Membership subscription revenue is the holy grail of revenue models. Everyone wants to get revenue coming in consistently, month after month, on auto pilot.

You just set it and forget it right? Not so easy.

Whether you have a membership site or a software that’s sold as a service, you have this thing called churn. Your churn rate is the percentage of people that sign up and end up leaving rather than staying.

Churn is something you want to keep down. You want to have a very low church rate, which means that members or users stay for a very long time. How do you get people to stay for a long time?

To get people to stay, you have to deliver something of value and you have to deliver it consistently.

I’m going to tell you how to get paid by clients every single time, on time, with no delays.

First of all, you need to know you must always get paid before you do work. Take a payment and then you start working.

It’s common to break up your payments into two payments of 50%. Take payment #1 which is 50%, do the work, then you take payment #2, and then you give the deliverables.

That’s the important part—before you send over the deliverables, or whatever the completed version of the project is to your client, you take the second payment.

Yesterday we talked about the actual value of your time. If you missed it, be sure to check it out.

We talked about the actual value of your time, not the theoretical value. Today, I want to use that knowledge to talk about hiring your first employee.

What I see a lot of people getting wrong with their first hire is waiting until they can justify that hire. I did the same thing.

Right now, we have eight full-time people at seanwes, but with my first business, I only hired one person.

I thought of this person as someone who I had to justify bringing on when they were able to make enough money for me to pay their salary.

Instead, I should have seen employees as a way to free up my time.

What is the actual value of your time? I’m not talking about the theoretical value, I’m talking about the actual value.

What is the theoretical value? The theoretical value is how much you bill clients. Typically, people say, “I am worth $50 an hour,” and that $50 an hour figure is how much they’re able to charge clients, but working with clients isn’t the only thing you spend your day doing. You also have to do accounting, send emails, and do other work that’s not billable.

In actuality, your time is not worth $50 if you’re spending it doing things that are not making you $50.

I’m talking about $50 every single hour. Whatever that figure is—$20, $200, or $1,000 an hour—needs to be actual value that you can create within 60 minutes.

Entrepreneurship is always going to have you in a place where you feel uncertain and that’s just the truth. You’re going to feel uncertain as an entrepreneur.

Maybe right now you’re in a day job and you’re thinking about quitting, but you really don’t want to leave the security of the day job. Well, there’s no such thing as job security.

There’s no such thing as job security no matter where you work, no matter what company, no matter how secure it seems—not even if you work for yourself!

The thing about being an entrepreneur is you can actually see how unstable things are.

A lot of people want to become famous and a lot of people want to become known for something, so how do you become famous?

First, you have to pick the thing that you want to be known for. You have to pick something that you’re good at and then go all in on that thing. Give all of your energy to it.

Sometimes, you might need to start with just exploring. Don’t worry about being famous right now, worry about finding what you’re good at and enjoy the process of it.

There’s a lot of things that you might think you would like. You have ideas of passions or ideas of things you would like to become famous for but you might end up doing them and not actually enjoy it.

Give yourself permission to explore things and figure out what you like the act of doing.

The #1 email newsletter mistake I see people making is addressing their subscribers as a group.

You might be tempted to do this. It’s very natural for you to do it because you see the numbers of subscribers you have. Maybe you have 1,000 subscribers and you imagine 1,000 people, like you’re on a stage in front of all those people.

You address them by saying, “Hello, everyone!” because someone sitting down in a chair in the audience can see that they are in a group.

They look to their left and look to their right and there’s people all around them, so it’s natural for you to address them as a group, but you’re not on a stage.

You may have 10,000 subscribers but when you send a newsletter, it’s 1 person sending 1 email to 1 other person, 10,000 times.

It’s not you sending a message to 10,000 people.

You either hate popups or you love them. You love them if you’re a marketer but you hate them if you’re a user.

Why do marketers love popups? Because they get more people to sign up for their email list. It’s just a fact that when you use popups on your website, you will get more email subscribers.

That’s why, naturally, a lot of people put popups on their website, but as users, we hate them. They’re intrusive and annoying.

When you’re on your mobile device, you’re trying to zoom in and click the X on the popup, it’s moving around, and you can’t close it, it’s frustrating, it’s not respectful of your time, and it fights the Rule of Reciprocity.

Maybe you’re stuck right now. Maybe you said aside time to write in the morning and you’re looking at this blank page and the words just aren’t coming. You don’t know what to say.

You feel like you have writer’s block right now, but writer’s block is 100% preventable. I want to help you prevent that next time, but also get you out of feeling stuck right now.

How do you find motivation?

Motivation seems to be elusive. We can never find it, we can never harness it. Where does it come from? What do you find it when you really need it?

The people who are motivated know it doesn’t start with motivation, it always starts with doing.

The motivation is found in the doing. You have to do! So, how do you do when you don’t have motivation?

Motivation starts with a choice. It’s as simple as that. We all want to source our desire to do, make, or produce from motivation.

Motivation isn’t a source, it comes as a result of doing. If we look to motivation as our source for the doing, we’re never going to show up.