Programming Coffee

Ok, lets get some assumptions out of the way. From what I’ve read, and experienced, only 60% of the time you spend ends up being billable. If your percentage is different, adjust things accordingly…but realize the point is still the same.

So you are charging $25/hr, $50/hr, $75/hr, $100/hr, or lucky enough to be able to charge more, you will notice that your income is purely based on how many billable hours you can work. At $50/hr, if you are lucky enough to have 24 billable hours per week (based on a 40hr week, and lets assume you want a 2-week vacation every year), your annual income will only amount to $60k. Want to make $20k more per year? Well, that will cost you 3 more hours of work every day (which will only add 8 more billable hours based on our assumptions).

Most of you probably aren’t fine with a $60k income, because lets face it, depending on your type of incorporation, your income will probably be comperable to $54k after paying company-related taxes. To jump up $20k per year, you have to work more hours…or raise your rates to roughly $67/hr. How will that affect your current client base? How will that affect your ability to attract new clients? If it won’t affect anything, and you are content with your income, then you probably won’t find much value in my solution.

What is my solution? Residual Income.

Not just any residual income though, you want the kind that isn’t directly proportional to the time spent to accrue it. You would probably agree that $2k/week in residual income would be nice, especially if you ony had to put in a couple hours of work to keep things rolling. What does it take to generate $2k/week in residual income?

An idea that you can sell.

It doesn’t need to be the best idea, the most unique idea, or even a good idea. It just needs to be something that you can sell. Some people sell information, some people sell their perspective on how to get things done, and some people sell access to a service. You will notice that my examples aren’t 1-man companies…but that shouldn’t affect your ability to create your own idea to sell.

So what does it take to make $2k per week? A $50 product that can be sold 40 times per week. A $25/month service that can have 20 new customers per week. And the neat thing is that you don’t have to do this with just 1 product, or 1 piece of information. You can mix and match to your heart’s content. You need to increase your income? Just add more streams of revenue, and sit back.