← The Journey with Morgan DeBaun
The Journey with Morgan DeBaun
How I Built 8 Income Streams for Wealth + Freedom
00:18:03
This episode originally aired in December 2023 and is a must-listen if you're serious about achieving financial freedom and stability. Morgan DeBaun is breaking down the power of multiple income streams—why relying on just one paycheck is risky, how...
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Who else likes to give me money? I do have it. It is not something that is a profitable stream of income for me. Just to be clear, having corporate sponsors for your events is lovely way to increase your profitability. However. So I have a book advance for my book. It was a nice chunk of change. Do not fall for this. Hey, everyone. I'm Morgan debon, a passionate entrepreneur and life advisor. With the Journey podcast, you'll discover that success isn't about the destination. It's about the journey. I'm sharing stories of amazing people who've taken control of their lives. Join me on my own journey to discover the secret sauce behind reaching success. With permission from no one else. Hey, all, welcome back to the Journey Podcast. It's Morgan Devon here. Today I want to chat about something so important, which is having multiple streams of income. But before we do that, I need you to pause. I need you to stop what you're doing and I need you to subscribe to the podcast. I need you to actually follow it and press subscribe. Wherever you are listening to this right now or watching this on YouTube, I would appreciate it so much. All right, so as you know, I'm all about empowering entrepreneurs and corporate professionals to do the work and live the life that they love. But here's the thing. The reality is that if you rely on one source for your income, whether that's your business income or your salary, you are putting your livelihood in the hands of something or someone else. And that can be really scary because one setback could mean you have no money coming in. So I want to get into all of the different ways that you can give yourself a little bit more stability for yourself, for your family, by diversifying your income and. And what it can look like to have multiple streams of income flowing at the same time. So for me, I have probably about eight streams of income. Some of them are bigger than others, and some of them flex up and down depending on how much time and energy I want to put into it. Before I tell you about my streams of income, I just want to walk you through why this is so important for you to consider. One, it protects you in times of uncertainty. As you have seen, there are layoffs happening all over the world all the time. There's disruption from technology like AI, where one day you may have a job, the next day your job may not be relevant, or the service or product that you're offering may not be relevant. If one area falters or the world changes, this is a really great way to have some protection and some safety net for yourself over, you know, the time in which you need to adjust your income or your quality of life or the standard of living that you have for whatever your standard of living is. So one, I always start with the downside, right? This is protecting you against the downside, which is very important. Now, the upside, this is really where you win. The upside is that if you have multiple streams of income, you are able to scale scale your quality of life and the freedom that you have much faster because you're able to have your baseline income from whatever's the largest bucket, whether that's your salary or your business income. And then you're able to take all the new incremental sets of money that's coming in, whether it's consistent or inconsistent, and you're able to invest that cash in something that can either change your life or change how you're living your life and how you spend your time. Okay, so instead of putting all of your energy into one thing, I want you to consider a world in which you put 80% of your energy in one thing and 20% of your energy, exploring how you can have multiple streams of income and how then you will spend that money so that you can have a better life. The last thing that I would say that's a benefit of having multiple streams of income is that it gives you a sense of confidence and it gives you a sense of creativity and being limitless because you are no longer beholden to any one thing. You become your biggest moneymaker. And that can lead to so much of a sense of freedom and creativity when you know at any given moment you can decide to make more money. So if you're like, I want to buy this car and I want this bougie car and I want it to be luxury and I want the windows tented and I want all these things that may be irrational on my salary, but I know I have some more money coming in or I can work harder and do some more work to make the money. Then you can buy the car, you can justify it, right? And there's been so many times in my life where I'm like, you know what? I just would really like to buy first class. I just would. I would love to fly first class to Europe, but on my salary, that doesn't make sense. But you know what? I just got this brand deal, and mentally I say to myself, if you do this brand deal, even though you're going to be up all night, even though you're going to be annoyed by the emails, Coming in, even though you know you're going to be frustrated in the moment. But if you do this deal, you get to fly first class, and I make a deal with myself that allows me to release any tension or guilt for spending more money than I should with my salary. Does that make sense? Are you with me? Okay. My encouragement to you today is that you get really creative about building multiple streams of income. So let's get into the ones that I have in my life, how I built them, and how maybe you can think about building them for yourself as well. First things first. This is my baseline, which is my salary as an entrepreneur. I did not have a salary. So you may be in a situation where you started your business and you're putting all of your extra revenue coming in back into the business. You're not taking out a huge salary, and eventually you're going to get to the point and you're going to be building towards the point where you can start to take money out and that becomes your salary or income. And I would highly recommend that you do this because having a W2 as an entrepreneur, even if it's small, but having a W2 allows you to get access to loans, get access to being able to, you know, have a mortgage. There was a time, and I think I might have had a podcast episode on this at one point, but there was a time when I was buying my house that they look at a history of all of my W2s, and it looked so disjointed because I didn't pay myself consistently because I was just kind of ebbing and flowing with whatever was happening with the business. I do not want you to make the same mistake that I did. Pay yourself a W2 consistently, and that gives you just a baseline. Once I started to pay myself a baseline, I then started to do coaching and advising. So I advise entrepreneurs and my Work Smart advising program. It's group coaching. And then there's a DIY set of videos that we have hundreds of videos that I've reported about how to scale your business, how to grow your team, and it's really incredible community. Now, depending on what's happening in my life, I might run two or three cohorts, or like, this year, I ran no cohorts because I was having a baby and I was tired. So you can go up and down depending on what's happening in your life, but it always gives me an option to. To network, to be in community with other entrepreneurs, and of course, to add more income into my entire life and my Business. As a part of my advising, I also advise large corporations. Those are more retainer deals. So I might advise a major Fortune 500 or 100 company and I might meet with their CEO, meet with their leadership team once a quarter and they pay me for that time. And then there's advising on one off basis. If somebody wants to work with me on a two, three week consulting project, then I'll charge them for that as well. So advising could be anywhere from your coaching, you know, could be automated, or it could be seniors charging like an hourly or a retainer. Generally for a larger corporation or a business, the next stream of income is public speaking and or hosting. So in the world of digital media and marketing, there's a lot of opportunities for you to be a host of someone else's project. So I've talked about before in my personal branding podcast about how you can become hosts for digital shows like Labity Shows, or you can become a host for conferences. If you're really serious about being a host, you should take it seriously. But there's a lot of money to be had in being a professional speaker. You can have develop keynotes, you can develop different topics that you have an expertise on and then people will pay you honorariums, or not necessarily even just an honorarium. They might pay you a lot of money to travel around the country and speak about whatever your expertise is. So that's my number two set of income, is speaking after advising. And then the third one is brand deals, brand partnerships. Again, I've talked about this a ton in the podcast, so go ahead and look at those other episodes. But working with brands to advertise their products or services is a great way to increase your income. It's something that is not always consistent, it's not something you can always guarantee. I mean, people who are full time creators shout out to them because they've got to be super duper resilient. The market ebbs and flows with who's in, who's out, what platform's in and out, how. However, if you're able to have one or two, three or four brand deals a year, again, that extra money is money that you can be saving in your head for something that's going to get you to the next level in your life, whether that's again, quality of life or something that you're investing in, that will help you grow and will pay dividends down the line. So the next stream of income that I have is a product business. I launched four Matcha and in the past I've launched a skincare business called IMRO's Essential. Now this one is very difficult to pull off. It looks cute on the Internet because you've got T shirts, you've got products, you've got skincare, you've got whatever looks looks delightful. It costs a lot of money up front. Do not be bamboozled by all of us on Instagram, okay? Do not fall for this. The product business only makes sense if you're really committed to it over a long period of time or you have some sort of system or automation that gives you a competitive advantage. So people who do drop shipping from Alibaba and Amazon and you really want to get into that world, more power to you. That is a way to arbitrage margin and make a lot of money. It is not easy to run a product business as a side hustle. So beware. Although I do have is not something that is a profitable stream of income me, just to be clear yet give me a couple years, all right. And then the next type of income that I have that brings me so much joy. It's a ton of work is running an event. So you can run a digital event or you can run a in person event. But I have an event called Sea Out Spring Break which is once a year. It's in the spring, usually around Memorial Day weekend where I get together with 30 to 50 entrepreneurs, many of which I've advised, some of which I haven't advised. And we spend three to four days together really working on their business, working on their leadership skills and one also just giving them a sense of community with other CEOs who are doing really, really well in their business. This event I love. You can have sponsors for your event. So in year one I had Martell as a sponsor, Salesforce as a sponsor, or you don't have to have sponsors and you could just do it by ticket sales, which is what I did for year two. Again, it just depends on how much profit you make and how much time you want to spend. Having corporate sponsors for your events is lovely way to increase your profitability. However, it is a lot of work and a lot of effort and it's not something that can be taken lightly. I will at some point do a podcast on corporate sponsors in the process. It's something you guys have asked for, so I'll come back to that at some point. But having an event is an incredible way to grow your network and to make some money. You also could do a digital event. So you can see lots of digital events or webinars where people might pay 10.99 or $100 to get access to that event. In Covid times, I did this more so I did like a master class with my girlfriend, Melissa Butler. I did a masterclass and conversation with Alex Wolf. And that was really fun way for me to not have to work for months and months and months to put something together, but to still have a moment where people are coming together, asking questions and being in community with each. If a big event feels overwhelming, consider a digital event and consider something really straightforward and easy that you can just do on zoom. Set up a stripe and boom, boom, bam, you've got income. The next one is writing a book. Now I have an episode on writing a book, so you can watch that later. But writing a book, there's different ways that you can go about writing a book and getting income from a book. One, you can write a book and have a book advance when you go the traditional publishing route. And a book advance is basically money that the publisher is giving you as an advance of the income and revenue that they think your book is going to make. And that is money that is yours to spend how you want. So I have a book advance for my book and it was a nice chunk of change. It was money that I was able to use on marketing. It was money I was able to use to hire my own supplemental editor to help me out since I've been so busy this year. It's money I've been able to reinvest into the Debon and company empire. And I could have used some money to just buy a bunch of bubble gum and sit on the beach. I mean, they don't tell you what to do with it. But I try to use that type of extra money to reinvest in myself or my business so that I can scale and get to the next level. So that's how you do a book if you have a publishing deal. My book is being published next year by paying a random house, which I'm really excited about. And you know, they're one of the largest publishing houses in the world. And so the book advance is quite juicy, which has given me a lot of freedom and time to be able to invest it in making it the best possible book ever for you all. And I'm really excited about it. It is not a small undertaking writing a book with a publishing house. It would be much faster to just go direct to consumer and publish, but the upside is that you can use it as a larger launch pad for other things later on in life. If you want to go direct to consumer, you can also publish a book directly on Amazon and online like an ebook. And that's a really quick way to grow your revenue and at least test the market for are people buying what you're selling? You know what I mean? So consider going the publishing route, but also the self publishing route. And last but not least, my favorite source of income, and this is what I call my mailbox money, even though I don't get it in the mail. This is my dividends from my stock portfolio. And don't let this one sneak up on you, you guys. So there are stocks that pay a dividend, an annual dividend of 3 to 7% every year, regardless of how much that stock also grows and appreciates. Okay, so let's say the Stock was at $50, and they say $50 all year, but they're still going to pay out a quarterly dividend. That's cash money millionaire. Then two, there's also the option of let's say that stock actually went from 50 to $70 in that year and they're paying a dividend. Right? So it's really a win, win, win in my opinion. And so I have quite a few. Most of, I would say like 40% of my portfolio is in dividend stocks that are blue chip, so they're also likely to grow and pay me income. Now I reinvest my dividends, but there may be a point in my life where I choose not to reinvest my dividends back into the stock and use that as income. So this is chef's kiss when it comes to passive investing. Of course, another type of passive investing is real estate, although one would argue being a landlord is not very passive, I would say, which is why I haven't done it. But technically, real estate investing and having people pay you rent is another source of income from investments and things of that nature. So lots of different ways to play with your investments to see if you can get income coming out, not just have the money stuck in one place. And there you have it, folks, so many different ways for you to make money. I really hope you consider in 2024 setting yourself up to never be reliant on anyone but yourself. And in today's crazy world, it will bring you so much peace and stability if you know that you are your biggest money maker and regardless of what happens in the world, you're able to provide for yourself and provide for your family. Thank you for listening to this very brief but hopefully useful podcast today. And I hope that you subscribe and share this with a friend. Also, make sure you're on my newsletter. If you're not, you can go to morgandevon.com we'll be posting blog posts, free resources, all different types of things via the newsletter and the website, so make sure you check it out if you haven't already. Until next time. Bye. Thanks for listening to the Journey podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure you leave a review and head to our Instagram and YouTube to leave a comment. I look forward to hearing how this podcast has made an impact on your own Journey.