15: Lisa Johnson: Creating Passive Income

Do you get triggered when you hear people talk about money, especially about how much money they’ve earned?

If your answer is yes, then you’re probably not going to like this, but think of it as exposure therapy. Think of it as what is potentially possible, think of it as learning.

I am so excited to bring you Lisa Johnson. She is a multi-six figure business coach in the UK, specializing in passive income from memberships and courses. We also talk about how she actually built her first business which was in the wedding industry and wanting to sell it, but ended up giving it awayfor free.

Lisa started her business journey in the corporate world, in an investment bank. After unexpectedly getting pregnant with twins, she knew that she couldn’t go back to that world. She decided to start a business, and just plucked out of the air- wedding planning. At the end of her first year, she had 13 fully planned weddings, but she was making less than £1.5 an hour, because she knew nothing about business. She got a business coach who taught her the foundations that she really needed. She learned who she actually wanted to work with, what’s her ideal client, all the basic money mindset things. And five months later, she was known as the biggest UK urban wedding planning company. Five years later, she started Lisa Johnson coaching business. And, by far, the coaching business was doing so much better in terms of profit, because you can charge around 6,000 to 10,000 pounds for one wedding and it takes about 250 hours of work.

When it comes to business, Lisa is very much about old fashioned business. She looks at the metrics, she cares about the metrics. Her profit margins are over 90%, which in this industry is ridiculous, but it’s because she doesn’t waste money on having a massive team of people around her. She does invest, she’s invested heavily in coaches, but for what she needs: she will get a sales coach if she needs to learn how to sell better; she will get a coach on PR, if she needs to learn how to get into some big places; but she won’t get a coach just for the sake of coaching.

Don’t be afraid of failing. 

Every business owner has failed at some point. People aren’t going to shout about their failures as much as they are about their wins. But what makes you successful is not the failure, and all the wins, it’s learning from those failures. 

You need to take risks.

If we think about something for two years and then it fails, we’ve lost two years. If we think about something for a month, and it fails, we’ve lost a month. Fail fast, just get it out there, see what works.

Never create something before you’ve sold it.

Get your sales page out there. You kind of know what’s going to be in the module so you can still write a sales page, get it out there. If you make a load of money from it, write the content as you go along, do it as a beta version. And it saves a lot of time, a lot of heartache because your audience might say – no we don’t want that, but what we’d really like is this. And then make that instead. 

One of the things that we hear a lot when it comes to passive income, it’s that it is the magic bullet that will solve all your problems, yet so many people struggle with getting this started. Passive income is just as hard as any other kind of business model, it’s just a different business model and with all different business models, there are problems that come with that.

The biggest myth about passive income is that you just go to sleep and money will rain down on you and you don’t have to do anything.Even the word passive in “passive income” should be changed to leveraged income. Because it’s not passive, you have to put a hell of a lot of work into it. Yes, it becomes easier after that and you make money from it time and time again, put you have to work for it.

Start with getting over the fact that you’re not an expert in something. The imposter syndrome is what stops most people from having a passive income stream. So, sit down with a pen and a piece of paper, and work out all of the things you actually are an expert in, because you will be so surprised. It doesn’t have to be about what you’re doing in your business right now. It could be a hobby you have or it could be something you’ve done in your business.

Love + magic, 

Maggie