Today we have a very special couple of guests who have been incredibly successful with online business and investing. It’s a pretty long poddy, so grab yourself some snacks, maybe some airline peanuts and a tiny beer, and enjoy.
Matt and Liz Raad are Website investors, Angel Investors and leading educators in digital marketing, website design and website monetisation. They are recognized as the Australian experts in Flipping Websites.”
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Introduction to Matt and Liz Raad
On board today we have two VIPs in the first class cabin. These entrepreneurs were able to light the afterburners on their own wealth engines through a number of successful business ventures. Coming from humble farming backgrounds, this couple actually met whilst studying at university and managed to spark each other’s fire for financial Independence.
Dropping out of university in pursuit of Financial Independence, they learnt the harsh realities of the business world when they unwittingly invested their entire life savings into a failing manufacturing business! Neither of them being one to admit defeat, through hard work, sheer will power and at times a 90% savings rate they were able to reinvest almost every dollar they made to turn the struggling business around into a profitable venture.
From this trial by FIRE, they educated themselves in due diligence and to prove it to themselves they even began buying and selling small businesses, scaling up as they went. Eventually, they found themselves in the corporate space of Mergers and Acquisitions for High Net Worth investors and business owners.
One day they discovered the power and leverage of online business and how they could use them to escape the corporate world – and began building and buying their very own websites. Fast forward 12 years later to today, they have built an incredible portfolio of online businesses and investments which is now generating a 7 figure passive income!
Being true entrepreneurs, they are absolutely hooked on the game and admit despite being Financially Independent that they will never ‘Retire Early’, and so continue to reinvest almost all of their earnings into a diversified portfolio of business, shares, gold and real estate.
They now live in South East Queensland where they are raising a family, giving back to the community as prominent Angel Investors, and are passionate about educating people on the power of investing and online businesses. When they aren’t buying or selling websites or analysing potential investments, they run training courses teaching people how to do exactly what they did – using online business to transition out of a conventional job and reach financial independence.
I’m absolutely stoked to introduce you all to Mat and Liz Raad
Episode 11: eBusiness with Matt and Liz Raad
Show Notes
- Check out my Review of Making Money online
“The key to success and what we understood right from the beginning is when you look for a website to buy, you’re buying something that’s answering a question or solving a problem. And that’s the key to making money online, answer questions and solve problems.”
Matt and Liz Raad
Matt and Liz Raad’s Top financial tips
- Diversify – Whether it is your income sources or your investments, you need to diversify. Create multiple sources of income, and have a broadly diversified portfolio across a range of assets, and a range of sectors within those assets.
- Get Educated – Learn everything you can before making an investment – especially so in business and websites
- Growth mindset – You need to adopt a growth mindset and known your true worth.
- Start small – Make a small investment initially, and then scale that up as you gain experience
Matt and Liz Raad’s top Books and influences
- What they don’t teach you at Harvard business school
- Louise hay – you can heal your life.
- Unlimited power by Tony Robbins.
- Awaken the giant within by Tony Robbins.
- Zig Ziglar
- Tommy Hopkins
Transcript
Captain FI 0:07
Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. Welcome aboard Captain FI the Financial Independence Podcast.
Good day, welcome to an episode of Captain FI, the Financial Independence Podcast where I open the copy to some of the best and brightest in personal finance, as well as those who have reached or are on their way to financial independence. Before we get started today, remember anything on the show is provided for general information only, and should not be taken as constituting a professional advice, you should always do your own research when making any financial decision. O
n board today, we have two VIPs in the first class cabin, now these entrepreneurs were able to light the afterburners on their own wealth engines through a number of successful business ventures. Coming from humble farming backgrounds This couple actually met while studying at university to become kangaroo experts, but managed to spark each other’s fire for financial independence. So much so that they actually dropped out of university together to pursue their dreams of being business owners.
Now when they did, they learnt the harsh realities of the business world, they unwittingly invested their entire life savings into a failing manufacturing business. Now, neither of them being one to admit defeat through incredible amounts of work, sheer willpower, and at times a 90% savings rate, they were able to reinvest almost every dollar they made to turn the struggling business around into a profitable venture. From this initial trial by fire, they educated themselves in due diligence. And to prove it to themselves. They even begin buying and selling small businesses scaling up as they went each time. Eventually, this led them into the corporate space of mergers and acquisitions, where they worked for big companies high net worth individuals and business owners.
One day they discovered the power and leverage of online businesses, and how they could use them to escape the corporate world. So they began building and buying their very own websites. Fast forward 12 years later to today, they have built themselves an incredible portfolio of online businesses and investments, which is now generating them a staggering seven figure passive income. Now being true entrepreneurs, they are absolutely hooked on the game. And they admitted despite becoming financially independent, they will probably never retire early. So they continue to reinvest almost all of their earnings into a diversified portfolio of business shares, gold and real estate.
They now live in sunny southeast Queensland, whether raising their family, but also giving back to the community as prominent angel investors. They’re also passionate about educating people on the power of investing and online businesses when they aren’t buying or selling websites, analyzing potential investments, or teaching their children how to do this. They even run training courses, teaching people how to do exactly what they did. I’m absolutely stoked to introduce to you all our guests today, which are Matt and Liz rod. Okay, so today we’ve got Liz and Matt coming to have a chat a little bit about online businesses. Liz and Matt, thank you very much for making time to come on the show.
Liz raad 4:30
Oh, thanks for having us.
Matt Raad 4:31
Our pleasure.
Captain FI 4:33
So first up, guys, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Liz raad 4:37
Okay. Oh, big question. So I’ve known actually, so we’re both from farming background, and we grew up in in the bush. And then we and we ended up being zoologists. So that’s a really interesting start to this interview.
Matt Raad 4:52
That’s where we met Yeah, starting to our zooology
Liz raad 4:54
and Who would have known back then that we would fast forward today. Making Several figures online and, and running a digital business and working from home angel investors. So my journey has been a really interesting one and the E Business Institute, how it was born out of our passion to help other people achieve that same journey. So throughout our lives very early on, we wanted to achieve financial independence. I think we’re going to talk about that.
Matt Raad 5:29
Yeah. Um, and we always wanted to come in from farms and growing up in rural areas, we always want that ability to work from home and freedom was a massive value for both Liz and I and when we met we, we we both realized up we share similar goals here but and also raising our family and stuff so it it’s a so that’s what we love helping people do and these days we do I get to help people transition from pa YG jobs over to working full time online. That’s basically what we’re all about at a Business Institute.
Captain FI 6:05
That’s awesome. So switching from I must say a pretty interesting career as zoologist to working now full time online. How did you guys start like what was the moment for you that you realize you needed to be on the path to financial independence?
Liz raad 6:24
Well, I think that has to start with Matt because Matt, Matt’s the powerhouse driver there or the initial powerhouse driver. Yeah, so
Matt Raad 6:32
it so we were destined to be leading experts in red kangaroos physiology of red kangaroos. And I had always had this dream ever since I was a kid of being able to make money out of thin air because I come from very poor family and we money was always a struggle when we’re when we were kids. So when I say we grew up on farms, my dad was a farm manager and anyone that comes from rural Australia you know, farmers that paid actually that much money and also in my family the other summer family immigrants is pretty tough. Like at the time back in the
Liz raad 7:10
you considered your classes and under underprivileged child
Matt Raad 7:13
Yeah, because I should I should mention one per my story that it my mom remarried her mom was was, you know, as a single mom family, and it was really tough for mom, when when I was a young kid, and at one stage in my life, my mum jokes about it now, I was considered an underprivileged child. So I think that really impacted me around wealth. And it’s funny, I was the only one in my family. I did have an unusual obsession with becoming wealthy. And but I knew no one, you know, millionaires growing up, never met a millionaire in my life. All I knew is that I wanted to be wealthy and I was in my family quite unusual. And in my whole community,
Liz raad 7:51
I think that was the family joke was if anything was happening. Anyone bought anything or brought anything home? That was a how much is that?
Matt Raad 8:01
At school, I was trading toys left, right and center. Oh, man, I’d swap everything. And the famous story in our family is I swapped my granddad’s war medals for a toy truck and, and it sounds really bad. And to the rest of the family it was but my granddad I think secretly didn’t have a problem with it, because he didn’t like the war and didn’t. He was the one that handed them to me. And he knew what I was like, I swear, he knew that I was I, I think he saw my eyes lit up. And I realized that he’d got him man war medals is awesome. And I’ve got an awesome track I still got it was really
Captain FI 8:40
straightaway listening to that I’m reminiscing of my own childhood. Because I think we might have had similar similar interests and hobbies as a kid. I’m almost that person in the family now where I’m like, oh, what did you buy? How much was it? And so you know, I’m sort of being sometimes told to body out.
Matt Raad 9:00
Funny, you mentioned that that’s what happened to me when but when I was a young kid, so when I was, you know, under the age of five, or under the age of seven, my granddad was always telling me to butt out. You shouldn’t ask that. So I was programmed at a very young age, wealth is bad, rich people are bad. You shouldn’t ask that about money. And but I didn’t care. I just kept I was fascinated by it. And so I think when I went to uni, and doing zoology, we did well, we did honors and everything. And we I want I want a scholarship to do a PhD in this amazing research we’re doing but I actually handed back the money and gave away the scholarship and the PhD because I realized we Liz and I both realize we weren’t ever going to make money out of that. Unfortunately,
Liz raad 9:50
we said Oh, that was the last thing was so from all that and from growing up on farms and from an in the bush and just having a real sense of freedom. That That’s something that runs through both our lives that, I think and for me that was the that was the defining moment was, I grew up with not a lot of money. We weren’t wealthy, but we weren’t, we weren’t as poor as you were, we weren’t in sort of financial straits, like, perhaps Mets family was. But I did learn that you can have an amazing life with lots of love and fun and adventures without actually having a lot of money. So even still, like when I was a little girl, I remember thinking people who lived in brick houses must be really rich. And that was my idea of wealth back then. But if you had a brick house, you know you’d made it. So even though that we got to that point in our lives, where we thought, Okay, well, we want the security of, of having enough wealth to be able to do our own thing to have the adventures we want to have in life. And mainly to have that sense of freedom to work when we want and not when we don’t want to, to not be stuck to definite hours, neither of us had ever I think I’ve had, you’ve had no, really, you’ve never had a real job, I had a real job for about a year. And both of us were in that sort of, okay, know, this isn’t working, we need to do our own thing and have control of our own destiny, which is why when we finished uni, we just sort of went okay, we need to do something different. And we with our little little amount of savings that we had, and some I had a little bit of money or an inheritance not much, but enough that we got into our our first business. And we could see that that was a way that we could control our own destiny. And we fell in, you know, young and keen and excited and thought,
Captain FI 11:46
yep, we can do this. What kind of business Did you branch into? And what like, how did you take the plunge because it’s, that’s not something a lot of people do.
Matt Raad 11:55
That’s actually really good, fun, but scary. At the same time, we bought a small manufacturing business, and we knew nothing. And literally, certainly self taught. We had to learn stuff from books, and we had no money literally, every last cent we had went into that business, and we just kept feeding the money back into it. But it was funny it was it was tough at first, and manufacturing businesses really, really tricky. We’re making spare parts for the outdoor power equipment, industry. And what we I think it’s shaped us for the rest of our entrepreneurial career in that will give them the wrong advice. When we bought this business. An accountant said, Yep, it looks good and everything, but it wasn’t it was nearly bankrupt. And we just had no idea not even accountant could tell. And to this day, I think that’s influenced us where as you know, we’re really passionate about teaching people how to do proper due diligence, no matter what sort of business it is. And I think that’s one of the big things that’s really focused in on that. So what we did, we were hooked from within the first 24 hours of owning that business. It was like the first time ever got on a fast motorbike within another. Yes. And it was exactly like that. And seriously, it was and leaves you with exactly the same, the two of us just went straight at it. And we had to turn it around, because otherwise we would have gone bankrupt. And basically, we just figured out Luckily, we figured out Ah, let’s just get more sales. That’ll do us. So we just read every single book we could possibly find I remember my first book was that, what they don’t teach you at Harvard Business School, I think it was 60 cents at the local vinnies. And that just kind of like I’m doing everything that’s in that book. And we just did it. And then we started learning for the great time, like Zig Ziglar, and Tom Hopkins, and Brian Tracy, all those sorts of things. And we literally turned that business around to the point where we’re exporting overseas. And we outsourced everything. So we we we didn’t own the manufacturing plant, or I think we just outsource to it. And so we were exporting and we started selling through the corporates, companies like still Honda Makita. And it was a real buzz. But it was it was a journey. But what it did to we even back then it’s very similar to what we do with online businesses. It freed up our time, and we got good at it. And the business was automated, so and it was also seasonal. So we only work six months of the year. So basically, we started buying and selling other businesses, and we got really good at it. And then from there, we moved into professionally, what I suddenly realized, Hey, this is now where I can start MCs we just always specialized in import wholesale businesses or manufacturing businesses. And we started hanging out with other business owners who are really successful. And this is where our lives had to change. Because we got to hang out with some very successful entrepreneurs, guys who had made millions out of their business and for the first time in our lives, we started to know millionaires, and it was just through because we’re in that space and we started helping them buy and sell businesses and we got involved mergers and acquisitions. And I guess we just worked their way up to the point where we were helping high net worths buy and sell businesses. And we’re doing deals anywhere, you know, up to $20 million, which is a whole nother story in itself. It was really cool. And we’re very driven now. And I think the thing that drove us was what? The same thing as when we’re a kid, how much is that worth? What’s that worth? What are the and it just fascinated us? What a business is really worth? What are the best business models out there?
Liz raad 15:31
What gives us the most leverage? So throughout our journey, I think one of the different things, and it seems like one of the traps of being in pa YG is that you get caught on that regular paycheck. It’s like these golden handcuffs, that seems we work with lots of people now who are in pa YG, and really wanting to get move over into entrepreneurship or business and online space. And I think it was it’s, it’s really interesting looking at that mindset. And we always, always looking for value, what assets where we can buy something and add value. So very similar, like you obviously, if you’ve ever invested in property, that’s what you you want to do. You want to find a asset that’s undervalued that you can renovate, add value to get better, returns paid off faster, and then own this asset that’s increased in value. We just applied that same thinking to business and we apply that same thinking to online business and digital assets. We’re looking for the ways to leverage up our money. So it’s, for us, it’s not ever been about just saving money and putting it away in the bank. It’s always been about Okay, how can we use that money best to grow this as quickly as possible? And for us, it’s always been cashflow. We’ve always been in that cash flow businesses. We’re always looking for ways to leverage, how can we make more but work less and have less time involved. And so when we discovered digital business, we just like when the internet came along, we’re just going on man.
Matt Raad 17:11
I’ve never seen anything as good as digital business, online businesses that just ticked every single box, and all that high net worth guys that we used to work with stuff that that then come to us for advice on these things.
Liz raad 17:25
Okay, how do you do this? How
Matt Raad 17:25
do you do this? It is just so cool.
Captain FI 17:29
Well, that’s that’s actually how we got in, in touch with each other, wasn’t it? So I, I had a friend, colleague, and we, you know, very close friend of mine, who actually started learning about online businesses. And he, he roped me into the the cult, which I thought it was at the time, and I thought I humored him, and I thought I’ll give it a go. And we created our first website together, which was about aviation. As you can imagine, I’ve worked in the aviation industry, so I was more than happy to give that a go. Yeah, and that was really fun. I got to learn all about writing and online businesses. And then I thought, Hey, I’m gonna, I’m gonna give this a go on the Captain FI blog about finance, and I’m going to start talking about investing. And I think for me, I actually started the the Captain FI blog, more of a way that I could learn more about investing. And for people that have followed me, they can see how my investing strategy has kind of evolved. And I’ve also been sort of documenting my experience with online businesses. Since getting in touch with you guys, I have started a number of other websites. And I am totally hooked. I think I ran some numbers. And over the last 12 months, the revenue, sorry, not just the revenue, the profit that I’ve paid myself, from my online businesses in one year, it now exceeds what I earned from nearly seven years of investing into stocks and dividend funds. So
Liz raad 19:23
yeah,
Matt Raad 19:25
and we said a lot amongst our clients that people don’t realize the phenomenal returns that you can get. And of course to listen, I this is normally what we do all the time, and our businesses, but the returns and the leverage that like you said, you know, in your returns have bigger in the last four months and in the last seven years, just getting out and giving it a go. That was the big thing as well.
Captain FI 19:50
So what was the point where you guys got into digital business, I know you kind of talked about how you work your way up. into mergers and acquisitions. But what was the Can I ask what were the first couple of sites you worked on? or What was your first experience in a digital business? Like?
Liz raad 20:12
Well, actually good question. So it was brought on by the thing every couple goes through at some point, I think most, we had kids. And so there was a real driver, again to m&a was great. It was fun. It was, you know, but it’s high pressure. And it was a lot of work. So there was a lot going on. And, and at that time, in our lives, we were sort of doing a bit of a rethinking, we said, okay, what do we want in this next phase of our life. And so
Matt Raad 20:42
also, we, we’d always been looking for that perfect business model. And we started to see the internet taking off.
Liz raad 20:48
And so we we actually started looking around and investigating this because we thought, okay, that’s the other thing, I think a really big key to success is being open to new stuff that’s coming and investigating it with open mind, and looking for the, you know, the value and the real opportunities that exist in a particular market. And so we were starting to look into that now back then that was, what, 12 years ago or more, no more. And it was, it was pretty tricky back then, in that it was, it was a lot of coding, if you wanted to build websites, you had to know HTML, you had to use programs like Dreamweaver, it was it was still new, it was still pretty new. And it kind of put us off. And I think I understand. So I know a lot of people kind of go into this digital start investigating this digital world. And they just think, Oh, this is too hard. This is too complicated. It’s a whole new vocabulary. It’s a lot of stuff there. And so I do understand why some people shy away, but it is such a shame that they do. Because if you bother to just take it a step at a time, and get in there and learn it. It’ll pay you back a million times over. And so it actually took us I think, was it about two years before we really got serious, like we would dabbling on the edges instead of going. Yeah. And but then finally, I said, right, that’s it, I’m gonna do this. And we got we built our first website. It was funny because it, we launched it. And I remember we launched it, and I was like, yeah, we’re gonna make so much money. And I put when, and it was like, zero sales and zero money. Oh,
Matt Raad 22:34
and one big thing I should mention, just in case you’re listening, everyone thinks internet businesses or like e commerce selling physical products and stuff. Because of our background in manufacturing and wholesale import businesses. We never, ever, ever want to know a physical product ever again. So we do know ecommerce.
Liz raad 22:52
So this was information information, selling information. This is first website advertising, oh, advertising it. And yes, zero sales, zero money. And I like Oh, no. So but luckily, I spoke to someone at the time. And I was saying to them that this is not working. Is this all like is this not real kind of thing? And I said, No, no, just keep going. You need to keep going. So I did. So I went back in on tweaking things. And I just fixed a few things. And I, you know, applying the things I was learning, and that next month, we did $1,000. And I was like, Well, yes, sweets works. This works. And I’m always got that chick, I still have that chick that. I like, yes. Okay, we’re on. And, and after going through the process of building it all and putting it all together, me being the impatient one. I said, Matt, can we say what? Can we just buy these? Do I have to do that again? Can we just buy this like we did before. And so we started looking around, and this was even pre flipper. And it was on site point. And you know that we bought websites on eBay. Actually, I think the first website we bought first
Matt Raad 24:02
was on eBay, we bought a really good website, I do not recommend it. But back then there was no other marketplace. It was just the site, computer, people called sitepoint, which is still around today. And then there was like a forum and people would just say, hey, I’ve got a website, but also on eBay. And we did actually buy a really that one was making us
Liz raad 24:26
I was right by months. Yeah, straight up. And then we did a quick rental on that. That was the one we double pretty much in a month. Because it just it was just simple stuff. And what what we were doing was just applying that same strategy that we’d used in business and that you would apply to property and also shares, looking for undervalued assets, looking for the easy wins, things that we could do quite quickly to these websites to increase their profits or their traffic. And, and from that, I just went from there. We just we don’t have to. We’re just getting met. This is fantastic ram when you’re buying when you’re paying off an asset within months, the cash flows coming out of them phenomenal. And so
Matt Raad 25:09
and we’re and we’re good at it because of our experience in buying and selling bricks and mortar. There’s literally the same process. Well, going in with a store, we have a strategy when you exactly what what once we sorted it out, we knew exactly what we’re doing. And we use exactly the same strategy today. Yeah. And so that’s
Liz raad 25:25
one thing, I think, what we don’t do is I noticed a lot in this industry. And I think this, what maybe puts a lot of people off is, is so many of these kind of fly by night strategies of how you can make $10 million on Facebook in five minutes, and this and that, and they’re all these kind of gaming, the system style strategies where they’re supposedly like, they’re just Fast Money, and then they’re gone within five minutes. And that was never our, our, our goal at all, we wanted to build long term sustainable assets and income. And so we always applied a much more standard business strategy to the online world. And I think that’s what worked best for us.
Captain FI 26:09
Yeah, and I totally agree with that as well. I recently looked at the average times that I’d spent, and I think it was close, it was over 1000 hours, over the last 12 months that I’ve spent on online business and websites, that’s creating these five websites. So it’s not Yeah, it’s not like easy money, five minutes, and you’ve made your 10 million, it’s, you know, you’re consistently putting in a couple of hours a day, or at least for me, I was consistently putting in a few hours a day for a whole year. And it’s only really been in the last sort of, you know, six, three to six months that I’ve seen a huge uptick across the entire portfolio. So yeah,
Liz raad 26:56
yeah, you’ve hit the curve hit the
Matt Raad 26:59
time. And, and as you know, what, what one of the things we teach too, is you’ve got to, you’ve got to understand anyone listening is, as you found, it takes longer at the beginning. And studies have shown it takes seven times as long to learn something when you’re first learning to do something when you’re first learning it. And we see that across the board with our students, and we teach the due diligence process. And even today, like for me, for instance, when I do due diligence on a website, particularly to bigger one, I spend a good couple of hours, maybe even longer, so I’m an expert in it. But of course, when you’re learning, if it’s seven times as long, there goes your day, basically, and we all right, but it’s the highest paid skill you will ever learn hardly anyone knows how to do due diligence, let alone on a website. And that’s in life, what we’ve learned is, the more rare or valuable your skill is, the more money you’re going to make. And doing due diligence is a hugely valuable skill in this day and age, or understanding how websites work is a hugely valuable skill in this day and age. So just take a bit longer to learn it. But once you’ve learnt it, then you can get really good leverage and it shows for life, but yours for life, that’s an asset that you can be adding value to these websites. And you can create money wherever you want, whenever you want. And that’s what we love about it. So it’s allowed us to live literally, we’re like we’re in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales when we had our kids. And I was beautiful way we lived on the bush and everything like that. But it was so cold when we were outdoors people. And we’re just gonna look at each other game. And this is crazy. What the hell are we doing living here in this cold environment? When we want to be outside? Let’s just move to Queensland. So within four weeks, we’d packed up sold everything, and we moved to Queensland. And so I think it shocked the family a bit. But um, well, that’s the beauty of an online business. It’s the ultimate form of freedom for us, once you get over that learning phase.
Captain FI 28:50
It’s it’s phenomenal. That’s very inspiring. I love the fact that you just picked up and moved to Melbourne warmer climate, um, that that really appealed to me. So I guess, being talking about financial independence, and you know, the financial independence, retire early, it really resonates. And I’m sure anyone who’s listening to this, because they’re interested in fire is going to be pretty impressed with that. So I like the fact that I can literally turn the dial on or off. If I want to spend a couple hours or a whole day writing, working networking. You can if you want to dial that back, you can do nothing for weeks at a time. And it doesn’t seem to really impact or at least I haven’t seen it impact the profitability of the business.
Matt Raad 29:40
Yeah. And well, it’s really funny you mentioned that one of the numbers so I personally coached both ways and I personally coach people particularly high performing pa ye G’s who want to get out of the jobs. And it’s really interesting. I’ve got I take it for granted exactly what you said then which is it. I think normal people So this industry understand, I’ve got to keep remind him, Hey, you don’t have to work on these websites every single day, it’s not working nine to five, you don’t even have to turn up, you can literally Park these things for months at a time, they still make you money, or at the very least, they still just sitting, they just sit there, it’s not like you have to turn up each day and tweak them will do anything. And so once you get them going, and especially if you’re buying the right kind of site, so there’s sort of sites we talk about. And we own a ones exactly like that, where you do a what we call a rainbow on them or renovation, do a bit of work, and then you leave them for six months, and you come back again. Now when you’re building them up, initially, you go do a bit of work on them, and you might work on them every couple of days, but people seem to I’ve got to keep reminding people, relax, you can park it, if life gets in the way, just come back to it in a few weeks time does not go anywhere.
Liz raad 30:49
Well, the other wonderful thing too, is that you’ve got your outsourced team. So you have now access to amazing people around the world who also work from home, who are jumped at the chance to be part of your team who can whether that’s writing content, or you’re maintaining the websites. And that’s a question that a lot of people ask us, you know, what’s, what’s the ongoing maintenance here. And because of the particular type of websites that we choose to buy, it is relatively little It is about just content about maintenance and making sure the website secure. And that’s really pretty much it.
Captain FI 31:30
When did you guys decide, you know, to start sharing this message and helping others. So I know you guys have a training business, educational service you provide? When did you get started? What’s it all about? And what can people learn from you?
Liz raad 31:50
And we actually had some friends and mentors say to us? Yeah.
Matt Raad 31:56
Or like anyone that was doing this sort of stuff back in its day, you should
Liz raad 32:00
be teaching this. And at the time, it’s funny because Matt is an absolute introvert in terms of presenting not that you would know it now. But um, yeah, I had to retrain myself.
Matt Raad 32:14
About mindset witness, man.
Liz raad 32:15
But that’s one of that’s one of the things that we like to do. We like to challenge ourselves. And we like to try new things and, you know, take on things in life. And that was what we did 10 years ago. Yeah. And so
Matt Raad 32:32
because we got success quite quickly with this. And initially,
Liz raad 32:35
we weren’t teaching this, we were teaching actually how to buy offline businesses. Because that was our regional expertise. We
Matt Raad 32:43
kept getting asked by friends and by high net worths, who are advising How do you apply these websites? Because that’s what we’re really doing in the background. We’re very open about it. We say, well, we don’t find so bricks and mortar business anymore, if you would, what would you do that I’m very young, on anti buying bricks and mortar businesses these days. So we’ve just started talking about how we buy and sell online businesses, it takes easier it’s leveraged. And all the benefits, amazing benefits of being able to work 24 seven that passive. And so people just naturally started asking us more and more questions. And then we thought, all right, well, here’s the next challenge in life let’s and we love we’ve always loved helping people. And also because when you think about when we’re mergers and acquisitions, that’s what we’re doing. We’re advising high net worth, how to buy and sell businesses. And so now we just get to do it with everyone. And I guess it’s evolved over the years from doing that we’ve got an amazing community of people. And we realize there’s a massive need out there for people who are wanting to work from home, because that’s always been one of our big drivers or like, like yourself, that the fire movement have that financial independence. So there’s kind of two groups that we look after. And, and we also know there’s a lot of burnout. Now, there are people that just really want to quit their jobs.
Liz raad 34:05
So yeah, we have a lot of students who are corporate who have just got to a point where they’re just over it, and they just want to do something different. And they want to set themselves up for the future. And, and that’s something that is incredibly rewarding for us. We know when we celebrate wins with people, and when people you know, email us and say quit my job. Yay. And that is such that’s such an awesome feeling. And then people getting that financial independence and yet beyond just surviving but really thriving, where you
Matt Raad 34:37
met a bunch of them at our three day workshop, didn’t you?
Captain FI 34:40
Yes, that’s right. I did. I had a great time lurking in the comments.
Matt Raad 34:46
And thank you for contributing so many amusing anecdotes. It was good fun seeing your comments to come through.
Captain FI 34:53
Yeah, no, actually I picked up a lot of really great tips and tricks as well. And I think doing that, during that conference, I think it motivated me as well to put a bit more time into it. It’s great. What’s the saying? It’s not as hard as everyone thinks. Just cawood
Liz raad 35:17
I think that’s the other reason we we do this is because I believe we’re good. We’re good teachers. So we break down very complex things into very simple steps. And, and that’s, that’s a challenge, like it is hard to, like it’s a skill to be able to take someone who’s an absolute beginner who knows nothing online. I think you saw some of the people there who started out seriously really not knowing how email is really working or and then they’re going through to six figure incomes online. I think that’s just awesome. I we’re really proud of ourselves for that, for being for creating a system that step by step that gets people no matter where they’re at fruited, that level of achievement. So that’s something that’s incredibly fulfilling for us
Captain FI 36:06
now to you guys are like the the Barefoot investor of online businesses. Yeah,
Matt Raad 36:14
I’ll take that as a compliment.
Unknown Speaker 36:15
Thank you for Square
Liz raad 36:16
One True to wherever you want to get to. That’s, that’s the other thing. And I think it’s really important that you do that step by step. And
Matt Raad 36:23
start out small, that’s what we’re all about, we get everyone starting out really small, no risk, you know, just just learn how to build basic sites, how the internet space works, if you buy some really small sites get a feel for this. So there’s zero risk. And that’s how we did in our own business as entrepreneurs. We’ve been in business now for 25 years, and we’ve worked together 24, seven. I mean, we literally, you know, work together 24, seven on all our businesses. But I think one of the big things for us, we’ve always started out small baby steps, first learn it, and then gradually, just keep stepping on accelerator. And that’s our teaching process as well, when we get people online, especially beginners. And, you know, we, we absolutely love it. And we and one of our big core values, too, is to inspire people to change their lives, because we’ve been fortunate enough to be able to change our lives. But our thing we love doing is inspiring people to make those big positive changes and changes in their lives. Now,
Captain FI 37:25
it’s funny you, you mentioned that, like, I Oh, happily throw, you know, $10,000 onto a parcel of index funds. But I am terrified, absolutely terrified. Matt, about buying a $500 site on flipper. Way, I am really trying to overcome my mental limitation here. And I know that’s part of the process. So I’ve just been building sites from scratch. But yeah, my net, the next step for me is to is to buy one and I know I have to listen to your advice and just do it. Otherwise, I’ll never learn how to do the due diligence.
Liz raad 38:04
Yeah, and that’s, and that’s a really good price. And you’ve done it really well, like you start, that’s the other cool thing about this markets, not like if you get into a traditional business, if you buy a traditional business or you buy a property, you’re looking at half a million dollar spend. Whereas here, you can pretty much pay per trade, you can build a website of your own, build it up, get it making money, understand the process before you go and invest the money into the marketplace and actually buy a website. And so I think that’s really powerful that you’re able to do that. start from square, start small, invest more and grow. And yeah, you’re right. It is a mindset thing, a lot of mindset that
Matt Raad 38:47
we end up coaching people on these days, that’s that’s a really interesting insight.
Captain FI 38:53
So for someone who’s, you know, never owned, or built a digital business or website before, and might be feeling a little bit daunted about the whole process. I mean, what’s some advice? How could you How could you help someone’s mindset?
Liz raad 39:09
I think the main thing is, is to not small start small so that you build that foundation and build that confidence. And then that allows you to grow it’s like anything, you know, when if you when you learn how to fly, you don’t just jump in a plane the first time and it’s be expected to take off fly and we land in five minutes. It’s about standing Okay, I’ve got some stuff, probably I need to know how this all works first, and then I can do little baby steps. Someone will be next to me the first time I do it, and they’ll help me they’ll guide me and then as I go, I’ll do a little step further a little step further. And then what it is about is increasing your comfort zone. So once you’ve done those little steps, you gradually get more and more current In that digital world, and I think that’s probably, like you said, I think the overwhelmingness is often because there is a whole there’s new words, there’s new lingo, there’s, there’s all these things that feel uncomfortable to start with. But once you get in there, if you make the effort, it’s like anything in life, if you make the effort, it’s it’ll reward you million times over.
Captain FI 40:23
I saw I recently discovered the term bootstrapping, you start small, and you build your business up incrementally. And that’s certainly resonates with how I’ve been been doing it. And I don’t know if it still is, but I’m actually a qualified flying instructor. So if, if Matt or yourself want to, you know, take skies? Well, I’m happy to coach you to become a pilot, if you can help me become better website.
Matt Raad 40:53
We’ll take up on that. And we can sit and chat about websites where we’re up. And yeah, that’s pretty good.
Captain FI 40:59
I shouldn’t say this, just in case my employers are listening. But I actually sometimes I sometimes take my iPad with me on when the autopilots doing my job for me, I can I can I can get stuck into some content creation online.
Unknown Speaker 41:19
That’s really cool.
Captain FI 41:20
So we’ve talked a lot about the upside of digital businesses, but I feel maybe we should also cover what do you think some of the risks of web sites
Matt Raad 41:31
are? Yeah, that’s an awesome question. And I, I, I was thinking about this in I’ve broken it down to three things, Liz added in one extra too. But I think the main risks, honestly, are what we see from what we’re doing when we’re buying and selling websites and and people getting into it is, seriously the main risk is what we did in our very first business is lack of knowledge, not knowing how to do due diligence, not knowing how websites work. So too many people hear how awesome this is, I might hear us talking about it or something. So those rush out there, and I go and buy a $5,000 website without never being online before, or not knowing how to do due diligence. So I think number one main risk is between our own ease, which is lack of knowledge. And then that then flows into the number two main risk that we see people make out there. And that’s greed, which is ignoring the white warning signs when because they don’t have like a knowledge or wanting to believe we say nothing, I believe the good word of the seller or just ignoring the warning signs, because there is little risks with websites, you’ve got to know what you’re doing. But once you know what you’re doing, they’re pretty easy to spot. So I think that’s when the second big risk comes in, people get a bit greedy, they’re desperate to earn money, and they see this website making $1,000. And it’s only being sold for five grand. And you know, it’s too good to be true type thing. So we need to be careful of that. And then the other big main risk, I would say that is out there is we see clients by wonderful websites, but they literally do nothing to or do or just inaction it like they learn all this stuff, but actually do nothing with it, for whatever reason, mindset reasons or whatever. It’s just inaction. So I guess you call it apathy or whatever. So I know I’m not talking about specific risks of websites, there is some technical risks to websites.
Liz raad 43:27
Yeah. So the main thing that I think is most important for people to understand is that so website, I guess, it’s like investing in any business. So we take a portfolio view of our websites. So when we buy websites, it’s most often in most cases, we’ve been able to double those incomes. And that’s always our intention. And that’s through like Matt just said, good knowledge, know, it like looking for websites with an opportunity to do something in there. So that we can have an effect on that website, there’s something we can do to improve it to renovate it, whether it’s adding more content, whether it’s tidying it up, whether it’s changing the monetization or something like that, we can see that there’s an opportunity there. So it’s like any asset, if you can buy it undervalued or with potential, it means that you de risk because your actions will increase the value. Now, sometimes, on occasion, you will, you will buy a website that doesn’t do what you expected. When they’re done. Yeah, we’ve done that. So we’ve had websites where they’ve just not really grown, like we’ve done all the things that we, you know, we thought we would do would make a difference. And for whatever reason, it just hasn’t. And so the markets change or something, but because we’ve got a portfolio of them and we divide our assets. So I know you’re big on talking about that about how you allocate funds. So it’s also been there being smart with your funds, you know, if you’ve got $10,000 to spend, don’t buy a $10,000 website, no $5,000 website or a two or $3,000 website, work on that one first, and then go on and and see this is the wonderful thing, if you buy this, we’ve got a student at the moment, actually, who’s just been talking about her website, she bought a website for three and a half thousand dollars in January this year, she’s added a whole lot of content to it. And so she’s got had articles written for her, she’s added a whole lot of content. And when she bought it, it was making $148 a month. And just last month in sorry, what were already in October this year, it made $2,000. So that’s profit. So within what, six, nine months, it’s gone from 150 bucks a month to $2,000 a month, what? Well, she’s gonna pay that back to herself. So that that money that three and a half thousand she originally spent plus probably about 1000 or something on articles, that’s now within the next couple of months that will be paid back to her. So her now risk in that deal is basically zero. And that’s always our goal is to pay that website off to ourselves back to ourselves as quickly as possible. And that’s how we we de risk by having a portfolio, but also by using the cash flow of that website to initially get back our investment. And then really, the thing is, from there. Okay, if that website at some point does tankful warn if something happens to it? It’s not stressful? Because we know we’ve got a whole portfolio of other websites. And on that one, yeah, we’ve got techies, we can get things fixed. If it’s if it’s if something’s happened to it, but it’s not stressful. And even if it didn’t drop to back to $150 a month well, sear, it owes me nothing. And $150 a month all for free is still
Captain FI 47:04
good money. Once you’ve basically gotten your investment back out that it’s essentially a cash cow that’s creating you free money. Yeah, exactly.
Matt Raad 47:15
Well, the other thing I like to point out here, too, is we’re big about assets, people don’t realize that websites are virtual real estate, if you I guess you could describe so that we view them as foreign assets, just like we view our shares, or our real estate, or a bricks and mortar business. And for that website, I’d say I’ve, I would value that at around 60,000 plus now. So that’s an asset that Lisa has, if she can sell off at any time. So
Liz raad 47:44
from a three and a half thousand dollar investment. So yeah, we’ve got the want. The thing here is we can pull these levers and very quickly increase value. And I’m at the moment in this digital markets place that is relatively easy. Like in an offline business, when we’re in traditional bricks and mortar, you know, that might take you 20 years to do that. And you know, you’ve got a overdraft and you’ve got stock, and you’ve got all these risks. And here we are with this little cash cow website, starting at three and a half thousand. And now we’ve got an asset worth 60,000 within 12 months. Yeah, that’s phenomenal to us,
Captain FI 48:23
for me personally, that the risk is pretty much zero. Yeah, doing it.
Matt Raad 48:29
Yep, yeah. So you can reduce your risk on that that’s a really good point, you can reduce your risk, not just on your money, but also when your time as well. So, so it can work really well. And of course, if you’ve got a little bit more money, you can invest in a team to get you to help you do these things. Or as like like you’re finding now as your site start to make good money, you do what I’ve always done, you just reinvest every last cent back into it, and
Captain FI 48:56
snowballs, then that’s a really interesting topic, because at the moment, and I’ve been speaking to you guys offline quite a bit, a bit about this. And I really appreciate your your coaching and mentoring is expanding my team and getting VA s and techies and people to help with the websites.
Liz raad 49:16
Yeah, well done. And then that’s your point of leverage to the leveraging this model. So we got a lot of automation, we choose our automation points, or we choose websites that are easy to run regardless. So they’re very automated, the monetization is very automated. The growth strategy is very automated. But then to go that one step further, you have a team, all you need really is the two main things you need is writers and a tech person to do any tech troubleshooting stuff. So it doesn’t The other thing too, you should not be doing all the tech stuff. And initially you need to understand it. But I think a lot of people are afraid of weight sort of frightened away from all this because you think oh gosh, I’m not a programmer, and I don’t understand all that tech stuff. Well, you don’t and you don’t need to be a programmer. I’m not. That’s not wizard religious. I’m not a tech guy. I’m not a programmer.
Matt Raad 50:11
And you hit the last students at that three day workshop, you know, making six figure incomes and they’ve got no idea
Liz raad 50:15
that, can I say, Matt has choice words with computers?
Captain FI 50:21
Yes. Okay. So look, I love I’m really interested talking about this kind of stuff. We could, we could obviously we’re, you know, vibing over websites, and we could we could chat all day, and I know you guys are busy people. So I still I want to ask you some more questions about finances. That’s okay. Yep. So, you know, whenever guests come on, people that have reached financial independence, I always like asking them, you know, those nosy questions that Matt and I used to love asking his kids and being told by so. So feel free to tell me to buddy at any point, but generally speaking, how do you guys manage your your finances these days, I would say
Matt Raad 51:05
for us, diversifies where diversifies but we always reinvest. So we, we’ve done well in life, we can do what we want, basically. But we still reinvest the majority of our income back into our businesses, like into our website, businesses, or into our share portfolios and into a little bit of real estate. So and we’re especially when we’re younger, before kids, we would literally reinvest that. And I sometimes felt like 90% of our money would go the businesses
Liz raad 51:36
in so saying, no, it’s interesting, Matt and I were just talking about this beforehand, we lived an awesome life, I never felt like I missed out. No, we had our bikes, we always had bikes, we always had an injury, we went off around Australia, we traveled we, we were always doing everything that we wanted to do. So I never felt like I missed out on anything. And I think there’s an energy around it as well, that that you can, you can save and feel like you’re missing out on life, or you can save and still have an awesome life. So I think we we do reinvest, but we also do spend,
Matt Raad 52:15
and we do and we do support a lot of charities, so we have same sort of it. I think this themes coming through that’s isn’t it, we have a portfolio of shares. We have a portfolio of charities here in Australia that we support. We support charities that look after kids disabled, and the environment. And so we’re pretty big in that. Yeah, mainly outside of that though, we’re we’re putting our money back into our own businesses. And we and we do this together, because listen, I work 24 seven, and we’ve always worked together, we’re constantly talking about it. And the really cool thing now is our kids growing up, and they’re learning to sew, we’re teaching them now how we invest into shares, and they love it. And they they’ve always known about the website thing. But all of a sudden, they think the shares are actually really cool. which is which is kind of interesting. And but they they hear us at dinner talking about how we how we’re managing our money and where we’re putting it and I’ll say to our like, Yes, I said to our kids, just went and bought some more, you know, Alibaba or whatever, or 10 cent or some more Google shares, and they think that’s really cool. And we’re kind of tracking it and looking at it or index funds and stuff. So um, yeah, we talked about it as a family now.
Captain FI 53:26
That’s, that’s fantastic that you can get them excited about financial independence at such a young age. That kind of leads into the next question, I was gonna ask, what kind of an investor are you? So it sounds like you, you have a really broad portfolio and you’ve almost got your fingers in a lot of pies. Absolutely. Yeah,
Matt Raad 53:49
always have done. So ever since a kid. I’ve always bought and sold lots of stuff. And in a look at our patterns. Now in life. Louise and I have always been portfolio buying and selling businesses, especially websites when a wide range of websites, we used to do physical property. But with these days, we’re not big fans of property, because they’re what we call heavy assets. We don’t work the entire 20 banks in any particular way. But we do a little bit of property. But these days, we would lean more towards using rates for property. And then we’ve got a big share portfolio that is very diversified amongst index funds. And in specific sectors, obviously, tech is huge for us. So that’s a big part of our portfolio, but also we love rates and some commodities and health related shares or index funds to balance out the portfolio. And then across our website, there’s a goal you got a bit of gold here, which is done well over the net for the last five or so years. But also with our websites. We do exactly the same thing. We invest in a range of websites in different niches with different monetization and we teach that
Captain FI 54:59
we also will really highly diversified not just across asset classes, but also within asset classes and within the monetization as well.
Unknown Speaker 55:10
Yeah, yeah.
Captain FI 55:11
Did you ever have a target number of passive income or a target portfolio size?
Liz raad 55:20
Don’t like when you say, Did you ever we still do we always revise it up.
We’ve hit you know, hit that target,
Matt Raad 55:29
I would say we’re a little bit different maybe to most people, I think you’re you’re going to be interviewing or that you may, because we always reinvest our money. So we’re entrepreneurs, and were, and we’re all about cash flow. So in terms of a specific number, it’s just that we snowball like Warren Buffett. So we’re heavily influenced by the teachings of Warren Buffett. And I know he doesn’t do on a massive wide diversification. He’s very big on compounding. And that’s what we’re all about. So in terms of hitting a specific number, once we made the specific number of our websites, we kind of hit that goal, that number becomes irrelevant to us. Now, it’s just about compounding what we have. And we do it because we love it. And it’s a it’s the system that we follow. So there’s no specific number these days, I would say, how would you answer that least I haven’t been asked.
Liz raad 56:18
And I guess what the specific number probably relates to the idea of people have a specific number, because that’s when they can quit their job. Or they can, you know, do like something that where they don’t work? Where is it?
Matt Raad 56:29
We’ve never worked at
Liz raad 56:30
this point. Yeah, we, we kind of feel like we don’t work, we do our thing. And we’re having fun. And, and so we don’t have a specific number in mind, what we’ll do is we’ll keep going until we decide, hey, this is this is fun. But we might have I mean, we intend on having a gap year at some point in the near future, where we just stop and we can bang around and do what we want for a while. And we’ll see where the where the world where the wind takes us. So that’s I think, so maybe we’re a little bit different. In that way, we’ve got to the point where we, we don’t have to be working, but we do still love it. So we’re gonna keep going. And until we have that point where we go, Okay, that’s enough.
Matt Raad 57:13
But we have always been very big goal setters. And, you know, I now I’m at that point in my life where I can. So I’m in my 50s, I can look back and go, this is cool. I’ve achieved 95% of the goals that I wrote down back when I was 18 or 20 years old.
Captain FI 57:29
Well Spoken like a Spoken like a true entrepreneur, that I’m actually really impressed that you’ve had those goals written down since you’re a teenager.
Matt Raad 57:40
Yep, yeah. And they’re all sitting in various success journals that I haven’t dated and everything and you’re very big on goal setting. That’s phenomenal. Well,
Captain FI 57:49
look, I normally ask my guests about questions like superannuation and salary sacrificing.
Matt Raad 57:57
Because I’m passionate about that very topic.
Captain FI 58:00
Well, I was almost thinking we would just skip this entirely because it doesn’t sound like that’s a part of your, your strategy at all. But hey, we’re here. Matt, what’s your attitude on Super?
Matt Raad 58:12
Right? Absolutely love it. I think too many people don’t realize the power of super because here in Australia that currently and I know the tax rules are changing all the time and are highly likely to change down the track. But you got to look at the now super in Australia is an awesome investment vehicle in my opinion. Again, I’m not giving financial advice. But if I was just chatting with friends I’ll be saying especially any self employed people because in the early days of our journey Listen, I had no money so we had no suit bar. So it’s only in the last you know 10 years that we’ve realized man super rocks because you don’t pay much and I go above and beyond I make extra payments interest super fun. Absolutely love it.
Captain FI 58:57
Wow, that’s interesting. I almost I was almost about to write super Off with you guys because I thought you would kill it it out. But that’s that’s really good tonight and absolutely agree with you. I am I salary sacrificed additional to my super early on?
Unknown Speaker 59:15
Well, for
Captain FI 59:16
at that point, I had really known about conventional brokerage or anything like a digital business or that kind of stuff. And I’m glad I did at the moment, my sort of plans have kind of shifted a little bit. What advice could you offer somebody who is looking to start their own business, digital or otherwise,
Liz raad 59:40
get into cash. You need knowledge, knowledge is the key to success. And in order to you want to invest smart and you want to go in with a strategy. So that’s the other thing. Stay focused, get a strategy and stay focused. And the most important thing is little steps matter, little actions matter and exactly what you were just saying before you so glad you did this did the salary sacrifice in the super, because it the fact the sooner you start time is your friend. And if you can have the time to learn and master a skill that can pay you back
Matt Raad 1:00:23
that compounds just like investing. So getting educated and then taking exactly like what you’ve done with your websites to Yeah, you said you know you’ve been investing time, a little bit of time and taking little steps. That’s perfect. That’s exactly what we would recommend for someone wanting to start out is just take some little steps, get educated, don’t take 30 years like we did stand on the shoulders of giants and learn off other people. And my biggest bit of advice for anyone wanting to get into business these days. And I’m really passionate about it because we have such a wide experience across all businesses. We’ve bought and sold so many plus scenes and personally been involved in so many deals is get online. It’s an absolute no brainer. I think if the last six months with Coronavirus, and what’s happening out there have shown us anything it is you have to be digitally digitally educated in this day and age going forward into the future. If you’re not digitally educated, you are going to be left behind unfortunately.
Liz raad 1:01:25
And the other thing is to own assets, you need to own assets. That’s what’s happening in the world right now. We’ve got this huge divide opening up between the people who own assets and the people who don’t. And if you can’t afford real estate, you can’t afford shares, or you know, you want to accelerate beyond shares, then digital online business is where we’re seeing huge growth right now. So I think that’s a very smart place to be owning assets, we’ve got so many graduates and students who have grown their basic their net worth 10 times in 12 months. And that’s that’s a, that’s a phenomenal kind of marketplace. So I think that’s our best advice. And no matter even if you’re a bit scared of it now, just even if you just take the first steps and keep your mind open to it, and absolutely
Captain FI 1:02:22
start that process words of wisdom from two very, very successful business people early on. I think, Matt, you mentioned, you went through a pretty interesting period of self development and learning and you grabbed all of the mind. I’m so impressed that you grab books from the knees. If you could, you could potentially list your favorite three or your top, what would they be? cheap. But that’s a cruel question. Because
Unknown Speaker 1:02:56
you said
Matt Raad 1:02:59
so how do i do the top three, the top one, and it’s cliched is how to win friends and influence people because I was incredibly shy, but also that so that helped us with sales and getting out there and talking to people and and I know that it is also Warren Buffett’s favorite book who’s also an introvert. So for me personally, that was probably my all time I read it, reread it once a year, and you can just jump online read a summary of it even but that’s how to win friends and influence people by Dale Carnegie. That’d be number one. Number two, I would say for me that changed my life on my journey, both personal development and mindset wise, would be Louise Hay, you can heal your life. So highly recommend it’s really good about affirmations in mindset.
Liz raad 1:03:48
Because one thing we have noticed, interestingly, because we’ve coached so many people is that knowledge is one it’s very, very important. But the other side of the coin, the other element that you need is a growth mindset and the ability to value yourself. And what we’ve seen is huge turnaround. As soon as someone starts to realize their own value, and ask for what they’re really worth. Suddenly their wealth grows exponentially. And so that mindset is really really important.
Matt Raad 1:04:26
And then I’d say the third one it not so much now for me see depends where you’re at in your journey journey but I would suggest anything by Tony Robbins the books by Tony Robbins are a big influence for Louise and I when we’re starting our journey so I think Ferriss or Tim Ferriss four hour workweek but unlimited power or awaken the giant within another classics by Tony Robbins, but they’re really good mindset wise. And actually really interestingly, he’s new book about our newest book about money, he’s really hot. I often recommend that to clients who are starting out and want to learn about money. Rome’s a good guy wrote some good stuff I know he’s full on and everything, but they’re probably some big influence. And of course the classic Rich Dad Poor Dad.
Unknown Speaker 1:05:08
But by going
Liz raad 1:05:09
over, do I. And I gotta say not a book, but a teacher, Zig Ziglar. Tommy? Yeah.
They were our influences as well.
Captain FI 1:05:23
Oh, fantastic. Well, you snuck in a few bonus ones. That’s great. I know you got so much knowledge to pass on. And I love listening. When I go on my road trips, or increasingly now, I bought some bluetooth headphones, which I can put actually underneath my headset in the aircraft. And I’ll often listen to Ziegler’s tapes, some of these insurance sales tapes, I just find them interesting.
Matt Raad 1:05:50
And they have such a lovely guy so positive, and it really makes you feel good. And he’s, you know, he’s a, he’s a really nice guy. So yeah, zixi goes a big influence for us.
Liz raad 1:06:01
I think one of the things we learn very early on, because I think it’s very tempting, when you very first start out, you think you have to be something else to become wealthy. You think you have to be like the business people, you see, you’re the you know, the people in the Financial Review, or the CEOs that you see. And one of the biggest learnings for Matt Nye was the realizations was, hey, we can do it our way. And we can have a bucket load of fun and a lot of laughs and still create a lot of wealth. Learn how to value is so important. Learn how to value assets, and also learn how to value yourself. Bingo, that’s awesome. That’s gonna make a massive difference.
Matt Raad 1:06:40
I think I’ll just reiterate one other key thing, if I could distill it down, and I said it in your previous question is seriously get online. If you want to change your life, or you’re looking for financial independence or freedom, I am yet to see anything like it so
Liz raad 1:06:54
and that vehicles and vehicles available to you to whistle right now,
Matt Raad 1:06:58
stop learning pretty easily. Like it just gets up digital educate. And of course, we’re biased. So that’s because as you’ve heard, that’s been our journey. And I know the results. Also,
Liz raad 1:07:08
I’d only like we’ve seen so many students who’ve done it now that we know what works. And, and it’s very, very inspirational, as you would know, to see all these people who’ve who’ve just changed their lives around.
Captain FI 1:07:22
So where can we find out more about the course the training? And where can people get in touch with you or follow you online? Yeah, well,
Liz raad 1:07:31
we’re on social media, of course, matt and liz Raad on Facebook. But if you go to a business institute.com.au You can learn more, you can read success stories and students stories, and get inspired. But I think you’re going to put a link to because we’ve got some really good training, if you if you’re interested in finding out about the basic seeing what’s needed. What do you need to know, in this marketplace? How does this all work? What sort of websites do we focus on, like, you know, we’ve been talking today about the principles or the the ideas about how we invest, if you want to know a bit more detail about that I think you’re gonna get you get your link, and there’ll be under here for free free training. So we go through all that our steps to the sorts of websites we buy, how we buy them, how we value them, how we do due diligence, all that stuff, and how we build those portfolios.
Captain FI 1:08:27
That’s incredibly generous of you to offer some some free content for the audience. So thank you appreciate that. If anyone wants to learn more about how I’ve personally gone about online businesses, of course, feel free to get in touch and chat to me. And of course, I’ll link in the show notes how you can get in touch with Liz and Matt, on their Facebook and through the business issue. So look, Liz, Matt, thank you so much for making time to speak to me today. It’s been an absolute pleasure to be able to interview you learn a little bit more about your journey, and of course share the really powerful message of online businesses and financial independence.
Liz raad 1:09:16
Awesome. Thanks so much for having us. Awesome.
Captain FI 1:09:19
Thanks for listening to another episode of the Captain FI Financial Independence Podcast. To read the transcripts, or check out the show notes, head over to www.Captainfi.com for all the details. If you have a question for the captain, make sure to get in touch. You might even make it on the airwaves. You can reach me online through the Captain FI contact form or get in touch through the socials. I’m active on Facebook and Instagram as well as a number of online finance and investing forums. And finally, remember the information presented on the show and the links provided. For general information purposes only, they should not be taken as constituting professional financial advice. You should always do your own research when making any financial decisions and make sure it’s appropriate for your personal circumstance.
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Captain FI is a Retired Pilot who lives in Adelaide, South Australia. He is passionate about Financial Independence and writes about Personal Finance and his journey to reach FI at 29, allowing him to retire at 30.
