When I was a kid I would sweep up in my mother’s hair salon. She would work 7AM to 8PM every day, often longer. She had to be there every single second to make sure nothing went wrong.
I mostly remember her being tired a lot.
So tired that at the end of the day she would fall into her chair with fatigue.
That was the model of my mom’s generation. Work really, really hard to get ahead to provide a better life for your kids.
But the internet and technology has changed all of that. We can now communicate with anyone in the world instantly. We can use technology to leverage our time in ways that my mom only dreamed about, and we can outsource nearly anything. This creates an entirely different dynamic and if you think creatively perhaps opens up an entirely different way to live.
There are many, many people that have leveraged this new technology to work just a few hours a day and earn the living of a doctor or lawyer. You can too.
The Myth of Hard Work
There is a Taoist saying “before enlightenment chop wood, carry water…after enlightenment chop wood, carry water.”
Basically this means that the work of life is the work of life.
While this is as true as it has always been, there is now a catch.
The work of life has changed a great deal in the last 150 years and even more so in the last 25 years. Technology has eased the burden of traditional work in ways that past generations could have never anticipated.
But our sayings and the way we think about work are exactly the same as they’ve always been.
“You have to work hard to get ahead”.
“Protestant work ethic”.
“Work hard to achieve your dreams”.
And while there is a lot of truth in this, it is also a bit outdated. Because now you can make a ton of money, and have the lifestyle you want and only work hard… for a while.
Getting Leverage In Your Income
The big key to working less, making more money, and enjoying life more is getting leverage in your income. Most people do some version of trading dollars for hours. This is CRAZY. When you trade dollars for hours, you have zero leverage.
But there is another path. You can own a company and use modern technology to amplify your reach, lower risk, and automate systems. This gives you nearly unlimited earning potential, and the ability to really make plenty of money working far less hours.
Of course, owning a business can also be a major, major trap like it was for my mom.
So you need to think through what kind of business you want to own, and you need to consider how much time you are willing to put into learning it.
Otherwise you just end up with another job.
Being Willing to Climb the Hill Of the Learning Curve
The key to making bank while working a short amount of hours, is to use automation. These are tools that do most of the work for you once you have them working and set up properly.
The most powerful of these tools comes as a set and needs to be combined with a killer offer to make a synergistic combination that can grow a simple business at low cost and low risk day after day and week after week.
But each tool also comes with its own significant learning curve. So you have to be willing to put in the work upfront to learn the tools and the systems and put it all together.
Learning only takes a few hours a week, so you can do it in your spare time. But it takes time and perseverance to get it working. And most people give up just shy of success.
What a “Work Less and Make More” Business Looks Like
The most important thing in a Work Less and Make More business is that you have a way to find a passionate group of people who buy stuff (either recurring stuff or stuff in the same product line) and then develop a relationship with them where they will buy from you over and over.
The easiest and lowest risk way to do this is, believe it or not, still through email. Most of the time at least.
Email is a trusted environment and if you communicate effectively with your prospects, they will buy from you through this medium.
Email is also very low-cost to send compared to other forms of advertising. And so the ROI can be much, much higher than trying to get people to buy stuff directly from an ad.
The Simple Systems That Make This Work
To set up a business like this you need a few simple systems (but remember that you have to learn them all – so give yourself some time).
These are the parts:
A passionate audience that buys stuff: Think hobbies or needs here. Perhaps makeup or camping or knitting. There are tons of others, but you want a group of people who make multiple purchases for things or information they need within a single niche.
A paid ad to get your audience to your optin page: We’ll talk about the optin page next, but you need to get traffic to that page. Usually this is a very specific ad where you pay for clicks to your page. It can be as low cost as $5 a day.
An optin page to gather email addresses: This is the page with the form where people enter their email address. Usually in exchange for a valuable piece of information in their niche. These are very easy to build these days. OptimizePress is a great tool for this.
A thank you page: This page is the page your prospect goes to directly after the optin page and it is a limited time offer that if done right will create enough sales to pay for the cost of the ad.
Your email provider: To send individualized emails to a large group of people, you need a SPAM compliant provider. There are many, many tools that do this (AWeber is what we use). But this will allow you to communicate directly with your customer.
The willingness to write an interesting and engaging email on a regular basis: Keep your prospect informed about the niche they are in. Let them know the news, what is going on in the industry and any other relevant information. Tell stories. Engage. And make a soft pitch at the end of every email.
That’s really it. It is about the simplest business system on the face of the earth. But it works and it works really well if you master it.
Working far less and making far more is very possible. But only if you pick the right business and master it. You’ve got to put some work in up front to do that, but the payoffs are pretty awesome.