering I received).
- Add more shirt designs as time allows (overall low priority)
- Interview some music artists from the genre to grow traffic to the site (low priority)
Since last May (well before I discovered MJ’s Millionaire Fast lane book which was in Sept '19) I set actions in motion to start a B2B service company with a business partner. The partner is absolutely essential in this and we also work really well together professionally speaking. He’s the backend guy (CTO) whereas I am the frontend (CEO) of our little operation. By the nature of the niche we’ve entered and the service we provide, this endeavor will likely not be an easy candidate for the fast lane. Scaling up would require hiring a staff of account managers, and taking on employees is something I’m not a big fan of doing... But I would still do it if we have the clients coming in. What it will give us is additional income on the side, which I personally plan to re-invest in other truly fast lane style businesses. But more on that in item #3. I won’t go into much specific detail on this biz, but we leverage external talent to fulfill the services for our clients, so happily we’re in an arrangement where we’re not trading 1:1 time for money. We handle quality assurance to make sure client gets a top service level.
Progress so far:
- Marketing is in a great place. Domain, website, business card, insta / facebook / linkedin are looking great.
- Accounting and etc. in place
- External talent secured and ready to roll
- Google advertising for a week, now turned off (about $1 / click but no leads generated)
- Facebook advertising now in place (much better $0.30 / click, but also no leads yet)
- Clients, clients, CLIENTS is what our business needs right now. As soon as we can get 3-5 clients we’ll be in an excellent place since the nature of our niche encourages recurring revenue and business.
- Planning to keep Facebook advertising alive for the time being since its inexpensive.
- Also attempting to reach out to potential clients myself through LinkedIn, but not sure how to do this without looking scummy. I'm a total newbie to sales. Approach right now is to strike up conversations with CEOs (or similar) of architecture companies asking them where their business pain points are vis-a-vis our service. Would like to be as organic and relationship building as possible, but I can't think of anyway to approach these folks without mentioning something about my biz. Open to feedback here!
- Have been reading this thread by @EarlOfChina but haven’t quite figured out what my initial pitch / contact message should be... (or what I would put into a short video)
My third initiative is what I’m considering to be my fast lane vehicle. It might change in the future but at the moment I am planning to follow in @richardd 's footsteps and the excellent precedent he has set in his execution thread.
Unlike Richard I don’t have the ability to generate huge sums of cash quickly via consulting in my slow lane job (unless I cash in stocks, which I'm unwilling to do). I’m paid well, but most of it funds living expenses and lifestyle. I am able to save about $1000 / month however. Combined with an existing $20k that I have set aside already, and also with anticipated income from the B2B startup, I should be able to begin purchasing some small businesses in the near term. With at least one business purchased I will be able to increase my savings rate to purchase more businesses that complement the existing ones. From there, gradually step up and up... Sounds easy—I know it won’t be.
Progress so far:
- $20k in saving
- Desire
- R&D on the process of purchasing a business online
- Contemplation on the type of “empire” I want to build. I.e. what businesses should I target?
More to come... Open to your feedback. Thanks for reading.
Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum:
Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.