Have you heard of the coveted lifestyle business that online gurus love to talk about?
If you haven’t heard the phrase, you’ve probably at least heard of the concept.
You’ve surely seen ads like this:
“Make six figures per year working from home!”
“Quit your 9 to 5 job and make passive income!”
“Use these proven wealth-building secrets to make money doing what you love!”
You’re probably wondering: Is it actually possible to build a profitable lifestyle business?
You bet.
Is it as easy as all the make-money-gurus preach?
Definitely not.
At the same time, though, it’s not crazy difficult or impossible to achieve.
With a little sweat equity, a solid plan, and the willingness to learn new skills, you can build a business that makes $10,000 per month (or more).
But before we talk about how to build a lifestyle business, let’s get clear on the definition.
It’s exactly like it sounds: a business that allows you to have the type of lifestyle you want.
You build your business as a way to facilitate your desired life (instead of building a business with the sole goal of making money).
With a lifestyle business, you usually work independently (as a “solopreneur”) or have a small team.
You’re not aiming to scale and grow a big company with dozens or hundreds of employees, build the next Tesla, or start a venture-backed tech company.
Some of the most common reasons for building a lifestyle business are:
Joy
You want to make money either doing something you love or find interesting (where you have autonomy) instead of working a job you hate or tolerate.
Freedom
You like the idea of doing what you want, when you want, and on your own terms 100% of the time.
Time
If you build a lifestyle business that replaces your income and only requires, say, 20 hours a week, you can make more time for experiences you’ve been putting off: traveling, making more time for family and friends, and taking on new hobbies.
Money
You can build a lucrative lifestyle business that not only matches but exceeds the income you’d make from a normal 9 to 5. And it’s possible without sacrificing a ton of your time. This is the “unique value proposition” or selling point of building a lifestyle business.
Control
Even if you build a business that requires a good chunk of your time, it won’t feel like work because you’re choosing what you get to work on.
Some examples of a lifestyle business are:
You can go in a ton of different directions with a lifestyle business, which is the blessing and curse that most people face when starting one.
With all the options in the world, how do you pick the one that suits you best?
Here’s what you need to be successful:
Let’s break down a step-by-step process for figuring out each piece of the puzzle.
There are tons of different businesses you can start, but there are two models that make the most sense for people starting out.
First, you can get paid in exchange for your knowledge as a coach or consultant.
Most people in the online business space choose this “e-learning model” as their first business idea.
The process of how it works is simple:
Identify a skill, lifestyle, or set of outcomes you already possess and teach the process of acquiring them to people who are a few steps behind you.
Examples:
Find the people who are interested in those outcomes, find out where they hang the outline, and create content demonstrating your expertise.
Examples:
Collect insights from your audience and use them to create your first “offer” (the thing you’re going to sell). Then, invite people to become your clients.
Here’s a snapshot of the process I’d use:
Once you have the gist of what your audience might want, create an offer to run on a trial basis.
⚡ Pro tip: Offer your product/service either for free or at a deep discount to take the pressure off and to make sure you’re delivering results.
After running the initial offer, collect feedback from your first few clients, get testimonials to use in future advertising, and raise your prices now that you’re confident in working with clients.
There’s also a second option for those of you who are truly stuck when it comes to not having a specific “passion” or topic to teach others.
You can simply pick a profitable skill and/or service to provide. There are tons of straightforward skills and business models that are already validated and proven to work like:
I could go on forever, but the point is there are some businesses where you can make the commitment to learning the skill or performing the service. And then selling the skill/service all boils down to improving on what already exists:
The last point is key.
I’ve been in the business game and here’s the dirty little secret you don’t know…
Most service providers just aren’t that good at what they do.
If you can display an even above-average level of competency, you’ll blow the competition out of the water.
The process of getting the business off the ground isn’t easy, but it’s straightforward:
Let’s look at a specific example. Say you want to become a freelance writer (this is how I made my first income stream online).
First, spend 30 days hardcore studying basic business writing skills.
Next, create a Google doc with writing examples or published posts on Medium.
After that, you have everything you need to start pitching companies to write for them. If you pitched 10-20 a day, every day, for a month, you’d have your first set of clients.
Land a few clients. Then get testimonials, case studies, and referrals. Now you’re in business. After 90 days, you’d have a viable business you could grow and use to quit your job.
Ninety days is about what it takes to have your first set of clients and customers if you are dead serious and execute fast.
At this point, you might be thinking to yourself, this sounds good, but what do I do if I don’t know what the heck my skills are or can’t pick a business idea to test out?
Stick with me…
We’re about to walk through that process in-depth right now.
You either have skills, hobbies, or interests that the market is already interested in. Or, you have natural tendencies you can lean on to learn skills you could sell as a service provider.
I’ve given students these prompts to help them discover all the above:
The last answer usually holds the key.
You might have an idea of what lifestyle business you’d like to start, but you’re scared. The answer is already there—embrace it.
Whatever you’d do if you had zero fear is the business you need to start.
Sit down for an hour or two and do a thorough brainstorming session until your brain hurts.
Once you get thoughts out of your head and onto paper, you’ll see you have more than enough experience, knowledge, or talent to make your business idea viable.
On top of answering these questions, you can take strengths tests and personality assessments to get an idea of your next steps.
It doesn’t matter if they’re the most scientifically accurate tools in the world. It matters that you have something that points you in the right direction—something you can run with.
My favorites are:
Strengths finder: I like this one because it comes with recommendations for habits to adopt, careers to choose, and strategies to navigate life based on your skills (find the test here).
Meyers Briggs: Also known as the 16 personalities test, it comes with career recommendations as well (find the test here).
Big 5 Personality test: This is considered by many to be one of the most comprehensive tests available online (find the test here).
Now that you have a better idea of what your talents, strengths, and tastes are, you can map them across existing business models to see where the best overlap might be.
Take all of the information in front of you and use it to come up with a set of ideas to run with and research.
You might run through your answers and come up with answers like:
You can use different Google searches and prompts if you’re still fuzzy on what to come up with like:
The point is to do a pretty exhaustive brainstorming session into what’s possible. After you have your set of ideas, here’s how to narrow down your options.
The best business idea has these three variables:
You can use a simple scoring system to narrow down your idea. Rate each idea from 1-10 based on three factors:
These are all judgment calls, but the goal is to go through the exercise and label and score these to feel better about making a final decision.
Here’s how you come up with the scores for each:
Rate each idea on all three variables for a total potential high score of 30. Narrow down to your top three answers and pick the one that makes the most sense to you.
Let’s assume you have a basic idea of what to start for a business. You practiced your skill/studied the business model, and you’re ready to start looking for customers.
Now, to turn your idea into a reality…
You need people to know about your product or service, so you can ask them to give you money in exchange for those products or services.
This seems obvious, but most would-be entrepreneurs, or “wantrepreneurs” will do almost everything but the activities that make them money.
This is because the activities that make money tend to involve putting yourself out there, facing rejection, or doing repetitive tasks to make people aware of your business.
I’ll talk about how to overcome those mental hurdles shortly, but you must understand that these are exactly the things that must be done in order to have a business.
And if you don’t do them you simply won’t have a business.
Here are the only four ways you can make your product known. You can reach out to…
These are basic definitions and strategies. For a deep dive into this topic read the book “$100M Leads” by Alex Horomozi.
If you’re running a coaching or e-learning-based business, then create content, turn it into warm traffic by getting people signed up for your email list, and sell your product/service via email.
If you’re running a service-based business, focus on cold outreach and connecting with businesses to promote your product or service.
Regardless of the business model, spend most of your time (outside of your 9 to 5) doing the activity that will lead to getting future customers.
If you spent 90 days creating content to attract customers, you’d have people to pitch. If you spent 90 days pitching prospects first thing in the morning, you’d eventually get clients.
For further reading, check out these posts:
But it’s only the beginning. Continue to scale up your income so you can have even more time, freedom, and flexibility than when you started.
The path to reaching $10,000 is pretty simple—but not easy.
If you’re actively doing all the activities mentioned in this post—and you do them repeatedly—you’ll hit $10,000 in no time.
It’s not about having a fancy process.
It’s about following a proven method until it works.
Most people never reach $10,000 per month with their lifestyle business due to a lack of patience and nothing more.
The faster you execute on these strategies, the quicker you’ll reach your income goals.
So what are you waiting for? Get to work.
