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Andy Black

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Dammit. No-one copies my AdWords posts. (Feeling left out.)

Well @RHL ... it's a compliment of sorts I suppose.



The best is if this pirate had got somewhere building his house on sand, and now there's more to come tumbling down as the rug is pulled.

I suspect not though as he showed from his actions that he's not a serious operator, and likely never will be with that moral compass.

"How you do anything is how you do everything."

He just doesn't get it...



EDIT: Haha. I had to Google DCMA. Here's a nice wee article:
 
Last edited:

RHL

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No-one copies my AdWords posts. (Feeling left out.)

Too technical. They actually deliver cash value, and I swear value creation is like deet to these pests.

Yeah, I mean DMCA, it was late here.
 
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IceCreamKid

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Oh dang he's the Asian Tai Lopez. Except instead of posting videos of cars in his garage, he's posting his restaurant tabs from when he eats out at fancy spots. I'd laugh if he actually stole my posts because they're void of technical details.

I feel empathy more than anything else these days. Hope he understands one day that there is no shortcut to the process.
 

RHL

The coaching was a joke guys.
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I feel empathy more than anything else these days.

I feel that for people who cut corners to make ends meet. I feel that for the 19 year old who works at Taco Bell, lives in a 1-parent household, and is trying to make himself into something with no support, no game plan, and no role models or mentors.

People who project fake success or flaunt imaginary wealth to look better than others on social media don't get much sympathy from me.
 
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twdavis

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ApeRunner

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After seeing the upteenth thread where a new member says "I decided to go fastlane, but I have 10 dollars and am eating a raccoon I hit with my '94 Mercury Tracer right now to stave off starvation," or "I read TMF but tell me the exact steps and don't leave anything out," I decided that apparently MJ's really simple explanation wasn't simple enough.

I don't know how else rationalize that guys like @SinisterLex and @IceCreamKid are putting points on the board in mundane fields and people are totally shocked that it's possible to make money that way, like "how could someone who owns a cleaning company for a living possibly get that rich?"

It's pretty easy, as they illustrated, CENTS+badass execution, but it's also easy in parallel fields that don't involve ripping them off. If you missed the basic principle behind their threads (which seemingly a lot of people did, because instead of using it as a launching point for the millions of possible parallel businesses, everyone just started copy/carpet gigs), I'm going to spell it out for you.

There are lots of ways to go fastlane, you can apply CENTS to figure them out. But if you're dead out of ideas, if you've got nothing, there is one way that never fails. In the last two years I have used it over, and over, and over again. Since it seems a lot of people couldn't distill the secret of "churning their own ice cream" from the other threads, here it is:





4mkSumH.png





Boom.





Think it doesn't work? Think again. I'm going to make this live for you guys, at the risk of inadvertently starting dozens of non-EPA and non OSHA compliant ghetto auto body operations, which hopefully won't happen because now you guys have at least the six other possibilities whose little cliparts I pasted up above.

A little over a month ago I decided I was going to learn to paint cars. I had to buy equipment to do it. The equipment cost me $1200. I spend $700 on paint (would have been $350 but I messed up so many times on the first panel that that one consumed the entire materials supply and took three weeks) so $1900 overall. The last panel I shot took me 6 hours including dry time, without dry time, my total effort was 1 hour. Very, very steep learning curve with very, very shallow effort curve once I cracked it.

So I get the car done. I know this girl from back near my parent's house who is friends with one of my younger siblings. She's hard up and has an old station wagon that has a mismatched door because she couldn't afford to fix it or buy a better car. I make her a deal-you buy the base coat only for the door ($45.00 1/2qt ppg) and I'll use my leftover base and clear and my own sandpaper and tools and respray the door to make it an exact match, but no blending because that's a lot more effort and cost. $45 for a probably $250+ job normally.

So he does, and I do, and it looks great. Boom. Done.

So not 4 days later, I get a call from a guy this kid knows from work. He has a car that he wants repainted. He want's it done in a custom metallic (mixed by the shop, no real work on my end except evenly blending the metallics) but the shop wants $9,500 to do it. He says he'll remove all the trim and everything and sand the panels if I can do it for less (that's like at least 75% of the work, but I had the specialty tools and knowledge, whereas unbolting things and sanding requires few/no special tools or knowledge). I'm not typically down for manual labor because I prefer to get paid for sitting or sleeping, but I'm always looking for ways to make tools and other things I buy pay for themselves quickly, so, long story short, I eventually ended up getting paid $4000 for three 8-hour days of work. And I've only been doing this for a month.

I needed no degree, no education, no contacts, nothing except a computer or phone, internet access, access to electricity, and the gumption to save up $1700-2000 to risk on supplies, to increase my income from hypothetically as low as minimum wage to $160/hr. How long would your mummified corpse have been in the ground waiting for Burger King to raise your pay from $10.00/hr to $160/hr? The general managers don't make a third that much. But follow my map, have some savvy in picking a real need people have, and you, O teenage roadkill eater, can be making $7.25/hr January 1st and potentially more than $15,000/mo by January 31st. Replace my spray kit with a battery of carpet cleaners and a van, or some wicked copy skills a laptop and a modem, and you see it's the same formula, with some good advertising thrown in, to get these results.

Luck? You wish you had that excuse. You know how long it was between the time I blew my first content up on social media to the time I landed my first xx,xxx advertising contract?

less than 3 weeks.

See you with your resume are wandering around beating on doors (whether for VC for an untested unproduced and unsold idea, or for a slow-lane job), implicitly broadcasting to employers (and anyone who will follow you online) "I have no direction and no drive, teach me how I can produce some value for people so I can afford to live and eat, hold my hand, make me stable." So, predictably, you get rejection after rejection, and you keep eating that tasty raccoon.

But if you follow the map above, you switch from being like the McDonald's employee, to being like a mini version of the McDonald's restaurant itself. Word gets out. You talk, and people talk, and suddenly, it's like you're there on the corner with your neon sign glowing in the dark. People can smell the value being created inside, and people who see you know instantly "If I want something to satisfy my hunger, that's where I can go to get it." The whole game changes. I haven't looked for work in AGES pursuant to my consulting stuff. I learn new skills. I get the tools to manifest the value of those skills. Work comes looking for me. And when it does, it's the employer, it's the job, that's clutching the resume, looking hopefully at me across the desk, wanting me to do for them what they heard I did for X and Y other local business.

This is a hustle. It's not a time independent fastlane (not in its nascent stage anyway, hire others to do the work, get spending your capital on advertising rather than on bottle service at the club, build out, and you're on your way). Whether you have lawn care equipment or a team of painters or a floor sander or video equipment for rent, get the expensive tools (entry) that are built to meet needs (need, duh), that only your fastidious research could have assembled in just such a way to maximize their value (entry), get trained to use it to meet needs more effectively (Need, entry), and sit there and watch your magnitude variable absolutely explode as you with your $5000 worth of video camera go from being worth $12.00/hr at Kohls to $250/hr at Susie Q Public's wedding. Work two days, take 5 off to work on your fastlane, earn more money than you did working 5.

Now get out there, kick a$$, get started, get the cash you need to launch, and have fun...

but I swear if anybody PMs me asking what paint equipment I bought or how to find clients for car painting, Imma be waiting under your bed when you turn off the lights tonight.

Very nice advice to pass on on aspiring entrepreneurs.

Rep. + transferred.
 
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focusedlife

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Working at Burger King:

Cost barrier: $0.15 for the piece of paper your resume is on, cost of one outfit and washing yourself that morning to land the job.
Knowledge barrier: A ten year old could do it if the government would let them.
Need Level: People who like food that makes their napkins transparent when they wipe their hands.

Payoff: As little as legally allowed.

I spit my drink all over my computer screen.

Your post was awesome.

Your hustle is inspirational and your advice is priceless.

I'm really digging you folks on this badass forum.

Regards

Los
 

omar

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How about installing security camera's in nice neighborhoods?
1. You import them from China (around 120$)
2. Make a flyer. Write about increasing theft, burglary etc. How this will benefit them, like it will make them feel safe, you can check your house from everywhere in the world) Deliver this flyer to 1000 houses.
3. Install security camera's for around 600$ (1 hour of work)
4. Increase your hourly wage from 5$ to 480$
5. Scale to infinity

Thanks for your posts RHL, they make you think in another perspective.

HOLY, this is a pretty sick business model in 5 steps. Talk about resourcefulness!
 

The Abundant Man

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but I swear if anybody PMs me asking what paint equipment I bought or how to find clients for car painting, Imma be waiting under your bed when you turn off the lights tonight.
What paint equipment did you buy or how do I find clients for car painting?
 
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Robert321

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If you are living in a low cost country, wouldn't it be better to serve clients internationally?

For example, I can maybe get 1/3 of the profits you are getting and both of us put the same amount of time and effort in the business. Sure, I get cheaper labor but the time I invest in the business and all the risks associated are pretty much the same.
 

WillHurtDontCare

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Great post. Both hilarious and insightful.
 

maikooo

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After seeing the upteenth thread where a new member says "I decided to go fastlane, but I have 10 dollars and am eating a raccoon I hit with my '94 Mercury Tracer right now to stave off starvation," or "I read TMF but tell me the exact steps and don't leave anything out," I decided that apparently MJ's really simple explanation wasn't simple enough.

I don't know how else rationalize that guys like @SinisterLex and @IceCreamKid are putting points on the board in mundane fields and people are totally shocked that it's possible to make money that way, like "how could someone who owns a cleaning company for a living possibly get that rich?"

It's pretty easy, as they illustrated, CENTS+badass execution, but it's also easy in parallel fields that don't involve ripping them off. If you missed the basic principle behind their threads (which seemingly a lot of people did, because instead of using it as a launching point for the millions of possible parallel businesses, everyone just started copy/carpet gigs), I'm going to spell it out for you.

There are lots of ways to go fastlane, you can apply CENTS to figure them out. But if you're dead out of ideas, if you've got nothing, there is one way that never fails. In the last two years I have used it over, and over, and over again. Since it seems a lot of people couldn't distill the secret of "churning their own ice cream" from the other threads, here it is:





4mkSumH.png





Boom.





Think it doesn't work? Think again. I'm going to make this live for you guys, at the risk of inadvertently starting dozens of non-EPA and non OSHA compliant ghetto auto body operations, which hopefully won't happen because now you guys have at least the six other possibilities whose little cliparts I pasted up above.

A little over a month ago I decided I was going to learn to paint cars. I had to buy equipment to do it. The equipment cost me $1200. I spend $700 on paint (would have been $350 but I messed up so many times on the first panel that that one consumed the entire materials supply and took three weeks) so $1900 overall. The last panel I shot took me 6 hours including dry time, without dry time, my total effort was 1 hour. Very, very steep learning curve with very, very shallow effort curve once I cracked it.

So I get the car done. I know this girl from back near my parent's house who is friends with one of my younger siblings. She's hard up and has an old station wagon that has a mismatched door because she couldn't afford to fix it or buy a better car. I make her a deal-you buy the base coat only for the door ($45.00 1/2qt ppg) and I'll use my leftover base and clear and my own sandpaper and tools and respray the door to make it an exact match, but no blending because that's a lot more effort and cost. $45 for a probably $250+ job normally.

So he does, and I do, and it looks great. Boom. Done.

So not 4 days later, I get a call from a guy this kid knows from work. He has a car that he wants repainted. He want's it done in a custom metallic (mixed by the shop, no real work on my end except evenly blending the metallics) but the shop wants $9,500 to do it. He says he'll remove all the trim and everything and sand the panels if I can do it for less (that's like at least 75% of the work, but I had the specialty tools and knowledge, whereas unbolting things and sanding requires few/no special tools or knowledge). I'm not typically down for manual labor because I prefer to get paid for sitting or sleeping, but I'm always looking for ways to make tools and other things I buy pay for themselves quickly, so, long story short, I eventually ended up getting paid $4000 for three 8-hour days of work. And I've only been doing this for a month.

I needed no degree, no education, no contacts, nothing except a computer or phone, internet access, access to electricity, and the gumption to save up $1700-2000 to risk on supplies, to increase my income from hypothetically as low as minimum wage to $160/hr. How long would your mummified corpse have been in the ground waiting for Burger King to raise your pay from $10.00/hr to $160/hr? The general managers don't make a third that much. But follow my map, have some savvy in picking a real need people have, and you, O teenage roadkill eater, can be making $7.25/hr January 1st and potentially more than $15,000/mo by January 31st. Replace my spray kit with a battery of carpet cleaners and a van, or some wicked copy skills a laptop and a modem, and you see it's the same formula, with some good advertising thrown in, to get these results.

Luck? You wish you had that excuse. You know how long it was between the time I blew my first content up on social media to the time I landed my first xx,xxx advertising contract?

less than 3 weeks.

See you with your resume are wandering around beating on doors (whether for VC for an untested unproduced and unsold idea, or for a slow-lane job), implicitly broadcasting to employers (and anyone who will follow you online) "I have no direction and no drive, teach me how I can produce some value for people so I can afford to live and eat, hold my hand, make me stable." So, predictably, you get rejection after rejection, and you keep eating that tasty raccoon.

But if you follow the map above, you switch from being like the McDonald's employee, to being like a mini version of the McDonald's restaurant itself. Word gets out. You talk, and people talk, and suddenly, it's like you're there on the corner with your neon sign glowing in the dark. People can smell the value being created inside, and people who see you know instantly "If I want something to satisfy my hunger, that's where I can go to get it." The whole game changes. I haven't looked for work in AGES pursuant to my consulting stuff. I learn new skills. I get the tools to manifest the value of those skills. Work comes looking for me. And when it does, it's the employer, it's the job, that's clutching the resume, looking hopefully at me across the desk, wanting me to do for them what they heard I did for X and Y other local business.

This is a hustle. It's not a time independent fastlane (not in its nascent stage anyway, hire others to do the work, get spending your capital on advertising rather than on bottle service at the club, build out, and you're on your way). Whether you have lawn care equipment or a team of painters or a floor sander or video equipment for rent, get the expensive tools (entry) that are built to meet needs (need, duh), that only your fastidious research could have assembled in just such a way to maximize their value (entry), get trained to use it to meet needs more effectively (Need, entry), and sit there and watch your magnitude variable absolutely explode as you with your $5000 worth of video camera go from being worth $12.00/hr at Kohls to $250/hr at Susie Q Public's wedding. Work two days, take 5 off to work on your fastlane, earn more money than you did working 5.

Now get out there, kick a$$, get started, get the cash you need to launch, and have fun...

but I swear if anybody PMs me asking what paint equipment I bought or how to find clients for car painting, Imma be waiting under your bed when you turn off the lights tonight.
Thanks for the post, very helpful. Needs are indeed everywhere, just gotta put my blinders down
 
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Royce2

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Thank you for the post @RHL,
This post is on of the more motivating ones to get me moving. Even though, I damn well know all of what was said, I needed someone to throw the facts at my face in a manner that wouldn't make me feel like its a textbook rather a conversation.
+rep
 

D_Benga

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This is an eye opener, so much useful info you that seems so basic but hard to think of when you are stuck in the slowlane.
 

Notlately

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Great, great thread.

New here and so far been reading a lot of GOLD threads, but this is one of my favorites. Inspirational, wise and funny. Gets your melon working and kills all excuses.

Thank you @RHL
 
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Madman1996

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After seeing the upteenth thread where a new member says "I decided to go fastlane, but I have 10 dollars and am eating a raccoon I hit with my '94 Mercury Tracer right now to stave off starvation," or "I read TMF but tell me the exact steps and don't leave anything out," I decided that apparently MJ's really simple explanation wasn't simple enough.

I don't know how else rationalize that guys like @SinisterLex and @IceCreamKid are putting points on the board in mundane fields and people are totally shocked that it's possible to make money that way, like "how could someone who owns a cleaning company for a living possibly get that rich?"

It's pretty easy, as they illustrated, CENTS+badass execution, but it's also easy in parallel fields that don't involve ripping them off. If you missed the basic principle behind their threads (which seemingly a lot of people did, because instead of using it as a launching point for the millions of possible parallel businesses, everyone just started copy/carpet gigs), I'm going to spell it out for you.

There are lots of ways to go fastlane, you can apply CENTS to figure them out. But if you're dead out of ideas, if you've got nothing, there is one way that never fails. In the last two years I have used it over, and over, and over again. Since it seems a lot of people couldn't distill the secret of "churning their own ice cream" from the other threads, here it is:





4mkSumH.png





Boom.




Think it doesn't work? Think again. I'm going to make this live for you guys, at the risk of inadvertently starting dozens of non-EPA and non OSHA compliant ghetto auto body operations, which hopefully won't happen because now you guys have at least the six other possibilities whose little cliparts I pasted up above.

A little over a month ago I decided I was going to learn to paint cars. I had to buy equipment to do it. The equipment cost me $1200. I spend $700 on paint (would have been $350 but I messed up so many times on the first panel that that one consumed the entire materials supply and took three weeks) so $1900 overall. The last panel I shot took me 6 hours including dry time, without dry time, my total effort was 1 hour. Very, very steep learning curve with very, very shallow effort curve once I cracked it.

So I get the car done. I know this girl from back near my parent's house who is friends with one of my younger siblings. She's hard up and has an old station wagon that has a mismatched door because she couldn't afford to fix it or buy a better car. I make her a deal-you buy the base coat only for the door ($45.00 1/2qt ppg) and I'll use my leftover base and clear and my own sandpaper and tools and respray the door to make it an exact match, but no blending because that's a lot more effort and cost. $45 for a probably $250+ job normally.

So he does, and I do, and it looks great. Boom. Done.

So not 4 days later, I get a call from a guy this kid knows from work. He has a car that he wants repainted. He want's it done in a custom metallic (mixed by the shop, no real work on my end except evenly blending the metallics) but the shop wants $9,500 to do it. He says he'll remove all the trim and everything and sand the panels if I can do it for less (that's like at least 75% of the work, but I had the specialty tools and knowledge, whereas unbolting things and sanding requires few/no special tools or knowledge). I'm not typically down for manual labor because I prefer to get paid for sitting or sleeping, but I'm always looking for ways to make tools and other things I buy pay for themselves quickly, so, long story short, I eventually ended up getting paid $4000 for three 8-hour days of work. And I've only been doing this for a month.

I needed no degree, no education, no contacts, nothing except a computer or phone, internet access, access to electricity, and the gumption to save up $1700-2000 to risk on supplies, to increase my income from hypothetically as low as minimum wage to $160/hr. How long would your mummified corpse have been in the ground waiting for Burger King to raise your pay from $10.00/hr to $160/hr? The general managers don't make a third that much. But follow my map, have some savvy in picking a real need people have, and you, O teenage roadkill eater, can be making $7.25/hr January 1st and potentially more than $15,000/mo by January 31st. Replace my spray kit with a battery of carpet cleaners and a van, or some wicked copy skills a laptop and a modem, and you see it's the same formula, with some good advertising thrown in, to get these results.

Luck? You wish you had that excuse. You know how long it was between the time I blew my first content up on social media to the time I landed my first xx,xxx advertising contract?

less than 3 weeks.

See you with your resume are wandering around beating on doors (whether for VC for an untested unproduced and unsold idea, or for a slow-lane job), implicitly broadcasting to employers (and anyone who will follow you online) "I have no direction and no drive, teach me how I can produce some value for people so I can afford to live and eat, hold my hand, make me stable." So, predictably, you get rejection after rejection, and you keep eating that tasty raccoon.

But if you follow the map above, you switch from being like the McDonald's employee, to being like a mini version of the McDonald's restaurant itself. Word gets out. You talk, and people talk, and suddenly, it's like you're there on the corner with your neon sign glowing in the dark. People can smell the value being created inside, and people who see you know instantly "If I want something to satisfy my hunger, that's where I can go to get it." The whole game changes. I haven't looked for work in AGES pursuant to my consulting stuff. I learn new skills. I get the tools to manifest the value of those skills. Work comes looking for me. And when it does, it's the employer, it's the job, that's clutching the resume, looking hopefully at me across the desk, wanting me to do for them what they heard I did for X and Y other local business.

This is a hustle. It's not a time independent fastlane (not in its nascent stage anyway, hire others to do the work, get spending your capital on advertising rather than on bottle service at the club, build out, and you're on your way). Whether you have lawn care equipment or a team of painters or a floor sander or video equipment for rent, get the expensive tools (entry) that are built to meet needs (need, duh), that only your fastidious research could have assembled in just such a way to maximize their value (entry), get trained to use it to meet needs more effectively (Need, entry), and sit there and watch your magnitude variable absolutely explode as you with your $5000 worth of video camera go from being worth $12.00/hr at Kohls to $250/hr at Susie Q Public's wedding. Work two days, take 5 off to work on your fastlane, earn more money than you did working 5.

Now get out there, kick a$$, get started, get the cash you need to launch, and have fun...

but I swear if anybody PMs me asking what paint equipment I bought or how to find clients for car painting, Imma be waiting under your bed when you turn off the lights tonight.
good god what a value here this is insane man can I lets say learn a skill whatever that may be and how should I go with finding the need and what if my skill doesn't require equipment can I still go for it
 

PizzaOnTheRoof

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People often ask how they should fund their (first) Fastlane business. THIS is bootstrapping.

Don't have the $1900? Fix iPhone screens. Speed up computers (esp. Mac computers). Build computers for people (have them buy the parts, you do the building, charge a small markup). Paint houses (inside and outside). Finish driveways.

Here's what this does for you. First, it puts you at the forefront of potential needs (Paint Brush Cover was invented because one of Sal's side gigs was painting with his brother and cousin). Second, it puts you in front of the customer and teaches you about real business (how to manage expectations, etc). Third, it gives you an extra stream of income, some extra money in the bank, and a hedge against the Slowlane.

That means if you lose your job, you're not as F*cked as most people would be.

Now I'm not saying go full @IceCreamKid and try to scale it (you COULD potentially). I'm saying that with a network of friends that trust you, you could potentially see things that people might NEED... and do them.

Start with mom and dad. Tell them to tell their friends at work or at bingo (lol). Start with your buddies.

If you have a friend or family member that potentially competes with you, learn from them and operate in a different geographical area (or help THEM scale).

Money is everywhere. Go F*ckin get some.
@MoreValue

This is what we’ve been trying to tell you my guy.
 
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William Ainslie

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This really helps to open my eyes to the possibility of practical solutions that don't involve technology.

Thank you
 

sonny_1080

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Oct 30, 2019
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After seeing the upteenth thread where a new member says "I decided to go fastlane, but I have 10 dollars and am eating a raccoon I hit with my '94 Mercury Tracer right now to stave off starvation," or "I read TMF but tell me the exact steps and don't leave anything out," I decided that apparently MJ's really simple explanation wasn't simple enough.

I don't know how else rationalize that guys like @SinisterLex and @IceCreamKid are putting points on the board in mundane fields and people are totally shocked that it's possible to make money that way, like "how could someone who owns a cleaning company for a living possibly get that rich?"

It's pretty easy, as they illustrated, CENTS+badass execution, but it's also easy in parallel fields that don't involve ripping them off. If you missed the basic principle behind their threads (which seemingly a lot of people did, because instead of using it as a launching point for the millions of possible parallel businesses, everyone just started copy/carpet gigs), I'm going to spell it out for you.

There are lots of ways to go fastlane, you can apply CENTS to figure them out. But if you're dead out of ideas, if you've got nothing, there is one way that never fails. In the last two years I have used it over, and over, and over again. Since it seems a lot of people couldn't distill the secret of "churning their own ice cream" from the other threads, here it is:





4mkSumH.png





Boom.




Think it doesn't work? Think again. I'm going to make this live for you guys, at the risk of inadvertently starting dozens of non-EPA and non OSHA compliant ghetto auto body operations, which hopefully won't happen because now you guys have at least the six other possibilities whose little cliparts I pasted up above.

A little over a month ago I decided I was going to learn to paint cars. I had to buy equipment to do it. The equipment cost me $1200. I spend $700 on paint (would have been $350 but I messed up so many times on the first panel that that one consumed the entire materials supply and took three weeks) so $1900 overall. The last panel I shot took me 6 hours including dry time, without dry time, my total effort was 1 hour. Very, very steep learning curve with very, very shallow effort curve once I cracked it.

So I get the car done. I know this girl from back near my parent's house who is friends with one of my younger siblings. She's hard up and has an old station wagon that has a mismatched door because she couldn't afford to fix it or buy a better car. I make her a deal-you buy the base coat only for the door ($45.00 1/2qt ppg) and I'll use my leftover base and clear and my own sandpaper and tools and respray the door to make it an exact match, but no blending because that's a lot more effort and cost. $45 for a probably $250+ job normally.

So he does, and I do, and it looks great. Boom. Done.

So not 4 days later, I get a call from a guy this kid knows from work. He has a car that he wants repainted. He want's it done in a custom metallic (mixed by the shop, no real work on my end except evenly blending the metallics) but the shop wants $9,500 to do it. He says he'll remove all the trim and everything and sand the panels if I can do it for less (that's like at least 75% of the work, but I had the specialty tools and knowledge, whereas unbolting things and sanding requires few/no special tools or knowledge). I'm not typically down for manual labor because I prefer to get paid for sitting or sleeping, but I'm always looking for ways to make tools and other things I buy pay for themselves quickly, so, long story short, I eventually ended up getting paid $4000 for three 8-hour days of work. And I've only been doing this for a month.

I needed no degree, no education, no contacts, nothing except a computer or phone, internet access, access to electricity, and the gumption to save up $1700-2000 to risk on supplies, to increase my income from hypothetically as low as minimum wage to $160/hr. How long would your mummified corpse have been in the ground waiting for Burger King to raise your pay from $10.00/hr to $160/hr? The general managers don't make a third that much. But follow my map, have some savvy in picking a real need people have, and you, O teenage roadkill eater, can be making $7.25/hr January 1st and potentially more than $15,000/mo by January 31st. Replace my spray kit with a battery of carpet cleaners and a van, or some wicked copy skills a laptop and a modem, and you see it's the same formula, with some good advertising thrown in, to get these results.

Luck? You wish you had that excuse. You know how long it was between the time I blew my first content up on social media to the time I landed my first xx,xxx advertising contract?

less than 3 weeks.

See you with your resume are wandering around beating on doors (whether for VC for an untested unproduced and unsold idea, or for a slow-lane job), implicitly broadcasting to employers (and anyone who will follow you online) "I have no direction and no drive, teach me how I can produce some value for people so I can afford to live and eat, hold my hand, make me stable." So, predictably, you get rejection after rejection, and you keep eating that tasty raccoon.

But if you follow the map above, you switch from being like the McDonald's employee, to being like a mini version of the McDonald's restaurant itself. Word gets out. You talk, and people talk, and suddenly, it's like you're there on the corner with your neon sign glowing in the dark. People can smell the value being created inside, and people who see you know instantly "If I want something to satisfy my hunger, that's where I can go to get it." The whole game changes. I haven't looked for work in AGES pursuant to my consulting stuff. I learn new skills. I get the tools to manifest the value of those skills. Work comes looking for me. And when it does, it's the employer, it's the job, that's clutching the resume, looking hopefully at me across the desk, wanting me to do for them what they heard I did for X and Y other local business.

This is a hustle. It's not a time independent fastlane (not in its nascent stage anyway, hire others to do the work, get spending your capital on advertising rather than on bottle service at the club, build out, and you're on your way). Whether you have lawn care equipment or a team of painters or a floor sander or video equipment for rent, get the expensive tools (entry) that are built to meet needs (need, duh), that only your fastidious research could have assembled in just such a way to maximize their value (entry), get trained to use it to meet needs more effectively (Need, entry), and sit there and watch your magnitude variable absolutely explode as you with your $5000 worth of video camera go from being worth $12.00/hr at Kohls to $250/hr at Susie Q Public's wedding. Work two days, take 5 off to work on your fastlane, earn more money than you did working 5.

Now get out there, kick a$$, get started, get the cash you need to launch, and have fun...

but I swear if anybody PMs me asking what paint equipment I bought or how to find clients for car painting, Imma be waiting under your bed when you turn off the lights tonight.
I think this is the best thing I’ve ever read.
Thank you.
 

Andy Black

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Uday Saroj

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How about installing security camera's in nice neighborhoods?
1. You import them from China (around 120$)
2. Make a flyer. Write about increasing theft, burglary etc. How this will benefit them, like it will make them feel safe, you can check your house from everywhere in the world) Deliver this flyer to 1000 houses.
3. Install security camera's for around 600$ (1 hour of work)
4. Increase your hourly wage from 5$ to 480$
5. Scale to infinity

Thanks for your posts RHL, they make you think in another perspective.
Thanks so much for giving me a most wonderful opportunity detection and seizing format totally unexpectedly...
 

Steven Pham

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So not 4 days later, I get a call from a guy this kid knows from work. He has a car that he wants repainted. He want's it done in a custom metallic (mixed by the shop, no real work on my end except evenly blending the metallics) but the shop wants $9,500 to do it. He says he'll remove all the trim and everything and sand the panels if I can do it for less (that's like at least 75% of the work, but I had the specialty tools and knowledge, whereas unbolting things and sanding requires few/no special tools or knowledge). I'm not typically down for manual labor because I prefer to get paid for sitting or sleeping, but I'm always looking for ways to make tools and other things I buy pay for themselves quickly, so, long story short, I eventually ended up getting paid $4000 for three 8-hour days of work. And I've only been doing this for a month.

I needed no degree, no education, no contacts, nothing except a computer or phone, internet access, access to electricity, and the gumption to save up $1700-2000 to risk on supplies, to increase my income from hypothetically as low as minimum wage to $160/hr. How long would your mummified corpse have been in the ground waiting for Burger King to raise your pay from $10.00/hr to $160/hr? The general managers don't make a third that much. But follow my map, have some savvy in picking a real need people have, and you, O teenage roadkill eater, can be making $7.25/hr January 1st and potentially more than $15,000/mo by January 31st. Replace my spray kit with a battery of carpet cleaners and a van, or some wicked copy skills a laptop and a modem, and you see it's the same formula, with some good advertising thrown in, to get these results.

Luck? You wish you had that excuse. You know how long it was between the time I blew my first content up on social media to the time I landed my first xx,xxx advertising contract?

less than 3 weeks.

See you with your resume are wandering around beating on doors (whether for VC for an untested unproduced and unsold idea, or for a slow-lane job), implicitly broadcasting to employers (and anyone who will follow you online) "I have no direction and no drive, teach me how I can produce some value for people so I can afford to live and eat, hold my hand, make me stable." So, predictably, you get rejection after rejection, and you keep eating that tasty raccoon.

But if you follow the map above, you switch from being like the McDonald's employee, to being like a mini version of the McDonald's restaurant itself. Word gets out. You talk, and people talk, and suddenly, it's like you're there on the corner with your neon sign glowing in the dark. People can smell the value being created inside, and people who see you know instantly "If I want something to satisfy my hunger, that's where I can go to get it." The whole game changes. I haven't looked for work in AGES pursuant to my consulting stuff. I learn new skills. I get the tools to manifest the value of those skills. Work comes looking for me. And when it does, it's the employer, it's the job, that's clutching the resume, looking hopefully at me across the desk, wanting me to do for them what they heard I did for X and Y other local business.

This is a hustle. It's not a time independent fastlane (not in its nascent stage anyway, hire others to do the work, get spending your capital on advertising rather than on bottle service at the club, build out, and you're on your way). Whether you have lawn care equipment or a team of painters or a floor sander or video equipment for rent, get the expensive tools (entry) that are built to meet needs (need, duh), that only your fastidious research could have assembled in just such a way to maximize their value (entry), get trained to use it to meet needs more effectively (Need, entry), and sit there and watch your magnitude variable absolutely explode as you with your $5000 worth of video camera go from being worth $12.00/hr at Kohls to $250/hr at Susie Q Public's wedding. Work two days, take 5 off to work on your fastlane, earn more money than you did working 5.

Now get out there, kick a$$, get started, get the cash you need to launch, and have fun...

but I swear if anybody PMs me asking what paint equipment I bought or how to find clients for car painting, Imma be waiting under your bed when you turn off the lights tonight.
Wow, I am new this forum, and I am compelled to reply that this is immediately an eye opener. In short, you don't even need a traditional brick-and-mortar shop to get started. With the dot-com boom, I am surprised that not many people are taking advantage of the free education that's online (myself included). You just need to get out of the comfort zone and check out a variety of new things : D
 

Clan50

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Amazing post...reads with great joy and sure brings down emphasis on all the mechanics from the book!
 
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b.stod

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Great stuff. I think I'm too caught up on the cents idea, just need to use the skills I already have to get the ball rolling instead of looking for the perfect passive fastlane business
 

Pabblo

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But hustling has always worked best for me when I hit it hard and fast. As I mentioned in my B&P presentation, to have rapid stable growth (like @throttleforward), people have to be really pleased with your product and service. But to have immediate, explosive growth that might not be sustainable, people have to like your product and service...

but love you.
I have known that clients from recomendation is very good form to get deals. BUT
I did not know "WHY" behind it. While I readed this I understand how many times i wanted recomended someone only by I like them.
Family first recommend you, next close friends, next friends...
This is soo powerful. Going deeper this also heleped me to understand how customer service is valuable.
THANK YOU! Great Thread
 

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