Show Notes

Welcome back to The Designer Practice Podcast, and I’m your host, Kayla Das.

Last week we discussed the power of passive income and in honor of my new book, the Passive Practice. Today, I want to bring it a step forward and we’re going to talk about the passive income pathway, as well as the nuts and bolts of passive income because when we think of passive income, just like any type of other income, there are still some key considerations regardless of the stream of choice. So in other words, the type of passive income stream you choose.

Now, last week I discussed the client’s journey when it comes to a potential passive income stream that you may choose. As a therapist you are likely seeing clients who have taken so many additional steps before they come and see you. They may have sat out free content. They may have sought out low-cost content, they may have tried other paid content before they even came and saw you.

But regardless of all of that, there’s still a passive income pathway that you, as the person implementing a passive income stream, should consider and think about.

And I also want to take a step back that. While many of you may already have a private practice or a group practice, or working as a contractor in a group practice, you don’t necessarily need a private practice to be able to incorporate passive income streams into your life. So if you’re working, a nine to five job, a corporate job, a non-for-profit job or a public sector job, you can still incorporate passive income into your life.

Whether it’s directly related to your profession such as therapy or social work or whatever your designation is, or maybe it’s something completely different. Maybe you have a different passion that you want to tap into. You can still tap into that as well.

And let me give you an example. So while a lot of my content is very social work, therapist focused something that I want to branch out in, and I haven’t started it yet, so I do want to give that disclaimer, but I want to start blogging for a topic that has nothing to do with social work that has nothing to do with therapy whatsoever. And I even purchased a website domain called the Money Conscious Canadian, and I love talking about ways to save money, to coupon, a blog that gives everyday Canadians a way to think about how they can save money, to bring in additional income.

If you haven’t already noticed, I’m someone who loves giving a good discount or a coupon code. I consider myself the coupon lady of our profession and I want to expand beyond that in the larger scale.

Now I’m going to back a little bit ’cause this goes into the passive income pathway, is that it’s always good to really start off with one idea first, because there are so many possible ideas that we could focus on. As you can see, that idea is very different from any of the content that I currently do. So again, that’s a future endeavor. But when we think of the passive income pathway, we want to start with one idea and build it to fruition.

So I want you to think about your primary income stream. Typically, this is an earned income stream, so whether you’re in your private practice, whether you’re at your agency job. We do want you to keep that primary source of income.

While you may have a goal that you want all of your income to be passive, that’s definitely possible. But when we’re starting out, we don’t want to just quit our job. We don’t want to just give up our clients. And for many therapists working with clients is what’s so energizing. And you may be thinking, I never want to give up my client work, but you might be wanting more flexibility, more freedom, more autonomy over your schedules, more profits coming into your practice or your life.

So, you don’t ever have to give up your earned income stream or your primary income stream, regardless of what it is. But we definitely, even if your goal is to, in the future, we want you to keep it as you start building up your passive income stream.

So when you have your primary source of income, that’s when we start building out the first passive income stream. And for some, maybe one passive income stream is all they want, and that is completely fine. And actually in many cases, if you really hone in on the one passive income stream and really put a lot of effort into it and build it out, create it, market it and pivot, and many people thrive on one passive income stream, and that is what helps them bring in additional revenue.

But if you are like me, I’m someone who loves to have so many different projects on the go. One income stream would just not be suffice for me, and that’s because my creativity is about building content or resources to help with gaps that I see in the world. And of course, there’s so many different gaps that we could be plugging into. So as a result, I’m often building many passive income streams. So I love having multiple streams of income coming into my practice, but that is my goal. That is what I love to do.

But we want to get super intentional and we want to focus on one thing, build it out, then move on to the next if you want to so that you can gain the benefits of your passive income stream.

If you’re like me, you have so many different ideas. Again, going to the money Conscious Canadian as example, I don’t know if that will ever come to fruition. It’s lower on my totem pole of ideas, but it’s an idea all the same. But I’m still focusing on my other sources of income, my other passive income streams first building them out and later down the road. As I start building up more schedule flexibility, more freedom into my life, then I might start moving into something different.

So start with your primary income stream, then go to your first passive income stream. Build it, create it, market it, pivot, make it into what you want it to be. Then add in additional passive income streams as the first one is on autopilot. And as we mentioned in the last episode, it’s never truly a hundred percent on autopilot. You still need to share, you still need to talk about it, but you’re putting a lot less effort into it to bring in revenue. So as you build in additional income streams, you’re increasing the financial stability and time freedom into your life because now you’re having more passive income streams into your business.

 I always love to give the example of when I first finished my Bachelor of Social work I worked at three casual jobs. Now I say they’re a casual because that’s the title of them, but I often worked 24 hours, 36 hours straight, going from one job to the next job and so forth.

And when we think of earned income, many of us have multiple different earned income streams. Maybe we have two jobs. In my case, I had three jobs. And of course, there’s only so much time in a day. There’s only 24 hours. And even though I say I worked 36 hours straight and I did, I had to sleep for 24 hours after to recuperate from that. So, in that year and a half that I had worked three jobs, going from one to the next without sleep in between. I can say I aged a lot during that time and it probably did more harm than it did good.

But the beauty of passive income is that you can have multiple passive income streams, especially once they’re established and make additional revenue. And you could have 5, 6, 7 different income streams if that is something that you’re wanting to develop into your practice.

But we want to start with our primary source of income, which again, is typically your earned income. It’s your clients, it’s your day job, it is whatever is bringing an income to your life. And then we start building out from there.

So that is the passive income pathway, having your primary income stream, then building out your first passive income stream, and then building out your next and so forth.

But there are some nuts and bolts that we have to think about regardless of the passive income stream of choice. So as I’ve mentioned, you do want to have your primary income stream, usually your earned income stream to supplement your income as you build.

While you’re building your passive income stream, as I said last week, you’re not going to make money right away, and I use my book, the Passive of Practice, as an example. While I was writing the book, while I was publishing the book, I was making no money. In fact, I spent money into it from book coaching, editing, book formatting, before I got to actually making sales.

 And I sat on a half-written manuscript for two years before I picked it up again to continue to write that book. So between all of that time, I put effort into writing a book that wasn’t making me any money.

Now, fast forward to today and I’m sharing it to the world. And my goal is that it helps other therapists be able to bring passive income streams into their life. Because it is so rewarding to be able to have income coming into your practice with minimal or little effort.

So first, you need your primary income stream.

Then you need people to share your passive income stream with. And I think this is often overlooked. We want to just go into creating whatever it is, the passive income stream that we want to build. I’m going to write this book, but I’m not going to have anybody to share it with.

What’s going to happen is you’re going to create this wonderful passive income stream, and if there’s no strategy on how you’re going to share it to the right people, you’re probably not going to see a lot of revenue coming in from it.

So you might want to start building your email list, a social media following, if you’re doing blogging, organic search traffic. Now, organic search traffic comes with continuing to build your blog. For instance, you may not necessarily have an existing community, but with each blog you develop, especially if you SEO optimize it or search engine optimize it, you will be able to start building up your visibility, your traffic. Google is going to rank you higher, and then you’re going to have people naturally coming to your website. So it goes hand in hand with that particular passive income stream.

But not all do. For instance, my book, while it’s on Amazon and people can find it organically on Amazon, I’m probably not going to make a lot of money just waiting for people to magically find my book. I still need people to share it with. I still need this podcast to share it with, I still need to share it with my email list. I might want to go to different events where therapists are like conferences or lunch and learns and things like that to be able to share it with the world. But what’s great about it is I could do it for an hour, two hours, or maybe even a weekend in the case of a conference, and I could make significant revenue and build visibility in doing that. So yes, I’m physically needing to be there, but there’s no income glass ceiling, as we mentioned last day, there’s no maximum amount of money that I can make.

So going back to the nuts and bolts, you need people to share your passive income stream with. As you’re developing whatever passive income stream it is to think about how am I going to share this with the world.

And I want to actually give a caveat here, maybe your passive income stream is actually hiring therapists in your practice to work for you. That is a passive income stream, by the way, because someone is doing it for you and bringing in revenue passively on your case to your practice.

You might not need people to share it with directly, but you still need to have marketing strategies to continue to bring clients into the practice. You also still need to find the right person to hire into your practice. And then also not necessarily just sharing in that way, you’re also going to want to continue to nurture that relationship.

And nurturing is the next component you’re going to want to nurture whatever passive income stream it is. So that maintenance stage where you’re continuing to keep it relevant, that you’re still talking about it, that you’re still sharing it with the world but you’re nurturing it in a way where it’s not always about making money, but it’s about how can I build stronger relationships with either my audience, my readers, or the staff that I have.

Thinking of hiring individuals, a big part of your job duty is mentoring, managing, leading, providing resources to your new hires or, in some cases, even hires that you’ve had for a while, and it’s because they still want that community too. So while it may not be directly client facing, you’re still going to need to develop that positive work environment where your staff feel supported and wanting to continue to show up every day so that they continue to make you money.

 The next nut and bolt of passive income is basic equipment. And that does depend on the passive income stream of choice. So let me give an example. Podcasting, you’re going to need some type of mic and maybe earphones and a recording and editing software of some kind. So you’re going to need that to consistently develop content.

When we think of hiring individuals into your practice, you are going to need a job posting, which isn’t really equipment, but it’s still something that you need to develop. You might need policies, procedures. You might need electronic health record or a practice management software that can add in additional staff persons so that they can write their notes, they can schedule their clients. You can also schedule directly into their schedule, so you’re going to need some basic equipment depending on what it is.

The next one, I think is the most important when it comes to building a passive income stream with success. Is you need to be intrinsically motivated to continue to do the passive income stream.

That doesn’t mean that you won’t necessarily need some accountability built in. And I’m going to give you an example. I love to write. If I could honestly write for the rest of my life that would be my dream to be able to write for the rest of my life. However, as I mentioned, I sat on a half-written manuscript for two years before I decided, you know what? I’m going to hire a book coach to give me that motivation, to give me that accountability, to help me with the direction where I need to go to be able to get my book out in the world.

Because I did that, I was able to continue to move forward with what I’m already intrinsically motivated to do, which is to write. But now I had some guidance, some support, someone to cheer me on along the way, and that is what I needed. But I still intrinsically motivated to do it.

If you are someone that you know doesn’t like to write, you dread having to write. Maybe writing a book or a blog may not necessarily be sustainable passive income stream for you.

If having to manage and support your independent contractors or employees is something that just doesn’t energize you. It may be hiring therapists, may not be the role for you. Now, it doesn’t mean that there isn’t other ways you can pivot. You could technically hire a manager to manage your staff. So there’s still a way around that. But then you would still need to supervise and manage the manager. So there’s still going to be some component of leading, managing, supporting, and so forth within the business, if that was your passive income stream of choice.

If you are podcasting you’re going to want to intrinsically be motivated to not only speak on the podcast every week, but unless you have the finances to outsource the editing, the scheduling, the marketing that goes with that.

Then it may not necessarily be the passive income stream choice for you. Now, if you do have the finances, you can also outsource. So similar to what I’ve mentioned before. A lot of times if there’s things that you don’t particularly enjoy in a task that is a part of the task, you can outsource it. But at the end of the day, you are the person that’s writing the blogs. You are the person that’s hiring the individual. You’re the person that is speaking on the podcast. You are the person writing that book. So as a result, you still need to intrinsically be motivated by the overall task of what that passive income stream is. And then you can outsource components of it, if you financially can do so.

The final nut and bolt of passive income is the plan for how you’re going to build your passive income stream of choice. We all have these ideas on what we would like to do into our business and our practice.

And I’m going to go back to the money conscious Canadian. For an example. I have not developed a plan when it comes to that particular passive income stream. And, as I mentioned, it’s like an idea. It’s not something that I’ve fully put out in the world yet, so I haven’t developed a plan. And without a plan, I’m probably not going to get to it very quickly.

Also, that plan is your kind of your roadmap, your North star for where you’re going, how you’re going to get there, and that’s really what I talk about in the passive practice is I give you the steps for creating that plan for how you’re going to build a passive income stream of choice. So I give you how you’re going to build four proven and passive income streams. But that plan is going to help you continue to move forward.

So it’s not just about having the idea, it’s about being intentional, about the idea. It is about planning the idea. And going back to sharing your passive income stream, a part of your plan is how am I going to share my passive income stream with the world? Am I going to build an email list? Am I going to build a social media following? Do I need to focus on search engine optimization? If I do I know how to do that? If not, it might mean I need to find additional resources or information or training on how to do so.

Do I know how to hire individuals into my practice? Do I know how to onboard individuals into my practice? Do I know how to manage individuals in my practice? And those are all the things we might think about within the plan. It’s not just about the idea, but it’s about how are we going to make this idea into a reality?

Thank you for tuning in to today’s episode, and I hope you enjoyed this episode as much as I enjoyed sharing it with you.

If you are interested in checking out the passive practice, you can check out the passive practice on Amazon sites worldwide. However, if you’re in Canada or the US, I do have links to Amazon below in the show notes where you can easily just click on and it’ll bring you right to the sales page so that you can check it out.

Thank you for tuning into The Designer Practice Podcast.

And until next time, bye for now.

Credits & Disclaimers

Music by Denis Pavlov Music from Pixabay

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