I am so excited to talk to you today about building a business that can create residual income for you. Let’s just say that I’ve kind of been born into the small business mindset, both my parents were entrepreneurs, they owned businesses my entire life growing up, from real estate to delivery companies.  At a very young age I started with Chalene Johnson’s former company Powder-Blue Productions, where we went from a small business to a multi-million dollar company that eventually sold to Beachbody, the company I am a rep for now. Oftentimes, small business owners are of the mindset that you have to hustle and do everything yourself. With that, your business basically owns you, luckily we live in a time where that is no longer the case. Online is the future and one of the awesome benefits of living in these digital times is we have the opportunity to earn an online income.  I’m talking about residual income today, but a lot of these tips relate to brick-and-mortar businesses as well. What I like to do now is share the message that this is not special for me, literally anybody can do it. My husband and I work on our business part-time, approximately ten to fifteen hours a week, so that we can be full-time parents. Within nine years time we were able to pay off a couple hundred thousand dollars of debt, able to buy a house, able to put in a pool for cash. Here’s part one of a series of seven on how to create residual income so that your business doesn’t own you. Residual income means you can turn off the lights, you can shut down, you can go on vacation, you can do all those things and you continue to get a check. Residual income works like this, you work your tail off in the beginning and you might not see a whole lot of payout right from the start, but then it gets legs and it starts to grow. It starts to build and you continue to receive income for the work you put into it at the beginning.  My goal is to teach my team, the people that come into my business, how to create a residual income, a business that will work even if they are not working. Number one tip if you’re in a multi-level marketing or network marketing business, which by the way, there’s no stigma attached to that anymore, is to realize it’s a marathon, not a sprint. It’s a marathon, so you’re not going to start a business, sign on the dotted line, become a distributor for XYZ company and then the next day become a member of the million dollar club. It took me four years to get into the million dollar club and five years to get in the multi-million dollar club and that’s strictly because I was consistent. When I started my business I already knew that this had to be something that I could do while I was driving, in the time before I went to work or when I got home. I had to make the most of the free time I had or on my lunch break, so I kept in mind… okay if I carve out ten hours per week then I can make this work and that’s what I did and that’s still what I do, I still work ten hours a week at this business. There are of course costs associated with starting a business, the forty dollars it cost me to start my business would have been wasted if I didn’t put in the time to get it going. Along with your initial investment, you should invest in personal development along with business development.  You’re going to want to grow yourself as a person and at the same time get a phenomenal education on how to better yourself and grow your business. The second expectation you need to set is for yourself. What do you want for yourself? You need to be thinking long term and what you want for yourself in the future.  Who do you need to become in order to be an awesome business owner that can earn a residual income? Think about what you have on your plate right, of those things what could you potentially give up or cut back on for now, not necessarily forever, to move yourself to the next level?  When I started this business I had to eliminate anything that didn’t also bring in a paycheck. I didn’t eliminate my most precious and valuable relationships and to be quite honest with you when I told other people what I was doing lots of people didn’t understand like why I didn’t want to go out drinking in the middle of day on a Saturday because I was working my business. I was working on things right so there’s there’s lots of different expectations but the number one that you need to set for yourself is that it’s not gonna be overnight. It’s not gonna be a quick fix, you need to know that this is a long-term game. You must also know that not everybody’s gonna jump onboard with you. This is another huge mistake that people in home-based businesses make, is that they they think that they’re just gonna talk to the nearest and dearest to them and then like the first couple people say no and they freak out and they drop it and don’t continue. To be honest, my goals, my dreams, who I want to be and the life that I want is bigger than hearing the word no, even from some of my closest family members and friends. You need to remember it’s okay because this isn’t something that’s for everybody. The third expectation that you need to set or help to set is the expectation for others.  You have to prepare people for what you are doing, when I started this business one of the best things I did was to tell my then boyfriend, now my husband, that I want to be out of debt in two years. At that time it was an immense amount, it was at least fifty thousand dollars in credit cards and a couple hundred thousand in vehicles and houses. At the time I was already working full time, so I needed to work my online business before and after my job, plus on the weekends. I painted a picture of what our lives would look like after I paid off the debt I had accumulated. It would have been completely unfair if I just started working this business without what I letting him in on what my end goal was. One of the smartest things  I decided to do was tell him you don’t have to work the business with me but please just be on my team and understand when I’m working the business I may not be available to do other things at that time. I just kind of laid it out there and I told my friends that I’m building this business so if I seem unavailable it’s because I have this vision of my future and you know what the people who matter are still around and in my life. I will say that not everybody will understand and that’s okay, not everybody’s gonna understand. If they don’t understand that you need to take a step back in order to make your life better, then it might be the right time to take a step back from them. When I started this business I wanted to get out of debt,  then I continued to do it because I wanted to live this amazing life of complete freedom, where I could work whenever I wanted to and now it’s morphed into teaching other people how to do that. and so that’s what I’m doing now. Those are my tips for you today, it is all about setting expectations; expectations of the business, expectations for yourself, expectations for others and that I believe is the first step in creating a very strong foundation to creating a business that has residual income.  Stay tuned for part two.