It's the Financial Ozempic

One year ago, Chris Koerner got a few million views from a short form video about the dollars and cents behind a hole-in-one challenge business gimmick. He already had a few hundred thousand followers, but now he has millions, adding over 12,000 followers per day across his entire ecosystem. (Newsletter, Youtube, Instagram, Tik Tok, X and Youtube Shorts)

Chris built a social media following that inspires Americans who crave more than ever to escape from mundane spreadsheets and Zoom calls through entrepreneurship.

On yesterday’s episode of Diary of a CEO, host Steven Bartlett, the Joe Rogan of business media, asked Chris if passive income and passion should be the goal of all entrepreneurs. Chris’s response was that passive income is the silver bullet, but it is only achieved after sweaty, ugly, by any means necessary and boring income first.

Chris goes on to explain that passive income and careers you are passionate about only come to fruition after years of hard work in startups that feel like a daily fire drill. I could not agree more.

As as the CEO of an influencer marketing agency, I meet with founders on a daily basis. 99% of them only chase the dream of passive and recurring income. Most of them would never stoop so low as to sell something ONCE. Even my local car wash barely sells one time scrubbings. They push monthly memberships like a time share in Cabo, but it must have started a little grittier than touch screens and marketing emails.

When my media career kicked off by working with Car Dealership Guy, I was infatuated by the prices and margins we could get by directly selling media engagements, but the game was no different than selling anything else. The production was sometimes easy, but the operational side of the business could get complicated while ensuring we use the correct brand collateral, links, copy etc. I had to build a system and survive some headaches while doing it.

When I left CDG, I knew that I was walking away from something that is easy. Only working about a single publisher, and it would be hard to land that great of a publishing client day one. We now work with about 70 different influencers at Freddy Media, so I was forced to create the process to deliver multiple campaigns at once, correctly, across multiple channels. This is even harder because we generally do not sell Youtube preroll ads, we have to pitch ideas, the brands have to approve, then out pops something like this below:

The fact that we sell one-off engagements with social media creators, or longer term media contracts never disheartened me because I always felt lucky to catch good margins, and prices for something that I didn’t have to pay for inventory. This was crucial for a startup.

Although, my phone rings off the hook from influencers, brands, and employees. This is just a tradeoff. I sometimes find myself yearning to sell an intimate product or service that quietly scans through the checkout aisle without objections like, “Alex Hormozi would never do that”, or “tell the brand I’ll do it, but they have to let me use the F-word”. Alas, talent management is part of the fun.

My thesis has always been to build the sales, customer services, production and back end resources around modern media, especially the creators that speak to valuable audiences like entrepreneurs in the fashion of Chris Koerner. In traversing this profitable yet rocky terrain, I was able to find myself some passive income. I have built software that resides in car dealerships, I also have some dealerships using my payment processor and financial services etc, life is good.

Yet, I do have big dreams of selling and fulfilling every creators’ brand deals on my own platform like the one I built below:

However, I only built Freddy Media for two purposes. First, I wanted to prove to myself that I could be successful building a novel business at the beach, that my family could be proud of.

But, what my team will tell you is that when I get a chance to help write an edition of The PE Guy’s newsletter and some finance guy gives his stamp of approval on Linkedin, we get to make fun of Lane Kiffin, or produce a commercial for an auto auction with George Saliba, and Benzs and Bowties, that makes me feel better than any passive income that I could ever generate.

If you have made it this far, and you are not my mom or brother, I would encourage you to just get started building something. The passive income and fun will come later. If you struggle to find an idea, head over to Chris’s business library and just copy all the good ideas.

Hot off the press: Chris’s episode on Diary of a CEO is the best performing episode ever in the first 12 hours! Let me know if you would ever like him to promote your brand.

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