76. How to Earn $4.8M/Year Doing What You Love

0:00As the old adage goes, do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life. Although true, it's way easier said than done. Do you know what you love? Do you know whether you should pursue it? And most importantly, do you know how to monetize it? We are now getting preferential treatment over others. And the last time we did that, we turned a$100 ,000 job into a 1 million plus job. Every change, every piece of knowledge you acquire allows you to do what you do better, faster, and for more money. It's harder to find new clients than it is to keep a client that you already have. So focus on them.

0:32I'm saving and reserving my free time to learn because I know everything I learned is going to magnify through the pieces of content that I create. So I delegate almost every single thing except for the parts that cannot be delegated. So when I make an announcement, I'm going to do a workshop or a talk. They'll show up. If I launch a video, they'll make sure they watch the whole video. I'm your host, Alex Freeman, and I'm joined by Chris Doe, founder of The Future, who turned his love of teaching into a 400K a month business. Earning exorbitant amounts of money from your passion is possible, but the key is doing it the right way.

1:06And that's exactly what we're covering in today's episode. Let's get started. Chris, thanks so much for joining us. Glad to be here. Thanks for having me. So to get things started, tell me a bit about your background. When and why did you start the future and how did you get there? I'm a traditionally trained graphic designer who, upon graduation, got into motion design and making commercials and music videos. But in 2014, a friend of mine asked me to start making YouTube videos. I reluctantly said yes. And that decision changed the course of my life. Making videos is now my primary business. Teaching others is what I do.

1:37Incredible. And can you tell me about your mission with the future and how you kind of came to that decision as being the goal and how that big picture vision helped the company grow? Sure. Our mission is to teach 1 billion people how to make a living doing what they love. And this expression came from a management meeting with my executive team. We were transitioning from doing client work, making videos and commercials into creating content. And I wanted to know, what are we doing now? What is it that we're in the business of? And I wanted to be able to articulate to them in a short, succinct way.

2:07I told them a story. I could tell it worked. That night I went home and kind of thought about it. And by the next morning, I was able to rewrite it into the sentence which I just said to you. Helping people to monetize what they love doing begs the question of how does somebody figure out what they love doing? If somebody hasn't figured that out yet. What steps should they take? And how did you discover what you love doing? I think finding what you love doing is sometimes a lifelong pursuit that some of us never actually find. Most of us in our childhood know what it is that we love, but we're told not to pursue that.

2:38That's a frivolous pursuit that we'll never make any money. We'll be starving. I was one of those people. And I thought for a long time that creativity was the thing that you do as part of your pastime, your hobby, but not as a career. It wasn't until I met a real life graphic designer who was actually making a living doing what he loved that it gave me permission to pursue the same. And so I would suggest to people, think back when you were like five or seven years old, think about what you love to do, where you lose track of time when you're in your total flow state. One in which you're almost like not gonna go to the bathroom because you're having so much fun doing it.

3:06That's a clue. So go back to that place. As somebody uncovers what they do love doing, understanding that it could be a profitable business. So how do they take that leap? What kind of research should somebody be doing to identify a target market for what they love doing and verify that it can be profitable. If you truly found something that you love doing, you have an inherent built-in advantage over other people who are just kind of doing it and phoning it in. You're naturally passionate, you're very curious and you can become obsessed. So allow yourself to become obsessed. Learn as much as you can about what it is that you do and put in the time and the necessary work to become excellent.

3:40Once you do that, look for a market that might need something close to the way of the thing that you like to do. When you can find the intersection between what a market needs, what a starving market wants, and what it is that you love to do, you may have found your purpose in life. I love that. Almost finding it to be an obsession. So when you found your own obsession, how long did it take for that obsession to become profitable? And did you have any struggles staying motivated if you were in that kind of obsessive flow state with it? I taught in a private art school for over 15 years. I would say that I was obsessed, but I wasn't thinking about it as a long-term career thing.

4:13I thought it was a way to give back to the community. It wasn't until many years later that I meet my former business partner, Jose Caballet, that we started to formulize a business plan or create a business around education. So there was a lot to learn. Prior to that, someone else took care of the enrollment of students, the marketing, all the things that you need to do to run a class. I just focused on teaching. So now I had to learn a whole different skill set. And it does take some time. I think from the time in which we started teaching online until when it became semi-reasonable to start a business, I think it took a little over three years.

4:43And in the business now, can you break down what revenue streams exist in the business for you? Yes. In an education business like the one in which we run, there are multiple buckets that add up to a larger sum of money. So we make money by creating courses that used to be the primary way in which we made money. And then we run a community, a coaching community called the Future Pro Group. Now that's become the single largest source of revenue for us. So much so that we've split into two groups, Accelerator and Pro, for people who are starting from zero and who need to get to 100K. And the Pro is for anyone who's from 100K who wants to get to half a million to a million dollars.

5:16We also do brand deals where we're working with large corporations and sponsored projects. They do pay us quite a bit of money. We make passive income through YouTube AdSense for the videos that are viewed by hopefully thousands or millions of people. Every single month, we make money that way. And I do also make money doing public speaking and running workshops. So all those combined is what allows us to run our business. What I might take from that initially is just kind of my own reflection of that is that the best way to scale revenue in a creative business is to create these multiple buckets.

5:45Is that true? Or is there a different strategy that I may have missed? There are two different kinds of businesses in which we want to lump together under the umbrella of creative business. One is service oriented, one is product oriented. The future is really a product company. We don't really have clients. We have customers and there's a big difference. Instead of selling to a few people, we sell to many. And so they're products that we release and we release whatever we want, whenever we want, based on our understanding of the market, product fit. Now, when it comes to service industry, which is something that I used to work in for over two decades, entirely different business model.

6:15Here, we're looking for a few clients in which the products are high six figures, mid six figures. And we're not looking for a ton of clients. We're just looking for the right kinds of clients. High competition, a totally different business model. And now we don't have customers, we have clients, and we have to really focus on customer service. We have to give the clients what it is that they want and make them feel great about the process of receiving the services. Very different businesses altogether, different ways of running it, different ways of marketing it. Note for our listeners that you can hear more growth strategies for small business in episode 58 of the podcast, where we interview entrepreneur and business expert, Barry Maltz.

6:47Chris, now I know a lot of creatives in my life, and a lot of them are free spirits, free flowing. And I think that as you become a creative business, that can be the temptation. Does a creative business need a business plan? And how did you plan before you started the future? Now I've run and started two multi seven figure businesses, and I've never had a business plan. I don't believe in business plans, but I'm not saying that they're not good for every kind of person. The problem with business plans is it's asking you to forecast into the future based on too little information and you can get stuck or married to your own business plan.

7:19And what I mean by that is, let's say you're in the business of client services and you're going to do design and branding for companies and a new business emerges, say, for example, in this case, an education business where you can create products and you can do public speaking, but you're so married to seeing your business plan through that you don't respond to new opportunities or challenges. I don't know about you, but a year and a half ago, probably no one was talking about artificial intelligence. And now you can't turn anywhere on the internet without somebody talking about AI. So if you made your business plan two years ago and it didn't foresee AIs being a massive disruptive force within the creative world, then you're going to stick to your business plan.

7:53And that's the problem. And a lot of people say a business plan is short for BS. And you know what that stands for. So true. So talk to me about how with that in mind, without utilizing a traditional business plan or the kind of BS levels of forecasting that can exist in that process, what steps are you taking to set smart business goals for your business? We have a couple of different goals and the clearest path forward is to set revenue goals. There's two different ways that you can approach this. I talk about this. One is where you look back at historical information and see patterns that emerge, different markets and percentages of growth and you project forward.

8:29I think that's a very reasonable way of figuring out how to forecast what you're going to do this year and the next couple of years based on how you've done historically. I don't want reasonable results. I'm an unreasonable person. So what I do is I look forward to the future. I think about where I want to be in the next one, two to three years, financially speaking. And I set these really lofty goals based on zero information. And then what I do is I just sit throughout the rest of the year thinking about how do I close the gap between where we are and where we want to be. Last year, we did$5.4 million in revenue.

8:57This year, I want us to hit$8.5 million. So we have to close a$3 million gap. I do not know how to get there just yet, but I'm looking for three$1 million ideas. This kind of forecasting forces you to really audit and make sure that you're doing the right kinds of things that are going to get you there. For example, if a new business opportunity comes in and it's$100 ,000 opportunity, everybody in the team will think, this is great, let's do this. But you know how many of those I have to do or find in order for me to get to that$3 million gap. I'd have to do 30 of those opportunities and there are not that many of them.

9:27So it forces me to filter and select the right kinds of ideas. What's the biggest myth that people believe about doing what you love for a living? And what's the actual reality of that situation? Well, there's a couple of things like doing what you love. It doesn't mean that you will never work. That's a big myth there because that's the rest of the expression. If you do what you love, you'll never work a day in your life. No, you work like hell because if you have raw talent, that's the part that the love speaks about. But if that talent isn't discipline, if you don't seek personal growth, development and coaching, and you're not constantly thinking about how do I optimize this?

10:00how do you become not just best in town or best in country, but best in world, then you're going to leave a lot of untapped potential on the table and it requires a ton of work. But work isn't the way that other people would see work. It's not a grind. It's not like you dread doing something. It's actually something you look forward to doing that you obsess over and you can't stop thinking about. And I think that's the kind of work that I think is super pleasurable. And it means that you're really aligned with what you're supposed to be doing. So what's the downside to having a career you're passionate about?

10:26That you can become super obsessed and you can become a workaholic and you can forget other kinds of things that you're supposed to be working on, like your personal relationships, like being a parent or making sure you're there for your partner. The other part that the downside is sometimes you're so obsessed with what you're doing that the business model hasn't emerged. You haven't been able to figure it out. And all the signs tell you this is not working now and you just won't give up and you run yourself into the ground through exhaustion and through bankruptcy. So how do you avoid that? I think you have to give yourself realistic timetable with realistic goals and say, okay, I'm going to give myself three years to hit this.

11:00And if I'm not making significant progress towards that goal year one, year two, by the end of year three, I have to reevaluate, either set new goals or say, you know what, I did the best that I could. This is just not for me. Or right idea, wrong time or wrong person. Something is wrong. What did you first struggle with when you were first getting the future going? And how did you overcome that struggle? I think transitioning from being a service industry and having that mindset of serving other people and waiting for a project or a creative brief to emerge, learning how to set your own brief, your own agenda without any other input from somebody else is the ultimate kind of freedom.

11:32But with that kind of freedom comes a lot of indecision. So I think the problem is switching gears in your mind in terms of figuring out what it is that you want after having served someone else for 20 plus years. It's a bit of a trick. When you're looking at potential revenue streams for the business, what is your evaluation process to decide if it is something to pursue or if it is something that is maybe not for now or maybe not forever? One, if it's something that's pulling us away from our mission of teaching, then I consider that a distraction. And there are many things and many opportunities that will come your way, especially if you're obsessed and good and there's a hungry market for you.

12:06Two, I don't want to respond to other people's wishes, meaning I don't want partners, I don't want investors, I don't want anybody that starts to feel like they have an ownership in my company because then I start to compromise and feel like I'm doing this for someone else and not for myself. And that will zap my motivation. And number three is I'm looking quite literally for half a million to million dollar ideas or multi-million dollar ideas. And when I hear something that has that potential, I would pursue that over like, let's go and refine one of our business models right now. In your opinion, what's the biggest reason that a creative business fails and how can new entrepreneurs avoid finding failure?

12:41here. We'll start with the basic. Most businesses fail in the creative space because they have no idea about their own finances. They don't know if they're profitable. They don't know if the margins are correct and how they're bidding their projects. And number two is they've been believing this idea that if the work is good enough, you won't have to sell anything. And that is very rarely true. If you're world-class and unique in that no one else or few other people can do what you do, then that might be true. Most of us don't fit that kind of category or that description. So I would say that you have to learn how to market to generate leads.

13:11And then you have to learn how to do sales, which is turning warm leads or prospects into clients. And that's a whole different kind of soft skill that most creative people don't know how to do. This is going to bring us to a section of our show that we call our Fan Blitz Questions. These questions come from our YouTube community. Listeners, you can go join that community by going to youtube.com slash upflip and post questions to future podcast guests. Chris, I've got six questions here. Let's try and do them in about, I don't know, a minute and a half or so. Let's really hit these. All right.

13:40Laporta D submitted a couple of questions. The first one being, do the tactics that you teach work for physical style businesses? So I guess that would be like a product oriented business or just in the creative space. These are business principles. They're not creative principles and they're not meant to be for products or services or tangible or intangible things. This is how commerce is done. And this is the stuff you would learn if you went to business school. Another one from Laporta D. What's your advice for software developers who specialize in mobile but don't know what business issue to go solve?

14:10When people have that kind of problem, they don't understand who their uses are and what their pain points and challenges are because they're casting too wide of a net. Focus up on who you serve, observe them, find a pain point, a challenge they have and solve that. You'll do well. Andre Vasily would like to know about any tools or techniques that you have to introduce yourself to potential clients that you found as you're prospecting the market to see if they're looking for what you have to offer. I would just get on LinkedIn. Less than 1 % of people who are on LinkedIn actually ever make a post.

14:39I'm not talking about a long post or short post. They never post something. LinkedIn is full of business-minded people who want to either grow, market, sell, or buy services. Get on LinkedIn, create value for other people, and introduce yourself to the world that way. Mr. Arshath asks, really a great question for any business here. How do you get repeat customers? Deliver, over-deliver, and deliver customer delight. It's harder to find new clients than it is to keep a client that you already have. So focus on them. In three words, what would you like to tell the naysayers now that you've made it this far?

15:09Keep coming. Didn't even need all three words. Just two. I love it. And last one of these FanBlitz questions here. How would you rebrand yourself on Mars? I think you don't have to rebrand yourself on Mars. There's probably little to no competition. So you're the only game in town. I love it. That's going to do it for the FanBlitz questions. Listeners, let us know what you think of this episode by reviewing it on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you're listening right now. Chris, a few more questions for me here. In the world of the courses, can you talk about the process for developing a new course?

15:38What are the big steps involved? I mean, even just starting from determining that now is the time to develop this specific course. If you listen to your audience, your community, they give you all the feedback that you need. Oftentimes you'll hear a pain point, a challenge, and you're thinking, I didn't know everybody else didn't already know how to do this. Once you have an idea, what I would do is develop a minimum viable product in the form of a workshop, something that you can do an hour or an hour and a half. Teach one or two skills at most and focus on going deep. What you need is real-time feedback to figure out if this is working.

16:08So you're going to make adjustments. What I would do is repeat that over and over again until you have that nailed. And then take that entire process and repeat it across all the different parts that you need to teach to create a comprehensive course. Always prototype and test your course before you go and go through the effort of recording video. There's an additional benefit. If you teach this in real-time, you'll get real-time feedback, but you'll get testimonials, which you can use when you go to launch. This is very important. And this gives others who are reluctant some proof that you can do this.

16:34How are you listening to your customers and potential customers? Like what is the process for gathering that feedback? There's a couple of ways to do that. They literally will tell you on all social platforms, in the DMs and out loud, but there is a dark place on the internet. It's called Reddit. Go into Reddit, poke around, search for yourself and see what happens. And there you get an unfiltered response, sometimes not wholly informed. So don't take it as gospel, But it's important to engage and read and understand what the critical feedback is. I guess this question is specific to the courses, but I'm curious, just kind of all around, how do you determine the right pricing for the courses?

17:08And I guess for the courses and then for any other services, how do you go about building out the correct price to charge for your services? That is a super difficult question to answer. I'll tell you the correct way and then I'll tell you the way we do it or I do it. Okay. The correct way would be to see what the different price points in the market are and to list out the features and the benefits of each one relative to the price and the experience of the instructor and the size of audience that they have. You get a pretty good product matrix. Now, what you have to do is you have to figure out where do you want to be positioned in the market?

17:37Are you going to go for mass and teach at the bottom level? Or are you going to be the most premium experience that's out there and going to charge the most? The price will tell the audience a story about who you are and your level of experience. So when you price it high, they're going to assume that you're really good and it's a very high quality product. It's just the power of pricing. You would price relative to your competition. That's the correct way to do it. For me, what I do is I just sit there and think, what is the right number in which someone's going to be committed to doing the work and think this is a good product that's going to solve the problem?

18:06I've learned over the years that when you charge a low price, they think this cannot be a serious solution to what they're doing. So if they're trying to learn a$30 ,000 skill and you price your course at$199, it might be the best course, objectively speaking, but people are going to say$199, that's too cheap, this can't be good. and they'll go out and buy a$3 ,500 program instead. So with all these different revenue streams and different kinds of things that you're doing, how do you manage your workflow? What systems or tools are you using and how did you pick that one or how did you develop it?

18:36I'm very fortunate. I have enough revenue and I have an amazing team. So the team does 95 % of the work that I do not want to do. I try to do what Peter Drucker talks about, which is to gather the largest amount of discretionary time and lump it together. So most of my days are free except for the things I choose to do. I spend whole days just reading books or writing or just thinking and sketching or going on podcasts like this and being a guest. So I'm saving and reserving my free time to learn because I know everything I learn is going to magnify through the pieces of content that I create.

19:09So I delegate almost every single thing except for the parts that cannot be delegated. What social media platforms are you using as an entrepreneur and that the company is using and how do you determine what platforms your company or you as a creative entrepreneur should be on? Where you should be on should play into the strengths of who you are. Let's say, for example, you have a great voice. You have a great voice. You would make a podcast and do audio only experiences. Let's say you're like really amazingly beautiful, great looking, and people just are mesmerized by you. Well, you should be on video or in pictures.

19:40So you really have to think about your strengths and play to them. All platforms are viable if it's the right platform for you. So for me, I think of it as when I create content, I want it to go on YouTube because that is evergreen. It's searchable. It's not a real social media platform. So years from now, somebody can discover a video and very rarely are they going to be able to do that on LinkedIn, on Facebook or Instagram. And there are posts out there that talk about the shelf life of a piece of content. So TikTok is the shortest and Twitter. And beyond that, then you kind of get into LinkedIn and then YouTube at the very highest end in terms of how long it can live.

20:13I think on YouTube, it can live forever. What kind of content should the creative business be producing? I mean, obviously, like, yeah, in the example of me, obviously, audio content, you mentioned YouTube content. Is that specific to the strengths of the person and the type of business? I heard it explained on Instagram via one of the founders from Flick, which is a technology company. And what he said, and it's like social media platforms are very easy to understand. It's a value exchange platform. You give tremendous amounts of value. They give you their time and attention. The more value you give, the more time and attention they will give you.