How to make actual passive income as an agency

Passive, recurring income is like…the golden holy grail of running an agency.

Let me break down how you can actually, realistically do this AND show you the plan I used to create a business that supports my life and goals.

So first I think it’s important to understand how most agencies (indeed, most businesses) work and WHY we’re so drawn to passive, recurring income.

Note: in 99% of cases I’ve found that most people don’t HATE their work. And most people don’t want passive recurring income because they hate their job/work. It’s often for something completely different.

So my first agency ran like most other agencies.

I’d tell people I can help with their marketing, websites, social media and SEO.

I did anything and everything to get clients.

I’d find a client, tell them what they needed and guess an amount to charge them.

Let’s say…£4000 for a website and some social media.

I’d get a deposit and charge them at each stage.

At the end of the project, I’d have to run around finding a new client.

So if we want to move to passive recurring revenue, we need to change a couple of our approaches.

1. We need income that stacks and grows over time
2. We need something that can be sold without adding to our workload 

There are so many options for creating passive income that’s also recurring, but in my opinion, people ask the wrong question.

Usually, they ask “What should I sell?” Like, is it better to sell courses, or memberships, or books or infoproducts and that’s asking the wrong question.

There’s no question that there are some products that work better than others, and I’ll get to that in a minute.

When I was running my agency, I knew I wanted to help people do two things.

1. Increase their income while reducing workload
2. Increase their sales

While both of those might sound the same, what I found is that anyone can increase their sales but they’ll often find that their workload also increases as they make more sales.

So we want to increase sales AND increase income while reducing their workload.

The way I did it was through hiring people, selling products and creating content that I could sell.

And I knew that ALL of this required an audience.

So I created a Facebook group, wrote blog posts, filmed YouTube videos and slowly but surely built an audience of people with a problem I could solve.

Those two problems being:

1. They want to make more money
2. They want to work less

In my content I talked about those problems and how to solve them.

Hiring, creating products, affiliate income etc.

I talked about the problems of working too much and not having any downtime. I talked about the problem of low value clients and how you never seem to have any spare time.

I talked over and over about THEM and their problems.

And then I released one small course about selling digital products.

So now, I was making money at scale from the audience that I had built.

I knew it would sell because:

1. I used the exact same language, problems and headlines that I had used from my most popular blog posts/videos
2. I pre sold my course to early bird customers for a discount to basically fund the production of the course.

I used this same model to write books, create products, sell info products and courses, templates, and eventually software.

And recurring passive income is when things REALLY start to take off.

Finding software that charges a recurring monthly fee AND gives a % of each payment to me, the affiliate seller, was a game changer.

It meant that I could focus 100% on finding customers and selling, rather than worrying about delivery.

But I made sure that the products all solved similar problems that my audience had.

I do have some products that sell without any work, such as my books and courses.

But of course they required work upfront to create.

And now, all I do is focus on creating content to attract new audience. 

That audience is shown the products I have and the cycle continues.

Now, we’re on about $10,000 a month of totally passive income. 

I do however have to keep creating content and working with my team a little.

But in theory, if I took a year off, my income would only GROW (which is pretty amazing).

I’m not telling this to brag, but to explain just how long it takes.

With regular daily commitments to building the foundations, eventually the money side just kind of…took off without me.

And of course that passive income doesn’t include consulting fees, paid events etc.