In this episode, I dive deep with my guest, Paul Hutchings, who’s a successful entrepreneur and multiple business owners.
Paul shares his inspiring journey from living in a single-wide mobile home to becoming debt-free and financially independent in his 40s.
We talk about the shifts in network marketing, the growth of affiliate marketing, and the importance of residual income.
For more details on Paul’s “LetGoal” app and how to get started, click here: https://academy.samcart.com/referral/letsgoalapp/lvxe91lNcJwonjYg
TRANSCRIPTS
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Which is so unnecessary. I mean, 200 million is impressive. Why not just roll with that? You know what I mean? I know in most network marketing organizations, the time and the production required to go from zero to positive cashflow is
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Hello, my fellow Ripples. This is Chris Miles, your cashflow expert and anti financianal advisor. This show is for you that works so hard for your money and you’re now ready for your money to start working harder for you today. You want that freedom of cashflow now, not 30 or 40 years from now, but you want it today so you can live that life that you love with those you love. And it’s not just about getting rich, it’s about living a rich life. Because as you are blessed financially, as you financially prosper, you now have a greater capacity to create a ripple effect through the lives of those around you. Guys, thank you for allowing me to create a ripple effect through your lives as well. You guys have been tuning in, guys. We’re over 850 freaking episodes in the last two years. Thank you so much for being such a loyal listener or watcher.
(01:16)
If you’re on YouTube, obviously, thank you so much for joining us today. Guys, if you haven’t done so already, there’s also another second YouTube channel. There’s the podcast channel. We have the Money Ripples podcast channel. You definitely should like and subscribe. And we’ve got the Money Ripples podcast or Money Ripples channel, period, money Ripples. That’s it. So that’s one that I know most of you guys are already on, but make sure you’re subscribed to both so you do not miss out on any updates, any great content that we put out for you. Hey guys. So I’m bringing back a guest. I believe we’re on our fourth time, fourth returning guest, and if I bring him on four times, there’s a reason. So I’m bringing back Paul Hutchings here. Paul actually lives in Idaho, successful entrepreneur of multiple businesses, definitely somebody I’ve watched his journey over really the last, I think, 10 to 15 years at this point. He’s a father of four. He even went from living in a single wide mobile home to retiring debt free in his forties and everything else. So I know his message resonates with a lot of you because you guys want to know how did he get that freedom? And guys we’re going to talk about something today that you might be missing out on that could create a massive income stream for you without you having to work your tail off, which is the whole point of this show. So Paul, welcome
Speaker 1 (02:21):
Back. Hey Chris, it’s good to be here. Thanks for having me on. And hello to all the Money Ripples out there.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Yeah, I think it’s been about a year or so since we had you on, which means that was over a hundred episodes ago. So even if they’ve been binging, they many haven’t gone this far back unless they’ve been a loyal listener for quite a while. Tell us a little bit more about that backstory, about the single wide and stuff.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
So I grew up in Idaho. I grew up in a double wide, that’s where I grew up and just kind of followed the traditional route that my teacher said to follow, go to school, get good grades, get a good job. So I graduated from college with a business degree, was kind of shocked to find that the best job I could get was 11 and 9 cents an hour. So I started in the corporate world and realized quickly that the joys of corporate life were not for me. And so when a friend of mine gave me an invitation to look at a network marketing business, I was like, heck yeah, let’s take a look. So I got into network marketing, failed for a number of years, then eventually broke through thanks to great mentors and persistence and became the number one earner and recruiter in my network marketing company.
(03:28)
So I had some success there. And then in 2009, I got into affiliate marketing. So I was doing network marketing combined with affiliate marketing. And then in 2016, I started an affiliate marketing company that I’ve been focused on since then. And then along that journey, as probably all of, I’ve been taking my earnings from my business and investing them into income producing assets. And so thankfully I have rental properties. I know you might not be a fan of that Chris, but debt-free rental properties with great passive income. And I’m just living a life of freedom. I own my time. I get to do what I want to do every day. I’ve got plenty of time for my wife and my four boys. Just super happy and thankful and excited to share anything I can that might be of value to other people on the journey.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
Hey, to be clear, I’m not opposed to debt-free. I mean, if you’ve got more than enough of cash to burn debt-free is great. One less bill to pay, which is not a bad thing at all, right?
Speaker 1 (04:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (04:30):
Well, I know that a lot of our people too, they’re also investing in various real estate or they’re looking at term investments and things like that too. So it’s kind of cool to hear you do both. You’ve got the business income and you got the real estate income. Funny enough, I actually told them, I did an episode recently about Dave Ramsey who claims he’s worth 600 or 700 million, but find out he’s really only worth about 200 million, but he inflates the value of what he thinks his business and his real estate’s worth.
Speaker 1 (04:55):
How’d
Speaker 2 (04:55):
You
Speaker 1 (04:55):
Find that
Speaker 2 (04:55):
Out? It took a lot of digging.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
I went down a rabbit hole for a few hours to really look. I was actually trying to find out how much his net worth was with the six or 700 million to see what the breakdown was.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
So
Speaker 2 (05:08):
I was looking for a different reason. But what I found was surprising was, oh, he’s lying. And even he got on one show where they claimed he was a billionaire. He didn’t argue that,
Speaker 1 (05:17):
Which is so unnecessary. I mean, 200 million is impressive. Why not just roll with that? You know what I mean?
Speaker 2 (05:24):
I know, I know. Seriously. And here’s what I tell him is that business and real estate are the two primary investment that he’s invested in, not mutual funds. He talks everybody to buy mutual funds, but he’s made money in his business. It was worth about roughly well worth, arguably about $50 million. And then his rest of his is real estate, which is over a hundred, $150 million. But none of that is literally his stocks and mutual funds. That’s not what he got rich off of. And I love that you are doing the very thing that we’ve both figured out and he figured out, but at least you’re teaching your people to do the same thing.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
Bob Proctor says, I have license to brag because none of this stuff is mine. Robert Kiyosaki strategy minus the leverage to the max.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
Yeah, you got to have a good balance there. Leverage to the max doesn’t work well. Now tell us a little bit more. What is affiliate marketing?
Speaker 1 (06:19):
So I think the easiest way to describe affiliate marketing would be to say go to walmart.com. Scroll down to the bottom, you’ll see a link that says signup as an affiliate. Go to amazon.com. Scroll down to the bottom. You’ll see a link that says signup as an affiliate. So basically all affiliate marketing is you sign up as an affiliate for the company, they give you the ability to share the products they’re already selling, and then when people buy those products through your link, you get a cut of those purchases,
Speaker 2 (06:52):
Right? Yeah, exactly. So it’s really like referral marketing, right? Referring people there. You get a cut because you’re basically doing the marketing for that company, right?
Speaker 1 (07:00):
Yep, yep.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
That’s right. And I know with your company, I mean even though I usually save this at the end, tell more about the company you have right now because you’re affiliate marketing company. You’ve even got some cool things you’ve got going. I know I’m a member of it as well because you’ve got good value. I’m a customer, it’s still great value even if I don’t do anything on the affiliate marketing side. But tell ’em more about that.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
And I sometimes don’t even like to call us affiliate marketing because affiliate marketing is a big bucket. You’ve got Amazon where you can earn some pennies for the sale you produce no residual. You’ve got other affiliate programs that are just kind of here today, gone tomorrow, fly by night, launch this product and then see you later. So we’re not that. Our company’s called the Home Business Academy and our vision is freedom through principal centered leadership. The freedom part is we want to help people build as much residual income as possible that is stable as fast as possible. That we started a company where our affiliate model pays out 80% commissions residual, which is, I think it’s pretty unheard of. You can refer one customer and your membership is just about paid for refer two, and now you’re in positive cashflow. That’s the income side of things. On the product side of things, we have products that assist people and entrepreneurs in really just living the best lives that they can and learning how to market in the best way that they can, can market our products and profit from our affiliate program, or they can use the knowledge and the tools that we offer to be more successful in whatever it is that they’re doing. Which by the way, I think is a good marketing tip.
(08:51)
If you can avoid coming off our thing is the best thing, your thing is not good. You need to quit what you’re doing and do our thing. I don’t think that’s the best strategy. I think the best strategy is have something you love that you’re passionate about that other people can love, but also they can use to build whatever it is that they’re doing. I think that’s a good strategy. And so I’ll just explain a couple of our entry products real quick. We’ve got a product called Let’s Go, which is a personal transformation app I like to call it. It was built by a programmer friend of mine. And what it allows you to do is every day you can log in, it takes you through a morning routine reading meditation or prayer writing in your journal, gratitude practice planning your day vision board. It’s got a digital vision board and it’s got a to-do list with these tasks.
(09:44)
It’s kind of cool. One of my old friends, Todd Young, he was very successful and he said, Paul, you want to know something that I learned a long time ago about success? I said, what’s that? And he goes, Paul, did you know when you check an item off your to-do list, it actually releases endorphins in your brain. And I call this hits of success. So every time you check an item off, you’re literally rewarding yourself. So this app has a to-do list, and when you click the little radio button, it has this little, I’m not doing it right, but it has this little audio feedback, and then it gives it a strike through and moves it down to your completed task list. So I find myself just being really motivated to get my stuff done, and then at the end of the day, I can look down at my completed task list and see everything I did with everything crossed out.
(10:35)
So anyway, it’s a really cool product. 10 bucks a month pays $8 residual, a great entry point for anyone who just wants to grow personally, and also anyone who might want to dip their toe into the affiliate marketing. Can I grow a residual income space without betting the farm on it? So that’s our first entry product. And we have a website builder tool that you can build funnels with digital memberships, lead capture pages, landing pages, sales pages, our corporate website, which we’ve paid out already over five and a half million dollars in sales. And our corporate website was built with the funnel builder. So it’s very robust, it’s very fast, and it’s 25 bucks a month and pays $20 residuals. So comparable products are anywhere from 50 to $300 a month. Alright, now I’m going to stop pitching because it kind of feels like I’m selling here.
Speaker 2 (11:26):
Well, no, I think this is cool because I tell my listeners often we’ve talked about doing a morning ritual. Some people call it Tony Bins calls the hour of power. We’ve refer, people call Power hour or morning routine or whatever you want to call it, right? Miracle Morning. They all have their own thing. Yours actually gamifies it. And
(11:42)
I tell people, if you want to really hit a different level of success, you’ve got to be doing these kind of morning rituals. That’s something that all successful people do. It’s something that’s changed my life even financially because I’ve done it. And even all my VIP clients, I tell ’em all the time, guys, this is something you need to do for success. So the fact that you gamified it, the fact that you can just have that, even if it has that little dopamine hit, and I know I’m guilty of this, whenever there’s 30 day challenges, especially if they’re more physical, I’m all over it. I don’t care if it’s a pushup challenge or whatever it is. I’m all over that and I’m daily marking off and I don’t even get any reward for it. I mean, sometimes they used to do a little $50 gift card type of drawing or whatever, but they don’t even do that anymore.
(12:21)
I still just do it because I know it helps me and it gives me some focus. And the fact that you’ve got that in an app and it’s 10 bucks a month, and even better, I don’t know if anybody you guys picked up on it, but he said the affiliate commission is eight bucks a month. That means if you refer a friend to it because you think it’s cool, you make $8 a month of the $10 a month they’re paying. That’s an 80% payout. Which guys, I remember when Paul first told me about that, I was like, I don’t know how you can even operate a company like that. That means you have to have at least an 80% profit margin before you pay those commissions. That’s pretty insane.
Speaker 1 (12:56):
Software makes it possible.
Speaker 2 (12:59):
If it weren’t for software and tech, I mean it would definitely not be possible.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
Well, I want to switch gears a little bit. This is why I want to bring you on because switching to talking about network marketing, you had some experience there and we have some people that follow us or network marketers too. I’ve heard from several of my friends in this space that they’re seeing a shift in a change. They’re seeing that it’s getting harder right now. I thought it would be easier, especially with inflation, everything else, people would be looking for multiple streams of income, but for some, it’s been getting harder in those businesses. And I know you set off the air, you said in 2016 you kind of saw a change or a shift that might be affecting this. What do you think might be attributing to that?
Speaker 1 (13:37):
Yeah, can I share my screen by chance?
Speaker 2 (13:40):
I can make it that way.
Speaker 1 (13:42):
Okay. And before I share my thoughts, I just want to say that all I have is my perspective. So what I’m going to share with you is may not be the truth all over the world, I only know what I know. I only know what I’ve been exposed to. And I love the concept of network marketing. The idea that you can have a great product that you love, that you can share it with people, they can love it, they can share it, and in theory, you grow a leveraged residual income. It’s a beautiful concept. When I first saw it, I’m like, I’m in. This just makes total sense. So what I’m going to share from my perspective comes from being in the trenches, building multiple network marketing businesses. Sometimes there’s a difference between theory and then how something plays out in reality. Maybe all the time it’s that way. It’s always a little different when you actually put it to work. So I’m just going to share real quick before we got on here today, if you go to Google Trends, you can type in some search terms. So I was just curious today. So I went in and I typed in network market, and this is back from 2004 to today. So you can see in 2004, you see the trend line. I mean, does that look like it’s going down to you, Chris?
Speaker 2 (15:08):
That’s, I used to be a stock trader. I would definitely say that’s a downward trend.
Speaker 1 (15:13):
Okay. So that’s what it
Speaker 2 (15:14):
Looks like to me. Maybe bottoming out. But yeah, that’s definitely down from what it used to
Speaker 1 (15:18):
Be. So then if we look up the term multi-level marketing, it’s not as pronounced as the network marketing, but I don’t know, it does kind of seem like it’s over the last little bit of time. There’s a little bit of a downtrend there.
Speaker 2 (15:32):
Is that last bit, is that 2022? Is that what I’m seeing April 1st? That
Speaker 1 (15:36):
Last line there? Yeah, that’s 2022. And then I think this is all the way up to today. So
Speaker 2 (15:41):
Really last two years, you’ve seen a significant downtrend too.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
So then if we scroll up here to the top and we do affiliate marketing from 2004 to today, it’s a little bit of a different trend over the last, I don’t know, a year or so, even this one has little bit of down, but I don’t know. Overall it looks like those are kind of different trend lines, like affiliate marketing seems to have been on the rise and multilevel marketing network marketing seems to have had a little bit of a downtrend. So I wanted to share that just so there’s some actual data behind some of the things that I’m going to mention. So I mentioned in 2011 was when I was the number one recruiter and earner in my network marketing company. So what happened there was the company basically decided to make a decision to start a sister company. And long story short, the company literally killed the business. They killed my income, they killed all of our team’s dreams, so on and so forth. Next company I joined, pretty successful in that company, built that for about four years. Same thing happened. The company owner launched a sister business, added quotas.
(17:03)
And if you dunno what quotas are, it’s basically where they say, Hey, in order to collect your residual income, you have to produce four new sales a month. So it kind of makes it so it’s not residual if they have a quota. So anyway, that business was killed. So there were some of these things happening in the background in my daily experience where I was seeing that what is happening, this idea that I had in theory of building this big team, having this nice stable residual income. I’m starting to see some problems here. So another thing that I learned while I was in network marketing was that, and I don’t have any verified data on this, this was just something that I heard from people that I talked to, although I did recently mention this on a YouTube video, and someone who was in the company verified this, and I won’t say the name of the company, but if I did, you’d all know which company It was super famous network marketing company.
(18:00)
And the thing that I heard was that the top earners, the vast majority of their income was coming from tools and training. So they had two different comp plans. They had a comp plan for the products, and then they had a secret comp plan that the leaders could tap into where they were selling the CDs and the books and the training. And most of the income was in that tools and training program. So I was like, huh, that’s a data point. That’s something for me to think about. The other thing that I started to notice was that some of the most famous network marketing gurus, which I also will not name, but I started to notice that they weren’t actually building a network marketing organization.
Speaker 2 (18:51):
They
Speaker 1 (18:51):
Had built one, they had created success in one, which gave them their credibility. But are they building one today? And as I went through and looked at these different names, I was like, Nope, nope, nope. What are they doing? They’re selling training and maybe tools to people who are doing network marketing. And so I started to think, what’s going on here? If everything is so great, why am I seeing a little bit of a disconnect in some of this messaging? So those are things to think about. And then the other thing that I started to think about was retention. I want to build a residual income. I want to help people build a residual income. And so retention is very important in whatever it is that you do. And one thing that Chris, you mentioned to me in our discussion before we started the podcast was that people want to build an income, but now they’re starting to look at their expenses and they’re like, the outflow versus the income I want to build might not be happening as fast as I want it. So hey, let me cancel this auto ship. And so one thing that I realized was that in most network marketing organizations, the time and the production required to go from zero to positive cashflow is usually somewhat significant. Now, it might be a little different depending upon what you’re promoting, but just give you an example. My first network marketing company, I earned a dollar 50 residual for every customer in my organization. And my monthly auto ship was $60 a month. If you take 60, 40
Speaker 2 (20:29):
People,
Speaker 1 (20:30):
40 people, yeah, 40 people. And I’m just barely now paying for my product. With affiliate marketing, if you can pay a higher commission, as I already mentioned with our company, two people, and you’re in profit. So from a retention standpoint and also from a, Hey, can we get people to actually making money quickly standpoint, affiliate marketing really started to make a lot of sense to me. Another thing that I started to not be a fan of was, and not all companies are like this, and not all leaders are like this. However, what I noticed was a fairly significant amount of smoke and mirrors, like hype selling the dream. One example, my first company, it’s like, and I’m guilty. Whenever you’re pointing a finger, you’ve got three back at you. So I did this, I think I didn’t know any better, and that’s what I was trained to do.
(21:31)
But we would put these charts up and say, Hey, two who get two who get two, you duplicate that out 10 levels, you’re making 40 grand a month and everyone’s all excited about it. But practically, when you actually get in and build, you realize it never duplicates like that. And there is no magical duplication code. I used to be on the hunt. What’s the magical duplication code, Chris? If we could just figure out the way to get everyone so that they would get there too, and it would just duplicate out, man, we’d be set. Man. I spent so much time thinking about how to do that, and it just never happened. And so I got to a point where I didn’t like talking about something that in my mind and in my heart didn’t seem like really real. I didn’t holding a carrot out there that I kind of felt like, I mean, yeah, it’s possible, anything’s possible, but I wanted to offer something that was more within reach for everybody.
(22:33)
And so with affiliate marketing, the other appeal for me was that I can show somebody, Hey, you gather five customers. You’re 500 bucks a month in residual income. Do you think you can do that? That’s something people can sink their teeth into and actually do. 10 customers, you’re over a thousand dollars a month residual income. And then it can just go up and it’s all based on what you do so that your results are not held hostage to whether or not you can crack the whip and motivate all the people on your team to go and produce. So these are some of the things that I was seeing. And as far as recent news, the two things that I’ve heard, there was a company, maybe it’s okay to mention the name, Rodan and Fields. They were a network marketing company for a long time. As one of my first YouTube reviews back when I got started, marketing online was about this company just a couple of months ago.
(23:29)
They switched to affiliate marketing. And so no more downline, Hey, we’re going to do affiliate marketing. Now there’s another company that I’m actually a part of as a customer. The guy who developed the product was the product developer behind the company that I hit my first six figure income in network marketing. He took the product because that company went down. He kept selling the product, and it’s a great product. So I’ve been taking it as a customer for a long time. When I found him again and started retaking the product, he was in a network marketing model. Couple years go by, guess what happened? He switched to an affiliate marketing model. So I feel like I’m seeing some indications that maybe affiliate marketing is pretty attractive compared to the alternative. So yeah,
Speaker 2 (24:22):
Sure. And that’s the one thing too is I know affiliate marketing and the map could be why there’s a little bit of a downtrend recently because people kind of got burned out on the traditional affiliate marketing, which was, lemme just blast my email list with all kinds of junk and products and
Speaker 1 (24:36):
Things
Speaker 2 (24:36):
Like that that really don’t apply to people. And so people are kind of like, okay, yeah, that’s great, but get out of my face. This is disingenuous. But what I love is that you are offering things that actually people use. You have the sales funnel builder that you’ve got there, of course, which helps people build websites for easy, even if they have their own business, their own sales page, they want to create for cheap. It’s a huge service for a customer. But it’s also great on the residual side too. If you’re someone that promotes it saying, Hey, this is what’s working for me, and you get a kickback. I mean, if I got paid every time I recommended Rich Dad, poor Dad or something on this show, or other books as well that I’ve promoted, I’d probably be rich, but I haven’t done that. And the fact that you can say, Hey, here’s something that’s actually good for you, that also gives back to you too. That’s the best way to do it. And to tell you, from my experience, that’s the fastest way I was able to get out of the rat race without having a lot of money too, was that yes, I had passive income from my real estate. What was awesome is that I could also create residual income through connections, through that building of connections and creating value in different ways.
Speaker 1 (25:45):
And what you mentioned is really key if you want to build a residual income, because you got to think about this people, a lot of people can get excited about growing an income when they realize that they actually have to work and grow themselves. Sometimes people become a little less excited. And so if all you’re doing is promoting an opportunity that is a never ending churn cycle where people are excited they join, then they realize that, oh man, I’m going to have to work my butt off to make this work. I don’t think I want this anymore. If all there is is the boom, cancel, cancel, cancel, right?
Speaker 2 (26:24):
So
Speaker 1 (26:25):
From a retention standpoint, you have to have something that people use in order for it to be a real residual income. Otherwise, just everyone’s get excited, they want to make a bunch of money, then not everyone makes that bunch of money, then they quit. And what do you do? You got to go find more people. It’s just never ending. So good products are important for that, that people actually use. And then also just from a, how do you feel about yourself standpoint? I mean, I’ve been doing this a long time, and I will say that it gets old promoting opportunity. I still am excited about opportunity and freedom, but I really want to feel like the things I’m offering are making a real difference in people’s lives. That’s where Bob Marley, I read a quote recently where Bob Marley said, some people are so poor that all they have is money. I don’t want to be that guy that all I have is money, and that’s all I’m talking about. Yeah, I love money, I love talking about it, but I want to have products that really make a difference in people’s lives. So it’s a key to your bank account that’s ripple and a key to your soul account.
Speaker 2 (27:35):
That’s right. That’s all part of that ripple effect, right? It’s like how you give back and create value. And it’s great when value comes back your way too, because you’re always focusing on serving others too. Well, Paul, I appreciate your time. I know we’ve had a great conversation here already. So everybody, we’ll put a link in there for his Let’s Go app that you guys can definitely check out. I recommend it, especially not just because obviously I’m doing it myself, and I’m a part of this as well, but just for the fact that if you want to be accountable to increase the quality of your life, increase the richness of your life, not just money, but yes, as a side benefit, you could also make money too from an affiliate marketing side. Definitely go check that out, everybody. Make it a one phone prosperous week. We’ll see you later.