Energy into Assets into Money

I was already a few million in when I learned this & even then it made me rethink everything - now it’s an in house mantra at my company that we live & breath 24/7/365. 

Let’s dive in: 

If you look out at the world, most people are stuck in a 2 step loop back & forth from the day they start working until the day they retire (usually with not enough money to live the way they want to). 

They bounce between 2 walls - Energy & Money. 

Each day they wake up, spin out of bed, get ready & swap a few units of energy tickets for a few units of $$$. Over & over again this happens until their body, mind or both cannot continue to make the trade. Then the $$$ stops. 

Worse yet, the entire time they’re stuck in this loop making this Energy for $$$ trade back & forth for years on end, how much $$$ they can make has a heavy ceiling weighing down on it. It’s strictly limited by how much Energy they can expend in a given day, week, month or year. Again, you cap out. Even in a purely imaginary world, you can’t work more than 24 hours in a day & 7 days per week. Then you come crashing back down to the real world where you need sleep (there goes 6 to 8 hours), you’ve got a family (I assume you want to see them?), you’ve probably got some hobbies you’re somewhat fond of? 

Keep peeling it back, you’re left with a small amount of productive hours each day you can trade for $$$ to pay the bills and the only lever you can pull to make more is to sacrifice those other areas - sleep (health), family, leisure / hobbies. 

Now I’m not sitting here pretending I wasn’t once stuck in this matrix. I was the kid who did really well in high school & university then went hard & fast into the 60 - 80+ hour corporate weeks from my early 20s. It took me over to New York where I worked on multi billion dollar corporate restructuring deals. 

Now don’t get me wrong, the money was good BUT I had the exact problem I outlined for you above - in order to cash these checks, every other part of my life suffered in a big way. My health, I hardly slept & the few spare hours I had free on the weekend to enjoy life, I was pretty cooked from the week before & contemplating the repeat that lay ahead in the next week. 

So keep that little ‘2 step’ dance in mind for a moment - Energy into $$$. 

Now you’d THINK being all edgy & ‘advanced’ the online business world would know better than this right? And some people do, but the vast majority come online & repeat this same mistake. The mentality is so ingrained in their operating system that they repeat the same mistakes in their brand & business. 

‘What can I do today to get paid today?’ 

Aka - how can I trade my energy tickets today for some $$$ tickets ASAP. Only difference is they’re doing it online instead of at their job. Same disappointing outcome awaits. 

This manifests for folks in a few different ways, such as: 

• Constantly selling their time via 1 to 1 coaching deals for an hourly rate that is usually way too low
• Spending all their time in 1 to 1 conversations in the DMs or on the Phone to try close deals 
• Jumping from strategy to strategy, tactic to tactic, model to model & starting over again & again & again…

I could go on & on. You’ve seen it, I’ve seen it & it only ends one way. Burn out with little to no $$$ to show for it. 

If you’ve been falling into this trap, I don’t want you to feel guilty. It’s incredibly common, the vast majority of people are doing it & even people who on the surface might appear to be ‘succeeding’ are committing this sin & eventually it will catch up with them - it has to. 

And thankfully for all of us, there’s actually a really simple fix & I’m excited to share that with you today. It will however require you to commit to longer term thinking, slowing down, being more deliberate & methodical in how you build your brand & business and above all else, patient. What I’m going to show you in a moment can drastically change your life (as it has mine) but it won’t be easy or fast. 

Are you ready? 

Remember that little 2 step process I mentioned before that most people are stuck in?

Energy into $$$ over & over & over again….

We’re going to buck that trend & add one more step right down the middle. Energy into _________ into $$$. You see the REAL problem with the first model is that the energy is being spent to gain the $$$ & when that is done, it’s done. The only way more $$$ can be gained in the future, is more energy.

The fix? 

We have to capture the energy & store it up so that we can benefit from it today, tomorrow, weeks, months & years into the future. This is the real hack to making more & more money, without increasing your workload (and in a lot of cases working less & less each year). 

Rather than letting our energy make us money, we’re going to flip the script & invest our energy into Asset Building (more on this in a moment) and then we will let the ASSETS generate the $$$. 

With this simple tweak & taking the 2 step process 99% of people are engaged in every day that is limiting their income & maxing out their workload (leaving them financially & energetically broke) we’re going to intercept all that energy & strategically direct it into Assets that will do the heavy lifting for us & produce us cashflow day in & day out. 

This little shift is so potent. Every time I have a client grasp this & fully embrace it, they come back to me in 6, 12, 18 months time & tell me how their life has never been the same. 

So now you’re probably saying, “okay Jacob I understand that in theory.” I need to build assets to capture my energy. I want to let the assets do the cash flowing for me so I don’t have to crank the handle all day to make money. 

“How the heck do I do that?”  

To discuss this it’s important to understand that there’s 4 core pillars inside your business when it comes to selling stuff & making money: 

1. Marketing
2. Sales
3. Offer
4. Delivery 

Marketing is what people consume on the front end (your ads, your content etc)

Sales is the discrete process they go through to see your offer (chat, call etc)

Offer is what you’re selling, how it is packaged & positioned, pricing strategy etc

Delivery is how you serve your clients (courses, coaching, communities, calls etc) 

With that basic understanding, it’s important to note that there are parts to this process that have no leverage, parts that have some leverage & parts that have a lot of leverage. 

We want to invest our energy into building assets where we can achieve maximum leverage within the business. When we do this, it will serve to reduce the amount of time / energy we have to invest into parts of the business with no / limited leverage. 

Let me give you an example: 

Marketing with content has a lot of leverage. You can film a YouTube video, upload it & 1000s of people can watch it over weeks, months & years. If this video is done well it can pre-sell people on your products & services while generating ‘ready to buy’ inbound leads. 

You might invest an hour ONE TIME into creating this video, hand it off to your team / a freelancer to edit & you can see benefits from it for years to come. 

On the flip side, a 1 to 1 conversation with someone has little to no leverage (in the DMs you can get a bit more since you can have multiple convos at once). We invest 1 hour here & after that hour is done, it’s over. It hasn’t been captured in any asset that can serve us tomorrow, next month or next year. 

Another example: 

The way we create offers, where we sell them with PDF & Google Docs, we can capture all the critical info about the offer into 6 - 10 pages & that does the selling & telling for us with a prospect. We invest the time once to create it, 1000s of prospects can read it & decide if they want to buy or not. We don’t have to explain it 1 by 1 over & over again. If we want to tweak the offer, we make a change in the doc & boom - it’s changed forever. 

Can you see in these examples how capturing your energy to build assets can be so beneficial in the long term? 

It gets even cooler when you stack these assets together (and this is why this lesson of investing energy into assets into $$$ is so critical for the work we’re going to do together). 

This is how we do business:

1. We publish & distribute content across multiple platforms to build an external brand ecosystem that people can move through, consume & interact with (HIGHLY LEVERAGED)
2. Our audience moves towards us & joins our email list + free private community where they’re greeted with more relevant & helpful content (HIGHLY LEVERAGED)
3. When the time is right for them, they get in touch (or we reach out to them) and we send them an invitation to work together. The invitation is in the form of a PDF or Google Doc as outlined above (HIGHLY LEVERAGED)

When we stack these 3 things together they’re doing the heavy lifting in the business. It means the 1 to 1 DM chat is VERY brief because the prospect is already pre-sold & highly educated about what we do & how we can help them. 

They’ve decided they want to work with us & they just need the details. 

Therefore, we’re MINIMIZING the time spent in the part of the business with limited leverage because we let our assets & high leverage points of the business do the heavy lifting for us. 

The challenge people inevitably face with this approach, is that it can be slower than just going to ‘source’ & trading energy for $$ today. That is true, you could spend all day in the DMs & make a bunch of money. But for how long? To what end? 

Did you get into this business to be grinding all day every day? 

Or did you get into this business to build something you love, that grows bigger & better each day without you having to spend more & more time away from your life & family to keep it alive? 

I think it’s a pretty simple answer for most people - and that’s why I love this framework. 

Now before we wrap up, some comments about practically applying this in your business & life ASAP. 

Firstly, I want you to look at your calendar (or if you aren’t running one, analyze how you’re spending your time each day & week.) How much time is being taken up by activities where you’re expending energy & it isn’t being captured in some form of asset that you can derive benefit from in the future? 

Don’t feel bad - for most people nearly all their time is sucked up into this abyss never to be seen again. 

This is the first step. Slashing those activities from your calendar wherever possible. Do you really need all those meetings? All those calls? There’s likely a ton of stuff you can cull pretty quickly & open up your calendar so that you’re primed for asset building (sidenote - we’re going to go deeper on planning your week & how your calendar is directly tied to your happiness in future Issues). 

Once you have freed up some time, I want you to revisit what I outlined above about the different elements of your business & the components that have a lot of leverage (and those that don’t). Is it time for you to restructure things so you’re putting more weight on the areas where your energy can be captured? 

Are you ready to finally get off the hamster wheel to build something sustainable, long term, highly profitable & detached from the # of hours you put in each day / week / month? 

If you’re ready to make the plunge, start the process of shifting your priorities, energy & attention to those areas that have a lot of leverage: 

1. Build more content assets (videos, articles, lead magnets, written posts you can repurpose & re-distribute)
2. Restructure your ecosystem so that people can move through it & consume your content at their own leisure & know where to go when it is time to buy 
3. Reengineer your offer so you can sell it without calls or long DM chats
4. Pay attention to the tasks you do over & over & over again - can you eliminate them, automate them or invest energy to build an SOP to delegate them

Make this 3 step process of investing energy into assets into $$$ your new mantra. 

Commit to a life of saying ‘no’ as much as possible to trading energy for $$$ (unless you really love it). 

And be ruthlessly consistent about how you execute on this plan. 

You could very well wake up in 6 months & realize everything has changed. 

Your business is running without you needing to be there every moment. 

Sales are coming in while you sleep. 

Prospects are DMing you & your team saying ‘how do I pay you?’ 

And most importantly, your friends & family will be saying ‘you look a lot more relaxed.’ 

I hope you take this & run with it. 

Until next time, 

Jacob