Today I am going to talk abo
ut the different type of business model people use in their everyday lives. I am writing this because this is something that I am in the process of trying to personally change in my life at the moment.
Just by making this change it can vastly improve the quality of my life. If you too can make similar changes in your life it could give you the freedom and time to enjoy the things that you really want to rather than slogging away everyday in the rat race.
I have a question for you
Q: What is it that makes successful entrepreneurs different from the normal everyday person?
A: They leverage time, money and they create assets that will continue to generate an income. So they do the work once and continually get paid over and over again.
At the time of writing this post I am self employed in the building industry. My business model is as follows. I charge X amount of money for each job I do or I charge on a day or hourly rate for the amount of time I spend doing a particular job.
The trouble with this type of model is that there is only so much time in the day to earn a certain amount of money. The amount of income is limited by the amount of time that can be invested in the job and this is why I am on a personal mission to change it.
Whether you are working for a company or are self employed you have to step back and look at the way you are working. I used to think that being self employed would be great but all that I have created at the moment is another job but I generate my own income.
In many cases this can be harder than just working for a company because your work doesn’t just finish at the end of the day.
You can have customers calling you in the evenings and at the weekends. You may have to go out to see them and measure up jobs. When you get back home your evenings can be taken up with working out the estimates and at the end of all this you may not even get the job to do.
A competitor may undercut your price or quite often people just want to get an idea of how much the job will cost so that they can decide weather they can afford it or not so after all this you may still not get any return on your time invested.
As you can see being self employed doesn’t always mean it is better, you can end up just creating another job for yourself and working a lot harder than you would if you worked for someone else.
So my advice here is to take a step back and look at your business model before you jump in. I have done this myself and now realise that I have been working hard and not smart, for me this all has to change.
When I look back over the years at how many walls I have built and fences I have erected etc. I think wow imagine if I could do all that work once and get paid over and over again, yet with my current business model to get paid again I have to go and do the work all over again.
Now this has got me thinking what if I was to create products that once finished I could get paid for over and over again. So for example if I am building a wall I could perhaps record the process on video and then I could burn this onto a DVD.
I also have an interest in the internet and have taught myself different areas such as how to upload websites via FTP and other areas that new people coming into the industry might not know how to do. I could get some screen capture software such as Camtasia and record myself uploading a website onto my web server and sell this as a digital file or again burn onto a DVD and sell it as a physical product.
I would then have a digital product to sell over and over again. So the work has been done once and yet I can still go on creating an income forever more by just selling the DVD’s.
When you sell products as described above you can capture people’s names, email or physical addresses and create yourself a mailing list of hot prospects. You can build a relationship with these customers over time. Because these individuals have now got to know and trust you it is quite likely they will be interested in further offers from you in the future that relate to their particular niche.
Is there something that you have an interest in perhaps painting or another hobby? You could video yourself doing a painting and explaining what you are doing along the way, the way you mix the colours or different techniques that you use this could all be recorded and once the work is done you could sell it over and over again as perhaps a “How to Do Oil Painting” instructional video course.
You could also create your products in different formats such as PDF’s for people to read or MP3 files so that people can listen to it on their iPod’s etc.
If you think about it these products are assets because once they are created and set up correctly they can continue to make you money long after the initial work has been done.
I hope this has given you some food for thought
Regards
Rob
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