Episode #24 - Passive Income
Advice to younger selves — Dale would tell his 15-year-old self to pay attention to everything around him, while Coby reflects on not understanding money and missing opportunities. An honest, fun episode about the one habit that separates people who build extraordinary things from those who wonder why nothing changes. Plus, a Merger or Murder featuring a genius South American lead generation pivot.
Hello and welcome to the Sequoia Project podcast. Episode 24 — passive income. Think everyone who started a business has had the goal of getting it to passive income. Everyone who's watched YouTube has heard about $10,000 a month passive income. But is it all really that sexy, Dale?
Coby: I thought passive income was money that you didn't have to do anything for. So it came in passively. You just have something that was going to — you didn't have to keep doing something or you did have to keep doing something and it was very, very small but it just kept recurring coming in. The way it was kind of described to me was like rent. Like you own a house and that rent just keeps coming in constantly every single week or month, and you don't actually do anything — but realistically you have to upkeep the house.
Dale: My understanding of it was very similar — yeah, cool. You set something up that does an action over and over again and that action gets you paid. And when I first heard about it, I thought it was the coolest thing in the world and I was like, need to get me some of that. Nothing is truly passive. I think the statement as passive as practical is more realistic.
Dale: The first thing I made passive was the service in junk business. The way that I did that was after about three months of doing it myself — I had tested those things and documented those things for three months. And then the service was now I bring someone into the team. They come with me in the truck. I never sent them out. I never said, alright, cool, like I need more, I've got too much work, you go out in the truck. I sacrificed being able to do double the work to be able to have double the impact on the person I was training. I brought them with me and I said, your job is to follow this checklist. And before you go and do it on your own, I want you to check me off. I want you to watch me do it, word for word, box by box. And once you've seen me do that 20, 30, 40 times, you'll know for a fact, it can be done and that's what I expect.
Coby: The first thing that I actually ended up making, I suppose, passive was automating literally all of my email systems and everything like that — my inquiry system. That was the first thing that I did. And that didn't even require getting another person in. It just made sure that I had literally the best process from the moment somebody inquires all the way up until their wedding day. It's got literally everything planned. And then slowly you start bringing things in that people cover everything you hate doing. So if it's something like editing, that's now passive to me because I just upload it and then it gets sent back to me.