 Is it possible to have a four hour work week with an authentic business? So that's what one of my clients asked me. And I thought it was a fascinating thought experiment. And so I attempted to create a kind of a plan for that. But the best I could come up with is an eight hour work week and still earn $4,000 a month. Now $4,000 a month is not, you know, it can't be a millionaire with 4,000 a month. But if you think about it, 4,000 a month is more than the average American earns in 40 hours a week. The average American earns about 40,000 a year, which is 3,333 per month. I know it's 3,333 per month. It's, yes, 40,000 a year or 3,333 per month, US dollars, working 40 hours a week. Actually, it's 48 hours a week on average. So if I'm giving you an opportunity to earn 4,000 a month working eight hours a week, instead of 40 hours a week or 48 hours a week, wouldn't that be a miracle? Yeah, it would be a huge privilege to be honest. Quite a luxury, especially in these times. So how do we get there? Now, if I were a typical kind of success marketer, coach, extraordinaire, I'll say buy my program and in 60 days you will be able to earn 4,000 a month working just a few hours a week. And I would be lying if I said that. Because how can you expect, I mean, you have probably tried those kinds of programs. But if you do them yourself, maybe you have. Maybe you know other people who have and always it is a failed promise unless somebody already has an incredible foundational business and then they're scaling back the hours. That is really how it works. Okay, so what do I mean by that? How can you expect to have zero experience, zero contact, zero audience and go, great, I'm gonna work eight hours a week and earn 4,000 a month? That you can't even count how many hours you need to see clients, how many hours you need to clear your emails and respond to emails, how many hours you need to do your marketing and your bookkeeping and all that other stuff. It's way more than eight hours a week to barely even make 4,000 a month. So how do you then do this? So the real answer, the realistic answer is that you need to first build up an audience of true fans who many of whom like to buy almost anything you create. You have to first build up an audience of true fans who buy almost anything you create and then you can create offers that you really believe in that really resonate with them. And then you can earn 4,000 a month working eight hours. So that those are the prerequisites. If anybody is telling you anything else, I wanna know what they're telling you because maybe I don't know something that they do, but from my 11 years of experience doing this stuff, those are the prerequisites. Enough true fans who buy just about anything you create. And of course, I'm assuming you create things that you really believe in or you sell things. You don't have to create things. You can sell other people's things. You can earn money from affiliate income, that's true. But for an authentic business, I'm a purist. So I want you to have a, I want you to make money selling things that you really, really believe in that you really are meaningful to you and the things that are most meaningful to you are the things that you create. True, you could sell my stuff. Sure, I'll pay you a commission for it, but it's not as meaningful as selling your own stuff, right? Okay, so those are the two requirements. A true fan audience and resonant offerings. And I've written so much about these things on my blog and I teach about this in my courses, but once you have a true fan audience and a resonant catalog of offerings, then you can pare down your hours to eight hours. So I'm gonna use my own business as an example because it's a true example. It's a realistic example. So at this time, by the way, I have a blog post that details all of this stuff. So you can just click on the blog post in the notes of this video, wherever it's above or below the video or to the side, click on the blog post to read about it. But at this time, I'm netting after income plus expenses, I'm netting about 14,000 per month. So about 168,000 a year. That's after expenses, not before taxes, but it's after paying expenses. I just, I pay taxes out of that 160K per year. And I work 40 hours a week doing that as a solopreneur. There are specific reasons I don't want an assistant or a team right now. I've had that before. And right now I've really pared down my activities such that I've automated away what I can and then the rest is really best for me to do. I'm sure I could outsource a little bit more, but right now I'm happy doing it. So I work 40 hours a week, really, not 48, like the typical American. I work 40 hours per week. I'm very good at time management and I earn 14,000 a month, okay, on average. Last 12 months, that's what I calculated, net. Okay, so I could pare it down to eight hours a week and still earn $4,000 by doing the following. And I'm gonna go ahead and share with you that part of the blog post. And you can read the rest if you wish to, but so this is the blog post, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so I pair it down to eight hours per week and still earn 4,000 a month. This is what I would do. I would spend four hours per week responding to emails and group client posts, meaning I would have a client group. So my client group would be $50 a month, very minimal, very basic client group. I probably just, I would basically have my courses in there plus one hour per week of a call in there, $50 per month, 25, and I could easily enroll 50 people because of the size of my audience right now. $50 a month, that's 2,500 per month, okay? Because right now, just to give you some perspective, right now I am enrolling for my 2021 client group. That's $111 for 2021 per month. And I've already got 55 people enrolled and I still have a month and 10 days before the program starts. So, and I'm not even trying that hard to enroll that. So enrolling 50 into a $50 a month if I had that would be pretty easy. And I would spend one hour per week on that call. And then additional four hours per week, like I said, responding to their emails and their posts. I would also spend one hour per week repurposing my existing free content and then spending about $200 a month running Facebook and Instagram ads to distribute that content to my warm audience, which means that my warm audience with each about 5,000 people, let's say, I would be able to reach for four times a month I'd reach 5,000 people with my Facebook and Instagram ads. That's not even including organic traffic which is them seeing stuff without me paying ads. Anyway, it's very reasonable, very reasonable. So one hour per week repurposing meaning I already have by this point over 1,000 articles and videos that I've created over the years. I could just take the best ones and just edit them, improve them, repurpose them in that one hour a week and then share that. Another hour a week I would spend, I would actually rotate in that one hour a week I would rotate between audience research, collaboration or getting or seeking client feedback and integrating that. So again, these three activities I would spend one hour per week, one week is doing this, one week is doing this, one week is doing that. One other hour per week I would be spending on course creation or logistics, marketing or follow-up. And I've already thought about all the hours and how much time it would take. If I only spent one hour on my course prep stuff it would allow me to launch one course every 12 weeks. Yes, this includes teaching courses. So basically, in 12 hours I'm able to prepare a course, teach it and do follow-up and that's 12 hours. And the reason I can do that is because I already have a whole catalog of 17 courses I've created and I'm going to create more, which means I will just basically be improving the stuff I've already created. So I can likely average, I'm being conservative here a launch each quarter and I'd probably earn $7,500 $7,500 per quarter. Right now I'm earning $7,500 per month on my courses. I would just say, ah, maybe if I'm paring it down or earn one third of that, which means I'll be earning $2,500 per month in course sales. So if you add $2,500 per month plus $2,500 per month in group income that's $5,000 per month. Now if I took away 4% for e-commerce fees like PayPal fees, that would be what? 5,000 times 96%. So I'd be down to $4,800 net and $4,800 minus $750. $2,000 a month on ads, that's generous. I mean, if I were minimal business I'd spend $200 a month on ads and $50 a month for course launches, that kind of stuff. And the $500 a month on operations, which is what I'm spending now already, just various kinds of softwares and things like that. So that would be total net before taxes earning $4,000 and working eight hours a week. Again, this is more than most Americans earn before taxes. Okay, and this is of course working way less than most Americans who work 48 hours per week. So as I've already said, this is all possible only because of the work that I've already done up to now. If anybody's telling you that you could do this kind of thing by joining their program and starting from day one and getting there within 60 days or even getting there in a year they're probably lying to you honestly. They're not being realistic. And now, like I said, the difference is if somebody already approaches that kind of process with already an audience and already offers that are good then it's more likely to get there sooner. But I would say that if you're starting from scratch with nothing, no audience and no online courses, no offers, no contacts, nothing and you work diligently for at least 20 hours a week work diligently, you'll probably take three to seven years three to seven years to build the kind of foundation that I have, which then allows you to pare it down to eight hours a week and still earn 4,000 a month. So I hope this is helpful. I hope this is inspiring and not discouraging. I don't mean to discourage you but I mean to be realistic with you. I will always try to be realistic with you compared to many of the people in my industry who are making you promises of the moon and the stars and giving you great disappointment as a result of trying to do their fantasy programs. So I'm being realistic with you but I think it's absolutely doable, absolutely doable. So I hope this is helpful. I hope you have at least three to seven years before you have to, before you're so exhausted and have to retire and do nothing at all or at least eight hours a week minimal work. I don't know, are you planning to retire and work zero hours a week? I don't know. I mean, I feel like working some hours a week gives us the vitality to continue growing personally personal development is how I see the true purpose of business, especially an authentic business. It's just a stage. It's just an exercise for our personal growth, really. Isn't that true? I think so. So I'm not planning to work. I'm planning to work all the way until the day that I die but probably when I'm in my 80s I'll start paring it down to just eight hours a week. By that point, maybe in my mid 70s I'll start paring it down but until I'm in my mid 70s I'm gonna keep working as much as I can to improve the kind of content that I make for you to improve the courses that I sell to you to write better books, to make better videos, to bring you better ideas. So that's my hope and that's my aim. I hope this is helpful. Those of you who don't know me, I'm George Kau, authentic business coach. I love talking about, well, this kind of stuff. How do we build a business with truly of heart, truly in service to the world and earn a living, at least a living wage? All right, I hope this helps and I wish you well. See you in the next video. Take care.