If you’re like me, you’re probably surrounded by people who are uncertain about their financial future, or are second guessing their career path altogether.
But if you’re not putting some serious thought into how the world is shifting right now, you’ll miss out on the biggest economic opportunities of the next decade & ground zero is RIGHT NOW.
These opportunities are only available to people aren’t freaking the f**ck out. Only positive people who understand how these market cycles work will have the means to identify & execute them. The fact that everyone is freaking out is exactly what creates these massive opportunities in the first place.
Back in my hometown of Vancouver, toilet paper & alcohol can’t stay stocked on the shelves more than 10 minutes… the perfect summation of the response of the “typical person.”
If spending the next few months crying into a mountain of toilet paper & drinking yourself to sleep binge watching Netflix sounds like fun then you don’t need to read this, you’re all set!
But if you’re keen to the fact that every major recession in the past 100 years was followed by an economic BOON for the people open to opportunities…
If you recognize that mass hysteria, fear, & uncertainty are predictable human behaviors that have repeatedly & reliably created wealth creation opportunities during times of crisis.
Then you will benefit while others lose their wealth & stay stuck in scarcity & survival mindset.
Is Profiting During a Crisis Wrong?
Is it somehow immoral or insensitive to think of profiting during a time when there is real suffering around us?
If you think so you are doomed to a fate of toilet paper and alcohol during the coming months. Many people have a fear of selling that stops them from working for themselves, I’ll get to that later.
If you ask me it’s your call to service, your wake up call that the world is changing and you need to catch up.
While many people become depressed about losing their jobs, many others will become hyper motivated to make massive positive change in their lives.
What’s the key differentiator between these two types of people?.. Just one thing.
- Hope.
- Vision.
- A mental road map to an even more incredible future.
In the Bali entrepreneur community I’m surrounded by people in the second category, and they are all smart enough to understand just how crucial these next months are to capitalizing on new opportunities becoming available.
Many of the most successful companies we know today were founded immediately after an economic crash.
Every crash is a reset of an over-optimized system. When things have been good for so many years, all the opportunities get fully opitimized, squeezed for their value & highly competitive.
During the last economic crash of 2008, Facebook Ads was less than 2 years old and and recently launched their ads platform, a massive opportunity for businesses of an size to grow on the back of.
Today in 2020, ads costs are rising 30% per year & running profitably is a challenge that requires top level expertise and updated knowledge to compete with the best who’ve been cutting their teeth since 2007.
But when the economy crashes the game gets flipped on it’s head. What new opportunities are emerging this time around?
The Best Emerging Opportunities
These are the major cracks in the pavement I see forming from the current economic crisis. These were all in motion slowly already, but the virus outbreak has put them on hyper speed and people who previously had no reason to adapt are being forced to.
- More demand for remote workers & freelancers
- Accelerated growth in E-commerce sales
- Offline businesses needing digital consultants of all kinds
Opportunity 1: More demand for remote workers & freelancers
Companies worldwide are being forced to setup remote work in all possible cases. Many companies didn’t have the right software systems, processes, or company culture to allow this, but have now been forced to implement them.
It’s highly likely these systems will remain a part of these companies in the future, leaving remote work & ability to work with more freelancers much easier than before.
So what does this mean for the average worker?
There are varying levels of freedom one can gain with their work.
Freedom Level 1: Working your 9-5 job in the office.
Freedom Level 2: Working your 9-5 job remotely with strict working hours.
Freedom Level 3: Working remotely as with flexible work hours
Freedom Level 4: Working remotely as a freelancer with flexible hours & ability to decide how & when the work is complete.
To reach levels 3 & 4 requires trust with your employer that you’re reliable & self motivated.
If you’re valuable enough to the company you can often negotiate work as a freelancer for your current employer on a part time basis while taking on other clients.
This was a lesson I learned from Tim Ferriss’ book The 4 Hour Work Week and I didn’t think it would work. But after negotiating a part time work agreement with my carpentry boss, I was able to work only 3 days per week and retain my same pay. You never know unless you ask!
If you plan to build your own business from your current career, don’t forget that your current employer could be your best option as a first client.
Opportunity 2: Accelerated growth in E-commerce sales
E-commerce will grow massively in the coming months and years and already Amazon announced they are hiring 100,000 new employees to keep up with demand. Right now there are hundreds of millions of people making their very first online purchase.
Lets assume a large portion of these first time shoppers become regular shoppers. With the convenience & guarantee of Amazon Prime 2 day shipping, it’s becoming harder for brick and mortar stores to compete.
In the short term there is panic as people self quarantine and supply chain issues from Chinese manufacturers, but as the dust settles it’s becoming clear e-commerce will see a massive spike as offline brands are forced online to stay in business & meet consumers where their attention is.
Do I recommend getting into e-commerce? The answer may surprise you…
For 90% of you reading this, I will say a firm no. It’s a bad idea for most people. It’s a tougher game than it looks.
For the few of you that have $10,000+ you are willing to risk and have some related skills I’d say go for it! The problem with e-commerce businesses no one talks about is exactly how expensive they are to grow.
Example scenario: You invest $5000 in 300 units of your first product, enough units so you won’t go out of stock before your second batch is manufactured & shipped to Amazon.
They start selling well, awesome! Now you have to spend another $10,000 on inventory because sales are growing fast, but your Amazon payout hasn’t come yet. Oh well, lets put it on the line of credit!
The amount of successful e-commerce business owners I know that have at least once maxed out all their credit cards to pay for inventory is mind boggling. The cash flow problems don’t go away once you get “big enough,” in fact they get bigger.
Reality is it’s difficult to extract profit from the business to pay yourself well & also reinvest into business growth. I know people who sell $4,000,000 per year but can’t afford to pay themselves 6 figures because they’re constantly launching new products.
And you’re competing against people who pay themselves nothing and reinvest 100% of profits back into the company. Amazon did this themselves for 15+ years and look at how big they are now.
For the average person looking for a new opportunity, there are safer, more reliable ways to start working for yourself and earn more than a 9-5 job.
Opportunity 3: Offline businesses needing digital consultants of all kinds
Many businesses have been doing just fine with no or incredibly mediocre digital marketing for years, but the game just changed.
The demand for consultants, freelancers, and agencies that can help these businesses with digital marketing just skyrocketed. Business owners must either learn themselves the hard way taking dozens of hours of courses & trial and error, or hire someone who knows what they’re doing.
This section is all about how to be the latter…
This is the best opportunity in my opinion because it brings together some key things.
Benefits of Providing Digital Services as Income
- No financial investment needed to start. You create value with your skills, connections, & hard work instead of needing lots of capital to start.
- You provide valuable services & expertise these businesses desperately need to adapt to the new economy. They will rely heavily on outside help that already has the skills & expertise they need.
- Most people already have skills they can monetize as a freelancer or build a digital agency from. Whether it’s from a past job or a hobby, many of these skills can be your launch pad to finally start working for yourself if you learn the skills of finding & closing clients.
So what exactly do I mean by helping other businesses? Basically any digital service you can offer businesses that they probably don’t hire for internally, but could highly benefit from.
Digital Services You Can Provide
- Managing Facebook Ads
- Managing & creating social media content
- Creating product listings for e-commerce stores
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Sales
- Customer Service
- Product photography for brands selling online
- Lead generation for realtors, doctors, and dentists
My agency Kenji ROI creates Amazon product listings and manages advertising for brands selling on Amazon. We serve a narrow niche (brands selling on Amazon) with very specific services (listing optimization & ads management). This well defined combination has allowed us to standardize our systems & processes enough to scale up to 6 full time team members.
Four years ago, I knew nothing about online business & was working carpentry in the pouring Vancouver rain. Through relentless education & a lot of hard work I identified a need in the marketplace, learned the skills I knew I was lacking, and built my own business without investing anything. In fact, I was $20k in debt from a previous business when I started Kenji ROI.
And in today’s world the need for these types of businesses is rapidly growing. There was enough demand back then and there is even more today as businesses scramble to adapt or die.
How to Start Working For Yourself in the New Economy
Lets say you’re sold on working for yourself, online location independence, freedom to work how want and all that jazz… but you’re not sure where to start.
The good news is, you don’t need a university education! I never went to university, & here in Bali most successful entrepreneurs I know didn’t either.
The quality, accessibility, and affordability of online courses & information from experts on literally anything is beyond the wildest imagination of any of the greatest minds of the past.
Podcasts, YouTube videos, cheap kindle books all give us cheap or free DIRECT ACCESS to the most experienced & smartest people in literally any field.
And since today’s online business landscape moves so fast, learning the skill of learning is the single most effective thing you can do. I’d recommend taking the Superlearner Course on Udemy. I’ve taken it to sharpen my comprehension and learning speed.
The Biggest Thing that Stops People From Success
Everyone who has successfully started to work for themselves had a trigger.
A moment where their current situation was painful enough or the desire to succeed outweighed the comfort of staying in their lane.
In my case it was all on the side of pain. I hated my work as a carpenter & with everything I was learning about online business through the courses & podcasts I consumed, it felt like such a travesty not putting it to to the test.
The more I learned the more it built up potential energy wanting the be released, and after a few more months of holding it in, I just had to express it into the world.
It hurt my soul to be doing mindless work 40 hours a week when I wanted to badly to take action & grow my own business. To take control of my life.
I won’t pretend it’s an easy path, in fact it’s the much harder path…
But really what’s more difficult, taking a leap of faith & risking it?
Or living out the next 10 years spending 36% of your waking hours doing something that makes you feel dead inside?
Yes, a 40 hour work week is 36% of your waking hours assuming you spend 8 hours asleep and work 5 days per week.
Being conservative lets leave 20% (3 hours per day) for maintenance like eating, groceries, & showering, then we’re left with only 44% of our waking hours to do what we want.
What could you accomplish in a year if you spent 2,080 hours working on building a business instead of doing something you hate?
You’d probably have to take a big pay cut for a while, and deal with the doubt and uncertainty, but to me that’s miles better than the certainty of doing nothing.
Are Online Courses Worth It?
I’ve personally spent more than $30k on online courses and programs and continue to spend. What I’ve learned and the people I’ve met through the process has made me back well over 20 times that amount.
I know so many people who spent $100-$250k on their MBA from some fancy university and regret it. Many of them express that what they learn there does a poor job of preparing them to actually run a business (it’s more for executives in large corporations) and by the time they graduate they are in six figures of student loan debt & half their education is out dated.
The low cost nature of producing online courses & distributing them to hundreds or thousands of people means the costs can be much lower than any University could provide. This is the future of education, but it requires self discipline and focus in whatever environment you’re learning in.
Conclusion: Value for your money + convenience + new fresh information makes online courses great. But they come with less accountability and require discipline to show up and do the work on your own time.
Join our Community of Freedom Actualizers
Through my own journey of working for myself online, there was nothing more important than community of like minded people on the same journey.
There were so many times where I didn’t believe in myself because literally no one in my physical world had done anything like this & I felt lonely.
I post free content about working for yourself & everyone in the group helps hold each other accountable to their goals of working for themselves.
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