Welcome to my first quarterly Business & Lifestyle Review.
My 2014 yearly review was very well received, so I thought I would start doing these on a regular basis.
Each quarter I’m going to write a very detailed review of the previous quarter (maybe I’ll do them monthly if I get enough comments, social shares and and emails about it).
I do this not only to help me track my own progress, but I want to be as transparent as possible about what’s going on in my business and life. I want to lead by example by showing you what’s working for me, and what’s not – both in business and when it comes to my lifestyle/traveling. And I do all this by telling stories in writing, photos and video.
Each quarter I’m going to review how I did when it came to achieving the previous quarterly goals both in business and my personal life.
In each quarterly report I’ll cover the following topics:
- Did I hit my quarterly goals?
- Lessons learned during this quarter
- Revenue/expenses (full breakdown of revenue/expenses is coming in future reviews)
- Lifestyle design & travel check
- Plans for next quarter
- Other things worth mentioning
Inspiration for doing this review comes from my friends Greg Hickman, John Lee Dumas and the man who started it all, Pat Flynn. Thank you, and keep up the good work!
Without further ado, let’s get into my first ever Business and Lifestyle Review for quarter 1, 2015. I hope you’ll enjoy it as much as I enjoyed writing it!
Warning! This is a 7700 word in-depth blog post covering everything I’ve done for the past 3 months, the lessons I learned and goals for next quarter, mixed with text, a lot of photos and some videos. Enjoy, and do let me know what you think in the comments please!
Did I Hit My Goals For Q1?
My 7 goals for Q1 were:
- Move abroad and leave Sweden behind for good
- Kick off my Virtual Summit Mastery pilot program
- Create my 7 Steps Cheat Sheet Optin Offer
- Launch The WP Summit and The Movement Marketing Summit
- Get three new high-end coaching clients to help them create successful virtual summits
- Do an awesome promo for Ramit Sethi and Selena Soo
- Get featured on podcasts and get major press
1. Move abroad and leave Sweden behind for good
All I can say is that I crushed this goal. I actually left Sweden back in December 2014 when I went to Thailand with my family, but I decided to not stay there for more than 3 weeks. Instead, I went back to a very cold Stockholm, and only a few days later I left for Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, and my adventure began.
I can honestly say that I was very nervous about all this. I had many questions going on inside my head.
Would I be able to run my business on the road? Would my money last or would I run out of cash? Would I continue making good money online? Etc etc. This list goes on and on…
But I’m glad I just did it anyway… together with pushing through and getting my virtual summit out there end of 2014, moving abroad is the best decision I’ve ever made in my life.
In fact, I’m making way more money than when I was living in “safe” Sweden. I’m living my dream now while taking my business and life to the next level. I’m actually never going back to Sweden to live there in the future… 28 years was enough, now I’m enjoying myself so much more. It’s hard to explain, but this is what I always dreamed of, living an unconventional extraordinary life.
Was the 18 hour days I put in for 18 months worth it? Of course! Is it for everyone? Probably not, but it worked for me!
More about my exciting adventures living abroad under “Lifestyle Design & Travel Check” below.
2. Kick off my Virtual Summit Mastery Pilot Program
I managed to launch the pilot of my Virtual Summit Mastery program. I’ve very happy about that and that I got the membership area set up by my awesome designer Gion-Per.
I have the first module completed and some bonus content added. My intention was to have even more modules recorded by now, but it took a bit longer to plan out than I first thought.
Now all the modules are planned out, and I basically just have to get all the slides done and record.
What I’m most proud over is the community I’ve built. We have a very engaged, supportive group of people in my private Facebook group for the Virtual Summit Mastery program. I’ve very happy to have some some more advanced people in the group as well like Roger Deveau who is adding a ton of value to everyone in there. We also did an exclusive bonus interview which you can find inside the members area when you join the program.
Note From Navid (late 2018): We’re now onto Virtual Summit Mastery 3.0. You can find more information about the Virtual Summit Mastery here.
3. Create my 7 steps cheat sheet optin offer
This was top priority to get done as soon as possible, and I finally got my cheat sheet created as a new optin offer that is super targeted to what I focus on right now which is helping people create successful virtual summits.
My designer Gion-Per created the awesome cover you can see below.
4. Launch The WP Summit and The Movement Marketing Summit
The Wp Summit
I helped my good friend Jan Koch create The WP Summit and it turned into a massive success for him.
The WP Summit reached 110+ countries and got major media coverage on the biggest WordPress blogs. In addition to that, Jan grew his email list by around 600% and generated a few 1,000 dollars in revenue.
Now Jan is seen as the go-to expert for WordPress and his business is taking off more and more.
The Movement Marketing Summit
I’ve also been working closely with Aj Amyx and Andy Zitzmann to help them create the Movement Marketing Summit.
It all kicked off April 8, and I’m so proud of what Aj and Az have created so far. It’s the summit of 2015… with 50 elite entrepreneurs as speakers!
I also managed to get Aj and Az featured on Business Insider as a little bonus for being so awesome. Check it out here!
5. Get 3 new high-end coaching clients to help them create successful virtual summits
As much as I’m trying to move away from coaching, I like to do it because it’s a great way to get amazing case studies for my business. And I love getting people results in their business and life.
Did I achieve my goal of getting 3 new high end coaching clients?
YESSSS!
In fact, I got 5 new clients and I might take on a few more to get some great case studies. I don’t have to do much to get clients anymore either. They just come to me, either through my list or referrals since they’ve seen the quality of my work and that I really care about my clients success more than anything.
6. Do an awesome promo for Ramit Sethi and Selena Soo
Ramit Sethi’s Zero to Launch
I’ve been a proud affiliate for Ramit Sethi’s products since July 2014, and I’ve had quite some success even when my audience was smaller, generating a few $1,000.
Worth mentioning here is that I also purchased his premium online business training, Zero to Launch ($2,000 investment), and I’ve had quite some success with using Ramit’s proven system, especially for validating my Branding Summit, and pre-selling my Virtual Summit course.
For the January launch, my list was around 3,500 people (I grew my list with close to 3,000 people from my summit, and some obviously unsubscribed as well after) and I was excited to see what would happen since I knew that my audience love Ramit’s stuff already.
All I can say is that I crushed it, and this launch exceeded my wildest dreams.
I got 34 sales (and a few additional ones later on as well, not part of the initial promo) for Zero to Launch and a 7.67% conversion rate out of my 443 optins. Each sale generate $800-1400 for me, so you can do the math yourself!
That’s just crazy to me… but it gets even better.
A week or so after the cart closed for ZTL, I receive an email from Ramit himself, and not his affiliate manager, Colleen (who I’m usually in contact with). He said that I won the grand affiliate prize of $7,500… I was blown away but very grateful of course considering that John Lee Dumas, Chris Ducker, Laura Roeder, John Corcoran and Ramit’s own brother Maneesh Sethi promoted his launch, and they have much bigger audiences than I do.
Even though, I was drawn at random to win the cash prize, I kind of deserved it too, since I actually made the most sales out of all affiliates too.
I hope to do well for Ramit’s next launch as well. But I have a lot to live up to if I want to top this January launch. We’ll see how it goes…
Selena Soo’s INFLUENCE
After the successful promotion for Ramit Sethi’s Zero to Launch, I was excited to help my good friend Selena Soo, to get the word out there about her new course, INFLUENCE: Turn People You Admire Into Friends, Mentors, And Clients.
I’m happy to say that I crushed it with the promotion for her program too. YES, I became the #1 affiliate when it comes to sales, and I believe I was #2 when it comes to actual leads. Not too bad to do that well for two promotions in a row!
In order to get the most out of the promotion I did something by creating a bonus page for Selena’s INFLUENCE.
This promotion alone will bring in close to $8,500, and maybe even more later on since people that bought INFLUENCE are tagged and can potentially purchase GKGC as well.
7. Get featured on podcasts and get major press
Business Insider
Let’s start with something crazy that happened beginning of February.
I was featured on Business Insider, thanks to my good friend Primoz Bozic.
But it was just a regular story on BI. It went completely VIRAL. To this date, it has close to 135,000 views, and even more around the world since it spread to Croatia, Serbia, Israel etc.
I got some great business from this feature almost instantly, and I was able to grow my email list with almost 2,000 people from this feature on Business Insider alone.
My article on BI also got re-published on Yahoo Finance, which I’m pretty stoked about of course.
Joel Comm’s Social Poetry 2
Thanks to Amber Vilhauer, I was featured in Joel Comm’s Social Poetry 2, part of his Twitter Power 3.0 launch, which was pretty cool.
Here’s a quote from my contribution:
Podcast Interviews
Even though I haven’t updated my own podcast or blog as frequently as I used to, doesn’t mean I don’t put out quality information that is available online for free.
Here’s some of the recent podcast’s I’ve been featured on talking about the power of virtual summits and sharing my story:
- Navid Moazzez on Virtual Summit Mastery (Content Warfare with Ryan Hanley)
- How to Turn Adversity Into Success In Life (The Grass Gets Greener with Melissa Wilson)
Virtual Summit Interviews
- The Movement Marketing Summit
- The WP Summit
- Miracle Business Breakthrough
Lessons Learned During Quarter 1
It’s not as hard as I thought to run my business from abroad. But it’s not super easy either…
Let me explain.
I need to get into a perfect daily routine (see below under goals for next quarter). When I do that and get most of my things done in the morning, I’m so much more productive and get a lot done in my business, but also have time for some crazy adventures.
The hardest part for me in the beginning was that I always wanted to go out and explore the surroundings, and to be honest I didn’t get that much work done as I wanted. But I also needed some time to reflect and relax since I had been working extremely hard for the last 18 months.
Now that I’ve been living abroad for a while, it’s actually easier than when I was back in Sweden, mostly because I enjoy my life so much more, and have the freedom to live and work from anywhere in the world.
Don’t plan too far in advance. You never know when something will happen that will change things up a bit. For me, that means not staying in San Diego two months as planned and moving to Cancun instead of going to Europe this summer. I don’t mind it at all, since I can spend a lot of time with my girl, learn Spanish fluently and start taking Salsa classes.
You can make a lot of money as an affiliate if you do it the right way. I knew this already of course, but I had never experienced it myself like I outlined above. Pretty cool, and I hope to be able to take my affiliate partnerships to the next level in the future.
Set up your funnel and create systems in your business as soon as possible. I wish I would have done this earlier, but everything takes time, and now was the right moment. I’m moving from AWeber to Infusionsoft, in order to get a much better overview of my business and also be able to start automating some things eventually. Very excited about that!
Cashflow in your business is so important as an entrepreneur. As much as I like payment plans the more money I have on my account the better obviously. A big goal of mine is to generate as much cashflow as possible this year, so I can relax even more later when I have all the systems in place.
Revenue & Expenses (full breakdown is coming in future reviews)
I was going to do a full breakdown already in this review of my first 18 months since I started out online mid June 2013, in addition to my first 3 months this year, but I need to sit down with my accountant to make it more valuable for you. You will see a big difference, and that things can turn around very quickly.
For now I’m going to tell you this. From mid June 2013 to October 2014, I made some money, but it was not even close enough to quit my part-time job or live the life I’m living now.
My Branding Summit generated little over $20k in November and December, and took my business and life to the next level.
What’s even more interesting is what happened after the summit, when I finally moved abroad.
The first 3 months of this year I’ve made over $70k, which is amazing, but I put in the hard work up front, and now I’m reaping the benefits.
My business expenses are fairly low, around $2,500 for the first quarter this year. Even though I’m making more, I invest back in my business (I just got Infusionsoft for example), and try to save as much as I can as well.
Yes, I like living in a nice apartment with amazing ocean view and big swimming pool so I can do laps… that’s not that cheap even in Mexico, but I’m willing to invest in that because it really helps me focus and I can grow my business faster by being able to wake up in paradise every morning.
I also do adventures from time to time (see below under Lifestyle Design & Travel Check), but that’s part of being a lifestyle entrepreneur and something I really enjoy.
As I mentioned above, full breakdown is coming in future biz & lifestyle reviews, so stay tuned for that!
Note: Not all of this is actual cashflow in my business, but money I will get throughout the year since some are on monthly payment plans.
Lifestyle Design & Travel Check
I had a good time in Thailand with my family for 3 weeks over christmas and new years. Besides getting quite sick during my stay there, I really enjoyed it. But I didn’t love it, so I decided to not stay there for that long but instead book a trip to Mexico which seemed way more my style.
So I went back to Stockholm for a short few days, and then I boarded my flight to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico.
My adventure officially began!
Cabo San Lucas
Cabo San Lucas was amazing, and to make it even better I stayed at a 5 star resort called Pueblo Bonito Sunset Beach… one of the best places I’ve stayed in my life (I found it on AirBnB for a pretty sweet deal!). If you’re going to Los Cabos, consider staying there. The only downside is that it’s a bit far from all the action, but it didn’t bother me much.
