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Systematic Wealth
Good Morning Friend,
Yesterday I told you the story of how I hit a wall with my work from home marketing job and made the dreaded decision to get a “real” job. If you missed that story, you can read it here.
Today, I promised to let you in on the epiphany that led me to grow a real business and has allowed me grow systematic wealth.
But before I get to that, I need to tell you where I got my definition of wealth and how it informs many of my decisions.
When I was 12 years old my dad handed me my first self improvement book. The purple and yellow cover made me smile and I couldn’t pronounce the author’s last name.
P“Keee-Yo-Sak-eee” I read.
I remember thinking it was weird name, but the title “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” intrigued me and I so I read it, despite it not being my normal sci-fi or fantasy book.
Reading that book was a defining moment in my life and started an insatiable quest to find this concept of wealth the author spoke of.
He said that wealth was just a measure of time counted by how long one could continue his current lifestyle if he quit working. Most people can measure their wealth in days.
It’s usually the number of days from this paycheck to the next.
At 12 years old, I realized that my parents measured their wealth that way and knew that I never wanted that for my life.
And so I spent the next 16 years learning, doing, & failing to build some sort of systematic wealth in my life.
As a kid I thought it was just that I needed to start a business. So in high school I started buying candy wholesale at my local big box store with my allowance and selling it for huge mark-ups to my peers at school.
As a college student I thought I could leverage my skills into a service. So I started a wedding portrait business. At the same time I thought I would try putting together a team of people selling someone else’s product and hooked up with a network marketing company.
As a grad and a new parent I was still stuck on the idea leveraging my skills, figuring that I had just chosen the wrong skill with photography and switched to the marketing practice I told you about yesterday.
Every one of my failed attempts at creating wealth was missing something vital. None of those attempts were failures in their own right. I made money at all of them. I even had what some would consider success.
But I didn’t have what I wanted. What I needed. What I dreamed about every sleeping and waking moment of my life.
I didn’t have the kind of wealth that Robert Kiyosaki described in Rich Dad, Poor Dad.
I was the bottleneck in every one of my “businesses”. If I ever stopped working. I stopped earning. Which means all I ever had was a glorified job.
Which leads me to the epiphany I had while I was working and kicking ass at my last “real” job.
They were selling something! A real tangible something!
In this case it was solar system and the CEO wasn’t doing it. If he didn’t show up for two months… the business was still selling. It was still working.
Then it started to dawn on me.
In the network marketing business, the owners were selling something (A business opportunity and a cool product).
Behind the thousands and thousands I had spent on marketing and business courses were the owners who were selling something (info products).
The physical and virtual shelves all around me were filled with products owned by someone who could scale the sales beyond the physical labor he or she put in.
Apple computer was selling something (computers and mobile devices).
Google was selling something (ads).
Amazon was selling something (physical products).
All the big business, all the successful marketers, all my mentors had something in common.
They were selling something!
What was I selling?
I was selling my time!
I was taking my knowledge, experience, and expertise and using it to build systems for someone else that they could use to sell their products. I was doing the same thing in all of my self-employed attempts at wealth creation.
It was like a light bulb went off and I realized that obviously all of my previous attempts were doomed to fail because they were flawed at the outset when it came delivering the outcome I wanted.
I had been working and learning for 16 years and realized that in that time I had built absolutely zero leverage-able assets.
I had an incredible set of skills and knowledge, but nothing that I could point to and call my own.
My epiphany was simple: Every successful business has some sort of leverage-able asset and the most common of these types of assets is a product.
I needed my own product.
I had that epiphany on May 1st, 2014.
On August 1st, 2014, I quit my job and launched my first physical product into the marketplace on the same day.
15 days later I had sold over $13,116.03 of that product and has gone on to be a stable money earner with little to no input from me.
A month later I launched my first information product into the market.
25 days after that I had sold $12,228.00 of that product and has also gone on to produce sales with little to no involvement from me.
Over the last year I’ve also helped my business partner grow his info product business to well over 6 figures a year.
I still have a ton of work and growth to do to hit my goals for income and lifestyle, but I have found the secret.
I already knew how to setup a sales funnel. I knew how to capture and nurture leads. I knew how to make sales. I knew how to turn a profit. I even knew how to do it all from home so I could be the dad I wanted to be.
What was missing was building assets that could be leveraged, scaled, and automated to give me the true wealth I was striving for. The wealth would allow me to reduce my working hours to an absolute minimum and really focus on being a dad to my kids, a husband to my wife, and a valuable contributor to my society.
Today, I don’t struggle for money. You couldn’t pay me to eat ramen noodles. All of our cars work. Most importantly… my son and now daughter don’t really know what’s it’s like not to have their dad around all the time.
My hardest decisions now are about what products to launch next and when to do my next promotions – not deciding which bills to pay.
My ‘why’ is being a full time dad to my kids with no restraints on time, location, or income.
My vehicle to get there is running a profitable online business with great products that I can scale into whatever income I need.
Your “Why” is probably very different than mine and that’s okay.
But your vehicle can be the same.
You can start today and in just a few month’s time have a product released into the marketplace. You can then use the skills and cashflow that product provide you with to scale your business into more products, more markets, more cash-flow, and more time.
Your journey can start today. Don’t spend another moment building someone else’s assets and get to work building your own.
Join me as I break down my 7-Figure Social Sales Funnel Formula for building kick ass sales & conversion funnels that you can leverage into more leads, more sales, more profits, & more freedom in your business on my next webinar.
You can register here:
Class No Longer Offered
These webinars a ton of fun to be a part of. You’ll learn a lot of real actionable content that you can use to actually go out and start building real funnels. In fact, if you stick around until the end… I’ll even give you a whole funnel you can just install in your business right away.
Don’t miss this opportunity because now is the best time there has ever been to build systems and wealth online.
Here to your success,
Richard “The Funnel Alchemist” Matthews
PS – Keep your eye on your inbox for my next story. I plan to teach some pretty cool stuff on how to build sales funnels quickly and easily.