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SNM207: Improve Your Work With 1 of 3 Home Based Business Models

• Jonathan Green : Bestselling Author, Tropical Island Entrepreneur, 7-Figure Blogger

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Social Selling

· Selling things to your friends comes down to what your personality is like. Personally, I don’t like mixing friendships and business. But you can definitely build your business around your existing connections. 

What are you excellent at?

· When you're selling your expertise, what you're really selling is your time. This type of business model allows you to get paid to learn. 

 Make it once, sell it a thousand times 

· Share your creations: sell buttons on Etsy, make stickers and courses, or design coloring books. Crafty businesses are very cool.

Get paid three times for everything you do

I'm always looking for ways to maximize my efficiency and return on investment by getting paid to learn something, getting paid why learning it, and getting paid to teach it to other people.



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The post SNM207: How to Improve Your Work With 1 of 3 Home Based Business Models on Serve No Master: 3 Home Business Models

Connect with Jonathan Green

SNN207 3 Home Business Models

 More than 3 home business models - learn them all on today’s episode! 

 Today’s episode is brought to you by Design Pickle. Every custom drawing on my website came from the most affordable designers in the world at servenomaster.com/pickle. 

 Are you tired of dealing with your boss? Do you feel underpaid and underappreciated? If you want to make it online, fire your boss and start living your retirement dreams now, then you've come to the right place. Welcome to Serve No Master podcast, where you'll learn how to open new revenue streams and make money while you sleep, presented live from a tropical Island in the South Pacific by best-selling author, Jonathan Green. Now, here's your host!

 The birds are singing and for now the neighbors’ rooster, it’s not going too crazy. There’s always a rooster crowing but the closer ones are not making as much noise as the further away ones. Hopefully, you won’t hear too much of that. 

 We’re gonna talk about home business models and different home business ideas. Rather than giving you a list, an incomprehensive list of really specific ideas, I want to start from an overarching idea. I want to, kind of, give you the big 3 categories of which your home business can fall under and the different types of business models. 

 It’s important to understand something. There’s more than one martial art. There’s kung fu, there’s taekwondo, there’s karate, there’s jiu jitsu, there’s judo, there’s Krav Maga. There’s loads of different martial arts and all of them work. At the end of the day, when you master a martial art, you learn how to fight. And in the same way, there are loads of different business models and styles and crafts that work. 

 What we want to find is the one that’s right for you. The one that’s the right path you. The one that’s gonna bring you to fruition and help you become your own boss. 

 So I want to look at this from a really big picture idea. And what I’m going to share with you in this episode is not, by any means, a comprehensive list, ‘cause it’s impossible to create one of those. Instead, what I want you to do is combine this lesson with my test on ensuring you have a recession-proof business to come up with the right ideas for you. Because some of the ideas that people have I really disagree with. 

 I recently read a book about starting a side business and the first thing they recommended was becoming a driver for Uber. That really gets my goat. You’re not your own boss. 

 I was riding an Uber a few years ago and this guy had done a really good job. He put a sign behind him that hung on the back of the stair that said Uber drivers who drop below 4,5 stars can get kicked off the platform. I didn’t know that. You can have a 90% and you can lose your job. How’s that being your own boss? There’s a little bit of freedom there but there’s not a lot. 

 And Uber drivers are, all the time, in conflict with that company. Whether they’re trying to start a union, trying to get benefits… Did you know their pay gets cut continually? They’re always getting lower and lower percentages than they were initially. There’s nothing you can do. That’s not being your own boss. So even though yeah, it’s something you can do on the side of a real job, it doesn’t, for me, meet the qualifications of a home business model. 

 Hopefully, you’ve been following me on the Be Your Own Boss series. This is number 6 in that series. And so I want to take you through stuff where you are in control, you are your own boss, what meets my criteria for being your own boss. 

 And the first type of business model is when you sell stuff to your friends. And there are a lot of ways to do this. They always change the name of this. The first thing they say is It’s not a pyramid business. If someone says it’s not a pyramid scheme, it definitely is. And I say What’s the shape? and they go, It’s a triangle, and I’m like Okay, what happens when you put 4 triangles together? You get yourself a nice pyramid. 

 There are a lot of different ways to do this. I had a friend in my twenties, his wife, she was my friend a little bit too, but I knew him better. She was a rep for Pampered Chef, which is one of these companies where you sell stuff for the kitchen to your friends. You have those parties at your house, like a Tupperware party or a Mary Kay party, all those are the same type of thing. It's fine. I don't have a problem with this business model.

 The thing I learned, actually, was all the stuff from Pampered Chef was really good. I've always assumed the stuff that you would get isn't great, but actually one of our friends, she did her, she had a wedding, and so all the stuff she wanted was from Pampered Chef. So I don't know, I bought her eight things from the list off Pampered Chef, and she went crazy. I bought her like eight plates, sorry, not eight things. 

 I said, Oh, this is about the right amount to spend. And she was like, these are amazing, dah, dah, dah. I really love it, I can't believe it you spent so much. It wasn't crazy. I think it was, I don't know, $40 or $60, but it's a wedding. I don't know. I haven't been invited to a lot of weddings as a guest.

 Most weddings I've been to are for my sisters, or my own. So, at least that one, the quality is good, but I've met a lot of people who go down this path and it's not the right fit for them. They start doing it and they just become annoying. I had a friend from high school, he joined one where he would order everything from a catalog. He's like, Oh, you should order your toothpaste from this catalog. It's like 10 cents less. We all stopped talking to him for two years. 

 I've met people that are selling, like, energy drinks that way. My wife is always getting invited to these schemes where we live. So I definitely don't let her do that stuff. It's like, Oh, you can sell tea to your friends. I don't know. That's not a world that I know a lot about, but it's absolutely a business you can do from home. And in certain cultures and certain environments, you can be really successful. 

 One of my friends here where I live is actually the head of Mary Kay for most of Asia. She worked her way all the way up to the top of the peak. She's really good at it. And her friends love hanging out with her. And there's certain people that love those types of things. If you're really social, if you love throwing parties and if you can make it fun and not feel like a hard sell, and every time you meet people, they want wanna hang out with you, that could be a really great business model for you. 

 We have to find something that's not too thin. I find that, if you're doing something where it's a single product, right, like you're just selling or reselling energy drinks, that's too thin. Those don't really last very long, right? They have their run and then they disappear and all the people at the bottom have to start all over.

 I got invited to join one of these, say 10 years ago, maybe more than 10 years ago, where they wanted me to sell cell phones and a video phone with like a tiny 2 inch by 2 inch screen on it. And I didn't get involved in it because they wanted me to pay $200 to join. I was like, I'm not doing that. They're like, you can have your own website. It wasn't, it's not really your own website. It's just a photocopy of their generic website that has a really, really, really long link that would be my own link. There’s like my name on top of the page. So that's been my experience with that type of business model. But I do know they can work. I have friends who've had massive successes there.

 And that really comes down to what your personality is. Do you want to sell stuff to your friends? I don't like to mix friendship and business. I hate doing that. It drives me crazy. And also it really relies on very specific skill sets. Not everyone has that skill. Most people don't. But if you're super social, if you're really good at doing it in a way that's not annoying, if you can throw parties and events that are really, really fun, and the product you get into line with has a good enough product suite.

 Like, the cool thing of Pampered Chef is that it's just stuff for the kitchen. So you know what it is. Not going up to the bedroom, not going after the living room. It's like a fixed set of stuff. They know what you have. And it's not so thin that it's just an energy drink. It's kind of like the right size catalog for me. I don't want to buy a computer, toilet paper, toothpaste and a knife all from this catalog. I guess that's what Amazon is now. 

 But that's the first type of business model where you do social selling, friendship selling, where you're going to sell stuff to your friends. And of course there's other iterations of this, where you sell services to your friends, your former coworkers, and you build your business, you build your business around your existing connections. That's really what that is. 

 Our second business model for a home business is to sell your expertise. This is where you have something that you're excellent at. It's something inside your brain and you sell access to that. And this can be in the form of day trading, you could be a consultant or selling digital services. 

 This is how I kind of started. I started off selling search engine optimization services. I would help people in my hometown to get their websites more traffic, more visitors, more tension for people that were looking for businesses like theirs. 

 When you're selling your expertise, what you're really selling is your time. And that's a critical thing to understand about this type of business model. Because when you're selling your time, that means you have a business that's not scalable. Now you can find ways to scale it, by getting other people to sell their time under your brand, but still, it's not infinitely scalable. There's a limitation, there's a cap on it. You have to keep that in mind. 

 And so, I tend to think of this business model as a stepping stone, as the first type of business I would build, because it's exactly what I do. What's good about this type of business model, where you're selling your expertise, is that you can generate fast revenue. You can get paid at the start of a project rather than the end of the fruition of a project. And you could build up your war chest to start building up other types of passive revenue streams.

 This type of business model, where you're selling your expertise, allows you to do one of my favorite things, which is get paid to learn. You can find something you want to do and start off with cheap clients and work your way up. An example of this, that I teach about a lot, is copywriting. One valuable skill is being a copywriter. In fact, I hired another copywriter yesterday for a project. Even at my level, I can write my own copy. 

 Paris, who's my team project manager, is an amazing copywriter, we never have enough time to write as much copy as we need. Copywriting is one of the most in-demand skills. If you're good at it, you can make crazy money and you can work your way with this particular skill.

 And some other skills could do the same thing, where you go past flat fee and into percentages. And so you get a percentage of what you bring in, and that's when you go beyond just selling your time. Now you're selling your expertise in a way that's not limited by how many hours your project takes you, but instead on the results of your work. And you can generate a lot of money when you're getting a percentage of every sale that came in from a sales letter or a commercial or an ad that you wrote.

 Selling your expertise does require facetime. Part of this process, even though you're working at home and we're talking about home business ideas today, is that people will expect to see you or communicate with you in real time. It's very hard to sell asynchronous services. By asynchronous I mean: you don't speak to each other at the same time. Asynchronous is email, synchronous is phone call. We're talking at the same time, or we're doing a video call at the same time, or meeting in person. 

 Whenever I was selling services to clients, they would expect to meet with me and have phone calls with me and talk to me in real time. There are certain people that I do business with that always want to do phone calls, and I kind of hate them, I hate phone calls. I really don't like synchronous communication, because I like to do multiple stuff at the same time. 

 My team, yesterday I was really tired, because the night before I had a really big night shift, I'd done a live training, my throat was really sore. I was really tired. So I took most of the day off. And there were so many messages going in on our team chat board and I wasn't responding to any of them.

 You know what I did? When I got to work last night, in the middle of the night, I woke up around 3:00 AM. I was like, I feel like working. Got on the computer, answered all of those messages. Asynchronous. I responded within 24 hours, which is what we always agree on. Everyone will respond within a day to any messages. 

 And I was able to really dig deep into each answer, ‘cause I wasn't in the middle of a conversation. I could just write a really detailed answer, post links, adjust things, and take an hour responding if I wanted to. I really like that. 

 Sometimes I want to talk in real time, but very rarely for me, and this is a personal thing, do I do phone calls or video chats. I just find that stuff, it's just annoying. Because if the internet cuts out or glitches and the other person starts giving me stick and I'm like, I can't control the internet on my island. That's why I didn't want to do a phone call with you. 

 Every once in a while I get a message in email from someone who's listened to podcasts, one of my followers, and they send me their cell phone. Like, Hey, give me a call. I’m like, what? I don't do synchronous communication with people I work with. It's not that I have a problem with talking to you, but if you would just write me an email, I'll respond. If you asked me to call you, it's not going to happen. Because I don't like to call anyone. It's very inconvenient for me.

 I've worked with people who, when they knew I was sick, I was having really big problems in my eyes,kept asking for computer meetings. Guess how I feel about them. I say, guys, my eyes are killing me. I can't be on the computer. I have a medical condition. Like, no, we got to do a video call. And then all they talk about is BS.

 Guess what? I secretly hate them. When people take... I don't ask for a lot of consideration by the way, because if you'll just, if you'll send audio messages back and forth, we have a walkie-talkie app, I'll message you all day long. But when I say that it's physically causing me pain, that I'm struggling with blindness and you go, well, you have to use that, we'd like to do our meetings anyways. Guess what, I'm going to hate you. 

 So when you're selling your expertise, you do have to have that as part of your project, you're gonna have to meet people in person or in real time. And you just want to keep that in mind that people are going to want to speak with you sometimes. Even when you're day trading, or doing stocks for people, they're still going to want to chat to you. So that is part of the process. 

 The third level, the third type of home business model, falls into the category of selling your creations. This is where you sell something that you've made, and this could be something crafty, this could be a course, it can be an invention. It’s where you're selling a thing and this is where things get really scalable. This is where things for me get very exciting. Now, I still practice business model number two and this business model, because I still take on clients sometimes, there's still some expertise or do consulting or coaching.

 Every time I do it though, at a certain point, I just get burned out or I'm like, I don't know why I'm doing this. Yeah, I like the money, but golly, I don't like having to talk to people in real time. I'm going to one of those things right now with these people where they want to extend a project, give me more money. I can’t think about it, I'm like, you know what? I don't think I want to work with you guys anymore. I think I'm burned out on it. And then you guys aren't a good fit for me. 

 Because I really, sometimes I fall in a relationship where I'm a consultant for someone, they start to think I work for them. And I'm like, you're 5% of my monthly revenue. I'll work for anyone. I'm my own boss. It was all about being your own boss.

 When you're showing your own creations and crafty things, this is really exciting, this is when you can make buttons and sell them on Etsy or make stickers or make coloring books. It's beautiful. I think crafty businesses are very cool. Just depends where you are on the crafty spectrum. 

 Although I'm artistic, I'm not super crafty, so... But also, it's not really easy for me to make something physical and sell it. Although I really like the sticker market, and I've done some print on demand stickers, I really like doing coloring books, I really like crafty things. What I can't do is sell a vest and then mail it to someone, ‘cause I live in the middle of nowhere. So the things I have to ship physically, that's one limitation on why I don't do a lot in the crafty space. ‘Cause I do find it fun, but also, I only have so much time. But I really think you can do a lot, whether you're making crafty stuff, whether you're making courses, whatever you're making. 

 Now, the reason I like to make courses even more than I like to make stuff is that it's infinite. I can sell one copy of a course or a thousand copies of the course, takes the same amount of time for me. I make it once, sell it a thousand times. If you have an invention, you can make a business and sell it yourself, or you can license it and sell the idea over and over and over and over again, and just get paychecks until you're a millionaire. They're really cool. There's a lot to be said for selling your creations. This is my favorite type of business model. 

 Now this is a different way of talking about businesses that I haven't in the past. And that's because I want to show you why I built my business structures the way I have. I really believe that our second business model, which is where you're selling your expertise and selling your time - this is really how I like to build it one way. 

 If you need to make money, the easiest thing you can do is take what you're doing at work and start doing it for yourself and get paid more. You immediately get more money and more control of your time. You start to be your own boss. 

 If you're an accountant, stop working for an accountant firm, hang up your own shingle. You could bring some of your clients with you. You can start getting all of the money instead of splitting the money between you and your boss, which means you can work less hours for the same money. Boom. 

 Now you have time to build your passive income business model, sell-your-creations business model. So then what you do is you create a self accountancy training, how to manage your own books, or maybe even design some software with a programmer. You put that out there, using the money you make and the free time you have from selling your time and your consultancies, you can then start to sell creations. That's exactly what I did. That's something I'm a big believer in. 

 So what I want you to see is how these business models tie together. And even if you start, this is number one, you're selling stuff to your friends and you're building a downline. That's a finite business. You can't do that forever. Or most people can't, because you only have so many friends, you only get to meet so many people. 

 At a certain point you're not going to scale. You will get bigger and bigger, you'll just be flatlining. And in between your parties, in between your events, in between your networking, you can start to build passive income streams. 

 How about creating a course? How to be a social business entrepreneur. Now you can teach people. How to do exactly what you do and people can go through your training and then they join your downlines. 

 So we're merging, creating ideas. So I don't want you to think that I'm down on any of these ideas. Just because that's something I do, doesn't mean it’s something you shouldn't do. The beauty of having your own home business and going through these home business ideas is that they all work for different people and we can merge and think of combining them in different ways.

I'm always looking at a way to get paid at least three times for everything I do. I want to get paid to learn something, then paid while I'm learning it, and then paid to teach it to other people. That's what I really like to do. So I'm always looking for ways to maximize my efficiency, maximize my return on investment of both time and treasure.

 There's a really amazing story that I tell in some of my trainings as a guy who used to sell armor. What he would do is make steampunk armor and sell it for people. It's very cool. There's a whole world of people that love to dress up like the Victorian steampunk warriors: big goggles, big hats, with goggles on top of their top hat, big wheel small wheel bicycles. Someday, I might have to learn the name of that bicycle. Monocles, latest steam powered laser gun. 

 And so this guy was really, really crafty and he has a really great story on YouTube. And what he does is make armor. And one day he made a piece of armor out of his wife's yoga mat and he realized this is exhausting. One of his children came sick and he couldn't spend as much time as he wanted to work. He started doing this from home after he lost his job as a jeweler. 

 So he was good with his hands. He was crafty. Making jewelry is hard if you asked me, I certainly could never do it. And so we went through this process, and forgive me if I'm telling the story a little bit out of order, and he realized one day that selling stuff is hard. 

 He could only make like two pieces of armor a day, ‘cause of how many hours it took him, and so instead he would make a piece of armor and write down the process and turn it into plans. And guess what? He can sell infinite plans every single day. He took something that was limited and turned it infinitely scalable by turning it into a course, by turning it into information. 

 So what you want to do as you're thinking about becoming a boss, as you think about different business models and ideas, is look at these different categories and continually run them through the test. Is this an adaptable recession-proof business model? And not every single one of these ideas will pass this. 

 The reason I don't think you should become a rideshare driver for someone else is because there's a single point of failure. If that business goes out of business, if that business has a renegotiation, that business loses license in your city, you're out of business and it’s not your fault.

 While social selling can be good, you're not really in control of your business because you don't choose your product catalog. If you want to build an infinitely, scalable version of that, start your own social selling business. Then you have total control and that's where you can really infinitely scale. 

 It's okay to be your own boss and start with social selling, or start with selling your time or services. You just want to see it as a step on the path to total freedom. I don't want you to stop halfway through your journey. Yes, you are your own boss, but you can achieve even more things when you keep thinking of what's the next level. So you can work and be part of a social selling or friend selling, whatever the name for it is.

 When they change the name next year, where you're selling stuff to your friends, your acquaintances, and they sell stuff to their friends, you get paid and all that for a couple of years and you master that and you go, I could start one of these on my own. I can come up with a couple of product ideas and create one of these things.

 Absolutely, I get it now. That's when you become really, really big. Now, depending upon your areas of expertise, some of the things you can do may pass that long-term adaptable business test and some might not. That's up to you. And of course, if you have questions, you can always email me for specifics, but we want to be really strategic before we start investing time and treasure in a business model.

 I'm continually adapting and updating my business. I'm in the middle of a process of rebranding and renaming, because the first iteration of that business model was really good. The new one is invincible. 

 I'm constantly revolutionizing and I'm really big into the concept of Extreme Giving, which is my core concept. It's just a term that my mentor invented as I was going through, working through the sales process and the explanation of what I was doing, because the very first version of extreme giving and building an extreme giving business model was all about using a book as your leverage point. That's gone. You don't need to do that anymore. That's the first iteration. 

 I go, I want to make something that's even more infinitely scalable, but something that's faster that we can do in different and dynamic ways. Where you could give without having to go through a hard, long, painful creation process. And so, I'm continually revolutionizing even what I teach, what I do, but it still goes through my core process.

 And when you're choosing what you're going to do, you want to follow your hearts, which means do things that you find interesting, that you find exciting, that make you want to get up in the morning. 

 When my friend was one of the first 10 drivers for a rideshare company, not Uber, but another one, he loved it, he still wears the bracelet he got. He did it not because he needed the money, but he really enjoyed it. That's something that I can totally understand. I can be by myself, that's why I live in the middle of nowhere, but I absolutely understand that everyone has a different path to bliss. That's why we're talking big picture rather than specifics.

 What we want to do is invest your time as part of a strategy. I don't want you to spend two years investing in a job where you think you're a boss, only to discover there’s a path to a recession-proof business test. Where you're selling stuff to your friends, but suddenly the business folds or suddenly all of your friends are in dire financial straits, or they've already bought everything your company sells. And so you can't sell to them anymore. They've already bought the whole catalog from you. It's done. 

 So that's why I encourage you to think about a long-term business strategy that has the ability for you to make money while you're sleeping. That's when you know you have something really good. If you can make money while you sleep, if you make money while you're on vacation, if it's a business it's hard to kill, if it's something that can work in a downtime and in an uptime, in an economic growth and economic shrinking, then you have something really, really cool. You have something that can get you excited and that can last a long time. 

 Because the worst feeling in the world, I've been there, is to have a business model with a single failure point. That failure point gets triggered, now you got to figure something out, because you're not in control anymore. You got to start over. 

 I started over a few times. Think about this. I lost my job in February of 2010. I only launched the book Serve No Master in August of 2016. That's six and a half years of different business models, of figuring out what the right thing for me is. It took me a long time to get here.

 I didn't have this thinking. No one explained to me how all my business models worked. I started off just chasing what seemed like the best idea. It seemed like something I could do. And every new bit, all my business ideas, every home business idea, it just got me so excited that I'll try, try, try, and try to figure out what would work for me, but I didn't look at them from the big picture. 

 And I had friends who were out succeeding me early in my career, who were making really big money. And I was so jealous of them. And now they're out of business because the business model they were following faded into nothingness. They didn't have a recession-proof business. They didn't have an adaptable, enduring business. And so, even though they were making a lot of money when they started out, it didn't last. 

 I encourage you to be strategic with how you invest your time, your treasure and your passion. I don't want you to follow a business model that doesn't have longevity. I don't want you to find out that you've made a mistake. 

 What I want is for you to choose a recession-proof home business idea that can go the distance. And when you do, I want to hear about it. So let me know in the comments below, let me know that you're excited. 

 And if you heard something today that you've never heard before, that started to make sense to you, if you realized that you were about to go down a business model that's limited, that's not truly being your own boss. Well, throw me a thumbs up below. Because I want to know what I'm sharing with you is useful. 

 I put a lot of time and effort in these episodes and your feedback, a little thumbs up, puts a smile on my face. It helps more people find me, helps my business grow. It expands my reach just a little bit. And that means a lot to me because together, you could be your own boss, I could be my own boss and we could build something really amazing. 

 Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Serve No Master. Make sure you subscribe so you never miss another episode and we'll be back next Tuesday with more tips and tactics on how to escape that rat race. Head over to servenomaster.com/podcast now for your chance to win a free copy of Jonathan's bestseller Serve No Master. All you have to do is leave a five-star review of this podcast. See you Tuesday!

 Are you ready to make your first dollar live? Grab my free guide How to make $1,000 this month at servenomaster.com/1K.