Interviewer: Boom, shake the room Fire Nation. JLD here with an audio master class on how to scale to seven figures by adding semi passive income streams. To drop these value bombs, we have brought Lisa Johnson the mic. She helps business owners add that semi-passive income stream to their lives so they can work less but earn more. She’s also the mother of 8-year-old twins and lives in the UK. And Fire Nation, we’ll be talking about why you need both semi-passive and passive income streams. What types of passive income streams, you can create now. I wanna talk about Lisa’s very special and unique CAsSH system. That’s C-A-S-S-H system. We’ll be talking about the biggest mistakes people make along the way and so much more Fire Nation when we get back from thanking our sponsors. Lisa, say what’s up to Fire Nation and share something interesting about yourself that most people don’t know.

Interviewee: Hey to Fire Nation. There’s a lots of things about me that people don’t know. I’ll just give you one. I went on a gameshow and won 28,000 pounds, because it’s Britain, on TV.

Interviewer: Wow. Do you have that linked up on your about me page?

Interviewee: There’s no way. I would never ever show you it.

Interviewer: Oh my God.

Interviewee: I look like a fool.

Interviewer: I’m the exact opposite. See, I actually won a car on the Price is Right and I linked to that on my about me page. It’s sill linked to there like that 11 minute clip of me winning a car on the Price is Right. So, Fire Nation –

Interviewee: That’s brilliant.

Interviewer: – many of you have heard that story before but for those of you that haven’t, you can just go to eofire.com/aboutwatchmewinacaronthepriceisright. And Lisa, congrats. Did you put that 28,000 pounds to good use?

Interviewee: Yeah. I went on three holidays and bought a little smart car.

Interviewer: Now, listen, I don’t wanna go too far down the rabbit hole because I like what you just shared there like you used it for experience and then something practical. But did you get a pretty big luxury tax bill at the end of the year because I don’t know if the UK is the same as the US, but we have like a 60 percent luxury tax.

Interviewee: No. We don’t have that. There’s no tax if you win things.

Interviewer: That’s amazing. See, that’s actually where so many people get so screwed. Like you’re so excited when you see people win on gameshows in the States. You’re like, oh my God. They just won a $75,000.00 yacht, but then they get like a $45,000.00 tax bill at the end of the year.

Interviewee: Are you kidding?

Interviewer: A hundred percent. You have to pay 60 percent tax on the value of it. So, I got a bill at the end of the year for like $9,000.00 for my $17,000.00 car that I won. It was absolutely insanity because the car, of course, is only worth like $13,000.00 or $14,000.00 as soon as you drive it off the lot. So, I actually was considering doing an entire podcast episode about how the gameshow industry in the states is just an absolute scam. And I was gonna actually talk to contestants that won about how winning ruined their lives because it doesn’t obviously ruin everybody’s lives in the states, but it does for people that don’t get prepared or can’t handle that tax. But again, we’re going down that rabbit hole. A big congratulations. I think you should be more proud of that and share it with your audience. I think they would really enjoy watching you win 28,000 pounds on a gameshow.

But, Fire Nation, as I had told you in the introduction, we’re talking all about how to scale to seven figures not just with passive income streams but with semi-passive income streams. So, I really love how you added that word in and we’re gonna get into that right now. So, why Lisa? Why do we need semi-passive as well as passive income streams in our life?

Interviewee: Well, luckily, this year has shown people why they need it. I mean I’ve been banging on about it for three years. When I came into the coaching industry, I was told do one to one. Get ally booked out as you can. So, I did that and I was really lucky. I got six figures very, very quickly and I got fully booked out with one to one spots very quickly. But it wasn’t this success. It wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. I was absolutely shattered. I was working from 6:00 in the morning till 11:00 at night –

Interviewer: What?

Interviewee: – with these one to one clients. And people were saying take my money. I wanna work with you, and I was saying, well, I can’t. I’ve only got so much time in the day. And I knew that was gonna have to change. I’ve got 8-year-old twins. I couldn’t spend every minute working, and then I heard some people talking about passive income on a podcast and didn’t really know what it was. They were actually arguing on this podcast as to whether it exists, which I quite liked. If anybody argues about anything on a podcast, I’m listening to it. And I started learning everything I could about passive and semi-passive income streams like courses, and memberships, and dropship, and all the different things, and started slowly adding passive income streams and semi-passive income streams into my business. And it took me from working 60 hours a week and earning 220,000 a year to earing a million the next year on 24 hours a month.

And so, I then realized how important this was and how so many people weren’t utilizing what there was already out there going from one to one to going to one to many is a great example of a semi-passive income stream, and started teaching my clients it, and telling people you really need to be doing this. And I earned this nickname the Passive Income Queen because of it. But it was only this year when this pandemic hit that a lot of my clients came from the wedding industry because I used to have a wedding planning business, and they suddenly had absolutely no business. But the clients that have worked with me and had passive income streams set up already, they were able to just glide through this year, and still make money whereas the rest of them it was really hard for them. And so, now, people are listening.

Interviewer: I really resonate specifically with the semi-passive income stream stance because I see it every single day, every single week, every single month in my business. We’ve been publishing income reports at eofire.com since October of 2013 I believe, so like 84 months at the time, that you and I are chatting. We’ve done 84 monthly income reports.

Interviewee: Wow.

Interviewer: And I can tell you 100 percent, we are getting passive income and semi-passive income on every single one of those income reports. So, things that I did back in 2013, ’14, ’15, ’16, ’17, go on, and on, and on, are still producing income. And I’m not doing anything except, and this is where I like that word semi, I’m still out here producing great content on the podcast with your right now, and social media, and running blogposts, and email. So, I’m still building my brand, building my awareness, building my authority in different areas. So, that is of course contributing to that income that I put in place years, and years, and years ago, but I’m not actually working on any of those projects that are still making money. So, that is absolutely passive to semi-passive. What are your thoughts on that?

Interviewee: Yeah, I think you’re absolutely right. And that’s where I think people get confused. I wish it wasn’t called passive income. I wish it was called leveraged income because I think passive has connotations that you literally do nothing. And we know that’s not true. You have to work really hard at the start, but then it makes you money over, and over, and over again, and that’s why it’s good thing. It’s not trading time for money anymore. But for me, the reason that I love semi-passive instead of passive is because I was doing everything passive at the beginning because it seemed like the easiest way to do it. So, I would have a course for instance. I would record all the modules, have all the workbooks, stick on my website, and people would buy it overnight. So, yes, I would make money while I slept, but they weren’t getting the results that I really wanted them to get because there was no accountability.

And so, I realized that if I have 10 modules, I could do something over 10 months and just show up for one hour a month, deliver it. Everything was already done. So, all I had to do is deliver it and then go away again. So, that’s 10 hours’ worth of my work. Now, if I was gonna do something one to one with somebody for 10 hours, I could maybe make $20,000.00. If I do it like this, one to many, even though it’s still only 10 hours’ worth of work, I could make $300,000.00 because I’m talking to more people. And it really made me realize that it’s leveraged income. Is it most of it just happening [inaudible] [00:08:44]? No, that doesn’t work, but it’s still worth it because you’re making money time and time again. So, if your integrity tells you that actually it isn’t great for me to just be putting something on my website and hoping people buy it. There are ways around it, and semi-passive income for me is the way around it.

Interviewer: I love that clarification of the word leveraged income, and I honestly think it should be shifted to that. The word passive just doesn’t have the connotations that you, and I, and other people want it to have because we that are living it, that are experiencing it, know that it’s truly leveraged income. It’s not passive because what we’re doing it we’re putting something in place. We’re building that income producing machine, and then we’re doing all the right things to it time and time again, occasionally once a week, once a month, to make sure it’s still running, updating it, tinkering with it a little bit here and there, to leverage that one activity we did way back in the day to make it still an income producing machine. So, let’s get specific Lisa, about the types of passive and semi-passive income streams that are out there.

Interviewee: Yeah. There’s so many that you could do. And when I started, I was like trying them all because it was so exciting to me. So, I was doing a course, and then doing a membership, and doing some drop shipping. There were so many things. The things that I like the most, the things that I think for most people that are already in the industry, already working with clients, so that they could start making money quickly from passive income, I think the easiest way is to go from one to one to one to many. So, think like courses, things like a membership. My membership has been going now for three years, and it doesn’t take me much time. It’s very semi-passive, and it probably makes me around 300,000 a year, things like affiliate.

So, we see this on people’s websites all the time. You probably have this on yours where people say these are the things I like to work with. These are the people I like to work with. These are the systems I like to work with, and you put links for them all. And when someone clicks on one of those links, then you make a bit of money, and you aren’t doing anything for that. You’re literally just using the audience you already have. So, I think affiliates is great. I think eBooks can be a really good one. I have clients that all the time ask, hey, can I pick your brain? Can I take you out for coffee just to ask you a few questions?

Interviewer: No but you can read my eBook.

Interviewee: Exactly. They’re going to ask the same questions anyway. Say, actually I’ve got an eBook all about that. You can go onto my website and grab it. And you’ve done the hard work. You’ve written the eBook. People can just download it time and time again, and you will continue to make money.

Interviewer: And here’s one thing I wanna add to that, Lisa, because I know that you have that membership site you were talking about. So, I get people that reach out to me all the time about podcasting questions, and people that already in Podcasters Paradise, my community where we have that Facebook group specifically ask their questions, they’ll reach out to me one on one. And they’ll say, hey, I just have a couple quick questions about podcasting. I’ll always say listen, I don’t answer questions one on one because then only you benefit, but if you post your question in the Facebook group everybody benefits.

Interviewee: Yeah.

Interviewer: And I do that for multiple reasons, 1.) Because it’s true and so, when I answer their questions in the Facebook group, everybody gets the benefit of the answer, but 2.) It makes it more passive because guess what? Other people answer their questions before I even get to it. So, it takes the complete work and onus off of my shoulders. So, that is a great kind of way to look at what you’re saying and just pointing people toward eBooks, towards your membership sites. And again, if people are asking me a lot of questions about podcasting, I’d say hey, I answer those questions when you join my membership site, when you join Podcasters Paradise, as you can do as well Fire Nation for your membership when you have that. So, keep going Lisa.

Interviewee: I mean, you’re so right in what you’re saying is you can point them to something, and also it gives people that might not be able to afford to work with you in your maybe usual ways to be able to afford to work with you in a smaller way. So, memberships are a great way for them not just for you. Other things such as the usual building app, stocks and bonds, renting out a room, these are all types of passive income because you’re not trading time for money. But for me, I’m a lover of memberships, workshops, and group programs. They’re the three that generally, with my clients, we put those in. They start making money a lot quicker than they were and leveraging their time so that they can stop working as much.

Interviewer: Fire Nation, how can you go from one to on to one to many, course, memberships, workshops, group programs, affiliates, eBooks, app, I mean even throw in real estate there. You can just think of a lot of different cool ideas and things for sure. And Fire Nation, one thing I’ve been really excited to talk with Lisa about today is her CAsSH system that I did tease in the introduction. That’s C-A-S-S-H system, and you’re gonna have to stick around during our sponsorship break to get the dets on that. We’ll be right back. Lisa, we’re back and as I teased before the break, you have the CAsSH system. Break that down for us. What is the CAsSH system, and how can we use it to keep things simple?
Interviewee: Yeah because I love simple. I love a bit of step by step, the easiest way of doing things. So, I found that when I was adding these income streams into my business, I was doing the same thing no matter what product. And I was doing it in the same order. Then, when I was talking to clients, I was telling them to do the exact same thing. And they were getting these great results. So, I decided to trademark what I was doing so that I could teach it easily. So, that’s what the CAsSH system is. I do wish it had one S in it, but we’re gonna have to with it. I couldn’t [inaudible] [00:14:18] in.

Interviewer: It makes it more unique. I kind of like it with a S and lower case S. It just looks look.

Interviewee: It looks cool. So, we’ll go with it. So, what it stands for is the first C is for client because even if you’re passive income stream is gonna be completely different to what you do it in your general everyday business, you’re still gonna have to work out who you wanna serve. So, instead of thinking okay, I’m gonna have a membership or I’m gonna have a course, don’t worry about that in the beginning. Just think about who do I wanna help? Who do I wanna serve? And work out who that person is because that’s what the C is for. You can then go on to the A. The A stand for audience. Now that you know who you wanna server, you need to grow an audience of those people and not just grow an audience of them, and you can do this using a funnel. Funnels are the easiest ways, but there are so many ways now with social media to grow audiences. You need to nurture the audience as well. You can’t just grow them and have them sit there. You need to be consistently giving value. You’re doing this all the time. So, you know what I’m talking about.

And then, the next S is for structure and systems. It used to be that people would go because of the tech. The tech was always the thing that got in the way, but it’s become easier and easier in the last few years. There are all these front-end systems that are much easier to use than they used to be. So, you just need to decide where you’re gonna host your course. Where are you gonna host your membership? We have all these different ones [inaudible], and Teachable. There’s plugins on websites, so many different things you can do, and then, work out how you’re gonna deliver it because not everybody wants to do live video. I love live video. That’s how I will always do my courses and programs. But some people don’t enjoy that. So, they do workbooks or they do audio. And you have to just decide what you’re gonna do that’s good not just for you but for your audience as well.
And then, the next S, which is probably the most important, stands for selling in other words, launching. This is the bit that most people get wrong. Launching isn’t just a case of hey guys, I’ve this thing, come buy it, which people sometimes think it is. It’s a whole strategy on its own. And for me, it takes 6 to 12 weeks to do a really good launch like having everything in place and making sure that people can see what they’re gonna get, what value they’re gonna get from your semi-passive income product. The good thing is once you’ve done one, you’ve got all the marketing to be able to repeat, rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat, and that’s what passive income’s about, right, like continuing to make money from something over and over again.

And then, the H stands for happy because what I found is at the beginning when I first sold my first course, I didn’t have any testimonials. And so, I had to really do a hard job of selling it again. And the first time that you’re doing any kind of passive income stream, whether it’s a course or whatever, you’re putting the work in. You’re writing as you go along. You’re doing all the marketing. You’re writing the workbooks. Where it becomes really passive is like the second time you sell it, the third, fourth, fifth, sixth because it’s already done. And so, you wanna make sure you can sell it over and over again, and the only way you can do that is to make sure your clients are actually getting the result that you promised. So, I think keeping your clients really happy is so, so important and whether that means adding something in to your course that you didn’t have, adding accountability parts to our courses. We added in done for you services like funnels because people get stuck because it’s really important you do absolutely everything you can to have people get results. But if you follow those five steps, client, audience, systems and structures, selling, and keeping your customers happy, you will continue to make passive income over and over again.

Interviewer: We’re talking cold hard cash Fire Nation, clients, audiences, that’s the nurture and the adding of the value part of it, that structure, those systems, and then of course the selling, which is the most important. That’s also known as launching, and I love how you broke that down, Lisa. Six to twelve weeks for a great launch. That’s really setting solid expectations. You just can’t come up with an idea and next week just think you’re gonna have this great launch and then happy. Keep your clients happy. They’re gonna refer you business. They are going to stay longer in your program, and they’re gonna make you happy because they’re happy, and that’s what it’s all about.
Now, despite all of this with your great CAsSH system and everything that you’ve put into place, you’ve still made a lot of mistakes along the way. You know Fire Nation is gonna make a lot of mistakes along the way. We’re human beings. We make mistakes. What are the biggest ones we can know and talk about right to hopefully avoid in some capacity?

Interviewee: Yeah. I’ve made loads. I think everyone has who goes from one to one to one to many. And it’s okay to make mistakes. I wanna make that really clear. If you haven’t made mistakes, you’re probably doing something wrong. You should be learning all the time, and we can only learn from making those mistakes and then tweaking it. So, it the biggest mistakes that I’ve done and that I’ve seen is the expectation of being able to sell something whether it’s a membership, or course, or workshop, whatever, without having an audience because we hear people all the time create your course, sell your first course, you don’t need an audience, or you need a tiny audience. And when we’re being realistic about it, it’s a numbers game.

You do need an audience because otherwise you’ve got nobody to sell to. And yes, there are other ways around it like using affiliates and that kind of thing, but it’s so much better to grow your own audience so that they can really know, like and trust you. We’ve heart this no like and trust [inaudible] [00:19:46], but it’s so true. You know, people wanna buy from people that they like. So, they need to get to know you and they can do that, and you can grow this audience anywhere. It doesn’t have to be like a Facebook where people are starting to not like Facebook groups. So, it can be on your list, your email list. You can email them every week. You could do it on Instagram. You can really do it wherever you like as long as you do grow that audience. So, that’s the first thing I see. The second is spending a log time like six months or more making something shiny. So, like I’m gonna do this course, and I’m gonna do these amazing videos, and they’re all gonna be amazing. It’s costing me thousands to do it, and they do it, and it takes months, and then they put it out there to their audience, and their audience, and their audience is like no. That’s not really what we wanted.

Interviewer: I’ve been there.

Interviewee: So have I. We all have, right? And so, they waste all this time doing something that people don’t want. So, ask your audience first. And the big tip from me is don’t actually write a word of anything until you’ve sold it, and I know that’s scary, but I really believe that it’s the best way to just write it as you go along the first time even if it means you’re doing a beater version or something like that. So, they are the two biggest mistakes I see. But actually, the thing that stops most people from making passive active income is mindset. There’s two things that people say. The first one is I’m not an expert in anything. I don’t believe that I’m a guru. And the second thing is somebody’s already done that. And what I always say is that if somebody has already done it, this is a good thing, not a bad thing. If nobody has done something, there’s a problem there. There may not be a market for it. I’d be more worried about that than somebody having already done something. So, if there’s already a market out there, of course someone’s gonna have done it. But it doesn’t mean that people won’t buy from you. You’re very unique. You say things a different way. You explain things a different way. And so, don’t worry about that part of things.

But on the expert topic, I think we’ve all been sort of raised in this coaching world, and I’ve only been in it three years, and people consistently talk about gurus. And so, we feel like we need to be one when actually we don’t. The definition of an expert is a person that knows the most about a particular subject in an average room not the world or the internet, but an average room. So, we all know something more than others in an average room. I could probably do an entire course on how to potty train twins for example. So, we can all do something. People come to me and say yeah but my business is I’m an assertiveness coach. I don’t really know whether I wanna do a course on that. You don’t have to. Have a think about other things that you know. Your knowledge is everywhere. It isn’t just the thing that you do now. What about something that you may have done in an old job? Maybe you worked in a call center and you’re an expert in customer service or retention. Maybe you were a fitness expert. Or maybe it’s a hobby that you have.

I have a client called Lauren, and she came to me, and she didn’t really know what to have her membership on. And so, she made membership for people that like the theater because she likes the theater. And then, she started buying up theater tickets and selling it to them. And she made 600,000 pounds last year from that membership, and that’s a membership of a hobby. There are people that have memberships in dating, memberships about sex, parenting memberships, course on Caribbean cooking. Anything that you have a knowledge on that somebody wants to buy, you can make money from. So, we have to get out of this kind of thing that we’re telling ourselves, this imposter syndrome of well I’m not an expert in anything because there will be somebody that wants what you know.

Interviewer: I’ll give you a hint on Caribbean cooking, Fire Nation, buy a deep fryer. That can get started right there. So, let’s go over this real quick. You need an audience, Fire Nation. Don’t kid yourself. You need an audience. That’s why I’m so obsessed with podcasting. It’s one of the great ways to build an audience. So, if you wanna check out freepodcastcourse.com to get started there, get going on that. Don’t write a word of anything until you’ve sold it. People vote with their wallet, Fire Nation. Prove the concept first, presell, presell and the mindset, not believing in yourself. Fire Nation, as long as you are one chapter ahead just like your high school teacher in math, he was just one chapter ahead of you in math, in algebra. She was just one chapter ahead of you in trigonometry. They were one chapter ahead. That was it. You can be one chapter ahead, and you can teach people. You can be that expert in that average room by just having 10 percent knowledge, having that 10 percent edge.

And then, if somebody’s already doing it, that’s proof that there’s a market out there for it. If I had said oh no, Cliff Ravenscraft, the Podcast Answer Man, already has a course on podcasting, I never would have launched podcasters Paradise. I would have lost out on over $6 million in course sales over the past six and a half years. So, guess what? I said oh, Cliff’s proving that there is a market for a podcasting course. Let me go out and do my spin, my version of it, Podcasters Paradise, and capture a different and unique segment of that market. So, Lisa, you’ve given us a lot of volume bombs. What is one key takeaway from this audio master class that you really wanna make sure Fire Nation gets? Then give us the best way to connect with you as an individual, any call to action or gifts you have for us, and then, we’ll say goodbye.

Interviewee: The one thing I want people to take away is to just start because if you don’t start building an audience, then it’s gonna take you even longer. So, even if you’re really not sure right now what you’re going to do as your passive income stream, start building an audience of the people you wanna help. And you can work out the rest later, but at least you’ll be three to six months ahead by the time you do decide, and you’ll have an audience ready to sell it to. So, start with that. And if you are not sure whether you are ready for passive income or whether you have halfway down the road to getting there, I have a quiz for you called the CAsSH Calculator that you can get from thecashcalculator.com and in there, you can just fill in this quiz, and it will tell you exactly what you specifically need to work to make sure you’re up to speed to start making passive or semi-passive income.

Interviewer: Fire Nation, you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with, and you’ve been hanging out with LJ and JLD today. So, keep up that heat. And if you head over to eofire.com and type Lisa in the search bar, her [inaudible] [00:26:23] page will pop up with everything that we chatted about today, best show notes in the biz. And of course, get the cash calculator quiz under your belt, thecashcalculator.com. That’s gonna get you to the quiz, thecashcalculator.com. So, Fire Nation, get over there. Take that quiz. Get into Lisa’s world. Learn more about her, what she has going. And Lisa, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation today. For that, we salute you and we’ll catch you on the flip side.