Side Hustle City
Step into Side Hustle City, the ultimate podcast for entrepreneurs, creatives, and anyone eager to turn their side hustle into a full-time passion. We bring you real-life stories of resilience, innovation, and success from diverse entrepreneurs who’ve made the leap from side projects to profitable ventures. Whether you're exploring entrepreneurship, looking for business insights, or seeking inspiration to fuel your journey, join us for valuable tips and motivational tales. Transform your passion into a thriving business with Side Hustle City, where dreamers become doers.
Side Hustle City
Turning the Internet into Income: The New Age of Entrepreneurship with Matt Raad
Have you ever dreamed of swapping the 9 to 5 grind for the freedom of running your own online business? Join us as we sit down with Matt Raad, a man who traded zoology for the digital business world, and hasn’t looked back since.
Together with his wife Liz, Matt shares the intricacies of their transition from farming to online entrepreneurship, revealing how they unlocked a lifestyle of flexibility and freedom. For those considering dipping their toes into the world of business, Matt imparts some valuable advice, including why he steers clear of businesses involving physical inventory.
In an era where remote work is becoming the norm for many, we explore the rise of online businesses. Matt and Liz’s journey captures the essence of this, as they balance their young family with a thriving business, all thanks to the power of the internet. Amid a global pandemic, the mindset towards work has shifted dramatically, making space for the boundless potential of the knowledge economy. Non-traditional businesses that offer a high income without the need for trading time for money are on the rise, and Matt and Liz’s story is a testament to this.
But the conversation doesn't stop there. We delve into their ingenious business strategies, including how they turned a $4,500 website into a profitable venture pulling in $8,000 a month. Uncover the benefits of living in Southeast Asian countries like Vietnam and the transformative power of affiliate marketing and SEO for online companies. Plus, get a glimpse into the future of buying and selling websites and the untapped potential of YouTube as a tool for online business success. Tune in to this episode and let Matt and Liz guide you through the world of online entrepreneurship.
Some topics we discuss:
1. Leveraging Digital Assets for Financial Independence
2. Buying, Selling and Renovating Online “Real Estate”
3. Replacing your income within 12 months using websites
As you're inspired to embark on your own side hustle journey after listening to this episode, you might wonder where to start or how to make your vision a reality. That's where our trusted partner, Reversed Out Creative comes in. Specializing in strategic branding and digital marketing, Reversed Out Creative is an advertising agency dedicated to helping you turn your side hustle into your main hustle.
With a team of experienced professionals and a track record of helping clients achieve their dreams, they are ready to assist you in reaching your goals. To find out more about how they can elevate your side hustle, visit www.reversedout.com today and start your journey towards success. Our blog is also full of great information that we work hard on to provide you with a leg up on the competition.
We also recently launched our YouTube Channel, Marketing Pro Trends, which summarizes all of our blog posts.
https://www.youtube.com/@MarketingProTrends
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Welcome to Side Hustle City and thanks for joining us. Our goal is to help you connect to real people who found success turning their side hustle into a main hustle, and we hope you can too. I'm Adam Kaler. I'm joined by Kyle Stevy, my co-host. Let's get started, all right? Welcome back everybody to the Side Hustle City podcast today. Guess Matt Rad at the Business Institute Australia, right?
Speaker 2:Good day, Adam. Thanks so much for having me on that try.
Speaker 1:I love it. I love it all the way from Australia. What time wait? What time is it now, where you're at right?
Speaker 2:now it is around seven o'clock in the morning, which is that's late for us. The sun gets up really early here. We're up at five AM most mornings with the cookaburras. We're in northern part of Australia, so the sun comes up quite early here.
Speaker 1:Ah, wow, yeah, I couldn't handle that. The sun will automatically wake me up, Even if there's a tiny little bit of it. I got blackout curtains too, and if the sun even remotely comes near my eyes, I'm waking up. So yeah, I'd be up early there, I think.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, we don't have a choice with all the like, the wildlife. You know, there's these birds called cookaburras and they're crazy loud and they basically, once they start, you're up and doing things.
Speaker 1:There's nothing you could do. You're awake at that point. Yeah Well, awesome. Well, it's great to have you on. You had somebody who had reached out to us, one of your assistants and it's crazy the way, when I was looking at your profile, how you've transitioned and we talked a little bit about this before the show started but from zoology into digital business, growth and M&A and sales and consulting I mean it's wild. But in all this in Australia, northern Australia, you guys are. I mean I get why you would be into zoology. You got some really interesting animals there, but you know, selling businesses can be much more interesting.
Speaker 2:Well, it turns out we love that more. So we, you know, we, both my wife and I grew up on farms and my wife is my business partner as well as my life partner. And I think from growing up on farms we had a lot of freedom as kids, the two of us. And when we got together at uni we realized, and both of us came from backgrounds where we had no money, and I always said to Liz look, I want to get into business of some kind and make lots of money and zoology is not going to cut it for us. And so as soon as we left uni, with the help of family, we were able to buy a small manufacturing business and we just built that up and bought and sold more. We got good at it and we were able to free up time.
Speaker 2:And I think, probably like a lot of your listeners, for us we were always looking for because we grew up on farms, we wanted that type freedom in life. It wasn't just money. For me personally it was money. For Liz it wasn't so much the money thing, but for both of us we just wanted freedom. And I guess, like your listeners now, it was the business. For us was that ultimate way of having security because you're not tied to it. Time wise, we've never worked in a business where it's nine to five. It's always leverage businesses, and these days, of course, we buy and sell websites, which does sound quite different to Zoology and to even the bricks and mortar business that we used to buy and sell, and we absolutely love that. For us, that's like the ultimate business or side hustle you could ever do, which is online businesses. There's just so much leverage with them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's actual freedom. I mean, and you, coming from this manufacturing background after Zoology thing, starting a business that probably required you to physically be there, you had probably had employees, there was machinery that needed to be fixed, there were vendors that you had to deal with, there was inventory issues at times, probably, or whatever. I mean you physically have to be there and those businesses are great. But I can't do that from Bali.
Speaker 2:Right, I can't. No, no, you can't do that from a laptop. And the other thing is, too, that maybe like for someone listening to this, if they're thinking about getting into a business and Adam, I'm going to sound a little bit biased here. So, full disclosure. I'm these days, out of all the hundreds to thousands of deals that I've seen, because I'm an advisor in business exits and mergers and acquisitions I've been doing this for 30 years. I've seen a lot of businesses and for bricks and mortar businesses like a manufacturing business, we're not fans of them anymore for one main big reason, and that's why we're so passionate about websites and you just mentioned it.
Speaker 2:There's wasn't just being tied to the business, but it was the physical inventory bit, because when you're new in business, any business that needs physical inventory like a manufacturing or wholesale import business, which is what we used to specialise in it ties up all your money and we're always in debt to the banks. We were kind of if I'm honest about it, we were skirting bankruptcy the whole time and because all our net worth was tied up in a warehouse somewhere. Now, don't get me wrong you can make a lot of money out of a manufacturing or wholesale import business, but it's not good for beginners and we were young entrepreneurs. We knew nothing. We knew we were totally self-taught in business and in hindsight I mean that's why I'm here today it was lucky that we kind of did get into it.
Speaker 2:In hindsight I would not advise a beginner to go into any business that involves physical inventory, because we struggled with it for I don't know 10 years. The payoff takes a long time, whereas with websites hopefully that's what we can share on this podcast, but I'm sure people can realise that at the very least with websites, particularly the kinds that we buy, we're not stuck with physical inventory. We don't do e-commerce, we just sell information, products or advertising. So there's none of this tying up our money into inventory and we've just found it very freeing. Like you said, we're not tied to it anymore. We can work. We literally work in our jimmy jams you know, pajamas and work from home have done for the last 10, 15 years and to us it's like the ultimate business model compared to all the other businesses that we've seen.
Speaker 1:That's a really good point, because you could become an entrepreneur, because you want freedom, but end up building yourself a prison.
Speaker 2:Absolutely yeah, and we see a lot of people do that with bricks and mortar, particularly if you have a bricks and mortar that is a nine to five style, like we're doing B2C, like business to consumers, like a retail store. So we've never bought. We've only owned one retail business in our lives. Everything else we always for that reason.
Speaker 2:So we read you know being self taught in business, we read all the books back in the early days and I think you know the classics from Brian Tracy and you know the sales guy and Tom Hopkins we loved. Tom Hopkins is American sales trainer or a zig-ziggler.
Speaker 1:You throw some of him in too.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and zig-ziggler like that's who we used to listen to nonstop. Remember the days of cassettes? Yeah, we put that in our little ute that we had, and when we, because we had a manufacturing business, we drive around Australia selling these spare parts and we'd listen to zig-ziggler to get ourselves feeling positive. Our Tom Hopkins or Brian Tracy they're pretty much our three go-tos. Hey, yeah there you go.
Speaker 1:That's a good lineup right there. That's great.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, thank you. But you know, americans know how to sell and that's one of the key skill we had to learn in business. But then later in the years, we had this guy come along write a book, robert Kiyosaki. You know Rich, gad and Portad and I know it's a classic, but honestly, he's on the money in that and, with our experience in business, when we read it we realized, yeah, we need leverage here, we need these what we call semi-pass. You know, remembering his day at him. In that book he talked about buying laundromats and, like on one of your other podcasts you mentioned that, the gentleman that does our vending machines, businesses like that that are semi-passive, and we really liked that idea.
Speaker 2:And, what was interesting, we, as business brokers and M&A, we actually sold a few of those I know very successful, and so when we saw the internet, though, we realized that's next level, because it gives us freedom from having to fork out megabucks on owning the laundromat or whatever. Yet they work 24 seven, and of course, for us too, we're in Australia the biggest market in the world is America, and it allowed us there was no barriers to us then to have a business in America, which is so most of our websites, our traffic, the visitors come from America and they're based in America. So for us, obviously it's great. We make money 24 seven, while we sleep, literally wake up in the morning and you can see the clicks that have come to your website and I'd say 80% of the traffic comes from America. So all of a sudden we realized, compared to bricks and mortar businesses, this was a game changer for us. This was about.
Speaker 2:This was in the GFC, where we started online, and we realized, wow, this is like nothing we've ever seen in business before. It's ultimate leverage. I don't have to dress up in a suit, I don't have to be anywhere, I can work whatever hours I want. We can do this part time. So we started a young family then, so Liz could work on these whilst we're raising our kids, didn't matter what hours and when you've got kids. Typically you're up late in the evening at some point one of these. And well, guess what we're doing? You've got a laptop there and we're working away. And it was perfect, absolutely perfect compared to businesses that needed physical inventory.
Speaker 1:So that's why we're so passionate about.
Speaker 2:That's why we love them.
Speaker 1:I mean it's so crazy too, because when you think about previous generations, they didn't have this kind of freedom, right? But there's still so many people that don't understand that this is. It's like a thing Like you don't have to be stuck somewhere. And I know an American, probably with Australia too, especially. I know some of the laws, I mean pretty heavy handed when it came to COVID in Australia, not so much here.
Speaker 1:It depended on what state you were in here, I mean, if you were in California or New York, really, really hard. If you were in Florida, do whatever you want, go outside, shoot a gun, ride an alligator and, you know, breathe all over. It Didn't matter, right? So, but you know that uncovered a lot of things that uncovered, and everybody knows this story. Do you have to be in the office, you know? I mean, now you almost got these, these, uh, their employees, but then away they're kind of entrepreneurs and you know what the funny thing is is, now there's people out here and they're cracking down on it, but there were people with two or three full time jobs that were 100% remote, and these guys are making three $400,000 a year. Yeah, they've got the skills and they can. They can. Yeah, they're almost entrepreneurs, right? Yep.
Speaker 2:And it's super cool. So this is a thing that I think COVID highlighted for, like everyone and out, especially our community. This is where we saw massive success stories in our community, where people I think it was more just a mindset shift realized, oh wow, this is a real thing. Making money remotely online is real. Everyone's well, not everyone's doing it, but it can be done. And I think people started to realize. Combine that with that Robert Kiyosaki idea of you know, having these, let's call them, you still got to work, work in them. But they're these businesses that are remote and leverage, and combined with, like, what we call the knowledge economy, I think suddenly people realize okay, it's not about physically being somewhere and swapping time for money anymore. It's about being smart and figuring out well, how can I make money online or how can I leverage, working remotely so I can earn a high income.
Speaker 2:And that was the good thing with COVID, because I think people were, especially here in Australia. We're all fourth, we weren't allowed out of the house, it was, we weren't allowed to cross state borders. It was full on, really full on here. And, yeah, I think it got people realizing also how about we create an alternative income backup plan because people couldn't work. There were businesses that just had to close down for 12 months, so people had to, by necessity, figure out well, what's a backup plan here, say, like, with the travel industry and things like that. So it was a really interesting time and I think that's one of the things, too, that put us on the map a little bit, if I'm honest about it, because we've been teaching people how to start online businesses since 2010. But, covid, suddenly everyone's coming to us and going, oh, how are your clients doing that stuff? And that's what I think got the message out there that this is a real space. Now you can actually make money online, working from home.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, and it's been around for years. But people just get tied up in their little bubble in this idea that you have to work for someone else, right? I mean, if somebody wanted to pay me $300, $400,000 a year to come work for them, I might consider it like hey, I can go to work nine to five and make $300, $400,000. But if you're making $50, $60,000 a year to go in and be somebody's indentured servant, I don't know, there's probably easier ways to make that money.
Speaker 2:Absolutely there is. Well, it's like Warren Buffett says these days, wages won't give you enough leverage. No, not at all. I heard him say that at one of his meetings. Like he said, you need to find other ways to get leverage on your money because that, like in America, it is tough, and it's the same here in Australia it's tough unless you're in that $300,000 range. Man, you're swapping a lot of time for not as much money as what was in the past.
Speaker 1:Well, the crazy thing is is you can automate a lot of that. It's not like you physically don't have to be there. Even if you've got that $300,000 job, they're probably going to be asking you to spend more than 40 hours a week doing that job. You're probably going to travel, which include that in your time right, there's going to be a bunch of travel. If you've got a family, that's going to suck. You know you're not necessarily being able to go where you want. Like, you know, where are you going to send me? Lincoln Nebraska. I mean, I'm sure Lincoln Nebraska is awesome. I'm just using that as an example. But, like, would I rather have a digital business where I can do that and be in, I don't know, phuket? They're probably rather do that.
Speaker 2:Well, we've got clients that do that. So during COVID here's an interesting story Two of our really successful clients, a young couple actually, nathan and Alexa. They make money buying and selling websites, exactly like we've taught them, and they've got what we call little tiny passion sites, but they own a portfolio of them so it turns into quite a big income. So they'd buy these sites, typically for under $2,000. They fix them up and they get them making a couple of grand a month and then they own five or six of those and what they saw was when COVID hit Australia because it was so what's the word?
Speaker 2:Strict, you know the lockdown they actually managed to get out of Australia and for that two years of COVID they lived in Europe and they just lived, truly lived off their laptop and they would spend. They weren't constantly traveling. They'd spend about three to six months in a different sorry, typically three to month, three months in a different European country and they literally just made money off their laptop, off these simple little tiny passion sites. So they've got one on the crochet, one on cheese making, but there are all these little weird and wonderful websites that. You know they're a young couple, they didn't have a lot of money when they first started, but they're able to build that up and then and now that's what they do. Now COVID's over, they've come back to Australia and they they still do the same thing. They work basically off a laptop and they live in. They're testing out living in different parts of Australia now to see where they want to settle.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I actually looked it up. There's only so many days you can stay. You can be in Europe, but you got to move from country to country. Like you can be in, I think, italy, what 90 days maybe, and then you got to leave.
Speaker 1:And you got to leave for so many days and then come back, like maybe a day even, and then you can just come right back or something. But but it's interesting, it's, you know the way you have to do things. Or in like Thailand, you can be in Thailand, I think, 90 days and then a lot of people go to Vietnam and then come back. I think is how they do it too, I think that's what Nathan Alexa did.
Speaker 2:They went to.
Speaker 2:They did it the other way. They went to Vietnam, lived there for however many months and then they had to. I remember, on a Zoom call to them they said, oh, we've got to leave tomorrow, matt, for the visa or something. And they went to. Yeah, they went to Bali and then or Singapore or somewhere, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:So that's the beauty of this of owning these online or digital businesses. You don't, you know, there's no, there's no borders or anything like that, and you've got this 20,. What we love about it is it's a 24-7 marketplace, unlike traditional businesses where it's typically, you know, daylight hours. With these digital businesses, doesn't matter where you are in the world and you typically outsource your team that's helping you run them. So all our staff are virtual no one. We don't need an office to run what we do and never have done, and that's the other big attraction we don't need lots of staff to run these. So it's ideal if you're a beginner and you want to get into business and you know online businesses. In my opinion not giving financial advice here, but based on all my experience online business is a way safer than traditional bricks and mortar businesses to get into, there's not as much risk. Yeah, that's what that's been our experience.
Speaker 1:When you mentioned borderless. It's like when you have a digital business, you also don't have to hire locally. I mean you could get assistance. Like I mean, you know, we do this little Etsy thing where we're going in a mid-journey, we're creating these patterns for digital. You know crafters or whatever to put on bugs or whatever in the world they're selling, right, and they go online. They look for digital products that like patterns, seamless patterns that they could put on things. I don't have to do that. Like I could hire people in the Philippines. Like I could, I could get a team for pretty affordable to actually do that for me. Like I could just tell them the process and say this is what I need you to do. Here's a login to mid-journey, here's a login for this. Help me out here, right, I mean, and that's, that's something you can actually do.
Speaker 1:And then people don't understand. They think, oh well, you know I have to be able to replace my income here, right? No, like you could live in so many places on this planet for so cheap. Like I'm. I'm honestly, I'm looking at going down to Argentina. Like their inflation is crazy, but just this steak, you know, is big there. They, you know, they got the wine we don't drink but the tango stuff. It's very European, but the cultures fascinates me. You have to learn Spanish, though, if you're going to live there. But it's crazy how like $1,600, two people could live on $1,600 better there than a lot of like $10,000 a month here.
Speaker 2:Yep, and that that's what. Well, it's interesting. Let me give you a specific. You just mentioned Etsy, so the young couple that I just talked about that one of their websites. So, Nathan, he's an electrician right and he's got no experience in the crafting niche and he just outsources everything. So they own a crochet site and he's not a crocheter. Obviously he's an electrician. He's not into it.
Speaker 1:He probably could. The way he braids wires and stuff, he might actually be a good crocheter. I guess I didn't think of that.
Speaker 2:But and Liz and I have owned websites in the same we love the crafting niche. That's typically the niche that it can be very lucrative because you can buy a little tiny sites. So Nathan and Alexa bought this site. I think it was $4,500 US and it was only making $400 at the time. But here's the interesting way it makes money it wasn't from selling physical products on Etsy, what it is. They get an affiliate commission, so they talk so this is a crochet site and they talk about crochet patterns and then they just give a link over to Etsy and if someone buys that pattern, it's not theirs, but they're just an affiliate for it and they get a commission.
Speaker 2:Now that website is one of the ones that makes them $8,000 a month. Now that's crazy. Now they fixed it up. That's a significant sum of money and they don't work on it a lot themselves because they're not experts. They've got two or three writers, sometimes up to four writers in, like the Philippines and stuff where the rates are a lot cheaper, and basically their job is just to project manage. So Nathan and Alexa's job is to project manage these writers to write content about crocheting and then people go over to Etsy and they just earn an affiliate commission. They don't even have to have an Etsy store or anything. That's how leverage this model can be and that's one of the sites that help them travel around the world. And that's $8,000 a month, like you said, in a country like Bali, or typically a lot of Aussies here will go to Southeast Asia. So they lived in Vietnam. $8,000 in Vietnam a month. You're living like a king.
Speaker 1:Vietnam is literally the cheapest place in the world, I think, to live. It's like $800 a month for two people. You could totally be good and you're eating delicious Southeast Asian food and beautiful country, great things to explore. I mean, that's the thing it's like. Guys, do you want to pigeonhole yourself Like America is great, australia is great, yep, but there's so much more to see in the world, so many more cultures. So I mean you want to wait until you're 65 years old to experience that kind of stuff. It's crazy, I mean. And what you're talking about is like let's buy a site with an aged domain, something that's been around for a while. That's one of the first things you know Google's going to look at. It's like how long has this domain been around? Does it have a high domain authority? I mean, are you? What are some of the metrics you're looking at when you're trying to buy a website?
Speaker 2:The main thing that we teach and this is a big topic, but we love teaching it and that is when you do website due diligence.
Speaker 2:The main metrics are the profit and the traffic, and traffic is the amount of visitors that come to the website each month. If we break it down in the most simplest terms and they're the two main things that we're using and running through our heads what's the true value of this website? And something else you just mentioned, adam as well, pardon me, which I do take for granted, you're right is also the age of the website. Is it real? So that's the main thing we're trying to determine Is this a real website? And this is why we love what we call passion websites, so typically sites that are about hobbies or like crafting, learning how to play guitar, learning doing photography, learning any new skill, better golf, whatever sites that have been set up by people who are real and they're passionate about it, but they've gotten bored with those websites and not have owned them for five years, not really made a lot of money, and they might not like they might not be good online, but they're experts in there, so they're not SEO experts.
Speaker 1:They're not. They don't know how to create backlinks yeah, they're not.
Speaker 2:Off page SEO experts yeah, they're more, just passionate about the topic and those are the sites that we say are absolute gold in these days, particularly with AI. Now it's, they're really, really. I think they're going to be the. We call them diamonds in the rough. They're these little, hidden like lumps of gold sitting out there on the internet. When you uncover one of those and you polish it up. That's what Nathan Lexer did so well with that crochet site. They've done it as well with a gardening site. It's another really good niche, worldwide gardening sites. So the thing is people think, oh, when you own a business, you've got to have. You know, businesses that make hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions of dollars. No, not at all. You can uncover these little diamonds in the rough. Their best one that they bought was only $400. And it was by a guy here in Australia was on native gardening, like native shrubs. Sounds obscure $400. You wouldn't think there's much value in it. That site now is making four grand a month, but super niche, super niche, like super niche.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, they just polished it up, and that's that's. The exciting thing here is that you can, once you know what you're doing, in terms of, like you're saying, what do we look forward to buy in an in an ideal world I'm not going to say it's always perfect, you can't always find them but in an ideal world we find those sorts of sites, the ones that have been around for five or six years and kind of neglected the fall I guess you call them the fallen angels and particularly now this year or in the last six months, when we've seen the explosion of AI generated content. What people want is real content, and so the goal is finding these real sort of hobby sites that people are happy to sell off. And also, people do genuinely get a bit over their websites. When they they get them to a certain level, they typically will sell them and flip them to make money, to put into bigger websites, and that's the other strategy, too, when you're ready to go to the next level. So what that means is, for someone coming in, you can still buy really good money making websites because the person wants to move to the next level, so you can buy these good money making websites and, in that instance, what the main thing there is.
Speaker 2:We do need to know how to do due diligence to make sure basically everything's real, particularly the profit and the traffic. They're the two main metrics that we live and breathe by. And that's easy online because everything's tracked, everything's clicked. When you know what you're doing compared to bricks and mortar businesses like, I think, of my background buying and selling bricks and mortar when you're doing due diligence on those, oh man, you've got to be a bit of a detective on bricks and mortar businesses. But with websites, basically, this is a free tool. It's just Google Analytics. That's probably the main tool we use. And then also, when you know what you're looking for, you can get live feeds now to people's affiliate accounts or to their ads accounts. You just literally get a live feed, so it's very difficult to fake that.
Speaker 1:When I always watch, you know I'm all over YouTube constantly digging in and trying to find cool side hustles. And you've got a lot of SEO experts who build websites strictly to do affiliate stuff and they'll build these things up because they know SEO, they know content, they're constantly blogging. They've got the right structure when they blog right. So you've got to. You got to have the right structure you probably want to do. Actually, the amount of words doesn't even matter anymore, it's actually how relevant it is and things like that. You know. But if you want to pump out a 3000 word blog post using AI, great, like, yeah, I mean you could do that now and it takes minutes. You know, just make sure your keyword density is right and all that other stuff. But then they'll go into ClickBank and I don't know if you guys have a different site in Australia, but here ClickBank is a place you go to see. It's just a list of affiliates and how much money they pay and whatever they're selling, and you sell high ticket items. And there's now now here's another thing the categories.
Speaker 1:I think in America at least, there's, I think, six categories that Almost everybody really wants to go after. People already think about it, but it's like health and wellness, beauty toys, finance, yep, yep, there's a certain number of them. Yeah, and it's because the affiliates, those are the areas, these, these hot, these affiliates that pay a lot, because that's where the margins are. A lot of these people have a white label, supplements or something they're trying to sell, and it's crazy, like I mean, you're in Australia, I mean you're not far from China, so I'm sure you guys get a lot of this white label stuff like manufactured in China and then drop shipped. But these companies have huge margins and they can pay good affiliate money. I mean you could make $50 or $100 if somebody subscribes to you know 12 month supplement package or something you know.
Speaker 2:Yep, yeah, and that, and it's interesting you just mentioned ClickBank. That's one of the main affiliate networks that we recommend people go and look at because it's info products you know, it's just eBooks and an info price and the margins are really high. Typically you can get 50, sometimes 75% affiliate commissions from ClickBank, but also you can go to CJ, commission, junction and there's a bunch of other of these affiliate networks and you're right, you go into those big niches. That's what we teach, even for beginners. That's the easiest ones to learn off, even though they're more competitive, but that's where the money is.
Speaker 2:Health we've got the three main niches that we always have health, happiness and wealth. Health, wealth and happiness People always wanting to know how to get rich, people always wanting to know how to get healthier, and people always want to know how to be happy, and that's the hobby sites. You know being happy from your hobbies, but health and wealth are huge, huge niches online for exactly the reasons that you said, adam. The margins in those products are so high. So for us, as affiliate marketers, you can make really good money just being an affiliate. You don't have to physically deal with any end users or anything like that. We've just got to recommend their products and we get an affiliate commission.
Speaker 1:Well, have you ever been on the other side of that, where you were the company that was looking for affiliates?
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, we've done that all the time. We've done that as well. So we sell info products ourselves and that works really well for us as well and that's kind of next level. That's not something a beginner it's not. It's not a strategy we recommend a total beginner would get into. But once you've got some SEO and you know online experience and you know how it works, then that is a key strategy that we would recommend you use to take it to the next level.
Speaker 2:So you create your own course and you typically outsource that. That can be relatively easy. And then you set up a funnel, which I'm sure listeners have seen lots of Facebook ads for courses that teach you how to set up these funnels and things and then you can sell your own info product where you're coaching someone or you're running lessons in a like maybe it's how to take better. You know, at some niche within the photography niche, I did an interview with a guy. He's American. He set up a course. He's a photographer but he outsourced this photography course for wedding photographers how they can make money. I think it cost him about $4,000 to pay someone to create that course for him. You just got them off Udemy and then he sold that course for it was a membership style thing for $49 a month and he turned that into a multimillion dollar business within three years and he sold it for $10 million, plus Wow, to a corporate.
Speaker 2:I love it. That's a huge success. So not every, not everyone, does that. That's not a normal result, by the way, but the point is it was just that even I was surprised. That was the that's the power of doing these courses yourself, I guess, and even I was surprised because we've been in the photography niche ourselves over the years. It's very lucrative. So even in this day and age, the humble I call it inadverted commerce, the humble photography niche is still worth a fortune because there's always someone wanting to know.
Speaker 2:When you think about it, what we're trying to do is help someone take better photos in whatever the niche is it might be weddings or whatever, but also maybe how to make money out of it. And so what we, what Liz and I discovered and we see this with all our clients as well the real secret, we think, to making money online with these digital businesses is coming up with the niche where you're helping someone, where someone's going into Google and they're looking for a solution. It's not we don't make money by getting eyeballs to funny cat videos and entertaining stuff like that. We've never. I mean, you can do that, but that's a lot of work. What we do is we try and basically just try and be helpful. So if you're, if you're an empathetic kind of person and you like helping people, this is where you could really turn on your creativity. If you can figure out, okay, how can I sew better, or how can I find the perfect crochet pattern, or how can I play better golf or how can I fix up my health, whatever but you want to go niche within health because it's very competitive. But we've always learned online that you can. If you can help someone, then you stand a chance of ranking in Google and people will be engaged on your website and you're offering solutions and then, hey, a certain percentage of that will take an action and hopefully buy something.
Speaker 2:But primarily, we're there to help people first and foremost and it's really interesting you mentioned SEO, my favorite topic, search engine optimization. Well, google, in the last year, have released what they call this new update to their algorithm and it's called the helpful update and basically they're saying, in this day and age of AI, guys, all you need to do is provide and they call it literally helpful content, and I think that's probably the. So we've been teaching this for years. You know, just try and answer people's questions, and that's what Google lives and breathes by right. But it's really cool how Google now just kind of laid it out in a simple one page document. You can go Google it. It's on the, it's on the Google webmaster guides, but it's just called the helpful update and literally in my opinion, that's probably the simplest way to get started making online. Come up with helpful content that helps someone in a specific niche and a way you go.
Speaker 1:That's pretty much Well and people do these like lists.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's a lot you've got to learn behind that, but it's a lot of fun and it's very creative.
Speaker 1:When people don't understand. Like you know, if you go on and you type in a question how do I lose weight? Google's going to give you. There's a, there's a, an accordion menu on every search page now and people have probably seen it, where it says how do I lose weight? Blah, blah, blah, what are the best supplements? It says, because people also ask these questions. So every time I do a blog now I literally I will, whatever I'm doing a topic on, I will go and I will search that and then I'll look for those questions and I have in my blog.
Speaker 1:We created a on our WordPress blog. We created a custom post type which is like a little extra widget that you can create inside of WordPress for the FAQs. So I go in there and I copy straight up, copy the FAQs and then I'll go into, I'll go into chat, gpt and I'll say hey, answer these questions. So we have our own content, right. And then I send it through the AI copy detector. Make sure it seems like it's human written. If it isn't, we changed it up a little bit. And then on every single blog post I just put all those. I'll have like five to 10 of those suckers on every single blog post and then the blog post itself will be a listicle which is top 10, top five, whatever it is. So people got a people love top 10 lists, top five lists, top 10 lists for whatever reason. And actually they love odd numbers in headlines more than they love even numbers. So you're like seven top reasons to lose weight today. Boom, here's the seven reasons, right. And then you put your you're thinking that, right.
Speaker 2:You put your, your, your, your webinar on exactly that topic, on the, the joy of creating listicle articles like why, why Google loves it, and and, like you said, odd numbers. And when you think, adam, what you're doing there, it's exactly what I was saying. Ultimately, if you break down what you're doing or what you're providing for a visitor is answers to all their questions because they're they're engaged, then and that's so too many people I think think, oh, it's all about just grabbing attention any way we can. What we teach is, if you can help people by answering their questions, google loves you and your visitors will love you. And you think what you're doing there like that's one of the key techniques we teach is look at those people also ask and make sure you get that into your articles so that you can cover the topic completely. So it's really handy.
Speaker 2:So, if someone is looking for the best ways to lose weight, when they come to your article, there's this complete, you know there's there's a listicle 10 top ways or seven top ways to lose weight in 2023. And and then there's also a bunch of FAQs. So the whole topics answered and people are engaged. Hopefully they read all your article and they're engaged, and then that feeds back to Google. So Google Analytics is tracking that, or Google themselves are tracking that through their algorithm and that's how the internet basically goes around is by providing really useful or helpful content for people. Once you crack that one, you can definitely make money online. I love it Pretty much.
Speaker 1:The key skill in this day and age One of the cool techniques I saw is a way to get around having to go buy SEMrush or all these other SEO tools is you just go into Google and a guy he'd start to type in you know how to lose weight and then he puts the letter A and then everything that anyone could write afterwards with letter A pops up. Then he puts a, B, Everything with a B. After that pops out, everything is C. See what I'm saying? That's cool.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, it was a really cool technique. And there you go for for maybe your next class, that's. That's something people are. People are starting to do outside of just that accordion menu that shows up on the SERP. Yeah, you can literally do that or whatever it is you're trying to do, you know, and then just put a boot. It gives you a bunch of B boot gives you. I'm going to write that down. Yeah, love it.
Speaker 2:That's because we use all those you know tools like Semrush and and Ahrefs, but we're always on the lookout, for I still love the good old fashioned research of just using Google itself and also it's. It's called it's ads planet keyword ad planet tool. It's very powerful. It's totally free. Yes, that's a little bit geeky, like it did. There's. There's a bit too much data for your average beginner to look at that. What you've just described is a really nice, simple thing that anyone could understand and do.
Speaker 1:Quite that, yeah when people could go into keyword planner. Yeah, they could go into keyword planning. You look for they have different categories and you can actually see how much money companies are spending, how much they're bidding on keywords. So you look for things that they're spending a bunch of money on where the competition is actually low, absolutely.
Speaker 1:So, there's a competition category and then there's how much money are these people spending? And then there's how many search queries people have on that topic every month. So I mean you just filter it. You say, ok, here's how much money these people are spending $40 a click and this is a real thing. People spend. Companies spend $40 for every time somebody clicks on their silly little text ad. $40 in the competition could be low. Write a blog post about it.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, that's that and that's how we do. That's how we teach our keyword research. That's basically what that's you mentioned earlier, like what are some of the metrics when it comes into renovating these websites? That's what we're looking for new keywords like that that we can add to the website over the life of the websites. Not a it's not a get rich quick thing, like we've got to build these or renovate these sites over typically a 12 month period, and but we're doing that sort of research. That's the sort of research and most of our clients I say all of our clients love that process because it's quite creative, it's good fun, that's the sort of thing you're sitting at home, it's like a game.
Speaker 1:It's like a game to you once you start getting into it, like checking the data and constantly just massaging what you're doing, your process and changing it up, and it's just it's fun. I mean, I don't know, maybe because I'm weird like that, but I think it's fun and it's cool to see the progress, right as long as you're seeing progress, and then you start going down the rabbit hole with different techniques and all these things. You know SEOs are out here doing which a lot of them don't like to share their little secrets and stuff. They go work at Google and Facebook and everything. But you know there's a lot of best practice stuff out there that you can do. That makes sense. I mean, I know people that take their blog posts. When they're done with them, they'll turn them into. They'll use chat to PT now to turn them into slide decks and then they'll take that slide deck and they'll put it on slide share and all these other things so they can get backlinks from, you know, high ranking websites. But there's some fun stuff that you can do.
Speaker 2:Thing about web. Yeah, it's very leveraged. There's a lot you can do now. Compared to, say, 10 years ago, it's a lot more leveraged with website businesses.
Speaker 1:I think so when do you think, where do you think all this is going? So you know, more and more people are going to start to understand that this is possible. So the competition is probably going to be be more and more. Now the you know the fruit has gotten a little lower. Now you can kind of pick the fruit right, because you got AI that's going to help you out with all this stuff. You know, where do you see this all going and evolving, because you're so intimately involved with this over, say, the next five years, 10 years, if you wanted to look out that far.
Speaker 2:Well, the good thing is, I think it's now like it's a respected or mature marketplace, and when you think about it so I'm lucky I've come from remember traditional buying and selling of traditional bricks and mortar businesses and I've been through the GFC with that, plus the high interest rate period we had here in Australia. I watched my parents back in the early 90s and I think what you'll find is people say I isn't this market flooded? I just say no. Now it's just like a normal buying and selling of the business, which has always happened throughout the history of mankind, and so to me it's just now. The good news is there's always going to be websites to buy and sell, just like there's always been bricks and mortar businesses to buy and sell, and it will just trundle along as an industry, just like so.
Speaker 2:And people are worried that AI is going to change it or whatever. Not really, it's just. I mean, obviously it's hugely disruptive, but at the end of the day, buying and selling websites is just like buying and selling a normal business. Now it's a much more mainstream. There's a lot of big buyers out there, which opens up a lot of opportunities for us small guys to get these small bargain sites, build them up and sell them off to the big guys, which has always been around. And when you think about it, in bricks and mortar world, that's basically the key strategy that you do to make the big money. If you want to make lots of money out of this, that's a really smart strategy. So the good news is I see it just like bricks and mortar. Well, if the economy goes down, things get a bit tighter, but online it's actually easier because you're not in debt to the bank, you're not forking out megabucks, so in some ways, it's a lot safer when the economy goes down. But of course, I think it's here to stay.
Speaker 2:Bottom line is we see it getting bigger. Now. We're privy to inside data, with all the big website brokers as well. They tell us behind the scenes look, here's the sales this month of what we're selling in terms of website deals, and often a lot of these guys. They're very open about it too. They share it publicly as well. You can go and see what their sales figures are. They're still going up. Wow. Basically, this is M&A. This is a new M&A, mergers and Acquisitions category. I guess that was never there, say, 10 years ago. It's just new. It's established. Now it's got what 10 to 15 years worth of history, and it's just getting bigger because there's more websites on the planet.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's always going to be another website.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's right, and so there's always going to be an opportunity to buy and sell, just like you know, it's exactly the same as the same market, as real estate. There's always a market, no matter what the economy is doing. Ok, some people have got to sell stuff cheap. There's always a marketplace for buying and selling real estate, as there is traditional bricks and mortar business. Now we've just got another category, which is online businesses. So in that sense, I think it's very, very exciting in the future, and particularly with AI. That's a game changer. It's going to create more opportunities than less long term. Now there's some things that we can't predict with AI, but on the whole and we're talking to lots of these brokers and lots of owners of seven and eight figure websites these are significant. You know they're making millions of dollars out of these things. None of them are worried about AI. It's because people want real, helpful content. As long as we're doing that with these sorts of sites, we're good.
Speaker 1:Well, I think you're kind of motivating me to go start an AI website, a blog, because there's so much AI software coming out and I'm sure they're involved in affiliate stuff, right? I mean, you've got, you've got Copyai, you've got Jarvis or Jasper or whatever they changed it to. It's one of the two now.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you've got. I mean, there's tons of these tools coming out and I'm sure they've got funding and they're like, hey, how do we get this out in the world? Well, we need people on YouTube to talk about it. We need popular blogs to talk about it.
Speaker 1:A buddy of mine, he started a Facebook group and it's chat GPT for life and business, I believe, is what it's called. He started that maybe two or three months ago and it's over 200,000 members now and they're getting constant engagement. Every post is receiving probably over a hundred likes and things like that. He's got brands now coming to him asking it how do I advertise on your group? You know what's the process. He's like I don't know what the process is, I didn't think about that. You know like, and he runs a data center. He's got his own data center in Covington. My buddy, Chris Brock I'll give him a shout out, but he yeah, he just started this thing up.
Speaker 1:The timing was right. You know, he jumped on it early. People were getting on Facebook looking for this stuff, so, paying attention to trends, why not start a blog that talks about AI and all the new stuff that's coming out? And people are there to find the newest things, so they're good. You know when you say, hey, here's this new AI tool that's coming out. It doesn't look like an advertisement, but it could be.
Speaker 2:No.
Speaker 1:And you're making money.
Speaker 2:So that's perfect. And actually you just mentioned something, adam, too. I'll give you listeners. Another free tool that we use to find these sorts of trends is just the, the, the good old Google trends tool. So that's free, just Google it. It's called Google Trends and it literally just shows you what's trending at the moment, and you can type in any niche and like, say, you can put in the words AI and it will show you what are the keywords or the topics in particular that are trending.
Speaker 2:And we also use that tool to look for what we call evergreen niches as well, which is, you know, like photography or golf. We just want to see a nice flat line or slightly growing. And it's a. It's a fascinating, it's totally free, it's really good fun to to look up niches. So there's a. There's a really good free research tools out there these days. I love hearing stories like that. They like what your friends done because someone like him. I was just straight away thinking, oh man, he needs to be selling advertising space on there and, like you said, he's already been approached.
Speaker 1:He's already been approached. Wow, here's a tip for your listeners.
Speaker 2:Any website these days don't care what the topic is If it's got eyeballs like lots of visitors. You can sell advertising space to the big corporates because they know that is targeted traffic and they traditional media is dying. You know the returns aren't as good, whereas on targeted traffic you can have a website about really obscure topic. But that's in some ways that's better for a corporate because they know the only people that are coming to that obscure topic all they want to do is learn how to play golf, say, or whatever. It is not that that's obscure, by the way, but you know what I mean. Like golfing schools, it's a no brainer to advertise on there 100%. So any website that has lots of traffic you can sell advertising space directly now to big corporates. Do you guys do?
Speaker 1:anything on YouTube, or you guys do have channels on YouTube that sell particular things. I mean, I just recently started a faceless YouTube channel where I'm using Pictory, which is an AI tool. That and this is an affiliate thing for them. It's just something I use, but Pictory is a. You go into chat, you create a script out of whatever the topic is, you plug it in there and it will create a video for you. I mean, it's got this library of stock photos or videos and it just plugs them in there.
Speaker 1:You could use a voiceover with it and then you can. You know you got your voiceover thing and then you add music. It's got all that stuff and you don't have to be a video editor or anything. It's super easy to use. So I just created a YouTube channel for my marketing agency and I just talk about. It's called Marketing Pro Trends and all I do is just do that and it kind of. You know, the AI voice isn't the greatest in the world. It just it is what it is, but you just put it out there and you try to build that up as well, and then at some point, maybe in the description, you put your affiliate links and things like that YouTube is the second biggest search engine. People don't know that, yeah.
Speaker 2:And I think it's interesting. You mentioned that that's the YouTube. Using YouTube as a online business or as an adjunct to what we do as an online business. I think that's the new big game changer Now. It's been around for the last 10 years and we always teach people. Look, all things being equal, once you get more advanced, you should put a YouTube channel with no matter what website you own and so, like you're asking, do we have a YouTube channel? We have our digital investors show on YouTube and that just started out with 100,000 people out with humble beginning like interviews like this with really cool case studies. But now we're finding a lot of private equity firms and big corporates are starting to look at that and see who's on there, and it's more for us, our personal YouTube channel, which is the digital investor show. It's more like a I guess, a networking slash branding tool for what we do here, teaching people out of you know by websites. But I think you're onto something there and it's interesting.
Speaker 2:I've done a few interviews recently with people where we're starting to see the new marketplace within our niche of buying websites is buying YouTube channels because they're so valuable now and, like you've just pointed out, it's actually a really smart question. It's something that's caught me by surprise is a lot of people out there are suddenly realizing, oh, youtube is hugely valuable. Therefore, is there a market in buying and selling YouTube channels? And that's a brand new thing. That's literally just in kind of the last year that now is people are starting to pay a lot of attention to. So if you're listening to this and you're a bit more, you know intermediate, I think Adam's onto something here. The YouTube channel thing is, all things being equal, we highly highly recommend it. I think that's the new growth area going forward as well, and you watch it.
Speaker 1:It's already starting, yeah it is Well, my God, you've got those ones that just play music, right, they just play music and it's got an animation and they just play music and they get tons of hits all the time. Or what they do is they go in, yeah, or they'll go into and they'll just. They'll grab audio from a motivational speaker, right, like you can do a search for anything on YouTube that is open license, right, and then you just grab clips of these, of people that are motivational speakers you know Joe Rogan, you know Goggins, all these other guys and then you just put these like people lifting weights and stuff and videos behind it. I mean those channels and those are faceless channels. Yeah, they're making so much money, but think about this it's just like any business, right, and you, being an M&A, you know this, saying, you know you want to work on the business, not in the business.
Speaker 1:And if you leave the business, if you're, if you are the sole reason, your business does its thing, you're the salesperson, you perform the services. That is not a sellable business, because they need you, right, they need you. They want you to be out of the process. They want the business to work without you. So if you walk away, the business still runs, right. Your sales process is tight. You've got everything straight, right? You know exactly what to do. So the YouTube channels that are faceless, that do not have a personality behind them because it would suck to buy Mr Beast's YouTube channel and then him decide he wants to retire, like, yeah, now it's not Mr Beast anymore, right, it's? You know it needs to be. If you could create a valuable YouTube channel, or if you could find a valuable YouTube channel that's producing these faceless things and they've got a tight process, that's a. That's a great business to buy.
Speaker 2:That's right. That's an asset that's leveraged and but also on YouTube, the branding thing is is going to be important too, because, well, it's not so much a branding is it, it's got to be. I think more and more people where the goal is in this whole industry is real. You know everyone wants, don't always want people are looking for answers from real experience. You know that's useful and helpful. That's the main, main thing there. And YouTube is a very interesting space and, like you said, it's the world's second biggest search engine. Obviously, you know Google owner. They bought it many years ago, one of the smartest acquisitions they ever did, and that space is going is is definitely going to become very interesting, and it's the perfect tool if you own an online business, as well as a as a secondary backup to what we do online. So traditionally we haven't bothered with social media accounts and YouTube accounts or anything like that. With our affiliate sites, we haven't needed to, but these days, if you want to turbo charge them, adding in a YouTube channel is a brilliant strategy.
Speaker 1:I love it, I recommend it. Well, and my wife she even you know I I mentioned to you before the show she's building out a course on Kajabi, which, if nobody knows what Kajabi is, kajabi is a way to build an interactive course, it's a tool. Then they host the course and all that and then you could put that on Udemy or, I guess, teachable or one of those other platforms and that's where people find these courses and buy them. But you can also sell your course, you know, through affiliates. So I guess you know one of her number one strategies once she builds this thing is do you know, put it out on her network and let her friends and family know and tell them to share it. But you really need to get it into the hands of affiliates and you need to get it out there.
Speaker 1:We had a lady on our podcast probably like maybe 10 podcast episodes ago. She built an SEO course doing the same thing, put it out on Udemy, made $4 million in four years selling her course. Now she teaches other people how to make courses and it's great, yeah, and it's like, why wouldn't you do this? It's crazy. So, matt, like, yeah, but how do people I mean find experts like you. I mean, are you, are you only working with the bigger companies? Are you wanting to work with, you know, side hustlers? Is there a course that they can buy? Like, how do people find, like, how do people take what's in your head and your knowledge and your understanding and use it for their, for their thing?
Speaker 2:Well, the good news is we we definitely don't work with the big companies. We specialize working with, typically, corporates or people who are burnt out, people that work nine to five or, these days, five to nine and want to earn a side hustle. So that's why I love what you're doing, and so we specialize in teaching beginners how to buy or build online businesses, and we run courses in that here at the E Business Institute. We have a lot of clients in the US, so this strategy works everywhere. Obviously, we we started teaching this to Australians, to Aussies, but these days we run, you can do like our free masterclass. We've got a 19 minute masterclass. If anyone's interested, they can jump on our website, ebusinessinstitutecomau, and I see lots of examples there of actually how you like our overall strategy of how you buy, renovate and then sell websites, and we we're very passionate about my wife and I, liz, teaching beginners, because that was our journey when we first got into business. It was really tough and we made lots of mistakes, and so now we give back by teaching beginners when we're not.
Speaker 2:We don't really teach intermediate or advanced people. We love teaching beginners, as do all our coaches here. All our coaches are people that have done our course and they're the same no online experience whatsoever. For us, it's personal buzz. That's how we, that's how we're helpful. You know, we teach people. We're good at breaking down complex topics into actionable businesses that work and obviously we've got a lot of experience as well. So if anyone's interested and they want to get what's in our head, I'd suggest he's a plug for us. Jump on our website and check us out. Just go and look at our success stories. Go and look at what our clients are doing and consider doing our free masterclass.
Speaker 1:That's awesome, matt. Well, all this will be in the show notes, in the description guys, if you want to go in there and take a look. But, matt, yeah, this is great. I mean, we're on the same page. I think we both. You know you found success. Obviously I'm doing well.
Speaker 1:You know, at some point you really want to, you want to help other people and it really frustrates you to see people struggling, not being able to pay their bills. We're in probably a global recession. We're going into one, at least in most countries, and it's it's rough knowing that we're headed in this direction and people are not in a position to, they're not prepared. They're not prepared and it's going to hit people like a ton of bricks. And you've got it. You've got to start transitioning. You need a side hustle. You have to have something else that could eventually. I mean and you're doing this full time and now you know you've done it so many times. Now you could teach people, yep, and it's, it's, it's fulfilling, it's enjoyable. This is something like hey, look, I love buying and selling businesses and making a bunch of money, but at the same time, you go and into work every day, you go and talk to these people and it's crazy to watch them succeed. I mean, you shared a couple of stories. It's amazing. I love it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thank you. Yeah, well, it's very similar to what I love, what you're doing with your podcast. That's the message we want to get out is, like Warren Buffett says, you can't rely on your income anymore and you need a side hustle of building it on the side. The side hustle is where Liz and I started and and all our clients do, and this is leveraged and safe, because I'm like you, adam.
Speaker 2:I think the world is headed for a recession at some point, and it might not be a good one, and you need to do it with low risk. That's the one thing we've noticed over the years helping people in M&A. We've seen people take too much risk on in the form of debt, and we're very Liz and I like being debt free. That's what? Because cash is king in the middle of a recession. Yes, when you can make the most money If you have zero debt and you can then take advantage of the opportunities that are about to come up, you watch what's going to happen out there.
Speaker 2:There's going to be awesome businesses to buy for cents in the dollar, because people just need the cash. So that's the other thing we're preparing for and, at the very least, it's safe, but I don't need to take risk, nor should you listen to. So you know, if you're interested in this stuff, consider website businesses, because they're so in our experience not giving financial advice, but in our experience there are a lot lower risks than traditional bricks and mortar. But that's right. I'm, of course, biased on that one.
Speaker 1:Well, my Aussie friend, gary he lives down in Fort Lauderdale, florida. He grew up in Melbourne, lived under a bridge, he was orphaned. When he was 12 years old and he was homeless, came to America somehow I can't even remember how he told me he got to America, started working on boats, created a yacht building business at some point, sold it for $60 million. He was the only only person they didn't have any investors or anything sold it for $60 million. I went to his house one time. He's a huge yacht in the back of his he's right on the intercoastal not on the intercoastal, he's on a you know, and they have all these little finger islands you know these and you park your boat behind your house and then you get off your boat and you just walk into the back door. So he lives in one of these places and he opens up his garage and he's got like four cars in there Rolls Royce, phantom, a McLaren, all these cars. And I said, man, that's crazy. He said how much do you think that Phantom cost? I was like I don't know, it's a $350, $400,000 car, $100,000. And I said how'd you get that? I was like how'd you get it for $100,000?
Speaker 1:He said I'm in the misery business. I said what's the misery business? He said everybody that lives around me. Eventually, some of them get into tax trouble. They all live above their means. They're using debt to pay for their lifestyle. They want to live this lifestyle but they're really not earning that much money and income. He said, eventually, the tax may incomes. They have to pay their bill and they look for people like me to sell their stuff to. He's like and I just buy it, it's coming and you got to have cash. Right, you got to have cash If you're going to be in the misery business, which is he doesn't like being in the misery business, but it is what it is and he's a businessman. So, yeah, there they are, you know, and you don't want to be in the other position. You want to be in the position to buy, not in the position where you have to sell.
Speaker 2:Yep, absolutely so. Cash is king. That's that's the thing we've learned in business after 30 years High cash flow. Business is rock. You're not. I don't want to ever be beholden to banks again. That's how. That's our number one rule.
Speaker 1:And you don't want to sit on inventory. That's why we do what we do and you don't want to be sitting on a whole bunch of inventory. You spend a bunch of money on that. You can't move.
Speaker 2:Especially in a recession, not good.
Speaker 1:That's right. Well, matt, this has been a pleasure. I thank you for joining me such early, you know, and really early in Australia there and I appreciate it and I think everybody's listening appreciates it and hopefully some people reach out to you and get it together you know Awesome, it's been a pleasure.
Speaker 2:I don't think so much for having me on my on your show. It's just on the road, All right, Matt thank you.
Speaker 1:Thanks for joining us on this week's episode of Side Hustle City. Well, you've heard from our guests. Now let's hear from you. Join our community on Facebook, Side Hustle City. It's a group where people share ideas, share their inspirational stories and motivate each other to be successful and turn their side hustle into their main hustle. We'll see you there and we'll see you next week on the show. Thank you.