410 – Life Lessons – Part 4 of 4

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James on a Silver Circle call

In this podcast:

00:10 – How to be happier
02:59 – Consider the subscription business model
05:24 – Turning services into products

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Part 1 of the series
Part 2 of the series
Part 3 of the series

More about the subscription business model

Tweetables:

Are you living a compromised life? [Click To Tweet].
How to keep getting paid [Click To Tweet].
Package time into results. [Click To Tweet].

Transcription:

James Schramko here. Welcome to SuperFastBusiness, and this is Life Lessons part four. If you haven’t listened to part one, two or three, please go back and listen to those first.

Reducing compromise

In this episode, I’m talking about some more lessons. And the first one is reducing compromise. If you can reduce compromise in your life, then you’ll end up being happier. Some people have so many layers of compromise, they’re literally stuck. You need to think seriously about what’s important to you and see if there’s some creative ways to go about getting that.

For example, one simple way is maybe you can rent instead of having to buy a property because a mortgage compromise can eat up all of your income, put huge pressure on you to win the next deal, and stress you out, cause you not to sleep. It literally can make you sick and can shorten your life; versus the idea where you’re only attached to a short term commitment at a lower monthly amount. So it’s just one way of a creative way around compromise.

You can also do other things like have things in the right names so that you can have tax deductible debt versus consumer debt, which is non-tax deductible. So have a talk to your accountant and see how you should structure things.

There are other kinds of compromise too, like relationships. Maybe, you’re dealing with the wrong customers and they’re just eating you up. Maybe you’re dealing with the wrong partner or you’ve got friends and family members that just pull you down. Maybe you need to reduce that compromise by making a change there.

You can also have business compromise. You might have the wrong business model, you might have the wrong people in your business, you might be using the wrong tools. Question everything. Maybe you’ve got a lot of credit card debt. Maybe you can consolidate some of that or pay it down much faster instead of buying a new TV or the latest outfit. Maybe those things aren’t even important as it turns out.

Maybe, you’ve compromised the relationship with yourself. Perhaps you’re blaming yourself unnecessarily, or maybe you’re putting off things that you know you need to do. I suggest you get a mirror, have a good look in it, and reduce that compromise. Have a decent conversation with yourself and step up to the plate.

I think that some of the self-talk that people say to themselves is ludicrous. Words like “I can’t do that,” or “I can’t afford that,” or “That’s not for me,” or “I’m no good at that.” Those sort of things can be very destructive, and I would question all of those things. I think they’re reversible.

Question everything

Question everything

Lots of Western people are very unhappy because they’re not good at following clues. I think one of the solutions, and I mention this in part three, is to have space to think about and let go of stuff. Question everything. That’s how you’ll find out where you’re compromised and what you can do to fix it.

The subscription model

Let’s talk a moment about the subscription model idea because I do cover that in many of my trainings, but where did I get the idea from?

I noticed that a lot of things we use are on subscription. We have Internet service provider contracts, we have a telephone subscription, and we generally keep paying or the service stops. And we would miss that if it stopped. I remember finding out from a share trader who was talking about how he likes to invest in tollway stocks, and he defined tollways stocks as where people need to keep going and keep paying. Think like a tollway on a freeway or a highway or a bridge. You keep paying if you want to use it. I liked this concept. So I decided that I was going to switch from selling things from one at a time to look for at least affiliate schemes that had recurring components.

“Think like a tollway on a freeway or a highway or a bridge. You keep paying if you want to use it.”

What do people keep paying for that they liked? And one of the things I found was software, and the other ones I found were education forums. I looked at guys like Dan Kennedy. He had a newsletter subscription and that’s a very old business model, a newsletter subscription. My parents used to get the newspaper delivered to their door every day. That’s a subscription model.

There’s not great information about it out there, but I have been teaching it to business owners and I’ve been having huge success. We’ve shattered all these illusions of a 3-month subscription expectation from a consumer. Now we’re talking about 3 years. But not just for my business, but also for my students. It is a great way to reduce compromise when you have a recurring cashflow rolling in month after month.

Is it possible?

You almost have to pinch yourself to believe it’s possible. If you go back to the original parts of this life lesson series, you’ll remember that I talked about some of the crappy jobs that I used to have to do. There was no leverage in that. When I was carting barrow loads of earth from the backyard to the front of the street with the skip, tipping them in there one at a time, there was zero leverage in that.

At the time, I might have thought there was no hope or no better way. But now with recurring cash coming in on a daily basis from the things that I’ve set up, I know that there’s a better way. If you need help with that, join SuperFastBusiness membership. I’ll explain how that works.

Productize services

I’m also a big fan of productizing services. I’ve been productizing services for a long time. In one of my workshops in around 2009, I set up a recurring productized service called SEO Partner. Recently, you can buy books about this. John Warrillow covers it very well in “Built to Sell” and “The Automatic Customer.” But you can standardize services that are going to be done the same way over and over again and turn them into subscriptions.

I’ve been doing it with SEO. I’ve done it with website maintenance. The idea is that if you’re going to sell time, package it into results. I learned this concept from the motor dealership where we had servicing of cars. I realized that we were selling time. People would budget for a car service, let’s say $1,000 or $1,500 or $2,000. They were looking at their car coming in and then being rolled out with new oil, fresh windscreen wipers, vacuumed, washed and they drive off, and it’s all fresh and new. But what they were really buying was a technician’s time to change these things and the parts. So it was made up of different things.

I realized this applies to service businesses. We can take bits and pieces like software, licenses; we can take some labor for developers, and we can package subscription services the same for search engine optimization. So that is a great business model. So if you’re going to build a service business, package services into uniform packages that can be sold on a recurring basis.

A lot of businesses are productized and it is the way to go. The enemy of productization is customization. So if you’re any kind of field, these could be logos, it could be Pay-Per-Click services, etc. Each one of those has to be done customized in the beginning. So they’d become much more difficult. So just keep that in mind if you’re going to go down this path.

Wrapping it up

I’m going to wrap it here for this series. I hope you’ve enjoyed my life lessons series. If you like it, let me know in the comments section. I can do more of these. I’m just putting this series out there just to see how you like it. Thank you for coming along the journey. I do hope you take the ideas for what they’re worth and if some of the things that I’ve been through in the past help you grow your business, then it’s been worthwhile.

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