Recession-Proofing Your Income Streams
Is fear for your financial future impacting your career?
Having a rigid mindset can prevent you from coming up with creative ways to protect your income!
If you…
Struggle to take time off for financial reasons
Feel caught off guard when you need time off
Find it hard to see yourself operating without a fear-based financial mindset
…you’re going to get a lot out of the latest podcast episode.
Discover how being nimble can bring you some ease. Tune in now.
CLICK BELOW TO LISTEN!
Show Notes:
Hey, Risers. Welcome to episode 175 of Empathy Rising. Just wanted to remind you that registration for our third annual open house is now open, and there are dozens of your colleagues who are already signed up to come over and check out Side Hustle.
If you're somebody who has been considering the 2023 round of the live version of Side Hustle and you like to open up the cabinets, peek inside people's closets, and just be able to check out what you're buying before you put that money down, you are more than welcome to head over to the open house and come hang out with us.
I will be walking you through the entire curriculum. I'll be your realtor and I'll be walking you around showing you all the lessons that are included plus the extras. I walk you through the curriculum, but I also show you the templates, the trackers, and the cash injection strategies, the workbooks.
Our support staff like Shayna (our graphic designer) will show you all of the brand kits she creates for you guys, the website template she delivers to you, and also how she supports you to create a custom-looking brand by the end of the program.
We'll also have current students and alumni there who are going to be able to give you a more recent and more current view of what it's like to participate in the program. I encourage them to share the challenges and the wins; what was hard for them and what they enjoyed. I want you guys to have a realistic picture before you join me.
You can head on over to marissalawton.com/openhouse and save your spot. That way you'll get all the information like the zoom room and the replay and all that stuff. You do want to register so that you can be included on that list.
Today we're going to stay a little bit in this kind of economic concept, whereas last week I talked about the idea of betting on yourself, cultivating a sense of self-trust, self-reliance, self-mastery, and knowing that you are always your safest bet. Investing in yourself.
We talked a little bit about economic uncertainty and the challenge that we're facing right now of tricking us into thinking we have, like, scarcity mindset and just bringing up nerves and doubt and all kinds of stuff that all of us are feeling right now, me included.
The truth is we never know what tomorrow is going to bring in terms of the economy. What we talked about last week is we do know that we can rely on ourselves to figure it out. The more that you step outside your comfort zone and find success, the more that you challenge yourself and come out on top of that challenge, then the more you are going to know that you can get through anything.
That's part of what happens inside of Side Hustle Support Group, you build your first funnel and then you go on to do your validation interviews, and maybe one validation interview goes terrible. We've had this happen. One validation interview goes terrible and you're like, "oh my God, I'm a loser. No one's going to buy my stuff", but then the next validation interview goes amazing.
Then you're like, "I'm Queen of the world". It's those ups and downs, as you navigate those with me as your guide and with all of the cohorts supporting you through all of that is what teaches you self-trust. That's what helps you build that reliance and that resilience.
I think that's the key to building any business, more so than the skills, more so than the strategies. It's that self-trust. If you didn't listen last week and you feel like you need that kind of pep talk, go back because that's what we talked about.
But this week, I thought it would be a good idea to share my outlook on a potential recession. I'm not a forecaster by any means, but just what I see is probably the best solution, whether we have an economic downturn, whether it just stays volatile and as up and down, as it is right now, this is what I think is the key.
This is what I think is the solution. Last week was mindset. This week is more tangible. I fully believe this. I believe this with every fibre of my being and what I feel is part of my purpose to help you guys with is this idea that you can have financial security, financial stability, and lifestyle freedom.
Empathy and success are not mutually exclusive and neither are wealth, lifestyle freedom, or security and living the life we want. We do not have to give up our lifestyle freedom just to work hard and be like slaves to the machine. We can have financial security and lifestyle freedom.
Running with this idea from last week, we can handle anything that comes our way. To prepare our business for change is to know when to invest in ourselves. When we have cultivated this reliance and cultivated this self-mastery, we're able to go inside.
We talked about this last week—turn off these external messages, almost put a bubble around it (like a noise-dampening bubble is how I see this) and we go into ourselves and we're able to just get quiet to ask ourselves, what do I need? What do I want? What's actually happening here?
We get to change this from a reactionary feeling, a scarcity mindset, a trigger, these frenetic feelings we get to go from reactionary to responsive. What do I want from the situation and what do I need to do? What's my best course of action?
When you're in that responsive place, when you're able to just step out of the noise, build yourself a bubble, buy yourself some time, whatever that looks like for you, and come from this responsive self-reliant place, this is where we get to the answers that make the best sense for us.
What I want to focus on today is the key to responding to economic instability, the key to this responsiveness, is being able to be nimble. Being able to pivot and respond accordingly. If A happens, I will do B if X happens, I will do Y.
The ability to do that, the ability to pivot and to be nimble comes from self-trust. It comes from, "A happens. I trust I can handle it. I will then do B", and sometimes we bypass that we just go, "oh, A happens B", but we don't realize - what do we need in order for that to happen for that process to be automatic or that process to even be quick? That's self-trust.
When we have that established, we can be nimble. We can be light on our feet and we can respond quickly. Investing in yourself gives you this long-term skillset. It gives you this trust and the ability to pull whatever you need out of your toolbox, so you can rely on that. You can rely on your ability to respond.
The nimbleness comes in when you're able to call on these skills, at will. Whenever you need them, however you need them. It's "oh, this is what's happening. I'm able to read the situation. I need a hammer" or "oh, this is what's happening. I need a screwdriver".
Having those tools at your disposal, having those skills at your disposal, allows you to be responsive in a quick way. To bring this little less nebulous, a little more concrete here, this is what multiple income streams allows you to do. It gives you the ability to respond in real-time to whatever is happening economically.
To give an example of this, I saw this at the beginning of 2020, when COVID was just happening and we couldn't do anything in person. Some clinicians that I was working with personally, or just what I was witnessing in the space was some clinicians had already been dabbling online or had been exploring it.
Even if they still had 100% in-person practices, they had been mentally nimble and open to and looking at these ideas and saying, "okay, online therapy, I might not love it right now, or it might not be my thing right now, but I see it's merit. I see its validity" and they were able to switch over so much faster than people who had either not been doing dabbling in, or doing a little bit of online therapy or those who weren't even open to it at all.
If they were like "in person is the only way I don't care what the research says, I'll only ever practice in person", or if they would have been head in the sand (and this might be you, I'm not saying that you're bad for this because sometimes we just like what we like) and we don't want to make these changes.
This is what I saw is people having some people had to shut down their practices completely so they could get the software set up so they could get the HIPAA compliant, whatever, and the ABAs and all of this stuff so they could figure it out, people lost weeks, sometimes even multiple weeks, months of income while they were switching over.
This is an example of when we're not nimble when we're not able to respond quickly or in real-time to things that are happening, and in this case, it did have economic fallout. By having multiple income streams, we can look at in-person therapy and online therapy almost as multiple income streams. Then what we're really talking about is therapy as a whole, and then your side hustle, your course, your group program, your membership site.
In general, we've seen recently in our industry, what happens when we weren't able to be as nimble as we wanted to be, or as nimble as we could have been prepared to be. The same thing is true when you have another income stream outside of the therapy room. We talked about this a little bit last week as well as this idea of giving yourself the gift of options. This is what multiple income streams will give you. It gives you the gift of flexibility, the gift of options.
Now, when we are nimble or when we are able to be responsive quickly, we don't have to lose much time and we don't have to lose much income if any, we just shift our focus or shift our energy and our income streams respond. Taking the economy out of the equation, let's say you have a family reunion coming up in Cancun next July.
The family reunion is only going to be four days, but you've never been to Cancun and you really would love to take three weeks. Just go down and explore, be able to go to the Mayan ruins and go look at things on the Yucatan and all this stuff. You want to take some time off.
If you only have your practice, that means three weeks of lost income. You're more likely to say, "I'll just go for the four days. I'll just make it a quick little trip because I'm only losing, (maybe it's over a weekend or something) one day of clients. Are there exceptions to this?
Can you potentially be in Mexico and see your clients online? Yes. I'm talking in generalities here, but for the most part, we don't see clients, we don't get paid. Do you want to go down and see the Mayan ruins for the first time and still be trying to be doing online sessions?
Just because you can doesn't mean you want to. If we only have therapy, if that's our only income stream, it's going to affect the choices that we make. We're either only going to go for the four days or we take a little extra time, but we don't actually take time off and we can continue to see our clients, which kind of ruins our vacation.
When we have another income stream...let's say you host a workshop. Let's say—I'm just making this up off the top of my head. Let's say the three weeks that you want to go down to Cancun are the second, third, and fourth week of July. Let's say you plan a workshop for the first week of July, and you know what you were going to lose income-wise from those three weeks, let's call it five grand. I'm just making up numbers.
Let's say the three weeks that you don't see clients, you're going to lose five grand. We make a plan for you to make this five grand from this workshop that you host before you even leave on your vacation, and then you have not lost any money, because you have another income stream.
This is where we get to shift our focus and we just shift our energy and these income streams respond. When we are too rigid in our thinking, in our planning, in our businesses, or whatever, we miss opportunities. We tell ourselves, "oh, I'm just going to shorten this up" or "It's best if I don't go. It's just not a good time for me right now".
We miss these opportunities, but there are some other things that happen. Let's say you host that workshop and then on that workshop, there just so happens to be an HR manager for a big old company. They say, "I want you to come in and give this training to our company. We'll pay you $25,000", that's a future possibility that never could have happened if you were too rigid in your thinking or too rigid in your business planning.
When we are nimble, when do we allow ourselves to be open, receptive, and responsive these crazy synchronicities can happen. These awesome future possibilities can happen. The other thing that rigidity cuts off is our creativity.
Hosting a workshop could be really fun. It could be a way for you to do something that you don't normally do or to peel out some psycho ed that you do in session but doesn't feel fun anymore in session, but doing it and putting it together in a creative way.
Also just then selling a ticket to it and making money in a new, different creative kind of way. But if you're too rigid, you won't experience that. Basically, when you're rigid, you get swept away by the current. Remember when we were talking about cultivating and curating intentionally designing your life? That doesn't happen when you're rigid.
When you are white-knuckling your way through things, you don't get to have any of the extras or any of these pleasures, you're stuck in survival mode, even if you don't have to be stuck in survival mode.
The example I've given is like I said, we took the economy out of the equation, but let's just say, our private pay and the economic instability. There are not as many people who want to pay $200 a session anymore out of pocket.
Maybe you're getting a bunch more insurance requests from clients. You can decide if you want to either get panelled again or maybe reactivate some of these insurances you told you weren't taking more clients right now, or whatever. You can choose to go that route. You could choose to lower your hourly rate or offer a sliding scale.
If you wanted to stay private pay, or you could choose to keep your rate at $200 an hour, that you feel that you have worked for and that you deserve, and then you can offset maybe losing a couple of clients with an evergreen course or with a group program or a membership site or something like that. This flexibility serves you either way. Having flexibility in your business helps you make more sales and it helps you serve more people.
If you're like "the only way I work is like this. You pay me $200 an hour for a therapy session. That's the only way I work", that's rigid. That's rigid thinking and it's not nimble, and it's not going to serve you with any economic instability, but if you start thinking creatively and if you start having other income streams, you get to make more sales to more people and potentially even help more people than you could have in your caseload in the first place.
Again, this key that just keeps coming up last week and this week is the idea of being responsive rather than reactive. When we all had to get online real fast in the spring of 2020, that was reactionary.
But some people were able to just be more responsive. They were able to respond calmly, quickly, in a way that served them, in a way that was...I'm trying to think of the... I don't remember what word I'm trying to think of. Anyway, they were able to respond rather than have that reactionary reaction.
I think the other thing that comes from being nimble, curating, and cultivating this flexibility is you keep yourself creatively engaged. One thing that I see so many times from my students in Side Hustle is that they're bored. They've been doing therapy for five years, 10 years some people multiple decades, and they're like, "this is boring. I want to do something else".
Multiple income streams allow you to have a creative aspect to the way that you earn your living. That ratio can look like predominantly therapy with just a little bit of side hustle. It could look half and half. It could be that your side hustle becomes your main hustle over time and therapy is your side hustle.
This ability to play, this ability to design and, I'm seeing like finger paints, this ability to just mush things around and have it be exactly what you want - that comes when you have multiple income streams, that comes when you've given yourself the gift of options.
The first thing that I encourage when we're thinking about this economic instability, and we're thinking about recession-proofing our income streams is having more than one in the first place. This is your therapy practice and your side hustle, but also within your side hustle, there are some things that we can do to ensure that we're going to have sales.
What I recommend doing within your side hustle itself is having what I call an offer suite. Some people call these offer ladder. There are lots of different nomenclatures, whatever that word is, there are lots of different names for the same dang thing and I call it an offer suite.
This means having different products or programs that you offer at different price points. This might mean, a low-cost/passive upsell or tripwire within your funnel. We mentioned workshops that you charge a ticket for, and you could do those live. You also might have a medium ticket kind of self-study course that you don't have any facilitation in.
A product suite like this takes some time to build, especially if you're going to have these different programs available all the time and you're going need funnels set up and all of that, this would be like, if you were going for what I do in terms of building a business out of your side hustle, and maybe this becomes your main hustle and your therapy decreases substantially. This is what I would want you to work towards.
I have many episodes on like the Ascension model and how that works of low ticket, medium ticket, and high ticket. They work best when they're either in a ladder form or kind of a nesting doll kind of format so that they easily lead into the next offer.
If you're curious about that, you can certainly go and listen to other episodes where I talk about that model. This is the most efficient and effective way to make a full-time income, plus, get into that multiple six-figure range from your online income stream.
However, this takes a while. This takes a couple of years to get everything set up like this. Most of you are like, "I'm not trying to have, take a couple of years to have multiple income streams, Marissa. You're telling me about all this nimbleness and all this stuff. You can't be nimble if it takes you three years".
The alternative to this is what I teach you inside of Side Hustle Support Group. This means having cash injections. A cash injection is something that you offer in addition to your signature program. Inside of Side Hustle, over the nine months, what we are doing is building your signature offer.
We build the funnel for it. We build the marketing system for it, and you launch it. You go through the sales process of it once during the nine months, and as you're learning that will become the thing that you just repeat. It's like rinse and repeat, rinse, and repeat. You market, you sell, you market, you sell. You have this signature offer like Side Hustle Support Group is my signature offer.
What else I teach you so that you have this responsiveness, and so that you have this nimbleness is to mix in other kinds of pop-up types of offers along the way and this is what we call cash injections. You might be building out your signature program, which is a membership site or a group program, and that's what you will launch.
That's going to be the basis of your income stream, but then you might also decide you want to do a workshop or you want to do, what else have we done? A joint venture. We've done a lot of cash injections. In fact, I teach six of them strategically inside of Side Hustle.
What we've seen students do are beta rounds of their program. Meaning that they run it before it's ready, basically at a reduced price. The exchange for that is these beta testers, these beta customers give extensive feedback on the program that can help with the facilitation and getting your confidence up, especially if like you're nervous about stepping out of the therapy room and doing a different role.
Beta rounds can be really helpful with this, but also they help you work the kinks out of your program. You might move some modules around or some lessons around or whatever. Many students have done beta rounds. I've also had students do one on one. So yes, I talk a lot about moving away from one on one, but we know that the coaching hour is more lucrative.
You get to charge more for the coaching hour than the therapy hour. Some of my students do one-on-one and basically, it takes a spot on their caseload, but they're making more money for that spot. That's an option. Workshop sales, I have a student right now who is selling her first workshop.She's sold four or five tickets already. It's really exciting.
Also tripwire offers, those upsells and those passive income streams. While you are working towards launching your signature offer, you also have the opportunity to try some of these things, to yes, inject cash, but also to provide multiple ways for people to pay you, multiple things for people to pay you for.
Integrating both a signature offer and cash injections provides you the ability to be adaptable. You get to meet your audience at various places, you get to create offers that have diverse levels of touch and diverse price points.
Having the ability to bring this flexibility into your income stream ensures that you're going to bring in income in one form or another, regardless of what's going on with the economy. I was alluding to this last week as well when I said, "all right, let's imagine my premium price program doesn't sell anymore, or it doesn't sell like it used to because people are just pinching pennies. They're tightening up".
What would I do? I still like high touch, so I still would do live and I still would do workshops and I would probably do one once a month. Then I've gone from high touch premium price, still keeping that level of touch, which I enjoy, and also I am making the price point more accessible, so people who are still interested in working with me would feel like they still get to learn from me.
They still get to learn the material, but the delivery is a little bit different. I get to do the price point a little bit lower and we switch from low price, high or low volume, high price, and then we switch into high volume, low price. This is that adaptability.
The way that we do that is through having a signature offer that is your bread and butter program at your bread and butter price point and having cash, injection opportunities, running workshops, having passive income, upsells, having the option to do one-on-one if you want to or run a beta version, if you want to, these are all skills and tools that will be at your disposal when you join Side Hustle Support Group.
No matter what is going on, economically, you are going to have multiple income streams. You're going to give yourself the flexibility, the gift of options you're going to give yourself; the ability to respond to situations instead of having to be reactionary to situations.
You're also going to learn multiple ways to deliver your side hustle so that you can meet many price points and serve many people and be able to adapt to whatever the needs of your customer base.
You keep making money. That is what is super important when we're looking at economic instability is that you have the means to continue to make money in a way that still serves your lifestyle. Because what I open the episode with: You can have financial security and lifestyle freedom.
That's it for today. If you have been thinking about joining us for Side Hustle, don't forget to register for the open house. I will specifically be showing you the curriculum that is signature offer based and the cash injection strategies that we'll cover.
I'll show you where this comes up and you'll also be able to talk to current students who have maybe done a beta round or who have done a workshop or some of these cash injections in addition to what they are launching as their signature offer.
You get to pick all of their brains. Plus the support staff will be there to show you how they help you create all of the assets that you need to carry all of this out and how they support you throughout the program. If you want to come in, kick the tires, so to speak, and give it a test drive.
I'm mixing metaphors here, but that's okay. Go ahead and register for our open house October 19th, 7:00 PM Eastern, 4:00 PM Pacific. Even if you can't make it, you still want to register because that's the way that you're going to get the replay. I will talk with you guys next week and until then, keep on rising.
