Aim High and Adapt Goals Set ambitious goals, aiming for the moon, as even if you fall short, you’ll still reach a significant milestone. Start with cumulative objectives to test your capabilities as a springboard, then consider evolving them into annual targets as your business grows. Prioritize achieving a balanced work to income ratio over solely pursuing monetary success, as it reflects better personal growth and sustainability in the long run.
Courtland
The stars. And if you fall short, you’ll hit the moon at least.
Justin Welsh
Whatever, whichever order that goes in, I can never remember which one’s further away. So yeah, exactly.
Courtland
Aim for the moon. And if you miss, you’ll be lost among the stars. Is that $5 million? Like, do you imagine that as being cumulative? Like in total, you want to hit that? Or is that like, you want that every year? No, no.
Justin Welsh
When I started, it was cumulative. That’s how I was thinking about it. Because when I started, I never had the intention of working for myself forever. I thought of it as like a cool proving ground. Because unlike a lot of people that do this, I don’t know how to code. And I don’t know how to build products in the traditional sense of how you might think about products. So I thought that this was not going to be something that I would do for a long time. So I was like, if I can go out and just cumulatively earn this money, again, money doesn’t mean everything. But it’s like, it’s a good indicator that I’m doing something right. But as my business is growing, I think there’s an opportunity for me to do that on an annual basis based on some of the things that I’m doing. I don’t really want to shoot for a monetary goal. My goals are more like a work-to ratio that I’m trying to achieve is a much more important goal than I think total income or revenue.
Courtland
Yeah, I think most people, when they’re thinking about making money, are really thinking about making time for themselves. Yes, totally. It’s someConsider the Sacrifices Behind Success Success stories often paint a glamorous picture with impressive revenue numbers, but behind the scenes, there are often sacrifices such as working long hours, constant stress, and detrimental impacts on personal life and health. It’s essential to consider the full picture before aspiring to replicate someone else’s success and be mindful of the sacrifices attached to it.
Channing Allen
Public often sees is someone putting a revenue number up. There’s a guy who’s really, I’m not going to mention his name, but he’s making a killing financially. He does some consulting work, but he works 24-7 around the clock, high stress, in the situation where you see the number, you see the revenue. And a lot of people are like, you know, they go wide eyed and they go, I want that too.
Courtland
But if they saw what that was attached to, they would be like, hell no. Are you talking about Brett from design joy? I had him on the podcast last year. And he’s like, I’m doing two million a year and revenue with my, you know, my agency. And it was like, I’m also working 18 hours a day, seven days a week, driving myself insane.
Justin Welsh
I have friends like that and their businesses are booming.
4 million businesses, mostly service-based. So tons of time, tons of projects, like marriages are suffering, physical and mental health are suffering. And like, I get this thing and I wrote about this the other day you know a traditional word is shiny object syndrome i get like shiny outcome syndrome where i see like the outcomes of other People and immediately i get wide-eyed i’m like oh shit if that guy can do it i can do it and then it’s like wait a minute hold on what is that person sacrificing and doing to get that thing And if i don’t want to do that then don’t make that the outcome that you’re shooting for. Like you can’t get tied into that.
Courtland
It’s super hard to see. PeopleMaximizing Revenue Through Information Products and Subscriptions The speaker generates 70% of revenue from flagship information products, followed by 15% from a subscription email service and a mix of coaching and consulting, which has been discontinued recently. The primary revenue strategy involves using information products as Trojan horses to attract customers into subscribing to monthly emails for a deeper dive into the content. This approach allows for scaling the subscription service regardless of the number of subscribers.
Justin Welsh
Sort of flagship products that are information products so I’m like an I’m a knowledge entrepreneur that’s what I am like I have knowledge-based products 70% of my revenue comes from Those products another 15% comes from recurring revenue from a what I would call like a subscription email that you pay for and then there’s a smattering of coaching and consulting Which I’ve stopped doing completely actually as of about three months ago. Cool. Congratulations. Thank you. I wanted to reinvest that time into something else. There’s newsletter sponsorships, there’s affiliates, there’s all these other like little things, but the bulk of my business comes from my information products. And the way that my subscriptions work is I think of my information products as Trojan horses for subscriptions. So it’s, you know, get a lower cost, high quality information product, put it in front of people that want to learn how to do something, get them into the product and use the product to Sell the subscription. And then say, hey, like we can go advanced on this module. I actually send a monthly email that’ll take you a little bit deeper and then roll those folks into a recurring revenue email subscription. Which is like, it doesn’t matter if one person subscribes to it or 20,000 people subscribe to it.Work Ethic, High Performance, and Burnout Developing a strong work ethic and high performance led to achieving an executive position, but the real challenge came with the unexpected problems in the business. Burnout was not due to hard work, but the loss of control over mounting issues that seemed unsolvable. Coping mechanisms like overeating, excessive drinking, lack of sleep, and no exercise were common responses to feeling overwhelmed by the business problems.
Justin Welsh
You kind of like forged a good work ethic and high performance. And I turned that into my first executive job at 32. I was the VP of sales at a company called Patient Pop in LA. Pre-revenue, got them zero to 50. And what happened was, someone wrote a tweet about this and I can never remember who, but I always remember what he wrote. What happened was every day, like I thought I was going to be there for 1 million, 3 million, 5 million in recurring revenue. And then they’d go get somebody older, more experienced, better and higher over me. And I’d like take on some other role. That didn’t happen. I kept going and going and going and going. And I got to a point where like every day was a new dollar. Every day was a new employee number that was like unforeseen. I had never done it before. So every day was a new challenge. And burnout doesn’t come from working hard because I can work really hard forever. At least less so as I get older. But what burnout comes from, in my opinion, is loss of control, where it’s like this stacking of problems that I could not figure out. I didn’t know how to solve them. I didn’t know how to solve the problems that were happening in the business. And when you start to work on one problem and then another one stacks, then another one stacks and then another one stacks, pretty soon you start coping in ways that are pretty common, Right? And that’s what I did. I coped in ways such as overeating, over drinking, no sleep, lack of exercise. I
