First, I heard a podcast about the book. Then, I read the title, “The Million-Dollar, One-Person Business: Make Great Money. Work the Way You Like. Have the Life You Want.”
I knew I was hooked.
The Million-Dollar, One-Person Business is a book about what I love to do and what the Life Reboot Project is all about. It is the last pillar of the foundation for me and the one I’m currently working on now.
When I first began laying out my step-by-step process for getting out of my job and creating a life of my design, I realized there were three primary components. The most basic would be to pay off any debt.
Check.
The only debt I had was a mortgage which was quickly disappearing.
Second, I needed a nest egg emergency fund to make sure I had good cash on hand whenever I needed it.
Third would be to create a personal business for myself which would revolve around my life.
I love to travel and want to start taking many and increasingly more extended vacations as time goes on.
I don’t want a business with a bunch of employees or one that ties me to one particular location.
The book lays out six primary types of one-person businesses you can start and make an incredible living.
Personal business ideas; Creating a personal e-commerce business
The first is creating a personal e-commerce business. This can be a simple arbitrage business where you are buying at a discount in one market and selling higher in another. An excellent example of this is the popular Amazon FBA system.
They source products at a discount. Box them up and ship them to Amazon. Then Amazon handles the sales and distribution.
This is pretty good for earning money, but unless you buy the products at an extremely outstanding price, making big money won’t be possible.
A drop shipping enterprise is another e-commerce option. Drop shipping is when the manufacturer agrees to ship the product to the end user.
These businesses are an excellent way to earn considerable money.
First, you’ll need to source the products to sell. This will include doing market research and sourcing products to sell. You’ll have to make sure the manufacturer will want to drop ship. Not all are willing.
Then you’ll need to build an e-commerce website.
A platform like Shopify is the one most people use.
There are downsides to the drop shipping business. First, you are responsible for the customer service.
If you are someone who wants a more passive income business, this might not be for you.
There are ways to outsource this, but you will still need to make sure your customer service outsourcer is doing their job.
You will still be at the top of the food chain, and your business will suffer if things don’t get handled.
The last and my favorite in the e-commerce area is affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is just like being an independent salesperson. You refer a sale to the parent company and get a commission on the sale.
You are not responsible for the customer service or even the delivery of the product. However, recommending shoddy products or companies with horrible customer service will reflect on your brand. Ultimately, you are not responsible. It is the most passive kind of e-commerce you can have.
Personal business ideas; Creating a personal manufacturing business
When I saw manufacturing on the list, I had to think about it for a while. Then I clicked back a couple of years to when I heard a story of a kid designing car parts on his computer at home, and then getting a manufacturer to create and ship them.
He would send the CAD drawings to a fabrication shop to build however many he needed. He used to keep them in his garage and ship them out himself as he sold them. Not a bad deal, but it can get pretty time-consuming since you have to do all the design, marketing, sales, and distribution.
3-D printing has come onto the scene in a big way in recent years. Now you can design and manufacture all sorts of things right in your own home. To earn big money with a 3-D printer in your home, I see problems with scalability and time-to-quantity ratio.
First, there will only be so much time a printer can run. This will give you a total number of products per day. Once you hit that max, the only way to increase your revenue is by purchasing more printers or getting a higher margin for your products.
This runs right into the scalability issue. Once the item prints, someone will have to manually pull it from the printer and start the next project. If you hire this out to free up your time, then you no longer have a personal business.
Again, there is that customer service issue you will have to work through. You can outsource this, but you are still the one at the top.
If you hire someone to handle customer service, then this falls more into the realm of a regular business. The goal I’m looking for is to have a company I can run by myself, automated to a point where I can focus most of my time on growth, not fulfillment.
Personal business ideas; Creating a personal, informational content business
Creating information products and selling them online is the highest thing on my list right now.
First, it can be almost entirely automated. Once you take the time to create the products, they can quickly be put up for sale on any number of distribution networks or sold through a Shopify store just like with E-commerce.
There is still an issue with customer service, but it is much easier to deal with than physical products.
You will handle customer service issues with the click of a button rather than the shipping and reshipping of a physical product.
Customer service works through a ticket system and an email response. You can handle customer service in a specific time you block out for this.
On E-commerce platforms, it is common to put a phone number at the top of the store to build credibility.
I know when I shop for a physical product unless I can get all my questions answered, I won’t buy. I’ve called the number on the website many times to talk to a real person who can answer my questions.
With electronic downloads, I’m ok with working through a ticket system.
I love the electronic download information product space. I think it’s wide open to creating my ideal business.
Personal business ideas; Creating a professional service or consulting business
Making big money in professional services, or consulting, will be difficult, but not impossible. Since you will be getting paid for your time, scalability will be an issue. You need to create a brand around you and command top prices for your time.
I talk a lot about branding. You will need to create a brand if you want to be competitive in the professional services market.
Top speakers will make multi-millions of dollars a year from speaking. But they have spent years building a following of loyal listeners and building their brand.
You will still be able to create an excellent income for yourself as you build a brand, but it may be a little more difficult than other areas in a personalized business.
In other areas of business, you are selling a product. The product design and functionality work with your brand to assist in making the sale.
With a professional service or consulting business, you are the product. Your brand is the product you are selling.
You will need to think about yourself as the product as you start looking for customers or clients.
Many people make easily six figures and into seven figures from public speaking and or consulting.
I’ve heard of speaking fees in the thirty to the fifty-thousand-dollar range. By charging this much, I can see where someone could easily make more than a million in sales a year. And, with this business model, overhead could be negotiated down to minimum levels. Requiring not only the speaking fee but also the event also pay your travel expenses would almost eliminate your cost out of pocket.
It might take quite some time to build your brand enough to command the fees associated with millions of dollars a year earnings.
Personal business ideas; Creating a personal business offering expertise service.
Personal expertise businesses are usually considered technician businesses. These occupations like freelance traveling masseuses, home decorators, dog groomers, or anything where you are selling your expertise as a service.
Personal businesses are similar to the professional service business as far as there are only so many hours in the day and just so much per hour, you can charge.
Branding is vital to be able to elevate fees, but there is only so much you can charge before you run out of steam and time traveling around providing these services.
There will be a cap on how much you can earn on your own unless you start to franchise yourself.
The book touches on this with an example of someone who styles eyebrows for the rich and famous.
They charged $115 per styling, but even at that, there are only so many that can get done in a day.
The person in the book started teaching other salons how to do the styling and worked out a profit-sharing revenue stream with them.
But, let’s take this one step further.
If you had a marketable skill, create a brand around yourself and that skill, and then generate franchising opportunities to sell that skill, the sky would be the limit.
Franchising could easily be the opportunity for this particular business model to take off. It adds scalability to a business model that is seemingly un-scalable.
I love the franchising and even the licensing business models.
Personal business ideas; Creating a personal business in real estate
Besides investing in the stock market, real estate has always been considered the other genuinely passive way to earn wealth. But, in the last decade, the real estate market was extremely volatile. Your home was once considered the best investment you could make.
During the recession of 2007 and 2008, the housing market took a significant hit, and tons of people lost everything they had worked so hard for when adjustable interest rates sent their payments into orbit, and they finally ended up letting their property go to foreclosure.
So, why then is real estate considered one of the six categories for creating a million-dollar personal business?
Two ways.
One is house flipping. This is where someone buys a house in foreclosure or at a dramatically reduced price and fixes it up a little to resell it at a much higher price. This does take some work to learn or figure out, but if you could do ten house flips a year and make $100,000 on each house, you could make a million dollars a year. It’s possible to do that many by using subcontractors, but they cut into your margin.
Most house flippers do much of the work themselves to save their margin. Doing ten houses a year would be an extraordinary feat in some markets.
The other option is to create rental income. People are making vast amounts of cash buying property and leasing or renting it out.
There is still an aspect of work to be done. The property needs maintenance, rents need collecting (sometimes unwillingly), and taxes and other paperwork need doing on a monthly basis.
It is possible to create a vast amount of income from real estate, but it isn’t always as passive as it seems.
Back when I was growing up the dream income to make was $100,000 a year.
Now we see people making a million dollars a year with solo personal businesses.
There are examples all over the place of people doing it.
These examples are the fuel for the fire that keeps me plugging away and working toward my goals.
What business model are you currently working on?
Leave your story in the comments below or go here to tell us your story. I’d love to hear them.
Till next time, be safe.
Kevin