Do you want to break a new income record in 2018? Do you feel like you’re plateauing?
How was I able to break thru TWO income barriers in 2017?
Join me (Chris Miles) as I teach how I nearly tripled my income from 2016, and how you can break through new income barriers this year.
Chris Miles Bio:
Chris Miles, the “Cash Flow Expert,” is a leading authority on how to quickly free up and create cash flow for thousands of his clients, entrepreneurs, and others internationally! He’s an author, speaker, and radio host that has been featured in US News, CNN Money, Bankrate, Entrepreneur on Fire, and has spoken to thousands getting them fast financial results.
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Listen to the podcast here
How To Break Thru Your Income Barriers
This show is all about you. All about how you can get your money and/or your business working for you, so you don’t have to work hard for your money. This is about how you create a great lifestyle rather than having to wait 30 or 40 years. That’s what this is all about. A quick shout out to our sponsors like the American Homeowners Preservation.
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As a part of our show, I want to talk about how we break our income barriers. How do we create new levels of income that you’ve never attained before? This is something that I’ve experienced a lot throughout my career. This is something I’ve experienced, especially in the last couple of years. I’ve broken many income barriers. I want to dig deep into this because if you feel like you’ve ever plateaued or there’s this glass ceiling where you think, “I’m so close. If I could only break through that ceiling or if I could hit this income level.”
Whether it’s $5,000, $10,000, $100,000 a month, whatever it might be or whatever it is per year that you are trying to hit. If you’ve got income goals, I suggest you take some good notes here because that’s exactly what I’m going to teach you how to do. The first thing I’m going to start and I’m going to make a few key points about this. First things first, with my own situation, I have been all over the board. I have been in places where I have been in poverty. I have been in places where I’ve lost.
Many of you have heard I have been in the hole of a million dollars before. I had no money and no credit to be able to battle out of that. I had to do it purely by generating income. I had to do it by getting creative and being resourceful with the resources I had. Not all of it was creating income. I’ve got that eBook that’s on my website at MoneyRipples.com. There is that free eBook you can get that talks about some of those key things.
Income is an important one because you can only cut expenses back so far but income can be limitless. The only problem is for many of us, income doesn’t seem limitless. What’s the first thing that has to happen? You got to, first and foremost, not trade time for money. You have to understand that value allows us to have more income, not the time or hard work. It’s none of those things. It’s not dependent upon how hard you work or how many hours you work despite what everybody tells you.
I don’t care how many people tell you to 10X everything, and you need to work 150,000 hours a week. For me, that’s not the lifestyle I want nor ever want to. I love my lifestyle of working about 10 to 20 hours a week. That’s my sweet spot. This is part of that work time is I get to teach you guys, and this is why this show is an outlet for me to teach and do what I love. When we are talking about this, what is the cause of money? What is the cause of income? It’s not the amount of time. It’s not a matter of hard work. It’s value.
What value are you creating for other people? Stop asking, “What does it take for me to make more money?” That’s an old question that doesn’t work. Instead, ask, “How do I create more value for more people?” For those of you, that already get this and are maybe already doing this, ask yourself, “How can I create more value for more people with less of my time? How can I create leverage?”
Sometimes your barriers might not be breaking because you haven’t figured out how to create leverage. You are doing the same thing and realizing you are getting maxed. You might feel like you are maxed out of your time and out of the money you make in that time. You might feel like you are maxed because you don’t know how to get there. The first thing you got to understand is that dollars follow value. You got to create more value for people.
You don’t have to spend more time doing it. You could create more value for less people. For example, how can you create deeper value? How can you create a higher amount of value so you get paid more while working with less? I saw something interesting on Facebook. I have a lot of chiropractors that follow me, and I even follow some of them, too.
Sometimes, your barriers might not be breaking because you haven't figured out how to create leverage. Click To TweetSomebody brought this up. He asks a question. He would ask a chiropractor. He’d say, “How many of you guys would prefer 50 patients coming in at $100 a visit or would you prefer 100 patients coming in at $50 a visit?” He says that almost every time in that field, people will say 100 patients at $50. He’s like, “That’s ridiculous.” I thought the same thing. If I were a chiropractor, I would rather see 50 patients for $100 versus 100 patients for $50. Why?
Granted, you might feel like you are getting more impact, and that’s part of the thing but it doesn’t do anything for you. What is your family losing out on because you are not around, being so overworked and overtaxed to try to hit these new income barriers and so forth? You don’t have to sacrifice your family, your health or your livelihood to do this. In fact, you can have an amazing lifestyle without having to work yourself to the bone.
When you realize that it’s not about the amount of time or volume. All of those things can all help but it’s about value. What can I do to create more value? If you do it with less people, it’s even better. From my own experience, when I first started, I was a financial advisor, and now it has been many years. When I first started there, I thought, “I’m going to have to bring in hordes of people.” I remember I had a tough time making a lot of money, “I thought I would be making more money than this with the amount of people I’m meeting with.”
Now granted, there are some factors you can change. If you are in business, factors like close ratios, getting people to say yes more often, and spending less time on those appointments. There are things like that on the sales conversation side. If you get more effective there, you could spend a lot less time. Most time, when I talk to people, many of you have been reaching out to me. Oftentimes, you reach out to me because you are the perfect fit for what I do.
For me to coach you, that would not be much of a conversation. I only have to determine whether or not you can get results. That’s pretty simple. It’s probably the least sales-y type of conversation you’ve ever had because it’s as simple as like, “Do you want this? Can I do it? Yes or no.” Most of the time, you have already figured out that I’m exactly who you need, so it’s very easy to get past that.
I remember I did meet with a lot of people but I wasn’t meeting with the right people. I also wasn’t doing well on the sales side. I was new in the business. I was only getting to learn it, plus I was taught bad sales techniques from other crappy financial advisors and people like that. People that did okay with their sales techniques but again, they did volume, and that to me is ridiculous. It’s crazy to have to do that much.
I bring this up because the most important point is you got to understand the principle behind income and money. If you understand the principles and you not only understand it mentally, you get it logically but you understand to your core where it becomes a part of you where you naturally go and create value. You are always looking for ways to add more value and hear what issues or problems people are dealing with and see how you can uniquely solve those problems. You will find that it’s very easy for you to do that.
That’s why I say first things first. Before you even try to do step number two, you’ve got to, again, get a good foundation and understanding of that. It’s not about time. It’s not about labor. Although you got to perform good labor, a good value for people, it’s about value, and people will pay you what you feel is worth more. You will accept less or a certain dollar amount because, in your life, you realize that the money is more important than the value you’re delivering.
To you, the money is more valuable than that but to them, the service you are rendering is more valuable to them than the money. All you have to do is figure out, “How do I give people more of what they want.” I know I have been the dead horse on this but it’s important. It’s vital. I’m going to stop with that.
The next thing is I want to talk about reverse engineering. If you can realize that you can create more value, for example, maybe you realize that you have been getting paid about $100 an hour. The question is, “How do you get up to $200 an hour?” Let’s say you get to $200 an hour, and your goal is to make $100,000 a year. You’ve got to reverse engineer and say, “What does that take?” $200 divided by $100,000, we do the math and will find out that’s about 500 hours. That’s about ten hours a week.
You are thinking, “That’s that easy?” “Yeah.” That’s what it takes. What if your goal is $1 million a year? Now, if you are doing $200 an hour and your goal is to hit $1 million, you will realize, “Let’s do the math here. That’s 5,000 hours.” You divide that up and you are like, “We don’t have that much time,” for the average full-time person. You could do that. That would be 100 hours a week, give or take and that’s a lot.
If you are able to get up to $1 million, this might seem impossible. I’m going to add a little bonus here. I would question you why you have the income goal you have because I remember early on, when I first started Money Ripples, I hired a coach. I remember we went out to lunch, and as we were talking, I said, “My goal is to create a great, huge, massive coaching company and make at least $5 to $10 million a year. I want to do that in the next few years. I could really do that. I can get to a $1 million pretty quickly if I want to do that.”
She looked at me and said, “Chris, I’ve worked for coaches that have done that. I will tell you when you hit that $5 million mark, things change. Your life is not the same. In fact, your life gets sacrificed. I’ve seen many of those coaches. When they get over the $5 million year hump, your life is never the same. You don’t have much of a lifestyle anymore. You might go travel places but you are pretty busy doing everything.”
She’s like, “Even if you leverage and get people hired, it takes a lot of process and systems to do that. Chris, what is it you really want? Why do you want to make $5 or $10 million a year?” I was like, “I know I will be impacting lots of people if I’m doing that much. I will do tons there, and I know that I will have a great life myself.” She was like, “Chris, I’ve seen people making $300,000 a year having a better life than people that make $5 million a year in their business.”
That threw me for something. I was like, “I had never considered that before.” It wasn’t that she was saying to settle. I’m not saying that at all because again, you might be already making $300,000 a year. You might say, “I need a break higher.” The point was great, and I realized that when I started shifting my focus, I was like, “I still want to make an impact but I don’t have to go speak all over the country like I was thinking I had to do. I can speak from right here, right now in New Mexico, as I’m staying in a vacation home. I can do stuff and teach you right here, right now. I can have a great impact on people’s lives and have an impact on you at 2:00 AM when I’m sleeping.” That’s the beauty. I don’t have to be standing in front of you. Do I love speaking? Of course, I do.
If you are looking for an income goal, first, you got to ask yourself, “What is it that I really want?” You can have income and lifestyle, and you can have both but you have to ask yourself, “What is it really?” Many people will say $100,000 a year is their goal or $10,000 a month. They are like, “I want to get to $10,000 a month or five figures a month.” Why? What’s so big about that?
I had a client and he’s like, “I want to do $1 million in my business this year.” I remember I got in his face a little bit. I was like, “Why do you want that?” It was his first real full year of business. I’m like, “I’m sorry, but you are not there yet. You are not mentally there. You mentally can do $100,000 easily. I think you can even do a couple of hundred thousand but you are not mentally in a place to make $1 million. Your mind hasn’t gone there yet.
You haven’t been or doing anything that would equate to getting you to $1 million, and that’s more than just creating value and working hard. It’s a mindset that goes there. We did reverse engineer, and I show him what it would take to $1 million. I said, “But here’s the thing. What about making less?” I remember we got towards the end of the year. He was in the last quarter. He only made $130,000. He’s trying to make $900,000, basically in the next few months of that year. I said, “Here’s the thing. What would happen if you didn’t make a million?”
His wife actually was like, “That would be devastating. It would be horrible.” I’m like, “Why? What’s so horrible? What if you hit $400,000 this year,” which would be a great feat that you could do still.” They were like, “That’s just unacceptable.” I’m like, “Why is that unacceptable?” They didn’t have a good answer because they are so dead set on a stupid number that they failed to see the point of, “Do you realize this goes in by degrees, for one? You’ve got to mentally go there first and two, that’s a good successful year for somebody who is in their second year in business. That’s awesome. It’s nothing to frown and to get depressed about.”
Do you know what happened? They didn’t hit their goals. I know they didn’t, and by the next year, they almost dropped out for a matter of several months, and now he’s trying to resurface again. My point is this is. 1) We want to make sure that dollars follow the value, and that’s about value. It’s not about time. 2) You’ve got to reverse engineer it and figure it out based on that value you are delivering. It’s very simple to figure out. If you want $1 million a year, if you are charging $5,000 per client, you need 200 clients. You can do simple math.
The key to breaking income barriers is that your mind has to go there first. Click To TweetIf you charge a thousand dollars for your product or service, you need 1,000 clients to hit $1 million a year. If you are $100,000 a year, you only need 100 clients. You break it up by a month, and that’s eight a month. You can reverse engineer it quickly but again, your challenge is why you want that income. What is it that you are trying to get? What’s behind that? What do you think the money is going to get you? That is key.
The third thing, and I already said this. Your mind has to go there. Your mind already has to hit there. As I said to this couple, “You are mentally not there at $1 million. You got to get there.” What’s that going to take? That means you’ve got to be at a place where you are mentally at a place of making $80,000 a month. I remember this happened to me. It was in 2006 when I was able to retire for the first time. When I first broke $10,000 in a single month, my world was shaking. I had never seen that before.
It became more sustainable and possible but I had to mentally go there. I remember we went to launch Money Ripples. My goal is as quickly as possible to get to $10,000 a month. Within the first year, I made over $100,000 at Money Ripples despite having a two-year non-compete with the previous company I had started. I was pretty proud of that. I was like, “That’s cool.” The next step was, “Let’s consistently do $10,000 a month.”
I would hit $20,000 in some months and then maybe $4,000 or $5,000 in other months. It would vary. I still hit over $100,000 but I wanted to get that higher. The next year I was like, “I want the $10,000 to be the minimum standard or what’s acceptable.” I was like, “I want to make sure I’m making at least $10,000 a month baseline.” After about a year or two, I got there. There are a few random months where it might’ve gone below but there are also some months where it did way higher. I kept seeing it going up and up.
You’ve probably heard my previous episode where I had my bad year. I still was over $100,000 but it wasn’t a growing year. It shrunk that year. That was 2015, and then in 2016 and 2017, both years have broken the records. In 2017, it nearly tripled my best year, which was 2016. Here’s what I did. Mentally, I had to go there. For example, at first, I had to get a baseline. This is back in 2016. I was like, “I need to have a baseline where I mentally make $20,000 a month as my baseline. That’s got to be the place where I go.”
It took some time because, again, I mentally had to go there. I had expected so much that when it started to happen, it wasn’t a shock. It wasn’t a surprise to me at all. I thought, “This is it. This is what I should have been doing the whole time. In fact, haven’t I been doing this?” The key is that I fully expected to be there. That’s a critical point because in Spanish, the word for hope is Esperanza which comes from esperar, which is to wait or to expect, and that’s the thing. You have to have an expectation of like, “I get that.”
Now, even if I didn’t hit it during those times, it was fine. I did not get attached to the results. In fact, the more non-attached I’ve become to the results, and my income goals, the more I hit them. I still want to hit those goals. I still have that as part of my thing but I don’t get bummed. I don’t get depressed if I don’t hit it. I realized that nothing was perfect. It’s funny because, as I’ve worked more emotionally on myself and that’s helped translate into my business, my relationships, and everything, I realized too that the more personal development I’ve done, the more stable I have been able to be with my income.
Pretty soon, that $20,000 a month was a baseline. My mind went to the next place. I was like, “ What if?” I could have said, “Let’s go to $30,000 or $40,000.” I knew some things were coming in the pipe, especially with how I was creating values. I was like, “What if that baseline was $50,000? What if we could even break some months where I even break over $100,000 a month? What would that be like?” In 2017, I mentally prepared well before I even saw those numbers. I was like, “I’m going to prepare for that. I want to get there,” and so I did.
I was like, “Let’s see what happens.” Pretty soon, $100,000 a month, and guess what? I was happy. I was grateful but I wasn’t shocked. I wasn’t surprised. I’m like, “That’s cool.” I have been doing it month after month and again and again. I still think, “I want to do a baseline of at least $40,000 or $50,000.” Mentally, I’m like, “That’s a cool baseline,” but for me, I’m like, “I want to keep it over.” Let’s keep this at $100,000 because you might raise the temperature even if that’s not consistent. Let’s say that I don’t do $100,000 every single month.
My mind’s gone there that it’s stretching my mind enough to say, “I could do that.” As I have, it’s funny now. I was like, “I kind of expect it.” It’s interesting. I’m curious to see how this moves forward as I have been making 6 figures a month instead of only 6 figures a year. Let’s say, “What’s this going to be like? How’s this created?” Again, I love it. I don’t need that. I am seriously not attached. I don’t need to make $100,000 a month. I would be totally happy making $20,000 and have a great lifestyle making $20,000, $30,000 or $40,000 a month. No problem.
I could do all the things I wanted to do. I could hit a lot of my financial goals. Again, I’ve already got to a place where I could retire. It’s not like I need to hit anything but the key to breaking in those barriers is that your mind has to go there first. You have to get there to a place to say, “What does it take? What kind of person do I need to be?” Not only what do I need to do, although that’s important too but who do I need to be to get to that space?
That takes some time. That takes you getting into the mindset of those people that are already there. This is why you listen to podcasts and read good books. This is why you do these things. Your mind has to go there. You have your mind talk. All the talk you got to have is got to match the vibration of what creates that income. It is a vibration. There is a definite vibration. You got to be at a place where mentally, you are already there.
You will start to realize that you will resonate with people, too. You might think like, “I need to surround myself with better people.” They tell that you tend to be the average of the five people you surround yourself with. You tend to have the average of their incomes. You could probably say, “I want to hang out with people that make millions a year or even billions.” That’s great but will they want to hang out with you?
You got to mentally already be at that place or getting there to do that. The way we get there mentally is one, you read good books. You listen to good podcasts, listen to people. Even if you can’t be with those people physically, surround yourself with their voice and their words. Don’t focus so much on what they did but on how they think because how they think is the key.
There are people that are making way more money than you doing the same things you are doing but they do it a little bit differently. They have different thought and vibration level that does things differently. As I’m telling you, it’s so awesome when you start to attract the right people into your business if you are a business owner or having the right opportunities to show up.
I expect success. I expect all of that. I see a lot of people who can make even a decent income, and they don’t expect success. They wonder why they work their tails off making a good income. If you find yourself overworked or working your tail off, and even if you are making a good income but you don’t have the lifestyle with it, that’s your next step. How do you get the lifestyle to go with it? How do you change that? I don’t want you guys dying. To me, money is not worth sacrificing the quality of life.
Don’t get me wrong. For those of you who haven’t got there yet, where you say, “I don’t want to sacrifice my quality of life, so I’m not going to make more money.” That’s dumb. That’s not what I’m saying at all. What I am saying is that you need to make sure that what you are doing aligns with the life that you want. Anytime you are making a goal, you got to be crystal clear about what you want and why you want it. Figure out, “What do we do to create that?”
You can get there. For any of these income goals, you got to mentally go there first. You have to reverse engineer and keep creating ways to create value to deliver more. Whether you are using your time and energy or using your money and resources that way, there are ways to do it, and I tell you, there are many ways to do it.
My challenge to you is this. Create with all the time and the energy with your money and resources. You got so much out there. There’s much abundance and opportunity available. Now more than ever, there is an opportunity to create more income and freedom in your life right now. I hope this has inspired you. I want to keep inspiring you. Please keep reading this. Get this in your head, share this with other people, and talk about it with other people.
Create conversations because the more you talk about this and the more you share, the more you teach, the more you internalize it, and the more it becomes a part of you to where you start breaking into new places. I’m telling you, it’s what you create that comes out of your head and out of your mouth. It’s all right there. You make a great and prosperous week. I hope it’s a prosperous New Year for you. Let me know how I can serve you. We will see you later.