life quest

Life’s little moments of success can pass us by so easily. If we don’t track the things we’re proud of, we lose track of how far we’ve come. Steve Kamb’s Epic Quest of Awesome inspired me to build my own Epic Life Quest. I keep track of achievements, and after five significant ones, I level up.

In the last level, I focused a lot on passive income: building training that I could sell, and then getting that educational material out to as many people as possible. That paid off in this level because the passive income gave me more time to focus on other areas of the business – and some fun.

Here’s what I accomplished in this level:

Jeremy Clarkson’s old digs on the Isle of Man

• Visit Poland. When I saw @AaronBertrand‘s photographs of his Poland trip, I decided I had to go. SQLDay 2017 in Wroclaw was great! Completed May 2017.
• Half-point: Ride in the upper deck of a 747. I don’t count this as a full experience point, but I’ve always wanted to do it, and I wanted to mark the achievement here so I could remember it when I looked back. I usually fly United, and they don’t use 747s, so I had to take a Lufthansa FRA-MCO flight to do it. Completed May 2017.
• Visit the Isle of Man. Famous stateside for the bonkers TT motorcycle race which produces terrifying crashes and kills riders every year, this beautiful island was way, way, way more beautiful than I’d expected. I rode most of the race course (in a taxi, not a bike), and I’m totally going back. If, heaven forbid, Erika passes away before I do, I’m moving here. It had that much of an effect on me. Completed September 2017.
• Set the PASS Summit pre-con attendance record. The Microsoft SQL Server industry holds a big annual conference in Seattle, and I’ve helped teach pre-con classes there before. My Expert Performance Tuning pre-con with Erik Darling broke the sales record more than a month before the event, and PASS couldn’t fit any more seats in. Completed October 2017.
• Half-point: Get code into a Microsoft product. When Microsoft announced SQL Operations Studio, their new open-source cross-platform SSMS-type tool, the execution plans looked awfully familiar. Turns out one of the open source projects they’re using is HTML-Query-Plan, an open source project that Brent Ozar Unlimited sponsors – because we use it for PasteThePlan! So awesome – because that means we might actually be able to get the PasteThePlan icons in there as a theme, heh heh heh…
• 

  So close, yet so far

  Sell $500K of training in one month. Our Black Friday sale has done really well over time, and this year I want to see if I can cross that big round number. Update: so close, yet so far: our Black Friday sales hit $439K. That’s more than double our prior record, but not the big round number goal I was aiming for, so no Epic Life Quest points here.

• Sell out 2 pre-cons at the same conference. When our SQLBits 2018 pre-con sold out, Erik suggested something I’d never heard of before in our industry: why not run the exact same pre-con again a second day? It’s kinda like how musicians will add a second date when that one sells out. The Bits crew agreed, and we sold that one out too! Completed January 2018.

My achievements will slow down a little in Q1 due to a vacation trip to Germany, SQLBits in London, and several online training classes. I’ll make some more progress in Q2, but then our Chicago lease is up at the end of May, and we’re looking (again) at moving to San Diego. These winter storms make that decision a whole lot easier.

Life’s little moments of success can pass us by so easily. If we don’t track the things we’re proud of, we lose track of how far we’ve come. Steve Kamb’s Epic Quest of Awesome inspired me to build my own Epic Life Quest. I keep track of achievements, and after five significant ones, I level up.

When I became the sole fella in charge at Brent Ozar Unlimited® back in fall 2015, running the company dominated my calendar for a while. I struggled with trying to grow the consulting company, then ended up laying off half the staff. Once I stopped trying to grow consulting, I shifted priorities and tackled a few other things:

Room 6E. No pressure. Instagram

• Launch an online service. I’ve done scripts and apps before, but never an online service where code runs and stores your data in a database. PasteThePlan launched in September 2016.
• Spoke in the biggest room at PASS, first session. After the opening keynote, I had the first session in the biggest room, broadcast live on the web. I wish I would have taken a panoramic photo! Completed October 2016.
• Launch GroupBy, a free online conference. For years, I’ve been thinking about different spins on how the SQL Server community can get together. GroupBy.org launched in November 2016.
• Scored Google as a client. I’ve had larger clients that I couldn’t talk about, but even if I could, Google would still hold a special place in my heart. I wish I had a picture of my face when they booked a meeting with me out of nowhere and said, “Hey, we’d like to work with you on an Always On project.” Completed October 2016, announced publicly February 2017.
• Increase my passive income numbers to match my active income. Completed April 2017, and let’s talk about this one in detail.

Warning: the passive income topic is rife with spam. There’s a ton of slimy companies out there that wanna sell you their secret to making money while you sleep. Because of that, I’m not going to link to anything at all in this post – I’m just going to talk about strategies, and if you want to learn more specifics about a given strategy, you can ask away in the comments.

Active Income vs Passive Income

A quick definition:

• Active income is trading time for money.
• In theory, passive income isn’t directly tied to your time.

There’s a lot of gray area here. For example, if you have a rental house, and you earn rent money from it, is it truly passive? You probably have to deal with fixing the heat when it breaks, or chasing down tenants when they’re late on the rent. Another example is writing a book: you write it once, then earn royalties from it over time, but is that active or passive income?

For me, passive work means these four things aren’t fixed or related:

1. The time when I do the work
2. How much work I do
3. The time when the income arrives
4. How much income arrives

When I was learning about this stuff several years ago, I was mesmerized, and I totally understood that it was going to be the only way I was gonna get to retirement. Let’s face it, database administrators have a tough time accumulating a million bucks, let alone whatever money you need to retire. I had to figure out a way to build something that could make money while I was off doing other things.

But How Can a Geek Build Passive Income?

I’m a Microsoft SQL Server database administrator. I looked at people doing passive income businesses, and I had a hard time connecting the dots between what they were doing, and how I could make money. Eventually, I did enough research that I came across a few strategies that seemed to work.

I’m not going to include generic strategies like buying rental houses or stock. I’m specifically talking about things that us geeks can do.

Build a paid training course. It takes (a lot of) time initially, but once the material is built, people can buy and consume the material without you being involved. (Obviously, this is the one I went for.)

Build great content and get sponsors. If you can write or film stuff that brings in lots of eyeballs, you can cut deals with advertisers who want to piggyback off your popularity. You can make a living with active income as a vendor evangelist, but the catch is that when they let you go, you’re no longer making money off the content you built. If your goal is to do this with passive income, you’ve gotta figure out a way for the vendors to keep paying you long after you’ve stopped writing the content, or get other people to write the content. (This is totally doable in our industry – think about content sites with sponsors.)

Sell a retainer-based service. Clients pay you $X per month to watch over your systems, give them periodic health reports, and maybe even take action when the systems fail. In the cloud age, I see a huge opportunity here for ongoing DBA services to help keep monthly cloud costs low. This is tricky, though, because it can easily consume just as much time as active income, but the idea is to build something that you can hand off to someone else to perform.

License a process or idea. Say you build a powerful health check process, with tools and sample output. License it to other geeks who can use it with their own client base. They’re paying you while they do the work – although there’s also some ongoing improvement work you’ll need to do to make sure your process is the best. In the cloud age, this can mean building a VM template that has royalties built in – you just automatically make money when people start your VM template on AWS, Azure, or GCE.

Build a list and sell other people’s stuff. Start a popular blog, YouTube channel, or email newsletter, and then as your audience grows, use affiliate marketing to link to other creators. For example, people who start training classes want to reach as many people as they can, so they’ll give you a coupon code for your audience. When folks buy using your coupon code, they get a deal, the seller makes money, and you get a percentage. This was the entire basis of TheWirecutter.com‘s business – they made money when you clicked on Amazon links to buy products they reviewed. There’s no reason that business couldn’t work with tech industry products too, like monitoring software and cloud product reviews.

Build an app and make it popular. “But Brent,” you sneer and point, “that’s not really passive at all! Building stuff is hard!” Bad news: none of these techniques are easy. Remember, with passive income, those 4 key things I mentioned earlier aren’t related. If you can build something and make it go viral, the amount of money you make isn’t directly tied to the work you put in. More importantly, the app is making money that funds your next venture, and you can work on that next thing while you’re getting paid from the last thing. I separated out those two things – build an app and make it popular – because you gotta do both. There’s even a market for people who take a good app that never caught on, buy it from the creators, and then make it popular by selling it to their existing market. (This is how a lot of indie software makers get acquired.)

There’s many more, but I’ll stop there. When you’re looking for inspiration, don’t look in the tech market – look at completely unrelated markets like photography, gadgets, wedding planners, you name it. Pick your hobby, figure out how people are making passive income in your hobby, and then see if that technique can be used in your day job’s industry.

I Picked Training Courses, and I Worked My Tail Off.

You gotta use what you have to get what you want.

To do that, you gotta know what you have – your strengths and weaknesses – and identify exactly what you want. After a lot of self-examination, I decided that the best passive income strategy for me was to build training courses.

Free duffel bag with every subscription

It was a long, hard journey, but in April, I made it. For the last rolling 12 months, my total on-demand recorded online training – what I define as passive income – was higher than my consulting or active (live) training revenue.

Is it purely passive? Of course not – looking at my April 2017 calendar, I had four weekdays and two weekend days invested in the online training business. However, it’s a magical passive income feeling every time I check my email during a break, and there’s a handful of new-customer payment emails. Even now, as I’m writing this post, I’ve seen half a dozen come in. (I still have these going directly to my in-box during April just in case something with the new subscription process breaks. After I finish writing this, I’ll turn off that email again and just review sales daily.)

Having a passive income stream like this means that I’ve got more choices:

• I can goof off on future Epic Life Quest goals (which to be honest, I haven’t done enough of lately), or
• I can take normal consulting work, and basically get paid double, or
• I can work on the training business, making investments to grow future passive income, or
• I can work on other parts of the Brent Ozar Unlimited business (consulting & tools), or
• I can give back to the community, like building GroupBy.org or the First Responder Kit

So that’s why I kind of look at our subscription training customers as community sponsors. They pay for my time to work on stuff like GroupBy. That’s kind of awesome.

Following Steve Kamb’s lead, I treat my life as a video game with a series of levels. Whenever I unlock five new achievements, I count it as a level-up.

Company retreat in Napa Valley

Level 8’s 5 new achievements:

• Pass 50,000 Monday email subscribers. The Brent Ozar Unlimited mailing list has over 70,000 subscribers, but it feels pretty magical to know that over 50,000 folks want our favorite links in their inbox every Monday morning. Completed February 2016.
• Tour a winery in Napa, California. The Brent Ozar Unlimited team went to Napa for the 2016 company retreat and had a blast. My favorite by far was the Cliff Lede Vineyards. Completed February 2016.
• Visit Israel. I’ve always wanted to go, and I don’t exactly know why. For years, I’ve asked the SQLSaturday Israel organizers to let me know whenever they pick dates, and this year my work schedule finally worked out! Teaching a pre-con and spending a few days walking around the city, plus doing Vienna on the same trip. Completed April 2016.
• Have readers on all 7 continents. I’ve always thought this would be a nifty badge to unlock, but Antarctica never showed up as a continent in our Google Analytics list. I sat down one day to figure out if there’s a SQL Server professional in Antarctica, and it turns out that Google Analytics tracks Antarctica as a country rather than a continent. We had a visitor from Antarctica this year! Completed June 2016.
• Own the same car for five years. I know this sounds ridiculous, but I’ve never pulled this off before, and I was proud to pull it off. I have a serious attention span problem when it comes to cars. I bought my current 2008 Infiniti G35x in mid-2011, and I’m still happy to get into it and hit the start button, so I’ve made huge progress. Completed June 2016.

Mine for the last 5 years (and bought it used)

I feel a little guilty about three of these because they seem passive at first glance. Passing a subscriber number, having readers on all the continents, and owning a car for 5 years – these seem like you could just sit still and do them. They all required discipline along the way, though, so I’m marking ’em down as goals.

I also kinda feel like I cheated on the car one because I’m living in downtown Chicago at the moment. Parking spots here are $250-$350/month to rent, or >$50k to buy (plus homeowners association fees). I would really love to have an old Fiat or Alfa convertible for tooling around on nice spring and fall days, but I can’t justify putting a $3,000 car in a $50,000 parking spot. That just doesn’t make financial sense.

When our lease is up here in early 2017, though, we’ll likely move out of downtown Chicago and to somewhere with cheaper parking. That also means I’m probably going to keep the Infiniti almost another year. It’s still got under 70K miles – as telecommuters, Erika and I just don’t drive all that often. In the meantime, I do splurge on road trip rentals every now and then.

What I’m working on for Level 9

I have no idea.

My life went through several unplanned changes in the last year: the company buyout, then hiring our first developer, and then a few that I can’t talk about publicly yet. They’re all good – they’re just surprises that I had to take advantage of. Life is what happens when you’re making plans, and for once I catch myself full of life and not quite full enough of plans.

I have an Alaska cruise coming up in August, and I use those to reflect. I sit on the deck for hours with a notebook and a drink, think about what I’ve done right recently, and what I need to do better.

Following Steve Kamb’s lead, I treat my life as a video game with a series of levels. Whenever I unlock five new achievements, I count it as a level-up.

Level 7’s 5 new achievements:

Breakfast with Dad & Caryl in Mexico

• Become the sole owner of Brent Ozar Unlimited. Sounds kinda funny to be the only owner of a company with my name on it, but Jeremiah Peschka & Kendra Little were equal owners with me. (The company just happened to have my name on it since we started it from my blog.) Completed December 2015.
• Grow the company to 5 full time employees. I would have called this an Epic Life Quest achievement, but I kinda cheated my way into it. I had to hire people to make up for Jeremiah & Kendra leaving, so I’m not counting the 5 FTE thing as a separate achievement.
• Take Dad & Caryl to Mexico for vacation. When Erika and I first arrived at Casa de las Olas in Tulum in 2014, I knew I wanted to bring Dad & Caryl here to celebrate Dad’s retirement. Completed December 2015.
• [Redacted] – I set a revenue goal for our company’s online sales (training classes & videos), and we crossed it. I’m not sharing the goal publicly yet, but I’ll circle back in a couple/few years and blog about it in my Life Quest category. Completed September 2015.
• Blog at Ozar.me every week for 52 weeks straight. Writing energizes me, and writing here helps me keep track of my challenges and accomplishments. Completed November 2015.
• Teach a week-long training class by myself. I’ve taught week-long classes with Jeremiah and/or Kendra before, but never solo. Managing an entire week’s worth of training and questions is not easy, but I eased my way into it with a whopping 5-person class. However, I count the for-real achievement unlocked with my 26-person class in San Diego. Completed February 2016.

And here’s the first few tasks I’m working on for level 8:

• Pass 50,000 Monday email subscribers. The Brent Ozar Unlimited mailing list has over 70,000 subscribers, but it feels pretty magical to know that over 50,000 folks want our favorite links in their inbox every Monday morning. Completed February 2016.
• Tour a winery in Napa, California. The Brent Ozar Unlimited team went to Napa for the 2016 company retreat and had a blast. My favorite by far was the Cliff Lede Vineyards. Completed February 2016.
• Visit Israel. I’ve always wanted to go, and I don’t exactly know why. For years, I’ve asked the SQLSaturday Israel organizers to let me know whenever they pick dates, and this year my work schedule finally worked out! Teaching a pre-con and spending a few days walking around the city, plus doing Vienna on the same trip. Scheduled for April 2016.
• Own the same car for five years. I know this sounds ridiculous, but I’ve never pulled this off before, and I would be kinda proud to pull it off. I have a serious attention span problem when it comes to cars. I bought my current 2008 Infiniti G35x in mid-2011, so I’ve made huge progress. Scheduled for June 2016.