by: AskPat 332 Transcript
Pat Flynn: Hey, hey, what's up everybody. Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 332 of AskPat. Thank you for joining me today.
Alright, here's today's question from Jeremy.
Jeremy: Hi Pat, my name's Jeremy Degan, and I've been a dedicated listener since November of 2014. I've listened to all of your SPI podcasts from the beginning, and I've just reached episode 100. I want to thank you for all of this wonderful content and value, and I just want to let you know that I started my journey this week and put up a website. So it's been six to seven years since you started on your journey into passive income. Your tagline is, “Where it's all about working hard now so you can sit back and reap the benefits later.” My question is, now that it's later, do you still feel you've created substantial passive income? I know you love what you do, and you wouldn't trade it for anything else, and it gives you time for your family, but is it truly passive? In other words, could you easily plan to leave next month to travel the world for a year and still maintain the business and live off of its income? Thank you again, and I look forward to hearing your answer.
Pat Flynn: Jeremy, thank you so much for the question, and, first of all, congratulations on putting up your brand new website. That's great. And secondly, thank you for listening to the show. You're already at episode 100 after listening for just about six months which is great, and you have what? 59 more to catch up on now? Which is pretty cool. And so there will always be more content for you and everybody else to listen to. But hopefully this episode of AskPat will help you out and shed some light on this idea of passive income for everybody else out there as well.
Now what's really cool is that I'm at the point in my business with the way I've set it up using automation, getting involved with systems, and also building a team to get it to a point where, yes, I can walk away from it. Could I walk away from it completely for a year? Just drop everything and have it continue to run for a year? At this point, no, and that might surprise a lot of you. But the thing is, there is no such thing as a 100% passive income. No matter what, there's no such thing as 100% passive income. With my businesses, I do have to check on them every once in a while, especially with some of my niche sites that have been up for years. I still maintain them and things like that, but I'm not required to trade my time for money which is the whole point of all this. Also, when you're doing stuff in the stock market, for example, you have to keep track of your portfolios or have somebody to manage that for you. If you're doing real estate, same thing. You need somebody to keep track and manage those properties. So there's nothing in this world that is 100% passive income forever.
But you can create businesses, online business. And I feel creating online businesses is the best way to create this form of passive and residual income. The fact that you can work on something now and create it so that it continues to work for you later on, even if you were to walk away from it every once in a while. And I've gotten to the point where I feel like I could walk away. If I were to drop everything today, things would continue to run and work well for me for about three to six months. Now the thing is with SmartPassiveIncome.com, I'm very active in the content creation side of things. So if I were to stop that, people would still continue to find my content and share it. New audiences would come. A lot of people have listened to a lot of older episodes of the podcast just brand new. A lot of people have discovered and stumbled upon older blog posts and videos. Again, brand new. So it's not like, once I stop, the ability to collect new audiences is going to stop as well. No, that will continue to happen, but I know that, like most sites, if you were to stop content creation, it stops a lot of the potential for even more people to find you. So a lot of what people share these days that I'm posting are brand new things, of course. But the cool thing is that these systems are in place to capture those email addresses to get people through a funnel, to get people onto my resource page, to get people clicking on affiliate links and things like that.
Now I do feel that, in the future, when I have courses and books and things like that out for everybody, it's going to be even more so to the point where I can walk away even for a little bit longer. But if I wanted to, if I wanted to walk away for a year, I'd have to work even harder to set that all up. I could continue to, with the way that online business works, and blogging, and content creation, I could plan ahead. And I've done this, where I've walked away and had not done anything on my site for up to three weeks because I spent a lot of time upfront posting, and scheduling content, and batch recording interviews, and things like that. I actually recently just did this with my trip to Las Vegas for New Media Expo. Now this is a mini-vacation, if you will, or walk away from my business, but I had planned ahead. I had recorded about two and a half weeks worth of AskPat episodes. I had recorded about four or five weeks worth of SPI episodes, and I've also written posts ahead of time so that they would be published on schedule. And content could continue to come out on that Monday, Wednesday, Friday schedule that I currently have, and that's been working great.
So again, you can work a little bit harder upfront to have things work for you in the future, especially when it comes to that content creation and having to keep continually posting. But yes, I am very, very happy with the way things are, the way that I've set up my businesses, and having that flexible schedule, and not having to trade my time for money. Because I've invested that time up front, it allows me to spend more time with my family. It allows me to go on vacations without having to worry about the business and all that stuff. So again, it's all about this whole idea of passive income is building businesses, so that they can work for you instead of you having to work for them. You still have to work in them a little bit. You still have to maintain them, but it's not about being tied down to the trading time for money factor. That is the big part about this, and the more you invest upfront, the more you can get in return. And it comes in spurts, but you can also set things up and diversify like I have over time.
And it's an incredibly beautiful thing. That's why I talk about it. That's why I created the site in the first place, and I hope to continue to explore new avenues of income generation and passive income generation for you. I'm very soon going to be “wrapping up,” I'm doing that in air quotes, “wrapping up” FoodTruckr. It's not going to be taken down, of course, but I am “wrapping up” the ramp up of content and product creation. We're working on our second book which is called The FoodTruckr Growth Kit, or the food truck growth kit, which is like book two. But it comes with a lot more pieces. It's for people who already have food trucks, and that is going to be the last big project for now at least. And then I'm going to make sure that the focus and attention that I put on is going to be put into some other things that I have planned for later this year. But that site, that FoodTruckr site, because I've invested a lot of time upfront in content creation on it, I have one book already that's doing really well making a couple thousand dollars a month. The second book is going to be a lot pricier. Hopefully some partnerships will be put into place to be able to make even more money from that. And that will be there for good and passively making money over time.
And of course I'll still have to maintain the site and make sure things are working, but I'm not going to be quite as heavy on the content production of FoodTruckr anymore. And we're going to see what happens. We're going to see exactly how passive it can be and how much and how long it could last. So we'll see what happens, but I'm really excited to move into the second half of the year here as we'll be taking the pedal off of FoodTruckr. And obviously, all the speaking that I've done with New Media Expo and the One Day Business Breakthrough live event which just happened, I am now able to breathe and focus my attention away from those things because those things are done or wrapping up and putting my focus and attention onto new things. And one of those new things includes potentially getting into some e-commerce stuff. So exploring Amazon and a lot of the things that we've had other guests on the SPI podcast talk about for income generation. Something totally different, something I've never tried before. I'm going to be doing a lot of experimentation on that front. So it's not necessarily a Niche Site Duel 3.0, because it's not really a niche site, but it's going to be a niche product, selling it on Amazon. I'm still exploring. I haven't nailed down that that's exactly what I'm going to do yet, but those are the plans. I know a lot of people would love to follow along, and we'll see what happens.
So Jeremy, thank you so much for the question today. I hope that answers it and gives you some insight onto what I'm thinking but also what I plan on doing as well. Hopefully that gives you some inspiration down the road too, since I know you just started as well. So best of luck to you. An AskPat t-shirt will be headed your way for having your question featured here on the show. Thank you so much for calling in. And for those of you listening, if you have a question you'd like potentially featured here on the show, just head on over to AskPat.com. You can ask right there on that page.
And as always, I'd like to finish off with a quote. Today's quote is from John D. Rockefeller. He says, “Don't be afraid to give up the good to go for the great.”
Cheers, and I'll see you on the next episode of AskPat.