Most financial and real estate professionals perform a service for their clients (for example: investing in stocks, selling life insurance, searching for a home to buy, or listing a home to sell). This is “active income” because it requires you to be present and spend some of your time and talent to deliver the service.
Unfortunately, you only have 24 hours in a day so there is a potential cap on the amount of money you can make by providing services to clients. And in some cases, if you have multiple service offerings (as is the case of a financial advisor who also sells insurance, for example), you can end up overloaded with so much service-offering that you don’t have time to grow your business any more.
That’s where the passive income model comes in and it can help you to grow your income and it can give you a little more freedom to reduce your face-to-face time with clients, if you want. I also like the idea of passive income for financial and real estate clients because these industries can be boom/bust industries so passive income provides another revenue stream to help smooth out the peaks and valleys.
WHAT IS PASSIVE INCOME?
Passive income is another type of business model. It’s a revenue stream where you don’t have to spend the time delivering a service. Instead, you sell something else that is complementary to the services you deliver (I’ll tell you some of the options later in this blog post).
For that reason, there is less of a “cap” on your income potential because whether you sell one or one hundred, you still spend the same amount of time.
The name “passive income” is a bit of a misnomer because there is still work involved. (Side note: If you look around the web at passive income possibilities, you are going to find a lot of opportunities that requires some effort even if they promise no effort at all, and you are going to find a lot of failed entrepreneurs who didn’t realize that their passive income required some effort to be successful). Some of the work involved might include marketing and advertising, emailing, accounting, and team management.
But don’t get scared off! What makes passive income so attractive is that you can put in some effort but get a much larger, ongoing result than you would by working one-on-one with clients.
You can continue working one-on-one with clients but the passive income part of your business allows you to generate additional revenue and grow your business to the point where you can dial back on some of your face-to-face time-intensive services.
PASSIVE INCOME OPPORTUNITIES
For financial and real estate professionals, there are many different passive income opportunities. Here are a few that are popular:
- Sell a book
- Sell a digital download product (like an ebook or software, etc.), sell advertising space on a popular blog, or promote other people’s products or services (this is an “affiliate model”)
- Manage a staff of junior partners (who pay you a percentage of their sales)
These are some possibilities that I’m really excited about and have seen many of my clients succeed with. (Plus the following two blog posts give you some ideas to turn your existing financial or real estate business into a more passive income business: How to be a lazy serial entrepreneur part 1 and How to be a lazy entrepreneur part 2).
HOW TO GET STARTED IN PASSIVE INCOME
- Look at your own skills and weaknesses. That can tell you a lot about what you’re likely interested in promoting. If you have a weakness in the business that you’ve overcome, an ebook on that topic might be good. If you have a weakness that you haven’t overcome, don’t focus your efforts on creating a passive income stream around that. If you have a strength in a particular area, spend your efforts on that. (Case in point: I don’t love managing other people so my passive income streams are going to be focused on things I can do. It’s not likely that I’m going to build up a huge staff of people unless I can get an Operations Manager involved very early).
- List the problems that your clients come to you with already and find ways to solve those problems… for example, by writing something (a book or an ebook) or by promoting someone else’s services (as an affiliate).
- Look at your systems and processes. Is there something you do well that makes you so successful? Perhaps it can be developed into a product.
- Look around to see what other competitors are doing and add your unique twist to it. (Note: I’m not recommending that you steal the content or the idea!!! But if you see a real estate agent who is selling an ebook on how to prepare a home to be listed, and you have a better way to do it, you should write your own ebook on the topic.
- Here’s a blog post about how to develop products that are complementary to the services you already provide.
- Click through Amazon and see what popular books are for sale in your category. Do you have any insight that you can share on one of those topics? Even if you don’t have enough for an entire book, perhaps you have enough for an ebook.
- Send me an email. If you’re at a total loss, I’m happy to help with some free email-based consulting to give you some ideas and get you on the right path.
WHAT’S NEXT
It never hurts to broaden your options. Make it a goal in the next few months to create one more income stream. It doesn’t have to be big, comprehensive, or perfect. But get something together and put it out there and build from there. In the short term, you won’t retire from a flood of unexpected cash. But it will give you more credibility and more opportunity.
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December 14, 2011
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