Creative Financial Freedom Strategy With Ann Sieg

Episode 461: Creative Financial Freedom Strategy With Ann Sieg

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Do you want to have financial freedom and claim back the 2,600 hours you spend working on day jobs yearly? Then this episode is for you! Ann Sieg, the Founder of E-Commerce Business School, discusses how you can attain financial freedom through an automated eCommerce business. Ann offers a coaching program you can join where she and her team will teach you everything you need to know about running your own e-commerce business.

The biggest factor that can launch you into success is to have a community of like-minded successful people. Another factor? Mental discipline. Are you willing to have the mental fortitude to learn new things and keep showing up when you have to put in the work? Listen to Mitch Stephen’s interview with Ann and discover how you can attain financial freedom with her practical advice on eCommerce!

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I have a guest that we’re having back for a second time, Ann Sieg. The reason why I liked talking to her is because the goal of this show is to help people become financially independent. My genre that I worked in to find my independence was creative real estate investing. I don’t care how anyone gets financially independent. I think it’s important that you need to find yourself, find where you belong, and get financially independent as soon as possible so that you can start to become the person that you’re supposed to be in this world. When you become financially independent, that means you don’t need a job. You can call your boss and tell him that you no longer need their services. That will gain you about 2,600 hours a year to devote to yourself and your family or whatever you’re supposed to be doing in your life.

It’s very important that people understand that that’s probably the first step to being who you’re supposed to be. You’ve got to free up that 2,600 hours a year. Some people are doing the math and they’re saying, “You don’t work 2,600 hours a year on an eight-hour day.” I say, “If you’re the kind of person who’s going to be financially independent, you don’t just do the hours at your job. You go past the hours at your job because you’re a responsible person. You take care of your crap and take pride in what you do.” If you have an eight-hour job and it takes ten hours, you just stay the extra ten hours. That’s why I say 2,600 hours because it’s going to take that kind of personality to get there.

Dave Ramsey does the primal scream when people get debt-free. At my office, we ring the bell when people tell their boss, “We don’t need you no more.” I don’t know why that turns me on but that turns me on because that’s what I can do to try to help people. I don’t care if you hire me as a coach. I don’t care if you hire Ann as a coach, although we’re putting people in your path to find out which one is for you. This is not about real estate. This is about eCommerce because real estate is not for everybody. I’ve often said to myself, “If I had to start over again at something and real estate was not what I was good at or was off the table for me at that point, I would go into some kind of eCommerce business. No doubt.” I found her story very interesting. I also had her on in 2020. A lot of people tuned in, appreciated the message, took up on her advice and were out there doing things. I wanted to bring her back. That was a long-winded intro. I’m excited. How are you doing now?

I’m doing awesome. It’s great to be here again. I’m excited because I’ve been in the real estate industry. My husband and I have done real estate investment. Our middle son became a leasing agent and our youngest son bought real estate so I get it. I’ve been in the real estate space. Where I found my sweet spot was in the online space. That pull away from the offline world is I have been building a business online for several years. My eldest son was my partner when I first got going, we were teaching people how to get online and attract customers to their business. That’s what I taught for several years then I shifted to eCommerce in 2013, which my son ran an eBay business when they were in junior high and high school. It was like, “Come on back, my old friend, eCommerce.” As we know, it’s been growing incredibly fast.

It was 2020, Mitch. I think it was the last week of March 2020 or so. We were two weeks out in the first-ever lockdown of the first-ever global pandemic. I don’t think any of us realized how much that was going to change things. Here’s what happened with eCommerce. I called it the lucky bucket. In fact, I defined it even further and called it the Amazon lucky bucket. What happened in those two remaining weeks of March 2020 initiated what would have taken five years to shift people’s buying habits and compressed it into three months. It all started with that catalyst of the shutdown. How many people ran rushing to Amazon to buy? Everyone was sheltering in. We were all freaked out. We thought it was going to be twenty million people that we all got, “We’re masking up and doing the whole quarantine thing.”

What’s happened is once you habituate to something and like it, you’re grooving on that thing. That is the whole shopping online including groceries. Groceries exploded. Do you remember the toilet paper, the run on that, all the mask memes? Everything was in sheer pandemonium, but we got through that. The main takeaway here is that eCommerce was already headed way up. That just made it super accelerate the shift of eCommerce. What that means is there are two people at the end of the cash register. One is the consumer. Statistically, 2/3 of American households are Amazon Prime. Mitch, are you an Amazon Prime buyer?

Absolutely. I watched her win some awards. She’s a very good Amazon Prime buyer. There was a box that comes to the house every day.

Financial Freedom: An automated eCommerce business is a business that sets you up for freedom by not sucking up eight hours of your week.

There you go. There was a husband. I do a monthly student success webinar tied in with what you just said. They were both on the call. Her name was Payola. He said, “Ann, I love your program. All my wife ever did with Amazon was spending our money. The boxes were coming in every day. Now, she’s making me money.” In her fourth month, she had hit $16,000 in sales. He was like, “This is more like it, Ann.” For all the husbands out there or whomever in your household, many of you are heavily addicted to Amazon, I’ve got a shopping list now for Amazon myself, you can sit on the other side of the till, it’s what I call, the cash register. You’re the one who’s going to be making money instead of the person who’s constantly buying from Amazon.

I want to make it clear. We have taught every sourcing method possible. We have taught Shopify. I want people to understand the reason I call Amazon the simplest business model is because they do all the traffic, marketing, and advertising. You don’t have to worry about one leak about your traffic. It’s already done for you and very magnificently at that. There is no other rapid buyer base than Amazon because of the Prime buyers, even outperforming Alibaba, which I know is huge. I track that. I have a son who lives in China. With Amazon, they brilliantly designed the Prime buyer, spoiling us a run.

I look at it this way. There’s this concept of the redistribution of wealth. I’m more interested in the redistribution of opportunity. You put in those number of hours because you’re putting the buffers on with the assumption that these are quality people who take pride in excellence. They’re hired by someone. They go in and do a good job. I’m glad you said that because that is exactly the personality type that is needed to succeed in business. While what I share with people may feel like a get-rich thing, it’s not. I tell people it takes work in order to build what can be an automated eCommerce business.

It’s not pie in the sky. You can make a lot of pie in the sky but you’re going to have to put in some hours and give it some time. You’ve got to hone your skill like anything else. If it was so easy that everyone could sit down and make $16,000 a month then everyone would be doing it. I appreciate your honesty, Ann.

I don’t want to BS people into something that they quickly give up on because they thought it was going to happen overnight. We have to be real with people, a real adult conversation that’s going to take work. I’d like to hone in on this concept of an automated eCommerce business. That ties into what you said about people being able to be set free via a business but not a business that’s sucking up 6 to 8 hours of your week. There are plenty of those out there. The majority of them, that’s how it shapes it out.

With this model, we design it from day one. When you come into our training platform, you are going to set up an automated eCommerce business. That’s the name of the game. It will take some work to set that up. It’s primarily due to setting up systems and then a team in place to run the systems for you. That’s what we start from the day so that they can have this and it becomes an automated cash machine. This too can apply to real estate investors, though because I’ve seen it with my members. The design of our system is to get an automated cash machine to whatever size and scope you want as you scale it. That scaling happens again primarily through a team and system and all being very profitable, by the way. The average is 32%.

Not everybody wants to make $1 million. It’s not about $1 million for a lot of people. Some people just need to make an extra $1,000 a month so they can make ends meet, get the kid through college, or whatever it is. They are not going to do it for the rest of their life. There are all different levels of people. I get excited when you start thinking about, “How do I make a couple hundred thousand dollars a year?” That’s where I would want that but not everybody is like that. The program can help you make an extra $2,000 or $3,000 a month or an extra $500 a month if you want to pursue it. Multiply yourself or get ingrained. The sky is the limit but it’s not just for people who want to be rich.

I’m so glad you clarified that. The vast majority of people, what they are buying into or want to buy into is, “Could I have where I can meet my family’s needs, a little more than that, we can enjoy a lifestyle through that, not be as stressed about the money, and feeling that financial pinch bearing down on me if I could lighten that load?” What they find out when they come into eCommerce is it not only meets that but there’s more potential beyond that. That then becomes whatever that person wants to do, the extent to grow their business. I also want to talk about it because I’ve been in real estate. What we’re talking about is a very fast return on your investment. The sales velocity is much faster in the eCommerce space. The turn rate, that’s what they call it in the stores, is how quickly does that product turn on the shelf?

In the eCommerce space, that all comes down to data. Whoever has the right data and knows how to properly interpret it are the people who can get the highest sales velocity with the highest profit margins. What I want to be clear on is you make that investment but it flips and returns on you very quickly such that someone can have that initial funds. I’ll give you a case in point. A PhD in Biochemistry ended up with a bad workplace. There were some very unethical things going on. She quit. She said, “That’s it. I’m tired of it. I’m not going to put my family’s livelihood at risk like this again. I’m going to strike out and make it on my own.” She tried a bunch of things and it didn’t work. She came into our program. She started with a $300 investment into products. That’s not much, is it? That’s a pittance.

If you want to start a business with $300, good luck.

Here’s what happened. With our training, oversight tools, and everything, she took that and it parlayed and grew into $171,000 with no extra capital. It’s just purely from that amount because the profit margins when you do this right are so big. It’s between 32%. That’s the average. If you do discounts added to your shopping when you’re doing your sourcing, you can get up to 50% profit and with a very fast turn rate of 50% of your products flipping in one month. We have a profit calculator. It comes with some training too. This is free. You can see it as an investor because you’ve got to do that with real estate, don’t you, Mitch? It’s all about the numbers.

Yes, you’ve got to have the numbers.

I tell people, “Same as in real estate, you make your money when you buy. Meaning, it’s all about how you size up the deal.” That’s the same with product flipping. It’s all about sizing up the deal and the metrics, going by what the numbers tell you, making that purchase but the goal here is velocity. That dollar you put in might flip 6 to 7 times a year.

At 32%?

Exactly. I got people who are chasing crypto. It’s going through its peak and this and that. This is the most reliable, dependable, and predictable method of flipping money fast, albeit it’s work through the machine that you set up. It’s a machine with a team to run it for you. That is what we do in terms of setting you up as a CEO from the get-go. We do it in a 90-day sprint with the oversight of getting that automation in place.

That’s encouraging that a person doesn’t have to have the fortune to get involved in the business. Let’s do this. You just don’t walk up with $300 and know what you need to know. There’s got to be some training. There’s got to be some expense there too. What can a person expect? What do they need to have so they can get the right training so they might have a chance to take $300 and make a real business?

We have our new mentorship. Are you talking about our exact training? Do you want the specifics about it? Our eCommerce Acceleration Program is designed for people. There’s a range. For folks who want a side hustle of $300 to $500 a month, we have different options so that they can meet that basic family need. This particular program that is setting you up as a CEO, for example, you’ll need some funds to hire a VA. We have the training for it. You’re going to need that. You’re going to need some software. Our actual mentorship, eCommerce Acceleration, we layered on our 90-Day Peak Performance mentoring. What that does is set you up with all the mentoring you need with a checklist to go through the program so that in 90 days, you have your entire automated eCommerce business set up for you.

The speed at which that happens for one person versus another person all comes down to discipline. We had a gal who did it in 30 days. She was working full-time as an insurance adjuster. Within her 30 days, she had products selling by day eleven. She had products selling every single day. After that missing three days, she had two VA’s hired and her system was set up in 30 days. That’s a rare exception. It’s a checklist. You go through the whole thing and upon completion, you’re going to have your system set up. You then have to go to the next step of optimizing and scaling it. That’s what you do in your first 90 days. Do you want me to share what the cost of the program is for them?

Financial Freedom: People can come together as a family and become an economic powerhouse through the industry of eCommerce; it’s so doable, so achievable, and the results are so fast.

Not because of any reasons. It’s just that sometimes costs change. Let’s do this. Let’s send everyone over to 1000Houses.com/Ecomm. You can break down where they can get the consult there. I know how sometimes things got to change. I don’t want this interview to be obsolete or misleading people. Over there, you’re going to give away an arbitrage profit calculator. If you’re someone out there and you don’t know what to do or where to go and you know you need to do something, this is worth taking a look at. I don’t know if it’s for you or not but look at it. If it is for you, you have the right trainer here. That’s probably one of the biggest pieces is making sure that you have the right person.

She’s been doing this for a long time. She’s a very sincere person. She’s out to help people. I don’t think she would take the money from anyone if she didn’t think she could help them because I’ve heard from her customers and people. Not everybody is a winner. I’m going to promise you that. There’s nothing in life where everybody is a winner. Go there and see what it’s about, 1000Houses.com/Ecomm.

You have all different kinds of levels, which I appreciate too because not everybody can buy the big kahuna and get all the bells and whistles down the road. They may not even be ready to. They may not even know and I’ve done this before. I got into things where I went ahead and bought the big thing but I wasn’t even mature enough in that business to even understand what they were talking about. I should have started a little slower. I’ve gotten intimidated and ultimately smashed by it because I didn’t take it in some smaller bites. I’m trying to be as honest as I can about the whole thing.

I want to make a key distinction since I’ve been an online trainer, mentor, coach for years. A very important distinction is the difference between training and mentorship and also having a community of like-minded people. I want to emphasize that because I’ve been in the digital marketing space for a long time and have seen a lot of things. What tends to be lacking for people as they are going into a new venture is the proper level of support that they need and deserve in order to fully execute on what they got themselves involved with. I was a sports coach for several years as well. I’m keen on the entire scope of the learning process and giving people all the tools they need, quite frankly, at an emotional and mental level to give them the strength and wherewithal to stay with the journey of learning a new venture.

It’s not necessarily easy to shift and move into a new industry and venture that you’ve never done before. We have a Ten-Day Accountability Bootcamp. That comes to no matter what level people are at. We have our weekly Saturday morning live. We have a very strong community, a mastermind group of 2,300 people. It’s being around the people who are successful. The biggest predictor of your future success is the top five people you hang around with. Look at that and there’s your future. Take a look at who you’re hanging with.

There’s your income. That’s the level of restaurant you’re going to eat at. That’s everything. Those five people are average.

It’s important that you get immersed in a solid support community. That’s my finesse. I also want to say that my heart worked into this. I know we share the same worldviews because we’ve had some private communications. I believe in the empowerment of the individual and also in strengthening the family economy. If you are looking for a business that you want to do with your family, we have many people who are doing this as a family. We have an ER physician who’s done well. I don’t know if she’s still working in the ER but she’s got five family members working in her team. That’s what I especially love. When people come together as a family and they become this economic powerhouse through the industry of eCommerce.

It’s so doable, achievable, and the results are so fast. The turn rate towards success is remarkably fast. Quite frankly, that’s why I shifted to eCommerce. I was teaching people how to do online sales funnels and that’s a long learning curve. That’s like master’s or PhD kind of stuff. To eCommerce, it was virtually night and day. My people are having almost instantaneous success. It’s extremely rewarding to see how fast families’ lives turned around. They got oxygen again because there have been hard times since 2020.

Ann, my personal viewpoint is that the middle-class and the lower-class are getting squashed. The way that it’s looking and going, the middle-class is getting super pressured. If you owned a lot of assets, you’re fixing to go into a boom. As inflation goes, your assets will be worth more and more. How you break out of this cycle is you’ve got to find some method where you control your income and is not capped anywhere close to the earth. I don’t know if you can make $10 million a year in this business but I suppose someone can.

There’s more than enough to get ahead. The ceiling is high enough that you’ll probably never reach it. All those levels in between are substantially more than enough to get ahead and get out of the middle-class into more of the upper-class where you can start to function. As the price of gas and everything goes up, the pay raises aren’t going up. The power of the middle income’s dollar is dropping. You don’t wait until you get yourself in foreclosure with your house or something.

Plan ahead, guys. You’re going to have to burn your candle at both ends for a little bit to find where you belong. You’ve got to keep the day job and then you’ve got to start exploring things at night. Every real estate investor I ever met did the same thing. We had a day job. After work, during lunch, 6:00 in the morning before work or all weekend long, we were plowing the neighborhoods trying to find the next deal so that we could get out of that damn job. It wasn’t paying us enough at all. You’re going to have to burn the candle at both ends for a little while and see where you belong. Maybe you belong in Ann Sieg’s room.

Ann, I think it’s exciting. I want to ask you a question. I have a big ongoing concern in business. I believe in your business enough. I have thought about sponsoring one of my family members to go to your camp, that someone who needs to get out. What do you look for? Does a person have to be super computer-savvy? Can they learn what they need to learn? Can they find VAs that’ll do what they can’t do on a computer? That’s the only fear I have with the person.

I’m so glad you brought this up. We’ve had 8,000 students since I shifted into eCommerce at the end of 2013. In 2020, we brought in about 360 new members into our Acceleration Program. From an industry level, I know that healthcare people tend to do well. I don’t know if it’s because they have more of a diagnostic nature and more data-driven-centric. This is by occupation but I’ll also get more drilled down into your question there. CPAs and bookkeepers instantly get it. They see the numbers. If they watch the profit calculator, they just go, “Bingo, got it.” We have a lot of bookkeepers. One CPA joined and one of his staff members is going through the program for him. He’s building a business of businesses. It’s an add-on business.

These are the attributes that people need. For one, sheer mental discipline. Can you go through training? We have people come in and a bunch of them don’t have the mental discipline to show up. That’s qualifying number one. It helps if you have any concept of being a project manager because it’s a project. You’re going to go through this project. Essentially, it’s all laid out in a very linear fashion but you just follow through sequentially on these steps. Computer skills. If you are an absolute rank newbie, you’re going to have it much longer and stiffer. It will take you more time because you’re going to have to acclimate to the technology. I’m not talking coding or anything like that. It’s just the basic functions of using a computer.

If you do happen to be knowledgeable on Excel spreadsheets because that’s one of our software tools, it’s a whole product evaluation sheet with all the formulas in place. The work has been done for you. You just need to hire a VA to do the work. The hiring, if you’ve had any background in hiring people, that’s helpful. We see such an incredibly wide range of people. It’s sheer mental discipline. I’m so glad you said about burning the candle on both ends. That is what you’re going to have to do. Radiya is a gal of ours. She’s a physical therapist. She does and squeezes it in. She’s also a manager and an administrator. She does it in the evenings and the weekends. She’s ready to retire her husband this 2021. Was it worth it for her to buckle down and get mentally disciplined? Yes. Now, her husband gets to come home to be with her.

The mental discipline, that’s my number one. In terms of time, minimum of 12 to 15 hours a week. If you are holding down a job or we have people who are business owners and they’re adding in a business 12 to 15 hours, you have to know how to focus. It is very attention-detailed. These are numbers. Again, as I say, “Then to the comfort level. We guide and coach you through everything, to hire someone to come in and take over, respect of tasks that are involved to where your team is running your business for you.” Meiwa, my gal, who’s a biochemist, has nine VAs and two businesses now. She gets to homeschool her kids. That’s her passion in life. She’s got a team of nine in the Philippines who are running her businesses for her.

I see a lot of kids out there. The kids are probably some of the best-equipped because they grew up in the era. They know how to buy online. They know all about it. It’s second nature. It takes me a kid to figure out how to program my TV. The kid is in the fourth grade. He’s showing me how to turn on the TV and program my VCR or whatever the hell it is. They spend so much damn time on these video games. Let me make a small suggestion to some of you youngsters out there. Let’s play a different video game. You’re going to get on your computer. It’s called “How many nickels can I make this computer crap into my bank account?”

If you spent as much time learning how to do this as you did learning how to weave your way through this game and get to the end so you could ring a bell and a bunch of people out there could say, “He’s good,” you could get a bunch of money in your bank account. I think it’s true. The amount of focus it takes in those games is incredible. The length of time they’re on those games is incredible. Let’s just switch the game. Go to Ann and switch your game out.

I tell parents, I always asked, “Do you have kids?” I was in a consult with one gentleman and said, “Is that your child?” “Ann, yes, that’s my daughter.” “How old is your daughter? You need to bring her into the business.”

They get all like that. I want everyone to go to 1000Houses.com/Ecomm. Get over there, get your free arbitrage profit calculator, and then there are all kinds of information over there. You can get connected up with Ann. You can see the different levels that you might want to be interested in. I’m sure there’s a place to get a consult if you’re not sure even then. All the connections will be over there, 1000Houses.com/Ecomm. Anything you’d like to say to the folks that I covered? We could never cover enough with you. I could be on here for a week.

It’s fine. This was great. I want to be of encouragement to people. I get it. There are so many options out there. I taught a lot of different methods. eCommerce has been the fastest results-driven method that I’ve ever taught in my years online. Gather the information. I like people to be well informed to understand the model. The more informed you are, the more likely you are to stick with the effort that you’re going to put into it. Thank you for having me on, Mitch. I look forward to connecting with some of your members.

No problem. I’d like to thank you. I failed to do this at the beginning because I was so excited you were here. I’d like to thank TaxFreeFuture.com for sponsoring this episode because you do not know what your financial advisors are not telling you. We’re going to tell you what they’re not telling you. We’re going to tell you why they’re not telling you. We’re going to show you what to do about it and then you can do what you want with that information. TaxFreeFuture.com will help you move your retirement funds into a self-directed bank account where you get to direct what you invest in.

By the way, did you know that you can borrow from some retirement plans to pay for education? You just have to pay yourself back within five years or less. You have to pay yourself probably somewhere between 4% or 12%. You can’t pay yourself too much but you can’t charge yourself too little. You can borrow from your retirement plan to go to the bootcamp or go to visit Ann and do all this stuff. You have to pay it back with interest to yourself. If you want to talk about a good investment, what better money to do with your retirement funds than to educate yourself on how to make a boatload of money or how to create a cashflow?

Let me get this off here. Go to TaxFreeFuture.com. Watch the 37 little video vignettes on how you can transfer your money away from Wall Street and Yahoo! Get it in a tax-deferred or tax-free account that you say where the money goes, what you’re going to earn, what risk you’re going to take, and how much is it going to grow to. It also has a checkbook control. We also know a lot of good deals don’t wait around for administrative people and trustees to get around to filling out your paperwork. You can’t make great deals in slow motion. You got to move fast.

I started all my retirement funds with a minimum of $250. Anybody in the world would be proud of my retirement plans. I never put any more of my own money in it. I did what Ann is going to show you how to do, how to take a small amount of money and get a very handsome return, 25%, 30%, 35%, whatever. You got more and it’s going to make 25% or so on and so forth. It starts to go viral or get exponential quickly. TaxFreeFuture.com can maybe help you figure out how you’re going to get some training whether it’s with me, Ann, or somebody. Find where you belong, get financially independent and get on with being who you’re supposed to be, please.

That’s what we want. I know that’s what Ann wants because she takes a lot of pride in helping people get self-sufficient. It is very rewarding. I have people come to my door and cry. People meet me at the seminar. They start to say thank you and cry. I cry and the whole thing. It’s what I’m in it for now because more money is not going to help me. I’m not going to drive a better car. I’m not going to live in a bigger house. I’m not going to do anything. I’m trying to downsize everything now. We’re at that age where I was like, “I don’t need this house. I don’t need this boat. I don’t need this car.”

Go over there to 1000Houses.com/Ecomm. Thank you, Ann. You’re always a pleasure. I don’t know why but I always get so excited when you come on because I know your heart and you’re helping people. I’m not saying that’s for everybody or that you can help everybody because you can’t. If they raise their hand and they’ll apply themselves, you’ll give it everything you’ve got. It’s an honest effort. That’s all you can ask for from people. Check it out. I’ll see you later. Thank you so much. I’d like to thank everybody for stopping by to get with Ann Sieg and learn a little bit about online marketing and how you might become financially independent in something you never even dreamt of.

Important Links

• 1000Houses.com/Sieg
• 1000Houses.com/Livecomm
• 1000Houses.com/Moat
• 1000Houses.com/101
• 1000Houses.com/aof

About Ann Sieg

Ann Sieg and her husband owned a thriving windshield replacement business for twelve years. Then almost overnight, a new state law literally destroyed their company.

They were left with nothing.

So Ann took her little “side-hustle” business and doubled-down…taking her sales from 2K per month to 90K per month in three months’ time.

It was more than enough to bring her husband home. But she didn’t stop there…

Network marketing, info-marketing, affiliate marketing, creating and selling her own products…Ann did it all…to the tune of $20 million+ in sales.

• Here’s How »

• reinvestorsummit.com
• Real Estate Investor Summit Facebook
• Real Estate Investor Summit Twitter
• Real Estate Investor Summit YouTube
• Mitch Stephen LinkedIn