Brian Basilico — May 19, 2017 Masterminds
About four years ago, I decided to start a mastermind group. This is not a paid-for mastermind group of people from different industries. This is a very specific mastermind group. I invited a bunch of people in my industry to get together twice a month to sit down and discuss problems, issues, best practices, all that kind of stuff. We call it Media Masterminds. Now, I am in the marketing business. I’ve been audio and video and websites for years. I started my business in 2001, so it’s been close to 16 years ago that I started this. I wanted to get together with a bunch of like-minded individuals so that we could share, teach each other new things, and talk about best practices. There are some great people in there: a graphic designer, a couple of different writers, one who focuses on blogging and website content, public relations. There are a couple of different photographers and videographers. One guy’s got a drone … I love drones. Those are cool.
We all get together, and not only do we talk about things, but we teach each other things. That’s the most important part of this, is we’re really there to help educate each other, which helps us work together. So it’s collaborative as well. Almost everybody in the group works with almost everybody else in some way, shape or form. So if you need a specific task done, content written, photography, video, etc., we can work together as a collaborative team, which makes for a great group.
Building A Plan
One of the guys in the group is a very high-level marketer. He works with large companies like Facebook. That’s how big this guy is, but he still finds value in it. For someone that smart, he constantly asks me, “Brian, how do you do what you do? How do you get everything done?” So last week, It was my turn out of the 12 people to go up and speak. What I said was, “Here’s the thing. I’ve got systems.” I actually entitled the presentation, “How Do You Do What You Do?” Systematizing your business is by far one of the best ways to grow it, to solidify it, to make it more stable.
It’s taken me a good two or three years. I gave a presentation a couple of years ago and said, “Here is my plan. This is what I’m going to be working on and this is how I plan to systematize my group. So after two years, I finally came back and said, “Okay, here’s how I did it.” I laid it out in a way that everybody could understand. I actually made a flow chart and went through the flow chart and start talking about things. So, one of the core things that most every successful business does is create multiple streams of income. That’s where it all starts: you don’t want to put all your eggs in one basket. I have five core areas where I actually produce income.
Multiple Streams Of Income
The first one is what I call hours for dollars. I’ll dig into that a little bit more. The second one is speaking. If somebody was to ask me what my superpower was, I would say my superpower is teaching. I love to teach. I have a mind that is easily set up to create systems and put things in order in a way that most people can understand it. I always say, “I translate geek into English.”
The third way to do it is to create products. Now, if you’re a brick and mortar business, obviously you have services and you have products. I mean there are things that most businesses do that way. The third puzzle is training. Training involves the classes that I create and the different things that I’ve been able to do that are repeatable. The final thing is affiliate marketing. I make money every single month from selling things over and over and over again. A perfect example of affiliate marketing is that I have books on Amazon. When those books sell, every single month Amazon sends me a check. They put it right into my checking account.
So let me give you a brief overview of the five different areas.
Hours For $
I create websites and that had been the core of my business. The problem is it was always feast or famine. One of the things that I learned to do is instead of constantly doing estimates and proposals and all these other things, is I created basic packages. These packages include: if you want a website, this is what it cost. If you want a Google package, which includes Google Business, Google Analytics and setting up Gmail and doing all the things that you need like search console, and then teaching you how to use it, that’s another package. I do SEO. I have another package where I help clients manage their Google Analytics on a monthly basis.
Now, some of these things have repetitive income, meaning I’ve got clients that come back month after month for their Google AdWords. I’ve got people that come back and want to just go over their Google Analytics. I have a system setup to maintain only my client websites. I don’t do this for outside companies, but I help them maintain and keep their stuff up-to-date, make sure it’s backed up, and those kind of things.
Speaking
From the speaking standpoint, I was able to create the same kind of thing. I do one-time speeches. I’ve spoken at all different kinds of conferences locally, in my state, nationally. It just depends on what the clients want, and generally they’re paid speeches. But I’ve also created boot camps from the training section. I’ll talk about that in a couple of minutes. Then I also have created something called custom training, which is mostly speaking, but it’s part of the training packages that I built.
Products
Now, I consider my books as products. The beauty is that when I’m speaking, I always ask, “Can I sell my books?” So not only do I get paid to speak, but I can sell almost as much in books a lot of times at those speeches. Then I’ve created these bundles, like my productivity bundle, my checklist bundle. There’s a handful of bundles. These all support a lot of the training that I do. Then I also have courses that I’ve created on Google for Business and social media secrets, and those are other tools that I can either sell or give away.
Training
Now, when we get into the training side, I have a weekly mastermind that I do called The Bacon Weekly Mastermind. I’m sure you’ve heard me talk about that. Then I have my Bacon System, which is a 12-week course where I train people how to do content marketing. I’ve created a brand new one called Bacon System for LinkedIn. That’s where I create the custom courses where I can go into companies and actually help them optimize their LinkedIn for their sales teams and things like that. These are all systems that work together.
Affiliate Marketing
Then, finally, you’ve got the affiliate products. Whether I’m setting people up for web hosting or for email marketing and things like that, I made sure that I can actually sell that with an affiliate link, so as I’m doing that, I make a little bit of money. It doesn’t cost the client anymore. The thing is, is the company sees me as an expert, so I get a little bit more advanced tech support from a lot of them. So it helps me to support my customers better.
Those five streams of income help balance out everything that’s happening in the business.
Final Thoughts
Now, how can you do that in your business? How can you find things that you can do repetitively that are going to help you market your business and stabilize it? One of the things that really helps me is having virtual assistants to take care of certain things like posting blogs, doing my email newsletters, etc. It’s getting the support team around you. That’s why I love that mastermind because it’s a brain trust where we all teach and support and help each other.
I would love to hear your stories, thoughts, and comments on this subject. Comment below and share ways that you have created and leveraged multiple streams of income to grow and stabilize your business!
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