How I Work 5 Hours A Week & Make $1.6 Million A Year

I never thought I would make much money, honestly, because I just wanted to be a musician. And I think what I wanted most was to do something I loved for a living. I never wanted to have a job I hated, and I was always creative. My name is Graham Cochran. I'm 39 years old. I make about $1.6 million a year. I work about 5 hours a week. And I live in Tampa, Florida. I'm a business coach. I run an online business where I teach people how to make money off of their passions, turn their knowledge into income, sell online courses, and maybe build a following around a YouTube channel, a podcast, or a blog, and then eventually sell their knowledge in online courses and memberships or one-on-one coaching packages.

Welcome to Episode 167 of The Graham Cochran Show, where I'm here to help you build your online business. A friend of mine who is older and wiser said, "Man, you don't have any real family time. You've got to take at least one day off with your family." So from day one, when I got serious, I just committed to, okay, I'm going to figure this out from Monday through Thursday. I decided in 2018 to launch my personal brand, GrahamCochrane.com. Teaching everything I know about online business. And as that's become successful, we've built this house here on the river, and it's just been a dream to be able to have the home the way we want. space and have the privacy to go where we want. Be on the water, which we love.

So in front of the house, we love having a formal living room that rarely gets used. But, you know, we love it if we have people over; sometimes people spread out. So it's a really nice, beautiful, quiet spot. Piano. It's the one instrument I don't really play very well, but my daughters play a little bit. Guest room for guests, obviously. And then really, the whole house is all about back here—just having a really cohesive living space. Right? We love tall ceilings. So the 20-foot ceilings and then the view, which is what it's all about,. Being on the river. And we put in these custom iron arch doors, which are so fun. This is kind of a splurge to have something unique and custom.

So the kitchen's all my wife. She wanted it to be really open. We decided to go with a more open-shelf concept, which was different, but it was just great. Everything's accessible, and we just wanted a big island and to keep it as clean as possible. My wife is trying to take over with plants. She wants us to be in the jungle room. This is a great room for the kids to do crafts. All the stuff that's fun leaves a mess. They can take over this table and not take over the kitchen table. So it's a dining room where meals take place, obviously, but it's also like morning time. So I'll sit in the morning first thing by myself, reading my Bible, praying, drinking coffee, and waking up.

The summers are great. We have time with the kids since there's no school. We can all sit around the table. We try to go through a devotional together and read through the Bible, trying to teach my kids how to read the Bible themselves. So books are a huge part of my life. That's how I've grown and learned. I got my very own book and finally published my first book, How to Get Paid for What You Know. Everywhere we go in the house and in the office, we have bookshelves and books. And one of my only requests for the house was to put the master bedroom at the back of the house so we could have a balcony and a view of the river. So we kind of built the house around that.

My parents were military early on, but we settled in Virginia, and I fell in love with music as a kid. Singing, playing trumpet, eventually playing guitar, and just becoming a music head. I played in middle school bands and high school rock bands. That's what got me into audio engineering and recording music. So I met my wife my sophomore year of college. We dated for 3 years all through college and got married right out of college. It was a really hard year. So I actually lost a job in 2009 before we moved, and then it was really hard to find a job in Tampa during the Great Recession. I think I applied for 50 jobs and finally got one in the debt settlement industry. That's when we bought our first house. My first daughter was born, and then, 4 or 5 months into working that job, that company ran out of money, and they had to let me go. I had like an emergency fund that we lived off for a while, but eventually we burned through that.

The first couple of years that I was doing this were pretty bleak. At that time, we literally had no income. I had family and friends sending me checks and trying to help us out. We applied for food stamps. It was a very humbling experience. So I would say that for almost 2 years, it was me trying to get work, and I got a little bit of work. I think I made $7,000 in my first year. It wasn't very much. There were two moments where light bulbs went off. One was when I sold my first online course. Hey everybody, it's Graham over at GrahamCochrane.com. Functionally, I was teaching things on YouTube for free. And then I thought, "Could I sell what I'm teaching?" And that was probably 18 months before the second moment, which was the back half of my second year of business. I launched two more products that became best sellers for me. And that's what I've got for you today. It is the Behringer Truth Monitor's studio monitor. And in the last couple of months of that year, we brought in almost $60,000, and I realized this was game over.

I used to make $30,000 a year working full-time in corporate America. Same with my wife. So I was replacing both of our $30,000 a year salaries from a website talking about what I love to do, which is music and music recording all from home. And that's when we didn't qualify for food stamps anymore. And I knew my life was going to be different from then on. I was trying to figure out how to build a business. And at the time, my weekends were taken up with this church that we're starting. So I never got a day off. A friend of mine who was older and wiser said, "Man, you don't have any real family time. You've got to take at least one day off with your family." So from day one, when I got serious, I just committed to, okay, I'm going to figure this out in Monday through Thursday So I work 32 hours a week and work normal 8-hour days. So that became the most I ever worked on my business when I started. And then every year, I'm kind of a weirdo. I try to play this game and figure out whether I can make the same amount of money I made last year or grow it. That'd be even better, but work fewer hours. So it's been

Income goes up, but work hours go down. And it's been that way ever since.

I remember going on a beach vacation with my family. Just a three- or four-day getaway in the panhandle of Florida. And I remember my wife looking at me with my laptop over at the beach, and she says, "What are you doing?" And she said, "You can't even get away for three or four days because you have to check your email." And I remember feeling, "What am I doing?" And that was when I realized I needed somebody to be in my inbox for me to take care of those types of requests that needed a response right away. Most of what allows me to work so few hours is a combination of systems and eliminating a lot of stuff that just isn't really necessary. And I learned that. All the activity on social media I was doing, being in email all day long, keeping my email like tab open and responding to emails as they came in. I work on all kinds of projects without really looking at what products really make up the bulk of my money. I use the 80/20 rule. Pareto's principle is used all the time as a framework for looking at what I'm doing and eliminating as much as I possibly can. I'm not really working faster as much as I'm just doing less in my business, and I'm only doing the things that I have found actually drive revenue in my business.

I eventually brought on a customer service person to take care of some of those emails in my inbox. And then I eventually hired someone to help me with the boring stuff, like uploading my videos to YouTube and making thumbnails or editing some videos if I needed them edited. Thinking about launching a membership site. Today's episode is for you. I've been making videos for 13 years, so I usually know what I want to say. There are very few stops and starts, and I can get it done pretty quickly. And then I'll wrap up the morning by checking email, and then I have a paid community of people that I jump into, and I answer questions and touch base with those people and see what they need help with. And then I'm usually done by lunch. I'd love to move into more public speaking. Going back to my music roots, I love being on stage. What I'm going to be working towards is just getting on more stages, getting in front of people, and trying to share this message of how to monetize what you know and turn it into a flexible, automated business that gives you freedom. I would say money is a great servant, but a horrible master. I think people have more control over where their money goes and what they do with it than they give themselves credit for. It's not worth being scared of or living your life as if you're controlled by what money you have or don't have.

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