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The Side Hustle Show: Episode 620 - 9 Rules to Scale Any Side Hustle
Episode Overview In this episode of *The Side Hustle Show*, host Nick Loper talks about scaling side hustles with guest Justin Williams, a serial entrepreneur. They delve into nine key rules for growing a side business, transitioning from initial success to significant growth.
Key Concepts and Takeaways
Introduction
- Host: Nick Loper
- Guest: Justin Williams, experienced entrepreneur and founder of Millionaire University.
- Focus: Moving from the "zero to one" stage (initial launch) of a side hustle to scaling it effectively.
The Nine Rules to Scale
- Intent
- Establish a clear intention to grow your business.
- Ask yourself how you can improve and automate operations.
- Quote: "We either live with intention or exist by default." - Kristen Armstrong
- Eliminate
- List all tasks and identify what can be removed to focus on high-impact activities.
- "Nothing is worse than doing efficiently that which shouldn't be done at all." - Peter Drucker
- Automate
- Automate repetitive tasks to save time.
- Focus on automating and delegating everything you can from your business and personal life.
- Delegate
- Identify tasks on your list that can be passed on to others.
- Ensure your business can run without your constant involvement, making it easier to sell later.
- De-risk Plan
- Address the fear of failure by establishing a plan to mitigate risks.
- Use strategies like wholesaling or joint ventures to protect your investment.
- $60 an Hour Rule (3X Rule)
- Ensure your service or product can be scaled sustainably by maintaining a labor cost ratio (e.g., charge $60 per service while paying $20-$25).
- Marketing Flywheel
- Develop strategies to acquire customers at little to no cost, such as using breakeven funnels.
- Example: Acquiring podcast listeners while making money from ads.
- Velocity of Money
- Understand how quickly you can turn over investments and realize returns.
- Focus on maximizing returns within a year through multiple cycles.
- Aggregation of Marginal Gains
- Small daily improvements compound over time.
- Consistently assess and improve all aspects of your business.
Additional Insights
- Business Idea Donation: Justin proposes the idea of "10-minute tours" or audio history lessons for travelers, leveraging the expertise of historians.
- Triple Threat Round:
- Marketing Tactic: Collaborating with podcast players to increase visibility.
- Tool: Google Calendar as an organizational method.
- Book Recommendation: *Procrastination on Purpose* by Rory Vaden, focusing on the value of time and leveraging tasks effectively.
Conclusion Justin Williams emphasizes the importance of taking actionable steps toward scaling a side hustle while minimizing risks and maximizing efficiencies. He encourages listeners to focus on developing their businesses in a way that allows them to step back from day-to-day operations and truly scale their ventures.
Listener Action
- For more insights, check out *Millionaire University* and use resources from this episode to enhance your side hustle journey.
- Share the episode with friends who might benefit from these strategies!
Sponsors
- Gusto: Online payroll and HR services for small businesses.
- Shopify: E-commerce platform for creating online stores.
- Indeed: Job posting services to help businesses find talent.
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For detailed tips and strategies on scaling your side hustle, tune in to the full episode at [The Side Hustle Show](https://www.sidehustlenation.com).
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00Let's be real. Nobody starts a business for the joy of calculating tax withholdings. That's where our partner Gusto comes in to take the stress out of payroll, benefits, and HR, so you can focus on why you started your business in the first place. Gusto is online payroll and benefits software built for small businesses. It's all-in-one, remote-friendly, and incredibly easy to use. So that means you can pay, hire, onboard, and support your team from anywhere. I'm talking about automatic payroll tax filing, simple direct deposits, health benefits, commuter benefits, workers' comp, 401k, you name it.
0:34Gusto makes it simple and all with no hidden fees, no surprises. Plus, if you have any questions, their team of certified HR experts are standing by to help. It's no wonder why more than 400 ,000 small businesses already trust Gusto and why it's the number one rated payroll software for fall 2025, according to the review site G2. So try Gusto today at gusto.com slash side hustle and get three months free when you run your first payroll. That's three months of free payroll at gusto.com slash side hustle. One more time, gusto, G-U-S-T-O dot com slash side hustle. Nine rules to level up any side hustle.
1:14What's up, what's up? Nick Loper here. Welcome to the Side Hustle Show, helping you take back control of your earning power so your income doesn't have to stop when your day job does. Today, we're talking about scaling up your side hustle. We've got a lot of episodes on the zero to one part of the equation. which is honestly probably the harder part, wheeling something into existence and getting it off the ground, not an easy feat, but today we're talking about the next stage. You've gone from zero to one, now it's time to go from one to two to 10. Well, how do you do it? We've got nine rules to go through, listen in to see which stage you're at today to see where you need to focus your attention next.
1:52To help me with these is a special guest who knows a thing or two about scaling. He's done it with multiple businesses, including flipping over 100 houses a year, sometimes without even seeing the houses, scaling, automating, and selling an online education business, and his latest venture, an online platform and podcast from MillionaireUniversity.com, Justin Williams. Welcome to the Side Hustle Show. Hey, Nick, what's going on? What's up, Side Hustle Nation? Before we dive in real quick, Nick, I just want to say I started listening to your podcast just over a year ago. So we had taken some time off.
2:25We sold our business. And honestly, it was hard to get back into the business world after taking some time off. There was a lot of demons in there. And I found your show and started listening to it, even though your show was for side hustles. And in a way, like people getting started and getting going, it gave me a lot of inspiration to keep going. And I just appreciate what you're doing. So being here is pretty exciting. I mean, you're one of the rare podcasts out there that both get the guests to really share everything that's going on in their business, but it's also real down to earth. You never get that icky feeling when you're listening to you.
2:59And I just recommend it to everyone. You're like a mentor to my kids. So anyway, huge fan. Thank you for everything that you've done. I'm going to put that on a bumper sticker. You don't get that icky feeling. That's an endorsement. I don't know. No, it's so true, right? Like you just don't get that. Like a lot of times I'm listening to something, I get a lot of value, but there's kind of the back of my mind. I'm like, what's really going on here? And you're just so down to earth. And I just really appreciate what you're doing. And on behalf of everyone, And I'm sure who's listening feels the same.
3:24You're doing a great work. So thank you. Well, very much appreciated that. That makes my day. So if you're listening, we're doing three rounds with Justin today. We're doing the nine rules of scale or nine rules to scale. We're doing a donate a business idea. He says he's got a good one for us. Stick around for that. And then we're doing the triple threat, a marketing tactic that's working now, a favorite new or new to him tool, and the best book of the last 12 months. But let's kick it off with these nine rules. What's rule number one? So the first rule that we have is intent. Now, I almost didn't use this one because it sounds obvious.
3:56Of course, you have to have intent. But what I found is the number one reason and the way that we have scaled all the business we scaled is because it was our intention to do so. In our minds, we were always asking, how can we do this better? How can we do more of this? How can we automate this? How can we get more done with less time? And what I found is most people who haven't scaled their business or aren't scaling their business for side hustle is it's not their intention to do so. Kristen Armstrong, who's one of the best women cyclists that's ever cycled, she said we either live with intention or exist by default.
4:32And I just see so many people going throughout their lives and they don't have an intention to change things. And they just kind of are reactive to things that are going on in their life and they don't really get the places that they want to go. So number one is intent. Your brain is an insanely powerful tool. If you give it a problem to solve, it'll usually go to work doing it. So first of all, you got to have that big vision. You got to know where you want to go. You got to have the intention to want to grow and scale. And that's rule number one. That's a really powerful one. I'm kind of with you.
5:03Like, do you even include that? Because it's like, it's almost so obvious and almost woo woo of like the power of positive thinking. If you believe it, it'll start to come true. we've heard from so many entrepreneurs, like if you don't have this vision of where you want to go, how are you ever going to get there? I'd like trying to do Brian Scudamore from 1-800-GOT-JUNK. He called it his painted picture vision of like, Hey, five years down the road, this is what the business is going to be doing. This is what it's going to look like from a branding perspective. And then just kind of working backwards to get from the reality that is today.
5:34How do we make that happen? I love this line of we live with intention or exist by default. And I find myself guilty of this as much as anybody. So this is not like preaching from on high, but like you're going through the motions day to day and you feel like kind of just in maintenance mode. And like you described it reactive versus driving your own agenda forward, living with intention. It often feels like, well, I'm too busy chopping down trees to sharpen the saw. And you kind of get stuck at that. Like anything that has worked for you exercise wise or other resource wise to get clear on this intention or where you want to go?
6:11I always start with the goal. Often it's a money goal, it's our number goal. For example, when we started flipping 100 houses a year, I remember we were at Wild Buffalo Wings with a bunch of other investor friends. And together I started counting up how many houses we had all flipped collectively that past year. And it was just over 100. And I said, I want to flip 100 houses, just my business alone. Everyone laughed at me. They thought I was crazy. That's like a house every three and a half days. How does this even happen? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And up until that point, we definitely hadn't done that many.
6:41Right. But I just thought, why can't I do this? So I just started thinking about how can we do it? How can we do it? It started with a goal. Also wanted to get to a seven figure income. So it was constantly just working those numbers. How can we get there? How can we get there? And then, I mean, we'll kind of go through. I don't want to like we'll go through the rest of the rules. Right. Well, we'll share what how we're going to help them get there, essentially. So rule number two, should we move on to it? Yeah, let's do it. Okay. Rule number two is eliminate. Essentially, the way this works is you want to write down everything that you're currently doing in your business and your life.
7:16And you just want to start getting rid of anything you can. I'm all about having multiple streams of income. But if you're spending a lot of time doing some things that you're not getting great results, you might want to just let those things go. Peter Drucker said, there's nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which shouldn't be done at all. And I don't know about you, Nick, but there are a lot of times where I'll find myself working on this project and it's taking a ton of time and energy and I'm getting frustrated and I just sit and think about it and I think about my long-term goals and I'm just like, do I even need to do this?
7:52Like, is this even something that matters or is important right now? And sometimes I'll just eliminate it completely. What was an example for you? When we started Millionaire University, Tara and I were doing everything. We thought we had to have our social medias dialed in. We were doing the podcast. We were trying to collect emails. We were doing blogging. We were doing Twitter threads, which now you have threads, threads. We were trying to do it all. And it was fun for about a week. And then it started to get exhausting and overwhelming. And we were like, what are we doing? We don't even have to have a business, but we're doing this business because we got bored and we weren't fulfilled.
8:33So we started the business and now we were just working and working and working and not enjoying anything that we had done. So we just came to the realization, okay, what is the one thing that we want to focus on? And it was the podcast. We still did some social media stuff, but it was very limited. We didn't worry about any other metrics. We just worried about growing our podcast. We weren't getting traction in anything. Here we had Bill, other successful businesses. We had pretty good cash flow coming in and we were just working our guts out and not getting any traction because we were spread too thin and weren't really getting anywhere.
9:08Is that the deciding factor of if I'm not seeing traction in the combination of I really don't enjoy doing it because the counter argument would be like, well, I'm not seeing traction, but I only gave it a week. I got to put in some reps. I got to put time here to grow an Instagram audience, to grow a Twitter audience or something like that. So I think it's a combination of both, right? We decided what are we best at and what do we enjoy the most? And let's put everything else on the back burner. It doesn't mean we're not going to go back to it at some point, but let's put it all in the back burner and really double down and focus on what we enjoy the most because it gives us the most energy and what we think we're the best at so we can really focus in on it.
9:44And that was the podcast. And the truth is, even at the beginning, we weren't getting a lot of traction in the podcast. We had done several podcasts in the past and we thought this is like our fourth podcast. We're going to kill it. And we published it and it was crickets. Like we had several episodes ready. We built this website. We're excited for everyone to reach out and be like, yeah, a million university. You guys are going to change the world. And nothing happened. It was so disappointing. And even after we learned other stuff, it was still crickets. But after focusing on that one thing, just growing the podcast numbers in any way we could, creating the best content we could for the podcast, we did start to see traction to the point today where we now in the past 30 days have over 260 ,000 downloads.
10:30And it's just everything has changed. Now we have traction. We can go back and start to do some of those other things over time. Yeah, I feel like there's a certain pressure to be everywhere and try all these different channels. But the brands and creators that you see doing that likely have a team in place. They've been doing this for years where they've really honed in the systems for it. 100%. And if you're trying to do that as a side hustle, you're just like, oh my God. And then that's the reason I've had such a hard time dedicating the time to short form social platforms. It's like, I'd so much rather create long form content that's going to be around for years.
11:04100%. Then come up with this thread that may or may not get any traction or eyeballs is gone tomorrow, even if it does. I guess it's just kind of a weird. And one of the things that I eliminated early on that I felt was very necessary in the business was the email opt-in form had like first name email, right? And some people would not fill in the first name. It was like an optional field, but I would, I still remember doing this in Aweber, copying and paste this email. And sometimes it would be like John Smith at yahoo.com. It's like, okay, I'm going to guess that this guy's name was John. So I'm gonna put in John and like, just so it would show up like more personalized in their broadcast emails.
11:39It's like, if somebody didn't care to put in their name. Like, I don't know, the cumulative hours I probably spent doing this in the name of a more personalized experience. But that was something that has long since been eliminated. So that's rule number two, eliminate what is not getting results or driving you towards that intention. But what's number three for us? Rule number three is automate. So you want to take that same list that you had all those things on, you eliminate everything you can and also eliminate things in your personal life. They say the average person consumes about eight hours of media per day.
12:13So imagine if you could just cut that in half. If you're at four, cut it to two. I'm not saying don't watch any TV or like I would be a hypocrite, right? Or Netflix or anything. But just cut that in half. It'll buy back a lot of your time. So then you're going to take that list of what's left over. And number three and four kind of go together. You're going to write down, you're going going to figure out what you can automate, which is number three, and then number four, which is delegate. So you're going to look at this list and you're not going to think, can I automate or delegate these things?
12:42You're going to think, how can I automate and delegate everything on this list? Now you want to start with the things that take the most of your time and you feel like would be the easiest to automate or to delegate. So for us, for example, when we were flipping houses, we spent most of our time making offers on houses, fixing up houses, managing contractors, that sort of thing. So some of the things that we did was we hired an assistant, we trained her our exact criteria for making offers. And then she later trained our agents. And we had all these agents out making offers, which we gave them authorization to make offers on our behalf, based on our criteria.
13:25And they were making hundreds of offers without us even knowing anything or seeing the house or seeing that number until one got accepted. Then we would briefly go over it and review it, make sure it was good. We had a 14-day inspection clause. I was gonna say, there's a certain level of trust in there, but as long as you have like a risk. Oh yeah, 100%. Yeah, get out of jail free here. Yeah. And then we had just a couple of contractors that we worked with and they had the people they worked with. And we would use the exact same materials for every house. The decision making went out the door.
13:57We were buying similar types of houses and would use the same color paint, same type of finishes. And then another thing that we did, we realized we were spending a ton of time working with contractors and coming up with the beginning would have like three people go to the property and come up with these different bids and would haggle back and forth. And I was sitting down one day and looking at these bids. And I was like, you know, at the end of the day, they're all ending up about the same place. so why don't we just start there and we came up with a list that had every line item that the contractors would do and we came up with a pre-agreed price and we had our contractors agree to that ahead of time so we no longer had to do multiple bids there was no longer any haggling we knew exactly what we were paying for a house for paint for like the square footage of the house we knew we were paying for flooring based on how big the flooring was it was all laid out it made it very simple and really save a lot of time in that way.
14:53Okay. Yeah. So rule two, three, and four, eliminate, automate, delegate in that order, right? There's no sense in automating or delegating stuff that doesn't need to be done in the first place. A hundred percent. But figuring out, and even if it's something as simple as sending an email, like I have found certain triggers would necessitate sending an email to another member of the team. It's like, okay, well, the trigger is that file is delivered back from the editor. So now I need to send a note to the writer that it's ready to summarize. Like, oh, if they're uploading it to a specific folder in Google Drive, like, okay, make used to be Zapier, but like make.com like can automatically send that email trigger, that task notification system, or it could automatically add tasks to Asana.
15:36Even if it's just individually, it only took a couple seconds, but like now you just don't have to think about that. And then delegating that to somebody else on your team, the combo platter of automation and delegation can be super powerful. For me, it was bookkeeping tasks years later than I should have, where it's like every PayPal notification would come through. It was kind of like the dopamine hit of like, oh, I made some money. I get paid. I better go log this in my up to the minute accounting spreadsheet, basically. It's like, oh my God, the task switching costs of all this sort of thing.
16:05100%. Having a bookkeeper that can tap into your accounts and just create that summary for you. More with Justin in just a moment, including how he's delegated himself off his own podcast and more rules to scale your side hustle right after this. As a business owner, you worked hard to make that phone ring, but missing a business call, it's like watching money fly right out the window. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo, spelled Q-U-O. It's the smarter way to run your business communications. Quo is the number one business phone system built for 2025, not 1995. In fact, it's rated the top choice for customer satisfaction with over 3 ,000 reviews on G2.
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18:38So in our house flipping education business, essentially, the way it worked out was like, what were all the main things that we needed to do? We needed a tech guy, I need someone who was constantly making offers and funnels and sending out emails. So we brought on a guy to do that. And then it was essentially coaching. So I initially did the coaching myself, but then brought someone on to help with the coaching. And over time, brought on other coaches. eventually our COO was one of our first high-level students. We got to the point in the business where I was no longer needed in my house-upping business or my education business or my coaching business.
19:16And I would show up to events and just kind of talk a little bit and record stuff and just kind of hang out. And eventually, when we were ready to sell the business, it was an easy exit because we weren't needed anymore. It makes it more sellable or makes it sellable in the first place. Yeah, exactly. not relying on you. But it's interesting too, with the podcast, in fact, it's rarely you behind the mic from how it started to where it is today. Yeah. So the same thing with our podcast now, it's like, what are the main things that we focus on? What are the main levers? And it's create podcast content.
19:49I always use you as an example. I'm like, is our content as good as Nick Loper's content? If it's not, we got to keep working on it. Right. So that's kind of the gold standard is we're always trying to improve the content. and then we're trying to grow our numbers, right? And I'll get into that in the upcoming ones. But yeah, you're right. We're to the point where Tara and I, who Tara's sitting over here, but we rarely even show up on the podcast. So we've created this podcast that has over a quarter million downloads per month. If I wanna show up, we show up. But my goal is to create businesses where I don't have to be a part of.
20:22If something happens to us, because the truth is there are some days where I don't wanna do anything. There's some days where I feel super motivated and wanna talk. And I like to run businesses in a way that I don't have to be involved if I don't want to or I can't. And that, to me personally, is kind of like the ultimate true freedom. Yeah. Was there any pushback from listeners? It'd be like, who's this new guy? Ask you the questions. No. So the way we did it, and this was pretty similar to how we did our coaches, was the first person I brought on was Brian Guerin, who. Side hustle show guest.
20:52Yeah. Yeah. I heard on your episode. So I reached out to him. I was like, hey, you are awesome. Can I interview you? So we kind of built a relationship. And then I asked him, I said, hey, do you want to help me interview people on the show? And of course, he was excited to do that because it gives him notoriety. We pay him a little something. We give him a little bit of equity. You know, we kind of made it this win-win situation. There wasn't pushback because they had already heard from him. And then I think I don't know if I interviewed him again or the first couple of times that he interviewed someone, I did the intro and outro.
21:21So I helped the guests kind of get warmed up to him. You know how you watch a TV show or a series. and if a new person just comes in and you don't know who they are, you're like, hey, who's that? What's going on? But if you kind of get warmed up to him over time, you're like, okay, I like this person. I can jive with that. So I did the same thing with the other two hosts that we have. I was people, you know, Eric Fisher, who he's been on the show a couple times. I've been on his show. Long time podcaster, beyond the to-do list. I know, long time, man. So I usually like to have the audience hear them a few times before I let them just kind of go on their own and do their own thing.
21:59We have not had any pushback. I still listen to every episode. I'm kind of like quality control. There have been some episodes that I've sent back and said, hey, we got to get more details on this one. Right. But the goal is eventually where I don't have to do that quality control. OK, so that's rule number four. Delegate. How do you delegate the items on your list? How do you make the business ultimately. It doesn't have to be today, but someday in the future run without you. What have you got for number five? Number five is come up with your de-riskify plan or your risk mitigation plan. De-riskify is just kind of a fun word I came up with.
22:36So this was actually pretty huge for us. And it's something that I don't think a lot of people think about. I think the first few are kind of a little more obvious, but I think the main thing that holds people back from taking action on their dreams and starting their side hustle or their business is fear. It's the fear of what people are going to think of them, the fear of failure, the fear of what if this doesn't work out. And I think the thing that keeps people from growing or scaling their business is fear of risk, fear of what am I going to lose? So one of the things that happened before we started scaling our business was when we first started in the real estate game, it was in May of 2007.
23:15And for those of you who know your real estate history, that was not a good time to get into real estate. But we started out doing a thing called wholesaling, which essentially was we would put houses under contract and then we would sell the rights to that contract. We never actually bought the house, so we weren't risking any money. We weren't risking any repairs or anything like that. A couple of years later, when we went to flip our first house, I was scared to death. The thing is, we weren't even using our own money. we're actually using one of our investors' money, but I was so afraid to lose his money.
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23:45And we made it through that deal, but it caused me to not want to buy any more houses. So we got into rental properties and I learned rental criteria and learned how to understand cash flow. And we just went to town. And in a four month period, we ended up buying 12 houses, which was more houses than we had bought in that shorter period of time. It was really exciting. But we got to a point in our life where we were way out of money. Our investors were out of money. We didn't know how to pay the bills. So kicking and screaming, we had to sell some of those houses. And we ended up selling four of those houses.
24:15And from selling those four houses within a couple of weeks, we made more money than we needed to pay our bills and all our expenses for over a year. And that just changed everything for us. I was like, wow, what if we could do this every month? What if we could make more money than we need for an entire year every month? So we ended up selling the rest of the houses at the same time we started buying more houses, but that also met that rental criteria. And it just helped us go to town. I no longer had that thing in my brain, that limbic brain, that lizard brain, the fight or flight that was getting so afraid of taking action because I didn't know what the end result was going to be.
24:51I was afraid of losing money. So I was stuck in my tracks. I didn't have that anymore because I was buying houses. I was flipping rentals, essentially. I had a plan B. I had a plan A, plan B. If something didn't work out, then I would end up with the 100 rental properties that I initially wanted and the cash flow that I was looking for. So that combined with the systems and all the things that we've been talking about just allowed us to really take off and scale. From there, we got a JV partner who put up, this guy had deep pockets. It wasn't like the other guy that I was borrowing money from who, this was his retirement.
25:21This guy understood the risk and we were just able to go to town. Okay, have a plan B that is still acceptable to you. I think probably makes sense versus like the Warren Buffett thing. You make money when you buy. Like I'm gonna do the forced depreciation thing and sell this to another investor. Let them be the long-term holder of this thing, but I'm going to get my money out quickly as a way to de-risk the whole operation. I think about what's probably on a lot of people's mind for the last nine to 12-ish months in the world of online businesses, algorithm updates and AI and stuff. Like how do I de-risk my business from AI?
25:56Whether it's diversifying traffic sources, whether it's building an email list, whether it's selling your own product, how are you going to compete in an AI first world? the answers may look differently for a person, but that's number five here is this de-risk plan or come up with your de-riskify plan. And it's gonna be different for everyone. The truth is, I don't know about you, but the number one thing people tell us, because we ask our audience like, hey, what's the number one thing you're stuck with? And it's always money. They're like, I don't have enough money. And you know this, I know this.
26:24You don't really need a lot of money to start a business. There's so many different ways you can start a business with little, no money. So it really depends on your situation. And we could talk about this for hours, right? You love service businesses. I love service businesses. There's not a whole lot of risk in going out and trying to get these clients for a service business. In most cases, right? It's like the startup costs for almost anything that we talk about would be sub$500 or there's some creative way to make it such that it is. That it's within reach where you're not having to take out a second mortgage or something to get something off the ground.
26:59and when you've kind of minimized your downside exposure and you're taking a swing at something with some upside, with some scale, it's only a matter of time before something hits and erases all the losses because the first thing may or may not be the one that actually works. 100%. And having the wherewithal to be like, well, that doesn't make me an abject failure. It just means that idea didn't pan out. So, okay, on to the next thing. So definitely keep your risk slow, keep your goals high and get after it. So, all right, that's number five, the de-risk plan. And what have you got for number six?
27:28Number six is what I call the$60 an hour rule or the 3X rule. If someone can do something like a service business, whether it's cleaning, I know you did painting, whether it's gutters, curbs, trash cans, car detailing, yard, tree removal, all that stuff, power washing, parking lots. I'm just naming all kinds of stuff. If you can come up with one of these businesses and you can make at least$60 per hour, you can scale that because then you just hire out the labor at 20,$25 an hour. Then you focus more on getting the new clients. You hire out the labor and that's how you can scale those businesses, also known as nail it, then scale it.
28:11Right. Okay. So this would be like an agency model. Like this is the cost of labor ratio that you would like to see. You want to have the final price be triple your labor cost. Exactly. So my son, for example, he just turned 18 and he's trying to figure out what is he going to do in life, right? And he's been fixing phones and he's been doing a few different things, but he's gotten to the point where he can make$100 an hour fixing phones. So now he just has to improve his marketing. He has to be able to get more clients and then he can hire people to do the driving and to do all these different things, like all the different things that we've been talking about that will allow him to focus on his highest and best use of time and ultimately be able to scale the business.
28:53Yeah, this is one where in the context of SEO and online business, like, okay, based on this projected keyword volume or traffic volume, if it ends up hitting and this projected affiliate ad, it's like really hard to kind of try to figure out, well, what's this page even going to make if it gets to the first page of Google? But say it does and say it is going to make$1 ,000 a year, best case scenario. Like, okay, so it wouldn't be unreasonable to pay somebody 300 bucks to write that article for you. and then lather, rinse, repeat. It's like a timing of cashflow in this case, like you're gonna earn that thousand over the course of 12 months.
29:28Hopefully, you may not. So that's like where the risk comes into play, but that's where you can kind of pencil in, well, okay, what's my labor cost or what's my potential labor cost for whatever model that I'm in? And then, you know, you start to buy back some of your time and then you're able to do the whole think smarter, not work harder, right? You go from labor to leadership and that's how you really go. You become the rainmaker. That's what you focus on. And then you eventually can hire someone to help you with that marketing, but you've increased your customer base pretty significantly. And then hopefully you have repeat customers and so on and so forth.
30:00Rule number seven is the marketing flywheel. How can you creatively get customers for free or even get paid to acquire customers? That's coming up along with Justin's business idea donation and more right after this. Yeah. So this one, I have lots of titles for it, but the marketing flywheel, self-liquidation offer or breakeven funnel. Russell Brunson often refers to the breakeven funnel. And that's kind of how he grew ClickFunnels was he created a webinar and spent X amount of money to get people to register for the webinar, sold the webinar for like$1 ,000 plus six months of ClickFunnels. And the whole concept is you're making money by acquiring customers.
30:41You're acquiring customers for free. And he talks about how he would sometimes talk to venture capitalists and they would ask him, what's your cost to acquire a customer? He's like, oh, no, we acquire them for free. We make money when we acquire customers. I'm like, wait, this doesn't work for my numbers and my algorithm. And it totally throws me off. But understanding this concept, once again, I think so many people who want to get into business think, oh, I got to have this big, huge tech idea and invest millions of dollars and most businesses fail and all this stuff. And it's like, no, You just have to figure out one of these models that work for you.
31:18And for us right now, we're just focused on how much does it cost us to acquire a new listener? And it took us a year to build up to this, but we're at that break-even point that it cost us about$0.06 to$0.08 to acquire a new listener, and we're making about$0.06 to$0.08 for every new listener. So if someone listens to just one more show, we're spending a dollar to make$2. And the goal is to keep growing that. I have these different numbers where I know we could make 10 cents per listener and even up to like 15 cents per listener. If and as we continue to do that, these numbers get better and better.
31:57And then over time, you could add on programs, different things you're selling, but we don't have any of our own programs at this point, but we're already to that break even or make money point, right? Right. There's a thousand different add ons you can make to that to where it's you got your money making machine, essentially. Right. Yeah. And that's the whole goal of business. For every dollar you put in, you're making two dollars back, three dollars back. How can we excel or make that number bigger and bigger that every dollar we invest? We're making more and more back. Yeah, it's fascinating.
32:25We heard from newsletter operators. Well, if every I mean, there is very elaborate equations that could start to go into it. But like, well, what's a new subscriber worth to us? does it make sense to pay two dollars for a subscriber if they're going to open 50 of the emails and they're going to stay on the list for nine months and they're going to be exposed like oh okay we're going to make five dollars from that one subscriber on average so yeah we're happy to pay two bucks for it and so this is on terms of the podcast downloads this is just on average we have two or three four ads per show at this cpm so every download is worth to us six to eight cents or six to 10 cents.
33:01Yep, yep. I'm constantly looking at the numbers and analyzing numbers and just seeing, oh, if we pull this one lever and we spend this much money, what does that do to our bottom line? Yeah, that's really interesting. Like only very recently started doing any paid podcast promotion. And it's interesting to look at like the cost per download metrics or cost per subscriber metrics. Yeah, I never really thought about it that way. And then, yeah, if you have a potential guest, could you share the cost with that? because they're getting some promotional benefit out of it. But yeah, what platforms do you like in terms of going out and buying listeners?
33:35So at the beginning, we had an agency that we hired that was connecting with a lot of other podcasters, but it was costing us like several dollars to get a download. Then we started going to like the podcast players and we started to get a lower amount. But one of the gotchas, something you want to watch out for is what we didn't realize because we just didn't know what we didn't know until we were starting to work with an agency to get sponsors for us was one of these podcast players, a lot of the places they were promoting to were in countries that sponsors just being honest, they just weren't paying for those areas.
34:11So we got to a point where we had like 20 % in the US and our agency was like, that's not gonna work. So we had to go back to the drawing. It's like Facebook ads. Like, oh yeah, it's cheap if you wanna advertise to a non-US audience. Gotcha, gotcha. But then we found the right players. And if you invest enough, certain players, the amount just goes up depending on like how many people are bidding on it, right, or buying the ads. And then there are other players that you can negotiate with the podcast player. We've done such a high volume at this point where we've gotten some of the players to come down.
34:48We're like, hey, we'll keep buying in volume. We just want a good deal. We mainly buy like the US, but then they'll throw in other places like Canada, Australia, UK. So we've been able to literally like 3x the amount of listeners that we would be getting with them because we've worked out deals. We're buying in bulk. We know they're good listeners. We know we're getting paid well for them. But yeah, another one I really like. This isn't a podcast player, but it's called Podroll. Podroll is amazing because you can get a great CPM by allowing other podcasters to do what's called a feed drop. I don't want to get too technical, too into the weeds here, but doing a feed drop is where another podcaster can put their episode in your feed.
35:33And Podroll has a platform that facilitates doing this. So initially we got doing Podroll because we're like, oh, you can make$50 to$100 CPM. But what we realized is we wanted to be on the other end of that where we're paying 50 to 100 cpm for people to listen to our show. Because it sounds like a high cpm, but they're actually listening to your show. It's not just someone hearing a one minute ad on someone else's show on your podcast. Right? They're listening to your show. So you get the downloads. And then you get some people that stick with you. And that's how you can grow. So that's been huge for us.
36:14It gets pretty exciting. And you can do that. I know we're talking about podcasting, but you can do this, like you said, with an email list. You can do it with, I know, I would say a blog. I know there's been a lot of stuff with the updates and whatnot, but it's just all about, and I guess that gets us to our last one, which is, oh no, there's two more. I've been talking too much. Anyway, I'll save that, but you can do this with anything. Yeah. Figuring out what that marketing flywheel is, what that self-liquidating offer may be if that may be possible in your industry or your niche? Like, how can you acquire customers for free?
36:46I think it's a creative marketing thought experiment, if nothing else, to figure out where are customers at? How can I set this up in such a way that it doesn't cost me anything to get that next lead into the funnel, that next person into the pipeline there? All right, that's number seven, the marketing flywheel or the break-even funnel. What have you got for number eight? So number eight is you want to understand the velocity of money and returns and how they work. And this might sound simple, but I'm telling you, most people do not understand it. In fact, I read something earlier that said two thirds of American adults cannot pass a very basic financial test.
37:25We just don't learn this stuff in school. But the velocity of money basically says, for example, we started flipping houses. We were making anywhere from 15 to 20 percent on the money that we invested into a particular house, it would take us about four months to flip a house. So there's 12 months in a year. We could essentially turn that money three times. So essentially, if you're making 10 to 15 % and you're doing that three times a year, that's... It's probably more than that. I think, yeah, I messed up these numbers. 45 to 60. Yeah, 15 to 20 % were the numbers. You make 15 to 20 % on your money and you do that three times a year, you're making 45 to 60 % annualized.
38:08Yeah, nominally, I'm sure there's like some other velocity, time component or time value element to it too. But right, it's like, okay, how quickly can I get a return on it? And how often can I lather, rinse, repeat? Is that my understanding? Yeah, exactly. We were making 50 to 20 % per house. We were doing that three times a year, giving money. And that was 45 to 60 % for the year. So what we did, I mentioned this JV partner. I went to this guy. This guy had deep pockets, millions of dollars, knew the real estate game, was just kind of retired. And I said, hey, here's our track record. Here's all the houses.
38:41Here are the numbers we're getting. Would you be interested in putting up the money? And we split the profit. And he took a look at it and he's like, heck yeah, it took a little more than that. But essentially, that's what it came down to. And he essentially gave us a blank check. So we now knew we had the systems to buy the houses. We had the systems to fix up the houses. We just needed more money. And that was our money. And that's the other thing that helped us really grow because his return, all he did was he's like, OK, so I'm going to make anywhere from 22 and a half to 30 percent annualized.
39:10That's a heck of a lot better than what I'm making and anything else I'm doing. Since that time, I've talked to a lot of different people and done this with a lot of different businesses. We talked to a guy that had like a grass fed beef business. So he raised cows, essentially. And he was like, I want to do more of this. I just don't have the money. And I'm like, OK, how much does it cost you to buy a cow? How much does it cost to feed the cow? What are all the expenses that go into that cow? How long does it take till the cow gets slaughtered? I hope anyone listening gets too offended by this, but how long does it take till you're able to essentially sell the cow?
39:44We broke the numbers down and it was like 100 % annualized returns. I'm like, dude, I'll give you all the money you want. And I said, a better thing to do though is now that you know that you can make 100 % annualized return on the money invested, just go borrow to 10%. Okay. And then you're essentially making 90, it's arbitrage, right? You're taking other people's money, you have the system in place and you're making a killer return on that money. Yeah, this is an interesting one. And I think about it most often in the context of an e-commerce business or a physical product business. Okay, I'm gonna buy 500 bucks of inventory, sell it next month for 600.
40:22And now I've got$600 worth of inventory and I could sell it for 750. And then kind of like continue to level up and multiply your money, but like how you would think about it in context of inventory turns and coming from the car business, like how much inventory is in our parts department right now? That was always like the dealers wanted to know, like how many millions of dollars are we sitting on parts? Like what has it sold lately? Do we really need this sitting on the shelf? Like, could that money be better deployed elsewhere? And it's like, okay, this could really apply to any business that has an investment component to it.
40:51Cost of labor or cost of goods type of aspect to it, like cost of houses in a flipping type of business. You're right. E-commerce is a great example. You just essentially run the numbers. If the numbers make sense, and you can either bring on a JV partner if you don't want to take on the risk, but usually you'll find that the cool thing about business is if and when, like you said, it's hard to get started. It's hard to get that inertia, hard to get that thing going, put that thing up into orbit. But once you do, a business typically will pay you significantly more than you're ever going to make in any other kind of investment, which then allows you to get the investors coming to you.
41:29That's what I believe. And I don't think most people should go out and raise a ton of money unless you've experienced in that kind of thing. But if you're not that experienced in raising money and growing a huge business, nail it first, then scale it, right? Go start that e-com business, go start that SaaS business, whatever that thing is, and then start to get some proven numbers. And if you can come to someone like me and you can show, hey, these are the things I'm selling, This is how much I'm making. These are the returns. I'll give you the money. No problem. No problem all day long. All right.
42:00Well, you may be getting some calls after this. Sounds good. That's number eight, velocity of money. Number nine on the nine rules of scale. Go for it. So number nine is the aggregation of marginal gains, also referred to as like the compound effect. But essentially, the aggregation of marginal gains, many people know about it from the book Atomic Havoc, James Clear and his blog. it essentially is from the british cycling team back in the day for like a hundred years they were horrible they only won like one gold medal in that time and they brought in this guy to be the new manager of the cycling team so his name was dave brailsford the way he did things is most people came in they're like all right we're gonna make this huge improvement by doing this one thing it's gonna change everything and it just wasn't working out so he was all about this thing that we're talking about, the aggregation of marginal gains.
42:54And he just said, if we can take every little component of what it takes to be good at cycling or to make you faster, whether it has to do with the bike or the athlete, then we're just going to do that. We're going to make 1 % improvement each day as much as we can in all these different categories. And within five years, the British cycling team just started dominating. They started winning almost every gold medal. They started winning Tour de France's, which they hadn't done previously in that hundred years. And it just changed everything. And he was just focused on the one small thing. That's what I would invite everyone who's listening to do.
43:32We're in the information age. You're literally listening to a podcast. There's so much information out there. I love like swipe and deploy, see what people are doing and just be like, oh, let's try that. It's a different industry, but I can try it here. We try it out. We test it out. We keep going with what's working. We keep trying to improve the things that aren't working. I'm constantly talking to my team about how can we improve the podcast? How can we get more numbers? How can we improve everything that we're doing just little by little? And as you do those things over time, you'll see a huge difference in your business.
44:04Yeah, this 1 % improvement every day. It's like doesn't make a huge difference. It may not even be noticeable, but over time, it really does start to compound. And that's like Einstein's eighth wonder of the world, compound interest and all this stuff where it really does start to lead to some exponential growth over time. But the trick is doing it consistently, making it a habit. So the compound effect for number nine. Let's move on to round two, the donate a business idea round. What have you got for us here? So I have business ideas every day, as I'm sure you do as well. But the idea, and it's related to all the things that I've been working on combined with different things that have been happening in my life.
44:44So recently, we traveled the world for nine months. As you know, we were in Rome just a couple of months ago. And as we were in Europe and these different places, we're doing all these tours. And some were OK, but some of them were kind of long and a little boring. But it was almost like a necessary evil. I felt like I'm glad I'm doing this tour, but I'm kind of bored and it's a little long. And I thought, you know, there needs to be something called 10-minute tours or something like that. And I know they have audio tours, but I was like, what if there was like a podcast that had like a tour that my mind got going to like a, or a history lesson.
45:16And maybe it's longer than 10 minutes, maybe because now that I'm thinking about the ads that you can put in, maybe it's a little longer so we can put more ads in, but you have 30 minute to 40 minute lessons. And there's so many lessons you could do on history just in Italy alone. Cause we were in Italy for like 38 days. I'm like, you could do a lesson on that, on that, on that, on that, on that. But part of the reason why I had this idea, too, is I know another guy who has a history podcast, but he does it himself. And his returns are bigger than ours just because there's a lot of business podcasts.
45:45And he invests in his podcast and the amount of people that stick and the amount he has to spend to get more listeners are significantly higher than what ours are. So I was taking all these ideas. I was like, I don't know a lot about history, but I know there's a lot of people out there who do know a lot about history and they're probably not making a ton of money. I thought you could reach out to them. And then Tara made an ad for our podcast the other day. And we got this great guy with a great voiceover voice. Just, you know, just sounded amazing. And I was like, you get the person who writes these things, get the person who's going to record them, and then just work with different podcast players and promoting these.
46:23So this guy, once again, he spends all day creating this. You could tell he works really hard on him. I was like, man, you could put this thing together, bring the people together. you could pay them equity. So there's no cost. Or if you have a little bit of money, you could just pay them whatever they would get paid and ultimately you make more money. Yeah. Or it may even be like an AI voiceover artist. A hundred percent. Yeah. I was thinking of all that too. I was like, you could probably do some AI stuff. You could probably do, especially like AI online is kind of tough because you have Google like crawling it and everything, but podcasting, no one's crawling podcasting, right?
46:57So you could even create these lessons through AI. you could record them yourself or you could have someone else record them. But then the same idea, like for every dollar you spend, you could easily make two back and you could essentially have this thing be, you could be a big part of it or you could just kind of outsource it to different people. And anyway, I'm just sitting there at the Coliseum and the forum. And I'm like, this guy is kind of boring, but people need these lessons. They're incredibly valuable. And I think it would just take off. Anyway, if I had more time, I'd do it. But yeah, that's the business idea.
47:30donation audio history lessons or audio walking tours. We've been on some that were incredible. We had this British guy in Barcelona who was just like so into the history of the city. And here we're going from the fifth century to the 15th. That's awesome. It's right across the street from, you know, and he was really into it. And he told us that the FC Barcelona logo is like got those four red stripes. He's like, that was like the king's bloody fingers, like running down a, like, dude, I will never look at that. That's awesome. We'll go the same way again. And then we've had other ones where you're kind of like, yeah, I'm getting something here, but he's the bar now that everything else is measured against.
48:05It's interesting. But yeah, this could be an interesting one, hiring historians to write or repurpose lessons. Maybe they already have. Maybe could I license these from you? And then hiring a voiceover artist or using some AI voiceover to be the voice of your podcast might be interesting to play around with. And you can do the same thing with science or any subject, right? And it goes on and on, but just, yeah, what came to mind. Yeah, yeah, you got to scratch your own itch from these boring tours. Yeah, exactly. All right, round three is the triple threat. This is, first off, a marketing tactic that's working for you right now.
48:39Could be this pod roll stuff. Could be something else you got in mind. Yeah, I mean, I think I've kind of went through that. It's just working with the podcast players to promote the show. And we have our numbers pretty dialed in. Like, I'm pretty aware of what it costs us for each pod player. If that doesn't work, I reach out to him and try to negotiate a better deal or we focus on other ones. And then from that, like I said, we're going to leverage it into working more with podcast swaps and all that. So that's kind of our main focus. At some point, we do want to launch a program, but we're just trying to hang in as long as we can.
49:10Because once we do that, it's a whole other thing to take care of. We're just trying to generate a bunch of cash because cash will allow us to hire more people and just keep that flywheel going. Right. Yeah. If you can get somebody to tune in for multiple episodes, they join the email list, maybe they eventually buy the to be determined future product. Totally. There's a lot of good things that can happen. And it could be an affiliate marketing at the beginning, right? There's so many different options. A new or new to you tool that you're loving right now. For me, this might sound kind of boring and not that exciting.
49:40I just love my Google Calendar. That is my second brain. Anytime I have an idea, a thought, I put it in my calendar. If I have to do, I put it in there. And then I just either delete them, like eliminate, automate or delegate. That's my list, right? So every day I'll have my list of top priorities. I'll check it out the day before, make sure it's what I want to do for the next day. And I'll either delete it. I'll move it over like sometimes months away. Sometimes it felt like a great idea and then it's not anymore. But I'm always trying to figure out how can I systematize this? How can I do? But I use the Google Calendar.
50:12very not that sexy but i use it all the time it's my calendar of where to go where to be what to do it's what i live by i never wake up and don't know what to do because it's always there very good not a new tool but a very useful one at that so i like that one as well it's like and i find myself to block off that time and be like it's not important right now i'll punt that off until next month but like it's in there it's kind of a reminder yes you thought this was important at one point. Exactly. Is it still? All right. So that is the tool and a favorite book from the last 12 months. So in getting ready for this, I re-listened to the book Procrastination on Purpose by Rory Vaden.
50:54He also has a good TED Talk on it. And he kind of talks about the focus funnel. And he does go over, I don't know about you, but sometimes I'll teach something or talk about something and I almost forget where I learned it from. So as I listened to that again, I was like, Oh, yeah, he talked about the eliminate, the automate, the delegate. And then he goes as far as to procrastinate on purpose, right? If it's not a priority now and then concentrate. That was a pretty good read, I thought. He talks about ROTI, return on time invested, which is a lot about what we've been talking about and how that's like the best investment you can make is working on your business instead of just in your business and it'll pay you back dividends for time to come.
51:37Yeah, return on time. You start off doing the$10 an hour things and you graduate to the$100 an hour things. And then hopefully you graduate to the$1 ,000 an hour things. And I like this. I have not read this book, Procrastinate on Purpose, but we'll link that up in the show notes for this episode. You can just follow the link in the episode description and I'll get right over there. Millionaire University, Justin Williams, thank you so much for joining me. Be sure to check out the podcast. Check out the website at millionaireuniversity.com. Any parting words of guidance before we wrap up here?
52:06I would just say, take action. That's what everyone says, but take action. And then after you've taken action, don't just keep taking action. Start to think about how can I use leverage? How can I grow? How can I implement the things that we're talking about today so that you can really get to the point where you're making more money with less time? And once again, I want that to sound like cheesy or like woo woo or fake, but you really can. the same things that helped us get to the point where we were flipping 100 houses a year also gave us more time. Because if we were the bottleneck, if we were the one doing it, there was no way that would have happened.
52:41Same with our education business. So just take action, but then start thinking about how can I take that next level of action that will get me to that next level and just keep living a life on purpose. Yeah, it's such an interesting distinction between how can I make extra money, right? I'm going to go solve this problem. And then flipping the switch to be like, how can I be a business owner and trying to fire yourself from the doing stuff and promoting yourself to the CEO role. And it's a different set of questions. I think it's really interesting stuff. So again, millionaireuniversity.com, check out the podcast.
53:15I was an early guest on there. Brian was my interviewer for that one. I think that's a good one to start with. But big thanks to Justin for sharing his insight. Big thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone. As always, you can hit up sidehustlenation.com slash deals for all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place. Thank you for supporting the advertisers that support the show. That is it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you're finding value in the show, the greatest compliment is to share it with a friend. So fire off that text message. Hey, I think you'll like this episode.
53:47Hey, I think you should check this out. Until next time, let's go out there and make something happen. And I'll catch you in the next edition of the Side Hustle Show. Hustle on.
From the publisher
Let's talk about 9 rules to scaling up your side hustle.
We've got a lot of episodes on the zero-to-one part of the equation, but now it's time to go from one to two to ten.
Joining me is Justin Williams, a serial entrepreneur who's done it all—from flipping over a hundred houses a year to scaling and selling an online education business.
Now, he's the brains behind millionaireuniversity.com and its accompanying podcast.
Full Show Notes: 9 Rules to Scale Any Side Hustle
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