9 Income Streams You Can Build While STILL an Employee

if I wanted to be wealthy have less risk and have a higher likelihood of figuring out where I could make the most money I need multiple income streams and in this video I want to share with you the nine income streams I grew while having a job before I got known on the internet I wish somebody would have told me this stuff when I was working nobody talked about where they put their money why and how much money they actually made in fact they hid it totally frowned upon to share any of this depending on

your situation in life the best side hustle or income stream for you to pick it's going to be different the most important thing to understand when looking for more income streams is that you want to find leverage a way of working smarter not harder to achieve the same goal with less effort consider it like using a lever to open a bottle cap you can either attempt to manually brute force it which is time for money or you can use the right leverage for your situation and The Leverage doesn't work for you so how do you

figure out which income streams you have the right lever for there are four money levers at different points you can use to build up your income streams like I did let's jump into what those are and I'll give you all the exact things that I did first lever is time obviously time's like you got in the beginning early on anytime you can trade your time for somebody else's money that's going to be your superpower here is one of the first income streams that I had a service business I started a service business that helped people

do business in Latin America it was called selling South and basically did it on the side with a colleague who worked with me at the time all we did was we helped companies that wanted to do what we did in Latin America by giving them introductions so this company got paid by the hour to create Market entry to those who also wanted to sell investments into ladam it wasn't a huge income strain but our first year we each took home about $40,000 a year it also led to a big job years later for me helping

this woman Nelly Gan do a part of her tour in the US for Latinos and finance and I never would have gotten that opportunity without a couple of long hours and nights doing the service business that's how I met Gloria Stefon that's how I got on people in espanol's red carpet I think I made 15K for that side gig with Nelly Galan but I would have paid to participate and all of that now today I own another online service business this one's called viral cuts and it's made me realize this is something I wish I

had done when I was in my 20s I didn't have selling South until I was well into my 30s it's so easy today to start offering a service online we've paid contractors at contrarian thinking 5K for 10 to 20 hours a month doing research writing design short form editing like this finding an Outsource expert on sites like upwork or Fiverr for look at this like 5 10 20 bucks an hour and then you charge 10020 an hour you can also start a barebone sort of boring service business out in the real world you could do

it for 500 bucks like we did with this pressure washing company window cleaning Landscaping Etc I didn't do that early on I did it with my Consulting hours to make intros here's what no one will tell you about this though service businesses are a great way to start but I don't think they're a great way to end if you have custom services and provide services before you get paid that means you're chasing invoices scope creep is a real thing which means somebody asks you for this and you instead deliver all of this but you don't

get paid for this in the middle so there's a reason there are so many of them and very few of these service businesses get huge you want to have somebody pay you before you offer a service you want to have somebody have very specific things you deliver every single time you want to get paid for every single hour of your time and with service businesses that's hard to do in the beginning the last thing that's hard for me with the service business I couldn't estimate very well what my total time needed was and that's something

you're going to want to do so don't start with a ton of these start small if you're going to do a service based business number two 9 to5 hard truth your first 100K will most likely come from your earned wages your income for most people it'll be your first million it was for me I made 37 Kish when I got out of college and at the end of my time being employed by someone else in finance I made Seven figures as a private Equity partner it was broken down like this 20% salary so I get

this no matter what for my dayto day unless I get fired 30% carry which is distributions for performance I'd get paid out a percentage of the profits we made in our investments so if we have a company pay out I don't know $100,000 dividend between us partners I might get 8% of that because that was the percentage that I owned of the company then another 35 to 40% was bonuses these are Milestones hit so I'd get paid when we hit our Milestones like a number of deals done or a return profile hit and then maybe

another 10 to 15% for Commissions in money raised so you will ideally have a gradually declining line that starts at 9 to5 at the height and eventually whittel down to the least portion why because earned income working versus investment income or what is deemed by the IRS as non-active income is taxed at a startlingly lower rate so you keep more of what you make look at this chart if you have a taxable income and you make over $622,000 by having a job you pay 37% if you use long-term capital gains AKA investment income you pay

20% you are almost double paying for the right to trade your time for money crazy my income was also highly skewed by my salary and I'd say probably accounted for 80 to 90% of what I made back then so I had other income streams but it was mainly salary nothing wrong with having a job just know it'll be your biggest driver to start and it could be forever but you still want to have something else in case your income dries up the second lever is expertise so after a couple years of trading your time for

money and job got something more valuable expertise so my third income stream that I had was Consulting I was doing a ton of work in Latin America investing and building up investment businesses I noticed people wanted to mimic the work that we were doing and so it made me think could I teach other people how to grow a large Latin American Investment business like I do someone first asked if they could pay for an hour of my time and I really had no idea about that so I said sure and I think I threw out

a number of like 250 bucks they paid then I increased it to 500 and would randomly take one off phone calls I made 2 to 4K a month taking a few phone calls then I got on GLG and it connects a million plus experts to clients you could also do this one which is intro. co I like intro better because GLG makes people interview for the opportunities while intro you don't have to apply you just get paid the second that somebody signs up I'd rather get paid do the work and move on then have to

do an application Pro tip do some calls for free in the beginning but don't do that work for free forever now I don't even do one-off consultations but in the beginning I did so take the thing that someone pays you for in your salary or other high area of performance and do it one off by the hour that's what Consulting is and you can do this on the side petting your employer is okay with it what people won't tell you is that you have to set boundaries when you consult for an hour and you do

a good job they're going to want more and more you have to make sure you're really clear on rates and you only do work when you are tracking it almost like if you were in a job back in the day where you had to clock in and clock out you have to be really good at that with consult Consulting most people are not so the other way you can get around it is I now have a Consultants that I pay like Jordan and I pay him a flat fee I pay him 10K a month for

him to help me scale a few of my businesses if I use more than the couple hours a week that he has dedicated to me it's okay because he has a flat amount that allows for overage in the beginning of you doing consulting if you're like me that probably won't work out for you fourth sitting on boards I use my expertise to add another income stream by sitting on the board of a company in my industry for instance now I sit on the board of a hedge fund back then I sat on the Board of

venture capital fund called magma Partners this meant getting paid somewhere between $30 to $300,000 to go to four quarterly meetings and give my advice obviously when you start out you will be very cheap or maybe even free but as you continue to become a better board member you can charge more now how do you get this type of position how did I get somebody to decide that they even wanted my vice I was really valuable to the founder of a fund group in an area that I already knew and I asked him what his two

biggest pain points were deal flow and fundraising so I made some introductions and then he asked me to be on the board one of the biggest hacks is not always you having to do the work you finding somebody's who to solve their biggest how or what and so the way that I got a board position is I introduced him to a few High net worth friends that I had accumulated relationships with who wanted to invest in Venture Capital that led to investment by them into his fund because that he offered me a 30k payment a

year for being at quarterly meetings and continuing to help and advise him now again not everybody can do this but you need to understand what the really really rich do to add income streams I hate when people gatekeep how they got here so I thought I'd share this with you for real how could you do this as somebody brand new well you probably couldn't what you could do though is you could do what this guy Jamie did who actually consulted on this YouTube channel you could watch my YouTube channel see that we've had some success

take all of the expertise that he's had by playing around with this industry being young experimenting in YouTube and send us a format and that format which looks like this that Jamie sent it gives us a bunch of free ideas and insights from somebody who's played in this space for quite a while even though he's very young he sent this to me I took a meeting with him and we ended up paying him to be a consultant for us now if I went and started a YouTube company do you know who I'd ask to be

on the board Jamie and when you're on the board of one that might mean you get equity and you get income who this is really good for though is ex Executives Founders and people with real expertise it does come with some risk though so for instance you could be in trouble if you sit on a bad board and they do something really dumb or if your Executives of the company do something really dumb imagine being on open ai's board or enron's or ftxs board you could have what's called fiduciary charges which basically means they could

do lawsuits against you that's why you can earn a ton doing this but it's not my favorite income stream speaking events so then I started wanting to get paid to speak first no one would even let me speak then I did it for free a handful of times while I was still an employee and then about my my fifth speech I started getting paid they asked what I charged for an event originally that was 1,000 2,000 then 5 and then after like 15 to 20 and then after 30 and 40 and 50 and 100 now

I get paid more like 50 to 100K that last part candidly wild to me that we still get paid like that but I want you to understand the events industry because then it doesn't sound so crazy I mostly turn down the number of speaking events we get let me show you how this works though we do an annual event each year at contan thinking it costs like 200 to 230k to put on and we have a 25k speaking budget that's because we can make that money back from the group look at this graph the UK

spends $20 billion a year on events look how big the exhibitions Market is it's huge $ 11 billion and that means they need speakers in order to get sponsors and attendees this is where you slot in you can do some of these speaking agencies like I have you can see me listed on a few of these and what happens is if you can find a specific niche especially in a niche where other people make money or they bring in attendance then you too can get paid a lot for speaking in events just expect the beginning

to kind of suck almost like any type of income stream you're going to make all right what kind of events you start local then go corporate then go conference then go exhibition those are the different budget levels that speaking goes to now what people will not tell you about speaking have you ever been stuck overnight in Topeka Kansas had to stay in an airport hotel miss your anniversary then catch a red eye the next day and since everything was Clos for dinner eat Cool Ranch Doritos and a Sprite for dinner yeah I have it's not

fun you do get paid to speak for an hour but it takes 5 hours to prep for that speech then you got to come up with a PowerPoint the idea you talk to the hosts you get there early you fly in the night before you always need at least 3 hours to speak and because of Q&A and wait time the average hourly rate you should never calculate at 1 hour because I think it's more like 10 to 24 hours now the upsides are you meet a ton of really cool people you look good you expand

your ability to speak and communicate which is super super valuable and I would totally recommend most people at some point get paid to speak it just means you're going to be able to get more of what you want by being able to communicate more clearly now Pro tip I have a rate that's for local speeches 15K and one for travel 50 to 100K depending on what it is and where it is it still feel weird saying that out loud I focus on my businesses otherwise the other thing that I wish I had done earlier is

stop giving new speeches I can't take my own advice on this but the best speakers give the same speech 400 times until it's incredible I get ADHD and change mine all the time if you can just have one speech you skip all of those hours year one of speaking I made maybe 3K almost nothing year two of speaking I made more like 25k year three of speaking we're talking close to six figures more like 90k and now if I wanted to I could make millions a year instead we take I don't know probably somewhere between

$300,000 $500,000 worth of speaking events a year so you certainly can scale there are people that their entire income is from public speaking I don't think it's the best income talk about really bumpy but it's certainly possible info product I was in cannabis private Equity but I kept getting two questions how do I get a job in cannabis and how do I invest so I randomly made two guides and I put them on Gum Road you can see them here and it's wild because they're still up there and we still actually get people buying these

things you can see right here this made me $4,160 in total so about 3K in the first year and then dwindled off from there not huge but not nothing I don't promote it and I still randomly get sales from it which is awesome now where did I learn to do this cuz I'm actually not very tech-savvy I listen to a now friend of mine Sam par talking about creating a guide for finding an apartment in San Francisco so I basically followed his process uploaded mine to gumroad I said it's free to create they just take

a percentage of the sales great who would this work for if you get asked for your expertise on multiple subjects multiple times I think start writing wrting it down worse comes to worse you can start sending them the little blog post or a little Twitter thread you do on it and after you start getting that asked 10 15 20 times I think it's guide time the worst comes to worse you learn how to create a guide maybe you sell 5 20 100 bucks the best case scenario you're like me and you get a couple thousand

bucks in a product you don't spend any time on or you develop an entire Ino product business now what do you need to apply this skill intelligently you need three things cash curiosity crowd people who are willing to pay for insight on the subject so how to pet a cat probably not curiosity something you're naturally interested in and want to create around if you're already curious because you like to look hot on Instagram and you want to put cool filters on well it turns out that other people buy those filters from you so if you're

already creating them you're already curious you just sell them that could work and then finally you need a crowd a group of people who are willing to pay you might be able to get a crowd of people for how to turn your cat into a cool looking Panda maybe there are a bunch of people that want to do fancy cuts on their cats but if you go how to just groom Siamese cats it's not as much a quick way to tell one way or the other is to go to Facebook search the exact term you

want in Facebook groups and see if there are groups of at least 100,000 people interested in your subject why I like it you don't have to trade time for money anymore you create something once and then it continues to sell in multiple different ways if someone ask me a question on a subject I can briefly answer but say hey if you want more detail I actually have these I think this is the easiest way usually to make your first dollar on the internet for me it wasn't a huge Revenue stream it's hard to be unless

you have massive scale all right the third lever brand or audience the most powerful Leverage is building an audience maybe you already have one or maybe you want to build one I Grew From nothing to over 5 million in less than 3 years it was a lot of work it was not just luck and having fun on the internet but it did start with this next income strain newsletter affiliate sales my newsletter back in the day was called Cody sanchez. really creative and I would make about a th000 bucks a month from newsletter sponsorships for

a year or so then I branded it contrarian thinking I got serious and I grew up from 0 to 55k subscribers and 50k in Revenue in 8 months I started this all out on MailChimp that was my tech stack then I went to substack if I was starting out right now I would use beehive here's the reason why they have an auto sponsor button so they basically bring ads to you you can click a couple buttons select yes or no which means you don't have to chase them now we're going to get into more details

on how exactly to do that later but if I was going to start this now I think there are four questions you need to ask yourself before you start a newsletter and how to do it this is what I ask myself where do people ask for your opinion what would you do even if you weren't getting paid for it what are the Hobbies you'd like to get into and what are you really really uniquely skilled at when you answer these four questions you should have a short list of topics you could create a newsletter or

a product business so how did I learn this I watched these guys who become friends Alex liberman and Austin reef at the morning Brew grow theirs and then my other friend Sam basically I want to steal other people's homework just like you guys are doing today all of us create all of this stuff on the internet and we literally tell you all the secrets back when I was just starting I had to go through podcast after weird oneof blog post and now I could just double X speed look at the transcript and also the comments

and get all the information I need from YouTube amazing who is this good for well you need to like writing and you need to also be able to commit to writing at least one newsletter a week for a year if you won't do that and find joy in it don't do it now what people will not tell you about starting a newsletter dealing with one-off sponsors is literally the worst thing in the entire world especially when you're small I would not go back and do this way again I would use beehive or convert kit where

they set up sponsors for you and you just get to insert them it's too much work for me going and trying to talk people into sponsoring my newsletter I wouldn't do that I love the fact that you could plug and play now don't get me wrong morning Brew created a ninef figureure business by going and hand selling people on putting ads in their newsletters it's totally possible I just didn't love doing it another little Pro tip don't do oneoff prices or custom amounts try to standardize I did a lump sum $250 to $1,000 a newsletter

then once I got bigger I use what's called CPO which is a newsletter specific metric it's basically based on every thousand opens and so it ranges between 20 to 100 the numbers can be a little fuzzy with multiple factors at play but if your newsletter has an average of 5,000 opens and you can charge $50 CPO Your sponsorship price would be$ 250 because 5,000 opens divided by 1,000 * 50 that's how you determine what you can charge now the next one's slightly different this is sponsorships online for being kind of public and this one takes

me way back I didn't do a lot of these ever but I remember getting thrilled when I first got on the internet to get sponsored by these guys Prana and I think they basically gave me some leggings and some yoga pants and a very small amount of money I also remember doing one a billion years ago for kind bar look at how awful this was I was influencing hard I think this led to Max 5K a year for me now who is this good for lots of people I mean this is a internet friend of

mine Danny Austin and I assume she makes definitely seven figures but probably eight figures by doing sponsorships and affiliate posts on her Instagram you have to have a massive audience for this to work at scale and you know I never liked the idea of a brand being able to put words in my mouth and control my actual picture it just felt bad for me so I think if that doesn't bother you and you want to start at a smaller level that works but at a certain point when you get big enough you can kind of

say no I don't want that no I don't want that and this is the only way that I'm going to do it what don't they tell you about sponsorships one there's no set amount pay uh when you are what's called a micro influencer or somebody below 15,000 subscribers or followers on something like Instagram typically they're going to give you free product maybe a couple hundred bucks and you might have to apply for the sponsorships once you get up above 15,000 let's call it more like 50 to 100,000 they're going to have set prices plus some

free product but it's probably not going to be a lot it's only once you get to hundreds and hundreds of thousands if not a million that real money starts to be here and you can start making five six figures a month if not more obviously Kim Kardashian does this like crazy the other thing that I never loved about this is for $5,000 a year if I was to go and sell my own products instead of selling somebody else's that means I kept the whole pie so I know if Prana is going to pay me $5,000

for a post let's say then they've done the math that they're going to make on average I think 5 to 10 10x what they paid me so that means they're making $50,000 off of a post that I did well why wouldn't I just want to go try to make $50,000 on something I own myself that's why now mostly we talk about our own businesses I input in our portfolio of businesses and I grow but in the beginning this was $5,000 a year fourth lever money once you have money it's your job to make that money

make you more money and this is where it becomes really really fun and it becomes your strongest lever my next income stream was Airbnb I very first bought a small townhouse with my brother and he managed it while we cash flowed off of it I had more money he had less so he earned in by managing it then we did that again and again and again now we make multiple six figures a year in incomes from airbnbs that I have in Texas and California I'll actually show you one of the pnls right here the first

year that we did this we made $73,000 in total revenue uh expenses were $221,000 and then uh Allin pay we made about $52,000 I think we made a little bit less than that with you know uh extra miscellaneous things but let's call it $40 to $50,000 off of one Airbnb then the next year we made more like $129,000 and the expenses were something like $36,000 which means that we made $93,000 in cash flow split between the two of us you do that a few times and it starts looking pretty interesting also note this is without

us owning the property management companies so who is this good for this is good for anybody who can do one of two things have some cash to be the backer like I was have some time and willingness to be an expert or become one AKA like my brother became one to actually manage the property you can do either the other interesting thing that you should know about Airbnb is there's huge volatility so you can kind of see this in some of our months you know we had a couple months in the beginning where we were

negative we made no money and then we have a couple months where we make 10,000 another month where we make 18,000 there's a lot of variance between those and so you have to understand that when you're getting into the Airbnb game every single month isn't going to be the same so that kind of stressed me out in the beginning the last thing that nobody ever told me about Airbnb is that I would never want to be the one to manage them at some point I had to tell my brother please stop telling me about all

the stuff that's going wrong in our airbnbs cuz I actually don't want to know cuz I don't want to go solve it your job to solve it my job to own it and so you know there were is an instance where a pipe burst in the um top of the townhouse and it flooded the entire thing it flooded during ACL weekend which is the weekend that we make the most money AK that $18,000 weekend it fell on the guitar of a uh person performing that cost I don't know how much thousands and thousands of dollars

that we had to replace we had to go back and forth with Airbnb plus we had to refund the guy completely plus that was our biggest weekend and so Airbnb does have a lot of issues just like any business and that stressed me out my Pro tip would be either spend a lot of time and be the one that manages it and just know what that's going to feel like or hire somebody else to do it which is pretty much how I like to run all of my businesses because I spend the most time managing

the portfolio overall laundr mats you guys have heard about this a lot from me video video video you could link to any one of these I won't belabor the point I know you've already heard my laundr mat story about how I was working an employed at the time I was running businesses in Latin America I couldn't actually own a business that I had to operate because I wasn't in the country and so I partner with somebody who had already owned and run a laundromat before I was the money behind it we bought one for a

very small sixf fig amount that didn't make that much a year and then we added other laundromats on top of it the reason isn't that I particularly like laundry I just like the Simplicity of it and let me explain why too launder mats are interesting because the customers do the majority of the work they're washing and drying their own clothes that means you don't have a lot of Labor so training and onboarding is pretty minimal the customers pay you upfront I like upfront cash which makes accounting and tracking easier it's recession resistant people always need

clean clothes and you can Roi on it the laundry industry has something like let's call it 15 to 35% return on income and they have a little bit higher success rate because there's not so much variance in this type of business the another thing that's interesting about laundromats is unlike a restaurant convenience store grocery store La mats have very little physical inventory we just used to have these soap dispensers and some toy dispensers the last thing not a lot of seasonality so maybe you get more bathing suits in the summer if you're in California and

more warm jackets if you're in the winter in Colorado but people are still washing their clothes now there are a lot of cons to this business you or in my case my gent an operator who R the business have to run a laundr matat so there's that it's also not the cheapest thing to start you could go start an online business for zero but laundr mats are going to have a price tag of a couple hundred K so you got to figure out creative financing to get them we talk about this a lot you can

see some of the free blog posts we have on it the other thing is it's a low barrier to entry there's a lot of laundr mats out there so competition is high we're not like Facebook moded you also have to get your hands a little dirty you're like a plumber electrician businessman marketer janitor a million things rolled into one or you do what I do and you give an equity split to an operator who can do all those things and you take care of the cash utilities and rent they don't go away those are set

costs which can keep rising and then the customers this is a unique client set you know I have someone else do this coin collection oversight and security because you know crackheads some of these laundr mats have tough neighborhoods last thing I want to hit on here is not exactly one income stream it's a way to layer a bunch of them I call this horizontal income and it's an idea that you can layer on top of any of these income streams you can think about it kind of like the Russian nesting dolls of income streams you

know those dolls that fit inside of one another for instance I bought a launder mat then I added soap vending then I added toy machines then soda Ving machines then wash and fold a new service then I might buy the actual strip mall then I might add more laundromats this is called a platform acquisition where you're buying up different sectors of clientele that you can serve vertical acquisition and then horizontal acquisition you're buying your competitors then you can layer these all on top of each other the thing is I'm a self- admitted wuss it was

too scared to leave my job to go take a big huge startup risk so I needed to stack income streams that made me confident I wasn't going to go completely broke if you have a big huge idea and aren't scared at all go do it you don't need a million income streams I just don't think that has to be the only way and I think people mislead you there I want you to send this video to someone who's like me a little scared and needs a ladder thrown down from somebody like you and two comment

below the income streams you have right now alongside your job you cannot be it if you cannot see it and you can actually inspire somebody else below let's go do the work because there are two types of people in this world those who talk and those who do I know which one you are don't talk subscribe see it see that